advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership highly successful women administrators: the inside story of how they got there sandra lee gupton & gloria appelt slick a book review kimberly griffith, ph. d. & janice p. thompson griffith & thompson, winter, 1998 we are encouraged to acknowledge the fact that gender-related problems will face us as we pursue educational administrative careers.our family, friends, and professional peers can provide the wisdom and support we need to lead with excellence. one of the most exciting things about reading this book is its application to our own lives: each administrator's story validates our personal trials and tribulations, hard work, and desire to succeed as women administrators in education. the authors, dr. sandra gupton and dr. gloria slick, have provided an excellent service by presenting the viewpoints, personal stories, lesson frustrations, and accomplishments of successful female educational leaders. using a strong research base, the authors provide insight into a field which historically is theorized and mandated by the viewpoints of white males. to our knowledge, no other study of this type has focused upon women in the educational power positions, the top executive administrators in public education: high school principals, assistant superintendents, and superintendents. the authors sagaciously note that women bring with them a way of leading that is different from the traditional, transactional style. the unique, and possibly natural, ability women possess is required by today's administrators of reform. this book provides a glimpse into the hearts and minds of the women behind the text and encourages women administrators by stressing the need today for a gentler, more values-oriented, integrative approach to educational leadership. each chapter examines issues that women encounter on their journeys into careers in educational administration in the maintenance of their positions, and in their professional and personal growth. in chapter 1, the authors note that being sensitive to the political arena's perspective of women, as well as http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html developing political awareness of the system and how it functions, is imperative, having the proper credentials is only part of the preparation necessary for success in the job, and does not guarantee acquiring or retaining a position. commonalities shared by female administrators indicate that one must be prepared for challenges above and beyond what might be expected of male counterparts. another lesson indicated in the chapter is that the journey to the top involves insight into both the personal and transpersonal, as well as psychological and sociological, aspects of our changing cultural milieu. in chapter 2, women administrators call loudly to other women, encouraging them to plan their careers. each participant's story resounds with the advice that career mapping is essential. lack of planning has kept many women from successfully reaching the top. the authors indicate that it is important to have a blueprint for your career and to use strategizing skills from the start. networking with others and learning from mentors can help seize opportunities to grow and facilitate career advancement. the third lesson reminds women that perseverance must prevail. several of the women who provided responses to the authors indicated that they had little encouragement to pursue careers not traditionally occupied by women. cultural biases also abound, and the data indicates that women in administration encounter numerous gender-related barriers. other issues of this chapter cluster around family responsibilities and mobility problems which each woman overcame by tapping into the ability to perservere. in chapter 4, the issues of diligence and professionalism are stressed. gupton and slick found that women frequently refer not only to having a strong work ethic, but also to being willing and able to work harder than their male counterparts in administrative positions. many women administrators feel that they still have to prove their worth in a male-dominated environment. the authors also indicate the need for women to hold fast to both a high priority of professionalism and strength of character. remembering to laugh, refusing to whine, and keeping a professional, dedicated, positive attitude are essential for women in leadership. in chapter 5, the results of a november, 1995, usa weekend reader survey indicate that compassion, tolerance, responsibility, integrity, and perseverance are highly valued by american families today. interestingly, the authors note that these same values and families today. interestingly, the authors note that these same values form the core characteristics of women leaders who tell their stories in the book. the importance of believing in oneself, adhering to one's values and maintaining personal integrity despite political pressure is addressed. most of the women administrators surveyed acknowledged that they make decisions in the best interests of the students. in chapter 6, women are encouraged to network and support each other. we are encouraged to acknowledge the fact that gender-related problems will face us as we pursue educational administrative careers. our family, friends, and professional peers can provide the wisdom and support we need to lead with excellence. political savvy and skill are also recognized as essential elements for success as leaders in education. the seventh lesson concerns the importance of both finding and being a mentor. specific mentoring strategies are outlined in order to improve communication and to share the power of information. lifelong learning, risk-taking, envisioning, establishing priorities, and reflecting are suggested to establish us as credible leaders. the final lesson is to lead by example. one woman administrator said that the ability to facilitate meetings, to resolve conflicts, to problem solve with diverse groups, and to listen well have changed the status of women in education. women possess the attributes of creativity, flexibility, and orientation toward people rather than things. this book is an important educational tool for any woman who is considering, pursuing or currently working in an administrative role, and it greatly enhance the contents of educational administration courses. a very valuable resource, one should read it early in a career. (it would have significantly influenced our career plans.) the advice of others in this study has provided insights into career planning, strategies for reaching goals, identification of the political arena in an educational environment, and the means for establishing a network base for managing the frustrations and obstacles which can occur in a woman's administrative pursuits. after reading gupton and slick's "pearls of wisdom", women will know that they can go for it! kimberly griffith is assistant professor for the department of professional pedagogy at lamar university in beaumont, texas. e-mail: griffithkg@hal.lamar.edu janice thompson is field experiences supervisor and former acting assistant director for field experiences at university of southern mississippi in hattiesburg, mississippi. e-mail: janice.thompson@usm.edu awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 2, winter 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright 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school executive willa l. gipson gipson, spring, 1999 women rising in school leadership positions is becoming more of a reality than in years past. i believe this accomplishment is attributed to women taking more control of their careers instead of acting in a passive role waiting to be selected or appointed. many people have told me and continue to tell me that i am making a difference.well, that is a matter of opinion but i would like to believe that i ammaking a difference. the question of some persons might be, in what wayam i making a difference. before i make a transition to the history of myposition, let me share with you a little bit of my background. i am told that i am the fourth female director of athletics in the historyof the state of texas. along with that, i am told that i am the first blackfemale director of athletics in the state of texas. what follows is nottooting my own horn nor is it meant to be delivered in a bragging manner.my intent is to reveal two thoughts. i am a thirty-four year old educatorwho graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and college at theage of nineteen. i was a teacher and coach for five and one-half years beforemoving into administration at the age of twenty-five. i reveal these factsto you to emphasize two important points: success is a choice and the skyis not the limit you and i are. as i reflect on the past twenty years and the road i have traveled toreach my present destination, i often think about key persons who have crossedmy path. through their negativity or positivity, all have made a significantimpact on many decisions that i have made in my personal and professionallife. i shall never forget persons telling my mom as i prepared to go tohigh school and college that i would never make it in either place becausei was too young. thank god my mom had the keen insight at each level toknow that i would survive in spite of my age. i recall persons implyingthat i could not survive as a young black female teacher in a predominantlyanglo, suburban school district. as recently as two years ago, when i submittedmy resume for the position i now hold, i heard some people say i would notget the position because of the traditional male dominance in athletic directorpositions. i draw upon these experiences often to remind myself to stayaway from people whom i have identified as having "stinking thinking."those past experiences speak to me in a voice that says flee from thosewho have buckets full http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html of pessimism in hand to dump all over my dreams, goals,and aspirations. instead, i surround myself with innumerable people whohave buckets full of optimism. those people are the ones who have goalssimilar to mine and are headed in the same direction i am going. recently, i read a book that i highly recommend. rick pitino, authorof success is a choice, highlights ten steps one should take towardsoverachieving in business and life. the steps, which include several principles,are not steps for quitters or those looking for the easy road to success.instead they are for those who have a will and a why for success. oftenwomen executives find themselves having to operate in pressure situations.in pitino's book, he has a chapter entitled, "thrive on pressure."within this chapter he speaks to a "stress versus pressure" concept.mr pitino (1997) writes, " most people will tell you that there's goodpressure and there's bad pressure, i don't believe that. if you use it toyour advantage, it's good pressure. let it control you and it becomes badpressure, or stress" (p.166). women executives, in my opinion, face challenges daily that require atremendous amount of persistence. there is a perception floating aroundin our society that sets forth the idea that it takes women longer to landthe higher paid positions than it does men. furthermore, there is the beliefthat women who acquire high-paying jobs have done so through a company'sneed to meet a quota. i operate under the notion that you do whatever ittakes to reach a level that you wish to reach. if by chance you are awardeda job because of a quota, affirmative action, or for other reasons, so what?i have had people imply that i have acquired the position of athletic directorbecause of various reasons without entertaining the thought that perhapsi am best qualified for the position. there goes that "stinking thinking"again. persistence in attaining a goal may require years for some and afew short days for others. the important component i have found in persistenceis developing a "never-give-up" attitude. in pitino's (1997) book,he addresses being ferociously persistent by offering the following: "aman is a hero, not because he is braver than anyone else, but because heis brave for ten minutes longer." i have truly come to know that thereis a direct, positive correlation between persistence and success. sometimes, i am still awestruck when i consider the fact that, for theposition i currently hold, a committee recommended me the only femaleapplicant for the position. do not get me wrong. i am not awestruck becausei knew and still believe that i am the most qualified, but i am still awestruckbecause i am glad to know that a committee made a recommendation based onan interview and not any predetermined ideas. what i am going around tothe back door to say is this: you never know who is watching and listening.i believe women executives have to be better at salesmanship than men. wemust sell ourselves and our ideas harder and stronger. to this day, i amthankful the recommending committee listened to each applicant express howhe or she would carry the school district above and beyond in the area ofathletics. there is something i must say about contentment and comfort. i do notdiscredit anyone for feeling content in their position in life. i do believewe should be content in what our heavenly father has blessed us with, buti also believe he has provided us opportunities for self-improvement. ithas always been a personal challenge given by me to myself to linger nolonger than five years in one position. thus far i have come close to meetingthat personal challenge with a little coaxing in some cases from others.there is also something to be said about coming out of our comfort zones.my fourteen years in education have been spent in this manner: five andone-half years as a teacher and coach, five and one-half years as an assistantathletic director, two years as an assistant principal, and one year asa director of athletics. i believe that every now and then someone comes into your life to letyou know you are becoming a little too comfortable where you are. that happenedto me in 1994. i was enjoying my position as an assistant athletic director,hoping to become an athletic director someday. i had made my wishes knownto several persons in our administration, including our superintendent.it was he who encouraged me to seek some building experience so that i couldmake myself more marketable if and when a driector of athletics positionsurfaced. i want to make it clear that he never promised me anything butadvised me to seek postions at the building level. i had a decision to make.i could heed his advice and seek building-level positions or i could remainin my area of comfort as an assistant athletic director. i sought a buildinglevelposition and was fortunate to recieve one. i truly believe the experiencei gained as a high school assistant principal was a key factor in my gettingthe position that i currently hold. without a doubt, i believe those twoyears of building experience have enhanced my effectiveness as a centraloffice administrator. yes, i chose the risky option which was to seek building-levelexperience. sometimes what we want in the long run requires us to be a risk-takerin the short run. as i stated earlier, my superintendent did not make anypromises to me and i took a chance in leaving an area in which i enjoyedand felt comfortable. women rising in school leadership positions is becoming more of a realitythan in years past. i believe this accomplishment is attributed to womentaking more control of their careers instead of acting in a passive rolewaiting to be selected or appointed. commanding control of our careers bypromoting ourselves and making our wishes known is the most important toolwe can use in attempting to rise to school executive positions. lessons learned you must have a "why." determine for what reason you want what you want. when that is determined, you will succeed through a strategy of what it is you aspire to do. flee from those persons who have "stinking thinking." pessimistic people will not help you get where you are trying to go. they can , however, be a source for helping you develop an "i can" attitude. develop a "never-give-up" attitude. remember to persevere and be persistent. the end result is what you are seeking. from start to finish, you may not experience pleasure or happiness, but the final outcome makes struggles worthwhile. take command of your destination. do not allow someone other than yourself to control the direction in which you would like to go. instead, get behind the driver's wheel. if you get lost, it is up to you to find your way back through whatever means are necessary. move out of your comfort zone. many of us sometimes get too comfortable where we are. too much comfort stagnates our growth and we can dry up and die. have a game plan. develop multiple offenses and defenses so that when one offense or defense does not work, you can try another one and another one until you accomplish your goal of winning. references pinto, r. (1997). success is a choice. new york, ny: broadway books. (a ten-step approach for preparing yourself for the challenges you face. a book for those who are serious about making dreams reality.) willa l. gipson is the director of athletics for the birdville independent school district, fort worth, texas. reprinted with permission, funk, c., pankake, a., reese,m. (eds.) (1998). women as school executives: realizing the vision.commerce, texas: texas a&m university-commerce press awl journal home page awl journal volume 2, number 2, spring 1999 file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/awl_spring99.html subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership the school superintendency: male bastionor equal opportunity? mimi wolverton wolverton, spring, 1999 the state of washington provides a model for many states where female participation in the superintendency remains at much lower levels. but what kind of model is it? in 1997, the states with the highest percentage of women school superintendents included delaware (26%), nevada (24%), california (23%), arizona (22%) and rhode island (22%) (association of california school administrators, 1997). ranked tenth with 16% (a figure which by fall, 1997 had slipped to 14%) was washington state. washington prides itself on being at the forefront of providing leadership opportunities for women school administrators. it does, in fact, rank above 40 other states in that area. and if we consider the salaries of men and women who head comparably sized school districts, women seem to fare as well or better than men. for example, in districts that serve between 1,000 and 2,000 students the man superintendent salary is $76,568. several women superintendents make 4 to 6% more than the average. in the largest districts where salaries exceed $100,000 or more; 13% (7) of all women superintendents fall within the same pay category. the only possible exceptions to these pay differences seem to arise in very small districts where fewer than 200 students are enrolled. (washington has districts that serve as few as 10 students.) some of these districts share superintendents or use part-time and uncertified personnel to fill the superintendent's role. while state averages suggest that the mean salary for this group hovers around $54,000, salaries for women superintendents in these districts vary widely with a ten-student district paying its part-time, uncertified superintendent $400 per month, a district with 40 students paying its superintendent $48,000 a year, and one that serves 60 students offering an annual salary of $28,300 1(winter, 1997). in each instance, confounding variables such as district size, location, the tenure of the position, and other duties assigned to the superintendent make viable wage equity comparisons impossible. the more telling story may lie in the participation rates of washington women in school-related labor markets. this paper briefly outlines the basic tenets of occupational segregation and then examines washington school labor markets, paying particular attention to where and in what proportions women participates. lastly, it questions, based on the state of washington's track record, whether leadership roles in school districts remain male bastions or offer equal opportunities for women. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html occupational segregation gender-based workplace segregation occurs when women's work can be clearly distinguished form men's occupations and when concentrations of men and women appear at different levels in workplace hierarchies (reskin, 1997). this latter form of job participation difference is often called vertical segregation (blau & ferber, 1992). occupation segregation b gender constitutes a major social problem for working women . full-time working women earn less than three-quarters of what full-time working men earn, and at least 40% of this wage gap is due to women's concentration is lesser paying jobs (west & zimmerman, 1987; williams, 1995). interestingly, even though participation in the workplace by women has steadily increased and we have a history of political and legislative action designed to eliminate (or at least ease) such inequities, gender differences in occupations remain constant (goldin, 1990). in 1989, 44% of women worked in five professions that are over 80% female dietitian, librarian, nurse, pre-kindergarten/kindergarten teacher, and elementary teacher (blau & ferber, 1992). in 1990, women comprised 99.1% of all secretaries, 94.5% of all registered nurses, 97% of the country's child care workers, and almost 75% of all teachers (excluding colleges and universities). in contrast, only 9.5% of dentists, 8% of engineers, 21% of lawyers and judges, and less than 20% of all physicians were women (rothenburg, 1992). today, about 46% of the labor force is made up of women, yet only about 10% of all women workers are in management; many of these are in mid-level positions from which there is little chance of promotion (kelly, 1991; dunn, 1997). in fact, most studies indicate that women hold fewer than 5% of senior managerial and executive positions in large corporate organizations (federal glass ceiling commission, 1995; dunn, 1997). the washington state school system seventy percent of washington's 296 independent, public school districts serve fewer than 2,000 students each. fourteen of its superintendents who are located in some of the state's most isolated districts are each responsible for seven to 100 students (10 of these superintendents are women). in districts with fewer than 250 students, superintendents either take the helm at multiple districts (13 districts share superintendents one superintendent has three districts, five superintendents have two districts all are men) or carry dual superintendent-principal responsibilities. in the very small districts, the superintendent may be the teacher as well. districts with 250 to 600 students typically have a superintendent and one or two building principals. as enrollment tops 600, parttime directors of special education and sometimes vocational education are added. at 2,000 students these positions become full-time, and the administrative structure expands to include one or more assistant superintendents (winter, 1997) washington state's occupational hierarchy of the state's 289 school superintendents, 42 or 14% are women (strozyk, 1997). by district size, 43% (18 in number) of all female superintendents work in districts with 10 t 245 students. another 21% (9) serve in districts ranging in size from 751 to 1,799 students. fourteen percent (6) are located in districts with 2,000 to 4,999 students; 7% (3) are in districts of 5,000 to 9,000; 10% (4) work in districts of 10,000 to 14,000; and 5% (2) run districts with 18,000 students or more (winter, 1997) (table 1). if we consider female participation in the state's education job market as a whole, the picture becomes even clearer. 2 women in the state of washington fill 98% of all office and clerical positions in schools and provide schools with 93% of their aides. eighty-one percent of all elementary school teachers are women; 52% of elementary school vice-principals and 51% of the elementary school principal slots are occupied by women. at the secondary school level, female participation decreases. less than one-half (48%) of high school teachers are women, and they fill only 37% of the vice-principal and 28% of the principal positions. at the district level, across the state, 52% of central administrators (other than assistant superintendents and superintendents) are women. at higher district administrative levels, female participation again decreases. only 35% of the assistant superintendents and fewer than 15% of all school superintendents are women (strozyk, 1997) (table 2). file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/wolverton/woltb1.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/wolverton/woltb2.html whether we consider only the population of women superintendents in the state or we look at the education job market in its entirety, an occupational hierarchy exists in washington. in the first instance, we see that the majority of female superintendents (64%) are clustered in districts serving fewer than 1,800 students. indeed, ten of the state's fourteen smallest districts have women in charge. not only do these women have significantly different job descriptions and responsibilities from those who oversee large districts, they are relegated to the lower end of the superintendency pay scale. likewise, it is readily apparent when we examine the education job market as a whole that the rate of participation of women diminishes the higher up the occupational hierarchy we move. proportionately, fewer women stand on the top rungs o the managerial ladder than on the bottom. further, large concentrations of women, to the almost virtual exclusion of men, are found in job types that are traditionally described as feminine office, clerical, aides, and elementary teachers. fewer than 2% of all clerical positions are filled by men, no more than 7% of school aides are men, and less than 20% of elementary school teachers are male. in contrast, men occupy, in far greater proportions, work categories historically classified as men's work that of leadership and management. eighty-six percent of all school superintendents, 65% of the assistant superintendents, 72% of the principals and 63% of vice principals in secondary schools, and almost half of the elementary school principals and vice principals in washington are men. lessons learned men still control the vast majority of key leadership positions. the state of washington provides a model for many states where female participation in the superintendency remains at much lower levels. but what kind of model is it? obviously, men still control the vast majority of key leadership positions in the state's schools and districts. and, even in the nine states where greater proportions of women fill school superintendencies, nowhere does the proportion mirror the overall levels of female participation in the education job market. being tenth in a snail race doesn't give you the right to boast. while washington is in the top ten states with the highest percentage of women school superintendents, let's not forget that the number one achiever is only at 26%. is that really anything to brag about? schools appear to be no more progressive than corporate america. less than 15% of washington's superintendents are women, and the majority of these serve relatively small districts. women's work is still women's work. the vast majority of women working in washington schools hold clerical, aide, or elementary teaching positions. when women do "men's" work, they do it disproportionately i less desirable locations, with expanded responsibilities, with fewer support staff, and for lower pay. ten of washington' s smallest, most isolated districts are headed by women who work as teachers, principals, and superintendents for salaries below the state mean. we cannot allow ourselves to be lulled into thinking that we are making progress when in fact the school superintendency remains a strongly held male bastion. women, for the most part, fill the "rank and file" elementary and secondary school teacher positions. men continue to retain control of superintendencies and principalships. endnotes 1 salaries were spot-checked through personal contact with the superintendents. 2 for purposes of this analysis, i define the market categories as office and clerical, aides, elementary school teachers, vice-principals, and principals; secondary school teachers, vice-principals, and principals; district administrators other than superintendent and assistant superintendent; assistant superintendents; and superintendents. references association of california school administrators (1997). survey concerning percentage of female superintendents by state conducted fall 1996. blau, f.d. && ferber, m.a. (1992). the economics of women, men, and work. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. dunn, d. (1997). workplace/women's place. los angeles: roxbury publishing. federal glass ceiling commission (1995). a solid investment: making full use of the nation's human capital. washington dc: u.s. government printing office. goldin, c. (1990). understanding the gender gap: an economic history of american women. new york: oxford university press. kelly, r.m. (1991). the gendered economy: work, careers & success. new york: st. martin's press. strozyk, e. (september, 1997). personal commuique. supervisor of data management, information services, office of superintendent of public instruction, state of washington. west, c. & zimmerman, d. (1987). doing gender. gender & society (1), 125-151. williams, c.l. (1995). still a man's world: men who do women's work. berkeley: university of california press. winter, d. (september, 1997). personal communique. executive director, washington association of school administrators. mimi wolverton is assistant professor in the departmentof educational leadership and counseling psychology at washington stateuniversity, pullman, washington. reprinted with permission, funk, c., pankake, a., reese, m.(eds.) (1998). women as school executives: realizing the vision.commerce, texas: texas a&m university-commerce press awl journal home page awl journal volume 2, number 2, spring 1999 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic 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2013 volume 33 48 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 48-51, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper is there perceived gender disparity for women practicing sports medicine? nicole g. stern, ann gateley, and james r. barrett nicole g. stern is the team physician and an associate athletics director for the university of california, santa barbara email: nicole.stern@athletics.ucsb.edu; phone: 805-893-3424 ann gateley is a professor emeritus in the department of internal medicine at the university of new mexico health sciences center in albuquerque, nm. phone: 505-272-2147 james r. barrett is a professor and the residency program director in the department of family and preventive medicine at the university of oklahoma health sciences center in oklahoma city, ok. email: jim-barrett@ouhsc.edu; phone: 405-271-2569 accepted july 3, 2013 to understand the demographics of women sports medicine physicians and to determine whether they experienced gender disparity in the quality, quantity or types of clinical job opportunities. the authors surveyed women sports medicine physicians in the united states who were trained in one of the five primary care sports medicine specialties (pediatrics, emergency medicine, internal medicine, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and family medicine). the participants completed the survey on the internet and their participation was solicited via email based on membership in the american medical society for sports medicine or board certification with the american board of family medicine. a total of 300 surveys were distributed; 182 surveys were completed for a response rate of 61%. our study revealed that women over 35 years of age covered fewer events and games as part of their sports medicine practice than women under age 35 (75% versus 89% respectively). only 25% of women under 35 and 41% over age 35 felt that they had achieved their career goals. in addition, 60.5% of the women surveyed felt that they were compensated at a rate commensurate with their male peers and most women stated that the type and amount of clinical opportunities for women did not differ from men. overall, women sports medicine physicians were satisfied with their careers and most work in larger communities. however, it will be important to follow the careers of women sports medicine physicians in order to better understand the nuances of their clinical practice environments that may reveal disparities in the field of primary care sports medicine. keywords: women, sports medicine, gender disparity introduction men clearly outnumber women physicians in the field of primary care sports medicine in the united states. according to the american board of family medicine (abfm) gender statistics, 19% of 2012 diplomates with certificates of added qualification (caq) in sports medicine are women (abfm, gender of current diplomates, 2012). this represents an increase, since in 2009 the percentage of women with caqs in sports medicine was 17%, and in 2007, it was 15% (abfm, gender of current diplomates, 2007, 2009). this disparity in the number of women in sports medicine may be due to the relatively recent establishment of this specialty in the early to mid-1980s (puffer, 2004). some gender differences were recognized in a study of family physicians trained in sports medicine previously, demonstrating that men did have more training room coverage, except at the division 1 level (pana & mcshane, 2001). in this same study, men were also shown to be more likely to have a wider variety of game and event coverage (pana & mcshane, 2001). in another study of primary care sports medicine physicians, clinical practice descriptions and job satisfaction were examined from a predominantly male perspective (bennett, lipsky, & sharp, 2008). since no previous studies looked at the career experience or employment satisfaction of women primary care sports medicine physicians, our study was advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 49 exploratory in nature and designed to better understand factors that affect career satisfaction for this specific minority of women physicians. overall, we do know that gender disparity exists among primary care and nonsurgical physicians as evidenced by the physician work life study (mcmurray et al., 2000). in this study, women were less satisfied with their autonomy (e.g. decision-making regarding physician referrals, volume of patient load, and office scheduling particulars), salary, and availability of resources compared to their male colleagues (mcmurray et al., 2000). in an effort to better understand gender disparity in physician clinical practice, we surveyed women sports medicine physicians, since this group of physicians may reflect gender inequities found in other non-physician sports-related professions. unlike most medical settings where patients dictate their preference for providers, in many athletic department clinics, the gender of providers is dictated by sports administrators, head certified athletic trainers, coaches, and school traditions. historically, collegiate and professional sports in the united states have been male-biased. title ix, which dictates gender equity in federal funding, was only established in the early 1970's. as more women athletes participated in collegiate sports and then further in professional sports, more women found job openings in coaching and certified athletic training. however, job opportunity and compensation disparities between men and women still persist within these professions. in 2009, the national collegiate athletic association (ncaa) reported that some female coaches indicated dissatisfaction with the lack of equity between the sexes within athletic departments, salary, and workplace stress level (ncaa, 2009). in addition, more men than women coach women's sports, and there are very few women coaching male collegiate and professional sports. to illustrate this statement, in the 20102011 season, examination of representative division 1 state universities in 3 different conferences reveals 50 intercollegiate sports of which 23 are men’s teams, 25 are women’s teams and 2 are mixed (e.g. men’s and women’s ski team). all men’s teams are coached by men and, of the 25 women’s teams, 11 are coached by men, 14 are coached by women and both mixed gender teams have men as head coaches. therefore, the primary purpose of this study was to identify perceptions of gender disparity among women sports medicine physicians and to determine the role (if any) of physicians’ ages and locations of practice in these perceptions. methods an internet survey was completed with a national nonprobability sample. the questionnaire was divided into two main sections. the largest section surveyed the demographics of women sports medicine physicians and included questions about specialty, age, population of practice location, practice setting, fellowship training, board certification, team physician designation, family composition, and past experience as an athlete. the second section included questions about type of sports medicine coverage such as game, event or training room experience, coverage of women’s versus men’s sports teams, and perceptions of whether gender played some role regarding type or amount of work opportunities or compensation differences. a copy of the survey is available on request from the first author (n.s.). women primary care sports medicine physicians in the united states were recruited on a voluntary and confidential basis to take part in this study. participation was solicited via email, based on membership in the american medical society for sports medicine (amssm) or certification with the american board of family medicine. an email including the survey link was sent three different times. for our study, 300 women sports medicine physicians were contacted based on the percentage of women holding certificates of added qualification in sports medicine (220) plus a conservative estimate of those trained in other non-surgical specialties and those without a caq (80) (abms, 2005; abfm, 2012). initially, 200 women physicians agreed to complete this internet survey. however, out of these, 15 did not complete any portion of the survey and 3 failed to complete a majority of the survey. consequently, 182 women physicians (61%), out of 300, completed the survey (total sample size). of note, not all respondents answered every question. in order to examine the relationships under investigation in the present study, frequencies and chi-square tests were used. when calculating frequencies, an age split of 35 was used in order to separate those physicians who were within five years of fellowship graduation from those older. this is significant as a smaller percentage of older women sports medicine physicians certified prior to the requirement mandating completion of an accredited fellowship as of 2000 (amssm, n.d.). in addition to age, the physicians surveyed were sorted by population size of their clinical practice location (less or more than 100,000 people). this study was judged to be exempt by the institutional review board of the university of arizona. results when indicating their primary practice specialty, family medicine (144) comprised the largest number of physicians out of a total of 185 respondents to this first question. this compared to physicians in pediatrics (13), internal medicine (13), emergency medicine (7), and other (8). out of 185 women answering the approximate age question, there were 80 respondents stating their age was under 35 versus 105 women over age 35. as far as practice location, 44 out of 185 women stated they worked in an academic setting at a university and 22 of the 185 practiced in a student health facility. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 50 statistically significant findings in our study reveal that among women under age 35, 89% covered games and events, while only 75% of women over 35 covered these as part of their sports medicine practice (p = 0.015). out of 176 women who answered, 12 covered women’s sports only, 11 covered men’s sports only and 153 covered both. in addition, among women under 35, 25% stated they did not feel they have achieved their goals, while women over 35 answered affirmatively at 41% (p = 0.036) [figure 1]. age clearly appeared to play a role in the type and quality of sports medicine experienced by women physicians. specifically, among older practitioners there are significant perceptions of gender disparities by the majority of women sports medicine physicians. however, this population of women practitioners over age 35, in spite of perceived differences of practice opportunity and lower compensation believe that they have, in fact, achieved their goals. this may reflect lower expectations than their younger colleagues, i.e. they have had more time to achieve their career benchmarks and they may have less family versus career conflicts, as their families are now older. figure 1. women who have achieved career goals additional results of our survey indicated that irrespective of age, practice location, or years of experience, only a few more than half of the women surveyed (60.5%) felt that they were compensated at a rate commensurate with their male peers. notably, the preponderance of women physicians felt that the type (75%) and amount (87%) of opportunities available to them did not differ from their male counterparts. in terms of sports coverage available to women physicians, about 44% were granted the opportunity and chose to cover both football and men’s or women’s basketball (alongside other varsity and club sports). table 1 reveals some interesting additional findings that were not statistically significant. one result revealed that, in comparison to a survey of sports medicine fellowship graduates completed in 2000 where only 15% of graduates had a practice comprised of 75% or more sports medicine, 28% of women in our study had a practice 75% or more of which was comprised of sports medicine (henehan, shiple, & coppola, 2003). table 1 select survey results questions yes no board certified (e.g. caq) in sports medicine 88% 12% head team physician 62% 38% fellowship trained 83% 17% completed fellowship after 1992 85% 15% willing to attend women’s interest group at amssm 77% 23% travel with any teams 33% 67% women >35 y.o. who felt compensation was equal to men 54% 46% women <35year old who felt compensation equal to men 68% (p = 0.078) 32% felt type and amount of opportunities did not differ from men 75% (type) and 87% (amount) 25% (type) and 13% (amount) married 62% 38% sports medicine practice limited time with family and personal life 63% 37% wish could do more sports medicine 53% 47% was/is a competitive athlete 86% 14% conclusions overall, most of the women surveyed in our study believe that the availability of options afforded women sports medicine physicians appears to be on par with those for men. however, as questions arise from large surveys of women physicians about practice parity, we hope that our study will prompt further inquiry and research about medical practice differences that exist between men and women. limitations of our study include the lack of a male comparison group and perhaps a biased sample, i.e. only those women interested in the questions being asked completed the survey. however, our intention was only to survey women physicians to see if perceptions of practice differences exist at all. another limitation is that we did not use different age range comparisons, since we used the two categories of under 35 and over 35. the reason for this was to better understand the difference in experiences between those within just a few years 0.00% 5.00% 10.00% 15.00% 20.00% 25.00% 30.00% 35.00% 40.00% 45.00% <35 >35 (χ2 = 4.38, n = 161, p = .036) p er ce n ta g e age advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 51 of fellowship graduation in their first job(s), and those out several years, who may or may not have completed fellowship training. a final conclusion from our study is that more research into the concept of practice parity is needed. with decreased gender disparity in our profession and other closely related professions, we should anticipate over time more equal and ruminative practice opportunities for women sports medicine physicians practicing alongside men in the united states. acknowledgements: the authors wish to thank the office staff at the american medical society for sports medicine and james c. puffer, md with the american board of family medicine for their assistance with distributing the survey email to their respective listservs. references american board of family medicine. (2012). gender of current diplomates. in american board of family medicine. retrieved april 6, 2012, from https://www.theabfm.org/about/stats_gender.aspx. american board of family medicine. (2009). gender of current diplomates. in american board of family medicine. retrieved november 16, 2009, from https://www.theabfm.org/about/stats_gender.aspx. american board of family medicine. (2007). gender of current diplomates. in american board of family medicine. retrieved march 12, 2008, from https://www.theabfm.org/about/stats_gender.aspx. american board of medical specialties (abms). (2005). 2005 annual report & reference handbook. retrieved may 1, 2007, from http://www.abms.org/downloads/publications/annual report 2005.pdf. american medical society for sports medicine (amssm). (n.d). membership. american medical society for sports medicine (amssm). retrieved april 23, 2012, from https://www.amssm.org/membership.html. bennett, a., lipsky, m., & sharp, l. (2008). the careers of primary care sports medicine physicians in the united states: a survey study. clin j sport med, 18(1), 81-84. doi: 10.1097/jsm.0b013e318160a514. henehan, m., shiple, b., & coppola, g. (2003). nonsurgical sports medicine training in the united states: a survey of sports medicine fellowship graduates. clin j sport med, 13(5), 285-291. mcmurray, j. e., linzer, m., konrad, t. r., douglas, j., shugerman, r., & nelson, k. (2000). the work lives of women physicians results from the physician work life study. the sgim career satisfaction study group. j gen intern med, 15(6), 372-380. national collegiate athletic association (ncaa). (2009). gender equity in college coaching and administration: perceived barriers report. retrieved april 6, 2012, from http://www.ncaapublications.com/productdownloads/ bar09.pdf. pana, a. l., & mcshane, j. (2001). gender influences on career opportunities, practice choices, and job satisfaction in a cohort of physicians with certification in sports medicine. clin j sport med, 11(2), 96-102. puffer, j. c. (2004). sports medicine: the primary care perspective. south med j, 97(9), 873-874 advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership adjusting to a new society: a study of educated chinese women's acculturation in the united states ping liu, ph.d liu, spring, 1997 meeting the challenge of adjusting to a new culture and social life from a professional to a housewife places a great deal of pressure on these educated chinese women. they have strong desires and motivation to continue their professions, but have not obtained the support necessary accomplish their goals. as housewives, their social circle is very limited, which leads to isolation in the host culture. leaving one's motherland for a new country where a different language and culture dominates often results in barriers which must be overcome. however, i had never realized how hard it was to adjust to a new cultural and language environment until i immigrated to the united states. the most prominent change that i experienced in this new land was the shift from a professional to a housewife. fortunately, this status did not last long (a year and a half) before i had the opportunity to pursue a higher degree. i was, then, able to resume the career that i had enjoyed in the past. today, with an earned doctoral degree, i often reflect on my personal experiences in the past six years in the united states and wonder what happened to other chinese educated women who are not able to pursue their careers in the new country but remain housewives instead. how do they adjust themselves to the host country? what are their reactions to their current status? what support and help do they need in facilitating the process of adjustment? what are their desires and hopes? with these questions in mind, i conducted research on married chinese female immigrants who were well-educated and employed in china. by the middle of this century, chinese women had been playing a subservient role for more than 2,000 years. in a woman's lifetime, she was supposed to obey her father when she was a girl, obey her husband when she got married, and obey her son when her husband died. she had no right to inherit family property and was not even allowed to keep her own name after marriage; she was addressed as her husband's wife or her child's mother. in addition, women were deprived of the right of education, and it was a virtue for a woman to be uneducated. the social status of women changed dramatically over the http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html past few decades. they were encouraged to walk out of their houses and become active participants in society. although many critical issues still exist in women's status in china (croll, 1995), chinese women, especially those who live in urban areas, have witnessed fundamental changes in education, employment, and marriage. the majority of chinese women who joined their husbands in the u.s. were well educated and employed in respectable professions in china. these female immigrants are usually unable to find a job to resume their professions in this new country due mainly language and cultural barriers. therefore, they may encounter more difficulties in acculturation than those women who originally were in the traditional roles of housewife and mother. for this study, i interviewed three chinese women who were all college graduates and who worked as a teacher (mrs. z), an administrator (mrs. p), and a journalist (mrs. c), before they immigrated to the us. they have been living in the us for 9, 8, and 3 years respectively. except for mrs. z, who has been working in a plant for a few months, the other two have not been employed since coming to the u.s. in this manuscript, i focus the analysis of their responses in the following categories: language/cultural barriers in adjustment, self-evaluation of current status in the host culture, reaction to gender issues, and attitude toward the pursuit of a higher degree. language/cultural barriers in adjusting to the target environment mrs. z was a middle school english teacher, so her english was good enough for basic daily communication. however, she admits that she has both language and cultural barriers yet to overcome. "although it is important that you should have high language proficiency to communicate effectively, there seems to be as much of a cultural barrier as there is a language barrier. little is shared between people from different cultural backgrounds, and few common topics exist between them. for instance, i do not have much communication with my american colleagues, except for exchanging greetings and discussing the movies we have seen. most of the time, i associate with chinese workers." mrs. p, a former administrator at a university, and mrs. c, a former journalist at a national newspaper, are both full time housewives, taking care of their husbands and kids. they claim that language barriers prevent them from getting involved in the social life and hinder their professional development in the new environment. everyday they communicate with other chinese immigrants but seldom interact with native english speakers. as a result, they feel very much isolated in the host culture. all of the three women report that when they first arrived in the u.s. they attended english language development classes but soon dropped out. their general impression of the quality of the classes was unanimous -not positive, though their specific comments on the ineffectiveness of the classes vary. mrs. z explains: "i dropped out mainly because the level of the class was too basic. what i need is to enroll in an advanced class, so that my english can be improved. i am sure that my english can be greatly enhanced if i had the opportunity to study in a formal educational program." mrs. p's reaction to the limitations of the english classes is similar to that of mrs. z. "you may learn the basic skills for daily communication, but little support was provided for language advancement." she lists further reasons for the ineffectiveness of the class: a) the teachers were not well trained, b) various proficiency levels of students in the same class made it harder to focus instruction, and c) the teaching materials were not adequate. according to mrs. c, the english classes she attended did not help very much because of ineffective instruction. "vocabulary was the focus of teaching. we learned and memorized many words that we seldom or never use in daily life. i think listening comprehension is a major area that needs to be stressed, which was unfortunately ignored in the class. since only english was used for instruction, i often failed to comprehend what was explained. the games we played, on the other hand, were too easy. another weak area of teaching was that grammar was not taught at all. therefore, we only know isolated words but do not know how to use them properly." it is interesting to note that all participants chose to have the interview done in chinese because they could explain themselves better in their native language. perhaps language is not the only issue here; culture may have a lot to do with their choices. it is still questionable whether the acculturation model (schumann, 1978) explains all about second language learning, but the participants' experiences do indicate that language learning is closely related to social interaction, or vice versa. self-evaluation of current status in the host country since the chinese women's social lives underwent a dramatic change due to immigration, they were asked to compare their current status with that in china. their adjustment in the host country not only includes knowing a new language and culture but also experiencing the change from professionals to housewives. are they happy with their current status? "i am not quite satisfied with my current situation because i have not been merged in the social life here," says mrs. z. mrs. z continues, "ever since i came to this country, all i have done was give birth to two daughters. though i have a minimum wage job now, i am still not involved in the society. i guess one of the reasons for the isolation is that i do not have a chance to be educated." mrs. z states that she would rather go back to china if her life and status remain the same in this country. "an individual needs to make contributions to a society. so, my strongest desire is to change my current status by starting a profession that i like and becoming an independent woman again." similarly, mrs. p is disappointed at her current status. "now i do not have my own social life. there is a major difference between being a housewife and a professional. you do things playing either role, but you can only enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when you complete tasks as a professional. you work everyday as a housewife, yet you still feel you are nowhere." except for volunteering as the principal of a chinese sunday school, mrs. p has never officially been employed in this society. she has been trying very hard to find a job, but has been rejected so far. "i wish i could go back to china to continue my career. however, i have to stay to take care of my husband and two sons. i do not know exactly how my experiences here would affect my life in the future, but one thing is for sure -i am wasting my time for my career." isolation and the feeling of being lost are also the primary worries of mrs. c. "as a professional, i often felt exhausted at the end of a day but was happy. whenever my articles were in print, i enjoyed my achievement. language and cultural barriers prevent me from making use of my expertise and being recognized in this society." mrs. c does not see herself being involved in the mainstream life yet. "i still eat my chinese food and keep my own life style. i do not know very much about the american customs." her communication circle is limited to chinese people. she is not sure how the experience would affect her life in the future, however. "i have gone through a lot of psychological pressures which prepare me to handle a new environment better." mrs. c is expecting her second child in eight months, and can only plan for her future when her husband graduates. reaction on gender issues in the interview, the participants evaluate women's status in the u.s. compared to that of chinese women. they also comment on whether the barriers they encountered in the new environment were related to gender differences. interestingly, their responses to the issues represent different views. instead of directly comparing women's status in the two countries, mrs. z admits that age makes a major difference in the way u.s. women fit into family and society. for the traditional (older) women, husbands are their bosses and they are very obedient. but the younger female professionals, are more independent and have a more equal relationship with their spouses. the reflection of mrs. p on women's status in both countries is rather straight forward: "i think chinese women are much better off than the american women in terms of independence and professional development. almost all chinese urban women are employed and have a more equal relationship with their husbands. in this society, you hear stories of family violence and battered women all the time." holding an opposite view to that of mrs. p, mrs. c thinks american women are well treated. "quotas prevent women from discrimination in job searches. when a couple is getting divorced, the wife can still get economic support from the husband if she is not independent. women's rights are well protected. for instance, a pregnant woman can always get the nutrition she needs for the baby's and her own health from the government." all of the women agree that the pressure one is under in adjusting to a new culture is more universal than gender related. however, their opinions on the amount and types of pressures experienced by males and females differ. mrs. z believes that her husband has more pressure than she does. "he has to worry about holding his job so as to provide economic support for the family. my pressure is rather caused by the tedious routines and boring life. other than that, i do not have to worry about my food on the table." mrs. p indicates both she and her husband have pressures but their pressures are different. he has the responsibility of supporting the family, while she is concerned at the change of her current status by finding a job. she further explains that no matter whether one is a male or a female, s/he must deal with many difficulties in adjusting to a new culture. "but i think it is even harder for a woman because she has more family responsibilities, such as taking care of kids. if i were in china i could get help from my family, and now i have to handle everything all by myself." like mrs. p, mrs. c admits that she and her husband have different types of pressures. "my husband's pressure is mainly from his career. he is not young anymore, but has to work hard to support this family. i, on the other hand, do not have economic pressure but am caught in a dilemma: if i stay here, i cannot resume my career; if i go back to china and do what i enjoy, i have to leave my husband." mrs. c further states that both men and women will encounter difficulties when they are in a new country. however, men are more independent than women in adjustment. women are usually dependent on their husbands and have their specific problems to deal with such as bearing and raising children. "i do not have anything else to do now, so it is the best time to have children. children make me feel wanted and bring me joy." obviously, these participants express very different views in their evaluation of women's status in the u.s. a possible explanation to the phenomenon could be that none of them has actually looked into the issue, and their responses are primarily based on the nonsystematic information available in their lives. attitude toward education and pursuit of a higher degree asians view education as a means to improve their lives (scarcella, 1990), and the three chinese women are no exception. they all understand the relationship between continued education and the development of their careers in the us, but only mrs. z has an immediate goal to work on a higher degree. the other two both suggest that it is not realistic for them to continue their education due to language, culture and age barriers, responsibilities in their family, and limited support available. however, mrs. c plans to choose a career that requires less language skill. "i would like to do something in a chinese community or select a profession that does not require too much language proficiency, such as running a chinese restaurant. making money is important, but my priority is to maximally develop my potential." although the chinese women have experienced many difficulties in their adjustment and still feel lost, they have not given up. they have been trying persistently to find a way out so that they may develop their potential in the new environment. meeting the challenge of adjusting to a new culture and social life (from a professional to a housewife) results in a great deal of pressure on these educated chinese women. they have strong desires and motivation to continue their professions, but have not obtained the support to accomplish their goals. as housewives, their social life circle is very much limited, which leads to isolation in the host culture. they are fully aware of the relationship between acquiring the new language and pursuing their careers in this country, but they are not yet able to improve their english proficiency. implication/conclusions an implication of this study related to english teaching is that a good understanding of students' needs is fundamental for effective instruction. if students do not see much progress in language learning, it is not only a waste of time, but their self-confidence may be negatively affected. moreover, english classes should also create opportunities to have students well connected to the new society to both improve their language proficiency and facilitate the acculturation process. social/psychological distance seems to play an important part in students' language acquisition. in other words, their isolation from the target language group slows down the process of english learning. language, culture, and opportunities through jobs are key elements to newcomers' success in this complex society. the three interviewed women were eager to participate in this new society but found major language and cultural barriers. as the country with the largest number of immigrants in the world, it is important that u.s. institutions be established to serve the immigrants' needs in language acquisition, education, and employment. if timely guidance and support are provided, the acculturation processof immigrants would be greatly facilitated. the sooner chinese women immigrants find their positions in a new society, the less pressure they will have to deal with, and the sooner they can make contributions to the society if they choose to pursue their careers. editors' note: apa style is followed as closely as possible in html. indentions, spacing, and footnoting may vary. references croll, e. (1995). changing identities of chinese women: rhetoric, experience and self-perception in twentieth-century china. hong kong: hong kong university press. scarcella, r. (1990). teaching language minority students in the multicultural classroom. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. schumann, j. (1978). the acculturation model for second-language acquisition. in r. gingras, ed. second language acquisition and foreign language teaching, pp. 27-50. arlington, va: center for applied linguistics. dr. ping liu is assistant professor, school of teacher education, san diego state university, san diego, ca 92182. e-mail: pliu@mail.sdsu.edu awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 1, spring 1997 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:pliu@mail.sdsu.edu file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/spring97/awl_spring97.html 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file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership gender, culture and language in school administration: another glass ceiling for hispanic females rosita marcano, ph.d. marcano, spring, 1997 women in administration face many challenges in their careers. when the additional characteristics of racial and ethnic differences are included, the challenges increase. the struggle to achieve fair representation and adequate advancement opportunities within school districts is a problem that disturbs minority women. a review of the literature reveals little information on the experience of hispanic female administrators. most of the relevant literature deals with women in general. the studies that do address minority themes ground themselves in the african-american female experiences. the u.s. government describes "hispanics" as persons of puerto rican, mexican or mexican american, cuban, south or central american, or other spanish ancestry. many people from these backgrounds use latino or their actual country of origin (puerto rican, mexican, etc.) to describe themselves to others. for convenience, i use the terms "latina" and "hispanic" interchangeably in this study, although i know that some colleagues take exception to both terms and to the labeling and marginalizing that they represent. to gain a deeper understanding of hispanic women in administrative positions, i asked hispanic female principals to respond to a questionnaire. afterwards, i interviewed ten principals. i asked them to report their experiences in five domains: career advancement, cultural and ethnic identity, significant mentors, sexual harassment, and the cultures of the schools in which they currently work. my goal was to investigate hispanic female principals' common experiences, challenges, and victories. this paper is based upon the experiences of ten hispanic female principals in chicago, texas and wisconsin. the participants were five puerto rican, one south american, and four mexican female principals. all are fluent spanish-and english-speaking professionals between the ages of thirty-five and fifty; three have doctoral degrees; four are currently married, three are divorced, three are single, never http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html married. i interviewed each extensively to gain a richer understanding of her experiences. language, gender, and culture the dual impact of language and culture emerged as both a source of success and as the reason for fear of failure as perceived by eight of the interviewees. the gender issue varied, depending on the community involved. high numbers of latino families in the community impacted the gender issue in a different way from populations with lower numbers of latino residents within the community. the hispanic women interviewed for this study shared similar experiences in this area. although they had the advantage of communication in the school community's native language, those interviewees who worked in communities with large hispanic representations felt they had been placed there chiefly because they were hispanic rather than because they were the best qualified for the position. in communities with smaller latino representations, the gender issue of leadership weakness emerged. in several cases, parents questioned the quality of the school's educational program with a female principal at the helm. one respondent eloquently described her first challenge in the principalship as that of "having to prove yourself twice, first because you are female and second because you are hispanic!" when asked if speaking a second language and being familiar with the communities was of benefit to their leadership roles, their responses in this area ranged from having the advantage of communicating in two languages with their districts, especially those with high correlations of latino populations, to the negative experience of having integrity and skills questioned on the premises of ethnic differences between hispanic groups. linguistic barriers were evidenced more by some than others. one respondent, who has a distinct spanish accent, claimed that people sometimes speak in a louder voice as though if she does not understand. this makes her angry because she claims her accent has nothing to do with her hearing. she holds a ph.d. and has worked hard to achieve her position but struggles with the way in which she is sometimes treated because of her strong spanish accent and presence. she has also had the uncomfortable experience of being accused of preferring puerto ricans over mexicans or other latino groups. the women protested the way in which their leadership was questioned in terms of gender and culture. this created a highly stressful work environment for the women who constantly had to prove themselves. one principal's greatest challenge was convincing the hispanic males in her community and on her staff that she could handle gang-and drug-related issues. in another school the parents (minority and nonminority) began to transfer their children to other schools because they believed that the school's educational quality might go down with a female minority principal. two of the principal's suggestions and ideas were devalued in public meetings. according to one respondent, when these ideas were presented later by a male coordinator from the regional offices, they were more readily accepted by the same audience. another area that was uncovered was the domain of intentional and unintentional injury due to racism or lack of cultural sensitivity on the part of colleagues and central office administration. respondents felt their colleagues were insensitive to their culture or gender because of remarks and jokes expressed in their presence. two respondents expressed their resentment of negative innuendo such as "muchacha," or "chica," which mean nothing more than girl. comments about ethnic foods, dress, and music were also demeaning. other issues that emerged dealt with the participants' feelings of isolation due to lack of trust within the educational system. this feeling of isolation threatened their self confidence in their own leadership. one respondent almost changed careers during one of these episodes because of the loneliness and stress she felt. the lack of a strong support system was another obstacle to which several women alluded. these difficulties are not uncommon to administrators in general, but women (especially minority women), appear to face more challenges these areas. this may be expressed as a form of culture shock. culture shock has been defined as the set of emotional reactions to: the loss of reinforcements from one's own culture, new cultural stimuli which have little or no meaning, and the misunderstanding of new and diverse experiences (adler, 1975). most disturbing to this researcher was the way in which the truth of the painful experiences of these was cloaked to avoid dealing with the reality of what they were actually experiencing in terms of sexual and racial discrimination. although they knew their leadership skills were questioned unfairly by their superiors, they learned to get around these painful issues and move on even though they had not been vindicated. while this may be referred to as developing a "thick skin," it seems as though the women had placed masks over their beings and somehow had forgotten to remove them at the end of the day. according to sanford (1970), the mask is the person we pretend to be, the false outer personality which we turn to the world, but which is contradicted from within. the mask is that which conceals our real thoughts and feelings, which we come to use so habitually as a way to hide from others and ourselves that we become unaware we have assumed it (p. 95). sanford further states that we begin to identify with the mask and start to believe we are the person we pretend to be and are, thus, unable to identify with our real self. the reason this was such a disturbing finding to me was that it forced me to take a good look in the mirror. as a female administrator, i too, had learned to hide these painful experiences so deeply that they were not dealt with at all. some principals had ignored and gone so far beyond the incidents that they had forgotten that they had actually occurred. professional promotion when the principals were asked about their current positions and future career promotion opportunities, the answers were varied and, in some cases, surprising. one respondent felt that she had been placed in her position because the school district had a high influx of hispanic students. although she had excellent credentials and a doctoral degree from a reputable school, she felt her placement there was pure tokenism. she claimed her perception would have been different if she had been placed in a less segregated school. she also noted that in her district there were no superintendents or other key positions held by hispanic or female professionals. deitz (1992) touches upon the view of this respondent when she states that people continue to hire in their own images and when they do that, they hire people who are not hispanic. simply from a traditional decision-making viewpoint, hispanics are not sought out often, and when they are sought out, they are sometimes sought out in a token fashion, without any real desire of making an appointment (p. 6-8). one respondent felt that she acquired her position because of luck, or being in the right place at the right time. she knew she had leadership skills and talents but could not talk about them specifically. it was hard for her to see or describe herself as the most qualified for the position. several respondents felt they had achieved the opportunity to become principals because of early retirement initiatives in their districts. career advancement getting to "know thyself" as a leader seems to be key to dealing with the dilemma of casualties in leadership. accurate self-assessment is absolutely crucial to leadership success; however, for the female hispanic it is culturally inappropriate to sing her own praises. the interviewees had difficulty specifically citing their leadership strengths and skills, and they attributed much of their success to teamwork of staff and parents. it was difficult for them to attribute their success to their own contributions. this might be misinterpreted as a lack of self-esteem by superiors. the administrative portfolio would serve as a tool for these hispanic women administrators who are reluctant to portray their successes and accomplishments to conduct an accurate self-assessment. the administrative portfolio, as suggested by brown and irby (1995), is an excellent technique for self-assessment (p. 190-193). it offers administrators an overview of where they have been, what they have done, and what they need to be doing. brown and irby suggest that, along with artifacts and reflections, transcripts, letters of reference, a five year plan, personal philosophy of education, samples of workshop certificates, and thank you notes from administrators, parents, and students be included in the administrative portfolio. besides being a reliable tool to use in to a job interview, the administrative portfolio can provide the hispanic female administrator documentation over time of her very real skills. when mentoring prospective female principals, much of the intervieweesõ advice dealt with knowing strengths and weaknesses as leaders. joining key educational organizations that foster and encourage hispanic administrator's development, as well as those organizations that offer positive networking opportunities was highly recommended. one respondent expressed the importance of her mentor's role in her own mental health. she was advised to stay current on the latest research as well as the occasional reading of a good novel. this gave her a good sense of culture and helped her to relax, enjoy, lighten up and not take herself so seriously. understanding the majority culture and its politics, including the "good old boy network," was also advice she had received from mentors and now passed on to others. status and positions one common theme that surfaced during the interviews was that minority women tend to play several roles in their positions as administrators. on the one hand, they are expected to represent their ethnic group. they felt their ethnic groups were watching them closely and would be quick to condemn them if they behaved "too anglo." these women also felt their colleagues and central administrators were always watching and that they would be viewed as "outsiders" if they behaved "too hispanic." their performance as leaders was always under the watchful eye of others, and they were quick to be judged based on their femininity and ethnicity. another role conflict they perceived was that while they are expected to behave as "ladies" on their jobs, this expectation contributes to perceptions of vulnerability and weakness because they are women. getting angry or being assertive is acceptable for a male administrator, but if a female administrator behaves this way it must be because it is "that time of the month." menstrual cramps or pregnancies were cited as possible reasons for the perception that women could not be effective in their jobs. racial and sexual discrimination although all except one of the respondents acknowledged sexual discrimination was present in their district, none of the participants was overly concerned about this issue. according to brilles (1995) sexual discrimination may be expressed physically, verbally, or non-verbally. one respondent had experienced sexual harassment by way of jokes that demeaned women. these jokes were related by male administrators and colleagues in her presence. although she asked them to stop, they continued, so she walked away. since then, communication between male colleagues and this respondent have been somewhat "cut off." she expressed a sense that they view her as a prude and don't see her as a "team player," a situation that she feels may have a substantial negative impact on her support system. another respondent related an incident she experienced at a principals' meeting. she has an italian last name, although she is puerto rican. a fellow principal had a complaint about "those" puerto rican and mexican kids transferring into his school. after some nasty remarks about "those" kids, he asked if she had been experiencing the same problems at her school. a little embarrassed, she replied that she had been one of "those" kids when she arrived from puerto rico to study on the mainland and went on to share some cultural information to help him understand the children's behaviors he had alluded to in his remarks. he apologized for having possibly offended her, and he thanked her for the information. he still calls her from time to time. not all hispanics will respond or behave as this respondent did. anger or alienation are probably more typical reactions. the successful women administrators interviewed utilized the worst situations they encountered by creating opportunities to teach and lead others into understanding. no longer could people around them plead ignorance for their lack of cultural sensitivity. they held those around them accountable for their actions. their fear and anger changed from internalizing to expressing to others understanding of why their actions are unacceptable or inappropriate. this was an advantage in their networking with others. as female hispanic principals continue to increase in numbers, they will deal with cultural and language discrimination issues on a more frequent basis than their female non-hispanic colleagues. like other women, hispanic women may experience different treatment because of their gender, but, in the case of the hispanic woman, being both female and culturally different will often result in double discrimination. implications for the future as school districts continue to meet educational needs of the large influx of hispanic students, more emphasis should be placed on hiring school administrators in key positions that better reflect the ethnicity and cultural identities of the student population. according to a 1991 article in the new york times, chancellor joseph a. fernandez of the new york city's public school system pushed for increasing the number of black, female, and hispanic principals who could serve as role models for their students (metropolitan news. p. b1 and b5). in 1995 the chicago public schools had a total of 123 hispanics in administrative positions, including facilitators, principals, assistant principals and regional officers. in 1996 that number grew to 140. hispanic female principals made up 42 of the group in 1996 and hispanic male principals made up a total of 27 of those numbers (1996). results of this study point out that hispanic female principals do not want to be considered "outsiders" by their colleagues; they seek entrance into leadership positions and acceptance by the majority culture. condescending attitudes and tokenism, once they are detected, are destructive to positive working relationships. in seeking to "know thyself" or what their leadership styles are, it behooves all women to become knowledgeable about the majority culture in which they work. women will play a significant role in the administration of education in the future, and more effort needs to be expanded in support of females in key leadership positions, including women of differing cultures and language, so that their successes can become the successes of american urban education. editors' note: apa style is followed as closely as possible using html. indentions, spacing, and footnoting may vary. references adler, p. s. (1975). the transitional experience: an alternative view of culture shock. the journal of humanistic psychology. 15 (4), 13-23. bell, l. a. (1990). the gifted woman as impostor. advanced development: a journal on adult giftedness. 2, 55-64. bennis, w. (1989). on becoming a leader. reading, ma: addison-wesley publishing company, inc. bolles, r. n. (1996). the 1996 what color is your parachute? berkeley, ca: ten speed press. brilles, j. (1995). gender traps. new york, ny: mcgraw hill.. burdin, j. l. (ed.) (1996). prioritizing instruction: the fourth yearbook of the national council of professors of educational administration, ncpea.. lancaster, pa: technomic publishing co., inc. chicago public schools, department of human resources. (1996). hispanic population: administrative positions. chicago, il: cps publications. comas-diaz, l. (1995). women of color. new york, ny: guilford press. deitz, r. (1992). hispanics in educational policy making positions: where are they?. the hispanic outlook in higher education, 2 (12), 6-8. dellinger, s. (1992). management & leadership skills for women: solutions for the special challenges of being a woman in management. boulder, co: career track publications. depree, m. (1989) leadership is an art. new york, ny: dell publishing company. drucker, p. f. (1992) managing for the future: the 1990's and beyond. new york, ny: truman talley books. gil, m. r. (1996). the maria paradox: how latinas merge old world traditions with new world self esteem. g.p. putnam's sons, new york, ny. haven, e.w. (1980) minorities in educational administration: the principalship, a literature review. annandale, va: jwk international corp. hesselbein, f., goldsmith, m., & beckhard, r. (1996). the leader of the future. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass publishers. hill, m. h., & ragland, j. c. (1995). women as educational leaders: opening windows pushing ceilings. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press, inc. irby, b. j. & brown, g. (eds.). (1995). women as school executives: voices and visions. texas council of women school executives. huntsville, tx: sam houston press. kappa delta pi. (fall, 1996). gender and ethnicity. 33, (1).west lafayette, in kappa delta pi. lush, j. (1992). women and stress. grand rapids, mi: baker book house. metropolitan news.(1991) the new york times. october 8, b1 & b5. sanford, j. a. (1970). the kingdom within. new york, ny: paulist press. shepard, s. i. (1996). women as school administrators: past and present attitudes of superintendents and school board presidents. paper presented at 50th annual national conference of educational administration. texas a&m university, corpus christi. shorris, e. (1992). latinos: a biography of the people. new york, ny: avon books. souder-torres, l.m. (1992). daughters of the island: contemporary chamorro women organizers on guam. second edition. lanham, md: university press of america, inc. telgen, d. (1996). latinas: women of achievement. detroit, mi: visible ink press. tingley, j. c. (1994). genderflex men & women speaking each other's language at work. new york, n.y.: amacom. tzu, s. (1996).the lost art of war. translated with commentary by thomas cleary. harper collins publishers, inc. new york, n.y. dr. rosita marcano is assistant professor of leadership and educational policy studies at northern illinois state university. e-mail: rlm@flash.net awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 1, spring 1997 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:rlm@flash.net file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/spring97/awl_spring97.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership mexican women confront mainstream policy: voices from the colonias address family self-sufficiency georgiana vaccaro, ph.d., ann lessem, ph.d. vaccaro & lessem, winter, 1999 the practice of allowing "family self-sufficiency" to become tantamount to the family's adoption of legislated middle class values might limit access to these social services to women who are willing to compromise their own culture. "colonias" are unincorporated settlements in the outskirts of the u.s. cities along the mexican border. they are typified by high unemployment, low access to potable water, chronic disease, a high birthrate and residents who have a lack of knowledge about, or access to, medical care (salinas, 1998). in addition to the daily challenges which colonias women face, they are often judged by standards established by american middle class culture. these judgment criteria include such items as the: (a) acquisition of written language and literacy skills; (b) reliance on the individual (self) over reliance on the group (community); and (c) acceptance of a priority on activities that will produce a higher socio-economic status. based on these standards, the colonias women appear to fall short, or to be somehow more deficient than other women in poverty. often they speak little or no english and may have limited reading or writing skills in their native language(s). they often value commitment to family and neighbors more than commitment to "economic independence". in fact, this commitment may supersede their desire for personal growth through education and job training programs (salinas, 1998; vaccaro, 1998). it is the contention of the authors that the difference in values between women living in the colonias and typical middle class values might be problematic when middle class values are used as the basis for social legislation. for example, the recent welfare reform law (the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act of 1996 prwora) seems to include such a mismatch. the comprehensive welfare reform program, called temporary assistance for needy families (tanf), focuses on moving recipients into work and to time-limit assistance. under this statute, program funding http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html and assistance come with predefined expectations and responsibilities for welfare recipients. adults receiving assistance are expected to engage in work activities and develop the capability to support themselves before their time-limited assistance runs out (prwora, 1996). in other words, adults receiving assistance are mandated to become "self-sufficient" based on a middle class definition of the concept. this definition of self-sufficiency includes a synthesis of competencies, which, when achieved, should allow the family to meet their physical needs and to problem solve in the areas of personal finance, health and medical care, transportation, education, job seeking and work, child care, communications and personal development (baird, 1991, zieghan, 1992). the authors feel that female residents of the colonias could easily be caught between legislated values, such as those inherent in welfare reform, and the values rewarded by their own culture, i.e. self-sacrifice, conformity and deference to male authority (anzaldua, 1987, cisneros, 1991). the practice of allowing "family self-sufficiency" to become tantamount to the family's adoption of legislated middle class values might limit access to these social services to women who are willing to compromise their own culture. methodology the supposition that the perspectives held by mexican women regarding independence and self sufficiency was substantively different than the values included in legislated welfare reform and job training programs, and would thus limit access to these programs by these women, led the researchers in two different directions. first, it was necessary to learn the values of the colonias women directly. to that end, the first author conducted interviews with several of these women. the women were selected through kinship and friendship associations. as the author met one individual, she was subsequently introduced to neighbors and friends. some of the women were students in a job skills training program, one worked in a restaurant and one young woman worked full time in a machine shop. the second author focused on the perspectives held by staff employed in federally funded programs. she interviewed program staff at four pilot training project sites. the purpose of these interviews was to ascertain: (1) the extent to which the staff perceived that legislation was driving program implementation and (2) the extent to which they perceived that the values included in the legislation might be contrary to values of program recipients. as in most qualitative studies, data collection and data analysis were simultaneous activities. however, the analysis of the date became more intense once all the data was acquired (merriam, 1988). analysis of the data involved a systematic process of working with it, organizing it, dividing it into manageable units, synthesizing it, searching for patterns and discovering what was important to be learned and reported (bogdan & biklen, 1982). each of the women who were interviewed was asked to talk about her life. the responses were freeranging and the conversation was self-sustaining. the conversation was carefully framed to avoid potentially damaging queries, such as immigration status. however, many of the respondents volunteered this information. all conversations were tape recorded with the participants' knowledge and permission. later the tapes were transcribed and the data were broken into units, coded and organized according to emerging themes. pseudonyms were used to protect the anonymity of these women. because welfare reform legislation had not yet been fully implemented, it was not possible to interview tanf program staff. therefore, staff from other programs based on legislated mandates were chosen for interviewing. the assumption was that the beliefs of this set of program staff would be consistent with beliefs held by individuals charged with implementing new welfare programs. eight individuals were interviewed using a semi-structured process and basic interview guide. the interviews were audio-taped and the transcript of each interview was returned to the interviewee for verification and correction. information from the modified transcripts was used to determine conceptual categories. to preserve the confidential nature of the staff members' comments, they will not be identified. voices of the women from the colonias all of the women who participated in this study worked. two were employed full time, one was intermittently employed, and all worked at home. as the women shared their stories, they described the importance of working together and of maintaining a family atmosphere. sol participated in a pilot study which addressed workplace learning. a single parent, she was of medium height with wavy brown hair which she wore in a clip. she preferred wearing jeans and boots rather than wearing dresses and heels. sol was bi-lingual, and on the day of the interview she sat in an office behind a desk. estela also participated in a pilot study of workplace learning. her job site, and the site of the interview, was a restaurant. she smiled frequently and glanced often at her co-workers during the interview. she spoke no english at the time of the visit. lupita, ines and mathilda invited the author to mathilda's home, where they participated in an open ended discussion. the women who participated in this study did not hold a conception of self-sufficiency that differed greatly from that of policy makers. they did, however, see self-sufficiency from a different perspective. from their perspective, it was necessary to be responsible and to take care of one's family and finances. their views differed from the legislated values in one significant way the women did not feel it was necessary to become "self-sufficient" by oneself. in fact, it is arguable that none of these women would be found to be self-sufficient. few of the women interviewed could obtain medical care or get their children off to school alone. but, if assessed within the values held by their culture, interconnectedness and interdependency on their friends and neighbors, they functioned very well. as a culture and as a community they were "self-sufficient". two of the respondents emphasized their personal satisfaction from working together, revealing their pride and preference for familial contexts at work. the most important thing about working with others is respect. how one is treated. just like one of your own people like a family member. (estela) [tr.] ... this is what we need, this is what we gotta do ... and once i've helped her i'm like i feel good about myself. i feel like i've done something good (sol). sol, the young woman who worked in a machine shop, took pride in the fact that her family worked together. she emphasized that she knows her role in her family and that this role had extended to the workplace. i want to be able to help my dad ... to help my dad with his business ... and i want to be able to help him and i'm not gonna let him down (sol). in addition to family support, these women also received support from their neighbors. mathilda, the mother of several small children, talked about relying upon her friends to get her children to school and back each day. it's difficult for me since i have a little girl and i have another one in pre-kindergarten. some leave in the morning and my son and daughter at noon. i send the morning one to lupita so she can get her on the bus for me. and in the afternoon i go and pick them all up (mathilda) [tr.] all of life in the colonias and in the city involved struggle, but these women were intent on not giving up. struggle was viewed as a benefit when the group struggled together. i've been through too many, and, there's a time when you just want to give up but you really can't ... i think that i never want to end up giving up because of my daughter. i see what my dad has given to me and what he has and i want to be able to give her that (sol). ines had lived in a colonia for a number of years. her husband worked as a warehouseman in a large border city. an activist, ines attended training in community leadership and made public speeches regarding her views of the lives of mexican women along the border. she also has participated in marches for residents' rights. ines and her family moved into an abandoned house. she described her first night there when new neighbors came to help them, not only to move, but to put a floor down so that they could sleep. so, we went to bed [in the new house] without windows, without a floor, only three walls, and it did not have a roof, and we slept in a way that you should have to see ... but good and tired ... [neighbors came to help out]. we put the floor in, everybody, grab something here, grab something there, even the little one in pre-kinder filled the jugs with water. everybody worked to our capacity (ines). [tr.] each woman described the injustices she encountered as she attempted to adjust to the predominant american middle class culture. several expressed rage and frustration, but they also expressed pride. sol, who is bilingual in english and spanish, chose to express these emotions in spanish. she took particular pride in telling visitors to the machine shop that each person on the job floor was hispanic and that she was aware that the work group established standards for the work and produced work to those standards together. it's so hard that sometimes you're looked at by the color of your skin and not for what you would like or what you have in yourself ... just because i go in speaking spanish to somewhere that we'll be treated different than if we go in speaking english, that we don't know much, but it's not that way ... because i know and i let everybody know that comes here, if you point out to me a single white person ... that is out there running that shop, i said, no! that's why i feel so proud of being hispanic ... we're the ones who get the work out! (sol) [tr.] the colonias residents had scant access to medical care. in an emergency, solving a problem could require special effort and ingenuity. ines talked about trying to take an injured child to the doctor on the bus, but was barred from getting on because she had not purchased a ticket in advance. her injured child, also, was prevented from boarding. in her rage, she described her feelings of powerlessness. however, she also took her problem to the residents' organization and publicized the name of the bus driver at the meeting. my son fell and broke his elbow. i didn't have a ticket in my hand and they didn't let me get on. they told me i didn't have a ticket. i told [the driver] "don't be an ingrate. i'm out in the country. where am i going to get a ticket?" can you imagine? i cried, out of anger, desperation and impotence ... "look", i said, "i'm not refusing to buy a ticket." "you can't lady" the driver said. "those are the rules". "no" i told him. "what an ingrate you are." i took his name and i wrote it down [to report at the next residents' meeting ...] (ines) [tr.] interestingly, these women found good in their harsh circumstances. rather than viewing themselves as subsisting, they felt privileged to lead the lives they led. they exhibited pride in their austere living conditions and pride in teaching their children to persevere. they believed that they would get ahead through hard work. [w]e don't worry so much about that which we don't have, but what we do have. really, it's a lot if we look at how much we have by comparison to what we don't. some day we're going to have it, and we're not here for the sake of conformity. if it were for conformity we wouldn't be there, in that house without a floor ... we're training our kids that they're going to struggle (ines) [tr.] we are proud and we have the advantage of living here on the border, and we can get a lot of things in mexico, right? ... we have that advantage that other people who live further north don't have. ... we're aware of it, and we're happy and proud to live one step from mexico (lupita) [tr.] voices from staff members the staff members of training projects that were based on federal legislation had varying perceptions of how the legislated mandates impacted the implementation of their projects. however, all of these staff believed that the implementation of their programs were based on the stated (legislated) goals for the program. well, the goal is always at the back of my mind as the main purpose for what i'm doing. what needs to be done to get to the goal. okay, let's break the goal down and see what kind of tasks need to be done to get there. i spend a lot of time preparing. the first thing i do is read what is available, like the laws if there are new ones. these staff members did not express much concern about pressures, rules and/or restrictions imposed by project guidelines. ... we are given the parameters to work in with the project ... so you sort of plan around that. i don't find [the oversight agency] unreasonable in what they ask. i really don't have a problem with any of the rules. i understand [the oversight agency] has to document and they have to validate their expenditures and all that. the basic assumption of the staff members was that the funding source (in this case, the federal legislation) had the right to dictate specific expectations and outcomes. their perception was that the funder was their "customer". in fact, this role was so taken for granted that none of the staff members mentioned the possibility of a different type of relationship, such as "partner" or "benefactor". the staff members understood that their institutions were responsible for compliance with bureaucratic rules and that these rules could impact the implementation of their projects. in other words, the legislation and subsequent regulations established the "house rules" and anyone who wanted to "live in the house" had to abide by these rules. these staff members also believed that the interests stated in the legislation were the same as the interests of potential participants in the program. they did not perceive that participants' interests or values might be different. this lack of perception conforms precisely to knoke's definition of "authoritative power" (1993). a transaction of authoritative power means that both domination and influence occur simultaneously. this type of transaction carries strong expectations by both the issuer (i.e. the federal government) and the recipient (i.e. the staff members) that compliance will be uncontested. staff members in this type of situation will believe that the program guidelines are appropriate and acceptable. they will follow the guidelines because they believe it is the right thing to do (lessem, 1997). cultural relevance is necessary when conducting any assessment of students' assets and needs, but the assessment methods which are currently used in traditional academic settings are frequently inappropriate for other groups. the dominant culture assesses persons in the subordinate cultures, in this case mexican american women. however, if this culture assesses them individually, but their culture provides for group problem solving; if tests and measures are the predominant ways of achieving this assessment but many of those persons assessed have never been to school, chances are good that the results will find the participants to be wanting and dependent. if this culture holds that intelligence can be measured, but the culture of the colonias believes that intelligence is something demonstrated by interest rather than by cleverness (vaccaro, 1998) then there is a disconnect, and that which is measured is not reflective of that which was intended. if the mexican american women spread their assets around to their friends and family members, then many of the measures which exist to determine self-sufficiency may find these individuals to be less than sufficient, when the community may quite successfully, if erratically, care for its members. in another recent study, of immigrant mexicans' work place learning strategies, it was learned that personal and group identities of many immigrants from mexico are interwoven, especially in the workplace and in their communities (vaccaro, 1998). in addition, assessment of these workers was found to be most appropriate when conducted over time in order to ascertain life experiences. the types of assessments found in classroom settings were inappropriate to the participants, in light of the fact that intelligence and expertise took the form of interest and diligence. learning, for these specific immigrant mexicans, took place in an atmosphere which was an extension of the home and family dynamics which were suited to their culture. this learning took place in an environment which was the direct result of deliberate and meaningful social, not necessarily individual, action (vaccaro, 1998). conclusion the responses of program staff confirmed the authors' contention that the values inherent in legislation often become the institutionalized values within subsequent programs. in the instance of welfare reform, these values include: (1) independence, (2) self-motivation, and (3) competition (prwora, 1996). in contrast, the values of the women living in the colonias stressed: (1) connectedness, (2) groupdirectedness, and (3) collaboration. it is, therefore, possible that attempting to impose a middle class cultural construct of self-sufficiency on colonias women will inadvertently force radical change in their cultural values. rather than bettering their lot in life, this practice could result in community and family disintegration (francis, 1995; martin, 1990; ogbu, 1992; podeschi, 1990; vaccaro, 1998.) references anzaldua, g. (1987). borderlands: la frontera. the new mestiza. san francisco, ca: aunt lute books baird, b. (1991). project forward: a lifeskills curriculum for adult learners. el paso, tx: texas education agency and el paso community college. bogdan, r. & biklen, s. (1992). qualitative research for education: an introduction to theory and methods. boston, ma: allyn and bacon. cisneros, s. (1991). woman hollering creek and other stories. new york: random house. francis, j. (1995). training across cultures. human resource development quarterly, 6, (1), 100-107. knoke, d. (1993). networks as political glue: explaining public policy-making. in wilson, w.j. (ed.), sociology and the public agenda. (pp. 164-184). newbury park ca: sage. lessem, a. (1997). negotiating the powers and pressures of planned program implementation: a case study of the texas skills standards certification projects. unpublished doctoral dissertation, texas a&m university, college station, tx. martin, l. (1990). facilitating cultural diversity in adult literacy programs. in j. ross-gordon, l.g. martin, & d.b. briscoe, (eds.) serving culturally diverse populations. (pp. 17-29). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. merriam, s. (1988). case study research in education: a qualitative approach. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. ogbu, j. (1992). understanding cultural diversity and learning. educational researcher, 21,(8), 5-14. personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act (1996). http://www.acf.dhhs.gov.hypernews/get/tanf/preamble.html podeschi, r. (1990). teaching their own: minority challenges to mainstream institutions. in j. rossgordon, l.g. martin, & d.b. briscoe (eds.), serving culturally diverse populations, (pp. 55-64). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. salinas, e. (1998). colonias factbook summary. chud: the colonias program: detailed summary of program. world wide web site.(date visited: may 21, 1998). http://chud.tamu.edu/chud/colonias/detail.html. vaccaro, g. (1998). identifying and acquiring information needed to work successfully without formal training: perceptions of selected latino immigrants in texas. unpublished doctoral dissertation, texas a&m university, college station, tx. ziegahn, l. (1992). learning, literacy and participation: sorting out priorities. adult education quarterly, 43, 30-50. dr. geogiana vaccaro is a 1998 doctoral graduate of texas a&m in the department of educational human resource development, with minor emphases in bilingual education and bilingual vocational training. gvaccar@ibm.net dr. ann lessem is a 1997 doctoral graduate of texas a&m in the department of educational human resource development and is certified as a mediator in alternative dispute resolution. awl journal home page awl journal volume 2, number 1, winter 1999 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, 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file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word conner_do_women_value_the_domains_of_leadership_differently_than_men.docx advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 49 advancing women in leadership vol. 36, pp. 49-53, 2016 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper do women value the domains of leadership differently than men? tonya conner & kirk davis tonya conner: troy university, email: tconner22269@troy.edu kirk davis: troy university, email: kldavis@troy.edu accepted august 08, 2016 a comparative study was conducted to determine if women value the various domains of leadership differently than men, and, if they differ, to determine if the differences are consistent across leadership positions. seventy-two actively employed educators completed a short online leadership survey where they were asked to report their gender and current academic position (teacher leader or administrator). in addition the participants were asked to rate (4-point likert scale) the importance of the four domains of leadership strength (relationship building, strategic thinking, executing ideas, and influencing others) suggested by rath and conchie (2008). a two-way manova was conducted to determine if any significant main or interaction effects could be found for gender and academic position for each of the four self-rated domains of leadership strength. a statistically significant (α=.05) difference was only found for gender. a significant main effect for gender was found for both strategic thinking, f (1 ,68) = 4.85, p = .031, η2 = .067, and for relationship building, f (1 ,68) = 9.42, p = .003, η2 = .122, with men (m = 3.06, sd = 1.14) scoring significantly higher than women (m = 2.31, sd = 1.18) on the strategic thinking domain and women (m = 2.71, sd = 1.3) scoring significantly higher than men (m = 1.65, sd = 1.11) on the relationship building domain. these results suggest that women perceive the relationship building domain of leadership as more important than men. if the findings of rath and conchie’s study are valid, women could become more effective leaders if they adopt a leadership style they prefer, which the present study suggests may differ from that of men. in addition, the results suggest women may be more effective mentors because of the importance they place on relationship building.. keywords: gender, leadership domains. introduction the present study was conducted to determine if women value the various domains of leadership differently than men, and, if they differ, to determine if the differences are consistent across leadership positions. based on a review of the current literature, it is predicted that females will rate the relationship building domain of leadership higher than males, but it is unclear if this difference will be consistent across leadership positions. the results of a study conducted by rath and conchie (2008) suggest people in leadership positions are more productive if they adopt a leadership style consistent with their values. the results of their study suggest effective leaders are highly aware of their own strengths and use their strengths to their advantage. fullan (2004) found the most effective leaders surround themselves with people who have strengths and talents different from their own in order to develop a leadership team comprised of all four leadership strengths: relationship building, influencing others, executing ideas, and strategic thinking. a study conducted by merchant (2012) found common leadership distinctions between men and women stem from differing communication styles depending on the purpose of the conversation. women use communication to build relationships and social connections, while men tend to value communication to achieve tangible outcomes. women are more expressive and polite in situations of conflict, whereas men are more likely to offer solutions to problems while avoiding what they perceive to be unnecessary discussions of interpersonal problems. women tend to value the process of communication as a tool for building and strengthening relationships, while men are prone to be more assertive in their speech, and unemotional or detached in conversations. tannen (1990) found different communication styles between men and women begin at a young age. boys tend to build relationships by doing things together, participating in an action toward a common goal. girls tend to simply talk and create close relationships. male leaders prefer to have negotiations and women leaders prefer connections. however, some researchers advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 50 argue men and women do not differ in communication or leadership styles at all, but rather the differences are merely conditional on various situations (eagly & johnson, 1990; foels, driskell, mullen, & salas, 2000). in a 2008 study examining high-achieving women-leaders stern found women are more likely to use a leadership style that is relationship-based, collaborative, and team-building. the following quote from a female participant in a study conducted by eckman (2004) reflects this leadership style, “i spend a lot more time listening than i do pontificating…i use a lot more feeling words…i have a real relationship with my staff” (p. 203). anderson, lievens, van dam, and born (2006) found women scored significantly higher than men on measurements of oral communication and interaction with others suggesting an interpersonally oriented leadership style. cheung and halpern (2010) also found women had a greater tendency to share information with faculty. on the other hand, some researchers contend differences between genders do exist. however, these differences do not imply that either gender makes better leaders, but understanding these distinctions will help leaders better communicate with those of the opposite sex (cheung & halpern, 2010; merchant, 2012). leadership styles and domains transformational and transactional leadership over several decades an enormous amount of research has been conducted based on burns’ (1978) transformational and transactional leadership theory. transformational leadership is characterized by a charismatic leader with a visionary, inspirational, and trusting rapport with followers (merchant, 2012). transformational leaders gain the confidence of others in order to achieve organizational goals, by encouraging and helping develop their followers’ full potential (val & kemp, 2012). kastenmuller et al., (2014) suggested women tend to take on a more transformational approach to leadership than do men. transformational leaders inspire others to go beyond the expectation. they pay attention to the differences among team members, inspire others through modeling, provide mentoring, coaching and continuous feedback, and challenge others with new ideas (bass, 1985). based on self-reporting teachers, zeinabadi (2013) indicated females prefer more transformational leadership styles whereas males are more prone to a transactional leadership style. merchant (2012) explained transactional leaders offer incentives in exchange for obedience and punishments for failures. transactional leaders have a take charge authoritarian attitude, although the transactional leader uses a leader-follower exchange when performance and goals are in agreement. furthermore, transactional leaders focus on finding mistakes and intervene when necessary (almansour, 2012; kastenmuller, et al., 2014; val & kemp, 2012). men are considered to be more goal oriented, task completers, and strategic problem solvers. they want to fix problems and achieve results (merchant, 2012). women in the workplace continue to increase in proportion to men, although women remain vastly underrepresented at the highest administrative levels (u.s. bureau of labor statistics, 2011) regardless of positive leadership effectiveness (paustianunderdahl, walker, & woehr, 2014). however, ayman and korabik (2010) suggested women may be more suited to leadership positions in contemporary organizations because of a woman’s interpersonal and sociocultural attributes. women have an advantage stemming from the belief they are more likely to adopt collaborative and empowering leadership styles leaving men at a disadvantage because men may exhibit more assertion of power (paustian-underdahl, walker, & woehr, 2014). relationship building relationship building is a strong component of transformational leadership by taking care of followers’ needs, concerns, and providing individualized consideration (braun, peus, & frey, 2012). rath and conchie (2008) explained relationship builders are leaders holding a group of people together with a collective energy to transform individuals into a team. relationship builders minimize distractions and relate to people as strong mentors and steer others to improved achievements. hensley and burmeister (2008) explained building relationships share a common theme of relationship connectors: communication, trust, support, competence, continuous renewal, and safety. hensley and burmeister (2008) clarified “effective leaders recognize quickly and clearly that people are the most important asset in any organization” (p. 126). finzel (2000) agreed and shared how leaders must make people a priority with “people work before paper work” (p.40), and whitaker (2003) suggested the most effective leaders concentrate on people, not on programs. reig and marcoline (2008) concurred, stating relationships should be on the priority list of all leaders. finnigan and daly (2014) offered what they referred to as relationship reform by taking a relational approach to education improvement with collaborative and trusting cultures. bleich (2014) suggested relationships should not stand alone, but with action, leaders should take full responsibility for establishing and nurturing relationships, even when those relationships are challenging. influencing others rath and conchie (2008) defined effective influential leaders as those who can sell their ideas to others. these leaders take charge and speak up to make sure the group is heard. they help the team reach a much larger audience and help team members feel comfortable and connected to the objectives at hand. merchant (2012) described influence “as a leader’s ability to motivate their followers to change their behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes” (p.23). researchers who studied influential tactics found males use personal appeal, assertiveness, and inspiration. females also use inspirational appeal, along with consultation and ingratiation. clifford, behrstock-sherratt, and fetters (2012) explained how a leader’s influence can affect multiple layers within education. “at the center of the ripple effect is a principals’ practice, which includes principal knowledge, dispositions, and actions” (p.7) to provide direct and indirect advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 51 influence to community…“school conditions, teacher quality and placement, and instructional quality” (p.8). executing ideas rath and conchie (2008) identified the strength of executing ideas by accomplishing tasks, providing coaching and feedback, and monitoring projects to make sure goals are met. those that excel at executing ideas work tirelessly to complete a task and take ideas and turn them into realities. some executive leaders may ignore other strengths when bogged down in challenging tasks. executive leaders may tend to focus more on task-oriented goals without a network of relationships to support them. however, theodore roosevelt commented “the best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it” (as cited in finzel, 2000). strategic thinking rath and conchie (2008) described strategic thinkers as problem solvers and constantly pulling team members into the future. strategic thinkers navigate the team through the most effective route. beatty (2010) distinguished strategic thinkers as those that can identify patterns, connections and key concerns. furthermore, they can move forward with decisive action based on a plan. they also have a balance of direction and autonomy, reward appropriate risk taking, and build commitment within the team. beatty (2010) furthered explained strategic thinking is a structural and individual process. merchant (2012) added strategic thinkers are task oriented, autocratic, and direct. mellon and kroth (2013) stated strategic thinking is “a particular way of thinking” (p.70). it is not the same as strategic planning, “one is analysis, and the other is synthesis” (mintzberg, 1994, p.107). methods participants a total of 72 actively employed educators, 55 females and 17 males, from a public school district in southeast alabama completed the survey during the 2014-2015 school year. teaching faculty, assistant principals and principals were contacted. participant demographics are provided in table 1. table 1 participant frequencies by gender and academic role academic role administrator teacher leader total gender female 11 44 55 male 8 9 17 total 19 53 72 in the interest of protecting potential respondents, the institutional review board at the affiliated university reviewed and gave approval prior to conducting the study. participants were contacted via the local school district it department. the it department emailed the survey to all district central office faculty, assistant principals, and principals. the it department requested the principals to forward the survey by email to the individual school faculty members. the survey took approximately 10-15 minutes for the average respondent to complete. the survey was developed using google forms® and was sent via email to 674 potential participants. only 10% or 72 surveys were completed and returned which is a key limitation of the study. participants were asked to identify themselves as male or female and whether they were serving in either a teaching role or an administrative role. participants were then asked to read a brief description of each of the four domains of leadership strength as described by rath and conchie (2008). after reading the descriptions of each domain, the participants were asked to rate how important they perceived each domain to be in order to be an effective leader. using a 4-point likert-type scale, respondents were asked to rate each domain using the following scale: (4) very important, (3) important, (2) somewhat important, or (1) not important. results to analyze the data collected from the 72 participants, the researchers chose the statistical data analysis software statistical package for social sciences (spss, version 22). the means for each of the domains for gender and academic role can be seen in figure 1. figure 1. this graph displays the means and 95% confidence bands for each of the four domains measured as a function of gender and academic position. after determining if the data met the requirements of having a homogenous covariance matrix and having multivariate normality, a two-way manova was conducted to determine if any significant main or interaction effects could be found for gender and academic position for each of the four dependent measures. advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 52 a significant main effect for gender was found for both strategic thinking, f (1 ,68) = 4.85, p = .031; wilk's λ=.849, partial η2 = .067, and for relationship building, f (1 ,68) = 9.42, p = .003, wilk's λ=.849, partial η2 = .122, with men (m = 3.06, sd = 1.14) scoring significantly higher than women (m = 2.31, sd = 1.18) on the strategic thinking dimension and women (m = 2.71, sd = 1.3) scoring significantly higher than men (m = 1.65, sd = 1.11) on the relationship building dimension. no significant main effect for gender was found for either influencing others, f (1, 68) = .578, p = .45; wilk's λ=.849, partial η2 = .008, or executing ideas, f (1, 68) = .017, p = .895; wilk's λ=.849, partial η2 <.001. no significant multivariate main effect for academic position was found, wilk's λ (4, 65) =.572, p=.684 partial η2 = .034, nor was a significant multivariate interaction effect between gender and academic position found, wilk's λ (4, 65) =.570, p=.685 partial η2 = .034. implications, future research, and limitations as predicted, females rated the relationship building domain of leadership higher than males. although no priori prediction was made regarding the strategic thinking domain, the fact that males in the current study rated this domain higher than the females is consistent with the literature (e.g., merchant, 2012). the current study differs from previous studies in that it did not use a formal instrument to classify participants. instead, the current study simply asked participants to rate how important they perceived each dimension of leadership after reading a brief description of each component. the results of the study do not suggest that the domain perceived as being most important by a person necessarily reflects the leadership style that the person actually utilizes, nor do they suggest that women uniformly value one domain and men another. the results of the current study do suggest women in general value the domains of leadership differently than men, and, as such, may benefit from adopting a leadership style they find most comfortable. research (e.g., rath & conchie, 2008) supports the idea that many effective leaders employ a leadership style they find comfortable rather than adopting a leadership style that is expected of them or is prevalent within a particular organization. therefore, simply being aware of the various domains of leadership and how you value each of them may help leaders become more effective by noticing discrepancies between what is valued and what is actually employed. if women do value certain dimensions of leadership more highly than men, which the current research suggests, modeling the leadership styles of men may not be an effective strategy for many women. in addition, because women rated relationship building higher than men, the women may be more effective mentors than men. effective mentoring relies heavily on building a sound, trusting relationship between the mentor and mentee (kutilek & earnest, 2001; mincemoyer & thomson, 1998; zachary & fischler, 2014). realizing the full potential for mentoring success, the mentor and mentee must lay the groundwork during the beginning of the essential partnership. the researchers suggest the following for future research: • do women seek the role of mentor more often than men? • do women mentor men differently than women in the work place? • are women more effective mentors than men? although the results of the current study are consistent with the literature, it has several limitations that should be noted. the response rate was only 10%, which was lower than expected 2030%. the poor return rate negatively impacted the size of our sample (n=72), which was smaller than desired. both of these factors could negatively impact the generalizability of the findings and the statistical power of the analysis. as such, the reader should interpret the findings of this study with these limitations in mind. references almansour, y. m. 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(2013). social exchange outcomes of transformational leadership: comparing male and female principals of public primary schools in iran. international journal of educational management, 27, 730-743. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ijem-04-2012-0061 microsoft word harper_considering_principal_evaluation_as_means_of_renewal_reflection_and_growth2.doc advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 76 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 7681, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper considering principal evaluation as means of renewal, reflection and growth brenda l. harper brenda harper: kent state university, kent, email bharper5@kent.edu accepted february 24, 2014 in this article, the author examines the current context of educational leadership evaluations and how this context might be reimagined and operationalized in terms of feminist ideas and ideals in which collaboration, renewal, development and growth are valued throughout the evaluative process. feminist philosophy is explored and applied to the feedback process for educational leaders, enabling them to sustain and renew in a climate of intense scrutiny and accountability. keywords: feminist, feminism, leadership, accountability introduction the history of education has been guided by men (greene, 1993). although women fill the teaching ranks, they have historically not set the rules and outlined the precedents of educational landscape. early patriarchal norms established the character and lived situation of properly employable females (unmarried, humble and gentle) suitable to guide america’s children and have subsequently defined the current structure and common goals of education including ideas of producing zero defect products and the ultimate aspiration for students being capacity for economic prosperity (greene, 1985; greene, 1993). it is not surprising then that a male normative process of evaluation exists and that women in leadership continue to function within the conditions of a hegemonic framework in this regard (wilson & nutley, 2003). maxine greene (1993) talks about early school reform writers such as horace mann who delineated ideas of what successful education should look like. his ideas promoted the equalized conditions of humanity with the supposed neutral persona including all persons although women were not truly part of this opportunity. similarly, there is still a tightly held articulation of what a successful educator looks like and how he/she is evaluated in a standardized accountability culture. women work on the fringes to guide this articulation, pushing and nudging the framework already in play. qualities typically associated with male leadership such as control and competition are presently idealized as the best management qualities (reay & ball, 2000). in fact, marshall (1984) states, “…leadership characteristics and the masculine sex role correspond so closely that they are simply different labels for the same concept” (p. 19). current educator evaluation practices are focused heavily on accountability, representing a broader accountability movement whose practices are highly associated with control and competition. in today’s accountability climate for education, policy makers, not just educators, are playing a larger role in establishing evaluation criteria (babo & villaverde, 2013; piro, wiemers, & shutt, 2011). in this climate, schools are pressured to demonstrate success through narrowed definitions and markers of progress reliant to a significant degree upon once a year normed tests (keith, 2011; piro, et al, 2011 ;). accountability is the buzzword in an environment where districts, schools and individual professionals are measured and assigned rankings corresponding to performance or failure to perform in accordance with prescribed criterion of accountability. student achievement measures, i.e. student standardized test scores, are appearing more often in district and state-wide personnel evaluation systems for educators. such annual personnel evaluations cannot constitute the only means of feedback that teachers and leaders receive regarding the efficacy of their practice (parylo, zepeda, & bengston, 2012; siens & ebmeier, 1996). this annual high stakes feedback contributes to the competitive rankings driven milieu as opposed to one focused on the growth of every leader and educator within his/her lived context serving concrete and individualized students with specific needs which vary from school district to school district, situation to situation. greene’s (1984) concept of educator success is articulated by the following, if we are ‘successful’ or ‘effective,’ then, there will be no visible product for which we can take the credit. there will be diverse individuals in diverse contexts, engaging in continually new beginnings as they work to make sense of their worlds. (p. 62). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 77 those who align with this concept may be perceived as antiintellectual, fuzzy headed or operating under a naiveté that is not data-driven, another buzzword in the accountability culture vernacular. despite the potential of being labeled as one or all of the aforementioned pejoratives, i am challenged by greene (2000) who calls us to imagine educational ideals and practices differently than they currently exist when she states, “there are many instances of images of the possible calling attention to what is lacking that break through the boundaries laid down by the taken-for-granted” (p. 273). in the case of principal evaluation this means breaking the boundaries of the taken for granted by re-imagining the process as iterative, renewing and egalitarian as opposed to singular and summative. demands on school leaders research studies consistently demonstrate that meaningful professional development and support systems are lacking to assist leaders in directly impacting student achievementespecially in terms of assisting minority students, students with disabilities and economically disadvantaged students that must show rigorous yearly growth in order for principals to achieve successful evaluations (daresh, 2007; honig 2012; keith, 2011). although there is a sound base of information available on the mentoring and induction of new principals to the profession in the literature, there is considerably less information on best practices to support established principals underlining the lack of a well-articulated support structure for those responsible for leading our nation’s schools. honig (2012) highlights this stating, “previous work in educational leadership has barely explored job-embedded professional supports for school principals’ learning, let alone how executive level central office staff might participate as main agents in that work” (p. 764). established principals continue to need reinforcement and renewal. if not provided, principals can lose focus and fail to self-reflect, limiting their ability to continually improve practices, move their schools forward and maintain perceptions of efficacy. an important component that may be easily overlooked regarding support and professional development is that of the emotional and social competencies required in the principal role. cooley and shen (2000) found there is a significant emotional impact on principals related to stress, second guessing from multiple publics, bureaucratic requirements and frustrations that may result in burnout. williams (2008) ascertained that the social and emotional skills of selfconfidence, achievement orientation, initiative, organizational awareness, leadership and collaboration were all significantly related to sustained excellence in the principal role. lack of support for administrators ranks among the ten most important factors influencing principals’ desire to remain in or leave the profession (cooley & shen, 2003). it is vital that those responsible for supporting principals understand and address this. altering the processes and context in which leadership evaluations are structured and delivered provide a dynamic means of supporting principals to sustain growth, renewal, and perceived efficacy. the modern educational leader faces multiple publics, priorities and tasks during the day-to-day work of the job. as stressors associated with educational leadership positions rise, a number of potential candidates are declining application to the profession and those currently employed are turning over at a less than desirable rate (cooley & shen, 2000). marzano, waters and mcnulty (2005) outlined a diverse range of educational leadership competencies necessary for success including cultural capacity, understanding of curriculum, facility with assessment and instruction, relationship building and the ability to make changes. conflict with teacher unions, school boards, parents, and increased administrative duties are all factors associated with decreased interest in the principal position (cooley & shen, 2000). urban principals in particular are faced with additional challenges such as student mobility, teacher retention and school violence. increased responsibilities afford less time for cultivating relationships with stakeholders and in engaging in their own professional development. time pressures often negatively impact a principal’s interactions with her family and school leaders often find they are toiling beyond normal working hours (portin, 2000). additionally, principals are now key players in providing professional development to teachers in interpreting growth and accountability measures. under these conditions, fatigue and self-doubt contribute to decisions of leaders to drop out of the profession or experience reduced self-efficacy. (kneese, pankake, schroth, & blackburn, 2003; portin, 2000). professional development and renewal techniques are critical in a profession that taps such diverse competencies and demands a multiplicity of results. however, those in the field report that support and renewal structures and meaningful professional development allowing them to grow and become more effective are inadequate (cooley & shen, 2003; marcos, witmer, foland, & vouga, 2011). to ameliorate this, a re-thinking is necessary in terms of educational leadership personnel evaluation. a serious consideration of evaluative practices that align with norms other than those currently established in accountability based paradigms are warranted. such a realignment will afford a much needed avenue for growth and renewal. it is commonly noted that there is a constant tension in the evaluation process that exists between development and accountability, between formative and summative assessment (shoaf, zigler, & beebe, 2013). in the state of ohio, along with a large number of the states in the nation, there is a strong focus on school administrator accountability by including student growth measures in evaluation. goal setting, based on narrowly defined data points and evidence gathering to prove mastery is commonplace (piro, et al., 2011). i question the ability of these evaluative frameworks to promote deep selfreflection and the capacity to assist administrators in learning journeys that allow them to explore and take risks within a safe and collaborative environment. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 78 support for school leaders considering school leadership evaluation as a multi-year roadmap for professional development, long term growth, discourse and reflection will not only provide a means of renewal and growth but also will calibrate more closely with dialogical and power equalizing methods espoused by feminist thought and ideals. these ideals situate growth, development and problem solving within contextualized situations involving what seyla benhabib (2008) references as “embedded and embodied” realities. the traditional banking model of learning and the adversarial self-doubting model, which i equate most closely with the evidence gathering mechanics of today’s evaluations, are not aligned with feminist thought which is more carefully connected with a problem posing model in which questioning and dialogue are encouraged between participants. additionally, feminist theorists favor connected knowing as opposed to proving knowledge and value efforts to learn as opposed to efforts to please (belenky, clinchy, goldberger, & tarule, 1986). noddings (1984) addresses this in a seminal work when she advocates engagement in questionraising instead of rule following. current standards and rubrics contained in principal evaluation models do not lend themselves to the dialogue that starts with, “what if?” but rather relegates leaders to proving their completion of prescribed competencies. in bitter milk, madeline grumet (1988) talks about a patriarchal standard of education which views curriculum and teaching (and therefore associated evaluations) as a means to an end in the form of products including test scores and various forms of accountability. she goes on to say that curriculum, under this male dominated ideology, is formed around the abstract unnamed student as opposed to being a dynamic and changing construct based on real students in context who respond to and question the content (more in line with feminist thinking). specifically, grumet (1988) articulates this by stating, “the rules fit the curriculum but the curriculum does not fit anybody” (p. 165). these ideas dovetail with those of nodding (1984) who talks about the decrease of caring when persons are relegated to the status of being a “case.” i immediately think of accountability measures and standardized scores. in the realm of principal evaluation, i think of student growth measures by which student scores translate to principal ratings. this context makes it all too easy for students to be seen as “cases” as opposed to individuals with needs and aspirations in which the principal plays a large part through curriculum and instructional leadership and the establishment of school culture which directly impacts a student’s well-being on a daily basis. for example, will a principal with third grade reading scores well below average approach reflection about classroom climate and its effect on learning or automatically move to disaggregating data according to skill set? will a principal working with a teacher through a newly designed evaluation system think to coach a teacher about making connections and relationships with students as the key to improving their achievement or will the focus be narrowly confined to technical competencies and instructional delivery methods aimed at moving the teacher to the next rung on the state designations ladder? noddings (1984) develops the idea of seeing another person as data point and then moving back to the personal. it is of utmost importance that principals and those holding them accountable (evaluating them) never lose sight of this necessity of returning to the personal because in the end students are persons we serve, persons we have a profound influence upon. students are not simply products to be developed at a zero defect rate to increase the efficiency of economic development, but rather persons that will contribute to relationships of caring and personal fulfillment throughout their lifetime. greene (1993) presents the idea of individual consideration artfully asserting that educators require, the sense of presentness and responsibility that accompanies the realization of constructing knowledge from situated vantage points in the world. there has to be pondering, wondering, thinking in terms of networks and textures, thinking resembling whitney otto’s ‘quiltmaking,’ with its multiple patterns, its randomized realities” (p. 253). i find noddings (1984) understanding of the grading of students interesting in terms of care theory and directly applicable to the “grading” contained in the personnel evaluations of today. she postulates that the caring relation is broken between students and teacher when grades are assigned because grades are for others whereas feedback is for the student-to encourage reflection and growth. once the teacher publishes a grade, the caring relationship is disrupted. she suggests an external summative grader be considered. if this same thinking is applied to principal evaluation, the focus would be on a developmental relationship in which reflection and learning is of utmost priority in which pairs of professionals dialogue, learn and grow together with an emphasis on reflection without a summative or grading component to disrupt the relationship. this relationship would be equal, collaborative and enduring (i.e. not a one year mentoring program for new principals to learn the ropes or an annual yearly ranking supported by isolated achievement data points from the year prior). james-ward and potter (2011) qualitatively describe a collaborative school administrator coaching process that has the effect of developing “reflective, courageous leaders” (p. 126) through dialogue and feedback. the coaching program was built on inquiry processes and personal discovery to define goals with targeted feedback in a trusting non-threatening environment. to face the complex challenges that principals are faced with today, policy makers should seriously consider the propensity to grow courage and reflection, not only proficiency and attainment of performance targets. perhaps noddings (1984) ideas of care theory should be applied to principal evaluation in which elements of reflection and accountability might co-exist with decreased tension by divorcing the coaching and dialogue relationship from the summative evaluation component. multi-year cycles of summative evaluation would allow this to be accomplished advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 79 as would a framework more heavily valued for growth as opposed to accountability. in their work on the self-efficacy of women leaders, momsen and carlson (2013) talk about learning as a social process in which people learn from observing and simulating others, citing the work of cognitive social psychologist albert bandura. they contend that as women in leadership interact with others through observation and engage in encouraging dialogue and confidence building activities, they build selfefficacy which in turn promotes higher job performance. i am left questioning whether “real talk” as referenced by belenky et al. (1986) in their pioneer work articulating women’s understandings is a part of current evaluation conversations. this “real talk” is that in which, “…domination is absent and reciprocity and cooperation are prominent” (p. 146). skepticism regarding real talk arises from the fact that all evaluation terms and language are scripted and defined along a continuum of performance provided to educational leaders to internalize as well as be placed somewhere on that continuum. many accountability based performance evaluations are closed as opposed to open ended, discouraging rather than encouraging dialogue. statements replace questioning throughout the process. portfolio considerations portfolio use in evaluations provides another potential vehicle to assess principals that can work within a competency based framework and also provide the means for reflection, feedback, growth and renewal. important to understand is the fact that not all portfolio practices are the same with regards to their intent, process and outcome. dossier portfolios articulate the types of performance artifacts that should be collected, being somewhat of the checklist version of portfolios. a course or program linked learning portfolio involves defining objectives and the collection of artifacts to demonstrate competence levels (babo & villaverde, 2013). a third, more powerful portfolio approach is the reflective learning portfolio which has a focus on learner generated items which demonstrate growth in competence areas (tillema, 2011). regarding portfolios, tillema (2001) asserts that too strong a pre-occupation on performance evaluation can be counter-productive to growth and development. while gathering pieces for the portfolio, “an emphasis should be placed on reflection, insights gained, reasoning and deliberation, with the appraisal piece arising naturally through the collection of evidence, and reflection on its relevance and meaning” (p. 95). portfolios can be especially valuable in a peer review process, a method which could be used to promote critical reflection (williams, 2009b). it is important portfolios be used in an atmosphere of trust and unity with participants being able to set goals and self-reflect along the way, using the portfolio to reflect thinking in progress (babo & villaverde, 2013). the process of compiling a portfolio requires principals to be active self-directed learners as they invest physical and mental energy into meaningful learning (mestry & schmidt, 2010; williams, 2009b). an important caution is that the compilation processes not fall into the trap of being contrived as opposed to authentic. this may happen when principals feel pressured to prove they have accomplished a number of competencies at a desired level. when the priority is on growth and development there is less pressure to show that one “has arrived.” hargreaves, earl, and schmidt (2002) caution regarding portfolio assessments that, “…simulate rather than stimulate achievement” (p. 90). in addition to encouraging reflective engagement in assessment, portfolios have the potential to disrupt traditional power relations that may favor certain populations (mestry & schmidt, 2010). women, in particular, may benefit from gathering specific contribution pieces that represent a whole or holistic picture of their leadership growth and development with strong contextual reference and connection. traditional male understanding is focused on generalizing whereas women-related understandings are more particular and specific to immediate context with local events and contingencies affecting behaviors and decision making (belenky et al., 1986). the qualitative research of mestry and schmidt (2010) indicated that principals designated themselves as benefiting from portfolio assessment and experienced reduced pressure and anxiety associated with traditional yearly evaluations. this type of reduced pressure has long been associated with increased capacity for adult learning. goal setting considerations goal setting should naturally occur as a part of reflective practice. in order to be most impactful goals need to be specific and not overly complex. if goals are too complex, actions toward goal attainment can trigger counter-productive behaviors. participants must have the skill set required to accomplish the goal. if they do not, they should be able to articulate learning goals that will assist them in obtaining the skills required to meet the performance goal (sinnema & robinson, 2012). this is an especially key component for leaders and supervisors to keep in mind in an era when student achievement and gap closing goals are often of paramount importance. strictly articulated goals for complex tasks might cause performance pressure and an individual’s choice of a strategy that impedes problem solving needed to generate promising planning to effect change. the creation of goals that are too rigorous may cause anxiety that focuses the individual more on personal survival and protection than growth and development (sinnema & robinson, 2012). principals need to be encouraged throughout the evaluative process to set not only achievement goals but learning goals to accomplish achievement goals (i.e. the how as opposed to the what). in order to impact student achievement and become better leaders it is just as important for principals to be able to identify what they need to learn as what they need to do. this duality of goal setting contributes to reflective practice with renewal at the core. this concept was supported by the research of sinnema and robinson (2012) in which they evaluated the match between participants’ goals, capacity and level of advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 80 support. they found that the three areas were often not balanced appropriately-with goals outstripping either capacity or support. a more balanced triangulation is called for. additional development considerations in addition to goal setting and portfolio development, a way for principals to be dynamically engaged in the evaluation process would be including them directly into the feedback loop by way of dialogue with peers. research exists on peer feedback processes in general but not in the particular context of principal evaluation. however there are sound peer to peer reflection practices that can be incorporated into the evaluative process or become part of the evaluative context. because of the intense complexities of the principal position and the adaptive challenges (challenges without readily apparent solutions) faced by administrators, renewal and development endeavors are significant to assisting principals to stay on the job and become more effective. studies that probe to understand principal needs indicate a desire to reflect with colleagues (drago-severson, 2012). barnes, camburn, sanders, & sebastian (2010) examined an urban principal development framework designed to foster the application of newly learned content while working and reflecting collaboratively with others in communities of practice. the framework allows principals to strategically apply learning through job embedded contexts. the authors established that changes in principal behaviors occurred through a “gradual refinement” (p. 271) of their current practice as opposed to major shifts in practice. principals relate that a condition of the development framework that facilitated the most change in their practice was the sustained structure of a professional learning community of practice whereby they could discuss and reflect with knowledgeable others (barnes et al., 2010). also powerful was the job-embedded nature of the framework in which principals’ integrated declarative knowledge into their current school culture. in other words, they were provided an opportunity to practice what they were learning and then to reflect with others as to how well it worked. drago-severson (2012) interviewed 25 principals regarding renewal and reflective practices. she found engaging in regular and ongoing conversation with other principals was strongly desirable as a means of problem solving intended to improve practice. transformative learning, a term coined by adult learning theorist mezirow (1991) involves the changing of mindset after critically reflecting on assumptions. educational leadership researcher drago-severson (2012) states that, “critical reflection occurs when we invest time reflecting on the content of the problem, the process of problem solving, or the problem’s basis” (p. 12). she advocates that districts move away from only a heightened accountability focus to also embrace a collaborative orientation being intentional about the practice of pairing or grouping leaders which is not always easy in a field where geographic and contextual isolation is the norm. additional studies regarding principal leadership and student achievement support the call for the engagement of principals in reflective practice dialoguing with others as a means of problem solving contextual challenges related to learning-centered leadership (reardon, 2011). summary in summary, reflection, renewal and growth are key pieces that we must promote and protect, working within the context of accountability mandated performance evaluations. local education agency leaders can make choices to promote a culture of growth and renewal or simply a culture of approval and accountability with many of the dialogical and collaborative practices explored throughout this discussion. feminist ideas and ideals, no longer only encompassing “woman” but rather addressing social justice, power relations and issues of class, contextual knowing and sexuality should be embraced and seriously considered when re-imagining what educational leadership evaluative practices and process should encompass. references babo, g., & villaverde, c. 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(2011). using student achievement data in teacher and principal evaluations: a policy study. international journal of educational leadership preparation, 6(4), 1-9. retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/j/issn-2155-9635 portin, b. s. (2000). the changing urban principalship. education and urban society, 32, 492-505. doi: 10.1177/0013124500324005 reardon, r. m. (2011). elementary school principals' learningcentered leadership and educational outcomes: implications for principals' professional development. leadership & policy in schools, 10(1), 63-83. doi: 10.1080/15700760903511798 reay, d. & ball, s. (2000). essentials of female management: women’s ways of working in the education market place? educational management and administration, 28, 145159. retrieved from http://www.sagepub.com/journals/journal200888/title shoaf, l., zigler, t., & beebe, r. (2013). building cohesive leadership development. policy futures in education, 11, 256-266. retrieved from http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pfie/ siens, c. m., & ebmeier, h. (1996). developmental supervision and the reflective thinking of teachers. journal of curriculum & supervision, 11, 299-319. retrieved from: http://www.ascd.org/framejcs.html sinnema, c. e. l., & robinson, v. m. j. (2012). goal setting in principal evaluation: goal quality and predictors of achievement. leadership and policy in schools, 11, 135167. retrieved from www.tandfonline.com tillema, h. (2001) portfolios as developmental assessment tools. international journal of training and development, 5, 126-135. retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/ wilson, f. & nutley, s. (2003). a critical look at staff appraisal: the case of women in scottish universities. gender, work and organization, 10, 301-319. doi: 10.1111/1468-0432.00197 williams, g. (2009), portfolios: a learning and development tool, chief learning officer, 8(5): 34-39. retrieved from www.clomedia.com williams, h. (2008). characteristics that distinguish outstanding urban principals: emotional intelligence, social intelligence and environmental adaptation. journal of management development, 27(1), 36-54. retrieved from: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/pricelist/us/usprice.html. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 115 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 115-121, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper comparing two female superintendents’ first years: challenges and successes jody isernhagen and nadia bulkin jody isernhagen is an associate professor in the educational administration department at the university of nebraska-lincoln email: jisernhagen3@unl.edu; phone: 402-472-1088 nadia bulkin was the project assistant for this study at the university of nebraska-lincoln email: nadia.bulkin@gmail.com; phone: 402-472-6754 accepted july 3, 2013 this article investigates the journeys of two first-year female superintendents. a qualitative descriptive analysis of the superintendents’ journals reveals not only how their experiences differed, but what factors contributed to a more positive or negative first year as a superintendent: (a) the superintendents’ relationship with their school board; (b) their ability to network within the school community; and (c) the school district’s willingness to change. this article provides insights into how different professional environments can help or challenge a new superintendent, as well as recommendations for maneuvering through these environments. keywords: female superintendent, new superintendent, rural schools, school board, community, leadership, change introduction no matter how much aspiring superintendents enrich their knowledge, abilities, and leadership skills, a school district’s social environment may still pose a challenge that they have not prepared for. this article investigates the journeys of two firstyear female superintendents. a chronicle of events written by each superintendent reveals not only how their experiences differed, but what factors contributed to a more positive or negative first year as a superintendent. the sample used is limited. this may be partially contributed to the geographic midwestern area where the sample was taken, which is considerably below the national average of female superintendents. this article is offered to new superintendents and higher education institutions that prepare them in the interest of enlightening their perceptions of how different professional environments can help or challenge a new superintendent. purpose and methods the purpose of this qualitative study was to compare and contrast the experiences of two first-time female superintendents. they are referred to as superintendent a and superintendent b. the article examined skills of superintendents and how these skills interact with the daily challenges within different school environments and geographic settings. researchers asked both superintendents to keep a journal of their daily experiences. superintendent a submitted data in one document; superintendent b submitted data in two documents, one for each semester of the school year. researchers color-coded both journals as they were submitted. qualitative descriptive analysis was selected as the method for this research. the study used intense prolonged contact with individuals whose experience was reflective of the everyday life of a group. this method provides a “holistic” overview of the context and captures data on insider perceptions with relatively little or no standardized instrumentation (miles & huberman, 1994). using the descriptive analysis method, three main themes were yielded which affected the superintendents throughout their first year: relationship with the school board, networking within the school community, and the school district’s ability to change. this data is further supported by connections to academic research. the superintendents validated the narrative data and final document, which will remain confidential to protect both participants. lastly, researchers explored additional insights to produce possible advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 116 implications for higher education institutions as they prepare future educational leaders. sample population this qualitative study compared and contrasted the experiences of two first-time female superintendents, located in two midwestern states, referred to as superintendent a and superintendent b. superintendent a came to her first superintendent position with previous experience as a teacher and principal, including more years of administrative experience than superintendent b. superintendent a repeatedly indicated that her prior administrative experience was helpful for managing situations. she wrote, “if i was a new supt. [sic] who had to do the budget, i would have been really confused and probably more scared. i am really glad for my central office experience.” superintendent a’s district is identified by the national center for educational statistics’ common core of data (2010) as “32-town, distant: territory inside an urban cluster that is more than 10 miles and less than or equal to 35 miles from an urbanized area” (new urban-centric locale codes section). superintendent a had more resources readily available, students routinely performed above the state average and the free and reduced rate was considerably below the state average (institute of education sciences, 2011). superintendent b also entered her first superintendent position with previous experience as a teacher and principal, but without the administrative experience reported by superintendent a. superintendent b described herself as “much like a new teacher . . . i am finding things out by accident.” superintendent b’s district is different from that of superintendent a; identified by the national center for educational statistics’ common core of data (2010) as “42-rural, distant” census-defined rural territory that is more than 5 miles but less than or equal to 25 miles from an urbanized area, as well as rural territory that is more than 2.5 miles but less than or equal to 10 miles from an urban cluster (new urban-centric locale codes section). one-third of the students were eligible for free or reduced lunch, slightly above the state average (institute of education sciences, 2011). academically, superintendent b reported that the scores in her district “were not good and academic changes were needed.” she also identified disadvantages to working in a rural school district such as: the school board restricting funds for the school in efforts to do “whatever they can to not raise taxes,” and finding new teachers to bring to the district. superintendent b reported, following a job fair for teachers, “not very many participants would even stop at my table. they are all looking for big cities.” additionally, both school districts report over 90% of the student population being “white alone” (nces.ed.gov). results this study yielded three common themes that factored into the experiences of both superintendents during their first year in the position: (a) the superintendents’ relationship with their school board; (b) their ability to network within the school community; and (c) the school district’s willingness to change. these themes are expanded upon to complement each superintendent’s skills, circumstances, and challenges. relationship with the school board a superintendent’s relationship with the school board substantially influences the chances of their success. blumberg and blumberg (1985) reported that the most significant element in running a school district is the relationship between the superintendent and board of education. for superintendent a, this relationship was positive from her first impressions – “after visiting the board meeting, i feel confident making the move. i feel at home with those people” – and continuing as the school year went on: “board meeting went off without a hitch. everything went smoothly.” she helped the board transition to a paperless agenda, and felt able to “tak[e] the board-identified goals and blend them into something coherent for my tasks for the year,” prioritizing as needed. she wrote, “i’ve met all of the board members and can honestly say i really like all of them,” and received “glowing reports from the board” for her evaluation. even though superintendent a had interpersonal conflicts with other stakeholders, she could count on the school board’s support. superintendent b had a negative relationship with her school board. when she failed to participate in traditions she was unaware of, such as sending out a weekly update and attending a volleyball game against a rival school, she received “stinging email[s]” from board members. she felt that the school board rejected her ideas simply because they were hers. she explained, “they did pass the landscaping project the kids presented and the building upgrades the architect suggested. maybe i should have someone else present any idea i have.” superintendent b also felt that the school board had too much control over school decisions. she wrote, “i feel concerned about my relationship with the board. i have to do something because if i don’t, [the] board is completely in charge and making all the decisions – even curriculum and development decisions. i am a puppet.” after one board meeting, she shared, “i have not felt this discouraged all year. i guess the honeymoon is over. . . . one person questioned everything. he emailed me questions, i answered all of them, and he came up with more. one person is running the show.” superintendent b realized that the school board could be a helpful force when it worked well, since “they ask me questions and provide perspective that i could otherwise not have,” and she was aware of the problem in the relationship, writing, “i have to build a relationship of trust with the board. i don’t think they trust me yet – and i know i don’t trust them. i wonder if i tried too hard or did too much too soon.” but although she stated repeatedly that she needed to discuss these problems with the board president, she wrote, “i just don’t want advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 117 to go there yet.” at the end of the year, the feedback she received from the board was not positive, as it set the raises of “everyone except mine and the principal’s.” this led her to self-doubt: “maybe i did a bad job of communicating with my board and it is my fault if they give me a bad evaluation.” a positive working relationship that results in collaborative goal-setting between the school board and the superintendent is linked to higher levels of student achievement (waters, marzano, & mcnulty, 2006). each has a significant role to play in guiding the district to success. clear and defined roles for the superintendent and board of education are essential to the development of a strong working relationship. when these are ambiguous, strain can increase (carr, 2003). carr (2003) noted, “privately and in surveys, superintendents often express dismay at some school boards’ tendencies to micromanage, while board members voice concerns regarding the lack of communication and conflict over roles and responsibilities” (p. 17). petersen and fusarelli (2002) summarized the need for a strong working relationship between a board and superintendent as, “a superintendent and a board can’t sing two different tunes and then expect the public to hum along” (p. 3). a study by mountford (2004) suggests that half of the people who serve on school boards are motivated to serve for personal reasons while the others are motivated for altruistic reasons. mountford’s (2004) findings suggest there is a direct relationship between superintendent-school board relationships, motivations for school board membership, and the different perceptions of power held by school board members. role confusion is cited by multiple researchers as the most commonly cited reason for difficult school board– superintendent relationships (danzberger, kirst & usdan, 1992; education commission of the united states, 1999; national school boards association, 1996; petersen & fusarelli, 2002). possibly, role confusion and power struggles accounted for some of the school board issues that superintendent b encountered. furthermore, superintendent b understood that she was walking into a role traditionally dominated by males. however, she did not begin to reflect upon this fact until her mentor suggested that some of the difficulty she faced with the school board might have been due to her gender, rather than the transition to new leadership: when he asked, “do you think some of the problems you encounter are sexist? i think some of it may be,” caught me by surprise. he said as a principal, he watched boards question the female superintendent when they didn’t question the males—they got their ideas blessed far more easily than she did and, in his opinion, her ideas were just as good. he said he thinks women really do have to cover more bases than men. i guess i had thought about it. i knew i had to be far more careful with my tone and demeanor than a man and, as my mentor said, i have to do my homework even more carefully. according to 2007 data, even though 75% of the educational work force in the u.s. is female, only 21.7% of school superintendents are female (polka, litchka, & davis, 2008, p. 294). the u.s. census bureau described the superintendency as “the most male dominated executive position of any profession in the united states” (as cited in garn and brown, 2008, p. 51). implications from this data are supported by academic research which details additional challenges for these women. garn and brown (2008), who found that female superintendents perceived a gender bias from the district and community, also described “dispelling gender stereotypes” by being “tough or compassionate, collaborative or dictatorial, depending on the situation” as a “fact of life” for female superintendents (pp. 65-67). female superintendents also perceive pressure to “conform to male expectations regarding the superintendency” as a barrier (polka et al., 2008, p. 302). there is much debate whether specific leadership styles are associated with a particular gender or whether genders behave differently in the same role (eagly & johannesen-schmidt, 2001). nonetheless, eagly and johannesen-schmidt (2001) suggest that there is an underlying process of bias encountered by women especially if the roles they occupy are maledominated: one manifestation of this prejudice is the operation of a double standard by which women have to meet a higher standard to attain leadership roles and to retain them over time. . . . a reluctance to allow women to ascend to organizational hierarchies may reflect resistance to change managerial styles. (p. 795) by contrast, superintendent a never commented on sexism in her workplace. she wrote, “had a great day yesterday with a metro superintendents’ meeting. they were very accepting, and one man even made the nice comment that they needed more women in that group! funny.” that she did not feel pressure due to sexism may have led to her upbeat demeanor. rural superintendents, particularly those located in more extreme rural and isolated areas, encounter specific difficulties. among rural-specific challenges, lamkin (2006) lists bearing sole responsibility for the school district’s success or failure when the school district is a large employer in the community, an understaffed central office that makes delegation difficult, and being “often the only target of public criticism” (p. 17). superintendent b was located in a more rural school district; it is possible a combination of factors, including rural specific challenges associated with limited resources, gender, as well as tradition may have contributed to her difficulties with the school board compared with superintendent a. networking within the school community superintendent a placed a great emphasis on building relationships within the school. she described the people she worked with as “the inner gears that keep everything running. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 118 take care of them!” therefore, she had an empathetic approach to her new support staff: “i’ve been reassuring my new secretary that i will try to make the transition smooth for her. we have found some things we have in common and she seems eager to work together.” she took her staff on retreats, reporting, “great day of retreat getting some things hammered out for next year, then golf in the afternoon. makes me remember how important it is to play together during the year.” she also took the office staff to motivational seminars. she noted, they really seemed to enjoy it. we often leave support people out of the loop for development and it’s crucial to move them along as well. we also had our luncheon to celebrate one year of being together. it’s good to celebrate the small things, although i think this is a big thing! superintendent b also tried to build positive relationships in her school district, but met with less success. one of her successful endeavors was involving teachers in administrative decisions, such as hiring a new p.e. teacher, and shared that “they seemed genuinely honored to be included.” however, she felt that her office staff was less willing to cooperate or “buy in” to her new leadership, which was less top-down than they were accustomed to. she described the situation with the office staff as an “‘us and them’ thing,” and explained, “the office staff runs things to make it easier for them[selves].” this antagonistic relationship with her staff continued throughout the school year: when i ask [the high school secretary] to make calls or fill out a form she [says] she is not going to do my job. she told 2 people that ‘[the superintendent] thinks she is in charge but i am’ . . . i tried to be very diplomatic b/c she is quite opinionated. my hope was that if she did get mad she would be mad enough to quit. networking superintendent a successfully tapped into the tremendous advantage of networking. she defined networking as “talking with the right people who set you up with more people,” and explained, “you have to take advantage of the resources available and use them to your advantage. the old adage of ‘it’s not what you know but who you know’ becomes even more important in a high profile position.” superintendent a contacted and met with superintendents in the region and other states, former superintendents of the district, the ministerial association, the district’s bus drivers, community members recommended by the school board, as well as students and parents. it was the first time a superintendent had accepted the invitation to meet with the bus drivers, and she wrote, “they seemed very appreciative and it’s nice to know them better when i see the buses out on the road.” she explained, “i have done everything i can in terms of doing my homework, following good advice, and following through with contacts. it really pays off.” superintendent a also seemed happy to partake in community and school events. she wrote, “big season for plays and readers’ theater. was out in buildings a lot, but that’s a great opportunity to see parents and grandparents. pays big dividends with students, too. i love that preschoolers and kindergartners know my name.” networking was more of a challenge for superintendent b. she was not able to attend a community meeting until march, and did not attend regional superintendent association meetings until much later in the year, because she had felt too overwhelmed by her own school: “i know i should be a part of other things but the first year is not the time to jump into all those organizations.” she also did not try to contact all the retired superintendents in her town because “[the superintendent who just retired] told me he didn’t get much help when he took over so i probably wouldn’t either.” of the retired superintendents she did contact, one became a trusted mentor who was like “a big brother who had ‘been there done that’ and genuinely wanted to see me succeed,” while the other “can help sometimes but at other times not” because “once you are gone, you are gone.” while superintendent b attended extracurricular school events, she resented the time commitment they required. she explained, “i am so tired of all the extra stuff that has very little to do with the ‘job.’ there are games every night and i just want to be at home. i could handle late nights and long hours, but being expected to be at everything that happens at school is too much.” while she did not want others to think she didn’t want to be involved, she added, “this place is taking advantage of me and i don’t know how much of it is my fault.” superintendent b understood the importance of positive relationships, but also seemed to feel burdened by the pressure of this realization: “if you offend someone, you must go in person, apologize, and talk it out. in a town this size, it is life and death.” being a superintendent requires balanced leadership and the ability to network with various stakeholders. among the various responsibilities of a balanced leader are: fostering mutual beliefs, building a sense of community, providing teachers with professional development and resources, being an advocate and spokesperson for the school district, being willing to challenge the status quo, and adapting one’s leadership as needed (waters, marzano, & mcnulty, 2003). according to fullan, (2001) relationships and organizational success along with moral purpose are interconnected, “if you asked someone in a successful enterprise what caused the success, the answer was ‘it’s the people.’ but that’s only partially true: it is actually the relationships that make the difference” (p. 51). superintendents must develop these skills for their leadership to have an impact, since they face a range of external challenges in their line of work. the school district’s willingness to change one clear situational advantage that superintendent a had over superintendent b was her placement in a school district that wanted to change and was relatively functional. she explained advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 119 that change “can be made easier or more difficult depending on a lot of factors. for me, they have been easier because of how things are going where i am going to.” despite the perception that her district was “very successful and cutting edge,” she still felt that “things behind the scenes are very behind and need to be brought up to speed.” when superintendent a proposed improvements, they were received warmly. she shared, “i had my secretary read [the new newsletter], and she characterized it as very good and ‘refreshing.’” she added, “after many of my meetings, people tell me how glad they are i’m here and how they detect a new freshness. i think a layer of fear has been removed and people are beginning to hope they don’t have to deal with the same dynamics.” the district where superintendent b worked was much less eager to change, even though she felt desperate to make changes because of the school’s poor performance. teachers were willing to adopt new ideas, such as professional learning communities, action research, and a new assessment data program. unfortunately, superintendent b felt completely stymied by the school board, which did not see the incentive to change: “[the school board president] actually said current teacher development is working. well, their scores are stagnant or dropping, so it isn’t working.” she felt that the school board “use[s] the ‘we’ve never done it that way’ card all the time,” whether the issue was driver’s education or parent-teacher conferences. she was especially disappointed because she considered herself a change agent in the area of curriculum/teacher development. she wrote, “i left the board meeting wondering why they hired a change agent who talked about professional learning communities at her interview and then not let any changes happen,” and “they hired a curriculum/teacher development specialist and don’t want to change anything in those areas.” she concluded, “if you do what you have always done, you get what you’ve always gotten.” accordingly, superintendent a had an easier time updating and modernizing old systems. rather than writing about difficulties she encountered, superintendent a simply recorded her progress: “working on getting our forms online. would be much simpler and would help us get updated. those things need to be tightened up, but this way it could happen at once.” her experience also gave her insight on how to update these systems: i’ve learned enough to know about some things, [but] little twists need to be dealt with, so no two days are ever alike. i’ve also learned that some changes should take place at a logical break. leave forms need to be updated and combined for efficiency and accuracy, [but] can wait to be rolled out next fall. that will give the appearance of [being] just a modification. it also won’t scare teachers. superintendent b expressed greater frustration in updating systems in her school district: “i printed off the calendar. there are significant things missing – ayp, apr??? i looked on the website where we complete forms – nothing?” there was noticeable dysfunction present in the way her school district followed guidelines: “a lady from the state said they were not doing summer school according to the way the grant app says. [the ladies teaching summer school] knew nothing about the grant app. why didn’t the teachers know what was in the app?” her district lacked enthusiasm for technology as well, as the business manager “has been very stubborn” about not updating to an online payment program: “i found out recently she is writing every transition by hand. what a waste of time.” superintendent b began to feel that not only change but her own leadership in guiding change was impossible. she shared, i went to the technology conference and had to fight back tears. i want this for my school so badly but i am not sure the board sees it. i wonder if the problem is really me. what made me think i could lead[?] i keep thinking of that saying, ‘you aren’t a leader unless someone is following.’ now that i have been shot down on everything i am too afraid to ask. as new leadership emerges, changes will occur. change is an unavoidable process which takes time and must be allowed to happen. according to fullan (2004), the change process will emerge due “to pressure to change or a compelling reason to change” (p. 39). although some leaders believe change should be defined or managed, fullan (2004) emphasizes that “change cannot be managed. it can be understood, and perhaps led, but it cannot be fully controlled” (p. 42); “change is rapid and nonlinear, which creates messiness” (p. 39). the journal of superintendent b included multiple entries detailing times when staff, especially office personnel, reverted back to how things were done in the past, even manipulating the situation to move back to what had been done before the new superintendent arrived. the resistance to change, to new leadership, and to a new gender in the leadership role may have combined to contribute to the complexity of change. the superintendent even commented that her “frustration was the messiness of seeming to move forward and then falling back.” fullan (2004) explains that as leaders make worthy changes, everyone involved experiences anxiety throughout the change process. effective leaders must have sensitivity to these emotions but cannot cave in to the resistance for change. furthermore, fullan (2004) emphasized that during the change process building relationships can alter these emotions and help to develop a school climate that results in confidence in new leadership. eventually, the building of relationships can lead to support for the systemic change that is occurring. as all effective leaders come to realize, not everyone is willing or able to make the entire journey through this change process (collins, 2001). collins challenges new leaders to seek out and determine who is willing to take the journey— determine who is on the bus! superintendent b reflected: advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 120 i think xxx (name omitted for confidentiality) would like to have controlled the situation. i had thought all along that i needed the business manager on my side since she seemed to be really respected by the board, but recently a few board members have asked if i am sure the real problem is gone (secretary) and indicated that (the issue was) the business manager. i told them at this point i think she does want control but is manageable. she is smart enough to back down and the biggest problem is she thinks the money is hers—probably not an unusual problem. part of the journey is deciding what to do about those who are resistant to change and must be let go. this may include the least apparent staff members who might impede the change process, simply by siphoning time and energy on meaningless complaints. superintendent b made some staff changes, but also indicated her “weariness” from “the daily battle to keep things on an even keel and not from the actual dismissal of the secretary and the resignation of the head cook.” a school district’s willingness to change impacted the successful transformation for these two superintendents. letting the change process occur is the journey that all new leaders must take (fullan, 2004). conclusion in summary, superintendent a and superintendent b had different experiences within three main areas: (a) the superintendents’ relationship with their school board; (b) their ability to network within the school community; and (c) the school district’s willingness to change. superintendent a had a supportive relationship with her district’s school board, whereas superintendent b felt that her school board did not trust in her abilities or support her. superintendent a successfully built networks within the school community, while superintendent b had difficulty negotiating these networks. superintendent a also felt that her school district exhibited enthusiasm toward change, while superintendent b felt that her school district did not want to change the way they operated. while no one factor determined how the subjects fared in their first superintendency, a combination of these three factors did contribute to the superintendents’ overall experience. at semester break, superintendent a felt positive and confident about her school district and her progress: “it’s nice to feel confidence, like you know more than you did six months ago. it’s also nice to know names and faces as you visit with people or discuss situations in the district. i don’t have much to complain about!” at the end of the year she was able to “sit with people and come full circle” during administrative evaluations, enabling her to feel not only like she had made progress, but had consolidated that progress. she wrote, “i’ve adjusted to my team and really like them. i didn’t want to be the one who came and destroyed a great team. the opposite has happened, and they have reaffirmed that to me.” superintendent a finished her school year on a high note: “i need to see things through until my leadership has done what it was supposed to do. it doesn’t get any better than this gig!” having a supportive network of colleagues within the school system helped superintendent a enact necessary changes. for superintendent b, the pressure to fix a struggling school district that didn’t want to embrace the changes she suggested weighed on her. she shared, “the greatest needs of the district are in curriculum, technology, and teacher development, but if we don’t do something about the social climate, we will sink. i don’t think the community or board understands how serious things are.” by the end of the year, superintendent b had gained enough experience to understand how she might enact change, but did not feel confident that the board would support her: “i have begun to think of myself as a change agent. things will get worse before they get better. my heart breaks to see how students act, how they treat each other, and how they treat teachers . . . i am willing to take this on, but only if the board is with me 100%.” this perceived lack of support from the school community caused superintendent b to doubt herself and her abilities, and also caused her to doubt whether change would be possible in her school district. polka et al. (2008) describe “professional victim syndrome” as a condition faced by superintendents whose “professional and personal reputation was being tarnished,” and had to “navigat[e] the political waves in order to survive” (p. 296). the authors caution that female superintendents may be more likely to experience “professional victim syndrome” (pp. 302, 305) and suggest that personal and professional preparation is the best guarantee that a superintendent will weather the crisis (see also byrd, drews, & johnson, 2006). self-confidence, acting as if one is in control of the situation “no matter how disastrous,” learning from criticism, emotional management, and self-awareness were other keys to resilience (byrd et al., 2006, p. 306; kopelowitz, 2009; summers & wells, 2000). school boards are often cited as a decisive factor influencing how long a superintendent stays in the job, as superintendents often feel micromanaged by the school board (byrd et al., 2006). some rural superintendents noted that school boards have changed to expect “increased shared decision-making” and “continuous communication” (lamkin, 2006, p. 21). kopelowitz (2009) recommends that to develop a mutually respectful relationship, superintendents spend time with school board presidents, acknowledge the school board’s importance, keep members regularly updated, and must “be willing to learn” (p. 30). summers and wells (2000) suggest that superintendents and board members hold a joint training on developing an effective relationship. building interpersonal relationships with stakeholders was considered a key to success for superintendents in general (kopelowitz, 2009), and female superintendents in particular (gilmour & kinsella, 2010). summers and wells (2000) advise superintendents to get involved in the community, volunteer at school functions, and use local news to disseminate advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 121 information, because good community relationships are critical to a superintendent’s success. however, in some more rural districts, a lack of privacy and confidentiality lead superintendents to feel “too visible” (lamkin, 2006, p. 22), and when faced with this challenge, rural superintendents often retreat from the high exposure instead of embracing their visibility. this can ultimately impact networking and the building of relationships. it is clear that these three factors, (a) the superintendents’ relationship with their school boards; (b) their ability to network within the school community; and (c) the school district’s willingness to change, all impacted the superintendent’s success in their first assignment. aspiring superintendents should learn to anticipate these potential challenges and institutions preparing them for a career in educational administration should assist these aspiring superintendents to brainstorm ways to mitigate these challenges, should they occur. references blumberg, a., & blumberg, p. (1985). the school superintendent living with conflict. new york: teachers college press. byrd, j. k., drews, c., & johnson, j. (2006, august). factors impacting superintendent turnover: lessons from the field. ncpea education leadership review, 7(2). carr, n. (2003). leadership: the toughest job in america. american school board journal special report: education vital signs, 122, 14-20. collins, j. (2001). good to great: why some companies make the leap . . . and others don’t. new york: harper collins. danzberger, j., kirst, m., & usdan, m. (1992). governing public schools: new times new requirements. washington, dc: institute for educational leadership. eagly, a., & johannesen-schmidt, m. (2001). the leadership styles of men and women. journal of social issues, 57(4), 781-797. education commission of the united states. (1999). governing america’s schools: changing the rules (report of the national commission on governing america’s schools). denver, co: author. fullan, m. (2001). leading in a culture of change. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. fullan, m. (2004). leading in a culture of change: personal action guide and workbook. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. garn, g., & brown, c. (2008, january). women and the superintendency: perceptions of gender bias. journal of women in educational leadership, 6(1), 49-71. gilmour, s. l., & kinsella, m. p. (2010, february). top 3 tips for succeeding as a female superintendent. the leader’s edge [american association of school administrators online newsletter]. retrieved from http://www.aasa.org/content.aspx?id=11542 institute of education sciences. (2011). national center for educational statistics. retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/ kopelowitz, s. b. (2009, december). the laws of resonant leadership. the school administrator, 66(11), 29-31. lamkin, m. l. (2006, fall). challenges and changes faced by rural superintendents. the rural educator, 28(1). miles, m., & huberman, a. (1994). qualitative data analysis (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. mountford, m. (2004). motives and power of school board members: implications for school boardsuperintendent relationships. educational administration quarterly, 40(5), 704-741. national center for educational statistics. (2002). common core of data (ccd): locale codes. washington, dc: u.s. department of education, office of educational research and improvement. retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/ccdweb/school/glossary.asp national school boards association. (1996). becoming a better school board member: a guide to effective school board service. alexandria, va: author. petersen, g., & fusarelli, l. (2002). changing times, changing relationships: an exploration of current trends influencing the relationship between superintendents and boards of education. in g. perreault & f. c. lunenburg (eds.), ncpea 2002 yearbook: the changing world of school administration (pp. 282293). lanham, md: scarecrow. polka, w., litchka, p., & davis, s. w. (2008, october). female superintendents and the professional victim syndrome: preparing current and aspiring superintendents to cope and succeed. journal of women in educational leadership, 6(4), 293-311. summers, m. e., & wells, m. h. (2000, march). changing the dynamics of a board from hell. the school administrator, 57(3), 54-55. waters, t., marzano, r. j., & mcnulty, b. (2003). balanced leadership™: what 30 years of research tells us about the effect of leadership on student achievement. denver, co: mid-continent research for education and learning (mcrel). retrieved from http://www.mcrel.org/pdf/leadershiporganizationdev elopment/5031rr_balancedleadership.pdf waters, t., marzano, r. j., & mcnulty, b. (2006). school district leadership that works: the effect of superintendent leadership on student achievement (mcrel). retrieved from http://www.mcrel.org/pdf/leadershiporganizationdevel opment/4005rr_superintendent_leadership.pdf microsoft word maguire_the_influence_of_online_social_capital_on_women’s_career_change.docx advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 64 advancing women in leadership vol. 36, pp. 64-72, 2016 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the influence of online social capital on women’s career change diana maguire diana maguire: alfred university, email: maguire@alfred.edu accepted june 22, 2016 women seeking to manage their careers have faced numerous challenges for decades. the influence of social capital on women’s careers has been a concern of researchers, particularly within the contexts of women’s underrepresentation in businesses’ higher organizational ranks and societal expectations for women. this research builds on previous career studies and improves the understanding of women’s career changes with consideration of their social capital behaviors online. the two research questions in the study are: to what degree does online social capital impact women’s ability to make desired career changes in business? to what degree do workingwomen view online social networking platforms as a viable means to develop and maintain social capital? in phase one, a quantitative study was conducted via an online survey of over two hundred women working within nearly fifty companies in a southwestern new york and northwestern pennsylvania region. in phase two, follow-up qualitative questions were asked of an age-stratified sample of women working in the region. the findings suggest that women’s use of direct communications channels online is associated with developing and maintaining professional network contacts. women in the study indicated a limited use and perception of social media tools for developing social capital. factors including age and field of work were found to impact women’s use of social media professionally as well. future implications suggest investigating the activities women use to develop and maintain their career-related social capital networks over time to identify potential shifts in behavior or social media acceptance. keywords: career change; social capital; online networking, social media, women in business; women’s careers. introduction this study analyzed the impact of online social capital on women’s ability to make desired career changes in business. women tend to make career changes and adjust their work situations to fit their larger life contexts, based on both family and career implications (o’neil, hopkins, & bilimoria, 2008). united states bureau of labor statistics have indicated that workers in the united states change jobs nearly eleven times over the courses of their careers (2010). women in the thirty to forty age range have faced career change issues in that women with children enjoyed less career success, while men with children enjoyed more career ascension (mason & ekman, 2007). women working in business have been challenged in their career advancement, longevity, and satisfaction (catalyst, 2014; eagly & carli, 2007; the white house project, 2009; wfd consulting, 2004). moe and shandy’s (2009) research found that women in business desiring career change as their family life situations evolved appeared to face organizational obstacles that impacted their career trajectories. one element found to contribute significantly to organizational and career success has been social capital (burt, 1992; higgins, 2001; ibarra, 1992; lin, 2000). social capital, defined as value gained through the interaction of individuals and groups, has been found to influence women’s career success particularly through the diversity and higher rank of social network contacts (burt, 1998; ibarra, 1993, o’neil et al., 2008). research on the effects of social capital on changing careers implied that the greater the diversity of an individual’s social capital network, the greater the likelihood that the person would change careers (higgins, 2001). social capital networks broadened the range of career possibilities that an individual considered and increased advice and information on career advancement opportunities. additionally, the social network increased the individual’s confidence, a necessary trait in the job search process, through positive psychological support (higgins, 2001). however, studies have indicated that women endured greater challenges than men in building social capital (burt, 1998; lin, 2000). how individuals maintain their social capital can also influence its effectiveness (burt, 1992). the advent of electronic communications has altered the accepted norms for business communications. within the past decade, new web and mobile platforms for social networking have also emerged. a number of different social media platforms offer varying goals and advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 65 interaction purposes. facebook, along with its subsidiary instagram, offers individuals and organizations pages and profiles to connect with people and their world around them (facebook, 2016) while twitter promotes community, conversation and inspiration for viewers’ interests (twitter, 2016). facebook boasts 1.59 billion monthly active users, while twitter connects 320 million monthly active users as of december 31, 2015. each of these platforms also offer online space to advertise businesses and services. beyond the socializing and marketing aspect, some online platforms have been specifically designed to better one’s future and help find jobs. linkedin allows individuals to connect online in a professional atmosphere and offers to pave the way to future jobs, meet new clients, or connect to career contacts (linkedin, 2016). linkedin has become more popular in recent years as people have become employed through this social media platform. recent company data revealed that 100 million active users access linkedin on a monthly basis (weber, 2015). over the past decade, social media use amongst men and women has nearly equalized (perrin, 2015). initially, women accounted for a larger percentage of users. however, most recent tallies indicated that women and men’s use of social media has become nearly equal. women account for a larger percentage of users on facebook and instagram, while men account for a slightly larger percentage of users on twitter and linkedin. whether women were able to use those online social networking connections to their advantage with career change remained unanswered. this study sought to analyze the impact of women’s use of online social capital tools to make desired career changes in business. the study investigated whether women’s use of social media for professional networking was associated with their reported career change success. additionally, the study evaluated whether women viewed social media as an accepted platform for career networking. literature review social capital is a critical element of success for businesspersons in today’s knowledge economy. organizational leaders are challenged to manage workers’ talents, skills, and ideas (dess, lumpkin, eisner, & mcnamara, 2014). a central element of competitive advantage lies in the tying together of knowledgeable, talented individuals through social connections, or social capital (dess et al., 2014). social capital can play a key role in career success, as it provides the advantages of information, skill sets, and power (cross, thomas, & light, 2009). online tools for developing and maintaining social capital offer individuals varying degrees of connectivity with those in and around their social networks. electronic communications, such as email and text messages, allow individuals to communicate and share information with established contacts. social media platforms, such as facebook, twitter, and linkedin, allow individuals to broadcast communications to expanded circles of contacts and their related contacts. both electronic communications and social media offer the opportunity to connect with others without limitations of geographical proximity. as outlined in the following literature, women have not enjoyed the same advantages as men in developing and maintaining their social capital. social capital is not universally accessible to all, particularly women. additionally, the nature of women’s use of online social capital methods has shown marked differences from that of men’s. social capital that connects previously segregated groups has been associated with greater career success (burt, 1992). diverse social network connections were associated with higher rates of promotion and salary increases (burt, 1992). additionally, managers whose positions brought them into contact with contacts outside their organization were found to have more acceptance of their innovative business proposals, while those in closed groups had their ideas dismissed (burt, 2004). further, burt’s (2004) research indicated that managers were more confident in acting on their ideas when they had diverse social connections. according to burt’s (1992) research, social capital has been measured by an individual’s number of connections, length of established connections, and frequency of contact. models of career change have identified social constructs as integral individuals’ decisions to change careers (rhodes & doering, 1983). voluntary career changes were closely tied to job dissatisfaction, driven by lack of person-organization or personenvironment fit, two socially constructed concepts (rhodes & doering, 1983). higgins (2001) offered insights on social capital’s influence on career change, indicating that the greater the diversity of an individual’s social capital network, the greater the likelihood that the person would change careers. higgins (2001) found that a diverse social network provided advice and information on career advancement opportunities, as well as broadened the range of career possibilities that an individual considered. further, as the number of different career alternatives presented through an individual’s social network increased, the likelihood of career change increased (higgins, 2001). the positive psychological support offered by the social network also increased individuals’ confidence in seeking new job opportunities (higgins, 2001). lin (2000) argued that not only the quality, but also the quantity, of network connections impacts career outcomes. lin (2000) suggested that men belonged to larger social networks centered on economic institutions that provided information related to job opportunities. in contrast, women belonged to smaller networks focused on community and domestic issues (lin, 2000). similarly, still’s (2006) research showed that women had family-based social networks, due in part to their culturally prescribed greater investment in childcare. lin (2000) proposed that several other factors distinguished women and men’s social networks. women had fewer contacts in other fields, failed to advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 66 integrate into men’s networks, and gained male contacts through family ties (lin, 2000). in contrast, men associated with contacts in higher positions and had fewer network contacts who were neighbors, friends, or family (lin, 2000). lin’s (2000) assessment was that women were unable to connect to the right social ties. one fundamental social capital element lacking for women was the ability to connect with contacts in higher organizational ranks. women lacked available resources to develop an adaptive strategy for career change via self-definition (ibarra, 1999). those who adapted to a new role most successfully had access to an observable role model (ibarra, 1999). since corporations have had fewer women in top organizational positions (catalyst, 2014), women have held a disadvantage in developing new professional self-images. women’s perceived value within corporations has been affected by organizational structure in terms of both availability of power through network contacts and social diversity of the employee base (kanter, 1993). additionally, individuals’ self-image and behaviors have been shaped by their social connections within organizations (ibarra, 2004). further evidence of the difference between women and men in developing and maintaining social capital was shown in their use of online platforms in the digital society. since the early 1990’s, business professionals have had the opportunity to develop social capital via online communications, or email. since the early 2000’s, business people have connected within the digital society by means of social networking sites such as linkedin and facebook. a larger percentage of women use mobile devices for social media, use social media more than once per day and consume news via social media (hillsberg, 2014). monthly active user statistics for facebook and twitter have indicated that women comprised the majority of users with fifty-eight and sixty-four percent, respectively (hampton, goulet, rainie, & purcell, 2011). site statistics indicated that women share photos and news via social media more often than males (hillsberg, 2014). further, the hampton et al. (2011) study indicated that only ten percent of facebook users’ connections were coworkers. nielsen (2012) social media studies reported that men use social media more for professional contacts. sixteen percent of men’s social media contacts were considered professional, while only versus only ten percent of women’s contacts were professional (nielsen, 2012). this data suggested that even in the digital society women’s network ties were centered more on family and friends. positioned especially for business professionals, linkedin offers its more than 100 million active monthly users value by connecting to other professionals (schein, 2014). the primary goals of most users have been to seek employment or other business opportunities (schein, 2014). unfortunately, user statistics have suggested that women have not taken advantage of the professional networking opportunities in the digital age. pew researchers determined that women comprised only thirtyseven percent of the users on linkedin (hampton et al., 2011). similar to social capital development, online networking platforms particularly social media have been shown to contribute significantly to individuals’ perceived value (keller, 2013). given women’s limited use of social media as a professional networking channel (hampton et al., 2011), women in business could be missing opportunities to develop their value through online networks. further investigation was needed to determine the impact of online social networking for women’s satisfaction with career change. methods as this study sought to analyze the impact of women’s use of online social capital tools to make desired career changes in business, the research questions focused on whether women utilized online networking and whether they were satisfied with their ability to make desired career changes. the study investigated whether women working in business fields used social media for professional networking. the study also evaluated whether women viewed social media as an accepted platform for career networking. the overarching research questions were: to what degree does online social capital impact women’s ability to make desired career changes in business? to what degree do workingwomen view online social networking platforms as a viable means to develop and maintain social capital? from the research questions, the following hypotheses were developed: hypothesis 1: utilizing online connectivity for developing social capital is positively related to a women’s satisfaction with career change. hypothesis 2: women view online social networking platforms as acceptable tools for developing and maintaining professional networking contacts. to test the hypotheses, a two-phase approach was taken. in order to test the positive relationship between utilizing online social capital and women’s satisfaction with career change (hypothesis 1), a quantitative study was conducted. in a second phase to investigate women’s perceptions of online social networking platforms as viable means of developing and maintaining social capital (hypothesis 2), qualitative interviews were conducted. population and sample the population for the first phase of the study consisted of women working in for-profit businesses and business-related fields in southwestern new york state and northwestern pennsylvania. this geographic region was selected for the study in order to minimize variability of economic, market, or employment conditions. companies that were willing to invite their employees and contacts to participate in the study were identified. qualified participants were screened for gender and advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 67 experience with a for-profit entity within the past ten years. the ten-year time period was set to establish a technological and sociological frame set for the study. the participants in the study operated within a number of industries including manufacturing, oil and gas production, financial services, and professional services. their organizations ranged in size from small – under 200 employees – to large over 2,000 employees. organizations were both public and privately held. the population for the second phase of the study was also comprised of women working in for-profit businesses and business-related fields in northwestern pennsylvania and southwestern new york state. qualified participants were screened for frequency of social media use and age. the need to interview women who used social media for networking arose as a result of limitations identified in phase one of the study. age was included as a criterion considered to control for generational trends with social media. instrumentation and data collection procedure the instrumentation for phase one of the study was a qualtrics online survey. the invitation to complete the survey was sent via email from human resource managers. the online survey instrument contains thirty-five closed-ended multiple-choice questions. opening questions on the survey qualified participants for gender and willingness to participate. eight questions addressed categorical issues of demographics and employment status. twelve questions utilized likert scales to measure participants’ level of agreement with concepts, while the remaining questions utilized equal-interval continuous scales to measure participants’ perceptions and behaviors. an online survey was determined to be most appropriate to collect responses from women in a variety of professional organizational positions. additional advantages to utilizing an online survey included the ease of use for the participant and the direct migration of response data into the spss statistical software. since phase one solicited quantitative responses, an unaided online survey is appropriate for scaled and ranking questions. the instrumentation for phase two of the study was a list of fifteen questions asked of participants by researchers conducting the interviews. the invitation to participate was sent via email to women working in business who were known to be active on social media. qualifying questions screened the participant for frequent use of social media and for age brackets. ten women in each of the age brackets – twenties, thirties, forties, and over fifty – were selected to participate in phase two of the study. since phase two sought qualitative responses, the smaller sample size was deemed appropriate. variables for both phases of the study, the dependent variable was defined as successful career change by women. successful career change was measured by respondents’ satisfaction with their ability to make desired career changes. their satisfaction was assessed based on respondents’ perceived satisfaction with their 1) salary; 2) availability of new work opportunities; 3) work structure, including their work schedule, flexibility, and location; and 4) support from their supervisors and coworkers. the primary independent variable in this study was defined as the participant’s social capital. four factors of social capital were measured: 1) diversity; 2) size; 3) upward reach; and 4) connectivity. diversity of social capital related to the types of persons and relationships within a social network (burt, 1992). size of social capital was measured by the range of contacts in the network, while upward reach of social capital was measured by the organizational and social rank of persons in a social network (ibarra, 1992). connectivity of social capital referred to participants’ use of online tools to develop and maintain their social capital network. six control variables were established for the study: the participants’ 1) age; 2) organizational level; 3) field of work; 4) employer size; 5) education; and 6) personal brand value. personal brand value was measured by participants’ behaviors in marketing their career aspirations (keller, 2013). data analysis plan the survey data from phase one was analyzed using spss version 21. using spss’s table views, the data was reviewed to confirm that all variables transferred properly with coding in place. for all statistical testing, the level of significance of .05 was established. statistical analyses included descriptive statistics, such as frequencies, mean, median, and standard deviations for all variables contained in the dataset. observations for the dependent variable, successful career change, were analyzed using responses to questions asking participants to indicate their satisfaction with career outcomes related to career change. four areas of satisfaction measured included both objective and subjective measures: salary, new opportunities, work structure, and supervisors and coworkers. participants were asked to indicate the length of time since the respondent’s last career change. the data for career repositioning was analyzed against the data for the independent variable, social capital. the social capital measurements provided continuously scaled data. perceptions of success were measured on continuous scales. the data from phase two was analyzed using microsoft excel 2011. researchers entered participants’ answers into a spreadsheet in order to analyze frequencies and trends in the participant responses. sorting participants by age allowed the researchers to evaluate responses by participants’ age and compare for variances. participants were asked to rate their satisfaction with making desired career changes. the mean of this score was compared to the mean found in phase one of the study. trends in participants’ responses to questions about their use of online networking tools were summarized by age groups. in turn, those trends were compared to group means for career change satisfaction. advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 68 limitations the most significant limitation of this study was that participants self-reported their perceptions of career changes, obstacles, and opportunities. some self-selection bias could limit the study if only women who felt strongly about career issues chose to participate in the study. since the study was limited to women working within small cities in two east coast states, the findings may not be generalizable to metropolitan or other employment clusters within the united states. additionally, the study was limited to the timeframe in which participants responded to the survey. questions in regard to participants’ network contacts or communication methods could vary over time, causing the participants to respond to questions based on their most recent activities rather than their typical behaviors. results for phase one of the study, the survey data was first analyzed by reviewing the frequency of responses for control variables, to ensure that the distribution of respondents was not skewed. an overview of the sample data for usage of connectivity tools is available in figure 1. secondly, the initial data testing process was to conduct an analysis of variance (anova) on the variables. the anovas included testing a) between the independent variables and the dependent variable, b) between the control variables and the dependent variable, and 3) between the control variables and the independent variables. if an anova indicated a statistically significant relationship between variables, a post hoc test was run to determine the differences between group responses and the strength of the relationship between variables. last, linear regression models were run on the independent variable to confirm the strength of association with the dependent variable (ability to make desired career changes). control variables were tested in the regression series as well. a 95% confidence interval was accepted as the significance level for all analyses in the study. figure 1. connectivity of work-related social capital network. this figure illustrates participants’ use of listed methods for professional networking (n=218). results for hypothesis 1: utilizing online connectivity for developing social capital is positively related to a women’s satisfaction with career change. frequency of participants’ use of traditional and online methods for developing social capital was measured in two questions. the first question asked, “how do you typically communicate when discussing career issues – face-to-face, phone, email, text message, linkedin, facebook.” the second question asked, “how often do you use these online tools for your professional networking – email, text messaging, linkedin, facebook, twitter, instagram.” the anova for these responses was run against the dependent variable measure: “please indicate the degree to which you agree or disagree with the following: over the course of my career, i have been able to make my desired career changes.” for the analysis of ability to make desired career changes, a statistically significant relationship was found in only one anova for all of the elements of both questions. statistically significant results were found in the anova for the second question in regard to the frequency of use of email for professional networking. the anova showed a significant association between use of email for career networking and women’s ability to make desired career changes at the p < .05 level for the conditions [f(4, 213) = 4.54, p < .05]. post hoc tests were then run to find the variance amongst groups in the responses. the post hoc value was on the dependent variable question’s scale of one to four (where ability to make desired changes, 1=very true, 2=true, 3=somewhat untrue, 4=not at all true), so that a negative post hoc mean difference indicated that the respondent found her ability to make desired career changes under that condition to be more true. 0 50 100 150 200 email text linkedin facebook twitter instagram very frequently frequently occasionally rarely never advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 69 the post hoc test for this question, in regard to the use of email for professional networking, indicated that respondents who very frequently used email for professional networking rated their ability to make desired career changes higher than nearly all other groups. as indicated in table 6 anova post hoc tests, frequent users of email for professional networking indicated higher ability to make desired career changes by -.379 than women who frequently used email, by -.490 than women who occasionally used email, and by -.524 than women who never used email for professional networking. the anova findings lent preliminary support to a possible association between email connectivity behaviors for professional networking and women’s ability to make desired career changes. the regression analysis showed one connectivity behavior – use of email – to have significance with ability to make desired career changes. use of email for career-related networking was shown to have a weak positive relationship with ability to make desired career changes. the results are outlined in table 1 and table 2 summary of regression analyses: dependent variable = ability to make desired career changes. analysis of control variables: table 1 anova post hoc tests mean difference std. error sig. use of email tamhane very frequently frequently -0.379 0.131 0.045 very frequently occasionally -0.49 0.138 0.006 very frequently never -0.524 0.171 0.047 note: the mean difference is significant at the 0.05 level. independent variable: use of email for career networking dependent variable: ability to make desired career changes the anova analyzing the statistical significance of control variables showed significance in field of work as well as age. respondents working in communications/public relations used facebook for career networking more than those in engineering by a measure of -1.346 on the 1-4 (often, sometimes, rarely, never) scale. analysis of variance in connectivity by age groups found statistical significance in the methods typically used for professional networking. face-to-face, email, text messaging, and facebook use varied amongst the age groups. post hoc tests revealed that respondents in the youngest (20-30 year-old) age group were more likely to utilize each of the four listed methods than respondents in older age groups. those in the 30-40 yearold group were also more likely to use face-to-face as a typical networking method than those in the 41-50 year-old age group. the question used a four-point scale, where respondents indicated the tool was used typically 1=often, 2=sometimes, 3=rarely, and 4=never. the 20-30 year-old age group was -.504 more typically using email than those in the 41-50 year-old age group. the 20-30 year-old age group was more typically using text messaging than those in the 41-50 year-old and over-50 age groups by -.500 and -.786 respectively. the 20-30 year-old age group was -.491 more typically using facebook than those in the over-50 year-old age group. for phase two of the study, the interview responses were analyzed by reviewing the frequency of responses to determine trends. each age grouping was evaluated in order to determine whether participants’ ages were associated with differing trends in responses. results for hypothesis 2: women view online social networking platforms as acceptable tools for developing and maintaining professional networking contacts. most participants in the phase two follow-up study of social media users indicated positive feelings in regard to their ability to make desired career changes. participants in the youngest age bracket of social media users – the 20-to-30 age group – indicated more frequently that they spent considerable effort and time marketing themselves. participants in the other three age brackets indicated that they spent only a small amount or no time marketing themselves. participants in the younger age group also indicated nearly unanimously that the only online connectivity tools they considered to be professional networking tools were email and linkedin. participants in their 40’s or 50’s indicated that they used a greater variety of online tools for professional networking, citing facebook and twitter as utilized tools. among all ages of the women participating, those who were self-employed indicated most frequently a greater use of the social media tools for professional networking. advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 70 table 2 summary of regression analyses: dependent variable = ability to make desired career changes discussion phase one of the study offered an important finding for women seeking career change in regard to their online behaviors associated with their development of career related social capital. of all the online connectivity behaviors associated with developing and maintaining professional social network contacts, email was the only online tool that was found to have significance on ability to make desired career changes. however, important to note is that the use of most online tools was very infrequent amongst participants. more than 80% of participants indicated that they regularly use email for professional social networking. conversely, nearly 70% of women indicated that they rarely or never use linkedin. likewise, 70% of participants never use text messaging for networking. some variance in the use of online networking tools was associated with the educational level of participants. women with master’s degrees were more likely than those of any other educational level to use the social networking tool linkedin. women who indicated that they spent more time marketing themselves were more likely to frequently use online tools. these participants use text messaging, linkedin, and facebook as typical networking tools, and more frequently utilize text messaging, linkedin, facebook, and twitter as a channel for professional networking. those who spent more time marketing themselves were more likely to use text messaging, linkedin, and facebook. some variance was also found in the use of online connectivity tools for professional networking across work functions and age groups. women working in public relations fields indicated greater use of the online social networking tool facebook for career networking than those in engineering. however, no significant variances were found for the use of other tools. the use of the social media tool facebook by those in public relations could be due to the nature of their field in trying to communicate across multiple media channels. still, the finding leaves question regarding how adept women in more technical fields are with contemporary communications tools. the results indicated that younger women were more likely to utilize email, text messaging, and facebook for professional networking than respondents in older age groups. this finding could suggest that women in younger generations may have different expectations for professional networking than the women with more working experience in business fields. younger businesswomen may need to be made aware that all women in business may not utilize the same connectivity tools that they are accustomed to using. additionally, experienced professional women in business fields may not appreciate being approached by younger women for career networking via online connectivity methods. the younger generations may face career networking challenges if they rely too heavily on these online tools that many women in business seem not to be currently using. advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 71 phase two of the study following upon phase one’s indication that women were not using social media to develop and maintain social capital, phase two was conducted to further clarify online professional networking amongst women who use social media regularly. the study sought to investigate whether women who use social media considered it a viable means of developing and maintaining professional network contacts. the follow up study was initiated to speak to women who use social media to determine whether its use influenced their ability to market themselves, make necessary connections, and craft desired career changes. all participants in the study indicated that they were less likely to consider tools other than email and linkedin as professional networking tools. they viewed the other online tools – facebook, twitter, instagram, and text messaging – as vehicles for personal communications. comparing women of different age groups showed some variance in their perceptions of social media tools as viable for professional networking. women in the forty-to-fifty age bracket used a greater variety of online tools for professional networking – citing facebook and twitter as used tools. women in the twenty-to-thirty age range indicated that although they used facebook and twitter, they did not consider them tools to connect with professional contacts. additionally, another factor arose in the qualitative study. women who identified themselves as self-employed indicated a greater usage of all social media tools for professional networking. self-employed women saw less of a distinction between their personal and professional networking online. this study’s findings that women with higher educational levels – masters degrees – used linkedin more often for networking could be related to their graduate programs of study, typically mba programs. business faculty may encourage students to use linkedin as a tool in order to develop connections and brand themselves online. the findings related to field of work for business women in the study would seem to indicate a direct correlation to the content of participants’ work. women working within public relations indicated a higher use of social media tools for professional networking. adopting their work skills to their own career networking would not be challenging. raising the awareness of the connections available through social media amongst businesswomen in less public-focused functions may serve to help those women make career connections more readily. this study provides a better understanding of women’s use of online networking within business fields and how online connections may impact their ability to make desired career changes. the limited use of social media platforms by the participants in this study could indicate that women perceive those tools as less professionally valuable. alternately, the limited use of online tools could suggest that women perceive the broadcast aspects of social media as less applicable to developing social capital connections, as compared to the more directed means of communication. the more prevalent use of email for networking by women in this study implies the preference for direct communication channels as well. this study indicates that women of all age ranges should be made aware of the limitations of social media for developing and maintaining professional network contacts. women should be reminded that direct communications with contacts should be promoted as the preferred method for networking. women should also be reminded of the value of professional networking, as they attempt to plan changes throughout their careers. going forward, researchers should continually monitor and assess the usage of professional networking by women, not just in business, but all fields. researchers should include current and trending online tools as part of their assessment of professional networking. as online tools wane or become mainstream, career change implications could be impacted for women in many disciplines. references burt, r. 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(2004). when talented women leave your company: is it push or pull? it’s about time, 10. 23 advancing women in leadership vol. 32, pp. 24-35, 2012 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper do microfinance programs benefit women in developing countries? dr. mazhar siraj house 4, main road, margalla town phase ii, islamabad, pakistan e-mail: sirajmazhar@hotmail.com 0092-302-896-6961 this paper looks at the case for and against the view that microfinance programs benefit women in developing countries, based on a selective body of research. the analysis suggests that women constitute the largest pie of the clientele of microfinance programs at the global level. broadly, these programs have worked within two paradigms which aim at (1) poverty alleviation and (2) empowerment of women within the feminist discourse. however, the literature remains inconclusive about the real impact of these programs. in some developing countries, access to microcredit has helped many women to cross the poverty line but even where poverty has been alleviated, scepticism persists about long-term and sustainable benefits in terms of empowerment, including but not limited to, control of women over incomes raised through investing credit or savings, improved bargaining power and better social status. this is because the commercialization of microcredit and savings services is shifting the focus from the poor clients, particularly women, to all those who needs credit from formal institutions. this development is jeopardizing the objectives of poverty alleviation and empowerment of women and calls for a greater attention to the needs of women in setting the objectives and design of microfinance programs in developing countries. key words: women, microfinance, empowerment, poverty alleviation, developing countries introduction over the past decade and a half, the concept of microfinance has received a phenomenal popularity worldwide, particularly in developing countries. compared with a few initiatives till the early 1990s, there are now more than 7000 microfinance institutions (mfis) in 143 countries; a high majority of their clients comprises women (microcredit summit campaign [msc], 2009, p. 22). a growing body of scholarship suggests that women benefit from financial services of the mfis considerably, though in varying degrees, in the form of increased incomes and poverty alleviation (yunus and weber, 2008; pitt and khandker, 1998; remenyi and quinones, 2000), improved consumption and better schooling for girls (khandker, 1998) and empowerment within the feminist discourse (mayoux, 2002). at the same time, however, there exists a significant current of apprehension due to some known deleterious effects of microfinance programs on women such as indebtedness as a result of failure to repay the loans (hulme, 2007) and increased http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ 24 vulnerability to domestic violence and intimidation (goetz and gupta, 1996; rahman, 1999). the interest in the benefits and costs of microfinance programs is gradually increasing with the rapid expansion of the mfis. in this backdrop, this paper engages the wide range of arguments and attempts to examine the extent to which microfinance programs benefit women in developing countries. the discussion is organized as follows: the second section briefly explains the growth of microfinance and attempts to explore why the mfis specifically target women rather than men. the purpose is to identify the motivation that underlies the focus on women as the clients of microfinance services. the third section looks at the case for and against the view that microfinance programs benefit women in developing countries. then, different types of benefits are discussed in two broad categories, namely 'poverty alleviation' and 'empowerment'. the rationale for choosing these categories is explained at the beginning of the section. the last section draws some conclusions. before proceeding further, it seems pertinent to mention two caveats. first, the terms 'microcredit' and 'microfinance' are not the same. microfinance is a broader category which refers to a range of financial services including microcredit, micro-savings and/or micro-insurance (rahman, 2004), but nevertheless the bulk of the services still comprises microcredit (ditcher, 2007). the usage of these terms in this paper is guided by this distinction. secondly, there are some limitations of sex-disaggregated data on microfinance, especially in countries other than bangladesh. although the literature is steadily growing, it is difficult to draw a clear picture of the benefits, as cross-country comparisons are not possible due to differences in samples of the mfis and methodologies used by researchers. therefore, this paper draws on selective empirical data and case studies from various developing countries. growth of microfinance in developing countries: why target women? globally, women have had been the main target group of the mfis, although the numbers vary across countries. see table 1 for the outreach of the mfis. see table 2 for the percentage of women borrowers and profitability of mfis in selected developing countries. one may ask why it is so. do the microfinance programs target women as their clients purposefully for alleviating their poverty and/or for reducing gender inequality? or, do they prefer to target women only because of their greater willingness and ability to repay the loans? what kinds of benefits are generally predicted from women's participation in microfinance programs? one can find answers to these questions by looking at the process in which the mfis have emerged. the concepts of 'microcredit' and 'microfinance', as they are understood and practised today, are relatively new (grameen bank, 2009), but different arrangements for the provision of small credits have had been in vogue for a long time. according to rahman (2004, p. 27-29), the institutionalization of microcredit began in the 1950s when the developing countries with the financial support of international donors tried to deliver governmentsubsidized credit to small farmers and the poor households. later, it came to be known that the subsidized credit was indeed reaching the rich and the powerful, rather than the poor. the failure of this approach triggered the search for an alternative financial tool, which led to the development of microcredit for giving the poor access to 25 financial capital on a more sustainable basis. the main idea was to reach the poor who did not possess collateral for accessing loans from formal financial institutions or were being exploited by informal lending outlets. this motivation formed the basis of the grameen bank of bangladesh in 1976. the bank introduced tiny collateral-free loans to jointly liable group members, rather than individuals, and became popular worldwide due to rapid expansion of women clients and high loan payment rates. the grameen bank model was replicated at a large scale in most countries of asia, latin america, africa and north america during the 1980s and the 1990s. a group of major donors formed the consultative group to assist the poorest (cgap) in 1995 at the world bank in order to coordinate microcredit activities. the major breakthrough was the first microcredit summit held in washington in 1997, which marked the beginning of a global campaign to provide credit to 100 million of the world's poorest households, especially to the poorest women, by 2005 (msc, 2009; remenyi and quinones, 2000, p. vii). today, out of the total poorest clients reached by the mfis, the majority (87.6 percent) comprises the poorest women. from the above description, two arguments can be identified which explain the overwhelming focus on women: first, the conventional wisdom has reinforced the belief that, if credit is to be provided to the poor, it must go to a woman within a poor household, rather than to a man. why? one major motivation has stemmed from the fact that majority of the world's poor comprises women (rehman, 2004, p. 31). at the same time, women are more likely than men to be credit constrained, have restricted access to the wage labour market and have an inequitable share of power in household (pitt and khandker, 2006, p. 791). such considerations formed the basis of grameen bank's strategy to target women (yunus and weber, 2007). due to immense success of this strategy, donors began to view microcredit as one of the most important financial tools for alleviating women's poverty. remenyi and quinones (2000, p. 4) argue that today, almost all the mfis have learnt that if “one's objective is poverty reduction through the provision of financial services to the poor, women are their best clients”. secondly, an important reason for preferring women as the clients of microfinance services lies in institutional dynamics. the choice of women clients is believed to be a cost effective strategy because they are perceived as being more reliable and susceptible to group pressure. as a result, the repayment rates are higher for women than men (momsen, 2004, p. 207). moreover, some empirical evidence suggests that the benefits of the investment of loans by women are greater than men (see, for example, pitt and khandker, 1998 in rahman, 2004, p. 32-33); this point will be further elaborated in the next section. counting the benefits for women now i turn to examine the extent to which the motivations identified above have been actually translated into real benefits. the literature discusses the benefits mainly in two analytical categories: 'poverty alleviation' and 'empowerment'. the first category is primarily concerned with two interrelated benefits: increase in incomes and poverty alleviation. the second category looks at the transformation of the increased incomes and poverty alleviation into long-term and sustainable benefits through empowerment strategies. let us consider each category in some detail. 26 poverty alleviation conventionally, microfinance has had been considered a panacea for poverty alleviation (hulme, 2007, p. 21; yunus and weber, 2007, p. 233; khandker, 1998, p. 1), particularly for women who comprise 70 percent of the poor and two thirds of the world's illiterate population (remenyi and quinones, 2000, p. 4). it is widely believed that the poor women's access to credit will enable them to engage in viable microenterprises or other economic activities resulting in increased incomes. much of the legitimacy of this belief comes from the perceived success of grameen bank, which has come to serve as a model of the virtuous outcomes of credit for poor women in rural bangladesh (rahman, 2004, p. 31). in the past, however, few efforts have been made to examine the actual impact of microfinance programs on women's poverty. traditionally, the only indicators used by donors and practitioners for program evaluations have been the outreach and profit margins (rahman, 2004, p.32). it was not until 1991-92 that the first major study to examine the impact of microcredit on poverty alleviation was undertaken by pitt and khandker with the support of the world bank. based on a survey of 1800 households from 87 villages of bangladesh, the study found that about 21 percent of the borrowers of grameen bank (about 96 percent women) were lifted out of poverty within 4.2 years of their membership. in recent years, impact studies have been undertaken in many countries. in bangladesh, an internal survey of grameen bank has found that 64 percent of the borrowers who had been with the bank for five years or more had crossed the poverty line (yunus and weber, 2007, p. 52). however, the impact does not appear significant outside bangladesh. a number of authors have cited studies which confirm that microfinance programs have not been able to even scratch the surface of women's poverty in many developing countries such as sri lanka, kenya and malawi (see, for example, rahman, 2004; ditcher and haper, 2007). most recently, the msc has claimed that the mfis have reached more than 106 million poor clients out of whom 88.7 million are the poorest women. nevertheless, it is a significant achievement, but it still remains to be seen how many of these women have actually been able to improve their incomes and get out of poverty. considerable scepticism exists about the impact of microfinance on poverty alleviation, especially in terms of the coverage of women (sharif, 2002, p. 227). while globally, women constitute a high majority of the clients of the mfis, but the numbers vary across countries. as table 2 indicates, women do not constitute even half of the total clients of the mfis in pakistan (16.3 percent), sri lanka (47.6 percent) and eastern europe and central asia (45.9 percent). it can be argued that fewer women are likely to benefit from poverty reduction effects of microfinance programs in these countries/regions due to their low ratios in the total clientele. moreover, since the early 1990s, a shift from 'microcredit' to ‘microfinance’ is taking place globally. this process is accompanied by the progressive commercialization of microfinance services and entry of for-profit institutions in this sector (sharif, 2002, p. 241). this trend has significant implications for the poor because the commercial institutions target all potential clients who want to access loan from formal institutions, but not necessarily to the poorest (rahman, 2004, p. 37). in 27 bangladesh where microcredit originally emerged as a financial service for the poor about 40 percent of the total microfinance clients in the ngo-led industry are non-poor (zohair, 2001 in rahman, 2007, p. 194). this is contrary to the original concept of microcredit, which aimed to reach the poor for poverty alleviation. remenyi and quinones (2000) have compiled eight case studies from asia and the pacific which confirm this trend. an important concern persists about growing preoccupation of the mfis with profitability. overall, the mean profit margin of mfis stands at 12.9 percent, though there are huge variations among countries. the mean value is highest in asia and pacific. it is argued that the mfis are increasingly taking up a commercial face by raising their own revenues thereby tradingoff the objective of poverty alleviation (see, for example, mayoux, 2002; rehman, 2004). moreover, some critics argue that, even where microfinance programs reduce poverty of women, there is no guarantee that this outcome will increase their control over the raised incomes or reduce gender inequality within the household or community (goetz and gupta, 1996; mayoux, 2002). from this point of view, microfinance is considered as an entry point for women's empowerment in the broader economic, social and political context. empowerment the pursuit of microfinance's social objectives stops at poverty alleviation; women's empowerment has never been a major concern of microcredit or savings programs, notwithstanding some exceptions. indeed, empowerment was not originally predicted as an outcome of women's access to microfinance (ditcher, 2007, p. 4). the literature produced by the pioneers of microfinance and major institutions confirms this proposition. for instance, the founder of grameen bank and the nobel laureate, muhammad yunus, has recently co-authored a book on his motivation and experience in this field spanning over three decades (see yunus and weber, 2007). a glimpse of the book tends to convince one that microcredit is only about alleviating poverty; not even a single entry in the 261page book touches upon empowerment or gender equality despite that 96 percent of the borrowers of grameen bank are women. similarly, women's empowerment hardly appears as an important topic in the reports of leading international organizations such as the msc (2009) and mie (2009a, 2009b and 2009c). the absence of a purposeful empowerment focus, of course, has not prevented the academics and the feminists to investigate the potential of microfinance programs to create benefits associated with empowerment, i.e. control over incomes, improvement in social status, enhancement of capabilities and skills, and increase in bargaining power, to name a few. the debate on such benefits has picked up momentum during the past two decades based on growing empirical evidence. mayoux (2002) argues that this debate is taking place within three paradigms: the financial self-sustainability paradigm, the poverty alleviation paradigm, and the feminist empowerment paradigm. although the benefits with which each paradigm is concerned cannot be classified neatly into these three categories, they provide a useful framework for looking at women's empowerment in the context of microfinance in a systematic way. the financial self-sustainability paradigm the financial self-sustainability paradigm seeks “individual economic empowerment" 28 of women through increase in incomes on a sustainable basis. according to mayoux (2002), the assumption at the core of this paradigm is that economic empowerment will lead to greater control of women over their income and savings, which in turn, will contribute to their own and children's wellbeing. the expectation is that sustainable income generation activities will enable women to initiate the broader social and political changes, even if explicit support for women does not exist within a household or community. empirical evidence suggests that access to microcredit or savings services has not necessarily empowered women economically. in rural bangladesh, a study conducted by goetz and gupta (1996) showed that 63 percent of the loans borrowed by women were controlled by male members of their family. although they had no direct control on the proceeds from these loans, the women bore the burden of debts and repayments. the authors noted that the lending process often victimized women borrowers leading to disempowerment, violence, and intimidation by the lending institutions. these findings have been confirmed in many other studies (see, for example, rahman, 1999; karim, 2001). in other regions, the benefits may be just the opposite. in sri lanka, for instance, a study (aladuwaka, 2002 in momsen, 2004, p. 208) shows that microcredit has little impact on poverty, but it is playing significant role in empowering the sri lankan women, as the income earned by them is not controlled by their husbands. their economic activities have earned them great respect in the eyes of their husbands. in addition, it is argued that benefits of microfinance for women have remained limited because the opportunities for investment lie only in informal sector and microenterprises. this issue is forcing the women into a “microcredit ghetto” without any meaningful economic empowerment (randriamaro, 2001 in momsen, 2004, p. 206). in recent years, however, some innovative models have been mounted in developing countries. a classic case is the economic empowerment of black women in south africa where stokvels have helped many black african women to become shareholders and investors in big companies, rather than participation in microenterprises. verhoef (2002, p. 108-09) explains in a case study that this process was started in the early 1990s with the emergence of black economic empowerment investment companies. the purpose of bees was to promote direct participation of black people in the corporate sector of mainstream economy of south africa. as a result, a large number of black women's economic empowerment (bwee) groups have emerged, which raise capital from international and domestic corporate and financial institutions. the capital is then invested in long-term ventures and the dividends are used to provide microfinance to women in rural and urban areas. verhoef (2002) notes that one of the bwee groups women investment portfolio holdings (wiphold) has pioneered a new approach to black women's economic empowerment by including stokvels in corporate investments. stokvels have to be registered as a company, which represents a shift from informal arrangement towards formal structure based on transparent rules. the registered stokvels invest savings of their women members in wiphold, which passes on the dividends of the investment. the investment of women savers in wiphold, through stokvels, has grown so rapidly that three years after its establishment in 1994, it was listed on 29 johannesburg stock exchange. the value of its investment portfolio increased to more than one billion rand (approximately usd 11.8 million) by 1998. nevertheless, such innovative models of economic empowerment are still very rare. the poverty alleviation paradigm as indicated above, the prime concern of microfinance services has been to provide credit and savings services for increasing the incomes of women borrowers through sustainable economic activities. the poverty alleviation paradigm is concerned with the manner in which this income is utilized for the “well-being” of women. according to mayoux (2002, p. 248), the term “well-being” in this sense may be defined to include a range of benefits such as improved confidence, increase in consumption expenditure, participation in household decision-making, and better schooling for girls, to name a few. thus, this paradigm assumes that women's empowerment and poverty alleviation are inherently mutually reinforcing. there exists considerable ambivalence in empirical evidence on the extent to which an increase in incomes and poverty alleviation create the above mentioned benefits for women in developing countries. take consumption expenditure, for example. in bangladesh, pitt and khandker (1998) showed that consumption expenditure increased by 18 percent for every dollar borrowed by women, but only 11 percent in case of men in bangladesh. however, the increase in incomes generated through small enterprises was generally not enough to meet the costs of basic goods and services. in malawi, a survey of 404 households showed that the effect of microcredit was too small to make any difference on consumption expenditure of the borrowers (diagne, 1998 in rahman, 2004, p. 34). similarly, evidence on the effects of microfinance on the schooling of female youth is conclusive. rahman (2004, p. 3536) explains that a longitudinal study commissioned by the united states agency for international development, focussing on three microcredit programs in asia, africa and latin america, showed that none of the programs had any impact on girls' education. even where the increase in incomes of women shows improvement in schooling of girls may be misleading in the sense that this change could be due to other factors such as improvements in accessibility to schools and government incentives. momsen (2004) argues that in general, the proposition that access to microcredit increases schooling of children has not been studied in detail. the feminist empowerment paradigm the feminist empowerment paradigm views microfinance as an important entry point for social and political change through enhancing women's ability to transform and challenge gender subordination. mayoux (2002, p. 248-49) argues that empowerment, in this paradigm, is seen as a complex and multi-faceted process that involves more than just economic empowerment or wellbeing. the end objective of this process is to address certain 'strategic gender interests' that include the promotion of individual internal change (power within), increasing capacities (power to) and the collective mobilization of women, and where possible, of men (power with) to question and transform gender subordination (power over). a number of studies have confirmed that in many countries, women who participated in microfinance programs were more likely to challenge or overcome gender subordination in a more effective way than those who did not (verhoef, 2002; khandker, 1998; pitt et 30 al., 2003). however, there is no automatic link between access to credit and ability of women, as individuals or in groups, to trigger social and political change. the creation of benefits depends on a multitude of social and political factors that resist the changes in prevailing gender relations. more difficulties arise where attitudinal changes are required. let us consider a case study to illustrate this point. in india, sinha (2007) has examined the efforts of women's self-help groups (shgs) to bring about social change. the growth of shgs has taken the form of a movement, as about 400 women join a shg every hour, according to the website of the national bank for agriculture and rural development (nabard). since the 1990s, the nabard has linked more than 2.2 million shgs to banks enabling the members of these groups (90 percent women) to access small loans. this model is distinct from many other microfinance institutions in the sense that it has ingrained empowerment as an element of the financial strategy. sinha (2007) conducted a study covering 3000 women members of shgs linked by the nabard whether the bank credit had any empowering effects in the social context. the findings indicated that the participation of women in the shgs became a source of confidence and strength for pursuing a social agenda which largely focussed on social injustices meted out to women. however, the success was only partial. as table 3 indicates that prevention of bigamy, obtaining compensation, marriage of an orphaned girl or a separated women were easier, as they required practical intervention with immediate results. however, the groups could not succeed where long-term behavioural change in men was required such as in the case of domestic violence and sexual abuse. the analysis presented in the previous two sections indicates that the benefits of microfinance programs for women vary considerably in their nature and degree, and across countries. the literature has documented important factors that cause this variation. they include, for example, the program design and strategies of the mfis (vyas, 2002; mayoux, 2002; khandker, 1998), the age of female participants (sharif 2002), intra-household gender relations (sharif 2002), and the prevalent social status of women (verhoef, 2002; sinha, 2007). some studies have shown that the benefits are higher for women when they involve skill building and training components. ellerman (2007, p. 157) observed that the 1997 annual report of the world bank institute reported that the women borrowers who had been trained in a grassroots management and training program in north africa had systematically better business practices, higher business incomes and felt more empowered than control groups without access to the training. conclusion while many 'pockets' of success in developing countries exist, it is difficult to claim that microfinance programs have been able to demonstrate a strong impact on poverty alleviation and empowerment of even a majority of their women clients, let alone all clients. in some countries, adverse effects such as indebtedness and increased physical violence against women have also been reported. in addition, the traditional enthusiasm and optimism associated with microfinance as a powerful strategy for helping women is being overshadowed by growing pessimism among academia and feminists. this is because the commercialization of microcredit and 31 savings services is shifting the focus from the poor clients, particularly women, to all who needs credit from formal institutions. this development tends to jeopardize the objectives of poverty alleviation and empowerment of women; these objectives cannot be left to be achieved as externalities or chance-outcomes of their participation in credit and savings services. the local 'pockets' of success must be scaled-up through redesigning the institutional objectives and strategies of the mfis. this must include the capacity to reach out to the poor women through effective mechanisms designed to alleviate poverty within the mainstream feminist empowerment discourse. end notes i the average loan size of grameen bank was less than usd 50. if we look at the websites of different mfis, the size of their loans varies greatly but is generally in the range of usd 100 -200. ii these countries include bangladesh, india, sri lanka, indonesia, malaysia, the philippines and the pacific islands. iii for example, stokvels in south africa and selfhelp groups in india have embodied empowerment as an element of financial strategy. iv stokvel is an umbrella term for different community-based informal financial and social organizations, which have existed in south african black communities since 1920. they perform similar functions as typical microfinance organizations do, but their focus rests more on savings, rather than lending. for details, see verhoef, 2001, p. 93-99. v a shg is a small group of poor women, which pools small amounts of savings. these savings are then deposited in a saving account in a local bank through 'linkage' organizations such as nabard. after about six months, the members can access small bank loans with low interest rate. see sinha, 2007, p. 73. references ditcher, t. and malcolm harper (eds.) (2007). what's wrong with microfinance? warwickshire: intermediate technology publication ltd. ellerman, d. (2007). 'microfinance: some conceptual and methodological problems' in ditcher and harper. eds. chapter 13. pp. 149-161. goetz, a. and r. sen gupta (1996). 'who takes credit? gender, power and control over loan use in rural credit programs in bangladesh'. world development. 24: 1. pp.45-63. grameen bank. (2009). 'what is microcredit?’ http://www.grameeninfo.org. accessed april 2, 2009. hulme, d. (2007). 'is microdebt good for poor people? a note on the dark side of microfinance' in ditcher and harper. eds. chapter 2. pp. 19-22. jabes, j. ed. (2004). the role of public administration in alleviating poverty and improving governance. an anthology of conference papers. kuala lumpur. http://www.adb.org/documents/books /role-of-public-administration/roleof-public-admin.pdf#page=54. accessed may 6, 2009. karim, l. (2001). 'politics of the poor? ngos and grass-roots political mobilization in bangladesh'. polar. 24:1. pp. 92-107. khandker, shahidur r. (1998). fighting poverty with microcredit: experience in bangladesh. usa: oxford university press. lemire, b., ruth pearson and gail campbell. eds. (2002). women and credit: researching the past, refiguring the future. oxford: berg. mayoux, l. (2002). 'women's empowerment versus sustainability? towards a new paradigm in microfinance programmes' in lemire et. al. eds. chapter 14. pp.245-70. http://www.grameen-info.org/ http://www.grameen-info.org/ 32 mie [microfinance information exchange]. 2009a. arab microfinance analysis and benchmarking report 2008. http://www.themix.org/publications/20 08-arab-microfinance-analysis-andbenchmarking-report. accessed april 30, 2009. mie. 2009b. asia microfinance analysis and benchmarking report 2008. http://www.themix.org/publications/20 08-asia-microfinance-analysis-andbenchmarking-report. accessed april 30, 2009. mie. 2009c. eastern europe and central asia microfinance analysis and benchmarking report, 2008. http://www.themix.org/publications/2 008-eastern-europe-and-central-asiamicrofinance-analysis-andbenchmarking-report. accessed april 30, 2009. momsen, j. h. (2004). gender and development. london: routledge. msc [microcredit summit campaign]. (2009). state of the microcredit summit campaign report. washington dc. http://www.microcreditsummit.org/sta te_of_the_campaign_report. accessed may 2, 2009. pitt, mark m. and khandker shahidur r. (2006). 'empowering women with microfinance: evidence from bangladesh'. economic development and cultural change. pp.791-831. pitt et. al. (2003). 'does microcredit empower women: evidence from bangladesh'. policy research working paper 2998. the world bank. rahman, a. (1999). women and microcredit in rural bangladesh: an anthropological study of grameen bank lending. colorado: westview press. rahman, aminur. (2004). 'microcredit and poverty reduction: trade-off between building institutions and reaching the poor' in lont, hotze and otto hospes. eds. (2004). livelihood and microfinance. delft: eburon academic publishers. remenyi, j. and benjamin quinones, jr. eds. (2000). microfinance and poverty alleviation: case studies from asia and the pacific. london: printer. sharif, najma r. (2002). 'poor female youth and human capital development in bangladesh: what role for microcredit programmes?' in lemire et. al. eds. chapter 13. pp. 223-244. sinha, frances. (2007). 'shgs in india: numbers yes, poverty outreach and empowerment, partially' in ditcher and harper. eds. chapter 7. pp. 73-82. verhoef, grietjie. (2002). 'stokvels and economic empowerment: the case of african women in south africa, c. 1930-1998' in lemire et al. eds. vyas, jayshree. (2002). 'banking with poor self-employed women' in lemire et. al. eds. chapter 9. pp.145-166. yunus, muhammad and karl weber. (2007). creating a world without poverty: social businesses and the future of capitalism. new york: public affairs. 33 table 1: outreach of the mfis region number of mfis reporting to msc number of total clients number of the poorest clients number of the poorest women clients sub-saharan africa 935 9,189,825 6,379,707 3,992,752 asia and the pacific 1,727 129,438,919 96,514,127 82,186,663 latin america & caribbean 613 7,772,769 2,206,718 1,450,669 middle east & north africa 85 3,310,477 1,140,999 890,418 developing world total 3,360 149,711,990 106,241,551 88,520,502 north america & western europe 127 176,958 109,318 72,576 eastern europe and central asia 65 4,936,877 233,810 133,815 industrialized world total 192 5,113,835 343,128 206,391 global total 3,552 154,825,825 106,584,679 88,726,893 source: msc (2009). 34 table 2: percentage of women borrowers and profitability of mfis in selected developing countries country/region sample mfis 1 percentage of women borrowers 2 median value of profit margins 3 afghanistan 14 53.2 (70.8) bangladesh 20 98.9 (14.5) cambodia 15 84.3 20.5 china 5 85.0 (22.1) indonesia 59 100.0 6.3 indonesia 38 50.8 (0.5) nepal 14 100 15.8 pacific islands 3 n/a (15.9) pakistan 8 16.3 (101.0) philippines 50 95.5 5.4 sri lanka 5 47.6 (2.1) vietnam 11 98.3 6.4 asia and pacific 242 69.16 4 23.44 egypt 13 75.1 4.1 jordan 6 82.0 9.8 morocco 9 95.5 8.6 middle east and north africa 28 84.2 7.5 balkans 39 39.0 11.6 caucasus 29 42.7 9.8 central eastern europe 17 42.1 -5.0 central asia 35 46.6 16.6 russia 38 58.9 1.6 eastern europe and central asia 158 45.9 7.8 all regions 418 66.4 12.9 notes: 1. number of mfis that reported data to the mie. 2. number of active women borrowers/adjusted number of active borrowers. 3. adjusted net operating income/adjusted financial revenue. 4. excluding pacific islands. sources: compiled from mie 2009a; 2009b; and 2009c. 35 table 3: issues of social injustices addressed by shgs and reported success in india category total effective partially effective failure total actions 20 10 6 4 ending domestic violence 6 4 2 preventing bigamy 5 4 1 marriage of a girl orphan, remarriage of a separated woman 2 2 compensation for dowry death 1 1 prevention of child marriage 1 1 ending sexual harassment 1 1 justice for husband/son (compensation for injury, unfair arrest) 4 3 1 source: sinha (2007). microsoft word szendrey_leaning_in_and_leaning_out_rev4.docx advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 73 advancing women in leadership vol. 36, pp. 73-82, 2016 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper leading by leaning in and leaning out karen stock & julie szendrey karen stock: walsh university, email: kstock@walsh.edu julie szendrey: walsh university, email: jszendrey@walsh.edu accepted august 08, 2016 women in business are often confronted by work environments which influence career/leadership choices and family decisions, as noted in the recent new york times article, “more than their mothers, young women plan career pauses” (miller, 2015). those in the millennial generation, born between the years 1981-1997, are learning by example from previous generations what career options they would like to pursue and not pursue. although individuals in this generation may think differently than their predecessors, they may also fail to understand and take action on career, leadership, and family opportunities available to them. this research focuses on developing leadership skills and career awareness amongst students at a small liberal arts institution after business faculty noted a higher percentage of students intending to pursue careers as homemakers versus businesspeople. the program, focused on getting the conversation started at the college level to prepare students for the business world, was based upon the research presented in the book lean in: women, work and the will to lead by sheryl sandberg (2013) as well as the resources provided on the leanin.org website. the program exposed students, university faculty, and staff to female leaders at various stages in their careers through interactive, discussion-based sessions. program developers also conducted empirical quantitative research on the student participants to identify changes in attitudes and behaviors as a result of participating in the program and found significant changes in student’s ability to network and level of self-efficacy – issues addressed within the sessions. significant differences were also noted between those choosing to participate in the program and a control group of non-participants. in addition, what initially began as a programming initiative to gain awareness around leaning in, or taking a more active leadership role, has since evolved to become a student-led effort that involves leaning out, such as working with others as mentors through collaboration with outside organizations. keywords: leadership development, gender, women in business, mentoring. introduction women in business face different challenges when entering the workforce than do men. women have a tendency to take a step back and not be as outgoing or aggressive as men. when they do, there are often negative consequences associated with such behaviors, as assertiveness is seen as a form of aggression (heilman & parks-stamm, 2007). these stereotypes start to take shape from a very young age in the classroom. rather than being praised for being a leader when calling out answers in class, young girls are often reprimanded to raise their hands for acting in the same way (beaman, wheldall, & kemp, 2006). as a result of such behavior that is reinforced over time, there is less tendency for women to take the lead for fear of backlash. for women, this often results in less promotions, fewer opportunities for overseas assignments and reduced pay (adler, 1994; national committee on pay equity, 2009). women in business are often confronted by work environments which can influence career/leadership choices and family decisions, as noted in the recent new york times article, “more than their mothers, young women plan career pauses” (2015). those in the millennial generation, born between the years 1981-1997, are learning by example from previous generations what career options they would like to pursue. although individuals in this generation may think differently than their predecessors, they may also fail to understand and take action on career, leadership, and family options available to them. as faculty members at a small liberal arts university, we have the ability to get to know our students on a personal level. many times we have had undergraduate students in more than one class before they graduate. in addition, our roles as advisors to student clubs add to our ability to mentor. we recognized a need and also an opportunity to develop leadership skills within students on campus, particularly those of undergraduate females. we observed that many of our female students did not speak up advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 74 voluntarily during classroom discussions, were hesitant to take the lead in group projects, and did not participate in extracurricular organizations. our concern was further documented by research results conducted by the higher education research institute (ucla, 2014) which indicated that a lower percentage of students within our university indicated “business” as a career expectation (7.0% vs. 13.7%) while a significantly higher percentage of students indicated “homemaker” (12.6% vs. 2.9%) in comparison to comparable schools in the cooperative institutional research program (cirp) report (ucla, 2014). (note: in the 2015 cirp report, the percentages were more comparable for the university in comparison to comparable schools). we, as faculty members, have also both worked in corporate environments before transitioning to academia, so we are familiar first-hand with the pressures faced by women in business. having understood the student need, as well as serendipitous timing of the release of sheryl sandberg’s book lean in: women, work and the will to lead (2013), we were inspired to act and sought to design a program to bring leadership issues to the forefront for our students. we first approached the program concept by consulting with our dean, who recommended that we consult our school of business student advisory group to gauge interest. we showed an abbreviated version of sandberg’s ted talk (sandberg, 2010), which offers advice to women in regard to advancing their careers, and talked about our desire to develop programming around the themes addressed in the talk and in the lean in book (sandberg, 2013). the response was overwhelmingly positive from both the male and female student attendees. with the assistance of two students from this board, as well as three other faculty and staff members from the school of business, we began planning programming that would occur during the following academic year. program overview the lean in book (sandberg, 2013) served as the roadmap for the program. each organizing member received a copy of the book, read it, and discussed how to go about bringing these concepts to the student body. from the leanin.org website, we also reviewed the plentitude of resources available, such as video clips and a discussion guide that could be downloaded that corresponds to the chapters in the book. we selected material based on the objectives of program, which were to: 1. encourage participants, particularly females, to “speak up” in academic/leadership situations, 2. increase confidence levels (self-efficacy) of participants, 3. increase social connections and involvement of participants, and 4. increase initiative in leadership positions of participants. we planned five sessions focusing on leadership development throughout the academic year. with the exception of the luncheon, each session, averaging 90 minutes in duration, began with a video clip centered around a particular theme, followed by a speaker or a panel of speakers, and concluded with small group discussions at the table that were led by a member of the organizing group. the events were promoted to all students on campus, regardless of gender, age, or academic degree being pursued. table 1 illustrates an overview of the programming themes. table 1 lean in program overview date session theme featured speakers sep. career success and challenges female executive chief financial officer nov. work/family balance panel of female midlevel managers from different industries jan. negotiations workshop: how to effectively negotiate salary husband and wife team consisting of a male attorney and female chief communications officer march campus-wide luncheon as part of a weeklong celebration of women on campus. topic: finding your purpose female researcher and consultant on gender diversity and inclusive leadership april advice for graduates and opportunities for mentoring session organizers differences exist in leadership development of women versus men (rosener, 1990; eagly & carli, 2007). the majority of this work has been observed and conducted at the corporate level; however, the intent of our program and corresponding research was to bring it to the university/college level. existing research discusses the rationale for implementing women-only leadership groups, further justifying the development of the lean in program (ely, insead, & kolb, 2011; vinnicombe & singh, advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 75 2003). although our program openly invited male participants, we did not have a large group of male participants, as noted in the sample demographic discussion and in table 2. table 2 sample characteristics variable participants (n = 17) non-participants (n = 24) gender female 17 (100%) female 24 (100%) age 18-24 17 (100%) 18-24 24 (100%) marital status single, never married 17 (100%) single, never married married 16 (96%) 1 (4%) race non-hispanic white hispanic african american asian american 14 (82%) 1 (6%) 1 (6%) 1 (6%) non-hispanic white hispanic african american asian american 21 (88%) 2 (8%) 1 (4%) 0 (0%) education level completed high school 4-year college degree 16 (94%) 1 (6%) high school 4-year college degree 24 (100%) 0 (0%) residential status live on-campus commute 12 (71%) 5 (29%) live on-campus commute 13 (54%) 11 (46%) year in school freshman sophomore junior senior graduate student 0 (0%) 1 (6%) 9 (53%) 6 (35%) 1 (6%) freshman sophomore junior senior graduate student 4 (17%) 2 (8%) 7 (29%) 11 (46%) 0 (0%) major accounting behavioral science communication global business management marketing museum studies 6 (35%) 0 (0%) 2 (12%) 1 (6%) 2 (12%) 5 (29%) 1 (6%) accounting behavioral science communication global business management marketing museum studies 8 (33%) 1 (4%) 6 (25%) 1 (4%) 7 (29%) 1 (4%) 0 (0%) research question and method the research question for which we sought to answer was: how and to what extent does participation in a women’s leadership program result in increased leadership skills? to answer this question and ultimately determine the effectiveness of the lean in program in meeting the previously mentioned objectives, we developed and administered a pre-test/post-test survey to lean in participants. survey questions were obtained from existing scholarly research relating to the development of leadership skills amongst university students. the questions were selected based on how well they addressed the four objectives of the program, while minimizing the likelihood of “survey burnout” amongst the survey takers. in addition to collecting demographic and survey data on the program participants, we also administered the same pre-test/post-test survey to nonparticipants to evaluate the actual impact of the program. three sets of hypotheses were evaluated to determine the overall effectiveness of the lean in program: (a) pre-test versus posttest of the participant group, (b) pre-test comparison of the participant versus the non-participant group, and (c) post-test comparison of the participant versus the non-participant group. objectives and survey development objective 1: encourage participants to “speak up” in academic/leadership situations. the first objective of the lean in program was to encourage participants to take a more active role in “speaking up” when in academic and leadership advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 76 situations. such situations would include taking on a more “vocal role” when working on group projects, planning events on campus, and leading campus organizations. students who tend to be more outgoing (versus shy) are naturally more inclined to “speak up” (spralls, garver, divine, & trotz, 2010). to access this objective, two five-point, likert-type questions, assessing outgoingness and pro-activeness in groups, were included in the survey, both originally used in spralls et al, 2010. the corresponding hypotheses, stated in alternative form are as follows: h1a: program participants report an increase in outgoingness from preto post-program participation. h2a: program participants report an increase in being a proactive leader in group work from preto post-program participation. objective 2: increase confidence levels (self-efficacy) of participants. self-efficacy refers to “people’s judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances” (bandura, 1986, p. 391). the “new general self-efficacy” eight-item scale was used for this research (chen, 2001) because of its length, unidimensionality, strong validity (content, predictive, and discriminant), and strong reliability (α = 0.85 and higher). for this research, respondents were asked to rate themselves from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5) on the eight statements which included “i will be able to achieve most of the goals that i have set for myself,” “i am confident that i can perform effectively on many different tasks,” and “even when things are tough, i can perform quite well” (chen, 2001). the summation score for the eight items was determined and used for evaluating the construct of self-efficacy (h3). the corresponding hypothesis, stated in alternative form is: h3a: program participants report an increase in self-efficacy from preto post-program participation. objective 3: increase social connections and involvement of participants. we recognized that students may be hesitant or not know how to establish connections (network) in both oncampus and off-campus experiences. the lean in program was established to not only encourage participation in our lean in program, but also to encourage students to become more involved in other organizations. the effectiveness of university leadership programs is highly dependent on getting students interested in participating in such programs (spralls et al., 2010). many students have limited time to participate in extracurricular activities due to time-constraints of attending class, completing homework, meeting to work on group projects, participating in other extracurricular activities, and possibly working an onor off-campus job(s). as with any type of resource allocation, we hoped that students were willing to sacrifice their time and recognize the benefits of establishing social connections and increasing involvement. five-point, likert-type questions from spralls et al. (2010) were included in the survey to address involvement and the importance of involvement, hypothesizing that involvement and the importance of involvement on and off campus will increase with participation in the program. the corresponding hypotheses, stated in alternative form are: h4a: program participants report an increase in involvement with activities on and off campus from preto post-program participation. h5a: program participants report an increase in the importance of being involved on and off campus from preto post-program participation. likewise, survey questions from zaccardi, howard, and schnusenberg (2012) were also included to address the number of organizations students are involved with, hypothesizing that the number will increase due to participation in the program. the corresponding hypotheses, stated in alternative form are: h6a: program participants report an increase in the number of organizations involved with from preto post-program participation. h7a: program participants report an increase in the number of outside organizations networked with from preto post-program participation. objective 4: increase initiative in leadership positions of participants. a student’s desire to participate in a leadership development program can vary by many factors. although our program was targeted at developing leadership skills amongst female students, we recognize that student attitudes and behaviors can vary significantly prior to participating in such a program. our objectives were focused on exposing students to leadership issues over the course of the year-long program with the intent of increasing/improving student leadership attitudes and behaviors. additionally, students choosing to participate, versus those choosing not to, may naturally show more positive leadership attitudes and behaviors, prior to the start of such a program. to measure initiative in leadership positions, fivepoint, likert-type questions from research by spralls et al. (2010) were used, hypothesizing that perceived leadership experience and importance of leadership skills will increase during program participation. h8a: program participants report an increase in perceived leadership experience from preto post-program participation. h9a: program participants report an increase in the importance of leadership skills from preto post-program participation. lastly, a dichotomous question “do you actively serve in a club leadership role (yes/no)” from zaccardi et al. (2012) was also included in the survey, hypothesizing the following: h10a: more program participants report serving in a club leadership role in postversus pre-program participation. note: the validity and reliability reporting for these scale items taken from spralls et al. (2010) and zaccardi et al. (2012) were not reported. advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 77 demographic variables. in addition to the questions listed above, the demographic data of gender, age, marital status, race, education level, residential location, year in school, and academic major were also collected. such data provided us with a better understanding of the composition of our participant group in addition to our non-participant group. sample: participant and non-participant groups. to determine if the objectives of the program were being met, the survey was distributed to lean in participants during the first event (september) and fifth event (april) to serve in a pre-test and post-test format. a control group of students, with similar demographics who were not participating in the lean in events, was also used. the pre-test and post-test surveys were distributed to the non-participant group within the same timeframe as the participant group. students used as the participant test group in this study were those who participated in two or more events (n = 17), referred to as “participants” and the control group consisted of those attending no events (n = 24), referred to as “non-participants.” demographic characteristics of both samples are included in the appendix. as can be noted, the demographic characteristics of the participant and nonparticipant groups are similar in that both contain all females, all are age 18-24, and almost all are single, never married. although male students were invited and encouraged to attend the lean in events, only a few did and none attended more than one event. both groups have similar composition in terms of race and education level. participant and non-participant majors are almost all business majors, with both groups containing approximately 33% accounting majors. residential location breakdown is slightly different for each group with 74% of participants living on campus versus 54% on non-participants living on campus. for year in school (class), both samples had predominantly junior and seniors, while non-participants had 17% freshmen versus participants with 0%. to evaluate similarities/differences between the participant group and non-participant group during both the preand postprogram time periods, similar hypotheses to those previously noted for h1a to h10a were also tested. with “b” indicating “pre-test period” and “c” indicating “post-test period,” the following hypotheses were tested: h1b to h10b null: the participant group has the same pre-test results as the non-participant group. h1b to h10b alternative: the participant group has higher/greater pre-test results than the non-participant group. h1c to h10c null: the participant group has the same post-test results as the non-participant group. h1c to h10c alternative: the participant group has higher/greater post-test results than the non-participant group. results hypotheses test set a: pre-test/post-test of participants a pre-test/post-survey method was used to evaluate student attitudes and behaviors relating to leadership roles in addition to level of engagement and self-efficacy. the effectiveness of the lean in program was evaluated using a pre-test vs. post-test method of paired comparison analysis using a 90% confidence level. results for test set a: pre-test versus post-test of participants. the results shown in table 3 indicate that six of the ten test variables showed an increase in pre versus post-test values for the participant group; however, only two of the six variables were determined to have a statistically significant increase: h3a: program participants reported an increased level of self-efficacy from preto post-program participation (p = .006). h7a: program participants reported an increase in the number of outside organizations networked with from pre to post-program participation (p = .009). when comparing these results to the change within the nonparticipant group, it was determined that: reported level of self-efficacy (p = .006) was not statistically significant in comparison to change within the non-participant group (p = .005). increase number of outside organizations networked with (p = .009) was statistically significant in comparison to change within the non-participant group (p = .271). relating to hypothesis h6a, the lean in participants reported a statistically significant decrease in the average number of organizations they were involved with during the course of the year, from m (pre) = 3.12 to m (post) = 2.82. although the average number of organizations for the non-participant group increased, it was not statistically significant. we attribute the participant group decrease to perhaps be due to students trading off the number of organizations they are involved with for an increase in participation and leadership they provide to a lesser number of organizations. additionally, a slight decrease was noted in the percentage of the participant group who serve in a club leadership role (53% to 47%), while the percentage remained unchanged for the non-participant group (21%). advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 78 table 3 analysis a: participant pre-test versus post-test results _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ hypothesis/variable participant pre-test m (sd) participant post-test m (sd) pre vs. post participant p-value pre vs. post non-participant p-value h1a: outgoingness 3.71 (0.89) 3.82 (0.92) .215 h2a: proactive leaders in group work 4.29 (0.57) 4.29 (0.82) .500 h3a: level of self-efficacy 34.80 (2.59) 36.53 (3.03) .006 * .005 * h4a: increased involvement 3.71 (1.18) 3.76 (1.00) .359 h5a: importance of involvement 4.12 (0.68) 4.06 (0.80) .387 h6a: # of orgs. involved with 3.12 (1.13) 2.82 (0.92) .068 * .106 h7a: # of outside orgs. networked with 1.94 (1.26) 2.65 (0.97) .009 * .271 h8a: level of leadership experience 3.88 (0.76) 4.12 (0.83) .149 h9a: importance of leadership skills 4.71 (0.46) 4.82 (0.38) .166 h10a: % serving in club leadership role 53 47 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ *p < .10 (one-tail) hypotheses testing set b: pre-test/participant versus nonparticipant groups a means comparison test using a 90% confidence level was done to compare the pre-test survey data for the participant group versus non-participant group. we were interested in determining if there was a difference in leadership attitudes and behaviors between the two groups prior to the start of the lean in program. results for test set b: pre-test comparison of participant versus non-participant groups. the results shown in table 4 indicate that several of the pre-test variables had a statistically significant difference between the participant group and the non-participant group. lean in participants reported a higher level of positive leadership attitudes and more leadership behaviors compared to the non-participant group before beginning the program. we observed the participants tended to be more leadership focused than the non-participant group even before beginning the program, with eight of the ten hypotheses tests indicating statistically significant results. . table 4 analysis b: pre-test results for participants versus non-participant group hypothesis/variable participant pre-test m (sd) non-participant pre-test m (sd) participant vs. nonparticipant p-value h1b: outgoingness 3.71 (0.89) 3.25 (0.88) .052 * h2b: proactive leaders in group work 4.29 (0.57) 3.83 (0.90) .022 ** h3b: level of self-efficacy 34.80 (2.59) 32.90 (2.92) .012 ** h4b: increased involvement 3.71 (1.18) 3.16 (1.18) .074 * h5b: importance of involvement 4.12 (0.68) 3.58 (1.22) .037 ** h6b: # of orgs. involved with 3.12 (1.13) 1.75 (1.30) .000 *** h7b: # of outside orgs. networked with 1.94 (1.26) 1.54 (1.19) .152 h8b: level of leadership experience 3.88 (0.76) 3.54 (1.04) .000 *** h9b: importance of leadership skills 4.71 (0.46) 4.54 (0.64) .169 h10b: % serving in club leadership role 53 21 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ *p < .10 (one-tail), **p < .05 (one-tail), ***p < .01 (one-tail) advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 79 hypotheses testing set c: post-test/participant versus nonparticipant groups a means comparison test using a 90% confidence level was done to compare the post-test survey data for the participant group versus the non-participant group. we were interested in determining if there was a difference in leadership attitudes and behaviors between the two groups after the completion of the lean in program. results for test set c: post-test comparison of participant versus non-participant groups. the results shown in table 5 indicate that several of the post-test variables had a statistically significant difference between the participant group and the nonparticipant group. lean in participants reported a higher level of positive leadership attitudes and more leadership behaviors compared to the non-participant group after completing the program. the data indicated that the participant group tended to become even more leadership focused than the non-participant group following participation in the lean in program, with nine of the ten hypotheses tested indicating statically significant results. . table 5 analysis c: post-test results for participant versus non-participant group hypothesis/variable participant pre-test m (sd) non-participant pre-test m (sd) participant vs. nonparticipant p-value h1c: outgoingness 3.82 (0.92) 3.38 (0.86) .057 * h2c: proactive leaders in group work 4.29 (0.82) 3.87 (1.05) .077 * h3c: level of self-efficacy 36.53 (3.03) 34.75 (3.32) .037 ** h4c: increased involvement 3.76 (1.00) 3.08 (1.26) .027 ** h5c: importance of involvement 4.06 (0.80) 3.71 (1.14) .123 h6c: # of orgs. involved with 2.82 (0.92) 1.92 (1.19) .003 *** h7c: # of outside orgs. networked with 2.65 (0.97) 1.67 (1.22) .002 *** h8c: level of leadership experience 4.12 (0.83) 3.67 (0.94) .053 * h9c: importance of leadership skills 4.82 (0.38) 4.46 (0.76) .022 ** h10c: % serving in club leadership role 47 21 *p < .10 (one-tail), **p < .05 (one-tail), ***p < .01 (one-tail) discussion programs such as the lean in program are invaluable to the development of females interested in leadership roles. in summary, our research results indicate that the lean in program was successful in helping to bring leadership awareness to those students who chose to participate, particularly in the areas of networking and self-efficacy, which further supports research by debebe (2011) and padgett, johnson and pascarella (2012). the increase in networking may be attributed to awareness brought about through participation in the lean in program, as indicated by differences between the participant versus non-participant groups. female students learned more about networking from female leaders in a “safe environment” and consequently became more comfortable with practicing it over the course of the academic year. although self-efficacy likewise increased for the participant group, this variable also did within the nonparticipant group, indicating that students tend to mature, in general, over the equivalent timeframe. also noteworthy, lean in participants reported a higher level of positive leadership attitudes and more leadership behaviors compared to the nonparticipant group, during both preand post-program assessment. these findings support previous research by dugan and komives (2007) in which university students who chose to participate in leadership events and activities tend to show stronger leadership capacity than those who do not. leaning in as a result of participating in the program, we expected students to be more accustomed to leaning in, and thus take a more active leadership role. based on our key findings, participants showed an increase in self-efficacy during the course of the year-long lean in program; however, when this data was compared to that of the non-participant group, it is noted that the non-participant group also experienced a statistically significant increase in selfefficacy. we attribute the increase in both groups to be a factor of the college environment that all the students are in and their experiences over the course of the year. advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 80 also relating to changes in leaning in for students, the pre-test “importance of involvement” and post-test “importance of leadership” variables were shown to be statistically different between the participant and non-participant groups. the participants in the lean in program placed greater importance on “leaning in” prior to participating in the program, with focus perhaps shifting from just “involvement” to “leadership” during the course of the year. additionally, in the pre-test survey participants did not indicate a difference in the “importance of leadership” variable; however, in the post-test survey showed a difference between the two groups. participating students recognized the importance of leadership more than their non-participating peers at the end of the year. leaning out participation in the program also resulted in students leaning out. our research indicated that participants in the lean in program had a statistically significant increase in the number of outside organizations they networked with during course of the program while the non-participants did not. for the pre-test analysis, we did not note a difference between participants and non-participants in the number of organizations networked with; however, in the post-test analysis, there was a strong statistical difference. we would like to attribute such an increase to participation in the program. we anticipate that the program helped expose students to the concept of networking, therefore increasing their chances of doing so. many of the students within our university are firstgeneration college students with one-third coming from households falling at or below the poverty line. these students are typically at a disadvantage in comparison to students whose parents are college educated because their parents are perhaps less familiar with “networking” in a professional business environment, resulting in our students being less inclined to participate in such activities (padgett, johnson, & pascarella, 2012). the lean in program provides a “safe” environment deemed necessary for transformation (debebe, 2011), particularly for our female students, to learn about such networking opportunities. consequently, because lean in participants become more familiar with the benefits of networking, they have also become more familiar with mentoring opportunities we provide on campus, both as mentors to younger class members and as mentees in our professional mentorship program. conclusions and future plans at the conclusion of the academic year, we reviewed the top 10 list that was published in sandberg’s lean in for graduates (2014), which focuses on many of the same concepts as the original text but with additions specifically targeted towards college graduates. we also asked for feedback from participants in regard to what they would like to see moving forward. at their suggestion, a student organization application was submitted and later accepted to form a student lean in club on campus, which would allow them to meet more frequently and also work with a faculty advisor and supporting staff on future programming. the charter of the club is to provide programming and facilitate discussions around encouraging women to take a more active stance in regard to leadership. in addition, the club will seek to form relationships with outside organizations whose focus is on developing leadership skills in young women. this may include participating in workshops hosted by these organizations as well as hosting young women on campus and introducing them to college life. thus, the students that are part of the lean in club will continue to lean out by becoming mentors themselves. limitations and suggestions for future research a limitation to acknowledge with our empirical research is the small sample size for the participant group (n = 17) and nonparticipant group (n = 24). for the participant group, we only included data from those students who attended two or more events. we did not want to include those participants who only attended one event because we believed they did not truly experience the lean in program. fortunately our non-participant group was similar in composition to that of the participants group. one difference which should be noted is that the non-participant group had less students living on campus than the participant group (54% vs. 74%) and more freshman students than the participant group (17% vs. 0%). these two variables may account for some of the difference in reported attitudes and behaviors between the participant and non-participant groups, in that students who live on-campus and those who are upper class members tend to be more involved in on-campus activities. this difference can also be viewed as an opportunity to “draw in” more commuter and younger class members for the lean in program. several ideas come to mind as we consider suggestions for future research. we would be interested in other schools implementing similar programs and using our research study and survey tool as a model. the effectiveness of other programs could be evaluated and results compared to our program. additionally, we would like to consider continuing our research as the program continues into to evolve into more of a studentled organization, perhaps considering how leadership behaviors develop in participating students. also, a pre and post selfassessment for students may be beneficial, perhaps focusing on determining and developing what their strengths and interests are. participation from more non-business majors is also a consideration, as students from all majors could benefit from the lean in program opportunity. our program focused on leadership development from the individual perspective; however, based on supporting research, future programs and research may want to also focus on leadership development from the organizational perspective for maximum impact (hopkins, o’neil, passarelli, & bilimoria, 2008). campus-wide organizations can work together in advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 81 developing opportunities which encourage students to build leadership skills and enhance career awareness, such that more students consider the benefits of pursuing business careers regardless of gender. declaration of conflicting interests the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. note: reduced number of attendees over course of program events may be attributed to a gift card incentive being offered to students to attend the first event. a larger gift incentive was given to those students who attended all the lean in events during the academic year. no incentives were individually provided for attending the second, third, and fourth events unless tied to an activity/class independent of the lean in program. references adler, n. j. (1994). competitive frontiers: women managing across borders. journal of management development, 13(2), 24-41. retrieved from http://wa.opallibraries.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.as px?direct=true&db=bth&an=4002099&site=eds-live bandura, a. (1986). social foundations of thought and action: a social cognitive theory. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall, inc. beaman, r., wheldall, k., & kemp, c. (2006). differential teacher attention to boys and girls in the classroom. educational review, 58(3), 339-366. doi: 10.1080/00131910600748406 chen, g., gully, s. m., & eden, d. (2001). validation of a new general self-efficacy scale. organizational research methods, 4(1), 62-83. doi: 10.1177/109442810141004 debebe, g. (2011). creating a safe environment for women’s leadership transformation. journal of management education, 35(5), 679-712. doi: 10.1177/1052562910397501 dugan, j. p., & komives, s. r. (2007). developing leadership capacity in college students: findings from a national study. a report from the multi-institutional study of leadership. college park, md: retrieved from national clearinghouse for leadership programs: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237536892_devel oping_leadership_capacity_in_college_students_findings _from_a_national_study eagly, a. h., & carli, l. l. (2007). through the labyrinth: the truth about how women become leaders. boston, ma: harvard business school press. ely, r. j., insead, h. i., & kolb, d. m. (2011). taking gender into account: theory and design for women's leadership development programs. academy of management learning & education, 10(3), 474-493. doi: 10.5465/amle.2010.0046 heilman, m. e., & parks-stamm, e. j. 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(1990). how women lead. harvard business review, 68(6), 119-125. sandberg, s. (2010, december). why we have too few women leaders [video file]. retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_ too_few_women_leaders sandberg, s. (2013). lean in: women, work, and the will to lead. new york, ny: alfred a. knopf. sandberg, s. (2014). lean in: for graduates. new york, ny: random house. spralls iii, s. a., garber, m. s., divine, r. l., & trotz, h. (2010). needs assessment of university leadership programs. journal of leadership studies, 4(1), 20-35. doi: 10.1002/jls.20152 university of california at los angeles, higher education research institute, cooperative institutional research program (2014). cirp freshman survey: institutional profile report. retrieved from http://www.heri.ucla.edu/cirpoverview.php vinnicombe, s. & singh, v. (2003). womens-only management training: an essential part of women’s leadership advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 82 development. journal of change management, 3(4), 294306. zaccardi, m. c., howard, c. m., & schnusenberg, o. (2012). student preparation and personality traits in the job market. academy of educational leadership journal, 16 (special issue), 35-53. microsoft word hamdan_saudi_female_students’_perceptions_of_leadership.docx advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 36 advancing women in leadership vol. 36, pp. 36-48, 2016 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper saudi female students’ perceptions of leadership: an overview amani hamdan & neva alexander amani hamdan: university of dammam, email: amani.k.hamdan@gmail.com neva alexander: independent scholar, email: neva.alexander@gmail.com abdulghani al-hattami, the university of bahrain, email: hattami@gmail.com accepted may 06, 2016 very few researches have highlighted arab women leadership perceptions. the aim of this research study is to investigate saudi female university students’ perceptions of leadership. in order to address the aim of this study, data were collected from 50 female students at the university of dammam who were attending various colleges, namely the college of science, the college of education, and the college of arts. the data-gathering process included asking a random sample of students to complete a questionnaire and administering it to them at the end of the semester. the review of the results of this research showed that there are statistically significant differences in attitudes among female students towards leadership. keywords: higher education in saudi arabia, leadership in saudi arabia, female students’ education in saudi arabia. introduction the aim of this research study is to gain insight into saudi female university students’ perceptions of leadership. saudi arabia is the wealthiest country in the middle east and has directed its full attention a great deal of its attention in recent years to investing in human capital. recent researches, in some leadership journals, like advancing women in leadership journal, have focused on females and leadership and on ways in which societies can be reshaped in order to achieve a sustainable, inclusive and durable future. despite significant advances in education and professional achievement, women remain underrepresented in leadership positions in politics, education, communities and business around the globe. in many countries, policy-makers have responded by introducing gender quotas in politics and, increasingly, many have expressed an interest in requiring gender quotas for organizations (shura council law, royal decree no. a/91). according to pande and ford (2011), while female suffrage did not exist in 1890, women had obtained the right to vote in 96 percent of the countries in the world by 1994. the few remaining countries have also moved toward implementing female suffrage in recent years (dubois, 1998). for instance, women obtained the right to vote in oman in 2003, in kuwait in 2005, and in qatar and the united arab emirates in 2006 (kelly, 2009). these advances have been followed by an increase in the female share of registered voters around the world. given the increasing levels of political leverage that women have (voting, holding highly political positions, etc), it is important to assess how they perceive leadership. in order to address the aim of this study, data were collected from 50 female students at the university of dammam in saudi arabia and an analysis was conducted to see how these female students perceive leadership. as recently cited by alexander (2011), universities and higher education institutions are increasingly focusing on developing students’ leadership skills as a means of preparing them for the job market (shertzer & schuh, 2004; yarrish, zula & davis, 2010). this trend was motivated by the fact that leadership skills are not innate but instead are acquired through education, training and mentorship (fertman & van linden, 1999). indeed, leadership is one of the important skills that one needs to acquire in order to succeed in one’s professional life. according to gordon (1995), “career advancement opportunities . . . will be greatest for those who developed, practiced, and refined leadership skills as part of their educational preparation” (p. 3). researches have confirmed that there is a relationship between education and leadership skills. for instance, hobbs and spencer (2002) found that students’ participation in an educational program improved their perceived leadership skills. similarly, alexander (2011) found that female students’ perceived leadership skills improved after enrolling in a leadership class. a recent analysis about teaching and learning in saudi arabia (alnassar & dow, 2013) indicated that the substantial advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 37 development that has occurred in saudi higher education will only bear significant fruit if students develop confidence and effective learning skills. self-confidence is a major component of students’ perceptions of leadership. literature review culture and its effect on leadership higher education in saudi arabia is currently in a process of reform (hamdan alghamdi, 2016). recently, the main focus was on women’s education. for example, only in 1962 women were permitted to join universities in saudi arabia as irregular parttime students at the college of arts and administrative sciences of king saud university which was established in 1957 (jamjoom & kelly, 2013). from 1990 to 2004 female enrollments in saudi arabian universities witnessed an astonishing 512 percent growth representing one of the highest rates in the world (jamjoom & kelly, 2013, p.121). currently, women make up more than 60 percent of saudi university enrollment, and more than 20 percent of the students benefiting from overseas scholarships are women (house, 2012). these advancements in women’s education, together with king abduallah’s initiative of selecting 30 women to form the first female cohort in the saudi parliament in 2013, provided a great opportunity of inspiration to women in general and to young women in particular to aspire to leadership positions. according to alexander (2012), culture influences multiple areas related to leadership, such as the importance of achieving consensus and followers’ expectation that the leader will reduce uncertainty. researchers have identified some universal aspects of leadership that are valued in all cultures, including the need for leaders to be authentic and to demonstrate genuine concern for the well-being of their followers (house et al., 2002). it is important to understand the effect of gender and cultural differences on leadership because individuals are increasingly expected to lead groups and teams composed of individuals of both genders and drawn from many different cultures. this is referred to as cross-cultural leadership. cross-cultural leadership has developed as a way to understand leaders who work in the newly globalized market. today's international organizations require leaders who can adjust to different environments quickly and work with partners and employees of other cultures (house et al., 2001). for example, leaders in international organizations are often in positions in which they are required to manage individuals from different cultural, linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. leading a culturally diverse group of individuals is more complex than leading a group of individuals from the same culture because of differences in the perceptions of the role of the leader and differences in the expectations of followers regarding the specific behaviors of the leader. gender influences on leadership some gender disparities generally exist in the approach to leadership, though all of these disparities are not necessarily present in individual cases. these disparities are largely based on societal expectations of particular behaviors that are stereotypically associated with gender. for example, men are expected to act independently and assertively and to use a decision-making approach that is based primarily on rationality. they are also expected to adopt a more autocratic leadership style. conversely, women are expected to act collaboratively and to give greater consideration to building consensus through a participative leadership style (payne & cangemi, 2001). women are also expected to use a decision-making approach that is based more on intuition than on rationality (alexander, 2012). in the actual practice of leadership, men tend to adopt a taskoriented style, while women tend to adopt a relationship-oriented style. most individuals blend elements of the taskand relationship-oriented approaches. because of their tendency toward task orientation, men tend to be effective leaders when the activities necessary to achieve an objective have a clearly defined beginning and end. conversely, the relationship orientation of most women increases their effectiveness when the activities necessary to achieve an objective are ongoing and lack a clearly defined end state (payne & cangemi, 2001). northouse (2010) argued that women are more effective leaders in government, education and social-services organizations because the activities of these organizations rely heavily on the use of interpersonal skills. nevertheless, a female leader may find a task orientation is the most effective approach for addressing leadership issues in particular situations. because in these cases the female leader is not using a leadership style that is traditional for women, some of her subordinates might attempt to resist the female leader’s efforts to exert influence. as a result of this phenomenon, female leaders should assess whether the use of assertiveness and a strong task orientation would have negative consequences in the specific situation (payne & cangemi, 2001). conger and benjamin (1999) indicated that leadership development is not just about paying attention to the individual learner and his or her coaching needs, but it is also about paying attention to the learner’s changing behaviors. institutions need to build effective future leaders by providing individual professional development experiences and training opportunities that help emerging leaders learn how to effectively translate mission, vision, strategic planning, and concepts of leadership into practice (fiedler, 1996). saudi female students’ perception of leadership alexander (2012) demonstrated a number of characteristics possessed by female leaders that students view as being important for the development of effective leadership including the ability to persevere, to be a pioneer in a particular field, to excel in a male-dominated field, to achieve a dream or life-long goal and to be a role model or someone who inspires were all consistently noted as being components of effective leadership. when juxtaposed against the common leadership styles identified in the essays (e.g., democratic and charismatic), it is clear that the attributes of the leader and her leadership style are interconnected. for instance, the ability of a leader to inspire and serve as a role model is associated with the use of a charismatic advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 38 style while achieving excellence in a male-dominated field could be linked with the ability to meet the needs of followers or with the use of a democratic style. based on an analysis of the student essays, it is possible to better understand what the students believe constitutes sound leadership practice and what is effective for achieving success in a leadership role (alexander, 2012). method students from various colleges of the university of dammam, namely the college of science, the college of education and the college of arts, participated in this study. they were fifty female students. researchers aimed to gain those students’ insight of leadership. a questionnaire consisted of 15 questions were developed and checked by two faculty members for reliability and appropriateness. the study was conducted in which the researchers invited a random sample of students to complete a questionnaire at the end of the semester. the answers were analyzed in order to identify the students’ perceptions. all of the questionnaires were valid as the researchers reviewed the students’ answers with the students. the questions are set out hereunder. question 1: what are the reasons for training on effective leadership skills at the university stage? question 2: what is the concept of effective leadership from the perspective of female students? question 3: what is the importance of acquiring leadership skills? question 4: what are the features and characteristics of an effective leader? question 5: could a saudi woman be successful as a leader? what would be the reason or reasons for her success? results and findings validity and reliability of the instrument the pretest process was applied to a sample composed of 15 individuals; the instrument initially was applied to the sample then it was reapplied to the sample with a time lag of two weeks. the value of the reliability coefficient was 0.857. after calculating the self-validity, it was found to be 0.926. table 1 distribution of the study sample according to faculty type faculty n percentage theoretical 25 59.5 % practical 17 40.5 % total 42 100 % the data set out in the table 1 indicate that the study sample was distributed according to faculty type with 59.5 percent being completed in the theoretical faculties and 40.5 percent being completed in the practical faculties. question 1: what are the reasons for training on effective leadership skills at the university stage? all the participants of the study sample consider training in effective leadership skills to be an important element of a university education. this is due to the fact that effective leadership is one of the prerequisites for creating a civil society. it is essential to continue exerting effort in training, education, research, practice and application until one achieves success as a leader. this may lead to increased knowledge with effective leadership skills and to greater linkages between the behavioral and administrative sciences on the one hand and valid evidence on the other hand. question 2: what is the concept of effective leadership from the perspective of female students? table 2 the perspectives of members of the study sample regarding the concept of effective leadership concept n % a collection of skills and practices aimed at enabling those who possess them to achieve a particular goal 6 14.3 the ability to lead the teamwork, in terms of the allocation of tasks according to the abilities of each team member and the identification and solving of problems facing the team 5 12.0 a communication process between the leader and the team as well as their effect on each other to achieve the goal 5 12.0 decision-making ability 4 9.5 the ability to manage crises efficiently 4 9.5 the ability to lead the team and achieve a particular goal through insistence, persistence, resolution and the making of sound decisions 4 9.5 skills and strategies enabling the leader to utilize human, financial and intellectual resources to achieve a particular goal 3 7.1 the feeling of responsibility and the successful navigation of the issues in order to achieve a desired goal 3 7.1 the ability to make a change 3 7.1 working on achieving the goals and requirements in order to be able to make the changes necessary to keep up with the times 3 7.1 the skills that might be acquired and that affect the team and enable it to achieve its goal 2 4.8 total 42 100 the results in table 2 indicate that 14.3 percent of the members of the study sample believe that the concept of effective advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 39 leadership is represented in a collection of skills and practices that are aimed at enabling those who possess them to achieve a particular goal, while 12 percent believe that it is the ability to lead the teamwork in terms of allocating tasks according to the abilities of each team member and in terms of identifying and solving the problems facing the team. twelve percent of the members of the study sample consider it to be a communication process between the leader and the team as well as their effect on each other in order to achieve the goal, while 9.5 percent see it as the ability to make a decision. furthermore, 9.5 percent of the participants believe that effective leadership is the ability to manage crises efficiently; 9.5 percent believe it is the ability to lead the team and achieve a particular goal through insistence, persistence, resolution and the taking of sound decisions; 7.1 percent believe it is composed of the skills and strategies that enable the leader to utilize human, financial and intellectual resources to achieve a particular goal; 7.1 percent believe that it is composed of the feeling of responsibility and the successful navigation of the issues in order to achieve a desired goal; 7.1 percent believe it to be the ability to make a change; and another 7.1 percent believe it to be the ability to complete the requirements for making the changes necessary for keeping up with the times. finally, 4.85 percent of the study sample believes that effective leadership is composed of the arts and skills that might be acquired and that affects the team and enable it to achieve its goal. question 3: what is the importance of acquiring leadership skills? table 3 the perspectives of members of the study sample regarding the importance of acquiring leadership skills concept mean standard deviation relative scale serves as the melting pot in which all the concepts, strategies and policies are combined 4.19 2.59 59.9 provides for the controlling and solving of work problems, the settlement of conflicts and the establishment of a balance among opinions 4.14 2.031 59.1 keeps up to date with the surrounding changes and utilizes them for the service of the institution 4.14 1.90 59.1 makes it easy for the institution to achieve its planned goals 4.14 2.03 59.1 acts as the liaison between the employees and the institution’s plans and future prospects. 4.02 1.89 57.4 serves as a positive power in the institution and mitigates the negative aspects as much as possible 3.86 1.76 55.1 develops, trains and cares for individuals, taking into consideration the fact that they are the most important resource within the institution 3.55 1.810 50.7 the data set out in the table above indicate that 59.5 percent of the study sample believe that the importance of acquiring leadership skills is represented by the fact that it is the melting pot in which all of the concepts, strategies and policies are combined. of all the participants in the study sample, 59.1 percent believe that effective leadership includes controlling and solving work problems, ensuring the settlement of conflicts and striking a balance among divergent opinions as well as keeping up to date with the surrounding changes, utilizing them for the service of the institution and making it easy for the institution to achieve its goals. furthermore, 57.4 percent believe that leaders serve as the liaison between the employees and the institution’s vision and mission; 55.1 percent consider leaders to be a positive power in the institution and to help mitigate the negative aspects as much as possible; and 50.7 percent believe them to contribute to the development, training and caring of individuals, and thus consider them to be the most important resource within the institution. table 4 the perspectives within the study sample regarding the requirements of an effective leader requirements n percentage the ability to resolve problems and crises 15 35.7 % fairness, sincerity, honesty, courage and transparency 12 28.6 % insistence and determination 10 23.8 % efficiency 10 23.8 % assuming responsibility 8 19.1 % goal-orientation 8 19.1 % the ability to analyze and make decisions 7 16.7 % commitment 7 16.7 % tolerance 7 16.7 % cooperation 6 14.3 % consultation and listening to others 6 14.3 % advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 40 experience 6 14.3 % planning before taking action 6 14.3 % the ability to persuade others and communicate with them 6 14.3 % a sense of leadership 5 11.9 % self-confidence 4 9.5 % identifying the positive and negative points 3 7.1 % loyalty to the team 3 7.1 % goal planning 3 7.1 % balancing different matters 2 4.8 % in response to a question about the requirements of an effective leader, the participants response illustrated (table 4) that 35.7 percent of the study sample believe that the requirements of an effective leader include the ability to solve problems and crises, while 28.6 percent believe that effective leaders display fairness, sincerity, honesty, courage and transparency. furthermore, 23.8 percent of the study sample believe that effective leaders are distinguished by persistence and determination; 19.1 percent believe that they are able to assume responsibility and pursue goals; 16.7 percent believe that they are able to analyze and make decisions, while displaying commitment and tolerance; 14.3 percent believe that they have extensive experience and are skilled in cooperating, consulting, listening to others, planning before taking action, and persuading others and communicating with them; 11.9 percent believe that they embody a sense of leadership; 9.5 percent believe that they embody self-confidence; 7.1 percent believe that they are able to identify positive and negative points, are loyal and are able to make plans to achieve goals; and 4.8 percent believe that they are skilled in striking a balance among competing issues. question 4: what are the features and characteristics of an effective leader? table 5 the perspectives of the study sample regarding the features and characteristics of an effective leader features and characteristics n percentage motivation 18 42.9 % honesty, credibility and transparency 16 38.1 % assuming responsibility 14 33.3 % fairness 13 30.9 % efficiency 13 30.9 % determination and courage 8 19.1 % social intelligence 8 19.1 % flexibility 7 16.7 % aspiration and future vision 6 14.3 % adaptability to change 6 14.3 % patience and wisdom 5 11.9 % high activity and a love of work 5 11.9 % problem-solving ability 3 7.10 % it was indicated from table 5 that 42.9 percent of the study sample believe that the features and characteristics of an effective leader include motivation, while 38.1 percent believe that they include honesty, credibility and transparency. furthermore, 33.3 percent of the study sample believe that the features and characteristics of an effective leader include assuming responsibility; 30.9 percent believe that they include fairness and competence; 19.1 percent believe that they include determination, courage and social intelligence; 16.75 percent believe that they include flexibility; 14.3 percent believe that they include aspiration, future vision and adaptability to change; 11.9 percent believe that they include patience, wisdom, high activity and a love of work; and 7.1 believe that they include problem-solving ability. table 6 the perspectives of the study sample regarding the rights of an effective leader rights n percentage being respected and obeyed 8 19.1 % receiving commitments and assistance from others 7 16.7 % not being interrupted and being respected 6 14.3 % being rewarded 5 11.9 % being discussed 4 9.5 % being provided with facilities 4 9.5 % the rights of an effective leader question indicates (table 6) that 19.1 percent of the study sample believe that the rights of an effective leader include being respected and obeyed, while 16.7 percent believe that that these rights include receiving commitments and assistance from others. furthermore, 14.3 percent of the study sample believes that these rights include not being interrupted and being respected; 11.9 percent believe that they include being rewarded; and 9.5 percent believe that they include being discussed and being provided with facilities. table 7 advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 41 the perspectives of the study sample regarding the duties of an effective leader duties n percentage following up 13 30.9 % equity and fairness 17 40.5 % urging on work 8 19.1 % motivation 7 16.7 % pursuing the goal 7 16.7 % avoiding spying 7 16.7 % guiding the team 6 14.3 % consulting and cooperating 6 14.3 % distributing tasks 5 11.9 % acting with honesty and credibility 5 11.9 % rewarding and encouraging 5 11.9 % providing clarity 2 4.8 % when participants were asked about the duties of an effective leader, the data set out in table 7 shown above indicate that 30.9 percent of the study sample believe that the duties of an effective leader include following up, while 40.5 percent believe that they include equity and fairness. in addition, 19.1 percent of the study sample believe that they include urging on work; 16.7 percent believe that they include motivation, pursuing the goal and avoiding spying; 14.3 percent believe that they include guiding the team, consultation and cooperation; 11.9 percent believes that they include distributing tasks, acting with honesty and credibility, and rewarding and encouraging the team; and 4.8 percent believe that they include providing clarity. table 8 the perspectives within the study sample regarding how to learn the elements of leadership how to learn the elements of leadership n percentage through situations 14 33.3 through experience 13 30.9 through persistence in learning 10 23.8 through problem solving 9 21.4 through crisis management and settlement 9 21.4 through desiring, initiating and trying to solve problems in certain situations 8 19.1 through self-confidence and polite and tactful speaking 7 16.7 through control and guidance 5 11.9 the data set out in table 8 indicated the response to the question “how does one learn the elements of leadership”. the results showed that 33.35 percent of the study sample believe that it is possible to learn the elements of leadership through situations, while 30.9 percent believe that these elements could be learned through experience. furthermore, 23.8 percent of the study sample believe that they could be learned through persistence in learning; 21.4 percent believe that they could be learned through problem solving and crisis management; 19.1 percent believe that they could be discovered [learned?] through desiring, initiating and trying to solve problems in certain situations; 16.7 percent believe that they could be discovered learned through self-confidence and polite and tactful speaking; and 11.9 percent believe that they could be learned discovered through control and guidance. question 5: could a saudi woman be successful as a leader? what would be the reason for her success? table 9 the perspectives within the study sample regarding the possibility of a saudi woman being successful as a leader faculty n percentage yes 42 100 % no 0.0 0.0 % total 42 100 % the data set out in the table shown above indicate that the entire study sample believes that a saudi woman could be successful as a leader. table 10 the perspectives within the study sample regarding the reason for the success of a saudi woman as a leader faculty n percentage assuming important positions in the country 42 100 % competent 30 71.3 % well-trained 35 83.3 % the data shown in table 10 indicated that the entire study sample thinks that a saudi woman could be successful as a leader if she were to assume an important position in the country for which she is competent and trained. a series of significant tests were performed to examine if there were any significant differences between the perspectives of the theoretical and practical faculties’ female students regarding the categories indicated in the previous questions. the results were as follows: advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 42 question: are there any significant differences between the perspectives of the theoretical and practical faculties’ female students regarding the concept and components of effective leadership? table 11 differences among the perspectives within the study sample regarding the concept and components of effective leadership according to the type of faculty concept practical theoretical total ka2 p-value n % n % n % a collection of skills and practices aimed at enabling those who possess them to achieve a particular goal 3 7.1 3 7.1 6 14.3 0.264 0.608 the ability to lead the teamwork, in terms of the allocation of tasks according to the abilities of each team member, and to identify and solve the problems facing the team 3 7.1 2 4.8 5 12.0 0.898 0.343 a communication process between the leader and the team as well as its effect on each other in order to achieve the goal 2 4.8 3 7.1 5 12.0 0.001 0.982 decision-making ability 2 4.8 2 4.8 4 9.5 0.166 0.683 the ability to manage crises efficiently 0 0 4 9.5 4 9.5 6.502 0.011 the ability to lead the team and achieve a particular goal through insistence, persistence, resolution and sound decision-making 1 2.8 3 7.1 4 9.5 0.440 0.507 skills and strategies that enable the leader to utilize human, financial and intellectual resources to achieve a particular goal 2 4.8 1 2.8 3 7.1 0.920 0.338 the feeling of responsibility and careful navigation of the issues in order to achieve a particular goal 2 4.8 1 2.8 3 7.1 0.920 0.338 the ability to effectuate change 0 0 3 7.1 3 7.1 4.751 0.029 working on achieving the goals and requirements so as to be able to make a change in order to keep up with the times 2 4.8 1 2.8 3 7.1 0.920 0.338 the arts and skills that might be acquired and that affect the team and lead it to achieve a particular goal 0 0 2 4.8 2 4.8 3.088 0.079 the data set out in table 11 demonstrated that there are no statistically significant differences among the perspectives of the members of study sample according to the type of faculty in regard to the concept of effective leadership except in terms of their choice of leadership concept (the ability to manage crises efficiently and the ability to make a change) as there is a statistically significant difference between them (this was the perspective of the theoretical faculties). question: are there any significant differences between the perspectives of the theoretical and practical faculties’ female students regarding the importance of acquiring the leadership skills? advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 43 table 12 differences among the perspectives within the study sample regarding the importance of acquiring leadership skills according to the type of faculty importance practical n = 17 theoretical n = 25 t p-value mean sd mean sd acting as the pot in which all the concepts, strategies and policies are melted together 3.2353 2.43745 4.8400 2.52784 2.048 0.047 controlling and solving work problems, achieving the settlement of conflicts and striking a balance among competing opinions 3.8824 1.83311 4.3200 2.17409 0.681 0.500 keeping up to date with the surrounding changes and utilizing them for the service of the institution 4.7647 1.71499 3.7200 1.94765 0.789 0.081 making it easy for the institution to achieve its goals 4.4706 2.00367 3.9200 2.05994 0.860 0.395 acting as the liaison between the employees and the institution’s plans and future perceptions 3.7647 1.82104 4.2000 1.95789 0.727 0.471 acting as a positive force in the institution and combatting negative aspects as much as possible 4.1176 2.02739 3.6800 1.57374 0.787 0.436 developing, training and caring for the individuals considering them the most important resource 3.38824 2.23278 3.3200 1.46401 0.988 0.329 the data shown in table 12 indicated that there are no statistically significant differences within the study sample according to the type of faculty in regard to the importance of acquiring leadership skills as the t-value has ranged between 0.681 and 0.988. the only exception is in terms of regarding them as the pot in which all the concepts, strategies and policies are melted together. the practical faculties give them the third rank, while the theoretical faculties give them the fifth rank. the t-value reached 2.048. question: are there any significant differences between the perspectives of the theoretical and practical faculties’ female students regarding the requirements of an effective leader table 13 the perspectives within the study sample regarding the requirements of an effective leader requirement practical theoretical total ka2 p-value n % n % n % the ability to solve problems and crises 9 21.4 6 14.3 15 35.7 3.69 0.055 advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 44 fairness, sincerity, honesty, courage and transparency 5 11.9 7 16.7 12 28.6 0.010 1.00 insistence and determination 5 11.9 5 11.9 10 23.8 0.494 0.482 efficiency 6 14.3 4 9.5 10 23.8 2.077 0.150 the assumption of responsibility 3 7.1 5 11.9 8 19.0 0.036 0.849 goal-orientation 4 9.5 4 9.5 8 19.0 0.372 0.542 the ability to analyze and make decisions 5 11.9 2 4.8 7 16.7 3.340 0.068 commitment 4 9.5 3 7.1 7 16.7 0.968 0.325 tolerance 3 7.1 4 9.5 7 16.7 0.020 0.888 cooperation 3 7.1 3 7.1 6 14.3 0.264 0.608 consultation and listening to others 3 7.1 3 7.1 6 14.3 0.264 0.608 experience 4 9.5 2 4.8 6 14.3 1.993 0.158 planning before taking action 3 7.1 3 7.1 6 14.3 0.264 0.608 the ability to persuade others and to communicate with them 3 7.1 3 7.1 6 14.3 0.264 0.608 a sense of leadership 3 7.1 2 4.8 5 11.9 0.898 0.343 self-confidence 2 4.8 2 4.8 4 9.5 0.166 0.683 identification of positive and negative points 2 4.8 1 2.4 3 7.1 0.920 0.338 loyalty 2 4.8 1 2.4 3 7.1 0.920 0.338 goal planning 1 2.4 2 4.8 3 7.1 0.068 0.794 balancing of issues 1 2.4 1 2.4 2 4.8 0.079 0.779 the data displayed in table 13 indicated that there are no statistically significant differences within the study sample according to the type of the faculty in regard to requirements of an effective leader as the ka2 value ranged between 0.020 and 3.69. question: are there any significant differences between the perspectives of the theoretical and practical faculties’ female students regarding the features and characteristics of an effective leader? table 14 differences between the perspectives within the study sample regarding the features and characteristics of an effective leader according to the type of faculty characteristic practical theoretical total ka2 p-value n % n % n % advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 45 motivation 10 23.9 8 19.0 18 42.9 2.973 0.085 honesty, credibility and transparency 7 16.7 9 21.4 16 38.0 0.115 0.735 assumption of responsibility 7 16.7 7 16.7 14 33.3 0.791 0.374 fairness 6 14.3 7 16.7 13 31.0 0.252 0.616 competence 7 16.7 6 14.3 13 31.0 1.397 0.237 determination and courage 5 11.9 3 7.1 8 19.0 1.990 0.158 social intelligence 4 9.5 4 9.5 8 19.0 0.372 0.542 flexibility 4 9.5 3 7.1 7 16.7 0.968 0.325 aspiration and future vision 1 2.4 5 11.9 6 14.3 1.647 0.199 adaptability to change 2 4.8 4 9.5 6 14.3 0.148 0.700 patience and wisdom 0 0 5 11.9 5 11.9 3.859 0.049 high activity and a love of work 3 7.1 2 4.8 5 11.9 0.898 0.343 problem solving 3 7.1 0 0 3 7.1 4.751 0.029 the data set out in the table shown above indicate that there are no statistically significant differences within the study sample according to the type of the faculty in regard to the features and characteristics of an effective leader. the ka2 value ranged between 0.115 and 2.973, while there was a difference between the characteristics of patience and wisdom and the characteristic of problem solving, as the ka2 values were respectively 3.859 and 4.751. question: are there any significant differences between the perspectives of the theoretical and practical faculties’ female students regarding the rights of an effective leader? table 15 differences between the perspectives within the study sample regarding the rights of an effective leader according to the type of faculty rights practical theoretical total ka2 p-value n % n % n % being respected and obeyed 5 11.9 3 7.1 8 19.0 1.990 0.158 receiving commitments and assistance 3 7.1 4 9.5 7 16.7 0.020 0.888 not being interrupted and being respected 2 4.8 4 9.5 6 14.3 0.148 0.700 being rewarded 3 7.1 2 4.8 5 11.9 0.898 0.343 being discussed 1 2.4 3 7.1 4 9.5 0.440 0.507 being provided with facilities 3 7.1 1 2.4 4 9.5 2.187 0.139 the data set out in table 15 indicated that there are no statistically significant differences within the study sample according to the type of the faculty in regard to the rights of an effective leader. the ka2 value ranged between 0.020 and 2.187. advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 46 question: are there any significant differences between the perspectives of the theoretical and practical faculties’ female students regarding the duties of an effective leader? table 16 differences between the perspectives within the study sample regarding the duties of an effective leader duties practical theoretical total ka2 p-value n % n % n % following up 8 19.1 5 11.9 13 31.0 3.467 0.063 being equitable and fair 10 23.8 7 16.7 17 40.5 3.990 0.046 urging on work 5 11.9 3 7.1 8 19.0 1.990 0.158 being motivated 4 9.5 3 7.1 7 16.7 0.968 0.325 being goal-oriented 6 14.3 1 2.4 7 16.7 7.135 0.008 avoiding spying 2 4.8 5 11.9 7 16.7 0.494 0.482 guiding the team 3 7.1 3 7.1 6 14.3 0.264 0.608 consulting and cooperating 2 4.8 4 9.5 6 14.3 0.147 0.700 allocating tasks 1 2.4 4 9.5 5 11.9 0.988 0.320 acting with honesty and credibility 2 4.8 3 7.1 5 11.9 0.001 0.982 rewarding and encouraging 3 7.1 2 4.8 5 11.9 0.898 0.343 providing clarity 2 4.8 0 0 2 4.8 3.088 0.079 the data shown in table 16 demonstrated that there are no statistically significant differences within the study sample according to the type of the faculty in regard to the duties of an effective leader as the ka2 value ranged between 0.001 and 3.467 except for regarding them as including equity, fairness and seeking to achieve goals as there is a difference between them, where the ka2 values were respectively 3.990 and 7.135. question: are there any significant differences between the perspectives of the theoretical and practical faculties’ female students regarding learn the elements of leadership? table 17 differences between the perspectives within the study sample regarding how one can learn the elements of leadership how learn the elements of leadership practical theoretical total ka2 p-value n % n n % n through situations 5 11.9 9 21.4 14 33.33 0.198 0.657 through experience 4 9.5 9 21.4 13 31.0 0.736 0.391 through persistence in learning 6 14.3 4 9.5 10 23.8 2.077 0.150 through problem solving 4 9.5 5 11.9 9 21.4 0.075 0.784 advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 47 through crisis management and settlement 5 11.9 4 9.5 9 21.4 1.081 0.298 through desiring, initiating and trying to solve problems in particular situations 3 7.1 5 11.9 8 19.0 0.036 0.849 through self-confidence and polite and tactful speaking 4 9.5 3 7.1 7 16.7 0.968 0.325 through control and guidance 1 2.4 4 9.5 5 11.9 0.988 0.320 the data set out table 17 illustrated that there are no statistically significant differences within the study sample according to the type of the faculty in regard to how one can learn the elements of leadership as the ka2 value ranged between 0.036 and 2.077. discussion a review of the results provided in this investigation does indicate that there are statistically significant differences in attitudes among university-age saudi women towards leadership. the literature regarding women in leadership positions indicates that, in many instances, leadership is stereotyped as a masculine domain. the findings of the current investigation have important implications for educating women in leadership practice and for creating the foundational resources necessary to reduce the primarily masculine stereotypes associated with leadership practice. the conclusion is in agreement with some scholars, including al-tamimi (2004) who indicated that saudi female academics are well represented in academic fields, which were traditionally a male preserve. this representation could be applied in leadership positions in which women are presented as deans, vice deans and department heads in all-female settings. since 2009 saudi female professors have served as the president of the largest female university campus (princess noura university in riyadh) and of two female private universities in jeddah (effat university and dar alhekma university). limitations one limitation of this investigation is the fact that the study was limited to female students at the university of dammam. another limitation of the study is the fact that a small sample was used. indeed, the 50 students who provided data represented only a small percentage of the total student population. the small sample and its lack of random selection reduce the generalizability of the findings. future research in order to increase the level of understanding of the role that education plays in advancing the leadership competence of female students, additional research is necessary. future research would include a control design in which students would be randomly selected for participation in the leadership course. the control group would participate in a comparative study that would involve students enrolled at other universities in multiple provinces of saudi arabia. future research should also consider the use of larger sample populations in order to incorporate a higher level of diversity into the range of women surveyed. increased diversity within the sample population of the findings to the larger population of female students currently seeking higher education in saudi arabia is a way to make this study generalizable. references alexander, n. h. 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(2013). higher education for women in the kingdom of saudi arabia. in l. smith & a. abouammoh (eds.), higher education in saudi arabia: achievement, challenges and opportunities (pp. 117-125). new york: springer. kelly, s. (2009). recent gains and new opportunities for women’s rights in the gulf arab states, in women’s rights in the middle east and north africa: gulf edition. freedom house. northouse, g. (2010). leadership: theory and practice. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. pande, r., & ford, d. (2011). world development report 2012: gender equality and development. washington, dc: world bank. retrieved from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/intwdr2012/reso urces/7778105-1299699968583/77862101322671773271/pande-gender-quotas-april-2011.pdf. payne, k., & cangemi, j. (2001). gender differences in leadership. in k. payne (ed.), different but equal: communication between the sexes (pp. 145-162). westport, ct: praeger. shertzer, j.e., & schuh, j.h. (2004). college student perceptions of leadership: empowering and constraining beliefs. naspa journal, 42(1), 111-131. shura council law, royal decree no. a/91. retrieved 04 april 2016 https://www.shura.gov.sa/wps/wcm/connect/shuraen/in ternet/laws+and+regulations/the+shura+council+an d+the+rules+and+regulations+job/shura+council+law /. yarrish, k., zula, k., & davis, e. (2010). an exploration of differences of leadership perceptions related to a student’s gender within the college of business at a small liberal arts institution. american journal of business education, 3(11), 69-76. the role performance of female headteachers in primary schools advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 29 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 29-37, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper exploring the mentoring relationship among african american women in psychology karia kelch-oliver, chaundrissa oyeshiku smith, kenia johnson, josie s. welkom, natasha d. gardner, and marietta h. collins karia kelch-oliver: assistant professor at morehouse school of medicine’s department of family medicine email: kkelch-oliver@msm.edu; phone: 404-756-5753 chaundrissa oyeshiku smith: assistant professor at emory university school of medicine’s department of psychiatry and behavioral science, email: csmit@emory.edu; phone: 404-778-1535 kenia johnson: licensed psychologist email: drkjohnson865@gmail.com; phone: 678-684-8592 josie s. welkom: postdoctoral fellow at johns hopkins school of medicine’s division of pulmonary and critical care medicine, adherence research center, email: jwelkom1@jhmi.edu; phone: 410-550-5211 natasha d. gardner inpatient forensic psychologist, georgia regional hospital-atlanta, ga, email: natashadgardner@aol.com; phone: 404-244-2297 marietta h. collins: associate professor at emory university school of medicine’s department of psychiatry and behavioral science email: mcollin@emory.edu; phone: 404-778-1538 accepted july 28, 2013 historically, there has been a scarcity of available mentors for african american women in psychology. the diminished presence of african american female psychologists in higher education limits the availability of same-race mentors for african american students, which decreases opportunities for african american students to pursue and succeed in this field, which in turn reduces the number of african americans pursuing teaching, research, and clinical careers within psychology. we assert that same-race/same-gender mentorship is imperative in increasing the recruitment, retention, and training of african american women in psychology. in this literature review, we seek to address the unique issues related to the mentoring experience among african american women in psychology across three different stages of professional development (i.e., undergraduate, graduate, and faculty). finally, we provide recommendations for mentors, mentees, and academic organizations in order to foster the growth and presence of african american women psychologists. keywords: mentoring, african american, women, psychology training introduction although in the year 2000, racial/ethnic minorities comprised approximately 30% of the united states (u.s.) population (u.s. census bureau, 2000b), racial/ethnic minorities continue to be largely underrepresented and have unequal access to opportunities in higher education (ntiri, 2001; vasquez & jones, 2006). in 2003, racial/ethnic minorities received 19% of all doctoral degrees awarded in the u.s.; and only 7% of these doctoral degrees awarded went to african americans (hoffer, et al., 2004). given the demographic shifts in the general population, it is in the country’s best interest to increase the academic participation of african americans, women, and other persons of color across all institutional types (zamani, 2002). there is an additional shortage of african american women in higher education (tillman, 2001). in 2009, 7% of college and university faculty were african american, compared to 79% white (i.e., 42% male and 37% female) (national center for educational statistics, 2011). it is assumed that the percentage of african american women faculty is even smaller than 7%. membership in both marginalized groups (i.e., race and gender) often makes african american women invisible in colleges and universities (zamani, 2003). advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 30 the percentage of racial/ethnic minorities in the field of psychology is especially low. in 2007-2008, the american psychological association’s (apa) center for workforce studies (cws) reported racial/ethnic minorities made up 13% of total faculty, 19% of recent psychology doctorates, and 13% of the psychology work force. although historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) (which the vast majority of students enrolled are racial/ethnic minorities) have been integral in granting baccalaureate degrees to close to 30% of future psychology doctorates (national science foundation division of science resources statistics, 2008), it is unclear how many of those psychology graduates pursue doctorates or careers in psychology. in 2008, approximately 24% of doctoral degrees in psychology were awarded to racial/ethnic minorities, which reflects an increase of almost 10% in one decade (national science board, 2008). african american women, however, earned only about 5% of psychology doctoral degrees granted in 2008 (hoffer, et al., 2004). it is presumed that even less than 5% of the african american women who earned a psychology doctoral degree in 2008 pursued positions in academia. in response to the underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minorities in the field of psychology, the apa assembled the commission on ethnic minority recruitment, retention, and training in psychology in 1994 to assist graduate and professional training programs with strategies and materials toward increasing enrollment and faculty positions held by racial/ethnic minorities (american psychological association, 1997). among the recommendations set forth by the commission, establishing mentorship programs was identified as an important consideration across all levels of training (i.e., graduate school coursework, research, early career development) (american psychological association, 1997). yet, the most notable program was initiated prior to the commission’s mandates in 1974, through funding from the national institutes of health in collaboration with apa. specifically, the minority fellowship program (mfp) aimed to increase the number of underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups conducting mental health-related research. between 1974 and 2006, 43% of mfp fellows have been african american (jones & austin-dailey, 2009). further, the apa identified model strategies implemented by institutions between 1995 through 2006 for racial/ethnic minority recruitment, retention, and training in higher education (american psychological association, 2000). although mentorship was reported as integral to institutional objectives, specific gender and racial/ethnic considerations were not consistently noted. although augmenting recruitment and retention of racial/ethnic minority students may subsequently increase the numbers of available racial/ethnic minority faculty mentors, it is unknown whether these initiatives will directly address the mentoring needs of african american women in psychology. thus, despite ameliorative efforts, the availability of appropriate mentors, a factor indentified as important in increasing the recruitment and retention of african american women in psychology, remains insufficient. it is imperative that efforts are made to addresses the underrepresentation of african american professionals, particularly african american women, in higher education as well as the field of psychology. the diminished presence of african american faculty limits the availability of same-race mentors for african american students, which decreases opportunities for african american students to pursue and succeed in the psychology field, which in turn reduces the number of african americans pursuing teaching, research, and clinical careers within psychology. we assert that samerace/same-gender mentorship within psychology is necessary to increase african american women in academia. the current paper seeks to address the unique issues related to the mentoring experience among african american women in psychology. although the exclusive focus of this article will be on african american women in psychology, similar tenets can (and should) be applied to the importance of same race/same gender mentors for african american males in psychology. we begin this paper with an explanation of the definition and types of mentoring relationships, a review of relevant mentoring theories, and a discussion of the unique mentoring needs of african american women across 3 different stages of training/professional development in psychology (i.e., undergraduate, graduate, and faculty). finally, we provide mentoring and training recommendations for mentors, mentees, and academic organizations in order to support the recruitment, retention, training, growth and presence of african american women in psychology. definition and types of mentoring relationships mentoring has been defined as a relationship in which a more experienced professional guides, teaches, trains, and offers counsel to a less skilled or experienced student or junior professional (daniel, 2009; johnson, 2002). mentorship may be considered as a transfer of the social resources necessary for professional advancement (chow & chan, 2008), a view that suggests that mentoring is a process of instilling individuals with social and professional skills essential to developing and navigating the networks needed for career success while also providing career and psychosocial benefits (kay & wallace, 2009). mentoring relationships can be either formal or informal (ensher & murphy, 1997). within formal mentoring relationships, which are typically short-term and geared toward academic (e.g., a research/teaching advisor during graduate school) and career advancement or employment opportunities, the mentor provides professional knowledge, advisement, and guidance. formal mentoring relationships have increased within the last decade in the areas of government, corporations, and some education (ensher & murphy, 1997). still, limited attention is paid to how these formal mentoring relationships influence african american women (crawford & smith, 2005; williams, brewley, reed, white, & davis-haley, 2005). advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 31 informal mentoring occurs when mentors and mentees connect through less structured contexts and serves more of a psychosocial function such as providing (perhaps non workrelated) emotional support and guidance. informal mentoring relationships are typically more long-term and may continue beyond school or work. in some contexts, informal mentoring relationships have been found to result in increased careerrelated support compared to formal mentoring relationships (chao, walz, & gardner, 1992). formal mentoring relationships likely provide the social capital needed for career advancement, such as the importance of research to academic and professional goals, while informal mentoring relationships provide the encouragement needed for success (alfred, 2001; johnson, 2002). further, informal mentor relationships may develop due to the scarcity of multiple african american women in academic psychology settings. mentoring theories mentoring is considered important for success within academia and is an inherent part of the institutional culture, although evidence supporting this perception is limited (sambunjak, straus, & marusic, 2006). the field of psychology has not articulated mechanisms for the scientific process of mentoring (forehand, 2008). in the absence of a widely accepted mentoring theories or guidelines within the psychology field, the following is a review of relevant mentoring theories for african american women in psychology. feminist models rooted in feminist theory, the feminist model of co-mentoring (mcguire & reger, 2003) replaces the traditional hierarchical model of mentoring, instead focusing on mutual empowerment and learning. in this model, each participant in the comentoring relationship serves in the role of teacher and learner and has an equal balance of power with the implicit assumption that both mentor and mentee has value in the relationship. this model attempts to integrate emotion within the experience of the academic professional, values both paid and unpaid work, and emphasizes the importance of cooperative, egalitarian relationships for learning and professional development. mcguire and reger (2003) argue that given the limitations of traditional mentoring relationships (i.e., hierarchical structure and shortages in availability), feminist theory’s focus on comentoring is especially relevant and beneficial for underrepresented groups. however, feminist theory has been criticized for primarily addressing the needs and concerns of middle-class white women, not the welfare of african american women (zamani, 2003). more specific to the african american experience is that of black feminist thought (bft) (hill-collins, 2000), which has been examined in studies of mentoring relationships among women of color (johnsonbailey, 2004; patton, 2009). specifically, bft notes the similar struggles for advancement african american women share with their male and caucasian women colleagues, while acknowledging the experiences unique to this demographic (hill-collins, 2000). social network theory social network theory (snt) (denmark & klara, 2010) examines mentoring within a career developmental context (higgins & kram, 2001). snt suggests that a single or primary mentor is limiting, and therefore encourages multiple, developmentally-appropriate, and diverse mentoring systems that address the mentee’s needs across phases of their careers. meaning, the mentee benefits from a “network” of diverse mentoring resources, as opposed to one mentor experience. however, as snt relates to african american women, there may be limited access to a “network” of mentors due to the shortage of african american mentors in academic settings. identify formation theory identity formation theory (ift) conceptualizes mentor relationships as a socialization process of identity formation. tenets of ift have addressed the challenges faced by graduate students when transitioning, developing, and conceptualizing new identities for themselves in academia (hall & burns, 2009). in ift, success in mentoring relationships occurs when the mentee incorporates doctrines and beliefs in their scholarly work that are reflective of their mentors, suggesting similar professional identities. however, despite their inherent qualifications and capabilities, students who reject or are unable to acquire the characteristics of their mentors may experience fewer positive opportunities for advancement as a result of their mentoring relationship. this may be the case for african american women mentees whose mentors may not have professional identities that encompass racial and gender considerations. linear model the linear model (lm) was developed in response to the dearth of attention in the literature on effective mentoring for women. it underscores the critical role of mentoring in an academic career. a strength of the lm framework is it incorporates both a theory for mentoring and specifics related to the practice of mentoring women within graduate programs in psychology (williams-nickelson, 2009). within lm, mentoring is viewed as a recursive process where specific roles, functions, practices, and guidelines for changing or ending the relationship has been articulated for mentors and mentees (williams-nickelson, 2009). yet, the mentoring needs of african american women within graduate programs in psychology may be different than their non-african american female peers. the mentoring theories presented above provide an acceptable perspective on conceptualizing successful mentoring for this population. of the theories discussed, the theory that best explains the mentoring experience of african american women is btf. however, what is not explicitly reflected in these theories is that the foundation of the mentoring relationship for african american women may be rooted in shared racial/cultural experiences, academic/career development and guidance, psychosocial support and nurturance, and mutual advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 32 contribution and reciprocal gain in the relationship. for example, experiencing a shared unique perspective or collective identity of being an african american woman in psychology within the mentoring relationship may facilitate a social climate of mutual exchange and learning within the expected roles and practices of both the mentor and mentee. mentoring needs among african american women though studies have suggested that racial/ethnic and gender matching within mentor relationships is not significantly predictive of students’ academic and professional outcomes (campbell & campbell, 1997), we propose that distinct experiences related to race/ethnicity and/or gender exist that impact the mentor-mentee relationship. specifically, the “double bind” of being female and african american places african american women at the confluence of two forms of oppression (zamani, 2003) that can be discussed and addressed within the mentoring relationship. we do not assert that all same-race/same-gender mentoring relationships between african american women in psychology will be effective, worthwhile, and mutually beneficial. being of a specific race or ethnicity (and/or gender) does not provide de facto competence in a particular domain (lowe & davis iii, 2010). jernigan and colleagues (2010) asserted that having a same-race mentor/supervisor does not necessarily guarantee a positive, nurturing, and supportive mentorship relationship; rather, it is the thematic congruence between the mentor-mentee dyad’s racial identity stage (see cross, 1995 and helms, 1995 for racial identity theories) which may be more relevant to the relationship. meaning, the level of black racial identity development of the mentor and the mentee, rather than racial group membership alone, may have an effect on the quality of the mentoring relationship between african american women in psychology. however, we do contend that the experience of being an african american woman in the u.s., in conjunction with solid training in psychology and the desire to mentor other women of similar backgrounds, provides the opportunity for a unique mentoring relationship than cannot be provided by male mentors or those from another race/ethnicity. specifically, it is the lived experience as african american women that add the most depth to the same-race/same-gender mentoring relationship. for example, the participants in patton and harper’s (2003) qualitative study stated their mentoring relationships with african american women provided not only academic guidance and career advice, but also nurturing, mothering, and “culturally-relevant counsel” (i.e., “understanding the complex intersection of race and gender in the academy and society…and the depth of being an african american woman in their respective areas of study” [p. 71]). african american women in higher education and professional careers often found it difficult to identify same-race/samegender mentors due to the shortage of african american women in academic and professional programs, especially at predominantly white institutions (pwis) (patton & harper, 2003). although mentoring is recognized as a salient factor in academic and career success, scant attention has been given to the mentorship process as it affects african american women (patton & harper, 2003; williams et al., 2005). research specific to psychology suggests that caucasian male faculty members can successfully provide academic and professional mentorship to racial/ethnic minority students (atkinson, neville, & casas, 1991). still, students’ success in higher learning depends not only on academic advisement and professional guidance, and different race/ethnicity and gender mentor-mentee pairings may not adequately meet the unique needs of african american women. similarities among mentors, including race/ethnicity and gender, may foster effective communication and a trusting relationship that enable the relationship to sustain over time (lee, 1999). for example, african american students attending hbcus (who typically employ more racial/ethnic minority faculty than pwis) viewed their relationships with faculty as more positive than their counterparts attending pwis (cokley, 2000). for the most part, institutions that have a mission dedicated to underserved or marginalized groups have a better appreciation for students’ background and needs (zamani, 2003). given the aforementioned disparities among racial/ethnic minorities and women in higher learning and faculty positions, and particularly in psychology, the salience of sustaining samerace/same-gender mentorship relationships among african american women in higher education is imperative (patton, 2009). the specific mentoring needs for african american women in psychology vary across career and educational levels. the following exemplifies the differing mentoring needs of african american women from faculty, graduate, and undergraduate perspectives. faculty in academic settings, mentoring is primarily informal (busseyjones, et al., 2006). here, the mentor relationship is a distinct, personal interaction with a more senior faculty member serving as a guide, role model, teacher, or sponsor of a less experienced junior faculty member. the mentor provides knowledge, advice, support, challenge, and counsel in support of the mentee’s pursuit of a higher level faculty/ professional position (clark, harden, & johnson, 2000). when compared to their non-mentored peers, mentored junior faculty in academic settings tended to have better research skills, were awarded more grant monies, published more, and had greater career satisfaction (bussey-jones, et al., 2006). obtaining these benefits may be difficult for african american women faculty. given the scarcity of african american women in doctoral programs and faculty positions, african american same-race/same-gender mentors are difficult to identify. thus, the benefits of same-race/same-gender within effective mentoring relationships are often non-existent for the african american female faculty member. further, there may be an advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 33 expectation for african american women in faculty positions to mentor the majority (if not all) african american students while simultaneously maintaining scholarly activities in levels congruent with their non-african american colleagues. similar to non-african american female faculty, african american women in faculty positions encounter the “glass ceiling” or experience difficulty obtaining promotions (e.g., tenure) or leadership/administrative positions. further, african american female faculty members often have to combat myths and stereotypes of african american women (e.g., tokenism, unproductive, incompetent, domineering) (daniel, 2009; niemann, 2003). as a result, they may feel increased pressure to succeed to prove to those who scrutinize their credibility or underestimate their performance. finally, they may encounter feelings of alienation and isolation from peers, uncertainty, less support for research interests, and disparities in the workplace or academic environment (grant & simmons, 2008; tillman, 2001). thomas & hollenshead (2001) and niemann (2003) identified these challenges experienced by african american women in academia in their research. in both studies, mentoring emerged as a critical variable (daniel, 2009). graduate students african american graduate students also have unique mentoring needs. between 70-85% of first-year doctoral students receive education funding in the form of research or teaching (american psychological association center for workforce studies, 2009). based on these numbers, it is likely that an african american female graduate student will serve as a mentor to other african american graduate or undergraduate psychology students during her teaching or research responsibilities. however, it is unknown if the graduate students own mentoring needs can be met. although the majority of african american graduate students obtain doctoral degrees at hbcus (hoffer, et al., 2004) where finding african american faculty is likely greater than at a pwi, the opportunity for identifying a same-race/same-gender mentor for an african american female graduate student may be quite rare. the formal relationship between the african american female graduate student and her faculty advisor(s) may include involvement in research projects, presentations and publications, guidance on dissertation, and accessing additional funding sources. although this relationship could lead to academic/career advancement and opportunities, it may not satisfy the student’s needs for guidance, counsel, or moral support. further, although the relationship may have been created due to similar research interests or expertise, the african american female graduate student may fail to feel that she can freely relate without their interaction affecting evaluations of her professional performance. thus, a need to develop informal mentor relationships outside of the faculty advisor-student relationship, the department, or even the university may be required. as african american women graduate students continue their professional development, they may seek peer or hierarchical mentorship relationships to navigate their career trajectory. during this transition, mentorship may focus on social support and relational factors, but also emphasize issues relevant to career advancement and collaboration. as a result, mentors and mentees may partner on scholarly activities. further, the likelihood of women participating in careers that emphasize scientific research in psychology is largely contingent on the presence of a female research mentor during graduate school (dohm & cummings, 2002). undergraduate students the importance of mentoring to african american women’s career development in higher education has been investigated generally (crawford & smith, 2005), but not specifically during the undergraduate years. more attention has been paid to the mentoring needs at the faculty and graduate level. for african american women, most mentoring relationships exist during professional careers rather than undergraduate or graduate years (howard-vital & morgan, 1993). however, establishing early mentoring relationships during the undergraduate years may lead to the most successful outcomes for african american female psychology students. early mentorship may increase retention, the probability of degree completion, meet the mentee’s psychosocial needs, and may also positively affect interest in and the pursuit of professional development and career advancement in psychology. some data have shown a trend in which higher rates of mentoring relationships were found among african american undergraduate students attending pwis than those at hbcus (howard-vital & morgan, 1993). the distinction could be attributed to a lesser sense of alienation, thus less need for mentoring relationships among students attending hbcus. alternatively, more formal matching systems for mentorship programs may exist at pwis, while in hbcus, more student or faculty-initiated informal mentorship relationships exist. though typically defined to exist during graduate level psychology education, intentional mentors (i.e., mentors belief that mentorship is a component of professional practice) (johnson, 2002), may also be beneficial to undergraduate african american women in psychology. whether at the faculty, graduate, or undergraduate level, samerace/same-gender mentoring relationships between african american women may minimize obstacles faced in the academic environment by providing a safe place for the discussion of sensitive issues and can increase self-efficacy in order to manage these topics more effectively. given the underrepresentation of african american women in higher education, especially within the field of psychology, samerace/same-gender mentorship relationships at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels seems even more imperative to the success of current and future african american women in psychology. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 34 recommendations it is our assertion that the mentoring process for african american women in psychology must occur earlier in the career development process. specifically, it must begin during the undergraduate years and continue throughout the pursuit of a graduate degree and long-term career in psychology. the following are recommendations (presented as a progression of needs) for formal mentoring and training programs to increase opportunities for african american women across undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels: undergraduate students opportunities for mentorship should begin at the undergraduate level. structured, formal pairings of faculty with undergraduate students should occur either prior to or during the freshmen year or as early as possible during the undergraduate years. psychology departments could collaborate with other universities to provide mentoring programs with a race-gender focus for african american women undergraduates. existing programs such as minority access to research careers-career opportunities in research (marc-cor), national institute of mental healthcareer opportunities in research (nimhcor), and the mcnair scholar’s program, which are undergraduate research training programs for underrepresented groups, could be utilized to create formal and informal mentoring relationships and facilitate interest in scientific psychology fields. graduate students the first step in providing same-race/same-gender mentoring experiences for african american female graduate students should include increased mentoring efforts focused on recruitment, retention, graduation, and promotion of african american women. graduate programs that have been successful in recruiting and graduating african american students often have a history of maintaining faculty and students of color, utilizing personal contact in their recruiting efforts, engaging students in diversity and multicultural issues (e.g., research, classes), having university and departmental climates that encourage diversity, department commitments to the salience of working with racial/ethnic minority populations and communities, and availability of same-race peer and/or faculty mentors (chandler, 2010; rogers & molina, 2006). african american female graduate students could become peer mentors for undergraduate african american women. yet, african american female graduate students may have to go beyond their department or discipline to seek mentors for themselves. graduate programs should acknowledge mentoring efforts through mentoring awards or other types of formal recognition. graduate teaching/research assistantships should be awarded to provide african american female graduate students financial support and formal research assistance in addition to mentorship from faculty advisors. additionally, mentors should encourage african american female psychology students to attend conferences and graduate student and/or professional organizations for networking opportunities, and programs should offset the cost of professional organization membership and allocate funds for conference attendance. lastly, departments should consider hiring their african american female alumni as junior faculty with opportunities for advancement (i.e., promotion, tenure) if this is in line with the graduate’s own career goals. faculty just as universities have transition-to-college programs for freshmen, including programs specifically for students of color, similar formal processes may be needed for african american women transitioning into faculty positions. the development of such programs specifically for african american women is slowly emerging. other professional disciplines (e.g., medicine, government, business, etc.) have successfully created formal mentorship programs targeting faculty members. for example, in response to the mentoring needs of women and racial/ethnic minority faculty in medicine, an innovative program known as the internal medicine research group at emory (imerge) was developed (bussey-jones, et al., 2006) at emory university. in imerge, faculty members at the same academic level provide peer mentorship to each other. this program serves as a viable alternative or supplement to traditional mentorship programs. program outcomes show this horizontal peer mentoring strategy is effective for academic advancement as well as fostering stronger collegial relationships within the academic community. daniel (2009) discussed a mentoring program specifically designed for early career african american women with an interest in pursuing academic research careers in psychology called “next generation.” the objective of the program was to increase the number of tenured african american women faculty members within graduate level psychology departments (daniel, 2009). the program utilized a same-race/same-gender model and included goals such as reducing isolation, facilitating the mentoring process, and emphasizing self-care. within this academic mentoring program, success was exhibited through the receipt of federal grant funding awards (e.g., k-awards) by some of the mentees within the program (daniel, 2009). programs such as next generation highlight the salience of encouraging senior african american women faculty to mentor african american women junior faculty. african american women senior faculty could also serve as mentors to african american staff and administrators. african american faculty organizations may be helpful in creating and utilizing same-race/same-gender mentor relationships for junior faculty; junior faculty should be encouraged to serve on these committees. additionally, effective mentoring of racial/ethnic minority students should be a part of faculty evaluations, tenure, and promotion (thomas, willis, & davis, 2007). for the african american female faculty member in a psychology department, intentional mentoring requires a concerted and increased effort of outreach to seek out and make connections with african american women undergraduate advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 35 students (sedlacek, benjamin, schlosser, & sheu, 2007). faculty members can accomplish this by electing to teach undergraduate courses that may be of particular interest to african american students (e.g., psychology of the african american experience, multicultural psychology, psychology and culture). further, african american faculty members may recruit undergraduate research assistants from introductory psychology courses. african american undergraduates often view faculty members as instrumental in encouraging them to move beyond their boundaries (freeman, 2000). more than encouraging the undergraduate to succeed in their classes, the faculty member can introduce and encourage the african american female student to become involved in research experiences and state and national psychology organizations (e.g., american psychological association, psi chi honor society, and local chapters of the association of black psychologists). the faculty member can also provide education and insight into psychology career options. finally, and perhaps of most importance, mentoring should be valued at the institutional level (thomas, et al., 2007). institutionally-based mentoring programs for faculty should be provided for continuous and 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(2001). resisting from the margins: the coping strategies of black women and other women of color faculty members at a research university. the journal of negro education: black women in the academy: challenges and opportunities, 70,166-175. retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3211208 thomas, k. m., willis, l. a., & davis, j. (2007). mentoring minority graduate students: issues and strategies for institutions, faculty, and students. equal opportunities international, 26(3), 178-192. doi: 0.1108/02610150710735471 tillman, l. c. (2001). mentoring african american faculty in predominantly white institutions. research in higher education, 42, 295-325. doi: 10.1023/a:1018822006485 u.s. census bureau. (2000). population profile of the united states. washington, d.c.: u.s. census bureau. vasquez, m. j. t., & jones, j. m. (2006). increasing the number of psychologists of color: public policy issues for affirmative diversity. american psychologist, 61, 132-142. doi: 10.1037/0003-066x.61.2.132 williams-nickelson, c. (2009). mentoring women graduate students: a model for professional psychology. professional psychology: research and practice, 40, 284-291. doi: 10.1037/a0012450 williams, m. r., brewley, d. n., reed, r. j., white, d. y., & davis-haley, r. t. (2005). learning to read each other: black female graduate students share their experiences at a white research i institution. the urban review, 37(3), 181-199. doi: 10.1007/s11256005-0008-0 zamani, e. m. (2003). african american women in higher education. new directions for student services, 104, 5-18. retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ss.103/pdf educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 189 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 189-198, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper glass ceilings and catfights: career barriers for professional women in academia stephanie j. jones and elyn m. palmer dr. stephanie j. jones is an assistant professor of higher education at texas tech university in lubbock, texas, box 41071, lubbock, tx 79409, (806) 742-1997 ext. 245, (806) 742-2179 (fax) stephanie.j.jones@ttu.edu elyn m. palmer is a doctoral student in higher education at texas tech university in lubbock, texas. texas tech university, college of education, elyn.palmer@ttu.edu, phone: (575) 394-2288 accepted april 21, 2011 women continue to struggle to reach parity in the workplace, constantly hitting their heads on the glass ceiling. the inability to break through this barrier may lead women to develop covert actions to create an advantage over their competition. the existing literature on the relationships of women and men in the workplace provides some insight to the struggles that occur when one gender could be considered a professional minority. in addition, some researchers have studied the working relationships of women in the business environment, but there is a deficiency in the literature of the working relationships among women in academic organizations. the purpose of our study was to explore the challenges of female relationships in the community college workplace, as women continue to dominate these institutions as both employees and students. a psychodynamic perspective was used as the theoretical framework for the study. we sought to assess the perceptions of female professional staff in public community colleges of how women supported the career advancement of their female peers, as well as how their supervisors and departments supported the professional development of potential female leaders. the results of the mixed method study identified two areas of limitations for women within community college environments: interpersonal and institutional cultural. the results of the quantitative analysis identified that a majority of females felt their peers were supportive of the career advancement of their female colleagues. the qualitative results of the study painted a different picture, indicating that women may use covert actions to compete with and hold back their female colleagues. keywords: women, community colleges, interpersonal relationships, career advancement introduction the first convention on women‟s rights was held in seneca falls, new york in 1848. centuries later, the literature and national media continues to explore women‟s lack of parity in the top levels of corporate and academic management. with many movements in place and national attention on equal rights, the question of why women continue to struggle against a glass ceiling, limiting upward mobility, continues to intrigue researchers. as women fight for equal rights in the workplace, one has to wonder what keeps them from reaching the equality that they have so long desired. the literature is rich with discussion and speculations as to why women do not reach the upper rungs of their professions. clark, caffarella, and ingram (1999) described an environment in which women must sacrifice their gender and adopt masculine perspectives, choosing between their personal and professional identities. additionally, researchers have suggested that women do not know how to compete and negotiate for the top positions of leadership. along with these professional struggles, "stereotypically feminine qualities are generally not the qualities that come to mind when people think of successful leaders," resulting in the portrayal of them as "relatively illsuited to leadership" (prime, carter, & welbourne, 2009, p. 28). researchers have posited at length the ongoing struggles for balance between the role of women as caregivers and homemakers, and that of women as professionals (clarke et al., advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 190 2007; mooney, 2005; rhode, 1997). the necessity to balance these dual identities creates complex challenges for women, as they also try to advance in their careers, while maintaining social relationships with their colleagues. women trying to balance both their careers and families as equal priorities are losing the battle. “the majority of working women are trying to stuff a twelve-foot-long scarf into a two-inch-square pocket, and even houdini had an assistant” (mooney, 2005, p. 92). it is often assumed by managers and coworkers that work matters less once women have children (mooney). such an assumption and other stereotypes continue to affect women in professional settings. not surprisingly, women with children now earn 2.5% less than women without children (mooney). additionally, women also struggle to find their voices and positions within male-dominated professional cultures. besides these most commonly cited theories of why women are struggling to reach the top positions within their organizations, it is also perceived that women may be their own barriers to progress due to how they treat one another in the workplace. interpersonal relationships among female colleagues though exploration of interpersonal relationships among women in the workplace is not a new topic (mooney, 2005; rhode, 1997; rosen, 1999; tanenbaum, 2002), a majority of the research occurs within the business sectors of corporate america. there is limited research on women and workplace relationships in the postsecondary environment, a sector that today has a majority female student population, and where a majority of mid-level professional staff positions are filled by women. the national center for education statistics (nces) reported that in the fall of 2007, women made up 53.7% of all employees at postsecondary institutions. within public twoyear institutions, they made up 54.5% of professional staff, which included non-instructional and instructional positions. professional female staff classified as administrative and managerial made up 53.9% of employees in this classification (nces, 2010). with a majority of professional staff in twoyear institutions being female, in our study we sought to explore the working relationships of women at community colleges, to determine if they are supportive of their female colleagues in their career advancement. the perceptions of the researchers of this study is that community colleges are supportive and nurturing, and portray themselves as having democratic values (eddy & cox, 2008), based on their purpose of serving and educating students through their open access missions. community colleges are unique organizations in that a majority of their employees and students are female, but their top executive administrations are predominately male. eddy and cox (2008) found evidence that these institutions continue to rely on hierarchy and positional power. they support their case by drawing attention to the fact that more females are attending community colleges, but less than a third of them are led by women. in their study of the literature on community college leadership, amey and twombly (1992) found that scholars typically used “strong, often militaristic‟‟ language that “perpetuated the „great man‟ style of leadership‟‟ (p. 145). this language suggested that it would be difficult for women to fit in as leaders in these institutions since it is stereotypical of male leadership. the slight increases in the number of women that hold community college presidencies do not solve the issue that community college structures are and continue to be established based on male norms (amey & vanderlinden, 2002). the one or two women that do find themselves at the top also find themselves holding the position of the token female on administrative teams. the female as token the position of tokens confines women to a predetermined number of professional positions within organizations. a review of the literature on management conducted by giscombe (2007) reported that women still perceive cultural barriers within organizations that exclude them from the social groups affiliated with their administrative teams. ultimately, women are in token positions and are still expected to "take care" of others while their male counterparts "take charge" (giscombe, 2007, p. 391). because female administrators continue to struggle to find their professional values within their organizations, they oftentimes react to situations defensively, continually looking for recognition and confirmation from male and female coworkers (tanenbaum, 2002). consequently, the professional, academic, and intellectual resources of women are often wasted in the field of higher education, where "men are overrepresented in executive positions…[and] women are most highly represented in positions described as entry-level (sometimes referred to as professional)," (cooper et al., 2007, p. 642). women also tend to carry heavier teaching and advising loads than men, and oftentimes expected to act as unofficial mentors to most of the minority and female students (christman, 2003).when in leadership roles, women are seen as serving in positions outside the realm of acceptance among their peers, and often face many obstacles. researchers have identified four categories of these obstacles. first, many women continually battle to prove their abilities to maintain and operate within their positions of leadership (carli & eagly, 2007; sandler, 1986). second, they constantly work to earn the trust and establish a positive rapport with their male colleagues (heifetz, 2007; sandler, 1986). third, these women fight against isolation, typically working without female peers within their levels of administration (reinarz, 2002; sandler, 1986). this isolation often leads to fewer opportunities to receive feedback regarding institutional issues. finally, female supervisors struggle with the ongoing balancing act between their roles as token female administrators and their responsibilities to build relationships among their professional peers (chesler, 2001). they struggle to truly earn a position among the elite (sandler, 1986). advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 191 heifetz (2007) described a common misconception between the reality of leadership and the culture of authority within a professional environment. women, historically, have successfully held positions of leadership; their vision and gender traits providing them with unique insights into motivating and supporting others for change. authority represents the power and tools necessary to carry out effective leadership strategies. heifetz declared that most positions of authority are held by men. society does not typically trust women with this authoritative power. therefore, women hold informal leadership positions, but do not have the authority to support their efforts (heifetz). it is assumed that such struggles as described above would serve to bond professional women to one another. however, such camaraderie is not identified in the literature. women who earn opportunities for advancement are oftentimes viewed as threats to coworkers (heifetz, 2007; mooney, 2005; sandler, 1986; tanenbaum, 2002). for women, it seems friendships and ambition may not be able to coexist within a work-based relationship (chesler, 2001; mooney, 2005). workplace relationships ambitious women are concerned they will be viewed negatively by coworkers and may perceive it necessary to camouflage their ambitions so as not to feel ashamed of their desires for power (heifetz, 2007). heifetz further supported this by stating, "keeping these desires under wraps generates a selfdefeating dynamic in which many women remain inhibited in trying to get the power they want (2007, p. 316). he also acknowledged that even if women earned positions of authority in professional settings, it would not remedy the issues surrounding the achievement of women in the workplace and, more specifically, the development of beneficial relationships between women (heifetz). relationships among women do not appear to be supportive. heim and murphy (2003) found that, “women consistently failed to support other women and even actively undermined their authority and credibility” and “actively sabotaged” each other (p. 2). women are the first to attack other women who are promoted (heim & murphy, 2003). "competition…is caused by feelings of inadequacy" which "is fostered by a very real societal situation: woman's restrictive roles" (tanenbaum, 2002, p. 39). women will limit other's access to “important meetings and committees; withhold information, assignments and promotions,” or will block interactions with mentors and other people of influence (klaus, 2009, para. 5), in order to maintain their token positions and hold back their competition: their female colleagues. older women can resent those younger than them, especially when the older women perceive they are not being given the respect they are due (mooney, 2005). this perception of disrespect could be caused by these female supervisors' lack of successful relationships in their formative years, particularly because their mentors were male and gender propriety was paramount (sandler, 1986). another reason could be that they perceive that the younger women have not paid their dues (gordon, 2006). cultural stereotypes such as these continue to limit the positions of women in administration, as well as affect their relationships among female colleagues. the traditional nature of women and their relationships with each other presents limitations to their career advancements. it is expected that women should and do value interpersonal relationships. the absence of these relationships and the lack of women in positions of power, however, create feelings of inequality for professional women within organizations, minimizing their abilities to create associations (giscombe, 2007). work consumes many hours of each day. because it is perceived that women have such strong needs for relationships and intercommunications, they try to create meaningful relationships at work (mooney, 2005). these are considered lateral relationships within the workplace (giscombe, 2007). women then perceive they must remain supportive and generous with one another, even when doing so contradicts the organization‟s goals (mooney, 2005). worrying about these tertiary professional relationships can result in an inability to trust professional judgments and/or decisions of working women, creating an ineffective professional environment (mooney). when women do not nurture social relationships with one another, honest communication is often difficult. mooney (2005) found that women sometimes experienced difficulties in confronting other women. women often quietly sabotage one another if they feel threatened, rather than choosing to communicate openly and honestly about an issue. mooney suggested such behavior stems from the desire of most women to appear nice to coworkers, but still be successful in their careers at the same time, seemingly determining that both cannot be attained in conjunction with the other. for women, outward competition is deemed inappropriate. therefore, in response to societal expectations, women try to do battle without engaging directly with one another. in order to be professionally demanding without alienating others, women sometimes resort to covert acts like lying and sabotage in order to reach their desired outcomes (mooney). the term catfight has historically been used in a "derogatory way to describe a viscous clash between women" and dates back to the early 1900's (tanenbaum, 2002, p. 29). men use the term catfight to describe the indirect aggressive behaviors of women in the workplace, viewing the behaviors displayed that are purposefully used to sabotage female colleagues to be inappropriate and irrational (heim & murphy, 2003). in addition to sabotaging each other, other behaviors used include gossiping, spreading rumors, divulging secrets, making public insinuations and insulting comments, and withdrawing friendships (heim & murphy). advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 192 in direct contrast to women supporting and mentoring one another within a professional setting, tanenbaum (2002) found that women did not want to work for other women. both male and female subordinates viewed female supervisors as competitive, and perceived they would withhold information, as well as take the credit and resulting power from any professional effort, in order to advance. additionally, female administrators are viewed as less capable in authoritative areas such as problem-solving (giscombe, 2007). ultimately, this lack of trust and respect can damage the impact of female superiors within an institution. moss kanter (1942) provided examples of these feelings: in men and women of the corporation, rosabeth moss kanter reprinted a 1942 management survey that questioned 521 young working women about whether they would prefer a male or female boss: 99.81 percent picked a man. among the reasons listed: women were too controlling, too focused on petty details, too critical, too jealous, and too unwilling to delegate. though the list echoed stereotypical characteristics often attributed to women bosses, moss kanter pointed out that such qualities are also representative of another group: people with limited power. (p. 113) a study conducted of 2,000 women by onepoll.com found that 32% of women preferred to work for male bosses because they were better managers and less emotional (the telegraph, 2010). other findings concluded women preferred having men in charge because they were more authoritative and straighttalking than female colleagues. they were tougher, better delegators, more likely to praise accomplishments, were better decisions makers, and were more knowledgeable about the business. another interesting result of this study was that 40% of women who had female supervisors perceived they could do a better job than their bosses (the telegraph, 2010). theoretical framework a psychodynamic perspective, based on psychoanalytical theory, supports that behaviors are motivated by conscious and unconscious influences (white, 2004). gabriel (1999) discussed what motivates people to act and react to situations: our perceptions and ideas about our social reality are not neutral. they are shaped by feelings, such as pride, anxiety, and pain, as well as by earlier experiences in our lives, which, unknown to us, have left deep marks on our mental personality. ( 270) supported by the work of gabriel, we perceive that women‟s behaviors in the workplace are guided by their life and prior workplace experiences, as well as stereotypical expectations of women as a gender, which entails both conscious and unconscious influences. this perspective was utilized to frame our research. purpose of study this study was developed to explore the working relationships among female professional staff in public community colleges. women continue to dominate these institutions both as employees and as students. of interest to the researchers was whether females in professional staff positions were supportive of their female colleagues in relationship to career advancement, the types of behaviors expressed in the workplace between supervisors and subordinates, and the degree to which the working environments of community colleges supported conflict among female professional staff. this research will expand the literature on this topic by utilizing a psychodynamic perspective to analyze the perceptions of the women in the study concerning the above stated purposes of this research. research questions three research questions guided this study: 1. do female professional staff in public community colleges support the career advancement of their female colleagues? 2. what are the behaviors demonstrated by female supervisors and subordinates within their working relationships? 3. do the working environments of public community colleges nurture conflict among female professional staff? research design and methods the study used a mixed methodology design that combined both quantitative and qualitative analysis for better understanding of the issue. greene, caracelli, and graham (1989) identified five reasons for conducting mixed methods studies: triangulation, complementarity, development, initiation, and expansion. in this study, the aim of triangulation provided the justification for the mixed methods approach, in order to improve the validity and reliability of the findings (golafshani, 2003). the study used an embedded concurrent design (creswell & plano clark, 2011), in which “both quantitative and qualitative data are collected simultaneously” (creswell, 2009, p. 214). the embedded design was chosen because the researchers did not perceive the quantitative data alone to be sufficient to establish an understanding of the experiences of the participants without allowing them avenues to express their experiences. data were collected concurrently due to the sensitivity of the information gathered. survey instrument the data for this study was gathered from a 52-question, researcher-developed web-based survey that was constructed to capture the perceptions of female professional staff at public community colleges of their working environments. the survey contained five sections with multiple-choice, multiple-response, and open-ended questions that pertained to participant advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 193 demographics, institution culture, institution climate, department climate, and open-ended questions. this study utilized a subset of the data collected that specifically addressed the perceptions of how females supported the career advancement of other females within their institutions, the behaviors that were demonstrated by female supervisors and subordinates, as well as the degree to which the working environments of the institutions supported conflict among female professional staff. to support the discussion of the working environment of institutions, participants were asked to identify the gender of their colleges. a foundational definition of gendered institutions was provided to the participants: a gendered institution is one that makes decisions regarding processes, practices, images, ideologies, and distributions of power decisions based on a particular gender bias. the study asked the participants to identify their colleges as gender neutral, male gendered, or female gendered. face validity of the survey instrument was established through analysis and critiques by university researchers. participants a total of 3,726 female professional staff from 988 public community colleges were invited to participate in the study. the 988 institutions were identified through the membership list of the american association of community colleges. all members were invited to participate. the 2010 higher education directory and institutional websites were used to identify females currently holding professional staff positions within these institutions. the study focused on those in the positions of all levels of deans, directors, coordinators, counselors, advisors, librarian and other library positions, specialists, and other. the majority of participants were from small rural-serving community colleges at 26% (n = 246), 21% (n = 192) from medium rural-serving, and 14% (n = 132) from medium suburban-serving. a majority of the participants held permanent full-time positions (90%, n = 838). the largest percentage of participants identified their institutions as gender neutral (47%, n = 441), 29% (n = 275) reported male gendered, 5% (n = 48) female gendered, and 18% (n = 170) chose not to identify. the positions of dean, associate dean, or assistant dean were held by 10% (n = 87) of the participants; 33% (n = 262) were directors, associate directors, or assistant directors; 19% (n = 136) were coordinators or assistant coordinators; 20% (n = 153) held the positions of counselor, advisor or specialist; 3% (n = 17) were librarians or other professional library positions; and 15% (n = 105) identified their positions as other. most that responded were in the age range of 45 – 54 (30%, n = 279), with 55 and over being a close second (29%, n = 270). the majority of the participants were caucasian/white (83%, n = 765), 8% (n = 75) were african american/black, and 5% (n = 47) were hispanic/latina. in addition, asian american/pacific islander, native american/ american indian, and other were represented by 1% of participants, respectively. the majority of the participants reported to female supervisors (59%, n = 447), with 41% reporting to males (n = 310). data analysis descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the quantitative data, specifically the effects between the independent variables position held (dean, associate dean, assistant dean; director, associate director and assistant director; coordinator and assistant coordinator; counselor, advisor and specialist; librarian and other profession library positions; and other), age range (18 – 24, 25 – 34, 35 – 44, 45 – 54, and 55 and over), ethnicity (african american/black, caucasian/white, hispanic american/latina, native american/american indian, and other), and gender of immediate supervisor on the dependent variables of whether females supported the career advancement of other females. the tukey hsd post hoc was used to determine if the differences between the groups were statistically significant. significance was established at the p = .05 level. harmonic means were used due to unequal sample sizes. effect sizes were identified to understand the strengths of the relationships among the groups. the qualitative data were analyzed through content analysis. our intent was to systematically work through each transcript, identifying responses that could qualify the results of the quantitative analysis of the study, to provide an “overall composite assessment” (creswell, 2009, p. 214) of the research problem. in addition to the quantitative questions addressed, participants responded to three open-ended questions that provided them opportunities to further discuss examples and experiences of female support of other females, supervisor and subordinate relationships, as well as any other discussion the participants wanted to provide. through the grounded theory approach to qualitative data, and the use of open coding (erlandson, harris, skipper, & allen, 1993), two main themes emerged that the researchers identified as: interpersonal limitations and institutional cultural limitations. within these two main themes, eight subcategories were identified (see table 1). findings our study was developed to explore the working relationships among female professional staff in public community colleges. a total of 934 responses were received, with 172 of those incomplete. none of the responses were eliminated from the analysis. this resulted in a 25.1% response rate. female support of career advancement of female colleagues to address research question 1, the participants were asked about their perceptions of whether females supported other females in their career advancement within their institutions. a majority of the participants, 84.7% (n = 644 out of 760), perceived that females were supportive of their female colleagues' career advancements. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 194 the majority of the participants, analyzed based on their perceived genderedness of their institutions, perceived that females were supportive of the career advancement of other females. close to 100% (n = 47 out of 48) of those at femalegendered institutions perceived women to be supportive of each other. those at male-gendered institutions acknowledged high levels of support at 97% (n = 266 out of 275), and 98% (n = 431 out of 441) of those at gender-neutral institutions perceived that females were supportive of the career advancements of their female colleagues. those participants that did not identify the gender of their institutions reported slightly less support at 93% (n = 150 of 170). to determine if there were statistically significant differences between the gender of institutions, age ranges (18 – 24, 25 – 34, 35 – 44, 45 – 54, and 55 and over), positions held (dean, associate dean, assistant dean; director, associate director and assistant director; coordinator and assistant coordinator; counselor, advisor and specialist; librarian and other profession library positions; and other), gender of immediate supervisor, and ethnicity and the perceptions of female support of the career advancement of other females, one-way analyses of variances (anovas) were conducted. the results of the analysis indicated statistically significant differences between the groups based on the gender of the institutions in regard to female support of other females, f(3, 759) = 98.295, p = .000. the effect size was η 2 = 0.06, which is a medium effect. participants at gender-neutral institutions (m = 1.08, sd = .273) had higher perceptions that females were supportive of other females than those at female-gendered (m = 1.28, sd = .452) and male-gendered (m = 1.25, sd = .433) institutions. the analysis of age ranges, positions held, gender of immediate supervisor, and ethnicity did not result in significant differences among the groups. through content analysis of the comments provided by those same participants that perceived that females were supportive of their female colleagues' career advancements, discussions of competition between female co-workers, as well as the inability of women to view one another as team members were revealed. as one woman commented, "in general, on our campus women try to put and keep each other down. they rarely celebrate the successes of one another because they are too busy trying to get ahead of each other." additionally, a significant number of women identified jealousy and competition as reasons why they did not support one another. as one participant commented, "in order to advance, someone else has to fail.” this underscores the either/or mentality of these professional women. one woman stressed, it is not only the lack of cooperation among coworkers, but also the lack of cooperation among female supervisors and female supervisees: i've asked for mentoring from all of the female executive leaders who told me, "your time will come...just stick around and see what happens." none were willing to help me develop networks or become a protégé of theirs. women are going it alonethey're all uber competitive for ceo/vp positions themselves. since they broke the glass ceiling, i can't help but think it's in their interest not to have more women at that bottleneck with them. the participants reflected on the perceptions that many women would rather damage the progress of the entire gender than allow another woman to succeed. some acknowledged suspicions as to how some females earned positions of power, insinuating inappropriate relationships with supervisors. one of the women commented, “there are a limited number of females in higher level positions. other females seem suspicious as to how they obtained their positions.” another common trend seemed to insinuate that there were some preferences to work for male managers simply because they “are not petty.” though there were no statistically significant results found between the groups through quantitative analysis based on ethnicity, participants did discuss cultural and racial obstacles to their professional successes. some expressed that they did not feel women conveyed outward support of one another in the professional setting, and that many were reluctant to speak out to support another female co-worker, or even against discriminatory practices. as one women stated, “[it] seems no one is outraged when discrimination happens. all quietly support each other, but we do nothing to speak up.” behaviors among female colleagues to address research question 2, the researchers relied on content analysis of the participants' responses to the open-ended questions in the survey. participants discussed jealousy among professional women regarding career advancement. some of the women viewed their female colleagues to be more inclined to damage another‟s opportunities for career advancement within an institution because of jealousies, rather than sharing in the celebrations of their advancements. as one of the women stated, “my boss feels threatened in her job if too many females are equal or higher than her.” the women in executive positions are of the first and second waves of feminism. the comments analyzed appear to showcase a conflict between generations of older women who do not accept the younger generations of females within the workplace. these younger women do not feel they have to be as "male," but can be feminine, openly sexualized and powerful, in their dealings with others on the job. as one participant commented concerning the perception of the "old guard" that young women should adopt traditional practices of dressing in power suits and be openly more masculine in their "assertive" communication styles, "words like 'bitch and biotch, chick, etc.' are okay with my generation, but not with the older advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 195 ones." additionally, some stated that generational differences among female professionals limited women‟s abilities to support one another. there appears to be a generational influence on the dynamics between women and within their gendered roles. working environments of community colleges the quantitative figures above demonstrated positive support for career advancement among females. through content analysis, the researchers identified recurring statements regarding the high level of institutional cultural barriers apparent within institutions, which were used to address research question 3. as one participant commented: i believe decisions have, at times, been made with gender being one factor that is considered; however, i don't believe these decisions are entirely "based on gender." in many instances, a female is preferred [when hiring], but only if she is unlikely to become pregnant. females who are likely to become pregnant, are currently pregnant, or have been pregnant recently, are very unlikely to be considered for promotions or administrative positions. another of the women reflected on a conversation that had been overheard of administrators discussing appointments to committees, "i've heard directors state that they need 'emptynesters' to chair a committee because of their dedication. i've also heard people refer to women as being on the 'mommy track'." other participants commented on the lack of support by their institutions of talented women, "there is no positive reinforcement for talented capable professional women. they appear to be seen as aggressive and are not encouraged. no positive feedback is given for high performance." as another commented, "women are perceived as less efficient and more emotional despite education and employment background." some of the participants discussed the impact of the dominant (white male) culture within their institutions, “…there is a constant push and pull going on between the „white male boys camp‟ and „white female girls camp.‟ only one minority is allowed in the group.” many participants stated that those women in positions of authority demonstrated traits of this primary culture, exhibiting more aggressive male traits than their female subordinates. the participants also acknowledged that there were few opportunities for the advancement of women within their institutions, and “those that are available are seldom given to women.” as one commented, "…our leadership has been here for so long, and the men hold the majority of the power at the top levels of administration, they simply aren‟t going anywhere. there are no opportunities for women to move up; they just leave." discussion female support of career advancement of female colleagues the women of the study reflected (as part of their quantitative survey responses) perceptions of substantial support of female career advancement among their colleagues. in contrast to this positive support were comments made that highlighted the jealousies and competition that underlie a significant number of the female-to-female relationships in the workplace. in fact, the researchers of the study identified that 77% (99 of 129) of the responses received by the participants mentioned competition and/or jealousy as part of the female relationships in their current professional positions in public community colleges. continuing to address the reasons behind why some women are promoted in language that is derogatory, such as insinuating a woman has an inappropriate relationship with a superior or that she is promoted because she is pretty or cute, is simply reinforcing the barriers that women are not as intelligent and capable as their male counterparts. men do not persist in sabotaging their competition in such a manner. they appear to welcome healthy competition. the behaviors demonstrated by women in support of other women are disadvantageous to the gender. the results of our study indicated that a majority of the participants perceived their working environments to be supportive of the professional development of potential female leaders. participants with male immediate supervisors showed a higher level of dissatisfaction with the support of female career opportunities. we found this interesting and perhaps supportive of the literature that claims that men are more overt and transparent in their management versus women. if men are not supportive, they will display this publically by their actions. women perhaps may portray a public image of support, but their actions and behaviors prove otherwise. this was further supported by the discussions of the participants who reported that their female supervisors were unsupportive and withheld important information that was necessary for the subordinates to be successful in their jobs. behaviors among female colleagues in addition to the sabotaging of others, it also appears that women undermine their gender by utilizing undercutting and back-biting techniques within the professional culture (heifetz, 2007; mooney, 2005; tanenbaum, 2002), often referred to as catfights. as some of the participants noted, they experienced competition and lack of support from their female supervisors. comments from participants in this study indicated that female supervisors did not develop support systems for upcoming female subordinates. it appears that some women perceived relationships with female superiors as more competitive than supportive. the question remains as to why some superiors view the up and coming female professionals within their colleges as threats rather than as protégées. this issue could be grounded in generational differences among supervisors and advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 196 subordinates. many times older women perceive that their younger counterparts must pay the same dues as their predecessors, whether beneficial to the subordinates or not. others perceive that organizations will only allow a certain number of women in positions of authority. supporting a subordinate‟s growth could be detrimental to the career of the token woman. supervisors may perceive that grooming subordinates for future leadership positions will ultimately cost them their positions of power. women seem to innately feel that the successes of one devalue the successes of others. working environments of community colleges the contradiction between the indication of female-to-female support, and the identified covert actions among female relationships, leaves the researchers to evaluate why some females deem it necessary to adopt these defensive behaviors when interacting with other women. both of the researchers of the study have been exposed to the behaviors of women in various working environments, and perceive that the actions demonstrated within the comments of the participants who work within community colleges are supported in part by their institutions' "hierarchical bureaucracies …based on traditional structures that favor men," which limit career advancement opportunities for women (mitchell & eddy, 2008; twombly, 1995). this would support the psychodynamic perspective, which states that behaviors are influenced by conscious and unconscious influences. with limited positions of power and influence within many community colleges and many of these held by men, competition will ensue. historically, women have competed for men's attention, and today researchers have noted that this continues. women are accustomed to fighting for equality and parity within an environment of limited positions of power for women at the top, which results in tokenism. this further exacerbates the problem. it is difficult to understand why once a woman is promoted, her female peers do not always support her. if women do not see themselves as equals, but they want to reach parity, they must be supportive of those that do reach the top rungs of career ladders. if they continue to sabotage those that come before them, they will continue to nurture the reputations of women being too emotional and petty to serve in top leadership positions. implications the number of comments from the study participants that identified perceived competition among women, if not realistic, appears to be a perceived reality among some professional relationships. while other minority groups work to create organized support systems in efforts to expand their influences within a variety of organizations, policies, and social efforts, women have not figured out how to do so, thereby diminishing the power and progress of the women‟s movements throughout the centuries. historically, women fought for the right to vote and to work outside of the home (solomon, 1985). today they continue to bond together under efforts not associated specifically with gender, such as breast cancer research and mothers against drunk driving. even with these small efforts at organizing as groups, women are not joining together to help move the gender into greater positions of authority in professional environments, including the world of higher education. instead, some women prefer to tear down their statuses as a whole rather than allow any one woman to surpass another. if the results of our study could be generalized across the gender, women convey a desire for their gender to be “at the top.” their inner turmoil, however, is actually “why am i not at the top?” until women can join together instead of fighting with and among one another, the gender as a whole will struggle to move forward. the literature on female professional staff in community colleges is limited. these individuals make up the largest sector of professional employees and are an important part of the operations of these institutions. further research needs to be conducted to explore the working environments of these individuals as they continue to be affected by barriers to career advancement and work and life balance issues. if females are not supportive of their own gender, it will be difficult for others to 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(2004). a psychodynamic perspective of workplace bullying: containment, boundaries and a futile search for recognition. british journal of guidance and counselling, (32)3, 269-280. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 198 table 1 frequencies and percentages of female support comments theme f % interpersonal limitations 68 55 competition between females 62 50 rather work with men 14 11 jealousy/threat of other women 68 55 lack of trust of other women 65 53 institutional cultural limitations 61 50 must adopt masculine traits 16 13 must fit into traditional male culture 33 27 tokenism 17 14 no positions of power 28 23 n = 129 the role performance of female headteachers in primary schools advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 106 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 106-114, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper stepping stones: nine lessons from women leaders in academic medicine megan m. palmer, krista j. hoffmann-longtin, emily c. walvoord, and mary e. dankoski megan m. palmer: assistant professor of emergency medicine and assistant dean for faculty affairs and professional development at indiana university school of medicine, assistant professor of educational leadership & policy studies at indiana university-purdue university indianapolis email: mmpalmer@indiana.edu; phone: 317-278-0367 krista j. hoffmann-longtin: director of programs and evaluation, office of faculty affairs and professional development, indiana university school of medicine email: klongtin@iu.edu; phone: 317-278-0367 emily c. walvoord: associate professor of clinical pediatrics, assistant dean for faculty affairs and professional development, indiana university school of medicine email: ewalvoor@iupui.edu; phone: 317-278-0367 mary e. dankoski: lester d. bibler scholar and associate professor of family medicine, vice chair for faculty and academic affairs, department of family medicine, and associate dean for faculty affairs and professional development, indiana university school of medicine email: mdankosk@iupui.edu; phone: 317-278-0367 accepted september 9, 2013 women now make up half of all medical school matriculates; yet few women hold leadership positions in academic health centers. the reasons for this gender gap are complex and have been the subject of much discussion. however, the experiences of women who successfully ascend to positions of senior leadership are rarely examined. it is critical to develop a greater understanding of women’s paths to leadership positions in order to inspire and enable more women to seek such opportunities. using a semi-structured protocol, we interviewed 16 women leaders who were willing to share their career journeys in a public forum. these leaders were asked to share pivotal moments or milestones, referred to as “stepping stones,” in their careers. the interviews were taped, transcribed and analysed for significant patterns and consistent themes. nine themes were identified and included: hold fast to your values; be open to unexpected opportunities; surround yourself with people who believe in you and people you believe in; be assertive in your communication and actions; continually refine your leadership skills; don’t take things personally; stay organized; build positive relationships and welcoming environments; and when and if necessary, prove them wrong. the women leaders had strikingly similar lessons to share. this study develops a deeper understanding of the career paths of women in leadership positions, setting the stage for future study as well as encouraging and empowering more women to climb the leadership ladder. keywords: women in medicine; academic medicine; leadership development; qualitative research introduction by many accounts, women are making great strides in academic medicine. a major milestone was reached in 20032004 when, for the first time in history, women comprised 50% percent of medical school matriculates (association of american medical colleges, 2010). such strides, however, are not uniform across disciplines and progress is rather mixed among faculty ranks. while growing in number, women are concentrated in the junior faculty ranks and non-tenured positions. across all of higher education, there are proportionally fewer women at each step in the academic career ladder (national research council, 2009; martinez et al., 2007), and in many disciplines, there is a strikingly low number of women who enter, remain in, and advance through the ranks to full professor and positions of senior leadership (burelli, 2008). among medical schools, for example, in 2009-2010 women comprised 19% of full professors, 13% of department chairs, and 13% of medical school deans (association of american medical colleges, 2010). the reasons for the gender gap among faculty are multifactorial, and evidence shows that women face cumulative career disadvantages over time. these may include lack of mentoring (bickel et al., 2002), tokenism and smaller advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 107 professional networks (thompson & sekaquaptewa, 2002), a chilly climate (rosser, 2004), and inflexible policies for the integration of personal and professional roles (welch, wiehe, palmer-smith, & dankoski, 2011). further, many disadvantages stem from unconscious biases that cause both men and women to underestimate the competence of women and overestimate that of men (isaac, lee, & carnes, 2009; valian, 1999). this phenomenon plays a tremendous role in academe where peer review, evaluation, and sponsorship are pivotal to advancement (e.g., trix & psenka, 2003; wenneras & wold, 1997). evaluations of competence also have profound implications for obtaining leadership roles and for being perceived as an effective leader. despite numerous studies that show far more similarities than differences between men‟s and women‟s leadership styles (catalyst report, 2005), women are often stereotyped as lacking the very qualities associated with effective leadership. for instance, one study of leaders in the corporate sector found that many business leaders maintained a stereotypical view that “women take care,” that is, that women leaders are better than men at supporting and rewarding subordinates. in contrast, the stereotypical view of men is that they “take charge,” that is, that male leaders are better at behaviors such as delegating and problem solving. in this study, these gender stereotypes were strongest when women worked in predominantly male fields; thus, women in such environments spend considerable effort motivating and negotiating with subordinates to get their buy-in. in such an environment, the demands of leadership may be far more difficult for women than for their male counterparts (catalyst report, 2005). leadership can indeed come with a personal cost for women, in both the business world and in academic medicine. for example, when department chairs at academic medical centers were interviewed about the continued shortage of women, the following themes emerged: constraints of traditional gender roles, sexism in the environment, and few effective mentors. women department chairs, in particular, reported that they personally experienced a lack of recognition, resistance from direct reports, and limitations on leadership and decisionmaking (bickel et al., 2002). yet, despite such challenges, many women do successfully navigate academe, ascend the leadership ladder, and become successful institutional leaders. multiple metaphors for women‟s path to leadership have been used including a glass ceiling (cotter, hermsen, ovadia, & vanneman, 2001), a sticky floor (shambaugh, 2007), and a labyrinth (eagly & carli, 2007). to the junior or mid-career woman faculty member, the path to leadership can appear confusing, complex, and riddled with challenges. further, although many studies have been conducted regarding gender gaps in career advancement, far fewer studies have been conducted to understand the experiences of women who do ascend to positions of senior leadership in academic medicine. in this study, we sought to fill this gap and learn whether women in leadership at our institution had similar experiences to those cited in the literature and to glean lessons about leadership in academic medicine through conducting interviews with women who hold influential leadership positions. in his book on interviewing as a qualitative research method, seidman wrote, “stories are a way of knowing” (2006, p. 7). by interviewing a number of women about their personal and professional career milestones and analyzing those narratives, our goals were to generate tangible leadership lessons and demystify the path to leadership for current and future generations of women in the academy. theoretical underpinnings personal narratives provide an important window into the human experience, and illustrate a clearer picture of the collective identity of groups (myerhoff & ruby, 1982; personal narratives group, 1989). myerhoff and ruby (1982) contended that storytelling and its interpretation allow researchers to deconstruct and examine the complex boundaries of our relationships and organizations. as illustrated in the literature, these complexities multiply for women in academic medicine. women‟s voices and individual experiences provide an important lens through which to view gender within organizations (personal narratives group, 1989). as researchers, we seek to collect women‟s stories as a way to better understand the ways in which pivotal moments have helped them to make sense of their lives. further, by asking our participants to explain how they make meaning of these moments, they are encouraged to be reflexive, so that others may benefit from understanding their approaches (myerhoff & ruby, 1982). while scholars sometimes disagree on the specifics of what constitutes a narrative (sandelowski, 1991), for the purposes of this study, a narrative is defined as a story that included a recounting of events, and an attempt to make meaning out of those events, either for the individual who experienced the events or the collective. according to the personal narratives group (1989), narratives are especially important to understanding the experiences of women. these stories have the potential to illuminate several aspects of gender relations including the construction of identity, the relationship between individual and society, and the power dynamics between men and women. methods interview setting and protocol using a snowball sampling technique (patton, 2002), we identified women leaders at our institution (including department chairs, deans, and high-level administrators) who might be willing to share their career journeys. between 2008 and 2012, prospective participants were contacted to take part advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 108 in 60-minute, public interviews over lunch. the interview series was described to prospective participants and audience members as “a forum where all faculty and students can learn about professional development through hearing the personal career journeys of successful women.” the participants were also informed that they would be asked about “significant milestones in their personal and professional lives that have led to career success.” the study was approved by our institutional review board, and we received written confirmation from all of the leaders of their willingness to participate in the study. the interviews were conducted using a semi-structured protocol (patton, 2002) in which the leaders were asked to tell stories of pivotal moments or “stepping stones” in their career journeys that encouraged their growth or success. more specifically, they were asked to, “describe what this stone represents for you, and how it contributed to you becoming the person that you are.” each leader shared six to eight “stones” or significant narratives. additional follow-up questions included:  did you make any mistakes or wrong turns along the way that you wish you could have avoided? what were they?  what do you know now that you wish you knew when you were starting out in your career? what advice do you have for women who are early in their professional development?  what accomplishment do you consider to be the most significant? what are you most proud of? what do you hope to do in the future? participants sixteen women faculty leaders from the institution participated in the interviews. twelve participants had md degrees, three had phds, and one had an mba. the participants represented a variety of disciplines, with pediatrics being the most common. based on the observations of the research team, three participants were african-american, and 13 participants were white. qualitative analysis each interview was taped and transcribed, and the interviewer took notes during the event. members of the research team read and analyzed the interview transcripts and field notes for significant theme patterns. each transcript was reviewed individually and in the context of the sample. as often suggested in qualitative analysis (patton, 2002), an inductive process was used to determine consistent categories across the interviews. separate elements were placed into larger categories and the research team developed descriptors to represent the sentiment of each section or cluster (patton, 2002). researchers then analyzed the relationships among the clusters and developed higher-level categories or themes that drew together several related concepts (patton, 2002). after returning to the original data, representative examples were identified from the interviews and notes to support the themes discussed. results nine themes emerged from the qualitative analysis. these included: (1) hold fast to your values; (2) be open to unexpected opportunities; (3) surround yourself with people who believe in you and people you believe in; (4) be assertive in your communications and actions; (5) continually refine your leadership skills; (6) don‟t take things personally; (7) stay organized; (8) build positive relationships and welcoming environments; and (9) when and if necessary, prove them wrong. below, each theme is explained and sample quotes are provided. hold fast to your values virtually all of the women leaders interviewed for this study shared stories that conveyed a deep sense of commitment to their personal values. they knew themselves well and could clearly identify what mattered most in both their personal lives and their careers. for example, one interviewee remarked, “my heart was tugging me toward… medicine. i had dug my heels in before, so i listened to my heart. i joined.” further, the personal values these women held served as both an anchor and a compass throughout their lives. for example, one participant commented, “all of the work i do focuses on what i truly believe in.” another woman shared: i think that…sticking to what made me interested was very important. a lot of people get told what to do…but you‟ve got to have something that keeps you up at midnight…if you don‟t believe in it, you don‟t have it. at least half of the participants made comments about the importance of knowing one‟s values and sticking to what matters. for example, one woman remarked, “it‟s important to set goals for yourself and be a strong person. know what you are supposed to do on the inside and remain calm at all times.” another shared: it is important to find what you love and do it. forcing yourself into a position or being forced into a position that you don‟t love or that doesn‟t fit you [will not work]. regarding career and family, many of the women spoke about how their values related to their family shaped their priorities. one participant reflected: did i miss opportunities [to play with my children]? i‟m sure there were times that i was busy or i was cooking dinner. all i can say is you just do your best and you have to let yourself know that you are human. when my kids explain me to people, they… imply that i never had to choose between medicine and them…they never felt like medicine was my first priority….the way they look at it is, they think that i got it all done…i just tried to do it all. similarly, another woman shared: we assume we need to be a perfect mother…we have our expectations…that we should go to everything our kid does. the reality is that most people work and don‟t have the flexibility that we have and so in fact we can go to a lot more than somebody who has a job where they can‟t get time off and can‟t do these things. all of a sudden this light advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 109 bulb went off and i thought, „why am i killing myself trying to be the perfect mom? i‟m a good mom. i‟m a very good mom.‟ in addition to holding their personal values close, the women who participated in the interviews still felt it was critical to be open to opportunity. be open to unexpected opportunities in their stories, participants shared their openness to see opportunities in virtually every situation. many of the women offered stories of resilience in the face of challenges and learning from making the most of each situation. in looking back, one woman commented: i‟m amazed sometimes how i was able to make a curvy line into a straight one. i learned to develop the life philosophy that you should shoot for the stars. you might end up on the moon, but that‟s ok. i started reaching for things and didn‟t always get what i was aiming for. i did a fellowship at the nih which was definitely not my first choice for what i wanted to go into. however, i found it to be full of exciting opportunities and unlimited resources. today, looking back, i can see it wasn‟t a miss. you end up better if you make the most of each opportunity. the unexpected bumps in the road could have been perceived as obstacles yet the women who participated in the interviews explained how they found ways to convert the bumps to opportunities. one participant remarked: i found that taking things that i didn‟t necessarily think i would be interested in actually turned out to be some of the most interesting things that i‟ve done and helped to start building the areas where i have expertise today. similarly, another participant shared how she made the most out of a personal hardship: almost days after my baby was born, my husband was deployed. he was gone for the first year of my child‟s life; i was alone with no family doing this dissertation. but i think there is no better training for being a faculty member. i got really good at using my time well and i think it helped me to develop a resilience that has served me well in other positions…because it was really, really hard. i think those years were very important in helping me to become very good at staying focused. in order to turn unexpected events into opportunities, the women in the study shared that they relied on other people who also believed in their success. surround yourself with people who believe in you and people you believe in throughout each of our interviews, women spoke about the important role of others in their personal and professional development. they identified key individuals who believed in and supported them from both personal and professional arenas, and how this developed into belief in themselves. further, they also spoke about the importance of believing in the people with whom they worked most closely. for example, one woman shared: my husband… is a true partner in every way. he shares in all the responsibilities…..he is an incredible support to me and has always been somebody who sort of pushes me to achieve. another woman commented about the importance of friends, stating: i have a great cohort of women friends who i consider my mentors as well. they are people i can turn to that know all the words and are people i can talk to professionally. we talk about strategies for different things and challenging situations. beyond individuals who are currently in their lives, several participants discussed the importance of their parents or extended family. for example, one woman noted: my mother had a strong influence; she insisted that my brothers and i had equal responsibilities with household chores. also, as a teenager…my brother was treated…by a wonder woman md, who also happened to be pregnant. my mom said, “why don‟t you think about being a physician?” it never occurred to me that i couldn‟t do anything i wanted to do. many of the participants shared stories from their childhood about adults who left a lasting impression because of their belief in the participants‟ potential. for example, one woman remarked, “my first grade teacher was the first to appreciate my potential. she gave me encouragement and structure. i didn‟t come from a family of academics. the women stayed home.” among all of the participants, finding supportive colleagues and friends was critical. for example, one woman who was a single parent commented: the number of people that had helped me along, who babysat my kids, you would not believe. they were just wonderful. i didn‟t have family nearby, but i had a network of neighbors and friends…amazing people…who were so good to me. i think that creating that support system was really helpful. asking for help became my area of excellence. when reflecting on the importance of a colleague and mentor, another woman remarked: when i went into [my field]…the chair of the department…helped me learn how to get into the residency program; helped me to learn how to stay on the faculty. how to write a paper. how to do a poster. he introduced me to people at national meetings…he is one of the best mentors that i‟ve had and has helped me make an awful lot of decisions over time. ultimately, the vast majority of the women in the study shared in the sentiment that surrounding oneself with supportive friends, family, and colleagues is essential in career development and in becoming an effective leader. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 110 be assertive in your communications and actions the women who participated in our study also often discussed the importance of speaking and acting assertively, whether this was in negotiating for resources or giving feedback to others. this development of communication skills was identified as critical for obtaining leadership positions. for example, in reflecting about how she learned to seek mentors at various points in her career, one woman shared: i have been more pointed in looking for mentors… what exactly do i need help with now? who do i know that might help me? and then not being embarrassed to ask for it…i‟m not asking for the old traditional model of mentoring where you will be a lifetime guide for me to get to all realms but „i need help doing x, y, z….‟ i try to approach it in a very professional way. here is exactly what i‟m asking for. here is what i‟ll do and i try to be completely accountable. another commented about changes in her focus and assertiveness in making career decisions: i have become much more thoughtful in my decisionmaking. my earlier mindset was that i had to say yes because opportunities were coming to me, instead of a mindset that i could make a plan and then look for opportunities that fit that plan. it‟s a whole different mindset. there was little question that as leaders the participants learned to voice their opinions and ideas. in describing the need to do this one woman noted: if you want to make a difference, you have to step up. frequently i think women tend to be less vocal in a group situation than men….some of these meetings can be drowned out by the old boys club if the women don‟t speak up. i‟ve been to some meetings [recently where] there were a couple women who…wouldn‟t say a thing. i pulled them aside at a break and said, „talk. everything you say is fine! talk! because you will never get a chance again to get back into this community structure if you don‟t.‟ assertive communication was just one leadership skill among many that the women in the study felt they needed to hone in order to be effective. continually refine your leadership skills many of the women in our study also discussed a life-long learning approach to their own leadership development. this ranged from gaining important skills related to budget management and supervision of personnel to developing an authentic and collaborative leadership style. for example, participants shared the following examples: it‟s not like i set out and said i want to be an administrator that deals with budgets and personnel. at the same time, i was looking for ways to improve my skill set so i looked for professional development opportunities in different areas. i spent all my life in education, as you would imagine, but also in leadership, just trying to develop skills for things that we didn‟t learn in medical school. i tried to be very deliberate in looking for opportunities to participate in that would help develop my skill set. i think there is great value in building consensus around a plan at any stage of leadership, because then you can use that plan to make difficult decisions. i think that sometimes women might have an advantage with that because i think we tend to listen well. i think we tend to communicate effectively and a lot of what i learned to do over the years is take what people share with me and write it in a way that is easy to digest and strategic and forward thinking. despite the fact that many of the women felt increasingly confident about their leadership abilities, many shared that it was still important to develop a thick skin. don't take things personally many of the women in the study discussed their personal development in the ability to manage their emotional reactions and to not take things personally. participants told very personal stories in this regard: people can put extra pressure on their interpretation of your behaviors and can be very quick to use adjectives that none of us like….at the end of the day, i want people to like me but not at the expense of doing what is right. so i do work really hard on personal relationships because they are important to me, but that is not all that i base decisions on. i try to be fair and i try to be transparent…i would rather if somebody had a problem with me, they talk to me. i just try to lay that out there. even when not achieving the success for which they had hoped, the women felt it was important to manage their personal reactions. one participant shared: last year, i was candidate for [a leadership position] and not selected. this was a harder one, it felt more personal. here‟s when i realized that everything would be fine: i went on an international trip with my family shortly after the search process. we went to a very crowded place. i realized that no one there knew or cared anything about [my job or institution]. it put my life in perspective of the world. another shared the struggle of trying not to take things personally and how this might be more difficult for female than male leaders: as a new chair, i would meet with certain sections and just feel like i needed to have brought my bullet-proof vest… i started becoming good friends with male chairs around the country. when you get to know them and you start going out to dinner with them in an informal environment, you find that they have exactly the same feelings and the same challenges but they are better at not wearing it home and staying up all night. i found that i wasn‟t alone. i also read a lot of books and went to every session i could find at meetings about dealing with the emotional side. it has been getting more comfortable and i am much better at this now than i was before. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 111 other women reflected on the importance of balance and outside activities to provide distance and not make everything personal: you put one foot in front of the other and do as much as you can and then turn off the light and close the door and go home and come back the next day. sometimes i‟m on email late at night or something but for the most part, i try not to take it home. i have outside interests…that seem to help my disposition a great deal….so you find other outlets and venues and things that you are interested in doing in your life and exploring relationships and whatnot. live your life. in addition to managing their emotions, many participants found it was important to have a system for managing time and tasks. stay organized the women we interviewed spoke at great length about goal setting, time management, organization, and delegating to others as critical for achieving their career goals. for example, one participant remarked: i can‟t be at three places at once….so i‟m a good delegator and have developed my administrative skills so i can actually have enough people around me that are doing the work. i meet with them regularly and kind of move things along that way. i have to do that. in addition to maintaining a system for delegating and organizing, one participant mentioned the importance of attending to the task at hand: focus, focus, focus. when i‟m doing [a procedure], i‟m doing that [procedure]. i do rely on people to assist me and remind me; some things have changed. but the main thing is the focus. many participants remarked on the importance of building a strong team in support of their goals. for example: i have three research coordinators that are amazing and that make the research happen. i can‟t give them enough credit because they make the research happen. i can think of the idea. i can do the networking all over the country with people i meet. i can get into studies but the actual nitty gritty, getting things done, they do with my help and supervision. that is a big, big argument for delegating. while delegating proved to be an important strategy, many participants remarked that this approach was possible only because they paid close attention to their relationships with others. build positive relationships and welcoming environments the women in our study also discussed their positive attitude and respectful approach to dealing with others. many of our participants used their relationship-building abilities to their advantage. for example: i have the optimism gene. my attitude is we‟re all people and so i‟m going to do what i can to pull my weight and i‟ll help you and you help me and we do that no matter what any of our external appearances are. i think that having that kind of attitude has made it possible for me to get along with people. the importance of being respectful of others even in moments of disagreement was mentioned by more than one participant. as a participant explained: i just believe if i give you respect, you have to give respect back to me. when i have an opinion and something to share, i‟m not a person who believes in screaming or having a tantrum. i just speak quietly. my big stick is my mind. you cannot influence my mind. you have to know who you are and be true to yourself. that has always served me. an attitude of respect and collegiality was a useful tactic when the participants encountered barriers. when and if necessary, prove them wrong not surprisingly, many of the participants told stories where they had to overcome negative messages about their career choices. rather than letting these obstacles become major setbacks, however, many of the women set out to show that they could be successful. for example, one participant explained: [a senior colleague] told me that i would never have an academic career because i wanted to work part time…finally…i said, well i‟m not going to let this guy do that. so i just started looking for opportunities. it just was very clear to me that i was going to have to make my own way if i wanted to be successful. similarly, one participant shared: in high school when i told my advisor that i wanted to go into medicine, i was steered to something else so i went around that little rock and i found another counsellor who got me into the program that allowed me to do the career sample. she took me seriously. and lastly, one woman explained: my 6th grade teacher one day was talking about career opportunities, and said to me that i might want to become a doctor. but the script from my grandmother was “marry, have kids, make toast in the morning.” one christmas i asked for a microscope. grandma was mad at my parents for buying one for me. i overheard their argument while looking for specimens. but i didn‟t buy her script. in summary, nine themes emerged from the participant interviews, including: (1) hold fast to your values; (2) be open to unexpected opportunities; (3) surround yourself with people who believe in you and people you believe in; (4) be assertive in your communications and actions; (5) continually refine your leadership skills; (6) don‟t take things personally; (7) stay organized; (8) build positive relationships and welcoming environments; and (9) when and if necessary, prove them wrong. these themes offer a powerful lens through which to examine the development of women leaders in academic medicine. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 112 discussion previous research has shown that career paths differ between men and women in academic medicine. for example, white, mcdade, yamagata, and morahan (2012) recently studied gender-related differences in the pathway to deanship among 534 deans appointed between 1980 and 2006 (38 of whom were women). they found that women took longer on average than men to advance through the ranks from assistant to full professor, served shorter terms as dean, and that women deans were more likely to graduate from and serve as dean at less research-intensive institutions. the finding that women tend to advance through the ranks more slowly than men is not new (i.e., ash, carr, goldstein & friedman, 2004; wright et. al., 2003); however, less is known about the lived experiences of those women who do achieve positions of senior leadership, regardless of the length of time it took them. fewer studies capture the qualitative experiences of women in leadership in academic medicine or more broadly across higher education, with some notable exceptions. pololi‟s (2010) book, for example, captures the perspectives of women faculty in academic medicine based on two qualitative studies during which she and her research team interviewed 116 faculty members of various ranks across five medical schools (55% of whom were women). she notes, little has been written about values, power, and relationships in medical schools. there is modest literature about medical school faculty per se, but women‟s experience in particular has largely been left out of the conversation…their perspective…in many respects is that of an outsider. (p. 11-12) some of the success strategies that the women in her studies described include “creating microenvironments,” that is, collaborative and trusting work groups and focusing on the increased opportunities to be of service to others. many of the women interviewed by pololi described the ability to bring new perspectives to policies, practices, and decision-making as far more important than leadership simply for the sake of being in charge. while some of the themes from pololi‟s work are similar to those that emerged in our study, ours offers new insights. because our study focused on women in academic medicine currently holding leadership positions, we add to the understanding of those who have successfully navigated the complex and competitive environment of an academic medical center. there are a few qualitative studies designed to understand the experiences of women in other sectors of higher education. for example, philipsen (2008) conducted 46 interviews with women faculty members across all phases of the faculty life cycle. this research generated a number of recommendations for success in higher education, such as learning to say no, finding a mentor, maintaining a sharp focus on one‟s goals, developing a well-connected network, and cultivating both personal and work relationships. in a book based on interviews with african american women faculty, cooper (2006) emphasized the necessity of feeling deeply passionate about one‟s work, stating: “a passion-based philosophical framework does more than drive your tenure activities. it can also serve as the foundation or a successful career. when your ideas and scholarship are challenged, simply refer back to your framework and refocus” (p. 120-121). this advice resonates with the theme from our study about holding fast to one‟s values. many of our interviewees based their career and life choices on what mattered most to them, thus using their values like a compass to guide them throughout their personal and professional journeys. similarly, madsen (2008) interviewed ten current or recently retired women presidents or chancellors of universities about their lives and the influences of their experiences on their careers. some of the themes and observations in this book are similar to the themes in our study. for example, the majority of the presidents described their parents and other influential individuals who, throughout their lives, mentored them and provided both support and challenges for growth. additionally, the women presidents described the importance of relationships and trust for effective leadership. moreover, madsen (2008) wrote that one takeaway from her interviews is that: women academic leaders do not always intentionally look for leadership positions, but instead work hard and perform to the best of their abilities in their current posts. they are often offered added responsibilities and new positions and are also encouraged by others to apply for and accept new opportunities. (p. 152) this is similar to the theme from our interviews of being open to unexpected opportunities and, with mentoring regarding strategic risk taking, being flexible enough to take advantage of them. again, while some themes from these studies relate to what we learned in this study, in comparison to other sectors of higher education, academic medical centers have a unique organizational structure and business model due to the clinical enterprise. thus, our focus on women in academic medicine adds to the literature base about women in leadership by filling this gap. limitations one major limitation of our study is that all interview participants were drawn from the same academic institution. women may share some common experiences by working at the same institution, and a multi-institutional sample may yield different results. however, the institution from which the participants were drawn is one of the largest of its kind in the country, and thus likely to be more diverse. an additional limitation is that the interviews were conducted in front of an audience. while this was because the interviews were intended to serve the dual purpose of our research study and as a learning opportunity for the audience, the potential exists that the participants may have censored themselves to some degree for the purpose of impression management. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 113 conclusion throughout her book, madsen (2008) commented about the powerful role of self-reflection in the lives of the women university presidents that she interviewed, a skill which they developed early in life and practiced routinely throughout their development. examples of quotes from her participants include, „reflection has been an absolute lifesaver‟ and „reflection can be the most enriching experience if you are willing to deeply acknowledge your own frailties…‟ (p. 11). similarly, we have been struck by the self-reflective capabilities of the women we interviewed and the role of selfreflection as a component of leadership development and effectiveness. we believe that discussing life lessons of successful women is important to empower women to create and embrace their own career paths. by developing a deeper understanding of the unexpected yet authentic career paths of women in leadership positions in academic medicine, we hope to encourage and empower more women to climb the leadership ladder. references ash, a. s., carr, p. l., goldstein, r., & friedman, r. h. 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(2003). gender differences in academic advancement: patterns, causes, and potential solutions in one u.s. college of medicine. academic medicine, 78(5), 500508. educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 213 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 213-222, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper using classroom community to achieve gender equity in online and face-to-face graduate classes barbara polnick , carol ritter, and raymond fink ii barbara polnick email bpolnick@shsu.edu; phone office: 936-294-3859; cell: 936-520-7652 carol ritter email edu_clr@shsu.edu; phone office: 936-294-1124; cell: 713-305-3637 raymond fink email raymond.fink@selu.edu; phone office: 985-549-5203; cell: 504452-3272 accepted august 4, 2011 the purpose of this study was to determine the degree to which graduate students’ perceptions of classroom community in their online and face-to-face classes differed based on gender. students participating in the study were generally from urban, suburban, and rural school districts in southwest texas. all students (144) who were pursuing a master’s degree in educational leadership using either face-to-face or online format in the fall semester, 2008 were emailed a survey. of the 126 surveys returned (88%), 102 participants were selected for this study based on completion of data. perceptions were measured using the classroom community scale (ccs), which included three measures: total classroom community, connectedness, and learning. classroom community in both online and face-to-face classes was evaluated by students who were enrolled during the fall semester, 2008. it was found that after implementing classroom community elements, there were no statistically significant differences in the perceived total classroom community, connectedness, and learning of male and female students attending both face-to-face and online classes. the study also found that there were no statistically significant differences in the perceived total classroom community, connectedness, and learning of male and female students attending only online classes and for those attending only face-to-face classes. findings suggest that by providing elements of a positive classroom community, university instructors can better meet the needs of male and female graduate students, thus eliminating any potential gender inequities in both face-to-face and online classes. keywords: online learning, gender, gender equity, gender gap, distance learning, classroom community, connectedness, learning, webbased learning introduction enhancing online learning has been the goal of many universities today. enhancement may come in several formats, but critical to the quality of any online program is successful completion for all students, regardless of gender, race, age, or ethnicity. even though technological advances have been made with regard to male and female participation, studies reveal that gender differences still exist in several areas related to distance learning. in this paper, we explore how the implementation of classroom community can serve as an equalizer for female students who may otherwise struggle with online learning and/or the use of technology as a learning tool. studies have examined gender differences in confidence, teacher attitude, computer experience, and perceptions of computers as a male domain (young, 2000). in addition, muilenburg and berge (2005) when analyzing barriers to online learning found gender as a barrier with respect to administrative issues as well as time and support for studies. in a later study of age, gender and ethnicity in web-based instruction, enoch and soker (2006) found gender to be a factor in terms of access to technology for israeli university students enrolled in web-based courses. additionally, wolfe (1999), in her study of gender differences in computer-mediated classroom interactions, found that “electronic communication does not automatically equalize the proportion of discourse spoken by men and women” (p. 153). in their analysis of retention problems for female students in university computer science, bunderson and christensen (1995) reported that females were less likely to take advantage of advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 214 computer learning opportunities than males. similarly, young (2000) reported gender differences in the way high school students oriented themselves to the world of computers and technology, with boys being more confident than girls in their use of technology. one essential element of online learning is the creation of classroom community where students are both challenged in their learning and feel they are a contributing member of the group as a whole (rovai, 2001). researchers have found differences in how males and females perceive classroom community in both graduate and undergraduate online classes (booker, 2008; rovai & baker, 2005). measuring male and female graduate students’ perceptions of how well their courses developed a sense of classroom community is important in targeting areas for improvement. in this study, we explored potential differences in male and female perceptions of their success in both online and face-to-face classrooms. in addition, we measured the perceptions of classroom community of males and females who attended either online or face-to-face graduate educational leadership classes. these perceptions were measured using the classroom community scale developed by rovai (2002) who granted the authors permission to use the instrument in 2008. specifically, we explored the following three research questions: 1. is there a statistically significant difference in the perceptions of males and females regarding elements of classroom community as experienced by all students in either online or face-to-face classes? 2. is there a statistically significant difference in the perceptions of males and females regarding elements of classroom community as experienced in online classrooms? 3. is there a statistically significant difference in the perceptions of males and females regarding elements of classroom community as experienced in face-toface classrooms? classroom community developing a positive classroom community is essential in both face-to-face classes and online classes (rovai, 2001). a positive classroom community insures that students feel connected to the professor and other students in the class in order for their educational needs to be met. in analyzing the classroom community scale instrument, we found two main components of classroom community, connectedness and learning. connectedness is composed of spirit, trust and interactions. the spirit component encompasses the feelings that students are accepted by their class members (2001), that students belong with the group and there is a group identity. trust is developed among students, which allows students to feel safe to respond to others and share their own ideas, indicating that friendships are established. learning includes the feeling that the class will work together to complete a goal and to construct meaning and understanding of the course content (2001). palloff & pratt (1999) reported that when developing classroom community in online classes, the professor assumes the role of facilitator in developing the course, posting the syllabus, discussing goals, ethics, communication styles and clear expectations for the class. also, the professor develops procedural rules and decision-making norms, which are essential to establishing classroom community (1999). in both online and face-to-face classrooms, the professor should take the time to get to know the students and for them to get to know each other (booker, 2008). tinto (1997) noted that building supportive peer groups is important because they provide for both social and academic support. however, the development of classroom communities online can be a timeconsuming and difficult process when students are disconnected from the university campus life. also, professors who teach online have difficulty perceiving students’ physical reactions with only written language for communication to monitor and adjust instruction (palloff & pratt, 1999). creating a friendly social class climate in online venues at the beginning of the semester is essential for successful learning, because human needs play a large part in the way online communities are formed (collins & berge, 1996; cradler, mcnabb, freeman, & burchett, 2002; dow, 2008; palloff & pratt, 1999). muilenburg and berge (2005) found that social interaction was strongly related to a positive classroom to the point that the lack of social interaction were perceived by most students as even being a strong barrier to their learning.shepard (2008), coordinator for educational technology for walden university, found that helping to build online communities was important for the success of the students in their graduate and undergraduate programs. this was done when students are engaged both with other students and the faculty (2008). diramio and wolverton (2006) found that providing online connections, experiences, and setting high expectations for student work facilitated students in becoming responsible for their own work. santovec (2004) also emphasized that online learning communities can provide for a deep understanding of the subject matter through discussions and interactions with members of the class. students must feel an affiliation with the university in order to be successful, even when they are never physically present on the campus. palloff and pratt (1999) created a framework for building online communities which included collaborative learning in which students are engaged in creating meaning of the course content. lally and barrett (1999) in their study of building classroom community online found that cooperative learning was a key feature of online classes. curtis (2004) and caverly and macdonald (2002) found that much of the success of online communities comes from the use of online threaded discussions. students had the time to think through their discussion, and these cooperative group discussions helped them reach their academic goals. in advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 215 addition, cooperative groups tend to encourage and support one another so that they can all be successful. gender and sense of community in the area of classroom community, rovai and baker (2005) found that female students in online graduate courses responded with higher scores than males in the areas of connectedness and learning. also, females perceived that their learning was greater than the male students. according to sullivan (2001), both male and female students enjoyed faceto-face interaction in traditional classrooms; however, females, more than males, felt like the lack of face-to-face interaction was a major drawback in online classrooms. however, the writer also found that it was possible to create online learning environments that both men and women would find favorable. in the areas of learning and student outcomes, there have been some discussions concerning the effectiveness of online classrooms as compared to the face-to-face classes. allen and seaman (2003) found that online instruction is as good as or equal to face-to-face instruction. russell (1999) found that the online students had the same grades and attitudes towards the course as the face-to-face students taking the same classes. in addition, students in online classes participated in the same high levels of thinking as their face-to-face students (christopher, tallent-runnels & thomas, 2004). however, additional studies found that students preferred face-to-face contact over online instruction (bikowski, 2007; ritter, polnick, fink, & oescher, 2009). methodology the classroom community scale (ccs) developed by rovai (2002) was used to measure participants’ sense of community, connectedness, and learning. the survey was administered using an email format during the fall semester of 2008. students from 12 educational leadership classes responded to the survey. one hundred twenty six of the one hundred fortyfour students completed the questionnaire for a response rate of 88%. a single student responded to less than 70% of the items on all scales, and three participants did not identify the delivery type of the course and five did not record a gender. these participants were eliminated from the analyses leaving a usable total of 117. because the 15 students taking hybrid classes in the survey had no male students, they will not be further considered in this study, which resulted in a sample of 102 students. of the 102 participants responding to more than 70% of the items and reporting gender, slightly less than three fourths of the participants were female (71, 69.6%) and slightly more than one fourth were male (31, 30.4%). of these respondents, 70 (59.8%) were enrolled in an online class and 32 (27.4%) in face-to-face classes. the ccs instrument consisted of 20 items to which participants responded on a five point likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree rovai (2002). three sets of scores are calculated. the first is a total community score calculated as the mean of all non-missing items. the second and third were subscales of 10 items each which represented connectedness and learning scores. again the scores for these were calculated as the mean on non-missing items. no score was calculated for any subject for which less than 70% of the items on the total scale or subscales was missing. scores for the total community scale and both subscales of connectedness and learning were therefore in the same scoring range on the response scales rovai (2002). ten of the 20 items in the ccs are negatively worded. a participant’s response to the negatively worded statement required the response to be reversed. that is, a strongly disagree response to a negative item suggested the subject strongly agreed, and the answer of 0 is recoded to a 4. the following algorithm was used to make all changes (5item) = score. scores are interpreted as described in table 1. the scores for the total score should be interpreted relative to community. scores for the first and second subscale are interpreted relative to connectedness and learning respectively. a principal components confirmatory factor analysis with varimax rotation was used to examine the underlying constructs of community, connectedness, and learning. in the case of all but one item, factor loadings were consistent with those stated by rovai (2001). cronbach’s alpha was used to estimate the reliability of the total score and both subscale scores. these estimates for the community scale, connectedness subscale, and learning subscale were .91, .91, and .86 respectively. all were acceptable levels of reliability for the purpose of this study. the summation of all twenty items yielded a measure of a sense of community. the even numbered questions, when summed, provide a score to reveal the sense of learning in the class. the odd numbered questions, when summed, provide a score to reveal the sense of connectedness in the class. findings related to gender the means and standard deviations of the total group (online and face-to-face) by gender for each of the three measures of the survey instrument are shown in table 2. examining the mean scores from table 2 and using the matrix from table 1 shows that the mean scores of community, connectedness, and learning for the total sample as well as both males and females in both the online classes and face-to-face classes were in the somewhat positive range. the mean community scores for both males and females showed that both perceived that the learning and connectedness components of the classroom community were strong enough to support their success in the classroom. this trend was also evident in the connectedness subcomponent where the mean scores for males and females indicated both groups experienced a feeling of acceptance and belonging throughout the course. the highest mean scores were in the advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 216 area of learning. here the scores for both males and females indicated that students felt that their goals were accomplished, in part, because of the support from their other class members. to test the significance of the differences of the means for students taking both online and face-to-face classes, a t-test was run. the results showed no statistically significant differences in the perceptions of males and females regarding elements of classroom community as experienced by all students in either online or face-to-face classes. all assumptions underlying the ttest were met, and the results can be seen in table 3. the effect sizes for all three scales are small (huck, 2008). table 4 shows the data by gender for those students enrolled in online classes. based upon the matrix from table 1, the mean scores for both males and females in the area of community and learning are in the somewhat positive range. the learning mean scores for males and females were, however, somewhat higher than the other subscales. the scores for connectedness were in the high portion of the neutral range. to test the significance of the differences of the means for students taking online t-test was run. the test showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the perceptions of males and females regarding elements of community, connectedness and learning as experienced by students in the online classes. all assumptions underlying the t-test were met, and the results can be seen in table 5. the effect sizes for all three scales are small (huck, 2008). the data for the face-to-face courses by gender is seen in table 6. based on the matrix from table 1 the mean scores for both the male and female students enrolled in the face-to-faces classes showed them to be on the high end of the somewhat positive category in all three areas, community, connectedness and learning. while the mean scores of males were higher than females in the areas of community, connectedness and learning for students taking face-to-face classes, a t-test of the differences of the means found that that there were no statistically significant differences in the means of the perceptions of males and females regarding elements of classroom community as experienced in face-to-face classes all assumptions underlying the t-test were met, and the results can be seen in table 7. the effect sizes for all three scales are small to moderate. (huck, 2008). conclusions and recommendations for further study in this study, we found no significant differences between the perceptions of male and female graduate students regarding their experiences of classroom community in either online or face-to-face classes. these findings are significant to our study, in that they demonstrate that by establishing a positive classroom community in either class type, both males and females have equal access to learning opportunities, regardless of the delivery method. by purposefully including elements of classroom community (encouraging participation, family and caring relationships, connecting students to each other and to the university, collaborate learning activities, etc.), equitable environments were created. this is supported by tinto’s (1997) recommendation to build support of peer groups for both academic and social support to ensure success for all students. in addition, ni and aust (2008) examined gender differences in online graduate and undergraduate classes and found that regardless of their gender, the development of a sense of classroom community is essential to enhance student perceived learning and course satisfaction. specifically, our study demonstrated that there were no gender differences regarding elements of classroom community as perceived by all students (research question one). in addition, there were no gender differences in the way each group, males and females, perceived elements of classroom community in either their online or face-to-face classes (research questions two and three, respectively). we conclude from our study that the inclusion of multiple classroom community elements may be an effective way to equalize potential gender differences in online environments, specifically. this need is further validated by other researchers who have found that without intervention, gender differences in online classrooms do exist in social interactions (wolfe, 1999), technology usage levels (enoch & soker, 2006), communication levels (sullivan, 2001), time usage (muilenburg & berg, 2005), as well as attitudes towards technology (young, 2000). the results of our study were found to differ from earlier studies conducted by rovai (the author of the classroom community scale used in our study) and baker (2005). several factors may account for the lack of difference in both male and female students’ perceptions when compared to the earlier study conducted by rovai and baker (2005): (a) the difference in 3 years between the two studies may reflect an increase in how females positively respond to computers and computer usage; (b) the intensive efforts made by online faculty to develop a high level of classroom community at the university in our study may have balanced the responses of males and females, and (c) the trend toward younger students now attending graduate education programs (average age 34 years in our study) may represent different perspectives with respect to classroom community and learning in online classrooms than females in earlier studies. in our online and hybrid courses, efforts have been made to implement strategies that eliminate gender inequity in learning. in summary, we found from our study, that by building and sustaining a sense of classroom community, course designers and instructors can eliminate potential inequities in the way males and females may perceive their levels of learning and connectedness in both online and face-to-face classes. while improving the area of connectedness can enhance learning for all students, female students who traditionally learn better in environments where people are accepted and feel they belong advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 217 in the classroom, may especially benefit from the increased inclusion of classroom community elements. we recommend that researchers further assess how the elements of classroom community are utilized in their online classes as a tool for meeting the needs of all adult learners. in addition, research in how the concept of classroom community can be used to impact learning with correlations to actual academic performance. as online classrooms in graduate school continue to grow, it is important that researchers consider what elements have the greatest impact on both students’ perceptions of their own learning, including engagement with others and with the faculty. references allen, i. e., & seaman, j. (2003). (sizing the opportunity: the quality and extent of online education in the united states, 2002-2003) italicize and use lower case except first letter. report from alfred p. sloan foundation. needham, ma: the sloan foundation. bikowski, d. (2007). internet relationships: building learning communities through friendships. journal of interactive online learning, 6(2), 131-141. booker, k. c. (2008). the role of instructors and peers in establishing classroom community. journal of instructional psychology, 35(1), 12-16. bunderson, e. d., & christensen, m. e. (1995). an analysis of problems for female students in university computer science programs. journal of research on computing in education, 28(1), 1-18. christopher, m. m., tallent-runnels, m. k., & thomas, j. a. (2004). raising the bar:encouraging high levels thinking in online discussion forums. roeper review 26(3), 166-171. caverly, d. c., & macdonald, l. (2002). online learning communities. journal of developmental education 25(3), 36-37. collins, m., & berge, a. (1996). facilitating interaction in computer mediated online courses. retrieved from http://www.emoderators.com/moderators/flcc.html cradler, j., mcnabb, m., freeman, m., & burchett, r. (2002). how does technology influence student learning? learning and leading with technology, 29(8), 47-49, 56. curtis, r. (2004). analyzing students’ conversations in chat room discussion groups. college teaching, 52(4), 143-148. diramio, d., & wolverton, m. (2006). integrating learning communities and distance education: possibility or pipedream? innovative higher education 31(2), 99113. dow, m. j. (2008). implications of social presence for online learning: a case study of mls students. journal of education for library and information science 49(4), 231-242. enoch, y., & soker, z. (2006). age, gender, ethnicity and the digital divide: university students’ use of web-based instruction. open learning 21(2), 99-110. huck, s. w. (2008). reading statistics and research. boston, ma: merrill. lally, v.. & barrett, e. (1999). building a learning community on-line: towards socio-academic interaction. research papers in education 14(2), 147-163. muilenburg, l. y. & berge, z.l. (2005). student barriers to online learning: a factor analytic study. distance education 26(1), 29-48. ni, s., & aust, r. (2008). examing teacher verbal immediacy and sense of classroom community in online classes. international journal on e-learning 7(3), 477-498. palloff, r. m., & pratt, k. (1999). building learning communities in cyberspace. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. ritter, c., polnick, b., fink, r.. & oescher, j. (2009). classroom learning communities in educational leadership: a comparison study of three delivery options. internet and higher education. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2009.11.005. rovai, a. (2001). building classroom community at a distance: a case study. educational technology research and development journal, 49(4), 39-50. rovai, a. (2002). development of an instrument to measure classroom community. the internet and higher education, 5, 197-211. rovai, a.. & baker, j. d. (2005). gender differences in online learning sense of community, perceived learning, and interpersonal interactions. the quarterly review of distance education, 6(1), 31-44. russell, t. l. (1999). the no significant difference phenomenon: a comparative research annotated bibliography on technology for distance education(italicize). raleigh, nc: office of instructional telecommunications, north carolina state university. santovec, m. l. (2004). virtual learning communities lead to 80 percent retention at wgu. distance education report, 8(8). shepard, m. (2008). a walk around walden pond: reflection on th educational technology phd specialization, walden university. distance learning, 5(4), 1-6. sullivan, p. (2001). gender differences and the online classroom: male and female college students evaluate their experiences. community college journal of research and practice, 25, 805-818. tinto, v. (1997). classrooms as communities: exploring character of student persistence. the journal of higher education, 68, 599-623. wolfe, j. l. (1999). why do women feel ignored? gender differences in computer-mediated classroom interactions. computers and composition 16, 153-166. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 218 young, b. j. (2000). gender difference in student attitudes toward computers. journal research on computing in education, 33(2), 204-217. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 219 table 1 interpretation of ccs scores scoring range interpretation 0.00 – 0.49 strongly negative sense of community, connectedness, or learning 0.50 – 1.49 somewhat negative sense of community, connectedness, or learning 1.50 – 2.49 neutral sense of community, connectedness, or learning 2.50 – 3.49 somewhat positive sense of community, connectedness, or learning 3.50 – 4.00 strongly positive sense of community, connectedness, or learning table 2 means of total scores by gender for all students instrument gender n m sd community male 31 2.61 .64 female 71 2.58 .74 total 102 2.59 .70 connectedness male 31 2.94 .56 female 71 2.82 .81 total 102 2.85 .74 learning male 31 2.72 .64 female 71 2.77 .55 total 102 2.70 .68 advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 220 table 3 t-test for equality of means for all students t p d community 0.150 0.881 0.16 connectedness 0.248 0.805 0.03 learning 0.281 0.780 0.11 table 4 online results by gender gender community connectedness learning male n 24 24 24 m 2.66 2.46 2.86 sd 0.55 0.63 0.59 female n 46 46 46 m 2.53 2.34 2.72 sd 0.70 0.69 0.89 table 5 advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 221 t-test – equality of means of online results by gender subscale t p-value d community 0.799 0.328 0.17 connectedness 0.667 0.507 0.17 learning 0.656 0.514 0.19 table 6 face-to-face results by gender gender community connectedness learning male n 7 7 7 m 3.17 3.12 3.22 sd 0.32 0.34 0.31 female n 25 25 25 m 3.01 3.03 2.99 sd 0.54 0.60 0.62 table 7 advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 222 t-test-equality of means of face-to-face results by gender subscale t p-value d community 1.02 0.32 0.38 connectedness 0.541 0.595 0.41 learning 0.969 0.186 0.31 educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 1 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 1-7, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the examination of the mentoring relationship between the head coach and assistant coaches of women’s basketball teams glenna g. bower chair and associate professor in the physical education department at the university of southern indiana (usi). e-mail: gbower@usi.edu. accepted august 1, 2010 a number of studies have examined the decreasing number of female head coaches of women’s teams. researchers have consistently demonstrated the mentoring relationship has provided substantial benefits in helping women advance within leadership positions within the sport industry. the purpose of this study was to examine the mentoring relationship between the head coach and female assistant coach of women’s basketball teams who aspire to become a head coach. more specifically, the mentoring characteristics and advancement techniques were two areas of focus. findings suggested mentoring characteristics and advancement techniques may provide recommendations on mentoring women who aspire to become head coaches. key words: mentoring, women, basketball, coaches. introduction most title ix advocates have focused their energy on female athletes, thus creating increased opportunities for women to participate in high school and college sport. following the enactment of title ix in 1972, female athletes playing college sports has risen from 16,000 in 1972 to 180,000 in 2006. in addition, the number of women’s teams per school has grown from 2.5 in 1970 to the highest number at 8.45 in 2006. while there are increased opportunities for women to participate in sport, the percentage of women’s teams coached by women is at an all time low. the number of female head coaches of women’s teams has dwindled from 90% in 1972 to 42.4% in 2006. over the past three decades, nearly every sport has seen a steep decline in the proportion of teams coached by women. of the five most popular sports basketball, volleyball, soccer, cross country, and softball – all but soccer, has seen a decrease in female head coaches (acosta & carpenter, 2006). why has obtaining a head coaching position for women’s teams remained a struggle? a number of studies have examined the decreasing number of female head coaches of women’s teams and discovered several themes for this phenomenon. these themes have included work and career related variables (hums, bower, & grappendorf, 2007; sagas & ashley, 2001; sagas & cunningham, 2004), the social context of female coaches operating in a predominately male environment (kilty, 2006), lack of leadership confidence (lough, 2001), financial inequity (acosta & carpenter, 2006; pastore, 1991), career-related burnout (pastore, 1991), and discriminatory hiring procedures (lovett & lowry, 1994). in addition, some researchers have indicated female assistant coaches have less desire and are less likely than male assistant coaches to apply for a head coaching positions (cunningham & sagas, 2002; cunningham, sagas, & ashley, 2003; sagas, cunningham, & ashley, 2000). this lack of desire is discouraging considering female assistants have the largest candidate pool (57.2%) for women’s head basketball coaching positions within the national collegiate athletic association (acosta & carpenter, 2006). however, it must be noted there are barriers that exist and have contributed to this “lack of desire” of women applying for head coaching positions including financial inequity (acosta & carpenter, 2006); gender disparity (kelly & sagas, 2005) and work and career related variables (knoppers, 1992, 1989; sagas, cunningham, & pastore, 2006; yiamouyiannis, 2007). these barriers are very similar to the reasons why the number of female head coaches continues to decline. therefore, strategies need to be examined to help in the development of female assistant basketball coaches of women’s teams who aspire to become a head coach. one strategy that continues to emerge on a consistent basis within the literature is mentoring. researchers have consistently demonstrated the mentoring relationship provides substantial benefits in helping women advance within leadership positions within sports (bower & hums, 2007; weaver & chelladurai, 2002, 1999; young, 1990). advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 2 theoretical framework formal mentoring has been linked to increased satisfaction, personal growth and career mobility of many protégés within sport organizations (pastore, 2003; sagas, cunningham, & pastore, 2006; weaver & chelladurai, 2001, 1999). the mentoring relationship can also be a critical factor in recruiting, educating, and retaining female assistant basketball coaches of women’s teams. the head coach has a definite influence on the female assistant by serving as an expert facilitating learning. mentoring defining mentoring and mentor is problematic due to inconsistent definitions and ungrounded theory (merriam, 1983). for the purposes of this study, mentoring is defined as “a process in which a more experienced person (i.e., the mentor) serves as a role model, provides guidance and support to a developing novice (i.e., the protégé), and sponsors that individual’s career progress” (weaver & chelladurai, 1999, p. 25). the term mentor is defined as “an individual who has taken a personal interest in an individual and has guided, sponsored, or otherwise had a positive influence on their professional career development” (allen, poteet, & burroughs, 1997, p. 2). this definition was chosen because it was the description used on the profile of mentors in sport survey to help the female assistant basketball coaches of women’s teams identify whether their head coach was a mentor. in addition, to eliminate inconsistencies in terms the head coach has been identified as the mentor and the female assistant head coach of division i women’s basketball teams has been identified as the protégé throughout the study. mentoring characteristics the mentoring relationship constitutes a reciprocal, interactive process of giving between the coach and the protégé in helping each other reach their goals. the reciprocal, interactive process may best be explained by the social exchange theory. the social exchange theory “views the interaction between two people as an exchange where the cost of participation in the relationship is compared to the perceived benefits. the basic premise of the social exchange theory indicates that if an individual perceives greater rewards than cost, he or she will be more inclined to develop the relationship” (olian, carroll, & giannantonio, 1993; pg. 2). the social exchange may include material benefits along with psychological benefits of approval, respect, affection and esteem. for example, a protégé may select a mentor based on certain desirable attributes and/or competencies with the anticipation of receiving career and psychosocial benefits in becoming a head coach. the mentor may choose a protégé based on performance. if the protégé is a high performer the mentor may perceive the protégé and the organization will be successful. primary functions of the mentoring relationship mentoring relationships are critical for the career success of women wanting to advance within leadership positions within sports (bower, hums, & keedy, 2006), sport and physical activity academic disciplines (bower, 2007), intercollegiate athletics (lough, 2001; weaver & chelladurai, 2002), and interscholastic athletics (bloom, durand-bush, schinke, & salmela, 1998). kram (1985) identified mentoring as a relationship between two individuals. according to the mentor role theory (kram, 1985), mentoring relationships usually occur when a senior employee takes a junior employee “under his or her wing” and provides career and psychosocial functions. kram (1985) theorized five specific career development functions including sponsorship, exposure and visibility, coaching, protection, and challenging assignments; and four specific psychosocial functions including role modeling, acceptance and confirmation, counseling, and friendship. the career-related functions of sponsorship, exposure and visibility, coaching, protection, and challenging assignments (kram, 1985), are important for an effective mentoring relationship between the head coach and the female assistant coach. the sponsorship function allows the mentor to help build the reputation of the protégé by highlighting his or her potential; and exposure and visibility allow the head coach to introduce the female assistants to other coaches within the field. these relationships assist the protégé in developing relationships and allow for greater advancement opportunities. the mentor also provides knowledge and skills, as well as productive feedback on coaching. often, the protégé makes the mistake of overwhelming themselves, not realizing when to say no. as a protection function, the mentor shields the protégé from taking on too many responsibilities. finally, challenging assignments are given by the mentor to prepare the protégé for greater responsibilities (kram, 1985). the psychosocial functions identified by kram (1985), include role modeling, acceptance and confirmation, counseling, and friendship. role modeling consists of the head coach efficiently performing organizational tasks while the protégé observes these behaviors, attitudes, and values. in acceptance and confirmation, the mentor expresses confidence, creates mutual trust, confirms individual abilities, and lends encouragement and support. counseling allows the mentor to help the protégé investigate and solve personal conflicts they might detract from effective performance. finally, friendship is a social interaction allowing the protégé to share personal experiences and escape the pressures of coaching. purpose of the study the purpose of this study was to examine the mentoring relationship between the head coach and female assistant coach of women’s basketball teams who aspire to become a head coach. more specifically, the mentoring characteristics and the advancement techniques were the two areas of focus, which veered the following research questions: 1. what mentoring characteristics of the head coach were important to the female assistant basketball coaches of women’s teams? advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 3 2. what advancement techniques were used by the head coach to prepare the female assistant basketball coaches of women’s teams to become a head coach? the possible benefits of this study include the potential to bridge theory and practice and contribute to knowledge in the profession in several ways. first, the study provided information on the importance of the mentoring relationship in the development of female assistant basketball coaches of women’s teams who aspire to become a head coaching. these findings will provide recommendations on ways to mentor women who aspire to become head coaches. second, the study provided insight on facilitating a prolonged and useful mentoring relationship. finally, the study added to the body of scholarly research in the sport management literature which is limited in the area of mentoring women within intercollegiate athletics. method participants approximately 650 division i female assistant basketball coaches from 325 universities in the national collegiate athletic association (ncaa) were invited to participate in the study. the national directory of college athletics provided a mailing list which contained all of the addresses for the assistant coaches. the study focused on female assistant basketball coaches for two reasons: (a) the decrease from 80% to 61% in female head coaches of all division i, ii, iii women’s basketball teams over the last three decades, and (b) basketball is considered by many as the flagship sport of female athletics (acosta & carpenter, 2006). of the 650 female assistant coaches who were mailed a survey, one hundred and sixty four (n = 164) responded. of the 164 responses, 89.6% (n = 147) identified their head coach as a mentor and indicated he or she has played a big role in their desire to become a head coach. the gender of the mentors identified consisted of 65.3% female and 34.7% male. the majority of the assistant coaches were between the ages of 35-44 (54.4%), followed by 28.6% between the ages of 45-54; 8% between the ages of 25-34; 7.4% greater than 65; and 2% less than 24. all respondents held a bachelors degree, 60% of the respondents held a masters and 1% held a doctorate. the majority of respondents were white females (65%), followed by african american (26.6%), hispanic (2.8%), other (4.2%). there was at least one respondent from all 32 conferences with 6.99% coming from the big 10 and atlantic 10 conferences. procedures following recommendations by dillman (2007), a letter and a modified version of the profile of mentors in sport survey (bower, 2007) was mailed to all participants in april (following march madness and before recruiting camps began). all non-respondents were mailed a postcard two weeks following the first mailing. two weeks later an additional postcard was sent to all remaining non-respondents. the post cards asked the participant to go to a website and submit the survey online. instrument the profiles of mentors in sport survey was developed and piloted by bower (2007) through extensive research of previous studies in the area of mentoring and sport (allen, poteet, & burroughs, 1997; bower, 2007; bower, hums, & keedy, 2006). a panel of experts examined the survey to make sure the instrument displays content validity and avoids biased items and terms. the survey elicits responses from the mentor experience, the protégé experience, and the reflection of the meaning of the mentoring relationship. modifications of the survey language were completed to primarily address the protégé experience of division i assistant women basketball coaches. the questions for the profile of mentors in sport survey included demographic information of age, educational background, income, and race. the open-ended questions focus on characteristics and the professional advancement techniques of the head coach (allen, poteet, & burroughs, 1997; bower, 2007). the following definition of a mentor was used to help assistant coaches identify whether their head coach is a mentor: “an individual who has taken a personal interest in an individual and has guided, sponsored, or otherwise had a positive influence on their professional career development” (allen, poteet, & burroughs, 1997, p. 2). data analyses means and standards deviations were calculated for the demographics using spss 16.0. wolcott’s (1994) four-step approach was used to organize the qualitative data. first, the researchers organized the data by utilizing hyperresearcher 2.6. second, the researchers read and reread the qualitative responses from the participants’ answers to the open-ended questions. third, categories began to develop through a categorical strategy of analysis called the constant-comparative analysis. the constant-comparative analysis was used to “identify similarities and differences among the data through coding and sorting into appropriate categories” (rossman & rallis, 2003, pg. 273). for classification purposes phrases were used because some sentences contained two or more divergent ideas. for example, the comments, “coach them once in the field area and give feedback….” and, “offering feedback and suggestions based on my personal experience” were grouped under career function “coaching.” each phrase was assigned to a single category. finally, the researchers coded the data looking for themes that emerged through intensive analysis and categorization of the data. trustworthiness of the data the researchers used multiple strategies introduced by lincoln and guba (1985) to strengthen the trustworthiness of the study. credibility (internal validity) was established through advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 4 “authenticity”. authenticity was described by neuman (2000), as a “fair, honest, and balanced account of social life from the viewpoint who lives it every day” (p. 31). the constant comparative analysis provided strength for the validity by establishing categories and developing themes from the openended questions. transferability (external validity) was provided through the “thick description” of comments provided by the assistant basketball coaches supporting the themes (erlandson, harris, skipper, & allen, 1993). the examples of the “thick descriptions” are found in the results section of the paper. dependability (reliability) was supported by researcher debriefing. each researcher examined the data and met to discuss themes and categories. following many meetings amongst the researchers a final conclusion of the themes and categories were determined. confirmability (objectivity) was based on the researchers’ ability to limit bias by not making any premature conclusions on the themes and/or categories, by using the constant comparative analysis, reading and rereading the data, and the researchers debriefing. limitations the researchers identified two limitations for the study. first, the return rate was 22.6% (n = 147) which seems significantly low; however, this may due to the aftermath of march madness or the limited time due to athletic recruitment. the study also was limited to females working as division i assistant women basketball coaches. results the purpose of this study was to examine the mentoring relationship between the head coach and female assistant coach of women’s basketball teams who aspire to become a head coach. the qualitative responses led to some interesting results in terms of head coaches mentoring characteristics and advancement techniques. the feedback from the mentoring experience was deemed important to these protégés who aspire to become a head coach. research question #1 what mentoring characteristics of the head coach were important to division i assistant women’s basketball coaches? there were four themes identified as important characteristics of the head coach as a mentor including being a role model, acting as a leader, having the ability to communicate, and to nurture the protégé. the protégé viewed their mentors as role models because they led by example and were willing to serve in any way possible to the basketball team. a protégé conveyed, “he sets a positive example on and off the court. he has demonstrated his ability to be a successful coach.” other women indicated their head coach acted as a leader. for example, my head coach is a leader and has the ability to teach lessons while allowing her players and assistants to have a lot of responsibility. she allows us to have ownership with the team and guides us along the way and teaches us to be gracious. the mentor also acted as a leader as a protégé mentioned, “ability to lead without comprising values, educator of the game and its history, shares knowledge and helps develop his staff while allowing us to be individuals.” the protégés also stressed how important it was for the mentor to be able to communicate. for example, assistant coach responded, “she communicates well, great teaching skills, personable, straight forward and disciplines.” finally, nurturing characteristics were apparent within the head coaches, “concern and involvement in helping me make decisions about my career. . . caring and sharing her wisdom. . . ability and willingness to nurture my talent.. . .support of your goals.” research question #2 what advancement techniques were used by the head coach to prepare the female assistant basketball coach to become a head coach? there were five themes were identified as advancement techniques used by the mentor prepare the protégé to become a head coach which included attending professional conferences, providing networking opportunities, stressing the importance of specific personality indicators, opportunities to learn day-today operations, and provide “hands-on” experience. attending professional conferences was most often mentioned as an advancement technique the head coach used to prepare the protégé for a head coaching position. for example, an assistant coach mentioned, “he provides me with continuing education opportunities…stresses leadership conventions such as the wbca, clinics, seminars, and workshops. at conventions he guides me toward the important forums to attend.” networking opportunities was an advancement technique geared toward the working with other coaches. the protégé explained that solid networking was the coach, “selling me to other universities and working with other coaches to receive more information on effective use of their resources in coaching”. personality indicators were mentioned by many of the women. a protégé mentioned the coach stressed the importance of “confidence assertiveness, patience, and the ability to motivate players.” opportunities to learn day-to day operations was illustrated through an assistant coach, “the coach taught me skills of organization, budgeting, administration, public relations, marketing, scouting, recruiting, breakdown of film, practice planning, scheduling, travel arrangements.” finally, the ability to gain “hands on” experience was extremely important. a woman mentioned, he allowed me the opportunity to take in huddles during games, lead drills during practice, and more importantly he let me coach a game to see what it is like real time…these opportunities allowed me to “think like a head coach. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 5 discussion the purpose of this study was to examine the mentoring relationship between the head coach and female assistant coach of women’s basketball teams who aspire to become a head coach. the results of the study provided specific mentoring characteristics and advancement techniques the protégé thought were important for the mentoring relationship. mentoring characteristics the protégé identified the important characteristics of the head coach as being a role model, acting as a leader, having the ability to communicate, and to nurture the protégé. all of these themes supported the psychosocial functions provided by the mentor that were deemed important to the protégé. the coach acting as a role model was mentioned throughout the responses. the protégé was able to observe behaviors, attitudes, and values of the mentor. these mentors were able to set a positive example and displayed characteristics of leadership qualities and communication skills which were deemed necessary traits by the protégé. the mentor provided acceptance and confirmation by having the ability to nurture the protégé by showing concern, providing guidance and support, and offering encouragement. these characteristics along with communication skills may also overlap with having the ability to counsel which is needed to help the protégé solve personal conflict that may detract from effective performance. it is interesting to note that friendship did not develop as a theme. advancement techniques there were five themes identified as advancement techniques used by the mentor prepare the protégé to become a head coach which included attending professional conferences, providing networking opportunities, stressing the importance of specific personality indicators, opportunities to learn day-to-day operations, and provide “hands-on” experience. all of these themes supported the career functions provided by the mentor that were deemed important to the protégé. the networking opportunities at conferences and other events provided a form of sponsorship where the mentor help build the reputation of the protégé. these opportunities also led to exposure and visibility. the mentor introduced the protégé to learn from other coaches. coaching and challenging assignments were supported as the mentor provided opportunities to learn day-to-day while providing hands-on experiences through coaching actual games and/or leading practices. throughout these challenging assignments the mentor was able to provide the protégé with a tremendous amount of knowledge and skills, as well as productive feedback to consider when she becomes a head coach. protection was the only career function that did not get enough support to constitute a theme. the mentoring connection the majority of the mentoring characteristics were examples of psychosocial functions while the advancement techniques were examples of career functions. however, the combination of the psychosocial and career functions supports the social exchange theory (olian et al., 1993). from a leader-member exchange perspective, successful mentoring can be viewed as an relationship (characterized by a high quality of social exchange) that develops when potential mentors are perceived as having certain career and psychosocial attributes (dansereau, graen, & haga, 1975; graen & cashman, 1975). the mentors and protégé developed a reciprocal relationship which constituted an interactive process of learning, thus connecting the mentors to the protégé. the reciprocal relationship allowed the protégé to view the interaction between them and the mentor as an exchange where the cost of participation in the relationship was related to perceived benefits of becoming a head coach. implications the results of the study provided implications that are specific to mentoring characteristics and advancement techniques that have the potential to provide female assistant coaches of women basketball teams with the tools in the development of a mentor that may provide advancement opportunities. first, the protégé needs to consider whether the mentor has the characteristics and necessary career and/or psychosocial skills necessary to achieve their goal of becoming a head coach. if the head coach is not the best mentor for the protégé, she may need to look elsewhere to avoid frustration of not receiving the necessary career and psychosocial skills in becoming a head coach. second, the study provided advancement techniques useful in becoming a head coach. these advancement techniques may be useful to other head coaches wanting to provide additional ways to help the woman to excel within the profession. third, career and psychosocial functions were important to the development of the mentoring relationship. thus, sport organizations may benefit from implementing formal mentoring programs that encompass career and psychosocial functions fostering career development for the female coach aspiring to become a head coach. these formal mentoring programs may provide insight on helping both the mentor and protégé develop guidelines and interventions for facilitating a prolonged and useful relationship. future research the results suggest directions for future research. this study was examined from the perspective of the protégé. a study should be replicated to study an effective mentoring relationship from the perspective of the mentor within intercollegiate athletics. the study also focused on division i assistant basketball coaches of women’s teams. additional studies should focus on division ii, and iii. conclusion the examination of the mentoring relationship between the head coach and female assistant coaches of women’s basketball teams provided some valuable information about mentor advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 6 characteristics and advancement techniques. findings suggest these mentoring characteristics and advancement techniques may provide recommendations on ways to mentor women who aspire to become head coaches. references acosta, v., & carpenter, l. 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(2000). examining the women’s coaching deficit through the perspective of assistant coaches. international journal of sport management, 1, 267-282. sagas, m., cunningham, g. b., & pastore, d. (2006). predicting head coaching intentions male and female assistant coaches: an application of the theory of planned behavior. sex roles, 54, 695-795. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 7 weaver, m. a., & chelladurai, p. (2002). mentoring in intercollegiate athletic administration. journal of sport management, 16, 96-116. weaver, m. a., & chelladurai, p. (1999). a mentoring model for management in sport and physical education. quest, 51, 24-38. wolcott, h. f. (1994). transforming qualitative data: description, analysis, and interpretation. thousand oaks, ca: sage. yiamouyiannis, a. (2007). occupational closure in intercollegiate athletics: female head coaches of men’s sport teams at ncaa colleges. unpublished dissertation, george washington university. young, d. (1990). mentoring and networking: perceptions by athletic administrators. journal of sport management 4, 71-79. title page (not for review) 38 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 38-47, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper gender identity and the role of an adult educator in a vocational training institute kostas kokogiannis phd in sciences of education (specialized in sociology of education), aristotle university of thessaloniki. alamanas 2d, peraia thessaloniki, 570 19 greece email: kostas.kokogiannis@gmail.com; phone: (+30) 6973886906 accepted july 3, 2013 this study examined the degree of sensitization of an adult educator in a vocational training institute with regard to the link between his (her) gender identity and his (her) pedagogic role. in effect, the degree of sensitization connotes the extent to which an educator experiences the sexism. thirty eight adult educators (19 male and 19 female) have been interviewed for the purpose of the inquiry. the results showed that the female adult educators experienced and perceived higher the above link than the male educators. the origin of this differentiation has been largely based on the social construction of the gender identity and the segmentation of the labour market, and internalized in values and beliefs about appropriate masculine/feminine roles and expectations. keywords: gender identity, adult educator, pedagogic role, sexism experience introduction gender identity is one aspect of the social identity; it is the meaning women and men attach to their membership in the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’. identification with these categories can be associated with the salience and nature of comparative distinctions between men and women in a given setting. these distinctions and the value attached to them in turn affect their self-attributions, including stereotypic attributions (alderfer, 1987; ridgeway, 1988). the stereotypic attributions are closely linked to traditional social roles and power inequalities between women and men (eagly, 1987). gender-based stereotypes are usually perceived by many as a logical consequence of the situation. for instance, gender-neutral areas, such as the educational system and labour market, produce different results for women and for men, without any explicit gender-separating purpose being discernible (westberg-wohlgemuth, 1996). focusing on the researching area of this study, the adult technical education, which is closely related to the practical/technical qualifications and characteristics of an occupation in the labour market, numerous books and articles have been written about the gendered pattern of career salience and educational and occupational choices of the adult learners (hackett, esposito, & o’halloran, 1989; phillips & imhoff, 1997), the perceived differences in male and female roles through vocational/career guidance services (ellis, 1990), the fact that men’s goals and aspirations exceed those of women (leung, conoley & scheel, 1994; mednick & thomas, 1993), the gender gap as an obstacle to women seeking and obtaining educational leadership positions (eakle, 1995), the discrimination against female adult educators due to the organizational structures and practices in education (tallerico & burstyn, 1996), as well as studies about the attention of adult educators to male learners more often than female in technical disciplines classes (ayala, 1996; deligianni, 1993; kabounidi, 1990). despite the broad scope of this literature, there is little scholarship about how male and female educators are aware of their pedagogic roles in a vocational training institute in virtue of their gender, which is the researching goal of the present study. throughout the literature on vocational training, there is remarkable absence of any debate about the role of the teacher/trainer in the promotion of vocational training, without gender diversity being included (rogers, 2006). however, the above literature indirectly contributes to a conceptual framework within which the researching goal of the study may be shaped and developed. the pivotal aim of the research refers to the fact that female adult educators in a vocational training institute perceive and experience much more sexism than male educators on the grounds of their ‘role’. by demarcating the pedagogical content of the term role, we mean that adult educators should encourage creativity, bold self-critique, familiarity with research theory and practices, genuine collaborative inquiry, and renewed interest in ongoing professional learning (paterson & west-burnham, 2005). the effective 39 pedagogical role of an adult educator presupposes and fosters collaborative group learning, which emphasizes the process of listening to and respecting others, understanding alternative views, challenging and questioning others, negotiating ideas, and caring for group participants (imel and tisdell 1996). besides, the most important conditions for school success are the qualities of relationships; that is, whether they create or fail to create a sense of safety and belonging that fosters collaborative inquiry (bryk & schneider, 2002). thus, how could a sexist perception of a male adult educator in a vocational training institute be compatible to the promotion of professional learning and collaborative inquiry in virtue of his pedagogical role? in other words, how could his pedagogical role be positively effective to adult learners when sexual orientation-based and gender identity discrimination is being perceived by him as a natural occurrence in many workplaces? the present research aims to shed light on the above contradiction by estimating the degree of sexism experience of male and female adult educators in a vocational training institute and demonstrating the recognition of the need for action by the educational community in securing the advancement of women and the elimination of gender-based discrimination in the field of vocational education. actually, sexism experience connotes the continuing existence of gender segregation: the process in which women and men end up in different types of occupation, so that two different types of labour market may be said to exist, female and male. gender segregation is not synonymous with gender marking – a process that renders an occupation typically female or male (bradley, 1989; westberg-wohlgemuth, 1996). notions and ideas about what is feminine and masculine legitimize the placement of women and men in different occupational categories or the same occupational categories, but with the content differently defined. this leads to notions that “female” qualifications and qualities differ from “male” (elgqvist-saltzman, 1998). for instance, the world bank paper, “women in higher education”, notes that technology has a strongly masculine image not only because men still dominate the field, but also because they dominate the language and images found in scientific literature (dundar et al, 1994). lack of women’s visible participation in technology and its consequent occupational categories, and a dearth of female role models result from, and perpetuate the socio-cultural absence of women in this area (hafkin & taggart, 2001; hassan, 2000), a parameter that implies the social construction of female qualifications enhanced many times by the gendered instructional practices of male educators mostly. with the rapid development in occupational, educational, and computer technologies, the gendered instructional model of transmitting to adult learners a discrete and ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ well-established set of skills must be called into question. within our uncertain environment of change, the ability of an adult learner to construct viable anti-sexist knowledge and to adapt is paramount. additionally, on one hand, the possible low degree of sensitization of a male adult educator concerning the link between his gender identity and pedagogic role in a vocational training institute could also enhance the antagonistic (and/or traditional) teacher-principal relationship with female colleagues or adult learners and exclude the opportunity for an open and trusting pedagogical way of communication. on the other hand, the higher degree of sensitization of a female adult educator could possibly offer the opportunity for all to move from an old way of seeing things to a new one and promote a less sexist teaching and learning. moreover, it could develop women’s educational leadership, as female educators acquire, over years of sexism experience, bundles of beliefs and assumptions about schools and school systems work, authority, leadership, the purposes of schooling and the role of competition, from a feminist perspective; these “mindscapes” could prepare quality school administration and lead female educators to transform the culture of the schools into one that emphasizes cooperation, trust, openness, and continuous improvement (hoy & miskel, 1996). actually, this connotes a developmental shift during which a woman’s judgments change from the conventional mode of taking responsibility to feeling empowered and committed to choosing goals which are self-directed and lifegiving (gilligan, 1993). thus, the female school leaders could be open-minded, flexible rather than dogmatic in their thinking within a system of anti-sexist values, persistent, resilient and optimistic. “such traits help explain why successful leaders facing daunting conditions are then able to push forward where there is little reason to expect progress” (leithwood et al., 2007, p. 14). methods the research goal we attempted to define the way male and female educators are aware of their roles in a vocational training institute in virtue of their gender. particularly, the definition of the “way” acquires the meaning of the degree of sensitization of an adult educator concerning the link between his (her) gender identity and his (her) pedagogic role (“functional definition”). the structured interview was used as tool of research. we presupposed that a practically constant, immutable core of personality should exist, according to which an individual would give information under certain conditions (cohen & manion, 2000, p. 377-378), even if nobody could keep under all the aspects of the cooperation between the interviewer and interviewee (cicourel, 1964). the researching goal requires a systematic record of the positions of the interviewer; on that account we selected structured questions. thus, an evaluation scale of equal numerical intervals was used for the quantification of the predefined answers (very much / much / not much / not at all). therefore, the following values were presented (from the lesser starting point to the higher): not at all = 1 (0, 50– 1,50) / not much = 2 (1,51 – 2,50) / much = 3 (2,51 – 3,50) / very much = 4 (3,51 – 4,50). the bigger the number is the higher the degree of sensitization of an adult educator becomes. on the strength of the above pointing out we brought forward the following hypothetical query: the degree of sensitization of female adult educators is higher than the degree of 40 sensitization of male adult educators. (in other words, the degree of experiencing the sexism by female adult educators is more appreciable and existent in virtue of the way of their perception). table 1 variables of the research differenial variable [gender male adult educators  female adult educators dependent variable [the degree of sensitization] in parallel, some contiguous findings may also be noted down as they come of the non predefined parameters (speciality, residence area, economical status, previous service) in combination with the educators’ answers. additionally, we should point out the following: (a) the verification or not of the hypothetical query concerns the local limits of our research. (b) the male educators usually present a lower degree of sensitization, because, as they are hidden behind the ostensibly innocent and neutral significances: right, person, adult educator, normal situation, which are in favour of the masculine subject (kokogiannis, 2008), they cannot finally perceive (or they do not want to acknowledge) the possible nuances of sexism that are presented at the expense of the women. (c) the interview (and particularly the form of the “oral questionnaire”) was preferred (paraskevopoulos, 1993, p. 128) avoiding the mailing of the questionnaire. we considered that our option would lead the participant to a more comfortable dealing with the researcher, because as more rationalist the interviewer becomes as less genuine the answer of the interviewee follows (cannell & kahn, 1968). time – place – way of data collection thirty-eight adult educators of two vocational training institutes (a town of a northern greece: veria/imathia) were interviewed (19 male educators – 19 female educators), 88, 3 % of the educators of the two institutes totally (43 educators: 3 educators were absent during the interviewing process and 2 educators refused to participate). the interviews took place by the present researcher visiting by himself the institutes (winter 2008), seeing that he had already communicated with the interviewees. the pre-existing familiarity of the researcher with the local educational spaces (he has been working for many years as educator in the specific region) facilitated by far the process of receiving the interviews. the interviews lasted out three days. the use of tape recorder was considered unnecessary, provided that, on one hand, the predefined alternative answers of the interviewees could easily be noted by the interviewer and, on the other, the interviewees countenanced that they would escape in this way from an asphyctic pillory of observation. except gender (a pre-defined parameter of the selection of the educators), the consequent noticed parameters that come of the 38 interviewees are the following: the speciality, the residence area, the economic status and the previous service, seeing that the latter parameters could affect the dependent variable (degree of sensitization…). particularly, we divide into two general categories the various fields of the educators who work in a vocational training institute: a) educators who teach subjects on theoretical level and b) educators who teach subjects on laboratorial level. this general demarcation of the specialities defines the more theoretical or technical character of the teaching object respectively. then, regarding the residence area, we must note that the quantity and quality of the stimuli in an urban or in a semi-urban/ rural area are differentiated by far and certainly this may affect the educators’ self-image (kiridis, 1996, p. 120) and consequently the way male and female educators perceive their role in virtue of their gender within a vocational institute. finally, the previous service (of short or long time: a) 1-10 years b) 10+…) in a vocational training institute perchance differentiates the degree of their sensitization concerning the link between gender identity and pedagogic role (and, particularly, the understanding of some practices/stereotypes of gendering reactions, the realization or not of the gender inequalities and so on). structure of the questions each question was composed on the strength of the link between gender identity and the role of the adult educator. this link was expressed by a quite negative perspective of experiencing the potential sexism in the vocational training institute (the same structure of content in each question). additionally, the questions were subsumed in some categories, which were based on aspects of the role of the adult educator: 1. self-image of the adult educator in the vocational training institute (one question) 2. the role of the educator and the effectiveness of his/her pedagogic work (four questions) 3. the role of the educator and the structural function of the vocational training institute (five questions) 4. the role of the educator and his/her relationships with the colleagues and the adult learners (three questions). all the questions are inter-dependent, although they are placed among the above categories. in parallel, we took into consideration the following: (a) usually, the interviewee is prone to give a socially desirable answer (shrauger, 1975; berglas & jones, 1978; fiske & taylor, 1984). apart from that we did not ignore the fact that “interviews are fluid encounters where balances shift between and during different interview situations” (cotterill, 1992, p. 604) (b) the possible gender bias of the interviewer and interviewee (rosenberg 1979) and (c) the emotional guidance of the interviewee (ribbens, 1989). the questions of the interview 1. on the strength of your experiences, could you characterize your self-image negative as male (or female) educator in the specific institute you work? 2. do you consider that the degree of the success of your instructive 41 objectives is negatively influenced by the fact that you are male (or female) educator? 3. do you believe that the degree of creativity and friendliness you attempt to manage to the adults’ classroom (irrespective of some fluctuations) is not satisfactory because of your sex? 4. do you feel that the expectations of the adult learners for your educational role sometimes dissimulate sexism, so that the quality and style of your pedagogic efforts are influenced negatively? 5. how much do you believe that the possible problem of the harmonization between your pedagogic efforts and the expectations of the adult learners comes of the more technical (less theoretical) character of the teaching object in combination with your sex? 6. do you feel that the expectations of your colleagues for the effectiveness of your work dissimulate sexism, so that they are doing you an injustice? 7. does the fact that the structural function of a vocational training institute is mostly based on technical specialties impede your self-expectation for the effectiveness of your role? 8. on the strength of your experiences, could you characterize the relations with your colleagues as “relations of inequality” because of your sex? 9. do you disagree with the standpoint that the majority of male directors in training institutes of adults are justified by the fact that they are in practice more successful than female directors and consequently they facilitate the role of adult educators? 10. do you consider as necessary that adult educators should be committed to attend specific courses of sensitization on gender issues before they teach in the institute? 11. do you disagree with the standpoint that sexism as fact-finding tool of the role of an educator is henceforth considered out of date and quite useless in regard to other tools and theoretical approaches? 12. do you disagree with the standpoint that the “authentic by nature” masculine rationalism is more consistent with the teaching of practical specialities in a vocational institute, in contrast to the inclination of female educators to teach more effectively the specialities of theoretical direction? 13. do you disagree with the standpoint that female adult learners must be encouraged by their educators to more “female” training specialties (e.g. hair-dressing, ornamental painting) so that they would be more successful in their career? table 2 demographic factors/data [predefined parameter] 1. gender a) male 19 b) female 19 [consequent parameters] 2. speciality a) theoretical teaching object  b) laboratory teaching object  3. economical status a) very well – well  b) almost well – badly  4. residence area a) urban area  b) semi-urban & rural area  5. previous service a) 1-10 years  b) 10+…years findings x = σxi / n  numerical average of the answers of the interviewers: σxi = the total of the numerical values of the answers, n = the number of the researching subjects of the categorical variable gender. see table 3. thus, x 1 we call the total average of the answers of the female educators: x 1 = 35,526 see table 4. x 2 we call the total average of the answers of the male educators: x 2 = [σχ(1…19)]/19 = 543/19 = 28,578 statistical processing/ pointings out / diagram according to the definition of the researching goal we examine mixed co-variables: a) bi-variable gender  categorical variable separated into two categories (male and female adult educators) and b) dependent variable the degree of sensitization…  numerical variable. in that case, we attempt to describe the degree of correlation (numerically) between the above mixed co-variables in a systematic and accurate way. thus, we used the most appropriate (in that case) pointer of correlation: the biserial. as is usual, statistical anticipation is completed approximately and contains a percentage of error. this error is as minor as the degree of the interrelationship of the two variables is higher (paraskevopoulos, 1884, p. 93-96). _________ biserial = [( x 1 – x 2) √ (n1) (n2)] / (s) (n)  x 1 = the total average of the answers of the female educators x 2 = the total average of the answers of the male educators n1 = the number of female educators n2 = the number of male educators n = n1 + n2 s (formal variation) =   x/nxi  σxi = the total of squares of values of the answers n = the number of female and male educators x= the square of total average of the answers of male and female educators 104 table 3. answers of the female educators. s / n* 19 female adult educators answers to the thirteenth questions (xi) ** total s e r p 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 1 a*** b a b 3 2 1 4 4 2 3 3 4 4 3 4 4 41 2 a b a b 2 2 2 2 3 4 3 2 4 4 4 3 4 39 3 b a a b 2 3 2 2 2 2 2 3 4 3 2 4 4 35 4 a b b a 3 3 2 3 3 2 3 2 3 4 3 4 4 39 5 b a a b 2 2 3 2 2 3 2 2 4 4 2 4 3 35 6 b a b a 3 2 2 1 2 3 1 1 4 3 4 4 3 33 7 b a a a 2 2 3 3 2 3 4 2 3 3 2 4 4 37 8 a b a a 3 2 2 2 3 3 3 2 4 3 3 4 4 38 9 a b a a 2 2 2 3 4 2 4 2 3 4 3 4 4 39 10 b a b b 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 2 4 2 2 4 3 27 11 a a a a 2 3 3 3 4 1 4 1 3 4 4 2 2 36 12 a a a a 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 2 3 4 3 3 3 35 13 b b a a 1 1 2 2 3 3 1 3 4 2 2 4 4 32 14 b a a b 2 3 2 2 1 3 2 3 4 3 3 4 3 35 15 a b a b 3 2 2 3 3 1 3 1 3 4 3 4 3 35 16 b a a a 2 2 1 2 2 2 1 2 4 2 2 4 4 30 17 a b b b 3 4 3 2 4 1 3 1 4 4 3 4 4 40 18 b b a b 2 2 2 3 2 1 1 1 4 3 3 4 4 32 19 a a a b 3 3 3 2 3 2 4 1 4 4 3 4 4 37 total 64 54 72 68 675 * truncated terms: s / n = serial number, s. =specialty, e. =economic status, r. = residence area, p. = previous service, **v. much = 4, much = 3, not much = 2, not at all = 1; *** according to the tables 5 & 6. 105 table 4. answers of the male educators. s / n 19 male adult educators answers to the thirteenth questions (xi) total s e r p 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 1 b b a a 1 1 2 1 2 2 3 1 3 2 2 1 3 24 2 b a b a 2 1 2 1 1 3 1 3 2 2 2 2 4 26 3 b a b a 2 2 2 1 1 2 1 2 3 3 2 1 3 25 4 a b a b 1 1 2 2 2 3 4 2 3 3 3 3 3 32 5 a a a b 1 2 3 2 3 1 4 1 3 3 2 3 4 32 6 b b b b 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 4 2 2 2 2 3 24 7 a a b a 2 2 3 3 2 4 1 4 3 3 3 3 4 37 8 b a b b 2 1 1 2 2 2 1 2 3 3 2 2 3 26 9 a a b b 1 2 3 3 3 1 3 1 3 2 2 3 4 31 10 a b a a 1 2 3 3 3 1 4 1 2 3 3 3 3 32 11 a b b a 1 2 1 2 2 3 2 4 3 2 2 3 3 30 12 b b a b 1 1 2 1 2 3 2 3 2 2 1 2 3 25 13 a a b b 2 1 2 3 3 1 3 1 3 3 2 3 4 31 14 a b a a 2 1 1 2 4 1 4 1 3 2 2 3 4 30 15 b a b a 1 2 3 3 1 1 2 1 2 2 2 3 4 27 16 b b a a 1 1 1 3 1 3 1 3 3 2 2 3 3 27 17 a a b b 2 2 2 3 3 1 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 31 18 b a b a 2 1 1 3 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 24 19 a b b a 2 2 2 3 1 2 1 3 2 3 3 2 3 29 total 29 28 37 42 38 38 41 40 50 47 42 48 64 543 104 thus, according to the tables 3 & 4, σx(1…38) = 39.966 n = 38 x = 1027, 2 s =   xnxi  / = 5 consequently: biserial = [    2121 nnxx  ] / (s) (n) = 0, 69  as we can understand, the value {0, 69} connotes a very strong relation between the independent categorical bivariable gender and the dependent numerical variable the degree of sensitization… this means: a) the statistical error is being minimized and b) the fact that x 1 › x 2  our hypothetical query: the degree of sensitization of female adult educators is higher than the degree of male adult educators (in other words, the degree of experiencing the sexism by female adult educators is more appreciable and existent in virtue of the way of their perception) is being verified – of course, on the grounds of the local research without any generalization. see figure 1. figure 1. the average of female and male educators in relation to their average the average of female and male educators in relation to their average 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 questions t h e a v e r a g e o f t h e q u e s t io n s ─■─■ average of female educators ─■─■ average of male educators the correlation shows the extent to which the question is measuring the same way of sensitization that the total test is measuring. a negative or zero correlation means the question is measuring something different than the rest of the test is measuring. in that case, the strong positive correlation (0, 69) indicates that the questions are measuring what the rest of the test is measuring. contiguous findings see table 5 for consequent general data of female educators. according to the above averages we could note the following: the female educators, who teach theoretical courses, live in an urban area and their economical status is almost good or bad, present higher (more positive) degree of sensitization. it also seems that the previous service does not play an important role concerning the differentiation of the degree of the sensitization. we could also point out that bad (or not good) economical status presumably amplifies the sense organ of the female educators on gender inequalities or emerges cases of gender inequality more frequently sharpening the way of female perception. see table 6 for consequent general data of male educators. first, the averages of male educators (according to the resultant general data of the table 4) are much lower than the corresponding averages of female educators. this confirms the different degree of sensitization between male and female educators generally. second, we can observe that the parameter speciality gives an important outcome (male educators who teach theoretical courses present much higher degree of sensitization) in contrast to the other parameters, which do not lead to remarkable differentiations. additionally, as it comes from tables 3 & 4, the parameter speciality remarkably differentiates the degree of sensitization not only between male and female educators but among educators of the same gender. obviously, the familiarity with the theoretical teaching object presumably prepares or amplifies the sensitization of an adult educator on gender issues. discussion and conclusion it seems that there is a strong link between gender identity and pedagogic role of an adult educator in a vocational training institute, according to the biserial correlation we used. certainly, we found that the female adult educators experience higher the above link than the male educators; that means female educators perceive adult vocational education more as a place of sexist learning experience than a cooperative creation of new knowledge and shared understandings that could help transform their lives and break the bonds imposed by forces for ‘intense sexist individualism’. besides, the significance of professional community as a variable influencing classroom organization demands attention to the development of workplace relationships that promote openness, genuine reflection, and collaboration focused on student (anti-sexist) learning (louis, 2006). thus, relying on the answers of the female educators we easily understand that they do not experience deep engagement with the intrinsic satisfaction of their work, not only with adult learners but also with their male colleagues (question 2,4, and 6) and they seem to need relationally more ‘safe’ spaces than male colleagues to support genuine collaborative learning (question 8). collaborative learning as the result of the degree of creativity and friendliness in adult’s classroom (question 3) may increase adult’s understanding and adaptability when he or she is able to examine an experience from multiple perspectives. these perspectives provide the adult learner with the ability to become an occupationally self-regulated, self-mediated, and self-aware individual, which should be the goal of career and 105 table 5. consequent general data of 19 female adult educators. specialty residence area economic status previous service theoretical teaching object laboratory teaching object urban area semi urban & rural area very well & well almost well & badly 1-10 years 10 + … years (a) (b) (a) (b) (a) (b) (a) (b) 10 9 15 4 10 9 9 10 x = 33, 8 32, 8 35, 7 34, 7 34 37, 2 35, 4 35, 6 note. numerical averages relying on the answers of the table 1. table 6 consequent general data of 19 male adult educators specialty residence area economic status previous service theoretical teaching object laboratory teaching object urban area semi urban & rural area very well & well almost well & badly 1-10 years 10 + … years (a) (b) (a) (b) (a) (b) (a) (b) 10 9 7 12 10 9 11 8 x = 31, 5 25, 3 28, 8 28, 4 29 28, 1 28, 2 29 note. numerical averages relying on the answers of the table 2. technical education (grubb, 1997). the issue is that the career choices of an adult learner depend to a large extent on how gender identities are constructed. thus, the fact that careers are gender-marked and the labour market is gendersegregated indicates the socially conditioned character of the choices. consequently, on one hand, adult learners ought to redefine their ‘professional self’ released from gender bias and, on the other, male educators ought to realize that their pedagogic role could be based on the dynamic interplay of mind and culture, knowledge and meaning, and reality and experience viewing equality of opportunity as an anti-sexist knowledge issue; actually, the findings that teaching practical specialities in a vocational institute (question 12) is more consistent with the “authentic by nature” masculine rationalism and also the more technical (less theoretical) character of the teaching object (question 5) is being harmonized with the teaching effectiveness and pedagogic efforts of male educators manifest that the opportunity for an open and trusting pedagogical way of communication among male and female colleges and adult learners could hardly be happened. low sensitization of male educators (according to their answers) prevents the possibility of negotiated futures built upon trust in relationship and breaks those collaborative reflective processes that lead to the successful educational professionalism and pedagogical role in developing social capital and promoting social cohesion to optimize anti-sexist learning conditions for students. in parallel, female educator’s underrepresentation in the director position of a training institute (given that the answers of male educators to the question 9 were moved onto a lower scale again) affects professional women’s social construction of gender difference and gender identity at work. research results (ely, 1995) suggest that gender roles are more stereotypical and more problematic in firms with relatively low proportions of senior women. thus, the overrepresentation of male educators in director position reinforces the devaluation of female educators even more. in particular, the commonly accepted stereotypes of women’s thinking as emotional, intuitive and personalized has contributed to the devaluation of women’s minds and contributions, especially in western technologically-oriented cultures, which value rationalism and objectivity. given that successful leaders have historically been characterized as decisive, analytical, individualistic, powerful, and willing to make the hard decisions, it has also been a given that women’s ways of leading have been devalued. however, in the past decades, influential thinkers have pointed to the need for a new style of leadership to meet the complex demands of the workforce and the organizations of the future—a style that defies the old stereotypes of leadership (bennis & goldsmith, 1994; block, 1993; wheatley, 1992). instead of being devalued, it has been suggested that women are ideally suited to the new style of leadership and, in fact, are better leaders than men are in today’s workplace (applebaum & shapiro, 1993; smith & smits, 1994). what is this new and increasingly prevalent leadership paradigm? according to peter senge (1990), the era of the leader as charismatic decision maker is over; future leaders will have to build learning organizations wherein people can expand their “capabilities to shape their future” (p. 8). such leaders will be designers and teachers, helping organizational members identify and deal with underlying causes of problems. in parallel, according to kegan’s model (1982, 1994), our order of consciousness (or stage of development) determines our relationship to the world we live and work in. what we perceive as reality—”how things are” or “how i am”—is largely our own construction based on our 106 interpretation of perception. in fact, we perceive and understand in increasingly complex ways; we become more tolerant of ambiguity and more willing to recognize that we participate in the construction of our beliefs. thus, female educators as designers and teachers and receptive to the reality based on their interpretation of antisexist perception could be successful leaders of educational change. the anti-sexist sensitivity of female educators as potential leaders includes reorienting their concerns toward nurturing the growth of teachers and students; ensuring that there is a relationship with and honest contact between them; intentional restructuring of the institute; empowerment; and exploration with adult educators and learners. there is no room for antagonism in one who would be nurturing and open, respectful, and trustworthy. all of these actions and qualities on the part of the female educational leader involve shifts into a praxis that is philosophically and emotionally different from the usual sexist practices used by the male directors in the vocational training institutes since now. besides, we must admit that resolving conflict, building networks, listening to colleagues and students, and sharing power and information—skills identified as contributing to effectiveness of the educator’s pedagogical role in schools, training institutes and so on—are relationship-building skills into which women have historically been socialized. moreover, it has long been an axiom in feminist literature that the personal is political and that women consistently look to the needs of the community as well as their own (tisdell, 2000). defining leadership as “a relational process of people together attempting to accomplish change or make a difference to benefit the common good” (komives, lucas, & mcmahon, 1998, p. 21), high sensitization of female educators (according to the 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(1992). leadership and the new science: learning about organization from an orderly universe. san francisco: berrett-koehler historical overview 54 advancing women in leadership vol. 32, pp. 54-78, 2012 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper gender barriers of women striving for a corporate officer position: a literature review heidi joy gregory-mina, dm, mba, ms ceo the center for leadership excellence 28 jessica circle pembroke, ma 02359 e-mail: heidi_mina@yahoo.com 508-246-3043 adjunct lecturer northeastern university college of business administration college of professional studies h.gregorymina@neu.edu adjunct lecturer kaplan university school of business and management hgregorymina@kaplan.edu literature examined from the past 30 years discovered that even though gender issues have received a great deal of attention, little research has been conducted on gender barriers and disparities in the corporate suite (agars, 2004). through examination of this literature, it became evident that women and men are not equally represented, and agars (2004) wondered whether gender discrimination is a primary cause. women have made tremendous breakthroughs within middle management but a lack of progress has been seen in obtaining corporate officer positions. the purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive literature review regarding the gender barriers that are applied to females who strive for a corporate officer position. http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ mailto:heidi_mina@yahoo.com mailto:hgregorymina@kaplan.edu 55 key words: women, equality, literature review, women in leadership positions historical overview leadership has been a predominantly masculine role through the centuries that few females have obtained (eagly & karau, 2002). beginning with early antiquity, few female leaders have stood out who performed a stereotypical masculine task. the females who did make historical advancements have helped to break down gender stereotyping and advance females within the workplace to gain equality (porterfield & kleiner, 2005). the term ‘leadership’ was first used in the early 1800s to describe the political influence and power of the british parliament. during the 18 th and 19 th century the first leadership style emerged, termed the great man theory, which believed certain distinguished men held the characteristics needed for leadership. the great man theory never considered women as leaders. during the 19 th century, further research took place that determined certain individuals had characteristics that made them leaders, thus resulting in the development of trait theories. trait theories listed traits in masculine terms that did not correlate with feminine characteristics. as a result, females who entered corporations fell into assistant roles (jogulu & wood, 2006). in the mid-19 th century, researchers began to argue that traits alone did not distinguish effective leadership techniques. researchers argued that leadership could be taught and did not have to be an inborn characteristic. this led the way to three major behavior theories of leadership: democratic, autocratic, and laissez-faire leadership styles. in 1964, these leadership styles were extended to incorporate two other dimensions: employeeand product oriented dimensions. as leadership research continued to evolve, it began to recognize the need for both individual traits and situational aspects, which led to situational leadership theories in the 1970s. situational leadership stated that leaders would change their leadership style based on the needs of the situation. the emergence of situational leadership in the ’70s gave birth to numerous other leadership styles, which focused on the specific individual traits of an individual’s leadership style (jogulu & wood, 2006). biological sex versus gender early philosophers found females to be inferior to males, but by the 1960s, the feminist movement had begun to counter these findings. sigmund freud was the first philosopher to postulate a differentiation between sex and gender. prior to this, gender was measured based on an individual’s biological sex (korackakabadse, korac-kakabadse, & myers, 1998; watson & newby, 2005). the term ‘feminism’ furthered the distinction between sex and gender where “sex is the biologically invariant factor and gender is comprised of various social, cultural, or historical variable components” (korackakabadse et al., 1998, p. 351). many researchers believe masculinity and femininity are the ends of a single bipolar dimension. this belief was challenged by constantinpole in 1973, leading the way to a third dimension referred to as androgyny (marsh & myers, 1986). androgyny theory stated that females and males could possess both masculine and feminine traits (ballardreisch & elton, 1992; mcgregor & tweed, 56 2001). this bi-dimensional conceptualization allowed individual personalities to be measured on a twodimensional rather than a one-dimensional scale (vecchio, 2002). some researchers referred to this theory as the feminization of management, because organizations needed to include feminine characteristics, such as collaboration, in their leadership styles for success (watson & newby, 2005). individuals who are heavily sex-typed conform their behaviors to match stereotypically defined characteristics for that sex, and individuals who display both masculine and feminine traits are considered androgynous. androgynous individuals are better able to adapt themselves to the current environment because they possess the necessary traits for any situation. therefore, flexibility is a characteristic of androgynous individuals, which is also necessary for ego development. proper ego development is necessary for moral, character, and cognitive development, as well as socialization (schwarz & robins, 1987). prejudice is measured by negative stereotypes and social distance. stereotypes are defined as “a set of attributes ascribed to a group and imputed to its individual members simply because they belong to that group” (heilman, 1983, p. 271). the relationship between men and women does not meet the scope of prejudice because images of women throughout western culture have not always been negative. sexism is an extension of prejudice, which defines the relationship between men and women more accurately because sexism accounts for ambivalence. traditional theories have conceptualized sexism as being hostile towards women, but traditional ideas do not take into account positive attitudes and perceptions of women (glick & fiske, 1996; glick & fiske, 2001). traditional theories conceptualized that gender is a single dimension with masculinity and femininity at opposite ends (vecchio, 2002). traditional theories do not take into account positive attitudes towards women because of the dominance of the male ego in western culture. the male ego is dominant within western culture due to factors relating to biological reproduction. on average, a male’s physical body structure is larger than a female’s, which has allowed males to dominate in roles that require physical strength. females, meanwhile, have been stereotyped into the majority of domestic duties due to their reproductive abilities. a female carries a baby to term and provides nourishment to the baby, which has historically resulted in a division of labor. this division of labor left females taking on a majority of the domestic duties, while the males fell into the role of provider (glick & fiske, 1996). traditional theories have, throughout history, sex-typed paid work as a male’s domain except for a few roles that were deemed appropriate for females; namely, librarian, nurse, secretary, and elementary school teacher. these roles require characteristics that society has deemed as female characteristics: nurturing, social sensitivity, and service. senior-level roles are held by few females because of the aggressive characteristics, which are predominately a male characteristic, needed to hold higher-level positions. a study conducted by schein in 1973 found that the attributes of successful middle managers had a direct correlation to masculine characteristics. kiesler conducted a study in 1975 that proposed an alternative view to the sex-typing of jobs. kiesler proposed that jobs became sex-typed based on the individual who held the position prior, not 57 based on society’s perception of the characteristics necessary for the job. therefore, if a man held a position previously, then a man should fill the position because society sees the job as appropriate for that sex (heilman, 1983). diversity in the workplace the concept of diversity in the workplace has created a large amount of activity in the research field. in 1964, the civil rights act was passed, which “made it illegal for organizations to engage in employment practices that discriminated against employees on the basis of ethnicity, color, religion, sex, and national origin” (kochan et al., 2003, p. 4). while this act assisted in developing policies and procedures for hiring managers in organizations as they moved forward it did not address decisions made prior to the act. in 1965, an executive order was issued requiring “government contractors to take affirmative actions to overcome past patterns of exclusion or discrimination” (p. 4). the late 1960s began the feminist movement, the main goal of which was to achieve equality for females by minimizing the differences between men and women. during this time the term androgyny, which is the combined presence of socially valued agentic and communal traits, was coined. during the feminist movement, sexual power became diffused and the focus was on socializing women to become equal with men. this re-socialization of women was conducted during workshops and seminars that were constructed to train women on becoming agentic, which continued the belief that women have deficits when it comes to leadership (grant, 1988). from the late ’70s to early ’80s, it became evident that these government mandates were not being enforced. while organizations did become increasingly diverse, the change was minimal and slow due to the entrenched corporate cultures. corporations began offering in-house diversity training to help change their corporate cultures by showing the value of diversity. these training programs did not lead to long-term cultural changes within corporations. in the 1990s, business cases began to emerge that tied corporate diversity to better business results in hopes of fueling the diversity pipeline. these business cases highlighted the need for open channels of communication, conflict resolution, and cohesion, which was being hindered by the adverse effects of low workplace diversity (kochan et al., 2003). gender stereotyping over the years, there have been two main streams of research concerning gender and managerial stereotyping: virginia schein and sandra bem. virginia schein believed that gender stereotyping created a majority of managerial barriers for females. in 1970, a survey was done by women in the work force that revealed only 5 percent of middle and senior management positions in corporations were held by females. schein believed that sex role stereotyping was inhibiting females from achieving managerial roles through the creation of occupational sex typing (schein, 1973). “occupations can be described as sex-typed when a large majority of those in them are of one sex and when there is an associated normative expectation that this is how it should be” (epstein, 1970, p. 152). using the definition of occupational sex typing coupled with the statistical findings of the women in the work force survey, schein concluded that managerial roles are classified as masculine occupations (schein, 1973). 58 due to sex role stereotyping, some females do not even strive for management positions because it goes against their self-image and individuals typically only engage in positions that maximize their cognitive balance (korman, 1970). schein believed females who did aspire for a management role faced promotional barriers because the characteristics of a successful manager were more closely related to men. a study conducted by bowman, worthy, and greyser (1965) found that men were more accepting of females in a managerial role if the females were older. men were more accepting of older female managers than they were of younger female managers because older female managers were seen as having more experience and most likely to have adopted masculine characteristics over time. sandra bem believed that masculine and feminine dimensions should be evaluated separately rather than as opposing dimensions. she hypothesized that typical sex-typing eliminated the possibility that individuals could have both feminine and masculine traits. in 1975, sandra bem used the bsri to test the level of conformity of feminine individuals compared to masculine and androgynous individuals. bem used prescreened cartoons that participants were asked to rate in order of perceived level of humor. there was only one subject per group, and the other group members were instructed on how to respond. half the groups had the subject rate the cartoons first and the other half had the subject rate the cartoon last. the results of this study indicated that individuals with masculine or androgynous traits conformed less frequently than did individuals displaying feminine traits. according to bem and lenney (1976), androgynous individuals were becoming the norm for society because these individuals have the flexibility to display masculine and feminine traits as needed. they hypothesized that androgynous individuals could display either masculine or feminine traits, but individuals categorized as displaying masculine or feminine traits did not cross over. the study pre-determined masculine, feminine, or neutral activities, and then subjects were asked to choose a pair of activities in which they wanted to partake, with 15 control pairs as the baseline. each activity paid out a certain amount, with sex-appropriate activities paying less than less sex-appropriate activities. the results of the study showed that individuals with masculine traits picked the higher-paying activities regardless of the sex-appropriateness of the task, whereas individuals displaying feminine traits tended to choose only sex-appropriate tasks. current theories in the past, studies of sex differences have not taken into account the impact an organization’s social culture has on the variables. by not accounting for this factor, there are inadequate explanations for individual behaviors in corporations. ely and padavic (2007) looked at studies done over the past twenty years to explore the need for further studies focusing on the impact of gender on corporations. through their research, they found common trends in the studies. first, they found that a majority of studies used the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ interchangeably. by not acknowledging differences between sex and gender outside of an individual’s personal attributes, the researchers did not allow for the possibility that socialization would influence an individual’s gender. second, they found that researchers believed sex differences developed outside organizations during an individual’s childhood socialization. limiting the development of sex roles to an 59 individual’s childhood eliminated the possibility that sex roles continue to develop and refine during one’s life. lastly, researchers assumed that differences existed between men and women due to variables other than sex and gender. gender has traditionally stemmed from biological sex. biological sex is defined as an individual’s biological characteristics, whereas gender is a collection of qualities, labeled male or female that is created culturally (pounder & coleman, 2002). “gender is an institutionalized system of social practices for constituting males and females as different in socially significant ways and organizing inequality in terms of those differences” (ridgeway, 2001, p. 637). according to carli (2001), an individual’s gender impacts the power and influence he or she has over others. women tend to hold lower status levels than men within organizations, thus placing women at a disadvantage. due to this gendered hierarchy, individuals tend to be influenced by men more than women, and when women do yield power and influence, it is within the context of their defined societal role. power shifts take place within group settings. when a group is predominantly comprised of women, women tend to participate to a larger degree, whereas if the group is predominantly comprised of men, women participate less. individuals tend to resist women’s influence because women are seen as having lower levels of competence than men. men tend to resist a woman’s power more often than do other women because men perceive influential women as threats to their power base. gender stereotyping stereotypes are “beliefs about the characteristics, attributes, and behaviors of members of certain groups,” which are used to process information and justify certain social roles (hilton & von hippel, 1996; as cited in powell, butterfield, & parent, 2002, p. 177). stereotyping often works to women’s disadvantage in the corporate world. gender stereotyping is embedded into western culture and has been a major impediment to women’s progress into the corporate suite. when decisions need to be made regarding skills, leadership ability, and individual characteristics, stereotypical images fill in the blanks when making decisions (gmur, 2006). according to gmur (2006), women can lessen the influence of gender stereotyping by providing as much information and being as transparent as possible to eliminate information gaps in decision-making. the expectations of how a group of individuals behave are referred to as descriptive norms, and how the group actually behaves is referred to as injunctive norms. stereotypes correlate to a culture’s descriptive norms and lack the prescriptive element of injunctive norms. gender roles, meanwhile, combine the descriptive and injunctive norms of a culture. an individual’s observable behavior matches the stereotype for his or her gender role. “gender stereotypes thus follow from observations of people in sex-typical social roles…men’s occupancy of breadwinner and higher status roles and women’s occupancy of homemaker and lower status roles” (eagly & karau, 2002, p. 574). these gender stereotypes of men and women have remained stable within western culture, even with the progress women have made in creating equality between the two sexes (powell et al., 2002). expectation states theory and status beliefs gender stereotypes are the genetic coding within western culture that affects an 60 individual’s perception of how females and males should behave in certain roles. expectation states theory states that gender is deeply embedded into an organization’s social hierarchy and an individual’s leadership style because of the rules of the gender system. gender stereotypes contain status beliefs, which are defined as “shared cultural schemas about the status position in society of groups such as those based on gender, ethnicity, education, or occupation” (ridgeway, 2001, p. 637). according to the expectation states theory, when individuals in a corporation work together to carry out its vision, status beliefs shape the social hierarchies. the status beliefs that develop about the social groups within corporations are also grounded in inequalities. for example, when individuals exert power within social groups, powerful females find themselves facing disadvantages compared to powerful male colleagues because of gender status beliefs. according to ridgeway (2001), advantaged groups are seen in society as having greater competence and social significance than disadvantaged groups. “the core of expectations states theory is its account for the formation of behavioral hierarchies of influence and esteem among individuals and how this process is shaped by status beliefs” (ridgeway, 2001, p. 642). these behavioral hierarchies are the basis for individuals accessing leadership roles, because leadership roles are based on both tasks and social ability. western culture refers to this informally as who’s got it and who doesn’t. task and social ability thus emerge as necessary components of leadership because of self-other performance expectations. expectation states theory argues that when individuals enter the organizational setting for the first time they absorb the culture to determine what is socially acceptable in that environment before constructing their role in the social hierarchy. the assumptions these individuals make about the culture are termed self-other performance expectations (ridgeway, 2001; weyer, 2007). role congruity theory role congruity theory takes into account an individual’s gender role, its congruity with other roles, and prejudicial behavior associated with the role. females holding or striving to obtain leadership roles face prejudice because their feminine gender role does not correlate with the stereotypical expectations of leaders. feminine gender roles are seen as having communal qualities, whereas leadership roles are perceived as having agentic qualities (sumer, 2006). role congruity theory is quite different from traditional theories because traditional theories are context-free. traditional theories cannot explain why women have been evaluated positively in some roles but not others and postulate a general prejudice towards women. role congruity theory also differs from glick and fiske (1996)’s ambivalent sexism theory, because ambivalent sexism theory sees both viewpoints as sexist. ambivalent sexism theory is comprised of benevolent and hostile sexism. benevolent sexism takes place when women are performing culturally appropriate gender roles, whereas hostile sexism occurs when women perform gender roles that go against culturally appropriate roles. heilman (1983)’s lack-of-fit model has greater congruency with eagly and karau (2002)’s role congruity theory. the lack-offit model states the success an individual will have in a position is determined by the “fit between the perception of an individual’s attributes and the perception of the job’s requirements” (p. 278). applying 61 heilman’s lack-of-fit model to the perceived job requirements for a managerial role, women’s attributes are a poor fit that will likely result in failure whereas a man’s attributes are a good fit that will likely result in success. eagly and karau’s role congruity theory “transforms [heilman’s] insights into a systemic theory by joining social-cognitive research on stereotyping and prejudice and industrial-organizational research on management and leadership” (eagly & karau, 2002, p. 579). by joining these theories, eagly and karau’s role congruity theory is able to “account for a wide range of moderating conditions in terms of common underlying mechanisms” (p. 579). gender and perceptions perceptions about men and women are embedded, from childhood, in creating a gendered lens within our society. a human develops three types of schemata: selfschema, cognitive generalizations, and gender schema (olsson & walker, 2003). an individual’s gender schema defines how the individual perceives and processes information based along gender dimensions. in western culture, females have more latitude than males when defining their gender schema. females adopt feminine, masculine, or androgynous characteristics that do not have any restrictions on their gender role. males only typically adopt masculine or androgynous characteristics and reject femininity. they typically reject feminine characteristics because, within western culture, a male’s gender role should not reflect these characteristics and could result in social rejection and ostracism (grabill et al., 2005). within western culture there is a general perception that men are leaders and women are followers that has not changed over the centuries (jackson, 2001; liu & wilson, 2001; robison-awana et al., 2002). when women are perceived as good leaders, it becomes a disadvantage for them because of the injunctive norms that are associated with the feminine stereotype. to be defined as a good leader in western culture, a leader needs to portray agentic attributes, which means when women are defined as good leaders they are displaying stereotypical masculine attributes. this could create a disadvantage for women when being evaluated by someone whose beliefs are embedded in traditional gender roles (eagly & karau, 2002). according to eagly and karau (2002), women face discrimination based on perceptions of how women could lead or how they actually lead in comparison to men. a study conducted by seem and clark (2006) found that current gender role stereotypes have changed, but not to benefit women. their study found that females are still expected to display traditional feminine characteristics in addition to masculine characteristics and behaviors such as competency. the perceptions for men have not changed. power, influence, and promotion according to cartwright (1959), power is defined as “the potential ability of one person to induce force on another person toward movement or change in a given direction, within a given behavior direction, at a given time” (p. 99). women have not been victimized within corporations in relation to executive power (olsson & walker, 2003). gender roles define the basis for power differentials, which is referred to as gender authority. an individual’s perception of power is influenced by his/her social standing and systematic biases (cundiff & komarraju, 2008). 62 men and women use power differently, when women exert power, it typically results in negative consequences. according to johnson (1976), there are three dimensions of power: indirect vs. direct, personal vs. concrete, and helplessness vs. competence. women use indirect power more than men, because women are seen as being less direct and sneakier than men. men have concrete power in our culture because they control resources such as money, knowledge, and strength, whereas women have personal power because of their ability to build relationships. women rely on helplessness because of their lack of concrete power. there are two streams of research about how individuals exert influence over others: leadership theory and power research. leadership style focuses on leaders’ leadership style and how they use this style to influence others, whereas power research focuses on which power source a leader uses to influence others. both methods are used to increase communication and meet organizational objectives. stoeberl, kwon, han, and bae (1998) conducted a study to determine if gender influenced the relationship between leadership and power. they used the student instructional report developed by the educational testing service, which was administered to four different universities totaling 486 participants. the study found that gender did have an impact on the power sources women and men used to influence others. women use legitimate, expert, and referent power sources to influence others more than men, and men use reward and coercive power sources to influence others more than women. johnson (1976) conducted a study and found that when women tried to use masculine stereotyped power sources they received negative reactions but that it was socially accepted for men to use both feminine and masculine stereotyped power sources. appendix a lists johnson (1976)’s stereotyped power sources by biological sex. a study conducted by raven and kruglanski (1970) found a direct correlation between helplessness and self-esteem. women who use helplessness as a power tend to have low self-esteem. it is common today for individuals to wonder why some were promoted into the corporate suite while others were overlooked. women are overlooked more frequently than men when organizations are filling senior management positions. when women inquire about this, the responses are typically vague and lack detail. if a woman adapts a masculine leadership style and is seen as displaying masculine characteristics, she will have a greater likelihood of success (hopfl & matilal, 2007). according to beeson (2009), individuals must possess three characteristics for career advancement; strong performance, ethical behavior, and self-motivation. there are four characteristics meanwhile that would prevent an individual from advancement: poor interpersonal skills, lack of respect for others, putting self-interest above the organization, and having a narrow vision. gender and leadership the distinction between biological sex and gender has allowed females to exhibit masculine traits and males to exhibit feminine traits. in addition, by breaking down gender, distinctive characteristics have been attributed to each category: masculine, feminine, and androgynous (pounder & coleman, 2002). appendix b presents a partial list of characteristics by gender. according to pounder and coleman (2002), the characteristics that have been attributed within our society as masculine have been 63 correlated to transactional leadership, whereas characteristics attributed as feminine have been correlated to transformational leadership. socialization is the central idea behind pounder and coleman’s theory that gender influences an individual’s leadership style. through the socialization process, “women have developed values and characteristics that result in leadership behaviors that are different from the traditional competitive, controlling aggressive leadership behaviors of men” (pounder & coleman, 2002, p. 124). within western culture, the terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ refer to the individual and the collective. “a leader is an individual who influences others to make choices consistent with the leader’s intention” (volkmann, 2005, p. 290). the role of leader changes based on the needs of the organization and necessary skill sets to meet organizational objectives. “leadership is the emergence of leader behaviors in a system over time” (p. 290). over the past decade, there has been debate about leadership styles and gender. prior to the ’90s, researchers believed gender did not have an impact on an individual’s leadership style. during the past two decades, this belief has been shifting with a greater focus on transformational leadership style. transformational leadership was first coined in 1978 by burns and was developed further by bass in 1985. as females have increased their presence in the management arena over the past two decades, the differences between feminine and masculine leadership styles have become increasingly evident. in 1990, eagly and johnson conducted a study of gender differences in leadership style and found that women adapted to a participative style while men adapted to a more autocratic style. eagly, karau, and makhijani (1995) furthered the 1990 study by using participants from corporations. this study found that women were more successful in roles that were deemed feminine and men were more successful in roles that were deemed masculine. in terms of leadership, the study found that men were accepted more frequently as leaders than women and that women generally led in a transformational style. both of these studies had some limitations such as sample size, narrow definition of variables, and so on. kabacoff (1998) constructed a study that focused on narrowing down these limitations. he used 900 males and 900 females in his study, who were asked to complete 360-degree evaluations from 143 different companies. when the evaluations were analyzed, the researcher found results he did not expect in comparison to previous studies. based on the previous studies, it would seem that males should have been rated higher on dominant and management focuses than females, but kabacoff’s study revealed the opposite to be true. conversely, it would be expected that females would rate higher on cooperation and consensual issues than males; but again, kabacoff found the opposite to be true. in terms of general effectiveness, women and men both rated the same except in regards to strategic vision. the study found that there is a general perception that females lack training in developing strategic plans, which creates an impediment for females to achieve senior-level positions. in 2000 kabacoff conducted another study, once again attempting to address limitations in previous studies by using the self and observer version of the leadership effectiveness analysis (lea). the selfanalysis was given to 215 senior executives and the observer analysis was given to 622 64 peers and 784 direct reports. all participants reported male senior executives as restrained in their emotional expressions, whereas direct reports reported females as more emotional but having a greater capacity for keeping individuals motivated. female senior executives also set more deadlines and benchmarks for their direct reports, resulting in higher expectations, whereas male senior executives were seen as following a more traditional approach and working towards minimizing risk. these leadership behaviors did not have an impact on the leader’s effectiveness but observers did value involvement to a higher degree, which correlates closer to a female’s leadership behavior. burke and collins (2001) conducted a study to see how women and men identified their leadership styles. one thousand thirty-one cpas were surveyed using the multi-factor leadership questionnaire to measure the frequency between transformational and transactional leadership. the study found that both men and women in this industry tended to use transformational leadership more frequently than transactional leadership; but the women’s frequency was higher than the men’s frequency. burke and collins noted that industry played a large role in the study’s findings because cpas work in a team atmosphere, which demands higher levels of transformational traits. socialization some researchers believe that an individual’s gender determines his or her leadership style, and the concept of socialization is central to this belief (pounder & coleman, 2002). socialization is “the processes by which an individual selectively acquires the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to perform a social role effectively” (trinidad & normore, 2005, p. 577). due to the socialization process, women have developed leadership characteristics that are different than the traditional leadership characteristics of men (pounder & coleman, 2002). the socialization process has three stages: separation, transition, and incorporation. during the separation stage, individuals begin defining themselves rather than being defined by society. in the transition stage, individuals compare themselves against their job tasks and functions. lastly, the incorporation stage is a time for individuals to reflect upon the differences between their former and present selves. for women, these socialization stages influence and shape their behavior within corporations (trinidad & normore, 2005). helgesin (1990) argues that a woman’s domestic role involves juggling multiple tasks, which gives women an advantage over men in terms of being able to prioritize. grant (1988) believes that, due to socialization and woman’s role in nurturing, women are better at communicating than men. as 21 st -century organizations continue to increase the amount of teamwork within the organization, leaders who have increased their communication capabilities will have more successful teams in terms of efficiency, commitment, trust, and productivity (rigg & sparrow, 1994). a study conducted by yammarino, dubinsky, comer, and jolson (1997) revealed that female leaders are able to develop interpersonal relationships more easily than male leaders. according to rigg and sparrow (1994), women communicate to develop relationships, whereas men communicate to dispense information. women develop relationships through communication by using probing and openended questions, which are interpreted as indecisiveness and a lack of confidence. 65 transformational-charismatic leadership research has shown that the most effective leadership style for the 21 st century is transformational leadership, which has a higher rate of frequency with women than with men. the top-down approach within organizations is no longer effective. knowledge workers want an environment that promotes self-development, innovative problem solving, teamwork, open channels of communication, and so on (“the world needs,” 2008). transformational leadership empowers others to become freethinking, independent individuals capable of exercising leadership (kinkead, n.d.). judge (2004) believes transformational leadership adds to transactional leadership through the augmentation effect making better leaders. without transactional leadership, transformational leadership would not be possible because transformational leadership is an extension of transactional leadership. madzar (2001) believes transformational and transactional leadership are two distinct leadership theories, but that a single leader can possess traits from both theories. fiedler and house (1968) describe charismatic leadership as “articulating a vision and mission, and creating and maintaining a positive image in the mind of followers” (p. 78). according to bedell, hunter, angie, and vert (2006), a link exists between transformational and charismatic leadership because both leadership theories emerge from a single pathway. aaltiomarjosola and takala (2000) believe followers who accept charismatic leadership are displaying signs of weakness and subordination. followers accept charismatic leaders because they are in distress and believe the leader is extraordinarily qualified. transformational-charismatic leaders develop relationships with their followers, which results in higher levels of productivity and efficiency and goes beyond meeting the needs of followers through the use of contingent rewards (yammarino et al., 1997). a study conducted by druskat (1994) found that female employees rated female leaders as having more transformational leadership characteristics than transactional characteristics. bycio, hackett, and allen (1995) had similar findings as druskat, but their study showed that both female and male employees felt that female leaders have more transformational than transactional leadership characteristics. bass, avolio, and atwater (1996) conducted a study similar to druskat et al. (1995), but determined the findings were not significant due to small effect sizes. all three studies did determine that leaders with transformationalcharismatic characteristics have employees who performed superior work and had higher levels of organizational commitment. barriers females face females continue to report barriers preventing them from obtaining senior management positions and, females of color face double marginalization because of their gender and minority status. “failure to acknowledge that there is discrimination in the workplace fails to address one of the core barriers: stereotyping and preconceptions” (kilian, hukai, & mccarty, 2005, p. 161). according to barrett and beeson (2002), there is a direct correlation between organizations that acknowledge diversity and offer diversity training and having a diversified leadership team. organizations that do not acknowledge diversity are limiting female’s career paths. 66 for females to be able to begin breaking down some of these organizational barriers, there needs to be commitment from senior management. it is not enough for corporations to meet the minimum legal requirements when building a diversity pipeline. senior management needs to commit to moving females into senior management; the only way to do this is to change organizational culture through training. the think male-think manager phenomenon limits organizations and is a cultural norm that hinders females (jackson, 2001; schein, 2007). building a successful leadership pipeline is critical for succession planning in corporations. when top executives leave an organization, most organizations struggle to find the right talent to replace this individual. by maintaining a strong leadership pipeline within the organization there will be a large pool of talented candidates. this leadership pipeline needs to include a diverse pool of talented individuals to maximize the organization’s potential (charan, drotter, & noel, 2001). glass ceiling. the term ‘glass ceiling’ was first coined in 1986 by the wall street journal and is defined as “a barrier of prejudice and discrimination that excludes women from higher level leadership positions” (eagly & karau, 2002, p. 573). many researchers attribute this barrier to gender stereotyping rather than women having a lack of ability (jackson, 2001; maume, jr., 2004). education and social hierarchies are part of the reason the glass ceiling phenomenon exists (guillaume & pochic, 2009). women are less likely than men to participate in networking events due to work-family conflicts (“the world needs,” 2008). according to weyer (2007), three categories explain the glass ceiling: biological, social, and structural/cultural issues. women find that it takes them longer than men to achieve corporate officer positions, if they achieve this level at all. men typically follow a progressive vertical track to senior management, whereas women follow a slower route and at times make horizontal moves in hopes to get ahead. when geographical locations become a factor in organizational progression, women are less willing to move than men due to workfamily conflicts. western culture has established long hour norms for senior management, which is difficult for women because of their domestic role. due to the social barriers that have developed in organizational culture, the glass-ceiling phenomenon has prevented women from obtaining corporate officer positions as frequently as men. for those females who do break through the glass ceiling to senior management, it typically happens later in their career than it does for their male counterparts (guillaume & pochic, 2009; maume, jr., 2004). goodman, fields, and blum (2003) looked at the cracks in the glass ceiling to understand in what type of organizations women have made it to the top and how they differ from other organizations. he hypothesized that organizations with more women in lower management would have more women in higher management; high turnover rates would be consistent with women in top management positions; the lower the management salaries, the more likely women would hold top management positions; and the younger the company, the more likely women would be in top management. goodman et al. (2003) 67 found that women who did make it to the top did so in less-desirable companies. women obtaining these positions in less-desirable companies faced gender stereotyping as a barrier since none of the women attained this level in a desirable company. most recently, women have been facing another version of the glass ceiling, referred to as the expatriate glass ceiling. with an increase in globalization and expansion of multinational firms, promotional opportunities into senior management not only reside within the u.s. but also abroad. due to work-family obligations, women are often overlooked for foreign assignments. according to insch, mcintyre, and napier (2008), this should be a concern for corporations because their senior management lacks diversity, which inhibits strategic decision-making. glass cliff. in 2005 the media began making claims that organizations with female corporate officers and board members resulted in the organizations experiencing a decrease in their stock prices. as a result of the media’s claims, ryan and haslam (2005) conducted a study of 100 organizations that had recently appointed a female to their board of directors. the study looked at the organizations’ financial trends prior to and after the females’ appointments. a majority of the organizations were struggling prior to the female being appointed and, in most cases, the stock prices rose slightly after the appointment. “in a time of a general downturn in the stock market, there was evidence of the glass cliff, such that [organizations] that made female board appointments had experienced consistently poor performance in the months preceding the appointment” (ryan, haslam, & postmes, 2007, p. 183). ryan et al. (2006) supplemented their prior research because their previous study used archival data. the 2006 study was an experimental study. participants were provided with a job description and three likely candidates. one candidate was a female who was qualified for the job; the other two candidates were male. one of the male candidates was qualified and the other was not qualified for the job. this study found that females were more likely to be appointed into corporate officer positions or as board members when the organization was in a financial downturn. ryan et al. (2007) believed there are four underlying processes that create the glass cliff for females: sexism, lack of networks, perception, and inability to lead in a crisis. to determine the perception of others about the underlying processes of the glass cliff, ryan, haslam, and postmes conducted a study using an article about the glass cliff phenomenon followed up with a survey that asked participants different questions about their perceptions of the glass cliff. when the results were analyzed, they found that females were more concerned about the glass cliff than males, and females more frequently related the glass cliff to sexism than males. the results also showed that both females and males felt females were at a disadvantage in terms of networking. females believe they are appointed to these precarious positions because organizations see them as expendable. labyrinth. women and men use different routes to climb the corporate ladder because of the barriers women face within corporations (lyness & thompson, 2000). a majority of the barriers that are used to describe a woman’s path through the corporation are no longer relevant because 68 they describe impermeable paths. nevertheless, women are beginning to break through these barriers into the corporate suite but in small numbers, which makes a metaphor, such as a labyrinth, more reasonable. a labyrinth represents the possible multiple routes that women follow in their career with viable routes to the corporate suite. the labyrinth still contains numerous barriers that females will face in corporations, but it accurately depicts that routes to the corporate suite do exist for femalesthey are just not direct (eagly & carli, 2007; eagly, 2008). this differs from male colleagues, who tend to obtain corporate office positions without hitting these barriers. males climb the corporate ladder via a glass escalator (ryan, haslam, & postmes, 2007). tokenism theory. women who have broken through the glass ceiling are considered token women, because there are few who have achieved this status (rosener, 1990). tokenism theory was first coined by kanter in 1977 and states that women will encounter at least six barriers to career advancement, which are listed in appendix c, throughout their career. the label token has been associated with incompetence, and, since mostly women face this label, they are seen as incompetent (kandola, 2004). according to lyness and thompson (2000), there are four facilitators women can use to be successful to alleviate the impact of barriers: have a good track record, develop good relationships, take a proactive approach to setting career goals, and obtain a mentor. female corporate officers will not feel the effect of tokenism theory in organizations that are predominantly feminine because social isolation will already have been overcome. in organizations where there are already women in senior management, these women will be perceived as a barrier to women below them because they will feel the organization’s diversity quota has already been met. women in these senior management positions still report a lack of power, and the predominant power still lies with men, even in situations when men might be the minority in senior management (elvira & cohen, 2001). simpson (2000) conducted a survey of 90 women to determine the differences between token and non-token women. both token and non-token women reported the men’s club as the single largest barrier they face. this is also referred to as corporate patriarchy and increases for women with minority status. token women report having greater difficulty with their relationships with male colleagues than nontoken women, which could be because there are fewer token women than non-token women, thereby causing organizational fit to be critical for their success. according to yoder (2001), gender balancing is one solution for eradicating token status for women within corporations. elvira and cohen (2001) found tokenism to be one of the reasons women have poor work experiences. people prefer to work with similar people, and when women are a minority in an organization, they have reported less positive experiences than men. women in these types of organizations reported experiences such as social isolation, increased work demands, and so on. organizational composition has been directly linked to employee turnover. the researchers did find that when men are the minority in an organization, they have not reported poor experiences like women have. it has been postulated that this is because men typically hold more powerful positions than women and belong to a larger majority of working individuals in society. female 69 employees see the females directly above them as an impediment to success because there are fewer positions that need to be filled, and the organization may have already hit its quota of female employees. females report that, when they are promoted, power and decision-making continue to reside with male employees. networking and mentoring. corporations have informal and formal networks. research has shown that informal networks are typically divided by sex and ethnicity and that these networks have a significant impact on filling open vacancies. formal networks in corporations are seen as a way to share knowledge and learn from others. many of these formal networks are also segregated by sex and ethnicity limiting the impact (kandola, 2004). in the past, men had far more informal and formal networks than women, but that has slowly changed over the last decade. women have been less successful in utilizing the full potential of these networks. they tend to rely on networks for social support while men use these networks to further their career growth. while women’s participation in networking has increased, they are still not present in key networks. the barriers women face to joining key networks is power, less developed informal networks, and work-family conflicts. many of these key networks meet after work-when women have family obligations that place them at a disadvantage (tonge, 2008). individuals who have a mentor find they have greater career success than someone without a mentor. mentoring moves through four stages: initiation, cultivation, separation, and redefinition (friday, friday, & green, 2004). mentoring helps individuals learn values, abilities, and expected behaviors that they can implement into their career paths (allen, eby, poteet, lentz, & lima, 2004; singh, vinnicombe, & james, 2006). a study conducted by palgi and moore (2004) found that women who had male mentors had greater success gaining access to key networks and professional contacts than if they had a female mentor. another study conducted by okurame (2007) found that female mentors had higher psychosocial functions than male mentors, but there was no difference in terms of career development functions. few women have obtained senior management positions within corporations; this in turn, has resulted in limited same-sex mentors for younger women. the lack of female mentors has created a barrier for women striving to climb the corporate ladder, because younger women need to cross genders to find a mentor. crossing genders can create issues for younger women because their approach to male senior colleagues can be misconstrued. when a man agrees to mentor a younger woman, he tends to spend less time and effort with that individual so their relationship is not seen as sexual in nature (headlem-wells, 2004). stress and emotional health according to nelson and burke (2000), men reported women’s lack of experience as the greatest barrier to achieving a corporate officer position. however, women perceived the corporate culture as the greatest barrier to achieving a corporate officer position. when women do obtain these positions, they tend not to last. men believed they did not last due to work-life balance, whereas women believed they did not last due to a misalignment with personal values. women who do obtain corporate officer positions report physical symptoms such as headaches, depression, sleep disturbances, and so on more often than 70 men. “women’s rate of depression is twice that found in men, and women are more likely to commit suicide than men” (p. 109). due to women’s minority status in corporations, women experience more stress than men. “the task stressors that pose particular risks for executive women are barriers to achievement, tokenism, overload, and downsizing” (p. 111). emotion management is comprised of two parts: emotional labor and emotion work. according to erickson and ritter (2001), emotional labor takes place in public for a wage and emotion work takes place in private. within western culture, our jobs are also emotionally gendered, placing an additional stressor on women. women are best suited for positions that allow them to display positive emotions, while men are better suited for the opposite positions. an individual’s hierarchical position within a corporation will determine the amount of control he or she has over his or her emotional labor. hence, individuals in senior management will have more power and will be able to display negative emotions, whereas individuals in lower-level positions will have less power and need to display positive emotions towards individuals in higher positions. since a majority of gendered roles for women are service positions, they will have less power and will receive a greater amount of negative emotions from their superiors. due to this disadvantaged position for women, they report higher rates of burnout than men. over the centuries, the workplace has been dominated by men while the family role has been handled by women. however, this has been changing and women are attaining a larger role in the workplace. when work is defined as anything that is compensated, studies have found that women actually work five to seven hours a week more at non-compensated tasks than men. while women have increased their presence in the work force, men have not kept pace with increasing their contribution to household work (erickson & ritter, 2001). women report feeling guilty when their work interferes with their family obligations, creating another barrier for women. a study conducted by livingston and judge (2008) revealed that women feel less guilty when family conflicts interfere with work, but more guilty when work conflicts interfere with family. men feel guiltier when family conflicts interfere with work. guilt has risen as an outcome from the work-family conflict, placing more pressure on women than on men. conclusion bias and discrimination are embedded in western culture and are displayed in everyday interactions. the number of women in management positions within organizations has seen some sharp increases, but the number of women sitting on boards or in senior management positions has shown a much smaller increase over the years. due to work-family conflicts, women are not able to join the same social networks as men since men typically get together after hours. females have reported that they receive poor performance evaluations in comparison to their male colleagues within the context of their job roles resulting in a high percentage of turnover. as the landscape of corporate america continues to change and female-owned businesses increase, not having female board members could limit an organization’s external resources. 71 references aaltio-marjosola, i., & takala, t. 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(2001). making leadership work more effectively for women. journal of social issues, 57(4), 815828. doi:10.1111/0022-4537.00243 appendix a: stereotyped use of power by biological sex (johnson, 1976) female power sources male power sources coercions expert referent legitimate helplessness information indirect forms of power direct rewards coercion http://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2fs11199-006-9059-2 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2fs11199-006-9059-2 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108%2f17542410810908848 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108%2f01437730510624601 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fs1048-9843%2802%2900156-x http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fs1048-9843%2802%2900156-x http://dx.doi.org/10.1108%2f09534810510599434 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108%2f13552550510590545 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108%2f09649420710778718 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307%2f257027 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2f0022-4537.00243 78 appendix b: gender (masculine, feminine, or androgynous) characteristics masculine characteristics feminine characteristics androgynous characteristics aggressive emotional adaptable independent sensitive conceited objective expressive conscientious logical cooperative conventional rational intuitive friendly analytical warm happy decisive tactful inefficient confident receptive to ideas jealous assertive talkative likable ambitious gentle solemn opportunistic loyal unpredictable impersonal empathetic unsystematic submissive note: data retrieved from bem, 1974; pounder & coleman, 2002. appendix c: token status barriers faced by women token status barriers 1. women perceive that they are not a good fit with male dominated cultures. 2. due to structural theory gender ratios are skewed within the upper rankings of corporations resulting in heightened cultural boundaries for women. 3. women report receiving less mentoring than men. 4. due to work-family conflicts women do not participate as often in social networking activities, which results in women relying more on formal organizational career processes than men. 5. gender stereotyping has created barriers for women by attributing characteristics that are less desirable in male dominated cultures for critical assignments. 6. women are less likely to receive overseas assignments due to stereotypical assumptions. note: data retrieved from kanter, 1977. educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 113 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 113-123, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper lessons for a rural female superintendent: gender, leadership, and politics shellie gammill and courtney vaughn shellie gammill is in the department of educational, administration, curriculum and supervision, university of oklahoma courtney vaughn is in the department of educational studies, university of oklahoma norman, ok 73019 email: vaughn1@ou.edu accepted april 6, 2011 two years before my coauthor and i began this narrative inquiry, as the school superintendent of a rural community, i failed to fire a malicious football coach and resigned shortly thereafter. i floundered for a few months and then decided to pursue a doctorate in educational administration. soon i met a professor, now my coauthor, who offered me the opportunity to explain what had happened in terms of socially constructed gender roles. we investigated 40 post-world war ii urban, suburban, and rural female superintendents whom my coauthor and other scholars had interviewed. after theming their stories into five prototypes we wove these collective representations into my personal narrative and found that operationalizing any political agenda necessitated being aware of how a school community views acceptable womanhood, because it determined how the female superintendent was received. had i adopted my stakeholders’ notion of female demeanor, more school patrons may have heard me. yet, for me and other superintendents the feasibility and ethics of what might be seen as outright manipulation will forever loom on the horizon of politics, gender and the superintendency. keywords: female superintendents, contextual qualitative research, personal narrative, and fictional perspectives introduction one day i awoke and realized i had to quit. i had been a rural female school superintendent for over 2 years but, in my mind, i had failed. a few years before i took office most of the district‟s students scored high on standardized and criterion referenced tests, excelled in extracurricular activities, and felt a part of the school community. by the time i became superintendent those days were over. because i worked in my hometown i thought i could reunite school patrons and restore the district to its former glory. i was wrong. after resigning, i began work on a phd in educational administration and took a position as a university/school liaison. in one of my first graduate courses my professor/coauthor and i began a narrative inquiry tracing my upbringing and educational career to determine why my dreams had faded. i soon learned why i had been adrift (tallerico, burstyn, & poole, 1993). politics and power are things that any superintendent must deal with when negotiating public, professional, and student needs (brunner, 2007). and i was not good at it. i had been one of many women whose school patrons must see the female not just the superintendent, so when i emulated a gender-neutral leadership style, i was doomed to fail (dufour & eaker, 1998; grogan, 1996; lambert, 2002). society, i discovered would not let female superintendents “not be female” (sklar, 2008, p. 118). this conundrum is what skrla (2008) called a “grey zone” (p. 121). to explore this complexity more in depth, my co-author and i selected and studied 40 post-world war two urban, suburban, and rural female superintendents whom she and other authors had interviewed. this resulted in five prototypes, each of which contained all of the like-minded women. we focused on the remarkable but common experiences with community, power, and politics. i identified with some more than others but they all gave me insights into my personal self-searching. when my advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 114 story slammed into my biggest failure, a publically attended board meeting gathered to consider firing a pernicious coach, my coauthor and i used our five prototypes‟ insights and experiences to speculate how they and then i might have gotten the job done. in so doing, i realized that irrespective of leadership style the female superintendent must decide how to present herself to others. a successful leadership style varies according to personality and contextual perceptions of appropriate gender roles. ever-evolving history of women as educational leaders delving into my co-author‟s and other u. s. historians‟ work illustrated how women have slipped into leadership‟s back door via traditionally stereotypical gender expectations. for example, the american revolutionary era paved the way for female teachers to enter. before that time when a cadre of citizens sought an educator, primarily for wealthy white males, they hired a schoolmaster (mattingly, 1975). during the late eighteenth century influential colonial spokespersons, such as physician benjamin rush, supported female seminaries that arose to educate well-to-do white women to be republican mothers. because they were natural nurturers, it was argued, they should prepare the new nation‟s premier citizens to take their places in the elite hierarchy (smith & vaughn, 2000). the dye was cast. as in other areas, women‟s would-be professional lives were tied to biology (miller, 1986). although at the turnof-the twentieth century, remedies to these sexist practices (i.e. flexible work schedules) emerged, miller maintained that it entails “more changes in social economic arrangements” are needed to bring about equanimity (miller, 1986, pp. 127-128). beating tremendous odds, a few women stealthfully used biological determinism to become the foremothers of female superintendents. in 1909, at 22, emma hart married john willard, 28 years her senior. he had four children of his own, and they had one son in 1910. her husband‟s nephew also lived with the family while attending a male seminary. emma enthusiastically read his books. her intellectual hunger came in handy because four short years into the marriage her husband‟s finances went sour giving emma tacit social permission to open a women‟s school in her home. in 1819, she moved what became troy female seminary to new york. the curriculum was rich with science, math, and literature but accommodated the current finishing school curricula that included subjects such as dance, french, and sewing. mastering these, political school supporters thought, would help females be good mothers and further their husband‟s business interests. although many of willard‟s graduates did become homemakers, others, like elizabeth cady stanton, evolved into suffragists. willard‟s husband died in 1825, and she continued to run the school until 1838 when she turned it over to her son and daughter-in-law. aside from a later short-lived marriage willard remained single until she died in 1870 (blount, 1998; scott, 1979). the school founder lived to see much of teaching‟s feminization. as capitalism replaced the mercantilist colonial economy, male and female immigrants flooded the country. some worked in steam-powered factories and later built railroads and labored in various manufacturing plants. common school advocates such as horace mann and catherine beecher argued that single educated white women leave the home and staff the ever-growing common schools. mann believed these women were responding to their natural call (altenbaugh, 2004). after manumission and the last of the great plains indian wars, there were yet more youth, freed slave and native american children, in need of education primarily for assimilation or, sadly, extinction. it is a tragedy that respected gainful employment for some euro-american, african american, and a few native american women came at the expense of their silenced sisters and brothers (adams, 1995; blount, 1998; peterson & vaughn-roberson, 1986; vaughn-roberson, 1993/2004). in any case, by 1920 only 15 % of the nation‟s public school teachers were men (vaughn & liles, 1992). during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some single women rose to the superintendency, especially after various western and mid-western states passed school suffrage acts, but progress was uneven. although by 1900, approximately 276 women served as county superintendents and 12 years later the number jumped to around 857 (blount, 1998), in 1912 the first assistant texas attorney general held that coverture prevented his state‟s married women from holding such offices. he was responding to an unnamed “married woman from stockdale” who had thrown her hat in the ring (new york times, 1912, p. 26). paralleling this time period, married women still could not legally teach in arizona, but they could run for county superintendent (bowers, 1994; nilsen, pace, & evans, 1985). however, most of the wellknown school and state superintendents were white, single, urban women. while each made inroads for other females, they also faced contentious political environments and their tenures were often brief. one of the notable, susan miller, taught greek and latin in new york until she married patrick william dorsey in 1881. they moved to california in the 1890s, but patrick soon absconded with their son. alone in los angeles, susan returned to the classroom and in 1919 and became the city‟s school superintendent. among many accomplishments, she increased teacher qualifications for licensure but also raised salaries. yet, citizens attacked her for engaging in partisan debates rather than remaining a public servant, and she soon stepped down (mcgregor, 1953). perhaps chicago public school superintendent ella flagg young, a single white woman, was the most remarkable early twentieth-century superintendent. supported by suffragists, young was elected in 1909, and a year later colleagues named her president of the national education association (nea). young was widowed after a brief marriage to an older man, and advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 115 she remained single throughout her career sharing her home with a former teacher and female secretary. according to young, education was not only a natural endeavor for women but one in which they surpassed their male counterparts (blount, 2003). practicing what she preached the superintendent supported women teachers‟ efforts to equalize the pay schedule, but when she opposed school board corruption she was forced to resign, take up the position again, and finally quit for good. at 55, young began graduate work with dewey at the university of chicago. her dissertation explored ways to disembowel the rigid, rapidly increasing educational hierarchy. after graduating she taught at the same university and was principal of the chicago normal school (blount, 1998; smith, 1979). a fellow traveler, in 1919, texan annie webb blanton was elected to lead her entire state‟s school system. founded in 1893, the texas equal rights association secured white women‟s enfranchisement in primary elections in 1918. this opened the door for blanton, but her campaign was a bitter contest. opponents accused her of atheism, and blanton countered by exposing her male opponent‟s close association with an impeached former governor (vaughn-roberson, 1993/2004). following young‟s lead on the national educational front, blanton was also elected vice-president of the nea on three separate occasions. similar to other national colleagues, the texan increased requirements for teaching credentials, worked for a non-gender-based pay scale, and improved rural education in her state. after her second term, blanton ran unsuccessfully for the united states congress from denton county. leaving politics behind, the former school administrator earned a doctorate from cornell university and then a professorial appointment at the university of texas in 1927 (vaughnroberson, 1993/2004). although the vast majority of female urban and state leaders had to make a choice between marriage and career, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries some professor/teacher lesbians allowed the old maid school marm image to shelter them and their partners from public scrutiny. whatever their gender orientation, however, as the twentieth century wore on, percentages of female to male school superintendents slid into the abyss (blount & nash, 2004; broughton & palmieri, 1999). moreover, as educational bureaucracies grew the elected superintendent, supported heartily by newly enfranchised female voters, became a thing of the past. governors appointed state superintendents and school boards hired their own district leaders. not until the 1970s did the proportional numbers of women slowly creep above the all-time high of 10 % in 1930. early in the twentyfirst century that figure rose to around 17 %, but just 5 % was non-white (grogan & brunner, 2005; shakeshaft , 1987). during this time period an additional concern was that the proportionate numbers of female applicants were declining, although the number of superintendencies were becoming more prevalent (keane & moore, 2008). ruth love was as exception to the rule. an african american, in 1971, she was appointed superintendent of oakland unified school district. love created two programs in particular that hosted visiting dignitaries; such as alex haley, maya angelou, james baldwin, and coretta scott king; to address her student population. in 1981, she took the chicago public school system‟s top spot. the second female superintendent since young, love echoed her predecessor‟s earlier admonition that women and their nurturing values especially suited them for and enhanced the moral stature of teaching and administration. in fact a white female, mayor jane m. byrne, had spurned deputy superintendent manford byrd‟s aspiration for the job in favor of love. but the new superintendent‟s career was shortlived when two years later harold washington, an african american, defeated byrne in a mayoral race and ousted love so byrd could become superintendent. ironically byrd then claimed the daley political machine in chicago was deterring strong black political/community leaders (johnson, 1989). as we read this we could only think that while political battles raged many of chicago‟s school children just slipped through the cracks. soon after leaving office, love followed in blanton and young‟s footsteps, becoming a professor and school reformer, especially in third world countries (arnex 1981; hayes, 2009). echoing love‟s sentiments during the late twentieth and on into the twenty-first centuries, leadership theorists emphasized traditional female traits such as listening, caring, and nurturing. yet, when contemporary men have lead this way they are seen as successful, situational leaders. so as not to seem weak, have worried about appearing too female, translated as weak. conversely, when grassroots decision-making stalemates and the superintendent makes an executive decision to fire someone, for example, he is doing what a man must do. a likeminded female authority figure becomes an out-of-control threat. turning history on its ear, especially when she is single, speculation can arise that she is gay and a threat to children (blount, 2003). she is no longer the forgiving domestic woman (already a suspect leader) that society expects her to be. she has found eve within her, the harbinger of social disintegration (peterson & vaughn-roberson, 1988; skrla, reyes, & scheurich, 2000;). this tangled web of expectations and judgment are part of why bjork (2008) wrote, “gender and politics intersect in a system of relationships and power so rich and entangled that we have only begun to explore them” (p. 30). a majority of quantitative and qualitative studies focused on subjects‟ or participants‟ collective, thematic, or stratified similarities rather than differences. moreover, few researchers showcase rural women superintendents, although at least 33% of early twenty-firstcentury schools are in rural areas where a substantial number of the nation‟s female superintendents serve (garn & brown, advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 116 2008). in sum “if we are to ever make progress toward redefining the superintendency to include the presence of women‟s representative numbers, we must come to a better understanding of how the social constructions of gender, power, and politics play out in lived experiences and the workplace (skrla, scott, & benestante, 2008, p. 116). we did identify a synergistic school leadership model that helped us frame our study in terms of women‟s multiple realities (brown & irby, 2003; irby, brown, duffy, & trautman). the authors employed a variety of leadership theories to describe an alternative, post-modern look at the impact of social factors on female leadership. the model‟s four factors are: (a) organizational structure, (b) leadership behavior, (c) external forces, and (d) beliefs, attitudes, values. we applied sub points made in each of these areas to guide and interpret our investigation. for example, organizational structures are: (a) formed by leadership style; (b) molded by the way a particular approach is put into practice; (c) inspired by one‟s values; and ever (d) observed and evaluated by external expectations from a school community, such as appropriate gender roles. in so doing, i learned that as a female superintendent i needed to be aware at each juncture how i perceived myself as a woman, how my school patrons saw me, and how i could use my gender to accomplish my goals. this article answered brunner‟s (2003) call “to mine” female superintendents‟ stories and understand how a variety of ways these women navigate leadership in different social and cultural contexts methodology when we closed the last of our books and articles, we felt the full weight of women superintendents‟ historic challenges. at one time, having been the only woman in a university college of education and having done research on numerous female educators, my co-author experienced a renewed passion for our topic. she enthusiastically guided me through my personal quest and the resulting narrative inquiry. pragmatism and interpretivism inform this methodology. for example, in the early twenty-first century dewey and mead both saw the “social situation [as] an organic whole in which both the individual and society are functional distinctions or two abstract phases of the same process” (odin, 1996, p. 194). first my co-author and i penned 20to 30-page personal journals. she wrote extensively about 29 years of chairing dissertations and studying female educators and administrators. i read over her words and conversed with her about experiences that might cause her to objectively evaluate each woman‟s experiences. i watched her adhere to that trustworthiness commitment as we read and analyzed the data. my writing was autobiographical and became the first draft of the narrative in this article. we dialogued about it for hours, as i continuously looked backward and then forward to sew my life together. simultaneously my story resulted also from weaving inside and outside of myself, especially through each watershed period of my career (clandinin & connelly, 2000). this entailed many rewrites, a type of analysis in itself (richardson, 1998). to mask the identities of the people in my sojourn, on occasion i created composite characters yet their comments are contextually authentic. i benefitted from 40 other female superintendents‟ reflections. we were fortunate that my co-author had spent countless hours with and interviewed 15 female school superintendents. adding to this participant pool were twenty-five other women superintendents, represented in five budding scholars‟ dissertation studies (i.e. amedy, 1997; bran cato, 1997; palmer, 2003). my coauthor was the major professor for two (everett, 1989; robinson-hornbuckle, 1991) and served on another‟s dissertation committee (kerber, 1992). our superintendents were a diverse group, representing three generations of african and euro americans who grew up in single and two parent homes or extended family units within varied socioeconomic circumstances. at the time of their interviews they lived and worked in rural, suburban, and urban districts in numerous states. the superintendents had varied sexual orientations and multiple opinions on religion and/or spirituality. likewise their political and social views often quite different. couched within historical context and points made in the synergistic leadership model (brown & irby, 2003; irby, brown, duffy, & trautman, 2001), we analyzed by coding and theming the 40 superintendents‟ interviews and stories. our major themes are represented in five prototypes: (a) ruth, the white, rural lady; (b) rachel, the stalwart imposing urban autocrat; (c) nancy, the african american success story working in a black inner-city neighborhood; (d) margaret, the white suburban superintendent who embraced the would-be disaffected students of the 1970s counter cultural youth; and € reagan, the contemporary chameleon who united a disparate political community of a rural and suburban constituency. thematic prototypes ruth ruth could have been my grandmother. she was a white, working-class, rural female educator who became county superintendent during world war ii when no men were available to take the position. she had a degree from a teachers college and as a young unmarried woman in the 1930s felt that her place was to teach school, not be a school superintendent but when called on she did her patriotic and community duty. ruth did not see herself as a leader in her own right but a substitute for a man, eliciting from her staff and communities a kindly authority based on years of sunday school teaching and nursing home volunteer work. “i wasn‟t out to get any men,” ruth said, “just keep the light burning while they were away.” advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 117 thus ruth used influence rather than power relying on the “lady” image amidst an agricultural environment. defusing any potential strife she explained, “i got along just fine with the board members. i treated them like gentleman, and they treated me like a lady. by avoiding conflict at all costs ruth at least tacitly assumed blame when problems arose, explaining, “it was my responsibility to keep things running smoothly.” miller (1986) insightfully interpreted situations such as ruth‟s by explaining that even in victory there is defeat. by not confronting conflict head on ruth unknowingly internalized the belief that she had failed and was truly just a substitute for a male. a loyal soldier, it was interesting to hear her talk about her enthusiasm for sports, a community mainstay. unlike i, she seemed to have little trouble with the board over the coaching staff and continued to be an avid fan when she returned to the classroom. as she talked about her enthusiasm, the lady like personality seemed to melt a bit. i could see her loudly cheer on her team. a metaphor of sorts, she was not the community‟s heart but part of its sidelines. now deceased, she lies in her grave that is unattended in a small county cemetery. rachael rachael was young enough to be ruth‟s daughter. she earned her first superintendency in an inner city school where no men wanted to lead. white and single, as a principal in the same district, rachael had taken advantage of her size and forthright personality to control her high school. “i just squared off with a lot of those tough kids and backed them down,” she remembered. this did not go unnoticed by her board. in a classoriented world the less money one has the more one depends on the body for sources of power. physical and reproductive capacities are a major source of capital. the community wanted order in a deteriorating neighborhood, and she delivered. nancy rachel‟s contemporary, nancy, also won her first superintendency in the 1970s in an urban district on which male leaders had given up. an african american nancy was divorced and the first female to head the predominantly black community. she was dedicated to turning her bedraggled urban community into a place of hope. however, in some respects nancy resembled new yorker meier (1995). she spent hours listening to community members who had not lost hope. pointing out the ironies of her own segregated schooling, nancy explained, “now don‟t get me wrong, i‟m not for segregation, but we learned valuable lessons in those schools— to share books and see black role models lead our schools.” margaret another woman of the same era margaret first became superintendent in an urban/suburban community. it was a plumb job even for a white woman in the 1970s, but margaret had social and cultural capital on her side. a businessman, her father had taken her to numerous professional meetings throughout the country. as the only female in attendance, margaret had learned to act like the boys with impunity but, like all of the superintendents in our study, her passion for children‟s education was always in the back of her mind. in addition to socioeconomic class, margaret had history on her side. she began teaching the decade i was born when the country was very afraid of up-and-coming hippie revolutionaries. margaret developed a reputation for being able to quell potential chaos. her first job was instructing english in an alternative high school. undaunted when johnny came to the board to spell the word “fame” he wrote “f-u-k,” she calmly took the chalk from his hand and said, “johnny, if you are going to cuss, spell it correctly,” margaret then inserted a “c” after the “u” in johnny‟s word and said, “if you are here to learn, now write „f-a-m-e.” the student did as he was told and sat down. word spread like wildfire. her deliberate but caring personality became part of her district‟s cultural lore. meagan meagan is a more recent portrayal of the female leader. just 10 years my senior, she was a comely relatively unassuming white woman who could use her feminine mystique (friedan, 1963) to work a crowd. she conceptualized her job as a set of interchangeable roles not a task, as did another superintendent in skrla, scott, and benestante‟s (2008) study, who declared, “„what is right for kids is right but what wins out is politically negotiating the landscape,‟” (p. 124). meagan could change hats at will, relating to each person as if she had been part of their world since birth. although she did tout and sometimes employed a transformational, educational, and school patroncentered leadership style, meagan could dial her femininity up or down to maximize communication. after dealing with her older, bucolic school patrons one such woman remarked, “after i first met meagan i went home and told my husband, „that‟s a great little girl and we need to support her.‟” but wearing a taciturn smile, meagan also politely, but stubbornly, refused to leave the state superintendent‟s office when a special school program was in danger of being cut. in effect, she wore her opponent down with polite resistance. on occasion, she shed this skin, but not in a school board meeting, behind closed doors with a recalcitrant staff member. just feminine enough to soften her masculine resolve, she was able to put innovative programs in place for students and raise test scores. my narrative having compiled the above composite characters my coauthor and i then began threading their lives into my narrative. throughout this process, we confirmed our appreciation for richardson‟s (1998) earlier noted claim that writing is truly a legitimate analytical technique. the result was my four-framed personal narrative: (a) growing up female and male; (b) the interview; (c) putting out fires; and (d) the board meeting. in a fifth frame, fictive successful scenarios, we then speculated how our five archetypes might have handily conducted my illfated board meeting and gotten a vote to fire the coach. richardson (1998) identified four criteria for presenting advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 118 research findings in this matter: substantive contribution; aesthetic merit; reflexivity; and impact and expression of a reality. my fifth frame draws from the latter two. i hope that all or parts of my story will resonate with other superintendents, thereby fulfilling an important narrative inquiry goal (clandinin & connelly, 2000). looking backward and forward inside and outside when i enrolled in graduate school in 2008, i was burning to study the superintendency. i internally flinched during a qualitative research class one night after speaking about women superintendents‟ experiences. one of the two professors teaching the class said, “sounds like you might want to take a feminist perspective.” at this time my belief system resembled that of judy (represented in ruth, the white rural lady prototype). who explained, “i really have this hang-up that we women dwell too much on the fact that we are women…. i think of myself as an educational administrator and not a female and it bothers me in those realms that we identify ourselves and make ourselves different” (cited in robinsonhornbuckle, 1991, p. 51). echoing judy, i mustered my courage and shot back, “i‟m not a feminist. a person is just a person.” the other professor, now my co-author, offered, “i can understand that. when i grew up, my dad had all the power inside and outside the home. he derided my mother, and i decided i wanted to be out there with him as a professional. i clearly didn‟t want to be a homemaker.” i had been ready for a fight, but the second professor had given me a modicum of support. the only thing left to do was to keep reading and thinking, so that i could posture my egalitarian thoughts in more sophisticated terms. yet, i came to disagree with myself as evidenced in this paper‟s introduction. in that class, i learned that female superintendents face exaggerated political problems compared to their male counterparts. they are torn between behaving as traditional women or as men: juggling this conundrum by having two homes, one within and the other without the community; appearing at school and social events alone; and working more hours than men (bell, 1995; grogan & brunner, 2005; pavan, 1999). growing up female and male i was like many other good rural children who grew up oblivious to the cultural context in which they were reared. it was the 1960s, but my hometown and surrounding farms were removed from the civil rights tumult. a racially homogeneous population, no one said to me, “you are white and entitled,” not “different.” yet, i wore an invisible stigma. i was a girl. my father was the family patriarch, a school administrator who instructed me to get an education and become a teacher. yet interestingly, he also encouraged me to work hard and achieve any administrative opportunities that came along. at the time, i identified with one female superintendent in brunner‟s (1999) work who said, “my father said you can be anything you want” (p. 190). modeling my father‟s leadership style when he was a principal my demeanor was never classically “feminine,” and before i married and bore two children some straight and gay people thought i was a lesbian. after reading blount (2003) i realized that i was not the only older single woman who had been stereotyped. although i am sure my father breathed a sigh of relief when i tied the knot with a man, he still kept telling me i could do anything i was big enough to do. after college, i taught for 11 years, first away from and after i married in my hometown. but unlike other women in my family, i moved for my job, not my husband‟s. i soon became an elementary principal, and like many other women, as evans (2007) corroborated, this was my springboard to become an assistant superintendent. my promotion paralleled a school community in transition. farmers feared losing their land to corporate agriculture. it became harder and harder to find blue collar jobs, because so many workers had gradually moved to urban areas while more impoverished residents moved in to find any type of menial work. the district suffered commensurately. in addition to financial and personnel problems, the physical plants were a mess, filled with countless, dirty, old boxes packed with trivia, but also with crucial documents needed for tax purposes and student records. a christian zealot, the superintendent anointed my office with oil shortly after i assumed the job. biblically and socially, i was eve who had pushed mother mary‟s role aside and he was very afraid. peterson and vaughn‟s (1988) work on educational and nursing professionals among catholic nuns recounted several similar situations. the all-male school board was not as adamantly opposed to me, but it still wrestled with the oxymoron of a female leader. like joan, another of our rural participants subsumed in the ruth prototype, when my superintendent left and the board was desperate to find an immediate replacement, the president of the board asked me temporarily to fill in (brancato, 1997). the interview when initially advertised, i did not apply for the permanent position. consciously, i based this decision on the school system‟s disarray, but i may have been conflicted over my dual responsibilities of administrator and homemaker. my mother had been a teacher, never an administrator. if i took the job, i would have been much younger than the average female superintendent whose children, if she had any, were already grown (brunner, 1999; kowalski & stouder, 1999; young & mcleod, 2001). due to a lack of applicants, a week before the final interviews a board member asked me to submit an application. as usual, i went to my father for advice. he mulled the question for a few days and finally, as an afterthought said, “you know, if you ever want that job now is the time to try for it. the school is at the bottom of the barrel and you can only move it forward. i am not telling you what to do but it is something to consider.” i took his advice but, like the women grogan and shakeshaft advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 119 (2011) referred to in my situation, i applied mainly because i wanted to serve what seemed to be the forgotten school children rather than to further my career. the board narrowed the pool to five candidates. on the evening of the interviews, i was the last to be questioned. i spoke honestly about the schools‟ problems. after i left the room the board deliberated for hours, then called me back in for additional repartee. the president informed me that they had narrowed their selection to two candidates, an older white male and me, but the representatives were concerned that if i were not given the job i would leave the district. the board‟s first choice, i now reason, was to have an industrious, long-suffering assistant female superintendent who did most of the work for a male leader. probably due in part to my father‟s stature, the board capitulated and offered me the job. brunner‟s (1999) research, i later discovered, suggested that, like mine, women‟s advancement into leadership positions benefit more from having a male rather than a female mentor. putting out fires naively, i expected hometown support. my goals were simple: create individualized instruction for special needs students; encourage learning-by-doing across curricula; hire teachers and administrators who put the youngsters‟ welfare first; and nurture bad teachers through failure (lightfoot, 1983), but without haste get rid of the ones who were bad for children. i was also concerned with professional inequalities among teachers and administrators. for example, in my district and others throughout the country (carter, 2002) it was an enduring historical practice that male teachers/coaches made more money than did females who also sponsored clubs and did other service work. i was decisive but tried to be as inclusive as i could be with teachers, staff, and school patrons, but i did not want to lose control. i listened with curiosity when certain male patrons told me i “had more balls than a man.” at the time, i did not appreciate what skrla, scott, and benestante‟s (2008) participant maintained: „“you‟re not supposed be competent in everything. you‟re supposed to need somebody to help you in something. and if you‟re (a woman)…and look like you don‟t need help, i think that…just gets at people. it gets at other women; it gets at other men‟”(p.125). because my style often smacked of the masculine-identified autocrat, my community did not know what to do with me either. apparently i was not like many other women who, as grogan‟s (1998) work suggested, try to avoid the weak female label by casting themselves in a gender-neutral role. i must have sold this image to some people because at meetings where the board and i sat at a long table placed on a raised platform in front of the public crowd, the newspaper photographer was so oblivious to my gender that he thoughtlessly positioned the camera to give a clear view up my dress. a few patrons appreciated my gender-neutral no-nonsense style, especially when i quickly arranged for optimal educational placements for special education students and other youngsters in dire need of extra attention. yet, overall my style was ineffective, as one disastrous board meeting demonstrated. the board meeting the meeting was conducted in a packed auditorium with an imposing grey fuzzy microphone that a large city news crew had plunked down on a table in front of me. the issue was whether to fire a male football coach. he was insidious, but a winner. he bullied and belittled students, refused to learn any innovative teaching styles, and behaved in other inappropriate ways that did not legally justify his being fired. yet, in a fractious community with a constantly shifting population, football was a narcotic. a successful team was all many people felt they had and provided the community with bonding experiences. i began the meeting by introducing the dilemma in a didactic way—to fire or not to fire. soon a heated debate emerged, and my efforts to charge through and not deal with the conflict failed. in graduate school i later read about other besieged superintendents (arnez, 1981). a few days later i quit, applied for a doctoral degrees program in educational leadership, and was accepted. i hoped that my studies would help me understand why i had failed. i read about other optional leadership styles that involved sharing responsibility and creating learning communities (e. g. dufour & eaker, 1998; lambert, 2002) which made me feel worse than i had before, because i then believed i should have known about them before i became a superintendent. my coauthor encouraged me to work through this guilt by speculating about how our five prototypes might have resolved a similar board meeting such as mine where they too wanted to fire the coach. fictive successful scenarios although ruth never really challenged her board directly, she would have used her subtle influence to accomplish the desired goal. most of the adults in her crowd would have come that night with childhood memories of ruth‟s kindly, but unyielding christian teaching. also an older woman, ruth was mother mary‟s progeny, never eve‟s. what might have been a strident bunch of cowboys would have been more deferential to her than they had been to me and would have voted to fire the coach. rachel and nancy were both urban superintendents during the tumultuous 1970s; however, due to their distinctively different personalities and situations, they would have handled their meetings in diverse ways. rachael‟s patrons would have responded to her direct manner and fired the coach without reservation. but i was not rachel, and my board would have never appointed her. we were both white, but our rural and urban contexts were completely different. without belittling black, especially male school patrons, nancy would have opened the meeting, not with a fiery, but with a confident tone, and would have lined out enough facts to illustrate the coach‟s advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 120 individual infractions that stood in the way of rebuilding the school community. the group would have discussed the situation, but nancy, the luminary, would have won over any detractors. margaret might have started the board meeting with a friendly joke about fred being too drunk to attend the function. the crowd would have laughed, and the board would eventually have voted to fire the coach. margaret‟s professional child, meagan, would have begun the session with a tempered tone and greeted attendees with diffidence that masked steel blue determined eyes. just feminine enough to soften what her community might have tagged an unacceptable masculine resolve, she would have gotten the job done. my coauthor and i devised a fictional scenario for me. my male assistant superintendent could have initiated the discussion. after the crowd debated for a time, i could have introduced my nurturing side and, in the name of resolution, i might have called on certain attendees whose views were in the middle ground much closer to each other than apart. then i could have guided the group to consensus. because i am not a girlie woman, that strategy might have worked. i would have taken advantage of the female image as peacemaker to win over enough of the opposition who appreciated my ability to quiet the crowd. the beginning of never-ending reflection following narrative inquiry edicts, with the help of my coauthor, i reached back into euro-american history of emergent women leaders, especially superintendents. this gave me a heartfelt respect for those who had come before me and the ways in which they obtained educational leadership or superintendent positions despite tremendous social pressure to remain at home, or, at best, aspire to nothing but a teaching position. willard took advantage of an economically failing husband to begin her own school. miller benefitted from an absentee spouse and young from widowhood to be, from my perspective, accepted as women who had once conformed to society‟s expectation that women become wives above all else. of course, during and after being elected they had to fend off criticism for engaging in what might be described as unladylike behavior or thoughts. miller and blanton were accused for being political activists; blanton was labeled an atheist; and young suffered politically for attacking graft. after investigating the 40 participants‟ lives i learned that contemporary female superintendents still wrestle with cultural and personal views of womanhood as if working with the public was not hard enough, they had an extra layer of problematic concerns regarding gender. ruth‟s image as a maternal christian teacher would have dissuaded the roughest cowboy from challenging the pure of heart. margaret knew just how much assertiveness or motherly intimidation she should employ in her suburban district to be effective. rachael was the strict larger-than-life caretaker who inspired working class students to adopt middle class decorum. nancy was the female crusader who brought civility and some degree of continuity back into a fragmented black community. and meagan was a twentieth-first century woman who took advantage of feminist insistency that women could be leaders but at the same time owned her femininity. in sum, achieving the superintendency is not simply breaking the glass ceiling that sexism creates to prevent women from obtaining chief executive-type positions. rather, as eagly and carli (2007) put forth, women‟s rise to the top varies by individual and context, and consequently is better seen as a labyrinth. moreover, as the synergistic leadership model explained, keeping such positions is based on any number of factors related to the way one acts to develop an organizational structure (brown & irby, 2003; irby, brown, duffy, & trautman, 2001). i should have been more aware of external community based social constructions of gender and more introspective about the kind of woman i perceived myself to be. this study helped me do just that. i decided that i am incapable of projecting ruth‟s sunday school or meagan‟s pretty woman image. nor am i like margaret who was tutored in the ways entitled upper-middle-class men jockey for power. in another non-rural setting similar to rachael and nancy‟s my stature and aggressive persona is imposing enough to at least, in the board meeting scenario, bring order out of chaos and achieve my desired goal of firing the coach. but for me herein lies the rub. ethically how much cultural manipulation am i willing to engage in to accomplish positive goals? to what extent does the end justify the means? having not as yet answered these questions for myself i invite my readers to contemplate them and share their reflections and in so doing contribute to an everchanging scholarly conversation that intends to inform practice. references adams, d. 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(2001). flukes, opportunities, and planned interventions: factors affecting women‟s decisions to become school administrators. educational administration quarterly, 37(4), 462502. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership feminist epistemology: the foundation of feminist research and its distinction from traditional research joanne ardovini-brooker, ph.d. ardovini-brooker, spring, 2002 ...feminist epistemologies are the golden keys that unlock the door to feminist research. once the door is unlocked, a better understanding of the distinctive nature of feminist research can occur. there are many questions surrounding feminist research. the most common question is: “what makes feminist research distinctive from traditional research within the social sciences?” in trying to answer this question, we need to examine feminist epistemology and the intertwining nature of epistemology, methodology (theory and analysis of how research should proceed), and methods (techniques for gathering data) utilized by feminist researchers. feminist epistemology in contrast to traditional epistemologies is the foundation on which feminist methodology is built. in turn, the research that develops from this methodology differs greatly from research that develops from traditional methodology and epistemology. therefore, i argue that one must have a general understanding of feminist epistemology and methodology before one can understand what makes this type of research unique. such a foundation will assist us in our exploration of the realm of feminist research, while illuminating the differences between feminist and traditional research. an introduction to feminist epistemology epistemology is the study of knowledge and how it is that people come to know what they know (johnson, 1995, p. 97). originating from philosophy, epistemology comes to us from a number of disciplines, i.e.: sociology, psychology, political science, education, and women’s studies (duran, 1991, p. xi). feminist epistemology emerged from research within these fields that professed to spell out what “feminist knowledge” entails, what is implied by women’s ways of knowing, and research on women’s lives (p. xi). unlike traditional epistemology, the term feminist epistemology does not have a single referent. feminist theorists have used the term variously to refer to women's "ways of knowing", "women's experiences", or simple "women's knowledge" (alcoff & potter, 1993, p. 1). therefore, the term feminist epistemology is http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html a means of summarizing, to some extent, and integrating women's knowledge and experiences. inherent in feminist epistemology is the "multiplicity of women's voices" (duran, 1991, p. xiii). this is central to feminist research. it implies that feminist researchers need not search for the one “truth” but for the multiple “truths” that exist in researching the oppression of women. the recent literature on feminist epistemology suggests that the word "epistemology" has been "reconstructed" by feminists to include the broadest possible sense of the term. this has been done by drawing attention to areas previously left untouched by traditional epistemologies and research. additionally, by creating "gynocentric epistemics", knowledge centered on women's realities, a new knowledge is brought forth. the reason for these actions is the feminist desire to have women's experiences recognized, legitimated, and included as possible subjects of research. the history of feminist epistemology is the history of the clash between feminist commitments to "the struggles of women to have their understandings of the world legitimated" and "the commitment of traditional philosophy to various accounts of knowledge" (alcoff & potter, 1993, p. 2). the history of epistemology has also been one of inquiry into "whether knowledge was possible" (cartesianism/traditional epistemology) and "seldom into the conditions producing knowledge" (feminist epistemology) (duran, 1991, p. 3). cartesianism, traditional epistemology, assumes the unproblematic generalizability of knowledge from its context of discovery to a variety of contexts of use (stanley & wise, 1993, p. 191). this approach also views knowledge as existing independently of the person(s) who produced it. feminist epistemology rejects these notions. the feminist researcher “is an active presence, an agent in research, and she constructs what is actually a viewpoint, a point of view that is both a construction or version and is consequently and necessarily partial in its understandings” (stanley & wise, 1993, p. 6). feminist epistemology assumes "that those we deem to be knowers actually do possess knowledge" (duran, 1991, p. 4). in other words, “knowledge is contextually specific” and not independent of the person(s) who produce it (p. 6). therefore, feminist researchers must “acknowledge the ethical and political issues involved in what we do, how we do it, and the claims we make for it (p. 7).” we must not assume the generalizability of our knowledge and experiences. as seen above, feminist epistemology evolved from a critique of traditional epistemology and its search for a dominant narrative. today, feminist epistemology is comprised of research programs that move beyond the critique of traditional research to a reframing of the problematic of knowledge to unearth the politics of epistemology (alcoff & potter, 1993, pp. 2-3). alcoff and potter suggest that feminist epistemologies should not be taken as involving a commitment to gender as the primary axis of oppression or positing that gender is a theoretical variable separable from other axes of oppression and susceptible to a unique analysis (pp. 3-4). if feminist research is to assist in the liberation of women by researching our oppression, then it must address virtually all forms of domination because women fill the ranks of every category of oppressed people. feminist epistemology "seeks to unmake the web of oppressions and reweave the web of life" (p. 4). this is similar to what lorraine code describes as standpoint epistemologies. in her discussion, "taking subjectivity into account", code argues that traditional, mainstream epistemology creates the illusion of a universal "truth" through the removal of "unacceptable" points of view. these "unacceptable" points of view are the experiences of the oppressed. therefore, according to code, the goal of feminist epistemology is to overturn "perspectival hierarchies" (alcoff & potter, 1993, p. 5). recent work concerning feminist epistemology, (i.e., fox-keller, 1985; bordo, 1988; harding, 1986) has a common theme: "there is a masculinist, androcentric tradition that yields a hypernormative, idealized, and stylistically aggressive mode of thought" (duran, 1991, p. 8). keller analyzes the relationship between androcentric epistemology in plato and plato's philosophy of sexual love and its link to metaphysics (p. 8). bordo's study of descartes meditations is similar to keller's work. harding’s analysis offers the feminist responses to the androcentrism inherent in science (p.10). all are examples of feminist epistemology and its reactions to traditional research. harding’s analysis has been interpreted by alcoff & potter as an illustration of the impact of androcentrism upon traditional epistemological assumptions of science. harding argues that feminist epistemology, particularly feminist standpoint epistemologies, must seek validation of the perspectives of knowledge that have been ignored by traditional research (alcoff & potter, 1993, p. 5). harding identifies herself as a feminist standpoint epistemologist. yet, harding does not go as far as embracing relativism. she suggests that feminist standpoint epistemologies will increase and strengthen women’s ability to achieve objectivity. this can be done by the use of feminist methodology, which involves starting from the lives of marginalized people (alcoff & potter, 1993, p.6). this will reveal more of the unexamined assumptions influencing science and will generate more critical questions, thus producing a less partial and distorted account (p. 6). therefore, harding argues that this research needs to be undertaken by everyone, not just by the marginalized. stanley and wise disagree with harding's suggestion. they advocate women as the knowers and the doers. they also view feminist epistemology a bit differently. they define feminist epistemology as a "framework or theory for specifying the constitution and generation of knowledge about the social world; that is, it concerns how to understand the nature of reality” (stanley & wise, 1993, p. 188). since women's realities differ from men's realities, then feminist epistemology is women's epistemology. for example, women’s leadership styles may vary from male leadership styles because they are not phallocentric in origin. women’s leadership styles emanates from a female center and construction of reality. this reality is one of objectification and marginality, as defined by an androcentric society. therefore, women’s leadership styles tend to be transformational, collaborative efforts rather than a traditional “one man show”. feminist epistemology distinguishes what women's knowledge is and how it may differ from the knowledge that dominates, which is usually men's knowledge and traditional research. this is done by specifying the sex of the “knowers”. feminist epistemologies also examine by what means someone becomes the knower and "the means by which competing knowledge-claims are adjudicated and some rejected in favor of another/others" (stanley &wise, 1993, p. 188). i believe that this is fundamental to feminist research, "for it is around the constitution of a feminist epistemology that feminism can most directly and far-reachingly challenge non-feminist frameworks and ways of working" (stanley & wise, 1993, pp. 188-189). stanley and wise allege that there are key areas of the feminist research process that draw from feminist epistemology, which sets it apart from traditional research, such as: 1. the researcher/research relationship should not be a hierarchical relationship; 2. emotions should be seen as valuable aspects of the research process; 3. the conceptualizations of "objectivity" and “subjectivity” as binaries or dichotomies must not occur in research; 4. the researchers’ intellectual autobiography must be taken into consideration when viewing their conclusions; 5. the researcher must consider the existence and management of the different "realities" or versions held by the researchers and the researched; 6. the researcher must be aware of issues surrounding authority and power in research; 7. the researcher must recognize that there is authority and power in the written representation of research. (p. 189) harding describes these basic feminist epistemologies and places them into three categories: feminist standpoint, feminist empiricism, and feminist postmodernism. when harding writes of the feminist epistemologies, she is referring to "feminist ways of knowing" or to "feminist critiques of traditional accounts of ways of knowing" (duran, 1991, p. 81). feminist standpoint theory the fact that women are charged with maintaining everyday life is the basis for feminist standpoint theory. within research, standpoint feminists argue that the problem is deeper than "bad science" or "poor research methods". the problem is that the dominant conceptual schemes of research fit the experiences of western, white, elite class males (harding, 1991, p. 48). the specific social location of the knower is important to research because it shapes what is known and what is not known. standpoint feminists argue that not all perspectives are equally valid, complete, discovered, or even heard by the use of traditional research methods. therefore, it is essential for feminist research to begin from women's lives, "then we can arrive at empirically and theoretically more adequate descriptions” (p. 48). harding argues, "women's specific location in patriarchal societies is actually a resource in the construction of new knowledge” (andersen, 1994, p. 373 citing harding, 1991). “reflecting long-standing feminist criticisms of the absence of women from or marginalized reports of women in research accounts, research done from the perspective of standpoint theories stresses a particular view that builds on and from women’s experiences (olsen, 1994, pp. 162-163 citing harding, 1987).” standpoint theory assumes that systems of privilege are less visible to those who benefit the most and who control the resources that define the dominant cultural beliefs, i.e.: whites, males, heterosexuals, etc. standpoint feminists believe that it takes the standpoint of the oppressed groups, i.e. people of color, women, and homosexuals, to recognize systems of oppression and privilege. however, this standpoint is not accepted blindly. “systems of oppression also shape the consciousness of the oppressed" (andersen, 1994, p. 373). therefore, standpoint feminists must construct knowledge that reflects the experiences of both the dominant and subordinate groups in order for that knowledge to spawn liberation. dorothy smith, nancy hartsock, and sandra harding, as well as hilary rose, jane flax, and alison jaggar, among others, all assisted in the development of standpoint themes that originated from hegel's insight into the relationship between the master and the slave. the themes also originated in the insight of karl marx and friedrich engels’s development of the "proletarian standpoint" (harding, 1991, p. 120). these standpoint researchers/theorists focus on differences between men and women's situations. there are many differences, which are the grounds for standpoint feminists to make their claims. according to harding, there are seven basic assumptions concerning the differences between men’s and women's experiences. the seven differences are summarized below: 1. women's different lives have been erroneously devalued and neglected as starting points for scientific research and as the generators of evidence for or against knowledge claims. 2. women are valuable "strangers", "outsiders" to the social order...women's exclusion from the design and direction of both the social order and the production of knowledge...this status is seen as an advantage. 3. women's oppression gives them fewer interests in ignorance...this is grounds for transvaluing women's differences because members of oppressed groups have fewer interests in maintaining the status quo. 4. women's perspectives are from the other side of the "battle of the sexes" that women and men engage in on a daily basis...human knowers are active agents in their learning and women's knowledge emerges through the struggles. 5. women's perspectives are from everyday life, which is best for the origins of research. 6. women's perspectives come from mediating ideological dualisms, nature versus culture, which enables us to understand how and why social and cultural phenomena have taken form. 7. women, especially women researchers, are "outsiders within"...this increases objectivity (harding, 1991, pp. 121131). the works of smith and hartsock exemplify feminist standpoint research, that is, research that starts from women’s actual experience in everyday life and ends with the stimulation of thoughts, doubts and questions concerning traditional research (olsen, 1994, p. 163). both smith and hartsock illustrate this challenge of traditional research by examining the researcher’s place “in the relations of ruling” within the research process (p. 163). they stress the importance of intersubjectivity in research as well as the problematic nature of the everyday world. women’s experiences are shaped by external material factors (p. 163). therefore, a feminist researcher studying the experiences of women must not view the experiences as objects for study. this would only divide subject and object as traditionally done. instead, a researcher must “be able to work very differently than she is able to with established sociological strategies of thinking and inquiry that are not outside the relations of ruling” (olsen, 1994, p.163 citing smith, 1992). feminist empiricism harding (1991) also discusses two other types of feminist epistemologies: feminist empiricism and feminist postmodernism. basically, feminist empiricism attempts to bring the feminist criticisms of scientific claims into the existing theories of scientific knowledge (p. 48). feminist empiricists argue that sexist and androcentric ways of knowing result from "bad science". feminist empiricists work within the standards of the current norms of research, however; their research “proceeds on the assumptions of intersubjectivity and commonly created meanings and the realities between researcher and participant” (olsen, 1994, p. 163). scholars working within this genre do not reject traditional research per se, but try to do it better. feminist empiricism undercuts traditional assumptions of research by recognizing that bias is introduced by the very nature of the context of discovery (danner & landis, 1990, p. 107). similarly, feminist researchers recognize the social identity of the research, i.e.: race, ethnicity, class, and gender, as relevant to the validity of the knowledge produced by the research process. “acknowledging the subjective stance of the researcher at once increases the objectivity of the research and decreases the objectivism which hides this kind of evidence from the public” (danner & landis, 1990, p.107 citing harding, 1987). feminist postmodernism feminist postmoderns argue that feminist empiricists and "standpointers" are not radical enough. it is believed that these two approaches still adhere to the "damaging enlightenment beliefs about the ability to produce one true story about reality that is out there and ready to be reflected in the mirror of our minds” (harding, 1991, p. 48). postmodern feminist researchers regard truth as “a destructive illusion” and view the world as “endless stories or texts, many of which sustain the integration of power and oppression and actually constitute us as subjects in a determinant order” (olsen, 1994, p. 164). with such a foundation, the focus in postmodern feminist research is narrative. the distinction between text and reality where gender is no longer privileged, as seen in standpoint feminist research, is important to this “new” ethnography offered by postmodern feminists. this “new” ethnography is more than just “writing it up”; it lets the people we are studying “speak for themselves” (p. 164). there are three types of inquiry of interest to postmodern feminists. first, there is an interest in the social construction of realities. in other words, postmodern feminists examine such artifacts as video, film, music, and the body to understand “the production, distribution, consumption and exchange of cultural objects and their meanings” (olsen, 1994, p.164 citing denzin, 1992). second is “the textual analysis of these cultural objects, their meanings, and the practices that surround them” (olsen, 1994, p.164 citing denzin, 1992). third, postmodern feminists study the impact of these culturally constructed meanings. they study the “lived cultures and experiences, which are shaped by the cultural meanings that circulate in everyday life” (olsen, 1994, p.164 citing denzin, 1992). as patricia ticineto clough argues, “the textuality never refers to a text”, as in traditional research, “but to the processes of desire elicited and repressed, projected and introjected in the activity of reading and writing”, of experiencing culture (olsen 1994, p.164 citing clough, 1993). postmodern feminist research rejects the oedipal logic of realist narrativity (clough, 1998, p. xiii). feminist critics of traditional research refer to “the narrative of the heroic scientists, the researcher who goes out in search of truth, struggling to get there, stay there, and return from there with a truly objective story of the world” (p. xiii). framing research in such a manner grants a form of subject-identity that privileges masculinity and serves to authorize cultural constructions of reality (p. xiii). thus, rather than maintain the same male-dominated focus of traditional research, feminist research focuses on “the problem of discursive authority at the level of literary practices – at the level of a political unconscious, which the narrative logic of western, modern discourse puts into play” and on “the way narrativity elicits the participation of readers and writers in the practices of dominant forms of knowledge, thereby showing how a male-dominated production of knowledge is linked to modern practices of reading and writing – practices of meaning construction generally” (clough, 1994, p. 3). this focus on discursive authority may seem too narrow. postmodern feminist researchers have argued to extend their focus to include the assumptions and methodological orientations of research. stanley and wise reject harding's conception of the empiricist and postmodern epistemologies. they believe that it is around the constitution of feminist epistemology that feminist methodology develops, research methods can be conducted, and where feminism can directly challenge non-feminist frameworks (stanley & wise, 1993, p. 189). they argue that to conduct proper feminist research, the methods must derive from the methodology, which derives from feminist epistemology. the researcher/study participant relationship must not be hierarchical in nature and emotions must be viewed as an aspect of the research process. the researcher must also be critical of objective versus subjective binaries, focusing on the processes by which understanding and conclusions are reached. this understanding is achieved through the researchers’ frank presentation of the existence and management of different realities held by both the researcher and the researched. the feminist researcher should also examine the issues of power in research and try to dispel any and all unequal distributions of power, including the written representations of the research findings (p. 89). feminist epistemology not only impacts what researchers examine, it also affects the methodology utilized by the researcher. therefore, we must understand the intertwining nature of epistemology, methodology, and methods in order to recognize the impact that feminist epistemology has upon the research that evolves from it basic assumptions. the intertwining nature of epistemology, methodology, and methods the answer to the question posed in this article, "is feminist research distinct from traditional research within the social sciences?”, is yes. yet, we cannot leave this discussion at this point. we must explore feminist methodology, which evolves from feminist epistemology and lays the foundation for feminist research. this leads us to another question, “is there a distinct feminist methodology?” here, we are concerned with "theory and analysis of how research should proceed". feminist methodology is connected to feminist epistemology, which challenges issues of adequate theory of knowledge or justificatory strategy and traditional theory and methods (harding, 1987, p. 2). the answer to this question is yes. i would argue that there is a distinct feminist methodology. i would also argue that feminist methodology is based on distinct epistemological assumptions that differ from traditional methodology. for example, a main feminist epistemological assumption is that "rather than there being a ‘woman's way of knowing,’ or a ‘feminist way of doing research,’ there are women's ways of knowing" (reinharz, 1992, p. 4 citing belenky, clinchy, goldberger, and tarul, 1986). "the ways of knowing that women have cultivated and learned to value, ways we have come to believe are powerful but have been neglected and denigrated by the dominant intellectual ethos of our time" (preface). therefore, women have different ways of knowing and understanding reality. in turn, research concerning women must be approached differently. feminist methodology, due to its basis in feminist epistemology, proposes alternative theories of knowledge that legitimate women as knowers. avoiding the “add women and stir” ideology of traditional research that begins its analyses only in men’s experiences does this. for example, theories of crime have a fascination with male deviance and crime. as chesney-lind argues, criminology suffers from the "westside story syndrome". according to chesney-lind, this androcentric focus of research may be explained by margaret mead's observation (chesney-lind, 1988): that whatever men do, even if it is dressing dolls for religious ceremonies, has higher status and is more highly rewarded than whatever women do...for this reason, field studies focus on male activities and attributes wherever possible: to study them is to convey higher status to the researcher (p. 26). therefore, feminist methodology evolves from the epistemological assumption that women's experiences provide the new resources for research (harding, 1987, p. 7). this "fault line", as dorothy smith refers to the fragmentation of women's identities, offers rich sources of insight from which feminist research generates (harding, 1987, pp. 7-8). the goal of this research is to provide explanations, for women, of social phenomena that affect their lives so that they can understand themselves and our gendered world better. "in the best feminist research, the purpose of research and analysis are not separable from the origins of research problems" (harding, 1987, p. 8). therefore, the personal is very much political. for example, dorothy smith and nancy hartsock "note that all research is done from a particular standpoint or location in the social system" (andersen, 1994, p. 372). for women, this location is one of the oppressed groups. smith continues the debate by stating, "research and theory must situate social actors within their everyday worlds". unless research begins within the ordinary facts of lives, then the knowledge constructed will be "both alienating and apart from the actual experiences of human actors” (andersen, 1994, p. 372). the objective here is to establish the relationship between social structure and everyday life. this relationship is especially important in comprehending women's experiences. this is due to the fact that the affairs of everyday life are the specific area of women's expertise. “given the gender division of labor, women are charged with maintaining everyday life. to overlook that fact or to treat it as insignificant is to deny women's reality" (andersen, 1994, p. 373 citing reinharz, 1983 and smith, 1987). since i have argued that there is a distinctive feminist epistemology and methodology, another question could be posed at this juncture. “are there specific feminist methods?” this question concerns "the techniques for gathering evidence" (harding, 1987, p. 2). my response to this question is no. i, along with many other feminist researchers (stanley & wise, 1993, reinharz, 1992) do not believe that there are distinct feminist techniques for gathering evidence. "feminists have used all existing methods and have invented some new ones as well" (reinharz, 1992, p. 4). although the epistemology and methodology of feminist research is distinct from traditional research, the tools for collecting data remain relatively the same. it is the approach, the epistemological assumptions and research methodology, to research that differs from traditional methodology and places it within the realm of feminist research. in other words, it is the epistemology and methodology, not the methods, which makes feminist research distinctly feminist. as harding argues, "it is difficult to find a satisfactory answer to the questions about a distinctive feminist method" because discussions of method and methodology have been "intertwined with each other and with epistemological issues...in both the traditional and feminist discourses” (p. 2). with this noted, feminist research methods can range from questionnaires to oral histories. the recognition of the plurality that exists within feminist research methods is important. i say this because this plurality of methods is a reflection of basic epistemological assumptions of feminist research, which contradict the epistemological assumptions of traditional research. the feminist epistemological assumption, of which i speak, is the recognition of the multiplicity of women’s voices and experiences. in other words, traditional research fails to recognize that women experience the world differently than men and each other. traditional research has silenced these voices and experiences by not including them in the realm of study. therefore, feminist epistemological assumptions are based on the desire to create something different from that, which already exists, dominates, and oppresses women. traditional research ignores the experiences of women, while feminist research celebrates them. feminist research and traditional research: the basic differences other than the differences already illustrated, feminist research differs from traditional research in that it locates the feminist researcher on the same critical plane as those on which she is researching. both men and women, according to harding and smith (1991), can do feminist research. however, many feminist researchers, including myself, believe that nothing is separate from social life and experiences, nor does it exist outside the social (stanley & wise, 1993, p. 192). we also believe that men and women have different experiences. since it is argued that feminist research methods must reflect feminist ontology, epistemology, and methodology, which are derived from the experiences of women, then the question is, can men conduct feminist research? this is yet another issue that is still unresolved within the debate concerning feminist research and is a topic for another article. another way feminist research differs from traditional research is that the feminist researcher makes sense of the world and produces generalized knowledge-claims on the basis of experiences (stanley & wise, 1993, p. 8). feminist researchers also treat knowledge as situated because they make the assumption that particular structures are defined as facts external to and constraining upon people (p. 8). in addition, feminist researchers are aware of the varying degrees of oppression in relation to a woman's social location and in relation to men, thus necessitating "prying apart the category men and women's experiences of different men in different times, places and circumstances" (p. 8). feminist research differs from traditional research in that it rejects using research to colonize material differences among women. this is done by presenting a social constructionist and non-essentialist notion of "the self" (stanley & wise, 1993, p. 8). many feminist researchers believe that there is a social reality, “one which members of society construct as having objective existence above and beyond competing constructions and interpretations of it” (p. 9). it also recognizes that social life is composed of discussions, debates and controversies concerning objective reality (p. 9). a major distinction of feminist research from traditional research is "the questions we have asked, the ways we locate ourselves within our questions, and the purpose of our work" (maynard & purvis, 1995, p. 6 citing kelly, 1988). feminist researchers begin with the rejection of hierarchical relationships. by doing this, feminist research becomes a means of sharing information. feminist research is characterized by a concern to record the subjective experiences of doing research (maynard & purvis, 1995, p. 16). in other words, the researcher herself becomes a subject matter in the research. she must take into account her personal experiences as part of the research process. this differs from the objective stance that traditional research usually takes. feminist research is distinctive in that the research is political in nature and has the potential to bring about change in women's lives (maynard & purvis, 1995, p. 16). feminism is both theory and practice. it is a framework that informs women's lives. "its purpose is to understand women's oppression in order that we might end it" (p. 28). this is what it means to do feminist research. it also means becoming part of the process of discovery and understanding. it is a responsibility to attempt to create and initiate social change. we must, as feminist researchers, see feminist research as praxis. through our research we create useful knowledge in order to “make a difference” and inform activism (maynard & purvis, 1995, p. 28). as illustrated above, differences may be found when examining the goals of traditional and feminist research. the goal of traditional research is to uncover human experiences and to understand human behavior. in addition, the goal of feminist research is to uncover and remove the blinders that obscure knowledge and observations concerning human experiences and behaviors that have traditionally been silenced. in this light, many feminist researchers see a direct relationship between feminist consciousness, feminism, and research. conclusion in conclusion, no matter what the discipline or method of research, the unique nature of feminist research is its foundation of basic feminist epistemological assumptions. these assumptions are critiques of traditional research. feminist researchers argue that there is a pervasive lack of information about women’s worlds and the oppression they experience. there is also a bias in the under-representation of women researchers. therefore, feminist researchers believe there is a need to re-conceptualize traditionally investigated phenomena to include women’s experiences. they also argue that new research questions must be asked that have crucial implications both for the results obtained and for practical action (cook, 1983, p. 127). these basic assumptions, as well as the fore mentioned epistemological assumptions, lay the foundation for feminist methodology and the resulting research. therefore, it is the epistemological assumptions that affect the methodology that ultimately create feminist research. with all this said, i believe that feminist epistemologies are the golden keys that unlock the door to feminist research. once the door is unlocked, a better understanding of the distinctive nature of feminist research can occur. references alcoff, l. & potter, e. (1993). feminist epistemologies. new york: routledge. andersen, m. l. (1994). thinking about women: sociological perspectives on sex and gender (fourth edition). new york: macmillan publishing. ardovini-brooker, j. (2000). feminist epistemology: a reconstruction and integration of women’s knowledge and experiences, [online]. advancing women in leadership. available: http://advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2000/m4_ardovini-brooker.html ardovini-brooker, j. (2001). the debate surrounding feminist research and its distinction from traditional research, [online]. advancing women in leadership. available: http://advancingwomen.com/awl/. code, l. (1993). taking subjectivity into account. in l. alcoff and e. potter (eds). feminist epistemology. new york: routledge. cook, j. (1983). an interdisciplinary look at feminist methodology: ideas and practice in sociology, history, and anthropology. humbolt journal of social relations, (10) 2: 127-151. chesney-lind, m. (1988), doing feminist criminology, the criminologist 13(4): 1-3, 16-17. clough, p. t. (1998). the end(s) of ethnography: from realism to social criticism (second edition). new york: peter lang. clough, p. t. (1994). feminist thought: desire, power, and academic discourse. cambridge, massachuesetts: blackwell publishers, inc.. danner, m, and j. landis (1990), carpe diem (seize the day!): an opportunity for feminist connections. in b. maclean and d. milovanovic (eds.) racism, empiricism, and criminal justice, vancouver, canada: the collective press: 105-112. durna, j. (1991). toward a feminist epistemology. savage, maryland: rowman & littlefield publishers, inc. harding, s. (1991). whose science? whose knowledge? thinking from women's lives. ithaca, new york: cornell university press. harding, s. (editor)(1987). feminism and methodology: social science issues. bloomington, indiana: indiana university press. johnson, a. (1995). the blackwell dictionary of sociology: a user's guide to sociological language. cambridge, massachusetts: basil blackwell inc. maynard, m. and j. purvis (editors) (1995). researching women's lives from a feminist perspective. bristol, pennsylvania: taylor & francis inc. olsen, v. (1994), feminisms and models of qualitative research. in n.k. denzin and y.s. lincoln (eds.) handbook of qualitative research, thousand oaks, california: sage publications, inc.:158-174. reinharz, s. (1992). feminist methods in social research. new york: oxford university press. stanley, l. and sue wise, s. (1993). breaking out again: feminist ontology and epistemology. new york: routledge. author dr. joanne ardovini-brooker is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at sam houston state university. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing 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2011 volume 31 34 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 34-39, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper influences of early life experiences on the generative leadership roles of four female professors of educational leadership sandra tonnsen, ann alexander, kathleen topolka-jorissen, and jacque jacobs sandra tonnsen, ph.d., is an associate professor in educational leadership and foundations western carolina university,cullowhee, nc e-mail: tonnsen@wcu.edu ann e. alexander, ph.d. is an associate professor in educational leadership and foundations western carolina university, cullowhee, nc e-mail: aalexander@wcu.edu kathleen topolka-jorissen is an assistant professor in educational leadership and foundations western carolina university, cullowhee, nc e-mail: ktjorissen@email.wcu.edu jacqueline e. jacobs is a professor in educational leadership and foundations western carolina university, cullowhee, nc e-mail: jjacobs@wcu.edu accepted june 1, 2010 this study examined the influences of early life experiences on the development of leadership in four female professors of educational leadership. the findings of this naturalistic study suggest that early influences related to achievement, affiliation, and power are precursors of generativity on the part of these leaders. understanding self as leader through reflection and critical examination can provide insight into those early experiences that can help girls and young women develop their leadership capacity. the authors conclude with a discussion of implications for leadership preparation and further research. key words: women leaders, generative leadership, leadership development, mentoring introduction “by reflecting on...our own lives, we can identify the points along the road of leadership that have served in some way to propel or compel us to where we are today” (stavem, 2008, p. 73). the concept of journeying conveys thoughts of experiences that influence our lives, of the joys and trials of day-to-day living, of travels and explorations which help to explain our current approaches to life. for adults who have reached what erikson (1950) identified as the adult stage of generativity versus stagnation, the work of this stage can be particularly rewarding, as adults engage in the work of “guiding the next generation” (erikson, 1950, p. 267). assuming the responsibilities of parenthood is the most common act of adults in this stage. however, examples of generativity can also be seen in organizations in which leaders attend to and care for the mission and the employees, in contrast to “less healthy individuals who seek power to overcome a perceived inadequacy” (slater, 2003, p. 57). this difference is an important one for organizational leaders, to be sure. and it may be even more critical in the preparation of future leaders, as faculty in leadership preparation programs strive to develop leaders who understand generativity. although the generativity/stagnation conflict has been examined from a range of perspectives, the literature in the field of educational leadership in general is sparse, and it is non-existent in the studies of women in educational leadership. urging scholars to explore this area, slater (2003) advocated the use of identity theory to study leaders, stating, “there is a need to do longitudinal studies especially since generativity develops over time and relates early experiences to later psychosocial conflicts” (p. 64). interested in exploring the development of generativity in women educational leaders, we undertook an examination of the life histories of four professors advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 35 of educational leadership. our purpose was to explore the early life experiences of female professors of educational leadership to identify antecedents of generativity. to provide specificity to our investigative framework, we used the definitions of mcclelland (1980) and peterson and stewart (1996), to answer the following questions: 1. how did the participants perceive their early experience of achievement? 2. how did the participants perceive their early experience of affiliation? 3. how did the participants perceive their early experience of power? background erikson’s (1968) concept of generativity is “…primarily the concern for establishing and guiding the next generation” (p. 138). generativity occurs typically in middle age, following the formation of a sense of identity in adolescence, continuing into young adulthood. this sense of identity, in turn, contributes to the development of an intimate relationship with another. as one develops, his or her span of influence widens and he or she becomes more interested in caring for others, hence contributing to the success of future generations (peterson & stewart, 1996). generativity also includes an individual’s ability or motivation to be productive and creative. it is the opposite of a “…pervading sense of stagnation, boredom, and interpersonal impoverishment” (erikson, p. 138). in describing his eight-stage theory of the human life cycle, erikson (1950) encouraged other scholars to identify precursors of each stage (slater, 2003). since then, several researchers have explored precursors of the generativity versus stagnation stage (peterson & stewart, 1996; slater, 2003). erikson (1968) elaborated on the fifth stage, identity versus identity diffusion, and proposed leader and followership versus authority confusion which slater (2003) suggested as a conflict that serves as a precursor to generativity versus stagnation. mcadams (2006) delineated research that has shown generativity to be associated with parenting patterns, social support, and involvement in religious and civic organizations. the complexity of studying identity development related to generativity was reinforced by mcadams (2006), who stated, “a judicious reading of the empirical literature suggests that generativity may be a multifaceted developmental task for adults expressed unevenly across life domains and over time and contoured by a wide range of contextual variables” (p. 83). among the challenges is that of addressing the role of gender in identity development. that women may develop differently from men has been proposed by several scholars. josselson (1996), for example, proposed that women may develop through a weaving of strands, rather than in a structured progression of stages. an instrument designed to help researchers understand generativity, the thematic apperception test (tat), assesses four dimensions of generativity: teaching or advising others, concern for others, broad societal concerns, and personal productivity (peterson & stewart, 1996). included in the teaching and advising others category are mentoring and guiding another adult. concerns for others encompasses “…acts of kindness, care giving, concern, or help…” (p. 20). adults who display broad societal concerns are interested in human welfare and believe “…that humans are good and will survive as a species” (p. 21). personal productivity is characterized by a desire to leave behind something that is tangible and enduring or something that positively affects the future. theoretical framework peterson and stewart (1996) have tied mcclelland’s (1980) concepts of achievement, affiliation, and power motivation to erikson’s generative model. they found that “…generativity at mid-life was related to a combination of adolescent scores on achievement, affiliation, and power motivation” (p. 21). for mcclelland, achievement is the need individuals have to excel. he found that people with high needs for achievement typically are involved in work that has at least a moderate success probability. they also require feedback so that they can assess their level of achievement. individuals with a high affiliation need are those who seek harmony with other people. they are, in general, willing to conform to group norms and need to be accepted by others. people motivated by power either need personal power or social (or institutional) power; those needing personal power are interested in directing other people. those who need to “organize the efforts of others to further the goals of the organization” (netmba, n.d., ¶ 4) have a need for social or institutional power. these concepts, then, provided the framework for this study and for understanding the data collected. research design and methods this study had its genesis in the lived experiences of four female faculty members (the authors) in a small regional university who teach in educational leadership programs. the purpose was to explore the childhood experiences of female professors of educational leadership to identify antecedents of generativity as defined by mcclelland (1980) and peterson and stewart (1996). study questions the study was designed to answer three questions: 1. how did the participants perceive their early experience of achievement? 2. how did the participants perceive their early experience of affiliation? 3. how did the participants perceive their early experience of power? advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 36 research methods the study utilized naturalistic inquiry to satisfy the purpose and answer the study questions. the design, therefore, was not determined entirely a priori, but “emerged as the study proceeded” (lincoln & guba, p. 11). at the foundation of the method, however, was the intention to elicit, through multiple formats, the participants’ life stories. mcadams (2006) outlined the benefits of using life story research in the study of generativity. first, life stories can elucidate developmental factors that served as precursors to generativity and thus lead to testable hypotheses. secondly, the self-constructed narrative identities of generative adults evolve over time, as individuals integrate and organize the multiple experiences of a lifetime into themes. mcadams (2006) summarized the importance of using life stories by saying, “research has suggested that individual differences in adults’ life stories are related to important features of their personalities, their lives, and the worlds within which they live” (p. 87). in the process of developing an evolving data gathering method, then, the researchers used an iterative process of debriefing, “to determine the next steps in the emerging methodological design” (lincoln & guba, p. 308). the study began with an unprompted writing focused on the participants’ career paths. as a product of analyses of these writings, further questions evolved concerning demographics, especially families, early lives, school activities, early jobs, and accomplishments. next, a 20 item survey was developed, piloted, and revised in order to clarify questions and collect the same demographic data from each participant. as those data were tabulated and analyzed, a long semi-structured interview protocol with 36 questions and possible follow-up questions was developed and tested that helped the participants reflect on their lives and careers. these interviews were conducted over a two month span and each lasted approximately two hours. they were tape recorded and then transcribed. each interviewee read their transcript for accuracy and transcripts were corrected as noted. in summary, data for this study were collected by an unprompted writing, a demographic survey, and a semistructured long interview. data analysis all data were analyzed using a continuous inductive process. data analysis was collaborative, and a shared understanding of the data developed among the four researchers. the demographic data were combined and charted for comparison purposes. text was coded by the researchers using the activities of data coding, memoing, data display and conclusion drawing/verification (miles & huberman, 1994) to address the research questions. reduction was done so that an independent auditor could verify coding results (lincoln & guba, 1985). the themes were collapsed and participant analysis and thirdparty analysis compared to further hone the themes. a nonparticipant analyzed the transcripts. the data from the survey and unprompted writing were used to modify and further elucidate the emerging themes. standards of quality for the conclusions several tactics were use to ensure the quality of the conclusions. miles and huberman's (1994) “five main, somewhat overlapping, issues” (p. 277) were used as indicators of quality. objectivity and confirmability were addressed by describing general methods and procedures. the researchers described and agreed upon the sequence of data collection, processing, condensing and drawing conclusions. to support the reliability/dependability of the research, the research questions were clarified, roles as participant-researchers were defined, and coding checks conducted, including the inclusion of a third-party auditor. internal credibility was ensured by making comparisons between and among subjects, writing comprehensive accounts, and utilizing member checks. every effort was made to adequately describe our lives and our experiences so that comparisons to other professors/leaders could be made. utilization and application were addressed by making the findings accessible to potential users by presenting findings at female leadership conferences and by speaking with colleagues and students about the impact of early leadership development on generativity. participants the participants are four women (the authors), ranging in age from 59 to 64, and because of our ages, we grew up in the same social context, at a time of great social change and particularly the women's movement. although two grew up in the south, one grew up in the north and one in mid-america, we all experienced similar childhood and adolescent events. all have been married, but none are currently married. three are divorced and one is widowed. two have grown children; the other two have no children. all grew up in middle-class, two parent families which faced financial or family crises during their youth. our career paths took us from practitioner/administrator to professors, back to administrator, and finally we all returned to academia. findings transcript analyses of the interviews related to the conceptual framework of mcclelland’s (1980) theory indicated that all four participants displayed achievement, affiliation, and power needs early in their lives and continuing throughout their careers. determining whether a particular behavior would best be classified as one or the other was sometimes difficult especially as it related to affiliation and power. it was clear that many times these factors were entwined, with participants using their abilities in affiliation to gain power. achievement motivation peterson and stewart (1996) viewed achievement motivation as “… a concern for performing according to standards of excellence or meeting self-imposed requirements of good performance” (p. 25). greene and debacker (2004) speculated that achievement motivation for women is “…impacted by whether or not they… considered intellectual achievement to be appropriate for women” (p. 93). jacobs (2006) expanded the advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 37 concept more recently, stating, “if more girls and young women are to become leaders for our society, it appears critical that they have the opportunity in their formative years, particularly through their educational environments, to develop their intellect, abilities, and skills to be leaders as adults. confidence in one’s ability to lead may be as important as the knowledge and skills to do so” (¶ 4). the participants in this study appear to have high levels of achievement motivation, believing that it is not only “appropriate” for women to be achievers, but also that it is imperative for them to be so. regarding academics in their youth, all of them were publicly schooled and earned “good” to “excellent” grades. one participant said, “i actually have very fond memories of my 5th-7th grade years. i think it’s sort of when i came into my own in a number of different ways.” she won the school, district, and regional spelling bees and came in second in the state. another participant won the science fair in middle school. they were all very involved in activities in and out of school. together, they were involved in 23 different extracurricular activities. one participated in 10, two participated in 13, and one participated in 15. the activities ranged from sports to annual staff to student government to choir and band to drama club. one participant said, “when i think about how i always overbook myself, i remember that i’ve always been busy. i was always in a bunch of activities and carrying a bunch of books. i was busy all the time with activities and my list of activities in the yearbook was the longest of any.” as far as early work experience, all held paid jobs in their adolescence. these jobs included babysitter, greenhouse worker, grocery store clerk, medical office assistant, camp counselor, and choir director. affiliation motivation affiliation motivation describes the need individuals have “…to establish, maintain, or restore positive affective relationships with other people” (peterson & stewart, p. 26). looking at the participants’ families, all of us reported experiencing the powerful influences of both our mother and father. it has been suggested that one advantage young girls have over young boys is that whereas boys see only their fathers as role models, girls see both their mothers and fathers as such. one of us remembered, “my mother was the one who kind of kept things in balance, kept life in balance, did all the right things as a mother, reading bedtime stories, setting up routines, helping us with homework, sewing clothes, all those things, but also had and has a real independent streak.” speaking of her father, one participant said, “i think his influence on me clearly strengthened what i think is a strong skill set for me – my organization skills.” our pragmatism seems to come from our fathers. this theme was best summarized with the observation, “i think my dad just accepted it as what happens in life. i credit my father with just being very, very pragmatic.” examples of role models were teachers and parents. other heroes included people who did good things for others, e.g. roy rogers, dale evans, and madame curie. all of the women had mentors early in life, in addition to their parents, who positively influenced their development – a high school band director, a piano teacher, and other teachers at various levels. the participants in this study, from their early beginnings, described themselves as, first, being close with their families and later, being active in organizations related to church and school, including scouting and involvement in the ymca. they sought out opportunities to establish relationships with others and affiliated with others who positively influenced their lives. power motivation power motivation revolves around the need to “…impact, control, or influence…” (peterson & stewart, p. 26) another person or organization. as adolescents and young adults, the participants in this study were influential. all of them reported taking on leadership roles in the clubs they belonged to, in student council, and in church. their early career aspirations were varied. one stated, “i went through a period when i thought it would be very glamorous to be a nun. that didn’t last long.” another said, “i wanted to be an actress; i had leading roles in both middle and high school.” yet another stated, “i was always going to be a teacher…i can remember sitting on the bunk bed playing school and i had made my own little grade book and i would make up all these lessons. then i would grade them and some kids would fail and some kids would pass.” one wanted to be a doctor, like her father. and one, whose mother had a significant influence in her life, said, “i never wanted to be anything. i always just wanted to be like momma.” these early aspirations demonstrated that these women saw themselves as being able to have an impact on, and influence over, others. another dimension of power comes from the point where the participants realized their own power. all of them were empowered by an early unpleasant, tragic, or life-altering event. one woman lost the hearing in an ear after a tonsillectomy at age nine until she was 12. when asked how she dealt with it, she said simply, “i accommodated pretty fast…by just turning my head and doing that kind of thing.” a second event occurred when the participant was 13 and she made a bad decision. “that was a pretty significant event because…it was…my first awareness of actually having some control in my life, that i could make some decisions…it was also during that time…that i remember standing at the dining table and saying to my mother, ‘i want to be somebody…’.” when describing a house fire that left her grandmother and grandfather homeless, a woman said, “i don’t remember dealing with it…i felt sorry for them, and i didn’t know what was going to happen to them…it was just something that happened and you go on.” then, finally, when describing a serious car accident at about the age of 11, one woman said, “i remember feeling afraid that my parents would die. i’d been…a spoiled child. but i became more aware that they might need my help in just doing daily things. i became aware that family was incredibly important…and because i was the oldest daughter, i needed to advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 38 accept responsibility and try to help out where that had never been an expectation before.” discussion and implications that early life experiences with achievement, affiliation, and power may be precursors to female generativity is evidenced in this study. as participant-researchers, we concluded that we are leaders who displayed a need for achievement, affiliation, and power early in our lives. we worked hard to succeed academically and took on jobs as very young teenagers where we learned more about taking care of others. we participated in a variety of activities that honed our skills, especially our interpersonal ones, which are incredibly important in fulfilling achievement, affiliation, and power needs. furthermore, there appears to be a reciprocal relationship among these three needs for the participant-researchers in this study. one said, “our accomplishments made us feel empowered. feeling empowered made it easier for us to accomplish things. a sense of empowerment and success boosted our confidence and helped us develop relationships with others.” all of us returned to academia after successful careers as educational leaders because we were concerned about, and interested in, developing new leaders in education. our actions and the rationale behind those actions affirm one of erikson’s (1968) conclusions about human development, “i am what survives me” (p. 141). that is to say, we believe it is important to use our past experiences and knowledge to help novice leaders, especially women, to develop to their full potential. language in our interviews and experiences illustrates this tendency toward generativity. one said, “i’ve always seen myself as a teacher while holding administrative positions; i help others; i’m a developer.” another described her experience as a superintendent as unusual: she formed a leadership academy and instead of hiring a facilitator, taught the future leaders of the district herself. one of us described herself as having an emotional and intellectual investment in her students. another talked about her ability to provide authentic learning to students, stating she enjoyed “…giving them experiences they are likely to encounter in their lives of leadership.” several of us talked specifically about mentoring students both formally and informally; one spoke of “…helping students write proposals for conferences, publishing articles with students, taking students to conferences, and either copresenting with them or supporting them during their presentations.” we also clearly communicate our maternal side even though two of us have never been mothers. one observed that for all of us “helping female junior colleagues negotiate the tenure and promotion process boosted our confidence and helped us develop relationships with others.” another described part of her role as superintendent as “…supporting employees who were ill or reeling from tragedies in their lives.” still another spoke about “…balancing the need to give direct corrective feedback while helping the individual see past the pain and embarrassment of his/her mistakes,” a common task among us. summary through extensive analysis in a naturalistic study, it appears that there is importance in helping others to reflect upon and examine their early life influences as they relate to their development as leaders. additionally, expanding the knowledge based of those positive early life experiences and understanding these influences can help parents and educators who are actively helping girls and young women on their life journeys. the findings hold several implications for educational leadership programs. selection of candidates, for example, is traditionally based on criteria that include standardized test scores, letters of recommendation, undergraduate transcripts, and letters of recommendation. another dimension that may reveal the potential for women applicants to be grounded in a generative approach to leadership may be the inclusion of a biographical essay that includes examples of achievement, affiliation, and power. another area that might be reinforced through the findings of this study is that of guiding students in their career decision-making. many females enter leadership preparation programs, primarily because they want to further their formal education. in fact, many will state explicitly that they have no intention of ever becoming a principal or superintendent or college president. in the context of this study, such women may be expressing a stronger orientation toward achievement and affiliation than to power. leadership preparation programs, then, may want to re-examine how power is addressed in course content and processes, in order to provide arenas for openly exploring power as a critical leadership competency and as a positive precursor of generativity. finally, further research on the precursors of generativity in leaders may produce additional hypotheses for further exploration of ways to strengthen the preparation of school leaders. references erikson, e. h. (1950). childhood and society. new york, ny: w.w. norton and company, inc. erikson, e. h. (1968). identity: youth and crisis. new york, ny: w.w. norton and company, inc. greene, b. a., & debacker, t.k. (2004). gender and orientations toward the future: links to motivation. educational psychology review, 16(2), 91-120. jacobs, j.e. (2006). teachers perceptions of “smart” girls: what does it mean for developing girls and young women into leaders? advancing women in leadership. retrieved from http://www. advancingwomen.com/awl/spring2006/jacobs.html josselson, r. l. (1996). revising herself: the story of women’s identity from college to mid-life. new york, ny: oxford university press. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 39 lincoln, y. s. & guba, e. g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. beverly hills, ca: sage. mcadams, d. p. (2006). the redemptive self: generativity and the stories americans live by. research in human development, 3(2&3), 81-100. mcclelland, d. c. (1980). human motivation. glenview, il: scott foresman. miles, m. b. & huberman, a. m. (1994). qualitative data analysis: an expanded sourcebook (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. netmba (n.d.). mcclellan’s theory of needs. (retrieved november 12, 2009 from http://www. netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/mcclelland/) peterson, b. e., & stewart, a. j. (1996). antecedents and contexts of generativity motivation at midlife. psychology and aging, 11(1), 21-33. slater, c. l. (2003). generativity versus stagnation: an elaboration of erikson’s adult stage of human development. journal of adult development, 10(1), 53-65. stavem, j. (2008). voices of women in the field: blue chair moments of leadership. journal of women in educational leadership, 6(1), 73-76. microsoft word 6.docx advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 48 volume 37, 2017 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 49 table of contents women in international public leadership: impacting foreign direct investment by reducing corruption and increasing healthcare investment ..................................................................................................................................................................................................49 s. catherine cole, larry m. dooley, judy r. sandlin, & elsa a. murano ............................................................................................. 49 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 49 advancing women in leadership vol. 37, pp. 49-56, 2017 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women in international public leadership: impacting foreign direct investment by reducing corruption and increasing healthcare investment s. catherine cole, larry m. dooley, judy r. sandlin, & elsa a. murano s. catherine cole, department of educational administration and human resource development, texas a&m university, catherinecole@tamu.edu larry m. dooley, department of educational administration and human resource development, texas a&m university, l-dooley@tamu.edu judy r. sandlin, department of educational administration and human resource development, texas a&m university, jrsandlin@tamu.edu elsa a. murano, norman e. borlaug institute for international agriculture, texas a&m university, elsa.murano@ag.tamu.edu accepted march 20, 2017 a potential solution for an economic challenge – increasing needed foreign direct investment (fdi) – is proposed using a human resource development perspective: equally investing in the development of men and women to serve in public leadership. this cross-sectional, nonexperimental study addressed a void in the literature by examining the impact of women in public leadership on fdi through lowered perceived corruption and increased national investment in healthcare. structural equation modeling using a simple path model was used to test relationships between observable variables. results included statistically significant relationships between the number of women in public leadership and lower levels of perceived corruption, between lower levels of perceived corruption and greater national investment in healthcare, and between greater national investment in healthcare and increased fdi countries received. additionally, a fully mediated, indirect relationship between the number of women in public leadership and fdi countries received was statistically significant. that is, as the number of women increased within governments, levels of perceived corruption decreased, national investment in healthcare increased, and fdi increased. ultimately, this study provides empirical results professionals and institutions can use to advocate for gender equitable vertically integrated human resource development, particularly within developing countries, to promote fdi and its related benefits. keywords: women, public leadership, corruption, foreign direct investment, healthcare introduction corruption is a pervasive threat to performance in governmental agencies (holtfreter, 2005). it steals resources from the neediest, undermines justice and economic development, and destroys public trust in governmental leadership (transparency international, 2014). sir paul collier (2007) who directed the world bank’s development research group from 1998 to 2003 discussed corruption in his groundbreaking work the bottom billion: why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it. corruption impedes development (collier, 2007). a review of the academic literature “finds that stories of fraud, mismanagement, and abuse have become almost commonplace” (carman, 2011, p. 433). particularly important for developing countries, foreign direct investment (fdi) creates an inflow of needed financial resources (buchanan, le, & meenakshi, 2011, delgado, mccloud & kumbhakar, 2014; moran, 1998; van vuuren, 2002). however, not all countries receive their desired level of fdi. not only does corruption take resources from the world’s most vulnerable people, it also creates avoidance in foreign investors to finance future ventures in those countries (habib & zurawicki, 2002). ultimately, corruption may discourage needed fdi. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 50 problem statement, purpose of study, and research question although adequate research about women and corruption was identified, a vacuum in studies examining the effects of women in public leadership on corruption, national investment in healthcare, and fdi existed. the purpose of this quantitative study was to fill a gap in the scholarly literature regarding the effects of women in public leadership on corruption, national investment in healthcare, and fdi. variables used included the number of women in public leadership (wp), corruption as represented by a perceptions index (cpi), national investment in healthcare (he), and foreign direct investment (fdi). the research question was: what were the effects of women in public leadership on corruption, national investment in healthcare, and foreign direct investment. study design structural equation modeling (sem) software was chosen to test the conceptual framework within a simple path model. the hypothesized, directional relationships between and among observable variables were tested using mplus version 7. observations, and in this case the population, n = 183, were tested using one dependent variable (fdi). conceptual framework based on dissertation research, this study began with a framework including three variables (wp, cpi, and fdi). relationships between those three variables were tested. statistically significant results were limited to the relationship between wp and cpi (p = 0.000). as kline (2015) explained, it is rarely the case when the scope of research is narrow enough to accept or reject one model based on its correspondence to the data. therefore, the framework was modified to include four variables (wp, cpi, he, and fdi). he was added to the framework because there was sufficient evidence that women make different policy decisions than men (svaleryd, 2009). women tend to value socially focused policy and allocate budget for those policies (svaleryd, 2009). women and men have different biases regarding economic matters (migheli, 2014). the modified framework tested six relationships. these included wp and cpi, wp and he, cpi and he, cpi and fdi, he and hdi, and wp and fdi. statistically significant results included wp and cpi (p = 0.000), cpi and he (p = 0.013), and he and fdi (p = 0.000). because relationships between wp and he and between cpi and fdi were not significant, they were eliminated from the framework. the final framework including four relationships is illustrated in figure 1. it included the percent of women in public leadership (wp), the levels of perceived corruption per country (cpi), the amount spent nationally on healthcare per country (he), and the amount of foreign direct investment each country received (fdi). figure 1. relationships between variables in the final tested conceptual framework. methods driven by the research question – what were the effects of women in public leadership on corruption, national investment in healthcare, and fdi – a quantitative method was chosen to complete a cross-sectional, nonexperimental study. a quantitative method allowed the study variables, represented by databases, to be tested and reported in an empirical way. data, sampling, assumptions, and conceptual definitions are presented. data. this study investigated data extracted from datasets from the corruption perceptions index (cpi) and the human development report (hdr), both published in 2014. corruption perceptions index (cpi). the cpi is an index developed and maintained by ti since 1995 (saisana & saltelli, 2012). it is “a composite indicator that measures perceptions of corruption in the public sector” (saisana & saltelli, 2012, p. 3). it scored countries scores from 92 to eight, with 92 as least corrupt. the cpi aggregated data from various respected institutions including the african development bank, the economist intelligence unit, the world bank, and the world justice project, (saisana & saltelli, 2012). the cpi country scores were used as a mediating variable. it is important for the reader to be aware that the higher the cpi score, the lower that country’s perceived levels of corruption. human development report (hdr). the hdr is published by the united nations development programme (undp) (malik, 2014). it is a composite measure determining life expectancy, educational attainment, and command over the resources needed for a decent living, among others (malik, 2014). elements of the composite index used included seats in national parliament (wp), national investment in healthcare (he), and fdi. for wp, the hdr operationally accounts the number of women elected to that country’s legislature as share of seats in parliament. this percentage is reported within the gender inequity index and is defined as the “proportion of seats held by women in the national parliament, expressed as percentage of total seats. for countries with bicameral legislative systems, the share of seats is calculated based on both houses” (malik, 2014, p. 175). for the purpose of this research wp is comprised of elected legislators. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 51 sampling. this study examined data from countries worldwide. data were extracted from two databases: the hdr and the cpi. these databases differed in reported countries (both in names and in numbers of countries). the names of countries listed on the hdr (the source of the independent or exogenous variable wp) were used. countries listed on the cpi were manually merged with it using an excel spreadsheet, (n = 197). the hdr contained information on wp for 183 countries. the cases without data on wp were not included in the analysis. this reduced the population by seven cases, (n = 190). in addition, the data included seven more cases where all information except wp was missing. these cases were not included in the analysis. this reduced the population to n = 183. the ultimate number of cases or observations tested was 183, just under the typical sample size expected for sem (n = 200) (kline, 2015). however, this population is limited in nature, as there are less than 200 countries worldwide. justification can also be made that the population size tested is adequate because tested models were simple. in addition, kline (2015) also reported that a ratio can be applied to determine adequacy of sample size. this included accepting a minimum size in terms of the cases (n) to the number of model parameters that are estimated (q). kline (2015) stated an ideal size-to-parameters ratio is 20:1. in this study parameters estimated were 4. therefore, q = 4 and 4 x 20 = 80. the sample, or in the case of this study the population size, (n = 183) exceeded the recommended ratio minimum. assumptions. accepting secondary data on corruption, it is assumed the cpi is a valid and reliable index. although researchers including van vuuren (2002) have questioned the validity of the index, it was recently improved by ti. in fact, a report issued by the european commission joint research centre stated the index, while not perfect, “may be more reliable than each source taken separately” (saisana & saltelli, 2012, p. 21). the cpi is also the most frequently cited corruptions index in the academic literature (atalas et al., 2009; gyimah-brempong, 2002; habib & zurawicki, 2002; ralston et al., 2006; swamy et al., 2001; and tabish & jha, 2011). conceptual definitions. conceptual definitions of corruption and fdi are presented. corruption. historically, reported danon (2011), corruption was a question of morality. it later involved judicial, sociological, and economic explications. walton (2014) defined corruption in the context of developing countries. this included abuse of public office for personal gain and the general abuse of power. more specifically, habib and zurawicki (2002) defined corruption as comprising bribes, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and political instability. the afce (2014) included conflicts of interest, bribery, illegal gratuities, and economic distortion in their definition of corruption. blackburn, bose, and haque (2006) defined public sector corruption as “the abuse of authority by bureaucratic officials who exploit their powers of discretion, delegated to them by the government, to further their own interests by engaging in illegal, or unauthorized, rent seeking activities” (p. 2448). for the purpose of this study, the following definition was used: “the misuse of authority and public resources for private gain” (vijayalakshmi, 2008, p. 1262). foreign direct investment (fdi). delgado, mccloud, and kumbhaker (2014) describe fdi as “the investments of large multinational corporations” (p. 298). it is through these investments that developing countries may have access to “advanced technologies, management practices, and research and development” (delgado et al., 2014, p. 298). because human resource development (hrd) has evolved from a primary focus on the corporate world to include international development, it makes sense that fdi may enable progress (mclean, 2006). specifically, foreign direct investors may provide development and training for local employees (delgado et al., 2014). for the purpose of this study, the definition of fdi from the undp (2014) was used: the “sum of equity capital, reinvestment of earnings, other long-term capital and short-term capital, expressed as a percentage of gdp” (malik, 2014, p. 211). hypotheses as mentioned previously, the final conceptual framework tested four relationships between observable variables in the form of a simple path model. the four hypotheses are presented. • h1: wp and cpi h0: there was no statistically significant relationship between wp and cpi ha: as wp increased, cpi increased (a higher cpi score indicates lower perceived corruption) • h2: cpi and he h0: there was no statistically significant relationship between cpi and he ha: as cpi increased (a higher cpi score indicates lower perceived corruption), he increased • h3: he and fdi h0: there was no statistically significant relationship between he and fdi ha: as he increased, fdi increased • h4: wp and fdi h0: there was no statistically significant relationship between wp and fdi ha: wp indirectly impacted fdi results paths were tested between wp and cpi, cpi and he, he and fdi, and wp and fdi. results from the path analysis are presented. these include descriptive statistics, fit statistics, missing data, and parameter estimates. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 52 descriptive statistics using excel, the mean, median, and standard deviations (sd) were calculated for wp, cpi, he, and fdi. table 1 lists descriptive statistics. table 1 descriptive statistics note: wp is a percentage of women to men, cpi is a score, and he and fdi are reported as real dollars. fit statistics the model revealed a model fit, χ2 (2) = 0.295, p > .05. according to suhr (n.d.), a chi-square value close to zero with a probability level greater than 0.05, indicates little difference between expected and observed covariance matrixes. rmsea = 0.000, lower bound = 0.000 and upper bound = 0.077. ideal thresholds for rmsea, according to kline (2015), include an estimate value close to zero, lower bound confidence intervals at zero, and upper bound lower than 0.100. additionally, the rmsea results are consistent with each other. that is, all values indicate a good fit, even with a lessthan-ideal n = 183. in addition, cfi = 1.000. hu and bentler (1999) concluded a cfi value of 0.90 or greater is acceptable. srmr = 0.011. ideally at zero (kline, 2015), this statistic is a measure of the mean absolute correlation residual. that is, the overall dissimilarity in the observed and expected correlations. complete fit statistics are reported in table 2. table 2 model fit statistics missing data mplus recognizes patterns of missing data and reports it as covariance coverage. the amount of data used to generate each input covariance for the analysis is reported. the lowest reported coverage was 0.874, well above the requirement of 0.100. parameter estimates parameter estimates are presented in figure 2. figure 2. *the relationships between wp and cpi, cpi and he, and he and fdi were all statistically significant, p = 0.000, p = 0.014, and p = 0.000, respectively. explanation of parameter estimates are reported per hypothesis. h1: wp and cpi. the tested path model resulted in a statistically significant relationship between wp and cpi (p = 0.000). the null hypothesis was rejected. that is, as the number of women in public leadership increased, perceived corruption decreased. ultimately, when wp increased one sd unit from its mean, cpi increased by .260 sd unit from its mean. h2: cpi and he. a statistically significant relationship was identified between cpi and he (p = 0.014). the null hypothesis was rejected. that is, as cpi increased, he increased. ultimately, when cpi increased by one sd unit from its mean, he increased by .182 sd units from its mean. h3: he and fdi. a statistically significant relationship was identified between he and fdi (p = 0.000). the null hypothesis was rejected. that is, as he increased, fdi increased. in other words, when he increased by one sd unit from its mean, fdi increased .618 sd from its mean. h4: wp and fdi. a statistically significant indirect relationship was identified between wp and fdi (p = 0.049). the null hypothesis was rejected. that is, wp was found to exert an effect on fdi through cpi and he. therefore this model is fully mediated. discussion findings from this study both confirmed and contradicted previous researchers’ conclusions. as the number of women in governments increased, corruption decreased swamy et al. (2001) and dollar et al. (2001) may not have known how right hey were concluding women may be less corrupt than men. although naysayers existed (alatas, advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 53 cameron, chaudhuri, erkal, & gangadhara, 2009; goetz, 2007; sung, 2003), most researchers after 2001 agreed that women tended, for whatever reason, to engage in corrupt behavior less. this research was consistent. it built on previous research with a more robust cpi, and resulted in similar findings. this included a statistically significant direct relationship between the number of women in public leadership and lower perceived levels of corruption. corruption and fdi several researchers studying fdi concluded that the level of perceived corruption effects individual countries’ ability to attract fdi (danon, 2011; delgado et al., 2014; forsyth, 2005). while indeed this makes sense, it was not fully supported by this study. surprisingly, no significant direct relationship between corruption and fdi was identified. although this study identified an indirect effect of corruption on fdi, it challenges the conventional wisdom that levels of perceived corruption have a direct effect on the fdi countries receive. national investment in healthcare because previous researchers concluded women tend to prioritize programmatic healthcare, it was hypothesized that the higher the number of women making budgetary allocation decisions within governments would be a direct influence on healthcare expenses. the lack of a statistically significant direct relationship between the number of women in governments and national investment in healthcare was unexpected. the point is further complicated because healthcare expenses were mediated by levels of perceived corruption. to put it another way, the number of women in public leadership affected corruption, and corruption in turn affected the amount of resources allocated to healthcare. perhaps the interpretation of investment in healthcare should be closer to one of a financial indicator versus programmatic. that is, the lower perceived corruption is, the greater amount of resources a country can both allocate and attract to invest in healthcare. in addition, health affects productivity (padgett & warnecke, 2011). in this logic, it make sense that investment in healthcare was significantly related to fdi. women and fdi traditionally seen as beneficiaries from interventions (chen, 2013), this study found higher numbers of women in public leadership contributed indirectly but significantly to higher levels of fdi. that is, as the number of women increased within governments, levels of corruption decreased, national investment in healthcare increased, and fdi was in turn affected in a significant, albeit, indirect way. this study used women as the exogenous/independent variable and tested their impact versus studying how potential interventions might affect them. implications in direct opposition to the pervasive belief that extra capital is the answer to their economic growth challenges, schultz (1961) noted poor countries are unable to effectively use large amounts of financial capital. the complex relationships among the tested variables in this study are consistent with human capital theory. that is, improving economic indicators may be much more complicated than simply “throwing money at the problem.” with that said, for countries desiring to attract additional fdi, even tackling the perceived levels of corruption may not be enough. because the number of women in public leadership is related to perceived corruption, healthcare investment, and ultimately fdi, improving economic indicators may be more a function of human resource development versus simple resource provision. therefore the primary implication from this research is consistent with human capital theory: improving desired levels of fdi may require a strategic investment in a developing country’s human resources to ensure boys and girls, men and women, are equally prepared for public leadership. in other words, when countries develop their female human resources, they may benefit from lowered perceived corruption, greater investment in healthcare, and increased fdi. having said that, nothing in this research implies increasing the number of women in public leadership, decreasing corruption, increasing the allocation of national investment in healthcare, and increasing fdi will be easy, fast, or cheap. achieving economic results from human resource development must be a long-term, strategic effort. this means efforts to develop women (and men) should be vertically integrated. this requires governments to assess needed skills, identify anticipated shortages, and create applicable policies (mishra, 2014). that is, for an adequate pool of girls to enter primary education, an adequate number of girls must have had good nutrition and early educational opportunities. for an adequate pool of girls to be available for secondary school, an adequate pool of girls must have successfully completed primary school. for an adequate pool of women to be available for tertiary training, an adequate pool of women must have graduated from secondary school, and so on. maximizing their fdi may lead to increased investments in research and development, training programs, and improved technology management (delgado et al., 2014) within developing countries. furthermore, this finding should be of interest to donor countries as well. donor countries, the u.s. and other developed nations, provide foreign aid to developing countries. with empirical evidence greater levels of women in public leadership was related to perceived corruption, national investment in healthcare, and fdi, donor countries may encourage recipient countries to proactively invest in their female human resources as conditions for further assistance. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 54 limitations, delimitations, and recommendations for further research study limitations, delimitations, and recommendations for further research are identified. limitations although the cpi is widely cited by scholars, gyimahbrempong (2002) pointed out its limitations. chiefly, corruption itself is near impossible to measure and not easily quantifiable. therefore, researchers are left with measurements of perceived corruption. in addition, cpi scores did not include african countries until after 1997 (gyimah-brempong, 2002). the databases used in this study (the cpi and hdr) did not report the same number of countries. reporting entities have differed on what geopolitical areas are considered countries. for example, in this study palestine was not disaggregated from israel and kosovo was not disaggregated from serbia. this limits available disaggregated data. also, these databases were macro in nature. they included all countries and all regions of the world. interpretations about specific regions or countries should be made with caution. statistically, structural equation modeling (sem) was used. sem has previously been referred to as causal modeling, but this term is outdated. furthermore, the results of an sem analysis cannot generally be interpreted as causal effects (kline, 2015). the models tested were simple path models, and the primary analysis was regression. readers should be aware of the limitations of interpretation in regards to causation. finally, this research regarding the percent of women in governments is inherently limited, as women generally make up less than 50% of governments worldwide. exceptions to this included rwanda and andorra with 52% and 50% of women occupying seats in parliament respectively. therefore, it is impossible to study the implications of female dominated legislative branches. delimitations secondary macro-level data was used and all variables were treated as observable. even though corruption may be thought of initially as a latent variable because of its difficulty in measurement, it was used in this study as an observable variable. the cpi was used to represent corruption and is a robust measurement. this treatment of the corruption variable is acceptable (moon, personal communication, october 8, 2015). ti’s cpi is a widely cited and accepted index throughout the scholarly literature (gyimah-brempong, 2002), therefore scores for corruption were exclusively delimited to the cpi. recommendations for future research although this research begins to address a void in scholarly literature, future research opportunities are unlimited. to begin with, future studies may attempt to explain the unexplained variance between current variables tested. of particular interest is the unexplained variance between the number of women in public leadership and corruption. although this research confirmed and built on previous research regarding women and corruption, it explained a limited amount of variance. for example, ionescu (2011) discussed corruption and “open networks of social capital” (p. 405). perhaps women are less likely to participate in corrupt activities because they have less access to unchecked social capital (ionescu, 2011). vijayalakshmi (2008) tested the relationship between educational levels and attitudes toward corruption. future research exploring variables such as access to social networks and educational levels may identify other influences on corruption. migheli (2014), in studying gender-based preferences in economies, concluded that women prefer greater regulatory measures than men. “while women’s representation in policymaking roles appears to matter, there is little agreement about what determines it” (mavisakalan, 2014, p. 301). perhaps part of the reason the greater number of women in governments is statistically related to lowered corruption is not because women are more virtuous. maybe it is more related to women’s desire for more government regulation. other research may include analyzing the tested variables in different ways. these ways could include looking at different geographic regions such as sub-saharan africa, latin america and the caribbean, middle east and north africa, western europe, and asia independently. additionally, the same variables may be analyzed by development level as categorized by the hdr. analyses could be done for those countries identified as low development through higher development. conclusion women can no longer be seen as just beneficiaries of economic development. they must be acknowledged as potential contributors to their own national economic improvements. this research has demonstrated the higher number of women in public leadership was associated with lowered perceived corruption, lower perceived corruption was associated with increased national investment in healthcare, increased investment in healthcare was associated with higher levels of fdi, and that higher levels of women were indirectly related to higher levels of fdi. women are a vital human resource to contribute to economic improvements within their national governments. however, for women to effectively contribute to economic improvements, they must be developed. opportunities exist for practitioners to contribute to “transitioning societies” by helping to reduce existing social and economic disparities among nations (mclean, 2006, p. 3). professionals and institutions have empirical evidence on which to base national human resource development investments. these may include crafting and implementing vertically integrated human resource development strategies that equally prepare both boys and girls advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 55 to become potentially viable public leaders within their governments. a potential solution for an economic challenge – increasing fdi – is proposed from a human resource development perspective: a gender equitable vertically integrated hrd model with investment in the development of men and women to equally serve in public 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(2014). defining corruption where the state is weak: the case of papua new guinea. the journal of development studies, 5(1), 1-17. doi:10.1080/00220388.2014.925541 educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 102 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 102-112, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper leadership styles and gender role: internalization among female managers in the united states jennifer j. young dr. jennifer jill young teaches at the south university in savannah, ga this research was conducted for a doctoral dissertation in fulfillment of an edd in leadership education spalding university, louisville, ky e-mail: jjyoung@southuniversity.edu accepted november 10, 2010 the purpose of this study was to examine whether the level of gender role internalization influences female leadership style. a quantitative online survey was developed that included bass’s multifactor leadership questionnaire (1985) and the gender role socialization scale (1999), developed at the university of toronto by dr. brenda toner and her colleagues. one hundred respondents were recruited from financial women international, a professional business association of women, and linkendin, an online networking community for business professionals. only respondents who were female and in management positions in the united states qualified for the study. results indicated that there was no strong correlation between gender role internalization and leadership style in females. keywords: female leadership, gender role, transformational leadership, transactional leadership introduction a proliferation of scholarly research on female leadership conducted in the last 30 years focuses on leadership style and how it differs from that of men. early research on leadership focused on leadership styles such as democratic and autocratic and participative and directive. in 1978, james macgregor burns categorized leadership as transformational or transactional. leaders who lead by “exchanging one thing for another” are transactional leaders and those who create an atmosphere where followers exceed performance expectations because the goals of the organization align with their own goal goals are considered transformational leaders. according to bass (2005), the mlq construct transformational leadership consists of several subconstructs: idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration. in individualized consideration, the leader pays attention to the needs of each individual follower and acts as a mentor. the leader creates a supportive environment and provides encouragement for the followers. previous studies suggest transformational leadership is a more successful type of leadership. (lowe, kroeck, & sivasubrmaniam, 1996; see also degroot, kiker, & cross, 2000). because of the success of transformational leadership styles, it is worth examining female transformational leadership behaviors and examining how they originated. statement of problem there have been numerous studies that discuss gender variation in leadership style (bass, 1996; eagly, johannesen-schmidt, & van engen, 2003; eagly & karau, 2002; sharpe, 2000). this literature tends to focus on which leadership style men and women adopt, how women are viewed who adopt transformational or transactional leadership styles, and whether transformational leaders are superior to transactional leaders. what becomes readily apparent to this researcher, though, is that there is minimal research into the internalization of society’s messages about how females are expected to behave and its influence in leadership behaviors in these studies and related discussions. thus, a logical next step for empirical analysis was to measure the level of gender role internalization among females who advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 103 adopted a transformational leadership style. if a correlation exists, further analysis could determine whether females who internalized the traditional female gender role behaviors associated with nurturing and support naturally gravitated to a transformational leadership style. purpose the current research study examined the relationship between gender role internalization and transformational and transactional leadership style in female managers. this researcher intended to discover whether the internalization of messages that society presents about female behavior correlates with the adoption of transformational leadership by women in management positions. specifically, the researcher wanted to find out whether there was a higher level of gender role internalization among female transformational leaders than in female transactional leaders. rationale minimal investigation regarding the influence of the internalization of gender role messages in women’s lives exists in current research (toner, b. b., ali, a., stuckless, n., weaver, h., aikman, d. e., tang, t. n., quattrochioci, d., & espen, m. j., 1999). as a result, tang and tang (2001) conducted the first pioneering study on gender role internalization in hong kong among a sample of chinese women using toner et al.’s preliminary scale on gender role internalization, called the gender role socialization scale, or grss, which is covered in chapter ii of this document. the current research study is the second in line-of-inquiry in gender role internalization and is different because it studied female managers in the united states. the current research employs both the toner et al.’s grss (1999), which measures the extent to which women have internalized gender role messages, and the mlq, which has been used in numerous studies and has proved a valid and reliable tool (bass, 1985). the self-rater version of the mlq was used to test the managers’ self-perceptions of their leadership style. the relevance of the current study lies in the determination of whether internalization of societal messages about women correlate with the type of leadership styles women leaders adopt in the workplace. the study attempts to find whether gender roles influence the leadership behaviors practiced by women in the workplace. the study is exploratory in nature and is intended to uncover any possible relationships. the instrument created by toner and her colleagues (toner, et. al., 1999) attempted to measure the degree to which gender role internalization occurs. after the tang and tang (2001) study, toner and her colleagues revised the grss from 63 items to 30 items and tested the scale for validity and reliability. the revised 30-item scale is used in the current research. in the current study, the self-sacrifice construct of the grss is compared to the individualized consideration portion of the mlq in order to confirm or refute whether a correlation exists between the two. other survey constructs are also compared in order to uncover any unexpected correlations in the study. limitations limitations of the current research study include self-reporter bias and cultural values. the inherent limitation of self-reporter bias is that the respondent may not have answered each statement in the survey honestly and may have reported they exhibit behaviors they wished they portrayed rather than the actual behaviors portrayed in their management position. another limitation is that results from this study were different in the united states and could not be generalized to other cultures because of the differences in gender role and status in western culture. even within the united states, the degree of gender role internalization may vary within sub cultures in women in the united states. finally, it is possible that the survey tools selected to carry out the current research may not be related to what the current researcher is trying to study. one of the survey tools, the gender role socialization scale (grss) is relatively new and has not been replicated in numerous studies yet. review of literature extensive research in leadership exists in current literature. studies conducted on the difference between male and female leadership styles have been examined extensively. furthermore, there are many theories present about leadership style. one of the most notable examples is burn’s (1978) work on transformational and transactional leadership. transformational leadership involves much more than managing, it involves “transforming” the relationship between leaders and followers into a symbiotic state and inspiring follower to achieve their best. transactional leadership is more of the traditional leadership style of exchanging one action for another, such as a reward. several studies have examined the role of transformational and transactional leadership in males and females. these studies include examinations of transformational leaders in traditionally transactional environments. (friedman, 2004) still, many conclude that leadership style depends on the situation (mintzberg, 1973; bass, 1985) or the organizational culture (schultz, 1990; anthony, 1994) and others conclude women often adopt more transformational leadership traits than men (eagly, johannesen schmidt, and van engen, 2003). the current study explores the latter indication that women adopt more transformational leadership behaviors and whether gender role internalization may influence that trend uncovered by previous research. manning (2002) examined male and female transformational leaders and did not find significant differences between genders in leadership style. however, eagly, johannesen-schmidt, and van engen (2003) conducted a meta-analysis of 45 previous studies that indicated the women adopt more transformational behaviors than males. the advantage of this study over manning’s single study is that it compares the results of 45 advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 104 studies. however, what is missing in this research is why women tend to adopt more transformational behaviors and whether gender role influences this trend. when looking closely at the behaviors involved in transformational leadership according to bass’s (1985) multifactor leadership questionnaire, one can see that some of the behaviors are stereotypically female behaviors. in order to see whether women internalize stereotypical female behavior, we need to look at gender role internalization. previously, a survey tool did not exist to measure the level of internalization by women about how society as a whole perceives how women should behave. dr. brenda toner developed a tool to measure gender role internalization in 1999 (toner, et. al). this tool has been used to measure the role of gender role internalization in chinese women by tang & tang (2001). tang and tang examined gender role internalization, multiple roles, and chinese women’s mental health. in current western societies, women play a balancing act between their careers and their traditional roles as wife and mother. this study examined the relationship between multiple roles and mental health among a group of chinese women, who were employed in hong kong. another important aspect of this study was the degree to which changing societal roles were reflected at the individual psychological level of the participants of the study. the purpose of the study was to examine the degree to which internalization of gender role messages for women affect their mental health, and the relationship between role quality and mental health. the results of the current research study could be affected by the cultural differences between western and chinese culture and may not generalize between cultures. chinese women may internalize gender roles differently than western women. method the current research study was a quantitative study that assessed the specific leadership style of participants by using an instrument called the multifactor leadership questionnaire 5 x, 2nd edition, short form. the study also measured gender role internalization by using the gender role socialization (grss) scale. the sample consisted of 100 female participants who hold managerial positions and titles in u. s. organizations and are members of professional business associations. an online survey was created on question pro software (www.questionpro.com) through a special subscription available through spalding university for currently enrolled students. this survey contained the multifactor leadership questionnaire (mlq), the gender role socialization (grss) scale, demographic questions, managerial questions, and an informed consent form. once the data were collected, correlation analysis was used. population and sample the subject sample consisted of 100 females who hold managerial titles in their respective organization and who have membership in their respective professional business organizations. subjects were recruited by posting invitations on linkedin, a networking website for business professionals, and by a newsletter circulated by fwi, a women’s financial business association. this association has over 700 members and the survey was delivered in an e-mail newsletter exclusive to members only. demographic information was collected for each participant. this included job title, age, years in current position, education level, and income level. reliability of the testing tools both the multi-factor leadership questionnaire and the grss scale were tested for reliability by using different methods to measure the consistency of each survey instrument. these methods include cronbach’s alpha and confirmatory factor analysis (cfa). although the multifactor leadership questionnaire (mlq) has extensive reliability testing due to the abundance of previous studies, the gender role socialization scale (grss) has been tested for reliability by the developer, dr. brenda toner. further reliability studies would benefit the credibility of the grss scale in future studies to reinforce its use. the multi-factor leadership questionnaire (mlq). this study compared transformational and transactional leadership styles as operationalized by data on the multifactor leadership questionnaire (mlq) 5x, 2nd edition, short form, as developed by bass and avolio (2000). for purposes of this study, the original 5x short form, consisting of 45 items, was reduced to 36 questions by removing the last nine items which measured constructs that are not related to this study. the omitted items were outcomes-related and measured effectiveness, satisfaction, and extra effort. the mlq is available in two forms: rater and leader. on the rater form, subordinates rate the manager on leadership style and behavior. on the leader form, the manager himself or herself rated themselves for each of the situations presented. this study used the leader form of the mlq as the study’s purpose is for the manager to assess their own leadership style. the mlq was derived from studies conducted by bass (1985), which derives leadership style from seven factors: charisma, inspirational motivation, idealized influence, contingent-reward behavior, individualized consideration, management-byexception and intellectual stimulation (bass, 1985). these factors were grouped into three categories: name the specific categories here and then explain what is meant by active and passive. transformational leadership consisted of the active factors of charisma, inspirational motivation, idealized influence, individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation. transactional leadership consisted of the active factors of contingent-reward and active management-byexception. laissez-faire leadership consists of passive management-by-exception and an avoidant approach to leadership. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 105 the mlq utilizes a 5-point likert scale to measure leadership styles with 0 (for not at all) and 4 (for frequently, if not always) as the anchors. the mlq is a copyrighted instrument that was purchased from the publisher (www.mindgarden.com) by this researcher for use in this study. reliability and validity of the questionnaire. avolio and bass (1999) re-examined the multifactor leadership questionnaire. the researchers wanted to examine whether the mlq survey measured the leadership factors it was developed to test. the study included 14 samples with a total of 3786 respondents. all 14 samples contained mlq rater evaluations of a target leader using the most updated version of the mlq. the first nine samples were used to test the original six factor model of the mlq. the remaining five samples were used to reconfirm the model derived from the first sample set. three of the nine samples included in the first set were followers of middle-level managers in u.s. business firms. one sample were from followers of supervisors working on north sea oil platforms. one sample each were followers of administrators in a nursing school and a government research agency. one sample was of junior u.s. army officers and their raters. two samples were undergraduates who described their supervisors in their outside work the second set of five samples included two from business firms in which raters described their middle-level managers; one was a fire department whose supervisors were rated by their followers; and the two others were a political organization and a not-forprofit agency whose administrators were rated by their respective followers (avolio & bass, 1999). the mlq (form 5x) was used, consisting of 80 items using a frequency scale that ranged from 0 = not at all, to 4 = frequently, if not always. this tool was an update of previous versions, form 10 and 5r (bass and avolio, 1990). new items were developed for the mlq 5x using recent literature that has distinguished charismatic from transformational leadership. six scholars in the field of leadership reviewed the mlq and made recommendations of what items to keep and what items to discard. they also judged whether each item was a behavior, attribute, or impact. these recommendations were included in the final version of mlq 5x. confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) was used to determine whether the data from the first and second sample set confirmed the proposed six factor model of leadership. the confirmatory factor analysis for the first sample was run including all 80 items from the mlq 5x with 8 items measuring attributed charisma; 10 items for charismatic behavior; 10 items for inspirational motivation; 10 items for intellectual stimulation; 9 items for individualized consideration; 9 items for contingent-reward; 8 items for active management-by-exception; and 16 items for passive management-by-exception and laissez-faire leadership. the goal of the study was to determine a “best fit” model for the mlq (form 5x) survey. the study was trying to address some of the limitations of earlier versions of the mlq. the first study and the second study, or replication study, did present a high level of reliability and consistency for the mlq 5x. this study was conducted on a broad variety of raters in different industries, which improves the generalizability of the mlq 5x. also, the mlq 5x would be more effective in measuring characteristics in leaders whom practice charismatic leadership, which has only recently been given attention (avolio & bass, 1999). toner’s gender role internalization scale. the gender role internalization scale (grss) for women was used for studying gender role internalization in the sample. gender role internalization operates on the premise that there is a contradiction within the modern role for women (toner, et al., 1999). women are expected to be both competitive and nurturing, compliant and assertive, and to appear in control, yet be vulnerable (bepko and krestan, 1990). gender roles make up an important part of identity and they define the social behavior of men and women in society. the gender roles begin early in life and role differentiation is maintained through cultural heritage, social norms, attitudes, and beliefs (tang and tang, 2001). the grss scale consists of three components: traditional ideal person, self-sacrifice, and competence without complaint. themes included in the items were: women’s experience of the conflicting demands of career and family, self-blame, and the value placed on physical attractiveness. actual items include (“i am torn between trying to reach my own goals and taking care of others”), (“i often apologize for things that i know are not my fault”), and (“i can’t feel good about myself unless i feel physically attractive”). these items were rated on a 7-point likert scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) (tang and tang, 2001). the first scale of 62 items was used in the tang and tang study in 2001. some samples of these themes and corresponding candidate items included: women’s experience of the conflicting demands of career and family (“i am torn between trying to reach my own goals and taking care of others”), self-blame (“i often apologize for things that i know are not my fault”), and the value placed of physical attractiveness (“i can’t feel good about myself unless i feel physically attractive”). this instrument is based on a 7-point likert scale and contains a total of sixty-two items. dr. brenda toner and her colleagues reduced the 62 item scale used in the tang and tang study to a 30-item scale which is due to be published in the near future. reliability and validity of the gender role internalization scale. data from 700 female participants, nearly evenly split between university, clinical, and community settings, were analyzed in order to develop the grss, the goal being to produce a reliable scale of 20 to 30 items from the original pool of 82 candidate items. in addition to the candidate advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 106 items, validating measures were also administered to participants including: (a) situational scenarios designed to assess the degree to which participants’ behavior correlated with their responses on the candidate items; (b) bem sex role inventory to test for convergent validity; (c) marlowe-crowne social desirability scale to test for social desirability contamination. toner and her colleagues examined the frequency distribution of the responses to each item and those in which more than 60% of the responses were on a single point of the 7-point likert scale were eliminated. items were eliminated if there were a significant proportion (at least 7%) of “not applicable” responses endorsed by participants. candidate items that correlated greater than .30 with the marlowe-crowne were eliminated. further items were eliminated due to redundancy if they correlated greater than .60 with other candidate items. items with the simplest phrasing were chosen through group consensus. toner and her colleagues performed principal components factor analyses with the remaining candidate items, specifying different rotation methods and component selection criteria. the most parsimonious results suggested two main factors comprising 42 items. through group consensus additional items were eliminated that were ambiguous, redundant, doublebarreled, and thought to prompt dichotomous rather than continuous responses. the remaining 30 items were subject to further principal components analysis and, once again, the most parsimonious results suggested two main factors accounting for 42% of the variance. the first factor reflects a mix of most of the a priori gender role socialization themes and the second factor reflects mostly the theme “be unselfish and of service.” all missing values and not applicable responses were replaced with the item mean. seven participants were eliminated from analyses because they had > 80% (at least 7/30) missing data. thus, the total sample is 693 women (231 university; 278 community; 184 clinical). the mean age is 32.62 (sd = 11.93, ranging from 18 to 76 years). two hundred thirty-eight (34%) are married/common-law; 385 (56%) single, 68 (10%) separated or divorced or widowed. annual household income was on a range but there are over 200 missing responses because this variable was not asked on the original demographics form at the beginning of data collection. this was also the case with the occupation variable. the sample was educated: 13 (2%) had less than high school; 67 (10%) completed high school; 18 (3%) had some college; 77 (11%) completed college; 191 (28%) had some university; 187 (27%) completed university; 135 (19%) completed graduate studies. in terms of ethnicity 125 (18%) indicated they were “canadian” and 232 (34%) indicated they were european (there are 12 other ethnic categories which have been reduced from a much larger number of categories based on participants open ended responses but we will want to collapse these even further at a later date). cronbach’s alpha indicates that both the factors and the overall scale are highly reliable, with alphas of .90 for both factors and .93 for the overall scale. the 30-item scale correlates negatively (-.256) with the marlowe-crowne, indicating that higher social desirability is associated with lower endorsement of gender role socialization. although this correlation is statistically significant, generally a correlation less than .30 with the marlowe-crowne is considered acceptable. the scale also correlates with the situational scenarios in the predicted directions. finally, the scale is correlated negatively (-.361) with the masculinity subscale of the bem sex role inventory and is uncorrelated with the femininity subscale. (toner, b. b., personal communication, february 9, 2008) results the scores for each construct of the mlq and the grss were totaled and compared. two sets of correlations were conducted. first, the scores for all the constructs for transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and laissez-faire leadership were summed and correlated with self-sacrifice in order to directly addresses hypothesis 1 and hypothesis 2. although self-sacrifice is only one construct in toner et al.’s grss survey, it is the construct referenced in eagly et al.’s 2003 meta analysis of leadership styles in men and women. this study concluded that females adopt transformational leadership styles more often than men. a suggested follow-up study was to determine whether gender role internalization is a factor in this. in analyzing the data in the study, this researcher noticed that individualized consideration, a sub-construct in transformational leadership, was high among females who participated in the study. this researcher determined that selfsacrifice, a construct in toner et al.’s gender role internalization scale, would best measure the type of caring and nurturing behaviors associated with individualized consideration. these measures are just a piece of the overall surveys, but if a relationship is established between these constructs, then the other constructs may necessitate further analysis in follow-up studies. correlations for transformational leadership a correlation analysis was conducted on constructs of transformational leadership based on the multifactor leadership questionnaire by bass and toner’s constructs in the gender role internalization scale (grss). all of the constructs included in transformational leadership on the mlq scale and the sub-construct of individualized consideration within the transformational leadership construct was compared to each construct of the grss scale. results that indicated weak correlations existed between the compared constructs. transformational leadership with self-sacrifice: hypothesis 1 the first hypothesis focused on examining whether female managers who scored high in the transformational leadership construct of individualized consideration also scored high in the self-sacrifice construct of the gender role internalization advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 107 tool. this author hypothesized that participants who score higher in the mlq -transformational leadership construct of individualized consideration would also demonstrate a higher level of gender role internalization in the self-sacrifice construct. a weak correlation was found to exist (r= .08). transformational leadership with traditional ideal person and with competence without compliance the construct of transformational leadership in the multifactor leadership questionnaire was correlated to the construct of traditional ideal person (r=-.02) and competence without compliance (r=.04) in toner et al.’s grss. although both traditional ideal person and competence without compliance were weakly correlated with transformational leadership, competence without compliance had a positive correlation with transformational leadership and traditional ideal person had a negative relationship. correlations for transactional and laissez faire leadership a correlation analysis was conducted on all constructs of transactional leadership and laissez faire leadership based on the multifactor leadership questionnaire by bass and toner’s constructs in the gender role internalization scale (grss). results that indicated significant correlations were present for transactional leadership when compared to all three constructs of the grss scale. transactional and laissez faire leadership with selfsacrifice: hypothesis 2 the second hypothesis examined whether a negative correlation existed between transactional leadership and each construct of gender role internalization. this author hypothesized that participants who demonstrated lower levels of gender role internalization as measured by the grss construct of selfsacrifice would demonstrate higher scores in transactional leadership and laissez-faire leadership constructs measured by the mlq. for hypothesis 2, this researcher measured selfsacrifice against all constructs of transactional leadership. a significant positive correlation was present between selfsacrifice and transactional leadership. further research needs to be conducted to determine which constructs of transactional leadership drives the relationship with self-sacrifice. next, the construct of transactional leadership in the mlq was correlated with the construct of self-sacrifice (r =.23), traditional ideal person (r=.26) and competence without compliance (r=.23) in toner’s grss. all three constructs in the grss are similarly correlated to transactional leadership, and they are significant. correlations related to demographics demographic analysis of results are presented to determine if a correlation exists between self-sacrifice and individualized consideration related to training factors, company size, and gender makeup of the organization. this information was important to collect and report for the study because environment can influence behavior. the researcher determined that analyzing the data by these factors would be important. the only limitation to splitting the data in this way in analysis is that it makes the sample size smaller. over two thirds of participants held a 4-year degree or higher. over three quarters of participants belonged to organizations that were at least 50% female. almost 90% of the organizations represented in this study were for-profit organizations. nearly three quarters of participants in this study reported that they took part in on the job management training. almost half of participants reported they were trained by both males and females to be managers. the majority of participants reported that they work at a small organization. over a third reported working for a large organization. business model: female managers who worked in forprofit organizations with female managers in for-profit organizations there were implications for hypothesis 2. specifically, there was a significant positive correlation (rather than the hypothesized negative correlation) between the grss constructs of traditional ideal person (r=.24), competence without compliance (r=. 22), and self-sacrifice (r=.23), as well as the total grss (r=.27), and the mlq construct of transactional leadership. regarding hypothesis 1, no significant correlation existed between the mlq transformational leadership sub-construct of individualized consideration and self-sacrifice in this group, contrary to the hypothesized positive correlation. however, a significant positive correlation, rather than the negative correlation predicted by hypothesis 2, existed between each construct of the grss and transactional leadership. management training: female managers who were trained on the job in agreement with hypothesis 1, there was a significant positive correlation between individualized consideration and self-sacrifice among managers who were trained on the job. however, contrary to hypothesis 2’s prediction of a negative correlation, there was a significant positive correlation between transactional leadership and grss total (r=.27). there was also a significant positive correlation between laissez faire leadership and two constructs of the grss: traditional ideal self (r= .23) and competence without compliance (r=.26). organizational gender mix: organizations 100% female (n=9) in organizations that were 100% female transformational leadership was significantly correlated with self-sacrifice (r=.74) and grss total (r=.70). no significant correlations were noted between transactional leadership or laissez faire leadership and self-sacrifice. there were no other significant correlations found related to this demographic. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 108 organizational gender mix: organizations 85% female (n=17) in organizations that were 85% female, in agreement with hypothesis 1, transformational leadership was significantly correlated with self-sacrifice (r=.66) and grss total (r=.68). contrary to hypothesis 2, which predicted a negative correlation, laissez faire leadership was significantly correlated with the competence without compliance construct of the grss (r=.56). summary eagly et al. (2003) hypothesized that gender role internalization may influence transformational leadership style, and this was the first hypothesis that this study investigated. the second hypothesis investigated was the corollary that a low level of gender role internalization would show a strong correlation with transactional or laissez-faire leadership styles. to test these two hypotheses, this author developed a quantitative survey and administered it online to females in management positions. the survey consisted of a short demographic survey, b. m. bass’s multifactor leadership questionnaire form 5x leader form (mlq), and toner et al.’s gender role socialization scale (grss). the survey took approximately 15-20 minutes to complete. this survey was sent in an e-mail newsletter sponsored by financial women international, a women’s business association with members worldwide. the survey was also posted on linkedin, an online networking community for business professionals. for the study, the total score for the grss (grss total) was compared to the total score for each leadership style in bass’s mlq (1985): transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and laissez faire leadership. also, each construct for each leadership style was totaled and compared to the total for each construct for gender role internalization. these constructs were compared using pearson’s correlation test in spss version 16. total scores were used for each survey because statistical means could not be used due to likert scale number rating differences. these scores were analyzed and strength of correlation was examined and interpreted. analysis of the correlations between the three gender role internalization constructs of self-sacrifice, traditional ideal person, and competence without compliance on one side and the three leadership style constructs of transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and laissez-faire leadership on the other side showed only weak correlations. to confirm or refute hypothesis 1, the grss construct of selfsacrifice was measured against the transformational leadership sub-construct of individualized consideration. to confirm or refute hypothesis 2, self-sacrifice was measured against the constructs of transformational leadership and laissez-faire leadership. all other measures were extraneous to testing the hypotheses and were measured for exploratory purposes and potential follow up research. contrary to the hypothesis suggested by eagly et al. (2003) and adopted as hypothesis 1 for this study, this researcher did not find a strong correlation between a high level of gender role internalization (measured by high scores on the grss construct of self-sacrifice) and a high level of transformational leadership style (measured by the mlq sub-construct of individualized consideration) in the total sample. when split by demographics, a significant positive correlation was found between self-sacrifice and individualized consideration in female managers who were trained on the job. only the grss construct of self-sacrifice was used test hypothesis 1, rather than also using traditional ideal person, competence without compliance, and grss total, because the construct of self-sacrifice measures behaviors that are selfless in nature. eagly, johannesson, et al.’s (2003) meta analysis suggested that perhaps gender role internalization could be a factor in female’s who adopt transformational leadership styles. this researcher determined that the other constructs of competence without compliance and traditional ideal person were not as relevant to the mlq construct of individualized consideration as the self-sacrifice construct in the grss. the results did demonstrate a spillover of gender role internalization into transformational leadership in female managers who were trained on the job. therefore, regarding transformational leadership, the analyses for this study confirmed hypothesis 1 it relates to the transformational leadership style and this specific demographic. regarding hypothesis 2 (that a low level of gender role internalization would show a strong correlation with transactional and laissez-faire leadership styles; that is, the construct of self-sacrifice would be negatively correlated with transactional leadership and laissez faire leadership) , there were significant positive correlations in the total sample and in for-profit organizations between self-sacrifice and transactional leadership, but no significant results between self-sacrifice and laissez-faire leadership. therefore, there was no strong negative correlation supporting hypothesis 2, and the null hypothesis was confirmed regarding transactional and laissez faire leadership styles. this researcher did find a strong correlation between a high level of gender role internalization and a high level of the transformational leadership style in female managers who were trained on the job, thus confirming hypothesis 1 as it related to this demographic. furthermore, a low level of gender role internalization did not show a strong correlation with a high level of the transactional leadership or laissez-faire leadership styles. thus, hypotheses 2 for this study was unable to be confirmed due to weak correlation. discussion the purpose of this study was to test two hypotheses concerning leadership styles of female managers and their advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 109 levels of gender role internalization. specifically, the researcher wanted to explore whether caring and nurturing behaviors that are traditionally associated with women spill over into their leadership styles as defined by bass’s (1985) multifactor leadership questionnaire (mlq). for the study, the grss construct of grss total was compared to the total score for each leadership style construct (transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and laissez faire leadership) in bass’s mlq (1985). also, each construct for each leadership style was totaled and compared to the total for each construct for gender role internalization (ideal traditional person, self-sacrifice, competence without compliance). these constructs were correlated using pearson’s correlation test in spss version 16. total scores were used for each survey because statistical means could not be used due to likert scale number rating differences. their scores were examined and strength of correlation was examined and interpreted. further analysis was conducted by breaking out the data by demographics and significant findings resulted. in organizations that were either 100% female or were 85% female, a significant correlation exists between self-sacrifice and transformational leadership. more importantly, participants in these organizations demonstrate a significant positive correlation between transformational leadership and toner et al.’s grss. further analysis is warranted to determine the influence of gender role internalization on leadership in mostly female organizations. it is worth examining whether females influence other females in these organizations and whether this affects the level of gender role internalization and the adoption of transformational leadership. in organizations where female managers who were trained on the job (rather than in college, in seminars, or by other means), there was a significant positive correlation between individualized consideration and self-sacrifice. however, there was also a significant positive correlation between laissezfaire leadership and traditional ideal person and between laissez faire leadership and competence without compliance. organizations predominately female the researcher hypothesized that women who internalized their gender role as caring and nurturing would carryover these behaviors into their leadership style and this would be reflected in their scores on the grss and on the transformational leadership sub-construct of individualized consideration. after analyzing the data, this is not the case in the total sample. however, there are some significant correlations between total scores for transformational leadership and grss constructs in organizations that are mostly female. perhaps the other sub-constructs of transformational leadership (intellectual stimulation, idealized influence (behavioral), idealized influence (attributed), and inspirational motivation) are at play in this case. it is possible that organizations that are mostly female influence gender role internalization and leadership style in a different way that in other organizations. female managers trained on the job a significant correlation between self-sacrifice and individualized consideration appears in organizations where female managers were trained on the job. in these organizations, over half were trained by females. further research should be conducted to determine whether women who are trained by other women internalize gender roles and whether they adopt a more transformational leadership style. limitations cultural and religious differences. the sample in this study consisted of female managers in the united states. a previous study (tang & tang, 2001) regarding gender role consideration consisted of a sample of chinese women in hong kong. eastern and western cultures are very different. in this study and the previous study by tang and tang, certain cultural issues could limit the generalizability of the findings. in chinese culture, attentiveness and sensitivity to other people’s needs is a key ingredient of social interaction (gabrenya & hwang, 1996). the chinese have a proclivity toward collective welfare and social concern, as well as toward neglecting their own feelings and personal enjoyment (yang, 1986). western culture places more value on the individual and on personal success rather that collective welfare of society. these differences in culture could produce very different results in the u.s. study. limitations of survey research. another limitation was the possibility of managers self-reports not reflecting their true leadership style. although great care was taken not to reveal too much detail about the subject matter of the study in order to not bias results, some participants were likely to report behaviors they imagined themselves as practicing, rather than the actual behaviors they practiced. implications accounting for disconfirmation of hypothesis 1. this research suggests that either females separate their internalization of gender roles from their management identity or women in the u.s. do not internalize messages about how society, as a whole, views and portrays women. another possibility is that women do not report their feelings about gender; therefore, a self-report bias skews the results in this study. the significance of the gender mix. although further examination is needed, the positive correlations between high transformational leadership and high gender role internalization for organizations that are predominately female suggests that predominately female organizations have female leaders who advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 110 demonstrate a higher level of gender role internalization and transformational leadership styles than female leaders in organizations that are predominately male. one explanation for this is that organizations with a strong female presence have managers who practice transformational leadership. for those who are responsible for hiring new leadership talent in organizations, the findings of this study could help determine which candidates would be a good fit in the organization. if further studies replicate the data found in this study, then those responsible for hiring could use the gender mix of the organization as an indicator of which candidates would bring a leadership style that is congruent with the organization. if this is true, this could be taken into consideration when hiring midlevel management as well. the significance of the business model. the results of the study found a high level of gender role internalization and a more transactional leadership style in for-profit organizations. this refutes the second hypothesis that predicted females who practice transactional leadership with have a lower level of gender role internalization. this could be due to organizational environmental factors or the culture of the organization. previous studies (young, 2004) have shown that the environment can overtake other factors in order to be the dominant force in what leadership type is practiced. in contrast, previous studies (kane & tremble, 2000; singer & singer, 1986) demonstrated transformational leadership in industries that are traditionally male dominated. further research needs to be done to uncover the reasons behind the findings in for-profit and non-profit organizations before implications can be drawn from the results. leader effectiveness. for those who evaluate the competence and effectiveness of leaders in organizations, for organizations that are mostly female the data suggests that females may be more effective leaders (since females are more likely to practice a transformational leadership style) than males (since they are more likely to practice a transactional leadership or laissez faire leadership style). this is a very important implication because in order to get the best performance from subordinates, you need good leadership. it may be that organizations with a majority of women need leaders who are supportive, encouraging, and motivating (the hallmarks of transformational leadership). congruence with bass’s leadership theories. those who support bass’s leadership theories that transformational leadership is the most effective leadership style may find it easier to be successful under certain types of leaders. specifically, employees who support these theories may be able to affect more change within an organization under a transformational leader, rather than a transactional leader, simply because they may be able to get their ideas across in a transformational environment. a transformational environment is more likely to foster teamwork and a group mindset for success. at the same time, those who are used to a very structured environment may be more comfortable under a transactional leader who delineates tasks and offers contingent rewards. as gender roles and expectations continue to gain attention in american society, there is an increased focus on both women’s representation in leadership positions and their approaches to leadership (eagly & carli, 2007). while women’s presence in the workforce, enrollment in higher education, and attainment of supervisory positions continue to dramatically increase, and in many cases exceed that of men, there is still a significant disparity between women and men holding top leadership positions that carry with them substantial authority (eagly & carli, 2004, 2007; helfat, harris, & wolfson, 2006). in addition to the disparity of the number of women in top leadership positions, there are a number of challenges that women face when in these roles. research demonstrates that women in top leadership positions face challenges in balancing their preferred leadership styles with followers’ expectations while in leadership roles (eagly & carli, 2007). while women’s leadership styles and approaches tend to be more collaborative, participative, and democratic than the leadership styles of most men (dugan, komives, & segar, 2008; eagly & carli, 2007; haber & komives, 2009; smith, 1997), women in top leadership, particularly in male-dominated industries, can feel pulled to adopt more masculine, autocratic, and directive leadership styles (eagly & carli, 2004, 2007; moran, 1992). this is a tricky double bind that women must face, as acting more assertive and directive is often met with resistance from both male and female colleagues; men, however, do not normally confront such resistance (driskell, olmstead, & salas, 1993; eagly & carli, 2007). women leaders also face challenges in their roles with stereotyping, experiencing harassment, feeling excluded, and feeling alone and tokenized (edmondson bell & nkomo, 2003). although women face the challenges of under-representation in top leadership roles and must often confront and manage gender norms, expectations, and even harassment while in these roles, there is evidence that the playing field is gradually being leveled. women are gaining access to and increasingly assuming top leadership roles (helfat et al., 2006), just as men are assuming more domestic responsibilities (galinsky, aumann, & bond, 2009). additionally, androgynous leadership styles that reflect a combination of masculine and feminine characteristics are more accepted and, even, valued than ever before (eagly & carli, 2007; northouse, 2007). women’s more democratic and transformational approaches to leadership have proven to be crucial to both organizational effectiveness (eagly & carli, 2004; helgesen, 1990; smith, 1997) and individual advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 111 success (heffernan, 2007). these steady changes could lead to an environment that is more open to women in top leadership roles and women’s ways of leading. one area that is under-researched but that could conceivably promote understanding of the future of women’s leadership in society is the experience of college student women leaders. examining the leadership styles and influences of these younger women may help us gain a greater understanding of women’s leadership today and what we may expect in the future. the college environment provides many opportunities to be involved with different organizations and hold formal leadership roles in these organizations (astin, 1997). additionally, unlike the upper ranks of the business world, the college environment is a conceivably more empowering context for women leaders, particularly as women in higher education outnumber men. the topic of female collegiate leaders is not completely uncharted territory, of course. recent research shows that college women student leaders demonstrate greater competence and ability to engage in more democratic leadership (a form of leadership that is increasingly associated with organizational success) than men (dugan, et al., 2008; eagly & carli, 2004; haber & komives, 2009; helgesen, 1990; shankman, haber, facca, & allen, 2010; smith, 1997), though men tend to have greater confidence and self-efficacy in their ability to lead (dugan & komives, 2007; kezar & moriarty, 2000). while the existing research sheds light on women’s preferred leadership style and their relative confidence in their ability to lead, it does not focus specifically on college student women who hold formal leadership roles. there is a lack of information on how college women in leadership roles exercise leadership and the various factors, such as follower expectations and gender roles and norms, influence how they engage in leadership. a further examination of the leadership experiences of college women leaders can contribute to a better understanding of women’s leadership today, with a particular focus on younger, college aged women. this information can also inform the ways in which college women leaders are supported and served on college campuses and how college student educators can help prepare these women for their leadership lives post-college. suggestions for future research further analysis on this subject is warranted. to overcome any self-rater bias, both the leader and rater form of the mlq could be used in a more expansive study. a study using populations from western and eastern culture could possibly uncover differences and answer questions about cultural influence on gender role internalization and female leadership style. further analysis needs to be done on organizations that are mostly female and organizations where female managers are trained on the job by other women in order to determine whether a strong female culture within an organization fosters transformational leadership. finally, both a quantitative and a qualitative approach should be used together in future research to add depth to the survey data and to uncover more themes in female leadership style. conclusion this research uncovered some significant correlations between the level of gender role internalization and transformational leadership in certain samples. these findings warrant further evaluation in organizations that are mostly female and organizations that have managers who are trained on the job by other females. it is possible that women influence other women in organizations and this issue needs to be analyzed further by using methods that eliminate self-rater bias and cultural bias. references avolio, b. j., & bass, b. m. (1999). re-examining the components of transformational and transactional leadership using the multifactor leadership questionnaire. journal of occupational and organizational psychology, 72, 441-462. baruch, g. k., & barnett, r. (1986). role quality, multiple role involvement, and psychological well-being in midlife women. journal of personality and social psychology, 51(3), 578-585. bass, b. m. (1985). leadership and performance beyond expectations. new york, ny: free press. bass, b. m., & riggio, r. e. (2005). transformational leadership (2nd ed.). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates, inc. bass, b. m., & avolio, b. j. (1990). transformational leadership development: manual for the multifactor leadership questionnaire. palto alto, ca: consulting psychologist press. bass, b. m., & avolio, b. j. (2000). mlq multifactor leadership questionnaire. (2nd ed.). redwood city, ca: mindgarden inc. bass, b. m., avolio, b. j., & atwater, l. (1996). the transformational and transactional leadership of men and women. applied psychology: an international review, 45, 5-34. bepko, c., & krestan, j. (1990). too good for her own good. new york, ny: harper and row. burns, j. m. (1978). leadership. new york: harper and row. degroot, t., kiker, s. d., & cross, t. c. (2000). a metaanalysis to review organizational outcomes related to charismatic leadership. canadian journal of administrative sciences, 17, 356-371. eagly, a. h., johannesen-schmidt, m. c., & van engen, m. l. (2003). transformational, transactional, and laissezfaire leadership styles: a meta-analysis comparing women and men. psychological bulletin, 129(4), 569591. eagly, a. h., & karau, s. j. (2002) role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. psychological review,109, 573-598. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 112 gabrenya, w. k., jr., & hwang, k. (1996). chinese social interaction: harmony and hierarchy on the good earth. in m. h. bond (ed.). the handbook of chinese psychology (pp. 309-321). hong kong: oxford university press. goldberg, d. p., & hillier, v. f. (1979). a scaled version of the general health questionnaire. psychological medicine, 9, 139-145. goldberg, d. p., & williams, p. (1988). a user’s guide to the general health questionnaire. london: nfernelson. kane, t. d., & tremble, t. r., jr. (2000). transformational leadership effects at different levels of the army. military psychology, 12(2), 136-160. lowe, k. b., kroeck, k. g., & sivasubramaniam, n. (1996). effectiveness correlates of transformational and transactional leadership: a meta-analytic review of mlq literature. leadership quarterly, 7(3). 385-425 maher, k. j. (1997). gender-related stereotypes of transformational and transactional leadership. sex roles, 37, 209-225. mintzberg, h. (1973). the nature of managerial work. harper & row, new york. questionpro survey software. (2008). questionpro. retrieved october 4, 2008 from http://www.questionpro.com. schultz, m. (1990). cultures in organization. function or symbol. handelshojskolens forlag. kopenhagen. singer, m. s., & singer a. e. (1986). relation between transformational vs. transactional leadership preference and subordinates’ personality: an exploratory study. perceptual and motor skills, 62, 775-780. tang, t., & tang, c. (2001). gender role internalization, multiple roles, and chinese women’s mental health. psychology of women quarterly, 25, 181-196. toner, b. b., ali, a., stuckless, n., weaver, h., aikman, d. e., tang, t. n., quattrochioci, d., & espen, m. j. (1999, august). development of a gender role socialization scale for women. in j. worell (chair), measuring process and outcomes in feminist therapy. symposium conducted at the american psychological association annual convention, boston. yang, k. (1986). chinese personality and it’s change. in m. h. bond (ed.), the psychology of the chinese people (pp. 106-160). hong kong: oxford university press. young, p. (2004). leadership and gender in higher education: a case study. journal of further and higher education, 28(1), 98-105. introduction advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 63 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 63-68, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women in love and men at work: the evolving heterosexual couple? narissra m. punyanunt-carter, stacy l. carter, courtney casey, jp destefano, and meagan schaffner narissra m. punyanunt-carter: an associate professor in the department of communication at texas tech university email: n.punyanunt@ttu.edu; phone: 806-742-3273 stacy l. carter: an associate professor in the college of education at texas tech university email: stacy.carter@ttu.edu; phone: 806-742-1997 courtney casey, jp destefano, and meagan schaffner: former students at texas tech university accepted july 3, 2013 we studied how the participants incorporated their emotions, feelings and behaviors into their relationships on an everyday basis. in our study, we focused on how women are viewed as being very emotional and how men show little to no emotion in their heterosexual relationship. our findings indicate what system women and men build their relationships upon and how they differ from each other. hopefully, men and women will understand that there are gender differences and that they will have to compromise on what they personally want in a relationship. keywords: women, relationships, gender differences introduction from a very early age as children, we were all introduced to the word “love.” everyone has their own opinions of what love is and what it consists of. love can have many definitions; it depends on how the person uses the word and to whom they are speaking. the main definition of love consists of a deep, passionate, or sexual affection for another human being. for many people, you can have that feeling of love right away or some may have to acquire the feeling over a long period of time. love can bring feelings and all kinds of emotions. this paper will look into heterosexual couples’ relationships and what each partner may want in the actual relationship. the couples’ views will also show the different gender stereotypes that they face in their relationships. many women in a heterosexual relationship are seen as either dreaming of or actually having a fairy tale romance take place in their life. they are also seen as being very committed in their own relationships. for women growing up, they were shown the fairy tale movies or most likely heard the romantic stories of princesses such as cinderella. girls grow up wanting a boy to come and sweep them off their feet, be their prince charming and live their life happily ever after. men as children were seen playing with cars, video games, and action figures. they are not dreaming about being a girl’s prince charming. men typically want sex in their relationship and seem to have to work harder on their commitment issues. girls were exposed to the fairy tale romance at such a young age while men have to learn what their partner wants in the relationship firsthand. this paper looks at how we studied our participants and how the participants incorporated their emotions, feelings and behaviors into their relationships on an everyday basis. our study will look particularly at how women are viewed as being very emotional and how men show little to no emotion in their heterosexual relationship. our research will show what system women and men build their relationships upon and how they may differ from each other. hopefully, men and women will understand that there are gender differences and that they will have to compromise on what they personally want in the relationship. literature review in angie burns’ 2002 study, “women in love and men at work,” she looks at heterosexual romantic relationships and the gender roles that men and women take on. there have been a multitude of studies that have provided the framework that burns needed to perform her research and find that women are in love and men are at work. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 64 many researchers in the past have conducted studies that deal with the overlying theme of fantasy and romance. more often than not, females have been shown to correlate their everyday lives with fairy tales, movies and stereotypical hollywood romances. as trite as it seems, many women equate the heroines that they envision themselves to be with the role they take on in their romantic relationships. in a pair of memory studies conducted, a better perspective on social experience and memory was gained in regards to couples watching romantic movies on a date (harris, 2004). the partners in this study were asked to take on a character’s role in the film and thus become them. director michael hoffman characterized “a midsummer night’s dream” by william shakespeare by describing the film as a reflection to a person. the stereotype that this reflection created was that of the person’s relationship and the role they should be envisioning themselves in (jones, 2004). another research article encompasses the war movie genre of the late 1930s which explored issues such as gender and sexual differences relating to propaganda film and interracial romances (freiberg, 1992). in addition, the issue of masculinity in the western world is critiqued as men are seen to be stereotyped into models of manhood (peek, 2003). this study done by peek was used to redefine the new ideal man and how men everywhere are trying to live up to this standard, especially in their romantic relationships. in 1985, fantasy themes were traced over a 33 year period to examine the vision of male and female relationships (hubbard, 1985). by tracing these fantasy themes, gender stereotypes were able to be analyzed and the researchers were able to see the stereotype of the new ideal male and the ideal female. analyzing the same trend, another study was done to research the past 25 years of hollywood filmmakers who have come to portray men and women in movies in new ways (powers, 1993). the final three studies all encompass the fairy tale romance which is often made evident in novels. one article focuses on how women might perceive romance in a novel and takes a closer look at why women are so interested in these novels (crawford, 1994). this same study shows a correlation between the expectations we have from these novels and the expectations we have out of real romantic relationships. another study took a closer look at how men always have sexual behaviors on their mind and women are more about the fairy tale romance and the emotions in their life (feldstein, 2005). finally, researchers analyzed how scientists referred to the egg and sperm and how even their actions are often explained with the same language that is used to describe relationships between men and women. specifically, the sperm were described as seeking out the egg and conquering it, while the egg was described much more passively. this is despite the evidence that shows that the egg does much to ensnare the sperm (martin, 1991). there were other research articles that obviously dealt with the romantic relationship aspect of the study that we feel need to be highlighted because our study deals with more than just fairy tale narratives and men wanting sex. for example, a previous study looked at how people may fall in love using words with emotions (helmuth, 2003). another study, cbq review essay, analyzed how supermarket tabloids were serving as methods to disintegrating female stereotypes which led to gender differences between two authors (greenburg, 1999). in 2001, researchers looked at positive affective shifts between men and women after first-time intercourse and the different perspectives that the two genders had in relation to continuing a long-term relationship (buss, 2001). they found that first-time intercourse did not lower one’s opinion of his or her partner’s attractiveness except in the case of males with many previous sexual partners. lastly, researchers presented a new instrument for measuring attitudes toward their personal meaning of romance (bradley, 1990). the romantic communication scale (rcs) was used, and males were found to adapt to this scale better; although both sexes were seen to prefer traditional romantic events and behaviors. overall, many researchers throughout the world have done numerous studies pertaining to romantic relationships. more specifically, researchers have analyzed the fairy tale romance that tends to form gender stereotypes by both sexes. romance is an intricate area to understand because it involves two people who are often very different trying to understand each other and the world they exist in. because of this, stereotypes are often formed, and romantic relationships can be a little confusing. synthesis of literature review angie burns’ 2002 study, “women in love and men at work,” explores fictional and factual accounts of women who want love and men who want sex and feel they have to work at relationships. burns explores if and how gender differences often affect heterosexual intimate relationships. the research findings were based on discourse analysis of qualitative interviews with women and men who were asked about their romantic relationships and asked to answer truthfully and openly about their wide array of experiences. eleven women and eleven men between the ages of 17 and 60 took part. all of the participants were white and british. burns found that there were two strong narratives that became evident in the 22 interviews that took place. one was the romantic narrative and the other was the workaday narrative. in the romantic narrative, primarily given by the female participants, they spoke of being “in love”, “failing to control their emotions”, and even a passionate love that interrupted day-to-day activities (burns, 2002, p.159-160). this narrative mirrored that of fairy tales and “chick flick” movies that often end with the hero winning over the heroine. on the other hand, men expressed a workaday narrative in which they told of their experience of having to work at relationships. feelings did not govern the male’s experiences in their relationships, although many of the men did emphasize that they took the relationship as seriously as their partner, even if they did not have the same emotional investment. burns concluded that that the once overemotional advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 65 woman has calmed down as a stereotype, and the once emotionally inexpressive man is starting to take relationships seriously. the research raises questions about gender difference in romantic relationships and how the heterosexual couples differ in their intimacy levels. the researchers believe this is a topic worth exploring further because of the interest in the issue of gender and romance in relationships and because relationships form much of the interpersonal communication in our everyday lives. this study is being replicated to look at different groups of people who are involved in romantic relationships here in the united states and possibly offer a different perspective on gender differences and stereotypes. there has been much research done about the fairy tale narratives often asking the question: are women simply in love; and are men simply at work? as college students, this topic is interesting because we feel that we are at an age where we are trying to find answers, possibly trying to form relationships and also desiring to learn a little more about the romantic relationships in our lives as well as our peers’ lives. we believe it is important to recognize that there is a hierarchical structure in society today, and in order to combat gender stereotypes, we must analyze and reanalyze research studies to better understand relationships especially in the romantic realm. we want to discover the differences between genders and if women are truly in love and if men are truly at work, or if there is something more to it. research questions and hypotheses the purpose of this replication study was to determine how women and men view love in their heterosexual relationships. our particular interests dealt with fairy tale romances for women and men just wanting to have sex in the relationships and having to work a little harder at them. the researchers came up with the following research questions. rq1: do women tend to be more overbearing with their emotions and feelings in the relationship? women tend to share too much information with their partners. they are more emotional when it comes to all aspects of their relationships. men have a tendency to not release much emotion in the relationship. they are taught usually from an early age that it’s not okay for men to cry. rq2: do women and men view commitment differently in their relationships? women view commitment as being with only one person the rest of their life. they will let the person know how they feel and how committed they are in the relationship. men on the other hand are more inclined to be less committed during relationships. they also will have more sexual partners than women. rq3: do women really want the fairy tale romance in their life? we believe that all women truly want the whole romantic scene. women grow up believing that their life is going to end happily ever after they find their prince charming. women are seen viewing romantic movies and novels more than men. rq4: are men seen as having to work harder in their relationships? men do not always see eye-to-eye with women. women want to feel loved all the time. men often have to buy gifts and pay more attention to the way their partner feels on any specific day. men are not as touchy as women, so they have to be careful with the words they use on a daily basis to their partner. methods design the following findings were obtained by using a qualitative interview questionnaire with women and men who responded about their personal intimate relationships in regards to themselves and their partner. these questions were aimed at trying to find the similarities and differences of how heterosexual men and women feel and think about the opposite sex in their relationships. there were ten questions on the questionnaire and each question tried to objectify whether or not males and females were different in their opinions about one another in their relationships. participants in this study, there were sixteen heterosexual couples interviewed. each couple consisted of one male and one female. the ages of the couples ranged from twenty to seventythree. half of the couples are currently in a marriage while the other half are planning on getting married. all were caucasian and live in the united states. most of the participants were either friends of the researchers or family of the researchers. these family and friends were chosen due to the personal nature of the study. procedure the qualitative interview questionnaire was either given directly to each participant or given by using the telephone. each participant was notified that they would remain anonymous for this study. we had each couple either write down their answers in a comfortable environment, or we wrote in the answers for them from the telephone interview. each couple consisted of one male and one female; therefore, we conducted each questionnaire with each gender separately. there was no system of whether or not the male or female should answer first. after all questionnaires had been completed, we then took all of them and analyzed each question separately. there were many similar themes that emerged within each answer so we used a tally system to code the participants’ answers. each theme was then grouped together and analyzed to get the overall objective of this study. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 66 analysis and results there were many interesting and unique ideas that emerged from the questionnaire dealing with the different perspectives from each gender in relationships. many stereotypes were noticed within this study as seen socially acceptable to society. this study showed just how different men and women tend to think about their relationships and how each gender tends to think about the opposite sex. we will start by analyzing the women’s interviews of their relationships and their perceptions of emotions and actions in their corresponding relationships. then, we will look at the other side, the men’s interviews and how they perceived themselves in the same situations. the women’s interviews while the women answered the questions to the questionnaire, there seemed to be more thought given in each of the answers analyzed. after the question was asked, the women tended to pause just for a second and then give lengthy answers. each woman was notified that her name would not be used in the study. the first question, after age, pertained to when they felt that they knew they had fallen “in love” or were “in love” (burns, 2002, p.160). there were two main responses that were tallied. the first response was that women felt this way shortly after they had become “best friends” with their boyfriend. the second main response stated that women felt this way after one year of dating. these two answers are similar due to the fact that both of these are about the same time-frame. some other responses were around the three month time frame, first kiss and at first sight. the third question was asked about what characteristics had attracted them to their partner. overwhelmingly, the biggest answer was personality. women felt that once they had a chance to get to know someone, the more they were attracted to them. another response that was tallied high was that the opposite sex was funny. this ties in to the personality aspect because if someone is funny, it is part of their personality. looks and honesty were only mentioned once out of all of the responses. the next question dealt with the term “commitment” and what it meant to them. the majority of the answers dealt with loyalty, honesty, and love. loyalty was the main response as many women felt that you must show devotion and honesty to your partner. they stated while enduring many hardships with the person you love, you must remain loyal and committed. the fifth question asked, “what was the biggest realization of the opposite sex that you have attained during the relationship?” there were various answers on this topic. some included, men don’t change, men are not as sensitive as women, men don’t have detailed conversations, men don’t listen, men only care about sports, and men don’t realize women’s feelings. most of these seemed to be general stereotypes about men, but it was noted that “men don’t listen” was the only answer to be marked twice. question six talked about what contributions were made to maintain a happy relationship. there were two responses that were marked the most and the same amount: trust and honesty. teamwork was close behind, but the main two were trust and honesty. these women felt that you have to have these two elements in order to maintain a lasting relationship. questions seven and eight were very similar and were one word answers. question seven asked if they felt that they were putting an equal amount of effort into their relationship whereas question eight asked if they felt that they were more or less emotional than their romantic partner. the responses to question seven were ninety-eight percent yes, and the responses to question eight were one hundred percent more emotional. the next to last question dealt with whether or not women tended to compare their relationships to a romantic narrative. this question was not asked to the men, only the women. there were only three answers given in the questionnaire. the majority of the women answered “yes” while some answered “no” and a few answered “sometimes.” the last question asked what these women felt was the most important aspect of their relationship. out of all of the answers given, love was the number one response. honesty, space, communication and trust were also stated as answers. the men’s interviews the men were interviewed separately from the women but the girlfriends and wives were present in some of the interviews. while the women tended to give lengthy answers and only took a brief pause to respond, the men gave short answers and most of them had trouble answering some of the questions. the men’s responses tended to be short and to the point. the first question, after age, pertained to when they felt that they knew they had fallen “in love” or were “in love” (burns, 2002, p.160). most of the responses stated that men felt that they were in love after the first date. two other responses were at the four-month mark and the one-year mark. nothing was mentioned about being friends or getting to know the other person. the third question was asked about what characteristics had attracted them to their partner. the main answer was that the “looks” of the opposite sex had attracted them. personality, family and sincerity were also mentioned as some characteristics. the next question dealt with the term “commitment” and what it meant to them. the men’s answers to this question were almost the same as the women’s answers. the term, “longadvancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 67 term” was mentioned the most often and monogamy was mentioned a few times. the fifth question asked, “what was the biggest realization of the opposite sex that you have attained during the relationship?” the responses to this question were in one big category: women as being very sensitive. some other one-time responses included women are always right, women are stubborn and men give more gifts than women do. question six talked about what contributions were made to maintain a “happy” relationship. there were three answers that tallied the same to this question. they included love, sex, and honesty. needing space and compromise were also mentioned but the main three were love, sex, and honesty in that order. questions seven and eight, once again, were very similar and were one word answers. question seven asked if they felt that they were putting an equal amount of effort into their relationship whereas question eight asked if they felt that they were more or less emotional than their romantic partner. all of the men answered “yes” to putting an equal amount of effort and all answered “less emotional” to question number eight. the responses to question eight coincide with the women’s answers as both sides seemed to agree that the women are more emotional in their relationships. the next to last question dealt with whether or not men felt that they had to constantly work at their relationship. the responses were fifty/fifty in that half of the men said that they did not have to constantly work at it and the other half did. the last question asked what these men felt was the most important aspect of their relationship. four categories were obtained from the men’s responses to this question. they included: communication, trust, love and being around one another on a regular basis. happiness and family were also mentioned but not as frequently as the top four. discussion we know that the article identifies two broad categories: discourses and narratives. these two categories give birth to two types of people: the romantic and the workaday. the article does not say there are differences between men and women that make them seem as if they are incompatible. however, men tend to discuss relationships and emotions differently. men were seen as emotionally inexpressive and restricted from communicating in the same way the opposite sex did. the women usually used a fairytale love story that based itself on how unexpressive men were about emotions. the implications of this study can be different from person to person. a big reason that this article is important is because it explores male and female dynamics. it gives women a better understanding on where men stand on ‘love’. the same goes for men; they get a better understanding on how women feel about ‘love’. women showed their emotions centered on having feelings for their partner, and men showed a different sort of emotion centered on working at intimacy. the article also gives a broader look into gender stereotypes. since the study left little room for non-disclosure, the participants were surrounded by their own gender stereotypes. the limitations that were obvious in the article are important to understand because it could give greater insight in future studies. one way the article prohibited itself from taking a more general point of view was that there was no racial diversity. some other factors need to be discussed as well. there were age barriers that the study missed because it was targeting mostly college students. another way the study could have been further explored would be to have taken these research questions out of britain and brought them to the united states. the group also felt that because people are sometimes shy, there could have been many things that the participants left out because they did not want to self-disclose too much information about themselves. both the original study and the replication showed how gender stereotypes are very much in existence today. however, these stereotypes are evolving and our civilization is slowly equalizing towards understanding each other better. both studies show how men and women have two very different perceptions of the opposite sex. as society evolves, research in both studies show that men and women are educating themselves more on the opposite sex so the postmodern man and women are taking relationships more seriously than they used to. the original study done by burns showed the “woman as emotional carer and man as rational worker” (burns, 2002, p. 169). this holds to be true in the replication study. this does not mean all women are housewives and all men are the breadwinners. this is the nature of different genders and the way they tend to act in romantic relationships. factual and fictional accounts of relationships will always occur. however, it is up to society and individuals to analyze information about the opposite sex to truly understand them and relate to where they are coming from: are they women in love or men at work? references black, k.n. (1997). surprise! perhaps men aren’t from mars and women from venus. journal of sex research, 34, 59-60. bradley, m. d. (1990) assessing two domains for communication romance: behavioral context and more interaction. communication research reports, 7, 9499. brown, j.d. (2002) mass media influences on sexuality. journal of sex research, 39, 42-46. burnett, j., & menon, a. (1993) sports marketing: a new ball game with new rules. journal of advertising research, 33, 21-35. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 68 burns, a. (2002) women in love and men at work. psychology, evolution, and gender,4,149-172. buss, d.m. (2003). sexual strategies: a journey into controversy. psychological inquiry,14, 219-226. buss, d.m. & haselton, m.g. (2001) the affective shift hypothesis: the functions of emotional changes following sexual intercourse. personal relationships, 8, 357-369. capraro, r.l. (2000) why college men drink: alcohol, adventure, and the paradox of masculinity. journal of american college health, 48, 307-316. costanzo, p.r., friedman, k.e., &musante, g.j. (1998) the comorbidity of depression and eating disregulation processes in a diet-seeking obese population: a matter of gender specificity. international journal of eating disorders, 23, 65-75. crawford, m. (1994) rethinking the romance: teaching the content and function of gender stereotypes in the psychology. teaching of psychology, 21,151. feldstein, g., missledine, w., parsons, j. t., punzalan, j.c. (2005) s/he loves me, s/he loves me not: questioning heterosexist assumptions of gender differences for romantic and sexually motivated behaviors. sexual addiction & compulsivity, 12, 65–74. freiberg. f. (1992) genre and gender in world war ii japanese feature film: ‘china night’ (1940). historical journal of film, radio, & television,12, 245. greenburg, g.s.(1999) cbq review essay. communication booknotes quarterly, 30, 78. harris, r.j. (2004) autobiographical memories for seeing romantic movies on a date: romance is not just for women. media psychology, 6, 257-284. helmuth, l. (2003). caudate-over-heels in love. science, 302, 1320. hubbard, r.c.(1985). relationship styles in popular romance novels, 1950 to 1983. communication quarterly, 33, 113-125. jones, n. (2004) bottom’s wife: gender and voice in hoffman’s dream. literature film quarterly, 32, 126-133. martin, e. (1991). the egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical malefemale… signs: journal of women in culture & society, 16, 485. peek, w.c. (2003). the romance of competence. journal of popular film & television, 30, 206. powers, s.p.(1993) transformation of gender roles in hollywood movies: 1946-1990. political communication, 10, 259-283. punyanunt-carter, n.m. (2006). love on television: reality perception differences between men and women. north american journal of psychology, 8, 269-276. educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 125 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 125-135, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper capacity building: a phenomenological study of the african women perceptions and experiences in the leadership training program jane wakahiu and diane keller jane wakahiu, ph.d. is the executive director of the african sisters education collaborative (asec) and project manager, sisters leadership development initiative (sldi) at marywood university, jwakahiu@marywood.edu diane keller, ph.d. is an associate professor and interim director school of social work, marywood university, keller@marywood.edu accepted december 23, 2010 the promotion of leadership skills among women leaders in developing nations is essential in order for change and progress to occur in these countries. in this phenomenological study, we examined the perceptions and experiences of nine women religious of africa who were engaged in a three-year leadership development initiative in three developing nations: kenya, uganda, and ghana. we described how, by subsequently practicing acquired leadership skills, these women brought about change in their educational, health care, social and pastoral ministries. data were collected using in-depth interviews, observation of the changes in the participants’ ministries, and field notes. the findings indicated that leadership development training enhanced participants’ capacity for effective service delivery and allowed for the expansion of their ministries, thus improving life for their people. participants engaged their communities constructively and positively transformed their projects. keywords: women in leadership, skills development, capacity building, transformation introduction much has been written about the need in sub-saharan africa (ssa) for quality leadership (maathai, 2006; masango, 2003; moss, 2007; obiakor, 2004, ugwegbu, 2001). for example, ubiquitous political upheavals (leonard & straus, 2003; moss, 2007) indicate the need for a systemic change through the development of high-quality leaders who will augment the productivity of organizations and enhance the quality of their performance. bell and morse (2003) asserted that quality leadership is vital to both the improvement of community participation in functional, consultative and interactive ways, and the propagation of a shared vision. moreover, quality leadership is a source of competitive advantage (mccall, 1998). accordingly, organizations invest in leadership development to improve human and social capital. given the fragile human situation in ssa, leadership development might be a viable strategy for advancing organizations and for augmenting investment opportunities. to borrow from mccauley (1998), leadership development refers to those activities which enhance leadership knowledge and skills within an individual or organization and which promote the transfer of these skills in order to maximize performance. although a multitude of studies focused on leadership models in core nations, far fewer are those studies indicating the necessity of good leadership and governance in the sub-saharan region (leonard & strauss, 2003; obiakor, 2004;) or the need to encourage women to assume leadership positions (kabila, 1993; sikazwe, 2006). in ssa, despite decades of cultural inhibitions that impeded leadership development in women, it is becoming increasingly necessary for women to be more visible and to take on decision-making positions. in order for women to assume leadership positions, it is imperative that they be enabled to build their leadership skills and self-confidence. salvaterra et al. (2009) found that gaining leadership skills enhanced women‟s self-confidence, improved their communication skills, and gave them the technological knowhow needed to manage their organizations (ministries) effectively. the women religious of africa operate ministries which respond to that continent‟s humanitarian crisis by providing housing, education, health care and social services to the elderly, orphans, hiv/aids patients, battered women and advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 126 abused girls, and refugees. the term, women religious, refers to women who have taken vows of chastity, poverty and obedience (canon law, 607-709) and who give their life to serve humanity. they belong to a religious institute established under catholic church law (canon law 607-709). they endeavor to attain a common purpose by responding generously to the needs of humanity. these women are also commonly known as catholic sisters or nuns. these women religious have been known to provide meaningful services to all by inculcating holistic development regardless of religious affiliation (masaku, 2007). despite their enormous contributions, there is little empirical research documenting the achievements of women religious in africa or of the challenges they face. however, a case is made here that providing skills development for women in the sub-saharan region might be a strategy for engendering change and development. this study examined the experiences of nine women from among the 340 african women religious enrolled in the innovative sisters leadership development initiative (sldi) program. the program is implemented in five sub-saharan nations: ghana, nigeria, kenya, uganda, and tanzania. the goal of the program is to provide leadership skills for women religious so that they can expand their ministries and address the sufferings of their people amicably. we argue that leadership development for these women might be an essential strategy to enable them to expand their ministries and deliver quality services to an increasingly needy population despite ever-fragile situations in the region. need for women in leadership in sub-saharan region studies have demonstrated that there are few women leaders or role models for women in the sub-saharan region (maathai, 2006; sikazwe, 2006). moreover, sub-saharan cultures have historically excluded women from leadership positions and confined the work of women to the home environment. researchers have suggested that excluding women‟s input by holding back their involvement in education, leadership, and financial and social progress has a negative impact on development and society at large (bauer & brinton, 2006; chisholm, 2001; kevane, 2004; lucas, 2001; mutindi, 2001). the result of such exclusion is that women become dependants rather than active co-producers, which deals a loss to the economy. accordingly, encouraging women to take on leadership positions in corporate and not-for-profit organizations is beneficial not only to the women themselves but also to the entire society, since shared leadership roles may bring new perspectives. in a study conducted with rural women in zambia, sikazwe (2006) established that there is a need for leadership development for women in order that they might overcome cultural hindrances and assume leadership positions in their communities. sub-saharan cultures have played a significant role in inhibiting progress for women by propagating rigid views of women‟s place in society. kevane (2004) asserted that women were required to focus their energy on the private and personal sphere as mothers of the home and family, while males were occupied in the public world of commerce, politics, and civil administration. such inhibition prevented females from pursuing their ideas and thwarted the self-confidence required to take on leadership roles in corporate and public spheres. to this day, the role of gender ordering prevails in ssa. the majority of sub-saharan african women continue to face both internal and external barriers. internal barriers result from the effects of cultural socialization and societal stereotypes, while external barriers include social constructs that block the majority of women from taking leadership positions (chisholm, 2001; marshall, 1997). for example, research by entounga (2000) demonstrated that women have experienced social disadvantages and reduced access to the self-development opportunities essential for full participation in community development. in a study examining the global factors affecting women‟s participation in leadership, bullogh (2008) established that factors affecting women in countries with few women leaders are different from the factors affecting women in countries that have more women leaders. in ssa, there are very few female role models in political and corporate leadership. therefore, enabling women in leadership positions to become more visible in their leadership styles and more effective in their service delivery might encourage more women to pursue the path to leadership. for women to participate in leadership, increasing their enrollment in education and enabling them by providing leadership development programs are both vital. analysis of literature on women in ssa suggests that there is a need for increased female enrollment in schools and skills-based training for women, both of which augment leadership skills—a viable channel for engaging and strengthening women‟s leadership roles, community participation and socioeconomic progress (lucas, 2003; robinson-pant, 2004; robinson-pant, 2004; tripp, 2004). given the opportunity for self-development, subsaharan women have the potential to plan projects, obtain resources, manage finances, and improve life for their people and society. for example, a study conducted to assess the viability and success of microcredit programs for women in africa, kevane (2004) found that women who engaged in these programs steadily improved their lives and the lives of their families, and had the potential for future success and social and economic returns. in addition, their bargaining powers improved because of their ability to access credit and invest in a variety of projects. however, because these women had inadequate leadership and management skills, some women made poor investment decisions. they could not predict market situations. as a result, they lost their investments, which made it difficult for them to repay their microcredit loans. in search of their own economic empowerment, sub-saharan women initiate and manage small self-help associations and advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 127 take on income-generating projects in order to improve their economic base (maathai, 2006; 2009; masango, 2003; miguel, 2005; mutindi, 2001). these self-help associations facilitate the creation of “rotating savings” to improve women‟s bargaining positions, strengthen community and civic participation, and enhance social connection (mbugua-muriithi, 1997, p. 38). rotating savings refers to the monies contributed by women to an account from which members may borrow to undertake a particular business enterprise and repay the loans with minimal credit (kevane, 2003). through such borrowing initiatives, women engage in viable projects such as buying property, building water reservoirs, investing in agriculture, and the creation of small businesses. over time, association members build a social niche in which they network and support each other. although most initiatives report considerable success (kevane, 2004), some projects fail to yield the desired benefits because of poor entrepreneurial skills. therefore, incorporating a broader vision for long-term investment, quality leadership and management training and accountability might augment best practices, thus ensuring grassroots and organizational development to spur change in the sub-saharan region. role of women religious and need for leadership skills much literature documents the work of women religious in the west (conway, 2004; draigler, 2000; melia, 2000; schier & russett, 2002). for example, researchers have explored recent historical and social development literature on women religious in the united states and canada (coburn & smith, 1999; conway, 2004; smyth, 2004) and noted the role of these women in advocacy in social justice, in elementary and higher education, in the healthcare system, and in social and pastoral services. women religious in europe and north america have been praised for their successful and altruistic endeavors to establish and run schools, colleges, hospitals, social service agencies, and institutions promoting community development. the work of tracy schier and cynthia russett (2002) assembled ten essays that discuss the challenges and other relevant elements of catholic women‟s colleges in the united states, which were primarily established and managed by women religious. similarly, the work of draigler (2000) provided an inventive survey of the challenges and achievements of women religious. taking into consideration their commitment to education in a time when educating women was taboo, conway (2000) descriptively analyzeed the phenomenon whereby “women religious orders founded women‟s colleges that became intellectual centers within which the question of knowledge and faith had to be reconciled” (p. 13). indeed, women religious broke many barriers, and so encouraged women‟s self-development in the church and in society. unlike the women religious in the west, little has been studied about the women religious in the sub-saharan region despite their contributions to poverty eradication and the significant services they provide to deprived populations. therefore, the narratives provided by studies from the west are an inspiration to women religious of other continents, who are prompted to share their own stories of success and of the challenges they face in establishing their place in society and steering their development agendas. the courage of women religious in europe and the united states encourages women religious of africa to become ambassadors of hope and development to their people in the sub-sahara region. they too have a story— one that is still in the making and so not yet fully told. we argue that providing a planned leadership development resource might be a strategy to increase abilities and offer new perspectives for these women as they work to expand their ministries and render meaningful services that meet the everincreasing needs in the sub-saharan region. purpose of the study the purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the perception and experiences of nine women religious participants of the sisters leadership development initiative (sldi) program. in addition, we examined the impact of the leadership training program on the women participants and how the participants transferred the knowledge and skills into their workplace to transform their ministries in ghana, kenya and uganda by applying the skills they learned. description of the program the program is the sisters leadership development initiative (sldi), which was inaugurated in 2007. a grant award from the conrad hilton foundation to the african sisters education collaborative (asec) enabled the creation of the sldi program. the overarching goal of the program was to provide comprehensive leadership training to women religious of africa in order to assist them in developing projects in their ministries that would contribute to the economic and social growth of the people they served. at the onset, seven program objectives were outlined. curriculum was developed that would facilitate the participants‟ ability to (a) transfer the skills and knowledge needed for effective project and financial management, (b) develop creative and effective leadership skills, (c) identify and mobilize resources, (d) expand their knowledge of development issues that impact the socio-economic and political life of individuals and communities, (e) enhance their human relationship skills, (f) develop and implement strategic plans, and (g) develop plans to ensure sustainability of the participants‟ ministries (sldi program, handbook, 2007). to attain these goals, five training sites, one in each country, were selected. a total of 340 women religious from 109 religious institutes in five countries, namely, ghana, nigeria, kenya, uganda, and tanzania, were enrolled. these participants enrolled in one of three tracks: administration, project direction, or financial management. most of these women had been trained in their area of specialty as nurses, teachers, social workers, and pastoral workers but had no leadership or managerial training. because of the demands in their ministries, these women were required to perform advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 128 additional leadership roles that often fell well beyond the scope of their professional training. the participants converged at the training site in each country for five two-week training workshops over a three-year period. the instructors were from the united states and africa. at the end of each training session, participants developed an action plan based on the skills they had learned in that session and how they were to practice or implement these skills. they were instructed to implement the action plan they had developed during the training session. upon returning for the next training session, the participants were to report their experiences, including the successes and difficulties they encountered in practicing and implementing the action plan. the instructors were to provide guidance and feedback on the strategies to improve implementation. in order to establish viable strategies,, the trainees were also required to mentor and/or train at least three people in their ministries, and report their progress to instructors. overall, the program aimed to enhance the creative and critical problem-solving skills of the women religious, so that they could promote meaningful productivity and performance in their ministries, where they would also integrate acquired knowledge and transfer acquired skills. the program followed a model of “theory-practice-theory”, whereby participants attended a two-week session and then practiced and/or implemented their gained skills within their ministries. theoretical framework both the sldi program and this study are framed by the transformational leadership model theorized by bass (1985). this model facilitates change through implementation of new ideas. the focal point of the theory is raising the individual‟s consciousness by inspiring, motivating and enabling the stakeholders (bass, 1985; pounder, 2008). a transformational leader encourages change through critical reflection, having a clear vision, communicating the vision, building the relationship, establishing a supportive culture, leading by example, and promoting goals implementation; under such leadership stakeholders are invited to identify and achieve higher-level needs and goals, and transformation may occur as a result. a transformational leader empowers the stakeholder to exceed their previous accomplishments (bass & avolio, 1990). following a transformational leadership model, the sldi training program works to increase the leadership abilities of women religious. as a result, the knowledge and skills these women acquire raises their consciousness to achieve higher level goals in their ministries and communities not only through practice of new skills but also through the training and mentoring of colleagues. in this way these women religious spur development and growth in their ministries, where they are also encouraged to inspire, motivate, and enable, and to collaboratively bring about change. research setting and methodology in this research study, we utilized a qualitative, phenomenological approach. the phenomenological approach is embodied in social and cultural experiences. it enables researchers to describe the meaning of the lived experiences of several individuals as they pertain to a concept, practice, or occurrence (creswell, 2007; giorgio, 1992; van der mescht, 2004). in this research, the approach provides the basis for describing the perceptions and experiences of the women religious—“what it is like for the participants” to be in a leadership program and to practice the skills gained in their ministries. we used a phenomenological approach to navigate the data collected from the nine trainees by describing the participants‟ perceptions and the experience and the meaning they attach to those experiences. then, by observing how the participants practiced and implemented the skills in their ministries, we made a determination on the impact of the leadership program. the prototype leadership training program is described as a phenomenon because it is not mundane for the participants. studying the participants‟ perceptions and experiences in the program provides relevant information on how they adopted and practiced the new skills to manage their ministries. perhaps the leadership approach can be used to enable women in africa to develop their abilities so that they may participate fully in community development. we designed an instrument to determine the participants‟ perceptions and experiences in the leadership program. in april-may 2008, we conducted a pilot study consisting of five women religious. the purpose was to ascertain that the language used in the interview questions was clear and understandable to trainee participants. the pilot study provided relevant information to revise the interview questions. the following questions were used in the interview process: (a) “can you describe clearly and concretely a significant experience in a training program when you felt you had received enriching input that may have changed your ability?”; (b) “what were the most useful skills that you gained in the leadership program?”; (c) “giving examples, can you explain how you used or practiced or transferred the skills to your ministry?”; (d) “how would you describe the leadership program in relation to the skills you gained?”; and (e) “what are the difficulties/challenges you may have experienced in learning and in practicing the skills?”. the interview questions helped the participants to reflect on the experience, knowledge, and skills that they gained in the program and how these translated into their work and ministries. interview questions were designed to elicit meaningful and significant stories of the participants‟ perceptions and experiences. the data collection process took place over a period of three months, from june to august, in 2008. on-site visits, face-to-face interviews, and observations were the methods of data collection. interviews lasted for 45 minutes to 1 hour and were audio recorded. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 129 participant sampling the study is composed of nine self-selected sldi participants from three training sites in kenya, uganda, and ghana. we visited the program sites from june through august of 2008 to recruit the participants. the criteria for selection included enrollment in the sldi training program and completion of two program sessions—at that time, the program was in its second year of implementation. to recruit participants, we described the research objectives to all the participants and requested volunteers. because the number of volunteers exceeded the three participants needed for interview from each site, random numbers were drawn from a container and the first three were picked. the nine volunteers were provided with an informed consent letter describing the purpose of the study as well as its potential benefits and risks. in addition, they were informed that the interview could be discontinued at their request without penalty. next, the interviewee and the researcher identified an appropriate time and location for an interview; each interview session lasted for about one hour. the true names of the nine participants are withheld to protect their anonymity. participants‟ statements on their perceptions and experiences were aligned and transformed into clusters through a process of phenomenological reduction (creswell, 2007, moustakas, 1994). meanings were formulated from the phrases and statements by reading and re-reading the transcripts, and were aligned to develop themes (creswell, 2007). the meanings were derived after reflection and interpretation of the participants‟ perceptions, experiences, and changes that resulted in their ministries. findings prior to data analysis, we read through the data transcript in its entirety, making marginal notes as if “conversing with the data” (merriam, 1998, p.179). data was then chunked into meaningful sections and labeled to correspond to the research questions. then a description of each piece of data relative to a particular question was read in its entirety, themes were identified, and codes were developed accordingly. finally, using the data transcripts and themes developed, 110 important statements were extracted from the interview scripts. the phrases articulated the participants‟ perceptions on the usefulness of the program, the skills they acquired, and the changes that resulted in their ministries. the finding of the demographic inventory collected from the participants included age, leadership position, job position, and education level. the general interview included the following questions, refined from versions used in the pilot study: (a) “can you describe clearly and concretely a significant experience in the training program when you felt you had received enriching input that may have changed your ability?”; (b) “what were the most useful skills that you gained in the leadership program?”; (c) “giving examples, can you explain how you used or practiced or transferred the skills to your ministry?”; (d) “how would you describe the leadership program in relation to the skills you gained?”; and (e) “what are the difficulties/challenges you may have experienced in learning and in practicing the skills?”. demographic information the nine women religious interviewed had attended at least three sessions in the leadership program, and their average age was 42 years. all of them were in active ministry, either as a project manager, bursar, teacher, nurse, accountant, social worker or pastoral worker. they had varying levels of education, ranging from college diploma to some college to high school diploma. their professional occupations are tabulated in table 1. overall, two major themes emerged from the significant statements that were extracted from the interviews: capacity building and leadership development that results in community transformation. these themes are described with supporting statements from the interview transcripts. capacity building when the interviewees were asked to describe the most useful skills they gained, the descriptions they provided indicated an enthusiasm for their participation in the leadership program, specifically because the content and skills learned were relevant to their ministries. they drew attention to the pertinent skills they had developed, such as the capability to identify needs or problems in their ministries and to design projects that directly addressed these needs. ninety-five percent of the interviewees agreed that they had developed intellectual, interpersonal and communication skills, all central to effective team building. when asked about the useful skills they had gained, a participant said the following: i used to be very shy, during the group discussion, after learning about communication skill, i was able to present our group views to the class, and my colleagues listened to my point of view… i can now effectively conduct a group meeting without much fear. another expressed the following: i feel confident and competent to apply financial skills in my accounting work; i am competent in areas such as capital budgeting, bank reconciliation, use of petty cash vouchers, and computer for accounting work…i did not learn these skills in my previous training. there was a general feeling that the program enabled participants to develop the capacity to implement skills and to engage communities to participate, which was significant in practice and in obtaining the desired changes. a general sense of self-confidence prevailed among the participants, which was demonstrated by a common feeling of competency and a high level of leadership abilities development. when asked how they practiced or transferred the skills they had learned in their ministries, participants were eager to talk advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 130 about their experiences. they reported that the leadership training had a practical approach that enabled them to implement the skills as soon as they learned them, unlike the college experience, where they learned skills but had to wait until they had gained employment before they could use them. in ghana, a participant explained her experience the following way: i was trained as a teacher but not as an administrator or a fundraiser…the skills i have gained in the leadership program have helped me to improve on my administrative skills … the course is so practical…i had never developed an action plan or [one] that connected the skills i learnt and the issues i was to address in my work …this is a very different approach from what i learned in college. such an expression provides evidence that the training simultaneously interwove theoretical and practical application of the knowledge and skills that resonated with participants‟ ministerial needs and experience. the participants who were not in leadership positions in their workplaces explained that they had experienced some resistance in implementing the new skills. they said that it was not easy to influence their colleagues who had not attended the training. however, after the colleagues were mentored in the new skills, they appreciated and were eager to apply the skills in their ministry. mentoring was required; each participant was to mentor at least three people in their workplaces. the findings reveal that mentorship was very successful because almost all of the participants had either mentored or conducted a workshop to educate their colleagues or community members. by each of the nine interviewees meeting the minimum mentoring requirement, a total of 27 people would have been mentored; however, five of the interviewees mentored seven people, so that in fact the total number of people mentored was 44. in addition, the interviewees conducted seminars for over 270 employees, coworkers, and community members as part of their capacity building strategies. capacity building in their communities and ministries was clearly evident through mentorship and training. one ugandan participant, who was a social worker and project manager, enthusiastically described her mentoring experience the following way: i was eager to teach the staff and my colleagues…we arranged for a community workshop and 36 people participated…we are implementing the skills in schools, and in the health care centers and our community…i taught about communication and interpersonal skills, group dynamics, delegating responsibilities, developing memos and taking minutes in a meeting…these skills are important for a strong organization. participants described a level of transformation in their leadership styles and abilities. they provided concrete examples of the practical change that had resulted after being in the program. a kenyan participant who is in charge of a street family development program said the following: …without this course i would not have known how to write a successful grant proposal…there are quite a few changes i have made in my work, all because of the skills i have gained in this course…i wrote a grant to a local bank to expand the school…i was so happy when i was informed by the bank officials that my grant proposal was successful among a hundred applicants …i have used the funds to build two classrooms. and in ghana, a participant emphasized how the program had enabled her to bring change in the life of the local women‟s development program: i have helped to transform life for poor women and their families…they can grow fruits, vegetables and do better farming, [and] i owe it all to this training…i learned how to communicate with the community and conduct meetings to encourage them to do farming... i taught them better farming methods, crops that can yield…i will never be the same…i can see the fruit of my work. there were powerful and profound statements that indicated a level of personal growth, confidence, and change, as well as the development of critical thinking skills and the application of acquired skills within individual ministries. leadership for community transformation when asked to describe the leadership program in relation to the skills they had gained, participants said that the skills acquired in the training program reinvigorated their ministries. in kenya, josephine affirmatively expressed that “the training has created a difference in my life, it has made me to think differently and develop new perceptions…i now involve the staff and teachers in planning and carrying out the plans…[and] work has become a lot easier.” this is an indication of a level of openness with staff and also of the ability to trust and delegate responsibilities that is essential to teambuilding and collaboration in order to achieve development initiatives. a participant in uganda asserted, “the course has strengthened my leadership capability… [and] it has been a journey for growth”; another participant in ghana elaborated, “i have never had any computer skills…i am excited on how computers make work easy and one can accomplish so much in little time…i now use excel spreadsheet to do accounts and produce reports.” the data analysis shows that participants developed essential skills comprising the ability to communicate effectively with clarity and precision, the ability to listen, and the ability to work in teams with self-confidence—which enabled them to discover their innate potential. these skills afforded an expansion of the circle of individual persuasion and participation that is essential for collaboration and organizational progress. the program was also an opportunity advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 131 for professional development and an opportunity to use a computer. the skills gained were not of sole benefit to the individual but also promoted community engagement initiatives—a phenomenon facilitated by the african concept of collectiveness, whereby an individual has no identity separate from the community. in african cultures this concept is an integral part of daily life, and positively influences the way people interpret their environment and their society. for example, upon gaining skills, the participants quickly mentored their colleagues and conducted workshops in order to empower and enable the entire community for effective change. a participant described her approach the following way: i mentored eight employees…i found mentoring as an opportunity for self-discovery, i reflected on the skills i gained and how to utilize them in my ministry as a teacher, to promote cohesive relationship with the employees…this has helped to stimulate change in the school. another participant in uganda observed the following: i have trained 40 employees from the school and health care facility on managerial skills, teambuilding, facilitation, [and] planning…this has contributed to positive outcomes evident in collaborative teamwork in [the] school and health care facility. and in kenya, a participant said, “i have trained 18 community members in conflict management, communication and teambuilding…they are so eager to learn more and practice the new skills”. in ghana, a participant emphasized: i am able to mobilize local women‟s groups effectively… i have been able to begin a palm oil processing plant to help local women improve their lifestyle by making palm oil for cooking and soap for domestic use… these women are capable of earning a wage to support themselves and their families. incredible transformation in the participants‟ ministries has been credited to the leadership program. there has been an increased level of awareness, innovation and creativity in women that has positively affected their communities and ministries through enhancing development. the majority of the participants were encouraged by the amount of information they gathered and learnt from each other. as one expressed, “the course has helped us to realize that we are all struggling to address the challenges of our people… this is a great encouragement because i realized that we need to come together often to discuss on ways to improve our ministries.” the participants developed a level of collaboration in searching for solutions to the problems in their ministries and for ways to help their people. seeking ways to provide better services, they looked forward to engaging in collaborative efforts even after leaving the training site and returning to their ministries. analysis of the data on participants‟ experiences and skillsimplementation shows that the session‟s content and curriculum were relevant to their ministerial needs, as evidenced by their ability to recognize challenges and solutions. participants were able to integrate what they learned into their real life experiences—namely, the services they administered to the people. interaction with the participants, and observation of the way they practiced acquired skills in their ministries to expand their projects, engage in constructive decisions, and hold training seminars and workshops, revealed that the leadership training had provided an avenue for change and progress to the ministries. discussion analysis of the participants‟ perceptions and experiences in the leadership training program shows the program‟s impact in participants‟ performance and the ensuing change in their ministries. difficulties in securing sources of funding for projects were reported, as were difficulties in training colleagues due to their demanding schedules. however, the trainees remained connected, and worked in teams even after returning to their ministries. this helped them to discuss and solve most of their challenges. the findings suggest that women religious and, in general, all ssa women are in critical need of leadership skills with which they might facilitate change in their communities and ministries. adopting the diffusion of innovation theory (roger, 1992) might provide a viable approach to the transfer of leadership. this theory identifies five stages, which include attaining the knowledge, persuasion, deciding to transmit the skills, implementation and confirmation. clearly, these stages were evident in the sldi leadership program; participants obtained the skills, and then taught and mentored others while at the same time practicing the skills and making informed decisions. as a result, there was change both in their leadership styles and in their ministries. the findings suggest that investing in leadership training can promote a significant level of social and economic transformation in africa, because the skills attained enabled the participants to generate programs that address the needs of their people. although there are a variety of methods that can be used to bring about development, leadership training has proved to be a key variable in the transformation of mental models, the elevation of individual consciousness, the increase of self-efficacy, and the generation of confidence in tackling problems and widening problem-solving vision (edoho, 2001: gilley, 2005). researchers have asserted that quality leadership development and practice is essential for sound progress in africa (chisholm, 2001; maathai, 2006) as such, enabling women who are managers in healthcare facilities, schools, and social ministries might be a significant factor in the expansion of their ministries and in their ability to offer quality services. social learning theorists (bandura, 1986; harrington, 2005) suggested that people make meaning in their lives through questioning the occurrences around them; then, individuals advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 132 organize those meanings in their experiences—through human interaction (bell, 2008). thus the leadership development training provided an opportunity for women religious to learn, and then to assign meaning to their learning by connecting it to their own lives and experiences. the results may have included self-discovery and a questioning of the underlying reasons for their continued underrepresentation in corporate, political, and community leadership. new perspectives and self-confidence as leaders emerged where participants made huge steps in fundraising, grant-writing, networking, and in enabling lifechanging events for other women in their communities. leadership development seemed to increase the ability of these women to be advocates, disseminate information, and encourage others to assume leadership roles in the community. through the retelling of their experiences, they explained how they carved out their own career paths, in the hope that others would follow these pathways. although the women religious who participated have leadership opportunities in their ministries that are mostly geared towards poverty eradication, the leadership training provided them with an opportunity to develop new perspectives, which in turn allowed them to question best practices in order to transform and develop the projects they manage. as a result, changes took place in their work; participants developed new perspectives which enabled them to shift their thinking, and so engage in better leadership styles and better community organization. the skills they developed were essential to the strengthening of requisite relationships in their communities, and to the increase of awareness, high level teamwork, and collaboration. these skills were also necessary for the initiation of creative development projects, such as establishing palm oil production, purchasing desks for schools, securing library funds, building classrooms, and managing rotating credit investments. leadership training plays a definite pivotal role in societal and ministerial transformation, and enables reforms that shape people‟s lives through increased productivity and community participation (merriam & ntseane, 2000). participants demonstrated increased levels of courage and creativity, showed negotiation skills, and became action-centered to initiate and drive change. they affirmed through their testimonies that the leadership training helped them to realign their work, and to involve the stakeholders in strategic planning. as one participant reported, “the course is a huge eye opener to me on the issues of financial management…i am able to use the computer to generate reports...i can claim to have computer skills, that have broadened my understanding, and increased confidence and competence in financial management.” an increase in the level of expertise led to adaptation of new and better strategies to plan and store financial information. the pertinent change evident in the participants‟ conception and implementation of skills suggested that leadership training is a tool that can facilitate change in africa. mezirow (2000) asserted that people bring about change through making meaning out of their experiences and allowing their frames of reference to undergo transformation. when viewed through the lens afforded by the transformational leadership model (bass, 1985), it is evident that huge changes occurred in the participants‟ ministries within a short period of time. participants explained that at first some of their colleagues were not enthusiastic about the new knowledge, skills, and behaviors. eventually, after they themselves were trained and mentored, these stakeholders responded positively in support of the new initiatives; collectively, they worked together and quality outputs were reported. for example, outcomes included successful grant writing and grant implementation, the construction of new classrooms, the purchase of school equipment and computers, the creation of self-reliance projects, and the mobilization of women‟s groups for social support and income-generating initiatives. personal internal leadership changes could not be quantified; in the words of one participant, “the course has helped me to become a good leader and listener…internet skills have helped me to be connected with other people through opening [an] email account…actually communication has become easier and faster…also this has improved my preparation of reports, organizational and administrative skills…the course has changed my community.” providing leadership training can be a way to support aspiring women leaders in sub-sahara africa by instilling confidence and a inspiring strategies for the removal of barriers they face (chisholm, 2000; salvatera et al, 2009). the leadership training encouraged the women religious to follow best practices, and increased both their awareness of socio-cultural barriers and their relevant skills—which they then utilized to unearth obstacles hindering progress in their ministries. over 90% of the trainees reported engaging in a variety of development activities, such as (a) creating jobs, (b) educating the community, (c) mentoring staff, and (d) using technology to improve the quality of their work. bernadette, a participant, expressed that “the course has helped us to transform our communities…we are more resourceful and aware of more ways to mobilize and use resources…we have created jobs for poor women through production of palm oil.” leadership training promoted capacity building. capacity building refers to actions that lead to an increase in the collective power of a group to improve economically, socially, educationally, culturally, and politically (hudson, 2005). it also describes the ability of a community to help individuals address and alleviate their economic challenges by strengthening community initiatives (felkins, 2002; mezirow, 2000), such as self-reliance programs, economic sustainability programs, and poverty eradication initiatives. an increase in knowledge and skills raised the level of consciousness of the participant and stimulated her intellect to become more creative in nurturing social and economic change. participants embarked on activities to build a multifaceted organizational capacity and to advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 133 increase effectiveness through networking. kibbe et al. (2004) suggested that partnership and networking in the community are essential; in order to provide effective services to the poor, leaders must engage and collaborate with them in development projects. this encourages them to take responsibility for making vital decisions in the initiative. building the skills of women religious has increased their capacity to network and to tackle the problems that plague their communities (fewick, 2001; harrington, 2005). for example, one participant identified a significant accomplishment that elated her spirit: she wrote a successful grant proposal and was awarded $3,500 to construct classrooms for street families. overall, leadership training is an investment. the changes induced in participants‟ ministries indicate that leadership training is a vital gift to women in sub-saharan africa which enables them to stimulate change. on-thejob training is a viable way to develop creative and critical problem-solving skills that are applicable to their situations; it is also a strategy to transform their socio-economic base, since participants come to understand the barriers that have prevented their progress. obviously, africa‟s strength lies in the social networks which are invisible to people unfamiliar with the culture (commission for africa report, 2005). studies have linked transformation leadership with innovation, creativity, (hinkin, 1999), identity, motivation and courage, (marques, 2007), change and generating ideas (sosik, 1997). transformational leadership is positively linked to participants‟ learning goal orientation, suggesting that individuals have intrinsic interest in their work (hinkin, 1999). it enhances leadership effectiveness through individual growth and change (bass, 1985; burns, 1978), which is the result of motivating and enabling colleagues. leadership skills change an individual to a „new self‟ (quinn, 1996). also, transformational leadership is highly correlated to the concept of transformative learning (kristskaya & dirkx, 2000). mezirow (2000) observes that upon gaining leadership skills, new viewpoints emerge as individuals question their previous understanding and sensemaking habits and alter their existing ideas to follow a new course. although cultural, socio-economic, and political transformation is an arduous process that cannot be achieved in one day, women religious are gradually constructing the schema to drive desired change through insight and skills development. as transformational leaders, women could now foster intellectual curiosity, facilitate creativity, and stimulate progress in their ministries and communities. they have embarked on a vibrant transformation process that is gradually yielding sustainable effects. the impact of transformational leadership theory, which was pertinent in the training model, is now practiced in the participants‟ skills utilization. indeed, participants have implemented relevant strategies that operate to improve their vision in order to achieve progress. however, they need support and encouragement to persist as agents of change. the road to development is the creation of a compelling vision of change relevant to a given situation (fairbanks, 2000; mitchell &sackney, 2001). these women have marked out their path by adopting an action model to help implement desirable skills so that they can meet the needs of the people they serve. significance and implications of the study clearly, positive change was reported by the participants in their communities and their ministries as a result of participating in the leadership program. the program provided a new approach to management issues and increased the viability of human capital through an enabling innovation. as a result, the trainees have acquired technical competence, increased ability to plan and perform administrative jobs in their professions, and an integrative propensity to shape and integrate theory into practice. obviously, there is need for more studies to ascertain the effects of leadership development on women in africa. the current research focused on a single leadership program; the findings indicated a need for more leadership training. follow-up studies on various programs might provide relevant data on ways to engage women of africa and unearth the challenges they face as leaders in their ministries. this phenomenological study must be understood in the context of the leadership training as perceived and experienced by the participants, and as reflected in the skills they subsequently practiced. the skills deemed important were those that they applied within their ministerial context. different perspectives may emerge if the staff and the community served by the participants are interviewed. future phenomenological studies might examine the perception and experiences of the stakeholders, staff, and community, and might consider how they internalized the changes brought about in their ministries by the participants of the leadership training. researchers agree that leadership training instills fresh ideas and a greater sense of agency (debebe, 2009; hill, 2003;), both of which are required in order to spur change in sub-saharan women. in her research on transformational learning among women leaders, debebe (2009) established that leadership training enhances the insights that lead to real change in the leadership styles and practices of women. this research has added an awareness that grassroots leadership training has meaningful benefits, since favorable outcomes trickle down to the community much sooner than they do with national programs, where leadership is concentrated at a higher level with little or no input from rural communities. also, personal benefits were highlighted, and can be summarized as self-awareness and change of perspective; both of these benefits enabled participants to carry their responsibilities in a new direction. the findings agree with mezirow‟s (2000) notion of transformative adult learning, which creates a shift in understanding and behavior in order to filter leadership experiences. although individuals may have changed their perspectives, the ministries and environments of participants advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 134 have not changed. this situation could create difficulties in the implementation of the new skills. for ease in adaptation, future leadership planners may need to consider and integrate strategies that would enable the participants to design knowledge and skills dissemination workshops and learning activities at home in their ministries. the results presented in this paper were drawn from the nine participants‟ perceptions, experiences, and demonstrated transfer and performance of skills midway through a three-year program. to confirm extended findings and objective measurements of these data after participants‟ completion of the program might provide more relevant outcomes. references bandura, a. 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(2001). women‟s movement and challenges to neopatrimonial rule: preliminary observations from africa. development and change, 21, 33-54. ugwuegbu, d. c. e. (2001). the psychology of management in african organizations. westport, ct: quorum books. van der mescht, h. (2004). phenomenology in education: a case study in educational leadership. indo-pacific journal of phenomenology 4(1), 1-16. advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership barriers to upward mobility in internationalschools for women administrators barbara t. berman, ph.d. berman, spring, 1999 in order to cultivate the qualitites of effective leadership, women administrators must be challenged to behave in ways beyond the bounds of the conventions of academia when women are obtaining degrees and certification in educational administration, and when women are working in the international school setting, where they do not traditionally have the same opportunities and levels of decision-making that men do. throughout history women have been discriminated against in the field of education as well as in other sectors of society (marshall & kasten, 1994). the discrimination against women in education has been coupled with constant reform movements during the past 30 years. educational administration is in the midst of exciting challenges, with new models for leadership and new policies supporting the inclusion of teachers in decision making (murray & simmons, 1994). women have historically had the fewest employment opportunities in the area of k-12 educational administration (restine, 1993). purpose the purpose for conducting this study was to examine the barriers to upward mobility faced by female administrators working in american and international overseas schools and how these women perceived selected barriers. the sample consisted of 67 women employed in administrative positions in international schools in latin america, africa, asia, the middle east, and europe. included in the sample were women administrators in attendance at the 1997 annual association for the advancement of international educators conference in atlanta, georgia. these administrators typically held the title of principal, director, or superintendent. the framework utilized included replication of an earlier study of female administrators in alabama (crutcher, 1992). statement of research questions the study set out to answer four research questions. these included the following: 1. what barriers to upward mobility do female administrators perceive in american and international overseas schools? 2. are there significant differences in the perceived barriers identified by female administrators in http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html american and international overseas schools based on geographic location? 3. what are the perceived differences in mobility patterns for female administrators based on institutional and demographic variables (career progression and method of promotion, job title, gender of supervisor, and length of tenure)? 4. what are considered to be the most urgent professional development and training needs for female administrators working in american and international overseas schools? significance of the study the need to increase the awareness of barriers which contribute to the low incidence of women administrators is vital in achieving gender equity in administrative positions in american and international overseas schools. as regan and brooks (1995) asserted, women's experience as school leaders has value, and the knowledge constructed from this experience should be disseminated to men and women alike. the current study attempted to provide the following: 1. important information that could be used to develop and plan in-service training in the personnel recruitment and selection of american and international overseas school administrators. 2. gender values which would enable women to overcome barriers and help dismantle barriers that presently exist. 3. a framework for scholars studying gender disparity in educational administration. margaret mead believed that the ideal culture is one in which there is a place for every human gift. by mead's standards, the contemporary culture is far from ideal for women, as many gifts are unused and unappreciated (pipher, 1994). the french author stendahl wrote, "all geniuses born women are lost to the public good" (cited in pipher, p. 22). many women who aspire to be educational administrators are lost to the public good due to the barriers that they encounter (gilligan, 1993); the intent of this study was to examine some of those barriers. theoretical / conceptual framework of the study macgregor and touchton (1995) discussed the identification of gender differences with respect to the language used to describe power structures in educational settings. in addition to power perspectives, findings from previous studies have included gender viewpoints on empowerment, accountability, responsibility and resources (acker-hocevar, touchton, & zenz, 1995). brunner (1993), in her study of highly successful superintendents, concluded that females who wish to access power circuits needed to be culturally bilingual, i.e. they needed to "speak the language of those in the male circuits of power while remaining feminine" (p. 198). thus, certain barriers exist which prevent female administrators from having access to upward mobility. brief review of the literature gender issues an issue of continued interest and concern for those who work in educational administration is that of the dearth of women employed in leadership positions in educational settings (bagenstos, 1987; edson, 1988; hallinger & murphy, 1991; luebkemann & clemens, 1994; marietti & stout, 1994; mertz & mcneely, 1990; mitchell, 1993; montenegro, 1993; north, 1991; pavan, 1989; shakeshaft, 1989; wesson & grady, 1994). there is a need for well-qualified women candidates who are ready and willing to pursue administrative opportunities in the educational arena at all levels (schmitt, 1995). as educational institutions make efforts to address this need, questions arise, such as the identification of elements which comprise preparation programs for prospective female administrators. during the first century and a half of the history of the u.s., little attention was given to the education of women either in theory or in practice (woody, 1966). although teaching was identified in the 20th century as a female profession, teachers have not always been women. records have indicated that in the late 18th century, all teaching was done by men (shakeshaft, 1989). the percentage of school superintendents who are women has been gradually increasing, because of affirmative action efforts including the passage of title ix in 1972 and the glass ceiling act of the civil rights act of 1991 (pavan et al, 1996). nevertheless, graduate degree attainment by women does not necessarily guarantee proportionate representation in administrative positions in education. by 1990 women earned 59% of the master's degrees and 51% of the doctoral degrees in educational administration (snyder, 1993). national data compiled by glass (1992) illustrated that 6.4% of the public school system superintendents nationwide were women. the lack of female school administrators cannot be blamed on women's unwillingness to get the needed credentials or to make extensive job search efforts (pavan, 1988; 1989). according to schuster (1993), the lives of women have been affected significantly by gender role socialization and gender discrimination. her studies revealed that a consciousness of the struggle for gender equity has shaped the expectations and influenced the well-being of educated american women. schuster's studies suggested that even young women still feel somewhat limited in their choices and perhaps even disenfranchised by a society that does not provide structures for women to comfortably sustain multiple career and family roles during early adult years. openness and willingness for self-examination, and a lifelong commitment toward personal mastery are critical for anyone who takes up the challenge of being an educational administrator (carrow-moffett, 1993). with the advent of any change, individuals are required to learn something new and "unlearn" something old; it is the unlearning process that is at the root of most resistance to change (schein, 1969). to become effective educational administrators, educators must first challenge themselves to explore and develop their awareness of the barriers and enhancers that they bring to the educational process (carrowmoffett, 1993). international schools and international education the total number of american and international schools worldwide is 557 (international schools services, 1995). the history of "international schools" and of "international education" is in each case a relatively recent one in formal terms, with the last 50 years having seen particularly rapid developments resulting in substantial diversity with respect to both areas (hayden & thompson, 1995). in many cases international schools and international education are clearly linked in the perception of those responsible for education provision, and in the expectations of many parents subscribing to such institutions. matthews (1989), in discussing the nature of international schools, made only a small number of references to their relationship to international education and no attempt to define the latter. belle-isle (1986) challenged the assumption that international education is de facto to what takes place in international schools. gellar (1981) pointed out that as the number of "overseas" schools worldwide grew, for want of a better one, the term "international education" gained currency. cole-baker (in hill 1994) believed that both international and national schools may offer an international education, which he saw as a being essentially about intercultural understanding. a major role of the administrator in overseas schools falls into the realm of "public relations," but does not entail "selling" the school to its american customers (allen, 1990). instead, the focus is on selling america to the citizens of the host country. depending on the part of the world in which the school is located, the selling job can be either frustrating or personally satisfying, with the odds leaning heavily toward the latter (allen, 1990). asbury (1993) conducted a study to examine recent trends in alabama public schools regarding the qualifying and hiring of females for secondary school principalships. the results of asbury's study revealed that females perceived a significantly higher degree of discrimination in the hiring practices of their districts than did their male counterparts. according to asbury, the top three inhibiting factors listed by females for not holding secondary principalships were lack of interest, belief that male supervisors think that females should not hold secondary principalships, and lack of experience in leadership activities. based on the findings of his study, asbury recommended that further research of this nature be conducted on a regional and national basis to determine trends at those levels. with further study on both a national and an international basis, perhaps the cultural influences on institutional behavior could be determined. jankowicz (1994) stressed the limitations and dangers of an oversimplified model of cultural change processes. the origins of the concept of experiential learning and teaching have been traced to the work of john dewey in the middle of this century, and later to the student centered philosophy of carl rogers. more specifically, the founder is usually thought of as being david kolb, who in 1974 produced his "cycle of learning." this has been adapted and developed by roberts and woodhead (1995) in their training course for effective school administration in lithuania. burnard (1988) produced a means of demonstrating how practical experience can be used as the basis for planning theoretical blocks of study. methodology sample the population studied was identified as women administrators employed by american and international overseas schools located outside of the united states and canada. according to gall, borg, and gall (1996), educational researchers rarely can investigate the entire population of individuals who interest them. instead, they must select a sample of individuals to study. a properly executed sample survey can measure individual views in a representative way (fowler, 1974). the sample for this study was comprised of women administrators attending the annual meeting of the 1997 association for the advancement of international education in atlanta, georgia. the sample was selected on the basis of the willingness of participants to respond to the survey. an additional mailing of surveys was done to all women administrators in american and international schools listed in the international schools service and association for the advancement of international education directories. where applicable, surveys were sent via surface or air mail, e-mail, or facsimile transmission. design the research paradigm selected for use in this study was survey research. babbie (1973) reported that "survey data facilitate the careful implementation of logical understanding" (p. 46). according to settle and alreck (1986), perceptions are what really count; they facilitate the discovery of trends and the prediction of where things are going in the next few years. thus, the survey was designed with the intent of measuring female administrators' perceptions of barriers to upward mobility for women working in american and international overseas schools. additionally, an open-ended question was incorporated into the instrument as a result of mccormack's (1995) finding that open-ended questions enhance questionnaire responses. descriptive statistics are mathematical techniques for organizing and summarizing a set of numerical data (gall, borg, & gall, 1996). the design of this study was to provide empirical evidence to test the validity of perceptions of barriers to upward mobility faced by women administrators employed in american and international overseas schools. findings based on data collected from the sample are generalized only to that population (gall, borg & gall, 1996). thus, the generalization of knowledge claims indicated by this study beyond the defined population will be considered speculative until supported by evidence from new studies involving other populations. instrumentation the likert-type method of summated ratings, as described in research in education by john w. best and james v. kahn (1989) was chosen to measure the perceptions of the subjects on a questionnaire. the likert-type method was used as a response mode to measure the perceived values each respondent assigned to individual barrier statements listed on the instrument. the items of the questionnaire were developed by selecting those barriers which had the highest frequency in related literature. the questionnaire was designed to determine the perceptions of female administrators regarding the barriers affecting the upward mobility of women administrators in international schools. in a pilot study (berman, 1996), the questionnaire was tested for validity and reliability. the cronbach alpha reliability coefficient for the total instrument was 0.91, and this evidence strongly supported the reliability of the instrument as a whole. factor analysis and item-to-total correlations have been presented as evidence of construct validity only. both reliability and validity provide evidence of strong psychometric properties (gregory, 1996). the structure of factor analysis loaded the items into four factors: support systems barriers, social barriers, self-imposed barriers, and cultural barriers. the first two factors, support systems and social barriers, had cronbach coefficient alphas of 0.92 and 0.83 respectively. both of these conveyed strong reliability for these factors. factors 3 and 4, self-imposed barriers and cultural barriers, had cronbach coefficient alphas of less than 0.70, which is reasonable for small samples (mickler, chissom, & mclean, 1989). results data collection a total of 230 surveys were distributed via mail, e-mail, fax, and at the annual women administrators' breakfast meeting at the 1997 association for the advancement of international education in atlanta, georgia. a total of 146 responses were received, comprising a response rate of 63%. of the responses, 67 were usable, which accounts for 30% of the population of female administrators in international schools, and 46% of the respondents. the reminder notifications were sent via e-mail as a follow-up to the original distribution of surveys. the differences in the number of surveys received and the number of surveys used in the analysis can be accounted for by a strict adherence to criteria regarding the respondents. in order for a survey to be considered usable, the respondent had to be female, employed in an administrative position in an international school, and living outside of the united states. if the respondent did not meet all three requirements, the survey was considered unusable. the instrument contained 7 demographic items, 40 barrier statements followed by a choice of 5 possible responses, and an open-ended question. participants' responses to the barrier statements were scored on a 5-point modified likert-type scale, ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). data analysis in order to answer the first research question concerning the barriers to upward mobility faced by female administrators in american and international overseas schools, responses to survey questions 1-40 in section ii of the questionnaire were analyzed in terms of mean, median, and mode in descending order. higher levels of agreement indicated a more frequent occurrence of a barrier. the statements with which the respondents most frequently agreed were: mentors can help women's careers by giving their protegees career direction, support, career aspiration and by assisting with career change (mean 4.409, standard deviation .607); the key to resisting oppression is a strong self-concept (mean 4.154, standard deviation .795); women build self-esteem and confidence by associating with the mentor (mean 4.030), standard deviation .859); women frequently do not receive salary, title, and status to match responsibilities (mean 3.923, standard deviation 1.122); and beliefs that male administrators best handle certain kinds of positions are restrictive (mean 3.848, standard deviation .949). the statements with which the respondents had the strongest degree of disagreement were: women bring psychological turmoil to the job (mean 1.697, standard deviation .877); women find psychological separation and alienation from the rest of the group too much to bear (mean 2.242, standard deviation 1.039); women have the educational preparation but lack the necessary experience to hold administrative positions (mean 2.379, standard deviation 1.092); faculty members treat male administrators more professionally than female administrators (mean 2.470, standard deviation 1.166); and male co-workers extend a lack of professionalism to women (mean 2.470, standard deviation 1.056). the second research question concerned differences in the barriers identified by female administrators in american and international overseas schools based on geographic location. in order to answer this question, the responses to item 1 in section i of the survey were included in the analysis of variance on all items in section ii. the type i error rate was maintained at a pre-established alpha level of .05 for the entire set of comparisons. the respondents employed in schools in asia agreed more strongly with the statement concerning the greatest barrier for women as being role prejudice than did the respondents employed in schools in africa, europe, latin america, and the middle east (f probability of .0352). there were no other statistically significant differences among the respondents based on country of employment for the other barrier statements. the third research question pertained to the differences in mobility patterns for female administrators based on the following institutional and demographic variables: career progression and method of promotion; job title; gender of supervisor; and length of tenure. in order to answer this question, data were analyzed for items 1-40 on section ii and in section i items 4-6 (career progression and method of promotion), item 2 (job title), item 7 (gender of supervisor), and item 3 (length of tenure). for the comparison, the one-way analysis of variance procedure was used. the participants who had been promoted from outside the school responded with a significantly higher (tukey-hsd test with significance level .050) level of agreement than did their counterparts who had been promoted from within the school on four items. first, the respondents promoted from outside the school maintained a higher level of agreement (mean 4.0435) with the statement concerning the notion that women experience external barriers to promotion despite the declaration of equal opportunity employment than did the respondents who had been promoted from within the school (mean 3.4250). second, the respondents promoted from outside the school maintained a signficantly higher level of agreement (mean 4.1304) with the item related to the idea that women often spend the early part of their marriages promoting their husbands' careers than did the group promoted from within the school (mean 3.1538). third, the respondents promoted from outside the school had a significantly higher level of agreement with the statement positing that school counselors fail to identify future positions in administration as desirable to females (mean 3.4783) than did the participants promoted from within the school (mean 2.79). finally, the respondents promoted from outside the school had a significantly higher level of agreement with the statement concerning the idea that the key to resisting oppression is a strong self-concept (mean 4.4783) than did the respondents promoted from within the school (mean 3.9744). the present position title of the respondents did not significantly influence their responses. there were no significant differences among the respondents on any of the items based on their present position title. the item asking if women should be allowed to progress by cooperation more than competition received a stronger degree of disagreement from the respondents whose previous positions had been as coordinators and department chairs (mean 2.8571) and counselors (mean 1.333) than did the respondents whose previous positions had been teachers (mean 3.2703), teaching principals (mean 4.000), non-school related (mean 3.7500), and other administrative positions (mean 3.3636). the respondents whose immediate supervisor was male had a significantly higher level of agreement with the item stating that belief systems create barriers for career advancement for women (mean 3.5714) than the respondents whose immediate supervisor was female (mean 2.5556). the item stating that women should be allowed to progress by cooperation more than competition received a significantly higher agreement response from the participants employed in their present position for 6-10 years (mean 3.5333) and those employed in their present position for 11-15 years (mean 3.6250) than it did from the participants employed in their position from 0-5 years (mean 3.1026) and those employed in their present position for 16 years or more (mean 1.5000). the answer to the question regarding the most urgent professional development and training needs for female administrators working in american and international overseas schools came from responses to an open-ended question at the end of the survey. information from this open-ended question offered data that might not have been found in the responses to the survey items. the professional development and training needs described by the respondents included the following: on-the-job training; mentoring; having opportunities to meet with other administrators to discuss issues; leadership training; and developing self-confidence. conclusions first, the professional development and training needs for female administrators working in american and international overseas schools identified by the respondents were consistent with their level of agreement with the barrier statements on the survey. the statement which received the highest mean score was the following: mentors can help women's careers by giving their protegees career direction, support, career aspiration and by assisting with career change. in addition, by responding to an open-ended question regarding professional development and training needs, the respondents discussed the importance of mentoring for female administrators in international schools with greater frequency than any other item. the second conclusion inferred from the results of the analysis in this study was the importance of a strong self-concept in resisting oppression. the statement with which the respondents had the second highest mean was that the key to resisting oppression is a strong self-concept. the next conclusion revealed from the results of the study was that the respondents perceived that women do not bring psychological turmoil to the job. the statement with which the respondents had the strongest degree of disagreement was that women bring psychological turmoil to the job. the fact that the aforementioned statement was the only statement on the survey with which the respondents tended to strongly disagree is significant. the fourth conclusion drawn from the results of the study was that geographic location did not appear to have a significant influence on the participants' perceptions of barriers to upward mobility. the respondents employed in schools in asia agreed much more strongly with the statement concerning the greatest barrier for women as being role prejudice than did the respondents employed in schools in africa, europe, latin america, and the middle east. there were no other statistically significant differences among the respondents based on country of employment for the other barrier statements. the final conclusion drawn from the results of the study is that only one of the most frequently reported barriers to upward mobility for the respondents was consistent with crutcher's (1992) findings from her examination of the barriers which affected the upward mobility of women administrators in the state of alabama. crutcher concluded that the most frequently reported barriers to upward mobility for all categories of female principals in her study were as follows: 1. women believe that they will be considered unfeminine if they confront conflict assertively. 2. a major barrier to a woman's career is her need to give primary attention to her family until the youngest child is in school. 3. women do not have a "good-old-girl" network. 4. women find psychological separation and alienation from the rest of the group difficult to experience. 5. women build self-esteem and confidence by associating with a mentor. recommendations for practice the first proposal offered is to incorporate a structured mentoring component in american and international overseas schools for female administrators. regardless of geographic location, career progression, method of promotion, job title, gender of supervisor, and length of tenure, the results indicated agreement among the participants that mentors can help women's careers by giving their protegees career direction, support, career aspiration and by assisting with career change, and that women build self-esteem and confidence by associating with the mentor. secondly, programs aimed at developing on-the-job training practices for female administrators in international schools would benefit from a strong experiential component. in order to cultivate the qualities of effective leadership, women administrators must be challenged to behave in ways beyond the bounds of the conventions of academia when women are obtaining degrees and certification in educational administration, and when women are working in the international school setting, where they do not traditionally have the same opportunities and levels of decision-making that men do. only then will the experience of working in an international school serve females who aspire to senior-level administrative positions (i.e. directors, superintendents, etc.) to develop and try the leadership skills necessary for their future career development. the high standards expected of international school administrators would then be judged on a more equitable basis according to specific actions of men and women alike. the final recommendation regarding improvements in future practices would be to have opportunities to meet with other administrators to discuss issues. this would ensure that female administrators are able to utilize the experience and expertise of their peers to develop as professionals. an ongoing discussion, both through technological assistance and in person, forms a foundation for mentoring, leadership development, and professional and personal development. for further study the first recommendation for future research is to appraise the development of leadership potential of women administrators in international schools over three to five-year time period. longitudinal studies aimed at assessing how female administrators' perceptions of barriers to upward mobility in international schools may develop or change during a four-year period of time, for example, would greatly add to the existing body of knowledge. the next recommendation is to investigate whether any relationships or correlations exist between different types of women administrators in international schools relative to their success in moving upward in their professional careers. the results of this study found that female administrators working in international schools in asia tended to have a significantly higher level of agreement with the item stating that role prejudice is the greatest barrier faced by women than the participants working in africa, europe, latin america, and the middle east. ascertaining whether this perception affects the upward mobility of women in that particular region would expand existing insights into the characteristics of female administrators. the third recommendation is to investigate the level of development of perceptions of barriers to upward mobility among female administrators in international schools occupying top-level positions, those occupying entry-level administrative positions (i.e. assistant principals), and those in non-administrative positions. no effort was made in this study to distinguish between female administrators and nonadministrators in international schools. the final recommendation is to investigate the variables above and beyond formal instruction responsible for contributing to the advancement and upward mobility of women in educational careers. are there other quality indicators that can be used to assess the perceptions of barriers to upward mobility by female administrators in international schools? the results of this study indicated a significant difference between the perceptions of barriers by participants who had been promoted from outside the school and those who had been promoted from within the school. summary major barriers to upward mobility facing female administrators are not always related to inequitable salaries. the findings of this study suggest that female administrators working in international schools have the perception that mentors can help women's careers by giving their protegees career direction, support, career aspiration and by assisting with career change. attempts to discover factors that give rise to the development of perceptions of barriers to upward mobility by female administrators in international schools would prove useful to researchers, international educators, school administrators, and women. three prominent sites of inquiry include the mentoring process, self-concept within the interpersonal environment, and hiring practices. do natural processes occur during educational administration training programs that reinforce leadership practices that determine the future success of female administrators in international schools? investigating the role played by self-concept in interpersonal dynamics of educators may uncover useful data on peer group influences that foster leadership development in women administrators in international schools. the selection criteria for the hiring of administrators in international schools deserves scrutiny. are efforts consciously made to recruit female administrators or is there a proclivity for international school boards to maintain the status quo by awarding top-level administrative positions to men more often than to women? variables thus identified may also provide a significant determinate for the selection of women as administrators in international schools in the future. references acker-hocevar, m., touchton, d., & zenz, j. 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(1966). a history of women's education in the united states (vol. 2). new york: octagon press. dr. barbara berman is a secondary principal at the colegiointeramericano in guatemala city, guatemala. bberman@redvirtual.com awl journal home page awl journal volume 2, number 2, spring 1999 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career 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file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word howe_walsh_the_influence_of_motherhood_on_stem_women_academic_perceptions.docx advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 54 advancing women in leadership vol. 36, pp. 54-63, 2016 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the influence of motherhood on stem women academics’ perceptions of organizational support, mentoring and networking liza howe-walsh, sarah turnbull, emmanouil papavasileiou, & nikos bozionelos liza howe-walsh: portsmouth business school, university of portsmouth, email: liza.howe-walsh@port.ac.uk sarah turnbull: university of portsmouth, email: sarah.turnbull@port.ac.uk emmanouil papavasileiou: university of portsmouth, email: emmanouil.papavasileiou@port.ac.uk nikos bozionelos: audencia business school, email: nbozionelos@audencia.com accepted august 08, 2016 the lack of women in senior positions in stem within higher education is an ongoing concern. identifying the barriers that stem women face to progress their careers remains an important area of research. while previous studies have explored some of challenges associated with the gendered culture within higher education, less is known about the additional barriers faced by women with children. using a survey of stem women in the uk this study examines the influence motherhood has on women’s perceptions of organisational support, mentoring and networking and identifies that stem women with children are found to have less opportunity to engage with mentoring or to benefit from formal or informal networks within the institution. the findings have significant implications for the career progression of women with children and suggest that review of hr policy and practice to facilitate greater organisational support and in particular mentoring and networking requires the institution to take a far more proactive approach. keywords: women, stem, networking, higher education. introduction the under-representation of women in senior positions in higher education has been well reported in both academic (howewalsh & turnbull, 2016; macfarlane, 2010; rayner, fuller, mcewen & roberts, 2010; smith, 2011) and popular press (athena swan, 2011; rigby, 2015; tapping all our talents, 2012). the imbalance of gender remains a key concern for higher education institutions in the united kingdom (uk) with less than 20% of women in professorial posts (ucu, 2013). areas of science, technology, engineering and medicine (stem), in particular, have been identified as key areas of concern and the need to encourage women to reach seniority (such as professorial and managerial positions) in these disciplines has been recognised by the uk government as a priority (women and the economy, 2013). initiatives such as the athena swan (scientific women’s academic network) charter have been established in the last decade to look at ways to help address the gender imbalance in stem. established by the equality challenge unit (ecu) a charity set up to support equality and diversity in higher education in the uk, athena swan makes awards to institutions to recognise their commitment to gender equality (athena swan charter, 2015). a better understanding of the challenges women in stem face in advancing their careers may provide a valuable insight into why so few reach senior positions in their institutions. one key issue that has been highlighted in the literature regarding the underrepresentation of women in stem is motherhood (ceci, ginther, khan & williams, 2014; williams & ceci, 2012). the impact of having children on women’s careers is acknowledged as a significant challenge to career advancement (fox, fonseca, & bao, 2011; ward & wolfwendel, 2012). the organisation’s ability to support women with children in academia is relatively underexplored. the purpose of this study is to extend understanding of the three key attributes that have been associated with career advancement in academia (see baruch, 2013); organisational support, mentoring, and networking which have not previously been examined in this domain. furthermore the research identifies whether having a baby influences these factors. the paper begins with a review of the extant literature which explains our existing knowledge of the challenges academic women in stem face in their careers. we also discuss the wider career development literature in order to recognise the value attributed to organisational support, mentoring and networking. the methodology is then explained and the data collection and advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 55 analysis discussed. the findings and discussion of the study are presented, followed by conclusions. finally, limitations of the study are noted and areas for further investigation are identified. work challenges, babies and why organisational support, mentoring and networking matter there has been increasing interest in recent years over the challenges faced by women in stem academia within the uk and internationally (freedman, 2012; howe-walsh & turnbull, 2016; nazemi, mortazavi, & borjalilou, 2012; nguyen, 2013; smith, 2011). previous studies have explored the gendered nature and practices within higher education institutions (barnard, powell, bagilhole & dainty, 2010; moss-racusin et al., 2012; roton, 2009; van den brink, benschop & jansen, 2010). in addition, many have examined the caring responsibilities women stem academics have that may influence their career progression (adamo, 2013; fox, 2010; fox, fonseca & bao, 2011; goulden, mason & frash, 2011; nazemi, mortazavi & borjalilou, 2012). while several studies have explored the organisational culture and caring responsibilities, to date there has been no exploration of the exact influence motherhood has on perceptions of organisational support, mentoring and networking. there is widespread recognition of the gendered culture within academic institutions (bailyn, 2003; priola, 2007; probert, 2005) and the impact this has on women in stem from a very early stage in their careers (grove, 2013). grant and elizabeth (2015) noted from their research that women often felt not good enough and undervalued during their academic career. howe-walsh and turnbull (2016) for example highlighted the gendered practices which occur from the beginning of an academic career starting with the recruitment stage, with direct and indirect discrimination being evidenced. their study identified how the possibility of a candidate being a mother was an issue raised during the selection process highlighting the gendered nature of stem academia and the negative association of having parenting responsibilities. other studies have similarly highlighted discrimination (mason, 2008) and gender inequality in the recruitment and selection process within stem (settles, cortina, maley & stewart, 2006; van den brink, benschop & jensen, 2010). further evidence of continued discriminated is noted from the gender pay gap that persists amongst senior professors (leake & hamilton, 2015). moreover the likelihood of stem disciplines commanding higher salaries balanced in favour of men perpetuates the pay and gender gap (evans, 2015). while gendered institutional cultures present barriers for women in stem to navigate their careers, having children is seen to present one of the biggest challenges women face (ceci et al., 2014; goulden, mason & frasch, 2011; ward & wolf-wendel, 2012; williams & ceci, 2012). several studies report on the difficulties women in stem find balancing their careers with caring responsibilities (darisa, davidson, korabik, & desmarais, 2010; fox, 2010; fox, fonseca & bao, 2011; nazemi, mortazavi & borjalilou, 2012; pell, 1996). since stem careers are seen to be very competitive with the need to secure research funding, this makes having children even more challenging for women (adamo, 2013; goulden, mason, & frasch, 2011). having children has also been found to influence women’s tenure (de welde & laursen, 2011; rosser & lane, 2002). howe-walsh and turnbull (2016) highlight the negative impact that taking a career break can have on women’s career advancement. the study highlighted a number of issues associated with having a baby including: the impact on publication outputs, a key driver of career progression; informal work practices restricting women’s involvement in decision-making such as informal meetings outside of normal working hours (howe-walsh & turnbull, 2016). while previous studies have explored the challenges having a child presents, to date there has been no examination of the influence of having a child on women’s perception of organisational support, mentoring and networking. considering the challenges for women in stem identified in previous literature this is disappointing and exploring how having a child influences these aspects of career development may provide greater insight into why women are underrepresented in senior positions in stem. the need to provide greater organisational support for academics has been highlighted in previous research (kinman, 2014; nikunen, 2012; ren & caudle, 2014). nikunen (2012) highlights the different forms of organisational support that academic institutions can provide including line managers, supervisors, mentoring and networks. furthermore, nikunen suggests that reputation and recognition are connected to the support and patronage received from senior colleagues who further highlights the institution’s role in individual career development (2012). kinman (2014) highlights the need for institutions to consider the support they provide to academics and suggests institutions need to address academics long working hours and work-life balance to better support academics wellbeing. while the literature has explored the challenges of organisational support within academia more widely and to some extent in the context of women in academia (pautasso, 2015), less is known about the perceived influence of organisational support for women working in stem (ceci, et al., 2015; howe-walsh & turnbull, 2016). howe-walsh and turnbull (2016) highlighted that women in stem reported a lack of career guidance and institutional support and identified women’s successes were less celebrated than their male colleagues, resulting in stem women feeling marginalised in the institution. while issues associated with institutional support have been highlighted in such prior research, to date no study has explored the influence of having a baby on perceived organisational support. the wider career development literature suggests mentoring plays a significant role in supporting career development (i.e., baruch, 2013; bozionelos, 2004, klasen & clutterbuck, 2012). however, within higher education baker (2015) argues that formal mentoring programs lack trained mentors precluding clear and consistent implementation to benefit the individual mentee. furthermore she suggests the informal nature of mentoring arrangements may result in differing expectations between the mentor and mentee resulting advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 56 in dissatisfaction for all. while there have been no specific studies examining mentoring in the stem field, the lack of women holding senior positions in academia more widely is seen to be problematic (fox, 2005). similarly networking is seen to offer a number of career advantages (bozionelos, 2003, 2008). in particular networks within institutions are considered to offer a number of benefits in the form of social capital and are seen to be advantageous to those who can access them (ibarra, kilduff & tsai, 2005). prior studies in stem suggest that women are disadvantaged by not having access to male networks in higher education influencing their ability to get support for promotion to senior positions (van den brink & benschop, 2009). the gendered culture that exists in higher education institutions acts against women’s career progression to seniority with old ‘boys clubs’ acting as a career barrier (barnard et al., 2010). the lack of female role models is seen to be a key limitation perpetuating the male dominated networks within institutions (ceci et al., 2015). considering the gendered culture that prevails within stem (fisher, 2007; fotaki, 2013), more female role models would be desirable. howe-walsh and turnbull (2016) similarly identified that formal and informal networks were dominated by men and that this prevented women asking for career guidance and support. hence networks are seen to play an important role within stem and career advancement relies heavily on access to these networks. to date there has been limited exploration of these networks (barnard et al,. 2010; van den benschop, 2009) and scant evidence of the influence having a child is seen to have on institutional networking. this study seeks to redress this gap by analysing women in stem with and without children by asking the following: 1. what are the perceptions of organisational support among women, with and without children, in stem? 2. what are the perceptions of mentoring among women, with and without children, in stem? 3. what are the perceptions of networking among women, with and without children, in stem? methods sample the athena scientific women's academic network (swan) charter was chosen as a source for developing our sampling frame, in line with prior work among academics in uk (i.e., howe-walsh & turnbull, 2016). the charter recognises the commitment made by higher education institutions to advancing and promoting women's careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (stemm). an online survey was employed allowing participants to provide anonymous responses directly which were automatically added to a database. overall, 153 fully completed surveys were received. the mean age of participants was 39.94 years (sd=9.902). in addition, table 1 shows that 49% of the participants had at least one child, 59.5% declared themselves to be married/cohabiting and 51% were part of a dual-earner couple. furthermore, the majority of respondents were lecturers (34%), followed by postdoctoral researchers (26.1%) and senior lecturers (13.1%) (see table 1). table 1 summary of women academics’ characteristics (n=153) measures we measured perceived organisational support (pos) with seven of the highest loading items derived from the spos (eisenberger, huntington, hutchinson & sowa, 1986). using fewer items from the original scale does not appear to be problematic due to the internal reliability of the scale (rhoades & eisenberger, 2002). respondents were asked to indicate the degree of agreement to statements related with both valuing (i.e., ‘the institution values my contribution to its well-being’ and ‘the institution takes pride in my accomplishments at work’) and caring (i.e., ‘the institution cares about my general satisfaction at work’ and ‘the institution really cares about my well-being’) over a 7-point likert scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7). mentoring received was assessed with six items on a 5-point response format (1: not at all, 5: to a great extent) from dreher background variables frequency % dual earners yes 91 59.5 no 62 40.5 number of children 0 78 51 1 24 15.7 2 43 28.1 3 5 3.3 > 3 3 2.0 marital status married/ cohabiting 91 59.5 non married/divorced 62 40.5 position lecturer /teaching fellow 52 34.0 postgraduate researcher 19 12.4 postdoctoral researcher 40 26.1 senior lecturer (assis. professor) 20 13.1 reader (assos. professor) 4 2.6 professor 11 7.2 head of department/school 7 4.6 tenure <5 years 74 48.4 5-10 years 33 21.6 10-15 years 22 14.4 15-20 years 16 10.5 >20 years 8 5.2 advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 57 and ash (1990). participants were asked to consider their career history since they started working in the university and indicate the extent to which a higher-ranking individual (this need not be limited to one person) from the university had given or recommended the participants for example to challenging assignments that present opportunities to learn new skills. institutional networking was assessed with the same response format, as mentoring, but with six items from bozionelos (2003) (i.e., there are individuals within the institution with ‘whom i share emotional support, feedback and work confirmation’ and … ‘whom i consider as best friends and i share any kind of issue, professional or personal’). data analysis the data were analysed using the spss software (ibm corp., released 2013. ibm spss statistics for windows, version 22.0. armonk, ny: ibm corp.). the estimation of cronbach’s α values indicated strong evidence of internal consistency for each of the three measures (perceived organisational support, α=.89; mentoring, α=.88; network resources, α=.82, see tables 2, 3 and 4) in line with earlier recommendations by nunnally (1978), of cronbach’s α value over the 0.70 threshold. furthermore, a series of independent sample t-tests were conducted to examine whether significant differences existed between women academics’ perceptions of organisational support, mentoring received and networking resources with regard to motherhood. the assumption of homogeneity of variance was examined with levene’s test for equality of variance. the p value of the levene’s test was insignificant (p>.05) for both perceived institutional support (f=.084, p=.772) and mentoring (f=2.69, p=.103) as well as network resources (f=356, p=.552). therefore, for each variable under examination, the variances within both sub-samples, women academics with children and women academics without children could be assumed as equal. nevertheless, following recent studies in higher education such as de bruijn-smolders, timmers, gawke, schoonman and born (2016) and dancer, morrison and tarr (2015), for each obtained measure the mean difference was computed between the two sub-groups of women academics, divided by the pooled standard deviation. the result of this standardized mean difference is cohen’s d estimation of effect size (cohen, 1992) which in almost all cases has been considered zero (0.00 < d < 0.20) or small (0.20 < d < 0.50) (see de bruijn-smolders et al., 2016). results the results revealed significant differences in all three variables under investigation. in particular, the mean scores of the perceptions of organisational support was significantly lower (t(151)= 2.76, p=.006, d=0.41) for women academics with children (m=3.76, sd=1.24) than their counterparts without children (m=4.27, sd=1.19). similarly, the mean scores of the perceptions of mentoring received was significantly lower (t(151)= 2.42, p=.017, d=0.39) for women academics with children (m=3.19, sd=. 99) when compared to those without children (m=3.55, sd=.84). nevertheless, the mean scores of the perceptions of network resources for the women academics without children (m=3.75, sd=.69) was significantly higher (t(151)= 2.49, p=.014, d=0.39) than their counterparts with children (m=3.46, sd=.77). in order to extract a better understanding of the above observed significant differences between the two subgroups of women academics, further t-tests were conducted. in particular, the means scores of each of the items included in the composite variables were examined. table 2, 3 and 4 provide a more detailed analysis of the differences in the perceptions of women academics with regard to motherhood. table 2 differences in perceptions of organisational support between women academics (with children vs. without children) the university… having children n=75 not having children n=78 m s.d m s.d t-test d values my contribution to its well-being. 3.63 1.55 4.23 1.39 -2.54* 0.40 fails to appreciate any extra effort from me (r). 3.81 1.71 4.00 1.54 -0.71 0.11 really cares about my well-being. 3.44 1.57 3.88 1.55 -1.76 0.28 even if i did the best job possible, would fail to notice (r). 4.13 1.76 4.69 1.56 -2.08* 0.33 disregards my best interests when it makes decisions that affect me (r), 3.59 1.54 4.14 1.59 -2.19* 0.35 cares about my general satisfaction at work. 3.52 1.56 4.09 1.45 -2.34* 0.37 takes pride in my accomplishments at work. 3.96 1.66 4.86 1.46 -3.56*** 0.57 note: equal variance assumed; *p<.05, **p<.01, ***p<.001; m=mean; sd=standard deviation; (r)= reverse scored; d= effect size; responses ranged from (1: strongly disagree, 7: strongly agree) advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 58 perceived organisational support in line with the above results, women academics with children scored lower than their counterparts without children, in all seven questions assessing the perceptions of institutional support (see table 2). however, in this particular variable almost all items presented a significant difference. the item that presented the greatest significance difference measured women academics’ perception of working in a university that takes pride to their accomplishments at work (t(151)= 3.56, p=.000, d=0.57). the item with the second greatest significant difference measured women academics’ perceptions of being valued for their contribution in university’s well-being (t(151)= 2.54, p=.012, d=0.40). participants’ perception of working in a university that cares about their general satisfaction at work presented the third greatest significant difference (t(151)= 3.52, p=.021, d=0.37). the perception of working in a university that disregarded their best interests when it made decisions that affected them followed in the level of significant difference (t(151)= 2.19, p=.021, d=0.35). the perception of working in a university which even when they did the best job possible, failed to notice was the fifth item that presented a significant difference (t(151)= 2.08, p=.039, d=0.33). this item was most highly rated by women academics with children (m=4.13, sd1.76). in terms of the lowest rated item of perceived institutional support, an agreement appeared to exist. the perceptions of working in a university that really cared about women academics well-being was the lowest rated by both women with children (m=3.44, sd=1.57) and women without children (m=3.88, sd=1.55). the findings suggest a significant difference in the perceived support women with and without children receive from their institution. while the need for greater institutional support for all academics has been highlighted in previous studies (kinman, 2014; nikunen, 2012; ren and caudle, 2014) and women in stem in particular (ceci, et al., 2015; howe-walsh & turnbull, 2016), until now there has been little evidence of the perceptions of support between women with and without children. the current study highlights women with children see their contribution as less valued and recognised for their achievements. the findings also suggest that women with children perceive the institution takes less pride in their work and fails to appreciate any extra effort made. the sense that women with children see their best efforts would fail to be noticed by the institution is a particularly significant finding. the findings provide a valuable insight into women with children perceptions’ of the level of institutional support and recognition received; suggesting more care needs to be taken to ensure support is transparent and consistent. table 3 differences in perceptions of mentoring received between women academics (with children vs. without children) to what extent a higher-ranking individual (this need not be limited to one person) who had advanced experience and knowledge had…… having children n=75 not having children n=78 m s.d m s.d t-test d given or recommended you for challenging assignments that present opportunities to learn new skills? 3.25 1.15 3.94 1.04 -3.86*** 0.26 given or recommended you for assignments that required personal contact with academics in different parts of the institution? 2.91 1.34 3.10 1.28 -0.93 0.14 conveyed feelings of respect for you as an individual? 3.69 1.09 3.83 1.02 -0.82 0.13 shared personal experiences as an alternative perspective to your problems? 2.97 1.35 3.55 1.12 -2.89** 0.46 discussed your questions or concerns regarding feelings of competence, commitment to advancement, relationships with colleagues and supervisors or work/family conflicts? 3.12 1.20 3.29 1.19 -0.91 0.14 encouraged you to prepare for advancement? 3.20 1.27 3.47 1.26 -1.34 0.21 served as a role model? 3.21 1.34 3.68 1.24 -2.23* 0.36 note: equal variance assumed; *p<.05, **p<.01, ***p<.001; m=mean; sd=standard deviation; d= effect size; responses ranged from (1: not at all, 5: to a great extent) mentoring table 3 shows that women academics with children scored lower than their counterparts without children, in all seven questions assessing the extent of mentoring received. among these seven advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 59 questions, three appeared to have significant differences in the reported responses. the item that measured the extent that a higher-ranking individual from the university had given or recommended the participants for challenging assignments that present opportunities to learn new skills demonstrated the greatest significant difference (t (151)= 3.86, p=.000, d=0.26). the second item with significant difference measured the extent that a higher-ranking individual from the university had shared personal experiences as an alternative perspective to participants problems (t (151)= 2.89, p=.004, d=0.46). the third item with significant difference assessed the extent that a higher-ranking individual from the university had served as a role model (t (151)= 2.89, p=.027, d=0.36). in terms of the highest rated item, challenging assignments presenting opportunities to learn new skills was most highly rated from women academics without children (m=3.94, sd=1.04). by contrast, women academics with children rated most highly the item that assesses the extent to which a higherranking individual from the university had conveyed feelings of respect for them as individuals (m=3.69, sd=1.09). in terms of the least rated item, there appears to be an agreement between the two-subgroups. the extent to which a higher-ranking individual from the university had given or recommended them for assignments that required personal contact with academics in different parts of the institution was least rated by both women academics with children (m=2.91, sd=1.34) and women academics without children (m=3.10, sd=1.28). the differences between those with and those without children are an important finding considering the role attributed to mentoring in career development (baruch, 2013; bozionelos, 2004). in particular the findings suggest women with children perceive they have significantly less opportunities to learn new skills, participate in cross-faculty projects and receive less respect. the findings also indicate that perceptions of women with children are lower in terms of how more senior colleagues relate to them and encourage them in their careers. this highlights the differences in the mentoring experiences received by women and suggests women with children perceive their mentoring experience to be less positive than those without. having a baby appears to have a significant effect on how women see this important aspect of career development. while previous studies have identified the negative influence of caring responsibilities on stem women’s career advancement (adamo, 2013; fox et al., 2011; goulden et al., 2011; nazemi et al., 2012) to date there has been little evidence of the impact having a baby can have on stem women’s perceptions of mentoring. the findings suggests that institutions need to ensure the mentoring provided to women is consistent and offers women with children the same opportunities and experience as those without. institutions may find it useful to provide training to mentors to ensure that they are conscious of any bias that may exist and provide a more homogenous mentoring system. how mentors are chosen and aligned with mentees requires careful consideration. the human resources function has to work closely with line managers to ensure that mentoring is a valued source of organisational support and consistently applied in practice. table 4 differences in perceptions of organisational networking between women academics (with children vs. without children) there are individuals within the institution i currently work for…. having children n=75 not having children n=78 m s.d m s.d t-test d with whom i exchange information concerning what’s happening in the institution. 3.81 1.02 4.08 0.91 -1.69 0.27 with whom i frequently talk about work related topics. 4.09 0.84 4.38 0.79 -2.20* 0.35 with whom i share emotional support, feedback and work confirmation. 3.53 1.13 3.88 0.99 -2.04* 0.32 i have direct access to people who occupy leadership positions in the institution. 3.64 1.06 3.81 0.91 -1.05 0.17 i have a network of friendships in the institution which can help to further my career progression. 2.55 1.12 3.03 1.14 -2.62** 0.42 i keep in touch with a number of people in the institution who are at higher levels than i am. 3.13 1.11 3.36 1.09 -1.27 0.20 note: equal variance assumed; *p<.05, **p<.01, ***p<.001; m=mean; sd=standard deviation; d= effect size; responses ranged from (1: not at all, 5: to a great extent) advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 60 organizational networking similarly to mentoring, women academics with children scored lower than their counterparts without children in all six questions assessing the extent of available networking resources (see table 4). among these questions, three appeared to have significant differences in the reported responses. the item that measured the extent participants have a network of friendships in the institution to help further my career progression presented the greatest significant difference between the two subgroups (t(151)= 2.62, p=.010, d=0.42) even though this was the lowest rated item by both women academics with children (m=2.55, sd=1.12) and women academics without children (m=3.03, sd=1.14). the item with the second greatest significant difference measured the extent individuals within the institution frequently discussed work related topics with colleagues (t(151)= 2.20, p=.029, d=0.35). this was the highest rated item by both women academics with children (m=4.09, sd=0.84) and women academics without children (m=4.38, sd=0.79). the third item that presented a significant difference between the two subgroups assessed the extent individuals within the institution engaged with colleagues for emotional support, feedback and work confirmation (t (151)= 2.04, p=.043, d=0.32). the findings suggest that women with children have less positive perceptions of networking than women without children. this is a significant finding considering the value attributed to networking for career development (bozionelos, 2003, 2008; ibarra et al., 2005). while prior studies suggest that women in stem have less opportunity to access networks than male counterparts (van den brink & benschop, 2009). the current study suggests that there are perceived differences in networking opportunities afforded to women with children and those without. in addition the findings highlight that women with children see the networks they have within their institution provide less opportunity to discuss work related topics and access to more senior level members of the institution. given the importance of networking for career development, the findings indicate that women with children lag behind their peers and require opportunities to develop greater networks. suggesting a more proactive approach from the organisation and in particular hr to facilitate mentoring relationships. while previous studies have suggested that the gendered culture within higher education and the old boy’s networks are a barrier to women’ career advancement (barnard et al., 2010) the findings suggest that women with children may be more adversely affected than those without. the male dominated informal networks which women find challenging to access (howe-walsh & turnbull, 2016) may in part explain the difference in perception between women with and without children, as women with children have less flexibility outside of their normal working hours, thus impacting upon informal meetings. the findings that women with children perceive their networking opportunities are less than those with children is important for institutions that need to address women’s career development in stem (freedman, 2012; nguyen, 2013). conclusions this paper set out to explore three key attributes associated with career advancement; perceived organisational support, mentoring and networking. it adds to the growing body of literature on the challenges of women in stem that enable us to better understand why so few reach leadership positions in these disciplines (ceci et al., 2014; freedman 2012; howe-walsh & turnbull, 2016; nazemi et al., 2012; nguyen, 2013). this study makes a contribution to our understanding of three valuable areas of women’s career development; organisational support, mentoring and networking received in stem and importantly distinguishes between the challenges women face with children. while gendered practices are well recognised as a significant barrier to women in stem attaining senior posts in higher education (moss-racusin et al., 2012) and previous research has highlighted the perceived differences between men and women in terms of networking opportunities (barnard et al., 2010; howe-walsh & turnbull, 2016) and mentoring (fisher, 2007), to date there has been little examination of the differences between women with and without children. prior research has identified the challenges stem women have balancing their careers and their work (goulden et al., 2011), but has not explored how having children influences areas of organisational support. the findings therefore make a key contribution to our knowledge of the differences which exist between women with and without children and extend our understanding of the impact of motherhood on women’s career progression in stem. with regard to mentoring the study highlights motherhood influences perceptions of the mentoring received. since previous studies have identified the negative impact that taking a career break is seen to have on women in stem’s careers (howewalsh & turnbull, 2016) this is an important finding. institutions need to ensure that return to work schemes provide women returning from career breaks with adequate mentoring opportunities to ensure they are given the chance to learn skills and gain advice regarding raising their profile to take part in cross-faculty assignments etc. to develop their careers. a key finding of the study is the difference in how women with children and without perceived the mentoring they received in terms of how personal experiences were used, discussion of work/family conflict and whether the mentor had served as a role model. this would suggest the increased importance for institutions to provide mentoring support from other women who have had to balance their own careers with having children and are therefore able to offer advice based on their own experiences. furthermore the study highlights the need for institutions to recognise more stem women with children as role models. the finding that differences between women’s perceptions of networking opportunities exist is another key finding of the study. women with children saw their experiences as less positive than those without. as previous studies have highlighted the importance of networking for career advancement (barnard et al., 2010) is an area that needs to be addressed by institutions need to ensure that both formal and informal networking does advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 61 not conflict with childcare responsibilities. previous studies have identified that many informal networks occur outside working hours (howe-walsh & turnbull, 2016) and institutions need to ensure that such practices are reviewed to prevent women with children being excluded from valuable networking opportunities. provision of appropriate mentoring from women role models with children could provide a valuable guide to other women trying to navigate their careers with children. both mentoring and networking are related to overall organisational support. the findings suggest that significant differences exist in perceptions between women with and without children in relation to organisational support. it is here that institutions have the greatest opportunity to improve stem women’s perceptions of the support given. the study identified women with children see themselves as less valued and recognised by the institution and perceive their wellbeing is less cared about. institutions need to be mindful of the impact these factors can have on women’s career aspirations. for institutions wishing to support women’s career development in stem and encourage more women to gain leadership positions (athena swan, 2011) a number of issues need to be addressed. greater transparency in reporting and celebrating achievements would improve women’s perception of how institutions recognise success. this would work equally well for all women, but in particular may address the imbalance in perceptions between women with and without children. furthermore, ensuring flexible working hours are available and take into account access to networking would also provide a sense that the institution is taking wellbeing into account. finally, return to work schemes need to ensure that institutions check levels of support regularly for mothers returning to work. limitations and future research while the study makes a valuable contribution to women in stem literature, the methodological limitations need to be acknowledged. first, due to the cross-sectional nature of the study, caution should be placed when inferring to the causality among the variables under investigation. future studies, should therefore empirically assess the relationships under investigation through a longitudinal design, using repeated measures over time. second, our sample included women employed in stem across universities in the uk, we therefore suggest extending the research to include additional countries. implications engagement with human resources (hr) policies developed to support women, and in particular women with children, need to go further to redress the negative perception of organisational support during all stages of career development. it is important to have a clear policy to enable mentoring to take place 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(2012). when scientists choose motherhood a single factor goes a long way in explaining the dearth of women in math-intensive fields. how can we address it? american scientist, 100(2), 138. women's parliament: lessons learned from activities in israel and potential for activity abroad advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 166 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 166-176, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women’s parliament: the israeli experience esther hertzog social anthropologist, beit berl academic college, email bental4@gmail.com, phone +972-98666847, fax +972-986664731 accepted september 30, 2013 the women's parliament in israel is a platform for politics from a feminist perspective, established in november 1989. the article discusses the aims, activities and achievements of this framework on the background of political marginalization, economic discrimination, religious oppression, and cultural objectification of women. the parliament strives to raise awareness of this reality; to change public discourse and policies; to support women competing over leadership positions. the article also addresses the financial and organizational barriers faced by the women parliament's endeavors to bring about fundamental change in the gendered power structure. consequently, it examines the idea of establishing women’s parliaments around the world, as a means for global gender change. key words: women's parliament; political feminism; patriarchal society; gendered power-relations; women's marginalization; women's representation introduction the state of israel presents a conspicuous example of patriarchal society, characterized by a “man’s culture”, primarily due to the fact that it is a country that deals extensively with military activities and where the military enjoys prominent status. men's structured advantage in israeli society is reflected in all walks of life, in the military, industry, education and culture. as a central system in israeli society, the army serves as a framework that trains and channels man to leading positions in the israeli economy and politics. i suggest that in the militaristic reality of israel, feminine discourse and women's struggle for equality and partnership assume special importance and pertinence. however, its potential for a gender change in human society exceeds the israeli context. the women’s parliament is a framework for alternative and critical thinking and discussion with regard to the combativemale culture, the capitalist economy and the patriarchal society in israel. the experience of the women’s parliament in israel, which was founded in 1999, will be used to examine the processes, implications and chances entailed in establishing similar frameworks beyond israel. among the assumptions on which the discussion is based: achieving social-political-gender changes necessitates intensive, continuous and diverse activity of women, gradually joined by men, until full and equal partnership; the activity must relate to different areas of discrimination and oppression of women and of other groups; it requires the collective support for women competing for positions; it demands the commitment of the latter to the wellbeing of all, women and men, and to feminist values, once they reach influential positions. the women’s parliament will be presented as a model for feminist-political debate that aspires to change the hegemonic discourse and to develop social tools suited to the feministhumanist value system. i will use some of the women’s parliament's events to demonstrate how it challenges the gendered structure and the patriarchal order in israel. i will also discuss the role of women’s parliament in struggles for women's representation and rights and will analyze the implications of the women's parliament's activity. women’s parliament – background, goals and processes the women’s parliament is a “platform for politics from another perspective, for critical and feminist discussion of the prevailing policy and public discourse in israel”, as defined by the founders.1 the parliament was established in november 1999 by shin movement, for equal representation of women; hn (herzliya2 women); friedrich ebert foundation3; beit berl college; and herzliya municipality. since its establishment, the activity of the 1 see books of abstracts of women’s parliament sessions 19992010. 2 hertzliya is a town in the center of israel, sited on the mediterranean coast. 3 see website of friedrich ebert foundation www.fes.org.il advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 167 women’s parliament has been accompanied by a steering committee. the committee comprises some twenty members, whose most prominent characteristics are professionalism, established socio-economic status and feminist activity. among the committee members are politicians, journalists, women from the academia and from the field of education. one third of the committee members are north african and arab women. the parliament holds six sessions a year, with each session addressing a focal subject currently on the public agenda (national or local), from the perspective of women and from the broad social viewpoint. participants of the discussions are mainly women and few men, with professional, activist, political and other backgrounds relevant to the topic at issue in each session. the parliament's sessions are held around the country, in collaboration with women’s organizations and social organizations, both local and national, according to the topic covered by each session. the parliament's activity was, until recently, facilitated by financial assistance from the friedrich ebert foundation4 (which funded the mailing of invitations, website and annual books of abstracts), the hosting local authority (which provides the venue, an auditorium seating some 150-200, sound equipment and refreshments) and the support of beit berl academic college5 (which provided logistic and mailing support). all the activities of the women’s parliament (except for the website management), including organizing the sessions and participation in the discussions, are done on a voluntary basis. the 72 sessions held to date have been attended by more than 15,000 women (and some hundreds of men). most of the participants in the sessions are jewish, secular, aged 40 and above. the sessions held in arab towns are attended mainly by traditional women aged around 30, many men and children, as well as by many jewish women. two main political events provided the impetus for the establishment of the women’s parliament, the elections for local municipalities in 1998 and the elections to the knesset (israel parliament) elections in 1999. in the local elections, two women were elected as city mayors for the first time since the establishment of the state. the success of the two was attributed to the ongoing feminist activity in the sharon region, orchestrated by shin movement since 1989. this activity entailed the organization of many social gatherings and public seminars to discuss the goals of the feminist 4 recently the relationship with the ebert foundation and its funding have terminated, following the parliament’s support of a woman who competed over leadership of the teachers’ union, against the male head of the union for the last 12 years. the foundation blamed the women's parliament for getting them involved in elections. the women parliament's steering committee clarified that they would not give up their "raison détre", namely supporting women who run for leading positions, even if that will entail loosing financial support. 5 following the ebert foundation's letter to partner organizations against the women's parliament, beit berl college terminated its partnership and funding. later on the israeli association for feminist studies and gender research has joined the women's parliament as a new partner. struggle in israel and the world; demonstrations against courts in the region for their lenient rulings in the sentencing of rapists and women batterers; support for women running for positions within political and public bodies (such as the municipalities, the knesset and the general workers’ union). following this activity and that of other organizations, in the 1998 elections five women were elected to the city council of netanya, a major city in the sharon region (as compared with a single woman in all the preceding election campaigns), and a woman was elected mayor. the feminist networking and grass root work in herzliya was particularly interesting and successful. it was linked to the ongoing activity of local women’s organizations. moreover, it appears that the women’s leadership courses, organized by shin movement and hn association, since 1997, had a conspicuous impact and far-reaching results. the influence of this activity reached all parts and sectors of the city, religious and secular people, left and right, women and men. when a female member of herzliya city council, called yael german, announced her candidacy for mayor, the women’s organizations, and mainly the graduates of the women’s leadership courses, rallied to her support, and assisted in her campaign. after a run-off election german was elected mayor of herzliya and immediately following her election she established the women’s department. it was the first administrative framework of its kind in israel, operating routinely and extensively within the local municipality to promote gender awareness and social equity in the city. the success of women’s leadership courses in enhancing political awareness, women’s solidarity and willingness to support women running for political positions, has been discussed in feminist research for the last two decades. many studies pointed out the importance of women's social networks in promoting feminist awareness and women's personal and collective empowerment. an interesting example for these processes is connected to literacy programs (stromquist 1990; patel & dighe 1997; milligan 2004; lauren 2007: hertzog 2011). these studies have indicated the poor achievements of most literacy projects in terms of their proclaimed goals. nevertheless, it appears that “the women's social space”, that emerged in the contexts of literacy programs contributed significantly to mutual support, to increasing women's solidarity and even to the involvement of women in social-national struggles, such as occurred in the maoist revolution in nepal (manchanda 1999, 2004; gautam, banskota & manchanda 2001). the success of yael german, who had previously been active in women’s organizations, with the assistance of many women, aroused the hope that this success could be leveraged to achieve a significant breakthrough also in women's representation in the knesset. subsequently, a women’s party was founded, “ytzug shaveh” [equal representation], with the blessing of yael german, by several activists from shin movement and hn association, as well as many other women from herzliya, who had supported german in her campaign for mayor. the party started its activity close to the elections and lacked financial resources. the central activity advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 168 soon encountered difficulties, and the party was largely ignored by the media. ultimately the members decided not to run for election. in light of the grave outcomes and failure to enter the knesset, as an organized women’s power that expresses women’s voices and represents the various interests of women in israel, shortly after the elections a decision was made to establish the women’s parliament. it was planned to become an alternative platform, where feminist and gender issues, relevant to women in israel, will be addressed and critical views relating to women's exclusion, their widespread discrimination and silencing their voices, will gain prominence. the original idea was to establish a “shadow government”, but due to the reservations of some of the members it was decided to establish the “women’s parliament”. the establishment of the women’s parliament as an alternative framework to the institutionalized parliament expresses defiance of the political-gender reality in israel. it is related to the ongoing struggle for the representation of women and women’s rights and against their discrimination in all spheres of life, dating back to pre-state times. one of the main expressions of women's collective weakness in israel is the poor rate of their representation in all government bodies.6 the rate of representation of women in the knesset has never exceeded 20% and until 1999 no more than 14 women (out of 120, i.e. 10.2%) had served as knesset members (in one term). in all governments in israel to date, only 12 women have served as ministers (out of 216 ministers, i.e. 5.6%). in this respect israel is ranked 107 in the world. the average rate of women out of all city council members in israel is only 11%. only five women are currently the heads of local or regional councils and, as written above, only in 1998 were two women elected to mayors for the first time. the fact that in the pre-state period (1944 elections) the rate of women's representation in the elected body (assembly of representatives) was 15%, a rate nearly attained only in the 15th knesset (14%), highlights the significance of women's marginality and political weakness in israel since the establishment of the state and until today. furthermore, the fact that in the israeli political arena, which to a large extent is based on parties that represent sectoral interests, there is no women’s party, underscores the implications of the lack of women's collective representation. in other words, the women’s sector, which constitutes half the population of israel, has not been represented in the knesset by a party, since the first knesset (when wizo party, headed by rachel kagan, participated). the severe implications of the absence of women's political representation is heightened due to the numerous and basic common interests of this population. women experience common types of discrimination and oppression, among 6 source of data: the israel institute for democracy (latest revision: 3/1//2010): http://www.idi.org.il/breakingnews/pages/289.aspx knesset, research and information center (dated 2/12/2009): http://www.knesset.gov.il/mmm/data/pdf/m02432.pdf others with regard to wages, limited opportunities for occupational promotion, physical and sexual violence, discrimination by the religious authorities and the army, and more (swirski & safir 1991; herzog 1996; abu-baker 1998; hassan 1999; binyamin 2006; mazar 2008; hertzog 2010). during the course of 13 years of its activity the parliament has held 72 sessions (as of july 2012), which were conducted in urban and rural towns, jewish and arab, from the south, to the far north. some of the sessions were held at regional councils, in academic institutions, such as beit berl college and al-qasemi muslim college, at the women’s prison and idf base. most of the participants in these events were feminist and social activists, women from the hosting locale as well as women from the center of the country. holding the parliament sessions all over the country is a way of spreading the feminist concept in all its parts, offering numerous and divergent groups of women the opportunity to listen to and interact with prominent women with radical approaches, unique expertise and commitment to the feminist struggle. the founders had hoped that a “travelling” parliament would mobilize and bind women throughout the country to the struggle for equality. this would facilitate a fruitful encounter between women with different and even conflicting opinions from groups with different identities and affiliations. thus a sense of solidarity and affinity would arise between women from different and even hostile groups, creating awareness of a common interest to all women in society, despite the divisions, alienation and hostility fostered by the patriarchal regime. the parliament founders assumed also that the women's engagement in any issue on the public agenda, including issues relating to society in general, would clarify the relevance of the feminist point of view to any socialeconomic issue that concerns all parts of society. these expectations indeed materialized with time; the parliament sessions dealt with a wide range of issues and stressed the feminist aspect in each subject: state budget, minimum wage, education and welfare policies, issues of peace, war, media and economics, employment, violence, crime and terrorism, beauty contests and modeling, prostitution, women trafficking and pornography, military service, capital and politics, entrepreneurship, sport, higher education, ecology, custody of young children, and more. thus, the parliament created prominence for the feminist angle in public debate and for original and critical positions of women from divergent backgrounds. the parliament sessions also provided open and explicit public support to women who contended for public and political positions, such as: support for the contenders for head of the teachers’ union (in the elections of 2006 and 2011), support for colette avital, who ran for state president (in 2006) and for tzipi livni, in her bid for prime minister (in 2009). a further assumption of the parliament's activists was that its discussions will clarify that the gendered segregation is intentionally constructed by the patriarchal hegemony and is neither a “natural" or "coincidental” nor a “cultural” http://www.idi.org.il/breakingnews/pages/289.aspx advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 169 phenomenon. this state of affairs serves men in all levels of society, in leading society as a whole, as well as in the family and community. this understanding suggests that the patriarchal culture generates gender clashes and works against the profound interests of the two genders. to make this understanding the foundation for joint activity of men and women, the latter have to become aware of their discrimination, and of the need to cooperate in order to overcome the barriers of separation that have been imprinted in their lives and their minds. confronting male hegemony: the parliament's struggles and achievements analyzing twelve years of the parliament's activity, several accomplishments can be pointed out with regard to the goals set by the founders. the parliament created prominence of gifted women who made unique contributions in terms of social and professional achievements in public life in israel. more than 400 speakers presented original insights, personal testimonies and inspiring interpretations in the parliament's sessions. they presented a wide range of women's voices, from the professional fields, academia, politics, business, sport, social activity, the arts and more. the speakers were from diverse backgrounds and affiliations: jewish, arabs, north african, ashkenazi, veterans, new immigrants, young, senior, religious, secular, lesbians, right-wing, left-wing, and others. they demonstrated the fact that women in israel have the need, desire and ability to voice unique and original opinions and to influence the reality. moreover, the parliament's discussions exposed the mechanisms and manipulations of excluding women in governing agencies; pointed to the implications of women's discrimination and deprivation; and offered conceptual and pragmatic options for changing society and promoting gender and social equality. the multi-voiced and multi-perspective discussions clarified the understanding that “the personal is the political”, and that problems identified with any specific group of women are relevant in various ways to other groups. the parliament created an open and unique public forum, bringing together different and diverse groups of women, from various ends of the political spectrum, with different levels of education and occupation, different age groups and the like. these gatherings created an atmosphere of solidarity and sense of power; they strengthened the social bonds and encouraged joint initiatives among activists and holders of positions. the parliament was the first to raise public discussion on issues such as trafficking in women, prostitution and pornography, custody of young children, women and gynecology, gender and the state budget, gender and teachers' organizations, women's candidacy for the state president and others. in these discussions relevant information was offered, different viewpoints were raised and the speakers demanded that steps will be taken by the authorities to overcome gender discrimination. in several sessions harsh criticism was leveled against power centers; exposed their corruption, oppression and discriminating practices; and condemned the preservation of social injustice and gaps inflicted by the capitalist governments. the wide distribution of printed and internet invitations and annual books of abstracts, sent to public and academic libraries, to policy makers and to people in power centers, serves to introduce crucial issues to the wider public. the titles of topics and viewpoints, as phrased in the invitations, serve to reflect the speakers' (and the parliament's) critical messages in advance. more than once, even before the events took place, responses of enthusiastic support were received from women on the one hand, while on the other hand anger was expressed by men in power positions and by misogynistic groups. some of the men, who considered the topic of discussion or any of the discussants as harmful for their interests, tried to prevent the events from taking place or tried to dictate their format. the parliament's discussions, conferences and other activities introduced various initiatives and coalitions. thus, for example, following the parliament's discussion on prostitution, trafficking in women and pornography, shin, in collaboration with the movement for new masculinity, held three conferences dealing with policy related to these issues, hosting state officials. also, following the session on pornography, a coalition of women and social organizations was formed to take action against pornography. this activity resulted in a law that was passed in the knesset against the broadcast of pornographic programs on tv. since its beginning the women’s parliament has nurtured a range of partnerships. its most prominent partnership is the one with local municipalities, which contribute to the planning, financing and organizing the events. this partnership takes place through the collaboration with mayors' advisors on women's issues and their women’s councils. in many of the sessions local women’s organizations also participate in planning and organizing the events. often the women's parliament cooperates with social organizations, according to the topic of the session. for instance, when ecology was discussed, environmental protection organizations participated; organizations for women's rights at work participated in discussing employment issues; the parliament collaborated with several women’s organizations and with the “new masculinity” group when it discussed feminism and leadership. the parliament's discussions concerning jewish-arab relations in general and women's status in the two sectors spawned a network of women leaders, jewish and arab, called anwar (lights, in hebrew), that strived to empower women in israel and to promote equality between the groups. anwar organized seminars and conferences in jewish and arab locales, in which issues relating to the "status of women" in the different social-religious groups were discussed; women's narratives of the 1948 jewish-palestinian war and the second lebanon war were brought up. in 2005 anwar's activity focused on creating a common women's network in one of the poorest villages in the country. this cooperation gave rise to the parliament session on "women against arms”, which condemned the wide-spread use of arms by the men of the village in particular, and in israeli society and in the world in general. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 170 following discussion of the parliament in a town widely inhabited by the 1950s immigrants from yemen, about removing children from their parents since the "children of yemen" ordeal until today, a coalition of women's and social organizations was established. it campaigned for changing the welfare policy with regard to "children and youth at risk", demanding to transfer the state resources from the institutions' system to the family and the community. in september 2005 the women’s parliament initiated a coalition of women’s organizations for mothers and children, which worked against changing the law of “tender age custody" which stipulates that children until 6 years of age of divorcing parents, will remain with the mother. the coalition managed to stimulate broad public debate and criticism of the intention of minister of justice at that time tzipi livni to revoke the law, and succeeded (thus far) to prevent the change in the law. the women’s parliament participated in a coalition of feminist organizations before the 2006 elections and initiated a session where "social economic principles" were presented by members of the coalition to the representatives of the contending parties. the parliament initiated a campaign for election of the country's first woman president. six suitable women-candidates for presidency were presented at a session organized by the parliament. at the end of the event mk colette avital announced her candidacy, and the parliament provided its support throughout her campaign. a further accomplishment of the women’s parliament's activities is the establishment of a "young women's parliament" in 2010, in collaboration with the city of bat yam. this framework emerged from the understanding of the crucial need to convey the feminist agenda to female teenagers, encouraging them to join the feminist struggle for gender equality. to date six events have been held, in which hundreds of high school students, girls who dropped out, jewish and bedouin, members of "4girls" (website for young girls) and others, participated. the discussions underscored the empowering impact of these gatherings, overcoming borders of place, status, ethnic/religious backgrounds and the like. the opinions and narratives that were presented were fascinating. moreover, the young women's criticism, facing the establishment's representatives, demonstrated their need and ability to express their views on issues relating to their lives. the parliament's accomplishments attest to the great potential embodied in this kind of feminist activity and framework, in israel and globally, as a means to formulate and realize human, social and feminist goals. the way is long and arduous, among others because it is based on joint work with many groups sometimes with conflicting positions that compete over limited resources. often it would seem that the activity has little chance of bringing any change, also because the promotion and realization of ideas and goals hinge on the brokerage of the media that ignores them. below i will describe several sessions of the women's parliament and analyze the events that occurred during and around them, as examples of the social processes and drama which they generated. i will also discuss the potential contained in a women's parliament for promoting discourse and recognition of the importance of gender equality in israel and in the wider world. nevertheless, i will also elaborate on the hardships of the parliament's activities which impeded further accomplishments. the law of tender age custody7 the term “tender age custody” refers to a clause in the law that stipulates that children up to age 6 will remain in the custody of their mothers, when their parents get divorced (except for cases of evident harm done to them by their mother). following men's organizations' activity around the world, men in israel began to demand that the clause should be abolished and, instead, a legal procedure will take place, in which the child's custody will be determined according to "the minor's wellbeing" or, alternatively, "joint custody" should be enforced. in november 2005, an emergency session was organized in response to the launching of the "schnit committee". the committee was appointed by minister of justice at that time tzipi livni to examine the existing laws relating to parental responsibility in divorce cases. it was expected to provide recommendations regarding changes in the custody of young children and to introduce new legal arrangements with regard to parental responsibility of divorcing couples. opposition to the change in the law, led by the women's parliament, resulted in founding a coalition of many women’s organizations. the main claim raised was that canceling the clause of tender age custody would lead to protracted and costly litigation over the guardianship of children, which would harm mostly the weaker parties in the conflict, namely the children and in most cases also the women. on 7 november 2005 the parliament held a session in tel aviv. the discussion opened with a presentation from a personal perspective of the subject “parents and children in the shadow of divorce”, by a father and activist in the movement for new masculinity, and by a divorced mother. following this, experts presented their opinions. dr. rona shuz, a scholar of law from an israeli college, emphasized the implications of canceling the custody of young children from the perspective of the child's wellbeing. she explained that canceling the clause would lead to instability and economic hardships because legal litigation between the parents will dramatically increase. as married women's status is economically inferior the clause of tender age custody serves to balance the situation. if the law is cancelled, women will be easily threatened with losing custody of the children and will be willing to reach a bad divorce settlement just to keep their children. referring to custody cases in the us, shuz explained that in most cases the courts decide eventually to leave the children with the mother, because she is the "main caring person" over small children. moreover, she contended that even in the current situation, the israeli courts award custody of the child to the father when it is 7 see: book of abstracts of women's parliament sessions 2006. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 171 proven that this is in the child’s best interests. hence there is no need to change the law, which would lead to an increase in legal claims and to weakening of woman in divorce proceedings. prof. smadar lavie, a social anthropologist and social activist, elaborated on the connection between parenting, women’s poverty and joint custody. she pointed to the conspicuous financial interests of the “battalions of experts” from the therapeutic and legal fields that stand behind the struggle for “shared parenting”. according to her this struggle serves them well, financially and personally, while robbing the children of the sense of stability. adv. tagrid jachshan, an advocate and political activist in jewish and arab women’s organizations, described the position of moslem women that get divorced in the sharia courts and added that recently there have been an increase in rulings that award custody to the moslem men, not in a quest for equality but in the spirit of the islam. she claimed that joint custody does not fit the prevailing reality, in which women bear the main responsibility for raising the children. dr. odeda peled, a neuro-psychologist, discussed the interrelations between culture and biology and explained that customs and traditions are imprinted in us more strongly than nature itself. dr. peled called to allow more time for the processes leading to new parenting. at an early age the child needs a figure that specializes in nurturing, and currently it is still the mother. thus it is too early to change the law. things may change in the future. in this debate women represented various female identities: that of mothers, of experts, and of social activists. the event also exposed the profound common interests of women from different groups as mothers: jews and arabs, ashkenazi and mizrahi, religious and secular. it further appears that it is difficult to separate between the personal, the professional and the public perspectives, as it was revealed by prof. lavie's presentation. lavie unfolded her personal story as a battered wife with abused son, who experienced also abuse on the part of the legal authorities (in the us and in israel). at the same time she holds extensive knowledge in legal and social issues related to the subject, and is also a person whose social activities grew out of personal experience. she is an example of a woman whose feminist commitment to weaker women in society is based on both her personal experience and expertise. the "tender age custody" was brought up by the women’s parliament while the academia refrained from addressing this subject. it also provided a platform for women scholars who contributed to the debate and the struggle, from a personal and professional angle. only recently have discussions on the subject been held also in the academia and some research is being done. this struggle demonstrated, albeit something we already knew, that grassroots activity can put on the public agenda and introduce into the academic ivory tower neglected subjects of concern to society. moreover, rather than leading critical research on social issues, the latter often follow marginalized social organizations in studying the changing reality. in other words, academia is a conservative framework, part of the hegemonic social order that responds slowly and sometimes hostilely to social changes and struggles that take place in wider society. some striking occurrences took place in response to the "tender age custody" session. a group of men, several of those who demand to cancel the clause and to introduce “joint custody”, contacted the event sponsors, which had provided the venue for the session. they blatantly demanded that they cancel the event. the claim used by the men was that this was a “racist” activity against children and men, which aims to rob their rights of "fatherhood". the men also contacted friedrich ebert foundation, demanding that they cancel their support of the women’s parliament, because of its racism against men. some of the men, involved in the efforts to prevent the event, are behind websites that incite against "feminists", and some even use pornographic pictures in order to debase them.8 the event took place, despite the threats and pressures. before it started there was a demonstration by men against the event, outside the hall. the men displayed a hanging rope which was placed around one of the demonstrator's neck, used to attract the attending journalists. before the event began the men begged the organizers to be allowed into the auditorium. after undertaking in writing not to disturb and to leave the hall if asked to do so if they breached their promise, the demonstrators were permitted to enter the hall. the discussion proceeded relatively peacefully, except for sporadic comments of the moderator, who reminded the men of their commitment. throughout the event the men contacted the organizers, in writing and verbally, to be allowed to take the stage. and indeed, after a presentation of the positions as planned, and when the discussion was opened to the audience, the men (and women who supported them) came on stage and presented their positions. the entire discussion was filmed by a photographer on behalf of the men, who pretended to be a public tv reporter. the conduct of the media was highly indicative; over the many years of the parliament's activity it received only minimal coverage, but in this case, perceived as “war between the sexes”, the media showed great interest. an article in haaretz9 dealt extensively with the dispute, while “balancing” between polarized, hostile positions. radio and tv programs reiterated and stressed the “war of the sexes”. a prominent talk show moderator shed a tear, revealing his support for the men's position, and his sympathy to the suffering of a “bereaved father” (whose children are alive), on his panel. 8 e.g. david fishelzon wrote (on 12/10/2005 in www.mishmoret.org.il): “just like the nazis who tortured jews out of idealism – and not because the jews did anything – so too the crazy feminists torture men out of ideology”. another example is a website called “man’s rights in israel” which among others presents a voodoo doll, with the caption: “a new toy called ‘all men are evil’ which will allow women to practice stabbing men”. 9 “women’s organizations against the intention to cancel the automatic custody of small children”, by ruti sinai, may 2005). http://www.mishmoret.org.il/ advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 172 it appears that the media reflects the gender power system in society and contributes to its strengthening. claims about “balance” and "rating" expectations, blur the role of the media in fanning the hatred between men and women in this context. however, it should be noted that there were also articles that presented the subject fairly and even supported the non-cancellation of the tender age custody clause. thus, we learnt through this dramatic event that the media is an important agent in inflaming the hostility between the genders. among the panelists of that session was a father and activist in the movement for new masculinity. but his presentation aroused no interest in any of the media. while he was an invited guest to the discussion and even though he represented a position different to that of the women organizers – and even though among the audience there were a number of invited members from the movement of new masculinity – these were of no interest to the media. channel 2, which filmed the event, ignored them completely. the channel presented generously the positions of the aggressive men, while exposing its bias. the item on channel 2 presented the event as a "convention of feminists", did not mention the women’s parliament, and the filming bypassed the parliament's banner, conspicuously displayed in front of the stage. the role played by women, both activists and journalists, demonstrated that women, consciously or unconsciously, act as “collaborators”, similar to other cases of deprived groups. in the case of the struggle over the clause of the tender age custody, they advocated gender equality in general and care for children's welfare in particular. they expressed their contempt for both, “old-fashioned” feminists and “feminist radicals”, that "harm the good name of feminism”. thus, as men dominate the media, feminist men committed to partnership with women and to the struggle for equality have no chance of winning recognition and exposure. furthermore, it appears that men's aggressiveness towards “feminist” women is willingly accommodated and even support by the chauvinist media. while dealing with a core issue of gender relations, such as parenting, the women's parliament exposed overt and covert barriers on partnership for both genders, in the prevailing unbalanced power structure. it also exposed the heavy price for all, women, men and children, which the current situation involves. the discussion and the tumultuous events surrounding the parliament's event highlighted the importance and urgency for men and women to work together toward a fundamental gender change. this is expected to generate partnership between the genders and an equal distribution of resources and responsibility between men and women. the gender change necessitates the development of mechanisms of equal opportunities, in the work place as well as in other spheres. in the example described, the women's parliament created drama that exposed men's hostility and aggressiveness towards women ("feminists"), in a reality that limits their part in parenting and discriminates women in the labor market and in other spheres. hence, cooperation between women and men with awareness of gender equality and of social injustice is vital for constructing a fair and just society for all. the event exposed also the media's support of the prevailing gender power structure: by ignoring men who want cooperation with women, by supporting misogynistic positions and by imposing the image of self-evident gender war. the public debate organized by the women’s parliament in collaboration with experts from the academia and representatives of women’s groups, and the establishment of a coalition of women’s organizations against the changing of the law, following the parliament's session, prevented, so far, the change in the law. gender and education: teachers' status, reforms and women's leadership another drama took place in the parliament's 38th session, held in january 2006,10 in ra’anana,11 titled: “dovrat committee's report: the economic policy and teacher's status”. the timing of the session, very close to elections for the teachers’ union (held on 1 february of the same year), was not coincidental. the decision to hold it was taken with the intention of supporting a woman's candidacy for heading the teachers’ union. although this union consists almost exclusively of women (more than 90%), it has never been headed by a woman, since its establishment 107 years ago. the candidate, called yaffa ben-david, was a teacher and head of the teachers’ union branch in kiryat gat12 vicinity. announcing that ben-david will be on the panel of speakers raised the ire of the teachers’ union's heads, and especially that of the secretary-general of the teachers’ union, who was running for a second term. when the teachers’ union heads were informed about the coming event, to be hosted by the mayor of ra'anana, and especially about ben david's participation, they reacted forcefully, trying to prevent the event from taking place. the events related to this session of the parliament demonstrated the use of control mechanisms which serve to keep the bastions of power in the hands of men, totally unrelated to relevant talent and management skills. thus, women are being excluded from heading even an organization that consists of almost no men. the centralized system ensures that the labor party (that dominates the teachers’ union), will have the power to determine the head of the teachers' union, and they always appointed men. women can at best win the position of deputies or heads of the kindergarten teachers’ sub-unit. another way of excluding women from taking over the leadership of the teachers' union, as it emerged from bendavid's talk, is hiding their candidacy from potential teachervoters. teachers were not acknowledged of the fact that bendavid ran for the position. moreover, according to ben 10 see book of abstracts of the women’s parliament, 2006. 11 ra'anana is a town in the center of israel. 12 kiryat gat is a town in the south part of the country. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 173 david, her entrance to schools, where she could have met the teachers, was prevented. as the media hardly reported or discussed the elections in the teachers' union or the candidates, the public and the teachers in particular could not become acquainted with the new candidate, or even be aware of her existence. intense pressures were exerted on the organizers to prevent the event. they included telephone calls, requests and even threats on the sponsors and panel participants to postpone the event until after the elections of the teachers’ union. it was claimed that the women parliament's event would constitute an inappropriate interference in the union's internal elections. giving in to the pressures, the mayor of ra’anana cancelled his participation in the event, and a school principal cancelled her participation on the panel. mk yuli tamir contacted one of the organizers and pleaded her to postpone the event. she explained that if it will take place it may result in bringing someone “right-wing, fanatic, religious”, to take over the teachers’ union. tamir warned, further, that ben david's victory could harm “one of our last strongholds [of the left, author]”. yael german, mayor of herzliya, agreed to replace the mayor or ra'anana and participated in the panel, expressing her support of the parliament in face of the pressures. on her way to the event she received a telephone call from the head of the teachers' union, asking her to cancel her participation. although he was invited to participate in the discussion he refused. however, realizing that the event was to take place despite the pressures, the union's head allowed his female deputy to participate in the panel. unsurprisingly, the discussion clarified that the head of the teaches’ union had good reason to worry. panel participants criticized the union's responsibility for the unprecedented erosion of teachers’ salaries since the beginning of the decade, for the severe cuts in the education budgets, for the union's weakness in facing dovrat committee, and the ongoing humiliation of teachers. the discussion suggested that in order to improve economic and social status of women teachers, they must be the ones to represent and lead themselves. the criticism over the teachers' organizations' poor achievements came up, even more determinedly, in a parliament session held in kfar saba13 in january 2008, titled: “women teachers to government”. the minister of education prof. yuli tamir was blamed for dividing between the two main teachers' organizations and the teachers’ union was blamed for having cooperated with the ministry of education, signing the ofek chadash ("new horizons") agreement, even though many teachers objected to it. a principal of a local high school claimed that the “teachers received a few shekels as a supplement to their salaries and returned to their classes humiliated and angry. the reason for this is that the teachers are women [….] the government of the state of israel did not refrain from taking any measures against the striking women teachers”. this gloomy analysis 13 a neighboring town of ra'anana. was expanded by a high school teacher, who led the struggle against the ofek hadash agreement. using numerous examples of the agreement's failure to introduce any improvement in teachers' working conditions and wage, she blamed the heads of the ministry of finance, ministry of education and the teachers’ union for the “humiliation of the teachers in an agreement that pours down the drain years of achievements in the work conditions of the teacher […] this is a new employment agreement composed entirely of a deterioration of conditions […] which includes a minor addition of money while significantly reducing the hourly value”. it warrants mentioning that heavy financial suits were brought against this woman-teacher, for alleged libel (in her website). a similar drama to the one that surrounded the 38th session in ra'anana recurred in the 66th session that took place in kiryat shmona14, on 22 february 2011. it focused on women’s leadership in education. this session was planned in cooperation with the mayor's advisor on women's status in kiryat shmona and katzrin,15 and local women's organizations. soon after the invitations were sent out the head of the teachers' union contacted the ebert foundation (the main funder of the women's parliament), demanding to cancel the event, because, so it was claimed, it constituted intervention in the elections of the teachers' union slated for the beginning of april. turning to the foundation took place because a woman, called gila klein, who was running for the head of the organization, was one of the panelists. when the ebert foundation's director refused to comply with this demand, the union's head asked to meet with him. following the meeting, the event's organizers were demanded to include on the panel two of his people, one who would address the professional aspect and the other who would address the political aspect (confronting klein). additionally, as the intended convener had expressed public support for klein it was demanded that she should be replaced by an "objective", “neutral” person. pressures were also exerted on the partners in kiryat shmona to avoid the use of their venue. the event finally did take place. following an announcement by the parliament's steering committee that the union's head's conditions were rejected, the foundation terminated its partnership with the women's parliament and cancelled its financial support. in light of the paltry media coverage of the corrupt running of the teachers' union, the intimidating means used against teachers, the silencing and “buying off" of klein’s supporters, it was not surprising that the union's head succeeded to gain control over it for the third term. nevertheless, klein's success to get 15% of the votes, becoming the third largest faction in the teachers' union, signifies a substantial change within the organization and in its male dominated culture. the events surrounding the parliament's sessions demonstrate the means taken by men at the helm of organizations to preserve their control. among others: using threats, slander, 14 kiryat shmona is a town in the north part of israel. 15 katzrin is a town in the golan heights. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 174 exerting pressure on people with critical positions, silencing (or buying off) the media, filing libel suits and co-opting the opposition leadership. another important point to emphasize concerning the education sessions is the tactic of recruiting women to confront other women. women in senior positions, like a minister in the government and deputy chair of the teachers’ union, cooperated in undermining the chances of women to be elected to leadership positions. in the case of the elections in the teachers' union, where the vast majority of the organization's members are women the implications are extremely irritating. the parliament's sessions in ra’anana, kfar saba and kiryat shmona demonstrated the fact that women have the ability, skills and determination to improve teachers' working conditions and the education system, as well as to promote social change in general. however, it appears that men's pervasive control over power positions and resources serves them to prevent women's entrance into the leadership of their own union (and other organizations) and to bring about any significant gender and social change. the failure of women to enter power centers and leading positions clearly point to the vital necessity for women (teachers and kindergarten teachers in this context) to collectively support those who take upon themselves to lead the struggle and expose themselves to the risk of being suspended from the organization, of being fired, subject to libel suits and the like. moreover, women must overcome the barriers of fear and intimidation which are used to silence their representatives. the parliament sessions that supported the candidacy of women for leadership in the teachers’ organizations and in other contexts, were inspired by this understanding. the women’s parliament's dramatic sessions did well in terms of unveiling the methods and strategies applied against women who dare to threaten men’s control. however, the women's parliament did not change this reality. the teachers’ union's male domination prevailed. in this context too, the media gave negligible coverage to the event and did not provide the crucial exposure for those contending for leadership of the teachers’ union and for the women’s parliament events that supported them. another relevant issue in this context is that women’s organizations refrained from supporting the women candidates being afraid, probably, of losing their funding (as they could be accused of interfering in internal elections). women’s parliament – some implications and insights the women’s parliament unveils some of the marginalizing mechanisms employed by male dominated systems towards women. the parliament's accumulated experience also reveals the common interests of social groups, which the patriarchy has rendered rivals, encouraging them to competition, hatred and destructive wars. the parliament's discussions that were described demonstrate the need for constructing alternative concepts, discourse and practices,16 16 a few examples for feminist alternative thinking about gendered power relations, social order and gender change are: riane eisler (1987, 2007), joan acker (1990), genevieve vaughan (1997). which challenge the biased and repressive gender reality. the women’s parliament contributes to strengthening and disseminating concepts of defiance and criticism of the social gender order. it encourages action for change and cooperation between groups of women and subsequently (or concurrently) between women and men. establishing women’s parliaments, anywhere, necessitates extensive voluntary activity and independent resources which will allow freedom from restricting obligations and submission to the patriarchal establishment (as happens with most women’s organizations in israel and in other places17). the experience of the women’s parliament, as it emerges from the description of the sessions on gender, education and teachers' organizations, suggests that voluntary activity enables to address fragile and loaded issues in a critical manner and to hear voices that the ruling elites silence. the fact that the funding for the women’s parliament activity came from an external source (a german foundation) allowed a certain degree of freedom from pressures and intervention of government agencies. however, in the parliament's sessions held on the eve of the teachers’ union's elections this independence turned out to be rather limited. the ebert foundation withheld its financial support, claiming it had to refrain from supporting events where the panelists are candidates for coming elections. the pressures exerted by the heads of the teachers’ union resulted in cutting the financial support to the parliament and in deterring people from participating in the events. thus, the potential influence of the women’s parliament depends on its ability to fund its activity independently. the women’s parliament's discussions strive to break through the “hub of the establishment”, influencing it from within and not only from the margins. from this point of view, the parliament session on the dovrat report shows the potential strength conveyed by cooperation with governing agencies (e.g city councils), as much as posing a threat to the heads of the teachers’ union. they [the heads] reacted by applying pressures, which extricated the potential impact of the parliament's session. by contrast, the participation of dalia itzik, the knesset chairperson at the time, in the session which discussed women's absence from leadership of the teachers’ organizations (held in january 2008), afforded state acknowledgement to the parliament's significance. moreover, following this session the women’s parliament was invited to hold a session in the knesset.18 in other words, a women’s parliament should act both from "outside", relying on independent resources which will enable free and critical discourse, and from within the establishment, using resources held by governing systems (such as halls, equipment, public relations), while challenging their perceptions and practices. hence the framework of a women’s parliament can serve to develop and accelerate 17 see: chatty and rabo, 1997. 18 this session did not take place as the elections were set for a few months later and itzik decided not to hold the session during the election period. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 175 processes of change emerging from grassroots level, across communities and social organizations in the center and in the periphery. the women’s parliament refrains from centralized control and hierarchical management. however, the informal management of the parliament and its voluntary nature presents an obstacle on the expansion of the activity in israel and abroad. rather than “head” or “director”, the women’s parliament in israel has a "coordinator". this title indicates an operative rather than a controlling position with power and honor. nevertheless the parliament's coordinator is the director in effect. thus, the dependence of the women's parliament on a single person entails the vagueness of its future. indeed, no hierarchy is relevant in this framework, as it does not control financial or political resources. however, this mode of operation determines the scope of activity. the steering committee of the women’s parliament provides a solid public support for its activities. it is based on a group of prominent women, most of who joined the parliament when it was established (in 1999). the committee members take part in deciding on places and topics of the sessions, they participate in meetings with officials and women councils, and attend its sessions. the committee offered a crucial support in the stage of founding the parliament and it has provided a public backing for the parliament's prestige since its inception. the coalitions that emerged following the discussions in the israeli women’s parliament attest to the potential contained in joint action, which is capable of breaking structured barriers. thus it was in the fight against pornography that succeeded (to a certain extent, as said) thanks to the ad-hoc cooperation between women’s organizations and with the orthodox parties. similarly, the women’s parliament session on tender age custody led to the founding of a coalition of women’s organizations to prevent the change in the law. bringing together women’s groups from divergent backgrounds in terms of nationality, religion, ethnicity, status, age, etc. embodies great potential. however, the attempts of the israeli women’s parliament points to limited success in continuously nurturing the bonds. for instance, despite the fact that a substantial effort is being made to include in the panels speakers from different and even opposing groups, the audience participating in the parliaments' sessions is often homogenous. in most of the sessions there are hardly any arab women in the audience, unless the sessions are held in arab locales; there are few religious participants in the events of the women’s parliament and no orthodox participants at all (who refrain from approaching any activity identified as “feminist”). this situation demands that the framework be adapted to the needs of women from the divergent groups. running the parliament's sessions throughout the country provides a partial solution to this problem, in that they are held all around the country, in jewish and arab locales, in the center and in the periphery. the achievements of the feminist struggle, which seem to contribute to the wellbeing of human kind, should be institutionalized. the establishment of women’s parliaments can contribute to delivering the values of equality, based on honor and compassion, to human society the world over. references abu baker, k. 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(1999). the politics of honor: the patriarchy, the state and women’s murder in the name of family’s honor. in d. n. izraeli et als. (eds.) sex gender politics: women in israel. tel aviv: hakibbutz ha'meuchad, 267306 (hebrew). hertzog, e. (2010). introduction: at women's expense – gender between education and society. in e. hertzog and t. walden (eds.) at teachers' expense: gender and power in israeli education. jerusalem: carmel, 11-36 (hebrew). ___.(2011). patrons of women: literacy projects and gender development in rural nepal. new york & oxford: berghahn. herzog, h. (1996). why so few? the political culture of gender in israel. international review of women and leadership, 2(1), 1-18. lauren, g. l. (2007). 'failed development' and rural revolution in nepal: rethinking subaltern consciousness and women's empowerment. anthropological quarterly, 80(1),127-172. manchanda, r. (1999). empowerment with a twist. the hindu (november): 21. ____. (2004). maoist insurgency in nepal: radicalizing gendered narratives. cultural dynamics, 16(2-3), 237258. mazar, y. (2008). wage gaps between men and women when joining the public sector. israel bank, 81, 39-92. (hebrew). milligan, j. b. (2004). democratization or neocolonialism? the education of muslims under us military occupation 1903-20. history of education, 33(4), 451-467. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 176 patel, i., and a. dighe. (1997). gender issues in literacy education. institute of rural management: http://nird.ap.nic.in/clic/rrdl101.html stromquist, n. p. (1990). women and illiteracy: the interplay of gender subordination and poverty. comparative education review, 34(1), 95-111. swirski, b., and m. safir, (eds). (1991). calling the equality bluff. new york: teachers college press. vaughan, g. (1997). for-giving: a feminist criticism of exchange. austin, tx: plain view press. http://nird.ap.nic.in/clic/rrdl101.html. educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 153 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 153-159, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper american women and the gender pay gap: a changing demographic or the same old song jennifer perry and david e. gundersen jennifer perry, stephen f. austin state university david e. gundersen, stephen f. austin state university, e-mail: dgundersen@sfasu.edu accepted july 25, 2011 women have made great strides in education and career opportunity selections since the passage of the equal pay act in 1963. despite these many gains, female remuneration has not kept pace. the gender pay-gap continues to exist with serious consequences for women and the families that depend on their earnings. the gap is presented and framed historically and legislation is presented that has influenced women’s pay. a variety of explanations for why the gap continues are explored and debunked. the effects of the pay gap are presented and analyzed with policy initiatives offered underscoring possible solutions. keywords: pay, compensation, gender, inequality introduction the working world has changed dramatically for women over the past several decades. societal attitudes have changed regarding the role of women in the house and at work. aided by laws that have provided increasing opportunities, women’s presence in the labor force has steadily increased. according to the bureau of labor statistics (2010a), 47% of all employees are women with an unemployment rate of 8% compared to men who comprise 53% of the labor force with an unemployment rate of 9.8%. men’s occupations have been especially hard hit with job losses during the recent recession with construction and manufacturing taking inordinate job losses thus explaining some of the differences of unemployment rates by gender (bureau of labor statistics, 2010a). the coined term ―mancession‖ has even been used to show the disproportionate impact of job loss on men compared to women during the recent recession (baxter, 2009; thompson, 2009; white, 2010). consequently, the importance of women’s earnings has never been more significant to the financial health of family households. in educational attainment, women still hold fewer university degrees than men when comparing the total population over 25 years of age. however, for the age demographic of 35 to 44 years, women earned bachelor’s degrees or higher at a rate of 31.7% compared to men with similar educational achievements at only 29%. this trend appears to be continuing where the age range of 18 to 24 years showed women earning bachelor or higher degrees at a rate of 10.9% compared to men who had a rate of only 7.2% (u. s. census, 2010a). women have made inroads earning law, business, and medical degrees but still lag men in these fields (u. s. census, 2010a). despite trailing men in these fields, women are no longer restricted to working jobs only in domestic work, nursing, clerking, or teaching. it might be said that we currently live in the age of great women role models where supreme court justice sonia sotamayor, surgeon general regina m. benjamin, and secretary of state hillary clinton lead the way. with these achievements, many feel that the battle for gender equality and gender discrimination no longer exists. with men’s job losses grabbing headlines, the gender gap measured by many metrics has shrunk to the point that the issue appears irrelevant and not even referenced on most literary forum’s back pages. the relevancy of the topic is the focus of this investigation. first, the gender earnings gap will be explained. this will include a discussion on the current state of the gap and some historical reference to where the issue of equal pay began. this will be followed by a brief discussion on legislation that has influenced the issue of gender pay equality. next, some critical advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 154 analysis and discussion will be devoted to why the pay gap still exists including the impact of gender pay inequality where the dominance of single parent households is women. finally, we present policy and employment practice suggestions that could be used to help address the pay gap issues. pay gap explained and the historical context the gender pay gap refers to pay discrepancies between men and women where women bring home smaller paychecks compared to their male counterparts (income gender gap, 2010). in 1940, women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by men and the pay gap issue was not even on the radar screen. organizations typically paid women less and these pay practices were rooted in the view that female employees were often second incomes not meriting pay rates of men. as the issue gained attention, legislative efforts including the equal pay act of 1963 and title vii of the civil rights act of 1964 were passed to address the inequality. currently, the gap has been reduced to 80 cents for every male earned dollar according to the most recent data set of 2009 from the u. s. bureau of labor statistics (2010b). drilling further into the data, age group comparisons show a startling trend for gender comparisons of pay. women earned 93% of men’s pay for workers 16 to 24 years old and 89% among workers 25 to 34 years old. this earning’s gap balloons for the age group 35 years and older showing women earning only 75% of a man’s pay (u. s. bureau of labor statistics, 2009). young women begin work and are paid closer to their gender equal counterparts while older female workers show the greatest wage disparity with men. for occupational group comparisons women fared poorly again. despite the fact that management and professional occupations provide women with some of the highest paying careers, they consistently earned less than their male colleagues in similar positions (u. s. bureau of labor statistics, 2009). table 1 shows selected occupations and the corresponding median weekly earnings for management, engineering, and information technology careers by gender. despite enhanced accomplishments in educational achievement, earnings for women even in careers requiring substantial education, lag their gender counterparts. table 1 median weekly earnings by gender for selected careers * management engineering information technology men women men women men women $1384 $979 $1286 $1001 $1320 $1088 * note. all data from u. s. bureau of labor statistics (2009). for decades, wage discrimination in the united states was perfectly legal. the rationale behind this was that women needed less money because female economic requirements in society were shouldered by parents until marriage where economic responsibility was then shifted to husbands. an interesting influence on lower pay came about because of minority and immigrant female employee experiences. their lower rates of pay were exacerbated due to discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and not gender. when employment opportunities for these groups opened due to societal changes, their wages were set at one-half to two-thirds those of males due to race and ethnicity considerations. these women were allowed to work in positions and felt fortunate to be employed despite lower wages. despite women performing jobs with equal professionalism and productivity as men, their rates of pay were less. over time, employers hired more women regardless of race and ethnicity and the discriminatory rate for minority and immigrant women became the going rate (bravo, 2003). employers had an economic incentive to hire women and pay less. the presence of women in the work force increased profoundly during world war ii. men were compelled to enlist in military service and war production required a growing workforce. consequently, women had to pick up the slack in the american labor market building weapons needed for the war. with large numbers of american women taking jobs in war industries, the national war labor board urged employers in 1942 to voluntarily make "adjustments to equalize wage rates paid to females and males for comparable quality and quantity of work on the same or similar operations" (brunner, 2007, para. 1). despite the voluntary request few employers made adjustments and as the war wound down to the end most women were pushed out of their new jobs to make room for returning veterans (brunner, 2007). legislation influencing pay and gender until the early 1960s, newspapers published separate job listings for men and women. jobs were categorized according to sex, with the higher level jobs listed almost exclusively under "help wanted—male" (brunner, 2007, para. 3). in some cases employment advertisements ran identical jobs under male and female listings with separate and unequal pay scales. as late as 1960, women with full time jobs earned on average between 59–64 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned in the same job (brunner, 2007). not until the passage of the equal pay act on june 10, 1963 was it illegal to pay women lower rates for the same job strictly on the basis of their sex. demonstrable differences in seniority, merit, the quality or quantity of work, or other considerations might merit different pay, but gender could no longer be viewed as a drawback on one's resume. two landmark cases further defined and strengthened actions against gender-based pay discrepancies as dictated by the equal pay act of 1963. shultz v. wheaton glass co. was a case heard advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 155 before the united states court of appeals in 1970. it is important in that it underscores the impact of the bennett amendment on title vii of the civil rights act of 1964. the bennett amendment incorporated explicit sex-discrimination considerations into title vii of the civil rights act where employers are required to ensure equal pay for men and women doing work of equal skill, knowledge, and responsibility (luna, 2003). in its rulings the court determined that a job that is "substantially equal" in terms of what the job entails, although not necessarily in title or job description, and is therefore protected by the equal pay act and title vii of the civil rights act. an employer who hires a woman to do the same job as a man but gives the job a new title in order to offer it lower pay is discriminating under legislation (moore & abraham, 1994). corning glass works v. brennan was heard by the united states supreme court in 1974. the court ruled that employers cannot justify paying women lower wages because that is what they traditionally received under the "going market rate" (brunner, 2007, para. 5). a wage differential occurring simply because men would not work at the low rates paid women was an unacceptable rationale for having this type of pay practice (brunner, 2007). this discouraged employers from offering wages well below the going rate for the purpose of attracting female employees who had a more limited selection of employment opportunities. lilly ledbetter fair pay act was introduced january 2009 by then senator hillary clinton and rep. rosa delauro to strengthen the equal pay act of 1963. this act is named after a former goodyear employee who alleged that she was paid fifteen to forty percent less than her male counterparts, which was later to be found accurate (brunner, 2007). the main purpose of the bill is to expand damages under the equal pay act and provide for full compensatory and punitive damages. the lily ledbetter act prohibits employers form punishing employees for sharing salary information with their coworkers when the focus of the sharing is concern over discriminatory pay practices (national women’s law center, 2010). interestingly, the lily ledbetter act preceded a piece of british legislation addressing pay secrecy clauses in a similar fashion (freshfields, bruckhaus, & deringer, 2010). both allow employees to discover wage disparities and to evaluate whether they are experiencing wage discrimination. passage of the legislation restores an earlier position of the eeoc whereby each paycheck that delivers discriminatory compensation is a wrong actionable under the federal eeo statutes regardless of when the discrimination began. this act also allows pay discrimination victims to a file a complaint with the government against their employer within 180 days of their last paycheck. in the past, employees were only allowed 180 days from the date of the first unfair paycheck (national women’s law center, 2010). the blatant gender-based pay discrimination seems archaic today as does the practice of sex-segregated job listings. the workplace has changed radically in the years since the passage of the equal pay act, title vii of the civil rights act and continues changing with the lily ledbetter fair pay act. what has not changed radically, however, is women's pay. the wage disparity has narrowed from 59 cents to 80 cents per male dollar, but it still remains significant. why does the pay gap still exist? there have been many assumptions made as to why the gender pay gap still persists with women making less money than men. one assumption is that women earn less because they are missing from the workforce. however, the gender wage gap is figured by comparing the earnings of full time working men against full time working women. if a woman is not working full time, then her earnings are not added in the earnings gap computation. expanding the argument to include educational attainment suggests that education plays a key factor in pay disparities. logically the argument makes sense because people who add education and skills should be more valuable as employees. if someone exceeds another in education and experience they should be compensated more. research found that the gap actually increases when analyzed in conjunction with education level. higher levels of education increase women’s earnings as they do for men. there is, however, no evidence that the wage gap closes at higher levels of education (compton, 2007). sadly, the opposite is shown to be true in that at higher levels of education the gap is the largest. comparing similar higher educated male and female employees produces the largest pay inequality (compton, 2007). performance is frequently cited as an explanation for pay differences especially at exempt level jobs incorporating executive management levels within organizations. catalyst (2007), a nonprofit corporate membership research and advisory organization, released a report that analyzed performance levels of fortune 500 companies. those with the highest representation of women on the board of directors performed significantly higher than those with fewer female directors. specifically, return on equity, return on sales, and return on invested capital were higher by 53%, 42%, and 66% respectively for organizations with more women directors. the data clearly show a strong correlation between good financial performance and gender diversity. in a study conducted at carnegie mellon university, babcock (2002) found that men graduating from that university with master's degrees were eight times more likely to negotiate starting salaries and pay than their female counterparts. in a follow-up study, small, babcock, and gelfand (2003) found that women more than men said they felt a great deal of apprehension about negotiating starting salaries. women’s reluctance to negotiate pay may help explain differences in pay and this reluctance may be tied to the female socialization process that perpetuates pay disparity (babcock & laschever, 2003). advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 156 hekman, aquino, owens, mitchell, schilpzand and leavitt (2010) published an article shedding light into gender pay differences including the intervening factor of race. the researchers found that customers prefer white men over equally-well performing women and minority employees and therefore may help to explain why white men continue to earn more than other types of employees. the study’s authors found that customers who viewed videos featuring a black male, a white female, or a white male actor playing the role of an employee helping a customer were 19% more satisfied with the white male employee's performance. customers also rated store cleanliness and appearance higher with the white male employee despite the fact that those store conditions were experimentally controlled and the same across all employee demographics. the experimental design required all employees to perform identically reading the same script in the same location with similar camera angles and lighting. interestingly, 45% of the customers were women and 41% were minority indicating that even these groups of customers preferred white male employees. an additional experiment in the hekman et al. (2010) article used race in a physician with patient scenario. the authors found white male doctors were rated as more approachable and competent than equally-well performing women or minority doctors. hekman et al. (2010) suggested that employers are willing to pay more for white male employees because employers are customer driven and customers are happier with white male employees. the poignant conclusion is that what is required to solve the problem of wage inequality isn't necessarily paying women more but changing customer biases. another explanation for the gender earnings gap focuses on the type of work men do compared to women. men are more frequently associated physically dangerous jobs which typically pay more. this notion is supported by data showing that men accounted for 92% of workplace fatalities in the united states in 2006 (u. s. bureau of labor statistics, 2008). due to hazards associated with these jobs many employers offer a danger premium to entice workers to take these hazardous jobs. typically women are not willing or physically able to take these jobs even for higher wages (farrell, svoboda, & sterba, 2010). a contrary argument is that the most dangerous jobs in the united states are not necessarily male but more often very lowpaid jobs where immigrants and other workers having few occupational options and end up taking this type of employment. the u. s. bureau of labor statistics (2008) investigated job traits that are associated with wage premiums. their analysis on job attributes relating to physically demanding or dangerous jobs showed that there is no affect on wages. women are frequently segregated into pink collar jobs and these jobs often are lower paid. known as occupational segregation, the reference includes examples such as truck drivers are dominated by men and child care workers are dominated by women. wage analysis across occupationally segregated jobs show that on average, women cluster around lower-paying jobs compared to men (u. s. bureau of labor statistics, 2009). according to the national organization for women (2009), researchers using data collected and analyzed from the department of education found that women overwhelmingly work in low-wage low-skill fields. for example, women comprise 87% of workers in the child care industry and 86% of the health aide industry. as articulated by neumark (1996), disagreements abound as to why the earnings gap remains. one position is that the difference in pay reflects a tendency of women to freely choose low-wage jobs because women prefer less dangerous positions or more flexible work schedules. another perspective is that both discrimination by employers and social expectations steer women into lower-paying occupations compared to men. with so many women crowding so few female dominated occupations the effect is to drive down wages. it may be as simple as supply and demand (neumark, 1996). another set of factors needing comment include the personal choices made by men and women and how they differ. selecting a university, choosing a college major, hours worked a week, the amount of years worked, and in what jobs to take might all be considered. steinberg (2009) analyzed career plans of high school valedictorians in the united states. she found that female valedictorians planned to have careers that had a median salary of $74,608 compared to male valedictorians where planned careers led to a median salary of $97,734. steinberg (2009) suggested that female choices factored in work and family balance where male choices did not. women prioritize social and family life before embarking on careers and this restricts their choices in that they avoid jobs that require long inflexible hours and extensive travel. the family factor cannot simply be ignored. the biological fact of women having children has a negative effect on wages (compton, 2007). for employers, economic risks or more precisely, the resulting costs of women having children and leaving work for a period of time, while not politically correct, is a consideration. this is especially true for executive or hard to replace positions where it is much safer for a man to be hired rather than risking losing a female job holder (compton, 2007). wages reflect this reality. among married people working fulltime with no children, women earn 76.4% of men’s weekly median income. this drops to 73.6% for women with children (u. s. census bureau, 2010b). the more likely a woman is to have dependent children and be married the more likely she is to be a low earner and have fewer hours in the labor market. interestingly, men with children under the age 18 earn 122% of what men without children earn (u. s. census bureau, 2010b). for men, the exact opposite situation exists. marriage and dependent children make it much more likely that a man has higher earnings. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 157 so the argument is that the difference between men and women salaries comes down to individual lifestyle preferences. the choice of millions of mothers is to decide the priority between children and careers (doughty 2008). the unanswered question is why does a woman’s inherent right to have children become the basis for wage inequality? effects of the pay gap rose and hartmann (2004) authored a study funded by the institute for women’s policy research (iwpr) to determine the effects of the long term earnings gap and its implications for women, families, and the labor market. the study titled still a man’s labor market: the long-term earnings gap used data from a 15-year longitudinal effort. the authors found that over that period women earned 62% less than men or only 38 cents for every male dollar earned. over the 15 years of the study, the average prime age working woman earned $273,592 while the average working man earned $722,693 across all job categories. the gap widens to $1.2 million for white collar jobs. the study sheds light on the costs over time for women and their families where women make most of the adjustments of time in the labor market to perform family related responsibilities. the authors highlight some issues previously mentioned. women are much more likely than men to have persistently lower earnings; that women continue to work disproportionately in occupations where the majority of workers are of their own sex; that men’s jobs involve longer working hours and that the pay premium for male jobs far exceeds the additional hours worked. rose and hartmann (2004) suggested that this reinforcing cycle of inequality in the labor market and in the distribution of domestic work resulting in low pay for women is particularly damaging to the growing number of single female headed households. one area that disproportionately impacts on single female headed household employees is the time given up at work for family related responsibilities. single headed households with children do not have the luxury of two incomes from a dualearning family. since single female headed households are five times more prevalent in society compared to single male head of households (u. s. census bureau, 2003), women’s pay inequality is magnified in these situations. rose and hartmann (2004) indicated that in their study over a 15 year period, only 48.5% of women earned wages all 15 years compared to 84% of men earning all 15 years. also three out of ten women went without earnings four or more years compared with one out of twenty men. women on average also work twenty two percent or 500 hours less than men, even during the years when both men and women earn wages. even when women work the same hours as men, they earn only 69.6 cents per male earned dollar. astonishingly, one in three women had four or more years with earnings below $15,000 compared with one in fourteen men. the result is that 90% of those who average less than $15,000 per year are women with many as single head of household employees. the 15-year longitudinal study offered the following summary in explaining the wage disparity between men and women: 1. women on average earn less than men over the 15 year period. 2. gap is partially due to differences in number of years out of the labor force. 3. gap is partially due to differences in hours worked when working. 4. a remaining unexplained gap exists. (rose & hartmann, 2004, pp. 1-17). policy and employment practice suggestions gender pay inequality is a complex and challenging issue without any simple prescriptions. the factors contributing to the long-term pay gap include continued direct discrimination in the labor market; the undervaluation of work typically performed by women; the lack of systematic work that provides for family support; the particular disadvantages faced by the growing number of women-headed households and others. as a consequence of the problems addressed previously, we suggest the following policy and employment practice considerations to help address gender pay inequality. enforce existing policies that reduce sex discrimination the recent economic downturn has squeezed the funding of federal agencies that have responsibilities for discrimination enforcement (naacp, 2009). we suggest providing more resources to oversight agencies including the equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc) and the office of federal contract compliance programs (ofccp) to strengthen the enforcement of equal opportunity laws that currently exist. without adequate funding, enforcement agencies have inadequate resources to ensure legal employment practices addressing pay fairness are followed. the lily ledbetter act, if rigorously enforced, should also limit employer gagging clauses that prevent employees from disclosing their salaries in ascertaining whether pay discrimination exists. encourage family friendly employment practices work and family balance is now more than fashionable for employers, it is cost effective (fortune, 2011). offering affordable, good quality daycare for children has many benefits, including making it easier for mothers to stay in the workforce. other practices enhancing the family-friendly work environment include flextime (flexible hours), family paid leaves for sickness and family care, restrictions on mandatory overtime, and job sharing. single head-of-household employees are acutely aware of the needed flexibility. without familyfriendly benefits, employees are sometimes forced to decide between working and not working. even in dual earner households, women tend to be the ones who sacrifice work hours for family needs perpetuating the perception that jobs held by females are less important. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 158 we suggest that more employers need to develop and offer employment practices that are mentioned above. while this suggestion is not a new perspective, many employers continue to lag leading firms in offering family-friendly benefits and hold the belief that these employment practices are not cost effective and only politically correct (lewis & campbell, 2007). the benefits of these employment practices need to be better communicated and promoted thereby improving the likelihood of adoption by more employers. improving female career planning services improved career counseling for girls and young women opens the door to better employment opportunities. despite gains for women earning university degrees, we suggest continuing efforts in high schools and universities to provide better education and career information to women. this information can help women make better choices that lead to higher paid employment opportunities. public policy enforcement supporting women-headed households we recommend that state agencies responsible for collecting income from non-custodial fathers be more rigorous in their collection efforts. these collected monies enhance income levels of families headed by single mothers who are much more likely to live in poverty. increased family income allows women greater opportunities for vocational training and educational programs making it more likely for single mothers to participate in the labor market. policies addressing the low-wage labor market while politically controversial, we recommend policies raising the minimum wage and encourage the rigorous enforcement of national labor laws protecting the rights of employees to form unions. these actions will provide higher wages and increased access to benefits for low-wage workers who are disproportionately female. low income service occupations such as child care and housekeeping services are prime examples of categories where women predominate the workforce, have minimal union representation, and have few to no benefits (service employees international union, 2011). for those resistant to these suggestions, the fact remains that the costs associated with these families are already paid by society at large. if higher earnings result from these actions, societal costs incurred from food assistance and medicare can be reduced. conclusion the gender wage gap is a problem that society will face indefinitely if it continues to be ignored. the true costs for society are not just inferior female earnings. lost energy, expertise, potential skills, and the costs associated with the lowwage population are borne by all. acknowledging that the wage gap exists and communicating its existence to the public more vociferously is the starting point for addressing the issue. employers need to embrace the challenge of work and family balance recognizing that problems at home result in lower performance at work. references babcock, l. 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(2010). chart of the day: the mancession continues. business insider, retrieved from http://.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-male-vsfemale-employment-2010-10 conceptual framework advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 1 advancing women in leadership vol. 32, pp.1-23, 2012 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper motivational factors influencing women’s decisions to pursue upper-level administrative positions at land grant institutions dr. kelline sue cox director planning and analysis at kansas state university e-mail: kellicox@ksu.edu 785-532-5712 dr. trudy salsberry professor in the college of education at kansas state university e-mail: tas@ksu.edu 785-532-7801 much of the research on women advancing in higher education has been focused on the external barriers and how to break down the barriers. this study acknowledged that external barriers existed, but determined that a new approach needed to be explored for implementing new initiatives geared toward advancing women to upper-level administrative positions (e.g., president, vice-president or provost). using the elements of bandura’s model of reciprocal determination, specifically self-efficacy, personal behavior, environment, and the interaction of all three, this qualitative study examined women in upper-level administrative positions and investigated what influential factors were responsible for motivating them to this achievement. key words: higher education, female administrators, women leaders, self-efficacy introduction over 160 years after the first women’s rights convention in seneca falls, n.y. in 1848 (osborn, 2001), women are still discussing, researching, and lobbying for many of the same issues and resolutions to problems laid out in the first meeting. the issues are equal opportunities for employment and equitable means to advance in one’s career choice. throughout history, women fought to improve their lives and the lives of women who came after them. as educators, women challenged the comforts of familiarity to reach new understandings. unfortunately, it takes time to change long held beliefs and values regarding the role of women in society. fueled by the women’s movement, affirmative action, feminists, and women’s strong work ethic and abilities, women have made great strides in becoming more visible within the workforce and in greater numbers at colleges and universities. wenniger and conroy (2001) concluded that women were more likely to head smaller schools or lead community colleges, which traditionally emphasize teaching over http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 2 research. as of 2006, the same conclusion exists with only 13.8% of the doctoral institutions were led by women. conversely, the largest percentage of women presidents (28.8%) led community colleges with 23.2% of the women overseeing baccalaureate schools (jaschik, 2010). similar trends have occurred for the second in command or the chief academic officer at most institutions. in 2009, american council for education (ace) published the first national census of chief academic officers (caos) in the united states. the census revealed the lowest percentage of women cao’s employed at doctorategranting institutions (32%) compared to 50% of the women caos at associate’s colleges; 38% at master’s institutions; 37% at baccalaureate institutions; and 33% at special focus institutions (american council for education, 2009). despite the fact that the percentage of women presidents had more than doubled what it was 20 years ago from 9.5% in 1986 to 23.0% in 2006, the most significant change took place between 1986 and 1998 with only 1.9% of the rise being between 2001 and 2006. furthermore, this relatively small percentage of college presidencies stands out because less than half of the cao’s are women (40%) and the cao is the senior academic rank from which presidents tend to be selected. thus, the proportion of women at these senior academic ranks shows that women remain underrepresented as presidents (jaschik, 2010). in contrast to the top two upper-level positions, the number of women in the administrative branch (includes executives, directors, and managers) at four-year public institutions increased 57.8% from 1997 to 2007. the number of men during this same time period only increased 12.3% (u.s. department of education, 2010). as of 2007, the proportion of women in the administrative branch is almost 50%. however, the administrative branch is a very broad category and includes many middle management positions in which women may or may not have upper-level decision making authority. these data support the premise that women made progress and achieved many of the goals established by the first adopters of the women’s movement. however, women have not climbed career ladders with the same speed and ease as their male counterparts (thomas, bierema, & landau, 2004) nor have they become a predominant force in prime leadership or decisionmaking positions, especially within higher education (walton & mcdade, 2001). the statement of the problem much of the research of women in administrative roles has been concentrated on the external barriers that exist in higher education and are considered particularly troublesome for professional women (baugher & martin, 1981; bowers & hummel, 1979; kanter, 1977). for instance, colleges and universities, like most institutions, were established by men. consequently, they tend to have processes and structures in place that are reflective of male values and lifestyles (e.g., no accommodation for child care). these already established values and processes are difficult to change. further studies were conducted and several barriers were found in recruitment and hiring practices, training, formal and informal communication networks, and sex typing of certain types and levels of administrative positions. in fact, fields identified with women are often downgraded as in the case of home economics, nursing, library science, and student affairs. women in these fields often advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 3 are overlooked and find that their experience is disregarded when institutions initiate a search for vice-presidents, provosts, or other top administrative positions (sandler, 1986). other studies coined the phrase “chilly climate” in higher education or the “glass ceiling” effect. these studies were focused on the countless intangible inequities of women in the workforce such as fewer resources, fewer opportunities, and sexual harassment that prohibited or barred women from applying or accepting positions within upper-level administration. the compounding effect of fewer opportunities for administrative promotion perpetuates the lack of women in the pipeline (nidiffer, 2001). when reviewing an organizational chart, women are most likely clustered within the middle and bottom portions of the pyramid. thus, women are far more likely to be assistants and associates than presidents and provosts, especially at four-year public research universities (american council for education, 2009; kaplan & tinsley, 1989). these middle management type positions are where women’s skills have minimal chance of impacting the overall university policy, and opportunities for advancement are virtually non-existent (baxter & wright, 2000; elliott & smith, 2004; wenniger & conroy, 2001). basically, women who are employed in lower administrative positions must have the education, skills and expertise to do the job, but do not impact the future of the organization because there is less communication with the primary organizational hierarchy (ferguson, 1984). historically, women have received little or no encouragement to seek leadership positions, while men were encouraged to enter administration to a greater degree than women (growe & montgomery, 1999). this lack of encouragement exists even though women who earn doctorates are more likely than men to desire an academic career, but are not being hired at equal rates. interestingly, from 1997-98 to 2007-08, the number of women earning doctorate degrees increased 67.9% in comparison to men who had a 17.1% increase in the number earning doctorates. in fact, women surpassed men in the total number of doctorate degrees conferred in 2007-08. therefore, more women have the education credentials for these academic career positions, but may not be encouraged to pursue such a career. even though women are lauded for having the right combination of skills for leadership which yield outstanding effectiveness, there appears to be a widespread recognition that women often come in second to men when competing for upper level leadership positions (eagley, 2007; wellington, kropf, & gerkovick, 2003). furthermore, because leaders are thought to have manifesting traits such as confidence, aggressiveness and selfdirection, stereotypes about leaders generally resemble stereotypes of men more than of women. consequently, people more easily credit men with leadership ability and more readily accept them as leaders (eagly, 2007; wenniger and conroy, 2001). basically, with more women holding positions that are stepping stones to upperlevel management, it is apparent that doors of opportunity have opened for the advancement of women. however, with 45% of the administrative and faculty positions in higher education held by women, the number of women in upperlevel positions primarily at four-year doctoral research institutions is still fairly sparse in comparison to the number of men suggesting more leadership development, mentoring, networking, and greater efforts by institutions to identify and attract women leaders are needed (jaschik, 2010). advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 4 purpose of the study while research has identified barriers, documented the external forces inhibiting a woman’s ability to move upward in her career, and developed methods to overcome, eliminate, or change the barriers, patriarchal culture, and masculine leadership roles, the prior research has had little effect on the advancement of women to upper-level administrative positions at four-year doctoral research institutions. as a result, researchers need to look through a different lens and consider the influential factors motivating a woman’s decision to pursue and succeed to upper-level administrative positions, particularly at four-year doctoral research institutions. overall, the goal of this study was to promote a fuller understanding of motivation as an important “ingredient” influencing a woman’s decision to advance in her career. motivation is perceived as the central focus to understanding behavior and is a concept used to describe forces that initiate or direct behavior. in other words, motivation serves to link the stimulus change to the behavior change and provides a possible explanation for this relationship (petri, 1991). the study of motivation is broad and may be analyzed using four main categories, physiological, individual, social, and philosophical. although each of these levels of analysis is important, the focus for this study was on the individual analysis. basically, the study of motivation at the individual level involves understanding motivational changes that occur within a person as a result of organizational or environmental conditions. the individual level of motivation was examined to provide insight into the important motivational factors that influence the behavior of the individual (petri, 1991). bandura’s (1977) research is important for an understanding of motivation at the individual level because it strongly suggests that some motivated behaviors are learned through observation. motives are personal possessions which have subjective reality. motivated behavior, on the other hand, is evaluative which implies choice and decisions. human decision making is an integrating process that takes account of the multiplicity of variables including facts, values, and feelings (cavalier, 2000). the source of motivation increasingly is being seen as something inside the person, an intrinsic part that needs to be supported or elicited rather than established. eliciting natural motivation requires supportive interpersonal interactions and environments that provide for autonomy support and a match of personal and organizational goals (mccombs, 1994). using bandura’s model of reciprocal determination, the researcher investigated in-depth what influential factors were responsible for motivating women to achieve upper-level positions in higher education. specifically, the components of bandura’s model which included selfefficacy, personal behavior, environmental factors and the interaction of all three components were explored. bandura (1986) suggested that personal factors affect behaviors and interpretation of environmental cues. self-efficacy influenced effort, persistence, and choices of responsibility. one of the beliefs that promote autonomy is the strength of personal self-efficacy. as efficacy increases, individuals feel a greater sense of control, which leads to less anxiety, greater persistence, more task-related effort, and better use of feedback. self-efficacy is an assessment of all the personal factors that could affect one’s performance such as past performance, ability, adaptability, capacity to coordinate skilled sequences of actions, advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 5 and resourcefulness (locke & latham, 1994). for instance, if a woman has a high self-efficacy, she possesses a personal belief in her ability to pursue and achieve her stated goals for career advancement, and thus motivated to explore employment opportunities in the upper-level administrative arena. secondly, the study determined how a woman’s action or reaction (personal behavior) to situations or events affected her beliefs and attitudes in fulfilling her career goals. women can help to advance their careers and the profession and to nullify stifling stereotyped images of leaders by being well-prepared and qualified for the position (gupton & slick, 1996). in relation to career development, targeted behaviors would be identified in relation to a specific outcome. ultimately, the successful female administrator needs to create a blueprint for personal ownership and professional growth. she is the architect of her future, creating all the changes, building upon personal beliefs and prior experiences, shaping her life by purposes and principles (ausejo, 1993). in other words, women’s motivations for upward career mobility are influenced by the establishment of a career path or career goals that are set for advancing to upperlevel administrative positions. finally, research suggests that factors influencing motivation might vary with gender, cultural identity, and environmental factors (hoddell, street, & wildblood, 2002). environment factors, by definition, are external to the individual and are not as easily changed, altered, or implemented. however, the individual has a choice as to how she reacts to these environmental cues and how she can use them to her benefit, especially as she advances in her career. essentially, environmental factors such as the role of a mentor, the organizational structure and culture influence a woman’s decision toward career advancement. according to bandura’s model, the person (beliefs and expectancies), behavior and environment interact in ways that have reciprocal influence on each other. bandura (1989) contends that within a system of “triadic reciprocal causation” self-generated influences are just one source of human action along with other personal factors (background) and the environment which both have a determining influence on action. research questions an understanding of motivation can serve as a valuable tool for understanding the causes of behavior in any organization, which in turn helps to predict the effects of any action within the working environment and directs behavior so that individual goals can be achieved (nadler & lawler, 1977). with this in mind, this study answered the following overarching question along with four sub-questions related to bandura’s model of motivation including the four components of self-efficacy, personal behaviors, environmental factors and the interaction of these three components: what motivational factors are perceived by women to influence their decision to pursue upper-level administrative positions? 1. what are the perceptions of women’s self-efficacy related to career advancement? 2. how do women’s personal behaviors (career path, mobility, and overall skills) affect their beliefs and attitudes towards career advancement? 3. what are women’s perceptions of the effects from environmental factors such as organizational structure, campus culture, and mentors in regard to their career advancement? 4. in what ways do self-efficacy, personal behaviors, and environmental factors interact to advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 6 influence women’s motivation towards career advancement? together the responses to these questions created a composite of the factors influencing women’s motivation to pursue upper-level administrative positions in higher education administration. methodology a multi-case study approach was used to provide a more in-depth understanding of the motivational factors affecting women’s decisions to advance in their careers, specifically to upper-level administrative positions. according to merriam (1998), a qualitative case study “is an intensive, holistic description and analysis of a single instance, phenomenon, or social unit” (p. 27). insights gleaned from the case studies can directly influence policy, practice, and future research. the sources of data included in the study were: (1) in-depth, semi-structured, individual interviews with each female and (2) pertinent documents related to their career progression, (e.g., vita, organizational chart, etc.). in addition, a reflection journal was kept to record emerging themes, implications to the data analysis, the length of interview, interviewee’s inflection of voice when asked certain questions, and which questions may need to be reworded for future interviews. for this study, participants were identified from one specific type of higher education institution, the land-grant college or institution. using the land-grant system provided the opportunity to receive a sample of participants from institutions with similar roles and missions and located in each of the fifty states. participant selection was achieved using purposive sampling (patton, 1990) in order to satisfy criteria seen as having the potential to enhance its descriptive quality. in this study, 61 potential participants meeting the criteria (female, upper-level position such as president, vice-president, or provost, three years at the land-grant institution) were invited to participate. a formal invitation letter, a short questionnaire, and an overview of the study were sent to the potential participants. the interview sample was identified from those who agreed to participate in the study. because this investigation focused on women who were currently employed in upper-level higher education administrative positions, participants who were invited needed to be considered successful in their careers. for this study, success was defined as retaining an upper-level administrative position for at least three years. by using women acknowledged to be successful, the study had an advantage of exploring the motivation behind the critical decisions and behaviors exhibited by women in upperlevel administrative positions. although a specific sample size was not set, the sample needed to allow for a reasonable number of different positions. from this group of 61 women, 18 participants agreed to participate and provided the requested information (vita, organizational chart, and consent form) and thus, were included in the study. unfortunately, of the two women employed as the president or chancellor, one retired as president in june 2007 and the other declined to participate. the participants included four chief academic officers, two vice presidents for finance, seven vice presidents for student affairs, and five other vice presidents. see table 1 for the characteristics of the participants. using creswell’s (1998) data analysis spiral, the researcher established main coding categories and then entered the interview data (narrative excerpts) into a spreadsheet program for ease in data manipulation. the spreadsheets were divided into the three main components (main codes, level 1) of self-efficacy, personal behaviors, and advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 7 environmental factors based on bandura’s model of reciprocal determination and one spreadsheet to record the participants discussion of the interaction among the three main components. a reiterative coding process was then conducted which allowed for findings to emerge as suggested by the data, in other words, inductive analysis. both within-case and across-case analysis was conducted. for this study, the narrative excerpts were further analyzed and grouped into sub-codes (level 2) as defined by the literature reviewed. also, this study followed the process suggested by guba and lincoln (1981) to further categorize level 2 subcodes into at least two and not more than six level 3 sub-codes. guba and lincoln recommend four guidelines for developing level 3 sub-codes that are both comprehensive and illuminating. first, the number of people who mention something or the frequency with which something arises in the data indicates an important aspect. second, level 3 sub-codes will appear to various audiences as more or less credible. thirdly, sub-codes will be unique and should be retained. finally, certain level 3 sub-codes may reveal “areas of inquiry not otherwise recognized” or “provide a unique leverage on an otherwise common problem” (p. 95). several iterations of the analysis resulted in the refinement and clarification of level 2 and 3 sub-codes and their definitions. from the three levels of codes, the data analysis produced a total of 35 findings that were then reduced to three broad themes threaded throughout the levels of codes. results the findings are described within each of bandura’s components of self-efficacy, personal behavior, and environmental factors (table 2) and respond to each of the research sub-questions. a few of the verbatim quotes are included to exemplify the findings. self-efficacy bandura noted that unless people believe that they can bring about desired outcomes by their actions, they have little incentive to act or to persevere in the face of difficulties. women exclude entire classes of options rapidly, on efficacy grounds, without bothering to analyze costs and benefits. behavior such as this can only be explained by adding perceived efficacy to the decision making model (kester, 2001). beliefs of personal efficacy touch every aspect of a woman’s life whether by how well she motivates herself, perseveres in the face of adversities, or the life choices she makes. in this study, the participants felt their confidence was defined by their abilities and effectiveness as well as just having the internal belief that they can do the job and in some cases, better than those in the current position. a woman’s strong confidence was built on the continued rewards, accomplishments, and achievements. in addition, networking and observing others succeed assisted in identifying the best methods or steps to handle specific situations or improve and thus, increased confidence. dr. marshall approached confidence by being self-assured. she explained, “i think a person needs to be self assured, and that’s not to say i know everything. i don’t know a lot of things. but i know i can figure it out by talking to other people, by going to the library, by using the lab. i am smart enough to figure it out. that’s self assurance.” the successes and challenges of the participants provided a measure of their self-efficacy. the participants tended to define success in relation to assisting students, staff and colleagues as well as advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 8 providing opportunities for them to improve and succeed. they also described success in terms of making a difference either at the institutional level or in the lives of students or colleagues. dr. shilo defined success as “small saves” and having respect for herself and others. basically, it is “the impact that i'm able to make; that i will have left at least a fingerprint here, more than on my desk, but that, i think that's something we should all do for many positions at any level, is to make a difference and to make the load easier for the people that you work with. i'm real relationship oriented so, i think it's respect, the impact that you're able to have, and the unexpected. they're not intangible, but small saves. if you can come to your office and have a small save every day, it really does add up. you know, so we can provide little miracles, little mini miracles, small saves, that i think make a huge difference to how the campus feels, how we feel about ourselves and what we do, and i think sometimes you got to go looking for them, but they're there every day.” personal behavior this study uncovered several types of personal behaviors affecting the participants’ advancement to an upper-level administrative position in higher education. women in this study did not plan their career path; rather they took advantage of opportunities as they arose. making a difference either at the institution or in the lives of students and staff and evaluating value systems were critical factors when deciding to move to an upper-level position at the current institution or move to another institution. besides earning a terminal degree, all the participants encouraged developing the ability to work with a diverse group of people, demonstrating a collaborative leadership style that also empowers others, and valuing other people’s ideas and expertise. in describing her leadership style, dr. letterman noted, “i like the team approach a lot to addressing issues at the university, because we are a complex institution and you need multiple perspectives to address some of these issues. you do have to be upfront with innovative ideas, but they have to be ones that people are willing to work in a team to move forward, or they won’t get done. you do have to work with a number of peers and strong leaders at your own level to accomplish very complex tasks. you do have to make a decisive decision that nobody likes, and give people the motivation to get it done.” balancing work time and personal time, whether with family, friends, or just oneself, concerned over half of the participants. making choices between time with family and career was the greatest compromise expressed by the participants. the lack of time with family is directly affected by the increased time spent at work and additional work responsibilities, which participants considered to be a concern. dr. hatfield confessed, “i live to work and work to live and i love that. you get a lot of energy from that.” dr. shilo admitted, “i don’t rest enough and i don’t go on vacation enough. i’m not quite a devout workaholic, but i’m on their watch list.” dr. patton declared, “i am a workaholic and i give my heart and soul to what i do. my service is my work. i don’t have the kind of time i wish i had to really go out and do things in the community. to spend time away from work is a scheduled event.” even with these concerns and consequences for advancing in their careers, participants would not have changed anything because advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 9 every challenge or experience was a positive tool for growth. environmental factors environment factors, by definition, are external to the individual and are not as easily changed, altered, or implemented. however, the individual has a choice as to how she reacts to these environmental cues and how she can use them to her benefit, especially as she advances in her career. in addition, a person’s inability to understand or become fully integrated into the structure, reward system, and culture can lead to powerlessness, frustration, and even failure. for that reason, the structure and culture of the organization should provide opportunities and not limit access for women to attain experiences in the organization and prepare them for attaining administrative positions (kanter, 1993; wernick, 1994). the specific environmental cues most noted in the literature as affecting a woman’s career advancement include organizational structure, culture, and mentoring. some considerations for understanding how women function in an organization include understanding the organizational environment and culture and considering the numerical distribution of women in the existing organizational structure (kanter, 1993). all but one institution had a male president or chancellor. even with these statistics, most of the participants felt the organizational structure supported women and provided women opportunities to advance. unlike the organizational structure which is more the external skin of the institution, the campus culture provides the internal attributes of the institution. the goals, style, values, and ethics of the institution are learned, felt, or perceived by the faculty, staff and even the students. the success of any of these groups is determined by how well their goals and values match to the institution. the participants felt if persons are valued by those to whom they report to, then the participants would be perceived by others as being credible, trusting, competent, and effective. participants felt the president or ceo determined the tone of the campus and a change in the presidency made a huge difference for them in either staying at the institution or making a difference in their unit and thus, the university. according to ms. butel, it was an interesting experience to understand how the leadership tone set by the person at the top impacts an organization. she further explained: “now we have our brand new president who is going to change the face of this university very, very rapidly because he is already bringing in three new people at the vp level each of whom is superbly qualified for the job they were recruited to do. the difference is like night and day. i would never have believed that you can see that kind of difference overnight. and it’s gratifying, because having lived for seven years under an administration, i would never have pinpointed that during the beginning or middle of the administration how kind of stultifying that kind of environment is.” stewart (1986) found that for women’s career development, mentoring had a positive effect on goal achievement, timely introduction into administrative professions, role model identification, network expansion, and political familiarity with the institution. the participants described their mentors as either promoting them and thus, helping them to advance in their careers or as coaches providing advice, tips, and insight needed to be successful. networks of people, particularly those in the same type of position, were considered by the participants as important support groups. advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 10 participants commented about the importance of being visible and how mentors helped them to be more visible. dr. sankey’s colleague in the department was very supportive and made sure she got involved. “he would invite me to come for coffee in the main building which was about one mile away. i would always have an excuse not to come. well, he persisted and said that i needed to do this. so, i did and it helped me get socialized in the department. by being the only woman and the youngest person in the department, it would have been easy to just hide out. by being asked to go to coffee could have been the difference between success and failure. in addition, when this man became department head, he made sure that i was put on some key committees. then, when he became dean, he made sure i was provided similar opportunities. i am now a leader nationally and therefore, i have chaired a number of national committees and prominent groups. so, my peers feel i am a leader.” interaction of the three components – self-efficacy, personal behavior, and environment bandura (2001) used the term reciprocal determinism, in which the environment, behavior, and the person interact in ways that have reciprocal influence on each other. in other words, cognitions influence choices of environments and behaviors, which then influence behavioral performance and, ultimately, beliefs concerning those environments and behaviors (maddux, 1995). in this study, nine of the 18 respondents agreed with bandura’s theory of the interaction which occurs between an individual’s personality (ability, values, needs, expectations, etc.), her perceived environment, and her personal beliefs. dr. samuelson described the linkage like a series of three knobs. “you turn them up or turn them down depending on what’s happening with the other knob. your self-confidence is up or down depending upon what’s happening in your leadership role and how hard you want to push a committee. they are all mutually dependent on one another and i think the success of a leader is the ability to understand the ratio with which each of those must interact at any one time and to be willing to adapt and change.” in contrast, seven out of the 18 respondents either felt personal behavior (being prepared) or a combination of personal behavior and the environment contributed most to their decisions to advance to an upper-level administrative position in higher education. overarching themes by examining the findings from this study within the three components (level 1 codes) of bandura’s model and how these components interact to reciprocally influence each other, three themes integrated throughout the findings and across all levels of codes emerged. theme one consists of a woman’s need to seek out support groups and have the opportunity to nurture others as she pursues an upper-level administrative position. theme two suggests there are requirements of institutional knowledge, skills to manage and lead projects and colleagues, experience working in higher education and in a specified area, and participation in different trainings in order to advance to an upper-level administrative position. finally, theme 3 embraces the idea that women must establish a value system, follow their own values and do not compromise their values in order to advance to an upper-level administrative position in higher education. table 3 shows the themes advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 11 that interact or cut across all coding levels or categories. because the participants mentioned support systems and networks either in building confidence, providing sponsorship, encouragement and feedback or assisting with the interview process, theme one stresses the need for mentors or coaches. in addition, hiring and working with good people who participants helped to grow and succeed substantiated the reason the participants entered higher education. participants in this study described role models who are caring, giving, and provide opportunities to promote other women. the participants also realized at many institutions, the tone of the university is set by the person in charge and recognized the strong leaders are those who collaborate and empower others. the second theme demonstrated the need for knowledge, skills, and preparedness for other job opportunities, committee work, increased job responsibilities, and being effective in their current position. increasing one’s skill set, becoming more proficient, efficient, and competent as well as receiving specialized training were emphasized by most of the participants in order to do one’s job well, increase confidence and to advance in one’s career. values are the main thrust of theme three. according to the participants, decisions and working relationships must be value driven in order to maintain credibility, trust, honor, integrity and to move the institution in the right direction. participants stressed comparing one’s values to the institutional values for similarities. also, participants described many of their role models as very ethical and tough by pushing for what they felt was right. the compromises faced by the participants focused on determining the value of their time at work, at home, and even for themselves. participants with the “i-can” attitude have the confidence to stand by their values and not allow their values to be compromised. discussion and implications the overarching themes emerging from this study suggest that women are motivated to pursue upper-level administrative positions if they are supported by others and are able to provide support and guidance to others (theme 1); have knowledge of university processes and executive position responsibilities and are competent, efficient, and effective (theme 2); and finally are able to maintain their personal value systems (theme 3). more importantly, the combination of all these factors interacting and influencing the other impacts women’s decisions to pursue upper-level administrative positions. theme 1: support groups and nurturing the participants in this study emphasized the need for support groups not only for building confidence and assisting in the direction of their career path, but also as role models, coaches or to provide feedback. in addition, participants tied their successes, challenges, and skill attainment to people’s influence and assistance. women need a person or several people to be their sounding boards to bounce ideas off of and to work through issues or concerns. for women, these support groups and individuals reinforce their beliefs in their abilities and experiences to develop, implement and complete a project. in addition, the feedback from these support groups is critical in helping women improve, grow, and increase their confidence. formal and informal mentorship programs were not specifically explored in the interviews, nor did the participants describe any type of mentorship programs. this was somewhat surprising since mentoring programs are not new to the public sector and have been implemented within various advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 12 higher education organizations such as the national association of student personnel administrators (naspa). however, the participants provided descriptions and stories of people who offered their expertise, assistance, and encouragement. for the most part, fellow colleagues at other institutions, former or current department or unit heads (even a chancellor), or former graduate school professors were identified as coaches, supporters or those who provided encouragement or feedback. according to powney (1997), women as senior managers were all successful by definition because of personal motivation and support. in the case of this study’s participants, mentors or supporters were very much involved in their entry and advancement in higher education. in addition, participants felt by helping others, they also assisted the institution to reach its mission and goals. in fact, participants in this study were fairly adamant in the fact that when a person reaches the upper-level administrative arena, the emphasis is nurturing and influence the success of others rather than on self. dr. samuelson used an analogy to describe where a woman in upper-level administration should focus her attention. “from a woman’s aspect, it’s like if you’re going to a party and you’re going to worry about what you’re going to wear because you want to make a good impression on everybody versus going to the party and making sure that you have made everybody else comfortable and spoken to everybody. if you lack confidence, you’re going to worry about what you look like. if you are confident, you don’t worry about what you look like, you‘re going to worry about everybody else having a good time.” participatory, collaborative, team oriented, and cooperation were words used by the participants to describe various leadership styles. according to madden (2002), collaboration is an effective leadership strategy. collaboration works because participatory and consensus-based decisionmaking is far more satisfying for participants and produces results and plans that people readily embrace. the participants in this study would be best described as catalysts leaders in which they feel good when bringing out the best in others and by being democratic. according to brunner (1993), catalyst leaders do not use the “power over” people because they achieve power through people by moving people, motivating people and getting the job done through people. at the same time, the “power to” method is used when they want to empower others to make their own decisions collaboratively and to carry them out through a collective and inclusive model. the participants in this study agreed that women leaders often possess the attributes of compassion, empathy, inspiration, and vision, equating these aspects of nurturance forming the basis of tone, voice and vision in women’s leadership. these attributes of a leader were necessary as women leaders advance in their careers (helgesen, 1990). in fact, participants described their role models with many of these attributes in addition to promoting other women, being human or real, leading as a woman rather than as a man, and creating a harmonious work place. as wenniger and conroy (2001) noted, the leadership roles are changing and people today are prone to gravitate towards leaders who are nurturing, caring, and giving. women understand and can easily adapt to inclusive leadership, team orientation, and empowering others. “women have a profound talent for making order out of the most confounding intricacies of apparent chaos, moving well advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 13 from the pieces to the whole, creating quilts from scraps and baskets from plants” (p. 14). furthermore, participants in this study found working in teams was beneficial and ensured that the experts were at the table when making tough decisions. participants made every effort to involve the people most affected by the decisions. in addition, the participants strived to be inclusive and keep the communication lines open. for one participant, ms. roller, a quilting bee came to mind as she described her leadership style along with good communication. “i look at it [my leadership style] like a quilting-bee. you’ve probably seen them on tv. my grandmother used to do them. it’s this big room, with a big frame and you have all of these women on all the corners and they work together to reach the middle. they have to communicate. how many spots am i off, and so when they get to the middle it all works, because if it’s off, it doesn’t work, and so it takes lots of communication so that they are in sync when they get to the middle. so i think that that’s my leadership style.” participants cited the opportunity to influence and work with individuals or groups of people as reasons for being in higher education. conversely, it was also the reason to not pursue the presidency because of the isolation from these groups of people who the participants felt they helped. therefore, for women to pursue upper-level administrative positions, opportunities to interact, influence, and impact people are important motivational factors. theme 2: knowledge and skills all of the women in this study expressed strong personal confidence and self-esteem. for the most part, these women never doubted their ability to do the job or to lead a group. participants based their confidence on their acquired knowledge, experience in the field and doing well. echoing the statement of hymowitz (2004), these women did not view themselves as ambitious, but viewed their success as resulting from their positive experiences, effective leadership, accomplishments, either personally or through other people, and increased responsibilities. participants emphasized the need to be prepared and acquire various skills especially in listening, interpersonal, institutional process, higher education finance, and even the law. one participate indicated the need to read well, quickly, and feel comfortable in just catching the broad view rather than all the details. ms. butel summarized the necessary skills and attributes needed for her position, which also can be translated to other positions in higher education. “to do this kind of job, you have to have very good leadership skills combined with very good managerial skills. in the kind of job i do, i not only oversee my specific division, but i’m also part of the executive leadership team and budget counsel of the university, so i need to know a lot about the entire institution and how it functions to be a participant at that level. you need to have very good people skills. and i think this is particularly relevant for women. you have to be the kind of person who can be aggressive when you need to be, persuasive, and sort of get things done. get people to collaborate around a set of goals, push hard when you need to, and back off when you need to. you know, do all of that without being abrasive, without creating too many enemies. and at least the way i do advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 14 my job, i have to be able to function on a lot of different levels.” all in all, integrity, leadership and interpersonal skills as well as institutional knowledge, experience in the field, and being prepared either for job interviews, meetings with faculty, staff, constituents, or talking with the ceo were highlighted by the participants in this study. therefore, obtaining a broad knowledge base, being competent in the field, and acquiring good interpersonal skills are important factors to motivate women to pursue upper-level administrative positions. theme 3: value systems participants in this study shared the need for women to determine if positions they pursue are a good fit. in other words, women need to assess their values and the value system of the institution to determine if there is a match. the participants cautioned other women not to compromise their values and to not lose sight of what is really important in life. this follows the feminist principles that require the articulation of very clear statements of right and wrong, or acceptable and unacceptable behavior (madden, 2002). thus, strong leaders are guided by values and feminist theory provides a belief system that is the foundation for the values of higher education administrators of both genders. dr. patton concurred in that “the secret to my success is being able to identify where the values are in sync. and where i struggled, is when [the institution] didn’t even know what their values were, let alone whether my values were in sync with their values. and i think that’s a piece that fuels success or fuels trouble. but part of that is environmental, but the specific piece for me is what does the institution value, what is the character of that institution, and who am i as a person, and are those consistent?” at the same time, women in this study determined that the tone of the institution was set by the president or ceo. the ceos of institutions play a central role in shaping norms, policies, and practices that help create or ameliorate the chilly climate for women administrators (chliwniak, 1997). if the ceo is a strong advocate for women, then acceptance and support for women in upper-level administration is more prevalent. all the participants commented about time and how they have had to make choices in their professional and personal life regarding time commitments. long hours and numerous responsibilities in the workplace coupled with family, household, marital, social, and personal demands on time lead to multiple time commitments. in addition, making tough value oriented decisions about where to spend their time created compromises for the women of this study. some participants put their careers on hold while raising a family or decided to remain at an institution to allow their children to complete school rather than taking the fast track up the career ladder. o’brien and janssen (2005) conclude that women are encouraged to apply for positions, yet led to question if they really can fully participate because of external responsibilities such as caregiver roles within a family. at the same time, participants recognized that institutional time has become their time. in other words, participants found difficulty in finding personal time and time to be with friends. ensuring a good fit between the participants and the institution, specifically not jeopardizing personal values were necessary factors influencing women’s decisions to pursue upper-level administrative positions. being ethical, credible and accountable were important attributes in leaders and were further emphasized when the participants advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 15 described their role models and the reason their role models were successful. interaction of themes the main point of bandura’s model of reciprocal determination is that people are motivated by the interaction of their personal confidence or self-efficacy, their personal behaviors, and the environment. likewise, the themes which motivated the participants to pursue upper-level administrative positions in higher education are intertwined. the support and encouragement by others motivated many of the participants to enter higher education and to pursue upper-level administrative positions. at the same time, knowledge and additional skills were gained through people who showed interest in the participants and coached them as they moved to the next level. as was discovered by many participants, the supportive environment and positive culture for women was linked to the ceo. many participants remained at institutions where they were valued by the ceo, and thus by the institution. in turn, the participants were very much engaged to help and influence others. at the same time, they promoted collaborative and team oriented work places. inclusion rather than exclusion was the motto for many participants. in other words, focusing on others rather than self as well as how they could improve the institution were ways in which the participants were motivated to move to an upper-level administrative position. some of the skills required for the positions were value driven such as good ethics, accountability, and credibility. without a good set of values aligned with the institutional values, women have difficulty working in diverse environments and may develop a high tolerance to accept what they feel cannot be changed. on the other hand, possessing the knowledge, skills, and experience provided participants the confidence needed to pursue an upper level position. recommendations as was discovered through this study, women have the self-confidence, educational background, and years of experience to pursue upper-level administrative positions. however, women need support groups and the ability to nurture others. in addition, the opportunity to acquire knowledge and skills, and the ability to maintain and evaluate values were identified as motivational factors for women. consequently, women need assistance from the institutional leadership to develop, promote and implement initiatives focused on these factors, which will motivate women to pursue upper-level administrative positions. three initiatives were recommended: (1) implementation of mentoring programs, (2) provision of professional development opportunities, and (3) development of a family-friendly culture. aspiring women administrators should seek out support groups within their field and investigate any opportunities to network with women and men in similar fields. in addition to informal mentoring, institutions need to consider supporting formal mentoring programs. the development of mentoring programs which pair promising young women with experienced male or female administrators can help women understand the unwritten rules. institutions must either develop training programs or financially support aspiring women to attend various state and national organizational groups to become networked and take advantage of their internships and training. women need to take the initiative and volunteer for projects that would increase their visibility and further develop advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 16 leadership skills and abilities. at the same time, institutions need to offer opportunities to aspiring women to develop their leadership skills through training, specialized leadership institutes, and to ensure women are well represented on various campus committees and task forces. basically, to increase the number of women in senior academic leadership roles, it is necessary to provide avenues for women in the academy to enhance or develop leadership competencies (flood, et al., 2010). higher education institutions must consider re-evaluating their value system to ensure it is inclusive of everyone’s values, including those of women, and to implement family friendly initiatives. obviously, this will not be an easy task. however, one step is for institutions to stop requiring excessive time commitments that force employees to “prove” their job is more important than their family. in addition, incorporating family friendly policies and practices allows women and even men to be caregivers of children or parents without being penalized and provides a secure and friendly work environment. more importantly, women need to be tough and establish values that fit their personality and integrity. women must stand up for what they feel is right and not conform to values that deviate from their own values. recommendations for future research a number of unique issues arose in this research that warrant further exploration. the first issue is the general health of women especially as more women enter the upper-level administrative positions. participants were concerned about their personal health and fitness. having enough energy, discomfort of menopause, and emotional instability are just a few of the concerns raised by participants. the second issue concerns women who do not promote other women. in other words, women may discourage more than they encourage other women. as the participants indicated, women have not been as helpful to other women in their advancement as men often are for other men. researching why women diminish other women’s successes especially as they advance may provide further insight as to women’s slow progress towards upper-level administrative positions another issue to research is the imposter phenomenon. a couple of the participants raised the idea of feeling as though they were imposters and wondering if anyone was going to question them. the imposter phenomenon is an experience that negatively affects one's self-concept and self-esteem. a person suffering from the imposter phenomenon believes even though they are successful, their accomplishments were the result of luck or some external circumstance (clance & imes, 1978). even though the phenomenon was introduced 30 years ago, the possibility that this phenomenon is affecting women’s advancement to upper-level positions should be investigated. finally, another research study is to identify the motivational factors of aspiring women in higher education (women in middle management), and compare those factors to the motivational factors identified through this study. ideally, similarities would validate this study. on the other hand, differences would provide additional motivational factors influencing women to advance in their careers. conclusions one of the objectives of this study was to embrace a more positive tone of research rather than one that analyzed topics perceived as negatively charged in determining causes for women not advancing as quickly in higher education. advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 17 this study conceded that barriers existed, but looked internally to what motivated individuals. overall, the women in this study enjoyed their work and were very confident in their abilities and skills. these women did not question their confidence to do the job and to do it well. they have the credentials and experience to advance to the level of presidency. however, the women in this study have no desire to advance to the presidency. instead they aspired to upperlevel administrative positions that provided opportunities to work with faculty and students, contribute to the successes of colleagues and students, and to be in the trenches making change happen either by implementing programs or changing policy. for these women, their successes were defined by the success of others, success of programs and the success of the institution rather than their personal achievements of title, power and money. as dr. samuelson expressed, “i'm not looking for the next job. i don't have to worry about me, and i'm not focused on building my resume. i'm not focused on building me. instead i'm focused on building the university, and getting faculty awards and getting grants for them, and building their programs. i'm confident i can do 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(1994). preparedness, career advancement, and the glass ceiling. retrieved august 26, 2006, from http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ key_workplace/128. table 1: characteristics of the participants alias name alias name of institution us location current position years in current position tenure status highest degree mobil (y/n) kathleen anderson university of concretia midwest vice president for institutional effectiveness 6 non phd n carol butel salsberry state university west vp for university relations 7 non jd n kelly caldwell jackson state university southeast vp for student affairs 3 non edd y diane clark marvel state university south sr. vice president & provost 4 tenured phd y ashley colter university of concretia midwest vp for student affairs 5 non edd y christine garrett jackson state university southeast provost 3 tenured phd y evelyn gutrell university of catterberry midwest vice chancellor student affairs 6 non phd n amanda hatfield elijahton university east vp development & university relations 7 non phd n julie letterman university of bartelsville midwest sr. vice chancellor academic affairs 3 tenured phd y kathy marshall bethany state university midwest vice provost for academic services & technology 13 tenured phd n charlene patton evergreen state university east vp for student affairs 4 non phd y mary pratt university of johannesburg south vice chancellor student affairs 8.5 non phd y loraine roller sussex university south sr. vp & chief financial officer 3 non bba y barbara university of southeast provost 6 tenured phd n http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/key_workplace/128 http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/key_workplace/128 advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 21 samuelson donavan linda sankey evergreen state university east sr. vp research & dean of graduate school 8 tenured phd n martha schlinder university of bartelsville midwest vice chancellor business & finance 7 non mba y joan shavley university of shenandoah west vp student services 9 non phd y katrina shilo marvel state university south vp student affairs 7 non phd y table 2: categories and findings personal behaviors career path – a course or way of chosen pursuit. participants did not plan to enter higher education. (12) participants wanted to become a policy and change maker. (12) participants aspired to be president, dean of students or achieve in chosen field. (17) participants maintained status quo and were content to stay in current position. (13) women must be prepared, seek out assistance from mentors or friends when interviewing for positions. (12) women need to determine if the position is a good fit when interviewing for positions. (9) mobility – move from place to place gaining new ideas, discovering different methods and processes, broadening knowledge base, and working with a variety of people are advantages to moving from institution to the other. (11) by staying at one institution, you maintain your reputation and have a better knowledge and history of the university.(9) skills – ability, proficiency, technique, specialized training women must develop and maintain skills related to knowledge. (18) women must develop and maintain skills related to performance. (18) women musts develop and maintain skills focused in the behavioral skills. (18) women need to develop leadership skills primarily in being able to collaborate and empower others. (17) compromises women must balance time between family, work, and yourself. (15) women spend too much time at work, taking more risks and making compromises. (14) environment organization organization supports women, gives them power, and is an advocate for women. (12) organization is still an ole’ boys club.(8) culture administration values women and is good fit for women. (10) category (level 1 and 2) findings (number of participants) self-efficacy confidence – a feeling of assurance or certainty. women have an “i-can” attitude. (13) knowledge, experience and doing well increase confidence. (11) external awards, appreciation notes, and achieving “stretch” goals build confidence. (10) women are able to build confidence with the help from people. (9) success making a difference at the institution or impacting decisions define success. (10) helping and influencing others define success. (11) accomplishing goals define success. (9) success is determined by how one confronts change. (9) hiring and working with good people and receiving notes of appreciation were considered success stories. (11) challenges dealing with change was considered a challenge. (12) with various challenges or risks, women experience many different emotions, feelings, moods, or mental states. (9) advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 22 cultural factors create a chilly climate for women, (9) women perceive the culture to be awkward and may be tougher for women in some disciplines. (12) transformation or change is in progress at some institutions. (12) mentoring mentors focus on career development and provide sponsorship, and coaching. (17) mentors provide psychosocial benefits such as support, encouragement, and feedback. 15) most role models had various traits that contributed to their success such as caring, helpfulness, effectiveness, and very astute. (18) table 3: themes and supportive findings themes supportive findings (coding levels/names indicated) 1. women's need to seek out support groups and have the opportunity to nurture others. external awards and accomplishments build confidence. (self-efficacy/confidence) helping others builds confidence. (self-efficacy/confidence) helping and influencing others defines success. (self-efficacy/success) hiring and working with people and receiving appreciation notes are examples of success. (self-efficacy/success) women must be prepared and seek assistance from others. (personal behaviors/career path) gaining new ideas, discovering different methods and processes and working with a variety of people are a few of the advantages of moving from one institution to the other. (personal behaviors/mobility) women must develop and maintain leadership skills. (personal behaviors/skills) the organization supports women. (environment/organization) culture transformation is in progress and in favor of women. (environment/culture) mentors focus on career development. (environment/mentoring) mentors provide support, encouragement and feedback. (environment/mentoring) role models had various traits that contribute to their success such as caring, helpfulness, effective, promote other women. (environment/mentoring) participants felt that self-efficacy, personal behaviors, and the environment must be present and interact so that women can advance in their careers. (self-efficacy/personal behaviors/environment interaction) 2. requirement of institutional knowledge, skills to manage and lead projects and colleagues, experience working in higher education and participation in different trainings. knowledge, experience and doing well increase confidence. (self-efficacy/confidence) women must be prepared and seek assistance from others. (personal behaviors/career path) gaining new ideas, discovering different methods and processes and working with a variety of people are a few of the advantages of moving from one institution to the other. (personal behaviors/mobility) maintaining your reputation and historical knowledge are a few of the advantages of staying at one institution. (personal behaviors/mobility) women must develop and maintain skills related to knowledge. (personal behaviors/skills) women must develop and maintain skills related to performance. (personal behaviors/skills) mentors focus on career development. (environment/mentoring) role models had various traits that contribute to their success such as caring, helpfulness, effective, promote other women. (environment/mentoring) participants felt that self-efficacy, personal behaviors, and the environment must be present and interact so that women can advance in their careers. (self-efficacy/personal behaviors/environment interaction) 3. women must establish a value system, follow i-can attitude. (self-efficacy/confidence) women need to determine if position is a good fit. (personal behaviors/career path) women must develop and maintain skills related to behavior. (personal behaviors/skills) advancing women in leadership 2012 volume 32 23 their own values and do not compromise their values. women must balance time between family and work. (personal behaviors/compromises) women spend too much time at work and taking on more responsibilities, increasing risk. (personal behaviors/compromises) the administration values women. (environment/culture) role models had various traits that contribute to their success such as caring, helpfulness, effective, promote other women. (environment/mentoring) participants felt that self-efficacy, personal behaviors, and the environment must be present and interact so that women can advance in their careers. (self-efficacy/personal behaviors/environment interaction) educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 57 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 57-68, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper representation of women in top educational management and leadership positions in kenya osumbah b. amondi beatrice osumbah is a lecturer in the science department at bondo teachers training college in kenya phd candidate at maseno university in kenya e-mail: osumbaha@hotmail.com accepted april 24, 2010 the purpose of the study was to investigate factors causing under representation of women in top educational management and leadership positions at the ministry of education headquarters in kenya. descriptive survey design, utilizing quantitative and qualitative approach was used in the study. stratified random sampling was used to categorize the target population of 161 educational personnel by level of management and gender. simple random sampling was then used to get a study sample of 76 officers. questionnaire and interview guide were used to gather information from the respondents. analysis of staff returns documents was done to get the numerical representation of the personnel by gender. data were analyzed using descriptive statistics such as percentages, frequency distribution, mean scores, and standard deviations. the findings showed that 33.3 percent and 32.1 percent of top and middle management positions respectively were held by women. in terms of professional qualifications, 55 percent and 51.5 percent of m.ed and b.ed holders respectively, were women. both male and female genders were rated ‘high’ in possession of skills and personality characteristics the respondents considered important for top educational management and leadership positions. organizational factors were the strongest barriers for women in ascending to top educational management and leadership positions. this was followed by socio-cultural and the least were individual factors. strategies to improve the representation of women in top educational management and leadership therefore focused on the girl child in school, women themselves, society, government policies, the education act and the country’s constitution. key words: top educational management and leadership, women, barriers, representation, skills, personality characteristics introduction under-representation of women in top educational management and leadership positions has had negative implications on government policies and general educational curriculum which has lacked gender mainstreaming. girl child has also lagged behind in education due to lack of positive female role models (republic of kenya, 2007). working women teachers have also lacked mentors and the scenario has tended to be cyclic (gachukia, 2002; growe & montgomery, 1999; otieno, 2001). the question one asks is “do women have what it takes to occupy top educational management and leadership positions, and if they do, what is keeping them out of this female dominated carrier?” in this article, i present the findings of a study i conducted which examined the perceived connection between possession of skills necessary for top educational management and leadership positions and gender representation in the positions as described by various educational officers at the ministry of education headquarters in kenya. located at the capital city of kenya, the ministry of education headquarters is mandated by the government to promote education in the country and constitutes the top and middle management in the education hierarchy. following a brief description of the ministry headquarters, i will present an over view of the literature on women and leadership which both prompted and under-girded this study. the perceptions of educational managers on abilities of women for educational management and leadership positions will then be presented. the intersection of leadership and women is then examined as it applies to ministry of education headquarters. finally, implications for further study are examined. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 58 history, organizational structure and functions of the ministry of education in this section the history, organizational structure and functions of the ministry of education are outlined. the historical outline spells out gender issues in education in kenya from colonial period up to the time of the study. the establishment and growth of the ministry of education from colonial period to date is also outlined. suffice to note that the changes in the organizational structure of the ministry of education would modify its functions accordingly. history of the ministry of education and the gender trail as with any government institution, the ministry of education is a dynamic entity, changing along with political, civic and intellectual movements and changes over time. at this point (june, 2009), in kenya’s history, the ministry of education is experiencing a period of change and restructure, and the number of directorates is currently under discussion for one or more changes (ministry of education, 2009). christian missionaries are largely acknowledged as the founders of western education in kenya (sifuna & otiende, 1994). early missionary schools were established without sanctions or help from the government. the efficiency of such schools depended on the resources and initiative of a particular mission which formulated its own policy, trained, employed and dismissed it own teachers. each mission set its own curriculum and determined what would be examined, resulting in unbalanced education development (ngaroga, 1996). chege and sifuna (2006) outlined that in 1908, j. nelson frazer, a man who had education experiences from india, was invited by the colonial government to survey the education system and recommend ways of organizing it in such a way that both the government and the missionaries could hold stakes in education. he recommended that department of education be established and director of education be appointed to head it. in 1910, the recommendations were effected. the development of education continued to be controlled by the director throughout the colonial period. in 1963, when kenya gained independence, the ministry of education was established, and mandated to manage education in the country, headed by the minister for education. throughout the colonial period, education of girls lagged behind. it was not until 1925 that the government openly decried the low status of women and girls’ education, describing it as lagging behind that of men and boys. the government started to advocate for the improvement of girls’ education, arguing for the first time that educated wives and mothers would contribute to the general welfare of the home and community (kenya national archives annual report as cited in chege & sifuna, 2006). however, it is clear that even as it attracted support for girls’ education, the colonial administration failed to interpret the value of girls’ education in terms of their personal development and well being (chege & sifuna, 2006); much less did it prepare them for leadership. the curriculum for girls was described as three bs, representing baby, bath, and broom. according to assie-lumumba (as cited in chege & sifuna, 2006), a new tradition was established for transmitting values of humility, low ambition and systematic underestimation of girls’ and women’s ability in cognitive achievement, social attainment and capacity to work in the public sphere. soon after independence in 1963, the government published sessional paper no. 10 of 1965, african socialism and its application to planning in kenya, which emphasized the country’s commitment to the objectives of individual freedom, social justice and human dignity (republic of kenya as cited in chege & sifuna, 2006). this paper hardly mentioned, let alone addressing the gender dimension as a crucial defining factor in the existing inequalities between men and women, and between girls and boys in all sections of the society. the first and the second national development plans, 1965-70 and 1970-73 respectively, which mainly addressed the need to translate political independence into economic and social realities, did not mention women at all, giving the impression that women did not have a role to play in national development besides their traditional reproduction obligations. the first direct mention of women in government documents since independence was in the third national development plan (1974-1978), and subsequent development plans re-emphasized this trend (chege & sifuna, 2006). other government documents that have addressed gender issues in education are the poverty reduction strategy paper (2001), economic recovery strategy (2003-2007), national development plan (2002-2008), sessional paper no.1 (2005), kenya education sector structural program (2005), ministry of education strategic plan (2006-2011) and the kenya vision 2030 (2007). kenya is also a signatory to international protocols relating to education and human rights of women and girls, including the universal declaration on human rights (1948), convention on the elimination of all discrimination against women (1979), convention on the rights of the child (1989), jomtiem world conference (1990), beijing declaration and platform for action (1995), dakar framework of action of education for all (2000), millennium development goals as well as goals of the african union (republic of kenya, 2007). in the past, the government has had a number of on-going initiatives to address gender gap at all levels of education including management such as: appointment of qualified female educational managers; gender balanced intake of preservice teacher trainees; gender responsive deployment of teachers; engendering the curriculum; capacity building for school managers, teachers and quality assurance officers on gender issues; and the ministry of education has also established a national task force for gender and education, a ministerial task force on girl’s education and a gender desk (republic of kenya, 2007). since the gender gap continued to be glaring, especially in key governance and management advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 59 positions, both in the wider society and in the education sector in particular (republic of kenya, 2007), the ministry of education, in one of its strategies to implement its ten year policy framework for education, training and research outlined in the sessional paper no. 1 of 2005, developed a gender policy in 2007. among its specific objectives were to: increase participation of women in governance and management of education; mainstream gender at all educational levels, institutions, policies, programs and activities, planning, implementation and budgeting; ensure institutional work environments are gender responsive; and to empower girls and boys, women and men on gender issues (republic of kenya, 2007). the handicap to the realization of gender equality in education in the country is neither lack of knowledge nor of the necessary policy options, but rather the challenge seems to be one of bringing the necessary political commitment, expertise and resources together in order to respond to the task (sifuna and otiende, 2006). however, professor george saitoti, the minister for education at the time of development of the ministry of education gender policy, showed his support and assurance of the government’s commitment in his foreword message when he said: there is consensus that girls’ and women’s empowerment in general has been seriously impeded by several factors, such as cultural and religious practices, inadequate policy guidelines, poverty, and lack of community awareness. these have impacted negatively on women’s access, participation and performance in education... this now policy provides a framework for planning and programming of gender responsive education at all levels of education and this is a clear indication that the government is committed to pursuing gender equality in all spheres of development, and in establishing mechanisms to redress the existing inequalities. (republic of kenya, 2007, pg. 4) organizational structure of the ministry of education headquarters the ministry of education is headed by the minister for education, the chief policy maker, who guides and directs the development of education in the country. the minister is assisted by an assistant minister. the ministry is further divided into administrative and professional wings. the permanent secretary is the executive head, the chief accounting officer and heads the administrative arm of the ministry. the professional wing is headed by the education secretary who is answerable to the permanent secretary (ministry of education, 2009). the current structure of the professional wing is as shown in appendix a. the professional wing is made up of four directorates namely: secondary and tertiary education (s&te); quality assurance and standards (qass); policy and planning (p&p); and basic education (bed). each directorate is headed by a director (d), assisted by senior deputy directors (sdds), who are assisted by deputy directors (dds). under the dds are the senior assistant directors (sads), assisted by assistant directors (ads). the senior education officers (seos) follow and lowest in the rank are the education officers (eos). as at the time of data collection in 2005 the ministry’s professional wing was made up of five directorates namely: basic education; higher education; technical education; quality assurance and standards; and policy and planning. there were also parastatals and semi-autonomous government agencies (sagas) which had roles and reported to the permanent secretary. they included kenya institute of education, jomo kenyatta foundation, kenya literature bureau, kenya institute of special education, kenya education staff institute, commission for higher education, kenya national commission for unesco, higher education loans board, kenya national examinations council, teachers service commission and centre for mathematics and science and technology in africa (cemastea) (ministry of education, 2006). functions of the ministry of education functions of the ministry of education include: (a) formulation, dissemination and implementation of education policies; (b) administration and management of education programs; (c) planning and implementation of education and training programs; (d) curriculum development and implementation; (e) provision of curriculum support materials; (f) quality assurance in education and training; (g) examination and certification; (h) registration of education and training institutions; (i) promotion of educational research; (j) supervision of semi-autonomous government agencies under the ministry; and (k) actualization of the national goals of education (ministry of education, 2009). these functions are condensed in the moe vision and mission. the vision of moe is “to have a globally competitive quality education, training and research for kenya’s sustainable development.” the mission of moe is “to provide, promote, co-ordinate quality education, training and research for empowerment of individuals to become caring, competent and responsible citizens who value education as a life-long process” (ministry of education, 2007) relationship to the literature on female leadership much of the research on women and leadership has concentrated on what women are capable of bringing to management and leadership and what keeps women off management and leadership positions. these two themes became apparent when examining the literature on this topic. the barriers have been categorized into individual, organizational and socio-cultural factors. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 60 women and the leadership paradigm under-representation of women in positions of senior management within educational institutions continue to be a matter of concern, particularly as the teaching force is largely dominated, by women (cubillo & brown, 2003). for instance, despite variations in the pattern of representation of women in positions of educational leadership across europe, what is common is that educational leaders are predominantly male, and women seem to be under-represented at managerial levels in virtually all countries (riley, 1994). this is despite the fact that women have shown themselves to be extremely capable educational leaders (cubillo, 1999), and there is little doubt that many women have a great deal to contribute to the changing practice of educational management in response to the radical global restructuring of education (cubillo & brown, 2003). a study to identify professional and personal characteristics, and styles of leadership in order to develop profiles of six outstanding female superintendents in texas by funk in 2004 established that leadership characteristics of outstanding superintendents included being brave, caring, creative, courageous, committed, confident, energetic, healthy, honest, industrious, introspective, intuitive, knowledgeable, openminded, passionate, pragmatic, reflective, responsible, risktaking, trustworthy, and being well-informed. qualities needed by successful superintendents included character, integrity, vision, courage, and passion. critical skills for female superintendents were visioning, determining the real needs for their districts, communicating, hiring the right people, delegating, developing team support, working effectively with people, and producing meaningful and lasting change (funk, 2004). female attributes of nurturing, being sensitive, empathetic, intuitive, compromising, caring, cooperative, and accommodative are increasingly associated with effective administration. while these characteristics are innate and valuable, women possessing the qualities of a good leader still face higher attrition and slower career mobility (growe and montgomery, 1999). rosener (as cited in wood, 1997) adds that women will succeed to executive levels because of – not in spite of certain characteristics generally considered to be feminine and inappropriate in leaders. theoretical framework cultural feminism theory was applied as a theoretical framework in the study. cultural feminism can be traced back to jane addams in the 1890s. it later on emerged in 1970s becoming a strong voice in 1980s (schemerhorn, 2001). repeatedly, addams advanced the argument that women were more humanitarian, caring, and "down to earth" than men. by restricting women's freedom to the home, the larger society was corrupt and unjust. everyday life functioned poorly because it was based on male values and ethics only (jane addams and the men of the chicago school, 1892-1918, 1986). cultural feminism argues that there are fundamental biological and personality differences between men and women and those women differences should be celebrated as a source of personal strength and pride. culturalists acknowledge the existence but not the inferiority of the difference and on this platform enunciates an equality of quality, not of sameness to men. one such difference is that women raise children while men do not. this makes women ‘connected’ and ‘intimate’ beings. the consequences of a woman’s potential for connection makes women value intimacy and develop a capacity for nurturance, and an ethic of care for the ‘other’ with which they are connected, creating interdependence with and in the community (schemerhorn, 2001). in educational management and leadership women have been noted to exhibit characteristics such as empathy, intuition, sensitivity, caring, supporting, compassion, patience, organization, attention to detail and ability to integrate people, to listen to them and to motivate them through non monetary incentives (cubillo, 1999; funk, 2004; growe and montgomery, 1999). this is because, according to cultural feminism, women tend to value ideas such as interdependence, co-operation, relationship, community, sharing, joy, trust and peace, while men tend to value ideas such as independence, hierarchy, competition and domination. according to cultural feminism society should facilitate, by its laws and respectful attitudes, the full participation of women in all sectors, while neither denying their distinct nature nor discriminating against them for their differences (schemerhorn, 2001). barriers to women’s sufficient representation in management and leadership absence of women in decision-making positions stems from variety of factors. according to neidhart and carlin (2003), barriers to women’s leadership can be categorized into: barriers stemming from socialization and stereotyping; individual; and organizational barriers. women have also lagged behind men in education (unesco, 2000). ernest (2003) adds that “glass ceiling” is the most important reason for women’s underrepresentation in leadership positions. level of education there is adequate evidence that educating women is beneficial at the national, community, family and individual level. with even basic education, individual women effectively engage in economic activities and thus contribute to greater national productivity. at family level, educated women have reduced fertility rates, brought up healthier, better educated children, and reduced infant and maternal mortality rates. at the society level, educated women participate more in development activities as well as in political and economic decision making processes (republic of kenya, 2007). however for one to occupy top management and leadership positions one needs higher education. one fact that is evident from various research findings is that the higher the level of education, the wider the advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 61 gender gap. in kenya, studies by otieno (2001), ngome (2003), and bunyi (2004) all agreed that the higher the level of education, the wider the gender gap in favor of males. individual barriers individual barrier looks to women as the cause of their underrepresentation because it argues that women are not assertive enough, don’t want power, lack self confidence, are unwilling to play the game or work the system, don’t apply for jobs and even when in a job, they don’t apply for line positions (tallerico & burstyn as cited in growe and montgomery, 1999). however research by ruderman (as cited in neidhart & carlin ,2003), suggested that some women in management carefully assess career decisions in the light of their own values and beliefs. for these women the barrier was not lack of confidence, but rather an informed choice based on knowledge of what is important to them personally and the extent to which they are authentic. another individual barrier is other directedness. women are generally more concerned than are men about how they are perceived by others in their group. other individual barriers according to cubillo (1999) include: the tendency among women to avoid where they risk facing criticism or receiving negative feedback; fear of failure and hence a reluctance to voice their opinions; excess responsibilities and fear of conflict and loneliness; selfdoubting; and a different (feminine) style of management. organizational barriers organizational barriers include: entrenched cultures and norms; the way power is defined and exercised; selection procedures; lack of appropriate mentor schemes; exclusion from informal networks; failure of senior leaders to assume accountability for women’s advancement; job requirements; facilities; organizational climate; and placement (livinstone, 2004; neidhart & carlin, 2003). the cultures of organizations have been shaped by men (neidhart & carlin, 2003). according to shakeshaft (as cited in tripses, 2004), while there are differences among societies and culture, in all cultures men and women divide labor on the basis of their sex and male tasks are more valued than female tasks. this male world view, called androcentrism, elevates masculine pursuits to ideal while female values, experiences and behaviors are viewed as inferior. the resultant is that men are considered to be experts while women have to prove that they are (ernest, 2003). the way power and authority are defined and exercised in organizations are related to the andocentric world. socio-cultural barriers women’s identities and roles have traditionally been associated with parenting and caring, while men’s have been associated with paid employment as well as becoming public and industrial managers (neidhart & carlin, 2003). the socialization process therefore structures and equips men and women to enact their respective and different roles. according to livingstone (2004), domestic duties that women are still expected to do for their families take significantly more time and energy than those that most men expect and want to do. he adds that this inequity is the chief persistent disadvantage that women suffer in seeking opportunities for advanced education and career advancement. none the less, socialization process results in boys and girls conforming to the socially determined behavior (otieno, 2001). girls learn to be feminine while boys learn to be masculine. while femininity is associated with submissiveness, gentleness, emotional dependence and not quite good at decision making and tactfulness, masculine characteristics are dominance, aggressiveness, not emotional, blunt, independence, very good at decision making etc (unesco, 2000). women who get into leadership are … trouble. in particular, strong women are labeled difficult and dangerous because they trouble dominant masculinities and modes of management by being different (blackmore as cited in cubillo & brown, 2003). this ‘masculine woman’ is described as a ‘monster’ with gender problems and a risk to assumed stable identities, social roles and positions in the hierarchy of professions. the fear of losing femininity therefore becomes widespread and real (ernest, 2003). glass ceiling this term refers to many barriers that can exist to thwart a qualified woman’s rise to the top management of an organization. these barriers are artificial and invisible, providing a view to the top, but also providing a ceiling on how far a woman can go. when a glass ceiling exists, men occupy a disproportionately high percentage of the higher ranks in a career field, while women tend to be overrepresented in its lower ranks (sincoff, et al., 2006). therefore the ‘glassceiling’ is the most important reason for women’s underrepresentation in leadership-positions (ernest, 2003). glass ceiling is therefore an effect of individual, organizational and socialization barriers and exists in its strongest forms denying women opportunities to gain access into top management positions. while it is true that more women, now than ever before, are slowly chiseling through the glass barrier to take on leadership positions, one can hardly claim to hear glass ceilings shattering around us (cubillo & brown, 2003). the question one asks is whether it is possible to shatter the glass without hearing it break! methodology this study utilized instrumental, single-site, descriptive survey design with both quantitative and qualitative approaches. the site was the moe headquarters. data were collected over a period of two weeks using questionnaire and interview guide and analysis of documents on staff returns. participants out of a target population of 161 officers, stratified sampling was used to group the educational managers at the headquarters into top and middle management as shown in appendix b. the top management in the study was composed of one education secretary, five directors, five senior deputy directors and 13 deputy directors. this totaled 24 officers. middle management advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 62 was composed of 19 senior assistant directors, 23 assistant directors, 44 senior education officers and 51 education officers. giving a total of 137 educational officers. simple random sampling resulted in a study sample of 76 officers as shown in appendix c. in the study sample there were 16 top management educational officers which included one education secretary, five directors, five senior deputy directors and five deputy directors from the five directorates in the ministry. sixty middle management officers were sampled from the directorates and this comprised of 14 senior assistant directors, 14 assistant directors, 16 senior education officers and 16 education officers. the sampling from all the five directorates gave a representative sample of the ministry. data analysis the quantitative data were analyzed using spss computer software employing descriptive statistics such as percentages; frequency distribution; mean; and standard deviation. qualitative data were analyzed thematically providing a detailed and personal view of important characteristics for top educational management and leadership positions, and their possession by gender as well as barriers to women in the top positions. process five primary questions were developed to anchor this study. these were, what is the distribution of educational personnel at the m.o.e. headquarters by gender? what skills are important for top educational management and leadership positions and which gender posses them? what personality characteristics are important for top educational management and leadership positions and which gender posses them? what individual, organizational, and socio-cultural factors cause under representation of women at the top educational management and leadership positions? what strategies would improve the representation of women in top educational management and leadership positions? to answer these questions, educational officers were given self administered questionnaire which had both closed and open ended questions. to allow for probing five males and five females randomly selected were interviewed using interview guide. findings gender and professional qualifications of the educational managers data analysis from staff returns showed that there were 24 top management and 137 middle management officers at the ministry of education headquarters. in top management positions, 33.3% were females, while 66.7% were males. in the middle management cadre 32.1% were females while 67.9% were males. analysis of the professional qualifications showed that there was no phd holder among the respondents. however, 55% of m.ed degree holders were females while 45% were males. holders of b.ed degrees were 51.5% female and 48.5% male. skills and personality characteristics important for top educational management and leadership positions the respondents were to rate the degree of importance of skill and personality characteristics based on a five point rating scale i.e. 1-not important, 2-of little importance, 3-important, 4-very important and 5-extremely important. team work ability, communication, managing time, delegating, formulating policies and decision making skills were rated as ‘extremely important, while sharing power and information, analytical and report writing skills were rated as ‘very important. no skill was rated as ‘important’, ‘of little importance’ or ‘not important’. decisiveness, self confidence, listening and honesty were considered to be extremely important, while emotional stability, objectivity, empathy, consistency, attention to detail and nurturing were rated as very important. none was rated as ‘important’, ‘of little importance’ or ‘not important’. possession of skills and personality characteristics by gender the degree of possession of the skills and personality characteristics by the male and female gender were rated on a five point rating scale i.e. 1-very low, 2-low, 3-moderate, 4high and 5-very high. averagely, personality characteristics and skill possession by both genders was rated as ‘high’. female gender was rated higher than male in possession of teamwork ability, communication, report writing and managing time skills, while male gender was rated higher than female in possession of skills such as analytical, formulating policies, decision making, delegating and sharing power and information. male gender was rated ‘high’ in possession of characteristics of decisiveness, self confidence, emotional stability, listening, objectivity, and consistency, and moderate in possession of empathy, attention to detail, honesty and nurturing. female gender was rated ‘high’ in possession of all the qualities except emotional stability which was rated as ‘moderate’. generally, male gender was rated higher than female gender in possession of characteristics of decisiveness, self confidence, and emotional stability, while the female gender was rated higher than male gender in possessing listening, empathy, consistency, attention to detail, honesty and nurturing. barriers to women a comparison of mean scores from all respondents showed that organizational factors were the strongest barriers to women’s fair representation in top educational management and leadership positions. these were barriers that emanated from the work place. they were followed by socio-cultural barriers and least were individual barriers. the socio-cultural barriers ranged from gender roles and gender stereotypes. individual barriers looked to women as their own enemies in occupying advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 63 top educational management and leadership positions. organizational barriers these factors included: management and leadership requirements such as long working hours not favoring women; prejudice against women in management that prevents full utilization of their talents and abilities; women in management positions having to prove themselves while men are assumed to be experts; men in management not supporting advancement of women; jobs being got on the basis of ‘who knows who’ rather than competences; discrimination against women during interviews for jobs and promotions, since such panels are male dominated; men being better in networking, lobbying and canvassing for upward mobility, while women have poor, disunited and tactless network in strategizing for power; men also teaming up in execution of duties and socialization leaving little or no room for women to fit; and the country’s constitution and government employment policies being gender neutral. socio-cultural barriers these barriers included: dual responsibility of family care and employment being too demanding; society labeling women as wives and mothers and not capable of top management positions; both men and women not liking to work under women; belief that women in positions of power and authority tend to be lonely; and lastly management and leadership norms have been set by men and women seem not to fit. individual factors these factors included: women tending to avoid where they risk facing criticism and receiving negative feedbacks; women having fear of failure hence reluctant to voice their opinion; women tending to express less confidence in their ability to assume leadership roles; women in management tending to be more concerned about how they are perceived by others; fear of sexual harassment, of responsibility, of success, of broken marriages and divorces because of accusations of love affairs with senior male officers especially when the females rise fast to the top, of paying the price of being at the top, of being labeled iron lady, of taking risks, and finally of being public figures as most prefer to be fairly private; and lastly, women not supporting one another on the upward ladder of management. while many previous studies had included women not being interested in power as an individual factor, in this study this factor was disputed. strategies to improve the representation of women in top educational management and leadership positions respondent’s responses through the open-ended question in the questionnaire revealed that practical way forward to improve the representation of women in these positions should focus on the women themselves, the girl child, the government/moe and the society. women themselves would need to consciously address the individual barriers, the government would address the organizational barriers, while the society would address the socio-cultural barriers. the focus on the girl child would be a long term point of intervention, and the women would have to take the lead. conclusions the study concluded that there is under-representation of women in top educational management and leadership positions at the moe headquarters. kenya vision 2030, the country’s development blue print, aims at making kenya a newly industrialized middle income country by the year 2030. the vision is based on three pillars namely, the economic pillar, the social pillar and the political pillar upon which the government intends to address gender equity and equality (republic of kenya, 2007). republic of kenya (2007) adds that in as much as the government has put a minimum of 30 percent representation of women in all sectors and particularly in decision making positions, it is envisaged that full equality will be eventually achieved as stipulated in international goals, protocols, conventions and the gender policy in education. while past studies show that women have lagged behind men in education, this study shows that women are more aggressive than men in pursuit of under graduate and post graduate educations which are a prerequisite for top educational management and leadership positions. the basic differences in possession of skills and personality characteristics considered important for top educational management and leadership positions between men and women seems to be in degree of intensity rather than in kind. women have not been left behind in possession of these skills while they are ahead of men in possession of important personality characteristics. equal gender representation in these positions would enrich the existing pool with skills such as team work ability, communication, report writing and skills of time management. personality characteristics such listening, empathy, consistency, attention to details, honesty and nurturing would also be improved. previous studies reveal that there are individual, organizational and socio-cultural factors that have resulted in the underrepresentation of women in top management and leadership positions in almost all spheres of life. in the past it has been assumed that the major barrier is the individual factors, therefore looking to women as the cause of their underrepresentation in top echelon of management and leadership. the findings of this study have also revealed that there are individual, organizational and socio-cultural barriers to women aspiring top educational management and leadership positions, however, the organizational factors are the strongest barriers, followed by socio-cultural and least were the individual barriers. women have also been proved to be more interested in power than in the past. recommendations recommendations for the profession include: • training of women in top, middle and supervisory advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 64 management in skills required for top educational management and leadership positions. • providing gender sensitive training to both males and females to promote non discriminatory working relationships and respect for diversity in work and management styles. • creating a system for mentoring for women in middle and supervisory management. • engendering government educational and employment policies, with the government committing itself to provide the political will which a pre-requisite in the success of the policies implementation. • focusing on girl child education in terms of women in top educational management and leadership providing candid role models, meeting the biological and sanitation needs of the girls in school and removing all types of stereotypes against women at all levels of education. these will improve retention of the girl child in school and improve the number that will complete education at all levels • employing affirmative action, such as constitutionally managed quotas, to improve the representation of women in top educational management and leadership positions. recommendations for further research include: • case studies of women who have been in top educational management and leadership positions to find out the challenges they faced and how they overcame the barriers. • detailed survey of practical affirmative action strategies that could be employed to improve the representation of women in educational management and leadership. • gender roles in change management. changes are normally resisted and can be a source of conflict which must be managed. references bunyi, g.w. 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(2003,). pathways, incentives and barriers for women aspiring principalship in australia catholic schools. paper presented at nzare/aare conference, auckland. retrieved from http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:_ gjlorlwl9wj:www.aare.edu.au/03pap/car03480.p df+pathways,+incentives+and+barriers+for+women +by+neidhart+and+carlin&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk& gl=ke ngaroga, j. m. (1996). revision professional studies for primary teacher education. nairobi: east african educational publishers. ngome, c. (2003). kenya higher education. retrieved august 30, 2004 from htpp://www.bc.edu./bc_org/arp/soe/cihe/inhea/profil es/kenya.htm otieno, c. (2001). gender issues in education: a paper presented during a capacity building workshop for catholic secretariat at karen, nairobi. republic of advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 65 kenya. (2007). gender policy in education. nairobi: government printer. riley, k. a. (1994). quality and equality: promoting opportunities in schools. london: cassell. schemerhorn, p. (2001). feminism means more than sexual equality. retrieved from http://migreens.org /awog/2001/2001summ/feminism.htm sifuna, d. n. & otiende, j. e. (1994). an introduction to history of education (revised edition). nairobi: university of nairobi press. sincoff, m. z., baker, b. ,& graham, t. s. (2006). pay and rank of female engineers in government service: a crack in the glass ceiling. advancing women in leadership journal, 21. retrieved from http://www. advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006 /sincoff_baker_graham.html tripses, j. (2004). redefining the voice of women administrators. advancing women in leadership journal, 16. retrieved from http://www. advancingwomen.com/awl/ spring2004/tripses.html unesco. (2000). gender sensitivity (module 5). nairobi: unesco. wood, m. (jan 1997). educational management and administration. journal of the british educational management and administration society journal, 25. retrieved from http://www.emaraldinsight.com.html advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 66 appendix a organizational structure of moe headquarters (moe, 2009). minister assistant minister dbed permanent secretary education secretary parastatals and sagas ds&te dqass dp&p assistant minister eo seo sdd dd sad ad sdd sdd sdd dd dd dd sad sad sad ad ad ad seo seo seo eo eo eo advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 67 appendix b distribution of educational personnel in the five directorates officer dbed dhed dted dqas dpp total es 1 ds 1 1 1 1 1 5 sdds 1 3 1 5 dds 3 3 4 3 13 sads 8 4 2 3 2 19 ads 6 6 8 3 23 seos 10 8 7 15 4 44 eos 13 12 6 10 10 51 total 42 37 16 42 23 161 note. dbed = directorate of basic education ; dhed = directorate of higher education; dted = directorate of technical education; dqas = directorate of quality assurance and standards; dpp = directorate of policy and planning; es = education secretary; ds= directors; sdds = senior deputy directors; dds = deputy directors; sads = senior assistant directors; ads = assistant directors; seos = senior education officers; eos = education officers; = vacant position. compiled from staff returns documents at ministry of education in march 2005. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 68 appendix c sample of study officer dbed dhed dted dqas dpp total es 1 1 ds 1 1 1 1 1 5 sdds 1 3 1 5 dds 1 1 2 1 5 sads 3 3 2 3 3 14 ads 3 4 4 3 14 seos 3 3 4 3 3 16 eos 3 3 4 3 3 16 total 16 18 11 17 14 76 note. dbed = directorate of basic education ds; dhed = directorate of higher education; dted = directorate of technical education; dqas = directorate of quality assurance and standards; dpp = directorate of policy and planning; es = education secretary; ds= directors; sdds = senior deputy directors; dds = deputy directors; sads = senior assistant directors; ads = assistant directors; seos = senior education officers; eos = education officers; = vacant position the role performance of female headteachers in primary schools advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 52 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 52-62, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper cross-generational perspectives on work-life balance and its impact on women’s opportunities for leadership in the workplace deborah b. roebuck, deborah n. smith, and terri el haddaoui deborah b. roebuck: professor of management, department of management and entrepreneurship, kennesaw state university email: droebuck@kennesaw.edu; phone: 770-423-6364 deborah n. smith: associate professor of higher education and leadership studies director, assistant department chair, department of university studies, kennesaw state university email: dsmith1@kennesaw.edu; phone: 770-423-6874 terri el haddaoui: ceo, the edge connection email: telhadda@kennesaw.edu; phone: 770-499-3228 accepted september 30, 2013 this qualitative study focuses on how women of three different generations, generation y, generation x and baby boomers, view the concept of work-life balance and what relationship these views have to their attainment of workplace leadership positions. work-life balance was defined differently across the three generations, but the generational lines faded as most women reported struggling with finding a balance. some women conveyed choosing not to pursue high-level leadership positions as the personal cost was too high. those who had obtained high-level leadership positions shared what types of support were most effective in helping them juggle personal and professional obligations. a general theory became apparent; the answer for women may not be balancing, but rather integrating work-life commitments. keywords: cross-generational, work-life balance, women, leadership, workplace introduction “work-life balance is the term used to describe those practices at the workplace that acknowledge and aim to support the needs of employees in achieving a balance between the demands of their family (life) and work lives” (jyothi & jyothi, 2012, p. 35). today’s workforce is comprised of three generations working side by side – generation y (born between 19812000), generation x (born between 1965-1989) and baby boomers (born between 1946-1964). each generation brings distinctly different sets of values, expectations, attitudes, and motivational factors to their work (klun, 2008). generational descriptions baby boomers are comprised of the post-world war ii babies. they are also known as the generation who “questioned authority.” boomers have enjoyed unprecedented employment and educational opportunities in most countries. they value creativity—while their parents were conformists, this generation searched to break the mold. they love adventure and are risk-takers. boomers tend to evaluate achievement in terms of personal fulfillment. this generation was the first generation to discover that lifetime employment no longer existed—so job security is not everything to them, job satisfaction is more important. with women now firmly implanted in the workforce, boomers have been forced to reevaluate the role of work in their personal lives. because boomers invented new forms of families, they also incurred new stresses. boomers were the first generation to divorce at a higher rate than the two previous generations (hammill, 2005). generation x was the first generation to grow up in the new family systems created by the boomers, so this group tends to be comprised of independent individuals. the xers also adapted the boomers “question authority” attitude quickly— much to the dismay of their boomer parents. they are determined to be involved, responsible and in control. because xers grew up watching television, they tend to have a more cynical view of the world and they focus on the here and now. they are risk takers, but they take calculated risks and are not advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 53 intimidated by authority. they are problem solvers, tend to be goal oriented, and demand flexibility (hammill, 2005). the gen yers (also known as millennials) are the first generation to grow up with the internet—they do not remember a time when it didn’t exist. many millennials are both technologically savvy and dependent upon it. they are over stimulated and became easily bored. this generation understands they will change jobs at least once every five years. as such, titles do not mean much—they believe respect should be earned based on the job, not the title. millennials are goaloriented and are team players. however, they are extremely independent and feel empowered. they will question workplace regulations and leave one organization to go to another if they are not satisfied. they have also embraced technology which allows them to talk and do business when they want to do it, as well as have relationships all over the world (hammill, 2005). work-life balance “in the highly competitive global scenario, society and organizations are filled with conflicting commitment and responsibilities. hence, work-life balance has become an important issue at the workplace” (kanwar, singh & kodwani, 2009, p. 3). kanwar, singh and kodwani note that work-life balance facilitates job satisfaction and promotes a healthy balance between family and work life, while effectively reducing organizational costs and enhancing employee performance. interestingly, they also identified that burnout by those who struggle to attain work-life balance is a common thread that hinders attainment of that very goal. “seeking out a more balanced life is not a women's issue; balance would be better for us all” (slaughter, 2012, p. 100). however, few can argue against the point that women carry most of the burden of caring for children, grandchildren and parents, while also juggling household tasks and responsibilities at work. “generally speaking, in the united states, women's career development is still more subject to the family needs than men's” (zhao, 2011, p. 725). women, more than men, see such options as part time work, child care availability, and work flexibility, as ways to improve their work life balance (doble & supriya, 2010). guillaume and pochic (2009) stated there are three options for a man and woman who share a home life together and hold top management positions to achieve work-life balance: they can try to lead two symmetrical careers at once, trying to move together and showing their commitment by putting in long hours at work (double-career model); they can manage their two careers alternatively (alternate model, knowing that women are more likely to accept a momentary disruption of their career for their husband’s benefit); or they can again opt for work–life reconciliation knowing that their career will suffer (a family-oriented model) (p. 32). furthermore, some individuals question whether it is even possible for work-life balance to be attained in today’s socioeconomic state: i still strongly believe that women can "have it all" (and that men can too). i believe that we can "have it all at the same time." but not today, not with the way america's economy and society are currently structured. millions of working women face difficult life circumstances. some are single mothers; many struggle to find any job; others support husbands who cannot find jobs. many cope with a work life in which good day care is either unavailable or very expensive; school schedules do not match work schedules; and schools themselves are failing to educate their children. many of these women are worrying not about having it all, but rather about holding on to what they do have (slaughter, 2012, p. 86). emslie and hunt (2009) concluded that work-life balance choices are constrained by socioeconomic resources and cultural norms and noted that “while the middle-class independent women had the freedom to reduce their working hours in order to enhance their work–life balance, this option was not open to those with more limited resources” (p. 168). women have broken down barriers and paved new paths, all the while pursuing the elusive work-life balance, but have they successfully achieved the equilibrium needed to balance the demands of their personal and professional lives? slaughter (2012) gives insight as to why she believes women haven’t found the balance they need: although women, as a group, have made substantial gains in wages, educational attainment, and prestige over the past three decades, the economists justin wolfers & betsey stevenson suggests that women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men. the best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what wolfers & stevenson call a "new gender gap"—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. that will be a society that works for everyone (p. 89). while slaughter focuses on closing the leadership gap, sandberg (2013) eludes to a leadership gap forming as a result of women holding themselves back, versus being held back by their counterparts: when it comes to integrating career and family, planning too far in advance can close doors rather than open them. i’ve seen this happen over and over. women rarely make one decision to leave the workforce. instead, they make a lot of small decisions along the way, making accommodations and sacrifices that they believe will be advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 54 required to have a family. of all the ways women hold themselves back; perhaps, the most pervasive is that they leave before they leave (p. 93). theoretically, work-life balance is straightforwardly attainable by simply allocating equal time between work-related tasks and activities related to other areas of an individual’s life. jyothi and jyothi (2012), however, state that a positive work-life balance involves achievement and enjoyment and should not be understood as simply an equal balance or scheduling equal number of hours for each one's work and personal activities. from theory to reality, the concept becomes much more complex as contextual circumstances change the landscape and alter the work-life dynamic. for example, previous discussions of work-life balance for women typically revolved around balancing work demands with those of raising children. today, however, just as many women mention the demands of caring for aging parents. emslie and hunt (2009) report on this further: women found it difficult to combine roles such as employee, partner, mother, friend and daughter, and spontaneously used metaphors of juggling and balance to express these difficulties (for example, ‘can’t keep all the balls in the air’, ‘juggling match’, need ‘more of a balance’). many discussed caring for grandchildren or assisting elderly parents with household tasks. maureen and heather spoke about making difficult choices between spending time with aging parents or with their children (p. 159). in addition to often having more care-taking demands placed on them, women also are learning how to navigate an increasingly technologically driven world. “recent advances in technology have for example resulted in an almost seamless interface between work and family” (brough & kalliath, 2009, p. 581). “while mobile technologies undoubtedly facilitate flexibility and free people from restricted hours and physical locations, they also blur boundaries of work and personal time” (sarker, sarker & ahuja, 2012, p. 145). currie and eveline (2011) also describe a fading divide between work-life domains: “there has been a shift from thinking of these domains as separate and distinct realms to thinking of them as on a continuum” (p. 534). they further detail this invasion and intrusion of e-technologies into homes as “a blessing and a curse” that is of benefit to work, but comes at a cost to family life (p. 533). thurston (2012) suggests that technology is such a threat to work-life balance that there is no place anyone can go to get away from work, further emphasizing this by stating that even the restroom holds no solace. conversely, cousins and varshney (2009) challenge concerns that technology is disrupting work-life balance and propose that it may simply be representative of new ways of working and living. technology may, in fact, assist with work-life balance as the “ubiquity of computing resources is increasing and work activities infiltrate the home with ease and spontaneity, and employees can carry out family activities at work effortlessly” (p. 117). work-life balance across generations technology in particular has given way to a broader gap between older and younger generations. gen xers and millennials view workplace boundaries much differently than baby boomers. they are much more inclined to value efficiency over face time, as they want their results managed but not their flexibility. they want to be able to use technology to help them do their jobs and also provide work-life balance” (sonier, 2012, p. 22). what constitutes work-life balance, however, changes at various stages of people’s careers and different factors become important to individuals as they age (jyothi & jyothi, 2012). “the negotiation of work and life is mediated by generational attitudes and understandings of the workplace” (favero & heath, 2012, p. 351). klum (2008) concurs noting that: baby boomers may have pioneered the concept of worklife balance as an important component of their satisfaction with work, but younger workers from generation x (born 1960–1980) and generation y (born 1980–2000) place even higher value on meshing family needs with the demands of their jobs (p. 1). sonier (2012), however, asserts that baby boomers are often considered die hard workaholics who have long sneered at the idea of a work-life balance. as such, it is not surprising that a tension surfaces in the workplace with the addition of gen x and y workers who seek improved accommodations to better balance work and life (favero & heath, 2012). nevertheless, sonier reports a clear consensus among generations: the data strongly suggests that all generations are now working longer hours and are making significant work-life sacrifices. a recent survey by the society of human resource management finds that among all generations, 89% of american workers say work-life balance is now a problem (p. 20). women and leadership many women sacrifice job advancement opportunities if they do not perceive they can balance work and other obligations (guillaume & pochic, 2009). this is especially true if they deem the personal cost to be too high (gerdes, 2010). employers can no longer ignore the significant impact that nonwork demands have on employee performance, commitment and job satisfaction. as jyothi and jyothi (2012) share “it is not enough for organizations to implement family-friendly practices such as flextime and extended parental leave, to reduce employees' work-life conflicts. it is more important to have a supportive culture that encourages employee utilization of work-life benefits” (p. 36). schueller-weidekamm and kautzky-willer (2012) concur noting that: women are still disproportionately underrepresented in leadership positions. women still face a trade-off between career positions that are associated with power and influence and emotional responsibilities and family life. long-term career planning is partly hindered by family advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 55 planning, which affects successful career development (p. 248). without strong organizational support, some women find it is easier to simply leave the workforce (zhao & shang, 2011). organizations with supportive cultures that retain women who assume leadership roles, however, can look forward to a financial advantage. desvaux, devillard-hoellinge and meaney (2008) found that firms which had three or more women in senior management had higher scores on all dimensions that related directly to financial performance than did firms with no women at the top. although there is significant research on both work-life balance and generational differences, there is little research examining both generational differences and work-life balance among women. favero and heath (2012) noted this lack of research and recommended that future research attend to questions such as “how do women from different generations work differently or the same as they progress through the life cycle?”(pg. 351), and “how does conflict with work and life change among generational cohorts as they age?” (p. 351). mcnamara, pittcatsaouphes, matz-costa, brown and valcour (2012) also support a need for additional “gender-focused analysis of satisfaction with work–family balance focusing on differences within genders, rather than between genders” (p. 293). furthermore, there is little information on how generational differences and the pursuit of work-life balance impact women’s opportunities for leadership. this study attempts to shed light on some of these issues by using a qualitative research examination of the following questions: (a) do women from each of the three different generations experience work-life conflict?; (b) are there differences in the way the generations balance their professional and personal life?; (c) how do they and their places of employment address potential work-life balance issues and provide support?; (d) does organizational support help women move into organizational leadership positions?; and (e) how willing are women in the workplace to help each other. qualitative research techniques are particularly beneficial when the researcher seeks to understand the world from the perspective of those being studied (pratt, 2009) and allows participants to communicate details that address the context from which they speak. methods participants a total of 161 women fully completed the study questionnaire with 79% self-identifying their ethnicity as white, 68% reporting they were married and 63% indicating they had at least one child. seventy six% of the participants were employed full-time in a variety of settings ranging from education to healthcare and consulting to telecommunications with 63% indicating they currently held a managerial or leadership position in their organization. forty % of those surveyed held at least a bachelor’s degree. generational breakdown of the participants was: a) baby boomers (born from 1946-1964) = 54; b) generation x (born from 1965-1980) = 69; and c) generation y (born from 19812000) = 38. instrument the author-designed questionnaire created for this study was based on an interview protocol used as a course assignment in a women’s leadership mba course taught by one of the authors. the study instrument contained various demographic questions, one optional question for women to make any comment(s) they chose and the following five primary questions: 1. has there been a time in your life when your personal and professional goals clashed or were not in balance? if so, please elaborate. 2. do you see any differences between the way you balance your work and personal life from women in your family or workplace who are from different generations than you? if so, please elaborate. 3. how supportive have organizations for which you have worked been regarding your responsibilities and commitments outside of work? please explain your response. 4. what impact does the above described level of organizational support have on the ability of women to move into organizational leadership positions? 5. do women in your workplace help each other and have you noticed any change in the willingness of women to help each other over the span of your professional life? please explain your response. procedure once institutional review board approval was obtained from the researchers’ university, the authors invited colleagues, family members, personal friends, and professional contacts to respond to the questionnaire. all participants were asked to forward the survey to other females they thought might like to participate. in addition, a link to the survey was also posted on various professional organizations’ websites from whom the authors obtained permission. data was collected over a three month period in the fall of 2012 with results maintained in qualtrics, a web-based research surveying software program. responses were grouped according to generation. at the halfway point of data collection, the authors began to read through the participants’ answers using lincoln and guba’s (1985) and strauss and corbin’s (1990) constant comparative analysis techniques. responses were then analyzed again at the conclusion of the study. credibility was established through the use of triangulation between the three authors. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 56 through the use of open coding (boyatzis, 1998), the initial general framework, key word analysis, and extraction of phrases and contextual comments was determined. next, emerging categories and over-arching themes were identified. then, axial coding techniques were used to build a hierarchy of codes, categories and themes. finally, selective coding was employed to generate key statements that resulted in a general theory. results in examining the responses to each of the five primary research questions, some general themes emerged. specific findings follow. question 1. has there been a time in your life when your personal and professional goals clashed or were not in balance? generation y women mentioned clashes such as: “working an inconsistent, 50+ hour a week schedule didn’t allow me the time to pursue personal interests, such as joining an intramural sports league and joining a toastmasters club” and yes. my first job out of college was incredibly demanding and provided no opportunity for a healthy work-life balance. as a newlywed, my home life was very important to me. however, getting a good start to my career was also important. generation x and baby boomer participants frequently mentioned clashes regarding having and raising children (when they were younger) and helping with aging parents. quotes from some of the participants which reflect these themes include “yes when my children were young and required my being available to pick them up after school. this conflict required my having to leave my job” and yes, when i had an opportunity to accept a high paying, high profile, right up my alley kind of job, one of my parents became terminally ill. i chose my parent over the job. some people did not understand that decision, but i have no regrets. question 2. do you see any differences between the way you balance your work and personal life from women in your family or workplace who are from different generations than you? generation y women often noted that one difference between them and older working generations is technology. as one woman stated: i think the generations in the past were more effective in balancing work and personal life. i feel this imbalance has been partly due to technology. women today bring work home due to the internet and email. i feel this causes more of a grey line and therefore, the work/family lines to cross more often. generation x women, however, stated a difference between them and their older female relatives was that their relatives did not have to work and thus balance was easier to obtain. for example, this woman shared: oh yeah...completely. older generations of women don't seem to bother trying to have a career if they don't have too. the man is the breadwinner. the woman is the homemaker. case closed. i am sure they look at my generation and shake their heads. i know my mother says, "i don't know how you do it all. some baby boomers made negative comments about the work ethic of younger generations. for example, one woman stated “younger generations don't live to work. baby boomers live to work. we created the 80-hour week and feel guilty if we take time off.” other baby boomers, however, wanted to share their life wisdom and encouraged younger women to give up on being “superwomen.” question 3. how supportive have organizations for which you have worked been regarding your responsibilities and commitments outside of work? no generational differences surfaced for this question. most participants said “yes” their organizations were supportive or it depended on where they were working. for example, one participant said: i find it varies on a boss-by-boss basis. my female bosses with families and young children, and are familiar with having to juggle many different roles, are generally more flexible. male bosses, bosses with older children, or bosses without children are less forgiving and more demanding of my time outside of work. in my experience, they tend to believe that i'm available to work outside of standard work hours or on my vacation, and are more resentful when i take sick or vacation days. some women, such as this one, mentioned quitting jobs that did not provide the support they needed: some have been more responsive than others. in my current position, things have been very flexible; however, when i had a purely administrative job the demands placed on me were great. the needs of the business typically came first particularly in our busiest times. once i quite a job as a director of education because my daughter got sick and i needed to be with her more. the demands of the job did not allow this so i resigned. question 4. what impact does the above described level of organizational support have on the ability of women to move into organizational leadership positions? again, there were no generational differences on the responses to this question. many respondents said something similar to this woman “it's vital. without that support, many women are forced to choose, which shouldn't have to happen. some women choose the career, some their families, either choice can have significant consequences.” moving into leadership positions was also very situational to the industry in which the woman worked. those who listed advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 57 working in an education sector, for example, were pleased with the opportunities to obtain leadership positions. several women, however, noted that working in a male dominated industry made it more difficult to obtain a leadership position. as one woman said “my location within this organization is led by white males. we have 300 employees at this site. we have four women in second tier leadership roles but none at the highest level. i don't see a woman being offered a top tier leadership role here.” question 5. do women in your workplace help each other and have you noticed any change in the willingness of women to help each other over the span of your professional life? as with the above two questions, there were no generational differences on the answers to this question. support was very situational with women from all generations noting that their biggest supporters or “enemies” might be women. as one woman put it: i'd say "it depends." i've had some amazingly helpful women in my life and some amazingly nasty, stab you in the back to get ahead kind of women. some women are really competitive against other women. i guess there are only so many good positions and if they help you there goes one! other women, such as this one, stated that being supported by women inspired her to help others: i have had several female mentors in my career, especially at my current company. earlier in my career, i felt there was more backstabbing behavior. i haven't really experienced that lately. i try to act as a mentor and role model to other women in my workplace, letting them know that i work hard to achieve a level of work/life balance and that i state that as a priority with my boss. i think it helps them to know that it's an option and not one that will necessarily result in limitations on your growth potential. key statements that emerged from the above data were: a) work-life balance is an issue for all women, regardless of generation; b) caregiving is the primary source of concern for women; c) each generation had a somewhat negative view of how women from other generations balanced work and life commitments; and d) many women chose not to pursue leadership positions at their workplace if they felt they could not have a healthy work-life balance. a general theory emerged from the data – women are attempting to integrate, rather than balance their multiple roles and commitments. discussion the results of this research study indicate that the answer to research question 1 (has there been a time in your life when your personal and professional goals clashed and were not in balance?) is clearly “yes”. gen yers mentioned a hobby, vacation, church or volunteer commitment as being important in their personal lives and sometimes clashing with their professional lives. it is interesting to note that not one gen. xer or baby boomer mentioned those things; all of their balance issues had to do with caregiving. our finding of baby boomers and gen xers being the primary caregivers supports existing research. for example, leman (1987), in her survey of almost 200 women, was not surprised to find that children were the number one stressor for working women. in a more recent study by hewlett (2007) over 90 % of women leaving the work place, said they were primarily responsible for child raising and domestic chores. similarly, guillaume and pochic (2009) found that gen x and baby boomers tended to sacrifice work to meet the needs of their families. our findings on this research question also supports the work of jyothi and jyothi (2012) who concluded that demands from family appear to increase over the years as the gen xers and especially baby boomers start to care for aging parents. also, due to the current economy, some baby boomers and gen xers are providing for adult children who could not find jobs upon their graduation from college or lost their jobs due to the economy. another interesting finding of the current study was that these two groups rarely mentioned husbands or their role in helping with work/life balance issues. based upon our experience as educators, we believe it is possible that the gen yers may not have faced these family conflicts as much due to their age. many of the gen yers we teach are just starting their careers and have yet to marry, have children or aging parents for which they care. regarding research question 2 (do you see any differences between the way you balance your work and personal life from women in your family or workplace who are from different generations than you?), all generations, but especially the gen. xers, commented that their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and other family members did not have to work or left a career to stay at home. across the generations, women mentioned that balance had more to do with profession or field than generations. one person said the big difference is not generational, but whether or not people are parents. many of the baby boomers and some gen xers had negative comments about the work ethic of younger generations and seemed to think that the younger generations don’t work as hard as them and favor doing family and fun things over their jobs. these comments seem to support sonier’s (2012) research that found baby boomers were company loyalists who expect their work to spill over into their personal lives. younger generations, however, prefer more of a separation between work and play. in hannay’s and fretwell’s (2011) study, for example, they found that leisure is very important to generation y and stated “the veterans and the baby boomers were content to see work as the driving force in their lives. gen x and gen y increasingly demand more work-life balance in the workplace” (pg. 4). advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 58 our study, however, found that it was the gen yers who thought the older women stuck to a 9-5 schedule, didn’t put in extra time, and did not have a problem of work-life balance like they did because of technology. these younger study participants said work is easier with technology and companies are more willing for women to work from home. however, they also feel the same technology can be a burden. compared to baby boomers or gen xers, gen yers spend 50% more time than other generations online (hellrigel & slocum, 2009). twenty six% of professional women in another study felt they had to be connected to work all day, every day (barsh, cranston & lewis, 2009). the gen yers in this study believed the boundaries between work and the rest of their lives were blurred, which was what sarker, sarker and ahuja (2012) found regarding technology. as noted earlier, currie and eveline (2011) stated that the invasion and intrusion of etechnologies into homes is “a blessing and a curse” that is of benefit to work, but comes at a cost to family life (p.533). for the gen yers in our study, it does not appear that technology is the missing link that brings women closer to achieving work-life balance but the catalyst that further deteriorates their work-life balance as they frantically try to do it all. a few baby boomers mentioned wanting to help the gen yers understand that they can’t be “superwomen” and that it is not worth it in the long run to pursue money, advancements, and titles if the personal costs are too high. for research question 3 (how supportive have organizations for which you have worked been regarding your responsibilities and commitments outside of work?), the results indicated the women across all generations perceived they did have some organizational support. all respondents stated that the amount of support they had all depended upon where they worked. we did not find enough evidence to support the notion that organizations are adapting and changing work environments to support both men and women in balancing their lives. according to a survey conducted in working mother (owens, 2010), many women felt that having an employer with flexible policies helped them to become successful at both work and home. women are more successful in their job if their company affords them the opportunity to have a flexible work-life schedule. until organizational structures adapt to meet the needs of both men and women, women will struggle with the complex issues of work and family obligations regardless of the generation. if traditional roles prevail at work and home, women will always find it difficult to penetrate the highest levels of leadership. it still appears there is work to do in this arena. regarding research question 4 (what impact does the above described level of organizational support have on the ability of women to move into organizational leadership positions?) we found no generational differences. several of the women mentioned that it is still a man's world and whether they could move into organizational leadership roles depended upon the profession. for example, those females who identified "education" seemed to be happy with their leadership opportunities. while others who indicated they were in more male-dominated professions shared that their chances of being promoted were slim. some gen xers shared that they had decided to stop trying to climb the corporate ladder as they perceived it wasn’t worth the effort or that they could not make a difference. these insights support sching’s (2009) study that found one of the main reasons women did not seek leadership positions was the growing demands of the workplace conflicting with the demands of their family. not pursuing leadership positions may also be due to the fact that women are often held to a higher standard of competence than men and have had to demonstrate superior performance to get promoted (eagly& carli, 2003). additionally, our finding supports gerdes (2010) discovery that women may not assume leadership positions if they have to suffer too much in their personal lives. women, particularly those in law, may not be getting into top leadership positions in the workplace because they accept more than their share of responsibilities when it comes to caring for their children and taking care of the house (sandberg, 2013). women also give up on taking on more challenging work because of premature work-life balance uncertainties. other researchers concur noting that long-term career planning is partly hindered by family planning, which affects successful career development (aguiluz, 2011; cummins, 2012). in roebuck’s and smith’s (2011) study of executive-level female leaders, one senior leader stated “the most critical problem a female leader faces is the balancing of family, career, and community service” ( p. 59) and women have a lot on their plate to balance. the stress and workload of high positions forces many women to choose carefully without creating overload. for women, there are other ways to get satisfaction. women may decide to take themselves out of the running [for top positions] by working part time, working for a small organization, or not working at all [to create balance] (p. 59). . finally, for research question 5 (do women in your workplace help each other and have you noticed any change in the willingness of women to help each other over the span of your professional life?) we encountered a mixed response of both “yes” and “no” that seemed to be situational. the “yes” responses support the findings of smith, roebuck, and maendler’s (2013) study that found younger aged women frequently answered ‘yes’ to the question of women supporting each other, while women in the older age brackets tended to use clarifying terms such as ‘depends.’ the “no” responses in this study continues to support the work of other research that suggests women in top leadership positions may resort to undermining tactics instead of supporting other women who advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 59 follow in their footsteps (hoyt & simon, 2011; rodgers-healy, 2003; roebuck & smith, 2011). it appears some progress may be occurring but obviously women are still not as willing to help each other as men do and continue to view other women as competition instead of individuals they should mentor and help climb the corporate ladder. we did not deduct any industry or generational differences in the responses to this question. it was interesting to note that most negative responses on this question came from the gen y group. implications organizational leaders should employ creative thinking to develop strategies that will allow both men and women to be successful in the work place. barsh and yee (2011) noted true cultural and organizational change must occur that is systemic and intentional if organizations truly desire to help women advance in leadership positions. such change involves listening to what matters from the women who are in the organizations. barsh and yee (2011) explained that one reason women choose to stay at a current position rather than be promoted is that they feel their work needs to matter and to make a difference. senior level positions are often perceived to be political or lonely. women value their relationships with their colleagues and don’t want to forfeit the joy they derive from that. as gerdes (2010) learned in her study of senior academic women, over half her respondents sought personal fulfilment through their work. leadership positions, which prevent women from being able to pursue that which matters most to them will not retain or attract women. clearly many women choose not to pursue higher-level leadership positions after the mid-management level because they perceive the personal sacrifice to their personal lives is too great. organizations should focus on workplace strategies designed to help women move into leadership positions as these two participants from this study so eloquently state. quote 1: frankly, i think this world is in great need of strong leadership. regardless if you are a man or a woman, if you have excellent leadership skills, you can make anything possible. i don't think i have any special gifts or talents. i am not smarter than my colleagues. i do not have a better network. i think that i had great managers that showed me how to be a good manager. i am grateful for my leadership skills. i think that is why i was able to be so successful so quickly and that upper management was willing to figure out ways to keep me happy. i do think that even in a female dominated industry, you will see that the vast majority of senior management is men. i really feel that is simply the choice of today's women. i stopped the climb to upper management because i saw that everybody in the next level up was divorced, separated and extremely unhappy. the job became their whole life. once i realized that, i understood that it is more important for me to find balance and to be happy. i believe the reason why you do not see women at that level is because it is too demanding and will not allow for a balanced lifestyle. i believe men are more willing to climb the ladder out of tradition for the title, and women do not need the title to feel successful. quote 2: if women know there is support for both their career goals and the ability to manage their life, they are more likely to stay with a company and continue to grow and develop within that same organization. women who lack organizational support are more likely to look elsewhere. women need to know that it is possible to both strive for career goals and support their families at the same time. in the 2009 shriver report entitled, “a woman’s nation changes everything,” the authors stated that the fabric of the american work model has changed enormously with women seeking higher education and entering the work place. the authors argued that while the family structure has changed, organizations and work structures have not. for example, many business practices are still modelled after the past where a married family with kids had a stay-at-home mother and sole breadwinner father. clearly, that is not the current reality of most homes in the united states. therefore, organizations need to revisit some of these ‘traditional’ ways of doing business and get creative with solutions that help both the employer and employee. some solutions include flexibility in the work schedules, job sharing, day care solutions, after school programs, and overnight care for working moms (hannay, 2012; twenge & campbell, 2008). another challenge organizations need to face is that expectations clash between the generations as shared by one of our study’s participants: “the older generations at my firm expect longer hours and the younger generation expects more flexible working environments and schedules. it is actually an issue.” educational training regarding the differences between the generations should be considered in order to raise awareness of the differences but also how the generations can complement each other. looking specifically at institutions of higher learning, they should assist the younger generations by providing more courses that focus on coping strategies, goal setting, and integration of roles to help them understand the challenges of work-life balance. the wellness model (hettler, 1984) suggested there are six dimensions that should be in balance, which are occupational, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, physical, and social. when the term work/life is used, we imply that five of the dimensions are dumped into life. it is easy to see how it is impossible to achieve balance and why individuals, both men and women, struggle trying to achieve it. it seems clear that women should start to support and help each other more. since all generations experience the same challenges, women should reach out more to other women around them for advice and support (evans, 2003). women should not be afraid to ask for help from family, friends, and co-workers when it is appropriate. women should focus more advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 60 on building relationship and expanding their network as those strategies will help them be successful in their careers and life in general (wolf, 2011). in addition, women should be mindful of technology. while technology can free women to spend time outside of the workplace, it can also be a stone around their necks. therefore, women should set necessary boundaries between the workplace and home. everyone, especially gen yers, should also be aware of when it is appropriate to communicate with technology and when there are better options such as the faceto-face interaction preferred by baby boomers. limitations of study as is true of all research studies, our study is limited by the following conditions. first, all three authors are women who fall into the typical demographic of the majority of the study participants. it is possible we imposed on the data and drew upon our own experiences to come up with the themes, study statements and general theory. second, the findings may not be transferable to the general population. the sample in this study is primarily white and well educated (see participant demographics in methods section). finally, the questions in the survey might be leading or poorly worded resulting in different interpretations by respondents. suggestions for future research any one of the five questions posed in this study could be a stand-alone study. by focusing on just one question, researchers could increase their sample size and learn whether or not the same concepts emerge. a related opportunity for further research would be to repeat the study with men to see if the same issues/concepts arise. or, researchers could undertake a cross-cultural study to compare the results across countries and genders. another interesting study might be to cross tabulate the results to look at intersection between demographic data such as ethnicity, type of industry and level of education and responses given. the current study just looked at the answers across the three generations. finally, many participants provided their names for future contact. to expand the current study, follow up interviews or focus groups could be undertaken to determine if the key statements and general theory noted in this study held true or resonated with them. conclusion women account for a majority of university graduates in europe, the us and oecd [organization for economic cooperation and development] countries. by 2020, it is anticipated that women will account for more than 70 % of college graduates in seven countries: italy, sweden, hungary, iceland, new zealand, the uk, and the netherlands (vincentlancrin, 2008). the low representation of women in executive leadership is a missed opportunity. “in today’s sagging global economy, organizations that mentor and support women moving up the organizational ladder could well be one of the best survival strategies that an organization could undertake” (p. 3), say authors howard and wellins (2009). “isn’t it time organizations stopped blocking the development and progress of the kind of talent that could fortify the executive suite?” (howard & wellins, 2009, p. 29). work/life balance is a challenge for all women. whether they are baby boomers, gen x, or gen y, they face competing demands from work and commitments outside of the office. five findings emerged from this study. first, women across the generations agree they had experienced situations where their professional and personal goals clashed. second, there are differences between the generations in how each generation perceives the other generation regarding work-life balance, which can cause workplace conflict. third, all generations agreed that they had some support from their organizations. fourth, no generational differences were found in perceptions regarding the ability of women to move into organizational leadership positions. however, similar feelings and thoughts revolved around the concept of this still being a man’s world and that for a woman to move into a leadership position, she would need to make personal sacrifices in relationship to her family and personal life. fifth, no generational differences were found regarding whether women help other women move into leadership positions. all three generations still perceive that some women in current leadership positions do not support and mentor other women to help them advance within their organizations. while generational differences do exist, one key trend is universal. the women in this study do struggle finding a work/life balance that meshes with their lifestyle. bone (2010) presents the notion of “fit” instead of “balance” because of the implication that individual women will make choices that are healthy for them and tailored to their unique situations. other researchers, such as barsh, cranston and lewis (2009) recommend that women let go and realize work/life balance may not exist. instead they recommend women consider work and home commitments in a new light. could that new light be called the integration of work and life instead of work-life balance? golder (2013), a role integration coach and author thinks so. she strives to help women integrate multiple roles without sacrificing their success, health or peace of mind. one of 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(2011). family-to-work conflict: gender, equity and workplace policies. journal of comparative family studies, 42(5), 723738. educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 119 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 119-124, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper improving equity through a science enrichment program maria m. ferreira and chinequa monique patterson maria m. ferreira is an associate professor and chair of the science education program at wayne state university e-mail: m.ferreira@wayne.edu chinequa monique patterson is a science teacher at luella high school e-mail: chinequa.patterson@henry.k12.ga.us accepted november 30, 2010 we examined the impact of science enrichment activities on african american female students’ achievement and attitude towards science. seventeen students participated in the study. attitudes were measured using a pre and post attitudinal survey, whereas achievement was measured using test scores from their biology class over a six-week period. preand post measures indicated a significant increase in achievement and attitudes for the students who participated in the study. keywords: females, african american, minorities, science activities introduction the increase in the number of baby boomers retiring in the next decade, combined with a greater demand in new technologies, are expected to lead to a shortage of skilled workers in stemrelated careers (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) (pantic, 2007; tornatzky, macias, jenkins & solis, 2006). to offset this shortage, and for the us to stay technologically competitive, a greater number of us students must enroll in math and science courses and choose stemrelated majors. however, international studies consistently show us students lagging behind students in other industrialized countries in their achievement in math and science (cavanagh, 2007; ravitch & cortese, 2009; schleicher, 2009), whereas within the us schools achievement gaps persist between minority and non-minority students (chapin, 2005; magnuson & waldfogel, 2008). furthermore, it appears that the disparities in educational opportunities that exist in the us may play an important role in our low performance in international studies (cavanagh, 2007). therefore, the economic and technological future of our country depends, to a great extent, on how far we go to achieve educational equity in our schools. theoretical framework the achievement gap between minority and non-minority students has varied since the 1970s (barton, 2005; ferguson & mehta, 2004; haycock, 2001). for example, between 1970 and 1988 the achievement gap between white and african american students decreased by half and decreased by one third between whites and latinos (barton, 2005; haycock, 2001). barton (2005) credited the increase in minority student achievement in the 80’s to interventions related to head start and title i legislation. however, in the early 1990’s the student achievement gaps began widening again and by1999 only one in 100 african american and one in 50 latino 17 year olds were able to comprehend specialized text, compare to one in 12 whites. in mathematics similar patterns were found. by the end of high school, one in 100 african american and one in 30 latino students were able to do multi-step problem solving, compared to one in 10 whites. when examining high school completion rates the data showed that while about 90% of white 18-24 year olds and 94% of asian students completed high school or a ged diploma, only 81% of african americans and 63% latinos achieved a similar level of education (haycock, 2001). nonetheless, recent data in math and reading scores from the national assessment of educational progress long-term (naep-ltt) show that achievement gaps between minority and non-minority students have been again decreasing for the past 10 years (magnuson & waldfogel, 2008). there are many reasons for the achievement gaps between minority and non-minority students. from very early in life many african american and latino children face economic advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 120 inequalities which in turn result in differing life opportunities. magnuson and votruba-drzal (2008), pointed out that in general african american children are more likely to live in poor and higher crime neighborhoods and have less access to quality health care. as a result, when these children begin school, they already score lower in variables related to school readiness. chapin (2005) found wide racial and ethnic differences in children’s general science and social studies knowledge in both kindergarten and first grade. however, although researchers agree that home and neighborhood environments play a role in children’s life experiences and opportunities, others suggested that schoolrelated variables play a greater role in the lack of academic progress of many minority children (aaronson, barrow & sander, 2007; corcoran & evans, 2008; donlevy, 2006; haycock, 2001). for example, donlevy (2006) contended that the discrepancies in funding greatly contribute to the substandard quality of education that many minority and poor children receive. according to donlevy, “schools serving mostly poor and minority students receive approximately $65,000 less per classroom or more than $1,000,000 less for a 400-student elementary school” (p. 1). researchers (aaronson et al., 2007; corcoran & evans, 2008; haycock, 2001) have also uncovered other school-related variables responsible for the achievement gaps. for example, corcoran and evans (2008) found that teacher quality plays a key role in the achievement gaps between minority and non-minority students, particularly in math and science. aaronson et al. (2007), also noted a strong relationship between teachers’ content knowledge and student achievement. using classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers haycock (2001) identified three major school-related variables: low student expectations, boring and meaningless curriculum and poorly prepared teachers. haycock contended that “we expect so little of students in high-poverty schools that we give them as for work that would earn them cs or ds anywhere else“ (p. 5). similarly, barton (2005) identified six school factors responsible for the achievement gaps: (a) the rigor of the curriculum; (b) the adequacy of teacher preparation in the subject matter; (c) the amount of teachers’ experience; (d) the class size; (e) the availability of technology-assisted instruction; and (f) the safety within the school. findings such as these led ferguson and mehta (2004) to call for research that focuses on improving what happens in classrooms. thompson and o’quinn (2001) suggested that academic achievement of african american students would increase if they were taught by able, well-prepared, experienced teachers and that minority students need a positive personal experience in school. glassman and roelle (2007) described the impact that systemic changes had on the achievement of african american male students in a suburban school in new york state. they found that increased teacher expectations, personalized instruction, smaller classes, strengthening of relationships between students and teachers, and increased faculty’s cultural competence, greatly increased the success of their african american male students. similarly, miles and matkins (2004) discovered that african american student achievement in science increased when students were exposed to meaningful science experiences. these experiences may include mentoring, tutoring, saturday science academy, and hands-on lab experiences. the literature presented here appears to indicate that the achievement gap between minority and non-minority students tends to be cyclical and influenced by national trends related to resource allocation. the current budget cuts that many schools in large urban areas are experiencing will most likely once again have a negative impact on the education of many minority students. however, the literature also indicates that programs at the local level can have a positive impact on the lives of the students they serve, when such programs implement approaches that lead to meaningful learning. in our study some of these approaches, role models and inquiry-based science activities, were implemented in an after-school program with a group of african american female students enrolled in a 9th grade biology class. the following research question guided the study:  what impact will enrichment activities have on participating female students’ achievement and attitudes toward science? method a pre-experimental design, single-group, pre-test/post-test was used in this study (mcmillan & schumacher, 2010). after school enrichment activities related to a biology class were implemented with a group of female students in grades 9 and 10. the enrichment activities included after school tutoring, inquiry-based activities, role models and mentoring. the biology teacher implemented the activities. setting and participants the study took place during the 2007-08 school year in a 9-12 public high school located in an urban area outside the city of atlanta. there were 2,155 students enrolled in the school, 48% of them white, 46% african american, 4.9% hispanic and 1.1% multi-racial. of the students, 30% came from an economically disadvantaged area. the school had met adequately yearly progress (ayp) for the 2006-2007 school year. seventeen female students chose to participate in the study and all of them were african american. since this was an after-school program, participation was voluntary. data sources and analysis test scores were used to measure changes in student achievement, while a survey administered before and after the enrichment program was used to measure changes in student attitudes toward science. the 20-item survey asked students to rate their opinion on various statements about science using a 5-point likert scale. descriptive and inferential statistics were advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 121 used to find statistically significant differences in student achievement and attitude as a result of participating in the enrichment activities. statistical significance was determined at p < 0.05. cohen’s measure of effect size (d) for comparing two means was also determined (cohen, 1988). qualitative data in the form of student comments made during the program’s activities were recorded verbatim and later analyzed using techniques of naturalistic inquiry (lincoln & guba, 1985; miles & huberman, 1994). as data were read several times, individual segments of data were coded and similar codes grouped into categories. program characteristics the program was implemented after regular school hours and had the following components: role models. once a week the students learned about a different female scientist and their contributions to science. dr. mae jemison, an african american astronaut, was one such role model discussed during the program. inquiry-based activities. students participated in many hands-on laboratory activities and projects related to concepts covered in class. these activities were delivered in the form of an inquiry-based approach know as the learning cycle (marek, & cavallo, 1997). in this approach students first explored the topic through hands-on activities to help them “discover” the concept they were investigating. their exploration was followed by whole class discussions and then applications of the concept to solidify understanding. for example, students explored the concept of osmosis using gummy bears and gel electrophoresis to learn about dna. students also participated in one-on-one tutoring as well as in small group discussions of concepts covered in class. results preand post-test comparisons indicated a significant gain in student achievement (p= 0.01) and attitudes toward science (p < 0.05). furthermore, cohen’s measure of effect size for both achievement (d = 0.9) and attitudes (d = 4.8) were high. please refer to tables 1 and 2 below. student achievement in this study, achievement was measured using a regular biology test given at the end of a unit of study. analyses of the data indicated a significant difference (p = 0.01) in achievement when comparing students’ biology test scores before and after the implementation of enrichment activities (see table 1). student attitudes toward science as results in table 2 indicate, the science enrichment activities had a significant positive impact on the students’ attitudes toward science, with the t-test resulting in a p-value of less than 0.05. table 3 shows student responses to a selected group of items in the survey. results show that after participating in the enrichment activities a greater percentage of students felt that they liked science, did well in science, planned to major in science and would like to pursue a science-related career. one of the highest point gains was connected to students’ sense of self-efficacy in science represented by the statement “i do well in science classes.” in addition, while on the pre-survey only 12% of the students said that biology was their favorite class, this number increased to 33% after participating in the enrichment activities. students also had an opportunity to comment on their experiences related to their participation in the science enrichment activities. overall their responses indicated a favorable view of the program. common comments included “i’m glad to be in the enrichment program; it’s helping me understand science better.” other comments were related to students’ enjoyment of the inquiry-based activities. “i never knew doing science could be so much fun,” wrote one of them and “i enjoy doing learning cycles, they make me like science,” responded another. student comments also indicated that some of the program components made a strong impact on the students’ perceptions of science. for example, when they learned about one of the role models -dr. mae jemison, a black female astronaut - they were very interested. many of them had never heard of her. one of them asked, “how come we didn’t learn about her in science class?” another student commented, “i didn’t know there were black astronauts let alone a woman.” they took a fond interest in learning that dr. jemison was from chicago and that she was a medical doctor as well as an astronaut. the biology teacher who implemented the enrichment program also served as a role model to the young ladies. also african american, she had decided to become a teacher after working for a few years as a biochemist in a medical school. she shared with her students some of her experiences when working as a biochemist and the career path she had taken through college and graduate school. this in turn resulted in many student questions about science-related careers and the importance of doing well in science classes. discussion and conclusion as the results of this study indicate, the science enrichment activities in which the students participated had a positive impact on african american female students’ achievement and attitudes toward science. pre and post mean comparisons show a 10-point increase for both achievement and attitudes as well as large effect sizes for both measures (cohen, 1988). these results support those of miles and matkins (2004) who found that activities such as mentoring, tutoring, saturday science academy, and hands-on lab experiences improved african american students’ achievement in science. the results advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 122 of this study are also consistent with nichols and steffy’s (1999) who noted that student self-efficacy increased when they experienced alternative learning environments. similarly, chang and mao (1998) reported higher student achievement when middle-school students participated in inquiry-based activities. researchers have also purported a relationship between role models and student career aspirations (fried & maccleave, 2009; hackett, esposito & o'halloran, 1989; nauta, epperson & kahn, 1998). in the program described here, as students became familiar with the lives of female african american scientists their attitudes about science changed. they began considering the possibility of majoring in science and pursuing a science-related career. results such as these show that school-related variables are key to narrowing student achievement gaps. yet, the current recession is once again negatively impacting the education of children in need, as schools cut programs and increase class size to meet budgetary cuts. education was supposed to be the big equalizer after the passing of brown v. board of education in 1954 and the subsequent civil rights act of 1964, yet, half a century later, the educational experiences of many minority children continue to be inferior in quantity and quality when compared to those of the majority. today as in the past, our large urban areas are segregated by race and socioeconomics and the schools in these areas mirror such segregation, with poor minority children attending, old, dilapidated schools with few resources. yet, even though most minority students’ educational experiences are drastically different from those of the majority, when measuring student achievement, those differences are not taken into consideration. gaps in student achievement will continue to exist as long as there are gaps in the quality of their education. references aaronson, d., barrow, l., & sander, w. (2007). teachers and student achievement in the chicago public high schools. journal of labor economics, 25(1), 95-135. barton, p. e. (2005). achievement gaps: past and present. principal, 84(4), 12-16. cavanagh, s. (2007). poverty's effect on u.s. scores greater than for other nations. education week. 27(15), 1, 13. chang, c. y., & mao, s. l. (1998). the effects of an inquirybased instructional method on earth science students’ achievement. (tech. rep. no. edo-sp-2003-02). san diego, ca: annual meeting of the national association for research in science teaching. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 418 858) chapin, j. r. (2006). achievement gap in social studies and science starts early: evidence from the early childhood longitudinal study (fn1). the social studies, 97(6), 231-8. cohen, j. (1988). statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences. hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum. cohen, j. (1997). the earth is round (p < .05). in l. l. harlow, s. a. mulalk, & j. h. steiger (eds.), what if there were no significance tests? (pp. 21-35). mahwah, nj: erlbaum press. corcoran, s. p., & evans, w. n. (2008). the role of inequality in teacher quality. in k. magnuson & j. waldfogel (eds.), steady gains and stalled progress (pp. 212 249). new york: russell sage foundation. donlevy, j. (2006). a new year’s resolution for 2006: closing the achievement gap. international journal of instructional media 33(1), 1-3. ferguson, r. f., & mehta, j. (2004). the 50th anniversary an unfinished journey: the legacy of brown and the narrowing of the achievement gap. phi delta kappan, 85(9), 656-669. fried, t., & maccleave, a. (2009). influence of role models and mentors on female graduate students' choice of science as a career. alberta journal of educational research. 55(4), 482-496. glassman, p., & roelle, r. j. (2007). singling black boys to close the gaps. school administrator, 64(10), 26-28, 30-31. hackett, g., esposito, d., & o'halloran, m. s. (1989). the relationship of role model influences to the career salience and educational and career plans of college women. journal of vocational behavior, 35,164-180. haycock, k. (2001). closing the achievement gap. educational leadership, 58(6). jencks, c., & phillips, m. (1998). the black-white achievement gap. washington, d.c: the brookings institution press. lincoln, y. s., & guba, e. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. beverly hills, ca: sage publications. magnuson, k., & waldfogel, j. (2008). steady gains and stalled progress. new york, ny: russell sage foundation. magnuson, k., & votruba-drzal, e. (2008). enduring influences of childhood poverty. in s. danziger & m. cancian (eds.). changing poverty. (pp. 153-179) new york, ny: russell sage. marek, e. a., & cavallo, a. m. l., (1997). the learning cycle: elementary school science and beyond. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. mcmillan, j. h, & schumacker, s. (2010). research in education: evidence-based inquiry (7th ed.). new york, ny: pearson. miles, m. b., & huberman, a. m. (1994). qualitative data analysis: an expanded sourcebook. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. miles, r., & matkins, j. j. (2004) science achievement for african american students. the science teacher 71(2), 36-42. nauta, m. m., epperson, d. l., & kahn, j. h. (1998). a multiple-groups analysis of predictors of higher level advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 123 career aspirations among women in mathematics, science, and engineering majors. journal of counseling psychology, 45, 483-496 nichols, j. d., & steffy, b. e. (1999). an evaluation of success in an alternative learning programme: motivational impact versus completion rate. educational review, 51(3), 207-219. pantic, z. (2007). stem sell. new england journal of higher education. 22(1), 25-26. ravitch, d., & cortese, a. (2009). why we're behind: what top nations teach their students but we don't. education digest: essential readings condensed for quick review. 75(1), 35-38. parker, v., & gerber, b. (2000). effects of a science intervention program on middle-grade student achievement and attitudes. school science and mathematics, 100(5), 236-242. schleicher, a. k. r. (2009). from finland to kyrgyzstan: a changing landscape. school administrator. 66(3), 2627. thompson, c. l., & o’quinn, s. d. (2001) eliminating the black-white achievement gap: a summary of research. greensboro, n.c: north carolina education research council (eric document reproduction service no ed457250). tornatzky, l. g., macias, e. e., jenkins, d., & solis, c. (2006). access and achievement: building educational and career pathways for latinos in advanced technology. report on a national study of latino access to postsecondary education and careers in information. technology. los angeles, ca. the tomás rivera policy institute. (eric document reproduction service no ed502061). advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 124 table 1 comparison of test scores preand post-treatment (n = 17) ________________________________________________________________________ pre-treatment m post-treatment m t d p ________________________________________________________________________ 69.9 78.8 3.17 0.9 0.01 table 2 comparison of student attitudes preand post-treatment ________________________________________________________________________ pre-treatment m post-treatment m t d p ________________________________________________________________________ 57.8 67.9 2.81 4.8 0.02 table 3 percentage of students agreeing with each statement before and after the use of science enrichment activities ________________________________________________________________________ statement total pre total post point gain ________________________________________________________________________ i like science. 33 38 5 biology is my favorite class 12 33 11 i do well in science classes 23 30 7 i plan on majoring in a science related field 16 22 6 i would like to be an engineer, scientist or 23 26 3 doctor advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership black women in academe: progress but no parity sheila t. gregory, ph.d. gregory, winter, 1999 many women who have been mentored by male scholars that are intellectually demanding, have been told to cut back on some of the time they devote to teaching and service in order to concentrate on research. while well meaning and possibly appropriate, this masculine perspective mirrors sexist attitudes that are prevalent both within and outside the academy. when black women enter the academy they often have a host of potentially rewarding experiences available. what limits those opportunities internal and external barriers? internal barriers are based on a combination of personal style and perceptions of one's capability to work within the department and college. one woman might hold a well-founded belief that this "parochial, chauvinistic, traditional system has worked hard to keep her out or to limit her involvement and advancement" (barnes, 1986). another woman might enter without these preconceived notions and learn to maneuver around obstacles that are placed in her path. both have the potential to become successful scholars and academics, but the first would be most likely to not succeed because of her preconceived notions, regardless of validity. external barriers are often described as those that an individual can only exercise minimal, if any, control over (biklen & brannigan, 1980). research on black faculty women have cited several external barriers which often stifle their success as scholars, such as: 1) undue burdens of non-research activities; 2) ambiguous, inappropriate and unfairly weighed tenure and promotion requirements; 3) lack of access to necessary resources and support teaching and research; and 4) racism and discrimination. the first possible barrier to promotion and tenure for many black faculty women are the conflicting and extraordinary time demands placed on them due to their relatively small numbers (banks, 1984; gregory, 1995). astin (1969) argued that "highly educated women often find themselves unhappy and frustrated because of the barriers they encounter in their career development." according to graham (1973), "when there are but a few women on a faculty, excessive demands are made upon them; not only must each fulfill the usual academic requirement, but she must serve as a token woman on all kinds of committees" (p. 733). for example, merton (1957) argued that the demands of a particular role may often be in http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html complete contradiction to other roles. one such example is the requirements of tenure. in many cases, some black faculty are torn between working to meet the requirements of tenure and advising and counseling disproportionately larger numbers of nontraditional students, as well as other duties, such as committee work (aquirre, 1992). these activities are often encouraged by departments, but are rarely taken into consideration during tenure review. furthermore, it often serves to penalize the faculty member for interfering with scholarly productivity (valverde, 1981). walker (1973) described a "double-consciousness among black university professors as they struggle to reconcile the demands of the academic and black communities. incompatibilities between action-research oriented towards the black community and the academic research oriented demand by promotion and tenure committees. the double consciousness is reflected in the goals black faculty pursue in their teaching and involvement in counseling black students, serving on disproportionately high numbers of committees, attending black events on and off campus, and maintaining strong relationships with the black community" (p. 69). moses (1989) claimed that "because there are so few black faculty women members...there is a tendency for the majority to see these women as spokespersons for all blacks rather than as individuals with other qualifications. black women are often asked to sit on committees as experts on blacks, and they are asked to solve problems or handle situations having to do with racial difficulties that should be dealt with by others. there is often no reward for this work; in fact, black women may often be at a disadvantage when they are eligible for promotion or tenure because so much of their time has been taken up with administrative assignments" (p. 15). for caribbean faculty, teaching is still a primary work activity for most although research is also required. in this study, caribbean faculty did not experience as much external barriers as they did internal barriers. none of the 44 caribbean women mentioned being over burdened by student advising, although 25% mentioned having more committee work than they would have liked. this can, in part, be explained by the following: caribbean faculty in this study reported greater autonomy in the university; had more dependents living at home which required their attentions; had more opportunities for international travel with precluded them from spending as much time on campus; and had more centralized academic departments which handled many administrative and advising functions faculty women in the states often must deal with themselves. many women who have been mentored by male scholars that are intellectually demanding, have been told to cut back on some of the time they devote to teaching and service in order to concentrate on research. while well meaning and possibly appropriate, this masculine perspective mirrors sexist attitudes that are prevalent both within and outside the academy. the advice assumes that teaching, advising, mentoring, service and volunteer activities are not important or challenging, yet no argument is given as to why these activities are not important or even less important than individual research. if institutions are to survive someone must teach classes, advise students, and build community relations. as long as these tasks are devalued and maintained as "women's work," few faculty men will carry their fair share of these activities. one way to change the system into one that truly values women and fairly evaluated their contributions is boyer's (1990) suggestion to redefine scholarship to encompass discovery, integration, application, and teaching. by doing this we can begin to deconstruct this gendered hierarchy and focus on new criteria for promotion and tenure. although many black faculty women find teaching personally rewarding, as opposed to the politics of administration, unclear expectations of scholarly research, and ambiguous requirements of promotion and tenure are tremendous barriers towards advancement. for example, black faculty women typically engage in more teaching, advising greater numbers of students, and participating in more committee work than white faculty men (menges & exum, 1983). as a result, they may conduct less research and publish fewer articles than their white men or women counterparts (moses, 1989). numerous studies have mentioned that black faculty often indicate having research trivialized and devalued if it focuses on black issues or issues of a social concern (exum, 1983; gregory, 1995; mitchell, 1983). several studies indicate that minority faculty often find promotion and tenure to be inappropriate, unrealistic, or unfairly weighed (banks, 1984; gregory, 1995; ladd, 1979; lincoln & guba, 1980; outcalt, 1980). some minority and women faculty never reach tenure because they were often caught in the "revolving door" syndrome. this often occurs when faculty members are appointed on tenure track, kept for four to six years, evaluated unfavorably for tenure, and required to leave. this "up and out" process may be repeated at numerous institutions until the individual eventually chooses to leave the academy altogether (aquirre, 1981; banks, 1984; gregory, 1995; valverde, 1981). for caribbean scholars who are able to apply for tenure more than once at the same institution, they are less likely to leave after being denied the first time but are at a tremendous disadvantage. in this study, 25% of the caribbean faculty women had been denied tenure at least once and chose to remain at the institution and try again. some minority faculty have reported that majority faculty sometimes fail to recognize the actual quality of their research, and instead focus on their publishing sources (fikes, 1978). some minority faculty do not choose to publish in predominantly white journals often considered "scholarly." as a result, many black faculty have reported that the quality of their research is rarely considered (sudarkasa, 1987). furthermore, other reports indicate that research by minority faculty on minority populations are rarely considered 'relevant in the field' or are 'significant contributions to the academy,' and therefore not recognized as a scholarly piece of work (epps, 1989; wilson, 1987). for caribbean faculty women, this was less of a concern because there was a common understanding of which journals were more competitive and rigorous. however, a few women who published pieces on gender development did report experiencing difficulty in gaining the respect of their male counterparts. in support of this contention, astin and bayer found in a 1979 study of active male and female scientific scholars that women perceive to have less control over how work is judged by peers. this can often block tenure for black and caribbean scholars, thus leading to greater numbers of black faculty leaving the academy. rafky's 1972 research on black scholars revealed that over one-quarter of black respondents perceived they were required to have better credentials than whites to be appointed and granted tenure at most institutions, particularly predominantly white institutions. blacks at historically black institutions were more likely to be tenured than those employed at predominantly white institutions (logan, 1990). the third external barrier is the lack of access to resources needed for teaching and research and the absence of support groups or formal mentoring. although, there has been much debate about the impact mentoring has had on career success for both faculty and students, many studies confirm that mentorship and sponsorship type programs can provide greater access to resources for research, advice, and collegial networks, which can often lead to greater academic productivity (clark & corcoran, 1986). white faculty men have traditionally benefited from this type of sponsorship, but it has been absent for most women and minorities (merriam, 1983). dodgson (1986) has contended that mentoring has often been a vehicle for upward mobility in the careers of women. many black faculty have reported a feeling of isolation. mentors can often nurture a sense of belonging for minorities in the profession (defour, 1990). the shortage of black faculty women appear to support the need for some type of mentoring and support networks (swoboda, 1990). african american women also tend not to be included in collaborative research projects with their peers. furthermore, they often lack sponsorship and rarely have access to resources for research (gregory, 1995; moore, 1981) which can lead to greater prestige, higher future economic gains, and enhanced job mobility. women have typically been found to teach more hours on average than men (austin & gamson, 1983; finkel, olswang, & she,1994). they also teach mostly undergraduates and have less contact with graduate students and are therefore less likely to be awarded teaching assistants (aisenberg & harrington, 1988; freeman, 1977). harvey and scott-jones (1985) have argued that often "in the absence of a support group... black faculty members are subjected to the aggravating aspects of the academic milieu without enjoying some of its compensating benefits: contemplation, independence, and social and intellectual stimulation from colleagues sharing the same interests and outlook "(p. 70). (author's commentary) caribbean faculty women reported receiving greater resources for teaching and research but experienced similar events with regard to the existence of supportive colleagues. as one woman in the study stated, "being very ethnic, i was often alone. i never had anyone to talk to the way that you would with other colleagues. being indian i rarely had anyone that i could share ideas with and whom i had similar experiences with as a woman." a fourth external barrier is what many consider discriminatory and/or racist practices against women, black and caribbean scholars. in 1974, for example, moore and wagstaff surveyed over 3,000 black women scholars working with or in predominantly white institutions. moore and wagstaff (1974) found that 95% of all black respondents reported some discriminatory activity by persons within their institutions. black professionals from two-year colleges have reported similar experiences. a 1995 study (singh, robinson, & williams-green, 1995) of black academics examined gender differences as perceived by black faculty and found that women faced additional challenges such as racism and discrimination. the study focused on tenure, institutional climate, professional life and promotion and revealed that women were less satisfied with their careers, were subjected to negative treatment and often felt isolated. according to clark and corcoran (1986) many female academics suffer from the "accumulated disadvantage," and whereas others term it "on sex discrimination" in the workplace. regardless of its name, it is apparent that there must be some type of ongoing social control that maintains differences in performance, opportunities and rewards. clark and corcoran (1986) describe a "salieri effect," whereby women were assessed by a dominant core group of men and often failed to "measure up" because of their social status in the department. the result is less overtly discriminatory as it is insidious because while it allows women to enter the academy, it also severely limits opportunities for development and advancement. theodore (1971) defined discrimination against women professionals as "when women of equivalent qualifications, experience, and performance do not share equally in the decision-making process or receive equal rewards, such as salary, promotions, prestige, professional recognition, and honors" (p. 27). in the academic workplace, black faculty often encounter prejudice and discrimination which can often create major obstacles to the academic success of faculty (frierson, 1990). according to tack and patitu (1992), "black women who have gained access to higher education and higher-paying positions, often find themselves in less than optimal work environments." in addition "the racist and sexist attitudes of colleagues can often result in less than satisfactory work conditions and increased stress in the life of a black female professional" (steward, 1987, p. 3). epstein (1970) contended that black professional women are caught in what she terms a "double bind" between discriminatory racism and sexism, which can cause tremendous stress for black women scholars. for example, some women who choose to concentrate on scholarship to further the research of blacks, often report that the majority of faculty peers and superiors do not consider such work relevant or worthwhile. file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/gregorycom1.html#one in contrast, leggon (1975) argued that ascribed status (race and gender) is more important and powerful in determining professional identity than achieved status (doctor, professor). this has been the case in my recent experience. (author's commentary) a study from mayfield and nash (1976) found that roughly one-third of faculty women perceive themselves to be victims of discrimination in salary and one-fourth discrimination in rank. also, onefourth indicated that performance standards were higher for them than their male counterparts. when gender and ethnicity were combined, black women professors were less satisfied than both white women and black men colleagues. caribbean scholars reported virtually no racist practices and only a few discriminatory practices that were believed to be based more on gender and age. the debate over the tenure system has existed for quite some time, yet little has been done because few viable alternatives have been proposed. in the early 1960s, over 20 states proposed legislation for the first time to reform or abolish tenure for new prospective faculty. the community colleges of virginia was the only bill which passed of the 20 submitted for legislation. in his book, scholarship reconsidered (1990), boyer examined the movement from teaching, to service, to research, and its implications on the roles of faculty. he began by illustrating the renewed concern for undergraduate education, teaching, service, and the core curriculum. he stated: "at no time in our history has the need been greater for connecting the work of the academy to the social and environmental challenges beyond the campus.... we need a renewed commitment to service" (p. xii). since scholarship is most often the primary requirement for tenure, it is important to explore ways to redefine scholarly activity. in summary, these four external barriers to promotion and tenure need to be addressed by: 1) revisiting the policies and practices surrounding tenure to ensure that requirements are equitably decided and policies are clear, appropriate, realistic, and fairly weighed; 2) providing rewards structures to encourage faculty success and offer support systems to reduce isolation; 3) ensuring black faculty women have the necessary tools required to succeed in the academy; 4) providing a conducive research environment by minimizing the number of undue burdens placed on many women scholars which tend to detract from scholarship, and eliminating racist and discriminatory practices. methodology this study began in the winter of 1994 and was based on a 100% sample of the 384 members and associates of the association of black women in higher education (abwhe). the purpose was to survey career mobility patterns of african american women professors from two-year and four-year american colleges and universities. of the 384 women surveyed, 336 (or 79%) returned the survey instrument, of which 180 were eligible to participate. of the 180 member sample, 96 (or 53.33%) of the women had remained exclusively in academic employment since completion of graduate training. fifty-nine (or 32.77%) of the women had worked outside of the academy since completion of graduate training but had returned and were currently working at a two-year or four-year american college or university. the third group of women totaling 25 in number (or 13.88%) were those who voluntarily left the academy and had not returned. in the winter of 1995, i received a grant to expand my study to include those experiences of faculty women from the university of the west indies system-mona in jamaica, st. augustine in trinidad-tobago, and cave hill in barbados campuses. the study i conducted in the caribbean differed from the original study because i was able to interview all 44 women face-to-face as opposed to distributing the surveys by mail with the 384 african american women. framework and procedure for african american faculty women the conceptual framework for both groups was based upon a combination of economic, psychosocial, file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/gregorycom1.html#two and job satisfaction theories to determine the effects of race, gender, and ethnicity. the inferential statistical technique employed for african american faculty women in the study was a discriminant analysis applied to the data to determine to what degree each of the designated independent variables would prove significant in predicting the factors which affect the decisions (dependent variable) of african american women professors to remain in, return to, or voluntarily leave the academy. the descriptive analysis included each of the three groups in the inferential analysis, however all respondents tended to fall into two distinct groups; those who were currently working in the academy (remainers and returners) and those who were not (voluntary leavers). a stepwise discriminant analysis was first applied to the data to identify and select from 21 possible independent variables (salary, tenure status, institutional type, intention to leave, marital status, number of dependents, support systems, external barriers, age, never married, when marriage occurred, education of spouse, employment of spouse, current employment status, job satisfaction, academic faculty rank, recent academic and nonacademic employment offers, type of community, discretionary activities, hours of domestic activities, and hours at work) those with greatest statistical significance (p<.05) in the decision to remain in, return to, or voluntarily leave the academy. of the 21 possible independent variables, 5 were selected in the discriminant stepwise procedure and were presented in order of significance (table 1). those who remained in or returned to the academy represented a total of over 86% of the sample and had two major characteristics. first, the members of this group were successful intellectual african american women scholars. they were most likely to hold tenure (.54 for those who remain and .37 for those who return, as compared to .20 for those who leave), and receive the greatest number of academic employment offers (2.75 for those who remain as compared to 2.39 for those who return and 1.04 for those voluntarily leave) from other four-year american colleges and universities. because of the demand for these academic women, many tended to have a high rate of mobility as they moved from institution to institution, receiving numerous attractive career opportunities. second, these academic women tended to have a high rate of job satisfaction (.65 for those who remain, and 64% for those who return, as compared to 48% for those who voluntarily leave). apparently, nearly two-thirds of these academic women were happy despite perceived barriers to career advancement, such as limited upward mobility opportunities within the current institution, unrealistic expectations of time to do the work, inability to manage role sets, and other personal factors. these barriers may have influenced some of these women to seek other opportunities. this would suggest that these women became mobile because they perceived the academy as having limited opportunities for advancement. although they often sought more attractive career opportunities elsewhere, most often accepted alternative positions within the academy. those who were no longer working in the academy and had voluntarily left displayed a number of distinct characteristics. they were twice as likely to be non-tenured and have the lowest job satisfaction rate of all three groups. tenure status for those who left was the most significant of all 5 variables identified in the stepwise discriminant analysis. those who left the academy were: 1) most likely to hold a non-tenured position; 2) voluntarily leave exclusively from a four-year college or university as opposed to a two-year institution; 3) most likely to receive the fewest number of academic employment offers; and 4) least likely to experience other barriers which interfered with academic career success. framework and procedure for caribbean faculty women the conceptual framework for caribbean faculty women was also based upon a combination of economic, psychosocial, and job satisfaction theories to determine the effects of race, gender, and ethnicity. the inferential statistical technique employed for women in the study was also a discriminant analysis applied to the data to determine to what degree each of the designated independent variables file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/gregorytable1.html would prove significant in predicting the factors which affect the decisions (dependent variable) of caribbean women professors to remain in, return to, or voluntarily leave the academy. the descriptive analysis included each of the three groups in the inferential analysis, however all respondents tended to fall into the first group; those who were currently working in the academy (remainers and returners). a stepwise discriminant analysis was first applied to the data to identify and select from 21 possible independent variables (salary, tenure status, institutional type, intention to leave, marital status, number of dependents, support systems, external barriers, age, never married, when marriage occurred, education of spouse, employment of spouse, current employment status, job satisfaction, academic faculty rank, recent academic and nonacademic employment offers, type of community, discretionary activities, hours of domestic activities, and hours at work) those with greatest statistical significance (p<.05) in the decision to remain in, return to, or voluntarily leave the academy. of the 21 possible independent variables, 5 were also selected in the discriminant stepwise procedure and were presented in order of significance (table 2). those who remained in the academy represented a total of over 68% of the sample and had three major characteristics. first, they have the highest rate of job satisfaction (.72 for those who remain, as compared to .64 for those who return and .48 for those who leave), achieved the highest academic faculty rank (3.68 for those who remain, as compared to 3.20 for those who return and 2.84 for those who leave), and finally they were most likely to hold tenure (.62 for those who remain, as compared to .46 for those who return and .28 for those who leave). the mobility rate for caribbean scholars was not quite as high as african american scholars, in part because they have an opportunity to go up for tenure more than once and often have little choice of academic institutions unless they choose to leave the caribbean. in addition, almost a quarter of these academic women perceived barriers to career advancement such as personal factors, inability to manage role sets, personal demands of family, and limited upward mobility opportunities within the current institution. these barriers may influence some of these women to seek other opportunities, especially if they are prepared to leave the caribbean. although they may have sought more attractive career opportunities elsewhere, most accepted alternative administrative posts or a combination of teaching and administrative positions within the current institution. caribbean scholars appear to have higher rates of job satisfaction and are more likely to be tenured but have greater external barriers than their african american women counterparts. again, this may be attributed to their lack of mobility options in the caribbean and their ability to seek tenure more than once. reference aquirre, a. (1992). an interpretive analysis of chicano faculty in academe. social science journal, 29, 124-140. astin, h. s. (1969). the woman doctorate in america: origins, career, and family. new york: russell sage foundation. astin, h. s. & bayer, a. e. (1979). sex discrimination in academe. in a. s. rossi & a. calderwood (eds.), academic women on the move (pp. 333-358). new york: russell sage foundation. banks, w. (1984). afro-american scholars in the university: roles and conflicts. american behavioral scientist, 27(3), 325-338. barnes, d. (1986). transitions and stresses for black female scholars, in career guide for women scholars. new york: springer publishing. file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/gregorytable2.html biklen, s. k. & brannigan, m. (eds.) (1980). women and educational leadership. lexington ma: d.c. heath & co. boyer, e. (1990). scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professorate, carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching. clark, s. m. & corcoran, m. (1986). perspectives on the american socialization of women faculty: a case of accumulative disadvantage. journal of higher education, 57, 20-43. epps, e. (1989). academic culture and the minority professor. academe 75, 23-26. epstein, c. (1970). a woman's place: options and limits in professional careers. berkeley, ca: university of california press. exum, w. h. (1983, april). climbing the crystal stairs: values, affirmative action, and minority faculty. social problems, 30, 383-399. fikes, r. (1978). control of information: black scholars and the academic press. western journal of black studies, 2(3), 219-221. frierson, h. jr. (1990). the situation of black educational researchers: continuation of a crisis. educational researcher, 19, 12-17. graham, p. a. (1973). status transitions of women students, faculty, and administrators. in a. s. rossi, & a. calderwood (eds.), academic women on the move (pp. 163-172). new york: russell sage foundation. gregory, s. t. (1995). black women in the academy. lanham, md: university press of america. ladd, e. jr. (1979). the work experience of american college professors: some data and an argument. faculty career development, current issues in higher education no. 2., washington, d.c.: american association for higher education. leggon, c. b. (1980). black female professionals: dilemmas and contradictions of status. in l. f. rodgers-rose (ed.), the black woman (pp. 161-174). newbury park, ca: sage publications. lincoln, y. s. & guba, e. g. (1980). the distinction between merit and worth. evaluation, educational evaluation, and policy analysis, 4, 61-71. logan, c. j. (1990). job satisfaction of african-american faculty at predominantly african-american and predominantly white four-year, state-assisted institutions in the south. unpublished dissertation, bowling green state university, ohio. mayfield, b. & nash, w. (1976). career attitudes of female professors. psychological reports, 39, 631634. mccombs, h. g. (1989). the dynamics and impact of affirmative action processes on higher education, the curriculum, and black women. sex roles, 21(1/2), 127-143. menges, r. j. & exum, w. h. (1983). barriers to the progress of women and minority faculty. journal of higher education, 54(2), 123-144. merton, r. k. (1957). the role set: problems in sociological theory. british journal of sociology, 8, 106120. mitchell, j. (1983). visible, vulnerable, and viable: emerging perspectives of a minority professor. in j. h. cones iii, j.f. noonan, & d. janha (eds.). teaching minority students. san francisco, ca: josseybass. moore, k. m. & wagstaff, l. (1974). black educators in white colleges. san francisco, ca: josseybass. moses, y. t. (1989). black women in academe: issues and strategies. project on the status of education of women. washington, d.c.: association of american colleges. outcalt, d. l. (1980). report of the teaching faculty on teaching evaluation. santa barbara, ca: university of california. rafky, d. m. (1972). the black scholar in the academic marketplace. teachers college record, 74(2), 225-260. singh, k., robinson, m., williams-green, j. (fall, 1995). differences in perception of african american women and men faculty and administrators. journal of negro education, 64(4), 401-408. steward, r. (1987). work satisfaction and the black female professional: a pilot study. kansas city, ks: university of kansas. sudarkasa, n. (1987). affirmative action or affirmative of the status quo? black faculty and administrators in higher education. american association of higher education, 39(6), 3-6. tack, m. w. & patitu, c. l. (1992). faculty job satisfaction: women and minorities in peril. (report 4). ashe-eric higher education reports,washington, dc: george washington university. theodore, a. (ed.) (1971). the professional woman. cambridge, ma: schenkman publishing co. valverde, l. a. (1981, oct.). development of ethnic researchers and the education of white researchers. educational researcher, 16-20. walker, g. p. (1973). effective and ineffective images: as perceived by the male afro-american university professor. (doctoral dissertation, university of pittsburgh, 1990). dissertation abstracts international, 34, 2803. wilson, r. (1987). recruitment and retention of minority faculty and staff. american association higher education bulletin, 39(6), 11-14. dr. sheila gregory is an assistant professor in the department of educational leadership at the university of nevada, las vegas, nevada. gregorys@nevada.edu awl journal home page awl journal volume 2, number 1, winter 1999 mailto:gregorys@nevada.edu file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/awl_winter99.html subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a 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mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership review by linda l. garner, ed.d. prairie view texas a & m university the texas a & m university system garner, spring, 1997 women as school executives: voices and visions beverly j. irby, ed.d., and genevieve brown, ed.d., editors texas council of women school executives huntsville, texas: sam houston press, 1995, 203 pp. $10.00 the publication of the texas council of women school executives (tcwse), women as school executives: voices and visions, edited by beverly j. irby and genevieve brown, explores the paradigm shift of women in executive roles in school administration. the editors have pointed to the changing landscape of leadership and found that inclusiveness is necessary in the educational work place and will enrich the fabric of the education of young people in america. this book was written for a broad audience of educators and educational policy makers. it is straightforward and comprehensive in analyzing feminine leadership, and it examines hypotheses and provides a focus for moving forward in the area of gender inclusiveness. irby and brown present us with much to reflect upon if we seek an agenda for critical inquiry and substantive change in the structure of education involving women as executives. women as school executives: voices andvisions consists of 41 authors, men and women, contributing 32 chapters which explore the concerns and trials of leadership from an array of varied experiences. these authors' experiences cover elementary school principalship, superintendency, central office coordination of various programs, service center education specialization, and university administration. the editors group the chapters into seven sections: voices from history, voices from the field, voices of power, voices of transformation, visions of power, visions for purpose, and visions for reflection. "voices from history" examines the politics of gender relative to a span of more than 100 years. this section raises questions about needed information regarding how women compare as leaders, the lack of data http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html about the number of women in leadership, and the shortage of research related to gender communication patterns. yet a discernment of these domains could serve the female leader well. "voices from the field" takes the perspective of leaders who are "out there" while examining attitudes towards their leadership and communication styles and the perceptions of how the feminine image affects the placement of women in powerful positions. "voices of power" analyzes the unique problems of women in the male-oriented culture of public schools and universities with emphasis on women of color. "voices of transformation" observes the particular ways that the feminine leader, through adaptive leadership styles, can contribute to administrative teams in these times of change. "visions of power" presents strategies for dealing with power structures and for valuing the skills of networking, communicating, and collaborating. also examined are the unique strengths that women have in managing site-based decision teams. "visions of purpose" gives hope, as well as concrete ideas to women seeking executive positions. investigated are equity issues and gender differences in regard to communication and leadership styles in school administration. valuable insights and tips for obtaining and keeping a superintendent's position are included. "visions for reflection" ponders the transitional decisions women are faced with when charting career paths. articles in this section relate to developing an administrative portfolio and overcoming barriers women face and would be beneficial to the professional seeking career change or enhancement. the articles are research based and contribute greatly to the literature concerning women in executive roles. many current studies are reported in this book on subjects such as comparisons of leadership styles, attitudes toward women administrators among school board members, perceptions of parent involvement, and challenges for women of color. among these pages any young professional will find sound advice for mapping career moves, and balancing family and career, and he/she will develop an understanding of the history and future of women in leadership. though the articles reveal that women have not advanced as much as might be thought, hope and direction can be gleaned from this book. the book can be purchased for $10.00 plus shipping and handling from: ann halstead executive secretary texas council of women school executives texas association of school administrators 406 east 11th street austin, texas 78701-2617 512-477-6361 fax 512-482-8658 email ahalstead@tasanet.org awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 1, spring 1997 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate mailto:ahalstead@tasanet.org file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/spring97/awl_spring97.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awnetwork/index.html bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership women faculty pursuing grants: gender differences patricia boyer, ph.d. irv cockriel boyer & cockriel, winter, 1999 female faculty overall, submitted fewer proposals and had fewer proposals funded than their male counterparts. research, including grant writing, has become an important aspect of promotion and tenure at most institutions of higher education, including comprehensive universities and liberal art colleges (daniel & gallaher, 1990). as this requirement for research increases, so does the need for external funding from public and private sources. meeting the challenges of successfully competing for shrinking research dollars requires a high level of skills in grant writing, and has proved to be challenging for some women faculty. as women faculty advance through the academy, several disparities exist between them and their male colleagues. specifically, research has shown that when compared to male faculty, women faculty do not advance through the academy as quickly (hall & sander, 1986); prefer teaching instead of research (armour, 1990); spend more time teaching than engaging in research, but some prefer to allocate more time to research like their male colleagues (finkelstein, seal, & schuster, 1996). additionally, female faculty tend to be untenured (armour, 1990), and do not conduct research to the extent of their male counterparts (bentley, 1990), including grant writing. additionally, despite some advances women have made in the academy, male faculty still outnumber women in research institutions. research conducted by finkelstein, et al. (1996) found that female junior faculty made up 41% of the faculty population compared with only 28% of senior female faculty nationwide; 33% of new hires at doctoral institutions are women. after controlling for gender, junior and senior female faculty are more likely to be in non-tenure track positions than their male counterparts; 46% of full-time female faculty at research institutions have been there for seven years or less (finkelstein et al., 1996). http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html one cannot address the issue of gender disparities in funded grants and without discussing the effect it has on publication and eventually promotion of faculty. finkelstein et al. (1996) asserted that males are more likely than females to be involved in research and publication. however, explanations are unclear as to why these differences exist (bentley, 1990). bentley (1990) speculated that the differences are related to the fact that few women are not concentrated in research institutions. while davis & astin (1987) contended that the differences exist in the type of publications and not quantity or quality of work. other research suggests that faculty members' beliefs about themselves affect their research endeavors. for example, taylor, locke, lee, and gist (1984) argued that research self-efficacy (self-perception in one's ability to successfully perform research) is related to faculty research productivity. self-efficacy, as defined by vasil (1992), is the perception faculty possess in their ability to successfully perform research or the belief that faculty possess certain skills and they are able to utilize them in a particular situation (landino & owen, 1988). moreover, women faculty with self-competence, belief that if one possess the necessary research skills, do publish; faculty who did not have self-competence published little (bentley & blackburn, 1992). the present study is an effort to understand differences in research, more specifically grant writing, among faculty members at association of american universities (aau) 'research i' institutions as classified by carnegie. more specifically, the focus of this research concentrates on factors that motivate and hinder faculty in their pursuit of grant proposals. the question guiding this research is: "are there any differences in the factors that motivate and hinder faculty in their pursuit of grants when gender is considered?" method procedure and study participants a list of aau 'research i' faculty members were obtained from sources such as the peterson's guide to business, education, health & law and the internet. the names of the faculty were placed in alphabetical order and numbered. then faculty were randomly selected utilizing random numbers generated from sas. addresses of the faculty were obtained via the internet from faculty respective institutions' homepage. a questionnaire was mailed to 370 college of education faculty. a sample of 248 (67%) usable surveys were completed and returned. the sample, identified through a systematic random selection of names of aau faculty, was designed to have a confidence level of 90% with a margin of error =.05. questionnaire and data analysis the questionnaire was developed based on instruments utilized by monahan (1993) and dooley (1995) as well as a review of the related literature. as shown in tables 1 and 2, the questionnaire assessed 15 items for both motivating and hindering factors. chi-square test of independence was utilized to answer the research question, "are there any differences in the factors that motivate and hinder faculty in their pursuit of grants when gender is considered?" results of the aau faculty responding to the questionnaire, 141 (57.3%) were males and 105 (42.7%) were females. the study participants include, 143 (58.1%) full professors, 58 (23.6%) associate professors, and 45 (18.3%) assistant professors; 191 (77.6%) of the respondents were tenured professors and 55 (22.4%) were untenured professors. the women faculty comprises of, 38 (36%) full professors, 35 (34%) associate professors, and 31 (30%) assistant professors. the male faculty represents, 103 (74%) full professors, 23 (16%) associate professors, and 14 (10%) assistant professors. as shown in table 1, comparison of female and male faculty revealed the following significant motivating factors for female faculty, "consideration in tenure or promotion decisions" (c2 =8.072, df=3; p<.05); "having access to boilerplates" (c2 =13.862, df=3; p<.01); and "building my professional reputation as a capable researcher" (c2 =13.862, df=3; p<.01). significant differences by gender were also found in the following barriers to grant writing. the barriers were, "inadequate support available to submit a proposal in a timely manner" (c2 =11.137, df=3; p<.01); "lack of training in grant seeking and grant writing" (c2 =9.926, df=3; p<.05); "too time consuming" (c2 =8.912, df=3; p<.05) were all found to be significant when compared to the gender of faculty (table 2). regarding submitting proposals for funding, the results show virtually no differences between female (10%) and male (8%) faculty who did not submit proposal for funding. when one to three research proposals were submitted for funding, female faculty (47%) submitted proposal at a higher percentage than male faculty (37%), while male faculty (54%) tend to submit four or more research proposals at higher percentage than female faculty (42%) (table 3). in this study, female faculty (23%) have a higher percentage of proposals that were not funded than male faculty (16%). when one to three proposals were funded, female faculty (59%) have a slightly higher percentage than male faculty (56%). when four or more proposals were funded, male faculty (27%) have a slightly higher percentage than female faculty (18%) (table 4). tables 3 and 4 are based on proposals submitted or funded from the previous five years. discussion this research indicates that there is a significant gender difference in factors that motivate and hinder faculty in grant writing. also, the results of this study suggest gender differences in the number of proposals submitted and funded. female faculty reported lacking the necessary training to pursue grants. in fact, the lack of training was a main factor that influenced the decision of the female faculty not to pursue grants. in most cases, women faculty were not knowledgeable about how to initiate the process of grant writing which accounts for fewer proposals being submitted. these findings hold important implications for university administrators who are interested in assisting their women faculty in successfully competing for limited grant funds. therefore, once faculty members are hired, university administrators play a major role in their success when pursuing grants. if the goals of university administrators are to support and facilitate success of women faculty, more emphasis should be placed on providing adequate training and mentorship to them. this notice is supported by the work of teague (1981) who proposed a collaborative effort between female faculty and those with knowledge of proposal writing. it is recommended that universities implement faculty development program with sessions on identifying appropriate funding sources and techniques in writing successful grants. previous studies have found male faculty more involved in research and publication. the findings of this study are inconsistent with results of previous research. for this study, female faculty overall, submitted fewer proposals and had fewer proposals funded than their male counterparts (table 3 and table 4). however, there are some female faculty who submitted four or more proposals and had four or more proposals funded. universities judge themselves and are judged by others based on research productivity (fulton & trow, 1974) and the dollar amount of grants acquired (geiger, 1986). since universities are competitive, goals file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/boyer1.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/boyer2.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/boyer3.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/boyer4.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/boyer3.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/boyer4.html for the faculty are to seek prestige for their particular institution and themselves. for faculty who seek opportunities to build their professional reputations as capable researchers, incentives must be individualized which will motivate them in making "a name for themselves," their universities, and contribute to their area of research interest when grants are funded. it is imperative that these motivators and barriers be taken into account if women faculty at aau 'research i' institutions will have an equal chance of succeeding in the academy. however, it is important to note a potential limitation to this study is the results are based on faculty in colleges of education at aau 'research i' institutions and thus it is unclear if the results can be generalized to faculty from other institutions. references armour, r. (1990). racial and gender differences in faculty careers. (eric document reproduction services no. ed323825). bentley, r. j. (1990). faculty research performance over time and its relationship to sources of grant support. unpublished doctoral dissertation, the university of michigan. bentley, r. j. & blackburn, r. t. (1992). two decades of gains for female faculty? teachers college record, 93 (4), 697-709. daniel, l. g. & gallaher, i. (1990). impediments to faculty involvement in grant-related activities: a case study. journal of the society of research administrators, 16, 5-13. davis, d. & astin, h.s. (1987). reputational standing in academe. journal of higher education 58(3), 123-144. dooley, l. m. (spring, 1995). barriers and inducements to grant related activity by a college of education faculty. research management review, 7, (2),10-24. finkelstein, m. j., seal, r. k., & schuster, j. h. (1996). the american faculty in transition: a first look at the new academic generation. a paper prepared for the national center for education statistics nsopf93. fulton, o. & trow, m. (1974). research activity in higher education. sociology of education, 47, 29-73. geiger, r. l. (1986). to advance knowledge: the growth of american research universities, 1900-1940. new york: oxford university press. hall, r. m. & sander, b. r. (1986). academic mentoring for women students and faculty: a new look at an old way to get ahead. (eric document reproduction services no. ed240891). landino, r. a. & owen, s. v. (1988). self-efficacy in university faculty. journal of vocational behavior, 33, 1-14. monahan, t. c. (1993). barriers and inducements to grant-related activity by new jersey state college faculty. journal of the society of research administrators, 25 (4), 9-25. peterson's guide to graduate programs in business, education, health, & law (1996) 13th ed. peterson's annual guides to graduate study: book 6. princeton, nj. taylor, m.s., locke, f.a., lee, c., & gist, m. (1984). type a behavior and faculty research productivity: what are the mechanisms? organizational behavior and human performance, 34, 402-418. teague, g. v. (1981). how administrators can encourage successful r&d. educational record, 62, 3639. vasil, l. (1992). self-efficacy expectations and causal attributions for achievement among male and female university faculty. journal of vocational behavior, 41, 259-269. dr. patricia boyer is an institutional researcher at the university of missouri-columbia. elpapb@showme.missouri.edu dr. irv cockriel is the associate dean and director of grants & contracts support office at the university of missouri-columbia. elpaiwc@showme.missouri.edu dr. boyer and dr. cockriel would like to thank dr. cherrie b. boyer for her helpful comments on this manuscript. awl journal home page awl journal volume 2, number 1, winter 1999 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in 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mailto:elpapb@showme.missouri.edu mailto:elpaiwc@showme.missouri.edu file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/awl_winter99.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 75 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 75-86, 2013 available online athttp://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper some ethiopian women leaders' perceptions about their leadership tesfay s. tsegay assistant professor, director of research and publication coordination office, ethiopian civil service university p.o.box 170407, addis ababa, ethiopia email: soultess4t@yahoo.co.uk; phone: 251-911-684863 accepted february 10, 2012 * this paper was funded by the heinrich boll foundation, ethiopia and presented at a gender and leadership workshop organized by the foundation in december, 2008. this research aimed at exploring the perceptions of women leaders on their performance on three key areas of leadership on ten leadership qualities, type of power they use and their leadership performance as perceived and assessed by the leaders themselves. a total of 45 women leaders 15 each from public, ngo and private sectors participated in the study. two questionnaires were distributed each consisting of two parts. the first part solicited information, among others, about a participant’s organization, position in and number of years in the organization as well as years in current position, educational level and whether or not she has participated in leadership training programs. the second part of the questionnaire contained three sets of questions on the three key leadership areas. the findings of the study show that with minor differences among them, private sector leaders seem to possess the ten leadership qualities better than and followed by ngo and public sector leaders. both in terms of individual and group performance, ngo leaders seem to use power of the person to the highest degree followed by private sector leaders and last come public sector leaders. ngo leader seem to be more able to work with and through other people (stateswomanship) followed by both private and public sector leaders. the overall average performance rating for all sectors in the three performance types puts ngo women leaders at the top followed by private and public sector leaders. the overall findings indicate that the relatively higher performance of women sectoral leaders in the study could be attributed to their corresponding high levels of educational qualification, over all work experience and experience in leadership positions, and training on leadership. keywords: women leaders, key leadership areas, ngo, go, private sector, self-reflection introduction much research has been conducted on women’s leadership styles in for-profit and non-profit government settings worldwide (goleman et al., 2002; kamensky & morales, 2005; michaels, 2005). however, there seems to be no research on this topic in ethiopia. in the ethiopian context, though there is a growing interest in both government and non-government actors to increase the number of women in decision –making, a lot remains to be done. the same is true in research into gender and leadership in ethiopia. there have been attempts to study gender – related issues such as gender and hiv/aids, gender analysis and mainstreaming, gender and leadership in some public sectors. this research studies a hitherto investigated issue of women’s leadership effectiveness in the public/government, private/forprofit and non-governmental organizations (ngos) as viewed by the leaders themselves. some studies have investigated the leadership style differences of male and female leaders using instruments that included both sexes. such studies have obviously shed light into leadership practice of women. but there are no studies that assess leadership effectiveness through self-reflection in ethiopia. review of related literature gender and leadership an organization’s greatest resource is human knowledge and the talent that makes use of it. a significant part of an organization’s resource, women, (particularly in terms of their performance as leaders) is misunderstood, often being measured and benchmarked against male performance criteria and behaviour (helgesen & williams, 2004). this seems also to apply in the ethiopian context. the real issue in leadership differences lies in the equity in selecting the right person with the appropriate skills and qualities to ensure the effectiveness and success of the organization (bass & avolio, 1994). it has http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 76 been argued that the integration of women in leadership roles is not a matter of “fitting in” the traditional models, but “giving in” the opportunities for them to practice their own leadership styles. since organizations have been mostly occupied by men, some women have chosen successful male leaders and their styles as their role models (appelbaum & shapiro, 1993). recognizing women’s styles of leadership represents an important approach to equity as long as they are not stereotyped as “the” ways women lead but as “other” ways of leading. the feminine leadership styles are not better or worse than the traditional male-oriented ones, they are just different. according to shakeshaft (1993, p. 105), “the point of examining these differences is not to say one approach is right and one is wrong, but rather to help us understand that males and females may be coming from very different perspectives, and that unless we understand these differences, we are not likely to work well together”. literature on leadership and gender often focuses on the influence of the latter to emphasize certain dimensions of leadership over others (pounder & coleman, 2002). feminine leadership styles are described in general terms as interpersonal-oriented, charismatic and democratic (eagly& johnson, 1990; freeman &varey, 1997) and related to gender because of stereotypes of women as being sensitive, warm, tactful and expressive (olsson and walker, 2003; van engen et al., 2001).earlier thinking emphasized that women who had achieved leadership positions were imitators of male characteristics, but contemporary theories recognize feminine leadership styles (helgesen, 1990; stanford et al., 1995). like any new trend in traditional settings, it takes years to develop styles until these styles are understood and accepted. meanwhile, women face several barriers that prevent them from been considered leaders or leadership candidates (still, 1994). obstacles with this origin have been described as “the glass ceiling” as a metaphor of an invisible top that halts women in moving up the career ladder at a certain point (oakley, 2000). nonetheless, the increasing participation of women in the labor market in the last half century, and their movement to managerial positions has changed the definition of leadership. female leadership tends towards a style defined as “interactive leadership” (rosener, 1990, p. 126) that involves: encouraging participation; sharing power and information; enhancing selfworth; changing selfinterests for an overall good; relating power to interpersonal skills; and believing in better performance when feeling good. as hall observes, women leaders value having influence more than having power (hall, 1994). laboratory experiments suggest that women leaders are often evaluated more negatively than male leaders, holding performance constant. these studies (eagly & karau, 2002) normally either provide written description of leadership situations, varying the sex of the leaders, or use trained actors to lead, allowing the experimenter to control the degree of success the leader achieves. women are typically judged to have less leadership abilities than men with similar characteristics, and the same actions performed by men and women in leadership situations are evaluated more negatively when women are the leaders. this evidence stands in contrast with survey data, which suggest that women leaders are seen as more effective and less likely to be corrupt. for example, a survey of 800 people in 8 countries in east africa by the british council (british council, 2002) found that more than 70% of people thought women performed better than or as well as men, and more than half of the people interviewed thought that women politicians were less corrupt and cared more about basic needs of the community than men. leadership focus in for-profit, public, and non-profit organizations billing and alvesson (2000) drew attention to the dangers of essentialism in debates about gender where all women are viewed as homogenous, reinforcing traditional stereotypes. the proposition that there might be sector-based differences in leadership competencies stems from the apparent differences between the sectors themselves. organizations in the private and public/non-profit sector vary in terms of goals, structure, accountability, budgets, and ownership, to name but a few areas of distinction. fottler (1981) emphasized that values, incentives, and internal and external constraints are key institutional differences between the private and public sectors. research findings show that women adopt democratic and participative leadership styles in the corporate world and in education. transformational leadership is the preferred leadership style used by women. the characteristics of transformational leadership relate to female values developed through socialization processes that include building relationships, communication, consensus building, power as influence, and working together for a common purpose (trinidad & normore, 2005). effectiveness of leadership, among other things, is characterized by the abilities to motivate people, build relationships and influence outcomes. the behaviour that is modeled by the leader and the top management profoundly shape and thereby determine competency level of their juniors. a transformational leader as compared to transactional leader has a major impact on the quality and efficiency level of subordinates (burns, 1978; bass, 1985; bycio, hackett & allen, 1995).transformational leadership is characterized as inspirational leadership, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration and charisma and transactional leadership refers to contingent rewards and management–by-expectation). what distinguishes these transformational leaders from transactional leaders is their relatively greater passionate commitment to a new vision for the organizations’ future and their ability to share that vision. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 77 current research on leadership emphasizes the importance of inspiring passion in others. some of the characteristics that leaders can embody to stimulate this passion are: a positive vision, inspiring core values, emotional intelligence, courage, and an engaging and inclusive leadership style (bilimoria and godwin, 2005). this approach to transmitting effective leadership is seen more typically in the business leadership literature. in particular, theories of charismatic (house, 1977), transformational (bass, 1985), and visionary leadership (sashkin, 1988) have inspired volumes of research and numerous training programs for business managers. a transfer of these passion-inspiring approaches to the public sector is seen only to a limited degree. however, the literature on non-profits has grabbed onto these theories, recommending them as a way to transform the organization (santora et al., 1999). finally, some of the more recent literature on leadership in non-profit and public organizations has focused on participative management as a way for leaders to improve organizational performance and employee satisfaction (kim, 2002). all over, women internventionists, in their capacity as leaders, are working through many ngos towards gender empowerment and development. as leaders, they are actively involved in the process which requires them to perform a variety of functions at different levels within the organizational structure of the ngos. effectiveness in delineating these functions, among other things, is directly related to leadership qualities expected of these women leaders at different levels vis-à-vis the competencies possessed by them. in an ngo, which practices openness, participation, delegation and transparency, transformational leadership at the top could be clearly visible. this promotes and develops their transformational leadership traits and develops the behavioural competencies in their span of control. it leads to matured and effective leadership among women leaders working at these various levels down the line. it enhances credibility and effectiveness of the ngo in terms of its ultimate objectives such as development of gender, empowerment of women, improvement in the quality of life at large, etc. the for-profit sector leadership has been examined to a far greater extent than has leadership in the public and non-profit sectors. the dimensions of leadership studied in each sector show great similarity. in fact, current texts for for-profit and non-profit leaders all seem to use the findings from the forprofit sector leadership research as the basis for their prescriptions for effective leadership. we see substantial overlap in the key attributes and skills associated with effective leadership. there is also the standard division of behaviors into the task-oriented and relationship-oriented categories. with regard to the importance of leadership to achieving results, a study asked women leaders “on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being very low and 10 being very high, how much do you believe leadership skills are important to achievement of results? “ on this survey item, the answers were very similar. the average response for for-profit leaders was 8.9 and the average response for public/non-profit leaders was 8.7, a negligible difference. the results suggested that both types of leaders view leadership skills as very important to achieving results, regardless of the organizational setting (thach & thompson, 2007). leaders as reflective practitioners the main premise that informs the current research is the view that leadership is an art that can be developed through the mastery of key leadership areas of success which can be learned and improved through self-reflection. self-reflection or introspection is self-examination or a reflective examination of one’s beliefs and motives in order to know oneself. why ask women to reflect on their leadership? to begin with, learning is deeply personal. learning occurs when we test what we have learned through application and reflection. according to branch & paranjape (2002, cited in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/reflective_practice), “reflection leads to growth of the individual – morally, personally, psychologically, and emotionally, as well as cognitively". moreover, it can lead to personal growth, professional growth all leading to meaningful change. secondly, and more specifically, through the process of reflection leaders can better understand their strengths and weaknesses, identify and question their underlying values and beliefs, acknowledge and challenge possible assumptions on which they base their ideas, feelings and actions and identify possible inadequacies or areas for improvement. leaders have been encouraged to become reflective practitioners (argyris & schon, 1978, 1996 cited in grisoni & beeby, 2007) to learn from their own and others’ experiences and helping people to interpret the meaning of events. the leader as reflective practitioner is the leader as personal sensemaker.reflection is usually related to action or practice, thus, the phrase ‘reflective practitioner’. reflection is, in luhmann’s (1982, p. 327) definition “the process through which a system establishes a relationship with itself ... [a] form of participation”. reflection is thought turning back to itself in an autopoetic process of ‘auto-evaluation’. action, on the other hand, requires that something happen; it is an engagement to transform what is to what it may become. in addition to leadership qualities, appropriate use of power and performance, leaders are also encouraged to know themselves thoroughly if they want to become the leaders they aspire to become. regarding leadership competencies in any type of organization, bennis (1987) said, there are a few areas that have been proven time and again as mandatory for effective leadership. these include the competency clusters of vision and goal-setting, interpersonal skills, self-knowledge, and technical competence regarding the specifics of the business in which the leader works. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 78 the brazilian educational theorist paulo freire (1973) argued that we apprehend the objective data of our reality through reflection. in like manner, taking time to reflect can help leaders identify approaches that have worked well, and in that way reinforce good practice. by combining action and reflection, we create what freire called praxis —a set of practices informed by reflection. thus our actions are not random or haphazard but informed and deliberate and we are aware of why we do what we do. griffiths (1990) also showed the realization of the importance and the relationship between reflection and action by stating that people reflect on, and improve, their own work and their own situations. he also states that reflection and action are tightly interlinked, including both reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. this means that the process includes both monitoring and also both short term and longer term reflections. research objectives this research aims to explore the perceptions of women leaders on their performance on three key areas of leadership on ten leadership qualities, type of power they use and their leadership performance as perceived and assessed by the leaders themselves. a secondary aim of the study is to explore the role if any educational level, leadership experience and training in leadership play in the successful performance of women leaders in the three key leadership areas under investigation. the women are drawn from three sectors in addis ababa, the capital of ethiopia. these are the public, the non-governmental and for –profit or private sectors. the study attempts to answer the following questions: 1. how do women leaders from the private, public and ngo sectors perform in the three areas of leadership? 2. are there similarities and differences in the self-rating of women leaders in the three sectors in terms of the three key leadership areas? 3. are there relationships between educational level, experience and training in leadership on the one hand and performance on the three leadership areas on the other among leaders from the three sectors? methods research participants by women leaders is meant women who currently assume decision-making positions in the three different sectors identified for the study. these include positions such as general/deputy manager, director, department head, program managers, team leaders. purposive sampling method was used to select participants for the study. participants were selected among women leaders who had a wide range of experiences in leadership positions and educational background, and who could understand and answer the items in the questionnaires. in other words, instead of statistical sampling, the study employs theoretical sampling wherein participant selection is based on potential relevance to the study’s research questions. intensity sampling (patton, 2002) was used to select participants through internal expert selection of members who manifested general leadership competence, knowledge and skills. a total of 45 women leaders 15 each from public, ngo and private sectors participated in the study. the women leaders from public organizations were drawn from federal ministries, commissions, corporations, addis ababa sub-city administrations public schools. these include directors, general and deputy managers to department heads, program managers and team leaders. women leaders from ngos comprised of organizations and associations that work on children’s’ welfare, family, health, relief work, and constituted leaders from both faith – based and secular non-profit organizations. here we have programme / senior managers and assistant managers, directors, programme / project coordinators, department heads, and a vice chairperson. the private sector leaders represented businesses such as manufacturing, distribution and retails, service industry such as education, training, consultancy, and hotels. their positions include a 5 –star hotel manager, medical doctor and manager of a clinic, general managers and assistant managers of private limited companies, retail shop managers, consultancy firm manager, university college department head. as summarized in table 1, the women leaders are drawn from various backgrounds in terms of education, years of work experience both at the organization and at current position in the organizations they represented. of the 45 leaders, 10 have ma / msc degrees; 29 hold ba degrees; and 6 hold diplomas. of these two hold ma and 5 ba in leadership and 28 had certificate level training in leadership. table 1 participants’ educational level and experience sector av. years in qualification training in leadership org position ma/msc ba dip ba& above cert no public 15.3 8.7 4 11 2 11 2 ngo 7 5.2 2 12 1 2 8 5 private 9.7 4.9 4 6 5 3 9 3 total 10.7 6.3 10 29 6 7 28 10 the average years of service within current organization and years in current leadership position are about 11 years and 6 years, respectively. overall years of service and years in current position are higher in public organizations, followed by private and ngo sectors. the questionnaires each questionnaire consisted of two parts. the first part solicited information about a participant’s organization, position in and number of years in the organization as well as years in current position, educational level and whether or not she has participated in leadership training programmes. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 79 moreover, three open-ended questions asked participants to state how they assumed current leadership positions, what helped them become the leaders they currently are and what kind of support they may need to be more effective and successful leaders. the second part of the questionnaire contained the three sets of questions, that is, one on leadership qualities (10 questions), a second on type of power used (16 questions) and a third on leadership performance (15 questions). about 60 questionnaires were distributed to women participants drawn from the public, private and ngo sectors in addis ababa. of these 45 women leaders (15 each from three sectors) completed and returned questionnaires on time. each of the questionnaires has an already established and tested rating system and has been used by different researchers. adapted from manning and curtis (2007), the scoring and interpretation methods used for each questionnaire are discussed in the findings section of the paper. data was compared and contrasted using statistical means, averages and ranks. results and discussions in this section of the study, the findings from the three questionnaires will be presented in two sections. first, findings on the ten leadership qualities, type of power used by women leaders and their professional performance both overall and by sector will be presented. secondly, the overall findings on the three key areas of leadership will be summarized, and comparisons and contrasts are made among sector leaders. here an attempt is made to answer the question, ‘do education level, experience and training in leadership have any effect on women leaders’ performance in the three areas of leadership?’ findings on leadership qualities, use of power and professional performance ten leadership qualities leadership is about social influence, leaving a mark, initiating and guiding. the result of leadership is change and the product could be a new direction or character, etc. effective leadership or effective leaders have the ability to attract and retain capable people, motivate them to put forth their best efforts, and solve problems that arise (manning & curtis, 2997). wren (1995, p. 236) wrote, leaders, through “their ideas and deeds show the way and influence the behavior of others”. to do so successfully, an effective leader must be director and motivator, implementer and innovator, mentor and team builder, expert and moral force, organizer and developer of people (wren, 1995). though different wordings are used, there are certain qualities or characteristics that effective leaders are expected to possess. in this regard, the first key leadership area investigated of women leaders looks at one of the variables called leadership qualities. it answers the question ‘what does it take to be a successful leader?’ the following is a discussion of ten qualities that mark a leader and help influence the leadership process – vision, ability, enthusiasm, stability, concern for others, self-confidence, persistence, vitality, charisma, and integrity (manning & curtis, 2007). each is followed by the findings of the study on how the women leaders performed. finally, overall ratings for three sectors are discussed. but first let us see how the ratings for this item work. each quality is measured along a scale of 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest). individual scores for the ten qualities are then added and scored out of 100. accordingly, ‘excellent; exceptional’ leaders score 90100; those in the ‘high; very good’ category score 80-89; ‘average’ leader’s score is 70-79; and ‘low’ is for those who score 60-69. findings are summarized in table 2 below. table 2 rating of leadership qualities by sector rank ranking by public sector ranking by ngo sector ranking by private sector raking by all sectors 1 integrity self – confidence integrity integrity (92.7) 2 enthusiasm integrity vision concern for others (89.7) 3 charisma& concern for others concern for others concern for others self – confidence (88.7) 4 enthusiasm ability enthusiasm (88.4) 5 persistence vision charisma vision (88.0) 6 selfconfidence vitality enthusiasm ability (85.6) 7 vision ability vitality vitality (85.3) 8 stability persistence selfconfidence persistence (84.7) 9 vitality charisma persistence charisma (84.3) 10 ability stability stability stability (80.1) vision. the findings of the study show individual as well as sectoral variations in the ratings of this quality. individually, a total of 24 leaders scored the highest rating (90-100; excellent, exceptional) of which 9 are private; 8 ngo and 9 public. but if we look at the sector average performance, we find that, public sector leaders scored the highest average of 92, followed by ngo leaders (88) and public leaders (84).‘vision’, with an average score of 88, ranked 5th out of the ten qualities for all sectors. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 80 ability. in terms of the quality of ‘ability’, we also observe differences in scores of individual leaders and sectors. a total of 24 leaders were self-rated as ‘excellent’ of which 6 are from the public, 9 from ngo and 9 from private sectors. sectoral performance is higher for private (89) followed by 86 for ngo and 81 for public leaders. this quality ranked 6th with an average score of 85.6. enthusiasm. this quality seems to be almost consistent in leaders of all sectors with the average ratings of 89, 88 and 87 by public, ngo, and private sector leaders, respectively. the overall rank is 4th which is one of the highest rated qualities. moreover, it also is one of the highest scored by 31 individual leaders (11 public; 10 ngo and 10 private). stability. ‘stability’ seems to be one of the qualities lacking in the women leaders in the study. only 5 from ngo 8 from private and 8 from public sector leaders were self-rated as ‘excellent’ in this quality. this is the only quality that scored the lowest average (75 by ngo) among the ten qualities. this is followed by 83 and 84 by private and public sector leaders, respectively. it is also stands the last in rank, that is, 10th. concern for others. following ‘integrity’ this is the second highest in rank, scoring an average of 89.7. the highest number of leaders, that is, (33 of 45) also possess this quality as ‘excellent” and are drawn from public 8, ngo 12 and private 13. with slight difference, ngo (91.3) and private (91) lead followed by public (87) sector leaders. self confidence. ngo leaders seem to be ‘excellent’ in ‘self –confidence’ ranking first in it by 93 points. with only slight differences between them follow private (86) and public (85) sector leaders. in general, this quality ranks 3rd for all sectors. a total of 28 leaders assessed themselves as ‘excellent’ of which the highest are from ngo (11), 9 from private and 8 from public sectors. persistence. this quality ranks among the lowest, that is, 8th, by all sector leaders. public sector leaders with an average score of 86 seem to manifest this quality more than private business leaders (85) and ngo leaders (83). only 8 leaders each from the three sectors seem to be persistent. vitality. both ngo and private business leaders seem to possess this quality almost equally (87 by private and 86.8 by ngo). the lowest score goes to public sector leaders with 82 points. ‘vitality’ ranks 7th out of the ten qualities. charisma. ‘charisma’ follows ‘stability’ as the quality that is most lacking in all leaders in the study. ranking 9th with an average 84.3 points, it is also assessed as ‘excellent by half of the leaders of which 8 are from public, 5 from ngo and 9 from private sector leaders. integrity. ‘integrity’ is ranked 1st by all sector leaders with an average of 92.7 points. all sector leaders possess ‘excellent’ integrity (scoring 93 points each for public and private and 92 for ngo). a score of 35 leaders (78 per cent of the total) 13 from public, 11 from private and 11 from ngo sectors individually scored ‘excellent’ in this quality. another study by thach & thompson (2007) comparing 23 qualities of profit and non-profit organization leaders found out the following almost similar overall ranking for six qualities. integrity was ranked 1st, concern for others or developing others was ranked 3; self-confidence was ranked 7; being visionary was ranked 9; enthusiasm or initiative was ranked 13; and being inspirational or charismatic leader was ranked 9th. overall ratings for women leaders in different sectors what really gives a true picture regarding qualities of effective leaders is not whether or not a leader possesses a particular quality better than others. it is the cumulative effect of the presence or absence of all the qualities that indicate the effectiveness of leadership. hence, the need to explore the average ratings for each sector as shown in table 2. if we look at the average ratings for qualities of leadership for ngo, public and private leaders, we find very slight differences. however, with an average of 87.9 per cent private sector leaders seem to lead followed by ngo sector leaders (86) and public sector leaders (85.7). this puts all leaders under the ‘high; very good’ category. however, there is a category called ‘excellent; exceptional’ which women leaders in the study failed to reach or possess. findings on type of power used by leaders according to manning & curtis (2007), another key characteristic of leadership is the empowerment of people through the exercise of power. with the office of leadership come both responsibility and power. the challenge for effective leadership is to meet the responsibility of the position without abusing its power. the successful leader masters the use of power to influence the behaviour of others. the following is a discussion of two sources of power, namely, power of the position and power of the person. the participants in this study have been asked to assess themselves in terms of these sources of power. sources of leadership power successful leaders master the use of power to influence the behaviour of others. research by manning & curtis (2007) found out two sources of power for leaders. the first is power of the position based on what leaders can offer to others. here the leader can use reward, coercive, legitimate or information power to influence followers’ behaviour. the second is based on how leaders are viewed by others and refers to power of the person. using expert, referent, rational or charisma power the leader attempts to persuade followers to do what he/she deems important. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 81 ratings for sources of leader power women leaders from the three sectors were presented with 16 statements and asked to select the most appropriate response using the following scale: 1= strongly disagree; 2= disagree; 3= neither agree nor disagree; 4= agree; 5 = strongly agree. each of the eight power types was represented with two statements. thus, the highest score for each type is 10 and the highest for the four types under each category is 40. based on the above ratings, the effective leader is expected to emphasize the power of the person to achieve desired goals. this does not rule out the use of power that emanates from the position when and where contexts demand it. an ideal leader uses each of the following eight types of power in the following order. first come power of the person in the following order. firstly, the leader needs to maintain knowledge and skill (expertise); secondly, she is expected to manifest high moral character (referent power); thirdly, she is required to demonstrate effective problem –solving ability (rational power); and fourthly, she needs to motivate and inspire people (charisma). the effective leader also needs a second set of power sources that come from the position one holds formally in the organization. from these comes the fifth type of power the need for the leader to reward efforts and accomplishments (reward power); to make effective decisions (legitimacy) is sixth; and the seventh is keeping people informed on important matters (information). finally, the effective leader rarely if ever uses fear and punishment (coercion) as form of power (manning & curtis 2007). we can now examine the power participants say they use in leading their respective organizations in light of the preceding discussion on the ideal order of power use. as indicated above, an effective leader emphasizes the power of the person more than the power of position. thus, we will start by assessing individual sector leaders who scored the highest in this power source. only one ngo leader scored 40 out of 40 for power of the person (that is, expert, referent, rational and charisma). this is followed by three ngo leaders and one public leader who scored 39 out of 40. one each from public and ngo and three from private sectors scored 38 out of 40. thus, ngo leaders seem to approach the ideal leader we discussed earlier, followed by private and public leaders. as indicated in table 3, women leaders in all sectors seem to favor one of the powers that emerge from position, namely, reward power and seem never to use coercion as a way of leading. whereas the former finding seems to disagree with what is expected of an ideal leader, the later finding seems to completely agree. another power of the person, referent power, which refers to capacity to influence others because of their desire to identify with the leader, is the next less used power type by women leaders in the study. yet this power type is ranked second in the ideal leader. information power, belonging to power of position, seems to be favored rather than referent power. the overall ratings put women leaders in the ngo sector to use more power of the person and appear closer to the idea leader. leaders in the private and public sectors follow. table 3 rankings on the power type used by sector leaders power sources power type ideal rank rank by public rank by ngo rank by private power of person expert 1 3 2 4 referent 2 7 6 7 rational 3 4 5 3 charisma 4 2 3 2 power of position reward 5 1 1 1 legitimate 6 6 7 6 information 7 5 4 5 coercion 8 8 8 8 the focus on power of the person (reward and information power) by all sector leaders may indicate the prevalence of a style that leans more to transactional, authoritarian leadership than democratic and transformational leadership. could these have resulted from the influence of more paternalistic ways of socializations both women and men have been exposed to? or could the male dominated organizations and their reliance on power that emanates from the position one holds and not how that power needs to be used to work with and through people have helped shape women’s leadership styles? though more research in this regard is called for, it seems plausible to argue that the way women are socialized and previously led could influence the way they themselves lead. findings on women leaders’ performance type another key leadership area, performance management, refers to achieving organizational success through personal humility, fierce resolve and sustained discipline. for leadership effectiveness it is important to have a vision, it is important to have leadership qualities, it is important to have the power of leadership position. but all of these will result in little actual accomplishment without performance management skills (manning & curtis, 2007).an important element of performance management and the third area self-assessed by women leaders is professional performance. for this purpose, the questionnaire evaluated job performance in three important areas: stateswomanship, entrepreneurship and innovation. a brief discussion on each follows. stateswomanship is the ability to work with and through other people. a stateswoman is skillful in human relations and is able to multiply personal accomplishments through the efforts of others. a stateswoman is not a dictator, but rather a developer of effective relationships. the stateswoman is one who guides rather than leads, helping others to make decisions rather than making decisions alone. the stateswoman believes that if advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 82 everyone works together, more can be accomplished. entrepreneurship is the ability to achieve results, regardless of obstacles. it takes entrepreneurship to build a plant on time, to produce a quality product, and to close a sale. an entrepreneur is action-oriented, but knows that it is not just action, but achievement, that counts. innovation is the ability to generate new and usable ideas. the innovator is not satisfied with the status quo, and therefore explores, questions, and studies new ways of doing things. innovation accounts for advances in all fields of work. important products we take for granted today are the results of yesterday’s inventions. ratings for professional performance to assess their professional performance women leaders were presented with 15 questions, five each for stateswomanship, entrepreneurship, and innovation. each question had four alternative answers with 1, 3, 5 & 7 point distribution. thus, the highest possible score for each performance type is 7 multiplied by 5 which equals to 35. accordingly, a score of 3035 places a leader on the ‘extremely high performer’ level; a score of 20-29 is for ‘good performer’; a score of 15-19 is for a leader who is doing the job, no more, no less. a score of below 14 is for those leaders who need a lot do to improve performance. like the findings for the two key areas of leadership, there are individual as well as sectoral differences in professional performance in terms of both each of and average for the three performance types.when we look at individual scores for the three performance types we find that seven ngo (of these 5 are for stateswomanship, one each for entrepreneurship and innovation); three private (two for stateswomanship and one for entrepreneurship) and one public sector leader seem to belong to the ‘extremely high performer’ category. this makes up 24 per cent of the leaders who participated in the study. only 2 leaders from the private sector scored the lowest (13 out of 35) for stateswomanship and innovation. unlike the individual differences in performance, we observe almost similar average scores by sector for all three performance types. as shown in table 4, ngo leader seem to be able to work more with and through other people (stateswomanship) followed by both private and public sector leaders. though with insignificant difference, private sector leaders, on the other hand, seem to possess the ability to achieve more results (entrepreneurship) followed by both ngo and public sector leaders. finally, when it comes to innovation, that is, the ability to generate new and usable ideas, again with slight difference between them public and ngo sector leaders seem to perform better than private sector leaders. similarly, there are differences within sector leaders in terms of achievements in the three performance types. with the highest average score of 26 ngo leaders seem to perform better as stateswomen, followed by innovation (25) and entrepreneurship (23.7). public sector leaders, scored the next best average score of 25.5 for innovation, and 25 for entrepreneurship and 22.6 (the lowest average) for stateswomanship. finally, private sector leaders seem to perform relatively higher as stateswoman than as entrepreneurs and innovators. table 4 professional performance by sector performance type public ngo private average stateswomanship 22.6 26 24.3 24.3 entrepreneurship 25 25 25.7 25.2 innovation 25.5 25 23.7 24.7 average 24.4 25.3 24.6 the overall average performance rating for all sectors in the three performance types (that is 20-29) puts women leaders who participated in the study under the ‘good performers’ category (see table 4). these are types of leaders who are pivotal people in their organizations and are solid produces. however, there is a higher much more efficient performer category called ‘extremely high performers’ who as a result of ability, experience, motivation, and attitude, produce top results. educational level, experience and training in leadership do education level, experience and training in leadership have any effect on women leaders’ performance in the three areas of leadership? as mentioned in the first section of the paper, participants in this research come from varied backgrounds in terms of years of experience in leadership position, educational level and training in leadership. table 5 shows the rankings for women leaders in the three sectors in the three leadership areas in relation to experience, education and training in leadership. women leaders from the public sector rank first in educational level (15 of them have ma /ba degrees), years in leadership position (average of 9 years) and training in leadership (13 out the 15). but when it comes to their performance in the three key leadership areas they score the least and stand last. it seems safe to conclude that experience, education and training have no effect on the performance of women leaders at least in the public sector. table 5 over rankings on experience, education and performance of key leadership areas by sector sector rank in experience rank in education rank in leadership training rank in three areas of leadership ngo 2 2 3 1 private 3 3 2 2 public 1 1 1 3 women leaders in the private sector rank second in leadership training (12 out of 15), and third in both education (10 ma & advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 83 ba) and experience (average of 5 years). however, they stood second in performance in the three areas of leadership. thus, these leaders seem to perform better than public sector leaders in the three key leadership areas in spite of lower rankings in education, experience and training. the same seems to be true for ngo sector leaders. ranking second in both experience (average of 5.3 years) and education (14 of the 15 have ba/ma degrees), and third in training (only 10 of the 15), they stood first in the three key leadership areas. like leaders in the private sector, these leaders have proved to be effective leaders in spite of limited experience and training in leadership. why do women leaders in the public sector perform less as effective leaders while having the highest level of education, adequate training in leadership and more years in leadership positions? why do ngo sector leaders with limited experience and training in leadership prove to be more effective leaders than the rest? in addition to personal qualities, performance and power use, other factors such as the broader culture and organizational culture as well as the characteristics of followers also contribute to leadership effectiveness. for example, public and non-profit organizations tend to be focused on public interest, while the goals of private organizations are driven by profits and self-interest (blau & scott, 1962; rainey et al., 1976 cited in thach & thompson, 2007). compared to private organizations, human resource systems in public organizations tend to be merit-based (ring & perry, 1985 cited in thach 7 thompson, 2007), and performance incentives tend to be inadequate or absent (perry & porter, 1982). research also shows that public organizations are more open to environmental influences as a result of their accountability to multiple constituencies, policy makers, and legislative mandates (self, 1977; ring & perry, 1985 cited in thach & thompson, 2007). along those same lines, lan and rainey (1992) found that public leaders perceived a higher emphasis in their organizations on formalized rules and procedures, which impinge upon their authority. after all, as discussed above and in the theoretical section of the paper, the proposition that there might be sector-based differences in leadership performance stems from the apparent differences between the sectors themselves. organizations in the private, public and non-profit sector vary in terms of goals, structure, accountability, budgets, and ownership. moreover, values, incentives, and internal and external constraints are key institutional differences between the private and public sectors. the research participants’ response to three open –ended questions – one on how the women assumed leadership positions, another on what helped in becoming the leaders one is and a third on the kind of support they would need to be even more effective leaders – could probably help answer the above questions. the first open-ended question asked ‘how did you assume current leadership position? in other words, how did you become the leader of the organization or section? ’leaders from the public sector mentioned that they assumed current leadership position through promotion based on competition that valued experience and educational qualification. the answer these leaders forwarded to the second question ‘what helped you be the leader you currently are?’ seems to differ from other sector leaders. they mentioned good performance, educational qualification and training in leadership. ngo leaders responded to question one in similar ways as those in the public sector (educational background; qualification for the position) but added personal qualities (such as persuasiveness, self-confidence, human relations, customer handling) and personal effort and interest in what they are doing. in answering the second question they also mentioned similar factors as those by public leaders (experience; good performance; education and training; qualification, personal qualities (persuasiveness, self-confidence, human relations, customer handling) but added two factors not mentioned by public sector leaders: supportive / conducive work environment and personal effort and commitment. answers for the first question by the private sector are slightly different as they focused more on ownership of business, shareholder; being elected by shareholders followed by education and qualification; personal qualities and experience. answers to the second question are similar as those of the public and ngo leaders. the reasons why women leaders in the public sector perform less as effective leaders with the highest level of education, adequate training in leadership and more years in leadership positions while ngo sector leaders with limited experience and training in leadership prove to be effective leaders seem to reside in the type and culture of organization and other personal qualities. unlike the public leaders, ngo leaders added personal qualities (such as persuasiveness, self-confidence, skills in human relations and customer handling) and personal effort and interest in what they are doing as contributing factors for their assumption of current position. they also added factors such as supportive / conducive work environment and personal effort and commitment to have helped them to be the leaders they have become. thus, in addition to the inherent differences among sectors, personal traits such drive, commitment, interest, interpersonal skills tend to affect leadership quality and effectiveness among the women leaders of the different sectors. to a question about the kind of support women leaders need to be even more effective leaders, they requested help in the following areas in that order: (1) short –term training on leadership; (2) experience-sharing, learning from exposure and feedback on performance; (3) psychological support;, encouragement and recognition for one’s contribution; (4) supportive work environment. conclusions advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 84 this research has attempted to answer three questions introduced in the first part of the paper. the following discussion brings the conclusions of the study by answering these questions. 1. how do women leaders from the private, public and ngo sectors perform in the three areas of leadership? performance on leadership qualities with variations both at the individual and sectoral levels, women leaders in the study self-rated the ten leadership qualities as follows: integrity; concern for others; self – confidence; enthusiasm; vision; ability; vitality; persistence; charisma; and stability. the findings of the study show that with minor differences among them, private sector leaders seem to possess the ten leadership qualities better than and followed by ngo and public sector leaders. the average score for all sector leaders puts them under the ‘high; very good’ category in terms of possessing these qualities. however, there is a category called ‘excellent; exceptional’ which our leaders failed to reach or possess. power use both in terms of individual and group performance, ngo leaders seem to use power of the person to the highest degree. they are followed by private sector leaders and last come public sector leaders. while the ideal leader is expected first and foremost to use more of ‘expert’ power, women leaders in study ranked it third. instead they ranked ‘reward’ power first. such a tendency could indicate the prevalence of transactional rather than transformational leadership among participants of the study. professional performance ngo leader seem to be more able to work with and through other people (stateswomanship) followed by both private and public sector leaders. though with insignificant difference, private sector leaders, on the other hand, seem to possess the ability to achieve more results (entrepreneurship) followed by both ngo and public sector leaders. finally, when it comes to innovation, that is, the ability to generate new and usable ideas, again with slight difference between them public and ngo sector leaders seem to perform better than private sector leaders. the overall average performance rating for all sectors in the three performance types puts ngo women leaders at the top followed by private and public sector leaders. it also puts women leaders who participated in the study under the ‘good performers’ category. these are types of leaders who are pivotal people in their organizations and are solid produces. however, there is a higher much more efficient performer category called ‘extremely high performers’ who as a result of ability, experience, motivation, and attitude, produce top results. these findings are similar to those arrived at by a study done earlier on 12 women leaders in addis ababa. the overall results for the two key leadership areas – leadership qualities and professional performance – show that women ngo leaders seem to score the highest, that is, an average of 88% followed by women in private businesses with an average score of 84 %. with 81%, women leaders in the public sector came last. 2. are there similarities and differences in the self-rating of women leaders in the three sectors in terms of the three key leadership areas? findings of the study show that women leaders in the ngo sector scored highest in terms of using power of the person, in professional performance and high in leadership qualities. women leaders from the private sector stood second by scoring the highest in leadership qualities and high in the use of power of the person and professional performance. women leaders from the public sector scored lowest and stood third in all key areas of leadership. as discussed earlier, for leadership effectiveness it is important to have all of the leadership qualities of the highest degree and it is also important to exercise the power of the person more than the power of position. but all of these will result in little actual accomplishment without the required performance or achievements that realize the goals of the organization. a question to address in this regard would be ‘is there any correlation between the two key leadership areas and professional performance by sector? findings of the study indicate that in terms of professional performance ngo leaders scored the highest compared to leaders from the two sectors. these leaders also scored the highest in using power of the person and possessing the required leadership qualities. the same is true for leaders in both the private and public sectors, though with slight difference it seems reasonable to conclude that there is positive correlation between high scores in the two key areas of leadership and professional performance. in other words, the higher the scores for the two leadership areas, the higher the ratings for professional performance. 3. are there relationships between educational level, experience and training on the one hand and performance on the three leadership areas on the other among the leaders? the overall findings indicate that the relatively higher performance of women sectoral leaders in the study could be attributed to their corresponding high levels of educational qualification, over all work experience and experience in leadership positions, and training on leadership. if we look at sectoral differences, the findings of the study indicate that women leaders in the public sector perform less as effective leaders regardless of high level of education, adequate training in leadership and more years in leadership positions. ngo leaders, on the other hand, were found to be effective leaders in spite of their limited experience and training in leadership compared to those in the public sector. what factors could contribute to this state of affairs? as discussed earlier, the advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 85 answer lies in the fact that though there are inherent differences among sectors in terms of goals, structure, culture, accountability, budgets, values, incentives and ownership, personal traits of leaders such drive, commitment, interest, interpersonal skills tend to affect leadership quality and effectiveness and make significant variations among leaders. recommendations this study has shown how women leaders in different sectors in the capital of the country self-assessed their leadership effectiveness on three leadership areas. it is hoped that the findings will contribute to the understanding of the status of current women leaders in selected sectors in terms of the key leadership areas. more significantly, however, the study indicates what needs to be done to improve the quality as well as increase the number of women leaders in the country. in line with this, the following recommendations are forwarded. 1. there is still a lot to be studied and discovered about gender and leadership in ethiopia. actual interventions become worthwhile when supported by and based on rigorous research and not on any amount and quality of rhetoric. thus, the growing interest to support research in this area by public as well as ngos needs to be strengthened. 2. research into gender and leadership needs to be translated into action. it must be accompanied as well as followed by activities that help bring more women into leadership positions and that empower current women leaders. such activities include continuous and need-based trainings on leadership, recognition for contributions made by women leaders, and creating sustaining and supportive work environments. 3. as the few studies on women leaders in ethiopia and the leadership trainings thus far offered to women attest, there is an ever-growing need for education and training in leadership. the efforts by public organizations and women’s affairs offices in this regard need a solid support from the non-profit, nongovernmental organizations. limitations and implications for future research one drawback of the study could be asking leaders to reflect about their leadership. studies on leadership effectiveness tend to follow the 360 – degree assessment strategy. that is, they use the leader’s self –assessment plus peers’, followers’ and bosses’ assessments. the danger associated with asking leaders to self – assess their performance lies in the tendency to characterize themselves in terms of dominant leadership traits and behaviour. at the same time leaders tend to describe themselves in terms that fit with the prevailing rhetoric of good leadership practice, now strongly associated with a consultative style and a high level of interpersonal skills. thus, results of such assessments could be more favourable to the leaders. however, there is research that shows otherwise. in a study of leadership styles of for-profit, public and non-profit leaders, thach and thompson (2007) administered questionnaires to participants. the most obvious and significant difference was that the women in the study tended to under assess their own skills when compared with how they were assessed by direct reports, by peers, and by bosses in the majority of cases. men, by contrast, tended to over-assess their skills. how would ethiopian leaders, women and men, perform if similar studies were done? considering the effect of the culture of the society and organization and the nature of followers, the outcomes could be different. moreover, there is no denying that effects of such tendencies to under – or over-assess one’s performance could be minimized by including assessments by followers, peers and bosses. this, of course, calls for another study. as can be surmised from the above discussion and the findings of the study there is a need for more and much detailed research on gender and leadership in ethiopia. a follow up study could be done on the performance of the same women leaders as assessed by their followers, peers and bosses. on a general note, more longitudinal and cross-cutting research is called upon to investigate the factors that influence the success of women leaders in ethiopia and how they fare in relation to men leaders in the private, public and non-governmental sectors. references appelbaum, s.h. & shapiro, b.t. 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(1994).making a difference: women headteachers’ contribution to school as learning institutions.paper presented at the annual meeting of the british educational management and administration society, manchester, january. helgesen, s. (1990).the female advantage: women’s ways of leadership. doubleday, new york. helgesen, sally & williams, marta. men and women differing drivers in the development of senior executive talent. criticaleye review: the journal of europe’s centre for business leaders. issue 14 www251.911.684863w.criticaleye.net. house, r.j. (1977). a 1976 theory of charismatic leadership.in hunt, j.g. and larson, l.l. (eds), leadership: the cutting edge. southern illinois university press, carbondale, il. kim, s. (2002). participative management and job satisfaction: lessons for management leadership. public administration review, 62 (2), 231-41. lan, z. & rainey, h.g. 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(1990). ways women lead.harvard business review, 68 (2), 119-125. santora, j.c., seaton, w. &sarros, j.c. (1999).changing times: entrepreneurial leadership in a community-based nonprofit organization.journal of leadership studies, summer-fall,101-109. sashkin, m. (1988).the visionary leader, in conger, j.a. and kanungo, r.n. (eds), charismatic leadership: the elusive factor in organizational effectiveness, jossey-bass, san francisco, ca, pp. 122-160. shakeshaft, c. (1993). gender equity in schools, in capper, c.a. (ed.), educational administration in a pluralistic society, state university of new york press, albany, ny, 87-109. stanford, j.h., oates, b.r. & flores, d. (1995).women’s leadership styles: a heuristic analysis. women in management review, 10 (2), 9-16. still, l. (1994).where to from here? women in management. the cultural dilemma.women in management review, 9 (4), 3-10. thach, elizabeth & thompson, karen j. (2007).trading places: examining leadership competencies between for-profit vs. public and non-profit leaders. leadership & organization development journal, 28 (4), 356-375. trinidad & normore, (2005). leadership and gender: a dangerous liaison? leadership &organization development journal, 26 (7), 574-590. van engen, m.l., van der leeden, r. &willemsen, t.m. (2001).gender, context and leadership styles: a field study. journal of occupational and organizational psychology, 74 (3), 581-598. wren, thomas (1995).the leader’s companion: insights on leadership through the ages. new york: free press. advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership hispanic women leaders and their perceptions of affirmative action kaye l.peery, ph.d., marilyn l.grady, ph.d. peery & grady, winter, 1999 professionals in positions to hire or promote hispanic women need to be educated on the effects of "tokenism" and hispanic women need support to help them deal with its effects. affirmative action is an intensely controversial concept (kaplin & lee, 1995) and one that is receiving a great deal of attention from scholars, news reporters and judges. affirmative action is the result of the civil rights act of 1964. title vii of this act prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, or national origin. title vii allows for the use of affirmative action to redress the effects of past discrimination, but affirmative action plans are mandatory only for federal agencies and contractors. according to kaplin and lee, the dual aims of the federal government's anti-discrimination initiatives are: 1) "to bar like discrimination in the future" 2) "to eliminate the discriminatory effects of the past" (p. 254). public outcry occurs when employer policies respond to a statistical "under representation" that gives preference to women and minorities, thus resulting in "reverse discrimination" (p. 255). most recently, three significant events brought public scrutiny and/or criticism to the implementation of affirmative action policies. in 1995 the first republican congress in over 40 years took control of the legislative branch of government. members of this congress articulated strong disapproval of government set-aside or preferential affirmative action programs. in 1996, the fifth circuit court district ruled that race could not be used as a factor in admissions decisions for the university of texas law school, and consequently, for any institution under that court's jurisdiction (hopwood v state of texas). then, in 1996, california voters passed proposition 209 which banned the use of racial and gender preferences in admissions decisions for higher educational institutions in california. scholars (marshall, 1993; szockyj & fox 1996; miller, 1986) recognize that affirmative action is most http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html influential in helping women and minorities enter occupations in which: 1) men are not threatened and/or organized 2) the job has become less attractive to men 3) cost is a dominant factor (lower salaries) 4) the positions are low-level and dead-end according to marshall (1993) affirmative action has little or no enforcement power. she stated that, "district policymakers and gatekeepers in the career are not concerned with special issues faced by minorities and women" (p. 173). the purpose for conducting this qualitative multicase study was to understand four hispanic women leaders' perceptions of affirmative action policies on their careers. all four of the women interviewed identified affirmative action as having an effect on their lives and careers. procedures to conduct this study, we utilized the multicase study design. case study design is flexible and adaptable to a wide range of contexts and people and provides some of the most useful educational research methods. voiced processes or themes by persons in a particular situation provide detailed descriptions and analysis (mcmillian & schumacher, 1993). using the multicase study design, we describe the participant's career progressions and their perceptions of the impact of affirmative action policies. we used multicase study to explore common themes that occurred within the leadership experiences of women in diverse professional fields. according to bogdan and biklen (1992), multicase studies of two or more subjects in a setting will address generalizability. in qualitative research, the researcher interacts directly with participants and becomes the primary instrument for data analysis and collection. the researcher must state the role she will be assuming for data collection and build trust by making it clear that she will not use information gained to harm or demean people (bodgan & biklen, 1992). the researcher role in this study was primarily that of interviewer and observer. because "the primary instrument in qualitative case study research is human, all observations and analysis are filtered through ones' world view, ones' values, ones' perspective" (merriam, 1998 pg. 39). difficulty may arise for non-members of an ethnic group to study that culture. this difference might cause bias by influencing the research to ask different questions than might be asked by a member of that ethnic group. in addition, participants may offer different answers to members outside their ethnic group (zinn, 1979). one way of addressing this is by "boundary spanning." goetz and lecompte (1984) describe boundary spanning as the ability to communicate within and across cultural groups as a result of familiarity with the beliefs, goals, and behaviors of the particular group. personal lifetime experiences influenced our interest and perceptions of the hispanic culture. one researcher lived and worked among the hispanic population for the past forty years. the researchers experiences as white females in leadership positions created some bias in that we saw racism, discrimination, prejudice, and sexism against both anglo and hispanic women. we approach with study with a belief in the basic principles of feminism. these experiences and beliefs heightened our awareness of the personal and professional challenges and frustrations confronted by women daily. it is our belief that these challenges become exacerbated when facing them as an hispanic woman. as the study progressed, we made every effort to recognize and control these biases. the technique used to select the four participants included purposeful sampling, including the technique of "snowballing." participants included hispanic females with at least five years of administrative or leadership experience. selected women held leadership positions in education, politics, and business. we chose one participant on the basis of personal knowledge of her present position as one of only two female hispanic public school superintendents in the southwestern state where this study took place. we used the technique of snowballing to select two additional participants. as described by berg (1993), this technique is "using people whom the original guide(s) introduces to the ethnographer as persons who can also vouch for the legitimacy and safety of the research" (p. 95). in this case, the original guide was a high ranking political figure who participated in a pilot study conduced in the fall of 1996. the two women selected served in positions as a judge and as the state corporation commissioner. the researchers selected the remaining participant from the corporate world. we spoke with the human resources director of several of the largest public held businesses in the state and asked for recommendations. the primary means of data collection consisted of interviews. we developed open-ended questions, and used interviews to collect data that provided insight into the women's perceptions of the impact of affirmative action on their careers. this interviewing process, or "conversation with a purpose" is one of the oldest and most respected tools of inquiry (guba & lincoln, 1981). guba and lincoln further contend that interviewing, "particularly the unstructured interview--is the backbone of field and naturalistic research and evaluation" (p. 154). interviews were audio recorded and the tapes were transcribed verbatim. other means of collecting data included a thorough examination of magazine and newspaper articles, speech transcripts, meeting minutes, court hearings (in the case of the judge), and memoranda. data analysis occurred simultaneously with data collection. following is a description of the women leaders and their perceptions of the impact of affirmative action policies on their career progressions. participants sandra martinez sandra is of puerto rican, cuban and new mexican hispanic decent. she was the first woman elected to the position of state corporation commissioner. sandra was running for governor, but recently withdrew from the race when she accepted a presidential appointment to washington, d.c. martha moreno martha is the daughter of mexican migrant farm workers. she is the first female judge appointed to her position in the history of the state. lucille sanchez lucille taught high school spanish for twenty-two years before appointment to her current position as a public school superintendent. she also served as a state representative. rosa astorga rosa is in upper level management at a southwest utility company. she is the daughter of mexican migrant farm workers. perceptions the four women described their opinions, as well as negative and positive experiences as a result of affirmative action polices. personally and politically, sandra spoke of discrimination and affirmative action as her "burning passion." she said: i care very, very much about discrimination, and about giving minorities opportunities to do better. i care so passionately about this that i'm probably not politically correct in my thinking, because i still believe very strongly in affirmative action. and i'm not afraid to speak out about it. now, people could say, "well, it's not so brave, because in this state, you'll find a lot of people that agree with you." and i say, "sure, it's not so brave, but i don't see everybody speaking out about it!" sandra talked about affirmative action as a way of making reparation, "because we've treated hispanics so badly." lucille, a public school superintendent and ex-state representative, talked about how affirmative action policies helped her get elected. she said: probably being elected into office (was an opportunity because of my ethnicity). there was a community group that filed suit against the legislature back in '80 because the legislative districts had been gerrymandered to elect whites. we won the suit and because that suit was won, a new legislative district was cut specifically to elect an hispanic person. it was because of that that i was fortunate to get into office. personally, i believe you shouldn't look at a person because of their ethnic background, but because of what they can do. you know, it doesn't matter if that person is black or chinese, or whatever. if that person can do the job, then that's the person that's best for that position. there have been times when i was given specific work assignments because i am hispanic. i found that to be very offensive. martha believed that she received her judicial appointment because of her gender and ethnicity. she said: i think, quite clearly when this position came open, i think people, the public, was talking a lot about wanting an hispanic and wanting an hispanic woman. i think that's the kind of thing that makes all our leaders; our senators, our president, our congressmen say, "yeah, you know, that's right. we don't have one, maybe we should consider one. maybe we should look to see who is available, who is out there." and i know, certainly, that that was done around the time that this position became open. martha addresses discrimination and affirmative action when she speaks to young people. the advice she gave to hispanic high school students in one of her speeches included the following: you can do one of two things. when you are in a situation where people assume you're stupid, assume you're lazy, assume you can do nothing, assume that you've been given special benefits because you're hispanic and not because you are anything, you can give up and say, "screw 'em." or you can prove them wrong. you know, it's just completely up to you. you can say, "i am not stupid, i am very capable." you can do it, or you can just let them win. rosa is a chemical engineer with a masters degree in business administration. she presently holds an upper management position in a very large southwest utility company. rosa discovered the negative effects of affirmative action when she received a promotion several years ago. rosa told this story: i applied for manager of transportation, which was a very high level manager's position. i got the job. it turned out to be a curse, a horrible experience, because coincidentally, just within a few days, there was a (discrimination) lawsuit filed against the company. the people involved in the lawsuit, employees, belonged to an hispanic employee association and one of them was the president. i had close ties with him because i was a personal friend and i was also a member of the association. so when i got the job, there was an immediate link made by employees that i got it because i was an hispanic female and there was a quota, and it was affirmative action. i was devastated that people would say that. i was angry, i was hurt, and i cried. i went into my office and i sobbed. the negative effects of this "token" appointment lasted several years. rosa explained: she (one of the people working for me) put out the word that i got the job because i was an hispanic female. it kind of became 'common knowledge' that that was why i had the job. so, it was communicated to the other members of the department that i was to take over. i couldn't gain the authority that i needed. i couldn't ask people to do things without there being this other inner play; this idea of being at their mercy. you know, i don't know the business, so i don't have the right to question their work or change their work or to do anything like that, which is expected of a manager. rosa did not make any changes for the first year. when she began to feel secure in her position, and did try to make changes, her staff turned against her, using her gender and ethnicity against her. rosa said: what happened is, these people went to their network and anybody who had ever had any small tiff or irritation suddenly was asked to come forward and to say that i had no leadership skills, no personal skills, and plus, i didn't deserve to have that job because i was an hispanic female, that was the only reason. there were all those games being played all the time, just resist the manager, don't take direction, throw up obstacles. that sort of passive-aggressive thing. i've been dealing with that from the very beginning. i was crippled as a manager. i never got management support. rosa talked about her need to prove everyone wrong, and how this resulted in long working hours. she also talked about the effect this had on her family and health. she said: i felt that i was guilty until proven innocent. i had worked eighty hours a week, constantly for month, and months, and months. if i put in a sixty-hour week, i was cruising; i was on vacation that week. none of that mattered. it carried no weight. it meant absolutely nothing. still, i was guilty until proven innocent. i felt that maybe, in a way, i had worked myself into that position because i had given away too much. i selfsacrificed. i gave away a tremendous amount of power, because i wanted to prove that i could do the job, that i was as good as anybody, and that it didn't matter what challenge you threw my way, i could handle it. rosa also spoke about the inappropriate instances when the issues of her gender and ethnicity came up in management meetings. in one instance, rosa held a meeting with a non-performing employee and her supervisor. rosa described the meeting this way: we were in this meeting and my boss says, "well, you know, i don't know what it's like to be an hispanic female. i'm sure that there must be a lot you have to deal with. but, ok, let's talk about the problem." and i thought, "first you reduced this performance problem that i'm bringing to you; to the fact that i'm a woman. the other problem is that i'm hispanic. not that we have a performance problem." although rosa suffered through some difficult situations as a result of this appointment, she said she would not change anything. she also talked about the positive appointments she received as the first hispanic and first woman to chair a very important company committee, and as a special trainee to the company's president. conclusions all four of the women interviewed identified affirmative action as having an effect on their careers. three of the four respondents attribute at least one of their successes to affirmative action. anti-discrimination laws are an important means of "leveling the playing field" (szockyj and fox, 1996). of the four women effected by affirmative action, rosa spoke of the "hellish" time she experienced after receiving a promotion as a result of affirmative action. rosa's story is common among women and minority persons when they are one-of-a-kind. according to szockyj and fox (1996), "tokenism is both cruel and unproductive when integration is the long-term goal" (p. 154). rosa's story supports this statement. although she had a difficult time with peers and with her own personal need to "prove" she could do the job, her appointment did serve to promote her career. affirmative action policy aided lucille to become an elected state official after the state established a new legislative district to insure an hispanic representative. rosa applied for a managerial position at the same time another division of the company faced an affirmative action lawsuit. martha received appointment to her position during a time of public concern regarding no female or hispanic representation in the judiciary. anti-discrimination laws are important because, according to szockyj and fox, "once inequality has become established, it is difficult for the system to right itself" (p. 143). these authors state that, following the passage of the civil rights act and its amendments, the rapid movement of women into predominately male professions indicated that artificial barriers, rather than choice or aptitude, kept women and minorities out of the labor market. although a great deal of debate exists regarding the positive or negative effects of affirmative action in this country, clearly, it did serve to help three of the four women in this study in their career progressions. implications hispanic women continue to face discrimination and unequal treatment in their career progressions. women and minorities need the opportunities affirmative action policies provide in order to prove their capabilities. the negative effects of "tokenism" need to be addressed. professionals in positions to hire or promote hispanic women need to be educated on the effects of "tokenism" and hispanic women need support to help them deal with its effects. additional research must be conducted to determine the effects of affirmative action on hispanic females, especially in light of the move to eliminate affirmative action policies. references berg, k.h. (1993). leadership styles and personality types of minnesota school superintendents. dissertation abstracts international, 54-61, 34. bogdan, r., & biklen, s. (1992). qualitative research for education: an introduction to theory and methods. boston: allyn & bacon. goetz, j.p., & lecompte, m.d. (1984). ethnography and qualitative design in educational research. orlando, fl: d.c. heath & co. guba, e., & lincoln, y. (1981). effective evaluation. san francisco: jossey-bass. kaplin, w., & lee, b. (1995). the law of higher education. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass publishers. marshall, c. (1993). the new politics of race and gender: the 1992 yearbook of the politics of education association. washington, d.c.: the falmer press. mcmillian, j.h. & schumacher, s. (1993). research in education: a conceptual introduction. new york: harper collins. merriam, s.b. (1988). case study research in education: a qualitative approach. san francisco: josseybass. miller, j. b. (1986). toward a new psychology of women. boston: beacon press. szockyj, e., & fox, j. g. (1996). corporate victimization of women. boston: northeastern university press. zinn, r. (1979). argentina, a nation at the crossroads of myth and reality. new york: r. speller. dr. kaye peery is the founder of the enchanted circle women's institute nchanted@springercoop.com dr. marilyn grady teaches in the department of educational administration at the university of nebraska-lincoln. awl journal home page awl journal volume 2, number 1, winter 1999 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for 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mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership double discrimination: an examination of the career destinations of muslim women in britain professor marie parker-jenkins dr. kaye f. haw mr. barrie a. irving ms. shazia khan parker-jenkins, winter, 1999 for most muslim women, it is these changing circumstances, this ebb and flow in the fortunes of muslim communities that they have had to negotiate and which the young generation of muslim women growing up in this country are now confronting. this generation of respondents perceived that there is a lack of comprehension by the older generation of the teachings of the qu'ran. they believe that this older generation is bound by culture rather than religion while they themselves, are more educated and aware of the 'precise' teachings of islam. background muslim communities in britain represent 1.5 million out of the 55 million of the total population, being the largest and the least researched ethnic minority in the uk context. although there is an increasing research interest in exploring issues related to the interface of ethnicity, gender, educational provisions and career opportunities, little is known about the educational and job experiences of asian women in general, and women of islamic orientation in particular. this study builds upon a series of longitudinal research activities on issues related to gender, career opportunities and the changing notions of feminism in non-western societies. objectives the aim of this study was to explore inter-relationships among ethnicity, religion, gender and education in women from muslim background. the specific objectives were: http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html 1. to provide an overview (demographic details) of muslim communities in britain; 2. to examine the position of muslim women in britain, their educational experiences and career destinations; and 3. to explore the interface among religion, gender, employment opportunities and education within the islamic context. related research and theoretical perspectives previous work in this area has focused on the destinations and career aspirations of either south asian or ethnic minority girls, and tends to fall into one of four categories. i) work in which girls are asked to describe their career aspirations such as studies by sharif (1985), and hussain and samarsinghe (1987). there is little in-depth analysis involved, but this work provides a useful source of data concerning the girls' preferences for different career destinations. this research considers the aspirations of girls who span a range of academic ability and who thus aspire to a number of different career paths, some of which are professional such as medicine or the law, while others are vague such as 'working with children'. the work highlights their concerns about the lack of careers advice, but does not take the argument any further. ii) this category consists of studies which attempt to compare the aspirations of south asian and africancaribbean adolescents with those of their white peers or each other. roberts, duggan, and noble (1981), and lee and wrench (1984) argue that african caribbeans reflect the attitudes and aspirations of the white working class in choosing to be nurses, secretaries or to work in libraries, while south asian girls aspire to be doctors, engineers or scientists. these studies are simplistic on two broad fronts. first they assume a polarized dichotomy between the ethnic groups studied and secondly they fail to address the questions and issues focused around the gendering and racialization of the labor market. iii) in the third category there is research which highlights the effect of parental and cultural influence on the career aspirations of girls from different backgrounds. joly (1984) notes that mirpuri parents in birmingham object to their daughters becoming nurses, but not doctors and that this is rationalized in terms of status of such work in pakistan. ahmed and wilson (1978) suggests that there is evidence that the attitudes of south asian parents to their daughters' education and subsequent career possibilities varies greatly with religion, and socio-economic background. siann and khalid (1984) highlight the practice of purdah and the related concept of 'izzat' where the honor of the family is dependent on the conduct of the female members of that family suggesting that the career chosen by the daughters should be sufficiently prestigious for izzat to be satisfied or enhanced (see also jeffery, 1979; mandelbaum, 1990). in a more recent study siann and khalid(1990) point to the lack of parental knowledge about employment opportunities and careers, inferring that although parents are ambitious for their daughters in terms of higher education and careers, they possess very little knowledge and have limited access to information and therefore these families are disadvantaged in this respect. in another study the careers service is implicated in this lack of knowledge (brooks, 1983). studies which emphasise the over-aspiration of south asian boys and girls and their high academic achievement and which base their analysis on the 'cultural clash' model must also be mentioned here (tanna, 1990). this model is based on the assumption that the south asian girl has to negotiate two cultures that of home and school and the focus of the clash is the arranged marriage. such an argument ignores assumptions by teachers and careers officers that these girls are destined for an arranged marriage (mcbeath, mearns, & smith, 1986); the difficulties experienced when applying for work (brooks, 1983) and more centrally the issues of gender and class which impinge on the structuring of the labor market. the use of the cultural clash model of analysis meant therefore that any discussion of institutionalized racism as constraints on the career opportunities of south asian girls was avoided (ahmed & wilson, 1978; amos & parmer, 1984; iquabal, 1980). more recent research acknowledges that the influences within schools, teachers, administrators and peer groups create alternative forms of gender identity which are frequently based on ethnicity (grant, 1992; mac an ghaill, 1988; williams, 1987); these complex relations emerge from continuing interactions, which persist into and beyond higher education and into the labor market. within female dominated areas of employment for example, women from ethnic minority groups are most often found in the lowest tier of jobs (beechey, 1986). women are channeled into 'appropriate areas' of the labor market, which are those already dominated by women, and accordingly the spaces available to ethnic minority women are particularly narrow. research projects concerned with higher qualifications reveal that those from minority ethnic groups have certain differences in their career paths. they are, for example, more likely to be unemployed for longer periods of time than white graduates and tend to obtain jobs of a lower status (brennan & mcgeevor, 1987; johnes & taylor, 1989). this category therefore includes several recent studies which have identified the issues associated with 'race', culture and ethnicity and placed them in a wider and historical content from which to explore the gendering and racialization of labor markets (beechey, 1986; phizacklea, 1990; walby, 1990; bhavani, 1991; penn & scattergood, 1992). brah (1993) proposes that it is crucial to conceptualize the labor market as mediated by "race", class, gender, ethnicity, age, disability and sexuality. she further suggests a framework for analysis which conceptualizes structure, culture and agency as inextricably linked and integral to such a framework so that the relationship of young muslim women to the labor market is seen to be structured by a multiplicity of ideological, and cultural factors. structural factors then such as the impact of the global and national economy on local labor markets; the discourses concerning the ideological positions of young muslim women in relation to home and family responsibilities, or career destinations; racism and the women's own perspectives on such issues are all important considerations for this piece of research. from a conceptual and theoretical framework situated within consideration of a historical context, the research will attempt to develop an understanding of the cross cutting at both macro and micro levels to explain the position of young muslim women in relation to the labor market and the implications for the future. moreover, within this framework of analysis the research will aim to explore issues behind the under-representation of muslim women in the labor market and institutions of higher education, and their perceptions and experiences of paid employment and education institutions. this topic is positioned within discourses on cultural diversity and the extent to which societal equity is in place for women of an islamic orientation. secondly, the study draws on debates around feminism and notions of liberation and empowerment for non-white, non-christian women. notions of feminism that are unique to islamic societies are explored in an attempt to provide an insight regarding the lives and obstacles that women of color face. equity within islam not without it, is the pursuit of many muslim women who may not necessarily relate to western notions of feminism which have no reference point to their own lived experience. thirdly, society needs not only to recognize cultural diversity as a reality but also to value the contribution minority communities make to society. the labor market implications from understanding the educational and job-related experiences of muslim women are particularly important. ethnic minority groups have a stake in society and their value should be acknowledged through equitable treatment. finally, this study draws on our previous examination of post-16 opportunities (irving, 1985); and the role of the careers service (irving, 1993). the study we began our research on the educational provisions of muslim children 10 years ago (parker-jenkins, 1991; parker-jenkins, 1993; parker-jenkins & haw, 1997; haw, 1991; haw, 1993). it was a comparative analysis of muslim girls' experiences as presented through discussion groups, questionnaires and account from the girls who volunteered to talk about their experiences. the most compelling finding was girls' desire to achieve equality within islam not without it, engaging in a discourse of what it means to be a muslim woman and articulating their sense of equality within the religion (parker-jenkins and haw 1996). they also raised concerns about the barriers to higher education or further education. the critical issue was career destinations that do not compromise religious adherence. this earlier work thus helped inform the present leverhulme project. muslim women presently constitute an unknown percentage of the workforce in britain, and we know very little about their career patterns, choices of employment or career destinations. they are often perceived as an 'invisible' and unobtrusive element of the labor market and are under-utilized in terms of their potential as human resources contributing to the economy. the central objectives of this research were: 1) to develop a fuller understanding of the intersections between gender, class, ethnicity, racism and religion, and how such a multiplicity of factors inscribe the position of muslim women in the labor market. 2) to analyze the role that educational and career institutions play in encouraging or discouraging young muslim women along certain paths of education and employment, and thus the reasons for their career destinations and advancement in the united kingdom (uk). aims of the study drawing on our earlier work and contacts with muslim communities in britain, we approached several muslim schools concerning their present year eleven (15-16 year olds) and former pupils, with regard to the feasibility of the study, and the question of access to information. based on this initial fieldwork we secured the necessary permission and cooperation for the project, and then developed a research design. this has involved in-depth interviewing of a sample of muslim girls aged 16-24 in 4 target areas in the midlands and the north of england, to include research of: education experience, careers advice, career destination, further educational opportunities, parental/community/religious influences, post-school issues, and opportunity structures. modes of inquiry this study is based on an empirical investigation of the educational and career opportunities of muslim women in britain. generally, a qualitative research methodology was used drawing on notions of ethnography in terms of testing emerging hypothesis and collecting rich and highly contextualized evidence. a longitudinal inquiry of this under-represented group was conducted by employing in-depth interviews on a sample of muslim women in four geographical locations selected in such a way as to reflect muslim settlements and population concentration in the uk. this study was funded by the leverhulme trust for £77,000 ($125,000), for 3 years commencing in 1995 and being due for completion in 1998. the participants were school administrators, teachers, former students, parents and pupils located in established muslim schools and communities. the research methodology employed was that of 'grounded theory' (glaser & strauss, 1967; richner, 1975; gehrike, 1982; hutchinson, 1988). this approach is particularly appropriate since it allows the researcher to imaginatively explore aspects of life within communities and institutions by adopting a systematic method to study the complexity and diversity of human experience; it assists in generating relevant theory. it allows the researcher to attempt to understand the participants' perspectives on their world, through their own eyes, and to understand the modes of cultural arrangement, social processes and structures which shape their world. from this understanding of 'contextual reality', educators can assess what is happening and plan strategies. the aim of the research was not the verification of a predetermined idea but discovery of new insights to facilitate depth of understanding. a guiding assumption of grounded theory is that people do have patterns of experience, and whilst their world may appear to be 'disordered or nonsensical' to the observer, there is an intrinsic order and sense to the participant (hutchinson, 1988). as berger and luckmann (1967) maintain, "reality is a social construct" and patterns of experience derive from symbolic interaction. the study directly focused on the phenomenon and allowed those who were studied to speak for themselves and explain their own sense of reality. the research approach thus used multiple data collection methods: direct observation, in-depth interviews, and comparative analysis etc. to provide a wealth of information. this is in keeping with what glaser and strauss (1967) called "slices of data" to ensure diversity, and different perspectives of the social phenomenon. finally, in addition to appointing a muslim research assistant to the project, we also established a panel of advisors, predominantly representative of muslim communities with expertise in islam, muslim schooling, the careers service and the department for education and employment, to help inform our practice. data sources 1) quantitative methodology procedures were used to collect demographic information about muslim women in four geographical locations (ie, nottingham, leicester, derby and bradford) across uk; 2) qualitative evidence was collected via individual open-ended interviews; and 3) information about career offices and employers in these geographical areas was gathered via surveys. summary of emerging issues methodologically this research proceeds, as detailed in the previous section, from a theoretical framework which draws on: 'perspectives which deal with fragmentation, hybridity and pluralism characteristic of the ever-changing economic, social and cultural context in which muslim girls and women live their lives. at the same time the theoretical framework is one which is both rooted in a set of values which center on ownership, empowerment and in a commitment to seeking out critical perspectives based on open, focused interactions with concrete others' (griffiths & haw, 1996) it is important to recognize that the common themes which have emerged so far are also fragmented by areas of difference and fractures. it is inevitable in a piece of research working with sensitive and very personal issues that both commonalties, but also differences and fragmentation will be evident. however, this also means that it is at the interstices of difference that spaces can be created in which these areas of disagreement and differences can provide new ways of theorizing and perceiving lived situations and hence to new ways of working and understanding. the evidence to date is complex and has every likelihood of remaining so. this makes it difficult to paint an overall picture of the issues emerging from this research which does justice to the range and diversity of opinion amongst the muslim girls and women who have participated in this work. it is important therefore to emphasize the realization that muslim communities are not unitary and do not speak with a single voice. there are not just class and gender differences but also a number of political and religious differences as well. these communities are also multiracial, multicultural and multilingual and comprise of the largest religious minority in britain today (ashraf, 1986). it is this religious dimension which provides a uniting factor. these fragmentations of class, gender and political and religious differences will be addressed as the analysis proceeds, but for the moment it is the intention that the analysis which follows is one which services to highlight and 'flag up' those issues which need to be explored in depth taking into account these different perspectives, discourses and dimensions. for the purposes of the preliminary analysis the data is being analyzed in the four major categories which guided the interview schedule and an additional one that emerged very strongly from this set of interviews. they are: 1) school life/experiences 2) post-school experiences 3) family background/life 4) attitudes to work 5) self-motivation some of these categories will be explained in greater depth, but first we turn to consideration of one particular transcript conducted from the research which illuminates initial findings. mariam's story we have chosen mariam as an individual case study because: 1) many of the emerging categories from the analysis of all our interviews to date are exemplified by her life history; lack of support at school and college for her chosen career, self-motivation and determination, manoeuvring around discourses of 'muslimness', and community 'gaze'. 2) she is in some respects both fairly typical and atypical at the same time. life history her parents arrived in this country 25 years ago. her mother was not formally educated, her father was educated in the system in pakistan because he was the only son. her mother could not speak english, although she did and does attend english classes at the local women's center. her written skills are not good. her father is a section leader at a local bakery, supervising nine people. her mother was from a poor family. she got married at an early age and has had seven children. she now looks after her first and pre-school grandchild while her daughter works. all the children were educated over here. one sister has a chemistry degree, another has a degree in business administration and is now a marketing assistant for alpha romeo. another is in the second year of her law degree. one brother is doing a btech national in business and finance, another want to be a car engineer. the others are still at school. her older sister is married to mariam's husband's brother and the second sister is also married to her youngest sister's brother-in-law. her father did not want the daughters to go away and study. it took him a long time to agree to it. they were all married on trips back to pakistan. mariam did not realize as she went out on one of these visits that she would be getting married. she stayed in the country for some months but has now returned to england leaving her husband in pakistan to go through the relevant immigration procedures. mariam talks of the 'favoritism' shown to her brothers by her parents who get 'first best' and who are allowed more freedom in where they go and in times for coming home. she does understand this because of the gossip that runs rife: 'they start putting two and two together and making something really stupid...that's why they send daughters to pakistan because the parents have thought that they have messed about with certain people'. mariam talks of the difference in standards of behavior between asian men and women. she is quite vociferous in this respect. she worries about meeting men that she works with in the street in case they talk to her or in a friendly gesture put an arm around her and that this will be seen by someone from the community who will relate it back to her family. throughout her time at school, her family were involved in working at home making lace. mariam talks of working until two o'clock in the morning to deliver on time to avoid wage cuts and to keep the work coming into the household. she did this all through school, so that her homework suffered and she missed playing and going out with her friends. her brothers were excused from the work. from a very early age mariam wanted to be an electrical engineer. 'before school i knew actually. when i was about nine and a half, ten years old, i used to collect electrical gadgets and motors and used to like to buy radios from a shop and break them up and put them back together again'. she wanted to know how these things worked and she 'just loved that word electronics'. her cousin was an electrical engineer and was an obvious influence. mariam went to an all girls state comprehensive school. when she told the teachers of her ambition they just said "why?". they said that it was a difficult career to follow "especially for an asian girl." she was well aware of the problems she would encounter and in her words, "the kind of barriers i would have to go through, they were a bit shocked and stunned." she was however, supported by her friends who 'were all for it'. she did physics, biology, maths, art, english and technical services and an engineering course at a local fe college. 'we used to do welding work, pipes, plumbing we did loads of things, health and safety for the workforce. i loved it. i got three credits and a merit. i really enjoyed doing it, for the practical i got 87%. she got three c's and two b's but her maths was weak and that was a problem for her. she loved her school years. she agrees with the saying that the school years are the best years of your life. she wasn't disruptive. she was totally dedicated to working hard, passing her exams so she could pursue her ambition to do something she always wanted to be. she was disappointed in her teacher's reactions to her chosen career. she felt that she got very little help or support from the careers' teacher: 'she wasn't that forthcoming, she wasn't that helpful at all. she would always give you, you know textiles and stuff like that, you might get a job in textiles and i said i am not interested in textiles or home economics or you know like girly, girly jobs, you know sewing, knitting and cooking cakes all day. i thought i'm not going to do that, no way. i want to be an electrical engineer'. she states that while she was growing up she knew of no asian women or even a white woman who did a job like this but she was determined. in the end she went to what she calls a careers' drop in center. they were supportive. she struck up a relationship with one particular careers advisor in.....she was really good. when i left school she told me about the college course in electronics". she got in touch with this person through her sister who mentioned to her that mariam wanted to be an electrical engineer. she was influential and extremely helpful in understanding mariam's situation and ambition. her father had already said that he would allow her to do a course as long as it wasn't mixed sex. 'so when i heard about an all girls course at....college, i thought that looks tasty, that looks good. she was the one who told me about it, she said, "mariam it is a two year course and you get a btech national, it's equivalent to a levels so have a bash at it." i went and enrolled in august. mariam got quite a lot of 'stick' from her brothers. 'they used to give me a lot of heartache, a lot of trouble. my mum said, "do an a level course, do chemistry, do something like your sister was doing or do a law degree or something....." she would always like to go on at me all the time. my family found out that i was doing this at college, from my friends "why's she doing this?" the class initially had 15 girls in and by the end of the course there was only five left. 'they all dropped out because of the kind of attitudes of the tutors. i used to get so mad. i used to think why are they saying this. some of the tutors were awful, they didn't turn up and one was quite sexist. he said, "girls, do you really see yourselves getting a job. i don't think so." and i'm like totally gobsmacked, complete shock, from a lecturer who is like a father figure because he was about 50.... and i go, "sir, what's your problem?" he goes, "well, i', just telling you girls, i'm just letting you know." you needed some kind of personal development, some encouragement but they didn't give it to you. a lot of vibes were really negative, so a lot of the girls didn't turn up. one girl wanted to work with the royal navy. she was clever and more than capable, but she left. there were work placements which were badly organized and 'shoddy and bore little resemblance to any sort of electronics work'. by the end of the course, mariam was so fed up, she came to believe that the tutor was right, there would be no job. the lecturers were all male, there was a female personal tutor who also gave little support. she relates how her determination blinded her to advice from her family, particularly her father who she felt was envious of her. at the end of her course, she passed everything with a merit in technical drawing electronics, but her maths had always been a problem and she got no support in this aspect of her course. 'that's where it all fell apart because i didn't get any support, i nearly changed my course but something in the back of my mind said, "no, mariam you're going to be an electrical engineer. you're going to do electronics." i was like lost in a maze.' mariam has had great difficulty finding a job since leaving college. she realized that this would always be a difficulty for her. she applied for several electrically orientated jobs but did not get interviewed for any of them. again, the careers person with whom she had struck up a relationship, gave her a lot of support, particularly with form filling in and letter writing, going through her applications and giving her advice. it was at this point that she had time on her hands. she began at the local youth center and from there has made many contacts with different local organizations. she also became involved with the care line and action line of the local radio stations. she became a 'link' worker, finding out what all the different organizations were doing, such as open days, events, training days and seminars and publicizing them on the radio. her contacts have grown. the electronics idea has all gone now and "i don't think about it anymore, although it is still in the back of my mind." she is now doing many different voluntary jobs, by helping out here and there, she has become a popular local figure whose contacts are invaluable to many. she says, "i love helping people, i love meeting people." she runs a support group for asian careworkers at the moment which meets once a month. she doesn't mind working with her own community although it came about quite by accident. she uses her language skills but the work is short-term, part-time and insecure. she has had to augment her wages by working in a nursing home. she has however, had to give this job up because of harassment by the other workers who she felt took advantage of her. she describes how the workers on the duty before her used to leave all their jobs for her, especially the more horrible jobs like cleaning people up after 'accidents'. she also describes how people used to either deliberately mispronounce her name or call her by an english name. for these reasons she feels her decision to leave has been a good one although she is now worried that she will be unable to keep up the mortgage repayments on her house. the pay from her jobs in the voluntary sector is insufficient in this respect. mariam also describes the difficulties of working within her own community in terms of confidentiality, the community gossip network and the problems of competing with other asian people for the few jobs there are. "it's not what you know, it's who you know." she believes that her ideas 'get pinched' and 'they (the managers) get full credit for that.' she feels at times that she gets little recognition and no personal development and speaks of nepotism within the asian community. 'you don't really get any support within the asian community. they tend to like to put you down all the time. they never like, let you get anywhere, the management do, but the workers don't get anywhere. jobs go to cousins and things like that. they advertise it to like, to make it equal opportunities. i applied for a job as a community care worker. i didn't get it. i was really cheesed off. i thought it happens. i know it does, that's why the community is suffering because there are people who have got no education. they've got no knowledge about the needs of the asian community, but people aren't working on those needs. they're working on looking after themselves.' she talks of the need for educating asian men because the women are suffering from family, community, culture and religious pressure. her family, especially her father, wish that she would get a full-time job rather than her many part-time jobs. they did not ask her to get married when she left school at 16 like many of her friends and she appreciated having the time to do a college course. her friends, who have children now, and who believed that they could train and find work after having had children, are finding life tough. mariam got married at 22 and even then feels that her mother could have waited a little longer. she feels she has been lucky in that she was not married earlier. fortunately for her there were no suitable offers. she believes in the need to work and in a career because: 'you've got the financial backup, you know your rights. when you haven't got a job and when you are at home, you are not doing anything for society, for the community, for nobody really.' results a number of categories have emerged from the data highlighted in mariam's case study thus far, but an overwhelming finding is the perception that muslim women have to work at least twice as hard to succeed. for practicing muslim girls, mixing with the opposite sex was an issue they had to deal with. members of the opposite sex, especially non-practicing were at times perceived to hold a low opinion of them believing them to be oppressed and controlled. many muslim girls who are practicing, talked of hostility from students, lecturers and employers. this is a point which needs to be recognized here; the stereotypical image others have of practicing muslim women as fundamentalists: 'i found it very difficult to adapt to university lifestyle because i am a practicing muslim. it was difficult to make the boys understand that i wanted only a working relationship and nothing else.' the evidence is contradictory here. while some girls, it must be said, those who largely attended mixedsex state schools, found no difficulty in communicating with men, in feeling able to voice their opinions, feeling less inferior, actively participating in discussions in an educational or work environment; other expressed the opposite view. this was usually those girls who had attended a muslim girl's school or a single-sex state school. there has been a gradual change in the attitudes of parents towards education and sometimes this has manifested itself as different siblings pass through the system so that it is often very much easier for younger children to persuade their parents to let them do their chosen courses or job. 'it's timing isn't it because at that time our parents weren't as broad-minded as they are now. it was like all due to time really. when i did get my results they were really pleased with what i did, not wasted five years at school and it was really easy for me. i said i'm going to college and that's it.' interviewees suggested that this gradual change is due to a realization that education capital is necessary for survival in a modern, rapidly changing society. one wage earner in the family is not enough either financially or in terms of security of employment. participants also made the point that increasingly muslim men are looking for educated partners so that this 'cultural capital' is as essential as caste, family and material circumstances and potential. whereas in the past it was only seen to be necessary for the sons to be educated now this holds equally true for daughters. education is seen as a tool for progression, a bargaining chip for work, marriage and status: 'just having one breadwinner in the family is difficult, education is a respectable way to earn money if needed.' 'it is important to have some education as that is the only way to find a husband who is himself educated.' 'well i think it was mostly my parents who influenced me. my dad's always stressed the importance of education and in the qu'ran you see the emphasis is on education and i've always had like my parents support.' religious/cultural interpretations of islam or discourses of 'muslimness' this category is very much linked to the following category of inter-generational pressures. for the purposes of clarity they will be dealt with separately at this point in the research. this is a category which was also in evidence in our last project, an ethnography of a muslim girls' school, (parker-jenkins & haw, 1996) and which at the time we found useful to analyze using the term 'discourses of muslimness'. it is one which we intend to develop further. all religions are open to political, ideological and symbolic interpretations which are fluid and shifting. this is true of islam, a religion and a 'way of life'. what was politically and socially expedient for one generation living in and through a particular context is not the same for another. when muslim communities go through a period of instability, it is those disempowered groups such as women, the poor and the uneducated who have had to submit to greater degrees of suppression than at times of success and optimism. this is done through claims for the necessity to adhere to absolute laws embedded in the text of the qu'ran and it is at times of crises that the return to this position is advocated through stricter controls and rejection of those who fail to conform. not all muslim women are equally affected because there are divisions, as always, along class, cultural, national and traditional lines, with old aristocratic and wealthy families using their position and/or wealth as a means of negotiation with the dominant power. for most muslim women, it is these changing circumstances, this ebb and flow in the fortunes of muslim communities that they have had to negotiate and which the young generation of muslim women growing up in this country are now confronting. this generation of respondents perceived that there is a lack of comprehension by the older generation of the teachings of the qu'ran. they believe that this older generation is bound by culture rather than religion while they themselves, are more educated and aware of the 'precise' teachings of islam. this is causing a culture versus religion struggle which can be compared to the western culture versus eastern culture which was evident in the past: 'parents want you to be muslim but not the way the qu'ran outlines but what they have chosen to be regarded as islam.' 'when i question what they are telling me about islam and then correct them they argue back saying that it is not acceptable by the community even though i am right. this causes friction between us.' community pressures/extended family pressure once again the primary issue to be identified here is the clash between culture and religion or discourses of 'muslimness'. the older generation was perceived to value community values and opinions. these are often those voiced by community leaders and spokesmen about islam, or powerful members of the kinship group. they see this as a form of guidance which comes as a direct link from the parent culture and which as immigrants it is important for them to retain. the issue of being accepted and respected within the community is very high on their agendas and seen to be necessary to their quality of life. often this seems not to coincide with their daughters' values and therefore happiness. 'it is so frustrating when my dad says that i understand but this isn't acceptable in our community. they are always concerned with what everyone else will say and we have to reform to their way of thinking. there's no point in arguing because if you rebel you will be disowned.' 'luckily i don't have any relatives here because relatives can put a lot of pressure on the family itself. sometimes if the parents let you choose whether you want an arranged marriage or choose your own husband, they will let you but if the relatives put a lot of pressure on that family they won't let you. i have got no relatives here so i'm quite lucky. you feel a bit lonely but i am happy they're not here to put pressure on.' respondents articulated conflict in finding and coming to terms with their own selves. they were juggling with trying to fit in with the culture of school, college, university or work with that of their immediate family, the extended family and the community. although it has been debated and argued in the past there remains the issue of maintaining a sense of belonging in an increasingly fragmented private and public sphere of balancing the cultures. 'it is so difficult to make parents understand that university life is different from what they think and afterwards they expect us to fit back into their way of thinking and lifestyle. what is the point of educating ourselves, trying to better ourselves if we can't even make our own decisions.' self-motivation this is a theme which emerged so unexpectedly strongly that it is worthy of a separate category. despite an articulated awareness of difficulties and problems facing them for religious/cultural reasons, racial reasons and considerations of declining employment in traditional professions, the girls were ambitious. self-motivation and a desire to prove others wrong and to be seen to 'succeed' were dominant factors in pursuing chosen careers. 'i've always been discouraged, like not by my parents or anything but like at college i was doing politics and everything and the message is that all the really top dogs are white, middle class males. it's kind of scary because i'm defined as a muslim woman and it's like i'm scared to go into something, i don't want to go into something where i end up not talking about things....it's just that, i can't explain it, i just have this great love of debate and i really feel comfortable thinking about philosophy, issues politics and debating them. i would like to pursue them and if i couldn't i would like to at least try something that has politics related to it....i would like to be an mp. i'm doing british politics now. if i could i would like to go to westminster. the thing is i don't want to have it as like an obstacle because i want to show people that i can. if i can do it then they can. i am a muslim; i am asian and i am female and i can do it. i feel that a lot of um muslim people um especially are really downhearted because they don't see the muslim political leaders are up there so we need to get more of them out there then they can set examples to younger generations, like my brother. i feel that i have to set an example to him and then when he grows up he can say, "look my sister can do it." anything i have done i have done off my own bat and i have got a pat on the back from other people outside (my family and school). i want my own business at the end of the day that's why i changed from nursing to travel. i can't get my own business (in nursing) and i want to work for myself. i want to show people that i can do something and that i think part of that is because of my parents who feel i can't do anything. it's a wrong way to go about it in that i want to do it and show people i can do it, to prove them wrong.' another respondent talked about her first failure to get accepted on an nneb course as follows: 'i think it was discrimination. i know other people who got on the course straight from school. it makes you wonder even though i had done voluntary work. i had to do all that and the part-time play leader job and other o levels. all those three things to get onto the course. i know it's going to be difficult for me to succeed in a well-known business company, with me wearing an hejab but that is what i want to do.' balancing a family life was also high on individual agendas and pursuing a career was seen as important for the self-development and independence, as well as being of advantage for the education of their children. the findings from this study demonstrated that muslim women in the workplace face double discrimination based on grounds of gender and religious adherence. there are several reasons that may explain this situation. recently, there have been a growing "islamophobia" in britain, due in part to the rushdie affair and the gulf war, resulting in overlooking the huge differentiation among muslim communities and, thus, coloring the ethos of these communities as being stereotypical "fundamentalists" (yuval-davis, 1992). increasing awareness of the existing discriminatory patterns and their consequences points to the understanding that we cannot afford to waste the talents of sections of our society. instead, we need to challenge iniquities practices and unnecessary obstacles to educational provisions and career progression and career progression among minority group women. significance of the study the findings of this study are expected to contribute to setting the inquiry and expanding existing theoretical models of cultural diversity as it relates to the educational provisions and career opportunities of women from under-represented ethnic groups. understanding these issues is of paramount importance in supporting policy and legislation aiming at equity in the treatment of ethnic minority women and contributing to practice by providing guidance to educators, career officers, employers and community leaders. research and practice that is culturally sensitive is crucial in combating discriminatory process/mechanisms that are currently in place regarding the education and employment of people of color. conclusions as stated in the paper, the evidence to date is complex and has every likelihood of remaining so. this makes it difficult to paint an overall picture of the issues emerging from this research which does justice to the range and diversity of opinion amongst the muslim girls and women who have participated in this study. we end therefore by emphasizing the realization that muslim communities are not unitary and do not speak with a single voice. there are not just class and gender differences, but also a number of political and religious differences as well. this fragmentation of class, gender, political, and religious differences will be addressed as the analysis proceeds, but for the moment it has been the intention of the analysis to highlight and 'flag up' those issues which need to be explored in depth taking into account these different perspectives, discourses and dimensions. specifically some participants talked of lack of support and motivation from their teachers as a whole and believed that they should have been given greater guidance and individual attention. at the same time there were references to more effective support from family members or even friends rather than school staff. there are of course, always contradictions in any research finding, but again it seems to be emerging that teachers were not perceived as having high enough expectations for their muslim students and often had some difficulty in relating to their needs so that muslim girls were left behind at school academically or for those more determined, left to their own devices. the theme of self-motivation emerges strongly at this point. it also emerges that there was a feeling that a more structured and informative approach was needed to career advice, which needed to involve not general guidance from a teacher in charge of careers, but such a teacher working alongside professional career officers who are brought into school at an early stage. further that individuals need guidance from a range of sources, individual interviews, interviews with parents, general information for students, for parents. also that community organizations who have a brief for training should also be involved. at this stage it would seem that there is scope for the careers service to be used more and to respond more. it would seem that there is scope for multi-agency action here by schools, leas, community organizations and this in relation to other sources of careers advice in fe colleges and universities in a co-ordinate and flexible approach organized by the careers service. finally, as we pointed out in the introduction, but it is worth repeating here, it is important to recognize that the common themes which have emerged so far as also fragmented by areas of difference and fractures. it is inevitable in a piece of research working with sensitive and very personal issues that both commonalties, but also differences and fragmentations will be evident. however this also means that it is at the interstices of difference that spaces can be created in which these areas of disagreement and differences can provide new ways of theorizing and perceiving lived situations and hence to new ways of working and understanding. references ahmed, s. & wilson, a. (1978). finding a voice. london: virago. amos, v. & parmar, p. (1984). challenging imperial feminism, feminist review, 17, 5-19. anwar, m. (1982). young muslims in a multi-cultural society: their educational needs and policy implications: the british case. leicester: the islamic foundation. anwar, m. (1993). muslims in britain: the 1991 census and other statistical sources. birmingham: center for the study of christian and muslim relations paper no. 9. ashraf, s.a. (1986). the case for muslim voluntary-aided schools by m. halstead. beechey, v. (1986). women's employment in contemporary britain. in v. beechey & e. whiteless (eds.), women in britain today. milton keynes: open university press, 77-131. berger, p. & luckmann, t.c. (1967). the social construction of reality. bhavnani, k.k. (1991). talking politics. cambridge: university press. brah, a. (1993). 'race' and culture in the gendering of labor markets: south asian young muslim women in the labor market. new community, 19 (3), 441-458. brah, a. & minhas, r. (1985). 'structural racism or cultural difference: schooling for asian girls.' in g. weiner (ed.), just a bunch of girls: feminist approaches to schooling. milton keynes: ou press. brah, a. & shaw, s. (1992). south asian young muslim women and the labor market. london: department of employment. brennan, j. & mcgeevor, p. (1987). employment of graduates from ethnic minorities. london: commission for racial equality. brooks, d. (1983). young blacks and asians in the labor market a critical overview. in b. troyna & d.i. smith (eds.), racism, school and the labor market. leicester: national youth bureau. gerhrke, w. (1982). 'teachers' role conflicts: a grounded theory-in-progress', journal of teacher education. glaser, b. & straus, a. (1967). discovery of grounded theory. grant, l. (1992). race and the schooling of young girls. in j. wrigley (ed.), education and gender equality. london: falmer press. haw, k. (1991). 'interactions of race and gender a problem for teachers? a review of the emerging literature', educational research, nfer, 33 (1). haw, k. (winter, 1993). muslim girls schools a conflict of interests? gender and education. hulmes, e. (1989). education and cultural diversity. london: longman. hussain, n.r. & samaransinghe, r. (1987). a case study and analysis of under education amongst asian girls in three schools in birmingham. unpublished manuscript. hutchinson, s.a. (1988). 'education and grounded theory'. in r.s. sherman & a.b. webb (eds.), qualitative research in education. iquabal, m. (1980). islamic education and single sex schools. london: union of muslim organizations. irving, b.a. (1985). opportunities post-16. newscheck irving, b.a. (1993). the careers service in the age of new realism. careers guidance today. jeffrey, p. (1979). frogs in a well: indian women in purdah. london: zed press. johnes, g. & taylor, j. (1989). ethnic minorities in the graduate labor market. new community, 15 (4), 527-536. joly, e. (1984). the opinions of mirpuri parents in saltley, birmingham and their children's schooling. birmingham: center for the study of islam and christian-muslim relations. lee, g. & wrench. j. (1984). skill seekers: black young, apprenticeship and disadvantage. leicester: national youth bureau. mac an ghaill, m. (1988). young, gifted and black. milton keynes: open university press. macbeath, j., mearns, d. & smith, m. (1986). home from school. glasgow: gordonhill college of education. mandelbaum, d.g. (1990). women's seclusion and men's honor: sex roles in north india, bangladesh and pakistan. tucson, az: university of arizona press. nasr, s.h. (1975). ideals and realities of islam. parker-jenkins, m. (1991). muslim matters: an exploration of the educational needs of the muslim child. new community, 10, (4). parker-jenkins, m. (1993). educating muslim children (2nd ed.). nottingham: school of education, university of nottingham. parker-jenkins, m. (1995). children of islam: a teacher's guide to meeting the needs of muslim pupils. stoke: trentham books ltd. parker-jenkins, m. & haw, k.f. (1996). equality within islam, not without it: the views of muslim girls in britain, the muslim education quarterly, 13, (3), 17-34. penn, r. & scattergood, h. (1992). ethnicity and career aspirations in contemporary britain. new community, 19 (1), 75-98. phizacklea, a. (1990). unpacking the fashion industry. london: routledge. parker-jenkins, m. & haw, k.f. (1997). the educational needs of muslim children in britain: accommodation or neglect? in s. vervovec (ed.), muslims europeans, youth: reproducing ethnic and religious cultures. london: macmillan. qureshi, s. & khan, j. (1989). the politics of satanic verses: unmasking western attitudes. roberts, k., duggan, j., & noble, m. (1981). unregistered youth employment and outreach careers work: final report part one: non-registration, research paper no. 31. london: department of employment. sharif, r. (1985). interviews with young muslim women of pakistani origin, birmingham: center for the study of islam and christian-muslim relations. siann, g. & khalid, r. (1984). muslim traditions and attitudes to female education. journal of adolescence, 7, 191-200. tanna, k. (1990). excellence, equality and education reform: the myth of south asian achievement levels. new community, 16, 349-1688. tomlinson, s. (1983). ethnic minorities in british schools. london: heinemann. union of muslim organisations of united kingdom and ireland (1976). guidelines and syllabus on islamic education. walby, s. (1990). theorizing patriarchy. oxford: blackwell. williams, j. (1987). the construction of women and black students as educational problems: reevaluating policy on gender and 'race'. in m. arnot & g. weiner (eds.), gender and the politics of schooling. london: hutchinson. yuval-davis, n. (1992). fundamentalism, multiculturalism and women in britain. in j. donald & a. rattasani (eds.). race, culture and difference. london: sage publications. professor marie parker-jenkins teaches in the school of education and social science at the university of derby. m.parker-jenkins@derby.ac.uk dr. kaye f. haw is a research fellow in the school of education at the university of nottingham. mr. barrie a. irving is a research manager at the college of guidance studies, kent. ms. shazia khan is a research assistant in the school of education at the university of nottingham. awl journal home page awl journal volume 2, number 1, winter 1999 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright 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http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 199 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 199-212, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper teaching leadership to female students in saudi arabia neva helena alexander neva helena alexander is an instructor in the college of arts and science, prince mohammad bin fahd university, al khobar, saudi arabia, nalexander@pmu.edu.sa, 516-855-4356 accepted july 31, 2011 education in saudi arabia has become a great interest to many of its people. additionally, women’s education and leadership have become a dynamic interest to many. this research gives light to how females perceive and their understanding of leadership at prince mohammad bin fahd university (pmu). the central focus of this research project was to evaluate the impact of a leadership course on improving leadership outcomes for female students studying at pmu in saudi arabia. in order to achieve this goal, a pre-test/post-test quantitative design was employed. the sample for this investigation was drawn from undergraduate female students enrolled in a leadership course at pmu taught by the researcher. keywords: education, leadership, saudi arabia, females in saudi arabia, higher education in saudi arabia, female leadership in saudi arabia, prince mohammad bin fahd university (pmu), middle east, education in the middle east introduction as educators, it is important to know if your students grasp the material being taught. it is also vital to understand the demographic, culture, and population you are teaching. education in saudi arabia has become a great interest to many of its people. additionally, women‟s education and leadership have become a dynamic interest to many. this research gives light to how females perceive and their understanding of leadership at prince mohammad bin fahd university (pmu). saudi arabia the kingdom of saudi arabia extends to approximately 2,250,000 square kilometers (868,730 square miles) between the arabian gulf on the east and the red sea on the west. with the united arab emirates, qatar, and bahrain to the east, saudi arabia shares borders with kuwait, iraq, and jordan in the north and yemen and oman in the south. the largest country in the middle east is saudi arabia, which occupies four fifths of the arabian peninsula and is comparable to western europe in size (ministry of higher education, 2010). saudi arabia was established in 1932 by king abdulaziz ibn abdulrahman al saud. the country covers about 900,000 square miles. saudi arabia is located in southeast asia with an estimated population of 19 million people. islam is the official religion, and arabic is the official language. many scholarly sources portray women‟s education, since it started, as being highly valued in saudi society (zurbrigg, 1995, p. 82). according to zawya, (2010) during 2009-2010, the labor force participation rate of women has climbed from 20% to 22% in the kingdom, the perception of the wage gap for similar work improved, literacy rates improved, and women‟s enrolment in tertiary education increased from 35% to 37%. higher education in saudi arabia the postsecondary system of education in saudi arabia is comparable to the educational system of the united states. however, the patterns and procedures of these educational systems have been adopted in accordance with islamic systems, traditions, and customs (ministry of higher education, 2010). in 1975, a segment of the ministry of education became a separate entity and was renamed the ministry of higher education with the purpose of dealing exclusively with higher education. the ministry of higher education (2010) stated the following: among its responsibilities were: proposing the establishment of higher educational institutions and authorizing them to offer special programs in accordance with the country‟s needs.  creating and administering universities and colleges in the kingdom. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 200  raising the level of communication and coordination between institutions of higher learning and coordinating with other governmental ministries and agencies in terms of their interests and needs in higher education.  representing the government abroad in all educational and cultural affairs, through various cultural and educational offices distributed over 32 countries.  according to the ministry of higher education (2010), the higher education council is the supreme authority for postsecondary education affairs with the specific task of supervising and coordinating its institutions, with exceptions of military education. some of the council‟s responsibilities involve directing university education in accordance with policy, supervising the development of university education in all sectors, coordinating among universities especially in the field of scientific departments and degrees, encouraging research, and formulating rules and regulations for compliance by all institutions of higher learning (ministry of higher education, 2010). women’s education in saudi arabia in the kingdom of saudi arabia, it is difficult to trace the beginnings of education for women before the amalgamation of the kingdom in 1930 (calvert & al-shetaiwi, 2002). before that date, most education for women was mostly at home with the help of a female teacher and concerned the quran and understanding islamic law (calvert & al-shetaiwi, 2002). calvert and al-shetaiwi (2002) stated that education in saudi arabia is not obligatory, but it is available to anyone who wishes to join the government schools; hence, student preferences play a part in the output from the educational system. the government does provide free, general scholarships for students (male and female) in some areas of general education and in all vocational, technical, technological, and higher education with free transportation for all females (calvert & al-shetaiwi, 2002). hamdan (2005) noted that women‟s schooling at all levels which comprises elementary, secondary, high school and university remained under the department of religious guidance. however this changed in 2002, as the boys‟ education was supervised by the ministry of education. this was to guarantee that women‟s education did not differ from the original principle of female education, which was to make women good wives and mothers, and to prepare them for „acceptable‟ jobs such as teaching and nursing that were believed to suit their nature (hamdan, 2005). according to hamdan (2005), the history of women‟s initiatives to accomplish education reaches back to as early as the 1940s. the ministry of higher education began sending a few bright young saudi men to continue their studies abroad. one adolescent woman by the name of fatina amin shakir sought the same opportunity. she applied for a ministry of higher education grant to study abroad, but was rejected. according to the ministry, it was immoral to allow young single women to study abroad. fatina and her father appealed to king faisal, who was known to be a supporter of women‟s education. fatina became one of the first saudi women to hold a ph.d. (hamdan, 2005). her thesis, which focused on the modernization of third-world countries, featured an interview with king faisal, the man who had made her dream come true (arebi, 1994; hamdan, 2005; lacey, 1981). fatina shaker, a female saudi anthropologist and perhaps the first to obtain a ph.d. degree from purdue university, believed that denial of women‟s rights is rooted in the authority of social practices, stated by fatina as laws or traditions, rather than rooted in islamic fundamental nature (arebi, 1994, p. 217; hamdan, 2005). in september 1963, the government had to send forces to stop a protest in buraydah, where much of the opposition to girls‟ education took place. the citizens of this town had to be restrained by force from demonstrations when they heard of the plan to educate women. former king saud started the informal schooling and faisal managed to convince tribal bedouins of the importance of formal schooling for women (hamdan, 2005; huyette, 1985 p. 74). it was iffat al thunayan, king faisal‟s wife, who pressed for the education of women in saudi arabia. she made her wish that women be allowed to pursue science, language, and other subjects into a reality. saudi arabia was the last country in the gulf nations to introduce secular education. iffat established the first girls‟ school in 1956. prince mohammad bin fahd university pmu is a private institution of higher learning in the eastern province of the kingdom of saudi arabia. pmu adopts the north american model of education and its system (i.e., administrative, financial, and academic programs) was designed by texas international educational consortium (tiec). tiec is a consortium of 32 american universities in texas. pmu has charted an ambitious course for a university that honors the traditions and culture of the kingdom of saudi arabia while utilizing cutting-edge contemporary teaching practices and technology in providing higher education (pmu, 2006). the university‟s vision is as follows: the vision of the founders for the university is to be a unique and distinguished higher education institution that participates in:  preparing future leaders in various fields of human knowledge and its application.  enriching and developing intelligence.  exploring innovative methodologies and technologies to achieve its objectives.  breaking the barrier between academic and business society. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 201 english is the language of instruction in all degree programs and courses except those devoted to arabic language and islamic studies. according to walker (2004), many consider saudi to be a highly male-dominated society that creates many social barriers that challenge women in leadership roles. pmu was established in 2006 with the idea to educate saudi nationals and international students. however, what is unique about pmu and its location in saudi arabia is that it created a female campus and a male campus. the male campus houses academic facilities for male instruction in the colleges of engineering, business administration, and information technology. it also houses facilities for male instruction in the preparation year program and pmu core curriculum. the university administration building is in the male portion of the campus. the female campus houses academic facilities for female instruction in the colleges of business administration and information technology and the department of interior design. it also houses facilities for female instruction in the preparation year program and pmu core curriculum. this means that not only would men have an opportunity to be educated but also women. all degree programs include a core of academic subjects. these subjects are distributed among five principal areas: pmu competencies, written and oral communication, mathematics, natural and physical sciences, and social and behavioral sciences. in addition, all students complete the pmu assessment capstone series of courses in which they demonstrate their abilities to assimilate and apply the knowledge and skills they have learned. the content of the capstone series varies according to major (pmu, 2006). pmu teaches its students six different competences—one of which being leadership and team work. according to hamdan (2005), statistics show that in 1990 women represented 47% of the total undergraduate enrolment at colleges and universities in saudi arabia. in 2010, pmu experienced its first female graduates. with this in mind, it is important that its graduates are prepared to enter leadership roles within their college majors. what is leadership? leadership is an important part of university students‟ education. omatsu (n.d.) stated that students need to learn leadership skills. they need to learn leadership skills in college so that they can help their communities. a small number of students learn the leadership skills they need for their future jobs or to serve their communities from their college classes. in most universities, the development of student leadership skills is not part of the academic curriculum but relegated to extracurricular activities (i.e., it is regarded as part of students‟ nonacademic activities in clubs and organizations; omatsu, n.d.). according to pmu (2006), leadership is defined as the ability to be informed, effective, and responsible leaders in family, community, and the kingdom. teamwork is defined as the ability to work effectively with others to accomplish tasks and achieve group goals. fertman and van linden (1999) stated that most leadership theorists currently agree that leaders are made not born. college students can learn and develop leadership attitudes and skills. zeldin and camino (1999) summarized five areas of competency that differentiate leaders and shape students leadership development efforts:  communication—persuasive argumentation, public speaking/writing, and engaging the participation of others;  teamwork—respecting others, performing roles of both leader and follower, building on strengths, and commitment to free group input and expression;  personal identity—understanding the relationship between oneself and the community, pride in being a member of a larger group, awareness of areas for selfimprovement, taking responsibility for one‟s actions and the resulting consequences;  professionalism—demonstrating tactfulness, understanding protocols, appropriate dress and action given appraisal of context, delivering quality work, positively presenting oneself to others; and  project management—setting goals/developing action steps, meeting facilitation, reflection, distinguishing between one‟s interests and community needs young people need to develop their leadership skills in situations that are important, which allows them to become actively engaged in decision-making processes (fertman & van linden, 1999). the development of leadership contributes significantly to the positive development of young people and their communities. leadership skills, such as goal-setting, problem-solving, and sound decision-making, are not just necessary for leaders—these skills are needed for success in today‟s world (macneil 2000). a historical frame of the idea of leadership during the 20th century provides a dynamic approach to the notion of leadership. these ideas have been grouped into six schools of thought: (a) trait theory, (b) behavior studies, (c) contingency theories, (d) power and influence theories, (e) cultural and symbolic theories, and (f) cognitive perspectives on leadership (middlehurst, 1997). many authors, aware of the flexibility of this concept, prefer to either brush broad general attributes to leadership; some prefer not to give any definitions, such as soobrayan (1998), who justifies her reason for not giving a definition in claiming that definitions only acquire meaning within particular contexts. leadership is complicated to define in theory as it is elusive to summarize in practice, and in both cases the influence of culture and values is strong (middlehurst, 1997). advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 202 fullan (1996) presented four general areas to generate theoretical framework in which to view leadership. his theoretical framework looks into the culture, process, purpose and performance, and people. under purpose, the notion of probability of individuals, institutions, or society is unpacked in relation to leadership. beare, caldwell, and millikan (1997) referred to leaders as entrepreneurs of values. process and performance looks into the purpose of an organization and, consequently, the process and phase of performance that needs to be followed up; this in turn leads to achievement. finally, regarding people, is not only the question of how will leadership be dispersed, but also how will it be undertaken, and by whom? walker (2004) noted that effective leadership is essential to the success and effectiveness of any educational organization. however, when unpacking leadership in a critical context, leadership must be viewed “in relation to the wider social and political context within which it does its work” (thrupp & willmott, 2003. p 161; walker, 2004). female and leadership although there exists ample evidence on the nature of leadership and the resemblance of women‟s and men‟s leadership styles, nevertheless, leadership roles and managerial posts seem to be stereotypically masculine (walker, 2004). traditionally, leadership was associated with a male figure and masculine characteristics such as dominance and competitiveness. perhaps this socially constructed stereotype is what causes such misunderstandings in leadership styles as either feminine or masculine (walker, 2004). walker (2004) also stated the divine and wholesome nature of leadership, therefore, has been polluted with cultural constructs, adding to its disfigured dimensions, such as gender, creating a more complicated and thorny field to explore. according to billing and alvesson (2000), perceptions and gender stereotypes are often considered barriers for women to gain leadership positions. women have faced many challenges in leadership positions, in terms of their gender, their identity being fastened to many stereotypes, being marginalized, and their experiences unnoticed in the formation of knowledge and power—these being the tools put in use to pave the way for this to happen (walker, 2004). al-hariri, in her 1983 article (as cited in walker, 2004), wrote about the shortage of women in leadership and dominant positions in saudi arabia. she expressed her anticipation of the progression of females in higher education that would enable them to participate and acquire access to more diverse work opportunities. this anticipation is currently taking shape as our eyes are becoming accustomed to seeing amazing news headlines—headings such as saudi women challenge traditional barriers in male dominated society, first saudi women to hold the top hospital post as chief ophthalmologist in king faisl hospital, and dr. selwa alhazzaa‟ threatens traditional male positions in the work force. another headline that may seem striking to traditionalists was sky‟s the limit for saudi woman pilot: first saudi woman pilot (walker, 2004). also, headlines of female advancements include for the first time three saudi women now serving as advisers to the traditionally all male consultative parliament and, in 2009, nora bint abdullah al-fayez was appointed the first female saudi arabian minister. nora bint abdullah al-fayez is a u.s.educated former teacher. she became deputy education minister as part of a reshuffling by the saudi king to rid his cabinet of ultraconservatives. teaching leadership the general mission of higher education historically has been to educate students to be future leaders. according to chaar (2010), saudi arabia is facing a shortage of local leaders in the private sector. due to the young population, the unevenness between growth and available talent in the private sector, and rising unemployment figures, the country must address the growing leadership shortage. the need for saudi leadership in the private sector is alarming and will be a growing problem over the next 5 years as 2.5 million more saudis enter the workforce (chaar, 2010). thus, it is necessary for universities within the kingdom to teach students to be future leaders. the number of people involved in leadership programs on college and university campuses around the world continues to grow (prince, 2010). so, the debate about whether leaders are born or made seems increasingly to have been resolved in favor of the position that much of what we think of as leadership can be taught (prince, 2010). however, a complete theory of how to develop leaders cannot be located. such a theory would, as a minimum, identify critical leadership knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and beliefs (prince, 2010). it would have to tell us what can be learned and what may be inherent. the theory might identify stages of leadership development that could be associated with different capacities and viewpoints within the learning leader (prince, 2010). the first issue that must be confronted is what outcomes are to be attained. if one seeks only to bestow learners with knowledge about leadership, then teaching leadership is predominantly a matter of teaching in the same way one would teach other subjects in the humanities and social and behavioral sciences (prince, 2010). prince (2010) noted that one would need mainly to focus on defining a province of knowledge and then engage the students in thinking about the subject. as educators before you go into a classroom to teach, you must know your audience, in other words conduct an audience analysis. goals and objectives are needed to measure that students have learned the subject that has been taught. the students should have a clear idea of the lesson. they should be eager to participate and be very corporative. mckeachie and svinicki (2006) stated that there are a variety of techniques that can help break the deadly routine of lectures day after day such as debates, fishbowl, and interviews. in addition, facilitating discussion and active learning can enliven the class with advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 203 debates either between faculty members or between student teams. also, it is important to create learning communities. a way to assist students to integrate the theories and practices of leadership is to integrate or create meaningful learning communities. transforming educational spaces from restraining to engaging places takes intentional thought and design. establishing a culture that encourages student voices, challenging dialogue, peer accountability, and spontaneity requires intentional action from the first class or workshop session (owens, komives, lucas, & mcmahon, 2007). according to lyons, mcintosh, and kysilka (2003), although establishing an agenda may keep your class flowing from activity to activity, what you plan to accomplish in those time segments must be clear in your mind and must facilitate the achievement of the overall goals and objectives of your course. in teaching leadership you should have a schedule of strategies that are as follow: (a) establish objectives, (b) plan learning experiences, (c) identify required materials, and (d) evaluate students‟ progress. mckeachie and svinicki (2006) stated that students who are motivated to learn choose tasks that enhance their learning, work hard at those tasks, and persist in the face of difficulty in order to attain goals. so it should be no surprise that motivation is important to consider if we want to enhance student learning. according to owens et al. (2007), to enhance student learning it is also essential that leadership educators dedicate time and attention to designing reflection activities. effective reflection activities are linked to particular learning objectives of the class or program, occur regularly throughout the course or the program, and allow for feedback and assessment. the integration of reflection activities into discussions and assessments increases student satisfaction and optimizes learning gains from the experience. reflection provides students the opportunity to create information and enables the facilitator to evaluate student learning (owens et al., 2007). the more we can connect the classroom with other parts of the campus leadership environment, the more potent leadership education can be. and we can send students off campus to experience leadership in settings where students are entrusted with leadership responsibilities in internships, service learning, and part-time work settings (prince, 2010). methodology design the central focus of this research project was to evaluate the impact of a leadership course on improving leadership outcomes for female students studying at pmu in saudi arabia. in order to achieve this goal, a pre-test/post-test quantitative design was employed. the pre-post-test design variables being measured in the investigation are evaluated both before and after the intervention (gravetter & forzano, 2008). although this type of research does permit the researcher to evaluate changes in variables it does not permit assignment of causality (gravetter & forzano). thus, in the current research, it was possible to evaluate changes in subjects with regard to specific variables, it is not possible to argue that the leadership course was the definitive source for these changes. sample the sample for this investigation was drawn from undergraduate female students enrolled in a leadership course at pmu taught by the researcher. four classes of students enrolled in the same leadership course were asked to voluntarily participate in the study to evaluate conception and understanding of leadership practice before and after the completion of the course. in total 94 students voluntarily choose to participate in the preand post-tests. demographic data for the students was not collected to ensure that confidentiality of the students‟ identity was maintained. the use of a convenience sample in this research was deemed appropriate to ensure that students were willing to participate in the study. instrument the instrument for this investigation was developed by the researcher and contained 15 statements regarding different aspects of leadership practice. the instrument was developed based on pertinent variables identified in the literature as relevant to successful leadership practice. a pilot test of the survey was completed using 35 students that were not enrolled in the class. data from the pilot test provided insight into the clarity of the statements. statements that were noted as difficult to answer by the subjects were re-worded to increase statement clarity. the instrument utilized a four-point likert scale to evaluate participant opinions: 1 = true, 2 = somewhat true, 3 = somewhat false and 4 = false. lower scores on the instrument were associated with the subject‟s opinion of a high level of personal leadership competence. procedures at the initiation of the course, all students were provided with information regarding an online survey to assess their opinions about their leadership skills and competence. the information was provided by the researcher via a flyer and through a verbal review of the experiment. students were asked to visit surveymonkey.com and complete an online survey. the students were instructed that they would have one week to complete the survey and would again be asked to complete a survey at the end of the course. following the completion of the course, students were again provided with a flyer about the survey and those that had participated in the pre-test were asked to again log on to surveymonkey.com to complete the post-test questionnaire. students were given two weeks to complete the post-test questionnaire. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 204 data analysis data analysis for this investigation included the use of descriptive statistics (mean, average, median, standard deviation, etc.) to provide a general review of the preand posttest scores for each individual item and for the survey as a whole. additionally, t-tests were used to compare the mean scores for the entire instrument and for each individual item. based on the t-test results it was possible to determine of a change in the leadership area had occurred in the preand posttest time periods. although t-tests do not provide a definitive measure of causality, they do indicate there has been a statistically significant change in the data. statistical significance was measured at the p < 0.05 level. results results for this investigation are presented in the tables below. the results include descriptive statistics for the preand posttest data (tables 1 and 2) as well as t-test data comparing results from preand post-tests to evaluate statistical significance (table 3) descriptive data for the pre-test results indicate that scores for the entire survey were 39.32 suggesting a lower degree of perceived leadership competence by students. standard deviation for the total survey and individual statements were, on average relatively low. this suggests a significant amount of uniformity among the responses provided by the participants. descriptive data for the pre-test results indicate that scores for the entire survey were 21.23 suggesting a lower degree of perceived leadership competence by students. standard deviation for the total survey and individual statements were, on average relatively low. again this suggests a significant amount of uniformity among the responses provided by the participants. table 3, on the following page contains data for t-test calculated for each individual statement and for the entire survey comparing preand post-test responses as well as cohen‟s d values. overall, the t-test results (p values) are statistically significant for the entire survey and for individual statements. four statements, 7, 8, 9 and 15 did not produce results that were statistically significant. cohen‟s d value ranges used for assessing the data were as follows: d = 0.2, small; d = 0.5, medium; and d = 0.8, large. most of the effect sizes calculated indicate a medium or above impact for the treatment effect (e.g., the leadership course). although effect size for the entire survey was low (d = 0.144), values recorded for many of the questions were medium or high, indicating that the leadership course had indeed had some impact on leadership outcomes for participants. discussion evaluation of the results a review of the results provided in this investigation does indicate that there are statistically significant differences in attitudes among women taking the leadership course. although it is not possible to solely assign these increases to the leadership course itself, there is support for the assertion that the leadership class may have influenced women‟s attitudes toward their leadership competence, resulting in a decrease in scores from the preto the post-test period. although most of the items on the survey showed a statistically significant decline from the preto pos-test time period, there were four specific areas in which no statistically significant change was noted. this was with regard to statements 7, 8, 9 and 15. in an effort to understand why no differences were noted, it is helpful to consider these statements more specifically. statement 7 was as follows: “i see value in learning about leadership.” a review of the data provided in tables 1 and 2 indicates that a high number of respondents noted true or somewhat true to this statement before the initiation of the course. high scores on this item in the pre-test did not change to the post-test period. similar outcomes can be noted with regard to statements 9 and 15. statement 9 was as follows: “i want to make a difference in my community.” statement 15 was as follows: “i consider myself an ethical person.” in the pre-test time period participants reported low rankings for both of these statements. although a lack of statistical relevance for statements 7, 9 and 15 can be explicated, the same cannot be said for statement 8. statement 8 was as follows: “i am conscious of my impact on others.” although direct causality between the leadership course and perceived attitudes toward leadership competence cannot be stated, the results for statement 8 suggest that the leadership course may not have had an impact on outcomes in this particular area. even though efforts were made to increase student awareness of their leadership capabilities, strengths and weaknesses there was relatively little change in the number of respondents reporting true or somewhat true in the preand post-test time period. moving forward, it is pertinent to consider whether or not this issue can be addressed in leadership education and if so what specific implements are needed to improve outcomes in this area. implications literature regarding women in leadership indicates that in many instances, leadership is stereotyped as a masculine domain (walker, 2004). even though leadership practice is currently viewed as a masculine domain, the current research does suggest that it is possible to change female attitudes regarding their own levels of perceived leadership competence. given this reality, the findings of the current investigation have important implications for educating women in leadership practice and creating the foundational resources to reduce primarily masculine stereotypes associated with leadership practice. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 205 in terms of the implications for the development of saudi arabia, the results provide an important insight into the benefits of teaching leadership to women. chaar (2010) has specifically noted that saudi arabia is facing a shortage of leaders in the private sector. chaar asserts that this issue will become even more acute over the next five years as an additional 2.5 million individuals enter the workforce. given that education of women could have benefits for increasing leadership competency, there is support for pursuing these courses to increase the number of leaders available for employment in the private sector. limitations the principle limitation of this investigation is the use of a prepost-test design. although the data evaluated in this investigation does show statistically significant changes in female student attitudes toward leadership competency, this research design does not allow for the assignment of causality. as such, it is not possible to definitively argue that the leadership course is solely responsible for the changes noted in the data. however, low standard deviation in the responses in both the preand post-test periods do suggest that a common variable (e.g., the leadership course) may have had an impact on all of the students. another limitation of the study is the sample used. although all students were encouraged to participate in the study, the 94 students that provided data represented small percent of the total student population. the small sample and its lack of random selection reduce the generalizability of the findings. although the leadership course may have contributed to changes in attitudes for students, it is not clear whether or not similar results would be reported for another group of female students taking the same course. future research in order to further understanding of the role that education plays in advancing leadership competence for female students, additional research is necessary. future research would include a control design in which students were randomly selected for participation in the leadership course. the control group would include students enrolled in the general curriculum. preand post-test measures evaluated through this method would better demonstrate causality. future research should also consider the use of larger sample populations to include a higher level of diversity in the women surveyed. increased diversity in the sample population would facilitate generalizability of the findings to the larger population of female students currently seeking higher education in saudi arabia. references arebi, s. (1994). women and words in saudi arabia: the politics of literary discourse. new york, ny: colombia university press. beare, h., caldwell, b., & millikan, r. (1997) dimensions of leadership. in m. crawford, and r. millikan (eds.), leadership and teems in educational management (pp. 31-40). buckingham: open university press. billing, y. d., & alvesson, m. (2000). questioning the notion of feminine leadership. a critical perspective of gender labeling of leadership. gender work and organization, 7(3), 144-157. calvert, j. r., & al-shetaiwi, a. s. (2002). exploring the mismatch between skills and jobs for women in saudi arabia in technical and vocational areas: the views of saudi arabian private sector business managers. international journal of training and development, 6, 2. chaar, i. (2010). how to address saudi arabia’s leadership shortage. retrieved from http://www.kenexa.com fertman, c. i., & van linden, j. a. (1999). character education: an essential ingredient for youth leadership development. nassp bulletin, 83(609), 9-15. fullan, m. (1996). leadership for change. in k. leithwood, j. chapman, d. corson, p. hallinger, & a. hart, international handbook of educational leadership and administration (vol. 2) london, england: kluwer academic. gravetter, f.j., & forzano, l.b. (2008). research methods for the behavioral sciences. thousand oaks, ca: cengage. hamdan, a. (2005). women and education in saudi arabia: challenges and achievements. international education journal, 6(1), 42-64. huyette, (1985). political adaptation in saudi arabia: a study of the council of ministry. colorado: west view press. lacey, r. (1981). the kingdom: arabia and the house of sa’ud. new york, ny: harcourt brace jovanovich. lyons, r. e., mcintosh, m., & kysilka, m. l. (2003). teaching college in an age of accountability. boston: allyn & bacon. macneil, c. (2000). youth–adult collaborative leadership: strategies for fostering ability and authority. mi: umi dissertation services. mckeachie, w. j., & svinicki, m. (2006). mckeachie’s teaching tips: strategies, research, and theory for college and university teachers. boston, ma: houghton mifflin. middlehurst, r. (1997). leaderhsip, women and higher education. in h. eggins (ed.), women as leaders and managers in higher education (pp. 3-16). buckingham: srhe/open university london. ministry of higher education. (2010). higher education in saudi arabia. retrieved from http://www.mohe.gov.sa omatsu, g. (n.d.). the critical need for student leaders. retrieved from http://www.csun.edu/eop/htdocs/leadership_booklet.p df advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 206 owens, j., komives, s., lucas, n., & mcmahon, t. (2007). instructor’s guide for exploring leadership: for college students who want to make a difference. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. prince, h. (2010). teaching leadership: a journey into the unknown. retrieved from http://www.utexas.edu prince mohammad university bin fahd university. (2006). retrieved from http://www.pmu.edu.sa soobrayan, v. (1998). gender neutral leadership: a myth nurtured by leadership. in p. drake & p. owen (ed.), gender and management issues in education (pp. 3346). london, england: trentham books. thrupp, m., & willmott, r. (2003). education management in managerialist times beyond the textual apologist. philadelphia, pa: open university press. walker. (2004). women and leadership: a female private institute for higher education, al nour college, in saudi arabia. retrieved from www.mbifoundation.com zawya. (2010). report on the middle east. retrieved from www.zawya.com zeldin, s., & camino, l. (1999). youth leadership: linking research and program theory to exemplary practice. research and practice: completing the circle. new designs for youth development, 15(1), 1015zurbrigg, j. (1995). unveiling portrayals of muslim women: examining western texts on saudi women (unpublished thesis dissertation). university of western ontario, canada. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 207 table 1 pre-test results descriptive statistics mean standard deviation median low/high raw score 39.23 1.12 40.00 1/4 statement 1 1.34 0.498 1.0 1/3 statement 2 2.22 0.922 2.00 1/4 statement 3 1.97 0.921 2.00 1/4 statement 4 1.52 0.729 1.00 1/4 statement 5 1.93 1.03 2.00 1/4 statement 6 1.89 0.933 2.00 1/4 statement 7 1.29 0.541 1.00 1/3 statement 8 1.67 0.653 1.50 1/4 statement 9 1.10 0.441 1.00 1/4 statement 10 1.89 0.977 2.00 1/4 statement 11 1.95 0.852 2.00 1/4 statement 12 2.21 0.966 2.00 1/4 statement 13 1.90 1.01 2.00 1/4 statement 14 1.87 0.544 2.00 1/4 statement 15 1.36 0.631 1.00 1/3 advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 208 table 2 post-test results descriptive statistics mean standard deviation median low/high raw score 21.23 1.22 21.00 1/4 statement 1 1.19 0.514 1.00 1/4 statement 2 1.32 0.608 1.00 1/4 statement 3 1.61 0.721 1.50 1/4 statement 4 1.32 0.643 1.00 1/4 statement 5 1.21 0.461 1.50 1/3 statement 6 1.62 0.744 1.50 1/4 statement 7 1.30 0.545 1.00 1/3 statement 8 1.69 0.687 1.50 1/3 statement 9 1.10 0.423 1.00 1/4 statement 10 1.31 0.554 1.50 1/4 statement 11 1.58 0.689 1.50 1/4 statement 12 1.33 0.542 1.00 1/4 statement 13 1.29 0.411 1.00 1/4 statement 14 1.65 0.866 1.50 1/4 statement 15 1.26 0.566 1.00 1/3 advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 209 table 3 t-tests for survey data statement t s.d. p value cohen’s d 1 2.02 0.506 0.045 0.295 2 7.89 0.785 0.000 1.151 3 3.00 0.827 0.003 0.438 4 2.02 0.687 0.045 0.295 5 6.13 0.797 0.000 0.894 6 2.99 0.785 0.000 0.436 7 0.134 0.543 0.893* 0.020 8 0.158 0.623 0.952* 0.023 9 0.145 0.410 0.912* 0.021 10 5.44 0.687 0.004 0.794 11 2.98 0.654 0.003 0.435 12 6.63 0.787 0.000 0.967 13 5.26 0.678 0.006 0.767 14 2.84 0.855 0.045 0.414 15 0.215 0.765 0.752* 0.018 full survey 0.985 2.54 0.008 0.144 advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 210 appendix a questions for the pre and post test 1. i am aware of my personal values  true =63 students  somewhat true = 30 students  somewhat false = 1 student  false = 0 student 2. i could name or describe multiple leadership theories  true =21 students  somewhat true = 42 students  somewhat false = 20 students  false = 11 students 3. i feel comfortable facilitating a group  true =32 students  somewhat true = 42 students  somewhat false = 11students  false = 7 students 4. i know the difference between ethics and values  true = 55 students  somewhat true = 32 students  somewhat false = 3 students  false = 2 students 5. i can describe my leadership style  true = 39 students  somewhat true = 37 students  somewhat false = 4 students  false = 14 students 6. i can articulate a connection between leadership and group process  true = 30 students  somewhat true = 44 students  somewhat false = 15 students  false = 5 students advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 211 7. i see value in learning about leadership  true = 71 students  somewhat true = 19 students  somewhat false = 4 students  false = 0 student 8. i am conscious of my impact on others  true = 51 students  somewhat true = 37 students  somewhat false = 5 students  false = 1 student 9. i want to make a difference in my community  true = 80 students  somewhat true = 10 students  somewhat false = 3 students  false = 1 student 10. i am aware of how groups function  true = 47 students  somewhat true = 37 students  somewhat false = 3 students  false = 6 students 11. i am comfortable speaking in front of groups  true = 33 students  somewhat true = 39 students  somewhat false = 12 students  false = 10 students 12. i have reflected on how my gender influences my leadership  true = 24 students  somewhat true = 46 students  somewhat false = 14 students  false = 10 students advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 212 13. i have been exposed to people with life experiences different than mine  true = 48 students  somewhat true = 30 students  somewhat false = 9 students  false = 7 students 14. i feel confident with my management skills  true = 30 students  somewhat true = 49 students  somewhat false = 8 students  false = 7 students 15. i consider myself an ethical person  true = 66 students  somewhat true = 23 students  somewhat false = 5 students  false = 0 student microsoft word blackchen_to_ lead_or_not_to_lead.docx advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 153 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp.153-159, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper to lead or not to lead: women achieving leadership status in higher education marsha blackchen marsha blackchen: the mico university college, kingston, jamaica west indies, email: marsha.chen@themico.edu.jm accepted july 06, 2015 the purpose of this article is to continue the dialogue and examine the exclusionary practices, and tenets on women as leaders in higher education. too often women are left out of leadership positions in higher education, which engenders the perception or reality of these positions being androcentric. women have also been faced with the daunting task of following in the footsteps of their male counterparts, and their experiences are never the same, because culturally and structurally, decisions are made differently. higher education therefore needs to examine the value placed on female leaders, as theoretically, female leaders have been found to possess the various types of leadership qualities in order to be considered good leaders. these areas establish credibility, as we begin to examine the requisite ingredients of leadership. women’s representation in colleges and universities throughout the world is on the rise, and is increasingly approaching the gender parity of 50 percent (bradley, 2000). importantly, in the united states of america, more women are expected to occupy college professor’s position, as they represent 58 percent of young adults between the ages of 25 to 29, many of who hold an advanced degree (u.s. census bureau news, 2011). these phenomenal strides are important to recognize. the argument is put forward that attitudinal and organization biases against women in higher education tend to exclude women from upper-level leadership positions. therefore, the author examines theoretical underpinnings of the different approaches to leadership, as well as the cultural and structural conditions and practices that create barriers to, and opportunities for the advancement of women in higher education. keywords: women, higher education, barriers, leadership introduction the obvious is that, higher education is seen as androcentric, as if it were a caveat, and, the barriers this situation has created for women in education, as well as the wider society. the “glass ceiling” (u.s. department of labor, 1991, p. 1) is evident, and women in higher education have had to face the daunting task of proving themselves in this so-called male dominated field, in order to be recognized as leaders. their male counterparts on the other hand, have been allowed to grow at a greater pace in the higher education system, for example; men dominate presidencies in all categories or types of institutions (glazerraymo, 2008). society is therefore seen as very male dominated, and as such, structurally and culturally, men’s methods of decision-making have created a myriad of challenges for women. and “the glass ceiling” which refers to the invisible or artificial barriers that prevent women from advancing past a certain level (federal glass ceiling commissionfgcc, 1997; morrison & von glinow, 1990) have created many obstacles for women in higher education to prove themselves worthy of being in the same category as men. this has therefore limited their leadership capacity, while fostering institutional prejudices, as leadership prepares and guides performance on a level where the individual and organization can be successful. the leadership capacity in women has therefore been overlooked because of their gender, and this highlights the fact that the competition for educational and economic opportunities is neither neutral nor fair, as women are judged by standards irrelevant to the competition. there is a tacit pro-male bias in hiring, and the scope for upward mobility poses many challenges. the evaluation procedures constitute a form of discrimination that continues to harm women in higher education. aguirre (2000) echoed that if there is too much stress at the work place preventing faculty from performing workplace tasks satisfactorily, then professional socialization, such as promotion and tenure would be disrupted. without a doubt, women have made significant progress in attaining leadership positions in higher education; however, they still need to be given the golden opportunity to adequately make their contribution as leaders. higher education institutions need to be cognizant of the realities of the workplace, and therefore understand that the workplace needs to be conducive for females, as it is for males. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 154 literature review women in higher education at whatever level women desire to reach in higher education, there appears to be a barrier-blocking ascendency. women’s representation in colleges and universities throughout the world in on the rise, and is increasingly approaching the gender parity of 50 percent (bradley, 2000). most noteworthy is that, in the united states of america, more women are expected to occupy college professor’s position, as they represent 58 percent of young adults between the ages of 25 to 29, many of who hold an advanced degree (u.s. census bureau news, 2011). and where as more and more women are in colleges and universities poised to enter leadership roles, upper leadership in higher education administration has a pyramid structure, and women are bunched at the base (kaplan & tinsley, 1989). consequently, women are far more likely to be deans, associate deans, directors, vice presidents or provosts especially in public institutions, as opposed to private ones, and there are many contributing factors to this. lack of empowerment for women is a contributing factor why many women do not have leadership roles in higher education. we often hear of the old boys club, but never of the old girls club. men seem to mentor other men, especially in professional situations leading to a gate-keeping phenomenon. male faculty is also paid more than female faculty. collins, chrisler and quina (1998) state that there are two determinants for this; human capital which determines the qualities the individual brings to the work place, and institutional structure which looks at the source of budget, their prestige, student population and their mission. the human capital one brings to the workplace makes them valuable commodities, as such; women need to be just as competitive as men in order to be valued in that light. however, this categorization was seen as deceptive (collins et al., 1998), as it presumes that the structural and the personal are interdependent of one another. but the very human capital that the system rewards is also perpetuated in the education system. the ivy league undergraduate is said to be on a fast track, gaining the credentials that will promote later success, including entry into the most prestigious and highest academic paying positions. the system is then seen as failing to accept certain categories of people or failing to encourage them to move into higher paying fields, and as such, one group is at a disadvantaged when compared to the other. as it were, women are at a disadvantaged, compared to their male counterparts. the dilemma women encounter in higher education women administrators are faced with a quandary of being underrepresented in high –level positions, especially at public co-educational institutions (etaugh, 1984). this situation therefore prevents the inclusion of women in certain sophisticated positions, major research led institutions, and even career fields or subject areas in education, for example the sciences. therefore, in order to be represented in high-level positions, the stereotype has to be removed, women need to mentor other women, and empower younger female professionals, as their older male counterparts have done. many women in higher education institutions have been stereotyped as having a willingness to be more family-oriented, thus the time taken off from work to procreate and care for their families. this situation is therefore seen as interrupting their professional lives, as a result, many are not offered leadership positions. armenti (2004) posits that “ department chairs, who tend to be men, make discretionary decisions about a woman’s leave time, and women’s request are not necessarily accommodated” (p. 211). consequently, some female faculty seems particularly vulnerable in their ability to seek and receive parental leave, fearing the worst for their professional development and career goals. many female faculty have had the desire to raise a family, however, because of their professional goals, and what others may refer to as impediments, many do not respond to their maternal instincts. however unfortunate this situation is, many have not had a choice, but have been forced as a result of their career path. women as leaders the question has always been asked by scholars, “can women lead?” there have been many causal factors that have created an atmosphere for the stigma of women not being able to lead. women are often seen in the light as living in a male dominated world. many areas in academe, for example the sciences, were considered out of the reach for females, even though much has changed with regards to women elevating themselves in higher education. the position of tenure has been difficult for many women faculty to achieve. furthermore, being employed at highly research-oriented universities has been difficult. lack of empowerment for women, and mentoring by other women would have made a serious difference in the lives of female faculty. the transition into higher education would have also been easier, had the way been paved for women by other professional women, and if society saw women in the same leadership roles as their male counterparts. northouse (2009) asserts that, with the increasing number of women in corporate and political leadership roles, the question of weather or not they can lead is now a moot point, as the obvious is; female leaders are seen in a variety of leading positions, and often times seem to empower subordinates by using participatory management (glazer-raymo et al. 2000, p. 244). therefore, women achieving leadership status in higher education is contingent upon several factors; how they are perceived by society, their academic peers, their commitment to the profession, mentoring, and being qualified, to name a few. many women have been afforded the opportunity to lead in higher education, and many have not been give such an opportunity. eagly (2007) highlights the fact that in the united states of america, women are increasingly praised for having excellent leadership skills, and in fact, more women than men, manifest leadership styles associated with effective performance as leaders. the increasing numbers of female leaders in higher advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 155 education institutions can attest to the fact of women achieving leadership status in higher education. with the many leadership positions offered to women, there have been many successes. eagly (2007) posits that more people prefer to have a male boss rather than a female. there is not a sense of the old girls club as there is the old boys club. however, there have been a few studies that have examined the significance of the relationship between women mentoring activities and academic career development (bolton, 1980; atcherson& jenny, 1983; cullen & luna, 1990). cullen and luna (1993) interviewed 24 women who were in executive or administrative positions from arizona and california. the findings revealed that only 3 of the 24 women lacked a mentor, of the remaining 21women studied, 5 identified a female mentor and 8 identified a male mentor. a barrier to women’s mentoring revealed that too few women were available to mentor other women. contrary, brown (2005) found that a majority of the college presidents in the study had received mentoring. these results therefore suggest that, mentorship plays a critical role in advancing female college presidents up the administrative ladder consequently; females’ having a mentor is essential for their career. in order to resolve some of these issues women have as it relates to leadership, women should be each other’s keeper. women in higher education should coach other female faculty, because research shows that mentoring does alleviate some of these problem areas women faculty face in higher education. along with mentoring, is also networking. networking is very important, and as collins et al. (1998) remarks, the larger the faculty, the more important networking is. furthermore, at large higher education institutions, faculty rarely sees and knows each other, except on occasions where it is necessary for them to meet, such as faculty meetings. when senior faculty network and mentor junior faculty, a symbiotic relationship is created, which can be beneficial to females being groomed as leaders. senior female faculty therefore needs to make a concerted effort to network and aid in the younger female staff’s development. this bonding creates confidence among female faculty, and the society sees this as positive, which can later lead to success among female academia. theoretical perspective there have been many theories put forward to aid in our understanding of the various types of leaders and the qualities they possess in order to be considered good leaders. understanding of the problem on women achieving leadership status in higher education, the theoretical underpinnings have to be well defined. therefore, the trait approach, skills approach and transformational leadership are all critical in explaining how women lead. educators are leaders in their own right, and female faculty need to achieve leadership status in higher education, because interaction is taking place in the learning environment, and students are being mentored in their own right. however, there needs to be more recognition on the path of what female faculty does, and there needs to be less stringent barriers, in order for women to achieve leadership status to their fullest potential. several reasons were listed as to why women faculties do not achieve leadership status just as equal as their male counterparts. female faculties at some juncture in their career need to internalize their purpose in the profession; why did they choose higher education? according to northouse (2009) research on the trait approach concluded that, over the century, there has been a list of traits that individuals might hope to possess or wish to cultivate, if they want to be perceived as leaders. such traits are: intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity, and sociability. in order for leadership to be effective, northouse (2009) put forward that intellectual ability is positively related to leadership. wenniger and conroy (2001) posit that the number of women in administration has been increasing steadily since 1970, and women’s movement, affirmative action, feminist, women’s strong work ethic and abilities, and the goddess herself have fueled this. they continue by stating that, “five percent of all presidents of colleges and universities in 1975 were women…the percentage increased to 12 percent by 1992, 16.5 percent by 1995, and 19.3 by 1998. the largest percentage of women presidents leads private two-year colleges, 27 percent” (p. 4). the intelligence trait as researchers see it, have confirmed that with such an increase in women as presidents of colleges, one’s intellectual ability is positively related to leadership. in order for women faculty to move up the academic ladder, they would have had to get themselves qualified, which would speak positive of their intellectual ability. this would therefore boost other areas such as, their confidence level and professionalism. the second trait is self –confidence. northouse (2009) highlighted that this trait assists one to become a leader. if leaders lack confidence, they will not be able to perform, and when women faculties are expected to influence others, they need to possess such leadership qualities while ensuring it is utilized. furthermore, displaying a high confidence level in higher education will prove to society that female faculty can venture into the so-called male domain. even though the strides women faculty have made at private institutions far supersedes that of public institutions, etaugh (1984) stated, “the status of women faculty and administrators in higher education has improved somewhat…but much remains to be accomplished” (p. 24). the confidence level can therefore be a factor in determining women’s ability, and if there have been strides in higher education, then there has been attempts by female faculty to be confident leaders in their own respect. the third trait is determination. if this is possessed then women might be considered good leaders. “determination is the desire to get the job done and includes characteristics such as initiatives, persistence, dominance, and drive” (northouse, 2007, p. 20). women faculty in order to be successful must be determined in their endeavors in higher education. wennigner and conroy advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 156 (2001) stated that in gaining tenure, women are making slow progress, as in 1989, 22 percent of tenured faculty were women, and by 1998 the percentage increased to 26 percent. in order for women to be seen as achieving leadership status in higher education, female faculty need to be more determined. several barriers are seen in the male dominated field, however, if younger female professionals are mentored, then there can be a dominance shown in the profession, and the gate keeping that is done by their male counterparts will be diminished. good leaders must be determined in their endeavors, and female faculty must show their dominance by coaching and mentoring other female faculty. the fourth trait is integrity, and this integral in leadership and for female faculty to be seen as good leaders. as northouse (2009) asserted, integrity is the quality of honesty and trustworthiness, and when people adhere to a strong set of principles, as well as take responsibility for their actions, they are demonstrating integrity. leaders need to exude an air of confidence and trust. female faculty, who exhibit integrity, will no doubt demonstrate that they can be trusted, and those being served will feel confident that their leader is trustworthy and loyal. most noteworthy too, are senior faculty who need to mentor younger female professionals. hetherington and barcelo (1985) referred to the situation as “womentoring” noting that, the presence of senior women who have made it in the profession in higher education can be a facilitating factor in the formation of such identity. this bonding and mentoring that will take place will aid in the passing down of principles, from the senior faculty to the junior faculty. this womentoring process will no doubt pave the way for others to see the principles that have been set by the senior staff, and the junior staff following suit. fundamentally, this lends itself to the integrity of the profession and the bond that female faculty share as being loyal and dependable. the final trait is sociability, and as northouse (2009) stated, in order to be sociable, a leader therefore has to seek out pleasant social relationships. leaders who show sociability are friendly, outgoing, courteous, tactful and diplomatic. they are seen as sensitive to others’ needs, and show concern for an individual’s wellbeing. female leaders though, have been criticized for showing too much emotion; where as, male leaders make decisions without being emotionally attached, yet still remain sociable. female faculty, who mentor other female faculty, will display the trait of sociability. showing concern for the wellbeing of others’ is important in any profession, and once this image is portrayed, the wider society will see female leaders as effective leaders. this creates a bond with other female staff members who will pass on such attributes to others they come in contact with. good female leaders should therefore display a focus on ‘we versus me’ to show concern for others. another approach used to analyze the challenges women face in higher education is the skills approach. the skills approach is important to female leaders in higher education, and as northouse (2009) see it, the skills approach takes a leadercentered perspective on leadership. in utilizing this approach, an emphasis is placed on skills and abilities that can be learned and developed, as these are needed for effective leadership. the skills approach is indicative of leaders who can accomplish, and the ability to use ones knowledge and competences to accomplish a set of goals or objectives (northouse). wennigner and conroy (2001) states that, “in the last twenty years, the number of women presidents of colleges and universities has more than tripled, from 148 in 1976 to 453 in 1996. women now make up 16 percent of all top leaders in u.s higher education institutions” (p.10) and such accomplishment would confirm that female leaders are using the skills approach. sax (2008) study addressed the gender gap in higher education and concluded that the presence of women faculty on campuses makes a positive educational difference for students. the study, which included 17,000 participants from 200 institutions, found that men attending colleges with more female professors showed gains in “mathematical confidence, scientific orientation, leadership ability, and emotional well-being. there was also a positive effect on gpa being even stronger for men than women” (p. 226), because of the influence of female faculty. moving beyond equity, sax’s findings provide educational justification for the increasing numbers of female faculty on college campuses, and the influence their presence has on the student population. this therefore exemplifies the skills that women have learned in order to be leaders and the impact they can have on individuals. with the skills approach, there are three basic administrative skills; technical, human and conceptual. the technical skill according to northouse (2009) is knowledge about proficiency in a specific type of work or activity, and women according to wennigner and conroy (2001) made up the 16 percent of all top leaders in u.s. higher education. this therefore demonstrates that women would have exemplified knowledge about, and proficiency in the teaching profession to reach thus far. wennigner and conroy continue by stating that “…the number of women in the pipeline, as senior leaders, their assistants, and associates, has also risen dramatically, and these women are poised to take the rein in the next millennium” (p.10). even though the technical skills as northouse (2009) sees it, is being more practical oriented, the technical skills needed in the higher education, such as; stretching budgets, experienced at being the go-between such as faculty and trustees to reach agreement, would no doubt be valuable skills female faculty posses to achieve leadership status. in achieving leadership status, human beings would have to work together. this is quite evident since simple societies, and utilizing the human skills is having knowledge about, and the ability to work with people (northouse, 2009). female faculty who want to achieve leadership status will have to utilize their human skills. knowing how to effectively work with peers, students and superiors can aid in fulfilling the institution’s goals. one of the reasons why women have achieved leadership status advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 157 is that, they have been considered to be holistic and strategic thinkers, viewing problems as multifaceted, and requiring a series of solutions rather than policy change. most women are likely to work with people, and as a leader, female leaders work with people, rather than expecting people to work for them. furthermore, there has to be an atmosphere of trust, and when this is created, others become involved and feel a part of the institution, thus becoming involved in the daily happenings. some amount of loyalty is also felt by all involved when female leaders use this approach. the final skill in the skills approach is conceptual skill. this skill lends itself to having the ability to work with ideas and concepts. northouse (2009) states that conceptual skills are central to creating a vision and strategic plan for the organization. every leader should have a vision as well as share that vision with others on the team. tinsley (1985) explains a situation of upward mobility for women administrators who are underrepresented in leadership positions. in order to achieve upward mobility, help from private organizations was solicited and donations made to support projects designed to promote administrative advancement were made. these foundation fundings had two major purposes, 1) to increase the ranks of women and minority professional workers in america, for example higher education, and 2) to improve the leadership of higher education. foundation officers believed that the experience and expertise of women would increase institutional vitality and bring new vision. and as such, the skills these female leaders had in galvanizing the support from outside organization was phenomenon in aiding the growth of the female administrators who were underrepresented. essentially, this demonstrates what the skills approach embrace; creating a vision, sharing it with the team, and building on that concept as a strategic plan for the organization. a female faculty who will be willing to consider alternative solutions to problematic situations can be considered a good leader. a female leader in higher education should be able to hold a bake sale for the institution if the alumni do not fulfill their promise, while balancing multiple responsibilities. therefore, working with ideas and concepts is essential for women to achieve leadership status in higher education. the final model that will be used to analyze the problem of women achieving leadership status is; transformational leadership. transformational leadership is important in any organization. female faculty in particular, should see themselves as transformational leaders, as in the learning environment they are transforming the minds of the learners. regardless of the plethora of explanations given about transformational leadership, mezirow (1997) states “personal transformation leads to alliances with others of like mind …effecting necessary changes in relationships, organizations and systems…” (as cited in merriam, caffarella& baumgartner, 2007. p. 134). when these alliances are formed, changes are effected and bonds are created. northouse (2009) sees transformational leadership as a process that changes and transforms people, and as such, is concerned with emotions, values, ethics, standards, and long-term goals. transformational leadership therefore, involves an exceptional form of influence that moves followers to accomplish more than what is expected of them, consequently, the transformational leader is to create change. eagly (2007) posits that “transformational leaders mentor and empower their subordinates and encourage them to develop their potential and thus, contribute more effectively to their organization” (p. 2). furthermore, female faculty who are eager to achieve leadership status need to know the importance of mentoring and empowering other female faculty, as well as their subordinates. female faculty who are also serious about achieving leadership status in higher education, need to acknowledge and accept the importance of being a transformational leader. the transformational leader will be open to constructive criticism, as they are constantly in dialogue with followers, and should be able to raise the level of morality in others. also, for women to achieve leadership status in higher education, it is important for them to understand the institution’s agenda, the organizational structures, and the political processes, as these come via dialogue with others, which is a part of the transformational process. as tinsley (1995) states, “each of us, irrespective of gender, has the right to participate in the leadership and management of higher education, the right to have our expertise and wisdom guide our institutions and our profession” (p.11). therefore, each female faculty has the right to participate in leadership, while making a meaningful contribution to higher education institutions and the profession. that contribution will lend itself to some amount of transformation, as the collective good is what is of essence. discussion and personal definition of leadership great leaders are everywhere in society, some are born, and some are made. women are perceived to have a soft persona, and as such, may not be seen by many to have a strong character to be good leaders. this is often seen as a negative, as well as a stigma. hence, good leaders are said to posses certain qualities, traits, and skills that aid in the transformation of lives, as well as situations. this is true, however, some of the negative stigma attached to women preventing them from achieving leadership status in higher education, are the same qualities that have molded society and their male counterparts, who are revered as great leaders. leaders should therefore have a vision, and that vision should be communicated to the followers. female faculty who are passionate about a particular situation in higher education should not be afraid to speak out and solicit help to see their dreams come to fruition. confidence should be an integral role in the female faculty’s character. this confidence will generate the energy required to be successful, and spur the dialogue needed to get tasks going as a successful leader. women, according to northouse (2009) are seen, as less effective in a role that is masculinized, however, they were more effective than men in education. therefore, if women are seen as advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 158 effective leaders in education because of their personality and the way they handle situations, for example as a transformational leader the way they mentor and empower their subordinates, then there is no doubt that women can achieve leadership status in higher education. collins, chrisler and quina (1998) believe that “there are many reasons why women should assume positions as faculty leaders… from the principled approaches to the common good to more individual reasons, such as career or personal development. all are important” (p. 200). if women want to be recognized and be considered good leaders in higher education, they need to empower each other, achieve seniority at their institution for that to occur, participate in committees, volunteer in a wide variety of campus activities, upgrade themselves, and generally, be satisfied with their jobs. for a female to become an effective leader, they must be dedicated to the institution and take on departmental projects that will be successful; a sense of commitment has to be shown. women have often been chastised for leaving work to attend to family situations, where as the men stay at work. again commitment must be shown. female faculty should also be willing to show organizational ability, creativity and initiative on the job to be considered for leadership positions as well as to be considered effective leaders. women wanting to achieve leadership status in higher education must be willing to accept appointments, and take on projects that will bring out their creative side, and use their initiative, even if they had no prior experience. women in higher education must be willing to take on challenges, and take risks, as the stereotypical leader is seen by society. women faculty should be great team leaders, if even for the moment, just for the good of the organization, as there are goals to be met. women faculty who aspire to be leaders in higher education must be role models. we need to be cognizant of the fact that, once women are in education, they are touching the lives of people, and this is important. when this happens, the values and principles that were instilled will be passed on from one generation to the next. good leaders need to be mentors and show a sense of citizenry. female faculty need to be there for each other, creating an atmosphere that will act as catalyst for the profession. while female faculty is seen as facilitators in the classroom, in order to be effective leaders, there needs to be a nurturing tone set in higher education, as individuals will have problems require solving. also, be an advocate for students, petition on their behalf when it is appropriate, yet maintaining that respect with other faculty. these characteristics make good female leaders and will need to be in effect, in order to achieve leadership status in higher education. therefore, with the strides women have been making in leadership positions and the styles used to get the job done, the expectations of women in higher education needs to be reexamined in light of the realities of their positions and organizations. conclusion and recommendations prior to what many researchers have suggested, that of the image of higher education being a male domain, the strength of character that women have are just as efficient as men in higher education. women inclusion on higher education campuses has not been easy. the strides they have made over the years has left a historical mark, as well as galvanize the attitudes of other women and support groups, therefore making leadership status in higher education possible for female leaders. the criteria for upward mobility, such as tenure for women may not be equally weighted for both male and female faculty, and as such, female faculty members need to be cognizant of this, and match their male counterparts in research and publishing. to be considered good leaders as quite pointedly stated, women need to be mentors for each other, and be principled about the profession. it is necessary for female faculty to seek out new ventures and present their vision to the institution, and seek support for that vision in higher education. therefore, society will need to stop judging women based on their personalities, and look beyond such to see effective contributions that have been made, and merit accordingly. however, if women are judged as if it were only a man’s world, there will never be changes. higher education needs to understand that female faculty, just as much as male faculty has a lot to contribute. the onus therefore is on women to dominate and overcome the stigma attached to the gender, as they aspire to achieve leadership status in higher education. female educators who have taught across all levels of the education system, would have found their comfort zone, and once this occurs, it takes a lot of reflection and internalization to really know if this is where she wants to be. every one is a leader in their own right, and when we have found our niche, we need to put those whom we come in contact with first. being in higher education comes with a lot of challenges, but there are rewards by just being there. women have come a long way in leadership positions, and for that successful path to continue, women would need to be just as qualified as their counterparts, mentor younger female faculty, serve their higher education institution, facilitate and nurture students, be focused, and have a vision that will be shared with all whom they come in contact with. transformation is also a part of that successful path, and is integral in achieving leadership status, both personally and institutionally. references aguirre, a. (jr). (2000). women and minority faculty in the academic workplace.recruitment, retention and academic culture.27 (6).jossey-bass. san francisco. amenti, c. (2004). may babies and post tenure babies: maternal decisions of women professors. in altbach, p., arnold, k., bassett, r., el – khawas, e., holub, t., &youn. t. (eds.). the review of higher education: the journal of the association for the study of higher education27 (2) 211231. atcherson, e., & jenny, j. (1983). what about mentors and women in academe? tempe, az, annual mid-year conference of american educational research association (eric document reproduction service no. ed242-642). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 159 bradley, k. (2000). the incorporation of women into higher education: paradoxical outcomes: sociology of education, 73, 1-18. bolton, e. b. (1980). a conceptual analysis of the mentor relationship in the career development of women, adult education, 30, 195-207. brown, t. m. (2005). mentorship and the female college president. sex roles, 52(9/10), doi: 10.1007/s11199 0053733-7. collins, l. h., christer, j.c., &quina, k. (1998). career strategies for women in academe. arming anthena. sage publications. cullen, d. l., & luna, g. (1990). a comparative study of female mentors in academe and business, in a. d. johnson & p. mroczek (eds.), mentoring minorities and women, 18-23, dekalb, il: northern illinois university press. cullen, d. l, & luna, g. (1993). women mentoring in academe: addressing the gender gap in higher education. retrieved from http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/delivery? eagly, a. h. (2007) female leadership advantage and disadvantage: resolving the contradictions.in psychology of women quarterly, 31, 1-12 blackwellpublishing. etaugh, c. (1984). women faculty and administrators in higher education: changes in their status since 1972. in journal of the national association of women deans, administrators, and counselors,48, 21-25. federal glass ceiling commission (1997). the glass ceiling, in d. dunn (ed.), workplace/women’s place: an anthology, 226-233, los angeles, ca: roxbury publishing. glazer-raymo, j. (2008).unfinished agendas: new and continuing gender challenges in higher education. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. glazer-raymo, j., townsend, b. k., & ropers-huilman, b. (2000).women in higher education (eds.).a feminist perspective.pearson custom publishing. hetherington, c., &barcelo, r. (1985). womentoring: a crosscultural perspective.journal of the national association for women deans, administrators,and counselors.48, 12-15. merriam, s. b., caffarella, r.s., baumgartner, l. m., (2007). learning in adulthood. a comprehensive guide. (3rded). jossey-bass. san francisco. morrison, a. m., & von glinow (1990).women and minorities in management, american psychologist,45, 200208. northouse, p. g. (2009). leadership theory and practice. sage publications. sax, l. (2008).the gender gap in college: maximizing the developmental potential of women and men. san francisco, ca: wiley. tinsley, a. (1985). upward mobility for women administrators.journal of the national association for women deans, administrators, and counselors.48, 3-11. u. s. census bureau news (2011). census bureau reports nearly 6 in 10 advanced degree holders age 25-29 are women. u.s. department of commerce, washington, dc, 20233, retrieved from http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/educat ion/cb11-72.html u.s. department of labor. (1991). a report on the glass ceiling initiative. washington, dc: government printing office. wennigner, m. d., & conroy, m. h. (2001). gender equity or bust? on the road to campusleadership with women in higher education. (eds.). jossey-bass. san francisco. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 160 advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership title ix of the united states education amendments: a gender-equity education intervention strategy cindy l. a. pemberton, ed.d. pemberton, spring, 1997 it has become increasingly apparent that gender equity in athletics, while in some instances centered on the particulars of title ix compliance, is about more than that. gender equity in athletics is about confronting fundamental cultural norms, beliefs and values held by a population who has been historically and traditionally responsible for perpetuating sexism, sex bias and discrimination through a variety of socio-cultural institutions, one of which is the co-curricular activity of school sport. historically, the culture of sport, and in particular school sport as a co-curricular part of the american education system, has been male dominated. according to sadker and sadker (1994): through athletics boys are taught that competition, aggression, and endurance build real men, on the playing field and in the workplace. it was precisely because they intensified traditional notions of masculinity that educators found sport so attractive and incorporated them into the official school program (p.213). in fact, sport emerged as an official part of the school curriculum in direct response to public perceptions that a largely female teaching force (a result of the departure of men from teaching in response to early periods of war.) would emasculate, or feminize, young men and boys (sadker & sadker, 1994). in an effort to preserve and foster "healthy male development" recess games and play activities were co-opted into organized sport, and became for men and boys an official part of the american school curriculum. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html in 1972 a federal civil rights statute, title ix, was enacted as part of the united states education amendments. title ix was designed to address issues of educational equity. specifically, title ix focuses on discrimination on the basis of sex in admission and recruitment policies and practice, educational programs and activities (such as athletics), and employment in educational programs and activities. title ix states: no person in the united states shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance (united states department of health education and welfare [hew], 1979, p. 71413). relative to educational institutions and school sport, enacting this law meant that "...institutions could not discriminate on the basis of gender, in any program receiving federal funds, including athletics" (hill, 1993, p. 51). this link to federal financial assistance (i.e., federal educational support funneled directly to schools and/or indirectly via student support funds, such as student loans), tied title ix to virtually all public, and most private educational institutions. according to indiana senator birch bayh (democrat), the principal senate sponsor of title ix, title ix was put forth as: a strong and comprehensive measure [that would] provide women with solid legal protection from the persistent, pernicious discrimination which is serving to perpetuate second-class citizenship for american women (vargyas, 1994, p. 6). in other words, title ix was designed to proactively address the historical wrongs associated with culturally embedded gender discrimination, and thereby ensure gender equity relative to educational opportunities, including educational-athletic opportunities. however, as the history and evolving reality of title ix and title ix compliance illustrate, "law only sets general policy" (scribner & englert, 1977, p. 19) and, in as much as the consequences for non-compliance can be avoided and/or tolerated, laws cannot and do not compel action. following the 1972 legislation of title ix, the united states department of health education and welfare (hew) took three years to draft a specific response (i.e., the federal register rules and regulations (1975)), and another four to write the policy interpretations (1979). these documents provided needed administrative elaboration, and specific compliance requirement guidelines, regarding the rules and regulations, policy interpretations and applications of title ix. based on these documents the office of civil rights (ocr) developed the title ix athletics investigator's manual. the ocr is the principal government agency charged with the enforcement of federal statutes that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, handicap and age, in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. there are four such federal statutes, one of which is title ix. the ocr (1990) investigator's manual is the primary resource/tool used to evaluate title ix compliance. the manual is divided into sections that correspond to the thirteen title ix compliance program components that may be investigated relative to gender equity in interscholastic (typically grades 9-12) and intercollegiate athletic programs. title ix compliance components the thirteen title ix compliance components fall into three categories. these are: (a) the accommodation of interest and abilities, (b) financial aid, and (c) equitable opportunities and accommodations regarding other program areas. title ix compliance relative to these categories is discussed below. the accommodation of interest and abilities compliance in this category is assessed in one of three ways. the ocr (1990) title ix athletics investigator's manual states that the three parts or prongs of the interest and abilities compliance test "...may be considered consecutively..." (p. 21). however, it is relevant to note, and often mistakenly understood, that although consecutive compliance assessment via the three prongs is one way to review compliance, it is not required. the three prongs can be reviewed independent of each other, and a finding of compliance in any one of the three satisfies the interest and abilities area of title ix compliance. the first part of the three-prong interest and abilities test involves the assessment of substantially proportionate participation opportunities. this means that athletic participation opportunities for women/girls and men/boys must be substantially proportionate to the female/male student body undergraduate enrollment rates at a particular institution. for example, if 50% of the enrolled undergraduate students are female and 50% are male, then the athletic program participation numbers must be substantially proportionate to these percentages (i.e., 50% female and 50% male). if proportionality is not found to exist, the following two prongs are examined: (a) whether or not an institution can show a history and continuing practice of program expansion which is demonstrably responsive to the developing interest and abilities of the numerically under-represented sex, or (b) whether or not an institution can demonstrate that the interests and abilities of the under-represented sex have been, and/or are being, fully and effectively accommodated by the present program (cohen v. brown, 1992). typically in american higher education, the under-represented sex in athletics has been, and continues to be, female. because of this, title ix compliance relative to the demonstration of a history and continuing practice of program expansion, and/or the full and effective accommodation of interest and abilities, usually involves an assessment of the expansion of women's sport programs, and/or the assessment of the full and effective accommodation of the expressed interest and abilities of female athletes. relative to the history and continuing practice prong, during the late 1970's and early 1980's, many higher education institutions added women's sport programs and increased women's sport participation and program support. however, the time line between then and now (i.e., the early to mid 1990's), shows that in large part institutions across the country have not continued this practice. in fact, when participation data from the 1994 national collegiate athletic association (ncaa) membership study was graphed, although there continued to be increases in women's sport participation numbers, the slope of the line between 1982 and 1992 was found to be relatively flat (pemberton, 1996). as a result, when title ix compliance is assessed using this prong, although institutions can often point to a history of expanding women's sport opportunities, and some can show recent trends relative to expanded opportunities, institutions often fall short of being able to show a continuing practice of program expansion and increasing support. when attempting to assess interest and abilities, the ncaa gender equity guide, achieving gender equity: a basic guide to title ix for colleges and universities (1994), suggests that institutions should attempt to identify unmet interest through a participant analysis of potential feeder sport programs, such as on-campus club and intramural sports, as well as off-campus high school, junior college and community club sport teams. however, applying survey methodologies to the assessment of interest and abilities can be both complex and difficult. because schools with intercollegiate athletics programs actively recruit student-athletes, surveying the athletic interest and abilities of an existing student body would necessarily reflect disproportionate interest and ability in the sport programs sponsored by a particular institution. for example, it is not likely that a student-athlete interested in swimming competitively at the intercollegiate level would apply to a school that does not sponsor varsity level intercollegiate swimming. this logic can also be applied in response to the argument put forward by schools who claim that a demonstrated athletic interest, without demonstrated varsity level ability, in and of itself is not sufficient to justify program expansion and/or elevation. examples of this include requests from club or intramural sport participants to have their sport programs elevated to the varsity intercollegiate athletic level. given the fact that intramural and/or club sport programs typically lack intercollegiate varsity level program supports (such as facilities, equipment, coaching, recruitment, etc.), it is not surprising that if and when interest and ability is expressed, varsity level ability may be questionable. what is surprising is that, given the lack of varsity level support for club and/or intramural sport programs as well as the gender bias and deprivation that has historically permeated school sport, interest and ability are expressed at all. with the above in mind, in order for a survey of interest and abilities to be meaningful, the entire statistical universe of potential student-athletes would need to be surveyed, (i.e., all potential student-athletes that could, might, and/or do, apply for admission to a given institution). obviously, this would be a logistical nightmare if not an impossibility. and even this broad ranging survey methodology would neglect the effects, past, present and future, of the historical gender bias, discrimination and deprivation, that have infused the culture of sport since it first emerged as a co-curricular outlet for male energy and aggression. in a recent court decision (pederson et al v. louisiana state university, 1996), federal district judge rebecca f. doherty articulated the following relative to surveying student-athlete interests and abilities: "the simplest way [for colleges to determine student athletic interest and abilities] ... may be to include survey questions on applications for admissions" (blum, 1996, p. a33). however, as discussed above, although this strategy may provide some information about the expressed athletic interest and abilities of students who end up applying to a particular institution, interpreting the survey responses would: (a) be limited by the applicant pool, (b) be affected by institutional recruiting, and (c) fall short of addressing the underlying socio-cultural issues of historic gender bias and discrimination that title ix was originally legislated to remediate. as the above discussion makes clear, unless the proportionality prong is met, assessing title ix compliance relative to the accommodation of interest and abilities is a complex process. further, despite the fact that the accommodation of interest and abilities is often the most broadly discussed area of title ix compliance, it is only one of three title ix compliance areas. the other two areas, athletic financial assistance and equitable accommodations in other program areas, are discussed next. athletic financial assistance athletic financial aid/scholarships must be allocated in proportion to the female and male athletic participation numbers. for example, if 60% of the intercollegiate athletic participants are male and 40% are female, then athletic related financial aid must be allocated in proportion to these participation percentages (i.e., 60% to male sport athletes and 40% to female sport athletes). title ix compliance assessment in this area is a straight-forward matter of numbers. however, if the likelihood of expanding women's sport participation numbers is related to available scholarship dollars, then the allocation of those dollars in proportion to existing intercollegiate gender ratios would simply act to reinforce a disparate status quo. as with the expression of interest and abilities, given the socio-cultural disincentives associated with women's sport and the persistence of gender biased institutional support barriers, such as disparate athletic scholarship allocations, it is not surprising that women's sport participation numbers are not as high as men's. what is surprising is that they are as high as they are. equitable opportunities and accommodations/other program areas this category of title ix compliance is assessed relative to equitable opportunities and accommodations with respect to equipment and supplies, scheduling of games and practice, travel and per diem allowance, tutors, coaches, locker rooms, practice and competition facilities, medical and training facilities, housing and dining facilities, publicity, recruitment of student/athletes, and support services. it is important to note that relative to these other sport related program areas, even given the specificity of the federal register rules and regulations, the policy interpretations (1979), and the ocr (1990) title ix athletics investigator's manual guidelines, analyzing title ix compliance is a complex process. this is because, "...different benefits require different analyses" (ncaa, 1994, p. 6). determining title ix compliance often requires both an overall approach and a sport specific comparative approach. an overall approach to title ix compliance assessment requires "...comparing the benefits provided to all men's teams [male athletes] to the benefits provided to all women's teams [female athletes]" (ncaa, 1994, p. 5). what this means is that if 50% of the male sport participants receive a particular benefit (e.g., shoes), even if all those male athletes are from a single team (e.g., football), then to achieve compliance, 50% of the female athletes should receive a similar benefit. this would be true even if it takes providing the benefit to two or three different women's teams to equal 50% of the female sport participants (ncaa, 1994). it is important to note however, that this compliance assessment is based on a determination of what benefits and services are needed and desired, and does not require equal monetary expenditures, or that money be expended on things that are not needed and/or desired. as is the case in football programs, the fact that more money may be spent to accommodate the purchase of team uniforms and/or protective padding, and, because of this, more money may be spent per athlete to outfit a large percentage of the male sport participants does not mean that an equivalent amount of money needs to be spent on women's sport participants if similar benefits and services are not required. in other words, equity does not require identical monetary expenditures. equity requires the provision of equivalent benefits. the overall approach "...ignore[s] the nature of particular sports and the fact that some benefits are not needed by some athletes or teams" (ncaa, 1994, p. 7). in cases where certain sports have particular needs, (for example large equipment storage facilities) title ix compliance involves assessing equity relative to the number of women's and men's sports teams so accommodated. finally, title ix compliance assessment is further complicated by the activities of athletic department booster groups and the fundraising monies they generate. according to vargyas (1994), the ocr title ix investigator's manual makes clear that: "[w]here booster clubs provide benefits or services that assist only teams of one sex, the institution shall ensure that teams of the other sex receive equivalent benefits and services" (p. 29). this means that regardless of the source of funds, it is incumbent upon the institution to provide equal benefits to both women and men. historically and traditionally men's sports have had, and continue to have, more booster support than women's sports. to cope with this situation, institutions have a variety of alternatives. they may: (a) decline to accept gender specific sport donations, (b) accept donations as specified for men's athletics and/or a particular men's sport team, and then provide an equivalent benefit, supported by the institution, to the women's athletic program and/or team, or (c) ask the donor(s) to give to both the women's and men's sport programs/teams, perhaps giving half their originally intended gift to each. the gender specific value of sport beyond the fact that gender equity, as legislated by title ix, is the law, sport provides a powerful medium for both females and males to develop and practice proactive patterns of life long health and fitness. it also provides opportunities for participants to experience implicit and explicit life-skill development and socio-cultural education. for example, lopiano (1994) reported that: (a) 80% of high school girls who play sports increase their chances of avoiding unwanted pregnancies, (b) 92% are less likely to be involved in drugs than their nonathletic peers, (c) girls who play sports are three times more likely to graduate from high school, (d) a minimum of two hours per week of exercise reduces the risk of breast cancer and osteoporosis for teenage girls, and (e) girls who play sports have higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of depression, as well as a more positive body image and higher psychological well-being. the women's sports foundation (1992) concurred with lopiano (1994). among the many benefits listed, the women's sports foundation cited statistics from the national center for health and reported that "...healthful levels of physical activity appear to be linked to a general sense of well-being, a positive mood, and lower levels of anxiety and depression, especially among women" (p. 1). in addition to physical, psychological, and emotional benefits, important socio-cultural education and expectations can and do occur through sport. in an article on gender bias in sport socialization, greendorfer (1987) asserted that: because sport participation in childhood and adolescence has implications for more full participation in various social spheres of adult life, it is time to devote more research attention to sport as a viable and natural activity for females (p. 339). according to lopiano (1994), sports are where "...boys traditionally [have] learned: teamwork, goal setting, excellence in performance pursuit, [and] achievement-oriented behaviors" (p. 282). these and other valued life skills, such as persistence, time management, competition, and risk taking, are critical for "...success in the workplace...[and]...women cannot be less prepared for the highly competitive workplace [and life] than men" (p. 282). historically and traditionally, sport, and the inherent life-skill lessons learned and practiced, have been seen as an expressway to socio-cultural access, power, prestige, and success (cantor & bernay, 1992). according to grant (1993), university of iowa women's athletic director: participation in sport by itself justifies the existence of athletics programs, but we are giving them much more than sport; and through these young women we are changing the reception and role of women in general throughout the nation...through sport we shatter into a million pieces the stereotypes portraying women as weak, helpless, dependent and passive. through sport we produce exactly the opposite type of woman: strong, independent, assertive, competent and confident, with strong self-esteem (p. 5). clearly, gender inequities in sport represent physical, emotional, and mental developmental opportunities deprived and/or lost, and send a message to women and girls that they are less important, less valued, and less worthy than men and boys. gender bias in sport the ultimate consequence for non-compliance with title ix is the loss of all federal funds (this includes federal grants, student loans, and work study), and is enforceable through the ocr. according to vargyas (1994), the congressional record shows "...remarkable consensus that sex discrimination in competitive athletics is a serious problem for which title ix should provide redress" (p. 11). however, in institutions across the country, gender discrimination in athletics persists as the norm, and to date, the ocr has never enforced the ultimate penalty for non-compliance. according to a cnn special report (january, 1994), over 90% of college athletic programs (with football) fail to fully comply with title ix. and, as reported in a 1992 ncaa gender equity study sponsored by the ncaa commission on women in athletics: ...despite the relatively even distribution of [ncaa] membership undergraduate enrollment by gender, males constituted nearly 70% of intercollegiate athletics participants, and they received nearly 77% of the operating budgets, 70% of scholarship funds and 83% of recruiting dollars (ncaa, 1994, p. 1). the 1996 general accounting office report (gao), intercollegiate athletics: status of efforts to promote gender equity, reviewed eight studies on gender equity in intercollegiate athletics. this study showed that although women's sport programs have made some "slight advances since 1992..." (p. 13), they remain behind men's sport programs in most areas of comparison. specifically, the report showed that: (a) the average number of sports offered to women had risen from 7.1 to 7.6 from 1992 to 1996; and (b) schools in all three national collegiate athletic association (ncaa) divisions had added women's sport programs over the past five years. however, the report also showed that: (a) at ncaa division i schools, women still received less than a third (31%) of the athletic scholarship funds, and less than a quarter (24%) of the total average athletic operating expenses, and (b) although women's sport participation numbers have increased since 1992 (34%), by 1995 women still represented only 37% of all student athletes, despite the fact that women made up, in many cases, more than half of the undergraduate student enrollment (u.s. gao, 1996). the report also commented on the recent update by acosta and carpenter on what has now become a 19 year longitudinal study on the status of women in intercollegiate sport. according to acosta and carpenter (1996), the percent of females coaching women's sport teams is down from 49.4% in 1994 (and a high of %90 in 1972), to 47.7% in 1996. further, according to faludi (faludi, 1991; faludi cited in hill, 1993), female coaches are paid significantly less than 99% of their male counterparts. acosta and carpenter (1996) also found that the status of women as athletic administrators was also declining. they reported that in 1996, 18.5% of all women's programs were headed by female administrators. this number was down from 21% in 1994. concluding thoughts title ix was legislated almost 25 years ago. specific compliance criteria were detailed through the federal register rules and regulations and the policy interpretations. numerous studies (greendorfer, 1987; lopiano, 1994; the women's sports foundation, 1992) provide evidence that there is gender specific value in sport, and, that sport provides a powerful medium through which participants (both female and male) learn and practice valuable life-skills, and healthy lifestyle habits. the history of sport shows that males have had, and continue to have, more and better sport opportunities than females, and as evidenced by the research cited, gender bias and discrimination in athletics persist, and compliance with title ix has yet to be achieved (cnn special reports, 1994; faludi, 1991; hill, 1993; lopiano, 1994; ncaa, 1994, u.s. gao, 1996). during its almost quarter of a century of life, title ix, as an educational gender equity intervention strategy, "...has been able to influence systems and affect behaviors somewhat. [however], [t]he question of changing people's attitudes and of meeting the spirit of the law has been a more difficult issue" (flansburg and hanson, 1993, p. 17). it has become increasingly apparent that gender equity in athletics, while in some instances centered on the particulars of title ix compliance, is about more than that. gender equity in athletics is about confronting fundamental cultural norms, beliefs and values held by a population who has been historically and traditionally responsible for perpetuating sexism, sex bias and discrimination through a variety of socio-cultural institutions, one of which is the co-curricular activity of school sport. editors' note: apa style is followed as closely as possible using html. indentions, spacing, and footnoting may vary. references acosta, r.v. & carpenter, l.j. (1994). women in intercollegiate sport: a longitudinal study nineteen year update, 1977-1996. brooklyn, new york: brooklyn college, department of physical education. blum, d.e. (1995, april 7). judge orders university to provide "equal opportunity" for women. the chronicle of higher education, 41(30), a37-a38. cantor, d.w. & bernay, t. (1992). women in power: the secrets of leadership. boston/new york: houghton mifflin company. cnn special reports, (1994, january 4). battle of the sexes. atlanta: turner broadcasting. cohen, a. (1995, july). striking back. athletic business, 26-30. cohen v. brown, 809 f. supp. 978 (d.r.i. 1992). cohen v. brown, 991 f. supp. 2nd series 888 (1st cir.) (1993). faludi, s. (1991). backlash: the undeclared war against american women. new york: crown publishers. flansburg, s. & hanson, k. (1993). legislation for change: a case study of title ix and the women's educational equity act program. newton, ma: education development center. grant, c.h.b. (1993, october 11). women opening a new frontier. ncaa news, 4. grant, c.h.b. (1996, june 3). title ix not just a proportionality issue. ncaa news, 4-5. greendorfer, s.l. (1987a, september). gender bias in theoretical perspectives: the case of female socialization into sport. psychology of women quarterly, 11(3), 327-340. greendorfer, s.l. (1987b, september). psycho-social correlates of organized physical activity. journal of physical education, recreation and dance, 58(7), 59-64. hill, k.l. (1993, november-december). women in sport: backlash or megatrend? the journal of physical education, recreation, and dance, 64(9), 49-52. lopiano, d.a. (1994). equity in women's sports: a health and fairness perspective. the athletic woman, 13(2), 281-296. national collegiate athletic association. (1994). achieving gender equity: a basic guide to title ix for colleges and universities. kansas city, mo: ncaa publications. pederson v. louisiana state university, cv94-247-a-mi (d.r.i. 1996). pemberton, c.l.a. (1996). an educational gender equity title ix workshop for intercollegiate athletic personnel. (doctoral dissertation, portland state university, 1996). dissertation abstracts international. sadker, m. & sadker, d. (1994). failing at fairness: how our schools cheat girls. new york: simon & schuster publishers. scribner, j.d., & englert, r.m. (1977). the politics of education, 76th yearbook of the national society for the study of education, part ii. chicago, il: university of chicago press. united states department of health, education, and welfare. (1980). rules and regulations. federal register, 45(92), 30-955-30,965. united states department of health, education, and welfare. (1979). policy interpretation. federal register, 44(239), 71,413-71423. united states department of health, education, and welfare. (1990). title ix athletics investigator's manual. washington d.c.: office for civil rights, department of education u.s. general accounting office (1996, october). intercollegiate athletics: status of efforts to promote gender equity. (hehs publication no. 97-10). washington d.c.: u.s. general accounting office. vargyas, e.j. (1994). breaking down barriers, a legal guide to title ix. washington d.c.: national women's law center. women's sports foundation (1992). women's sports facts. east meadow, new york: author. dr. cindy pemberton is associate professor, aquatics director, and head women's and men's swim coach at linfield college in mcminnville, oregon. e-mail: cpmember@linfield.edu awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 1, spring 1997 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map mailto:cpmember@linfield.edu file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/spring97/awl_spring97.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership perception is reality: perceptions of employment characteristics of women in administration i. sue shepard, ph.d. shepard, summer, 1998 it is important for women to be aware of differences in perceived employment characteristics as they seek positions in educational administration. an awareness of these perceptions will allow women the opportunity to present themselves in a manner which will counteract these perceptions. perception is reality to the person who is doing the perceiving. this perception may not be the truth but that is not of priary concern to the person making the decision. perception is what an individual understands or believes to be true. the question addressed in this research was what was the perception of superintendents and school board presidents of the employment characteristics of women who are seeking positions in educational administration. were there still perceptions held by superintendents and school board presidents that are influencing the hiring of women? were the perceived employment characteristics of women any different today than in the late 1970's after the years of affirmative action? superintendents and school boards have great influence in the hiring processes within school districts. in the last twenty years the number of women enrolling in graduate programs which prepare individuals to be educational administrators in public schools has continued to increase. however, the number of women who have been employed in positions in educational administration is still far fewer than the number of men (bushweller, 1997). in 1978, the american association of school administrators (aasa) conducted research which utilized a survey that contained items that identified employment characteristics. this research found that there was a difference in the perceived employment characteristics attributed to men and women by superintendents and school board presidents (aasa, 1981). the issue of differences in employment characteristics between men and women has been a point of discussion and research by other individuals as well. shakeshaft (1989) listed differences in words and phrases used in describing male and female employees in the evaluation process. these characteristics were similar to those in the survey instrument used in the aasa research. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html in 1955 parson and bales (as cited in bell & chase, 1995) indicated that expressive or interpersonal leadership characteristics were attributed to women and instrumental or task oriented leadership characteristics were attributed to men. in more recent writings there has been further discussion of the perceived differences in the characteristics of men and women in leadership positions (bell & chase, 1995; regan, 1990). the descriptors in these writings were very similar or the same as those included in the research by aasa in 1978. the research conducted in this study in 1996 to determine if there had been any changes in perceptions regarding the employment characteristics of men and women since 1978 was a replication of research conducted in 1978 by the american association of school administrators the survey which was used included four sections "under the general heading 'employment characteristics of women.' the related subtopics were (a) work attitudes and habits, (b) interest and motivation, (c) temperament, and (d) aptitude, knowledge and skills." (aasa, p.15) methodology the survey in 1996, as in 1978, was a national survey of superintendents and school board presidents. a stratified random sample was chosen to assure representation of various size school districts. table 1 shows the strata used and the percent of the sample chosen in each strata. in the 1996 research, superintendents and school board presidents were mailed the science research associates opinion survey for men and women (sra). this was the same instrument that was utilized in 1978. in 1978, 200 surveys were sent to superintendents and school board presidents and 115 were returned. surveys were returned by 92 superintendents and 23 school board presidents. this was a response rate of 29 %. in 1996, 256 superintendents and 256 school board presidents received the survey and 130 were returned. there were 86 surveys from the superintendents. there were 44 surveys returned by the school board presidents. the combined response rate for the two groups in 1996 was 24.5 %. results of survey the response categories for each of the items in the four sections were (a) men much more than women, (b) men slightly more than women, (c) no difference, (d) women slightly more than men, and (e) women much more than men. there was a total of 68 items. in all of the four areas , the neutral choice of "no difference" would indicate that this characteristic was perceived as the same for both men and women and either gender would be considered equally for employment. on all items the shift in choice was in the direction of the "no difference" response between 1978 and 1996 by at least one of the two groups, superintendents and school board presidents. however the change in the distribution was only significant on 48 of these items for superintendents and on 35 items for school board presidents. a chi-square (p < .01) was utilized to determine significant change. in tables 2, 3, 4, and 5 the items are grouped based on the significance of change for both groups or for each group individually. work attitudes and habits for the 16 items in this area there was a positive increase in the choice of "no difference" on all items for superintendents and on 15 items for school board presidents. the change was significant on eight items for both groups. in the first five items listed in (table 2), the selection of the "no difference" category rose to almost 70 % or more indicating less of a difference in the perception of the employment characteristics of men and women. these changes were significant at the .01 level. file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept1.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept2.html for the item "work effectively with subordinates," there was a significant change away from favoring men to seeing no difference between men and women. the change was almost 20 percentage points for both superintendents and school board presidents. superintendents in the current research saw women as more dependable employees than in 1978. for the three items "are reliable in a crisis," "are often absent from work" and "are likely to quit," there was a significant positive change in the selection of the "no difference" option. school board presidents have increased the choice of "no difference" by 20, 35, and 44 % respectively which were also significant changes. on the last two of these items, this made the opinion of school board presidents much more similar to superintendents in 1996 than in 1978. those who saw a difference attributed these characteristics more to women than men. on the item "are reliable in a crisis," those who saw a difference, attributed this more to men than to women. for the item "put family matters ahead of their job" there has been a shift in attitude of almost 20 % by school board presidents and more than 20 % by superintendents to the "no difference" choice. however, women were still seen as putting family matters before the job much more than men. for superintendents in a combined "women slightly more than men/women much more the men," this was 41 %. for school board presidents this total was 57 %. superintendents were also showing a more positive attitude toward women on the item "view work as a social situation" by indicating no difference based on gender 66 % of the time as opposed to only 35 % in 1978. there was no change in attitude by school board presidents. however, nearly 30 % of the superintendents along with 50 % of the school board presidents still felt that this was a characteristic of women. superintendents were also showing a more positive attitude with respect to the item "work effectively with co-workers" where superintendents chose "no difference" 78 % of the time which was a 24 % increase and a significant change. the increase in this choice by school board presidents was five % which was not significant. other alternative choices were almost evenly distributed between men and women for both superintendents and school board presidents for this item. interesting continued trends were seen in several other items in this category. for the item "take too much time off for personal reasons," 24 % of the superintendents and 25 % of the school board presidents perceive this is a characteristic of women. nearly 60 % of the school board presidents and 40 % of the superintendents indicate women "put family matters ahead of their jobs" more so than men. women were still seen as able to "accept the opposite sex as co-workers" and "care about the quality of their work" more than men. there has been significant change by superintendents in choosing "no difference" on the later item. however, at least 20 % of both superintendents and board presidents favored women on this trait. men were seen as resisting new methods more than women. women were seen to "waste time socializing" more than men. these have not changed significantly since 1978. also, nearly 20 % of superintendents and school board presidents saw women as keeping up with new developments on the job more than men. this was a significant change for board presidents. interest and motivation in the section of the survey on interest and motivation, there were several additional items along with the item "set long-range goals and work toward them" where nearly 80 % or more of both school board presidents and superintendents saw no difference between men and women (see table 3 ). two of these items were "desire interesting and challenging work" and "want to develop their special abilities at work." file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept3.html on both items the selection of the "no difference" category by superintendents in 1978 was high. there was an increase in the selection of this category in 1996 by superintendents, but the change was not significant. however, for school board presidents the increase in the selection of "no difference" was significant on both items from 1978 to 1996. in a third item, "want to participate in training opportunities," the indication of no difference between men and women reached 80 % in 1996. this was a significant change for both groups of respondents. although there was a significant level of change on 6 of the 14 items by both superintendents and school board presidents in the choice of the "no difference" category, there were still a number of items where nearly 30 % or more of the individuals in both positions saw a difference between men and women. men are seen as (a) wanting to get ahead, (b) liking math, science, and high finance, and (c) preferring to work for men. women were perceived as (a) more home oriented rather than job oriented and (b) liking to help others. men were also perceived as (a) liking to work alone on a project, (b) wanting increased responsibility, and (c) needing novelty and adventure more than women. women were seen as (a) having a stronger desire for security than men, (b) wanting to participate in training opportunities, and (c) enjoying doing routine tasks. the item of greatest change for superintendents dealt with job orientation, "are home-oriented rather than job-oriented," where there was an increase in the "no difference" category of 31 %. however, in 1996 this item was still attributed more to women than men. for school board presidents the greatest change was 44 percent on the item "like math, science, and high finance." this attribute was still seen as more characteristic of men than women as has been mentioned. temperament in the topic area of temperament there were 18 items. as seen in table 4, both superintendents and school board presidents have significantly improved their perception of women in the area of sensitive to criticism and being independent and self-sufficient. in the items which addressed jealousy and emotionality, superintendents saw women in a significantly more positive light than did school board presidents who have not significantly changed perception. in fact, of all of the 18 items, only in the items "give up easily" and "are slightly timid rather than forward" did school board presidents chose the "no difference" category to a greater degree than superintendents. in all of the other 16 items, superintendents were more supportive of women than school board presidents as evidenced by choosing the "no difference" category more frequently. even though there was an increase in the choosing of the "no difference" category, when the entire distribution of choices was studied for each item it was noted that there was a distinct attribution tendency of certain temperament descriptors to men and others to women. this tendency has remained constant from 1978 to 1996. those descriptors attributed to women were (a) sensitive to criticism, (b) jealousy, (c) too emotional about their jobs, (d) cry easily, (e) slightly timid rather than forward, (f) strongly desire security and approval, (g) warm and friendly toward others, and (h) sensitive to others feelings. those descriptors attributed to men were (a) stand up under fire, (b) hide their true feelings, (c) competitive, (d) self-confident, (e) lose their tempers easily, (f) aggressive, (g) keep cool in emergencies and (h) narrowminded. aptitude, knowledge, and skills of interest in the set of characteristics which address aptitude, knowledge, and skills was the fact that file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept4.html there were eight items where the increase in the choice of "no difference" by school board presidents was from 10 to 25 % greater than superintendents (see table 5). even though in all eight of the items the change was greater for school board presidents than superintendents, this change simply brought school board presidents to a similar percentage as that of superintendents. this would indicate that the attitude of school board presidents has gradually reached the same degree of acceptance as superintendents. in all but one of these eight items the "no difference" category was chosen almost 75 % of the time or more. for the two items "make effective decisions" and "are capable administrators," it was interesting to note the choice of the "no difference" option was above 90 %. the change in the option of "no difference" as a choice on the first item was an increase of between 13 % for superintendents and 22 % for school board presidents since 1978. the greatest change in this category, 34 %, was of the school board presidents' perception of there being no difference between men and women as capable administrators. the change on this same item was 16 % for superintendents. for the item "have leadership potential," 96 % of the superintendents and 84 % of the school board presidents choose the no difference category in 1996. this was an increase of 14 % for superintendents and increase of 18 % for school board presidents which was a significant change for both groups since 1978. when the entire distribution is studied for all 20 items in this topic area, it was again evident that several of the aptitudes, knowledge and skills listed were attributed to women more than to men. these items were those that address (a) verbal ability, (b) accuracy and precision, (c) good at detail work, (d) ability to get people to work together, (e) clerical aptitude, (f) social skills and tact, and (g) creative and inventive. men more than women were seen as possessing the (a) ability to negotiate contracts effectively, (b) having mechanical aptitude, (c) understanding financial matters, (d) having mathematical ability, (e) holding their own in an argument, and (f) solving logical problems easily. for the aptitude or skill "size up situations accurately," 87 % of the superintendents and 75 % of the school board presidents chose the no difference category. for those not choosing the no difference category, superintendents favored men and school board presidents favored women. summary of findings the 68 statements in four sections of the sra survey were designed to assess the perceived employment characteristics of women. these four sections were titled (a) work attitudes and habits, (b) interest and motivation, (c) temperament, and (d) aptitudes, knowledge, and skills. a choice of "no difference" indicated both men and women were perceived as possessing the characteristic stated in the item equally. on all items the shift in attitude was in the direction of no difference between women and men by at least one of the two groups surveyed. however the change was only significant on 33 of these items for superintendents and on 32 items for school board presidents. a chi-square (p < .01) was utilized to determine significant change in the choice distributions from 1978 to 1996. a summary of the 68 items that were still seen as more characteristic of men or women is presented in table 6. the perceptions that were found in 1978 still hold in 1996 although these perceptions do not hold to the same degree. there are several conclusions and implications which result from these findings. conclusions and implications the results of this research indicated that the differences in perceived employment characteristics of men file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept5.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept6.html and women have changed since 1978. the change has been a positive change toward women. however, the change although significant in many areas, has not been significant in all areas as noted in the detailed discussion. worthy of further discussion are those characteristics where almost 20 % or more of the superintendents and school board presidents perceived the characteristics to be attributed more to women. some of these characteristics can be seen as a positive attribute while others have negative connotations and are ones that need to be of concern. these characteristics are shown in table 7. of the 68 items on the survey, 23 items or 34 % are listed in table 7. this is an indication that perceived differences between the employment characteristics still exist and can not be ignored. overall, these differences are more strongly held by school board presidents than by superintendents as seen in the percentages shown in table 7. on 28 of the 23 items the percent indicating an attribute is more characteristic of women is greater for school board presidents than for superintendents. when classifying these items as positive or negative, 12 were indicated as having a negative connotation. only three of the perceptions defined as negative are more strongly held by superintendents than by school board presidents. these were strongly desire security, are slightly timid rather than forward, and are accurate and precise. of those characteristics under the area of work attitudes and habits, the first four of those seen as negative by the author are believed to be closely associated with the responsibilities women have for home and family. the same is believed to be true of the two items seen as negative under interest and motivation. of the items under temperament, five of the six were thought to be negative. women were still perceived as being very emotional and as displaying this emotion in the workplace. a more positive perception was seen in the group of items under aptitudes, knowledge, and skills. when these items are combined with other items defined as positive in the other categories, this provides a case for employing women. these characteristics are all necessary for quality work and many are in the area of interpersonal relations. more people lose jobs because they are unable to work with others than for not having the job skills. three items were seen as being both positive and negative. these were seen as positive characteristics because they are necessary for quality work. however these items were also categorized as negative because these attributes were seen by the author to be the reason many women are encouraged toward or kept in middle management or staff positions. summary as has been noted the change in perception has been a positive change toward women. overall, the change has been greater for superintendents than for school board presidents in the four different areas of characteristics surveyed. it is felt that superintendents are much closer to more employment situations than are school board presidents and would be more accurate in their judgment of these issues than school board presidents. it is important for women to be aware of differences in perceived employment characteristics as they seek positions in educational administration. an awareness of these perceptions will allow women the opportunity to present themselves in a manner which will counteract these perceptions. superintendents will be key participants in these efforts as the survey results indicate because of their more positive perception of women. superintendents need to be encouraged to support women and to file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept7.html educate school board members as to the capabilities of women as educational administrators. superintendents through their words and actions can assist in changing perceptions of school board members. references american association of school administrators. (1981). survey: attitudes toward women as school district administrators. arlington, va: educational research service. bell, c. s. & chase, s. e. (1995, april). gender in the theory and practice of educational leadership. journal for a just and caring education, 1(2), 200-223. bushweller, k (ed.). (1996, december). education vital signs. the american school board journal, 182 (12), a 20. regan, h. b. (1990, summer). not for women only: school administration as a feminist activity. teachers college record, 91(4), 565-577. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. newbury park, ca: corwin. shepard, i. s. (1997). women as school district administrators: past and present attitudes of superintendents and school board presidents. 5th annual ncpea yearbook. lancaster, pa: technomic. dr. i. sue shepard is an associate professor of educational administration and counseling at southeast missouri state university, cape girardeau, mo . awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 3, summer 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map mailto:isshepard@semovm.semo.edu file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/awl_summer98.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership violence(s) and silence(s) in engineering classrooms karen l. tonso tonso, spring, 1997 by finding that young women deny these violences, we move toward better understandings of the extent to which women's mistreatment becomes normalized in our society. while investigating how engineering students acquire and share knowledge as they work in teams on real-world engineering projects, undercurrents of violence became evident. for instance, one engineering professor repeatedly used violent metaphors to describe engineering work. when discussing how students should brainstorm ideas about their project and select the most salient issues, he advised the students to "make five or six blind stabs with a bayonet" into the pool of ideas. in addition, some of the men students used confrontational techniques in the guise of communicating. yet women students rarely made remarks about their professors' or peers' actions. in two semesters of classroom research, i heard only one such remark spoken in the presence of other students a young woman noted that "she hated to wear a dress to class, because everyone hassled her when she wore a dress." i was puzzled about the inconsistency between my observations of the classroom and the silences of the students. however, when i later saw myself in a similar silenced role as a student in an engineering doctoral seminar, i moved from perplexed to particularly frustrated at warp speed. in this paper, i begin to explore some of the ways that violences structure women and women's lives. (this is a work in progress and i anticipate that these ideas will continue to grow as i complete my dissertation research in the next two years.) using primarily ethnographic methods of participant observations and interviews, i gathered data on this campus in two classrooms: a sophomore class in the spring of 1993 and a freshman class in the spring of 1995. currently, there is little in the "women in engineering" research literature about developing engineering identities and the friction between women's vision of themselves as engineers and visions of "woman engineer" held by men engineers. i suspect that some of the violences present in engineering and engineering education serve to constrain the identities available to women engineers and to maintain an engineering culture centered around prototypically http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html masculine "features." using one experience i had as a doctoral student in education, i suggest that engineering is by no means unique (though it may well be an extreme example) and that violences deserve more research to adequately account for their impact in our society. conceptual framework my current research grows out of a desire to develop more comprehensive pictures of women's embeddedness in social and cultural systems. i remain disappointed with much of the research into gender issues (e. g., aauw, 1992; belenky, clinchy, goldberger, & tarule, 1986; benbow, 1988; benbow & stanley, 1980; chodorow, 1978; fennema, 1990; fennema & carpenter, 1981; fennema & peterson, 1987; fennema & sherman, 1978; lynn friedman, 1989; gilligan, 1982; hall & sandler, 1982, 1984; maccoby & jacklin, 1974; sadker & sadker, 1994; sandler & hall, 1986; sandler, 1993; tannen, 1990), because this earlier research overlooked contributions that larger societal structures impose on women. in fact, much of this research provided "cures" centered on changes women must make, without systematic critiques of social institutions. i feared that these "cures" placed an unfair burden on women and created the potential for blaming women for the situation if women were unable to change it. it seemed to me that these solutions overlooked the complexities of women's situatedness and gave them little credit for navigating difficult social systems. for me, anthropological and sociological research perspectives appeared to offer ways of researching women's embeddedness (e. g., holland & eisenhart, 1990; hewitt & seymour, 1994). in particular, lave and wenger's (1991) situated learning theory provided a starting point for my research. in this theory, being a member of a community developing an identity within a community implies a shared sense of cultural knowledge that gives meaning to who participants are and what they do within the community. rather than knowledge being held in the minds of individuals and separable from social interactions, anthropologists posit that knowledge is held in the culture and spread over and among the persons, artifacts, and structure. knowledge is neither separable from context, nor independent of it, but a way of being in the world, where "agent, activity, and world mutually constitute each other" (lave & wenger, 1991, p. 33). learning, then, is the process of becoming a full participant in sociocultural practices. knowledge comes from participating over time in the everyday, practical activities of the community. thus, knowledge resides in historically developed systems of meaning. in engineering, these systems of meaning encompass technical language, tools of the engineering trade, interactional routines, and accepted practices for doing engineering work. as student engineers become engineers, they become proficient practitioners in these systems of meaning; they enact these systems of meaning. situated learning theory provides a lens to investigate the ways that individuals shape, and are shaped by context (not only the here-and-now of social interactions, but also students' embeddedness in a system with historical, social, and cultural underpinnings). however, situated learning theory alone does not meet all of my research goals. in particular: situated learning theory fails to account for prior identities (prior knowledge) among novices how memberships in other communities, or identities from previous experiences, influence becoming a mature practitioner in a new community. situated learning theory assumes that one identifiable outcome identity, or kind of mature practitioner, exists and that this identity (and associated traditional practices) is acceptable, tending to promote the status quo. situated learning theory contains no mechanism for critiquing communities of practice. prior identity lave and wenger's theory developed from their studies of traditional apprenticeships, where participants came from similar backgrounds (or their backgrounds were ignored as if they were irrelevant). this is not the case for student engineers. in fact, because increasing numbers of today's students come from communities historically underrepresented among engineers, diversity of student engineers is increasing. situated learning theory fails to account for wide-ranging differences among novice engineers. by thinking about prior knowledge as identities that students bring to their college studies, i am developing a way to incorporate differences that result from a wide variety of sources: gender socialization and ethnicity, as well as variations in cultural capital, lived experiences, and academic preparation. i focus on the ways these differences tend to privilege certain groups of student engineers and disadvantage others, particularly when campus-wide policies and classroom organizational practices do little either to identify differences in students or to provide opportunities that serve all students. outcome identity according to lave and wenger's theory, apprentices strive toward an outcome identity, such as becoming a tailor. following kondo, i suspect that "engineer" cannot be reduced to one identifiable set of mature practices. "...[i]dentity is not a static object, but a creative process....[h]uman beings create, construct, work on, and enact their identities, sometimes creatively challenging the limits of the cultural constraints which constitute both what we call selves and the ways those selves can be crafted....[w]e should not speak of 'the self' as a global entity, but of selves in the plural. perhaps then we can come to appreciate both the insistent rhythms of common cultural idioms, and the many ways they reverberate through people's lives" (kondo, 1990, p. 48, emphasis in the original). kondo posits that identities are plural, not only that there are varieties of engineering identities, but also that an individual can exhibit contextual variety. communities of practice finally, situated learning theory contains no mechanism for critiquing communities of practice. friedman (1991) cautions us to examine critically, not merely accept, these traditions and their impact on women. she points out that "communities have harbored social roles and structures which have been highly oppressive for women" (p. 305) and have operated with "a kind of morally normative legitimacy" (p. 307). kondo (1990), discussing how japanese employees developed "worker" identities, described the ways employees redefined certain aspects of "ideal" worker identities. her suggestion that cultural identities are actively shaped by participants provides a model for considering how women student engineers might reshape engineering identities. in addition, i seek a standard against which to "measure" (characterize and hold up to scrutiny) communities of practice. i believe that gutmann's (1987, citing dworkin) equality provides that standard. she argues that all students must be treated as equals; that is, relevant differences must be understood and considered. this is very different from an equality standard where all students are treated the same, regardless of relevant differences. gutmann reiterates dworkin's example illustrating how sameness of treatment differs from treatment as equals. in a classroom with blind and sighted students, using the same lessons to teach both kinds of students would guarantee that one or the other would be ill-served, depending on the pedagogy employed. that one can see and another cannot profoundly influences how one teaches. i argue that these kinds of differences must be allowed for legitimate participation. howe (1993) calls this sort of equality "participatory," suggesting that in a democratic society participation is the more important standard when making judgments about equality. when linked to lave and wenger's situated learning theory, legitimate participation is the process that guarantees equality. (though lave and wenger seem to imply this, they do not appear to guarantee it. here, i strengthen their notions of participation in a community of practice, privileging participation and cultural change over traditions that promote the status quo.) in this participatory equality, different persons with different perspectives, different goals, and different motivations not only have access to education, but also contribute via their participation to develop what a good education might be. that is, participatory equality requires that all persons can openly advocate their own positions without the fear of retaliation. taking this democratic stance that values participation, i argue that violence is done when participation is constrained. in looking at the narrow issue of violence in my research site and my life, i seek a fuller sense of what counts as violence and wonder: what is violence? how is it construed in the experiences of my research participants and in my own academic life? how does it become normalized in our society? how might we contribute to expanding what counts as violence? how might we expose violence while we enact our research goals? violences and silences i start with the dictionary meanings of violence (webster's new twentieth century dictionary, 1979): 1) physical force used so as to injure or damage; roughness in action. 2) a use of force so as to injure or damage; a rough, injurious act. 3) natural or physical energy or force in action; intensity; severity; as the violence of the storm. 4) unjust use of force or power, as in deprivation of rights. 5) great force or strength of feeling, conduct, or language; passion; fury. 6) distortion of meaning, phrasing, etc.; as to do violence to a text. 7) desecration; profanation. synonyms: vehemence, impetuosity, force, outrage, rage, profanation, injustice, fury, infringement, fierceness, oppression. unfortunately, violence comes in several forms for women. at the recent fourth world conference on women assembled in beijing, considerable discourse revolved around issues of physical violence against women. hillary rodham clinton spoke against the systemic violence that pervades the women of the world rape as a tactic of war, killing of girl babies, burning of women whose dowries are too small, capture into prostitution and slavery, domestic violence, genital mutilation, coercive abortion and sterilization. rodham clinton went on to note that "violence against women thrives when there is a 'crisis of silence and acquiescence'" (tyler, 1995). even in the united states a democratic, industrial nation, violences against women persist, though (we hope) not at the same horrific levels reported in third world countries. yet, even in the united states a country that pioneered free speech and open dialogue, women's silence and acquiescence endure. of particular interest to me as a former engineer currently studying gender issues in engineering education, is the extent to which silence and acquiescence become normalized in our everyday lives. in fact, the ways in which silence and acquiescence become a survival technique. another variety of violence recently surfaced in discussions of shannon faulkner's experiences at the citadel. this violence is more along the lines of definition seven above violence as desecration and profanation of women's everyday activities, and in synonyms for violence infringement and oppression. when faulkner decided to leave in august, 1995, after only a few days on campus, royko (1995), the chicago editorial newspaper writer, wrote a touching and insightful commentary. in his column, he told of similar horrors and degradation faced years before by a (now) gray-haired, chicago man, previously a working class lad attending a military high school with the sons of privilege. royko provided a litany of hazing, taunting, and insults that preceded the man's becoming shunned by his classmates for speaking about and resisting his mistreatment. this man ultimately left the military school. in closing, royko offered to shannon faulkner this gray-haired man's consoling thoughts: "if she had endured the abuse of her freshman year, something even worse would have happened to her. she would have become one of them." (emphasis added) royko illuminates an unspoken violence the violence of having to deny one's existence and values to become "one of them." when i entered engineering over 25 years ago, becoming an engineer seemed to imply that i could go out into the world and assume male duties. that presumption comes from an earlier day and age. times have changed and we must now understand that being forced to adopt, in an unexamined way, these culturally and historically taken-for-granted ways of construing professional identity is a violence against women that not only denies our existence, but also denigrates the importance and honor of women's work. to expect that women "check their identities at the door" constrains our participation makes us silent and invisible. first, i will tell you the stories of young women student engineers and relate how their men colleagues talked about women students to me. what i hope to make most striking is that the women students rarely spoke of their campus lives in terms that express their mistreatment, while their men student colleagues reveal the disadvantages of being women on the campus. then, i will talk about the extent to which i caught myself in an identical silent-and-acquiescing mode during one of my doctoral classes in education. from these sets of experiences, i will suggest that we, as researchers, embed ourselves in our women participants' experiences and use what we see to fill the silences that cultural norms perpetuate. franci and the issue of professional dress as part of a larger research project, i observed two teams of college engineering sophomores 3 women and 2 men, 1 woman and 4 men. though i met with these teams over 25 times during the semester and interviewed all students two of them on two occasions, the students never explicitly referred to any "gender bias" or violence during their college experiences. however, i observed both in every class. students' lack of awareness was astounding. franci (a woman student on the team with 3 women and 2 men) commented in her team meeting about being hassled when she wore "professional" dress to another class. because of the almost total silence related to gender bias and violence, her comments really stood out. this is what happened: as the student teams prepared for their first client meeting (week two), they were told to wear "professional dress," but the professors' advice referred only to men's dress clothing slacks, jacket, and tie. further advice about keeping one's jacket on if the client kept his on was given. however, this directive was entirely too vague for the students, and considerable team time was spent negotiating the women's professional dress for all occasions and the men's professional dress for "working" site visits. when one of the male students suggested that they "look nice, but not a suit and tie," one of the female students added "or a jacket and skirt." ... although the professors implied that all client meetings and site visits required the same professional dress, the students decided to modify their attire to fit different situations. for all indoor presentations and on-site tours (requiring only walking through town and talking to their client or to business owners), the students decided to wear their "best" clothing. for the men, this meant a suit, tie, and dress shoes and, for the women, either a skirt and jacket or dress, nylons, and low-to-medium heels. however, for on-site "work trips," especially the building-by-building survey, the students decided on more casual clothing, such as jeans and t-shirts. for these occasions, the students decided that a suit and tie or skirt and heels were inappropriate when an engineer was measuring the dimensions of doorways and toilet stalls, among other things.... there was another facet to the dress-code discussions beyond the simple "what to wear" issues. during the team's discussions about the attire for their first field visit, franci wanted the team to leave for the town at 10:15, instead of immediately after her 9:00-9:50 class. by leaving later, franci would be able to go to class, then return to her dormitory and change into a dress, instead of wearing a dress to class. she remarked that "everybody hassles you" when you wear a dress to class. she was adamant about this, saying, "i hate for them to notice that i am wearing a dress." doug disagreed with her. he thought that "it's not a big deal. everybody knows you're in [this class] or have an interview." for these two students, professional dress seemed to serve different purposes. for doug, being in a suit and tie signaled that he was part of a collective--students in a required class or students looking for work, but for franci, wearing a dress only emphasized that she was an outsider and set up her being hassled by men students in her other class. when i told this story to my writing group, most of my peers found it interesting, but not earth-shattering. only when one of our education professors remarked forcefully (especially for this professor), "you can't even wear a dress for crying out loud!," did it become clear to us just how circumscribed women's presence on this engineering campus had become. in fact, students took it for granted that this was just part of being an engineering student and not worthy of notice or comment. that franci in a dress was out of the ordinary provides evidence of the extent to which these young women are expected to be, in some very real ways, invisible. this is oppressive1. becoming "engineer" a glimpse at gender while gathering data for a classroom ethnography of first-year engineering students, i observed three teams closely (3 women and 2 men, 2 women and 1 man, and 2 women and 2 men a total of 7 women and 5 men). in one-on-one interviews, i asked what it was like to be the interviewee's gender and then asked if it would be different if they were the other gender. women students rarely mentioned and often denied gender bias. yet, young men spoke openly about men's fit with engineering, even as they denied gender bias. for me, the young men's ability to enact gender bias, yet deny its existence, speaks volumes about how gender bias becomes normalized. according to men, being a man on this campus meant: given the fact that i am a man, i think i would much rather be a man going to a campus like this. that's what i've been prepared for. i've been prepared to be a male in society (w-m1, 1:212) for me, it's about as conducive a situation as you'd hope for. this is still a somewhat oldfashioned [place]. by that i mean retaining the white males' approach, you know; you're welcomed with open arms....as far as i'm concerned it's a real natural environment for me. (f-m1, 1:10) well, a lot of it is just being one of the other guys. because there's so many guys on this campus....i don't know what it was, but i mean i don't really know any differences between guys....it's not really any different it's about like high school anyway. (m-m1, 1:11) there's still a lot of macho things, the macho ideas about engineering. not that it's a macho thing to do, but just that males have always done it. (f-m2, 1:16) but being a woman meant: i have yet to meet a woman that has that same approach, that "hand me the wrench and i'll take care of this" [approach]....i think it might be a little bit harder for some of the women to be taken seriously by their classmates. (w-m1, 1:14, 21) i have a feeling that a nontraditional woman student [a student who returned to college some years after graduating from high school] would not be received with the same amount of, they would not be viewed as having the same commitment....i would think it would be very, very hard for a woman, especially one that did not already have a degree in a science, to enter into an engineering program....[women students] are learning a new language that has been developed by males, [a language] that almost is a second language to women. they think about things differently and when i think about that i think that those women ... are actually smarter than a good deal of the men, because they're not only thinking of things in their own language, but they're learning them in a male language, because mathematics and everything from way back has been developed by a male. (f-m1, 1:10) there's definitely more attention paid to you by the guys. if you're a woman on this campus, you'd definitely get more attention than most places.....guys are like "there goes one of them." it's different because there's so many guys and it's not like rare or anything to see a woman walking down the street, [but] you notice the women. it's just like [and he gawks wide-eyed]....but as far as school goes, i don't know if there's really any difference. i don't see any difference. i don't see like professors treat them differently or ta's treat them differently or anything. pretty much, i see everyone is treated the same. (m-m1, 1:12) when you go to a school where most of the people are guys, all the girls automatically get like bumped up into a higher social class...and [with so many guys] wanting to date them, it makes a lot of girls stuck up.... [if you were a woman,] you'd always get hit on, you'd always have a date on friday night if you wanted it. i mean it would be basically [the] opposite of what i'm feeling3. (f-m2, 1:9,18) for these men, participating on this campus was consistent with male-socialization patterns and women could be expected to have problems becoming engineers and fitting in. these men students viewed women's difficulties as springing not only from an implicit assumption that women must "learn new languages developed by men" and accommodate to (or assimilate into) the prototypically masculine mold, but also from social pressures placed on women because of their scarcity. though some of the women students commented on how the imbalance between the numbers of women and men contributed to men having fewer dates and women having more, none spoke of it in terms of shifting up in social class. most women students spoke about how they were treated the same as their men counterparts by professors and most did not comment on the peer social relations, outside of dating. only one woman student offered a different perspective on women students' relationships with faculty: i think it's a lot like prejudice, i'm not kidding, i mean, guys don't notice it. there is a lot of sexism on this campus and it's from the professors more than anybody else, it really is. i don't think it's the fact that the professors think you're a woman you know. all i think is that they look at you and they say this is a woman and i don't know if it's that they feel their career is threatened or that they feel that you just don't belong in this field or that they want to make sure that you want to be here, so they make it extra hard on you. i don't know what it is. there's a lot of sexism....i'm looking at [it] as this is a challenge. this is not something that i'm going to sit here and go, i mean it upsets me that there's a lot of sexism, but i'm also looking at it as the reason that they're probably sexist toward me is the fact that i'm a woman. well of course it is....and [they] can just deal with that, because i'm a woman, i'm going to be an engineer. i'm going to come out of [this school] and, you know, it's another one of those prove-you're-wrong, show-you-up type things. (w-m2, 1:16) she never provided specific examples of sexism. she was willing to talk with me about these issues in private, but never mentioned them when i observed in her class and during her team's meetings. not one woman student noted that engineering encouraged prototypically masculine endeavors. i argue that the underlying assumptions about engineering being a prototypically masculine activity result in women facing a choice between being an engineer and adopting engineering's prototypically masculine ways, or not becoming an engineer. that is, women carry the burden of fitting in and must, in real ways, deny who women are and what women have done in order to fit in. this does violence to women. what concerned me in the experiences of the women student engineers was their silences about these traditions that set up and maintain a "stacked deck." when i was an engineering student over 25 years ago, i probably shared this adoration for engineering. but i honestly thought i had developed a voice and no longer participated in the silence(s) and acquiescence. as with most pious statements of this sort, it simply did not play out that way in situ. i sit mute and acquiesce in a doctoral seminar during my doctoral coursework in education, i took a doctoral seminar devoted to reducing bias in educational settings4. in addition to eight or ten doctoral students, almost as many master's degree students registered for the course. the readings challenged even the most proficient doctoral students and seemed, at times, to overwhelm the master's students. part of the appeal of the course came from the professor's desire that each student focus on those kinds of bias of most interest to the student. during the semester, we were expected to write two papers: the first the beginnings of a literature review in our own area of specialty, the second a more thorough examination of the class readings and an integration of these readings with our particular work. success in the course depended on not only a clear understanding of this semester's readings, but a well-formulated understanding of an area of specialty to which to apply the readings. most doctoral students already possessed substantial knowledge in our areas of specialty, derived largely from our own master's courses and ongoing doctoral studies. but for some master's degree students, this was clearly a push. on at least four occasions during the semester, we began class by going around the table and talking about our progress in the specialty areas. not too surprisingly, i focused on gender issues in math and science education. on each occasion when it became my turn to summarize my progress, one of my men doctoral student colleagues remarked "oh, let me guess, karen. you're going to do gender." to which i answered, "yes, and i guess you'll be doing [his specialty]." though i quietly seethed, i wrote his remarks off as so much ribbing among doctoral students. i felt that he adequately displayed his own immaturity and petty jealousies, which were beneath comment. i only knew him from a course we took together the previous semester along with almost 30 other students, hardly an opportunity to become acquainted. during the tenth or eleventh week of the class, we repeated our exchange for the fourth time. as the class continued that day, the professor was, as usual, late with our break. when we finally took a break, i was out the door like a shot and down the hall to the restroom. four or five of the women master's students entered the restroom after i closed my stall door: student 1: i can't believe you're going to do gender after the way [the man doctoral student's name] treated karen. student 2: yeah, i thought about doing a paper on gender, then decided not to. i'm going to write about [another topic], something the prof doesn't know much about. student 3: well, i probably shouldn't be doing gender, but it's what i'm interested in, so i don't have much choice. student 4: it's still not too late to do it on something else. just take an incomplete and finish it up next semester. we could both do [my area]. student 3: well, i'll probably not do a paper anyway and just take a w [withdraw without a grade]. that means i'll have to take three more hours next semester to get my degree. i came out of the stall and commented that her solution seemed unfair. i encouraged her to think about it more before she decided, offering to set aside time on a regular basis to chat about her progress or to support her in any way that seemed meaningful to her. she ultimately took a "w" for the course. this meant that the seminar would eventually disappear from her transcript, but that she must pay for another three-hour course in the next semester. deep in my heart i believed that my silence had contributed to her dilemma. i had my reasons for not confronting this man: his status as the confidante of two senior professors, my existing reputation as someone who was "too extreme," and my desire not to add to his considerable self-importance by acknowledging him further. but these are lame excuses. i did not confront him, the professor gave no comment, and these women master's students determined that studying gender issues was somehow unsafe based on the way i was treated by the other doctoral student. in private, i asked other doctoral students what they thought his comments meant. to a student, his comments were "just kidding around." i went to the professor and told this tale. s/he expressed only mild interest; it was "just kidding around." nonetheless, the comments worked to reduce the number of qualified people studying gender issues, limited academic discourse, and made outcast those who studied gender, constraining participation in clear ways. in this classroom context, that doctoral student's hassling of me for studying gender represented the norm violence against "my kind" was an accepted practice. i argue that these kinds of everyday infringement and oppression are the very air we breathe and must be documented and resisted by those of us for whom resistance is a safe endeavor. summary in ways that only became clear after catching myself deciding not to speak, i was unfair to my women student engineers when i blithely expected them to notice their own mistreatment and speak out against it. there i was in a classroom composed of almost equal numbers of women and men graduate students something women student engineers will never experience and a professor who is an outspoken advocate for reducing bias another benefit women student engineers will probably never have and i weighed the alternatives and decided not to confront the man graduate student. my expectations of the young women student engineers failed to take into account their embeddedness in a system and the consequences of resistance within that system. there seems to be an endless recursive loop embedded in societal venues violence happens, speak against it, become a target for more violence. for me this is distressing and the crux of my dilemma about how to reduce violences. what can we do when we see and document these oppressions? how can we do our research to see these oppressions better? how can we create a forum to discuss these issues? how can we guarantee that our actions do not further endanger our research participants? though i am aware of overt acts of physical violence against women, there are other subtle and pernicious violences that women contend with daily. by making explicit how these undocumented violences work to limit women's opportunities and constrain both who women can become and who can be valued in our society, we contribute to naming violences and taking a stand against all varieties. my research data indicate that young women are often silent about the particular, subtle violences that play out in their lives. though we must continue to incorporate these young women's perceptions of the world in our findings, we must also give our own observations of these women status in our work. by finding that young women deny these violences, we move toward better understandings of the extent to which women's mistreatment becomes normalized in our society. that violences exist is an interesting finding, but it seems to me that of more concern is documenting how wellmeaning folks manage to create precisely the circumstances that they claim to abhor. i am routinely astonished at the contradictory statements my research participants make. the normalization of violences in our society is not the blindness of selected individuals, nor the workings of some demonic sect, but evidence of the ways that social and cultural systems structure women and women's lives. 1 in this second-year class, the an engineering professor created, with the assistance of his men students, a particularly chilly climate for women. because my earlier paper presentationsfocused on that classroom climate, i refer readers to those papers for additional detail. 2 these descriptors refer to participants and their team affiliation w-m1 is the wednesday team's male student #1. the other numbers refer to first interview page 21. 3 this young man had spoken at length about having no dates during his first year at college. since he dated during high school and desired to date in college, this was a problem for him. 4 i am vague to protect the identities of the professor and other graduate students. this professor is noted for his/her contributions to reducing bias. these students are typical of our doctoral program and represent a wide variety of perspectives. in fact, most of these students give high priority in their academic work to issues of reducing biases in educational settings. editors' note: apa style is followed as closely as possible under the html format. indentions, spacing, andfootnoting may vary. references american association of university women (1992). how schools shortchange girls. washington, dc: author. belenky, m. f., clinchy, b. v., goldberger, n. r., & tarule, j. m. (1986). women's ways of knowing: the development of self, voice, and mind. new york: basic books. benbow, c. p. (1988). sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability in intellectually talented preadolescents: their nature, effects, and possible causes. behavioral and brain sciences, 11 (2), 169232. benbow, c. p., & stanley, j. c. (1980). sex differences in mathematical ability: fact or artifact? science, 210, 1262-1264. chodorow, n. (1978). the reproduction of mothering. berkeley: university of california press. fennema, e. (1990). justice, equality, and mathematics education. in e. fennema & g. c. leder (eds.) mathematics and gender. new york: teachers college press. fennema, e., & carpenter, t. (1981). the second national assessment and sex-related differences in mathematics. mathematics teacher, 74, 554-559. fennema, e., & peterson, p. l. (1987). effective teaching for girls and boys: the same or different? in d. c. berliner & b. v. rosenshine (eds.), talks to teachers (pp. 111-125). new york: random house. fennema, e., & sherman, j. a. (1978). sex-related differences in mathematics achievement, spatial visualization, and related factors: a further study. journal for research in mathematics education, 9, 189201. friedman, l. (1989). mathematics and the gender gap: a meta-analysis of recent studies on sex differences in mathematical tasks. review of educational research, 59(2), 185-213. friedman, m. (1991). feminism and modern friendship: dislocating the community. in j. arthur & w. h. shaw (eds.) justice and economic distribution (pp. 304-319). englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice: psychological theory and women's development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. gutmann, a. (1987). democratic education. princeton, nj: princeton university press. hall, r. m., with assistance from b. r. sandler (1982). the classroom climate: a chilly one for women? washington, dc: association of american colleges, project on the status and education of women. hall, r. m., & sandler, b. r. (1984). outside the classroom: a chilly campus climate for women? washington, dc: association of american colleges, project on the status and education of women. holland, d. c., & eisenhart, m. a. (1990). educated in romance: women, achievement, and college culture. chicago, il: the university of chicago press. howe, k. r. (1993). equality of educational opportunity and the criterion of equal educational worth. studies in philosophy and education 11, 329-337. kondo, d. (1990). crafting selves: power, gender, and discourses of identity in a japanese workplace. chicago, il: university of chicago press. lave, j. & wenger, e. (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. new york: cambridge university press. maccoby, e., & jacklin, c. (1974). the psychology of sex differences. stanford, ca: stanford university press. royko, m. (1995). shannon faulkner got out of the citadel just in the nick of time. denver post, 8-2595, pp. 9b. sadker, m., and sadker, d. (1994). failing at fairness: how america's schools cheat girls. new york: charles scribner's sons. sandler, b. r., with assistance from r. m. hall (1986). the campus climate revisited: chilly for women faculty, administrators, and graduate students. washington, dc: association of american colleges, project on the status and education of women. sandler, b. r. (1993). women faculty at work in the classroom, or, why it still hurts to be a woman in labor. washington, dc: association of american colleges, project on the status and education of women. seymour, e. & hewitt, n. m. (1994). talking about leaving: factors contributing to high attrition rates. final report to the alfred p. sloan foundation. boulder, co: author. tannen, d. (1990). you just don't understand: women and men in conversation. new york: ballantine books. tonso, k. l. (1995). women engineering students building identities while working on real-world projects. paper presented at the 1995 annual meeting of the american educational research association, san francisco, ca. tonso, k. l. (1995). discourse in an engineering classroom: whose talk counts? proceedings of the annual conference of the american society for engineering education, anaheim, ca. tonso, k. l. (1994). discourse as a mediational tool for constructing a masculinized engineering classroom. paper presented at the 1994 annual meeting of the society for the social study of science, new orleans, la. tonso, k. l. (1994). disrupting masculinist settings: women engaged in teamwork in an engineering classroom. paper presented at the annual conference for research on women and education, a sig of the american educational research association, st. paul, mn. tyler, p. e. (1995). first lady gives china women's rights earful. denver post, 9-6-95, pp. 1a, 14a. karen tonso is an engineer and educator. she is currently pursuing her doctorate in engineering education at the university of colorado at boulder. e-mail: tonso@acsu.colorado.edu awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 1, spring 1997 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. 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mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership women in transition: a mission of service catherine e. hackney, ph.d. elaine m. hogard hackney, winter, 1999 when women are appointed to leadership positons, they enter existing social groups with established norms, beliefs, and assumptions that guide interactions and relationships. this process is complex for all newly appointed leaders, but it is particularly difficult for those who are different-in ethnicity, race, or genderfrom traditional incumbents in leadership roles. over the past three decades women in leadership have been viewed as anomalies, as deficient with respect to the traditional male models of leadership (jones & montenegro, 1983; krchniak, 1977; lesser, 1978; paddock, 1981; valverde, 1974; valverde, 1974) for their uniqueness (fishel & pottker, 1975; hemphill, griffiths & fredericksen, 1962), because of the personal and societal obstacles they have encountered (darley, 1976; hennig & jardim, 1977; shakeshaft, 1980) and for the contributions they are able to make when their gender related behaviors are affirmed and valued (frasher & frasher, 1979). helgeson (1990) has described female leadership as web-like, dynamic, continuously expanding and contracting. female leadership, helgeson (1990) explained, is highly connective, deriving its strength from empowering others. female leadership then takes on different appearances, different shapes, different directions as a web in constant redesign. rosener (1990) suggested that a woman's leadership orientation is marked by a concern for community and culture. characterized by a disposition toward a democratic culture, women concern themselves with the importance of establishing relationships and maintaining connections with others. in a leadership position, women are more likely to critically examine the past, ask the difficult questions, promote collective visioning, focus on the development of others, and to respond with the good of the community at heart (irwin, 1995). they practice leadership as a form of inquiry; they are more apt to foster organizational exploration. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html despite the real potential for organizational learning and constructive change a woman's model of leadership could foster in our schools, women continue to struggle as they assume supervisory roles in schools and districts dominated by the traditional male model of leadership and professional success. when women are appointed to leadership positions, they enter existing social groups with established norms, beliefs, and assumptions that guide interactions and relationships. school principals, superintendents, and other educational administrators must take charge and become functioning, integrated group members at the same time that they try to understand and accommodate the unwritten norms of the new group. this process is complex for all newly appointed leaders, but it is particularly difficult for those who are differentin ethnicity, race, or genderfrom traditional incumbents in leadership roles (hart, 1995). women often must deal with the fact that their behaviors evoke confusion and misconceptions among their constituents. women leaders who value relationships and who are more relaxed in their leading, are often perceived as too soft, indecisive, weak, and incompetent. others who exhibit an intensity of professionalism are often seen as too cold, too distant, too perfectionist. furthermore, when women leaders' beliefs are incongruent with those of the organization and community, they are often alienated by others in the organization. this is exacerbated when the "good old boys" hold the power, control communication, interpret policy, and set the norms for success. this is especially problematic to women when success is normatively defined as managerial efficiency, timely reporting, an absence of complaints, problems, or phone calls. women who value community building, collective visioning, and democracy may experience feelings of inadequacy and inefficacy in such an organizational environment (hart, 1995). the study theoretically, the purpose of this study was to discover the ecological and psychological transitions women undergo as they consider leaving the classroom for an administrative position. though shakeshaft (1989) reported that women school principals create and maintain closer relationships with children, parents, and teachers, and are perceived to lead more successful schools than do their male counterparts, many women still hesitate when considering an administrative position. their fears center around losing contact with the real business of schooling, teaching and learning, and becoming too distant and separated from children. they also worry about their own leadership dispositions and how the established powers will perceive and interpret their work (hackney, 1994). our research, however, centered around the perceptions and aspirations of women teachers who have decided to pursue positional leadership and who anticipate a career move within the next couple of years. the underlying motive of our research was to engage this group of eleven women as co-researchers and offer them opportunities for reflective and projective thinking about leadership and the roles they will someday assume in hopes that they would be better prepared to deal with the "existing social groups with established norm, beliefs, and assumptions" (hart, 1995) of which they will become a part. the findings of our study can inform school districts so that they might better understand and support these new women leaders. the findings can also be instructive to educational administration preparation programs with respect to recognizing, affirming, and valuing the leadership models of women as respectable alternatives to the traditional male model. but most importantly, the findings personify and validate the theoretical underpinnings of women's leadership with real women's voices and experiences. participants we invited nearly 40 women enrolled in the masters, educational specialist, and doctoral educational administration preparation programs at a northeastern ohio university to become a part of our study. eleven women responded and agreed to become co-researchers with us. the women varied in age (late 20s to mid 50s), in experience (a few years to over 20 years teaching), in marital status (5 married with children, 1 married with no children, 3 divorced with children, 2 single/never married). developing the research questions though as researchers we were particularly interested in these women's conceptions of leadership, we were also interested in what they wanted to know about themselves as they prepared for a future administrative position. our central research question was, "to feel successful as a school leader, do these women feel they will need to reconcile their own conceptions of leadership with that which has been the existing model?" to expand that question, we invited the participants to a research get-together during which we conducted a focus group and asked them the following open-ended questions: 1) as you prepare for an administrative position and anticipate leaving your role as a classroom teacher, what would you like to tell us about? 2) what do you want us to ask you about? we developed the following three sets of additional research questions from the analysis of the focus group data. the questions directly reflected that which the women wanted to know about themselves and guided the design of our interview protocol. 1) why are the women of the study motivated toward school leadership? 2) what interpersonal dynamics do the women of the study feel will impact their effectiveness as school leaders? where do the women of the study envision they will draw their support? where do they expect to encounter a lack of support? 3) how have these women's personal lives affected, or been affected, by their decisions to pursue and prepare for school leadership? data collection and analysis it was important to us that we allow all of these women to speak openly about their experiences and feelings. we used semi-structured interviews as the primary data collection tool. triangulation was achieved through the analysis of journals the women kept and the notes from their paired conversations which occurred several times throughout the course of the study. we analyzed the data using the strauss and corbin (1990) componential model for coding data in stages: open, axial, and selective coding. data were initially open coded using the topics represented by the four research questions. during the second stage, the axial coding stage, we were able to reassemble the data in new ways, around the categories which began to emerge: the women's need for affiliation, their other-centeredness, and their sense of mission. each category, or theme, was further analyzed to uncover the subcategorical themes hidden within. selective coding characterized the final stage of data analysis. this stage permitted the linking of the earlier determined categories to create stories of causal conditions, strategies, and consequences for action-oriented construction of grounded theory which will be reported later in this paper. during the selective coding stage, our objective was to identify the core phenomenon around which all the categories were integrated. this involved selection of the core category, or story line, relating it to the other categories, validating the relationships, and filling in categories in need of further refinement (strauss & corbin, 1990). soundness of the study the soundness of a qualitative study depends on its credibility, its reliability, and its transferability. to accurately identify and describe the transition these women were experiencing as they anticipated a move from the classroom to an administrative position, we conducted the interviews in tandem, analyzed the data as a team, and worked toward agreement in the interpretation of the findings. we kept field notes, preserved the data on audio-tape and in hard copy, and verified the data with participants during a culminating focus group. we do not assume that the findings of this study generalize to larger populations, but only that they might be instructive about other similar groups of women contemplating a future in educational administration. the findings during the axial stage of coding, three dominant themes emerged from the analysis of the data gathered in this study: 1) these women are grounded in the necessity for affiliation. 2) these women are other-centered: they prioritize the moral responsibility for the care of the relationships in their lives. 3) these women are on a mission of service: a love of "the right" and the desire to follow it. the first theme: these women are grounded in a necessity for affiliation repeatedly, with each participant we heard a focus on the importance of relationships in their lives. whether discussing their personal lives or their "extended families," as rae so often referred to her workplace, these women depended on the connections they made with others. audrey so powerfully stated the feelings of the group when she said that "leadership comes from relationships...we need to stay close to each other." the women voiced the importance of relationships for theirs and others' personal and professional security, achievement, celebration, and consolation. they did not "know how to separate their personal and professional" lives (carol). as bonnie noted, because "women are bonders," these women spoke consistently throughout their interviews, paired conversations, and journals of the need for creating "welcoming organizations" (rae), where people were available and accessible to each other, where harmony was cherished, and where "lots and lots of dialogue" would take place (carol). they also voiced the importance of safety nets, shared vulnerability, and "stewardship" (wendy), caring for and about people, and " having each other to care" (rae) about them. affiliation with others, personally and professionally, was integral to their notions of leadership. their conceptualizations of leadership were defined by the importance of the relationships in their lives. the second theme: these women are other-centered; they prioritize the moral responsibility for the relationships in their lives though we have separated out this second theme, it is highly intertwined with the first theme of affiliation. however, it redirects attention from the individual's own need for affiliation to a consideration of the needs of others. it reinforces the notion of affiliation coupled with the ethic of care and responsibility (gilligan, 1982; noddings, 1984). it explains much of the accommodations these women have made in their personal and professional lives; it describes their concern to make sure that families and colleagues are cared for and comfortable. it reaches from their personal lives and family responsibilities to their visions of leadership. for these women, it was more than an isolated act; it was a way of living, a way of being. wendy, rae, mary, susan, and carol spoke extensively of family responsibilities. all of them deferred academic study and their pursuit of a leadership position until personal lives permitted it. their families came first causing both wendy and susan to start their graduate programs twice, interrupted because of children's needs and nonsupportive husbands, respectively. beth quipped that she was free to pursue her interests as long as there was "food in the frig and the jeans were clean." but mary most poignantly stated, "for years i focused solely on my husband and children. i'm finally doing what's important to me, satisfying something in me." rae, a single, divorced mother of two, worked as a teacher and a waitress, supported her children, and went to graduate school. on the verge of collapse, she said "i took a summer off, finally listening to my body, finally doing what was important for me." carol struggled with her husband's lack of understanding. she stayed up very late at night to do her academic work, to avoid taking time and attention away from her husband. she said that it was "difficult to get people to understand just what the drive is all about." she was a master of accommodation, adjustment, and compromise who attended to her family responsibilities first so as to be able to pursue her professional dreams. interestingly, even the women of the study who are single or married without children, referred to the responsibility of caring for families first, if at some time they were to acquire a husband and/or children. they knew this would become the most pressing priority. the theme of accommodation, the other-centeredness, the moral responsibility for the care of the relationships in their lives, spilled into professional lives as well. amy spoke of retaining duties that could be turned over to someone else not out of a need to control, but out of a moral responsibility. her extreme concern about students and school programming caused her to take on more work than others might think necessary, burdening herself out of a sense of responsibility to the children. audrey spoke of denying herself the opportunity to apply for a new position in her district, because at that particular point in time, doing so would damage relationships in the organization with professional jealousy. she deferred her career progress for the sake of the others and the good of the school community at large. when discussing their roles as teacher leaders and aspiring administrators, the women emphasized the need to "listen and learn from others...to get a feel for their agendas". they were conscious of "adults coming (to the school organization) with different feelings and beliefs, not clean slates" (wendy) making working together toward a common goal quite a challenge. yet, they were intent on creating a climate in their organization where people would be comfortable to take some risks and would be able to work and learn together as part of an "extended family" (rae). the third theme: these women are on a mission of service. "it's not about position. it's not about money. it's about 'this is what i have to do for kids. this is my calling. this is what i have to do for the world.' is this a religion? it is!" (carol). to the women of the study, leading was, as carol continued, a "way of life, a set of beliefs." they repeatedly spoke of "being in touch with" who they were and what they believed (amy). their mission was expressed in their love and desire to follow what they believed was "right." several of the women actually spoke of "owing something to the world" (wendy) and "giving back" what was given to them (bonnie). it was obvious that they were operating from an altruistic as opposed to a more instrumental or self-serving base. the data reconstructed under this third theme, "the mission of service," arranged itself into three subcategories: grounding in principles, ethics, morality; the operationalizing of beliefs; and, the purpose behind the leadership. the first subcategory, grounding in principles, ethics, and morality was characterized by a strong belief in stewardship, which was articulated clearly by wendy as a "caring for people, places, what will happen and what people will do" in the school organization. the women cited the importance of standing up for their beliefs and exerting gentle pressure on the organization to establish and maintain a culture of goodness, kindness, respect, trust, and focus on children. included in their belief systems was an appreciation for diversity. wendy spoke of "honoring differences," others referred to the importance of validation of ideas which "come from the trenches." the women of the study believed in the value of the individuals of the school organization, the children, the parents, the teachers. of equal importance was their belief in the organization, its collective inquiry, its growth, and therefore change for the better. wendy spoke of her responsibility of "engaging the minds of children and adults." they would not compromise their own and others' learning growth as a way of life in the school. their beliefs were dominated by a need for continuous inquiry. asking the difficult questions, pressing for answers: what's best for kids? what are we doing to alter the underlying structures to provide what's best for kids? am i doing all i can to make this vision a reality? do i have what it takes? the second subcategory of the third theme provided data which helped to describe and explain how these women approach the operationalizing of their beliefs. as carol noted, "the bottom line for me is if it's best for kids, then by golly we're going to find a way to make it happen." as she continued, that might mean continuously "talking, thinking, dreaming," asking those hard questions, keeping the vision before them, and providing the guidance, nurturance, and strength necessary to help people to do their jobs. as amy stated, "there's a framework that things fit between, but it doesn't hurt to nudge that framework." operationalizing their beliefs also meant having an "honest voice..." themselves and encouraging the synergy which comes from hearing many voices and sharing in many ideas. these women felt the need for all in the organization to share accountability. leadership to them was a joint endeavor; they greatly valued community participation in decision making and problem solving. several women stated that they wanted students, teachers, and parents to be the source of ideas. carol said that she had "given up the idea" that she had "all the answers," feeling now that she has very few of them. the women felt they would best operationalize their principles and beliefs about serving children and families if they could convince all school adults to take the responsibility to lead by example and to enable and inspire each other. as rae reflected, these women wanted to lead by "being human, staying human", and finding joy in their work. and as carol shared, "i lead with love. that is something i always remind myself of." the third subcategory under the third theme, the mission of service, gave direction to these women's conception of leading. the "service" notion of the theme was illustrated vividly in this category. their sense of commitment, dedication, and obligation to "give back" to the profession was loud and strong: i've taken. they trained me so that i could work and become successful, put myself through college and graduate school. (i need to) give back to education what it has given to me" (bonnie). the women spoke of affecting change for the betterment of the school organization and the education of children, of making a positive difference in the school, and of having more influence in positional leadership than they might have as a classroom teacher. these women were driven by a desire build a spirit of community in their schools. becoming role models they felt they influence the community to take responsibility to "work for the common goodto work for all of us" (bonnie). as cindy noted, and the others mirrored, "we all own this. it's everybody's school." they were intent on minimizing their own importance and maximizing the importance of others. as evidenced by audrey's decision not to apply for a new leadership position because it would damage existing, fragile relationships, these women were not afraid of self-sacrifice for the common good. their values extended beyond themselves and their own achievement. perhaps wendy best summarized it: "the heart and soul of leadership is the development of others' leadership for the common good." the third theme: negative instances within this theme we found two negative instances, cindy and sally. cindy spoke the language of the other women. she referred repeatedly to the need for participatory management, shared problem solving, and decision making; yet her motives were much more instrumental than those of the other women. she believed that "happy workers make good workers" and help to achieve the goals of the school; whereas, with the other women the moral "rightness" of exercising more democratic leadership was more pronounced. their first consideration was maintaining a high regard for people and the morality of more inclusionary democratic practice. vision development, goal achievement, and change were more secondary considerations. nonetheless, cindy was centered on children and on "anything that could help me help the kids." she did not ever want to "divorce herself from the rest of the group" because all school adults were "partners in the kids' education." however, her feelings seemed to be predicated by a desire to help the business of schooling transpire more smoothly. it is our interpretation that these results might be explained by cindy's extreme intelligence, her youth, and her limited life and professional experience. a very quick study, in less than a year cindy has assimilated into her thinking the more contemporary, feminist notions of leadership. she is very comfortable with these conceptions of leadership: they fit well into her own mindscape. yet, very young in the profession, she has not had the opportunity to live and learn, to make mistakes, to alienate others with her decisions, and to attempt to manage the complexities of dealing with difficult questions and people. she has known success in her personal life, her academic career, and now her first teaching position. it may be that leadership is another endeavor in which she expects to experience success. therefore, her methods are more procedural, her decisions less contextual, and her motivation more instrumental than those of the other women. yet, it does seem that cindy is moving steadily toward a more constructivist approach to leadership. sally, on the other hand, is another, yet different, negative instance. sally is a single woman who has been teaching for about ten years. she grew up in a very well educated, professional family with highly conservative ideals. as a teacher, she has experienced only a very traditional, managerial model of leadership. within her administrative preparation course work, sally has struggled with the more contemporary notions of leadership. a very pleasant and considerate individual, sally "likes everyone to get along." she added: "on a personal level it is upsetting to me when there is not teaming, not collaboration...the kids suffer." nevertheless, sally views leadership as a responsibility to "win people over, find supporters, set expectations, be clear and concise, provide the know-how and the materials...to accomplish the job." as a very caring person, sally realizes the need for relationships within the school; yet, she views those relationships as essential to organizational goal achievement. unlike the other women in the group, sally is more focused on positional authority. her concept of leadership is marked by the provision of "guidance, information, nourishment, strength to accomplish a goal,the determination of which goals need to be met,belief in the organization, and...knowing when 'this is the way it will be done.'" sally strongly believes that she "owes something to the world" and "has an obligation to the profession." yet, sally is less driven by the moral principles of democracy and community building than she is by the moral responsibility of positional leadership to get others to do what she considers the right thing to do. she stated very succinctly, "if that's the way i think it should be, then that's the way it will be." we would assert that sally's very strong, confident personality, coupled with her experiential exposure to only traditional, male leadership models and her very conservative personal values contribute to her more hierarchical conceptions of leadership. many models of women's leadership exist. sally's just happens to be dissimilar to the ones expressed by the others in the study group. though cindy and sally are both on missions and exhibit strong desires to do the right, thing, that which is behind their belief structures and their behavior is much more influenced by the traditional measures of success than by those suggested by the other women in this study. their more instrumental thinking is characterized by sally who says it is important to be "pleasant not because it is nice...but because it makes people work harder, makes them do their jobs better. if they are happy, they put out more effort and make education for kids better." discussion of the findings the final stage of coding, the selective stage, required us to revisit our research questions with a newfound perspective. based upon the interviews we conducted, as well as the paired conversations notes and journal entries the women submitted, we were able to reconstruct the data to tell the story of these women in transition from the classroom to the administrative office. what we discovered among these women was that they are on a beliefs-centered mission of service bolstered by their affinity for affiliation and enabled by their responsibility for, and their accommodation of, others' needs. our initial question asked, "to feel successful as school leaders, do these women feel they will need to reconcile their own conceptions of leadership with that which has been the existing model?" in essence, the answer to the question was a resounding "no!" yet that "no!" was qualified by the complexity of context through which the women described their notions of leadership. what has emerged from our study is a model of feminine leadership existing in a cyclical state of flux and transition. our model of leadership is highly dependent upon, and supported by, the establishment and maintenance of the relationships in these women's lives; and it is enabled, or even allowed, by their acceptance of the responsibility for accommodation of others in their personal and professional lives. belief-centered leadership as these women spoke to us about their conceptions of leadership we did not hear the language common to traditional management paradigm: unilateral decision-making, positional power, leadership as a technique, political savvy, and success by getting other to do what "you" want them to do (blackmore, 1989). rather,"true" to their beliefs, we heard women say that their leadership "takes a different route, plays a different tune" (carol). they spoke the language of commitment, obligation, duty, and responsibility for the common good of the community. several of them even spoke of their transition toward leadership as the fulfillment of a calling. they were moved by what regan and brooks referred to as their intuition, "the ability to give equal weight to experience and abstraction, mind and heart" (1995, p. 33). leading schools was just something they had to do. data verification confirmed that for them leading was their way of life, their expression of "passion about life" (cindy). central to their notions of leadership were the ethics of care and responsibility (gilligan, 1982; noddings, 1984). their reference to caring took on a meaning more akin to regan and brooks' definition, "the translation of moral commitment to action on behalf of others" (1995, p.27). repeatedly, these women affirmed their moral purpose as leaders, centering their efforts and those of others, on what would best benefit children. their primary concern was to foster those conditions in the school which would support their moral disposition (sergiovanni, 1990). they were committed to what is right and determined to see it materialize for children. they continually asked of themselves and others difficult, often disconcerting question: why are we here? what is of greatest value to us? how can we best serve the needs of those who depend on us? how can we best affirm each other? how can we help each other develop into moral leaders? the women of the study were both anxious and excited about assuming leadership positions. they spoke of their fears of not being able to stand up for what is right and of their souls and spirits being crushed in hostile environments (audrey). yet, they were not deterred in their quest for leadership and in the determination that they could make a positive difference in schools. audrey quoted bolman and deal to express her emotions: "the wizard says that everyone is afraid. courage is the ability to go on anyway" (p. 47). these women exhibited such courage, impelled by their firm beliefs to move forward. bolstered by affiliation repeatedly, the women of the study expressed the necessity of relationships. audrey and susan, in a paired conversation, agreed that "in order to risk, to make changes, you must have relationships." they spoke of affiliation, developing and maintaining relationships, for the good of the community, to achieve the moral purposes of the school, and because of a sturdy beliefs in democratic values. for them, strong affiliation provided the whole community security through support, a basis for collegiality and achievement of moral purpose, and a platform for not only celebration but also for consolation. the women envisioned their leadership diffused through affiliation. marked by collaboration, shared problem-solving and decision-making, "lots and lots of dialogue" (carol), synergistic collegiality, and an exchange of vulnerability, their dispositions of leadership caused them to see themselves and others as "real people, who have each other to care" about each other and the good of the community (rae). they saw leadership in their schools buttressed by the constructive relationships they sought to create and nurture. enabled by accommodation to feel free and confident in their ability to lead, these women needed to care for those people and relationships that they held dear in their lives. they were continuously conscious of the needs of those around them. accommodation was a way of living, a way of being for them. whether in reference to caring for family, making sure children and husbands were provided for, or in reference to the needs of the many others in their professional lives, these women felt a keen sense of duty, responsibility, and obligation. the commitment they brought to leading had its origins in the responsibility they felt for individuals. undoubtedly, these women value others and in no ways see them as means to an end or obstacles to hurdle, but rather as people to be heard, understood, and accommodated. just as they had made sure "the frig was full and the jeans were clean" (beth) at home, they wanted to make sure that the needs of people in the organization were recognized and addressed. as leaders, they were motivated by a deep and genuine respect for others. realizing that "leadership is an unique as the people who possess it" (carol), they were intent on listening to others with caring and empathy, seeking to understand, validating others, asking questions gently, and speaking softly. as wendy noted, "honoring differences" was essential to leading toward harmony and the common good. these women firmly believed that if they worked collaboratively, respected differences, and practiced leadership as learners, they would not experience difficulty "fitting in." centered on their beliefs and intent on the moral purposes of the school, they were convinced that they would facilitate far more enriching conditions for children and adults in the school by leading with accommodation, collaboration, and an honest respect for diverse ideas and opinions. they wanted to lead by enabling others to consider and contribute alternative, new, and different ways of achieving the common good and by creating a trusting, respectful, and caring environment. with respect for those who would offer them little support, who could make their lives difficult, who might block their efforts toward moral purposes, they spoke of exerting extra effort, "stepping out of one's own frame of reference into the other's" (noddings, 1984, p. 24). as rae noted, "the child (and we would add "adult") who is hardest to love needs your love the most." and as maxine greene has written, these women would agree that this would mean "becoming a friend of someone else's mind, with the wonderful power to return to that person a sense of wholeness" (1995, p. 38). the women of the study embraced the notion that there must exist in their schools "an active reciprocity among different people before community can arise" (greene, 1995, p. 40). data verification supported these notions with a hope that "younger women would not lose the need for accommodating others" (mary). bonnie added, "there is a beauty in giving of yourself to others." leading from the head and heart these women in transition were grounded in their beliefs about children, about the business of schooling, about the roles and responsibilities of school adults, and about leading. more than a just a few times, they spoke of themselves as leaders who were also learners (barth, 1990). they felt themselves in continuous formation, interdependent with the flow and flux of the organizational and personal relationship needs they faced each day. they were journeying, not anticipating arriving at any predetermined time or place, but responsive to and supportive of the moral purposes of the community and the recognized common good. these women were what greenleaf would have referred to as a "servant to the community... a leader as a servant of his followers" (1996, p. 334). the women of the study were able to reinforce their leadership dispositions by their need for affiliationaudrey called it "connectiveness-building"and through their beliefs in accommodation. governed by an ethic of care and responsibility (gilligan, 1992; noddings, 1994), they were moved by their hearts toward constructiveness and compassion and stewardship for the people, places, and events in their lives, personal and professional. their notions of leadership do not stand alone; they are defined through their relationships and their commitment to goodness, to kindness, to trust, to honesty, to what is fundamentally right. implications for practice the findings of this study can inform both graduate schools of educational administration as well as the educational organizations within which these women, and similar others, may assume leadership positions as they "argue for a big change" (cindy). they suggest that those involved in planning and teaching educational administration programming, must attend to the overwhelming importance of relationships in these women's lives. as bonnie noted, "women are bonders," and "need to stay close to each other" (audrey). therefore, it would behoove existing programs to consider structural redesign. developing cohorts, especially those which would give women a choice to study only with other women, are one way to address relational needs. others ways might include courses which are more integrated in content, allow students to stay together and support each other longer than a quarter or a semester, and offer intensive opportunity for team work and group assignments. of equal importance is the recognition, acceptance, and validation of women's ways of leading in program content, course readings, and professorial attitude. as the findings have pointed out, women such as the ones in the study, are not using the language of traditional management and leadership. their conceptions of leadership call for different words, different descriptions, and different determiners of success. it is imperative that women feel affirmed in their knowledge and ways of leading, that women's notions and experiences be respected as valid alternatives to the traditional existing model. historically, women have been taught that there is only one leadership knowledge base, that there is only one way to lead. that must cease so that women do not suffer discrimination and an absence of support "in subtle ways" (beth) from traditional male professors, and other "people who just don't want this" (cindy). the educational organizational, as well, would benefit by acknowledging the findings of this study. the existing power structures need to understand women leaders as being grounded in beliefs and experience, focused on the future, and centered on the common good. being community-based, these women would find support in the organization's encouragement of linkages between and among administrators, teachers, parents, and students. moving away from the traditional, administrative management silos (curriculum and instruction, personnel, facilities, finance) to toward more integrated teams of leaders would encourage communication, understanding, empathy, and respect for the varied roles within the organization and for the various "levels" of responsibility. by providing for more opportunities for school adults to work together, to find connection around school goals, and to interface their expertise the organization would encourage "leadership by affiliation" (cindy), a more synergistic environment and more creative solutions to problems they face. because women similar to those in this study are intent on finding better ways of leading the business of schooling, they have a high regard for organizational and personal learning and inquiry. organizational support for less than traditional measures of success could support inquiry among the adults in the school and lead to more constructive and creative problem identification and solution. if the emphasis on efficiency, organization, management, positional authority, and unilateral decision-making were replaced by an emphasis on community building, participatory leadership, collective problem-solving, collaboration, and hierarchical flattening, women would be assessed for their strengths and competencies rather than for those "techniques" to which they find it difficult to relate. conclusion the women of our study are discontent with the educational status quo and with leadership as it has traditionally existed. they believe there is a better way and they are committed to practicing it. though faced with some fears as they anticipate a move from a place where they have been comfortable and have met with success, the women of our study believed that "it is the inspiration and initiative of individual persons that move the world along" (greenleaf, 1996, p. 334). they are intent on being one of those individuals. and for them, that means being firmly planted in their own beliefs, yet being highly interdependent with others who can share and interpret those beliefs, and being keenly aware and responsive to the needs of others in their lives. for them "the bottom line is this: i will be fine. i will lead with my head and my heart. i will make a difference wherever i go and i will enjoy doing it!" (carol): all for the common good. references barth, r. (1990). improving schools from within. san francisco: jossey-bass bass.blackmore, j. (1989). changes from within: feminist educators and educational leadership. peabody journal of education, 66, (3), 19-40. bolman, l. & deal, t. (1995). leading with soul: an uncommon journey of spirit. san francisco: josseybass. darley, a. (1976). big careers for the little women: a dual-role dilemma. journal of social issues, 32, (3), 85-97. fishel a. & pottker, j. (1975). performance of women principals: a review of behavioral and attitudinal studies. journal of the national association for women dean, administrators and counselors, 18, (13), 110-117. frasher, j. & frasher, r. (1979). educational administration: a feminine profession. educational administration quarterly, 15, (2), 1-13. gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice: psychological theory and women's development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. frick, d. & spears, l. (eds.) 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(1977). the managerial woman. new york: anchor press/doubleday. irwin, r. (1995). a circle of empowerment: women, education and leadership. albany, ny: state university of new york press. jones, e. & montenegro, x. (1983). factors predicting women's upward career mobility in school administration. journal of equity and leadership, 3, (3), 231-241. krchniak, s (1977). entry into school administration by women in illinois: facts and dynamics. report to the state board of education, illinois office of education. lesser, p. (1978). the participation of women in public school administration. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american research association, san francisco. noddings, n. (1984). caring: the feminine approach to ethics and moral education. berkeley, ca: university of california press. paddock, s. (1981). male and female career patterns in school administration. in p. schmuck, w. charters, & r. carol (eds.). educational policy and management: sex differentials. new york: academy press. regan, h. & brooks, g. (1995). out of women's experience: creating relational leadership. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. sergiovanni, t. (1992). moral leadership: getting to the heart of school improvement. san francisco: jossey-bass. senge, p. (1990). the fifth dimension: the art and practice of the learning organization. new york: doubleday. shakeshaft, c. (1980). dissertation research on women in educational administration: a synthesis of findings and paradigm for future reference. doctoral dissertation, texas a&m. dissertation abstracts international, 1980, 40, 6455-a. dr. catherine eggleston hackney teaches in the college of education at kent state university, in kent, ohio. chackney@kent.edu elaine m. hogard is a doctoral student in women's studies at kent state university and is currently writing a dissertation concerning women in leadership / international studies. awl journal home page awl journal volume 2, number 1, winter 1999 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women 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file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 144 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 144-152, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper an analysis of stress levels of female graduate students in an online program lynne arric, ken young, sandra harris, and vicky farrow lynne arric, ed.d is a student programs manager, in the college of pharmacy at the university of south florida, larric@health.usf.edu, 409.540.4995 ken young, ph.d. is an assistant professor, in the doctoral studies in educational leadership program in the college of education and human development at lamar university, jkyoung1@lamar.edu, 409.880.7376 sandra harris, ph.d. is the director of doctoral studies in educational leadership, college of education and human development, lamar university, drsandy@flash.net, 409.880.8676 vicky farrow, ph.d. is the executive director, office of planning and assessment, lamar university, vicky.farrow@lamar.edu, 409.880.1843 accepted june 13, 2011 this quantitative study was designed to investigate the differences in stressors and demographic variables of women enrolled in an online master’s degree program in education. participants were women with multiple personal, career, and family responsibilities. survey data and demographic data were used to identify which stressors were most frequently experienced and whether there was a significant difference between stress scale scores and demographic variables. seven hundred and fifty women completed the social readjustment rating scale – revised (hobson, 1998) and non-parametric tests were used to analyze the data. findings indicated the stressors most common to female graduate students were related to family, finances, and health-related issues. the results also suggested there were significant differences among the demographic variables of age, ethnicity, program start date, number of courses completed, and marital status. for institutions of higher education these findings may offer insight for incorporating student services such as learning communities, flexible financing options, and accelerated programs to allow for increased retention of women in online programs. for women seeking to enroll into an online graduate program, this study may provide insight into assessing their resources for successful completion of an online master’s degree. keywords: female, women, stressors, stress, online, graduate, education, masters introduction between 1998 and 2008, there was a 50% increase in the number of master’s degrees earned by women (ies national center for education statistics, 2009), however, primarily due to financial constraints, lack of affordable and flexible child care, and lack of health insurance, female graduate students with children are the single most at-risk population for attrition from their on-campus, full-time graduate programs (anderson, 1998; lynch, 2008). according to the ies national center for education statistics (2009), in 2006-07, women earned 61% of master’s degrees and, for the first time, females and males earned an equal number of doctoral degrees. based on these data, it appears that students of both genders were completing degrees at an equitable rate; however, women have been faced with different challenges than men in their pursuit of higher education (devos, viera, diaz, & dunn, 2007; grenier & burke, 2008; heenan, 2002; johnson & robson, 1999; lynch, 2008; mallinckrodt & leong, 1992; scott et al., 1998; sullivan, 2001; younes & asay, 1998). with the rapid development of distance learning opportunities, women who are balancing advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 145 multiple responsibilities such as careers, families, and community obligations that might have previously impeded their pursuit of higher education, are being provided the option to complete classes online in the comfort of their own home, on their own schedule (muller, 2008). background of the problem in investigating how women have negotiated their various roles, including taking on the additional responsibility of being a student, researchers have found that women experienced a great deal of conflict and stress in balancing their status as a student with being primarily committed to their family and children (giancola, grawitch, & borchert, 2009; grenier & burke, 2008; johnson, schwartz & bower, 2000, mallinckrodt & leong, 1992; younes & asay, 1998). one study found that women who took on additional roles without delegating other responsibilities were more likely to experience strain on relationships, health and overall functioning (home, 1997). giancola et al. (2009) discussed how the accumulation of family, school and work demands could create stress and role strain for female students while women from low income households experienced the greatest levels of stress (home, 1997; mcgrath & burkhart, 1983). distance education has opened doors for many who were previously unable to access on-campus programs, such as working mothers, single mothers or caregivers to multiple generations (heenan, 2002; sullivan, 2001). however, some women motivated to return to school have found it difficult to persist through to graduation due to issues such as lack of family or employer support, rather than due to inherent personality characteristics (scott, burns, & cooney, 1998). statement of the problem muller (2008) posited that similar to their on-campus counterparts, the primary impediment for female online students was the challenge of juggling multiple roles and responsibilities, in addition to a perceived lack of institutional support and involvement. several studies corroborated the findings of mallinckrodt and leong (1992) that female graduate students experienced significantly less support from their families, employers, and academic programs, as compared to their male counterparts (park & hee jun, 2009; scott et al., 1998). these findings, taken with the increased likelihood that women reported more financial and relationship strain, have led researchers to assert that women experienced more challenges in balancing multiple roles, particularly with the additional responsibilities of being a graduate student (gouthro, 2007; mallinckrodt & leong, 1992). however, one gap in the research literature appears to be the lack of exploration as to the differences in the demographics of female online graduate students who manage stressful life experiences immediately preceding or during their time in graduate school. purpose of the study and research questions the purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in stressors and demographic variables of female graduate students enrolled in an online distance education graduate program. this study was guided by the following research questions: 1. what stressors were experienced most frequently by female graduate students? 2. was there a difference between demographic variables and the total score on the social readjustment rating scale revised? this study was an exploratory investigation leading to further work in identifying female graduate students who had experienced a relatively high level of perceived stress for further qualitative research exploring their experiences with stressors and support systems while enrolled in an online graduate program. theoretical framework as a framework for the study, mcclusky’s theory of margin (1963) and post-structural feminist pedagogy were used to investigate female graduate students’ management of stressful life events and responsibilities. mcclusky (1963) developed his theory of margin in the early 1960’s as he studied adult learning and how life responsibilities changed as people moved through different stages of the lifespan. he analyzed the impact of increased demands on adult learners’ resources over time and his theory of margin examined how people balanced their resources against the demands of their time and energy to determine whether they had the capacity to take on additional endeavors such as committing to a graduate program. in his theory, mcclusky defined margin as the difference between a person’s load (responsibilities) and their power (resources). both power and load had external and internal components encompassing one’s psychological strengths and weaknesses, as well as physical and time commitments or freedom. the more margin that was available to a person, the more opportunities that could be pursued, including furthering one’s education. however, one criticism of the theory of margin was that there was no examination of how the stressors may create different levels of load or power (home & hinds, 2000). through mcclusky’s framework, this study examined whether some particular subset of female online learners experienced more challenges balancing load and power than other women in the study. tisdell (1998) discussed post-structural feminist pedagogy and examined similar psychological and sociological issues as mcclusky (1963), but addressed the issues from a feminist perspective by providing focus on the additional influences of knowledge, privilege, and power on women’s identity development and pursuit of equity (english, 2006). from a post-structural feminist perspective, women who were attempting to balance many roles, and trying to seek educational and career opportunities, were faced with advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 146 additional difficulties in managing their responsibilities within a society that perpetuated unequal opportunities based not only on gender, but on class, race, sexual orientation, and the balance of power (gouthro, 2007; tisdell, 1998). by acknowledging factors other than gender, this study attempts to address the critical complexity of women as they struggle to manage the demands of their lives in addition to being successful in an online graduate program. literature review the review of literature examined the impact of stressors and multiple roles of female graduate students’ persistence to degree completion. additionally, the effects of demographic variables on adult learners were investigated and a brief assessment of the online format for graduate education was reviewed. female students’ managing stressors muller (2008) posited that even within online programs, the primary impediment for female students was the challenge of juggling multiple roles and responsibilities, in addition to a perceived lack of institutional support and involvement. several studies have corroborated the findings of mallinckrodt and leong (1992) that female graduate students experienced significantly less support from their families, employers, and academic programs, as compared to their male counterparts (park & choi, 2009; scott et al., 1998). these findings, taken with the increased likelihood that women reported more financial and relationship strain, led the researchers to assert that women experienced more challenges in balancing multiple roles, particularly with the additional responsibilities of being a graduate student (gouthro, 2007; mallinckrodt & leong, 1992). mallinckrodt and leong (1992) found that women in graduate programs experienced more stressors, role strain in dealing with their family obligations, less social support, and more depression than their male counterparts. several researchers have determined that for most female students, the effect of managing multiple roles and additional stressors was determined largely by the student’s perception of the enormity of the task (giancola, grawitch, & borchert, 2009; glynn, maclean, forte, & cohen, 2009; hammer, grigsby, & woods, 1998; home, 1997; lawson & fuehrer, 1989). the more stressors and conflicts experienced by students, and the more students viewed these as unmanageable or negative, the lower their overall life satisfaction and the more likely they were to use maladaptive coping mechanisms (giancola et al., 2009; mcgrath & burkhart, 1983). barnett (2004) discussed the notion that directly related to the increase in post-secondary educational achievement of women was the increase in married women, with children, returning to the workforce. the researcher predicted that it was likely that women would continue to manage multiple roles such as employee, mother, wife, and student. according to johnson et al. (2000), many adult students were often already managing a job and family when they decided to return to school and found it extremely stressful to balance schooling with parenting, which could exacerbate attrition and low completion rates for female students. when women took on the additional role of student, there was an expectation that they would accommodate the new role without any reduction in the load of the responsibilities as mother, employee or wife (mallinckrodt & leong, 1992). in addition, stressful life events, such as divorce or loss of a job, became the instigator for adults to seek furthering their education (johnson, schwartz, & bower, 2000). several researchers studied the tensions and conflict surrounding women who were embracing both motherhood and academics (devos, viera, diaz, & dunn, 2007; grenier & burke, 2008; lynch, 2008; younes & asay, 1998). younes and asay (1998) found that women felt stuck in a paradox with an equal desire to be a good parent, as well as a focused student. this was supported by lynch’s (2008) study of graduate student mothers who struggled to balance the demands of two (or more) roles that required a large, and sometimes conflicting, emotional and time commitment. these issues created feelings of emotional dissonance and stress in attempting to succeed in both roles simultaneously. grenier and burke (2008), in their co-generative ethnography regarding the authors’ experiences with pregnancy and graduate work, identified stress as a major theme throughout their narratives, and the researchers’ role strain, between being pregnant or being a new mother, and maintaining an expected level of productivity at school, as a primary source of guilt and stress. home (1997) found that the perception of role strain and demands was a better predictor of stress than the actual responsibilities of the varying tasks. at some critical point, multiple responsibilities became overwhelming and perception of role overload created a level of stress that was negatively associated with mental health functioning. glynn et al. (2009) found that women who maintained a perception of significant role overload experienced lower mental health functioning. in contrast, an assessment of women who were managing multiple roles indicated a moderate level of responsibility could be beneficial to women’s mental health status (barnett, 2004). additionally, younes and asay (1998) found that women who incorporated the responsibility of graduate work to their load of responsibilities reported feeling empowered and capable. in addition, a higher level of income, being employed, and the perception of positive role quality as a parent, spouse or friend positively contributed to women’s mental health status. giancola et al. (2009) found that students who viewed stressors as challenges to overcome had a more positive outlook, better adaptation skills and felt a higher level of general well-being. bachay and cingel (1999) concurred with giancola and colleagues that some women had the ability to reframe their experiences, even adversity such as death and divorce, to view them as developmental opportunities. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 147 these findings suggest that busy women were more likely to have better mental health, but there was a limit to the number of tasks that could be undertaken. barnett (2004) pointed out that many clinicians have ignored the positive mental health effect for women working outside the home and the author ultimately found the idea of women’s multiple roles having a negative impact on women’s health was largely a myth. giancola et al. (2009) assessed the levels of stress of adult students as they managed multiple roles in order to create a working model of conflict, appraisal and coping. specifically, these researchers examined inter-role conflict between family, school, and work. giancola and colleagues found that adult students ranked workplace demands as the greatest source of stress, with life stressors in the middle and school stressors as producing the least amount of stress. they suggested that for adult students in particular, work requirements might be less negotiable than family and social commitments and role strain was a significant influence on students’ levels of stress. additionally, students who did not have family support in pursuing their educational goals felt the most inter-role conflict. nevill and super (1986) outlined three criteria for assessing the importance of a particular role: one’s emotional commitment to a role, the amount of time invested, and a deeper understanding through experience in the role. while nevill and super addressed career choices over the lifespan, they indicated that women continued to take on more responsibility within the home and child rearing and, over the course of a lifetime, invested fewer resources in work outside of the home (1986). for female students in particular, home (1997) found that students who reported multiple role duties experienced a higher level of stress and role strain than students with fewer responsibilities. demographic variables of female graduate students recent research has indicated that individual demographic traits such as gender, ethnicity and age had no significant impact on the persistence of adult online learners (park & hee jun, 2009). in fact, rather than inherent personal characteristics, park and hee jun (2009) supported earlier research by scott et al. (1998) that indicated external factors, such as lack of family or employer support, were the primary reasons adult learners did not persist in their education. home (1998) also supported these findings by indicating that perhaps women did not adequately predict the amount of time required to complete all coursework requirements. in assessing factors other than gender, perna (2004) discovered that, all factors other than race being equal, black women were more likely than white women to enroll in graduate education. bachay and cingel (1999) stated that minority women who were successfully pursuing graduate education had a strong sense of competence and belief in their own abilities. in addition, a positive outlook on life and their religious faith also contributed to their persistence in working toward a graduate degree. morales’ (2008) study indicated that it was impossible to completely separate gender and ethnicity when exploring the two aspects of a student’s identity. other findings, such as those of calicchia and graham (2006), indicated that spirituality and the social resources of graduate students have a limited impact on buffering stress; however, they reported that specific stress factors, such as financial stress, are inversely correlated with specific domains of support, such as family income. several researchers also found women with lower income experienced higher levels of stress, and household income was the greatest predictor of the level of stress experienced by female students (home, 1997; mcgrath & burkhart, 1983). women with children under the age of 13 experienced more role strain while women with more than two children experienced less stress that their counterparts with fewer children (gerstel & gallagher, 1993; home, 1998). there were complex and varied reasons why women did not persist in graduate education, including family responsibilities and economic reasons (heenan, 2002). mature women returning to school shared the same level of motivation; however, it was discovered that complicated life situations were the primary difference between those who persisted to graduation and those who did not (scott, burns, & cooney, 1998). research has indicated that women who do not successfully persist in online education usually leave programs for family, health or financial reasons (johnson et al., 2000; park & hee jun, 2009). women’s experiences with the online format during the period of time from 1998-2008 there was a 50% increase in women’s enrollment into graduate school (ies national center for education statistics, 2009) and online education was generating heated discussions within higher education. while colleges and universities focused on the implementation of online programs, women were finding that online learning was a viable option for pursuing a degree while managing multiple life roles (price, 2006; rovai & baker, 2005; the college of 2020, 2009). benefits have been found in using online methods of delivery for educational content including flexibility, anonymity, and opportunity for engagement with other students (price, 2006; sullivan, 2001; sullivan, 2002). students in sullivan’s (2002) study indicated that they particularly liked being involved in asynchronous discussions where everyone had equal opportunity to participate and there was a lack of bias based on age, physical characteristics, or ethnicity. the feeling of anonymity gave some students a sense of freedom that they may not have felt within a classroom setting. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 148 in addition, lawson and fuehrer (1989) investigated the relationships between specific stressors and the types and sources of support that aided in lessening the stress of first-year graduate students. they found that the most highly stressed students benefitted the most from perceived social support. students who were most highly stressed also stated that they were most satisfied with their first-year graduate experience, indicating that stress may be a necessary component of graduate school, as long as students identified that there were adequate resources to manage the increased pressure. mackinnon-slaney (1994) proposed the adult persistence in learning model (apil) as a guide for developing support services for adult learners in higher education. viewed as a tool for retention of adult learners, the author incorporated the stresses and concerns of traditional college students with the additional responsibilities of managing work and family life. the researcher identified a three-fold diagnostic approach with attention given to personal/self efficacy issues, learning/academic issues and environmental/community issues that could be supported through individual and group counseling services offered within the higher education institution. methodology in measuring a subjective phenomenon such as reported levels of stress, it was important to utilize an instrument that reflected common stressors. the 51 items on the social readjustment rating scale – revised (srrs-r) (hobson, kamen, szostek, nethercut, tiedmann, & wojnarowicz, 1998) encompassed five themes from which stress arose, leading with death and dying, healthcare issues, crime and involvement with the criminal justice system, financial/economic issues, and family related issues (hobson et al., 1998). these themes are reflected in previous research indicating that women who do not successfully persist in online education usually leave programs for family, health or financial reasons (johnson et al., 2000; park & hee jun, 2009). although gender had a statistically significant impact on how life events were perceived and there was support of the contamination hypothesis, neither of these affected the practical use of the srrs-r instrument to assess levels of stress (hobson et al., 1998; scully, tosi, & banning, 2000). in evaluating levels of stress in female students, gadzella and carvalho (2006) reported that women who identified their stress at a particular level, either mild, moderate or severe, were found to mirror their self report by scoring at the same level on the student-life stress inventory, indicating that women’s perceptions of their stress accurately represented their lived experiences with stressors. population participants for this study were purposely selected from a database of currently enrolled graduate students pursuing a master’s of education degree through an online program at a university in south texas. the students in this program were pursuing advanced degrees in educational administration, teacher leadership, or educational technology leadership, providing opportunities for advancement to positions of leadership within the educational setting. the researchers sent 2254 female graduate students an email with a link to complete the social readjustment rating scale – revised (hobson et al., 1998). seven hundred and fifty students participated in the survey a 33% response rate, and 15 were removed from the sample for not answering any questions. the respondents to the survey ranged in age from under 25 to over 56 years old and came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, though the majority were caucasian (n=561). participants lived in many parts of the united states, but most lived in the state of texas, with the largest concentration in southeast texas (n=234). the typical woman who completed the survey was married (n=545), has taught in public education anywhere from 5 to 20 years (n=508), and the majority of women have been enrolled in the master’s program for 18 months or less (n=508), though the number of courses they have completed was equally distributed and ranged from 1-12. the number of respondents was sufficient to meet the minimum required for a given population (bartlett, kotrlik, & higgins, 2001). a post hoc power analysis was conducted to assess power. using an acceptable small effect size of .1 (cohen, 1992), the sample of 750, and an alpha at .05, the power was .84. data collection data were collected by using the secure website, www.surveymonkey.com, through which participants volunteered to complete the social readjustment rating scalerevised (hobson, et al., 1998) and provide their demographic information. instrumentation. the original social readjustment rating scale (srrs) (holmes & rahe, 1967) has been used in psychology and counseling to assess levels of stress (turner & wheaton, 1995) and in medicine to predict the likelihood of stress-related health outcomes (scully et al., 2000). the original srrs has been criticized for not taking into account the nature of the events, whether the event was in the person’s control, whether the stressor could be considered a positive life event versus a negative experience, and how that difference may impact the extent of the stress on a participant (hobson et al., 1998; scully et al., 2000). additionally, the contamination hypothesis alleged that some life events on the original srrs list were actually effects of stress (i.e., change in eating habits) and were not stressful events in themselves (scully et al., 2000). mcgrath and burkhart (1983) reviewed the original srrs and stated that many of the items on the scale were skewed toward people in the midst of establishing jobs, families and financial stability. these findings indicated that the scale may not appropriately recognize stressors in age groups in which creating a career and beginning a family were not priorities. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 149 the social readjustment rating scale – revised was created by hobson et al. (1998) to address additional criticism surrounding the original sample size, the weighting of the life events, confounding variables and the subjective interpretation of the life events. several studies found that events that had occurred in the preceding twelve months had a greater impact on overall stress levels, indicating that the more recent an event, the higher the level of stress, as well as highlighting the possibility that the effects of stressful events diminished over time. the researchers found the instrument to be a practical and valid tool for measuring levels of readjustment after experiencing stressful events (mcgrath & burkhart, 1983; scully et al., 2000). the srrs-r contains 51 items or events that have been indicated to create stress and a weighted measure of readjustment. for example, the event “death of a spouse/mate” has a weighted score of 87 while the event “getting married” has a score of 43. by indicating which of the events have been experienced within the past year, the student then received a total score that indicates their relative level of stress (hobson, et al., 1998). data analysis in assessing the data to ensure that it met the assumptions for parametric analysis, it was observed that data were positively skewed, violating one of the assumptions for t-tests and anova. although the t-test and anova are considered to be robust tests despite minor violations of assumptions (mcmillan & schumacher, 2006), it was determined that the use of non-parametric tests for analysis, specifically the kruskal-wallis test and the mann whitney u test would provide the most conservative analysis. the mann-whitney with bonferroni correction (pallant, 2007) was also used for post-hoc analysis when needed. the default alpha level was .05. findings the findings indicated that female online graduate students experienced stress and that there are statistically significant differences in stress levels based on demographic variables. the findings are reported by research question. no significant differences were found between total score on the srrs-r and the student’s geographic area or number of years of teaching experience. research question 1 the first research question investigated what stressors were experienced most frequently by female graduate students. the five stressors that were most frequently experienced in the past twelve months by the participants were: changing work responsibilities (n=354), beginning/ceasing formal education (n=343), financial difficulties (n=304), illness/injury to family member (n=253), and changing positions, transfer/promotion at work (n=207). these findings reinforce previous research which stated that women tended to leave graduate school for family, health or financial reasons (heenan, 2002; johnson et al., 2000; park & hee jun, 2009) and that women experienced a great deal of role conflict and stress due to the differing demands of work, home, and school (giancola et al., 2009). research question 2 an analysis was conducted of the demographic variables of the participants, which included age, ethnicity, geographic area, and marital status, and an analysis of professional and programmatic variables included years of teaching experience, program start date, and number of courses completed. significant differences were found in the categories of age, ethnicity, program start date, number of courses completed, and marital status. age. the kruskill-wallis analysis found a statistically significant difference in total scores on the srrs-r across the five age groups, x² (4, n = 733) = 11.9, p = .018. to determine which groups were significantly different from each other, the mann-whitney post-hoc test indicated that the oldest group of students (n=18) scored significantly higher (md=312) on the srrs-r scale than students under 25 years old (n=34) (md=124), z=-2.24, p=.02, r=-.31. cohen (1992) defined small effect size as r = 0.1-0.23; medium as, r = 0.24-0.36; and large as, r = 0.37 or larger. using the bonferonni correction when comparing the oldest age group to the youngest age group, it was found that older women experienced significantly higher stress levels than the youngest group of women (p<.25). ethnicity. according to the kruskal-wallis test, total stress scale score differences between ethnic groups were also found to be statistically significant, x² (5, n=734) = 14.63, p=.012). based on the post-hoc mann whitney test with bonferroni correction (p<.25), significant differences were found between scores for african american students (md=287) and caucasian students (md=202) z=-3.046, p=.002, r=-.12. in other words, african american students reported higher stress levels than caucasian students. geographic area. there were no significant differences found between the geographic locations of the participants. marital status. a mann-whitney u test revealed a significant difference in total stress scale scores with married women attaining a lower median score (md=190, n=545) than single women (md=275, n=183), u=38873, z= -4.47, p=.00, r=.17, indicating that married students experience a lower total level of stress than their single counterparts. years of teaching experience. no statistically significant differences were found based on the number of years the participants had been teaching. program start date. statistically significant differences were found for students based on when they began advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 150 the master’s program. the kruskill-wallis test indicated a significant difference between groups, x² (8, n=734)=38.89, p=.00, and the mann-whitney post-hoc analysis, with a bonferonni adjustment (p<.25) indicated that those who had been enrolled in the program longest (n=3) had a higher median stress scale score (md=398) than students who had most recently started the online masters program (n=55) (md=160) z=-1.422, p=.16, r=-.19. number of courses completed. number of courses completed produced statistically significant findings similar to program start date when using identical analyses, x² (3, n=733)=27.19, p=.00. the kruskill-wallis test and the mannwhitney post-hoc analysis, with a bonferonni adjustment (p<.25) indicated that students who had completed the highest number of courses (n=181) had a higher median srrs-r score (md=259), while students who had completed fewer courses (n=175) exhibited a lower median stress scale score (md=164) z=-4.789, p=.00, r=-.25, indicating a significant difference in levels of stress. discussion and implications as more women enter into and complete graduate education programs while managing multiple responsibilities, institutions of higher education who are interested in retaining these students need to be aware of the issues facing this growing population. as found in this study, the most frequently experienced stressors, which were changing work responsibilities, beginning/ceasing formal education, financial difficulties, illness/injury to family member, and changing positions/transfer/promotion at work – align with other studies that mirror the complex lives of working adult students with families, and the complicated reasons that muddle the issue of retention of female students in graduate programs (johnson et al., 2000; park & hee jun, 2009). based on the findings from research question 2, there are significant differences in the total stress scale scores on the srrs-r based on age, ethnicity, length of time of enrollment in the program, and the number of courses completed. the findings of this study support previous research on women’s perceived stress and their increasing role conflict as they take on the added responsibility of graduate school. based on mcclusky’s theory of margin (1963), it appears women who begin school with a sufficient amount of resources, may become increasingly strained the longer it takes to degree completion. women who are considering graduate school may be advised to assess their levels of margin and their ability to manage the demands of a graduate program in addition to commitments to work, family, and community. although park and hee jun (2009) found that individual demographic traits such as gender, ethnicity and age had no significant impact on the persistence of adult online learners, this study found that female students who are single, older, and of african american heritage experience the highest level of stress while those who are married, younger, and caucasian experience a lower level of stress while attending graduate school. based on tisdell’s (1998) post structural feminist pedagogy, privilege and power are influential in women’s pursuit of equity. this study reflects post structural feminist ideas that marginalized groups experience increased difficulty in reaching their educational goals by virtue of the struggles inherent in race, age, socioeconomic status, gender, and other variables (tisdell, 1998). it may be that students who fall within these demographic guidelines, and experience a higher level of stress, might not complete their graduate degree. in addition, students with spouses might find their positive partnerships to be vital in their progress toward a graduate degree. institutions of higher education could evaluate their institutional and programmatic support for online female graduate students and consider establishing learning communities, mentoring, and flexible financing options in order to attract and retain female students. colleges and universities might also consider that accelerated graduate programs leading to shorter time-to-degree may alleviate some of the stress experienced by female online graduate students. in addition, a model such as the mackinnon-slaney adult persistence in learning model (1994) may provide a valuable structure of student services for adult learners that incorporates the understanding of the multiple roles being balanced by many female graduate students. conclusion this study supported the findings of previous researchers that adult learners have needs that are varied and complex (gouthro, 2007; mallinckrodt & leong, 1992). the top stressors experienced by female online graduate students are related to health, family, and finance, supporting research by johnson et al. (2000) and park & hee jun (2009) in which the complicated issues surrounding this population of students were examined. significant differences in levels of stress experienced by female online graduate students based on age, ethnicity, length of time to degree, and total number of courses completed were also discovered through this research. although this study does not explore how the online format impacts persistence, further research could examine the specific effects of online learning on women’s levels of stress. additional studies could examine the impact of stress on persistence to degree since there were statistically significant findings based on several demographic and programmatic factors. references anderson, m. (1998). the experience of being in graduate school: an exploration. new directions for higher education. 101(1). advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 151 bachay, j. b. & cingel, p.a. 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(1995). the assessment of stress using life events scales. ins. cohen, r. kessler, & l. gordon (eds.), measuring stress: a guide for health and social sciences (pp.29-53), new york, ny: oxford press. younes, m., & asay, s. (1998). resilient women: how female graduate students negotiate their multiple roles. college student journal, 32(3), 451. advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership education and women's resiliency: exploring the experiences of successful women from disadvantaged backgrounds pamela lepage-lees, ed.d lepage-lees, summer, 1998 while some research has explored the needs of minority women, very little research has focused on women who have faced other disadvantages beyond those associated with minority status. a few years ago, i talked to a friend about hiring practices in academia. she had served on several search committees during her first year in a tenure track position. i was seeking a position in higher education and she was gave me advice as a result of her recent experiences. although i was most interested in educational psychology and women's issues, i also had quite a bit of experience in other areas of education, for example, educational technology. i wondered if having interests, experiences and publications in other areas would seem a benefit (broad experience) or a detriment (unfocused). much of my more current research was related to my true interests, but i was afraid of being judged by what i had done in the past. the response from her department was of particular interest to me since many of the women in her department considered themselves feminists. she responded that the search committee members had great sympathy for "people like me." they recognized the problem as being related to lack of mentorship as opposed to lack of focus or talent. ultimately the results were the same. candidates without a singular focus were overlooked. in some ways these women were correct, i did not always have good mentoring, although this is a simplistic interpretation of my situation. lack of mentoring is a common problem among women and nontraditional students. the questions then becomes, what are other problems and what should be done about them? in this situation a few academics understood the barriers to inclusion for women and nontraditional applicants, and were concerned about this issue, but could not find a way to put their moral beliefs into practice. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html this paper is not a personal anedote, it is a research paper born out of my dissertation where i interviewed women who achieved highly in academics and who were also disadvantaged as children. in that study, stories such as the example described above were commonplace. the purpose of my dissertation was to understand how education assisted these women in their academic achievement or hindered them in their progress. in this paper, i would like to explore the barriers to education for women in higher education and report how some women have overcome these barriers. women and high achievement other authors have addressed why some women achieve highly despite barriers to their success. in this area, most authors have solicited input from successful women in minority groups or in particular occupations (flores, 1988; furumoto, 1980; gotwalt & towns, 1986; hobson-smith, 1982; o'connell & russo, 1980; wyche & graves, 1992). for example, hobson-smith (1982) interviewed 12 africanamerican women who have achieved highly in academics and who also worked in higher education. the profiles in that research indicate that these women became aware of their potential in their formative years. each was nurtured and encouraged by strong family members and occasionally by professionals, such as teachers. these high-achieving african american women possessed a keen awareness of their strengths and a commitment to better the lives of all people, especially african-americans. the majority of them felt they had been victims of both race and sex discrimination and had to exert energy to fight both. this wasted time, which could have been better utilized doing other things. hard work and preparation were believed to be the essential ingredients for career success. while some research has explored the needs of minority women, very little research has focused on women who have faced other disadvantages beyond those associated with minority status. specifically, few researchers have attempted to understand and describe the special needs of women who have faced multiple disadvantages, especially those who experienced traumatic stress as children. harrington and boardman conducted a study that used biographical information to explain why some people from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve (in wells, 1989). these investigators interviewed 30 men (15 anglo and 15 african-american) and 30 women (15 anglo and 15 african-american) whom they described as people who were disadvantaged as children and were now successful as adults. subjects were considered disadvantaged if their parents did not graduate from high school or if their parents had low-status jobs. these investigators also interviewed 40 people whom they described as not being disadvantaged. subjects were not disadvantaged if at least one of their parents had graduated from high school or held a higher-status job. according to their findings, men and women who were successful despite their disadvantage were willing to confront obstacles directly rather than indirectly were more likely to turn failure around to their advantage were better trained for failure had an internal locus of control were self-sufficient were strongly motivated to achieve were reward oriented some of their conclusions are similar to mine, even though harrington and boardman's project (in wells, 1989) is different in many ways. for example, similar to harrington and boardman's results, the women in my study often turned their disadvantages to their advantage. many recognized, for example, that although disadvantage made the education process more difficult, it also motivated them to achieve and gave them a better understanding of different perspectives. other similarities and differences are described in the findings section of this article. harrington and boardman's study is different than mine mainly because their definition of disadvantage is very different. although parent education level has been recognized as an important achievement factor, it is not the only source of disadvantage. finally, in another study, gandara (1982) interviewed 17 mexican-american women who were from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and who also succeeded in completing a j.d., m.d., or ph.d. degree. although the author did not focus on her participants' childhood stress, they could easily be labeled disadvantaged not only because of their race and economic status, but also because they were first generation (in this country) and most of their families spoke only spanish in the home. in her study, gandara emphasized family influences. specifically, her findings showed that a mother's encouragement to persist, a strong work ethic in the family, a nonauthoritarian style of parenting, and equal treatment for girls and boys were all important factors in promoting success. although it was reported that a large percentage of these women lived in homes where they spoke spanish, the women also attributed some of their success to the fact that they were comfortable with both hispanic and anglo culture. the investigator credited their comfort to the fact that most of these women had attended highly integrated schools. finally, one last relevant finding was that the women in gandara's study most often credited their successes to their families, while men most often attribute their success to inner strength. this was also a characteristic of the women who were interviewed for this study. they often blamed themselves for their failures and credited their families with their successes. method participants in this project, in-depth interviews were conducted with 21 academically high achieving women who were also disadvantaged as children. qualitative measures were used to explore how education assisted these women in their academic achievement or set up barriers to their success. to qualify as disadvantaged, the participants had to have these experiences in common, 1) they lived in either a poor working class or lower class family as a child, 2) they were first generation college students, 3) they experienced at least one type of familial dysfunction or traumatic childhood stress (physical and or sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, severe illness and, or other stress). this identified women as disadvantaged if they did not have access to resources in three categories: financial, informational and social/emotional. to qualify as high achievers, the participants had to have an advanced degree or currently be enrolled as an advanced graduate student with at least two years of graduate work completed. women were recruited from all disciplines including, but not limited to, education, law, medicine, engineering, business, literature and psychology. the group of resilient participants included representatives from different ethnic groups including, african-american, european-american and hispanic. data collection methods and procedures data were collected in three ways, through in-depth interviews, questionnaires and historical records. when appropriate, information from one source was used to enrich information provided from another. interviews. in-depth personal interviews were used to describe and explain the educational experiences of each participant. these interviews provided the opportunity to explore in detail each participant's ideas and feelings about her education. the interviews were open-ended; the interviewer guided the inquiry, but the participants were allowed to discuss in detail what they considered important about their lives and their educational experiences. the interviews were audiotaped and then transcribed verbatim in preparation for analysis. questionnaire. after the interview was completed, an experience questionnaire was administered to each participant. the design of this questionnaire was guided by pilot study findings. the questionnaire provided a second opportunity for the participants to express their attitudes about education in a completely different format. the answers from the questionnaires were compared to the interview data to ensure that consistent answers were provided by each participant. transcripts. historical records were also used as a third and final check for consistency. participants were asked to sign a letter of permission so that the investigator could send away for transcripts from high schools, colleges and graduate schools. by analyzing transcripts, not only was the investigator able to compare actual records with self-report data, but these records were also used to identify the types of classes taken by individual students, grade levels in certain subjects, patterns of class enrollment and elements of transition from high school to college. data analysis the challenge of qualitative data analysis is to make sense of massive amounts of data, identify significant patterns, and construct a framework for communicating the essence of what the data reveal (patton, 1990). transcripts were made from each interview and descriptive data were presented in a way that people could draw their own conclusions. for example, dialog quotes were coded and listed as evidence, and demographic information was presented in tables. interviews were analyzed with an inductive cross-case analysis. inductive analysis means that the patterns, themes and categories emerged out of the data rather than being imposed on them prior to data collection and analysis. a cross-case analysis means that the information was grouped together according to different people, themes, perspectives or issues. in this project, data was organized topically. in the final step, the data was interpreted. interpretation, by definition, goes beyond description. interpretation means attaching significance to what was found, offering explanations, drawing conclusions, making inferences, building linkages, attaching meanings, imposing order and dealing with rival explanations. rigor within the positivist paradigm, a study's rigor is judged through measures of reliability and validity. lincoln and guba (1985) have offered the following four alternative terms which are more applicable in determining the rigor of a study conducted within an interpretivistic paradigm including, credibility, comfirmability, dependability and transferability. to check for credibilty, the interview data was supplemented with information provided in the questionnaires and in other historical documentation (transcripts). as an additional check for credibility, the women in this study were given a copy of the final report and asked to provide feedback on whether or not the results accurately reflected their voices. the women's response were very positive. to check for confirmability, two outside observers (in addition to the dissertation committee members) were asked to evaluate the interpretations. both outside observers were men. one outside observer is a psychologist who has ten years of clinical experience. the second outside observer has a ph.d. in mechanical engineering. by allowing the interpretations to be analyzed by two people with perspectives other than that of the researcher, additional objectivity was added to the evaluation process. dependability refers to the researchers attempts to account for changes in the design created by a refined understanding of the setting, this represents assumptions different from those shaping the concept of reliability. positivists assume an unchanging universe where an inquiry could be replicated. interpretivists believe that the social world is always changing and replication is itself problematic (marshall & rossmanm, 1989) it was not necessary to make changes during this investigation. finally, transferability refers to the applicability of the findings to other settings, contexts and groups. the results of this study cannot be generalized to other women who have achieved highly in academics and who were also disadvantaged as children. however, by using detailed information that was gathered through multiple methods, other researchers can explore the data and the results and determine the applicability of the findings to their specific situations. triangulation of methods through the use of multiple cases, multiple outside observers, multiple sources of data and multiple theories strengthen the transferability of the results. results the results of this study are organized into five sections . these five sections include, 1) relationship to disadvantage, 2) personalities of resilient women 3) what women want from schools 4) patterns of achievement and development, and 5) family and community influences. in the original report, the results of this study were described in two hundred pages. the results have been condensed for readability. relationship with disadvantage many of the participants questioned their status as disadvantaged. when women volunteered for this study, they often wondered whether they were qualified. this was interesting since most of these women had experienced serious difficulties as children including poverty, sexual and physical abuse, mental illness, alcoholism, family discord, racism and sexism and many other stressors. still, some participants had difficulty categorizing themselves as disadvantaged. obviously, the word "disadvantage" had different meanings to various people. there are many reasons why the women in this study may have been hesitant to adopt the label of disadvantage. first, disadvantage is often defined according to some type of imaginary scale. it is inevitable that someone else is more disadvantaged than you. it can seem pretentious to claim that you have faced adversity. and, the participants were extremely modest. also, some definitions of disadvantage are associated with functioning. in other words, some believe that a person can only be disadvantaged if the stress they endure negatively affects another part of their life. schools often adopt this definition and label students "disadvantaged" if they do poorly in school. in the late 70's and early 80's it became unpopular to describe children as disadvantaged because of family functioning because this classification was considered racist (wilson, 1987). in the past, the word disadvantage has been associated with deficiencies in the child-rearing practices of african-american families (ford, 1993, bronfenbrenner, 1979). the women of color were most cautious about claiming they were disadvantaged. yet, they were less reticent to claim that they had been oppressed or discriminated against. in fact, none of the women who were ethnic minorities claimed to be disadvantaged because of their race. however, all agreed that they had experienced some type of discrimination because of their ethnicity. this is an interesting contradiction since most would agree that discrimination puts people, especially children, at a disadvantage. nonetheless, because of their personal feelings about the word disadvantage, women were uncomfortable describing themselves in that way. how women define and experience disadvantage and race can be important, especially if people achieve at higher levels when they are not aware, or do not acknowledge, their disadvantages. in this study, women blamed themselves, rather than the system, for their difficulties. yet, they attributed their success to family members or school interventions. these women had extremely high standards for themselves and saw achievement as completely dependent on their own abilities, not on the school and not on their family. also, most of the women believed they achieved at a higher level because professionals in educational settings did not know who they were as individuals. they actively hid their nontraditional histories. one participant said: i've never told anybody about my life. i think if people knew, they'd be shocked because i certainly don't give the appearance of someone that grew up totally abused like i did. when i was at harvard, going to school full-time and working full-time, i got really good grades and a couple of friends at the time would say, gee, we're not working, we live on campus and it's hard for us. how are you doing this? so i did get some peer support in that way, but i've never told any person about my background. they didn't know. did these attitudes allow the women to achieve at the level they now enjoy? or did they drain their energy, making academic achievement a difficult challenge? the data in this study suggest that these women faced consequences from hiding their true identity. for example, these women felt they were different and ultimately believed they did not belong in positions historically reserved for the privileged majority. also, these women were not able to seek help or promote themselves and were often misevaluated as a result. so, although these women were independent, and able to achieve, they had to struggle to reach their full potential. personalities of resilient women some of the participants' common personality traits were explored in detail. often, investigators ignore the influence of personality and focus on family functioning. this is unfortunate since high achieving children often have siblings who do not achieve highly. in this study, personality, and individual responses to environment, were considered important. the common personality traits discussed include, maturity, confidence, benevolence, perfectionism and perseverance. these women were independent and mature for their age which made them more interested in an independent (adult-like) style of education. unfortunately, it also caused educators and counselors to believe these women did not need help. so, often they did not receive adequate counseling in high school and college. most of these women grew up as good girls and later became women who cared about making the world a better place to live. this is important because many girls act nice to gain the teacher's attention which causes the teacher to respond positively to their behavior and pay less attention to their academic needs (sadker & sadker, 1994). this may provide some explanation as to why girls often do well in elementary school and do less well in high school. the women in this study were ambivalent about their confidence. sometimes they were confident to the point of arrogance and at other times they were afraid to talk to professors because they felt unworthy. ultimately, they found enough confidence to try even when they faced rejection. the women were also perfectionists. although this trait helped them achieve at a high level, it also made the educational process more unpleasant because their style was at odds with instructional methods that focus on what students do wrong. the participants were dependent on positive feedback from school. criticism was intolerable. finally, the women were persistent, but in a way that precluded them from recognizing the difference between the level of work they demanded of themselves compared to that required of other students. for example, many believed that working full-time during school was a normal way to support themselves through college. there was no recognition that many other students did not work full-time during their undergraduate experience. what did women want from schools? what women need from teachers. with 21 participants, it was possible to recognize some common educational needs and experiences. first, teachers' personalities were more important than their teaching style. participants claimed they could easily adapt to different styles, but it was important for them to have teachers who were caring and attentive. participants were also interested in teachers who were somehow different. they connected with radical teachers who were nontraditional in their teaching style. one participant commented: what stands out for me are the radicals, the people who weren't behaving as they were supposed to, but somehow held up in this system. their nontraditional behavior was somehow excused because their students were learning and they were doing good. and that's who i thought i was going to be. participants also mentioned their disappointment in female professors. although these professors were role models, they were not as supportive as was expected. many of the participants felt that female professors acted like men (e.g., competitive and ambitious) to compete successfully in a educational system developed by and for men. also, the participants not only wanted women teachers, they wanted women who were like them. for example, they wanted to see women of color and women from disadvantaged backgrounds in positions of power. many thought that women who achieved highly were all caucasian women who had come from privileged backgrounds. guidance and mentors. only a few of the participants had any guidance in high school. there is some evidence of discrimination. for example, some students received bad counseling. in these cases, the participants were told they should pursue careers as secretaries or grocery clerks even though their grades were high and they were interested in college. in most cases however, the participants believed that professionals in the schools did not know, or were not fully aware, of their disadvantage. results suggest that the participants' disadvantages affected them in a way that made it difficult for them to take advantage of the counseling opportunities that were available. these women did not know how to seek advice or were too scared to ask for help. one participant suggested: i think this business of mentorship, i think you have to be receptive and seek someone out, and i didn't do that, and that's one of the things i learned how to do. i think there might be problems with people who have experienced trauma to the extent that they can't reach out to other people. they're really handicapped in the mentorship area. guidance in college was also important. those who had mentors were aware of the importance of that guidance. the women who did not have the proper guidance chose the wrong majors, attended the wrong schools and expended extra energy to accomplish at levels comparable to those with mentors. not only did each woman need academic guidance, it was also important for each women to be validated for being smart or special. in fact, it was important for these women to get validation for being above average. when the participants were considered average or below average, they often felt as though they should quit or change directions. success in school strengthened their self-esteem, when often it was being weakened at home. ingrained structure and attitudes that discourage learning. the participants provided examples of the norms and structures within the school system that discouraged their progress. many problems stemmed from a hierarchical system that encourages certain behaviors and attitudes. for example, people on the bottom of a hierarchy are often expected to be compliant and to show deference to those in positions above them. this structure is offensive to these women because they want to be valued as an equal. these women believed they have had more life experiences than their privileged counterparts and therefore had difficulty accepting the traditional role of a student or as a low level professor who is considered inexperienced and less knowledgeable. another reason that women have difficulty accepting a hierarchical structure is because they were often at the bottom of an abusive hierarchy associated with their families. in these situations, they had no control or recourse for unfair treatment. for this reason, they were uncomfortable when they found this structure replicated in the school system. some of the structures that are in place to support the hierarchical school system are the elitist way colleges are stratified, traditional testing methods that misevaluate nontraditional students, and competitive, rather than cooperative, methods of teaching and learning. patterns of academic achievement and intellectual development it was found that these women did very well in elementary and graduate school and did less well in high school and college. the data suggest that these women enjoyed the individualized attention in elementary and graduate school, and they were more comfortable in graduate school when they were given the opportunity to decide what was important for them to learn. the data also suggest that these women developed higher level thinking skills at an early age. many of the women seemed to develop what has been described as inter-and intra personal intelligence (gardner, 1983), or emotional intelligence (goleman, 1995). unfortunately, since they did not always present themselves well, they were evaluated inaccurately and provided with educational opportunities that bored them. later, these women often felt they had special abilities and were disappointed when these abilities were never (or seldom) recognized. one woman said: i know so many women who have always wanted someone to say, "i can tell you're gifted, and i want you to stay in my class because you're really good in this particular area." i know so many women who have wanted that to happen. they all have this seed of awareness that they've got something really great to offer, they just don't know which direction to go. i never had that. i had a couple of people that i sort of poked at enough and they finally helped me work things out, that kind of thing. family and community influence it is surprising that even those participants who faced an enormous amount of childhood stress described at least one member of their family as influential. in fact, many participants listed family members (especially mothers) as the one factor in their lives that was most important in helping them achieve. when the women spoke about significant others, usually they described them as helpful and encouraging. however, some were not, especially when the women had experienced traumatic divorces during their school experience. none of the women credited their husbands, boyfriends or significant others for their achievement. however, many claimed that their children motivated them to continue because they wanted to provide something better for them. women also mentioned the importance of the community. although their experiences were most affected by their family of origin, their extended family, friends and neighbors were also helpful at various times. conclusions so why did these women achieve? whether positive or negative, they adapted and assimilated to the majority culture. they hid who they were because they believed their backgrounds reflected on them negatively. their circumstances at home motivated them to seek out reinforcement in other places, and they sought reinforcement in the only way they knew how, by being good girls and excelling in school. since most girls develop faster in elementary school than boys, elementary school was easy for them. this was especially true for this group, since they acquired higher-level thinking skills early to protect themselves from childhood stress. later, in high school, academics were not as easy, because in elementary school these girls had concentrated on gaining reinforcement through behaviors rather than through learning. still, since these women were convinced in elementary school that they were smart and special, they never gave up the idea that they had something special to offer. and although it was difficult, they adjusted in high school and especially in college to the amount of effort needed to compensate for the changes in expectations. as adults, they continued to attract some attention and some rewards for their accomplishments, so their belief that they could earn rewards (money, status, etc.) continued to motivate them on their difficult journey. their motivation was enhanced by the fact that they were drawn toward something (e.g., graduate school, positions at work, etc.) where they could use their intellectual abilities. they were never satisfied with jobs that did not challenge their intellect. although these women achieved highly, the process of being educated was not always enjoyable, because often they lacked confidence, felt out of place, and clashed with an educational system that is often still more suited to traditional students. still, these women persevered because they were motivated to change their lives and prove they were capable. references bronfenbrenner, u. (1979). beyond the deficit model in child and family policy. teachers college record, 81(1). 95-104. flores, j. (1988). chicana doctoral students: another look at educational equity. also in garcia, h. s., & ghavez, r. ethnolinguistic issues in education (1988). (eric document reproduction service no. ed 316 041). furumoto, l. (1980). biographies of eminent women in psychology: models for achievement. psychology of women quarterly, 5 (1): 55-139. gandara, p. (1982). passing through the eye of the needle: high-achieving chicanas, hispanic journal of behavioral sciences, 4. (2).167-179. gardner, h. (1983). frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences. new york: basic books. goleman, d. (1995). emotional intelligence: why can it matter more than iq? new york: bantam books. ford, d. y. (1993). black students' achievement orientation as a function of perceived family achievement orientation and demographic variables. journal of negro education, 62 (1). 47-66. gotwalt, n., & towns, k. (1986). rare as they are, women at the top can teach us all. the executive educator, 8 (12): 13-29. hobson-smith, c. (1982). black female achievers in academe. journal of negro education 51 (3): 318341. lincoln, y.s., & guba, e.g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. newbury park, ca: sage. marshall, c., & rossman, g. (1989). designing qualitative research. newbury park, ca: sage. o'connell, a. n., & russo, n. f. (1980). models for achievement: eminent women in psychology. psychology of women quarterly, 5 (1): 6-54. patton, m. q. (1990). qualitative evaluation and research methods . newbury park, ca: sage. sadker, m., & sadker, d. (1994). failing at fairness: how america's schools cheat girls. new york, ny: charles scribner's sons. wells, a. (1989). the disadvantaged: paths to success. ncee brief number 3. national center on education and employment, new york (eric document reproduction service no. ed 309 252) wilson, w. j. (1987). the truly disadvantaged the inner city the underclass, and public policy. chicago il: the university of chicago press. wyche, k. f., & graves, s. b. (1992). minority women in academia. psychology of women quarterly, 16 (4): 429-437. dr. pamela lepage-lees is an assistant professor at the institute for educational transformation, graduate school of education at george mason university,washington, d.c. awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 3, summer 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:plepage@osf1.gmu.edu file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/awl_summer98.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership dancing for self-knowledge joyce kutcher, ed.d. kutcher, winter, 1999 women have not been taught to take care of themselves. they frequently spend their time taking care of everyone and everything else, leaving themselves for last. women in modern day america lead truly busy lives, rushing around on a daily basis trying to make sure everything gets done--for significant others, for children, for bosses, and for work. paying attention to everyone else's needs and wants at the expense of considering their own can have detrimental effects on women. after years of spending time "doing for others", women may manifest signs of depression or anxiety. they may be angry, bitter, resentful, edgy; they may feel apathetic and lack passion for life. the feminist movement has created many positive opportunities and choices for women, but the creation of the superwoman ideal keeps women in an impossible and unrealistic position. women, in general, have not learned the importance of taking care of themselves. in the past 20 years, women in the mental health field have researched women's psychological development, providing answers as to why this is so (gilligan, rogers, & tolman, 1991; miller, 1986). it seems that while men's strength lies in separation and autonomy, women's strength lies in connection and relationships. girls are brought up to focus on relationships, which become primary to both girls and women. when asked to describe themselves, women and girls interweave who they are with how they are in connection with other people in their lives. however that strength becomes a weakness when it is carried too far and women spend all their time consumed with others. it is important that women find a balance between caring for others and caring for themselves. taking care of oneself can provide nurturance and sustenance to a drained, weary body and mind. when women take time to care for themselves, they are replenished with energy to move out into the world again. taking time for oneself implies becoming familiar with who one is as an individual--by looking within and learning about oneself. when life is too busy, there is no time for such self-reflection, and yet it is the very thing needed to keep going. dance provides opportunities to become familiar with oneself at http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html a deep level, opening an avenue for revitalization and renewal. the use of dance as a healing ritual goes back to earliest human history (chodorow, 1991, p. 1). through dance one comes to a deeper understanding of the self through integration of the body, mind, and emotions (kutcher, stone, & horan, 1997, p. 1). in this manuscript, the author introduces dance and its healing properties, while also focusing on how individual women can begin to use this creative art form for self-knowledge. the dance of life when anyone says the word dance, people usually think of choreographed steps or a routine that is to be performed. but dance is also a form of creative expression. self-expression takes place when an individual moves (dances) based on an impulse, feeling, image, or thought that spontaneously arises from within. there is no right or wrong way; the woman's dance is her dance. the way she moves today may be different from how she will move tomorrow. her movement is based on her thoughts, feelings, and experiences at a particular moment. after dancing for a time she may come to see patterns in her dance which represent something specific in her life. at a recent workshop, a few women commented on how their restricted movements were symbolic of their fear to take risks in the rest of their lives. through their dance experience, they were able to observe their fear revealed via their moving bodies. in other words, the dance provided concrete feedback. sometimes this dance feedback can be more powerful than words. dancing may bring forth material that has been stored in the unconscious. such information has a strong hold over one's life, in spite of the individual not being aware that it is part of her. for example, a woman may get angry every time she tries to talk to her husband when he is reading the newspaper. she may think this is only about her relationship with her husband. when she looks deeper, however, she realizes she felt ignored by her father, especially when he read the newspaper and watched television. if she becomes aware of why she feels ignored and then talks with her husband about it, she may no longer feel ignored by him when he reads the newspaper. as a result, the woman now has control over her actions, whereas before she could only react. becoming consciously aware gives an individual more choices of how to respond. in a dance workshop, a woman explored some new information she had obtained through her dance experience. she said, "my needs were to take care of her. but i have a hard time asking for myself. this was apparent by the way i allowed myself to move with others. the first step for me was the realization that i have inner needs to be taken care of. i would like to continue learning what else i have been depriving myself of." (kutcher, stone, & horan, 1997, p. 7). dance invites opportunities to connect mind with body. women's bodies, in western society, are a major source of discontent. women are always talking about their bodies and doing things like dieting and exercising their bodies rather than connecting with them. disconnection from the body keeps women at a distance from their feelings. via dance, emotions arise. feelings inform women about who they are and what is important. when women allow their feelings to surface and then pay attention to the feelings, the information they get may be used to make better decisions, decisions based on their own particularities and not the outer world. joining with one's body brings a deeper respect for the body and a more profound sense of self. before dancing, a woman may find a feeling arises or she may be stressed about a situation in her life. dancing can then be used for release and to help move through her feelings or life situation. in one instance, a participant commented that in spite of her current difficult life circumstances, she was able to let go of the painful feelings and feel at peace with herself while moving her body. in dance, the participant is gently guided into the here and now, the present moment. during this woman's dance, she was able to liberate herself from a difficult life situation and focus on being solely with herself. in this way she was able to experience that there is more to one's life than just the immediate situation. sometimes when a woman is overwhelmed by a difficult situation, she may forget there is more to who she is than just what is going on in the moment. the time spent dancing is also a time to reflect and to focus inward, which ultimately lends itself to learning more about oneself. dancing, like other expressive art forms, provides opportunities for developing one's curiosity, sense of adventure, and playfulness. after dancing, a workshop participant remarked that she felt the dancing was much like being a child again. indeed this is so. adults lose this sense of adventure and playfulness that children call on spontaneously. how come? often times there is a belief that adulthood is supposed to be filled with seriousness; adults may lose sight of the spontaneity and flexibility of childhood as they get bogged down in all the tasks of adulthood. dancing can help a person find her way back to playfulness. natalie rogers (1993, p. 3) described the healing process when using dance or any of the other expressive art forms. "the [individual's] self-knowledge expands as her movement provides clues for further exploration. using [dance] becomes a healing process as well as a new language that speaks to the [individual]. [dancing] is a potent [medium] in which to discover, experience, and accept unknown aspects of [the] self. [it] moves the [individual] into the world of emotions and add[s] a further dimension." dancing is an extremely powerful tool to assist in reconnecting to oneself. it offers nourishment to the exhausted and depleted body, mind, and soul. moving from the inside out women are so accustomed to doing and being according to external standards that learning to move according to one's own inner experience can be difficult. in preparation, find a comfortable place to sit or lie down and close your eyes. you will want to begin by taking deep, relaxing breaths, inhaling in and out slowly. pay careful attention to your breathing, while making sure you are letting go. when i say letting go, i mean feeling your body letting go of the tension it usually carries. you are relaxed when all of your body feels limp. then--based on an impulse, feeling, or image--begin to move. you may have an impulse to move your right arm or you may feel a deep sense of sadness in your heart and put your hands over your heart. your image may be of being sexy or turning into a wild woman. rogers (1993) talks about how transformation begins to take place during movement. if, for example, you start with a feeling, the steps to transformation may look like this : [you] feel ____________. [your] body moves __________. a new feeling emerges ______________. [your] body moves the new feeling which is _____________. another feeling arrives which is ___________. [your] body moves accordingly _________. another feeling comes, which is _____________. [your] body accepts this new feeling _____________. eventually, [your] body stretches and [your] eyes open. [you may find you are] keenly aware of all senses. by starting with the awareness of a feeling and allowing that feeling to create a dance, the feeling shifts, transforms, and [provides new information]. the original cause of the [feeling] does not disappear. [after such an experience, the body relaxes and the mind has new information that will help the person take action]. (rogers, 1993, p. 55). you may use the previous statements to watch the process of transformation occur in you. when beginning this work, it may be easier to keep your eyes closed so you stay focused on your inner experience. moving from the inside helps facilitate self-discovery (rogers, 1993). secure a safe place for your dancing. this environment needs to provide enough space so you can move freely; it must feel comfortable and secure to you. this space could be in your home, a friend's home, or outdoors. when you move, you will also want to consider whether or not to use music. you may decide to use music based on a certain mood, or you could decide to dance without music. let this choice be determined by your feeling state at that particular moment. it is important to decide if you would like another person to move with you or whether you want to move by yourself. at the beginning of your dance experiences, it could be extremely beneficial to ask another person to be a witness. you might ask a dance therapist another member taking part in a workshop or therapy group. such an individual could observe you as you move and then provide feedback. this person is not charged with interpretation of your dance, but asked to be with you during your dance experience. for example, in a recent workshop, the witness for a woman crawling across the floor on her elbows expressed pain and despair, and sensed persistence despite adversity. when this information was shared with the dancer, she felt extremely affirmed. even though it was someone else's experience, these words tied into her own experience. when conveying an experience to a mover, the witness speaks from her own experience. the witness will want to start with "i felt . . . . " the mover always speaks first and then the witness shares her experience. if you are going to move on your own and do not have a witness, you may consider witnessing yourself in a journal. as you witness your own movement over time, you will probably see some themes and experience personal growth from your new insights. however, always remember that keeping a journal is for you. there is no need to worry about grammar or punctuation. if you find you are blocked, write about feeling blocked. when someone is stuck in therapy, the therapist may ask about the feeling of being stuck. in this very same way, you can write about your stuck feelings in your journal. after a movement experience, it is a good idea to write whatever comes to your mind without censoring what you write. in psychotherapy, this is known as free association. you may use other expressive art forms to facilitate your cognitive understanding of the dance experience. you might keep a journal of art and/or poetry. an art journal may be created using paints, crayons, markers, oil pastels, chalks, and/or collage materials. you may choose to sculpt with clay. the choice is yours, your preference. you may use all the modalities or you may feel particularly aligned with one. there is no right or wrong way; just choose what is most comfortable for you. if you would like to dance and feel uncomfortable beginning on your own, it is important to listen to your intuition and find someone who can help facilitate this process for you. dance therapists may work with you individually or in a group setting, much like talk therapists. you may find a dance therapist in your neighborhood by getting in touch with the american dance therapy association. there may also be dance classes at your local university. some of the instructors will likely be teaching dance classes geared for healing purposes. lastly, you may find a psychotherapist who is trained to use expressive arts in therapy. you will want to question the therapist about his/her training. conclusion women have not been taught to take care of themselves. they frequently spend their time taking care of everyone and everything else, leaving themselves for last. via dance, women can begin to learn who they really are. as women take the time to go inside, a sense of balance is restored in their lives. when women feel restored, they are able to give to others in a way that is full of energy, caring, and love. references chodorow, j. (1991). dance therapy & depth psychology. new york: routledge. gilligan, c., rogers, a., & tolman, d. (eds.) (1991). women, girls, & psychotherapy. new york: the haworth press, inc. kutcher, j., stone, p., & horan, s. (1997). healing through creative movement: contact improvisation. unpublished manuscript. miller, j. b. (1986). toward a new psychology of women. boston: beacon press. rogers, n. (1993). the creative connection: expressive arts as healing. california: science & behavior books, inc. dr. joyce kutcher is an assistant professor in the department of educational administration and psychological services at southwest texas state university in san marcos, texas. jk13@swt.edu awl journal home page awl journal volume 2, number 1, winter 1999 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:jk13@swt.edu file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/june9/no4/awl_winter99.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership 2013 volume (33) 132 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 132-141, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper mentoring: a model for cultivating leadership competencies in kenyan women religious jane wakahiu, ph.d. executive director of the african sisters education collaborative (asec) and project manager, sisters leadership development initiative (sldi), marywood university, jwakahiu@marywood.edu, phone 570-961-4700, fax 5703406068 accepted september 9, 2013 encouraging leadership development in african women religious is an essential strategy to build their confidence to take on leadership positions and execute decisions efficiently in their organizations. using twelve kenyan women religious participants of a three-year, hilton foundation-supported sisters leadership development initiative (sldi) program, this qualitative case study examines the role of mentoring as a strategy to propagate meaningful leadership competencies and transfer of knowledge and skills to the trainees’ ministries and communities. also, the study assesses the best instructional practices used to deliver instruction to facilitate transfer of skills to the trainees’ workplaces. the design of the study was drawn from the diffusion of innovation theory (rogers, 2003). methodology consisted of on-site, in-depth interviews and field observations of the skills trainees practiced in their ministries. findings indicate that mentoring is a fundamental strategy that cultivated both career functions, to carry on leadership duties efficiently, and psychosocial support to improve work performance in mentors and mentees. the mentorship relationship generated a new level of discourse in their ministerial management; they became agents of change, and increased their self-efficacy and personal and professional growth. using both international and local faculty enhanced instruction and multiple leadership perspectives. the study confirms that on-the-job mentoring programs can be a strategy to encourage women in kenya to take on leadership positions and can build confidence, self-efficacy and a capacity to respond to complex organizational challenges. keywords: mentoring, leadership, instructional practices introduction in the united states, mentoring women is popular in academic and business circles and is considered a key individual and career development resource (schaller, 1996; robertson, 1996; hezlett & gibson, 2005). a mentor is an individual who is believed to have reached a certain level of success, and who has the ability to share the secrets of advancement with lessexperienced persons by providing mentorship and protection (schaller, 1996). mentorship refers to a relationship in which a more experienced or knowledgeable individual guides an aspiring individual. in practice, mentoring programs pair a junior with a senior executive (douglas, 1997; mccauley & douglas, 1998) and sometimes with a peer (douglas, 1997) to facilitate needed skills for growth of a mentee. the mentor’s guidance and protection is rewarded by raising the mentee to a higher position. researchers have revealed that more women encounter a continuum of barriers including struggle for access and success in academic, career and corporate places (boreen, johnson, niday & potts, 2009; hausma, 2003; rolf, 2007). thus, mentoring may be a strategy to support and encourage women in academia and corporate institutions and to promote career development. according to bandura (1986), human behavior is learned through observation and through modeling others. in their research on the application of social learning theory to leadership, charbonneau, barling and kelloway (2000) found that people tend to mirror behavior exhibited by their parents/seniors, and exhibit these behaviors with their peers. mentoring occurs through observation and modeling. therefore, the mentoring process may promote and nurture talents and skills and enhance the self-efficacy women need to achieve their career goals, and may also promote the transfer of similar skills to other women. there are few researchers that have examined the mentoring experiences of african women (thomson & dey, 1998; grant & simmons, 2008). moreover, sikazwe (2006), stromquist (2002), and salvaterra et al (2009) indicated that there is need for study on sub-saharan women’s leadership development. sikwzwe (2006), when studying the development of women’s leadership in rural communities in zambia, found that there is mailto:jwakahiu@marywood.edu advancing women in leadership 2013 volume (33) 133 dire need for women to be more visible in their own development and to be part of decision making processes (sikazwe, 2006). however, leadership literature has not provided studies that examine the mentoring experiences of women religious (catholic sisters) of sub-saharan africa, nor has it examined the impacts mentoring would have on the academic, career, and psychosocial advancement of these women. in this paper, women religious refers to catholic sisters, women who consciously and willingly make the choice to engage in charitable works and respond to humanitarian needs in the communities they serve. there are over 5,600 catholic sisters in kenya. all are involved in running a variety of programs and institutions including schools, healthcare centers, social welfare and pastoral programs among other activities. in this study, i examined the impact of mentoring as explained by 12 kenyan women religious participants of a 3year, conrad n. hilton-supported sisters leadership development initiative (sldi) program. these women are leaders in a variety of programs including schools, healthcare facilities, social welfare and pastoral programs. they were selected to participate in the program because they could practice and mentor their workforce on the knowledge and skills they gained from the program. sldi is a multi-track (finance, administration, project management and basic technology) leadership development program envisioned by steven hilton, ceo and president of the conrad n. hilton foundation. specifically sldi is geared towards the capacity building of catholic sisters in africa. the program is implemented by the african sisters education collaborative (asec) and marywood university. a mentoring component was built into the sldi. participants were required to mentor three or more co-workers on the knowledge and skills they acquired. it was assumed that building the mentoring requirement component into the program would expedite the creation and dissemination of best leadership practices in the home organizations of participants. the requirement afforded trainees an opportunity to read, understand and internalize the concepts so that they could effectively coach their colleagues and co-workers. boreen et al. (2009) posited that the mentoring concept grew out of a tradition in which the older and wiser were perceived to guide the young and aspiring leaders. apprentice relationships were traditional among the blacksmiths, builders, healers, and rainmakers of kenya, for example, where no formal schooling existed until recently. traditionally, it was understood that the older members of society had a responsibility to guide and nurture the less-experienced young so as to pass on conventional values. in the family setting, aunts and uncles were to mentor nieces and nephews, because they were perceived as more experienced and possessed the ability to guide young adults during their transition to adulthood to become adult males and females who were ready to start a family. these relationships can be perceived as mentorship because the older guided the young to develop the customary skills of fatherhood and motherhood, and to attain self-efficacy and career goals as defined by the traditional african customs. in the mentoring process, the mentor-mentee relationship allowed mentees to learn how to set and achieve goals, make decisions and solve problems. researchers have shown that successful mentoring brings about a change in the person being mentored (boreen et al, 2009; dansky, 1996; manstead & van-eckelen, 1998), resulting in personal and career transformation. also, transformation may occur in both mentor and mentee. transformation may occur in complex ways, including the creation of new ways of making meaning in circumstances and life events, and the alteration of individual patterns of thinking. in turn, the gaining of new understanding may result in the change of individual behaviors and practices. the mentoring component in sldi aims to provide an individual with the tools and experience that will promote their personal, career and psychosocial development. mentoring in this program has extended the mentors’ achievements to mentees which should increase mentee self-efficacy, professionalism and productivity. western researchers on academic, career, and business mentoring have established that mentoring patterns further the synergistic relationship between mentor and mentee, and that modeled behavior eventually transforms the mentee (ragins, 2001; smith 2006; mccall, 1998; hezlett, 2005; rock & garavan, 2006). studying mentoring among catholic sisters in kenya is a feasible strategy to provide evidence on the effects of mentoring on these women and may, by extension, lead to new mentoring methods for women in corporate and not for profit institutions. reframing organizations through mentoring personnel in organizations have invested in leadership development as a resource for maximizing productivity and improving performance in a vibrant society (mccall, 1998). in support of leadership development, charan, drotter and noel (2001) asserted that quality leaders shift their focus from individual performance to leading others. also, successful leaders encourage sustained skills training, mentoring and coaching in order to build meaningful leadership potential in their organizations, thereby increasing productivity (hill, 2003; ladyshewsky, 2007; patterson, 2003). these kinds of leaders enable individual members of the workforce to become functional contributors, and motivate them to mentor and coach others in order to increase organizational outputs and enhance quality relationships that encourage altruism, humility, vision, trust and service. the implications of mentoring, as practiced by the sldi trainees, are three-fold: the trainees are equipped with the relevant knowledge and skills needed to succeed in their workplace environment; they are empowered with expertise and experience as mentors who will work to practice new business styles and initiatives; and they are encouraged to remain connected in forums that promote networking and collaborative exchange of ideas. the participants are advancing women in leadership 2013 volume (33) 134 commissioned to impart similar skills to their mentees. the sldi model of leadership development provides facets that enhance participants’ self-knowledge and self-efficacy and that promote achievement of career goals. in turn, participants pass on similar skills in order to promote best leadership practices in their communities and organizations. mentoring is a viable strategy to reframe organizations managed by women religious in kenya. reflecting on the theory presented in bolman and deal’s (2003) reframing organizations, the globalization phenomenon would require revisualizations of organizations using a variety of perspectives, including the structural, political, human resource and symbolic frameworks. to effectively reframe organizations, quality leadership and management skills are imperative for current and upcoming leaders. members of the workforce need to be equipped with knowledge, skills, and the ability to lead and to bring desired change in their organizations. in this light, the sldi program is a reframing initiative. it is a program geared towards enabling catholic sisters to recognize their place in leadership and envision ways to address immediate needs while also responding to complex societal needs and global changes. the mentoring concept, as applied in the sldi program, aims to enhance participants’ ability to transfer skills to the workforce in their respective organizations. to provide cross-cultural fertilization, experienced international (american) and local (african) instructors in leadership development were recruited to teach in the program. purpose the purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the role and impact of mentoring as a strategy to propagate meaningful leadership competencies and transfer knowledge and skills to the organizations and communities managed by catholic sisters in kenya. i illustrate the best instructional practices used by both international (usa) and local (african) instructors to deliver instruction and to facilitate transfer of skills to the participants’ workplaces. theoretical framework diffusion of innovation theory, as described by rogers (1995), is applied to conceptualize the skills learned by the trainees and how they transfer these skills to their organizations as well as mentor their colleagues. rogers (1995) defined diffusion as “a process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (p. 23). diffusion of innovation describes how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. the model is helpful to ascertain leadership behaviors learned and mentored to the mentees by a consideration of the innovation, style of communication, and steps in decision making and practice. following rogers’ framework, the sldi program is an innovation to enable its participants to transfer leadership skills to improve service delivery and to expand their ministries. the diffusion of innovation model provides five essential phases: (a) knowledge, (b) persuasion, (c) decision, (d) implementation and (e) confirmation. these phases are illustrated as demonstrated in the sldi program. figure 1: a model of rogers’ diffusion of innovation as applied to the sldi program. design of the sisters leadership development initiative in response to the leadership needs of the catholic sisters in sub-saharan africa, the sisters leadership development initiative (sldi) was envisaged and became a reality with the support of a $2 million grant from the conrad n. hilton foundation. the sldi phase i program commenced in 2007 by enrolling a total of 340 women religious from kenya, uganda, tanzania, ghana and nigeria. another $2 million grant was provided for phase ii (2010-2012). a total of 463 sisters participated in this phase. however, researchers in this study focused on phase i participants. mccauley et al. (1998) defined leadership development as “strategies and activities that expand the collective capacity of an organization and its members to engage effectively in management roles and processes” (p. 2). therefore, sldi aims to strengthen and increase the leadership, financial and basic technology skills of women religious of africa, so they can offer quality services and expand their ministries. the outlined sldi program goals were: (a) ability to transfer the skills and knowledge needed for effective project and financial management, (b) encouragement of creative and effective leadership, (c) increase in abilities to identify and mobilize resources, (d) expanded knowledge of development issues that impact the socio-economic and political life of individuals and communities, (e) enhancement of skills in human relations, and (f) development of a strategic plan and plans to ensure sustainability of the projects (sldi program, handbook, 2007). to achieve these goals, 10-week training was conducted to 340 women religious in five countries, kenya, uganda, tanzania, ghana, and nigeria; however, the focus of my study was in kenya. method to determine the role and the impact of mentoring and best instructional strategy applied to facilitate the transfer of skills to the trainees’ organizations, i employed qualitative case study advancing women in leadership 2013 volume (33) 135 methodology drawing from empirical data collected in kenya. a case study examines a single entity, phenomenon or social unit (merriam, 2002). data were collected through face-to-face interviews with the mentors and by conducting site visit observations in kenya. during the interviews, the interviewer became the main instrument because she directed the interview process (kvale & brinkman, 2009). astuteness, then, is required in crafting the interview questions, in order to ascertain the credibility and dependability of the items. prior to the site visit in kenya, a pilot study was conducted to determine the accuracy and consistency of the interview questions. after the analysis of the pilot study, six research questions were adopted to facilitate the interview process; they include: (a) how did the lessons on mentoring help identify resources in your work and ways to work with your mentees?; (b) what were difficulties or successes in mentoring?; (c) what was the lasting effect of the leadership training and mentoring in you and your mentee?; (d) “how would the skills you learned and mentored continue into the future?; (e) “what instructional strategies were relevant for skills-transfer to your workplace?; and (f) “what were the differences in instructional strategies applied by both american and african instructors?. participants a random sample of 12 women was selected from a group of 60 women religious in kenya who were participants of the three-year sldi program. a criterion of selection was that participants had to have completed the leadership program and had to be from a unique congregation (institute). in addition, only four participants were selected from each of the three sldi tracks, which included finance, administration and project management. these women had the opportunity to learn and practice the knowledge and skills acquired from the sldi program. they were in leadership positions, which enabled them to practice and mentor the workforce. an e-mail containing a cover letter introducing the purpose of the study and inquiring about willingness to take part in the research was sent to sixty sldi participants in kenya. from all favorable replies, a random sample consisting of twelve individuals was selected using the alphabetical last name as a criterion of selection. then, a consent letter was sent to the twelve participants guaranteeing confidentiality and optional withdrawal from the study at any time. follow-up telephone calls were placed to schedule the interview time, venue and date. findings and discussion the four themes that emerged include: (a) meaningful instructional strategies, (b) skills-mentored, (c) skills-transfer and capacity building, and (d) transformation and networking. mentoring was cited as a beneficial strategy that allowed for skills transfer and practice. meaningful instructional strategies participants explained that instructional strategies applied by instructors were relevant because they used similar strategies to mentor and conduct workshops to their colleagues. the strategies allowed them to reflect, internalize and remember the knowledge and skills in order to share with their co-workers. trainees described instructional strategies and materials that helped learn and transfer the skills to their workplaces. the instructional strategies cited as most feasible were categorized into three groups: (a) participatory interactive strategies, which included group discussion, lectures, questioning, case studies, and role play, (b) project-based strategies including action plans, hands-on activities, computer skills practices, peer mentoring and designing projects in groups, and (c) training materials for further exploration, including textbooks, mp3 players, visual materials, and podcasts. trainees appraised the mixing of international (american) and local (africa) instructors as a best strategy to broaden their leadership perspectives. they argued that american instructors provided leadership and mentoring examples from their culture, which were meaningful and relevant to the african work environment context. similarly, african instructors drew examples from political, economic, cultural and religious issues facing africa. they said they could resonate with the examples provided, and that they reflected on the concerns and issues facing their work environment. in turn, the trainees used similar strategies in conducting workshops or mentoring their colleagues. for example, case studies were cited as an essential tool for engaging trainees in reflective discussion. priscilla, a school bursar, explained, “i still remember a case that dealt with financial mismanagement due to poor recording of transactions … the individual in the case lost the job and had to pay the money … it was a big lesson for me … cases were good, we were able to think and analyze consequences of practical situation.” maria, a hospital financial administrator, noted, “in group discussion i learned listening, teambuilding skills and appreciation that other people are equally knowledgeable, and have something to contribute to the group … my confidence was built up to realize that i do not have to be correct … the most important thing is that i share my own perspective about an issue.” another trainee, sophia, a bursar, said of group work: we discussed and reported in the plenary about the topic in question, we gained confidence and ability to support our views in the class … also working in groups enhanced teamwork and ability to involve colleagues … my view to respect people for who they are was transformed … i do not need to force my ideas as the only correct ones but involve others. giber, carter, and goldsmith (1999), during their investigation of the best practices in leadership development, conducted a survey of 50 companies engaged in leadership development. findings showed that mentoring programs and action learning were reported to be the most successful efforts. furthermore, researchers who examined the differences between formal and advancing women in leadership 2013 volume (33) 136 informal mentoring indicated a significant difference between the two (ragins & cotton, 1999), with informal having more beneficial outcomes (dansky, 1996). it was thought that informal mentoring would be a more viable strategy because of intergroup relations that existed among the women religious and the desire to bring change and promote competency in their ministries. in the process, the focus of a competent mentor or leader is on planning, assigning work, motivating and coaching others. the goal of making training transferable is identifying the trainee transfer needs, providing interventions through action plans, mentoring, and matching the content to the trainee setting (lim &morris, 2006; lim, 2000). in addition, researchers in leadership studies (reinett, foster & sullivan, 2002; mccauley et al., 1998) asserted that knowledge acquisition is the first step in obtaining the necessary leadership skills. in this view, relevant instructional techniques that connect to the trainee transfer needs must be used. conversely, knowledge by itself may not be sufficient to change an individual’s leadership behavior and practices. practice of skills helps the trainee to claim competence. therefore, instructional expertise must be sought to provide the best leadership growth experience. trainees acquired new ideas by learning the set courses; they selected and practiced the skills relevant to their ministry. skills-mentored salient skills mentored by participants to their colleagues’ depicted issues and concerns trainees found to be imperative and needed to be addressed in their workplaces. all trainees identified relevant knowledge and skills that they acquired and mentored to their mentees and co-workers. the competencies mentored were similar to those embedded in the initial grant proposal and related to the competencies cited by trainees as essential, suggesting the success of mentoring in their communities. table 1 illustrates some of the skills trainees mentored. table 1 percent of sample skills and competencies mentored as reported by trainee mentored skills n % communication 11 92 mentoring 11 92 teambuilding 11 92 delegation 11 92 leadership styles 10 83 grant writing 10 83 financial management 10 83 time management 10 83 report writing 10 83 developing agenda 10 83 report writing 10 83 job description 10 83 needs assessment 10 83 motivation 10 83 conducting meetings 10 83 stress management 9 75 conflict resolution 9 75 bank reconciliation 9 75 swot analysis 9 75 budgetary control 9 75 property management 9 75 internal control 9 75 public speaking skills 9 75 when asked why they considered mentoring of particular skills relevant, mariatta responded, “time management is vital in accomplishing goals and tasks …most of my staff could waste time chatting on issues not related to our work… i conducted a time management workshop … there is change.” all 12 trainees (100%) concurred that their mentees were able to mentor others in their communities, thereby creating a cyclical, trickle-down effect in the ministries. trainees commended the mentoring component. to some, it was totally a new idea. though they were training each other on their jobs, they never referred to it as mentoring. understanding the concept accelerated the training, as illustrated by sophia’s description on the effect of mentoring: i mentored five people on communication, facilitation, teambuilding strategies, conducting meetings, delegation and facilitation skills, grant writing, and project planning … my mentees chose what they wanted to be mentored from the notes and handouts i provided from the training … it was so encouraging, we reflected on how we had been doing things … the skills were important to the mentees as teachers, particularly to communicate to co-workers and establishing routines, teamwork, conducting meetings, drawing memos, and developing agenda. also, jacinta elaborated: i mentored eight staff members and i conducted three training sessions to the entire teaching and nonteaching staff at my school … the topics i facilitated included job description, time management, motivation skills, conflict resolution, qualities of a leader, leadership styles, financial management and accountability and grant writing … the skills were important because we had issues … as a team in the school we needed to have a new direction in the school management. skills-transfer the mentoring concept had an enormous lifelong and sustainable effect on the trainees and mentees and in their ministries. interviewees reported having mentored far greater numbers than they had initially contemplated. mentoring was conducted by all 12 interviewees (100%); combined, they mentored a total of 52 co-workers and conducted seminars to 180 co-workers and colleagues. overall, mentoring had incalculable success. additionally, interviewees incorporated advancing women in leadership 2013 volume (33) 137 concepts of the knowledge and skills they acquired into their professional development or religious formation curriculum. the reasoning for building these skills into their development plans was the recognition that each individual contributes to her organization in a unique way, and needs to understand her leadership strengths and nurture them. susan a school principal reported, everyone has a part in the five leadership styles … it was important for members of staff to learn about grant writing, teambuilding, leadership styles … i did not know about needs assessment before i came for this course; i felt that my mentees too needed to know too, and they were indeed happy, we are still working together. trainees expressed that mentoring was a new concept to them, though in some ways they were already mentoring; this being the case, they did not have difficulty in identifying their mentees, because they were colleagues with related job functions. mercy, a healthcare administrator reported, mentoring was a new concept for most of us, though we did mentoring in our own world we did not call it that, we were required to conduct a formal mentoring process. we were not to mentor our friends, but a structured mentoring situation; this was very new to us. some participants organized seminars to teach their staff and community about better management of their institutions. anne a social worker and a program officer said, “mentees too learned something new and implemented the skills … they too began spreading the knowledge and skills … indeed i would say the goals and objectives on mentoring were completely achieved.” mentoring infused in the trainees, via instruction, a new way to nurture the skills they had acquired. in the sldi program, the focus on mentoring enhanced the ability of trainees to pass on the skills that they acquired to their colleagues and co-workers. the relationship centered on increasing the mentee capacity in two ways: through career development and through psychosocial support. several researchers have elucidated the mentoring concept as it pertains to career and psychosocial elements (ragins & kram, 2007; baron & morin, 2009). career functions involve increasing mentees’ exposure and capacity to carry out their duties efficiently, while psychosocial functions involve work performance, increasing self-efficacy, and providing friendship and personal and professional growth. the mentors’ and mentees’ relationships were beneficial to the dissemination of the desired leadership skills in their workplaces. trainees practiced the skills so as to be able to transfer similar skills to their mentees. they sowed seeds of encouragement and self-confidence in their mentees and coworkers. transformation transformation connotes a change or move from one form to another. transformation takes two forms: internal or external. internal transformation was evident in the participants’ selfrealization or a change in thinking patterns. this type of change can be evident in an individual’s pattern of doing things. as a result, the effects are evident not only in the person but also in their behavior and organization, and in the way they approach and complete things. lucy a healthcare worker reported, “the course gave me new ideas, it gave me confidence, i have the ability to do more and in a better way … mentoring changed me, i had to learn and understand because i could not mentor what i did not know.” josephine, a school teacher, added, “i am a new leader with new perspectives.” all the interviewees affirmed that mentoring is transforming their workplaces, because their colleagues were interested in learning and practicing the new skills. as a result, trainees conducted seminars because the demand for mentoring was high; as beatrice a financial administrator explained, “i conducted seminars and workshops to all project accountants and community accountants, we have developed a financial manual on guidelines about banking, and financial expenditure plans for all the projects we supervise.” the mentors became more self-confident and pushed harder to understand the concept so that they could in turn share knowledge with others. the sisters who were mentored felt like part of the program, even though they had not attended it. their sense of enrichment indicates that they had benefited from an opportunity to learn something, and so that was a plus. the women religious mentored more than they had initially thought; they conducted seminars and workshops for their colleagues and workplaces, creating a very positive scenario with the knowledge and skills they acquired. some mentored priests who they work with in parishes, so that they were on the same page in order to accomplish their administrative duties. as consolata, a pastoral care coordinator, described, “ the priest wanted to know what we learned in the training … i explained to him … i mentored him about delegation, teamwork, inventory, ethical leadership, financial management, report writing, grant writing, budgeting and balancing bank accounts.” individual change is the beginning of an inner journey to selfdiscovery. internal change would likely propel external change in workplaces. the participants reported self-discovery about their preferred leadership styles, articulating the ability to unlearn bad tendencies and taking on the meaningful leadership and managerial styles gathered from the training. the emphasis on change and new understanding of leadership concepts and styles created new understandings in the participants that were relevant for self-understanding: irene, administrator of a counseling center, described; the course gave me new ideas, it gave me confidence, i have the ability to do more and in a advancing women in leadership 2013 volume (33) 138 better way because of the leadership knowledge … i am a very strong introvert so i always thought leaders had to be extroverts … now i know i do not have to become talkative to be a leader but just plan and do what i know to do as a leader. learning and mentoring leadership skills created transformation and change in the organizations. susan, a trainee, elaborated: i am a new leader with new perspectives … i do believe that we left the training with a lot more confidence. i see leadership in a lot of different formats, not just the high-profile, so in that respect i think it has changed me and certainly i am changing my workplace. regarding networking, participants reported a change in their capacity to collaborate and work together. beatrice reported about networking, “i gained in this course and something that will always remain with me is the capacity to collaborate and work together with the sisters and co-workers.” recognition of the practices that engender change is a step towards achieving the desired lasting effect. in addition, participants reported that they had developed a capacity for empowering other people to become self-reliant and to manage their lives independently. regarding self-reliance, consolata said, “self-reliance is the desire of every human being … i am glad we have helped orphaned children and girls who become pregnant when they are not prepared to develop independent lifestyle.” also, jacinta appraised how grant writing skills created a lasting effect in her organization: “i was able to source for funds to create projects … construction of science laboratory and classrooms to provide education for poor children because endowing them with education is the beginning of transformation.” learning about a financial manual was a turning point for the trainees in the financial track, as mercy explained: “the manual is the guideline of what i do about banking, financial expenditure plans … also for all other project accountants that i supervise … this is a new change that is here to stay … i have conducted seminars in the province training the projects and community bursars how to use it.” the leadership competencies were described as a lasting effect, because they enable trainees to increase efficiency in organizational management. mentoring, as described and practiced by the trainees, had a huge impact among the trainees, their mentees, and their communities, and is a sustainable strategy to perpetuate knowledge, skills, career development and social support among co-workers. the goal of mentoring was to disseminate knowledge and skills to colleagues and co-workers, so that all could facilitate change and efficient service delivery. trainees as mentors assumed the role of enablers, peer supporters, motivators and encouragers to stimulate mentees’ and coworkers’ resourcefulness. changes affected might help eradicate poverty, enhance highquality leadership in others, and broaden projects. although building leadership abilities by training does not mean that good leadership will necessarily result in the environment, employing best policy and practice in leadership development is essential to its formation, and this study strives to describe the essential components. conclusion as illustrated from the experiences of the twelve women religious, mentoring had untold impacts on them and their colleagues. the mentoring process allowed for skills, transfer and dissemination of knowledge and skills to their organizations. this created transformations, strengthened work relationships as well as built teams. mentorship is essential for leadership development and the speedy transfer of skills. a key goal of any leadership program is to effectively transfer knowledge and skills to the trainees. caffarella (2002) defined transfer of learning as “effective application by the program participants of what they learned as a result of attending an education or training program” (p.204). several factors contribute in the participants’ transfer and practice of the skills they acquired in skills development programs, including the program design (caffarella, 2002), the content of the program (dorfman et al., 1997; hezlett, 2005), the organizational set-up, and the community or social and environmental factors (allen, 2003; russon & reinelt, 2004). a variety of research studies in organizational change demonstrate that sometimes successful skills implementation proves impalpable or difficult to measure (kotter, 1996; senge, 1992; ulrich, 1998). for example, according to an ibm (2006) study on ceo perception of change implementation, the description of success varied. critical variables for leaders to fruitfully bring about desired change in organizations include a level of mentorship, communication, motivation, involvement of colleagues and team building (gill, 2003; lim & johnson, 2002; longnecker, 2004; schnake, 2007). also, cognitive processing during learning requires attention in order to capture and internalize behavior so as to model it in the future. moreover, moxley and o’conner-wilson (1998) suggest that an organization’s leadership development program needs to focus on the effective operational skills that can be transferred in their organizational setting. so, leadership programs that fail to align the program with the real organizational environment can create difficulties for skills transfer and practice. researchers in this study revealed that mentoring was a success, supporting the findings suggested by the social learning theory (bandura, 1986; 1977), which holds that human behavior is learned through observation and modeling others (bandura, 1986). as a result of observations, learning becomes a reciprocal relationship between an individual and advancing women in leadership 2013 volume (33) 139 the environment. bandura (1977) postulated that humans learn behavior through socialization (e.g. leadership, moral behavior) and model from their parents or leaders. modeling here can be viewed as a transfer of skills, where mentoring in a participant’s ministry may alter an individual’s thought processes and behavior patterns. these findings suggest that exposure to leadership development could be a social experience modeled by the instructors, the leaders and now the women religious in the sldi program. significant variables are proposed in social learning theory; that is, person, behavior and environment are all necessary for skills transfer. so incorporating a variety of approaches in a program can provide tangible experiences for successful mentorships. quality modeling results if the participant pays attention to the skill, is capable of remembering, has the ability to reproduce or motivate, and has the desire to demonstrate the behavior learned (bandura, 1986). in addition, wezlet and welsh (2003) stress that individuals have a capacity to model and practice skills learned when the knowledge and skills resonate with their context; only then can they make a decision to implement and practice the skills. bandura’s theory indicates that leadership training can expose individuals to new knowledge and skills that elevate their consciousness for change. as a result, behavior change and self-efficacy may result and engender performance change. bandura (1997) defined self-efficacy as the level of confidence that individuals develop in their ability to execute a certain direction in their actions or achieve specific outcomes. studies show that a positive relationship exists between self-efficacy and performance (manstead & vaneckelen, 1998; zimmerman, et al, 1992). self-efficacy is important for leaders to perform effectively in delegating duties and responsibilities, encouraging participation, mentoring, and coaching their colleagues. also, self-efficacy can be based on an individual’s ability to learn and practice the competencies acquired. despite similar leadership skills provided to sldi trainee participants, the rate of innovation and adaptation may differ due to the level of individual enthusiasm, position in the workforce, work climate, ability to transfer skills, finances to support the change and the readiness of the workforce to practice the new strategies. effective skills transfer and practice is the foundation of change, the pedestal of quality assessment on the impact, effectiveness and possible sustainability of a program. conversely, it may be difficult to measure the level of change in a participant, and the degree to which the change has spread in her ministry. anecdotes gathered from the interviewees and observations would provide significant information on the level of the participants’ personal change and change in their ministries as observed by the instructors and program administrators. measurable and observable effects of the leadership and mentoring plans were cited. for example, sinking a borehole not only provided the greatly needed clean water for a community but also now saves time and energy for women and girls who otherwise would be trekking for miles and for hours to fetch water. the social and economic benefits evident in the trainee ministries and communities are in themselves lasting effects of the program, such as changing the lifestyle for many through employment in grinding mills, schools, hospitals and bakeries, among other projects. in addition, these ministries and programs are essential investments for the community, and include an ambulance for health outreach programs, improved farming methods to increase productivity, and increasing skills development for youths in a garment and catering center. all these indicate lasting effects that bring change, improve life and encourage self-reliance in their communities. other researchers support the findings in my study, indicating that the model of training design, trainee characteristics and workplace are sound, since these are essential factors in the transfer of skills (ford & weissbeing, 1997; grant & simmons, 2008). additionally, martin (2010) established that workplace climate, peer support, and availability of resources are essential ingredients to skills transfer. similarly, i found that behavioral changes following a single training occur; however, resources are necessary to ensure support, and practice is necessary to cement the skills into the job routine. also, hawley and bernard (2005) suggested that networking with peers helps to clarify job-related ideas, and seeking peer advice and support eases skills transfer. in my study, networking among instructors and trainees was cited as helpful, because trainees continued to consult instructors via email to borrow ideas. 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(1992). self-motivation for academic attainment: the role of self-efficacy beliefs and personal goal setting. american educational research journal, 29, 663-676. 107 advancing women in leadership vol. 32, pp. 107-122, 2012 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper two women for president: the importance of the announcement speech on the campaign rachel b. friedman, ph.d. assistant professor of communication, embry-riddle aeronautical university 600 s. clyde morris blvd. daytona beach, fl 32114 (386) 226-6628 (office) e-mail: rachel.friedman@erau.edu nichola d. gutgold, ph.d. associate professor of communication arts & sciences, penn state lehigh valley 2809 saucon valley road center valley, pa 18034-8447 610-285-5101 (office) e-mail: dgn2@psu.edu women keep gaining ground in the world of american politics. there are more women senators, representatives, supreme court justices, secretaries of state and governors than ever. still, america has never had a female president or even vice president. by examining the communication skills of women who have run for president we can begin to assess how a woman creates ethos for the presidency. this study focuses on an understudied genre of campaign speaking; a comparison of two high profile female candidates’ announcement speeches from both respective political parties. how a woman reveals that she is a candidate for president is key to her success. the presidential announcements of elizabeth dole and hillary clinton are examined to consider what introductory communication traits may best serve the next woman who attempts to break the largest and seemingly toughest glass ceiling: the united states presidency. keywords: women, politics, communication skills, campaign the global gender gap report, which examines data indicating the resources and status of women compared to men throughout the world, showed encouraging signs for women leaders in the united states. for the first time ever, the united states ranked in the top twenty in its 2010 report. although a hopeful sign, laura liswood, co-founder and senior advisor to the council of women world leaders, cautions that the united states is still catching up in the world. she said, “what is lagging is women’s presence at the highest levels of power be it management of a business or head of state or government or parliament.” america is simply not used to http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ 108 seeing women as power figures in leadership roles. this is especially true of women who have run for president in the united states. thus, by examining the communication skills of women who have run for president we can begin to assess how a woman creates ethos for the presidency. additionally, we will be examining a rather understudied genre of campaign speaking; a comparison of two very famous female candidates’ announcement speeches from both respective political parties. we argue that how a woman reveals that she is indeed a candidate for president is essential to her success. anyone running for president has to make his or her candidacies known. two of the most well-known women to make their presidential aspirations known are elizabeth dole and hillary clinton. before dole and clinton, to consider two other well-known women made their presidential intentions known and have perhaps paved a path for dole and clinton in 1964, the republican u.s. senator from maine, margaret chase smith, announced her bid by telling her audience that she was encouraged to run when she realized that: i would be pioneering the way for a woman in the future—to make the way easier—for her to be elected president of the united states. perhaps the point that has impressed me the most on this argument is that women before me pioneered and smoothed the way for me to be the first woman to be elected to both the house and the senate—and that i should give back in return that which had been given to me. her bid took her all the way to the convention. in 1972, democrat congresswoman shirley chisholm was poised and determined when she announced her decision to run for president. she said: i stand before you today as a candidate for the democratic nomination for the presidency of the united states of america. i am not the candidate of black america, although i am black and proud. i am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although i am a woman, and i am equally proud of that. i am not that candidate of any political bosses or fat cats or special interests. true, that although shirley chisholm was “unbought and unbossed” –her campaign slogan—she like chase smith--had the burden of running a campaign that was seen as a symbolic gesture. after her bid, ms. chisholm conceded privately that she “had at least two strikes—her sex and her race— against her. the difference in 2000, and again in 2008, both dole and clinton were cast in the press as viable candidates. the announcement speech of a candidate comes during what trent and friedenberg (2004) describe as the surfacing stage. surfacing is the first of four major stages of a political campaign and note seven functions of surfacing: demonstrating candidates’ fitness for office; initialing political rituals; providing the public opportunities to learn about the candidate; developing voter expectations about candidates’ personal and administrative styles; determining main campaign issues; separating frontrunners from the rest of the candidates and establishing candidate-media relationships. trent and friedenberg (2004) also assert that: the content of the speeches should serve four main purposes. first, candidates use the announcement address to indicate their intention to run for office. 109 second, candidates try to discourage other potential candidates from running. third, the candidate's speech should reveal why the candidate is running. fourth, the candidate uses the address to announce the basic themes of a campaign. our goal is to examine both dole’s and clinton’s political styles and messages to help create understanding about women candidates in the early stages of their campaigns. as erika falk notes “the way the media portray the candidates at the beginning of the campaign is particularly important to how the electorate form their first impressions” (p. 220). this may be even more crucial for women as presidential candidates; since there have been so few, the announcement of their candidacies are especially focused upon by voters discerning whether or not to take her seriously. while male candidates rarely need to wonder if voters will take them seriously, women do. as daniel j. palazzolo and sean m. theriault write: “timing, location, the people who appear with the candidate, and the content of the speech define the candidate's overall strategy” (p. 350). the announcement speech, and the subsequent media framing of it, are key to a candidate’s success and since both women—dole and clinton—had to situate their candidacies into the presidential realm for voters, we believe that walter fisher’s narrative paradigm is useful to apply to our study here. while fisher may not have been first to develop the study of narrative, he is the scholar who most developed the narrative paradigm “most fully in the speech communication field.” fisher’s (1984) five features of narrative paradigm include: (1) humans are essentially storytellers; (2) the paradigmatic mode of human decision making and communication is “good reasons” which vary in form among communication situations, genres, and media; (3) the production and practice of good reasons are ruled by matters of history, biography, culture and character; (4) rationality is determined by the nature of persons as narrative beings––their inherent awareness of narrative probability, and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, (whether the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives); and (5) the world is a set of stories which must be chosen among to live the good life (p. 4) although elizabeth dole does not current hold political office, or an appointment, she has been an extremely popular female politician. several gallup polls in 1999 suggested she was the strongest of the republican candidates, challenging even george w. bush and coming out ahead of steve forbes. as history proves, she dropped out of the race for what she cites as a lack of funds to continue the campaign. nonetheless, she was a well-liked political figure. according to brooks jackson of cnn at the time of dole’s presidential bid “elizabeth dole will appeal to more conservative women -probably older women, more affluent suburban women, professional women. certainly republican women.” schemo (1999) of the new york times suggested many people were happy to see a woman run even if they disagreed with some of her politics. at the beginning of her presidential campaign in iowa, cnn suggested that dole offered “girl power - the kind of raw enthusiasm that money can’t 110 buy and political professionals can't fake” (p. a22). several volunteers of the dole campaign in 1999 said: “it's a very big plus for me that she happens to be a woman on top of that. and i think that it's time that we see a change in how certain things are approached”… iowa state university's stefan schmidt said: “she has incredible appeal to independent women, to some women democrats. there is excitement about the fact that she is the first person who really could be the first woman president.” her narrative focused upon dole as a trailblazer and a woman who could rise above the male dominated world of politics. both republican and democrat mothers brought their daughters to see elizabeth dole campaign because they wanted to show their girls that a woman could at least run for president. this theme was evident in dole’s branding of her campaign. her slogan “let’s make history” suggested a “her story” mantra. the main theme of her candidacy was that a woman can do it; this woman can do it, ergo, you (other women) and girls (future women) can do it, too. this approach is fraught with controversy. as maria braden points out, as early as the 1920s “the question of whether women candidate should emphasize gender was already being discussed” (p. 37). dole’s strategy of emphasizing her gender may have solicited distracting attention to her novelty rather than her leadership qualities. dole’s warm narrative style was in striking contrast to a previously high profile national female political figure, geraldine ferraro. according to sullivan, ferraro was not successful because she was attempting to be likeable during the debates, thus her normal forcefulness and power was not exhibited fully. one significant implication of sullivan’s1989 study suggests, “…critics may be tempted to propose that women would achieve greater success on the political stage if they recognized and adhered to the frameworks for political discourse which have been shaped by masculine intentions” (p. 341). it seems elizabeth dole is better at adhering to this male formula because she has several of the qualities of a southern belle (which men might find charming) and she also values the dominant conservative perspectives in several ways (i.e. religion, abortion, the death penalty, the war in iraq, prayer in schools, etc). according to tillie fowler, a republican representative from florida, even a lot of good ole boys really love elizabeth dole…you have to understand where she grew up and how she grew up, and the fact that she retained a lot of that. you grow up as a southern woman, you grow up knowing about being a good neighbor, being polite, standing when somebody comes in the room, and saying ‘yes ma’am’ and ‘yes sir.’ i mean that’s just part of you that becomes ingrained, and i think it’s that part of her that makes her less threatening to some of the good ole boys. she doesn’t have this hard edge that some women acquired along the way (gates, 1997, p. 236). this description of dole by fowler may also shed light on why dole would resist calling herself a feminist. elizabeth dole is a conservative female politician. she maintains her image through being a woman who articulates the values of the republican party, but who also uses her gracious southern style to ensure her femininity. traditionally, her religious values seemingly place her in the midst of republican ideology and acceptable womanhood. but, how does she use personal experience, politicize the personal, and employ an ethic of care, all of which are more female styles of speaking, in her presidential announcement speech on march 10, 1999? 111 dole’s exploratory committee announcement elizabeth dole kicked off her 2000 campaign for president of the united states in iowa on march 10, 1999. the goal of her speech was to talk about how her experiences qualify her to be a good president. in so doing, she tells a lot of stories about her experience, her personal life and how she is the caring, ethical candidate to bring morality back to the white house after bill clinton’s eight year run. for the most part, dole does an excellent job at creating a very likable disposition, one which is important for female candidates, yet displaying toughness is more of a challenge. elizabeth dole emphasizes a few key things in her speech. first, she iterates ideas of experience and making a difference. she repeats these terms over and over throughout her speech. this is perhaps to demonstrate assertiveness in conjunction with likability (i.e. she has experience, she wants to change things, bring back a moral order, etc…). second, she emphasizes “service over politics” and “consensus over confrontation.” third, she discusses drugs and education as they pertain to keeping our children safe. and, finally she mentions the need for more military spending, but this argument is lodged between keeping our kids safe from drugs and creating a better education system. perhaps she does this to create a safer wedge for the toughness required of a president to make decisions about the military and how we utilize our defense budget. finally, dole speaks interpersonally as does clinton, using inclusive pronouns like “we” and “our” throughout the speech. true to fisher’s paradigm, her announcement is replete with good reasons why dole should be president. dole begins her speech in iowa as a woman who has an “obligation” to the people of america. her obligation is tightly woven into this idea of the public servant whose calling it is to change the immorality or wrongdoings in our culture. as is tradition for dole, this sense of calling can be linked to many religious leaders who claim it was a calling by god that led him or her to this moral position of leadership. thus, dole says, “i’m not a politician, and frankly, i think that’s a plus today. but i have spent a lifetime in public service, and let me tell you about that.” this statement procures the way for dole’s narratives of experience in her calling as a public servant, not as a politician who was likely (during bill clinton’s administration) to be associated with marital infidelity. dole seemingly wants to separate herself from the politicians and is able to do this for two reasons: first, she invokes a moral argument promoting the ethic or the right thing to do and second, she most recently had worked as the head of the red cross, which is nonpartisan. it is much easier to ask people for money for world disasters than it is to fundraise for particular electoral candidates as political parties are much more divisive. dole says, “when i entered public service as a young woman, it was considered a noble thing to do. today, too many of our young men and women can’t see the wondrous possibilities of public life for the ugliness of politics.” dole, again, reiterates this idea of the public servant midway through her speech as she says, “there is one overarching theme to my 30 plus years in public service, and i believe there; it’s that i placed service over politics, consensus over confrontation.” again, towards the end of the speech, dole says, “…i think americans are calling for leaders who really will help to call america to her better nature.” this notion of her becoming president as a calling is very powerful, somewhat religious in nature, and aligns her 112 with morality. with these utterances, dole puts forth the notion that her culture and experiences would serve america at just the right time, which further support fisher’s notion of the narrative paradigm. it is almost as though dole is explaining that she didn’t choose to run for president because she wants to, but because america needs her now. it is a force bigger than her. dole’s personal experiences are vast as she mentioned she had been a public servant for over thirty years. she begins her personal work narrative with the department of transportation citing various role requirements that are somewhat strong like “highway construction, shipbuilding, [and] air traffic control…” she lists all of her job responsibilities and then points out “that’s experience, that’s experience and that’s what counts, you know. you’ve got to have the experience in governing and indeed i’ve had a lot of that.” this is a great example of using her personal experiences to back up her claims of being ready to do the job. she is also politicizing the personal by constantly talking about her job experience (something men do not tend to do as often as they do not have to prove they are qualified to the same degree women do). she continues to talk about what she accomplished while with the department of transportation and this is where she qualifies her ethos. dole says, “i want to get in there and make a difference, a positive difference for people. so you find the areas where you can make a difference and you go for it.” this narrative builds dole’s credibility as a woman who can potentially do the traditional man’s job, and again, she relies on politicizing her personal life to make her point. the next job dole speaks of in detail is her cabinet job in the department of labor. here, she invokes an ethic of caring as dole says of this job, “what could be more important than trying to turn young lives around from the most negative behavior, gang leaders, et cetera, to help them prepare for a good job, and many of them for college. that became our top priority. and that was a wonderful mission field again for me.” using a term like mission suggests she is a public servant similar to a religious figure who may go on a religious mission trip to help others in need. again, she aligns herself with a spiritual, religious person who is a moral teacher and leader, helping people like kids in gangs find his or her way, much like a mother might guide a child. dole’s motherly tendencies were also useful for mediating the eleven-month pittston coal strike, where she worked with both the president of pittston coal and the president of the united mine workers and a mediator to come to a mutual agreement to resolve the strike. she settled the coal strike on new year’s eve. relating her mediation abilities to experience, dole says, “again, that’s experience, that’s hands on experience that i think makes the difference.” part of this female speaking style is to cite personal experience to support the claims one is making and it is also part of this style to politicize the personal, which dole often does when narrating herself into her stories about civil service, helping others, keeping america safe, etc. the mother in elizabeth dole constructs a lot of her experiences under the guise of family. dole asks her audience, “…are you better? are your families stronger? are your children safer from drugs? are our schools in america first in excellence? are you proud of the decisions you’re making and choices that those decisions are producing in terms of our country and where our country is going?” in asking these questions, she uses her personal experience referring back 113 to the reagan administration that first asked “are you better off than you were four years ago?” she also asks questions mostly relating to family, education and general decision-making about morality (i.e. being “proud” of your choices and the repercussion thereof). as mentioned, many female leaders have a challenging time being perceived as both tough and likable. elizabeth dole’s toughness, in terms of topoi, is a very small part of this speech. she asks for an increase in the defense budget in the midst of a discussion of family and keeping children safe from drugs. dole presents the “problem” of the defense budget as another ethic of care in the form of a narrative. dole says, …the percent of our gross domestic product on defense is the lowest in 50 years. we know there are problems with regards to the readiness of our military, spare parts are needed, equipment that needs to be to be replaced and talented people in the military are leaving and i think our defense budget is too low. yes. let's get it up. the president recommended in his budget $12 billion, but only $4 billion of that is new money. the rest, the 8 billion is moving money around the joint chiefs, top military advisors recommended 17 billion. i say let's go with the joint chiefs, right? need more money. and, you know, at a time when the secretary of defense is saying that north korea within a year may have nuclear bombs that could reach the united states and we know iraq is manufacturing biological weapons, we need to do everything to develop and deploy a strategic missile defense system immediately. immediately. this is important. defense is a typically male area of political discussion. it is harder for a female candidate to come across as likeable, tough, and knowledgeable when it comes to this issue. this is the only place in the speech dole speaks about such a topic and she tells it as a narrative with rhetorical questioning. there is nothing entirely definitive about her stance on the defense budget, only that we should increase it because other countries may have nuclear bombs. again, this is only an exploratory announcement speech, but her discussion of this subject is rather minor and since it is in the middle of two other more typical areas of discussion for dole (family and drugs), it may not appear to be too forceful for the southern belle’s image. this is not necessarily a good thing though. dole’s time as a senator of north carolina from 2002-2008 was not so successful because she was unable to make the hard decisions politicians often make in electoral politics. but again, this may explain why she was more likely to make an argument about being a servant and a leader rather than a politician. dole wanted to lead this nation into moral high ground. she calls drugs a “cancer on our society,” yet with good leadership, she says we can fix this problem. she cites nancy reagan’s “say no to drugs” campaign and repeats “they [drugs] kill, they kill.” her discussion of drugs is yet another example of how our country needs to return to a better value system, one she could instill. talking about nancy reagan, she brings back the image of the good old days for some, a time during the reagan administration when things were simpler and there weren’t many choices for the people. the discussion of things like drugs and keeping our children safe really displays an ethic of care that many male politicians 114 would not use as a topic of discussion, but the topics work for dole because she is still feminine while displaying some type of power. the closing of her speech reiterates the notion of “calling” as discussed earlier. many preachers, rabbis and other religious leaders become servants of god because it was his or her calling. dole believes “americans are calling for leaders who really will help to call america to her better nature.” this better nature is really based in a particularly vague set of morals and values. these values, as set forth by dole, are “respect for our fellow man…civility, personal responsibility, the fact that every individual can make a difference...and certainly honesty and integrity, this is what i think people yearn for today. and we are a great country, yes. yes that’s neighbor helping neighbor, isn’t it? that’s what it is all about.” dole’s sermonizing narrative completes the speech as one filled with all of the elements of a more female style of political rhetoric. dole embodied a feminine style of speaking in her announcement speech and she proved an agile storyteller. a large part of her style included a discourse that was both moral and religious in nature; it was even maternal at times. this argument that she was the more moral candidate was likely not enough and may have been too tender a case to make. this is particularly true since we expect politicians to make the hard decisions that may or may not always be moral. thus, people questioned dole’s toughness. additionally, elizabeth dole waited from january 4, 1999 when she stepped down from the american red cross to march 10, 1999 when she delivered her announcement speech to let the american people know that she wanted the job of president. we believe this created an impression that she was not so sure she wanted to be president. it certainly was not the most aggressive way to approach the role of president of the united states. furthermore, over the past twenty years or so, when the press would ask her about her presidential ambitions, dole often responded by saying “i’m not running for anything,” again reiterating this notion of the reluctant politician. that hesitancy is detrimental to all candidates, but especially women since america has never had a woman president. next, we will examine hillary clinton, a woman who came closer to becoming president than any woman had before her. hillary clinton: at home in the white house and on the campaign trail the former first lady hillary clinton, “the most ‘battle tested’ of all the democratic candidates--” declared herself “in to win.” and indeed, hillary clinton faced battles when she ran for the senate because she was a first lady that participated in a wider sphere of influence than tradition has allowed. in the united states, the roles of first lady and elected official could not be more different. while robert watson (2000) noted that first ladies regularly fulfill both private and public roles, first ladies who use their white glove pulpit for controversial issues are often judged more harshly by the public. the promise that bill clinton made on the campaign trail for the presidency was that voters would “get two for the price of one;” yet, this was not what some voters bargained for. thus, hillary clinton had a rough first ladyship when she wielded power that made much of the american public uncomfortable. most notably, her work on the healthcare initiative made her an unelected policymaker, which raised the ire of those who may have 115 preferred her to stay in a small sphere of influence more akin to a traditional woman’s role. as lawrence rifkind wrote, “hillary clinton’s activist first ladyship suggested that the role of being married to a head of state places a woman in an inevitable quandary making it difficult to fulfill public expectations”(p. 611). as jannette kenner muir and anita taylor point out: “when two personals did constitute or work as a team in the white house, they usually did so with the male member of the team being its public face. as karin anderson noted, hillary clinton was aware that when she enacted a more traditional role, her popularity rose. in her autobiography, living history, hillary clinton recalls an encounter with clinton advisor james carville that occurred shortly after a trip to nepal where she and chelsea were photographed atop an elephant. she explains, “when we got back to washington, james carville remarked: ‘don’t you just love it? you spend two years trying to get people better health care and they tried to kill you. you and chelsea rode an elephant and they loved you!’” colleen elizabeth kelley noted that “mrs. clinton and her husband have received steady criticism for presenting themselves in a way that some believe to be unprecedented for a president and his spouse: as political as well as marital partners.” as first lady, hillary clinton served as a spokesperson throughout america and the world when she ardently attempted to gain support for universal healthcare. she spoke about children’s and women’s rights and repeatedly defended her husband against several incriminating charges. as the equally educated political spouse of her husband, she met with criticism for her public role, yet she could not deny her political acumen. the idea that a former first lady would emerge as a presidential candidate, even one who was a successful two term senator, presented unprecedented communication challenges for hillary clinton. lisa m. burns (2008) aptly noted that “the question of women’s “proper” place in political culture is as relevant today as it has been during any historical period” (p. 162). no stranger to rhetorical situations that demanded rhetorical agility, her skills would be tested in a way they never had before. clearly, hillary clinton had to launch her presidential bid with rhetorical care. how would hillary clinton tell her story as a national figure in her own right? the narrative possibilities were endless. could she re-introduce herself to the american people, not as first lady, but instead an elected senator from new york and a presidential hopeful. she had to strike the right balance between powerful policy maker and populist “every woman” who is likable enough to win their vote? how would she highlight just enough of her first lady experience to create an ethos that demonstrates leadership without dredging up details of clinton white house drama that many americans would just as soon forget? would accentuating her feminine side win over voters or was that only a side of her that people wanted to see when she was first lady? when she ran for the senate while finishing up her duties as first lady, hillary clinton faced similar exigencies as a public speaker and a public figure. she successfully fulfilled the need to meet the people of new york, not as a celebrity first lady, but as a political powerhouse in her own right. she managed that and became thought of as apolitical figure who would fight for new yorkers’ needs. she not only won a senate seat, but she won re-election to the senate in 2006. originally labeled a “carpetbagger” for running for senate from new york, a state she never lived in, 116 clinton was not only successful in her bid, she was a popular senator. how did she do it? one of the ways she got to know new yorkers and allowed them to get to know her was not by talking, but by listening. hillary clinton embarked upon a "listening bus” tour of all parts of new york after her entrance into the senate race. she made it her goal to visit sixty-two counties in the state of new york, spending time with new yorkers, talking to them in small-group settings according to the principles of retail politics. to announce herself as a presidential candidate, hillary clinton did the electronic version of a listening tour, one that would be aided with “a little help from modern technology.” it’s on the internet: hillary clinton announces on the web on saturday morning, january 20, 2007, the world learned that hillary clinton does, indeed want to be president of the united states. the new york times noted that “one reason mrs. clinton chose to make her announcement on a saturday morning, when the political world is usually in slumber, was to dominate the news cycle, her advisers said, and contrast herself vividly as a leader with president bush before his state of the union speech on tuesday night.” seated comfortably on a sofa in her wellappointed living room, hillary clinton’s announcement for presidency personified the feminist credo, “the personal is political.” seeing a politician in a personal environment is not unusual. increasingly, politicians have become more familiar to us by appearing on late night comedy programs, and talk shows. television has made politicians more like celebrities who are likely to present themselves as likeable, popular figures. the internet has, in some ways, a double effect of intimacy and then the rebroadcast of the announcement on television reiterates that. the internet as a forum for the announcement makes sense in this political age and thomas friedman (1999) has noted that the interest is “pervasive, unavoidable and indispensible.” by making an internet announcement, hillary clinton could attempt to capture the youthful demographic more likely to log onto their computers rather than turn on their televisions. according to joe trippi (2004), in the revolution will not be televised: democracy, the internet, and the overthrow of everything, using the internet for the howard dean presidential campaign in 2004 was a way to “engage americans in real dialogue” (p. 103). her utilization of the internet furthers strengthens the argument that hillary clinton knew that she needed to employ all the “available means of persuasion” during her presidential bid. hillary clinton never gave the tradition speech of announcement so common for political candidates that placed her in front of a flag on the capitol steps. instead, she relied solely on this brief, less than twominute internet announcement to get her message to the masses. hillary clinton put herself in a context that americans had already known her from her years as first lady in the white house. appearing in a soft, home setting allowed her to blend her private sphere of influence as america’s first lady and hostess into the image for which she angled for: national public official. seeing her amidst the fine home furnishings was at once reminiscent of a president’s fireside chat and warm friend visiting for intimate conversation. the setting of the announcement speech, her living room in her georgetown home, melded her personal life into her political aspirations. the two other front runner contenders for the presidency, senator barack obama and senator john edward 117 chose much less personal settings. senator obama announced his candidacy in springfield illinois, outside, in front of the old state capital and invoked the words of president lincoln. former north carolina senator john edwards—trying to make a visual point of the “two americas” he spoke of, in his campaign—stood outside in the ninth ward of new orleans in front of a group of young people who worked with him to restore a home after hurricane katrina ravaged the city. her participative and cooperative announcement speech drew much review from the press. the washington post noted, “the effect was one of breathtaking political shrewdness and brilliant staging, like a mash-up between "the west wing" and diane keaton's latest holiday heartwarmer. and for all its studied spontaneity, its air of having been pre-tested, choreographed, and managed to within a microfiber of clinton's mascara, it worked, if only to provide a little eye candy within a grainy sea of canned speeches and awkward ichats.” media outlets noted that clinton’s announcement speech setting was markedly different from that of her counterparts. michael goodwin of the new york daily news gave her marks for uniqueness. he wrote, thus, her call for a ‘national conversation’ and three nights of live web chats are all new age, touchyfeely moves that target young people and women. as the only woman in the expanding democratic field, the forum is a chance for her to remind women voters especially that the mommy party is their party and that she can best represent them. that she is doing it on the internet makes her look younger and hipper than her 59 years. it was also a politically savvy move, since the trend in politics is moving towards the internet, a more interactive forum for political engagement. goodwin alerted readers that “the internet is the most democratizing innovation we’ve ever seen— more so than even the printing press. there has never been a technology this fast, this expansive, with the ability to connect his many people from around the world.” hillary clinton’s decision to sit on sofa, in her home with family photos, featuring her daughter chelsea and her husband, former president bill clinton visible in the background, was a much different choice than her rivals. both her husband and daughter would play significant roles in hillary clinton’s presidential bid. it was not surprising that bill clinton would have a role, but the emergence of the young adult chelsea clinton as an articulate voice for her mother was notable since she played a minimal role in her mother's 2006 senate reelection campaign, even missing the state nominating convention because of a work conflict. her presence was welcome, especially since there were already a number of photogenic children, including the young families of barack obama and former john edwards. seeing chelsea clinton in the photographs in the living room were also a nonverbal announcement of the well-raised, young woman and her emerging role in her mother’s campaign. when we first look at the scene, we take in a familiar figure: former first lady and senator from new york, hillary clinton. we are reminded of her domestic side, that of mother as we glimpse the framed family photos in the setting. she started: “i announced today that i am forming a presidential exploratory committee. i'm not just starting a campaign, though, i'm beginning a conversation -with you, with america.” her use of language to “have a conversation” is intimate and suggests 118 interpersonal communication rather than public campaigning. her choice to launch her campaign over the internet (which was widely broadcast over television) suggests a personal connection more than her rivals, since most people turned on their personal computers to hear her announcement. she was calling for participation and cooperation. her use of pronouns were personal, too. “let’s talk,” how to make “us” energy independent, “our basic bargain that no matter who you are or where you live, if you work hard and play by the rules, you can build a good life for yourself and your family.” her intimate quest is not “just” starting a campaign, but rather having conversations with the people. the notion of kitchen klatches and gathering around for storytelling and discussion has long been a feminine tradition in america. her call for conversation suggests that through her politics she can not only maintain but improve relationships—in this case with the american people and government. she is showing us that she is one of us, another mother and wife trying to live the american dream. for a woman who has had anything but an ordinary life in america, she presented a very ordinary, family, feminine vignette. instead of accentuating her tough business side in stiff business attire behind a podium, she took a “kitchen table” approach to politics. she made her political self as personal as possible. this functioned effectively for senator clinton because it was novel, warm and personal. though she looked serious and professional, she appeared approachable and friendly. clinton was telling the story that she is a woman like any woman in america: in her home, with treasured heirlooms around her. she was building upon the image of her that americans already have by disclosing her story this time, on her terms. she may also be the wife of a former president, but this announcement speech was crucial in creating her own national political character. hillary clinton spoke in a manuscript style, though unlike a live state of the union address, she had the advantage of editing and it was obvious that the announcement speech was cut and spliced together so that it would be as effective as possible. still, hillary clinton seemed comfortable delivering the speech and provided a warm, fireside chat feel. her gestures contributed to the chatty, close feeling achieved in the speech. for example, when she noted that “we all have to be part of the solution” she raised her hands with her palms facing as if to suggest that we will all have to re-mold america. later in the speech she rests her right arm on the back of the sofa to signify that she is comfortable talking about these issues and that we should feel comfortable sharing our views with her. she asks the audience to participate, creating a reciprocal interpersonal communication environment not usually evident in traditional manuscript speeches. she used personal experience to back up her claim that she would be an effective president. her experiential evidence: “i grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of america, and we believed in that promise. i still do. i've spent my entire life trying to make good on it. whether it was fighting for women's basic rights or children’s basic health care. protecting our social security, or protecting our soldiers. it's a kind of basic bargain, and we've got to keep up our end.” in this statement she reveals her ethos to lead the nation based on her history, biography, culture and character. she reminds the viewers that she has fought for women’s basic rights and children’s basic health care.” in a similar way that karrin anderson (2002) argued that hillary clinton employs personal narrative as a 119 rhetorical strategy to outline her political ideology in her autobiography living history, in her announcement speech hillary clinton again leans on her own life story as evidence that she would be an effective president. because she “grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of america” and “believed in that promise” [of opportunity for hard work in america] she asks the american public to trust her, and to vote for her. hillary clinton also confronted one of the exigencies that face women candidates: sounding tough enough to serve. she addressed the need to bring the war “to the right end” and put republicans and democrats on notice that she is ready for a fight. clinton said: “i have never been afraid to stand up for what i believe in or to face down the republican machine." furthermore, “after nearly $70 million spent against my campaigns in new york and two landslide wins, i can say i know how washington republicans think, how they operate, and how to beat them.” she closed with a personal, intimate request: so let's talk. let's chat. let's start a dialogue about your ideas and mine. because the conversation in washington has been just a little one-sided lately, don't you think? and we can all see how well that works. and while i can't visit everyone's living room, i can try. and with a little help from modern technology, i'll be holding live online video chats this week, starting monday. so let the conversation begin. i have a feeling it's going to be very interesting.” the term “let’s chat” has a double meaning as she promises to not only start a conversation but to use technology that will allow her, even if only through computer, to get into everyone’s living room. this announcement speech exhibited several sophisticated communication strategies on the part of hillary clinton. she adopted a more female political style of speaking and was ready with plenty of her own experience and background to support the claim that she could lead the nation. she communicated online to create a modern connection to younger voters and subtly reminded voters that she was now a newcomer to politics. she spoke utilizing a traditional manuscript style, but her warm hand gestures and the camera close-ups achieved a chatty, interpersonal, conversational speech of announcement unlike any other. the importance of announcing well for a woman to launch a successful bid for the united states presidency, she must consider her announcement speech carefully. any inclination that she is not forcefully announcing will likely cast her as a symbolic candidate or vice-presidential material from the start as occurred with elizabeth dole. both elizabeth dole in 2000 and hillary clinton in 2008 gave carefully constructed announcement speeches that underscored their experience, likeability and toughness. clinton had several advantages: her likeability was based more on the setting, not as much on the words she spoke, although they were very inclusive words. she let her home paint a warm portrait of her. her toughness was not a new facet of her personality, since americans viewed her as a no-nonsense politician from her previous roles anyway. she also presented herself as “all in” from the start. dole, in contrast, had to convince her audience that she was tough, nice and experienced all at once. dole was forced to reiterate her resume because she was never elected to political office. clinton could speak more of the future with her speech, 120 assured that the public already knew her. in addition, we demonstrated that these women’s styles were quite different. while they both embodied a feminine style in their announcement speeches, dole’s argument that she was the more moral candidate was not enough; it certainly was not a strong enough case to make in the world of electoral politics. clinton was a more famous candidate from the start. no one questioned her toughness, in fact many may have felt she was too tough and not feminine enough; therefore, she presented a softer, more feminine side during her presidential announcement speech. furthermore, as we mentioned, dole waited over two months to announce her candidacy and this certainly, this was not the most aggressive way to begin a campaign for the highest office in the unites states. aside from this rather lengthy period to make her announcement, she had been asked several times in the past if she were going to run for president and she always responded with “i’m not running for anything.” that hesitancy is detrimental to all candidates, but especially women since america has never had a female president and the accusation that they simply will not be tough enough and will in fact govern with timidity comes through in such a slow-motion-ask for the job. it begs the question: would dole hedge as president? hedge-free hillary clinton boldly declared: “i’m in to win” and that helped to contribute to her successful efforts for the presidency. these announcement speeches highlight the importance of female presidential candidates announcing without hesitation that they plan to become president because they are the most qualified for the job. there are many reasons why a candidate for president is not successful. this article points to the first statement by female candidates running for the presidency and suggests that a successful political style as well as timeliness of the announcement speech are crucial to success. references braden, m. 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(2000). the presidents’ wives: reassessing the office of first lady. boulder, colorado: lynne rienner publishers. 15 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 15-28, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper correlation of female trinidadians, bermudians, sri-lankans’ feminist identity development, and self-esteem: reflection of social role theory charmaine bissessar academic development coach at hugh wooding law school, trinidad email: drcharmainebissessar2013@yahoo.com accepted july 3, 2013 self-esteem and feminist identity development share symbiotic dyads. agentic and communal characteristics shape females’ identity and determine whether they see themselves as products or producers of their social system and display descriptive and/ or injunctive or prescriptive patterns of behavior. the aforementioned theoretical frameworks form the backdrop for my research which involved 40 trinidadians, 20 bermudians, and 38 sri lankans females ages 18 to 64. in my quantitative methodology study, i incorporated the feminist identity development scale (fids, bargad & hyde, 1991) and rosenberg’s (1965) self-esteem model (rse) to determine whether or not there was a significant correlation between trinidadian and bermudian females’ self-esteem and feminist identity development. descriptive statistics implementing a correlation matrix with the use of mega stats add-ins with microsoft excel determined that no significant correlation existed between trinidadian and bermudian female participants for their rse and fids respectively. additionally, one way anova tests showed the correlation: (a) within sample grouptrinidadian females with no significant correlation between their fids and rse; (b) within sample groupafro and indotrinidadians there was no significant correlation of rse and a slight positive correlation of .0467 between participants’ subscales of fids; (c) within sample group there was no significant correlation between bermudian participants’ rse but a significant negative correlation between subscales of fids; (d) within sample groupsri lankan females showed a significant negative correlation between subscales of fids; (e) among sample groupsbermudian, sri lankan, and trinidadian females there was a significant negative correlation among their rse and no significant correlation of their fids. the findings corroborate other conclusions on fids and rse and the social role theory. keywords: feminist identity development, social role theory introduction the global gender gap (2012) ranked countries where disparities in equal opportunities for men and women exist. the global gender gap index (2012) examined four pillars of gender parity: (a) economic participation and opportunity; (b) educational attainment; (c) health and survival; and (d) political empowerment. based on the global gender gap index, sri lanka ranked 39th, trinidad and tobago was at 43rd, and bermuda was not included. the problem of women being forced to adhere to strict gender roles continues to be one of the major deterrents in women’s empowerment, self-esteem and feminist identity development. as women’s empowerment advances at an exponential rate and more women are finding avenues to break the stereotypical notion of what a woman should do and what qualities she should possess there is need to determine what she does and how she defines herself within the gendered structure. as the story of mala yousafzai revealed, women are finding ways to transcend the boundaries made for them by society and cultural belief systems. understanding how women’s roles continue to evolve is essential in examining the leadership potential in each society and determining the social role construct therein. as women seek to redefine themselves in the ever changing processes of life, empowerment, identity, and self-esteem become the significant intangible qualities needed for optimal functioning in society. the need to examine the social role construct and the prevalence of women who are defined as possessing more communal or more agentic characteristics and adhering to prescriptive rather than descriptive behaviour stereotypes is significant in the feminist identity development and self-esteem sphere. feminist identity, self-esteem and the social role construct are vital elements of what comprises women’s empowerment, resilience and how they see themselves. eisele and stake (2008) linked feminist identity and positive mental health. they stated, “it is possible that adoption of a feminist identity is 16 strongly related to positive mental health” (p. 233). women’s positive mental health defines the types of mothers and wives they become. understanding how women perceive themselves as individuals and collectively can lead to increased awareness of how far their traditional role has changed. moreover, the dearth of information on trinidadian, sri lankan, and bermudian feminist identity development and selfesteem spawned the need for my research paper. a search for literature on trinidadian and bermudian feminist identity development and self-esteem yielded little information which made my study more significant in expanding the extant literature. sri lankan feminist studies for the last five years focused on the effects of the tsunami on the feminine perspectives. paynter (2008), in her exploratory study of nine bermudian adolescents between the ages of 14 to 17 underscored the importance of identity. she stated, “identity formation is an essential aspect of development that impacts later social development” (p. ii). collins (2001) made the following apposite statement, “establishing a sense of identity is a central task in human development” (p. 1). the purpose of my paper was to determine whether or not there is a significant correlation between female trinidadians, sri lankans, and bermudians’ self-esteem and their feminist identity development and how their feminist identity reflects the social role theory. within group sampletrinidadian females firstly, the data garnered will be examined within the trinidadian sample group between self-esteem and their feminist identity development. a correlation analysis using mega stats add ins for microsoft excel determined whether or not a correlation exists. with a trinidadian population of 40% indo-trinidadian and 37.5% afro-trinidadian, the need to examine the data collected from an ethnic perspective is equally important. boisnier (2003) vindicated, “researchers have begun to explore the issue of feminist identity development in ethnically diverse population” (p. 211). in this study, there were 17 afro-trinidadian and 23 indo-trinidadian female participants, reflecting the dichotomy in population distribution. thus, the results may be skewered in favour of the viewpoints of the indo-trinidadian female. afro-trinidadians pertain to those trinidadians of african descent whose forefathers were slaves brought to trinidad to work on the sugar plantations. indo-trinidadians refer to those persons whose progenitors came as indentured immigrants from india to work on the sugar plantations. further distinction, according to baksh-soodeen (1998) and chouthi (1998), is that afro-trinidadian women found their “voices” and were more vocal in expressing their feminist identity versus indotrinidadian women (p.5). the culture of subservience is part of the indo-trinidadian past. the indo-trinidadian remains at loggerheads with her muslim and hindu heritage and her status as a trinidadian woman. such disparities typify her reticence to give “voice” to her thoughts and to “silence the self” (witte & sherman, 2002, p. 12). yet, part of her desires to integrate or to be part of the intermixture that being a trinidadian female entails such as the “creolization” of the indian woman where there is a merging of the afro and indo trinidadian culture (mohammed, 1988, p. 23). this internal dilemma symbolizes the struggles of the indo-trinidadian woman to come to terms with her nature versus her nurture. with this in mind, an anova of the aggregate scores for both groups fids and self-esteem will be calculated to determine whether or not there is a significant correlation. additionally, subscales of each component of the fids will be correlated using an anova to determine whether or not any significant correlation exists. any similarities in the feminist identity development between both afro and indo-trinidadians could be linked to “creolization” which mohammed (1988) viewed as more of an “intermixture,” or “interculturation” rather than and “acculturation” where the indo and afro cultures are conflated to become more enriched (p. 24). within group samplebermudian females secondly, the data garnered will be examined within the bermudian sample group between self-esteem and their feminist identity development. an anova implementing mega stats add-ins in microsoft excel will determine whether or not a correlation exists. between group sampletrinidadian and bermudian females’ rse thirdly, data collated and tabulated in the form of an anova will determine whether or not there is a significant correlation between bermudian and trinidadian females’ self-esteem and fids. subscales of each stage of the fids will be correlated using an anova to determine whether or not a significant correlation exists. fourthly, based on the information gathered, collated, and calculated, the researcher will determine whether or not the distal and proximal causes of the social role theory were vindicated. moradi, subich, and phillips (2002) in their critical analysis of the fids suggested, “further scholarship on the breadth of applicability and utility of their model of feminist identity development is needed” (p. 32). as if heeding their call, the data from this research expanded the body of information on the use of fids and rse with a more diverse population. moradi et al proposed that future research should “(a) recruit samples that reflect the within-group diversity among women” (p. 39). the paucity of such information fomented the need for further study. data from this study were collected from a mixed ethnic population thus enhancing the extant research literature. 17 within group samplesri lankan females’ fids the data garnered will be examined within the sri lankan sample group for correlation among subscales of fids. among group sampletrinidadian, bermudian, and sri lankan females’ fids data collated and tabulated in the form of an anova will determine whether or not there is a significant correlation among bermudian and trinidadian females’ self-esteem and fids. subscales of each stage of the fids will be correlated using an anova to determine whether or not a significant correlation exists. data collated and tabulated in the form of a anova will determine whether or not there is a significant correlation among bermudian, sri lankan, and trinidadian females’ fids. based on the information gathered, collated, and calculated, the researcher will determine whether or not the distal and proximal causes of the social role theory were vindicated. bermudian women’s identity having two female premiers at the helm of the bermudian government demonstrated a definite representation of bermudian women at the higher echelons of the political arena. however, there is still a need for women’s empowerment according to the blog entitled “bermuda needs a new feminism.” in this blog, the author expressed the view that albeit, women comprised 50% of the population, women are only represented in government by 20%. such an obvious lacuna sets the background for the study on bermudian women’s self-esteem and feminist identity development. the current government, progressive labour party, hosted a women’s empowerment function in may 2012 to honour women who contributed to the party’s success. this action by itself vindicated that the then government does respect and value women and their contributions. conversely, fehr (2011), when discussing the making of feminism in art in bermuda, indicated: that is very common. very typically, the male is shown in a way that implies leadership rather than the two being equals together. typically, the male is shown in a leadership role, and the woman is shown in a submissive role. and very often the woman in her submissive role will be shown with a happy smile on her face. (moniz, 2011, p. 1) fehr (2011) further stated that, “he finds many young women, today resistant to seeing how they are diminished in portrayals in art and media” (moniz, 2011, p. 1). this attitude transcends art and is inculcated in the everyday bermudian society which robinson (2011) suggested, “ the island had suffered from something of an inferiority complex regarding its culture because the role played by black bermudians in defining the modern bermudian identity had traditionally been given short shrift” (p. 1). trinidadian women’s identity congruently, trinidad currently, has a female prime minister and also has many members of parliament who are female. however, the construct of feminist identity according to bakshsoodeen (1998) and chouthi (1998) is both in need of a stronger voice and also definitely seeped in issues of race with afro-trinidadian women being more vocal than indotrinidadian women. bakshsoodeen (1998) indicated, “that second wave caribbean feminism has been largely afro-centric and simultaneously interlocked with processes of independence and national identity struggles” (p. 74). for this reason, data from part of the within sample group in trinidad were analysed based on indo and afro trinidadians’ responses to shed light on any silos in differences in their fids and rse. sri lankan women‘s identity until recently, sri lanka was gripped by a civil war that lasted 30 years. once ruled by the british and now independent sri lanka has a population of 20 million. women comprise 52% of the sri lankan population. however, only 2% of women are elected into government (kodikara, 2011). sri lanka is currently governed by a male president. according to kodikara “sri lanka remains the only country without any special measures to facilitate women’s representation in local authorities” (p. 1). such under-representation reflects the mind-set of the sri lankan society where according to gunatilake (2012)” gender roles are the foundations of ascribed roles for either gender, and these affect the lives of men and women around the globe in varying degrees” (p. 1). sri lankan respondents, with their close proximity to india and its deep-seated traditions, were expected to possess differences in fids from bermudian and trinidadian participants’ as the gender boundaries are more clearly delineated. in fact, hyndman (2008) in her examination of the after-effects of the tsunami indicated: interviews with 40 widows and widowers along the east coast of sri lanka in february 2006 suggest that the tsunami not only reorganized gender relations among specific ethno-national groups, but also changed the meaning of ‘widow’ with war widows and tsunami widows positioned differently within posttsunami society and across ethnic groups.(p. 101) such disparity in treatment between men and women and their ability to remarry in favour of the men, is fraught with issues because the women exemplify an ideology in turmoil which could either evolve into a more developed sense of identity or remain in a state of confusion. within such a state, the sri lankan woman defines herself as a product of the male perception of her rather than a producer of her own identity. in her presentation of the opinions of the sri lankan women in the garment industry, gunatilake (2012) stated that the women interviewed were more interested in being home-makers, succumbing to their fates and letting the men take the leadership positions in society. this echoes similar sentiments from kodikara (2012) who stated, about the nominations of women in elections, that: 18 to be considered a ‘winnable’ candidate, money and muscle are important as is the active involvement in maintaining and supporting the chains of dependency between the party and the constituency. most women lack both money and muscle and are passive ‘clients’ in the margins of these networks (except if you a wife, widow or daughter of a politician of course). (p. 1). these statements graphically depict the powerlessness of the woman’s stature in the sri lankan society. comparison of bermudian, trinidadian and sri lankan women’s identity with such a heavy reliance on tradition and the archetypal notions of gender boundaries a comparison of the three women’s identity segues. barnes (1999) urged, “it would be useful to begin with the premise that women’s relationship to feminism is often a layered and unruly process and that women frequently reject its epistemes and politics” (p. 38). thus, epitomizes the complex nature of caribbean feminist identity shrouded in the male eyes, perceived through the females’. indeed, part of the rejection of the epistemology which defines feminist identity development is the environment and socialization processes where the polarities of nature versus nurture are iterative. stewart and healey (1989) posited that social events and environmental factors affect identity development. thus, the environment and social factors influence whether or not trinidadian and bermudian females possess an agentic viewpoint of themselves as both producers and products of their different social systems. however, based on the literature, it would appear that sri lankan women are typically more communal in perspectives preferring to leave the more agentic characteristics to their male counterparts. affected by their close proximity to the united states of america, bermudian females, albeit, considered caribbean could display a disparity in cultural values from that of the trinidadian females, whose influence could be seen as more south american due to their closeness to venezuela. sri lankan women would be expected to display a less evolved feminist identity development because of sri lanka’s close proximity to asian countries and the fact that the women are encapsulated in a culture of religion and adherence to norms and traditions, albeit, trinidad and bermuda share a rich caribbean heritage of slavery, there are definite incongruities in the leadership of both islands. sri lanka on the other hand, was a british colony and is now independent. trinidad is independent and a republic whereas bermuda remains a territory of the united kingdom. the climate in trinidad and sri lanka consists of the dry season and the rainy season. in bermuda, however, there are four seasons. it is difficult to find research on sri lankan women and their motivational level or transformational leadership. the literature abounds with information on men as transformational leaders and trying to promote leaders in the garment and diary industries which are predominantly female. this obvious silo in the skill set among the three nationalities of female participants sets sri lankan women apart. research conducted on trinidadian and bermudians’ motivation and leadership style mirror the similarities and differences in their geographical location, culture, history, and climates. in studies conducted by bissessar (2011), there were differences in leadership and motivational styles whereby the bermudian female participants displayed a stronger transformational leadership style versus her trinidadian counterpart who tended to display a more laissez-faire style of leadership. this would suggest that bermudian female participants exemplified a more pronounced attempt to avoid societal messages regarding gender and leadership as opposed to their trinidadian counterparts. such social role concepts seem more part of the typical trinidadian culture where the stereotypical male/female construct is seen as an injunctive or prescriptive norm. the bermudian female seems to be more agentic whereas the trinidadian female is more communal in attributes. bermudian female participants, therefore, exhibited an increased willingness to question the status quo and adopt internal standards rather than the canonical “feminine” behaviours of their fellow trinidadians. studies on gender and transformational leadership suggest that feminist theories and transformational leadership concepts intersect (kark, 2004). moreover, there is a strong link between transformational leadership skills to higher levels of feminist identity development. thus, one would expect the bermudian female to exhibit a more evolved stage of fids than her trinidadian coequal who is more laissez faire whilst the bermudian female is more prone to exemplify transformational leadership. these findings further perpetuate the preponderance of the indelible imprint of the “glass ceiling” (cotter, hermsen, ovadia, vanneman , 2001), in action where women are willing to take on more communal qualities and subsume their nature for that of nurturer preferring to take a lesser position of authority. this is an empirical reflection of the social theory role where trinidadian women take on prescriptive roles and see themselves as products of society rather than producers of society. another significant aspect is the similarity between bermudian and trinidadian females’ motivational preferences. both bermudian and trinidadian female participants exhibited extrinsic motivation with external regulation whereby their motivation was based on an expected reward system and there was an externally perceived locus of control (bissessar 2011). such findings are anathema to the aforementioned conclusions about the transformational leadership style of the bermudian female participants but are in accordance with the trinidadian female participants’ laissez-faire leadership style. for the 19 bermudian female respondent to possess high transformational leadership styles she should also display strong intrinsic motivation with an internal locus of control. in fact, barbuto (2005) found a strong correlation between intrinsic motivation and transformational leadership. from the data collected by bissessar (2011), both sets of females obtained the highest scores in the subscales of extrinsic motivation. this indicated that both bermudian and trinidadian female participants did not possess an internal locus of control vis a vis motivation and implies that there is no “autonomy” or “authenticity” in their motivational levels as expanded by ryan and deci (2006). thus, both groups of females’ motivational levels are based on external regulations such as acceptance by the male and extrinsic rewards for accomplishment. ultimately, such acceptance would affect their level of self-esteem. kernis (2003) discussed the difference between fragile and secure high self-esteem with fragile self-esteem grounded in extrinsic motivation which is the main motivation among participants interviewed by bissessar (2011) in an earlier study when they completed the academic motivation scale. literature review female identity development and self-esteem are conflated concepts with many articles linking both and suggesting a high level of each as complementary. according to boisner (2003) “a growing body of literature demonstrates that adopting feminist beliefs or identity may be associated with higher selfesteem” (p. 213). self-efficacy beliefs are the cornerstone of self-esteem and touted as essential to the social cognitive theory espoused by bandura (1986). pajares (2002) saw self-efficacy as synonymous with motivation, well-being, and personal accomplishment. eisele and stake (2008) in their study linked feminist identity development to self-efficacy as did foss and stanley (1986). markowitz (1998) and zimmerman, israel, schilz, and checkoway (1992), and zimmerman and rappaport (1988) also concluded that high self-efficacy led to increased levels of engaged activism unlike low self-efficacy. kaysen and stake (2001) also linked feminist activism with self-efficacy. activism and self-efficacy are all part of women finding their voices. saunders and west (2006) in their study found a direct correlation between women finding their voices and their feminist activism. they stated “instrumentality, expressiveness, and a more developed feminist identity were all related positively to psychological well-being” (p. 199). in agreement with those conclusions, witte and sherman (2002) found that the passive aggressive stage espoused by downing and roush (1985) was akin to the traditional male/female role where the women were used to “silencing the self” rather than giving “voice” to the self (musil, 1992, p. 10). smith (1999) concluded that women who identified themselves as feminists contained a higher level of self-esteem versus those who did not see themselves as feminists. similarly, fischer and good (1994) associated strong feminist identity with high selfesteem. eisele and stake (2008) affirmed, “positive relationships have been demonstrated between feminist attitudes and measures of self-esteem and self-efficacy” (p. 235). burn, aboud, and moyles (2000) found that self-esteem derived from belonging to a collective feminist group was empowering and self-identification with the group was a construct of social identity. similarly, nicholson and long (1990) found a positive correlation between self-acceptance and feminist attitudes among minority women. carpenter and johnson (2003) indicated “women's self-esteem is more strongly related to social acceptance and inclusion than to accomplishments” (p. 254). congruently, de man and bentoit (1982) and moradi, and subich (2002) found a positive correlation between rse and subscales of fids. however, the pa subscale of fids was negatively correlated to rse. in her research on specific aspects of fids, duncan (2010) concluded that: in three of the four feminist components (revelation, embeddedness, and active commitment), strong feminists scored significantly higher on feminist attitudes than did weak feminists who, in turn, scored significantly higher than nonfeminists. this pattern was reversed for passive acceptance (where strong feminists scored lowest). (p. 504) eisele and stake suggested that nontraditional gender roles are positively correlated to self-esteem. witte and sherman (2002) found a direct correlation between passive acceptance and “silencing the self” (musil, 1992, p.10) or women’s acceptance of the traditional gender roles such as agentic and communal perspective with descriptive and prescriptive characteristics and behaviours. model of feminist identity development cross’ (1978) seminal work on black identity model fomented the feminist development theory implemented in this study. according to cross, african americans move along a continuum from “low or neutral to high salience” (boisnier, 2003, p. 212). downing and roush (1985) suggested a five stage feminist identity model: (1) passive acceptance, (2) revelation, (3) embeddedness/emanation, (4) synthesis, and (5) active commitment. passive acceptance (pa) encompasses the traditional view that women are subservient and should be treated as less than men. men are considered to be superior to women. moradi, subich, and phillips (2002) stated, “passive acceptance is marked by a lack of awareness or denial of individual, institutional, and cultural discrimination against women” (p. 7). revelation (r) is the second stage along the continuum and is the catalyst for open questioning about the self and sex roles. foisted on the female mindset, according to boisnier (2003), is a state of dualistic thinking where women are seen in a sanguine light and men in a pessimistic one. women become kindred spirits and bonds are formed in the 20 embeddedness/emanation stage where women share an affinity as fellow sufferers at the hands of the androcentric dominated society. there is a more relativist thinking and women cautiously interact with men. moradi, subich, and phillips (2002) indicated that this stage is two-fold where “women in the first phase embed themselves in women’s culture and women’s company (eg. take women studies courses, become involved in women’s support group) uncritically adopt feminist ideology” (p. 8). transcending gender binaries, the synthesis stage suggests a need to see men as individuals rather than a collective group. women identities and roles take on a positive light and they become role models to be emulated. at this stage, moradi, subich, and phillips (2002) stated, “women individually interpret feminism, transcend gender roles, and integrate personally defined behaviours, traits, values, roles, and interests in their lives” (p. 8). the final stage, active commitment, “describes the stage in which the woman commits herself to meaningful action toward feminist goals” (boisnier, 2003, p. 212). men are considered equal to women but not the same emotionally and psychologically. at this stage, the woman commits herself to fostering a non-sexist community. women’s actions are personalized and rational at this self-actualized stage of feminist identity development. social role theory the social role theory suggests that individuals possess social roles based on their gender. dulin (2007) stated, “these stereotypic gender roles are formed by social norms that apply to people of a certain category or social position” (p. 105). eagly and koenig (2006) indicated that gender roles stem from two main differences: (a) descriptive norms and (b) injunctive or prescriptive norms. they expanded that descriptive norms are “beliefs about the characteristics of men and women” (p.163). injunctive or prescriptive norms are “beliefs about what men and women should do” (p. 164). eagly and koenig posited that social roles rather than gender fuel individuals’ behaviour. the underlying premise of the social role theory of distal and proximal causes where there is the perpetuation of social structures and gender role constructs and the socialization process is similar to the division of labour (eagly & koenig). dulin (2007) viewed the social role theory as structural rather than cultural further sustaining the construct of division of labour between genders. indeed, from a young age, individuals learn, emulate, and model gender specific roles they see in their everyday lives. subconsciously, they form opinions based on their environment and class men as more agentic. men are ascribed such characteristics as possessing more assertiveness, independence, and competence than women. women are more communal. they characterize women as considerate, unselfish, amiable, and have concern for others (eagly & keonig, 2006). such clearly delineated qualities according to eagly and koenig are along the lines of division of labour based on gender stereotypes. cotter, hermsen, ovadia, vanneman (2001) further propagated such a clearly delineated dichotomy with their “glass ceiling” theory where women cater to the communal qualities and work at home-making, taking positions of lower power and prefer to stay within the realms of the invisible barriers created by an androcentric society. society places certain expectations on individuals based on gender. the social role theory states that women and men behave differently in certain situations and take on gender specific roles as dictated by society. conway, pizzamiglio, and mount (1996) conducted research and found that participants rated low-status individuals as more communal and high status individuals as more agentic. data also implied that communal qualities, associated with females, connoted a low status position. ritter and yoder (2004) extended the social theory to indicate that men and women follow traditional stereotypes where men are expected to take leadership positions and women willingly accept their role as housewives. my study aims within group sampletrinidadian females descriptive statistics were implemented in the form of correlation statistics in order to obtain the most accurate measure of the relationship among subscales of the dependent variable rse and independent variable fids. mega stats addins in micro soft excel implementing a one-way anova for the aggregate scores of the fids and rse for the within group sample of afro and indo trinidadian females was used to determine whether or not there was a correlation. the independent variable is self-esteem with feminist identity development as the dependent variable. an anova of the aggregate scores for fids and rse indicated whether or not there was a significant correlation between trinidadian females’ self-esteem and feminist identity development. subscales of each stage of the fids were correlated using an anova. these aforementioned correlations answered the following hypothesis: hypotheses: h1there is a significant correlation between trinidadian females’ rse and fids. h2there is a significant correlation between afro and indo trinidadian females’ rse and fids. h3there is a significant correlation between pa, r, ee, s, and ac stages of the fids of afro and indo trinidadian females’. within group samplebermudian females hypotheses: h4there is a significant correlation between bermudian females’ rse and fids. h5there is a significant correlation between pa, r, ee, s, and ac stages of fids. 21 within group samplesri lankan hypotheses: h6 there is a significant correlation between 38 sri lankan females” pa, r, ee, s, and ac stages of fids. among group sampletrinidadian, bermudian, and sri lankan females hypotheses: h7 there is a significant correlation between bermudian and trinidadian females’ fids and rse. h8there is a significant correlation between trinidadian, bermudian, and sri lankan participants’ pa, r, ee, s, and ac stages of fids. based on the information gathered, collated, and calculated, the researcher will determine whether or not the distal and proximal causes of the social role theory were vindicated. methods participants bermudian and trinidadian participants spoke english as their first language whilst sri lankan respondents spoke tamil. sri lankan participants spoke an advanced level of english. all participants completed the survey in english (as indicated in appendices a and b for sample). all respondents gave informed consent. all participants were informed that the data would be reported cumulatively rather than individually. no female respondent was exposed to women’s studies or gender studies. maccalister (1999) suggested, “students have been found to become more liberal in their attitudes toward women, and their feminist identity, job motivation, job certainty, and self-esteem to increase, after taking a women's studies class” (p. 283). earlier, musil (1992) echoed similar conclusions stating that the students who attended women studies class found their voices and empowered themselves. trinidadian out of 70 rse and fids questionnaires disseminated 40 were returned. the minimum sample size for 70 participants with a confidence level of 95% and a margin of error of .05 and a response distribution of 50% is 60 according to raosoft calculations. participants included two housewives, four primary school teachers, 23 full-time college students pursuing the associates’ degree in business management (enrolled at university of the west indies school of business and applied studies, roytec), four sales clerks, one hairdresser, two unemployed females, and four managers with ages ranging from 18 to 62 (m= 30.9). nine 18 year-old, six 19 year-old, and three 22 year-old trinidadian females completed the rse model and fids with the remaining 22 participants evenly distributed throughout the aforementioned age range. no trinidadian female respondent was exposed to women’s studies or gender studies. maccalister (1999) suggested, “students have been found to become more liberal in their attitudes toward women, and their feminist identity, job motivation, job certainty, and self-esteem to increase, after taking a women's studies class” (p. 283). respondents were recruited based on their desire to participate in the study and were known and in some cases not known by the researcher. data for this study were collected in summer 2010. bermudian out of 40 rse and fids questionnaires disseminated 20 were returned. the minimum sample size for 40 participants with a confidence level of 95% and a margin of error of .05 and a response distribution of 50% is 37 according to raosoft calculations. participants included five middle school teachers and 15 full-time college students enrolled at bermuda community college and pursuing their associates’ degree. participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 48 (m= 27.6). participants known to the researcher were sent emails asking for their input in the study. those who were interested responded. data for this study were collected in summer 2010. sri lankan out of 50 fids questionnaires disseminated 38 were returned. the minimum sample size for 50 participants with a confidence level of 95% and a margin of error of .05 and a response distribution of 50% is 45 according to raosoft calculations. participants included students enrolled in classes at the university of sri jayewardenepura . participants’ ages ranged from 24 to 40 (m= 29.6). participants known to dr. hemamlie gunatilake were asked to complete the fids. those who were interested completed the questionnaire. data from the sri lankan participants were collected in june 2011. overview of the procedure for this study, trinidadian and bermudian participants completed the rse whilst trinidadian, bermudian, and sri lankan participants completed the fids measures to determine. they completed the surveys face-to-face, online, and via telephone. trinidadian and bermudian participants were asked their ages, their level of education, their job, whether or not they had taken a women studies class, and their geographic location. sri lankan participants were asked their ages and whether they had taken any women studies classes which they had not. each bermudian and trinidadian respondent agreed to participate, completed both surveys individually, and returned the completed surveys to this researcher online or face-to-face. each sri lankan participant returned the fids questionnaire face-to-face to hemamalie gunatilake. measures feminist identity development scale the feminist identity development scale (bargad & hyde, 1991) was implemented to assess the participants’ feminist identity development (as indicated in appendix b). comprising of 48 questions, participants did not completed the questions with “no scale” (ns) written next to them. these questions were numbers: 13, 15, 25, 26, 27, 31, 34, 39, and 41. the http://www.facebook.com/pages/university-of-sri-jayewardenepura/108139219213848?rf=110937835598002 22 remaining 39-item questionnaire is based on the five stages of downing and roush’s (1985) model of feminist identity development. downing and roush (1985) suggested a five stage feminist identity model: (1) passive acceptance, (2) revelation, (3) embeddedness/emanation, (4) synthesis, and (5) active commitment. all subscales of this model were assessed to determine participants’ level of feminist identity. the alpha values according to moradi and subich (2000) range from .74 to .87. in their research, moradi and subich found an internal consistency reliability of “fids’s r and s yielded alphas below this cut-off” (p. 72). the test of reliability for the fids, comparable stability was noted for pa(r = .77), r(r = .77), and ee (r =.79), but s (r = .50) and active commitment (ac) (r = .38) were problematic” (moradi & subich, p. 73). the discriminant and convergent validity for the fids showed “relations of sse dimensions were small or nonsignificant with pa, were highest with r, dropped slightly with ee and ac, and were nonsignificant with s” (p. 75). gertsmann and kramer (1997) conducted a study of female college students using the fids and determined that it contained an internal consistency as measured by cornbach’s alpha with a range of .51-.81, with a mean of .71. furthermore, a reliability test as measured by spearman-brown ranged from .69-.85, with a mean of .79. (see moradi) self-esteem (rse) rosenberg, schooler, schoenbach, and rosenberg (1995) indicated, “we marshal evidence that two types of self-esteem may have strikingly different consequences, global self-esteem being more relevant to psychological well-being and specific self-esteem being more relevant to behaviour” (p. 141). specific self-esteem according to rosenberg et al. is geared more toward academic achievement whereas global self-esteem is more psychological. the rse used in this study measures global self-esteem rather than specific self-esteem (flynn, 2003). rosenberg’s (1965) self-esteem scale (rse) was employed to examine participants’ level of self-esteem (as indicated in appendix a). these 10-items measured 23 participants’ level of self-esteem and self-acceptance globally. the instrument is divided into five positive statements and five negative statements. participants strongly agreed (1), agreed, disagreed, and strongly disagreed (4) with the statements. the higher the score the lower the self esteem. according to blascovich and tomaka (1991), the rse is one of the most frequently used instruments to measure global self-esteem. blascovich and tomaka reviewed the psychometric properties of the rse and reported a cornbach alpha range of .77 and .88. test and re-test correlations indicated a cornbach alpha range of .85and .82 within a two-one-week interval. results the results will be discussed: (a) within trinidadian sample group; (b) within bermudian sample group; (c) within sri lankan sample group; and (d) among trinidadian, sri lankan, and bermudian sample group. the independent variable is selfesteem with feminist identity development as the dependent variable. data correlation within trinidadian sample group hypotheses: h1 there is no significant correlation between 40 trinidadian females’ rse and fids. the table below indicates an f value of .41 and a p value of .53 when a correlation regression analysis was used in micro soft excel mega stats add-ins. see table 1 for correlation of trinidadian participants’ rse and fids. table 1 correlation of trinidadian participants’ rse and fids. source ss df ms f p regression 225.89 1 225.89 0.41 0.53 residual 20,975.21 38 551.98 total 21,201.10 39 h2 there is no significant correlation between 17 afro and 23 indo trinidadian females’ rse. see table 2.2 for correlation of indo and afro-trinidadian participants’ rse. the table 2.2 indicates an f value of .22 and a p value of .64. h3 there is a slight positive correlation of. 046 between 17 afro and 23 indo trinidadian females for fids. table 3.2 shows an f value of 4.22 with a p value of .046. see table 3.2 for correlation of indo and afro-trinidadian participants’ fids. table 2.1 correlation of indo and afro-trinidadian participants’ rse. mean and standard deviation mean n sd afro 19.9 17 5.1 indo 20.8 23 6.0 total 20.4 40 5.58 table 2.2 correlation of indo and afro-trinidadian participants’ rse.-anova table source ss df ms f p treatment 6.92 1 6.921 0.22 0.64 error 1,208.85 38 31.81 total 1,215.78 39 23 table 3.1 correlation of indo and afro-trinidadian participants’ fids. mean and standard deviation mean n sd indo 131.6 23 13.59 afro 117.2 18 29.96 total 125.3 41 23.14 table 3.2 correlation of indo and afro-trinidadian participants’ fids. anova table source ss df ms f p treatment 2,089.90 1 2,089.90 4.22 .046 error 19,320.59 39 495.40 total 21,410.49 40 data correlation within bermudian sample group hypotheses: h4 there is no significant correlation between 20 bermudian females’ rse and their fids. the table below shows an f value of .47 and a p value of .50 using the rse as the dependent variable and the fids as the independent variable a significant correlation is concluded based on a correlation regression matrix. see table 4 for correlation of bermudian participants’ rse and fids. table 4 correlation of bermudian participants’ rse and fids. source ss df ms f p regression 98.90 1 98.91 0.47 .50 residual 3,776.09 18 209.78 total 3,875.00 19 h5 there is a significant negative correlation between bermudians’ pa, r, ee, s, and ac stages of fids. a oneway anova yielded an f value of 59.44 and a p value of 4.84 e-that suggests that there is no correlation among the subscales of fids. see table 5.2 for correlation of bermudians’ pa, r, ee, s, and ac. table 5.1 correlation of bermudians’ pa, r, ee, s, and ac. mean and standard deviation mean n sd pa 23.5 20 0.51 r 16.7 20 1.53 ee 15.4 20 6.21 s 16.6 20 2.46 ac 28.6 20 2.76 total 20.1 100 6.07 table 5.2 correlation of bermudians’ pa, r, ee, s, and ac anova table source ss df ms f p treatment 2,607.94 4 651.99 59.44 4.84 error 1,042.10 95 10.97 total 3,650.04 99 data correlation within sri lankan sample group hypotheses: h6 there is a significant negative correlation between 38 sri lankan females” pa, r, ee, s, and ac stages of fids. a one-way anova with four of the variables yielded the following post hoc analysis with p values indicating that there is no significant correlation between ac, pa and ee but slight correlations for r, s, and ee. see table 6.2 for correlation of sri lankan participants’ pa, r, ee, s, and ac. table 6.1 correlation of sri lankan participants’ pa, r, ee, s, and ac. mean and standard deviation mean n sd pa 32.7 38 6.15 r 21.7 38 2.56 ee 19.2 38 4.05 s 19.3 38 1.16 ac 25.7 38 5.82 total 23.7 190 6.69 table 6.2 correlation of sri lankan participants’ pa, r, ee, s, and ac.anova table source ss df ms f p treatment 4,902.23 4 1,225.56 63.82 8.03 error 3,552.42 185 19.20 total 8,454.65 189 data correlation among trinidadian, bermudian, and sri lankan sample group hypotheses: h7 there is a significant negative correlation between trinidadian and bermudian participants’ rse. table 7.2 shows an f value of 20.81 and a p value of -2.68 which indicates that the null hypothesis should be accepted. see table 7.2 for correlation of trinidadian and bermudian participants’ rse. 24 table 7.1 correlation of trinidadian and bermudian participants’ rse. mean and standard deviation mean n sd tdad self 20.4 40 5.58 bda self 26.9 20 4.09 total 22.6 60 5.94 table 7.2 correlation of trinidadian and bermudian participants’ rse anova table source ss df ms f p treatment 550.41 1 550.41 20.81 -2.68 error 1,534.33 58 26.45 total 2,084.73 59 h8 there is a significant negative correlation among trinidadian, bermudian, and sri lankans’ stages of fids. a one-factor anova implementing mega stats add-ins on microsoft excel in table shows an f value of 12.24 with a p value of -1.85. see table 8.2 for correlation of trinidadian, bermudian, and sri lankan fids. table 8.1 correlation of trinidadian, bermudian, and sri lankan fids. mean and standard deviation mean n sd tdad 125.3 41 23.14 bda 99.5 20 14.28 sl 122.7 38 18.72 total 119.1 99 22.13 table 8.2 correlation of trinidadian, bermudian, and sri lankan fids anova table source ss df ms f p treatment 9,750.88 2 4,875.44 12.24 -1.85 error 38,251.30 96 398.45 total 48,002.18 98 when additional tests comparing sri lankan and trinidadian participants’ fids with one-way anova were conducted there was a slight correlation of.5424 with an f value of .37. no difference was found between bermudian and sri lankan’s fids. see table 9.2 for correlation of trinidadian and sri lankan fids. table 9.1 correlation of trinidadian and sri lankan fids. mean and standard deviation mean n sd sl 122.7 38 18.72 tdad 125.7 40 23.32 total 124.2 78 21.12 table 9.2 correlation of trinidadian and sri lankan fidsanova table source ss df ms f p treatment 168.38 1 168.38 0.37 .54 error 34,166.92 76 449.57 total 34,335.29 77 discussion trinidadians’ rse and fids no significant correlation was found between trinidadians’ rse and fids which would suggest that participants’ feminist identity development and self-esteem were not linked. when analyzed based on ethnicity, no significant correlation was found between indo and afro trinidadians’ rse. this suggests that albeit, it is generalized that afro trinidadian women found their voices before indo trinidadian women and are more vocal this in no way reflects differences in self-esteem. however, the findings that there is a slight correlations between afro and indo trinidadians’ fids illustrates that both ethnicities’ feminist identity development is linked. bermudian participants no significant correlation was found between bermudian participants’ rse and fids. this suggests that there is no link between the participants’ self-esteem and feminist identity development. when their scores for the stages of fids were correlated a significant negative correlation was obtained. this is in accordance with the stages of fids where the higher stages of feminist identity would result in lower levels of passive acceptance. sri lankan participants when the averages for each subscale of fids were correlated there was a significant negative correlation found. this suggests that the higher stages of the fids the higher the levels of feminist identity. this corroborates other findings on fids. overall when the rse was correlated for trinidadian and bermudian participants, a negative correlation was found. this would suggest that when self-esteem increases for one group it decreases for the other group. a negative correlation was also found when the stages of fids were correlated for trinidadians, bermudians, and sri lankans. however, no significant correlation existed between trinidadian and sri lankan participants’ fids. 25 link to social role theory the general purpose of my study was to determine whether or not there was a significant correlation between trinidadian, sri lankan and bermudian participants’ fids and trinidadian and bermudians’ rse. from the data examined, it can be concluded that trinidadian women reflect more social and causal conditioning than their bermudian counterparts vis a vis the pre-eminence of feminist identity development and selfesteem. conversely, bermudian females mirrored ‘tendencies predisposed by natural selection” rather than “culturally constructed” paradigms akin to their trinidadian counterparts as evidenced from their average scores at stage five of downing and roush’s (1985) model. sri lankan respondents demonstrated a strong reliance on tradition and adherence to the norm rather than seeing themselves as individuals. in essence, the sri lankan women displayed a more communal perspective with lower average scores of fids in areas demonstrating a more evolved levels of feminist identity development such as revelation, synthesis, and active commitment. they therefore, operated in a clearly delineated gender structure where disparate roles exist for males and females. this is in agreement with the more communal roles ascribed to females especially in asian communities. the sri lankan participants showed more proximal causes of gender roles and gender expectations where they abide by what is expected of them. trinidadian and sri lankan participants resonated more of an implicit patriarchy where distinct role constructs existed (myers, 2000). trinidadian and sri lankan females exhibited a more nurtured sense of feminist development versus their bermudian counterparts. this reinforces the proximal rather than the distal cause of gender roles and expectations. eagly and koenig (2006) stated, “the distal, or ultimate, causes of sex differences consist of (a) the physical characteristics of the sexes and (b) features of social structures and local ecologies” (p. 45). such differences suggest that sri lankan, bermudian, and trinidadian participants adhered to the social structures and local ecologies of their disparate cultures and their enculturation. these findings suggest that trinidadian and sri lankan participants portrayed the stereotypical communal qualities expected of them by society. boisnier (2003) stated, “women in higher stages are theorized to have a more positive image of women and to embrace their identities as women and feminists” (p. 213). in this case, bermudian participants scored higher averages in the fourth and fifth stages of the fids whilst trinidadian and sri lankan counterparts scored lower. this suggested that bermudian participants possessed increased levels of fids and rse as opposed to trinidadian and sri lankan females. bermudian participants’ feminist identity is more evolved and their self-esteem is higher than the other nationalities. this could be as a result of their close proximity to the american mainland. sri lankan and indo trinidadian participants share a history of similar belief systems and ethnicity which could account for lower levels of feminist identity development. in such cultures, men are seen as having agentic qualities and women more communal qualities and gender structure is clearly defined. limitations further studies should be conducted to determine the disparity between fids and rse among bermudian, sri lankan, and trinidadian females. a mixed methodology with open-ended interviews would have resulted in a more expansive response to the hypotheses. a larger sample size would have allowed for increased generalizability of the findings with equal numbers of indo-trinidadian and afro-trinidadian. another shortcoming would be the occurrence of social desirability bias where, according to fisher (1993), “systematic error in self-report measures resulting from the desire of respondents to avoid embarrassment and project a favourable image to others” (p. 103). recommendations moreover, a more diverse population with a larger sample in diversity may have yielded different results. further studies on the correlation between rse, collective self-esteem (cse), and fids among sri lankan, bermudian, and trinidadian females would provide insightful information on the geometrical interconnection of one with the other. it is recommended that a more specific correlation of females who were exposed to women’s studies or gender studies classes will foment 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(1988). citizen participation, perceived control, and psychological empowerment. american journal of community psychology, 16, 725–750. 28 appendix a rosenberg self-esteem scale (rosenberg, 1965) the scale is a ten item likert scale with items answered on a four point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. the original sample for which the scale was developed consisted of 5,024 high school juniors and seniors from 10 randomly selected schools in new york state. instructions: below is a list of statements dealing with your general feelings about yourself. if you strongly agree, circle sa. if you agree with the statement, circle a. if you disagree, circle d. if you strongly disagree, circle sd. 1. on the whole, i am satisfied with myself. sa a d sd 2. at times, i think i am no good at all. sa a d sd 3. i feel that i have a number of good qualities. sa a d sd 4. i am able to do things as well as most other people. sa a d sd appendix b feminist identity development scale (fids) source: bargad, a., & hyde, j. s. (1991). women’s studies: a study of feminist identity development in women. psychology of women quarterly, 15, 181-201. instructions on the following pages you will find a series of statements which people might use to describe themselves. read each statement carefully and decide to what degree you think it presently describes you. then select one of the five answers that best describes your present agreement or disagreement with the statement. for example, if you strongly agree with the statement, “i like to return to the same vacation spot year after year,” you would rate the statement with the number 5 in the space provided as shown below: 1-strongly disagree 2-disagree 3-neither agree nor disagree 4-agree 5-strongly agree _5_ i like to return to the same vacation spot year after year. remember to read each statement carefully and decide to what degree you think it describes you at the present time. ___1. i don’t think there is any need for an equal rights amendment; women are doing well. (1) ___2. being a part of a women’s community is important to me. (3) ___3. i want to work to improve women’s status. (5) ___4. i feel that some men are sensitive to women’s issues. (4) ___5. i used to think there wasn’t a lot of sex discrimination, but now i know how much there really is. (2) educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 8 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 8-13, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper a new sherriff in town: the barriers of structural discrimination facing women leaders patrick j. hughes doctoral student of leadership at alvernia university in reading, pennsylvania associate professor and the head of the criminal justice administration program leadership development program coordinator at central pennsylvania college, summerdale, pennsylvania e-mail: patrickhughes@centralpenn.edu accepted august 6, 2010 in the current world of organizations, it is no surprise that discrimination exists against women. many organizations, however, exhibit structural discrimination and little is done to combat this. this is no more evident than within law enforcement organizations. this research focuses on the disparate treatment, as defined by the ninth circuit court of appeals, as the barrier keeping women becoming sheriff. current data show women make up less than one-half of one percent of all sheriffs nationwide. this research suggests women hold leadership competencies that the field of law enforcement is seeking. by more women becoming the top executive of these agencies, the discriminatory landscape within law enforcement agencies will begin to change. key words: women in leadership, structural discrimination, police leadership introduction throughout history, both nationally and globally, the lack of social justice has been evident in many ways. discrimination, oppression, and underrepresentation are exhibited against race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity. these types of social injustices are displayed in many fields, such as education, business, healthcare, and government. an individual often might be experiencing organizational or institutional underrepresentation based on the values and perceptions of those institutions and organizations. adams, blumenfled, castaneda, hackman, peters, and zungia (2000) stated oppression is “generally used to convey the workings of the larger social system” (p. 6). this concept of oppression is very evident with the underrepresentation of women in the field of law enforcement, especially those elected to the position of sheriff. it has only been a few decades since women have integrated the field of law enforcement. law enforcement at its basic level is viewed as a very physical, aggressive profession that only men can endure or perform. as the world changed, so did the physical and mental competencies needed to perform in law enforcement. ortmeier and meese (2010) supported this by stating in the “contemporary policing environment , brute strength and aggressiveness give way to a new breed of officers who are better educated, self managed, creative, guided by values and purposes” (p. 31). as law enforcement evolves, competencies, such as communication, problem solving, analytical thinking, and ethical decision-making are crucial. these are concepts not easily measured. however, law enforcement needs to incorporate these non-traditional competencies as part of the policies and job description in some way to create a more gender-balanced organization and culture. the research price (1996) conducted of a large american law enforcement agency found “a number of interviewees believe there are deliberate departmental policies which work to the detriment of women” (p. 3). very seldom are those in law enforcement fired or arrested for lacking a physical skill. rather, the issue arises from lack of, or non-utilization of a non-traditional competency. nationwide, there are only 33 females holding the position of sheriff in 3,067 counties of the united states (bureau of justice statistics, 2010). this number seems to be staggering given the total number of counties nationwide. data such as this draw concern due to the fact that sheriffs are elected positions, unlike many police chiefs that are governed by civil service regulations. the person running for sheriff has in fact a possible direct impact on the outcome of the election. why then are so few women able to become elected to sheriff? advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 9 research is sparse in the area of structural discrimination occurring and preventing women from obtaining the leadership positions specifically within law enforcement. researching the discrimination of women in law enforcement and their impact on policing seems to be more progressive in europe than the united states (brown, 1996, price, 1996, silvestri, 2005). areas that have been examined are recruitment strategies (jordan, fridell, faggiani, & kubu, 2009), sexual harassment, and equal opportunity laws (brown 1996, hazenberg, 1996, seklecki & paynich, 2007) as they pertain to females in law enforcement. contemporary law enforcement, according to ortmeier and meese (2010), needs to “focus on leadership competencies that is, the abilities to do things rather than feel things” (p. 29). a need exists to explore the lack of female representation in top leadership positions within the field of law enforcement. the purpose of this research explores three items. first, the improvement to the overall traditional leadership structure of law enforcement organizations nationwide, specifically as sheriff. second, the non-traditional competency components women can contribute and achieve, if not faced with discrimination. third, by redefining the law enforcement position would increase future recruitment and retention of females to occupy such leadership roles. this research paper attempts to fill this gap between the structure of law enforcement and the structural discrimination strongly embedded in informal values and principles. structural discrimination, according to adams et al. (2000) “is not intentional and it is not illegal; it is carrying on as business as usual. confronting structural discrimination requires the reexamination of basic cultural values and fundamental principles of social organization” (p. 35). the researcher is not suggesting that women and men lead in the same manner. they are, however suggesting men and women possess similar competencies. women may in fact possess more than men. by defeating the structural discrimination oppressing women in law enforcement, perhaps leadership in these agencies can flourish. the first portion of this paper focuses on defining terms used and the traditional structural makeup of law enforcement agencies. the general position requirements of sheriff or chief are examined. a general explanation on structural discrimination/oppression as it applies to these organizations is explored. the second segment speaks to basic leadership competencies. it also discusses a comparison between business organizations and law enforcement organizations particularly, their leadership styles. finally, the last section considers female leadership competencies styles, that if not oppressed structurally, can benefit to law enforcement agencies. definitions three terms utilized in this research need to be defined to aid in clarity. first, structural discrimination as defined by adams et.al, (2000): refers to the policies of dominant race/ethnic/gender institutions and the behavior of the individuals who implement these policies and control these institutions, which are race/ethnic/gender neutral intent but which have a differential and/or harmful effect on minority race/ethnic/gender groups. (p. 31) the united states ninth circuit court appeals, specifically judge clarence thomas, interpreted the definition of both disparate treatment and disparate impact. second, disparate treatment is “the employer simply treats some people less favorably than others because of their race, color, or other protected characteristics” (p. 2). third, disparate impact, is defined as “employment practices that are facially neutral in their treatment of different groups, but that in fact falls more harshly on one group than another and cannot be justified by business necessity” (p. 2). the next few pages point out how these types of discrimination are being shown toward women in law enforcement agencies through their current structures, unwritten values, and definitional components of the positions in policies. improving the traditional leadership structure for decades, law enforcement agencies have been overrun by male dominance. the general mindset for years this field has been that law enforcement requires individuals to be aggressive and very physical. this mindset is now socially embedded into the culture and structure. silvestri (2007) observed, “it is within this gendered subculture that ideal worker is routinely constructed and reproduced” (p. 269). price (1996) also noted, “the biggest challenge facing women officers is the resistance displayed by male officers in their attitudes toward women in policing” (p.2). the general structural job task analysis of those in law enforcement contains such tasks as patrol, report writing, investigating crimes, and community policing activities. nowhere is aggressiveness and very physical mentioned. seklecki & paynich (2007) noted, “it took additional courtroom campaigning to prove that many strength and agility tests failed to measure the actual physical requirements of police commonly performed” (p. 18). they reaffirmed this and stated, “like so many other professions, law enforcement required years of political maneuvering and countless legal battles before the gates restricting women’s entry into the field opened” (seklecki & paynich, 2007, p. 17). those researchers are looking at the issue from a basic patrol structure standpoint. is the battle for women over? this research suggests, no. many law enforcement organizations, due to the male influence, accept women because of laws; however, informally they reject women’s ideas and competencies. kanter (1977) suggested women in law enforcement are thrust into four roles “mother, sex object, kid sister, and women liberationist” (ctd. seklecki & paynich, 2007, p. 20). it labels such as these that show no direct link to the task analysis originally discussed earlier. does this job analysis also apply for those in leadership positions (sheriff/chief) within law enforcement organizations? advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 10 some general functions of those in the top position are communicating, budgeting, enforcement of policies, hiring, decision-making, coordination of activities and critical thinking. when focusing specifically on organizational design, law enforcement organizations are very structured. the organizational chart of law enforcement agencies are well defined, as well as the roles that accompany rank and titles. communication inside these agencies is top down. it has been debated that this design is needed because of the severe situations these men and women encounter. the vicarious liability that accompanies those situations is also great. these organizations and those of the lowest rank, often seek positive behaviors exhibited with effective leadership, gender excluded. among these are better communication networks, more participation, better decision-making, and leadership. organizational commitment may increase through honoring the requested changes officers suggest. jermier and berkes (1979) wrote “participative role clarification improved organizational commitment.”(p. 17). seklecki and paynich (2007) noted females in law enforcement were asked, “what motivations were present for leaving a career in law enforcement, the overwhelming majority of respondents indicated that they had no intentions of leaving” (p. 27). the respondents answer is an example of females’ incredible commitment to the organization. in the same light, the seklecki and paynich (2007) study reported “39% of respondents indicated they were made to feel less welcome that males, and 32% indicated they were treated worse than males officers….thus there are a large number of respondents who feel they were treated less favorably than males” (p. 26). inside of a militaristic designed organization the levels of rank in management and their importance are often over simplified. many times ranking officers are seen as mere conduits of communication having no real influence on those they manage or lead. jermier and berkes (1979) pointed out that “obedience socialization and military command supervision across the hierarchal levels appears to distort the nature of police work” (p. 17). law enforcement organizations face change and a changing environment at a faster than normal pace. the structure must be flexible enough to handle such situations and be gender balanced to do it. law enforcement organizations must also have the flowing communication and leadership structure firmly embedded into its design free of discriminating factors such as gender. looking at most law enforcement structures the ranks transcend from sheriff/ chief, deputy chief, captain, lieutenant, sergeant, corporal, and patrol officer/deputy. these levels are seen more in a larger metropolitan or county level agency. the increased levels are mainly due to the amount of officers employed by the agency. jermier and berkes (1979) stated, “quasi military model makes no provision for the situational effects of a leaders behavior” (p. 17). miller, watson, and webb (2009) echo this thought and suggested: although many agencies appear to rely on military arrangements in terms of structure, rank, and hierarchies, this model may not effectively serve police leaders and their respective organizations. replacing the military model of leadership development with behavioral competency development may be more effectual in leadership and agency performance. (p. 51) because of the structural policies (job task analysis) of law enforcement agencies, it appears they are gender neutral. the concept of gender neutrality applies to both entry level and leadership positions. why then is there so little representation of women in both of that level of positions, particularly sheriff? the underlying values and beliefs of the structure and design is where it is apparent that structural discrimination is occurring in the form of “disparate impact” (raytheon company, petitioner v. joel hernandez, 2003). price (1996) agreed that “gender bias is clearly attitudinal as well as behavioral while the organization and its practices are inherently a matter of structure” (p. 4). those, however, inside these agencies are longing for a more contemporary style of leadership. currently, the structure of law enforcement agencies is not very accepting of those who can exhibit contemporary leadership. women appear to be making larger strides in the corporate society to positions of leadership. do the leadership styles of these two structures differ? do the overall general functions of the ceo truly differ from that of a sheriff? perhaps by answering these questions law enforcement agencies can begin reevaluating their belief system and become more accepting of women and their leadership. structure comparison and non-traditional leadership competencies the organizational charts of traditional corporations and law enforcement agencies share close resemblance. although, it should be noted, corporations are currently more progressive and have begun to become more flat in structure. referring to structures in england, silvestri (2007) suggested, “flatter organizational structures are leading to an increased rivalry and competiveness between men and women” (p. 278). however, in the united states organizations, for the most part, remain hierarchical in form having the top executive on the organizational structure being the ceo (corporate) and the sheriff (law enforcement). as the chart descends there are middle managers (corporate: managers, supervisors, law enforcement: lieutenants, sergeants) governing different sections or units. each unit has a specific function (corporate: marketing, customer service, law enforcement: investigations, community policing). on the very bottom are workers or officers. both entities have functions, such as payroll, human resources, employee training, and logistics. at a glance these structures appear to very similar. what about the leadership competencies needed to perform in the top position? kotter and northouse (2007) would agree both leadership and management competencies are needed. the argument is made here that within both corporate and law enforcement agencies advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 11 teamwork is essential to its effectiveness. “the key to a leader’s effectiveness is his or her ability to build a team” (hogan, curphy & hogan, 1994, p. 16). hogan et al. (1994) gave credit to a 1992 study by hallam and campbell in which they indentified “eight problems for leadership that effect team performance” (p. 16). the problems are separated into both task and maintenance areas. on the task side, successful leaders communicate a clear mission or sense of purpose, indentify available resources and talent, develop the talent, plan and organize, coordinate activities and acquire needed resources. on the maintenance side, they minimize and resolve conflicts among group members and they ensure that team members understand the team’s goals, constraints, resources, and problems (hogan et al., 1994, p. 16). others, such as daniel (1992), identified “13 leadership competencies: goal orientation, bottom line orientation, communicates and enforces standards, initiative, strategic influence, communicates confidence, interpersonal sensitivity, develops and coaches others, gives performance feedback, collaboration and team building, systematic problem solving, image and reputation and self confidence” (ctd. ortmeier & meese, 2010, p. 31). these two examples seem to have agreement as to the competencies needed for leadership. this is not to say these are all encompassing, but rather it adds support to the research. it is inferred that such competencies would apply to any organization and to those leading it. can these competencies in some way be applicable to law enforcement organizations? according to ortmeier and meese (2010), the leadership competencies needed for law enforcement are eloquently placed into five categories; “communications and related competencies, motivational competencies, problem-solving competencies, planning and organizing competencies, and actuation-implementation competencies” (p. 34-35). under each of these areas, the aforementioned competencies of both daniel and hallam, and cambell are integrated. some would argue that individuals who lead in these two organizations (corporate and law enforcement) do so differently regardless of gender. in 2009 miller, watkins, and watkins compared the scores of police leaders on the california personality inventory (cpi) with 5600 of those from the business world. miller et al. report that the “results indicate very similar scores” between all participants (p. 58). this supported the argument, that even though the perception is the two organizations are being lead differently, they in fact are not. many parallels have been drawn between the corporate and law enforcement worlds in terms or structure and leadership competencies. perhaps if women are to break the structural discrimination or disparate treatment law enforcement agencies exhibit, women could run for sheriff. a woman running for sheriff should platform their leadership competencies. they could further draw parallels to leading in the business structure is no different than in law enforcement, at least not as the top executive. incorporating female leadership in the future for decades, women in the workforce have been attempting to break the “glass ceiling.” women obtaining leadership positions seem to be shifting in areas of education, non-profit and business. in government, referring to females elected to positions, guyot (2008) noted, “the data shows that under appointment they rise faster, under election slower” (p. 530). as suggested earlier the structural discrimination described has permeated into society’s perception of women leading law enforcement. price (1996) suggested “women face a number of other major socially structured problems that are inherent in a larger society and are played out as well in policing” (p. 2). for women, being able to exhibit and communicate their leadership philosophy to voters during a sheriff’s campaign may be the necessary beginning. however, carlin and winfrey (2009) suggested, “projecting competence through demonstration of masculine traits such as toughness not only can result in crude humor but also the primary cause of the double bind” (p. 337). it is not debated in this research that men and women do in fact differ biologically and psychologically. utilizing social role analysis to show similarities eagly johnnessen-schmidt and van eagen (2003) noted men and women are the same in areas such “governing norms that regulate the performance of many tasks” (p. 572). this thought gives support to hallam and campbell’s (1992) “task side” competencies mentioned earlier. when discussing leadership competencies does the same hold true? both men and women can gain knowledge, skills, and leadership competencies discussed earlier. how each gender utilizes and practices them maybe the difference lays. from a basic patrol level both men and women need to able to investigate crime scenes, dispute resolution, gather evidence, serve civil papers, write reports, interview victims and witnesses and respond to calls of service. seklecki and paynich (2007) reported in their research results a high percent of respondents feel women do many of those functions “better” than men (p. 25). when examining the leadership competencies listed earlier (daniel, hallam and campbell (1992), and ortmeier and meese (2010)) women appear to exhibit many of those as well better than men. according to hazenberg (1996) she claimed among such competencies, women have over men “a greater power of observation, the ability to visualize, and better linguistic skills” (p. 5). to further emphasize the competencies women possess it may be easier to attach a leadership style. women are reported to reflect the components of transformational leadership. the component parts are described as “learning organizations, effective communication, supportiveness, participation, team based learning, coaching, and nurturing their employees” (eagly et al., 2003, p. 586; eagly et al., 2001). these components, like hazenberg’s, appear to align well with the competencies mentioned earlier in the research. researchers have shown (deluga & souza, 1991; drodge & murphy, 2001, 2003; eagly et al., 2003, 2001; silvestri, 2007, singer & advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 12 singer, 1990) that the officers of law enforcement agencies prefer the transformational leadership style rather than those of an autocratic and authoritarian style. this accounts for both genders. women, then, do in fact employ a leadership style that law enforcement organizations claim they are seeking. this brings rise to the question asked earlier of why are so few women able to become elected to sheriff? conclusion in this research, i examined three points that law enforcement organizations, based upon their structure and policies, as well as informal beliefs and attitudes need to improve. first, women exhibit nontraditional leadership competencies that current law enforcement agencies can benefit. secondly, the structure of law enforcement organizations needs to be more flexible, as well as redefine top leadership positions to be more gender neutral. third, women in law enforcement are structurally discriminated through disparate treatment. silvestri (2005) has an exquisite thought summarizing these three findings. he stated: challenging existing arrangements poses a radical challenge to the police organization and may potentially substantially remodel policing, both at an administrative and cultural level. any strategy that offers the potential to fracture the current career structure, break down the hierarchal nature and rank mentality of the police service and loosen the strong hold that men hold in policing is a project worth pursuing. (p. 279) the findings suggest, at a minimum level, law enforcement organizations exhibit “disparate treatment” toward females. disparate treatment, though not illegal, is not a suggested practice. this research has shown that structurally the corporate world and law enforcement are extremely similar. the leadership competencies utilized in both structures are shown to have empirical similarity. it is also noted in my research that women do possesses many leadership competencies, and those competencies are in fact what officers in law enforcement agencies are seeking. social scientists would agree to change the structures; beliefs and norms of law enforcement quickly would be foolish. that is why it suggested here women run for the office of sheriff. being an elected position, women may be references adams, m., blumenfeld, w. j., castaneda, r., hackman, h. w., peters, m. l., & zuniga, x. (eds.). 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(2009). the use of psychological testing to evaluate law enforcement leadership competencies and development. police practice and research, 10(1), 49-60. northouse, p. g. (2007). leadership: theory and practice (4th ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. ortmeier, p. j., & meese, e. (2010). leadership, ethics, and policing: challenges for the 21st century (2nd ed.). upper saddle river, n.j.: prentice hall. raffel price, b. (1996). female police officers in the united states. in policing in central and eastern europe: comparing firsthand knowledge with experience from the west. retrieved january 28, 2010, from http://www.ncjrs.gov/policing/fem635.html raytheon company, petitioner v. joel hernandez (united states ninth circuit court of appeals december 2, 2003) (supreme.justia.com, dist. file). seklecki, r., & paynich, r. (2007). a national survey of female police officers: an overview of findings. police practice and research, 8(1), 17-30. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 13 silvestri, m. (2006). "doing time": becoming a police leader. international journal of police science & management, 8(4), 266-281. united states, united states department of justice, office of justice programs. (n.d.). bureau of justice statistics. retrieved february 2, 2010, from http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=72 educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 79 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 79-85, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper empowering future women leaders through gate: the way forward charmaine bissessar charmaine bissessar is an adjunct professor at uwi roytec trinidad, west indies drcharmainebissessar@yahoo.com accepted january 10, 2011 the underlying premise of the human capital theory in education is that higher education and training are costly but there are concomitant tangible and intangible benefits to the microcosm and macrocosm. the aforementioned theoretical underpinning of this study set the tone for this qualitative research project which encompasses informal face-to-face interviews with 61 full-time and part-time-female students at the university of the west indies school of business and applied studies limited (trading as roytec) concerning their experiences with government assistance for tuition expenses (gate). the positive impact of gate on each female student’s life is unquestionable as her empowerment, development, and commitment are reflected in her answers to three open-ended questions. further expenditure in higher education would be of benefit to any country seeking to improve its citizen’s quality of life and standard of living. key words: higher education and gender, higher education and government funded programs, human capital and gender introduction with a dearth of students entering the tertiary level system, the government of trinidad implemented the government assistance for tuition expenses (gate) in 2004 as a means of making tertiary level education affordable and available to all citizens seeking further education. scarcity of a skilled and knowledgeable work force has led to the implementation of gate. the continuous brain drain or the human capital flight has resulted in the more educated trinidadians leaving the country. such concepts relate to the migration of educated facets of the community in search of a higher standard of living which mishra (2006) underscored is “embedded in the caribbean psyche” (p. 13). according to docquier and marfouk (2005) the caribbean region has the highest emigration rates in the world and is among the top 20 countries in the world for the highest tertiaryeducated migration rates. these issues fomented the need for a more educated population to remain in the region. in this expanding knowledge-based economy the need for skilled educated employees becomes vital in order to compete with the global workforce. the pursuit of higher education is akin to economic success and a higher quality of life. the government of trinidad and tobago implemented the gate program to ensure that, “there are no limits to accessing quality education” (ministry of science technology and tertiary level education, 2010, p. 1). the ministry of education website lists the following objectives of the gate program: 1. to make tertiary education affordable to all so that no citizen of trinidad and tobago will be denied tertiary education because of their inability to pay. 2. to widen access to tertiary education that will support economic development and promote social equity. 3. to build and strengthen a national quality tertiary education sector through both public and private tertiary level institutions. (p. 1) 4. such objectives are currently feasible for the government of trinidad and tobago but one wonders when the ripple effects of the current recession takes its toll on the government, how viable and sustainable such a venture would become. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 80 importance of higher education the international trend, according to goastellec (2008), is towards three dimensions of pressure with increased globalization, mechanization, and a knowledge-based economy. these three dimensions included: (a) demographic pressures, (b) economic pressures, and (c) political pressures. goastellec (2008) credited higher enrollment in tertiary level institutions as a result of such pressures and indicated international trends toward such changes. she further stated that increased enrollment is proportional to the amount of funding available for tertiary level studies. goastellac posited, “every higher education has organized a specific studentfunding framework linked to its societal understanding of higher education” (p. 19). congruently, barr (2004) indicated that government funding for higher education is necessary and desirable. however, it takes a big chunk out of public spending and is not fully embraced by all countries. keep and mayhew (2004) underscored the need for expansion and funding in higher education. they stated, “the british government's policy towards expanding higher education is based on two beliefs that it is necessary for an improvement of economic performance, and that it can increase access to better jobs by those from lower socio-economic backgrounds” (p. 298). most developed and developing countries adhere to such ideas and attempt to fund higher education, trinidad and tobago‟s government is no exception. keep and mayhew (2004) further argued that it is doubtful whether a more educated workforce leads to more economic success. however, they envisioned the need for higher education as advances in technology and the necessity for skilled workers at high levels such as managers and leaders became essential to the successful operations of society and organizations. moreover, chipman-johnson and vanderpool (2003) highlighted the growing trend away from imported skilled labor such as accountants and lawyers in bahamas to recruiting locals and becoming more self-sufficient in human capital as higher education enrollment continues to increase. concurrently, machin and stevens (2004) highlighted the importance of higher education in improving the marketability and social mobility of human capital. they viewed education as “as an investment, raising the future productivity of the individual and bringing other private and social benefits” (p. 157). with this in mind, the government of trinidad and tobago determined to develop its intellectual capital, has been spending vast amounts of financial capital in tertiary level education. additionally, thrall and mecoli (2003) underscored the competitiveness of higher education funding in the united states of america, “business geographical analysis can convey to legislators the importance of a university and help garner political support for adequate funding” (p. 46). higher education is seen as a means of minimizing the gap between the haves and have nots and an effective empowerment and leadership development tool. gender and higher education another aspect of higher education is the empowerment of female students. archer, hutchings, and ross (2003) noted the importance of higher education in redefining roles of gender, race, and class within societal structure. higher education, viewed more from an androcentric perspective and beneficial to males, allows females to reaffirm themselves collectively and as individuals. according to chipman-johnson and vanderpool (2003), student enrollment in higher education is increasing with female enrollment and graduation from caribbean universities far surpassing male enrollment. the aforementioned researchers projected a female/male tertiary level student-ratio of 2.6:1 and 3.2:1 respectively. this current trend in increased female enrollment is evidenced in this researcher‟s first year english class (september to december 2010) at university of the west indies school of business and applied studies limited (trading as roytec) where the female/male ratio is 2:1. this ratio reflects similar findings by chipman-johnson and vanderpool on the ratio of females to males in the trinidadian and anglo caribbean higher education classrooms. as if heeding the call for a more knowledge-based and knowledgeable population, trinidad„s government started the gate program which increased student enrollment in higher education institutions by 125% to100% from 2005 to 2009 with 64% females versus 36% males (uwi annual report, 2008/2009). it should be noted as well that the graduation valedictorians were females for each faculty including the faculty of medical sciences and engineering for the year 2008 to 2009. however, for that same period four men and one woman were given honorary degrees. this indicates a paradigm shift in the socio cultural mindset vis a vis women and higher education where women have moved into positions of prominence. albeit, there were less female students enrolled in the faculties of medicine and engineering, females emerged valedictorians with the highest grade point average (uwi annual report, 2008/2009). this statistical information is substantiated by conrad‟s (2009) findings where he acknowledged the inroads made by females in business and medicine but illustrated the continued disparity between male and female enrollment and graduation in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem). these apparent lacunae in gender equity can be resolved with continued application of the human capital theory in education. human capital theory in education and gender development of human capital is an invaluable element of exponential growth within societal and organizational cleavages. the human capital theory in education links “expected lifetime labor force participation to one‟s incentive to acquire effective training” (polachek, 2004, p. 13). the costs and benefits to human capital attainment of self-empowerment are “increased lifetime earnings, how one conducts advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 81 himself/herself in everyday life as well as social benefits such as reduced crime rate, lower unemployment, and greater economic growth” (polachek, p. 20). adiya (2009) postulated that “expenditure on training and education is costly, and should be considered an investment since it is undertaken with a view to increase personal incomes” (p. 1). with the implementation of gate, the emphasis on intellectual capital development is no longer individual but national and global. similar international programs illustrate a preoccupation with the empowerment, development, and commitment toward intellectual capital advancement. the european commission (2009) conducted a study on research funding and gender balance and discovered silos in gender equality. the commission developed strategies ranging from increasing the quota of females on committees in switzerland and slovenia to encouraging women to apply for funding and grants in higher education. marschke, laursen, nielsen, and rankin (2007) captured the paradoxical nature of gender representation in higher education faculty and students, stating: women, who now make up a majority of undergraduate degree earners and approximately 46% of ph.d. earners nationwide (national center for education statistics [nces], 2003), rarely make up more than 30% of faculty at research extensive universities. although the total number of tenure-track women faculty in higher education has increased steadily for the past 35 years, this increase and women's advancement through faculty ranks are described as excruciatingly slow. (p. 1) this example typifies disparities in gender equity existing nationally and internationally and is fodder for extended research. problem and purpose of the study roytec is a branch of tertiary level education with the focus primarily on business courses. located in the heart of the capital of trinidad, roytec serves a diverse population of part-time and full-time students. the emphasis is on preparation for the working environment with associate, bachelor, and masters‟ degree programs in business, education, and information technology. data garnered from the student satisfaction survey for 2010, conducted by roytec‟s quality assurance unit, indicated that 90% of students were very satisfied that programs offered adequately prepared them for the world of work. ninety-two percent of students interviewed indicated that they were experiencing positive learning experiences at roytec (uwi school of business and applied studies limited, roytec, 2010). sookram, basdeo, sumesar-rai, and saridaki (2009) offered the caveat that rising crime rates in trinidad and tobago is cause for polemical debates in the political and academic realm. their findings suggested a link between the “percentage of females in the labor force and the percentage of labor force with tertiary level education are important in determining criminal behavior” (p. 2). the problem is that of the escalating crime rate in trinidad and the high unemployment rate (sookram et al.) indicated a paucity of economic opportunity and the spawning of developmental plans for empowerment of the human capital through gate. table 1 illustrates the number of murders and kidnappings for 1994 to 2011 underscoring the tenuous nature of the crime situation. table 1. number of murders and kidnappings 1994-2011. year murders kidnappings 1994 143 1995 122 1996 106 1997 101 1998 98 1999 93 2000 118 2001 151 2002 171 29 2003 229 51 2004 260 28 2005 386 58 2006 368 17 2007 395 155 2008 550 11 2009 509 6 2010 485 4 2011 100 3 retrieved from: crime in trinidad and tobago. http://www.ttcrime.com/stats.php there is an exponential growth in criminal activity in trinidad and tobago which sookram et al. (2009) suggested can be stymied by an increase in higher education among the intellectual capital. the purpose of this study was to determine whether higher education in the form of gate is having a sanguine impact on female students at a tertiary level institute in trinidad. the central tenet of this research paper was to answer the question: what effect if any, does the gate program have on female students‟ life at roytec? research design in order to answer the central issue of the importance of gate, the researcher conducted informal interviews with 61 full-time and part-time roytec female students enrolled in the associates‟ degree program. the only demographic information requested was their age. students were informed of the interview two weeks before the actual interviews were to take place and gave informed consent. according to kvale (1996) and mc namara (1999) interviews provide in-depth information from participants and allow them to give details of their experiences while providing factual information. turner advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 82 (2010) echoed similar sentiments, “interviews provide in-depth information pertaining to participants‟ experiences and viewpoints of a particular topic” (p. 754). i conducted the interviews in groups based on which class they attended. this resulted in some participants agreeing with what others had to say and adding their own empirical and anecdotal experience. a rapport was already established with students so it was easier to ask questions since they were open and willing to respond. the ethnographic interview technique was implemented to first establish a rapport and then when the researcher felt they were adequately ready to commence. they were asked the following: (a) if gate were not in existence would you be able to attend roytec and have access to higher education? (b) how has gate allowed you to continue your professional life and school life? (c) if the government of trinidad were to stop funding the gate program would you be able to continue your higher education? i ensured that participants were cognizant of the purpose and nature of the inquiry and were willing to participate. answers to the questions were recorded by the researcher with full participation. i expressed appreciation for their participation in the study. participants felt that by participating in the study their voices would be heard and persons in authority would take note of how much of an effect the implementation of gate was having on their lives. low inference descriptors in the form of verbatim speech were implemented wherever possible to ensure validity and trustworthiness of the information given. johnson‟s (1997) interpretive validity was employed to record participants‟ responses. interpretive responses, according to johnson, refer to the degree to which “participants‟ viewpoints, thought, intentions, and experiences are accurately understood and reported by the researcher” (p. 282) the positive impact of gate on each female student‟s life is incontrovertible as her empowerment, development, and commitment are reflected in her answers to open-ended questions, her grade point average scores, and the low attrition rate. attrition rates for the period september 2008 to april 2010 were examined based on gender. students were considered drop outs if they no longer attended classes after the first month of each semester. performance scores and academic grades were also examined and determined that female students out-performed male students in english, communications, management, business, politics, and organizational behavior which are first and second year courses. the ratio of males to females in a business school which is traditionally maledominated indicates the proliferation of more female students. data analysis sixty-one female students taught by this researcher for the period january 2010 to april 2010 shared their higher education experiences. these students were selected based on their consent to participate in this study and the fact that they were enrolled in classes taught by this researcher. students‟ ages ranged from 18 to 42 years. the interview questions were validated using the “validity-as-reflexive accounting” procedure where “the researcher, the topic, and the sensemaking process interact” (creswell & miller, 2000, p. 125). the researcher then implemented “disconfirming evidence” to indicate recurring themes and categories (johnson, 1997, p. 283). empowerment, development, and commitment were the emerging themes when a content analysis of the responses was performed as well as analytical and topical coding. the extant research literature encompassed the aforementioned three themes and the significance of higher education on females. roudi-fahimi and moghadam (2003) concluded: as female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves. increases in girls‟ secondary school enrolment are associated with increases in women‟s participation in the labor force and their contributions to household and national income. women‟s increased earning capacity, in turn, has a positive effect on child nutrition. children—especially daughters—of educated mothers are more likely to be enrolled in school and to have higher levels of educational attainment. educated women are more politically active and better informed about their legal rights and how to exercise them. (p. 2) such changes, this researcher viewed as empowering, progressive, and illustrated a commitment toward advancement on the part of females who seek higher education. findings during the process of inquiry the researcher checked the data for trustworthiness “credibility, transferability, dependability, and conformability” (lincoln & guba (1985), p. 189). from the data garnered, there was the repetition of key descriptive words and phrases such as: “more focused,” “upward mobility,” “social networks,” “more vision,” “feel more appreciated,” “more constructive,” “feel more important,” “give me something to work towards,””more vision for myself,” “working towards something,” and “the best thing that ever happened” which when analyzed quantitatively proved to be 80% of words subjects utilized during the interviews. initial coding based on content analysis indicated the preponderance of similar themes of appreciation, selfdevelopment, and commitment to the completion of the program. as ideas were repeated, three large themes emerged based on the questions asked and researcher‟s expectations. they exemplified leadership qualities in the form of: (a) empowerment, (b) development, and (c) commitment. in their responses to the first question, students showed high levels of appreciation for the fact that they now had access to tertiary level education. marshall and rossman (1989) suggested a five mode analytical procedure in content analysis which involved: (a) organizing the data, (b) generating the categories themes advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 83 and patterns, (c) testing the emergent hypothesis against the data, (d) searching for alternative explanations, and (e) writing the report. when adhering to these five modes, the researcher found adequate content to validate the emerging themes of empowerment, development, and commitment. themes were deemed important based on the percentage of recurrence throughout the content. the frequency of themes was recorded based on the data garnered. from a qualitative analysis of the content the following themes evolved. from the data collected, the positive effect of gate on each female student‟s life is indubitable as her empowerment, development, and commitment are reflected in her answers to open-ended questions, her grade point average scores, and the low attrition rate. lumumba (2006) underscored the importance of promoting higher education among females, stating “that there are positive correlations between female educational attainments and capacity to make informed decisions about various aspects of life including health, marriage, and reproduction” (p. 12). such traits spawn an empowered and autonomous individual. empowerment gender affairs division of trinidad and tobago (2009) defined empowerment as “achieving control over one‟s life through expanded choices. empowerment encompasses selfsufficiency and self-confidence and is inherently linked to knowledge and voice. empowerment is a function of individual initiative which is facilitated by institutional change” (p. 9). this definition of empowerment encapsulates the recurring themes expressed by all 61 participants. eighty percent of participants felt valued and treasured by their government for implementing gate for giving them a vision, hope and appreciation of tertiary education. one 18-year old full-time student indicated, “i feel like i am working towards something.” an 18-year old single mother expressed the view that, “i can see myself getting a better paying job after completing my tertiary education.” one 19year old female full-time student declared, “i would have only been able to have a secondary level education and not as much opportunities for an improved quality of life.” students were focused on improving their quality of life which this researcher saw as empowerment and development. one 20-year old parttime student indicated, “i feel that i can better provide for my child and even feel more prepared to help him with his school work.” all participants interviewed underscored the importance of gate as being motivational and allowing them to look beyond their limited fiscal means. participants felt valued and looked forward to upward mobility job wise, were more focused and goal-oriented, and shared a symbiotic relationship with their peers. part of the theory of human capital in education is the view that outcomes are tangible and intangible. empowerment which suggests a level of self-efficacy, self-concordance, and selfactualization is part of the mainstay of the human capital theory for engendering self-directed behavior with both extrinsic and intrinsic motivational drivers. implicit in this empowerment are qualities of self-discipline and self-management, the main components of resonant, amplified, and mindful leadership. leadership in its embryonic stage involves empowerment and continues with the passion to inspire others to move beyond their comfort zone and challenge themselves (covey, 2004). development development is a process by which the members of society increase their personal and institutional capacities to mobilize and manage resources to produce sustainable improvements in their quality of life. it should be borne in mind, as a process, development can take many paths and the path(s) to development is often determined by legacies, the vision of society, the availability of resources, and the perceived approach for their use. (gender affairs division of trinidad and tobago, 2009, p. 9) the developmental aspect of gate funding was very significant to participants who expressed increased vision for the future and suggested that they would be on the streets looking for jobs adding to the unemployment rate if it were not for the provisions made by trinidad‟s government. participants also viewed gate as the best action that could have been taken by the government and vociferously declared that they would protest if gate were to be abolished. they understood the burden it places on taxpayers but acquiesce the need to continue funding in order for them to be afforded a better paying job and a higher standard of living. one full-time 18year old participant stated, “i understand that gate is a burden on taxpayers, however, we need it to keep us off the streets and i know we will protest if the government decides to abolish it.” since participants interviewed were second year students, they are yet to graduate. therefore, this researcher is unable to ascertain the impact of the gate program on this sample group in the future but can only record responses. future tracer studies should garner more compelling statistical data to determine whether women leaders were spawned as a result of the gate program. continuous self-development is a crucial aspect of any individual‟s aspirations toward honing and inculcating leadership skills. development, individual and collective, can only be achieved through conscious and meticulous efforts toward fomenting a culture of synergistic gestalt. female students expressed that higher education allowed for personal growth and increased critical thinking skills. commitment another component of effective leadership is commitment. from the responses garnered, students showed a strong commitment to higher education. sixty percent of participants between the ages of 18 to 25 suggested that they preferred to advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 84 prolong motherhood in favor of a higher education and by extension, an improved quality of life. informal interviews with 61 students indicated that 90% of these students at uwi roytec would not have been able to afford tertiary education if gate were not implemented. ten percent of students interviewed indicated that if they were not in the classroom, they would be on the streets wandering with “no job and nothing to do.” students also expressed fears that were the government to stop funding for the gate program they would have to discontinue their education. five percent of students interviewed were single mothers with children from ages 1 to 3 years. these young mothers were ages 19 to 23 and were being allowed to continue their education through gate. they opined that through further education they could become more financially secure and could provide a higher standard of living for their children. students also expressed a concern and desire to improve their quality of life. the commitment came from their views that they wanted to finish the program and continue to the bachelor‟s degree in order to better equip themselves and their children. all students interviewed expressed their satisfaction at the fact that gate allowed them to be focused and work toward achievable goals for improved life and by extension a more committed work force. conclusions and recommendations before the implementation of gate by the trinidad and tobago‟s government, young, single mothers were unable to continue their education preferring to remain in a state of homeostasis. today, with gate trinidadian women are finding their voices, making a difference in their children‟s lives, and contributing to the country‟s intellectual capital. previously, young mothers were left to fend for themselves finding it difficult to actually continue higher education. currently, the young mothers in this researcher‟s classes expressed pride and joy that they were being given a second chance to continue their higher education. women are embracing their strengths and abilities to create a paradigm shift in self-perception. fewer boundaries seem to exist for the current female trinidadian population. they feel empowered, committed, and motivated to work toward an objective and remain steadfast in this desire. arising out of the data from this study is further need for research in the form of a future tracer study to determine the success of the gate program in creating and sustaining a leadership culture among women. this article expanded upon the body of information on the impact of higher education on women and government funding of the university of the west indies (uwi) and roytec (an affiliate of uwi) and its effect on the human capital. nationally and globally, females are taking advantage of increased funding afforded to them, thereby fomenting a new genre of women, women labor force, and mothers. references adiya, e. 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(2010). retrieved from http://www.roytec.edu/index.php?option=com_ content&task=view&id=152&itemid=141 advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership school leadership of the 90's and beyond: a window of opportunity for women educators joyce p. logan, ed. logan, summer, 1998 in the midst of thes school evolution, vacancies for principal and superintendent positions are increasing at a time when more women than men are enrolled in preparation programs for educational administration. changes taking place in today's schools open a window of opportunity for more women to move into educational administration. education reform brings a new governance structure, modifies leadership practices, and emphasizes accountability for results. in the midst of this school evolution, vacancies for principal and superintendent positions are increasing at a time when more women than men are enrolled in preparation programs for educational administration. this article examines conditions favorable for advancing gender equity and proposes that now is the time to reactivate and energize equity strategies. changes and challenges a number of conditions that currently exist affect educational administration and have potential for redirecting hiring practices for these positions. a convergence of school reform, supply and demand for administrators, and societal changes enhances opportunities for more women to become school administrators. six specific circumstances are addressed in this discussion: 1. school-site governance structures emphasize local accountability for student achievement (hallinger, 1992; harvey, 1991; wohlstetter & mohrman, 1994). 2. essential leadership skills in restructured schools promote collaboration, consensus building, and empowerment of others (common & grimmit, 1992; cuban, 1988; leithwood, 1995; murphy, 1995). 3. nationally, an increasing number of vacancies and a dwindling applicant pool for positions of principal and superintendent create high-demand conditions for qualified aspirants for http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html these positions (american association of school administrators [aasa], 1988; brockett, 1996; klauke, 1990). 4. antidiscrimination legislation has fostered a more open environment for hiring women in nontraditional roles (flansburg & hanson, 1993; gupton & del rosario, 1997; national women's law center, 1997). 5. women have made up at least half of educational administration program enrollments since the mid-80s (bell & chase, 1993; logan, 1998; national association of secondary school principals [nassp], 1998; tingley, 1996). 6. an increase in the percentage of women in the educational administration professorate (mccarthy & kuh, 1997), as well as mentoring programs for women administrators, provide role models that validate school and school system administration as a career choice for women (wesson, 1997). these six changing conditions that collectively offer an opportunity for advancing gender equity in hiring practices for school principals and superintendents are discussed in succeeding paragraphs. women have been historically underrepresented in these two top-level school positions in contrast to the number of women teachers (gupton & slick, 1996; tyack & hansot, 1982; shakeshaft, 1989). school-site governance and accountability school governance reforms such as school-based decision making (sbdm) and teacher empowerment change the rules for who makes hiring decisions. in kentucky, for example, school council members make the final selection for employment of principals (kentucky acts, 1990). in addition, principals must consult their school council when staffing other positions. although officially school boards hire all employees, selection for employment of school-based personnel now resides at the school level. thus, school boards are no longer the predominant gatekeepers for the principalships. school councils share in these decisions. although national figures on gender composition of school councils are not yet readily available, research in kentucky and kansas show that women in these states represent the majority of school council membership (kentucky department of education, 1996) and that more women than men participate in council meetings (furtwengler, furtwengler, holcomb, hurst, & owens, 1995). it should also be noted that women constitute a majority of teachers in the nation's schools, therefore, teacher empowerment (as well as council membership) gives women a strong voice in school decisions. this change does not presuppose that women will hire women. it does, however, lead to a speculation that school reform has shuffled the players who influence hiring decisions. school boards still select superintendents. school council influence for this position will be longer in coming. studies have shown that career patterns that lead to the superintendency generally come via the principalship route and that the most likely route is the high school principalship (shakeshaft, 1989). it follows, therefore, that changes in who occupies principalship positions will in the long run have an effect on staffing the superintendency. school-based governance and the changing leadership paradigm affect the role of both superintendent and principal and, therefore, call for a new look at the knowledge and skills required for these roles. accountability places more emphasis on the job to be done than who does the job. student achievement is paramount to school success; therefore, the school councils and school personnel must focus on teaching and learning that fosters high achievement by all students (capper, 1993). legislative and community pressures demand quantitative evidence of gains in student achievement. states such as kentucky link rewards and sanctions for schools to student results. high stakes accountability for student achievement shifts attention to the job to be done rather than who does the job--another factor that can contribute to open access for women or men administrators who demonstrate requisite characteristics to get the job done. essential leadership skills the traditional bureaucratic model of schools was led by administrators who governed teachers, students and staff through formalized goals and procedures (lee, smith, & croninger, 1996). in top-down hierarchical organizations, authoritarian leadership was most often the pattern for school administration. public perception tended to favor men as better able than women to handle discipline, particularly at the secondary level. men were also viewed as more suited than women for working with predominantly male boards of education and dealing with political influences of the superintendency. culturally defined, desirable feminine behavior was nurturing and caring for others; placing importance on relationships and the quality of life; and using interpersonal skills, consensus, and negotiation for solving problems (bass, 1981; broverman, broverman, clarkson, rosenkrantz, & vogel, 1970; hofstede, 1991; shakeshaft, 1989). organizational leadership of the 90s requires facilitative leadership that empowers others and values diverse discourse as a means of reaching better decisions (grogan, 1998). school principal and superintendent roles are being reconceived, renegotiated, and reshaped (bredesen, 1998; brunner, 1998; grogan, 1998). brunner (1998) notes that literature on women in positions of power supports the notion that women bring to administrative practice many characteristics necessary for school reform. with a redefinition of requisite skills and characteristics of an effective school administrator, a teachable moment exists for erasing gender stereotypes and focusing on desirable characteristics that applicants (men or women) bring to the position. the dissonance created by changing perceptions about schools presents an opportunity for educating school council and school board members to identify the best candidates to fill school administrative positions based on strengths and skills that are not gender specific. principalship and superintendency demand and supply both principalships and superintendencies are experiencing high rates of turnover and a shrinking applicant pool (nassp, 1998; tingley, 1996). turnover rates for school administration have more than doubled in recent years (nassp, 1998). more than half of all superintendents and principals are becoming eligible for retirement (bowles, 1990; hess, 1988). the demand for school administrators is likely to become even greater with a predicted 10 to 20% increase in the need for school administrators through 2005 due to increased enrollments (nassp, 1998). a report by the new york state council of school superintendents (cited in tingley, 1996) called attention to a growing concern about the size and quality of the candidate pool for administrative conditions. educational reform narrowed the gap between teacher salaries and those of administrators and, at the same time, increased the complexity of school leadership line positions. educational reform initiatives since the 80s have significantly affected the superintendency (bredeson, 1998). changes in traditional sources of power for the position and priorities for the work role have placed superintendents in the position of legitimating their influence with constituents and competing with other local officials for scarce resources (bredeson, 1998). the stress and uncertainties of the superintendency are likely factors in a high rate of turnover for the position (gmelch, 1990; sweeney, 1982). brockett (1996) expressed a nationwide concern that superintendency positions in the next decade will become vacant faster than they can be filled. the nassp (1998) in a national survey of 403 superintendents asked about principalship shortages and found that 55% of the respondents reported a shortage in the labor pool for secondary principal positions. insufficient compensation compared to responsibilities, job stress, and time requirements are cited by educational leaders and personnel officers as deterrents to the attractiveness of this position. what does this shortage of principal and superintendent applicants mean for women administrative aspirants? search committees, school boards, and councils will be hard pressed to find sufficient qualified applicants. opportunities exist for well qualified applicants. the job openings are there. legislative and cultural change title ix and supporting legislation such as the women's educational equity act opened doors for women in education and extended employment protections of the civil rights act to include gender (flansburg & hanson, 1997). changes brought about by legislation show up directly in visible processes and procedures. attitudes toward these changes and acceptance of different ways of thinking take much longer but must occur before culture and societal expectations are modified. in spite of its limitations, title ix has made significant change in u.s. education and within society (flansburg & hanson, 1997). more women moving into higher education and filling nontraditional occupational roles as a result of antidiscrimination legislation, a national focus on inequities, and more successful women visible in a variety of roles have influenced societal expectations and helped to create a more favorable environment for women in administrative leadership. women have moved into more executive jobs in the corporate world. an annual census of women corporate officers by the research group catalyst showed that women hold 10.6% of corporate officer posts in the fortune 500 companies (cited in jackson, 1997). the study noted that work is still needed to help women advance in business but that the number of women among the top five earners at fortune 500 companies has more than doubled since 1994. times have changed dramatically in the last 20 years, and women leaders have been evident in every walk of life for sometime (west, 1997). possibilities for women to move into top-level school administrative positions are more optimistic than ever before. today's world is rapidly changing and change has become a way of life. although problems still persist and much remains to be done to remove gender filters in the workplace, conditions are favorable for advancing gender equity. women's leap into the hiring pool in school administration programs, the percentage of women students now outnumbers men. a 1997 survey of member institutions in the university council for educational administration (ucea) showed that 74% of certification programs in respondent institutions had from 51% to 72% women (logan, 1998). thirty percent of these institutions had more than 60% women students in these programs. the survey response rate was 50%. results from this survey correspond to other research that shows women entering educational administration programs in increasing numbers since the 1970s (cunanan, 1994; grogan, 1996; edson, 1988). bell and chase (1993) reported that women have made up at least half of educational administration program enrollments since the mid-80s. the number of women awarded superintendent certificates increased nationally between 1970 and 1984 by 15% (grogan, 1996) women enrolled in doctoral educational administration programs reflect only a slightly lower percentage than certification enrollments. the ucea survey showed 59% of respondents with a majority of women doctoral students (logan, 1998). of those with less than 51% women in educational administration doctoral programs, 30% had between 41% to 50% women. the percentage of women completing these doctoral programs experienced the greatest gain after 1980. thirty-seven percent of reporting ucea institutions had 41% to 50% women doctoral completers since 1980, 30% had between 51% and 60%, and one institution reported over 51% women doctoral completers after 1980. other research has shown that women often believe that in order to be hired for administrative positions they must be better prepared than men (gupton & slick, 1996); therefore, more women than men educational administrative aspirants may seek a doctorate degree. the low percentage of women employed in school administration line positions cannot be attributed to a lack of aspiration to be principal or superintendent. with the number of women who have entered and completed educational administration programs since 1980, lack of aspiration is clearly not a barrier. more women than men are entering the applicant pool. work remains to be done to gain attention for women and minorities as potential school leaders (bowles, 1990). support systems for women a noticeable increase in the percentage of women faculty members in university preparation programs has been an encouraging influence for women to become educational administrators. in 1986 only 12% of educational administration faculty were women compared to 27% women for college faculties overall (bell & chase, 1993; mccarthy & kuh, 1997). by 1994, women in ucea institutions made up 29% of all educational leadership faculty (mccarthy & kuh, 1997). women professors serve as role models for aspiring women administrators and help to validate students' decision to prepare for school administration. literature since 1980 has shifted emphasis from explanations for underrepresentation of women in educational administration to a need for better support systems (benton, 1980; coursen, 1989; gupton & slick, 1996; johnson, 1991; swiderski, 1988). this attention to mentoring, role models, and networks for women is one plausible explanation for the greater numbers of women preparing for these positions. mentorships and responsible internship placements assist women's transition into school administration and continue to be important. as more women become principals and superintendents, support strategies should be redirected toward helping those who enter the field succeed and advance. career advancement and career mobility continue to be concerns (grady & gosmire, 1995; irby & brown, 1995). women need connectedness in the workplace (gilligan, 1982). the internet and e-mail add new media for networking and communicating (glasscock, 1997). communities of interest on the internet enable worldwide communication in an instant. electronic networks such as advancing women can be important tools to build a sense of community among women leaders. these electronic support systems help women connect with one another as they develop an identity as administrators (glasscock, 1997). strategic advancement strategies now is the time for university educators to move away from sos "save our ship" strategies that recruit women and bolster educational administration enrollments. this article is not an sos call but rather a sas challenge--a challenge to educational administration faculty to develop and implement new strategic advancement strategies that level the playing field for women and men and that promote high expectations for all persons who enter the profession of school leadership. today's schools can afford no less. as one of the prime gatekeepers of the field, faculties in educational administration preparation programs can be catalysts for change. communities look to universities for leadership. higher education reform expects universities to serve their constituencies through education and support of local leadership. reforming and reframing schools presents an opportune time to set new goals for the profession and to activate strategies to get there. equal access in hiring practices for qualified school administrator candidates can be advanced through information and training for school council and school board members; through a relevant, rigorous administrative preparation program appropriate for the context of today's schools; and through continuous efforts to focus public attention on respect for diversity and desirable leadership skills for schools. bateson (1996) emphasized that change represents an ongoing adjustment and adaptation to new contexts and is not something that will ever be done once and for all (p. 7). equity and equality should be regarded in the same manner. advancement in these areas requires continuous effort. new contexts require strategic action. educational administration is at the apex of systemic school reform. the context of schools has changed significantly since 1990. if equity in employment, advancement, and retention of highly qualified school leadership is where we want to go, we must rethink and reactivate a plan to get there. conditions are right to adapt, adjust, and advance the cause of equity and quality. change is underway but we cannot rest. the job is not done. references american association of school administrators. 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(1996, spring). restructuring high schools helps improve student achievement. wisconsin center for education research (wcer) highlights, 8(a), 4-5, 9. leithwood, k. (1995). effective school district leadership: transforming politics into education. albany: state university of new york. logan, j.p. (1998). survey of ucea institutions. unpublished raw data. mccarthy, m.m., & kuh, g.d. (1997). continuity and change: the educational professoriate. columbia, mo: the university council for educational administration. murphy, j. (1995). restructuring schooling: the changing role of the superintendent and the district office. in k. leithwood (ed.). effective school district leadership (pp. 117-133). albany: state university of new york press. national association of secondary school principals (nassp). (1998, april). in search of qualified applicants: report validates principal applicant shortage. newsleader, 45(8),pp. 1,12. national women's law center. 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mentoring and socialization, particularly in organizations, hav advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 196 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 196-202, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women’s talk about mentoring and socialization in local policies linda pysher jurczak communication arts department, valdosta state university, email lpjurczak@valdosta.edu, phone 229-333-5826 accepted september 28, 2013 research on mentoring and socialization in organizations determined that there are benefits to mentors, protégés, and organizations derived from these relationships (burlew, 1991; kram, 1983). however, previous research largely ignores mentoring and socialization at all levels of politics and political organizations and this study attempts to address this oversight. i pose questions about the extent to which women are mentored in local politics and political organizations. if they are being mentored, who is doing the mentoring? are they being socialized into politics and political organizations and, if so, by whom? a total of nine women were interviewed and shared their experiences of mentoring and socialization in local politics. interviewees ranged in age from the early 30s to the late 70s and from school board to mayor. keywords: mentoring, socialization, politics, and women in politics introduction this study focuses on women in politics. specifically it addresses some questions about women in local politics. why are so few women elected to office in the united states? why do women elected to local office not advance through the ranks up to the national level? is there something about politics that makes women decide not to get involved or not to continue their involvement? or are women being largely ignored in politics, leading them to drop out? scholars and practitioners of organizational communication have been studying relationships and processes that are beneficial to employees within organizations for several decades. many have noted a relationship between tangible benefits such as promotions and pay increases with mentoring and socialization. despite the widespread interest in mentoring and socialization and the benefits to all parties involved, not much research has been done in the area of politics. what little has been done with politics and socialization focuses on political socialization within the family (mcdevitt & chaffee, 2002). little has been written about mentoring and socialization in political organizations or in politics and even less about women running for office. research on mentoring of political candidates is virtually nonexistent. in this study, i address some of the questions about mentoring and socialization of women in local politics by giving rise to the women’s voices. i ask questions about mentoring and socialization of women in local politics in two counties: one southeastern and one northeastern. first, i summarize the existing literature on mentoring and socialization. next, i explain the methodology and participants. then i analyze the data, and finally i conclude with a summary of my findings, implications, and future research in this area. literature summary an analysis of mentoring and socialization in political organizations must include some consideration of previous work in these areas. as previously noted, not much has been written about mentoring and socialization in politics; i make a leap and examine organizational literature. the following offers a representative rather than exhaustive review of the literature in these areas. mentoring has been of interest to researchers and practitioners for several decades, beginning in the 1970s. mentoring is important in helping to assimilate new members into an organization. the dyadic relationship of mentoring is beneficial to new people: it helps them assimilate an organization’s culture, gain access to influential people, and navigate the otherwise rough terrain (e.g. kram & isabella, 1985). research also suggests that there is a relationship between mentoring and promotions and pay increases. indeed, mentoring, or lack thereof, may very well be the most important determining factor of an individual’s career path. the importance of mentoring has been recognized in producing positive gains for workers. mentoring relationships have also been noted to help in socialization. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 197 socialization differs from mentoring in that it is not relational. although relationships are inherent in socialization, it is the process itself that is most important because it is “the process by which a person learns the values, norms, and required behaviors which permit him to participate as a member of the organization” (van maanen, 1976, p. 67). socialization helps organizational members to make sense of organizational events (louis, 1980) and to establish a situational identity (katz, 1980; wanous, 1980). like mentoring, socialization has been studied in various ways across various disciplines. mentoring levinson (1978) suggested that a mentor is defined in terms of the character of the relationship and the function it serves rather than the formal role. a mentor’s primary function is to be a transitional figure, someone who fosters the young person’s development, a mixture of parent and peer. others have defined mentoring in terms of the characteristics of the mentor and protégé (bolton, 1980; collin, 1988), the nature of the relationship (kram & isabella, 1985), and outcomes of the relationship (hunt & michael, 1983; kram, 1985; moore & sangaria-danowitz, 1982; roche, 1979). the result is that a continued lack of clarity about the antecedents, outcomes, characteristics, and mediators of the mentoring relationship leads to definitional vagueness (jacobi, 1991). however, although the concept lacks a specific definition, one component of mentoring that everyone agrees on is that it is a beneficial relationship for those involved. mentoring literature clearly describes several mentoring functions that help protégés. these functions can be careerrelated, which are directly related to the protégé’s career advancement or psychosocial, which influence the protégé’s self-image and competence (kram, 1983). the mentoring relationship can also provide different roles filled by the mentor at different times of a protégé’s development: trainer when helping to improve job skills, educator when teaching new tasks, and developer to facilitate personal and professional growth (burlew, 1991). mentoring can also be hierarchical, such as the four-levels found in the academy (zey, 1991). the first level parallels the socialization process; mentors share informal and formal knowledge about the institution’s norms, rules, mores, and taboos. at the next level the mentor is a source of psychological support, reaching out to the inexperienced protégé through counseling and encouragement. by the third level the mentor is openly supporting the protégé by recommending her or him to other colleagues, and finally, at the fourth level the mentor recommends the protégé for promotion. schrodt and sanders (2003) identified five academic mentoring behaviors similar to those identified by burlew (1991) when they examined mentoring in the academy: research assistance, protection, collegiality, promotion, and friendship, each of which contributes to the protégé’s professional growth. socialization socialization is routinely viewed as a process rather than a relationship, although relationships are important and necessary to the process. it is the process by which people acquire the values and attitudes, the interest, skills, and knowledge—in short the culture—current in groups to which they are, or seek to become members (merton, reader & kendell, 1957; jablin, 1987; albrecht & bach, 1997). the core idea of socialization is “the gradual persuasion of people to adopt desired attitudes and beliefs through social example, social pressure, and provision of positive reinforcement for ‘proper’ behavior and negative or non-reinforcement for ‘improper behavior’” (leavitt, 1991, p. 140). berger and luckman (1966) found that once someone had been socialized into a particular group or situation, subsequent socialization could induct her or him into new situations, groups, or organizations. they called this “secondary socialization” and noted that people who have left supportive, known environments, those who have left the familiarity of family and friends are particularly open to secondary socialization. more recently, moreland and levine (2002) examined socialization in work groups. their findings that the process results from the group looking for a member or members who can contribute to the group goals and individuals looking for groups that contribute to the satisfaction of personal needs suggest that socialization would be particularly important in political organizations. morrison (2002) looked at structural characteristics of newcomer’s networks and suggests that they have two types of networks—informational and friendship. the informational network, as would be expected, is used for acquiring various types of information. the friendship network helps the newcomer to feel integrated into the organization. morrison’s findings also suggest that socialization could be extremely important to women in political organizations. although business, psychology, education, and sociology focus on socialization, they do so with communication and interaction secondary to their particular fields. still, some researchers have noted the importance of communication in the socialization process. bernstein (1972), for example, observed that “individuals come to learn their social roles through the process of communication” (p. 474). similarly, reichers (1987) noted that newcomers establish a situational identity and make sense of organizational events more rapidly when engaging in more symbolic interactions. interaction frequency with insiders is important to the rate of socialization but it does not matter with whom the interaction takes place (not a mentor). several researchers have noted that the socialization process occurs in stages (katz, 1980; schein, 1983; van maanen, 1976). still others found that socialization, like mentoring, provides different functions. chao, o’leary-kelly, wolf, klein & gardner (1994) identified six functions of the socialization process: performance proficiency, people, politics, organizational values and goals, history, and language. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 198 obviously research suggests that there are benefits to both the individual members of an organization and to the organization itself derived from mentoring and socialization. however, little research has been done on mentoring and/or socialization in politics or political organizations. additionally, the lack of parity in the body politic raises questions about the mentoring and socialization of women in these areas. although women have made inroads into politics, gender parity has not been achieved in the united states. other democracies (e.g., norway, ukraine, wales) have legislated a more equitable distribution of power while the united states lags behind and relies on its citizens to distribute the balance of power. however, the “balance of power” continues to elude women in the u.s.; in our 228 year history only 215 (1.8 percent) have served in the congress, and only two supreme court justices have been female (wilson, 2004). it is not only national government that is lacking in gender parity, local governments are also dominated by men. wilson (2004) notes that currently women are only about 12 percent of both governors and mayors of the 100 largest united states cities. clearly this begs the question “why after all these years is the balance of power still tipped in favor of men?” an examination of mentoring and socialization of women in local politics is only a starting point; there is much work needs to be done in this area. the aim of this study was to explore mentoring and socialization of women in local politics and political organizations through the voices of women in local politics. this research takes a qualitative approach at answering some of the questions raised about women in politics. specifically, it gives rise to the experiences of women in local politics in an effort to gain a deeper understanding. local politics in general and women in local politics in particular have been largely overlooked. previous research largely ignores mentoring and socialization at all levels of politics and political organizations and this study attempts to address this oversight. specifically, it poses questions about the extent to which women are mentored in local politics and political organizations. if they are being mentored, who is doing the mentoring? are women socialized into politics and political organizations or are they left to figure it out for themselves? method participants women who ran for local office, regardless of the outcome of the campaign, are the focus of this study. a campaign for local office is defined as one that is run at the city or county level. examples include mayor, city council, school board, sheriff, and representative to the state legislature. initial contact was made by a former campaign volunteer with a woman who had made a run for mayor; the former candidate was told basics about the research and was asked if she would be interested in participating. she graciously accepted the invitation and scheduled an interview at her home. her political career began by stuffing envelopes for someone running for office. she got involved in the local democratic party and someone asked her to run for county commission, which she won. after two terms on the commission she decided to run for mayor, at the time she was in her late 40s. no woman had ever been elected as mayor in the city and of those who ran, nobody even came close. she came close, but lost to a candidate with better financial support. four of the participants were friends or acquaintances of the mayoral candidate and, per her advice, i used her name to get me in the door. one was a former school board member in her late 40s who ran for office because the county continued to be segregated and she wanted to change it. she served one term and lost her bid for reelection. another was a former city council member in her late 50s who had served two terms on a council of all men. she decided to run for office because she was tired of the way things were being handled. a third was currently a county commissioner in her late 50s to early 60s who had served for years. the last was a former county commissioner who at 79 still has her finger on the pulse of politics in the city. she was very active in the local republican party and someone convinced her she should run for office. she did, she won, and served for 30 years. my research interested her and she called a friend of hers who was in a school board race at the time of the interview and gave her my number. this resulted in a sixth interview in the southeast. this candidate was new to campaigning, but not to politics. although her children are one and three and a long way from going to school, she thought she could help to change and improve the current school system before they get there. i also contacted women in the northeast to get another perspective and to explore the experiences of women in a different region. i was curious to find out if women in general have similar experiences or if experiences are particular to specific geographic areas. the participants included the president of city council, in her early 50s who had been involved in politics for most of her adult life. she and her husband are ward bosses and she ran for office because they needed a candidate. the second northeasterner was a state representative in her mid to late 40s. she has also been involved in politics most of her adult life and got into it by working for other elected officials. i also interviewed the mayor of a small borough in her late 60s, who has been mayor purely by accident. on election day when she went to the polls someone handed her a button and told her to “make sure you vote for that candidate.” she looked to see who she was voting for and saw her name on the button. baffled, she said to the poll worker “you have got to be kidding. i’m not running for mayor.” she was told that they really needed her and she won the office without campaigning. interviews interviews were conducted at various locations based on the participants’ preferences: three interviews were conducted in the participants’ homes, four others at their workplace, and two in restaurants. prior to the interview, many of the participants asked how long it would take. i told them it could be as long or as short as they wanted it to be, and they ranged from one hour advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 199 to three hours. only one participant told me she would give me a specific amount of time. in an effort to create a comfortable, non-threatening environment i told the women basic information about myself and promised to tell them more after the interview. apparently my technique worked because they relaxed and forgot about the tape recorder sitting on the table. in fact, in two of the interviews the participants stated that they did not know why they were telling me things they had not told anyone else, one woman told me certain things were not for publication, and another got up in the middle of the interview and closed her office door. the interviewing methods were similar to those suggested by mccracken (1988) to allow the participant to tell her own story. i began each of the interviews by asking the participant to “tell me a little bit about yourself” and asked as few questions as possible based on the participants’ responses. i encouraged them to talk freely about their experiences, their backgrounds, what had initially gotten them involved in local politics, and any other area they felt was important in understanding the experiences of women in local politics by nodding affirmatively and keeping quiet. most of the women eventually got to the information i was interested in, but for the few that did not, i asked more specific questions such as “tell me about getting involved, was there anyone who helped you?” after most of the interviews participants told me to call if i had any more questions, wanted to set up another interview, or needed clarification. data analysis the first step in data analysis was transcription, which i did myself as a means of living with the data and becoming more familiar with it. my analysis of the data followed the grounded theory approach of glaser and strauss (1967). i reviewed the transcripts for anything that might give me some insight into mentoring relationships and socialization of women in local politics. in this analysis these were the only concepts i was interested in, and i analyzed the data with this in mind. i examined the transcripts for themes as they related to these two concepts, looking for both similarities and differences between the women’s experiences based on such things as region, age, and political party affiliation. findings it became clear from the interviews that very little mentoring was being done among women in local politics. in fact, it seems as if a small group of women who have run for office work together to help the next woman get elected. more accurately there are two groups of women working to get other women elected: democrats and republicans, and each do it differently. most of the mentoring taking place among these women is not mentoring in the traditional sense of an older, wiser person taking the younger, naïve newcomer under her wing; instead, it is peer mentoring (kram, 1980; kram & isabella, 1985). in fact, there is evidence that the three kinds of peer relationships suggested by kram and isabella (1985) occur among these women and these are intertwined with the themes of floundering, emotional support, and advice found in the women’s stories. mentoring or lack thereof a common theme for these women was a sense of not knowing what to do or how to do it. many of them were asked to run or decided to run with very little knowledge of what the office was or about how politics really worked. in fact, most of them thought that they could not win. at the early stage of a career kram and isabella (1985) define an information peer as someone who helps the newcomer to learn the ropes and/or tells her how to get the job done. there is little evidence in these women’s stories that information peers existed at this stage of their careers. instead, there are tales of not knowing what to do and having to find out for themselves as evidenced by a woman running for school board: “what i didn’t know, and no one told me, is that the way people play the political game, controlling air time, so most of the callers were supporters of my opponent” (candidate 6). another woman who had been involved in community organizations and in the pta and had worked for non-profit organizations such as the united farm workers of america and america’s promise, “used to joke with a friend that i would run for mayor one day.” but she had never been that involved in political campaigns. i helped a state senator stuff envelopes, you know a few things like that, and i hadn’t really been behind the scenes in a campaign, though i was very politically aware. and so when this guy encouraged me to run for office i really thought that i wasn’t qualified. i mean, i didn’t know how, what a county commissioner did (candidate 1). another woman described being left to figure it out for herself and blamed it on a lack of “camaraderie among women. we are not good coalition builders” (candidate 8). the experience was very different for women who were actually mentored in the traditional sense. she met with me and another woman who was thinking about running in a different district. she had us over for lunch and it was totally just a mentoring type thing. that was just really helpful. it was really helpful because she’s a republican and i used her name whenever possible to show that i have bipartisan support basically. (candidate 6) one long time office holder made it a point to talk to women throughout her career and beyond. she is in some senses the matriarch of the southeastern women. basically any woman that wanted to run, i talked to them and i still do. blank, when i first talked to her i would never have picked her out to be a winner. she had the qualities she needed but she also had two little kids and i don’t see how you’re gonna manage advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 200 that. but i wasn’t going to discourage her. (candidate 4) not only was she willing to talk to other women, but she seemed to take pride in the women that she helped regardless of the outcome: “i frequently work with other women. they come to me when they first run a campaign to find out what they should do. i have five out there. i have worked with a lot of women. i’ve worked with a lot that lost too” (candidate 4). other descriptions of the relationship include “willing to share her war stories” (candidate 3) and having “lunch several times to talk about my campaign and strategize” (candidate 6). in addition to the theme of mentoring in the traditional sense and peer mentoring to socialize women into the political arena, women also told about getting and giving advice. advice women who had never run for office before or been involved in politics before looked to others for advice. one would expect that advice given would include how to do what, when and some of it did. in fact, the only man mentioned in relation to mentoring was “very helpful. he had always run a very intense neighborhood campaign and he told me how to do it” (candidate 1). candidate 1, who had been in the most levels of local politics, told women at a dinner the importance of not only getting ready once they decided to run, but also the importance of being ready to run: “the important thing is to be prepared. so if you think you wanna run or if you know women that you want to run in the future, start getting that stuff organized now because when you decide, unless you decide a year ahead, a lot of times it’s about preparedness meeting opportunity.” interestingly, much of the advice the women talked about was about their appearance. this is the area where collegial relationships were most notable; it is here where friendships are important because they allow the women to be totally candid with one another. they were told about details such as what to wear, what makeup was necessary, and how to fix their hair. when candidate one decided to run for a higher office and she was spending more time in front of the cameras, her friend who had also been elected to office previously told her that she was going to have to look the part of a mayor. the discussion went back and forth between wearing suits, getting a professional looking haircut and more. you’re gonna have to wear makeup.” and she said, “well, i wear makeup.” and i said, “nobody can tell.” and i said “you’re gonna have to wear lipstick.” and i was sitting at her dining room table with no lipstick on and she left to go get some water or something and i said “okay now, we’re gonna try an experiment. you know what i look like right?” and she said yeah. so i put on my lipstick and she came back into the room and i said “okay, tell me what you think.” and she said, “alright, i’ll wear lipstick.” (candidate 2) candidate two knew what she was talking about; she had similar advice given her when she ran for office. “i had a friend who is very skilled in um media relationships and she would give me advice on things like image. for example, i usually wear a bunch of silver bracelets and she would say “you can’t do that.” although there was some traditional mentoring and aome peer mentoring going on in these women’s political lives, those things did not seem to be enough to keep them in politics. the most important benefit they got from their relationships was in the form of emotional support. emotional support several of the women talked about a woman or other women who supported them emotionally. one called it a “good old girls’ network” (candidate 6). she clarified this by explaining it was not like the “good ol’boys network” that kept women out, but rather a way to put everyone on equal footing. i think that a lot of women that have held office, not as many as the men, but a lot of women who have held office in the county, they are helping other women to do it now that they’re not or they’re not right now. they’ve gone out of their way to be really supportive. i feel like i can talk to them and trust them to know what to know. one woman got a phone call from a friend describing an interaction with one of the guys. she told how he called her “honey” in the workplace and how it was something that had always been overlooked and how finally she had the courage to look straight at him and “she said ‘you gave me the courage to say i am the bureau manager, i’m not your honey.’ so i think in that way women are helping one another” (candidate 8). candidate one recalled being in the process of deciding and calling for advice and trying everything she could to talk herself out of running. a dear lady who was a democrat, an activist, who’d been a labor organizer in the old days, she was 83 years old and i called and i said “they're trying to, they’re encouraging me to run.” and she goes, “well, i think you oughta do it, we need a lady in there. it's time that we make changes.” i said, “well, i'm not from here.” she goes, “well that’s okay, you’ve been active in the community.” i said “i'm divorced with two kids.” “oh,” she said, “a lot of people are divorced these days, that's no problem. ”i said “well, i come from a labor background.” she goes, “well you tell ‘em you’re for the working person.” and so you know, and a lot of that district is very working-class. and so every excuse that i had, “you know the people can’t pronounce my name,” you know, every excuse i had she had come back for. and she goes i think you oughta do it. so, we decided to do it. candidate six talked about building a relationship with another woman who had said she could not help her because she was advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 201 supporting another candidate during the primary. she talked of how nice the woman was, but that she could not support her due to a conflict of interest. however, when the candidate she was supporting lost in the primary she contacted me, she’s been really, really helpful. someone i can contact late at night and complain or cry or whatever about. she’s been real helpful just in terms of that personal support, but also she was on school board. she’s having a fundraiser for me and she helped me organize a letter that was signed by blank and the current and past democratic chair. perhaps the best explanation of the relationship women have to other women in politics is best summed up by candidate seven. i think there are still few enough women in government, as elected officials, that when you find someone, every woman has an obligation when you get to a certain spot to turn around and look who’s back there and reach out your hand and bring her along. and show her how to do that. that’s something that i think women could mentor one another a lot more and i find in government that women are willing to do that. i try to do that whenever i can. i love my internship program. implications this study suggests that there are important differences in the kinds of mentoring men and women engage in. although women have various supportive relationships among women running for local office, they are not mentoring in the traditional sense. many of the relationships that women in local politics have closely parallel the peer relationships outlined by kram and isabella (1985). these relationships are good, supportive relationships; they help women to feel better about running for office and give women more confidence once they are elected. women involved in these kinds of relationships help each other depending on who is running for what office at any given time. women do not support other women’s careers for the long haul, nor do they necessarily take other women under their wing. obviously, based on the benefits to parties involved in mentoring, mentoring is important. there is something to be said for an experienced person taking an interest in a newcomer and devoting time and energy to shaping that person. in addition to a lack of traditional mentoring, women are not being socialized very well into politics or political organizations. they stuff envelopes, put up yard signs, and make phone calls, but many have no sense of what politics is all about. when they decide to run for office they are often left to figure things out for themselves, which causes problems during the campaign and beyond. this lack of mentoring and socialization could partly explain the lack of female candidates at higher political levels. future research this research suggests a number of questions that need further exploration. it would be interesting to look at the relationship of this core group of southern women as new women enter into politics in the county. will they embrace newcomers? will more women be inclined to mentor other women knowing what they learned from experience about the challenges faced by newcomers? a better understanding of the benefits of mentoring and socialization to women in local politics needs to be developed in order to encourage more of these relationships. it is entirely possible that women do not recognize the need for mentoring and socialization and therefore do not engage in these practices. it would also be interesting to explore women’s backgrounds for similarities and differences that compel them to run for office with little or no knowledge of the office or politics in general. for example, are women with children more inclined to get involved locally because they can see firsthand the effects of policy on their children? is level of education an issue for women who want to run for office? do women run because of issues with local government? interview data suggests regional differences, but it is inconclusive at best. it would be interesting to collect additional data regionally to make a better comparison. other regions, such as the southwest or midwest, might garner additional themes of mentoring and socialization. the data also suggests differences between parties, but it is inconclusive because several of the candidates ran for nonpartisan seats. additional data, which distinguishes the women by party affiliations, might be helpful. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 202 references albrecht, t. & bach, b. 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(1991). the mentor connection. homewood, il: dow jones-irwin. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 142 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 142-150, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper saudi arabia female students’ perception of effective female leaders neva helena alexander prince mohammad bin fahd university, email: nalexander@nevalliance.com accepted september 17, 2013 the kingdom of saudi arabia witnessed significant development over the past few years. one of these developments involves the increase of female leaders in the society. the aim of this study was for the female students at prince mohammad bin fahd university taking a leadership and teamwork course to write an essay on a saudi female leader and their views about effective leadership. additionally they completed a survey to analysis female leaders and their qualities. with the realization that perceptions of effective female leaders may be different from those of men, the current research examined how saudi female students view effective leadership of prominent saudi women currently operating in leadership roles. keywords: saudi arabia students, saudi female students, saudi women leadership, saudi business women introduction the kingdom of saudi arabia witnessed significant development over the past few years. one of these developments involves the increase of female leaders in society. one will find women in different areas such as economic, education, medicine, business, and the media that hold leadership positions. the aim of this study was for the female students at prince mohammad bin fahd university taking a leadership and teamwork course to write an essay on a saudi female leader and their perception of effective leadership among their selected female leaders in different professions and organizations. additionally they completed a survey that identified the female leaders. effective leadership has been noted as a central ingredient in organizational and professional success (fernandez, 2008). researchers have effectively demonstrated that “resource capabilities, legitimacy and credibility” are foundational to effective leadership (karlsson, parker, hjerpe & linner, 2011). even though some basic requisites for effective leadership have been noted in the literature, research does indicate that the gender of the leader and follower may impact perceptions of leadership effectiveness (settles, cortina, malley & stewart, 2006). in particular, isaac, griffin and carnes (2010) reported that leadership is often perceived as a stereotypically masculine position. as a result, the entrance of females into leadership positions can challenge perceptions, creating changes in the way that effective leadership is perceived (isaac, et al., 2010). according to alexander (2012), effective leadership results in the group responding in the manner desired by the leader, which includes achieving a goal set by the leader. alexander (2012) also stated that female leaders tend to define leadership in interpersonal terms. from the female perspective, the cognitive and personal skills are more important for a leader than task or functional skills. while this perspective does not alter the fundamental definitional elements of leadership, it tends to emphasize process over achieving the objective established by the leader (p.7). method with the realization that perceptions of effective female leaders may be different from those of men, a mix method research was conducted. students wrote essays about their selected saudi female leaders. these essays were examined to grasp how saudi female students view effective leadership of prominent saudi women currently in leadership roles or they view as leaders. in total, 50 students wrote essays on a saudi female leader, describing the traits and characteristics that they believed contributed to effective leadership for the female selected. the essays were evaluated using content analysis to identify the frequency of common themes in the essays. the language utilized to describe female leaders and their effectiveness was tabulated and compared across all 50 essays. while there were some differences in the descriptions provided, there were some prominent commonalities in the language and mailto:nalexander@nevalliance.com advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 143 descriptors used. the results obtained from the content review of the essays are provided on the following pages and are based on the most frequent issues noted for female leadership effectiveness. to strengthen the research, students voluntarily completed a survey that i designed. this survey was reviewed by female educators currently working or worked in saudi arabia. students were asked five questions; (1) who is your favorite female saudi leader not related to you?; (2) state the names of 3 (famous public figure) saudi female leaders that you believe overcame a challenge?; (3) state one female saudi leader that you learned about who affected people’s lives negatively by making bad a bad decision?; (4) state one female saudi leader that you learned about and how she affected people’s future positively with her decision?; (5) and state three qualities you look for in a good leader? result when reviewing the results four main factors emerged in the way the students categorized successful female leaders. the four main factors are perseverance in the face of obstacles, being the “first”, excelling in a male dominated field and achieving a dream or goal. additionally, these female leaders have a leadership style that involves teamwork. perseverance in the face of obstacles content analysis of the essays written by saudi female students on the subject of female leadership reveals that perseverance was the most frequently noted theme in the essays. of the 50 essays collected, 42 made some reference to the obstacles faced by female leaders and their ability to overcome these obstacles and achieve their current positions. although the term “perseverance” was not directly used, the students descriptively detailed the challenges facing their chosen leaders and the ability of the leader to sustain their ambition and determination even in the wake of these obstacles. students noted that female leaders had to overcome obstacles that included: a lack of support from family members (34 essays), a lack of support from society or culture (33 essays), a lack of support from their profession or other leaders in their chosen field (19 essays) and a lack of support from other professionals or educators working in the same field (13 essays). a review of success in leadership does indicate that perseverance is a significant issue that has implications for the ability of the leader to achieve desired outcomes. thomas (2005) asserts that all leaders experience setbacks during their careers. leaders that are capable of overcoming these setbacks will display perseverance and are often able to eventually achieve their desired goals (thomas, 2005). while persistence toward a goal is one component of perseverance, thomas also notes that the way a leader approaches failure and setbacks will also have implications for his or her ability to persevere. specifically, thomas argues that “when you encounter a setback or a significant problem, you can be discouraged and maybe even develop a poor attitude; or you can re-double your determination, stay upbeat, maintain a good attitude and keep moving ahead” (p. 8). the description of perseverance in leadership noted by thomas (2005) is one that was reported in many of the essays reviewed. for saudi female leaders that faced obstacles from their families, many chose to focus on their personal goals and desires to achieve more. this focus provided a foundation for these leaders to maintain their determination even when they faced ongoing criticism of their roles and objectives. interestingly the need for perseverance was noted by one of the female leaders interviewed for the essay project. huda alghoson, general manager of training and development at saudi aramco stated that: in traditional societies, women’s roles are often stereotyped. family responsibilities are not shared and are assumed to be solely a female duty. balancing work and family life poses a great challenge. lack of family support is another reason why we do not see too many women in leadership positions (deema). thus, the ability of leaders to persevere even in the wake of these challenges prompts many saudi female students to view female leaders as effective. being the “first” while perseverance was noted to be the most prominent theme identified in the essays reviewed in this research, being the first in one’s field was also a prominent theme. being first was noted in 42 of the 50 essays as most students emphasized the role of being the first woman to accomplish a specific goal or task. repeatedly, the student essays noted the importance of being first in one’s field. while being first was an integral component of many of the biographies of women leaders, students writing about the experience of being first often commented on how being first influenced their perception of the leader. for instance, in an essay on arwa mutabagani one student noted that the accomplishments of mutabagani created some of the first steps toward a “dramatic change in saudi arabia” in which women were capable of leading (kinana). what this suggests is that being the first in a specific discipline has larger implications for the development of effective leadership as perceived by female students. the concept of “being the first” has been best conceptualized in the literature through the use of the term pioneer. white (2006) in her review of the pioneer spirit in leadership argues that pioneering leaders are those that go into uncharted territory to create unique practice. white asserts that pioneers in leadership are “pathfinders who continually face the unknown, exploring new territories and dealing with unforeseen challenges” (p. 1499). while leaders in new fields are often considered to be pioneers, white maintains that many women in leadership are advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 144 pioneers because of their ability and willingness to seek out new pathways for women’s development. through this process, pioneers in leadership provide a roadmap for others that are seeking similar positions. as such, effective leaders are those that are willing to take these risks and to provide a foundation for future generations to pursue similar goals and objectives. although there is a paucity of research which relates effectiveness in leadership to being a pioneer, it is evident that many of the female students view this component of leadership practice and integral and essential to effective leadership. because female leaders have the capability of creating a pathway for others, they are viewed as being effective. in addition, because these leaders have been able to successfully overcome obstacles to entering into their leadership roles they are viewed as effective for achieving such a high level of success. excelling in a male dominated field essays written about female leaders also emphasized the ability of female leaders to succeed in fields or roles that are traditionally held by men. while some students noted the ability of women to make their mark on a profession typically dominated by men, others made mention of the fact that female leaders were able to affect change on the way in which leadership is viewed in the prevailing culture. one student, writing about the leadership of lubna olyan, an executive for the olyan company reported that “ms. olyan struggled a lot to prove to saudis that saudi women can make changes in the country's development same as saudi men” (laila). this theme was repeated 31 times throughout the essays reviewed. clearly, the ability of women to possess the same skills and capabilities as men create an important foundation for shaping the perception of female leaders as being effective in their roles. researchers when relating the issue of gender in leadership have definitively demonstrated that gender bias has long been an issue of concern (isaac, et al., 2010). as a result of this perception, women are often not viewed as effective as men in their leadership roles (lopez, 2010). lopez asserted that while women are often highly effective in leadership roles their inability to conform to the stereotypical images of the male leader often serve to diminish how their actions and accomplishments are viewed by others. lopez argued for an expanded view of leadership; one that incorporates female qualities of leadership practice as foundational contributors of leadership success and excellence. incorporation of these issues into prevailing leadership theory may reduce gender bias and prompt followers to view leadership as effective regardless of the gender of the leader. clearly, the essays reviewed for this investigation reflect the gender bias in leadership. most of the essays which noted the ability of the female leader to excel in a male dominated profession illustrated surprise or awe that the leader was able to accomplish this task. this view suggested that students have a specific view of leadership that is framed in a male context. this view makes it a true accomplishment of the female leader if she is able to succeed in this world. what is perhaps most important about this observation is that students were able to identify the elements of leadership that were unique to the success of female leaders. as such, this may alter the way that females view leadership, creating a foundation upon which perception is shaped by a broader understanding of male and female characteristics that can contribute to leadership success. this is commensurate with what lopez (2010) noted about changing the views of leadership. achieving a dream or goal another theme continuously noted in the essays was the ability of the female leader to achieve a dream or goal. this theme was identified in 27 of the essays collected. in many of the essays, the authors identified a central dream or goal of the female leader that has served as the foundation for motivating and driving the leader, even in the face of adversity. an essay written on dr .howayda qatham (2011) exemplified this theme as the author noted that “dr. howayda studied hard and traveled overseas to accomplish and achieve the childhood dream to become a great heart surgery and raise her country name in the sky” [sis] (razan, 2012, p.3). being able to achieve a dream or goal clearly has implications for shaping the way that female students view the leadership of saudi women in leadership positions. a review of the literature regarding translating dreams and goals into effective leadership practice implies that individuals capable of making this transition have certain skills and capabilities. bassaw (2010) in his review of the determinants of successful leadership argued that the ability to transform a dream or goal into applied institutional outcomes suggests that a certain process for development has occurred. in particular this author notes that in order to make this transformation the individual must “be open to different perceptions of reality, embrace contradictions and acknowledge mistakes” (p. 1002). although these issues were not directly noted in the essays reviewed for this investigation, the consistent identification of achieving dreams or goals by students indicates that there is some awareness of the complexity of his process and scope of the skills and challenges involved. saudi female students capable of recognizing the role and importance of achieving goals and dreams as part of effective leadership practice may be better able to identify important characteristics that that will be essential to their success as leaders in the future. while the identification of a goal or dream is important, the ability to achieve the dream is also an important indicator that the leader has mastered important skills that will be needed for leadership success. as students complete their education and begin their careers, exploration of dreams and goals should provide them with the ability to discern the specific skills or capabilities needed to achieve a specific dream or goal. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 145 role model/inspirational the final common theme noted in the essays regarding female leaders was that the leader was a good role model or was inspirational to others. one essay on princess loulwah noted the following with regard to the impact of this leader: there are challenges also she faces and overcome one is that taking charge on running the effat colleges making sure to educate well all the saudi women, and act as a role model to everyone that woman in the present century is not merely the same with the old culture whom saudi woman are known as a wife and stay at home [sic] (louwla, 2012, p.2). in this position as a role model, the author goes on to argue that princess loulwah has been able to motivate women to utilize their resources and talents and to seek employment. role modeling in the context of leadership has long been noted to be an important and integral component of effective leadership. yaffe and kark (2011) asserted that role modeling serves as a foundation to enlist the aid of others and facilitate the achievement of a common goal. by serving as a role model, leaders provide followers with a foundation for shaping and directing their behavior (yaffe & kark, 2011). role modeling essentially means that the individual leads by example. the process is one that also sends a message to followers that the leader is not asking followers to do more than he or she can or will do (yaffe & kark, 2011). students noting the issue of role modeling in leadership practice appreciate the ability of female leaders to set a good example not only for their organizations or professions but also to set a good example for saudi women in general. leadership style in addition to reviewing the essays to evaluate common themes for female saudi leaders, the essays were also evaluated to identify the most common forms of leadership identified by female saudi students. the specific leadership style identified by the respondent was recorded and tabulated for all of the essays. democratic leadership was noted by 32 of the students as the principle leadership style used by the female leader. charismatic leadership was also identified as a prominent leadership style with 19 of the essays having this descriptor of leadership style. other leadership styles noted, but with a limited degree of frequency included: autocratic (9 essays); bureaucratic (2 essays) and laissez-faire (2 essays). a closer examination of these leadership styles in conjunction with information provided in the essays facilitates greater understanding of why these leadership styles were identified. democratic leadership empirical leadership regarding the issue of democratic leadership among leaders indicates that this trait is one that is notable unique for female leaders (pines, dahan-kalev & ronen, 2001). according to pines and co-workers evaluations and comparisons of men’s and women’s leadership styles have shown remarkable overlaps in key areas such as task orientation and the ability to manage interpersonal relationships. the principle difference in comparing men’s and women’s leadership style has been with regard to democratic leadership: “the new generation of women [leaders] are more open with colleagues and subordinates than men, and are consensus builders who encourage wider participation in decision making” (p. 608). pine and coworkers go on to note that female leaders also appear to be more interested in the health and personal concerns of their subordinates. this research has been supported by other authors including coronel, moreno and carrasco (2010) who argue that female leaders “promote a somewhat kinder, more socially compassionate version of organizational goals and social policies, and place more emphasis on democratic relationships, participatory decisionmaking, delegation, and team-based leadership skills” (p. 154). placing this information into what students noted regarding democratic leadership styles of their chosen female leaders, it is evident that many of these characteristics were noted. for instance, in an essay on lubna olyan one student noted that “as a democratic leader, she created a comfortable work environment for her followers or co-workers by encouraging them to show all their special skills and expertise. also, she always considers her workers as basic elements in her decision making process” (laila). in an essay on the leadership of ala'a hariri, another student reports that “ala'a hariri is a very democratic leader. she always listens to the people that she is working with. she considers other opinions and ideas in everything, even in making the office polices [sic] (demah). similar issues as these were noted in many of the essays identifying the leader as having a democratic leadership style. the data obtained from the essays indicate that students using the term “democratic” to describe the leadership of women have a clear understanding of what this type of leadership entails. as women, the students may value the role and importance of building consensus as an important foundation for leadership practice. clearly, the ability of the leader to engage in this type of leadership practice will have a strong impact on the perception of female students with regard to effective leadership practice. charismatic leadership style charismatic leadership style was also noted with some frequency when reviewing the essays provided by students. kuppusamy, ganesan and rosada (2010) provided a review of charismatic leadership in which they note that leaders that employ this style are able to influence “major changes in the attitudes and assumptions of organization members” (p. 2-3). in addition kuppusamy and coworkers report that charismatic leaders are able to have “a magnetic effect” on followers: one that enables the leader to build consensus for achieving the organization’s objectives. these leaders are often very selfconfident, recognize the challenges that lie before them and are advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 146 willing to take personal and professional risks to achieve their vision and goals. many of these themes were identified in the essays provided by saudi female students who identified their leader as charismatic. for instance, in an essay on lubna olayan, one student noted that this leader was charismatic because of her ability to inspire others to do more and to provide “great work” (fatimah). additionally, in an essay on hayat sindi the author notes that this leader is charismatic because she is able to serve the needs of her followers. as a result of this characteristic, sindi is a leader that people like and one that inspires others (deena). based on these descriptions it is evident that many students believe that charisma is a desirable trait that provides the leader with a significant degree of effectiveness. table (1) leadership survey q1. who is your favorite female saudi leader not related to you? s. no. individual named by respondent frq. % 1 ameerah al taweel 14 20.0% 2 inconclusive responses 14 19.8% 3 hayat sindi 3 4.2% 4 lubna olayan 3 4.2% 5 muna abu sulayman 3 4.2% 6 no response 3 4.2% 7 alaa al hariri 2 2.8% 8 fatima batook 2 2.8% 9 ghada al mutairi 2 2.8% 10 manal al sharif 2 2.8% 11 princess al johara al saud 2 2.8% 12 zaha hadid 2 2.8% 13 adila al saud 1 1.4% 14 ayla ashadawi 1 1.4% 15 deena al faris 1 1.4% 16 dr salwa al hezza 1 1.4% 17 dr samia al-amoudi 1 1.4% 18 dr. howaida al-qethamy 1 1.4% 19 hana al zuhair 1 1.4% 20 iman al qahtani 1 1.4% 21 irrelevant responses 1 1.4% 22 lujain omran 1 1.4% 23 majda abu ras 1 1.4% 24 manal al dowayan 1 1.4% 25 noura al fayez 1 1.4% 26 princess noura al saud 1 1.4% 27 rajaa al sanea 1 1.4% 28 rasha al hoshan 1 1.4% s. no. individual named by respondent frq. % 29 razan alazzouni 1 1.4% 30 sarah attar 1 1.4% 31 thoraya obaid 1 1.4% total 71 100.0 % table (2) leadership survey q2. state the names of three (famous public figures) saudi female leaders that you believe overcame a challenge? s. no . individual named among 3 public figures stated by respondent frq. % 1 inconclusive responses 41 22.6% 2 ameerah al-taweel 19 10.6% 3 hayat sindi 18 10.0% 4 fatima batook 12 6.7% 5 muna abu sulayman 12 6.7% 6 manal al sharif 9 5.0% 7 no responses 9 5.0% 8 princess al johara al saud 5 2.8% 9 irrelevant responses 4 2.2% 10 lubna olayan 4 2.2% 11 sarah attar 4 2.2% 12 wojdan shaherkani 4 2.2% 13 adila al saud 3 1.7% 14 ghada al mutairi 3 1.7% 15 noura al fayez 3 1.7% 16 razan alazzouni 3 1.7% 17 alaa al hariri 2 1.1% 18 dr samia al amoudi 2 1.1% 19 hanadi al hindi 2 1.1% 20 lolowah al faisal 2 1.1% 21 rajaa al sanea 2 1.1% 22 amena al jassim 1 0.5% 23 amira al fadl 1 0.5% 24 ayla ashadawi 1 0.5% 25 deena al faris 1 0.5% 26 dr salwa al hezza 1 0.5% 27 dr. howaida al-qethamy 1 0.5% 28 hana al zuhair 1 0.5% 29 heba jamal 1 0.5% 30 iman al qahtani 1 0.5% 31 lubna al ansari 1 0.5% 32 lujain omran 1 0.5% 33 majda abu ras 1 0.5% 34 nabilah al-tunisi 1 0.5% 35 princess mashael al saud 1 0.5% 36 samaher mously 1 0.5% 37 samar badawi 1 0.5% 38 sarah abu abdullah 1 0.5% 39 thoraya obaid 1 0.5% 40 zaha hadid 1 0.5% advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 147 s. no . individual named among 3 public figures stated by respondent frq. % total 182* 100.0% *since not all the respondents gave exactly three names, the percentage is calculated from the total names received, including no responses, irrelevant responses, and inconclusive responses. table (3) leadership survey q3. state one female saudi leader that you believe influenced the society negatively. s. no. individual named by respondent frq. % 1 manal al sharif 29 40.8% 2 no responses 23 32.4% 3 inconclusive responses 8 11.4% 4 irrelevant response 3 4.2% 5 dr rawda al yousef 1 1.4% 6 aseel omran 1 1.4% 7 fawzia al nafea 1 1.4% 8 lubna olayan 1 1.4% 9 muna abu sulayman 1 1.4% 10 hanan younis (a.k.a wa'ad) 1 1.4% 11 noura al fayez 1 1.4% 12 princess al johara al saud 1 1.4% total 71 100.0 % table (4) leadership survey q4. state one female saudi leader that you believe influenced the society positively. s. no. individual named by respondent frq. % 1 ameera al taweel 13 18.3% 2 inconclusive responses 11 15.6% 3 no response 11 15.6% 4 hayat sindi 6 8.5% 5 noura al fayez 4 5.6% 6 muna abu sulayman 3 4.2% 7 princess al johara al saud 3 4.2% 8 dr samia al-amoudi 2 2.8% 9 lolowah al faisal 2 2.8% 10 sara attar 2 2.8% 11 irrelevant response 2 2.8% 12 amina al-jassim 1 1.4% 13 rajaa al sanea 1 1.4% 14 princess nora al saud 1 1.4% 15 majda abu ras 1 1.4% 16 deena al faris 1 1.4% 17 dr salwa al hezza 1 1.4% 18 iman al qahtani 1 1.4% 19 nassimah al sadah 1 1.4% 20 hanadi al hindi 1 1.4% 21 lubna olayan 1 1.4% 22 fatima batook 1 1.4% 23 adila al saud 1 1.4% total 71 100.0% table (5) leadership survey q5. list 3 qualities that you look for in a leader. s. no. quality named by respondent (1 of 3) frq. % 1 confidence 11 4.6% 2 integrity 11 4.6% 3 communication skills 9 3.8% 4 good listener 9 3.8% 5 respect for fellow members 9 3.8% 6 unbiased 9 3.8% 7 an open mind 8 3.4% 8 motivation 8 3.4% 9 decisiveness 7 3.0% 10 education & knowledge 7 3.0% 11 honesty 7 3.0% 12 optimism 7 3.0% 13 responsibility 7 3.0% 14 trustworthiness 6 2.5% 15 critical thinking skills 5 2.1% 16 loyalty 5 2.1% 17 risk-taker 5 2.1% 18 self-reliance 5 2.1% 19 strong beliefs 5 2.1% 20 ambition 4 1.7% 21 cooperation 4 1.7% 22 helpful 4 1.7% 23 no response 4 1.7% advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 148 s. no. quality named by respondent (1 of 3) frq. % 24 patience 4 1.7% 25 team worker 4 1.7% 26 a problem solver 3 1.3% 27 courage 3 1.3% 28 dedication 3 1.3% 29 faith 3 1.3% 30 flexibility 3 1.3% 31 humility 3 1.3% 32 power 3 1.3% 33 punctuality 3 1.3% 34 righteousness 3 1.3% 35 strength 3 1.3% 36 truthfulness 3 1.3% 37 vision 3 1.3% 38 amiable 2 0.9% 39 concern 2 0.9% 40 control 2 0.9% 41 convincing power 2 0.9% 42 creativity 2 0.9% 43 dignity 2 0.9% 44 hard working 2 0.9% 45 insignificant responses* 2 0.9% 46 kindness 2 0.9% 47 participation 2 0.9% 48 adaptability 1 0.4% 49 credibility 1 0.4% 50 determination 1 0.4% 51 enthusiasm 1 0.4% 52 experience 1 0.4% 53 fame 1 0.4% 54 influence 1 0.4% 55 inspiration 1 0.4% 56 poise 1 0.4% 57 productive 1 0.4% 58 self-esteem 1 0.4% s. no. quality named by respondent (1 of 3) frq. % 59 selflessness 1 0.4% 60 systematic 1 0.4% 61 understanding 1 0.4% 62 wisdom 1 0.4% total 235 100.0% *insignificant responses include those characteristics that were broad and didn’t attribute to specific trait (e.g., personality instead of strong personality). table (6) s. no. name information 1 adila al saud princess and influential public figure in terms of saudi female empowerment 2 alaa al hariri interior designer 3 ameerah al taweel saudi princess and philanthropist 4 amena al jassim 5 amira al fadl 6 aseel omran singer 7 ayla ashadawi businesswoman and member of the board of the young businessmen council at eastern province chamber of commerce 8 deena al faris businesswoman and member of board of directors of the chamber of commerce 9 dr rawda al yousef an activist opposed to political powers for saudi women 10 dr salwa al hezza renowned ophthalmologist 11 dr samia alamoudi chairwoman of a breast cancer association 12 dr. howaida alqethamy well known pediatric heart surgeon 13 fatima batook successful businesswoman and motivational speaker 14 fawzia al nafea fashion designer 15 ghadah al mutairi celebrated scientist 16 hana al zuhair deputy secretary general of the prince sultan fund 18 hanadi al hindi first saudi woman to become a commercial airline pilot 19 hanan younis (a.k.a wa'ad) singer 20 hayat sindi medical scientist and one of the advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 149 first female members of the consultative assembly of saudi arabia 21 heba jamal presenter, and the youngest on the arabian business list of 100 most influential arab women (2011) 22 iman al qahtani journalist 23 lolowah al faisal economist & one of the most publicly visible female members of the saudi royal family 24 lubna al ansari news presenter 25 lubna olayan ceo of the olayan financing company 26 lujain omran singer 27 majda abu ras environmentalist and nasa researcher 28 manal al dowayan contemporary artist 29 manal al sharif activist and avid supporter of saudi female driving 30 muna abu sulayman muslim media personality and former founding secretary general of the alwaleed bin talal foundation 31 nabilah altunisi director of the ras tanura integrated project (rtip) a.k.a iron lady 32 noura al fayez the first woman to hold a cabinet-level office in saudi arabia 33 princess al johara al saud partner and promoter of autism speaks and related organizations 34 princess nora al saud businesswoman and founder of princess nora university (pnu) 35 rajaa al sanea popular novelist and author of the book ‘girls of riyadh’ 36 razan alazzouni fashion designer 37 samaher mously one of the first saudi women to scale mt. everest along with 10 others. 38 samar badawi physical abuse survivor and human rights activist 39 sarah attar first saudi female to participate in the olympics (london 2012) 40 thoraya obaid executive director of the united nations population fund 41 wojdan shaherkani first saudi female to participate in the olympics (london 2012) table (7) comparison of responses that state “manal al sharif” questions % no. of people who named manal al sharif in q1 ( 2.8% favorite saudi female leader) no. of people who named manal al sharif in q2 (one of 3 saudi females who overcame a challenge 5.0% no. of people who named manal al sharif in q3 ( a negative influence) 40.8% no. of people who named manal al sharif in q4 ( a positive influence ) 0.0% no. of people who named manal al sharif in q1 and q3 1.4% no. of people who named manal al sharif in q2 and q3 7.0% table (8) questions no. of responses no. of people who named ameerah al taweel in q1 ( favorite saudi female leader) 20% no. of people who named ameerah al taweel in q2 (one of 3 saudi females who overcame a challenge 10.6% no. of people who named ameerah al taweel in q3 ( a negative influence) 0.0% no. of people who named ameerah al taweel in q4 ( a positive influence ) 18.3% no. of people who named ameerah al taweel in q1 and q4 7.0% no. of people who named ameerah al taweel in q2 and q4 11.3% inconclusive responses include those names that couldn’t produce sufficient information to suit the concerned question or were too ambiguous. irrelevant responses include those names that didn’t fit the specified criteria i.e. either deceased or not saudi. interpretations: the participants in the concerned survey comprise of students enrolled in a leadership class at prince mohammed bin fahd university (pmu). the results point towards the following: from the above tables, i deduced that there is a clear affirmative attitude towards ameerah al taweel as well as a distinct negative opinion about manal al sharif. manal al sharif disobeyed the law that stated that women are not allowed to drive. her action was viewed negatively and might actually harm the impetus for women to drive in saudi arabia. however, one can see that the respondents cannot subjectively distinguish between a public leader and a public figure. this evident in the fact that few respondents have named manal al sharif as their favorite leader and in contrast, a negative influence as well. the high percentage of inconclusive responses indicates the lack of general knowledge and clear understanding of a leader advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 150 as well as the possibility of simply naming random women to get extra credit. summary synthesis of the results noted from the saudi student essays on female leadership reveal that there are a number of characteristics possessed by female leaders that students view as important to the development of effective leadership. the ability to persevere, to be a pioneer in a particular field, to excel in a male dominated field, to achieve a dream or lifelong goal and to be a role model or someone who inspires were all consistently noted as components of effective leadership. when juxtaposed against the common leadership styles identified in the essays—e.g., democratic and charismatic—it is clear that the attributes of the leader and the leadership style are interconnected. for instance, the ability of the leader to inspire and serve as a role model is commensurate with the use of charismatic leadership while achieving excellence in a male dominated field could be linked with the ability to meet the needs of followers or a democratic leadership style. based on an analysis of the student essays, it is possible to better understand what the students believe are good leadership practice and what is effective for achieving success in a leadership role. references alexander, n. (2012). females' guide to understanding leadership. create space. bassaw, b. (2010). determinants of successful deanship. medical teacher, 32(12), 1002-1006. coronel, j. m., moreno, e., & carrasco, m. j. (2010). beyond obstacles and problems: women principles in spain leading change in their schools. international journal of leadership in education, 13(2), 141-162. fernandez, s. (2008). examining the effects of leadership behavior on employee perceptions of performance and job satisfaction. public performance & management review, 32(2), 175-205. isaac, c., griffin, l., & carnes, m. (2010). a qualitative study of faculty members’ views of women in chairs. journal of women’s health, 19(3), 533-546. karlsson, c., parker, c., hjerpe, m., & linner, b. (2011). looking for leaders: perceptions of climate change leadership among climate change negotiation partners. global environmental politics, 11(1), 89-107. kuppusamy, j., ganesan, j., & rosada, s. a. (2010). leadership styles and management techniques: an analysis of malaysian women entrepreneurs. communications of the ibima, 1-10. lopez, r. (2010). race and gender as variables that impact leadership and its perspectives in education. feature edition, 2010(4), 21-35. pines, a. m., dahan-kalev, h., & ronen, s. (2001). the influence of feminist self-determination on the democratic attitudes of managers. social behavior & personality, 29(6), 607-617. settles, i. h., cortina, l.m. malley, j., & stewart, a .j. (2006). the climate for women in academic science: the good, the bad and the changeable. psychology of women quarterly, 30(1), 47-58. thomas, g. (2005). persistent leadership: the five keys to successful and sustained leadership are principles, passion, people, performance and perseverance. leadership, 35(1), 8-9. white, s.j. (2006). leadership: successful alchemy. american journal of health-system pharmacy, 63(16), 14971503. yaffe, t., & kark, r. (2011). leading by example: the case of leader ocb. journal of applied psychology, 96(4), 806-826. literature review 92 advancing women in leadership vol. 32, pp. 92-106, 2012 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the effect of stereotype threat on the interview performance of women amanda shantz assistant professor, department of human resources york university gary p. latham secretary of state professor of organizational behavior rotman school of management university of toronto address correspondence to: amanda shantz atkinson building 4700 keele st, toronto, m3j 1p3 e-mail: amandashantz100@hotmail.com when women are in a situation whereby they are at risk of being judged by a negative stereotype, they underperform relative to men. this quandary is called stereotype threat. the present study examined whether stereotype threat affects the performance of men versus women in a simulated job interview. the stereotype that women are not suitable for managerial jobs was unobtrusively embedded in a job description presented to interviewees (n = 50) prior to the interview. the interviews were evaluated by four hr managers, two male and two female. the results showed that stereotype threat disadvantages females vis-àvis those in the control group, and it disadvantaged them relative to men in the stereotype threat condition. this occurred regardless of whether the hr manager was male or female. keywords: stereotype threat, employment interview, performance a wealth of studies have found that women as well as men perceive that the attributes ascribed to successful managers are more likely to be held by a man rather than a woman (e.g., boyce & herd, 2003; cabrera, sauer & thomas-hunt, 2009; eagly & karau, 2002; fernandes, & cabral-cardoso, 2006; gmuer, 2006; powell, butterfield, & parent, 2002; sczesny, 2003; welbourne, 2005; willemsen, 2002). this is because in euro-western society, managerial jobs are believed to “require an achievementoriented aggressiveness and an emotional toughness that is distinctly male in character and antithetical to both the stereotyped view of what women are like, and the stereotype-based norms specifying how they should behave” (heilman, 2001, p. 659). because of these perceptions, women’s competence in managerial positions is often viewed as inferior (foschi, 1996), and their work is undervalued and considered of lower quality even when they perform at the same level as men (heilman, 1995). thus, http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ mailto:amandashantz100@hotmail.com 93 it is not surprising that the selection of women for managerial positions has been uneven and slow (international labor organization, 2005). one reason for this slow and uneven growth may be that organizations perpetuate gender stereotypes through their hiring practices (kmec, 2005). organizations often frame particular departments or positions as masculine or feminine in their job descriptions and hiring criteria (hall, 1993; pierce, 1996). for instance, skuratowicz and hunter (2004) investigated how newly created jobs were described to incumbent employees at a us-based bank. management used signs, photographs and videos that depicted men as prestigious personal bankers and women as customer relations personnel. the latter position commanded lower pay, and had little or no supervisory power, as compared to a personal banker. gender stereotypes may also be perpetuated in the employment interview. indeed, the interpersonal nature of the employment interview makes it susceptible to interviewer biases (latham & sue chan, 1999). interviewer decisions are affected by expectations that are generated from stereotypes (pingitore, dugoni, tindale & spring, 1994). for male-sex-typed jobs (e.g., engineer, carpenter), male interviewees are hired more frequently than females because males are seen as more likely to be successful than female interviewees even when the latter have similar credentials (davison & burke, 2000; dipboye, 1987). these studies shed light on the human resource management procedures that maintain what schein (1973, 1975) coined as the ‘think-manager-think-male’ belief. however, these studies do not take into account how stereotypes influence the behavior of the target of a stereotype. rather, this body of research has been limited to discovering the evaluations made by “powerful others.” indeed, over and above any bias on the part of interviewers, women carry an additional burden, which is the possibility that what they say or do will be interpreted in light of the stereotype about women’s inferior managerial ability. this burden is called stereotype threat. specifically, stereotype threat refers to the phenomenon whereby an individual or group performs more poorly on a task when they perceive that a negative stereotype may be characteristic of their group within the task’s domain (steele, 1997; steele & aronson, 1995). research in management is lacking as to whether stereotype threat provides a disadvantage to an individual’s employment. in social psychology, stereotype threat has almost exclusively been studied as an issue in testing for cognitive ability/academic performance (nguyen & ryan, 2008). but it can also be present in routine situations that are part of most jobs and employment experiences (roberson & kulik, 2007). on-going exposure to stereotype threat may lead a person to disengage from the performance domain (steele, 1997). the purpose of the present study is to address this gap in the literature by assessing whether stereotype threat influences the interview performance of female job candidates. few studies have examined the effect of stereotype threat in the work domain, and no study, to date, has examined it in relation to the interview performance of men versus women. hence, the present study contributes to the extant literature by examining, for the first time, whether stereotype threat impairs women’s performance in a selection interview. to do so, we first define stereotype threat, and review empirical research that has examined its effects on women in a work domain. next we present the results of a pilot study that was conducted to ensure that the manipulation 94 of stereotype threat for a selection interview was effective. finally, we present the results of the simulated interview study, and conclude with a discussion of those results, as well as limitations of this experiment and directions for future research. stereotype threat there are voluminous experiments in social psychology showing that stereotype threat has a pernicious effect on the performance of those who are targeted (steele, 1997). this is because the targeted individual or group focuses on “the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype” (steele, 1999, p.46). this fear interferes with task performance, which ironically confirms for others the very stereotype that the individual or group wants to avoid (wheeler & petty, 2001). the targets of a stereotype perform poorly relative to their non-stereotyped counterparts as soon as they perceive they are being judged stereotypically, treated stereotypically or presumed to be behaving stereotypically (link & phelen, 2001). this is especially likely to occur when the targeted group identifies strongly with the stereotyped categorization (e.g., women who strongly identify with their gender), and the task domain (e.g., women who strongly identify with a management career; steele, 1997). this is because they perceive their self-identity has been threatened (schmader, 2002). stereotype threat can be experimentally activated in a variety of ways. for instance, schmader and johns (2003) explicitly reminded women of the stereotype that men outperform them in mathematical domains. shih, pittinsky and ambady (1999) elicited stereotype threat by asking women in the experimental condition to indicate their sex, and answer questions related to their sex immediately prior to taking a mathematics test. no explicit mention of the stereotype was made. davies, spencer, quinn and gerhardstein (2002) primed stereotype threat by showing the participants gender-stereotypical commercials on television, and then asking them to complete a mathematics test. the results of social psychology experiments reveal that stereotype threat can be elicited either obtrusively or unobtrusively. regardless of how stereotype threat is activated, research shows that it has a negative impact on the performance of a wide range of people, specifically, african americans’ and latinos’ academic performance (aronson, 2002; steele, 2003), females versus males on mathematical problems (brown & josephs, 1999; cadinu, maass, rosabianca, & kiesner, 2005; spencer et al., 1999), lower socioeconomic groups’ performance on academic tasks (croizet & claire, 1998), white males’ performance vis-à-vis asian males on mathematical problems (aronson, lustina, good, keough, steele & brown, 1999), and gay men in their interaction with children (bosson, haymovitz & pinel, 2004). there is also evidence that suggests that stereotype threat may hinder women’s performance in the workplace. one work-related activity whereby women are susceptible to stereotype threat is negotiations (kray, thompson and galinsky, 2001). kray et al. (2001) elicited this threat in a negotiating exercise by indicating that a test was diagnostic of success in the classroom. mba students enrolled in a negotiations course were randomly assigned to mixed-gender dyads. half of the pairs were told that success in the exercise generally translates into success in overall classroom performance (threat condition) and the other half were told that success in the exercise did not correlate with success in the classroom. simply labeling the negotiation as diagnostic of a person’s effectiveness improved men’s 95 ability to negotiate, but hindered women’s performance at the bargaining table. davies et al. (2002) examined the effect of stereotype threat on women’s vocational aspirations. undergraduate women, who were shown gender-stereotypic television commercials, indicated less interest in pursuing educational/vocational options where mathematical skills are required to succeed (e.g., engineer, mathematician, computer science, statistician, accountant, etc.) and more interest in domains that rely on verbal skills for success (e.g., author of novels, linguistics, journalist, communications, political scientist, editor, etc.), than did women who were shown gender-neutral television commercials. davies, spencer and steele (2005) examined whether exposing undergraduate women to stereotype threat, that was not made salient by the researchers, influenced the decision of women to adopt a leadership role as opposed to a problemsolver role on a subsequent task. the participants were shown television commercials that either depicted women in a stereotypical light, or neutrally. women who viewed the gender-stereotypical commercials were subsequently less likely to prefer a leadership role, compared to women who watched the gender-neutral commercials. although these experiments suggest a reason for why women do not occupy as many managerial roles as men, few studies to date have explicitly addressed work related tasks for managerial roles. a notable exception is a study conducted by bergeron, block, and echtenkamp (2006). they investigated the effect of stereotype threat on men and women’s performance on a managerial in-basket exercise. specifically, graduate students were asked to complete a decision-making activity in the field of human resource management after they were provided with information on their successful predecessor. their successor was described using either stereotypically masculine or feminine descriptors. bergeron et al. hypothesized that exposing female participants to masculine descriptors elicits stereotype threat, which in turn leads to lower levels of performance, both in terms of the quantity of memos to which the participants were able to respond, and the quality of their responses in the in-basket exercse. the results showed that women in the masculine sex-typed condition underperformed in terms of both quality and quantity relative to women in the feminine sex-typed condition. compared to men in the masculine sex-typed condition, women in the same condition underperformed in terms of performance quantity. in terms of quality, men and women did not perform differently in the masculine sex-typed condition relative to men and women in the feminine condition. surprisingly, both men and women in the masculine sex-typed condition underperformed compared to men and women in the feminine sex-typed condition in terms of performance quality. bergeron et al. suggested that a possible reason for these results is the nature of their sample. that is, the men in their sample scored atypically androgynous on bem’s sex role inventory (1974) compared to men in the general population. furthermore, the in-basket exercise was for a position in human resources, an increasingly feminine-sextyped position (roos, & manley, 1996). although the study conducted by bergeron et al. (2006) indicates that stereotype threat can negatively impact women in the workplace, additional research is needed to uncover the effect of stereotype threat in other non-gender specific, work-related domains. hence, the present study builds on the work of bergeron et al. (2006) by examining the effect of stereotype threat in 96 the employment interview. unlike bergeron et al.’s study, the job position in this study was not gender-specific, but rather a general managerial trainee program. furthermore, instead of a masculine versus feminine sex-role typed position, the present study assessed the effects of a masculine versus a neutral condition. finally, in the present study, a panel of four human resource (hr) managers assessed interviewee performance. the hypothesis was that the interviewee performance of women is undermined, that is, they perform significantly lower than women in the control group, when they encounter cues of a subtle negative stereotype in a job description. as noted earlier, stereotype threat can be elicited explicitly or implicitly. saliency of the threat was not made explicit in the present study because most, if not all, employers are sophisticated in avoiding explicitly sexist related behavior in hiring practices. before presenting the results of the main study, we present a pilot study that was conducted to ensure that the manipulation of stereotype threat in an interview context was effective. specifically, the experimental and control conditions were compared on the following three dimensions: (1) attractiveness of the job, (2) preference for the job, and (3) job description inspires confidence that the applicant will perform well in an interview for the position. pilot study a job description was developed for a management trainee position. the threat and no-stereotype threat (control) conditions differed in the description of the position for which the interviewees were asked to apply. six neutral and seven masculine descriptors were selected from bem’s (1974) sex role inventory. the seven masculine descriptors mapped onto a list of masculine descriptors generated by heilman et al. (1989) in their study of gender and success in a managerial position. these masculine descriptors were: self-confidence, ambition, independence, leadership, take a stand on issues, forceful, and willing to take risks. the 6 neutral descriptors were: conscientious, demonstrate a desire for continuous learning, motivated, flexible, responsible, and open to new experiences. each job description contained three paragraphs. the first and third paragraphs were identical for both conditions. the middle paragraph contained either the masculine or neutral descriptors: how would you like to spend your time choosing the perfect job? this is what milestones and associate’s 9-month management trainee program can offer you. while networking with top executives, you will experience how a number of different business units operate and get to know how we work as one of the leading companies in our field. you will rotate through at least three key business units of your choice, work on special projects designed to give you valuable work experience, as well as attend career and selfdevelopment classes and seminars about our industry. the management trainee program recruits top individuals who demonstrate self-confidence, ambition and a high level of independence. we are looking for trainees that possess strong leadership skills. success in this position requires you to be willing to take a stand on issues you believe in, make forceful and persuasive presentations to senior executives, and you must be willing to take the risks necessary to climb our corporate ladder. 97 or the management trainee program recruits top individuals who are conscientious and demonstrate a desire for continued learning. success in this position requires you to be highly motivated, flexible, responsible, and open to new experiences. what happens after the management trainee program? that’s up to you! past trainees have gone on to high-level positions across numerous businesses and functions within our company. method sample and procedure the pilot study was conducted with 71 undergraduate business school students. their mean age was 21.86 (sd = 31); 53.5% were female. the participants were randomly assigned to the threat (n=35) versus control (n=36) job descriptions. results to determine whether difference in length of the two job descriptions might be a confounding factor, the two job descriptions were rated in terms of attractiveness on a 4-item 5-point likerttype scale (i.e., “i would like to have a job like this.” “this job description would encourage me to apply for the job.”). the cronbach alpha coefficient for this 4-item scale was .84. a two-tailed independent ttest revealed no significant differences in the level of attractiveness for those shown the threat (x=3.97, sd=.65) versus the control condition (x=3.74, sd=.63; t(69)=-.79, p=.13). to assess whether gender differences in preference for the two job positions, the data collected on job attraction were reanalyzed in terms of males (n=33) and females (n=38). no significant difference (t(69)=1.55, p=.49) was found (x=3.91, sd=.64; x=3.80, sd=.65, respectfully). finally, the two job descriptions were examined to determine whether one inspired more confidence in the interviewees than the other. again, responses were assessed using a four item (e.g., “the job advertisement makes me believe that i would do well in an interview for the job.”) 5-point likert-type scale. the cronbach alpha coefficient for this scale was .79. no significant difference (t(69)=.93, p=.35) in responses were found for those who read the threat (x=3.41, sd=.67) versus the control (x=3.26, sd=.63) job description. consequently, these two job descriptions were used to assess stereotype threat in the simulated selection interview. simulated interview study method participants the participants were 20 male and 30 female fourth-year undergraduate business school students enrolled in a canadian university who were looking for full time employment upon graduation. none of the participants were in the pilot study. their mean age was 23 years (sd = 5.9). they were recruited through signs posted in a business school asking for volunteers to participate in a workshop for improving interview skills. these students volunteered to take part in the study on their own time. the participants were randomly assigned to a stereotype threat (n = 15 females, 10 males) versus control (n= 15 females, 10 males) condition in a 2 x 2 (male/female) factorial design. procedure the participants were told that this experience would enhance their ability to interview effectively, that the interview would be videotaped so that they could subsequently view their performance, and that they would receive written feedback from four hr managers on ways to improve their interview performance in order to obtain a job. 98 the interviews were scheduled so that each participant entered and left the interview room individually. ten minutes before the scheduled interview, each participant was provided with a job description of the position opening, namely a 9-month management trainee program. consistent with both schmader and johns (2003) and brown and josephs (1999), all the participants were interviewed by the same female human resource manager. a female interviewer was used in accordance with the recommendation of blascovich, spencer, quinn, and steele (2001) as a way to safeguard against experimenter effects by using the same gender as that of the stereotype threat target. the interviewer was blind to the hypotheses of the study as well as the assignment of participants to the experimental conditions. she greeted each candidate in the manner she uses in her department. specifically, she made welcoming comments to relax the person, and then asked the predetermined structured interview questions. six structured questions taken from latham and budworth (2006) were asked of each participant: (1) tell me about a time when you helped someone in need; (2) do you work well with others? if yes, please provide an example; (3) what two or three accomplishments have given you the most satisfaction? why?; (4) tell me about your past work experiences; (5) what do you see yourself doing five years from now? each interview lasted approximately 10-15 minutes. the video camera was placed behind the interviewer, somewhat hidden by a pole in the room so as not to be obtrusive. each applicant sat in the same chair so that the angle of the camera and background were identical for each applicant. after the interview, participants were taken to an adjacent room where they completed a questionnaire. participants were then debriefed and thanked for their involvement in this study. a simulated interview was used because it would be difficult, if not impossible, to observe and evaluate the performance of each interviewee during an actual interview in vivo. previous research has shown that there is no difference in rating accuracy for live versus a videotaped performance (ryan, daum, bauman, grisez & mattimore, 1995). the interviewees’ performance was independently rated by four hr managers, two males and two females. three were caucasian and one was asian. the hr managers worked for a bank, law firm, school board, and a union, respectively. the hr managers were blind to the hypotheses of the study, and whether the interviewee was in the stereotype or nonstereotype threat condition. they were told that the purpose of the workshop was to help graduating students improve their interview skills for selection into management trainee positions. the four hr managers rated each applicant independently on a 5-point likert type scale on three general managerial skills identified by baak, carrruffino and pelletier (1993), namely, selfconfidence, the ability to make logical sense to others, and ability to communicate effectively. the cronbach alpha coeffient for this scale was .86. in addition, the managers decided independently whether they would hire an interviewee using a 7point likert-type scale (e.g., i would hire this candidate, 1=strongly disagree, 7=strongly agree). the correlation between responses to the two scales was high (r = .91, p < .001). responses to the hiring and managerial skills items were averaged, and transformed into z-scores. after the hr managers viewed each videotape and rated the interviewees’ 99 performance, they were thanked and debriefed. participant interviewees were asked to rate the position for which they interviewed on two dimensions, namely masculinity and status. they were asked to state their level of agreement on a 9-point likert-type scale (1=strongly disagree, 9=strongly agree) for the following statements, “the position of management trainee for which i applied is a high status position,” and “the position of management trainee for which i applied reflects masculine characteristics.” it was important that participants did not see either of the two positions as being higher in status, because this could pose an alternative explanation for the results. results manipulation checks an arguable limitation of laboratory experiments is that participants may not see the outcome of their performance as important to them. a pre-requisite for stereotype threat is that the participants must care about doing well on the task, and the task must have an impact on selfidentity (steele, spencer, & aronson, 2002). consequently, spencer, steele and quinn’s (1999) scale was adapted to assess task importance/identity to the participants (e.g., “how important is it for you to do well in the job interview?” “how important is it for your self-esteem that you do well in the job interview?”) using a 9-point likert-type scale. the cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the responses was .72. the means were relatively high. there was no difference in mean scores between men (m=7.38, sd=1.06) and women (m=7.13, sd=.90; t(48)=.87, p=.41). a second independent two-tailed t-test revealed that there was also no significant difference on perceived task importance between those in the threat (m=7.02, sd=1.06) versus the control condition (m=7.44, sd=.87; t(48)=-1.56, p=.13). a univariate analysis of variance showed a significant effect of sex-typing (f(1,46)=10.39, p < .05, d = .89), with the masculine sex role job description condition (x = 4.5, sd = 2.01) being seen as significantly more masculine than the control condition (x = 2.6, sd = 2.26). a univariate analysis of variance indicated that the participants did not view the masculine sex role typed job description (x = 6.08, sd = 2.17) as differing in status from the neutral condition (x = 6.04, sd = 1.88; f(1,46)=.23, p = .64, d = .02). main results the two male hr managers did not rate the interviewees (x = 3.81 sd = .98) significantly different from the two female hr managers (x = 3.79 sd = .92, t(49) = .52, p = .61). an independent two tailed ttest showed that there was no significant difference in the scores given to female (x = 3.8, sd = .86) versus male interviewees (x = 3.77, sd = 1.02; t(48) =.12, p =.19) by the two female hr managers. similarly, the two male hr managers did not rate female interviewees (x = 3.76, sd = .91) significantly different from male interviewees (x = 3.89, sd = 1.09; t(48) =.44, p = .34). a two-way between-groups analysis of variance was conducted to explore the effect of gender versus threat/control conditions on interviewee performance. there was a significant interaction effect between the threat/control condition and gender for interviewee performance [f(1,46) = 14.1, p < .05]. in addition, there was a significant main effect for the sex-role typed job position on interviewee performance [f(1,46) = 2.6, p < .05]. the main effect for gender was not significant [f(1,46) = .09, p = .63]. consistent with the hypothesis, a planned t-test revealed that the interviewee performance of women was lower in the threat (x = 3.47, sd = .89) than in the 100 control condition (x = 4.1, sd = .76; t(28) = 2.08, p < .05, d = .76). an unanticipated finding was that the opposite pattern of results was found for men. men in the control condition (x = 3.04, sd = .83) performed worse than those in the threat condition (x = 4.61, sd = .48; t(18) = 5.23, p < .05, d = 2.3). within the threat condition, there was a significant difference between the performance of men (x = 4.61, sd = .48) versus women (x = 3.47, sd = .89; t(23)= 3.7, p < .05, d = 1.6). thus the hypothesis was supported. another unanticipated finding in the control condition was the significant difference in the performance of women versus men (t(23)= 3.29, p < .05, d = 1.3). the female interviewees in the control group performed better (x = 4.1, sd = .76) than their male counterparts (x = 3.04, sd = .83). see figure 1. discussion the results of this experiment show that stereotype activation prior to a job interview represents a threat for women, which in turn leads to a hiring disadvantage. the rival hypotheses that the participants did not care how well they performed in the simulated interview workshop for which they volunteered was rejected as were the rival hypotheses that one job description was preferred more by women than men, or that the differences in length of the two job descriptions affected the attractiveness of the managerial job position that was being advertized, or that one job description instilled more confidence in the interviewees than the other. this research provides external validity for steele’s (1997, 1999) findings in social psychology. threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype has an adverse effect on female interviewee performance relative to females who are not stereotyped. the present findings also provide support for bergeron et al.’s (2006) conclusions regarding the low performance of women on an in-basket test and those of kray et al. (2001) involving the low performance of women in a negotiating exercise relative to men. in previous studies on stereotype threat, objective measures of a targeted person’s performance were typically assessed (e.g., the number of mathematical problems solved). the present experiment is only the second to assess a targeted person’s performance through the eyes of others. bosson, haymovitz and pinel’s (2004) study involved observations of the interactions of gay males with children. the present experiment examined the performance of females and males in the domain of human resource management, namely, their performance in a selection interview as viewed by hr managers. previous research has shown that reducing stereotype threat improves the performance of those who have been stigmatized to the point where their performance is similar to those who have not been stigmatized (spencer et al., 1999; steele & aronson, 1995). the practical significance of the present study is that it suggests a way human resource managers can minimize stereotype threat in the selection process. in the present study, only 7 descriptors embedded within a job description were needed to elicit stereotype threat and hence bring about a deleterious effect on the interview performance of women. the performance of women in the control group suggests that to negate stereotype threat, hr managers must ensure that job descriptions are gender neutral. doing so, ironically, may be to the advantage of female interviewees. when the job description was written in neutral terms, women were seen by hr managers in this study as performing better in the interview than men. a speculative explanation is the fact that women are often found to be more 101 expressive than men (briton & hall, 1995). an unanticipated finding was that males in the experimental condition performed significantly better in the interview than men in the control group. this finding may be due to stereotype lift (steele, 1999), whereby a positive stereotype such as “think manager, think male” augments or lifts performance. evidence for this lift was found in a study by stone, lynch, sjomeling and darley (1999) on an athletic and an intellectual task involving black and white americans. limitations and future research an arguable limitation of this study is the use of senior level students in a simulated interview. however, these students were, or soon would be on the job market. it is unlikely that this experiment can be subsequently replicated by following them or fellow cohorts into an actual job interview. nor is it likely that there is a necessity to do so. the findings from laboratory experiments in organizational psychology generalize quite well to organizational settings (locke, 1986). as j. campbell (1986) noted: “perhaps college students really are people. after all, probably the vast majority of them work, or have worked at a job. why their disguise fools many observers into thinking otherwise is not clear” (p. 276). a second limitation is that participants may have behaved differently in an interview for which they were told that the experience would enhance their ability to interview effectively, than in an interview for which they were applying for a job. it is possible that the participants may have taken the opportunity to take more risks in a “training” interview because there were no repercussions for poor performance. anecdotal evidence, observations of the participants and the manipulation checks for task importance however, suggest that the fourth year students did their best to perform effectively in the simulated interview. future research should investigate other workplace domains that may be susceptible to the effect of stereotype threat (e.g., performance appraisals). future research should also address whether changing dysfunctional to functional self-talk of women, using techniques developed by meichenbaum (1971, 1975, 1977) mitigates stereotype threat. this technique has proven to be effective for displaced managers (millman & latham, 2001) as well as native north americans (latham & budworth, 2006) and muslim women over the age of 40 in turkey (yanar, budworth, & latham, 2009) in finding jobs. conclusion the present study shows that stereotype threat may be partially responsible for women’s underrepresentation in management. the results revealed that women whose identities are threatened due to the “think manager, think male” stereotype underperform in an interview for a managerial position relative to men. hence, it is imperative for human resource managers to minimize stereotype threat in order to support female managers. such steps will enable businesses to avoid engaging in behaviors that may reinforce domain-related stereotypes, which may in turn decrease the negative consequences related to stereotype threat. references aronson, j. m. 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(2009) . the effect of training in verbal self-guidance on selfefficacy and reemployment of turkish women. applied psychology: an international review, 58(4), 586-601. 107 figure 1 the effect of stereotype threat on the interview performance of men and women the role performance of female headteachers in primary schools advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 96 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 96-105, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper role performance of female headteachers in primary schools: a case of bondo district, kenya omondi e. atieno a phd candidate at kenyatta university in kenya, a part time lecturer in the department of education management at both moi and africa nazarene university in kenya email: everlyneomondi@yahoo.com accepted july 3, 2013 the purpose of the study was to determine the role performance of female head teachers in primary schools in bondo district of the republic of kenya. descriptive survey design was used in the study. as the population of female headteachers is not so big, 16 out of 17 schools were used for the research. questionnaire and interview guide were used to gather information from the respondents. data were analysed using tally marks and total frequencies to generate frequency accounts out of which percentages were calculated. information collected through interview schedules and discussions were thematically described. the findings revealed that in all six administrative tasks, the female head teachers’ performance was generally good. it is expected that the results of this study may help to shed light on how female head teachers perform their roles as administrators and to provide some indication of direction that could change the perception of the role of female head teachers from negative to positive. results may also provide an indication of what additional steps may need to be taken to address the elevations of more female teachers to leadership roles. based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that the government should come up with mentors among the female head teachers, thoroughly train some of them who will in turn be in a positions to offer assistance and more guidance to their counter parts. this will help motivate female teachers to pursue leadership roles. keywords: female, role performance, administrative tasks, head teacher position. introduction the quality of management, especially at institutional levels is and continues to be a major concern of the government of kenya (ministry of education, 2007). most head teachers irrespective of their formal training encounter administrative constraints in performing their roles effectively. it is generally perceived that schools administered by women experience problems due to their inefficiency, incompetence, poor human relations and gender. “is this the reason why there are low numbers of female head teachers in primary schools in bondo?” “does this mean that female head teachers are not competent in performing their roles as administrators? it is based on the above general perceptions that i present findings of a study i conducted which determine the role performance of female head teachers in primary schools. kenya has 8 provinces and several districts. bondo, is one of the districts which has a fairly large population. kenya follows 8-4-4 systems of education whereby learners spend a total of eight years in primary school. this consists of age groups from 7 – 14 years of age. four years in secondary school with an age group of between 15 18 years, then another 4 years at the university level. my main area of focus was in primary education. an overview of the literature on the role performance of female head teachers on various administrative tasks which have prompted the research on this study has been presented. the role performance on 6 administrative tasks was presented and determined. finally, implications for further study are examined. literature review school administrative school administration refers to the process concerned with identifying, maintaining, controlling and unifying, formally and informally organized human and material energies within integrated system designed to accomplish pre-determined objectives. okumbe (2006) defined administration as the process of acquiring and allocating resources for their achievement of the organizational goals. neither schools nor other institution could remain effective or survive for long without some type of administrative structure and personnel (mugambi, 2005). smulyan (2002) also highlighted that an advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 97 effective head teacher or leader is someone who helps the school achieve a positive school climate, increased time on instructive tasks, regular and systematic student evaluations community support and adequate resources. in the education sector in kenya, administration has often been seen as requiring certain male characteristics and drive. the stereotypical woman is said to lack such qualities, having been socialised into „female‟ attitudes and behaviour which discourages her and others from seeing themselves as potential head teachers. however, the criteria involved in the selection of head teachers emphasize the „male aspects of the job in a fairly arbitrary manner. this also excluded women from administrative position and the reason for the under representation of women at school head teacher levels on the basis of traditional perception of female and what constitutes good leadership (smulyan, 2000). curriculum and instruction a part from being an administrator, the head teacher should be conversant with what takes place in the classroom. oluoch once commented that teachers have been asked to reconsider their teaching method so as to check the rising failure rate (daily nations, 19th january 1980). onyango (2001) emphasized that it is the responsibility of the head teacher to correctly articulate to the teaching staff the overall aims and objectives of the schools curriculum. this will guide teachers in formulating policies for their respective subjects and in preparation of schemes of work and lesson plans. barasa and ngugi (1990) suggested that in managing curriculum and instruction, it is important that the head teacher comes up with supervisory programme. the significance of a good supervisory programme is the achievement of improved and well organized performance for the head teachers. the majority of female head teachers organized learning activities to cope with large numbers in class. most female head teachers supervised and checked documents and instruction as part of curriculum and instruction. their activities in the area of curriculum and instruction proved beyond doubt that they managed this role very well. school-community relationship the community in which a school is built is very important. the school is meant to benefit that community directly. the head teacher should therefore create a co-existence relationship between the school and the large community. olembo (1992) warned that unless the head teacher establishes effective communication with the community, he will not be successful in promoting new innovations in the school. this is particularly true in kenya where most of the new projects such as the construction of laboratories and libraries undertaken by schools are carried out by the community. most female head teachers integrated school interest with those of other community groups by involving the community in development projects for their schools. schermerhorn, (2001) pointed out that a woman‟s potential for connection makes women value intimacy and develop a capacity for nurturance, and an ethic of care for the „other‟ with which they are connected, creating interdependence with and in the community. this makes it easier for female head teachers to co-exist in harmony and have a cordial relationship between the community and the school, hence, enabling them to perform their roles in this area effectively. staff-personnel management it is the duty of the head teacher to ensure a good organizational atmosphere which is open and motivating, satisfying and relevant to job distribution and to encourage employees to be more productive all the time. the head teacher needs to have the knowledge and all the dynamics of managing human personnel. such dynamics include motivations of employees, knowledge in leadership styles, delegation of duties and responsibilities to the employees and styles of communication (onyango, 2001). in educational management, women have been noted to exhibit characteristics such as empathy, compassion, supporting, patience, attention to detail and ability to integrate people to listen to them and to motivate them through non-monetary incentives (funk, 2004). based on the above knowledge, female head teachers perform very well in motivating teachers, maintaining good staff relation and they also participate in the staff welfare decisions making. pupil-personnel management the head teacher should have the interest of the learners at heart. he/she should therefore seek for the best situation, conditions and atmosphere for the learners‟ education. whittaker (1983) emphasized that the head teacher should ensure that the school prepares children adequately for life and work and that the school is a well organised community where children learn what they need for the future. the main task of learners‟ management is to develop them to become acceptable members of the society. kochhar (1993) underscored that the student has a very important place in the school system, as it is for them that all education programmes are organized. it is ironical and very interesting to assume that female head teachers may not perform well in this area. this is because women have been socialised to be passive, family oriented, affectionate and supportive (lindsay, 1994). management of material and physical resources schools physical facilities include buildings, constructional equipment and playground. on the other hand material resources as explained by onyango (2009) were those resources designed, modified and prepared to assist in teaching and learning. learning involves identification of the resources, assessing quality in terms of needs, establishing criteria for standards determining the cost per unit and the use of the materials whether in groups or by individuals. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 98 finance and business management schools like any other organization require finance in order to run well. there must be an efficient controller of finance to keep the school a float. funds have to be obtained, utilised and budgeted for. schwartse (1985) observed that, constraints imposed by limited money in an organization makes majority of head teachers unable to purchase the best equipment and land that might be required by the organization. it is the responsibility of the head teacher, in terms of fiscal management to prepare the budget, do accounting and auditing. odali (1984) warned that, unless a head teacher knows his or her budget and how to collect money for the improvement of physical facilities or property keeping of school records, he or she will basically find him/herself in problems. the degree to which the head teacher may be involved in financial management depends on the following roles: determining needs and means of acquiring financial resources fair distribution of funds, preparing and managing budgets, accounting and record keeping procedures, supervising allocation and use of funds, identifying and implementing measures and inventories required for evaluations. methods this study used descriptive survey design. the choice of the survey design is made because the research is concerned with gathering of facts and to present realities of headship rather than manipulations of variables (orodho, 2004). the target population in the study comprised of 17 rural public primary schools in bondo district headed by female head teachers. as the population is not so big, i decided to work with 16 (94.1%) schools as a sample out of 17 schools. i also worked with 58 (53.7%) male teachers and 50 (46.3%) female teachers. a part from teachers, i had an interview schedule with 5 basic (primary) quality assurance standards officers. these are officers concerned with quality educations in primary schools in bondo district. the purpose of this study was to examine the role performance of female head teachers in bondo district. this is due to the perceptions that schools administered by women experience problems due to their inefficiency, poor human relations, incompetence and gender. the questions related to this issue were: 1. how well do female primary school head teachers perform their role in management of curriculum and instructions? 2. how well do female primary school head teachers perform their role in management of school finance and business? 3. how well do female primary school head teacher perform their role in maintenance and supervision of physical and material resources of the schools? 4. how well do female primary schools head teachers perform in fostering the atmosphere in management of staff and pupil personnel? 5. how well do female primary school head teachers perform their role in fostering sound community relation? data collection was carried out by use of questionnaires. part one of the questionnaires to gather demographic data of the respondents, and part two to gather information on the role performance of female head teachers. this section had both open ended and closed ended questions. the closed ended items were designed using likert scale format. during the pretest study, after each respondent had completed filling the questionnaires, head teachers and teachers were interviewed in order to determine the suitability of the clarity and relevance for the purpose of the study. procedure questionnaires for both the pilot and the main study were administered. research permit form was obtained from the ministry of education, science and technology. thereafter, the officer of the district commissioner in bondo, was contacted before the start of the study. selected schools were visited for pre-test and in the final study; questionnaires were administered to the respondents. questionnaires were collected once the respondents had completed filling them. data analysis data collected through questionnaires were grouped according to research questions. tally sheets were used to generate frequency counts out of which percentages were calculated. information collected through interview schedules and discussions were thematically described. closed – ended questions all respondents were indicated by level of agreement and disagreements using between three six point of likert scales. the level of agreement and disagreement were arranged as v. good (5), good (4), average (3) below average, (2), poor (1), average (3), below average (2), poor (1) or always (4), sometimes (3), rarely (2), never (1). data were analysed based on the six questions raised in the questionnaire from both female and male teachers and female head teachers. 1. performance of female head teachers in curriculum instruction. 2. supervision and checking of documents of instructor 3. supervising the maintenance and use of physical and material resources. 4. performance in staff personnel management 5. performance in pupil – personnel 6. performance in school community relations. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 99 the biographical data of the respondents were sought in relation to gender, age, professional qualification and years of teaching experience. this applied to both head teachers and teachers. the data sought also related to teaching experience of he head teachers, durations of headship after promotion and the number of schools the head teacher headed before becoming head teachers in their present schools. the biographical data were sought to provide background information on the head teachers and teachers. findings the findings of the study were reported in summary form using tables. the result shown in table 1 indicates that majority of headteachers and teachers rated monitoring and evaluations of curriculum planning, organizing the school programme, organizing learning activities, supervising teaching and learning activities as either very good or good. supervision and checking of documents of instructions the respondents were to rate the degree of supervision and checking of documents on a four point rating scales. results on table 2 implies that majority of respondents rated highly the performance of female head teachers in the area of supervising and checking of schemes of work, lesson notes, lesson plan note books supervising and checking records or work. table 3 shows that majority of respondents rated female head teachers performance in supervision of material resources and physical resources very adequate, only a few rated the head teachers‟ performance as adequate. as indicated on table 4, the results clearly shows that majority of female head teachers‟ performance was rated as either very good in the area of staff personnel management. table 4.10 indicates that female head teachers‟ performance was rated very high in the area of maintaining pupils‟ discipline, arranging for guidance and counselling services, paying attentions to general welfare of pupils‟ activities and reporting pupils‟ progress to parents. female head teachers‟ performance was rated as either very good or good in the following areas: planning the amount and nature of school community contact, explaining he school to the community , integrating schools interests with those of other community groups, interpreting the education programme to the community, gaining access to community resources for instructional purposes, involving community in „harambee‟ (pulling resources together) projects, for the schools, supervising and evaluating the effectiveness of schools community contracts (see table 4.11). in the area of management of finance and business, female head teachers‟ performance was generally rated „fairly well‟ by the respondents. majority of head teachers rated their performance as very good in the following areas: preparing school budget, maintaining a property record keeping, accounting and auditing procedures and supervising all allocations and use of funds in the schools. on the other hand, teachers rated their performance as only good and not very good. in establishing policies for distributions funds, the female head teacher„s performance were rated as good and average respectively. the quality assurance officers‟ response was that the general performance of female head teachers in the district was good except in the area of finance and business. see table 4.12 data from open-ended questionnaire the aim of open-ended questions was to get more information in order to comprehend female head teachers‟ experiences and how they performed their roles as head teachers. the data collected form open-ended questions was thematically described. the following section has highlighted some of the respondents or how the female head teachers performed their roles. in the area of supervising documents of curriculum and instruction majority of female head teachers expressed their concern that proper and relevant teaching must take place if pupils were to do well in the national examination. i assess work done by the teacher to make sure that the syllabus is being covered adequately. majority of female head teachers and teachers were in agreement that most schools have school instructional materials selection committee (simsc). in my school there is a committee consisting of 75% of the teaching staff. they meet and select the materials required. supervision and maintenance of physical and material resources is done by most head teachers for durability properly utilized and maintained. female head teachers mainly motivate their staff members‟ in order to create a conducive environment for teaching and learning in their school. head teachers allow their staff to grow professionally by informing them of any courses or opportunities for professional growth an also allowing them time to attend the in-service courses. most teachers accepted that the head teachers allow them to attend in-service training and seminars within the district or division. i do allow my teachers both male and female to attend seminars, in-service courses and workshops. i also give good recommendation for higher posts. female head teachers evaluate their teaching staff on weekly basis. most of them perform their role in this area and out of class. they also check documents of instructions used by teachers to teach. i check documents of instruction regularly and also observe learning sessions in order to maintain a record of performance and to promote good academic performance. in dealing with staff discipline, majority of female head teachers had no problems except three head teachers who cited that a few male teachers ignored information given by them and some gave negative comments. most teachers co-operated with their head teachers. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 100 table 1 performance of female head teachers in curriculum and instruction role performance headteacher (n: 16) teacher (n: 108) v. good good average b. av poor v. good good average b.av poor n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % articulating curriculum policies to the teachers 8 50.0 7 43.8 1 6.3 0 0 0 0 40 37.0 47 43.5 17 15.7 3 2.8 1 1.0 planning and organizing the school programme 10 62.5 6 37.5 0 0 0 0 0 0 48 44.4 46 42.5 11 10.2 1 1.0 2 1.9 organizing learning activities to cope with large numbers in class 7 43.7 8 50.0 1 6.3 0 0 0 0 43 39.8 49 45.4 12 11.0 2 1.9 2 1.9 supervising teaching and learning activities 6 37.5 9 56.3 1 6.3 0 0 0 0 41 38.0 47 43.5 17 15.7 3 2.8 0 0 monitoring and evaluating curriculum outcome 8 50.0 8 50.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 62 57.4 34 31.4 9 8.3 2 1.9 1 1.0 table 2 supervision and checking of documents of instruction by female headteachers role performance headteacher (n: 16) teacher (n: 108) always sometimes rarely never always sometimes rarely never n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % supervision and checking of schemes of work 9 56.3 7 43.8 0 0 0 0 77 71.3 28 25.9 2 1.9 1 0.92 checking of lesson notes 5 31.3 10 62.5 1 6.3 0 0 56 51.9 48 38.9 8 7.4 2 1.85 checking of lesson plan notebooks 8 50.0 8 50.0 0 0 0 0 59 54.6 38 35.2 9 8.3 2 1.85 supervising and checking of records of work 7 43.8 9 56.3 0 0 0 0 59 54.6 35 32.4 12 11.1 2 1.85 advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 101 table 3 female headteacher’s performance in supervising the maintenance and use of physical and material resources role performance headteacher (n: 16) teacher (n: 108) v adequate adequate inadequate v.inadequate v adequate adequate inadequate v. inadequate n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % supervision of the maintenance and use of textbooks and instructional material resources 4 25.0 11 68.8 1 6.3 0 0 55 50.9 48 44.4 5 4.7 0 0 supervision of appropriate teaching aid 1 6.3 9 56.3 5 31.3 1 6.3 24 22.2 56 52.0 22 20.4 6 5.5 maintenance of furniture 3 18.8 10 62.5 2 12.3 1 6.3 34 32.0 51 47.2 15 14.0 8 7.4 maintenance of classrooms 6 37.5 6 37.5 3 18.8 1 6.3 40 37.0 47 43.5 16 14.8 5 4.7 maintenance and use of space for pupil‟s playground 8 50.0 4 25.0 4 25.0 1 6.3 37 34.3 40 37.0 23 21.3 8 7.4 maintenance of sanitation for both staff and pupils 3 18.8 5 31.3 6 37.5 2 12.5 45 42.7 44 40.7 13 12.0 6 5.6 maintenance of school buildings 5 31.3 6 37.5 3 18.8 2 12.5 43 39.8 43 39.8 12 11.1 10 8.3 table 4 female headteacher’s performance in staff personnel management role performance headteacher (n: 16) teacher (n: 108) v. good good satisfactory b. av poor v. good good average b.av poor n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % induction of new teachers 5 31.3 11 68.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 43 39.8 40 37 19 17.6 3 2.8 3 35 organizing in service courses for teachers 3 18.8 11 68.8 2 12.5 0 0 0 0 19 17.6 30 27.8 34 31.5 20 18.5 5 4.1 supervising and writing an appraisal reports on the performance of the teachers 5 31.3 8 50 3 18.8 0 0 0 0 38 35.2 40 37 24 22.2 6 5.6 0 0 motivating teaching staff 10 62.5 6 37.5 0 0 0 0 0 0 46 42.6 25 23.1 15 13.9 15 13.9 7 6 maintaining good staff relation 14 87.5 1 6.3 1 6.3 0 0 0 0 48 44.4 32 29.6 18 16.7 7 6.5 3 2.2 participation in the staff welfare decision making 14 87.5 1 6.3 1 6.3 0 0 0 0 62 57.4 27 25 14 12.9 2 1.9 3 2 advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 102 table 4.10 female head teacher’s performance in pupil personnel role performance headteacher (n: 16) teacher (n: 108) v. well fairly well b. av v. well fairly well b av. n % n % n % n % n % n % maintaining pupil‟s discipline 13 81.5 3 18.8 0 0 65 60.2 36 33.3 7 6.5 arranging for guidance and counseling services 6 37.5 10 62.5 0 0 52 48.2 48 44.4 8 7.4 paying attention to general welfare of pupils 13 81.25 3 18.8 0 0 71 65.7 29 26.9 8 7.4 supervising pupil\s activities. 11 81.25 3 18.8 0 0 71 65.7 29 26.9 8 7.4 reporting pupil's activities 11 68.75 5 31.25 0 0 65 60.2 37 34.3 6 5.5 reporting pupil‟s progress to parents 12 75 4 25 0 0 78 72.2 23 21.3 7 6.5 table 4.11 female headteachers’ performance in school community relation role performance headteacher (n: 16) teacher (n: 108) v. good good average b. av poor v. good good average b. av poor n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % planning the amount and nature of school community contract 3 20.0 9 60.0 3 20.0 0 0 0 0 44 41.6 41 38.7 19 17.9 1 0.9 1 0.9 explaining the school to the community and vice versa 6 40.0 8 53.3 1 6.7 0 0 0 0 45 42.5 42 39.6 14 13.2 5 4.7 0 0 integrating school interests with those of other community groups 7 46.7 6 40.0 2 13.3 0 0 0 0 34 31.8 46 43.0 22 20.6 4 3.7 1 0.9 interpreting the education programme to the community 2 12.5 11 68.8 3 18.7 0 0 0 0 48 44.9 41 38.3 14 13.1 3 2.8 1 0.9 advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 103 gaining access to community resource for instructional purposes 2 12.5 8 50.0 5 31.3 1 6.2 0 0 36 33.6 41 38.3 25 23.4 1 1.9 3 2.8 involving the community in harambee projects for the school 3 18.8 4 25.0 4 25.0 5 31.2 0 0 46 43.4 39 36.8 12 11.3 6 5.7 3 2.8 supervising and evaluating and effectiveness of school community contracts 3 18.8 7 43.8 6 37.5 0 0 0 0 35 33.0 43 40.6 24 22.6 2 1.9 2 1.9 table 4.12 female headteachers’ performance in management of finance and business role performance headteacher (n: 16) teacher (n: 108) v. good good average b. av. v. good good average b av. n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % determining needs and means of acquiring financial resources 2 12.5 11 68.8 3 18.7 0 0 5 4.6 36 33.3 65 60.2 2 1.9 establishing policies for distributing funds 3 -18.8 10 62.5 3 18.8 0 0 19 17.6 30 27.8 34 31.5 25 23.1 preparing school budget 7 -43.8 8 50.0 1 6.2 0 0 37 34.9 62 58.5 6 5.7 1 0.9 maintaining appropriate record keeping, accounting and auditing procedures. 7 -43.8 7 43.8 2 12.5 0 0 24 22.2 56 51.9 22 20.4 6 5.5 supervising all allocations and use of funds in the school. 7 -43.8 9 56.3 0 0 0 0 62 58.5 30 28.3 10 9.4 4 3.8 identifying and implementing measures and inventories required for evaluation 2 -12.5 11 68.8 3 18.8 0 0 23 21.3 40 37.0 37 34.3 8 7.4 distributing funds for different activities in the school 8 -50.0 8 50 0 0 0 0 55 51.9 30 28.3 13 12.8 8 7.5 advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 104 most of my teachers co-operate with me, i treat them fairly and i am firm with them without any favouritism. there is good relationship between the community and schools headed by female head teachers because the community are allowed to use the school facilities. they in turn get involved and participate in school activities and assists in raising funds for various schools projects. i do involve the school community whenever we have a project and also allow them to use the school facilities whenever necessary. for example hiring a hall for weddings, funeral meetings etc. the money allocated to primary schools by the government is inadequate. this makes it very difficult for the schools to run smoothly throughout the year. as a result, the head teachers‟ performance in determining needs and means of acquiring financial resources and distributions of funds was rated as average and below average respectively. the school population is low and most vote heads lack funds. the money sent by the government in most schools is inadequate. all female head teachers agreed that they did not undergo proper training in the management of business and finance. most of them suggested that, they needed more tiring in this area. the in-service training in business and finance was sketchily done and the training period was too short. conclusions the conclusions of this study are from the research and analysis of the reports. the following conclusions were therefore based on the findings of the study. the teachers perceived the female head teachers‟ performance as generally good pertaining to the management of the six administrative tasks. the head teacher also rated themselves as having performed very well in all the areas of administrative tasks. likewise, when the basic quality assurance officers were interviewed, they gave their response concerning female head teachers‟ performance in the district as generally good. the head teacher‟s background characteristics did not cause any important differences among the head teachers in relation to the degrees of importance they attached to the role performance by head teachers in the six management task areas. the training of primary school head teachers‟ i.e. work shops and in-service courses has met the primary head teachers‟ expectations pertaining to their role performances in the six administrative tasks. however, more training is required in areas like school finance and business, designing and developing courses in curriculum and instructions, in order to enable the head teachers to perform more effectively and efficiently in these areas. examining the role performance of female head teachers as good, i therefore concur with cubillo and brown (2003), there is little doubt that many women have a great deal to contribute to the changing practice of educational management in response to the radical global restructuring of education. recommendation for the profession  further and well organized training on financial management is required. the ministry of education of kenyan republic should come up with mentors among the female head teachers, thoroughly train some of them who will be in a position to offer assistance and more guidance to their counter parts.  employing of affirmative actions to improve the number of female head teachers in educational management positions. recommendations for further research  the study to be replicated in other districts as well as to give a general picture of the whole country in terms of the role performance of female head teachers in primary schools.  research could be undertaken to determine the role performance of male head teacher in the six administrative tasks in public primary schools in comparison to the female head teachers‟ performance. references barasa, m.n. and ngugi, n. (1990). lecture series, education (part three): educational administration, nairobi university press cubillo, l; and brown, m. (2003). women into educational leadership and management: international differences. journal of educational administration, 41(3), 278-282. retrieved form http://www.emerldinsight.com 10957 – 8234.htm decline in academics. (1980, january 19). daily nation, p.11 funk, c. (2004). outstanding female superintendents‟ profile in leadership. advancing women in leadership journal, 16. retrieved from http://www.advancing women.com/awl/spring 2004/funk.html kochhar, s.k. (1993). gender roles: a sociological perspective upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall inc. mugambi, w. (2005). performance of head teacher as perceived by head teachers, deputy head teachers, heads of departments and teachers in secondary schools in mwimbi divisions, meru-south district, kenya. unpublished m.ed thesis kenyatta university. ministry of education. (2007). elimu news: a news letter of the ministry of education. nairobi: ministry of education. odali, e.n. (1984). a survey of current administrative problems of primary school headteacher in hamisi division of kakamega district, western province. kenyatta university. unpublished m.ed thesis. okumbe, j.a (2006). revised ed. educational management: theory and practice, nairobi: nairobi university press. http://www.emerldinsight.com/ http://www.advancing/ advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 105 olembo, j.o (1992). management in education research. nairobi: new kemit publishers. onyango, g.a (2001). competencies needed by secondary school head teachers and implications for pre-service and in-service educations. a case study of nairobi and kakamega district (kenya). unpublished phd. thesis, kenyatta university. orodho, a.o (2004). techniques of writing research proposals and report. nairobi; masala publishers. ozigi, a.o. (1981). a handbook on school administration and management, lagos: macmillan nigeria publishers. schermerhorn, p. (2001). feminism means more than sexual equality. retrieved from http:/migreens.org/awog/2007/sunm/feminism.htm schwartz, d. (1985). introductions to management principles practice and processes, new york: hbs media systems. smulyan, l. (2000). balancing acts; women principles at work. buffalo, ny; state university of new york. whittaker, p. (1983). the primary head, london: heinemann educational book advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership critical research: postmodern methodologies for the examination of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in education gaile s. cannella, ed.d. cannella, winter, 1998 although feminist perspectives are at times in conflict with each other, all focus on the lives of women and, to some extent, social justice for women. historically, we know that particular racial and ethnic groups, the poor, and women have been both withheld from educational opportunities and placed in schools for purposes of regulation, labeled as inferior and intellectually unsuited for "advanced" forms of "reasoning", tracked, placed disproportionately in special education, and on and on. the rationale for these educational decisions has been "scientific truth regarding the nature of human beings". what is this scientific truth? ---truth is reason; those who do not reason about the world in the appropriate way must be inferior and are not suited for education. truth is universality; those who do not fit the norm that we have created for human beings must have something wrong, so must be remediated. truth is progress; those who do not advance through material possessions, increase their monetary resources, or through education must be lazy or they would "progress". in the context of our presentations today, truth for teacher education is monocultural and technoscientific; those who would move beyond traditional knowledge bases are considered radical or attempting to cause trouble, and labeled as "those minorities". truth is speaking english; those who do not are categorized as inferior, as not belonging "here". truth is gendered; women were born for particular roles and those who do not follow those roles are mentally incompetent, too masculine, or even perverts. and finally, truth is white!! ---recently, some theorists have proposed that the truths that are constructed and accepted as legitimate for society are dependent on the negotiation of power relationships between various groups of people (lincoln & guba, 1985; kincheloe, 1991). these "truths" are actually complicated, decentralized discourses constructed in multiple ways to mask the acquisition and maintenance of power. jean-francois lyotard (1984) labeled this interpretation of the concept of truth as "postmodernism". the objectivity of knowledge or language and the appropriateness of applying (and imposing) generalized world views to(on) all human beings are questioned. this postmodern perspective is the foundation for a critical, and perhaps feminist, multiculturalism and can be one site from which research can construct action toward http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html progress in the attainment of social justice in education. the purpose of this paper is, therefore, to examine postmodern research perspectives and methodologies that can be tied to multicultural education in the pursuit of social justice. before postmodern research is discussed as an avenue for the examination of race, ethnicity, class, language, and gender in education, multicultural education must be recognized as the field in which these issues have been predominantly addressed related to teaching and learning. in her historical analysis of the development of multicultural education, geneva gay (1983) reminds us of the origins of the field within the 1960's and 1970's sociopolitical context. connected to the civil rights movement through which racial minority groups sought to overthrow racism and claim their own histories and identities, multicultural education emerged as "a form of resistance to dominant modes of schooling" (sleeter, 1996). christine sleeter addresses the complexity of multicultural education and explains the diversity within the field through discussions of antiracists teaching (banks, 1992; darder, 1991; nieto, 1992), techniques for teaching the culturally different and human relations training (hollins, et al., 1994; tiedt & tiedt, 1986), single group studies that include ethnic, women's, gay and lesbian, and black studies (asante, 1990; harding, 1991), multicultural studies that focus on redesigning schooling toward an ideal, equitable society, (baker, 1983; gay, 1983) and multicultural and social reconstructionist education, addressing political and economic oppression (sleeter, 1996). while multicultural education has come under attack by some critical and feminist educators as not radical enough, educators of color have reminded us that much of schooling is controlled by whites. lifetimes of racism have taught multicultural educators that the dominant group must be addressed with school reform language that they will listen to (banks, 1992; delpit, 1988). the development of strategies that would more likely appeal to whites has resulted in language that does not appear radical (for example, using the term human relations as opposed to racial conflict) and practices that are direct and fit dominant constructions of teaching content and methodology. further, most criticisms have been without recognition of the diverse and complex beliefs and practices represented by the field (sleeter, 1996). multicultural education has been defined as a form of resistance to oppression, particularly opposition to white supremacy and recently, for some, resistance to patriarchy. the goal is an education (and a society) that does not demand monocultural conformity or adherence to one dominant norm, but challenges oppression, celebrates diversity, and strives for social justice, equity, and opportunity. the field of multicultural education is challenging dominant forms of knowledge, universalist perspectives applied to human beings, and constructions of truth that are created and controlled by particular groups as power over other groups. multicultural education as a field, at least partially represents a postmodern view of the world. postmodernism what is postmodernism and how does it relate to multicultural research? >from the enlightenment perspectives generated in europe over 500 years ago emerged a belief in universal "truth", the naturally predetermined reality and knowledge that was believed to apply to all human beings. tied to this "truth" was the belief in human and individual progress; "man"kind is always advancing in thought; individuals are always progressing toward higher levels of growth, sophistication, and intellect. further, enlightenment beliefs fostered notions of natural dualisms, illustrated by the dichotomy constructed in the cartesian separation of mind and body, and further demonstrated in contemporary discourses of male/female, white/black, good/evil, adult/child, objective/subjective, reason/intuition, and on and on. as industrialization maintained and even fostered the enlightenment belief that science could reveal the natural "truths" that apply to all, the modern era emerged. those of us who are grounded in the "so called" western view of the world have accepted this belief in universal truth, progress, reason, and science without question. in education, specifically, we have accepted such notions as the existence of particular knowledges that all children should learn, the belief that science can determine the universal ways in which all human beings function, and the belief that a range of teaching methodologies are in some form universally applicable to all. postmodern perspectives in a variety of fields (e.g. arts, philosophy, literature, linguistics) have called to question these universalized "regimes of truth," labeling them as social constructions that give power to particular groups over others (cannella, 1997; derrida, 1988; foucault, 1980; kincheloe & pinar, 1991; lather, 1991). when lyotard (1984) coined the term "postmodern," he referred to critiques of enlightenment/modernist "grand narratives" or truths that were applied to all humanity. the notion that reason/knowledge, and therefore, education would deliver the poor from servitude and ignorance is an example "grand narrative" that has permeated much of our educational policy making. this regime of truth has legitimized the control of particular groups by, for example, denying blacks who could not read the right to vote, categorizing those who exhibit diverse views of the world as ignorant and without talents, constructing experts who control the lives of others because of their "advanced" knowledge and reasoning ability. further, accepting this "grand narrative" as truth has legitimized blaming the poor for their life conditions and ignoring the larger social, political, and historical context that has generated a classed society. postmodern perspectives challenge "regimes of truth" or grand narratives, calling to question the cultural and political contexts from which they have emerged and the power that is generated for those who construct the truth. again, multicultural education is at least to some extent a postmodern view of the world. postmodern thought does represent a variety of different perspectives, resulting in a definition that is elusive and problematic. however problematic, a postmodern position is directly applicable to research in multicultural education because it includes (1) the examination of regimes of truth, language, and power that have dominated thought; (2) social criticism of institutionalized systems and the truth assumptions underlying those systems; (3) the recognition that those who have been identified as different have been labeled the "other", especially related to gender and racial perspectives, and (4) a discourse that both accepts and critiques diverse cultural practices (slattery, 1995). postmodernism is not a cure for the disease of "grand narratives" or universal truth, but the creation of new multidirectional positions from which to view and construct the world (lather, 1991). further, postmodern thought would challenge us to create an openness to the unexplained, the ambiguous, the hidden. tied to multicultural education, postmodern research perspectives lead to the construction of such questions as: what are the regimes of truth that have been used to construct concepts of schooling? (e.g. child development, psychologized learning, discipline and management, universalized language acquisition, best practices) how have these truths been constructed (historically, politically, socially)? who claims the truth? what are the assumptions of these truths regarding difference? what are the messages that underlie institutionalized educational systems as they are applied to diversity? how do both conservative and liberal education support the status quo? how does the construction of educational professionalism support cultural hegemony? what students are silenced, disqualified, and/or disregarded by the regimes of truth that dominate schooling? what are the "truths" that have constructed multicultural education? what are the values and methods for analyzing those truths as they are practiced in the field? how can we, as multicultural educators, construct dispositions in which we appreciate but continually critique the field? questions and methods scholars such as jacques derrida (1988), julia kristava (1986), and michel foucault (1980) have constructed theories of postmodern analysis and research methods. the work of foucault best illustrates the possibilities for multicultural education. foucault's theories have focused on language, or discourse, as constructing knowledge and limiting alternative forms. language and knowledge are therefore, inextricably tied to power. foucault raised some of the most important postmodern questions that apply to the goals of multicultural education. as examples: what languages and knowledges have been included and excluded? how have forms of discourse been used to justify particular knowledge(s)? whose truths have been hidden through our discourse methods? whose knowledge has been disqualified as not good enough, not important enough, not sophisticated enough for consideration? how have particular groups gained control over others through the discourses that dominate? (cannella, 1997) foucault's focus included the recognition that discourse, knowledge, and power are rooted in historical, political, and social contexts. stressing the need for analyses of power from the bottom up, historical counterquestions are asked such as: who has written the history? who has been included and excluded? what has been left out? history is approached as counter-memory (hutton, 1993). foucault's "genealogy" of knowledge is an example of historical methodology that is particularly applicable for a critical multicultural education. a particular practice is located in the present and problematized to reveal the ways in which the practice was historically justified. the discourses that were used for that justification and the assumptions underlying the forms of representation are revealed. for example, in his book discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, foucault (1977) begins with the practice of imprisonment, asking the question: imprisonment had been rejected in the past; how did it later come to be accepted? as the genealogical analysis progresses, other questions emerge: what knowledges are disqualified within the construction of imprisonment? who gained control? in another example, thomas skrtic (1995) recently used a genealogical method to trace the discourse that has been used to shape and justify the field of special education. research issues applicable to multicultural education would be not only the genealogy of public education itself, but the problematization of such discourses as child development, educational constructions of discipline, testing practices, and english language dominance. genealogical analysis provides a research base from which taken-for-granted truths in the field of education can be challenged. as a theorist and researcher, foucault (1978) has provided a perspective from which to function multiculturally that addresses such issues as identity, subjectivity, reproduction, discipline, and regulation. further, postmodern examples of ties with a critical multicultural research perspective can be found. foucault introduced the notion of "disciplinary power", power constructed as the desire to be "normal" is produced by dominant discourses. for example, discourses in the media, education, and fields like medicine and psychology speak a language in which mothers are expected to spend a lot of time with their children, "sensitively" talk to them, constantly teach them how to function in ways that fit the educational system, and provide a play-oriented "childhood". those mothers who function based on this dominant discourse are considered and labeled normal, good, and responsible; they even take on these labels themselves. those who for cultural, individual, socioeconomic, or other reasons interact with their children in different ways are considered abnormal, ignorant, irresponsible, and even deviate; these are the mothers who must be taught to parent, and are labeled as uncaring, deficient and unknowing. this disciplinary power may be so strong that these mothers accept themselves as not normal, in some way lacking. critical multicultural research could explore the disciplinary powers that have been constructed within teachers and over students as learners. disciplinary powers produce the desire to be normal and may counter and even silence diverse cultural perspectives and ways of being in the world. tied to postmodern perspectives are fields of thought that, although not always labeled "postmodern", represent a challenge to dominant discourses, view resistance to oppression as a necessary action, and strive to foster social justice. two of these fields are (1) a "postmodernized" critical theory and (2) feminist theory and research as represented by postmodern feminism and feminist scholarship from the margins. postmodernized critical theory. grounded in the frankfurt school and often critiqued as using a language of privilege, critical theory has many diverse revolutionary voices. although avoiding association with the universal, a common belief is that domination, subjugation and injustice play major roles in shaping the everyday lives of human beings (kincheloe & mclaren, 1994; bottomore, 1984; giroux, 1983). postmodern critical theorists have challenged the more structural critical perspective that emancipation and social justice can be achieved through some form of rational critique. postmodern criticalists point to the complexity and ambiguity of human society and the idiosyncratic ways in which individuals, communities, and even localities are influenced (kincheloe & pinar, 1991). further, foucault's work relating power and discourse has eliminated any utopian belief in a rational, modernist elimination of oppression. postmodern criticalists do, however, address (1) relationships as unstable and in a modernist society mediated by capitalism; (2) ways that oppression is perpetuated by placing those with little power into positions in which they accept their status as natural; (3) the interconnectedness of forms of oppressions; and (4) the ways in which mainstream research constructions and methodologies reproduce oppression (kincheloe & mclaren, 1994). critical multicultural research is easily tied to postmodern critical thought. for example, critical analysis of the assumptions underlying mainstream research methodologies is very much a multicultural issue. what are the assumptions concerning reality and human truth in the construction of positivist research methods? who have these methodologies privileged? who have they oppressed? when social science research methods have been applied to education, has social justice been the result? has this educational research been used to regulate members of particular groups (e.g. women, blacks, the poor, diverse families, children in general)? other example critical issues that tie with multicultural education include the middle-class materialist emphasis of dominate educational methodologies, the focus on technology that will save the learning world, and the construction of economic, linguistic, and racial division through such practices as honors and gifted programs. critical research methods most often include historical reconstruction and critical ethnography, methods that support the multicultural researchers attempts to examine various forms of educational oppression (sleeter & mclaren, 1995; kincheloe & mclaren, 1994). feminist research. although feminist perspectives are at times in conflict with each other, all focus on the lives of women and, to some extent, social justice for women. for a critical multicultural education, postmodern feminist research and feminist perspectives that have been constructed from the margins provide the most insight. postmodern feminist researchers "regard truth as a destructive illusion" (olesen, 1994, p. 164). the world is viewed as complex narratives, endless stories of people and their lives. gender is not privileged as in some other forms of feminist work, but women are the focus of the research. cultural studies that stress both representation and text are common. one example is the work of haraway (1991), illustrating the cultural construction of "woman" as related to science. with this increased focus on life narratives, postmodern feminist research has drawn attention to two issues that directly relate to critical research in education: (1) the first is the issue of "voice." how are the "voices" of others to be heard? what does voice mean? and must voices be made to fit the dominant discourse learned by the researcher? based on this concern, postmodern feminists have begun to search for diverse (and unthought of) ways in which to provide accounts of women's lives (lather, 1996; fine, 1992; wolf, 1992; krieger, 1983). (2) the second is the issue of "experience." while we have accepted "experience" as representing life and educational work reality, postmodern feminists have demonstrated the instability of the concept. experience is understood as both representing life and as a vehicle for the replication of oppressive systems (scott, 1991). experience is an interpretation of life within a context and requires historical, political, and social analysis. critical multicultural education could explore the experiences of teachers and students with the historical recognition of the position from which their experiences have been constructed. additionally, critical multicultural research could provide further insight into how we listen and attend to the diverse voices of students in educational settings. finally, the work of feminist researchers who represent the margins of societal power (hooks, 1984), e.g. women of color, lesbian women, and women with disabilities, provide the most important postmodern multicultural research perspective. these scholars strain the accepted boundaries of social science, attacking the dualist lens from which researchers function. patricia hill collins (1986, 1990), patricia zavella (1987), and bell hooks (1990) are examples of those who have clearly critiqued the creation of the "other" by researchers dominated by male forms of reference, authoritarian assumptions, and hidden cultural norms. these scholars have always represented race, gender, and class oppression as undeniably linked. theories that would address only one form of oppression are understood as actually representing forms of thought that are part of dominate ideology and may even perpetuate that very oppression. as bell hooks has stated: "racism is fundamentally a feminist issue because it is so inter-connected with sexist oppression." (1992, p. 396). this work from the margins has begun to address the need for the construction of bonds between us, as black and white female researchers and educators, as members of diverse socioeconomic groups, as human beings with different types of education and life experiences. again quoting bell hooks: "as long as white and black women are content with living separately in a state of psychic social apartheid, racism will not change" (1995, p. 224). perhaps the greatest challenge for the construction of a critical multicultural research agenda in education is that we face the ways that we have knowingly or unknowingly oppressed each other and construct partnerships that would attack any form of social apartheid that places limits on human beings. after thoughts postmodernism should not become another "grand narrative", resulting in a relativistic form of dominance. the interconnections between the various postmodern perspectives, multicultural education, critical theory, and feminist perspectives can, however, serve as the conditions of stimulation and critique for each other. editors' note: apa style is followed as closely as possible under the html format. indentions, spacing, andfootnoting may vary. references asante, m.k. 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(1988). the silenced dialogue: power and pedagogy in educating other people's children. harvard educational review, 58, 280-298. derrida, j. (1981). dissemination. (b. johnson, trans.). chicago: university of chicago press. fine, m. (1992). passions, politics and power: feminist research possibilities. in m. fine (ed.), disruptive voices (pp. 205-232). ann arbor: university of michigan press. foucault, m. (1977). discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. new york: pantheon. foucault, m. (1978). the history of sexuality: vol's i-iii. new york: pantheon. gay, g. (1983). multiethnic education: historical developments and future prospects. phi delta kappan, 64, 560-563. giroux, h. (1983). theory and resistance in education: a pedagogy for the opposition. south hadley, ma: bergin & garvey. harding, s. (1991). whose science? whose knowledge? thinking from women's lives. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. haraway, d.j. (1991). simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. london: routledge. hollins, e.r., king, j.e., & hayman, w.c. (eds.). (1994). teaching diverse populations: formulating a knowledge base. albany: state university of new york press. hooks, b. (1984). feminist theory from margin to center. boston: south end. hooks, b. (1990). the politics of radical black subjectivity. in b. hooks, yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics (pp. 15-22). boston: south end. hooks, b. (1992). sisterhood: political solidarity between women. in j.a. kourany, j.p. sterba., & r. tong (eds.), feminist philosophies (pp. 391-404). englewood cliff, nj: prentice hall. hooks, b. (1995). killing rage: ending racism. new york: henry holt and co. hutton, p.h. (1993). history as an art of memory. hanover, nh: university of new england, university of vermont. kincheloe, j.l. (1991). teachers as researchers: qualitative inquiry as a path to empowerment. new york: falmer press. kincheloe, j.l., & mclaren, p.l. (1994). rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. in n. denzin & y. lincoln (eds.), handbook of qualitative research (pp. 138-157). thousand oaks, ca: sage. kincheloe, j.l., & pinar, w. (1991). curriculum as social psychoanalysis: essays on the significance of place. albany: state university of new york press. krieger, s. (1983). the mirror dance: identity in a woman's community. philadelphia: temple university press. kristeva, j. (1986). the kristeva reader. (t. moi, ed.). new york: columbia university press. lather, p. (1991). getting smart: feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. new york: routledge. lather, p. (1996). methodology as subversive repetition: practices toward a feminist double science. paper presented at the american educational research association, new york. lincoln, y.s., & guba, e.g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. beverly hills, ca: sage. lyotard, j. (1984). the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, (g. bennington and b. massumi, trans.). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. nieto, s. (1992). affirming diversity. new york: longman. olesen, v. (1994). feminisms and models of qualitative research. in n. denzin & y. lincoln (eds.), handbook of qualitative research (pp. 158-174). thousand oaks, ca: sage. scott, j. (1991). the evidence of experience. critical inquiry, 17, 773-779. skrtic, t.m. (1995). disability & democracy: reconstructing (special) education for postmodernity. ny: teachers college press. slattery, p. (1995). curriculum development in the postmodern era. new york: garland publishing. sleeter, c. e. (1996). multicultural education as social activism. albany: state university of new york press. sleeter, c. e., & mclaren, p.l. (eds.). (1995). multicultural education, critical pedagogy, and the politics of difference. albany, ny: state university of new york press. tiedt, p., & tiedt, i. (1986). multicultural teaching: a handbook of activities, information and resources. boston: allyn & bacon. zavella, p. (1987). women's work and chicano families: cannery workers of the santa clara valley. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. gaile cannella is associate professor of early childhood and multicultural education and assistant head of the department of educational curriculum and instruction at texas a&m university at college station, texas. e-mail : g-cannella@tamu.edu awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 2, winter 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the 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file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership the juxtaposition of career and family: a dilemma for professional women regina m. watkins, ph.d. margie herrin, ph.d. lonnie r. mcdonald, ph.d. watkins, herrin, & mcdonald, winter, 1998 many subtle restrictions exist that prevent women from acquiring promotions, tenure, and other forms of advancement. the vocations of successful mother and professional are not necessarily mutually exclusive (holt, 1981). however, the major segment of the workforce-women, comprising 52%-are struggling to balance these two most important forces in their lives. drastic increases in the number of working women have thrust this issue to the workplace forefront. resolution of such career and family concerns should definitely contribute not only to increased productivity, but also to the psychological well-being of a more successful workforce (aawcjc, 1991). the february 1, 1993 cover of time magazine confronts us with the plight of the working professional woman, as we see a picture of the first female nominee for u.s. attorney general. zoe baird was "drawn and quartered" for decisions she made regarding a family concern: quality child care. regardless of personal beliefs about respect for the rules, integrity, or credibility, the fact remains: had a male nominee ever been asked about his child care arrangements? the answer is no (gibbs, 1993). research supports a history of limited success for professional, and especially university, women with families (ezrati, 1983). in fact, conflicts involving expectations and family obligations appear to run rampant in institutions of higher education. several pertinent statistics are esoteric to institutions of higher learning and the issue of family and employee gender: (1) fewer married women achieve high academic rank than married men; (2) men are more successful in combining parenthood and academic careers; in fact, the combination of family and career are the norm for men, not women, academicians; (3) the majority of university women remain childless, 50% as reported by hensel (1991), with only 15% having http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html three or more children, as compared to 33% of men (carnegie commission as reported by ezrati, 1983); and (4) the more children a woman has, the more difficult it is to balance family and career. in fact, career advancement for the professional woman often means limiting family size (holt, 1981). in an attempt not to only initiate but also perpetuate change, the american association of women in community and junior colleges (aawcjc) selected for its 1992 agenda the theme of "the new workforce" in order to showcase issues pertinent to quality living for university women. this organization sees the need to promote optimum achievement of constituents, which means overcoming barriers to their success. effective management of family and professional responsibilities is quickly emerging as a primary concern for university women across the nation (aawcjc, 1991). covert issues in higher education's organizational culture many subtle restrictions exist that prevent women from acquiring promotions, tenure, and other forms of advancement. ezrati (1983) presented the following list of covert reasons why advancement for women in higher education may be limited. geographic immobility few women have the luxury of relocating in order to attain job advancement. ninety percent of women reported they would relocate only if their husbands secured employment. seventy-five percent of men would relocate for a better job with or without the spouseõs employment. in fact, our society "discourages family change for the sake of a wife's career" (107). limited bargaining power being confined to one location, women usually have little or no bargaining power in negotiating for position advancement. administrators feel minimal pressure when faced with the possibility of losing versus regaining a productive female employee who is trapped in one location. this condition also perpetuates low salaries and infrequent promotions. limited job market job relocation is acceptable if precipitated by the husband, but not by the wife. therefore, limited mobility perpetuates infinitesimal career options. to further limit female career choices, colleges and universities are seldom in close proximity to allow convenient commuting. nepotism and institutional inbreeding anti-nepotism policies are widespread in institutions of higher learning. these policies appear to be inordinately discriminatory to wives, usually due to the fact that husbands are employed first. most policies are not specific; however, the majority of institutions covertly forbid the hiring of any relative even if the position in question does not involve a supervisor/subordinate relationship. in fact, special permission is sometimes required, especially in the case of hiring a spouse. in juxtaposition, a similar discriminatory action deals with inbreeding. many institutions assume an inflexible stance in hiring their graduates, a mentality which handicaps married women because of their immobility. inability to combine family and career even when university employment is secured, the female faculty member has many tough decisions to make. if there are plans for children, the employee must face necessary leaves of absence which are usually at the convenience of the institution's schedule. upon return, she finds herself lacking in scholarly activities necessary for promotion and tenure. further, the ideal time for achieving quality professional status is between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five which happens to coincide with the optimum years for bearing children. additionally, women's career and family choices tend to follow a pattern of fragmented phases rather than a smooth continuum descriptive of their male counterparts. this paradigm tends to characterize university women's careers as disjointed. public mindsets society vehemently declares that childcare is the responsibility of women. mothering, not fathering, is a prevalent societal norm creating personal role conflicts that permeate institutions of higher learning. religion and mores further confound the problem facing women who desire to maintain a quality career and family life. most women feel pressured by society to make a choice. hampton (1982) states that women professors generally chose careers over marriage. housework even though female academicians have greater earning power than most other women in the workplace, they continue to bear the burden of the caretaking responsibilities of the home. in fact, socioeconomic status is negatively correlated with the amount of hours spent in housework activities. hensel (1991) reports the addition of a child and household responsibilities increase the workload of an average professor from 55 to 70 or more hours per week. part-time employment most part -time employees are women , a choice that is often family-driven. therefore they receive lower salaries, fewer promotions, and suffer from reduced productivity. childcare provisions few institutions of higher education provide childcare facilities, thereby requiring women to acquire childcare on their own. when such programs do exist on college campuses, implementation was historically initiated as a result of student versus faculty needs. the unavailability of onsite quality childcare is pervasive in institutions of higher education. it appears once again that our patriarchal society is restricting women faculty who are attempting to combine family and career. extraneous implications hensel (1991) noted that women are as productive and scholarly as men, although women suffer from higher attrition rates and slower mobility in higher education. gender discrimination is prevalent and appears to be exacerbated by the perplexing responsibilities of university women attempting to balance family life and professional career. most institutions continue to be male-dominated with athletic and military overtones. women are, however, quietly breaking into the male-controlled society in a subtle manner but are required to utilize male rules and mores for successful integration. in fact, women who secure administrative positions must capitalize on the typical paths derived from their male predecessors. holt (1991) also addressed the issue of juggling the demands of family and position in the advancement process. only those female university administrators who had secured quality childcare arrangements and had a supportive husband felt any relief from the career pressures they must endure. in addition, for those who are family women in management positions, their greatest expenditure of energy was directed at resolving conflict about priorities of family and career. most of them felt that eventually a choice was forthcoming (hampton, 1981). strategies for successful career integration the community of higher education and society as a whole can benefit from utilizing the untapped female academic talent of individuals who experience the conflict of family and career responsibilities. selected strategies which follow must be incorporated into the policies and activities of the higher education community to accomplish this endeavor and provide support for the universal family needs. higher aspirations by women women sometimes do not "actively work toward promotion" (hampton, 1992, 22). the psychological perspective of women must reflect higher aspirations and thinning patterns which support the achievement of non-traditional female fields of employment (parker, 1991). women must begin to change their mentality about professional opportunities and advancement (hampton, 1982). financial independence women must seek to achieve and maintain financial independence because of expected additional years in the workforce (parker, 1991). experience enhancement to enhance career opportunities and remain current, women must take advantage of internships, volunteer for opportunities which lead to additional experiences and seek advice of experts in the field when available (parker, 1991). family response surveys family response surveys administered by universities should be utilized to identify family conflict issues and family support factors, followed by the development of policies to eliminate unfavorable practices (hensel, 1991). dual career couples' recruitment the development of placement policies which recruit dual career couples must be encouraged. such measures will provide an easier transition for couples with families who move for career enhancement (hensel, 1991). family leave policies alternative student assignments during periods of time when childbirth occurs during the semester should be utilized. both parents should be allowed to participate (hensel 1991). maternity leave policies women need at least three months access to leave with pay upon the birth of a child (hensel, 1991). load reduction at the birth of a child, the woman may select a reduced teaching load or committee assignments for the semester or year (hensel, 1991). tenure clock adjustment the tenure clock must be adjusted for women one (hensel, 1991) or two years (graham, 1983) per childbirth to allow adequate review time. class schedule options parents should be permitted to select class schedule adaptations such as reduction of early morning, evening or saturday classes (hensel, 1991). leave of absence child bearing, child rearing and family emergencies are legitimate reasons for discontinuous service without negative consequences (ezrati, 1983). self-selection for leave time by either parent is advisable. networking with colleagues women must align themselves with productive employees of the university and be participating members of a network of female colleges (holt, 1981). mentorship mentor relationships and new programs for new women professionals offer assistance, contacts and critiques of activities (holt, 1981). throughout this article, we have attempted to share the concerns women have expressed as they attempt to balance their professional lives with their personal lives. with the suggested strategies women can begin to onsider how they can remedy some of the issues surrounding the juxtaposition between family and work. references american association of women in community and junior colleges (1991). aawcjc national agenda 1991-93: the new workforce. aawcjc quarterly, 16 (no. 1), 1-3 astin, h. (1973). career profiles of women doctorates. academic women on the move. new york: russell sage foundation. ezrati, j. (1983). personnel policies in higher education: a covert means of sex discrimination? educational administration quarterly, 19 (no. 4), 105-119. gibbs, n. (1993). thumbs down. time, 141 (no. 5), 27-29 graham, p. (1973). status transitions of women students, faculty, and administrators. in a. rossi and a. calderwood (eds.), academic women on the move. new york: russell sage foundation. hampton, l. (1982). the professorship: a portrait of women in academe. ed215 648. hensel, n. (1991 october). realizing gender equality in higher education: the need to integrate work/family issues. ed340 273 holt, m. (1981). strategies for the ascent of woman in higher education administration in the 80's. journal for national association for women deans, administrators, and counselors, 44 (no. 3). parker, g. (1991). workplace actively seeing women. amarillo globe-times extra. scott, h.j. (1990). views of black school superintendents on black consciousness and professionalism. journal of negro education, 59(2), 165-172. senge, p.m. (1990). the fifth discipline. new york: doubleday. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration (updated edition). newbury park, ca: sage. sizemore, b.a. (1986). the limits of the black superintendency. journal of educational equity and leadership, 6(3), 180-208. swoboda, m.j. & millar, s.b. (1986). networking-mentoring: career strategies of women in academic administration. journal of the national association of women deans, administrators, and counselors, 50(1), 8-13. townsel, c.w. & banks, l.a. (1975). the urban school administrator: a black perspective. journal of negro education, 44(3), 421-431. valverde, l.a. (1974). succession socialization: its influences on school administration candidates and its implication to the exclusion of minorities from administration(project 3-0813). washington, dc: national institute of education. valverde, l.a. & brown, f. (1988). influences on leadership development among racial and ethnic minorities. in n.j. boyan (ed.) handbook of research of educational administration (pp. 143-158). new york: longman. wheatley, m.j. (1992). leadership and the new science. san francisco, ca: berrett-koehler publishers. wheatley, m.j. (1979). the impact of opportunity and power structure in schools: why women don't become administrators. cambridge, ma: goodmeasure. awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 2, winter 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter98/awl_winter98.html 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leadership vol. 31, pp. 14-22, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the role of education in entrepreneurship: two canadian stories jennifer lynes, susan wismer, and mark andrachuk jennifer lynes is an assistant professor in the school of environment, enterprise & development (seed),university of waterloo e-mail: jklynes@uwaterloo.ca susan wismer is an associate professor in the department of environment & resources studies, university of waterloo e-mail: skwismer@uwaterloo.ca mark andrachuk is a research associate in the department of geography at the university of guelph e-mail: mandrach@uoguelph.ca accepted december 14, 2009 the role that education and training plays in entrepreneurial success is one that is subject to lively debates in the literature. in the first half of this paper, we explore the essence of this debate, with a particular focus on women entrepreneurs in canada. in the second half of the paper, we tell the stories of these two canadian entrepreneurs who have started technology-based businesses and were participants in a unique canadian non-profit educational enterprise, shad valley centre for creative technology. the stories of these two successful entrepreneurs thelma zee, who started a freelance web design business while she was still in high school, and jennifer corriero, who started a now world-renowned non-profit organization for youth aim to shed light on the role they see for education in entrepreneurship. our cases suggest that personal characteristics are important – persistence, self-confidence, initiative, creative thinking, and as thelma said, a certain kind of intelligence that isn’t really about being “book-smart,” although it often includes that too. our research also asked the question, “is learning important?” traditional formal education plays a relatively small role in these two cases and the others that we have gathered through our study. based on our research, we would argue this reflects the relatively low importance of formal education as specific preparation for entrepreneurship for women. in our stories, the informal learning that young people receive from family and friends was important. furthermore, participation in the shad valley program its intensity, level of challenge, and focus on experiential and applied learning – played a key role in inspiring these women to take on the entrepreneurial initiatives. key words: entrepreneurship, education, training, canada, women “my parents raised me to pursue my dreams….” jennifer corriero, takingitglobal “you must love challenges you get a lot of roadblocks, but you just don’t quit!” thelma zee, oppo design studios introduction thelma zee started a freelance web design business while she was still in high school. jennifer corriero has started a now world-renowned non-profit organization for youth. both are members of a new generation of young canadian women whose entrepreneurial activities are based in the scientific and technological knowledge of the new economy. in 1998, an industry canada study reported: “in the knowledge-based economy, it becomes paramount that all entrepreneurs take advantage of business planning, training and new technologies” (industry canada, 1998, n-1). these two young women have done just that, and more. both women have participated in a unique canadian non-profit educational enterprise, shad valley centre for creative technology. the brain-child of dr. derek lane-smith, shad valley offers an intensive four-week training program every summer to selected students entering grade 12 from across canada and overseas, at 12 host universities. most shad participants are entering grade 12 but some may attend earlier in high school if they have accelerated in math. the role that education and training plays in entrepreneurial success is one that is subject to lively debates in the literature. in the first half of this paper, we explore the essence of this debate, with a particular focus on women entrepreneurs in canada. in the second half of the paper, we tell the stories of these two canadian entrepreneurs who have started technology-based advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 15 businesses. the stories of these two successful entrepreneurs aim to shed light on the role they see for education in entrepreneurship. much of the research on women and entrepreneurship has focused on personal qualities, historically. more recently, there has been a strong call to re-examine this approach and to also examine structural and environmental factors that contribute to success (carter et al., 2001). the role of education and training in entrepreneurship entrepreneurship education has its origins in the 19th century agricultural sector, where courses were taught to children of farmers in the winter months (katz, 2006). almost two centuries later, there are still questions about the efficacy of education and training in creating successful entrepreneurs. we use the term ‘education’ here to refer to formal primary, secondary and post-secondary programs that lead to some form of certification. ‘training’ includes short-term programs like shad valley and informal learning that may take place at the workplace, through meetings and discussions with colleagues, through hearing stories from other entrepreneurs and through receiving advice and inspiration from mentors and role models. peter drucker, often referred to as the one of the top ten ‘gurus’ of management describes entrepreneurship as a ‘discipline’ and argues that like any discipline, it can be learned (drucker, 1985; schneider, 2001). contrary to this, mel baiada, one of america’s most successful technology entrepreneurs, reported that the most important element to entrepreneurship is one’s desire or passion: something that cannot be taught. he thinks that the objective of curriculum devoted to the teaching of entrepreneurship is to increase the probability of success by teaching students about the structure of a business (baiada interviewed in decker, 2004). numerous studies have demonstrated the link between education and higher rates of successful entrepreneurs, both in terms of the number of entrepreneurial endeavors and the longevity of these initiatives (e.g. coduras et al., 2008; weaver et al., 2006; menzies & paradi, 2002). educational and training programs that encourage entrepreneurship can help entrepreneurs learn valuable business and communication skills. program initiatives that support and promote entrepreneurship by teaching key skill sets should be integrated into all levels of the educational system (aronnson, 2004; coduras et al., 2008; katz, 2006). some practitioners feel that the best way to ‘educate’ entrepreneurs is through apprenticeship programs where successful entrepreneurs lead by example (aronnson, 2004; katz, 2006). duening (2008, n. p.) encapsulates the literature on education and entrepreneurship well by saying: “the moral of the story is that anyone can be an entrepreneur, but not everyone can be. if there is a fit between opportunities in the prevailing environment, and the skills and resources available to the individual, then success may [ensue].” the status of women entrepreneurs in canada the 2003 canadian prime minister’s task force on women entrepreneurs estimated that women entrepreneurs contribute in excess of cad $18 billion annually to the canadian economy. in 2008, more than 900,000 canadian women were identified by statistics canada as being self-employed (statistics canada, 2009b). entrepreneurial women represent about 11% of women in the canadian labor market (figure 1). 8105 9021 910 1720 0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 9000 10000 women men la bo ur fo rc e (0 00 's ) total size of labour force number of self-employed figure 1. size of labor force and numbers of self-employed in canada by gender (2008). source: statistics canada, 2009. during the past 25 years, the number of self-employed women in canada has increased rapidly – by over 200% from 1983 to 2009. by comparison, the number of self-employed men increased by 160% in the same time period (statistics canada, 2006; statistics canada, 2009b). figure 2 shows the contrast between the number of women and men who are self-employed in canada and also demonstrates the steady growth in selfemployed women. at the turn of the 21st century, entrepreneurial women in canada made up a larger share of the total number of self-employed workers than in any of the other twenty-nine oecd member countries (adrien et al., 1999; organization for economic cooperation and development, 2009; government of canada, 2003). in an increasingly knowledge-based economy, women play an important role in the knowledge-intensive services that are experiencing much growth in both canada and beyond (industry canada, 1998). during the past 25 years, the number of self-employed women in canada has increased rapidly – by over 200% from 1983 to 2009. by comparison, the number of self-employed men increased by 160% in the same time period (statistics canada, 2006; statistics canada, 2009b). figure 2 shows the contrast between the number of women and men who are self-employed in canada and also demonstrates the steady growth in selfemployed women. at the turn of the 21st century, entrepreneurial women in canada made up a larger share of the total number of self-employed workers than in any of the other advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 16 twenty-nine oecd member countries (adrien et al., 1999; organization for economic cooperation and development, 2009; government of canada, 2003). in an increasingly knowledge-based economy, women play an important role in the knowledge-intensive services that are experiencing much growth in both canada and beyond (industry canada, 1998). despite the rapid growth in numbers of women entrepreneurs, canadian women are still less likely to be self-employed than their male counterparts in the labor force. even though women in canada now constitute about half of the canadian labor force, at 47% and are contributing about half of all new businesses in canada, they represent about one-third of all entrepreneurs, as seen in figure 2 (industry canada, 1998; statistics canada, 2009a; statistics canada, 2009b). among aboriginal women, this proportion is somewhat higher, at 38% (government of canada, 2003). 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 1978 1983 1988 1993 1998 2003 2008 n um be r o f e nt re pr en eu rs (0 00 's ) women men figure 2. number of women and men who are entrepreneurs in canada source: statistics canada, 2006; statistics canada, 2009b. in canada, and in north america more generally, gender analysis of entrepreneurship has identified a range of barriers differentially faced by self-employed women. these barriers include difficulties in accessing financing, restrictions in access to business-oriented social networks, the challenges of balancing work and family life, and lack of access to suitable training and education (carr, 2000; lior & wismer, 2003; mirchandandi, 1999; terjesen, 2005). even with these barriers and challenges however, a recent canadian survey of over 120 women entrepreneurs found that 60% still prefer self-employment to working for others (government of canada, 2003). another study also found that, although some women enter self-employment because they have lost jobs or job status in the paid labor market, 60% of women choose self-employment, ‘pulled’ by the promise of independence, flexibility, a self-defined positive and challenging work environment, and the opportunity to escape the barriers of the paid job world (fenwick, 2003; government of canada, 2003; hughes, 2003a). one study found that, in comparison to men, women choose self-employment much more frequently to address work-family balance issues, with 12.6% of women compared to 2% of men citing working at home as a motivator for self-employment and 9.2% of women compared to 4% of men citing flexibility of schedules as important (hughes, 1999). case study of the shad valley program shad valley is a four-week summer enrichment program for high school students. started in 1981, shad valley now has over 10,000 alumni. the program strives to promote creativity, excellence, community, diversity and responsibility through an emphasis on science, technology and entrepreneurship. young women will comprise about half of the group. the students live in university residences, attend lectures from invited professors and guest speakers, and participate in intensive applied workshops that focus on problem solving in the areas of business, science and mathematics. all students in the program work on an entrepreneurship project, in which they create a new product, develop a prototype, prepare a business plan and present it to an expert panel (lupart & barva, 1998; shad international, 2009). requests were sent to women shad graduates who think of themselves as entrepreneurs to get in touch with us, so that we could hear their stories and so that they could share with us their views about what contributes to success in the world of self-employment. within the time frame for our study, 10 people responded and agreed to be interviewed. their business activities were diverse, ranging from new start-ups to businesses in their second decade, from social entrepreneurship to corporate entrepreneurship and profit-making enterprises in sectors from media to food to the creative arts. their shad valley experiences were also diverse, taking place between 1984, the year after shad valley started, and 1998; and at universities in quebec, british columbia, new brunswick, ontario, alberta and nova scotia. what these women have in common, in addition to their shad experience and a strong technological component to their enterprises, is their zeal for their chosen work, their persistence and their will to achieve. it should be noted that our sample was small and was not culturally or geographically representative of the range of women entrepreneurs in canada. we had no northern or native interviewees and only one francophone from inside quebec, none from outside. as a result, we cannot make any comments about the general applicability of our findings. our interviewees talked with us about their goals and motivations in starting a business. most discussed being drawn into self-employment by their desire for challenge, for flexibility, and by the positive self-image that business ownership offers to them. all of the participants in our study talked about the importance of the role models provided to them by their shad valley experience in leading them to advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 17 believe that they could be successful entrepreneurs. most interviewees also talked with us about other role models and mentors as important sources of learning for them. these people not only encouraged our participants to believe in themselves and the possibility for success, but also provided important advice about how to build businesses, offering everything from client referrals to financial acumen to product development expertise. one major interest in carrying out our study was to find out if our participants thought that entrepreneurship could be learned and if so, how. there was a range of opinion among our participants. one person said that entrepreneurship was about having a dream and a vision and being persistent, and that she did not believe these things could be taught. all the others, however, disagreed, saying that learning is important, that technological skills and knowledge, marketing and opportunity identification, financial management, product and service planning, working with people and problem-solving are all critical, and can be learned. they did say, however, that these things are rarely taught in formal educational programs and that their sources of learning were largely from training programs like shad valley, mentors and role models, the stories they heard from other businesspeople and the peer relationships they developed through networking. the cases included here provide detailed examples, and provided us with an opportunity to examine in depth what two women entrepreneurs had to say about themselves and their personal attributes, their businesses and the question of whether and how entrepreneurship can be learned. although both have created information technology-based enterprises, one is involved in a non-profit organization as a social entrepreneur, while the other has a more conventional business profile. despite the differences in business goals, both of these women report experiencing similar challenges as they move through the start-up phase of their businesses. in order to place these stories and the more general findings discussed above in context, however, we have included a summary of recent literature on women entrepreneurs in canada below. jennifer corriero and takingitglobal entrepreneurship is important because it contributes to ongoing adaptation and ability to respond to critical needs, to fill major opportunities… more broadly, we (canadians) need a culture of entrepreneurship… critical thinking, questioning, believing we have the capacity to respond, to handle change, to have the confidence that we can innovate and thrive in turbulent environments. – jennifer corriero as a self-described social entrepreneur, jennifer corriero is cofounder (with michael furdyk) and executive director of takingitglobal, an international organization led by youth and empowered by technology, based in toronto, canada (takingitglobal, 2009). started in 1999 and launched in 2000, takingitglobal was founded on the idea of using information technologies to provide young people with an online venue for sharing ideas, pursuing interests and taking action with the support of a global community of people with similar interests and aspirations. takingitglobal has experienced tremendous growth and support over the last nine years and has reached over 14 million people in every country and continent in the world and provides social networking opportunities, tools and resources in 12 languages. the organization’s website takingitglobal.org offers an online community aimed at actively engaging youth in a global online social network and also provides content and tool for educators (takingitglobal, 2009). in 2003, in partnership with canada’s department of foreign affairs and international trade, takingitglobal also launched an international internship program for youth. takingitglobal has partnerships with five united nations agencies as well as other international organizations such oxfam, the international institute for sustainable development and the environmental youth alliance. jennifer has been selected by the world economic forum as a young global leader (2005) and global leader for tomorrow (2002). starting in 2002, and with the assistance of a team of volunteer translators, takingitglobal’s entire technical infrastructure was re-developed to support multiple languages and different character sets. the virtual translation team includes over 130 volunteers and the site is available in twelve languages. jennifer spoke about the importance of providing a multilingual network: one of the major criticisms of technology and globalization is how it has contributed to the loss of local cultures and languages. [in the beginning] our website was only available in the english language, which contributed to the problem and held us back from truly achieving our goals of inclusivity. getting started. in 1998, when jennifer was still in high school, she attended the shad valley summer program at the university of calgary. she says that the shad experience was memorable because of the stories she heard there, of “people who are really committed to great things,” such as one guest speaker who had climbed mount everest. she also got experience with working in an intense and challenging environment: at shad, you’re confronted with a lot of things in a short period of time…. it takes you to a different level, being challenged by your peers, and finding balance too…. i created a product, developed a plan for it, managed the t-shirts for the group – got the design and handled the sales…. i was challenged intellectually…. shad helped me to overcome my own barriers. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 18 coming from ontario’s rolling farmlands and big cities, jennifer enjoyed the contrasting beauty of the landscape around calgary, which sits at the western edge of the canadian great plain, with the foothills and high snow-capped mountains of the rockies close by. jennifer noted that shad helped ignite her entrepreneurial spirit in several ways that went beyond what she learned in the program itself: “my parents told me that if i wanted to go, i had to pay my own costs, so i sold prints of my art to raise money.” the idea for takingitglobal also grew in part from a desire to go beyond the shad valley experience: shad is very restricted: (it’s) only for the best and the brightest. we need programs to be more broadly available, we need more of a culture of initiative within the school systems. a lot of people might not get the marks, but they have potential. leadership programs exist, but people don’t always get recognized. we need to increase exposure and mentorship. it really does make a difference when you hear people’s stories, when you are exposed to excellence, and different career paths. mostly in schools, there is not as much networking, not being given business skills, as is needed…we need to mainstream opportunities. shad valley was not the only experience that prepared jennifer for the challenges of creating takingitglobal. the support and encouragement of a grade 7 teacher, who encouraged her to become director of a school play was an important influence: “that was definitely an important experience because someone saw potential in me…i was also involved in sports, which gave me confidence, helped me to learn teamwork, developed me physically…. i learned that i could compete with the guys, do things, that i didn’t have to be afraid of any of that…” jennifer was inspired by her high school experience in toronto, ontario. she worked on the school newspaper there and was also responsible for a website that promoted awareness of important canadian women who have been ignored by standard history texts. in hindsight, she recognizes that some of these experiences were important not just for the substantive skill development involved, but also because they “developed initiative in me”. jennifer’s parents were also influential, always supportive, encouraging her to pursue her dreams and give her best effort. when a junior kindergarten teacher, in a conversation with jennifer’s mother, expressed concern that jennifer might be too ‘bossy’, jennifer’s mother pointed out that jennifer was never disrespectful of others and suggested to the teacher that what she was actually seeing in jennifer was early signs of leadership. jennifer says that her mother taught her that “good leadership is knowing when and how to respond”. like a number of others who volunteered for our study, jennifer went on from her shad experience to the ontario science centre summer school to investigate science as a career path. she set aside her interest in science however, after a summer program on website development and project development and a six month consultancy job with microsoft got her excited about the potential of information technologies. in fact, while jennifer and her colleague michael were contemplating how they could create a space that would foster inspiration, information and involvement amongst youth, microsoft heard about their project and invited them to work for the software company in seattle to help the company understand and re-think how they should approach the ‘net generation’ (takingitglobal, 2009). jennifer has also worked as a consultant on projects for xerox, bootlegger, j. walter thompson, canadian imperial bank of commerce, nike, swatch, mcdonalds and hp. in 1999, jennifer enrolled in the undergraduate business program at york university in toronto, at the same time as she was developing the idea that evolved into takingitglobal. by 2000, jennifer had reduced her university program to part-time so that she could focus on launching her new venture. since that time, she has not only finished her undergraduate degree, but has also started a master’s program in environmental studies. why did she decide to turn her efforts toward takingitglobal? i wanted to promote learning, sharing, leadership, social entrepreneurship…social entrepreneurship combines things important to me. i felt that takingitglobal needed to be created by young people and i felt compelled to create it…..i like having a vision, carrying it out. this [takingitglobal] requires massive dedication, it takes a lot, it’s not a 9 to 5 job, but i wanted to commit myself to something that makes a positive contribution to the world. lots of companies do that, they make a positive contribution also, but what i saw was a lot of gaps in the youth development space and i wanted to do something to strengthen civil society there. jennifer and her co-founder michael also wanted to “bridge the digital divide”, using information technologies to reach young people who might not otherwise be active in an on-line environment. challenges. jennifer cautions that the idea of entrepreneurship can be over-idealized: it’s a lot of work. a source of income is needed and you (the entrepreneur) are accountable to wherever that income comes from – clients, your board (of directors). you have to produce, you don’t just get to do what you want. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 19 one major hurdle for takingitglobal is that it is a young people’s organization in a start-up position and, as one result, there is considerable turnover in staff: …[t]he organization is run by young people who are at a life stage where longer term commitments are less likely and our pay scale is also less competitive. also, many positions at takingitglobal are internships, which means that people join with the expectation of leaving or moving on within a period of 6-12 months. we get a great deal of insight and fresh perspectives from the process of continuing to work with new people, but…. as we work toward increasing more secure sources of funding, we hope that a larger percentage of our core staff will be able to make longer term commitments to the organization. looking to the future. jennifer reflected on the past and looked to the future: “i’ve definitely learned a lot over the past 5 years…. how to hire the right people, collaborate with strategic partners, manage critical projects, and multi-task…” one of jennifer’s original goals was to see takingitglobal grow, to 100,000 members in 2006 and into the millions by 2010 (as of june 2009 they had over 250,000 members (along with 4 millions visitors to the site per year). jennifer notes: “knowing that my efforts are mission-centered and that i am having an impact is critical.” on a personal level, she remains deeply committed to the original vision and “would love to be able to continue to work with such dynamic and inspiring groups of individuals and organizations,” spending more time in the countries where takingitglobal has active members, learning new languages and “strengthening my leadership abilities as the organization grows.” thelma zee and oppo studio inc. i never thought about starting my own business until shad valley, but just going through the program, just hearing about what it’s like to be an entrepreneur, made me intrigued with the idea of being my own boss. i thought maybe i would have my own business when i was 30 or 40, but shad made me realize i could just go ahead. thelma zee, oppo studio inc. thelma zee is a graphic designer and artist and founder and owner of oppo studio inc. the company provides branding consultation and web project development services. founded in 2000, while thelma was still a student, the company has worked with a wide range of clients, including ibm, the royal bank, sandylion sticker company, flintstones vitamins and minute maid. thelma’s business strategy has been to build the company slowly and steadily: “now, i have a good steady flow of clients, many returning clients and referrals…. i haven’t ever really advertised… (my company’s) growth has been mostly through word of mouth”. getting started. thelma’s interests have always been in the arts. in high school, she specialized in the arts and then she went on to the york university/sheridan college undergraduate program in design. after completing her bachelor’s degree in design, she also completed a 2-year post-graduate diploma in multimedia at sheridan college. oppo studio inc. was started while thelma was in her third year of her undergraduate studies. thelma’s interest in the creative potential of information technologies also goes back to secondary school: “i was already doing web design in high school. i became good friends with my computer science teachers they sent me my first clients”. during the years when thelma was trying to balance studies at school with running her business, she kept to her slow and steady growth strategy, contracting out for assistance at times when it was difficult to manage both her schoolwork and her client load. like all those in our study, thelma was a participant in shad valley. she attended the program at university of waterloo in 1997. because her primary interest was in the arts, she felt “a little out of place” among a group of young people whose majority interests in her year were in engineering and systems design. she did say, however, that the opportunity to work with a highly qualified group of young people for four intense weeks definitely made an impression on her. she says she learned “how people can really excel”, and went on to say, “…. the group experience was really important”. like other participants in our study, she found that hearing stories from those who have started their own businesses was inspiring:“i think hearing case stories is really important training for starting your own business”. shad valley was not the only important influence on her future during high school. in addition to the relationships she forged with the computer science teachers who gave her first referrals, thelma also used high school as an opportunity to seek out leadership positions in group projects: “i built up my skills in project management, and also my design role…” in discussing what has made her business successful thelma gives lots of credit to some of her first clients: “my first clients were understanding, let me make mistakes and stuck with me… (they) allowed me to make mistakes and came back”. from her start doing freelance work in high school, thelma has built her business into an incorporated operation that employs her full-time and, in addition, employs two other web designers on a contract basis, and part-time financial administration assistance. challenges. thelma talked about challenges stating, “for me, trial and error and figuring things out for myself is what entrepreneurship is about…” thelma saw starting a business as a process of learning from both positive and negative experiences and carrying on, building the viability of the advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 20 business one steady step after another. for example, thelma credited an early negative experience that she had with helping her to learn some important lessons about success in business: in high school, i had one client who i really learned from. he had asked for a website, and i worked hard on it, but then he didn’t like what i did and wouldn’t pay me for my time. i didn’t know anything about contracts before that, but through that experience i learned to have a detailed contract. i’m glad it happened when i was very young. it wasn’t too bad; one summer’s income in high school was all i lost. i got a part-time job to make it up… in her interviews with us, thelma emphasized the importance of perseverance and social skills in overcoming challenges: you can’t be a quitter, because things happen even when i do everything right, clients can be hard to deal with. you have to learn to be a professional; you need business acumen; you need to know how to deal with clients who do not behave professionally. you need to learn how to read people and you need to be very good at interacting with others…. looking to the future. thelma intends to stay with the strategy that has worked well for her so far, of building slowly and steadily. she is pleased with how her business has developed. she says that doing well in business is “not so much about being book-smart, a lot of it has to do with social interaction and learning from your previous mistakes. it is how you deal with your clients that determines if they come back.” for thelma, her future plans are to continue to grow the business so that it can take on more clients and bigger projects. she says that the rewards come in “finishing a project and knowing you’ve done well.” she wouldn’t want to be doing anything else, but she also cautions that running your own business can be all-consuming since she likes to be ‘hands-on’ in all aspects of her business. her hands-on approach allows her to keep quality high, but it also means that it is important to plan vacations: “being my own boss is great. i like working my own hours, but you have to be careful to take time off. if you’re not careful, you can go for the full year and never take time off – that was me last year!” women, education, and entrepreneurship our cases suggest that personal characteristics are important – persistence, self-confidence, initiative, creative thinking, and as thelma said, a certain kind of intelligence that isn’t really about being “book-smart,” although it often includes that too. our research also asked the question, “is learning important?” traditional formal education plays a relatively small role in these two cases and the others that we have gathered through our study. other studies concur (hughes, 2003b; warren, 2004). moore (2004), in an extensive review of the literature relating to women’s entrepreneurship, made very little mention of education or training. based on our research, we would argue that this absence is partly a reflection of gaps in the literature, but it also reflects the relatively low importance of formal education as specific preparation for entrepreneurship for women. fenwick (2003) suggested that the strong preferences of women entrepreneurs for spontaneity and “gofor-it-now” approaches mean that highly formalized and institutionalized educational experiences are likely to be inappropriate and may actually act to stultify innovative energies. in our stories the informal learning that young people receive from family and friends was important. jennifer’s choice to tell us during her interview about a long-ago conversation between her mother and a junior kindergarten teacher about leadership is not unusual. among our interviewees, all of whom have been through the shad valley program, its intensity, level of challenge, and focus on experiential and applied learning were mentioned repeatedly as attractive. in this area too, jennifer’s comment on teaching people to be “entrepreneurial in their thinking” is typical: “i gained more in those four weeks at shad about that than in my five years of high school.” although many of our interviewees were skeptical about the value of higher education as preparation for self-employment, their levels of literacy, numeracy and technical skills were uniformly high. this finding reflects the characteristics of our pool of interviewees. all were selected for the shad program through a competitive process in which, after pre-selection at the high school level, only one of every three applications received by shad is selected. other studies have also found, however, that today’s young women entrepreneurs in canada are “generally more educated and career-oriented than their predecessors” (industry canada, 2003: m-14). for jennifer and thelma, teachers were important mentors. in jennifer’s case, the teacher who encouraged her to take on directing a school play also encouraged her to see herself as a capable leader. in thelma’s story, her teacher was an important source of referrals, providing her with her first clients. in these cases, and in the rest of our interviews, mentors and role models were important teachers. they facilitated learning in areas that are important for entrepreneurs working in the dynamic and turbulent world of information technologies. persistence, creative problem-solving, taking initiative, innovative marshalling and use of available resources, all identified as critical learning needs in our research, are seldom taught in formal educational programs, however. for thelma and jennifer and for many of our other interviewees, the training they received through the shad experience largely occurred as a result of meeting new people. other participants in the program urged our interviewees to accomplish more than they had previously imagined that they could. guest speakers provided inspirational stories. staff members focused the shad program on “nurtur(ing) their (participants) initiative, skills, advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 21 values, and desire to solve important problems, while challenging them to meet the highest standards of ethical conduct, social responsibility and environmental sustainability” (shad valley, 2009, n. p.). other studies too noted the importance of mentors, networks and stories in preparing women for entrepreneurial success (moore, 2004). the two cases here included relatively young businesses. their enterprises may support thelma and jennifer for a few years, or for many. for canadian women in today’s labor markets, conventional ideas about career as a continuous sequence of advancements within a single organization have been replaced. when the young women in our study talked about success, they identified criteria that have to do with personal satisfaction, goal achievement, generation of adequate income, and garnering the respect of mentors, peers, clients, family and friends. in this respect, they are typical of their generation (vermond, 2000). weiler and bernasek (2001, p. 100) also noted “self-fulfillment, rather than profits, is the most important measure of success for women entrepreneurs.” profit is, of course, necessary. income generation is necessary. a positive balance sheet is a powerful compensation for all the many headaches and challenges associated with any new business start-up. moore (2004) argued that in an increasingly diverse workplace, education, portable skills and knowledge, meaningful work experiences, on-the-job learning, networking and a variety of other skills define characteristics of successful women entrepreneurs. individual enterprises are likely to come and go, but it is entrepreneurial spirit, the desire to learn something new every day and the array of skills and attitudes that go with these things that determine whether the journey to work over the course of a woman’s lifetime will be, ultimately, a source of satisfaction and well-being. question: what are your criteria for success? answer: “you have to be able to inspire people, take initiative, and see opportunities that are important” (jennifer corriero, takingitglobal) references adrien, m. h., kirouac, s, & sliwinski, a. 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(2005). senior women managers’ transition to entrepreneurship: leveraging embedded career capital. career development international, 10(3), 246-259. vermond, k. (2000). making the jump. cma management, 74(3) (april), 18-24. warren, l. (2004). a systematic approach to entrepreneurial learning: an exploration using storytelling. systems research and behavioral science, 21, 3-16. weaver, m., dickson, p., & soloman, g. (2006). chapter 5: entrepreneurship and education: what is known and not known about the links between education and entrepreneurial activity. small business economy. united states small business administration, office of advocacy, 113-156. accessed online: www.sba.gov/advo/research/sbe_06_ch05.pdf. weiler, s., & bernasek. a. (2001). dodging the glass ceiling? networks and the new wave of women entrepreneurs. the social science journal 38, 85-103. introduction advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 48 advancing women in leadership vol. 34, pp. 48-53, 2014 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper increasing the proportion of female superintendents in the 21st century teresa wallace eastern kentucky university, email: teresa.wallace@eku.edu, phone: 859-622-7625 accepted august 18, 2014 with the proportion of females in the superintendency being 23% in 2012, and increasing by only 0.7% annually, it will take nearly 80 years for females to be proportionately represented in public schools. this study sample consisted of 63 female superintendents, representing 51% of the overall population of female superintendents in the 6 southeastern states where the study took place. the 6 states were chosen because each has approximately the national average of female superintendents. female superintendents in the six southeastern states were asked what advice they would give to aspiring female superintendents and to recommend strategies for increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. participants offered valuable advice to aspiring female superintendents on how to navigate the system and be successful. they recommended practical strategies for attracting female candidates and increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. keywords: female superintendent, underrepresented, gender equity, feminist standpoint theory introduction in k-12 public education in the u.s., women dominate the workforce of teachers and staff members, but even in the 21st century, women are grossly underrepresented in leadership roles (usdoe, 2008). according to the 2012 u.s. department of education schools and staff survey report, 76% of teachers and 52% of principals in public elementary and secondary schools were female in 2011-12. but, even though women constitute 76% of the teacher workforce, the pool from which superintendents normally begin their journey, only 23% of public school superintendents were female (usdoe, 2012). according to grogan and shakeshaft (2011) the underrepresentation of females in the superintendency is not due to females not being motivated or certified for the position. they reported 40% of the women in central office administrative positions identified themselves as aspiring to the superintendency while 74% had earned, or were working toward earning, the certification required to fulfill the job. grogan and shakeshaft (2011) contend the underrepresentation is a result of females’ options being constrained by stereotypical expectations and beliefs. between 2008 and 2012, the percentage of female teachers in k-12 public schools in the united states increased from 75.6% to 76.3% while the percentage of female principals increased from 50.3% to 51.6% (usdoe, 2012). despite this steady growth in female representation in the roles of teacher and principal, female representation in the superintendency has seen little increase in the past few decades as shown in table 1. table 1 female superintendents year female superintendents 1990 10.5% 2000 13.2% 2012 23.0% u.s. department of education schools and staffing survey, 2008 & 2012 at the current average annual increase of 0.7%, it will take another 77 years for females to be proportionately represented in the superintendency (usdoe, 2008). in his welcoming remarks to scholars attending a meeting about women in educational leadership at duquesne university in pittsburg, pennsylvania, dr. charles daugherty stated: for the sake of justice, we must make efforts to bring the number of women working in leadership positions into closer proportion with the number of women in education. we owe this effort especially to our daughters, but to all future generations who will benefit from more inclusive educational institutions. (soberhart, 2009, p. xii) due to the continued underrepresentation of females in the male dominated profession of public school superintendent, there is a need for further research in this area. this study was designed to find out more about the career paths of female advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 49 superintendents, factors affecting females’ decisions to become superintendents, advice female superintendents would give to females who aspire to become superintendent, and female superintendents’ thoughts on how to increase the proportion of females serving in superintendent positions. theoretical framework a theory is defined as an explanation of observed phenomena that is organized into logical interrelated terms (gall, gall, & borg, 2008). a theoretical framework is a systematic explanation of phenomena related to variables within a given theory (lunenburg & ornstein, 2008). the theoretical framework supporting this study is the feminist standpoint theory. feminist standpoint theory emerged in the 1980s as a feminist critical theory about relations between the production of knowledge and practices of power, and was proposed as a method to guide future feminist research (harding, 2004). specific foci of the feminist standpoint theory are (a) identifying cultural values and power dynamics that account for the subordination of girls and women and (b) highlighting the distinct knowledge cultivated by activities that are assigned to females (wood, 2009). according to feminist standpoint theory, women’s lives differ systematically and structurally from men’s lives. each group engages in distinct activities and the two groups are accorded different rights and opportunities. women and men occupy different social locations, thus cultivating distinct kinds of knowledge (wood, 2009). according to harding (2004) feminist standpoint theory was presented as a way of empowering oppressed groups and valuing their experiences. feminist standpoint theory insists feminist concerns cannot be restricted to only social and political issues. we cannot pigeon-hole feminist issues and ignore them as only women’s issues. instead, feminist issues must be seen as valuably informing theoretical, methodological, and political thought in general. feminist standpoint theory was chosen as the theoretical framework for this study because the theory still holds true in the superintendency today. one way women’s lives differ from men’s lives is in the sexual division of labor, as is evident in the scant percentage of females serving as k-12 public school superintendents compared to the female representation in the roles of teacher and principal, even in the twenty-first century. feminist standpoint theory asserts males and females are accorded different rights and opportunities. this is again evident in the fact that in the u.s., women are twice as likely to have earned a doctorate in education, yet men are five times more likely to hold the job of superintendent of schools (sobehart, 2009). purpose of the study the researcher believed that giving current female superintendents an opportunity to share with females aspiring to become superintendents factors that influenced their decision to become a superintendent and advice for being successful in a male dominated role, would motivate more females to pursue the job of superintendent in the future. the researcher further believed that allowing current female superintendents to share suggestions of ways to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency would have implications for university superintendent preparation programs and state and local agencies looking to recruit females for the position of superintendent. to this end, the researcher investigated: 1. positions females held in the field of education prior to becoming superintendents; 2. factors affecting a female’s decision to become a superintendent; 3. advice female superintendents would give aspiring female superintendents; and 4. suggestions female superintendents offer to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency open-ended questions included: 1. what advice would you offer to a female aspiring to become a superintendent? 2. which strategies for attracting female superintendent candidates do you think would be most effective? method data were gathered using an online survey developed by the investigator specifically for this study. the survey was developed around the four issues to be investigated as listed above and included 17 multiple choice and two open-ended questions. in may of 2013, all female superintendents in alabama, florida, kentucky, north carolina, tennessee, and virginia were invited to participate in the study. an invitation to participate, survey link, instructions, and a deadline for responses were emailed to all 123 female superintendents in those states. a reminder email was sent in june. sixtythree superintendents, some from each of the 6 states, completed the survey with all participants remaining anonymous. after downloading data to a spreadsheet, each data element was carefully reviewed to identify emerging themes. analysis of data was limited to descriptive statistics. results to investigate the four issues above, female superintendents responded to questions, developed specifically for this study. to determine the career path female superintendents follow, participants answered questions related to previous advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 50 employment and the number of years they had spent as classroom teachers. table 2 shows 67% of participants had served as assistant, deputy, or associate superintendent before securing a job as superintendent and 89% percent had served as a school-level administrator, either principal or assistant principal. almost 90% had spent at least five years as a classroom teacher as shown in table 3. table 2 positions held prior to becoming superintendent position percent holding position associate/deputy superintendent 17.46% assistant superintendent 49.21% district level director 52.38% principal high school middle school elementary school 57.15% 11.11% 14.29% 31.75% assistant principal high school middle school elementary school 26.98% 7.94% 9.52% 9.52% teacher high school middle school elementary school 73.01% 22.22% 22.22% 28.56% table 3 years as a classroom teacher years as teacher percent less than 5 12.70% 5-10 47.62% 11-15 23.81% 16-20 14.29% more than 20 1.59% to determine factors affecting a female’s decision to become a superintendent, participants answered two questions. (a) what factors influenced your decision to become a superintendent? (b) what are the three most important incentives for becoming a superintendent? as shown in table 4, over 75% cited commitment to education as having the greatest influence on their decision and the opportunity to have an impact on student achievement as the second most influential. table 5 shows making a difference, leading learning, and team building as the top three incentives for becoming a superintendent. table 4 factors influencing decision to become superintendent factor percent commitment to education opportunity to have an impact on student achievement opportunity to serve the community interest in superintendent work opportunity to serve in a leadership position increase in salary 75.81% 66.13% 56.45% 40.32% 37.10% 14.52% prestige of the position 4.84% desire to leave building-level administration 3.23% note: participants were not limited to one response. table 5 most important incentives to become a superintendent incentive percent making a difference 74.60% leading learning 66.67% team building 49.21% addressing challenges 39.68% opportunity to manage a district 19.05% working with students 15.87% working with staff 9.52% compensation 7.94% prestige of the position 0% note: participants were asked to choose three incentives. female superintendents gave advice to aspiring female superintendents by responding to the following open-ended question. what advice would you offer to a female aspiring to become a superintendent? participants advice was categorized by common themes as shown in table 6. the top three categories by percent of responses were (a) learn how to do the job, (b) be aware of gender bias issues, and (c) prepare for job related stress. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 51 table 6 advice to females aspiring to become a superintendent advice category percent learn how to do the job 23% be aware of gender bias issues 13% prepare for job related stress 12% consider family support 10% consider moral and ethical aspects of the job 10% expect criticism 7% prepare to deal with politics of job 7% prepare to put job above self make sure the district is a good fit understand board and superintendent rolls take advantage of leadership opportunities 7% 5% 3% 3% within the responses, several made statements regarding the good of the students. perhaps best said was, “make all decisions on what you believe to be in the best interest of students. if you use this as your compass, even the most difficult decisions will be understood and accepted.” an opportunity to provide suggestions on how to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency in the 21st century was offered. participants were asked which strategies for attracting female superintendent candidates they thought would be most effective. the question gave choices for participants to choose from and a comment box for them to make additional suggestions. responses to choices given are shown in table 7 below. table 7 ways to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency choice percent change nature of superintendency by funding more central office positions 28.57% allow female superintendent to excel in what she likes to do by shifting some work to other employees 21.43% provide incentives for females to gain superintendent certification 42.86% states reward districts for hiring female superintendents 35.71% the five most frequently recommended additional strategies for attracting female superintendent candidates were in the areas of (a) establishing mentoring programs, (b) equal pay for females, (c) establishing support systems, (d) changing board perceptions of females, and (e) making the job more manageable. through their additional comments, 71% of the participants made it clear they did not think there should be a consideration of gender when discussing the position of superintendent. they stated the board should hire the best person for the job, regardless of gender, and encouraged women to “throw their hats in the ring”. discussion in this study, practicing female superintendents in 6 southeastern states completed an online survey. the survey consisted of 17 multiple choice and two open-ended questions. participants responded to questions regarding jobs they held prior to becoming superintendents, factors that influenced their decision to become superintendents, advice they would give to females aspirin to become superintendents, and suggestions of ways to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency in the 21st century. findings are discussed below. according to (kowalski et al., 2011) the general career path to the superintendency is the teacher-principal path. findings of this study are no different. seventy-three percent of participants had served as classroom teachers, with 71% of those spending 5 to 15 years in the classroom. fifty-seven percent had served as principal, with 32% of those serving as at the elementary level. not surprising, since the most frequent advice given by the participants to aspiring female superintendents was to learn as much as possible before applying for a position, 67% had served as either an associate, deputy, or assistant superintendent prior to securing a position as superintendent. this is consistent with the feminist standpoint theory idea that knowledge is based on experience, and different situations result in different knowledges (harding, 2004). these findings can assist females aspiring to become superintendents in planning their career path. they should pursue school-level administrative positions early enough in their career to work their way up to the superintendency. the top three factors influencing participants decisions to become a superintendent were commitment to education (76%), opportunity to have an impact on student achievement (66%), and an opportunity to serve the community (56%). this could be explained by the feminist standpoint theory as it identifies motherhood as part of women’s labor. serving others by helping them to develop and grow are important features of women’s activity as mothers (hartsock, 1983). in a 2007 aasa study, the top three incentives for females to become superintendents were making a difference (73%), leading learning (53%), and compensation (42%) (mccord, jordan, & jordan, 2008). participants in this study identified making a difference (75%), leading learning (67%), and team building (49%) as the top three incentives for becoming a superintendent. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 52 compensation dropped from third to eighth with only 8% identifying that as an incentive. this could be a result of 67% of participants having served as assistant, associate, or deputy superintendent, all positions just below the superintendent on the salary schedule. advice given by participants to aspiring female superintendents through an open-ended question could be categorized by common themes. the most frequent advice, to learn and be prepared for the position, appears to be a result of gender bias that exists in the superintendency. garn and brown (2008) found that women believed gender bias created a major challenge to their path to the superintendency and to their performance after gaining the position. the majority of participants in this study appear to share the same belief. derrington and sharratt (2009) offered recommendations from female superintendents. they recommended a strong determination and an iron will, recognizing that women have to fight harder, wait longer, and survive more scrutiny to become a superintendent. the second most frequent advice participants in this study offered related to gender bias, and included a warning to females that the superintendency is still a majority male field and females should be aware that gender bias still exists, echoed this recommendation. females aspiring to the superintendency should be aware of this gender bias and realize they may have to work harder to get the job and even harder to keep it. this should be discussed in superintendent preparation programs at the university level. derrington and sharratt (2009) advised females to balance their personal and professional life, making time for family, self, and work. the third most frequent area of advice given by participants was just that; be aware of the long hours and stress of the job and the effect it may have on family. one participant advised taking a realistic look at the balance between work and personal life to determine a willingness to accept the demands of the job before pursuing a superintendency. this finding has implications for the university superintendent preparation program, also. practicing or retired superintendents should be invited to speak to the students, making them aware of the demands of the job and answering questions on how to manage the long hours and stress and how to balance personal and professional responsibilities. participants suggested ways to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency. de santa ana (2008) found mentors to be of paramount importance in navigating the superintendency. participants in this study verified this need. several offered the suggestion of finding a current female superintendent to serve as a mentor. magdaleno (2006) found that same gender mentors can provide support for personal experiences with gender barriers. this finding should be considered by state superintendent associations and universities as they recruit mentors for new female superintendents. they should keep in mind female mentors can help new female superintendents with the balance between their personal and professional lives. the most recent figures on superintendent salary indicate females still earn an average of $4,000 to $18,000 less than their male counterparts (www.payscale.com/research/us/country=united_states/salar y). several participants in this study recommended equal pay for females as a strategy for attracting female superintendent candidates and increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. another recommendation was to consider females for the largest, not just the smallest districts, which could have an effect on average salary. state superintendent associations should lobby for a salary schedule that is based on educational level and experience as with other public school administrators. gender should not play a role in who gets the job or the rate of pay. in interviewing more than 50 successful female superintendents about their strategies for success, gilmour and kinsella (2009) found a critical piece to the success of female superintendents was the match between the superintendent and the school district. another critical piece was the relationships with all stakeholders, including the community and staff, and especially with members of the board of education. kowlaski et al. (2011) found superintendents considered family support as essential for success. participants in this study agreed with all three; recommending a supportive board, community, staff, and family as a strategy for attracting female superintendent candidates and increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. before applying for a superintendent position, female candidates should research the district and determine if it is a good fit. if they find there is no support for a female superintendent from the board, staff, or community, then they should keep looking until they find a district that is a good fit. they should not apply just because there is an opening and they want to be a superintendent. without support, they cannot be successful. brunner and grogan (2007) surveyed 1,195 female superintendents and assistant/associate/deputy superintendents and identified major limitations on the advancement of females in educational leadership. they found board member perceptions of females were that they were not good managers and were unqualified to handle budget and finance. the females surveyed felt the good-ole-boy network still existed in the superintendency. participants in this study identified a change in board member perceptions of the effectiveness of female superintendents as a strategy for attracting female superintendent candidates and increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. this may take board members having experience with a female superintendent and her having a chance to prove her ability before a change in attitude takes place. the role of the superintendent is all encompassing; including collective bargaining, personnel, budget and finance, policy development and implementation, effective communication with stakeholders, strategic planning, and instructional leadership (callan & levinson, 2011). currently being in the http://www.payscale.com/research/us/country=united_states/salary http://www.payscale.com/research/us/country=united_states/salary advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 53 position of superintendent, the participants in this study recommended co-superintendency as a strategy for attracting female superintendent candidates and increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. participants felt the job to be big enough for two people regardless of the gender of the superintendent. conclusion this study confirms previous research in the areas of gender bias, career paths of female superintendents, the need for mentors, the necessity of a supportive board that is compatible with the superintendent, and a balance between personal and professional responsibilities. the study extends previous work by revealing valuable advice to aspiring female superintendents on how to navigate the system and become successful superintendents and by sharing effective strategies for attracting female superintendents, thus increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. this study adds to the literature on females in the superintendency to be used in future research. the findings from this study benefit university superintendent preparation programs, state superintendent associations, and females aspiring to the superintendency. the advice and strategies shared can improve university superintendent preparation programs, better prepare females for the superintendency, and hopefully motivate and encourage more females to pursue the superintendency. as one participant stated, “if you would like to become a superintendent, do it! it will change your life.” references brunner, c. c. & grogan, m. (2007). women leading school systems. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. callan, m.f. & levinson, w. (2011). achieving success for new and aspiring superintendents: a practical guide. thousand oaks, ca: sage. desanta ana, t. m. (2008). opening up the superintendency. leadership, 38(1), 24-27. derrington, m.l., & sharratt, g. (2009). four attitudes of successful women. the school administrator, 8(66), 21. gall, m., gall, j., & borg, w. (2008). educational research: an introduction (8th ed.). boston, ma: allyn-bacon. garn, g. & brown, c. (2008). women and the superintendency: perceptions of gender bias. journal of women in educational leadership, 6(1), 49–71. gilmour, s.l. & kinsella, m.p. (2009). succeeding as a female superintendent: how to get there and stay there. lanham, md: aasa and rowman & littlefield. grogan, m. & shakeshaft, c. (2011). women and educational leadership. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. harding, s. (2004). the feminist theory standpoint reader: intellectual and political controversies. new york: routledge. hartsock, n. (1983). the feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism. retrieved from http://www.tu.ac.th/org/grad/master/pdf/paper/fulltext_t he_feminist__standpoint_developing_the_ground_for_ a_specifically_feminist_historica__materialism_nancy_ hartsock%5b1%5d.pdf kowalski, t. j., ellerson, n. m., mccord, r. s., petersen, g. j., young, p., & american association of school administrators. (2011). the american school superintendent: 2010 decennial study. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. lunenburg, f. & ornstein, a. (2008) educational administration: concepts and practices (5th ed.). belmont, ca: wadsworth publishing company. mccord, r.s., jordan, t., & jordan, k.f. (2008). state of the superintendency mini-survey: aspiring to the superintendency. aasa center for system leadership.center for education policy studies, university of nevada, las vegas. magdaleno, k. r. (2006). mentoring latino school leaders. leadership, 36(1), 12-14. sobehart, h.c. 2009. women leading education across the continents: sharing spirit, fanning the flame. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. u.s. department of education (usdoe), national center for education statistics. (2008). schools and staffing survey. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/ u.s. department of education (usdoe), national center for education statistics. (2012). schools and staffing survey. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/ wood, j.t. "feminist standpoint theory." encyclopedia of communication theory. ed. thousand oaks, ca: sage, 2009. 397-99. sage reference online. www.payscale.com/research/us/country=united_states /salary http://www.tu.ac.th/org/grad/master/pdf/paper/fulltext_the_feminist__standpoint_developing_the_ground_for_a_specifically_feminist_historica__materialism_nancy_hartsock%5b1%5d.pdf http://www.tu.ac.th/org/grad/master/pdf/paper/fulltext_the_feminist__standpoint_developing_the_ground_for_a_specifically_feminist_historica__materialism_nancy_hartsock%5b1%5d.pdf http://www.tu.ac.th/org/grad/master/pdf/paper/fulltext_the_feminist__standpoint_developing_the_ground_for_a_specifically_feminist_historica__materialism_nancy_hartsock%5b1%5d.pdf http://www.tu.ac.th/org/grad/master/pdf/paper/fulltext_the_feminist__standpoint_developing_the_ground_for_a_specifically_feminist_historica__materialism_nancy_hartsock%5b1%5d.pdf http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/ http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/ http://www.payscale.com/research/us/country=united_states/salary http://www.payscale.com/research/us/country=united_states/salary advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership a book review amy freeman lee, ph.d. at eighty two may sarton lee, summer, 1998 above all else, the substantive presence of poignancy created by her awareness of the failure to receive acceptance by her peers and the critics permeates the entire journal. may sarton's final journal, at eighty-two, calls to mind eleanor roosevelt's my day, though their days were quite different. in essence, sarton's journal is about approaching death. specifically, it is focused on the impending final days of this prolific poet, novelist and journalist. even though one brings to the reading experience enormous empathy and sympathy, the overall result is exceedingly depressing. sarton writes in such detail about the multiple facets of her illness and especially about her overpowering depression that the dark aura of the book is inescapable. not even her rich vocabulary and fresh turn of phrase relieved the overall gloom. however, one would have to be totally without feeling to criticize the books content in a censorial way because of this sober tone. all her journals are fraught with numerous reference to good food and her passionate appreciation of flowers, and this last journal is no exception. as usual, much of the culinary delights and radiant blossoms emanate from a plethora of friends with whom sarton shares them. along with her sustained attention to food and flowers is her preoccupation with the weather and animals. her day by day description of the weather is tantamount to an official forecaster's report. perhaps some circumstance made it necessary for her to remain in maine during the long winters that she found so disturbing. her description of the winter landscape and of the house she occupied is so vivid that it becomes virtual reality not only to those who have experienced them directly but also to the vicarious http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html travelers. some relief from the severe climate came from her love of animals. in this last journal, a very handsome cat named pierrot offers her comfort and companionship. not long before she died, she sent her manuscript about pierrot to norton, her publisher. her previous book about cats, the fur person, has sold more than one hundred thousand copies. sarton's deep devotion to pets did not make her oblivious to the suffering of humans throughout the world. she was particularly moved by those who were trapped in horrendous ethnic wars about whom she wrote with great sensitivity. while her life is characterized by many simple contradictions and complex paradoxes, the sustained presence of dichotomies comprises the leitmotif. the core dichotomy pertains to the universal experiences of solitude and loneliness. the compulsive and compelling concentration on her work so characteristic of the workaholic made a certain amount of solitude necessary. however, the supreme irony may well be that in reality it is work that interrupts the flow of life rather than vice versa. while sarton wrote that "...solitude is the richness of self and loneliness the poverty of self"... in the midst of her desired solitude, she suffered loneliness of cosmic proportion. because of her severe illness this last journal is inundated with more than the usual number of compound sentences in which the expression of pleasure in the first half of the sentence is canceled by repeated references to her prodigious overwhelming exhaustion. above all else, the substantive presence to poignancy created by her awareness of the failure to receive acceptance by her peers and the critics permeates the entire journal. not even her popularity among students, teachers and a large segment of the general reading public offered sufficient compensation. she longed to be known as a serious and accomplished poet, although her forte was really as a spinner of tales. late in life and late in her career, she was awarded the levinson prize for poetry in 1993. with the recent death of the eminent canadian author, robertson davies, whose deptford trilogy is one of the master-pieces of the 20th century, and the passing of may sarton, the literary world and those who love it are reeling from the double blow. like large trees, literary giants take a long time to grow, and in the interim, there are fewer places to rest in the shade and read. as a final gift, may sarton shares with us the many books she was reading as well as her opinion of them. for this and her own books, we are grateful. awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 3, summer 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. 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mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word 2. gender differences of perceived leadership skills among saudi students.docx advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 11 advancing women in leadership vol. 34, pp. 11-18, 2014 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper gender differences of perceived leadership skills among saudi students neva helena alexander, hala guta, gregory poole neva alexander: prince mohammad bin fahd university, email: nalexander@nevalliance.com hala asmina guta: prince mohammad bin fahd university, email: hguta@nevalliance.com gregory poole: prince mohammad bin fahd university, email: gpoole@nevalliance.com accepted june 2, 2014 the aim of this study is to examine female participation in saudi labor market as leaders. the leadership skills with which students in saudi universities and colleges can how educational institutions make their students career ready. however, considering the low female participation in the saudi labor market, exploring the gender differences in leadership skills is equally crucial as the leadership skills acquired in higher education institution can significantly influence employment opportunities. in addition, the gender differences in perceived leadership skills is the fact that the social roles assigned to women in saudi society bear great significance on how they perceive their skills, which will be discussed further in the discussion portion of this paper. keywords: management, self-perceived leadership, gender, women, higher education introduction the middle east has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. the realities of youth unemployment in this region have been a concern for governments, policy makers, and scholars. as of 2010, one in every four youth in the region was unemployed (international labor organization [ilo], 2011). the problem that faces the region is not only the high unemployment rates but also low labor force participation rates, resulting in very low employment-to-population ratios. according to the ilo’s (2011) report on global unemployment trends, the middle east employment-to-population ratio was 45.4% in 2010, meaning that less than half of the working-age populations actually are employed. however, in saudi arabia, the working population-to-population ratio stands at 31.2%, much lower than the regional average (central department of statistics and information, 2012). that makes the situation more adverse in the kingdom. although the kingdom of saudi arabia has been witnessing a steady growth of involvement of saudi youth in the job market, the youth unemployment rate remained at 30.2% in 2009— three times the national unemployment rate in the kingdom (ilo, 2011). a number of factors contribute to the youth employment situation and their participation in the labor force. the literature has suggested that the middle east region has witnessed an increase in youth population, creating a youth bulge, consequently contributing to the increase in youth unemployment (roudi, 2011). in addition, female participation in the labor market remains particularly low at 15% (ilo, 2011). to tackle the issue of youth unemployment, the saudi government intensified its efforts to enhance the contribution of the national saudi workforce in various sectors. one of the country’s strategic objectives is to develop the youth capacity to contribute to the kingdom’s social and economic development (ministry of economy and planning, 2010). as of 2008, saudi youth (age 18-24) represented 35% of the country’s working force. thus, it is not surprising that the saudi government gives special attention to the role of youth in the kingdom’s development plans, as this population sector represents the future generation of the country’s professionals. in 2010, the saudi government approved the kingdom’s ninth development plan—a 4-year economic plan that stipulates the development approaches to be followed for the period from 2010 to 2014 (ministry of economy and planning, 2010). the ninth development plan (2010-2014) specified certain measures to enable saudi youth to develop certain skills to ensure their success as active professionals within the national labor force. one area of interest is leadership. the ninth development plan emphasized providing education that “competes for leadership and contributes to building the knowledge society and meets requirements of socioeconomic and environmental development” (ministry of economy and planning, 2010, p. 412). these measures are in line with the advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 12 2008 world bank report, which called for an overhaul of the educational system in the middle east and northern africa to a system that delivers “the new skills and expertise necessary to excel in a more competitive environment” (p. 84). for that reason, an in-depth investigation of the leadership skills that saudi students are acquiring in universities and colleges becomes necessary to understand how educational institutions are preparing students for the job market. however, considering the low female participation in the saudi labor market, exploring the gender differences in leadership skills is equally crucial as the leadership skills acquired in higher education institution can significantly influence employment opportunities. another reason for exploring the gender differences in perceived leadership skills is the fact that the social roles assigned to women in saudi society bear great significance on how they perceive their skills, which will be discussed further in the discussion portion of this paper (burke & collins, 2001). the kingdom of saudi arabia was founded in 1932 by king abdul aziz ibn abdul rahman al saud through unification of the kingdoms of najd and hijaz. the kingdom occupies 80% of the arabian peninsula covering two million square kilometers of area. the kingdom is bordered by the arabian gulf, united arab emirates, and qatar on the east; the red sea on the west; kuwait, iraq, and jordan on the north; and yemen and oman on the south. the saudi population was estimated to be over 27 million in 2010 with a growth rate of 3.2%, which is one of the highest in the region. males make up 50.9% of the total population, while females make up 49.1% of the population. non-saudi residents are estimated to be 31% of the population (central department of statistics and information, 2010). it is worth noting that the percentage of citizens less than 24 years of age is more than 62%. the number of high school graduates has increased by 443% in the period of 19932008 (ministry of higher education, 2009). arabic is the official language, and islam is the official religion. traditionally, like most of the countries in the islamic world, education in saudi arabia took place in the kuttab, a form of qur’anic school, in which children were taught qur’an, hadith (prophet sayings), sunnah (prophet teachings), and the fundamentals of islamic teaching. females were taught mostly by private tutors in the confinement of their homes (alexander, 2012; hamdan, 2005). the establishment of the saudi modern educational system can be traced back to just before the establishment of the kingdom. the first government school was established in 1928. however, it was not until 1939 that the modern educational system of saudi arabia was fully institutionalized. the demand for education continued to grow as the population grew. the number of elementary schools reached 182 in 1949, with a total enrollment of 21,409 students compared to a little more than 2,000 students in 1939 (abdulkareem, 2012; ministry of higher education, 2009). female education started much later in the kingdom with the first girls school opening in riyadh in 1960 (hamdan, 2005). the education system in saudi arabia is primarily governed by four entities: the ministry of education, the ministry of higher education, the general presidency of girls’ education, and the general organization for technical education and vocational training. the ministry of higher education became an autonomous entity in 1975 to face the increasing numbers of enrollment in both general and higher education. according to onsman (2012), the kingdom’s education system includes more than 24,000 schools and a large number of colleges and several training institutions . . . the higher education system has expanded to include 24 government universities, 18 primary school teacher’s colleges for men, 80 primary school teacher’s colleges for women, 7 colleges and institutes for health, 12 technical colleges, and 24 private universities and colleges. (p. 512) the saudi government allocates over 25% of the total budget to education, including vocational training (onsman, 2012). this is a significant proportion of the national budget, underscoring the government’s commitment to address the demand for education among the country’s children and youth. under the ninth development plan, the saudi government allocated 200.2 billion sar for the higher education sector (ministry of economy and planning, 2010). the generous financial support that the higher education sector enjoys is a result of the kingdom’s vision to build a knowledge-based economy—an economy that is “capable of knowledge production, dissemination and use; where knowledge is a key factor in growth, wealth creation and employment, and where human capital is the driver of creativity, innovation and generation of new ideas” (ministry of economy and planning, 2010, p. 87). consequently, higher education institutions should play a crucial rule in the realization of these plans. the knowledge, skills, and attitude that students acquire and the quality of education they receive are critical factors for determining their competitiveness in the labor market in such an economy. recently, universities and higher education institutions focused on developing students’ leadership skills as a means of preparing them for the job market (shertzer & schuh, 2004; yarrish, zula, & davis, 2010). this trend is motivated by the fact that leadership skills are not innate but acquired. students are not born leaders, but they can be taught and mentored to be leaders (fertman & van linden, 1999). indeed, leadership is one of the important skills younger youth need to acquire in order to succeed in their professional lives. gordon (1995) articulated, “career advancement opportunities . . . will be greatest for those who developed, practiced, and refined leadership skills as part of their educational preparation” (p. 3). research has confirmed that there is a relationship between education and leadership skills. for instance, hobbs and spencer (2002) found that students’ participation in educational program improved their perceived leadership skills. similarly, alexander (2011) learned that female students’ perceived leadership skills improved after enrolling in a leadership class. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 13 zeldin and camino (as cited in alexander, 2011) identified five areas of competency that youth need to develop as indicators to leadership skills: (a) communication—persuasive argumentation, public speaking/writing, and participation of others; (b) teamwork—respecting others, performing roles of both leader and follower, building on strengths, and having a commitment to free group input and expression; (c) personal identity—understanding the relationship between oneself and the community, having pride in being a member of a larger group, being aware of areas for self-improvement, and taking responsibility for one’s actions and the resulting consequences; (d) professionalism—demonstrating tactfulness, understanding protocols, applying appropriate dress and action given appraisal of context, delivering quality work, and positively presenting oneself to others; and (e) project management—setting goals/developing action steps, facilitating meetings, reflecting, and distinguishing between one’s interests and community needs. the literature on leadership skills and self-perception of these skills has suggested that there are differences among both genders of their perceived skills (burke & collins, 2001; eagly & karau, 1991; yarrish et al., 2010). a meta-analysis of the relationship between gender and leadership skills found that in groups without a leader, men emerged as leaders to a greater extent than women. however, it is more likely for women to emerge as social leaders than men (eagly & karau, 1991). moreover, a meta-analysis of 58 studies suggests that while gender plays a role in leadership perception and effectiveness, organizational setting, leadership skills, and training also play a significant role. eagly, karau, and makhijani (1995) concluded that men tend to fare better when leadership is defined in masculine terms, such as military settings, while women performed better when leadership is defined in less masculine terms, such as educational settings roles. on self-perception of leadership skills, yarrish et al. (2010) concluded that there are significant differences in perceived leadership skills between males and females. according to their study, females perceived cognitive and interpersonal/intrapersonal skills as more important than did the male participants. methodology the current investigation sought to evaluate the effect of gender on perceived leadership skills among saudi college students. perceived leadership was measured using the leadership skills inventory (lsi) first developed at iowa state university in 1980 by carter and townsend (sargent, pennington, & sitton, 2003). the five subscales of the lsi— working with groups, understanding self, communicating, making decisions, and leadership—were also evaluated in the context of gender to determine differences as related to these variables. descriptive data for the sample, including age, number of past leadership experiences, and current major, were also collected. research questions 1. describe the characteristics of college students completing the leadership skills inventory. 2. determine if there is a difference in overall selfperceived leadership skills between male and female college students. 3. determine if there is a difference in the self-perceived ability to work with groups between male and female college students. 4. determine if there is a difference in self-perceived understanding of self between male and female college students. 5. determine if there is a difference in self-perceived communication skills between male and female college students. 6. determine if there is a difference in self-perceived decision-making capability between male and female college students. 7. determine if there is a difference self-perceived leadership ability between male and female college students. hypotheses using the seven objectives, six were translated into hypotheses to evaluate perceived leadership skill differences in male and female college students. the hypotheses follow: h1: there is no difference in overall self-perceived leadership skills between male and female college students. h2: there is no difference in the self-perceived ability to work with groups between male and female college students. h3: there is no difference in self-perceived understanding of self between male and female college students. h4: there is no difference in self-perceived communication skills between male and female college students. h5: there is no difference in self-perceived decisionmaking capability between male and female college students. h6: there is no difference self-perceived leadership ability between male and female college students. research design the current investigation employed a quantitative, nonexperimental, correlational design via a survey administered online completed by 230 students. quantitative research follows a deductive paradigm in which data are collected and analyzed to prove or disprove a hypothesis (greener, 2011). non-experimental research utilizes a descriptive framework in which the goal is to provide an accurate evaluation of a situation or phenomenon (muijs, 2004). the approach does not attempt to evaluate cause–effect relationships (e.g., causality). rather, non-experimental research seeks to identify the relationships that exist in a given situation and, if appropriate, describe the relationship between these variables (johnson & christensen, 2010). based on this foundation, the use of correlation to analyze the data provides a logical foundation for describing the relationships between variables without advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 14 demonstrating causality (brewerton & millward, 2001). data were collected using an online survey (i.e., lsi). surveys are widely used in non-experimental research to collect standardized information from a representative sample of the population (johnson & christensen, 2010). the dependent variables for this investigation were measured using the lsi. dependent variables included self-perceived leadership ability (total score from the lsi) and self-perceived abilities from the five subscales of the lsi—working with groups, understanding self, communicating, making decision, and leadership. the independent variable measured for the study was gender with number of previous leadership experiences evaluated as a covariate for the research. saudi college students from a wide range of educational disciplines (i.e., majors) were surveyed in an effort to provide a heterogeneous sample. because the research employed a nonexperimental approach, random assignment of participants to specific groups was not employed. correlational research a review of correlational research indicates that this method is often viewed as less substantive when compared with experimental research (goodwin, 2009). even though this perception exists, goodwin (2009) asserted that correlational research plays an important and vital role in the development of quantitative investigations and in understanding natural phenomenon. according to this author, experimental research provides a foundation for scholars to manipulate variables and determine the outcome. in comparison, according to goodwin, correlational research facilitates observation of natural trends and tendencies to provide insight into how events unfold in a natural environment. in this process, goodwin argued the researcher garners an understanding of how individuals differ from each other rather than an understanding of the general rules that can be applied to all individuals. data acquired from a correlational study facilitates insight into the degree to which two variables are related (marczyk & dematteo, 2010). marczyk and dematteo (2010) argued that correlations can be either positive or negative; a positive correlation between two variables indicates that the variables change in the same direction, whereas a negative correlation indicates that the variables change in opposite directions. based on the trends noted via correlation, marczyk and dematteo argued that it is possible to make certain predictions about the measured variables in other situations; and even though prediction is possible, the results from a correlational study do not imply causality. population and sample the population for this investigation included all saudi college students currently enrolled in university courses. the sample for the research was drawn from a convenience sample of college students from various universities in saudi arabia agreeing to participate in the research. the convenience sample was used to acquire a broad sample group of both male and female college students. the convenience sample has been noted as a relatively easy method for collecting a sample that is willing to participate in a research study (anderson, sweeney, & williams, 2008). even though the convenience sample provides a high degree of ease for data collection, anderson et al. (2008) noted that this sample cannot be evaluated in terms of its “goodness” (p. 290); in short, the representativeness of the sample cannot be quantified. even though the representativeness of the sample cannot be quantified in the context of the current research, the convenience sample was viewed as the most salient choice for collecting data from students attending different colleges and universities within saudi arabia. diversity created in the sample as a result of attending different universities was intended to increase the heterogeneity of the sample population and increase its representativeness overall. clearly, quantifying the representativeness of the sample is not possible; however, the use of a convenience sample across several different university settings will increase the diversity of the participants. data collection instrument the instrument used for this investigation was the lsi. the lsi consists of 21 statements that review different leadership and life skills for the subject (koch, townsend, & dooley, 2005). the instrument utilizes a 5-point likert scale with 5 = strongly agree, 4 = agree, 3 = undecided, 2 = disagree, and 1 = strongly disagree (koch et al., 2005). based on the rankings provided, the lowest score for the instrument indicating a low level of perceived leadership was 21 with the highest value for the instrument being 105. in addition to providing an overall score for self-perceived leadership ability, the lsi also contains five subscales that provide an assessment of specific areas integral to perceived leadership. these subscales include working with groups, understanding self, communicating, making decisions, and leadership. subscale scores also reflect higher and lower values of self-perception for each of the variables. total scores for each subscale are contingent upon the number of questions for each scale. participant responses acquired from each item for each scale can be averaged to provide a score for each of the subscale areas. for instance, the decision-making subscale included four items, which totaled produced a score of 4-20. the score could be averaged based on the number of items to provide a numeric value for the subscale. table 1 provides an overview of the subscales and questions for the lsi. table 1 subscales for the lsi scale item # statement working with groups 1 i can cooperate and work in a group. 2 i get along with people around me. 4 i believe in dividing the work among group members. 8 i listen carefully to opinions of group members. 12 i believe that group members are advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 15 scale item # statement responsible persons. understanding self 3 i feel responsible for my actions. 5 i understand myself. 13 i am sure of my abilities. 17 i accept who i am. 18 i feel responsible for my decisions. communicating 10 i can lead a discussion. 14 i am a good listener. 19 i can give clear directions. 20 i can follow directions. making decisions 7 i consider all choices before making a decision. 11 i use past experiences in making decisions. 15 i use information in making decisions. leadership 6 i feel comfortable teaching others. 9 i am respected by others my age. 10 i can lead a discussion. 16 i feel comfortable being a group leader. 19 i can give clear directions. 21 i can run a meeting. higher numeric rating of each skill translates into a higher perceived ability in a particular area (koch et al., 2005). subscale score reliabilities have been reported in the literature. in particular, thorp, cummins, and townsend (1998) reported reliabilities for each of the subscales as follows: working with others, 0.75; understanding self, 0.67; communicating, 0.73; making decisions, 0.63; and leadership, 0.83. koch et al. (2005) argued that the reliability of the subscales and the total lsi have subsequently been reviewed by other scholars and have proven to be constant. data collection the online lsi was the principal data collection tool used for this investigation. as previously noted, surveys are widely used in non-experimental research to capture data from a representative sample population (johnson & christensen, 2010). online surveys represent a new platform for dissemination of surveys and data collection. information regarding online surveys indicates that these instruments fall into the broader category of self-administered surveys (rubin & babbie, 2010). online surveys and self-administered surveys have been found to have a host of strengths and weaknesses (rubin & babbie, 2010). according to rubin and babbie (2010), self-administered surveys provide the respondent with the ability to complete the survey at a time and place that is convenient. as a result, more individuals may be willing to participate in this type of survey, increasing response rate. in addition, self-administered surveys often do not require extensive instructions or time to complete; and these surveys are often cheap for the researcher to administer (rubin & babbie, 2010). these issues can also increase participation rates for the survey (rubin & babbie, 2010). even though self-administered surveys can provide a valuable resource for enhancing participation in a research study, rubin and babbie (2010) noted that there are some pertinent drawbacks. in particular, these authors asserted that online surveys to not ensure that the sample is representative of the larger population. because a convenience sample was utilized for this research, recognition of representativeness issues has already been addressed. rubin and babbie also acknowledged that self-administered surveys conducted online will not ensure that all individuals recruited for the study will indeed participate. surveys completed via face-to-face or phone methods will help to ensure that those contacted actually participate in the study. in the present investigation, college students were provided with a web address and asked to complete the lsi online. because participants completed the survey following initial contact with the researcher, it was not possible to determine the number of students contacted for participation that actually completed the online survey. data analysis data for this investigation were recorded via the website through which the lsi was administered to participants. the data captured though the website was evaluated utilizing spss version 18.0 for analysis. the data were evaluated utilizing unpaired t tests for both the entire lsi and each of the subscales. t tests facilitate the analysis of sample means to determine if statistically significant differences in means exist when comparing groups within a sample (campbell, 2011). t tests were used to determine if the mean for lsi scores and subscales was statistically different for each of the two groups (i.e., male and female). a confidence interval of 0.05 was used as a measure to determine the statistical significance of differences in the mean. scores were also evaluated based on the number of leadership experiences reported by each of the participants. t tests were employed to determine statistical differences in means for the lsi and subscale scores. results table 2 demographic profile of respondents variable result (n = 230) age range 19-23 mean 21.1 (sd 0.876) gender male 79 (34%) female 151 (66%) leadership activities none 26 (11%) 1-2 128 (56%) 3-4 45 (20%) 5-6 14 (6%) more than 5 17 (7%) advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 16 table 3 total instrument and subscale scores for females scale m sd median low/high total score 85.0 2.340 83.0 40/100 work in groups 18.3 0.669 17.0 5/25 understanding of self 19.0 0.141 19.0 5/25 perceived communication 17.5 0.443 17.0 4/20 decision making 8.9 0.543 9.0 3/15 perceived leadership 21.3 0.973 21.0 6/30 table 4 total instrument and subscale scores for males scale m sd median low/high total score 88.5 2.090 87.0 42/105 work in groups 16.5 0.579 16.0 5/25 understanding of self 17.2 0.887 17.0 5/25 perceived communication 15.2 1.290 15.0 4/20 decision making 13.2 0.679 13.0 3/15 perceived leadership 26.4 0.998 26.0 6/30 table 5 t test data (probability) for gender scale t sd p total score -1.936 0.5541 0.049 work in groups -6.781 0.4321 0.009 understanding of self -7.765 0.8165 0.014 perceived communication -5.431 0.7654 0.017 decision making -4.212 0.6881 0.022 perceived leadership -3.212 0.9894 0.032 the results provided in this investigation indicate that the differences between means for both the entire survey and each of the subscales are significant at the 0.05 level. while the results indicate that gender differences are important, t tests only measure the statistical significance of the differences between means (motulsky, 2010). only by examining the scores for males and females is it possible to identify where differences exist. based on the data provided in tables 3 and 4, it is possible to see that female college student scored higher in areas of working in groups, understanding of self, and communication. males scored higher in areas of decision making and perceived leadership. although total scale scores were statistically different, the probability is close to the p = 0.05 limit set. overall, the differences between males and females on the lsi are not that substantial. discussion the results of this investigation indicate female college students perceive themselves to be quite adept at working in groups, understanding themselves, and communicating with others when compared with males. however, they do not perceive themselves to be better than males at decision making or overall leadership. to understand the gender differences in perceived leadership skills, the social role theory could give some explanations (eagly, karau, et al., 1995; eagly, wood, & diekman, 2000). the social role theory was developed to understand why males and females behave differently in certain settings. the social role theory suggests gender differences in social behavior results from the society expectations of the social role associated with each gender. generally speaking, “women and men adjust to sex-typical roles by acquiring the specific skills and resources linked to successful role performance and by adapting their social behavior to role requirements” (eagly, wood, et al., p. 126). in other words, people tend to engage in activities and acquire skills that help them to successfully perform tasks that are associated with their social roles. in societies where gender division of labor is prevalent and where men are the owners of property and the traditional breadwinner, it is more likely that male students will adapt to their social role by developing decision-making skills and general leadership. it is also more likely that female expectations of their perceived social role will have an impact on their perceptions about leadership in the labor market. on the other hand, until recently in the saudi society, “it is believed that the role of women was basic to maintaining the structure of the family and therefore of society” (hamdan, 2005, p. 45). the social role that assigned women to be the bearers of the family and society, in general, leads them to acquire skills that are “interpersonally facilitative and friendly behaviors that can be termed communal” (eagly, wood, et al., 2000, p. 126). therefore, it is not surprising that female students perceived themselves as better communicators and better in working in groups—qualities that match their social role. the complications, however, are that in a competitive job market, it is important that female students acquire leadership skills that make them more employable. recommendations the results of this investigation indicate that for female college students there are specific strengths and weaknesses in perceived leadership. while female college students perceive themselves to be quite adept at working in groups, understanding themselves, and communicating with others when compared with males, they do not perceive themselves to be better than males at decision making or overall leadership. in terms of cultivating leadership capabilities in female college students, it is evident that specific areas of focus may be needed to help bolster how females view their leadership capabilities (o’bannon, garavalia, renz, & mccarther, 2010). by developing leadership programs for women in this manner, it may be possible to target specific leadership deficits and improve skills to create well-rounded leaders (debebe, 2009). advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 17 it would also be important for scholars to further investigate the gender differences of leadership skills and determine how social/gender roles as determined in the saudi culture and the aspirations in education sector impact students’ leadership skills in respect to the labor market limitations although the current research provides important insight into perceived leadership skills among saudi college students, there are some limitations to the research. first, the sample size of 230 students is relatively small in comparison with all college students currently enrolled in colleges and universities in saudi arabia. second, participants were drawn from a convenience sample. both of these issues impact the generalizability of the findings to the larger group of saudi college students. thus, while the study does provide insight, it may not fully explicate the role of gender in perceived leadership among all saudi college students references abdulkareem, s. (2012). education development in saudi arabia. retrieved from http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa alexander, n. (2011). teaching leadership to female students in saudi arabia. advancing women in leadership, 31, 199-212. anderson, d. r., sweeney, d. j., & williams, t. a. (2008). statistics for business and economics (10th ed.). mason, oh: thompson. brewerton, p., & millward, l. (2001). organizational research methods: a guide for students and researchers. thousand oaks, ca: sage. burke, s., & collins, k. (2001). gender differences in leadership styles and management skills. women in management review, 16(5), 244-257. campbell, m. j. (2011). statistics at square one (11th ed.). new york, ny: wiley. central department of statistics and information. (2010). statistical yearbook. kingdom of saudi arabia: ministry of economic and planning. central department of statistics and information. (2012). key indicators. retrieved from http://www.cdsi.gov.sa/english/index.php debebe, g. 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(2009). national report on education development in the kingdom of saudi arabia. a report submitted to the 48th session of the education international conference, geneva, switzerland. motulsky, h. (2010). intuitive biostatistics: a nonmathematical guide to statistical thinking (2nd ed.). new york, ny: oxford university press. muijs, d. (2004). doing quantitative research in education with spss. thousand oaks, ca: sage. o’bannon, d. j., garavalia, l., renz, d. o., & mccarther, s. m. (2010). successful leadership development for women stem faculty. leadership and management in engineering, 10(4), 167-173. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 18 onsman, a. (2012). dismantling the perceived barriers to the implementation of national higher education accreditation guidelines in the kingdom of saudi arabia. journal of higher education policy and management, 32(5), 511-519. roudi, f. (2011). youth population and employment in the middle east and north africa: opportunity or challenge? paper resented at the united nations expert group meeting on adolescents, youth and development, population division, department of economic and social affairs united nations secretariat, new york, ny. retrieved from http://www.un.org/esa/population/meetings/egmadolescents/p06_roudi.pdf rubin, a., & babbie, e. r. (2010). research methods for social work (7th ed.). belmont, ca: brooks/cole. sargent, s. d., pennington, p., & sitton, s. (2003). development leadership skills through capstone experiences. retrieved from eric database. (ed480969) shertzer, j. e., & schuh, j. h. (2004). college student perceptions of leadership: empowering and constraining beliefs. naspa journal, 42(1), 111-131. thorp, l., cummins, r., & townsend, c. d. (1998). women’s self-perceived leadership skills in a collegiate agricultural education course. journal of agricultural education, 39(1), 55-62. world bank. (2008). the road not travelled: education reform in the middle east and north africa. washington, dc: world bank. yarrish, k., zula, k., & davis, e. (2010). an exploration of differences of leadership perceptions related to a student’s gender within the college of business at a small liberal arts institution. paper presented at the conference of the european applied business research (eabr)and the european college teaching & learning (etlc), dublin, ireland. retrieved from http://www.cluteinstitute.com/proeedings/2010_dublin_ etlc_articles/article%20367.pdf. educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 86 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 86-101, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper iron sharpens iron: exploring the experiences of female college student leaders paige haber paige haber is an assistant professor in the department of counseling, leadership, adult education & school psychology texas state universitysan marcos e-mail: paige.haber@gmail.com accepted december 11, 2010 this qualitative study explored a small sample of female college students’ perceptions of their experiences in leadership positions. specifically the researcher examined the women’s leadership styles and the factors that influenced how they lead. additionally, the researcher focused on how gender may relate to the women’s experiences. basic interpretive and descriptive qualitative research methods were employed. data were collected through in-depth individual interviews, a focus group, and participant journals. participants included four female students at a medium-sized, religiously affiliated private university who held significant leadership roles in student organizations. results revealed that the participants employed either a relationshiporiented, task-oriented, or hybrid approach to leading. additional themes emerged around influences on the women’s approaches to leadership, with particular emphasis on the role of the larger environment in impacting students’ leadership behaviors, and the role gender plays in their leadership experiences. this study can provide insight into the landscape of young women’s leadership today and help begin to fill the research gap that currently exists about college student women holding formal leadership roles and how to support these leaders. key words: women, gender, college students, leadership positions, leadership styles introduction as gender roles and expectations continue to gain attention in american society, there is an increased focus on both women‟s representation in leadership positions and their approaches to leadership (eagly & carli, 2007). while women‟s presence in the workforce, enrollment in higher education, and attainment of supervisory positions continue to dramatically increase, and in many cases exceed that of men, there is still a significant disparity between women and men holding top leadership positions that carry with them substantial authority (eagly & carli, 2004, 2007; helfat, harris, & wolfson, 2006). in addition to the disparity of the number of women in top leadership positions, there are a number of challenges that women face when in these roles. research demonstrates that women in top leadership positions face challenges in balancing their preferred leadership styles with followers‟ expectations while in leadership roles (eagly & carli, 2007). while women‟s leadership styles and approaches tend to be more collaborative, participative, and democratic than the leadership styles of most men (dugan, komives, & segar, 2008; eagly & carli, 2007; haber & komives, 2009; smith, 1997), women in top leadership, particularly in male-dominated industries, can feel pulled to adopt more masculine, autocratic, and directive leadership styles (eagly & carli, 2004, 2007; moran, 1992). this is a tricky double bind that women must face, as acting more assertive and directive is often met with resistance from both male and female colleagues; men, however, do not normally confront such resistance (driskell, olmstead, & salas, 1993; eagly & carli, 2007). women leaders also face challenges in their roles with stereotyping, experiencing harassment, feeling excluded, and feeling alone and tokenized (edmondson bell & nkomo, 2003). although women face the challenges of under-representation in top leadership roles and must often confront and manage gender norms, expectations, and even harassment while in these roles, there is evidence that the playing field is gradually being leveled. women are gaining access to and increasingly assuming top leadership roles (helfat et al., 2006), just as men are assuming more domestic responsibilities (galinsky, aumann, & bond, 2009). additionally, androgynous leadership styles that reflect a combination of masculine and feminine characteristics are more accepted and, even, valued than ever advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 87 before (eagly & carli, 2007; northouse, 2007). women‟s more democratic and transformational approaches to leadership have proven to be crucial to both organizational effectiveness (eagly & carli, 2004; helgesen, 1990; smith, 1997) and individual success (heffernan, 2007). these steady changes could lead to an environment that is more open to women in top leadership roles and women‟s ways of leading. one area that is under-researched but that could conceivably promote understanding of the future of women‟s leadership in society is the experience of college student women leaders. examining the leadership styles and influences of these younger women may help us gain a greater understanding of women‟s leadership today and what we may expect in the future. the college environment provides many opportunities to be involved with different organizations and hold formal leadership roles in these organizations (astin, 1997). additionally, unlike the upper ranks of the business world, the college environment is a conceivably more empowering context for women leaders, particularly as women in higher education outnumber men. the topic of female collegiate leaders is not completely uncharted territory, of course. recent research shows that college women student leaders demonstrate greater competence and ability to engage in more democratic leadership (a form of leadership that is increasingly associated with organizational success) than men (dugan, et al., 2008; eagly & carli, 2004; haber & komives, 2009; helgesen, 1990; shankman, haber, facca, & allen, 2010; smith, 1997), though men tend to have greater confidence and self-efficacy in their ability to lead (dugan & komives, 2007; kezar & moriarty, 2000). while the existing research sheds light on women‟s preferred leadership style and their relative confidence in their ability to lead, it does not focus specifically on college student women who hold formal leadership roles. there is a lack of information on how college women in leadership roles exercise leadership and the various factors, such as follower expectations and gender roles and norms, influence how they engage in leadership. a further examination of the leadership experiences of college women leaders can contribute to a better understanding of women‟s leadership today, with a particular focus on younger, college aged women. this information can also inform the ways in which college women leaders are supported and served on college campuses and how college student educators can help prepare these women for their leadership lives post-college. the study and its methods in this study, i sought to understand the experiences of a small number of women leaders. specifically, i examined college student women‟s leadership styles, the factors that influence the ways in which they lead, and what ways, if any, gender influences their leadership experiences. due to the exploratory nature of this study, qualitative research methods were used; qualitative methods allow for studying social phenomena through the perspectives of the people who are being studied, understanding in depth and in detail the potential complexity of one‟s experiences, and consideration of the larger context (glesne, 2006; patton, 2002). in this study, the larger context was made up of the organizations, organizational members, and campus community in which the women led. in this study, i employed basic interpretive and descriptive qualitative research methods, whereby “the researcher is interested in understanding how participants make meaning of a situation or phenomenon, this meaning is mediated through the researcher as instrument, the strategy is inductive, and the outcome is descriptive” (merriam, 2008, p. 6). this methodological approach encompasses characteristics of a number of more specific qualitative research methods. the methods of this study do not comfortably fit within one methodological approach and instead reflect and are informed by aspects a few different types of qualitative research such case study methodology (four specific cases of women‟s leadership experiences), ethnography (examining the culture and behaviors of women student leaders from their perspective), and phenomenology (gaining deeper understanding of the women leaders‟ experiences and the phenomena of college women‟s leadership) (merriam, 2008; patton, 2002). although it was not the intention of this initial study, the findings may serve as preliminary work to be built upon and can lead to a more complete ethnographic study or a grounded theory. the participants were four college student women who held significant leadership positions in different student organizations on a medium-sized, private, religiously affiliated university in the southwest united states. one woman was president of a sorority, one was captain of an athletic team, one was vice-president for a student government organization, and one was the president of a cultural organization. two of these organizations (cultural organization and student government organization) were co-ed and two are all-women (sorority and athletic team). all four of the women were seniors. two identified themselves as white, one identified as asianamerican, and one identified as native hawaiian. in addition to holding these formal leadership roles, each participant had taken at least one leadership course in college. the four participations were selected through purposeful, maximumvariation sampling; i identified them for the study based on my knowledge of the students and their prominent leadership roles on campus. the small number of participants and varied leadership experiences was intentional, with an effort to conduct “an in-depth, information-rich understanding” (klenke, 2008, p. 10) of college women‟s leadership experiences. data were gathered in fall 2009 through a demographic information sheet, open-ended qualitative interviews using the general interview guide approach, a focus group interview with three of the participants, and participant journaling. the interview and focus group protocols were validated through soliciting colleague review and feedback. additionally, i advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 88 conducted a mock interview with a peer. this process led to reorganization and rephrasing of some of the questions. the one-on-one interview protocol included 10 questions that focused on the nature of the students‟ leadership experiences and the organizations in which they lead, their motivation for taking on their leadership roles, their goals for their position or organization, their approaches to leadership, how they interact with others in their group, how others react to their leadership, expectations that they face from other on how to lead, and messages they have heard growing up that have influenced their leadership (appendix a). this initial interview purposefully did not include the variable of gender in the interview protocol until the last question, which focused on how, if at all, they felt gender norms or expectations have influenced the ways in which they exercise leadership. leaving the topic of gender to the end of the interview allowed for gender to emerge if it was in fact an important factor for the participants. the focus group interview examined the successes and challenges the women have faced in their roles and the perceived influence of gender on their leadership experiences and consisted of three main questions (appendix b). additionally, to help minimize researcher bias (i am an instructor of leadership and study women‟s leadership) and to triangulate the data, the focus group interview included a member check of the initial findings and the interview. the member check consisted of sharing of initial findings and supporting quotes from the one-on-one interviews. the participants discussed the findings and had the opportunity to add any additional information to the data that was presented. one of the women was unable to participate in the focus group interview and instead shared her experiences in a second follow-up interview. the data collected from the interviews and focus group were triangulated with the participants‟ journals. these journals consisted of the participants‟ answers to six reflection questions that related to leading events or meetings in their organizations (appendix c). the questions focused on expectations for the events or meetings and their experiences of the event or meeting after the fact. the participants completed the journal questions multiple times (ranging from two times to five times depending on how many meetings or events they led) during a three week period. interview and focus group tapes were transcribed by the researcher, and data were analyzed through content analysis procedures, leading to the identification of core patterns, themes, and categories through thematic and axial coding (boyatzis, 1998; klenke, 2008). the analysis included a focus on both the participant perspective (what the participants identified) and the researcher perspective (what is observed and concluded) as well as manifest and latent coding (boyatzis, 1998). initial coding categories were identified prior to the data collection and were revised after the initial data collection from the one-on-one interviews. matrices were created and used for capturing and examining quotes for the different themes and accompanied saliency of themes; matrices are helpful tools in organizing the data in way that can help identify themes and patterns that may not have otherwise been identified when examining cases or categories individually (patton, 2002). findings this section discussed the key findings from the research with a focus on identified patterns and themes from the research and key quotes and examples where relevant. the findings related to the women‟s‟ leadership approaches focused on relationshiporiented behaviors, task-oriented behaviors, balancing task and relationshiporiented behaviors, empowerment, and a feeling of responsibility to the members and the organization. findings on the influences on the women‟s leadership approaches emphasized behaviors of past leaders in the organization, the larger organizational and environmental context, and messages they heard growing up. throughout the findings section names will be used to identify the four participants. the names used are fictional. jessie, participant one, was captain of an athletic team; kara, participation two, was president of a cultural organization; anna, participant three, was president of a sorority; and christy, participant four, was vice-president for a student government organization (see table 2). leadership approaches each woman had her own unique leadership style and approach; some patterns of similarities emerged across the four women, and some key differences were also identified. the women‟s leadership styles reflected either relationship-oriented or task-oriented behaviors (or in some cases both), balancing relationship-oriented and task-oriented behaviors, empowerment, and responsibility to the members and organization (table 1). relationship and task-oriented behaviors. each of the four women identified the importance of focusing on the people and relationships in the organization and the tasks required within their roles in their organizations. likely due in part to the students‟ familiarity with leadership through taking a leadership course, a few of the students actually used this language (relationships and tasks), and others used similar language, such as working with people and accomplishing goals. the women described their leadership approaches and behaviors with varying degrees of focus on relationships and tasks. they each expressed at least some focus on both relationship and task in their preferred and more natural ways of leading as well as in the ways in which they led in their organizations. two of the women were much more focused on relationships than tasks, one woman was heavily task-oriented, and one woman reflected more moderate levels of both task and relationship. ana and christy, while leading in their advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 89 organizations, felt a need to adopt slightly different behaviors than their more natural ways of leading, which is discussed in more depth later in this section. table 2 provides a landscape of the women‟s approaches to leadership both in their natural inclination to lead and the ways in which they described how they led in thee organizations. relationship-oriented behaviors. the category of relationship-oriented behaviors included the four sub-behaviors of: (a) providing support, building relationships, and bringing people together, (b) creating a positive mood and energy in the group, (c) avoiding conflict, and (d) de-emphasizing the position or role. each sub-behavior is discussed in this section along with sample quotes from the participants. providing support to group members, building relationships, and bringing people together were prominent sub-behaviors within the relationship-oriented category and were emphasized by each of the women. kara outreached to many first-year students who joined the group to help them feel comfortable and included. similarly, christy focused heavily on building relationships within the group: “i wanted to use my style to bring everyone together… so that they know they have a support system…. i tell them i am their support system.” there was also a strong focus on the importance of creating a positive and up-beat mood in the group. for example, jessie recognized how the mood and energy on her team affected the team‟s cohesion and ability to perform: “[part of my role is] having fun and putting smiles on people‟s faces and being very upbeat.” anna discussed that during her term as president of her sorority she adopted more relationship-focused behaviors such as promoting a positive energy in the group. in reflecting on a meeting in which she allowed the mood to lighten, she shared: “everyone was laughingit was just the complete mood of the whole room and we‟ve never really had that before and that was just really interesting…everyone felt really motivated and almost every person attended the next meeting.” anna recognized the benefits of having a positive mood in the group. awareness of the mood in an organization and the importance of creating a positive mood were important for all four women, even for the women who tended to be more task-oriented. the avoidance of conflict was also a prominent theme among the two women who were more relationship focused. jessie avoided a member of her team when she had a conflict with her: “i am also a very unconfrontational personi just avoid it… it got to the point that i was pulling back from the team. whenever i was around her i would get all this built up negative energy and i just would pull back.” kara shared: “i deal with [conflict or difficulties in the group] in certain ways that i just suck it up.” rather than holding her group members accountable, she avoided conflict by taking on additional responsibility herself within the organization. kara eventually could not handle the additional pressure and responsibility and ended up resigning from her position of president during the course of this study. both jessie and kara recognized that avoiding conflict was not necessarily the best way to handle the situation, but they felt that they did not know what else to do. the final sub-behavior that was prominent for the two women who were more relationship focused was de-emphasizing their position or role. this was particularly the case for kara, who was in her second year of being president of her organization. for the second term kara selected a co-president to lead with her (which was the first time this had been done in her organization) and encouraged the rest of the executive board to take on more prominent leadership roles. she shared her intention behind this: “i want them to know: yes, i am the president, but everyone has a role in this club and everyone is part of it….i just want everyone to be able to work together.” kara did not like the title of president and downplayed the role. people looked to her to tell them what to do, and she did not like this expectation or responsibility. jessie did not deemphasize her role as much as kara did, but she did stress the desire to all work together, taking the full responsibility of the team off of her. she recognized that, regardless of role, everyone on the team could help by “cheering each other on, yelling each others‟ name, and feeding off of each others‟ positive energy.” all four of the women stressed the importance of other leaders and roles within the organization, acknowledging that they cannot do it all on their own and wanting others to step up. task-oriented behaviors. the sub-behaviors associated with the task-oriented behaviors category were in many ways opposite of those sub-behaviors characteristic of the relationship-oriented behaviors category. in addition to reporting at least some focus on relationship-oriented behaviors, anna and christy stressed task-oriented behaviors in describing how they led in their organizations. the ways in which jessie and kara described their leadership approaches did not reflect any of the sub-behaviors of the task-oriented category. the category of task-oriented behaviors includes leading with a direct style, confronting conflict, and establishing boundaries for their role. these themes are presented below with sample participant quotes. anna‟s leadership approach was naturally more direct than the other participants, and she was aware of her approach and the potential downfalls of this approach when leading women: i am very direct. i take feedback well and expect people to tell me what they like and what they don‟t like, so that is the approach i use with others and that didn‟t work with everyone… that was my biggest concern in leading a group of women because i feel i almost have a more masculine side of leading, where i am direct and tell how it how it is, and basically women don‟t respond to that approach [very well]. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 90 she recognized throughout her term that she needed to buffer her leadership style in ways that she was not as direct. while anna believed that the women in her sorority tended to dislike her style, she felt that they appreciated it when she was operating in a direct manner when representing the sorority to external groups and was standing up for the chapter. christy‟s preferred way of leading was not as direct as anna‟s, but she did feel the need to adopt more direct leadership approaches when leading her student government board. she viewed being direct as being honest and open: “it doesn‟t help to try to hide the truth with glitter and sparkleswhen you tell the truth you are more appreciated for it than hiding part of the truth.” throughout her term she gradually shifted her style to focus more on holding people accountable, setting expectations, and establishing additional structure within the organization. in contrast to kara and jessie‟s intentional avoidance of conflict, both anna and christy were comfortable confronting conflict. upon recognizing that her board was getting out of hand during the meetings and not following through with responsibilities, christy confronted the group at a meeting. she explained how she approached the situation: “i calmly and rationally told them that i‟m their supervisor that they need to update me... i tried to express how bad it makes me look because i‟m just trying to help them.” as the semester progressed she became more direct in her meetings with the members to tell them when they were not meeting expectations. anna confronted conflict both within the chapter in holding her members accountable and outside of the chapter when confronting others. she shared a situation in which a fraternity was acting inappropriately to a member of her organization and how she responded: “one girl was really humiliated by a fraternity and i went into the chapter meeting and approached their entire chapter...people were really happy that i could confront other people if there was something going on.” both christy and anna recognized that confronting conflict was important for their effectiveness in their roles and for the success of their organizations. another prominent behavior prevalent for the two women with more task-oriented styles was establishing and maintaining boundaries around their roles. both anna and christy identified that they must behave in a certain way when in their leadership role and created professional distance between themselves and their members. anna was intentional about the type of president she wanted to be in her sorority and was very aware of her boundaries when she was in the president role: “when i am in the role of chapter president i need to be in that in-thebox, authority, mature, professional role, but if we‟re just out to dinner with friends i can loosen up a little and have fun.” when conducting one-on-one meetings with the members of her organization, christy also set boundaries; she determined what types of conversations should take place in the meetings, placing a greater emphasis on her role of supervisor rather than friend. in particular, she wanted to keep the focus on the roles and responsibilities of her supervisees and described her boundaries on what was to be discussed in one-on-one meetings “when they ask me about how i‟m doing, i say, not it‟s not about me, it‟s about you… we can talk after the meeting, but right now it‟s not about me, it‟s about you.” both anna and christy recognized that there was a time and place for focusing on tasks, primarily when they were operating within their role of leader in the organization. additional approaches. in addition to the relationshiporiented and task-oriented behaviors discussed above, additional approaches to leadership emerged. each of the women demonstrated evidence of balancing task and relationship, valuing and promoting empowerment, and having a sense of responsibility to others and the organization. these themes are presented below along with sample quotes from the participants that reflect the themes. although the women tended to be more focused on relationship or more focused on task, they each stressed the importance of having a balance of the two. the women agreed that while relationships and tasks were both important, building relationships and cohesion in a group was the most important. without strong relationships, nothing would get done and the experience would not be very meaningful. jessie noted: “we do have [things to do]… but we can‟t even get there if we don‟t have cohesion on our team.” anna stressed the importance of balancing relationship and task: “i always try to find a good balance between work and play, [it is] good to not only focus on business every weekwe try to mix in fun.” each of the women struggled in balancing relationships and tasks, as there were downfalls to focusing too much on one or the other. regardless of leadership orientation, each of the women stressed the importance of empowering the members of their organizations and felt it was their responsibility to do so. kara shared that she was good at identifying things that people may be good at and finding opportunities for people to lead within the organization and noted: “people have thanked me for giving them the opportunity to step up when they don‟t have the courage to take initiative themselves.” anna‟s approach to empowerment revolved more around shared decision making within the organization, recognizing that “[the members] would have more trust in us and ownership in the whole organization if they knew what was going on or have a say in a decision.” at times, anna would bring a decision to the whole chapter, even when it could have been decided by her or by the executive board. the focus on empowering group members relates to the last finding identified for this research question: a sense responsibility to the members and the organization. the women felt a responsibility for their members, the organization, or in one case, the student body. this was a motivating factor for each of the women in assuming their leadership roles and an influence in how they chose to lead. christy wanted to give back to the university: advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 91 i wanted to serve the student body and make them feel satisfied with the events on campus. when i was a freshman i experienced a lot of student apathy, so i thought my senior year would be a great time to really influence that uplifting school spirit. one reason why anna decided to run for president was that she did not have enough trust in other members of her organization to lead the organization in the direction where she felt it needed to go. kara was motivated to help build a welcoming community for members of her cultural group on campus, and she wanted to strengthen the organization and help move it in a positive direction. jessie assumed her leadership role in part to serve as a big sister and support for the younger women on her team. she also stressed that it was important for her to instill a sense of responsibility in every member of the organization for the success of the team. she called this iron sharpens iron, whereby “each player on our team is the iron…. in order for us to get stronger, we have to sharpen each other, we have to feed off of each others‟ power to get to the next point.” while there was some sign of individual motivation to gain leadership experience in two of the women, the primary focus and motivation for the women was serving the organization and members of the organization or campus community. leadership influences the women‟s responses to questions about what has influenced how they lead can be categorized in three ways. these three categories are: (a) behaviors of past leaders in the organization, (b) organizational and environmental context, and (c) messages they heard growing up. each category is explained with examples below. behaviors of past leaders. for each of the women, experiencing the leadership behaviors of the former leaders in their organizations was both a motivation for taking on their leadership role and an influence on how the women chose to lead. in each case, the women felt a need to purposefully lead differently than past leaders. three of the women wanted to lead in a more relationship-oriented way than their predecessors and wanted to help create a more positive mood in the group. kara, jessie, and christie discussed wanting to create a more friendly and upbeat atmosphere in the group, reflecting on negative experiences and feeling from their organizations in past years. kara shared: “i didn‟t agree with how [past leaders] did things. there was a negative feeling when people walked into the meeting, so i wanted to bring a positive feeling into the club.” anna, on the other hand, wanted to portray a more professional and mature image in the role of president than the past president:“i didn‟t want to be the president that took shots with new members [like i‟d seen before]that‟s not the leadership i wanted to portray.” two of the women who wanted a more positive feeling in their group said that looking back now at their organization since they have assumed the leader role, they see positives in the ways that their more task-oriented predecessors led. jessie shared that the strict focus of the past captain was actually helpful in getting people to follow through and take the role seriously, but she did not appreciate that it caused discomfort and a lack of approachability. similarly, kara said: i had seen past presidents and way they had run things. i didn‟t agree with how they did thingsthere was a negative feeling when people walked into the meeting, so i wanted to bring a positive feeling into the club…now i think i need to be more like them [because they set expectations and people followed through and listened to them]. in these two cases, jessie and kara recognized the downfalls on being too focused on relationships and neglecting to set clear guidelines. organizational and environmental context. the larger organizational and environmental context also influenced how the women led. the two main aspects of an organization that influenced how women led were the gender make-up of the group and the structure and purpose of the group. during the focus group interview, the three women discussed how the gender makeup of the group influences how they would interact with members in their organization. the two women who led all-women groups felt like they could interact with all of their members similarly, while the woman who led the co-ed group shared that she noticed that she interacted with her male and female group members differently, often being more direct with the men than with the women. in discussing how she handled similar situations with men and women she explained: [with the female director] i don‟t want there to be tension because i am kind of upset at her, but for the male director… who did something too that wasn‟t very protocol and unprofessional… i had no problem telling him how it went. for the female director it took a couple one-on-ones to kind of ease her into it where as with the male i told him in two minutes. the structure and purpose of the organization was also a prominent influence in how the women led. anna stressed this when sharing the formal structure and rules that she had to follow based on the national organization requirements. the formal structure of the meeting influenced her leadership style; it also influenced anna to be more focused on being friendly and approachable outside of the meetings, particularly because she was leading an all-women organization. anna explained: in formal meeting – no one in the meeting can talk unless i call on them and people have to address me a certain way in the meeting…there is no eating or drinking and no chitter chatter. if there is i have to bang my gavel on the table and people have to shut up… it is really really formal, and i think it does come advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 92 from the structure of the organization…. i do feel in my role i have to be much more task-oriented and there is no room for relationship [building] when people aren‟t allowed to talk. anna continued to share that she needed to be particularly friendly in leading women. the structure of the organization, her formal role, and the gender makeup of the organization influenced how anna led. christy also felt that the very structured nature of her organization and the nature of the event-planning aspects of her board required a greater focus on managing tasks and making sure things were getting done. knowing that the organization tended to be more task-focused, she felt a need to bring a more personable and relational focus to the organization. in addition to the nature of the specific organizations, there was also evidence that other environmental factors influenced the way they lead. two of the women felt that their group and team environments growing up influenced their styles. anna‟s family is mostly men and she felt this influenced her direct leadership style. in playing sports throughout her life, jessie did not have many group experiences with boys or men; she felt this influenced her more relationship-orientated style. during the focus group interview the three women agreed that being on a campus with a majority female population supported their presence in these top leadership roles. messages from the past. the women identified messages they heard growing up that they felt influenced the way they lead. many of these messages had to do with the importance of serving and including other people. for example, anna constantly heard message growing up to make sure everyone is included and others‟ opinions and ideas are heard. she recalled one of these messages: “you have to be inclusive, everyone needs to be inclusive…even being captain of a dance team, you needed to make sure everyone is on the same page [and] you need to be inclusive and open to all opinions and ideas.” kara remembered from her childhood her mother sharing: “everything starts in the home. if you have peace at home you can take that peace out with you and share it with others and serve others.” the women were socialized to embrace, serve, and include others in their lives and groups. the women also heard messages about qualities they should encompass as a person or leader. jessie heard messages growing up about being focused and responsible, particularly as it related to her participation in athletics. she felt this led her to set high standards for herself. she also recalled the message: “be myself and lead with whatever ways come natural to me.” anna learned a lot from her mother on what type of person and leader she should be: “you have to be able to stand up for yourself…[i think this] came from the fact that my parents were divorced and i did need to stand up for myselfeven to my parents.” jessie heard messages about being true to herself when she is leading, emphasizing morals and values. kara heard messages about realizing and respecting her limits as a leader, recognizing that she can only do so much. many of the messages the messages the women heard affirmed who they were as leaders and people. perceptions about the impact of gender three of the women indicated that they felt gender influenced their leadership experiences. while they agreed that gender played a role in their leadership experiences, they felt it was just one of many factors and was not an overwhelmingly salient factor. one woman did not feel that gender was a significant factor in her experiences. she felt that the members of the organization had the same expectations of her and her copresident, and said: “i don‟t feel i‟m expected to lead in a certain way because i‟m a woman in my club.” she thought that gender could influence leadership, but she did not personally feel that it had. during the one-on-one interviews, gender purposefully was not included in the interview protocol until near the end to see if the variable of gender would emerge on its own. the two women who led in co-ed groups did not mention gender in their responses until prompted, and the two women in all-women groups did discuss their gender and the gender makeup of the group when answering some of the questions. during the focus group interview, the three women who attended discussed gender and identified ways in which they felt gender mattered in their leadership experiences and perceptions of leadership. the ways in which the three women felt that gender did matter fell into three categories: (a) it is different leading men and women, (b) in some cases they are treated differently because they are women, and (c) they lead differently than men would in their role. the women shared some of their own lived experiences as well as their beliefs and opinions about how they think gender matters. for example, anna and jessie, who both led all-women groups, believed that they would lead the group differently if it were co-ed. anna discussed how leading a co-ed group would be different: “i think my leadership experiences could have been different if i was working with men and women…our experiences are a lot different working only with women…my styles would be so different.” while these beliefs are not concrete evidence, there is something to be gained from examining these assumptions. jessie, christy, and anna all believed that they either do use different approaches when leading men or women or would if they also led men (for the women in all-women groups). christy shared a realization in the interview: i actually didn‟t really realize this until now but i actually do [lead men and women differently], i try to direct females a different way… with males, i know that they are very task-oriented, so if i tell them to do it then they‟ll do it. but for females, one of the questions i ask them is „how are you doing? how are advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 93 things going school wise?‟ i have to find a balance it‟s a struggle with the female directors to give them more task orientation. christy recognized that she was more direct and matter-of-fact with the men in her organization and tends to focus more on relationships and being nice with the women in her group. anna shared a similar feeling: i wouldn‟t say i buffer my leadership style at all around men, if anything i‟d say i am more direct…being a leader of women it is just hard to have that direct style of leadership and [you want] to get things done and accomplished but then it‟s 100 women so i‟ve had to be a lot more relationshiporiented than i‟ve wanted to be. i never anticipated trying to spend so much time just sitting and talking to people and letting them vent all of their problems the three women also felt that in some cases they were treated differently or viewed differently than men in similar roles. jessie experienced double standards with gender in athletics and thought that because she is a woman she is not taken as seriously. she felt that there is an expectation that men work and women are at home, which negatively affects her role as an athlete and therefore diminishes her credibility as a leader on a women‟s athletic team. christy felt very well respected as the leader of her board but felt less so when serving on the executive board of the organization with her peers of similar rank. within the executive board she felt that there were struggles around authority and power and felt like she was treated differently because she was a woman. she explained: there have been moments where i do feel like i‟m being treated differently because of gender….like for instance we‟re in exec meeting the males ask mostly each other for advice. i don‟t think it‟s intentional but it may be out of their comfort zone, so they ask the other males. christy also felt that the president treated her differently and unfairly. in an executive board meeting the president she felt attacked and felt that the fact that she was a woman influenced how he treated her: i don‟t see him reacting that way to men in the group… he can be kind of bossy [and] he likes to be sarcastic but it comes across as demeaning….he started acting like that to me and that‟s when i snapped back and said, „not i‟m not going to let you talk to me like this.‟ in contrast, anna and jessie felt that often it is the women in a group who are less supportive of their leadership roles. anna experienced this through an internship with a corporation; she felt women were jealous and treated her differently when she received a promotion while the men were supportive and congratulatory. a final way in which the three women believed gender mattered was their perceptions that they lead differently than men. the women felt that men are more direct, matter-of-fact, and no-nonsense in the way that they lead. jessie felt that the way she leads is “more loving, comforting, and relationship [oriented]” than how she imagines the captain of the men‟s team would lead, which is in “a more black and white way.” christy experienced men as more transactional, avoiding emotions and grudges. the one woman who could not attend the focus group interview, kara, answered questions related to gender in the follow-up interview and had different perceptions of the role of gender than the other three women. she did not feel that gender was an important factor in her leadership experiences. she did not feel that she was expected to lead in a certain way because she is a woman, and she also did not believe she led men and women differently. the only way in which she believed gender mattered was in thinking that people are supportive of her role as president of a cultural organization because people view clubs as “fun things.” she felt people assumed that because she was a woman it made sense that she planned the fun activities while her male executive members would do the “other work.” kara shared that she has heard and knows that women are not treated equally in society. she said: “i don‟t know if it‟s just me or i‟m naïve, and i guess [discrimination or differing expectations] exists but i haven‟t really experienced it and i‟m not going to let that bring me down.” she also recognized that the ways she leads does not challenge the gender norms since she leads with a feminine style. in addition to kara‟s uncertainty about whether gender matters, the other women shared that there were other factors that influenced their leadership that could be misconstrued as being related to gender. for example, christy believed that it was not solely gender that influenced how she led: “i‟m wondering if it‟s more personality based than gender based – i mean it‟s just a combination, i don‟t think it‟s solely gender.” similarly, anna shared that age, along with being a woman, could influence the way she was treated in her internship. they viewed gender as one aspect of self that likely interacts with their personality or other identities. the variable of the larger environment was recognized in determining if gender plays a role in the women‟s leadership experiences. the gender makeup of the group clearly influenced the way in which anna, christy, and jessie led. anna and jessie felt that they were supported in their leadership roles because the group was all women and the leader of their organization therefore must be a woman. anna jokingly shared: “i can‟t be discriminated against for being a woman because i have to be a woman [as president of a sorority].” advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 94 beyond this, though, was the context of the campus environment. all of the women, including kara, felt that the campus was a welcoming and supportive environment for female leaders. they all felt that leading in the “real world” would be different and that they would face more difficulties. christy experienced the college environment as more “feminist…in college it‟s more equal and a more accepting environment for women. in the real world i think there is still a little bit of discrimination. i think college allows for that more accepting environment for all men and women.” anna experienced this first-hand through her internship, recognizing that the college environment was more female-friendly. similarly, kara shared that she thinks that in the “real world” gender norms will be pushed more since it is a more formal setting. discussion the discussion of the findings of this study is presented below. the discussion is arranged around the three main categories of findings. first, the findings about the leadership approaches and behaviors are discussed. next, influences on leadership are discussed. last, findings on role of gender are discussed. leadership approaches and behaviors it is clear that the women in this study felt that focusing on relationships and the members of the group is very important in their approach to leadership; they also agreed that building and maintaining positive relationships in the group was crucial for the success of their organizations. the women stressed the importance of the success of the group (rather than individual success), empowering group members, and making the organization better now and in the future. it was clear that to these women, leadership means something beyond oneself. this served as a motivation for their leadership practice and helped them feel a sense of purpose in their work. the women recognized ways in which they were socialized to live and lead in ways that reflect these assumptions about leadership. these findings on a focus on relationships and embracing a group focus when leading are consistent with research on older women‟s leadership styles (eagly & carli, 2004, 2007; smith, 1997). the findings from this study also add additional depth to the quantitative research on college women‟s leadership styles, which have indicated that college women employ relational leadership approaches significantly more often than men (dugan et al. 2008; haber & komives, 2009; shankman et al., 2010). although this current study does not compare the women leaders‟ approaches to leadership to that of men, it supports the plethora of research on women in the real world and in college, which suggests that women‟s approaches to leadership reflect relational and group-oriented behaviors. with this being said, along with this value of relationships and the group, there was additional evidence that adopting taskoriented behaviors as important and necessary for leading in college organizations. two of the women exhibited these taskoriented behaviors alongside relationship-oriented behaviors, while the two women who were more relationship-oriented struggled in their ability to influence their organization and maintaining respect from their members, which led to recognizing that they needed to do a better job in confronting conflict and holding people accountable. this focus on also employing task-oriented behaviors reflects the research on the benefits of androgynous leadership and the movement in the literature toward more androgynous leadership behaviors embraced by many women (eagly & carli, 2004, 2007; northouse, 2007); two of the women seemed to have embraced this balance of relationships and tasks, while the other two recognized the need and desire to do this. the four women all agreed that there needed to be a healthy balance of relationships and tasks in order to be effective and that there were dangers in leading with too much of a focus on relationship or too much of a focus on task. androgynous leadership approaches are associated with greater leadership effectiveness and promoted within the field of leadership and organizational effectiveness, particularly for women in the real world (appelbaum, audet, & miller, 2004; park, 1997). this focus on androgynous leadership is too supported and recognized by the college women leaders in this study. this consistent theme supports the further promotion of androgynous leadership for both women and men and continued research into the effectiveness and use of androgynous approaches to leadership. the framework of how the women in this study led (see table 1) adds to the literature on how women engage in leadership. the framework presents specific behaviors and approaches that the college women engaged in while leading in their organizations and captures the relationship and task-oriented behaviors and the need to balance those behaviors. using this framework to examine women‟s leadership approaches in other environments outside of the college environment could provide additional insight to women‟s leadership approaches. influences on leadership in examining the influences on women‟s leadership approaches, there was evidence of expressed intentionality in the way that they led based on what they learned through experience. the ways in which they led were purposefully influenced by the way other people have led in the past and their assessment on how effective their predecessors‟ leadership approaches were in leading their groups. the organizations in which the women led and the larger environment in which their organization was situated also influenced the way in which gender played out in their experiences and how they approached leadership. this finding adds to the literature on how the organization and larger context can influence one‟s natural ways of leading. past research indicated that women in top leadership roles and women working in more male-dominated industries can feel the need to adopt more masculine and autocratic leadership styles advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 95 (eagly & carli, 2004, 2007; moran, 1992). this influence was also present for the women in this study. one of the women, christy, adopted more task-oriented behaviors in meetings and when working one-on-one with men because she found that this led to greater effectiveness for the organization and for her role. kara and jessie both recognized the value of embracing more autocratic leadership styles in their organizations, particularly when reflecting on their predecessors‟ styles, but did not themselves embrace them. interestingly, anna, who had a more inherent task-oriented approach to leadership, felt the need to try to adopt more feminine and democratic approaches in her female-dominated organization in order to successfully lead in the organization. these findings suggest that the larger organizational context can influence college women‟s leadership approaches and that the women are aware of this. additional research on the role of the organizational context on women‟s leadership approaches (beyond the college environment) could contribute to a greater understanding of this concept. in addition to recognizing how their organization influenced their leadership approaches, the women also identified that larger campus environment played a role in their leadership experience. they felt that their experiences of leading on a college campus are different than they would be in the real world, noting that the college campus was a more inclusive and female-friendly environment. it would be interesting to examine more directly women‟s experiences leading in these different environments. this could be done through case studies of women leading in different environments, cross sectional design studies, and/or longitudinal research and could shed light onto not only the role of the larger environment, but also gender and potential generational differences in women‟s leadership. having a clearer understanding of how women‟s leadership experiences differ across multiple contexts could provide valuable insight to college student educators in how they can prepare college women for life after college, not only in leadership positions but also in the workforce as a whole. while the women in this study felt that their experiences would differ post-college they did not seem to have given it much consideration. additional insight could be useful in preparing the women more intentionally for leadership outside of the collegiate context. research on women‟s experiences in college and after could also be valuable for organizations wishing to recruit and develop women leaders. an understanding of how the environment influences their experience could lead to better retention, development, and performance. role of gender while three of the four women identified that they felt gender was a significant factor in their leadership experiences, the role of gender did not appear to be as salient for these women as it appears to be in research on older women in the larger society (eagly & carli, 2004, 2007). there was some evidence of being treated differently, being left out, and feeling lonely by christy, which is evident in edmonson bell and nkomo‟s (2003) research on women in top leadership roles. for the most part, though, the women felt empowered and supported in their roles within their organizations and on the college campus. it is important to recognize that two of the organizations in which the women led were all-women organizations and were fairly social in nature. an interesting finding emerged on how gender interacts with leadership for two of the women. they felt like they could be more direct with men than with women without resistance. this is contrary to the idea that men may not react well to women‟s more direct styles (driskell, olmstead, & salas, 1993; eagly & carli, 2007) and supports the research that when adopting more direct styles women face resistance from other women (driskell et al.; eagly & carli). follower supportiveness from men and women is a concept worth further exploration in college women and older women. as more women continue to enter top leadership roles (eagly & carli) the perceptions of women in these roles may be shifting; this could be particularly the case on college campuses which ultimately could lead to a cultural shift in the greater society and the men and women in these organizations enter the real world. this potential shift is not only relevant for women in these roles, but also for men and women in organizations who may be interacting with women in top roles on college campuses and in the larger society. as college campuses continue to become more female dominated (eagly & carli, 2007), it would be interesting to examine the leadership experiences of men on college campuses. a study similar to this one with men in various top leadership roles on college campuses could provide additional insight into the experience of holding a formal leadership role, could suggest possible ways in which men and women experience the leadership roles similarly and differently, and contribute to a better understanding of the role of the college environment on student leadership experiences for men and women. additionally, it would be interesting to see how college men are engaging in leadership and if they, too, reflect a trend toward embracing more androgynous approaches. if an ultimate goal is advancing women in leadership roles consideration must, too, be paid to the leadership approaches of men in which they will be working, interacting, and leading. conclusion jessie‟s metaphor of iron sharpens iron provides an important perspective on women‟s leadership: the role of others. whether it is including others in their approaches to leadership, learning from others, or recognizing how other people influence how they lead, it is undeniable that the women in this study see leadership as more than just a role. leadership is an activity, a relationship, and a process one undertakes with others. it also, though, includes a focus on tasks and the challenge of balancing of these approaches was instrumental in the women‟s leadership effectiveness. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 96 while there is much to be speculated from this study as to if and how gender interacts with leadership, the study does suggest that gender did play a role in the women's leadership experiences. the women in the study did not feel that they were ultimately disadvantaged in their experiences on campus, but it is unclear what their experiences will be like in the real world. additional research is needed to understand the experiences of younger women in the workforce and the transition of women leaders from college into the work force and later into leadership roles. this information along with an examination of men in similar roles could lead to a better understanding of if and how the gender playing field is being leveled. the women in the study did not feel that they were ultimately disadvantaged in their experiences on campus, but it is unclear what their experiences will be like in the real world. additional research is needed to understand the experiences of younger women in the workforce and the transition of women leaders from college into the work force and later into leadership roles. in this study i sought to explore the leadership experiences of college student women in holding formal leadership roles in college organizations. findings from this study provide additional insight into the complex ways in which college women approach leadership while in leadership positions and the roles that past leaders, the organization and greater environment, messages, and gender play in influencing the women‟s approaches to leadership. references appelbaum, s. h., audet, l., & miller, j. c. (2004). gender and leadership? leadership and gender? a journey through the landscape of theories. leadership & organizational development journal, 24(1), 43-51. astin, a. w. (1997). what matters in college: four critical years revisited. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. boyatzis, r. (1998). transforming qualitative information. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. driskell, j. e., olmstead, b., & salas, e. (1993). task cues, dominance cues, and influence in task groups. journal of applied psychology, 78(1), 51-60. dugan, j. p., & komives, s. r. (2007). developing leadership capacity in college students: findings from a national study. college park, md: national clearinghouse for leadership programs. dugan, j. p., komives, s. r., & segar, t. c. (2008). college student capacity for socially responsible leadership: understanding norms and influences of race, gender, and sexual orientation. naspa journal, 45(4), 475500. eagly, a. h., & carli, l. l. (2004). women and men as leaders. in j. antonakis, a. t. cianciolo & r. j. sternberg (eds.), the nature of leadership (pp. 279301). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. eagly, a. h., & carli, l. l. (2007). through the labyrinth: the truth about how women become leaders. boston, ma: harvard business school press. edmondson bell, e. l. j., & nkomo, s. m. (2003). our separate ways: black and white women and the struggle to professional identity. boston, ma: harvard business school press. galinsky, e., aumann, k., & bond, j. t. (2009). times are changing: gender and generation at work and at home: families and work institute. glesne, c. (2006). becoming qualitative researchers: an introduction (3rd ed.). boston, ma: pearson. haber, p., & komives, s. r. (2009). predicting the individual values of the social change model of leadership development: the role of college students' leadership and involvement experiences. journal of leadership education, 7(3), 123-156. heffernan, m. (2007). how she does it: how women entrepreneurs are changing the rules of business success. new york, ny: viking. helfat, c. e., harris, d., & wolfson, p. j. (2006). the pipeline to the top: women and men in the top executive ranks in u.s. corporations. academy of management perspectives, 20(4), 42-64. helgesen, s. (1990). the female advantage. new york, ny: doubleday. kezar, a., & moriarty, d. (2000). expanding our understanding of student leadership development: a study exploring gender and ethnic identity. journal of college student development, 41(1), 55-69. klenke, k. (2008). qualitative research in the study of leadership. bingley, uk: emerald group. merriam, s. b. (2008). introduction to qualitative research. in s. b. merriam (ed.), qualitative research in practice: examples for discussion and analysis. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. moran, b. b. (1992). gender differences in leadership. library trends, 40(3), 475-491. northouse, p. g. (2007). leadership: theory and practice (4th ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. park, d. (1997). adrogynous leadership style: an integration rather than a polarization. leadership & organizational development journal, 18(3), 166-171. patton, m. q. (2002). qualitative research & evaluation methods (3rd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. shankman, m. l., haber, p., facca, t., & allen, s. j. (2010). gender and leadership through the lens of emotionally intelligent leadership. leadership review, 10, 88-103. smith, d. m. (1997). women and leadership. in p. g. northouse (ed.), leadership: theory and practice (pp. 204-238). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 97 table 1. leadership approaches relationship-oriented behaviors task-oriented behaviors provide support, build relationships, bring people together create positive mood and energy in group avoid conflict de-emphasize position/ role lead with direct style confront conflict establish boundaries within the role balancing relationship-oriented and task-oriented behaviors empowerment responsiblity to the members & organization advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 98 table 2. participant organizations and styles participant organizational type relationshiporientation (personal) 1 taskorientation (personal) 1 relationship orientation (in org) 1 taskorientation (in org) 1 jessie athletic (all-women) high low high low kara cultural (co-ed) high low high low anna greek (all-women) low high moderate moderate christy governance( co-ed) moderate to high moderate moderate moderate to high 1 options are none, low, moderate, and high and were assigned by the researcher advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 99 appendix a one-on-one interview guide 1. describe the organizations that you are or have been involved with and any formal leadership roles you now hold or have held in these organizations. 2. tell me a bit more about your position of <name of position> in <name of organization>. 3. why did you pursue this position? (if not covered in q2) 4. what have been/ are some of your goals for the positions you currently hold or have held and for the organization more generally? 5. please describe the leadership approaches, strategies, or tactics you tried that have worked. describe those that have not worked. 6. please describe the ways in which you interact with the members in your group. 7. how do people react to your leadership? 8. do you believe people have certain expectations of you as a leader? please explain. how have these expectations influenced the way you lead? 9. what messages have you heard in your life on how you should act or lead, and how do you believe this has influenced you in your role? 10. based on what you have shared thus far, do you believe gender norms or expectations have played a role in how you exercise leadership? please explain why or why not. (ask if gender has not come up at all) advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 100 appendix b focus group interview guide welcome students and ask them to briefly introduce themselves and briefly share what organizations they are involved with and what leadership roles they hold. share that the purpose of this focus group interview is to discuss successes and challenges faced in their leadership roles, and encourage them to refer to their journaling notes if it would be helpful. the second purpose of the time together is for me to share initial findings from the individual interviews to get their perspectives and feedback. 1. think about the leadership roles you hold or have held in organizationsand describe the successes you have experiences. 2. what challenges have you faced in your organizations? in working with your organizational members? 3. in what ways, if any do you believe gender has influenced your successes and challenges? i will share the initial findings, including themes and supporting data and quotes, from the interviews. i will provide a handout that includes these findings. i will walk through the findings so far and ask them to comment on the findings. i will specifically ask: 1. which findings or quotes do you particularly agree with? 2. which findings or quotes do you particularly disagree with? 3. do you have anything to add to any of the findings or quotes that i‟ve presented? i will end the focus group interview by asking if there is anything else they would like to add about anything we have discussed today. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 101 appendix c journaling questions over the next 2 or 3 weeks please take approximately 10-15 minutes before and after each event or meeting that you are leading to answer the following questions. before an event or meeting: 1. what are your expectations for this event or meeting? how do you plan to approach this? after an event or meeting: 1. my experience in leading this event or meeting was: 2. what went well about this event or meeting? (think about your leadership roles and styles, intentions, goals, interactions with other people, etc.) 3. this event or meeting went well because: 4. what challenges did i face in this event or meeting? (think about your leadership roles and styles, intentions, goals, interactions with other people, etc.) 5. these challenges arose because: educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 160 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 160-165, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper leadership, women in sport, and embracing empathy maylon t. hanold maylon t. hanold, ed.d. is an adjunct professor in the sport administration and leadership program, seattle university, lynn 114, 901 12th avenue, p.o. box 222000, seattle, wa 98122, 425.503.7754, hanoldm@seattleu.edu, maylon.hanold@olympian.org accepted may 12, 2011 leadership has frequently employed sport stories and metaphor to exemplify attributes and attitudes that leaders should embrace in order to succeed. competitive sport entered educational contexts in elite british boarding schools for the very purpose of providing training for future political and corporate leaders. as such, the paradigms for leadership reproduced through sport metaphors have held on to traditional, masculine views of leadership. yet, these paradigms are outdated and do not fit the values embraced by twenty-first century leadership concepts. new sport metaphors are needed. this article begins the task of shaping new perspectives about leadership from the sport world. specifically, attitudes and practices of highperformance female ultrarunners provide prime examples of the new lessons for leadership, focusing on empathy as one of the crucial aspects of successful leadership for today. keywords: leadership, sport, untrarunners introduction within the context of twenty-first century leadership, the lessons learned from sport and the analogies supported may be outdated and contrary to contemporary purposes. sport has historically been a site for (male) leadership development and continues to provide metaphorical significance within the context of today’s leadership. the unquestioned competitive ideals in sport, which reflect predominantly masculine ideals (anderson, 2010; messner 1992, 2007), facilitate their reproduction in today’s leadership context. consider the fact that the corporate world takes on the language of sport. for instance, the development of the corporate coach and references that leaders should be more like coaches is not uncommon (behavioral coaching institute, 2005; corporate coach u, 2002). organizations must win the contract and compete for market share. underlying such attitudes and nomenclature is the concept that competition remains a contest in which only one person or team can prevail. it is a mindset, which is grounded in the assumption of scarcity and the idea that competitors (corporations) are all against one another, vying for the limited reward (profit). yet, twenty-first leadership ideals are grounded in very different assumptions and need new sport stories and metaphors to illuminate key aspects. for instance, wholeness and interconnectedness (gardiner, 2006, 2008, 2009) are fundamental concepts of transcendent leadership. gardiner (2009) suggested that interconnectedness should refer not only to relationships within organizations, but also exist across boundaries and on higher levels such as planet. this perspective is one of abundance; that is, it is the view that we are connected on levels that should take into account the whole “web of life” (capra, 1996, p. 295) in order for us all to flourish. it is a mentality of working with others for the reward on some higher level, not against others (gerzon, 2006). the perspective taken in this article is that stories and metaphor are powerful ways to clarify meaning (zacko-smith, 2007). the aim here is to highlight the typical sport metaphor present in leadership, deconstruct underlying assumptions, and provide alternate ways of viewing sport stories. such a perspective is important in order to take new lessons from sport in order to elucidate contemporary perspectives on leadership. to provide an entrée into how new metaphors from sport can emerge, this article highlights the attitudes and practices of highperformance female ultrarunners and the role empathy plays in their successes. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 161 the outdated view of sport as training and metaphor for leadership in the late nineteenth century, elite british boys boarding schools established sports programs for several reasons; but primarily participation in sports was said to help young boys, who were to become the nation’s business and political leaders, learn to negotiate rules and develop leadership (light-shields & light-bredemeier, 1995). in essence, the game or competition existed as a socializing process. during this socialization process, it was expected that boys would learn to be tough and thus resilient to the demands of leadership in a highly competitive political and corporate world. while the aims of sport in this context highlighted psychological attributes, the actual experience remained highly physical. in this way, sport experiences, as distinct from the classroom, allowed competitive mindsets and the lessons therein to become embodied. once embodied, assumptions about competition became part of the cultural fabric. a good example of this phenomenon is a story collins (2001) recounted about a highly successful crosscountry coach. the point of the story was that the coach was able to identify one simple vision for the team. articulating this vision allowed the athletes to do what they could do best and generate their own enthusiasm for wanting to win the state championships, which they did. collins (2001) used this example to support one of his main points: when leaders articulate in simple terms where they can be the best, they will move from good to great, outperforming their competitors. certainly, having a clear, simple vision has purchase in leadership literature (gardner, 1990; kouzes & posner, 2007); however the unquestioned practices that result from this vision are worthy of closer scrutiny. a critical exanimation of the team’s practices revealed underlying assumptions that run counter to those of various forms of twenty-first century leadership. the cross-country team’s simple vision was to go fast at the end. every athlete aimed to run the last mile of the race faster than the previous miles. to measure this, athletes counted how many competitors they passed in the last mile of the race. for every competitor they passed, coaches awarded head bones to each runner. these head bones were “beads in the shape of shrunken skulls, which the kids made into necklaces and bracelets” (collins, 2001, p. 206). embedded in these symbolic practices is the idea that competitors must be completely vanquished. once competitors became shrunken skulls, they were then worn as trophies. while this practice may be productive in terms of results, one critique of this practice resides in its outdated underlying assumption about success. this practice supports an ego-centered approach to individual or team success. furthermore, it reproduces the scarcity mindset about competition as well as furthers the idea that competitors are enemies. indeed, while sport stories such as this may provide inspiration to corporate leaders on one level, sport is notorious for creating in groups and out groups (anderson, 2010). while this sport metaphor was intended to promote the power of vision, the embodied practice of head bones served to support an in group/out group mentality. the issue with an in group/out group mentality is that it creates mindsets which are void of empathy, an acknowledged important skill for leaders today (choi, 2007; cooper & sawaf, 1997; garner, 2009). the unquestioned practice of wearing head bones exemplified the lack of empathy for competitors. empathy is defined as being able to feel and understand another’s feelings (badea & pana, 2010; garner, 2009). certainly, if the athletes felt empathy, they may have questioned the symbolism of their head bones practice. indeed, as a society, we have come to assume that competition implies being against another. for instance, compete means “to strive against another or others to attain a goal” (american heritage dictionary, 2006, p. 376). despite this definition, empathy has legitimate grounding in the word “competition,” which stems from the latin root, compere, meaning “to strive with.” the relational aspect of “with” is quite different from “against” and connotes interdependence. ultimately, competition cannot exist without competitors; therefore, competitors literally enter into a mutually agreed relationship in which they help each other become the best each can be (feezelle, 2004). from this perspective, empathy can develop since competitors have clear understandings of each other’s experiences. in other words, empathy would be directed not only towards teammates, but also towards competitors. such an understanding of empathy opens up new ways of viewing sport as a metaphor and provides new leadership lessons. higher level goals enhance empathic relationships while sports may seem like an unusual place to look for examples of empathy, ultrarunning provides a few clear examples of how empathy leads to success. in short, ultrarunning is any race longer than a marathon, but runners typically race distances of 50k, 50 miles, 100k, and 100 miles. most ultra races take place on forest or mountain trails, defined by uneven terrain and significant elevation loss/gain (brannen, 2006). over the past 20 years the number of ultra races held in north america has tripled (medinger, 2009; milroy, 2001). more importantly, the growth of women participating has increased six-fold (medinger, 2009). while only comprising 30% of the total participants (medinger, 2009), highperformance female ultrarunners do very well relative to the men. when asked about the competition in a recent race, the male winner said, “i knew there were so many talented guys and gals, that i’d have to run my own race” (trent, 2007, p. 22). in this comment there is the explicit notion that ultrarunning is a gender-integrated event. in other words, men and women not only participate together, but they also race together. additionally, ultrarunning situates itself as a unique sub-culture, one that distinguishes itself from marathon and triathlon by having less focus on a competitive ethos (allison, 2001; brannen, 2006; massa, 2006; medinger, 2009; milroy, 2001). yet, it not so much a matter of what ultrarunners avoid advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 162 as much as it is a matter of what they strive to create. in short, ultrarunners express that there is camaraderie and a strong sense of community among competitors (hanold, 2008; helliker, 2010). women are often noted as embodying this ethos and unlike many other sports, embodying the true athlete. for instance, one male runner noted, “what else can be said? she passes you coming and going, she is all smiles, and friendly and totally at ease, a true athlete” (rodatz, 2007, p. 48). specifically, it appears as though the challenge of running these long distances over difficult terrain positions ultrarunning as a sport in which community develops (hanold, 2008). in particular, high-performance female ultrarunners believe that this higher goal brings them together as competitors in positive ways. one competitor mentions the support they give each other in ultrarunning. she says “it’s a very supportive environment, particularly among women [and] i feel happy when women i know perform well” (hanold, 2008, p. 123). as such the competitive drive coexists with the fun of being together. as another women notes, “whether i’m racing other women or not, it is more social, and i like that, even though i hate the stereotype sometimes of a woman being more social and being more supportive of one another” (p. 123). finally, these high-performance female ultrarunners view competition as performing to one’s potential with the help of others to achieve those goals. for example, one of the top performers says, “i don’t know if it’s being a woman or it’s just who i am [but, for me] it’s all about just being out there doing our best and working with each other” (p. 123). the larger challenge of completing an ultra race with uncertainties that abound creates a sense of togetherness, a sense of with in such a way that the relative placing of competitors falls as a secondary success. because competitors have this larger goal in mind and recognize the enormity of the task at hand, empathy develops through this sense of interconnectedness. empathy has a significant place within the leadership literature, especially in light of twenty-first century leadership concepts such as interconnectedness and wholeness (gardiner 2006, 2008). scholars (badea & pana, 2010; choi, 2007; cooper & sawaf, 1997; garner, 2009; jordan & ashkanasy, 2006) affirm that empathy is an invaluable skill for leaders in unstable and changing environments that characterize today’s world (friedman, 2006). goleman, boyatzis, and mckee defined empathy as “feeling the emotions of others [and] understanding their perspectives” (as cited in badea & pana, 2010, p. 77). empathy is the “foundation that builds trusting relationships” (garner, 2009, p. 84) and “makes resonance possible” (badea & pana, 2010, p. 77). choi (2007) posited that empathy allows for shared feelings, which in turn produces “a feeling of oneness, an interconnectedness” (p. 27). such interconnectedness brings forth cooperation and trust across the organization (garner, 2009). yet, this empathy is framed within the context of specific organizations and how this skill might enhance organizational effectiveness. the lesson from ultrarunning may be that viewing challenges from much broader perspectives would lead to empathic understanding. if companies could see what their industries face as larger challenges, then perhaps they might see ways to work together to solve larger problems. gerzon (2006) illustrated how solutions to worldwide problems can be solved when leaders cross boundaries, develop insights about others and take perspectives much broader than their own. gerzon framed this idea in the context of competition. he said, “winning does not mean annihilating one’s adversaries; it means raising the level of competition” (2006, p. 204). for gerzon, competition might entail corporations fighting for market share. he noted that often the corporations do not “choose to seek higher ground. they are compelled to seek it” (p. 204). in other words, empathy results when broader tasks or challenges are addressed. certainly, this has overlap with the tenets of goal setting and creating vision, but what is important here, is that such actions are not simply relegated to a single organization. empathy can extend across organizational boundaries and in the context of competition when higher-level challenges are identified. empathy is embodied: cognitive skills alone won’t make a difference in interviews with high-performance female ultrarunners, the support expressed for each other was pervasive (hanold, 2008). the striking quality of this support was that it was embodied, a distinctly felt sense (hanold, 2008; stelter, 2000). for instance, one runner noted that “you’re running across streams that are knee deep and going up snow and mud and there’s lots of challenges out there . . . it really bonds us” (hanold, 2008, p. 184). this connected sensation is almost palpable at 100-mile pre-race meetings according to another runner who explains that there is a “quiet, silent, unknown respect and understanding” (p. 184). thus, the shared experiences of difficult terrain and long distances create a physical bond that aids in the production of empathy. indeed, research shows that empathy has a biological component (goleman & boyatzis, 2008), lending support for the idea that empathy is primarily developed through nonverbal bodily cues (badea & pana, 2010; garner, 2009; johnson, 2009). goleman and boyatzis (2008) showed that “when we consciously or unconsciously detect someone else’s emotions through their actions, our mirror neurons reproduce those emotions. collectively, these neurons create an instant sense of shared experience” (p. 76). while these researchers describe this particular empathic response as social intelligence, the significance that these experiences are embodied clearly makes the case that an intellectual understanding or mental, attitudinal shift in views towards others is not sufficient for empathy to take place. goleman and boyatzis (2008) argued that leadership is “less about mastering situations—or even mastering social skill sets—than about developing a genuine interest in and talent for fostering positive feelings in the people whose cooperation and support you need” (p. 76). advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 163 for the ultrarunners, support comes from competitors to a large extent, the only other people who truly understand the task at hand at the deepest physical level. sport stories that emphasize the connection felt among all players can enhance our understanding of empathy as embodied. perhaps this aspect of empathy also helps frame the idea of interconnectedness and wholeness. given that we are of mind, body, and spirit, it follows that connection on all these levels might be aspects of empathy. to be sure, both the female ultrarunners’ experiences and research on the biological aspect of empathy encourage the view that empathy is an embodied experience and requires more attention than simply intellectual understanding. empathy raises everyone’s performance the connection and camaraderie high-performance female ultrarunners feel results in specific practices of caring that raises everyone to higher levels of performance. when speaking of ultrarunners in general, one runner commented, “i think that everybody is out there for everybody. i think anybody out there would do anything for you to help you see success” (hanold, 2008, p. 121). the women stated that they often helped each other during the race by running together for hours, waiting for each other, and encouraging each other. one runner’s comments illustrate this concept well: it really is whomever is feeling the best that day is going to win, but we work together, you know, for the first half of the race or the first three-quarters of the race or whatever it is. and i really feel like we’re helping each other out . . . at the end of the day i do want to do my best. i want to get out there and if i think i have the potential to run a fast time, i’m going to pursue that. the only way i really think i’m going to be successful is working together with other girls at that level. i think that that makes all the difference in a race. (hanold, 2008, p. 124) also, ultrarunning allows pacers in the longer events. a pacer is someone who is allowed to run with a competitor, encouraging him/her throughout the final miles of longer races. stories abound of pacers and competitors helping out each other through the nights and difficult last miles (hanold, 2008). in other words, embedded in the practice of ultrarunning is the idea that relationships matter. ultrarunning is not entirely a solitary endeavor. in fact, these women firmly believe that by helping each other, they are able to produce their best results. in this instance, the challenge of ultrarunning produces significant empathy, that competitors know that helping each other out will result in more of them succeeding (hanold, 2008). thus, in this sport context, the connections between empathy and performance begin to emerge in ways that have implications for leadership. indeed, goleman and boyatzis (2008) suggested that empathy as it relates to social intelligence might be considered a soft side of business. yet, as they remind, “as new ways of scientifically measuring human development start to bear out these theories and link them directly with performance, the socalled soft side of business begins to look not so soft after all” (goleman & boyatzis, 2008, p. 81). it appears as though, even when personal perspectives differ significantly, empathy provides the means through which others feel understood, (badea & pana, 2010). this connection is powerful because it is visceral rather than intellectual. as a result positive attitudes develop and people in organizations become more committed to the task at hand (garner, 2009). in turn, this commitment improves performance of individuals as well as that of the organization. such connections are highlighted in resonant leadership literature in which resonant leaders connect with others in ways that result “in people working in sync with each other . . . help[ing] us to become the best that we can be” (boyatzis & mckee, 2006, p. 16). beyond shared goals and group identity, positive relationships produced through empathy move people past tolerance and improves relationships (badea & pana, 2010), group cohesion and resultant performance (garner, 2009). the illustration of the link between empathy and performance for these female ultrarunners can help leaders visualize the powerful role of empathy. first, empathy takes on a serious and practical role for the ultrarunners. in addition, to making it more safe and fun (hanold, 2008), empathy raises performances among competitors. second, despite the fact that they are competing for place, this experience brings forth varied understandings of competition, ones that are less narrow than in traditional sport examples. each of the highperformance female ultrarunners held different views about competition (hanold, 2008), but were able to maintain these unique views while being supportive of each other because of empathy. thus, this sport example shows that despite having different intellectual beliefs about competition, empathy produces positive feelings of connection that promote working together on a deeper, more powerful level, raising the performance of everyone along the way. concluding comments while sports has historically been connected to masculine understandings of competition and leadership, twenty-first century leadership ideals such as empathy require different sport stories that illustrate different lessons. the experiences and attitudes of high-performance female ultrarunners provide a springboard to new sport metaphors and illustrative stories, which draw attention to the value of empathy and lend credibility to this soft side of business. indeed, with the focus on empathy, these sport stories highlight competition as an interconnected endeavor, in which support from other competitors—as well as those on the periphery—abounds because of a deep mutual understanding of the formidable task at hand. furthermore, this support arises from an embodied experience, which enables empathic responses. finally, these responses promote people helping each other within competition, allowing these high-performance female runners advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 164 to achieve their best. in the quickly changing corporate environment of today, organizational structures are becoming more horizontal and flexible (friedman, 2006). as such, twenty-first century organizations need leaders who are flexible and open to change. with shifting goals and flexible organizational structures, strong connections and positive relationships become even more important as people work together in organizations to respond quickly to changes and move forward on tasks at hand. as suggested by the sport stories of female ultrarunners, empathic understandings provide the grounding for working together in order to handle adverse and variable conditions, resulting in success. as such, embracing empathy may be one of the new leadership lessons from sport that warrants consideration by twenty-first century leaders. references allison, d. (2001, may). twenty years later: how ultrarunning has changed. ultrarunning, 6-11. anderson, e. (2010). sport, theory and social problems: a critical introduction. new york, ny: routledge. badea, l., & pana, n. a. (2010). the role of empathy in developing the leader’s emotional intelligence. theoretical and applied economics, 17(2), 69-78. behavioral coaching institute. (2005). coaching report #12: manager, leader as coach. retrieved from http://www.coaches-learning-center.com boyatzis, r., & mckee, a. (2006). inspiring others through resonant leadership. business strategy review, summer, 15-18. brannen, d. (2006, may). opinion: state of the sport. ultrarunning, 28-29. capra, f. (1996). the web of life. new york, ny: doubleday. choi, j. (2007). a motivational theory of charismatic leadership: envisioning, empathy, and empowerment. journal of leadership and organizational studies, 13(1), 24-43. collins, j. (2001). good to great. new york, ny: harpercollins publishers, inc. compete. 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(2007). the leader label: influencing perceptions, reality and practice. leadership review, 7, 75-88. microsoft word vongalis_macrow_worker_bees_and_wild_roses.docx advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 17 advancing women in leadership vol. 36, pp. 17-25, 2016 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper worker bees and wild roses: the pleasure and pain of mid-career female academics athena vongalis-macrow athena vongalis-macrow: deakin university, australia, email: athena.vongalis-macrow@deakin.edu.au accepted september 02, 2015 drawing on self-identified metaphorical expressions that represent women at work, this paper discusses how a group of midcareer academic women experience their work and workplace. the research was prompted by consistently high number of female academics who remain in the mid-levels in the academic career ladder despite research that shows this group is ambitious and holds leadership aspirations. understanding the experiences at the mid-career levels, by gaining insights into their workplace experiences, may further our knowledge of how to advance women in leadership. the research draws on the metaphoric descriptions provided by 28 mid-career women working across three australian universities. metaphors elicit hidden and implicit values about how the subjects respond and give meaning to their work and working conditions and have been used in organisational practices to disclose underlying issues. the findings discuss the positive and negative work and workplace associations disclosed by the participants. however, the findings suggests that women find pleasure and desire in and through their work. it is through their work that academic women experience self-expression, creativity and adding value. by focussing on the value of doing academic work and the rewards of contributing to academia, there is potential to enhance the capacity for mid-career women to thrive in academia and build the foundations for leadership. keywords: metaphors, mid-career academics, women, higher education introduction the metaphor has been used as a way to understand phenomena and a way to think and communicate experiences (egan, 1997; goldstein 2005). tapping into the communicative richness of a metaphor has the potential to reveal how subjects comprehend their context and how they generate meaning from their context (haack, 1994). by analysing metaphors and making associations between communicative expressions and their meanings, the metaphorical expressions of the user disclose how situations are experienced (lakoff & johnson, 1980). the use of metaphors as a way to clarify experience is wide ranging. in the field of medicine, metaphors associated with patients’ experiences and illnesses aid in the communication between medical professionals and their patients (korkmaz & senol, 2014). the use of metaphors helps to clarify conceptions of illness and treatment that can override cultural and communication barriers. metaphors have been analysed to better interpret how social and political groups influence public discourse and spaces to help shape their politics, action, and change (delouis, 2014). metaphors also play a significant role in legal analysis and communication. they are widely used to gauge and interpret conflict and mediation, and gender issues (henderson, 2014). the educative value of metaphors underpins the critical role they play in clarification of how learning is taking place, the impact on the learner and the teacher and the values and beliefs shared about learning (boud & hager, 2012; nye, foskey, & edwards, 2013). the use of metaphors in organisational research has been employed as a way to unpack the complexity of organisational identity (cornelissen, 2006), and to further organisational theory making (morgan, 2003; prange, 1999). the relationship between the language of the metaphor and the underlying feelings they represent is based on identifying the figurative language links with the unconscious (mcglone, 2007). if used well, they are a useful tool for explaining organisational relationships and processes (morgan, 1986; tsoukas, 1991). a value of metaphors is especially significant when you consider that the kinds of attitudes and beliefs embodied in metaphors. they usually allude to attitudes and beliefs that are often hidden from every day work dialogues and discussions. it is this kind of insight enabled through metaphors and through metaphoric analysis that may help to better understand work practices and, may in turn, explain gaps in performance or gaps in the organisation. for example, ollilainen and calasanti, (2007) proposed that the use of family metaphors in organisations, such as “at work we are like a family”, maintains the division of advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 18 labour between men and women where women take on the emotional and nurturing tasks as would a mother figure. in the case of family metaphor, they tell us what it means for individuals to be working in that organisation and the nature of gendered working practices. interpreting metaphors there is no one way to interpret metaphors, therefore, in this research the interpretations are underpinned by a hermeneutical approach to analysis. hermeneutical approaches are diverse, however, foundational to hermeneutical research is the ontological understanding that social phenomena and social action can be conceptualised and interpreted to produce insights about the social actors or actions being researched (butler, 1998). hermeneutical approaches stress the centrality of language to explain and interpret experiences (gadamer, (2006). the purpose of the interpretation shapes the type of hermeneutic approach depending on whether interpretation seeks to uncover original meaning, clarify, challenge or deconstruct meaning to address power asymmetries, reveal tensions, and contradictions (butler, 1998). the objective of this research on women in higher education is revelatory and critical in seeking to unpack the hidden experiences and practices of these actors within their organisational context. the interpretive process will guided by a critical approach that addresses issues related to power and how these may be deconstructed through language that is indicative of the actors’ experiences within the organisational context. understanding the links between metaphors, as a form of language that aims to capture the phenomenon of working within an organisation, and the value of their revelations depends on the particular analytical approaches used to interpret and analyse the metaphorical meanings. lakoff and johnson, (2003), suggest that metaphors work to structure mental representations of often complex concepts and feelings. they argue that metaphors capture sensory experiences and represent not only the mind but also how the experience is felt. in other words, metaphors represent “abstract concepts ‘embodied’ in sensory experience” (lakoff & johnson, 2003, p.5). lakoff and johnson’s representation of metaphors as deliberate and specific expressions that provide insight into situations of complexity. this interpretive stance intersects with a critical hermeneutical approach where critical analysis of phenomena aims to challenge surface or conventional beliefs (butler, 1998) delving into more hidden meanings. for example, if someone were to represent their working self as a ‘worker ant’, in addition to getting a sense of being part of a larger group, and comparing the self to ants , which suggests pulling above weight, being meticulous, organized , critical interpretive stance would interrogate the feelings associated with the experience that are embedded in the metaphor. thus feelings of being overwhelmed, over controlled, regimented would also be part of the analysis. more deeply, the metaphor expresses an essential identification with powerlessness in the working context. this paper extends the analysis of feelings by drawing on the work of garrett (1996) who delved deeper into feelings that embody power or lack of power, by framing analysis based on the theory of affects (garrett, 1996). garrett specifically attributes emotional associations with metaphorical expressions and how each person engages their emotional vocabulary presents a way for individuals to articulate intellectual and bodily feelings associated with their experience. the basic emotional vocabulary is captured through base emotions of pain, pleasure and desire. these three emotions have been identified by garrett as the primary responses that shape the relationship of others to others and to the world. these three affectives are the fundamental emotional tenors through which each individual maintains their essential being (garrett, 1996). how the pain, pleasure and desire are expressed in the workplace and through metaphors is as much a product of the individual as it is of the workplace and the affect it has on the individual. the metaphorical expressions about the workplace are co-constructed by the individual engaging with organisational structures and processes (brown and stenner, 2001). for example, if a worker describes the workplace as a ‘playground’, this metaphor suggests that for this individual, the workplace is construed as a joyful place that has a pleasurable effect on the individual. however, for another individual within the same workplace, the playground metaphor may not capture their unique experiences and organizational interactions. they may construe their workplace as a ‘jungle’, which is an image not readily associated with joy or pleasure. in the context of the higher education workplace, the notion of pain may seem out of place. however, for the purposes of this paper and research, pain has been redefined sociologically by framing the emotion and its interpretation by drawing on melzack and wall’s (1988) broader definition of pain, which takes a nonmedicalised understanding of the sensation. they state, the word 'pain' represents a category of experiences, signifying a multitude of different, unique experiences having different causes, and characterised by different qualities varying along a number of sensory, affective and evaluative dimensions (melzack & wall 1988, p. 161). affirming the socially constructed notion of pain and arguing that the sensation of pain has been prioritised over the emotion of pain, bendelow and williams (1995) also show the social and cultural construction of pain that gives it meaning. for example, describing someone as ‘a pain’, implies a negative emotional response to the person. in this case, how pain is experienced, demonstrated and evaluated depends on emotive interpretations of the social context relative to perceived ‘painful’ actions. morris (1991) confirms that, “ pain is never the sole creation of our anatomy and physiology. it emerges only at the intersection of bodies, minds and cultures (morris, 1991, p cited in bendelow &williams, 1995, p. 140). therefore, pain, as a negative emotive sensation is how the notion of pain is interpreted within the analysis. similar interpretations advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 19 of pain as emotive responses have been used in investigating emotional conflict in workplaces, (tracy, lutgen-sandvik & alberts, 2006; frost, 2003). research a survey investigating workplace practices and experiences of mid-career female academics was administered to 28 female academics across three australian universities. the women were drawn from a range of disciplines, primarily education, health sciences, humanities, business and law. their ages ranged from 20-55+, and 96% were from an english background (australia, uk and usa). the metaphorical analysis is based on the responses to the survey question: question: think of a metaphor that best describes you at work. twenty eight participants responded by submitting their metaphors. discussion the purpose of hermeneutical informed research is to illuminate experience to increase understanding of that experience (laverty, 2003). the quality of the interpretations of the experiences is dependent on the observer and how they are situated within the interpretive process. laverty (2003) argues the need for the interpreter to be aware of their influence in the research process. in this research, my awareness of context, as a woman working in higher education, is shaping interpretations and this may be a limitation of the research and the interpretive processes. however, as the hermeneutical process of interpretation ultimately seeks “sensible meaning, free of inner contradictions” (laverty, p.24). my insider knowledge of higher education context helps to frame “horizons and understandings possible” (p. 25) within the context so they are sensible and reliable interpretations. the interpretation of metaphors will progress along two stages. the first stage will group the metaphors in order to specify the types of phenomena that the participants associated with their work and workplace. the analysis will draw from lakoff and johnson’s notions that the concepts embodied in and by the metaphors represent sensory experiences (lakoff & johnson, 2003, p.5). the second stage will delve further into the nature of the sensory experience and interpret the metaphors through garretts’s three primitive effectives. in response to the survey question, think of a metaphor that best describes you at work, the participants gave the following metaphors. these have been tabled into thematic concepts, as suggested by lackoff and johnson (2003). table 1. thematic metaphors metaphor animals metaphor people metaphor –other butterfly emerging from cocoon back seat driver solid as a rock raccoonsteals from rich cassandra the meek shall inherit the earth monkey in a cage juggler doormat worker bee explorer kaleidoscope of colour leunig’s duck1 late bloomer leaf in the wind workhorse dancer footsteps on the beach fish out of water prisoner #4162 wild rose duckcalm on surface working hard underneath quiet achiever tortoise in (tortoise hare) contestant in egg and spoon race darn cat gardener echidna (prickly but vulnerable) table 1 shows that metaphorical expressions related to animals figure highly in the way that the participants represent their work environment and work practices. there is a history of metaphors that connect women and animals, and in most cases, the connection has negative connotations for women. being described as a ‘bitch’, a ‘dog’, and ‘cow’ implies women are unattractive, unworthy, mean. other animal comparisons are less severe but equally negative. ‘a social butterfly”, ‘a chick’ and ‘fox’, while not as disparaging, nevertheless denotes a frivolity and superficiality (dunayer, birke, & kheel, 1995). when analysing the animal metaphors in table one, one theme is of hard work. the duck working hard beneath the surface, the workhorse, the worker bee and the tortoise, imply that women identify with the hard work and reinforce the notion that the workplace is associated with struggle and effort. a second theme is one of subversion. the raccoon is equated to the robin advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 20 hood of the animal world, the darn cat, refers to a fictional cat that gets into mischief, and leunig’s duck, is an innocent yet evocative character who goes against the mainstream. the workplace represents a place of potential subversion. the third theme is of the outsider. the monkey in a cage and the fish out of water, illustrate the alienating context that some of the women find themselves. lópez rodríguez (2009) explored the relationship between power and the metaphorical use of animals. each culture endows animals with either positive or negative associations; therefore by identifying with a particular animal, the subject is expressing a connection to those qualities. table 1 illustrates the use of animal metaphors as expressions of beliefs and values. by reviewing the use of animals in relation to power, the metaphors further the argument that some feel disempowered by their working relationships. for example, the worker bee and the workhorse metaphors both emphasise the labouring nature of work, suggesting the lower status of their worker practices. they identify with the powerlessness of a worker in a system that demands excessive levels of labour. lópez rodríguez (2009) sums up this animal association thus, metaphorical identifications of marginal groups with animals may help express and perpetuate collective evaluations about their role in society, reinforcing stereotypes and, ultimately, pigeonholing people into the normative binary set of “the self” and “the other” (p.80). the use of animals reinforces feeling of powerlessness of the women’s selves, in comparison to the ‘other’. the other represents those in positions of power who inhabit the locus of control that create the working conditions. the women are expressing that they do not feel that they are part of the locus of power. the metaphoric animal theme consolidates the feelings of powerlessness and lack of the capacity to direct and control behaviour. the animal metaphors reinforce the notion that control has been taken away. the most evocative of these images comes from the metaphor of the monkey in a cage and fish out of water. these metaphors reinforce being powerless, that is feeling out of place and being controlled. certainly, the prevalence of animal metaphors, 11 out of 28 metaphors, disclose issues with power and expressions of power within the workplace. the second category of metaphors shows how the women associate their experience with another person. by unpacking the association, it is possible to determine primarily if the association is a positive or not so positive one. that is, the metaphors that rely on an association with another person draw on qualities similar or dissimilar qualities to give meaning to the individual experiences. for example, there are a number of metaphors that suggest that the women associate with other people’s skills and values. for example, the gardener, the dancer, the late bloomer, the quiet achiever, and explorer all suggest professional and vocational capability and productivity. on the other hand, the hindering personifications captured in metaphors such as; back seat driver, juggler, cassandra, and prisoner # 416, represent persons or actions as hindrances and incapacity either through lack of control, through over work or over control. when considering the people associated metaphors provided by the participants, they are divided equally between metaphors that are positive, and those not so positive. the third category of metaphors is varied. these associations evoke representation of strength, such as solid as a rock, kaleidoscope of colour and wild rose. they also illustrate associations of powerlessness, as in, leaf in the wind, footsteps on a beach, doormat, and the meek shall inherit the earth. in the subsequent discussion, a more detailed analysis of these metaphors is provided. emotions in the workplace in order to focus analysis on the emotional meaning of the metaphors, the same 28 metaphors have been categorised according to the three basic affectives; pain, pleasure and desire. as suggested garrett (1996), drawing on the theory of affects enables a deeper analysis of feelings that embody power or lack of power. table 2. basic emotions of the workplace metaphor pain metaphor pleasure metaphor –desire cassandra darn cat kaleidoscope of color prisoner #416 raccoonsteals from rich footsteps on the beach monkey in a cage solid as a rock butterfly emerging from cocoon worker bee explorer the meek shall inherit the earth late bloomer workhorse dancer fish out of water leunig’s duck duckcalm on surface working hard underneath quiet achiever tortoise in (tortoise & hare) contestant in egg and spoon race doormat gardener juggler back seat driver leaf in the wind echidna (prickly but vulnerable) advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 21 table 2 shows how metaphors related to notions of pain. in the context of this study, the definition of pain is taken from cupples (1992), in which pain is defined as a hurtful experience that has sensory, affective and evaluative dimensions. these three elements of pain are closely associated with the kinds of emotions experienced in the workplace. the definition is especially relevant considering how these emotions contribute to evaluating the workplace and its impact on the worker. table 2 shows that 50 percent of the participants have evaluated their workplaces in a way that is associated with some painful experiences. the metaphors of cassandra, prisoner 416, monkey in a cage, ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’, and doormat are examples of metaphors of pain. what can be analysed from this grouping of metaphors is that pain, is a negative emotion that denotes a sense of loss. cassandra alludes to the incapacity to have a voice, the incapacity to have her version of the truth heard and understood. in effect, it is the silencing of dissention. the prisoner #416 was especially highlighted in the stanford prison experiment study for speaking out against abuse and injustice. the prisoner then became the target for abuse and bullying. the metaphor of doormat echoes these feelings. similarly, the monkey in the cage metaphor illustrates the confinement and control mechanisms that reduce the participant to feeling inhumane. the biblical quote, ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’ affirms the feelings of powerlessness in the current context. therefore, what can be drawn from one group of painful associations is that they disclose lack of power as the source of workplace pain. the lack of power experienced by mid-career females reflects much earlier studies that drew similar conclusions. for example, a longitudinal study by ragins and sundstrom (1989) stated, research reveals a consistent difference favoring men in accessibility to, and utility of, resources for power. it suggests that the processes involved in the development of power differ for men and women and that the path to power for women resembles an obstacle course (p. 51). ragins and sundstrom suggest that the processes of power differ between the genders. the metaphorical expressions regarding the lack of power, propose that the processes of power are blocked and that sources of power, such as speaking out, are channels not open to women. the lack of control is also related to lack of power. power is control over what other people do, however, lack of control means inability to decide your own outcomes (inesi, botti, dubois, rucker, galinsky, 2011). metaphors connected to lack of control also figure highly in the painful evaluations of midcareer female academics. for example, back seat driver, fish out of water and leaf in the wind indicate the feeling of not having capacity for control. the third category of painful metaphors related directly to hard work. workhorse, duckcalm on surface working hard underneath, and juggler denote associations with labour, effort and menial taxing work. for women academics, their work is more likely to be composed of more administrative and teaching work, which is vital for institutional purpose and operations, however it carries a lesser status that research work. there have been successive studies that show how the lack of research lessens opportunity for female academics’ promotion and career progress (august, & waltman, 2004; lafferty & fleming, 2000). when analysisng the metaphors in terms of how they reflect painful experience of the workplace, table 2 shows that 50 percent of the participants equate their experiences to a painful affective. analysis of the metaphors denoting pain shows that the source of pain shows that it emerges from the lack of power and control within the workplace. however, institutional experiences of female academics also produce a sense of pleasure. table 2 shows ten metaphors associated with a pleasure. there is the pleasure of discovery and achievement, explorer, gardener and late bloomer all show a sense of satisfaction and curiosity associated with academic work. the metaphor, solid as a rock, alludes to a sense of resilience. the women also allude to a sense of playfulness and joy. the dance, the darn cat, the raccoon stealing from the rich, a contestant in an egg and spoon race and leunig’s duck, all position the players in an irreverent way. they are having fun, making fun or creating fun in ways not entirely associated with the gravity of their work. the final emotion expressed in table 2 is the metaphors of desire. desire denotes potential want, and while it is also a source of pleasure, it is more future orientated. viewing the workplace as a kaleidoscope of color suggests possibility, potential and choice. the metaphor of footsteps on the beach, presents a poignant image of freedom. the notion of desire and possibility is perhaps no better captured than the metaphor of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. the image has been traditionally related to renewal and re-emergence. the metaphors of desire number only three out of the 28. implications for mid-career female academics schön (1993) has argued how the narrative around metaphors is a powerful tool in expressing the nature of social problems. applying this argument to the research results suggests a driving narrative around disempowerment that shape the thinking and practices of mid-career female academics. the workplace rarely presents an idealistic space for either gender. however, as suggested by tsoukas and knudsen (2005), how far our idealised work transgresses from our reality can be indicative of how the workplace meets our expectations and what is possible within the workplace. the metaphorical expressions (table 2.) expresses a lack of power, a source of metaphorical pain, as a recurring theme in how mid-career female academics appraise their value in the work spaces. taking the example of the metaphor of cassandra, the myth recites a tale of a woman, with the power to foresee the future, being ostracized and ridiculed by others, especially after she refused to submit to her boss. the metaphor is tragic. in the workplace context, the capacity of the woman to use an extraordinary skill is disempowered. there advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 22 are other metaphors which connect the feeling of pain with the lack of power in working relationships. doormat, backseat driver, the meek shall inherit the earth; all express a lack of power within relationships. pleasure and desire: women and resistance the recent changes to higher education have ensured that the academic/worker has less and less control over their workplace changes and has less autonomy in the way they meet their work requirements (deem, 1999). therefore, it can be argued that in this context, metaphors expressing the lack of power are reflective of broader higher education changes in which the academic has less control and autonomy in their work and in how their workplace is managed. while the metaphors discussed so far emphasize the women’s belief about their lack of power within their organisations, it would be remiss not to acknowledge that in almost equal proportions, the women also present metaphors associated with pleasure and desire. these are more positive associations with their workplace and their work. the metaphors related to pleasure associate academic work with the sense of gratification and achievement that it brings. metaphors such as; the late bloomer, the explorer, the gardener, the dancer and the quiet achiever, allude to personal achievement, discovery and fulfilment. these metaphors suggest the sense of fulfilment from the work offers a more positive representation of the workplace. hey (2004) explored how academic women shaped their professional and personal identities through the concept of pleasure. she argued that how female academics navigated the climate of higher education with their “commitment to intellectual labour” (p.33) or perhaps, over commitment, to their intellectual academic work was one of those ‘elusive’ and ‘secret’ drivers in how women construct their academic identities. similar results showing female academics’ contradictory responses to organisational loyalty have been noted by author (2012). the author highlighted how women could endure a workplace that disempowered their capacity for autonomy that restricted their voice within the academy and presented persistent entrenched obstacles, if they could experience worthy and expressive work. hey suggests that women are seduced by the work. the metaphors expressing pleasure, as tabulated in table 2, do identify with a sense of personal fulfilment and enjoyment that run contrary to the constriction and control metaphors. however, further research would be needed as to the complexity of the responses in relation to significant expressions of disempowerment. it is difficult to conclude whether the contradiction can be attributed to a gendered experience of higher education workplaces or indeed, the contradiction is due to the diversity of responses among the mid-career academics. perhaps, the sample group does have a myriad of experiences that may be more about the individual rather than the group. conclusion by deconstructing and analysing the metaphors of 28 female academics, this paper has presented the organisational experiences as conceptualised by this group of mid-career women. one of the issues of conducting this hermeneutical framed research is the quality of the interpretation and the cultural and social experiences and insights brought to the analysis by the researcher. however, rather than being an outsider to the context, my own experience, as a mid-career female working in higher education, has helped to give an accuracy to the interpretations. another limitation is the culturally mediated interpretations of metaphors. in another cultural context, the interpretations can differ. therefore, the conclusions and inferences of the research need to account for the specific cultural context in which this research was conducted. there is scope to investigate further, in other cultural contexts. with these limitations in mind, the research shows that for this group of women, the work context is represented as a place of struggle. metaphors that emphasise the lack of power, the lack of the capacity to influence governance and the feelings that the women are the ‘losers’ corresponds with other research (ledwith, & manfredi, 2000) that highlight the predominance of institutional gendered power relations in higher education. the gendered aspect of the higher education workplace is not evident through the use of gendered metaphors; rather the metaphors are graphic representations of women grappling with perceptions of their disempowerment. conceptions of constriction, isolation and struggle build a powerful narrative of disaffection with organisational structures and relations. the use of metaphors in research raises awareness about potential for theory building (foropon & mclachlin, 2013). boxenbaum and rouleau (2011) argue that theories require empirical content, theoretical concepts and metaphors as a way to communicate and clarify ideas. the higher education space continues to be a difficult space for women. the difficulty is especially evident in the mid-career spaces where the experiences of working are perceived in such a negative light. it is also that this hierarchical level where most women will reach the limit of their career in terms of academic progress and promotion. research on the gendered organisation, especially, in higher education has persistently stressed that women’s experiences are hampered by traditional and hierarchical structures that women find incompatible with building their capacity. metaphorical analysis can further the gendered understanding of higher education and show the impact on the professional and personal lives of women. however, metaphors can be used to generate insight and further theorising about how organisations function (bacharach, 1989). in this case, the research shows that for all the isolation and lack of power experienced by this subset of women in the study, the workplace is also a place of rebelliousness, and a capacity for productivity and positivity. the imagery of rebelliousness can be a starting point to generate new propositions about women and their experiences of higher education work, beginning with advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 23 their practices of subversion and creativity. gendered analysis of organisation has focussed on ways in which “gender is done” and women are excluded” (tienari et.al., 2013, pp. 43). the research suggests that using the metaphors of desire 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(2013). collegial reflection on the meaning of metaphors in learning: emerging theory and practice. studies in continuing education, (ahead-ofprint), 1-15. ollilainen, m., & calasanti, t. (2007). metaphors at work maintaining the salience of gender in self-managing teams. gender & society, 21(1), 5-27. prange, c. (1999). organizational learning: desperately seeking theory. organizational learning and the learning organization, pp. 23-43. ragins, b., r., & sundstrom, e. (1989). gender and power in organizations: a longitudinal perspective. psychological bulletin, 105(1), 51-88. schön, d. a. (1993). generative metaphor: a perspective on problem-setting in social policy. in ortony, a. (ed). (1993). metaphor and thought. cambridge: cambridge university press, 137-163. simpson, a., & fitzgerald, t. (2013). organisational and occupational boundaries in australian universities: the hierarchical positioning of female professional staff. studies in higher education, (ahead-of-print), 1-13. tienari, j., meriläinen, s., holgersson, c., & bendl, r. (2013). and then there are none: on the exclusion of women in processes of executive search. gender in management: an international journal, 28(1), 43-62. tracy, s. j., lutgen-sandvik, p., & alberts, j. k. (2006). nightmares, demons, and slaves exploring the painful metaphors of workplace bullying. management communication quarterly, 20(2), 148-185. tsoukas, h. (1991). the missing link: a transformational view of metaphors in organizational science. academy of management review, 16(3), 566-85. author (2012). advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 25 warring with words: narrative and metaphor in domestic and international politics, (2013). retrieved from http://www.cgu.edu/pages/9491.asp. 1 leunig’s duck is a popular australian cartoon duck that appears authentic and therefore often out of place, in a range of settings thereby suggesting a defiant quality. 2 based on the stanford prison experiment, the number of the prisoner who succumbs to peer pressure. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 188 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 188-195, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the role of interpreters in sense-making by women leaders penelope m. earley, jane h. applegate, and jill mattuck tarule penelope m. earley, professor and director for center for education policy and evaluation, george mason university, email pearley@gmu.edu, phone: 703-993-3361, fax: 703 993-3678 jane h. applegate, professor emerita, university of south florida, email applegat@usf.edu, phone: 813-632-0689 jill m. tarule, professor of educational leadership, university of vermont, email jtarule@uvm.edu, phone: 802-656-2624 accepted september 28, 2013 in this study, we examine individual sense-making by women leaders using meta-synthesis, a modification of meta-ethnography, to analyze 11 vignettes written by women leaders published in three prior studies. the data were coded and the text analyzed, to create a new interpretation from the existing qualitative studies. two theoretical lenses informed this study: gendered leadership in education contexts and sense-making. the data were organized into five categories and common to all was the finding that the women leaders tested their perceptions of events as a form of sense-making. using dervin’s (2003) “situations-gaps-users” model we determined that most of the women relied upon interpreters (who in general are neither formal mentors nor advisors) to help them bridge information gaps. key words: gendered leadership, women leaders, meta-synthesis, sense-making, interpreters. introduction our inquiry journey began two decades ago when we began to document and analyze our own leadership challenges. as women in leadership positions, we recognized that we shared some common beliefs and strategies for considering problems in our respective institutions. we learned through extended conversations that we could trust and rely upon one another for insight and support. since that time, three studies on the topic of the roles of women in leadership have been published (tarule, applegate, earley, & blackwell, 2009; applegate, earley, & tarule, 2011; earley, applegate, & tarule, 2011). in each, we presented vignettes, told to us or written by women leaders at our request, and analyzed and detailed the themes within them. the three earlier studies were bounded by topics. the first was an exploration of how a non-proximate network of women leaders, meeting two or three times a year, evolved into an opportunity for discourse on leadership challenges. for the second study, we invited women to describe events that challenged their leadership. the third work had a more specific focus in which women leaders wrote essays about if and how they engaged in professional relationship building. the present study is the result of a series of conversations among the three of us about the arrival of a new administrator on one of our campuses. she came from a corporate background and her observations about the university’s operations were orthogonal to perspectives of other administrators and faculty (this is not a case of right or wrong, merely different). this event and our previous scholarship led us to speculate on the following question: when women move into new leadership roles, what steps, if any, do they take to make sense of events and actions in new contexts and new surroundings? we turned to meta-synthesis “as an alternative strategy for moving [our] work forward rather than continuing to conduct serialized investigations” (finfgeld, 2003, p. 898). finfgeld (2003), further, noted that it is appropriate for this type of work to be informed by the researchers’ earlier incremental work (p.898). methods theoretical framework our perspective for this study was informed by two theoretical lenses: gendered leadership in educational contexts and how sense-making informs women leaders’ actions in their specific advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 189 contexts. by gendered leadership we suggest that some leadership styles are gender related, but not gender specific (tarule et al.2009).women leaders have been identified in the literature as being likely to value relationships as a central element of their leadership (helgesen,1995). more recent research examined gender related leadership behaviors in context and suggested that women emphasize communal behaviors over agentic ones in their leadership style (eagly & johannesen-schmidt, 2001). madden (2011) builds on what these communal behaviors might entail by identifying particular “patterns associated with gender” (p. 326), such as valuing institutional transformation, an emphasis on the importance of understanding power relationships, and specifically, relevant to this study, a pattern of “defining situations rather than being defined by them, emphasizing that survival depends on interpretation and the meanings applied to situations” (p. 326). sense-making, or how leaders create meaning about situations that face them, is a particular focus of this study and the second theoretical lens. grounded in a constructivist perspective in which individuals are seen as constructing their world view, sense-making is a “social, ongoing, and retrospective process grounded in individual identities that involves noticing and selecting cues in the environment for interpretation and results in enactment of that interpretation in practice” (suspuitsyna, 2011 p. 407).we are drawn to this definition because it posits that sense-making may occur after an event and upon further reflection on it. to this, we add dervin’s situations-gaps-users model (dervin, 2003, p 256). describing the core elements of this model, she writes:  that sense-making is situational and will be predicated by situational conditions.  that the gaps seen at a specific moment by an observer will depend on where that observer is in time-space and how he or she sees time-space. thus, different observers will see different gaps.  that even supposing two people see the same gap, the ways in which they bridge that gap will be different depending on where they are in time-space, where they have been, and where they are going [author’s italics] (p. 256). written to explain and account for aspects of sense-making from the perspective of how individuals receive information, this model was developed to apply to events as they happen in specific contexts. dervin (2003) writes that “sense-making assumes that information seeking and use is not transmissionreceiving activity but rather constructing activity—the personal creating of sense” (p. 255). our expectation was that we would find examples in our data that conformed to this model. this was often the case, however we also found that individuals we labeled as interpreters were available in various situations to help build the understanding bridge. moreover, we determined that interpreters could be helpful to women leaders as they reflected on events as they are unfolding or after they occurred. data sources and mode of inquiry data for this study were 14 vignettes gathered and analyzed in our three previous studies (the first study used five vignettes, the second four, and for the third we analyzed five). we looked at them anew, with the new research question in mind. these vignettes were written at three different times and are bounded by the words of the women who wrote them. that is, we did not return to the authors of these vignettes for clarifications or further elaboration on the social context in which they occurred. the purpose of this study was to re-analyze existing data rather than to gather new information that would emerge if the original authors were asked to discuss their vignettes as much as a decade after they were originally written. thus, we relied entirely on the narratives—or words of the informants— for this study. our methodological approach was informed by norblit and hare’s (1988) description of meta-ethnography, which allowed us to reanalyze our original 14 vignettes and “compare and analyze texts, creating new interpretations in the process” (p. 9) or to draw conclusions by “translating studies into one another” (p. 24). finfgeld (2003) describes the distinction between quantitative meta-analysis and metasynthesis as this: in a meta-analysis the goal is aggregation and reanalysis of data whereas the goal of meta-synthesis is translating and interpreting (p. 894). we employed a modification of norblit and hare’s (1988) sevenphase, ordered approach to conducting a metaethnography. the seven phases are: (a) identifying an area of interest; (b) identifying studies or data for the analysis; (c) reading the studies (in this case the focus was on the 14 vignettes); (d) determining if they are related; (e) translating the data in the vignettes into one another; (f) conducing the synthesis; and (g) presenting the results (pp. 26-29). this study is not a true meta-analysis because we did not identify an issue of interest and mine the literature for appropriate studies to synthesize; hence, our work is more appropriately a metasynthesis that was guided in part by norblit and hare’s framework. as noted previously, our data were from three existing studies that we co-authored. given our initial decision to focus this analysis of existing data from our earlier works, we combined phases one through four related to data collection and at the end of four we determined that 11 of the 14 vignettes were similar enough for further analysis. the three excluded vignettes were ones where the author was an observer of events rather than a participant. as such, it was not an account of personal events and did not describe how the author’s actions were influenced by sense-making. to analyze the data (phases five and six of the meta-ethnographic protocol), we used narrative coding because of the nature of our data (vignettes), its utility in deconstructing personal stories, and its appropriateness for “critical feminist studies” (saldaña, 2009, p. 109). we first looked for a theme or themes that were common to the events described in the vignettes and determined that the 11 vignettes fit into five categories: introducing change, assuming a new leadership position, the nexus of personal and professional behaviors, being surprised advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 190 by an explanation of events from another source, and attempting to make sense of a situation absent a communication bridge for the next phase of the analysis we returned to the elements of dervin’s sense-making model and identified instances in each vignette that were situational, the understanding was informed by the moment, there was a gap in understanding, and the gap was bridged (2003, p. 256). as discussed below we found that in these 11 events when a woman leader was engaging in sense-making as a way of interpreting events, there frequently was an interpreter in the background who helped create the bridge of understanding suggested by dervin’s model. findings as noted in the prior section, we determined that the 11 vignettes could be placed into five categories and common to all categories was the concept that these women leaders tested their perceptions of events as a form of sense-making and, in doing so, they relied upon interpreters to help them make sense of these events in context. we further determined that the interpreter need not be co-located with the leader but may be non-proximate—separated by geography, time, and, often, by role. in this context we define interpreter as someone who helps another understand or make sense of events by testing that colleague’s perceptions, offering alternative explanations, translating perplexing events into something knowable, or, in dervin’s terms, creating a communication bridge. we distinguish interpreters from either advisors or mentors. the role of an interpreter is to help another individual explore and consider competing reasons for leadership challenges, but the interpreter normally does not offer advice on how to resolve them. thus, an interpreter might become an advisor, but an advisor rarely is an interpreter. ridenour and newman (2008) present the concept of peer debriefing in qualitative research suggesting that this is a strategy to help avoid interpreting the data solely from the researcher’s own “need base” (p. 58). this is an interesting concept and useful to consider here because leaders who seek information about events and their meaning are engaging in a form of qualitative inquiry. however, if we accept the definition of “peer” as someone of equal standing with another, it is more limiting than the notion of an interpreter. in the vignettes we analyzed the interpreter was not always an equal in the organization. the value of an interpreter is helping the leader engage in sense-making and is not limited by an individual’s role or status. we readily concede that our research questions could apply to male leaders and leaders in other educational settings. however, for this work we limited our attention, with one exception, to the experiences of women in higher education contexts. in the section that follows, the results of the meta-synthesis, organized by the five categories, are presented. introducing change at some point in her leadership, a woman must direct and manage change. when change needs to occur there are a myriad of forces and factors working against the change. many interpreters may be available to help clarify events but a leader may or may not listen to those interpreters. here, two vignettes describe how women leaders introduced and attempted to implement change. one cultivated interpreters in the change process; the other ignored them. the first case is of a president’s decision to close an under enrolled engineering department; the reorganization of a college by a dean is described in the second case. change vignette 1 (from earley, et al., 2011) this vignette involves a university president who knew that closing an academic program would be difficult so when she undertook this process, she involved a broad array of stakeholders. she spent considerable time developing relationships with some of the resistant faculty in the department. in her own words: for me, it is the web of relationships that makes organizations, and perhaps also their leaders, function. dealing with people and making decisions in one area impacts many others, sometimes in ways that cannot be anticipated. it is the relationships that hold everyone together… (p. 249). by developing a web of relationships, she encountered interpreters who helped her anticipate the unexpected. in this instance, these relationships made change possible. each event or incident in the process of closing a program created a situation where a gap in communication and understanding might exist and would need to be bridged. collectively, the actions of interpreters created a richer understanding of the university and revealed ways to meet this woman president’s goal of closing a program. the matter of bridging an information gap was particularly clear when addressing the future of faculty in that program. she learned that a senior faculty member in the program to be closed (engineering) was highly regarded by the physics faculty and with this information was able to move him to that unit. she wrote, “he shared with me that he was glad to move to a department where he was so well-regarded. and, he thanked me for the respect with which i handled the entire matter” (p. 249). change vignette 2 (from tarule, et al., 2009) this event also is about organizational change. in this case, a dean attempted to implement a new vision and direction for her college. it is an example where attempted collaborative planning did not go well. the dean’s own interpretation of events that thwarted her goals reflects a dichotomy between what individuals wanted and what the organization needed. the dean interpreted her relationship with the faculty as a power struggle that destroyed attempts to build community. as this dean questioned in the vignette she wrote: advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 191 is it possible that in trying to be collaborative, i gave the impression of lack of leadership and indecision, thereby causing the faculty to engage in endless debate? did the listeners perceive my willingness to share power as a sign of weakness because of a belief that real leaders don’t share power? (p. 42) she continued, “they not only resisted change but actively undermined any efforts that might result in diminishing their influence on the college” (p. 42). this dean’s attempt to reorganize the college ultimately was not successful. in this case, the dean focused on interpreting events, did not see the communication gap before her and, as such, if an interpreter was available to help bridge the gap, she did not acknowledge her or him. she wrote of being perplexed when her successor as dean was able to undertake a similar exercise with apparent ease suggesting that even after the fact this woman leader was unable to find a way to bridge one or more information gaps. assuming a new leadership role in three of the vignettes, women discussed challenges that occurred when they assumed a leadership position at a new institution of higher education. two of the women were provosts and one a new dean of education. the experiences of the two provosts were similar but with different outcomes. in the case of the dean, she found interpreters to help her make sense of the dynamics on her campus through conversations with female contacts who were leaders in other universities and organizations in other states. new role vignette 1 (from earley et al., 2011) in this vignette a new woman provost recounted to us her experience being continually challenged by a male administrator who was the inside candidate for her job. her sense-making of the situation led to seeing the behaviors of this man as indicative of lack of respect for her. she was irritated if he did not provide her with information about the institution that would be important to her and equally irritated when he did present information in what she felt was a condescending manner. there were too many incidents when his apparent hostility toward her made learning the new job harder. [he] would not respond to her requests for information or when he did, he provided only partial information that did not include sufficient detail for her to understand the issue fully or to make a reasoned decision based on evidence. (p. 245) clearly there was a communication gap and the provost recognized it, however she was not able to construct a needed information bridge. although she described being worried that she would not be able to create the professional relationship she and the other administrator needed to advance the goals of the university, it was not apparent that she was willing to use this male administrator as an interpreter. she also recognized that as the new leader, “she needed positive working relationships with everyone who reported to her and knew that [his] actions were being observed by them” (p. 246). this final point is telling. we speculate that she either isolated herself from potential interpreters or no one was willing to step into that role. in either case the consequence was the same, a constructive information flow and level of trust could not be built. new role vignette 2 (from earley et al., 2011) the events in this vignette also involve a provost who described arriving on campus to lead what she described as a very dysfunctional group of deans and senior faculty. she detailed various strategies intended to change a culture of sniping, back-door deals, and begging-based budgets (p. 247). one was establishing a transparent budgeting process for the institution. however, her work was undone when budget cuts needed to be made and the culture reverted back to what she described as “some sleazy politician’s ward!” (p. 247). after a year an interpreter emerged who explained that her efforts had been unsuccessful because, at that institution, “the provost is staff to the president” (p. 248). thus, although she held the title of provost, she was not perceived as having the role or power of a budget decision maker. in this situation, the culture of competition for resources resulted in every individual who wanted funding for a pet project acting as an interpreter, but their focus on personal agendas resulted in shaky information bridges. new role vignette 3 (from applegate et al., 2011) this vignette was written by a woman reflecting on her first year as a dean. in it she writes about her sense that gender was a significant factor in the power and privilege dynamics of her institution. this woman realized the need for interpreters but found them outside her institution through a forum of women higher education leaders. my membership in that community or network was an invaluable component in my own growth and development as an academic leader…the dialogue and the work were exhilarating, enlightening, troubling, hard. but along with what we accomplished for the profession, i gained a new perspective on my own institution and the practices in it. (p. 157) although these interpreters were at different institutions, in different states, and met face-to-face only several times a year at profession for professional conferences, they helped the new dean make sense of her challenges and from that to identify the strategies she would use on her campus. this is a somewhat different twist on dervin’s model because the events were described after the fact and the interpretation came later rather than at the moment. this suggests, however, that communication bridges might be able to occur at a point after the gap occurs and illustrates retrospective sense-making (suspitsyma, 2011). nexus of personal and professional behaviors we cannot draw a line or build a wall between our professional and private lives. although they are separate, one is bound to advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 192 influence the other. the two vignettes in this category describe situations when personal and professional behaviors overlapped. personal and professional vignette 1 (from tarule et al., 2009) this recounts the dissolution of a marriage and the woman leader’s attempt to conduct business as usual and not share her personal pain with others at her university. this leader recognized and used interpreters, who presented themselves in a variety of forms. for reasons unknown to me at the time, i did not want to share my personal pain with my university colleagues. now i know that i was afraid my personal issues would reflect badly upon me in the public realm, that there would be untoward gossip and speculation about me, and those kinds of hallway conversations might lead to considerations about me as a dean that would make me appear weak or worse. (p.35) she observed that this fear initially caused her to be unwilling to ask for help during this time of extreme emotional stress and thus she did not see potential interpreters who might have been around her. however, after some months she realized: it was time to trust my friends with my private pain. it was time to let my colleagues see my vulnerabilities. through them i could gauge with whom and in what ways i needed to share my personal life with my campus. (p. 36) this woman leader recognized she faced an information gap in regard to handling the nexus of her personal and professional lives, but she was initially unable to see that interpreters were available to her. it is another example of interpreters being present at a later time and their ability to create a bridge or to make sense of events that affected the woman leader’s private and professional lives. personal and professional vignette 2 (from applegate et al., 2011). the final vignette in this section also involves loss. this is a description of a group of women k-12 principals who met about once a month for a group dinner. they were essentially a group of interpreters, each helping the others with leadership challenges. the narrator writes: whoever had an issue, an idea, or a frustration would bring it to the group. often we started by simply reviewing events of the past month. someone would begin, usually in an incredulous tone, describing something that had happened, mostly a decision by the superintendent or an action by the school board. we would analyze why those moves by the district—or individuals—were being made at that time. among the four or five of us there were strikingly different perspectives. eventually we began to identify those perspectives as strengths: one of us always cast analysis within a political framework; another within an organizational behavior one; a third within an individual, psychological one; and a fourth took a political/financial view. the perspectives of my colleagues and friends taught me something and always inspired a new way to understand my work in the context of the district and in relation to other school leaders. (p. 155) these women had become personal friends and the narrator writes that one of the group succumbed to a serious illness and after her loss the dinner group disbanded. at the time of the writing, the narrator was attempting to make sense of the loss of her friend and the loss of her group of interpreters. these descriptions reinforces dervin’s model of bridging information gaps within situational contexts. however, it adds another dimension, that absent certain context, individuals do not continue to function as interpreters. surprised by an explanation of events from another source sometimes an interpreter appears and brings something to the attention of a leader; this was the case in two of the vignettes, both written by education deans. in one situation a gap is bridged by the observations of a person in a junior role. in the other, the woman leader is shaken when a colleague voices a point of view that the woman narrator believed she should have seen herself. surprised vignette 1 (from applegate et al., 2011) in this situation, a dean writes of agreeing to become the mentor of a young faculty member who wanted to move into an administrative role. it was the mentee who became the interpreter: one day, after she had sat in at a …meeting of department chairs in my college [she] asked me about the levels of participation in that group. she observed that of the eight chairs that i inherited from my predecessor, all but one was male and all were white. she also remarked that the one woman attending was an acting chair, not a permanent appointment, and was silent unless i called on her. [she] asked if i was comfortable with being the first woman dean and having a nearly all-male set of department heads. her observations prompted me to ask myself how i could have a leadership team that looked like this in a college with a student population nearly 80% female and 36% minority. (p 154) the mentee also provided some institutional scuttlebutt alerting the dean to possible retirements of some department chairs. with this information the dean made it a priority to diversify her leadership team and did so over the year that followed. this vignette illustrates a situation where the interpreter was not a peer in the sense of having a role equal to that of the dean. this vignette conforms to dervin’s model and goes further by detailing how the leader was able to act on the information offered by the interpreter. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 193 surprised vignette 2 (from tarule et al., 2009) this vignette describes dynamics in a search committee for a new provost. written by one of only two women on a 15 member committee, it details the impact of the woman who became an interpreter in the group when she observed subtle and not so subtle gender bias in the search process. the narrator described a meeting of the search committee in which a headhunter asked a question and the other female member of the committee responded: [headhunter:] if the provost candidate is a woman are there qualities or expectations that should be included? my colleague dean leaned forward, ‘huh?’ she said, ‘the qualities for a woman provost would be exactly the same as the ones for any provost!’ (p. 44) the writer acknowledged that she had missed this point entirely: driving home, i can barely stand the fact that i totally missed her very accurate and acute observation and comment. worse i was, just before she spoke, actually thinking about what different qualities might be relevant…am i beginning to unwittingly or unconsciously think more and more like the majority of leaders, primarily male, with whom i have been working my many years of being a dean? (pp. 44-45) dervin (2003) observes that her sense-making model may be used “to predict information seeking and using behaviors [and] must use situational conditions as predictors rather than traditional measures as demography and personality” (p. 255). however, this vignette, like the prior one, suggests that a leader may become so comfortable in her role that she misses certain information gaps when they occur. becoming her own interpreter as we discussed, in some cases a leader will be surprised by the presence of an interpreter. we found in two of the vignettes, the leaders appeared to be their own interpreters. that is, if an interpreter was present, the writers did not acknowledge one in the written vignettes. each involves a clash in values and expectations between a dean and her president. this raises the question for us of whether an individual ever can be her own interpreter. becoming vignette 1 (from applegate et al., 2011).the writer of this vignette is an education dean who recounts being called to a meeting by her president where she was asked to account for data that she had not seen. as she described the event: [i] was not offered any time to present contextual information, nor was there any discussion of how [i] might work with the president and provost to address the data and subsequent perceptions. [i] left the meeting feeling angry and betrayed. (p. 250) she found herself interpreting events at the meeting and as a result of that reflection developed a strategy to present a different perspective on the health of her college. at a subsequent meeting with the president and his leadership team she was able to present her own data with details and contextual information along with a list of suggestions, which appeared to address the president’s concerns. although the dean noted that her president had a history of basing decisions on anecdotal information and publicly criticizing members of his administrative team (p. 249), she was taken aback by his confrontational attitude in the first meeting. other than this observation, there is no evidence of an interpreter who could bridge what could be described as a gap in information between the dean and the president. as a result, the dean had the challenge of interpreting how the president’s information about the college shaped his view of it and then crafting a reply to him in a manner and format that would allow him to make sense of the new information. becoming vignette 2 (from tarule et al., 2009) this vignette involves a clash of values between a dean and her president. the president had encouraged the deans to speak out on important issues, in particular he wanted more press coverage of faculty and student work that would enhance the university’s public image. with that in mind, the dean wrote an editorial defending the values of her college regarding a state policy that she and her faculty felt would be detrimental to their goals and purposes. after her editorial was published she learned that a close friend of the governor was championing the legislation and the president of the university felt the editorial reflected negatively on the governor and, in turn, on his presidency. quickly, the dean saw that she had stepped into a political minefield. later she reflected, “…i asked myself if the values of my college were out of sync with the provost and president, and if so, what would this mean for my leadership” (p. 39). as the dean wrote in her narrative, she gathered information about the pending legislation from resources inside and outside the college and felt she was well informed on the matter. as such, she was gathering and interpreting the information she needed for her editorial. what she did not have was an interpreter who could alert her to the connection between the president and a state legislator. these two vignettes raise the issue of whether the leader can be her own interpreter. there is no question that in these two situations the leader reflected on very challenging events and in one case approached the situation with new data. in the second example the dean came to a troubling conclusion that she and her college may have values orthogonal to the values of the president and provost. as ridenour (personal communication april 26, 2012) observed, an interpreter introduces a sense of validity into the leader’s understanding of events. the logic of this point is strong and helps refine the distinction between selfreflection and sense-making informed by the perspectives of others. this meta-synthesis reveals that in the majority of the vignettes women leaders found colleagues at their institution who would advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 194 be their interpreters—and several were surprised by this revelation. one story involved a group of women k-12 administrators who worked in the same community but not in the same school. another vignette recounted the experience of a woman leader who turned to colleagues in other institutions and other parts of the country to help her make sense of stressful events in her life. in that original work (tarule et al., 2009) we concluded that women seek and find comfort and advice from what we termed “non-proximate” colleagues. we now see with this meta-synthesis and new translation of our original data that these non-proximate colleagues also may assume the role of interpreters and their distance allows them to offer a useful perspective that may not be visible to those who are close to challenging events. observations on one level, this study applied a methodology rarely used in education—the meta-synthesis—to existing qualitative data. exclusive of the matter of the selection of studies, we followed norblit and hare’s (1988) seven-phase process for conducting a meta-ethnography. for the analysis, we adopted dervin’s (2003) situations-gaps-uses sense-making model and used narrative analysis (saldaña, 2009) to reveal new findings in pre-existing qualitative research. of the 11 vignettes analyzed for this study, for the most part we found only evidence of one or two interpretative events in each. we believe that in more complex organizational descriptions a range of interpreters may appear; this was the case in the vignette written by a provost who was confronted with multiple administrators begging for special favors. thus, it is important for the leader to check perceptions and assumptions when developing confidants. part of perception-checking is learning who to trust and who not to trust. as an experienced leader advised a new leader: “trust everyone and trust no one until you really are able to find those few people you can count on to tell you the truth” (j. h. applegate, february 2012, personal communication). the president who struggled with closing a department in her college spent time listening to the voices on her campus—and there were as many interpretations as there were voices. for her it was more than merely a matter of whom to trust. it also demonstrated the need to assure the campus community that she would listen to multiple interpretations before the process of closing the engineering program began. we acknowledge there are limitations to this study. as we noted in our discussion of the analytic framework, this work is informed by the logic of the meta-analysis but unlike the metaanalysis our work is “interpretive rather than aggregative” (finfgeld, 2003, p. 894). the data for this ethnographic synthesis and analysis were taken from 11 of 14 vignettes in three studies conducted by us during the last decade and, as such, this work is not a true meta-analysis. because metaethnography is not a well-defined, broadly used method in the field of education, our intent was to conduct a synthesis of qualitative studies in a more limited and controlled setting. the data for the analysis presented here were all based on convenience samples and we three authors were involved in the initial gathering and examination of those data. for the most part, the subjects in the vignettes were women in higher education and there is limited diversity among the subjects. nevertheless, the institutions in which the vignettes occurred were public and private, large and small, and geographically diverse. we readily concede that the phenomenon of a leader relying on an interpreter is undoubtedly not limited to women administrators or to women in higher education. analysis of these vignettes suggests that interpreters are essential to sense-making and that they may perform an important role in bridging an information gap. leaders who are unaware of this possibility or who believe that the leader must “know all” not only impoverish the potential for understanding their organization and the processes within it, but also may soon find that their decisions or attempts at change are being viewed in ways the leader did not expect. the themes in this text illustrate the kinds of challenges some leaders face. examining them from both theoretical and reflexive positions enables us to think carefully and critically about the many facets of leadership from new angles. the importance of interpreters as individuals who help leaders make sense of their environments, has mostly been under emphasized, under examined and/or viewed as a negative attribute to the leader’s behavior. in contrast, this study suggests that the role of interpreter is critical for both the new and experienced leader and may introduce a validity check into her interpretation or sense-making of events. as we observed in one of our earlier works, “(w)e became more and more convinced of the value and power that is represented in our collaborative and supportive kinship” (tarule et al., (2009), p. 46-47). were the role of the interpreter better understood as an important feature of leadership, mentoring and leadership development programs could do more to help leaders consider how to identify and engage interpreters in the process of building healthy organizations. references applegate, j., earley, p., & tarule, j., (2011). support for women leaders: the visible and the invisible. in c. mullen (ed). the handbook of professional learning communities. 151-160. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. dervin, b. (2003). a theoretic perspective and research approach for generating research helpful to communication practice. in b. dervin & l. foremanwernet (eds.), sense-making methodology reader, 251-268. cresskill, nj: hampton press, inc. eagly, a.h., & johannesen-schmidt, m.c. (2001). the leadership styles of women and men. journal of social issues, 57(4), 781-797. doi:10.1111/0022-4537.00241 earley, p., applegate, j., & tarule, j. (2011). relationship and higher education women: stories and observations. in advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 195 j. martin, (ed), women as leaders in education, 1, (pp. 241-262). santa barbara, ca: praeger. finfgeld, d.l. (2003). metasynthesis: the state of the art—so far. qualitative health research, 13(7), 893-904. doi:10,1177/1049732303253462 helgesen, s. (1995). the female advantage: women’s ways of leadership. new york: doubleday. madden, m.e. (2011). administrative leadership styles. in b.j. bank (ed.), gender and higher education, 322-329. baltimore: johns hopkins press. norblit, g.w. & hare, r.d. (1988). meta-ethnography: synthesizing qualitative studies. london, uk: sage. ridenour, c. & newman, i. (2009). mixed methods research: exploring the interactive continuum. carbondale, il: southern illinois university. saldaña, j. (2009). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. los angeles, ca: sage. suspitsyma, t. (2011). changing student affairs through organizational sense making. in p.m. margolda, & m.b. baxter margolda, (eds.), contested issues in student affairs: diverse perspectives and respectful dialogue (pp. 407-414). sterling, va: stylus. tarule, j., applegate, j., earley, p., & blackwell, p. (2009). narrating gendered leadership. in d. dean, s. bracken, & j. allen, (eds), women in academic leadership: professional strategies, personal choices, 31-49. sterling va: stylus. political leaders and the media: a relationship that impacts on the nation’s consciousness advancing women in leadership, 2013 volume 33 87 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 87-95, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper political leaders and the media: a relationship that impacts on the nation’s consciousness diann rodgers-healey associate fellow, australian institute of business well being, university of wollongong. australia email: diann@leadershipforwomen.com.au accepted july 3, 2013 this study aimed to further investigate the relationship between politicians and the media and its impact on the consciousness of australians during a critical period of political events in late november 2009 and early december 2009 in australia. the findings of this study reflect limitations in perceptions of political leaders as governed by gaps in how the media portrays leaders, leadership, and issues that are of significance to a nation, and gaps in how politicians convey information and analysis to the public through the media. the study highlights how influential the australian media is in shaping perceptions of wide ranging issues beyond those directly covered. it points to recommendations to empower and enable effective decision-making at all levels of society. keywords: women, politics, perceptions, media introduction in the 1930s harold lasswell proposed a fundamental model of public communication that was linear and deterministic. the model (cunningham, 2008) canvassed ‘who says what, in which channel, to whom, and with what effect?’ lazarsfeld (lazarsfeld, berelson & gaudet 1944[1969]) went further to hypothesise a ‘two step’ flow between influencers like politicians and the media in general, and the public. cunningham (2008) states that in this model of public communication, the role of opinion leaders became crucial. characterising this trend as being politico-centric rather than media-centric, cunningham (2008) points out that this approach focussed on political leaders’ managing the media. tiffen (1989; 1999; 2001) and goot (goot and tiffen 1992), however, indicate that this relationship is not as straightforward and assert that both the political elite and the media elite exploit and manage each other for their own benefit as they negotiate deals and power (cunningham, 2008). this is echoed in former prime minister, paul keating’s (2000) remarks of the australian media: “it is an industry that operates behind a cloak of secrecy and insider knowledge. it is riddled with nepotism, backscratching and interlocking interests…” (keating, 2000). the political leaders-media relationship is also said to be “systemic” and “highly personal” (cunningham, 2008). keating (2004) alluded to this too. “…the media is the only effective way of getting the message through to the people…the large issues in australian life – economic and social change, constitutional reform, cultural diversity, australia’s view of its role in the world are all worked out through the media. the best journalists are right to think about themselves as having a high purpose in life (keating, 2000).” power is a dominant theme in both modernist and postmodernist analysis of the political leaders-media relationship with the former focusing on a balance of power between the state and the media and the latter focusing on the centrality of media in the political domain (cunningham, 2008). politicians have learnt to regard the media as a factor they need to learn to deal with in their political life. garreth evans (1998) remarked in a speech to the australian institute of political science (aips), “whether we like it or not and most political practitioners have very mixed views on the subject, probably varying with the number of bruises we are currently nursing it's impossible to imagine a democratic polity being conducted in this or any other country around the world without the media.” former british prime minister, tony blair (2007) spoke of the media inevitably misleading the public. keating’s (2000) statement echoes this distrust. “the media is powerful, and like all centres of power, it needs to be watched.” cunningham (2008) citing riegert (2007) advises that political leaders need to lead through and for the media advancing women in leadership, 2013 volume 33 88 interface and align their style with the protocols of “politicotainment” (p. 179). politicians also lament about the demise of quality media coverage. evans (1998) critiqued that “the disappearance of hard-edge reporting about policy, as distinct from politics and personality, has been endlessly remarked upon in recent years.” blair (2007) argued that the changing relationship between politics, public life and the media is adverse to public life necessitating management of all stakeholders’ interests so that the public is properly and accurately informed. young’s (2008) findings add further support to politicians concerns of the diminishing quality of media reporting. she found in her analysis of australian primetime tv news stories, the average election-news story is only two minutes long during which the reporter and host speak for more than half the time while politicians speak only in 7 second sound bites. she adds that the average news story about the 2007 australian federal election devoted less than 30 seconds to letting politicians speak in their own words. the media thus appeared to control the format, timing and commentaries of the politicians’ short appearances. the political leaders-media relationship, according to cunningham (2008) is, however, being eroded by contemporary internet developments, particularly around the “blogosphere, citizen journalism and the extent of ‘virtual’ public communication (p. 177).” however, a closer analysis of where do people find out about what politicians are doing and saying, indicates that the majority of australians are informed through tv. young (2008) reported that only around 10 percent of the population in australia takes an active interest in politics. she qualified that although there are a whole host of options for engaging with politics and political news particularly on the internet, these options need to be searched for on the internet and thus are only accessed by the dedicated seeker of political information. data from the 2007 election which suggests about 5 percent used the internet to get election news1 supports this assertion. with nine out of ten australians watching tv every week2, tv is still by far the most used medium in australia and as young (2008) comments, it is the place where the “accidental audience” (p. 5) is most likely to come across political news. appreciating that the relationship between political leaders and the media is vested with overt and covert influences of power; that the media is significant to politicians; that political leaders have growing concerns about the quality of media coverage relating to them and their actions; and that as a source of information about political leaders and their actions, tv is the predominant media for the australian public; this study aimed to further investigate the perceptions australians formed of their political leaders and their 1young, s. (2008) cites ian mcallister and juliet clark, trends in australian political opinion: results from the australian election study 1987–2007. canberra, australian national university, 2007, p. 4. 2 ibid. leadership and the extent to which their perceptions was influenced by the australian media. the period during which this study was undertaken, 28 november 2009 to 1 december 2009 was a crucial point in australia’s political history. divisions had already emerged in the liberal party over support for their leader, malcolm turnbull and his emissions trading strategy. several of turnbull’s senior frontbenchers and party officeholders had already resigned3 in protest at his decision that the liberal party would vote in favour of the rudd government’s emissions trading scheme (ets) legislation. the coalition party had also voted 48-354 against a motion that the position of leader be declared vacant. when this study commenced, turnbull was reported to have said, ‘‘we have a duty to our country, to our planet, to our children to take effective action on climate change…i respect the views of those who believe we don’t need to ... but it is not responsible to proceed on the basis that there is nothing to be concerned about (the age, 28 november, 2009).’’ the study closed on the day when there was a second leadership spill motion in which turnbull was defeated by tony abbott5 by one vote in a secret ballot. immediately, abbott then declared a secret ballot on the ets. the motion proposed that the legislation should be delayed for three months, and if this could not be secured, then the ets legislation should be defeated. “the motion was carried by 54 votes to 29, guaranteeing the death of the rudd government’s ets.6” against this tense backdrop of negotiations, power-plays, resignations, overt and covert conflict and strategizing to overthrow the leader within the liberal party; a high level of media interest and coverage of turnbull and the liberal party and to a lesser extent of rudd government’s emissions trading scheme (ets) legislation, this study was undertaken. in order to capture how people’s perceptions were shaped by all forms of media that is online and offline sources, media was defined in this study as referring to television, radio, newspapers, magazines, as well as online delivery of news, radio and television run by media companies. purpose of study this study aimed to further investigate:  the extent to which perceptions of political leaders and their leadership are influenced by australian media coverage; and  how the australian media’s coverage of political leaders and their leadership is regarded. 3 davis, m. (2009) seven senior liberals desert their leader. november 27, 2009. sydney morning herald. 4 lane, s. (2009) turnbull survives but divisions remain. 25 november 2009 abc news. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/25/2753605.htm 5 rodgers, e. (2009) senior liberals desert turnbull. abc news 26 november 2009. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/26/2754654.htm; 6 coorey, p. shock result as abbott wins liberal leadership by one vote ... ets dead. sydney morning herald, december 1, 2009 advancing women in leadership, 2013 volume 33 89 to do this, an online survey entitled, leadership survey about political leaders was designed to explore participants’ observations and thoughts on four areas:  how the media contributed to perceptions of leadership of a political leader  perceptions of the style of leadership employed in the liberal party in relation to the emissions trading scheme, and its effectiveness  perceptions of a preferred style of leadership for a political leader of a party  perceptions of the leadership style of labor's climate change minister, penny wong in relation to the emissions trading scheme methods the australian centre for leadership for women (aclw), a virtual centre conducted an online national survey entitled: leadership survey about political leaders. the survey which ran from 28 of november and closed on 1 december at 5pm comprised 20 questions and included open and close ended questions. responses to the survey were collated and analyzed using content analysis. sample invitations to participate in the survey were emailed on 28 november to a select group of 270 women who were selected from the aclw’s overall national membership on the basis of participation in the aclw’s most recent online leadership activities in the latter half of 2009. as the selected group of women was engaged in leadership issues and analysis as facilitated by the center, they were invited to contribute to an analysis of the issues dealt with by the survey. of the 270 women who formed the sample, 40 women of this group responded to the online survey which was accessed at the virtual center via a special link only known to the invited women. participants who responded had to provide their email address by which they received the original invitation. this email address was cross-checked against the selected sample to maintain the study’s sampling. although the respondent participant size of 40 is small, it is important to note that the distribution was national, representative of a cross section of ages, industry and political party preferences. moreover, the sample’s involvement in leadership issues through the center indicates that the sample is informed about leadership and therefore has credibility in assessing the issues that the center aimed to investigate through the leadership survey about political leaders. characteristics of the participants of the 40 participants, the predominant age group was 41-50 years with 42 percent being in this age group, followed by 27 percent in the 51-60 group, and then 17 percent in the 61+ age group. the geographical distribution of the 40 participants who responded to the survey indicates that the sample was spread across australia. 35 percent of the participants were from queensland, 25 percent were from nsw, 17 percent from victoria, 12 percent from western australia, 7 percent from south australia and 2 percent from tasmania. in terms of industry representation of the participants, 17 percent were in the health industry, 15 percent were in government followed by 12 percent in community services as well as in environment related industries. the positions held by the women participants were primarily in the upper echelons of the organization. 40 percent were in management, 32 percent in directorships and 17 percent owned their own business. findings media’s role in informing and influencing 70 percent of the participants indicated that the australian media coverage of turnbull's leadership over the emissions trading scheme was their only source of information. 22 percent said no and 7 percent did not respond. other sources of information outside the australian media coverage which participants said informed them included conversations with friends, family, personal contacts, and colleagues as well as government websites such as those of turnbull, tony abbott. polling sites such as crikey and ngo’s sites were also accessed. the scientific international press was also mentioned. in some of these ‘other’ sources mentioned such as participants’ friends, family, colleagues and polling sites, the australian media could have contributed to the views presented, though this was not identified. eighty percent of the participants said that they had viewed in the media coverage comments made by turnbull regarding his leadership of the liberal party over the emissions trading scheme. 12 percent said that they had not and 7 percent did not answer. media coverage of turnbull’s leadership of the liberal party over the emissions trading scheme fifty-seven percent said that the media coverage of turnbull's leadership of the liberal party over the emissions trading scheme had not been objective, 17 percent said that it had. 20 percent were unsure. when participants were asked to explain how the media was objective or unobjective, 10 participants outlined why they surmised that the coverage was objective. they felt that “all positions were discussed with the commentary explaining behind the scenes issues.” “balanced perspectives” were provided. the “australian financial review” was seen to be supporting turnbull’s leadership. the “age and “abc” and the “sydney-centric press” were noted as being “sympathetic” and “fairly kind to him.” although it was accepted that media journalists had their own “agendas,” it was felt that because there were “many different commentators with differing views” getting “space in (the) media,” all of the agenda’s were “being played out.” two participants indicated that despite this, the focus was “too advancing women in leadership, 2013 volume 33 90 much on the leadership spill” the coverage though balanced “had been "over the top." twenty four participants pointed out other reasons why they thought that the coverage was not objective. primarily, it emerged that the media was more interested in “speculation”, “sensationalism”, in “following politics” and not the emissions trading scheme or “the nature of the amendments put up by turnbull and macfarlane” or turnbull’s leadership per se. with media coverage focusing on “leadership speculation and a potential spill” and on the “leadership/party infighting,” it was pointed out that the media was interested in the “politics of power” and not “on what was at stake and the consequences of the amendments. the content of the negotiations was secondary to the power tussle.” furthermore, it was felt that the media became an active participant in leading to the demise of turnbull as the quotes below indicate. “the intense scrutiny of malcolm turnbull's words "i am the leader... and as such i have made the call" was sensationalistic and typical of the australian attitude to "tall poppies". there is little understanding of altruism in the media or australia at large.” “media loves short sound bites and scare tactics even if inaccurate” “the coverage has, in my perception, only fuelled the growing discontent within the liberal party.” “the media has looked to the largest story and helped with the demise of democracy.” “the media have been out to get rid of turnbull.” “the negotiations over ets and liberal party leadership all occur in private so the media is forced to build a story from impressions and door stops.” “engagement of turnbull has been strange and he has been asked repeatedly to ask questions that would only be asked of an incumbent governor. his mistake was trying to answer.” “very unfactual.” “(the) media are salivating over the fighting and backstabbing instead of presenting the issues …” “the media focus is about destructive directions and not about ets.” bias in the media was stated as being evident as the coverage did not focus on “the positive things turnbull may or may not have done in terms of leadership,” but too much on the negative and not the positive of the parties working together.” with australian newspapers and commentators being of a certain “pro-conservative” political orientation, participants felt that the stories were biased in “analysis and writing.” it was thought that the motive for such biased coverage was because such coverage “provide(d) the audience,” and provided “news that will buy newspapers.” media coverage of turnbull’s leadership of the liberal party in terms of whether there was a degree of balance in the media coverage about turnbull’s leadership, 77% said that they had viewed coverage of comments about turnbull's leadership which were made by party members who supported his leadership of the liberal party over the emissions trading scheme and comments by party members who were not supportive. suggestions for media coverage of political leaders balance and issues oriented the most prominent set of issues raised related to the need for media being balanced and issues oriented. media commentary was seen as “as spruking their own preferences” presenting a “biased labor or liberal view” "airing dirty laundry" and “skating over the issues and focusing on the personalities.” it was also raised that whilst “each 'side' or 'aspect' talk about different things,” the issue became “extremely unclear due to the many assertions made on each side” making it difficult for one to “make an informed choice.” the “power tussle should have been put into the context of ets more clearly. the playing of the personalities only is very limiting.” suggestions for how the media could present a balanced view were: “use a balanced view where "balance" takes into account not just the black or the white viewpoint, but the spread of grey views and the prevalence of these grey views.” “invite public, scientist, women's views” “concentrate on the issues, less on the people and personalities” “concentrate more on the performance of the individual as a representative of their electorate and less on personal traits or relationships” “stop reporting about in fighting and start reporting on the issues that matter. let them sort out their own fights.” “argue more constructively” “media coverage of leaders has been relegated to poll results, which at best are transient and do not reflect much, except what a certain number say in response to a particular question at a particular point in time.” “while minority views are important they should not automatically obtain the same coverage as general, moderate views.” “so often the public only hears the noisy cog, this is the case with the leaders that are most out spoken. it would have been beneficial to hear from some of the other members in the liberal party to hear their views. whilst i understand that the leader is the speaker, through the media we (the public) only hear from the strongest voices. because of this the public only hears those who speak up the most and are more aggressive.” media shaping outcomes the media was perceived as not only being led by what was happening but also influencing the course of outcomes and as such being quite a significant player in the events as they transpired. some of the comments to this effect are quoted below: “dissention within parties causes a feeding frenzy among media.” advancing women in leadership, 2013 volume 33 91 “once a leader is loosing loyalty of his/her members the media is relentless in its pursuit of the story. i would prefer the media to concentrate on the issues, less on the people and personalities.” “it doesn't help to have politicians text messaging the media whilst party meetings are being held. the betrayal of trust has been palpable…” “perhaps the media should concentrate more on the performance of the individual as a representative of their electorate and less on personal traits or relationships.” “the media had not made such a story of the leadership issue; malcolm turnbull might not be facing a leadership challenge today. why did the media give so much coverage to a group of failed political leaders who are so unsuited to the 21st century? did the media empower them when dying out like the dinosaur is actually more likely to happen? turnbull behaved like a true leader but thus was not highlighted by the media.” “the media decided it was more fun to cover a leadership challenge than the real issue of ets and climate change. i am getting tired of the media deciding when to undermine a leader and doing so regardless of the good of the country.” “are they acting for the greater good?” “they need to argue more constructively. climate change is the greatest issue facing us and the liberal party defectors are a disgrace.” “the media rarely covers leadership issues unless there is a crisis, balanced and general reporting on the processes of government and political parties may give the public a better idea of the constraints that politicians operate under and the balancing act that they have to do between what they believe, what the public believes and what the party believes. a better understanding of the processes might encourage australians to care about politics and political issues.” “the media have given a lot of coverage to the leadership issues, which is valid, however how this will impact on the policy issues and what this means for the public is an important next step to understand and be reported on.” “the media governs the country, and plays a huge role in every aspect, depending on their agenda the media can break a political partyin this case the media has focused on personal issues rather than policy.” media being truthful that the media “lead with truth and courage” and provide “true journalism,” “more true debate” and “not sensationalism” was urged. the perception was that “the media will not let the real truth get in the way of a story” and that “transparency and objectivity are paramount, but rarely found!” investigative journalism participants on the whole suggested that the media “investigate the real issues” provide “active critique” “replace 'opinion' with 'analysis'” and be less “worried about the rhetoric” but more about “the substance of the debate.” the media does a good job a few participants stated that the media did a good job and that it should not be criticized in its approach which is democratic and fair and that it is not responsible for creating the problems which exist. “we have a reasonably unbiased media in this country compared to other western democracies. they do a fair job on party politics and everyone gets a fair say, as well as a fair bashing when their turn comes around. leave the media alone this is not their problem, it's our leaders' problem.” “should be free to cover it in whatever way they desire. there will be multiple perspectives but that is healthy for democracy.” “it is fair game politicians are media savvy, it is up to them to manage media professionally according to party standards.” below are the findings of the perceptions that participants had formed of turnbull’s leadership of the liberal party in relation to the emissions trading scheme as well as that of penny wong, minister of climate change. style of leadership of turnbull participants were asked what style of leadership they thought that turnbull had used to lead the liberal party in relation to the emissions trading scheme. four distinctive perspectives emerged in the responses.  50 percent of the participants indicated that turnbull was “autocratic.”  35 percent indicated that he needed to be autocratic in this situation.  10 percent indicated that he had strong leadership.  5 percent indicated that it was difficult to determine his leadership style as one did not have any personal insights of what was happening behind closed doors except for what the media was conveying. participants who described turnbull’s style of leadership as being autocratic in relation to the emissions trading scheme used words such as “aggressive” “arrogant” “bull dozer” “commanding” “crash through or crash” “dominant” “forceful, non-collaborative – brinkmanship.” turnbull was described as someone who “likes to get his own way” and used a “totalitarian” and “dictatorial” style that was not “conciliatory.” the 35 percent who were in support of turnbull’s autocratic style of leadership in relation to the emissions trading scheme identified reasons that justified this leadership style in this particular situation. one of the set of reasons pertained to the significance of the emissions trading scheme and its relevance to the nation commending turnbull’s attempt to use “rational” “balanced” debate whilst being “outcome” focused on the “longer-term national interest” rather than “short term gain.” turnbull was also seen as being strategic, “strong” and “decisive” in making the best of a “no-win situation” “trying to drag his party into the 21st century” and as such, aware of the "long term implications of decisions made for his party…” “leading from the front” being the advancing women in leadership, 2013 volume 33 92 'light on the hill' to bring his caucus with him,” to “move the liberal party into a party of the future” was commended. turnbull’s leadership was evaluated in the context of the liberal party’s culture which was described as having an “immature, implosive, culture that is still getting used to being an opposition party.” in this context, turnbull was seen as using the “best style he could, given the level of dysfunction, lack of alternatives and dissent from the party.” in being “progressive, but cautious,” “principled,” “strong ethically,” “values led” and “autocratic,” turnbull’s “corporate style” of “leading” and expecting his “colleagues” to “follow” was qualified with “genuinely trying to "do the right thing" at a national level.” 10 percent of the participants who indicated that turnbull had employed strong leadership stated that it was “well informed” “clear & focused” and “strong with integrity.” perceptions of turnbull and rudd working with each other on the emissions trading scheme in response to the question that sought participant’s comments about the way turnbull and rudd worked with each other on the emissions trading scheme, on the whole, it was seen to be a positive in that it involved “collaboration” “collegiate respect” “great team work” “a common goal” and the desire to “find an outcome.” it was described as being “constructive” “pragmatic,” a negotiation to find “a common point in the best interests of stakeholders” “a good model” “a new experience for politicians” and an “excellent example of a bi-partisan relationship that realized this issue is bigger than federal politics. amongst those who described turnbull and rudd working together as “poor,” it was said that there was “no deep meaningful debate. there was a “lack of evidence and lack of answering the 'why questions’," and the bipartisan collaboration “was seen by labor voters to reek of back room deals and by conservatives as 'all about me'-ism from turnbull.” another said that although the “approach initially (was) destructive as there was little consultation on labor's behalf, considering the matter should have been very much a bipartisan initiative,” the final outcome “was better than anticipated.” a common theme was that of gamesmanship which emerged in the descriptions used to discuss the motives and moves made by turnbull and rudd in their negotiation. this is evident in terms such as “both wanting to win” “scoring points” having the “upper hand” “bargaining power” and “little room to maneuver.” some participants said that they could not tell if turnbull and rudd worked well together as they did not know “enough to have an opinion” or that their working together was “invisible, not public,” and that they “didn't see anything” as things were “done very privately.” support for turnbull from party members when asked if all of the liberal and national party members should have supported turnbull in his emissions trading scheme strategy, 57 percent said yes they should have supported turnbull; 25 percent said no and 17 percent were unclear. some of the participants who said that party members should have supported turnbull gave different reasons as the comments indicate: “absolutely. their behaviour has shown them to be oldfashioned and narrow thinkers. “yes they said they would and they backed down” “yes, once it was public and actioned.” “yes i do, however i understand why they did not as his style was unfortunate” “yes, given the ets is so critical to our global future; however, turnbull failed to build consensus or support initially so it is understandable that they behaved like put-out children” some of the participants who did not think that all the party members should have supported turnbull in his emissions trading scheme strategy said that party members have the “freedom” to “reject support of a strategy” if they “didn’t agree” and that the party “needed to find their own strategy that they were happy with as a party” as their current strategies were based on a “conservatively framed agenda.” participants who did not specifically say yes or no to this question made some very valid comments which criticized the process turnbull used, the failure of the party to come up with an alternative and the significance of the emissions trading scheme. the view that “the parties should have come to an agreed position” for turnbull to negotiate on” was common. in addition it was also commonly considered that it was imperative that “we need a form of ets asap” and that the liberals “needed to come up with a real alternative before shafting their leader.” the significance of the emissions trading scheme is noted in the comment quoted below. “i believe as a country we have an imperative to relinquish unsustainable energy sources including fossil fuels and therefore i am aghast at the behavior of joyce and company in the nationals and the deferring senior liberals. the motivation behind these people appears as nothing but self-interest.” participant support for turnbull on his emissions trading strategy when participants were asked if they supported turnbull in his emissions trading strategy, 60 percent of the participants said yes, 20 percent said no; 15 percent were unsure and 5 percent did not answer. participant support for turnbull on his leadership over emissions trading strategy forty percent supported turnbull in how he led the liberal party over the emissions trading scheme; 32 percent did not advancing women in leadership, 2013 volume 33 93 support him, 22 percent were unsure and 5 percent did not wish to answer this question. accountability of a leader in response to the question to whom should a leader of a political party be accountable to first and foremost, 67 percent indicated that a leader of a political party should be accountable to “australia at large” followed by 15 percent saying to the “electorate”; 12 percent to their “party members.” 2 percent said to themselves and equally 2 percent were unsure. as this question was a multiple choice question allowing only one option, it did not give respondents the option to choose more than one selection or order the items. as one participant stated, “a political leader has multiple accountabilities-to his/her party, to their electorate, and to the parliament. it is too simplistic to say that a leader has only one accountability.” how participants had voted and will vote 42 percent of the participants had voted for labor in the last election; 25 percent had voted liberal; 10 percent had voted independents and 7 percent for the greens. 5 percent had voted national and other parties and 2 percent for the democrats or other parties. participants were asked “if there is an election in the near future, which party are you likely to vote for?” 37 percent said labor; 22 percent were unsure; 15 percent said liberal and 15 percent said greens. 2 percent said the independent parties, or other parties or were unsure. it therefore emerged that in a future election, in this sample of 40 women, the liberal party vote would be down by 10 percent and the labor party vote would be down by 5 percent. whilst votes for the greens would go up by 8 percent, votes for the independents would go down by the same percentage. preferred style of political leadership participants predominantly expressed that they preferred a “consultative”, “collaborative” “democratic” style of leadership which was about “acknowledging if not addressing concerns of key players,” “integrat(ing) the needs and interests of party members into the strategy,” getting “people on board” and convincing “them of his/her position.” a number of participants qualified that whilst consultation was necessary at the initial stages of making decisions, the leader needed to after this inclusive and collaborative process, make the decision and stick to it. there were varying degrees of such nuances in the participants’ responses as indicated in the quotes below about preferred leadership style of the leader: “consultative but with capacity to make final decisions that stick” “initially consultative and collaborative when deciding the party line and then hard when implementing it. his party needs to know that they have no option other than to support him publicly, but there must be a good internal system to work through difficulties.” “leaders of political parties need to inspire but before all else, they need to allay fears and make backbenchers feel safe. collaboration at first, then if the views are at odds, a well communicated platform to the party prior to a strong, unshakable and sensible stance.” “best results come from consensus within the party, but where consensus is lacking, the leader must "drive" the issue convincingly.” overall, the view was that the leader needed to be first and foremost, collaborative, well-informed and able to convince the party of the final position, but if consensus was lacking after collaboration, then the leader needed to be “principled” and make the final decision in terms of what was best for all stakeholders. penny wong’s leadership participant’s views about the minister of climate change, penny wong's leadership in the emissions trading scheme was predominantly positive. her leadership was described as being “acceptable” “excellent” “exceptional” “fantastic” “impressive,” “good given the intense fossil fuel lobbyists” and “purposeful.” a few participants commented that her leadership was “poor” “unsatisfactory” and “wishy washy” her qualities as a leader were also alluded to by a number of participants and overall were positive. wong was seen as being “intelligent”, “strong” “focused” “consistent” “committed” “competent” and “articulate.” “she's strong, forward thinking and unflappable she's clearly an intelligent and focused leader.” comments about wong being “flexible” were noted amongst a number of participants as she was seen to be “willing to give the opposition the opportunity to work through their issues and thoughts.” she “listens” is “open for communication” “seems open to negotiate” is “consensusbased” and is “willing to reach a negotiated settlement.” she was also seen as being “competent” “measured” “credible” “well briefed and informed” and expressing the “decisions and policy” “supported by evidence.” some participants commented on wong’s style of leadership as being “task-oriented, detached” and “realist.” a few others referred to it with having degrees of dominance: “dominant and dictatorial initially, but more consultative when negotiations started. “slightly dictatorial” “at times confronting” there was also evident in a small degree a negative evaluation of wong’s behaviour which was judged in the context of her political ambitions. she was said to be a “follower of party lines” “jumping on the bandwagon” “too light on in the 1 minute sound bite” “self serving” or being used by rudd for his gain: “i think she herself is very smart advancing women in leadership, 2013 volume 33 94 but backed by kevin 07 who is very politically savvy and i believe he is using the ets for personal gain.” her handling of the emissions trading scheme was criticized by some participants. she did not effectively explain “why it is necessary to have a decision on an ets before the copenhagen meeting” nor the “complex issue” of the ets “to the australian people” and its “broader implications.” more “meaningful debate” and a “hear(ing) from all sectors” was needed “(not just the big end of town).” it was felt that wong really needed “to be in front, arguing for the government case, not just let turnbull be hung out to dry. the government has been "missing in action" lately.” conclusion from the findings of this study, it is evident that the online and offline media is the most popular source of information. the media is crucial in determining and influencing perceptions on a range of significant issues that move beyond australian political leaders and their leadership styles during a time of crisis. during a critical time in australia’s political history when an issue of national and global significance is at stake, australians engaged in observing and analyzing the events through the media. what the media presented contributed to the formation of in-depth and wide ranging perceptions such as those listed below: on turnbull, the emissions trading scheme and the liberal party  turnbull’s leadership style was perceived to be autocratic and seen as being necessary due to the significance of the emissions trading scheme on a broader level.  the way in which turnbull and rudd worked together on the emissions trading scheme was perceived to be collaborative.  predominantly, it was felt that all of the liberal and national party members should have supported turnbull in his emissions trading scheme strategy.  predominantly there was more support amongst the participants of this study for turnbull’s emissions trading strategy than for how turnbull led the liberal party over the emissions trading scheme. voting behaviour  participants predominantly had voted labor in the last election and indicated that they would vote labor, if there was to be an election in the near future.  there would be a decrease in the number of women within this sample who would vote liberal, if there was to be an election in the near future. on the leadership of wong  wong’s leadership in the emissions trading scheme was predominantly perceived as being impressive.  wong’s leadership style was perceived as being detached, task-oriented and to a certain extent dictatorial.  wong was perceived to be intelligent, strong, focused, consistent, committed, competent, flexible and articulate.  in relation to the emissions trading scheme, wong had not communicated clearly the complexity of the scheme, its broader implications and need for a decision before the copenhagen meeting. on preferred style of political leadership  predominantly it was preferred that the leader needed to be consultative, collaborative, wellinformed using evidence-based information, authentic, and able to convince the party of the final position, but if consensus was lacking after collaboration, then the leader needed to be principled and make the final decision in terms of what was best for all stakeholders.  support for the party leader was seen as developing during the collaborative process of consultation and integration of ideas and in the efforts employed by the leader to convince members of his/her decision. party support for the leader was stated as being necessary when the leader presented the final decision as what was best for all stakeholders. on accountability  predominantly participants stated that a leader of a political party needs to be accountable, first and foremost, to “australia at large” followed by the “electorate” then “party members.” on media coverage  it was perceived that the media was more interested in speculation, sensationalism and personalities, and not the emissions trading scheme or the proposed amendments.  the media became an active participant in influencing the outcomes of the liberal party.  suggestions for improved australian media coverage of political leaders were for media coverage to be balanced, issues oriented, based on investigative journalism, providing analysis not opinions and staying alert to issues that are driving its agenda and cognizant of its impact on the outcome of events and people’s lives. whilst it is evident that the media contributed to perceptions of democratic governance, leadership and negotiation styles for effective decision-making within a political party, when bi-partisan political agreements should override political scoring and accountability of a political party and the government to the nation, what is also clear is the extent to which the media is valued as a reliable source. given that the media is the most popular source of information, developing an in-depth appreciation of the motives underlying coverage would enable a critical appreciation of the information that is derived from this major source. participant’s analysis of the quality of media coverage lacked depth in terms of the extent to which the media filters what we see, hear and read. during this period turnbull’s leadership was shown to be autocratic advancing women in leadership, 2013 volume 33 95 in relation to the emissions trading scheme, but this escalated to turnbull being shown as an autocratic leader of the liberal party per se. an analysis or portrayal of turnbull’s leadership on other issues and his management of the party since he became leader in september 2008 did not appear to be part of a comprehensive media analysis. whilst it could be said that in the media ‘both sides’ of the story were being presented, it must also be noted that those politicians who sought the media’s attention got a sounding thus reducing media content in scope and breadth. what was happening behind the scenes would lend itself to an equally interesting study in the political leaders and media relationship that was spinning frantically during this time. it is clear that because of the significance of the ets issue in the context of global issues related to climate change, participants in this study, predominantly indicated that turnbull’s emissions trading strategy and leadership of his party was acceptable, despite it being autocratic. however, given the interest in this issue, and what is considered to be vested in it, the media coverage of the actual emissions trading scheme, its impact on global leadership initiatives to affect climate change is disappointing. these issues not only disappeared in terms of visibility and depth, but were presented by the media during this time through a plethora of unsubstantiated opinions heralded by a number of personalities who mostly disagreed with the issue of climate change or its impacts. the labyrinth of elements involved in any media coverage, elements that are responsible for its truth, transparency, bias, quality, immediacy and potency in shaping the course of events operates at all times and not just during critical times in a nation’s history. what this study urges is that in the interest of advancing the nation’s discourse on issues, and australians’ engagement with leaders and institutions responsible for the nation’s governance, that the media recognizes the immense value placed on it in bringing to the public information that is analytical, credible, broad ranging and investigative. this study urges politicians to consider their use of the media and whether the way in which they use the media enables australians to become more informed about issues. it urges politicians to appreciate the feedback from the public in terms of how they evaluate the leadership models being employed. although this study has limitations particularly in terms of size and gender, the findings give politicians, the media, leadership and media analysts a study of an unforgettable time in the nation’s history to enable understanding of how perceptions of leadership of political leaders are formed in the national consciousness. references blair, t. (2007) our nation's future’ series. seventh and final plenary address by tony blair in ‘our nation's future’ series. 12 june 2007. cunningham, stuart d. (2008) political and media leadership in the age of youtube. in: hart, paul ’t and uhr, john (eds.) public leadership : perspectives and practices. anu e press (the australian national university), canberra, act, pp. 177-186. evans, g. (1998) politics and the media circus. speech by gareth evans, then deputy leader of the opposition, to the australian institute of political science (aips) 65th anniversary dinner in sydney. february 20, 1998. retrieved from http://www.gevans.org/speeches/old/19961998/200298_dl_politics_and_the_media.pdf goot, m. & tiffen, r. (1992) (eds), australia's gulf war, carlton, vic.: melbourne university press. keating, p. (2000) speech on the australian media. total politics. retrieved from http://www.totalpolitics.com/speeches/countries/aust ralian-politics/34503/speech-on-the-australianmedia.thtml riegert, k. (ed.), (2007) politicotainment: television’s take on the real. new york, peter lang. tiffen, r. (1989) news and power. sydney: allen & unwin. tiffen, r. (1999) scandals: media, politics and corruption in contemporary australia, sydney: unsw. tiffen, r. (2001) diplomatic deceits: government, media and east timor, sydney: unsw press. tiffen, r. (2006) ‘political economy and news’, in s. cunningham and g. turner (eds) the media and communications in australia, sydney: allen and unwin, pp. 28-42. young, s. (2008) politics and the media in australia today. paper presented as a senate occasional lecture at parliament house, canberra, on 11 july 2008 http://eprints.qut.edu.au/18135/ http://eprints.qut.edu.au/18135/ microsoft word 5.docx volume 37, 2017 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 table of contents leadership style and career success of women leaders in nonprofit organizations ............................................................................37 elwin l. jones & ronald c. jones ....................................................................................................................................................... 37 pg. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 37 advancing women in leadership vol. 37, pp. 37-48, 2017 available online at http://www.awlj.org issn 1093-7099 full length research paper leadership style and career success of women leaders in nonprofit organizations elwin l. jones & ronald c. jones elwin jones, waldorf college, e-mail: elwin.jones@att.net ronald jones, forbes school of business at ashford university, rcjones@earthlink.net accepted march 20, 2017 the purpose of this study was to examine the correlation between the leadership styles and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations. the multifactor leadership questionnaire served as the instrument to identify transformation, transactional, and passive leadership styles. the development of a career success index through summing the coded values of data regarding job satisfaction, work-life balance, tenure in the nonprofit industry, tenure in current position, and compensation level facilitated correlational analysis with leadership style. the gulf coast region of the united states was the geographic region for the study. the results indicated a significant and positive correlation between the transformational and transactional leadership styles and the career success index, p = 0.024 for pearson’s product moment; p = 0.038 for spearman’s rho, and p = 0.012 for pearson’s product moment; p = 0.022 for spearman’s rho, respectively. no significant relationship existed between passive leadership style and the career success index, with p = 0.81 for pearson’s product moment and p = 0.983 for spearman’s rho. keywords: women in leadership, leadership style, career success of women, nonprofit leadership women remain underrepresented within public, corporate, and private organizational leadership positions (emmerik, wendt, & euwema, 2010). regarding corporate leadership, women hold approximately 3% of the chief executive officer (ceo) positions within fortune 500 companies (ely, ibarra, & kolb, 2011). of the top 400 nonprofit organizations within the united states, women hold almost 19% of the executive leadership positions; therefore, noted disparity exists between women serving in executive roles within for-profit corporations in comparison to nonprofit organizations (lansford, clements, falzon, aish, & rogers, 2010). women continue to experience difficulty regarding obtaining and establishing successful leadership careers because of the pervasive dominance of male leadership (clarke, 2011; doherty & manfredi, 2009; jonsen, maznevski, & schneider, 2010; lansford et al., 2010; lopez-zafra, garcia-retamero, & martos, 2012; muchiri, cooksey, di milia, & walumbwa, 2011; muhr, 2011; vanderbroeck, 2010). research indicates that women leaders add significant economic and social value to an organization’s sustainability and profitability, yet leadership opportunities remain somewhat depressed for women in comparison to men (jonsen et al., 2010; lansford et al., 2010; nadler & stockdale, 2012). regardless if the cause is ineffective or the lack of diversity initiatives, male-dominated recruitment policies, or inherent bias regarding women in leadership positions, evidence indicates that leadership genderdisparity exists (clarke, 2011; ely et al., 2011; lansford et al., 2010; nadler & stockdale, 2012). jacobson, palus, and bowling (2009) noted that leadership style, behavior, and decision making represent critical components of successful career development and advancement. when women occupy executive positions, subordinate men often resort to behaviors exhibiting condescension, bitterness, and resentment, potentially discouraging women from seeking leadership positions (thoroughgood, hunter, & sawyer, 2011). literature review the identification and development of an effective leadership style is of paramount importance for women seeking career success (elgamal, 2012). a critical gap exists within the existing body of knowledge regarding the examination of leadership styles and nonprofit executive leaders (budworth & mann, 2010; glick, 2011; reed, vidaver-cohen, & colwell, 2011). insufficient research exists within the literature regarding leadership styles, behaviors, and strategies women must employ to overcome gender biases and disparity to advance successful careers in leadership (budworth & mann, 2010). jones and lentz (2013) recommended additional research regarding the pg. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 38 relationship between leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations. addressing the lack of women in leadership positions requires a thorough examination of leadership style choice, the patterns and rationale of leadership style selection, and achievements of successful women in leadership positions (jacobson et al., 2009). furthermore, examining the leadership styles of successful women might detect characteristics and behaviors that allow more women to enjoy flourishing careers in leadership (jones & lentz, 2013; reed et al., 2011). examining the correlation between leadership style and the career success of women leaders in nonprofit organizations represents the purpose of this empirical research study. comparing the leadership style of women experiencing sustained and effective leadership careers to leadership styles of women that lack career success within the nonprofit sector is an objective of this study. research leading to a better understanding of leadership styles regarding adoption, employment, and application might assist women in breaking through the glass ceiling, leading to enhanced leadership opportunities in nonprofit as well as for-profit organizations (budworth & mann, 2010). emmerik et al. (2010) noted that recognizing differences in leadership styles of successful women leaders in nonprofit organizations is a critical component of meeting the growing need for effective leaders. transformational leadership style. transformational leadership style implies strong leadership regarding the motivation of followers to perform at higher levels than originally thought possible. transformational leaders evoke the need for strategic, forward-thinking planning for continuous improvement in the organization (oshagbemi, 2008). transformational leaders focus on the people in the organization as opposed to day-to-day operational aspects (brettel, engelen, & voll, 2010). embracing employee commitment, showing respect for individuals, promoting organizational altruism, and exhibiting authenticity, honesty, and broad, long-term strategic thinking exemplifies a transformational leader (brettel et al., 2010; jain & premkumar, 2010). the leader emphasizes the culture of organizational change, transformative initiatives, and the concept that people are the most valuable organizational asset rather than focusing on command-and-control, organizational hierarchy, or autocratic decision making (brettel et al., 2010). goleman, boyatzis, and mckee (2002) noted that transformational leadership style relates strongly with an affiliative style in that team-building, collaboration, organizational synchronization. promoting connectivity within the organization represents the means to attain the strategic vision. transformational leaders engage in consultation with team members to finalize decisions (oshagbemi, 2008). the leader values the participation and opinions, expert or otherwise, of other organizational members to facilitate decision-making through consensus building (oshagbemi, 2008). furthermore, transformational leaders possess no fear of delegating significant duties to subordinates (oshagbemi, 2008). organizational leaders spend approximately 20% of their time managing and mitigating conflict (ka wai, xu, & peng man, 2008). effective coaching and conflict management represent hallmarks of transformational leaders. recognizing the diversity of worldviews, opinions, and cultures within the work group and utilizing this knowledge to increase organizational value, attain strategic targets, and produce the desired outcomes requires an effective transformational and coaching leadership style (mukhtar & habib, 2010). transformational leaders place emphasis on connecting individual employee needs with strategic goals to draw out the best in each person in pursuit of organizational success (goldman et al., 2002). aligning the personal objectives of the individual worker with the corporate goals through promoting employee engagement, improving job satisfaction, and building a culture of commitment illustrates the utilization of a transformational leadership style (jyh-shen & tung-zong, 2009). transactional leadership style. transactional leaders, in contrast to transformational leaders, immerse themselves in the day-to-day operational aspects of the organization. bass and avolio (2004) noted that transactional leaders seek to meet their personal and professional goals by exerting pressure on other organizational members. whereas the transformational leader tends to forgo emphasizing the need for personal success, the transactional leader remains focused on obtaining personal recognition for organizational success (tabassi & bakar, 2010). lincoln (2012) commented that transactional leaders align closely with authoritative leadership in that the leader emphasizes the distribution of rewards or places contingent rewards at the forefront regarding employee performance. in other words, the transactional leader values the subordinates for what they can accomplish in a set period as opposed to who they are or what they know. although sometimes effective regarding attaining strategic objectives, transactional leaders tend to be more directive, retaining sole authority to define and implement strategic plans without significant input from subordinates (oshagbemi, 2008). lower and middle managers might follow the directives of the leader, yet transactional leaders must carefully consider that the lack of respect of the expertise and experience of others tends to lower morale, reduce job satisfaction, and create added organizational conflict (oshagbemi, 2008). recognizing that the type or style of leadership required in regards to attaining optimum performance and ultimate success is dependent on the organizational situation, transactional leadership style potentially holds significant value for organizational leaders. passive leadership style. passive leadership style implies the absence of leadership (bass & avolio, 2004). brettel et al. (2010) theorized that leaders engaging in passive leadership refrain from exerting the proper effort and diligence regarding developing individuals or team members into people who align their personal and professional goals with the organizational pg. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 39 strategic or operational objectives. passive leaders avoid leadership responsibilities, exhibit ineffective behaviors, and forgo decisions (giri & santra, 2010). subordinates lack feedback, direction, support, communication, and accountability when engaged with a passive leader (schilling, 2009). passive leaders explicitly or implicitly delegate authority or responsibility to direct reports who lack the expertise to engage in effective decision making (chaudhry & javed, 2012). recognizing that leadership behaviors are contagious, passive leaders send organizationally damaging signals to subordinates. schilling (2009) noted that avoidance or passive behavior, in essence, leaves the organizational adrift because the lack of leader involvement creates a lack of organizational orientation. passive leaders create a void within organizations, which may deprive the company of necessary directions to remain competitive and sustainable (aasland, skogstad, notelaers, nielsen, & einarsen, 2010). the literature clearly implies that effective leaders avoid engaging in passive-avoidance style. theoretical framework the theoretical framework for this study of the leadership styles of women in relation to career success is the contingency theory. dries (2011) defined career success as the achievement of professional and personal objectives in conjunction with worklife satisfaction. the applicability of the contingency theory depends on the environment of the organization, the relationship between the leader and followers, and the leader’s ability to motivate subordinates using positional authority (allio, 2013). based on the premise that career success is contingent on the foundational constructs of leadership style, behavior, experience, expertise, and compensation level, the contingency theory is best suited to serve as the guiding theory. theorists noted a link between the application of the contingency theory and organizational success with leader ability, adaptability, and style, positional power, organizational culture, and follower commitment to the leader (pertusa-ortega, molina-azorin, & claver-cortes, 2010). application of the theory of contingency facilitates the determination of the most appropriate leadership style when faced with unique organizational or external environmental situations (tabassi & bakar, 2010). for example, allio (2013) noted that transactional leadership style and behavior correlates with contingent reward, wherein transactional leaders reward performance and penalize under or nonperformance. successful transformational leadership relies on effective leader-follower relationships in which the leader focuses on inspiration and motivation as opposed to contingent rewards (allio, 2013). as noted by jaaskelainen et al. (2012) and jokippi (2010), the utilization of only one leadership style limits a leader’s overall effectiveness because of the variety of organizational, situational, and follower issues that demand flexible leadership. women serving in executive nonprofit positions make effective use of the contingency theory when they possess the ability to alter leadership styles as required to remain competitive, address emergencies, or maintain organizational success during structural shifts (decaro, decaro, & bowen-thompson, 2010). women leaders apply the contingency theory in the form of situational analysis coupled with leadership style flexibility and adaptability to forecast the effect of future events, explore critical issues, anticipate and address complex problems, collect relevant information, make effective decisions, and achieve the desired results (oghojafor, idowu, & george, 2012). organizational success remains contingent upon leader experiences and expertise, especially during strategic change, environmental shifts, or competitive struggles (prindle, 2012). applying the contingency theory to leadership strategies requires leaders who avoid a singular method of problem solving and decision making through examination and analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (jaaskelainen et al., 2012). a key attribute of the contingency theory is the relationship between achievement of strategic objectives, organizational structure, and the ethical and cultural climate within the organization (pertusa-ortega et al., 2010). the effective application of the contingency theory depends upon the aptitude of nonprofit executives to apply current data and knowledge in an impartial manner and reach beneficial solutions (storey & hill, 2010). successful leaders recognize that organizational politics and community-societal demands create challenges that tests organizational competencies, professional capabilities, and personal values. utilization of the contingency theory allows leaders to recognize variables that are contingent on organizational leadership and position power. furthermore, strategy development and implementation, situational analysis and leadership, and the competitive environment are elements consistent within the framework of the contingency theory. a leader’s propensity to influence environmental, situational, and organizational settings indicate the employment of the foundational canons of the contingency theory. contingency theorists agree that a single or unique technique to problem resolution does not exist; therefore, the need to employ contingency methods (jaaskelainen et al., 2012; jokipii, 2010; prindle, 2012; storey & hill, 2010). methods a quantitative method is appropriate when examining potential relationships between variables (bosak & sczesny, 2011; cook & glass, 2011; emmerik et al., 2010; orser & leck, 2010; sadeghi & pihie, 2012). the purpose of this study was to examine the potential relationships between transformational, transactional, and passive leadership styles and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations. a quantitative method, correlational design, was the appropriate choice because the purpose of the research was to examine potential relationships between variables. predictive analytics software (pasw) served as the means regarding testing of the existence and significance of the relationships. the multifactor leadership questionnaire (mlq) served as the instrument to identify and measure the propensity of the pg. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 40 participants’ leadership styles regarding transformational, transactional, and passive styles. the mlq holds broad acceptance in the research community because of the cronbach’s alpha scores for reliability determined to be 0.94; therefore, greater than the acceptable statistical level of 0.70 (bass & avolio, 2004; sadeghi & pihie, 2012; sahaya, 2012). furthermore, cronbach’s alpha for transformational leadership (0.94), transactional leadership (0.82), and avoidance/passive leadership (0.85) indicate the mlq as reliable (groves & larocca, 2011). using the mlq scoring key, measurement of scales or subsets of each leadership style occurred, facilitating a quartile ranking for each participant regarding transformational, transactional, and passive leadership styles (bass & avolio, 2004). orser and leck (2010) defined leadership career success as a person’s ability to obtain and maintain a leadership position that provides job and career satisfaction, work-life balance, equitable and sustaining compensation, and the achievement of selfefficacy. researchers noted five key career success indicators: (a) tenure in current position (clarke, 2011), (b) tenure in the industry (muhr, 2011), (c) job fulfillment (cook & glass, 2011), (d) work-life balance satisfaction (doherty & manfredi, 2009), and (e) total compensation level (orser & leck, 2010). supplemental questions attached to the mlq provided the means to obtain data regarding job satisfaction, work-life balance, tenure in the nonprofit industry, and tenure in current position. the publically available internal revenue service (irs) form 990 filed by all nonprofit organizations within the united states served as the means to collect compensation data. in consideration of these key career indicators, and for the purpose of creating a statistically testable variable, the development of a career success index occurred through summing the coded values of data regarding job satisfaction, work-life balance, tenure in the nonprofit industry, tenure in current position, and compensation level. job satisfaction and work/life balance satisfaction codes consisted of using the likert scale responses from participants of 1 – 5, 1 = very unsatisfied, 2 = unsatisfied, 3 = neither unsatisfied nor satisfied, 4 = satisfied, and 5 = very satisfied. additional interval constructs included position tenure and time in the nonprofit sector measured in months and years, with the codes 1 – 5, with 1 = 26% or more below the mean, 2 =16% to 25% below the mean, 3 = within 15% of the mean, 4 = 16% to 25% above the mean, and 5 = 26% or more above the mean. compensation codes were 1 5, with 1 = 16% or more below the mean, 2 = 6% to 15% below the mean, 3 = within 5% of the mean, 4 = 6% to 15% above the mean, and 5 = 16% or more above the mean. calculating the career success index was a function of adding the coded values of the five key success indicators for each participant. the lowest career success index value was 5 and the highest possible index value was 25. the irs form 990 contains the name of nonprofit organizations, name of key leaders, salary of key leaders, addresses, financial reports, and organizational mission statements. by utilizing the information provided within the irs form 990s, a means to identify and contact potential participants, crosscheck each participant’s position in a nonprofit organization, and make a final determination regarding a potential participant’s suitability for this study existed. recruiting participants occurred by delivering an invitation to participate letter, an informed consent form, the mlq survey, the supplement questions attached to the mlq, and instructions for participation, through the u.s. postal service. the gulf coast region of the southeastern united states experience annual increases in population, escalating the need for nonprofit services because of broader society challenges, more local community needs, or increased human suffering caused by local or widespread natural disasters (olson, 2011). nonprofit leaders face stressful situations and emotional challenges to fulfill their community, state, or societal mission. the impact of local or widespread natural disasters, and increasing community and societal demands on nonprofit organizations creates a need for strong, yet empathetic leadership. a purposive sample of women serving in leadership positions within nonprofit organizations along the gulf coast of the united states was a representation of the total population of women nonprofit leaders in the united states. participants served in the positions of chief executive officer, executive director, president, or vice-president of their respective organizations. invitations to participate mailed to 350 women who served as nonprofit organizational leaders resulted in 70 completed and returned mlq surveys and supplement career success questions, or a 20% response rate. the final sample size exceeded the minimum sample size of 64 calculated by means of g*3 power sample size calculator. research questions women are unrepresented in leadership roles within nonprofit and for-profit organizations and face challenges regarding improving career success opportunities. challenges to a successful career tend to decrease employee commitment, job satisfaction, and self-worth, requiring further research to address methods to increase opportunity for women to attain or maintain a sustained and successful career (channar, abbassi, & ujan, 2011). a research question that facilitates examining the potential existence of a relationship between the career success of females and leadership style within the nonprofit sector might afford women the opportunity to learn new and different leadership behaviors to overcome the barriers, biases, and challenges in the workplace. the research questions to address the problem were: q1. what, if any, significant correlation exists between a transformational leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations? q2. what, if any, significant correlation exists between a transactional leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations? pg. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 41 q3. what, if any, significant correlation exists between a passive leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations? hypotheses quantitative researchers develop null and alternative hypotheses to serve as testable statements, with the result being either a rejecting of the null or a failure to reject the null hypotheses. based on the research questions, the following null and alternative hypotheses align with the problem and purpose of the study: h10. no significant correlation exists between a transformational leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations. h1a. a significant correlation exists between a transformational leadership style and the career success of females in nonprofit organizations. h20. no significant correlation exists between a transactional leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations. h2a. a significant correlation exists between a transactional leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations. h30. no significant correlation exists between a passive leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations. h3a. a significant correlation exists between a passive leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations. results the results indicated a significant and positive correlation between the transformational and transactional leadership styles and the career success index, p = 0.024 for pearson’s product moment; p = 0.038 for spearman’s rho, and p = 0.012 for pearson’s product moment; p = 0.022 for spearman’s rho, respectively. no significant relationship existed between passive leadership style and the career success index, with p = 0.81 for pearson’s product moment and p = 0.983 for spearman’s rho. the analysis of the results of statistical testing follows. research question one. the focus of research question one was examining the potential correlation between a transformational leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations. bivariate correlation analysis occurred using pearson’s correlation coefficient (r) and spearman’s rho statistics (rs). the statistical analysis indicated a statistically significant and positive correlation exists between transformational leadership and career success (r(70) = 0.270, p = 0.024; rs(70) = 0.248, p = 0.038) as indicated in table 1. table 1 correlation coefficients between transformational leadership style and career success transformational leadership style consists of five components that define the traits and manners of a leader’s behaviors. statistical analysis provided the significance level of each of the transformational components as related to career success: idealized influence (r(70) = .222, p = 0.064; rs(70) = 0.230, p = 0.055); idealized behaviors (r(70) = 0.208, p = 0.085; rs(70) = 0.228, p = 0.058); inspirational motivation (r(70) = .301, p = 0.011; rs(70) = 0.303, p = 0.011); intelligent stimulation (r(70) = 0.149, p = 0.248; rs (70) = 0.118, p = 0.329); and individual consideration (r(70) = 0.132, p = 0.275; rs (70) = 0.135, p = 0.264). of particular note from the individual analysis of the transformational leadership scales, only one of the five components, inspirational motivation, significantly correlates with career success; therefore, the strength of the relationship between transformational leadership style and career success lies within the inspirational motivation component. table 2 contains the results of the testing of the five transformational elements. table 2 correlation coefficients between transformational scales and career success index procedure dv1 ia2 ib3 im4 is5 ic6 pearson coefficient csi7 0.222 0.208 0.301 0.149 0.132 p value 0.064 0.085 0.011* 0.218 0.275 spearman's rho procedure dependent variable independent variable pearson tf1 coefficient csi2 0.270 p value 0.024* spearman's rho coefficient csi2 0.248 p value 0.038* note. 1transformational leadership. 2career success index. *correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2 tailed). n = 70. pg. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 42 coefficient csi7 0.230 0.228 0.303 0.118 0.135 p value 0.055 0.058 0.011* 0.329 0.264 note. 1dependent variable. 2idealized attributes. 3idealized behaviors. 4inspirational motivation. 5intellectual stimulation. 6individual consideration. 7career success index. *correlation is significant further examination of the relationship between transformational leadership and career success through regression analysis occurred. figure 1 illustrates the regression curve estimation through a scatterplot, confirming the significant relationship indicated by pearson’s r and spearman’s rho statistics. with the null hypothesis for research question one stated as: no significant correlation exists between a transformational leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations, rejection of the null occurred. figure 1. regression curve estimation and scatterplot: transformational leadership style and career success index research question two. research question two addressed the existence of a potential relationship between transactional leadership style and the career success of women in the nonprofit sector. the findings indicated a statistically significant and positive relationship between transactional leadership style and career success (r(70) = 0.298, p = 0.012; rs(70) =0 .273, p = 0.022). of note, the correlation analysis indicates a stronger relationship between transactional leadership and career success in comparison to the relationship between transformational leadership and career success. table 3 presents the results of the transactional leadership analysis. table 3 correlation coefficients between transactional leadership style and career success procedure dependent variable independent variable pearson ta1 coefficient csi2 0.298 p value 0.012* spearman's rho coefficient csi2 0.273 p value 0.022* note. 1transactional leadership. 2career success index. *correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2 tailed). n = 70. transactional leadership style contains two components or scales, contingent reward and management-by-exception active. correlation analysis regarding the transactional scales indicates a significant and positive relationship between contingent reward and career success (r(70) = 0.306, p = 0.010; rs(70) = 0.287, p = 0.016), yet no significant relationship between management-by-exception and career success (r(70) = 0.128, p = 0.290; rs(70) = 0.121, p = 0.318). the strength of the relationship between transactional leadership style and career success lies within the contingent reward component. table 4 presents the results of analysis. table 4 correlation coefficients between transactional scales and career success index procedure dependent variable cr1 mbea2 pearson coefficient csi3 0.306 0.128 p value 0.010** 0.290 spearman's rho coefficient csi3 0.287 0.121 p value 0.016* 0.318 note. 1contingent reward scale. 2management-by-exception active scale. 3career success index. *correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2 tailed). **correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2 tailed). n = 70. regression analysis of the relationship between transactional leadership style and career success corroborated the existence of a statistically significant correlational. figure 2 illustrates the regression curve estimation through a scatterplot diagram, pg. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 43 confirming the significant relationship indicated by pearson’s r and spearman’s rho testing. the null hypothesis for research question two: no significant correlation exists between a transactional leadership style and the career success of women in nonprofit organizations. because of the existence of a significant relationship, the rejection of the null occurred. figure 2. regression curve estimation and scatterplot: transactional leadership style and career success index. research question three. research question three focused on the potential correlation between passive leadership style and the career success of women. statistical analysis indicated no significant relationship exist between passive leadership and career success (r(70) = -0.029, p = 0.810; rs(70) = 0.003 and p = 0.983). table 5 presents the results. table 5 correlation coefficients between passive leadership style and career success procedure dependent variable independent variable pearson pass1 coefficient csi2 -0.029 p value 0.810 spearman's rho coefficient csi2 0.003 p value 0.983 note. 1 passive leadership. 2career success index. n = 70. passive leadership style consists of two components, management-by-exception passive and laissez-faire. statistical testing of these two elements indicated no significant relationship between management-by-exception passive and career success (r(70) = 0.0102, p = 0.401; rs(70) = 0.098 and p = 0.401) and no significant relationship between laissez-faire and career success (r(70) = -0.146, p = 0.228; rs(70) =0.076 and p = 0.355). table 6 contains the results. table 6 correlation coefficients between passive scales and career success index procedure dependent variable mbep1 lf2 pearson coefficient csi3 0.102 -0.146 p value 0.401 0.228 spearman's rho coefficient csi3 0.098 -0.076 p value 0.421 0.355 note. 1management-by-exception passive. 2laissez-faire scale. 3career success index. n = 70. regression analysis of the correlation between passive leadership and career success further confirmed the absence of a significant relationship. figure 3 illustrates the regressive curve estimation through a scatterplot diagram. with the null hypothesis for research question three stated as: a significant relationship does not exist between a passive leadership style and the career success of females in nonprofit organizations, a failure to reject the null resulted because no significant relationship existed. this finding of no significant relationship between passive leadership and career success of women in the nonprofit sector was somewhat of a surprise, recognizing that passive leadership oftentimes equates to the absence of leadership. pg. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 44 figure 3. regression curve estimation and scatterplot: passive leadership style and career success index. discussion prior research confirmed that the leadership style of an organizational leader affects outcomes, employee performance, and facilitates the formation of perceptions regarding a leader’s effectiveness (getz, 2009; lopez-zafra et al., 2012; mukhtar & habib, 2010; orser & leek, 2010). furthermore, previous researchers found a critical link between leadership style and organizational and individual success (junquera, 2011; channar, abbassi, & ujan, 2011; toor & ofori, 2009). andersen and hansson (2011) noted that gender might be a factor regarding specific leadership styles, yet getz (2009) commented that leadership style relates more often to leader behaviors than gender. regardless of gender, career success remains a significant motivating factor for organizational leaders (elgamal, 2010; jones & lentz, 2013; junquera, 2011; lansford et al., 2010). jones and lentz (2013) recommended further quantitative research because of a critical gap in the existing body of knowledge regarding the correlation between the career success of women in nonprofit leadership roles and leadership style. the purpose of this study was to address the critical gap with empirical research. the research questions and hypotheses facilitated determining if leadership style had an effect on the career success of women within the nonprofit sector. a review of the results indicates significant statistical relationships between transformational and transactional leadership styles and the career success of women leaders in nonprofit organizations. no significant correlation existed between passive leadership style and career success. regarding the significant correlation found between transformational leadership style and the career success of women, the findings indicated that inspirational motivation was the strongest transformational component within the relationship. the implication is that employing transformational leadership style with robust inspirational motivation behaviors significantly contributes to career success. leaders who utilize inspirational motivational behaviors may enjoy greater career success than leaders who avoid inspirational activities to motivate followers. specially related to the findings of this study, women leaders in nonprofit organizations that employ transformational leadership style including inspirational motivation behaviors might enhance the level of career success experienced when compared to other leadership styles and behaviors. the findings indicated a stronger significant correlation between transactional leadership and the career success of women in comparison to transformational leadership. the transactional component contingent reward provided the strength within the relationship. previous research indicated that men dominate leadership roles in nonprofit and for-profit organizations, employing a transactional leadership style more often than any other style (ely et al., 2011; emmerik et al., 2010). the implication exists that women who employ a transactional style with emphasis on contingent reward enjoy greater career success than women who utilize transformational, inspirational behaviors. in contrast to the findings of this study, thorough good et al. (2011) noted that women exhibiting strong transactional leadership behaviors might create professional difficulties and risk alienating coworkers, subordinates, and superiors because of conflicting beliefs regarding the socially and professionally acceptable style expected of women. the findings indicated no significant relationship between passive leadership style and the career success of females in the nonprofit sector. the utilization of passive leadership style demonstrates an evasion of leadership duties and reveals a sedentary and unproductive demonstration of leadership behaviors (giri & santra, 2010). prior research indicated that women accept responsibility, exhibit effective and active leadership behaviors, and maintain an emotional connection to superiors, subordinates, and contemporaries (aasland et al., 2010). although participants in this study reported using passive leadership behaviors, and the results of statistical testing indicated an inverse relationship between passive style and career success, the p values indicated a lack of statistical significance. aasland et al. (2010) noted that women leaders who employ a passive leadership style risk the rejection of female and male subordinates; therefore, lowering the leader’s level of effectiveness to motivate and inspire followers. the implication exists that women who embrace passive and avoidance leadership behaviors tend to diminish career success opportunities. through the lens of the contingency theory, the findings indicate that the career success of women is contingent on a set of leadership constructs, attributes, and behaviors, all related to leadership style. additionally, the findings indicate that strong pg. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 45 levels of the elements comprising the career success index remain contingent upon the utilization of the most effective leadership style. allio (2013) commented that relationship between the leader and followers regarding organizational outcomes was contingent on the ability of the leader to demonstrate positional authority and effective leadership. the successful application of the contingency theory remains dependent upon the ability of nonprofit leaders to apply relevant information and knowledge in an unbiased manner to attain effective solutions regarding a competitive environment, emergencies, disasters, or during times of organizational change (decaro et al., 2010; storey & hill, 2010). the findings indicate that stronger transformational leadership skills positively relates to stronger transactional leadership skills, providing added confirmation that successful nonprofit women leaders possess the ability to utilize the most appropriate leadership style based on the current circumstances or organizational situation. conclusions women are unrepresented in leadership roles within for-profit and nonprofit organizations. this purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between leadership style and the career success of women in the nonprofit sector. data collection methods consisted of the mlq, supplemental questions regarding key career success indicators attached to the mlq, and compensation for the participants from the irs form 990. statistical analysis of the data using pearson product moment, spearman’ rho, and regression analysis indicated significant and positive relationships between transformational and transactional leadership styles and the career success of women. no significant relationship existed between passive leadership style and career success. the finding of this study should be beneficial to women currently serving in leadership roles as well as women aspiring to serve as organizational leaders. organizational leaders might find the findings of value regarding the need to implement leadership assessment surveys for a better understanding the leadership styles employed at the organization as well as the implications of each leadership style in relation to career success. the findings regarding women who employ a transactional or transformational leadership style tend to enjoy higher levels of career success than those women with passive leadership tendencies should provide impetus for organizational leaders seeking enhanced career success to embrace the more successful leadership styles. leadership style is contingent upon a leader’s behaviors, actions, and communications with subordinates, contemporaries, and superiors. the findings of this study indicated that the career success of women correlates with leadership style in that career success partially depends on leadership style. this examination of the relationship between leadership style and career success provides women with additional information based on empirical research regarding enjoying successful leadership careers through more promotional opportunities, increased career longevity, greater job-work-life satisfaction, and improved compensation levels. recommendations for practical use the finding of this study indicated that transformational and transactional leadership styles positively affects the career success of women serving in leadership positions within nonprofit organizations. a practical application recommendation would be that women seeking to obtain or maintain career success to embrace and employ transformational and/or transactional leadership style. organizational governing board members or directors could provide leaders with leadership-style-assessment surveys such as the mlq to allow the board as well as the organizational leaders to identify their current style utilized. recognizing the passive leadership style does not correlate with career success should provide leaders with impetus to avoid using passive leadership behaviors. professional development and leader training could include sessions regarding the organizational as well as leader benefits of employing transformational and transactional leadership behavior and the avoidance of passive leadership. recommendations for future research a qualitative study concerning leadership style and career success could be beneficial to gain the lived experiences of successful women serving in leadership roles. with the foundation established regarding the existence of a relationship between leadership style and career success, delving deeper into the how and why questions would provide a significant contribution to the existing body of knowledge. qualitative researchers might gain a richer perspective of the phenomenon of career success as related to leadership style and behaviors. future research could expand the career success index to include education, ethnicity, domestic status, and professional development. broadening the researched factors regarding career success should prove beneficial to organizational leaders for a better understanding of how to obtain and retain longserving leaders. an enhanced career success index should assist women seeking initial leadership opportunities and/or advancement. within the nonprofit sector, men hold 82% of the leadership positions. a future study regarding the comparison of the career success of men to women as related to leadership style should provide additional insight. although leadership style is not gender specific, studying the potential differences regarding the relationship between leadership style and career success of men versus women should result in noteworthy findings for organizational leaders as well as the existing literature. references allio, r. j. 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(2010). the traps that keep women from reaching the top and how to avoid them. journal of management development, 29, 764-770. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/02621711011072478. microsoft word 1. stories of generational leadership.docx advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 1 advancing women in leadership vol. 34, pp. 1-10, 2014 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper stories of generational leadership: women higher education administrators voices colette m. taylor and lindy stein colette m. taylor: college of education, texas tech university email: colette.taylor@ttu.edu, phone: 806-742-1997 ext. 266 lindy stein: university of colorado at boulder email: lindy.stein@colorado.edu, phone: 303-492-7732 accepted july 3, 2013 research focused on women in higher education is often conducted from a monolithic perspective of women. few studies have investigated differences among and between women and the influences impacting such differences. generational differences of individuals can influence values and preferences (arsenault, 2004) as well as impact the organizational functioning of colleges and universities in the united states. therefore, this mixed-method study explored these differences among female administrators in higher education. quantitative analysis indicated generational differences in managerial practices among female leaders. however, more similarities than differences among the generational cohorts were discovered in the qualitative analysis. implications for practice midlevel women administrators in student affairs are discussed. keywords: management, leadership, generation, women, higher education introduction the american workforce is highly diverse with several generations represented. for the first time, four generations are working together in organizations – the traditionals, baby boomers, generation x, and millennials (coomes and debard, 2004). employees within each generational cohort are collaborating with one another in numerous types of organizations, including higher education institutions. data demonstrates a generational change; baby boomers are retiring at a rapid rate, which may cause a leadership talent shortage in the coming decades (harris, moran and moran, 2004). this change impacts higher education in several ways. as baby boomers retire, more leadership opportunities will need to be filled. few researchers have explored the ways that generational differences shape female perspectives about leadership, and how the lack of awareness about these differences can impact the workplace (arsenault, 2004; lancaster & stillman, 2002; society for human resource management, 2004). literature review the american workplace has four distinctly different generational cohorts – the traditionalists, the baby boomers, generation x, and millennials (generational differences among working women, 2006). society assigns personality stereotypes to individuals according to generation. differences between generations have been linked to major environmental influences that impact the socialization specific to cohorts of individuals; influences which impact the development of personality, values, beliefs and expectations of individuals. traditionals, sometimes referred to as the silent generation and born between the years 1925 and 1942, represent the oldest generational cohort in the work environment in the united states (coomes and debard, 2004). mills (2009) states that traditionalists value hierarchical leadership styles, are loyal to the organization, and embody the “work hard, save money” mentality (p. 363). inter change group (2006) also supports mills’ assertions, listing these same traits, as well as “loyal, patriotic, and [showing] respect for authority and hierarchy” to further define this generation. baby boomers, born between 1943 and 1960 (coomes & debard, 2004), represent the largest percentage of individuals in the workforce; “comprising 40% of the workforce” (mcdonald, 2008, p. 63). cohort traits include “ambitious, career-oriented, and accustomed to intense competition for jobs” advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 2 (mcdonald, 2008, p. 63). mills (2009) explained that boomers embrace a consensus-style leadership; they have adapted a “work hard, play hard” mentality and are loyal to their work (p. 363). generation x cohort members, born between 1961 and 1981 (coomes & debard, 2004), are products of the “mtv generation” and emerging technologies, such as the personal computer. the children of this generation witnessed both parents working to provide for their families. research supports that traits associated with the gen x-ers include being “selfreliant and independent” (flannery, 2008, p. 41) and “resourceful, skeptical, and [valuing] autonomy in their work” (generational differences, 2006). mills (2009) explained that gen x-ers desire feedback, clarity, and autonomy (mills, 2009, p. 363). the millennials (also called generation y), born between 1981 and 2002 (coomes & debard, 2004), could be considered the most technologically savvy cohort in the workplace. cell phones and text messaging often replace personal communication. of all the cohorts, the millennials value a team-based leadership style, “where work should be fun” (mills, 2009, p. 363). mcdonald (2008) supports this further, stating that “millennials typically value autonomy and reinforcement in their jobs, as well as workplaces that are fun, informal, and promote collegial relationships” (mcdonald, 2008, p. 63). this group in particular is often categorized as “having a sense of entitlement and unreasonable expectations about work” (mcdonald, 2008, p. 64). zemke et al. (2000) explained that one’s generational affiliation impacts the views and attitudes related to management and leadership. due in part, to the beliefs that generations differ in values, cognitions, and behavior; there is a lack of understanding among the generations (dittmann, 2005). kezar and lester (2009) explained that differences among generations “if not managed properly….can result in conflict, misunderstanding, low morale, and organizational inefficiency and ineffectiveness” (p. 51). kezar and lester (2009), in their comprehensive article on generational differences among females in higher education, explored aspects of feminism within the context of generational differences in the higher education setting; “intense generational differences” were found among women (p. 51). kezar and lester (2009) deftly identified numerous challenges to females in higher education that could arise from generational differences if such differences are not properly understood. challenges include differing views on leadership and commitments to work and family. these views, which are shaped by the generation in which individuals were born and raised, impact the manner in which individuals act, treat one another, and view others in the workplace (kezar & lester, 2009). differing attitudes about work-life balance among the different generational cohorts, especially among women who are balancing work and family issues, could create barriers for women in the workplace (jones and taylor, in press; mayor and tikka, 2008). while not an empirical study, kezar and lester’s (2009) work is an important step forward in understanding how generational differences impact women in higher education. however, a gap exists in understanding female staff members’ views on management in higher education. airini, collings, conner, mcpherson, midson, & wilson (2011) point out that “it is not known how the new university environment and culture will enable or constrain women’s individual capacities to develop, synthesize, communicate, and enact their ideas as leaders; how they will consider professional planning (if at all) and how they will make use of systems, networks and authorities” (p.46). while research has been gathered on women in higher education, far fewer studies have investigated differences among and between women, and the influences to both other women and the environment based on such differences. contextually, as leaders in higher education work to meet the challenges of changing demographics in the united states, there is a unique phenomenon that has yet to be explored in great detail: the impact of generational influences on the organizational functioning of colleges and universities in the united states and its specific impact on female staff in higher education. purpose of the study despite kezar and lester’s (2009) generational work, there is an existing gap in the generational understanding of female staff members’ views on leadership in higher education. the growing diversification of higher education has led to more women being in leadership roles. because of this growth, the researchers sought to explore female perceptions of management and leadership from the generational perspective among mid-level female administrators in higher education. research questions the research questions which guided this study were as follows: 1. what are the preferred leadership styles of females within the four different generations? 2. are there differences and/or similarities that exist among leadership styles and behaviors of female administrators in different generational cohorts? research design and method to gain wide understanding of the participants’ perspectives, the researchers utilized an embedded data collection where both quantitative and qualitative data were collected simultaneously. a sequential explanatory design in which the qualitative data serve to inform the results collected during the quantitative data collection (creswell, 2009) was utilized. survey instrument quantitative data was collected via an online survey consisting of three sections: (a) demographic survey, (b) managerial practices survey (mps) (1994) which consisted of 38 questions advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 3 on various aspects of work values, work attitudes and work expectations drawn from previous studies in the literature, and (c) leadership behavior description questionnaire (lbdq) by halpin (1957) intended to collect information regarding preferred leadership styles from each generation. qualitative data was collected via one-on-one online, semi-structured interviews. participants using random selection, 800 self-identified female midlevel student affairs administrators, who were members the american college personnel association, were invited to participate in this study. of the email invitations (n = 697), 282 respondents returned the completed quantitative survey, for a response rate of 40.4%. for the qualitative portion of the study, the researchers used purposeful sampling to identify participants from those participants who completed the previous quantitative survey (patton, 2002). thirty-seven participants initially began the interview process, and 34 completed the interview, for a completion rate of 91.9%. quantitative participants the participants for this study included 282 female student affairs administrators who identified themselves as midlevel professionals currently working in institutions of higher education across the united states. respondents were placed in their appropriate generational categories: traditionalist, baby boomer, generation x, and millennial. the majority of the respondents were generation x (n=193, 68.4%), followed by millennials (n=46, 16.3%), and baby boomers (n=43, 15.2%). no respondents were members of the traditionalist category. qualitative participants in the qualitative portion of this study, thirty-two of the participants identified themselves as white, three as asian/pacific islander, one as african american, and one as latina/hispanic. six of the participants were members of the baby boomer generation; twenty-five were members of the generation-x cohort, while the final six participants were members of the millennial generation. no participants were identified as belonging to the traditionalist cohort. data analysis descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the quantitative data, specifically the effects between the independent variables: generational status (traditionalists, baby boomer, generation x and millennial), ethnicity years of experience in higher education and the dependent variables as outlined by the managerial practices survey (mps) and the leadership behavior description questionnaire (lbdq). in the qualitative portion of this study, written responses from the interviewees were analyzed to search for patterns and themes to formulate interpretations. interview answers analyzed using an open coding method and concept mapping “to brainstorm the important ideas that recur” (rossman and rallis, 2003, p.284). researchers also looked for counter-examples to be able to describe the range of opinions on each issue. results quantitative results managerial behaviors of women administrators table 1 outlines the overall means for subjects on each managerial behavior, while table 2 outlines the overall means for each generational cohort. overall, subjects reported problem solving (m = 4.1), clarifying (m =4.1), and informing (m =4.04) as important behaviors. the least important behaviors to the entire group were monitoring (m =3.49), networking (m =3.50), and recognizing (m = 3.6). table 1. self-reported importance of specific managerial behaviors entire sample behavior behavior mean standard deviation effective communication 4.0461 1.50728 creative problem solving 4.1099 1.51574 long term planning 4.0035 1.51974 team collaboration 3.9574 1.46549 clarifying expectations 4.1099 1.51574 motivating 3.8972 1.52793 rewarding 3.6277 1.53013 effective administration 3.4858 1.46907 conflict management 3.7518 1.52864 mentoring 3.8652 1.54514 building relationships 3.5000 1.45208 (n=282) table 2: self-reported importance of managerial behaviors by generational cohort behavior behavior mean standard deviation baby boomers effective communication 4.10 1.53 creative problem solving 4.23 1.50 long term planning 4.16 1.54 team collaboration 4.11 1,51 clarifying expectations 4.23 1.50 motivating 4.00 1.63 rewarding 3.77 1.58 effective administration 3.62 1.48 conflict 3.86 1.65 advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 4 management mentoring 3.74 1.71 team building 3.72 1.47 generation x effective communication 4.03 1.49 creative problem solving 4.11 1.52 long term planning 3.95 1.51 team collaboration 3.97 1.45 clarifying expectations 4.11 1.52 motivating 3.91 1.51 rewarding 3.62 1.51 effective administration 3.49 1.44 conflict management 3.73 1.51 mentoring 3.91 1.52 team building 3.50 1.45 millennials effective communication 4.02 1.57 creative problem solving 3.95 1.51 long term planning 4.06 1.55 team collaboration 3.73 1.48 clarifying expectations 3.95 1.51 motivating 3.73 1.51 rewarding 3.45 1.57 effective administration 3.46 1.47 conflict management 3.73 1.50 mentoring 3.76 1.49 team building 3.26 1.45 leadership behaviors of women administrators based on the data collected, midlevel women administrators in this sample preferred leadership styles, as described by haplin’s (1957) leadership behavior description questionnaire, on behaviors such as friendship, mutual trust, respect, and warmth in relationship between the leader and members of the group; this was indicated by the substantially higher consideration mean scores than initiating structure mean scores. the sample’s consideration mean score was 34.4, while the initiating structure mean score was 28.9. the mean scores for this sample are considered low for educational administrators on each dimension of leader behavior when compared to the norm mean score for consideration which was 44.70, and the norm mean for initiating structure was 37.90 (halpin, 1957). table 3 provides the summary information on the lbdq according to generational cohort for the research sample. all three cohorts, baby boomer, generation x, and millennial, rated themselves below the initiating structure dimension of the lbdq and below the mean on the consideration dimension of the lbdq. table 3 lbdq mean scores by generational cohort consideration initiating structure mean sd mean sd baby boomers 37.3 15.80 32.2 14.1 generation x 33.7 18.1 28.1 15.5 millennials 35.7 16.9 29.7 14.8 sample mean score 34.6 17.6 28.9 15.2 norm mean score 44.7 37.9 * generational cohorts not considered in sampling of norm mean scores. leadership behavior and managerial practices comparisons within generational cohort a manova test, with generation as the independent variable and values as the dependent variables, was administered to determine the mean differences, if any, between the independent variables, generational cohort and ethnicity, and the dependent variables outlined by the managerial practices survey and the leadership behavior description questionnaire. three generational cohorts, consisted of individuals born in the baby boomers, generation x, and millennial eras, were utilized because no participants selfidentified as belonging to the traditionalists cohort. an alpha level of 0.05 was used as the level of significance for this study. the overall results of the analysis on main effect are illustrated in table 4. overall results suggested there was significant difference between generational groups (baby boomers, generation x, and millennial) on the combined dependent variables: f=1.732, p=.015, and wilks’ lambda = .843 and ethnicities combined dependent variables: f=1.826, p=.000, and wilks’ lambda = .586 where p value less than significant level 0.05. table 4 overall manova tests using wilks’ lambda *significant when p < .05 effect value f= p< intercept .357 35.061 .000 generational cohort .843 1.732 .015* ethnicity .586 1.826 .000* ethnicity * generational cohort .569 1.441 .003* advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 5 to further explore the differences in mean group scores, a second level of analysis was conducted using two one-way manovas between the generations and ethnic identity categories. table 5 and table 6 show the results. statistically significant differences for 8 of the 11 managerial practices were found between generational groups and 10 of 11 managerial practices between ethnic identity categories. no other significant differences were found between the independent variables, generational cohort and ethnicity, and the dependent variables outlined by the leadership behavior description questionnaire. table 5 one-way manova tests using wilks’ lambda – generational cohorts dependent variable baby boome rs n=43 mean st d generati on x n=193 mean st d millenia ls n=46 mean st d f= p< .05 managerial practices effective communicati on 4.14 1.54 4.03 1.49 4.02 1.57 1. 88 .02* team collaboration 4.12 1.52 3.97 1.45 3.74 1.48 1. 78 .03* long term planning 4.16 1.54 3.95 1.51 4.07 1.55 1. 50 .100 creative problem solving 4.23 1.51 4.12 1.52 3.96 1.52 1. 74 .04* clarifying expectations 4.23 1.51 4.12 1.52 3.96 1.52 1. 74 .04* effective administratio n 3.63 1.48 3.29 1.45 3.33 1.56 1. 42 .133 motivating 4.00 1.63 3.91 1.51 3.74 1.51 2. 01 .01* rewarding 3.76 1.57 3.64 1.51 3.46 1.57 1, 57 .08 mentoring 3.74 1.72 3.92 1.52 3.76 1.49 1. 71 .04* conflict management 3.86 1.66 3.73 1.51 3.74 1.50 1. 89 .02* team building 3.72 1.47 3.51 1.45 3.26 1.45 1, 90 .02* leadership behaviors consideratio n 37.4 15.8 0 33,7 18.0 8 35.7 16.9 2 1. 15 .310 initiating structure 32.2 14.1 0 28.1 15.4 5 29.7 14.8 4 .7 86 .701 *significant at p<.05 table (6) in appendix (1) qualitative results with the research questions of the study acting as the guide for discovery, major categories were identified by use of selective coding for the qualitative section of this study. the following section discusses each category and the various themes that were found to support the categories. emergent themes and how they answer each research question are also identified. four significant themes were identified from the qualitative data, which serves to support the quantitative findings. theme 1 personal leadership: how women view themselves as leaders regardless of generational cohort, participants viewed themselves as “team players”, “collaborative”, and “inclusive” in their interactions with subordinates. this is consistent with previous research that identified female leaders as less hierarchical and more collaborative than their male counterparts (e.g., eagly, johanneson-schmidt, & van engen, 2003). the researchers compared responses to current research on the various generations. hammill (2005) described baby boomers as “consensual and collegial” as well as team players. however, the researchers noticed that it was those from the generation x cohort that identified with the themes of big-picture thinker and collaborative leader, the very same traits used to describe the baby boomers. hammill (2005) explained that the baby boomers were bigpicture thinkers, yet some participants in this study from the younger generational cohorts, including generation x and millennial, noted the importance of big-picture thinking in bringing about leadership. one millennial participant stated: as a leader, i would define myself as a macro-manager who likes to know the details. i find it important to consider the bigger picture when developing programs and guiding the activities of my staff… change management the participants were asked what leadership strategies they rely on when bringing about change in the organization; a highly important leadership behavior. among the 34 participants, a frequency count of answers was conducted to further illuminate the responses and then compare the responses to quantitative findings. of the 34 participants, 19 mentioned transparency, inclusion, and keeping people involved as crucial to change management. fourteen participants mentioned the reliance of communication; six discussed strategy, planning, and research; and three discussed previous experiences and intuition in helping them lead through change. the themes that emerged most often were the reliance on communication and keeping people involved, and these were consistent among the generations. for example, some generation xers emphasized listening as a crucial element to executing change. it should be noted that while many generation x participants mentioned relying upon modes of communication in their leadership behavior, it was the baby boomers who had the highest mean score for communication in the leadership questionnaire. yet when strategies were discussed in the qualitative portion of the study, all the baby boomers discussed themes consistent with consensus building. interestingly, more generation x participants who had lower mean scores for communication than baby boomers, appeared to rely more heavily on communication when bringing about change. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 6 while some millennials indicated relying on communication, the more common leadership trait relied upon by this cohort fell within the themes of experience (such as what has worked in the past), transparency, and intuition. one participant explained that she utilizes “inclusion, transparency, intuition, and firmness”, while another member of the millennial generation explained that it is important to admit “when a change was not well executed or didn’t have the intended effect.” comparing qualitative findings to the quantitative data, baby boomers had higher mean scores for clarifying expectations, motivating, creative problem solving, conflict management, and team building. within these managerial behaviors, statistical significance was found among the generations, indicating generational differences in relation to the managerial behavior. the qualitative findings support these quantitative findings in numerous areas. first, all but one of the baby boomer participants in the qualitative portion of the study mentioned relying on creativity when leading teams, which is in direct support of the creative problem solving mean score for which boomer’s held the highest mean score. baby boomers had the highest mean score for team collaboration, higher than both the generation x and millennial participants, in the quantitative data. however, when asking how the participants would describe themselves as leaders, more generation x participants commented on collaborative and participative leadership than did boomers or millennials. it should be noted that generation x participants had higher mean scores for mentoring than either baby boomers or millennials in the quantitative portion of the data. while mentoring questions were not asked within the qualitative portion, several generation x participants discussed this idea of leading to help staff members, which could be indicative of the generation x participants’ inclination towards mentoring behavior as a leader. overall, the qualitative findings directly support of the researchers’ quantitative findings that female mid-level managers in higher education are inclined toward using more participative means of leading and see informing as an important leadership behavior. in addition, the participants noted both planning and informing as important behaviors for effective leadership. theme 2 perceptions of differences in leadership styles among various generations participants were asked to consider the differences among leadership traits of those older and younger than themselves. some generation x members had negative views of those older than themselves, explaining that those older appeared to be “beaten down” as well as “burnt out, pessimistic, and often frozen in old ways of doing things.” conversely, some generation x members saw numerous positive elements of leaders who fell within older generational cohorts, evidenced by such statements as, “those older than me seem to project more confidence and less interest in consensus”, and “with time comes experience, and i think some of the experiences i’ve had help in my decision-making”. participants were also divided among perceptions of those younger than themselves. interestingly, it was the baby boomers who had more positive things to say about those younger than themselves than did the generation x cohort of participants, as evidenced by these comments: those younger than me have a refreshing outlook…they tend to be very creative. i love working with those younger than me! women and men my age and younger have a much more relaxed, participative style than men or women who are older than i am. many generation x participants noted no differences in leadership styles among the various generations. however, one participant mentioned, “[i] certainly [see] differences in leadership styles based on personality styles, but i find other leaders on campus from all generations with similar styles as my own.” these comments support the findings illustrated in the quantitative results, which revealed generational differences in managerial behaviors, but not leadership behavior. theme 3 – issues of work/life balance a pervasive theme among different generational cohorts is that of work/life balance. as noted earlier, research shows that different generations hold very different views of the importance of work versus life, with the baby boomers witnessing work as essential to a greater life, the generation x cohort witnessing work as impacting life, and both generation x and millennials viewing work as a part of life. certainly, having a leader from one generational cohort and subordinates from other cohorts could pose an issue in the workplace. the results from the society for human resource management generational differences survey (2004) indicated that one in every five individuals felt as though he or she was treated with disrespect from a coworker from a different generation. the researchers set out to investigate this further by asking questions related to work/life balance. the participants were asked, “at this point in your life, what is your highest priority, or your primary concern?” a second question was, “where are you putting your most effort or energy?” baby boomers did indicate that at this stage of their lives, work is the main focus. this is not a surprise, as the research has suggested that baby boomers are “ambitious” (mcdonald, 2008, p. 63) and tend to embrace a “work hard, play hard” mentality (mills, 2009, p. 363). one baby boomer participant stated that her priority at this stage includes: finishing up my 30 years in this career and stay [sic] healthy, have energy, and still be seen/appreciated as a valuable staff member. most energy is mentoring other staff and covering my areas and taking care of staff. several generation x participants supported previous findings that work/life balance is truly important to them at this stage of their lives. one participant said that in her career, helping her advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 7 department was important, but in life, starting a family was her priority. another participant said that “my energy is quite equally split between being a mother and successful in my career”. many participants noted that balance is critical, because they are now mothers, employees, and students, working on advanced degrees. one generation x participant noted, “in life, balancing my career, school (working on my phd), and raising my family. i think this is really a test of everything that i’m made of.” however, there were some comments that indicated conflict between previous research and where some generation x participants were in their lives. some generation x participants clearly made specific choices for one aspect or the other in the work/life balance situation. one generation x participant stated that “personally? i’m trying to complete a phd”. another participant said that “my career is my highest priority right now.” one millennial explained that life is most important to her; stating that “god and my family are always my highest priority. after that is education, then work”. another millennial participant echoed a very different priority, as evidenced by her statement, ”to be honest, i am still trying to prove myself to my colleagues on campus. since i have held so many titles within my office, i think some of the older staff are still trying to understand my place in the office.” theme 4 -– generational perspectives on work differences among men and women participants were asked their perspectives regarding any potential differences between themselves as female leaders and their male counterparts. while this study is grounded in generational perspectives, the researchers felt it was important to compare both individual and generational patterns of differences and similarities regarding the ways in which women and men lead and manage. a frequency count indicated that over half of the participants (20) were evenly split on their perspectives of either men being perceived as direct and bottom-line in their approaches, or women possessing the opposite style – very inclusive and supportive. while the quantitative portion of the study suggested that female participants did not view supportive behaviors as necessary for successful management, it was deemed to be an important element across the qualitative findings. for example, one participant explained: i am more inclusive in my decision making process than my male peers. i seek input from others before making a decision even if i already know what action i will take. this is often seen as a weakness, but i do it intentionally to create more buyin. i also see a difference in communication style. i give my staff a lot of information while many of my male peers do not, as readily, share. three of the four baby boomers felt that men were “showy”, and “in front of the scenes.” one baby boomer explained that men are “more aggressive. very showy in their accomplishments. very fake friendly towards their supervisors; some insincerity.” younger generation x participants and older millennials (those with birthdates in the late seventies and early eighties), overwhelmingly felt that there really was no difference among themselves and their male counterparts. additionally, it was mentioned by these cohorts that any differences tend to be related more to personality than gender. another subtheme that appeared when coding the comments was that it was perceived that men can make tough decisions, but when women do so, the women may appear “bitchy” to others. perception can be difficult to quantify, as it is as much a “feeling” as a reality. note however that the participants who made these comments were from the generation x cohort, more specifically from the 1970s generation. discussion and conclusion recent studies on generational differences in the workplace indicate marked distinctions among baby boomers, generation xers, and millennials working in contemporary organizations (e.g., dries et al., 2008; smola & sutton, 2002; zemke, 2001). others studies contradict these findings by demonstrating that the three generations were more similar than different (appelbaum, serena, & shapiro, 2004). perception about different generational cohorts and gendered notions of leadership are reflected but also reproduced into reality in the workplace. simply put, perception creates reality. based on an analysis of current literature regarding generational perspectives of the workplace, the researchers assumed generational gaps existed in women administrators in higher education for managerial behaviors. significant generational differences amongst preferred managerial practices were found in the quantitative portion of this study; managerial characteristics such as informing, problem solving, motivation, and managing conflict were examined. these generational differences, although found between all three cohorts, were most profound between the baby boomer and millennial cohorts. results indicated that there are some generational differences in management values among the three generations represented in this study, as well as differences between men and women, as perceived by the female participants. these findings are consistent with the beliefs of both theories. as more females from various generations work together, their views and their unique ways in which they manage and lead could have a tremendous impact on fellow employees. this is consistent with strauss and howe’s (1991) theory, as cited by coomes and debard (2004) which emphasizes the idea of biography impacting those within the generational cohort to which they were born, as well as impacting the personalities of those around them. baby boomers and the generation x cohort both indicated that creative problem solving and clarifying expectations are the most important managerial skills they used on the job. this is vastly different from the individuals in the millennial cohort who indicated long term planning and effective planning skills advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 8 are more important. moreover, respondents indicated that networking, motivating, and inspiring employees and recognizing their special contributions, while necessary, were not regarded as important elements of being successful. these findings are consistent with previous research, which has shown that female leaders tend to value cooperation and teamwork and are less hierarchical in their thinking than men (eagly, johanneson-schmidt, & van engen, 2003). one of the most surprising findings is related to the millenial generation participants. research has suggested (e.g., howe & strauss, 2007; jonas-dwyer & pospisal, 2004) that the millennials value teamwork and networking, among other things, in activities related to learning and working. the findings in this study do not support this. millennials in this study, while reporting that networking was important, did not report networking as the most important skill. in addition, the millennial participants in this study found team-building was the least important management behavior they practice, despite the stereotype that those within the millennial cohort value teamwork. it is important to point out however, that the networking, which millennials might find important today, includes social networking, and communicating via facebook, twitter, and linkedin, and this could help to explain part of this discrepancy. qualitative comments highlighted more consistency in chosen management behaviors among the different generations than did the quantitative findings. for example, generation x participants held lower mean scores in communication than the baby boomers, but generation x cohort members consistently mentioned the importance of communication as central to their leadership practices and behaviors in the qualitative comments. the generations appeared to have varying viewpoints between themselves as leaders and their male counterparts. differences among generations are important findings, as previous literature has suggested that research on differences among generations may be anecdotal at best. the differences in management practices across the three generations emphasize the challenges faced by upper-level administrators as they try to supervise and develop staff who identify with various generations. to foster inclusion, upper-level managers need to educate themselves on the basic values of each generation, while understanding that their own beliefs related to management practices may not be relevant for all cohorts of employees. fox (2011) warned that it is important not to stereotype based on assumptions regarding generations and suggests managers strive to see the similarities—creating greater inclusion among employees, and lessening the chances for stereotyping. this is also consistent with coomes and debard’s (2004) reminder that strauss and howe’s (1997) generational theory is similar to measures of central tendency; generational theory can help to explain and illuminate unique traits among individuals, however, it should not be used to generalize individuals. wong et al’s (2008) research found that despite small important generational differences, any differences might have been more attributable to experiences derived by age rather than generational cohort. therefore, managers need to be reminded that assumptions about a particular generation may not be true for each individual. while generational differences may exist as related to management practices and behaviors, the researchers conclude that the chosen styles may be similar regardless of generational cohort. in addition, generational differences that do exist may not emerge within the student affairs environment, or, if these differences do emerge, it is plausible that the differences are negligible and do not matter when working within higher education. it is also a possibility that the environment brings out certain leadership traits, and most of the participants moved towards certain shared traits within this environment. limitations of the study limitations of this study include the fact that gender was a constant, rather than a variable. therefore, the results of this study may not be generalizable to both genders. the sample population of this study did not include members of the traditionalists cohort. additionally, the extent to which the female administrators who participated in this study were successful in the use of their preferred managerial practices, within the context of generation, at their institutions is unknown. thus, the management profile depicted in this study may not be limited to only those female participants who are successful in leading their respective campuses. references airini, collings, s., conner, l., mcpherson, k., midson, b., & wilson, c. 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(2002). a hierarchical taxonomy of leadership behavior: integrating a half century of behavior research, journal of leadership and organization studies, 9, 15-32. yukl, g. (1994). leadership in organizations. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 10 appendix (1) table 6 one-way manova tests using wilks’ lambda –ethnicity dependent variable african american n=21 mean std native american n=1 mean std asian n=11 mean std hispanic n=15 mean std white n=225 mean std other n=5 mean std f p< .05 managerial practices effective communication 4.10 1.26 5.00 0.00 4.55 .69 4.47 .83 4.06 1.52 3.2 1.92 3.05 .007* team collaboration 4.05 1.20 4.00 0.00 4.45 .52 4.40 .63 3.96 1.49 3.4 1.95 3.03 .007* long term planning 4.14 1.28 5.00 0.00 4.64 .50 4.97 1.10 4.01 1.53 3.80 2.17 2,89 .01* creative problem solving 4.29 1.15 5.00 0.00 4.55 .52 4.60 .51 4.10 1.54 3.6 2.19 3.35 .003* clarifying expectations 4.29 1.15 5.00 0.00 4.55 .52 4.60 .51 4.10 1.55 3.60 2.19 3.35 .003* effective administration 3.38 1.36 4.00 0.00 4.18 .75 3.87 .83 3.48 1.48 3.00 1.87 2.01 .063 motivating 4.00 1.30 5.00 0.00 4.09 1.45 4.40 .74 3.89 1.53 3.60 2.07 2.84 .011* rewarding 3.67 1.32 5.00 0.00 3.64 1.50 3.93 .80 3.64 1.54 3.40 1.95 2,50 .02* mentoring 3.95 1.52 5.00 0.00 4.18 1.47 4.27 .59 3.87 1.54 3.40 1.95 2.50 .03* conflict management 3.95 1.24 5.00 0.00 4.09 1.45 4.07 .703 3.74 1.54 3.60 2.07 2.97 .008* team building 3.50 1.45 4.00 0.00 3.91 1.04 3.93 .88 3.50 1.44 1.80 1.10 3.33 .004* leadership behaviors consideration 39.3 10.09 50.00 0.00 39.0 13.38 28.6 21.22 34.2 19.90 28.6 21.15 .954 .457 initiating structure 38.3 9.57 40.0 0.00 31.3 11.54 24.5 18.68 28.2 15.20 23.6 21.59 .383 .890 *significant at p<.05 microsoft word defrank_understanding_university_women_leadership.docx advancing women in leadership journal 2016 volume 36 26 advancing women in leadership journal vol. 36, pp. 26-35, 2016 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper understanding “why” one university’s women’s leadership development strategies are so effective lisa defrank-cole, melissa latimer, presha e. neidermeyer, michele g. wheatly lisa defrank-cole: west virginia university, email: lisa.defrank-cole@mail.wvu.edu melissa latimer: west virginia university, email: melissa.latimer@mail.wvu.edu presha e. neidermeyer: west virginia university, email: presha.neidermeyer@mail.wvu.edu michele g. wheatly: west virginia university, email: michele.wheatly@mail.wvu.edu accepted december 15, 2015 one research university has brought formal training to campus to support women and provide the needed leadership training in a cost-effective manner. based on a coaching method used at harvard in their women’s leadership forum, our initiative has completed its fifth cycle and provides an on-campus leadership development and support program for women. this paper offers insights into the women’s leadership initiative provided by focus group participants and also highlights the overall impact and effectiveness using survey data. keywords: women, leadership, higher education, skill-development introduction leadership development programs are necessary and valuable for women in higher education. it is abundantly clear that fewer women than men make it to the senior-most leadership positions at colleges and universities (june, 2015; kellerman & rhode, 2014; cook & kim, 2012). this dearth of women is not due to a pipeline issue, as there are plenty of qualified women to do the jobs. for example, the number of female college and university presidents hovers around 26%. in 2006, the number of women who were chief academic officers was 38% and the number of women who were senior administrators was 45% (cook & kim, 2012). while the majority of presidents come from the ranks of provosts or chief academic officers, there is a disconnect between the number of women who could become presidents and the number of women who do become presidents. it is obvious that the numbers are not proportional. ely, ibarra and kolb (2011) point out that overt gender bias may not be the culprit, but instead it could be second generation bias, or less obvious forms of bias. ely, ibarra and kolb (2011) stated that “organizational hierarchies in which men predominate, along with practices that equate leadership with behaviors believed to be more common or appropriate in men, powerfully, if unwittingly communicate that women are ill-suited for leadership roles” (p. 475). how, then, can women become leaders despite this inadvertent bias? leadership development programs can assist them in feeling more comfortable taking on larger roles by increasing their competencies, self-confidence and networks. by modeling the behavior of women in academic leadership roles, universities will help to reduce future inadvertent bias in all areas of employment for students, who will have experience with women in positions of power during their formative years. having more women in leadership roles in higher-education institutions and on their boards will help shift the way many people think about women as leaders. it will encourage the most qualified persons to reach their potential (ely et al., 2011). it will also enable more women to consider themselves as possible leaders. elders (1994) stated that “you can’t be what you don’t see” (p. 16). women need to see themselves in other women who take on positions of leadership. if not, the domain of senior level leaders will remain an essentially male-dominated club, a result which limits the perspectives of the leaders and the followers themselves. research indicates that “the representation of women in leadership positions has a positive correlation with economic performance, measured in tangible terms such as organizational growth, increased market share, and return on investment” (rhode, 2003, p. 17). though correlation is not a synonym for causation, there are specific reasons to promote a culture of advancing women in leadership journal 2016 volume 36 27 equality. those include improved employee morale and better recruitment and retention of top talent. organizations that provide opportunities for employees, such as a leadership development program, may be better equipped to keep their most valuable resources—their people. numerous leadership-training methodologies exist for developing individual female leaders. defrank-cole, latimer, reed and wheatly (2014) suggest that a common methodology is a leadership institute for women such as the hers institutes or the women’s leadership forum at harvard. while effective for the participant, overall change within the participant’s institution is unfortunately not generally achieved due to the concentration of training on only the participant. women’s leadership initiative program design one research university began an internal, on-campus training initiative, called the women’s leadership initiative (wli), solely for female participants in january 2012. planning for the wli at the research university originated in the fall 2011 as a legacy of the provost, a stem researcher, whose education and career had benefited from all-women initiatives targeted at enhancing success and persistence in a male dominated discipline. the vision was to invest in the future of women’s leadership at this institution by providing an in house executive coaching program along the lines of that at harvard university. to this end, two coaching consultants were hired to design and deliver the content for the first twenty-six participants at the research university. after the initial coaching of the first group of participants, individuals volunteered to coach the next phase of women in the wli. the consultants were brought back to campus to “train the trainers” and develop materials that the research university coaches would use. once trained, the new coaches prepared to facilitate the next round of leadership development for participants in january 2013. the wli steering committee separated subsequent phases of women into groups, called pods, with two leaders assigned to a team of between four to five participants. the organization of the pods centered on matching the newer participants with professional women leaders on campus allowing for: insight into professional networks, coaching on a particular leadership challenge, and developing cross-disciplinary relationships that extend well beyond the initial pod sessions. to date, there have been five phases of training for campus women and 132 women have completed the program with an overall completion rate above 90%. the mission statement for our university’s women’s leadership initiative is to “empower women in leadership roles by providing them the tools, resources, development opportunities, and professional networks that will enable them to reach their full potential.” it is important to note that this mission statement was developed after the initiative was in place for one year. in many ways it was written to reflect what was already happening and what we thought should keep happening within the initiative. the training contains four major components: 1. the podwork: participants are systematically sorted into 4-5 member “pods” with faculty and staff participants from across the campus. former participants serve as coaches/facilitators for the groups for a 15-week period where they lead them through a series of prepared readings and exercises; 2. beginning and end-of-year events; 3. monthly breakfast meetings, and 4. regular skillbuilding workshops with invited onand off-campus speakers/practitioners leading the discussions. the wli utilizes a small, twelve-person steering committee, in addition to three staff members from the provost’s office (working part-time on the initiative), to plan events for the upcoming academic year. the vision is quite ambitious with plans that this leadership initiative be “a driving force in supporting the university’s goal to be a diverse and inclusive institution that advances, values, and rewards women for their leadership contributions” (https://womenandleadership411.wordpress.com/). new qualitative data, as well as updated quantitative data from three prior waves of participants in our wli, indicate that this initiative had a consistent positive impact on participants. specifically, preand post—test self-assessments from the first two phases on the initiative indicated that these women consistently rate their effectiveness on a number of skills significantly higher/improved at the completion of their training than in their initial self-assessment. in our current research, we add a third phase of self-assessments and use discussions from focus groups with these women to help us understand “why” this initiative has been so successful. self determination theory to promote the success of women’s leadership programs, the recipients of the training must be considered. programs that assist women in becoming leaders need to be designed in a way that benefits those who participate in them. “leadership development programs designed to meet the needs of women leaders are necessary in order to specifically address the challenges that women face within higher education” (sulpizio, 2014, p. 98). leaders are most effective when their personal values are aligned with their purpose and goals—and ultimately advance the collective good (ely et al., 2011). therefore, basing leadership development programs on theory that is predicated on advancing one’s authentic self is critical. doing this benefits participants by “satisfying a basic human need for relatedness, and thus, are inherently rewarding to pursue” (ely et al., 2011). the theoretical framework for this research is selfdetermination theory (sdt), a theory of motivation by deci and ryan (1985). according to vallerand, pelletier, and koestner (2008), self-determination theory is a high quality, creative, efficient theoretical perspective where “similar findings have been consistently obtained across a host of domains and outcomes” (p. 257). kovjanic, schuh, jonas, quaquebeke, and dick (2012) add further that self-determination theory is “one of the most detailed and best validated frameworks of psychological needs” (p. 1032). advancing women in leadership journal 2016 volume 36 28 deci and ryan (2000) have found that people are more likely to engage in and sustain their participation in initiatives for their own reasons with limited external support (i.e., they are intrinsically motivated) when those initiatives fulfill the basic psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. according to this theoretical perspective, these three psychological needs are the “nutriments that are essential for survival, growth, and integrity of the individual” (baard, deci, & ryan, 2004, p. 2046). competence is defined as “succeeding at optimally challenging tasks and being able to attain desired outcomes” (baard et al., 2004, p. 2046). autonomy involves “experiencing choice and feeling like the initiator of one’s own actions” (baard et al., 2004, p. 2046). deci and ryan (2000) refer to this as the integration and freedom of an individual to organize an experience to be in line within one’s sense of self. it also refers to “integration and freedom” (deci & ryan, 2000, p. 231). relatedness concerns “establishing a sense of mutual respect and reliance with others” (baard et al., 2004, p. 2046). deci and ryan (2000) define relatedness as “the desire to feel connected to others—to love and care, and to be loved and cared for” (p. 231), thus to be integrated into the larger whole. so how does this process work? according to deci and ryan (2000), “it is part of the adaptive design of the human organism to engage interesting activities, to exercise capacities, to pursue connectedness in social groups, and to integrate intrapsychic and interpersonal experiences into a relative unity” (p. 229). the researchers have found this to be true in their experience working with the women’s leadership initiative. therefore, opportunities to satisfy the three intrinsic needs will facilitate self-motivation and effective functioning because they facilitate internalization of extant values and regulatory processes, and they facilitate adjustment because need satisfaction provides the necessary nutriments for human growth and development. in contrast, thwarted satisfaction of the needs will undermine motivation and have maladaptive consequences. (baard et al., 2004, p. 2047) it is also important to note that the context matters. deci, connell, and ryan (1989) make the case that the interpersonal context (i.e., whether it is supportive or controlling) in which the change is occurring is critical in that contexts that support selfdetermination have a more positive impact on “intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, and perceived competence” (p. 581) and thus have been found to “positively affect creativity, conceptual learning, emotional tone, and self-esteem” (p. 588). within our context as a university, an autonomous work environment exists in far more areas than would be the case in a typical business environment. this situation is not only true in the classroom and in conducting research, but also in the academic administrative environment. autonomy means allowing individuals to act with choice and of their own volition. competency speaks to the human desire to get better at things. specialized trainings can help with competency as can continued practice in the work or outside environment. finally, providing an environment with an imbedded network allows for individuals to feel connected to others at the institution and for faster integration with the whole, rather than forcing individuals to blaze his/her own path, which is a considerably more timeintensive endeavor. the implication for this research is that key university leaders (in relation to faculty and staff) must engage in actions that support autonomy and provide “non-controlling feedback, and acknowledgement of the subordinate’s perspective” (p. 581) from deci and colleagues’ (2000) work. more specifically, the person in power must take the faculty or staff member’s frame of reference. they must understand and acknowledge his or her needs, feelings, and attitudes with respect to the issue at hand. when this is the case, the target person will be more trusting of the context and believe that it will be responsive to his or her initiations and suggestions (deci et al., 2000, p. 581) social contexts can vary in terms of how much they promote autonomy. “autonomy support involves the supervisor understanding and acknowledging the subordinate’s perspective, providing meaningful information in a non-manipulative manner, offering opportunities for choice; and encouraging self-initiation” (baard et al., 2004, p. 2048). this means that the context for autonomy support is “an interpersonal climate created by the manager in relating to subordinates and carrying out managerial functions, such as goal setting, decision making, and work planning” (baard et al., 2004, p. 2048). sturm (2006) argues that autonomous departments and lack of accountability structures complicate academic change efforts; solutions must include empowering faculty, students and staff and providing the critical skills they need to become organizational catalysts and initiate change within department and institutional decisionmaking processes. therefore, we need initiatives that empower faculty and staff to develop the organization. to continue motivating the employee, the wli addresses deci and ryan’s (2000) suggestion of providing an environment where competence is promoted. given the explicit charge stated in the mission statement of empowering women with increased tools and the pre-existing relatively autonomous state of an academia, motivation should increase with the addition of the constructs from self determination theory. within this academic structure, the mere existence of the women’s leadership initiative on a continuing basis and in a dynamic institution with considerable administrative change shows the commitment of the organization and those in it to the promotion and retention of women in leadership positions. several studies document the implications of selfdetermination/intrinsic motivation for general well-being. according to edmunds, ntoumani and duda (2006), “understanding the conditions that foster versus undermine psychological need satisfaction holds great practical significance. such awareness can contribute to the creation of social environments that satisfy the three needs and promote selfadvancing women in leadership journal 2016 volume 36 29 determined motivational regulations, personal development, and well-being” (p. 2258). the inability to satisfactorily get these psychological needs met leads to “negative functional consequences for mental health and often for ongoing persistence and performance” (deci & ryan, 2000, p. 262). thus, they affect job performance and psychological adjustment. when the three needs are equally supported and satisfied “people experience more vitality, selfmotivation, and well-being” (ryan, 2009, p. 1). in addition, high levels of self-determination are associated with “more adaptive cognitive, affective, and behavioural outcomes” (vallerand, pelletier, & koestner, 2008, p. 257). trepanier, fernet, and austin (2012) found that “managers who engage in their job out of pleasure or from a sense of personal significance perceive themselves as leaders who can inspire others and stimulate interest” (p. 275). thus, leadership initiatives that promote self-determination, also improve participants’ professional functioning which then affects the lives and experiences of those who directly report to them. “by valuing teamwork and respect for others, organizations can create social conditions that foster high-quality relationships among members” (p. 276). in summary, self determination theory provides an appropriate theoretical framework for understanding the consistent positive impact on this leadership initiative on female participants. thus, it is expected that the following major themes would emerge within the focus group transcripts of wli participations: that the wli provides connections with others/experiences of belonging (relatedness), builds opportunities to interact effectively (competencies), and reinforces overall feelings of autonomy. methods focus groups this research study employed multiple methods to collect data. the focus group questionnaire was designed independently by each of the researchers, then two of the researchers took each of the desired questions and put together four comprehensive research questions designed to illicit responses from the participants. each of the researchers then met the requirements set forth by the research university’s institutional review board (irb) and the four questions were submitted for approval. after three iterations, the four questions and the procedures for obtaining participants was approved by the irb (see appendix a). an email was sent to participants in the women’s leadership initiative at the research university asking them if they would be willing to participate in a focus group. those women asked to participate were part of the first three phases of the program since they had fully completed all of their pod training. women in the fourth or fifth cycle of the women’s leadership initiative were not solicited to participate in the focus groups. there were three specific dates, times, and locations for the desired meetings and an rsvp was requested if a person planned to attend. care was taken to ensure that information revealed in the focus groups remained confidential by ensuring that focus groups did not include women in direct supervision of other participants. these meetings were set to accommodate individuals on different campuses with different teaching, research, administrative, and service schedules. these focus groups met at the appointed times and two of the researchers conducted the focus group interviews. the responses were recorded using two electronic devices and notes were taken by a research assistant. the research assistant was introduced to the group in each of the meetings, but was not a part of the conversation and was not present at the table where the conversations were taking place in each of the interview sessions. one researcher asked for commentary using the questions and the second researcher facilitated more detailed responses to each of the questions where appropriate. the research assistant was charged with note taking to include a summary of each person’s commentary and to ensure that each person’s responses were recorded separately with a number assigned to each respondent to ensure anonymity. each focus group was recorded and then transcribed verbatim. although many of the women in the room knew one another, names were not recorded and were deleted from the transcripts. each of the focus group meetings were scheduled for one hour at which time the researchers stated that the end of the hour had come, but allowed for further commentary when desired by the participants. each of these meetings went for slightly longer than the hour, but none exceeded 90 minutes. the researchers then used an individual with transcription experience to transcribe each of the interviews. these transcriptions were checked against the original recordings to ensure the accuracy of the transcriptions by one of the researchers. the transcript data were evaluated inductively using the coding model developed by grounded theorists corbin and strauss 2008; glaser 1978; glaser and strauss 1967; strauss 1987. a student assistant color-coded the transcripts under the direction of one of the researchers. two of the researchers independently reviewed the transcribed interviews and assigned themes to the responses. these researchers then met to ensure that their themes were consistent and an additional theme emerged and was added to the transcriptions. thereafter, a third researcher took the transcribed interviews and the themes and reviewed for internal accuracy of the responses. this researcher then categorized all the themes and responses according to the aforementioned self-determination theory categories, of relatedness, competence, and autonomy. all three researchers then met to discuss the outcomes and to select various important aspects for each of the themes; thereafter two of the researchers independently selected quotes from the transcripts. survey development and implementation: measuring change advancing women in leadership journal 2016 volume 36 30 prior to the focus group interviews, data was collected from the majority of wli participants. collection method at time 1 (the introductory meeting for each phase of the women’s leadership initiative) and at time 2 (at least four months after the initial meeting and at the end of the group coaching) were both group administered. we have preand post-test data for three phases of the initiative. approximately 116 females in faculty and staff positions across the campus participated in the program at that point. these same women were invited to participate in the focus group discussions. the survey asked for the participants to self-assess their effectiveness in the following areas: 1. strategic thinking (how would you rate your effectiveness at strategic thinking), 2. influencing others (how effective are you at influencing your supervisors, people you supervise, and your peers), 3. speaking up and asking for what you need (how effective are you at speaking up and asking for what you need), and 4. career planning and professional development (rank the quantity and quality of your professional networks). for each question, participants were asked to rate their responses from one to four with one being “the least effective” and four being “the most effective”. results and discussion survey the general analytical strategy used by the researchers was to use statistical techniques for comparing and establishing statistical differences between groups. paired samples (t-tests) were utilized as the researchers tested the same persons on two separate occasions and compared responses. the results indicate that there are consistent significant positive changes across all three phases of the initiative. for example, respondents in phases 1 and 3 indicated that their effectiveness at strategic thinking had significantly improved. in addition, for phase 2 and 3 participants, there is a significant increase in the post scores for their effectiveness at influencing people they supervise. for phase 2 and 3 participants, there is a significant increase in their effectiveness in speaking up and asking for what they need. finally, there is a significant increase in the ranking of the quantity and quality of their professional networks for phase 1 and 3 participants1. two new questions were added to the pre/post test surveys of the phase 2 and 3 participant. these questions were designed to measure whether wli participants felt more connected to other female leaders on campus and if they felt comfortable asking for assistance from someone outside of their department as a result of their wli participation. there were significant increases in the number of women strongly agreeing to those questions. table 1 results of the three-phases of survey responses phase i pre-test phase i post-test phase ii pre-test phase ii post-test phase iii pre-test phase iii post-test effectiveness at strategic thinking 2.86 3.36*** 3.12 2.94* 2.95 3.31* effectiveness at influencing supervisors 2.95 2.82 2.76 2.76 2.89 3.03 effectiveness at influencing people you supervise 3.05 3.19 3.28 3.14* 3.12 3.44+ effectiveness at influencing peers 2.95 3.14* 3.04 3.06 3.06 3.27 effectiveness at speaking up and asking for what need 2.64 2.77 2.32 2.62** 2.41 2.97* quantity/quality of professional networks 2.45 3.00*** 2.68 2.84 2.56 3.0** note. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001 focus groups this data was categorized into themes, which were further identified according to self determination theory as: table 2 categories of focus group responses according to self determination theory blue—networking relatedness (r) yellow—mindfulness of others relatedness and competence (r) & (c) orange—mentorship relatedness and competence (r) & (c) green—career development competence (c) red—personal growth competence and some autonomy (c) & (a) advancing women in leadership journal 2016 volume 36 31 grey—navigating unwritten rules competence (c) self-determination theory suggests that individuals need relatedness, competencies, and autonomy as characteristics for the success of initiatives. within each of the focus groups, responses were categorized. investigating those constructs within the current leadership initiative, leads to the following: relatedness. a main benefit of engaging in the wli is the connections the structure provides. its members are connected with other members and experience the feeling of belonging as a result of inclusion in this organization. the organization and its members encourage a mutual respect between participants and encourage reliance on other participants. relatedness suggests the individuals have the desire to feel connected to others and to both love and care for others as well as be loved and cared for in return. this construct is fulfilled by the themes of networking, mindfulness of others (co-themed with competency), mentorship, and personal growth. these themes are echoed in their importance by the women of the wli in various contexts in the selected quotations from the coded transcripts, selections of which are available in table 3. these quotations show a sense of community and belonging emanating from membership and interaction with other participants in the wli, which may have been lacking for many of the women before. this can be illustrated by the following comments: • it was a wonderful experience to get to know people from other parts of the medical sector and the university and build community; • it’s like a family reunion. you know? we see each other… and then you try to catch up. because you share in it all; • [the wli training taught me] how to listen to someone and reflect back what they’re saying and not interject my own sort of assumptions or thoughts or experiences and whatnot unless that was really what was desired. and so how i’ve spoken to people has really changed because of that session; • i know if i need something right now, i can call one of my mentors; • i have other women to contact to get advice; and • [a fellow wli member said:] “i’m going to introduce you to this person at the state level. they represent us. this is who you have to talk to. and you need to go do that.” …to make those introductions, to have that happen, was huge, and all as a result of, of this wli and networking. quotations obtained in the focus groups within the wli showed the importance of relatedness. of the themed constructs, networking, mindfulness of others, and mentorship (the latter two co-themed with competencies), there were 106 quotes distributed nearly equally among the three focus group sessions. competencies. a participant in the wli has the opportunity to interact effectively, to gain mastery over tasks, and to learn different skills that increase her competency. these skills improve her ability to succeed at challenging tasks and to attain a desired outcome or prevent an undesired outcome. the focus groups provide insight into deci and ryan’s world of desired competency. the themes covered in this construct are: mindfulness of others2, mentorship3, career development, navigating unwritten rules, and personal growth4. these themes were reflected in each of the focus groups. looking at mindfulness, the individual women of the wli commented on the following aspects of her experiences: • to really contemplate and dissect and facilitate the other person’s ability to work through their own problem; and • it really made me mindful of others, the issues that others may have, and being sensitive to their development. this suggests specific growth in the area of mindfulness in allowing an individual to master this important aspect of his/her personal development. mentorship was seen to matter to the women in a variety of ways with specific women commenting as follows: • so, i had two women come to me within my organization who are in a really tough experience, during my wli experience, and i said i’m going to start practicing what i’m learning in wli. • “what are your personal goals? how can i help you accomplish them?” so i think that that’s a direct result of the wli. table 3 responses in each of the focus groups for the identified themes focus group 1 focus group 2 focus group 3 number of responses networking 29 28 25 82 mindfulness of others 7 3 6 16 mentorship 3 3 2 8 career development 44 36 32 112 advancing women in leadership journal 2016 volume 36 32 personal growth 31 7 8 46 navigating unwritten rules 10 40 10 60 navigating unwritten rules is also important to one’s development and progression in an organization; without such knowledge roadblocks may be encountered unknowingly hindering or stopping all forward progress. these themes are reflected by the following quotations: • the perceptions and expectations are sometimes unspoken, are sometimes hard to negotiate. • then there’s a rule that says you can’t go there. then there’s a rule that you have to talk, that you have to have permission, or you can’t have this, or you can’t have that, or sit down, stand up—what do you do? you know? and who do you talk to. • i try to talk to my team about unwritten rules. i mean, there’s no way you’re going to know about these unwritten rules unless somebody tells you the unwritten rule. career development and personal growth also reflect important areas of competency and can be seen in the following comments: • i took the job, my current job, i don’t know that i would have taken it had i not been part of the women’s leadership; • the way i’m working with my peers and superiors has definitely changed…[the wli] is allowing me to actually i think be a little more independent, and think a little bit more like a faculty membe; and. • that certainly gave me a different perspective on who matters, how i can reframe what i’m doing and they’ll be on board. autonomy. finally, participation in the wli reinforces feelings of independence or freedom—helping women feel in control of their own behaviors and goals. of the themed issues, personal growth (co-themed with competence) is the only construct directly associated with autonomy. the focus group theme of personal growth5 illustrated the construct of autonomy. given that academic environments tend to have much greater autonomy relative to private industry, the skills and relationships forged in the wli only augment the magnitude of the autonomous environment already existing for the majority of the women in the initiative. the women of the wli may already have many of these factors associated with their jobs, and thus only one response-type was noted as a co-theme6. the commentary here and some of the alternate themes may allow increased competency and relatedness which in term will help empower women with feelings of confidence leading to an evenmore enhanced autonomous environment. the quotations attributable to autonomy are: • i was in a situation before that i realized wasn’t fitting me. and that was tough. just, this really gave me the confidence to say, “okay, i need to step back. in a moment when everybody else is leaning in, i stepped back. which, you know, is tough for me because, you know, i definitely kind of like to go with the flow and be a part of a bigger movement. so i did step back, and made a change. and that was huge. having the confidence to do that and kind of put myself first was huge. and i think that that’s given me now a stronger voice, as you mentioned, to really speak up more and to put my ideas, my leadership out there, and not constantly kind of give myself up for everything else and everyone else. you know, to really kind of look inside. • the first year was very much about introspection, about myself and areas of strength and maybe some areas that i could improve upon. conclusion it is quite clear from both the qualitative and quantitative data that participation in our initiative had a significant positive impact on the women who participated in the program each year. the constructs within deci and ryan’s self determination theory of autonomy, competency and relatedness ripple throughout the comments made by the participants in the women’s leadership initiative. due to the environment in higher education, the construct of autonomy is not as highly noted by the participants. in contrast, the women’s comments clearly illustrate the importance of the dual constructs of relatedness and competency. participants articulate the sense of belonging that deci and ryan (2000) describe as relatedness within the framework of the women leadership initiative. the existence of a fabricated and intentional network allows for increased performance in one’s job and thus greater competency, the last of deci and ryan’s (2000) constructs. it is not surprising that women enjoy connection to other women. eagly and others have pointed out that social norms for women are aligned with them being more communal and concerned with the welfare of others (eagly, et. al., 2002). thus, relationships that are developed as part of the pod process enable women to act according to their prescribed gender roles. it has been previously reported that cohorts have mixed results regarding their efficacy (beachboard, beachboard, li, & adkison, 2011). however, the researchers have found that the relatedness or networking in the pods of the women’s leadership initiative was one of the most important aspects of the program. helgesen has defined the connection among women with the term web of inclusion (1995). she likens these intricate, circular patterns to those webs made by spiders where structures are connected in concentric circles and bound together with interweaving lines. in this system, the leader is at the central point, not at the top of a pyramid or hierarchy. this model posits: advancing women in leadership journal 2016 volume 36 33 leaders tend to be people who feel comfortable being in the center of things rather than at the top, who prefer building consensus to issuing orders, and who place a low value on the kind of symbolic perks and marks of distinction that define success in the hierarchy. (p. 20) critical to the success of this program is the full integration and continued participation of the chief academic officer. in not only the ideas on the structure of the program, but also in the implementation of the four major components of the initiative, effectively placing herself at the center of the “web.” thus, this initiative utilizes constructs, specifically relatedness and lesshierarchical structures that enable women to feel comfortable in their leadership training. this type of program may yield even greater outcomes in future years with the expected change in the environment in u.s. universities. crow and dabars (2015) suggest that success in these organizations will necessitate changes in the historic structures of departments and academic units. rather than being contained in individual departments, the authors suggest that research universities will need to be oriented in smaller focused units featuring cross-disciplinary colleagues to conduct research and educate students. this institutional structure will require a flattening of the administrative structure such that administration and faculty at all levels of the institution work seamlessly in order to educate students, conduct research and serve the public. this matrix model requires people to move freely within disciplinary departments bridged and linked by interdisciplinary centers, offices, programs, courses and curricula (p. 187). not unlike the web structures described by helgesen where people work from the center of organizations, rather than the top, women may be uniquely suited to the new models of institutional design and delivery. the outcomes of the wli show the importance of relatedness, particularly noting the importance of networking within the structure of academia. given the likelihood of change in the structure of the academic institution such networks will be critical to the success of the individual and the institution in the coming years. seamlessly transitioning from the traditional administrative structure described as silos with institutional knowledge and teaching and research responsibilities housed within the department or college to a situation whereby freestanding units of all administrative and faculty units are housed together will require the ability to interact with others not necessarily within one’s traditional academic unit. the leadership traits learned through the wli will help with this transition by allowing such interactions to occur organically through one’s existing responsibilities within the construct of the pod and then the larger wli organization. the integration of the constructs provided in selfdetermination theory are key to making this initiative useful to its participants and in extending the reach of the program throughout the university community through the women who participate in it. such a program can have wide-reaching impacts and the researchers encourage other academic institutions to consider the implementation of a similar program within their own organizations to allow for increased women’s leadership within the top levels of the organization. limitations and future research this initiative is limited to one academic institution and therefore the results may be different at another institution with different leadership. in future years, assessment will include a longitudinal study investigating the reach of this program both within the research university and outside it as some participants of the wli have been promoted both within and outside the university. acknowledgement partial support for this work was provided by the national science foundation's advance it program under award hrd-1007978. any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the national science foundation. references arieley, d. 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(2008). reflections of self-determination theory. canadian psychology, 49(3), 257-262. advancing women in leadership journal 2016 volume 36 35 wvu women’s leadership initiative vision and mission (2013, october 29). retrieved from https://womenandleadership411.wordpress.com/ appendix a. questions asked of participants. wli focus group questions: 1. has your leadership style changed as a result of your participation in the wli? if so, in what ways have you noticed a change and has this led to a change in your actions in your job or outside of work? 2. do you find that you are better able to tackle a leadership challenge now? if so, what are some ways in which your actions have been modified as a result of participation in wli or the experiences you have had subsequently? 3. have you learned leadership skills or competencies from your experience in the wli? if so, what are they? 4. do you believe that having an institutional leadership development program for women at wvu has been helpful to you in your position at wvu? if so, how? written question for the end of the focus group: 5. how would you recommend the wli continue in the future? a. participation by members only b. inclusion of more senior leaders c. inclusion for more junior leaders d. inclusion or junior or senior faculty advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership faculty tiering and academic inbreeding: one institution's relationships and realities debra j. blanke, ph.d. adrienne e. hyle, ph. d. blanke & hyle, spring, 2000 "like inbreeding, if the proliferation of faculty tiering is problematic for academe, this institution is promoting faculty tiering, but at a lower rate than national trends. but, inbreeding and faculty tiering appear to be related, with more inbred faculty in lower tiered positions." academic inbreeding has a long history as an issue and concern for higher education (eliot, 1908). although defined variously, inbred faculty members possess at least one degree from the academic institution employing them, most commonly their highest degree (blau, 1973, 1994). criticism about "pure" inbred faculty emanates from the concern that the entire professional experiences of these scholars were "limited to the confines of a single institution by virtue of their being recruited directly from the graduating classes of the employing institution" (dutton, 1980, p. 2). "silver cord scholars," those who have been "recruited back to their alma mater after having held positions outside their degree granting institution", (dutton, 1980, p. 2) are not included in the controversy because their professional experiences were not restricted to a single institution. negative impacts of inbreeding are assumed for both the institution as well as the individual. bridgeland (1982) states that "an implicit attitude against inbreeding abounds" (p. 288) and "when candidates restrict their [job] search to the university that granted their highest degree…, they may be doomed to temporary and misfitting jobs or ones that underutilize their talents or training" ( p. 289). despite these cautions, nationally, the average of inbred faculty of any kind has been typically 15% (berelson, 1960; blau, 1973, 1994). a relatively recent realization within the research on faculty and the academic workplace is the existence of at least a two-tiered faculty: tenure-track, full-time faculty and those who are not (buckless, ravenscroft & baldwin-morgan, 1996; burns, 1994; clark & corcoran, 1986; dupree, 1993; gappa & leslie, 1993; meisenhelder, 1986; menges & exum, 1983; reichard, 1998; roemer & schnitz, 1982; schuster, 1998). the numbers of these non-tenure track and part-time faculty have been increasing in http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html recent years (chronister, 1996; chronister, baldwin & bailey, 1992; gappa & leslie, 1993; leatherman, 1999; leslie & gappa, 1994). the most often cited rationale for increases in part-time and non-tenure track faculty are financial (chronister, 1996); they cost less than tenure-track, full-time faculty. the proliferation of rising numbers of a second tier faculty on the academy as a whole is not known. although non-tenure track or off-track full and part-time segments of second tier faculty represent a "significant and growing element of the american academic profession" (baldwin & chronister, 1996, p. 4), these faculty typically "carry a significant part of the responsibility for teaching, especially at the lower-division level of undergraduate education" (gappa & leslie, 1993, p. 12). although not exclusively part-time professionals, these faculty are often assumed to be less qualified and less productive. this is not the case (dupree, 1993; reichard, 1998), nor should they bear the blame for lowering academic standards in higher education (thompson, 1992). in sum, little research has been done on this relatively new group of second tier faculty, other than to document their existence (baldwin & chronister, 1996; rhoades, 1996; roemer & schnitz, 1982; sommer, 1994). purpose of the research unlike the research focused independently on faculty inbreeding and faculty tiering, the purpose of this exploratory study was to reveal potentially invisible relationships among faculty demographics. specifically explored were relationships between faculty tiering in terms of tenure and non-tenure track position types and gender, ethnicity and academic inbrededness. using data from a single institution, we sought answers to multiple questions: what are our faculty demographics in terms of tiering, gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding? in terms of gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding, what are the demographics of tier 1 faculty? in terms of gender, ethnicity and inbreeding, what are the demographics of tier 2 faculty? in what ways do tier 1 and tier 2 faculty differ? in terms of gender? in terms of ethnicity? in terms of academic inbreeding? review of related literature two sets of literature framed this research. the first was faculty tiering which emerges from the labor market research in higher education. the second was academic inbreeding, the institutional practice of hiring one's own graduates. faculty tiering over the years, numerous national studies have documented the demographics of faculty (age, race/ethnicity, gender, highest degree held, tenure status, academic rank) including disparities in compensation, workload, time allocation, job satisfaction and plans for the future by institutional type and program area (e.g., the most recent nces, 1990; nces, 1991; nces, 1998). in many ways, tier 1 and tier 2 faculty are similar; they are mostly white and male (baldwin & chronister, 1996). however, data also depict women and minorities as over represented in tier 2 positions (baldwin & chronister, 1996; burns, 1992; chronister, gansneder, harper & baldwin, 1997; clark & corcoran, 1986; lomperis, 1990; menges & exum, 1983). in fact, in one study, women were found to comprise 25 percent of tier 1 faculty positions but over 40 percent of tier 2 part-time positions (lomperis, 1990). in research from 1975 to 1985, the shift in the composition of the academic labor market from full-time tenure track faculty (tier 1) to those who are not (tier 2) has been "unequivocal" (lomperis, 1990). tier 2 faculty are found in all types of institutions, but, surprisingly are most heavily concentrated at public research institutions (baldwin & chronister, 1996). although not labeled as second tier, graduate teaching assistants in research institutions constitute an invisible element of the tier 2 faculty (burns, 1994; crannell, 1998). these teaching positions might more aptly be identified as non-tenure track and parttime faculty positions for the roles they play in institutions. many label tier 2 faculty "part-timers." they are more critically dubbed "have-nots" (bowen & schuster, 1986; leslie & gappa, 1995; chronicle, 1996), "second-class" (leslie & gappa, 1994), "proletariat" (menges & exum, 1983), "lowers and reserves" (meisenhelder, 1986), "separate, low tier" (dupree, 1993), "gypsy scholars" (sommer, 1994) and "low-status caste" faculty (gappa & leslie, 1993). many have focused on faculty tiering through the examination of part-time faculty. leslie (1978) and gappa (1984) independently and collectively (gappa & leslie, 1993; leslie & gappa, 1994, 1995) lead in the early research of part-timers. their review of policies and procedures regarding part-time faculty employment at 18 representative colleges and universities documents "a wildly random collection of institutional and departmental practices" (gappa & leslie, 1993, p. xiii). they also found that part-time faculty felt "they were being exploited, and blatantly so" (p. xiii). typically tier 1 faculty engage in the academic triad of teaching, research and service (outreach), while tier 2 faculty primarily teach. they teach undergraduate courses (gappa & leslie, 1993), teach at two or more institutions (burns, 1994; thompson, 1992) and generally carry a teaching load of between one and five courses (baldwin & chronister, 1996). tier 1 faculty are compensated on a yearly salary basis regardless of teaching load, while tier 2 faculty are generally paid per credit hour taught. it is common for tier 2 faculty to earn approximately $2000 per course taught, generally a three-credit hour course (wilson, 1999b). conditions under which tier 2 faculty do their work are often substandard (crannell, 1998) and support resources are limited at best (baldwin & chronister, 1996), in spite of tier 2 faculty numbers accounting for 42 percent of institutional staff in colleges (schuster, 1998). there are many occupational designations assigned to second tier faculty. these titles include "adjunct, part-time, non-tenure track, and temporary faculty" (douglas, 1988, p. 1), as well as "lecturer" and "associate" (sommer, 1994). roemer and schnitz (1982) denote titles including "visiting professor," "teaching associate," "doctoral research staff" and "one year appointment," including both full and part time employment conditions. in describing part-timers, gappa and leslie (1993) built on the work of tuckman (1978), modifying his taxonomy from seven categories to four. they retained tuckman's (1978) semiretireds category, calling them career enders. these individuals were moving out of full-time positions but were also fully retired or in transition from full-time to retired status. another of tuckman's (1978) categories, full?mooner, they renamed specialist, expert or professional. these individuals held a primary, usually full-time career elsewhere but taught "for the love of it rather than because of a need for income" (gappa & leslie, 1993, p. 48). gappa and leslie (1993) called tuckman's (1978) hopeful full-timers aspiring academics because, the focus of their career aspiration is not necessarily to teach full-time but to be fully participating, recognized, and rewarded members of the faculty with a status at least similar to that currently associated with the tenure-track or tenured faculty. (p. 48). aspiring academics comprised more than one-quarter of the part-time ranks and appeared to be more common in large metropolitan areas. their final category, freelancers, was a composite of tuckman's (1978) part-unknowers, part-mooners and homeworkers. these faculty were part-time by choice; they are not aspiring to full-time academic positions (gappa & leslie, 1993). full-time, non-tenure track faculty have been researched most recently by chronister, baldwin, and bailey (1992). increasing numbers of institutions are making such appointments; up to 30 percent of institutional faculty at some private liberal arts colleges were identified. lending to the notion of a tiered faculty, chronister, baldwin, and bailey (1992) found non-tenure track faculty "felt that they had less influence on departmental and institutional policies, felt less involved in departmental faculty meetings and in campus faculty committees, felt more negative about their teaching loads, and also felt their salaries were inadequate" (p. 398) when compared to their tenure track colleagues. chronister, baldwin and bailey (1992) identified three types of non-tenure track appointments. the first type was described as "indefinitely renewable appointments" (p. 384). faculty with this appointment type had the potential to renew their contract any number of times. the second type of appointment was the "restricted renewable appointments" (p. 384). faculty with this appointment time were limited in the number of times their appointment could be renewed. their final category was the "folding chair" (p. 384) which was strictly held to an appointment term and not renewable. with each of these appointments, there was the "lack of an explicit expectation of continued employment that a tenure appointment conveys" (chronister, baldwin & bailey, 1992, p. 384). current demographic information estimates that 80 % of american higher education institutions employ non-tenure track faculty contracted by semester or year (baldwin & chronister, 1996). at the same time as little as 30 % of undergraduate coursework has been identified as being covered by tenure-track faculty (wilson, 1999). for full-time non-tenure track professionals, chronister, baldwin and bailey (1992) found there were more obstacles confronted by these faculty than by faculty on the tenure track. these individuals were more likely to feel their positions were in jeopardy or feel trapped in the position they held (p. 395). these individuals were significantly more likely to be contemplating leaving academia or wistful about entering academia in the first place (p. 395). for both fulland part-time second tier faculty, their political involvement with colleagues and faculty governance structures were negligible at best (sommer, 1994) deferring more of this responsibility to fulltime tenured and tenure-track faculty. second tier faculty had limited access to fellow faculty members, few interactions in faculty meetings, and no resources for networking within their chosen field (burns, 1994). these conditions can lead to invisibility (gappa & leslie, 1993) and a lack of voice (douglas, 1988) within the organization. such characterizations of individuals and institutions is not positive for academia or higher education. unfortunately, the warnings about the rise of a second tier of faculty are not isolated to concerns exclusively for individuals or institutions, but include cautions for academia as a whole (baldwin & chronister, 1996; reichard, 1998; schuster, 1998). rhoades (1996) saw the growing second tier as a "challenge to the academic profession's definition of faculty lines as full-time, with a secure future" and "an explicit challenge to tenure as the professional structure that defines faculty's terms of employment" (p. 627). reichard (1998) stated that the creation of a two-tiered faculty "is an insidious trend that must be resisted in the interest of high-quality education" (p. 41). from his profiles of research institutions, reichard (1998) believed that replacing tenured faculty with a "flexible" workforce and having a "disproportional presence of part-time faculty can undermine institutional quality" (p. 42). his argument continued that as research and teaching are disjointed, problems arise as "teaching becomes an isolated activity, not connected to research" (p. 42). careful monitoring of this phenomenon of a growing second tier was called for by baldwin and chronister (1996) who saw this trend as transforming "academic careers, the culture of higher education, and ultimately, the teaching and learning process" (p. 1). schuster (1998) has done extensive study on what he terms as a "transformation" in higher education, specifically, the increase in part-time faculty members. by reviewing the rapid rise of part-time faculty within all types of institutions in the 1971 (22%), 1982 (32%), 1988 (33%), and 1992 (42%) u.s. department of education national studies of postsecondary faculty, he estimated that a similar rate of increase would bring the 1997 numbers of part-time faculty up to 45 or 46 % of all faculty. schuster expected this phenomenon to have "profound" effects on the professoriate, "albeit resistant to measurement in meaningful ways" (p. 50). schuster (1998) identified three specific issues of concern associated with the escalating numbers of second tier faculty members. these concerns included placing tenure at risk, weakening faculty loyalty and a decline in attractiveness of academic careers (p. 51). lee (1983) predicted similar detriments for first tier faculty who would have greater responsibilities in the absence of first tier colleagues. schuster (1998) also looked at prospects for future changes. if future "economic constraints" (p. 52) and the "perceived need to assure flexibility in the deployment of instructional staff" (p. 52) continue, the trend of increasing part-time faculty will continue undaunted. many factors fuel this increase, including the boom in distance education and its influence to move away from the current role of accreditation in dictating acceptable ratios between full? and part-time faculty. schuster (1998) also speculated that a reversal of this phenomenon could occur if there were certain shifts in the academic community. a narrowing of the supply and demand for faculty members may create changes, a higher consciousness among the academy about the effects of a tiered faculty on the quality of undergraduate education, and a major push by academic leadership to make "overdue corrections in the academic labor force" (p. 53). academic inbreeding starting in the early 1900's, the research on inbreeding documented its existence and cautioned against its practice (eliot, 1908; reeves, henry, kelly, klein, & russell, 1933; eells & cleveland, 1935; hollingshead, 1938; hargens & farr, 1973; mcneely, 1932). by mid-century, mcgee (1960) and berelson (1960) suggested that there might be functional reasons for inbreeding's "prevalence in the face of odium" (mcgee, 1960, p.483). mcgee (1960) claimed that universities which face financial and geographical handicaps in the national competition for faculty member may inbreed junior faculty positions to free resources for competition in the national academic labor market. in his examination of graduate education, berelson (1960) concluded that, even though it was believed that inbreeding had at least as adverse effects on faculty quality in the best institutions, as in other academic institutions, the top 12 institutions nationally experienced inbreeding "as a statistical consequence of their dominant position as producers" (p. 116). blau's (1973) examination of higher education resulted in additional insights into academic inbreeding. he asserted that "what promotes inbreeding in a major department in this country, with its many universities, is not that graduates of no other department are good enough but that the members of this department are unwilling to admit that they are" (blau, 1973, p. 138). his findings were more or less inconclusive, but raised two questions which have served to delineate inbreeding research to date: 1. what conditions in academic institutions affect inbreeding? 2. what effect does inbreeding have on faculty quality? ezrati (1983), wyer and conrad (1984a, b), dagg (1993) and dutton (1980) present the latest research in the area of effect. wyer and conrad (1984a) found that when time allocations were adjusted, inbred faculty were found to be more productive in all areas of scholarly research than their non-inbred counterparts. ezrati (1983) examined the impact of specific personnel policies on women with families finding that anti-nepotism, inbreeding, leave of absence, part-time employment and childcare regulations worked against these faculty. wyer and conrad (1984b) further examined the relationship of sex and institutional origin to productivity finding that male and female inbred faculty presented significantly different patterns of productivity. these measures of productivity included 1) scholarly publications, 2) experience and time devoted to research, 3) allocation of time to tasks, and 4) the previous variables analyzed with salary earnings, receipt of research funding and services as paid consultants (wyer & conrad, 1984a). dagg (1993), however, linked these productivity issues to professional mobility, not inbreeding. earlier research by abramson (1975) and the carnegie commission (1973) related inbreeding issues to equity, focusing specifically on women because married women, in particular, often attended a specific university within the geographical area in which they lived and worked. she also believed that there was some evidence that this policy was eased more often for men than for women (abramson, 1975). the report on the status of university women released by the carnegie commission in 1973 recommended "that policies which prohibit a department from hiring its own graduate students be reconsidered, since they have often worked to the disadvantage of women" (p. 131). through this history of inbreeding as a taboo, there were some specific indictments made to establish why such practice was negative for academia. mcneely (1932) stated that faculty hired from an institution's own graduates lacked the "broad outlook necessary to academic achievement" (p. 1). this concern was supported by research done by eells and cleveland (1935), reeves (1933), and hollingshead (1938). all of these studies found lower academic achievement by inbred faculty members based on indicators such as academic rank and length of service to the department. eells and cleveland (1935) went further, saying that institutions must exercise vigilance lest they be "undermined by excessive inbreeding leading to lessened academic productivity, if not sterility" (p. 328). these early works on the negative effects of faculty inbreeding fell in line with the negative connotation the word itself brings to mind. through the literature, or lack thereof, it appeared that for some time, the issue was moot and rarely discussed. no literature was found on academic inbreeding from 1938 to 1960. while trying to make the inbred faculty label less demeaning, gonzalez, newell?berghage, gallegos and wooden (1997) preferred to use the term "homegrown" (p. 51) for this group of faculty. perhaps the label was more agreeable, but the realities found in this research were consistent with earlier works. in terms of the hiring experience, consistently, the homegrown faculty realized later that they were hired for substantially less than comparable faculty positions. many homegrown faculty battled with the "perception of still being considered a student" (gonzalez, newell?berghage, gallegos & wooden, 1997, p. 53). collegiality was also lacking for homegrown faculty who felt they were expected to "prove themselves" rather than gain assistance and mentoring given to new incoming faculty members (p. 54). and, finally, these faculty faced opposition for tenure and promotion. for the homegrown faculty member, collaboration was more difficult than expected and resulted in feelings of isolation through the tenure and promotion process. summary heavy use of part-time faculty blurs the employment picture for college faculty overall, it denies usually well-qualified part-time faculty the opportunity to be full participants in the academic community, and it increases the governance and counseling responsibilities of full-time faculty. (lee, 1983, p.32) the research on second-tier faculty has carefully examined diverse issues in-depth as they relate to this faculty population including use and abuse of second-tier employees as well as future needs and anticipated trends. most recent literature about the college experience stresses the magnitude of the freshman year of college with respect to improving undergraduate education, retention of students and college graduation rates (goldberg, 1999). the extent to which second tier faculty are used for undergraduate education, especially lower level courses, is cause for concern. the quality of education students receive and their prospects to persist in higher education seem to be inextricably tied to the quality of the faculty in their early college experiences. a possible conflict with this perspective is the increasing second tier of faculty. further concern may rise from the incidence of inbred faculty in the second tier faculty. methods for purposes of comparison, we sought answers to our research questions as far back as were possible through our institution's office of institutional research. surprisingly, we were able to go back no further than 1994. our data sets include fall semester demographics for 1994 and 1997. population given our focus of instructional faculty only, individuals were included in each semester population by virtue of their assignments as instructor of record in a course. this included tenure and non-tenure track positions of all ranks. faculty on sabbatical and graduate teaching assistants were excluded. inbred faculty members were those whose highest degree attained was granted by our institution. "tenure received" and "on tenure track" were combined and assumed to comprise tier 1 faculty while the "not on tenure track" category was assumed to be tier 2 faculty. statistics descriptive statistics were used to establish population demographics (n, %). the average percentage of faculty found to be inbred nationally was 10.3% (nces, 1998). in the southwest region where our institution is located, an average of 9.7% of all faculty were found to be inbred (nces, 1998). analysis the clear intent of examining a single institution's instructional faculty demographics was to reveal realities about faculty that might be masked by a collective examination. following the reporting of demographic data, the realities revealed will be analyzed critically in terms of tiering, gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding. these analyses follow the findings section. findings what are the demographics of our faculty in terms of tier, gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding? in 1997, our instructional faculty were predominantly in tier 1 positions (81%), male (73%), caucasian (88%) and held terminal degrees from other institutions (82%). those demographics changed little between 1994 and 1997. the number of instructional faculty at our institution rose 9% from 1994 to 1997, but that rise was in tier 2 instructional positions (6%), as national trends would predict (schuster, 1998). interestingly, the number of female instructional faculty increased (5%) during this timeframe. it seems that at our institution, more faculty are being hired into tier 2 instructional positions and that those instructional faculty are female. the diversity demographics and inbreededness of instructional faculty remained stable, changing no more than one percentage point. table 1 summarizes these data. what are the demographics of tier 1 faculty, in terms of gender, ethnicity and academic file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/winter2000/b-table1.html inbreeding? in 1997, 79 percent of tier 1 faculty were male, 89 percent of these faculty were caucasian and 88 percent of tier 1 faculty held degrees from other institutions. these demographics were quite stable from 1994 to 1997, changing no more than one percent in any category. table 2 summarizes these data. what are the demographics of tier 2 faculty, in terms of gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding? from 1994 to 1997, the percent of females in tier 2 instructional faculty positions increased 10 percentage points from 39 to 49 percent. that 10 percentage point increase, however, was a 50 percent increase in females in tier 2 positions, from 46 to 93. virtually half of the tier 2 faculty positions are now female. males also increased in tier 2 instructional positions, up 24 faculty or 33 percent. the ethnic diversity of faculty in tier 2 positions changed little during this timeframe and the percentage of faculty with degrees from other institutions increased eight percentage points. in 1997, 39 percent of tier 2 instructional faculty were inbred, down eight percentage points from 1994, and 84 percent of these same faculty were caucasian, unchanged from 1994. table 3 summarizes these data. how do tier 1 and tier 2 faculty differ? to answer this question, we needed to compare faculty tiers against each other and the institution. in terms of gender? in 1994, 78 percent of the faculty at our institution were male and of that group, 90 percent were in tier 1 positions. three years later, in 1997, 73 percent of the faculty were male and of that group 87 percent were in tier 1 positions. the number of males in instructional faculty positions were decreasing overall at the institution as well as in tier 1. the converse was true for male faculty in tier 2 instructional positions; their numbers were increasing. the numbers of females employed in instructional faculty positions at our institution was increasing; from 22 percent (202) in 1994 to 27 percent (260) in 1997. of that group, however, 77 percent (156) of the female instructional faculty in 1994 were in tier 1 positions. three years later, in 1997, that group had decreased to 64 percent (167). like the demographics for males, female faculty in tier 2 positions have increased as well from 1994 to 1997. however, unlike male demographics, by 1997, 36 percent of the females employed at our institution were in tier 2 positions while only 13 percent of males were in similar faculty instructional positions. it seems that females were disproportionately underrepresented in tier 1 positions and over represented in tier 2 positions when compared to their male counterparts. ( table 4 compares tier 1 and tier 2 demographics, tables 2 and 3 support aspects of these comparisons as well.) in terms of ethnicity? the diversity of our faculty changed little from 1994 to 1997. the instructional faculty were predominately caucasian (89% in 1994, 88% in 1997). when comparing tier 1 and 2 diversity demographics, percentage increases in categories were found in tier 2 caucasians, african americans, asians, hispanics and nonresident aliens. the only decrease was noted in native americans where tier 1 instructional faculty increased from 71 percent to 74 percent or from 15 to 17 faculty. although numbers were small, it seemed that increasing diversity demographics (except for native american instructional faculty) were in tier 2 positions. in terms of academic inbreeding? in 1994, 83 percent of the faculty at our institution held terminal degrees from other institutions and of that group, 92 percent were in tier 1 positions. in 1997, 82 percent of the instructional faculty held terminal degrees from other institutions and of that group 86 percent were in tier 1 positions. therefore, the number of noninbred faculty, those with terminal degrees from other file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/winter2000/b-table2.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/winter2000/b-table3.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/winter2000/b-table4.html institutions, were decreasing institutionally and in tier 1 positions. remarkably, however, despite the fact that the percentage of faculty with terminal degrees from other institutions was decreasing institutionally, their numbers and percentages were rising in tier 1 faculty instructional positions, from 87 to 88 percent from 1994 to 1997. the picture for inbred faculty is similar. in 1994, 17 percent of the faculty at our institution held terminal degrees from our institution and of that group, 13 percent were in tier 1 positions. in 1997, 18 percent of the instructional faculty held terminal degrees from our institution and of that group 12 percent were in tier 1 positions. therefore, the number of inbred faculty were increasing but decreasing in tier 1 positions. tier 2 instructional faculty positions appeared to be key to understanding academic inbreeding at this institution. from 1994 to 1997, the numbers of academically inbred faculty rose one percentage point (from 17 to 18%; from 156 to 172, 16 faculty). in 1994, 17 percent of the faculty at our institution were inbred and of that group, 65 percent (101) were in tier 1 positions. in 1997, the number of inbred faculty had increased one percentage point to 18 percent but of that group 58 percent (99) were in tier 1 positions. inbred faculty were increasing. where, then, were increases occurring? they were found in tier 2 positions where 42 percent of the inbred faculty could be found. it seemed that if inbred faculty were hired at our institution in instructional faculty positions, they were tier 2 (non-tenure track and/or part-time) positions. this may be in response to financial constraints noted by schuster (1998). ( table 5 compares tier 1 and tier 2 demographics, tables 2 and 3 support aspects of these comparisons as well.) discussion we had a predominately male instructional faculty, these faculty were in predominately tenured or in tenure-track positions, they held degrees from institutions other than our own and they were overwhelmingly caucasian. on the surface these data seem reasonable and comparable to national norms (nces, 1998). according to the most current national center for education statistics data (1998), 46 percent of instructional faculty nationally are in tier 1 positions. at our institution, that percentage was 35 percentage points higher, 81 percent. in terms of tiering, our institution has yet to succumb to the same pressures as other institutions nationally. our faculty were 73 percent male and the national norm is 62 percent. the percent of caucasian faculty was virtually identical (nces 87 %, our institution 88%). in terms of academic inbreeding, national norms are 10 percent while at our institution 18 percent were inbred (nces, 1998). a closer examination reveals something else. from 1994 to 1997, 83 new instructional faculty positions were created but 71 of those faculty positions were non-tenure track and/or part-time tier 2 positions. of the 83 new instructional faculty positions, twice as many were held by females (58 female hires, 25 male hires). of the 83 new faculty positions, 16 (19 %) earned degrees from our institution and 60 (72%) of those faculty were caucasian. in sum, we are not making gains in terms of ethnicity. we seem to be making gains in terms of gender, but at what cost. these new female faculty are not in full-time tenure track positions. and, more new faculty hold degrees from our own institution; they are academically inbred. tier 1 faculty when looking at tier 1 instructional faculty positions, from 1994 to 1997, the numbers of faculty increased by 12 (9 %). females gained all but one of the positions and all but two of these positions were held by faculty with degrees from other institutions. we had no increase in caucasian faculty during this file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/winter2000/b-table5.html timeframe. the 12 faculty positions enhanced our institutional demographics by increasing african american (plus 1), asian (plus 5), hispanic (plus 2), native american (plus 2), nonresident alien (plus 3) numbers. there seemed to be a focused drive to increase tier 1 positions in ways that will diversity our faculty while increasing academic integrity by not academically inbreeding. tier 2 faculty however, this same evaluation cannot be made of tier 2 instructional faculty. the number of tier 2 instructional faculty positions increased by 71 (63 %). of those 71 faculty, 47 (66 %) were female and 24 (33 %) were male. almost twice as many women as men were placed in tier 2 positions. in this tier, we gained caucasian faculty during this time frame (60 of the 71), a demographic addition some would question. of the 11 faculty positions that enhanced our institutional diversity demographics, gains were found in african american (plus 2, 100% increase), asian (plus 3, 58% increase), hispanic (plus 1, 100% increase), and nonresident alien (plus 4, 60% increase) categories. the number of faculty with degrees from other institutions almost doubled while the number of faculty with degrees from our institution increased by 25 percent. such gains in inbred faculty numbers were well over the national norms or percentages recommended by scholars in the field. tier comparisons gender. from 1994 to 1997, the gender of instructional faculty changed. more women were being employed, but these women were being employed in tier 2 positions. in fact, over one third of the female faculty at this institution were in tier 2 positions compared to less than 15 percent of the male faculty. our institution is employing fewer males in instructional faculty positions, but males still outnumbered females in instructional faculty positions at either level, tier 1 or tier 2. ethnicity. from 1994 to 1997, the diversity of instructional faculty changed. more ethnic diversity could be found in both tier 1 and tier 2 positions. academic inbreeding. from 1994 to 1997, the numbers of instructional faculty holding degrees from our institution increased. most of the increases were in tier 2 faculty instructional positions. conclusions and recommendations changes in staffing in terms of tiering, gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding were revealed by this distinctly different descriptive review of institutional demographics. what seemed like small changes, a percentage point or two, were much more dramatic when viewed through the lens of tiers, gender, ethnicity and/or academic inbreeding. for example, between 1994 and 1997, the numbers of males decreased one percent and the numbers of females increased one percent. what was not known, however, was that the decrease in males occurred in tier 1 positions and the percentage of males in tier 2 positions increased (each by 3%). at the same time, the increase in females (13%) occurred in tier 2 positions and decreased in tier 1 positions. the trends are the same, but the percentages show disparities some might view as alarming. in terms of diversity, alarming trends are seen as well. institutional demographics would indicate that instructional faculty are predominately caucasian. increases in diversity demographics, however, illustrate that these new instructional faculty are in both tier 1 and tier 2 positions. although their numbers are low, the percentage point increases are tier 2 positions are alarming. more faculty of color are in all likelihood not on a tenure-track, not full-time and may possess terminal degrees from our own institution. they would be classified by many as second class academic citizens. they fulfill institutional diversity needs, but do not have the same opportunities to gain in terms of academic position through tenure-track full-time employment (chronister, 1996; sommer, 1994). academic inbreeding has become less of an issue over the years as institutions have more routinely limited the numbers of inbred faculty in tenure-track positions. however, the rise in second?tier (nontenure track and part-time) faculty may be altering this reality. inbred faculty reflect strikingly different demographics than those for the institution as a whole. they appear more likely to be female and in nontenure track positions than their noninbred counterparts. and, in some cases, inbred faculty reflect diversity demographics for the institution as a whole. if academic inbreeding is not a good institutional strategy, unfortunately, our institution is practicing it beyond the current national norms, but within the historical 15 percent margin. these numbers, however, appear to be rising. like inbreeding, if the proliferation of faculty tiering is problematic for academe, this institution is promoting faculty tiering, but at a lower rate than national trends. but, inbreeding and faculty tiering appear to be related, with more inbred faculty in lower tiered positions. at this institution, inbreeding has a better chance of leading to non-tenure track, full or part-time positions. these positions also appear to be offered more often to women and some minorities than is typical for the institution as a whole. this relationship needs further examination. our focus on instructional faculty was purposeful in that we wanted to reveal the characteristics of faculty teaching both undergraduate and graduate coursework. at our institution, we believe in addition to being concerned about the rise in people of color and academically inbred faculty in tier 2 instructional faculty positions, students and their education may also be negatively impacted. if academic inbreeding is not a wise practice for traditional tier 1 faculty, why would it be appropriate for tier 2 faculty who are primarily responsible for undergraduate instruction? this relationship needs further examination as well. references abramson, j. 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(1984b). institutional origin: labor market signaling in higher education. the review of higher education, 7(2), 95-109. dr. debra j blanke is a professor at midwest city. blanke@okstate.edu dr. adrienne e. hyle is a professor at oklahoma state university. aeh@okstate.edu mailto:blanke@okstate.edu mailto:aeh@okstate.edu awl journal home page awl journal volume 3, number 1, winter 2000 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style 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androcentric society in which they lived. they embraced their femininity in the curves and strokes of the nu shu language. condé and schwarz-bart searched to explore the themes of alienation as martinicans living in a european french society and the search for an identity that typifies the quintessential caribbean patriarchal culture. the evolution in consciousness of the female and how she sees herself as part of the diasporic dilemma confronting caribbean society is marked by the almost limited early works by women authors. as women found their voices and led the way for other women, a natural empowerment ensued with new loyalties as generations transcended the effects of colonialism, indentureship, and slavery. afro-caribbean women became vocal and paved the way for east indian writers to emerge and find their voices. contemporary literature exemplifies these women’s struggles toward empowerment and identification with the land of their birth. from confusion spawns a new position for women as they move toward self-expression and self-actualization with the appointment of the first indo-trinidadian female prime minister. keywords: nu shu, l’ecriture féminine, afro-caribbean writers, indo-caribbean writers introduction men dare to leave home and brave life in the outside world, but we women are not less courageous. we can create language they can’t understand. (quinn, 1991, p.101) this courage typified chinese women in the era where the ancient chinese art of foot binding was the norm. girls were forced to endure excruciating pain in isolation for the cost of smaller feet. in the qin dynasty, small feet were the aspiration of every chinese girl. during the years spent barely able to walk and function as a result of foot binding, chinese women and girls developed the nu shu language to form a kinship and bond that defied the patriarchal society in which they lived. chinese women in remote areas such as jiangyong county in hunan province were not permitted to learn the standard chinese writing. consequently, they formed nu shu to pass stories, songs, and folklore from one generation to another. women living in a patrilineal society were expected to be subservient to the men and as such, chinese women in jiangyong county developed nu shu to form a bond during the qin dynasty. oppressed, illiterate, uneducated, unable to walk, confined to their homes, lacking any political or financial power, nu shu gave chinese women a sense of power and understanding of each other and their positions (lee, 2002). their world is transformed into a place of secret power where they speak a separate language from the men and their years of confinement become more enriching. nu shu was discovered in 1958 and has been the source of numerous analyses. perennial subordinates to their husbands and only respected if they bore their husbands a son, chinese women sort respite and unleashed their creativity in the formation and perpetuation of nu shu. in the nu shu language, practicing their needlework on paper fans, they documented stories, songs, and folk tales celebrating their womanhood. lee (2002) indicated that two formalized kinship developed: (a) “tongnian, or same year, or laotong or old same involving two girls of the same age; and (b) jiebai zimei or sworn or ritual sisters found between two or more girls of different ages” (p. 104). these relationships offered chinese women the sisterhood, bond, respect, and advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 70 acceptance they did not receive from their husbands and the androcentric community. in creating nu shu and passing down the tradition from generation to generation, chinese women illustrated their defiance of the abject poverty and oppression in which they lived where their voices would never have otherwise been heard. lee (2002) stated that nu shu allowed rural women to “alleviate the pain, to validate each individual’s identity, to create a distinct atypical communication mode, and to invite participatory performance through the creation of literacy” (p. 107). celebrating every aspect of their femininity, chinese women capitalized on their femaleness and used the strokes and brushes of nu shu to empower themselves and celebrate womanhood. the size of the characters in nu shu are smaller and thinner reflecting chinese women’s attempt at embracing their difference in gender and their feelings of inadequacies in an alpha male society. the curves and titled lines laud femininity as opposed to the straight and ticker lines of the chinese language. mc laren (1996) underscored the importance of nu shu, “the value of nu shu writings lies not so much on the conventional plots and performances genre, but precisely in the stereotypical formulae and motifs that encode a distinctly feminine interpretation of confucian norms” (p. 384). women found self-expression, felt more in control and less powerless and victimized when they practiced nu shu. chinese women felt validated and in some way they were resisting the stereotypical dictates of society and men as to what was expected of them. in this manner, these iconoclasts set the tone for future generations and women internationally as can be evidenced in france with the écriture féminine. l’ecriture féminine: panegyric or panacea? l’écriture féminine movement started in 1970 with noted writers cixous, kristeva, and irigaray underscoring the need for women to embrace their feminine bodies and differences through language and text. cixous felt that women were sexually repressed and their sexual pleasure denied expression. in the laugh of the medusa (1975), cixous asserted, “woman must write herself, must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies” (p. 15). cixous, felt lost in a literary world dominated by phallocentric bias. in response, she wrote books urging women to see themselves as individuals. she pleaded with them to embrace their bodies and experiences. through empowerment, cixous believed that women would transcend their female bodies and view life not in terms of binary oppositions of male/female albeit as androgynous beings. writing, cixous exhorted, served as a form of celebration of all aspects of femininity. cixous advocated that it is through writing that social change would occur as women empowered themselves and refused to view themselves as oppressed and incapacitated. “is the pen a metaphorical penis?” questioned gilbert and gubar (1979, p. 6). cixous contends that it is. she believes there is a lack of exchange linguistically, socially, and culturally which allow women to express themselves freely. she believes that the pen is an invaluable tool in empowering women to search for their own identity at the exclusion of the limits placed on them through male mental modes. it is only through self-expression can women achieve emancipation, celebrating life and “libidinal economy” as opposed to freud’s emphasis on absence and death. by embracing and claiming their femininity through writing about themselves in its entirety, women accomplish liberty from a male-dominated conceptualized world. in a similar vein, cixous opposed binary opposites and viewed them as oppressive forces that kept women in the male/female mold. she espoused an androgynous individual who embraced both male and female as one. cixous opposes binary opposites. she believes that the idea of male/female places each individual, from birth, into the trap of emulating the behaviors of his/her gender. this offsets the necessity for individuals to see each other bereft of gender differences and to transcend gender stereotypes. according to sarup (1993), “cixous is committed to the production of a form of writing that would embody bisexuality, and operates in the interests of women” (p. 111). dualistic opposites suggest a hierarchy, which oppresses women. cixous indicates that women should reject these opposites and create a new reality with increased self-awareness and empowerment through writing. cixous and others finally answered a call for philosophy not to be seen only through a phallocentric perspective. irigaray, kristeva, and cixous allowed women to embrace their womanhood by urging them to write about their experiences, their bodies, and their feelings. in so doing, these postmodernists’ feminists showed the empowerment and respect owed to them. cixous instituted changes in thinking using writing from a female perspective. her play on words, phonemes, her use of rhythmic language to capture the varying emotions women experience gave vent to a new genre of writingl’écriture féminine. metaphysically, this challenged women to see themselves as individuals and through their eyes transcending the male/female dichotomy. this gave women voices. they no longer needed to stay repressed and oppressed. philosophically, this opened a new path of writing and thinking which defied lacan’s (1953) belief that language and the subconscious are similarly structured. cixous illustrated and defied focault’s (1966) view that language can be used to oppress. cixous carried her idea a step further and suggested that women could create their own language. she formed her own words because she continuously felt trapped in a language that is predominantly male directed. cixous created words within the confines of language and meaning so that the reader would understand the words. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 71 transcendentally, cixous urged women to reach beyond themselves, their sexuality, and their capabilities. condé and schwartz-bart: xenophilia or xenophobia? in their 1967 novel un plat de porc aux bananes vertes schwartz-bart and her husband explored the feelings of alienation and a woman’s search to embrace her caribbean identity. the perennial conflict between european french and french caribbean identity illustrate the inner turmoil as french caribbean women searched for a sense of identity and patriotism. this antipodal dimension moves from xenophilia to xenophobia as each character in the novel searched to reconcile her identity as a french caribbean woman or heuristically reconstructed a new french caribbean identity embracing both european and caribbean milieu into a harmonious gestalt. like such writers as aimé césaire and others, condé, and schwarz-bart celebrate the caribbean landscape coming to terms with their caribbeanness or antillanité through the beauty that surrounds, the vitality of the language, the rhythm of the african drums and the essence of their soul. their characters surpass their feelings of alienation and return to communing with the pulsating splendor represented in nature. telumée in pluie et vent sur telumée miracle (1972), finds her niche and embraces her indomitable strength by affirming that she is not a victim but a strong vibrant woman who identifies with her culture and the plenitude that surrounds her. cudjoe (1990) indicated, “telumée draws her energy from the language and culture of the island which mediates her entrance into the world of identity, presence and continuity” (p. 355). the book celebrates the discovery of caribbeanness and the need to embrace everything that makes the individual antillanité. telumée feels happy and contented exactly where she is emphasizing french caribbean woman’s need to accept their caribbeaness and connecting more with caribbean than a foreign european culture that leads to alienation and lack of self-concordance. the use of the creole language in both french and west indian novels celebrates the uniqueness of the caribbean experience and suggests that this experience is onedimensional despite language differences. the french island is rediscovered with the use of language, imagery, and poetic expressions offering a cadence of rhythmic caribbean heritage as a celebration of its identity and antillanité. mckay (1997) stated of condé’s plays, “whether the exile is chosen or imposed, living away from one’s native country can prove to be a profoundly difficult experience” (p. 106). living in exile in a foreign culture, condé’s characters in her plays are changed forever as they struggle to assimilate a culture that is in conflict with their innate nature and their upbringing. mckay (1997) continued, “because of the distance imposed by their exiles, like the author, the exiled characters all see themselves in a different way than those who stayed in their homeland” (p. 98). those in the homeland lead antipodal lives to those who chose to migrate for a specific number of years. neither fully identifying with the new culture, assimilating aspects of the new culture to integrate within the society, but never harmonizing themselves to the new culture, the feeling of being uprooted a constant inner conflict. they yearn for the life they had in their homeland thinking it is the same only to realize on their return that it is not the same and the longing they had for their native land is no more as they feel a disconnect between the past and the present. the female protagonists in west–indian french and english books covet the perceived comfort of the adopted land, unsure as to which they could call home. as more assimilation of the new culture occurs, there is inner turmoil and conflict with those of the native land. the dichotomy between the two cultures is never totally assimilated and on returning to the motherland, they find themselves feeling alienated from the culture of birth. such disparity and cognitive dissonance resonate into a fractured personality as evidenced in the protagonists of french and english caribbean novels and plays. the essence of such characteristics is captured in the works of condé, schwarz-bart, phillip, and to a lesser extent hodge. the dilemma is whether to choose the culture of the new country or be loyal to the culture of birth. xenophobia or xenophilia? afro-caribbean women: pundits or plaudits? the first voices to be heard in the afro and indo-caribbean diaspora were the afro-caribbean women. the afrocaribbean women set the tone and pace for the indo-caribbean women. mehta (2004) reiterated the connection between afro and indo-caribbean women, “african and indian women in the caribbean share a common history of geographical and cultural displacement, forced labor, economic enterprise, resistance and familial dispersal” (p. 25). the commonality of history, geography, and culture has found the indo and afro-caribbean writers forming a connection and understanding as fellow sufferers of similar fates. mehta further suggested, “by embracing a transformative dougla poetics of accommodation and renewal in their writings, afro-caribbean writers such as merle hodge, marina maxwell and indo-caribbean writers such as narmala shewcharan and ramabai espinet have created new discursive paradigms for reading caribbeanness as a site for interracial collaborations, gender negotiations and the affirmation of negated identities” (p. 25). chancy (1997) saw afro-caribbean writers coming to terms with their migration and in need of safe spaces. the theme is similar to that of their martinican counterparts on alienation in the adopted land, self-definition, recuperation, and return. space and transnational identities are the themes of various afro-caribbean authors. the need to leave the native land or return to the native land recurs throughout the literature (james, 2007) and echoes the cyclical ebb and flow of the waves from poverty to betterment. according to james, this “tidalectics” recurs throughout caribbean literature and is part of the advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 72 dilemma constantly confronting telumée in schwarz-bart’s novel (p. 33). hodge captured the essence and heartbreak of migration when her protagonist’s mother left the shores to seek education and improvement away from trinidad. the iterative theme of migration, separation, and alienation typifies caribbean literature. phillip (1988) captured the plight of the powerless afro-caribbean woman who is morally, emotionally, and psychologically strong and determined to succeed despite the odds. she is willing to sacrifice the known for the unknown in hopes of providing a better life for herself and her child. finding the balance between two disparate cultures resonate in phillip’s novel harriet’s daughter where zulma is forced to search for equilibrium between her west indian roots and her adopted home, canada. this conflict typifies the quintessential caribbean dilemma when migration is as much a necessity as a reality. lacy in for the life of laetitia and zulma in harriet’s daughter both have limited relations with their mothers who live elsewhere. zulma returns to the caribbean but lacy aspires to leave the caribbean. james (2007) underscored the paradoxical nature of west indian literature, stating, “ for all its grounding in regional reality, however, one of the enduring paradoxes is that reality is written out of an ethos, largely afrodiasporic, by writers who have migrated” (p. 45). afro-caribbean female writers, both french and english, paved the way for indo-caribbean writers to emerge and rise to the challenges of their enculturation and innate nature. indocaribbean writers inspired by their fellow afro-caribbean female perspectives, with shared nationality, history, and geography found their voices. their writings expressed disgust at the treatment meted out to them from an androcentric society, culture, and religion where they were treated as slaves by their husbands and his family. in contemporary society, indo and afro-caribbean women are making their mark in society as they set a new mode of thought on their contributions to societal development. indo-caribbean women: we will rise archetypal notions of the indo-caribbean woman as a victim of circumstance at the hands of a vituperative husband are changing. indo-caribbean women are finding their voices and transcending previous notions of them as simply subservient beings passively and dutifully catering to their husband and children’s whims and fancies. a paradigm shift has occurred in the way in which indo-caribbean women see themselves and their situation. they no longer see themselves as helpless and defenseless victims of their karma or destiny. they embrace their freewill through their indomitable spirit to succeed through hard work and diligence. indo-caribbean women are embracing their dharma (purpose) with grace and passion spawning a new genre of writers, educators, researchers and voices to be heard and lauded. bragard (2008) reiterated this point, “coolie women’s writings are refuting stereotypical representations organized around the paradigms of exoticism and victimization by portraying female characters transgressing social, ethnic, sexual, cultural and gender boundaries” (p. 133). in traditional literature, indocaribbean women are characterized as the brunt of their husband’s beatings after a bout of drinking rum and eating curried duck at a river lime (get together). indo-caribbean women according to bragard, especially hindu women, have perpetuated the tradition of exploitation despite herself by allowing the man in the past to continue his domination of her. this has changed and continues to change as evidenced by the rise in power of the first indo trinidadian prime minister in trinidad. no longer, are indo-caribbean women oiling the cricket bat with which her husband beats her (as portrayed by naipaul,1959 in miguel street) but she is now raising her head embracing her sense of self, learning to create her destiny and challenge the archaic laws, rituals, and dogmas espoused hundreds of years ago by pundits and the scriptures. shastra (1993) by laskhmi persad exemplifies such a transformation. the indo-caribbean woman has catalyst from her caterpillar form into a butterfly where she enhances, challenges, and evolves. the protagonist, shastra, defies the odds and becomes a success. she struggles to find herself and understand her place in the world. she fights against the traditional role of the indo-caribbean woman to that of her own role and who she aspires to become. she finds her wings like the caterpillar and embraces her voice as she starts her neophyte journey as a university student, marriage, motherhood, widowhood, and being a single parent. in this novel, persaud illustrates the transformation of the new indocaribbean woman who empowers herself through free will and choosing her destiny instead of surrendering to tradition and progresses toward a modern concept of the indo-caribbean woman symbolic of the crossing of the kala pani. mehta (2004) posited that the “legacy of the cane” has resulted in “female epistemology of cane” a direct result of indentureship leading to a tenacious, resilient, self-affirming indo-caribbean woman who succeeds through her own grit. mehta further stated, “the female cane cutter represents the literary muse for indo-caribbean women writers who position her as a valuable role model that inaugurates and sustains a vital female heritage in the caribbean” (p. 23). the strength and hardship endured by the female cane cutter during indentureship and after, suggests physical, spiritual, and moral fortitude. this strength no longer needed to deal with abusive husbands and many children is now channeled into finding their voices, developing a kinship and sisterhood, defining themselves in a phallocentric society, and engendering a legacy of hope and aspiration for young indo-caribbean women. shinebourne (1988) in her book the english plantation epitomizes the traditional relationship between the indocaribbean male and female in the following: advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 73 they just eat and drink rum in their spare time and beat their wives and fight at the rum shop, and weddings. their wives cook from 3 o’ clock in the morning to late at night. you want to be a coolie woman? i don’t care! coolie women have to carry all the burdens for the men, the burden of the sick, the old, the children, burying the dead, and no thanks, is only licks” (p. 128). in this rhetorical question, shinebourne appositely captures the essence of the archaic or traditional indocaribbean woman and even some who live in remote areas. in epitomizing the classic indo-caribbean woman in the kitchen taking care of her husband and children and always cooking, shinebourne (1988) dealt with the issue of physical and psychological entrapment which perpetuated based on the dictates of religion and the cane culture. the perennial issue that confronts june, shinebourne’s protagonist, is that of the archetypal role of a hindu woman who is expected to abide by tradition and destiny and not exert her free will. there is a definite disparity between her wants and desires and her cultural heritage and identity. claiming one’s heritage entails a certain level of subservience and passivity which neither shatra nor june want to surrender. the issue of the traditional coolie woman seems to be in conflict with the modern views perpetuated by both june and shastra as they search to redefine their indianness, their caribbeanness, and their definition of self, as modern coolie women. implications and applications you want to be a chinese woman? you want to be a french woman? you want to a martinican woman? you want to be an afro-caribbean woman? you want to be a coolie woman? you are woman. chinese women were physically and psychologically trapped. french women felt their world as women were interpreted through a male perspective. they also expressed the feeling that they were sexually oppressed. martician women felt trapped when living in a foreign culture and felt the disconnection with their native land after spending time away from their birth place. afro and indo-caribbean women were trapped in the antiquated stereotypical roles laid down by an androcentric society demoralized by the effects of colonialism, slavery, and indentureship. the indelible thread connecting all these women is oppression at the hands of a male-dominated society and their use of language as a tool to express their inner turmoil, foibles, strengths, fears, and happiness. they embraced their uniqueness and communed with their surroundings to find a voice and synergy. current trends in women’s movement and literature suggest a level of feminine consciousness developing. this woman is an activist, is finding her voice and honing what she wishes to express, she is competent and the maker of her destiny not leaving her life to chance or at the dictates of a religious pundit. she is best described as alexander (2010) described the indo caribbean prime minister of trinidad and tobago, “her girlish flowered dress, pink mini-sweater and white wedge heeled sandals gave no impression on tuesday that she had come to cut big men down to size” (p. 4). kamal persad bissessar went to the caricom heads of government in july 2010, to end the era of trinidad as the godfather of the caribbean. she used her cane culture of resilience, service to others, and strength to implement change befitting her people. kamla persad bissessar has set her own standards for excellence, defined and reengineered herself as a coolie woman individually and collectively, is a bedrock of the home and society and is no longer passive aggressive, is vocal and operates from a position of love, nurturing, appreciation and supportive motherly skills to govern a country. she is one of the many strong female indo-caribbean voices that are being heard throughout the region. so, in response to the question, you want to be a coolie woman? yes, i want to be a coolie woman and foremost i celebrate being a woman in this new voice that women are finding and embodying. no longer can the hackneyed cliché of women as barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen serve contemporary society where women are as strong as or stronger than men in all areas of life. they are empowered, selfactualized, with self-concordance, selfawareness, they possess empathetic listening skills, social and emotional intelligence, and are leaders in their own right choosing empowerment in lieu of subservience and oppression. the headline in the trinidad guardian (15 march, 2011) best sums up the efforts of women in general to empower themselves, “from barefoot to prime minister” (p. 6). references alexander, g. (2010, july 10). kamla shakes up caricom. retrieved from http://guardian.co.tt/ bragard, v. (2008). transoceanic dialogues: coolitude in caribbean and indian ocean literature. comparatism and society, 5, 133-153. chancy, m. j. a. (1997). searching for safe places: afrocaribbean women in exile. philadelphia,pa: temple university press. focault, m. (1966). les mots et les choses. paris, gallimard. gilbert, s. m., & gubar, s. (1979). the madwoman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination. new haven & london: yale university press. hodge, m. (1993). for the life of laetitia. usa: douglas & mcintyre limited. james, c. (2007). performing west indian childhood across oceans and time: gender and identity in marlene nourbese phillip’s harriet’s daughter, merle hodges’ for the life of laetitia and cyril dabydeen’s sometimes hard. canadian children’s literature, 33, 41-65. klages, m. (1997). helene cixous: “the laugh of the medusa.” retrieved january 10, 2006, from http://www.colorado.edu/english/engl2012klages/c ixous.html lacan, j. (1953). the discourse of rome. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 74 lee, l. (2002). creating a female language symbolic transformation embedded in nu shu. in x. lu, w. jia, & r. heisey (eds.), chinese communication studies: contexts and comparisons (pp. 101-107). westport: greenwood publishing group. mckay, m. (1997). exile and identity in the plays of maryse condé. paroles gelées, 15(2), 97-111. retrieved from http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/28g992w9#page10 mc laren, a. (1996). women’s voices and textuality chastity and abduction in chinese nu shu writing. modern china, 22(4), 382-416. mehta, b. j. (2004). diasporic dislocations: indo caribbean women writers negotiate the kala pani. jamaica: university of the west indies press. naipaul, v. s. (1959). miguel street. south africa: heinemann publishers limited. persaud, l. (1993). shastra. uk: peepal tree printers limited. phillip, n. (1988). harriet’s daughter. toronto: women’s press. quinn, n. (1991). the cultural basis of metaphor. in j. w. fernandez (ed.), beyond metaphor: the theory of tropes in anthropology, stanford, ca: stanford university press, 57-93. sarup, m. (1993). an introductory guide to post-structuralism and postmodernism. athens, ga: the university of georgia press. schwarz-bart, a., & schwarz-bart, s. (1967). un plat de porc aux bananes vertes. london: bristol classic press. schwarz-bart. s. (1972). pluie et vent sur telumée miracle. london: bristol classic press. shelton, m. (1990). women writers of the french-speaking caribbean: an overview. in s.r. cudjoe (ed.). caribbean women writers: essays from the first international conference. (pp. 346-356). ma: university of massachusetts press. shinebourne, j. l. (1988). the english plantation. uk: peepal tree printers limited. trinidad guardian. (2011, march 15). barefoot to pm. retrieved from http://guardian.co.tt/ home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership teaching under a glass ceiling: a study of gender equity in federal education career fields bud baker, ph.d. scott graham, ph.d. scott williams, ph.d. baker, graham, williams, spring, 2003 one optimistic view would suggest that this snapshot of the 1990s documents a stage in women’s inexorable journey toward gender equity at work. but those with less rosy perspectives can find ample room for concern. consider this picture: you are on the ground floor of a building, one of those modern palaces where balconied floors surround a central atrium reaching all the way to the roof. as you gaze upward, you can see fifteen floors of the building, all containing the expected level of activity: people are walking, alone and in groups, glass elevators are gliding up and down, a few people lean on the balcony railings, admiring the beauty of the architecture. as you continue to watch the people above, you begin to discern a pattern. on the second and third floors, there is a mix of people, young and old, black and white, male and female. but as your focus moves higher, that all begins to change. by the seventh and eighth floors, the people are considerably more homogeneous -mostly white, and mostly male. on the uppermost floors, minorities and women have pretty much vanished, and even those riding the glass elevators to the rarified air of the top floors are nearly all white, and nearly all men. how you feel about this little vignette depends a great deal upon your own gender. as a male, this scene might not seem surprising to you at all: it is in fact the norm in many places, the way things have always been. but if you are a woman, this same scene can mean something very different. true, it may be the way things have always been, but it’s not the way things need to be in the future. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html what is this barrier, this invisible mechanism that seems to make the upper floors an all-male preserve? this article will look at the nature of gender discrimination in general, and will focus on the status of federally-employed women in education career fields. a barrier invisible and impenetrable occasionally, a newly-introduced term resonates in such a way that it quickly becomes part of everyday language. the words of two wall street journal reporters, carol hymowitz and timothy d. schellhardt, had such an impact in a 1986 article: even those few women who rose steadily through the ranks eventually crashed into an invisible barrier. the executive suite seemed within their grasp, but they just couldn’t break through the glass ceiling. (p. 1) thus the term “glass ceiling” came to enter the language, and within five years it had entered the law as well. the civil rights act of 1991 focused on gender discrimination, establishing the u.s. federal glass ceiling commission (fgcc). the charter of the fgcc was to identify the causes of gender discrimination, and to make recommendations to eliminate it. from 1991 to 1995, the fgcc examined employment conditions in both private and public sectors, concluding that gender inequity existed in both spheres. the federal government was certainly not immune. for example, in 1990, the year prior to the establishment of the commission, only 6.2% of federally employed women were at or above the level of middle management (gs-13 and above). yet men were more than four times more likely to reach those upper levels: nearly 28% of federally-employed males were in that gs-13 and above category (fgcc, 1995, p. 35). this requires some explanation. most of the 1.7 million civilian federal white collar employees are paid based on what is known as the “general schedule” (gs). this is made up of fifteen grade levels, from the lowest (gs-1) to the highest (gs-15). within each grade are ten “steps,” incremental pay increases based largely (though not completely) on longevity (5usc, § 5332). above gs-15, special pay plans exist for the highest levels of leadership, e.g., the senior executive service, senior diplomatic service. as a rough comparison, a gs-12 is comparable to an army or air force captain, and a gs-15 is equivalent to a colonel. the highest levels of civilian leadership (above gs-15) can be thought of as equivalent to generals and admirals in the military. in 1991, the same year the fgcc was chartered, the average gs grade for federally-employed women was 7.50, and the median grade was gs-7. for men, the average was 10.38, and their median grade was gs-11. this disparity was reflected in average salary: in 1991, the average federally-employed woman earned $28,184, while the average for men was $40,926 (u.s. department of commerce [usdc], 1991, p. 9). the federal glass ceiling commission completed its work with the release of a report in 1995. that report, entitled, “a solid investment: making full use of the nation's human capital,” called on both the private sector and government to take action to reduce and ultimately eliminate the effects of the glass ceiling. the report urged the federal government to focus on two areas: first was the gathering and dissemination of national statistics to identify problem areas and to track progress. equally important, the fgcc urged government at all levels to “lead by example,” tearing down its own barriers to the career success of minorities and women (fgcc, 1995, p. 4). education career fields within the federal government there are 446 white collar career fields within the federal government. of those, eleven fall within what the government calls the “education group,” including “positions which involve administering, managing, supervising, performing, or supporting education or training . . .” (u.s. office of personnel management [opm], handbook, 1999, pp. 76-77). in 1991, the government had 19,902 employees classed as “general schedule and related” employees in the education group, also referred to as gs-1700 (usdc, 1991, p. 76). of those, 9,230 (46.4%) were women. the department of defense (dod) was by far the biggest user of education group employees: more than 77% of the total education work force belonged to dod. the department of the interior was the second most significant employer, with about 11%. all other federal agencies lagged far behind in numbers of educators employed (usdc, 1991, pp. 126-127). the government’s educational specialists in 1991 were spread among 11 career series. most were classified as “professionals,” the highest category of federal white collar workers. these people teach or manage teachers in various settings, including vocational training, vocational rehabilitation, public health education, and education research. typical lower-echelon education positions include “latch key” specialists, child care providers, education technicians, and entry-level teachers and guidance counselors. at more senior levels, education-related jobs typically require higher levels of training, and tend to be supervisory in nature. for example, child care directors, education services officers, curriculum specialists, and training administrators would fall into this category. review of literature the existence of a glass ceiling exists in education settings outside the federal government is well established. inman (1998) noted that the glass ceiling hinders women trying to move beyond mid-level faculty and administrative positions. in comparison with male faculty, the glass ceiling further contributes to both the relative career brevity and lower productivity of female faculty members (bain, 2000; chaffings, 1995). data shows that women in academia suffer disparities with respect to men by almost every indicator of professional status, including rank, salary, tenure, job satisfaction, and working conditions (glazer-raymo, 1999). women’s wages and advancement are also affected by their tendency to choose less lucrative occupations, assume a greater share of domestic responsibilities, and exit the workforce for family reasons at higher rates than men (hersch & stratton, 2002; kim & polacheck, 1994; palomba & palomba, 1982). other statistics on women educators beneath the glass ceiling are significant. for example, while 42% of new entrants to medical school are women, only 5% of department heads and only 3% of medical school deans are female. men in educational settings receive advantages in terms of office space, grant support, protected time for research and other career-enhancing benefits, compared to their female peers (tesch, wood, helwig, & nattinger, 1995). tesch et al. attributed these disparities to bias, poor negotiation ability, and underdeveloped networking skills on the part of women. coleman (1998) confirmed these ideas, identifying the most significant barriers to women in education, in order of importance: exclusion from “good ol’ boys” networks; employers’ negative attitude toward women; and lack of professional networking. while these studies have targeted non-federally employed educators, there is reason to believe that similar conditions exist in the federal workforce. while the glass ceiling may be itself invisible, its effects are not. if such a barrier exists within the federal government, one would expect to find women disproportionately clustered on lower rungs of the career ladder, with incomes correspondingly lower than those of their male counterparts. however, if the progress urged by the civil rights act of 1991 and the federal glass ceiling commission has in fact become a reality, we would expect to see progress through the decade of the 1990s, in terms of both pay and career success. a retrospective: the federal education field in 1991 to best evaluate the extent of progress made in cracking the glass ceiling, we can start by examining the state of the education career fields in the early 1990s. of the government’s 1.7 million white-collar employees in 1991, about 841,000 (or 49.1%) were women. in the field of education, we have seen that the overall proportion of women was similar. in 1991, 46.4% of general schedule-and-related education employees were women (usdc, 1991, pp. 2, 76). one significant measure of gender equity is salary. in 1991, male federal employees in education made substantially more, in the aggregate, thandid their female counterparts. the average salary for federally-employed men in education was $38,000 in 1991; for women, $29,800. thus, the average woman educator earned only about 78.4% of the salary earned by the average male in the field (usdc, 1991, p. 38). since pay scales in government do not vary based on gender, one must look elsewhere for the causes of this substantial disparity. some likely causes of this earning gap are rank and seniority. with such a significant gender-based difference in earnings, one would expect to find that the education field was, in 1991, characterized by disproportionate numbers of men at its upper levels, with women overrepresented in the lower ranks. note in figure 1 that compared to their overall representation of 46.4% in the general schedule education workforce, women were overrepresented at or below the level of gs-12, and severely underrepresented above that level: at and above the level of gs-13, men outnumbered women more than two-to-one. file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/spring2003/bakerf%7e1.html the underrepresentation of women was even more stark at the highest pay levels. at the highest general schedule level, gs-15, women made up only 23% of the workforce in 1991. at even more senior pay grades, those senior executives compensated above the levels of the general schedule, women held a mere 14 of 210 positions, only about 6.7% (usdc, 1991, p. 77). government education career fields in 1999 recall for a moment the “open atrium” example at the start of this article. all of the figures discussed above suggest that female educators within the federal government faced a strong glass ceiling effect in 1991. in a career field almost equally populated between men and women, salaries showed substantial inequity, and the highest-ranking levels of the field were very much a male preserve, with women filling less than 7% of those positions. that same year, however, marked the passage of the civil rights act and the establishment of the fgcc. did the status of women educators improve in the years following 1991? has pay equity been achieved, or at least improved? are women better represented at the upper levels of the education field? for these answers, one can turn to the most recent federal statistics, covering the workforce at the start of the 2000 fiscal year. women in federal education careers – 2000 if the above data shows an education career field with a strong glass ceiling at the start of the 1990s, how had the picture changed by the end of the decade? to examine this, it is necessary to evaluate the most recent data, covering the federal workforce at of the start of fiscal year 2000. the record demonstrates substantial improvement in the status of women educators over the years between 1991 and 2000. throughout the period, the size of the gs-and-related education workforce remained relatively stable, at about 19,000 employees. but the proportion of women in the field climbed dramatically, rising from 46.4% to 57% of the workforce in the year 2000: of the 19,016 people in the field, almost 11,000 were female (opm, occupations, 1999, p. 67). the news on the compensation front, though, is not so positive. we saw that in 1991, female educators earned, in the aggregate, only about 78.4% of their male counterparts’ salaries. this number barely changed over the decade of the 1990s, so that by the year 2000, women were earning only 79.8% of the men’s pay (opm, occupations, 1999, p. 42). of the dozens of career fields examined by this article’s authors to date, no other field has seen such an insignificant improvement. for a more typical example, female federal auditors earned about 80% of the average male salary in 1991, and that climbed to 87% by 2000 (baker & lightle, 2001, p. 22). the continuing salary disparity suggests a persistently strong glass ceiling, and other data bear that out. recall that in 1991 women made up 48.5% of the lower echelons of education at and below the rank of gs-12; by 2000, that number had climbed to 58.4% (opm, occupations, 1999, p. 67). so many women clustering at the lower levels of the career field has the effect of pulling down average female salaries, even if women make progress in moving into the upper ranks of the career field. (see figure 2). and such progress did occur in the 1990s. figure 2 shows that whereas women occupied only 28.7% of positions at and above gs-13 in 1991, by 2000 that percentage had risen to 45.6%. at the highest general schedule level, gs-15, the proportion of women nearly doubled from 1991 to 2000: in 1991, just 23% of gs-15s in education were female. by 2000, women educators made up more than 44% of all gs-15s. for the very highest pay grades, those senior pay plans above the general schedule, the proportion of women increased there as well (see figure 3), from 6.7% in 1991 to 9.3% in 2000 (opm, occupations, 1999, p. 67). analysis and potential causes so the data makes clear that the picture for federally employed women in education improved considerably during the 1990s. women grew from a minority of the federal education workforce to being a substantial majority by the year 2000. although still lagging behind their male counterparts in representation at upper levels of management, the proportion of women at more senior levels did in fact increase markedly. less clear are the causes of this improvement. we have seen that the civil rights act of 1991 and the establishment of the federal glass ceiling commission in that same year called for actions to improve the status of women in the workforce. but there were a variety of other socio-cultural influences at work in the 1990s that also likely had an effect. the decade of the 1990s saw a host of changes in the cultural landscape of america, and those changes were reflected in the federal workforce. some might find it ironic that president clinton, so often publicly castigated for his behavior toward women, led an administration which provided unprecedented opportunities for women, especially at senior levels. attorney general janet reno and secretary of state madeleine albright became the first-ever female appointees to those positions, while other women served as heads of the department of health and human services, the office of management and budget, and the air force. women were so well represented in the clinton administration that one author noted that women comprised half the attendees at senior staff meetings in the white house (kirschten, 2000). education is another likely cause of women’s progress. women outperform men in terms of grades and graduation rates at the baccalaureate level, and women are three times more likely to earn degrees in education than are men. interestingly, perhaps due to family responsibilities, the superior performance of women at the file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/spring2003/bakerf%7e1.html#figure2 file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/spring2003/bakerf%7e1.html#figure2 file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/spring2003/bakerf%7e1.html undergraduate level has not yet translated to proportionately higher graduate school attendance: within four years of graduation, women and men enter graduate school at an identical rate of 30% (u.s. department of education, 2001, pp. i-vii, 1-2). another source of an opportunity for women in the federal education field is the extensive early retirement programs offered by the government in the 1990s. given that men occupied a disproportionately high number of senior management positions, it would be expected that the impact of retirement programs would fall disproportionately on men. this trend is indeed felt in both the public and private sectors: the hudson institute estimates that men will make up nearly 60% of all departures from the workforce nationwide, through at least the year 2005 (judy & d’amico, 1998, p. 113). conclusions this research describes the status and the progress of women in the federal government’s education career fields. while it is clear that the 1990sbrought significant advancement for women educators, further research is required to determine the reasons behind that progress. one optimistic view would suggest that this snapshot of the 1990s documents a stage in women’s inexorable journey toward gender equity at work. but those with less rosy perspectives can find ample room for concern. is it possible, for example, that the large influx of women into the career field, which took women from a 46% minority to a 57% majority in less than a decade, was merely a result of the strong 1990s economy drawing more men to the higher pay of the private sector? is it also possible that federal education will be increasingly seen as “woman’s work,” subject to the social, economic, and cultural biases implicit in such a designation? until more research is done in these areas, the causes of the 1990s progress will remain unclear. even so, for women aspiring to careers in federal education employment, the news is promising. it would be naïve to say that the glass ceiling has been shattered. still, women have made substantial progress at moving into positions of upper management and senior leadership. from those positions, it is not unreasonable to expect that they can extend a helping hand to those women following behind them, and allow the entire workforce to move in the direction of gender equity. references bain, o. (2000). academe’s glass ceiling: societal, professional-organizational, and institutional barriers to the career advancement of academic women. comparative educator review, 44(4), 493-514. baker, b., & lightle, s. (2001). cracks in the glass ceiling: an analysis of gender equity in the federal government auditing career field. journal of government financial management, 50(3), 18-27. chaffings, s. (1995). the glass ceiling: are women where they should be? education, 115, 380-386. coleman, j. (1998). barriers to career mobility/advancement by african american and caucasion female administrators in minnesota organizations: a perception or reality? paper presented at annual meeting of the aera, san diego, ca. glazer-raymo, j. (1999). shattering the myths: women in academe. eric document reproduction service no. 432199. hersch j., & stratton, l. s. (2002). housework and wages. journal of human resources, 37(1), 217-229. hymowitz, c., & schellhardt, t. (1986, march 24). why women can’t seem to break the invisible barrier that blocks them from the top jobs. the wall street journal, 1. inman, p. (1998). women’s career development at the glass ceiling. new directions for adult and continuing education, 80, 35-42. judy, r., & d’amico, c. (1998). workforce 2020:work and workers in the 21st century. indianapolis, in: the hudson institute. kim, m. k., & polachek, s. w. (1994). panel estimates of male-female earnings functions. journal of human resources, 29(2), 406-428. kirschten, d. (2000, february). kicking glass. government executive, 32(2). retrieved august 26, 2000, from proquest database http://www.proquest.com palomba, c. a., & palomba, n. a. (1982). occupational segregation and earnings differentials by sex: a simultaneous model. review of financial economics, 17(3), 45-51. tesch, b., wood, h., helwig, a., & nattinger, a. (1995). promotion of women physicians in academic medicine: glass ceiling or sticky floor? journal of american medical association, 34(3), 455-456. united states code title 5 § 5332. (2001, july 3). retrieved from http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/5/5332.html united states federal glass ceiling commission. (1995). a solid investment: making full use of the nation’s human capital. washington, dc: u.s. government printing office. u.s. department of commerce. (1991). occupations of federal white-collar and blue-collar workers. federal civilian workforce statistics as of september 1991. washington, dc: office of personnel management. u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics. (2001). competing choices: men’s and women’s paths after earning a bachelors degree. nces 2001-154. washington, dc: author. u.s. office of personnel management. (1999). handbook of occupational groups and families, january, 1999. workforce compensation and performance service (hrcd-7). washington, dc: author. u.s. office of personnel management. (1999). occupations of federal white-collar and blue-collar workers as of september 30, 1999. washington, dc: author. authors dr. bud baker is a professor of management at wright state university. dr. scott graham is an assistant professor of organizational leadership at wright state university. dr. scott williams is an assistant professor of management at wright state university. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership teachers' perceptions of women in the principalship a current perspective johnetta hudson, ph.d. dorothy rea, ph.d. hudson, summer, 1998 teachers appear to not want extremes and prefer a balance in both male and female principals. women are still under represented in educational administration during the 1990's. when one compares the number of women teachers with the number of women in hool administration the number is disproportionate. the majority of teachers are females. criswell and betz (1995) noted that 66% of the teaching force is female. however, the percentage of women in school administration is quite different. women hold 5% of the superintendent positions, 20.6% of assistant superintendent positions, and 30% of the principalships (restine, 1993). a survey conducted by the executive educator and xavier university (natale, 1992 ) revealed that in the 1990's women hold 39.7 % of the elementary school principal positions, followed by 20.5% at the junior high/middle school level, and 12% at the high school level. what factors contribute to the low numbers of women in educational administration? one of the most common reasons presented in the literature for the under representation of women in school administration is negative perceptions of women's leadership (tyree, 1995). studies of female and male approaches to leadership document a distinct difference in the way women and men manage (shakeshaft, 1989). management attributes traditionally associated with men, such as authoritative, decisive, controlling, and unemotional, are often more respected by potential employers in education than a more decentralized approach to leadership which involves the principal as a facilitator of a shared vision and shared decision-making. tyree (1995) stated that the under representation of women in educational administration is fostered through a series of myths: " (a) women don't have what it takes, and (b) women lack support of teachers and the community." according to helgesen (1990), women still must deal with the negative views of female administrators held by peers, parents, and employees of both sexes. gupton and slick (1995) quoted a female elementary principal as saying that "even after women have obtained administrative positions they are not afforded the status or the respect given their male colleagues," (p. 10). within the school environment, the attitudes which teachers have toward women administrators may have http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html a direct effect on how well the administrators' job performance will be evaluated by her supervisor. these attitudes may also be a deterrent to more women seeking administrative positions. recent school reform efforts which include transformational leadership, site-based management, empowerment of teachers, and other forms of decentralized decision-making now celebrate the stereotypical characteristics of women school administrators. in fact, contemporary theories and studies of leadership indicate that the characteristics of the leadership style used by most women are becoming the dominant model of leadership (aburdene & naisbitt, 1993; bennis & nanus, 1985; helgesen, 1990 as cited by gupton & slick, 1995). now that collaborative, participatory leadership styles are valued, has the attitude toward women elementary and secondary school administrators changed to the positive? purpose the purpose of this study was to examine teachers' attitudes toward women principals. do teachers perceive that women administrators foster collaboration, cooperation, participation, and shared decision making? how do women teachers perceive the effectiveness of the female administrator? how do male teachers perceive the effectiveness of the female administrator? do teachers prefer a female administrator over a male administrator? we developed a questionnaire to gather data relating to teacher perceptions of women and men in the principalship. each item on the questionnaire was developed from a review of the literature on women and men's ways of leading and leadership qualities principals need in order to provide effective leadership while transforming schools into the 21st century (crogan, 1996; dunlap & schmuck, 1995; lunenburg, 1995; restine, 1993; sergiovanni,1995; shakeshaft, 1989; tannen, 1994; tichy & devanna 1990; tyree, 1995). procedures the questionnaire was distributed during the spring of 1996 to 1,047 public school teachers in missouri and kansas. of the surveys distributed 479 were returned for a 45.7% return rate. the data were analyzed by gender. there were 349 female participants and 126 male participants. four teachers did not specify gender. results describe the qualities of a successful male principal and a successful female principal ? participants were asked to indicate which qualities they thought were desirable in female and male principals. table 1 presents the collective responses of male and female participants. good verbal communicator was checked by 92.5 % of the participants for a male principal and 93.1% as a desirable quality for a female principal. one can conclude that good communication between principals and teachers is important regardless of the principal's gender. the least desirable quality of a male (17.3%) and female (19%) principal was unemotional. the quality emotional was also one of the least desirable qualities for male (23.2%) and female (26.3%) principals. teachers appear to not want extremes and to prefer a balance in both male and female principals. the low percentage of responses for the quality authoritarian, (21.7% ) for a male principal and (19.4% ) for female principal, indicate that an authoritative style is also an unacceptable quality for any principal. there are eight qualities which were checked by 80% to 90% of all participants for both male and female principals. those qualities are: good verbal communicator, good manager, good listener, problem solver, knowledgeable of curriculum and instruction, shares power and credit, and seeks variety of input. the researchers concluded that these were the most desirable qualities for a principal to possess, regardless of the principal's gender. it is interesting to note that the quality shares power and credit received a higher percentage of responses, 82% for a male principal and 83.7 % for a female principal, than did the quality collaborative which received 74.5% for a male principal and 76.4% for a female principal. one would think that in an era of shared decision making "collaborative" would have been a much more desirable quality. it was also interesting to note that decisive was slightly more desirable in a female principal than in a male principal. is this because women traditionally are perceived to be less decisive than men? table 2 presents the desirable qualities of male and female principals by gender of the participants. file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/hudt1.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/hudt2.html women selected good communicator, good listener, knowledgeable of curriculum and instruction, personable, good manager, problem solver and seeks input as the top seven qualities for both male and female principals. being a good communicator was the most desirable quality. of the women participants, 92% thought being a good communicator was a desirable quality in a male principal while 94% thought this was a desirable quality in a female principal. male participants' responses differed slightly. men selected good communicator, good listener, knowledgeable of curriculum and instruction, good manager, problem solver, and seeks input as desirable qualities in both male and female principals. however, men felt being decisive was more important than being personable. of the male participants, 82% selected decisive as a desirable quality for male principals and 81% selected it as a desirable quality for female principals. personable was selected as a desirable quality by 75.4% of the male participants. the data on table 2 substantiates the data on table 1. do male principals have legitimate authority? the majority of female participants (63.9%) responded yes, that males do have legitimate authority (see table 3). slightly more than half of male participants responded that men do not have legitimate authority. this suggests that men are not in agreement amongst themselves as to whether men step into the position of principal without having to earn their authority. do female principals have legitimate authority? the information on table 4 overwhelmingly says no female principals do not have legitimate authority. female and male teachers equally say that women have to work to earn their authority. female principals in the 90's still have to prove themselves. comments on the surveys stated that this authority has historically been given to males in the american culture. by whom would you prefer to be supervised? although participants in this study were limited to the choices of male or female for their replies, many chose to add an extra line indicating either. as a result, the category of either was added as part of the data analysis. female and male teachers stated that gender of the principal did not make a difference. they had no gender preference for their supervision. comments such as the following were made by participants: "i respect the person and the job he/she does not gender." the data raise several questions. if teachers have no preferences for whom they work, why do female principals still have to prove themselves? to whom do they need to prove themselves? are teachers contradicting themselves? conclusion the primary purpose of this study was to examine teachers' attitudes toward female principals. the results show that female and male teachers want the same qualities in a principal regardless of the principal's gender. teachers want principals who are good communicators, good listeners, knowledgeable of curriculum and instruction, personable, problem solvers and who share power and credit as well as seek variety of input. this study strengthens the contention that in the 1990's characteristics traditionally attributed to women's ways of leading are desirable today in male administrators as well. several questions arose as a result of the responses to legitimate female authority: why do women still not have legitimate authority stepping into a leadership position? why must women earn the authority? if teachers are receptive to female principals, to whom must female principals prove themselves? the question still remains, why are women under represented as educational leaders? the answers may be within the responses to the questions above. a follow up study examining this issue and the questions above is warranted. references criswell, m. & betz, l. (1995). attitudes toward administrators among school board members: a current perspective. in b. irby & g. brown (eds.), women executives: voices and visions ( pp. 28-35). austin texas: the texas council of women school executives. grady, m. (1995). building a network for women in educational administration. in b. irby & g. brown file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/hudt3.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/hudt4.html (eds.), women executives: voices and visions (pp. 121-126). austin, texas: the texas council of women school executives. gupton, s. l. & slick, g. a.. (1995). women leaders: who are they and how do they compare. in b. irby & g. brown (eds.), women executive: voices and visions (pp. 6-14). austin, texas: the texas council of women school executives. helgesen, s. (1990). the female advantage: women's ways of leading. new york. doubleday. lunenburg, f. c., (1995). the principalship: concepts and applications. prentice hall, inc., englewood cliffs, new jersey. national center for education statistics (ed). (january, 1994). public and private school principals: are there too few women. washington, dc. papalewis, r. & yerkes, d. (1995). fe/male: the role of communication. in b. irby & g. brown (eds.), women executives: voices and visions, (pp.15-21). austin, texas: the texas council of women school executives. restine, n. l. (1993). women in administration: facilitators for change. newbury park, california: corwin press, inc. sergiovanni, t. j., (1995). the principalship: a reflective practice perspective. needham heights, ma: ally, and bacon. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. newbury park, ca.: corwin press, inc., tannen, d. (1994). talking from 9 to 5 women and men in the workplace: language, sex and power. new york: avon books. tichy, n. m. & devanna,m. a., (1990). the transformational leader. new york: john wiley & sons. tingley, j. c. (1994). genderflex: men & women speaking each other's language at work. new york: amacom. tyree, c. l. (1995). women in education: are we perpetuating societal attitudes by moving toward an androgynous leadership style. in b. irby & g. brown (eds.), women executives: voices and visions ( pp. 22-26). austin, texas: the texas council of women school executives. dr. johnetta hudson is a west distinguished professor in educational leadership at midwestern state university. wichita falls, texas. dr. dorothy rea is a principal of don bonjour elementary school in the shawnee mission school district , lenexa, kansas. awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 3, summer 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, 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women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com 79 advancing women in leadership vol. 32, pp. 79-91, 2012 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper queen bees and mommy tracking: how’s an academic woman supposed to get ahead? dr. helene a. cummins brescia university college, the university of western ontario 1285 western road, london on n6g 1h2 associate professor, sociology e-mail: hcummins@uwo.ca 519 432 8353 ext. 28055 the purpose of this article is to highlight the socio-cultural variables that detract from women’s success in academe. the focus is on all women academics, whether partnered or not, and how mommy tracking and the queen bee may also work to hold women back. implications of these issues for women academics are explored. key words: women, mommy track, queen bees, academe, canada much has been written about the challenges women academics face in meshing work both with their intimate relationships and with the raising and socializing of their children (altman, 2007; de wet, ashley and kegel, 2002; jackson, 2004; leahey, 2007; philipsen, 2008; proctor gerdes 2003; stout, staiger and jennings, 2007; williams, 2005). less is understood about the mommy track and the movement of women academics, with or without children, through the system of academe (cummins, 2005). while patriarchy and the old boys’ network are still structural barriers to women’s advancement, limited research examines barriers erected by women in positions of power against women who are climbing the ladder towards tenure and promotion. if women hold other women back, or are nasty in their relations with each other, one wonders how the female academic can plan and navigate to get ahead? this paper examines both sides of this issue both mommy tracking and the queen bee – and analyzes the hampering of women academics both structurally and by the lack of assistance offered by other women. the concept of mommy tracking was first linked to female lawyers in a new york times article and identifies “women who choose to put in fewer hours and spend more time with their families … are considered less serious by their male colleagues” (williams, 2000, p. 72). i will argue that all academic women whether single and childless, or married with dependents are less successful in achieving promotion and tenure in the halls of academe because they are perceived to be mommy trackers. the new vocabulary that describes these barriers http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ mailto:hcummins@uwo.ca 80 includes the “sticky floor”, the “glass ceiling”, the “mommy track”, the “second shift” (buchanan, 1996), and the “glass cliff” (ryan, haslam and postmes, 2007). combined with these socio-structural issues facing women is the phenomenon of the “queen bee” – the woman who holds other women back or blocks them on the ladder of success. there is not always a “good old girls network” (stufft and coyne, 2009, p.3) that operates to align women with each other and leads them equally into positions of power. as williams (2005, p.101) highlights: “the crucial point is that all women, nonmothers as well as mothers, are disadvantaged by a workplace that enshrines the ideal worker who starts to work in early adulthood and works, full time and over time, for forty years straight”. that work often parallels compulsory motherwork as part of the structural underpinnings of their work related roles and the societal demands that are placed upon them which disallows them from concentrating on the real needs of their academic profession. in addition to work outside of the home, many women are also providing elder care to an aging parent (philipsen, 2008) and in doing so they undertake the mental hygiene function, the stroking function, emotion work, doing the intimacy and/or wifework (maushart, 2001, p. 144) or what is also called doing mom work (chrisler, herr & murstein, 1998, p. 198) both off and on the job. academic men are assigned to committees that make and implement university policy, or on grievance committees, whereas academic women can be found on committees that deal with students, social issues or with more routine matters (chrisler et al., 1998; eagly, wood and diekman, 2000). institutional housework takes women away from the real work that they need to be doing such as research and writing, and hence lessens their chances of climbing the academic ladder (kulis and miller-loessi, 1992). some women even suggest that the university is “family unfriendly” (philipsen, 2008, p. 95). interestingly, women with children often have ‘natural’ time barriers that prevent them from staying longer on the job or until meetings are completed as a result of the call away to see to their children (astin and davis, 1985). childless women can thus be called upon to stay longer at work and to finish up the work that needs to be completed. in many cases this is seen as normative social behaviour. furthermore, these same women suggest that all of their time is focused on achieving tenure or promotion and no time is available for networking, having fun, or dating (philipsen, 2008). when women are extremely adept at certain things like teaching they might be labeled as mothering their students and even overlooked for awards related to outstanding teaching or not rehired (carli, 1998). the courses female and males teach align with “gender schemas” (valian, 1998) and these work-related roles align with gender appropriate behaviour. in sociology, for example, eichler (2001) identifies how outstanding women in the field were taken away from valuable professional work to attend to family issues, even when they were childless. helen abell, for example, the founder of canadian 81 rural sociology, left a prestigious government post to care for both her aging parents and an alcoholic brother. ker conway (2001) once vice-president of the university of toronto, and been president of smith college, was childless; she however, kept busy by her husband’s manic-depressive personality. caring work, institutional housework, and gender schemas contribute to the challenges women face in academia and lessens their pace and power in the halls of success. theoretical framework three theoretical constructs – human capital, social capital and boundary theory – may be used to explain how and why women are disadvantaged structurally and personally. the economic theory of human capital is premised on the ideology that the greater the investment of the employee in their own human capital, the greater the reward in the workplace. that is, the greater one’s investment of time, energy and finances invested in education, skills building, and experience, the greater one’s productivity in the work world. investing in education not only increases knowledge, but it also links to ability and future expertise. when women academics put so much time into higher education it is understandable that they might consider their career as paramount, similar to other career professions such as law and medicine. what this often means for female workers is that with greater investments in human capital women will be less likely to rear children (hakim, 1995; kemkes-grottenthaler, 2003). even for women adamant to remain childless, abma and peterson (1995) found that significant numbers changed their minds and decided voluntarily to have a child within a two-year time frame. this helps us to understand the types of choices men and women make with regards to their career portfolio and their parental desires (probert, 2005). becker (1985, p. s35) claims that women’s active household and childcare responsibilities clearly delimit their abilities in the workplace as a result of the energy expended in those directions. this helps explain the lessened human capital and decreased salaries of women. a lessened presence in the workplace and the call away from the job inhibits relations with others. human relations’ theory aligns with social capital theory. social capital theory suggests that the greater the access to social capital the greater one’s chances in the workplace. social capital is instrumental for academics seeking tenure and promotion. things that might be taken for granted like “information and knowledge about institutional norms, expectations, and opportunities; access to and influence on key decision makers; certification and endorsement of an individual’s qualifications; and emotional support and recognition” (perna, 2005, p. 280) are required in order to climb the ladder to success. third, boundary theory assists to explain why there is such cumbersome interplay between ones work and home arena. when work life encumbers home life and vice versa the female worker becomes burdened and outright exhausted. philipsen (2008) argues that women need to learn quickly to prioritize: the conflicting role of supermom and super-worker make for unhealthy living. 82 when the female academic at middle age might believe she can slow down because she has secured tenure and promotion, researchers like heibrun (1988), believe women should make the most of that security and challenge, take risks and even become unpopular. unpopularity obviously would not build social capital with the “in” group! unpopularity can lead to female misogyny or negative relations between women (mavin, 2006). female misogyny is a reality that feminists must investigate, not downplay. this much under-researched area must be explored to ascertain how and why women may work against each other. how these theories bear out in relation to the positioning of women in academe fits into more traditional work related roles. in canada, between the years 1992-2002, women earned thirty-six percent of the doctoral degrees. in 2002 the united states had more women who held doctorates than did men (hoffer et al., 2003, 2004). in 2004, the majority of canadian women who earned a doctoral degree could be found in the discipline of psychology (70%), in the area of health sciences (72%) and education (65%). males are more likely to be found pursuing degrees in engineering and computer sciences (berkowitz, 2005, p. 37). therefore, it is very uncommon to find women at the helm of schools such as law and medicine. women in non-traditional fields such as geo-science find themselves isolated, and at the lower ranks of the university system (de wet, ashley, and kegel, 2002). with such busy schedules how do these women balance their life’s work with their home and personal schedules? work life balance taking time away from work. the most recent statistics canada profile of women show that women who work outside the home are more likely to take time away for personal and/or family issues: “five percent of all full-time paid employees lost some time from work for these reasons, compared with just two percent of male employees” (statistics canada, 2005, p. 109). in 2004 that loss of work time translated into absenteeism amounting to a total of ten days versus one and a half days for the average male full-time worker (statistics canada, 2005). this might help to explain the higher incidence of unemployment rates of female versus male university teachers, particularly women with children under the age of six. in 2001, this category of women accounted for 10.3% versus 6.4% of men. in general, women with children were unemployed at a rate of 7 %, versus 2.6% for men. women who had no children and were unemployed numbered 5.8% versus 4.4% for men. the average unemployment rate for all women was 6.3% versus 3.5% for men (canadian federation for the humanities and social sciences, 2005, p. 109). the numbers are very clear: by comparison, overall, women in all fields of academia are more likely to be without work especially when they have young children as dependents in comparison with similar male colleagues. since at least one third of our lives are spent at work, women must learn how to manage time effectively and efficiently in order to get the most joy and satisfaction out of their life’s work. it is 83 essential for them to tap into the social policies and processes available in the workplace that can enable one to greet success. work policies. it is here that women academics with children have a multitude of work option policies. the american association of university professors in their statement of principles on family responsibilities and academic work note that faculty should be treated equitably. they both recognize and support family life. in order to avoid stigmatization it is suggested that the probationary time allotted to faculty be extended for all faculty not just those planning a family (philipsen, 2008). some universities have concierge service that allows for the transportation of children to and from daycare (fogg 2003) and afterschool care on campus (philipsen, 2008). rosser (2007) found innovative policies such as that at the georgia institute of technology where women scientists and engineers were encouraged in climbing the academic ladder by stopping the tenure clock and they provided services for emergencies that women may need. despite these policies, however, female professors may still find themselves challenged in the competitive marketplace. a female political science professor in santa barbara was denied tenure when she took advantage of her university’s family policy to support women with children and to attend to her children as their care giver. in the end she achieved tenure detailing how her academic work refashioned the field of political science. we must consider if single, childless academics also have policies in place to protect them from work overload. their caring work may extend to siblings or aging parents, to a relative with a disability, or to nieces and nephews after the death of a sibling. in addition, as a result of their single status they are often called upon for care extended to their colleagues when they are sick, or in need, and their students, which may result in them overlooking care for themselves. williams (2005, p. 101) comments on how the childless woman may feel pained or even angry if asked to take over for a colleague who is on parental leave. interestingly, statistics canada (2005) report in the last census that when marital status is considered, the largest group of individuals fall into the “single” category. thus, there may be many more single academics in the pile than married ones over time. kemkes-grottenthaler (2003) and de wet, ashley and kegel (2002) find that it is normative for female academics to postpone and even reject childrearing in order for them to achieve tenure and promotion. oftentimes in doing so they found that this led to being involuntarily childless due to lost time in the process of procreation. work-life strategies. in addition to the challenges that exist between academic mothers and academic nonmothers, women need to learn the art of the separation of the self between the work sphere and the home sphere. luna brem (2001) and ker conway (2001) acknowledge that women generally do not separate the professional self from the personal self in the best ways possible. hence, “pressure can be self-induced” (luna brem, 2001, p. 188). a global survey which focused on the work and life experiences of 30,000 women in thirty 84 three different countries found that women require leisure time, and secondly financial independence (luna brem, 2001, p. 183). balance in one’s life allows for an enhanced quality of life (brooks and brooks, 1997). women need and must learn the politics of play whether it be joining a golf club, exploring new areas of their life, going to a spa, or allowing for time bursts “downtime, brainstorming, sorting out” (briles, 1996, p. 168). when women understand that the majority of professional women live hectic lives combining family and work life, that itself can be a stress reducer. when women deny this truth, they in effect live lives with false boundaries; not only does this delimit their worthwhile experiences but it denies them the pleasure of pushing beyond rigid boundaries, stretching and aspiring even higher (briles, 1996). once we understand what circumvents our lives, we can grow from these understandings and mobilize forward in more functional ways. the workplace needs to create “stretch opportunities for people” (luna brem, 2001, p. 179). women academics must learn to ask for help. they need to surround themselves with people who understand the work process that they engage in. they need to call upon their power network (fisher and vilas, 2000) or tap into the power tools (sherman, 2001) that facilitate movement through the ranks. they need to use mentors and networks to access and empower oneself in the process. on occasion such assistance can be denied from other women. although women can and do help other women, there are certain women who are not promoters of other women. women need to be aware of queen bees, princess bees and phantom bees. the queen bee believes that she got to the top by her own fortitude and through being savvy. queen bees are nonmentors and non-supporting of other women. in this thinking they believe women get to the top on their own. the queen bee has achieved high rank on the job with associated high pay and social success. these women according to staines et al (1974) are often popular with men, have looks going for them and are married. these women do not work for equality for other women and might even oppose programs that do. mavin (2008, p. s75) identifies the queen bee as “a bitch who stings other women if her power is threatened”, as she prefers to work with men (cherne, 2003). the princess bee will support other women as long as they do not violate her territory. hence, she mentors others as long as they stay separate from her domain. the phantom bee will not facilitate finding another woman for a work position. men, then, are allocated the job and fewer women are afforded access to new work roles (briles, 1996, p. 241-242). women can and do misuse power, “setting others up, sabotaging them, not giving them credit for appropriate work, or not respecting some of the unwritten rules such as connectedness in the workplace, they continue to poison the well” (briles, 1996, p. 253). mavin (2006) reports that the syndrome associated with the queen bee is alive and well in the workplace setting. “bad behaviour” exists amongst senior women in management towards other women (352) and it is something very difficult to highlight, let alone discuss. however, 85 ignoring it does not mean that it will go away. women, then, often do not mesh with each other as natural allies (legge, 1987; mavin, 2006: 2008). the single childless academic and movement through the ranks acker (2004, p. 23) highlights that all academic women have had to struggle within their climb to academic success. valian (1998) notes that it is often thought that women in academe are rising through the ranks at high speed, but clearly that perception is flawed. while single childless academic women are seen to have the advantage of greater freedom of time, their publication record is actually recorded as lower than that of their married female colleagues. toren (1999) studied russian women immigrant scientists who in a twenty year time frame their publication record increased with children. numerous researchers support this finding (astin and davis, 1985; kyvic, 1990; zuckerman and cole, 1987: cited in toren 1999). younger women academics can be advantaged by their youth, personal ambition, drive, and use of their time towards research or publication. however, even the social variables of age, appearance, attractiveness, weight, and dress sense, work against women as they perceive indifference towards women who have youth and style on their side (mavin, 2008). simultaneously, it is found that these same women who are young and ambitious are less productive in research as a result of their single status (astin and davis, 1985). they suggest that, “women without a male partner are more likely to be further excluded from the ‘boys’ network, important connections, and critical information” (astin and davis, 1985, p. 140). attractiveness and personal presentation can be a very large threat to any woman who is insecure about herself and lacks confidence and self-esteem. in 2001, women continued to earn less than their male counterparts; that is, fulltime women academics at all ranks earned .87 cents for every dollar their male colleague earned (canadian federation for the humanities and social sciences, 2005). while there is no data in canada that examines marital status and rank, again, overall women fall far behind. mason and goulden’s (2002) study of doctoral recipients found large numbers of women considering leaving academia when they had children. while marriage and children advance the careers of academic men, they detract from the careers of women. tenured women often are single and childless (mason and goulden, 2002). in 20012002, 16% of women in canadian universities were full professors, 32.8% were associate professors, 40.8% were assistant professors and 53.9% were categorized as other (canadian federation for the humanities and social sciences, 2005). statistics canada highlights at the administrative level, women totaled 29.7% of the senior administration on university campuses in canada in 2005. they occupied 21% of all canadian research chairs to june 2005 and made up 11.6% of royal society of canada fellows (berkowitz, 2005, p. 36). side and robbins’ (2007) research on the canada research chairs program confirms the arduous struggle and 86 devaluing of women’s research that female academics encounter in their bid for these prestigious research honors. chesterman, ross-smith and peters (2005) found in australia that senior women executives in the university system exhibited “lack of confidence, reticence, ambivalence, seeking balance and resistance as playing a part in women’s avoidance of senior jobs” (p. 178). while marital status is not identified it can be concluded that all women professionals in the halls of academe move slower and are less likely to climb as high through the ranks in comparison to men. immediate and future needs of academic women in canada, fifty-eight percent of the undergraduate students in the university system were female in 2006-2007, a figure which has remained constant since 2001 (statistics canada, 2009). the statistic is one to rejoice and applaud. in addition, there are more females with university degrees than ever before in the history of canada and the united states. the key will be to retain females in academe and encourage them towards higher degrees at all levels and in all disciplines. women must renounce the roles of queen, princess and phantom bees. it is imperative to empower women and launch then forward to advanced education and mobility through the ranks. in suggesting this, one must not underestimate the need for academic men to assist in the process. their assistance is absolutely required and essential to the process. acker’s (2003, p. 401) words are encouraging: “there is every sign that the proportion of women and minority groups (including women) will be rising throughout that period as the generation dominated by white men retires in large numbers”. women academics must find the courage, strength and drive to push forward, to continue to request policies that facilitate the balancing act of all the roles they play. in order to enjoy their life’s work they need leisure and play, loyal colleagues, peer-to-peer learning, mentors, and e-mentoring, and if they have partners they require encouragement and support with domestic and child rearing practices. the system that shapes and produces bright minds and encourages the enhancement of full lives touched by the gifts of education is of extreme importance. it is imperative that students and potential students succeed and climb through the ranks of possibility in academia. society is on the threshold of incredible change. it is important to harness the energy and accomplishments of women as structural changes and policy changes continue in our social and academic worlds. may society be successful in abolishing the mommy track in allowing women in academe to derive the best and fullest careers that they can master. it is important to support all women academics, be they single, married, divorced, separated, or widowed. sharpening one’s power tools, finetuning one’s power networks, and building the old girls network will assist women of all social and ethnic backgrounds to break down the social and structural barriers in academe. may the sting be taken out of the queen bee and a neutralization of her demonic ways. as luna brem (2001, p. 165) 87 highlights: “a leader makes change happen”. all academic leaders must push to make these changes happen! it is imperative to question our leaders, be they male or female and squash the ugliness of unfairness and inequity. in occupying their roles they must: “accept that the position of a leader is a position of power. embrace power. take it, and then give it away. the more power you give, the more you have. you lose power when you fail to empower others” (marsden, 2008, p. 279). it is time for the leaders in academe to take note of all the work women do to make the university system run smooth, to recognize and reward all the caring work that makes for sound relations between all the players in the system, and to note women’s diverse contributions to the academic forum. it is time to work with women academics and allow them to be all that they want to be, because the happy worker is also a more productive worker. everyone wins in the system when they are promoted to their full academic and human potential. women need each other and more as they make their way through the halls of academe. we need leaders to build trust, show compassion, provide stability, and create hope (rath and conchie, 2008) if women are to advance in ways that circumvent the socio-structural workplace dynamics in academe. more importantly, perhaps, is the absolute need for women in positions of leadership in academe during the downturn in the world economy. in nurturing female talent of the very brightest minds in the ivory towers of learning we position women better locally, nationally, and globally as the world searches for ways to counter the current economic crisis. it is imperative to have women situated at the top of the university system as bold voices in the decision-making processes that enable other women to move up the ranks in educational attainment. in doing so, we encourage girls worldwide to access education and work to achieve universal literacy. acknowledgements numerous invited lectures contribute to the ideas expressed in this paper. invited lecture for producing influential leaders (2006), “are all women on the mommy track: an examination of women in academe” national centre for the advancement of women in science, engineering, trades and technology, calgary, alberta. invited lecture for the congress of the humanities and social sciences, canadian sociological association (2008) status of women committee, “mommy tracking into the millennium”. vancouver, british columbia. invited panelist for the london and district academy of medicine (2010) “where the hell are all the women at the top?” london, on. i wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their generous time and constructive criticism of an earlier draft. 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(1974). the queen bee syndrome. psychology today 7(8):55-60. statistics canada (2005). women in canada. fifth edition. ottawa: ministry of industry. statistics canada (2009). the daily. undergraduate enrolment. ottawa: ministry of industry. stout, p. a., staiger, j, jennings, n. a. (2007). affective stories: understanding the lack of progress of women faculty” nwsa journal 19(3): 124-144. 91 stufft, d. & coyne, k. (2009). educational leadership: where are the women? advancing women in leadership 29: 1-7. toren, n. (1999). women and immigrants: strangers in a strange land. gender issues 17(1): 76-96. valian, v. (1998). why so slow: the advancement of women. london: the mit press. williams, c.l. (1992). the glass escalator: hidden advantages for men in the ‘female professions’. social problems 39(3): 253-267. williams, j. c. (2000). unbending gender – why family and work conflict and what to do about it. new york: oxford university press. williams, j. c. (2005). the glass ceiling and the maternal wall in academia. new directions for higher education 130(summer): 91-104. advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership paradigm shift: a perspective on omaniwomen in management in the sultanate of oman salma m. al-lamki al-lamki, spring, 1999 organizations need talented women in their core jobs, therefore, not only for reasons of social fairness, important though that is, but because many of those women will have the kinds of attitudes and attributes that the new flat flexible organizations need. if they screen out the women they will handicap their future. charles handy the entry of women into an all-male dominated profession may be one ofthe major transformations of the century. this recent and optimistic trendmust not hide the serious fact that in most countries there is only a smallpercentage of women in management and related decision making positions.this is made clear from the united nations official statistics and dataon women indicating that while conditions for women have improved in variousareas, particularly education, health and employment, women in general,and arab women in particular, continue to face many challenges. this predicament,considered to be a violation of women's rights, has always been a main concernof the u.n. it was in september 1995, that the fourth international women'sconference sponsored by the u.n. was held in beijing. this undoubtedly reflectsunited nation's relentless efforts in overcoming obstacles to women's rightsand equality. women in management the obstacles to women in management are still formidable and, some wouldargue, growing more intractable. significantly outnumbered by male colleagues,they are members of a minority group who have risen to positions of influencewithin systems which are best described as patriarchal (usis, 1996; dines,1993; vinnicombe, 1995; adachi, 1989; marshall, 1984). must society be constructed in such a way that intelligent, competentwomen are denied access to management careers, which are considered in manycountries to occupy the highest levels in the social and http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html professional hierarchy?must society be ordered in such a way as to generate extreme discriminationbetween men and women in certain employment sectors, and thereby to depriveitself of human resources sorely needed to solve its problems? women in management at the turn of the century is an issue that demandsserious attention and a new urgency. in the west, particularly western europeand north america, although women constitute almost forty five percent ofthe workforce, they occupy only 10% of the management positions (world almanac,1997; usis,1996). this figure is much lower in the senior management positions(world almanac, 1997; vinnicombe & colwill, 1995). in the past, thedirectives for women in the workforce were centered on civil rights act,equal opportunity and affirmative action (dessler, 1994; sherman & bohlander,1992; marshall, 1984). whereas such mandates have put pressure on businessand government to employ more women in the workforce, especially in theservice industry, not much has been done to break the glass ceiling foraccess of women to management positions (usis, 1996; korabik & rosin,1995; vinnicombe, 1995; hennig & jardim, 1977). greenglass & marshall (1997) in their special issue of applied psychologyon women in management provide valuable insight into why and how women continueto be repressed and silenced in male dominated organizations, despite theirpossession of requisite qualifications for management positions. this specialissue concludes that, globally, women continue to face major hurdles intheir career progression to potential ranks of senior management, arenasof power and major decision making. the above mentioned trends and practices ought no longer prevail in thecurrent business world. today clear business cases can be cited for increasingwomen's participation in management. as centralized leadership gives wayto flattened hierarchy and employee empowerment, managers will be expectedto have good communication and interpersonal skills, the ability to listenand relate to others, and be capable of working in self-managing teams (cascio,1992; de cenzo & robins, 1996; hunsaker & hunsaker, 1991). all thesequalities tend to favor women managers. management experts on both sides of the atlantic have realized that themanagement style of women fulfills the demands of new organizations betterthan their male counterparts. this is supported by an international surveyconducted by the sydney-based consultancy firm ddi asia pacific, which specializesin executive testing and selection. the consultancy surveyed 1,332 employeesand managers working in companies based in australia, the united states,canada and new zealand. results from the survey indicated that women makebetter managers than men due to their feminine qualities and attributesthat are better suited for the modern decentralized organizational structureswith flattened hierarchies and empowered work teams (oman daily observer,1997). these documented observations are appropriately summarized by managementguru, charles handy: for these jobs the organization wants quality people, well educated, well skilled and adaptable. they also want people who can juggle several tasks and assignments at one time, who are more interested in making things happen than in what title or office they hold, more concerned with power and influence than status. they want people who value instinct and intuition as well as analysis and rationality, who can be tough but also tender, focused but friendly, people who can cope with these necessary contradictions. they want, therefore, as many women as they can get. (1994, p.14) purpose of the study this case study addresses the role of omani women in management positionsin the sultanate of oman. this is highlighted by determining the factorsthat encourage women to pursue careers in management, the obstacles hinderingwomen's progress and the actions needed to be taken to help omani womenachieve greater strides. rationale of the study concern about the role of omani women in national development is an issuethat demands serious consideration. omani women represent almost fifty percentof the omani population, furthermore, an increasing number of educated womenare seeking employment in the labor market. soliciting feedback from oman's most valuable human resources, in thislight, omani female managers will supply the government and the privatesector sound information for policy development and implementation regardingthe profile and status of omani women in the workforce. the findings of this study could have policy implications for variousinstitutions in the government such as: the general directorate for women'sand children's affairs at the ministry of social affairs and labor, omaniwomen's society, ministry of education and the ministry of civil service. methodology to generate the needed information for this study, the researcher employedthe following methods and procedures: 1. carried a literature review pertinent to the study. 2. designed a questionnaire. 3. pilot studied the questionnaire on a sample of omani female managersto determine whether the questionnaire elicits the needed information. 4. distributed the questionnaire to a sample of omani female managers. 5. collected and analyzed the questionnaire responses to determine thedriving and resisting forces to omani women in management positions. 6. interpreted the results and proposed possible practices and patternsfor promoting omani women in management in the sultanate of oman. instrumentation for the purpose of this study, a questionnaire composed of a sectionwith questions on biographical, academic and professional data followedby a section with three open ended questions has been designed. a coverletter explaining the purpose of the study along with a section ensuringconfidentiality and anonymity was attached to each questionnaire. the respondentswere asked to complete the questionnaire and to respond to the three openended questions regarding the driving and resisting forces to omani womenin management and to suggest on what can be done to promote women in managementin the sultanate of oman. (questionnaire) subjects subjects of this study constituted a sample of omani female managersworking in the public (government) and private sectors. these subjects representsenior level of omani women in the work force and occupy positions of directors,director generals, advisors to ministers, head of departments, assistantdeans and file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/allques.html deans. data analysis procedures the researcher utilized descriptive and qualitative statistical methodsto describe, analyze and summarize the characteristics of the data collected.descriptive analysis was used to show the composition of the populationin terms of age, marital status, number of children, academic qualification,place of postsecondary education, and total years of work experience. qualitativeanalysis was used to summarize and present respondents' feedback on theopen ended questions regarding resisting and supporting factors to omaniwomen in management in the sultanate of oman. finally results from the dataanalysis and literature review was used to make recommendations on improvingthe status of women in management in the sultanate of oman. a perspective on oman's socio-economic and educational development hamoud (1993) writes, "the role of women in management cannot betreated in isolation from the general status of women in society, and fromthe general aims of economic, social and educational development " (p. 31). education is the key to women's equality. this is particularly significantgiven that one out of three women is uneducated (un, 1996). therefore, priorto considering the role of omani women in management, let us consider thefundamental question of opportunities for omani women in the formal education.access to education is one of the primary indicators of women's status ina given society, and therefore, is the root of women's emancipation. inthis regard, the sultanate of oman is no exception. until 1970, oman was a country that lagged behind socially and economically.the country lacked all sorts of public amenities and infrastructure suchas modern schools, hospitals, tarmac roads, electricity and water. twenty-eightyears later, oman has developed into a modern nation with both the infrastructureand the social organizations required to meet the needs of its people. theavailability of oil revenues have made such a significant and rapid transformationpossible. the vision and leadership for such a change was directed by oneperson his majesty sultan qaboos bin said al-said, ruler of the sultanateof oman since his accession in 1970. his majesty has overseen the transformationof the sultanate of oman from a single economy, based upon rudimentary agricultureand fishing, to a modern and dynamic nation with a diversified economy. a noteworthy catalyst for the above successful transformation is thedevelopment of education from primary to tertiary levels. prior to 1970,education in oman was confined to 3 primary schools with 900 boys, therewas no provision for the education of girls. following the accession ofhis majesty sultan qaboos in 1970, education has been made available toall omani nationals (boys and girls on an equal ratio) under a program ofcontinuous and rapid expansion, the most recent stage of which was the openingof the co-educational sultan qaboos university in 1986. the availabilityof education (from primary to tertiary) for women has undoubtedly playeda crucial role towards the emancipation of omani women. this achievementhas attracted the praise of a number of international magazines on women'sissues, one of which is the indonesian women's magazine (observer, 1996). women in management in the sultanate of oman the implementation of socio-economic and educational plans during therenaissance period (1970-1998) has transformed the omani society and economy.undoubtedly, the development of human resources has been accorded particularimportance in this transformation with the inclusion of women on an equalbasis. this however, has not resulted in equal participation of women inthe workforce, despite an equal percentage of women in oman's population.the results of the official population census taken in 1993 showed the omanipopulation at 1,480,531. the statistics revealed that there were 755,071male omanies and 725,460 female omanies, giving almost a 50:50 ratio ofmen to women (omani census, 1993). the age distribution of the omani populationis consistent with that of developing nations with almost 54% of the totalomani population under the age of 15. the profile of labor force statisticsduring this period comprised of 274,411 omani nationals of which only 24,007(9%) are omani women (table 1). it can be observed from table 1 that the omani labor force structureis heavily male oriented. this however, should not mislead the reader intointerpreting the gender inequity in the labor force for reasons of lackof education and or job opportunities for women. analysis of the omani laborcomposition attributes this gender discrepancy to several economic and socialfactors. some of the fundamental factors include traditional culture andattitudes coupled with values and stereotypes of the omani woman as a wifeand mother as their primary role in the omani society. other factors relateto the type and nature of occupations which the labor market provides, theunsuitability of some of these occupations because of social customs andtraditions, or the short supply of some jobs which women normally prefer.this situation is expected to change with projections of the increased roleof women in the labor market caused by the steady increase in the educationof girls and the expectation that thousands of girls will complete variousstages of education in the coming years (oman statistical year book, 1996). the profile of omani women labor composition and employment structureis shown in tables 2 and 3. this profile was prepared and presented by thegeneral directorate for women's and children's affairs, ministry of socialaffairs and labor at the fourth world conference on women in beijing, china.the statistics indicated that there were 17,946 women working in the governmentsector; 2,942 in the private sector and 3,119 who owned their own business.the profile of the government female employees indicates a heavy orientationtowards the service sector with the majority (59%) concentrated in the ministryof education followed by (22%) in the ministry of health and remaining (19%)distributed among other government sectors (table2). with regards to senior executive and decision making positions in thegovernment sector, the sultanate of oman under the wise leadership and directivesof his majesty sultan qaboos bin said, has set precedence in the arab gulfregion by appointing omani women in senior government positions. this undertakingwas epitomized by the recent appointment of four women in the 40 seat statecouncil (state council, 1997) (table 3). table 3 shows the distribution of omani women in the government sector'stop management and decision making positions. this includes 3 deputy ministers,4 members in the state council (majlis aldawlah), 2 members in the consultativecouncil (majlis alshu'ra), 4 in senior advisory positions, 13 in specialgrade, and 261 in grade one (equivalent to director & director general). tables 2 and 3 concludes that omani women are represented in all employmentsectors, be it government, private or their own business. furthermore, unlikeits neighboring arab gulf countries, the sultanate of oman has catapultedwomen to unprecedented heights by appointing them to senior political positionsin oman's council and ministries. this reflects his majesty's trust andconfidence in women's ability to manage and execute senior government positions.consequently, the representation of omani women (13%) in the ranks of seniorgovernment positions surpasses western standards. to begin with, it would be helpful to address a list of generic forcesas terms of reference in discussing the role of omani women in managementpositions in the sultanate of oman. such forces have been referred to quitefrequently by a number of writers on women's issues, for example (dines,1993; hammoud, 1994; vinnicombe & colwill, 1995). the driving forces for change in the sultanate of oman file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb1.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb2.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb3.html there are ten major driving forces acting for change in the sultanateof oman: religion (islam), national leadership, education, nationalization(omanization), economy, general directorate for women's and children's affairs(omani women's associations), women's leadership, favorable labor laws,family support and child care services, and changing women's attitudes.each of these driving forces will be discussed and analyzed for its impact.subsequently, strategies will be recommended to sustain and possibly strengthenthe impact. islam islam accords equal rights to men and women alike. in fact, islam isthe key to women's emancipation and liberation. islam does not forbid womenfrom seeking an education or from pursuing work. on the contrary, islamencourages women to be educated, work, own property and engage in business. it has elevated the value and worth of a woman to an unprecedented statusin society. a role model to muslim women is (sitina) khadija, the wife ofprophet mohammed (pbuh), who successfully fulfilled the roles of a businesswoman, a wife and a mother. the muslim nations have elected three women prime ministers, namely benazirbhutto of pakistan, khaleda zia (presently shaikha hasina) of bangladeshand tansu cillar of turkey. these individuals were elected by male and femalevoters on their abilities as capable human beings, not as women. these electionshave demonstrated the true essence of islam towards the role of women. ithas refuted the distorted myth construed by social taboo that a woman'splace is in the house, and that it is socially unacceptable and dishonorablefor a muslim woman to work. in her address to the fourth world conferenceon women, prime minister benazir bhutto pleaded that "muslim womenhave a special responsibility to help distinguish between islamic teachingsand social taboos spun by the traditions of a patriarchal society"(p.1). prophet mohammed (pbuh) encouraged muslims, men and women alike, to seekand pursue knowledge. the holy koranic verses and hadiths can be cited todemonstrate this fundamental right to knowledge. "say: my lord, increasemy knowledge" (holy koran xx: 1,14). "god will exalt to high ranksthose who believe among you, and those who have knowledge" (holy koranlv11: 11). "seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave" (hadith)."the search for knowledge is a duty of every muslim, male and female" (hadith). national leadership since the dawn of the national renaissance in 1970, his majesty sultanqaboos has repeatedly stated that oman's crucial resource is its nationalhuman resources. this appeal does not preclude omani women as proclaimedby his majesty in his speech: "the education of girls is never absentfrom our mind, since women form half of our society." in recognitionof this fact, a full fledged commitment by the government of oman has beenundertaken to educate, train and develop its national work force as a measuretowards nation building and economic development. his majesty's drive towards development of national human resources isnot restricted to men, but applies equally to women. this is attested byequal educational and job opportunities. omani women occupy different professionssuch as, medical doctors, lawyers, engineers, business leaders, and teachers.omani women are found in the army and police, private and public sectors,and most importantly, in senior government positions. to support the role of women, the omani government has set a number ofprograms such as a network of modern health services and social servicesthroughout the country aimed at improving the advancement of women. undoubtedly,omani women have been liberated and accorded their respect as equal partnersin omani society under the leadership of his majesty, sultan qaboos. nationalization (omanization) the government of oman is committed to nationalization (omanization),a program that has been initiated by his majesty to prepare omani nationalsto take an active role in the workforce and to replace expatriates whereverpossible. with a labor force of 690,000 comprising 55% expatriates and 45%omani nationals, the sultanate is highly dependent on expatriates. thispredicament has always been a concern of the government, and rigorous trainingand development programs have been enacted to promote nationalization inthe country. the importance of developing the country's national human resources hasbeen one of the main aims and policies throughout the sultanate's five yeardevelopment plans (birks & sinclair, 1980; development council, 1995).this aim is supported by several constructive policies and measures clearlydocumented in the development plan. for instance, the fourth five year developmentplan (1991-1995) has committed an initial allocation of omani rials 40 millionfor the implementation of the omanization policies, in addition to appropriatingthe sum of omani rials 10 million to the ministry of civil service towardsomanization programs in the civil service domain (development council, 1993). to this effect, legislation concerning employment contained in the omanilabor law states that preference should be given to omani nationals. thismandate is enforced by the government's ministry of social affairs and laborby specifying the ratio of omanization to be achieved by the end of 1996in the private sector taking into account the number of omani graduatesgraduating annually from the various educational institutes (table4). education education in oman is a fundamental right for each and every omani citizen.the importance of educating and developing the country's national humanresources has been one of the main aims and policies of his majesty's government.in accordance with his majesty's directives, a network of modern primaryand secondary education establishments for girls and boys has been extendedacross the whole country, catering to even remote villages. educationalprogress has been phenomenal. by the 1994-95 academic year, there were atotal of 947 schools at the three levels of general education (primary,preparatory, and secondary) with 474, 288 students, half of which are girls.at the post-secondary level there are equal facilities for both males andfemales to pursue higher education and vocational training. this is providedboth domestically and internationally. higher education facilities in omaninclude one coeducational university, sultan qaboos university of whichmore than 50% of the student body are female, twelve intermediate teacherstraining colleges, two specialized institutes of health and banking, sixtechnical colleges and six vocational institutes (sultanate of oman statisticalyear book, 1995). higher education in oman caters equally to men and womenwithout discrimination. this educational development is indeed staggeringand deserves a noteworthy recognition, given that prior to 1970 there wereonly three elementary schools for boys and no facilities for girls. general directorate for women's and children's affairs the development, advancement and participation of omani women as equalpartners in the country's socio-economic development has been supportedby many factors, one of which is the general directorate for women's andchildren's affairs, formally established in 1985. undoubtedly, a significantmove has been made by the government to enhance the status and role of womenin oman's society. the directorate, under the auspices of the ministry ofsocial affairs & labor, has setup a network of women's development centersthroughout the country, catering to rural and remote villages as well. file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb4.html the general aims and mission of the directorate is to set up programsfor the care of mothers and children, the eradication of illiteracy, education,the development of traditional and modern handicraft skills, the promotionof healthy and hygienic environment, the teaching of survival skills, andthe cultivation of women's minds and roles as citizens of a modern developingsociety. of significant importance and a positive precedent prior to the inceptionof the directorate, is the voluntary social work of the omani women's association,the first of its kind in the country founded in 1971. managed as a not forprofit organization, the omani women's association acts in collaborationwith the efforts and support of the government to carry out a great numberof activities aimed at improving and enhancing the role of omani women insociety. some of these activities include literacy classes, various handicraft skills, family care programs (day care centers, care for handicappedchildren, summer activities for girls, health awareness), social functions,organizing exhibitions to display the various work prepared by members ofthe association, intellectual and educational development through nationaland international women's conferences and meetings, and setting up workshopsto promote social and professional development. it is envisaged that thewomen's association could be instrumental in providing a network for omaniwomen in management, and to offer the much needed support for their developmentin the workplace. women's leadership pursuant to the directives of his majesty sultan qaboos bin said, nineomani women have been appointed to senior government decision making positions.this includes: four women in the forty seat state council (majlis aldawlah),two women in the eighty seat consultative council (majlis al'shura) andthree women for the positions of deputy minister. in addition, omani womenoccupy positions of senior advisors, director generals, and directors inthe various government organizations. it is noteworthy to mention that omaniwomen are represented in the faculty profile (academic staff) of sultanqaboos university as well as representation of medical staff (medical doctors)in hospitals all over the country. the consultative council was set up in november 1991 under the directiveof his majesty sultan qaboos bin said. it holds the position of a parliamentand is based on islamic religious law and procedures. since its inception,it has assumed a practical role in assisting the government in all importantmatters relating to social and economic issues. although under-represented,with only two women among the eighty elected members, this is considereda major development for women and a great opportunity for omani women tobe a part of the decision making body representing the people of oman. in december 1997, his majesty sultan qaboos bin said inaugurated thecouncil of oman comprising the newly formed state council along with thepre-established consultative council. the forty seat state council withfour women representatives is yet another progressive step in the consultative(shura) process, that works in conjunction with the majlis alshura for achievingthe nation's social and economic goals (majlis aldawlah, 1997). national economy since the accession of sultan qaboos to power in 1970, his majesty haspursued a vigorous policy for economic and social development which hasbeen facilitated by revenues generated from oil export (sultanate of oman,1975). oman's economy has been transformed from one that was based mainlyon subsistence agriculture and fisheries to one that is oil based with allthe modern facilities and infrastructure. subsequently, the omani societyemerged from one that was lagging behind socially, culturally and economically;to one that is educated, enlightened ,and endowed with modern social facilities.the availability of oil revenues has made it possible for oman to developits economy, educate its people and offer a relatively comfortable standardof living. this however, has not rendered a total reliance and dependenceon oil revenues, rather the government of oman has been pursuing economicdiversification and privatization programs as a measure of maintaining aviable and sustainable economy for its people. favorable labor laws omani women are accorded favorable labor laws which serve to protecttheir rights and ensure equality in the workplace. employment in oman doesnot discriminate on gender and exercises a sound policy of equal employmentopportunity and equal pay act. an entire section in the oman labor law isdedicated to the employment of women. for example, articles 80 to 82 inthe oman labor law clearly safe guard the rights and working conditionsof omani women (oman labor law). these articles spell out special advantagesand support granted to working women in areas such as maternity and widowhoodleave entitlements (each is six weeks leave), and a special provision thatallows working women to request leave of absence (up to four years) withoutpay to accompany a spouse who is posted abroad. working mothers who returnto work while continuing to breast feed are allowed to leave work an hourearly each day for six months to feed their babies. the working hours in the government (public) sector are conducive toworking women. government employees work from 7:30 a.m. 2:30 p.m. saturdaythrough wednesday, and thursday and friday are days off from work. suchworking hours allow parents, particularly working mothers, to spend timewith their children. family support and child-care services omani women enjoy a wide range of child-care support services. theserange from family support to professional services such as affordable housemaid/nannyand child-care centers (nurseries). the omani society is based on strongfamily ties. the centrality of the family accompanied by close relationshipsmakes it possible for parents or parents-in-law of working women to helpwith child care. working women can also avail themselves with a host of day-care centersand nurseries. these facilities are available through out the country witha higher concentration in the capital area to cater to the larger populationof working women. changing women's attitudes the aforementioned factors have contributed immensely in influencingwomen's attitudes towards their role in a modern developing arab society.in an interview with ten top women managers in bahrain and dubai about theirwork and its challenges, wilkinson (1996) affirms that "women who havesucceeded in business anywhere are controversial figures, and the arab gulfis no exception to this rule (p. 22). these women who have successfullymade it to top management positions either as entrepreneurs and owners oftheir business or managers of major companies have stated that the drivingforce behind their success includes: family support, educational opportunity,academic success, job opportunity, determination, inner drive for success,qualities and attributes conducive to successful management, ability tohandle multiple tasks, and selfconfidence. the challenges faced by thesewomen were overt discrimination at work, cultural taboos, negative attitudetoward working women, and lack of confidence and trust in women managers. in oman, the availability and accessibility to all levels of educationalong with equal opportunities in the job market has not only emancipatedthe omani woman but equally accorded her individual rights and respect asan equal partner in the omani society. this is substantiated by informalinterviews with some of the professional omani women working in governmentand private sectors. these women who have successfully progressed to managementpositions attribute their achievements to accessibility to equal educationaland job opportunities coupled with their perseverance in committing themselvesto their jobs and career progression. in this regard, one of the respondentssaid, "making it to the top is not easy. it takes a lot of hard work,patience, commitment, sacrifice and trade-off; however, the opportunityis there for those women who aspire to become managers and are willing andable to maintain multiple roles." the resisting forces for change in the sultanate of oman this case study does not imply a presence of a "utopia" forwomen in the omani society. arab nations in particular, provide differentforms of deterrents which prevent women's progress and development. someof these deterrents include a generic stereotype of arab women reflectedby muslim societies, particularly men, with regard to a woman's role asmother. negative male attitudes also prevail professional working women.there is an unspoken "silent" policy of discrimination againstwomen at work, the presence of a "glass ceiling" preventing women'saccessibility to top management positions, absence of a professional women'snetwork, lack of professional management training programs for women, andlack of affirmative action for promoting and ensuring women's presentationin the labor force as well as in management positions. traditional attitudes and stereotypes although gradually changing among the more educated modern arab/islamicsocieties, conservative arab societies hold traditional socio-cultural stereotypesand attitudes about the role of women. these conservative and traditionalattitudes highlighted in the literature of women in the muslim world bymagharabi, al-dabbagh & hayajneh, (1994); bech (1994); and al-hatimy(1983) portray women's primary role as a wife and mother. women are notnecessarily looked upon as having the abilities and potential for developingprofessional careers. they are portrayed as being inferior to men, naturallyemotional and unsuitable for leadership positions (hammoud,1993). such conservativeattitudes negate the concept of professional working women in traditionalarab societies, the idea of women working is degrading and a disgrace tosome arab men who consider that it is their responsibility to provide fortheir wives and family. therefore, traditional arab/islamic societies maintainthat first and foremost, women should prepare themselves for a domesticcareer of being a wife and mother. work should only be considered as a lastoption under extraneous conditions and circumstances. the above attitude tends to have a spillover effect at work, wherebymale employers regard women as being less capable then men and unfit forresponsible positions, claiming that their family obligations take priority;and hence, subjects them to lower productivity and absenteeism (beck, 1994;hammoud, 1993). this negative attitude and traditional stereotype towardswomen in arab/islamic societies has been, and still is, a major resistingforce to progress for professional working women, particularly for thosein management. portrayed self-image of women the inferior self-image of women becomes difficult to overcome consideringthat it is ingrained and conditioned in their upbringing and social development(hunsaker & hunsaker, 1991; hennig & jardim, 1977). in traditionalarab-islamic patriarchal societies, the feminine gender is subordinate,while the masculine is superior and dominant (magharabi et.al., 1994; bech,1994; hammoud, 1993; allaghi & almana, 1984; gerner, 1984; al-hatimy1983). generally, men are held responsible for providing the necessitiesof life, thus to work outside the home. on the other hand, women are expectedto serve their husbands and children at home, especially since women arenot required by the islamic law (shari'a) to financially support the family.in this subordinate position, women become victims of their own gender (mernissi,1985, rassam, 1984). hammoud's (1993) dynamic study on the role of womenin higher education management in the arab region confers that the mostfatal obstacle which prevents women from realizing their utmost professionalachievement is the self-image of a woman portrayed as inferior to men, incapableof being socially and financially independent, and hence depends on theman to care for and protect them. studies in the gulf countries by allaghi & almana (1984) and osseiran(1989) reflect women's inferior self-image. results indicate 50% of thefemale students surveyed believe that the husband should have the "finalword", that women should obey their husbands, and that a husband'seducation should be higher than that of his wife. with regard to work, itwas felt that women should only work in the traditional professions suchas teaching and nursing. there was a strong preference towards jobs thatdo not require women to mix with men. the khattab and el-daif (1984) studyin cairo revealed that 66% of female students stated that women with childrenshould stop work; 41% maintained that teaching and social work are the mostappropriate jobs for women; and the majority believed that women shouldonly work as an economic necessity. human resource policies and strategies the lack of proper human resource policies and strategies addressingwomen workers has proven to be a major obstacle to women's progress anddevelopment. for instance, in the usa, women's rights have not merely evolvedfrom vacuum; rather, advocates of women's rights in america applied thecivil rights law to fight sex discrimination at work and to demand equalrights. this struggle resulted in what is known as 'affirmative action'at the workplace (vinnicombe, 1995; hannig & jardim, 1977). only nine percent (9% ) of the omani workforce are women. the majorityof these workers are concentrated in the lower echelons of the organizationalhierarchy with a small percentage in decision making positions. in oman,the absence of human resource policies and strategies to promote the recruitmentand development of female managers at work is a deterrent to gender diversity.the work environment and culture are not conducive to promoting women inmanagement. this acts as a 'glass ceiling" preventing women's accessibilityto top management positions. for example, there are no programs to facilitatethe advancement of women as role models, absence of mentoring programs,lack of management training programs, and shunning of affirmative action. lack of professional a women's network the lack of a professional women's network in oman creates a major voidfor women aspiring to professional managerial positions. the absence ofa female mentor-protégé relationship makes it difficult forwomen to develop the requisite attitude, skills and abilities for leadershipand management positions. this results in a disparate situation and a stateof confusion; because after all, women are entering a male dominated domaincoupled with a traditional value system and a culture that tends to shunwomen from pursuing management careers. presentation and analysis of the data sixty questionnaires were dispatched to a random sample of omani womenin management positions in the sultanate of oman. the response rate wasextremely slow and tedious. except for a few, the majority of the respondentswere not cooperative. many repeated telephone calls along with remindersto solicit their feedback were necessary. this is quite understandable inthis part of the world whereby information and research are a foreign phenomenonand not the norm. people are not necessarily comfortable with the idea ofexpressing their opinion honestly and freely. an element of inhibition exists.therefore, of the 60 questionnaires distributed, 32 questionnaires werereturned for a response rate of 53%. personal characteristics of the respondents a summary of the personal and professional characteristics of the respondentsis displayed in tables 5 through 11. the distribution of respondents byage is shown in table 5. of the 32 respondents surveyed in this study, thehighest distribution of 15 (47%) were in the age bracket (35 44) followedby 11 (34%) in the (25 34) age bracket and 6 (19%) in the (45 54) agebracket (table 5). the distribution of respondents by marital status is shown in table 6.the majority of the respondents 27 (84%) were married leaving 5 (16%) single(table 6). table 7 depicts the distribution of respondents by number of children.the highest concentration was 18 (56%) having (1 3) children, followedby 8 (25%) with (4 6) children and 6 (19%) with no children (table 7). the distribution of respondents by academic qualification is shown intable 8. eighteen (56%) of the respondents received bachelors degrees, followedby 9 (28%) with masters and 5 (16%) with doctorates (table8). table 9 summarizes the distribution of respondents by place of post-secondaryeducation. fifteen (47%) of the respondents received their post-secondaryeducation in the arab world (east) and 17 (53%) in western universities(west) (table 9). the distribution of respondents by place of employment is shown in table10. the majority of 24 (75%) of the respondents worked for the government(public sector) and 8 (25%) worked for the private sector (table10). table 11summarizes the personal opinion of the respondents on whetheror not resisting forces outweigh driving forces to omani women in management.fifteen (47%) of the respondents felt that resisting forces outweighed drivingforces to omani women in management, while 17 (53%) felt that there wereno such imbalances (table 11). analysis of respondent's personal opinion on omani women in management as indicated in table 11, fifteen (47%) of the respondents felt thatresisting forces outweighed driving forces to omani women in managementpositions. it appears that these women chose to be critical and sorted outthis opportunity to voice their issues of concern on women in managementin the sultanate of oman. in their comments, these women acknowledge andrealize that the government of oman has made available to omani women anarray of social and economic factors (driving forces) to improve their statusin the omani society, but it was felt that women still remain victims ofdiscrimination (resisting forces) by the prevalent male dominated culture.for example, some of the respondents stated that "merely being a womanis a major obstacle towards professional development." other commentsinclude: "higher management is dominated by males who tend not to takewomen seriously professionally." "not having the social back-up nor the network needed to encourageand promote women in management positions." "feeling of inferiority complex towards men in the managementcadre." "traditional values and culture discourage women from pursuingprofessional and management file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb5.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb6.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb7.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb8.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb9.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/al-lamki/alltb10.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb11.html positions." "conflicting roles of being a domesticated wife and mother, andthat of professional woman." in general, women in this category indicated that the resisting forcesto women in management include: limited opportunities to higher education,discriminatory appointment and promotion practices, traditional attitudesof male bosses towards working women, male dominated domain, male resistanceto women in management, absence of policies and legislation to ensure participationof women in management positions, lack of professional networking, lackof female role models, lack of professional management development programs,lack of sufficient number of quality day-care centers, dual responsibilitiesof traditional and professional roles, balancing traditional and professionalroles, and family obligations as a wife and a mother for child-bearing andchild-rearing. coincidentally, considerable similarity existed between the respondentsopinion and the generic resisting forces for change in the sultanate ofoman. the most common issues of concern are related to cultural attitudes,traditional values and stereotypes of the status and role of women in arab-islamicsocieties. the respondents felt that the social and cultural perceptionof omani women's role was that of a domesticated wife and mother with primaryresponsibility towards families. on the other hand, the remaining seventeen (53%) of the respondents whohave ruled out that resisting forces outweigh supportive forces to omaniwomen in management positions supported their views with the following factors.women in this category felt that although resisting forces existed whichare primarily male dominated traditional social and culture attitudes andstereotypes of omani women, such forces were balanced out and in some casesoutweighed by supportive forces. these women have concentrated on the positivefactors attested by the following comments: "omani women get best education as men so that they can work alongside men and their place is not limited to their homes." "omani women have proven their abilities to succeed academicallyand professionally." "omani women are more devoted to their duties and carry out theirresponsibilities diligently and conscientiously." "the government has set up the directorate general of women andchild affairs which has made steady progress in uplifting women socially,economically and educationally." in general, women in this category indicated that the driving forcesbehind their success include: first and foremost family support from theirparents and spouse, determination and inner drive for success, opportunitiesfor access to all levels of education and academic achievement, self confidence,diligence and perseverance, job opportunities and potential for professionalgrowth and development. the entry of women into an all-male dominated profession may be one ofthe major transformations of the century. this recent and optimistic trendmust not hide the serious fact that in most countries there is only a smallpercentage of women in management and related decision making positions.this is made clear from the united nations official statistics and dataon women indicating that while conditions for women have improved in variousareas, particularly education, health and employment, women in general,and arab women in particular, continue to face many challenges. this predicament,considered to be a violation of women's rights, has always been a main concernof the u.n. it was in september 1995, that the fourth international women'sconference sponsored by the u.n. was held in beijing. this undoubtedly reflectsunited nation's relentless efforts in overcoming obstacles to women's rightsand equality. women in management the obstacles to women in management are still formidable and, some wouldargue, growing more intractable. significantly outnumbered by male colleagues,they are members of a minority group who have risen to positions of influencewithin systems which are best described as patriarchal (usis, 1996; dines,1993; vinnicombe, 1995; adachi, 1989; marshall, 1984). must society be constructed in such a way that intelligent, competentwomen are denied access to management careers, which are considered in manycountries to occupy the highest levels in the social and professional hierarchy?must society be ordered in such a way as to generate extreme discriminationbetween men and women in certain employment sectors, and thereby to depriveitself of human resources sorely needed to solve its problems? women in management at the turn of the century is an issue that demandsserious attention and a new urgency. in the west, particularly western europeand north america, although women constitute almost forty five percent ofthe workforce, they occupy only 10% of the management positions (world almanac,1997; usis,1996). this figure is much lower in the senior management positions(world almanac, 1997; vinnicombe & colwill, 1995). in the past, thedirectives for women in the workforce were centered on civil rights act,equal opportunity and affirmative action (dessler, 1994; sherman & bohlander,1992; marshall, 1984). whereas such mandates have put pressure on businessand government to employ more women in the workforce, especially in theservice industry, not much has been done to break the glass ceiling foraccess of women to management positions (usis, 1996; korabik & rosin,1995; vinnicombe, 1995; hennig & jardim, 1977). greenglass & marshall (1997) in their special issue of applied psychologyon women in management provide valuable insight into why and how women continueto be repressed and silenced in male dominated organizations, despite theirpossession of requisite qualifications for management positions. this specialissue concludes that, globally, women continue to face major hurdles intheir career progression to potential ranks of senior management, arenasof power and major decision making. the above mentioned trends and practices ought no longer prevail in thecurrent business world. today clear business cases can be cited for increasingwomen's participation in management. as centralized leadership gives wayto flattened hierarchy and employee empowerment, managers will be expectedto have good communication and interpersonal skills, the ability to listenand relate to others, and be capable of working in self-managing teams (cascio,1992; de cenzo & robins, 1996; hunsaker & hunsaker, 1991). all thesequalities tend to favor women managers. management experts on both sides of the atlantic have realized that themanagement style of women fulfills the demands of new organizations betterthan their male counterparts. this is supported by an international surveyconducted by the sydney-based consultancy firm ddi asia pacific, which specializesin executive testing and selection. the consultancy surveyed 1,332 employeesand managers working in companies based in australia, the united states,canada and new zealand. results from the survey indicated that women makebetter managers than men due to their feminine qualities and attributesthat are better suited for the modern decentralized organizational structureswith flattened hierarchies and empowered work teams (oman daily observer,1997). these documented observations are appropriately summarized by managementguru, charles handy: for these jobs the organization wants quality people, well educated, well skilled and adaptable. they also want people who can juggle several tasks and assignments at one time, who are more interested in making things happen than in what title or office they hold, more concerned with power and influence than status. they want people who value instinct and intuition as well as analysis and rationality, who can be tough but also tender, focused but friendly, people who can cope with these necessary contradictions. they want, therefore, as many women as they can get. (1994, p.14) purpose of the study this case study addresses the role of omani women in management positionsin the sultanate of oman. this is highlighted by determining the factorsthat encourage women to pursue careers in management, the obstacles hinderingwomen's progress and the actions needed to be taken to help omani womenachieve greater strides. rationale of the study concern about the role of omani women in national development is an issuethat demands serious consideration. omani women represent almost fifty percentof the omani population, furthermore, an increasing number of educated womenare seeking employment in the labor market. soliciting feedback from oman's most valuable human resources, in thislight, omani female managers will supply the government and the privatesector sound information for policy development and implementation regardingthe profile and status of omani women in the workforce. the findings of this study could have policy implications for variousinstitutions in the government such as: the general directorate for women'sand children's affairs at the ministry of social affairs and labor, omaniwomen's society, ministry of education and the ministry of civil service. methodology to generate the needed information for this study, the researcher employedthe following methods and procedures: 1. carried a literature review pertinent to the study. 2. designed a questionnaire. 3. pilot studied the questionnaire on a sample of omani female managersto determine whether the questionnaire elicits the needed information. 4. distributed the questionnaire to a sample of omani female managers. 5. collected and analyzed the questionnaire responses to determine thedriving and resisting forces to omani women in management positions. 6. interpreted the results and proposed possible practices and patternsfor promoting omani women in management in the sultanate of oman. instrumentation for the purpose of this study, a questionnaire composed of a sectionwith questions on biographical, academic and professional data followedby a section with three open ended questions has been designed. a coverletter explaining the purpose of the study along with a section ensuringconfidentiality and anonymity was attached to each questionnaire. the respondentswere asked to complete the questionnaire and to respond to the three openended questions regarding the driving and resisting forces to omani womenin management and to suggest on what can be done to promote women in managementin the sultanate of oman. (questionnaire) subjects subjects of this study constituted a sample of omani female managersworking in the public (government) and private sectors. these subjects representsenior level of omani women in the work force and occupy positions of directors,director generals, advisors to ministers, head of departments, assistantdeans and deans. data analysis procedures the researcher utilized descriptive and qualitative statistical methodsto describe, analyze and summarize the characteristics of the data collected.descriptive analysis was used to show the composition of the populationin terms of age, marital status, number of children, academic qualification,place of postsecondary education, and total years of work experience. qualitativeanalysis was used to summarize and present respondents' feedback on theopen ended questions regarding resisting and supporting factors to omaniwomen in management in the sultanate of oman. finally results from the dataanalysis and literature review was used to make recommendations on improvingthe status of women in management in the sultanate of oman. a perspective on oman's socio-economic and educational development hamoud (1993) writes, "the role of women in management cannot betreated in isolation from the general status of women in society, and fromthe general aims of economic, social and educational development " (p. 31). education is the key to women's equality. this is particularly significantgiven that one out of three women is uneducated (un, 1996). therefore, priorto considering the role of omani women in management, let us consider thefundamental question of opportunities for omani women in the formal education.access to education is one of the primary indicators of women's status ina given society, and therefore, is the root of women's emancipation. inthis regard, the sultanate of oman is no exception. until 1970, oman was a country that lagged behind socially and economically.the country lacked all sorts of public amenities and infrastructure suchas modern schools, hospitals, tarmac roads, electricity and water. twenty-eightyears later, oman has developed into a modern nation with both the infrastructureand the social organizations required to meet the needs of its people. theavailability of oil revenues have made such a significant and rapid transformationpossible. the vision and leadership for such a change was directed by oneperson his majesty sultan qaboos bin said al-said, ruler of the sultanateof oman since his accession in 1970. his majesty has overseen the transformationof the sultanate of oman from a single economy, based upon rudimentary agricultureand fishing, to a modern and dynamic nation with a diversified economy. a noteworthy catalyst for the above successful transformation is thedevelopment of education from primary to tertiary levels. prior to 1970,education in oman was confined to 3 primary schools with 900 boys, therewas no provision for the education of girls. following the accession ofhis majesty sultan qaboos in 1970, education has been made available toall omani nationals (boys and girls on an equal ratio) under a program ofcontinuous and rapid expansion, the most recent stage of which was the openingof the co-educational sultan qaboos university in 1986. the availabilityof education (from primary to tertiary) for women has undoubtedly playeda crucial role towards the emancipation of omani women. this achievementhas attracted the praise of a number of international magazines on women'sissues, one of which is the indonesian women's magazine (observer, 1996). women in management in the sultanate of oman the implementation of socio-economic and educational plans during therenaissance period (1970-1998) has transformed the omani society and economy.undoubtedly, the development of human resources has been accorded particularimportance in this transformation with the inclusion of women on an equalbasis. this however, has not resulted in equal participation of women inthe workforce, despite an equal percentage of women in oman's population.the results of the official population census taken in 1993 showed the omanipopulation at 1,480,531. the statistics revealed that there were 755,071male omanies and 725,460 female omanies, giving almost a 50:50 ratio ofmen to women (omani census, 1993). the age distribution of the omani populationis consistent with that of developing nations with almost 54% of the totalomani population under the age of 15. the profile of labor force statisticsduring this period comprised of 274,411 omani nationals of which only 24,007(9%) are omani women (table 1). it can be observed from table 1 that the omani labor force structureis heavily male oriented. this however, should not mislead the reader intointerpreting the gender inequity in the labor force for reasons of lackof education and or job opportunities for women. analysis of the omani laborcomposition attributes this gender discrepancy to several economic and socialfactors. some of the fundamental factors include traditional culture andattitudes coupled with values and stereotypes of the omani woman as a wifeand mother as their primary role in the omani society. other factors relateto the type and nature of occupations which the labor market provides, theunsuitability of some of these occupations because of social customs andtraditions, or the short supply of some jobs which women normally prefer.this situation is expected to change with projections of the increased roleof women in the labor market caused by the steady increase in the educationof girls and the expectation that thousands of girls will complete variousstages of education in the coming years (oman statistical year book, 1996). the profile of omani women labor composition and employment structureis shown in tables 2 and 3. this profile was prepared and presented by thegeneral directorate for women's and children's affairs, ministry of socialaffairs and labor at the fourth world conference on women in beijing, china.the statistics indicated that there were 17,946 women working in the governmentsector; 2,942 in the private sector and 3,119 who owned their own business.the profile of the government female employees indicates a heavy orientationtowards the service sector with the majority (59%) concentrated in the ministryof education followed by (22%) in the ministry of health and remaining (19%)distributed among other government sectors (table 2). with regards to senior executive and decision making positions in thegovernment sector, the sultanate of oman under the wise leadership and directivesof his majesty sultan qaboos bin said, has set precedence in the arab gulfregion by appointing omani women in senior government positions. this undertakingwas epitomized by the recent appointment of four women in the 40 seat statecouncil (state council, 1997) (table 3). table 3 shows the distribution of omani women in the government sector'stop management and decision making positions. this includes 3 deputy ministers,4 members in the state council (majlis aldawlah), 2 members in the consultativecouncil (majlis alshu'ra), 4 in senior advisory positions, 13 in specialgrade, and 261 in grade one (equivalent to director & director general). tables 2 and 3 concludes that omani women are represented in all employmentsectors, be it government, private or their own business. furthermore, unlikeits neighboring arab gulf countries, the sultanate of oman has catapultedwomen to unprecedented heights by appointing them to senior political positionsin oman's council and ministries. this reflects his majesty's trust andconfidence in women's ability to manage and execute senior government positions.consequently, the representation of omani women (13%) in the ranks of seniorgovernment positions surpasses western standards. file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb1.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb2.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/al-lamki/alltb3.html a generic framework for the driving and resisting forces for change to begin with, it would be helpful to address a list of generic forcesas terms of reference in discussing the role of omani women in managementpositions in the sultanate of oman. such forces have been referred to quitefrequently by a number of writers on women's issues, for example (dines,1993; hammoud, 1994; vinnicombe & colwill, 1995). the driving forces for change in the sultanate of oman there are ten major driving forces acting for change in the sultanateof oman: religion (islam), national leadership, education, nationalization(omanization), economy, general directorate for women's and children's affairs(omani women's associations), women's leadership, favorable labor laws,family support and child care services, and changing women's attitudes.each of these driving forces will be discussed and analyzed for its impact.subsequently, strategies will be recommended to sustain and possibly strengthenthe impact. islam islam accords equal rights to men and women alike. in fact, islam isthe key to women's emancipation and liberation. islam does not forbid womenfrom seeking an education or from pursuing work. on the contrary, islamencourages women to be educated, work, own property and engage in business. it has elevated the value and worth of a woman to an unprecedented statusin society. a role model to muslim women is (sitina) khadija, the wife ofprophet mohammed (pbuh), who successfully fulfilled the roles of a businesswoman, a wife and a mother. the muslim nations have elected three women prime ministers, namely benazirbhutto of pakistan, khaleda zia (presently shaikha hasina) of bangladeshand tansu cillar of turkey. these individuals were elected by male and femalevoters on their abilities as capable human beings, not as women. these electionshave demonstrated the true essence of islam towards the role of women. ithas refuted the distorted myth construed by social taboo that a woman'splace is in the house, and that it is socially unacceptable and dishonorablefor a muslim woman to work. in her address to the fourth world conferenceon women, prime minister benazir bhutto pleaded that "muslim womenhave a special responsibility to help distinguish between islamic teachingsand social taboos spun by the traditions of a patriarchal society"(p.1). prophet mohammed (pbuh) encouraged muslims, men and women alike, to seekand pursue knowledge. the holy koranic verses and hadiths can be cited todemonstrate this fundamental right to knowledge. "say: my lord, increasemy knowledge" (holy koran xx: 1,14). "god will exalt to high ranksthose who believe among you, and those who have knowledge" (holy koranlv11: 11). "seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave" (hadith)."the search for knowledge is a duty of every muslim, male and female" (hadith). national leadership since the dawn of the national renaissance in 1970, his majesty sultanqaboos has repeatedly stated that oman's crucial resource is its nationalhuman resources. this appeal does not preclude omani women as proclaimedby his majesty in his speech: "the education of girls is never absentfrom our mind, since women form half of our society." in recognitionof this fact, a full fledged commitment by the government of oman has beenundertaken to educate, train and develop its national work force as a measuretowards nation building and economic development. his majesty's drive towards development of national human resources isnot restricted to men, but applies equally to women. this is attested byequal educational and job opportunities. omani women occupy different professionssuch as, medical doctors, lawyers, engineers, business leaders, and teachers.omani women are found in the army and police, private and public sectors,and most importantly, in senior government positions. to support the role of women, the omani government has set a number ofprograms such as a network of modern health services and social servicesthroughout the country aimed at improving the advancement of women. undoubtedly,omani women have been liberated and accorded their respect as equal partnersin omani society under the leadership of his majesty, sultan qaboos. nationalization (omanization) the government of oman is committed to nationalization (omanization),a program that has been initiated by his majesty to prepare omani nationalsto take an active role in the workforce and to replace expatriates whereverpossible. with a labor force of 690,000 comprising 55% expatriates and 45%omani nationals, the sultanate is highly dependent on expatriates. thispredicament has always been a concern of the government, and rigorous trainingand development programs have been enacted to promote nationalization inthe country. the importance of developing the country's national human resources hasbeen one of the main aims and policies throughout the sultanate's five yeardevelopment plans (birks & sinclair, 1980; development council, 1995).this aim is supported by several constructive policies and measures clearlydocumented in the development plan. for instance, the fourth five year developmentplan (1991-1995) has committed an initial allocation of omani rials 40 millionfor the implementation of the omanization policies, in addition to appropriatingthe sum of omani rials 10 million to the ministry of civil service towardsomanization programs in the civil service domain (development council, 1993). to this effect, legislation concerning employment contained in the omanilabor law states that preference should be given to omani nationals. thismandate is enforced by the government's ministry of social affairs and laborby specifying the ratio of omanization to be achieved by the end of 1996in the private sector taking into account the number of omani graduatesgraduating annually from the various educational institutes (table 4). education education in oman is a fundamental right for each and every omani citizen.the importance of educating and developing the country's national humanresources has been one of the main aims and policies of his majesty's government.in accordance with his majesty's directives, a network of modern primaryand secondary education establishments for girls and boys has been extendedacross the whole country, catering to even remote villages. educationalprogress has been phenomenal. by the 1994-95 academic year, there were atotal of 947 schools at the three levels of general education (primary,preparatory, and secondary) with 474, 288 students, half of which are girls.at the post-secondary level there are equal facilities for both males andfemales to pursue higher education and vocational training. this is providedboth domestically and internationally. higher education facilities in omaninclude one coeducational university, sultan qaboos university of whichmore than 50% of the student body are female, twelve intermediate teacherstraining colleges, two specialized institutes of health and banking, sixtechnical colleges and six vocational institutes (sultanate of oman statisticalyear book, 1995). higher education in oman caters equally to men and womenwithout discrimination. this educational development is indeed staggeringand deserves a noteworthy recognition, given that prior to 1970 there wereonly three elementary schools for boys and no facilities for girls. general directorate for women's and children's affairs the development, advancement and participation of omani women as equalpartners in the country's socio-economic development has been supportedby many factors, one of which is the general directorate for women's andchildren's affairs, formally established in 1985. undoubtedly, a significantmove has been made by the government to enhance the status and role of womenin oman's society. the directorate, under the auspices of the ministry ofsocial affairs & labor, has setup a network of women's development centersthroughout the country, catering to rural and remote villages as well. the general aims and mission of the directorate is to set up programsfor the care of mothers and children, the eradication of illiteracy, education,the development of traditional and modern handicraft skills, the promotionof healthy and hygienic environment, the teaching of survival skills, andthe cultivation of women's minds and roles as citizens of a modern developingsociety. of significant importance and a positive precedent prior to the inceptionof the directorate, is the voluntary social work of the omani women's association,the first of its kind in the country founded in 1971. managed as a not forprofit organization, the omani women's association acts in collaborationwith the efforts and support of the government to carry out a great numberof activities aimed at improving and enhancing the role of omani women insociety. some of these activities include literacy classes, various handicraft skills, family care programs (day care centers, care for handicappedchildren, summer activities for girls, health awareness), social functions,organizing exhibitions to display the various work prepared by members ofthe association, intellectual and educational development through nationaland international women's conferences and meetings, and setting up workshopsto promote social and professional development. it is envisaged that thewomen's association could be instrumental in providing a network for omaniwomen in management, and to offer the much needed support for their developmentin the workplace. women's leadership pursuant to the directives of his majesty sultan qaboos bin said, nine omani women have been appointed to senior government decision making positions.this includes: four women in the forty seat state council (majlis aldawlah),two women in the eighty seat consultative council (majlis al'shura) andthree women for the positions of deputy minister. in addition, omani womenoccupy positions of senior advisors, director generals, and directors inthe various government organizations. it is noteworthy to mention that omaniwomen are represented in the faculty profile (academic staff) of sultanqaboos university as well as representation of medical staff (medical doctors)in hospitals all over the country. the consultative council was set up in november 1991 under the directiveof his majesty sultan qaboos bin said. it holds the position of a parliamentand is based on islamic religious law and procedures. since its inception,it has assumed a practical role in assisting the government in all importantmatters relating to social and economic issues. although under-represented,with only two women among the eighty elected members, this is considereda major development for women and a great opportunity for omani women tobe a part of the decision making body representing the people of oman. in december 1997, his majesty sultan qaboos bin said inaugurated thecouncil of oman comprising the newly formed state council along with thepre-established consultative council. the forty seat state council withfour women representatives is yet another progressive step in the consultative(shura) process, that works in conjunction with the majlis alshura for achievingthe nation's social and economic goals (majlis aldawlah, 1997). national economy since the accession of sultan qaboos to power in 1970, his majesty haspursued a vigorous policy for economic and social development which hasbeen facilitated by revenues generated from oil export (sultanate of oman,1975). oman's economy has been transformed from one that was based mainlyon subsistence agriculture and fisheries to one that is oil based with allthe modern facilities and infrastructure. subsequently, the omani societyemerged from one that was lagging behind socially, culturally and economically;to one that is educated, enlightened ,and endowed with modern social facilities.the availability of oil revenues has made it possible for oman to developits economy, educate its people and offer a relatively comfortable standardof living. this however, has not rendered a total reliance and dependenceon oil revenues, rather the government of oman has been pursuing economicdiversification and privatization programs as a measure of maintaining aviable and sustainable economy for its people. favorable labor laws omani women are accorded favorable labor laws which serve to protecttheir rights and ensure equality in the workplace. employment in oman doesnot discriminate on gender and exercises a sound policy of equal employmentopportunity and equal pay act. an entire section in the oman labor law isdedicated to the employment of women. for example, articles 80 to 82 inthe oman labor law clearly safe guard the rights and working conditionsof omani women (oman labor law). these articles spell out special advantagesand support granted to working women in areas such as maternity and widowhoodleave entitlements (each is six weeks leave), and a special provision thatallows working women to request leave of absence (up to four years) withoutpay to accompany a spouse who is posted abroad. working mothers who returnto work while continuing to breast feed are allowed to leave work an hourearly each day for six months to feed their babies. the working hours in the government (public) sector are conducive toworking women. government employees work from 7:30 a.m. 2:30 p.m. saturdaythrough wednesday, and thursday and friday are days off from work. suchworking hours allow parents, particularly working mothers, to spend timewith their children. family support and child-care services omani women enjoy a wide range of child-care support services. theserange from family support to professional services such as affordable housemaid/nannyand child-care centers (nurseries). the omani society is based on strongfamily ties. the centrality of the family accompanied by close relationshipsmakes it possible for parents or parents-in-law of working women to helpwith child care. working women can also avail themselves with a host of day-care centersand nurseries. these facilities are available through out the country witha higher concentration in the capital area to cater to the larger populationof working women. changing women's attitudes the aforementioned factors have contributed immensely in influencingwomen's attitudes towards their role in a modern developing arab society. in an interview with ten top women managers in bahrain and dubai about theirwork and its challenges, wilkinson (1996) affirms that "women who havesucceeded in business anywhere are controversial figures, and the arab gulfis no exception to this rule (p. 22). these women who have successfullymade it to top management positions either as entrepreneurs and owners oftheir business or managers of major companies have stated that the drivingforce behind their success includes: family support, educational opportunity,academic success, job opportunity, determination, inner drive for success,qualities and attributes conducive to successful management, ability tohandle multiple tasks, and selfconfidence. the challenges faced by thesewomen were overt discrimination at work, cultural taboos, negative attitudetoward working women, and lack of confidence and trust in women managers. in oman, the availability and accessibility to all levels of educationalong with equal opportunities in the job market has not only emancipatedthe omani woman but equally accorded her individual rights and respect asan equal partner in the omani society. this is substantiated by informalinterviews with some of the professional omani women working in governmentand private sectors. these women who have successfully progressed to managementpositions attribute their achievements to accessibility to equal educationaland job opportunities coupled with their perseverance in committing themselvesto their jobs and career progression. in this regard, one of the respondentssaid, "making it to the top is not easy. it takes a lot of hard work,patience, commitment, sacrifice and trade-off; however, the opportunityis there for those women who aspire to become managers and are willing andable to maintain multiple roles." the resisting forces for change in the sultanate of oman this case study does not imply a presence of a "utopia" forwomen in the omani society. arab nations in particular, provide differentforms of deterrents which prevent women's progress and development. someof these deterrents include a generic stereotype of arab women reflectedby muslim societies, particularly men, with regard to a woman's role asmother. negative male attitudes also prevail professional working women.there is an unspoken "silent" policy of discrimination againstwomen at work, the presence of a "glass ceiling" preventing women'saccessibility to top management positions, absence of a professional women'snetwork, lack of professional management training programs for women, andlack of affirmative action for promoting and ensuring women's presentationin the labor force as well as in management positions. traditional attitudes and stereotypes although gradually changing among the more educated modern arab/islamicsocieties, conservative arab societies hold traditional socio-cultural stereotypesand attitudes about the role of women. these conservative and traditionalattitudes highlighted in the literature of women in the muslim world bymagharabi, al-dabbagh & hayajneh, (1994); bech (1994); and al-hatimy(1983) portray women's primary role as a wife and mother. women are notnecessarily looked upon as having the abilities and potential for developingprofessional careers. they are portrayed as being inferior to men, naturallyemotional and unsuitable for leadership positions (hammoud,1993). such conservativeattitudes negate the concept of professional working women in traditionalarab societies, the idea of women working is degrading and a disgrace tosome arab men who consider that it is their responsibility to provide fortheir wives and family. therefore, traditional arab/islamic societies maintainthat first and foremost, women should prepare themselves for a domesticcareer of being a wife and mother. work should only be considered as a lastoption under extraneous conditions and circumstances. the above attitude tends to have a spillover effect at work, wherebymale employers regard women as being less capable then men and unfit forresponsible positions, claiming that their family obligations take priority;and hence, subjects them to lower productivity and absenteeism (beck, 1994;hammoud, 1993). this negative attitude and traditional stereotype towardswomen in arab/islamic societies has been, and still is, a major resistingforce to progress for professional working women, particularly for thosein management. portrayed self-image of women the inferior self-image of women becomes difficult to overcome consideringthat it is ingrained and conditioned in their upbringing and social development(hunsaker & hunsaker, 1991; hennig & jardim, 1977). in traditionalarab-islamic patriarchal societies, the feminine gender is subordinate,while the masculine is superior and dominant (magharabi et.al., 1994; bech,1994; hammoud, 1993; allaghi & almana, 1984; gerner, 1984; al-hatimy1983). generally, men are held responsible for providing the necessitiesof life, thus to work outside the home. on the other hand, women are expectedto serve their husbands and children at home, especially since women arenot required by the islamic law (shari'a) to financially support the family.in this subordinate position, women become victims of their own gender (mernissi,1985, rassam, 1984). hammoud's (1993) dynamic study on the role of womenin higher education management in the arab region confers that the mostfatal obstacle which prevents women from realizing their utmost professionalachievement is the self-image of a woman portrayed as inferior to men, incapableof being socially and financially independent, and hence depends on theman to care for and protect them. studies in the gulf countries by allaghi & almana (1984) and osseiran(1989) reflect women's inferior self-image. results indicate 50% of thefemale students surveyed believe that the husband should have the "finalword", that women should obey their husbands, and that a husband'seducation should be higher than that of his wife. with regard to work, itwas felt that women should only work in the traditional professions suchas teaching and nursing. there was a strong preference towards jobs thatdo not require women to mix with men. the khattab and el-daif (1984) studyin cairo revealed that 66% of female students stated that women with childrenshould stop work; 41% maintained that teaching and social work are the mostappropriate jobs for women; and the majority believed that women shouldonly work as an economic necessity. human resource policies and strategies the lack of proper human resource policies and strategies addressingwomen workers has proven to be a major obstacle to women's progress anddevelopment. for instance, in the usa, women's rights have not merely evolvedfrom vacuum; rather, advocates of women's rights in america applied thecivil rights law to fight sex discrimination at work and to demand equalrights. this struggle resulted in what is known as 'affirmative action'at the workplace (vinnicombe, 1995; hannig & jardim, 1977). only nine percent (9% ) of the omani workforce are women. the majorityof these workers are concentrated in the lower echelons of the organizationalhierarchy with a small percentage in decision making positions. in oman,the absence of human resource policies and strategies to promote the recruitmentand development of female managers at work is a deterrent to gender diversity.the work environment and culture are not conducive to promoting women inmanagement. this acts as a 'glass ceiling" preventing women's accessibilityto top management positions. for example, there are no programs to facilitatethe advancement of women as role models, absence of mentoring programs,lack of management training programs, and shunning of affirmative action. lack of professional a women's network the lack of a professional women's network in oman creates a major voidfor women aspiring to professional managerial positions. the absence ofa female mentor-protégé relationship makes it difficult forwomen to develop the requisite attitude, skills and abilities for leadershipand management positions. this results in a disparate situation and a stateof confusion; because after all, women are entering a male dominated domaincoupled with a traditional value system and a culture that tends to shunwomen from pursuing management careers. presentation and analysis of the data sixty questionnaires were dispatched to a random sample of omani womenin management positions in the sultanate of oman. the response rate wasextremely slow and tedious. except for a few, the majority of the respondentswere not cooperative. many repeated telephone calls along with remindersto solicit their feedback were necessary. this is quite understandable inthis part of the world whereby information and research are a foreign phenomenonand not the norm. people are not necessarily comfortable with the idea ofexpressing their opinion honestly and freely. an element of inhibition exists.therefore, of the 60 questionnaires distributed, 32 questionnaires werereturned for a response rate of 53%. personal characteristics of the respondents a summary of the personal and professional characteristics of the respondentsis displayed in tables 5 through 11. the distribution of respondents byage is shown in table 5. of the 32 respondents surveyed in this study, thehighest distribution of 15 (47%) were in the age bracket (35 44) followedby 11 (34%) in the (25 34) age bracket and 6 (19%) in the (45 54) agebracket (table 5). the distribution of respondents by marital status is shown in table 6.the majority of the respondents 27 (84%) were married leaving 5 (16%) single(table 6). table 7 depicts the distribution of respondents by number of children.the highest concentration was 18 (56%) having (1 3) children, followedby 8 (25%) with (4 6) children and 6 (19%) with no children (table 7). the distribution of respondents by academic qualification is shown intable 8. eighteen (56%) of the respondents received bachelors degrees, followedby 9 (28%) with masters and 5 (16%) with doctorates (table 8). table 9 summarizes the distribution of respondents by place of post-secondaryeducation. fifteen (47%) of the respondents received their post-secondaryeducation in the arab world (east) and 17 (53%) in western universities(west) (table 9). the distribution of respondents by place of employment is shown in table10. the majority of 24 (75%) of the respondents worked for the government(public sector) and 8 (25%) worked for the private sector (table 10). table 11summarizes the personal opinion of the respondents on whetheror not resisting forces outweigh driving forces to omani women in management.fifteen (47%) of the respondents felt that resisting forces outweighed drivingforces to omani women in management, while 17 (53%) felt that there wereno such imbalances (table 11). analysis of respondent's personal opinion on omani women in management as indicated in table 11, fifteen (47%) of the respondents felt thatresisting forces outweighed driving forces to omani women in managementpositions. it appears that these women chose to be critical and sorted outthis opportunity to voice their issues of concern on women in managementin the sultanate of oman. in their comments, these women acknowledge andrealize that the government of oman has made available to omani women anarray of social and economic factors (driving forces) to improve their statusin the omani society, but it was felt that women still remain victims ofdiscrimination (resisting forces) by the prevalent male dominated culture.for example, some of the respondents stated that "merely being a womanis a major obstacle towards professional development." other commentsinclude: "higher management is dominated by males who tend not to takewomen seriously professionally." "not having the social back-up nor the network needed to encourageand promote women in management positions." "feeling of inferiority complex towards men in the managementcadre." "traditional values and culture discourage women from pursuingprofessional and management positions." "conflicting roles of being a domesticated wife and mother, andthat of professional woman." in general, women in this category indicated that the resisting forcesto women in management include: limited opportunities to higher education,discriminatory appointment and promotion practices, traditional attitudesof male bosses towards working women, male dominated domain, male resistanceto women in management, absence of policies and legislation to ensure participationof women in management positions, lack of professional networking, lackof female role models, lack of professional management development programs,lack of sufficient number of quality day-care centers, dual responsibilitiesof traditional and professional roles, balancing traditional and professionalroles, and family obligations as a wife and a mother for child-bearing andchild-rearing. coincidentally, considerable similarity existed between the respondentsopinion and the generic resisting forces for change in the sultanate ofoman. the most common issues of concern are related to cultural attitudes,traditional values and stereotypes of the status and role of women in arab-islamicsocieties. the respondents felt that the social and cultural perceptionof omani women's role was that of a domesticated wife and mother with primaryresponsibility towards families. on the other hand, the remaining seventeen (53%) of the respondents whohave ruled out that resisting forces outweigh supportive forces to omaniwomen in management positions supported their views with the following factors.women in this category felt that although resisting forces existed whichare primarily male dominated traditional social and culture attitudes andstereotypes of omani women, such forces were balanced out and in some casesoutweighed by supportive forces. these women have concentrated on the positivefactors attested by the following comments: "omani women get best education as men so that they can work alongside men and their place is not limited to their homes." "omani women have proven their abilities to succeed academicallyand professionally." "omani women are more devoted to their duties and carry out theirresponsibilities diligently and conscientiously." "the government has set up the directorate general of women andchild affairs which has made steady progress in uplifting women socially,economically and educationally." in general, women in this category indicated that the driving forcesbehind their success include: first and foremost family support from theirparents and spouse, determination and inner drive for success, opportunitiesfor access to all levels of education and academic achievement, self confidence,diligence and perseverance, job opportunities and potential for professionalgrowth and development. discussions the following have been extrapolated from this study. first, omani women'slabor force participation rates are very low, representing only nine percent(9%) of the omani labor force and only four percent (4%) of the total laborforce. analysis of the gender inequity in the labor force attributes thisdiscrepancy to a number of social and cultural factors. some of the primarydeterrents include traditional values and attitudes towards women. theseattitudes portray women's primary role as a wife and mother. other factorsrelate to the type and nature of occupations which the labor market provides,the unsuitability of some of these occupations because of social customsand traditions, or the short supply of some jobs which women normally prefer(oman statistical year book, 1996). this situation is expected to changewith projections of the increased role of women in the labor market causedby change of attitudes towards working women as well as accessibility tojobs in the various sectors of the market. analysis of respondents' personal opinions on omani women in managementin the sultanate of oman indicated the presence of an array of resistingforces (obstacles) to management positions. all respondents confirmed thatresisting forces to management positions exist for omani women. forty sevenpercent (47%) of the respondents confirmed that resisting forces outweighdriving forces, whereas the remaining (53%) indicated that while resistingforces exist, it was felt that the driving forces balanced out, or at timesoutweighed, the resisting forces to omani women in management positions. in summary, some of the primary resisting forces to omani women in managementare related to cultural and traditional values coupled with traditionalstereotypes on the status and role of women in arab-islamic societies. respondentsindicated that the cultural perceptions of women's roles were those of adomesticated wife and mother with primary responsibility towards family.they felt that this traditional attitude towards women tends to have a spillovereffect at work, whereby predominantly male employers regard women as beingless capable than men and unfit for responsible positions, particularlythose in management. other resisting forces (obstacles) to women in managementinclude limited opportunities for higher education, discriminatory appointmentand promotion practices, the unspoken "silent" policy of discriminationagainst women at work, traditional attitudes of male bosses, male dominateddomains, the absence of policies and legislation to ensure participationof women in management, lack of professional management training programsfor women, lack of professional networking, lack of female role models,and the balancing of traditional and professional roles. on the other hand, respondents who claimed that the driving forces balanceout resisting forces to omani women in management supported their positionwith the following comments: "support and encouragement from national leadership." "equal access to education and employment opportunities." "family support and child-care services." "self-confidence." "determination and inner drive for success." recommendations the findings of this study clearly indicate that while in principle,women in oman have been accorded equal educational and employment rights;in practice, discrimination against women exists in the workplace. thissituation is made more difficult for women who aspire to be in managementpositions. several of the respondents have articulated that "merelybeing a woman" is a major obstacle to professional development. themajority of the respondents, confirmed that much more needs to be done toovercome barriers to the full participation of omani women in managementpositions. in view of the literature review and this case study analysis on omaniwomen in management positions, the following strategies have been recommendedto promote women into management positions. access to general and higher education first and foremost, it is recommended that the government continue itsefforts to maintain and sustain equal access to educational opportunitiesat general and post-secondary levels. since education is the major drivingforce for the improvement of women's status, and since links between employmentand professional qualifications are decisive, it is urged that educationalopportunities to omani women should never be compromised, but rather beimproved. meanwhile, special measures should be undertaken to encourageand promote women's access to scientific, managerial, technical, and vocationaldisciplines in order to develop the requisite skills and extend their opportunitiesfor employment in non-traditional occupations. women represent fifty percent (50%) of the omani population, therefore,the government is urged to tap this vital resource in order to capitalizethe full potential of contribution towards national economic developmentand prosperity. positively influence traditional attitudes and stereotypes attitudinal change needs action on the fore-front. traditional attitudesand stereotypes received highest attention by the respondents, and was unanimouslyconsidered a primary resisting force to women in management positions. thereis a dire need to positively influence male traditional attitudes towardswomen in modern developing arab-islamic societies. consequently, there alsois a need to significantly change the attitudes of senior male managerswho are apt not to take women manager careers seriously. hence, a professionalcareer should be viewed according to individual merit, i.e. aptitudes andqualifications, and not on the basis of gender. women have already proventheir success in many professional endeavors. special efforts are neededto modify these attitudes through social awareness programs promoting awoman's legal right to study, work, and participate in all aspects of developmentat all levels. human resource policies and strategies given that only nine percent (9%) of the omani labor force are women,there is a need to promote and encourage omani women to join the work forcethrough a mechanism of affirmative action and equal job opportunities. itis necessary to institute awareness programs of employment opportunitiesand benefits to omani women in all the different regions of oman. this canbe achieved through the utilization of the local media as a means for promotingthe role of working women in the workplace. at the international level,utilization of international media such as "arabsat" can be usedto transmit programs that promote the value and roles of arab women in achanging society and their integration in the development process. othermeasures include enacting policies and legislation to ensure the representationand participation of omani women in management positions, as well as settingup quota systems to ensure the employment and representation of women inthe workforce. accordingly, it is recommended to establish human resourcepolicies and strategies to execute and orchestrate the recruitment, training& development, and promotion of omani women to management positions. professional women's network and leadership the general directorate for women's and children's affairs along withthe omani women's society should play a proactive role in encouraging andpromoting professional omani women through awareness of female role modelsin leadership positions, organizing professional management & leadershiptraining programs, and establishing a network for omani women in management(for example, omani women management society). subsequently, it is importantthat these professional women's associations work on overcoming the inferiorself-image of women in traditional maledominated patriarchal societies.there is a need to instill a feeling of security, self-esteem and credibilityamongst women. omani women should be made to feel confident in themselvesand to be able to persevere against all odds. they should be accorded self-respectand trust in their ability and capacity to fulfill domestic roles as wellas professional roles. there is a need to highlight and discuss the inherentfeminine leadership qualities of women and their favored application intoday's decentralized and flattened hierarchical organization structures. support facilities and infrastructure it is difficult to dispute the hardship and challenge of managing multipleroles. professional women are faced with the challenge of maintaining houseworkand family and a professional career. in response to such challenges, specialattention should be directed to the provision of a social infrastructurethat will enable women to work, such as professional day care centers onsite, kindergartens, and adequate maternity leave. the availability of suchsupport services is a tangible expression of organizational recognitionof the needs of professional women. consequently, it undoubtedly can makea great difference to the capacity of women to manage multiple roles. references abdel kader, s. 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(1993). women's issues in modern islamic thought.in j. tucker (ed.), arab women: old boundaries, new frontiers (pp. 3-25).the center for contemporary arab studies: georgetown university, washington,dc sultanate of oman (1995). country paper presented at the fourth worldconference on women. beijing: china. state council (1997). sultanate of oman. the observer (1996). china admits that much remains to be done for women.april, 1996. the observer (1996). better deal for women in oman. april, 1996. united states information service (1996). "the role of women inpolitics." worldnet dialogue, usis, sultanate of oman. united states information service (1996). "the role of women inbusiness." worldnet dialogue, usis, sultanate of oman. vinnicombe, s., & colwill, n. l. (1995). the essence of women inmanagement. uk: prentice hall international. wilkinson, g. (1996). women in business. gulf business, dubai,uae. dr. salma m. al-lamki is a professor in the collegeof commerce and economics at the sultan qaboos university in the sultanateof oman. cce3370@squ.edu.om awl journal home page awl journal volume 2, number 2, spring 1999 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:cce3370@squ.edu.om file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/spring99/awl_spring99.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word 5. starting the bandwagon.docx advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 38 advancing women in leadership vol. 34, pp. 38-47, 2014 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper starting the bandwagon: a historiography of african american mothers’ leadership during voluntary school desegregation, 1954-1971 camille m. wilson camille m. wilson: university of michigan, email: camillewilson01@gmail.com, phone: 734-764-9470 accepted june 2, 2014 in this article, the author presents a historiography that considers the leadership that african american women, particularly mothers, played in u.s. school desegregation. discussion moves beyond offering a political analysis of school integration politics that is male centered, bounded by a legalistic frame, or steeped within general discussions of the political clashes between integrationists and segregationists to recast significant historical events through a more nuanced womanist lens. literature is reviewed and archival data from 1954 to 1971 are marshaled to shed light on why and how african american mothers contributed to the school desegregation movement, particularly in greensboro, nc. the author suggests what lessons can be gleaned from the mothers’ legacy to extend conceptualizations of transformative educational leadership. keywords: desegregation, african american women, educational leadership, mothers introduction u.s. educational leadership has traditionally been viewed as the domain of school administrators; yet, parents, community activists, and other engaged citizens have helped bring about educational transformation. indeed, mothers’ acts of political resistance in education have greatly contributed to systemic reform. in this paper, i present a historiography of african american mothers’ involvement in voluntary school desegregation. i consider the transformative educational leadership of these mothers and explore how they worked to improve schools while negotiating various social, political, and educational contexts. in line with the objectives of historiography, my examination “exposes the frames and parameters” of previous historical renderings and it sheds light on how the telling of history has been “mediated by philosophy, ideology, and politics” (villaverde, kincheloe & helyar, 2006, p. 311). specifically, i draw upon archival data to more fully account for the role that african american mothers played in u.s. school desegregation ─ actions most often linked to prominent male lawyers, male ministers, and male activists (payne, 1995; robnett, 1997). essentially, these mothers according to their peers of the day did not join the civil rights “band-wagon” (murray, 1971, p. 4), rather they helped to start it. i move beyond offering a political analysis of school integration politics that is bounded by a legalistic frame, centered in the leadership of males, or steeped within general discussions of the political clashes between black integrationists and white segregationists. i, instead, recast significant historical events through a more nuanced womanist lens. in the sections below, i overviewed literature regarding the quest for educational equity and the racial desegregation of u.s. public schools. such research has paid little attention to the roles of women. i discuss how african american women and mothers contributed to the civil rights movements in the u.s. and draw upon black womanist theories to suggest that such efforts constitute leadership. next, i review the insight gleaned from key historical narratives that indicate why and how african american mothers contributed to the fight for school desegregation, focusing on mothers’ leadership in greensboro, north carolina. i conclude the paper by pinpointing some of the implications of the mothers’ leadership legacy. school desegregation and the quest for equitable education in 1954, the u.s. supreme court’s ruling brown v. board of education, which mandated the desegregation of public schools, was viewed by many as a political victory that would secure equal access and quality schooling for african american children (anderson & byrne, 2004; bell, 2004). over 50 years later, the promise that brown held remains a dream deferred. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 39 many of the mandatory desegregation rulings and policies that school districts once adhered to have been repealed, and many schools have re-segregated (orfield & eaton, 1996; orfield, 2005; thro & russo, 2009). school districts are now free to choose voluntary desegregation plans; and, due to the parents involved in community schools ruling of 2007, even those plans have been legally banned when they involve race-based strategies (brown, f., 2009; donnor, 2011; thro & russo, 2009). educators and policymakers continue to debate the merits of school desegregation. supporters of school desegregation maintain that racial integration socially benefits society-at-large and provide african american children access to better schools, valuable social networks and more educational opportunities (frankenburg, lee & orfield, 2003; wells, duran & white, 2008). cautionary scholars have explained how mandatory desegregation resulted in the decrease of african american teachers; the bussing of african american students to hostile and unsafe schools; and/or the weakening of community bonds in african american neighborhoods that once benefited youth (bell 2004; edwards, 1993; siddle walker, 1996). with the decline of mandatory desegregation policies and the perpetuation of the achievement disparities between white and african american students, the search for effective and equitable educational options persists. the voices of african american families, however, have never adequately informed legal or policy debates. prominent school desegregation researchers have emphasized a host of influential supreme court cases that challenged the segregated assignment of african american and other nonwhite students to k-12 schools and universities that provided inferior resources and facilities (ogletree, 2004; orfield & eaton, 1996; patterson, 2001). these cases were typically brought about by african american students and families in partnership with the national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp) (ogletree, 2004; patterson, 2001). historical accounts of segregation are also replete with information about activist lawyers and judges, and both the opposition of racist whites and the support of white equityoriented allies (ogletree, 2004; orfield & eaton, 1996; patterson, 2001). some of desegregation research contains a historical tracing of brown that reminds one that the seminal case was the culmination of decades-long battles fought by many who were involved in community activism and in lesser known law suits filed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (bell, 2004; ogletree, 2004; patterson, 2001). indeed, such bodies of research include important historical accounts that do not reduce school desegregation efforts to the brown case nor separate the quest from school desegregation from the larger civil rights agenda of the era. rather, work by scholars like bell (2004), patterson (2001) and hochschild (1984) links school desegregation pursuits to the broader aim of incrementally dismantling the jim crow system of racial oppression in the u.s. still, analyses of the school desegregation movement are not explicitly gendered and lack specific attention to the experiences and contributions of women. for instance, it is widely known in education and legal circles that the brown v. board of education case was named after key plaintiff oliver brown, a topeka, kansas minister whose young daughter linda was forced to attend an all-black school that was farther from her home than the nearby, better resourced, all-white school (chappel, 2004; patterson, 2001). what is much less known is that all of the other 12 plaintiffs of this landmark case were women, specifically mothers (the brown foundation, n.d.). in fact, african american women and mothers are rarely named or described in the school desegregation research, with few exceptions (see celceski, 1995). a closer look at a variety of texts and historical documents indicates that mothers played significant roles in various locales. indeed these mothers displayed leadership. black womanist leadership critical revisionist scholars highlight how many african american women and mothers have fought for community improvement, racial uplift, and institutional transformation in ways that have advanced african americans’ overall quest for civil rights (collins, 2000; robnett, 1997; henry, 2005). historians like gasman (2007), perkins (1993), and gordon (1995) have particularly studied the ways african american women contributed to educational theories and institutions. work like theirs has begun filling in wide analytical gaps in scholarly fields that have overlooked centuries of african american women’s leadership. mcdonald (1997) has further explained that traditions of “maternal activism” (p. 775) among many african american mothers from the 18th century and beyond are well documented. nevertheless, such activism and modeling of both familial and communal care have yet to consistently be framed or understood as leadership. often mothers’ efforts have been cast as innate women’s work or simply celebrated as assistance that constituted the “backbone” of male leadership (o’reilly, 2005; robnett, 1997, p. 171). leadership traditions of african american mothers, however, are sophisticated, intentional, and rooted in distinct epistemology and cultural mores. historically, african american mothers’ leadership has embodied ethics of social justice and care that are usually family and community-centered (cooper, 2009i; mcdonald, 1997; siddle walker & snarey, 2004). these ethics have reflected both mothers’ childrearing responsibilities – natural, mandated, or chosen (collins, 1994; davis, 2005; o’reilly, 2005) – and their empathy for and social investment in the elevation of other african americans as a whole (collins, 2000; mcdonald, 1997). furthermore, they have typically reflected what beauboeuf-lafontant (2002) called “embrace of the maternal, political clarity, and an ethic of risk” (p. 71), which is part of black womanist caring norms. these guiding ethics are informed by knowledge and experience that come from facing racial, gender, and class oppression while lacking the male advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 40 privilege that benefit men or the racial privilege that benefits white women (collins, 2000; guy-sheftall, 2010; jones, 2010; robnett, 1997). within the field of education, african american mothers’ nontraditional leadership and maternal activism have also been evident in home and community spaces. for instance, mid-20th century educator-activist william pickens stated, “many an educated negro owes his enlightenment to the toil and sweat of his mother” (as cited in jones, 2010, p. 91). african american mothers have, in fact, toiled for other people’s children too by engaging in a range of education organizing, non-profit initiatives, and protest politics. such protest politics aimed at increasing educational equity at the community, regional, and national level. mothers served as professional educators as well, consciously nurtured children other than their own as teachers or school administrators (loder-jackson, 2005). still, scholars like king and ferguson (2010) have explained that the devaluing of african american women in society as a whole, coupled with their performance of extraordinary acts as part of their everyday struggle, lends to the minimizing of their leadership. links to school desegregation and mothers’ motivations and strategies what emerges from a historical look at african american mothers’ leadership is a framework for seeking justice that is culturally relevant, gendered, and rooted in black womanist ethics of activism and care. these roots are evident in the small body of school desegregation literature that highlights women and mothers’ roles, such as curry’s (2005) profile of mae bertha carter, the african american mother of a family of sharecroppers whose eight (out of thirteen) children were the first to integrate schools in sunflower county, mississippi in 1965. carter, who was also a voting rights activist and community educator, explained: why i decided that i wanted them to go was i was tired of my kids coming home with pages torn out of worn-out books that came from the white school. i was tired of them riding on these old raggedy buses after the white children didn’t want to ride on them anymore. . . . i thought if they go to this all-white school they will get a better education there. (curry 1995, p. 34-35) she added, “those white men were spending my tax money and making all the decisions about schools where they wouldn’t even send their own children,” (curry, 1995, p. 236). in her comments, carter indicated the political realities of the day with which african american families had to contend. these realities included distant, poorly resourced schools that were financially and politically controlled by all white school boards though they were usually staffed by all black educators and served all black students and their tax-paying parents (bell 2004; siddle walker, 1996). thus, african american parents faced not only the segregation of their children based on racist ideologies of fear and white superiority, but they were subjected to taxation without political representation or educational choice — factors that supported legal arguments that separate but equal school policies failed to offer african americans equal protection under the law (yudoff, kirp & levin, 1992). at the same time, mothers of the day voiced grave concern about the psychological effects of their children being systematically deemed inferior. for instance, zelma henderson, a brown plaintiff, asserted: "i wanted my children to know all races like i did" (associated press, 2008, para. 9). she added "it means a lot to a person's outlook on life. no inferiority complex at all, that's what i wanted for my children as far as race was concerned," (para. 9). furthermore, melba pattilo beals (1994), a member of the little rock nine group who integrated little rock, arkansas schools in 1957 recounted in her memoir the actions her mother lois pattillo took to not only enroll her into school but encourage her to remain in school despite the daily harassment and threats she endured. her mother strove to ensure her physical protection by speaking out in front of the all-white male school board. while there she stated, “what i want to know is whether or not you have any specific plans for protecting our children…as parents we have a right to know how you will protect our children,” (as cited in beals 1994, p. 188). once enrolled, beal’s mother offered moral support, emphasizing the meaning and importance of her daughter’s perseverance. she suggested: “you hit back every day you get through. you kick them every week you get through. and if you make it through the year, you’ve hit them with the biggest blow of all,” (p. 210). the “blow” that beals’ mother encouraged was personal, demonstrating that racist epithets, bullying, and physical assaults would not shatter beals’ resolve. it was also political since she indicated that beal’s persistence could help advance a larger movement and erode a racist system. indeed, those who integrated public schools acknowledged the pain of their experiences in their memoirs given the threats, bullying, and humiliation they endured. still, these former students also offered respectful and reverential analyses of their mothers, versus expressing anger or resentment about being volunteered to initiate school desegregation (bates, 1987; beals, 1994; bradley, 1995). to gain a more contextualized and in-depth understanding of african american mothers’ involvement in voluntary desegregation, i took a closer look at their efforts in one specific locale: greensboro, north carolina. methodology my research aimed to help address the absence of attention to the leadership exuded by women, particularly mothers, during the primary school desegregation era in the u.s. this era spans from the brown ruling in 1954 to the final implementation phase of mandatory desegregation in school districts in 1971. i designed my study to explore: why and how did african american mothers in greensboro, nc challenge school systems and volunteer their children to racially integrate them from 1954-1971? i also considered what lessons could be learned advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 41 from these mothers’ efforts. i chose to focus on mothers involved in voluntary desegregation because of their conscious choice to place their children and families on the frontlines of hostile and sometimes violent battles for civil rights when it could have been easier for them to wait for the debates over desegregation implementation to be resolved in the courts. to address my guiding research questions, i conducted a historiography, which villaverde, kincheloe, and helyar (2006) defined as “the careful study of historical writing and the ways in which historians interpret the past through various theoretical lenses and methodologies,” (p. 311). these scholars further described historiography as a process by which a historiographer assumes that the rendering of history – like a crafting of human narratives in general – it is a constructivist process that involves, “controversies, disputes and tensions in history” and requires “inter-textual understanding” (villaverde, kincheloe, & helyar, p. 313). as such, i entered the research process believing that history is theorized and subjective and that historical accounts are based on the presentation of knowledge that is partial, discursive, and informed by the multiple perspectives of others (raddeker, 2007; villaverde, kincheloe & helyar, 2006). moreover, my attention to the experiences and contributions of african american mothers reflected my understanding that dominant or mainstream histories too often dismiss women’s meaning-making and experiential knowledge (collins, 2000; raddeker, 2007; robnett, 1997). these histories also tend to underestimate racialized epistemologies, meaning the extent to which knowledge production is shaped by racially relevant understandings of the world and by systems that maintain racial hierarchies in which african americans have been traditionally disenfranchised (ladson-billings, 2000). indeed, historiography is an inquiry method that is pedagogical in nature given that it usually offers information and analyses that challenge long-standing dominant narratives and disrupts “regimes of truth” (gordon, 1995, p. 81), thereby constructing new knowledge (villaverde, kincheloe & helyar, 2006). my inquiry approach reflects both postmodern and feminist research methodologies that assume that the “discourse of history” (raddeker, 2007, p. 21) is dialogic, partially socially constructed, representative of cultural narratives, and reflective of power relations of the era being considered (villaverde, kincheloe & helyar, 2006). i engaged in inter-textual analyses of documents that involved “critically interrogating the texts and products that comprise culture to resist patriarchal understandings of social reality that push women and other minorities to the peripheries of their culture and interpretive processes” (leavy 2007, p. 224). i did this by doing a content analysis of primary sources created from 1954-1971 in greensboro, nc, including letters to the editors and newspaper articles containing quoted information from civil officials, parents, and other community members. these sources were published in white-owned and black-owned southern newspapers, local human resource department reports, city records from museum archives, and legal documents. additionally, i analyzed interview transcripts from the greensboro voices oral history archives housed at the university of north carolina at greensboro’s walter clinton jackson library and oral history archives at the greensboro public library.ii i also analyzed secondary sources authored after 1971, particularly dissertation studies, books about desegregation, and the memoirs of those who helped integrate southern public schools as children. i read all data several times for different purposes such as to map out a timeline of historical events, identify key people and organizations, and identify the substance of mothers’ views, experiences, and organizing efforts. in line with feminist content analysis methods, i looked for consistencies, contradictions, and gaps in the texts (leavy, 2007), along with ways in which the texts challenged or extended ideas previously presented in other desegregation research. i stayed mindful of various historical contexts, events, and power relations that influenced the politics of the 1950s through 1970s. discussion greensboro, north carolina, is a city most known in u.s. history for being the site of the 1960 woolworth’s sit-ins that catapulted the use of sit-ins as an effective political protest strategy throughout the nation. greensboro city schools did not begin mandatory desegregation until 1971, one of the last urban districts in the u.s. to do so (hawkins & mcdowell, n.d.). prior to that, 128 african american students, based on their parents’ approved applications for school transfers, voluntarily integrated the city school system (peck, 1974). voluntary integration from 1954 to 1971 increased the momentum of a highly contested civil rights movement, and it was the precursor to significant political organizing activities and legal victories along the way. the greensboro city schools (gcs) board of education voted six-to-one to honor the brown case one day after the supreme court’s 1954 ruling, affirming the city’s reputation for being a relatively progressive southern city (chafey, 1980; chavis, 1979; peck, 1974; player, 1979). the board’s intention to comply with brown, however, met immediate opposition at state and local levels, which put all desegregation attempts at a standstill until 1957. in 1957 governor luther hodges signed north carolina’s pearsall plan into law. the plan was a constitutional amendment that allowed parents to use one of three freedom of choice strategies to avoid sending their children to desegregated schools (nc museum of history, n.d.; bradley, 1995). according to historical and legal documents, communities could vote to close a local school, parents could receive a grant to send their children to private schools, or school administrators could waive the compulsory attendance policy for parents not wanting to integrate (bradley 1995; hawkins & mcdowell, n.d.). the pearsall plan was designed to benefit anti-integration white families, like most freedom of choice policies of that era (donnor, 2011). advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 42 african american families were a key group who strove to counteract the pearsall plan and other north carolina desegregation delay tactics. in fact, nine families joined in the summer of 1957 to request that their children be transferred to all white schools and six of those requests were granted (johnson, 1957). in her autoethnographic dissertation, josephine boyd bradley described how in 1958 she was the first african american student to graduate from a racially integrated, north carolina school. bradley integrated what is now grimsley high school almost a year earlier, escorted by her mother cora lee boyd (bradley, 1995). her graduation came 90 years after north carolina’s state constitution’s decreed that “the children of the white race and the children of the colored race shall be taught in separate public schools” (as cited in gavins, 2004, p. 68) local newspaper articles also indicated that her graduation also occurred during a time when many whites felt integration should be “condemned, vilified, damned, and cursed,” (benjamin, 1957, p. b-1). bradley (1995), in her dissertation, reflected about the importance of her mother and grandmother preparing her to integrate greensboro’s school system. she stated: under the tutelage of my mother and grandmother, i learned to strive for the best, the impossible. we were taught not to let our blackness stop us from learning or pursuing our dreams. we were encouraged by these women to seek the impossible dream. (p. 280) she further speculated that she was the “chosen child” (p. 278) by her mother to achieve what her mother and other family members couldn’t do during their youth. city archival documents revealed that additional school transfers allowing both african american and white families to voluntarily integrate schools were made in 1959 and more allowances were slowly granted thereafter (gso commission, 1971). during the 1965-66 school year gcs also desegregated its central office and for the first time assigned several african american administrators to predominantly white schools. still, u.s. department of health, education, and welfare (hew) officials determined that gcs was out compliance with brown implementation in 1969 (greensboro human relations commission (gso commission, 1971). greensboro had marginally integrated a small sector of its schools, but five allwhite schools and twelve all-black schools remained during the 1968-69 school year, and the school system resisted bussing or rezoning measures that would have facilitated integration (gso commission, 1971). in february of 1970, eleven african american parents, eight of whom were mothers, filed a u.s. district law suit to demand full desegregation compliance and repeal of the state’s exclusive freedom of choice laws (gso commission, 1971). newspaper coverage of the day explained that the mothers and lead plaintiff dr. george simkins, jr., a greensboro dentist, submitted their own detailed desegregation plan to the courts and were represented by naacp lawyers (knox, 1971). this was a bold and uncommon move in desegregation cases of the day. eventually the district court stayed the greensboro case, thereby putting it on hold until the supreme court ruled in swann v. charlotte-mecklenburg (1971). soon after the swann ruling, the greensboro plaintiff’s desegregation plan was approved (paul, 1971). altogether, from 1957 and to 1971 african american mothers were particularly active on various social, cultural, and political fronts to lobby for integration and desegregation compliance, efforts that were catapulted by brown. my review of greensboro oral history and newspaper data show that african american mothers harnessed their social capital and the influence they had accrued in their churches, community groups, sororities, black parent teacher associations, and professional groups to mobilize support for school integration. several of these groups had interracial and/or interfaith membership and some were founded by black mothers. also, like the pro-integration mothers in other locales, these mothers performed decision-making leadership within their families. historical data indicated that african american mothers sought to achieve three core objectives, including the overall implementation of brown, the monitored safety of integrating children, and the provision of moral support to integrating children. the mothers’ activism came with enormous risks. for instance, african american mother angeline smith (1989) recounted in her oral history narrative: as we began to put into action our plans, we encountered threats, epithets being hurled at our children, bricks being thrown through our windows, unethical handbills being passed around, and lurid letters being sent to us. bradley’s (1995) research further documented that mothers (and fathers) faced threats being fired and blacklisted for hiring by white employers. still, data suggest that african american mothers were steadfast and kept their focus on the integrating children and they engaged in numerous acts of care that helped sustain these students’ courage and will. yolanda leacraft (1988), for instance, discussed her and other mother’s efforts to meet and strategize about how to encourage and offer some relief to the children who were voluntarily integrating greensboro’s schools. she, in her oral history narrative, explained that the children faced severe opposition in their daily interactions with white peers, parents, and educators. leacraft stated: and i remember going and another black parent attended. and we began to talk about this situation and what could we do outside of the school setting to make things better for our children and help these kids really—i mean what the whole thing was all about: freedom of choice. and then ultimately integration of the school system was coming down the pike. so what could we do for these children who were really pioneers to help them make it easier for the ones who are coming. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 43 oral history data revealed that leacraft and the other mothers chose to organize picnics and dances for the integrating students, cook meals for pro-integration protestors who stood in picketing lines for long hours, and organize regular parent meetings and community dialogues. these informal activities that have often been overlooked or dismissed as women’s domestic work (or duties) made an important political difference. as historian christina greene (2004) suggested, they exemplify black women’s success in “nurturing the freedom movement,” (p. 259). such nurturing and sustaining effects were acknowledged by greensboro community leaders such as dr. willa b. player (1979), the former president of greensboro’s historically black bennett college who recalled that the “women of the community were very valiant in their efforts to support desegregation by doing a great deal of volunteer work in transportation and things of the sort” (p. 10), referring to women (most of whom were mothers) who, in part, organized carpools to transport integrating black children to predominately white schools. city documents also reported that african american mothers served as “bus mothers” (gso commission, 1971, p. 59), meaning mothers who rode along with integrating school children on the busses to and from school to offer safety and a sense of comfort. of course the mothers’ actions and those of the other family and community members with whom they collaborated, inspired vocal opposition from many white parents. newspaper coverage explained that some white parents petitioned to block the first small wave of greensboro integration in 1957 believing that, as a result, white children would “suffer irreparable injury and damage” (shields, 1957, p. a10). it is important to also acknowledge that some african american families opposed mandatory desegregation too, yet for distinct reasons. these families feared the retaliation that the integrating black students would face. they were also concerned about the impending demise of historically black schools in which many african americans took pride, and/or they found the city’s school desegregation plans to be impractical. for instance, mrs. onetha smith, co-founder of greensboro’s the black citizens for neighborhood schools group, addressed the greensboro city board of education and voiced opposition. according to newspaper data, she shared: we believe that to give up our schools and have our children spread out all over the city is wrong. we do not believe a majority of the students at [various all-black schools] and the other schools in the black community should be predominantly white. if most of the students at the schools are white, our children would not be treated fairly. at the junior and senior high schools our children would no longer get the leadership training they need. the student councils would mostly be white, the cheerleaders would be white. black students would become a minority in their own schools. this we believe is bad. (as quoted in benjamin, 1971, p. a12) comments like those from mrs. smith likely reflected that while greensboro’s segregated african american schools lacked the resources enjoyed at white schools and were often inconveniently located, they were regarded as offering a high quality education and being staffed with excellent, caring african american educators (hawkins & mcdowell, n.d.). indeed, civil rights-related archival data showed that some of greensboro’s all black schools were ranked among the top black schools in nc (hawkins & mcdowell, n.d.). newspaper coverage revealed there was also a group of african american parents who initially allowed their children to integrate greensboro’s schools but later chose to not support integration after they saw their children endure “personal damage,” comments offered at a public community meeting held at a black church (members of black community, 1971, p. 6.) nevertheless many african american families persisted in their quest for school desegregation, and african american mothers stayed vigilant and vocal. for example, in 1971 one of the (unnamed) mother plaintiffs of the greensboro district suit was reported as answering back to african american naysayers at a community meeting. the mother asserted: “it was an old battle to see change. why should we change our position now, when we are so close to achieving integration,” (members of black community, 1971, p.2). while newspaper letters and editorials of the day conveyed both african american families’ integration hopes and fears, calls for unity were strong (murray, 1971; stevenson, 1971). as connie murray, an african american mother, wrote: i feel that the eleven parents involved in the desegregation suit should have the support of the black community for their efforts, if nothing else. for it is out of these efforts that at least some change will be brought about. it is easy to get on the band-wagon after it is rolling, but it takes courage to get it started. (p. 4) in line with murray’s comments, historical data overall point to the bravery of rarely named mothers who helped implement school desegregation and advance social change. final analysis: mothers’ work as transformative leadership my research on voluntary school desegregation points to how the civic contributions and struggles of women and mothers in the school desegregation movement have gone unexamined and underappreciated. this identified gap aligns with the goals of historiography to revisit historical writing and phenomena to reconsider how philosophy, ideology and politics have influenced the rendering of historical narratives (villaverde, kincheloe & helyar, 2006). through applying a womanist framework to better understand the fight over school desegregation, it became clear that the contributions of african american women had been largely ignored, yet they are very significant. such contributions entail african american mothers performing transformative leadership that is gendered, advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 44 culturally relevant, and has intellectual, pedagogical, and activist dimensions. transformative leadership constitutes a form of “liberatory political praxis” (cooper & gause, 2007, p. 203) that is activist-oriented, morally-driven, and aims to bring about social justice (cooper, 2009; dantley & tillman, 2006). for many african american mothers who have navigated public schools to advocate for their children, such leadership has specifically involved engaging in self-reflection, systematically analyzing schools and communities, and confronting inequities. this leadership has been part of what is also known as motherwork —a maternal childrearing approach that encompasses political resistance (collins, 1994; cooper, 2007, 2009). indeed beyond uplifting their own family, many pro-desegregation mothers worked toward the social transformation of schooling 19541971 (brown, 2005; marshall & oliva, 2006; theoharis, 2007). data indicate that the mothers’ leadership was motivated by their desire for their children to have increased freedom and educational opportunities. their leadership commitments were further sustained by their belief that their efforts were helping to spark political progress on a societal level. a closer examination of historical data regarding the role mothers played in desegregation politics revealed that their leadership activities encompassed: being among the first parents in the united states to request that their children be transferred to integrated schools; establishing parent organizations that offered logistical, emotional, and physical support to other integrating black families; appearing in front of hostile school boards to advocate for their children; and, joining children to safely escort them through hateful mobs during the first weeks of integrated schooling. furthermore, the mothers’ leadership was guided by their lived experiences, social justice principles and their beliefs that education is political and emancipating. many of the mothers’ actions and motivations are described in memoirs of those who integrated schools in various locales (bates, 1987; beals, 1994; bradley, 1995), yet they are evident first-hand in the greensboro data. as a whole, the mothers’ maternal activism and transformative leadership amounted to freedom fighting work. today, it may seem routine for mothers to exert school choice given the array of options like traditional public, magnet, charter, and private schools that are ostensibly available to families of all racial and ethnic backgrounds if they possess adequate information and resources (cooper, 2007). scholarship on historiography, however, warns against analyzing historical acts with a “presentist” bias (raddeker, 2007, p.55). such bias imposes contemporary norms and assumptions that did not apply to past eras or events, while recognizing that our knowledge of the present inevitably influences our interpretation. in the context of the 1950s u.s. south, it is essential to understand that african american mothers requesting and exerting school choice and publicly advocating for their family’s educational rights – rights newly recognized at the federal level while still highly contested and ignored in the communities they lived – were radical acts. from mississippi to arkansas to north carolina, seeking school choice and desegregation defied racist patriarchal systems led by all-white school boards and politicians in locales where african americans had faced lynching, home bombings, and other forms of physical and emotional violence for implementing much milder civil acts (bradley, 1995; chafe, 1980; curry, 2005; patterson, 2001). these mothers were everyday african american women who were factory workers, stay-at-home mothers, domestic workers, agricultural laborers, and teachers. their educational choices, which included decisions to speak their truth to power while modeling and teaching political resistance to their children, embodied the ethics of care, justice, and risk that characterize womanist leadership (king & ferguson, 2010; o’reilly, 2005; robnett, 1997). moreover, their leadership during voluntary desegregation reflected well-established traditions of maternal activism and leadership that pre-dated the 1950s but extended them into a new era and established new legal ground (mcdonald, 1995; payne, 1995; robnett, 1997). in greensboro, mothers preparing their children to seek the “impossible dream” of school integration and political equality that josephine boyd bradley (1995, p. 280) mentioned partly entailed believing and teaching their children that they were equal to and deserving of the same rights and privileges that white children enjoyed. thus, the “tutelage” (p. 280) that they and other pro-desegregation mothers offered points to the pedagogical aspect of african american mothers’ political resistance and womanist leadership. in line with henry’s (2005) discussion of black feminist/womanist pedagogy, the mothers put forth a “pedagogy of liberation” and social justice-oriented “consciousness and commitments” (p. 91). doing so helped advance their families, communities, and society at large. the mothers further emphasized their sense of personal accountability for protecting their children, seeking increased educational and life opportunities for them, and nurturing their feelings of pride and dignity. findings about the plight and leadership of african american mothers during the school desegregation era stand to help educators, policymakers, and researchers renew and extend discourse about school integration, the role of race, gender, and various unsung leaders. mothers’ efforts also offer an important example of what it means to democratically engage and challenge the public education system. moreover, data illustrate how educational reform can be enhanced by a bottom-up grassroots movement rather than shaped only by highly ranked education officials and legislators. african american mothers advocated for their children while nurturing a collaborative, political movement. they did not act alone, rather they coalesced with men and women of various racial, religious and class backgrounds to politically strategize, mobilize, and support each other. indeed, families and communities, including african american fathers and high profile men, advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 45 united to secure educational and civil rights. women’s and mothers’ leadership, however, have become inappropriately subsumed in patriarchal retellings of the civil rights era. in this study, i have spoken to the importance of incorporating critical gendered analyses in scholarship overall and to the significance of revisioning long-standing analyses that have become dominant yet incomplete historical narratives so we can benefit from new insight and fuller perspectives. references anderson, j. d., & byrne, d. n. 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(pp. 469-590). st. paul, mn: west publishing company. advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership faculty tiering and academic inbreeding: one institution's relationships and realities debra j. blanke, ph.d. adrienne e. hyle, ph. d. blanke & hyle, spring, 2000 "like inbreeding, if the proliferation of faculty tiering is problematic for academe, this institution is promoting faculty tiering, but at a lower rate than national trends. but, inbreeding and faculty tiering appear to be related, with more inbred faculty in lower tiered positions." academic inbreeding has a long history as an issue and concern for higher education (eliot, 1908). although defined variously, inbred faculty members possess at least one degree from the academic institution employing them, most commonly their highest degree (blau, 1973, 1994). criticism about "pure" inbred faculty emanates from the concern that the entire professional experiences of these scholars were "limited to the confines of a single institution by virtue of their being recruited directly from the graduating classes of the employing institution" (dutton, 1980, p. 2). "silver cord scholars," those who have been "recruited back to their alma mater after having held positions outside their degree granting institution", (dutton, 1980, p. 2) are not included in the controversy because their professional experiences were not restricted to a single institution. negative impacts of inbreeding are assumed for both the institution as well as the individual. bridgeland (1982) states that "an implicit attitude against inbreeding abounds" (p. 288) and "when candidates restrict their [job] search to the university that granted their highest degree…, they may be doomed to temporary and misfitting jobs or ones that underutilize their talents or training" ( p. 289). despite these cautions, nationally, the average of inbred faculty of any kind has been typically 15% (berelson, 1960; blau, 1973, 1994). a relatively recent realization within the research on faculty and the academic workplace is the existence of at least a two-tiered faculty: tenure-track, full-time faculty and those who are not (buckless, ravenscroft & baldwin-morgan, 1996; burns, 1994; clark & corcoran, 1986; dupree, 1993; gappa & leslie, 1993; meisenhelder, 1986; menges & exum, 1983; reichard, 1998; roemer & schnitz, 1982; schuster, 1998). the numbers of these non-tenure track and part-time faculty have been increasing in http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html recent years (chronister, 1996; chronister, baldwin & bailey, 1992; gappa & leslie, 1993; leatherman, 1999; leslie & gappa, 1994). the most often cited rationale for increases in part-time and non-tenure track faculty are financial (chronister, 1996); they cost less than tenure-track, full-time faculty. the proliferation of rising numbers of a second tier faculty on the academy as a whole is not known. although non-tenure track or off-track full and part-time segments of second tier faculty represent a "significant and growing element of the american academic profession" (baldwin & chronister, 1996, p. 4), these faculty typically "carry a significant part of the responsibility for teaching, especially at the lower-division level of undergraduate education" (gappa & leslie, 1993, p. 12). although not exclusively part-time professionals, these faculty are often assumed to be less qualified and less productive. this is not the case (dupree, 1993; reichard, 1998), nor should they bear the blame for lowering academic standards in higher education (thompson, 1992). in sum, little research has been done on this relatively new group of second tier faculty, other than to document their existence (baldwin & chronister, 1996; rhoades, 1996; roemer & schnitz, 1982; sommer, 1994). purpose of the research unlike the research focused independently on faculty inbreeding and faculty tiering, the purpose of this exploratory study was to reveal potentially invisible relationships among faculty demographics. specifically explored were relationships between faculty tiering in terms of tenure and non-tenure track position types and gender, ethnicity and academic inbrededness. using data from a single institution, we sought answers to multiple questions: what are our faculty demographics in terms of tiering, gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding? in terms of gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding, what are the demographics of tier 1 faculty? in terms of gender, ethnicity and inbreeding, what are the demographics of tier 2 faculty? in what ways do tier 1 and tier 2 faculty differ? in terms of gender? in terms of ethnicity? in terms of academic inbreeding? review of related literature two sets of literature framed this research. the first was faculty tiering which emerges from the labor market research in higher education. the second was academic inbreeding, the institutional practice of hiring one's own graduates. faculty tiering over the years, numerous national studies have documented the demographics of faculty (age, race/ethnicity, gender, highest degree held, tenure status, academic rank) including disparities in compensation, workload, time allocation, job satisfaction and plans for the future by institutional type and program area (e.g., the most recent nces, 1990; nces, 1991; nces, 1998). in many ways, tier 1 and tier 2 faculty are similar; they are mostly white and male (baldwin & chronister, 1996). however, data also depict women and minorities as over represented in tier 2 positions (baldwin & chronister, 1996; burns, 1992; chronister, gansneder, harper & baldwin, 1997; clark & corcoran, 1986; lomperis, 1990; menges & exum, 1983). in fact, in one study, women were found to comprise 25 percent of tier 1 faculty positions but over 40 percent of tier 2 part-time positions (lomperis, 1990). in research from 1975 to 1985, the shift in the composition of the academic labor market from full-time tenure track faculty (tier 1) to those who are not (tier 2) has been "unequivocal" (lomperis, 1990). tier 2 faculty are found in all types of institutions, but, surprisingly are most heavily concentrated at public research institutions (baldwin & chronister, 1996). although not labeled as second tier, graduate teaching assistants in research institutions constitute an invisible element of the tier 2 faculty (burns, 1994; crannell, 1998). these teaching positions might more aptly be identified as non-tenure track and parttime faculty positions for the roles they play in institutions. many label tier 2 faculty "part-timers." they are more critically dubbed "have-nots" (bowen & schuster, 1986; leslie & gappa, 1995; chronicle, 1996), "second-class" (leslie & gappa, 1994), "proletariat" (menges & exum, 1983), "lowers and reserves" (meisenhelder, 1986), "separate, low tier" (dupree, 1993), "gypsy scholars" (sommer, 1994) and "low-status caste" faculty (gappa & leslie, 1993). many have focused on faculty tiering through the examination of part-time faculty. leslie (1978) and gappa (1984) independently and collectively (gappa & leslie, 1993; leslie & gappa, 1994, 1995) lead in the early research of part-timers. their review of policies and procedures regarding part-time faculty employment at 18 representative colleges and universities documents "a wildly random collection of institutional and departmental practices" (gappa & leslie, 1993, p. xiii). they also found that part-time faculty felt "they were being exploited, and blatantly so" (p. xiii). typically tier 1 faculty engage in the academic triad of teaching, research and service (outreach), while tier 2 faculty primarily teach. they teach undergraduate courses (gappa & leslie, 1993), teach at two or more institutions (burns, 1994; thompson, 1992) and generally carry a teaching load of between one and five courses (baldwin & chronister, 1996). tier 1 faculty are compensated on a yearly salary basis regardless of teaching load, while tier 2 faculty are generally paid per credit hour taught. it is common for tier 2 faculty to earn approximately $2000 per course taught, generally a three-credit hour course (wilson, 1999b). conditions under which tier 2 faculty do their work are often substandard (crannell, 1998) and support resources are limited at best (baldwin & chronister, 1996), in spite of tier 2 faculty numbers accounting for 42 percent of institutional staff in colleges (schuster, 1998). there are many occupational designations assigned to second tier faculty. these titles include "adjunct, part-time, non-tenure track, and temporary faculty" (douglas, 1988, p. 1), as well as "lecturer" and "associate" (sommer, 1994). roemer and schnitz (1982) denote titles including "visiting professor," "teaching associate," "doctoral research staff" and "one year appointment," including both full and part time employment conditions. in describing part-timers, gappa and leslie (1993) built on the work of tuckman (1978), modifying his taxonomy from seven categories to four. they retained tuckman's (1978) semiretireds category, calling them career enders. these individuals were moving out of full-time positions but were also fully retired or in transition from full-time to retired status. another of tuckman's (1978) categories, full?mooner, they renamed specialist, expert or professional. these individuals held a primary, usually full-time career elsewhere but taught "for the love of it rather than because of a need for income" (gappa & leslie, 1993, p. 48). gappa and leslie (1993) called tuckman's (1978) hopeful full-timers aspiring academics because, the focus of their career aspiration is not necessarily to teach full-time but to be fully participating, recognized, and rewarded members of the faculty with a status at least similar to that currently associated with the tenure-track or tenured faculty. (p. 48). aspiring academics comprised more than one-quarter of the part-time ranks and appeared to be more common in large metropolitan areas. their final category, freelancers, was a composite of tuckman's (1978) part-unknowers, part-mooners and homeworkers. these faculty were part-time by choice; they are not aspiring to full-time academic positions (gappa & leslie, 1993). full-time, non-tenure track faculty have been researched most recently by chronister, baldwin, and bailey (1992). increasing numbers of institutions are making such appointments; up to 30 percent of institutional faculty at some private liberal arts colleges were identified. lending to the notion of a tiered faculty, chronister, baldwin, and bailey (1992) found non-tenure track faculty "felt that they had less influence on departmental and institutional policies, felt less involved in departmental faculty meetings and in campus faculty committees, felt more negative about their teaching loads, and also felt their salaries were inadequate" (p. 398) when compared to their tenure track colleagues. chronister, baldwin and bailey (1992) identified three types of non-tenure track appointments. the first type was described as "indefinitely renewable appointments" (p. 384). faculty with this appointment type had the potential to renew their contract any number of times. the second type of appointment was the "restricted renewable appointments" (p. 384). faculty with this appointment time were limited in the number of times their appointment could be renewed. their final category was the "folding chair" (p. 384) which was strictly held to an appointment term and not renewable. with each of these appointments, there was the "lack of an explicit expectation of continued employment that a tenure appointment conveys" (chronister, baldwin & bailey, 1992, p. 384). current demographic information estimates that 80 % of american higher education institutions employ non-tenure track faculty contracted by semester or year (baldwin & chronister, 1996). at the same time as little as 30 % of undergraduate coursework has been identified as being covered by tenure-track faculty (wilson, 1999). for full-time non-tenure track professionals, chronister, baldwin and bailey (1992) found there were more obstacles confronted by these faculty than by faculty on the tenure track. these individuals were more likely to feel their positions were in jeopardy or feel trapped in the position they held (p. 395). these individuals were significantly more likely to be contemplating leaving academia or wistful about entering academia in the first place (p. 395). for both fulland part-time second tier faculty, their political involvement with colleagues and faculty governance structures were negligible at best (sommer, 1994) deferring more of this responsibility to fulltime tenured and tenure-track faculty. second tier faculty had limited access to fellow faculty members, few interactions in faculty meetings, and no resources for networking within their chosen field (burns, 1994). these conditions can lead to invisibility (gappa & leslie, 1993) and a lack of voice (douglas, 1988) within the organization. such characterizations of individuals and institutions is not positive for academia or higher education. unfortunately, the warnings about the rise of a second tier of faculty are not isolated to concerns exclusively for individuals or institutions, but include cautions for academia as a whole (baldwin & chronister, 1996; reichard, 1998; schuster, 1998). rhoades (1996) saw the growing second tier as a "challenge to the academic profession's definition of faculty lines as full-time, with a secure future" and "an explicit challenge to tenure as the professional structure that defines faculty's terms of employment" (p. 627). reichard (1998) stated that the creation of a two-tiered faculty "is an insidious trend that must be resisted in the interest of high-quality education" (p. 41). from his profiles of research institutions, reichard (1998) believed that replacing tenured faculty with a "flexible" workforce and having a "disproportional presence of part-time faculty can undermine institutional quality" (p. 42). his argument continued that as research and teaching are disjointed, problems arise as "teaching becomes an isolated activity, not connected to research" (p. 42). careful monitoring of this phenomenon of a growing second tier was called for by baldwin and chronister (1996) who saw this trend as transforming "academic careers, the culture of higher education, and ultimately, the teaching and learning process" (p. 1). schuster (1998) has done extensive study on what he terms as a "transformation" in higher education, specifically, the increase in part-time faculty members. by reviewing the rapid rise of part-time faculty within all types of institutions in the 1971 (22%), 1982 (32%), 1988 (33%), and 1992 (42%) u.s. department of education national studies of postsecondary faculty, he estimated that a similar rate of increase would bring the 1997 numbers of part-time faculty up to 45 or 46 % of all faculty. schuster expected this phenomenon to have "profound" effects on the professoriate, "albeit resistant to measurement in meaningful ways" (p. 50). schuster (1998) identified three specific issues of concern associated with the escalating numbers of second tier faculty members. these concerns included placing tenure at risk, weakening faculty loyalty and a decline in attractiveness of academic careers (p. 51). lee (1983) predicted similar detriments for first tier faculty who would have greater responsibilities in the absence of first tier colleagues. schuster (1998) also looked at prospects for future changes. if future "economic constraints" (p. 52) and the "perceived need to assure flexibility in the deployment of instructional staff" (p. 52) continue, the trend of increasing part-time faculty will continue undaunted. many factors fuel this increase, including the boom in distance education and its influence to move away from the current role of accreditation in dictating acceptable ratios between full? and part-time faculty. schuster (1998) also speculated that a reversal of this phenomenon could occur if there were certain shifts in the academic community. a narrowing of the supply and demand for faculty members may create changes, a higher consciousness among the academy about the effects of a tiered faculty on the quality of undergraduate education, and a major push by academic leadership to make "overdue corrections in the academic labor force" (p. 53). academic inbreeding starting in the early 1900's, the research on inbreeding documented its existence and cautioned against its practice (eliot, 1908; reeves, henry, kelly, klein, & russell, 1933; eells & cleveland, 1935; hollingshead, 1938; hargens & farr, 1973; mcneely, 1932). by mid-century, mcgee (1960) and berelson (1960) suggested that there might be functional reasons for inbreeding's "prevalence in the face of odium" (mcgee, 1960, p.483). mcgee (1960) claimed that universities which face financial and geographical handicaps in the national competition for faculty member may inbreed junior faculty positions to free resources for competition in the national academic labor market. in his examination of graduate education, berelson (1960) concluded that, even though it was believed that inbreeding had at least as adverse effects on faculty quality in the best institutions, as in other academic institutions, the top 12 institutions nationally experienced inbreeding "as a statistical consequence of their dominant position as producers" (p. 116). blau's (1973) examination of higher education resulted in additional insights into academic inbreeding. he asserted that "what promotes inbreeding in a major department in this country, with its many universities, is not that graduates of no other department are good enough but that the members of this department are unwilling to admit that they are" (blau, 1973, p. 138). his findings were more or less inconclusive, but raised two questions which have served to delineate inbreeding research to date: 1. what conditions in academic institutions affect inbreeding? 2. what effect does inbreeding have on faculty quality? ezrati (1983), wyer and conrad (1984a, b), dagg (1993) and dutton (1980) present the latest research in the area of effect. wyer and conrad (1984a) found that when time allocations were adjusted, inbred faculty were found to be more productive in all areas of scholarly research than their non-inbred counterparts. ezrati (1983) examined the impact of specific personnel policies on women with families finding that anti-nepotism, inbreeding, leave of absence, part-time employment and childcare regulations worked against these faculty. wyer and conrad (1984b) further examined the relationship of sex and institutional origin to productivity finding that male and female inbred faculty presented significantly different patterns of productivity. these measures of productivity included 1) scholarly publications, 2) experience and time devoted to research, 3) allocation of time to tasks, and 4) the previous variables analyzed with salary earnings, receipt of research funding and services as paid consultants (wyer & conrad, 1984a). dagg (1993), however, linked these productivity issues to professional mobility, not inbreeding. earlier research by abramson (1975) and the carnegie commission (1973) related inbreeding issues to equity, focusing specifically on women because married women, in particular, often attended a specific university within the geographical area in which they lived and worked. she also believed that there was some evidence that this policy was eased more often for men than for women (abramson, 1975). the report on the status of university women released by the carnegie commission in 1973 recommended "that policies which prohibit a department from hiring its own graduate students be reconsidered, since they have often worked to the disadvantage of women" (p. 131). through this history of inbreeding as a taboo, there were some specific indictments made to establish why such practice was negative for academia. mcneely (1932) stated that faculty hired from an institution's own graduates lacked the "broad outlook necessary to academic achievement" (p. 1). this concern was supported by research done by eells and cleveland (1935), reeves (1933), and hollingshead (1938). all of these studies found lower academic achievement by inbred faculty members based on indicators such as academic rank and length of service to the department. eells and cleveland (1935) went further, saying that institutions must exercise vigilance lest they be "undermined by excessive inbreeding leading to lessened academic productivity, if not sterility" (p. 328). these early works on the negative effects of faculty inbreeding fell in line with the negative connotation the word itself brings to mind. through the literature, or lack thereof, it appeared that for some time, the issue was moot and rarely discussed. no literature was found on academic inbreeding from 1938 to 1960. while trying to make the inbred faculty label less demeaning, gonzalez, newell?berghage, gallegos and wooden (1997) preferred to use the term "homegrown" (p. 51) for this group of faculty. perhaps the label was more agreeable, but the realities found in this research were consistent with earlier works. in terms of the hiring experience, consistently, the homegrown faculty realized later that they were hired for substantially less than comparable faculty positions. many homegrown faculty battled with the "perception of still being considered a student" (gonzalez, newell?berghage, gallegos & wooden, 1997, p. 53). collegiality was also lacking for homegrown faculty who felt they were expected to "prove themselves" rather than gain assistance and mentoring given to new incoming faculty members (p. 54). and, finally, these faculty faced opposition for tenure and promotion. for the homegrown faculty member, collaboration was more difficult than expected and resulted in feelings of isolation through the tenure and promotion process. summary heavy use of part-time faculty blurs the employment picture for college faculty overall, it denies usually well-qualified part-time faculty the opportunity to be full participants in the academic community, and it increases the governance and counseling responsibilities of full-time faculty. (lee, 1983, p.32) the research on second-tier faculty has carefully examined diverse issues in-depth as they relate to this faculty population including use and abuse of second-tier employees as well as future needs and anticipated trends. most recent literature about the college experience stresses the magnitude of the freshman year of college with respect to improving undergraduate education, retention of students and college graduation rates (goldberg, 1999). the extent to which second tier faculty are used for undergraduate education, especially lower level courses, is cause for concern. the quality of education students receive and their prospects to persist in higher education seem to be inextricably tied to the quality of the faculty in their early college experiences. a possible conflict with this perspective is the increasing second tier of faculty. further concern may rise from the incidence of inbred faculty in the second tier faculty. methods for purposes of comparison, we sought answers to our research questions as far back as were possible through our institution's office of institutional research. surprisingly, we were able to go back no further than 1994. our data sets include fall semester demographics for 1994 and 1997. population given our focus of instructional faculty only, individuals were included in each semester population by virtue of their assignments as instructor of record in a course. this included tenure and non-tenure track positions of all ranks. faculty on sabbatical and graduate teaching assistants were excluded. inbred faculty members were those whose highest degree attained was granted by our institution. "tenure received" and "on tenure track" were combined and assumed to comprise tier 1 faculty while the "not on tenure track" category was assumed to be tier 2 faculty. statistics descriptive statistics were used to establish population demographics (n, %). the average percentage of faculty found to be inbred nationally was 10.3% (nces, 1998). in the southwest region where our institution is located, an average of 9.7% of all faculty were found to be inbred (nces, 1998). analysis the clear intent of examining a single institution's instructional faculty demographics was to reveal realities about faculty that might be masked by a collective examination. following the reporting of demographic data, the realities revealed will be analyzed critically in terms of tiering, gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding. these analyses follow the findings section. findings what are the demographics of our faculty in terms of tier, gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding? in 1997, our instructional faculty were predominantly in tier 1 positions (81%), male (73%), caucasian (88%) and held terminal degrees from other institutions (82%). those demographics changed little between 1994 and 1997. the number of instructional faculty at our institution rose 9% from 1994 to 1997, but that rise was in tier 2 instructional positions (6%), as national trends would predict (schuster, 1998). interestingly, the number of female instructional faculty increased (5%) during this timeframe. it seems that at our institution, more faculty are being hired into tier 2 instructional positions and that those instructional faculty are female. the diversity demographics and inbreededness of instructional faculty remained stable, changing no more than one percentage point. table 1 summarizes these data. what are the demographics of tier 1 faculty, in terms of gender, ethnicity and academic file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/winter2000/b-table1.html inbreeding? in 1997, 79 percent of tier 1 faculty were male, 89 percent of these faculty were caucasian and 88 percent of tier 1 faculty held degrees from other institutions. these demographics were quite stable from 1994 to 1997, changing no more than one percent in any category. table 2 summarizes these data. what are the demographics of tier 2 faculty, in terms of gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding? from 1994 to 1997, the percent of females in tier 2 instructional faculty positions increased 10 percentage points from 39 to 49 percent. that 10 percentage point increase, however, was a 50 percent increase in females in tier 2 positions, from 46 to 93. virtually half of the tier 2 faculty positions are now female. males also increased in tier 2 instructional positions, up 24 faculty or 33 percent. the ethnic diversity of faculty in tier 2 positions changed little during this timeframe and the percentage of faculty with degrees from other institutions increased eight percentage points. in 1997, 39 percent of tier 2 instructional faculty were inbred, down eight percentage points from 1994, and 84 percent of these same faculty were caucasian, unchanged from 1994. table 3 summarizes these data. how do tier 1 and tier 2 faculty differ? to answer this question, we needed to compare faculty tiers against each other and the institution. in terms of gender? in 1994, 78 percent of the faculty at our institution were male and of that group, 90 percent were in tier 1 positions. three years later, in 1997, 73 percent of the faculty were male and of that group 87 percent were in tier 1 positions. the number of males in instructional faculty positions were decreasing overall at the institution as well as in tier 1. the converse was true for male faculty in tier 2 instructional positions; their numbers were increasing. the numbers of females employed in instructional faculty positions at our institution was increasing; from 22 percent (202) in 1994 to 27 percent (260) in 1997. of that group, however, 77 percent (156) of the female instructional faculty in 1994 were in tier 1 positions. three years later, in 1997, that group had decreased to 64 percent (167). like the demographics for males, female faculty in tier 2 positions have increased as well from 1994 to 1997. however, unlike male demographics, by 1997, 36 percent of the females employed at our institution were in tier 2 positions while only 13 percent of males were in similar faculty instructional positions. it seems that females were disproportionately underrepresented in tier 1 positions and over represented in tier 2 positions when compared to their male counterparts. ( table 4 compares tier 1 and tier 2 demographics, tables 2 and 3 support aspects of these comparisons as well.) in terms of ethnicity? the diversity of our faculty changed little from 1994 to 1997. the instructional faculty were predominately caucasian (89% in 1994, 88% in 1997). when comparing tier 1 and 2 diversity demographics, percentage increases in categories were found in tier 2 caucasians, african americans, asians, hispanics and nonresident aliens. the only decrease was noted in native americans where tier 1 instructional faculty increased from 71 percent to 74 percent or from 15 to 17 faculty. although numbers were small, it seemed that increasing diversity demographics (except for native american instructional faculty) were in tier 2 positions. in terms of academic inbreeding? in 1994, 83 percent of the faculty at our institution held terminal degrees from other institutions and of that group, 92 percent were in tier 1 positions. in 1997, 82 percent of the instructional faculty held terminal degrees from other institutions and of that group 86 percent were in tier 1 positions. therefore, the number of noninbred faculty, those with terminal degrees from other file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/winter2000/b-table2.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/winter2000/b-table3.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/winter2000/b-table4.html institutions, were decreasing institutionally and in tier 1 positions. remarkably, however, despite the fact that the percentage of faculty with terminal degrees from other institutions was decreasing institutionally, their numbers and percentages were rising in tier 1 faculty instructional positions, from 87 to 88 percent from 1994 to 1997. the picture for inbred faculty is similar. in 1994, 17 percent of the faculty at our institution held terminal degrees from our institution and of that group, 13 percent were in tier 1 positions. in 1997, 18 percent of the instructional faculty held terminal degrees from our institution and of that group 12 percent were in tier 1 positions. therefore, the number of inbred faculty were increasing but decreasing in tier 1 positions. tier 2 instructional faculty positions appeared to be key to understanding academic inbreeding at this institution. from 1994 to 1997, the numbers of academically inbred faculty rose one percentage point (from 17 to 18%; from 156 to 172, 16 faculty). in 1994, 17 percent of the faculty at our institution were inbred and of that group, 65 percent (101) were in tier 1 positions. in 1997, the number of inbred faculty had increased one percentage point to 18 percent but of that group 58 percent (99) were in tier 1 positions. inbred faculty were increasing. where, then, were increases occurring? they were found in tier 2 positions where 42 percent of the inbred faculty could be found. it seemed that if inbred faculty were hired at our institution in instructional faculty positions, they were tier 2 (non-tenure track and/or part-time) positions. this may be in response to financial constraints noted by schuster (1998). ( table 5 compares tier 1 and tier 2 demographics, tables 2 and 3 support aspects of these comparisons as well.) discussion we had a predominately male instructional faculty, these faculty were in predominately tenured or in tenure-track positions, they held degrees from institutions other than our own and they were overwhelmingly caucasian. on the surface these data seem reasonable and comparable to national norms (nces, 1998). according to the most current national center for education statistics data (1998), 46 percent of instructional faculty nationally are in tier 1 positions. at our institution, that percentage was 35 percentage points higher, 81 percent. in terms of tiering, our institution has yet to succumb to the same pressures as other institutions nationally. our faculty were 73 percent male and the national norm is 62 percent. the percent of caucasian faculty was virtually identical (nces 87 %, our institution 88%). in terms of academic inbreeding, national norms are 10 percent while at our institution 18 percent were inbred (nces, 1998). a closer examination reveals something else. from 1994 to 1997, 83 new instructional faculty positions were created but 71 of those faculty positions were non-tenure track and/or part-time tier 2 positions. of the 83 new instructional faculty positions, twice as many were held by females (58 female hires, 25 male hires). of the 83 new faculty positions, 16 (19 %) earned degrees from our institution and 60 (72%) of those faculty were caucasian. in sum, we are not making gains in terms of ethnicity. we seem to be making gains in terms of gender, but at what cost. these new female faculty are not in full-time tenure track positions. and, more new faculty hold degrees from our own institution; they are academically inbred. tier 1 faculty when looking at tier 1 instructional faculty positions, from 1994 to 1997, the numbers of faculty increased by 12 (9 %). females gained all but one of the positions and all but two of these positions were held by faculty with degrees from other institutions. we had no increase in caucasian faculty during this file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/winter2000/b-table5.html timeframe. the 12 faculty positions enhanced our institutional demographics by increasing african american (plus 1), asian (plus 5), hispanic (plus 2), native american (plus 2), nonresident alien (plus 3) numbers. there seemed to be a focused drive to increase tier 1 positions in ways that will diversity our faculty while increasing academic integrity by not academically inbreeding. tier 2 faculty however, this same evaluation cannot be made of tier 2 instructional faculty. the number of tier 2 instructional faculty positions increased by 71 (63 %). of those 71 faculty, 47 (66 %) were female and 24 (33 %) were male. almost twice as many women as men were placed in tier 2 positions. in this tier, we gained caucasian faculty during this time frame (60 of the 71), a demographic addition some would question. of the 11 faculty positions that enhanced our institutional diversity demographics, gains were found in african american (plus 2, 100% increase), asian (plus 3, 58% increase), hispanic (plus 1, 100% increase), and nonresident alien (plus 4, 60% increase) categories. the number of faculty with degrees from other institutions almost doubled while the number of faculty with degrees from our institution increased by 25 percent. such gains in inbred faculty numbers were well over the national norms or percentages recommended by scholars in the field. tier comparisons gender. from 1994 to 1997, the gender of instructional faculty changed. more women were being employed, but these women were being employed in tier 2 positions. in fact, over one third of the female faculty at this institution were in tier 2 positions compared to less than 15 percent of the male faculty. our institution is employing fewer males in instructional faculty positions, but males still outnumbered females in instructional faculty positions at either level, tier 1 or tier 2. ethnicity. from 1994 to 1997, the diversity of instructional faculty changed. more ethnic diversity could be found in both tier 1 and tier 2 positions. academic inbreeding. from 1994 to 1997, the numbers of instructional faculty holding degrees from our institution increased. most of the increases were in tier 2 faculty instructional positions. conclusions and recommendations changes in staffing in terms of tiering, gender, ethnicity and academic inbreeding were revealed by this distinctly different descriptive review of institutional demographics. what seemed like small changes, a percentage point or two, were much more dramatic when viewed through the lens of tiers, gender, ethnicity and/or academic inbreeding. for example, between 1994 and 1997, the numbers of males decreased one percent and the numbers of females increased one percent. what was not known, however, was that the decrease in males occurred in tier 1 positions and the percentage of males in tier 2 positions increased (each by 3%). at the same time, the increase in females (13%) occurred in tier 2 positions and decreased in tier 1 positions. the trends are the same, but the percentages show disparities some might view as alarming. in terms of diversity, alarming trends are seen as well. institutional demographics would indicate that instructional faculty are predominately caucasian. increases in diversity demographics, however, illustrate that these new instructional faculty are in both tier 1 and tier 2 positions. although their numbers are low, the percentage point increases are tier 2 positions are alarming. more faculty of color are in all likelihood not on a tenure-track, not full-time and may possess terminal degrees from our own institution. they would be classified by many as second class academic citizens. they fulfill institutional diversity needs, but do not have the same opportunities to gain in terms of academic position through tenure-track full-time employment (chronister, 1996; sommer, 1994). academic inbreeding has become less of an issue over the years as institutions have more routinely limited the numbers of inbred faculty in tenure-track positions. however, the rise in second?tier (nontenure track and part-time) faculty may be altering this reality. inbred faculty reflect strikingly different demographics than those for the institution as a whole. they appear more likely to be female and in nontenure track positions than their noninbred counterparts. and, in some cases, inbred faculty reflect diversity demographics for the institution as a whole. if academic inbreeding is not a good institutional strategy, unfortunately, our institution is practicing it beyond the current national norms, but within the historical 15 percent margin. these numbers, however, appear to be rising. like inbreeding, if the proliferation of faculty tiering is problematic for academe, this institution is promoting faculty tiering, but at a lower rate than national trends. but, inbreeding and faculty tiering appear to be related, with more inbred faculty in lower tiered positions. at this institution, inbreeding has a better chance of leading to non-tenure track, full or part-time positions. these positions also appear to be offered more often to women and some minorities than is typical for the institution as a whole. this relationship needs further examination. our focus on instructional faculty was purposeful in that we wanted to reveal the characteristics of faculty teaching both undergraduate and graduate coursework. at our institution, we believe in addition to being concerned about the rise in people of color and academically inbred faculty in tier 2 instructional faculty positions, students and their education may also be negatively impacted. if academic inbreeding is not a wise practice for traditional tier 1 faculty, why would it be appropriate for tier 2 faculty who are primarily responsible for undergraduate instruction? this relationship needs further examination as well. references abramson, j. 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(1993, april). the reno lectureships and the cccc statement: are they wearing white hats in nevada? paper presented at the annual meeting of the conference on college composition and communication, san diego, ca. dutton, j. e. (1980, april). the impact of inbreeding and immobility on the professional role and scholarly performance of academic scientists. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association, boston. (eric document reproduction number ed 196 714) eells, w. c., & cleveland, a. c. (1935). the effects of inbreeding. journal of higher education, 6, 323328. eliot, c. w. (1908). university administration. boston: houghton mifflin. ezrati, j. b. (1983). personnel policies in higher education: a covert means of sex discrimination? educational administration quarterly, 19(4), 105-119. gappa, j. m. 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(1998). reconfiguring the professoriate: an overview. academe, 84(1), 48-53. sommer, b. (1994). recognizing academe's other faculty. planning for higher education, 22(4), 7-10. thompson, k. (1992). piecework to parity: part-timers in action. thought and action: the nea journal of journal of higher education, 8(1), 29?37. tuckman, h. p. (1978). who is part-time in academe? aaup bulletin, 64, 305-315. wilson, r. (1999a, april 9). yale relies on tas and adjuncts for teaching, report says. the chronicle of higher education, a15. wilson, r. (1999b, october 22). how a university created 95 faculty slots and scaled back its use of parttimers. the chronicle of higher education, a18. wyer, j. c., & conrad, c. f. (1984a). institutional inbreeding reexamined. american educational research journal, 21(1), 213-225. wyer, j. c., & conrad, c. f. (1984b). institutional origin: labor market signaling in higher education. the review of higher education, 7(2), 95-109. dr. debra j blanke is a professor at midwest city. blanke@okstate.edu dr. adrienne e. hyle is a professor at oklahoma state university. aeh@okstate.edu mailto:blanke@okstate.edu mailto:aeh@okstate.edu awl journal home page awl journal volume 3, number 1, winter 2000 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awl%20aug3/winter2000/index.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/google%20drive/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership where have all the smart women gone? alice rowe, ph. d. rowe, spring, 1997 when society discourages women from showing their intelligence, two problems arise. not only are women's abilities hidden, but bright women are literally hidden from one another. "yes, you're bright, but shut up. you talk too much. i was very clearly taught that in order to be accepted, you had to keep the lid on about how bright you were." these words were spoken by sally, one of the participants in my study of gifted women. the study was designed to investigate women's reflections concerning their childhood gifted label. the study focus was twofold: whether the participants felt giftedness was a positive, negative, or mixed influence on their lives and how their achievements were affected by their giftedness. gifted labeling, gifted women, and women's achievements provided the literature contexts. the study subjects were 34 college-educated women between the ages of 30-50, who had participated in school gifted programs as children. overwhelmingly, participants shared the view that being identified as gifted was a positive experience in their lives. they found it a motivator to do well in school. even beyond school, it was still a part of their identity. negative effects focused on external social issues, such as feeling separate or isolated. study results lead to the conclusion that although being identified as gifted did help the participants as young women in that it gave them internal feelings of competence and confidence, there seemed to be no apparent link between being labeled gifted and career aspirations and achievements. once their education was completed, there was no, or little, external encouragement, support, or guidance to become high achievers in the professional field. this study formed the basis for my book, where have all the smart women gone? though the study i conducted was about gifted women, i believe the themes in their lives overlap with most women, whether or not they are seen by others as gifted. (in addition, the women in the study spoke of giftedness in broad terms, not just in brightness or ability to do well in school. they included the nurturance of one's children and family and the joy of accomplishment from the pursuit of a career that still allows time for a satisfying personal life.) my hunch is that women in leadership http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html positions, or who aspire to them, will find at least some of these themes to be very familiar. a country called double bind the land of lost dreams where have all the smart women gone? they went to a country called double bind. this is not a literal country, but a place many of us understand on a deep level, because we have been there ourselves. the country of double bind is a symbol for the dilemmas that women find themselves in, especially if they happen to be smart and competent. in this country are four lands. the first is the land of lost dreams. on the edge of this land is a place called miss invincible. most of the women in the study believed they could achieve anything. i was taught i could do anything i wanted to do." (anne) i felt like there wasn't anything i couldn't do. everything was out there. (roxanne) they had a strong message they could do anything, but did they? not necessarily. one reason for this ironic twist: they faced that double bind. they were told they could do anything in the classroom, but beyond that, the message was often, "well, of course you can't do that." when sputnik went up, they put me in math analysis and physics and chemistry to groom me. but when i wanted to be an astronaut, i was told, 'you can't apply.' (brenda) many women felt a lack of role models. ruth, a nurse, said: whatever i did, i did well, but if i had to point to something that kept me from trying out a different career, i think it would be the lack of female role models. i didn't see in front of me what the possibilities were. anne, also a nurse, could not picture herself in the career she had in mind originally, partly because she saw no women entering that field: i wanted to be a nuclear engineer when i started high school, but i couldn't see myself doing that. i couldn't imagine myself in a tie and wing-tipped shoes. the land of sexism in addition to a lack of female role models, a related reason for not achieving one's dreams is cultural sexism. this is the land of sexism, located next to the land of lost dreams. in various ways, both subtle and direct, our culture discourages women from expressing their intelligence. many of the women in the study faced gender role expectations. the following comment by brenda is a powerful testament to the conflict involved in being a woman and being bright: i was never told it was okay to be a girl. my dad raised me like a boy because i had the intelligence. for me, there was a loss of femininity, the whole side of me that made me a woman. now i've had to go back over that part, telling myself it's okay to be a girl. continue awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 1, spring 1997 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/spring97/awlv1_01p2.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/awl.html 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file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership exploring the dilemmas of leadership: voices from the field linda hampton wesson, ph.d. wesson, winter, 1998 although women comprise a majority of the nation's public school teaching force, most school administrators are white males, and at the highest level in public school administration, the superintendency, there seems to be a great deal of resistance to gender and minority integration. school administrators generally come from the ranks of teachers. therefore, a historical perspective of women and minorities in teaching provides a framework for understanding the role of women and minorities in administration. white males did almost all formal teaching in this country until the late eighteenth century, and it was not until the end of the colonial period that women began to teach in elementary school. but by the end of the nineteenth century women outnumbered males in the teaching profession. this was due in part to the high demand for males in the private sector and the rapid growth of the elementary school (shakeshaft, 1989). recent figures (feistritzer, 1990) indicate that this trend is escalating; since 1985, 78% of new teachers hired were women, and 92% were white; only 5% of teachers hired since 1985 were african-american; 2% were hispanic and 1% were asian. the number of native american teachers hired since 1985 is negligible (feistritzer, 1990). so while the number of women in the teaching profession is increasing, the number of minority teachers is declining. in part this decline of minority teachers may be accounted for by circumstances that are similar to those in the african-american community as reported by perkins(1989): in the 1980's [b]lacks began in increasingly larger numbers to take advantage of the fact that professions other than teaching usually are more financially rewarding and prestigious. black communities have always held educators in high esteem, but as communities have become more integrated, and teachers have moved their residences from the communities in which they teach, teacher status among blacks has dropped. as the number of black professionals grows in other fields, teachers lose significance. in addition, because society evaluates one's worth and status according to income, low salaries have http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html contributed to the decline in teacher status within the black community as it assimilates the values of the larger society (p.363). although the gender of students is fairly evenly distributed across educational levels, women teachers are concentrated at the elementary level and decrease in number in middle, secondary, and postsecondary institutions. table 1 shows the gender stratification in teaching and administration for american k-12 public schools and both public and private postsecondary institutions (bell & chase, 1993). table 1 gender stratification: proportion of female students/faculty/board members/leaders students faculty board members leaders postsecondary level 54.4% 27.0% 20.0% 11.3% secondary level 48.8% 52.0% 34.7% 5.6%(supts) 7.6%(prins) middle level 48.6% 57.0% 23.0% elementary level 87.0% 37.0% source: bell & chase, "the underrepresentation of women in school leadership," in catherine marshall (ed.), the new politics of race and gender, 1993. the racial and ethnic stratification of faculty, leaders and board members in the education system in american schools is even more striking than the gender stratification. table 2 shows that, particularly in k-12 public schools, faculty, educational leaders, and board members in the united states do not closely reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the student body. while 16.1% of elementary, middle, and secondary students are african-americans, just 8.2% of the teachers are african-americans; while 9.9% of the students are hispanic, only 2.9% of the teachers are hispanic. the middle school level has the highest representation of african-american principals (9.3%) and hispanic principals (2.1%). but at the highest levels of k-12 administration and policy making, namely the high school principal, the superintendent and the school board, minorities are even more likely to be missing. only 4.6% of the high school administrators are minorities, and among the nation's school board members, 3.4% of the members are minorities (bell & chase, 1993). similarly in private and public postsecondary institutions, the number of african-americans, hispanics and american indians are smaller proportions of faculty, presidents, and board members than the students they represent. asians who comprise 4% of students in postsecondary institutions and 4.7% of the faculty, are an exception to this pattern. although women comprise a majority of the nation's public school teaching force, most school administrators are white males, and at the highest level in public school administration, the superintendency, there seems to be a great deal of resistance to gender and minority integration (bell & chase, 1993). this is true despite the increased reservoir of highly and suitably qualified women. table 2 race /ethnic stratification: proportion of leaders/faculty/students/board members leaders faculty students board members postsecondary level 8% min 92% non-min 4.5% aframer 4.7% asian 2% hisp .3%natamer 88.5% white 8.9% aframer 4% asian 5.5% hisp 8.9% natamer 77.8% white 6.3% aframer .6% hisp 90% white 3% other min secondary level superintend'cy 2.5% aframer .3% asian .6% hisp .8% native amer 95.8% white principals 3.1% aframer 1.5% hisp 94.7% white middle level 9.3% aframer 2.1% hisp 88.1% white 8.2% aframer 2.9% hisp 88.8% white 16.1% aframer 2.8% asian 9.9% hisp .9% natamer 70.4% white 2.2% aframer .1% asian .8% hisp .3% natamer 96.5% white elementary level 7.8% aframer 1.5% asian 1.5% hisp 1% natamer 8 7.9% white source: bell & chase, "the underrepresentation of women in school leadership," in catherine marshall (ed.), the new politics of race and gender, 1993. barriers impeding change kanter (1977) suggested that uncertainty in the organization makes homogeneity of the management group important to its members. having studied corporate organizational structure, she concluded that the higher level of management in the organizational hierarchy, the more discretion the occupants have in performing their job responsibilities and the more unclear the criteria for determining their successes. therefore, management seeks to fill its ranks, particularly at the highest level of management, with those persons that best fit the existing norm. kanter showed that often those whose social characteristics are different from the management group are clustered in positions that have well-defined criteria for determining success or they served as experts rather than decision makers. wheatley (1979) adapted kanter's theory to public schools and postulated that this attempt by management to reduce uncertainty by requiring homogeneity in its management group placed constraints on all teachers and had definite negative implications for women and minorities. this theory helps explain the career patterns for minorities that has been identified by valverde and brown (1988). they noted that minority administrators are assigned to special programs and schools with large concentrations of minority students. research on african-american superintendents has also shown that they are often appointed to systems with inadequate financial resources (scott, 1980, 1990; revere, 1987; sizemore, 1986) or districts with a large concentration of minority students who are economically disadvantaged and have low achievement test scores (moody, 1983; townsel & banks, 1975). furthermore, research by revere (1987) and sizemore (1986) found that african-american superintendents who are women are found clustered in and around cities. hugh j. scott (1980), the first african-american superintendent of the washington, dc school district, noted that when urban districts became fiscally over burdened and the students they serve are racial minorities, white superintendents are reluctant to take the positions. he predicted over a decade ago: the expansion in the ranks of black superintendents will be related to whites not wanting to deal with the engrossing problems of cities. black superintendents will inherit the effect of increased societal deterioration, unabated decline in academic achievement, deficient financial resources, higher percentages of black students and students from low-income families, a majority of black activists on the school board, a large number of blacks in the community and demands from vocal blacks in the community (p.188). but in the south, these kinds of employment patterns did not begin until after the supreme court desegregation ruling in 1954. according to the research of coffin (1972), during the 1960s the number of african-american high school principals in 13 southern and border states actually dropped over 90%, and the decline of elementary principals could have been even greater. this loss had an overwhelming effect on the african-american community, because the school principals were often the most prominent citizens in the community. the loss of these role models create a leadership vacuum in these communities that has not since been recovered. ortiz (1982) used the social science theories of socialization and role to provide a means for understanding the occupational and organization participation of women and minorities in school settings. she defined socialization as those changes which occur in persons as they participate in an organization and concluded that minorities and women do not interface with the school organization in the same manner as white administrators. she explained this difference in part by the placement of women and minorities in special projects and schools with minority populations. she noted the importance of principals and other key administrators in this socialization process. these educators are the gatekeepers and provide the socialization opportunities for aspiring administrators to progress. valverde's research (1974) agreed with this, and also found that minorities are excluded from administrative positions mainly because they are not sponsored. it is evident that since only 4.6% of the secondary principals and 4.2% of the superintendents are native americans, asian, african-american and hispanic and only 7.6% of the secondary principals and 5.6% of superintendents are women, the numbers of women and minorities in the gatekeeping positions are simply not equal to the task of sponsoring and socializing women and minorities into educational administrative positions in any substantial way. another set of explanations for the underrepresentation of women and minorities in educational administration centers on public policy trends and their effect on equity. clark and astuto (cited in bell & chase, 1993) explained that after 1980 the attention paid to equity was replaced by a focus on excellence. this change is exemplified in the 1983 report of the national commission on excellence in education, a nation at risk which focused on learner outcomes and the need for excellence while disregarding the issue of equity. the education reform debate, which began in the middle eighties, also ignores issues of equity. in fact, a content analysis of 138 articles on this educational reform movement shows that gender equity occupied less than 1% of the articles (sadker, sadker, & steindam, 1989). ragins and sundstrom's (1989) synthesis of the literature on power and gender in organizations provides a useful model for understanding the underrepresentation of women and minorities in administration. ragins and sundstrom define factors for analysis in terms of individual factors, interpersonal factors, organizational factors and societal factors. they also note while there can be a great deal of overlapping in these factors, the larger aggregations, (societal and organizational) have a stronger impact on the smaller aggregations (interpersonal and individual). this analysis is consistent with the work of yeakey, johnston, and adkison (1986) who summarized the importance of these "larger aggregations:" the larger body of organizational literature suggests, irrespective of attitudes and training program, that no real change will occur until it is accompanied by broader societal change. that is, the basic problem of the exclusion of minorities and women from administrative positions is the subordinate role of women and minorities in all parts of society (p. 137). it seems that while organizational theory may reveal implicit prejudices as well as informal rules and practices that exclude women and minorities from educational administration, the constraints external to the organization may have a more powerful effect on equity. recent demographic and educational trends this gender and racial stratification in public school administration is becoming more striking and disturbing as the demographics of this country change. statistics (feistritzer, 1990) show that the number of white teachers who will be teaching people who are racially or ethnically different from themselves will continue to rise dramatically. this is not only because of the changing demo-graphic picture in this country which forecasts that the minority population in united states will increase from 30% to 38% between 1990 and 2010 (hodgkinson, 1991) but also because of the reduced number of people of color, who are entering teacher preparation programs (feistritzer, 1990). corresponding to an anticipated student population increase is a projected need to hire more teachers and administrators. the national center for education statistics (1988) reports that the demand for new teachers is expected to increase by more than 35% before stabilizing in 1995, with most of the increase occurring at the secondary level where the increase is estimated at 80%. the demand for hiring new administrators is more difficult to estimate due to the scarcity of national survey data on administrator turnover, but a 1988 study by the national association of secondary school principals (nassp) reported that 35% of current high school principals were 50 years of age or older, suggesting that a substantial number of high school principals will be eligible for retirement in the next 10 to 15 years. and the data indicate that the average age of high school principals is higher in larger school districts and communities; a fact that will have implications for the hiring of women and minorities, who have previously been more successful in being selected for these jobs (pounder, 1990). but filling numbers, quotas and targets with certain types of administrators is not the answer to the equity issues in educational administration. einstein's maxim that we can't solve problems with the same intelligence we had when we created them certainly can be applied to this complex issue of equity in educational administration. just as corporate america is using new paradigms to accomplish the enormous task of redefining the production and distribution of goods and services in a free-market global economy (senge, 1991; peters, 1988; wheatley, 1992: block, 1991), so educational leaders need to reach out to each other and free themselves of some of the constraints that traditional assumptions have imposed on the definition of educational leadership. a part of these traditional assumptions centers on the perceived need by those at the highest level of administration and policy-making to define leadership in terms of homogeneity and control. the importance of educational leaders trained to value diversity and see the need to expand their view of reality should not be minimized. if this nation is to survive as a democratic society which is competitive in the international arena, the full participation of all its citizens is necessary. this participation is dependent to a large degree on the ability of educational leaders to create systems that celebrate the multifaceted possibilities existing within schools today and see differences as a "valuable resource for enriching the tradition of democratic pluralism" (giroux, 1994). these are the kind of leaders who will have skills in "empowering students who typically struggle in schools (e.g., students of color, different ethnicities, students with disabilities, students of lower social classes)" (capper & jamison, 1993). to be this kind of leader and have access to the leadership roles in educational administration in the twenty-first century will be an exciting venture. here are some tips for equal access and treatment in educational administration. tips for success know yourself. the most important ingredient for success is honest and objective evaluation of your strengths and abilities as well as your aspirations. this self-assessment is a continual process which helps you understand your strengths and abilities so that you can put your energies where your talents and interests are. be prepared. credentials and work experiences are an important part of success in educational administration. be selective about the preparation program you chose; enroll in a preparation program that will best help prepare you for the job of an educational administrator. as you are working on your credentials, set realistic goals for yourself and seek work experiences that will enable you to be a qualified candidate for leadership positions. analyze and strategize. analyze your career situations and strategize your career moves so that each move will maximize the potential for achieving your goals. don't lower your own expectation for yourself; make career decisions based on the vision that you have for yourself. negative work experiences. work at turning negative experiences into positive factors to be utilized in reaching your goals. negative experiences give you information that can be useful to you and to others; these kinds of experiences have been used by many as a modus operandum for high motivation, determination and a set of survival behaviors that dispel illusions and help elicit change. critical factors affecting advancement. be aware of three critical factors that affect advancement: structural barriers, role compatibility and organizational fit. in order to be the right person at the right place at the right time and to get the job you want, critically analyze how structural barriers (those barriers that are in place in the organization), role compatibility (the fit of your talents and the needs of the organization) and organizational fit (how well you fit into the structure of the organization) will impact your advancement. affiliate. don't be trapped by historic divisions between races and genders; join state and national professional groups (i.e. national association of secondary school principals, nassp; american association of school administrators, aasa; association of supervision and curriculum development, ascd) that include people from various groups, classes, and races. share goals. no one can be successful in a vacuum. it takes support from others as well as support to others to be successful. establish "win-win" relationships; that is, relationships that are supportive for both parties. these are the kinds of relationships in which you can share goals, be a mentor and establish networking ties. find a mentor and be a mentor. a mentor is a person who you want to emulate; it is someone you respect not only for the position they hold but because of the skills they use to successfully execute their responsibilities in that position. as you learn from a mentor, you also learn by being a mentor; your personal growth will be enhanced if you also become a mentor to someone else. network. networking is an information giving and receiving system. it is the process of developing and using contacts for information, advice and support (duvall, 1980). these kinds of contacts are very useful in accomplishing your goals. table 3 mentoring functions career functions psychosocial functions sponsorshop/promote/recommend exposure/viability coaching protection set challenging task/performance standard share expertise provide needed information chance to observe/learn by association arrange administrative experience advise on salary negotiations role modeling support and encouragement counseling friendship encourage risk taking enhance self-confidence help formulate career plan act as sounding board facilitate move from classroom arrange access to other administrators provide feedback on progress there is a fairly close relationship among sharing goals, mentoring and networking. mentoring and networking can form a comfortable overlap. the sharing of information, the benefits of mutual support, the potential for tutelage and guidance are all features common to sharing goals, mentoring and networking (swoboda & millar, 1986). pavan (1987) lists mentoring functions that show the importance of mentoring and the ways in which mentoring can be effective. table 3 shows these mentoring functions which are divided into career functions and psychosocial functions. the career functions of a mentor deal with how mentors can help advance your career; the psychosocial functions deal with how mentors can give social and psychological support to you as you develop career plans and move from the classroom to roles in administration. summary as educators reach out to each other in these kinds of ways, they will be better prepared to meet the challenge of leadership in tomorrow's schools not with fear, anxiety, frustration or discussion only of standards in the traditional way, but with the expectation of a celebration as they work together to improve education to meet the needs of a pluralistic population. references bell, c. s. & chase, s. e. (1994). the underrepresentation of women in school leadership. in c. marshall, (ed.) the new politics of race and gender. washington, dc: palmer press. block, p. (1991). the empowered manager: positive political skills at work. san francisco:jossey-bass publishers. capper, c. a. & jamison, m. t. (1993). let the buyer beware: total quality management and educational research and practice. educational researcher 22(8), 25-30. coffin, g. c. (1972). the black school administrator and how he's being pushed to extinction. american school board journal, 159(11), 33-36. duvall, b. (1980). networking. paper presented at the annual meeting of the speech communication association, new york, ny. feistritzer, c. e. (1988). profile of teachers in the u.s.-1990. washington, dc: national center for educational information. giroux, h. a. (1993). living dangerously: multiculturalism and the politics of difference. new york: peter lang publishing, inc. hodgkinson, h. (1991). reform versus reality. phi delta kappa, 73(1), 8-16. kanter, r. m. (1977). men and women in the corporation. new york: basic books. moody, c.d. (1973). the black superintendent. school review, 81(3), 375-382. national association of secondary school principals. (1992). developing school leaders: a call for collaboration. reston, va: author. national association of secondary school principals. (1988). high school leaders and their schools. reston, va: author. national center for education statistics. (1988). the condition of education: elementary and secondary education. volume 1. washington, dc: us department of education, oeri. ortiz, f. i. (1982). career patterns in education: women, men, and minorities in public school administration. new york: praeger. pavan, b. n. (1987, winter). mentoring certified aspiring and incumbent female and male public school administrators. journal of educational equity and leadership, 7(4) 318-331. perkins, l. m. (1989). the history of blacks in teaching: growth and decline within the profession. in d. warren (ed.), american teachers: histories of a profession at work (pp. 344-369). new york: macmillan. peters, t. (1988). thriving on chaos: handbook for a management revolution. new york: alfred a. knoff. pounder, d. g. (1990). educational megatrends and increased female leadership in schools. paper presented at the 1990 university council for educational administration, pittsburgh, pa. ragins, b. r. & sundstrom, e. (1989). gender and power in organizations: a longitudinal perspective. psychological bulletin, 105(1),51-33. revere, a. b. (1987). black women superintendents in the united states 1984-85. journal of negro education, 56(4), 510-520. sadker, m., sadker, d., steindam, s. (1989). gender equity and educational reform. educational leadership, 46, 44-47. scott, h. j. (1980). the black superintendent: messiah or scapegoat? washington, dc: howard university press. scott, h j. (1990). views of black school superintendents on black consciousness and professionalism. journal of negro education, 59(2), 165-172. senge, p. m. (1990). the fifth discipline. new york: doubleday. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration (updated edition). newbury park, ca: sage. sizemore, b. a. (1986). the limits of the black superintendency. journal of educational equity and leadership, 6(3), 180-208. swoboda, m. j. & millar, s. b. (1986). networking-mentoring: career strategies of women in academic administration. journal of the national association of women deans. administrators and counselors, 50(1), 8-13. townsel, c. w. & banks, l. a. (1975). the urban school administrator: a black perspective. journal of negro education, 44(3), 421a31. valverde, l. a. (1974). succession socialization: its influences on school administration candidates and its implication to the exclusion of minorities from administration (project 3-o813). washington, dc: national institute of education. valverde, l. a. & brown, f. (1988). influences on leadership development among racial and ethnic minorities. in n.j. boyan (ed.). handbook of research of educational administration (pp. 143-158). new york: longman. wheatley, m. j. (1992). leadership and the new science. san francisco, ca: berrett-koehler publishers. wheatley, m. j. (1979). the impact of opportunity and power structure in schools: why women don't become administrators. cambridge, ma: goodmeasure. linda hampton-wesson is chair of the department of educational administration, research and foundations at youngstown state university in youngstown, ohio. e-mail: wesson@earthlink.net awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 2, winter 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style 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project (best), seeks to improve efficiency and reduce the repeating of grade levels and dropout rates for these girls throughout the country. this program is the first of its kind in guatemala. this article will provide a status report of the current situation for the girls in guatemala's public primary schools through a broad overview of the literature associated with the guatemala girls' education initiative. a brief orientation of the guatemala girls' education initiative within the broader basic education strengthening (best) project in guatemala will be given. next, a description of the status of education in guatemala, especially for girls, will show the need for a specialized program. different aspects of the initiative will be outlined, including the goals, strategies, and components of the program. finally, implications and findings of the program will be provided. guatemala geographically, guatemala is the third largest central american country at 108,889 square kilometers. at the outset of the initiative, guatemala's population was 8.6 million. the rural population is approximately 63 percent. fifty percent of the indigenous population live in rural areas, constituting 73 percent of the total rural population (usaid, 1989, p. 11). the official language is spanish, although 23 indigenous languages are spoken. to make communication even more difficult, geographic barriers caused by poor roads, and some 16,000 small, rural, mountainous satellite villages are difficult to access. usaid concludes that, because of guatemala's inefficient educational system, diversity of languages and cultures, and inaccessibility of a large part of the population, "solutions require consistently high levels of financial and political commitment over long http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html periods of time" (usaid, 1989, p. 12). guatemala has a high illiteracy rate, especially among the indigenous people, where 73 percent of the men are illiterate and 91 percent of the women are illiterate. in the labor force over the age of 15, about 87 percent have not completed primary school. about 25 percent of guatemala's schools are one-room, one-teacher schools (clay, 1991, p. 2). it is estimated that less than 60 percent of school-aged children were enrolled in school in 1980 (gorman & pollitt, p. 520). guatemala has late starting ages of school children, a high dropout rate, repeated reentries into school, poor retention, and poor efficiency. the basic education strengthening (best) project the guatemalan girls' education initiative is a subcategory in the larger educational project of basic education strengthening (best) in guatemala. best began with funds from united states agency for international development (usaid), which gradually became 'seed money' to encourage guatemalan donors to take over the financial responsibility. the project was initiated and mobilized by usaid/guatemala personnel, and later was taken over by guatemalan publicand private-sector leaders. in 1989, the usaid/guatemala project personnel created a mission education sector strategy to focus on public primary education. in addition, the mission developed the best program in cooperation with the ministry of education. the mission initiated a series of activities to examine the relationship of girl's public school education in guatemala to social and economic development. after initial investigation from literature reviews outside guatemala, usaid/guatemala decided that this was a topic for further investigation. an effort then was made to integrate girls' public education into the best project. the broad goal of best was to "improve the quality, efficiency, and equity of primary public education services in guatemala" and to "institutionalize measures to improve the classroom environment, improve efficiency in the allocation and use of resources, and increase the equity of educational policies and practices" (usaid, 1993a, p. 1). the best project originally started as a six-year project (1989-1995) that provided us$30 million to guatemala's ministry of education (moe) and was supported by an additional $31 million in counterpart funds. the timeframe has been extended to allow for system-wide, gradual change over the course of many years. best aimed to overcome long-term obstacles to education in guatemala; however, short-term constraints had to be improved before moving toward long-term results. thus, "project activities focused on the set of temporal priorities required for immediate improvements in the educational system, combined with a set of innovative delivery systems and analytic work designed to lay a foundation for future improvements in the financing, delivery, and management of basic education services" (usaid, 1993a, p. 1). best had four components: (1) bilingual education services for the mayan-speaking population; (2) support services to improve classroom instruction; (3) research and development on low-cost alternative instructional methodologies (including girls' education); and (4) support for the improvements in the management and planning function of the ministry of education through the development of a computerized management information system, standardized achievement tests, and a research program (usaid, 1993a, p. 2). the girls' education initiative was a subsection of component number three, 'lowcost alternative methodologies'. best had four major classroom innovations: (1) including bilingual education (pronebi); (2) multigrade active learning methodologies for learning schools (nueva escuela unitaria); (3) incentives for encouraging girls to stay in school (eduque a la niña); and (4) a pilot project to integrate these three components (clay, p. 1, 1996). the guatemalan economic, political, and social environment guatemala has suffered in all sectors from economic adjustments, poverty, political unrest and guerrilla warfare. guatemala's basic structure and stability is in a state of recovery as a result. gorman and pollitt (1992) described this instability: between 1954 and 1982, fourteen different presidents or governments were in power. of these, all but two were headed by the military and only five were chosen through democratic elections. during that same period, the ministry of education in guatemala was headed by 25 different ministers comprised of ten lawyers, five military personnel, two medical doctors, a journalist, an economist, an engineer, a biochemist, a writer, two primary-school teachers and "a woman without a profession" (p. 520). during this period public education suffered. improvements were needed in all areas of the public educational system. the rural areas had especially poor public educational services. overall, the system was marked by inefficiency; widespread illiteracy; high dropout rates; poor management; poor teaching methods; materials that were outdated, inappropriate, or marginalizing; and many other problems. guatemala began a democratically-elected national government in 1986, which has had a positive effect on the confidence in the government after years of political and economic instability. economically, a downward economic spiral experienced by guatemala in the early 80s appears to have ended with economic growth of 3.1 percent in 1987 (usaid, 1989, p. 11). these political and economic changes helped foster a more positive climate for development. these gains, however, have not spread to the marginalized members of the community, namely the highland indigenous people, the urban poor, and women. typically, about 95 percent of the education budget has been used for teachers' salaries. a 1987 calculation showed that grade-level repetition cost 20 percent of the total ministry of education budget for that year (clay, 1994, p. 3). limited financial resources have not left much room for investing in improvements. girls' education in guatemala a majority of girls in guatemala are at the low end of an already poor public school system. a greater percentage of males than females are enrolled in primary school. literacy rates favor males, and females typically leave school earlier than males. ironically, males are more likely to fail than females. if the number of years in school is held constant, then the maximum grade attained is equivalent between the sexes (gorman & pollitt, pp. 532-533). this might be misleading by creating numbers that reflect a brighter picture than the reality. nevertheless, girls consistently come out at lower levels in all levels of public education in guatemala. usaid (1989) points out in its project description that girls are required to help out with domestic chores and child care more than boys. because of scheduling problems from household duties, the girls are just too tired to complete homework or to participate in school regularly and meaningfully. a director of one school said that girls drop out more than boys because they are "too introverted; they are very reluctant to speak in class and do not interact in any positive manner", and blamed this on girls "innate cultural backwardness" (usaid, 1989, p. 13). often girls are thought to have a lack of ability, without considering other factors contributing to poor school performance. a question to be answered is to what extent do the highland indigenous girls understand spanish, if spanish is used as the language of instruction. perhaps this would influence their reluctance to speak. for the guatemala girls' education initiative, usaid/guatemala needed to illustrate that education of girls would bring about positive change. girls' education was identified as having a positive effect on the economy because without girls' education "the productive potential of much of the country's resources would not be brought to bear on guatemala's development" (clay, 1991, p. 1). thus, the idea of education for girls became an economic issue early on. this will be discussed further in the implementation of the initiative. beginning stages of the guatemala girls' education initiative literature about girls' public education in guatemala is basically nonexistent. usaid/guatemala found that "the literature review indicated that a number of studies, theses, and projects had focused on women's education; however, no research or projects had focused specifically on girls' education and its relationship to any of the indicators of development" (clay, 1991, p. 5). despite a shortage of research, usaid/guatemala generalized about girls' education in guatemala and its effect on social and economic factors of development based on studies in other developing countries. the following conclusions were drawn, which were incorporated into the reasons why girls' education was important to incorporate into the best project increased school attendance by girls produces long-term effects in reduced rates of illiteracy among adults; increased school attendance by girls can produce medium-term (three to five years) effects by reducing fertility rates; increases in the number of years that girls attend school yield cost savings for government and private sector entities in reduced expenditures; increased school attendance by girls can produce long-term effects in improved agricultural and industrial productivity; and increased school attendance by girls produces improved family well-being through improved knowledge of health and nutrition (clay, 1991, pp. 6-7). usaid stressed that improvements in girls' enrollment, attendance, and achievement rates could only occur through intersectoral cooperation (clay, 1991, p. 7). the multisectoral approach to this problem of girls' education stems from the obstacles that were out of reach of the ministry of education. these obstacles included poor roads or inaccessibility of schools, distance, and direct costs of education paid by the parents, including school fees, books, clothing, etc. other obstacles included: lack of child-care services, requiring older girls to stay at home; economic constraints due to lost opportunity costs for girls' labor in domestic tasks; inadequate public services of energy and water, requiring girls to search for and chop wood for cooking and to fetch water; perceived irrelevance of the educational curriculum to the needs of girls and their families; and school schedules that conflict with harvest periods or family work schedules (clay, 1991, p. 7). these constraints were recognized as problems faced by guatemalan girls in attending public schools. these obstacles were beyond the jurisdiction of the ministry of education. the challenge was to integrate the many sectors to attempt to fix these barriers in a multisectoral cooperative effort. the guatemala girls' education initiative planning strategies the usaid/guatemala personnel anticipated resistance from private and public sector leaders and cosponsors of the initiative to the idea of education for girls, and therefore had clarifications, responses, and plans of action ready for the opposition. usaid made particular efforts to make this initiative accepted and implemented. first, some individuals asserted that usaid was tampering with culture. usaid answered that "as a result of internal and external influences, cultures are dynamic and are in the process of continual change" (clay, 1991, p. 10). since change was inevitable, even with culture, usaid argued, at least planned change could be made into something positive (i.e., economic advancement for guatemala via education for girls). second, usaid wanted guatemalans to assume leadership roles in this initiative because "we knew that if girls' education was to take hold in guatemala the movement would have to be led by guatemalans, not by usaid, the united nations (un), or other international agencies" (clay, 1991, p. 11). in achieving that end, usaid attempted to pull influential guatemalan policy-makers to the cause. one way usaid attracted these top people was to find "highly qualified and motivated guatemalans who could spearhead the planning and implementation" (clay, 1991, p. 11). then, usaid presented the initiative to these policy-making people, who often became immediate supporters for girls' education, much to usaid/guatemala's admitted surprise. usaid/guatemala produced high quality materials and activities for the girls' education initiative campaign, including the following: an elegant luncheon and dinner; a logo for the initiative; personally delivered invitations; formal follow-up invitations; publicity documents; photo exhibition; media interviews; press announcements; and a formal reception at the ambassador's residence (clay, 1991, p. 17). third, usaid made a conscious effort to remain in the background. they wanted guatemala to make the initiative theirs, not to think of it as a usaid idea. also, usaid insisted that guatemalans present the initiative to other guatemalans, not usaid personnel. usaid had many requests from usaid staff to present and market the initiative, but usaid refused by saying that a usaid presence would be counterproductive for the promotion of the guatemala girl's education initiative. in the implementation process, usais encountered an obstacle that they had to overcome. the problem was that usaid identified lower fertility, better child and mother health, and later ages for first births to be a positive selling point in the aim to educate girls. they discovered, however, that whenever the issue of education's effect on reproduction came into the conversation, even the most ardent listeners would abruptly lose interest since the "subject of family planning was met with knee-jerk reactions" (clay, 1991, p, 13). usaid learned that whenever the topic of family planning was brought up, the people closed off any possibility of further discussion of girls' education. the subject was too much of a social taboo. at first, usaid decided it was best to educate the guatemalans about family planning. this failed to gain any constituents, so usaid "compromised our principles and excluded from the literature and discussions any reference to the relationship of girls' education to reductions in fertility rates" (clay, 1991, p. 14). this bias against family planning threatened to cancel support for the girls' education initiative. usaid reportedly was disappointed about abandoning this issue in the discussions and the literature, yet felt the overall mission of the project was more important. finally, in keeping with the ultimate end goal of girls' education, usaid made strategic decisions about presenting the initiative. first, they focused on economic development. usaid made it clear that their focus was social and economic development in guatemala, not education and not women's issues. they did not allow the topic of equity to come into the discussion, reminding the listeners that the focus was exclusively on social and economic development. however, it is suggested that both education and women's issues are tied to social and economic development. in this vein, usaid never referred to women, only girls. they did this because they received negative reactions if women were mentioned and they "did not want to allow listeners the opportunity to draw these and other possible inferences concerning the effects of education on the lives of girls as they grow into women" (clay, 1991, p. 17). usaid felt that when allowed to make the girl-to-woman connection, many guatemalans became threatened as to the possibilities of what an educated woman might do. little girls in public primary schools were not threatening, but grown educated women were. cultural implications regarding the role various social institutions, such as the church, play in influencing this view were not discussed, but are certainly worth further consideration. to sell the initiative, the discussion had to be limited to purely economic, social issues for guatemala as whole. this meant that inequities or the oppression of women were not mentioned. usaid, in keeping with the goal of educating girls, seemed to describe the initiative in whatever ways it would be accepted, and was successful in doing so. guatemala girls' education initiative components the girls' education initiative was not an original part of the best project but was added after the signing of the project agreement. the addition was made after extensive research and a literature review determined a specific need for a focus on girls' education. the research was conducted by aid/washington. the usaid material does not indicate what prompted this post-signing research to support a move to include education for girls. moving to the girls' education initiative, as indicated earlier, research and a literature review conducted by aid/washington showed that merely improving the quality and efficiency of the school system in guatemala could not improve the difference in girls' and boys' attendance, retention, and completion rates in primary school (usaid, 1993, p. 53). thus, separate action had to be taken for girls. at this point, specific pilot projects and actions emerged. one program, franja curricular, was a project that "focuses on qualitative changes in teachers' attitudes and classroom strategies, in curriculum materials, and in program development" (usaid, 1993, p. 54). another program, eduque a la niña, was a "testing package of interventions" (usaid, 1993, p. 54). eduque a la niña, which was a model project of donor coordination, was established, to test the following educational actions: tutors; scholarships; teacher training; educational materials; social marketing; and others. once tested, some of these newly tested and revised or improved activities were to be implemented in 21 guatemalan highlands communities. the goals were to find the most cost-effective ways to promote retention and completion for girls. components of the initiative a discussion of the components of the initiative follows. first, usaid wanted to create quality learning and teaching materials for girls in primary school. seven full-time specialists were proposed to be hired in the areas of literacy text writers and curriculum. this would cost approximately $19 to $120 per child. the annual cost per student in guatemala in 1992 was about $55. despite doubts as to the costeffectiveness of the project, it was supported and approved (usaid, 1993, p. 24). the initiative can be divided into three broad categories of goals. the first category was the material and curriculum improvement, mentioned in the above paragraph. second, the franja curricular and eduque a la niña projects, and third, the development and testing of innovations to retain girls in school and improve their achievement (usaid, 1993, p. 24). these three broad goals were implemented by the following activities: seminars, fora, and presentations to the public and private sectors policy-makers to promote national level actions to address the barriers to girls' education; support of the ministry of education in policy analysis and development through the analysis of research and findings on girls' education in guatemala; development of the franja curricular, including materials development and programs for integrating concepts, attitudes, and methods for improving girls' attendance and retention in primary school into all best project activities as well as all programs, materials, planning, and training of ministry of education personnel at all levels and in all regions; development and coordination of eduque a la niña, a pilot program of 'packages of educational interventions' supported by seven public and private sector donors which will operate in 21 communities in three educational regions through technical assistance of fundazucar; and support to the ministry of education to design its girls' scholarship program which was created by the minister of education in response to the policy initiatives of the best project girls' education initiative. during the first year, the program will benefit 2,000 girls in four educational regions of the country (usaid, 1993, pp. 24-25). the girls' education initiative was expected to provide 291 person-months of longand short-term technical assistance. these positions include: local long-term director (30 months) local long-term deputy director (30 months) program administrator (30 months) local long-term project design specialist (6 months) two local long-term coordinators (30 months each) long-term instructional design specialist (30 months) curriculum coordination specialist (8 months) long-term editorial specialist (30 months) communication specialist (3 months) evaluation specialist (4 months) two curriculum writers (12 months each) graphic designer (4 months) eight curriculum trainers (4 months each), and administrative/management specialist (3 months). in addition, the ministry of education agreed to open two new professional positions dealing exclusively with education for girls. finally, the ministry of education agreed to adding four coordinators and four supervisors to handle the girls' scholarship program (usaid, 1993, p. 25). involvement of fundazucar fundazucar, the foundation for sugar producers, was selected in a competitive bidding process to implement the eduque a la niòa project by coordinating the selection of bilingual public schools and implementation of eduque a la niña. fundazucar was founded in 1990 and immediately became involved in community activities, including supporting girls' education. this foundation is known in guatemala for efficiently and effectively implementing projects on education, health, and infrastructure programs. also, fundazucar partially funded the research and the publication of guatemala's national plan of action on girls' education (usaid, 1993a). fundazucar and other participating institutions were expected to generate funds from private-sector groups within the country to (a) raise money for the immediate project at hand, and (b) to establish sustainability for the activity. to facilitate fund-raising efforts, fundazucar participated in fundraising training within the institution and participated in fund-raising activities. discussion the results of the first year of the 'eduque a la niña' project found that combinations of interventions, including small scholarships for girls, community outreach, parent committees, and educational materials consistently lowered dropouts and raised attendance, but had only a slight effect on completion rates of girls. participation of girls increased. schools with the incentive packages for girls showed more consistent teacher attendance, which increased classroom instruction time for both boys and girls (clay, p. 14, 1994, p. 14). in a baseline study to establish indicators of girls and mayan girls participation, findings included that a lack of materials such as erasers, chalk, teacher guides, and paper was a complaint in many schools (usaid, 1994, p. b). therefore, if basic infrastructure is lacking, the innovations cannot reach full potential. the project raised several concerns, five of which are outlined below. first, the ministry of education seemed cooperative to add new staff positions to deal specifically with girls' educational issues and projects. did the ministry follow through on this commitment? if so, who filled these positions? are the new personnel knowledgeable and supportive of girls' education? it seems incongruous that guatemala would have such social, political, and cultural barriers to education, and yet the ministry would agree to wholeheartedly accept the initiative and other aspects of girls' education. one wonders if the ministry were responding to political pressure from usaid and the guatemalan policy-makers recruited to pursue the initiative, and if it actually has the intention of pursuing the initiative long-term. additionally, there is a question a second idea is that, although the girls' education initiative has specific components, programs, and personnel assigned for tasks; one wonders how this was all implemented. the research indicates that textbook revision was recommended, and that people were hired to do that, yet no results of this effort have been revealed. it would be informative to know how these changes were made, the cost, the new curriculum, how the materials were received, and finally, and if they seemed to be effective. the third idea deals with the methods used by usaid to gain local support in the communities for the initiative, such as how the local people were convinced that their girls should attend school. one example was given in which a father pulled his daughter out of the sixth grade. he was shown a flip chart entitled "las vidas de marta y rosa" which depicted the advantages of the girl who finishes sixth grade, and the disadvantages of the girl who only finishes first grade. the point made in the flip chart is that the family, community and the whole country reap the benefits of girls who can contribute socially and economically. this flip chart was effective in changing the father's mind, and the girl was allowed to finish sixth grade (see mothers & children, pp. 1-3). what other methods are used to gain respectability and acceptance for girls' education? what other materials have been developed? perhaps a full-scale campaign was created to raise awareness and gain excitement for the prospect of education for girls in the local communities. also, one assumes that the teachers, or whoever shows the flip chart, must have special training to be persuasive and have good reasons why girls should stay in school. the final idea relates to the methods employed for evaluation and follow-up by usaid in the communities in which this initiative was implemented. admittedly, major problems in the educational system included difficult access of the mountainous villages, language differences, lack of adequate buildings, seasonal migration of work. how have these problems of access been addressed? in spite of inaccessibility, how are the schools, teachers, and students evaluated? overall, the project seems fortuitous, and it is a bit unusual that a girls' education initiative would be integrated into the best program after the signing of the best project agreement. this turn of events created a rich and varied subgroup in the best program that has implications for further research. perhaps the research conducted during the initiative's phases and the lessons learned after the implementation will be fertile ground for learning about the effects of these methods on girls' education in guatemala. another unusual aspect of the program was the way the initiative plunged into the topic of girls' education in guatemala, despite having no prior research findings in that area to guide them (specific to their problem at hand). as indicated earlierin the article, the literature review found research on women and education, and no research on girls' education in guatemala. this initiative is pioneering in that respect. because of this, the findings will be all the more enlightening, since the project was unprecedented in guatemala. usaid and guatemala's ministry of education seemed open and willing to delve into this unmarked territory, despite many social, cultural, political, and economic restraints on girls' education. conclusion the guatemalan girl's education initiative was a subset of the basic education strengthening project (best), a usaid project. best was an overall educational improvement project. the best project's components were meant to revamp the primary school system in guatemala. the guatemala girls' education initiative had three main foci: (1) the development of educational policies and strategies for girls; (2) incorporation of a girls' education methodology (via eduque a la niña); and (3) educational innovation development and testing for girls' retention and achievement (usaid, 1993, p. 24). the initiative was funded and implemented in large part with the help of fundazucar, the foundation sugar producers. to rally support and receive credibility for the initiative, a full-scale pre-campaign was launched to get top policy-makers involved. apparently this was successful because there were sufficient numbers of guatemalan policy-makers wishing to be involved. usaid had innovative ways of presenting the topic of education for girls. the personnel learned early that fertility discussions were cause for immediate termination of discussion with potential guatemalan supporters. as a result, any mention of fertility was taken out of literature and discussions, to the chagrin of some usaid personnel. fertility was an important indicator of education, yet it was put aside as a topic to help reach the overall goal of integrating girls into the educational system. also, in an effort to minimize the connection between girls in school and women who are educated, no mention was made of women, oppression, or any other topic that would allow the listener to associate girls with educated women. usaid personnel felt that this association would cause the listener to have reservations about educating the girls, since educated women were seen as potential threats to the family and community. these efforts show flexibility and adaptability on the part of the people involved in the initiative. usaid was successful in staying with the original goal of girls' education, despite making compromises in certain areas. in summary, the guatemala girls' education initiative seemed to be particularly innovative and fresh in its approach to an enduring and deeply rooted problem of equity in education in guatemalan public primary schools. education for girls in developing countries is not an easy problem to tackle, since it takes money, time, and organization, not to mention support from the government and the immediate community. references clay, s. a. (1991). educating girls: achieving guatemala's development. planning and implementation a national conference for policy makers: a development model, 1-26. usaid, guatemala. clay, s. a. (1994a). the education of girls in guatemala: from oversight to major policy initiative. arlington, va: usaid. clay, s. a. (1994b). incentives for the participation [of] guatemalan indigenous girls in primary education: the first year of implementation of the 'eduque a la nina' project. arlington, va: usaid. clay, s. a. (1996). follow-up study of girls and mayan participation in guatemalan primary education. arlington, va: usaid. gorman k. s., and pollitt, e. (1992). school efficiency in rural guatemala. international review of education, 38, 5, 519-534. nuñez, g. and de cotì, o. (1994). education for girls: report from guatemala. mothers and children,13, 2, 1-3. usaid. (1989). guatemala: basic education strengthening. guatemala: usaid. usaid. (1993a). basic education strengthening (best): amendment no. 1 (project paper). arlington, va: usaid. usaid. (1993b). basic education strengthening (best) project: project evaluation summary. arlington, va: usaid. usaid. (1994). executive summary: baseline study of girls and mayan participation in guatemala. arlington, va: usaid. valdivia, m. (1993). gender issues. improving basic education in guatemala: a midterm evaluation of the best guatemala, special edition, annex c51-c515. awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 1, spring 1997 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | 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home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership exploratory study regarding the status of women's educational administrative support organizations beverly j. irby, ed.d & genevieve brown, ed.d. irby & brown, winter, 1998 women's support organizations should serve as vehicles for the growth of women at initial administrative career stages as well as for women in top level positions. demographic projections for the 1990ís suggest that 45% of all net additions to the u.s. labor force will be females (cox, 1993); however, only about 1% are likely to be in top management positions (levine, 1987). the numbers of women in school leadership positions reflect similar low percentages. the number of female principals has risen from 13% in 1977 to 34% in 1993, with most of these at the elementary school level (montenegro, 1993). percentages of female deputy and associate superintendents rose in number from 5% in 1977 to 24% in 1993, while the number of superintendents has risen from 2% in 1981 to 7% in 1993 (montenegro, 1993). low incidents of women in mid to upper school executive positions create problems of isolation, which are manifested by a lack of association with other women colleagues and a lack of both companionship and perspective. these women often find themselves as "lone women," part of a male dominated culture that does not value or support their leadership attempts (schmuck, 1995). women in middle to upper educational management positions need opportunities to meet with others in similar positions (levine, 1987). ely (as cited by nichols, 1993) found that women were more serious about their work, more satisfied and more self-confident when there were significant numbers of women in similar positions. she discovered that women view themselves differently when there is a critical mass of female administrators in an organization. based on these studies, it may be assumed that support groups for women administrators are critical. without such support groups, women leaders may have limited opportunities to interact with women colleagues and limited access to women who may effectively serve as mentors, confidants, role models, and sponsors. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html brown and merchant (1993) cited four related barriers for women seeking administrative positions: "(1) absence of role models for women, (2) lack of support and encouragement from others, (3) lack of sponsorship within and without the organization, and (4) lack of a supportive network" (p. 88). brown and irby (1995) reported findings of research collected over three consecutive years from aspiring or new women administrators enrolled in a "women in leadership" course; the findings were that these women exhibited lack of self-confidence and expressed naive perceptions regarding career advancement and networking. interestingly, brown and merchant (1993) identified three components of successful support systems for women: networking, mentoring, and learning from the experiences of others (brown and merchant, 1993). if support systems inclusive of these components were available, then it might be possible for women new to the educational administrative ranks to enhance their feelings of selfconfidence, their awareness of career advancement techniques and their skills in networking. of course, it is assumed that women would gravitate toward support organizations which would supply those components. the purpose of this paper is to (a) discuss the need for and the future of women's educational administrative support organizations, (b) report our study on the national status of such support groups, and (c) share activities determined to be central to supporting women administrators. need for women's support organizations from an emotional perspective the issues of care, connectedness, relationships, support, and self-esteem all point to a need for support organizations. women are socialized to care for others throughout their lives; with this connectedness an integral aspect of a womanís identity development (gilligan, 1977), women come to know themselves primarily through their relationships with others (gilligan, 1982; hancock, 1981). levine (1987) proposed that women in middle management spend a great deal of time supporting others, but rarely think about taking care of themselves. furthermore, yahne and long (1988), in a counseling study on womenís self-esteem issues, suggested that women struggle with a wide range of self-esteem related issues. even achieving women with professional accomplishments have been shown to experience the "impostor phenomenon". this experience is described as attributing success to factors other than oneís own abilities and include the fear of being discovered as a phony (clance & imes, 1978). the issues of care, connectedness, relationships, support, and self-esteem all point to a need for support. these studies, combined with the idea that one's social identity is derived from membership in various groups (ashforth & mael, 1989), including those that are work related, provide evidence of the need for a structured support group for women. women who participated in a counseling support group designed to address women's issues showed a significant increase in self-regard (yahne & long, 1988). levine (1987) investigated the relationship of a small, informal peer support group, of which she was a member, made up of professional women educators at similar levels of management from different organizational contexts and found that they offered an array of benefits. she listed some of these benefits as: "(1) discovering a new way of looking at a problem, (2) benefiting from one anotherís failures or successes, (3) willingness to serve as resources to help one another form new professional relationships, (4) the importance of professional contacts to offer and receive support, and (5) meeting other dynamic women educators in a wide range of management positions." levine noted that taking care of our own needs releases a hidden store of energy for both home and work. she further proposed that a small peer support group for women in middle management positions is an important idea that can make an enormous difference. the group serves as a "mechanism for broadening perspectives, generating alternative solutions to managerial problems, and enhancing professional and personal esteem" (p.75). according to stamler, christiansen, payne, staley, and johnson (1988), the university counseling service of the university of iowa developed an idea for a group of professional staff women that combines both professional research activities and support functions. this combination was determined to be very successful because it provided personal support for multiple-role women while enhancing their professional growth through the production of scholarly works. in view of these reports, it would appear that womenís support groups designed to meet the needs of women in educational leadership are needed. need for women's support organizations from a gendered perspective why do women need support specifically from other women, as opposed to simply belonging to a mixed gendered administrators' support group? jackson, stone, and alvarez (1992) noted that women are more likely to categorize themselves using their gender when the audience is mostly male. under these conditions, womenís social identities become the most salient aspects of their self-systems, which in turn blurs their individuality (gardner, van eck peluchette, & clinebell, 1994). grogan (1996) discussed these issues in a more philosophical way. she points out that the control of knowledge in various fields rest with the authority societies offer to professional organizations, academic disciplines, or various institutions, and that there is constant conflict emanating from those sources of knowledge in a structuring way. she further suggests that what ensues is alliances between groups and supporting arguments that always force those who differ to be moved to the side. those differences further isolate the less powerful and provide the dominant groups more strength that perpetuates societal rules and regulations. women's different experiences often bring them into conflict with the dominant establishment and, having less power, they are often compelled to conform to the hegemonic view. men learn the rules and cultural expectations society has for them at an early age. the value of competition is acquired in team sports where they learn to win at all costs, to play with pain, to compete ruthlessly, and to be loyal to their teams. women, on the other hand, learn to share, to show compassion, and to be nurturing. therefore, it is likely that when women join male dominated organizations, they are unaware of societal parameters which will determine their success (robbins & terrell, 1987). studies indicate that women need time to grow together professionally and to learn from other women. schmuck (1995) suggested that " . . . there is something special and celebratory for same sex members of all races and ethnic groups to come together; perhaps one of the most compelling and powerful experiences that women have in the conferences and workshops for women is the camaraderie, the shared unspoken assumptions, and the revelation of oneís experience which is understood" (p. 216). future of women's support organizations brown and irby (1995) stated that women's support organizations should serve as vehicles for both the growth of women at initial administrative career stages as well as for women in top level positions. because the needs of women at diverse career stages vary greatly, support organizations should carefully assess the needs of members or potential members and strategically plan for meeting those needs (irby, 1997). schmuck (1995) shared four specific recommendations for the future of advocacy groups for women school administrators: (1) women advocacy groups in educational administration should no longer have as a primary goal a womanís personal desire for career entry and advancement, (2) women advocacy groups should assist in refocusing the schoolís concerns on the childís welfare of our children, (3) women advocacy groups in educational administration would do better to address the problems of practicing women administrators who often find themselves as the ìloneî woman, or alone in a male dominated culture, (4) women advocacy groups in educational administration should concentrate, and even celebrate, the values of caring, calling for democracy, and collaboration. national status of support groups for women the purpose of our study was to: (1) determine which american association of school administrators (aasa) state level organizations have women's affiliates or subsidiary organizations, and (2) to determine from those existing state level aasa organizations what types of supportive activities are provided for their members. in addition, 41 state level womenís advocacy groups, identified by schmuck (1995), were contacted to determine what types of supportive activities are provided. the research questions for this study were: (1) what support networks and organizations are currently available to women in educational administration as determined from aasa state level organizations and from the schmuck (1995) listing of womenís support organizations, and (2) what services are provided through these organizations. methodology after the initial research question was developed, the aasa women's caucus was contacted to secure a listing of all aasa state level affiliate women's groups. however, once it was determined that this group did not hold such a list, then two questionnaires were developed for this study. the initial questionnaire was distributed to the fifty-one united states aasa state-level executive directors. they were requested to provide information as to whether their respective state organizations had a separate division, chapter or affiliate group that dealt with specific issues affecting women in educational administration. these 51 aasa organizations included 49 states. hawaii was not listed as having a state organization. three states were listed with two state-level aasa organizations per state, connecticut, pennsylvania, and virginia. a second in-depth survey was then sent to aasa state level organizations that responded positively. this survey requested the following information regarding each identified separate women's affiliate group: ô number of members ô how long the organization has been in existence ô frequency of conferences and workshops ô topics included in conferences and workshops ô board members and meetings ô local/regional groups ô publications ô job banks ô internet web sites ô other supportive activities provided to the women in the organization. in addition, the in-depth survey was sent to forty-one other state level professional organizations for female school administrators as indicated in the schmuck (1995) listing. if responses to the in-depth survey were not received from the aasa organizations or from the other groups listed, phone calls were made requesting the survey information. telephone attempts were logged with the types of responses received. the answers and information from the in-depth surveys were developed in a file on spss for windows. open-ended responses were recorded and analyzed qualitatively. results fifty-two questionnaires were returned, a 100 % return rate, from the aasa state level executive directors. of the 52 aasa organizations responding, only nine indicated having any type of womenís affiliate or support group currently in place. nine in-depth surveys to the contact person designated by the aasa state director were then mailed. three of these in-depth surveys were returned. additional phone contacts were made to gather the information. consequently, all state level womenís affiliate groups were contacted for information. those states reporting a aasa state level womenís support group were: idaho, iowa, kentucky, kansas, mississippi, oregon, pennsylvania, wisconsin, and texas. table 1 listing of american association of school administrators state level organizations reporting women's affiliate or associated support groups state women's support group and contact idaho northwest women for educational action marilyn reynolds 2311 e. lanark meridian, id 83642 iowa women in educational leadership donna hennington keota community schools keota, ia 52248 kansas kansas association of school administrators women's caucus patricia stephens p.o. box 158 clearwater, ks 67026 kentucky kentucky institute for women in school administration toni wilson 1211 louisville road frankfort, ky 40601 oregon northwest women in educational administration wanda monthy oregon department of education 255 capital street, ne salem, or 97310-0203 mississippi mississippi association for women in educational leadership sara smith hcc box 1263 raymond, ms 37154 pennsylvania women's caucus of pennsylvania association of school administrators carol saylor manheim central school district 71 n. hazel street manheim, pa 17545-1500 texas texas council of women school executives ann halstead, executive secretary 406 east 11th street austin, tx 78701-2617 wisconsin wisconsin women superintendent's group rosa smith beloit school district 1633 keeler beloit, wi 53511 of the 41 other listings from schmuck (1995), seven in-depth surveys were returned. three of those are cross-referenced with the aasa contacts. telephone contacts were attempted with all 34 remaining organizations. of these 34 organizations, five telephone numbers were inoperable and seven of the listed contact persons had moved with no forwarding address or telephone number. eight contacts supplied fax numbers, and in-depth surveys were faxed immediately. two of those organizations' surveys were returned by fax. one was determined to no longer be in existence; one was determined as a support group, but not a formal organization, while the remaining 12 did not return phone messages. one support group was determined to be an umbrella organization for seven state level organizations. the treasurer and president of that organization were contacted and responded via telephone to the in-depth survey. of the total number of potential in-depth survey respondents, only 15 surveys were completed, with one being from the umbrella organization. those organizations responding from the schmuck (1995) list were women in educational administration (ca), network of women administrators (ct), network of women school executives (in), women in educational administration (ne), pasa women's caucus (pa -cross-referenced with aasa response), iowa women in educational leadership (ia -crossreferenced with aasa response), ny state association for women administrators (ny), northwest women in educational administration (or -cross-referenced with aasa response) and utah women educational administration association (ut). the northeast coalition of educational leaders, inc. (necal) represents the following states: maine, vermont, new hampshire, massachusetts, rhode island, new jersey, and connecticut. according to necal, each of those states has a women administrator's support group. table 2 schmuck's (1995) list of contacted state level organizations reporting women's educational administration support groups state women's support group and contact california women in educational administration barbara peterson university of la verne department of educational management 1950 third street la verne, ca 91750 714-759-7733 connecticut maine massachusetts new hampshire new jersey rhode island vermont northeast coalition of educational leaders, inc. barbara jordon 244 fort hill road gorham, me 04038 207-725-4391 network of women administrators martha mccarthy indiana educational leadership & policy studies wendell w. wright education building 201 n. rose avenue, #4228 bloomington, in 47405 812-856-8360 missouri the leadership academy judy english 205 jefferson street p.o. box 480 jefferson city, missouri 65102 573-751-1370 new york new york state association of women administrators ann oí'brien-carelli casda-lead suny 135 western avenue, husted 211 albany, ny 12222 utah utah women in educational administration association mary peterson utah state office of education 250 east 500 south salt lake city, ut 84111 *illinois illinois women's association diane ashby illinois state university campus box 5900 normal, il 61790-5900 309-438-5422 (*data submitted after study was complete, but not included in the discussion.) of the 15 state level organizations reporting, the rounded mean for membership is 142. the number of members for individual organizations ranged from 20 to 300. the largest state organizations in terms of membership reported are missouri and texas. length of existence for organizations ranges from "just formed" to a 20 year anniversary for one organization. the rounded mean for years in existence for the reporting organizations is 11. two of the organizations do not hold conferences, while four of the organizations meet semi-annually and the remaining nine meet annually. out of the 15, three do not conduct specific workshops for members. other workshop numbers range from 1 to 10 per year. topics in the conferences and workshops include a wide range of information: self-renewal, preparing for promotion, dealing with conflict and stress, mentoring, networking, changing demands for leaders, leadership styles, student assessment, career paths of female superintendents, sexual harassment, issues in administration, communication skills, teaching and learning, moral leadership, workforce 2000, women school executives, and interviewing skills and techniques. the 15 organizations also reported the number of executive board meetings held annually. the number of meetings ranged from none to 12 meetings a year, with a rounded mean of 4. twelve groups reported having no men on their executive board. one group reported having two men and another three groups reported having one man on their board. the number of women on the executive boards ranged from none to 35 women, with a rounded mean of 11. information was gathered concerning local and regional affiliate groups. seven of the 15 have some form of regional affiliated groups. eight reported having no regional affiliations. organizations were asked to report on the types and frequency of publications. publications included newsletters, journals and books. four reported no newsletter publication. five publish a newsletter semiannually. two publish a newsletter three times a year, while two publish quarterly. one organization publishes 10 monthly newsletters, and one publishes 12. no organization reported publication of a journal; however, three reported sharing information in the state level aasa organization. one of the 15 reported the publication of a book. organizations were asked to report on other information sources for their members, including job banks and internet web sites. job banks were offered by four, while 11 offered none. internet web sites were reported by four, with 11 reporting no sites at this time. at least three organizations were contemplating a website. the survey concluded by asking what other supportive activities are provided to the women in the organization. responses included: resume preparation, mock interviews, networking directory, access to national organizations, sponsoring activities at state level education meetings, mentoring and placement assistance. two state organizations reported offering scholarships. one of the surveys included information from the northeast coalition of educational leaders, inc. this information revealed that the necel covers seven states with a conference biannually. state workshops for necel are held annually. a newsletter is published monthly with a journal, voices, published semiannually. services to members include a job bank with other support services being mock interviews and resume review service. the necel is currently producing a web site. one of the executive directors from one state that did not report a separate womenís support group wrote a follow-up letter and stated that his aasa organization believed in full inclusion as demonstrated by the number of women administrators holding leadership positions in the association. however, this state organization does sponsor a women's caucus breakfast at their annual convention. conclusions the researchers requested information from organizations that advocate for women administrators and executives. researchers contacted over 100 reported organizations. after repeated attempts by mail, phone and fax, only 15 replied to the in-depth questionnaire. therefore, the results of this study can only be suggestive rather than definitive. sharing of information by these groups would be extremely beneficial to others interested in such groups. we can suggest that support organizations and groups for women administrators need to continue to grow and flourish. although limited in scope, the research indicates that organizations for women administrators are attempting to serve women executives. the researchers make five recommendations for increasing support to women administrators. the first recommendation would be for the aasa to publish and provide an updated directory of womenís administrative support organizations. this directory could be printed in an aasa publication or accessed through the internet. also, a recommendation is made to encourage womenís administrative support organizations to form coalitions and collaborate with other state agencies and organizations. the third recommendation is for womenís support organizations to publicize information about membership, meetings and networking opportunities. the next recommendation is for these organizations to become actively involved in promoting activities that would allow women administrators networking opportunities and career advancement. the final recommendation called for continued research in regard to support groups and activities for women administrators. in particular, research on whether or not these groups are meeting the needs of their women members should be conducted. additionally, the researchers suggest that investigations are needed regarding the phenomenon of full inclusion of women into male-dominated organizations without specifically structured womenís support groups. based on our research study, this phenomenon appears to be the rule rather than the exception. a final question for further thought is that if general research findings are antithetical to the practice of inclusion without structured support for women, how well are the women in such organizations fairing in comparison to their male counterparts in terms of stress management, job satisfaction, skill development, mentoring, networking, and career advancement. references ashforth, b.e. & mael, f. (1989). social identity theory and the organization. academy of management review, 14, 20-39. brown, g., & irby, b. (1995, summer). perceptions of women aspiring to administrative positions. the delta kappa gamma bulletin, 61 (4), 33-38. brown, g., & merchant, j. (1993). women in leadership: a support system for success. in genevieve brown & beverly irby, (eds.), women as school executives: a powerful paradigm (87-92). huntsville, tx: texas council of women school executives, sam houston press. clance, p. & imes, s. (1978). the impostor phenomenon in high achieving women: dynamics and therapeutic intervention. psychotherapy: theory, research, and practice, 15, 241-247. cox, t. j. (1993). culture diversity in organizations: theory, research and practice. san francisco, ca: berrett-koehler. gardner iii, w. l, van eck peluchette, j., & clinebell, s. (1994). valuing women in management-an impression management perspective of gender diversity. management communication quarterly, 8 (2), 115-164. gilligan, c. (1977). in a different voice: women's conception of self and morality. harvard educational review, 47, 481-517. gilligan c. (1982). in a different voice: psychological theory and women's development. cambridge, ma: harvard. hancock e.(1981). women's development in adult life. dissertation abstracts international, 42, 2504b (university microfilms no. 812585). irby, b.j. (spring, 1997). texas council of women school executives: a leader in women's support organizations. tcwse news, austin, tx: texas council of women school executives. jackson, s.e., stone, v.k. & alvarez, e. b. (1992). socialization amidst diversity: the impact of demographics on work team oldtimers and newcomers. in l.l. cummings & b.m. staw (eds.), research in organizational behavior, 15, 45-109. levine, s. (1987, november). peer support for women in middle management. educational leadership, 74-75. montenegro, x. (1993). women and racial minority representation in school administration. arlington, va: american association of school administrators. nichols, n. (1993, july august) . whatever happened to rosie the riveter? harvard business review, 5462. robins, k., & terrell, r. d. (1987, summer). women, power, and the "old boys club": ascending to leadership in male-dominated organizations. school library media quarterly, 205-210. schmuck, p. (1995). advocacy organizations for women school administrators, 1977-1993. in diane m. dunlap & patricia a. schmuck, (eds.), women leading in education (199-224). albany, ny: state university of new york press. stamler, v., christiansen m., & johnson, m. (1988 may). women meeting dual needs for support and professional growth in the workplace. journal of college student development, 29, 273-274. yahne, c. e. & long, v. (1988, september). the use of support groups to raise self-esteem for women clients. journal of american college health, 79-85. * note: the researchers wish to thank marie holder and stephanie smith, graduate students in educational leadership, sam houston state university, for assisting in the completion of this investigation. additionally, if your state has a women's support organization in educational leadership, the researchers would be interested in receiving information via e-mail about the organization. beverly j. irby is associate professor and coordinator of research for the center for research and doctoral studies in educational leadership at sam houston state university in huntsville, texas. email: edu_bid@shsu.edu genevieve brown is professor and chair of educational leadership and counseling at sam houston state university in huntsville, texas. e-mail: edu_gxb@shsu.edu awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 2, winter 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a 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| advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com woollen_the_road_less_traveled advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 1 advancing women in leadership vol. 36, pp. 1-10 2016 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the road less traveled: career trajectories of six women presidents in higher education susan a. woollen department of criminal justice sciences, illinois state university, email: sawooll@ilstu.edu accepted april 14, 2016 most research on the career pathways of women presidents has been dedicated to the traditional career path and the paucity of women in positions leading to a four-year college or university presidency. this leaves little research on women who achieved the position by following a nontraditional trajectory. this qualitative study explores the career trajectories of six women presidents who described their journeys to the highest leadership position as “nontraditional” or “unusual.” using bateson’s (1989) concepts of improvisation and adaption to examine their professional and personal experiences, the presidents unveil they were responsive to new opportunities, responsibilities, and challenges leading to their presidencies. their backgrounds led them to develop an understanding and appreciation of institutional and organizational practices and cultures, community relations, campus relations, and a sensitivity to the importance of relationship building with an array of stakeholders. the study concludes by discussing the necessity of considering broader career frameworks to identify and increase the number of potential women candidates for the presidency. keywords: women presidents, career trajectories, higher education, women’s leadership introduction statistics on women presidents suggest that they are making inroads into the highest senior leadership position in american higher education. currently, women account for 26% of all presidents, representing a three percent increase in women presidents from 2006 (ace, 2012). the percentage of africanamerican and hispanic women presidents increased slightly from 2006, but women of color in presidencies are still disproportionately low and have a “rare presence” in the position (fitzgerald, 2014). at four-year public and private colleges and universities, women filled 13.8% of presidential positions at doctorate-granting institutions in 2006 and occupied 22.3% of presidencies in 2011. at master’s-granting colleges and universities, the percentage of women presidents increased slightly from 21.5% in 2006 to 22.8% in 2011, and at bachelor’sgranting institutions there was a slight decrease in women presidents from 23.2% to 22.9%. the concern regarding the disparity between females and males transcends raw numbers as the lack of diversity in this leadership position may also reduce the opportunities for colleges and universities to increase their effectiveness (gangone & lennon, 2014; witcher jackson teague & bobby, 2014). a national study of fortune 100 companies found that when a meaningful number of women occupy leadership positions, productivity and revenue are higher, sales are greater, and influence and scope in the industry are more extensive (colorado women’s college, 2013). kanter (1977) suggested that when women make up 35% of an organization’s workforce they move towards collective action as a result of their larger membership, thereby affecting change. further, united nations women (2016) contends that women need to achieve a critical mass of 30% in political positions to influence their nation’s political policies. although it appears that women are achieving one third representation in the academic presidency, the rate of change in their numbers remains slow and uncertain (ace, 2012). previous research on the career pathways of women presidents has not explored in detail women who achieved the position by following trajectories outside the normative academic career path. emerging from a larger study on women presidents and their relationship building practices, this study represents an opportunity to gain insights about the career histories of women presidents who described their paths as “unusual” or “nontraditional.” their previous positions were essential in accumulating, developing, and enhancing competencies that helped them eventually to become candidates for the highest administrative position in higher education. it concludes by discussing the necessity of considering broader career frameworks in order to identify and increase the number of women candidates for the presidency. advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 2 pathways to the presidency the “traditional” route to the presidency means that a president moved through every (or almost every) level of the academic hierarchy: faculty member, department chair, dean, and provost (birnbaum & umbach, 2001; cohen & march, 1974). this trajectory is historically recognized as the path that develops an individual’s competencies for the presidency, a position that has an array of functions, constituencies, and expectations. it is unclear from studies on presidential effectiveness if this pathway results in an effective president (darden, 2006; fisher, tack, & wheeler, 1998; mangels, 2008; minor, 2001; woodlee, 1992). it does, however, reflect a progressive, linear and formal approach to leadership development (borstein, 2008; madsen, 2008) that dominates current hiring practices across industries (hertneky, 2012). negatively affecting the number of women represented in the traditional pipeline is the lack of women occupying senior level positions in higher education overall. in 2012, ace reported that 43% of women presidents held the post of chief academic officer (cao) or provost immediately prior to their presidency. however, this represents only a slight increase from 40% in 2007. a follow-up study examining pathways to the presidency indicates that women comprise 41% of cao positions in the nation (ace, 2013). it is uncertain from these data how many women caos are interested in pursuing a college presidency, however, the results of an earlier national survey of caos found only 25% of female caos indicated an interest in pursuing a presidency and another 28% were uncertain if they would eventually pursue a presidency (meckel, cook, & king, 2009). further decreases in the representation of women in the presidential pipeline are reflected in academic dean and faculty positions. in 2013, the share of women in dean positions was 27%, and this position is most likely to launch individuals into the cao (ace, 2013). deans’ positions are typically filled by department chairs or senior faculty members, and, again, women are significantly underrepresented in the faculty ranks. according to the national center on education statistics (nces) (2015), fewer women than men were employed as professors at four-year institutions at title ix degree-granting institutions in the united states during the 2010-11 academic year. nces also reported that 35% of white women comprised the total of fulltime instructional faculty in degree-granting institutions while 6% were comprised of black and 4% hispanics; the breakdowns by gender for black and hispanic faculty were not available or were too small to report. since data does not indicate how many women faculty members desire to pursue administrator roles, there can be no assumption that a critical mass of women will be seeking positions that will lead to cao positions, then the presidency. bornstein (2008) suggests that female candidates are often not considered for presidencies because of their career histories, revealing how women and men can navigate differently through the traditional pathway. fitzgerald (2014) opines that the “patchwork of careers of women as a result of educational and career breaks or fractured patterns of employment due to life circumstances do not easily align with traditional academic career routes and structures” (p. 52). women may move through faculty ranks and administrative positions more slowly than men because of taking time to focus on family obligations, including childrearing or caregiving (bornstein, 2008; fitzgerald, 2014; glazer-raymo, 2008). in their study on productivity in the academy, butterwick and dawson (2005) found that females, regardless of their faculty rank or administrative position, consistently contend with competing work and personal demands more than their male counterparts. interruptions as result of those demands cannot only delay a woman’s progress through the traditional pipeline but could prevent a woman from making critical relationships that can provide support, encouragement, visibility, and training (bornstein, 2008). there is another pathway to the presidency that is commonly referred to as “nonacademic” or “nontraditional.” birnbaum and umbach (2001) define nontraditional paths as presidents whose careers included positions in both higher education and external organizations, as well as those with no professional experiences in higher education. even though more women are represented in other senior administrative leadership positions, specifically chief diversity officer positions (49%); chiefs of staff (72%); and executive vice presidents (36%), these positions only account for a small percentage of prior positions held by women who become presidents (ace, 2012). for example, in 2012, 9% of women presidents came from senior executive vice president positions other than cao; 4.2% came from senior executive student affairs positions; 5.9% from senior executive business positions, and 3.5% came directly from chair or faculty positions (ace, 2012). there are even fewer women presidents who worked outside of higher education prior to becoming president. only 2.1% of women held administrator position in k-12 and 1.9% came from business and industry (ace, 2012). over 9% came from other positions that were not specified (ace, 2012). again, it is unclear from these data how many women in these positions actually desire to pursue a presidential position. men and women who followed the traditional pathway dominate the occupancy of the presidency. as a result, women who face delays or interruptions in their career paths or who pursue nonacademic positions or careers may be perceived as lacking the necessary skills sets, constructive experiences, or professional and social networks that work towards their leadership abilities and advancement in higher education. however, there is no evidence in the presidential effectiveness literature (darden, 2006; fisher et al. 1988; mangels, 2008; minor, 2001; woodlee, 1992) supporting the argument that individuals who possess the most sufficient experiences and skill sets to be president are those with traditional career backgrounds. it may be within alternate or nontraditional pathways that women are indeed performing functions, creating and engaging in networks, and developing and accumulating experiences that become valuable resources transferable to a presidency. in other words, women are creating, investing, and mobilizing their resources to generate substantial social capital outside the traditional advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 3 conceptualization of the presidential pathway. what is unknown from the current literature is how the nontraditional career backgrounds of women presidents worked towards meeting the desired qualifications for their institutions presidencies. therefore, the findings of this research address the void by exploring the career paths of presidents who developed and enhanced their leadership, skills, and knowledge through unique pathways. theoretical framework bateson (1989) examined the narratives of five successful women and concluded that their lives were about “life as an improvisatory art, about the ways we combine familiar and unfamiliar components in response to new situations, following an underlying grammar and an evolving aesthetic” (p. 3). women’s lives are particularly prone to constant subjugation to struggles, ambiguities, and discontinuities as a result of multiple commitments arising from work, home and relationships. yet, these circumstances can lead to new discoveries, directions, and responses through improvisation that relies on a person’s creativity, talent, and ability to adapt, leading to opportunities for reinvention. she argues that “being an effective banker or restauranteur or general means that one has relearned one’s craft more than once” (p. 9). using bateson’s framework, the lives of women (and men) can be interpreted as a series of inventive practices and creative opportunities instead of single goals and monumental achievements. thus, there can be multiple interpretations of linear (continuities) and non-linear (discontinuities) experiences in a woman’s personal life and professional career/s (bateson, 2004), particularly when seeking meaning beyond a chronologically ordered vitae with job titles. bateson’s participants included herself, an anthropologist and college administrator, as well as a physician and psychiatrist, an electrical engineer and ceo of a high technology company, and anthropologist and college president. while each participant had multiple successful careers, their stories also reflect set-backs along with their abilities to reimagine the future. they admitted their aspirations could have been limited and restricted by male privilege, racism or other forms of exclusion. nonetheless, the women remained open to new opportunities and to the development of competencies and abilities, thus creating something new and better for themselves. when faced with professional or personal adversity, the women responded by developing new dimensions of responsibility, adaptability, leadership, clarity, identity, vulnerability, and resilience. bateson suggests that the process of self-invention makes it impossible to know how far these women’s achievements would stretch into the future and contends that they are “conservers, holding onto skills and relationships that may be recycled at a later date” (p. 235). methods the data for this study were derived from a larger qualitative research project exploring women presidents’ (n = 12) approaches to instrumental relationship building (woollen, 2015). the original study examined how participants identified and fostered relationships with stakeholders whom they recognized as possessing resources that worked towards institutional outcomes. it also analyzed how they secured those resources for their campuses. the results shared here are limited to participant responses regarding their career trajectories that were self-described as different from the traditional, normative, and linear route to the position. in the original study, data were generated from narratives collected during face-to-face or over the telephone interviews. face-to-face interviews were conducted in the presidents’ offices and all interviews ranged from 1.5 to 2.5 hours in length. a semi-structured interview schedule was used to elicit their experiences and perspectives about how they leveraged their leadership to identify and build relationships that could lead to institutional resources. the interviews were audio-taped and later transcribed verbatim with the aim of identifying major categories and themes. one theme in particular is the focus of this paper. those presidents (n = 6) who described their paths to the presidency as “nontraditional” or “unusual” were included in the current analysis. five were presidents of private institutions and one was president of a public institution. all were first-time presidents. an examination of their specific narratives suggests that the skills, knowledge, and experiences to be a college or university president may also be developed and enhanced through a variety of professional and nonacademic positions in an array of fields. the road less traveled to the presidency the presidents in this sample describe circuitous paths to the position, and all acknowledged the value of experiences gained through a variety of positions that may first appear unrelated to that of a college or university president. the following are brief biographical sketches that introduce each president and chronicle the events leading to her presidency. callaghan has served as president of a faith-based, small liberal arts university for over 10 years and declared that hers is an “unusual journey.” in a career that spanned over 20 years in the corporate sphere, callaghan, who earned an mba, moved through the management of a natural gas and electric utility company to the position of senior vice president for its electric and natural gas distribution, ultimately becoming the president of that company. as the senior executive, she was asked to serve on the board of trustees of her current university, because the company was a “friend” of it. upon retiring from the utility company, callaghan continued her service on the university’s board and was eventually asked to be the interim president for two years when the then-president left after a short tenure. finding that she liked many aspects of the presidency, she applied for the permanent post and was chosen to be the university’s eighth president. graham, who also possesses an mba, was president of her small, liberal arts university for over 20 years. she opened her pathway story with, “the first thing you need to know is that there’s advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 4 nothing usual about me or my presidency or my style or how i got here” (emphasis in original). after holding a position of director of student activities, as well as coordinating conferences, she managed the campus’ hotel for four years until she was offered the position of assistant to the president for student life at her current university. the then-president of the college learned of her reputation and experiences with work colleges, and, as such, he wanted her to become a part of his own leadership team. the then-president had broad hiring authority, so graham, without submitting a resume or going through a formal interview or vetting process, was offered the job. she was responsible for facilities, student life, and personnel, noting that she was really responsible for “everything except academics and development.” after her first years, three main events took place. the board of trustees declared financial exigency; the thenpresident resigned the following year; and finally she was appointed president, again, without going through a formal search process. another president rising through student affairs was sinclair. she finished her fifth year as president of a public, regional university and also affirmed that her rise to the presidency was “probably more nontraditional” than other participants. while working on her master’s in college student personnel administration, she worked in residence life. after graduating, she accepted a position at a private university. in 13 years, she moved from the coordinator of student development to dean of students. after she earned her doctorate in education, she successfully aligned her position with the other two senior staff positions, becoming the vice president for student affairs. the then-president became one of her mentors, providing advice that would help her achieve her own presidency. sinclair left that institution for a similar one at a larger, public institution in order to broaden her professional skills and experiences. eventually, she applied for and was offered her first presidential position. mckay is president of a single-sex, religiously-affiliated college and also expressed that her career path is “very nontraditional.” she began her professional career as a licensed mental health practitioner later to become president of two hospitals, one a faith-based hospital and one with a psychiatric focus. her extensive service in the community led to an appointment as a trustee of a private four-year institution. during dinner with the president of that university, she was asked to become its chief executive officer (ceo). despite having no background in higher education, the president thought she would “be a good fit.” as ceo, she was “in house doing the nitty-gritty trench work” while completing a doctorate in higher education leadership, management, and policy. after six years as ceo, she was contacted by a search firm and asked to apply for the position of president at her current college. mckay was extended an offer; however, she learned she would need surgery and a year to recuperate. the college refused to reconsider other candidates, agreeing to wait for one year, and she remains its president over 10 years later. murphy described her presidential route as a “very unusual one” even though the latter part of her career appears to follow a traditional pathway. she began her career as a public school teacher and taught english in one of the local high schools for over 20 years. she became an adjunct faculty member at a local university. after completing her doctorate in urban education, she was hired as an adjunct at her current college, a single-sex, religiously-affiliated institution. eventually becoming a full-time faculty member, she was later appointed director of the graduate program, dean, vice president, interim president, and president. although she never formally applied for those positions, she made it clear that she was vetted for them. she is the college’s 11th president and celebrated her fifth year in the position. at the time of her interview, drummond was president for three years of a religiously-affiliated institution. similar to murphy, the latter part of her journey reflects a traditional pathway, but she clearly emphasized her early career history in her narrative as being nontraditional. she began by stating her story is “different than the traditional and especially male dominated journey.” drummond was a farmer’s wife, worked at a grain elevator, opened her own commodities firm, and worked for a national tax company when business was slow in agriculture. after she and her husband divorced, she started college at the age of 40, earned her bachelor’s in agriculture, went on to complete a master’s in agricultural economics and a doctorate degree in education leadership and policy studies. she worked for a major foundation on several significant agribusiness/education grant projects before accepting an adjunct position at her current institution. she later accepted a tenuretrack faculty position and was voted faculty council chair, vice president of operations and systems, provost and interim president, then permanent president. drummond was the 26th president and first woman president of the institution. results three major themes emerged from their narratives. first, two acknowledged their credentials and experiences were questioned by some stakeholders; however, other presidents believed stakeholders considered their professional backgrounds as being well-suited for their positions and subsequently for their institutions. second, they recognized that their trajectories reflected an entrepreneurial spirit they embodied throughout their careers. they believed their trajectories provided them with extensive and pertinent knowledge and skills for leadership positions in higher education. the third theme that emerged focused on understanding and appreciating relationships. all the presidents agreed that their previous positions allowed them to intentionally leverage their leadership with others through relationships. skeptics and supporters despite their prior leadership and administrative competencies, two presidents acknowledged they were confronted by constituents about their qualifications and preparation for the presidency as a result of their nonlinear paths. however, there were three others who sensed stakeholders supported their hiring. the skepticism appears to be primarily from internal advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 5 stakeholders, particularly faculty who value the tradition of moving through the ranks. researchers (allan, 2011; chliwniak, 1997; eddy, 2009; niddifer, 2001) also suggest that women in leadership are often challenged by traditional images or accepted norms of leadership because those models represent white, male leaders. in an example of uncertainty regarding her qualifications, callaghan recalled being asked “what makes you think you can do this job?” to which she responded: first of all, i’m not sure i can [laughter], so let’s deal with that first! but i pointed out i do have the background and experiences that could be very helpful here. i understand the importance of team work…things are different in higher education than it is in the corporate world. i do appreciate that, and we’ve tried to meld the best of both. her understanding of the question was driven by the academic credentials of her college’s previous presidents, as well as her administrative experiences outside of higher education. callaghan said, “they were used to that very traditional environment – the previous president – all the previous presidents had some type of academic connection.” then, she added with the confidence of a president with over 10 years tenure in the position that “there had only been eight [presidents], so it’s not like there was a lot of people rotating through these offices.” similar to callaghan, sinclair admitted that individuals on campus underestimated her abilities to lead a campus as a result of her student affairs background. however, her narrative reveals the depth of what her experiences bring to the presidency, as well as how she created and increased her social capital: i believe that those of us from student affairs have breadth of the campus that our academic colleagues do not have, because we look at the whole institution. we have to partner. when i was in student affairs, i had to partner with everybody, because that’s what was good for students. i think that’s one of the best characteristics i bring is this big picture view of the institution. conversely, sinclair shared that external stakeholders did not question her credentials or abilities to perform the functions of the position: [for] most people in the community, it doesn’t matter what path i took to get here. as long as i’m effective in what i’m doing. they ask me about my discipline. some folks ask “what did you study?” “what’s your discipline?” but they don’t say, “what was your previous job?” their comments support research (martin, 2012; risacher, 2004) that presidents or candidates from nonfaculty positons do not occupy privileged positions in the academic hierarchy, and this resistance or skepticism can be considered an overarching challenge to legitimacy in the position for presidents without faculty backgrounds. there were three other presidents whose stories suggested their experiences and potential aligned with the needs and expectations of their campuses. graham acknowledged that there could have been some incredulous thoughts about her being appointed president. at one fall executive session of the board of trustees, her predecessor gave his 30 days’ notice and a directive that they should make graham the president. with the college already in financial exigency, the board showed remarkable faith in her abilities to save the college from shuttering by appointing her. their support of her was evident when she asked, “do you want me to close this [college] in a loving way or do you want me to try and make it work?” to which the board responded they wanted to her to sustain the college. the other two presidents are presidents of single-sex and faithbased institutions, many of which are led by lay persons. mckay’s predecessor was a member of the institution’s affiliated order; however, she acknowledged that her previous experiences as president of a religiously-affiliated hospital and as a lay administrator were appealing to her college’s constituents. contrary to keohane (2014) who found that women’s colleges possess pools of women who are interested and willing to hold leadership positions, mckay stated there was a lack of interest of potential candidates from the order: there was no body in the order [of the college] who wanted it [presidency] or who could’ve done it at that point. the nuns were getting up there in years. the two who could’ve done it they just didn’t want it. i have some very brilliant nuns that work here who are academics. they’re terrific, but they wouldn’t want the fundraising, the traveling. they like scholarly work. they write. they consult, but they wouldn’t like the life of a president. similar to mckay, murphy is a lay president of a faith-based institution as was her predecessor. after mentioning that she never applied formally for any of her positions, murphy emphasized that administrators were given opportunities to provide feedback to the president. “there wasn’t a search, but when i moved from acting vice president to vice president, the president met with all the department chairs and asked them for their thoughts.” the same process occurred when she was appointed acting president, then president. “the [religious order’s] leader went around and talked to everyone on campus to see if they were supportive of the move. i think i’m right in saying that it was well-received in each case.” being entrepreneurial the narratives of presidents suggest they were reinventing themselves, gaining experiences and knowledge and becoming strategic and purposeful at different points of their professional development. they thought and acted on a macro level to advance their organizations or constituents, reflecting research findings that effective presidents appear to be deliberate in their actions and considerate of long-term implications instead of being impulsive or spontaneous (darden, 2006; mangels, 2008; minor, 2001; rosia, 2006). fisher et al. (1988) also found in advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 6 their study of presidents that effective presidents are actionready, recognizing when to capitalize on opportunities. in the following examples, three presidents shared examples of what one described as “entrepreneurial.” murphy said she always thought of herself as being entrepreneurial “in the sense of looking for opportunities, looking for partnerships, looking for collaboration.” she mentioned an incident as a faculty member in the education department when she was asked by the president to meet with a trustee to initiate a teacher-training program. initially, the trustee met with the department chairperson of education who said the program was not feasible. disappointed by her reaction, the trustee told the president, “don’t ever send her [department chair] again!” to repair the relationship, the president sent murphy to meet with him, and she went with the attitude, “of course, we can do that!” i was thinking that this was a great opportunity for us. i’ve always been entrepreneurial. it wasn’t out of character that i would just go in there and figure out how to make it happen. the relationship with the trustee led to other multimillion dollar funded projects. about five years into her tenure at the college, murphy was asked by the president, “have you thought about administration? you’re good at [it]. i’m going to make you a dean.” in another example, sinclair was entrepreneurial when she told the president she was willing to assume additional responsibilities outside “the normal student affairs functions.” she said she: oversaw and negotiated contracts with the vending partners [and] the bookstore. i also oversaw facilities management and custodial services for a period of time. i aligned with enrollment management. i learned about advancement. [i was] on some “asks” with potential donors and how they could enhance what we were doing in student affairs. after moving to another institution, she oversaw environmental health and safety for two years, which, again, was not under the “normal purview” of student affairs. when a natural disaster struck her state, her unit took the campus lead in the preparations, response, and recovery of the event. finally, drummond, who was working for a major foundation, also demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit when she wrote a leadership grant aimed at promoting women faculty members and faculty of color into higher education leadership positions. she pointed out: they didn’t know about budgets. they didn’t know about interpersonal skills. they didn’t know how the university structure worked. if they got the management skills, they needed leadership skills. that’s a different set of skills, but we weren’t preparing our own people for those jobs. through this program, participants were presented with: [m]aterials on how the legislature works. how does the politics have to do with funding education, federal politics, and state politics? how can you make a stronger team by having people with different learning styles? we talked about teaching in a classroom and the newest assessment laws and rules. how do you do assessment [and] student learning outcomes? understanding and appreciating relationships emerging from the body of literature on presidential effectiveness (darden, 2006: kuh & natalicio, 2004; mangels, 2008; woodlee, 1992) is the reliance on relationships that presidents make with diverse constituents who can help them augment institutional development. the ability to realize relationships appears to be critical in developing and sustaining an effective presidential tenure. the presidents in this study suggest that they were aware of and sensitive to the importance of relationships and engaged in relationship building prior to their presidential positions. their investments in relationships with a variety of stakeholders also indicate their strong understanding and reliance on social capital necessary to achieve outcomes. for instance, callaghan said she relied on relationships as a corporate executive and understood how valuable relationships were with elected officials since the oil and gas industry is regulated: i understood very well the importance of relationships. i had chaired the chamber of commerce, [college] board of trustees, the united way board, [for which] i chaired the community-wide campaign. in other words, [i was] very connected. i knew the importance of relationships with legislators, and i knew some of our elected officials both at the federal and state level….one of the advantages and benefit that i had was that i already had some very strong connections in this community and in the state and federal legislatures…i had developed those relationships years before. after leaving her corporate position, callaghan was still actively involved in community relations. the president of the chamber of commerce and the mayor asked her to chair a project with the aim of securing a grant to build an event center in the city, and they were confident callaghan could bring together the diverse groups involved in the project. callaghan collaborated with the mayor and the chamber, meeting with city and elected officials and community leaders, and eventually through her leadership secured a $20 million grant to construct the convention center. in her opinion, “you can’t be president of a university or gas company or anything else if you are not able to work with people in relationships. you have to have strong relationships and [those relationships] come from working together and sharing in the pain and the success and celebrating that together.” graham also understood the importance of relationships while she was in the position of hotel manager. she was required to serve on the local tourism commission, because the hotel was subject to the local bed tax. as a member of the commission, she went: advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 7 [i]nto the community, meeting community leaders [to] figure out how you work with businessmen and women. it’s 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days out of the year that you’re a public figure. there was a certain amount of complexity in working with the different types of relationships and personalities to run the facility. further, the college used the hotel to enhance their development base. in fact, she mentioned it was more important that the dining room and registration cards were sent to the development officers than for the day’s receipts to go to the business office. managing relationships meant making sure guests had “extraordinary experiences” in order for the college to successfully secure donations, and, according to graham, any complaints or a lack of donations suggested otherwise. for her, the position had all the “pieces and pressure of being in a very public, high profile role” for her and the institution. sinclair admitted that being president created new learning curves for her in terms of developing relationships to build new constituent bases. she stated: it’s [relationship building is] not a choice. i had to realize that the relationships that i had [at] previous institutions may have been more internal, and i had to shift my thinking…mind shift to more external and how do you balance that [with internal stakeholders]? sinclair illustrated how her student affairs positions provided her with ample experiences to partner with multiple constituents. her understanding and appreciation of institutional missions were what she brought to her presidency and relationship building. despite not having external relationship building experiences, sinclair recognized the significance of those relationships to an institution, as well as how both internal and external relations demanded a president’s attention and effort. murphy knew that as provost her most important relationships were with the faculty, because “if the faculty were not supportive of me i could not be the chief academic officer of the institution, so i worked very [hard] at maintaining appropriate relationships with the faculty.” she also understood the critical and essential role relationships play at all levels and in different types of positions. consider murphy’s comment. having a certain amount of emotional intelligence is really important. my years of being a teacher really served me well, because teaching is all about relationships with children, and you can’t be a good teacher unless you have strong relationships with your students…one of the gifts that i bring to the presidency i like people. i like people, [and] that helps a lot! adding to the human relations perspective, fisher et al. (1988) found that effective presidents were “warm, outgoing people” (p. 88). when murphy was vice president, she worked with donors and understood that “they want to feel that they are a partner with you. [they want to know] that the institution is moving forward. in order to move forward, you will need their support.” prior to becoming president, she understood that relationships were pivotal in helping the institution achieve its goals and that whomever the donor works with needs to have a vision for the institution and the capacity to implement that vision. similar to the other presidents, mckay supported the necessity of building and sustaining relationships, and her prior positions provided her with a framework to develop productive relationships, as well as to understand the nature of relationships in higher education. i did a lot of group work, and i think a lot of the work over the years in the mental health field has helped me, because i do try to be a good student of cultures and understand, too, that groups have different cultures, and you can’t just go in there and impose [yourself]. this was evident when she first started in her ceo position. a month before she started, the faculty decided to unionize and tensions were high on campus. their attempt was unsuccessful, but the process provided mckay with an understanding of the type and quality of relationships, as well as the tensions, that can exist between faculty and administrators. “i came into that environment where it was very tense and very, very challenging [at] times. the faculty were difficult. i wasn’t in my happiest of days at times with the faculty.” mckay added an additional asset her mental health professional background brings to the position: at the end of the day, nothing gets done except through relationships. it’s absolutely the way that it is, and, hopefully, healthy professional ones, not dysfunctional [ones]. you need boundaries. sometimes it’s hard. donors, in particular, often think that you’re their friend and to some extent they are but keeping the boundaries clear. that’s where coming from a mental health background helps me. seriously, understanding what’s appropriate and what boundaries you don’t cross. discussion the purpose of this study sought to explore the professional pathways of six women presidents who described their journeys to that position as “nontraditional” or “unusual.” many presidents’ words and actions reflect opportunities that were either presented to them or that they created for themselves to develop and enhance their leadership and administrative acumen. no one position they occupied provided all the implicit or explicit experiences and skills necessary to become a college or university president. instead, they accumulated desired experiences and confronted challenges in a variety of industries, ranging from oil and gas, agriculture, tourism, p-12 schools, higher education, and health care. events, anticipated or unanticipated, can be opportunities for a woman to realize new aspects of herself, to assume new functions, and to generate leadership (bateson, 1989). sinclair was the only participant who had an ambition to become a president, and, as such, directed her professional goals towards that end. callaghan, graham, mckay, murphy, and drummond did not map out their advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 8 careers with the same purpose of achieving a presidency, but they found themselves in positions or circumstances that identified them as the best qualified candidates for one. not a single president expressed that her presidency was lessened as a result of her unique pathway instead each felt her pathway made her unique and fully capable of effectively executing the functions of the presidency. the findings suggest that presidents accumulated knowledge, skills, and leadership through multiple positions held along the way. many positions were not directly connected to administrative leadership in higher education but provided opportunities for the presidents to achieve competencies that ultimately prepared them to be considered candidates for the highest leadership position in academe. with the prospect of a significant number of presidents retiring or seeking second presidencies (ace, 2012), it is essential that boards of trustees, institutional search committees, and search firms consider broader pools of candidates who can help diversify the position and include those candidates who possess desirable and legitimate qualifications. in doing so, the process to construct a new conception of how the pathway to the presidency can be imagined. two of the presidents (callaghan and sinclair) expressed their belief that their credentials and qualifications were questioned by internal stakeholders. the traditional route to the presidency is engrained in the minds of many institutional members as the only proper way to become a president and seeking and choosing a candidate who does not adhere to the normative pathway may appear less legitimate and credible to them. all presidents must confront legitimacy issues after assuming the position (bornstein, 2003), but those with perceived deficiencies have additional hurdles to overcome. rhode and kellerman (2007) posit that ingroup favoritism leads to greater allegiance, positive evaluations, and collaboration. the assumption of qualified presidents only emerging from a traditional pathway is also a stereotype that may deepen the mental glass ceiling of a woman being qualified to pursue a presidency, as well as the increasing discord that could occur as a result of the stereotype (rhode & kellerman, 2007). none of the presidents in this study commented that their gender negatively affected their selection or credibility, however, rhode and kellerman (2007) suggest that gender stereotypes may be involved when women’s preparedness and qualifications are being considered for leadership positions. these conceptions of leadership devalue that leadership of women by comparing them to masculine stereotypes. further, women are often criticized for attempting to embrace those stereotypes or faulted for not adopting or being willing to accept those standards, thus forcing them into a double-bind (chliwniak, 1997). conversely, mckay and murphy applied for positions at single-sex institutions that were specifically seeking women to fulfill their vacancies. they are both lay administrators, and the religious orders did not have expectations that the leadership positions be filled with one of its members. consistent with research findings (diehl, 2014; hertneky, 2012; madsen, 2008), this study’s presidents achieved their positions through their leadership practices, which included embracing opportunities presented to them. their circuitous pathways, albeit different, do not suggest lessened leadership qualifications. callaghan and graham did not earn doctorate degrees, and they, as well as mckay, did not teach at the college level. graham, mckay, and sinclair were identified by presidents who encouraged them to move into and through higher education administration because of skill sets developed respectively in hospitality, health care, and student affairs. callaghan, murphy, and drummond developed relationships with their respective boards of trustees through community or campus based service activities that led to appointments as interim presidents. drummond and murphy were subsequently appointed president by their boards without searches, suggesting institutions may fill positions with individuals who already are tested and familiar with institutional missions, values, and culture. these narratives help inform us that presidents acknowledged that their accumulated knowledge collected on their unique pathways (e.g. oil and gas executive, hotel manager, student affairs, school teacher, hospital administrator and case worker) helped them to transition to their presidential responsibilities. these included experiences with managing and projecting budgets and resources, maintaining facilities, developing and maintaining client bases, collaborating with individuals who may have possessed divergent needs, and meeting a variety of different expectations. from studies of the academic presidency, we learn that the ability to realize relationships appears to be critical in developing and sustaining an effective presidential tenure. a finding of this study supports the research that relationship building is characteristically a disposition of women that brings them into connection with others (gilligan, 1993), and women tend to be more process-oriented, use networks, and establish relationships to generate cooperation from others than men (chliwniak, 1997). eagly and carli (2007) argue that “good relationships make it possible to call on others for support, ranging from getting advice and information to setting up deals and transactions” (p. 144). women in the present study were deliberate, strategic, and entrepreneurial in understanding the role and purpose of relationships, building social capital and capitalizing on their relationships. burt (2001) argues that social capital is most valuable to managers, such as ceos, divisional vice-presidents or entrepreneurs because they have the most to gain and benefit from information and control derived from social capital. this is supported by lin (2001), who found that top-level executives are expected to possess rich social capital as they need to deal and manage people both inside and outside the firm. implications these findings have implications for boards of trustees, professional development and search firms, institutional members, and women who may be seeking leadership positions advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 9 in higher education, including the presidency. bateson (2004) reflected: you cannot adjust to change unless you can recognize some analogy between your old situation and your new situation. without that analogy you cannot transfer learning. you cannot apply skills. if you can recognize a problem that you’ve solved before, in however different a guise, you have a much greater chance of solving that problem in the new situation. that recognition is critical to the transfer of learning (p. 70). the narratives of these presidents provide insights to the backgrounds and experiences that generated knowledge and skill sets that set them up for new positions, experiences, and challenges. they acknowledged that their experiences and backgrounds not only built the foundations for their presidential qualifications but made direct contributions to the efficacy to perform their current functions. for these women’s institutions, a nontraditional pathway proved relevant in developing the competencies, vision, and strategies they felt necessary in choosing a president. with the exception of sinclair, the presidents did not position themselves to assume the office. they did not have five or 10 year career plans that outlined the strategies they would need to follow to achieve the position, but not one president regretted her career path instead each emphasized the importance of those positions to her leadership development and capacity. all the women presidents were connected to higher education at some point in their professional careers prior to becoming a president, and each possessed an awareness and understanding of the academic values and beliefs in which institutions operate. their stories provide evidence that there are multiple avenues to become knowledgeable about how higher education operates organizationally, structurally, and culturally. considering the pipeline to the presidency in only dichotomous terms, traditional and nontraditional, lessens the value of one, thereby, privileging the other. reconceiving the pathway may help reinvent how women are identified and mentored for leadership development. boards of trustees, institutional search committees, senior level administrators, and professional development and search firms may need to holistically explore the vitas of women candidates to measure their broader qualifications and 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(2015). contradicting conventional wisdom: women presidents’ abilities to forge purposeful and instrumental relationships for institutional outcomes (doctoral dissertation). retrieved from proquest (publication no. 3704849) microsoft word bissessar_an_examination_of_indo_trinidadian_females.docx advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 134 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 134-143, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper an examination of indo-trinidadian females’ identity beliefs: implications for their centered leadership charmaine bissessar charmaine bissessar: hugh wooding law school, email: drcharmainebissessar@yahoo.com accepted may 08, 2015 discussions around the development of caribbean women have, to a great extent, marginalized indo-trinidadian with scant anecdotal evidence of their leadership potential and identity beliefs. i sought to examine indo-trinidadian women’s identity beliefs and how this is linked to the concept of leadership. the underlying theoretical framework of this qualitative methodology study was centered leadership (brash & cranston, 2011). the questions posed were, what are the beliefs as regards indotrinidadian females’ identity and how do such beliefs reflect the subscales of centered leadership? most of the 50 participants belonged to the 18 to 36 age range with 20 of them possessing high school certificates, 19 indo-trinidadian females lived in north-east trinidad, and 12 were salesclerks. all participants displayed high levels of self-efficacy, 80% indicated that they used positive methods of eliminating stress and they felt empowered emotionally, physically, and mentally. in responding to questions about their belief in freewill, 84% of respondents indicated that they favored free-will over destiny. four participants who lived in other countries indicated that they did not have any major issues assimilating a new culture. moreover, 10 of the participants verified the findings. indo-trinidadian women’s identity and belief systems closely matched the five stages of centered leadership: (a) meaning; (b) framing; (c) connecting; (d) engaging; and (e) energizing. keywords: centred leadership; indo-trinidadian women; identity beliefs introduction the foremost authors of indo-trinidadian issues have indicated that there is a paucity of extant literature on their contemporary identities and belief systems. kanhai (1999) and mohammed (1994) indicated that indo-trinidadian women’s experiences have continued to be described from a masculine perspective. according to kanhai, indo-trinidadian women remain marginalized by the dearth of information on the various ways in which they have developed. mohammed (1998) underscored this development in indotrinidadian women who found their voices and become large contributors to society. she noted that: over the last few decades we have seen the growth of a large, articulate and economically secure group of women. they come from all ethnic categories, including women of indian descent the majority of whom were hitherto allowed only limited education and were forbidden to work outside the home (p. 7). this identification with nurturing the home was highlighted when hosein (2011) interviewed rural indo-trinidadian women (1996 to 1998) who were over 80 years of age. hosein concluded, “household chores and maintenance of the home were crucial factors in the daily rounds of the indian female” (p. 103). this is no longer the case as mohammed (2012) indicated when she charted the paradigm shift in the perspective of the indo-trinidadian female in the following manner: from the earliest concept of the jehagin or the sisterhood of the boat which surfaced during the nineteenth century, to the more submissive concept of the dulahin, or the caste-centred one of maharajin, there emerged a changing set of symbols and ideas such as matikor and bindi that have currency today and whose meanings have complicated the simple stereotypes and apolitical notions once attached to indocaribbean femininity (p. 1). the strides made by indo-trinidadian women in finding and asserting their voices can be evidenced by the current achievements of the indo-trinidadian prime minister, mrs. kamla persad bissessar and other indo-trinidadian exemplars such as patricia mohammed, gabrielle hosein, and rosanne kanhai inter alia. the problem remains that there is minimal evidence of the “wide-ranging activities of indo-caribbean women and the multiple ways in which they had developed were hardly manifest in written texts” (kanhai, 199, p. xii).the need to substantiate the invaluable contributions made and being made by indo-trinidadian women is indubitable. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 135 in a similar vein, mehta (2004) indicated that indo-caribbean women view themselves through afro-centric lens which mohammed (1994) viewed as the creolization of the indotrinidadian female. furthermore, mohammed (1994) viewed indo-caribbean women’s identity as being placed through the dichotomous male/female dyad, “indian womanhood is depicted through the eyes of the male and defined only in terms of her relationship to the male” (p. 171). according to mohammed (2012), indo-trinidadian women “were considered outside of the mainstream struggle for female equality and equity” (p. 2). this study offers the indo-trinidadian participants an opportunity to give voice to whom they have become and links their development to the theory of centered leadership posited by brash and cranston (2011). there is not only a scarcity of information on indo-trinidadian females but even less on them as leaders. a google search conducted on august 25, 2014, found one article on leadership relating to indo-trinidadian females and that was linked to the current prime minister of trinidad, kamla persad-bissessar. the findings of this study add to the limited body of existing research on indo-trinidadian women and leadership. literature review centered leadership centered leadership evolved from brash and cranston’s (2011) desire to find a leadership style that best portrayed their abilities as women. in their exploratory qualitative study of successful women in leadership, they investigated the theory of centered leadership and how it most accurately typified contemporary female professionals. they stated, “centered leadership did not arise in a vacuum. when we searched for answers to why the women we interviewed shared certain traits and behaviors, we began with well-established thinking on management and leadership” (p. 286). they espoused five capabilities of centered leadership. they are: (a) meaning; (b) framing; (c) connecting; (d) engaging; and (e) energizing. meaning according to brash and cranston (2011), “what inspires women leaders, guides their careers, sustains their optimism, generates, positive emotions, and enables them to lead in creative and profound ways” (p. 11). meaning denotes motivation and allows the individual to propel himself/herself to do better. meaningful purpose according to brash and cranston “transcends everyday goals you open yourself up to long-lasting happiness” (p. 22). meaning defines successful leaders. meaning foments happiness and emotional and psychological well-being which brash and cranston viewed as critical to successful leadership. the four practical aspects of happiness are: (a) happiness is motivating; (b) happier teams are more creative; (c) leaders who exude happiness are more effective; and (d) happiness improves physical health, as well as stamina and resilience. brash and cranston urged individuals to find what makes them happy because that unleashes their potential. brash and cranston (2011) stated that framing is the individual’s ability “to sustain herself on the path to leadership and to function as a leader, a woman must view situations clearly avoiding downward spirals, in order to move ahead, adapt, and implement solutions” (p. 11). framing reinforces meaning. brash and cranston suggested that framing is a choice. the act of framing involves “unlearning deeply embedded behaviorsincluding snap judgments that constrain your views on situations, other people, and yourself. this ability to frame reality positively is a powerful capability and learning how to do it is part of your leadership development” (p. 67). an active part of framing entails optimism. an optimist views criticism as constructive and challenging and an opportunity to grow. optimists are proactive and “may find that they can apply their positive framing more consistently to help others see more opportunity” (p. 72). in practicing optimism, brash and cranston posited several ipse dixits, among these were: (a) make adaptability your skills; (b) make reframing a conscious act; (c) feedback can help you grow; (d) be cool under uncertain conditions; and (e) it is the journey not the end result. connecting, according to brash and cranston (2011), occurs when “women leaders make meaningful connections to develop sponsorship and followership, to collaborate with colleagues and supporters with warmth and humanity” (p. 11). women are more natural at connecting than men which is evidenced by research which shows women as sharing more communal roles than men. brash and cranston espoused quid pro quo as a fundamental element of connecting. they insisted that reciprocity forms, builds, and sustains relationships. this is the sine qua non of connecting. they suggested a network mapping exercise to determine how individuals should become connectors. they segued that connectors lead through others. engaging, opined brash and cranston (2011), occurs when “successful leaders take ownership for opportunities along with risks. they have a voice and they use it. they’re also able to face down their fears” (p. 11). engaging is the fourth process along the continuum where it all comes together. this happens “when you choose to cross an invisible line from being a person to whom things happen to becoming a person who makes things happen. it literally means breaking the bounds that circumscribe your career and your life” (p. 187). they advised in the engaging stage that women need to listen more than talk, they need to make their own luck, they need to remember that they are in control and need to take that step toward self-development and becoming more centered leaders. women are able to weather the storm and adapt to new realities. energizing is the ability “to succeed long-term and to accommodate family and community responsibilities, women learn to manage their energy reserves to tap into flow” (brash & cranston, p. 11). the most essential aspect of energizing is being able to understand what makes an individual stop and go. brash and cranston suggested a list of questions to self-evaluate what makes women tick under the following broad categories: (a) basic stamina and drive; (b) mental activities; (c) emotional moods; (d) relationship to others; and (e) core values. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 136 brash and cranston (2011) advocated various activities to reenergize the individual. these include: (a) learn yoga and build a simple exercise; (b) take a walk; (c) play your favorite music; (d) bring fresh flowers to work; (e) perform an act of kindness. women should also minimize drains, know that physical strength builds resilience, build recovery into their day, and be open to experience flow. the authors determine flow as “the phenomenon that happens when your skills are well-matched to an inspiring challenge and you are working toward a clear goal” (p. 8). this “flow which brash and cranston (2011) espoused can be found in earlier literature on employee immersion whereby csikszentmihalyi (2008) suggested that the optimal experience is flow which is a state of consciousness characterized by absorption which occurs when: (a) goals are clear and attainable; (b) there is strong concentration on a focused topic; (c) intrinsic motivation is prevalent; (d) there is equity between ability and challenge; and (e) there is immediate feedback. in such a state of consciousness, individuals experience deep enjoyment, creativity and involvement in life. individuals become so engaged in what they are doing that they lose track of time. based on data correlated, brash and cranston (2011) found that their concept of centered leadership was valid across the sample for north america and western europe. their research further validated the implementation of centered leadership at any stage in the career. brash and cranston also found a correlation of centered leadership to performance and satisfaction. they discovered, “a higher percent of the people who scored the highest on use of centered leadership practices report high success, satisfaction, and performance versus those who scored the lowest on the same practices” (p. 298). the researchers also found that centered leadership built up women’s strength. their findings illustrate that “professional women practice centered leadership skills a bit more than their male counterparts” (p. 300). method williams and heikes (1993), proponents of the qualitative methodology, “argue that they give a voice to women whose life experiences have been silenced or ignored by more standardized survey research techniques” (p. 280). a qualitative interview was selected to engender in-depth information on indotrinidadian women’s thoughts and feelings. according to kvale (1996) and mc namara (1999) interviews provide in-depth information from participants and allow them to give details of their experiences while providing factual information. turner (2010) espoused, “interviews provide in-depth information pertaining to participants’ experiences and viewpoints of a particular topic. oftentimes, interviews are coupled with other forms of data collection in order to provide the researcher with a well-rounded collection of information for analyses” (p. 754). an informal conversation style was implemented with the use of open-ended questions for an improved understanding of participants’ views. appendix a contains the questionnaire used. fifty participants completed this open-ended interview. furthermore, verification of the data collected was conducted individually to determine participants’ perspectives on the changing role of indo-trinidadian women. ten of the 50 participants agreed with the findings as regards to participants’ development of self-efficacy, resilience, and participants’ emotional, mental, and physical empowerment. open-ended questionnaire all 50 participants gave informed consent and were told of the confidentiality of the information and assured that data would be reported cumulatively. they were asked for comments on their: (a) self efficacy; (b) empowerment; (c) attitudes: free will versus destiny; (d) beliefs: traditional versus modern and for those “transnational identities”: (e) assimilation and integration of a new culture; (f) sense of alienation in the adopted land; (g) inner turmoil and loyalties to native land; (h) yearning to return to the native land; and (i) return to native land and disappoint or happiness. they also gave demographic information such as age, occupation, educational level, and where they lived. interviews lasted 10 to 15 minutes. some participants who lived in other countries and lived far away opted to answer questions via e-mail and by telephone. participants gave permission at the onset and the researcher transcribed interviews. no names were required of participants, nor were they expected to give specific information such as actual addresses. questions four and five were based on individual’s self-efficacy. these self-assessment statements were: (4) i feel confident that when a problem arises that i can solve it and (5) i don’t feel/ feel disadvantaged being an indo-trinidadian woman that i am at a disadvantage/advantage living in trinidad. these yes/no questions did not leave room for expansion on the part of the interviewees but indicated their level of self-efficacy. questions six to 12 focused on emotional, physical, and mental empowerment. question 13 dealt with resilience and14 to 20 encompassed questions based on freewill and destiny, and tradition versus modernity. the second section of the interview included questions on experiences living away from the native land and issues with assimilation, integration, and acceptance of the new culture. convenience and snowballing sampling strategies were employed. the researcher identified participants who were willing to share their experiences and feelings as indotrinidadian women and who gave informed consent. research questions research questions are significant because they set the tone for the entire study. the research questions which guided this study were, what are the beliefs as regards indo-trinidadian females’ identity and how do such beliefs reflect the subscales of centered leadership? the following data analysis will be used to answer the aforementioned research questions. data analysis step 1: data were read and re-read. step 2: data were analyzed based on the purported themes. step 3: themes were reviewed and anomalies were noted. step 4: findings were synthesized and advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 137 summarized. a categorical-content perspective was employed to analyze the data. findings participants’ ages fifty indo-trinidadian women were interviewed ranging from ages 18 to 64 years. the large cross-section of ages allowed for increased understanding of how indo-trinidadian participants of differing ages see themselves and their situation. participants were divided into five age groups as seen in figure 1, consisting of 18 to 25 years, 26 to 36, 37 to 45, 46 to 54, and 55 to 64 years. figure 1 shows the different ages of participants’ interviewed with an average age of 34.88 and a standard deviation of 13.44. figure 1. graph showing ages of participants. participants’ educational level participants’ educational levels were varied. twenty of the participants interviewed possessed “o” level qualifications which is the expanded certification on leaving secondary school at ages 16 to 17. fourteen participants possessed undergraduate level qualifications. five indo-trinidadian participants held graduate degrees. noteworthy, is that the 64 year-old hindu indo-trinidadian woman interviewed only had a primary school education. this showed a cultural inclination among traditional hindu families in the past era to place little emphasis on the education of their daughters. mohammed (1988) resonated “education at first was mainly for boys. it was thought unwise to educate your girls” (p. 20). such traditions were brought from india and no longer perpetuate in contemporary indotrinidadian society as most participants in this study indicated. however, one 35-year-old interviewee indicated that she possessed a primary level education because she had dropped out of secondary school. this was the exception rather than the rule. she did not wish to explain. she simply stated, “i had to drop out of school for personal reasons.” results of this survey indicated that such tendencies have altered. one 35-year-old participant indicated that her muslim father pushed her more than her brothers to become educated so that she would not have to be dependent on anyone. she stated, “i grow up in a muslim household but my father was harder on me when it come to school because i am a girl. he said he wanted to make sure no man would take advantage of me so he needed me to be educated so i can provide for myself” (personal communication, august 5, 2010). this is in contrast with yousef’s (2011) case study of a muslim female student who was expected to take time off from her studies to take care of her new born baby brother and return to her studies after a year. three of the participants interviewed did not finish secondary school. among these three, were a 63-year-old and a 19-year-old pregnant women. the 19-year-old did not wish to share why she had to cut short her education. the 63 year-old indicated that in her era, indo-trinidadian females were not allowed to go to school. she stated, “in those days, the boys went to school and the girls stayed at home and took care of the house-hold and the younger brothers and sisters.” figure 2 shows the ratio and levels of educated participants. figure 2. pie chart showing participants’ educational level. one 50-year-old participant sent a follow-up comment on the interview via e-mail exemplifying how the interview questions affected her. she stated, “i think it’s great and certainly allowed me to reflect on my journey and readjust accordingly” (personal communication, august 4, 2010). another participant who was somewhat hesitant to be interviewed at the end of the interview stated, “it was a pleasure responding to your questions” (personal communications, august 4, 2010). participants’ location figure 3 exhibits the number of participants and the areas where they lived. seventeen participants lived in the north-west with 19 interviewees commuting from the north-east to work in the 0   2   4   6   8   10   12   14   16   n um be r  o f  p ar tic ip an ts   age  range   frequency    count  of  participants'  ages   frequency  of   ages   2   3   3   20  7   7   3   2   3   frequency  count  of  participants'  level  of   education   a  level   primary   secondary   o  level   associates   ba   ma   phd   diploma   advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 138 north-west of trinidad. seven participants came from south and seven from central trinidad. since 31 out of the 50 participants lived in suburban and rural areas in trinidad, one would have expected to find more subservient thinking among the participants. figure 3. graph showing frequency count of regions in trinidad where participants lived. participants’ occupations twelve salesclerks and seven managers agreed to participate in the interview process. six teachers gave their voices to reconstructing the identity of the indo-trinidadian woman. three women were self-employed, four were unemployed and others ranged from business analyst to retired. figure 4 clearly depicts the various occupations of the women interviewed. figure 4. frequency count of participants’ occupations. participants’ self-efficacy in their responses to questions on self-efficacy, indo-trinidadian women displayed high levels of self-confidence and empowerment. they also indicated that when they set a goal and it seemed that they could not achieve it that they continued working toward achieving that goal. they exemplified resilience in attaining goals. they continued their goals albeit, these goals may appear almost impossible. one participant stated, “sometimes i will decide whether the goal is worth it in the long run.” however, all women interviewed displayed self-efficacy by their responses to the questions. they showed motivation toward setting and attaining goals and resilience in trying to achieve these goals. they displayed a level of confidence in accomplishing goals. another woman interviewed indicated that the role of indo-trinidadian women, “have evolved tremendously over the years but looking back the women of our culture quietly set the foundation for these changes into the way they raised their families, most especially the girls” (personal communication, august 4, 2010). participants’ methods of eliminating stress moreover, indo-trinidadian women vocalized their sense of physical, mental, and emotional empowerment when they responded positively to questions pertaining to self-efficacy and resilience. three out of the 50 women interviewed indicated that they were not comfortable with their body image. one 50-year old shared, “i don’t have time to think about my body and myself, i have to work and live” (personal communication, march 14, 2011). most women felt they had sufficient control over their emotions. a few respondents said, “sometimes it is difficult especially during the pre-menstrual syndrome.” participants claimed that they eliminated stress in more than one way. figure 5 shows the responses of indo-trinidadians ways of alleviating stress. shopping and listening to music were the major activities helping indo-trinidadian participants to eliminate stress. these are activities which brash and cranston (2011) suggested energized females involved in the development stages of centered leadership. one participant stated that she talks to friends when she is stressed about something. figure 5. pie chart showing methods of eliminating stress 0   5   10   15   20   north   west   north   east   central   south   n um be r   of  p ar ti ci pa nt s   regions  in  trinidad  where  participants  live   frequency  count  of  regions  in  trinidad   where  participants  lived   participants   5   1  2  1   6   3   12   3  1  1   7   1  1  1   1   4   frequency  count  of  participants'  occupations   student   business  alaysts   retired   lecturer   teacher   self-­‐employed   salesclerk   accountant   inventory  clerk   hr  assistant   1  1  2  2  1   4   1   6   3   10   5   1   3   1  2   2  2   1  1  1   frequency  count  of  participants'  methods  of   eliminating  stress   beauty  parlour   plant   pray   stay  by  self   dance   meditate  yoga   cry   relax  rest   advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 139 participants’ emotional, physical, and mental empowerment except for 3 women, all women interviewed indicated that they rewarded themselves when they achieved an accomplished. shopping and buying clothing or jewelry for themselves were high on the list of extrinsic rewards. three women 30, 50, and 19 years old did nothing to reward themselves. the 30-year-old indicated that she was too busy being a mother and did not make time for herself. she stated, “girl, i have my children and i have only time for them and i can’t find time for myself” (personal communication, august 5, 2011). this example is an anomaly. note also that few indo-trinidadian women indicated that they had the tendency to “cry” or “stay by themselves” which mohammed (1988) discovered in her interview with droopatie naipaul was the norm among indo-trinidadian women who were interviewed in that era. all indo-trinidadian participants indicated that they did not adhere to any rigid religious dogma. most of the women interviewed, stated that they practiced a different religion to that of their spouses. one participant stated, “i am not strict about my religion, i am a christian and i am open-minded.” another participant stated, “i am in a hindu/muslim marriage and we celebrate both religious festivals.” another indo-trinidadian female involved in a hindu/catholic marriage indicated, “i am not strict in any one religion.” six participants were in muslim/hindu marriages and seven participants were in hindu/catholic marriages. four women were in interracial marriages. according to chari (2005) “indo-trinidadian women continue to challenge community norms by marrying men from the afro-trinidadian community” (p. viii). participants’ belief about freewill versus destiny given the traditional and archaic view of arranged marriages as part of the culture handed down from india and first and second generation indo-trinidadians, participants were vehemently against arranged marriages. they said not at all. one 50-year old participant stated, “no finding a partner on your own is better.” another participant stated, “we will always find the right person in the right place and time.” three women indicated that they acknowledged the value of arranged marriages and have witnessed the positive effects of arranged marriages. one 22 year-old participant stated, “my family will know better to choose someone for me so i think arranged marriages have a place in my life.” however, most participants did not see it as necessary in this changing society where indotrinidadian women are taking control of their lives and demonstrating freewill in all areas. one 22-year-old stated that she felt it was important because she may be blinded by love and not be able to see the faults of the individual as her parents would. she stated, “arranged marriages have their value and i prefer that my parents choose for me because i feel that i would be too in love to really see the true individual” (personal communication, august 5, 2011). as an aside, arranged marriages still exists in some remote and not so remote parts of trinidad where indo-trinidadian women are coerced into marrying persons they do not know very well. one participant did express concern for a family who practiced such a tradition at the expense of its children’s happiness. as this study is being written, there is a petition to increase the legal age for a female to be married in trinidad from 16 to 18 years old. indo-trinidadian participants no longer felt that their space in the home was in the kitchen and they did not feel that cooking, cleaning, and washing were gender specific tasks. they saw themselves as breadwinners in the family and equal to men. a 24 year-old participant stated that, “they are the breadwinners and they have made significant contributions to society and their family.” one 25-year-old self-employed woman said, “before, cooking and cleaning to serve husband, now is trying to make a living to help out the entire family” (personal communication, august 5, 2010). another participant stated that she saw the role of indo-trinidadian women as “trying to balance family and professional life.” a 31 year-old indo-trinidadian stated that she saw herself and other indo-trinidadian women as “having more freedom to do whatever they wanted to do.” another respondent stated that her role as a contemporary indotrinidadian woman was, “greater and more respectful.” an 18 year-old stated that the modern indo-trinidadian woman was, “independent and strong.” another participant saw today’s indotrinidadian women as, “empowered and autonomous.” contributing to the household and ensuring that they are finding themselves and growing are the staying power of current indotrinidadian woman. another 27 year-old participant stated that present indo-trinidadian women are seen in a “mixed light since some women are the traditional type and live in the more rural areas but others are bold and live in the more urban areas.” most participants found that indo-trinidadian men are treated similar to the women. one participant explained, “it depends on the age group in question and to some extent the level of education of the persons. it seems that with a higher level of education equal roles are more accepted.” however, three participants regarded men as treated generally better than women. in four instances, women in the south of trinidad indicated that their brothers were treated better than they were. one participant stated, “some men are treated better than women.” another participant stated, “the women have not reached equality. indian men look down on indian women.” another participant stated, “no, in my home, my brothers are treated better than i am treated.” this feeling of being disadvantaged and pushed aside in favor of a male was expressed by one of the female indo-trinidadian participants in yousef’s (2011) case study. according to janine (the participant): but those things changed for me…before a levels when my little brother was born. that was the turning point for me. my father introduced us and said, “okay, he has to call you bibi.” and i liked that. …..i didn’t fight against tradition anymore… i took a year off from a levels. tradition became very important to me (p. 135). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 140 all women believed that their destiny was controlled by a higher power. however, many opined that they had free will as well and god was there to guide them if they so desired. the changing role of indo-trinidadian participants displayed more financially independent individuals grounded in modernization and progress. many expressed the view that the current prime minister, kamla persad bissessar, served as a role model to all indo-trinidadian women. her strength, humble beginnings, and continued humility, spawn feelings of pride and kinship or the “jahaji-bhain” principle of affiliation and sisterhood (pirbhai, 2010). one participant stated that she felt “more powerful now with the current prime minister as the role model.” a 30 yearold participant stated that today’s indo-trinidadian women feel “confident in themselves and that they will positively achieve something and be better in their lives with the prime minister.” indo-trinidadian participants expressed strength, confidence, progress, improvement, and upward mobility as their current characteristics. interviewees exhorted indo-trinidadian women to embrace their resilience, tenacity, self-efficacy, selfempowerment, motherhood, and family support systems to create and inculcate an identity personifying contemporary indotrinidadian women. the bare-foot and pregnant image they see as being part of their ancestral past, a past they acquiesce but to which they do not adhere. manuel (1997/1998) stated, “diasporic identities are inherently unstable and complex entities, in which allegiances to contemporary and ancestral homelands are variously reconciled, weighted, or compartmentalized” (p. 1). indeed the emerging voice and identity of the actual indo-trinidadian woman is powerful, self-affirming, and filled with self-esteem and self respect. ninety percent of the women interviewed indicated that being financially independent has given them a sense of empowerment and self-efficacy. they saw themselves as successful, intelligent, self-confident, modern women in charge of their destinies setting their own standards and creating a new identity for indo-trinidadian women. participants’ transnational identity another aspect of indo-trinidadian women explored was that of the embodiment of transnational identities. four participants lived for short or extended periods away from their native land. their answers to the second section of the interview suggested individuals who could easily assimilate and integrate in another culture. according to these four interviewees, they learned to adapt to and adopt the culture of their new country. one participant stated, “people tend to click based on a variety of reasons, socio-economic, perceived class, religion and culture. one has to work at finding the right balance wherever one chooses to live.” they claimed not to have suffered any dilemma between the two diverse cultures. creating transnational identities, these four women have engendered transnational spaces. when asked about whether they had problems being understood in another country three women said no. one female indicated that she sometimes had problems due to the difference in language from english to french. they embraced the culture by being open-minded and being true to themselves and their personalities without feeling alienated from their home land. one participant stated, “one has to be open minded to be able to assimilate without much pain. as with all new things it is a give and take. why move to a new land if not willing to integrate to some extent.” all experienced moments when they yearned to return to trinidad but did not let it reach a point where they were not able to function. two of the women returned; one after only a short stay and another after many years away. there was yearning to return to the known after living away for so long. however, the feeling of being connected and in one’s own space of comfort far outweighed that yearning. verification of findings gómez, juristo, and vegas (2010) stated, “the verification of a previously observed finding is important. being able to verify a finding provides some guarantee that it is not product of chance but that the observed phenomenon is stable or regular” (p. 1). verifying findings is crucial in determining the extent of reliability, internal and external validity, and generalizability of the data. morse, barrett, mayan, olson, spiers (2002) purported that “verification strategies help the researcher identify when to continue, stop, or modify the research process in order to achieve reliability and validity and ensure rigor” (p. 17). they posited five verification strategies as follows: (a) methodological coherence, (b) sample must be appropriate, (c) collecting and analyzing data congruently, (d) thinking theoretically, and (e) theory development. “member-check,” as indicated by goldblatt, karnieli-miller, and neumann (2011), enhances study credibility and participants’ involvement. additionally, johnson (1997) indicated that participant feedback is, “the feedback and discussion of the researcher’s interpretations and conclusions with the actual participants and other members of the participants’ community for verification and insight” (p. 283). verification of findings was conducted with 10 of the 50 respondents who answered the open-ended questionnaire. participants were made aware of the major findings of the study and asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the conclusions. one 50-year-old self-employed respondent indicated, “indotrinidadian women in town are more independent, and educated so i agree with what you say but i feel that in the country indotrinidadian women would not be as independent” (personal communication, march 29, 2011). another 55 year-old unemployed participant stated, “that is how indo-trinidadian women are now as compared to before.” she continued, “in the countryside, there are educated indo-trinidadian women who would understand the questions and the level of information expected but again this is based on their level of education” (personal communication, march 29, 2011). all participants agreed that indo-trinidadian women have emerged from passive acceptance to embrace self efficacy, self-empowerment, hope optimism and ultimately centred leadership. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 141 “i think too many women are being abused and ill-treated by men” opined a 45 year-old indo-trinidadian female when informed about the findings of this study. she furthered, “men feel because they are men the woman should listen to them even when they cheat on you” (personal communication, march 29, 2011). another 44 year-old manager posited, “i agree with the findings because indo-trinidadian women are stronger, more independent, and rely on themselves” (personal communication, march 29, 2011). a 34 year-old participant echoed similar sentiments on learning of the results of this study, “indotrinidadian’s women strength is in not relying on men to take care of them and provide for them” (personal communication, march 29, 2011). a 19-year-old respondent agreed with the findings and stated, “my parents and education give me strength and indo-trinidadian women are finding that strength” (personal communication, march 29, 2011). a quote from the present prime minister of trinidad and tobago effectively sums up the journey of the indo-trinidadian woman, “my own small story of village girl to prime minister is simply a demonstration of what can occur when even some opportunities and better education are provided to girls and women” (trinidad guardian, march 15, 2011, p. 6) link to participants’ centered leadership centered leadership consists of five leadership capabilities: (a) meaning; (b) framing; (c) connecting; (d) engaging; and (e) energizing. meaning involves purpose, motivation and happiness. in this respect, these 50 indo-trinidadian females displayed strong intrinsic motivation in attaining goals, eliminating stress, and seeing themselves as makers of their own destinies. they showed resilience by the tenacity they stated they possessed when trying to accomplish a goal. since the concept of centered leadership relates to professional leaders and some of these were leaders in their specific jobs, framing was not a very strong indicator in their responses. they did display the subscale of framing-optimism. they were optimistic about themselves and their role in society as contemporary indo-trinidadian women. the questionnaire did not adequately respond to the concept of connecting. however, from their responses of talking to others when they are stressed, and even agreeing to answer the questions posed to them, the participants displayed connection according to brash and cranston (2011). in the subscale, engaging as defined by brash and cranston, these respondents exhibited high levels as they indicated that they believed in freewill and did not believe that their parents should choose their spouse. in this stage, from the responses given, indo-trinidadian women were weathering the storm and making their own luck. the subscales of energizing as espoused by brash and cranston is that women possess stamina and drive which can be seen in these participants’ outlook in life. they were mentally, physically, and emotionally empowered based on their responses. forty-seven participants indicated that they rewarded themselves for small and big accomplishments. this action gave them a sense of achievement and also allowed them to persevere and set larger goals which reflected a high level of resilience, hope, and optimism which is related to aspects of centered leadership such as meaning, connecting, engaging, and energizing. respondents were particularly energized based on the activities they participated in to eliminate stress. they walked, listened to music, meditated, danced, prayed, relaxed/rested, shopped, and planted in order to feel re-energized. this also indicates that the interviewees were cognizant of what energizes them which is a valuable tool in developing centered leadership. most indo-trinidadian women interviewed indicated that they set extrinsic and intrinsic goals and tried their utmost to attain their objectives. above all, indo-trinidadian participants indicated that they always tried to uplift, love, praise, and respect themselves. such strategies will lead to more actualized individual who reflects centered leadership. discussion there is a tendency to stigmatize women based on ethnicity rather than what they have accomplished individually and collectively. women who have not been able to transcend the traditional role as mothers and caretakers should feel empowered by the examples of the 50 indo-trinidadian participants in this study. there should be global sharing and sisterhood as women look to emulate positive qualities of resilience, self-efficacy, self-concordance, and increased self-awareness. these findings suggest that participants were more self-contained and exemplified high levels of optimism, hope, and resilience which lead to high levels of meaning, framing, connecting, engaging, and energizing all necessary elements in centered leadership. they set goals and tried to attain them to the best of their abilities and displayed high levels of resilience. they found constructive ways to eliminate stress. they capitalized on their strengths and were willing to work on their weaknesses. these participants all displayed aspects of centered leadership from meaning, framing, connecting, engaging, and energizing. they knew what worked and did not work for them and they chose optimism as opposed to pessimism. they displayed resilience in their approach to life and their tenacity in achieving goals. strategies for empowerment according to the women interviewed were education, resilience, self-efficacy, increased understanding of themselves and the concomitant, onerous, and conflated responsibility as mother and professional. several indo-trinidadian participants stated that family and spousal support systems could be accredited to their success as individuals. recommendations and conclusions a recommendation would be that a more situated observation would have eliminated any tendency to create a positive impression. a younger age group would yield different results and comparing results with an older age group would illustrate the change and progress from one era to another. a comparison of urban and rural indo-trinidadian women’s perspectives would also provide insightful information. a larger sample size advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 142 may yield nuances in demographics such as age, religion, educational level, and marital status. the 50 indo-trinidadian women interviewed indicated that they were proud, strong, resilient, empowered women who were willing to reward themselves for their achievements. they also stated that they felt in control of their destiny, did not wish to be seen as the archaic prototypes of indian women, and felt financially and emotionally independent. they did not view themselves as products of a society but producers of the society. these findings corroborate the theoretical framework of centered leadership. the conclusions contained in this study expand the limited body of extant evidence-based research on indo-trinidadian women’s identity beliefs and leadership. mohammed (2010) stated, “in the 1980s i wrote a paper called ‘the creolization of indian women.’ i was talking about the way in which indian women in trinidad have turned the very weaknesses associated with them–submissiveness, subservience–into strengths” (p. 2). mohammed saw the modern identity of indo-trinidadian woman as capitalizing on her tenacity, perseverance, passivity, and “cane resilience” (mehta, 2010) and her education proves to be a powerful combination. the participants in this study demonstrate a new identity and belief system of the modern indo-trinidadian woman. mohammed declared of the incumbent indo-trinidadian female prime minister: so what i see with kamla persad-bissessar is a coming of age, to use a cliché, and to reduce her victory only to ‘the woman thing’ is to deny the importance of race and how important this has been for indians here and indian women in particular. (p. 1) indo-trinidadian women continue to use their very weaknesses as strengths to create a repertoire of skills, beliefs, and identities that challenge the quintessential concept of contemporary indotrinidadian women. references brash, j., & cranston, s. (2011). the breakthrough model for work and life: how remarkable women lead. mc kinsey & company inc: usa. chari, s. (2005). one together and one apart”: interracial marriages between indo-trinidadian women and afro-trinidadian men. retrieved from http://etd.fcla.edu/uf/ufe0011839/chari_s.pdf goldblatt, h., karnieli-miller, o., & neumann, m. (2011). sharing qualitative research findings with participants: study experiences of methodological and ethical dilemmas. patient educational council, 82(3), 389-395. gómez, o. s., juristo, n., & vegas, s. (2010). replication, reproduction, and re-analysis: three ways for verifying experimental findings. retrieved from sequoia.cs.byu.edu/files/.../gomez%20%20replication%20reproduction.pdf hosein, s. (2011). unlikely matriarchs: rural indo-trinidadian women in the domestic sphere. in r. kanhai (ed.), bindi: the multifaceted lives of indo-caribbean women. pp. 101120. mona, jamaica: university of the west indies press. johnson, r. b. (1997). examining the validity structure of qualitative research. education, 118(2), 282-293. kvale, s. (1996). interviews: an introduction to qualitative research interviewing. california, ca: sage publications incorporated. manuel, p. (1997/1998). music, identity, and images of india in the indo caribbean diaspora. asian music, xxix(1),115. mcnamara, c. (1999). general guidelines for conducting interviews. retrieved from http://208.42.83.77/evaluatn/intrview.htm mehta, b. j. (2004). disporic dislocations: indo caribbean women writers negotiate the kala pani. jamaica: university of the west indies press. mohammed, p. (1988). the creolization of indian women in trinidad. in s. ryan (ed.), trinidad and tobago: the independence experience 1962-1987. pp. 20-40. st. augustine, trinidad: iser, uwi. mohammed, p. (1994). a social history of post-migrant indians in trinidad from 1917-1947: a gender perspective. phd. dissertation. the hague: institute of social studies. mohammed, p. (1998). ram and sita: the reconstruction of gender identities among indians in trinidad through mythology. in c. barrow (ed.), caribbean portraits: essays on gender ideologies and identities, pp. 391-413. jamaica: ian randle publications. mohammed, p. (1998). stories in caribbean feminism: reflections on the twentieth century. trinidad: centre for gender studies. mohammed, p. (1998). towards indigenous feminist theorizing in the caribbean. rethinking caribbean difference, special issue on the caribbean, feminist review, 59, 6-33. mohammed, p. (2002). gender negotiations among indians in trinidad 1917-1947. new york, ny: belgrave. mohammed, p. (2010). the lotus of trinidad and tobago: kamla persad bissessar. retrieved from http://anniepaulactivevoice.blogspot.com/2010/07/lotus-oftrinidad-and-tobago-kamla.html mohammed, p. (2012). changing symbols of indo-caribbean femininity. caribbean review of gender studies, 6, 1-16. retrieved from https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/2012/journals/mohammed.pdf morse, j. m., barrett, m., mayan, m., olson, k., & spiers, j. (2002). verification strategies for establishing reliability and validity of qualitative research. international journal of qualitative methods, 1(2), 13-22. retrieved from http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ijqm/article/vi ew/4603/3756 pirbhai, m. (2010). the jahaji-bahain principle: a critical survey of indo-caribbean women’s novel, 1990-2009. journal of commonwealth literature, 45(1), 137-156. trinidad guardian (2011, march 15). barefoot to pm. retrieved from http://guardian.co.tt/ turner, d. w. (2010). qualitative interview design: a practical guide for novice investigators. retrieved from http://www.nova.edu/ssss/qr/qr15-3/qid.pdf advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 143 williams, c. l., & heikes, j. e. (1993). the importance of researcher’s gender in the in-depth interview: evidence from two case studies of male nurses. gender & society, 7(2), 280-291. yousef, v. (2011). finding self in the transition from east to west. in r. kanhai (ed.), bindi: the multifaceted lives of indocaribbean women. pp. 121-140. mona, jamaica: university of the west indies press. appendix a questionnaire indo-trinidadian women 1. age 2. occupation 3. (a) education level: o’ level, a’ level, ba, ma, phd (b) where do you live? 4. i feel confident that when a problem arises that i can solve it. 5. i don’t feel/ feel disadvantaged being an indotrinidadian woman that i am at a disadvantage/advantage living in trinidad. 6. when i enter a room where i know no-one, i make an effort to get to know people. 7. my outlook on the future is positive even if at the moment it does not appear to be. 8. how do you feel about your body image? 9. when it seems that all is lost and there is no other way. i lose hope/ do not lose hope. 10. do you believe that you have control over your emotions? 11. when you are stressed, what do you do to eliminate stress? 12. name one positive reward you did for yourself for achieving something? 13. when i set a goal and it seems that i cannot achieve it, i continue working toward this goal until i achieve it. 14. do you believe in arranged marriages or should we each find our partner on our own or it is destined and we will find this person in the right time and place? 15. do you believe that we have freewill over our destiny or that our destiny is controlled by a higher force? 16. do you adhere to strict hindu/muslim/ catholic practices? 17. do you believe as indo-trinidadian women we are no longer barefoot and pregnant but embracing all aspects of the role as bread winner in the household? 18. is there parity between the male and female indotrinidadian community: (1) professionally and (2) social status? 19. how do you see the role of indo-trinidadian women in 2010? 20. how do you feel you have empowered yourself as an indian woman? if you migrated etc.: 1. did you have problems being understood? 2. how did you embrace the new culture? 3. did you experience any sense of alienation? 4. did you yearn to return home? 5. did you learn to accept the new environment? 6. if you returned home what were your thoughts or feelings etc.? 7. did you have problems reintegrating into the trinidadian society? international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle the institutionalization of a gender biased sport value system robert b. everhart, ph.d. cynthia lee a. pemberton, ed.d. everhart & pemberton, winter, 2001 historically and traditionally sport has evolved as a male domain, and it is clear that women and girls, as well as men and boys, have different sport participation roots. introduction to develop tougher males while controlling wild ones, some school administrators experimented with an innovative plan. they co-opted the rough-and-tumble games boys played during recess and in their free time, and made these part of the official curriculum. (sadker & sadker, 1994, pp. 214-215) sport has been a part of the "...official school program..." since the mid-1800s, and was originally incorporated into the curriculum to serve as "...an important line of defense..." against the potential feminization of american males by a growing female teaching profession (sadker & sadker, 1994, p. 213). as a part of the curriculum, sport provided opportunities for physical fitness and competition, as well as a medium through which valued socio-cultural life skills could be learned and practiced. grounded in ideals of masculinity, sport, more than any other part of the educational curriculum has been, and continues to be, a gender issue. this paper will explore how school sport has served to institutionalize a gender specific and gender biased sport value system. first the socio-cultural context in which school sport emerged, and its history and evolution will be reviewed. next the differential impact which school sport has on females and males will be examined. the paper concludes that the development of school sport has, over time, marginalized and devalued women's sport, and the women who participate. http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/hispanic.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/hispanic.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html it is suggested that because of this, sport participation by women and girls has actually been suppressed. school sport: a historical perspective socio-cultural issues women's sport has been defined and shaped by "...men's values, men's understanding of the world, and men's experiences-all of which suppress the development and expression of female values"(blinde, 1989, p. 37). the history and evolution of gendered sport cultures substantiates this statement and provides evidence, not only of historic and existing gender bias in sport, but of a sport culture created and sustained to nurture that bias. historically, women and girls have not been provided equal opportunities in sport because of (a) perceptions relative to physiological differences between the sexes, (b) societal norms and attitudes, and (c) organizational rules and support (lumpkin, 1984). in the early 1900s, medical doctors and female physical educators thought that vigorous activity would endanger a women's reproductive capacities as well as result in the development of "unsightly" muscle. in response to these concerns, early sport endeavors for women and girls were limited to activities such as archery, dancing, croquet, golf, swimming, and tennis. in fact, as recently as 1972: the longest race allowed for women in the...olympics was the 1500m a holdover from the belief that females could not physically or mentally cope with the competitive demands of longer events. (weiss & glenn, 1992, p. 139) more recent and ongoing research has shown that there are no medical, mental, or emotional reasons that support the restriction of women/girls from participating and competing in sport (lumpkin, 1984; zimmerman & reavill, 1998). in addition to these physiological myths, the role of the successful competitive athlete, and the espousal of stereotypically masculine sport values, were perceived by both women and men as incompatible with the role of women in society. although there is evidence of change, women who were/are "overly" competitive risked social stigma via non-feminine labeling (aburdene & naisbitt, 1992; lumpkin, 1984). as a result, females in sport have struggled to pursue balance, acceptance, and success within a sport model characterized by the very attributes that the broader socio-cultural context discourages, and at times has even punished women and girls for exhibiting. the educational history of sport begins as the history of sport for boys and men. early on, school sport was seen as a "...panacea...one that would reduce the dropout problem, create a masculine environment, and give unruly males an energy outlet and schools a public relations bonanza" (sadker & sadker, 1994, p. 215). according to sadker and sadker (1994) "it was precisely because...[sport]...intensified traditional notions of masculinity that educators found sports so attractive and incorporated them into the official school program" (p. 213). sport was literally incorporated into the educational curriculum by men, for men, to serve men, evolving as a celebration of maleness, valuing strength, power, and competition. hill (1993) concurred and stated: it [sport] idealized, promoted and rewarded successful, elite athletes, established "the dream" as a professional career in sports, and viewed mass participation in sport as a tool of exclusion used to weed out the weak. the sport contest was public, the opponent was the enemy, and the winner dominated the loser. (p. 50) winning wasn't everything...it was the only thing; competition was war; and the athlete a warrior-hero. introduced into the curriculum based on the rough and tumble games played by young boys, interscholastic and intercollegiate athletic programs quickly grew in both quantity and quality throughout the educational system. the end result was a large, well organized, male dominated sport culture, grounded in community and curriculum-based sport programs with an established pinnacle of professional athletics. in contrast, women's sports originated to "...address the expressed need for healthful exercise for women..." (huckaby, 1994, p. 48). almost universally, women's sport programs were directed and coached by female physical educators (festle, 1996; uhlir, 1982). unlike the competitive warrior model characteristic of men's sports, women's sports were rooted in philosophies of participation, cooperation and play. the female sport culture was grounded in a physical education philosophy of participation and a belief that individuals of "...all skill levels deserved the benefits of sports programs" (uhlir, 1982, p. 173). the female sport culture emphasized enjoyment and social competition with the ultimate contest goals being those of self-development and teamwork, as opposed to winning and individual elitism (blinde, 1989; festle, 1996; hill, 1993). interscholastic and intercollegiate competitions evolved from a tradition of play days and sport days which consisted of "...several institutions...play[ing] at the same site" (huckaby, 1994, p. 48). institutional issues in the early 1970s, two events occurred that dramatically altered the course of sport for women and girls. in 1971, the association for intercollegiate athletics for women (aiaw) was created by female physical educators as a "...model of athletic governance designed for female studentathletes, which incorporated the prevailing women's sports philosophy" (uhlir, 1982, p. 173). shortly after, in 1972 congress enacted title ix of the education amendments. a federal civil rights statute that states: no person in the united states shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. (as cited in vargyas, 1994, p. 6) the association of intercollegiate athletics for women (aiaw), was founded to "...help schools extend their sports programs for women...stimulate leadership among those (mostly women) who were responsible for women's programs...[and conduct] national athletic championships for women" (festle, 1996, pp. 110-111). the aiaw was a small organization with a limited budget. unlike the national collegiate athletic association (ncaa), and the national association of intercollegiate athletics (naia), both originally men's sport governing organizations, the aiaw made no distinction between revenue and non-revenue sports. in fact, fearing that with money came corruption and exploitation, it wasn't until the latter part of 1973, in response to legal pressures associated with title ix compliance, that the aiaw allowed women who accepted athletic scholarships to compete in its national championships (festle, 1996; mckeown, 1974). during the 1972-73 season, the aiaw offered its first seven national championships (badminton, basketball, golf, gymnastics, swimming & diving, track & field, and volleyball), and by the 1980-81 season the aiaw national program had grown to 39 championships in 17 different sports with 6,000 women's teams and 960 member institutions (festle, 1996; uhlir, 1982). title ix impacted sport specific opportunities for women and girls as well as the ongoing evolution of school sport governance. relative to educational institutions and sport, this law meant that "...institutions could not discriminate on the basis of gender, in any program receiving federal funds, including athletics" (hill, 1993, p. 51). according to indiana senator birch bayh (democrat), the principal senate sponsor of title ix, the act was put forth as: ...a strong and comprehensive measure [that would] provide women with solid legal protection from the persistent, pernicious discrimination which is serving to perpetuate second-class citizenship for american women. (vargyas, 1994, p. 6) in other words, title ix was designed to proactively address historical wrongs and ensure gender equity relative to educational opportunities, including educational-athletic opportunities. the combination of the aiaw women's school sport governance and the legislation of title ix resulted in rapid expansion in the quantity and quality of school sport opportunities for girls and women. the results of these two events were nothing short of extraordinary. in 1966 there were approximately 16,000 women participating in intercollegiate sports nationwide; by 1976, that number had increased to 64,000, and by 1991 to 156,000 (carpenter & acosta, 1991). since the early 1990's that overall number has continued to grow, albeit slowly (university of iowa, 1997; women's sports foundation, 1998; national collegiate athletic association, 1999). as sport programs for women and girls expanded and began to receive more financial support and recognition "...[the] guardians of sports education for males...[who]... feared the development of sports for girls and women because of what it might mean to their entrenched power and traditions" (uhlir, 1982, p. 173), began to take action. the ncaa launched a series of efforts to limit the applicability of title ix regarding intercollegiate athletics. in 1974, they unsuccessfully lobbied the department of health education and welfare (hew) for an exclusion of athletics from title ix. later that same year the ncaa supported the tower amendment, which sought to exclude revenue producing sports from title ix. congress acted instead on the javits amendment, "...which charged hew with preparing and publishing title ix regulations, covering interalia, intercollegiate athletics. in formulating these regulations, hew was required to ' consider[] the nature of particular sports'" (vargyas, 1994, p. 7). the ncaa then turned to the courts and attempted, again unsuccessfully, to argue that the application of title ix to athletics was unconstitutional, ncaa v. califano (carpenter & acosta, 1991). failing in their efforts to limit the athletic application of title ix, the ncaa embarked on a mission of merger and acquisition to gain control of women's sport. in 1980, the ncaa offered its first women's national championships. they also provided institutional incentives of financial assistance for national travel and television rights to both women's and men's basketball championships (carpenter & acosta, 1991). in may, 1980 the national association of intercollegiate athletics (naia) passed legislation to establish intercollegiate championships for women (henry, 1993). the aiaw, a smaller and financially weaker organization, could no longer compete, and by june of 1982, the aiaw ceased to exist (huckaby, 1994). in response to the merger of national intercollegiate athletic affiliations, as well as perceptions that title ix compliance could, and would, be facilitated through departmental integration; institutions across the country combined their women's and men's athletic departments/programs. and, virtually without exception, the women's sport programs and their leadership were subsumed by the existing men's sport programs (carpenter & acosta, 1991). according to uhlir (1982): ...women lost authority over their programs...[and]... were appointed to secondary [sometimes tertiary], positions in the unified administrative structures, despite the fact that they frequently had more experience or held higher ranks and degrees than the men. (p. 174) in 1972 more than 90% of women's programs were administered and directed by women. by 1994, less than 21% of those same programs were administered/directed by a female, and by 1999 the percent of female head athletic administrators had dropped to 17.8% (acosta & carpenter, 2000). as women's sports programs expanded and began to receive more financial support and recognition, men began applying for, and getting, women's sport coaching positions. according to a 23-year longitudinal study by acosta and carpenter (2000): (a) in 1972, over 90% of the coaches who coached women's sports were female, by 1999, 45.6% of women's sports coaches were female; and (b) although coaching opportunities for men in women's sports have increased dramatically, there has been no correspondingly similar increase in opportunities for women coaching men. only about 2% of ncaa men's programs have a female coach at the helm. from its inception the impact of title ix on women's sport has been both positive and problematic. pre title ix women comprised less than 7% of interscholastic (high school) athletes (aburdene & naisbitt, 1992). today more than 2.5 million women play high school sports, while the number of men has remained relatively constant (approximately 3.7 million) ("high-school athletics participation," 1996; women's sports foundation, 1998). at the intercollegiate level, women constitute over half of all college undergraduates and approximately 40% of sport participants (national collegiate athletic association (ncaa), 1999; united states government accounting office (gao), 1996; women's sports foundation, 1998). pre title ix women's sports garnered a mere 2% of athletic budgets (aburdene & naisbitt, 1992); presently that number is over 30% (national collegiate athletic association (ncaa), 1999; united states government accounting office (gao), 1996; women's sports foundation, 1998). despite these gains men and boys continue to receive the bulk of sport participation opportunities, as well as better quantity and quality of sport specific accommodations, such as operating budget allocations, scholarship dollars, access to coaching, etc. (pemberton, 1996). ultimately, the cost of these gains has been the loss of the traditional women's sport culture and the full and effective assimilation of women's sport "...into the existing... male [sport] model" (hill, 1993, p. 51). as history reveals, not only has school sport for men/boys had a significant head start on sport for women and girls, but the socio-cultural value systems in which they were and are grounded, was and is very different. historically and traditionally sport has been defined, to virtual exclusion, by male dominated norms and values. if women and girls have gotten to play at all, they have had to adapt to and within the established male model. the price to play has been the virtual elimination of female sport administrative leadership, and a drastic reduction in the number of female sport coaches. because of this, it isn't surprising that women and girls have not, and do not participate in school sport in the same numbers men and boys do. what's surprising is that they play as much and well as they do. especially given the facts that: (a) playing sports for women and girls involves navigating the double-bind of conflicting sport and gender specific socio-cultural norms and values; (b) sport participation for women and girls has been dependent upon their ability to fit into the dominant male model; and (c) the very component parts upon which participation depends (i.e., participation opportunities, scholarship dollars, operating budgets, access to coaching, etc.), have been, until recently, largely denied to women and girls. school sport why it matters and why they play "sport and fitness activities are important contributors to the mental, emotional and physical well-being of human beings" (weiss & glenn, 1992, p. 153). sport is important physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially for both women and girls, as well as for men and boys. as such, it is simply too important to disproportionately benefit men and boys (lopiano, 1994). according to the 1985 miller lite report (as cited in women's sports foundation, 1992): women who are active in sports and recreational activities as girls feel greater confidence, self-esteem and pride in their physical and social selves than those who were sedentary as kids. (p. 1) sabo (1993) found female athletes to be more achievement oriented, independent, self-confident, and inner controlled than female non-athletes. further, lopiano (1994) states that girls who participate in sports experience health benefits associated with reduced risk of breast cancer and osteoporosis. further they are 80% less likely to have an unwanted pregnancy, are 92% less likely to become involved with drugs and three times more likely to graduate from high school than their non athletic peers (lopiano, 1994). sadker and sadker (1994) reported that: "one in four elementary school boys regards athletics as the best part of being male" (p. 85). by middle school and high school boys see sports as the most prestigious of all school sponsored activities. by college, males "...basking in status and popularity..." are revered as "campus nobility" (p. 184). historically and traditionally sport and the inherent life-skill lessons learned and practiced, have for men and boys, provided an expressway to socio-cultural access, power, prestige, and success. for men and boys, school athletics has a long history of helping...build stamina, courage, leadership, loyalty to the team, selfconfidence, and the drive to win. educators also recognize sports as a vehicle for shaping boys into men who will lead society...what benefits boys is good for girls too -the building of character, career skills, and self-esteem. but historically females have been barred from sports; until very recently they were taught in segregated classes with poorer equipment and fewer resources. (sadker & sadker, 1994, p. 125) cantor and bernay (1992) interviewed 25 female government leaders to determine what qualities and/or strengths enabled them to get elected and persevere in high governmental/political positions. repeatedly women attributed their success to a combination of competence, creative aggression and woman power. they linked these qualities to sport participation as a "training ground" (p. 62) for effective participation on the "playing field of power" (p. 50). as explained by cantor and bernay, the women interviewed saw sport participation as important because through it girls (and boys) experience opportunities to savor winning and to deal with losing. in the closing chapter of their work, cantor and bernay (1992) noted sport participation as an important vehicle to practice life-skills for leadership. a vehicle too often accessed by men and boys to the exclusion of women and girls. according to cantor and bernay (1992): [sport]...has been men's practice arena for centuries... [through sport men learn]...about creative aggression, its strengths, and limits, the rules to play by and the consequences of being aggressive. (p. 277) cantor and bernay (1992) concluded this thought by stating, "now it's our [women/girls] turn to take advantage of this learning and playing field" (p. 277). aburdene and naisbitt (1992) agreed. "engaging in sports, women will find the new leadership qualities they need in both politics and business, including persistence, courage and discipline and good sports-womanship" (p. 320). research shows that often females participate in sports for different reasons than males. in a 5-year longitudinal study conducted by butcher and hall (1983), girls in grades six through ten were surveyed to determine the extent to which their participation in physical activity changed with age, and what factors were most related to continued physical activity as girls matured. findings related to issues of a male-dominated sport culture focused on changes in the perceived value of sport participation as girls mature. according to butcher and hall (1983) as girls mature they become less motivated by competition and more motivated by physical activity as a release of tension. additionally, butcher and hall (1983) found that participation reinforcement by significant others declined with age, as did positive perceptions relative to the image of female athletes. the wilson report (wilson sporting goods inc., l988) was the first large scale nationwide and inter-generational survey of the female sport experience. the findings of this report showed that (a) 87% of the mothers and fathers surveyed valued sports as equally important for both their daughters and sons, and (b) 97% agreed that sports provide girls with valuable benefits and were not concerned with their daughters being labeled "unlady-like." the benefits cited, included: (a) positive contributions to physical well-being, (b) enhanced confidence and self-esteem, (c) the promotion of team work, and (d) the encouragement of friendships. of the 513 girls/young women interviewed, 58% said they participated in sports primarily because it was/is fun. eighty-seven percent of girls ages seven to 10, and 84% of girls ages 11 to 14, said they were currently involved in sports. that number dropped to 75% for young women ages 15 to 18 years. of the young women who did not play sports or had quit sports, 30% said their lack of participation was a result of lack of opportunity, 49% said it was because of lack of skill, and 59% said they quit or did not play sports because of lack of time. additionally, minority girls/young women, cited participation obstacles such as transportation, lack of funds, and social peer and family pressures not to participate. in a study designed to test the generalizability of the social-role, social systems framework, and to examine whether conceptual and methodological perspectives pertaining to sport might be gender biased, greendorfer (1987a) surveyed 110 female intercollegiate athletes from big 10 universities. based on a survey response rate of 92% and comparisons with a non-athletic control group, greendorfer substantiated her hypothesis that early sport participation research was gender biased. she based her findings on the following: (a) early sport participation research adhered to the underlying principles of a male sport model/ culture, and (b) it used male subjects. the substantiation of this underlying framework as gender biased helps explain why findings relative to female sport socialization have been considered deviations from the norm. in a related work, greendorfer (1987b) explained that: "...if the sport experience does not meet the participant expectations, the individual will withdraw from the activity" (p. 62). she found that female college athletes cited too much emphasis on winning, not enough playing time, and a lack of fun as primary reasons for dropping out of intercollegiate sports; that is, incompatibilities with the dominant male sport culture. blinde (1989) summarized data from several surveys and studies which examined reasons for, and conditions surrounding, female sport participation and sport patterns. what she found was that almost without exception, "men's sport programs [were] used as the norm by which equal opportunity in women's sport [was] judged" (p. 33). the result was that women's sport programs and opportunities never seemed to measure up. sport participation can, and often does, result in positive outcomes. physical, mental, emotional and social outcomes that benefit men and boys, as well as women and girls. in many ways the benefits of sport participation are gender neutral. however, the valuing of sport by males and females is at least somewhat gender specific. despite the fact that sport for women and girls has been redefined by a male sport history that espoused male norms and values, and was/is operationally and structurally delimited by disparate accommodations which favor men and boys, women and girls not only value their sport experience, but value it differently than their male counterparts. the problem is, this different valuing is not consistent with the dominant male model. by virtue of definition, that which is dominant prevails. despite the fact that in some instances the shoe hasn't quite fit, women/girls have been forced not only wear it if they wanted to play, but to learn to run well in it. given this incompatibility, or lack of fit between male and female sport motives, it is not surprising that women and girls do not yet participate in sport to the same degree as men and boys. what's surprising is that given this lack of fit, women and girls have been able to run as fast and far as they have. concluding thoughts historically and traditionally sport has evolved as a male domain, and it is clear that women and girls, as well as men and boys, have different sport participation roots. the evidence presented supports the notion that gender bias in sport is a product of not only different sport histories and traditions, but also an inherent incompatibility between female and male sport cultures and values. the dominant male sport value system has defined and delimited the parameters of sport for women and girls, especially and ironically since the passage of title ix. further, evidence has been presented to show that gender bias and gender discrimination are manifest in sport through differences in both the quantity and quality of the sport experiences/programs available, as well as the virtual elimination of female sport administrative leadership and dramatically reduced numbers of female sport coaches. the apparent physical, mental, emotional, and socio-cultural benefits of sport participation, have been, until recently, largely denied to women and girls. given these contextual realities it isn't surprising that as yet women and girls don't participate in school sport to the same degree men and boys do. it's surprising that given the long history of gender bias and discrimination, the many ways bias and discrimination have been institutionalized through male dominated norms and values, the operational structures and component parts that facilitate and/or delimit female school sport participation, and a differential valuing of the male/female sport experience, that women and girls participate in sport to the degree that they do. the question isn't how come things are as they are. the question is how could they be otherwise? the goal of this paper has been to review some of the literature and explore how school sport has served to institutionalize a gender specific and gender biased sport value system. the result of which has been the marginalization and devaluation of sport for women and girls and the consequent suppression of their sport participation. this paper stops short of a detailed look forward to possible gender neutral and/or gender inclusive sport models, how they might be envisioned and/or operationalized, as well as how they might or might not impact sport for women/girls and men/boys. instead, this paper has focused on the reality of what is, and tried to show how that reality defines and delimits what might be. ultimately, instead of propagating defenses against change based on assertions that women and girls don't want to play sports as much as men and boys, we can begin to appreciate that as much and exactly the same are not synonyms. given the history of school sport, gender based socio-cultural incompatibilities, and the many obstacles women/girls in sport have, and continue to confront, the fact that they participate in sport as much and as well as they do, suggests that perhaps they really do not want to play as much as men and boys...perhaps, they want to play more. it takes considerable time for women to understand that getting "equal" parts will not make them equal, as long as the script, the props, the stage setting and the direction are firmly held by men. (lerner, 1990, p. 8) references aburdene, p., & naisbitt, j. (1992). megatrends for women. new york: villard books. acosta, r. v., & carpenter, l. j. (1991, january/february). back to the future: reform with a woman's voice. academe, 77(1), 23-27. acosta, r. v., & carpenter, l. j. (2000). women in intercollegiate sport: a longitudinal study twenty-three year update, 1977-2000. brooklyn, new york: brooklyn college, department of physical education. bernay, t., & cantor, d. w. (1992). women in power: the secrets of leadership. boston, new york: houghton mifflin company. blinde, e. m. (1989, march). female intercollegiate athletics. changes and implications. journal of physical education, recreation and dance, 60(3), 33-37. butcher, j., & hall, m. a. (1983). adolescent girls participation in physical activity. edmonton: alberta department of education. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 231 777) festle, m. j. (1996). playing nice: politics and apologies in women's sports. new york: columbia university press. glenn, s. d., & weiss, m. r. (1992, august). psychological development and females' sport participation: an interactional perspective. quest, 44(22), 138-157. greendorfer, s. l. (1987a, september). gender bias in theoretical perspectives: the case of female socialization into sport. psychology of women quarterly, 11(3), 327-340. greendorfer, s. l. (1987b, september). psycho-social correlates of organized physical activity. journal of physical education, recreation and dance, 58(7), 59-64. henry k. (1993, fall). the fight for equal rights in athletics. balance magazine, 4(1), 15. high-school athletics participation. (1996, september 30). ncaa news, pp. 2. hill, k. l. (1993, november/december). women in sport: backlash or megatrend? the journal of physical education, recreation, and dance, 64(9), 49-52. huckaby, a. m. (1994). women's athletics. unpublished manuscript: kenyon college athletic department. lerner, g. (1990, spring). writing women into history. women of powet, 6-9. lopiano, d. a. (1994). equity in women's sports: a health and fairness perspective. the athletic woman, 13(2), 281-296. lumpkin, a. (1984). historical perspectives of female participation in youth sport. paper presented at the annual convention of the american alliance for health, physical education, recreation and dance, anaheim, ca. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 243 878) mckeown, m. (1974). women in intercollegiate athletics. in g. h. hanford (ed.), the need for a national study of intercollegiate athletics: a report to the american council on education, vol. 2, append. h, (pp. 369-387), (eric document reproduction service no. ed 132 968) national collegiate athletic association. (1999). ncaa gender-equity study. summary of results. kansas city, mo: ncaa publications. pemberton, c. l. (1996). an educational gender equity/title ix workshop for intercollegiate athletic personnel. unpublished doctoral dissertation, portland state university, portland, oregon. reavill, g., & zimmerman, j. (1998). raising our athletic daughters: how sports can build selfesteem and save girls lives. new york, ny: doubleday. sabo, d. (1993). psychosocial impacts of athletic participation on american women: facts and fables. in d. s. eitzen (ed.), sport in contemporary society: an anthology, (pp. 374-87). new york: st. martin's press. sadker, d., & sadker, m. (1994). failing at fairness: how our schools cheat girls. new york: simon & schuster publishers. uhlir, a. (1982, november). the wolf is our shepherd: shall we not fear? phi delta kappan, 64(3), 172-176. united states general accounting office. (1996, october). intercollegiate athletics: status of efforts to promote gender equity. (hehs publication no. 97-10). washington dc.: u.s. general accounting office. university of iowa. (1997). gender equity in sports [on-line]. available: http://www.arcade.uiowa.edu/proj/ge/ up_to_date.html#220 vargyas, e. j. (1994). breaking down barriers: a legal guide to title ix. washington, dc: national women's law center. wilson sporting goods inc. (1988). the wilson report: moms, dads, daughters and sports. los angeles, ca: diagnostic research inc. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 314 418) women's sports foundation (1992). women's sports facts. east meadow, new york: author. women's sports foundation (1998). participation statistics packet. east meadow, new york: author. dr. robert everhart is a professor of the school of education at portland state university. dr. everhart can be reached via e-mail at: bob@ed.pdx.edu. dr. cynthia pemberton is an assistant professor of sport science, pe, and dance at idaho state university. dr. pemberton can be reached via e-mail at: pembcynt@isu.edu. subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; 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programs or activity receiving federal financial assistance. --from the preamble to title ix of the education amendments of 1972 the most significant role played by the federal government in advancing the state of sex equity in educational administration, as well as in most other issues involving social change, has been through legislation. "old habits and time-honored gender roles," write gupton and slick (1996), "are nebulous and stubbornly resistant to change throughout a society. the two alternative approaches to . . . discrimination [are] using mandates or changing societal attitudes" (p.145). these authors make the point that discrimination of women in the workplace will continue to need legislative backing until there is concrete evidence supported by hard data and women's experiences to prove sex equity in the world of work has indeed been achieved to a level no longer justifying legislative overseeing. unfortunately, this seems to be how many societal prejudices and biases are overcome and ultimately (over much time) widely changed. and so, the federal level's role in addressing issues of discrimination is a critical one in facilitating societal change. "political pressures and laws and regulations have been, and continue to be, a potent force in removing barriers in both society and education systems" writes adams (1982) quoted in flansburg and hanson (1993). as a result of these varied pieces of legislation (e.g., title ix, equal pay act, women's educational equity act) related to equity issues in schools and in the workplace, federal funding has been made available for nearly three decades to states, various agencies, colleges/universities, and interest groups to provide skill development, professional enhancement, and other training opportunities for women. in the http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html field of education, many of these activities have been designed to raise the level of women's participation in the decision-making process in the field of education and, more importantly, to increase the number of women administrators at the local, state and national levels. this paper seeks to inform the reader by (1) describing a few of the more significant federally funded initiatives related to increasing sex equity (with particular attention to those aimed at improving the status of women aspiring to or currently in educational administration), (2) analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of these efforts, and (3) concluding with the authors' up-to-date analysis of the paradigm shifts that should occur in the current thinking about the issue of underrepresentation of women in educational administration; key suggestions for women seeking administrative careers in education; recommendations for making federally funded programs and services geared toward achieving gender equity more effective for today's women; and the authors' concluding thoughts about this topic. ultimately, this paper reinforces the paradigm shifts in thinking about women in education that should undergird future research and guide reflection, discussion, policy-making, and practice. these shifts move from the current trend of focusing on womenís skills that will enable them to perform above and beyond their job descriptions and capabilities toward training administrators with the power to recruit, hire, mentor, retain and promote women in leadership positions. while it is important to continue enriching womenís experiences and upgrading their skills, these activities (by themselves) have not resulted in fully opening and/or significantly expanding the opportunities for women in the workplace, and this includes women in leadership roles in education. federally-funded initiatives advancing women in educational administration southeastern desegregation assistance center one of the federally-funded, non-profit organizations charged with the responsibility of providing professional development for women educators in order to enhance their visibility and increase their numbers in educational leadership is the southeastern desegregation assistance center (sedac). known for its work in desegregation and equity across race, national origin and sex/gender, one of sedacís goals is to provide technical assistance and training which will improve the overall status of women in educational leadership and administration in the states of alabama, florida, georgia, kentucky, mississippi, north carolina, south carolina and tennessee. this section of the paper looks at a random sampling of conferences, institutes and training agendas that sedac has co-sponsored, supported financially, and/or endorsed for nearly three decades. to assess the effect of sedac activities, a number of women who have participated in sedac activities on sex/gender issues in general, and women in administration events in particular, were interviewed regarding their perceptions, professional and personal development. it is strongly suggested here that there is a need to establish collaborative working relationships and/or viable partnerships between those who are now in key administrative positions and (potential) women leaders. the challenge is to develop meaningful alternatives which will maximize the use of women's talents and skills, respect and acknowledge their ability to contribute in the decision-making process, and be accorded equal status in educational leadership. the southeastern desegregation assistance center was among the first organizations in the united states to receive federal support to carry out the civil rights mandates regarding desegregation and equity across race, national origin, sex/gender and different abilities. there are ten desegregation assistance centers in the country, however, sedac's work in the "deep south" is complicated by the region's history of segregation that has resulted in the persistence of racism and sexism in both rural and urban communities. over the span of nearly 30 years, sedac has received approximately $800,000 per year or $24 million in federal funds. an important part of the grantís initiative is that, in addition to dealing with desegregation, race and national origin issues, sedac will also deliver technical assistance to state and local education agencies to improve the quality of education for female students and the participation of women in education administration. to this end, records show that sedac has provided support (only upon request of organizations, colleges or universities, state and local education agencies) in the following ways: 1. by becoming members of and/or subscribing to womenís professional organizations and interest groups including: american association of university women (aauw), national organization for women (now), national coalition for sex equity in education (ncsee) and womenís sports society. 2. by co-sponsoring conferences, institutes and training programs which address issues pertaining to women in administration and title ix (educational equity for women in sports, math, science and other traditionally male-oriented fields). 3. by providing financial assistance to individuals, organizations and educational institutions in order to meet specific expenses for seminars, workshops, conferences, meetings and other events (e.g., honorariums for speakers, registration and expenses of participants, cost of meeting rooms, and so on). 4. by working closely with the office for civil rights (ocr) and the department of justice on current policies and mandates regarding womenís rights, sexual harassment, affirmative action and equal employment opportunity. the description above gives a misleading picture of the actual sedac support, performance and commitment to womenís issues. for instance, memberships to organizations and interest groups have not translated into meaningful sedac participation in and/or lending a voice for womenís causes. in cosponsored events, sedacís involvement ìbehind the scenesî have been limited to giving financial support for specific activities. on questions regarding legal matters (e.g., sexual harassment, hiring/firing policies, grievance process), sedac usually refers inquirers to ocr, private civil rights lawyers, consultants, state and/or local education agencies. moreover, throughout its history, sedac has never hired a part or full-time staff dedicated to addressing womenís issues (in july 1996, under a new administration, the centerís assistant director also bears the responsibility of ìgender equity coordinatorî).' when compared with other sedac activities, sedacís overall involvement in the area of ìwomen in administrationî may be best described as insignificant when considering the amount of time, resources and actual dollars expended on girls/womenís issues. therefore, it is not surprising to find that in sedacís constituency, the southeastern states, there has been very little progress (if any) for women administrators in terms of qualitative and quantitative placements in educational leadership. a former middle school principal (african-american woman who now directs a cultural diversity program) commented: you will find more women hired as principals in elementary schools. if we are in high school settings, women are more likely to be found in smaller or less prestigious schools. from what i can see, men tend to get assigned to the best schools with the most resources and community support. i might add that the men in these positions also tend to be white. this is why i gave up being a principal. i felt that i was on a dead-end job. no matter how i try and apply, i will never move up to a bigger and better school. a woman who was recently appointed as an assistant principal in a high school magnet academy summarized her feelings in the following way: i was very happy when i received this appointment. but that wore off very quickly. ever since i became an ap, i feel like a doormat -i welcome parents and other people who are visiting the school and i get to show them around. i was given a walkie-talkie to monitor the hallways, cafeteria, bathrooms, and school grounds. this is not the job that i applied and interviewed for. as a single mother, i need this job. as a well-educated person, my mind is in a wasteland. an in-depth analysis of training agendas designed to broaden womenís skills, talents and marketability indicates that: 1. while participants generally express satisfaction on the timeliness and types of training they have received, there are no indicators on how such training will affect short and/or long-term job retention and upward mobility. 2. training topics tend to raise the level of womenís performance, efficiency and management of their everyday lives (e.g., time and stress management, improving womenís health, networking, dealing with discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, variety of ìhow toísî). although the topics seem to raise womenís self-esteem and competency in their current positions, there are no indicators of how participants could move effectively in higher level positions or gain acknowledgment and respect in their respective workplaces. 3. conferences, institutes and training sessions tend to showcase women and men who have already reached or are reaching positions of leadership, expertise and prominence in their respective fields. even though participants gain a better perspective on ìwhoís who,î ìwhoís where,î and/or ìwhoís involved with what,î such events rarely (if ever) provide direct linkages between participants and the educational experts/leaders that would lead to, i.e., mentor-apprentice relations. 4. federal funds are granted based on proposerís goals and objectives. in the case of desegregation assistance centers, performance monitoring and accountability have been lax particularly on womenís issues. for example, the january 1997 meetings of the ten regional dacs reveal that directors have placed sex/gender as very low in their priorities by not including womenís equity issues in any part of their agenda (race, national origin and physical abilities were the prevailing equity issues). attendance records in sedacís co-sponsored activities indicate that the southeastern states have an abundance of highly qualified, skilled and capable women with strong leadership potential. the thousands that have attended local, state and national professional development institutes have included mid-level administrators, college instructors, principals, assistant principals, master/lead teachers, consultants, directors and coordinators of educational programs. they come from different racial and cultural backgrounds -asian/pacific islanders, blacks/african-americans, european americans/caucasians, hispanics/latinos, native americans, and those from mixed heritage. it seems that the underrepresentation of women and minority groups in educational leadership can be explained by other factors, not from lack of available, talented women. a regular participant in sedacís co-sponsored annual event for women educators, an administrator from dade county public schools, shared the following opinion: in every conference, you hear speakers and workshop presenters talk about the ìglass ceilingî for women in management positions. what are they talking about? many of us are outside the so-called ìglassî and far from worrying about the so-called ìceiling.î i feel that i am being constantly by-passed by people with little or no experience -younger men and women from different backgrounds have been hired for the positions that i applied for. right now, i am training my new boss how our office operates and iím supervising our office staff until he gets familiar with each personís responsibilities. these comments denote several levels of concern which include racism, sexism and ageism. that is, in spite of qualifications, experience and loyalty to the organization, other considerations seem to weigh heavily in the process of hiring and/or promoting women. the prevailing agendas of sedacís co-sponsored activities tend to reflect the idea of conferencing and training ìfor the women, by the women.î for instance, event committees and subcommittees are almost always led by and composed of (predominantly) women. male membership is usually reserved for ìmalefeministsî, those who are user-friendly to womenís causes, and/or donors of monetary and/or in-kind contributions on the movement for equity/ equality issues. however, it seems that women dominated committees and subcommittees responsible for launching and maintaining professional development activities have had very little impact, if any, on the recruitment, selection, retention and promotion of women in administration. another trend which needs scrutiny is the overdevelopment of women above and beyond their already high credentials. prevailing agendas seem to emphasize the need for women to develop further skills to cope with stress resulting from (greater) demands on their intellectual, mental and physical abilities. for instance, sociological studies show that in spite of modern technology (e.g., office computers, interoffice communication systems, vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, washers and dryers), the amount of time and energy required to do womenís work has not diminished significantly. if anything, modern machines and technology have created a false perception that women today have more leisure and easier time when compared with their pre-modern era counterparts. it would seem that time and stress management training would do little to improve womenís skills unless more time (beyond 24 hours a day) is provided to perform their work and home-related expectations. the observation of a literacy program director exemplifies the points mentioned above: school district restructuring forced a reduction in the number of office personnel. but the work that needed to be done was not decreased at all. instead, the work was redistributed to the different departments which now have lesser number of employees. most of us (women) began to share clerical and support staff. i noticed that most men in our building retained their secretaries and other folks. so, even though the responsibilities look like they had been redistributed evenly to key people, women administrators did not have the extra help that men were provided. to get things done, i have had to work late and, in most cases, take work home on weekends. separate interviews of three women who have succeeded in acquiring leadership positions in their local school districts in florida, georgia and kentucky indicated that they did not know about federally funded opportunities for womenís professional development. the georgian remarked: you could say that i am "ìhomegrown." my parents lived here all their lives, i grew up here and everybody knows my family. i went to college on scholarship and that was the only time i left home. i came back after college and began teaching. years later, i decided to go for my masterís degree and i am now working on my doctorate. it may be true that it is "who you know" that counts. sometimes i wonder if i would have had the same opportunity in cities or towns where i am a stranger. the administrator from florida had a different experience. she earned her bachelorís degree in puerto rico and taught there for a few years. she married and joined her husband in new york city. the couple moved to florida in order to find what they deemed desirable educational opportunities for their two small children. she related that: good timing, good luck and my spanish-speaking ability must have worked for me when i looked for a job. i started substitute teaching and doing volunteer work at my childrenís school so i could be near them. everybody got to know me -the superintendent, the principal, the children, all the teachers and staff. the number of spanish-speaking families was increasing at that time, and i volunteered to translate for parents and their children. when i got a job offer to work for a private company, i announced the possibility of ending my volunteer work. at the urging of the school principal who vouched for my abilities, a job was created for me at the school district. since then, i have worked hard and moved to bigger and better positions. the kentucky educator was proud of her growth from a classroom teacher to a school district administrator. throughout her graduate school years, her professor guided her career growth and opened the doors for job possibilities. she noted: i was working full-time as a teacher while going to graduate school part-time. even though there were many times when i wanted to give up working on my masterís degree, i had a wonderful relationship with all my professors. one of my them became my lifetime mentor. she gave me pep-talks and was patient in listening to my ideas and interpretation of what i was learning. this is not to say that she was easy on me. on the contrary, she demanded the best out of me and i, in turn, made sure that i met her expectations.....even now, with a fax or phone call, she would readily write a letter of recommendation on my behalf. this was an ideal mentor-apprentice relationship. the above examples suggest that there are various settings and alternatives which can be developed and explored to raise womenís status in educational leadership. there is a common element which seems to have contributed to the three womenís paths to success: familiarity with the people who had the authority to hire them. such familiarity has raised the level of confidence that the decision to hire the women is a good one -that, in addition to meeting the basic qualifications for specific positions, the women have a well-grounded history of desirable personal character which complement the organizationís goals. the women's educational equity act equity resource center the women's educational equity act (weea) passed in 1974 was designed to take proactive steps toward making education more equitable for girls and women by providing incentives and guidance to schools and community groups. the weea program, operating under the auspices of the u.s. department of education, funds projects aimed at developing model educational programs, training, materials, and research to promote educational equity and transform educational systems. weea projects must have national, statewide, or general significance and address all levels of education. weea grant recipients may provide direct services to a target group or may develop educational materials that are disseminated through the weea equity resource center. in addition, to numerous grants, the weea program established two support mechanisms: (1) the national advisory council on women's educational programs and (2) the weea publishing center, now titled the equity resource center. the national advisory council was established by congress to inform the secretary of education about educational equity issues, make recommendations related to weea's operation, and to assess weea's funded projects. the council was dissolved by congress in 1988 because of increasing pressure from women's groups who felt that the council as formed by thenpresident reagan was having a counter-productive effect on gender-equity issues. the second weea mechanism (still operative) is the weea equity resource center. the center, located at education development center, inc. and under the direction of katherine hanson, was established to support the work of weea-funded projects. in fy 1997 with a budget of $2,000,000 the women's education equity program awarded the following grantees: montclair state university $72,566 upper montclair, nj yakima valley community college $61,678 yakima, wa school district of palm beach $205,560 west palm beach, fl south dakota dept. of labor $163,746 pierre, sd board of education of prince george's county $199,275 upper marlboro, md massachusetts pre-engineering program, inc. $181,515 boston, ma source: melissa oppenheimer with the u.s. dept. of education office of the under secretary, budget service (see appendix c for weea's funding history from 1976 to 1997) according to a report on title ix and weea, the center "...provides assistance to grantees in developing products and in publishing and disseminating those products. in this way, work is shared nationally, and internationally, and allows others to learn from and build on the efforts taking place in local schools and communities. the publishing center maintains a national network of organizations and individuals working in sex and race equity, and works to keep equity issues visible within education discussions, as well as to link individual projects with national educational equity work" (flansburg & hanson, 1993, p.5). in 1992 the center expanded its networking capacity with the addition of electronic networking. through its initial link with equitynet, the center now shares resources and information with over 4,000 social service organizations and individuals who subscribe to equitynet which has greatly increased gender equity awareness and access to weea resources in a market that had heretofore been difficult to reach (oppenheimer, 1997). the center also moderates edequity (educational equity discussion list), a theory and practice discussion list that focuses on educational equity and serves as a forum for over 500 subscribers who discuss how to attain equity, improving education for all. [to subscribe, send the message subscribe edequity (without a "subject" line) to majordomo@confer.edc.org]. word is weea's newsletter (formerly titled digest) and is distributed free to those interested in gender equity and multicultural education. the august (1990) issue of the newsletter is devoted entirely to women in school administration and the barriers to their advancement. this issue includes valuable information on resources and publications available to women seeking administrative positions in education. the weea equity resource center can be accessed with weeapub@edc.org on the internet. women's bureau u.s. department of labor the women's bureau was created by congress on june 5, 1920, and given this mission: to formulate standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment. most of the bureau's work over the past seventy years has focused on entry level issues pertaining to women's access to non-traditional jobs and training outside the professions. in the 1980's the bureau began to advocate more forcefully policies and practices to help make work and family needs more compatible an issue that women administrators cite often as a complex problem and barrier to their advancement into higher levels of administration in the profession. for the 1990's, as women in educational administration and other fields of work continue to enter the workforce at ever-increasing rates, the bureau continues to emphasize the need for helping people resolve conflicts in balancing work and family responsibilities. from its position in the office of the secretary of labor, the bureau participates in departmental policy making and program planning, and serves as a coordinating body in the department of labor for programs affecting women. the bureau has ten regional offices headed by regional administrators whose work is to implement national programs and policies, develop local initiatives to address local needs and disseminate information and publications that support fair treatment of women in the workplace. in addition, the bureau initiates and supports research pertaining to women in the work force, tests innovative ideas and approaches through demonstration projects that help prepare women to enter or reenter the work force, move into new areas of work, or move up on their careers. it carries out an information and education program through publications, audiovisuals, media relations, feature articles, and public speaking (the women's bureau: milestones, 1990). valuable statistics and information on the history and current status of women and work in the u.s. can be obtained from the women's bureau (i.e., the completion of four major studies of women and work funded by the bureau and released in february of 1992). one of these studies, "breaking the glass ceiling in the 1990's" by terry scandura of the university of miami, investigated the career experiences of top level female executives to identify obstacles to women's career advancement to top-level positions. important findings related to women pursuing educational administrative careers of scandura's study include (1) the path to the top for women is through line authority; (2) positive perceptions of career mobility potential were more prevalent for males than for females; (3) having a mentor appears to be an important characteristic of the career of women to make it to the top of their organizations; (4) having a mentor was positively and significantly associated with higher salary levels and better self-concepts; (5) a significant lack of family-supportive policies existed, or if they did, they were rarely implemented; (6) women with dependent children under age 18 living at home had lowered career promotion expectations, increased job stress, more intent to leave the organization, and less mentoring than women without dependents. (u.s. dept. of labor, scandura, 1992). a particularly helpful publication issued by the women's bureau is the 1993 handbook on women workers: trends and issues. in the introduction, the bureau explains that "(t)his handbook is more issuemailto:weeapub@edc.org oriented than previous handbooks published by the women's bureau; thus, it attempts to create a better understanding of some of the forces that influence women's participation or nonparticipation in the work force and that affect their general economic well-being" (p.xiii). chapter 12 of the handbook is titled "legal rights of women workers" and includes a detailed account of recent legal developments and federal government initiatives affecting women in the workplace. a section of this chapter describes the work of the department of labor in dealing with the proverbial "glass ceiling" that is particularly pertinent to women educators in advancing their administrative careers. the authors admit that "...partially because of the difficulty in evaluating top executive-level recruitment and promotion patterns, corporate midand upper-level management has rarely been routinely included in compliance reviews performed by the office of federal contract compliance programs. as a result, they conclude, "corporate employment practices with regard to executive opportunities for women and minority employees have not received the attention that the opportunities for lower level employees have received" (p. 218). the glass ceiling commission office of the secretary of labor chapter 12 of the handbook on women workers also includes the findings of a yearlong study of the "glass ceiling" titled "a report on the glass ceiling initiative." partly as a result of this study that documented substantial barriers to women's advancement up the corporate ladder past the middlemanagement level, the civil rights act of 1991 mandated the establishment of a glass ceiling commission housed in the office of the secretary of labor. this commission, composed of 21 members, is charged with conducting a study of opportunities for and artificial barriers to the advancement of women and minorities to management and decision-making positions in business. this chapter also describes the status of women in state and local government positions where they state that "(a) glass ceiling in government limits the participation of women at the highest levels of the policy-making process. few women hold high-level political appointments to cabinet positions. in addition, the majority of women in government, especially women of color, still face barriers that restrict their opportunity to advance beyond the lowest level jobs" (pp. 221-222). this glass ceiling commission obviously funds numerous studies, some of which were reviewed by the authors of this paper. one of these reports confirms the existence of sex discrimination in the workplace by concluding the following in its executive summary: * race/ethnic and gender employment segregation is widespread in the u.s. economy. the allocation of many women of all ethnic backgrounds and minority men to lower quality jobs than they can perform directly creates gender and race/ethnic earnings inequalities. * both racial and gender occupational segregation and earnings inequalities have been reduced since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, but reductions in inequalities are uneven, reversible, and incomplete. the summary draws many conclusions and includes a number of helpful recommendations pertaining to hiring and promotion, job stereotyping, public and private policy initiatives, and research initiatives. in a special section on "glass ceilings" the authors conclude that the segregated job structures for women and minorities prevent them from ever competing for top managerial and professional positions in large corporations and government agencies. "the higher one rises in a managerial or professional hierarchy the more likely future promotions are based on trust, social similarity and access to the informal networks of power and influence in the organization. women and minorities are particularly disadvantaged on these dimensions in many workplaces," they contend, and they go on to say that the job of integrating lower levels of management is far easier than cracking glass ceilings (u.s. dept. of labor: report by thomaskovic-devey, 1994). still another example of the work of the glass ceiling commission is a report entitled "managing diversity and glass ceiling initiatives as national economic imperatives" written by cox and smolinski (1994). these authors attest to the dilemmas often caused by the workforce composition unique to the united states: a workforce that is among the most gender and racioethnically diverse in the world. one of the most critical challenges posed by diversity in the workplace is to eliminate barriers to entry and success in middle and senior manager jobs which may be related to group identity factors such as gender and race (i.e., break the "glass ceiling"). reports such as these give needed reinforcement, increased visibility, and helpful recommendations to issues of discrimination that must continue at the national level in order for equity to be achieved throughout the country. national center for education statistics office of educational research and improvement the center is described as "...the primary federal entity for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data related to education in the united states and other nations. . . . nces activities are designed to address high priority education data needs; provide consistent, reliable, complete, and accurate indicators of education status and trends; and report timely, useful, and high quality data to the u.s. department of education, the congress, the states, other education policymakers, practitioners, data users, and the general public" (u.s. dept. of education, national center for education statistics, kopka and korb, 1993, p. ii). one of this center's publications relevant to women in education is women: education and outcomes released in september of 1996. included among its 99 pages of tables, charts, and graphs depicting statistical information on the trends of all descriptions in the participation by women in higher education and in the labor market in the u.s. is information on the doctoral degrees in education conferred by institutions of higher education by sex, 1970 to 1993. the data reveal that in 1970-71 21% of the doctoral degrees in education were earned by women while they earned 59% percent of the doctoral degrees in education in 1992-93. charts depicting the ratios of men to women teachers at the university level as well and the ratios of men to women k-12 teachers dramatically portray the dominance of male professors in higher education and female teachers in k-12 schools (pp. 58-59). not listed in the table of contents, but buried in an appendix of additional tables, there is even a table depicting the distribution of male and female principals, with the information broken down by grade levels; indicating the dominance of male principals in middle and upper schools, and the concentration of female principals at the elementary levels (pp. 83-84). what is missing, however, is also noteworthy: no mention is made of the numbers of male superintendents to female superintendents, the top-level executive position in public school education. certainly, it seems not only reasonable, but also desirable for a book published by the national center for education statistics that is expressly focusing on women in education to include vital statistics regarding how many women are advancing to the office of chief administrator of schools in this country. where else should this information be collected if not by the country's officially designated and publicly funded office of educational research and improvement? research on this topic is too often impeded by the scarcity of readily available, complete data regarding gender and administrative positions in education. paradigm shifts about the underrepresentation of women in educational leadership from the perspective of shifting our paradigms, there is a need to examine what has worked well for women who have attained success in obtaining high-level administrative positions (with or without participation in federally-funded professional development for women). in their recent book, highly successful women administrators: the inside stories of how they got there (1996), gupton and slick report the results of their national study to determine what women in positions of power in education did to achieve their career goals. in chapter nine of their book, the authors describe the evolution of issues pertaining to women's underrepresentation in leadership positions in education (as well as other fields). the change in many of the causes for women's underrepresentation in educational administration has created new areas of concern which, in many instances, replace or need to be added to current thinking about the issue. these changes, the authors suggest, have created the need for rethinking (or shifting our paradigms) about where the attention and work need to be focused in order to help women advance in the field in an equitable fashion to their male counterparts. these shifts are revisited, expanded, and reinforced in this paper based not only on gupton's cited work but also on the experiences and research of this paper's co-author, assistant director of sedac, rose marie del rosario: 1. the need to shift from focusing most of the attention on women's lack of aspirations for administrative careers to their need for better support systems. as both gupton and del rosario have observed from their research and work with women educators; for the most part, women aspiring to positions of educational leadership have good skills and the proper credentials to be successful in administration. what they most need is assistance in sharing the responsibilities of work and home and supportive work environments that recognize and nurture their potentials for success as leaders. 2. the need to shift from women's lack of necessary qualifications (they now make up almost 60% of the persons receiving doctor's of administration degrees in education) to a greater scrutiny of the kinds of training and education they are experiencing. this shift speaks to del rosario's concern that most of sedac's activities are conducted "for the women, by the women" without important involvement of male colleagues who need to be included if significant change in the hiring, assigning of duties, mentoring, and promotion of women in the workplace is likely to occur, since these functions are primarily dominated by white males. 3. the need not only to continue but to expand entry level equity concerns to include on-the-job and retention problems of women who acquire administrative positions. a positive step taken by the ofccp is the inclusion in their compliance handbook for businesses and corporations of a chapter added only recently addressing the glass ceiling phenomenon experienced by many middle-management women. this chapter includes several new areas to which organizations must be sensitive if they are to perform equitable personnel practices (e.g., identifying high potential employees does the company have any mechanism for identifying persons with high potential for advancement? what is the race and gender composition for these people so identified? relocation and overseas assignments are relocation and overseas assignments important to advancement? are there safeguards to ensure that prejudgment on willingness to move does not bias job offers involving relocation? and cash bonuses, stock, and stock options at what level are employees eligible for cash bonuses, stock grants, and stock options? among those eligible, what standard is used to determine whether a person receives cash bonuses or stock?) 4. the ultimate shift, of course, is from access to equity wherein societal attitudes, and thus practices, related to gender and minority equity are changed to the extent that true equity is genuinely sought and achieved, not just token pieces of it attended superficially and sporadically to meet legal compliance or to satisfy the latest federal mandate. suggestions for women aspiring to administrative careers what seems poignantly clear is that: 1. education in the appropriate field is the first and foremost consideration. human resource personnel look at the level of education as a primary criterion for hire. it is important to have a bachelorís, masterís and/or doctoral degree from accredited schools in the united states*. the degree must be in line with the required position. (in recent years, hirers have found the value of considering people from ìrelated fieldsî when educational background is combined with experiences in, e.g., teaching in the classroom, education administration, work with children and youth-related programs, and so on.) 2. meaningful experience counts. quality of experience is analyzed according to the position applied for. according to a personnel administrator in dade county, florida, it is not necessary for ìexperienceî to be derived from a paid position. rather, the experience must be related to the desired job and should demonstrate capabilities and personal traits which degrees, by themselves, could not provide. experience covers a wide range of talents, skills and abilities that tend to enrich oneís educational background and the ìcapacity to leadî in educational leadership. in most instances, experience is earned over a period of time. for example, the first few lines of a typical job announcement for a program director state the minimum requirement as , i.e., a master's degree in education, child psychology, counseling or related field and five yearsí experience working with at-risk youth. in spite of the relatively broad description of requirements, focus of the initial sorting of applicants is based upon the basic description; in other words, those without a masterís degree and five years experience need not apply.3 3. record of improving and updating professional qualifications is important. changes in technology (i.e., modern machines, access to and use of computers and hard/ software), transitions in the course of human affairs (i.e., demographic character of urban and rural communities, attitudes toward people from different backgrounds, increased awareness of environmental and global concerns), and socio-political forces governing the workplace and local/national priorities in education present challenges which leaders must contend with in the process of day to day administration. in keeping with the trend of ìpreparing for leadership in the 21st century and beyond,î women who aspire to be a part of todayís and tomorrowís administration must be well equipped to deal with the transformations affecting the educational environment. for instance, children/students are now exposed and have access to sophisticated methods of modern communications such as e-mail, internet and worldwide web. on the other hand, there is a noticeable rise in the number of students who are non-english speakers (both from the american ethnic enclaves and immigrants from third world or developing countries) with a broad range of intellectual and linguistic proficiencies -some are fully prepared to meet the challenges of a global community, but most are in need of special assistance to keep up with the academic level of (same age or cohort) mainstream american society. more and more, those aspiring to become education administrators must gain new knowledge, skills and proficiencies that are appropriate in today's world. participation in professional development opportunities is critical. and, women should consider investing and re-vesting in themselves to stay competitive in the current and future job market. 4. networking should be an ongoing personal and professional pursuit. who you know remains an important element in lateral and upward mobility. while it is important to generate and maintain linkages with oneís peers, those who aspire to achieve higher positions must develop networks beyond like me professionals (i.e., those in higher positions and includes people from disciplines different from oneís own area of expertise). this means that there is a need to create opportunities and professional settings where meaningful and lasting personal connections can be initiated between (potential) mentors and apprentices or mentees, as well as between employers (persons with the authority to hire) and women aspirants. the idea here is to generate a friendly environment where, through authentic networking, women are able to demonstrate talents and skills in the course of dialogue and social interaction. over time, the authenticity of the socialization process between, i.e., mentors and mentees, establishes familiarity -an element which tends to validate women's worthiness for valued positions. 5. strategic and long-range planning should guide the direction of one's career. when compared with male counterparts, women seem more likely to zigzag through a career path. in a brief interview of five women aspirants for high level administrative positions, all experienced deviations from their original tracks due to marriage, children, family priorities, lack of geographic mobility, and other reasons. the interruptions have served as barriers to womenís aspirations, although such interruptions have very little, if any, significant impact in men's career path plans or upward mobility. the need to shift paradigms challenges women to determine the importance of career objectives in relation to other priorities. selfdetermination (along with personal virtues and social values which support one's ambition) and a wellplanned strategy can be used to direct and guide oneís road to attaining the desired position, in spite of expected and perceived interruptions along the way. supportive action needed at the federal level recommendations for federal level activity to improve women's workplace status include: 1. to a lesser degree, maintain current professional development opportunities for women. 2. promote greater collaboration among organizations and agencies that are vested in the status of women in general, women in educational leadership and administration in particular. 3. engage employers, particularly those with the authority to create jobs and hire people, in developing and nurturing opportunities for women to advance. 4. take immediate action through established offices such as the women's bureau, oeri, and especially the national center for education statistics, to collect, disseminate, and make readily available more detailed information and statistics related to the numbers of men compared to women in positions of educational administration at the state and local levels of government. 5. continue to fund federal initiatives such as weea, the desegregation assistance centers, the "setaside" funding component (repealed in the summer of 1995) for sex equity programs under the provisions of the carl perkins vocational education act, and other federally funded state-level personnel and projects related to sex equity issues. do a better job of targeting, coordinating and making known the existence of these services to women educators, school systems, and universities. 6. require better accountability of federally funded initiatives. evaluate and collect pertinent data to demonstrate and document the effectiveness of initiatives in promoting women's career advancement. 7. be the foremost example. use government as the model of fair practices and treatment of employees for the ultimate good of all the employees, the organization and the nation. conclusion in spite of the seemingly broad implications of federal initiatives for women, little is known about the actual impact of such initiatives on the state of women's participation in educational leadership. while there seems to be an increase in the number of women holding key administrative positions (e.g., principals, assistant principals, superintendents, and so on) in many school districts, there are questions about the "qualitative" and "quantitative" factors in regard to such placements. for instance, how do such positions compare with men's placements in similar positions in terms of salary, fringe benefits, school image, prestige, geographic location, students/ faculty's demographic profile, community support and chances for upward mobility? and, within school districts, state and national levels, which leadership positions are more likely to be assigned to women than men? a good way to investigate the issue of parity is by asking the right although oftentimes hard questions . . . then having the courage and commitment to make needed changes for the ultimate good of all. references cox, t. & smolinski, c. (jan., 1994). managing diversity and glass ceiling initiatives as national economic imperatives. (report for u.s. dept. of labor glass ceiling commission). ann arbor, michigan: the university of michigan. flansburg, s. & hanson, k. (1993). legislation for change (a working paper #3). newton, ma: center for equity and cultural diversity, education development center, inc. gupton, s. l. & slick, g. a. (1996). highly successful women administrators: the inside stories of how they got there. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics. (1996). women: education and outcomes, nces 96-061. washington, dc u.s. department of education, office of the under secretary budget service. (1997, march). program data on women's educational equity (cfda no. 84,083). (taken from program files and faxed by melissa oppenheimer to authors). washington, dc. u.s. department of labor, glass ceiling commission. (1994). race, ethnic, and gender earnings inequality: the sources and consequences of employment segregation. (report by donald thomaskovicdevey at north carolina state university). washington, dc. u.s. department of labor, glass ceiling commission. (1994). the impact of recruitment, selection, promotion and compensation policies and practices on the glass ceiling. (report prepared by roosevelt thomas, jeff porterfield, john hutcheson, and carol pierannunzi with the american institute for managing diversity). washington, dc. u.s. department of labor, women's bureau. breaking the glass ceiling in the 1990s. (1992). (study conducted by terry a. scandura, university of miami). washington, dc. u.s. department of labor, women's bureau. (1990). milestones: the women's bureau celebrates 70 years of women's labor history. washington, dc1990. u.s. department of labor, women's bureau.(1993). handbook on women workers: trends and issues. washington, dc: 1993. ' sedac has given high priority to the organizationís goals regarding desegregation and race (black and white). it has included national origin and other minority issues among its priorities only in recent years. 2 unless the applicant has provided evidence of ìequivalencyî to u.s. earned degrees, education obtained from foreign countries is usually considered insufficient to meet required qualifications. equivalency may include formal statement(s) from accredited u.s. colleges/universities and/or coursework at a local institution of higher education to meet internship, certification or other requirements. 3 human resource personnel are quick to add that the definition of ìmeaningful or related experienceî is flexible and negotiable depending upon the scope of the position, individuals or members of the group responsible for reviewing applications, letters of recommendations, references. sandra gupton is associate professor of educational administration at the university of southern mississippi in hattiesburg, mississippi. e-mail: sgupton@ocean.st.usm.edu rose marie del rosario is president of genesis network and former assistant director/gender equity coordinator for the south eastern desegregation assistance center. e-mail: gennetwork@aol.com awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 2, winter 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:sgupton@ocean.st.usm.edu mailto:gennetwork@aol.com file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter98/awl_winter98.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com aw home| jobsposting/search | search by google web or site | advertising | site map | awards | about us home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home business | entrepreneur |loan credit | web | network | balance |international| book store career strategies | employment | resumes | salary, benefits, employment, employee rights | negotiate career news | career indices, stats | career advice for execs,professionals |career advice for undergrads,mbas career paths | career planning for young women | mentoring and coaching | leadership development advancing women in leadership how do junior faculty compete for research dollars? implications for women patricia boyer university of missouri-st. louis introduction institutions of higher learning are currently encountering numerous financial problems. these problems present several dilemmas for faculty such as questions concerning their workload and the demand for more accountability of how their time is spent. women and junior faculty are the two groups most negatively affected by the demand for greater productivity and the demand for accountability (meyer, 1998). one approach to handling this financial crisis is for faculty to seek external funds to support their research projects. limited research dollars are available so faculty must be skillful in how to acquire them and must be aggressive when competing for them. acquiring and competing for these limited funds are important issues to faculty because tenure and promotion decisions are based on successful research. background research showed that women faculty members’ research interests and agenda differ from that of their male counterparts. women do not publish their research to the same degree as men (bellas & toutkoushian, 1999; harper, baldwin, gansneder, & chronister, 2001; schneider, 1998; tesch, wood, helwig, & nattinger, 1995) and married women publish even less than unmarried women (bellas & toutkoushian, 1999). there are many views in the literature that attempt to explain why differences exist between men and women faculty concerning their research agenda. bentley (1990) explained one such view by saying that there are gender differences in faculty seeking grants and publishing manuscripts. bentley was uncertain as to why these differences exist, but suggested that they are due to the fact that women are not concentrated in research institutions. therefore, if they are not at research institutions, they are less likely to have grants funded (bentley, 1990). bellas and toutkoushian (1999) indicated that women faculty who conduct research may work at a slightly slower pace, spend more time on research, feel less confident about it, and take more care with it than men faculty. kovar (1985) stated that women in higher education are stereotyped as less scholarly, less serious, and less interested in research than their male counterparts. also, some researchers claim that attributes of successful researchers file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///search.html file:///advertising.html file:///sitemap.html file:///awards.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/writing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/career_strategies/index.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/business-home-oview_index.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/loans-credit.html file:///web.html file:///networks/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/balancing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/networks/intlinks.html file:///amazingbookstore/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/library/resume/index.html file:///career/salaries_emplmnt.html file:///career/negotiating.html file:///news/awblog.html file:///career/indices_stats.html file:///career/career_advice.html file:///career/career_advice_undergrad.html file:///career_path/career_paths.html file:///career_plan.html file:///mentor/index.html file:///leadership.html are independence, assertiveness, and confidence, and traditionally women do not possess these attributes (harper et al., 2001). another view concerning gender differences in faculty research was described by keim and erickson (as cited by harper et al., 2001). they stated that, women are less likely to receive support for their research efforts because their work is often seen as less valuable. they claim that despite supposedly blind review processes, gender bias on the part of reviewers still exists, resulting in higher rejection rates for women. these obstacles, coupled with a greater tendency to abandon articles that have been rejected for publication rather than resubmit them, contributes to lower publication rates. (p. 250-251) in research conducted by schneider (1998), women faculty were asked their perceptions about, “why don’t women publish as much as men?” the findings of his research provided insights into how women faculty perceived this issue: some blame inequity in academe [and] others say quantity doesn’t matter….there are women who publish a lot, but somehow they get overlooked….the statistics measure quantity, not quality….the academics who study faculty productivity typically ignore the humanities, where women abound….once in graduate school, women complain, they have a tougher time finding senior scholars to be mentors….[and finally,] trying to figure out why women write less than men is like searching for a smoking gun on a firing range. there is no single cause.” (p. 1-7) conceptual framework the framework for the present study was based on previous research of tenured and untenured women faculty at colleges of education of association of american university institutions (boyer & cockriel, 1999, 1998). specifically, the findings of this research revealed that women faculty lacked the necessary training to pursue grants and were unaware of how to initiate the process. subsequently, this lack led to women faculty submitting fewer grant proposals which ultimately affected their success in securing promotion and tenure. the findings also showed that graduate programs and academic administrators would do well to develop programs that provide graduate students and junior faculty the necessary skills to successfully compete for grant dollars. despite previous research, little is known about factors that influence women and junior faculty’s pursuit of external grant funding across academic disciplines. this is important since there is evidence that faculty in the hard sciences spend more time writing grant proposals than teaching (fairweather, 1993; smart & elton, 1982; somers et al., 1998) because they have more research funds readily available to them (creswell & bean, 1981; somers et al., 1998). inquiry into this area of research will provide evidence about whether findings of earlier research within colleges of education are relevant to the experiences of women junior faculty across academic disciplines. furthermore, since researchers contend that women do not publish as much as men, it is necessary to understand the factors that both motivate and hinder women’s success in pursuing external grant dollars. as suggested by johnsrud and wunsch (1991), research is needed to understand how women faculty, especially junior faculty, overcome barriers and become successful in academia. therefore, the purpose of the present study is to examine both motivating and hindering factors that influence women junior faculty’s pursuit of external grant dollars across academic disciplines. this research addresses the question, “are there any differences in the factors that motivate and hinder female junior faculty at a midwestern research i university in the pursuit of grants across academic disciplines compared with their male counterparts?” additionally, junior faculty were asked about the type of grant-seeking training they received prior to their academic appointment. it is important to note that, for this research, the pursuit of grants is defined as a workload activity that falls under the umbrella of research. procedures and measures measures. the questions were designed around a four-point likert scale that consisted of the categories (a) very important, (b) moderately important, (c) marginally important, and (d) not important. the four-point scale was dichotomized into two categories for ease of comparison. therefore, very important and moderately important responses were combined to reflect the motivators and barriers that were important to faculty in their pursuit of grants. similarly, marginally important and not important responses were combined to reflect the motivators and barriers that were not important to faculty in their pursuit of grants. motivating factors included variables such as having personnel support when proposals were funded, having travel money for conferences, and having contact with funding sources (see table 1 for the complete list). also, barriers included variables such as unlikely chance of getting funded, pursuing grants being too time consuming, and too many committee assignments (see table 2 for the complete list). data analyses. chi square tests of independence were used to analyze the data with the sas statistical package. the sample was designed to have an alpha level of p < 0.05. results this research project is an effort to better understand factors influencing women junior faculty engaged in grant proposal submission, but specifically to determine if there are gender differences for these faculty. the findings of this research discovered that the top three motivating factors (opportunity to research new information, consideration in tenure or promotion decisions, and building professional reputation as a researcher) and the top barrier (heavy teaching load) were the same for both men and women junior faculty. significant gender differences were evident in two motivating factors; more flexibility in how time is allocated, and contact with funding sources. also, gender differences were evident in two hindering factors; inadequate support available to submit a grant in a timely manner, and lack of clarity in the college’s expectation. the results of this research suggest that administrators should be willing to mentor, and also make training sessions available for women who are new to the grant process. kovar’s (1985) research uncovered inequities in the academy favor male faculty compared to their female counterparts. specifically, she argued that the scales for determining tenure are tilted to favor male faculty members. however, kovar also found that women faculty, despite the stereotypes, were interested in conducting research, publishing, becoming independent scholars, and being committed to each other. women were more likely than male faculty to attend seminars to improve communication skills to improve teaching. on the other hand, male faculty members published more articles in non-refereed journals, received significantly more reductions in teaching loads to do research, developed more sources of funding for continued research, and attended more seminars designed to improve advising. a list of all junior faculty members from a university was obtained from the graduate school and their addresses were obtained from the campus faculty directory. the college of education faculty was excluded from the list because previous research was conducted with this group. junior faculty in all disciplines at the institution were sent a cover letter and the questionnaire via campus mail. procedures recommended by dillman (1978), with some modifications, were used to mail and to follow-up with faculty. approximately thirty days after the initial mailing, a followup letter was sent via email as a reminder. after three weeks, a third follow-up letter was sent to all prospective participants via email with a copy of the questionnaire attached. the purpose of this research is to determine factors that motivate and/or hinder female junior faculty at a midwestern research i university in their attempt to secure external grant funds compared with their male counterparts. the survey was sent to 205 junior members of the faculty via campus mail, and useable responses were received from 137 (67%) faculty. of the junior faculty responding to the survey, 85 (62%) were men and 52 (38%) were women. the academic disciplines were categorized into five areas and respondents were as follows: behavioral sciences, 11 (8.1%); biological sciences, 47 (34.8%); humanities, 16 (11.9%); physical sciences, 30 (22.2%); and social sciences 31 (23%) excluding education. one finding of this research indicated that the motivating variables, which included opportunity to research new information, consideration in tenure or promotion, building professional reputation as a researcher, and personnel support when proposals are funded, were important to the majority of women faculty members responding to the survey. of the fifteen motivating factors presented in this survey, thirteen of them were important for women faculty. moreover, ten out of the fifteen variables were important for the men. the variables that were important for both groups were so for more than 50% of the respondents (see table 1). the significant motivating factors with gender differences using a chi square test were: more flexibility in how time is allocated (2 =10.248, p= .017) and contact with funding sources (2 =12.465, p = .006). another finding of this research was that the most important hindering factor was heavy teaching loads for both female and male junior faculty (67% for women respondents and 56% for men respondents). the next important hindering factor was lack of knowledge of funding sources as stated by 52% of the women and 46% of the men. the significant hindering factors with gender differences using a chi square test were: inadequate support to submit a grant in a timely manner (2= 9.352, p= .025) and lack of clarity in the college’s expectations (2= 9.086, p= .020) (see table 2). the survey also consisted of three questions, two of which were open-ended. the questions were an attempt to better understand the type of training junior faculty received, if any, prior to their academic appointment. the three questions were (a) do you feel that you have been adequately trained to pursue grants? (b) why or why not? please explain. and (c) what would you suggest to the university to make sure that assistant professors are adequately trained in pursuing grants? in response to the question, “what would you suggest to the university...,” the most prevalent responses were “to mentor junior faculty,” “[to] offer more grant writing seminars and or workshops,” and “to offer workshops on budget preparation and how to locate funding sources.” three times as many men as women respondents stated that mentoring of junior faculty was important. two times as many men as women stated that the university should offer workshops on budget preparation and how to locate funding sources. this research project was an effort to further understand factors associated with grant proposal writing among junior faculty across multiple academic disciplines at a midwestern research i university. a second purpose was to determine whether there were gender differences among junior faculty who engaged in grant proposal writing. previous research conducted by monahan (1992) pointed out that women faculty members were more apt to emphasize the need for technical assistance in searching for grant opportunities, writing proposals, preparing budgets, and obtaining administrative signatures. these factors differ from the responses of the women in this study in which thirteen of fifteen variables were important for more than 50% of the respondents (see table 1). qualitative analysis only 40% of the respondents answered these qualitative questions. in reference to the question, “do you feel that you have been adequately trained to pursue grants?” the most prevalent responses from those who answered yes were that they had “some graduate preparation or post doctoral training,” “good mentoring,” and some were “self-trained.” the respondents who answered no to these questions explained that it was due to “lack of graduate school preparation,” “lack of time,” and “lack of mentoring,” (which was the most prevalent response). additionally, twice as many of the male respondents answered yes, stating that they felt they were adequately trained and mentored to pursue grants. in this study, two times more men stated that they felt they were adequately trained and mentored to pursue grants than their female counterparts. moreover, the men in this study submitted more proposals and had almost three times as many proposals funded as women. also, this research showed that male junior faculty allocated more of their time conducting research than did females. discussion similarities in the findings from this research and previous research conducted by boyer and cockriel (1999) suggested that faculty in both studies felt that the two motivating variables, consideration in tenure or promotion and building a professional reputation were important. although these variables were important for both males and females when securing grants, it is the female respondents who stated that they were not adequately trained or mentored to pursue grants. this deficiency of training and mentoring can negatively affect women junior faculty’s success in their academic career. but why is it that the males in this study stated that they are getting the mentoring and training that is needed to be successful faculty and the females are not? this difference is evident in the number of grants submitted and funded by males. answering this question and understanding this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this research, but requires further investigation. these findings should compel faculty and administrators to be cognizant of gender differences and to pay attention to these differences as they relate to women junior faculty in the academy and to female graduate students. administrators can play unique roles in assisting women junior faculty in successfully seeking external funds by providing a mentor to both junior faculty and graduate students new to the grant process and by making available and supporting training sessions in areas such as grant writing/seeking and budgeting programs. administrators will find that mentoring and training of women junior faculty will be worth the investment to their organization. today, research agenda is important for tenure and post-tenure reviews at all institutional levels and no longer at research institutions alone. the question to ask is, what is required of institutions, and more specifically graduate programs, to ensure that women are adequately mentored and trained to be productive and successful in pursuing their research agenda? it behooves administrators to consider the motivating factors discussed in this research as a starting place for assisting their junior faculty, especially women, in becoming successful academicians. the findings of this research concerning hindering factors (heavy teaching loads, too many committee assignments, and advising students) are consistent with previous research, although there were no gender differences. furthermore, these three factors were important for more than 50% of the women respondents but only heavy teaching load was important for 56% of the male respondents (see table 2). consequently, consideration of women junior faculty’s teaching load, student advising, and committee assignment should be monitored since they are barriers to women pursuing grants. at some institutions, female faculty tend to have more committee assignments and advise more students than male faculty. therefore, it is not surprising to see how these factors are important barriers when pursuing grants to the women faculty at this research institution. research shows that prior experiences positively influence future tasks, such as the graduate work of junior faculty. it is necessary for junior faculty members to enter the academy with some basic training from their graduate work to increase their chance of ‘success’ in their career, which increases persistence at the institution. grant writing is no exception to this concept. prior experience in proposal writing preparation during graduate school encourages faculty to seek external support and also contributes to the success of that attempt as faculty members (harris, 1985). blackburn and lawrence (1995) explained, “in the same way that prior publication rate was a strong predictor for current publications, so was prior proposal writing a strong predictor for grant getting” (p. 164). golde and dore (as cited in austin, 2002) argued that graduate students (90%) were prepared to conduct research but the majority (62%) lacked skills in the process of securing grants. junior faculty must juggle multiple tasks and must integrate these tasks into their personal lives (austin, 2002). traditionally, women are primary caregivers in the family. for future research, other variables to consider are the marital status of faculty and the number of dependents in relationship to the effect these variables have on the research agenda of women junior faculty. additionally, thought should be given to whether or not women junior faculty are spending the time they need and desire to conduct research and secure grants. if not, attention should be given to the barriers. to tie into this concept of how time is spent, the variable, flexibility in how time is allocated, requires further investigation. for this study, the majority of the women stated that this variable was an important motivator when pursuing grants. references austin, a. e. (2002). preparing the next generation of faculty: graduate school as socialization to the academic career. the journal of higher education, 73(1), 94-122. bellas, m. l., & toutkoushian, r. k. (1999). faculty time allocations and research productivity: gender, race and family effects. the review of higher education, 22(4), 367-390. bentley, r. j. (1990). faculty research performance over time and its relationship to sources of grant support. unpublished doctoral dissertation, university of michigan. blackburn, r. t., & lawrence, j. h. (1995). faculty at work: motivation, expectation, satisfaction. baltimore, md: john hopkins university press. boyer, p. g., & cockriel, i. (1998). factors influencing grant writing: perceptions of tenured and nontenured faculty. journal of society of research administrators, 29(4), 61-68. boyer, p. g., & cockriel, i. (1999). women faculty pursuing grants: gender differences. available at: http://www.advancingwomen.com/public_html/boyer.html creswell, j., & bean, j. (1981). research output, socialization, and the biglan model. research in higher education, 15, 69-91. dillman, d. a. (1978). mail and telephone surveys. new york: john wiley & sons. fairweather, j. (1993). faculty reward structures: toward institutional and professional homogenization. research in higher education, 34, 603-623. harper, e. p., baldwin, r. g., gansneder, b. g., & chronister, j. l. (2001). full-time women faculty off the tenure track: profile and practice. the review of higher education, 24(3), 237-257. harris, k. (1985). effect of prior experience on decision to submit proposals. journal of the society of research administrators, 16(4), 29-35. johnsrud, l. k. & wunsch, m. (1991, october). barriers to success in academic life: perceptions of faculty women in a colleague pairing program. paper presented at the annual meeting of the association for the study of higher education, boston, ma. kovar, s. k. (1985). women faculty scholarly productivity. east lansing, mi: national center for research on teacher learning. (eric document reproduction service no. ed278327. meyer, k. a. (1998). faculty workload studies: perspectives, needs, and future directions. ashe-eric higher education reports, 26(1), 1-101. monahan, t. c. (1993). barriers and inducements to grant-related activity by new jersey state college faculty. journal of the society of research administrators, 25(4), 9-25. schneider, a. (1998). why don’t women publish as much as men? the chronicle of higher education. smart, j., & elton, c. (1982). goal orientations of academic departments: a test of biglan’s model. research in higher education, 17, 213-229. somers, p., cofer, j., austin, j., inman, d., martin, t., rook, s., & wilkinson, l. (1998). faculty and staff: the weather radar of campus climate. new directions for institutional research, 35-52. tesch, b. j., wood, h. m., helwig, a. l., & nattinger, a. b. (1995). promotion of women physicians in academic medicine: glass ceiling or sticky floor. the journal of the american medical association, 273 (13), 1022 (4). table 1 motivating factors by gender for junior faculty when pursuing grants ______________________________________________________________________________ table 2 hindering factors by gender for junior faculty when pursuing grants ______________________________________________________________________________ copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home business | entrepreneur |loan credit | web | network | balance |international| book store about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2005 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///awl/winter2004/boyer%20table%201.doc file:///awl/winter2004/boyer%20table%202.doc file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/writing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/career_strategies/index.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/business-home-oview_index.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/loans-credit.html file:///web.html file:///networks/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/balancing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/networks/intlinks.html file:///amazingbookstore/index.php file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 45 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 45-56, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the effect of sex and gender on perceptions of leaders: does situation make a difference? michelle t. violanti and linda pysher jurczak michelle t. violanti is an associate professor of communication studies university of tennessee at knoxville e-mail: violanti@utk.edu linda pysher jurczak is an assistant professor in the department of communication arts valdosta state university e-mail: lpjurczak@valdosta.edu accepted october 18, 2010 relatively little research has been done focusing on feminine and masculine communication styles in leadership. this study seeks to fill in some of the gaps. the quantitative design of this study is based on goldberg’s (1968) experimental paradigm and used an internet-linked survey consisting of renzetti’s (1987) sex role attitudinal inventory, a brief description of a leader (one of four different sex and gender combinations), and a likert-type scale with 20 items that rated leaders on several dimensions. a factor analysis resulted in combining these into three factors: task/dynamism, relationship/organizational id/qualifications, and an overall item. participants were selected using a snowball approach. expectation states theory was the foundation for this study. the results suggest that the expectation of leaders is changing with a feminine communication style preferred across the board, regardless of situation or sex of the leader. key words: expectation states theory, sex-role attitudes, communication style, leadership introduction more than three decades after women began pursuing careers in earnest, the “glass ceiling” remains intact. according to the 2000 united states census, women in the united states account for approximately 36% of all managers (u. s. census, 2002). it would seem that women are making significant progress in the world of work compared to their predecessors. women are now in positions of power; they are managers and supervisors and they are business owners. however, of those women and men in “management of companies and enterprises” men are making approximately 87% more annually than women (u. s. census, 2000). in the top 1000 industrial firms and the 500 largest u.s. corporations, as ranked by fortune magazine, women comprise only 3% to 5% percent of top management (u. s. department of labor, 1998). the presence of women is also lacking on corporate boards: 105 of 500 companies surveyed still had no women on their boards (dobrsynski, 1996). these numbers suggest that a problem continues to exist for women trying to break into upper management. the problem can no longer be a lack of qualified women. according to the united states census, slightly more women than men in the 25 to 29 age group were high school graduates in 2000: 89% of women, compared with 87% of men this age. thirty percent of women in this age group held a bachelor’s degree or better, compared with 28% of men. more women than men have enrolled in college since 1979 (u.s. census, 2000). these findings are not limited to the united states; similar numbers are found in great britain. statistical data show a significant growth from 1991 to 1996 in the number of women and men between the ages of 20 and 34 earning degrees: approximately 23% for women and 22% for men (central statistics office, 2003). if it is not a lack of academic qualifications keeping women out of boardrooms and leadership roles, then what is keeping them out? one possibility is communication style; more specifically, the relationship of sex and gendered communication style of those in leadership positions. the relationships among sex, gender, and leadership have not garnered much attention in communication studies, however deserving. a search of the advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 46 communication and mass media complete database with leadership as the search term resulted in 1224 hits in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. combining the term with sex resulted in 39 articles, and combining it with gender resulted in 26 articles. many of the articles listed in sex and gender were duplicates. the most current article in the search for leadership and sex was published in 2004 (aldoory & toth, 2004) and for leadership and gender in 2005 (kinnick & parton, 2005). few articles can be found that study sex and leadership or gender and leadership in communication; virtually no studies sex, gender, and leadership. in addition to the lack of studies, it is particularly problematic that much of the literature uses sex and gender as interchangeable terms. this makes the study of sex, gender, and leadership particularly provocative due to the ways in which we communicatively construct our worlds (blumer, 1969; mead, 1934). this study examines communication styles and their relationship to perceived leadership abilities within the theoretical frame of role expectations. literature review communication styles much has been written about the differences in communication styles. males use a more assertive style while females use a tentative one. the assertive style has been said to be masculine and the tentative style feminine. males communicate with greater volume, lower pitch, and greater inflection, which give power and passion to their ideas (eakins & eakins, 1978; payne, 2001). females, on the other hand, do not speak as loudly, have higher pitched voices, and are hesitant, which communicates weakness rather than strength. they often sound powerless due to frequent use of hedges, qualifiers, and tag questions (mulac, lundell, & bradac, 1986). according to crawford (1995), assertiveness training for women resulted from the idea that women were socialized to be meek, polite, and passive. the assertiveness training that was offered to women included behaviors that were considered to be masculine according to the bem sex role instrument [bsri] (bem, 1974), behaviors such as defending one’s own beliefs, being willing to take a stand, forcefulness, self-reliance, and independence. the prototype for assertiveness is virtually synonymous with masculinity (crawford, 1995). it should not be surprising then that women have been led to believe if they wanted to succeed, they had to be like men. women, in an effort to sound more powerful and to combat stereotypical impressions of them as the weaker sex, have adopted more masculine speech styles, including lowering their pitch (hoar, 1992). researchers of tentative versus assertive speech styles have found mixed results (see e.g., baird & bradley, 1979; bradac & mulac, 1984; bradley, 1981; lakoff, 1975). both women and men judged women who spoke more tentatively as less competent and knowledgeable than women who spoke more assertively; there were no effects for judgments of men. however, men were more influenced by women who spoke tentatively, and women found them to be less effective (carli, 1990). perhaps men preferred women in the appropriate gender-role of feminine female and women did not. this presents yet another quandary for women. these findings suggest that women in powerful positions should adopt an assertive, strong, and passionate style—masculine. however, to gain positions of power in the first place in a male-dominated, hierarchical system might require a tentative style that would be more influential with men. clearly women in leadership roles need to adapt depending on where in the hierarchy they are located. expectation states theory according to berger & fisek (1974), expectation states theory is about status characteristics and about roles that members of a group come to hold for themselves and others. roles do not suddenly materialize out of nowhere; like other things, they are socially constructed, and they are socially constructed based on categories (ridgeway & smith-lovin, 1999). status characteristics can be differentially evaluated as having high or low honor, esteem, and/or desirability. in other words, people with high status characteristics, such as men in leadership, are expected to be more honorable. they also are held in higher esteem and are more desirable in leadership positions. people with high status characteristics are also differentiated from other characteristics by having distinct performance expectations associated with the high and low states (berger & fisek, 1974). not only do status characteristics lead others to have evaluations and expectations about people, but they also determine the distribution of action opportunities. action opportunities are stabilized beliefs about how an individual possessing a given state of the characteristic will perform. someone with a high perceived status characteristic will be expected to perform better than someone with a low perceived status characteristic. interestingly, one need not necessarily possess a status characteristic to be perceived favorably. one can actually possess the status characteristic leading to the expectation. for example, one could actually have an mba, which would lead to expected possession of business sense. or one could be similar in behavior to someone who has an mba leading others to conclude that he or she can perform an expected task or function. there can be an expectation of possession based on similar tasks or similar individuals. there may have been no previous interaction with an individual, but based on previous experience with similar individuals others may associate him or her with organizing and defining cues in a particular situation (berger, webster, ridgeway, & rosenholz, 1986). people are deemed high-ability or low-ability based on past experiences with others. however, status characteristics can be relevant even if there is no previous association with the characteristic relevant to a particular task. having an mba is enough to lead others to expect someone to be able to read a spreadsheet, for example. more importantly, transfers of expectations to others with the same attributes are only blocked when cultural beliefs advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 47 suggest that the goal of the subsequent encounter is explicitly unrelated (ridgeway, 1991). if the goals are unrelated but there is no clear evidence that they are unrelated, the expectation will be transferred, meaning that those with high status characteristics will more often than not be expected to have the ability to perform the task at hand. this is one possible explanation for a lack of women in leadership positions—sex is a status characteristic and women have lower status leading to lower expectations. similarly, expectations may also be linked: if an individual possesses a particular element, he or she is expected to have access to another element (fisek, berger, & norman, 1995). there are also some situations in which status characteristics are insignificant. basically, given status elements that are directly related to a task, the actor’s use of them forms performance expectations for self and others. expectation states theory argues that a hierarchy develops based on interactions. those with high status characteristics are more likely to offer goal-related suggestions within their local hierarchy because they are expected to do so. it is self-fulfilling that those with high status characteristics behave in ways in which they are expected to behave (ridgeway, 1991). once the expectation for high performance is formed, it is likely that others will positively evaluate and accept those suggestions. this is a problem for women in leadership positions because they have low status compared with men; women are not expected to perform as well (fisek, berger, & moore, jr., 2002). wagner and berger (1997) suggested that gender is deeply entwined with social hierarchy and leadership and that rules for the gender system are at the core of status beliefs contained in gender stereotypes. eagly, makhijani, and klonsky (1992) conducted a meta-analysis of 61 goldberg-paradigm experiments. goldberg’s (1968) paradigm experiments are so named in honor of the man who first used identical articles written ostensibly by a woman or a man to test bias against women. this design allows researchers to manipulate the independent variable and assign the sexes randomly. eagly, makhijani, and klonsky (1992) found that women in leadership positions were devalued more strongly, relative to their male counterparts, when leadership was carried out in a stereotypically masculine style. women are devalued by being recognized as competent but not having the same leadership potential as men because prejudice is more likely to occur when female leaders violate their gender role by using an agentic, masculine style. likewise, dominating or autocratic leadership behavior is less well-received from female than male leaders (copeland, driskell, & salas, 1995; korabik, baril, & watson, 1993). a meta-analysis of leadership studies from 1961-1987 revealed that styles were somewhat gender stereotypic in laboratory experiments with student participants and in assessment studies with samples of employees. women tended to manifest more interpersonally oriented and democratic styles and men tended to manifest more autocratic and task-oriented styles (eagly & johnson, 1990). as previously noted, this study examines the relationships among sex, gender, and leadership. research indicates that leaders’ behaviors are important (e.g., fleishman, 1973; judge, colbert, & ilies, 2004; powell & butterfield, 1984), but can the same be said about communication styles? what makes a difference in people’s leadership expectations: biological sex, communicator style, and/or psychological gender? work to date on masculine and feminine communication styles in leadership roles is limited. much of the leadership research reflects an interest in the differences between the behavioral styles of men and women, but relatively little has been done with feminine and masculine communication styles. it is important for leaders to know how best to communicate with employees if they want others to follow. previous researchers found that sex-role orientation, not sex, was a predictor of leadership style with an initiating structure of leadership (task) significantly related to masculinity and a consideration style (relationship) significantly related to femininity (korabik, 1982). masculine communication is direct, succinct, and instrumental, while feminine communication is indirect, elaborate, and affective (mulac, bradac, & gibbons, 2001). because it is direct, it would seem that masculine communication would be less time-consuming and appropriate for task-focused situations, such as meeting a deadline. conversely, feminine communication would be timeconsuming and therefore inappropriate for trying to complete a task, but appropriate for situations requiring more of an interpersonal, relationship-building goal. this leads to the following hypotheses: h1: masculine communication is preferred in situations that require a task focus. h2: feminine communication is preferred in situations that require a relationship focus. communication competence has been of interest to communication scholars for a very long time. chomsky (1965) focused on a message-centered approach while others were interested in an outcome-focused approach (e.g., weimann, 1977). in other disciplines, relationships have been noted between communication and competence (e.g., huber & boyle, 2005; tubbs & schultz, 2006) and competence and performance (e.g., powell, lovallo, & caringle, 2006). powell, lovallo, and caringle (2006) noted a link between an organizations performance and competence of its people. although it has been variously defined, this study simply defines competence as having the necessary or adequate ability or qualities to do a particular job. this study asks the following research question about competence in relationship to communication style. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 48 rq1: to what extent are women and men, using the same communication style, viewed as equally competent in leadership positions? methods participants the sample included participants in various organizations and occupations. the only criterion for this sample was that participants had been employed for at least five years, not necessarily with the same organization. this study was interested in subordinate perceptions’ of leaders. survey participants were selected using a snowball approach. the researcher sent an email to prospective participants with a link to an internet-based survey. prospective participants were contacted using a personal address book. the email included a brief statement about the research and a link to the survey. recipients were asked to pass the email on to individuals whom they knew had worked for at least five years, regardless of position or length of time with any one organization. this sampling technique resulted in 213 usable surveys. the sample consisted of 63% females and 37% males. race was collapsed into two groups—majority (88%) and minority (12%) due to the overwhelming response of european american/white participants. education was also collapsed into 4 rather than 9 groups, high school (25%), bachelor’s (32%), master’s (24%), and doctorate or professional (18%). the majority of participants, 54%, were in the 42-60 age range, 26% were 27-41, 15% were over 60, and 5% were 18-26. given a choice between a blue collar or white collar economic background, 21% identified as the former and 78% as the latter. the on-line survey consisted of a measure of participant sexrole attitudes, a brief scenario of a leader in one of four conditions (feminine female, feminine male, masculine female, or masculine male), a measure of perceived leadership in five areas—task, relationship, organizational identity, qualifications, and dynamism, and demographic questions. the distribution of scenarios was good with 25% (n = 54) of participants answering questions for a feminine female, 26% (n = 55) answering those for a feminine male, 24% (n = 51) answering questions for a masculine female, and 25% (n = 53) answering for a masculine male. instrument a survey was used to gather preferences for leader communication style, situational style preferences, perceived leadership competence, participants’ sex role attitude, and demographic information. based on goldberg’s (1968) experimental paradigm, a survey consisting of four different sex and communication style combinations was used. a total of four surveys were used to test the interaction of each of the four possible sex and gendered communication style combinations. considerable thought was put into the names of the leaders used in this experiment. kasof (1993) noted that in some goldberg-paradigm experiments naming bias occurred when male stimulus persons were given more positive names than female stimulus persons. care was taken to use generic names that would give the impression of european american/white leaders to avoid confounding the sex/gender variable with race. borrowing from fine, johnson, & foss (1991) the following abbreviations are used: masculine female (mf), feminine female (ff), masculine male (mm), and feminine male (fm). two surveys used a feminine communication style and two used a masculine communication style (available from the first author). the feminine and masculine descriptions were exactly alike except that one was julie and one was john and one was mary and the other david. each of the four versions described a hypothetical leader, female or male, communicating in either a feminine or a masculine style. the leader’s background and education were briefly described. no mention was made of the level of leadership (i.e., supervisor, manager, chief executive officer). items were used to measure his or her perceived leadership with a likert-type scale. a variety of sources were used for the survey items. multiple questions were asked, in different forms, to measure variables of interest and combined into a scale (cronbach, 1951; devellis, 1991). first, nine items from renzetti’s (1987) adapted sex role attitudinal inventory (srai) were included to measure sex-role attitudes of participants. renzetti reported inter-item correlation for each index (pearson’s r, significance level was at least .05) (1987). the reliability for this study was .837 (general sample). next, six items were adapted from the communication satisfaction questionnaire (csq) (downs & hazen, 1977). the items were chosen based on their representativeness of the taskfocused and relationship-focused dimensions of leadership. the task-related items included: 1) “i would expect this leader to offer guidance in solving job-related,” 2) “i would expect this leader’s meetings to be well organized,” and 3) “i would expect this leader’s written communication and directives to be clear and concise.” reliability for this scale was .66. relationshiprelated items included 1) “i would expect this leader to know and understand the problems faced by subordinates,” 2) “i would expect this person to listen and pay attention to me” and 3) “______’s communication would make me identify with the organization and feel part of it.” reliabilities reported for the eight dimensions of the csq range from .72 to .96 (downs & hazen, 1977; taylor, 1997). in general, the csq has been widely used in the united states, as well as in other countries. however, the instrument is normally used in its entirety, not in pieces. reliability for this scale was .90. four items were also adapted from the organizational identification questionnaire (oiq) (cheney, 1983). the items used were 1) “i would probably continue working for this leader even if i didn’t need the money,” 2) “i would be very proud to be an employee of this leader,” 3) “i would describe myself to others in the organization as ‘i work for julie jones,’” and 4) mary’s communication makes me identify with the advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 49 organization and feel part of it. this instrument also consistently has high reliability; cheney (1983) reported a chronbach alpha of .94, bullis and tompkins (1989) reported an alpha of .95, and sass and canary (1991) reported an alpha reliability of .94. again, the reliabilities reported are for the entire instrument, not for three items. in this study the reliability was acceptable at .83. the final questions were adapted from the source credibility scale (scs) (berlo, lemert & mertz, 1970). two dimensions were used in their entirety: qualifications and dynamism. the scs is a semantic differential instrument and was used in items designed for a likert-type scale for this study. the items used were: 1) trained, 2) experienced, 3) qualified, 4) skilled, 5) informed, 6) aggressive, 7) empathic, 8) bold, 9) active, and 10) energetic. kaminski and miller (1984) reported alpha reliabilities for the scs of .72 for the qualification factor and .85 for the dynamism factor. dynamism had an unacceptable reliability and one item, “i would describe this person as aggressive,” was deleted bringing the reliability to .69. the qualification scale had a good reliability at .87. the surveys were accessed via an internet link and each time the link was used a different survey was opened to insure equal distribution of the four different versions and random sampling. however, when a survey timed-out it was not counted and the next survey opened was the next in rotation, which accounted for the unequal distribution of scenarios. definitions sex of the leader is an important independent variable; it is purely biological in nature. male and female are based on obvious outward physical characteristics and leaders were defined as male or female. unlike sex, gender is not automatic, but is socially constructed; it is the meanings that societies and individuals ascribe to female and male categories (eagly, johannsen-schmidt & van engen, 2003). one is not born masculine or feminine; one becomes masculine or feminine through socialization. other independent demographic variables of interest in this research include those of the participants: sex, age, socioeconomic background, race, and education level. data analysis alpha reliabilities for the questionnaire subscales ranged from .69 (dynamism and task with one item deleted) to .89 (relationship), which were deemed acceptable (see table 1 for alpha reliabilities for all study scales). also, the items loaded on two factors in a factor analysis. the task and dynamism items loaded onto one factor, which was labeled td; relationship, organizational identity, and qualifications loaded onto a second factor labeled roiq. a factor analysis of the csq items, the oiq items, and the scs items loaded onto two factors, with the exception of one task item and one dynamism item, which were deleted. the two new variables were combined to create a third variable—tdroiq, which was the overall leadership score. the alpha reliability for sex-role attitudes was also acceptable at .82. (see appendix a) results hypothesis 1 focused on the use of communication in a situation that requires a task-focus. specifically it tested that masculine communication is rated more positively than feminine communication in situations that require a task-focus. results do not support this hypothesis (df = 211, t = -6.32, p = .000). leaders communicating in a masculine communication style (m = 9.07, sd = 3.11) are rated less positively than leaders communicating in a feminine style (m = 11.36, sd = 2.11) in a situation requiring a task-focus. hypothesis 2 focused on the use of communication in a situation that requires a relationship focus. it was posited that feminine communication would be rated more positively than masculine communication in situations that require a relationship-focus. results of a t-test support this hypothesis (df = 211, t = -23.77, p = .000). in situations requiring a focus on relationships, a feminine communication style (m =17.39, sd = 2.43) is rated more positively than a masculine communication style (m = 7.04, sd = 3.80). research question 1 asked to what extent women and men, using the same communication style, were viewed as equally competent in leadership positions. results of t-tests partially support this hypothesis (df = 102, t = -2.18, p = .031). females using a masculine communication style (m = 73.39, sd = 17.97) are perceived more positively than males using a masculine communication style (m = 66, sd = 16.49). however, there was no difference in ratings of feminine females and feminine males (df = 211, t = -.792, p = .430). discussion expectation states theory is about status characteristics and about roles that members of a group come to hold for themselves and others (berger & fisek, 1974). status characteristics are characteristics that can be differentially evaluated as having high or low honor, esteem, and/or desirability. the theory argues that a hierarchy (social or professional) develops based on interactions. the interactions are based on roles into which people are socialized. deaux and major (1987) explained this as a dynamic process in which each person’s gender belief system influences his or her own behavior as well as that of the other interactant. tying this back to expectation states, those with high status characteristics are expected to offer more goal-related suggestions, which they do. it has also been noted that people are expected to behave consistently with societal gender roles (eagly, 1987). this is problematic for women in leadership because woman and leader are conflicting roles. to be a woman, one must act like a woman. she needs to be nurturing, relational, and othercentered. to be a leader, one must act in a stereotypically masculine manner: direct, autocratic, and task-focused. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 50 it was expected that masculine communication would be rated more positively than feminine communication in situations requiring a focus on tasks, and feminine communication would be rated more positively in situations requiring a focus on relationships. previous researchers found that sex-role orientation, not sex, was a predictor of leadership style with an initiating structure of leadership (task) significantly related to masculinity and a consideration style (relationship) significantly related to femininity (korabik, 1982). this research did not support the supposition that masculine communication would be rated more positively in task-focused situations. in fact, the opposite was true—leaders communicating in a feminine style were rated more positively than those communicating in a masculine style in task situations. this could be explained by a description being given rather than an actual task being done, as in previous studies in which a masculine style was preferred in task situations (e.g., bartol & butterfield, 1976; riggio et al, 2003). it could be that a polite, considerate style (more feminine than masculine) is preferred regardless of the situation (eblen, 1987). this would seem to be a logical assumption based on the evidence that suggests social skills are important in leader behavior (e. g., jablin, 1979; o’reilly & pondy, 1979; whetten & cameron, 1984). social skills, such as knowing when to talk and when to listen, using the appropriate language and tone for a situation, and knowing what to say are important considerations for leaders. this research confirmed previous findings that a feminine communication style would be rated more positively in relationship-focused situations (e.g., boumans & landeweerd, 1993). relational practice is a strategy for performing gender, regardless of the sex of the leader, and contributes to the construction of feminine or other-oriented social identity (holmes & marra, 2004). of interest in this study was the extent to which women and men using the same communication style were viewed similarly. it was expected that men in leadership positions would be rated more positively if both men and women used the same communication style, either masculine or feminine. this was expected due to the role of leader being associated more with males and masculine individuals. as with previous studies, there were mixed results. this study supports findings that there are no differences based on sex (e.g., brown, 1979; donnell & hall, 1980), but only with feminine communication. women and men who both used a feminine communication style were rated similarly. however, women using a masculine communication style were rated more positively in this study than men using a masculine communication style. these findings contradict previous findings that men and women using a masculine style are perceived similarly and those using a feminine style are perceived differently (rosenfeld & fowler, 1976). this seems strange considering that women who use an autocratic, direct leadership style have been less well-received than men who use the same style (copeland, driskell, & salas, 1995; korabik, baril, & watson, 1993) and that women using a masculine leadership style are devalued compared to their male counterparts (eagly, makhijani, & klonsky, 1992). it is possible that women using a masculine communication style are rated more positively due to the expected use of nonverbal reinforcers and paralanguage behaviors. perhaps in our social hierarchy we have different expectations of women and men (berger & fisek, 1974), and because women have been socialized to use more positive non-verbal reinforcers and paralanguage to downplay directness (payne, 2001) we expect them to do so. although men and women say the same thing, they may say it in different ways. men may be expected to be direct—“have the schedule done by sunday” and women may be expected to say “have the schedule done by sunday, okay?” although there were no differences between the masculine male and masculine female in this study, these differing expectations may have led to a more positive rating for women using a masculine communication style. another possibility is that women in supervisory positions are perceived to focus more on the task and others, while men in similar positions are perceived to focus on themselves (statham, 1987). women may be perceived as other-centered, even if they use a masculine communication style, while men may be seen as self-centered, which lowers subordinates’ evaluations of them. limitations and future research as with all research, this study has limitations. several limitations in particular, deserve further discussion: instrumentation, sampling, sample and definition of leadership. instrumentation limitations include the sex role attitudinal inventory (renzetti, 1987), descriptions of leaders, and adapting parts of previously-used scales. sampling issues include convenience and snowballing. limitations of the sample include demographics of participants and diversity. the definition of leadership in this study was left purposely ambiguous. instrument first, although renzetti (1987) reported good inter-item reliability for the sex role attitudinal inventory (srai), it is a dated instrument. unlike the bsri (bem, 1974), which has been consistent over time, the srai has not. both instruments were developed at a time when cultures were in flux. the srai was created to measure the way participants perceived feminism and sex-role attitudes. the basis for the instrument was feminism and the questions on the attitudinal scale were loaded by today’s standards. for example, one item in particular speaks to the negative perception of women and work―“career women tend to be masculine and domineering.” this is also one example of several items on the instrument that are double-barreled. future research needs to develop a new instrument to measure sex-role attitudes that is more reflective of the changes in our culture and other cultures. because the world is becoming advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 51 smaller and more cultures are being blended, it is important to include the differences in any new measure. a second limitation of the instrument is in using sections of validated instruments rather than creating a new instrument. although previous studies have had success with the instruments used, they were used in their entirety, not in bits and pieces (bullis & tompkins, 1989; downs & hazen, 1977; kaminski & miller, 1984; sass & canary, 1991; taylor, 1997). the items adapted from the source credibility scale (scs) (berlo, lemert, & mertz, 1970) may have been particularly problematic because they were attributes written in question form. for example, qualified became “i would describe this leader as qualified.” not only were the lists translated into questions, the questions did not follow the form of those adapted from other scales. the other scales started with “i would expect this leader to…” future researchers using this instrument should change the form of the questions to “i would expect this leader to. . .” although each of the subscales had acceptable reliabilities, there is a need for additional items. the dynamism subscale had only two items after one item was deleted to make it more reliable. one instrument is needed that captures a variety of communicative dimensions of leadership. it would be very helpful, for example, to have one instrument that measures communication and character, communication and competence, and communication and qualifications. the third issue with the instrument is the written description of leaders. although communication styles were built into the descriptions of leaders, written descriptions cannot capture true communication. one of the missing ingredients was non-verbal communication behaviors. future researchers who want to use written descriptions and hypothetical scenarios should include non-verbal behaviors to balance the communication style. it is possible that the masculine leadership scenario itself was problematic. masculine leaders could have been perceived as rude; however, this was not tested. additional pilot testing needs to be done to tease out masculinity versus rudeness. the masculine leadership scenarios may also have been more negative, and therefore prejudicial. many leaders are nice people with a symbolic veneer of politeness in certain situations who then make a decision (e.g., jack welch). it would be interesting to look at what happens with leadership in a variety of situations (e.g., crisis). do people in crisis situations maintain the same leadership style? do leaders who typically use a feminine communication style change to a more masculine style as a crisis would warrant? it is necessary and important that future studies include qualitative methods to capture differing realities of leadership. focus groups would allow participants to discuss leadership in their own words and identify concerns with leadership. they would also help to flesh out preferences for communication styles and effectiveness of different styles in different situations. observing communication within organizations would allow researchers to see first-hand similarities and differences between non-verbal behaviors that may impact effectiveness rating. it would also allow researchers the opportunity to determine if there are actual observable differences or if the differences are in the perception of the subordinates. sampling and sample there were also some limitations with the sampling. snowball sampling via the internet was used because it was an expedient and inexpensive way in which to collect data. however, people who do not have access to the internet would not have the opportunity to participate. also, homophily suggests that people generally only have significant contact with others like themselves (lazarsfeld & merton, 1954). the survey link was sent via the internet to people in the primary researcher’s address book and to frequently-used listservs. although attempts were made to control sampling bias, it is possible that those who received the survey were similar to the researcher and that those people sent it to people who by extension were also similar to the researchers. this would be expected to limit the diversity of the sample. the sample in this study was not diverse. as previously mentioned, the sample consisted of mostly white, middle-aged, upper-class, educated, women. racial diversity was almost non-existent. only about 13% self-reported as being from a minority or mixed race. caution should be used in generalizing these findings. future studies need to make a more concerted effort at including diversity. it would be interesting to see how preferences would change with a more diverse sample. definition of leadership mintzberg (2006) noted that leaders have to be managers and managers have to be leaders. in this study, no distinction was made between leader and manager. likewise no distinction was made between different kinds of leaders or in leaders in different kinds of organizations. leadership was left purposely ambiguous to allow participants to define it themselves. no mention was made of the level of leadership within the organization; the only indication that these people were leaders was the label. leadership is one of those murky concepts that everyone perceives differently. podsakoff, mackenzie, podsakoff, and lee (2003) examined measurement models in three leading journals that publish leadership research (the leadership quarterly, journal of applied psychology, and academy of management journal). they found 47 studies that examined 138 leadership constructs. according to them, many of the studies examined the same constructs using different measures and, in many cases, the wrong kinds of measures. future research needs to be more specific about different aspects of leadership. how is leadership constructed in different kinds of organizations? what effect does organizational culture have on leadership? what does a leader need to do to adapt to a situation, followers, or superiors? how might a political leader differ from an organizational leader? what role does motivation and inspiration play in leadership? advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 52 conclusion it is important when engaging in research to remember why it is being done in the first place. it is not solely for the pleasure of the researchers or on a whim. research is conducted to contribute in some meaningful way to what we already know. this study was expected to contribute in meaningful ways to expectation states theory, leadership literature, and the notion of sex and gender similarities and differences. the following contributions are offered. expectations states theory suggests that we are evaluated based on categories to which we belong (berger & fisek, 1974). characteristics may be high status or low status depending on our particular category and we may be judged differently depending on which roles we fill. studies have suggested that men have higher status than women (e.g., ridgeway, 1987), which would be expected to place men at an advantage. neither general expectation states nor specific expectation states had an effect on the perception of women and men in leadership in this study. there was not the expected preference for a male leader based on the higher status placed on male; in fact, the opposite was true, with females being evaluated more positively. nor was a male who used a masculine communication style preferred over one who used a feminine communication style (in this study androgynous). sex and gender are also very different things. much of the previous work in leadership studies conflated the two, which causes confusion. in addition to being confusing, it makes findings questionable. this study seeks to differentiate between sex and gender; treating the two separately makes sense. gender is a continuum; most people are not either feminine or masculine, they are somewhere in between. it is unrealistic to compare men and women in leadership solely on the basis of sex. comparisons need to be made with both sex and gender being measured. we do not have enough information at this point to make any generalizations about sex, gender, and leadership. what we do know is that sex and gender matter. the results of this study suggest that there are few differences in the ways in which women and men in leadership are perceived based on their communication style. in most cases, women and men were rated similarly, with feminine communication being the preferred style across the board. these results were unexpected; previous research suggested that masculine communication was preferred in task-oriented situations and feminine communication was preferred in relationship-oriented situations. this study does not confirm this. perhaps this says more about the followers than it does the leaders; we may be more willing to accept a feminine style of communication. in spite of the limitations of this study, it makes a contribution to the discipline. much of the research in communication studies and leadership studies looks at either sex or gender. this brings the two together to get the bigger picture. not all women are feminine and not all men are masculine, and they cannot be studied as if they are. feminine/masculine is a continuum on which we all fall; some are more in line with their sex and others are not. what remains to be seen is how quickly effective leaders, both male and female, with a feminine communication style can break through the glass ceiling. although most of the findings in this study were contrary to what was expected, it is not a good idea to shout from the rooftops that women and men are finally equal. this study lends credence to the notion that the inequity in our culture is not due to communication style and it is not due to sex. of course, this is not results-based, but a conclusion instead. if not qualifications, what? what does that leave? it leaves structure and tradition. in other cultures restrictions are more obvious. americans were shocked when we discovered that the taliban required women to wear a burka and cover themselves from head to foot. yet little mention is made of saudi women covering themselves, many from head to foot, not attending school, and not going outside without a male member of the immediate family (almunajjed, 1997), a husband, father, grandfather, or brother. little, if any, thought is given to saudi women wearing black, which holds the heat, from head to toe in temperatures that sometimes reach 145 degrees, while saudi men wear white, which reflects the sun. in our culture it is subtle, not obvious. a scene in to kill a mockingbird (1963) shows the embarrassment scout deals with when wearing a dress for the first day of school. scout had never worn a dress before but girls had to wear dresses to school. girls and women are no longer required to wear dresses, but it was not so long ago that they were. the restrictions are no longer visible, but they are there. references aldoory, l., & toth, e. 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(2-tailed) .000 .000 n 213 213 213 qualifications pearson correlation .555** .783** .841** 1 .87 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 n 213 213 213 213 dynamism pearson correlation .560** .500** .586** .658** 1 .69 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 n 213 213 213 213 213 leadershiptd pearson correlation .807** .563** .634** .695** .941** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .84 n 213 213 213 213 213 213 leadershiproiq2 pearson correlation .565** .932** .957** .939** .624** .675** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 n 213 213 213 213 213 213 213 leadership pearson correlation .679** .854** .904** .920** .829** .868** .950** 1 tdroiq2 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 n 213 213 213 213 213 213 213 213 advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 151 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 151-165, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper who framed the women? measuring the public relations impact on the media’s framing of the u.s supreme court nominees katherine fleck dept. of communication and theatre arts, ohio northern university, k-fleck@onu.edu, phone 419-772-2053 accepted november 1, 2013 this study seeks to determine if presidents frame female nominees to the highest court differently than their male counterparts in ways consistent with other female leaders. entmen (1993) defines framing as process whereby certain aspects of a perceived reality are selected and made more salient in communication. this work further examines how u.s. presidents select and highlight certain aspects of their u.s. supreme court nominees’ background, experience and personal attributes in public relations materials. by analyzing frames in public relations materials and comparing them to those found in testimony by third parties and in newspaper coverage, the study will determine the effectiveness of the presidents to influence others to utilize his frames. keywords: bush, frame, framing, gender, obama, public relations, supreme court introduction those who sit in the supreme court interpret the laws of our land and truly do leave their footprints on the sands of time. long after the policies of presidents and senators and congressmen of any given era may have passed from public memory, they'll be remembered. – ronald reagan (reagan, 1981). in 1981, president ronald reagan nominated judge sandra day o’connor to become the first female associate justice on the u.s. supreme court. in his announcement, reagan (1981) remarked: …she is truly a person for all seasons, possessing those unique qualities of temperament, fairness, intellectual capacity, and devotion to the public good which have characterized the 101 brethren who have preceded her. i commend her to you, and i urge the senate's swift bipartisan confirmation so that as soon as possible she may take her seat on the court and her place in history. (para. 9) in 1987, president reagan nominated judge robert bork to become an associate justice on the u.s. supreme court. conversely, for this nominee, reagan (1987) said: judge bork is recognized as a premier constitutional authority. his outstanding intellect and unrivaled scholarly credentials are reflected in his thoughtful examination of the broad, fundamental legal issues of our times. when confirmed by the senate as an appellate judge in 1982, the american bar association gave him its highest rating: ‘exceptionally well qualified.’ on the bench, he has been well prepared, evenhanded, and openminded. (para. 2) these two announcements are examples of how u.s. presidents “frame” their nominees for the highest court in the land. according to entmen (1993) “framing essentially involves selection and salience. to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described” (p. 52). related to this study, richard davis explains in his book, electing justice: fixing the supreme court nomination process, presidents use framing as a way to “sell” their candidate to the many constituencies who must be convinced to support a particular nominee. davis (2005) noted, “‘selling’ requires creating an image of a nominee. because an image inevitably will form, the nominee and the white house want to be the first to shape it” (p. 130). as davis explained, the president is merely the first player in the supreme court nomination process to define the imagery of a nominee. congress, legal organizations, interest groups, and the media also take turns framing the nominee, which helps form the american public’s perception of a candidate. further, davis (2005) pointed out: mailto:k-fleck@onu.edu advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 152 supreme court appointments are well designed for image making because nominations often begin with a blank slate in terms of public awareness of the nominee. over more than 200 years, few supreme court nominees have been widely known to the public when they were nominated. (p. 135) indeed, as graber (1980) explained, …of the three branches of government, the federal judiciary receives the least publicity for its officials. aside from initial appointments to the federal bench, justices are rarely in the limelight in a way which would be comparable to chief executives or members of the legislature. judges infrequently grant interviews, almost never hold news conferences, and generally do not seek or welcome media attention. (p. 216) given these dynamics, the images formed for the public through the framing of a nominee will be done during the nomination process. and, as davis (2005) reminds us, presidents know that their image-making strategies can be ruined if others can set images first, hence the importance of establishing a frame for a nominee at the outset. this frame is the story of the nominee...administrations extract from personal backgrounds those parts of the past that would be viewed as appealing to the general public (p. 131). justice o’connor and judge bork provide two contrasting images of nominees. however, these are not simply two different people in two different years. these two justices are female and male and the contrast in the framing of their qualifications appear to reflect america’s gendered political realities. while justice o’connor is described as having a good temperament and being devoted to the public good, judge bork is described as having been a premier constitutional authority with an outstanding intellect. clearly the frames chosen for these nominees evoke different images and emotions. one of the questions this current study seeks to answer is whether the differences in framing female nominees are notably different from male nominees. in addition, the current study sought to discern if the president, as the key player in the nomination process, succeeds in framing a candidate in a way that attracts the attention of the media and ultimately the public. framing research the current study analyzed and compared the frames proffered by individuals and groups in the nomination process. however, it did not analyze the work of an individual public relations practitioner, but instead acknowledged their import as the crafting agent of the ‘frames’ being analyzed. in other words, the research did not analyze the public relations practitioner or the process but instead scrutinized their product. by hallahan’s (1999) definition, a “frame limits or defines [a] message’s meaning by shaping the inferences that individuals make about the message. frames reflect judgments made by message creators or framers.” (p. 207) according to entman (2008), “framing is an omnipresent process in politics and policy analysis. it involves selecting a few aspects of a perceived reality and connecting them together in a narrative that promotes a particular interpretation” (p. 391) importantly, entman (2008) continues, “frames introduce or enhance the availability and apparent importance of certain ideas for evaluating a political object” (p. 391). as entman (2008) noted, “skilled politicians and other actors frame communications to highlight and weave together those dimensions of a situation most likely to sway potential allies to become actual supporters” (p. 392). while this is accomplished in many ways, one of the most important methods is through the mass media. mass media how the media characterize an issue can have an effect on how the audience understands and comprehends the issue (scheufele & tewksbury, 2007). this concept is particularly relevant to the supreme court nomination process, where, as noted earlier, the nomination process is not widely understood, and the nominees themselves are unfamiliar to the general public. the media defines the players and the issues, conveying the framing of the nominees by the various political leaders who seek to influence public opinion for or against a particular nominee’s confirmation. media outlets select certain frames and emphasize those frames that are congruent with the outlets’ perspective or understanding. for example, graber (1980) asserted that “media not only survey the events of the day and make them the focus of public and private attention; they also interpret their meaning, put them into context, and speculate about their consequences” (p. 7). altheide (2006) concurred: the mass media are significant for our lives because they are both form and content of cultural categories and experience. as form, the mass media provide the criteria, shape, rhythm, and style of an expanding array of activities, many of which are outside the ‘communication’ process. as content, the new ideas, fashions, vocabularies, and myriad of types of information (e.g., politics) are acquired through the mass media. (p. 47) according to graber (1980): media images are especially potent when they involve aspects of life that people experience only through the media, rather than directly in their own neighborhoods. popular images of politicians and their work habits, criminals and crime, big business activities, moon advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 153 walks and space flights – and their impact on ordinary people – are not generally experienced firsthand. rather they are shaped largely by the images portrayed in news and fictional stories in print and electronic media. (p. 3) as mentioned, the same could be true then for supreme court nominations. further, graber (1980) asserted: media coverage is the lifeblood of politics because it shapes the political perceptions which form the reality on which political action is based. media images define situations for nearly all participants in the political process because direct contact with political actors and situations is limited. (p. 195) altheide (2006) agreed, noting “mass-mediated experiences, events, and issues are particularly salient for audiences lacking direct, personal experience with the problem” (p. 62). it should be noted the framing of an issue does not necessarily have a singular and direct effect on any given audience. it is part of a complex tapestry of factors that can influence opinion. and, of course, the effect can be different on individuals within an audience. while most studies focus on the effect frames have on the media consumer, the current study focuses on the nature of the frames constructed by various groups as well as the media as a consumer of the information and frames. this type of analysis follows scheufele’s definition of a “frame-setting” study (scheufele d. , 2000). public relations public relations practitioners develop and promote frames that characterize a candidate, product or organization. knight (1999) determined “frames represent powerful mechanisms through which public relations practitioners can mediate debate related to public policy” (p. 381). hallahan (1999) went further asserting, “public relations practitioners fundamentally operate as frame strategists…framing decisions are perhaps the most important strategic choices made in a public relations effort” (p. 224). this concept is important to the public relations practitioner, as it is a primary goal to positively influence media coverage. ultimately, by influencing media coverage, public relations practitioners attempt to influence public opinion. however, the first priority is to influence the media. strong scholarly work has been done to understand the impact of public relations efforts, in the form of information subsidies, on news coverage. indeed several works have examined how candidates have adopted each other’s framing of issues and events within a single political campaign. most studies focus on the public’s views of the supreme court itself and its decisions, or the nomination process itself. few, if any, have analyzed the actual framing or “image-making” process by which players in the process frame a supreme court nominee, specifically as framing relates to gender. therefore, the current study focuses on the frames themselves and how each is used relating to the gender of the nominee as well as their success in influencing the media’s coverage of the nominee. this type of analysis is a second-level analysis focusing more on the quality and success of the frame(s) and assuming through the myriad of other research studies, the effects the frame, by virtue of media coverage, has on public opinion. the supreme court given that the supreme court and its nominees are not well known or understood, using framing as a tool helps an individual, such as the president or a senator, connect concepts not always naturally linked in the public’s mind. the result of doing so produces what is called the “applicability effect.” in other words, the framer helps individuals connect two concepts such as “temperament” and “doing the public good” with supreme court justices. and, if successful, the individual accepts those concepts should be linked (scheufele & tewksbury, 2007). sapiro and soss (1999) studied the frames that emerged and swayed public opinion during the confirmation hearings of supreme court nominee clarence thomas. in this case, they analyzed the frames associated with justice thomas and those associated with anita hill (a former employee who alleged that justice thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked for him). they determined public opinion was not moved by a singular dimension (or frame) and in fact, the dimensions guiding the responses either “for” or “against” each of the protagonists in this saga “differed in their content and in their complexity” (sapiro & soss, 1999). in a different study of the thomas/hill hearings, robinson and powell used a framing analysis to determine the rhetorical/symbolic content of the media images of both justice thomas and ms. hill as constructed by the opposing political ideologies and actors in their attempts to influence public opinion. guided by the concepts of agenda-setting, priming, and framing as it relates to mass media, they analyzed the news coverage of the hearings themselves in the washington post and the new york times (robinson & powell, 1996). robinson and powell identified the two dominant themes of support and opposition for each. they found that ms. hill was either framed as an “innocent victim of sexism” or a “political/racial persecutor,” while justice thomas was framed as either a “sexual persecutor” or “innocent victim of racism” (robinson & powell, 1996). they concluded: …this mediated symbolic contest took the form of a public-image management battle in which victory for advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 154 each camp depended on being able to effectively construct a positive, credible impression of the personality of its own ‘witness’ for public consumption, while simultaneously denigrating the character and downplaying the credibility of the opposition’s ‘witness’. (p. 297) the researchers determined the thomas forces “won” the battle by virtue of him winning confirmation, while the hill camp did capture a longer-term victory by raising issues that resonated with significant portions of the american public (robinson & powell, 1996). robinson and powell concluded: in this brave new world of virtual politics, whoever effectively frames the context of ‘reality’ perception via the electronic media ‘wins’ and the ‘critical element in political maneuver for advantage’ becomes the ability to successfully manufacture popular consent by inventing mesmerizing images capable of legitimizing favored courses of action to mass publics. (p. 300) johnson and roberts (2004) analyzed the strategic public relations decisions presidents make in determining how and when to use their political capital to secure the confirmation of their supreme court nominee. they contend the decision to ‘go public’ meaning making direct public appeals in order to put pressure on the senate – is made easier in supreme court nominations because they are entirely at the discretion of the president. in addition, johnson and roberts asserted: …in contrast to public statements about other domestic policies, public statements about supreme court nominees always present the president’s position in unambiguous terms, and the mass media tend not to alter the frame with which presidents discuss their nominees. (p. 666) johnson and roberts (2004) focus on the strategic aspect of the public relations campaign and analyze presidential statements that focused on a nominee’s qualifications; claims of public opinion in favor of the nominee; and calls for the senate to act fairly and quickly during the confirmation process so that the court can continue its work with a full complement of justices. gender frames scholarly studies have analyzed the framing of women political candidates and show news coverage to be gender biased, perpetuating stereotypes traditionally associated with females. while most focus on the coverage itself, few have focused on how the candidates themselves (or more accurately the public relations specialists working on behalf of the campaign) frame themselves. in their study on the effect of race and gender on campaign coverage, major and coleman (2008) found “significantly more coverage of the female candidate’s gender, marital status, and parenthood than the male candidate’s during the gubernatorial runoff in the 2003 gubernatorial election in louisiana” (p.324). additionally, they found “significantly more positive newspaper coverage about the female candidate’s ability to handle feminine issues and the male candidate’s ability to handle masculine issues” (p. 324). the authors credited kathleen blanco, the female candidate, for the press’ coverage of her gender, noting: …press frequently described blanco as a mother, grandmother, and wife. the overwhelmingly positive tone of the coverage may indicate an awareness of this by her campaign staff, and their ability to manipulate it to the candidate’s advantage. blanco herself drew attention to her gender, repeatedly calling herself the ‘‘cajun grandmother.’’ she also emphasized her appearance by exclusively wearing a signature blue suit throughout the campaign. it is difficult to blame the media entirely for this stereotypical portrayal. although the media did accord more coverage about gender roles to blanco, journalists provided the public with the description offered by the candidate herself. (p. 325) this finding inadvertently displayed a positive relationship between the candidate’s frame of herself and the resulting media coverage. in a study of how the media frames women gubernatorial candidates, devitt (2002) contends that framing research found: …a pattern in the differences in coverage between female and male candidates and public officials. compared to their coverage of men, journalists tend to highlight the personal in reporting on women. this includes mentioning their appearance, attire, marital status, and whether or not they have children. by contrast, the news media focus on the professional in covering men. this means highlighting their experience, accomplishments, and positions on issues. (p. 449) devitt (2002) overall, newspapers paid more attention to female candidates' personal characteristics (when compared to their male opponents), such as age, personality, and attire. female candidates received less coverage outlining where they stood on public policy issues such as education, health care, and taxes. however, on the whole, female candidates received more issue than personal coverage (devitt, 2002). while not constitutionally political in the sense of a traditional election campaign, many have suggested that the supreme court nomination process mirrors a traditional election campaign. indeed, davis (2005) agrees with this characterization noting: judicial selection has become a public process prone to the same emphases as other public selection processes such as elections and executive branch appointments – that is, advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 155 image making to shape mass perceptions. as presidential campaigns seek to shape voters’ images of a candidate, so supreme court nominations have become an attempt by the white house to secure certain perceptions of the nominee in the minds of elites and the public. (p. 129) therefore, studies of coverage of women political candidates are germane to this study. one such study examines how secretary of state, then presidential candidate, hillary clinton was covered during the new hampshire primary. dimitrova and gieske (2009) analyzed news coverage from the new york times and usa today to determine if candidate clinton was framed in the traditional sexist ways other female politicians have been covered. they found clinton was framed in a predominantly masculine way. while clinton was not framed as a traditional female, this masculine framing may have backfired. they noted that voters may find female politicians “too aggressive and too masculine, even though those traits also tend to help women in political office compete with their opponents more effectively” (p. 18). during the same election cycle, sarah palin was chosen as a vice presidential candidate for senator john mccain. a study was conducted to determine how palin was characterized in the media, which helped form the first (and perhaps lasting), impression of her in the general populous. this study is relevant in that palin was an unknown entity, much like most supreme court nominees, and americans had to rely heavily on the media to gain information and form an opinion of her. harp, loke, and bachmann (2010) found that palin was successful in navigating the dicey gender waters that many female politicians are thrown into when being introduced to a national audience. unlike clinton, palin was initially viewed as being untraditionally “tough” without being viewed as harsh. however, the researchers found palin’s unique characteristics of beauty queen and mother offset her “toughness.” harp, loke, and bachmann (2010) concluded that women “are accepted as tough only when they can uphold ideal forms of femininity” (p. 304). dabbous and ladley (2010) examined newspaper coverage of the first female speaker of the house nancy pelosi. they found the media did cover the significance of a “first” women speaker, however, the “coverage consistently mitigated the event by regurgitating a number of gender-biased frames traditionally associated with female politicians, thereby reflecting the hypermasculinized conception of government and public affairs” (p .182). similar to the earlier devitt study, dabbous and ladley (2010) attributed coverage not only to the traditional media bias, but also to “the manner in which pelosi herself chose to gender her transition to speaker of the house” (p. 182). similar to the current study, reeves (2009) compared editorial coverage in the new york times of the 1984 vice presidential candidates and the 2008 vice presidential candidates. specifically, the author analyzed female candidates. reeves discovered both candidate ferraro and candidate palin were covered heavily and were framed in terms of their family and gender. conversely, the study indicated male vice presidential candidates received little to no coverage at all. at a time when women continue to break glass ceilings in both the political and business sectors, it is important to continue to analyze both the public relations frames as well as the actual media coverage. in the case of the u.s. supreme court, the glass ceiling was broken some time ago. in fact, in 2013 three women sit as associate justices on the court. supreme court nominations are still taken relatively seriously, and media cover each with somewhat deeper sobriety than traditional political campaigns. therefore, the gender bias may indeed be subtle. methodology this study used content analysis to measure frames. content analysis is a central methodology in communications research aimed at analyzing messages in mass communication (lombard & snyder-duch, 2002). lim and jones conducted a thorough survey of public relations research using framing as a basis of research. from 1990 through 2009, they reviewed the main public relations research journals in addition to ancillary journals that regularly contain public relations research work. they identified 39 studies published that used framing to analyze public relations phenomena (lim & jones, 2010). in their survey, lim and jones determined that 95% of the studies conducted focused on the “construction of reality” thesis while the remainder on the individual receiver’s cognitive principles. they found nearly 60 % of the time public relations research focused on the comparison of messages to news coverage and general analysis of public relations messaging. they further determined only 10 % of the studies analyzed combined both qualitative and quantitative methods and urged researchers to consider doing so to provide additional layers of analysis (lim & jones, 2010). the current study seeks to answer some of the issues raised by lim and jones. first, this study will analyze both the frames of the messages and will compare them to media coverage. however, beyond simple comparison, the current study analyzed the differences between frames and the gender of the nominee. in addition, both qualitative and quantitative analysis will be done to analyze the phenomena. by doing so, the current study provides an additional dimension to the growing body of framing research in the public relations field. data collection nominees were chosen to reflect the most recent vacancies, which occurred during a relatively condensed timeframe. this advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 156 condensed timeframe was helpful in that it will not be compromised by societal shifts in opinion, approach, or attitude. these nominees also provided for both gender and political balance. in addition, full documentation was easily accessible and allowed for full analysis, ensuring greater integrity of the study. the nominees in this study include president george w. bush nominees john roberts, samuel alito, and harriet meyers (nominated but not confirmed); and president barak obama nominees sonia sotomayor and elena kagan. sources were chosen to include documents that reflected the most obvious opportunities for the various players to frame the nominees. these documents were written prepared statements and were chosen because each was reflective of the public relations process. statements in the form of quotes in media accounts were considered later as a measure of success in the framing process. because presidents do not make many formal statements about nominees the universe of all available presidential statements were analyzed including statements, news releases, and radio address transcripts. supreme court nominee statements and testimony was included in this category along with presidential statements as they will, by design, reflect the themes presented by the president. presidential surrogate statements or press comments were not analyzed separately as these statements were examined through the media coverage. the written testimony of each senator who testified as part of the judicial committee’s confirmation hearings were included. any congressman who testified was included as interested parties as that is the proper role in these proceedings. the senate alone is charged with giving advice and consent for judicial appointments. relevant statements, quotes, etc. by senators and congressman were assumed to be caught in the media coverage and therefore not analyzed separately. it was impractical to attempt to gather all formal and informal statements made by members of the senate on each candidate. the statements made at the confirmation hearings should contain all intentional frames for each nominee and serve as the truest reflection of congressional intention. formal written testimony given during senate confirmation hearings by interest groups and interested parties were analyzed. as is the case for members of the senate, it was impractical to collect all statements made by every interest group in support or opposition to each nominee. therefore, the assumption was made that formal senate testimony would reflect all intentional frames. the washington post and the new york times were chosen as barometer news outlets. both cover the federal government extensively and have dedicated staff to cover beats including the judiciary. in this study, all articles discovered via lexisnexis were considered. the search criteria included the nominee’s name and supreme court and the dates from the announcement of the nominee from the president through their confirmation and swearing in (if applicable). articles were scanned to determine if they were materially about the nominee and/or the nomination. if the nominee was simply mentioned in an article about another topic, those articles were not included. letters to the editor were not included, but columns and editorials were included. the rational for excluding letters and including columns and editorials, was that the primary audience studied was the media, not the public directly. data analysis to avert common reliability problems associated with content analysis, data was analyzed using the diction software. diction is a computer-aided content analysis program. diction was developed by communication and journalism scholars, however the program has been used in a variety of disciplines. it serves as a viable standard against which to measure the frames associated with this study. bligh, kohles, and meindl (2004) used diction software to content analyze the language of leadership using the speeches of president george w. bush pre-and post-9/11. while highlighting content analysis as a viable research methodology in the field of organizational leadership, the authors further tested the reliability and validity of computerized content analysis versus the traditional method of human coding (bligh, kohles, & meindl, 2004). the study concluded: …content analysis is highly systematic and reliable, making it ideal for uncovering aspects of language that even the trained human eye might not readily perceive. for this reason, dictionary-based content analysis is likely to be particularly appropriate in situations in which human coders may fail to notice or may give undue weight to certain constructs on the basis of perceptual errors and previously developed schemas. (p. 564) in the current study, newspaper articles were analyzed using the journalism normative profile and specifically the political reporting analysis. all other “statements” were analyzed using the politics normative profile and specifically the public policy speeches analysis. each story, statement, testimony, etc. was examined through diction, and analyzed. data was then exported into excel for further analysis and aggregation. diction reports all results that fall out of the “normal” range for each normative profile. within each profile, diction measured the following frames: certainty, tenacity, leveling, collectives, insistence, numerical terms, ambivalence, self-reference, variety, optimism, praise, satisfaction, inspiration, blame, hardship, denial, activity, aggression, accomplishment, communication, motion, cognitive terms, passivity, embellishment, realism, familiarity, spatial awareness, temporal awareness, present concern, human interest, concreteness, past concern, complexity, commonality, advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 157 centrality, cooperation, rapport, diversity, exclusion, and liberation. the results found to be either out of range high or out of range low, meaning the results are higher or lower than expected for that profile, were counted and analyzed. results will be considered if they rank in the top 15 % of themes covered. this measurement isolated the top frames covered to answer the hypotheses in the current study. results were aggregated by gender and category (senate testimony, presidential statements, etc.). results were then compared to determine the success and/or prevalence of dominant frames. operational definitions cognition. includes “words referring to cerebral processes, both functional and imaginative” (digitext, 2000, para. 15). human interest. includes descriptions that “concentrate on people and their activities gives discourse a life-like quality. included are standard personal pronouns (he, his, ourselves, them), family members and relations (cousin, wife, grandchild, uncle), and generic terms (friend, baby, human, persons)” (digitext, 2000, para. 22). optimism. includes language endorsing some person, group, concept or event, or highlighting their positive entailments (digitext, 2000, para. 34). praise. includes “affirmations of some person, group, or abstract entity.” terms included in this frame describe “important social qualities (dear, delightful, witty), physical qualities (mighty, handsome, beautiful), intellectual qualities (shrewd, bright, vigilant, reasonable),entrepreneurial qualities (successful, conscientious, renowned), and moral qualities (faithful, good, noble) (digitext, 2000, para. 5). rapport. as defined by diction, this frame describes attitudinal similarities among groups of people. included are terms of affinity (congenial, camaraderie, companion), assent (approve, vouched, warrants), deference (tolerant, willing, permission), and id entity (equivalent, resemble, consensus) (digitext, 2000, p. 29). satisfaction. satisfaction is defined as “terms associated with positive affective states (cheerful, passionate, happiness), with moments of undiminished joy (thanks, smile, welcome) and pleasurable diversion (excited, fun, lucky), or with moments of triumph (celebrating, pride, auspicious). also included are words of nurturance: healing, encourage, secure, relieved” (digitext, 2000, p. 6). variety. variety is measured in diction using wendell johnson’s (1946) type-token ratio, which divides the number of different words in a passage by the passage’s total words. according to diction developers, “a high score indicates a speaker’s avoidance of overstatement and a preference for precise, molecular statements” (digitext, 2000, p. 8). hypotheses h1: given the president’s place as the leader in the framing hierarchy, his frames for each nominee will be prominently reflected in the news coverage. h2: given the president’s place as the leader in the framing hierarchy, his frames will be prominently reflected in testimony by both senators and interested parties. h3: given the president’s place as the leader in the framing hierarchy, female candidates will be framed stereotypically regardless of perceived equality. specifically the president will emphasize frames highlighting the personal side of the nominee such as temperament, family, appearance, and personal attributes. results h1: given the president’s place as the leader in the framing hierarchy, news coverage will reflect his frames. the president’s frames, as predicted, were reflected in the top 15 % of the media coverage. however, not all presidential frames were reflected in the news media. the key frames the president used to influence public opinion were cognition, optimism and praise. cognition when nominating anyone to the highest court in the country, a president would want to make sure they frame their nominee as having high intellectual capacity. in the cases studied this supposition was found to be true. an example of the president’s frame of high cognition is found in the nomination of justice sotomayor. president obama stated: while there are many qualities that i admire in judges across the spectrum of judicial philosophy, and that i seek in my own nominee, there are few that stand out that i just want to mention. first and foremost is a rigorous intellect -a mastery of the law, an ability to hone in on the key issues and provide clear answers to complex legal questions. second is a recognition of the limits of the judicial role, an understanding that a judge's job is to interpret, not make, law; to approach decisions without any particular ideology or agenda, but rather a commitment to impartial justice; a respect for precedent and a determination to faithfully apply the law to the facts at hand. (obama, remarks by the president in nomination of judge sonia sotomayor to the united states supreme court , 2009, para. 3) this frame was reflected in the the new york times, which noted: “the president, as he did in nearly all of his public appearances last week, hailed the biography of judge advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 158 sotomayor. he called her path from the south bronx to the federal bench 'a journey defined by hard work, fierce intelligence and the enduring faith that in america all things are possible” (zeleny, 2009, p. 20) president bush characterized judge alito’s high cognition in several different ways. he portrayed alito as: “a man of character and intelligence;” having “legal brilliance;” “scholarly;” and as gaining “respect of his colleagues and attorneys for his brilliance” (bush, 2005, para. 2). this characterization was reflected in both the the washington post and the the new york times. for example in a washington post column alito was noted as “a nominee who has a 15 year judicial track record and an intellectual capacity they (democrats) don't dispute” (hinderaker & mirengoff 2005, p. b03). and, in a new york times article, alito was remembered by colleagues for his “his superior research powers, his probing brain, his wrestling with the questions and his disinclination to see any issue as a slam dunk,” (para. 3) and “as disinclined toward small talk but brilliant in debate” (scott, 2005, para. 9). praise with respect to high praise as a presidential frame, president bush’s nomination of justice john roberts provides a strong example. in the statement announcing his choice of roberts, bush (2005) stated: before he was a respected judge, he was known as one of the most distinguished and talented attorneys in america. john roberts has devoted his entire professional life to the cause of justice and is widely admired for his intellect, his sound judgment, and personal decency. (para. 4) the frame is reflected in the washingtonpost’s reference to justice robert’s qualities: roberts became known for his astute political judgments in the reagan administration and his cordial personal relations with many liberal attorneys during his years as a supreme court advocate. in a role in which he will have few means of forging majorities other than persuasion and tact, that could make roberts an effective force for conservatism on the court. ‘a committed conservative with interpersonal skills equal to or superior to rehnquist's would be a far more effective chief justice than a nominee of equal intellect who lacks those graces,’ said david j. garrow, a professor of law at emory university (lane, 2005, para. 3-4) president obama used praise in good measure to describe justice sotomayor. president obama introduced judge sotomayor saying, “over a distinguished career that spans three decades, judge sotomayor has worked at almost every level of our judicial system, providing her with a depth of experience and a breadth of perspective that will be invaluable as a supreme court justice.” (obama 2009, para.7) he further praised her declaring: along the way she's faced down barriers, overcome the odds, lived out the american dream that brought her parents here so long ago. and even as she has accomplished so much in her life, she has never forgotten where she began, never lost touch with the community that supported her. what sonia will bring to the court, then, is not only the knowledge and experience acquired over a course of a brilliant legal career, but the wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life's journey. (para. 17) the washington post followed the president’s praise frame noting: …the 55-year-old appeals court judge, who is to begin her confirmation hearing tomorrow before the senate judiciary committee, would bring to the court a sensibility shaped by a set of experiences -and an immense network of people -far more eclectic than those of most sitting justices. (goldstein, 2009, para. 5) the new york times also adopted the frame saying: sonia sotomayor, who would be the supreme court's first hispanic justice, brings to the confirmation experience the kind of rich personal story that has always been deeply gratifying to americans, the journey from humble beginnings to a respected position of great influence. as she was presented by president obama at the white house on tuesday morning, she referred to herself as 'a kid from the bronx…but it was mr. obama who provided many details of her history as a child of a city housing project who lost her father at an early age and saw her mother work two jobs to put her and her brother through professional schools. mr. obama said that he had wanted to select a person who had 'a common touch and a sense of compassion.’ (lewis, 2009, para. 1-3) optimism president bush used his weekly radio address to the nation to discuss his nomination of judge samuel alito. in this address, he expressed strong optimism as defined in this study declaring: the united states senate will now exercise its constitutional responsibility to advise and consent on judge alito's nomination. the process is off to a good start. since i announced his nomination, judge alito has met with many senators, and they are learning more about his great character, accomplishments, and ability. our nation is fortunate to have a man of judge alito's intellect and integrity willing to serve. i look forward to the senate voting to confirm judge alito as the 110th justice of the supreme court of the united states. (bush, 2005, para. 7) advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 159 the president’s frame of optimism for judge alito was reflected in the washington post when columnist david broder proclaimed: whatever slim chance the democrats had of defeating his nomination -and it was never really plausible - disappeared on the second day of questioning, when the liberals focused on alito's membership in that controversial princeton university alumni organization and on his failing to recuse himself in a case involving the vanguard investment firm. by shifting the focus from his judicial philosophy to his character, the democrats set up alito to play to his strength. (broder, 2006, para. 6-7) bush nominee harriet miers, who withdrew from the nomination after it became clear that she was opposed by members of the president’s own party, provided a valuable contribution the current study. her failed candidacy was included to provide political balance to the female nominees. this balance was necessary to reduce political bias as a potential reason for stereotypical framing as defined in hypothesis 3. overall this hypothesis was partially supported. while several of the president’s top themes were reflected, others were rejected indicating an influence on the news but not a direct effect on the coverage of the nominees. h2: given the president’s place as the leader in the framing hierarchy, his frames will be prominently reflected in the testimony of senators and interested parties. the president’s frames for both females and males were reflected in part in both senate and interested party testimony. however, framing success was more pronounced for females than males. both the senate and interested parties reflected the themes for females of high optimism, low tenacity, high variety, low accomplishment, high cognition, and low certainty. interested parties also reflected the president’s high variety theme. for male nominees, the president’s frames were reflected in only one measure, cognition, for both the senate and the interested parties. the frames of high variety and low tenacity were also seen but only within the testimony of interested parties. these findings offer a mixed conclusion. both male and female nominees are characterized with high variety within the testimony of interested parties. this frame may reflect the nature of interested party testimony, more than an actual reflection of a presidential frame. interested parties by their nature are concerned with a few specific issues and therefore adjust their testimony to judge the candidate’s stance and/or record on those specific issues. this factor may be cloud the results in the current study. for example, dr. charmaine yoest, president and ceo of americans united for life, the oldest national pro-life publicinterest law and policy nonprofit organization, testified against justice kagan and reserved the majority of her comments about kagan’s philosophy on pro-life issues. her opening statement noted, “based on our research, we believe that solicitor general kagan will be an agenda-driven judge on the court, and that she will strongly oppose even the most widely-accepted protections for unborn human life” (yoest, 2010, para. 2). in addition, both males and females were characterized with low tenacity. while males were characterized this way only within interested party testimony, this measurement was true for females in both senate and interested party testimony. this may reflect a willingness on the part of senators to follow the president’s lead in framing female nominees, but rejecting those frames for the males. rapport the senate had a high rapport ranking. this may indicate a higher comfort level with the male nominees over the females. for example, senator dick lugar commented: judge roberts' path would lead first to harvard, and then to serving his fellow citizens in numerous important posts in our nation's capital. but as one friend remarked when his nomination was first announced, "if you ask john where he's from, he says indiana." one of my friends, a native hoosier who worked alongside him in the reagan white house counsel's office, also testifies to judge roberts' open appreciation of and pride in his indiana roots. i know committee members will understand my observing that our state takes a certain pride of its own in his nomination by the president to lead our nation's highest court. (lugar, 2005, para. 3) another example is found in the testimony of senator mike dewine during justice robert’s confirmation hearings: while preparing for this hearing, i came across a statement from a sitting federal judge that neatly sums up this philosophy. deciding cases, this judge said, ‘requires an essential humility grounded in the properly limited role of an undemocratic judiciary in a democratic republic, a humility reflected in doctrines of deference to legislative policy judgments and embodied in the often misunderstood term 'judicial restraint.' judge roberts, those words are yours. and, in my opinion, they are very wise words indeed. you have the talent, experience, and humility to be an outstanding member of the supreme court. and, i expect that these hearings will show that you have the appropriate philosophy to lead our nation into the future as the 17th chief justice of the united states. (dewine, 2005, para. 23) optimism advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 160 the president claimed optimism as the leading frame for both males and females. however, this frame was only reflected in senate testimony and through testimony of interested parties for females. again, a mixed result showed senators and interested parties followed the president’s lead for females but rejected this frame for males signaling less confidence in the confirmation of the male nominees. as an example of the president’s optimism, republican senator sheldon whitehouse declared in his testimony regarding justice kagan: i think it's fair to say that some of my republican colleagues aren't so favorably disposed to your nomination. we've already heard a lot about their concerns. but let's not lose the big picture here. you are the solicitor general of the united states – the lawyer for the united states before the supreme court – and the former dean of harvard law school – a school to which i suspect every one of us on this committee would be proud to have our children attend. your nomination to the supreme court has to be among the least surprising ever made. and i don't want to take any suspense out of these proceedings, but things are looking good for your confirmation. (whitehouse, 2010, para. 2) marcia greenberger, co-president, national women’s law center, testified in support of justice kagan, concluding: with the confirmation of solicitor general kagan to the supreme court, this country rightfully continues on the road to doing better. our country’s history is a history of barriers being broken, of remarkable individuals being the first, to be followed by seconds and thirds, and finally of reaching a point where the additions are no longer of note. it is in keeping with the proud tradition of this country to have such an accomplished woman as elena kagan confirmed to join the two other distinguished women currently on the supreme court. (greenberger, 2010, para. 16) the presidential frame of high cognition, was found to be a leading frame for male candidates in testimony of both senators and interested parties. an example of this includes testimony from former new jersey governor christine todd whitman in her support of justice alito. governor whitman noted: sam alito has been a model as a federal appeals court judge. he has shown that he has the intellect, the experience and the temperament to serve with true distinction. i have every confidence he will be a balanced, fair and thoughtful justice. i urge this committee to favorably report his nomination to the u.s. senate. (whitman, 2006, para. 12) senator ted kennedy’s testimony during justice roberts’ confirmation hearings reflected a high cognition frame. kennedy stated, “judge roberts you are an intelligent, well-educated and serious man. you have vast legal experience and you are considered to be one of the finest legal advocates in america. these qualities are surely important qualifications for a potential supreme court justice” (kennedy, 2005, para.19). given these factors, the second hypothesis was partially supported. however, additional research should be conducted to more clearly answer this question and better understand the interplayer agenda-setting that may exist among the participants within the nomination process. h3: given the president’s place as the leader in the framing hierarchy, female candidates will be framed stereotypically regardless of perceived equality. specifically the president will emphasize frames highlighting the personal side of the nominee such as temperament, family, appearance, and personal attributes. within diction’s normative profiles, the frames of praise, satisfaction, and human interest most closely represent what the literature has deemed as more stereotypical for females. following that assumption, hypothesis 3 was partially supported. praise was reflected higher and more often for females than males but was not exclusively female. for instance, the washington post’s coverage also included the frame of praise in the top 15 % for males. presidential statements included the frame of satisfaction for both females and males, although stronger for females. however, the newspapers did not adopt this frame in their coverage. and, human interest was not featured in the top 15 % for females or males in either the president’s statements or in media coverage. praise a relevant example of the president using praise to frame a nominee is found in president obama’s characterization of justice elena kagan. in his introduction of kagan as a nominee, the president said: elena is respected and admired not just for her intellect and record of achievement, but also for her temperament -her openness to a broad array of viewpoints; her habit, to borrow a phrase from justice stevens, ‘of understanding before disagreeing’; her fair-mindedness and skill as a consensusbuilder. these traits were particularly evident during her tenure as dean. at a time when many believed that the harvard faculty had gotten a little one-sided in its viewpoint, she sought to recruit prominent conservative scholars and spur a healthy debate on campus. and she encouraged students from all backgrounds to respectfully exchange ideas and seek common ground because she believes, as i do, that exposure to a broad array of perspectives is the foundation not just for a sound legal education, but of a successful life in the law. (obama, 2010, para. 6) advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 161 another example was found in the washington post coverage of the nomination of harriet miers. the washington post noted: harriet was blond, pretty and athletic -she captained the tennis team as a senior, and was voted "best all around in sports" -but she was known as more serious than social. while the cool girls wore bouffant hairdos, she wore a long braid wound modestly around her head. and she was one of the few students outside the in crowd elected to class offices. ‘harriet? was popular, but popular in a certain way - very efficient, very dependable, and as sweet as anybody in our class,’ said denny holman, a dallas real estate developer who was president of the senior class of 1963 while miers was treasurer. (grunwald, 2005, para. 12) the new york times also featured the praise frame in its coverage of justice sonia sotomayor. in an article titled, “the empathy issue,” david brooks asserts: the crucial question in evaluating a potential supreme court justice, therefore, is not whether she relies on empathy or emotion, but how she does so. first, can she process multiple streams of emotion? reason is weak and emotions are strong, but emotions can be balanced off each other. sonia sotomayor will be a good justice if she can empathize with the many types of people and actions involved in a case, but a bad justice if she can only empathize with one type, one ethnic group or one social class. (brooks, 2009, para. 10) in a washington post column regarding justice kagan’s preparation for her confirmation, alexandra petri noted: it's that day every little girl dreams of. it will mark the beginning of a new life as part of something bigger than herself. centuries of tradition have determined what she'll wear, what she'll say. some have objected, but they'll hold their peace on the big day. forget chelsea's wedding! i'm talking about elena kagan's confirmation as a supreme court justice. (petri, 2010, p. a13) when applied to male nominees, the praise frame is used differently. for example, in a column about the nomination of justice roberts, washington post writer robin givhan noted: there they were - john, jane, josie and jack - standing with the president and before the entire country. the nominee was in a sober suit with the expected white shirt and red tie. his wife and children stood before the cameras, groomed and glossy in pastel hues -like a trio of easter eggs, a handful of jelly bellies, three little necco wafers. (givhan, 2005, para. 2) this commentary focused more on the nominee’s wife and children and their “image” over justice robert’s personal attributes or image. in another example, the new york times published a story on justice alito titled, “alito team says he lacks polish, but grit is a plus.” this article noted: …two of judge alito's supporters who participated in the murder boards, speaking about the confidential sessions on condition of anonymity for fear of white house reprisals, said they emerged convinced that his demeanor was a political asset because it gave him an everyman appeal. ‘he will have a couple hairs out of place,’ one participant said. 'i am not sure his glasses fit his facial features. he might not wear the right color tie. he won't be tanned. he will look like he is from new jersey, because he is. that is a very useful look, because it is a natural look. he's able to go toe-to-toe with senators, and at the same time he could be your son's little league coach.’ (kirkpatrick, 2006, para. 5-6) this reference is more closely related to that of the females however, it is twisted to “spin” his lack of physical appeal as an advantage. discussion one goal of this study was to determine how successful presidents are in gaining adoption of their frames of supreme court nominees by the news media and in testimony of senators and other interested parties. for practitioners, understanding if, and how, public relations frames are adopted by the media is an important concept. equally as important is discovering who, beyond the media, those frames may influence. in the field of political public relations, this knowledge can help make the difference in the success of political appointment or election to high office. while not conclusive, the study found some key frames offered by presidents were reflected in the newspaper coverage of the nominees studied. while it is easy and obvious to determine success by whether direct quotes from presidents are used, the success of reproducing underlying frames within news stories is a deeper, more meaningful discovery. understanding the nature of the frames, and the potential for their adoption by target audiences can assist a practitioner in better framing their issue or candidate. the president’s top frames were reflected in news coverage, but not entirely. this may be because the news media has its own agenda and has already established set of frames with which it uses to cover nominations. for example, a great deal of coverage was spent analyzing strategies of various players highlighting process itself. the president was able to influence, but not dictate the coverage frames. this is particularly relevant for a nominee not well known to the media or to the public. by associating successful frames with a little known nominee at the outset, may indeed hold the key to the overall success of the nomination. the effect of the president’s frames on others such as members of the senate and other interested parties was partially supported. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 162 the results show the president’s influence was stronger for females than males. while the reason is not entirely clear, one possible explanation may be that members of the senate did not know the female nominees as well as the males. i draw this conclusion based in part on the high rapport measured in the senate testimony for males. another potential explanation may be the public record of the male nominees was more extensive, resulting in more information to discuss rather than focusing on personal attributes for male nominees. further research into these dynamics would be worthy of study. by delving deeper, those practitioners engaged in the political and governmental practice of public relations may find more guidance and subsequent success. in addition to determining the success of presidential frames, the material was analyzed to determine if presidents would frames female nominees stereotypically. the research partially upheld this hypothesis. the presidents offered stereotypical frames about the female nominees to target audiences, and both the washington post and the new york times covered females with an emphasis on traditionally gendered frames. this finding differs from other studies that focus on and assign blame to the media for stereotypical coverage. in fact, this study should sound a warning to public relations practitioners to be cautious and sensitive to stereotypes when developing frames for female leaders. as women leaders continue to gain critical mass in politics and public office, those who represent them as public relations practitioners, bear responsibility to offer frames respectfully reflective of their leadership, and less focused on personal matters of little consequence to their achievement. references altheide, d. l. 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(2009, may 31). obama urges fast action on court pick. the new york times, p. a20. microsoft word bonaparte_leaning_in_revised_may5_2016.docx advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 1 advancing women in leadership vol. 36, pp. 11-16 2016 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper leaning in: a phenomenological study of african american women leaders in the pharmaceutical industry yvette bonaparte yvette bonaparte: north carolina central university, email: bonapartephd@gmail.com accepted february 24, 2016 the pharmaceutical industry includes low levels of african american women in leadership positions. in 2010, according to the equal employment opportunity office, african american women comprised only 1.5% of senior executives and 3.4% of first/mid-level managers. this qualitative study describes the leadership behaviors of 8 african american women leaders within the pharmaceutical industry. the approaches used by these women leaders to navigate their environments illustrate that although these women may be limited in number, they are in fact leaning into and embracing their leadership roles; and consequently impacting their organizations and communities. seven themes are found to categorize the leadership experiences of these women as leaders. they are: 1) making a difference, 2) leveraging information and knowledge, 3) serving as mentors, 4) establishing and maintaining credibility, 5) asking for support, 6) illustrating integrity at the highest levels and 7) facing up to challenges. while the study is limited in its transferability by its qualitative design and number of participants, the findings provide insightful themes regarding the common experiences of these particular african american women leaders in the pharmaceutical industry. keywords: leadership, women, african american, phenomenology, qualitative, diversity, pharmaceutical introduction according to the us equal employment opportunity office 2010 job patterns for minorities and women in private industry (eeo-1), 2010 eeo-1 national aggregate report, african american women comprised 7.6% of all employees in the pharmaceutical industry, and only 1.5% of senior executives and 3.4% of first/mid-level managers. the approaches used by these women illustrate that although they may be limited in number they are in fact leaning into and embracing their leadership roles. highlighting the strategies used by these women, from multiple functional areas, to lead and impact their organizations and communities represents an opportunity to give voice to their experiences. the purpose of this qualitative study is to describe the leadership experience of african american women leaders within pharmaceutical industry. literature review african american women in leadership african american women leaders use a number of strategies for communicating and navigating within predominately white environments. these include approaches such as “engaged communal orientation” (king & ferguson, 2011), interactive communication, empowerment through challenge to produce results, and participatory decision making through collaborative debate (parker, 2001). while african american women in leadership are equipped with the “attributes, knowledge and skills” to perform in their positions, they may need additional strategies to overcome negative stereotypes and barriers; and these strategies may be different from their majority peer group (epps, 2008). it is possible that the strategic responses that some african american women have to problematic encounters can be seen as methods for “transforming organizational structures” (parker, 2001). byrd (2009) found clusters of meaning that described the experiences of executive and senior level african american women managers in predominately white organizations. these clusters included: disempowering encounters, being excluded from the good ole boy social network, being the only one, needing validation and dymythicizing stereotypical images (byrd, 2009). additionally, due to their marginalized status, it has been reported that it is necessary for african american women to develop their own support systems (king & ferguson, 2011). “these systems helped them work through psychological injury, cultivate community with and across their immediate work contexts, and develop strategies for social advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 2 change within their organizations and professions.” (king & ferguson, 2011, p.128) the pharmaceutical industry the pharmaceutical industry is a growing, dynamic and complex global industry that has become increasingly more complex over time (green & aitken, 2006). it seems imperative, that organizational cultures within the industry evolve to embrace collaboration and knowledge sharing to ensure their competitiveness (rowlands & morgan, 2006). the pharmaceutical industry is also faced with an interesting paradox that can, and perhaps has, impeded creativity and productivity previously. a number of dichotomies are highlighted due to the interaction that is required between the various areas of the organization (professional and science based). these include: team versus individual, unity versus heterogeneity, freedom versus control, and leader versus researcher (sundgren & styhre, 2006). while none of these dilemmas may in fact be unique to the pharmaceutical industry, they may be more pronounced or urgent due to the industry’s traditionally strong financial performance, global marketplace, technological focus, as well as other considerations (hashemi, 2012). the evolution of the pharmaceutical industry seems well underway. and, there is recognition that new approaches to the leadership and business will be required; approaches that are more collaborative and empowering for employees. the industry seems ripe for a study exploring how african american women leaders perceive and experience their roles as leaders with these organizations. method the strategy of inquiry used for this qualitative study was phenomenology. a series of open ended questions were asked during the interviews in order to gain an understanding of the participants’ experiences, values and behaviors in the context of their leadership positions within the pharmaceutical industry. the phenomenon studied is african american women in leadership. additionally, all participants were employed in the pharmaceutical industry at the time of the study. given the research question, this methodology is appropriate. “…..a phenomenological study describes the common meaning for several individuals of their lived experiences of a concept or phenomenon.” (creswell, 2013, p.76). additionally, phenomenological studies require that the researcher abstain from making suppositions on the specific topic, and instead approach the topic ‘freshly and naively” (moustakas, 1994, p.47). through this approach, the researcher “derives findings that will provide the basis for further research and reflection” (moustakas, 1994, p.47). recruitment participants in the study were recruited utilizing a snowball strategy. “snowball sampling is arguably the most widely employed method of sampling in qualitative research in various disciplines across the social sciences” (noy, 2008, p.330). this method also leveraged the researcher’s personal contacts. a total of twenty-three individuals were contacted for assistance with identifying the participants for this study. participants were required to meet the following criteria: at least four years of employment in the pharmaceutical industry, currently employed in the pharmaceutical industry, and holding a position of leadership in which they are responsible for influencing direct reports or other individuals or groups of individuals toward completing a common goal (northouse, 2013). eight interviews were completed with african american women in leadership positions in the pharmaceutical industry from three different global pharmaceutical companies. participants were recruited from multiple functional areas within the industry and included participates from human resources, marketing, sales, corporate services and research and development. data analysis the data gathered from all of the interviews were summarized with respect to the participants’ experiences as leaders within the pharmaceutical industry. the texts of all eight interviews were analyzed and findings organized thematically in order to highlight themes that were essential to the constitution of the lived experiences of the participants as african american women leaders in the pharmaceutical industry (creswell, 2013). verbatims were used to demonstrate support for the themes (moustakas, 1994). this was also done in order to ‘bring in the voice of participants in the study” (creswell, 2013). paragraph length quotations were used along with embedded quotes (creswell, 2013). trustworthiness to increase the trustworthiness of this study, triangulation of field notes, transcripts and audio tapes was performed in the analysis of the data. “triangulation is also to “member check”: to ask the woman quoted if that is what she said.” (stake, 2010, p. 123). it involves providing the participant with a copy of the interview transcript and asking for comments (stake, 2010). participants in this study were provided with a copy of their own transcripts for review and comment. results the results of this qualitative phenomenological study follow. to maintain confidentiality, the companies represented in this study are referred to as company x, y and z, and participants will be referred to as participants a, b, c, d, e, f, g and h. participant demographics while six of the eight participants are employed by the same company (company x), two additional companies are represented in the study (company y and company z). consequently, the participant pool represents the experiences of african american women leaders in three different pharmaceutical companies, each of which is ranked among the top fifty pharmaceutical companies globally. additionally, multiple functional areas are represented by the participants (human resources, marketing, sales, corporate services and advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 3 research and development), along with four geographic locations. these factors reflect a degree of diversity that is important to providing a broad view of the experience (laverty, 2003). the titles of the participants included that of manager, director, and vice president. the participants in this study are experienced with their years in the pharmaceutical industry ranging from ten to twenty-seven and one half years. the women in this study report having managed people for five years or more (with one exception where a participant indicated having one direct report for one year). each of the participants reports currently having direct reports (with one exception), and all (with one exception), have been in their current position for at least two years. this information is summarized in table 1. table 1 summary of participant demographics – years in industry, functional area, leading people and years in current position years in industry functional area years leading people (in the industry) number of direct reports years in current position participant a 19 sales 5 0* 2 participant b 14 sales 9 17 4 participant c 20 corporate services 1 1 7 participant d 10 research and development 10 7 2 participant e 17 research and development 12 2 <1 participant f 17 marketing 17 4 3 participant g 16 human resources 16 4 5.5 participant h 27.5 human resources 25 3 3 *note: this participant had no direct reports; however she has had 5 years of experience leading people in the pharmaceutical industry. leadership experiences the experiences of these particular african american women leaders in the pharmaceutical industry, in general has been good, although not without challenges. these women have all prepared themselves well for their roles. at times this has included the support of their companies through training and development and/or the support of mentors and others within the organization. they have excelled in their particular areas of the industry, with some achieving recognition not only from their organizations, but also from their communities. upon multiple reviews of the interview text, the following themes emerged with respect to the leadership experiences of this group of women: 1) making a difference, 2) leveraging information and knowledge, 3) serving as mentors, 4) establishing and maintaining credibility, 5) asking for support, 6) illustrating integrity at the highest levels and 7) facing up to challenges. making a difference. participants report being fulfilled by the work that they do as part of the pharmaceutical industry. for some, this extended beyond the particular positions that they hold in their organizations, and included added fulfillment through their association with an industry that contributes to improving the health of those that use the medicines their companies develop and market. they recognize the pharmaceutical industry as one that plays an important role in the everyday lives of many people. it is also interesting to note the multiple functional areas that are represented with respect to this characteristic. i didn’t create the medication, but by extension, me ensuring that physicians were educated about it, i know that i am directly impacting how people live and work and are able to spend time with their grandchildren or be on the earth longer. so for me working in this industry, there are many, many stories like that. (participant b, personal communication, june 21, 2013) i’ve had the privilege to work on so many drugs that do mean so much to people. drugs that were developed for diseases where there was not another option. and even in the case where the drug may not have been successful in making it to market, it was so incredible to be a part of trying to deliver that; and for the patients that it did work for, to understand what a difference it made in their lives. (participant f, personal communication, june 25, 2013) advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 12 others report being fulfilled by their work on products that directly impacted the african american community along with the ability to influence the allocation of resources to communities they perceived as being in need. for example, participant d reported “i’m working at a pharmaceutical company and i have the opportunity to spend their money in a community that i know needs this product”. (participant d, personal communication, june 22, 2013) still others discuss the opportunity they have, by virtue of their level in the organization, to influence policy, practice and the culture of the organization at the highest levels. this is viewed as an advantage, a motivator, and in some sense validation of their leadership position. one participant states “i’ve been most impactful as [title omitted], because it’s given me the opportunity to influence at the very senior levels of the organization, from the ceo on down.’ (participant g, personal communication, july 2, 2013) so i’ve gotten a lot of satisfaction out of my leadership experience because i feel like i’ve been able to do a lot to grow the business, to grow and develop my people, and to really shape the corporate culture. that’s a very satisfying part of my job. (participant b, personal communication, june 21, 2013) levering information and knowledge. participants ascribe an inherent value to being a leader in the pharmaceutical industry due to the information they have access to by virtue of their leadership positions in the industry and the knowledge they have acquired. for some participants, the higher levels of medical and scientific information and knowledge to which they have access were associated with being able to better assist their family or friends who may have cause to access the health care system. as a derivative of their participation in the pharmaceutical industry, participants report being able to contribute relevant and impactful information in such situations due to their increased level of knowledge and/or ability to understand information provided by medical professionals, as well as their understanding of how to navigate the health care system. i have a child who turned eighteen and developed a chronic illness and he was going off to college and because i was in healthcare and because i work on the reimbursement side, i knew that he had to maintain a fulltime academic status to maintain healthcare coverage. and, i remember reaching out to other parents of children who had chronic illness [to inform them]. (participant f, personal communication, june 25, 2013) personally, again, just being with my family, my parents, my siblings, just kind of knowing what our options are when maybe a doctor doesn’t know, or a doctor’s telling us one thing and we’re like, “that doesn’t even match, what are you talking about?”, and being knowledgeable to kind of go back to them and say, “here, this is what i’ve read, here’s an article that i’ve looked up, here’s what the latest researcher says about this. are you sure?” (participant d, personal communication, june 22, 2013) for others, the organizational knowledge they are able to acquire which is often inherent with more senior levels of leadership, allows them to navigate the environment internally in a manner that helps them further their careers as well as improve the organization. because when you’re in leadership there’s information that comes … that you are a part of. you sit around a table where you hear data that 99% of the time won’t ever be heard again out of that room…. (participant h, personal communication, july 9, 2013) serving as mentors. mentoring is reported as an important part of the leadership experience for these african american women leaders in the pharmaceutical industry. nearly all spoke about the contribution that mentors have made to their careers and the need to have strong mentors help them rise through the organization’s ranks. “to get to that place [in leadership], you are going to need in a number of individuals that can mentor you for different aspects” (participant g, personal communication, july 2, 2013). the advantage of having been mentored is clearly acknowledged by the participants. “i’ve been fortunate that i’ve had a lot of great mentors who have encouraged me to stretch quickly, and to advance and grow and develop my career” (participant b, personal communication, june 21, 2013). while having the support of a mentor is reported to be an important component of the leadership experience, the opportunity and responsibility that these women have to serve as mentors was often a common point of discussion regarding their leadership experience in the industry. the opportunity to serve as mentor to other african american women (and other individuals) interested in learning from their experiences, seemed to be an aspect of the leadership experience that was embraced by the participants in this study. i’m always honored when people call me and say, “will you mentor me”. i never turn people down. i mean i could have so much to do i can’t even see straight, but because someone took time with me early on in my career, that’s my way of giving back, is to help others navigate. (participant h, personal communication, july 9, 2013) i consider myself a mentor, as well as a coach for others coming along in this industry because it’s so important for us to pass along what we’ve learned, not just to take it and keep it and hold it close to our vests, but to make sure that we reach out to others and share…. very often they are african-american women. i’m not opposed to reaching out to men or majorities at all…. i make it a point to reach out to all of those that touch me. (participant f, personal communication, june 25, 2013) one of the women in discussing her role as a mentor presented it as a commission that she gives to those that she mentors, in advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 13 which they are encouraged and expected to excel, and consequently charged to seek out others to mentor. i always make sure that i leave them [mentees] with the charge and commission to find somebody else who hasn’t made it along as far as they have, and mentor them the same way i just provided them with mentorship. so, it’s kind of like, really helping folk understand that we have a very significant role to play in lifting ourselves up through this organization. (participant g, personal communication, july 2, 2013) establishing and maintaining credibility. this theme encompasses the idea and necessity of being well prepared with respect to the participants’ particular functional area, the business as a whole and industry trends; and being able to communicate this information. providing a clear rationale that illustrates that an appreciation and understanding of the business accompanies a particular response or recommendation is reported to be important for maintaining and enhancing credibility, and to achieving broader organizational support for ideas. “you can’t just come to the job every day; you have to understand ‘how does it work’? how does this intersect and interface with this to really get those long term results for the organization?” (participant h, personal communication, july 9, 2013). but when i raise an objection where i might say, “you know what; we might be heading down the wrong path.” i will always give some perspective on why i think a different idea or a different approach is needed, or who i pulled into that discussion, and what is the possible downside, right? because you always want your conversations to have been vetted, and you want your ideas to have the credibility of “okay, well, maybe this could go off the rails and i’ve thought about it, but i still think it’s worth a lot for us to consider.” (participant b, personal communication, june 21, 2013) there can be the perception of women that we are emotional or we’re speaking from the heart … instead of taking into account the facts and data. so i always make sure, if it’s something that is a data-driven decision, that i have done my homework, because there’s nothing that will dispel your credibility faster than if you haven’t and if the numbers don’t support your rationale so i think that’s part of it. (participant b, personal communication, june 21, 2013) additionally, participants recognize that in their roles as leaders, they may need to bring knowledge to the table that has been acquired from experience outside of their current organizations. at times they may need to leverage knowledge they have acquired from their own research as well as outside, yet related experiences. participants’ abilities in this regard can be closely linked to their credibility. just being able to use your full knowledge—so your business acumen—really leveraging the business acumen that you have. so that way you can be able to think in a diverse and broader sense versus just what some of the team members may have…. they [other team members] may not have a depth of experience and so what i was able to really leverage was the broad base experience and the even outside of the industry experience. (participant a, personal communication, june 20, 2013) i think there's always a question of credibility and whether or not i should be the person to give advice in an area, or whether it should be someone else. i've definitely seen men with less experience and less time at the company have more walking-in-the-door credibility than me with more experience and more time at the company. (participant c, personal communication, june 22, 2013) “being substantively prepared” (participant c, personal communication, june 22, 2013) and “being able to use your full knowledge” (participant a, personal communication, june 20, 2013) and having “very clear, well thought out, strategic” communication (participant b, personal communication, june 21, 2013) represent important aspects of this leadership experience theme. a lot of people that are coming into the industry now are not science oriented but they may have great managerial skills. it doesn’t make for a great pharmaceutical project manager; you need to know the science. so you still need to read, you still need to attend conferences, you still need to be abreast of what your compound or what your drug is doing. you need to know your competitors, [and] what they’re doing. you need to collaborate. (participant d, personal communication, june 22, 2013) i think that’s the important way for leaders to—particularly black women—to communicate, because there are people who come to the table with certain judgments about what you’re saying and why you’re saying it and how you’re saying it, so communication, your communication has to be very, very, very clear, well thought out [and] strategic. and you have to be courageous enough for when you get push backs … to have that discussion or debate in a very respectful and positive way. (participant b, personal communication, june 21, 2013) when you challenge somebody you need to have your data and not just have these philosophical discussions. i think that’s where people get in trouble. they want to have these, ‘well this is what i see ....’well yeah you see it, but where are the facts? because when you are dealing with a senior leader, they want facts. (participant h, personal communication, july 9, 2013) some of the participants spoke about the importance of establishing and maintaining their credibility particularly when establishing new relationships. “coming into a new setting, people want to make certain that you know what you’re talking about” (participant c, personal communication, june 22, 2013). participant a provided an example in this regard when she advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 14 outlined her experience in transitioning to a new company within the industry. “when i transitioned from one company to the next, i really had to prove myself all over again. the second company really didn’t appreciate the experiences that i had because they didn’t see me experience them. ….basically, my resume didn’t exist.” (participant a, personal communication, june 20, 2013) the extent to which these african american women leaders are able to establish and maintain their creditability is crucial. interestingly, this validation may come from multiple sources, both inside of and outside of the company and, when it takes place can be rewarding and satisfying to the participant. asking for support. many of the participants report that it is important to ask for organizational support in furthering their careers as leaders within the industry. these women recognize the value of continuous learning and learning agility as they manage their careers as leaders. the one thing that i do recognize is that there’s a very distinct responsibility for the individual to…. very proactively address their career and proactively go after…. the knowledge and the experiences, training, that will help them move to that space where they want to be. (participant g, personal communication, july 2, 2013) i think i was lucky at the time when i started that i had the confidence to speak up and ask for the development that i sought and that i desired….we women, we, african american women especially, are courageous in asking for what we want….and as much as you can co-opt others into feeling invested in your success and your development, that’s a really important thing. (participant b, personal communication, june 21, 2013) one of the participants in the study relayed the following situation when she was offered her current leadership role; a role that would position her to directly influence the policies and practices of the company and place her in the ranks of the company’s senior leadership for the first time. so i asked for two things coming into the role. i knew the transition from individual contributor to leader was going to be something new for me. i did not want to be set up to fail. and so i asked for an executive coach…..the executive coach would be that person, somebody who had the expertise to help me in my transition from individual contributor to leader of a group of people. and so i requested to go to the hr executive program …….both of those experiences, helped a tremendous amount. (participant g, personal communication, july 2, 2013) i haven’t been afraid to knock on doors and to ask the questions that people may not want to ask. they may say it outside of the senior leader presence, but i’ve always had the courage really to speak up and not have that fear, so it’s allowed me to really get opportunities because i have been … just forward with asking for those opportunities, and that’s kind of the way i’ve continued in my career. (participant a, personal communication, june 20, 2013) personal support systems are also part of this theme of ‘asking for what you want’. some of the women made this point with the following comments. it’s so important too to have a support system within your own network to help you; people that you can go to when you’re feeling vulnerable; either in or out [of the organization], wherever that support system lies for you, it’s important that you reach out to it. i think sometimes we … as women of color think that because we’re strong, we’re little warriorettes, so therefore you don’t want to seem like you’re vulnerable. (participant h, personal communication, july 9, 2013) i would just say we talked a lot about this environment, the professional environment and how i’ve navigated here, but i have to say that i would not be able to do half of what i’ve been able to do professionally if i did not have a very strong home team…. a partner. so, my husband, partnered with me, he’s my partner in life, and he partnered with me and we decided what we would do with our lives in order to support my ability to be successful in this major pharmaceutical company. (participant g, personal communication, july 2, 2013) illustrating integrity at the highest level. these women are committed to and exercise the highest level of integrity in their leadership approach. not only due to the regulatory requirements of the industry, but also due to their personal standards. the importance of doing things as they should be done and acting with integrity is paramount. these leaders also indicate that they are transparent, genuine and authentic in their approach to leadership and, as a consequence, ethical considerations are very much a part of their leadership experience. honesty is always best. i can’t expect someone to know or be on my side if i’m not honest. i don’t have to be mean, i don’t have to be rude, i don’t have to be deceitful, i can just be honest. so honesty is my best policy…..i think you have to be honest with whomever, wherever, whenever….you don’t have to give it to them all at once. sometimes you have to be smooth, but you always have to be honest…. honesty and integrity kind of [go] together. (participant d, personal communication, june 22, 2013) multiple acknowledgements of the continual and critical focus on maintaining high levels of integrity and ethical standards are noted, as an important part of the leadership experiences of these women. statements from participant d and h illustrate the importance of ethical leadership. “you want to be ethical at all times…. there are ways to skip and cheat and beat the system, but in the end it doesn’t work. (participant d, personal communication, june 22, 2013) advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 15 i really believe when you’re a true leader, sometimes you have to let your ego [go], put that away and do what’s right. again it’s about your ethics and your values. it’s letting that show up, because lots of times people do things out of fear (participant h, personal communication, july 9, 2013) facing up to challenges. in addition to the themes previously presented, these women highlighted various challenges that related not only to race and gender, but other factors as part of their leadership experience. the leadership positions these women hold can be described as “not for the faint of heart” (participant b, personal communication, june 21, 2013 and participant g, personal communication, july 2, 2013). while participants make it a point not to dwell on the challenges they face as african american women leaders in the pharmaceutical industry, they report multiple challenges as part of their leadership experience. for example, participant b reports, “i felt very supported from early on. it wasn’t without challenges but i certainly felt like i had a chance to go on and do great things if that’s what i wanted to do” (participant b, personal communication, june 21, 2013). in addition to race and gender, other factors that present periodic challenges for some of the participants include, generational differences, the lack of specific training as a health care provider along with inherent challenges associated with having few african american women as colleagues or being the only one. i think everyone has challenges, right? i think it’s not for the faint of heart. if it’s hard for you to be one….to be the only, to be the first, all of that, then there’s probably a sense of intimidation that you might feel”….i’m sure there are people who have made assumptions about me and my capabilities based on the fact that i’m a woman, or the fact that i’m black, but to me, those are their limitations, not mine, so i don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about that”. (participant b, personal communication, june 21, 2013) being the only african american women leader presents challenges that extend beyond discussions related to the business particularly given the expectation of interactions in social settings (which is often the case with senior levels of leadership) where issues related to current events may arise. participant h presents an interesting and telling perspective on this point. when you’re in leadership you get socially exposed to things, and people see how you’re going to react to being put in socially awkward situations, and it’s very tough when you are lots of times….the only woman in that scenario, and if you’re a person of color in that scenario. (participant h, personal communication, july 9, 2013) while the women in this study are successfully managing the multiple challenges they face as african american women leaders in the pharmaceutical industry, there is acknowledgement that the challenges facing these women are not likely to subside particularly in light of an increasingly competitive job market. discussion the results of this research study suggests that the attainment of and potentially the retention of, leadership positions held by african american women in the pharmaceutical industry require focused preparation and learning that is constant and ongoing. the research further suggests that not only is a high level achievement and competence within one’s functional area (e.g., marketing, research and development, human resources, sales) needed for success, but also the ability to manage and influence organizational factors related to hierarchy, policies and procedures and data-driven decisions. while the study is limited in its transferability to a broader population by its qualitative design and number of participants, the findings provide insightful themes regarding the common experiences of these particular african american women leaders in the pharmaceutical industry. many of the leadership practices and experiences of the participants in this study align with strategies reported to be used by african american women leaders in navigating predominately white environments. for example, strategies related to the need for african american women to achieve a high levels of preparedness is supported by the themes noted by participants in this study of leveraging information and knowledge, and establishing and maintaining credibility. strategies related to driving social and organizational change are aligned with the themes reported by participants of: making a difference, and serving as mentors. strategies related to the need for african american women to develop support systems are aligned with the theme of asking for support. the commitment to operate with high levels of integrity, another theme identified by participants in this study, is relevant and supportive of all strategies highlighted. additionally, the participants’ discussion of the challenges they face provides a broader view of obstacles that extend beyond race and gender, the two areas which are often used to frame the challenges encountered by african american women within various organizations. the implications related to the findings of this study would be of interest to leadership scholars, practitioners and others charged with succession planning and leadership development. the study has also illuminated a number of areas that represent additional research opportunities. future research the results of this study highlight several areas for future research. further research that seeks to describe and compare the leadership experiences of the most senior women (of various ethnicities) within the pharmaceutical industry would be informative. additionally, building on the work that has been conducted in this study, further inquiry regarding mentoring views and practices of african american women as both a requirement and as a responsibility across multiple industries where they represent a relatively small percentage of advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 16 the leadership presents an opportunity. mentoring as a responsibility was a theme that emerged to characterize the leadership experiences of african american women leaders in the pharmaceutical industry. it is expected that a multi-industry quantitative research study that explores the topic of mentoring as both a requirement for success and as well as a responsibility, would be of interest to multiple audiences including management and leadership scholars, industry leaders and practitioners, women in corporate settings (both current and those who have aspirations in this area), as well as training and development professionals. references byrd, m. (2009), telling our stories of leadership: if we don’t tell them they won’t be told. advances in developing human resources, 11(5), 582–605. creswell, j.w. (2013). qualitative inquiry & research design, los angeles, ca, sage publications. epps, s. (2008) african american women leaders in academic research libraries. libraries and the academy, 8(3), 255– 272. green, j. & aitken, p. (2006), creating a leadership culture for knowledge utilization. journal of medical marketing, 6(2), 94–104. hashemi, f. (2012), industry dynamics in pharmaceuticals. pharmacology & pharmacy, 3, 1–6. king, t.c. & ferguson, s.a. (2001), charting ourselves: leadership development with black professional women. nwsa journal, 13(2), pp. 123–141. moustakas, c. (1994). phenomenological research methods, thousand oaks, ca, sage publications. northouse, p.g. (2013). leadership theory and practice. thousand oaks, california: sage publications, inc. noy, c. (2008). sampling knowledge: the hermeneutics of snowball sampling in qualitative research. the international journal of social research methodology, 11(4), 3273–44. parker, p. (2001). african american women executives’ leadership communication within dominant-culture organizations. management communication quarterly, 15(1), 42–82. rowlands, c. & morgan, a. (2006). winning strategies for effective collaboration in the pharmaceutical industry. the journal of medical marketing, 6(2), 83–93. stake, r.e. (2010). qualitative research: studying how things work, new york, new york, the guilford press. sundgren, m. & styhre, a. (2006). leadership as deparadoxification: leading new drug development work at three pharmaceutical companies. leadership, 2(31), 31–52. us equal employment opportunity commission, 2010 job patterns for minorities and women in private industry (eeo-1), 2010 eeo-1 national aggregate report by naics-4 code 3254: pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing. retrieved from http://www1.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/employment/jobpateeo1/2010/index.cfm#centercol advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 177 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 177-187, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper perceived self-efficacy, domestic violence and women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling ottu, iboro f.a., inwang, winifred chris iboro f.a ottu department of psychology, faculty of social sciences, university of uyo, email boirottus@lycos.com, phone +2348060412991 winifred chris inwang, akwa ibom state university, obio akpa campus, nigeria, email winniegold2008@yahoo.com, phone +2348027420900 accepted september 30, 2013 the purpose of this study was to examine perceived influence of self-efficacy and domestic violence on women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling and become leaders in their chosen careers. a total of 150 women working in 3 government departments in akwa ibom state, nigeria comprised our study group. participation was voluntary. participants filled out questionnaires anonymously. women’s ability to break glass ceiling was measured using industrial glass ceiling questionnaire constructed by the researchers. the self-efficacy questionnaire and the domestic violence scales, also developed by the researchers, measured self-efficacy and practices of domestic violence by women. results showed that self-efficacy [f(1,146) = 4.85, p < .05] and the interaction of domestic violence and self-efficacy [f(1,146) = 5.95 p < .05] significantly influenced women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling. we found that the nature of domestic violence – whether it was emotional or physical – differentially impacts women’s career aspiration depending on their levels of self-efficacy. women who reported high self-efficacy in the midst of exposure to emotional violence made the greatest effort to break industrial barriers towards career success. in the same way, women who reported low self-efficacy in an atmosphere of emotional violence were found to perform least in ability to achieve career goals. physical violence however showed a near-inelastic effect irrespective of whether the women were high or low in self-efficacy. we therefore suggest that partners in dual career families should denounce violence and be supportive of each other in order to boost each other’s (especially the wife’s) self-efficacy, not only to achieve career success but also to meet the labyrinth of demands that marriage has placed on each partner. keywords: self-efficacy, domestic violence, industrial glass ceiling, women introduction in recent times, the attention of researchers into gender and leadership has tended to focus more on the inequalities that women encounter while trying to climb the corporate ladder, with particular emphasis on the role played by the so-called glass ceiling (eagly & carli, 2003; haslam & ryan, 2008). the term “glass ceiling” is most commonly used to refer to barriers which prevent women from ascending the corporate ladder to senior-level management positions (falkenrath, 2010). it is used to describe the conflict that ensures when qualified women were denied higher job position in the corporate ladder and did not get equally paid for similar work. many scholars have described the concept in various interesting but consistent ways. for example, carnes, morrissey and geller (2008) indicated glass ceiling refers to women’s lack of advancement into leadership positions despite no visible barriers. according to them, “the term gained traction as an apt metaphor for widespread observation that despite entry of women into nearly all fields traditionally occupied primarily by men, women remain virtually non-existent or present in token numbers in elite leadership position” (p.1). the term can be defined as an unofficial barrier to opportunities within an organization or company which is perceived to prevent protected class of workers, particularly women, from advancing to higher positions (hymowitz & schellhardt, 1986). these barriers which could be covert or overt, may be a result of everything from gender stereotyping, through preferred styles of leadership, to any number of other sociopsychological factors that could inhibit women’s vigour or ability at work. from hobfoll’s (1989) conservation of resources theory, vigour represents a positive affective mailto:winniegold2008@yahoo.com advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 178 response to one’s job and work environment that comprises the interconnected feelings of physical strength, emotional energy and cognitive liveliness (shirom, 2003a). vigour is an important expression in the study of the glass ceiling because it “refers to a high level of energy, motivation to invest effort at work, and resilience that is withstanding difficulties and persisting despite obstacles (louw, 2007, p. 23). redwood (1996) succinctly described glass ceiling as artificial barriers, that deny women and minorities the opportunity to advance within their careers and sees it as one manifestation of the perpetual struggle for equal access and equal opportunity. with curiosity, loannidis (2010) explored and confirmed the existence of the phenomenon among top highly cited female scientists of research universities. he found that the participation of highly cited female researchers in top leadership of universities is limited due to hidden barriers. lyness and thompson (1997) in an archival study on career histories, experiences and outcomes also found that women showed less authority, received fewer stock options and had less international mobility than men. some other researchers have shown the branching out of the glass ceiling into newer and more complex problems. for example, joan williams coined the phrase “maternal wall” to describe the obstacles women face as working mothers (williams, 2000, p. 70) and associated forms of discrimination they also face not only as women, but also as mothers (williams, 2003). despite these, women nevertheless come close to breaking the glass ceiling when they face the “class cliff” as they attempt to wrestle troubled organizations out of crisis (ryan & haslam, 2005a, p. 82). generally, one of the most notable and troublesome components of occupational glass ceiling is the disparity in monetary compensations between men and women in a workplace. firstly, women who aspire for management role or who are doing the same job as men are either not accepted or paid less in monetary terms due to a perceived view that management roles require masculinity especially in the field of sports (burton, grappendorf & henderson, 2011). secondly, women are only perceived to be suitable for promotion to prejudiciously “comfortable” levels of advancement, keeping salaries down in relation to their male peers (falkenrath, 2013, n.p; ryan & haslam, 2007, p. 554). for example, the american situation, as portrayed in the wall street journal (march, 1986) reported that many women writers raised their voice to point out how they have been treated and made to bump their heads on the glass ceiling without any result. frenkiel (1984, cited in barreto, ryan and schmitt, 2009) has reported gay bryant’s view, one of glass ceiling victims in this way: “women have reached a certain point. i call it the glass ceiling. they are in the top of middle management and they are stopping and getting stucked. there isn’t enough room for all those women at the top. some are going into business for themselves. others are going out and raising families” (p. 5). glass ceiling is truly a metaphor to describe the tacit limits often placed on women in the workplace particularly in the area of job hierarchy and compensation. while the phrase is metaphorical, many women who find themselves bumping their heads on it find it (the ceiling) very real indeed. the glass ceiling phenomenon is most often used to describe the sexist attitude many women run into at the workplace. it is also frequently applied in business situations in which women feel, either accurately or not, that men are deeply entrenched in the upper echelons of power and such women, try as they might, find it nearly impossible to break through. but moss, lawrence, topham, porter and smith (2008) have argued that the so-called glass ceiling has become a “reinforced concrete” – one with a number of women employed in senior positions falling over the past year (p. 1). earlier, lyness and heilman (2006) found that women were less likely to be promoted than men and if they were promoted, they had stronger performance ratings than men. also, heilman (2001) demonstrated how gender stereotypes weighed women down and prevented them from career advancement towards self-actualization. ordinarily, observers believe glass ceiling is the mindset of the traditional patriarchal society habituated to discriminate women from basic rights. the term is particularly used for women at workplace who are discriminated against and denied pay equal for the same work as the opposite gender. the term therefore has much to do with gender discrimination that limits a woman as inferior and is tacitly endorsed by the society. social endorsement of gender stereotype is therefore age-long. for example, in 1869, myra colby bradwell (12 feb., 1831-14 feb., 1894) who applied to the illinois bar in the united states was denied initial admission on the basis of gender role orientation. when the case reached the supreme court, justice bradley concurring to the verdicts of 3 other justices, held that a state may refuse to admit women to the practice of law under its plenary authority (bradwell vs illinois, 1872, cited in worell, 2002). the judge at the ruling asserted that “the paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother”, adding further that “this is the law of the creator” (p. 133). such pronouncement appears as an illegal legislation to exclude women from rightful aspirations towards career development. moreover, such lopsided package is capable of showing a subtle effect on the victim’s peace of mind. it is such tacitly accepted domination practiced by stereotypical societies that makes a woman weaker not only physically but mentally as well. glass ceiling is a faceted form of dominance that emerges from the concepts of sexism and gender discrimination. it is a barrier in the line of progress of gender minority groups, especially working women, and appears as a new concept that aims at reinforcing the construct of domestic violence in the industrial sphere. glass ceiling exists in the workplace not only in the form of discrimination regarding hierarchical advancement and pay packages, but also by sexual harassment, exploitation at work and a feeling of insecurity in women due to conduct of the opposite sex. this increases the suspicion that advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 179 it could manifest as an outcome of learned helplessness associated with age long dominance and multifarious forms of domestic violence. literature evidence, however, indicates mixed reactions about the existence of the glass ceiling in industrial settings. some voices have been raised to condemn the cacophony about the glass ceiling, dismissing it as non-existent. other feminist writers say today’s workplace challenges are not the fault of men but what appears as women’s weaknesses emanating from their self-perception and physiology. for example, in a series of interviews conducted by moss, et al (2008), one respondent said: the problem for women in business is not men – it is their (women’s) own lack of confidence. females fear rejection in a way that men don’t and that’s the reason they can’t push through the supposed ‘glass ceiling’ (np). in what appears as a form of support to this line of reasoning, frankel (2004) also viewed glass ceiling in a similar direction and described it as career stunting behaviors women knowingly or unknowingly exhibit at work including exhibition of girlish mannerisms they were taught as children. she believed, and rightly too, that most women focus on being attractive, warm and supportive rather than being assertive. as a result of this, women prefer to collaborate rather than compete, prefer to listen rather than talk and are more comfortable to use relationships to achieve their goals (i.e. wait to be given what they want) rather than muscle influence in the direction of their aspiration. according to her: from early childhood, girls are taught that their wellbeing and ultimate success is contingent upon acting in certain stereotypical ways such as being polite, soft spoken, compliant and relationship oriented. throughout their lifetimes, this is reinforced through media, family and social messages. it is not that women consciously act in self-sabotaging ways, they simply act in ways consistent with their learning experiences (p. xvi). however, despite persistent and perceptibly consistent ideations and assumptions about gender stereotypes and women’s level of achievement, the glass ceiling may appear malleable using such theorizations that people’s motivations are a function of their expectations as inherent in the expectancy theory of motivation (vroom & yago, 1978). this model, which also relates significantly to self-efficacy, examines how confident a person will be such that if the person puts in the required effort, she will actually reach her goal – and that the goal will really lead to expected outcome. thus, it appears if a woman is confident, she can do the work that is required to break the glass ceiling (high expectancy), and she may also be confident that she will get the outcome for doing the work (high instrumentality). after this, she still needs to demonstrate that she really needs the outcome (high valence for the outcome) and if feasible, such efforts could manifest in breaking the glass ceiling. but assertiveness and overconfidence in women have a tendency to backfire against them since these qualities are likely to generate certain emotions not acceptable about women. generally, emotion theorists suggest that displays of certain emotions such as anger can communicate that an individual is competent and therefore entitled to high social status (shields, 2005, 2002; tiedens, 2001). but female professionals who express anger or assertiveness are perceived to violate the female norm of being kinder and more modest than men (brescoll & uhlmann, 2008; heilman, 2001; & tiedens, 2001). there is therefore a dilemma whether women should exude confidence, replicating the tough mien of the mother hen or acquiesce pleasantly to men in the workplace. some self-assertive words in one of theodore roosevelt’s (1910) speeches will help to impute such dilemma. it is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. the credit belongs to the man (and today to the woman) who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself for a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and, who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat (p. 3). in line with the spirit of these words, women are expected to “actually be in the arena” if they expect to ultimately break the glass ceiling. however, as a way of being fair to women, it is our informed view that women have come to this lowly position through many years of direct or indirect domination by men – through socially dependable roles they have been assigned to play. based on these observations, which tend to locate women’s underdevelopment along the realm of selfbelief, it becomes important to examine this deficiency from a specific dimension of self-esteem known as self-efficacy. basically, social and organizational psychologists have over the years been concerned about performance mismatch between two individuals on a task based on different levels of selfefficacy. self-efficacy explains a person’s belief about his or her chances of successfully accomplishing a specific task (kreitner & kinicki, 2001). according to gist and mitchell (1992), self-efficacy arises from the gradual acquisition of complex cognitive, social, linguistic and/or physical skills through experience. it means, by deduction, that childhood experiences through parenting and other forms of socialization advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 180 have a powerful effect on a person’s self-efficacy. interestingly, researchers have documented a strong linkage between high self-efficacy expectations and success in widely varied physical and mental tasks, anxiety reduction, and pain tolerance – recognizing also four sources of self-efficacy beliefs such as prior experience, behavior models, persuasion from others and assessment of physical/emotional state (bandura, 1989; gecas, 1989; wood & bandura, 1989). there are many inherent factors that help maintain and sustain the glass ceiling syndrome in organizations. most often, the glass ceiling is promoted by corporate culture as when men in the executive suite and board room tend to select successors who look and behave as they do themselves. at other times it has been found that the glass ceiling exists because women more often than men devote a greater portion of their lives to caring for children or elderly family members to the detriment of their careers. apart from this, women generally are limited due to their role(s) as primary care-givers in different human settings across cultures. in one study, the society for human resource management investigated the underlying factors and challenges faced by women in their industrial aspirations. apart from the challenge of finding an appropriate balance between work life and home life, the study also cited isolation and loneliness as well as being a woman in a man’s world as some of the factors limiting women’s advancement in organizational settings. (lockwood, 2004). thus, the probability of successfully confronting the glass ceiling appears as an outcome of self-efficacy– a person’s belief that (s)he is capable of specific behaviours required to produce a desired outcome (bandura, 1986; bandura, 1977a). also, pajeres (2006, 2002) found that self-efficacy can affect the task effort, persistence, expressed interest and difficulty level of goals users attempt to attain. in the realm of learning, vrugt (1994) found an association between high self-esteem and high level of academic performance. most times, women resort to the use of defence mechanisms such as rationalizing their role as mothers and home makers as reasons they are unable to advance to top careers positions. at other times they believe they cannot rise to top positions because successors are often chosen by chief executives from people who look and behave like them and since they see themselves as inferior to men, they believe they are very unlikely to be selected. does it then mean that if women exhibit the masculine qualities of men, they may likely be chosen to succeed men? researchers in a recent study revealed that career self-efficacy when moderated by high masculinity work-related values among females showed no relationship with glass ceiling while a negative relationship with glass ceiling was found among low masculinity women (bolat, bolat & kilic 2011). also, do women in leadership positions in organizations support their fellow women to rise to the top? jones and palmer (2011) in a psychodynamic perspective study found that females felt their peers supported their career advancement along organizational ladder on the one hand and also use covert actions to compete with and hold back their female colleagues. however some of women’s explanations on why they can’t break the glass ceiling appear as forms of self-defeating, deep self-handicapping strategies that provoke learned helplessness through selffulfilling prophesies. as found by moss et al (2008) assertive women generally dismiss the concept of the glass ceiling as a fallacy. they assert that no one can put a ceiling above their head that they wouldn’t smash through. according to them, “successful women don’t acknowledge barriers, whether people believe they exist for other women”. also, success in the workplace is based equally on performance as well as one’s capacity to verbally demonstrate achievements. in another dimension, the prevalence or perceived prevalence of the glass ceiling have also been blamed on relational conflict and violence between spouses. researchers (e.g. chronister, wettersten & brown, 2004, nadel, 1998) have shown that domestic violence interferes with women’s exploration of career interests, pursuit of career goals and attainment of economic independence. also, albaugh and nauta (2005) found that sexual coercion was negatively associated with three aspects of career decision self-efficacy – self-appraisal, goal selection and problem solving. recently, abama and kwaja (2009) documented that violence against women remains a major threat to social and economic development. in nigeria, pristine traditional and cultural components of marriage which required women to place their families above all else, was very much supportive of women restricting their aspirations towards the enhancement of their family welfare. there was virtually little or no support for work outside the home. however, with continued educational advancement and special awareness, women’s career advancement also continues to grow and therefore threatens their marriages for two reasons: (a) the real or unfounded fear by men about the threat to their marriage and relationship status, and (b) the actual abuse of career privileges by women who use it as a platform to undercut their marital commitments. these concerns coalesce into several strands of domestic violence “which directly or indirectly impact a woman’s participation in the labour market” (woolery, 2004, p. 6). regrettably, domestic violence affects, not only a woman’s career advancement, but also her selfesteem. when a woman is battered and isolated from the rest of the world she begins to doubt her self-worth and loses confidence in her abilities (woolery, 2004). holistically, abuse prevents many women from advancing in their careers (nadel, 1998) and also interferes with cognitive development (raphael, 2000). holistically, while domestic violence impacts both men and women and threatens their economic wellbeing, approximately 85% of victims of domestic violence are women (ewing, 2006). the problem of stunting career has been a long standing issue of concern for women. although notable women have reached some level of advancement in the highest echelons of business as well as surpassed men at certain levels in higher education, it advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 181 should not be reasoned that the idea of a ‘glass ceiling’ is becoming outdated. research evidence shows that prejudice still persists in the workforce in form of wage, employment and opportunity gaps and these implicit biases still form prescriptive gender norms that are easily activated and applied in decision making settings. as revealed in a recent study, a dazzling array of mixed characteristics seems to emerge from women, especially those of african descent, that may impact or inhibit career inclinations. in a nationwide survey conducted by the washington post and the kaiser family foundation on more than 800 women, a complex portrait emerges of black women who feel confident but vulnerable, who have high self-esteem and see physical beauty as important, who find career success more vital to them than marriage. this presents an unclear situation and prompted this investigation using the nigerian career women. the glass ceiling has been with us for a while and is a very popular but perceptibly injurious metaphor that strengthens the career gap between men and women. the subject of organizational leadership has continued to be an albatross for women. however, women’s inability to break career glass ceilings has been found to be an outcome of the extended impact of domestic violence (e.g. chronister, wettersten & brown, 2004) as well as their lack of self-efficacy or confidence in the pursuit of certain career goals (e.g. marra & bogue, 2006). when women in career progression ladder are weighed down by low self-efficacy, they are torn apart by uncertainty about what their careers mean to them. it has been observed that a lot of women lack assertiveness and self-efficacy in advancing their careers. what this means is that they don’t believe in themselves and this translates to their lack of self-confidence to generate career-specific behaviors. this can generally be attributed to their overall lack of self-esteem. in the same way, exposure of women to several forms of intimate partner violence have been known to also inhibit genuine motivation for career advancement or at least slowed down the process. we have therefore reasoned that domestic violence at home has the capacity of inhibiting the genuine aspiration of some women especially when such violence stems from men’s desire to perpetually subjugate women. in the same way, we reasoned that women may be weighed down by their social categorization and gender roles and prevented from aspiring to higher career positions, especially when domestic violence is also present. from these lines of reasoning the following research questions were derived; (a) can the prevalence of domestic violence, whether emotional or physical, in a marital relationship influence the ability of women to break industrial glass ceiling; (b) and can a woman’s level of self-efficacy, whether high or low, influence her ability to break industrial glass ceiling? the purpose of this study was to examine the influence of selfefficacy and domestic violence on women’s ability to break the glass ceiling in their occupational setting and become high flyers in their careers. we also expected to (a) investigate women’s global career achievements i.e., strengths and inherent weaknesses; (b) discover the role of intimate partner violence in women’s career frustrations; (c) discover the role of selfefficacy in women’s career successes; (d)and to establish the interactive effects of intimate partner self-efficacy and violence on women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling. method research design we adopted the ex-post facto (quasi experimental), design. since intimate partner violence cannot be directly manipulated in the study for ethical reasons, the researchers opted to surveying the participants’ opinions directly on the subject. the independent variables were self-efficacy and domestic violence. these variables existed at two levels each, with self-efficacy existing as high or low while intimate partner violence existed as physical or emotional. this yielded a 2x2 factorial matrix which formed the investigative design for the study. the dependent variable was ability to break industrial glass ceiling. setting the study setting was the akwa ibom state civil service and related parastatals in nigeria. the participating ministries and departments were: the ministry of women affairs, uyo, the ministry of health, uyo, hospitals management board, uyo and akwa ibom state college of agriculture, obio akpa, oruk anam local government area. the choice of these government agencies were informed by the existence of a strong civil service and another fact that a high proportion of males and females were working together as employees in these departments. this therefore afforded the women, who were participants in this study, the opportunity to report their actual experiences with their male counterparts regarding promotions, discrimination and advancement in their respective careers. participants/sampling participants were 150 female employees drawn from the study setting. their ages ranged from 21-50 years. eligibility criteria included: interest in career advancement by women, willingness to participate and perception that women were disadvantaged in career development and progression. the captive sampling strategy was used and participants who met the eligibility criteria were surveyed. the questionnaire contained statements requesting participants to choose whether to participate in the study or not. it was discovered that none of the participants solicited withheld consent to participate. they were impressed by the nature of the investigation since it sorely addresses the peculiar situation of women in the society. instruments three scales were used in carrying out the research. they are: the self-efficacy questionnaire, domestic violence scale, and industrial glass ceiling questionnaire. the three scales were constructed and validated by the researchers. the approaches advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 182 included content validation by four expert judges (3 psychologists and 1 sociologist) and principal component analysis. items were generated through interviews with the general populace and review of relevant literature to each of the constructs. section a of questionnaire contained items that measure socio-demographic characteristics of participants. section b of the questionnaire contained 14 items which measures participant’s self-efficacy scores. section c contained 16 items that measure participant’s intimate partner violence while section d which had 14 items measured participant’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling. pilot study the three new scales were pilot-tested for reliability using 40 participants among the staff of the school of nursing, as well as the school of midwifery of st. luke’s hospital, anua, uyo. the pilot study yielded alpha coefficient of .84, .88 and .83 respectively for the domestic violence, self-efficacy and industrial glass ceiling scales. for each scale, the cut off-point for item inclusion after factor analysis was .30. items that loaded below .30 were therefore excluded from the scales. the three scales were developed using a 5-point likert format ranging from “strongly agree” (5) to “strongly disagree” (1). for the domestic violence scale, baseline measurements were emotional violence (0-39) and physical violence (40-80). in respect of self-efficacy scale 0-34 indicated low self-efficacy while 35-70 showed high self-efficacy. the glass ceiling scale was scored using the mean deviation. scores above the mean indicated participants who were able to break the glass ceiling while scores below the mean revealed the helplessness of the women to move up their career ladders. the self-efficacy questionnaire originally had 17 items which was reduced to 14 items after the pilot test. the domestic violence scale originally had 20 items and only 16 items loaded within the cut of mark of .30. four items were therefore deleted from the scale. also, the 21-item glass ceiling measure was left with 14 items after the pilot study. the three scales yielded satisfactory alpha coefficients which make them suitable for this study. procedure for the main study the instruments were administered directly to the respondents in their respective offices after official permission was obtained from the head of the units. although one hundred and eightythree (183) questionnaires were administered on a “found-ontheir-seat” basis, only one hundred and seventy-one (171) were returned. the twelve respondents who could not return their survey instruments were either said to be ill or given other assignments that took them away from their duty posts. however, in the process of analyzing data, sixteen questionnaires were found to be defective based on wrong or careless mode of completion, while five others had some pages detached. one hundred and fifty (150) entries were therefore left for use in the study. statistical analysis the main statistical analysis used in this study was the 2x2 analysis of variance for unequal sample sizes. in addition, descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation were also used to complement other results. basically, the two-way analysis of variance allows a researcher in one experiment to evaluate the effect of two independent variables and the interaction between them (pagano, 2007). results the results in respect of our research questions are presented as follows: self-efficacy might contribute to women’s overall ability to break industrial glass ceiling but that effect might be moderated by the existence and nature of domestic violence in the marital arena. a two-way analysis of variance tested ability for career advancement among women who experienced physical violence compared with those who experienced emotional violence. results of the 2x2 analysis of variance (see tables 1&2 below) show that there is a significant main effect of selfefficacy on women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling, [f(1,146) = 4.85, p<.05, η2= .030] thus confirming the first hypothesis which stated that self-efficacy will significantly influence women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling. also, the hypothesis which stated that domestic violence will significantly influence women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling was not confirmed [f(1,146) = 2.67, p>.05, η2 = .021]. this can also be shown by the group means. however, the result also indicates that the interaction of self-efficacy and domestic violence was significant [f(1,146) = 5.95, p<.05, η2 = .040]. in all cases, cohen’s (1988, 1992) rules of thumb on the determination of effect size were used. as figure 1 below shows, there is a remarkable difference in the level of career success of women with high self-efficacy who suffer emotional violence compared to women with low self-efficacy who also suffer emotional violence. however, women who experienced physical violence did not demonstrate this ability whether they were in the high or low self-efficacy groups. from a simple analysis of mean and standard deviation of the four experimental groups, women in the high self-efficacy and emotional violence group showed the best ability to break industrial glass ceiling. see table (1) table (1) table of means ( x ) and standard deviation (sd) showing influence of self-efficacy and domestic violence on ability to break industrial glass ceiling variables domestic violence total levels physical emotional high mean 38.66 53.85 92.51 self-efficacy sd 25.02 -1326.67 low mean 39.54 36.54 76.08 sd 151.05 16.12 total 78.20 90.39 168.59 advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 183 table (2) summary table of a 2x2 anova showing the influence of self-efficacy, and domestic violence on women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling source of variance (sov) ss df ms f p self-efficacy (se) 2249.44 1 2249.44 4.85 <.05 domestic violence (dv) 1238.21 1 1238.21 2.67 ns se x dv 2756.72 1 2756.72 5.95 <.05 s/ab error 67682.92 146 463.58 total 73927.29 149 the means and standard deviations of the four experimental conditions where the influence of self-efficacy and domestic violence were tested against women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling indicate that participants with high self-efficacy who experienced physical violence scored 38.66 while those high in self-efficacy who experienced emotional violence scored 53.85. on the other hand participants with low selfefficacy in the physical violence condition scored 39.54 while those with low self-esteem in the emotional violence condition scored 36.54. figure. 1. graphical presentation of the interaction between self-efficacy and domestic violence on ability to break industrial glass ceiling. discussion through the results, researchers showed that high self-efficacy predisposes some women towards breaking industrial glass ceiling. this illustrates that high self-efficacy women compared to their counterparts with low self-efficacy easily reach leadership thresholds within their organizations. the result shows that the higher the self-efficacy of participants, the higher their ability to break barriers in their work advancement pursuits. the role of self-efficacy as revealed in this study was to increase scores on women’s ability to break glass ceiling. the significance of the results is however, influenced by the levels of the other variable. this result confirms theoretical and research findings by pajares (2006, 2002). people with high self-esteem tend to have more realistic motivation and expectations as they aspire for career advancement. the result also supports bandura (1986, 1977a) and vrugt (1994) who found that people associated with high self-efficacy pursue a relatively high level of performance and are prepared to persevere when they encounter problems. moreover, this result supports moss, et al (2008) who identified women’s inability to push through the supposed glass ceiling in business settings as an outcome of lack of self-confidence and assertiveness. in the same way the result aligns with frankel (2004) who believes that women’s perception of the glass ceiling is a product of career stunting or girlish behaviors women unknowingly exhibit at work. these behaviors, we believe, may be put forward as forms of self-handicapping strategies to serve as explanations for women’s unsatisfactory advancement along their career ladders. as expected, these behaviors do not boost their self-efficacy but instead reduce their self-confidence and resultant ability to excel thus justifying their hidden expectations in a self-fulfilling manner. however, the second aspect of the result did not confirm our hypothesis that domestic violence has a significant influence on women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling. this appears to contradict a number of studies which affirms that domestic violence influences peoples, especially women’s, efficacy towards the achievement of career successes (abama & kwaja, 2009; albaugh & nauta, 2005; and chronister, et al, 2004). but the interaction leaves this result uninterpretable. as can be seen from the results, the study has not directly supported the empirical claim that domestic violence prevents many women from advancing their careers (nadel, 1998) and another one that violence impedes victim’s cognitive development (raphael, 2000). however, the interaction of self-efficacy and domestic violence on women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling suggests that both variables greatly impact women’s ability to break the glass ceiling, but the impact is in opposite directions. while self-efficacy has been found in this study to increase women’s ability to advance in their career aspirations, domestic violence tends to inhibit such ability. deducing from the interaction, emotional violence shows a progressively rapid and direct relationship between self-efficacy and ability to break industrial glass ceiling. this suggests that higher selfefficacy leads to higher ability to aspire towards organizational leadership and vice-versa. in the same way, women who suffer physical violence tend to show lower ability to break glass ceiling if they were already enjoying high self-efficacy. on the other hand, they tend to show higher ability if they were initially low self-efficacy women. from the results, domestic violence has been seen to also directly influence self-efficacy by which self-efficacy can serve as a mediator between domestic violence and ability to break the glass ceiling (albaugh & nauta, 2005). this interaction has shown that the strength of each of the variables greatly depends on the levels of the other. the interaction therefore overrides the main effect of self-efficacy. as can be seen in the graph, changes in the respective levels of self-efficacy (low and high) and the respective levels of domestic violence (physical and emotional) alter the effects of each other on women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling. it is clear from the graph that the most 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 low self-efficacy high self-efficacy in c re a s in g a b il it y t o b re a k i n d u s tr ia l g la s s c e il in g physical violence emotional violence advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 184 successful set of women in their career are those who are high in self-efficacy, and who also experience emotional violence from their partners. women with low self-efficacy who are physically abused by their spouses come next on the line of successful career women. this comparison shows that self-efficacy remains a very potent force in women’s career success. thus, even some unappreciative level of self-efficacy serves to balance and/or outweigh the physical abuse inflicted on them by their spouses. this result supports woolery (2004) findings that domestic violence both directly and indirectly impacts a woman’s participation in the labour market. it also supports various conclusions that abuse threatens a woman’s economic wellbeing, prevents women from advancing in their careers and interferes with women’s level of cognitive development (nadel, 1998; raphael, 2000). our findings also show that women with high self-efficacy who suffered physical abuse placed third in the order of women’s ability to break industrial glass ceiling. these two results (low self-efficacy vs. physical abuse and high self-efficacy vs physical abuse) may not be surprising because experimental groups were of unequal sample sizes. in this respect, it serves very little scientific purpose to compare these two results since one sample size is almost twice that of the other. the last of these results show that low self-efficacy women who suffered emotional violence were the poorest group in terms of their ability to break industrial glass ceiling. these mixed results show that women’s career success can be influenced by a combination of various levels of self-efficacy and domestic violence. the interaction also shows that in as much as people may perceive physical violence as being a more serious form of domestic violence than the emotional form, certain dimensions of emotional violence destructively impact career aspiration more than physical violence. there are two salient observations in the study. physical violence affect high self-efficacy women more than low self-efficacy women; i.e. women who already perceive themselves as having low self-efficacy in their career aspirations are not markedly discouraged from career pursuit in the face of physical violence as those who perceive themselves as high in career self-efficacy. discouragement in career aspirations after experience of physical violence is higher among high self-efficacy women compared to low self-efficacy women. on the other hand, emotional violence affects women with low self-efficacy more than those with high self-efficacy. this may be due to the role of emotional needs in the sustenance of women’s social thresholds. it should also be noted that self-efficacy and domestic violence are inverse variables that tend to oppose each other. therefore, with the malleable nature of human personality, differential combinations of these variables are bound to yield curious and interesting results. it is therefore important that couples work towards the reduction of violence in the home as this will create a halcyon atmosphere for intimacy and career building. conclusion the findings of this study show that women’s career impetus is influenced by a combination of several levels of self-efficacy and domestic violence. it is evident that none of these variables can on its own single-handedly influence women’s career success as measured by their ability to break industrial glass ceiling. there is a very marginal difference on the influence of physical violence and emotional violence on women whether they have low self-efficacy or high self-efficacy. this means that physical violence negatively and significantly impacts all women almost equally irrespective of their self-efficacy levels. emotional violence on the other hand shows marked differential effect on women with those high in self-efficacy showing remarkable advancement in their careers and those with low self-efficacy showing helplessness in breaking industrial glass ceiling. it may not be surprising that in this study, emotional violence from men did not have much debilitating effect on women’s career advancement. a simple explanation could be that there has been an unofficial division of labor and specialization on the form or nature of domestic violence routinely engaged by men and women. while men and women may physically and emotionally abuse each other, at one time or the other, women have been known to show a tendency to specialize more in emotional violence while men have been found to engage more frequently in physical violence than women. this may explain why women in this study are more susceptible to physical than emotional violence in their career disruption because they appear not to have received significant amounts of emotional violence from men compared to physical violence. on the other hand, violent husbands may not have shown reasonable vigor to outperform women in the elicitation of emotional violence to make the impact really significant to be felt by women themselves. thus, women who suffered emotional violence were still able to report increased ability in the pursuit of their careers. due to this, we advise couples to always create an atmosphere of intimacy and selflessness in the management of their homes. husbands should however understand all the debilitating effects of violence on women and restrain themselves from using any form of violence as a weapon of interaction in the home. rather, they should engage their wives in relationship maintenance activities that will improve their self-efficacy in order to help them achieve career success and advancement. conflict resolution in the home should be handled with emotional intelligence. this is also the reason why wives should engage their husbands in transactionary interaction devoid of confrontations. career aspirations are for the benefit of both spouses. there is no reason why women should not be encouraged by their spouses and society to break industrial glass ceilings provided they also break, and are seen to have broken, their home concrete ceilings. references abama, e., & kwaja, c. m. a. 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(2004). how can wisconsin help battered women become economically self-sufficient?: an analysis of wisconsin works & domestic violence policy. wisconsin’s women prosperity project. microsoft word hickman_women_leadership_young men_expectations_of_female_leaders.docx advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 22 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 22-30, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women’s leadership: young men’s expectations of female leaders laura j hickman laura hickman: duchesne academy,creighton university, email: lhickman@duchesneacademy.org accepted september 04, 2014 interviews with twenty pre-professional millennial men revealed that while many young men have experienced a maledominated home life in their youth, their experiences in college and early work have led most to believe that in their professional careers female authority figures will be a normal and accepted part of work. other themes include the desire for more personal and trusting relationships in the work place and a growing acceptance of all people without discrimination. implications of this study are discussed. keywords: women's leadership, female leaders, leadership and gender introduction beginning in the 1960s women experienced massive expansion in access to higher education and leadership positions in american society. with the passage of the 1964 civil rights act and title ix, new opportunities have been seized and in 2014 there are more women than men earning degrees in all levels of post-secondary education (institute of education sciences, 2011). a critical mass of highly educated and experienced women is poised to move into executive and other leadership positions in all sectors of society. the current study explores whether the future work force is prepared for the insurgence of female leadership, how young men describe women in leadership, and whether they expect to work for a woman. in “miss-representation,” newsom (2011) posed concerns that young people cannot become what they do not see. her documentary presented a media that does not portray women in positions of leadership and thus inhibits society’s ability to accept female leaders in the united states. yet, the white house project (2009) has found that the vast majority of americans polled felt ready to accept women in leadership, even at the highest levels. the authors of the white house project polled many generations. the millennial generation, those born after 1980, is the youngest generation to begin entering the work force and there are many indications that this generation is bringing new values and new expectations to its communities. deal, altman and rogelberg (2010) studied millennials at work and found new attitudes toward the working environment. they attributed these new attitudes to changes in family structure over the past few decades that include more single parent families, more working mothers, and delayed child-bearing. other research has focused specifically on millennial men’s bias toward leader identification. jackson, engstrom and emmers-sommer (2007) conducted a seating chart study that asked undergraduate students to identify the leader at a conference table when one end of the table pictured a female and the opposite end pictured a male. though young men continued to identify men as leaders, when asked the reason for doing so, they cited the social bias and norms as reasons for their choice while denying any personal bias toward female leaders, “none made comments regarding the superiority of men” (p. 720). eagly and carli (2007) studied the causes of gender discrimination in the united states and found that authority, and particularly assertive and dominant behavior, is considered unfeminine and is often rejected by male subordinates. this phenomenon holds true across many studies, though few researchers have looked at subcultures within american society to identify geographic regions, religious groups, ethnic groups or age groups that might hold variations on acceptable behavior for women in positions of authority. kilbourne (1990) indicates that men are more susceptible to stereotypical images of women in the media and thus may be unable to accept women’s supervision just as women are poised to assume more management and executive positions. kilbourne (1990) studied respondents’ ratings of women’s leadership ability after exposure to ads depicting women as professionals and ads depicting women as housewives. female respondents rated women consistently and showed no effect of influence from the advertisements. male respondents showed significant influence from the ad depicting a house wife by rating women’s leadership ability much lower after exposure. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 23 however, these studies are aging in a fast-changing culture and bear examination with a new generation of men. twenge (1997) conducted a meta-analysis of 71 studies that used the aws (attitude toward women scale) and traced the results across time, place and gender, as well as maternal employment and individual experiences of social change. twenge found that women consistently scored higher (more liberal toward female leadership) than men and the general trend from 1975 to 1995 is one of steady and continuous acceptance of women in authority despite some regional differences. in the three decades since this research, the current study is proposed to determine if expectations of female leaders have evolved to allow for a broader expectation of behaviors. twenge (1997) indicated that we should expect even greater liberalization of attitudes toward female authority figures. research questions this study was designed to answer the question, how do young men describe their expectations of female leaders? method an understanding of young men’s expectations about future supervisors can only be obtained through discussions with participants that allow the young men to tell their own stories. interviews of millennial men aged 19-24 were conducted to ascertain their expectations of working for a woman in the future. twenty participants enrolled in a university or community college, but not yet working in their planned profession, were interviewed about their leadership expectations and ability to work for a female supervisor. sample selection selection of individuals began with a snowball technique. access to recent high school graduates through the alumni network of a local high school and fraternity members at a local university in a large midwest city garnered the first participants who then referred classmates or friends to the researcher. selection of individuals within this population was affected by willingness to participate and availability. when possible, all interviews and observations were conducted at the participants’ home school or place of employment, or a mutually agreed-upon location. long distance interviews were conducted via telephone or skype. all of the participants in this study were born and raised in the united states or territory of the united states and nearly all come from midwestern states, from ohio to nebraska and wisconsin to texas. the majority of the participants were white and middle class, though one was black and came from an inner-city poor background and three others were hispanic or mixed race. the sample group therefore represents a narrow slice of middle class and midwestern millennial men. data collection and analysis with the permission of the participants, all interviews were taped and transcribed verbatim. each interview consisted of nine to ten questions and lasted from 15 to 40 minutes. the ultimate focus of female leadership was not made known until during the interview. this tactic was used to decrease the likelihood of participant bias due to the gender of the researcher and to allow the researcher to capture participants’ first reactions to questions of female authority. the unguarded reactions to the question of working for a female provided important field observation data. the sample size was based on saturation of categories, “theoretical saturation is what grounded theorists aim for” (charmaz, 2006, p. 114). after the first fifteen interviews had been completed the responses of participants became repetitive; no new data were being offered. at that point, the researcher expanded the sampling technique to ensure greater ethnic and socio-economic diversity was included in the sample. after twenty interviews with a variety of young men, the common themes and categories proved saturation with the population’s views on the research topic. the data were analyzed for key words and telling comments in the responses of participants. initial coding identified attributes of participants and values/attitudes that may affect their acceptance of female leadership, as well as the leadership qualities desired by participants and their negative and positive statements regarding female leadership. the second phase reorganized, categorized and developed axis to identify a central or core theme (saldana, 2009). protection of subjects all participants’ identities were carefully guarded. each participant gave his permission to be recorded and all were reminded before the interview began of the right to stop the interview at any point. methods used to build internal validity in the analysis included peer review of the interview guide and methodology for validation and consistency purposes. the researcher made every attempt to validate through triangulation of responses within the sample group. themes and categories identified in the results appeared in at least three of the participants’ interview responses, and often far in excess of three respondents; the themes and categories represent a majority of the participants’ views. results attributes coding of a variety of attributes was based on participant’s own words during interviews and the results are visually displayed in table 1. for example, a strong identification with one parent was inferred from participant’s frequent references to the mother or father (or in one case to grandfather and in another, a advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 24 step-father) during the interview. traditional family life meant that the father was the primary bread-winner for the family and if the mother worked, it was either in the home or in a significantly lower status position than the father and in a position that allowed her to take primary responsibility for the home and child care. the professional aspiration of each participant was also coded as being a masculine (m) or feminine (f) or gender neutral (neu) profession. this coding relied on the current social interpretations for professions, so for example, though “lawyer” was considered a masculine profession a few generations ago, this generation has an equal number of women in law school as men, so it was coded as gender neutral. police officer, military, and electrical engineer remain heavily dominated by men and were thus coded as male professions. because many of the participants in this study attended all-male high schools, this factor also became an interesting attribute for analysis. this factor may be a partial cause of one of the themes identified below: new experiences are challenging old expectations. going to school with women is a relatively new experience for a number of men in this sample. the values of the participants who attended mission-centric schools are also strongly influenced by the charisms of their schools. despite a male-dominated education, one of the participants also lived in a home with a professional mother, no father and two sisters. this female-dominated home life was also true for a few other participants. their experiences watching their mothers raise a family and deal with a demanding career turned out to be formative in their view of women’s role in the work place. in some cases, even when the mother took a more traditional role as homemaker, an older sister’s successful career offered the same formative experience. one participant said, “i’ve always had this certain respect for women because i grew up in a house with all women.” he watched his mother, who had him as a teenager and gave up her dreams in order to raise him, struggle to make ends meet, working two or three jobs at a time. she has now completed her bachelor’s degree, is beginning a master’s degree and has published two books and a play. these experiences of strong women at home played formative roles in the attitudes of gender equality. even those who grew up in a traditional home said, “i have two older sisters and a mother who were really important influences on me.” his father was ill much of his life and so his sisters took on some of the parenting in the family: “my sisters have shown me the way.… they challenge me to get better and make something of my life.” one of the participants came of age in a fundamentalist christian home where paternal superiority was overtly taught. this conservative traditional home is marked with two x’s in table 1 below. race and religion also played a role in the attributes of this sample group. sixteen of the participants are caucasian, two are black or mixed race, and two are hispanic. race shaped participants’ views on gender discrimination. a black man who grew up in inner-city poverty, said, if i was to draw a distinction professionally between a man and a woman, then i’d also have to draw a distinction between a black person and a white person, a gay person and a straight person. or whatever it might be, a tall person and a short person. you know, i have a lot of things that would take me out—this guy shouldn’t be here. if i was to draw that distinction then i’d also have to draw these other discriminatory distinctions. along a similar vein, a man who struggled with a disability much of his life shared the same sentiment toward discrimination of any kind, “i guess i don’t want someone to think that i can’t do something. it goes both ways.” while the experimenter did not specifically ask the religion of the participant, it became clear during the interview that most of the men were roman catholic, and nearly all came from homes where their religion continued to be actively practiced. two of the participants indicated that they were active in campus ministry at their colleges. the skew in the sample toward catholic participants occurred for two reasons. first, the cities where the participants were located, columbus, ohio, omaha, nebraska and chicago, illinois all have high percentages of catholic residents. more importantly, early points of contact were through the alumni association of a boys’ high school that is catholic and through students at a catholic university. the non-catholic participants also specifically referenced their church community as important to them. this attribute had some interesting effects on the data. though there is no correlation between the participants’ religion and concern with working for a woman, when asked if women in their lifetimes would achieve equality even at the highest levels in society, some of the participants pointed out that the catholic church would be the exception to their belief in women’s access to any office. this distinction was not limited to catholic participants. a baptist who was raised with overtly paternalistic teachings in his home, but was attending a catholic university, when asked if women would achieve equality even at the highest levels of leadership replied, “i would say yes, but being in a jesuit school i’m pretty aware they can’t do things like be priests and any high ranking religious positions.” other christian religions offered a formative experience of female leadership in a participant’s young life. one participant’s grandmother acted as bishop of his church. when asked about the cause of his acceptance of female authority he said, “my mom was a single parent and my grandma was really powerful. my whole family is church-oriented. my uncles and aunts are pastors. my grandmother, she was a bishop, along with my granddad…. she had a lot of authority.” advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 25 the last attribute noted in table 1 is whether the participant indicated concern with working for a female boss. though two participants did raise the concern that a romantic or sexualized relationship in the workplace would create serious problems, they also noted that this was unlikely and unprofessional so not of immediate concern to them. only three participants expressed concerns with having a female boss, but even they said that if common ground can be reached then there would be no problems with working for a woman. most respondents, 17 of the 20 participants or 85 percent, gave an unqualified and definitive answer, “absolutely not,” when asked if they would have any problem working for a woman. one phrased his response more colorfully, “i don’t care if they’re male, female, brown, yellow, green, purple, whatever they are. i don’t care if they have a pink mohawk.” the participants’ denial of any concern with working for a woman was often phrased in a deeply passionate voice and couched in terms of values of justice and equality for all people, no matter their gender, race or any other characteristic: “if i was to draw that distinction then i’d also have to draw these other discriminatory distinctions.” four of the participants, or twenty percent, indicated they would actually prefer to work for a woman: “i’ve gotten along better with women than men. i might prefer to work for a woman.” one participant said it is “very impressive for women to step up and take the role. i actually prefer female leaders in organizations and groups.”1 even men in male dominant work environments, such as the military, found a female superior acceptable. an airman said, “there would be barriers. i think that the women know they are in a male environment so they’re more guarded, careful.” he added that he couldn’t call a female superior “bro.” when asked what he would call a female superior, he answered, “ma’am.” table 1: participant attributes and expected concerns of working for a woman 1 rosette and tost (2010) concluded that when a woman achieves top leadership positions, she is likely to be rated as both more agentic and more communal by subordinates of both sexes who admire her for having achieved top leadership despite the social biases against this. notes: m=male; f=female; neu=neutral; cauc=caucasian; hisp=hispanic; mixed=mixed race. traditional home refers to a two parent family where the father is the primary bread-winner and the mother has primary responsibility for the house and children; the double x (xx) indicates an ultra-conservative home where male superiority was overtly taught. based on table 1, no pattern can be discerned that connects participant attributes with concerns over female leadership. while there are similarities between the three who expressed negative reactions to female leadership, those same attributes are also seen in participants who responded positively. the lack of any pattern in attributes may be due to the homogeneity of the sample group and the very small number of participants who responded negatively to working for a woman. three of the respondents, fifteen percent of the participants, expressed initial concern with working for a woman. two of the participants attended an all-boys’ high school and all three expressed strong identification with their fathers. when asked about their concerns about working for a woman, like the participants who had no concerns about working for a woman, they cited their limited experiences of females in the work place. one gave examples of working with female students on class projects when his female partner and he could not seem to find common ground on what needed to happen to complete the project. another spoke of his mother’s and girlfriend’s negative attitudes toward work. both also offered many positive strong identifica tion w 1parent tradit ional home profes sion allmale hs f-run home religion race concerns over working for a woman m x m catholic cauc y neu x f x catholic cauc y neu m x christian black n neu x f catholic cauc n m x m catholic cauc n m x m x catholic cauc y f m x x catholic cauc n m xx neu baptist cauc n m x neu x catholic cauc n neu x m x catholic cauc n neu neu x catholic cauc n m x unk catholic cauc n m m catholic cauc n neu x unk catholic cauc n f m x christian mixed n neu m catholic hisp n m neu x x catholic cauc n neu m x christian hisp n m neu x catholic cauc n neu x neu x catholic cauc n advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 26 experiences of working with women and contradicted their first opinion when pressed for examples. values millennial men interviewed in this study often expressed strong, though developing, beliefs about justice, equality, human dignity and the changes they expect to experience in their lifetimes. one young man was surprised to learn, during an interview for a job at his fraternity, that the leadership was not all male. he asked the interviewer why that was, “and he said, i’ll never forget this, he said our only goal is to hire the most qualified person and if that’s a man or woman, greek, nongreek, over-weight, tall, short, whatever, we really don’t care. i thought that was really awesome.” relationships based on trust and respect also emerged as a common value. the young men expressed a desire to protect human life and build strong relationships as well as a desire for a more communal environment as a feminine leadership style: “there are a lot of men who have grown up with pre-conceived notions that there were certain like masculine qualities. . . [an] alpha male role. i think a lot of those myths have been broken.” the values expressed by the participants strongly influenced the traits they desired to see in leaders as they enter their professions. common leadership qualities. “i just check in and do my job. i know they’re always there, but they leave me alone.” this desire for autonomy was always couched in terms of knowing what was expected of them (clear communication) and a desire to be told if their work was not up to par (honesty and openness). said one participant, “the fact that she actually trusts me and respects me enough to let me take responsibilities has really been beneficial and it’s also really allowed me to grow and become a professional over the past two years.” he captures the leadership traits of autonomy, professional support and respect. he also spoke of his supervisor being “up front” with him if he did not produce what she expected of him. beyond professional support and growth, many also desire a leader who cares about their personal lives and needs. “if you can’t get some sort of personal level with your employees, then you won’t be able to get them to work to their full potential.” a respondent who is serving in the air force while working toward his bachelor’s degree said, “in the military there’s a wingman theory. we’re supposed to be a family.” along with these relationship-building and communal traits, there was also some desire for strength and fearlessness from leaders. a leader “needs a backbone,” and must be “good under pressure,” but these qualities were discussed in terms of protection of subordinates. participants also seek a role model in their leaders. “passion” and “strong work ethic” were words often used alongside words like “responsible,” “skilled,” and “organized.” think leader, think male. as participants described their ideal qualities of leaders, their language indicated a strong tendency toward male pronouns. jackson et al. (2007) found that millennial males continue to identify leaders as male, though they also justified this bias as an indication of social norms rather than personal prejudices. this finding is strongly supported in the current study. only one participant used female pronouns when describing an ideal leader. he referenced his current supervisor in an internship. focused and second stage coding. as the young men described their acceptance of female authority figures, a focused theme of ‘newness’ in terms of their post-high school experience of female authority as opposed to their childhood expectations emerged in many of the interviews. one participant described his childhood understanding of female authority to the developing acceptance of it, which though extreme, provided a powerful example of what many of the participants described in more subtle ways. he explained that his mother had not worked most of his childhood but she had recently left his father. because of the culture i grew up in, southern baptist female oppressive culture, where i was pretty much explicitly taught, like women can’t be in charge of men, explicitly taught that. then being here and exposed to so many women who are just so infinitely more competent than any man or woman that i’ve ever seen before. it’s really been incredible and really exciting. so i don’t wonder if there’s not like a newness factor—like i never knew this before and it’s really great…. and from another way it’s been my mother and me coming out of this culture together at the same time, and so once she’s out of it i’ve seen her be more strong. while the other young men did not experience quite this degree of transformation, they too voiced a new awareness and appreciation for women’s abilities after attending college. “i went to a high school that was dominated by males….when i came to [my university], …. i saw a lot of women in control . . . [it was] all women who run things.” he went on to share that his university’s undergraduate population is 62 percent female, so he sees many women in leadership positions and this “makes it normal in a way.” a young man in physical therapy school where he has experienced dynamic and competent female supervisors in the hospitals where he has interned reflected, when i was a kid with my dad in the hospital, we didn’t see many female doctors. there were a few, but thinking back i can’t picture them. i only ever remember meeting male doctors. but now there are at least 15 attached to the clinic, and only one male doctor of physical therapy and three female. another focused theme that emerged was the role of influential women in each young man’s life who helped him to challenge his childhood concepts and believe that female authority is acceptable and even favorable in society. for some of the men advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 27 it was their mothers or older sisters who became their role models. other young men who came from more traditional families also named their mothers. “well, that would be my mom. she was a strong authority figure.” he went on to describe her using the qualities he had earlier named as qualities he would seek in a good leader, sensitivity, advocacy for her children, a good listener. men who grew up watching their single mothers raise their family while working universally credited their mother with instilling in them a deep respect for the abilities of women. other young men had experienced a female supervisor in summer or part time jobs in high school and college. these experiences proved formative in their acceptance of female supervisors. positive, negative coding. one of the respondents who preferred not to work for a female explained his feelings were due to his mother’s negative attitude about work he had witnessed at home. “i would be afraid of their attitude.” he also believed that many of his male friends felt the same and that a female authority figure was often called “the b-word.” other concerns raised by those who did not want to work for a woman came from direct experience of working with female partners in college classes. the girls were too concerned with the details and making it “pretty pretty perfect” rather than with looking at the big picture or working for efficiency. another concern was that the women he worked with often did not fight to ensure their voices were heard. they were “drowned out” by more assertive men in mixed work groups. the vast majority of responses to female leadership, however, were positive. the young men who experienced competent and impressive female leaders in school and at their jobs described leaders who “get things done,” and are “good workers.” most of the respondents argued that gender in no way mattered to them as long as the leader earned his/her credentials. others suggested they might prefer working for a woman as they tend to be more blunt. “i’ve gotten along better with women than men. i might prefer to work for a woman,” said one participant who cited the superior organization and motivation of the women at school. one young man’s preference for female leaders was based on his interest in politics and admiration for hillary clinton, who he hopes to support in a 2016 presidential bid. watching the media and congressional treatment of secretary of state clinton during the hearings on the attack on the embassy at benghazi, libya, he was upset to see the mistreatment of her, when she had the recent health issues, some people said that she was faking it. i just think when she was testifying on benghazi, she cried during part of her testimonial. sometimes i notice that when males cry, they're seen as in touch with what's going on and sensitive, but when females cry it seems like they are seen as unstable he concluded that he would actually prefer to work for a woman as he found it “very impressive for women to step up and take the role. i actually prefer female leaders in organizations and groups.” 2 the acceptance of female leaders did not, however, blind the young men to the differences in culture that would occur under female leadership, “i think i see different qualities in [my current supervisor] than reporting to a man.” she was more likely to share her personal life and discuss his personal life with him. the men in the office discussed fantasy football. the young man, who grew up in a home with all women but attended an all-male high school said, “i enjoy both and i’m comfortable with both.” new experiences of female leadership. over and over the respondents described their childhood acceptance of male authority and how those views had undergone change in recent years as they entered college and were exposed to competent and dynamic female leaders in the faculty, the staff, and fellow students. even those who would not like to work for a woman said that at school they had seen good leadership from women. they “get things done.” arriving at a university from his conservative home, one participant said, the women “just blew me away in terms of leadership.” these experiences are clearly formative but nascent. due to the newness of so many of the respondents’ awareness and acceptance of female leadership, they often were able to name the women who helped shape their attitude. a female supervisor in a summer job or internship most often was offered as the cause of a young man’s complete comfort level with working for a woman. in other cases, a mother or sister offered the formative experience of female leadership that made any experience of other strong women seem normal. growing desire for communal work environments. the most important qualities of leaders, based on frequency of reference among the respondents, included clear communication of expectations, personal concern for employees, autonomy, honesty and openness, skill, responsibility, accountability, and good work ethic. participants spoke with great respect of female supervisors who helped them grow as a follower and as a professional through trusting guidance. a transformational leader, as defined in the multifactor leadership questionnaire used by eagly, johannesen-schmidt and engen (2003), is someone who motivates respect and pride, communicates values, is willing to look at problems from new perspectives and works to develop and mentor subordinates to attend to their personal and professional growth. comparing the qualities identified by the respondents to this definition, the common qualities are much more transformational than they are transactional (provides rewards for good performance and punishment for poor performance) or laissez-faire (manages without involvement). the quality of autonomy identified by 2 see rosette and tost (2010) for a discussion of women in top management and see lewis (2000) for effects of women showing emotion in public. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 28 millennial men might be considered a desire for a laissez-faire style of management, but the description offered in the interviews put much more emphasis on the trust, respect, and clear communication that accompanied that autonomy. participants enjoyed the freedom to be creative while still expecting that their supervisors were available to them if a problem arose and knowing that if their work did not meet expectations, their supervisors would redirect their work. millennial men also explicitly rejected male styles of leadership—domination and task-oriented efficiency. a grounded theory millennial men express a high degree of acceptance of female authority as they prepare to enter professional careers. their acceptance and egalitarian attitudes are based over and over again on their experiences, mostly positive, of female supervisors, teachers, and fellow students, as well as mothers, sisters, and grandmothers. nearly every example offered by young men is limited to women in some very low level supervisory positions, middle management or lower. they do not often see, consider, or include examples of women in top management. but as interns, temp workers and part time workers, the pre-professional millennial man’s experience of leadership has in fact been heavily dominated by female supervisors. this early career experience, at a formative time in their lives and careers, could prove to be very important to the way society continues to grow in acceptance of female authority. the personal experiences of working with female supervisors were reinforced with major news items and events in the formative years of millennial men. in 2007, when these young men were in high school, they watched two women vie for the top political offices in the country, if not the world. during the months of data collection, november 2012 to february 2013, women achieved some notable milestones. the election of 2012 put more women in the u.s. congress than had ever represented before in united states history. in february, the department of defense announced that women, long banned from combat on the front lines, would now be allowed to assume combat roles. this event in particular brought comments from respondents. social acceptance of women in combat is another indication of growing acceptance of agentic behavior from women. these macro events served as a backdrop to developing attitudes and expectations of gender equality. major themes that emerged in this study include new experiences of female leadership at college, awareness of cultural changes in gender expectations as well as growing acceptance of all people without discrimination, the importance of key women in a young man’s acceptance of female leaders, and the desire for more personal and trusting relationships in the work place all support a theory that is grounded in the data. entry-level men experience women in leadership since middle management is often dominated by women. thus, young men do see women in leadership. despite women’s current inability to achieve equal access to top management positions, these millennial men will carry their acceptance of female authority figures from their early careers into their later careers, and society will continue a steady and fast-paced trajectory toward greater acceptance of female authority. the physical therapy student said of his experiences with female leaders during his internship, the majority of the leadership positions i’ve seen at the hospital are filled by women. maybe these are just the positions i’ve seen. maybe there are more at higher up positions that are filled by men or more behind the scenes that are filled by men. the ones i’m seeing are filled with women. the head of the nursing department, the head of the outpatient rehabilitation department all that kind of stuff is female. the patient manager on the outpatient [wing] and the rn all are female. it would be easier to count the number of men because there’s less of them. as another participant said, “it makes it normal in a way.” young men do see women in leadership positions and accept them. discussion of the results to answer the central research question of this study, how do young men describe their expectations of female leaders, the voices of 20 pre-professional young men was gathered. overwhelmingly (85 percent), these men responded positively to the acceptance of female authority, and they vehemently asserted their beliefs in equality and justice in the work place. they described leadership in terms of communal and transformational traits. four of the respondents, 20 percent, believed they would prefer to work for a woman. millennial men expressed universal belief that it was only a matter of time before women achieved full equality in even the top leadership positions. deal et al. (2010) suggest that millennials’ world view has been affected by different family structures such as fewer two-parent families and more working mothers. this study has shown the profound effect of single mothers’ influence on their sons’ perceptions of women in authority and equality for women. perhaps just as important as changing family structure, world events have also been a powerful influence on acceptance of female authority. results in context of related literature eagly and karau (2002) theorized that acceptance of women in leadership would only occur if society’s definition of feminine behavior changed or if there was growing acceptance of transformational leadership. ayman, korabik and morris (2009) challenged eagly and karau’s hypothesis with a study that showed that while female subordinates rated transformational leadership as highly effective, and while male subordinates also rated it highly effective from male leaders, they did not rate transformational female leaders as effective. ayman et al. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 29 explained the finding: transformational leaders encourage subordinates to be involved in decision-making. this behavior from a man, who holds high status in society, is appreciated. for a woman, it is interpreted as weakness. no such conflict occurs between female subordinates and female leaders. these findings contradict the testimonies of the young men in this study and in many other studies (dolin, 2008; jackson et al., 2007; ng et al., 2010; twenge, 1997), but paired with the observational research of a mixed-gender campus mac-user group conducted by anderson and buzzanell (2010), the findings raise concern that the values espoused by young men may not match their actions once in the workplace. male members of the mac-user group, though claiming beliefs in equality, continued to expect female members to provide food for meetings and maintained stereotypes that belittled femaledominated creative uses for computers. geis, brown and wolfe (1990) offer an explanation for the gap that could occur between values and actions as preprofessionals enter the work environment. men who enter organizations where female authority is de-legitimized or poorly legitimized, may subtly be encouraged by the culture in which they work each day to reject female leaders. cuadrado, novas, molero, ferrer, and morales (2012) found that evaluations of female leaders in spain varied depending on the sex of evaluator. scott and brown (2006) reinforced the existence of gender stereotypes against female leaders “most notably when the leadership position is defined to be clearly masculine” (p. 231). in his early twenties, a young man’s gender identity is still often in the moratorium stage, actively seeking identity, and so can be influenced in a different culture. on the other hand, exposure to competent female leaders in a culture that values and legitimizes their leadership will only strengthen and solidify young men’s belief that female leadership is normal. for example, scott and brown (2006) found that perceptions of good leadership “depends both upon exposure to a target’s behavior and preexisting knowledge structures regarding the traits that underlie that behavior” (p. 231). delimitations the current study was conducted in 2012-2013 among millennial men attending college in a midwestern city of the united states. the study was specific to an age-group at a particular point in career/education and thus cannot be assumed to be replicable to other generations. furthermore, there are serious limits to the generalizability of any grounded theory as being representative of an entire generation. limitations and assumptions the limitations inherent in the study include access to participants of this age group. the sex of the researcher offers another limitation to the study as young men may be less honest about their attitudes toward women leaders when speaking to a woman. thus, assumptions are that the respondents were honest with the researcher and were selfaware. the researcher assumed the respondents were not unduly influenced by the researcher’s gender. implications of results the findings of this study and the body of literature on the subject reinforce the importance of nurturing work and school environments where women have equal access to leadership and where that leadership is legitimized by authority figures. women must be seen in positions of authority and their credentials must be recognized and celebrated, particularly by other women in the organization. while agentic behavior is increasingly accepted from women, it is not universally accepted. a woman who makes her voice heard and adopts an assertive communication style will be accepted by some and rejected by others. and while communal management styles are desired by most employees, they can also be interpreted as weakness from a female manager, particularly in masculine environments. the findings of the current study and others also have important implications for young men. the fact that they will be working for a woman is statistically increasing every year and their success as subordinates depends on accepting agentic behavior from women. most young men are ready for female leadership, but others may struggle. finally, for current leaders who want to ensure that the talent of all of their employees is maximized, the creation of a work environment that legitimates female leadership will also be important. significance of the findings is also found in the common characteristics voiced by participants as indicative of good leadership. the communal, personal management style built on trust and respect, as well as open communication, is strongly favored by millennials in the current study and other research (dolin, 2008). though the current study and others (jackson et al., 2007) have shown that millennial men continue to think male when considering leadership, perhaps the next generation will break that stereotype as female leaders become more normal in u.s. society. the results of this study also offer possible new areas for research. a longitudinal study of pre-professional men who declare highly liberalized views of female power could investigate if these values hold in the work place. twenge’s (1997) meta-analysis of attitudes toward women indicates a geographical difference in attitudes. the participants of this study are midwestern. their values may differ from other geographic regions of the united states and the world. another sub-culture for future study is male-dominated professions and work environments. scott and brown (2006) and geis et al. (1990) show that in these environments, men succumb to anti-female perceptions. would the egalitarian views of millennial men change in such environments? finally, though this study focused on millennial men, the population could be further fractured and other sub-cultures advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 30 (religion, ethnicity, non-professional goals) of the generation may offer greater understanding of their expectations. references anderson, w.k.z. & buzzanell, p.m. (2009). outcasts among outcasts: identity, gender and leadership in a mac users group. women and language, 30 (1), 32. ayman, r., korabik, k. & morris, s. (2009). is transformational leadership always perceived as effective? male subordinates’ devaluation of female transformational leaders. journal of applied social psychology 39 (4), 852-879. charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory. london: sage. cuadrado, i., novas, m., molero, f., ferrer, e. & morales, j.f. (2012). gender differences in leadership styles as a function of leader and subordinates’ sex and type of organization. journal of applied social psychology 42 (12), 3083-30113. deal, j.j., altman, d.j. & rogelberg, s.g. (2010). millennials at work: what we know and what we need to do (if anything). journal of business psychology 25, 191 199. dolin, l. (2008). leadership preferences of a generation y cohort. journal of leadership studies, 2 (1),43-51. doi: 10.1002/jls.20045 eagly, a. h. & carli, l.l. (2007). through the labyrinth: the truth about how women become leaders. boston: harvard business school press. eagly, a.h. & johannesen-schmidt, m. c. & engen, m.l. (2003). transformational, transactional and laissez-faire leadership styles: a metaanalysis comparing women and men. psychological bulletin 129 (4), 569-591. eagly, a.h. & karau, s.j. (2002). role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. psychological review 109 (3), 573-598. geis, f.l., brown, v. & wolfe, c. (1990). legitimizing the leader: endorsement by male versus female authority figures. journal of applied social psychology, 20 (12), 943-970. institute of education sciences (2011). degrees conferred by sex and race. retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72 jackson, d., engstrom, e. & emmers-sommer, t. (2007). think leader, think male and female: sex versus seating arrangement as leadership cues. sex roles 57, 713 723. kilbourne, w. e. (1990). female stereotyping in advertising: an experiment on male female perceptions of leadership. journalism quarterly 67 (1), 25-31. newsom, j. s. (producer, director). (2011). missrepresentation [motion picture]. united states, virgil films entertainment. rosette, a.s. & tost, l.p. (2010). agentic women and communal leadership: how role prescriptions confer advantage to top women leaders. journal of applied psychology 95 (2), 221-235. saldana, j. (2009). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. e-edition. los angeles: sage. scott, k. a. & brown, d. j. (2006). female first, leader second? gender bias in the encoding of leadership behavior. organizational behavior and human decision processes 101, 230-242. twenge, j. m. (1997). attitudes toward women, 1970-1995: a meta-analysis. psychology of women quarterly 21,35-51. doi: 10.1111/j.14716402.1997.tb00099.x the white house project (2009). benchmarking women’s leadership. retrieved from http://www.benchmarks.thewhitehouseproject.org microsoft word 3.docx advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 18 volume 37, 2017 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 19 table of contents career experiences of women working in paralympic sport organizations internationally ..................................................................20 maki itoh, glenna g. bower, & mary a. hums ..................................................................................................................................... 20 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 20 advancing women in leadership vol. 37, pp. 20-28, 2017 available online at http://www.awlj.org issn 1093-7099 full length research paper career experiences of women working in paralympic sport organizations internationally maki itoh, glenna g. bower, & mary a. hums maki itoh, school of health & science, department of sport management, juntendo university, m-ito@juntendo.ac.jp mary a. hums, department of health & sport sciences, university of louisville, mhums@louisville.edu glenna g. bower, kinesiology and sport department kinesiology sport department, university of southern indiana, gbower@usi.edu accepted august 08, 2016 the purpose of this qualitative study was to identify and understand the career factors considered important for women working in leadership positions in the paralympic movement. this study relied on in-depth interviews and demographic information as the primary means of collecting data. formal semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 participants who have worked in leadership positions in the paralympic movement for a minimum of 5 years. the three parts of the interview were (a) personal life history including demographics and career path, (b) career experiences including the most/least enjoyable and greatest challenges as a woman working in the paralympic movement, and (c) career aspirations and career advice. the results provide insight into the career challenges and work climate for women working in paralympic sport. keywords: women , paralympic sport, social role theory introduction a major international sporting event people around the world anticipate and enjoy watching is the olympic games. elite athletes who represent their countries gather in a spirit of competition and fair play in hopes of making the medal podium and hearing their nation’s anthem played. another major sporting event follows the olympic games by two weeks and in the same city and same venues the paralympic games. at the summer paralympic games, over 4000 elite athletes with physical disabilities compete on the world stage just as their olympic counterparts did a few weeks earlier. the paralympic games are a rapidly growing part of a greater industry known as the sport industry. the sport industry includes specific segments such as professional sport, intercollegiate athletics, scholastic sport, facility management, event management, and international sport. the sport industry is traditionally considered a male dominated industry (bower & hums, 2009; burton, barr, fink, & bruening 2009; burton, borland, & mazerolle, 2012; burton, grappendorf, & henderson, 2011). the under-representation of women within sports organizations has received considerable attention (inglis, danylchuk, & pastore, 1996, 2000; sartore & cunningham, 2007). researchers indicate that women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions in intercollegiate athletics (acosta & carpenter, 2012; bower & hums, 2014; hancock. 2012; lapchick, 2010), interscholastic sport (ladda, 2007; mather, 2007; whisenant, pedersen, & obenour, 2002), campus recreation (bower, 2004), health and fitness (bower & coffee, 2007), professional sports (hums & sutton, 1998; itoh, 2014; itoh & hums, 2014; mcdonogh, 2007) and international sport (hums, barr, & döll-tepper, 1998; hums, moorman, & nakazawa, 1998; ioc, 2012; itoh, hums, bower, & moorman, 2013). according to strawbridge (2000), national and international sports organizations made slow progress incorporating women into leadership positions. the first two female members of the international olympic committee (ioc) were not elected until 1981 (ioc, 2012), and for 87 years the ioc was exclusively male (davenport, 1996). henry and white (2006) conducted research to provide information and evaluate progress on the implementation of ioc policies related to women’s leadership in the olympic movement. however, there is limited research on women’s leadership in paralympic movement (döll-tepper, 2005; hums & moorman, 2001; sharp center for women and girls, 2013), and it is important to understand the limitations and barriers women face in leadership positions in the rapidly expanding paralympic movement. the international paralympic committee (ipc) (2012) announced that a record number of women took part in the advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 21 london 2012 paralympic games and new events will be available for women to compete in at the 2020 tokyo summer paralympic games in tae kwon do and badminton (bbc, 2015). while strides have been made for female athletes, work remains to be done on the leadership side despite ipc efforts to increase the number of women in leadership positions over a decade ago. in 2002, the ipc formed its women in sport committee in response to the issue of gender equity within the paralympic movement. the committee was established to address the low number of female athletes and events in the paralympic games as well as the lack of women in coaching, officiating, and leadership positions. the role of the women in sport committee is “to advocate for the full inclusion of girls and women at all levels of paralympic sport, to identify barriers that restrict participation, to recommend policies and initiatives that address these barriers, and to oversee the implementation of initiatives to increase participation” (ipc, 2010, p. 4). the language “at all levels” applies not only to athletes, but leaders as well. although achieving equality on the field of play is a main priority, there is a low representation of females in leadership positions in paralympic sport (ipc, 2010). it is important to address the lack of representation of women in leadership positions in the paralympic movement for a number of reasons. first, sport and physical activity for people with disabilities generally is becoming more relevant internationally. this is illustrated by the fact that the 2006 united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities contains specific language related to sport and physical activity (hums, wolff, & legg, 2014). second, paralympic sport, just as any other sport industry segment, needs to become more inclusive of women in leadership positions (ipc, 2009). in 2003, the ipc general assembly adopted a policy stating that the ipc, national paralympic committees, international organizations of sport for the disabled, and sport entities belonging to the paralympic movement should immediately establish a goal that women hold 30% of all offices in their decision-making structures by 2009 (ipc, 2009). though many member organizations missed the target deadline, the number of female representatives has increased. according to the ipc women in sport committee (2008), the percentage of women in leadership positions is as follows: 19% of positions within all ipc decision making, 29% of ipc standing committees and councils, 10% of the leaderships positions within the ipc governing board and national paralympic committees’ leadership structures. in 2008, 17% of npc staff was women, and that number rose to 23% in 2010 (ipc, 2012). also only 11% of countries have women as presidents of their respective npcs (sharp center for girls and women, 2013). as of 2015, three women are on the ipc governing board ann cody of the united states, rita van driel of netherlands, and hyang-sook jang of south korea (ipc, n.d.). women in the paralympic movement likely face barriers similar to women in other segments of the sport industry such as women’s underrepresentation in higher levels in sport organization (knoppers, bedker meyer, ewing, & forrest, 1990; sartore, & cunningham, 2007), in athletic administration (burton, grappendorf, & henderson, 2011), and face the socalled old boys network (bower & hums, 2009; hancock, 2012, schein, 2001, shaw, 2006). it is important to acknowledge these barriers and consider recommendations to overcome them. career barriers gender can be an obstacle to women in their careers. since employers tend to select people with masculine characteristics as leaders, it may lead to the perception that women are not identified as suitable to hold leadership positions (eagly & carli, 2007). swanson and woitke (1997) defined barriers as events or conditions that make career progress difficult. women seeking employment in male-dominated professions face many barriers that decrease their chances of obtaining leadership positions. hayes (1985) defined non-traditional and male-dominated occupations as those having less than 30-34% women in their ranks. as mentioned in the previous section, the sport industry is considered a male-dominated industry. women who are eager to become leaders usually face unique challenges in addition to what male leaders have to face (mccauley & van velsor, 2004). in the business setting, “homologous reproduction” and the “old boy’s network” are common barriers women face during their career development. stangl and kane (1991) explained, “homologous reproduction is a process whereby dominants reproduce themselves based on social and/or physical characteristics” (p. 47). a “boys’ network” refers to organizations that have traditionally been male-dominated. these organizations are typified by maledominated culture, atmosphere, and traditions (schein, 2001). according to brass (1985), “because men have historically dominated high-level hierarchical positions, women are less likely to be included in these informal, high-level interactions” (p. 329). there is definitely an old boys’ network where women face difficulties in order to get accepted. previous studies have identified barriers to women’s career development in the sport industry especially in intercollegiate athletics, including (a) old boys’ network (bower & hums, 2009; hancock, 2012; schein, 2001; shaw, 2006), (b) homologous reproduction (aicher & sagas, 2009; whisenant et al., 2002), (c) work-life balance issues (bruening et al., 2008; bruening & dixon, 2007; dixon & bruening, 2007; sagas & cunningham, 2004) and (d) gender role stereotypes and perceptions of gendered opportunities (burton et al., 2009; burton et al., 2011; grappendorf et al., 2004; grappendorf et al., 2008). sartore and cunningham (2007) addressed how these “gender discrimination and stereotype factors become obstacles to women who have careers in athletics because “they obstruct the development of women’s identity as leaders and have consequences for self-limiting behaviors” (sartore & cunningham, 2007, as cited in itoh, 2014, p. 11). in addition to advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 22 these barriers, women’s careers are also at times influenced by social role theory. social role theory eagly (1987) defined social role theory as notions that “are more than beliefs about the attributes of women and men: many of these expectations are normative in the sense that they describe qualities or behavioral tendencies believed to be desirable for each sex” (p. 13). since men’s and women’s expectations are gendered, social role theory can be used to better explain gender stereotypes and expectations. gender role is explained as the expectations and behaviors of men and women in society (eagly, 1987). the negative and unfavorable expectations of women’s abilities to perform a task are deeply related to traditional gender stereotypes. according to many studies, women are perceived to be less effective leaders whereas men are perceived to be more effective leaders who are suited for decision-making tasks (eagly & carli, 2007). this perception that women lack leadership abilities creates a barrier that discourages them from taking on managerial positions, regardless of their self-esteem. it is evident that women face career barriers in the workplace, including in the various segments of the sport industry. few formal scholarly studies of careers of women working in the management of paralympic sport have been undertaken (dölltepper , 2005; hess, n.d., hums & moorman, 2001; sharp center for girls and women, 2013). given the dearth of information about women in the management of paralympic sport, this current study attempted to establish basic information about women working in leadership positions in paralympic sport. method study purpose the purpose of this qualitative study, therefore, was to explore and understand the experiences of women working in leadership positions in the paralympic movement. the present study investigated one central question: what is the experience of being a woman working in a paralympic sport organization? study design the researchers chose a qualitative research design to examine the experiences of women working in paralympic sport organizations for several reasons. first, most existing research on women’s sport industry work experience has been conducted from the north american perspective of intercollegiate coaches (bruening & dixson, 2007; dixson & bruening, 2005, 2007; inglis, danylchuk, & pastore, 2000), intercollegiate administrators (burton & peachey, 2009; peachey & burton, 2011), and professional sports (hums & sutton, 1999), and was quantitative in nature. this qualitative study examined the career experiences of women working in paralympic sport from the perspective of women holding leadership positions in paralympic sport organizations. utilizing a qualitative design allowed for a naturalistic, interpretive approach of inquiry (denzin, 1994; patton, 2002). the researchers gathered data in the natural world as opposed to experimental laboratory conditions, quasi-experimental designs, problematic sampling strategies, or using groups to compare interventions (ross & rallis, 2003). this approach to inquiry does not remove participants from their everyday world and seeks to understand their lived experiences (creswell, 2007; marshall & rossman, 2011). a qualitative design is useful in for “documenting how structures shape individual experiences, and also how individuals create, change, or penetrate the structure that exists” (glesne, 2011, p. 39). the interpretive approach allowed the researchers to focus on description, analysis, and interpretation as opposed to a quantitative approach that attempts to control and predict (ross & rallis, 2003). specifically, the phenomenological tradition was the particular qualitative research genre used for the study. creswell (1998) described a phenomenological study as “ the meaning of lived experiences for several individuals about a concept of the phenomenon” (p.51). since a phenomenological study is composed of in-depth, exploratory interviews as its main means of collecting data (ross & rallis, 2003), a greater understanding of participants and the meaning they make of their experience provided a “thick description “ as opposed to quantifiable data. the exploratory nature of the study allowed participants to explain their experience of being a female leader in a paralympic sports organization. patton (1998) explains that exploratory research is used “because sufficient information is not available to permit the use of quantitative measures and experimental designs” (p.37). with little previous research conducted on women’s leadership in paralympic organizations, the researchers explored these female leaders’ experiences and work environments to gain insights about their roles in their organizations. finally, the use of an emergent design allowed the researchers to avoid imposing a rigid framework on the design of the study. researchers can make changes to the conceptual framework and guiding questions during the study. phenomenological genre the phenomenological genre uses a specialized interview technique in searching to define the meaning of lived experiences for several individuals about a concept of the phenomenon (rossman & rallis, 2003). according to rossman and rallis (2003), a “ phenomenology assumes that shared experiences have an effable structure and essence. interviewing elicits people’s stories about their lives” (p. 190). van manen (1997) further noted that there are two purposes of the phenomenological interview including, (a) “ a means for exploring and gathering experiential narrative material for developing richer and deeper understanding of a human phenomenon” (p, 66), and (b) “ a vehicle to develop a conversational relation with a partner (interviewee) about the advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 23 meaning of an experience” (p. 66). further, a phenomenological design utilizes in-depth, exploratory interviews as its primary means of collecting data (rossman & rallis, 2003). this type of interviewing allows the meaning relationship to be examined in an exploratory nature, providing a greater understanding of women’s career experiences (patton, 2002) participants the research participants were selected using purposeful sampling. according to ross and rallis (2003), purposeful sampling provides the researcher with “ reasons (purposes) for selecting specific participants, events, processes” (p.137). in addition, according to patton, “information-rich cases are those from which one can learn a great deal about issues of central importance to the purpose of the research” (p. 46). female leaders in paralympic sport organizations were contacted for participation in the study. the researchers contacted participants from the list of official paralympic sports organization and participants from the researchers’ knowledge and connections within paralympic sport. a total of 10 women working in leadership positions in paralympic sport were interviewed. the researchers identified these professionals based on the following criterion: they had worked in leadership positions in the paralympic movement for a minimum of 5 years. miles and huberman (1994) defined this type of sampling as criterion sampling. according to miles and huberman, criterion sampling works when all individuals participating represent people who have experienced phenomenon forming the basis of the study. criterion sampling means that each person meets a specific condition required for participation in the study (miles & huberman, 1994). creswell (2007), and marshall and rossman (2011) also recommended criterion sampling because the qualitative design requires participation from individuals who have worked in similar environments. further, the use of sampling criteria aids in the trustworthiness of the study. sample size the sample size for this research project was ten. this sample size was based on the recommendations for phenomenological study. polkinghorne (1989) recommended that researchers interview from 5 to 25 individuals who have all experienced the phenomenon. other researchers suggest two criteria for determining the number of the participants for a phenomenological study. siedman (2006) labeled the first criterion as sufficiency. “are there sufficient numbers to reflect the range of participants and sites that make up the population so others outside the sample might have a chance to connect to the experiences of those in it? ” (p. 47). the second criterion is saturation of the information (creswell, 2007; glaser & strauss, 1967). saturation of the information is “a point in a study at which the interviewer begins to hear the same information reported” (seidman, 1998, p. 48). access and entry according to creswell (2007), “in a phenomenological study, the access issue is limited to finding individuals who have experienced the phenomenon and gaining their written permission to be studied” (p.154). creswell (2007) indicated, “gaining access to the site or individuals also involves several steps regardless of the approach to inquiry” (p.152). permission to conduct a study on human subjects was obtained through the institutional review board (irb) at the researchers’ home institution. ethical issues as they pertain to the protecting participants are of paramount concern (marshall & rossman, 2011; patton, 2002). following irb approval, the researchers contacted qualified participants via email to schedule an interview. interested participants received a letter describing the purpose and procedures of the study. next, the researchers scheduled interviews with each participant during the month of march, april and may. then, at the initial interview, the participants received information describing the purpose and procedure of the study. the researchers proceeded with the interviews after each participant signed an informed consent form. in addition, to maintain confidentiality, the researchers assigned each participant a pseudonym by which she is referred to in the results of this study. the researchers notified participants that identifying information such as organization, country, or race would not be directly linked to their participation in this study. the researchers informed participants about how the data would be handled, stored, and disseminated. finally, the researchers described measures taken to ensure the secure storage of research related documents such as interview transcripts, resumes, or job descriptions. the researchers stored participant files in locked cabinets in their respective home offices. the researchers stored electronic transcripts of interviews and other electronic correspondence with participants on password-protected computers. pilot study and expert panel a pilot study consisted of one person from an international paralympic sport organization. the wording of interview questions was revised from the results of the pilot study. since this was an emergent design, questions were added at the completion of each interview. the researchers used an expert panel comprised of sport management faculty members and as well as other faculty members with expertise in interview question and protocol development. the proposed interview questions were distributed to the panel members, and the researchers asked for their feedback regarding the questions. they were asked to make suggestions to improve the readability and functionality of the interview questions. data collection in qualitative studies, multiple sources of data are typically collected (creswell, 2007). data collection from multiple sources provides a more holistic account of the problem or issue being studied (creswell, 2007; glesne, 2011; marshall & advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 24 rossman, 2011). collecting data from multiple sources aids in the triangulation of data. triangulation “is the act of bringing more than one source of data to bear on a single point” (marshall & rossman, 2011). a data source may include an interview, a document, or an observation. the questions for this study were utilized in previous studies examining women’s careers in other segments of the sport industry including campus recreation (bower, hums, & keedy, 2006), professional baseball and professional basketball (hums & sutton, 1999), sport for people with disabilities (hums & moorman, 2001), intercollegiate athletics (bower & hums, 2013), and international physical educators (bower, 2009). we relied on in-depth interviews and demographic information as the primary sources of data. formal semi-structured interviews were conducted until saturation of the data was reached. a total of 10 women working in leadership positions in paralympic sport were interviewed. the women worked in leadership positions in the paralympic movement for a minimum of 5 years. the methodology for this study used a modified three-interview series technique (bower & hums, 2009; siedman, 1981). the interviews took place in one designated time period, with breaks between question sets. the three parts of the interview were (a) personal life history including demographics and career path, (b) career experiences including the most/ least enjoyable and greatest challenges as a women working in the paralympic movement, and (c) career aspirations and career advice. each interview lasted approximately 30-45 minutes. interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. the researchers relied on in-depth interviews as the primary means of data collection. demographic information was collected using forms developed by the researchers. the researchers used a background data collection form to determine the following for each participant: (a) gender, (b) age, (c) race, (d) highest level of education obtained, (e) current job title, (f) the type of organization for which they worked, and (g) the number of years they worked at each position. additionally participants were asked about their work experience in three areas: (a) in paralympic sports organizations, (b) in the sport industry outside paralympic sports organizations, (c) and outside of the sports industry. the participants were asked the following questions about their experience working in paralympic sports organizations: 1. what is the best part about being a woman working in paralympic sports organizations? 2. what is the hardest part about being a woman working in paralympic sports organizations? 3. what were the biggest challenges you faced as a woman working in paralympic sports organizations? 4. what are your career goals in the next 3-5 years? 5. what is your ultimate career goal? 6. what advice would you give women wanting to pursue careers in paralympic sports organizations? data organization the data were transcribed following each interview. the researchers organized each transcript by the interviewee’s pseudonym and kept a list of data collected throughout the study. they also kept notes following interview and wrote down analytic ideas throughout the study in a journal. files were created for each participant in the study and included a contact summary form (miles & huberman, 1994), field notes collected during and written after the interview, participant documents (i.e., resume, signed informed consent), and an interview transcript. the researchers recorded dates, times, and locations on field notes, documents, and interview transcripts. understanding when and where certain information was obtained provides a more holistic picture of the observation experience for a particular field session. in addition, organization of the data allows for more efficient analysis and enhanced trustworthiness of the study (miles & huberman, 1994). data analysis the research analysis was shaped by the phenomenological framework of the study. a phenomenological analysis requires the researcher to approach the data with an open mind while seeking what meanings and structures emerge (heidegger, 1998). according to van manen (1990), “when we analyze a phenomenon, we are trying to determine what the themes are, the experiential structures that make up the experience” (p. 79). thus, a categorical strategy of analysis was used for the study (rossman & rallis, 2003). the categorizing strategies “ identify similarities and differences among the data, coding and sorting them into appropriate categories” (rossman & rallis, 2003, p. 273). reducing the interview data is the first step in allowing a researcher to present the interview material, analyze it, and interpret it (wolcott, 1994). the researchers used a simplified version of the methods discussed by moustakas (1994) as follows: 1. first describe participant’s personal experience with phenomenon under study. 2. then develop a list of significant statements. 3. take the significant statements and then group them into larger units of information, called “meaning unit” or themes. 4. write a description of “what” the participants in the survey experienced with the phenomenon. 5. next write a description of “how” the experience happened. this is called “structural description,” and inquirer reflects on the setting and context in which the phenomenon was experienced. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 25 6. finally, write a composite description of the phenomenon incorporating both textual and structural descriptions. this passage is the “essence” of the experience and represents the culminating aspect of a phenomenological study (moustakas, 1994). trustworthiness of the qualitative data the researchers used several techniques developed by lincoln and guba (1985) to establish trustworthiness of the study. the goal of trustworthiness with qualitative research is to produce findings “worth paying attention to” (lincoln & guba, 1985, p. 290). four issues of trustworthiness are credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. credibility, or internal validity, reflects whether the research finding “represents a credible conceptual interpretation of the data drawn from the participants’ original data” (lincoln & guba, 1985, p. 296). credibility can be established through authenticity or giving a “fair, honest and balanced account of social life from the viewpoint of someone who lives it every day” (neuman, 2000, p. 31). the researchers attempted to ensure authenticity by recording the interviews and creating complete transcripts of their responses (mccracken, 1988). collecting data over the course of interviews helps to ensure consistency with each participant's responses (seidman, 2005). the researchers established categories and placed participant interview responses into broad classifications, which eventually lead to themes. finally, the researchers incorporated member checking by reviewing the subsequent analysis with participants and asking them to verify the accuracy of the researchers’ interpretations. transferability, or external validity, represents the degree to which the findings apply or “transfer” beyond the present study and its participants. transferability techniques include the use of thick description, whereby “the voices, feelings, actions, and meanings of interacting individuals are heard" (denzin, 2001, p. 83). the researchers intend to present and publish the research findings, giving other researchers the opportunity to review the conclusions drawn or to replicate this study with other participants. dependability, or reliability, reflects the quality of the data collection, data analysis, and theory generation processes. dependability can be strengthened via external auditing, or working with peers familiar with the study’s conceptual framework. these research peers can examine the interview transcripts, data analysis documents, field journals, and comments from member checking. confirmability reflects whether the researcher considered subjectivity within the context of the trustworthiness of the findings. confirmability becomes a measure of how well the study's findings are supported by the data collected (lincoln & guba, 1985). the researchers helped establish confirmability by limiting bias and premature conclusions. the researchers also made a conscious effort to remain neutral in their verbal and non-verbal responses during the interviews. results and discussion participants the ten participants in this study all fit the criteria of having worked a minimum of five years in the paralympic movement. all of the participants were between 32-59 years of age. eight of the ten were white and two were asian. as an international sample was desired, in terms of geographic representation, four women were from north america, two from europe, two from asia, and two from australia. a well-educated group, all ten had earned bachelor’s degrees, five had masters degrees, and one had a doctorate. nine of the ten indicated they had participated in organized sport, and three were former paralympic athletes themselves. emergent themes after analyzing the participants’ response to the questions listed above, three distinct themes emerged: (a) social identity, (b) underrepresentation of women, and (c) work-family conflict. each of these will be addressed in the following sections. theme 1: social identity. social identity influences the selfconcept of affiliation, attachment, identification, and action to reflect “multiple selves” (laverie & arnett, 2000, p. 227). people can enhance their social identities via associations and affiliations with organizations (underwood et al., 2001). many women in this study identified themselves as being part of paralympic movement and its cause related aspects and other women identified themselves according to their paralympic job titles. this is consistent with the thought that the concept of self considers multiple identities and draws connections between one’s self and one’s role in society (laverie & arnett, 2000). for example, rd stated, “this is where my heart is and where my passion is – to work with the paralympics” and mr concurred that the “paralympic movement is my passion. it is my blood and soul. paralympics is (sic) everything for me.” lm commented, “i would love to continue to be part of paralympic movement. it’s a good group and i feel like i can have an impact there.” ac stated “i think the paralympic movement probably really complements my strengths as a professional and i think that also relates directly to my gender and my experience as a woman. and i also really enjoy working with the people who are drawn to and work in the paralympic movement.” theme 2: underrepresentation of women. a number of authors suggest that females are vastly under-represented in the upper echelons of sport organizations (acosta & carpenter, 2014; hancock. 2012; hums, barr, & döll-tepper, 1998; hums, moorman, & nakazawa, 1998; itoh, hums, bower, & moorman, 2013; inglis, danylchuk, & pastore, 1996, 2000; sartore & cunningham, 2007). international organizations of sport for the disabled (isods), and any other relevant sports organizations belonging to the paralympic movement, set a goal that women should make up 30% of their decision-making advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 26 structures by 2009 (ipc, 2009). despite the fact that most organizations failed to achieve this target by the fixed deadline, the number of female representatives in each organization increased. according to the ipc women in sport committee (2008), the percentage of women in leadership positions as of 2008 was as follows: 19% of positions within all ipc decision making, 29% of ipc standing committees and councils, and 10% of the leadership positions within the ipc governing board and national paralympic committees’ leadership structures. participants in this study indicated that one of the challenges of being a woman working in the paralympic movement is underrepresentation of women in leadership positions. this is in concert with what many other previous researchers on women’s leadership in sport found. the women in this study clearly articulated the lack of women in leadership roles in the paralympic movement. ac pointed out, “if you look at the ipc governing board level, the ipc general assembly, we could use a lot more women participating as the delegates from their nations. we want the governing board, as an example, to have parity of representation of women and men. and right now there are three women (out of 15 members) serving on the governing board…. i’d like to see a woman be president of the ipc.” lm added, “i would like to see more women presidents of national paralympic committees around the world. i would like to see, i know we’re getting closer in terms of equity of events within the confines of the games, but i would like to see us being better.” ac added her thoughts, let’s look at the paralympic movement at the grassroots level as opposed to the paralympic movement maybe from the ipc governing board level. because when i’m working at the grassroots level there are many more women leaders in those positions, you know running the paralympic sport clubs, in communities running the youth sport teams and programs in communities. that really feels like home for so many reasons, because we have such a shared experience. then if you look at the ipc governing board level, the ipc general assembly, we could use a lot more women participating as the delegates from their nations. we want the governing board, as an example, to have parity of representation of women and men. and right now there are three women serving on the governing board. and i think two of us are going to be returning and running again. so encouraging other women to run, we’re challenged by the fact that the national paralympic committees have their own structures. usually they have democratic elections and the secretary general and the president are elected to serve on the national paralympic committee. and those two are typically the people who come to the ipc general assembly and engage at that level. so if those two people are men they’re not likely to nominate a woman to run for the governing board because they view themselves as the most qualified person to run for the governing board. theme 3: work-family conflict. dixon and bruening (2005) defined work-family conflict as “a type of inter-role conflict wherein at least some work and family responsibilities are not compatible and have resultant effects on each domain” (p. 228). in addition, especially in male-dominated circumstances, gender stereotyping and apparent gender discrimination may become obstacles for women, and those obstacles must be overcome in order for women to persist in their leadership career (eagly & carli, 20007). participants in this study who had children stated the difficulty of work-family conflict. other common issues connected to work-family conflict included planning children around the paralympic games cycle and organizational environmental considerations involving childcare and a family friendly environment. am stated this very clearly when she said, “you live your life in four year cycles. for women it is particularly challenging as well. as an athlete i kind of grew up that way, but having a child and going back to work has to be fit in that time. it’s funny when i got pregnant, my friend told me that ‘it is perfect timing for rio.’” jl continued, “it was not as nearly easy as i had expected it going to be after (becoming a mother). there is no policy allowing breast feeding or supporting breast-feeding. they (my organization) were not flexible for a year, when i really needed the time as a mom.” nd added, “i can see myself staying until 2020, which is in seven years time and then i’ll probably change again and change to a different type of organization probably. ” finally, mr reflected how, “there is culture in asia. when you are married, you have lots of blocks. especially, husband, family, kids will never allow you to continue or do what you want in life. so, i chose my husband who understands i need to pursue my career. i do not have a child, that’s my commitment.” on the other hand some women stated that, thanks to childcare systems in their countries, they could manage work-life balance. kl stated that “i’m on the right track but i do have to say that the organization i work for is extremely supportive of females in the workplace. obviously they’ve given me the opportunity to be have my position which is amazing and i’m really looking forward to taking on the challenge. but from a personal point of view i’m a mother of a one year old which makes life fun at times. for myself along with those other girls who are in middle management and are also mothers, the flexibility of the working hours we are given is amazing. we wouldn’t get this anywhere else i don’t believe. they know that the girls they’ve got working for them are worth keeping and they have knowledge that’s worth maintaining so they’re really flexible and know that we’ll do the right thing by the organization, i guess, by doing things like working from home and four day weeks and so on. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 27 implications the study results provide insight into the career challenges and work climate for women working in paralympic sport. both practitioners and researchers can benefit from reading these results. this information can prove to be useful to officials in the paralympic movement, and in particular to the ipc women in sport committee, in meeting the ipc’s goal of increasing women’s participation in leadership positions. while some paralympic sport organizations are meeting the ipc’s goals for women’s representation in leadership positions, others are not. hearing the voices of women working in the movement and their concerns could help drive policy considerations which could create more female-friendly work environments. the results also provide researchers an insight into the status of the careers of women in leadership positions in a segment of the sport industry that has not yet been explored. as the paralympic movement is international in nature, this work provides a starting place for looking at women’s careers in cross-cultural sport settings. working with areas of the world where women’s lives and inputs are simply less valued than men’s creates systemic barriers. when it is challenging for women to move up in their native national organizations, their opportunities to represent on an international level are negatively impacted. another area of inquiry could examine the retention of women through career phases in sport management by addressing the question, “why do some women step up and some women step off?” a further area for study is the genderdisability intersection in sport. some authors have examined this, but not from the administrative perspective (burton et al., 2009; burton et al., 2011; grappendorf et al., 2004; grappendorf et al., 2008). a final question is “are women welcomed in sport for people with disabilities?” since women are often seen as outsiders in the clubhouse of sport, as are people with disabilities, perhaps sport managers for organizations which work with a primarily underserved population (people with disabilities) could find ways be more open to diversifying their workforces and welcoming women. conclusion women are increasing 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(1994). transforming qualitative data. thousand oaks, ca: sage. the role performance of female headteachers in primary schools advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 122 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 122-131, 2013 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper to know i can might be enough: women's self-efficacy and their identified leadership values kyle m. momsen and julie a. carlson kyle m. momsen: department of health and exercise science, gustavus adolphus college email: kmomsen@gustavus.edu; phone 507-933-6062 julie a. carlson: department of educational leadership, minnesota state university, mankato email: julie.carlson@mnsu.edu; phone: 507-389-5441 accepted july 28, 2013 this three-year mixed-method study examined levels of self-efficacy and leadership values held for 32 women before and after participating in graduate coursework specifically focused on women’s leadership issues. a 21-item, 5-dimension self-efficacy scale adapted for leadership from the work of albert bandura was used in addition to open-ended questions focused on leadership values and obstacles. self-efficacy levels increased in each dimension, most notably in encouraging a productive work ethic and creating a positive work climate. shifts occurred in the nature of values identified for effective leadership in terms of more traditional and outwardly-visible attributes to more postmodern and inwardly-experienced attributes. the nature of obstacles that participants identified as preventing them from being more effective leaders also revealed shifts from self-critical behaviors to proactive behaviors. keywords: self-efficacy, leadership values, women’s leadership self-efficacy background renowned cognitive social psychologist, albert bandura (1997; 2004), theorized that people primarily learn by observing and replicating the behavior of others. learning is largely a social activity, he posited, meaning socially influenced and socially facilitated. one cognate area within cognitive social psychology, self-efficacy, pertains to people’s perceptions of their own capabilities. self-efficacy is often socially sculpted through the tendency of comparing, subconsciously or not, one's own performance to that of others. over time, bandura (1977; 1997; 2004; 2006) established correlations between levels of self-efficacy and actual performance. numerous self-efficacy measurement scales constructed by bandura and others have laid the groundwork for a remarkable body of research conducted across disciplines over the past four decades. bandura's assertion has been that people tend to perform at higher levels when their perceived self-efficacy is high, and likewise, tend to perform at lower levels when their self-efficacy is low. hence, this phenomenon of self-efficacy is paramount to understanding leader and leadership effectiveness. such insight can be especially relevant for women in leadership positions as they face role and gender stereotypes that can threaten their levels of perceived efficacy (bosak & sczesny, 2008; hoyt & blascovich, 2007; pajares, 2002a; pajares, 2002b). the most salient influences on self-efficacy are masterybuilding opportunities, vicarious experiences, intrinsic motivation/emotional arousal toward bettering performance, and verbal persuasion or encouragement from others (banduara, 1997). research studies such as those cited in the previous paragraph have ascertained that interventions that provide some or all of these influences can raise self-efficacy levels. being involved in masterery-building experiences in interactive group settings creates opportunities for participants to also receive verbal encouragement and learn vicariously from others. self-reflection that often accompanies mastery experiences may also spark intrinsic motivation. based on these reasonings, the theoretical assumption that guided this study was: leadership self-efficacy would be increased for women who participated in intentional mastery-building opportunities that focused on leadership. although research has been conducted on leadership self-efficacy (see paglis & advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 123 green, 2002), and women’s self-efficacy (see hoyt & blascovich, 2007), studies that examined women’s self-efficacy specific to leadership are rare. rarer still are studies that measured women’s self-efficacy before and after mastery-building experiences specifically intended to enhance leadership development and performance. one such intervention that has been anecdotally heralded (hart & silka, 1994) and quantitatively supported for increasing selfefficacy is participation on challenge courses1 (gillis & speelman, 1994). this study attempted to address the void in women's leadership self-efficacy research by measuring selfefficacy in relation to enrollment in a graduate level college course intentionally focused on women and leadership that included a multi-day challenge course experience. in addition to the assumption that leadership self-efficacy would be increased for women because of their enrollment in the class, the researchers also believed that higher levels of self-efficacy would be evident because of their participation in the challenge course experiences. it was further predicted that changes in self-efficacy, if any, would be accompanied by changes in perceptions of leadership values or attributes and of perceived obstacles to participants' leadership effectiveness. purpose of the research the purpose of this three-year mixed-method study was to explore changes that occurred in women’s self-efficacy and the leadership values/attributes and obstacles they perceived as a result of participating in graduate coursework focused on women’s leadership issues. an additional secondary purpose was to identify what relationships existed, if any, between those changes and the inclusion or non-inclusion of a multi-day challenge course experience. review of the literature the research in self-efficacy is widespread through many disciplines. this review of the literature begins with those that are specific to women and self-efficacy. that section will be followed by a discussion of research that was not focused on gender in particular, but rather on self-efficacy in general that bears relevance to the findings and discussions for this study. self-efficacy for women there has been a great deal of research investigating the relationship of self-efficacy and health-related behaviors in women. a sampling of recent research included studies on 1 challenge courses entail obstacles, called elements, constructed in trees or vertical poles that pose physical challenges to groups and individuals. these elements may take place near ground level or climbing to heights of 30 feet or more. reflective discussion takes place before, during, and after participants complete the elements. challenges and reflections are aligned with specific learning objectives such as communication, problem solving, trust, leadership, or selfefficacy. nutrition, exercise, childbirth, hiv/aids, and physical activity. some of these health-related studies analyzed correlations between high levels of self-efficacy and better, more desirable performance. for example, annesi (2011) found that selfefficacy mediated more effective self-regulation for women who were starting an exercise and nutrition program. mcauley et al. (2007) ascertained that self-efficacy mediated the association between functional limitations and physical activity in older women. ip, tang and goggins (2009) concluded that increased self-efficacy of chinese women towards childbirth resulted in decreased pain and anxiety in the first two stages of labor. other health-related studies with female participants focused on measuring changes in self-efficacy as the result of experimental or quasi-experimental interventions. jones, owens, lydston, tobin, brondolo, and weiss (2010) determined that hivpostive women who completed a stress management and supportive therapy intervention increased in measures of selfefficacy and had significant decreases in depression and anxiety compared to the control group. stuifbergen et al. (2010) evaluated self-efficacy in women with fibromyalgia syndrome and found that both those who underwent an intervention program, as well as those in the control group who received fibromyalgia related education, showed significant increases in self-efficacy. wingood et al. (2011) developed a health educator-delivered intervention and reported increases in selfefficacy for latina women related to negotiating safer sex and condom use, accompanied by heightened hiv knowledge. publications from other fields have also considered selfefficacy in women. dickerson and taylor (2000) investigated psychology and business students and found that students were more likely to choose a leadership task when their self-efficacy for that task was high, and more likely to choose a subordinate role in completing a task when their self-efficacy for the task was low. hart and silka (1994) presented a hypothesis that a ropes course could be used as a learning laboratory to improve leadership self-efficacy in women. hoyt and blascovich (2007) found that leadership self-efficacy in women moderated the effects of stereotype activation and that women with high self-efficacy increased perceived performance, increased rated performance, and had a higher sense of well-being. yanar, budworth, and latham (2009) found that training women in verbal self-guidance increased their self-efficacy with regard to re-employment. the women also persisted longer in job searches and were more likely to find a job in their area of interest. self-efficacy for all many studies have been conducted in education that involved students, teachers, or learning. corkett, hatt, and benevides (2011) found that teachers’ perceptions of students’ selfefficacy were significantly correlated with the abilities of the students, but the students’ self-efficacy towards literacy was not correlated with their actual ability. swackhamer, koellner, advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 124 basile, and kimbrough (2009) correlated middle school teachers' higher self-efficacy toward teaching with completing four or more math and science content-focused courses. kitsantas, cheema, and ware (2011) connected decreased achievement gaps with an increase in homework resources and mathematics self-efficacy. mills, pajares, and herron (2007) investigated french language learning and reported that selfefficacy for self-regulation was more important than selfefficacy towards obtaining high grades. a small assortment of research has been conducted relative to adventurous activities such as wilderness expeditions, parachuting, and challenge courses. propst and koesler (1998) found that participation in a national outdoor leadership school course increased self-efficacy towards outdoors tasks with gains that lasted for at least one year on most tasks. they theorized that improved self-efficacy led to continued involvement and therefore improved outdoor leadership skills. samuels, foster, and lindsay (2010) found that united states air force academy cadets who participated in freefall parachuting training had significantly higher scores in leader self-control efficacy and leader assertiveness efficacy than participants who participated in soaring training or no training at all. stadler and kotze (2006) found that utilizing a challenge course to increase leadership self-efficacy of young career officers in the south african national defense force was not successful, but they theorized that a more holistic approach to improving self-efficacy would have provided higher results. in summary, current research literature supports bandura’s theory that self-efficacy can positively influence achievement and performance, and further that self-efficacy can be increased through an array of intentional interventions. there is increasing variety in studies, and while the evidence is not absolute, it appears that all fields can benefit from efforts to increase self-efficacy. however, research focused on women’s self-efficacy concerning leadership is still limited and is especially true for studies that investigate specific interventions to increase leadership self-efficacy in women. the review of research in this area affirms that there is a need for future inquiry in the realm of women’s leadership self-efficacy, which this particular study sought to address. methods this mixed-method study examined changes in women's leadership self-efficacy and their perceptions of leadership values and attributes. a self-efficacy scale and questionnaire adapted from bandura (2006) was created to survey students participating in a graduate level university class focused on women’s leadership. the first two years that the class members were surveyed included a challenge course experience over a one-week time period with learning objectives specific to leadership. the third year of the survey, the challenge course was not included and the class meeting times were changed to once weekly over a five-week period. the course curriculum, content, and instructor were the same for all three years of the study. participants the initial participants in the first two years of this study were students enrolled in a graduate level course, women and leadership, at a mid-sized four-year university in the united states. data were analyzed from eleven women who enrolled in the course during the summer of 2009 and nine women who were enrolled in the summer of 2010. in the third year of the study during the summer of 2011, when the challenge course was not a part of the women and leadership course, 12 women completed the survey, for a total of 32 study participants. [note: the data from the male students (n = 7 over all three years) were not analyzed for this study due to low numbers each year]. the 3rd year participants were viewed as a quasi-comparison group, acknowledging that the time/year differences and changes in course design allowed for confounding variables to emerge. the ages of the female participants ranged from approximately 22 to 60 years of age. all participants were graduate students, most of whom were also working professionals in higher education, k-12 schools, or other educational settings. most of the participants were graduate students in an education-related program. data collection instrumentation. albert bandura’s (2006) self-efficacy scales have been confirmed over time as valid and reliable instruments for measuring levels of confidence for particular groups of people such as adolescents, parents, and teachers pertaining to various behaviors. bandura's scales, or adaptations of them, have been used for researching adolescent self-efficacy (caprara, pastorelli, regalia, scabini, & bandura, 2005); exercise self-efficacy (everett, salamonson, & davidson, 2009); efficacy in managing pain (turner, ersek, & kemp, 2005); chronic disease management (lorig et al., 2001), and child/parent self-efficacy in relation to career interests (bandura, barbaranelli, caprara & pastorelli, 2001). teacher self-efficacy scales rooted in bandura's work have been widely utilized and validated by research teams such as gibson and dembo (1984), hoy and woolfolk (1990), and tschannenmoran and woolfolk hoy (2001). bandura did not create a scale specific to leaders or leadership; therefore his scale for teaching efficacy was adapted to create the leadership selfefficacy scale (lses) for this study. the lses contained 21 leadership behaviors in the areas of influencing decision-making, motivating others, enlisting outside involvement, creating a positive work climate, and encouraging a productive work ethic (see appendix a for scale). for each of the 21 items, participants were asked to rate how certain they were (their degree of confidence from 0 to 100) that they could accomplish the behaviors listed (e.g., advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 125 motivate people who show low interest in work). a score of zero indicated, "i cannot do at all", a score of 50-60 indicated, "i moderately can do", and a score of 100 indicated, "i certainly can do". many of bandura's (2006) scales have been set up this way asking respondents to provide a rating between 0 and 100. on some of his scales, similar items appear, but in question form (e.g., how much can you influence....?) and with numbered likert-scale responses providing ranges similar to "nothing" to "some influence" to "a great deal". in modifying the lses from bandura's original 2006 teacher efficacy scale, a few non-applicable items were removed and a few items were combined to reduce the original scale of 30 response items to 21 items. there were questions, for example, that were specific to enlisting parental help at school. those were not relevant for this study and so were subsequently removed. for other items, the term school was replaced with organization or work, and the term students was replaced with people or workers. other wordage was minimally adjusted to retain the meaning and intent of each item while shifting to an organizational leadership focus. for instance, rather than being asked to rate their confidence level on reducing school absenteeism, they were asked to rate their confidence for reducing turnover rates of workers. open-ended questions were also included, creating the lses & questionnaire, or lses & q. the open-ended questions inquired about the most important leadership values the participants felt that effective leaders do or should exhibit, what attributes they themselves exhibited that were weakest or strongest, and what obstacles they perceived prevented them from becoming more effective leaders. brief demographic information was also collected on gender and age categories. procedures. participants from the first two summers completed a pre-experience lses & q just prior to their first session on the challenge course on the first day of the class, followed by a post-experience lses & q within a few hours of their last challenge course session a week later. due to the remainder of the course being on-line the lses & q was given before the course ended for the first two years of the study. this will be addressed in greater detail in the discussion section. participants from the third summer completed the lses & q on the first day that the class met, and on the last day five weeks later -again, the third group did not participate in a challenge course experience as part of the class curriculum. the schedule for the women and leadership course during the first two summers consisted of meeting for six hours a day, monday through friday, for a one-week period of time. mornings entailed meeting in a classroom; afternoons were spent participating on the outdoor challenge course. classroom content and dialogue were all focused on women's issues in relation to leadership. content included historical, current, and future roles of women in leadership; experiences of specific diverse women leaders; and influences of gender, race/ethnicity, and class on leadership. activities included limited lecture, discussion of readings, guest speakers, guided verbal and written reflection, and films to engage in discussions and critical analyses of women's roles in leadership. after the one intensive week of class meetings, the remainder of the course provided for an additional two weeks using an online instructional program that involved additional readings, reflections, and online assignment submissions. an example of this work was the “your story” reflection. this assignment was designed to get students to reflect on where their leadership skills came from and what meaningful leadership experiences they had. the challenge course experiences began with challenges that required group decision-making, problem solving, and collaboration to reach completion (e.g., piecing together a puzzle of large foam pieces with each person having one clue to the solution). the latter part of the week was devoted to individually attempting the elements that required climbing several feet above the ground. these included challenges such as walking across a horizontal wire or jumping off a 40' pole while attached to a human belayer and back-up team of classmates on the ground via a rope and climbing harness. guided reflection was woven throughout the activities by a trained challenge course facilitator at various stages of completing each group or individual element. these reflections sometimes considered group efficacy/leadership behaviors (i.e., how did the groups' motivation influence the end result?), and sometimes focused on individual efficacy/leader behaviors (i.e., what did you contribute to help the group accomplish its goal? when you wanted to quit climbing, what did you think or say to yourself that caused you to continue?). during the third summer of this study, the women and leadership course was re-designed and did not include any challenge course experiences. the course schedule spanned a five-week period of time with classroom meetings held once a week in the evenings. between class meetings, an online instructional program was employed. data analysis quantitative. preand postlses measures were analyzed using brief descriptive statistics, t-tests, and measures of central tendency calculated with spss/pasw 18 quantitative analysis software. aggregated two-tailed paired sample t-tests were run on each of the 21 items on the lses scale individually, and also for each of the five grouped leadership dimensions of influencing decision-making, motivating others, enlisting outside involvement, creating a positive work climate, and encouraging a productive work ethic. additionally, independent sample t-tests were conducted on data from the years when the challenge course was included in the curriculum (2009 and 2010) and compared with data when the challenge course was not included (2011). qualitative. open-ended questions were analyzed using open (initial) and axial (categorized) coding. analysis for the 2009 advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 126 survey led to identification of salient and common terms pertaining to the most admirable values or attributes exhibited by leaders, as well as obstacles that the participants perceived kept them from being the most effective leaders they could be. the categorized data were then further analyzed by comparison of preand postexperience responses. after the 2010 data sets were collected, analysis was conducted on combined 2009 and 2010 data to reduce researcher bias or sway toward confirming the previous first year results. in some cases, new categories were identified through axial coding; in some cases the original categories were affirmed. next, in order to analyze potential changes between preand postexperience responses, terms were identified that were common in both the preand postquestionnaires. then, responses were identified that were unique only to either the preor postexperience questionnaires, and subsequently interpreted for meaning in relation to changes in leadership self-efficacy. the data for the 2011 questionnaire were analyzed using the same initial and categorized coding processes, and then compared to the combined 2009 and 2010 data. results were quite similar, with a few unique items noted and reported in the findings section below. discussion of findings levels of self-efficacy aggregated quantitative data sets from the three years of scale surveys revealed increases in self-efficacy for each of the 21 individual items; however these increases did not occur for some items when separate years of data were analyzed. similarly, aggregated data showed increases in self-efficacy across all five of the leadership dimensions on the leadership self-efficacy scale (influencing decision-making, motivating others, enlisting outside involvement, creating a positive work climate, and encouraging a productive work ethic). some of these increases were found to be statistically significant. there were no significant differences (increases or decreases) in self-efficacy scores for those who did or did not participate on the challenge course as a part of the women and leadership curriculum. individual leadership self-efficacy items. each of the 21 lses items showed aggregated increases in levels of selfefficacy from the preto the postexperience surveys. there were nine that revealed increased post-experience self-efficacy scores that were significantly higher (p = < 0.05) than the preexperience scores. in rank order, these were overcoming the influence of adverse working conditions (.000), earning respect from the most difficult workers (.002), influencing decisions that are made in my organization (.003), earning respect for my decisions (.005), and controlling negative or toxic behavior in the workplace (.006), and reducing turnover rates of workers (.006). the remaining were influencing people to enjoy coming to work (.012), increasing collaboration between workers and administration (.012), getting people to trust others (.022), and getting people to believe they can do well in their work (.022). commonalities for these significant score items are not apparent although most are indicative of change or resolve toward more positive and respect-worthy dispositions and behaviors. the item that does not fit as neatly into that interpretation is reducing worker turnover, unless that turnover was viewed as a result of negativity in the workplace and hope was ignited that positive change or influence was possible. aggregated self-efficacy dimensions. table 1 reveals the mean scores for the combined aggregated group data for all three years of the study. there were gains in levels of leadership self-efficacy in each of the five dimensions with the largest gains in creating a positive work climate (+8.00 %) and encouraging a productive work ethic (+8.83 %). these two dimensions are again, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, indicative of a resolve to demonstrate a more positive and respectful approach to work and leadership. the greater increases in the dimensions of positive work climate and productive work ethic make sense when the qualitative findings are also considered. as discussed in that section (see leadership values), it appeared that the women experienced an increased awareness of their own leadership development and things within themselves they could proactively change. the individual items in those dimensions addressed trust, safety, overcoming adversity, helping, collaborating, and encouraging others -actions and behaviors that come from self-determination within and from belief in one's own ability, ergo self-efficacy. the dimension with the third largest increase was influencing decision making (+6.32), and held the highest mean scores for both the preand postsurveys. high efficacy in pre-lses scores for making decisions could be a reflection of job function as well as autonomous decision-making processes. the increased scores may demonstrate a perception of being able to affect those processes to a higher extent in the future, or a higher belief in the rightness or soundness of the individual's decisions and an increased resolve to be more adamant about them. the dimension with the lowest gains was enlisting outside involvement with an increase of only 3.49 %. it should be noted that dimension also held the lowest self-efficacy mean scores for both the preand the postlses, beginning at a level of 64.32 % confidence and ending with a confidence level of only 67.81%. it is possible that these low scores were the result of the nature of the positions held by the participants, meaning that enlisting outside involvement may not have been a function or priority of the person's job responsibilities or may not have been a function or priority of the organization. therefore, low preand postratings were given and very little gain occurred as a result of enrolling in the class for that dimension. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 127 table 1 aggregated mean scores in five dimensions of leadership self-efficacy leadership selfefficacy dimensions preexperience mean scores postexperience mean scores difference influencing decision making 78.52 84.84 +6.32 motivating others 71.79 75.48 +3.69 enlisting outside involvement 64.32 67.81 +3.49 creating a positive work climate 74.21 82.21 +8.00 encouraging a productive work ethic 69.02 77.85 +8.83 note: self-efficacy scores designate percent of confidence on a 0-100 point scale. three dimensions of leadership self-efficacy revealed changes that were statistically significant (p = < 0.05). these were, creating a positive work environment (.003), influencing decision making (.011), and encouraging a productive work ethic (.017). the largest standard deviation (see table 2) was in the dimension of enlisting outside involvement (24.39), again perhaps due to disparity in the nature of the participants' job responsibilities. the smallest or tightest standard deviation was for motivating others (11.95). a plausible explanatory interpretation of this is that the behavior of motivating co-workers, peers, supervisors, or subordinates can be a part of everyone's work day regardless of job duties, unless someone works in total isolation. the mean of the difference for that dimension was 73.64 %, a score that reveals a self-perception of above average (much more than 50 %), but with the recognition that one can always do better in encouraging and trying to motivate those around them. table 2 differences in preand postscores in five dimensions of leadership self-efficacy leadership selfefficacy dimensions difference in mean scores standard deviation significance influencing decision making +6.32 13.28 .011* motivating others +3.69 11.95 .091 enlisting outside involvement +3.49 24.39 .424 creating a positive work climate +8.00 14.19 .003* encouraging a productive work ethic +8.83 19.75 .017* note: * 2 -tailed level of significance (p = < 0.05) challenge course vs. no challenge course. table 3 provides a comparison of the combined 2009 and 2010 increases in lses scores with the 2011 score increases, the year when the class members did not participate on the challenge course. none of the scores for the five dimensions were significantly higher for the 2009 and 2010 groups who participated on the challenge course. rather, quite the opposite occurred: the increases in lses scores were lower in all five dimensions for the challenge course groups than for the group that did not participate on the challenge course. when the 2009 results were compared with the 2010 results, increases in leadership self-efficacy for the 2010 group were substantially higher than for the previous summer. although the class instructor and cognitive content were the same for all three years of the study, it is likely that the instructor made yearly adjustments that may have improved the class with each offering. different challenge course facilitators could have been a factor. group culture could have been a factor. even weather may have influenced the results. additionally, increases in leadership self-efficacy were higher on some 2009 and 2010 individual survey items than for the 2011 non-challenge course group. although these results are different than predicted, there is a plausible explanation. during the first two summers, the post-lses was completed following the last challenge course day at the end of the first week of the class. approximately 15% of the class was not completed yet with additional course content provided in the remaining two weeks via online instruction. for the group that did not participate on the challenge course, the post-lses was completed at the end of the last day of the class after 100 % of the course content had been provided. this may indicate that the remaining unfinished portion of the class had bearing on the results. also the difference in schedule time frames may have had an affect (three weeks for the first two summers vs. five weeks for the last summer). perhaps a longer period of time is needed to digest, reflect, and adjust dispositions and confidence levels. advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 128 table 3 comparison of leadership self-efficacy increases between challenge course participation and non-participation as part of the class curriculum leadership selfefficacy dimensions increase in mean scores w/ challenge course (n = 20) increase in mean scores w/o challenge course (n = 12) influencing decision making +1.89 +13.71 motivating others +1.45 +7.42 enlisting outside involvement +3.33 +3.75 creating a positive work climate +3.38 +15.70 encouraging a productive work ethic +3.71 +17.35 leadership values in the 2009 qualitative data, there were several leadership values or attributes that were identified in both the preand postexperience questionnaires. these included common societal values that are not usually limited to leadership such as integrity, trust, and compassion. others did have more of a leadership connotation or expectation about them (vision, confidence, intelligence). when these results were further analyzed, though, for values that were unique to either the pre or postquestionnaires, a distinct shift emerged. in the preexperience questionnaires, values such as powerful, decisive, influential, and ability to delegate were listed. in the post questionnaires, values such as encouragement, passion, belief in others, and authenticity appeared. this was interpreted as a shift from more traditional, authoritative, often male-associated leadership attributes to more postmodern, participative, often female-associated values or attributes. furthermore, these results were interpreted to show an affirmation that it is acceptable to be true to one's gender and self (i.e., authentic) even in leadership situations -behaviors that aren't as yet universally accepted. analysis of the combined years of 2009 and 2010 data unveiled the same shifts in terminology, with only a few additions when the 2011 data were conjoined. additionally, themes emerged of leadership values that were more inwardly-experienced or known by self and those that were more outwardly-visible or revealed to others. in other words, other people don't necessarily know if a leader is honest, ethical, motivated, or authentic. only the leaders themselves know those things. other attributes such as consistency, knowledge of the business, and including the voice of others are things that are revealed and detectable by others. interestingly, most of the leadership values listed in all questionnaires were those that were revealed to others. however, the percentage of those known by self greatly increased in the post-experience questionnaires. one explanation of this increase was the realization that leadership does come from within, or is more about what a person is than how a person impresses or uses their power. another explanation is the realization by the women that they themselves had the ability and/or responsibility to develop their own leadership values and attributes; hence the result of increased leadership self-efficacy. table 4 displays the increases in values known by self and the shift that occurred in participants’ terminology. table 4 most admirable values or attributes that effective leaders exhibit responses in both pre and post-questionnaires responses unique to prequestionnaires responses unique to postquestionnaires 2009 & 2010 trust integrity vision confidence compassion/respect good communication/listen intelligence/knowledge 2011 the above plus: support/encouragement known by self honesty motivation ethics revealed to others work ethic clarity of goals ability to deliver consistency interest in people knowledge of the business ability to influence others ability to delegate strong/powerful decisiveness known by self authenticity sense of self awareness investment passion courage/belief in self revealed to others caring/care for others include the voice of others belief in others embracement of diversity understanding collaboration maker of safe space obstacles to effective leadership when similar analyses were employed for the question pertaining to the obstacles that prevented participants from being the most effective leader they could be (see table 5), another shift appeared, albeit more subtle, from self-critical behaviors (e.g., self-sabotage, lack of focus) and things done to them (e.g., confrontational people, good old boys) to the identification of behaviors or actions they could affect (e.g., taking initiative, lack of mentors, willingness to imagine). this also was interpreted as evidence that there were increases in self-efficacy and the belief that the potential for change and advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 129 betterment resided within rather than without. the obstacle of confidence was identified in all of the preand postexperience questionnaires, indicating that many of the participants felt they needed more confidence both before and after the conclusion of the women and leadership course. although the quantitative and qualitative data provided evidence of increases and adjustments in thinking relative to their leadership self-efficacy, it is possible that these changes were not consciously evident to the women themselves. table 5 main obstacles to effective leadership responses in both pre and postquestionnaires responses unique to prequestionnaires responses unique to postquestionnaires lack of confidence finishing graduate degree not enough time lack of experience self-sabotage defeatism dealing with confrontational people conflict resolution lack of focus politics/good old boys gender not taking the initiative [lack of] willingness to imagine or dream not letting go of past failures lack of mentors myself conclusion the purpose of this study was to investigate changes in leadership self-efficacy levels derived from a graduate level course that intentionally focused on women's leadership issues. investigation of the influence of a challenge course experience on self-efficacy levels was a secondary purpose. however, it was presumed that the challenge course would have a positive effect, and the results herein indicated an opposite negative effect in comparison to the non-challenge course groups. the confounding variables that interfered with the ability for this to be a true quasi-experiment were the different time frames that the surveys were conducted in relation to the class completion dates. the results did affirm that participation in the class in its entirety did increase leadership self-efficacy more than the class in its partiality. bandura (2006) consistently cautioned that self-efficacy is specific to various activities or functions. that is, someone may have high parenting efficacy, but low pain-management efficacy. therefore, there is not a universal self-efficacy scale that fits all realms of our lives. likewise, self-efficacy in similar realms may vary greatly depending upon the environment within which someone is operating. leadership self-efficacy may rise and fall throughout a person's career, in different organizations, or surrounded by different people. this results, then, in "much ambiguity about exactly what is being measured or the level of task and situational demands that must be managed" (p. 307). although social cognitive theory has established a relationship between high self-efficacy and higher performance, efficacy levels do not solely determine performance. capabilities are also influenced by "higher-order self-regulatory skills" (bandura, 2006, p. 308) such as problem diagnosis and resolution, design thinking, goal setting, motivation toward task completion, and creating "self-incentives to sustain engagement" (p. 308). individual efficacy levels can also be dependent on group-efficacy levels and if the environment has a positive or negative effect on healthy group cultural norms. in essence, self-efficacy is a complex concept that is not succinctly measurable or conclusive. although it has been researched for decades, and much is known and understood, there is still ample need to learn more. what we can conclude from this particular study on leadership self-efficacy is that the findings did demonstrate that intentional provision of leadership focused opportunities for women can increase their levels of leadership self-efficacy. more specifically, the results of this study affirmed that self-efficacy can be influenced through bandura's claims that mastery-building opportunities (class and challenge course activities focused on women and leadership), vicarious experiences (observation of and learning about leadership from others), and encouragement (support from classmates, instructors, and challenge course facilitators). these findings further lend support to social learning theory, shaped by bandura (1977, 1997, 2004, 2006) and others, by way of providing opportunities to observe and replicate leadership behaviors of other women. significance this research will be most beneficial in organizational cultures where leadership knowledge, skills, and dispositions are valued, encouraged, and supported for women. organizations and those who lead them can begin immediately to implement learning opportunities where such increases in self-efficacy can be fostered. implications that can be derived from this study, then, suggest that more experiences for developing self-efficacy for women should be created. when asked what obstacles existed that prevented the participants from being the most effective leaders they could be, one responded, “there are very few obstacles. it’s just a matter of finding the right opportunities.” need for further research the number of participants in this study was small, and the findings would be further substantiated with larger sample sizes. additionally, conducting similar research using quasiexperimental designs with simultaneous treatment and comparison groups is a logical next step to cement the findings of this study. although these results indicated that intentional leadership-focused activities can and do increase levels of selfefficacy for women, it is not known if similar intentional experiences can also affect leadership self-efficacy levels across the full spectrum of gender identities in society. there is further need to examine all four of the influencing factors that advancing women in leadership 2013 volume 33 130 bandura (1997) emphasized as variables on leadership selfefficacy (mastery building experiences, vicarious experiences, intrinsic motivation/emotional arousal, and persuasion or encouragement from others). such research would increase the generalizability for the small body of literature that exists pertaining to leadership self-efficacy. references annesi, j. j. 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(2011). efficacy of a health educator-delivered hiv prevention intervention for latina women: a randomized controlled trial. american journal of public health, 101(12), 2245-2252. yanar, b., budworth, m. h., & latham, g. p. (2009). the effect of verbal self-guidance training for overcoming employment barriers: a study of turkish women. applied psychology: an international review, 58(4), 586-601. doi: 10.1111/j.1464-0597.2008.00366.x appendix a: leadership self-efficacy scale and questionnaire this scale and questionnaire are designed to help gain a better understanding of the kinds of actions and behaviors that effect efficacy and create difficulties for people in various stages of developing their leadership. for the first 21 items, please rate how certain you are (your degree of confidence) that you can do the things listed below. record a number from 0 to 100 on the line following each statement, using the scale provided in the shaded box: confidence influencing decision making confidence (0-100) influence the decisions that are made in my organization __ _____ express my views freely on important work matters __ _____ obtain the materials and equipment i need to do my work __ _____ earn respect for my decisions __ _____ motivating others earn respect from the most difficult workers __ _____ keep people on task on difficult assignments __ _____ motivate people who show low interest in work __ get people to work well together __ _____ enlisting outside involvement get parent/community groups involved with the organization __ get other businesses involved with the organization __ _____ get other schools and colleges involved with the organization __ creating a positive work climate make the organization a safe place __ _____ influence people to enjoy coming to work __ _____ control negative or toxic behavior in the workplace __ _____ get people to trust others __ _____ overcome the influence of adverse working conditions __ encouraging a productive work ethic help others with their professional skills __ _____ increase collaboration between workers and the administration __ reduce turnover rate of workers __ _____ reduce absenteeism __ _____ get people to believe they can do well in their work __ (lses adapted from a. bandura, 2006, teacher efficacy scale, p. 328) educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 69 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 69-78, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper nine decades later: idaho women reflect on the meaning of the nineteenth amendment kathy canfield-davis, penny tenuto, russell joki, and erik hadley kathy canfield-davis is an assistant professor, department of leadership and counseling university of idaho, coeur d’alene canfield@uidaho.edu penny tenuto is an assistant professor, department of leadership and counseling university of idaho, boise ptenuto@uidaho.edu russell joki is the chair, department of leadership and counseling university of idaho, boise rjoki@uidaho.edu erik hadley is the budget specialist, department of leadership and counseling university of idaho, boise erikh@uidaho.edu accepted march 15, 2011 reflecting on the 90th anniversary of the nineteenth amendment (ratified august, 1920), this narrative inquiry explored its significance to women in leadership positions residing in idaho. idaho’s status as a forerunner approving suffrage underscored the foundation for the study. the researchers also wanted to investigate whether women have reached equal citizenship in aspects other than the right to vote. findings indicate that the nineteenth amendment was pivotal in not only giving women a voice in governmental decisions, but also paved the way for other political and social breakthroughs. however, few participants linked passage of the amendment with their rise to leadership. in some instances, full equality has not been achieved and gender discrimination still occurs, primarily when seeking leadership positions. key words: top women in leadership, gender equity, nineteenth amendment introduction this calendar year, 2010, marks the 90th anniversary of the nineteenth amendment giving women in the united states the right to vote. twenty-four years prior to its passage, in 1896, idaho became the fourth state to grant women suffrage following wyoming territory, colorado, and utah. considered by historians to be one of the most important events after statehood (arrington, 1994), affirmation of this right opened doors for many of idaho’s female pioneers to assume leadership positions. ten years after the law passed, women were elected state legislators, state superintendent of public instruction, county treasurers, county superintendents of schools, and deputy sheriffs. idaho’s status as a forerunner approving suffrage underscores the foundation for this study. the purpose was to explore what significance the nineteenth amendment may have had for 17 female civic and educational leaders who presently work and reside in idaho. although a transformation of gender roles has occurred during the past three decades, women remain significantly underrepresented in formal leadership positions (rhode, 2003). moreover, a wage gap still exists and women continue to experience forms of gender discrimination and sexual harassment (ireland, 2003). two primary questions guided this study. the first was: what significance, if any, does the nineteenth amendment have on women who have aspired to leadership prominence in idaho, 90 years after its passage? o’conner (1996) posed a second question for further examination: have women reached full and advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 70 equal citizenship in aspects other than the right to vote? using phenomenological research methodology, in this narrative inquiry, we sought answers to these questions. underpinnings of suffrage in the west and idaho the initial advancement of women’s suffrage took place in the rocky mountain west when wyoming territory was the first government in the world to grant women the right to vote on equal terms with men (mintz, 2007). subsequently, utah, colorado, and idaho followed. using data collected by historians who studied the early enfranchisement of women in the western section of the united states, morin (1997) identified three recurrent themes that influenced the passage of women’s right to vote: (a) regional demographics; (b) the political structure and economic opportunity; and (c) campaigns by advocates for women’s rights. in 1870 there were nine men for every woman residing in idaho (arrington, 1994). morin (1997) contended the passage of suffrage was used as a recruiting tool to draw women to western territories and states where they were proportionally few in number. men wanted to attract women to the west and granting them the right to vote was one means to encourage migration. edwards (2002) added an economic motive for enfranchising women in idaho. during the 1890s idaho’s economy was based primarily on silver mines. a strong political movement was initiated to increase the money supply by minting silver coinage at the same value as gold. proponents believed if women were enfranchised, they could help advocate for silver currency. idaho’s unique political structure was significant to the suffrage movement as well. groups such as the church of jesus christ of latter day saints assumed women would vote like their husbands thereby doubling the mormon vote (morin, 1997). morin explained, “it would thereby secure the legal status of polygamy while at the same time prove that mormon treatment of women was progressive, not abusive” (p. 23). given the moral virtue associated with women, particularly in the domestic realm, proponents asserted that providing women political power would advance public morality, or in a sense, “civilize western communities” (morin, 1997, p. 24). thus suffrage came to be associated with other principled crusades deemed appropriate for women including temperance, protection of children, and educational reform. the west was a dynamic place and lacked either the paternalistic, evangelical character of the south, or the moralizing culture of puritan new england. morin (1997) maintained the west was characterized by an individualistic culture emphasizing personal freedom, which was conducive for accepting women’s suffrage. evoking noted historians frederic jackson turner and daniel elazar, morin postulated that a discernable american character persists, and it manifests differently based upon three geographical locations: (a) southern, (b) eastern, and (c) western. morin explained: the early enfranchisement of women in the western states represented a unique coming together of diverse forces set upon the political culture stage of moralism and individualism; few women, nascent political structures, economic opportunism, and women’s rights activism all were specific forces that came together to operate on this stage. (p. 32) larson (1974) agreed saying a combination of “frontier spirit” and chance afforded western women the vote at an earlier date than eastern women (p. 19). enfranchising women in idaho was initially addressed by the territorial legislature in 1871 before black suffrage was considered (colson, 1991). the first bill was introduced by representative joseph william morgan who believed women were equally affected by the laws and therefore should have a voice in making them. according to colson, opposition to the measure was expressed by w. h. vanslyke. citing a report from the idaho tri-weekly statesman colson presented vanslyke’s argument, “woman rules us through her love, and her chiefest power over us is through her graceful impulsiveness of heart and fancy, well enough around the fireside, but dangerous guides in the halls of legislation” (p. 142). the initiative was defeated after the third reading in a roll-call tie vote at 11 to 11. successive years produced little suffrage legislation (arrington, 1994). however, several key landmark decisions paved the way for granting women voting privileges. in 1879 a bill was passed permitting unmarried female taxpayers to vote at school tax elections. in 1885 married women were extended suffrage in school elections, and authorized to hold school offices. shortly thereafter in 1889 women were sanctioned to be elected county superintendents. colson (1991) reported the following reason quoted in the boise city republican justifying why women progressed in education affairs, “women being naturally gifted teachers, we see no reason why they should not be competent to judge the qualifications necessary for teaching, which is the only matter which the law entrusts [sic] to the sole judgement [sic] of the superintendent” (p. 142). the same year, idaho held its constitutional convention resulting in admission to the union on july 3, 1890. several nationally renowned suffragists including henrietta skelton and abigail scott duniway addressed the assembly, pushing for full suffrage. although the bill had some support, the motion to include it in the constitution failed, in part, because of the perceived close relationship between women’s right to vote and prohibition, which many of the delegates opposed. mead (2004) confirmed, “true to form duniway alienated many local activists when she opposed the linkage of suffrage and prohibition amendments” (p. 93). four years later two additional milestones moved suffrage closer to becoming a reality: (a) the formation of the first women suffrage organization to advocate for enfranchisement, and (b) public endorsement for a suffrage amendment from idaho’s three political parties. after the 1895 convention of the advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 71 national american woman suffrage association (nawsa) national and state activists launched a strategic campaign. local clubs were established throughout the state along with the idaho equal suffrage association, an affiliate of the national organization. when the 1986 suffrage convention was held, “committees of women were stationed near polling places with yellow suffrage banners and circulars beseeching men to “remember the amendment” (arrington, 1994, p. 436-437). the amendment passed by 12,126 in favor, and 6,282 against. immediately afterward the state board of canvassers ruled the amendment invalid arguing it did not receive the majority of all votes cast in the election. instead it only garnered a majority of those voting on the amendment. the edict was appealed to the idaho supreme court and on december 11, 1896 a unanimous decision was rendered in favor of the amendment, making idaho the fourth state to extend voting privileges to women (arrington, 1994). larson (1974) pointed out all three judges were spouses of suffragists at the time, which may have influenced their decision. idaho’s victory was celebrated the following year at the convention of national woman’s suffrage association. reasons given for its successful passage were: first, the fact that within the state a large colony of people reside who were formally residents of utah at the time the women were voting there and who were then converted to the measure; second, the educational and organizational work of the national committee; third, the labors of the various branches of the idaho association; fourth, the political endorsement by all political parties. (arrington, 1994, p. 437) arrington’s (1994) analysis supported morin’s (1997) discussion about factors that influenced the passage of women’s right to vote: (a) regional demographics; (b) the political structure and economic opportunity; and (c) campaigns by advocates for women’s rights. women’s equality post suffrage the right to vote was sanctioned for every american woman in 1920 with successful passage of the nineteenth amendment. nevertheless, the struggle to gain equality over property rights, marriage and childcare, reproductive rights, sexual harassment, equal pay protection, and maternity leave proved to be a slow, evolutionary process (brown, 1992-1993; o’conner, 1996). chapman and mills (2006) commented, “even in the immediate wake of the 1920 ratification, there were questions about the meaningfulness of women’s entrance into the electoral process, and scholars today remain divided about the nineteenth amendment’s benefit for women” (p. 4).eleanor roosevelt (1940) also voiced this observation about women: “in government, in business, and in the professions there may be a day when women will be looked upon as persons. we are, however, far from that day as yet” (p. 67). in a compelling article depicting the post world war ii status of women’s rights in america, anthony ii (1948) observed: there are more than 16,000,000 women working today, but they form only one fourth of all american workers. only a third of all women over fourteen years of age have jobs. more important, women are the last to be hired and the first to be fired, just as they were in aunt susan’s lifetime. their wages are still low. women work at half the pay men get according to the united states department of labor. even in 1945, when war wages were swollen with overtime, the average annual earnings of women workers were only $1240. men averaged $2570 during this period. (p. 23) the commentary further describes how eighteen states barred women from jury duty and in nineteen additional states, women were eligible to serve but could be excused because of their gender. sixteen states required women to acquire their husband’s consent to sign legal documents and five states required women to obtain a court order to start a business. anthony ii (1948) concludes, “our economic, political and social position is only slightly better now than it was in 1920” (p. 119). based upon an analysis of the southern poll tax, requiring women to pay voter registration fees, podolefsky (1997-1998) maintained that even after passage of the nineteenth amendment, women were subjected to discriminatory voting privileges. those who did not have sufficient economic resources were excluded from obtaining a ballot. these conditions prevailed into the 1960s, along with a widely accepted dogma of male superiority in work and public service. women were considered unfit to be airline pilots, firefighters, television news anchors, carpenters, movie directors, or ceos (collins, 2009). women and leadership today according to the u.s. department of labor (2009) website, 66 million women were employed in the united states in 2009. although 26% of these women held part-time jobs, the remaining 74% were employed full time in 2009. this online report stated: the largest percentage of employed women (40 percent) worked in management professional, and related occupations; 32 percent worked in sales and office occupations; 21 percent in service occupations; 5 percent in production, transportation, and material moving occupations; and 1 percent in natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations. (p.1) twenty years ago in 1989-1990 there was one female superintendent serving in idaho across 108 school districts. the following school year, 1990-1991, two females held this rank. in the present school year, 2009-2010, the number has increased to 47 female superintendents and charter school administrators. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 72 historically, women have been largely excluded from leadership ranks (rhode, 2003), and conventional leadership has been primarily constructed in masculine terms (billing & alvesson, 2000). one theory for women’s absence from leadership status is frequently termed the glass ceiling (hoyt, 2007). the glass ceiling refers to “artificial barriers based on attitudinal or organizational bias that prevent qualified individuals from advancing upward in their organization into management-level positions" (begun, 2000, p. 30). hoyt offered three explanations for this phenomenon. first, women lack human capital investment in education, training, and work experience. campbell (1982) added: in addition—men because of their security, selfconfidence, and the backing of sponsors—have been able to learn the job while doing the job. unfortunately, women need more education to be hired for the same jobs and make the same salaries as men. (p. 338) second, although women are equally effective in leadership roles, they are less apt to promote themselves. finally, gender stereotyping portrays women as communal which is characterized by concern for others, sensitivity, warmth, helpfulness and nurturance (deaux & kite, 1993; heilman, 2001). conversely, men are depicted as being agentic; displaying confidence, assertiveness, independence, rationality, and decisiveness. nelson-kuna and rigor (1995) explained: the highly valued attributes that our society defines as agentic are those associated with power and status because autonomy and mastery require the freedom to make choices. frequently what is considered feminine is the product of powerlessness and low status; those not in a position of autonomy and choice must focus on connection and communal goals to survive. (p. 173) in other words, men are more apt to retain positions of autonomy while women lack the institutional power, status, and economic independence to act agentically (nelson-rigor & kuna, 1995). new york times reporter, lisa belkin (2003), offered another reason for the dearth of women leaders. belkin’s term “opt-out revolution” (p. 1) suggested many women made conscious decisions to avoid seeking leadership roles. according to fine (2009), multiple reasons coalesced to rationalize this trend including, women’s desire to balance work and family life, fear of success, lack of desire for power, and lack of confidence in their preparedness to seek a higher position. additional rationale included health and religious demands, personal burnout, and a desire to support other women who aspired to leadership roles (bond, holmes, byrne, babchuck, & kirtonrobbins, 2008). the nineteenth amendment has been recorded as a crossroad that changed the course american history (mcpherson, brinkley, & rubel, 2001). toward this end, the goal of this study was to understand how this landmark legislation defined and shaped the professional lives of 17 women who hold civic and educational leadership appointments in idaho. method a phenomenological research design (manen, 1990; moustakas, 1994, & sokolowski, 2007) was used to understand how women in contemporary civic leadership positions construed the meaning of the nineteenth amendment, and its impact on their leadership experiences. according to manen (1990), “phenomenology aims at gaining a deeper understanding of the nature or meaning of our everyday experiences” (p. 9). furthermore, patton (2002) described this method as one in which people perceive, describe, feel about, judge, remember, and make sense of a phenomenon. in addition to offering descriptions of events and experiences, narratives express emotions, thoughts, and interpretations. this study also incorporated several principles drawn from feminist research; specifically: (a) inequality exists in our culture and (b) highlighting the experiences of women and allowing their voices to be heard, may reverse these inequalities, and encourage action to redress oppressive practices (gribich, 2007). another purpose of this inquiry was to examine whether women believe they have reached full parity in aspects other than voting privileges participants data were collected from 17 women who hold civic leadership positions, including seven public school superintendents, two school board members, four legislators, two mayors, and two former judges. women were selected as participants based upon their experience retaining positions of leadership in idaho. the significance for selecting idaho was determined by the state’s distinction as a vanguard in women’s suffrage. the research team anticipated comments from long-time civic leaders in the state would generate information-rich data (patton, 2002), offering insight on the significance suffrage had on their respective paths to leadership (maxwell, 2005). civic leaders were chosen over corporate executives because members of the research team were more familiar with leadership in the public sector. additionally, women in civic or public leadership roles are more visible, and therefore tend to be more readily accessible. all of the women were white and their ages ranged from 45-60 years. data collection following approval from the university’s human assurance committee, the first and second authors conducted 17 interviews. qualitative interviews were selected as a means to collect data, because this study was concerned with establishing common patterns between the respondents versus focusing on a particular setting (warren, 2002). silverman and marvasti (2008) suggested, “perhaps we all live in what might be called an interview society in which interviews seem central to advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 73 making sense of our lives” (p. 146). using interviews allowed the authors of this article to gain the perspectives of others by assuming their viewpoints were meaningful, knowable, and able to be made explicit (patton, 2002). applying the principles recommended by merriam (2009) several basic procedures were employed to schedule the interviews. the first author contacted the female leaders via phone to explain the study, and determine their level of interest in participating. all 17 women responded favorably. next, face-to-face interviews were scheduled at a location of the participants’ choosing. prior to the interview, each woman received an electronic copy of the interview protocol which helped guide and focus the dialogue. open-ended questions were used to established some parameters and allow the participant to elaborate, and the interviewer to seek clarification when needed (seidman, 2006). with permission of the participants, the semi-structured interviews were audio recorded and careful notes were taken by the interviewers. each interview lasted approximately one hour. researchers were mindful of the complexities associated with feminist methodological issues. for example, during the course of an interview, some women may discover personal thoughts they have not yet considered, and learn more about who they are. others who may have never had the opportunity to express themselves may not know how to respond (reinharz & chase, 2002). to protect anonymity, pseudonyms were assigned. analysis the data analysis process followed steps outlined by (gribich, 2009). interviews were transcribed, verbatim, and then read in their entirety by the research team to obtain a sense of what the data set contained as a whole (yin, 2009; leedy & ormrod, 2010). possible categories and interpretations were chronicled by making written notations in the margins, and highlighting the emerging themes with different colored markers (merriam, 1998). according to patton (2002), when multiple reviewers analyze data, it is helpful to have each person develop the coding format independently, then compare and contrast similarities and differences. patton suggests this procedure serves as one means to help triangulate data. this process of triangulation was used in this research. overall impressions of what the data meant, was exchanged electronically among the researchers. next, the data were condensed, removing all extemporaneous, irrelevant comments, phrases, and utterances, then arranged by question. this permitted the first author to group the whole into smaller parts. schwandt (2007) maintained, “through reassembly of the parts, one comes to understand the integrity of the whole” (p. 6). next, a more detailed pattern-coding analysis (miles & huberman, 1994) was employed by the first author to sort the text into themes. miles and huberman explained, “it helps the researcher elaborate a cognitive map, an evolving, more integrated schema for understanding local incidents and interactions” (p. 69). further, theme codes show where patterns re-occur in the text (bernard & ryan, 2010). when analyzing data collected from women, reinharz and chase (2002) theorized: feminist researchers face a particular challenge when we interpret the words of women who reject feminism or other aggressive movements. in such cases, it is tempting to attribute an interviewee’s ideas to ‘false consciousness’ and to discount what she says. the idea of false consciousness suggests that a person misunderstands his or her own situation, particularly with regard to self-interest (bartky 1998). (p. 233) consequently, the first author remained attentive on how the words and phrases of the women were interpreted. recurrent themes were then highlighted electronically. according to stake (1995), “sometimes, we find significance in a single instance, but usually the meanings will come from reappearance over and over” (p. 78). data were then compiled into a checklist matrix (miles & huberman, 1994), permitting the information to be presented systematically. once it was reviewed and a consensus on the accuracy was reached by the research team, generalizations were made about the inquiry, and contrasted with the literature. finally, the narrative was written and revised according to researchers’ discussions and feedback from the participants. one concern with interview research is that participants may change their responses during an interview, or they may offer different replies to different interviewers ( kvale & brinkmann, 2009). interviewers followed the advice of kvale and brinkmann, and were cautious to avoid asking leading questions because of their propensity to inadvertently influence a response. to strengthen validity member checks (merriam, 2009) were used. member checks revealed the participants concurred with the findings and appreciated participating in the research. limitations participants in this study were selected based upon their experience holding positions of leadership in idaho. their perceptions and reactions about the impact of the 19th amendment on their lives may not be the same as other female leaders in states that also afforded women the right to vote at an early stage. moreover, the participants held civic and educational leadership positions. women more closely aligned with the private sector may have alternative viewpoints. the first and second authors, both females, conducted all of the interviews. responses may have been changed had the interviews been completed by the third and fourth authors, both males. all of the women interviewed for this study experienced success in a leadership role. had women who aspired to leadership, but failed, been interviewed the results may have been the different. the women interviewed were between the ages of 45-60 and caucasian. women representing a different age and ethnic group could have different responses. for advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 74 example, when these findings were present during a college campus forum on the nineteenth amendment, different role models were mentioned. results three primary themes emerged from the data. first, women in this study agreed the nineteenth amendment had a significant impact on their lives. second, full and equal citizenship has not yet been attained, particularly in employment opportunities, advancement, and equal pay. third, women in this study expressed an acceptance of the agentic theory of male dominance. the data also revealed two other themes. first, participants shared the advice they would give to younger women on how to fulfill their goals and aspirations, and second, women in this study identified their role models, and why they were chosen. significance of the nineteenth amendment in her essay, the history of the women’s suffrage movement (1996), supreme court justice sandra day o’connor wrote: it is difficult to imagine that only seventy-five years ago, a woman’s right to vote was not protected by our constitution. it is hard to remember that a right i have taken for granted, all my life is one that some of our grandmothers never enjoyed. but it is important to remember such things, to celebrate the amendment that extended to women one of the fundamental rights of citizen participation, and to reflect on how far we have come. (p. 657) fourteen years after her essay was written, 90 years subsequent to the enactment of the nineteenth amendment, and 114 years following the passage of idaho’s constitutional amendment granting women suffrage, participants in the present study echoed o’connor’s sentiment suggesting this right has been taken for granted. for example, susan jones remarked, “i think it’s really amazing that women haven’t always had the right to vote,” while jenica jones found it “almost unfathomable” to imagine such a time. the participants acknowledged how significant the nineteenth amendment was, not only in terms of the right to vote, but also the way in which it opened other opportunities for women. lucile applebee noted how this historical legislation built women’s “confidence to be able to become not only homemakers and child bearers but also intellectual participants in our culture.” likewise, carmen riley-morgan said it helped “women to participate in those higher levels in citizenship, such as running for office, voting for candidates of their choice and that opened doors in terms of civic participation, educational participation, and labor force advancement.” other participants shared how the nineteenth amendment also contributed toward moving women forward in self determination, building confidence to become more than child bearers and homemakers, and giving women a voice in how they were governed. in the words of deborah jensen: well, i guess my thinking is how much it has enabled women to expand their horizons and to know they are part of a larger community and that their contributions are needed and accepted. it just seems to me that when women understood they had a voice; that they too could make decisions about themselves and about their families and people in their community. that is of tremendous significance. they were no longer, well, a chattel. although some courts still treated them that way, but they were no longer just a belonging and just an entity. they had their own voice. when asked whether a more historical event had occurred to advance equality for women five of the respondents were unable to identify one. the following comment made by wendy cartwright was typical. she remarked, “i thought about that question quite a bit and honestly, i don’t think any other single event had more ramifications than suffrage had”. five interviewees placed an emphasis on reproductive freedom and two identified women’s health care issues. discrimination related to employment opportunities, advancement, and equal pay despite an overall consensus that the nineteenth amendment launched greater freedoms for women, several participants in this investigation experienced present day discrimination, most commonly occurring in employment related opportunities. one example given by deborah jensen occurred when she applied to become a judge. during her interview, she was asked by a male commissioner whether she would be able to drive during inclement weather. she reflected, “i’m fairly confident that he didn’t ask any of the men whether they would have any difficulty driving over snowy roads.” in another instance, elizabeth trewen recalled her 1979 interview with a male superintendent and a male special education director who asked whether she was planning to get pregnant in the near future. she remembered thinking if she came across too strident, she would ruin her chances of obtaining employment. she added, “so i just kind of made a joke about it. but in the end, i answered the question and i told them what they wanted to hear; oh no, i’m not going to get pregnant.” other participants reported situations where they were denied employment based on gender. jenica jones described a circumstance when she applied for a position where she was more qualified and had more experience. she recalled, “as it turned out, they selected a male candidate who wasn’t even endorsed for the position.” davis lee recounted a similar situation: i remember walking in and i knew the principal fairly well, and i shook his hand and i sat down, and he leaned across the table and he said, “i appreciate you coming in, and i won’t waste your time, and you won’t waste mine. i really need a man.” and that was surprising to me. that was the extent of the interview. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 75 despite these discriminatory experiences, data analyzed from a related question revealed that several women in this study did not appear interested in advancing legislation to correct existing inequalities. for example, susan jones offered, “i don’t see really that there is anything legislatively that hasn’t been done to give women equal rights. i don’t think that you can just make more laws and that’s going to change people’s attitudes.” others agreed and made similar comments to camille richardson who remarked, “i don’t know that there is any legislation that could be written that can dictate behavior and people’s value systems.” several participants believed the opposite, and felt legal recourse was necessary, primarily in the area of equal pay. for example, hazel zaffke suggested, “i would direct it specifically to compensation. as soon as you fall outside of an identified leadership role, i think women are undervalued in their compensation. so i would write a simple line; you pay him that, you pay us that.” all of the interviews were conducted prior to president obama’s 2010 state of the union address. it is therefore worth mentioning the president made note of his administration’s commitment to correcting this form of discrimination stating, “we’re going to crack down on violations of equal pay laws—so women get equal pay for an equal day’s work” (para. 97). acceptance of male dominance one of the more complex themes that emerged from data obtained in this investigation is drawn from the agentic theory of male dominance (nelson-rigor & kuna, 1995). on the onehand, when asked if gender prohibited them from attaining their professional goals nearly every participant replied it was not a factor. however, some comments suggested the participants had acquiesced to a system of male dominance in leadership positions, and found ways to work within it. for example, leigh snider offered the following: i even interviewed in a neighboring district, and they said, “well what does your husband think about you working in this field?” and i thought well, this is not right, but i also knew that if i made a big stink about it that it would get around to other districts. i jumped through the hoops and proved myself again. i realized that if i was going to be successful, i would not only have to know my stuff, i have to watch what i say, and how i say it; skills that you would normally learn for your career, but beyond that. it had to be even better than that. i couldn’t afford to slip. i remember being told by other women that were in leadership roles that you just have to be better than the average man. so you have to be always aware of what you’re saying and doing and how they might perceive you and pay your dues before you can get there. and i know most leaders have to do that, but it was more so, way intensely more so for women. when working with male colleagues, elizabeth trewen observed, “ if i’m in a heated dialogue with a group of people, mixed genders, women and men, my sense is that society gives permission for the men to raise their voices and to dominate the conversation and to be a physical presence, but if a woman tries to do that, or if i have done that, then i’m labeled with the “b” word and i’ve even seen it, the exact same behavior, demeanor. camille richardson added: you know, i tend to address my approach to gender discrimination is to try and figure out what the system is, what the expectations are – you know, are you supposed to wear pants, wear a skirt? i try to understand the boundaries and the framework and the expectations and then work within them, to build integrity and trust and a rapport with individuals on a one to one basis. i try not to be in your face, because what i have found is when you say, well, you’re just treating me like that because i’m a woman, the door closes, whether it is intentional or not, you can just sort of see the door come down. advice and role models two additional themes pertaining to the advice participants in this study gave younger females and the identification of role models warrant notation. first, in advising young women today on how to achieve their dreams, the interviewees recommended many of the same patterns and behaviors they utilized: obtain an education, develop a clear picture of future endeavors, define personal goals and follow personal dreams, work hard, be persistent, follow the rules, and work within the system. hazel zaffke pointed out “i would probably tell that to a young man too, if he asked, because those are just really what makes a person successful.” second, the women leaders in this inquiry identified primarily political figures as role models, in both contemporary and historical eras. eleanor roosevelt, abigail adams, rosa parks, hilary clinton, jackie kennedy, and margaret thatcher were mentioned most often. when further questioned about what type of national event would further advance women in leadership the most common responses were the election of a woman president, and equitable representation in government. discussion it is fitting, after 90 years of its ratification as part of the united states constitution, an analysis of the nineteenth amendment and its impact on women in present day leadership roles should take place. after its passage in 1920 the right to vote became a reality for women who now exercise the franchise on an equal footing with men (brown, 1992-1993). participants in this study unanimously agreed the nineteenth amendment was significant, in not only giving women a voice in governmental decisions, but also paving the way for other political and social breakthroughs including greater involvement in the culture and community. few linked passage of the nineteenth amendment with their rise to leadership, and instead attributed this phenomenon, in part, to mentorship and encouragement from others, including male role models. additionally, they advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 76 associated their success to hard work, professionalism, and in some cases, being in the right place at the right time. whether the nineteenth amendment eliminated other discriminatory practices against women appears to be in question today. some women in this study could not think of a situation where they were either discriminated against or marginalized. however, others recalled instances when they were overlooked in the process of applying for leadership positions, and men were awarded the job even if they were less qualified. those participants who felt they were bypassed for employment because of their gender, supports campbell’s (1982) and rhode’s (2003) assertions that men are better able to secure positions of a higher status, than women are able to do. none of the participants identified gender as being the most virulent form of discrimination. rather, the majority pointed to racism. however, shirley chisholm, the first black woman to serve in the united states congress was quoted as saying “of my two ‘handicaps’ being female put more obstacles in my path than being black” (lewis, 2010, p. 1). despite encountering discriminatory practices, several participants did not view the legal process to be an effective tool to correct them. this could imply an acceptance of the status quo. or, it could be rationalized that if women are perceived as gaining a position based upon legally required preferences for females, then they may feel less competent and hesitant to make tough decisions (heilman & alcott, 2001). all of the women in this study served in leadership positions, and therefore had achieved a degree of success in historically male-dominated professions. even though they encountered certain road blocks along the way, they deemed their education, determination, and patience eventually propelled them into breaking the glass ceiling (hoyt, 2007). several participants admitted that in order to succeed, they learned how to work within patriarchal systems, and used these principles to their advantage. one could presume the women in this study consider the battle for equal rights has largely been won, which could account for why none of them offered gender-specific advice for up-andcoming women. many of the participants found it hard to believe it had been 90 years since woman attained this right, and admitted they took it for granted. results from this study show no eminent passion on behalf of the participants to correct any existing imbalance between women and men, whether the inequity is grounded in legal, political, or social norms. this study sheds light on what significance the nineteenth amendment may have on contemporary women in civic leadership positions. it shows that, in some instances, full equality has not yet been achieved, and causes one to wonder whether, as a group, women have used this right to their advantage. or, are women today content with the status quo because the struggles and barriers encountered by their predecessors have been diminished? it is also worth considering whether these women were empowered through their own agentic systems resulting in a self-determination to succeed and disregard the potential of male domination. conclusion the nineteenth amendment revolutionized the equal status of women and men in the united states. as o’conner (1996) pointed out, “suffragists were jailed, attacked, harassed, and divorced in their quest for the american dream of full citizenship and civil rights” (p. 668). accordingly, the results obtained from this study caused the research team to reflect upon how the suffragists’ principles of equality are still relevant today. statistics tell part of the story. in the 2008 presidential election women comprised 53% of the voters compared with men who cast 47% of the votes. idaho’s records show in the same election women encompassed 52% of the vote, and men 48%. these statistics demonstrate females have made gains over time. nevertheless, participants in this study reported incidences of gender discrimination. blind spots are prevalent in attitudes about working relationships between male and females in leadership positions, both from a supervisory perspective, and a subordinates’ outlook. if this investigation encourages further discussion allowing women to keep moving forward, then its purpose will be fulfilled. references arrington, l. j. 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(1995). the art of case study research. thousand oaks, ca: sage. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 78 sokolowski, r. (2000). introduction to phenomenology. cambridge, ma: cambridge university press. u. s. department of labor. (2009). retrieved from http://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/main.htm warren, c. (2002). qualitative interviewing. in j. f. gubrium & j. a. holstein (eds.), handbook of interview research: context & method. (pp. 83-101). thousand oaks, ca: sage. yin, r. k. (2009). case study research: design and methods. thousand oaks, ca: sage. microsoft word paros_encouraging_the_productivity_of_female_millennial_employees.docx advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 83 advancing women in leadership vol. 36, pp. 83-88, 2016 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper encouraging the productivity of female millennial employees who apply knowledge to enhance products and services amy k. b. paros amy k. b. paros: quinnipiac university, email: amy.paros@quinnipiac.edu accepted august 08, 2016 the almost 20 million female millennial knowledge workers enhance products, services, and customers in american businesses by applying their skillset knowledge. while participative management theories, like william ouchi’s theory z, are known to promote employee productivity and loyalty it is noted that they only focus on the majority population. this study looked to extend existing participative management theories to include the female millennial knowledge worker and avoid negative costs associated with poor productivity and turnover. this manuscript highlights key results from a qualitative embedded single-case study that explored the influence participative management techniques had on the turnover and productivity of female millennial knowledge workers. this study extended participative management theory to include the female millennial knowledge worker and noted that managers with female millennial knowledge employees should consider a focus on employee development, timely feedback, and cultivating a positive working environment. keywords: female, millennial, knowledge worker, participative management, productivity, turnover. introduction the almost 20 million american female employees born during the millennial generation, working in roles that benefit the product, service, or customer through the application of knowledge contribute to domestic business (united states census bureau, 2011; lücking & pernicka, 2009). participative management techniques that are used to achieve long term organizational benefits by facilitating employee performance through loyalty and involvement are noted to focus on the majority population (male employees) and could alienate women (davidson, timo, & wang, 2010; angermeier, dunford, boss, boss, & miller, 2009; pinkovitz, moskal, & green, 2006, ouchi & price, 1978). during this research how participative management influenced the productivity and turnover of the female millennial knowledge worker was considered. this paper reflects and summarizes the findings from paros (2015). literature review researchers have found that men and women bring different perspectives and contributions to business. male leaders have been recognized for their results orientated focus, while women are known to contribute a more collaborative style (ion & folch, 2009). the researchers did not look for a superior style, but recognized that applying the correct technique to a business challenge could influence achieved success. a focus on collaborative execution, a quality correlated with the behavior of women leaders, can help to positively facilitate change initiatives where organizational buy-in is essential for successful execution (ion & folch, 2009). it is important to recognize and value the influence of women in business and better understand management styles that could alienate these organizational assets. female leaders have been found to be more dedicated to making a difference in the workplace than their male counterparts (chandler, 2008). women are attracted to leadership positions in order to contribute organizationally through honesty, integrity, competence, and a selfless focus (chandler, 2008). organizations can capitalize on the nature of women in the workplace by placing them in positions involved in the culture of the business, initiatives focused on benefiting the community, or projects that enhance an existing quality of life (chandler, 2008). women have been shown to exhibit a strong sense of execution in the workplace, which is influenced by their drive to make a difference (chandler, 2008). women in the workplace is a current controversial issue. it is important to understand the specific characteristics the female millennial brings into the workplace since her formative advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 84 experiences influence generational experiences and shape her professional and personal values (young, sturts, ross, & kim, 2011). generation y, referred to interchangeably as the millennial generation, was born between 1980 and 1995 (ng, schweitzer, & lyons, 2010). this generation has been noted for its uniqueness in the workplace carrying a focus on execution (kaifi, nafei, khanfar, & kaifi, 2012; bannon, ford, & meltzer, 2011). the millennial generation is praised for its acceptance of diversity, fluency with technology, global consciousness, personal confidence, and ability to multitask (anantatmula & shrivastav, 2012; young et al., 2011). although, employers have also found that the millennial generation is less loyal to employers than previous generations (anantatmula & shrivastav, 2012). in addition, the millennial generation is challenged by skepticism, impatience, and communication (anantatmula & shrivastav, 2012). the millennial generation has also been found to value the work environment, enjoy challenging work, seek growth and development, respect work life balance, look for meaningful work, and appreciate flexibility at work (bannon et al., 2011, ng et al., 2010). coupling in the aspect of knowledge work, in the perspective of the almost 20 million american millennial female employees, focuses on women working in roles that benefit the product, service, or customer through the application of knowledge (united states census bureau, 2011; lücking & pernicka, 2009). female millennial knowledge workers contribute to the business by applying skillset knowledge (lücking & pernicka, 2009). these employees are commonly seen in education and training, management, innovation, or research and development (lücking & pernicka, 2009). female millennial knowledge workers contribute to business enabling industry presence by benefiting products, streamlining processes, enhance customer experiences, and supporting the execution of fiscal strategy (nelson & mccann, 2010; lücking & pernicka, 2009, pyoria, 2007). purpose of the study the purpose of this qualitative embedded single-case study was to explore the influence participative management techniques had on the turnover and productivity of female millennial knowledge workers. with a greater understanding for what contributes to the turnover and productivity of female millennial knowledge workers relevant support can be considered to promote this population’s success in business. three embedded units of analysis: management review of productivity, organizational review of productivity, and participant review of productivity and turnover were utilized to understand the effect management techniques have on this population. participative management practices, like ouchi’s theory z, are popular in business because they drive organizational stability and loyalty, which is connected to more productive employees and lower turnover rates (ghulam, syed, & zainab, 2012; mahmood & ali, 2011; angermeier et al., 2009; daft, 2004; ouchi & price, 1978). participative management theories alienate the minority including female millennial knowledge workers, therefore, this study was conducted to extend current theory to include the female millennial knowledge worker population (kopelman, prottas, & davis, 2008; daft, 2004; ouchi & price, 1978). research questions the research in paros (2015) started with the following question: ‘how does participative management affect the productivity and turnover of female millennial knowledge workers?’ schram (2006) supports that a series of topic questions can be used to gain understanding and reinforce a central question. the following topic questions by paros (2015) were used to understand and reinforce the central question while exploring the positive and negative aspects of managerial styles on productivity and turnover associated with female millennial knowledge workers. topic questions focused on female millennial knowledge workers productivity q1. what types of management behaviors encourage female millennial knowledge worker productivity? q2. what types of management behaviors discourage female millennial knowledge worker productivity? q3. what things can a manager do to encourage female millennial knowledge worker topic questions focused on female millennial knowledge workers turnover q4. what types of management behaviors encourage female millennial knowledge worker turnover? q5. what types of management behaviors discourage female millennial knowledge worker turnover? q6. what things can a manager do to discourage female millennial knowledge worker turnover? research design and method the researcher conducted this study to look more deeply at understanding the female millennial knowledge worker and utilized a qualitative study applying an embedded single-case study design to a single case that was most relevant to maximize the study’s learning (yin, 2013; tellis, 1997). the explorative nature of this study considered a contemporary research question with the intent to understand behavior within its context, which is highly appropriate for the case study research method (yin, 2013; zikmund, babin, carr, & griffin, 2010). yin (2013) identified that a single case study design was justifiable for supporting a common case, because “the objective is to capture the circumstances and conditions of an everyday situation” (p. 52). with a population of almost 20 million female millennial knowledge workers entering post-industrial participative management organizations, this research observed the common case associated with how participative management techniques affect the productivity and turnover of the female millennial advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 85 knowledge workers employed in these organizations daily (yin, 2013; united states census bureau, 2011; mccrimmon, 2010). vigilant consideration was taken to ensure that the single case adequately represented the female millennial knowledge worker and allowed for maximum data collection (yin, 2013). the embedded design supported the study’s inquiry, analysis, and insights by exploring both her manger and the organization’s review of her productivity by collecting data from her performance reviews and participating in a direct observation. in addition, her perception of her productivity and turnover were collected utilizing an interview (yin, 2013). the three mentioned subunits were used as several data collection points: (a) her manager’s; (b) the organization’s, and (c) her perspective of productivity and turnover to support triangulated data collection. triangulated data collection was used to increase the validity and transferability of the case study (stavros & westberg, 2009; tellis, 1997; bryman, n.d.). in addition to the subunit data collection, with-in method triangulation was used again by coupling the research topic questions to contrast participant interview responses (bryman, n.d.). the within method triangulation was used to enhance the credibility of the study, where the topic research questions explored both the positive and negative aspects of managerial styles associated with female millennial knowledge workers (bryman, n.d.). two levels of triangulation coupled with a well-documented embedded single-case study design promoted construct validity and mitigated some academic concerns regarding the case study design (yin, 2013; tellis, 1997). participant women contribute 46 percent of the united states labor force and are expected to contribute 51 percent of the projected workforce increase between 2008 and 2018 (united states department of labor, 2010). about 72 million women currently support the united states labor population and 40 million of these women are working in knowledge jobs that benefit the product, streamline processes, enhance customer experiences, or support fiscal strategy (united states census bureau, 2011; lücking & pernicka, 2009). applying the millennial generation birth year range of 1980-1994 an estimated population of almost 20 million female millennial knowledge workers support united states businesses (united states census bureau, 2011). a purposeful focus in order to facilitate qualitative inquiry was placed on identifying a single case that met the participant criteria for being a female millennial knowledge worker employed within a participative management organization while also allowing access, cooperation, relevance, and applicability (stavros & westberg, 2009; tellis, 1997). a single case method was adequate to answer the research questions even though geographic proximity limited the population to the western massachusetts and connecticut area (yin, 2013; stavros & westberg, 2009; tellis, 1997). results using a qualitative single-case study the researcher explored the female millennial knowledge worker and the effect participative management techniques had on productivity and turnover using the embedded units of analysis of management review, organizational review, and participant review to understand this population. data was collected through a participant interview, performance feedback, and direct observation. the interview guide is noted in appendix a, and the confidential participant agreed to provide a current performance review along with allowing the researcher to observe her during a workplace meeting. the purposeful single case participant was confirmed to meet the study criteria by using a check and control process within a recruitment email and followed up with the opening interview questions (brinkmann & kvale, 2015). the participant was interviewed on april 2, 2015 and observed in a workplace meeting on april 9, 2015. the observation, guided by the observation guide in appendix c, of the participant occurred during a usa-domestic, multi-location, teleconference, meeting with 5 attendees. the participant also provided her annual performance report to support the triangulation of data using the data review guide noted in appendix b. the interview guide (appendix a), data review guide (appendix b), and the observation guide (appendix c) noted from paros (2015) were used to ensure that the study’s main question supported by six topic questions always remained the focus of the data collection. to enhance study credibility, the topic questions applied with-in methods triangulation to explore both the positive and negative aspects of managerial styles associated with female millennial knowledge workers (bryman, n.d.). pattern matching was used to identify common themes during the interview and repetition was applied to triangulate those themes in both the observation and performance review data (yin, 2009; ryan & bernard, 2003). included from paros (2015), the figure 2 chart details the number of times a theme was repeated during the interview. the themes that were repeated several times during the interview included: work environments, feedback, recognition, timely communication, and employee development. figure 2. interview themes based on the number of repeat occurrences. themes that were repeated several times during the interview advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 86 themes that triangulated across each data collection technique: the interview, the performance review, and the observation were understood to influence the productivity or turnover of the female millennial knowledge worker. employee development and timely communication were the two themes that triangulated across all three data collection techniques identified to influence productivity (topic questions q1, q2, and q3). employee development was noted as all aspects where the participant looked for support regarding development and growth. timely communication was seen to be a requirement for prompt communication. feedback, working environment, and employee development were the three themes that triangulated across all three data collection techniques identified to influence turnover (topic questions q4, q5, and q6). in addition to the above definition of employee development, feedback was noted as a requirement for performance based feedback. the working environment included all aspects where the participant considered her direct manager to be propagating either a constructive or destructive working culture. table 2. triangulated themes using the interview, observation, and performance review data. themes identified by topic question topic question interview themes performance review data review themes observation data review themes productivity questions themes that triangulated in all three forms of data collection: employee development and timely communication topic question q1. what types of management behaviors encourage female millennial knowledge worker productivity? recognition feedback working environment feedback employee development timely communication working environment timely communication employee development topic question q2. what types of management behaviors discourage female millennial knowledge worker productivity? feedback timely communication working environment feedback employee development recognition timely communication timely communication topic question q3. what things can a manager do to encourage female millennial knowledge worker productivity? feedback timely communication employee development working environment recognition not applicable not applicable turnover questions themes that triangulated in all three forms of data collection: feedback, working environment, and employee development topic question q4. what types of management behaviors encourage female millennial knowledge worker turnover? timely communication feedback working environment timely communication feedback recognition employee development working environment no themes identified topic question q5. what types of management behaviors discourage female millennial knowledge worker turnover? working environment feedback employee development feedback working environment employee development topic question q6.what things can a manager do to discourage female millennial knowledge worker turnover? recognition feedback employee development working environment not applicable not applicable the effect participative management techniques had on the productivity and turnover by applying the three units of analysis: management review, organizational review, and participant review was illustrated in this study of the female millennial knowledge worker. understanding the population of female millennial knowledge workers will support women’s advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 87 productivity in the workplace, which contributes to fiscal strength (barney, 2004; daft, 2004; ouchi & price, 1978). the researcher’s findings from this study suggest that participative management theories, like william ouchi’s theory z, can be extended to the female millennial knowledge worker population. the results of this research propose that the management techniques of employee development and timely communication influence the productivity of the female millennial knowledge worker. also, the management techniques of feedback, working environment, and employee development influence the turnover of the female millennial knowledge worker. discussion and conclusion participative management techniques that are used to achieve long term organizational benefits by facilitating employee performance through loyalty and involvement are noted to focus on the majority population ignoring the female population (davidson, timo, & wang, 2010; angermeier et al., 2009; pinkovitz et al., ouchi & price, 1978). alienating the female millennial knowledge worker by allowing poor management practices could affect american businesses with higher turnover and productivity challenges that accumulate to 30 percent of the lost employees salary (kaifi et al., 2012; synar & maiden, 2012; nishikawa, 2011; davidson et al., 2010;). managers with female millennial knowledge workers as employees should invest in employee development to increase productivity and decrease turnover, which can be accomplished by offering training, mentoring, and engaging work assignments. in addition, managers should provide timely feedback to this population of employees in order to encourage productivity. another practical application of the findings in this research show that managers should provide timely feedback coupled with cultivating a positive and productive work environment to minimize turnover of the female millennial knowledge worker. the researcher conducted this study looking to extend participative management theory, which was limited by a majority focus, to include the population of female millennial knowledge workers. construct validity, internal validity, external validity, and reliability were used to establish the quality and reduce researcher bias in this study (yin, 2013). multiple sources of data, such as, performance reviews, interview responses, and participant observation were used to establish construct validity while data triangulation used to identify repeatable patterns supported internal and external validity (bryman, n.d.). reliability was maintained in this study through the application of rigid research practices and adherence to the interview guide, the data collection guide, and the observation guide. this study was limited by a focus on the female millennial knowledge worker and did not consider ethnic or social position. this study was not a comparative study and did not extend to male workers. in addition, the nature of this general case study included a focus on extending theory rather than representing a universe, sample, or population (yin, 2013). a single case method was adequate to answer the research questions of this study and this study was limited by sample size. resultantly, this study explored the effect of participative management techniques on the female millennial knowledge worker, and was limited by its intent only to extend participative management theory. future researchers could expand on the themes identified in this study to consider industry, business structure, organization size, and type of work performed by the female millennial knowledge worker. also, consideration for a larger sample of the female millennial population could consider geographic location, social levels, and cultural communities. lastly, employing additional research methods like a survey or experiment design could be incorporated into future research to quantify the effect participative management has on the productivity and turnover of the female millennial knowledge worker. references anantatmula, v., & shrivastav, b. 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(2010). business research methods (8th ed.), mason, oh: south-western. microsoft word hoffman_building_leadership_from_within_the_ranks.doc advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 144 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 144-152, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper building leadership from within the ranks: leadership fellow initiative regina umpstead, holly hoffman, and dale-elizabeth pehrsson regina umpstead, educational leadership department, central michigan university, phone: 989-774-7325, email: umpst1r@cmich.edu holly hoffman, counseling and special education department, central michigan university, phone: 989-774-1498, email: gerki1hh@cmich.edu dale-elizabeth pehrsson, dean of college of education and human services, central michigan university, phone: 989-774-6695, email: pehrs1d@cmich.edu accepted february 25, 2015 creative approaches in the field of leadership often yield positive results. this article highlights an example of how out of the box thinking with regard to building a strong leadership foundation in the area of higher education benefits a community of learners. within the field of education and human services, a new administrator facilitates innovative approaches to provide opportunities of empowerment for team members. the sustainable and abundant positive results are outlined in detail. keywords: higher education, mentorship, leadership, leadership fellow introduction “leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” warren g. bennis nestled in the northern edge of mid-michigan’s lower peninsula stands one of michigan’s lesser known but great universities: central michigan university (cmu). michigan is renowned for its excellent universities, particularly its public flagship institution—the university of michigan—and the first land grant college—michigan state university. however, cmu, founded in 1892 as a normal school, holds a long, proud tradition of educating outstanding teachers. today, cmu houses eight colleges that offer over 200 degree programs at the bachelor’s, master’s, specialist’s and doctoral levels, and a new medical college. the former normal school has morphed into a doctoral research university. cmu remains true to its original mission, and invests heavily in the quality of its students, faculty, and facilities, and because of this, one college is making great gains, the college of education and human services. in this article, the authors examine the leadership development program initiated by the new dean of the college of education and human services at cmu wherein she mentors one tenured faculty member each year as a leadership fellow. they discuss the leadership fellow initiative within the context of the educational leadership and mentoring literature, explains the conception of and motivation for the leadership fellow position, explicates its goals, and details the experiences of the first two fellows who participated in the program. leadership literature leadership is a process wherein leaders influence others through persuasion and inducements to follow them. to be successful, leaders offer a clear vision of the goals of the organization, espouse a set of core values to support the vision to guide the organization’s choices and actions, provide a vision and implement a plan to make things happen (locke, 2003). successful leaders capitalize on their social influence within their organization to win supporters, build coalitions, stir emotions, negotiate deals, and mend fences (brehm & kassin, 1996; collins, chrisler, & quina, 1998). generative leadership conceptualizes leadership as a collaborative effort in which leaders empower others to accomplish their goals. in it, leaders focus on establishing caring relationships with others in order to enhance their protégé’s self-esteem and leadership capabilities (sagaria, 1988). this type of leadership can be realized through mentoring relationships. this is also consistent with feminist leadership styles, which typically contain a strong ethic of caring and connection and use voice and influence to inspire others to work towards common goals or the mission of the organization (colflesh, 2000; isaac, 2009). mentorship advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 145 although many formal faculty mentorship programs exist, mentorship for leadership positions in academe is typically conducted in an informal manner (moore, 1982). in mentoring relationships, experienced higher education administrators serve as mentors who guide and support less experienced administrators or faculty members (aka mentees) by providing career and psychosocial support (cullen & luna, 1993). career functions typically include the practical aspects of doing the work and learning the culture of the organization, so mentees can advance within the organization while psychosocial support focuses on the individual efficacy and sense of identity of mentees (kram, 1988). mentors support mentees’ learning of new skills by providing feedback and by offering opportunities for career development through greater involvement within the academic community (cullen & luna, 1993; hill & ragland, 1995; moore, 1982). mentoring is particularly important for the development of women leaders. until recent decades, there were few women in influential positions within institutions of higher education (cullen & luna, 1993; earnst, 1982; sagaria, 1988), and often women had not actively planned their careers (hill & ragland, 1995). even today, although women earn over 50 percent of the ph.d.s awarded in the u.s., they represent only 38 percent of all college faculty and only 33 percent at the more prestigious doctoral granting institutions (mason, 2011). at central michigan university, the institution where the authors of this article work, 28.9 percent of full professors are female (razenberger, 2014), and there are only three females out of the eight academic deans who lead the colleges on campus. many barriers to female advancement persist. common barriers against female educational leaders include historical myths expressed as stereotypical and negative images of women and cultural expectations. these myths and images have a limiting impact on women’s access to leadership roles. males dominate key leadership positions. women lack knowledge of male ways of being and their political savvy. this can promote weaker career positioning, limit their mentoring opportunities, stymie their mobility, and accelerate bias against women (hill & ragland, 1995). chrisler, herr, and murstein (1998) explain that “lingering stereotypes that portray men as leaders and women as followers still affect women’s opportunities to become faculty leaders …” (p. 197). despite these challenges, mentoring remains essential because where present, it has made a difference in the careers of women leaders. some researchers have noted that same gender mentoring can be particularly impactful (cullen & luna 1993; earnst, 1982; kelly & marin, 1998). mentoring provides support as faculty members transition into administrative roles, such as department chairpersons, associate deans, or deans. these transitions can be difficult because successful administrators utilize different skills from those skills employed by successful faculty members. successful professors engage in extensive research activities, make quick decisions about student issues, passionately pursue causes of interest and service, speak to limited audiences such as students and colleagues, and have the ability to limit their exposure to individuals with whom they prefer to work. perlutter (2009) asserts that when moving from professor to dean a faculty member must navigate complex and often-time consuming organizational protocols in decision-making, develop the ability to work with a broad range of individuals, and learn to target their messages to a variety of audiences. they also begin to limit their research agendas, deans as chief executive offices display three domains of competence to perform successfully: “analytical competence, to recognize and formulate problems to be worked on; interpersonal competence, to build and maintain various kinds of relationships and groups; and emotional competence, to handle the emotional demands of the managerial role itself” (schein, 1985, p. 171, as cited in wolverton, et al., 2001, p. 101). moreover, new deans are typically underprepared to handle the complex challenges of their roles. these roles involve managing limited financial resources, dealing with external accountability pressures, disciplining ineffective faculty, and an understanding the changing educational environment that requires constant updating of curricula and programs and an integration of technology in order to meet the demands of the job market and the needs of the students (wolverton, et al., 2001). senior leadership within institutions of higher learning should play a crucial role in supporting the leadership development of faculty. bennet and shayner (1988) argue that the most important thing senior leaders can do is to develop a learning environment on campuses where leadership development can take place as individuals question, form values, and develop intellectual strengths. this will provide faculty members with the opportunity to use their knowledge to make foundational decisions, form commitments, and learn to trust their own judgments. next, senior administrators must articulate and follow their institutional vision and mission. they set the example for effective leadership; this example goes across and beyond the boundaries of campus. finally, when promoting female leadership, effective leaders promote a culture that rewards risk-taking, provides structured learning experiences, and appoints women to significant visible roles throughout the institution. designating women for committees and assigning them special roles and opportunities helps them to develop leadership skills and broadens their exposure to critical issues influencing the campus at large (earnst, 1982). campus committee work provides faculty members with insight into institutional operations from a legal, fiscal, and policy standpoint. this provides faculty members with experience completing large-scale group tasks that require working with a variety of people and producing reports. they also promote networking opportunities (chrisler, herr, & murstein, 1998). in addition, senior leadership should model mentoring and explicitly discuss its importance in establishing institutional norms (cullen & luna, 1993). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 146 early mid-career mentoring is particularly important because tenured professors have typically established their competence in their profession and developed their academic identity. they often use this time to reassess, reflect and expand career paths. support at this stage promotes a faculty member’s sense of well-being and continued professional growth (kram, 1988). overall, women benefit from workplace cultures that consider “individual fit” over organizational fit (cullen & luna, 1993). the new dean’s perspective: an idea is born and a program begins in the summer of 2012, i arrived to begin my post as the new dean for the college of education and human services at central michigan university. after meeting with the provost, other deans, senior leaders and the department chairs in my college, i learned about an assumption on campus that there was a leadership vacuum in my college. i knew this was untrue, for during my first few weeks at cmu i had met with many individuals from my college. i was impressed. what i gleaned from these many meetings and conversations was this: there were actually many faculty and professional staff members who were willing to serve in leadership roles; indeed, they were already doing so. what i also observed was the past three years had taken a leadership toll. because of the sudden death of the permanent dean, the interim status of the former dean and the three years of “grieving” and “waiting” for the next dean to be selected, many things were put on hold within the college until the next permanent dean arrived. as a result, that there had been very little investment in faculty, staff and leadership development. there were no programs offered. investment in leadership development and enhancement both by internal means and external trainings were limited. so, there was no vacuum of willing individuals, but instead, a dearth of support, resources, and training. so, as a new dean i asked, why not create a college dean’s office leadership fellow program? this program might promote the study and advancement of individuals who could refine leadership with their own particular focus, a focus that might enhance their programs, departments, the college or cmu in general. i did not want management or administration to be the only focus. what i thought was this... there are so many ways to be a leader, faculty could study administration for sure, but they could also focus on innovative program development, bolstering scholarly recognition, promoting social justice, refining curriculum and enhancing programming, entering the national leadership arena even more, and jumpstarting external funding development. i saw many faculty members who were leaders over my career in the academy. and as i look back, i was a leader as a faculty member and at that time i had no interest in higher education administration, yet i brought back richness to my department, programs and students at my former universities and i helped advance the reputation of my universities. so i thought with resources to support the efforts of our college, faculty who are emerging leaders in this college could craft something that would be very successful and enhance our college reputation across the campus and nationwide. after discussing this with the financial officer of my college (to secure funding) and the provost (to secure support), we developed the first leadership fellow program in summer of 2012. so far, we have interned two fellows and as a result, a new department chair was born, and a new scholarship support office is being launched… a very good investment, indeed. we have now installed two new fellows for the next academic year. overall, there are costs, but the investments have not been exorbitant. the dean's office provides funding for a course release for half time for two consecutive semesters. we invest in materials, books, supplies and graduate assistantship help. we also target intensive trainings that fellows attend (american council on education, harvard, hers, etc.) and fund those. these are investments in the future of our college and cmu. thus far, we have leaders who have connected across the cmu campus, the michigan department of education (mde) and the nation. leaders have made multiple local, university, regional and national presentations related to our leadership projects. more importantly, our college is valuing leadership in new ways and "leadership" is part of our everyday vocabulary, thinking and planning. we are seeing a culture shift. i think the message is clear: college leadership invests in faculty and staff leadership development. and as a result we expect thought and action leaders to emerge and mentor others along this path. an inaugural fellow steps forth: opportunity knocks in year one there was a buzz in my office that our newly hired dean of education and human services wanted to see me. i have to admit, i was a little nervous at the thought. she just got here… why does she need to talk to me? what did i do? i was pleasantly surprised when i was greeted, “so what would you think about being our inaugural leadership fellow starting in the fall?” our new dean asked. i wasn’t able to hide my thoughts of confusion and panic as i replied politely, “what is that?” although honored by her question, i thought clearly this new leader has been misinformed! she was asking me to become a leader? my fears were quickly calmed as i learned the details of her vision for this new and exciting opportunity. throughout that conversation, we discussed the importance of building leadership capacity within academic environments. highlights of this exchange included the following: (a) current challenges faced with regard to building leadership capacity; (b) potential within our environments to create new knowledge and opportunities through the fellowship; (c) components of a successful fellow opportunity and goal setting; (d) value of creative thinking and unique approaches to leadership development; and (e) outcomes and necessary resources for the leadership fellow program. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 147 as we walked through the possibilities of this opportunity and determined our course of action, i looked ahead to this yearlong adventure. the agreed upon set of goals included the following tasks: (a) develop a leadership network of support for faculty and staff (related to teaching/advising, scholarship, and service); (b) examine the leadership needs of faculty and staff members; (c) seek out and highlights exemplary leadership efforts within the college with regard to service, teaching, scholarship; (d) identify opportunities to support faculty and staff in multiple areas of leadership at program, departmental, college, university and professional levels; (e) support mentorship efforts of junior (pre-tenure) faculty members; (f) support mentorship efforts of staff and teaching faculty members; (g) bridge and communicate leadership development within the college and university, as well as within state, national, and international endeavors; (h) participate in college-wide meetings and events while under the mentorship of existing leaders; (i) assist with and develops sustainable programs related to leadership initiatives; (j) work in concert with current leadership regarding college leadership endeavors; (k) assist with encouraging, promoting, screening and recommending future leadership fellows; (l) identify, plan, develop and evaluate progress of personal leadership goals; (m) collaborate with leaders, faculty and staff on scholarship related to leadership; and (n) recommend leadership initiatives for future strategic planning. soon the adventure began. as the inaugural leadership fellow, i was fortunate to have the unique opportunity to gain insight regarding many of the tasks facing leaders. these evolved into unique experiences in the areas of task force and committee involvement, building processes and infrastructure for sustainable efforts within the college, professional development, building of partnerships, and support of dean’s office initiatives. for example, attendance at regular meetings of the dean’s leadership council where personnel, budgetary, strategic planning, and student issues were discussed on a regular basis were exceptional learning opportunities. in addition, having active roles in various task forces, committees, and college wide initiatives have provided new perspectives and a more broad view of issues facing our college’s students, staff, and faculty, and the university in its entirety. task force and committee involvement increased involvement with various college task forces as well as university and college committee work opened new opportunities for exchanges and collaboration across the campus and college. i was able to examine issues and operations in a new light as various discussions centered on initiatives to optimally support cmu students and efficiently reach a multitude of goals. for example, three college task forces including the scholarship support task force, human services task force, and clinical partnership and practice committee were convened during my position as leadership fellow. these three focused initiatives addressed a variety of topics – all leading to one result centered on the best preparation of our students, faculty, and staff for ideal education and employment supports. the scholarship support task force brought together individuals to address the growing needs of faculty as they strive to conduct research within their disciplines. the human services task force was comprised of representatives of each of the college’s human services programs such as apparel merchandising and design, child development, counseling, dietetics, early childhood development and learning, family studies, gerontology, interior design, interdisciplinary leadership, nutrition, outdoor and environmental recreation, recreation and event management, and therapeutic recreation. these representatives worked together to conduct a human services summit to gather vital data about the changing human services fields as we prepare to educate learners in the year 2023. finally, the clinical partnership and practice committee is made up of representatives that are involved with extensive field experiences in teacher education coursework. leaders in the field such as teachers, clinicians, faculty, staff, and students work together within this group to determine optimal relationships, agreements, and program components of top-notch clinical experiences. involvement with several committees within the college also resulted in extensive exchanges and increase of knowledge level and awareness. as a participant in the dean’s advisory council, i was able to interact with department chairpersons and program directors as we engaged in strategic planning and decision-making. other committees such as the college academic technologies group, nash family professional development endowment committee, website design committee, and the associate dean search committee combined to provide a well-rounded view of the not only the college resources, but initiatives to best meet the needs of our existing student, faculty, and staff population. other committee work at the university level due to my position as the leadership fellow included a place at the table in committee work such as cmu enrollment management and recruitment subcommittee, summer enrollment, leadership council, and leadership caucus. each of these committees was charged with university wide initiatives such as determining issues related to a decline in summer enrollment, factors impacting the interdisciplinary leadership programs, and optimal recruitment and outreach opportunities throughout the state of michigan and beyond. building sustainable efforts one of the conversations with our new dean revolved around building sustainable efforts within that would positively highlight and support the activities and needs of the students, faculty, and staff. as the inaugural leadership fellow, i was given the unique opportunity to help shape these efforts with the goal of an infrastructure that would be sustainable throughout time, while simultaneously being flexible enough to remain resilient with the changing goals and needs within the college. several different projects were a result of the initial advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 148 planning. many of them remain today, and others have adapted to best needs the existing needs while being mindful of the future demands. a review of feedback for example, feedback gathered from college’s team members provided momentum to begin an initiative to construct a leadership library within the new leadership fellow office. this library boasts over 300 titles centered on the theme of effective leadership. faculty, staff, and students are encouraged to both borrow and contribute to the resources available in this venue. since the inaugural leadership fellow was an appointment position, it quickly became apparent that a recruitment and application process needed to be constructed to sustain this year-long position within the dean’s office. this opportunity allowed me to educate others about the positive experiences i had been exposed to, as well as share the benefits to not only individual faculty in the position, but to the current and future students, staff, and faculty of the college and university wide. funding sources for both research and teaching initiatives of the college faculty members was consistently shared as a concern and need across the five academic departments within it. in response to these requests and in planning for the future, college faculty scholarship grants and best practices in pedagogy awards were initiated through requirement, an application, and a review process. many tenured/tenure line faculty members within the college applied for one course release and $1000 through the scholarship grants, and $2000 through the teaching support award. this funding proved to be successful as faculty shared the outreach through professional venues such as conferences, workshops, and publications. innovative teaching practices took place in college classrooms across the university as faculty celebrated the availability of these new endeavors. in addition, another sustainable event that was initiated during this inaugural year is the chippewa camp project. our university has a proud tradition of working with the saginawchippewa nation and being a chippewa has a long history for our students and alum. we wanted to build on our outreach and summer camp programs. what began as a conversation about the importance of reaching out to more middle level students about the benefits of a college education and increased accessibility to college for all students resulted in an exciting hands on opportunity for potential future chippewas. working collaboratively across the university, a proposal has been funded to support this week long science and math camp for middle schoolers in underserved and higher-risk areas of the state. multiple conversations about flexible usage of space within our main college building have occurred in the last two years. one of those changes in space allowed me to participate with a team regarding converting the kromer instructional materials center into the new college learning commons. within this team, we were able to gather data, engage in community outreach, and dialogue about the possibilities within a learning space for utmost efficiency and productivity for all involved with the college team. the results include a higher level of accessibility to technology for our students and increased sharing of knowledge for our faculty, staff, and students. the learning and leading award is another beneficial experience that began with my role in the dean’s office. this began with a teacher education and professional development faculty member with an interest in highlighting cmu undergraduate students that excelled in the field placement components of their course work and volunteer endeavors. the result is a college wide award to not only honor our students and the positive contributions they make to their communities and professions, but to build a sustainable cohort of graduates to assist with mentoring and connections between alumni and current students. other shorter-term activities that were included in the fellow opportunity included the opportunity to collect and disseminate professional development and funding opportunities to our faculty, promoting the veteran’s resource center activities to support all students within our college, and fulfilling the role as a college representative at many different events including new faculty orientation, scholarship award venues, and multiple campus proceedings. building of partnerships building positive and mutually beneficial partnerships was a consistent opportunity as the leadership fellow. i was asked to represent the dean’s office in several different discussions that centered on reaching shared goals and possible collaboration opportunities. for example, i was able to attend several meetings between potential funders and community representatives. woven together with the shared goal of increased opportunities for the community at large as well as cmu students, staff, and faculty, many important and groundbreaking discussions too place. from education administrators, ceos, and philanthropists, as well as the michigan’s deans alliance, all conversations were dedicated to building a more collaborative future between these individuals or entities with reciprocally valuable results. professional development another area of enhancement for me in this role was increased accessibility and funding for professional development. for example, i traveled to the academic chairperson’s conference and was able to participate in the new chair alliance. this opportunity allowed me to discover more insight about the roles and responsibilities that face department chairs, as well as network with chairs from all over the world. initially i was not open to applying for a chairperson position within the college, however after this conference and completing the year as a leadership fellow, i was ready for the excitement and challenges ahead. within my college, i was able to participate in a weekly writing group that greatly assisted with goal setting and writing advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 149 productivity, as well as increasing my personal knowledge base about quality writing components and available supports. within the state, i was privileged to attend the nbc news education nation detroit summit. this opportunity brought together educators, political stakeholders, parents, and students to discuss the current challenges and successes of our educational systems. the most life and career changing professional development opportunity i was honored to attend was the exemplary two week harvard graduate school of education management development program. this intensive program was filled with a wide variety of sessions including presentations by higher education leaders throughout the country, small group work, networking, and resource sharing. support of the dean’s office initiatives lastly, holding the position of leadership fellow allowed me to take part in a multitude of events hosted by the dean’s office. i was able to organize and assist with the implementation of a special presentation by the dean, navigating leadership in higher education: things they don’t tell women. this event was well attended and reached capacity quickly. i was able to complete a needs assessment, plan, and co-present at the first college pre-tenure luncheon with the goal of mentoring new faculty through the reappointment, tenure, and promotion process. another college event i had the pleasure of presenting was the retirees appreciation luncheon. i assisted in the planning of this event full of diverse leaders that built the rich history of programs in the college. i was also invited to represent the leadership fellow position in a higher education course and present information about my current leadership fellow role. other events i was able to attend include the staff appreciation breakfast, the student organization luncheon, homecoming representation and festivities, and the college’s tr johnson speaker series. summary a review of the activities i was able to participate in reveals a busy and meaningful year full of new and exciting opportunities. i am honored to be the inaugural leadership fellow in the college of education and human services. this experience, whit ought hesitation, provided with incredibly valuable experiences i would not trade for a moment. after the experience, i was confident that i could meet the high level of challenges and standards as a department chair. the counseling and special education department set a goal of selecting a leader to join the team with strong teaching, research, service, and administrative experiences as a new chairperson. while i was originally reluctant to consider this opportunity when first approached, after completing an inaugural leadership fellow experience, i was ready. new to this role as chairperson, i am challenged by learning many new things, as well as increasing my knowledge level of budgetary and the other administrative tasks at hand. a posting in the on hiring blog from the chronicle of higher education highlighted that many individuals who serve as department chairpersons have limited to non-existent training to prepare them for the responsibilities required for this role (evans, 2012). the leadership fellow experience assisted me in reaching this goal. following the leadership path: a fellow takes on year two i was immediately intrigued by the possibility of becoming a leadership fellow when our new dean introduced our first leadership fellow during our fall “all college” meeting prior to the 2012-2013 academic year. i thought it would be an excellent opportunity to learn about how the college operates and what it takes to lead it while contributing to the success of various initiatives during the year. at the end of the first year of the dean’s tenure, my opportunity came when i responded to the invitation for applications to serve as the second leadership fellow. as the second leadership fellow, i was chosen based on my application to provide leadership for the development of the college scholarship support office. during the fall of 2012, the dean had assembled a scholarship support office task force with membership from across the college to identify the needs of faculty members regarding scholarly and creative activity. the task force was asked to comprehensively review the culture and climate of scholarship and creative activity within our college and to offer recommendations based on their assessment. they gave their recommendations to the dean in february 2013. although the report contained many recommendations, two key initiatives were to (1) encourage department chairs to make scholarship and creative activity a priority; (2) increase internal and external marketing of scholarship and creative activities within our college. i had been a member of this task force, so i was familiar with the recommendations. in coordination with our dean, i set goals for her year based on position description and the recommendations of the scholarship support office task force. my primary goals for the year were as follows: (a) gain college level leadership experience; (b) develop the scholarship support office; (c) complete a scholarship project relating to leadership; and (d) attend a leadership development conference. these goals were to be accomplished in a variety of ways. my arrangement with the dean was flexible, and i was able to work with several staff members within the office. for the position, i committed to be on campus and work out of the dean’s office two days a week. with so many scheduled activities, however, many weeks three or four days were necessary to fulfill the responsibilities. i had bi-weekly meetings with the dean and informal meetings with the associate dean to support the initiatives i was leading and to receive mentorship. i was also able to work with the two graduate assistants in the office. one assisted with the design of advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 150 the faculty development website and the other organized the writing retreat. leadership experience serving as leadership fellow provided me with the opportunity to gain an understanding of college level leadership responsibilities and develop a broader perspective into the work of the faculty and students within the college. our college consists of five departments which cluster many program areas, the departments include: counseling and special education, educational leadership, human environmental studies, teacher education and professional development, and recreation, parks, and leisure. these encompass the full range of educational experiences from early child development through higher education, and span from undergraduate through doctoral study. it also addresses a variety of other majors such as dietetics, gerontology, interior design, and therapeutic recreation. each department has its own unique culture, mission, and values. to gain an understanding of college level leadership, i attended the weekly dean’s leadership council/dean’s advisory council (dac) meetings. this experience gave me a sense of the important initiatives taking place on campus and within the college. i was able to contribute to discussions about how to capitalize on opportunities and handle problems. i also gained a broader perspective of how to better service students by participating in meetings across campus such as the interviews for the assistant directors for the office of student success, statewide meetings of the directors and representatives of teacher education programs, and the michigan public deans council. after the director of cmu’s honor’s college approached the dac to host a night of the 200+ member honors 100 class, i was able to practice my leadership skills by organizing the event. for our college-wide honors 100 night, i coordinated the participation of all five departments in the conceptualization, planning, and execution of the experience for first year students. this occurred within my first six weeks of assuming the position, so i had to learn quickly how to work with the department chairs to develop an idea for the night, negotiate the schedule of events, and handle the logistics of the event. it tested my ability to facilitate using consensus, provide departments with the leeway to develop their own segment of the program, and handle the logistics for the 200+ students and 50 faculty and staff volunteers. the process proved challenging and successful. scholarship and scholarship support i spent the majority of my time as leadership fellow developing of the office of scholarship support. a major part of this responsibility was managing the college’s grants that had been put in place by the leadership fellow the previous year. the three grants—scholarship, pedagogy, and a nash awards—required the processing of new applications and follow-up on the awardees from the previous years. i tracked the progress of previous award winners, revised and sent out new calls for applications, set up review panels to assess the quality of the 2013-2014 applicants, assisted with the decision process, and communicated with all applicants about the results. i also expanded the earlier established leadership library. year two initiatives included the creation of a research roundtable series where college faculty members share their scholarly and creative projects with other faculty members, inviting guest speakers to educate faculty regarding scholarly writing and grant writing, as well as facilitating a day long writing retreat. a new faculty development section was added to the college website to provide faculty members with a place to easily find the resources available to them at cmu to advance their scholarship agenda. these web pages have information about scholarship, instructional and professional development, mentorship, external resources for research software training, recommended professional conferences, and suggested readings and websites regarding writing. in addition, i attended the hers bryn mawr institute leade during the summer to extend my learning about leadership in higher education institutions. through that experience i honed key leadership skills such as negotiation, budgeting, and gained insight into my own leadership style and strengths. i also developed a national network of aspiring female leaders within academe. connection to the leadership literature. one of my significant ongoing experiences during my year as leadership fellow was serving on the yearlong mentorship task force. the task force consisted of faculty members from each department within the college, me as leadership fellow, and a graduate student from the dean’s office. this experience provided me with the opportunity to delve into the mentorship literature. we identified the need for mentorship in the specific areas of teaching, scholarship, and service because they relate to tenure and promotion but also to general career management. my time as leadership fellow provided me with great career mentoring. during my interview for the position, i explained to the dean, associate dean, and then leadership fellow that i am a first generation faculty member. now i haven’t read any literature on this phenomenon, but i have noticed that my colleagues who have family members in academe or who study higher education as their field know a great deal more about the structures of and opportunities within the academy. they understand the significance of bodies such as the academic senate and the graduate council and positions such as provost and omsbud. they can identify a clear career path that will take them from where they currently are to where they eventually want to be within the institution. working as leadership fellow allowed me to interact with the head of our research and sponsored programs, our president, other deans from colleges of education around the state, and to hear the concerns of our institution’s provost and registrar. although i haven’t identified which leadership step i will take next, i am aware of more options within the institution. i plan to follow my advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 151 mentors’ advice that i earn my promotion to full professor before assuming a university-wide leadership role. one thing that is intriguing about our college’s leadership fellow initiative thus far is that it has only involved female faculty members. i know that our dean began the program with the intention of developing leadership within the college, not specific to gender. it has simply worked out the fellows and the dean have all been women. yet, this is not a bad thing because the mentorship literature validates that mentorship relationships are particularly important for women. for me personally, i grew in my understanding of how the college and the dean’s office operates, and i broadened my view of what i might be able to accomplish as a faculty member. i saw faculty advocate for themselves and their programs in constructive ways and the dean get behind their efforts. i learned that the dean is eager to support faculty ideas and initiatives. i witnessed how she supported faculty who were in difficult situations by employing creative solutions where available and how she held others accountable for dysfunctional behavior when needed. i feel more connected to central michigan university and more comfortable building my network within the institution and asking the dean for help with what i want to accomplish. i plan to adopt the mantra of nothing ventured; nothing gained as i leave for my sabbatical and return to the faculty ranks in a year. during my sabbatical i will continue my study of leadership, but within a k-12 context, as i travel across the country to join the efforts of a network of charter schools. in particular, i would like to focus on leading in light of an organization’s culture and the need for change. although i’ve noticed immediate changes in myself as a result of this experience such as my confidence in my ability to lead an organization, my knowledge of the workings of and key positions in a higher education institution, and an acknowledgement of my need to be more vocal about my opinions and ideas, i believe that the long term benefits of serving as leadership fellow will be extensive both for myself and for central michigan university. it is fitting that it is the college of education and human services that is taking the lead in this leadership development initiative because our college is dedicated to the service of others and the betterment of their lives. this can best be accomplished by investing in the lives of our faculty who in turn pour into the lives of our students. this program sets a high bar and sends a clear signal that effective leadership matters. it also provides an opportunity for hands on learning for future leaders. conclusion when she arrived on campus for the 2012-2013 academic year, our new dean established a leadership fellow position where one tenured faculty member would receive a one-year half-time appointment in the dean’s office to work on college-wide leadership initiatives. to date, two college faculty members have served in this role and have led several leadership initiatives within the college. during year one, the first leadership fellow learned about the detailed responsibilities of a department chairperson by participating in various committees and task forces across campus. additionally, she built sustainable programs such as the leadership library, two faculty grant programs and a sustainable student leadership award. her leadership capabilities were advanced through the participation in professional development such as new department chairperson training. near the end of the experience, she was elected chairperson for her department and now serves in that role. in year two, the succeeding leadership fellow assumed the position with an eye to develop the resources supporting faculty scholarship within the college. to this end, she created a faculty development webpage that consolidates available resources in one easy to access location, managed the collegewide faculty pedagogy, scholarship and nash awards. she established research roundtables where faculty members share their scholarship and creative endeavors. she also participated in several college-wide initiatives such as the dean’s leadership council, the mentorship taskforce, and college honors 100 night. at the university level she helped select assistant directors for the new office of student support, and state-wide she participated in meetings relating to the future of teacher education. in the position she grew in her understanding of the administrative functions and structures within the university and in her own confidence and skills as a leader. in the end she decided to adopt a nothing ventured, nothing gained attitude to motivate her to share her opinions and ideas and to undertake new initiatives. she took a sabbatical the next year and plans to earn a promotion to full professor when she returns. the leadership fellow position will continue in future years. currently, two new leadership fellows are working in the dean’s office. they are focusing on bringing the mentorship and taskforce initiatives to fruition by working to implement the faculty recommendations, thus building upon gains made in the areas of leadership development and scholarship support during the first two years. the future looks bright within our college at cmu. references brunner, c. c. & grogan, m. 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(2006). mentoring latino school leaders. leadership, 36(1), 12-14. sobehart, h.c. 2009. women leading education across the continents: sharing spirit, fanning the flame. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. u.s. department of education (usdoe), national center for education statistics. (2008). schools and staffing survey. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/ u.s. department of education (usdoe), national center for education statistics. (2012). schools and staffing survey. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/ wood, j.t. (2009). feminist standpoint theory. in s. w. littlejohn, & k. a. foss (eds.). encyclopedia of communication theory (pp. 397-99). thousand oaks, ca: sage. sage. retrieved from www.payscale.com/research/us/country=united_states/ salary microsoft word hannum_women_leaders_within_higher_education.doc advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 65 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 6575, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women leaders within higher education in the united states: supports, barriers, and experiences of being a senior leader kelly m. hannum, shannon m. muhly, pamela s. shockley-zalabak, and judith s. white kelly m. hannum: center for creative leadership, kent, email: hannumk@ccl.org shannon m. muhly: center for creative leadership, kent, email: muhlys@ccl.org pamela s. shockley-zalabak: university of colorado colorado springs, email: pshockle@uccs.edu judith s. white: higher education resource services, university of denver, email: judith.white@du.edu accepted february 24, 2014 fundamental change is underway in higher education requiring more leaders and a different type of leadership at all levels. however, statistics indicate the women are under represented at the senior-most levels. our research focused on 35 women at the senior-most levels of institutions of higher education and explored their journey into senior leadership roles and their experience of being a leader in higher education today. semi-structured interviews were conducted, coded, and analyzed. included is a statistical comparison of the experiences of white women and women of color. this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the experiences of women in senior leadership positions in higher education. the women leaders in this study provide more detailed descriptions of the positive aspects of being in a leadership role than have been previously reported. the positive aspects of being in a leadership role are important to document in order to provide balanced perspective on the experiences of being a senior leader and a woman in higher education. keywords: women, senior leadership, race introduction fundamental change is underway in the united states higher education sector: (1) student enrollment is growing while student demographics are more diverse; (2) the population of faculty is growing and increasingly diverse; (3) the need for and cost of earning a degree is increasing and new business models for meeting that demand are emerging; (4) the types of institutions offering an advanced degree are changing (for example, more for-profit and online institutions); and (5) technologies are changing what is taught as well as how teaching and learning are accomplished (fusch & mrig, 2011; lennon, 2013; snyder & dillow, 2012; touchton, musil, & campbell, 2008). new forms of leadership and new leaders are called upon to navigate through these turbulent times. in this context of change and turbulence, our research focuses on women who have successfully reached senior leadership positions in order to understand the pathways to the top and how to better support women leaders on that journey. since 1979, women have been more than 50% of the enrolled students in higher education (snyder & dillow, 2012). in the early 1970’s, 11% of doctoral degrees were awarded to women, since 2005 women have earned more than 50% of doctoral degrees (snyder & dillow, 2012; wolfinger, 2008). most of this recent growth was among white women, and while there has been growth in the number of women of color earning degrees, that growth has been slower than that of white women (cook & kim, 2012). while the general outlook is promising in terms of the number of women earning advanced degrees, few women reach the senior-most leadership levels. the percentage of college and university presidents who are women rose only slightly from 23% in 2006 to 26% in 2012 (lennon, 2013). women faculty members continue to earn less, on average, than their male counterparts. women at doctoral institutions earn only 78% of what male faculty earns (aaup, 2011). the gap is narrower at two-year institutions where women earn 96% of what men earn (aaup, 2011). despite the salary gaps, the percentage of women in faculty roles is nearing 50% (lennon, 2013). the statistics clearly indicate that while there has been progress, there is much work to be done in creating equitable systems of development and opportunity. while the low numbers of women overall in senior roles at institutions of higher education is concerning, the number of women of color in these roles is advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 66 proportionally even lower, and more concerning (toutkoushian, 2007). the lack of diversity at the senior-most levels of higher education institutions limits the success of individuals, institutions, and the sector as a whole (hart, 2006). many compelling arguments about the benefits of higher numbers of women in senior leadership roles have been presented (dezso & ross, 2011; joy, carter, wagner, & narayanan, 2007). it is clear that advancing women in leadership roles is not something to be done solely to benefit women; it is in the best interest of institutions as well as society overall. as the baby boomer generation vacates leadership positions, there is a need for talented replacements. failing to recognize and cultivate talented women leaders for these positions reduces the pool from which replacements can be made. increasing the number of women leaders in higher education would also increase the number of and variety of role models for a wide range of professions (patton, 2009). most professionals begin their career at an institution of higher education. time spent earning one’s degree not only prepares one for his or her profession, it shapes one’s perception of a profession in terms of what is “normal” and what is possible within that profession. if, during the course of their educational experience, the senior-most leadership levels reflect a limited array of social identity groups, a consequence can be a perception of limited options in that field. the received message is one that signals “i don’t fit” or “no one like me makes it to the top.” the cultural importance of higher education is reflected in a recent report, “as microcosms of society, postsecondary institutions reflect, resist, and contribute to shaping norms of the larger culture in which they are situated” (ashe, 2011, p.3). the focus of the research described here was on understanding the experiences of senior women leaders within the context of higher education in order to identify experiences important in reaching top leadership levels as well as the challenges and benefits of the role. review of literature leadership approaches are expanding to include more plural and inclusive forms of leadership (denis, langley & sergi, 2012). according to marion and uhl-bien (2001) complex leadership is called for in complex organizations, and one might add in complex times. some scholars have posited that women, in general, may be better able to lead complex organizations (ritt, 2004). however, there are two downsides of these types of arguments. one is that focusing on individual characteristics reinforces a heroic leadership model and distracts from the growing understanding that leadership is a process and is often most effective when there is a diverse mix of skills and perspectives represented and able to work well together. another downside is that focusing on individual characteristics and determining which gender has more or less of the desired characteristics can reinforce unhelpful stereotypes. perhaps a more important focus for inquiry is understanding how to increase effective leadership and the variety of leaders required. some argue that there are fewer women at the top because fewer women desire to be there or have what it takes to succeed at higher levels of leadership. undoubtedly there are individual cases where that is true. equally true, however, is the counterpoint: that there are women who desire to be senior leaders and have the skills to do so, but face multiple challenges on their journey to the top. previous research has shown that informal exclusion, devaluation, and marginalization can function to exclude women from the academic enterprise (maranto & griffin, 2011; nguyen, 2012). boards of trustees are often male dominated and replacements are selected from their professional networks (ehrenberg & main, 2008). the networks tapped for these positions often do not always adequately represent a range of identity groups. previous research also suggests that adding one or two women may not be enough to reap the benefits of difference, and argue that a more substantial amount of representation is needed (konrad, kramer, & ekrut, 2008). in addition to structures and processes that reinforce traditional, outdated leadership models and expectations, our collective conceptions about leaders and leadership tend to continue to give preference to men (eagly & karau, 2002). according to evans, (2011, p. 62) “men are still viewed as ‘default leaders’ and women as ‘atypical leaders,’ with the perception that they violate accepted norms of leadership, no matter what the leadership behavior.” not being seen and not seeing oneself as a leader threatens the future of women leaders (christman, 2012). these forces coupled with a lack of senior role models for women create an unseen barrier for aspiring women leaders. “the higher a woman goes on the academic ladder, the fewer female colleagues she finds, the problem of finding mentors and supervisors becomes more acute the higher she advances” (glover, 2010). there also remains a double bind, in which women who are assertive are seen as too tough and not likable or not feminine, while women who are compassionate are seen as too soft and not a leader; this creates a no-win situation for some women (oakley, 2000). women must not be too much within or too far outside of social constructions of femininity; the consequence of doing so can be detrimental to the perceived competence of the woman’s leadership (eagly, johannesenschmidt, & van engen, 2003; eagly, makhijani, & klonsky, 1992; oakley, 2000). in addition to the intangible challenges related to identity and stereotypes, women tend to be assigned heavier course, service, and advising loads relative to their male counterparts (aguirre, 2000) reducing their availability and energy for higher profile work, including meaningful leadership roles. early formal leadership experiences provide the opportunity to see oneself as a leader, to build leadership skills, and for others to more clearly see his or her leadership potential. not engaging in leadership early in one’s career can create an experience gap that is cumulative, becoming most pronounced at the highest levels (jackson & leon, 2010; jackson & o’callaghan, 2009). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 67 increasing responsibilities in the workplace have not been coupled with decreased obligations for women on the home front. women still bear the burden of care and household responsibilities (hochschild & machung, 2012; wells, 2011). in a study of two generations of graduate students friedman (2013) found that the number of graduates, both men and women, who plan to have children has dropped by nearly half in the past two decades. faced with the challenges of being a dual-career couple, respondents indicated that they are opting out of parenthood rather than compromise career goals. similarly, hewlett (2002) found that women faculty have the highest rate of childlessness of any profession (43%). while women choose to not have children for a wide variety of reasons, there should not be a choice between being successful in a profession and being a parent especially when men rarely face this choice. in fact, the majority of men in senior positions are married and have children; 89% of men in senior positions are currently married while only 63% of women presidents are married. ninety-three percent of men have children under the age of 18 while only 71% of women presidents have children (bureau of labor statistics, u.s. department of labor, 2012). in addition to being personally fulfilling, being a parent may also enhance one’s career. research by ruderman, ohlott, panzer, and king (2002) found that engaging in multiple life roles (such as parenting) in addition to leading was related to positive outcomes such as higher self-esteem and higher ratings of managerial skill and performance. flexible work options can help individuals better manage multiple roles, but research in other fields indicates that flexible work options can be difficult to navigate, in part because these options have been shown to have both positive and negative career consequences (leslie, manchester, park, & mehng, 2012). while flexible work provides more options for where and when individuals work, it does not always address workload issues; an issue particularly pronounced in academia because of the promotion and tenure system which is routinely timed. if a faculty member does not achieve tenure within the allotted time he or she could be out of a job during the early stages of one’s career. exacerbating the need for new ways of thinking about and organizing work is the increasing work demands on leaders and administrators in general. in light of these increasing demands, one study indicated that women administrators are more likely than men administrators to identify an overwhelming workload as a major dilemma (kochan, spencer, & matthews, 2000). understanding the pathways to and the pressures faced by senior-leaders contributes to understanding what needs to be done to open doors and create support for these leaders. empirical evidence about women in higher education surfaces information that is both challenging and helpful. diversifying higher education leadership is critical and the stalled pace suggests that more work is needed to understand and address the underlying factors that are contributing to the slowed progress. research questions given the preponderance of research suggesting women are not moving adequately into diverse leadership roles and positions within higher education, we sought to answer the following research questions: research question 1: what barriers or sources of discouragement do senior women leaders identify as obstacles faced on their journey to leadership roles? research question 2: what sources of encouragement and support do senior women leaders identify as important to their success? research question 3: what are the negative aspects of being in a senior leadership role? research question 4: what are the positive aspects of being in a senior leadership role? description of sample and method our research focused on women at the senior-most levels of higher education institutions in the united states of america and explored their journeys into senior leadership roles and their experiences of being a leader. using a semi-structured interview protocol we interviewed 37 senior-level women. the women provided demographic information via an online survey or as part of the interview process. interviewees were identified by tapping into the professional networks of the chancellor at a large public university and the executive director of a leadership development institute especially for women in higher education. a snowball sampling technique, wherein interviewees were asked to recommend other women to be interviewed, was used to identify additional women to be interviewed. all women were assured that the information they shared would be kept confidential and they provided permission to have the interview recorded. interviews were conducted face-to-face whenever possible, but the majority of interviews were conducted over the phone. two of the interviews were not analyzed because the interview quality was not sufficient for analysis; the remaining 35 interviews were included in our analysis. description of the interviews and coding all of the interviewees had a doctorate as their highest earned degree. the mean age of the 35 interviewees was 57.49 years (sd = 7.90). the majority (20) of interviewees were caucasian, with the remaining interviewees identifying as african american (9), latina (1), native american (2), latina and native american (1) or other (2). twenty-three of the participants were married, three were partnered, four were single or never married, and the remaining women were widowed (1), divorced (1), or living as married (1). seventeen of the participants had at least one child, with an average of 2.2 (sd=1.24) children for those with children. in terms of organizational level, 15 were presidents/chancellors (2 being emeriti), 10 were vice presidents/vice chancellors, 5 were advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 68 provosts, with the remaining 5 holding another senior leadership role, such as dean, chief diversity officer or treasurer. seventeen of the participants had been in their current position for 1-5 years, 10 had been in their current role for 6-10 years, 4 had been in the role for less than a year, and 4 had been in their role for longer than 11 years. fourteen participants were employed by public universities, with the remaining women representing a variety of institution types including private liberal arts colleges, community colleges, private universities, tribal, technical, public, and private colleges, an art institute, or a board of regents. sixteen participants were employed at institutions with student enrollment between 1,000 and 9,000, 7 at institutions with enrollment between 10,000 and 19,000, and 5 where enrollment was between 20,000 and 31,000 students. the remaining participants worked at institutions where enrollment exceeded 50,000 students or was less than 1,000 students. one interviewee did not report the size of her institution. the interviews were professionally transcribed. the research team then used a constructivist grounded theory approach to analyze the interviews (charmaz, 2008; glaser & strauss, 1967). two researchers independently created summaries of each interview that were combined by a researcher into a single summary. this process helped to ensure that summaries were as comprehensive as possible. four members of the research team each read all of the summaries and proposed and discussed interview themes; 15 themes emerged. based on those themes, the researchers developed an initial codebook. at least three independent coders coded each full interview transcript. researchers independently reviewed interviews to identify passages of text related to the 15 identified themes. inter-rater agreement among raters was calculated (see table 1). after the initial coding was completed, we identified themes to pursue based on the level of inter-rater agreement and our desire to reflect a balanced perspective (e.g. positive and negative themes). we further refined the descriptions of these areas and reexamined the interviews to confirm that all relevant passages were identified. the following themes were selected: barriers to leadership, supports for leadership, negative aspects of being in a leadership role, and positive aspects of being in leadership role. the first set of themes examined the supports for and barriers to leadership roles. this set of themes included stories interviewees shared about experiences that provided them with support on their leadership journey as well as stories of the barriers or roadblocks they faced along the way. the second set of themes focused on the negative and the positive aspects of being in a senior leadership role. table 1: interrater agreements for initial coding interview passages associated with these themes were independently reviewed by at least two researchers and subthemes were identified and discussed. a detailed codebook was created for each theme. the four codebooks included a description of the subthemes associated with each major theme, as well as at least one example to illustrate each subtheme. two independent raters coded interview passages into the subthemes. the codes were captured and analyzed using the qualitative analysis software package nvivo 10. we calculated the level of agreement between raters using cohen’s kappa (k) (see table 2). the value of cohen’s kappa ranged from 0.18 to 0.86. a commonly used scale to determine the acceptability of kappa values (landis & koch, 1977) considers kappa values between .21 and .40 as indicating fair agreement, between .41 and .60 as indicating moderate agreement, between .61 and .80 indicating substantial agreement, and between .81 and .99 as indicating near perfect agreement. interview theme level of agreement agency self-efficacy 0.81 authenticity 0.66 confronting political landscapes, institutional systems, and gendered expectations 0.99 formal development experiences 0.80 gendered leadership style 0.95 negative aspects of being in a leadership role 0.93 positive aspects of being in a leadership role 0.99 career stalling or limiting 0.60 general discouragement, naysaying, and lack of support 0.77 general encouragement, support, and/or acceptance 0.94 role models 0.65 task information, knowledge development, career growth, and task completion 0.76 a family member outside the organization 0.86 someone inside the organization at the time of the event described 0.93 someone (or some group) outside the organization at the time of the event described 0.71 advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 69 passages on which coders did not agree were discussed until an agreement was reached, though in some instances passages were omitted from the coding process. a detailed description of the subthemes is provided in the subsequent paragraphs. table 2. cohen’s kappa for subthemes subthemes kappa barriers to leadership not having a leadership identity 0.47 lack of opportunity and support 0.46 discouragement and sabotage 0.66 different expectations for men and women 0.65 supports for leadership formal leadership development 0.39 early leadership experiences 0.86 encouragement and support 0.80 having a role model 0.40 negative aspects scrutiny and criticism 0.65 time demands of the job 0.79 pressure of ultimate accountability 0.41 broad scope of the job 0.37 isolation 0.66 not fitting in-not being heard 0.84 positive aspects having an influence 0.21 making an impact 0.38 broad scope of the job 0.80 power, authority and autonomy 0.18 being a role model 0.67 description of codes for barriers senior women face the barrier subthemes included the following: not having a leadership identity, lack of opportunity or support, discouragement and sabotage, and different expectations for men and women. the subtheme not having a leadership identity was used to code stories of women limiting themselves because they did not see the possibility of being in a leadership role or did not see the possibility of being a leader while remaining authentic. passages coded as lack of opportunity and support were about women not being offered or asked to apply for leadership roles or opportunities. stories were also about men being well-networked in a manner that afforded them access to leadership opportunities via connections while a woman who was just as qualified was overlooked. descriptions of discouragement and sabotage included subtle as well as direct discouraging comments and acts of sabotage. whereas the previous barrier (lack of opportunity and support) included passive instances, discouragement and sabotage was a theme that illustrated active examples from people in these women’s lives. passages coded as different expectations for men and women reflected expectations and standards that were at times held by the women themselves (internal expectations) and in other cases were general social norms (external expectations) that women would not be able to perform well in a leadership role. some stories reflected the experience that women have to perform at higher levels than their male counterparts in order to be recognized as competent. description of codes for sources of support senior women identify the subthemes associated with supports for a leadership role included formal development experiences, early leadership experiences, encouragement and support, and having a role model. passages coded under the subtheme formal development experiences referenced a formal leadership development experience (e.g. a leadership development program or a formal mentoring program) that helped define success, increase skills, and improve confidence. passages coded as early leadership experiences were stories of experiences that happened while growing up or before entering into a formal leadership role that taught the interviewee something valuable about their leadership or leadership more generally. the subtheme of encouragement and support includes any mention of support or encouragement the interviewee received from others at any point during the interviewee’s career. the having a role model subtheme was used to code passages wherein the interviewee mentioned having a person or event in her life that she learned from by observing or interacting with that person. description of codes for negative aspects of being in a senior leadership role. the subthemes associated with the negative aspects of being in a leadership role included broad scope of the job, isolation, not fitting in-not being heard, pressure of ultimate accountability, scrutiny and criticism, and time demands of the job. the subtheme broad scope of the job represents the stress and pressure of having multiple, and sometimes competing, roles within the institution as well as balancing diverse stakeholder relationships. the passages coded at the subtheme of isolation included references to a reduction or lack of contact with social and/or professional networks. this is advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 70 partly because there are few women in these roles, but also because of the nature of the role. women who were originally in faculty positions noted that colleagues tended to view the decision to go into administration as going to the “dark side,” and they were no longer trusted by their previous peer group. passages of not fitting in-not being heard included missing out on opportunities because women are not part of the “good old boys” network. stories reflected feelings of not fitting in and missing out on decisions or conversations because the interviewee was not included or invited to participate. interviewees also expressed the sentiment that often a woman can say something, but until a man says it, it is not recognized as a good idea. the subtheme pressure of ultimate accountability included references to pressures that come with making difficult decisions and being accountable for everything within an institution. passages in the subtheme scrutiny and criticism included women feeling perpetually watched, questioned, and criticized by others. the women often stated they felt like people were watching them with the assumption that they would inevitably fail. some interviewees shared stories about regularly having their credentials questioned. time demands of the job was the last subtheme within negative aspects of being in a leadership role. passages included managing the long hours of the job and the stress of multiple roles (such as parent and leader). many women noted that female presidents tend to play more roles than a male president would. for example, some leaders mentioned pressure to personally attend social functions of institutions, whereas for married male presidents with a female spouse it was acceptable for the wife to play that role. this feeling of always being “on,” the cumulative impact of extra roles, familial pressures, and a lack of personal time encapsulates the most common time demands and work life alignment challenges in higher education. description of codes for positive aspects of being in a senior leadership role. the positive aspects of being in a leadership role included the following subthemes: having an influence, making an impact, broad scope of the job, power, authority, and autonomy, and being a role model. passages coded as having an influence were about the interviewees involvement in and engagement with the decision making processes. these leaders talked about the advantage of having a voice at the table and being able to represent viewpoints, constituencies, or populations in situations where those perspectives are not always present or considered. stories associated with the subtheme making an impact indicated that creating positive change was rewarding. the stories included changing someone’s path for the better by opening doors and helping them, encouraging faculty members and students, influencing higher education policy, and starting or changing institutional initiatives. passages coded as broad scope of the job relayed the role-based opportunities and connections which allowed them to have a more comprehensive perspective. the subtheme power, authority, and autonomy was used to code passages that described the benefits of having sufficient power to make and execute decisions. the subtheme being a role model was used to code passages that expressed the reward women felt from knowing that their presence in a leadership role was a source of encouragement for others. description of the results in the barrier category, discouragement and sabotage along with different expectations for men and women were mentioned by 60% of the women in our sample. while 51% of the total sample mentioned the lack of opportunities and support they received, nearly 75% of women of color experienced this barrier compared to only 35% of white women, a statistically significant difference. forty-six percent of the entire sample shared stories that were coded as being related to not having a leadership identity. in the support category, 40% of our sample mentioned the importance of receiving support and encouragement from mentors and their networks, accounting for over 75% of the total references coded in this category. over a quarter of women leaders interviewed discussed the positive impact of formal leadership development. while 20% of white women experienced the benefits of having a role model only 7% of women of color said the same thing. on the other hand, 13% of women of color recognized how early leadership experiences shaped them while only 5% of white women discussed the impact of early leadership experiences. while neither of these differences was statistically significant, it is worth exploring this in future research. pressures associated with the intense time demands of the job were mentioned by 46% percent of the women interviewed and accounted for 18% of the total references coded as negative aspects of being in a leadership role. forty percent of women interviewed mentioned being singled out for criticism or being the target of intense scrutiny and, though mentioned by fewer participants, references coded in this sub-category accounted for over a quarter (28%) of the total in this category. more women of color in our sample (67%) shared experiences of scrutiny and criticism than did white women (20%); a statistically significant difference. more than 30% of the women in the sample discussed challenges related to the broad scope of the job, isolation, or managing the pressure of ultimate accountability. the challenge of not fitting in or not being heard was discussed by nine women interviewed, a quarter of total participants, but only represented 9% of total references in the negative aspects of being in a leadership role category. eighty percent of interviewees identified making an impact through their leadership role as a positive aspect of their position. while only 10% of white women mentioned having an influence as a positive aspect of being in a leadership role, nearly 50% of women of color indicated having an influence as a positive aspect of the role; the difference between the responses of white women and women of color is statistically significant. having an influence was the second most positive advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 71 aspect of being in a leadership role after making an impact. thirty–five percent of white women see the broad scope of the job as being a positive aspect while only 10% of women of color view it this way. being a role model to others was mentioned equally by both white women and women of color. table 3. number of interviews coded as each subtheme white women (n=20) women of color (n=15) total sample (n=35) subthemes n % n % n % barriers to leadership not having a leadership identity 9 45% 7 46% 16 46% lack of opportunity and support 7 35% 11 73% 18 51% discouragement and sabotage 11 55% 10 66% 21 60% different expectations for men and women 13 65% 8 53% 21 60% supports for leadership formal leadership development 5 25% 5 33% 10 29% early leadership experiences 1 5% 2 13% 3 9% encouragement and support 7 35% 7 46% 14 40% having a role model 4 20% 1 6% 5 14% negative aspects scrutiny and criticism 4 20% 10 67% 14 40% time demands of the job 10 50% 6 40% 16 46% pressure of ultimate accountability 8 40% 3 20% 11 31% broad scope of the job 6 30% 5 33% 11 31% isolation 6 30% 5 33% 11 31% not fitting in-not being heard 3 15% 6 40% 9 26% positive aspects having an influence 2 10% 7 46% 9 26% making an impact 15 75% 13 86% 28 80% broad scope of the job 7 35% 3 20% 10 29% power, authority and autonomy 9 45% 6 40% 15 43% being a role model 5 25% 5 33% 10 29% spss was used to conduct pearson's chi-square test of independence in order to examine the relationship between the subthemes within each thematic area and the racial categorization of the women in this sample. race was categorized as a dichotomous variable (e.g. white women and women of color). this is not to suggest that either white women or women of color are homogenous groupings, but rather to determine, at a very rudimentary level, if women of color and white women have different experiences and perspectives of their leadership journey. these analyses extend previous research about race and the intersectionality of race and gender (turner, antonio, garcia, laden, nora, & presley, 2002). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 72 the three subthemes for which a statistically significant difference between white women and women of color were found included scrutiny& criticism (χ2(1, n = 35) = 7.78, p = .005), lack of opportunity & support (χ2(1, n = 35) = 5.04, p = .025), and having an influence (χ2 (1, n = 35) = 6.03, p = .014). in all cases, women of color expressed higher frequencies as compared to white women (see table 4 for full results). table 4: chi-squared results white women (n=20) women of color (n=15) χ2 p-value subthemes n % n % barriers to leadership not having a leadership identity 9 45% 7 46% 0.010 0.922 lack of opportunity and support 7 35% 11 73% 5.040 0.025* discouragement and sabotage 11 55% 10 66% 0.486 0.486 different expectations for men and women 13 65% 8 53% 0.486 0.486 supports for leadership formal leadership development 5 25% 5 33% 0.292 0.589 early leadership experiences 1 5% 2 13% 0.760 0.383 encouragement and support 7 35% 7 46% 0.486 0.486 having a role model 4 20% 1 6% 1.244 0.265 negative aspects scrutiny and criticism 4 20% 10 67% 7.778 0.005** time demands of the job 10 50% 6 40% 0.345 0.557 pressure of ultimate accountability 8 40% 3 20% 1.591 0.207 broad scope of the job 6 30% 5 33% 0.044 0.833 isolation 6 30% 5 33% 0.044 0.833 not fitting in-not being heard 3 15% 6 40% 2.804 0.094 positive aspects having an influence 2 10% 7 46% 6.033 0.014* making an impact 15 75% 13 86% 0.729 0.393 broad scope of the job 7 35% 3 20% 0.945 0.331 power, authority and autonomy 9 45% 6 40% 0.088 0.767 being a role model 5 25% 5 33% 0.292 0.589 note: *p<0.05. **p<0.01. discussion and implications this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the experiences of women in senior leadership positions in higher education. the women leaders in this study provide more detailed descriptions of the positive aspects of being in a leadership role than have been previously reported. this is an important contribution because stories about the negative experiences of women leaders tend to outnumber and garner more attention than the positive ones, which can serve to dissuade women from pursuing leadership roles. advocates of women’s leadership need to prepare women for challenges, but advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 73 also make clear the benefits and rewards of formal leadership positions. another important contribution of this work is the exploration and documentation of the experiences of women of color as contrasted with the experiences of white women in similar leadership positions. that women of color are not offered leadership opportunities and are more likely to experience scrutiny and criticism than their white counterparts is an important finding. it suggests that particular focus and attention is needed in that area. also important is the finding that for many of the women of color in this study, the counter-veiling experience—having influence and a role in shaping policy—is a powerful motivator. while the women interviewed in this research were, as a group, gratified by “making a difference,” the specific benefit women of color reported seeking and claiming for themselves is being a voice for those who are routinely excluded from strategic conversations and decisions. taken as a whole, these findings provide support for continued vigilance with regard to stereotypical expectations, discrimination, and other forms of inequity women continue to face. our findings suggest new approaches for leadership development which specifically address the challenges and the positive aspects of leadership. the change required is multifaceted. cultural norms are shifting, but “think leader, think male” remains true. women wrestle with internal and external expectations that are neither helpful nor realistic. empirical research is a mechanism whereby damaging myths and beliefs that are folklore from ages past can be brought to light and critically examined. there must be greater urgency in public conversations about the current, sometimes more subtle, forms of discrimination and bias that persist. it is important for women’s leadership advocates and sponsors to continue to engage in systematic inquiry that informs individual as well as collective action. discouragements can be faced and overcome by drawing on positive experiences. extending opportunities and providing positive reinforcement can have a real and cumulative impact for women in higher education. if we are strategic in and vocal about our efforts and the results thereof, perhaps this can form the basis for institutional practices and larger social change to create new paths for women as well as men to exercise leadership aligned with their professional and personal roles. our findings suggest that it is important for leadership development initiatives to include stories from women who are comfortable with having and using authority. having role models that demonstrate a range of different ways of being in and successfully navigating a leadership role would help make the role more attainable and attractive and could serve to weaken assumptions and stereotypes. also helpful would be for leaders to share more about the intellectual excitement in the broad scope of senior leadership roles. while the work of senior leaders is different from the research, teaching, and writing that characterizes faculty roles, there are intellectual challenges and rewards. as with any research project, there are tradeoffs that impact the research process and outcomes. the sample size for this project, while larger than many qualitative studies, is a small subset of the entire population of senior-level women leaders. therefore, the stories gathered may not reflect the full range of senior-level women leaders’ experiences. for this study only women were interviewed therefore, we cannot make direct comparisons between the experiences of male leaders with the experiences of female leaders. we purposefully sought to represent women of color in our sample. the outcome of that, one could argue, is that women of color are over represented relative to the population. however, the paucity of research on senior level leaders who are women of color in higher education was a gap we wanted to help fill. all of the interviews occurred at one point in time with women advanced in their careers. 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(2011). why do more women than men want to earn a four-year degree? exploring the effects of gender, social origin, and social capital on educational expectations. journal of higher education, 82(1), 1-32. u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics, integrated postsecondary education data system (ipeds). (2012, july). full-time instructional faculty in degree-granting institutions, by race/ethnicity, sex, and academic rank: fall 2007, fall 2009, and fall 2011 (table). retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_ 291.asp wolfinger, n. (2008). problems in the pipeline: gender, marriage, and fertility in the ivory tower. journal of higher education, 79(4), 388-405. microsoft word 4.docx advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 volume 37, 2017 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 table of contents gender pay inequality: an examination of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act six years later ................................................................29 michelle wade & susan fiorentino ......................................................................................................................................................... 29 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 29 advancing women in leadership vol. 37, pp. 29-36, 2017 available online at http://www.awlj.org issn 1093-7099 full length research paper gender pay inequality: an examination of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act six years later michelle wade & susan fiorentino michelle wade, department of public policy and administration, west chester university, mwade@wcupa.edu susan fiorentino, department of public policy and administration, west chester university, sfiorentino@wcupa.edu accepted november 22, 2016 the lilly ledbetter fair pay act was the first piece of legislation signed into law by president barack obama in january of 2009. this legislation enables an employee to sue more easily for wage discrimination under title vii of the civil rights act of 1964. in this article, we examine the impact that the lilly ledbetter fair pay act has had on gender pay equity discrimination complaints and on how the lower courts have interpreted it since it was signed into law in january of 2009. first, we will provide a brief background about the passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act and a description of the legislation itself. then we will examine any changes in discrimination complaints since its passage, and we will analyze how lower courts have interpreted the legislation. we conclude by arguing that passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act has offered little redress for gender wage discrimination since its passage six years ago. keywords: gender discrimination, equal pay complaints, lilly ledbetter fair pay act introduction the lilly ledbetter fair pay act was the first piece of legislation signed into law under president barack obama in january of 2009. this legislation enables an employee to sue more easily for wage discrimination under title vii of the civil rights act of 1964. the law makes a discriminatory compensation decision illegal each time it occurs, such as with every paycheck received, as opposed to when the discriminatory decision is first made. the lilly ledbetter fair pay act of 2009 (lilly ledbetter fair pay act) was passed in response to a 2007 supreme court decision that made it more difficult for employees to sue their employers for discriminatory pay. opponents of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act have argued that it is not fair to sue businesses for past discrimination. they feared that the number of lawsuits for pay discrimination would increase dramatically as a result of the law. although a great deal was written about the lilly ledbetter fair pay act prior to and directly after its passage, little has been written about it since. what effect has the law had on pay discrimination claims? have such claims increased dramatically since the passage of the law as critics feared? in this article, we examine wage discrimination complaints since the passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act, and we examine how the lower courts have interpreted it since it was signed into law in january of 2009. first, we will provide a brief background about the passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act and a description of the legislation itself. then we will examine any changes in the receipt of discrimination complaints since its passage. lastly, we will analyze how lower courts have interpreted the legislation. we conclude that passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act has done little to redress wage discrimination, and we examine other possible avenues to achieve that goal. background in order to understand congress’s motivation in passing the lilly ledbetter fair pay act, it is helpful to understand how lawsuits for employment discrimination are litigated in the united states. title vii of the civil rights act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on sex, race, religion, color and national origin (civil rights act, 1964). the law requires that all claims for employment discrimination initiate with a charge of discrimination that must be filed with the equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc). the statute of limitations for filing a charge is quite short-anywhere from 180 to 300 days from the date that the discriminatory act occurred, depending upon the state in which the claim arises. failure to initiate a charge within this timeframe prevents an employee from pursuing the matter later. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 30 the passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act was prompted by ledbetter’s gender discrimination suit against goodyear tire company, which was originally filed in 1999. lilly ledbetter was employed by goodyear tire company in gadson, alabama from 1979-1998. in 1998, lilly ledbetter received an anonymous note in her locker at goodyear. the note contained ledbetter’s salary information in comparison to that of her male counterparts (ledbetter, 2012). ledbetter sued goodyear under title vii of the civil rights act of 1964, alleging gender discrimination. in the trial that followed, ledbetter discovered that she was making less than all of her male colleagues, even those with less seniority and those who received lower performance reviews than she did. goodyear argued that ledbetter’s salary was directly related to poor performance reviews rather than gender discrimination. the lower court ruled in ledbetter’s favor, but goodyear appealed the decision arguing that under title vii, all discrimination complaints must be filed within 180 days of the discriminatory action. thus, only the most recent salary review was subject to challenge according to goodyear. the u.s. circuit court of appeals for the eleventh circuit ruled in favor of goodyear and dismissed ledbetter’s complaint, finding no discrimination within the 180 day review period. this decision was not consistent with other decisions in the federal court of appeals, which had followed the precedent of the paycheck accrual rule. according to this rule, it is acceptable to bring forth a wage based discrimination claim as long as one paycheck reflecting the alleged discriminatory pay was received during the 180 day statute of limitations (ledbetter, 2007). ultimately, the case was appealed to the supreme court of the united states. the primary question before the supreme court was not about gender-based wage discrimination. rather, the question before the court was whether or not ledbetter had a right to sue under title vii since she had not filed her claim with the eeoc within 180 days of the initial discriminatory act. according to ledbetter, that initial act occurred in 1981 when goodyear made a pay-setting decision by adopting a payfor-performance system (house of representatives, 2007). in reaching its decision, the ledbetter court relied heavily on precedent established in several cases: united airlines v. evans, (1977), delaware state college v. ricks, (1980), lorance v. at&t, (1989), and national railroad passenger corporation v. morgan (2002). in each of those cases, the court determined that the eeoc charging period is triggered by a discrete unlawful employment practice. as the court explained, “a new violation does not occur, and a new charging period does not commence, upon the occurrence of subsequent nondiscriminatory acts that entail adverse effects resulting from the past discrimination.” (ledbetter, 2007, p. 628). ultimately, the ledbetter court was divided on the interpretation of the “discrete act” of discrimination. those in the majority argued that ledbetter did not have a timely claim because the discrete act of discrimination--the alleged discriminatory pay-setting decision which led to the pay inequity--occurred outside of the 180-day filing period. those in the minority, however, argued that it is often impossible to know when the discrete act of discrimination first takes place since salary information is often confidential. for that reason, the minority argued that the discrete act of discrimination was renewed with the receipt of every paycheck resulting from the initial pay-setting decision. in a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that lilly ledbetter did not have the right to sue goodyear since she had not filed her claim within the 180 day statute of limitations. even though discriminatory pay had occurred within the 180 day statute of limitations period, the initial decision that resulted in disparate pay had not. rather, that decision had occurred much earlier in ledbetter’s career. voting in the majority were john roberts, antonin scalia, anthony kennedy, clarence thomas, and samuel alito. dissenting were ruth bader ginsberg, john paul stevens, david souter, and stephen breyer. justice ginsberg read her dissenting opinion from the bench, criticizing what she called “a cramped interpretation of title vii, incompatible with the statute’s broad remedial purpose” (ledbetter, 2007, p. 661). lilly ledbetter fair pay act of 2009 the ledbetter decision prompted the passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act. after the supreme court’s verdict was announced on may 29, 2007, dissatisfaction with the decision led democrat representative george miller and several other members of congress to co-sponsor a bill to prevent a similar occurrence from happening in the future. congress began committee hearings on june 12, 2007. ledbetter and other interested parties testified in both the house and senate committee hearings. the lilly ledbetter fair pay act amended title vii of the civil right act of 1964. according to the law, a compensation decision that discriminates against a person is illegal each time the act occurs – as with receipt of a paycheck—and not just when the initial pay decision is made. this legislation overturned the supreme court’s decision in ledbetter v. goodyear tire and rubber company, as is clear from the statutory language. in section 2, the act states that the ledbetter decision “undermines…statutory protections by unduly restricting the time period in which victims of discrimination can challenge and recover for discriminatory compensation decisions or other practices, contrary to the intent of congress” and “ignores the reality of wage discrimination and is at odds with the robust application of the civil rights laws that congress intended.” (lilly ledbetter fair pay act, 2009, § 2). consequences of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act opponents of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act claimed that there would be an increase in pay discrimination cases (editorial, 2009; hulse 2008; will fair pay 2009). senator mitch mcconnnell of kentucky was quoted by the new york advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 31 times, saying “we think that this bill is primarily designed to create a massive amount of new litigation in our country” (quoted in hulse 2008). opponents also predicted that the lilly ledbetter fair pay act would increase costs for businesses not only because of an increase in the number of lawsuits, but also because employers would be forced to maintain employee personnel files for longer time periods in order to protect themselves against lawsuits. in addition to the law’s critics, some legal scholars also opined that the effect of the act would be far-reaching, extending the statute of limitations not just for disparate pay claims, but for all decisions related to pay, such as promotions and demotions (sorock, 2010; sullivan, 2010). although some legal analysts predicted that claims for genderbased wage and other types of discrimination would increase significantly in the wake of successful passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act, eeoc statistics do not bear that out. a review of the number of charges of gender-based wage discrimination claims filed with the eeoc from the five-year period of 2010-2014 shows a slight overall decline in genderbased wage claims, with the exception of 2012. that apparent anomaly can be explained by the fact that in may of 2012, 1,975 women pursued class-action claims against the wal-mart corporation, alleging gender-based discrimination in both pay and promotion decisions (hines, 2012, june 6). the number of gender-based wage charges is as follows: table 1: gender based wage claims filed with the eeoc, fy 20102014 year number of claims 2014: 1,880 2013: 1,963 2012: 3,777* 2011: 1,985 2010: 2,073 we also examined the number of equal pay act charges filed with the eeoc, including any concurrent charges with title vii. although equal pay act claims are not required to proceed through the eeoc, equal pay act claims may and often are brought concurrently with title vii claims for gender-based wage discrimination. for that reason, examination of concurrent equal pay act charges filed with the eeoc is useful for determining the number of title vii gender-based wage discrimination claims. the mean number of charges that the eeoc received from fiscal years 1997 to 2014 was 1,041. the line in the middle of figure 1 represents the mean number of charges, and the dotted lines above and below the mean represent one standard deviation from the mean. the only years that show receipts higher than the mean and greater than one standard deviation away are in 2000, 2001, and 2002 – all before the passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act in 2009. while charge receipts increased slightly in 2010, it was well within one standard deviation of the mean, and the number of charges went back down in 2011. therefore, a cursory glance indicates that the eeoc has not received significantly more wage discrimination charges, either under title vii or under the equal pay act. figure 1. equal pay act charges according to an institute of management administration survey in 2010, the majority of employees in the human resource field did not feel that the law “affected their organization directly” (“what has changed,” 2010). larger companies were the mostly likely to report that the law had affected their organization and reported those effects were primarily confined to the maintenance of records such as performance reviews and historic salary information. lower court interpretations of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act the lilly ledbetter fair pay act amends title vii and provides, in relevant part, that an "unlawful employment practice" occurs: (a) "when a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice is adopted," (b) "when an individual becomes subject to a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice," and (c) "when an individual is affected by application of a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice, including each time wages, benefits, or other compensation is paid, resulting in whole or in part from such a decision or other practice." (civil rights act of 1964, § 1134 1071 1044 127012511256 1167 1011 970 861 818 954 942 1044 919 1082 1019 938 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 fy 1 99 7 fy 1 99 8 fy 1 99 9 fy 2 00 0 fy 2 00 1 fy 2 00 2 fy 2 00 3 fy 2 00 4 fy 2 00 5 fy 2 00 6 fy 2 00 7 fy 2 00 8 fy 2 00 9 fy 2 01 0 fy 2 01 1 fy 2 01 2 fy 2 01 3 fy 2 01 4 re ci ep ts equal pay act charges (includes concurrent charges with title vii, adea, and ada) fy 1997 fy 2014 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 32 2000e-5(e)(3)(a) (emphasis supplied). immediately after passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act, legal scholars began debating the law’s scope and predicted that the statute’s language—especially the “other practices” phrase—would enlarge the statute of limitations for all sorts of discrimination claims, including failure-to-promote claims that only tangentially impacted compensation (siniscalco, 2014; sorock, 2010; sullivan, 2010). in reality, lower courts have been reluctant to adopt such a broad reading (jacobs, 2010). in fact, while there were a few early district court cases that adopted a more liberal reading of the statute, (for example, gentry v. jackson state university (2009) appellate courts have been virtually unanimous in reading the lilly ledbetter fair pay act very narrowly to apply only to those cases in which plaintiffs can demonstrate evidence of unequal pay for equal work. those decisions are reviewed below. the district of columbia circuit court of appeals was one of the first appellate courts to weigh in on the breadth and scope of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act in the case of schuler v. pricewaterhouse coopers, llp (2010). in 1999 and again in 2000, harold schuler, then 55, was passed over for a partnership position at pricewaterhouse coopers, llc, (pwc), a global accounting firm with more than 20,000 employees. pwc offered the partnership position to a 37 year-old employee who became partner in 2000. in 2001, schuler filed a charge of discrimination with the equal employment opportunity commission (“eeoc”), alleging that pwc failed to consider him for the partnership position due to age. in 2002, schuler, along with another male employee, sued pwc for age discrimination pursuant to the age discrimination in employment act (“adea”). the district court dismissed the case as untimely, claiming that schuler failed to file his administrative charge of discrimination within 300 days of the 2000 partnership decision, as required by the adea. in 2005, after the employees filed new lawsuits alleging ongoing age discrimination, the district court consolidated the new claims with the claims in the former lawsuits, and once again dismissed schuler’s claims as untimely. schuler appealed, claiming that his 1999 and 2000 claims under the adea were made timely by passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act of 2009. the circuit court, in a case of first impression, rejected schuler’s broad reading of the statute, stating that he misquoted the statute by arguing that “the decision not to promote him was an ‘other act[]…intertwined with a discriminatory compensation decision’ because as a result of that decision he received significantly less remuneration that he would have done as a partner” (schuler v. pwc, 2010, p. 374). agreeing with pwc, the court interpreted the statutory language “discrimination in compensation” to mean “paying different wages or providing different benefits to similarly situated employees, not promoting one employee but not another to a more remunerative position” (schuler v. pwc, 2010, p. 374). moreover, the court noted that employees who sue for “failure to promote” do not have to demonstrate wage disparity, but merely must show that they were rejected for the promotion and that someone outside of the protected class filled the position. accordingly, it concluded that the decision whether to promote an employee to a higher paying position is not a “compensation decision or other practice” under the lilly ledbetter fair pay act. the schuler case has been cited frequently for the proposition that the lilly ledbetter fair pay act does not extend to failureto-promote cases in which there is no evidence of compensation discrimination. in noel v. the boeing company (2010), the third circuit court of appeals relied on schuler to hold that the lilly ledbetter fair pay act did not preserve the employee’s failure-to-promote claim where there was no evidence that the employee suffered lower pay than his counterparts. emmanuel noel, a black haitian national, worked for boeing as a chinook helicopter repairman. in may 2002, noel applied for an offsite assignment at boeing’s amarillo, texas facility. temporary offsite assignments resulted in a pay grade increase. noel was not assigned offsite until november 2002, at which time he received a salary increase. at the same time, two white employees were also assigned to the amarillo facility with similar pay grade increases. after a few months, the two white employees were promoted again, resulting in another pay grade increase, while noel remained in the lower paying position. noel complained to boeing, yet received no response. on march 25, 2005, he filed a formal charge with the eeoc alleging discrimination based on race and national origin against boeing. on june 6, 2006, noel filed a lawsuit against boeing alleging race and national origin discrimination when it failed to assign him to the offsite facility in may, 2002 and when he was not promoted along with the other white employees in 2003. the district court granted judgment in favor of boeing, finding that noel’s claim was time-barred because he filed his eeoc charge more than 300 days after the decision not to promote him. noel appealed the district court’s decision, asserting that boeing’s failure to promote him caused him to receive less pay than his white co-workers throughout his time at the off-site facility. he argued that, under the lilly ledbetter fair pay act, “an unlawful employment practice occurs each time an individual is affected by application of a discriminatory compensation decision.” accordingly, “each paycheck he received started the administrative clock anew” (noel v. boeing, 2010, p. 270). the third circuit court of appeals affirmed the district court’s holding, and found that the lilly ledbetter fair pay act did not extend to preserve claims such as noel’s. the court reasoned that noel’s claim was simply a failure-topromote claim and did not assert any claims of unequal pay for performance of the same job. relying on the reasoning in the schuler case, the court found that the plain language of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act does not apply to failure-topromote claims: “thus, the plain language of the [fair pay act] advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 33 covers compensation decisions and not other discrete employment decisions. []to maintain a pay disparity claim, a plaintiff must demonstrate that ‘employees …were paid differently for performing “equal work”-work of substantially equal skill, effort and responsibility, under similar working conditions’” (noel v. boeing, 2010, p. 274). the court further opined that the purpose of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act was to preserve claims for compensation decisions which are often cloaked in secrecy and not discovered until long after the administrative period has expired. this was not the case here, as noel knew in 2003 that he was not being promoted, and therefore his statute of limitations began to run from that discrete date. to interpret the lilly ledbetter fair pay act too broadly “would potentially sweep all employment decisions under the ‘other practice’ rubric” of the law and would have the effect of weakening title vii’s administrative filing requirement (noel v. boeing, 2010, p. 275). in contrast to its decision in the noel case, the third circuit found in favor of the plaintiff’s lilly ledbetter fair pay act claim in the case of mary lou mikula v. allegheny county of pa (2009). mary lou mikula was hired in march 2001 as grants coordinator for allegheny county police department. in 2004, she sent a memo to the police superintendent requesting a salary increase to reflect the salary of a similarly situated male employee who earned approximately $7,000.00 more than she earned. mikula never received a response from anyone in the police department regarding her request. in 2006, mikula filed a complaint with the county human resources department in which she explicitly raised her objection to being paid less than a comparative male employee. she also filed a lawsuit under the equal pay act at that time. finally, on april 17, 2007, she filed a charge of discrimination with the eeoc claiming that she was paid less than a male in her position would receive. shortly thereafter, she amended her lawsuit to include a title vii claim for gender discrimination alleging that she was paid substantially less compensation for equal work performed by similarly situated male employees. the district court granted the county’s motion for summary judgment, finding that mikula’s title vii claim was timebarred because she learned of the disparate pay in 2004, but failed to file a charge until 2007. in the interim, congress passed the lilly ledbetter fair pay act, and mikula appealed the district court’s decision. the third circuit court of appeals reversed the lower court’s ruling and held that the county’s failure to answer mikula’s request for a raise in 2004 constituted a “compensation decision and other practice” within the meaning of the statute. accordingly, mikula’s title vii claim was not time-barred as to that request. while the third circuit’s decision in mikula may appear to be a more expansive reading of the statute, in reality, the court’s reasoning in the case is consistent with its reasoning in the noel case. in both circumstances, the plaintiffs asserted clear claims of unequal pay for equal work. a similar reading of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act was reached in the more recent tenth circuit case of almond v. unified school district (2011). the employees in almond were informed in 2003 and 2004 that the district planned to eliminate their maintenance positions due to budgetary cuts. in lieu of termination, the district offered to transfer the employees to lower paying jobs, while promising to pay their current salaries for a period of two years. plaintiffs agreed to the transfer, then filed charges of age discrimination with the eeoc in 2006, claiming that their transfer and demotion was a result of age discrimination. the district court ruled that plaintiffs’ charges were timebarred because, under the well-established discovery rule, plaintiffs had 300 days from the date of discovery of the adverse action to file a charge with the eeoc. plaintiffs appealed, arguing that each new paycheck that reflected the pay demotion renewed the statute of limitations. while their appeal was pending, congress enacted the lilly ledbetter fair pay act. the parties agreed to withdraw the appeal to allow the district court to consider whether the lilly ledbetter fair pay act rescued the plaintiffs’ claims. on reconsideration of the case, the district court ruled that the lilly ledbetter fair pay act did not apply to the case at hand. the plaintiffs then filed the appeal to the circuit court, arguing that the decision to demote them and reduce their pay was discriminatory, and hence affected every paycheck thereafter. the circuit court, adopting both noel v. boeing and schuler, narrowly read the lilly ledbetter fair pay act, stating that it “governs the accrual only of discrimination in compensation (unequal pay for equal work) claims in violation of § 623(a)(1) -nothing more, nothing less” (almond v. unified school district, 2011, p. 1183). in a thorough review of both the statutory language of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act as well as the legislative history of the act, the court dismissed arguments that a broader interpretation of the statute was warranted based on the language of the statute that an "unlawful employment practice" occurs "when an individual is affected by application of a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice, including each time wages, benefits, or other compensation is paid, resulting in whole or in part from such a decision or other practice" (civil rights act of 1964, § 2000e-5(e)(3)(a) (emphasis supplied). the court stated: [i]t isn't enough for an employee to show that a discriminatory practice somehow affected his or her pay. instead, the employee must show a discriminatory pay disparity between himself or herself and similarly situated but younger employees. see, e.g., macpherson v. univ. of montevallo, 922 f.2d 766, 774 (11th cir. 1991) (proof of "discrimination in compensation" under adea requires showing "similarly situated persons outside the protected age group received higher wages"); schuler v. pricewaterhousecoopers, llp, 595 f.3d 370, 374-75, 389 u.s. app. d.c. 213 (d.c. cir. 2010). in other words, “discrimination in compensation” requires not just any effect on pay, but one of a particular kind: unequal pay for advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 34 equal work. (almond v. unified school district, 2011, p. 1181) the court ultimately found that plaintiffs’ claim failed because neither alleged disparity in pay—to the contrary, both acknowledged that they were being paid at a higher rate than other similarly situated employees for the first two years in the position, until their pay was brought in line with everyone else in their pay scale. the court’s decision in almond was more recently affirmed in daniels v. ups (2012). there, the court again rejected a failure-to-promote claim as falling within the protection of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act unless the claim was rooted in unequal compensation for equal work: as we recognized in almond, the fair pay act did not create a “limitations revolution for any claim somehow touching on pay.” examining justice ginsburg's dissent in ledbetter, which the court found congress followed when drafting and passing the fair pay act, almond concluded that "hiring, firing, promotion, demotion, and transfer decisions, though often touching on pay, should and do accrue as soon as they are announced.’…. the argument daniels advances would "potentially sweep all employment decisions under the 'other practice' rubric." noel v. boeing co., 622 f.3d 266, 275 (3d cir. 2010) (daniels v. ups, 2012, p. 631) (internal citations omitted) most of the other circuit courts of appeal have weighed in on the scope of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act as well, each construing the law narrowly to apply only where plaintiffs have demonstrated evidence of unequal pay for equal work. (see, for example, hylind v. xerox corp. (2012) (affirming noel and schuler and finding that lower court properly dismissed hostile environment claim as untimely); see also tarmas v. secretary of the navy (2011) (finding that statute of limitations for single and discreet acts of discrimination are not altered by the act); groesch v. city of springfield (2011) (reviving police officers’ title vii claims for unequal pay for similar position under the act); tillman v. southern wood preserving (2010) (holding that lilly ledbetter fair pay act did not apply to discrete acts of discrimination such as reprimand or failure to receive pay increase due to performance); miller v. kempthorne (2009) (holding plaintiff’s claim timely where employer improperly assigned him to lower pay grade, but declaring as untimely claim that he was denied permanent employee status); oniyah v. st. cloud state university (2012) (finding that lilly ledbetter fair pay act does not change the burden of proof for salary discrimination under title vii or adea). one of the most recent circuit cases to address the issue of the breadth of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act was decided by the fifth circuit court of appeals in niwayama v. texas tech university (2014). in that case, plaintiff sued the employer for both denial of tenure and for pay disparity claims. plaintiff argued that the decision to deny tenure had consequences for her compensation, and accordingly, her otherwise time-barred claim should be timely under the lilly ledbetter fair pay act. the court rejected that argument: in niwayama's view, because the provost's decision to deny her tenure had consequences for her compensation, the provost's decision constituted a "discriminatory compensation decision" under the ledbetter act. accordingly, niwayama argues, a new title vii claim for denial of tenure accrued each time she received a paycheck that was affected "in whole or in part" by the provost's allegedly discriminatory decision. as authority, niwayama cites only to gentry v. jackson state university, 610 f. supp. 2d 564, 567 (s.d. miss. 2009). niwayama acknowledges, however, that this district court's decision stands for "a minority view." indeed, niwayama's argument is contrary to the overwhelming weight of authority on this issue. specifically, the tenth circuit explained that under the ledbetter act "hiring, firing, promotion, demotion, and transfer decisions, though often touching on pay, should and do accrue as soon as they are announced." (citation omitted). similarly, the district of columbia circuit held that the ledbetter act's use of "the phrase 'discrimination in compensation' means paying different wages or providing different benefits to similarly situated employees, not promoting one employee but not another to a more remunerative position." the third circuit also rejected an argument similar to niwayama's because a more "expansive interpretation of 'other practice' . . . would potentially sweep all employment decisions under the 'other practice' rubric" set forth in the ledbetter act. finally, this court in an unpublished opinion held that the ledbetter act does not apply to "discrete acts" by employers such as "termination, failure to promote, denial of transfer, and refusal to hire." (niwayama, 2014, p. 356) (internal citations omitted) thus, the fifth circuit concluded that the district court had correctly dismissed the tenure denial claim as untimely under title vii. however, the court held that the “pay disparity claim falls under the ledbetter act and therefore is not time barred. the ledbetter act explicitly…makes each paycheck at an allegedly discriminatory rate a separate, discrete act of discrimination, effectively resetting the statute of limitations for filing an eeoc charge.” (niwayama, 2014, p. 356). once again, this reasoning is consistent with the other appellate cases cited above. conclusion since the passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act in 2009, little has been written about the impact the decision has had on subsequent court decisions and implications for human resource managers. only time will tell what impact the lilly ledbetter fair pay act will have on litigation in employment discrimination cases, but so far the effects seem relatively small. while it is true that employers will need to document all promotion and compensation decisions, many businesses were already doing this. there does not appear to be a surge in title vii complaints of sex discrimination pay claims with the advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 35 eeoc, and businesses themselves report the primary effect of an added administrative burden, not an increase in lawsuits. lower court interpretations have limited the reach of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act, and eeoc charge statistics since the law’s passage corroborate that conclusion, all of which suggests that the lilly ledbetter fair pay act did little to effectuate real change for women seeking redress for genderbased compensation claims. as sara lyons has suggested, merely extending the time in which to bring a claim for gender pay discrimination does nothing for those who never become aware of gender-based discrepancies in the first place (lyons, 2013). lyons argues that the strong societal norm of pay secrecy undermines any potential benefits made by the lilly ledbetter fair pay act. she concludes that real change will require 1) passage of the paycheck fairness act (pfa), proposed legislation that would prohibit pay secrecy rules in the workplace, and 2) affirmative disclosure of salary information to employees. while such an approach seems radical, there is some merit to the argument. research shows that the wage gap is smaller where employers promote pay transparency, such as in federal government and union jobs. according to a study conducted by the institute for women’s policy research, 62% of private sector female workers and 60% of private sector male workers report that discussion of salary is discouraged or prohibited and could lead to punishment (institute for women’s policy research, 2014, january). that number is dramatically lower for public sector workers, with only 18% of women who work in the public sector reporting pay secrecy rules, and only 11% of men. not surprisingly, the wage gap for the federal workforce, where pay transparency is very high, is only about 13%, much lower than the national average of about 30%. (covert, 2014, april 14). similarly, in unionized workforces where salaries are disclosed in a collective bargaining agreement, the wage gap for unionized workers is only about 9% (covert, 2014, january 27). moreover, gowri ramachandran has argued for the use of pay transparency policies as a legal affirmative defense to wage disparity claims, thereby further incentivizing an employer’s use of such policies (ramachandran, 2012). unfortunately, systemic change to pay secrecy rules face an uphill battle, as proponents of the fair pay act can attest. while passage of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act has not resulted in an increase in charges of wage discrimination, it may have caused some employers to examine pay practices to avoid claims for wage discrimination (siniscalco, livingston, cousins, tran & phillips, 2010). this is a modest gain at best. nevertheless, until there is a cultural shift towards pay transparency in the workplace, the lilly ledbetter fair pay act offers an incremental legal tool in the fight for full gender-wage equality. references civil rights act of 1964, 42 u.s.c. § 2000e et seq. (1964). almond v. unified school district, 665 f.3d 1174 (10th cir. 2011). covert, b. (2014, april 14). here’s one place where the gender wage gap is actually shrinking. retrieved from http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/04/14/3426369/ge nder-wage-gap-federal/ covert, b. (2014, january 27). the gender wage gap between unionized workers is tiny—and shrinking. retrieved from http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/27/3206671/ge nder-wage-gap-unions/ daniels v. ups, 701 f.3d 620 10th cir. (2012). editorial: “saying no to lilly.” [editorial]. (2009). investor’s business daily. greenwald, j. (2010, february 8). ledbetter fair pay law hasn’t flooded courts: year-old bias law still has changed rules; litigation may rise. business insurance. gentry v. jackson state university, 610 f.supp.2d 564 (s.d. miss. 2009). groesch v. city of springfield, 635 f.3d 1020 (7th cir. 2011). hines, a. (2012, june 6). walmart sex discrimination claims filed by 2,000 women. the huffington post. retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/06/walmart-sexdiscrimination-women-_n_1575859.html hulse, c. (2008, april 23). g.o.p. set to block bill easing limits on pay discrimination suits. the new york times. hylind v. xerox corp., 481 fed. appx. 819 (4th cir. 2012). institute for women’s policy research. (january, 2014). pay secrecy and wage discrimination (iwpr #q016). retrieved from file:///c:/users/75sfiorentin/downloads/q016.pdf jacobs, r. b. (2010). say when: an analysis of post-ledbetter continuing violations. employee relations law journal, 36 (2), 19-41. ledbetter v. goodyear tire and rubber co., 550 u.s. 618 (2007). ledbetter, l. with isom, s.i. (2012). grace and grit: my fight for equal pay and fairness at goodyear and beyond. new york: crown archetype. lilly ledbetter fair pay act, pub. l. no. 111-2, 123 stat. 5 (2009). lyons, s. (2013). why the law should intervene to disrupt paysecrecy norms: analyzing the lilly ledbetter fair pay act through the lens of social norms. columbia journal of law and social problems, 46, 361-392. mary lou mikula v. allegheny county of pa, 583 f.3d 181 (3d cir. 2009). miller v. kempthorne, 357 fed. appx. 384 (2d cir. 2009). niwayama v. texas tech university, 590 fed. appx. 351 (5th cir. 2014). noel v. the boeing company, 622 f.3d 266 (3d cir. 2010). oniyah v. st. cloud state university, 684 f.3d 711 (8th cir. 2012). ramachandran, g. (2012). pay transparency. penn state law review, 116, 1043-1079. schuler v. pricewaterhouse coopers, llp, 595 f.3d 370 (d.c. cir. 2010). advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 36 siniscalco, g., livingston, a., cousins, o., tran, t., & phillips, r. (2010, march). developments in equal pay law: the lilly ledbetter act and beyond. paper presented at the aba national conference on equal employment law. retrieved from http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrati ve/labor_law/meetings/2010/2010_eeo_007.authcheckda m.pdf sorock, c.e. (2010). closing the gap legislatively: consequences of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act. chicago-kent law review, note, 85, 1199-1216. sullivan, c.a. (2010). raising the dead?: the lilly ledbetter fair pay act. tulane law review, 84, 499-563. tarmas v. secretary of the navy, 433 fed. appx. 754 (11th cir. 2011). tillman v. southern wood preserving, 377 fed. appx. 346 (5th cir. 2010). united states house of representatives (2007, june 28). committee of the judiciary, subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights, and civil liberties, house of representatives. u.s. equal employment opportunity commission, equal pay act charges, fy 1997-fy2014, retrieved from http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/epa.cfm u.s. equal employment opportunity commission. enforcement and litigation statistics. bases by issue, fy 2010-2014. retrieved from http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/bases_b y_issue.cfm what has changed since enactment of lilly ledbetter. (2010, june) hr focus. will fair pay bring more litigation? (2009, may) hr focus. advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership girls in public school: the american association of university women reports priscilla little little, spring, 1997 the findings showed a drop-off in girls' self-esteem from elementary school (when 60 % reported high self-esteem) to high school (when 29% reported high self-esteem). . . additionally the poll found differing levels of self-esteem among girls from different ethnic groups. since 1990 the american association of university of women (aauw) educational foundation has been committed to conducting research on the status of girls in public schools. the objectives were threefold: to eliminate the barriers to girls' and women's education by promoting a hospitable educational environment; to promote cross-cultural understanding, and an education that taps into the rich diversity of america today and recognition that children and adults live not only in national but a global society; and to foster an accurate understanding of the development of women and girls and to explorehow women and girls think, learn, work, and play. report of the first five years in 1991 the aauw educational foundation, in partnership with the aauw association, published a nationwide poll entitled shortchanging girls, shortchanging america (greenberg-lake: the analysis group, 1991) that assessed the self-esteem, educational experiences, math and science interests, and career aspirations of nearly 3,000 girls and boys from ages 9 to 15. the findings showed a drop-off in girls' self-esteem from elementary school (when 60% reported high self-esteem) to high school (when 29% reported high self-esteem). boys' self-esteem also dropped from elementary school to high school, but not as far (60% to 46%). additionally the poll found differing levels of self-esteem among girls; african american girls (58%), hispanic girls (30%) and anglo girls (22%). researchers speculate that "there is high self-esteem among black girls because black culture emphasizes independence and assertiveness. but academic self-esteem is low." http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html following the release of shortchanging girls, shortchanging america (greenberg-lake: the analysis group, 1991), the aauw educational foundation commissioned the aauw report: how schools shortchange girls (wellesley college center for research on women, 1992), a thematic overview of the status of girls in public schools. this report synthesized findings and major concerns that affect girls' education from early childhood through high school from more than 1, 311 reports, books, data runs, research documents, and interviews with administrators and teachers. the aauw report challenged myths about the education of girls and uncovered disturbing evidence of new and, not so new, barriers to their learning. preferential teacher behavior, bias in textbooks, and bias in testing were three major findings; the report also uncovered other issues that impact upon girls' learning such as sexual harassment, which appeared to be on the rise in middle schools. examining the issue further, the foundation found that very little data existed about sexual harassment in the nation's public schools. to help correct for this lack of data, the foundation commissioned the louis harris and associates, inc. to conduct a national poll of student opinion about sexual harassment in school. hostile hallways: the aauw survey on sexual harassment in america's schools (louis harris and associates, inc., 1993) examined 1,632 8th to 11th grade students in 79 schools across the country. the poll confirmed the high incidence of sexual harassment in the schools, with four out of five students reporting that they had been subjected to such harassment, defined as "unwanted and unwelcome sexual behavior that interferes with your life." although the survey found that boys experienced sexual harassment at many levels, girls reported greater problems. a higher percentage of african american girls reported problems compared with anglo and hispanic girls. at the international level, the aauw foundation sponsored two separate research projects for the u.n. fourth world conference in china, held in 1995. supported by a grant from the ford foundation, a team of language experts translated the aauw report into three languages chinese, spanish, and french--and distributed to the non-governmental organization (ngo) forum participants and to the ford foundation's field offices in asia, africa, and latin america. additionally aauw educational foundation released a small report about efforts to stem school dropout by girls in hubei province. keeping chinese girls in school (tan and tan, 1995), published in chinese and english, was also presented and disseminated at the ngo forum in china. positive school climate for girls in its most recent research initiative, the aauw educational foundation commissioned three reports addressing what was working for girls in school under a series title, "positive school climate for girls." the first study, growing smart: what's working for girls in school (hanson, walker, and flom, 1995), is a comprehensive review of more than 500 studies and reports from grass-roots organizations; it identifies approaches that promote girls' achievement and healthy development. a major finding of this report is that girls' achievement must be examined in the context of their race, culture, and socioeconomic background. among the new approaches highlighted in this research are: mentoring programs for native american girls, nontraditional reading groups for asian american girls, as well as experimental all-girls' math and science classes, and student career portfolios. to supplement the literature review, the foundation commissioned a report entitled "the influence of school climate on gender differences in the achievement and engagement of young adolescents," a quantitative analysis of 8th grade data from the u.s. department of education's national educational longitudinal studies (usdoe, 1988). the report found small gender gaps favoring boys in science, social studies, and math, and small gender gaps favoring girls in reading and engagement. the small margin of differences suggest further study is needed in the 10th and 12th grade data to confirm these patterns and to explore what happened to girls in the same cohort as they progressed to 10th and 12th grades. girls in the middle: working to succeed in school the final report in the "positive school climate" series, girls in the middle: working to succeed in school (research for action, 1996) reveals strategies girls from diverse backgrounds use in their school lives. this field study, which took place in six urban, rural, and suburban middle schools, found that girls across all races and locales had common strategies of "doing school," "speaking out," and "crossing borders." additionally the report documents educational reforms that are encouraging girls to achieve and participate in educational endeavors, such as peer mediation, mentoring, and leadership teams. an accompanying video captures diverse girls' experiences in three of the sites and offers an insider view of their strategies for success. girls in the middle (research for action, 1996) utilizes innovative qualitative research methods to develop fresh insights into what "works" for girls in a variety of middle school settings. through intensive field study of six regionally diverse american middle schools in rural, suburban, and urban contexts, researchers composed richly detailed insider's portraits of girls' school experiences and environments. their narrative accounts of girls' everyday experiences and perspectives animate gender equity issues elsewhere obscured. "researchers began this study by looking for a relatively linear connection between what schools are doing and how their successful girls are faring." they found, instead, that successful girls and their schools are engaged in a complex, dynamic relationship that is neither linear nor necessarily cumulative.... what 'works' for girls, in other words, "involves a repertoire of possibilities." this repertoire, researchers discovered, includes at least three distinct behavior strategies that girls adopt. some girls, for example, "speak out"--asserting themselves and insisting on being heard in both friendly and hostile circumstances. other girls may embrace the "doing school" strategy--employing a traditional "good girl" approach to completing assignments on time and complying with adults' expectations. finally, some girls move easily between different cultures or sets of expectations, thereby excelling at "crossing borders" or "translating" between divergent communities and social codes. schools might traditionally fear girls who "speak out" or stigmatize them as disruptive. however, girls in the middle (research for action, 1996) researchers challenge school communities to reevaluate what counts as success and achievement for middle school girls, and persuasively re-frame each of the three strategies they describe as indicative of certain skills and potential. the girl who "speaks out," for example, might emerge either as a "maverick leader"-one who makes herself highly visible as a powerful figure--or as a "troublemaker." similarly, the "cool girl" or "translator" who crosses borders, researchers observe, has proficiency in mediating between groups, and may also emerge as a school leader. the development of girls' identity, researchers summarize, has a lot to do with how the school community recognizes their distinct strategies: are these strategies viewed as "disruptive" or potentially valuable? are they treated as pathologies or as attempts by girls to experiment with a variety of social roles as they struggle to forge an identity? girls in the middle (research for action, 1996) underscores that school environments themselves conform to typologies in how they handle the issue of gender equity. suburban schools, they argue, tend to rely on policies to redress gender-related problems such as sexual harassment, while urban school environments stimulate strong individual mentoring efforts for girls by already overburdened, committed educators. rural schools, researchers note, typically handle gender equity indirectly--they may encourage leadership, for example, through girls' sports programs, but they might not explicitly identify these programs as designed to encourage or foster equity. researchers compiled their intimate portraits of the alchemy between school environment and girls' strategies to identify several general conclusions on how best to promote girls' development. most importantly, researchers observe, schools need to recognize girls' strategies and expand their notion of accepted behaviors. without this understanding, they note, adults may fail to tap girls' potential for leadership. for example, encouraging outspoken girls to be peer mediators can raise esteem and give them a stake in a system they might otherwise attack. similarly, encouraging quiet, almost invisible "doing school" girls to tutor younger children can help them articulate their values more aggressively, and develop dormant leadership skills. recognizing that effective mentoring is perhaps the single most important factor to develop girls' sense of self, the report recommends that funding, programs, and resources be made available to alleviate the burdens on educators in urban settings, especially, committed to the mentoring process. another set of recommendations concerns making the issue of gender equity visible and integral to public debate, particularly in rural settings where it is often handled indirectly. creating public forums in which all segments of the school community can meet to address gender equity not only lends legitimacy to the issue itself, but would also contribute to the success of those girls who "cross borders" and mediate between groups. finally, girls in the middle ( research for action, 1996) reports that the research process itself is an often-overlooked vehicle to stimulate a dialogue on gender equity, as well to buoy the esteem of girls who contribute to and participate in the field studies. references greenberg-lake: the anlaysis group. (1991). shortchanging girls, shortchanging america. washington, d.c.: american association of university women. hanson, s., walker, j., & flom, b. (1995). growing smart: what's working for girls in school: executive summary and action guide. washington, d.c.: american association of university women educational foundation. louis harris and associates. (1993). hostile hallways. washington, d.c.: american association of university women educational foundation. research for action. (1996). girls in the middle: working to succeed in school. washington, d.c.: american association of university women educational foundation. tan, d. and tan, d. (1995). keeping chinese girls in school: effective strategies from hubei province. washington, d.c.: american association of university women educational foundation. united states department of education. (1988). national educational longitudinal studies. washington, d.c.: usdoe. wellesley college center for research on women. (1992). how schools shortchange girls. washington, d.c.: american association of university women educational foundation. priscilla little is the director of research initiatives at the american association of university women educational foundation. e-mail: info@mail.aauw.org awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 1, spring 1997 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic 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mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com educational research and reviews vol advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 40 advancing women in leadership vol. 31, pp. 40-44, 2011 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper mentoring and support systems: keys to leadership doris g. johnson doris g. johnson is an associate professor at wright state university e-mail: doris_joh@sbcglobal.net accepted december 14, 2009 the descriptive study examines mentoring research in education, leadership, and female career development. sixty-six female faculty and administrators completed women in leadership surveys. most respondents believe that hard work, perseverance and dedication are the essential keys to success. many had a mentor or someone who significantly influenced or supported their career choices. adherence to non-traditional female roles and a positive attitude greatly affected their career choices and contributed to leadership roles. the respondents answered questions about their professional training and provided suggestions to those aspiring upper level leadership responsibilities. key words: support systems, gender equity, mentoring, discrimination, effective leader introduction researchers of gender in career development have examined career choice, work, achievement, motivation, and factors influencing occupational status (costello & stone, 2001). findings from such research have direct implications for schools and postsecondary institutions in two main areas: expanded programs for women in educational administration and career-related education and counseling in the prekindergarten through post-secondary schools. the vocational role for women is not as clearly established for them by ages 20-35 as it is for men. college women may choose a job instead of a career or selected occupation because of roles as wife and mother. researchers of feminist research show women's life patterns are more variable than men's and have a higher rate of individual change from more gains and losses of work and family roles (eldridge, 1997; mascia-lees & sharpe, 2000). education and emotional support systems are more critical for women than for men in attaining occupational status and earnings. secondary and postsecondary education discrimination in postsecondary education is to some extent a continuation of what is found in the elementary and secondary schools. because of widespread belief that the male is more suited for leadership, positions of authority, and dominant roles – in the school administration, top elected student office, and higher education – both males and females are socialized to accept these stereotypes (mcbride-stetson, 2004; mclaughlin, 2003). gender equity research has shown that a large number of highly qualified females are prevented from using their full capabilities because of discriminatory admission practices, lack of financial support, and other difficulties (mcbride-stetson, 2004; mclaughlin, 2003). successful role models and mentors are not often provided for females since the highest-ranking faculty members and administrators have been traditionally males. traditional mentoring grew from the concept of the older and wiser guiding the young and aspiring. contemporary mentoring has many forms and frequently people regard each other as partners, colleagues or peers ignoring age, status or power (rolf, 2007). mentoring is a gift that is shared. it is a relationship that enables purposeful conversation. the conversation assists the mentored to reflect on their own experience, make informed decisions and act upon the ideas that are generated. in mentoring, people develop a synergetic relationship through a conversation that enables them to set and achieve goals, make decisions and solve problems. any one who has the skill to facilitate the mentoring process may be a mentor (rolf, 2007). in spite of research indicative of their competence, women do face problems of establishing a professional identity and discrimination (mcbride-stetson, 2004; mclaughlin, 2003; newman, 1999). first, social attitudes about women's competency levels have been documented in recent years. data have suggested that to make the grade women must be superior advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 41 to men or that the greater striving and loneliness required in the process of ascending the career ladder ensures that only the best women will succeed. women are evaluated differently due to differences in attitudes which are problematic. women are judged as being competent in their feminine as well as their occupational roles. feminist researchers have indicated that in spite of beliefs there is no difference in leadership abilities of males and females, males prefer working for male administrators (mclaren, 2002; mclaughlin, 2003; newman, 1999). women who are interested in becoming educational leaders, or who have been chosen for a leadership position, find that their working life is partly shaped by the constraints and contingencies of being a woman (mclaughlin, 2003; strom, 2003). although a woman may face family constraints because of the conflicting expectations regarding traditional values involving a woman's place and coordinating family and work life, she can become an effective leader. leadership leadership is the activity of helping others work toward common goals or purposes (fletcher, 2004; giammatteo, 1981). according to fletcher (2004), leadership takes on many forms and one such leadership form is post heroic leadership. post heroic leadership requires “enacting a model of ‘power with’ as opposed to the more common association of leadership with ‘power over’” (fletcher, 2004, p. 653). the most effective leaders of the 21st century will help individuals and teams to coordinate and integrate their differing styles to drive change through a process of applied creativity that includes continuously discovering and defining new problems, solving those problems, and implementing the new solutions. the strategies leaders use to manage can have a significant effect on performance. leadership may be regarded as a series of functions that (a) builds and maintains the group and organization, (b) gets the job done, (c) helps the group feel comfortable and at ease, (d) helps to set and clearly define objectives, and (e) cooperatively works toward the organization’s mission, vision and objectives (giammatteo, 1981).the ability to work effectively with groups in a leadership role can be learned through conscientious effort, study, observation and practice (bardwick, 1991; wheatley, 1992). leadership is both an art and a science, of which the scientific principles are learnable. the art of leadership is the way in which one applies leadership principles (robbins, 1991). individuals, teams, and organizations differ in their creative problem solving styles. leaders must appreciate individuals' differing preferences for various stages of this process. giammetteo (1981) advocated the following are some skills that are important to learn and to practice: 1. skills of personal behavior. the effective leader: • is sensitive to the feelings of the group. • refrains from criticizing, arguing or ridiculing others' suggestions. • helps others feel important and needed. 2. skills of communication. the effective leader makes sure that everyone understands not only what is needed but why. 3. skills in equality. the effective leader recognizes that leadership is to be shared and is not a monopoly. 4. skills of organization. the effective leader helps the group plan, act, follow up, and evaluate. 5. skills of self-examination. the effective leader helps the group to become aware of their own forces, attitudes and values. these leadership concepts, knowledge of the self and understanding the power and effects of one's behavior on others are needed for effective leadership and mentorship. they are highly developed cognitive processes and affective behaviors whereby leaders actualize the human potentials of self and others to effect change. effective leadership is the combined cognitive efforts of the shared leadership and the willingness to become an agent of change (bardwick, 1991; walters, 1994). effective leaders and mentors know how to release the creative talents of those with whom they work. are females being given equal access to high-level leadership positions? does the female have the appropriate professional training and the appropriate support system that are necessary for advancement into top leadership positions as they become available? the next section deals with the methodology of the study. methodology this study was a quantitative inquiry in which data were collected through a questionnaire designed to examine female educators’ perceptions of the leadership and career opportunities. the questionnaire contained 32 questions that were divided into sections designed to investigate areas such as the participants’ educational background, number of years in the position, goals and career aspirations, training, secondary level education, influences on the career choice, mentorship, supporter network, perceptions of gender bias, and leadership opportunities. participants a cover letter introducing the purpose of the study, consent letter and survey were mailed to 82 female faculty and administrators at the university and 18 female administrators and teachers at the school district. the participants were guaranteed confidentiality and urged to participate. at the close of the two-week survey period, the researcher received 66 surveys. there was not a follow-up survey. some participants did not respond to each question. in these instances no data was reported. after comparing and examining the surveys for patterns in the participants’ responses, the researcher recorded advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 42 and coded responses. an analysis and transcription of the responses were recorded and the conclusions and recommendations were then reported. data analysis and findings the surveys consisted of a series of questions and the participants were requested to respond to as many questions as possible. the participants in administrative positions ranged from assistant principal to associate vice president for academic affairs, while those in faculty positions ranged from instructor to full professor. the participants’ ages ranged from 25 to 65 years.the types of degrees earned by the participants ranged from the bachelor’s to doctoral in such disciplines as philosophy, education, chemistry, mathematics, and jurisprudence. the postsecondary education institutions attended by the participants ranged from local to international universities. the number of years that the participants were employed at the university or school district ranged from nine months to 39 years. when listing the previous employment positions, 50 of the respondents listed jobs/careers that ranged from graduate assistant to clerk typist. in examining the respondents’ professional education and their previous positions, 48 had positions that were in their area of specialty. the number of years in the current positions ranged from two months to 26 years.in summarizing the participants’ responses regarding the highest administrative levels they would like to achieve: one respondent aspired to become president of a university; two aspired to become vice presidents; five wanted to become superintendents; eight aspired to become principals and five chose the other category. the participants’ responses regarding the highest faculty positions they would like to achieve were: eight aspired to become deans; three aspired to become associate deans; two wanted to become assistant deans; three aspired to become department chairpersons; 20 aspired to become full professors, four wanted to become associate professors and four aspired to become assistant professors. the responses to the type of training or preparation that the participants received for their current positions ranged from having a male mentor and learning through the school of "hard knocks" to course preparation via formal academic training. i requested that respondents recall their elementary and secondary schooling and reflect upon a critical event that may have occurred because of their gender. thirty-four respondents did not remember a negative incident that occurred because of their gender. although 21 could remember an incident that occurred, it did not negatively affect their ability to achieve. this was also true if the now achieved area was different from an earlier goal. the most dominant factor narrowing the career horizon for 20 respondents was the lack of information about career choices.three respondents considered becoming an administrator/faculty member at the junior high level, six at the secondary level, 38 at the postsecondary level and 17 at some other level. table 1 contains influences on the respondents’ career goals. table 1 influences on participants’ career choices influence on career choice number of participants choosing this factor • husband relocating 2 • high school choral director 1 • vacant position 2 • self-motivation 6 • male peers 3 • personal aspiration 6 • teaching colleagues 2 • strong mentors 4 • elementary teachers 3 • secondary teachers 3 • professors 15 • school principal 2 • mother/parents 7 • neighbor 1 • spouse 4 • department chair 1 • relative 1 • nursing leaders 2 twenty-four respondents did not pursue certain careers or options because of societal expectations concerning females and professional careers. thirty-three respondents pursued the careers they had always wanted. some of the careers or options not pursued were: medical school, professional golfer, geology, anthropology, lawyer, chemist, chemical engineer, archeology, fashion designer and biology. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 43 sixty-one respondents felt that in their present positions they can effectively mentor or influence other females to become successful while two did not. two respondents felt they could not effectively influence colleagues and one felt she could be more effective with female students.in the survey’s section regarding who was part of their network of supporters, most of the respondents checked two or more supporters which accounts for the numbers listed below. fifty-nine respondents have a network of supporters while six do not. this supporter network is listed in table 2. table 2 network of supporters support network *number of participants choosing this option • spouses 32 • parents 30 • siblings 21 • children 30 • peers (academic/administrative) 47 • friends 44 * participants chose as many supporters that would apply; hence, the large number of responses. most of the respondents had encountered people who tried to dash their hopes of being a leader, yet they did not allow these negative expectations of others to adversely affect their achievement. while 21 respondents reflected that others’ underestimation of their performance worked as an incentive for them, 39 of them felt that high expectation of society increased their confidence level. respondents said that a sense of knowing who they were, having a support system and believing in themselves were the keys to their success. under the leadership opportunities section, 63 respondents said they have been given an opportunity to participate in professional events. one respondent stated that she took the opportunity to participate in professional events by paying her own way to the events. twenty-eight respondents have had an opportunity to chair a committee whose decisions have impacted the entire university or school district while 35 have not. twenty-eight respondents have had an opportunity to be a keynote speaker at a professional meeting and 35 have not. thirty-five were considered leaders in a religious or civic organization while 28 respondents were not. fifty-nine respondents provided suggestions/comments for those aspiring to high level leadership positions. some suggestions included • try to do your job with good interpersonal skills. • work hard and efficiently. always be prepared. • network with peers, a mentor; stay in touch with people around you. • set clear, definable and obtainable goals. • don't accept gender bias. learn inoffensive ways to deflect snide remarks. • believe in yourself and be genuine. • find out how the system works. • be ethical. you have free will, so do what you think is right. • volunteer to do extra assignments. be cautious in "tooting your own horn." • observe, learn and always remain teachable. • always expect to win! discussion the researcher’s inquiry began by asking, "do females on university campuses and school districts have access to high level administrative and faculty rank positions? what support systems are in place?" were the females properly trained for these positions or were they not? the researcher looked for a correlation in the total number of years at the university or school district with the number of years the respondents had held the current position. twentytwo respondents' total number of years varied from the number of years in the current position. when observing the last position held by these respondents, most had been promoted to a higher position. five respondents, whose total number of years was the same as the current number of years, were hired into high-level administration or faculty positions. the preparation and training of the respondents matched the position that was currently held. all respondents had formal educational training while nine also had professional experience receiving national recognition in their respective fields. the respondents' number of years at the university or school district ranged from nine months to 39 years. the rate of advancement at the university and school district varied from respondent to respondent. there appears to be no consistent promotion pattern for the women at the university. however, a common refrain was, “the harder a person worked, the more the person can advance to a higher position.” the highest administrative or faculty positions that participants aspired to achieve were in alignment with the respondents’ preparation and training. all respondents appeared to have reasonable goals that could be achieved within a five-year period. the results of the survey show that if one is qualified for a position and has proper training, the female administrator or faculty member does have an opportunity to advance to a high level. the recurring themes of each of the surveys were advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 44 the belief in self, preparation, support systems and diligence. conclusions because the female role is more complicated than that of the male, can the female move outside of the traditional female role into top leadership positions? the purpose of the study was twofold: to investigate whether females at a southern university and in a public school district have opportunities for advancement; and what preparation, support systems or training were needed in order to achieve top leadership positions. females face constraints in the workforce and research shows that the greater the proportion of women in an occupation, the lower the average salary. as a result of the belief that the male is suited more for leadership, positions of authority, and dominant roles, females may be prevented from using their full potential and advancing to higher level leadership positions. although a female may have faced discrimination, she can achieve her career goals. a female can be a successful leader in a school district or on the university campus. how can one become a successful mentor or leader? the recommendations in the following section provide some answers. recommendations each of the 66 respondents had common traits that included a positive self-concept, a belief that their gender did not limit their achievement, and a strong sense of perseverance. these are all traits that are found in effective leadership and mentorship. a true leader shows the way and encourages others during the journey (fletcher, 2004). how can women become leaders? women have some historical baggage to overcome in the course of learning to be leaders. they must be encouraged to be confident, respectful of their gender and their own abilities. fifty-nine respondents provided suggestions/comments for those aspiring to high level leadership positions: 1. begin with self-assessment. what basic leadership skills do i already possess? 2. recognize your own potential. identify realistic goals. verbalize your career plans. outline your career goals. 3. implement your plan. systematically study working practices. seek advice and sustenance from more advanced persons. emulate their admirable professional qualities. develop and use professional and personal support systems. protect yourself. 4. remember to have excellence in all phases of the work place and that your performance is the ultimate goal. as women keep these suggestions in mind, they can be successful administrators or faculty members and build stronger organizations. references bardwick, j. m. (1991). danger in the comfort zone. new york, ny: amacom. connell, r. w. (2002). gender. malden, ma: blackwell publishers inc. costello, c. b., & stone, a. j. (2001). (eds.). the american woman 2001–2002: getting to the top. new york, ny: w. w. norton. eldridge, l. d. (1997). (ed.). women & freedom in early america. new york, ny: new york university press. fletcher, j. k. (2004). the paradox of post heroic leadership: an essay on gender, power, and transformational change. [electronic version] the leadership quarterly 15, 647-661. giammatteo, m. c., & giammatteo, d. m. (1981). forces on leadership. reston, va: national association of secondary principals. mcbride-stetson, d. (2004). women’s rights in the usa: policy debates and gender roles. new york, ny: routledge. mclaren, m. a. (2002). feminism, foucault, and embodied subjectivity. new york, ny: university of new york press. mclaughlin, j. (2003). feminist social and political theory. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. newman, l. m. (1999). white women’s right: the racial origins of feminism in the united states. new york, ny: oxford university press. robbins, s. (1991). organizational behavior. upper saddle river, nj: merrill prentice hall. rolf, a. (2007). mentoring demystified. terrigal nsw, australia: mentoring works. strom, s. h. (2003). women’s rights. westport, ct: greenwood press. walters, j. d. (1994). secrets of life. new york, ny: the time warner company. wheatley, m. j. (1999). leadership and the new science. (2nd ed.). san francisco, ca: berrett-koehler publishers, inc. advancing women in leadership 2011 volume 31 45 advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 23, spring 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] motivators and inhibitors for women superintendents sandra harris abstract findings indicated that the top five motivators for women were desire to make a difference, ability to initiate change, desire to positively impact people, and the personal and professional challenge. there were no significant differences for male superintendents. the top female inhibitors were increased time commitment, the amount of paperwork and bureaucracy, community politics, working with the school board, and isolation from the campus setting. increased time commitment was significantly more important to females than to males. motivators and inhibitors for women superintendents today, the job of the superintendency is still mostly a male-dominated position with only 13% of superintendent positions in the united states held by women (glass, bjork, & brunner, 2000). this is an even more striking statistic considering the fact that over 75% of teachers are women and only 43% of principals are women (shakeshaft, 1999; skrla, 2001). in texas , for example, 77% of teachers are women, while only 16% are superintendents (price, 2003). because of the low numbers of women in the superintendency, this study reviewed the literature on women as superintendents, then compared male and female factors that were considered motivators or inhibitors in deciding to stay or leave the superintendency. in other words, when women become superintendents what keeps them in the job and what causes them to retire and/or leave the job for other positions? as the demands on all superintendents continue to grow, leaders are less interested in becoming superintendents or staying in this role once they have been in it for several years (goodman & zimmerman, 2000; houston, 2001). exacerbating this already critical issue is the prospect of looming retirements because the overall median age of public school superintendents is 52.5 years old (american association of school administrators, 2000). illinois reports that 47% of current school administrators will become eligible for retirement in the next three years (rohn, 2001). clearly, the position of superintendent is becoming harder and harder to fill with either men or women ( houston , 2001). in fact, grogan (2000) wrote that it is "mind-numbing" to lead schools in this often "fragmented and contradictory environment" (p. 134). still, for women, the actual service of being a successful superintendent is not as difficult as is securing the position itself. for example, often school boards have selected male applicants over female applicants, even though there is evidence in the literature that females are often better at curriculum and instructional leadership file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm than males (shakeshaft, 1999). in fact, gender has been such an issue in acquiring superintendent positions that obvious factors, such as certification, experience, and strong references, have proven to be of minimal benefit to females (siegal, 1999). likewise, women submit more applications, have more interviews, and search longer than men for these positions (pavan, 1988). grogan (1996) indicates that women feel they must have significant job experiences in order to deal with school board members who have reservations about hiring females, and brunner (1999) suggests that it is "risky business" for females to even consider becoming superintendents. additionally, women are more likely to become superintendents in the smallest districts with the smallest number of support staff help, more reported job stress, less satisfaction, and greatest vulnerability to negative school board conflict (tallerico & burstyn, 1996). even though superintendencies are difficult for women to obtain, women continue to encourage other women to seek this role to "make the schools better for all kids" and to be able to provide leadership that "leads to improvement" (lowery & harris, 2000, p. 10). despite the difficulties of the job and of obtaining the job, women are able to successfully meet the challenges of this extremely difficult position. after all, most individuals in the superintendency have found it to be "exhilarating and challenging" (houston, 2001, p. 429), and education secretary, rod paige, said that "there is no more important job than that of leading effective public schools" (paige, 2001, p. 26) literature review the role of the superintendent historically grogan (2000) reported that the superintendent, historically conceived of in "distinctly male terms" (p. 121), was seen after world war ii as the new executive in america . at that time, superintendent practices were borrowed from business, government, and the military. in fact, images of the warrior and community priest were often invoked in describing the symbolic power held by the man in this position. by the end of the l960s, the superintendent role was seen as one of managing public resources efficiently. at the same time, the superintendent's role became more political. this led lutz and iannacone (l978) to consider the conflictive nature of the superintendent and the school board and the political maneuvering necessary to remain at the helm of the school district. the role of the superintendency beyond the business perspective was enhanced in the late l980s and early l990s as the superintendent began to address key school reform issues, such as restructuring, change, and effectiveness (bjork, 1993; holdaway & genge, 1995; hord, 1993; murphy, 1991, 1993). prior to this time, little work had been done on the relationship between the superintendent and learning (grogan, 2000). even into the 1990s, the language used to describe the superintendent was almost completely male, such as statesman or the pronoun he. however, during the decade of the late 1980s and early 1990s, gender issues surrounding the role of the superintendency began to be addressed (bell & chase, 1994; brunner, 1995; grogan, 1996). feminist perspectives as the superintendency, the "most male-dominated executive position of any profession in the united states " (glass, 1992, p. 8), began to include female leaders, the first superintendent gender literature focused on investigating and telling about the lives of women who had been superintendents. some of these early superintendents included carrie chapman catt, who later led the national american women suffrage association; betty mix cowles, the first superintendent in canton, ohio in the 1850s; and ella flagg young, the superintendent of schools in chicago in 1909 (bjork, 2000). the next stage of research, beginning in the l970s and leading into the 21st century, began to explore experiences of women who aspired to become school administrators. these inquiries focused on issues such as discriminatory attitudes and stereotyping (shakeshaft, 1989), gatekeepers (tallerico, 1999), and mentoring (hart, 1995). in fact, skrla, reyes, and scheurich (2000) suggested that empirical studies presenting women superintendent responses might be flawed because samples and attitudes had been biased in favor of men, and thus, contributed to a knowledge base with unanswered questions regarding the ambitions of women and how they perceived their experience. furthermore, bjork (2000) suggested that common attributes of women leaders studied within the past 30 years tended to be consistent with the call for school reform. women in leadership appear to be relational, community-minded, and open to empowering decision making at all levels within the organization. they tend to be caring, collaborative, and reflective with a strong interest in bringing about change (grogan, 1996). continuing this departure from male-dominated leadership literature, grogan (2000) re-conceptualized the role of the superintendency by applying feminist concepts that considered gender by drawing on the experiences of women in the position and critically examining the social paradigm in which the job was practiced. recognizing that the superintendency was filled with conflict, grogan (2000) recommended that superintendents, whether male or female, must "be comfortable with contradiction, work through others, appreciate dissent, develop a critical awareness of how children are being served, and adopt an ethic of care" (p. 132-133). in the mid-1990s, irby, brown, and trautman (1999) re-conceptualized leadership "inclusive of female perspectives" (p. 168), thus, contributing to a richer understanding of women as leaders and leadership as a whole. women's experiences skrla, et al. (2000) interviewed three women who left the superintendency for employment elsewhere after at least three years of experience in the same superintendency. all of the women described instances of "differential treatment" based on their gender by having their competence questioned, by enduring basic sex-role stereotyping, and by being intimidated (p. 57). they also reported that the denial of gender's role in the position of the superintendency played a negative part in their careers. darragh (2004) had similar findings in a study of four women superintendents in rural texas . brunner (2000) interviewed twelve women superintendents, along with others in the district, to gather information about professional work experiences. her findings revealed that women superintendents frequently experienced inequality through gender bias. she also noted that when women broke norms of explicit talk about inequality, there were negative consequences. lowery and harris (2000) suggested that, in general, women tried to play down the gender issue by forgetting "that there are women superintendents and men superintendents" and just concentrating on being "a good superintendent." (p. 10). in fact, one female superintendent challenged other females by saying, "don't get hung up on being a woman," identifying this tendency to lead to a change in significant ways of communicating so that women superintendents did not participate "in their own experiences of inequality" (brunner, 2000, p. 107). one female superintendent reported that the very fact of being told that she could not gave her a "burning desire" to become a superintendent (harris, 2004, p. 26). however, tallerico (2000) interviewed 75 persons (25 headhunters, 25 school board members, and 25 applicants for the superintendent) and found that there were clear barriers presented regarding gender stereotyping, such as "can she do discipline? can she do budget? can she be tough enough to do whatever needs to be done? do we have to pay her as much as the male contender?" (p. 32). other factors that contribute to the shortage of women superintendents include career path trends. typically, women spend more years in the classroom than men and enter administration in their 40s (peters, 1986; shakeshaft, 1989; zemlicka, 2001), while the majority of male superintendents become administrators as young as 25 (glass, 1992). additionally, allen (1996) suggested that women seem to be less tolerant of the politics found in the role of the superintendent, thus creating another barrier. clearly, family influences appear to have a greater influence on women in seeking and keeping the superintendency. ernestine mcwherter, a former tennessee superintendent, commented, "children are so much more of a factor than is a spouse because women feel strongly about spending time with their children" (ramsey, 2000, child influences, para. 2). consistent with this, lowery and harris (2000) reported that when women superintendents gave advice to women wanting to become superintendents, an important consideration was how to balance family and personal needs with such a demanding career. yet, women administrators "see themselves as teachers first" and are, therefore, powerful voices in leading communities about how to meet the needs of children (tucker, 2000). across the board, female superintendents reported that making "the schools better for all kids" is the most positive aspect of the job. other female superintendents listed the opportunity to provide leadership that "leads to improvement" and then being in the position to actually see "all your hard work. . . move from being an idea to a reality!" (lowery & harris, 2000). this is consistent with a study by vaughan and pankake (2005), which surveyed male and female superintendents in texas and found that women scored significantly greater in inspirational motivation than males. this suggests that women were more involved in envisioning, demonstrating commitment to shared vision, and aligning individual and organizational goals; important qualities for successfully leading a school district. methodology sample this study was part of a larger study which surveyed one third of the 1,041 superintendents in texas . two hundred thirty superintendents responded and 30 of these were women. there are approximately 92 female superintendents in texas ( littleton , 1997), consequently, these 30 respondents represented nearly one third of the women in texas holding this very important position. data collection participating superintendents responded to a survey which consisted of three parts. the first part asked general demographic information about the respondents, such as age, qualifications, and length of time in the superintendency. respondents were also asked to describe the school district, including its state rating. part two asked respondents to discuss their future plans for remaining in the superintendency, which included questions about plans for retirement. the last section asked participants to indicate items as motivators or inhibitors for the superintendency on a forced choice likert scale of 1 (not important) to 5 (very important). motivator selections from which to choose were increased salary and fringe benefits, desire to make a difference, ability to initiate change, desire to positively impact people, teacher of teachers, personal challenge, professional challenge, support/encouragement from others, relocate to a desired location, and increased prestige/status. inhibitor selections were salary too small, lack of job security, increased time commitment, isolation/alienation from campus, amount of paperwork, working with the school board, increased emphasis on standardized tests, community politics, litigation surrounding education, fear of failure, and jobs outside of the superintendency. data analysis frequencies were tallied and measures of central tendency generated. after means were developed, independent samples t -tests were conducted to test for significance at p < .05 level when female responses were disaggregated and means compared with male responses. results demographic data nearly half (46.7%) of the women superintendents were between the ages of 40 and 49 and 37% were between the ages of 50 and 55. only 17% of the respondents were over 55. the men were both older and younger; 27% of the men were over age 55 and 6 of the male superintendents were between the ages of 30 and 39. thirty-seven percent of the women held doctoral degrees, while only 29% of the men had terminal degrees. eighty-seven percent of women respondents were white, as were 93% of the men. seventy percent (21) of the women had been a superintendent less than five years and only two had been a superintendent over ten years. in this category, only 38% of the men were in their first five years as a superintendent and 74 (37.3%) had been superintendents for over ten years. forty percent (12) of responding female superintendents worked in a district of less than 1,000 students, while 20% (6) headed school systems greater than l0,000 students. this was an especially interesting finding because only 8.5% (17) of male respondents were in districts greater than l0,000 students. twenty-four of the female superintendents led districts with a recognized or exemplary texas state rating, and only one superintendent indicated her district held a rating of low-performing. table 1 side by side demographics of female and male superintendents by percentages n = 30 female n = 199 male female male age 30-39 3.0% 40-49 46.7% 25.1% 50-55 36.7% 44.2% 56+ 16.6% 27.1% doctoral degree 36.7% 29.7% anglo ethnicity 86.7% 92.5% other ethnicity 13.3% 7.5% yrs. as superintendent 1-10 93.3% 72.4% 11+ 6.6% 37.2% district size less than 5000 76.7% 86.9% 5000+ 20.0% 14.0% location of district rural 56.7% 76.4% suburban 33.3% 16.6% urban 6.7% 5.0% retirement 55 years 30.0% 36.7% 60 years 26.7% 33.2% 65 years and older 36.7% 28.2% work after retirement educational consultant 33.3% 22.1% college professor 33.3% 12.1% business 3.3% 22.1% other 13.3% 21.1% retirement plans when female superintendents were asked at what age they planned to retire, 30% indicated they planned to retire by age 55. eight others indicated retirement plans at 60, and nine (30%) reported planning to stay on the job until they were 65. over half of women indicated plans to work after retirement, while approximately 30% said they were undecided about working after retirement. sixty-seven percent of women indicated an interest to remain in the field of education upon retirement, one third expressed an interest in educational consulting, and another one third indicated an interest in becoming a college professor (table 1 has complete figures for retirement). motivators for the superintendency when listing motivators for the superintendency, women clearly indicated motivators that were intrinsic and focused on helping others. means ranged from 3.83 for the item "desire to make a difference" to a low mean of 1.76 for the item "relocate to a desired location." the top five motivators for males and females were the same, although in a somewhat different order. table 2 top five motivators for males and females femalesmales desire to make a difference m = 3.83, sd = .38 m = 3.73, sd = .48 ability to initiate change m = 3.73, sd = .45 m = 3.56, sd = .55 desire to positively impact people m = 3.73, sd = .45 m = 3.70, sd = .47 professional challenge m = 3.73, sd = .64 m = 3.63, sd = .57 personal challenge m = 3.67, sd = .66 m = 3.60, sd = .58 clearly, women were motivated by factors that focused on bringing about change and creating better opportunities for children through initiating change and positively impacting people. however, when male and female means were compared and independent samples ttests calculated, there were no statistically significant differences at the p <.05 level between motivators for male and female superintendents. inhibitors for the superintendency when identifying inhibitors, female superintendents indicated that increased commitment of time was the most important issue in determining whether or not to accept the superintendency or stay in the job. means ranged from 3.13 for "increased commitment" to a low mean of 1.77 for the item "fear of failure." the top five inhibiting issues for males and females were the same, although in a different order. table 3 the top five inhibiting issues for males and females female male increased time commitment m = 2.12 sd = .94 m = 2.75, sd = .98 amount of paperwork m = 3.03, m = 3.03, sd .85 sd = .90 community politics m = 2.90, sd = 1.03 m = 2.96, sd = .96 working with the school board m = 2.86, sd = 1.03 m = 2.92, sd = .90 isolation from the campus setting m = 3.13, sd = .94 m = 2.70, sd = .85 when female and male means were compared, only the category of "increased time commitment" was statistically significant at the p <.05 level. discussion study findings were consistent with much of the prior research regarding why women are motivated, as well as inhibited, to remain in the superintendency. consistent with other studies, women in this study tended to be older when they accepted their first superintendency, thus they did not have as many years in the superintendency as their male counterparts. this study also included women in texas who were being considered for larger districts, suggesting that opportunities for women in larger districts are increasing, rather than having their opportunities limited to small, rural districts as was evidenced in prior years (tallerico & burstyn, 1996). while the study did not identify reasons for this, one can hope that as women successfully lead school districts that are small, there reputation grows as school district leaders. this would lead to opportunities for leading larger districts. much of the literature focuses on whether there are gender differences in how men and women run the job of the superintendency, and this is an important consideration. however, the data from this study indicated that women and men shared much in common when identifying what encouraged them to stay in the superintendency and what caused them to leave. women, as well as men, entered the superintendency and stayed because they wanted to change education for the better. neither was particularly motivated by extrinsic factors, such as salary or prestige and status. only when considering whether they should leave the superintendency was the increased time commitment for women more important than it was to men. intuitively, this suggests that this is due to the strong demands of family that are made on women, especially those who have children still at home. even other inhibitors, such as paperwork and bureaucratic demands that also strongly influenced the decision to leave the superintendency, reflected this increased time commitment. likewise, workings within the political framework of the community and with the school board both require enormous amounts of time to develop and maintain the support of these constituents. while there were some minor differences in retirement ages, none were significant. although, surprisingly, men were more likely to retire at age 55 than women and more women than men were likely not to retire until age 65. here again, this could be attributed to the fact that women achieve these jobs later than men. recommendations because of the shortage that exists today in filling the position of the superintendency with qualified individuals, it is imperative to understand factors which influence women superintendents to stay in this position and to understand those factors which influence them to leave. it is equally important to understand the intent of current female superintendents regarding retirement. identifying the positive and negative aspects of the superintendency provide a better understanding of the role itself. this can lead to stronger university preparation programs to more effectively prepare men and women for this important leadership position. for example, preparation certification programs should emphasize strategies for effective time management. other components of these programs should provide strategies in effective communication so that superintendents can build collaborative learning communities within the framework of the politics of the community. school boards that have a clearer understanding of the motivators and inhibitors of the job will also be able to provide more positive support for superintendents. clearly, the position of the superintendency holds great promise for women, but most importantly it opens new possibilities for women in leadership roles. references allen, e. 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(2005). some leaders are more transformational than others: leadership behaviors of male and female superintendents in texas . in s. harris, b. alford, & j. ballenger (eds.), leadership: a bridge to ourselves (pp. 39-48). austin : texas council of women school executives. zemlicka, b. (2001). the career paths of texas public school superintendents . unpublished dissertation, sam houston state university , huntsville , tx . copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.aasaorg/issues/women/tucker.htm file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word 2.docx volume 37, 2017 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick advancing women in leadership pg. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 1 table of contents literature review of the university teaching trap of academic women .............................................................................................13 helene cummins .................................................................................................................................................................................. 13 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 13 advancing women in leadership vol. 37, pp. 13-19, 2017 available online at http://www.awlj.org issn 1093-7099 full length research paper literature review of the university teaching trap of academic women helene cummins helene cummins, educational leadership department, central michigan university, hcummins@uwo.ca accepted november 22, 2016 commonplace division of labor practices in canadian academia favor a forty percent focus on each of teaching and research, with a twenty percent focus on service. the social climate, workplace culture, and social structure of academe often burdens women faculty with excessive teaching responsibilities. this may inhibit both their career success, and personal work-life balance. the absence of workplace policies, career and institutional support often encumbers women faculty and produces inequities in the workplace triggering what is defined as the "teaching trap". smaller universities, financial cutbacks in the university system, and the general neglect of the needs of women academics serves to maintain both unfair, and unequal treatment of women scholars in the academy. the implications of these issues are discussed. keywords: women faculty, university teaching trap, workplace culture, structural barriers, canada introduction much has been written about female faculty in the academy, work-life balance, and challenges in the system of tenure and promotion. increasingly, the student learning experience and teaching quality is the focus of advancing university curriculum and resources (macfarlane & hughes, 2009; matthews, andres & adams, 2011), rather than ways to support faculty as they navigate large university classes and workloads with fewer resources. in a changing canadian economic climate with less governmental funding allocated to higher education and the need to account for things such as the quality of teaching, university teaching remains a prominent part of female faculty's work and focus, and yet often it is given little to no weight, nor worth in consideration of tenure and promotion. a sad reminder of how far women faculty remain behind in academe is highlighted by west and curtis (2006, p.4) that suggests "women face more obstacles as faculty in higher education than they do as managers and directors in corporate america". how and why, do women faculty, trip into what i shall call "the teaching trap"? what implications does it have for their scholarly research, service, and personal life? what are the expectations of the university academic culture? how and why does the gendered culture of academe imposition and impinge upon women in their academic careers? this literature review explores how the prevalence of female faculty's work associated with teaching detracts from their overall workplace productivity and delimits their climb up the ladder of academic success. it explains how the culture of academe, and powerful socio-structural barriers, align to detract, and trap women faculty in teaching, with lessened time and focus for academic research. literature review female faculty in higher education in canada, similar to the united states, academic female faculty are vastly underrepresented in the halls of academe and are positioned lower on the wage and seniority scale relative to their male counterparts. while making some progress from the past women are still missing from the canadian halls of academe especially visible minority women, and aboriginal women (caut education review, 2010, p. 1). their full-time incomes are only 88.8% of their male colleagues, and only approximately 20% of women hold full professor status (caut education review, 2010, p. 1). they are more likely to be found in the traditional disciplines such as education (49.9%), fine arts (42%), humanities (41.3%), and less likely to be found in mathematics and physical sciences (15.2%) (caut education review, 2010, p.2). in 2006, it was also found that canadian women faculty are more likely to be unemployed (5.2% versus 3.4%) in comparison with male faculty (caut education review, 2010, p. 4). with consideration of the variable of age, relative to establishment of one's career, in american academic institutions, which mimics canada, most graduate students advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 14 receive their ph.d. by age thirty-three (clark & hill, 2010, p. 1). tenure then is often not secured until approximately age forty (clark & hill, 2010, p.1). if women academics desire to partner, and have a family these later years of life for raising and socializing children relative to one's biological time clock serves to further complicate the successful mix of career within one's profession. austin (2006) concluded that the process of marriage and having children for female academics lessens one's chances for a tenure-track position. in canada, acker, webber, and smyth (2012) found senior management, and faculty association respondents were careful to sidestep issues of equity in claiming that women faculty had more difficulty achieving tenure, and securing equity in the university than males. they suggested that: "typical tenure review systems may be creaking under challenges to forms of knowledge, ways of working and lifestyle priorities taken for granted when faculty were mostly white, able-bodied men, often married with a spouse at home to pick up the domestic and support work" (acker, webber, & smyth, 2012, p. 757). should women faculty have to weigh out, to have, or not to have children and a career? these important personal ingredients only add to the complex trajectory of professional women and their life's work in the academy. the type and forms of ambiguity met by junior faculty in the university are unheralded. price and cotton (2006) found that many assistant professors did not receive guidelines, nor did they receive documents to give direction to any of the requirements of teaching, research, and service expectations in their disciplines. what seems to be more standardized in the academic system is the expectation that service is given less value overall, in comparison to the weight given to research and teaching. they also found that over half of junior faculty had never discussed their candidacy for promotion with the chair of their department, and senior faculty felt these issues were part of informal collegial conversations. hence, while senior faculty thought these conversations were taking place informally, the vast majority of junior faculty never had a single conversation about these important work components in order to climb the academic ladder of success towards tenure and promotion (price & cotton, 2006). increasingly ph.d. students note that they felt ill-prepared for their future work roles in the academy (crooks & castleden, 2012). what is it about the culture of academe that contributes in leading women faculty astray in the academic process? how in an age of diversity, and accommodation, can women faculty not climb to the pinnacle of success, and how is it that these academic corridors of higher learning, and the ivory tower system are continually disadvantaging women faculty's careers in making their way through the workplace labyrinth? the culture of academe salin (2003) and tippeconnic fox (2009) identified the culture of academe as one that supports both the isolation of workers and one which is based on an ambiguous work structure. such work structures lend themselves to additional workplace stress and provide less structure for the individual worker to navigate their way. when workplace expectations for promotion and tenure are obsolete, the situation of female faculty becomes even more stressful and encumbered. cormier (2007) found that even when women were successful business leaders and had broken the glass ceiling in their various high ranking workplaces, they did acknowledge feelings of isolation and a lack of "fitting in" (cormier, 2007, p. 264). one said, "even though i know i'm good, i feel like an imposter, so i prepare and i prepare again. that takes time time that could be spent on better things"(cormier, 2007, p. 265). despite all the abilities clearly highlighted by successful educated women, simeone (1987) and whaley and krane (2012) found that throughout the decades women faculty were assigned heavier teaching loads, and additional service work in the university. simeone (1987) identified that male faculty could be found to spend more of their time in mentoring their graduate students, or teaching graduate courses which were validated more highly. as an example, what were called "trailblazing women in sports psychology" they experienced the culture of academe as "institutionalized patriarchy and sexism" (whaley & krane, 2012, p. 70). while not all of female faculty detractors are men, some can be women as road blockers, gatekeepers, and queen bees in their lack of support and inequitable treatment of other women (cummins, 2012). despite such structural impediments within the academic culture, the successful eight trailblazing sport psychologists did reach full professor status, which took a total of fourteen attempts to reach the highest academic rank (whaley & krane, 2012). within such a precarious working landscape the toll is high for women academics. minority women such as american indian women faculty, reported "jealousy, competition, favoritism, and other forms of preferential treatment" as a part of their academic culture" (tippecononic fox, 2009, p. 214). the salient outcomes of this type of workplace lead to the absence of a personal life, physical health challenges, and sometimes the need to leave the workplace to find a better workplace fit. nigerian women academic library, and information professionals coped by adjusting when they did their work, making personal sacrifices such as paying to enhance their digital skill abilities, and learning to work with others such as their male colleagues to bridge their skills gap (anunobi, ukwoma, & ukachi, 2012). the importance of retaining faculty is another way of financial savings for universities as faculty replacements tend to increase costs (american association of university professors, 2008) furthermore, dielh (2014) found that female university leaders experienced tokenism, discrimination, a lack of mentors, harassment, and unequal salaries in their work lives. despite these challenges many worked to overcome these adverse work conditions, and used it as a springboard for change to help improve their character and build their individual strength in the workplace and beyond. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 15 small universities in smaller universities, mooney, chrisler, nutt williams, johnston-robledo, and o'dell (2007) noted how heavy teaching loads are commonplace work practices for faculty which deter from both their research time, and research collaborations. often these types of institutions provide no additional marking aid, nor teaching assistants to help offset the heavy teaching workload, and make use of their limited faculty with the addition of the expectation of high service commitments. both women of color (benjamin, 1997), and american indian women faculty (tippeconic fox, 2009) were called upon to undertake committee work that aligned with their diverse cultural backgrounds. one quarter of the women psychologists at a small university noted that they devoted at least thirty percent of their time to service related work (mooney, chrisler, nutt williams, johnston-robledo, & o'dell, 2007). given this, fifty-five percent of their sample suggested that they had little time for any productive scholarly research and writing (p.177). eight percent said that they had absolutely no time for these same important work undertakings (p. 177). single female faculty and single-parent female faculty may be further held back in academic success as they pursue additional course teaching, in order to supplement lower wages, and financial needs as self-supporting households that may include children. they are often required by the administration to undertake non-stop new course development in order to keep their small departments fresh, and current in their course offerings that include fewer faculty personnel and nonexistent staff support. smaller university settings are also less likely to offer, or validate regular sabbatical leaves for their faculty, and they may have limited, or no academic policies to support regular sabbatical intervals. with fewer faculty resources and personnel, women faculty may find they have no equal return on a sabbatical leave to pursue time for writing and research as required for promotion and exit out, or away from the teaching trajectory. faculty discipline and publication record interestingly, when women were to be found in greater number in certain disciplines, in certain geographic locations, they were still limited in their research output. d'amico, vermigli, and canetto (2011) found that in a discipline such as psychology, in italy, with more women in the university ranks, women were more likely to be at the assistant professor level and not at higher administrative levels. they also were more limited in their publication output, were less likely to be a senior author, and were less likely to publish their research in internationally acclaimed journals relative to their male counterparts. hence, order of authorship is very important to valuation of multiauthored research publications. west, jacquet, king, correll, and berstrom (2013, p.5) provide reassurance that more women are named in jstor network authorships, and those numbers have increased by 12.1% overall, between the years 1965-1989 and 1990-2012. they note that fewer women are to be found as single authors on journal research publications (p.5). even the subject matter that women faculty teach and undertake their research in may be afforded less prestige in institutional evaluations. that is, rothblum (1988) found that teaching and research on the subject of women's studies were not taken seriously, were not seen as academically valuable, and was overall devalued, and denigrated. clearly, the lack of support for one's area of expertise has a large impact in the valuation process of a female academic's life's work and her contributions to teaching and research. research-intensive universities paradoxically, at research-intensive universities one would expect that faculty workload would favor the heaviest faculty time spent on research. instead, as crespo and bertrand (2013) found in their canadian survey research at a research university the faculty spent more time on teaching than research. that is, forty-four percent of faculty time was spent on teaching, thirty-five percent of their time was spent on research, fifteen percent on service, and another six percent on university administrative tasks (p.1). full professors and stem disciplines in order to reach the highest status pinnacle of full professor, misra, lundquist, holmes, and agiomavritis (2011) found women faculty instead hit a glass ceiling in the academic ivory tower of learning, as they attempted to move from associate professor status to full professor status. they found that women associate professors spent more time on their teaching, and male faculty spent their extra seven and a half hours of time on their research. ambiguity becomes even more enhanced particularly for women in the stem disciplines aiming to achieve the honor of full professor (frank fox, & colatrella, 2006). with so few women faculty in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, the need for their advancement becomes even more essential as women garner momentum upward through the academic ranks of success. of social importance to the well-being of the health of residents and by failing to track and solve these significant career setbacks in the academic healthcare sector, the health care trajectory of americans is put to the extreme test. tong et al. (2014) found significant obstacles for early career academic cardiologists that were signaling their exit from the industry. other health care professions such as academic dentistry in india report few women at the helm of academic leadership (tandon, kohli, & bhalla, 2007) which is important for the purpose of future role models for female students. absence of clear policies within the culture of academe gender equity is further inhibited by the absence of clear policies for important career advancements including, starting salaries, documentation of requirements for promotion, the absence of faculty mentoring, and a lack of understanding of work life balance (american advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 16 association of university professors, 2008). importantly work life balance must be understood as an "institutional problem" (morrissey & schmidt, 2008, p. 1400) that necessitates institutional understanding, and problem solving related to allowing academics to have down time, me-time, leisure, family time, and personal time. all of these policies would assist women faculty for more fair, and equitable work-related issues and enhancements if they want ways to counteract the teaching gap. for example, in australia, at a prestigious research intensive university women faculty requested teaching relief time more frequently than men, in order to be more research productive (probert, 2005). sociability and networking for gain one unique way work life balance was handled in academic medicine was through the introduction of what was coined "the academic quilting bee"(mayer, files, ko, & blair, 2009). quilting bees in history brought women together in a social setting to create a tapestry of fabric design with the end result of a completed quilt. women joined in the quilt completion with other women to support each other, socialize, dialogue, and undertake enjoyment of the creative quilting experience together. mayer, files, ko and blair (2009) noted friday evening academic quilting bees that supplied child care, thus allowing seven female academics to complete a six hour completed draft manuscript. in that time frame, socializing and dinner were also provided which resulted in motivation, enthusiasm, and support for fellow female faculty colleagues. in balancing the particulars of work, and life, a successful publication outcome was achieved in collaborative fashion for these medical academic women in a novel, fun, and productive way. women constantly struggle with finding time to work towards network enhancements, and time to nurture professional friendships. isolation as women leaders is often subsumed by their work roles. cormier (2007) suggests that similar to finding time to keep physically fit, women must remind themselves to fit in networking as part of their daily routine. advancement links to strong relationships with others, and when women walk the time tight rope, they often need to drop social networks as there may be no available block of time in their agenda for it, let alone the energy required to undertake more. welcoming new women faculty is another simple way to foster sociability, and engender collegial social networks (slate & harris, 2010). until women are more numerous in number across the ranks of academe whereby they can establish an "old girls network" (stufft & coyne, 2009, p. 3) they will greet fewer opportunities to share their work experiences with other women in their midst, and grow their social networks to assist their life's work. additionally the concept of bringing colleagues together in communities of practice (weaver, pifer, & colbeck, 2009; jones, 2010) allows for more social interaction to build collegiality, as well as supplying chances to build collaborative engagements, and enduring social ties and enhanced interpersonal communication. tong et al. (2014, p. 2202) emphasize that "tangible factors such as onsite mentoring, institutional commitment, and the availability of collaborators directly contribute to the success of early career cardiologists". slate and harris (2010) found that female texan community college faculty, were well served by senior faculty advising and mentoring them. "mentoring can also aid the new faculty member in understanding unique challenges that affect women faculty, such as request for their service on committees, which rarely carry sufficient weight in their tenure and promotion process" (slate & harris, 2010, p.7). these inputs are essential to the success of female faculty and have numerous spinoffs for academic institutions of higher learning. structural barriers within the academic hierarchy certain structural barriers work to impede the process of teaching and further add to the stressful workplace conditions of female faculty. skelton (2009) reminds universities that they must be accountable with real quantifiable measures. calling for improved facultystudent ratios, the general workplace structure is in need of improved workplace conditions, up to date contracts, downtime to catch ones breathe in the workday, and enhancements for professional development for faculty. the financial resources of various universities are currently being called into question. "excellent systems therefore seek to lessen these inequalities rather than hide them through award schemes which emphasize individual performance" (skelton, 2009, p. 110). hence, the focus on collective improvements in universities is warranted, rather than more self-enhancing requirements to position already high achieving academics that are more likely to be caucasian men. subsumed under, and intertwined within these structural barriers are the arguments focusing on faulty female faculty choices. the system blames the women faculty for their challenged careers, rather than the systemic biases and sociostructural barriers that are built into the academic system and hold women faculty down and out. that is, often differences in faculty outcomes are "the result of 'choices' women make (curtis, 2011, p.6). women often do not choose, but are either "pushed out" of the academic hierarchy, told what to do, or optout due to overwork, inequities with work-life balance, and partnerships that continue to require their over-functioning related to a partner's wellbeing, caregiving, childcare, and domestic responsibilities (williams, 2010). curtis (2011, p. 7) contends that women's choices are circumvented by "limited career options, socially gendered roles on the job and in the home, and by 'simple' economics". the very same actions by men and women in academic medicine in prioritizing family often, reaffirm old stereotypes, and stigmatize women and their actions in completely different ways. strong et al. (2013) found that when men leave the workplace early for family reasons they are applauded by their peers, yet the same actions by women are perceived as the women are less interested in their advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 17 professional work on the job for the purpose of mommy tracking. family policies women fear use of their institutions family-friendly policies as they think that there exists a user-penalty (williams, 2014). this involves the intersection of mommy-penalties, delays in tenure for the baby track, and the mommy track (cummins, 2005). until "men use these policies, it's normalizing the idea that this is for academic parents, not just women" (williams, 2014, p. 4). women continue to be punished in the structural system of academe when they make use of family friendly policies instead of being assisted through, and by these processes to rectify fairness and the teaching gap. similarly, human resources often contextualized their concerns for employee wellbeing as people-friendly. managers of academics, for example, in the uk university system were perceived as being "consultative, people-focused and facilitative" (deem, 2003, p. 252). what was found to be most interesting was that the jargon was used to assume the academic system embraces more people-focused institutions that relied upon the language of business, but nonetheless stressful workplaces prevailed (deem, 2003). hence, what is codified as the concerns of employees, whereby male academic managers favored finances and research in the university, women favored the focus on students, learning and teaching. with declining economic resources, and a workplace "audit culture" (deem, 2003, p. 255), or "quality audit" (cheng, 2011, p. 180), the way forward may require serious reformulation of the academic structures of work. retention of female faculty perhaps one of the most significant challenges confronting women academics is their rates of retention in academe. research on postgraduate women, and men in australia found that the biggest hurdle for women was whether or not they would remain in academia upon completion of their doctoral studies (crabb & ekberg, 2014). discrimination, and the boys' club mentality were constant roadblocks for women, and never were these same issues ever mentioned by the male academics. in a culture of fear female respondents were equally fearful to equate these issues with their own experiences, and were justifiably more likely to attribute these experiences to other women. finding time in their life schedules to have and plan for family was typically attributed to women's experiences as faculty (crabb & ekberg, 2014). while so few women are to be found within the ranks of academe, it would be tragic to think that so much education had been successfully undertaken by women holding doctoral degrees, only to find out that they desired not to play the academic game in its totality as the rules and policies worked against them. universities need to pay heed to the value of women academic faculty and place themselves as forerunners in policy formation to enhance, support, and encourage their faculty to continue, enjoy, and be successful in their life's work. cross-cultural experiences the future for women in less developed countries, such as in the kurdistan region of iraq; identified that the challenges of social, political, and historical devaluing of women, spilled over into female academics lives (masika, wisker, dabbagh, akreyi, golmohamad, bendixen, & crawford, 2014). as such, women had to overcome foreboding traditional views where their lives were equated with domesticity, unequal competence, and total depreciation as academic women. that is, "for females in an environment where they cannot go out alone or be out late, it is very restricting to organize and participate in networks" (masika et al., 2014, p.2). under such restrictive social circumstances women academics would never hear about a conference, nor would they attend one for research purposes and general scholarly development (masika et al, 2014). these capable women academics are at the pinnacle of old, outdated, punitive, and coercive denigration of their personhood that has far reaching deterrents and undermines their personal and professional lives. these findings are in keeping with other traditionally based societies, such as in india, where female academic dentists (63.5%) claimed they were unable to take care of family and groom themselves in their own professional prowess (tandon, kohli, & bhalla, 2007). these social, cultural, and structural challenges require a whole new thinking in traditional rural india and other low-income countries, and are only just starting to change in urban settings such as india. at the very minimal, developing countries such as vietnam, still have no policies in place to promote women into leadership roles within the academy. their closest current allies and support networks are women's associations located within the university that support women in the ranks of academia, celebratory days for women's achievements, and social outlets for women to travel and sightsee with each other for increased sociability (huong nguyen, 2013). the best way ahead in such a cultural climate as offered by huong nguyen (2013) is a woman's own self mobilizing effort, her familial support structures, and a university placement where she is allowed to vie for higher administrative ranks. family continues to be the largest detractor that takes women away from the academic leadership avenue, and the women themselves have learned the script, to embrace what their university offers them, and to be happy with their less aspiring gendered identity (huong nguyen, 2013). in such delimiting climates of work, and its overlap with women's professional life, much more research is required in these low-income global countries whereby educated women experience patriarchal, cultural, and institutionalized biases in their personal and occupational social structure. conclusions: escaping the teaching trap and jumping the hurdles why does the teaching trap need to be reset in order to value the important teaching work of academic women? first, the stress of continuing to place heavy workload burdens on the backs of women with high teaching loads, large class size, few advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 18 support systems, and networks, mommy tracks, and abysmal work life balance lifestyle, can only hamper the wellbeing and health of academic women. sharma and nair (2015) found women in management colleges in jaipur noted regularly feeling stress, noting medical symptoms such as headaches and migraines, they experience anxiety on a regular basis, feel tired, angry and overall they are overwhelmed by frustration. all of these issues affect their health and wellbeing. additionally, they will be less effective workers, at high risk of absenteeism, and less capable in their personal roles and responsibilities outside of the workplace. their lessened capacity to work, and feelings of unhappiness adds higher costs to institutions and health care systems. happy workers who are supported in the workplace add more positive energy to their employers and personal/institutional workplace productivity. productive, content, and happy female faculty is a sure magnet for the future success of undergraduate, and graduate female students. happy and supported faculty will be better workers in the many roles they take on, such as academic teachers. realistic, and refined female academic role models, and equitable teaching work structures, are required for future generations of incoming female students and faculty. mobilizing women into higher echelons of learning are not only good for the pipeline of learning but also for the advancement of women into leadership roles in all academic disciplines. women's presence is required to make for even playing fields in academe, incorporating sound policies, within a diverse, and supportive workplace structure. moreover, the local, provincial, and canadian economy will be well served by educational advancement, and by the prowess of women faculty who are capable, and learned. in a highly mobile, and socially interactive global society, these strides are necessary to take women out of the trap of teaching, and into the corridors of success, promotion, research, administration, media exposure, and leadership, locally, regionally, provincially, nationally, and internationally. finally, the current corporate climate within universities, with financial cutbacks, fewer workers and faculty support systems, larger class structure, and higher teaching loads, would be well served with more equitable playing practices for both women and men faculty. trapping women faculty through the academic culture, and structural barriers to be found in academe will serve to diminish the knowledge base and bright accomplishments, mobility, and success of women academics. it will provide no incentives to continue in one's life work with such destructive ways of working, diminishment of the human spirit, erosion of one's wellbeing, and will continue to push women faculty out of the corridors of teaching, learning, research, and service. collectively, women faculty deserve, qualify, and need to be released from the inequity trap to be found in academe and linked to the incongruous teaching trap and its processes. references acker, s., webber, m., & smyth, e. 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(2012). resilient excellence: challenges faced by trailblazing women in u.s. sport psychology. research quarterly for exercise and sport, 83(1), 65-76. williams, a. (2014). fear of stigma lingers about use of family-friendly policies. the chronicle of higher education, june 9, 2014, http://chronicle.com/article/fear-of-stigma-lingersabout/146965. williams, j.c. (2010). reshaping the work-family debate: why men and class matter. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 20 advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership preventing the spread of hiv from unprotected sex and intravenous drug use among black women through community-based intervention and education dashiel geyen, ed.d., m.p.h.; ingrid fisk-holmes, m.p.h. h. mark guidry, m.d., m.p.h. & janice m. beal, ed.d. geyen, fisk-holmes,guidry, & beal, winter, 1998 there are many popular, yet erroneous, beliefs about hiv/aids held by some women from the black community. such attitudes only complicate their confusion surrounding the origin and fatality of the disease. the disproportionate number of blacks who test positive for the human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) give reason to devote attention to this segment of society. blacks are 12 percent of the national population (selik, castro, & pappaioanou, 1988) and yet in september of 1990 an estimated 28 percent of the reported acquired immune deficiency syndrome (aids) cases in the united states affected black people (center for disease control [cdc], 1990). in october, 1992, the hiv/aids surveillance report from the center for disease control reported 71,984 cases of aids among the black population. this number represented 30% of the aids cases in the united states. the report further showed that black adolescent/adult males are 26 percent (56,081) of males with aids, and that females formed 53% of the adolescent/adult female population with aids. hiv/aids is rapidly growing and affecting many blacks. more recently in 1996 blacks represented 41% of the adolescent/adult population who reported having aids. this was the first time in the history of the aids epidemic that this group exceeded anglos (cdc, 1996). according to the center for disease control (1986), aids may be defined as a set of symptoms occurring at the cumulative stages of a human immunodeficiency virus infection. moreover, it is characterized by a loss of immunity against an otherwise nonthreatening disease. the virus infects certain cells of the immune system and can also affect the brain. infected people remain in relatively good health for several months to years before the illness develops. infected people who are in good health are classified as hiv positive, but without the illness. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html once the symptoms develop, the severity of illness varies from mild infections to life threatening infections called acquired immune deficiency syndrome. most infected people eventuality deteorate from a state of good health to severe disease. hiv is spread by sexual contact, needle sharing, blood, blood products, or organ donation. the virus can also be transmitted from an infected mother to an infant during pregnancy, at birth, or shortly after birth (possibly through breast milk). there have also been a few reported cases of transmission by an infected (hiv positive) health care professional to the patient. while the research toward the biomedical effects of this disease is vital, it is equally important to address the psychosocial related behaviors that perpetuate the transmission of hiv/aids throughout this population. according to the national institutes of health (1997), the pharmacologic treatment of hiv positive individuals may increase the longevity, but is unknown how successfully treated individuals will alter their recreational drug use or sexual behavior. the prevalence of hiv/aids among black women more women are testing positive for hiv. according to mays and cochran (1988) the incidence of hiv infection among women is growing at a proportionately faster rate than any other specific minority group. aids is now the eighth leading cause of death among women 15 to 44 years of age (jenkins, lamar, & thompson-crumble, 1993). even women who are incarcerated have most reported hiv/aids cases. aids has become a leading cause of death among female inmates (brewer & derrickson, 1992). the u.s. department of health and human services (1992) reported that the rate of hiv infection among women in ten selected u.s. jails, federal and state prisons increased from 3.2% to 14.7% in 1991. they compared these numbers with male cohorts that reported an increase from 2.3% to 7.8% at the same locations during the same year. as the number of aids cases among women continues to rise, the disease bares no preference. it cuts across all ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic groups. one group that draws much concern is adolescent and adult black females. more specifically, the groups that may be greatly affected are the lower income black and latino women who are exposed to hiv through sexual contact and drug use (pettit, 1997). however, the number of aids cases continues to grow most rapidly among black women. black women diagnosed with hiv/aids are disproportionately over represented among females with aids cases ( wingood, hunter-gambles, & di clemente, 1993). deaths resulting from aids among black women in 1987 totaled 739 and had increased to 995 in 1988 (jenkins, lamar, & thompson-crumble, 1993). during 1994 there were a reported 4,166 deaths caused by aids, the following year the number had increased to 4,313 deaths among adult black females. bakeman (1987) suggested that cumulative incidence of aids among black women is 12 times higher than that of white women. methods of hiv/aids exposure among women heterosexual contact and injecting drug use account for 40 % and 34% of cases reported in 1996 (cdc, 1996). however, most of the black women who are exposed to an hiv infection contract it via unprotected heterosexual activity, illegal drug use behavior, or a combination of both. the exposure categories for aids may vary by gender for blacks. nevertheless researchers who study black adult females showed that the virus is primarily contracted through needle sharing for drugs and heterosexual contact (belgrave & randolph, 1993). higher rates of infection among black women are the result of higher rates of intravenous drug abuse and higher rates of infection among their drug using sexual partners (jenkins, lamar, & thompson-crumble, 1993). the relative risk of intravenous drug abuse related aids has been consistently higher among black women than with white women since 1982 (selik, castro, & pappaionmoare, 1988). therefore, researchers hypothesize that the greater proportion of black women who abuse intravenous drugs in the black community accounts for many differences in the distribution of aids cases by ethnicity. despite hiv/aids messages directed toward injectable drug users (idus), needle sharing continues to occur. poor idus who are unable to obtain needles and syringes may use ìshooting galleriesî where needle sharing is common (jue & kain, 1989). shooting galleries are usually abandoned and condemned buildings or houses where people can hide and inject drugs into their veins. according to friedman (1990) and inciardi (1992) a shooting gallery may be the most significant factor in the drug related transmission of hiv, because an hiv infected person may pass the infection onto other patrons of the shooting gallery. some women engage in unprotected heterosexual behavior in exchange for illegal drugs. others participate in unlawful sexual activity to get money to purchase illegal drugs, and there are women who believe that ìgetting highî before having sex make the activity a more pleasurable experience. these actions contribute to greater exposure to hiv/aids among black women. it is estimated that black women represent about one third of female aids cases in the united states whose primary hiv risk was sex with a bisexual male (cdc, 1993). moreover the research shows that higher hiv infection rates among female inmates may be attributed to the prevalence of substance abuse, exchanging sex for money or drugs, and the greater efficiency of male to female hiv transmission (cdc1989; graham & wish, 1994; van hoeven, stoneburner, & rooney, 1991; weisfuse, greenburg, back, makki, thomos, rooney, & rautenberg, 1991). socio-cultural dimensions and self efficacy the cultural norms within many black communities hold significance for addressing hiv/aids among black women. important social and biological contexts and co-factors can increase or decrease the likelihood of risk behaviors. moreover many behavioral risk factors are quite well known but the contextual risk factors are only beginning to be understood (national institutes of health [nih], 1997). aids education and prevention efforts have previously lagged in the development and implementation of gender and cultural specific programs that can help black women in incorporating general aids knowledge into safer sex behaviors (dalton, 1989; mays & cochran, 1988; peterson & marin, 1988). an understanding of the african american culture is important for educating black women who exhibit risky behaviors. a major concern for many black women is how to deal with role strain produced by ìcultural conflict.î cultural conflict occurs when some peeople stick to the status of their own culture and fail to assimilate to the norms of the dominate culture. for black women this may mean they are often expected to adhere to certain behaviors that have been put into place in anglo-male western civilization. cultural conflict causes a great deal of stress for these women (aponte, rivers, & whohl 1995). cultural conflict may lead to sex role conflict such as identity crisis, feelings of isolation, alienation, or depression. cultural attitudes influence the black communityís experiences with aids and seeking health care for hiv/aids (broman, 1987). many black people within lower socioeconomic strata are confronted with high unemployment, poverty, and disproportionately high incidences of morbidity and mortality. there are other blacks who view aids as relatively unimportant when compared to other more immediate problems such as paying rent and feeding their families (icard, schilling, el bassel, & young, 1992) according to research, black women may have to confront pressing social problems such as poverty, racism, unemployment, inadequate education and crime that make aids are far less urgent (freudenberg, lee, & germain, 1994). there are many popular yet erroneous beliefs about hiv/aids held by some women from the black community. such attitudes only complicate their confusion surrounding the origin and fatality of the disease. for example there is a myth that hiv/aids is the disease of white middle class homosexual males. this notion may stem from reports presented by the center for disease control (1996) which reported that in 1981 five-healthy white males with a history of having sex with men were diagnosed with pneumocystis pneumonia. their condition was later called acquired immune deficiency syndrome (aids), and also became associated with being white, middle to upper middle class, homosexual, and male. there are also certain traditional beliefs perpetuated within much of the black community. however, these beliefs are sometimes misunderstood by members of the community. that is, they may engage in risky behaviors based upon mores. for example, one traditional philosophical concept emphasizes an extended kinship among people of similar culture and ethnicity. this concept may involve certain communal group practices. given the notion that as a group they are all ìsisters and brothersî (extended kinship), then sharing needle within the ìfamilyî is probably safe. moreover, mays and cochran (1988) noted that sharing ìworksî sometimes denotes bonding among ìbuddiesî who use drugs. those idus who are most in need of social validation may be more likely to engage in this form of behavior. the practice of needle and syringe sharing should never occur. black women idus may face stressors stemming from racial discrimination, poverty, and deprivation. ascribing to a ìsubcultureî status, many black women idus may perceive that there is limited access to the same resources made available to white women. they may experience feelings of alienation and reach out for any opportunity to use an available needle and syringe. research has suggested that black and hispanic idus are more likely to share syringes than white idus (des jareais, friedman, & hopkins, 1985) many black women maintain a poor self concept and often perceive themselves in a less than favorable manner. they may develop a sense of helplessness and inclinations toward victimization from a system that fosters dependence. as such, these women exhibit greater risk behaviors that would expose them to people who are hiv positive. they may subconsciously place small value on the integrity of life by putting themselves in hazardous situations. the women often feel trapped by an environment that only offers to them oppression. this experience usually results in manifestations of internal emotional dissatisfaction. black women often lack an internal locus of control. they believe that they are unable to take the responsibility for the direction of their lives. according to sue and sue (1990) an internal locus of control refers to a personís belief that lifeís affirming reinforcements are contingent upon their own actions, and that a person can shape her own fate. many black women from this group may not possess self confidence in their own ability to decide. they often become the victims of circumstance and fail at any attempt at controlling their own destiny. in essence, these women do not feel good about whom they are, their means of maintaining survival, and the environment in which they exist. intervention, prevention, and educational programs there is a consensus in much of the literature that many black women who test positive for hiv contracted the virus through unprotected heterosexual contact and illegal drug use behavior. local and community outreach programs have been established throughout the country to address the treatment and prevention of hiv/aids. according to the national institutes of health (1997), community workers have developed many innovative and promising programs. there is a great need for the programs to work with researchers to further hiv/aids risk behavior intervention through scientific analysis. researchers suggest that many programs that are currently in existence fail to meet the needs of black women. this is primarily among those women who are educationally disenfranchised from the lower socioeconomic strata. the weaknesses in the programs may be attributed to format and design. quimby (1993) suggested that appropriateness of content, methods, and personnel have been questioned. he noted that the major funded efforts are generally top down actions organized by professional elites and aimed at their constituencies rather than neighborhoods. these programs are useful for some, but they are inappropriate and lack authenticity for certain ethnic and gender groups. there are, however, those intervention and prevention programs that show gender, cultural, and socioeconomic sensitivity that are helping many women of color. community-based organizations contribute a great deal of effort to control the hiv/aids epidemic. there are programs with components that provide an ongoing and intimate relationship which constituents an understanding of relevant cultural values, beliefs, familiarity with relevant channels of communication, and commitment to safeguard the well being of their neighborhoods (singer; 1991; freudenberg & trinidad, 1992) other projects that have met with a large degree of success are those that include training on self management and interpersonal management skills. kelly and colleagues (1989) discovered that training in self management skills that consist of personal awareness, problem solving, and coping skills tended to enhance the perception of risk and to increase motivation toward risk reduction behavior. in addition, teaching individuals to identify high risk circumstances and to recognize prospective situations that are likely to lead to unsafe sex and illegal drug use is vital. moreover, some programs stress the significance of working through high-problem areas by developing and maintaining alternative coping behaviors. enhancing interpersonal skills helps to reduce a partnerís opposing reactions, and to maintain a mutual relationship that is supportive of safe sex. research has demonstrated the importance of having social support and social networks in community based and culturally-oriented prevention programs. belonging to and keeping social connections may become an integral aspect of living with hiv. many ethnic minority groups extol the family as a primary social unit and a necessary means for support (aponte, river, & wohl, 1995). however, rhoads (1983) suggested that those women who use drugs tend to lack the support systems that have been traditionally made available to men. many women who are substance abusers lack social support from family and friends who do not abuse drugs. in recent years, the association of black psychologists addressed the issue of culturally appropriate education to help in preventing the spread of hiv/aids within the black community. the association of black psychologists, in consultation with progressive life center, designed and carried out an afrocentric model to train psychologists to deliver culturally competent aids education, prevention programs, and psychological services in the black communities nationwide. the center for disease control funded this project for six programs years beginning in 1988 and ending in 1993 (foster, phillips, belgrave, randolf, & braithwaite,1993). according to the organizations, their effort to reduce the spread of hiv among the black community has been successful. addressing high risk behaviors the public health department of beaumont, texas, reported in 1995 and 1996 an increase in the number of black women who tested positive for hiv. it was believed that the increase was attributed to high-risk behaviors that contribute to the spread of hiv. unprotected heterosexual contact and illegal drug use behavior may be the salient concern regarding this population. according to the city public health departmentís demographic data report, in 1995, 26 cases were reported as hiv positive; of the 26 cases, 27% were females and 73% were males. within ethnic parameters, 8% were hispanic, 27% were anglo, and 65% were black (beaumont public health department [bphd], 1995). the following year the public health department reported 32 positive cases of hiv. among this group, 47% were males and 53% were females. nine percent of this group were hispanics, 31% were anglos, and 59% were black (bphd, 1996). the public health department has identified this epidemic as an extremely critical concern. the number of positive hiv cases in beaumont is increasing within the black community especially among its female population. therefore, it becomes imperative to address the concerns and implement prevention measures for those black women at risk. womenís empowerment program the beaumont public health department has an extensive, innovative, and culturally sensitive womenís empowerment program for the large population of hiv at-risk, ethnic minority women that live within the metropolis. more specifically, the targeted population is women who receive drugs or money for sex, is the sex partner of men who are intravenous drug users, ones that may be actively abusing drugs, and those that presented a history of illegal drug use. blacks represent more than 80 % of the clients that regularly visit the two clinics. the clinics serve a metropolitan area of a twenty-five-mile radius. the at risk women are also identified through other local, county and state-supported organizations with which the public health department has collaborative agreements for hiv prevention education programs. once the women have been identified for being at risk, they are interviewed and recruited to the beaumont public health departmentís womenís empowerment program (wep). the women participate in and complete the hiv prevention education program as a component of wep. the program has joined hiv prevention with education on building self esteem and developing responsible decision making skills related to sexuality and drug abuse. the curriculum is presented by a full-time wep coordinator who trains wep peer educators to provide on-going information and support to other women (and men) of color who are at-risk for contracting hiv. the peer educator who is also part of the at risk group serves as an essential component to assure cultural and lifestyle sensitivities. the public health department acknowledges that wep peer educators need support and encouragement for circulating information to friends in their community and maintaining their own low risk behaviors. therefore, support groups are provided for wep peer educators to advocate maintenance of low risk behaviors for hiv transmission. method subjects the subjects for this investigation consisted of 28 adult females (peer educators). they were referred to the day long program by the public health departmentís outpatientsí clinic and from local organizations that have collaborative agreements with the cityís public health department for hiv prevention education. the subjectsí ages ranged from 20 to 47 years of age. they were 71% black, 21% white, 4% hispanic, and 4% native americans. the sample consisted of 68% who earned less than $ 10,000 a year. fourteen percent of the subjects earned between $10,000 and $15,000 annually. among the sample, 4% had yearly incomes ranging from $15,001 to $20,000, and another 4% earned between $20,001 and $25,000 dollars. seven percent of the sample group had an annual income of more than $25,000 a year. the marital status consisted of 50% single women and 14% divorced. fourteen percent of the subjects said they were married, and 18% reported married but not living with their husbands. four percent of the sample indicated a mutual cohabitation arrangement. fifty-four percent of the sample were mothers of two or fewer children. within the same sample 25% had four or fewer children. eleven percent reported having six or fewer children, and 11% of the subjects had no children. within the realm of education, 39% of the subjects said they had completed high school. thirty-two percent indicated a limited college education. fourteen percent of the sample had gone beyond the ninth grade, and only 4% indicated having graduated from a four-year college. among the sample, 96% reported having never tested positive for the hiv infection. four percent indicated a positive hiv infection test result. instrument the hiv/aids attitude and awareness inventory for unprotected sex and drug use form f (geyen, 1997) was used in this investigation. the instrument is newly developed and continues to undergo field testing and evaluation. its objective is to assess the womenís attitude toward and awareness of risky behaviors that may lead to contracting the hiv infection. furthermore, the instrument is designed with three components: (a) question demographic data, (b) unprotected heterosexual activity, and (c) illegal drug use behavior. the instrument suggests that higher response scores represent a greater awareness of risky behaviors leading to hiv/aids. conversely, lower response scores suggest a lesser awareness of risky behaviors leading to hiv/aids. in the initial test analysis of internal consistency on the twenty-eight subjects of this investigation, the instrument yielded a reliability coefficient of .83. the sections of the instrument that assessed unprotected heterosexual activity and illegal drug use behavior were constructed to be gender appropriate and culturally sensitive. the instrument is geared toward the population from which the subjects originated. it should be emphasized that the content of the instrument is not intended in any way to pass judgment, categorize, or negatively stereotype and depict the participants in this investigation. data collection and procedure twenty-eight women, majority black, took part in the investigation. subjects were given a written informed consent form to read and endorse before their actual participation in the study. the women were then administered the hiv/aids attitude and awareness inventory for unprotected sex and drug use. this segment of the investigation took place in the morning before the women took part in the program. the program was divided into two sessions, the first focused on education and prevention of hiv/aids, and the second session involved developing self-efficacy. representatives from both the cityís public health department and the university facilitated the program sessions. the facilitators were majority black women. although there was an array of important information delivered by the facilitators, the format of each session centered on the subjects. this style allowed for a relaxed, comfortable, and homogeneous environment suitable to address the participantís personal issues related to hiv. the language, behavior, mode of dress, and context of information presented and discussed was informal. this arrangement was perceived as appropriate and productive for the subjects. upon completion of both sessions in the afternoon, the same subjects were administered the hiv/ aids attitude and awareness inventory for unprotected sex and drug use. data were collected and recorded from both sittings. analysis and results the mean score for the first administration of the hiv/aids attitude and awareness inventory for unprotected sex and drug use was 128.0. the mean score for the second was 135.3. the womenís scores ranged from 95 to 154 on the hiv/aids instrument before the workshop sessions. following the workshop sessions, the subjectís scores on the hiv/aids attitude and awareness inventory for unprotected sex and drug use ranged from 111 to 155. the mean scores for both administrations of the hiv/aids attitude and awareness inventory for unprotected sex and drug use was compared using the two-tailed t-test for paired samples. there was no statistically significant difference found in scores at the .05 probability level. (t= 4.89, df 27, p>.05). the statistics suggested no significant difference in the mean scores. more specifically, a seven-point increase from the mean score of the first sitting compared to the mean score of the second sitting. this increment of change in scores may suggest that, on the average, participants enhanced their awareness of hiv/aids; therefore, the increment of change in scores is clinically significant. preventing the contact of hiv to even one person could extend or even save a life. discussion and observations this was a pilot study to address hiv prevention among black women. research investigations such as this one may take certain ìscientific research liberties.î the nature of some variables like the sample size, a newly developed instrument, and the subjectsí understanding of research are similar to confounding variables that are found in much of this type of research. future research within this area should attempt to constitute greater control. however close and systematic observation of subjects during the session showed they actively engaged in the sessionís activities. many subjects in this study voiced their enlightenment on information regarding behaviors that spread hiv/aids. subjects expressed interest in future sessions. several subjects indicated their wanting to share the knowledge learned from the sessions with friends, relatives, boyfriends, and husbands. subjects acknowledged their own counterproductive behaviors and vowed to change their life styles. the applications of culturally appropriate strategies demand ethnographic or naturalistic research to understand values, attitudes, behaviors, and factors, such as socioeconomic status in different communities. cultural factors may affect the ability of individuals to change behavior. researchers from different ethnic or cultural backgrounds may help to address this issue. language and other cultural barriers to the delivery of interventions must be addressed with special consideration for individuals whose physical or other impairments limit access to most prevention and intervention programs. references aponte, j.f., rivers, r.y., & whol, j. (1995) psychological interventions and cultural diversity. boston, ma, allyn and bacon. bakeman, b., mccray, r., lumb, e., jackson, r.e., & whitney, p.n. (1987) the incidence of aids among blacks and hispanics. journal of the national medical association, 79, 921-928 beaumont public health department (1995) hiv statistics: race, ethnicity, & risk 1995-1996 demographic data. beaumont city health department, beaumont, tx 77705 belgrave, f.z., & randolf, s.m. (1993) introduction: psychosocial aspects of aids prevention among blacks. journal of black psychology, vol 19, no. 2, 103107. brewer, f. f., and derrickson, j. (1992) aids in prison: a review of epidemiology and prevention policy. aids, 6, 623-628 broman, c. (1987) race differences in professional help seeking. american journal of community psychology, 15, 473-489 center for disease control (1990 october) hiv/aids surveillance report pp. 8-11. department of health and human services, atlanta, ga center for disease control ( 1989) update: heterosexual transmission of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and human immunodeficiency virus infection in the united states. journal of the american medical association, 262, 463-471 center for disease control (1986) cdc reports on aids: june 1981 may 1986. atlanta, ga, department of health and human services center for disease control ( 1993 july) hiv/aids surveillance report, second quarter edition (vol 5, no2.) united states aids cases report through june 1993. atlanta: department of health and human services center for disease control and prevention (1996 december) hiv/aids surveillance report, year end edition. (vol 8, no 2) united states hiv and aids cases report through december 1996. atlanta: department of health and human services. dalton, h. l. (1989) aids in black face, daedalus, 188, 205-227 des jarlais, d.c., friedman, s.r., & hopkins, w. (1985) risk reduction for acquire immunodeficiency syndrome among intravenous drug users. animals of internal medicine, 103, 755-759. foster, p.m., phillips, f., belgrave, f.z., randolf. s.m., & braithwaite. n. (1993) an africentric model for aids education, prevention, and psychological services within the black community. journal of black psychology. 19, 2, 123-141. friedman, s., des jarlais, d,. and sterk, c. (1990) aids and the social relations of intravenous drug users. millbank memorial fund quarterly/health and society 68, 85-109 freudenberg, n., lee, j., and germain, l.m. (1994) reaching low income women at risk of aids: a case history of a drop-in center for women in the south bronx, new york city. health education research, 9 (1) 119-132 freudenberg, n., & trinidad, u. (1992) the role of the community organization in responding to the aids epidemic in two latino communities in new york city. health education quarterly, 19, 219-232 geyen, d.j. (1997) the hiv/aids attitude and awareness inventory for unprotected sex and drug use -form f. college of education and applied science sam houston state university, huntsville, tx graham, n. & wish, e.d. (1994) drug use among female arrestee: onset patterns and relationships to prostitution. journal of drug issues, 24, 315-329 incard, l.d., schilling, r.f., el-bassel, n., and young, d. (1992) preventing aids among black gay men and black gay and heterosexual male intravenous drug users. social work, 37, 5, 440-445 inciardi, j. (1992) the war on drugs ii: the continuing epic of herion, cocaine, crack, crimes, aids, and public policy. mountain view, calif., mayfield. jenkins, b., lamar, v.l., thompson-crumble, j. (1993) aids among blacks: a social epidemic jue, s., & kain, c.d. (ed.) (1989) culturally sensitive aids counseling. no longer immune: a counselorís guide to aids alexandria, va, american association for counseling and development publishers kelly, j.a., st. lawrence, j.s., hood, h.v., & brasefield, t.l. (1989). behavioral intervention to reduce aids risk activities. journal of consulting and clinical psychology 57, 60-67 mays, v., & cochran, s. (1988) issues in the perception of aids risk and risk reduction activities by black and hispanic/latino women. american psychologist 43, 949-957 national institutes of health.(1997, february 11-13). consensus statement online. peterson, j. l., & marin, g. (1988) issues in the prevention of aids among black and hispanic men, american psychologist, 43, 871-877. pettit, s. (1997) ed. the women; long on risk short on real data. out extra: a consumer guide to hiv care. summer, 4-48 quimby, e. (1993) obstacles to reducing aids among blacks. journal of black psychology. 19, 2, 215-222 roadhs, d.l. (1983) a longitudinal study of stress and social support among drug abusers. international journal of the addiction. 18, 195-222 selik, r.m., castro, k.g., & pappaioanou, m. (1988) distribution of aids causes by racial/ethnic group and exposure category in the united states, june 1, 1981 july 4, 1988. morbidity and mortality weekly reports, 37(ss-3) 1-3. singer, m. (1991) confronting the aids epidemic among iv drug users: does ethnic culture matter? aids education and prevention, 3, 258-283 sue, d.w. & sue, d. (1990) counseling the culturally different:therory and practice, 2nd ed. john wiley & sons: new york van hoeven, k.h., stoneburner, r.l., & rooney, w.c. (1991) drug use among nyc prison inmates: a demographic study with temporal trends. international journal of addictions 26, 1089 1105 weisfuse, i.b., greenberg, b.l., back, s.d., makki, h.a., thomos, p., rooney, w.c., & rautenberg, e.l. (1991) hiv 1 infection among new york city inmates. aids, 5, 1133-1138 wingood, g. m., hunter-gamble, d., and di clemente, r.j. (1993) a pilot study of sexual communication and negotiation among young black women: implication for hiv prevention. journal of black psychology, vol 19, no. 2, 190-203 dr. dashiel j. geyen, ed., m.p.h., is a behavioral scientist and clinical practitioner. he serves on the graduate counseling faculty at sam houston state university. dr. geyen is also an adjunct psychology professor at the university of houston. he has completed research fellowships at the national institute on drug abuse and the national institutes of health. dr. geyen had researched, published and presented works on youth-at-risk, chemical dependency, and mental health. e-mail: edu_djg@shsu.edu. ingrid fisk-holmes, m.p.h., is the public health director of the beaumont public health department. she has held positions of director of health education, executive assistant to the city manager, and public health administrator. ms. fisk-holmes is responsible for the initiation and development of the peer empowerment program designed to work with at-risk women to reduce the spread of hiv. h. mark guidry, m.d., m.p.h., is a regional health director for the state of texas. he has served as public health directory and health authority for the city of beaumont. his professional career experience also includes associate medical director and family physician for a beaumont area manage care practice. dr. guidry has researched and published articles on hiv/aids and other communicable diseases. janice m. beal, ed.d., is an assistant professor and coordinator of the psychology program at prairie view a & m university in prairie view, tx. she is also a clinician in private practice specializing in mental health issues that impacts women and children. dr. beal has published and presented research on drug addiction and mental illness at a number of national and international meetings. awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 2, winter 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from 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narjis hyder, c.a. parrington, mariam hussain narjis hyder: college of education, siue, argosy university, email: narjishyder@hotmail.com c.a. parrington: college of education, auo, argosy university, email: parringtonphd@gmail.com mariam hussain: saint joseph’s college of maine, mariamfh@hotmail.com accepted september 02, 2015 the purpose of this study was to describe the experiences of muslim women who wear the hijab, their perceptions of the how wearing the hijab impacted their relationships, identity formation and cultural adaptation in the american workplace. through the analysis of qualitative data, this exploratory phenomenological study investigated the lived experiences of muslim women to gain an understanding of how the wearing of the hijab impacted cross-cultural interactions, how they maintained their personal and social identities, coped with stress, and perceived discrimination and feelings of isolation. qualitative interviews with seven participants were conducted in the u.s. and the results varied. keywords: hijab, hijabi, muslim women, american workplace, u.s., scarf, headscarf introduction this article describes the experiences of muslim women who wear hijab, a headscarf or other body covering, and their perceptions of how wearing hijab affected their relationships, identity formation and cultural adaptation in america. through an analysis of qualitative survey data, this phenomenological study investigated the lived experiences of muslim women to gain an understanding of how the wearing of the hijab impacted cross-cultural interactions, how the hijabi women maintained their personal and social identities, coped with stress, and perceived discrimination and feelings of isolation. qualitative interviews with seven muslim hijabi women were conducted in the u.s. literature review very few studies have used qualitative interviews on the topic of the hijabi woman, and the wearing of the headscarf regarding their work experiences in the u.s. there are however, a few studies regarding the wearing of the hijab, on various topics. the first study investigated the influence of the hijab (the islamic headscarf) on perceptions of attractiveness, intelligence, and employability among muslim women in the united states (us) by pasha-zaidi (2012). the author found that religiosity was highly correlated with personal hijab status, and the effects of religiosity and perceived discrimination were also examined. he concluded that perceived discrimination had a negative effect on ratings of employability among hijabi’s in the us (pashazaidi, 2012). the second example was a study by kelley-hollwell (2008) on perceptions and behaviors that encourage or impede advancement or attainment of leadership positions in higher education by muslim women wearing hijab. the purpose of this study was to identify factors that encouraged or impeded muslim women wearing hijab from attaining or advancing in positions of leadership in higher education institutions in the united states. the study findings articulated the importance of the role institutions of higher education played in creating environments that endorse inclusion for recruiting, employing, supporting and promoting aspiring muslim female leaders; and the importance of relationships or connecting with breaking down barriers and stereotypes of muslim women to support recruit, employ, and promote aspiring muslim female leaders (kelley-hollwell, 2008). a third study focused on the nature and range of stereotypes that job recruiters hold about muslim women wearing the hijab, with five main themes identified: (a) fear of muslims, (b) hijab appearance vs. hijab functionality, (c) impact of cultural and religious differences, (d) stereotypes, and (e) discrimination in the united states. (hana-meksem, 2012) the findings offered opportunities to investigate, illustrate and document stereotypes on muslim women wearing the hijab that could intervene during a hiring process. (hana-meksem, 2012) advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 173 hijab the hijab (headscarf), worn by muslim women, is currently defined as the covering of the hair and neck (headscarf), according to the merriam-webster dictionary, 2014). traditionally and in the qur’an, hijab means a covering or veil that not only covers parts of the body, but also metaphorically is a covering for the eyes and heart for both men and women. hijab of the eyes and heart means that men and women cannot look at each other (other than their own spouse) in a lustful way. traditionally, hijab is meant to harbor respect among and between men and women. hijab (headscarf) is not required in front of all people. there are also those who are mahram to women, or male family members that women are not required to wear hijab in front of, such as the husband, father, father-in-law, sons, brothers, uncles, and grandfathers, etc. (the qur’an and hijab, 2014) this parallels the literature and the relevance of religiosity, identity and of muslim culture in the lives of people and the communities they form. specifically, among muslim women, religious affiliation and beliefs in the qur'an or koran, and islamic traditions played a vital role in their lives. the hijab (headscarf) is a particularly powerful symbol of muslim identity that holds different meanings for muslims and non-muslims alike. the veil and the situation of women in islamic societies are irrevocably linked. according to smith (2010) and rasheedali, et al. (2004), the qur’an does not specify exactly how the body is to be covered, but does order men and women to dress modestly. it is clear that when the topic arises of hijab and women’s dress, islamic authors and researchers and those who study islam address and write about the topic quite differently, suggesting multiple interpretations and possible conflicting viewpoint articles (severson, 2011). identity theories concerning the relationship between social identification and behavior are increasingly attentive to how group members emphasize or de-emphasize identity-related attributes before particular audiences. the continued and growing presence of islam and muslims in the west has produced a plethora of conflicting literature and debates around interpretations and representation of minority muslim identity constructions (seddon, 2013). these women must navigate two different cultures: their native culture and their hosting culture. they have to acquire financial and social stability, and they face discrimination and rejection while undergoing identity development, which is an essential process to healthy adaptation (khatib, 2013). today, muslim women do not view their hijab as a restriction to their potential but more as a symbol of empowerment. they attend colleges and universities, work in various professions, have families and friends and enjoy life, all the while wearing hijab. their hijab can be a regular headscarf covering their hair, neck and chest area or something more traditional like an abaya (long, loose robe) or even niqab (face covering). but they don’t let their form of hijab come in the way of a successful and meaningful life (tariq-munir, 2014). by wearing the hijab, women signal to others what code of life, values and morals, to which they subscribe. muslim women wearing hijab in muslim countries may do so to "fit in" with the dominant culture, whether forced or not to wear the attire. when muslim women move to western countries such as the united states, hijab symbolizes something else entirely. it actually holds a multitude of meanings depending on their interactions and experiences. it becomes a way to express their muslim identity to others, to symbolize their differences (tariqmunir, 2014). among muslims living in the united states, islamic religious practices are negotiated and adapted to a new culture. a visible and controversial symbol of muslims' differences from dominant american christianity is the hijab worn by many muslim women. the decision to wear hijab occurs within a two-fold cultural context: (1) the assumption by many non-muslims that hijab encapsulates islam's inherent violation of women's "equal rights"; and (2) a widespread muslim critique of american culture for its individualism, materialism, and lax sexual morals (beall, 2008). ba-yunus and kone (2006) wrote about muslims in the united states and the way the u.s. culture influences their lives. they wrote about the freedom to choose whether or not to attend a mosque, the ability to vote elected officials in and out of office, and the freedom of women in choosing to wear the hijab or not. they wrote, “this [america] is a society in which muslim women observe modesty (hijab) out of their own free will” (p. 25). discrimination muslim women living in the u.s. today, continue to face explicit and subtle acts of discrimination and prejudice. over the past decade, and particularly since the september 11th terrorist attacks, the muslim community in the united states has experienced an increased level of social and religious scrutiny. this has fundamentally changed the way the american society views muslims, especially muslim women who wear the veil or hijab in public. tariq-munir (2014) in his study says that it is imperative that muslim women become active in the muslim society as well as in the mainstream american society, to improve the public impression of muslim women as meek, uneducated and confined to their homes. in examining the effects of discrimination on the behavior of muslim americans, livengood and stodolska (2004) found that the majority of their participants experienced some form of discriminatory behavior in the year following 9/11. the various acts ranged from racist epithets, menacing looks, exposure to obscene gestures, and intentional avoidance, to more serious acts of prejudice such as direct threats, vandalism, and physical attacks. the perpetrators were both strangers and individuals with personal connections to the victims. women experienced discrimination at a much greater frequency than men. this phenomenon can be attributed to the visibility of muslim women who wear hijab, as was true of the majority of the women in their sample. hijab "gave women away" (livengood & advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 174 stodolska, 2004, p. 193) and made them easily identifiable as belonging to a target group. method this research was conducted as a qualitative study using individual interviews. the findings generated from the research are the result of data collected from a sample of employed muslim women who wear the hijab in their workplace. data was collected from subjects who could sufficiently provide written data through a qualitative interview survey. the current study included a sample of seven participants. this sample aligns with phenomenology's emphasis on rich, in-depth analysis, and is within the established standard for phenomenological investigations within the social sciences. data analysis was completed for each interview. interview transcripts were read several times by the researchers to gain an overall sense of the data. data analysis using thematic clusters, categories, and subcategories that reflect the experienced phenomenon was accomplished by two authors responsible for conducting all data analysis procedures. selection of subjects the selection of the subjects is a vital component to this study. subjects have to be actively wearing hijab and working part time or full time to be included in the research. theory based sampling occurs when subjects are selected because they are able to provide data towards the research in developing a theory (onwuegbuzie and leech, 2007). instrumentation the selection of the subjects was conducted by electronic request. participants are members of a mosque and were emailed general information about the study and requested to reply if they qualify and are interested in participating. the email addresses were obtained from the mailing list of selected mosques in the chicago and st. louis areas. to qualify for participation, female subjects must be employed full-time or part-time, and wear hijab. participants responded by email. participants were given confidentiality by using pseudonyms. the interview protocol contained questions about challenges hijabi women face at the workplace, viewpoints and positive/ negative experiences with wearing hijab at the workplace. the interviews did not last more than an hour. assumptions certain assumptions were made in the methodology. the purpose of some studies is to add insight to a group. the qualitative data provides descriptive data and did not require a large sample (creswell, 2008). the researchers collected, transcribed and analyzed the data, according to patton (2002). here, an assumption is made that the researchers who collect and analyze the data will provide unbiased research (creswell, 2009). assumptions are also made that the subjects voluntarily participated in this study; and also, that the participants provided honest responses in the electronic interview. limitations limitations include the study used only qualitative data only with selected samples from various demographic areas of the u.s. participant selection was confined to mosques in the united states. since the study was qualitative, it could not be determined how many participant interviews there would be. also, researcher bias could have occurred through collection and analysis. results and findings the purpose of this study was to examine the following research questions on the experiences of muslim women who wear the hijab, and their perceptions of how wearing the hijab impacted their relationships, identity formation and cultural adaptation in the u.s.: 1: what factors influence how working hijabi women make decisions to wear a headscarf? 2: how is identity relevant to hijabi women's professional life? how do hijabi women present themselves in the workplace? 3: what factors in the workplace influence how hijabi women present themselves, shape their professional identity, and conduct their work? 4: what challenges do hijabi women face? this chapter aligns with the responses of participants to the research questions. the responses include the meaning participants ascribe to being muslim, as this provides a context within which to situate the interpretations. the participant responses are followed by cross-participant thematic analysis of the seven interviews. the themes that emerged from the findings as to why muslim women chose to wear hijab varied. women felt empowered and spiritually directed by wearing a headscarf, while others desired to improve the poor image of islam. the participant, rita states “…i wanted to be a positive advocate for my religion, which had come under much scrutiny post 9/11. i sensed a widespread dislike for my faith…” many felt a calling from within, some because peers were wearing it. all of the women expressed a sense of pride, but also a feeling of security. yolanda, another participant in the study, states that “wearing hijab gives me authority, dignity and respect versus being treated like a material. i want to attract people to my intellect not my figure.” wearing the hijab would attract attention, but in a positive way, and many stated that it protected them from unwanted invitations or remarks. for some, it is a requirement of islam to wear the hijab and these women want to follow the path of and emulate female saints such as fatima zahra and zainab binte ali, the respective daughter and granddaughter of mohammed, the prophet of islam. barbara says “it would burn me up from inside that despite my practice, adherence to, and understanding of islamic law, i was not doing hijab. i was not following the pure examples of fatima zahra (sa) and bibi zainab (sa). it made me feel so depressed inside and continuously incomplete and fake.” advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 175 it was interesting to note that none of the participants felt pressured by their families to wear the hijab. in fact, one of the participants, molly, received opposition from her family in her decision to wear hijab. molly states that wearing hijab “…was just something that came from within me. it was my decision entirely even though i was met with a lot of opposition at home and in the workplace.” another participant started wearing hijab after she had been working for a while without hijab as a teacher. barbara states “i worried about response at work. my husband did not want me to wear it and was adamantly against the idea.” although these women met with opposition both at home and work, they decided to start wearing the headscarf. conflict often exists between two social and cultural structures as in the case of the american muslim women. many women in the survey mentioned how they would not shake hands with male colleagues. anna feels this may be a limitation for them. “hijab means i have to set some limits for myself so before shaking their (men) hands, people think twice.” beth, another participant in the survey, states “my male co-workers know that i cover my head and that i do not shake hands with men. they make it a point not to shake my hand or hug me…even at company parties/events.” it was evident that a conflicted identity within them, often making them feel invisible. molly states, “there is an invisible barrier that separates me from my colleagues. i feel it when they’re socializing at lunch or going out after work, etc.” many of the participants did not socialize with their colleagues after work because their colleagues would choose to meet at places like bars for drinks. contrary to the women who felt conflicted, some women felt that this limitation created positive effects as yolanda states “wearing hijab keeps me focused and empowers me to deliver an excellent lesson without creating any distractions for my students and me.” not having the social distractions and following social formalities helps yolanda focus on her work and gives her clarity in her work. but, as was evident in the participants, when positive psychological adaptation occurs, the acculturating individual develops a clear identity, strong sense of self-esteem, and a positive mental health image. yolanda feels “i do not consider hijab to be my weakness…my struggle and fight has doubled that of a non hijabi…every day is a liberating day and no one can take away my respect, dignity, knowledge and equality with men.” all the hijabi women related that it was important to be professional, dress appropriately, and modestly; and for all of the muslim women the hijab professed not only their faith, but their professionalism. mostly, they match their hijabs to their outfits and try not to dress themselves the way hijabi’s are portrayed in the media. some even chose to avoid wearing black colored hijabs so as not to seem too radical or orthodox. barbara states “i try my best to coordinate my outfit and accessories to make it look fashionable, yet islamically correct. i do not believe hijab means that you have to make yourself look ugly and unpresentable. i do try to avoid wearing black too much all though it is one of my favorite colors.” many of the participants found that the working climate was supportive and colleagues embraced them. beth states “they (colleagues) respect my choice to wear the hijab and understand that it does not affect my role in any way.” after initial reluctance and intimidations, most of the colleagues ultimately respected their choice to wear the hijab and accepted that it did not affect their jobs. one of the women said that she completely felt a part of the mainstream as a professional. upper management gave her the responsibility and trust to run her department with minimal supervision, while some others related that hijab meant having to set limits to feel a part of the mainstream. however, the other women did not meet with such luck and encountered some adversity at their respective workplace. beth had a colleague who did not want her to accompany them to conventions because she wore “…that thing on her head. he claimed he didn’t want me to be uncomfortable wearing it.” another woman, roberta, worked at a french culinary institute, and her supervisor asked her to remove her hijab for an evening gala event. “she reduced my hours eventually and i ended up quitting but it also happened around the time when the veil debate was hot in france – i’m sure she did not want to rub her french guests (the wrong way).” other women, like molly and yolanda had questions asked of them such as, “are you related to saddam?” or “does wearing hijab clog your brain due to heat?’’ and even “does your husband mind if you talk to a guy?” many of them were avoided or stared at. however, for some the hijab made people ask questions and the hijabi women were happy to answer them. beth relates, “one co-worker even said once that before he met us…, he thought all muslims were terrorists. i’m glad i’m able to answer questions about my faith and beliefs if it’ll help remove any stereotypes.” for them, the adversity was something that did not hinder their work or success at the company, as molly states “i am very lucky…not to be persecuted for it (wearing headscarf) as in many countries around the world. so why would i stop wearing hijab because of some discomfort at the workplace…? in the end, it makes me a better worker/professional.” others, such as barbara, were actually able to change people opinions about hijabi’s. barbara, a school teachers relates a parent’s conversation with her. “from you, i learned never to judge a book by the cover. i used to look at you and think…’she probably has trouble with english…she has an accent.’ and then i heard you speak. i am so sorry for thinking that about you.” many of the women felt that the more diversified the workplace, the more hijabi’s would be accepted as legitimate workers, as roberta states, “diversity is a big one. i feel that the more diversity and hijabi’s (that) are around, the easier it will be to find a niche in the workplace.” they wanted to think that it does not affect relationships and most do not want to worry about advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 176 unwanted attention. their identity as a hijabi affected their practice with colleagues because it restricted some of the things they could say or do that may not have been the case if they weren’t wearing hijab. barbara states “if you work with people who are bigoted and have no tolerance or acceptance of differences, it will be very hard for a woman to wear hijab there.” these women did not feel part of the mainstream as a professional as much as they hoped. roberta says that there were “individuals who immediately stereotyped me and did not want to talk to me…otherwise i don’t think there were any barriers.” and rita says “…there were times where i felt my hijab was causing a hindrance in getting me past certain doors.” all of the hijabi women who choose to dress modestly faced more discrimination because hijab openly declares that the women are muslim. they related that they had to work extra hard to prove themselves. molly states “i have to be more assertive and aggressive…strive to do my best and better than others…if i make a mistake or i am not as productive as others, my hijab could be blamed for that…people might believe that hijabi’s in general are a certain way or inadequate at their work.” almost all of the women expressed difficulty in obtaining interviews and subsequently jobs. some of them had phone interviews in the past that guaranteed jobs based on experience and education, but were turned down within 5 minutes of a personal interview. molly states, “and when i rarely have an interview, i am not considered for the position…because of my hijab. i can see the interviewer’s eyes rove to my head when i walk in for the first time.” some had made good friends but not close friends that they could easily relate. yolanda states, “there is always that assumption that being a hijabi means being rigid in my religious beliefs, a boring person who always preaches…even a non hijabi muslim girl avoids hijabi girl friendship…” since they subsume their identity. molly states “it was difficult to foster relations with colleagues…many of them think that hijabi women do not understand the american culture especially at the workplace. (they) probably thought that i came from some desert location, where camels roam and women hide from people.” they indicated it was difficult to help people realize that being a hijabi woman also gives them the right to achieve the goals that non hijabi or non-muslims do. they felt that they were always characterized as different. some were at a point where they had accepted being different is alright. beth states “as a woman in general, i try to act as professional as possible to ensure that i’m taken as seriously as the men in the organization…i have to hold my own…i worked hard to work my way up in the company. my work and knowledge spoke for itself and it didn’t matter that i wore because they knew i was the best person for the job.” but, many women give up their hijab to be accepted by western cultures to avoid the discrimination and stress. mainstream america is all about freedom of religion, right to speech and religion and so on. but in reality a hijabi muslim as a minority does not have those rights. to paraphrase yolanda, “orthodox jewish women wear a head covering, and so does a nun. but, these women are accepted because that connects them with their religion; while a muslim woman wearing hijab at work is a new phenomenon.” discussion our findings of why muslim women chose to wear hijab varied: political reasons as a positive advocate for religion due to the poor image of islam, a requirement as part of islam, as a calling from within, peers were wearing it, and discovering being pregnant with a baby girl so that she can show her daughter the right path. it is interesting to note that there are many assumptions behind why muslim women begin to wear hijab yet all the reasons provided were different but supported very well. some employers were supportive (for e.g. allowing the participant to read daily prayers in a meeting room) and accepted that muslim women will not attend after work functions if there is drinking or dancing and will not shake hands with men. forming relationships with co-workers felt real and not superficial for many of the participants which indicate genuineness. co-workers have asked to clarify what is presented in the media regarding islam and this was appreciated by the participant which also indicates learning positively about the role of islam. a positive workplace feeling is that wearing hijab provides clarity to the role she plays at work and hijab keeps her focused without the distractions. some negative perceptions of hijabi muslim women were observed within the study. the co-workers of one of the participants did assume all muslims are terrorists. one participant mentioned gender stereotypes along with religious stereotypes. another negative was feeling like being watched more than others in their place of employment and also mentioned being extra cautious with her actions because she represents her religion openly by wearing hijab. it also presented a hindrance where you could not get past certain doors. sometimes, it takes longer to understand the potential within hijabi women due to the negative perceptions associated with hijabi muslim women which resulted in not feeling a part of the mainstream professional culture. implications for practice the perspectives examined based on the interview questionnaire completed by muslim women will enable employers to evaluate their work relations to muslim hijabi women in general and develop a model for professional development and subsequent training in the workplace. the information from this study may benefit other muslim women to improving the relationship with their workplace as well as satisfaction at the workplace. the information from this study may aid institutions of higher education in discussing the perspectives of muslim women. conclusion overall, muslim hijabi women do face specific challenges but as a participant, molly, stated: “i will say, based upon my many travels and residing abroad experiences that this country is the best as far as freedom of speech and religion goes. i am very advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 177 lucky to be able to do what i want essentially and not be persecuted for it as in many countries around the world. so why would i stop wearing hijab because of some discomfort at the workplace or because i have to strive harder and do better to get ahead? in the end, it makes me a better worker/professional.” references ba-yunus, i., & kone, k. 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(2010). islam in america (2nd ed.). new york, ny: columbia university press. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership where’s the joke? the meaning behind sexual humor penelope w. brunner, ed.d. melinda l. costello, ph.d. brunner & costello, spring, 2002 yet, if humor, and particularly sexual humor, is being used to undermine power, then women seeking success in management roles need to be aware that even subtle sexual or gender-related joking may be blocking their path to the top. to laugh or not to laugh? that seems to be the question. with every article on workplace stress comes another recommendation for including more humor on the job. however, there is corresponding research showing that office humor may lead to such negative repercussions as sexual harassment charges. in 1980 the equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc) published the guidelines that define sexual harassment as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature” (rutter, 1997, p. 10). these guidelines also define harassment as the creation of a hostile or intimidating working environment; it is such an environment that serves as the basis for numerous work-related lawsuits. the eeoc classifies unwelcome behavior into seven forms, and according to a u. s. merit systems protection board study, the most frequent form cited includes “sexual teasing, jokes, remarks, or questions” (rutter, 1997, p. 11). under eeoc guidelines and employment law, the kinds of sexual communication or behaviors that were previously considered harmless in the workplace may now be illegal. and yet, human beings remain sexual beings regardless of governmental rules and regulations, so our use of humor is increasingly a source of confusion and perplexity. however, the study of humor, for the most part, either overlooks sexual humor as it occurs in organizations or is limited to an analysis of whether or not a joke is sexual harassment; the meaning behind sexual humor is generally ignored. lundberg’s (1969) joke labeling scheme totally omits the sexual content of jokes other than to include a disclaimer that excuses the sexual frolics as typical. vinton (1989) categorizes humorous interactions observed at a small family-owned corporation in the midwest, but labels obviously sexual jokes as mere “bantering” ( p. 161); a recategorization of vinton’s data indicates that sexual humor is more pervasive in her setting than she reports. other researchers (decker, 1987; hemmasi, graf, & russ, 1994; herzog, 1999; prior, 1995; wilson & molleston, 1981) study http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html different perceptions of sexual humor and, in some cases, explore how far sexual humor can go before it is considered offensive. duncan, smeltzer, and leap (1990) provide a framework for exploring the evolution of humor’s various roles, including when humor “deteriorates into harassment” (p. 257). fritz (1997), hemmasi and graf (1998), rutter (1997) and schaefer and finegold (1995) also contribute to the understanding of humor and harassment in the workplace, but none focuses on the purpose of sexual humor or examines the meaning behind the jokes. a study by spradley and mann (1975) goes a step further and proposes that sexual humor plays a role in leadership, power, and status relationships; we agree with this proposition. we also suggest that sexual humor may disguise attitudes toward gender roles and may be used to maintain an existing organizational structure. analysis of these attitudes and their implications should not be ignored in our efforts to understand organizational behavior and gender relationships and should invite further consideration and examination. recognizing that sexual humor may be used, consciously or unconsciously, to undermine power and control may help women in their quest to comprehend, and effect change in, the existing workplace hierarchy. humor sends a serious message in order to discuss sexual humor in organizations one must understand the complexity and illusion that surround the constructs of sexuality, gender, and humor. in this sense, we define sexuality in the words of burrell and hearn (1989), “the social expression or social relations of physical bodily desires, by or for others, or for oneself” (p. 2). sexuality and gender are “intimately related” and burrell and hearn (1989) include both in what they call the “sexuality of organization” (p. 2). we use the term “sexual humor” to describe humor that relates to issues of either gender or sexuality. hearn and parkin (1987) present four “fronts” of sexuality in organizations: (a) visible, such as open sexual liaisons; (b) secret, such as sometimes uncirculated documents that pertain to sexuality in the organization; (c) unseen, such as sexual fantasies and desires; and (d) elusive, which overarches the visible, secret, and unseen fronts. the primary front of sexuality in organizations is the elusive because, as hearn and parkin (1987) write, “on the one hand, we have discovered the ‘ever-presentness’ of sexuality in organizations and the ways it can permeate, influence and be powerful; on the other, sexuality almost always remains ‘one step removed’ from being pinned down, measured and researched unambiguously” (p. 123). given this elusive nature of sexuality, it is easy to see how ambiguous, gender-related messages are often sent on a humorous vehicle. according to mulkay (1988), there are two different forms of discourse-serious and humorous--and different rules of interaction apply in each mode. assumptions made by the listener in the serious mode are not appropriate in the humorous mode. humor provides a perspective that would not be appropriate in the serious mode. although at times there may not be any hidden meaning, a humorous statement may carry significance from the serious realm. the recipient of the humor is left to wonder whether or not there is a serious message because the words can convey both serious and humorous messages at the same time. humor is the perfect medium in which to couch a serious message because any serious intention and any serious meaning can always be denied (linstead, 1985; mulkay, 1988). sexual humor maintains an existing structure while societal norms and discrimination laws target the obvious discrimination practices in organizations, subtle methods of prejudice, such as sexual humor, retain and support an organization’s historical structure and are often overlooked. although most organizations present themselves as gender-neutral, in actuality most organizations exist according to a masculine identity, and several writers argue that gender and sexuality exist in organizations as part of the process of control (acker, 1990; burrell, 1984; hearn & parkin, 1983; walby, 1988). often this control is demonstrated through maintenance of the status quo. mulkay (1988) believes humor, and especially sexual humor, is used to preserve existing organizational structures: “it is yet another ‘paradox of the humorous mode’ that, although semantically humor involves confrontation with a subversion of a dominant pattern, it is used most effectively for serious purposes mainly in structured situations where it works to maintain that pattern” (p. 177). thus, sexual humor may be used to support the patriarchal structure of most workplaces. seemingly harmless jokes and remarks may undermine a woman’s advancement, thereby preserving the existing power base. kahn’s (1989) article concerning organizational diagnosis and change demonstrates how humor sends a message about power relationships. when a male employee mumbles a one-line witticism under his breath, this forces a female consultant to reconsider the gender relationships in their workplace. a female secretary walks into a meeting of the bank’s managers to deliver some papers and accidentally unplugs the slide projector with her foot. a male supervisor’s quick comment about “a woman’s touch” provokes laughter from the men attending the meeting (kahn, 1989, p. 46). initially the consultant perceives the men in the bank as liberal and non-sexist but, with some investigation, she finds that the joke signals “issues about resistance to women’s control and authority” (kahn, 1989, p. 47). this supposedly innocent joke exposes underlying attitudes toward power relationships in the organization. although these attitudes may not manifest through conversations with organization members, humor provides an acceptable way for men to express these beliefs. this type of brief interaction, recurring repeatedly throughout a normal workday, may indicate and perpetuate assumptions that men make about women’s roles in the workplace. spradley and mann (1975) also illustrate how sexual humor maintains status and role relationships. in the cocktail waitress (spradley & mann, 1975), the authors observe a complicated and tricky pattern of joking between the exclusively male bartenders and the female waitresses. it takes time for the waitresses to learn how to negotiate the boundary between acceptable joking comments and unacceptable serious insults because, “even when joking, girls must maintain a subordinate position, careful that their ritual insults do not denigrate a male bartender” (spradley & mann, 1975, p. 93). even without the help of the authors’ narrative and interpretation, it is clear that the bartenders’ joking keeps the women subordinate. the explicit or subtle sexual humor observed by spradley and mann (1975) and kahn (1989) provides insight into existing power structures and gender relationships. it is interesting to note, though, that most of the research regarding sexual humor does not follow this lead but focuses instead on the legal harassment aspects. yet, if humor, and particularly sexual humor, is being used to undermine power, then women seeking success in management roles need to be aware that even subtle sexual or gender-related joking may be blocking their path to the top. as organizations, and organizational researchers, seem to focus primarily on finding the formula for avoiding sexual harassment litigation, popular culture and the media, paradoxically, seem intent on projecting an image that says work relationships are more rife with sexual innuendo and power trips than ever before. if television may be considered in any way a mirror of what society deems normal or acceptable, then even a superficial, non-scientific review of programming would reveal that, as in the past, sexual humor is still being used to define roles. much of the humor in the media involves sexual situations and put downs and is considered funny because others can relate to it. however, as spradley and mann (1975) demonstrate, humor is often used to keep a character in her place; and many times that place is subordinate. conclusion sexual humor’s prevalence in the workplace seems to imply a normalcy that is accepted until it crosses the legal harassment line. research that defines the boundary of acceptable sexual humor probably helps some organizations avoid legal action but does not address the possibility that sexual humor supports an existing organizational framework that is harmful to the advancement of women. we conclude that sexual humor perpetuates men’s domination of women while appearing innocent of intent, and in this way, supports the existing patriarchal, social structure of organizations. women need to recognize that even if sexual humor does not cross the boundary into harassment, it still may communicate a deeper, and darker, meaning. is it possible that humor can be used in an organization in a way that promotes equality and does not diminish the power of men or women? in 1978, neitz suggested that office humor should change in content to reflect the awareness of the power contained in the male narrative. this humor would allow laughter by both men and women at the expense of neither, “laughter in this sense is only possible between equals; when men and women can both tell jokes, and can both laugh together perhaps the content will reflect the change, with neither needing to assert superiority over the other through their jokes, or in other patterns of interactions” (neitz, 1978, p. 222). mary crawford (2000) also acknowledges that sexual humor “maintains a sexist social order” (p. 220), but she suggests that humor may “subvert the social order and create new realities” (p. 224). perhaps neitz (1978) and crawford (2000) are optimistic in their thinking, or just ahead of their time. their proposals imply that organization members have an understanding of how sexual humor is used to perpetuate a male dominated structure, and we present an initial step toward that goal. women who are leaders in their organizations need to have an understanding of the serious messages that may be hidden in seemingly harmless jokes related to sexuality or gender. further research exploring the roles of sexual humor should not overlook women’s perspectives, the meaning behind jokes, and how humor may perpetuate relationships that are no longer appropriate. references acker, j. 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(1981). effects of sex and type of humor on humor appreciation. journal of personality assessment, 45, 90-96. authors dr. penelope w. brunner is an associate professor of management at the university of north carolina at asheville. dr. melinda l. costello is an assistant professor of management at the university of north carolina at asheville. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | 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mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com introduction advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 54 advancing women in leadership vol. 34, pp. 54-63, 2014 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper making meaning of barriers and adversity: experiences of women leaders in higher education amy b. diehl shippensburg university, email: abd@ship.edu, phone: 717-477-1421 accepted august 18, 2014 extensive research has demonstrated that women aspiring to and serving as leaders face many barriers, which creates a glass ceiling effect for women’s advancement into top leadership positions. in higher education, women hold only 26 percent of all college and university presidencies. the objective of this qualitative study was to discover the meaning of adversity for women leaders in higher education. face-to-face interviews were conducted with 26 women in senior leadership roles in higher education. the research question was “how do women leaders in higher education make meaning of adversity?” participants reported experiencing wide-ranging types of adversity, including gender-based leadership barriers. while adversity had a generally positive effect on participant identity, it had disparate effects on self-esteem, power, connections to others, and worldviews. the common thread was that adversity can lead to growth and opportunity but such benefits are intertwined with pain and loss. keywords: women in leadership, adversity, higher education, meaning making introduction women leaders face barriers which operate at all levels of society—individual, organizational, and societal (diehl, in press). barriers affecting women at an individual level include work-family conflict (heilman & okimoto, 2008; poduval & poduval, 2009; williams, 2001) and communication style (violanti & jurczak, 2011). barriers within organizations include tokenism (broughton & miller, 2009; kanter, 1977; king, hebl, george, & matusik, 2010), exclusion from informal networks (catalyst, 2004), lack of mentorship opportunities (catalyst, 2004; mcdonald & westphal, 2013), lack of sponsorship (hewlett, peraino, sherbin, & sumberg, 2010; ibarra, carter, & silva, 2010), the dynamic that women “get disappeared” (fletcher, 2001, p. 3) in organizations when contributing relationally, salary inequalities (compton & palmer, 2009; kulich, trojanowski, ryan, alexander haslam, & renneboog, 2011), gender discrimination (diehl, 2013; eagly & carli, 2007; ely, ibarra, & kolb, 2011; ibarra, ely, & kolb, 2013), and workplace harassment (diehl, 2013). at the societal level, cultural constraints on women’s own choices (haveman & beresford, 2012; rhode & kellerman, 2007), the association of leadership perceptions with masculinity (lucas & baxter, 2012; schein, 2001), and gender stereotyping (hofstede, 2009; pittinsky, bacon, & welle, 2007; rhode & kellerman, 2007) may impede women from moving forward to top leadership positions. in total, at least 13 distinct types of gender-based leadership barriers have been identified in the literature (diehl, in press). although any of these barriers may hinder individual women’s advancement and success in leadership, taken together, genderbased leadership barriers contribute to the glass ceiling (cook & glass, 2014). the glass ceiling is an invisible barrier built into the social structure of organizations that women face in gaining entry into top management positions regardless of their accomplishments or merits (cotter, hermsen, ovadia, & vanneman, 2001; hymowitz & schellhardt, 1986; u.s. department of labor, 1991). this glass ceiling for top leadership positions is evident across a spectrum of occupations, fields, and organization types (lennon, 2013; rhode & kellerman, 2007; the white house project, 2009), including higher education (american council on education, 2012; king & gomez, 2008; the white house project, 2009). women’s progress in gaining entry into top leadership positions at colleges and universities has been slow. by 2011, the percentage of presidents who were women had risen to only 26 percent (american council on education, 2012). meaning of adversity although women face many barriers in leadership work, existing research gives limited insight into how women leaders make meaning of barriers and other adversity they may face. empirical research on how adult-aged individuals construct meaning of adversity suggests that adversity leads to both positive and negative meanings. johnston’s (2003) study of 20 adults found that adversity was constructed as a turning toward the adversity, a dwelling in the adversity, and a calling out from the adversity. some viewed their adversity experiences as advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 55 permanent, inescapable losses, whereas others found hidden opportunities, new directions, liberation, and deeper meaning in life (johnston, 2003). mcmillen’s (1999) meta-analysis of prior studies of individuals who had endured a variety of adversities found that individuals both benefitted from and were harmed by adversity. several processes seem to account for the reports of benefit: purposeful changes in life structure, changes in the views of others and the world, receipt of support, and the search for meaning in adversity (mcmillen, 1999). seery, holman, and silver (2010) conducted a four year longitudinal study and found that individuals with some lifetime history of adversity reported better mental health and well-being than those with a high history of adversity and those with no history of adversity. the researchers concluded that while exposure to adversity typically predicts negative effects on mental health and well-being, adversity may also foster subsequent resilience with advantages to health and well-being (seery et al., 2010). beaty (2001) conducted a qualitative study on the meaning of adversity specific to women leaders, six secondary principals. the principals embraced failure as essential to the learning process and saw adversity experiences as unclear and messy when they were occurring, but in retrospect as purposeful and strengthening to them as individuals. beaty concluded that leaders who have experienced adversity may make meaning by choosing to deny their experiences or by being defined or redefined by them, bringing about an awareness that was not previously known. study objectives given the limited research on the meaning of adversity and the relatively small number of women who have advanced to top leadership in higher education, further insight on the personal implications of adversity and barriers may be gleaned from the stories of women who have attained such positions. this goal of this study is to examine how women leaders in higher education make meaning of adversity. this article begins to shed light on this question through an in-depth qualitative study of women in senior leadership positions in higher education in order to better illuminate the little understood perceptions of adversity, including implications for their lives and interaction with others. data and methods to find out how women in influential leadership positions in higher education make meaning of adversity, barriers, and obstacles, i conducted face-to-face interviews with 26 women presidents, provosts, and vice presidents from a variety of midatlantic institutions in the united states. these women ranged in age from 39 to 79 and had worked in higher education administration anywhere from 1 year to 36 years, with an average of 20 years. all participants but one (a retired president) were active in their positions at the time of the interview. i employed maximum variation sampling to capture central themes of adversity which cut across a great deal of variation amongst participants. participants varied in their leadership roles (president, external affairs, academic affairs, financial/administrative, information technology, student affairs, executive vice president); personal characteristics (age, race/ethnicity, marital status, parental status, education, professional experience); and higher education institution type (associate’s, baccalaureate, master’s, doctoral-granting), size (small, medium, large), control (public, private not-for-profit, private for-profit), and setting (city, suburb, town, rural) (see diehl, 2013, for detailed sample description). the research question was: “how do women leaders in higher education make meaning of adversity?” anticipating that women may not use the term “adversity” to describe significant difficulty in the workplace, i included the words “barrier” and “obstacle” in my interview questions. i used a semi-structured interview guide that included questions focusing on significant episodes of personal and professional adversity as well as professional barriers and obstacles the women had encountered. the hour-long interviews were recorded, and i personally transcribed the audio recordings. the interview data were analyzed in several steps using patton’s (2002) content analysis methodology. first, i created a classification system by coding the interview transcripts with labels that corresponded to themes. i then performed a logical analysis across the themes to explore their interconnections, which allowed me to generate new insights to organize the data. this is a logical process in which potential categories are created by crossing each theme with each of the other themes (patton, 2002). lastly, i performed an interpretative analysis to more fully understand the meanings in the data. interpretation goes beyond descriptive data by attaching significance to what was found, finding meanings, offering explanations, and drawing conclusions (patton, 2002). to ensure accuracy and transparency throughout the process of data analysis, i sent both transcripts and preliminary findings to participants for their feedback. after reviewing transcripts, a few participants shared additional feedback and clarifications with me, which were added to transcripts used for analysis. a number of the women in this study also shared feedback on preliminary findings. in general, participants seemed to understand, appreciate, and relate to findings, indicating that statements attributed to them were “accurate” and that findings were “interesting,” “fascinating,” and “impressive.” results the women leaders in this study shared stories of significant adversity or challenge in their personal and professional lives. participants had encountered 21 distinct types of adversity. fifteen of these were professional adversities (e.g., discrimination, unsupportive leadership, advancement issues); five were personal adversities (e.g., relationship conflict, family challenges, serious health issues); while one type, work-family conflict, crosses both the personal and professional domains. the women also reported experiencing professional barriers advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 56 and obstacles resulting from their gender, such as discrimination, exclusion from informal networks, tokenism, lack of mentoring, workplace harassment, and salary inequalities (see diehl, 2013, for complete listing and description of adversity types). these adversities led to multiple meanings in the lives of participants. these meanings are organized by three societal levels: micro (individual), meso (group), and macro (societal), as shown in figure 1. figure 1. meanings of adversity by level of society. identity all participants mentioned some aspect of how their experience with adversity related to their identity. although the experience of going through adversity was trying, the changes in identity which resulted were generally positive. participants used their experiences with adversity to analyze themselves (self-analysis), accept themselves (self-acceptance), define themselves (self-definition), and gain perspective over what was important in their lives. self-analysis. half of the participants spoke of how adversity led them to give serious thought to their own character, actions, and motives. through this reflection process, many gained knowledge about themselves, and some became open to changing themselves to overcome the adversity. in reflecting on their experiences with adversity, several women discovered their own identities and strengths. through her experience of running construction projects, carla found that she could do more than she thought: i grew up thinking i would never do anything but be a teacher. at my age, most girls went to school for nursing or education. … it's really taught me that i can do what i want to do, and i can do things that i never knew i could do. upon reflection, other participants realized they had inner strength and courage. as a result of working for a disrespectful boss, kelly discovered that she could “survive some tough times.” similarly, wendy discovered that she is a survivor after her experience with a serious car accident: “i was so thrown initially. i'm like, ‘oh my god, i could have died.’ … i evolved from that into: ‘i survived. i'm a survivor.’” while the self-knowledge gained by some participants was positive, for others, adversity was a more humbling experience. as a result of her experience with cancer, claudia discovered that she “can get sick just like everybody else.” for some women, the self-analysis process did not end with knowledge gained about self. these participants became open to change, as frances articulated: that obstacle might be there for a reason. … you have to really think about what are people telling you. it's one thing if one person says it. if it comes across in other areas, well, i think you need to be open to changing or growing a little bit. self-acceptance. several participants spoke about learning to accept that that they could not control or fix everything in their lives. nina was verbally attacked by a male colleague and then not supported when she reported the incident. nina found it difficult to accept that she could not fix the situation: “i couldn't fix it, and i had a really hard time with that. so i think getting me to accept that i can't fix everything, and that sometimes the right thing is to leave a situation.” self-definition. over half of the participants described how they defined themselves, not allowing adverse situations or people to limit who they could become. some experienced overt discouragement in high school or college which they used to prove their naysayers wrong. anne did not allow discouraging teachers define what she could do: “people told me along the way i couldn't do something, and that was very motivational to get it done.” others experienced this naysaying attitude in the workplace. even though she experienced discrimination and harassment, lillian didn’t let others define what she could do. lillian shared how she handled discriminatory attitudes: “it just made me mad, so of course, i was going to show them that i could do it.” many women made deliberate and proactive choices to define themselves. ava shared that she does not allow adversities to be a part of who she is: “i don't dwell on them at all.” brenda discussed how she separated her identity from her role as president when her institution had to cut personnel: “the only way you can do those things is to say, ‘this is not me doing this. this is not about me.’” perspective. many participants spoke about gaining perspective over what is important in their lives through their experiences with adversity. those who experienced life and death adversities gained greater clarity in other aspects of their lives. wendy’s car accident gave her perspective about her life: “everything became clearer in life, and i realized i didn't want to be in [my] marriage anymore.” adversities that were lifealtering, but not life-threatening also enabled participants to put minor problems into perspective. olivia shared that after being forced to leave her job, she realized that “small situations” are “not as important. they're little things. i take them into perspective now.” advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 57 self-esteem most participants discussed how their adversities led to positive and negative effects on their self-esteem. on the negative side, participants experienced feelings of insecurity resulting from the difficulty or trauma. on the positive side, participants developed self-confidence and pride when they learned to manage or overcome the adversity. insecurity. for a majority of participants, adversity led to insecurity, a concept that encompasses a number of distinct feelings including self-doubt, shame, inferiority, stress, loneliness, disappointment, and failure. participants experienced a loss of self-confidence as a result of these feelings, as eileen discussed: “you begin to accept and become more complacent. it isn't the right answer, but it's how you survive.” many participants spent much time questioning how they could have prevented their adverse situations. some concluded that they were to blame, despite evidence to the contrary. marcy described her self-examination: “could i have done better? should i have done better? did i shoot myself in the foot sometime?” for a few participants insecurity was manifest as a sense of shame, as nina expressed in regards to enduring the verbal attack of a male colleague: “i felt dirty i felt like i was the instigator.” for others, insecurity was manifest physically through weight gain, appetite, lack of sleep, stress, and slumping posture. gina mentioned the stress she endured while working for a verbally abusive supervisor: “it affected me personally just in sleep deprivation, appetite, anxiety.” another type of insecurity which participants discussed was loneliness. lillian described the loneliness which resulted from serving on a male-dominated leadership team and being excluded from male-dominated social events: “you don't get the social interaction out of your job that most males get.” participants who serve as presidents, such as claudia, do not have peers within their own institution. claudia articulated her feelings of loneliness and insecurity: “[the presidency] is the loneliest place i can imagine. ... sometimes i feel like, ‘my god, who can i ask about this?’” several women felt an intense need for privacy for selfprotection. evelyn discussed how “scary” it is to serve in a leadership position in which “everybody's watching your every move.” some participants with serious health issues chose not to share their diagnoses with their campus communities to protect themselves from criticism regarding their leadership. as claudia explained, “i didn't want the campus to know i was sick so they wouldn't think i wasn't making good decisions because of that.” a few women noted the importance of sharing their struggles with trusted family and friends, but as brenda stated, “other than that, i think a line of privacy where people don't go is important.” self-confidence. another aspect of self-esteem which over half of the participants developed was self-confidence. many participants discussed feeling “stronger” and “tougher” and gaining “confidence” as a result of navigating through adverse experiences. overcoming barriers or difficult obstacles resulted in an increase in overall self-esteem. vivian described that going away to a four year college against the advice of her counselor increased her confidence: “i felt better about myself, more power, more capable.” some participants found that their adversities could be managed but not overcome. developing the emotional strength and skills to manage adversity led to an increase in selfconfidence. evelyn noted that growing up with a drug-addicted mother “made me strong.” she further explained how this experience has allowed her to handle situations that are not easy or clear: i will listen and listen and listen and understand in most situations why people make the decisions that they do. … i always believe people deserve second chances because there are always circumstances around the reasons why people make decisions. a few participants shared their experiences in eliminating programs, sports teams, and positions to keep their institutions afloat financially. such decisions were more than difficult, they were “painful” as claudia described. however, making decisions which saved their institutions led to an increase in self-confidence. as claudia further explained, “it's allowed me to have confidence that when i think a decision is right, trust it.” pride. several participants discussed feelings of pride and fulfillment when they accomplished things they did not know they could. those who persevered through challenging educational programs and job searches felt a great sense of accomplishment. sherry spoke about her feeling of accomplishment after going through six interviews before being offered a position: i knew some of my fellow job candidates, and i saw people get hired who i knew did not have the skill set that i had. and it's been wonderful to be a successful president. so there. [laughs] that's my revenge…i got the right presidency. beyond a personal sense of accomplishment, some participants also experienced pride for their families and their culture. frances explained that completing a full-time doctoral program while working full time and raising three children led to pride for self, family, and “the culture for women.” power power concerns what an individual can or can’t do. some participants experienced a lack of control over aspects of their lives, while others experienced empowerment and new opportunity. some women experienced both lack of control and empowerment as a result of the same experience. in these situations, when participants could not control one aspect of their lives as a result of adversity, they focused on what they could control. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 58 lack of control. about half of the participants experienced lack of control or disempowerment as a result of their adversities, meaning that they felt a lack of power to freely choose, achieve, influence, or direct events in their lives. this was especially evident for individuals who went through traumatic adversities such as serious injury or illness, miscarriage, job loss, and loss of spouse or partner. prior to their experiences, these women thought that they had a good deal of control and power. however, after dealing with adversity, they became keenly aware of their inability to control their lives, as marcy described: “i used to think, in all honesty, if you are intelligent, if you are honest, and if you are a hard worker, you'd be fine. i don't believe that anymore.” after having had academic and career success, participants who suffered miscarriages and infertility found it especially difficult to handle the inability to have children. sherry shared her story of being unable achieve this life goal: i became pregnant, but i miscarried. … i had so many tumors in my uterus that i couldn't carry a child. right after miscarrying, i also had to have a hysterectomy. …that was my first "failure” in life. i had made it through all of my academic preparation. i had had fulbrights and all these grants. i had lived abroad successfully. … i'd bought a house. i prepared everything to start a family. it was the first disconnect between setting goals and achieving them. several participants spoke about the frustration of being unable to control their working conditions. claudia, a university president, described her inability to control her own agenda: the day i come in with is not the day i get. it's close, but it's changed because of this emergency or that emergency. … when this semester's over, it's been about whatever it needed to be about, but not what i wanted it to be about. this inability to control working conditions includes lack of freedom to advance or not advance within an organization. lillian described the lack of opportunities at her institution: “i’ve talked to my boss about career goals, and he's just said, ‘well, there's nothing for you here.’” eileen was given no other choice but to accept a position as vice president, “i didn't want it. i refused it, and i was basically told, ‘you will do it.’” empowerment. more than half of participants felt empowered as a result of their experiences, meaning that they had gained power or control over aspects of their lives. some described the self-reliance gained through surviving adversities, as faith experienced after the loss of her husband at a young age: “it made me self-reliant.” others developed resilience, which is the ability to “rebound and keep going” when things don’t work out as expected, as frances articulated. many participants found they were empowered through the leadership skills they developed as a result of professional adversity. navigating through a particular experience of adversity led to insight and new skills which participants could use to address subsequent challenging issues. as isabelle expressed, “i've been able to look back on it and use in other situations that are similar.” some participants gained ability to make tough decisions and to implement change in the workplace. as wendy stated, “it's really empowered me to just be very professionally direct with people.” for ava, overcoming the perception that her promotion was a demotion resulted in her ability “to make the tough calls” and to hold her own with her board. others became more assertive. by standing up to a disrespectful supervisor, kelly learned “to not be afraid to speak my truth … and to not be afraid to showcase my work.” individuals in this study were also empowered when they learned how to be prepared for adversity or barriers. some participants of a minority race discussed how they had learned to “embrace” discrimination and “be prepared,” as isabelle described. participants also learned how to deal with genderbased leadership barriers, such as exclusion from informal networks. for example, olivia built a network of women to get around the “good old boys’ network.” participants who felt disempowered in one area of their lives were empowered when they discovered what they could control. after phyllis was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she started to control what she could. as she stated, she “started sleeping more [and] not sweating the small stuff.” teresa noted the importance of remembering that individuals can control their own destiny: if you get fired, you get demoted, you don't get the job you want, it may be for a large variety of reasons, but it's never because one person has prevented you from doing that. … you control your own destiny, and don't give that over to anybody else. opportunity. about one quarter of the participants expressed that their experiences with adversity led to new opportunities. these women viewed adversity as a catalyst which made it possible to do something new or different. however, participants described opportunity in the context of adversity as intertwined with pain and loss. as sherry stated, “adversity brings opportunity as well as challenge and pain, if you could get through it.” faith elaborated on how her world both contracted and expanded after losing her husband: on an emotional level, [my world] contracted enormously. but it expanded professionally and to some extent personally … in many ways, my life was very much enriched because of moving into administration and having the freedom to travel and not feel that i was neglecting either my husband or my children. some participants found that professional adversity was a catalyst for professional growth and more challenging work. gina spoke about how she turned serving as the first female vice president at her institution into an opportunity: “i was then frequently called to be the one to substitute for the president if there was a speaking engagement. … i seized it as a wonderful, amazing opportunity to take full advantage of.” advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 59 several participants were able to recast barriers as opportunities. when asked if she had experienced any barriers or obstacles in her position, wendy shared that she does not define difficult situations as barriers. instead she uses her energy to turn would-be barriers “into an opportunity.” connection a majority of participants described how their experiences impacted how they relate to other people, both positively and negatively. on the negative side, some participants experienced loss and relationship stress. on the positive side, several participants experienced relationship strengthening and the ability to provide support for others. loss. several participants described losing connections to others due to various circumstances, such as death, miscarriage, jealousy, or job loss. faith shared that the death of her husband was “the greatest loss in my life,” while marcy stated that as a result of her job loss, “i miss my team.” some women lost connections to people who were not directly involved in the adversity. in faith’s case, without her husband, she no longer felt comfortable participating in couple’s activities, and therefore lost connections to friends: “for a while, i agreed to continue [to] play bridge with a friend. but it wasn't the same, and so gradually i just felt the need to find my own space and time.” a few participants dealt with infertility and miscarriage. this type of loss was especially difficult for participants because there were no memorials to publicly grieve the loss. for example, darlene described the grief she endured in private after suffering a miscarriage: you feel like you can't tell people because you didn't share your greatest joy with them. [so] why are you going to say, “well, somehow you're weren't good enough, or you weren't trustworthy enough then, when i got pregnant, now i'm going to tell you about my miscarriage?” relationship stress. about one quarter of participants described how adversity had caused connections to others to be strained. several experienced strained family relationships when the adverse situation demanded so much time and attention that it left the women with little energy for members of their families. nina discussed the negative impact on her children: “my kids suffered in the sense that i wasn't present for them like i could have been otherwise because i had so much going on in my head that i couldn't shut down.” strained relationships also occurred when partners were unable to provide emotional support. some participants found it difficult to share workplace struggles when their partners lacked sufficient background to understand and empathize. for example, a few women had husbands with blue-collar jobs, which were very unlike the white-collar environment of higher education administration. as eileen stated, “you can't empathize if you have no experience or no context.” in evelyn’s case, discussing workplace adversity with her husband caused a strained in her marriage when her husband wanted to interfere: he wanted to give [my boss] a piece of his mind. … often times what we take home from work are the bad stories, the negative things and if it's a person that doesn't like to hear that, then they're going to tell you to quit your job. they're not going to tell you how to handle it. relationship strengthening. a couple participants described how their adversities had caused connections to others to be strengthened. whereas for some women talking about workplace adversity with a partner strained the relationship, darlene noted that “talking about issues related to adversity with your spouse or partner does good things for your relationship in terms of strengthening it.” whether such conversations strengthen or strain a relationship “depends on your partner” as evelyn stated. professional relationships were also strengthened as a result of adversity. eileen spoke about the cohesiveness her team developed in handling a crisis involving accounting errors which were attributable to her predecessor: “it definitely brought my team together … like the football mentality--we succeed or fail together.” support for others. more than half of participants expressed that going through adversity allowed them to support others, in ways such as having empathy, providing encouragement, mentoring, promoting workplace inclusiveness, and preventing mistreatment. frances articulated that her experiences helped her to “become more supportive [and] to encourage others.” olivia shared how she plans to protect other women as a result of her own experience: “i will not allow another woman to be subjected to what i was subjected to.” some participants developed empathy, support, and patience for others. darlene stated that “i'm more empathetic with my friends and colleagues who are going through work transitions.” phyllis discussed how her experience with multiple sclerosis made her “more aware and sensitive to another group of folks that have a lot of invisible barriers.” dealing with adversity made it possible for participants to encourage others going through similar struggles. evelyn shared how her experience growing up with a drug-addicted mother helps her to relate to students at her institution: “they come in here saying they can't do it, and i say, ‘boy, do i have a story for you.’” some women were also able to use their experiences to mentor others, helping them to avoid mistakes and encouraging them to take on new opportunities. as teresa stated, “i see it as my obligation to turn around and do what i can to help [other people] transition through advice, through opportunities, through clear and forthright feedback.” not only did experiencing adversity allow participants to provide support to individuals, it also allowed them to support others through institutional policy or culture change. evelyn advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 60 explained that her own experience with salary inequalities led her to push for better salary and benefit policies for employees in her institution: “the benefits wouldn't have been implemented if there wasn't … a woman or somebody that had family concerns that needed to be addressed.” worldview half of study participants discussed how their adversities related to their views of the world. for some, experiences with adversity led to a sense of disillusionment with the way that the world operates. for others, adversity led to an optimism of the world and why things happen. disillusionment. some participants expressed a sense of disillusionment when their experiences did not match a more idealized pre-existing worldview. as a result of their adversities, several came to believe that things don’t happen for a reason. as wendy explained, “i don't think there's a god that says, ‘okay, she's going to be an accident today,’ or ‘her marriage is not going to work out.’ things just happen.” ava shared a similar belief when asked how she made sense of the abuse she experienced as a child: “i don't think you make sense of that. that was a bad thing to happen, but bad things happen to people.” prior to going through adversity, some participants believed in the goodness of humanity. these participants experienced a sense of disillusionment when good didn’t happen in their lives and when they were mistreated by others. eileen shared her experience of disillusionment: “my perspective changed, and sadly you begin to realize that good doesn't always prevail.” olivia also experienced disillusionment: “my perception has always been, as i was growing up, that everybody in the world was nice, and then you find out, not everyone is.” the disillusionment which some participants experienced was an awareness of problems in the world. these participants translated this realization that other people do indeed have serious challenges and difficulties into an obligation to provide assistance and encouragement. as lillian explained, “people need to be watched out for. not everyone is tough and can handle things on their own.” sherry also came to understand that problems happen to everybody: i figured problems came in small sizes, and maybe people were making more of them than they should, and you have to kind of be knocked on your butt by something before you understand it can happen. optimism. after going through adversity, several participants retained or gained optimistic views of the world and why things happen. in some cases, participants viewed experiences with adversity through the lens of pre-existing faith or beliefs. instead of focusing on the negative outcomes of adversity, holding firm to faith enabled participants to focus on the benefits of the adverse experience. as phyllis stated: “i have a firm belief things happen for a reason. i've got a very deep faith. … [the adversity] has helped me develop sensitivity to people that i wouldn't have necessarily had.” in other cases, participants used their optimistic beliefs to recast their adversity more positively. jacklyn discussed her belief that “every experience teaches you something.” as she further elaborated, “obstacles either help you grow or help you make a decision about moving on to something else.” similarly, several participants found that adversity can have positive outcomes. as teresa stated, “the worst of times can actually turn out to be the most beneficial of times.” some participants gained optimism when an unexpected positive result occurred. one participant developed an optimism about what other people could do. through her experience in working with a difficult boss, evelyn learned that it was possible for an adult to change: “over the last 15 years, i have seen him change significantly. and i didn't know that could happen.” while for some participants adversity caused a sense of disillusionment when outcomes did not match pre-existing beliefs, other participants experienced a confirmation of their beliefs. in marcy’s case, the person who had caused her harm was removed from his position. as she shared, “your mother always tells you that people that do bad things will get their [reward] but you never think you'll see it in your life. but we did.” participants who retained optimistic worldviews experienced increased self-confidence and felt empowered as a result of their adversities. as kelly described, “the more difficult times you're able to go through, the more you're able to look back and learn from those experiences. … i'm able to think back, ‘okay, i got through this and this and this and this, i can get through this one next.’” discussion there are five themes which emerge from the meanings formed by the women in this study. first, out of adversity comes opportunity or growth if you survive it. this appeared to be especially evident for those who suffered some of the harshest forms of adversity, such as child abuse, death of spouse, life-threatening accident, infertility, and severe institutional financial crises. these women chose to redefine or recast themselves after their experiences and found new identities and meanings for their lives. as a result, they were empowered and discovered new opportunities in life. second, perspective matters. how an individual views a situation often defines what one does with it. several women in this study discussed not seeing barriers in their personal or professional lives. this was the case even though they experienced difficult situations. they chose to not view difficulties as barriers. in some cases, the women did not expend effort to acknowledge the troublesome situations. in other cases, the women chose to reframe their negative experiences by focusing on positive aspects. in general, when advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 61 encountering difficulties, these women chose to keep moving. they also considered how to work with or around difficult situations and how to turn them into opportunities. third, privacy in adversity is important. many participants, most notably the presidents in this study, held very public positions. several presidents expressed that privacy was necessary, but not always available, when dealing with adversity. for some, privacy meant sharing struggles with only a few, trusted friends so that their ability to lead would not be questioned. for others, finding time to be alone and reflect was important. when adversity was public knowledge, such as the possible elimination of programs, the women also had to deal with being offered opinions no matter where they were, both inside and outside of the workplace. fourth, finding a meaning for adversity or concluding that none exists relates to self-esteem and empowerment. those who had settled on a reason for their experience or concluded that there was no reason experienced an increase in self-esteem and empowerment. coming to a sense of closure seemed to enable participants to move past the adversity. often the meanings were positive, such as new opportunities, self-confidence, or the ability to support others. however, not all meanings were highly positive. in some cases, participants made sense of their adversity with the realization that bad stuff exists in the world and that problems happen to everyone, including them. in other cases, meanings included being forced to make decisions that they did not want to make, such as leaving their jobs. concluding that no particular meaning could be attributed to their adversity also resulted in increased self-esteem and empowerment. conversely, those who were not able to make sense of their adversities experienced a decrease in self-esteem and empowerment. it seems that this lack of closure resulted in a sense of insecurity or lack of ability to control their lives. many of these participants were still working through and processing their experiences with adversity, even though some of the experiences had occurred years in the past. in this study, meanings involving identity, connection and worldview did not appear to depend on the participant’s ability to make sense of or find a meaning for their experiences. participants who made sense of their experiences and participants who did not make sense of their experiences defined themselves in spite of adverse people or situations and used their experiences to support others. in addition, participants in both groups came to hold both disillusioned and optimistic worldviews. finally, participants in this study are survivors. these women did something relatively few women have done. they overcame adversity, navigated through obstacles, and broke through barriers to attain senior leadership positions in higher education. although some participants aspired to further climb the career ladder but found that they had hit the “ceiling,” all participants have survived and most have even thrived in spite of the adversity they have faced. conclusion how women leaders construct the meaning of adversity and barriers they face has received relatively little attention in prior research. in this study, i have sought to address this gap by deconstructing the ways that adversity and barriers manifest as meanings in the lives of women leaders in higher education. although adversity had a generally positive effect on participant identity, it had disparate effects on self-esteem, power, connections to others, and worldviews. these findings reflect the experiences of women leaders in a particular context. future research could examine women leaders in settings outside of higher education, in mid-level positions, and in regions across the united states and around the world. additionally, future research could examine how male leaders make meaning 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(2011). the effect of sex and gender on perceptions of leaders: does situation make a difference? advancing women in leadership, 31(1), 4556. retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/vol31_2011/violanti_f inal7_2_17.pdf williams, j. (2001). unbending gender: why family and work conflict and what to do about it. oxford, uk: oxford university press. advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership voices of women at entry level positions of educational administration catherine eggleston hackney, ph.d. hackney, summer, 1998 if women are to stand on equal professional footing with males in educational administration, a new organizational paradigm must emerge. alternative voices, experiences, backgrounds, and histories must be acknowledged as valid. each and every individual must be considered valuable to the organization. compassion, respect, generosity, and connectedness must be the norm. when title vii of the educational amendments of public law 92-318 was passed by congress in 1972, women applauded it as a definitive step toward removing sexual discrimination in all federal assistance programs and activities. the passing of the equal educational opportunity act, in 1974, amended the law to further its coverage to employees in educational institutions. these pieces of legislation became milestones in the growing movement for women's rights in education and the workplace (random & strasburg, 1982). so, as the decade of the seventies ushered in growing awareness and sensitivity to issues affecting women, this legislation gave women the hope for equal treatment and opportunity under the law. progress was made; women were entering fields which had historically been closed to them; women were enjoying greater choice in determining the directions their lives would take; women were in greater control of their minds, their bodies, and their lifestyles. but, as the decade began to wane and the political climate began to shift toward the right, the political activism which had spurred the feminist movement quieted into a false complacency. moreover, societal constructions of perceived gender differences biased the treatment of women in the educational setting. though empirically not real, these differences have accounted for exclusion in language, symbols, culture and practice (amey & twombly, 1991). though society seeks to determine why schools are failing to produce self-sufficient, productive young adults and failing to be held in respect by the community at large, it continues to hold on to the norms, values, and beliefs that have governed our schools since the turn of the century. at the time when our nation's educational system needs people of high ability and high motivation, it continues to minimizes the contributions of women http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html and advances disproportionately small numbers of women to administrative positions. though promotion and hiring practices of women in school administration have gradually loosened so that more women hold positions at higher levels of power and decision-making, the field remains predominantly male. policy makers have not adequately altered the organizational structures to incorporate the feminine leadership disposition; the hierarchy is continually reinforced, and the structures which keep women in lower level administrative and staff positions are preserved. why are proportionately so few women in positions to make policy, identify needs and values and set priorities for education? why, with the dramatic increase in the number of doctoral degrees held by women and the added expertise of women in educational administration, do so many women achieve only lower level positions in school administration? why is the research about women as excellent educational leaders held in such little regard by educational organizations? this study has generated theory concerning the organizational culture and how it is perceived by women who have historically been marginalized from power. it also has examined the organization's impact on the women's aspirations and advancement into higher-level administrative positions. by listening to the voices of the women of this study, educational policy makers can identify the subtle messages that exist in the organization which influence an employee's development and performance-self-esteem. women's development and the organizational culture many have sought to explain why so few women are represented in the higher levels of school administration. it seems obvious that the organizational culture profoundly affects the individual's sense of self and in turn the individual affects the nature of the organizational culture. yet, changing the status quo, altering attitudes, and shaping the behaviors of individuals present obstacles which may at times be insurmountable. because the present cultural reality reinforces the notion that acknowledging and accepting the voices and values of others represent the loss and surrender of power, for change to be realized organizations of the future must be forged in an alternative paradigm. belenky, clinchy, goldberger, and tarule (1986) were interested in what women themselves had to say about their own development. their women's ways of knowing research (1986) identified five stages of epistemological development women transcend as they mature, gain life experience, develop "voice," self-confidence, and self-esteem. the stages of silence, received knowing, subjective knowing, procedural knowing, and constructed knowing represent women's accounts of their own personal change and growth. belenky et al. (1986) characterized their five stages in the following ways: silence at which women are not-knowing, voiceless, and powerless; received knowing at which women find knowledge and authority external to themselves and within powerful others from whom one is expected to learn; subjective knowing at which knowing is personal, private, and based on intuition and feeling rather than on rational thought; procedural knowing at which techniques and procedures for acquiring and evaluating knowledge, that can be separate (marked by skepticism and reasoning against) or connected (marked by understanding and reasoning with), are developed and practiced; and, connected knowing at which truth is contextual, knowledge is not absolute, and the self is central to the knowing process. perceived as both catalytic for change and impedimental to growth, these accounts were reflective of their moral dilemmas and decisions, their education and learning, their relationships of importance, and their own self-images . though results of the women's ways of knowing (1986) research were originally directed to the academic setting, they can be easily applied to the organizational culture, which graves (1986) referred to as the "glue that holds organizations together" and a means by which they communicate and coordinate their efforts, a "ring fence" separating insiders from outsiders. schein's "learning culture" (1992) was characterized by a faith in people and an assumption that human nature was basically good and mutable. a complex blend of individualism and groupism promoted diversity as desirable at the individual and subgroup level; subgroups were valued as resources for learning and innovation. tasks and relationships were considered equally important. the prevailing logic of the organization was non-linear, reflecting the complexity of the world as well as the difficulty with prediction and analysis. finally, information and communication were central to the organization's wellbeing. the goal of communication was to connect everyone in the organization to everyone else. a high degree of trust, value in truth and belief in others' constructiveness of intent was integral to the philosophy of communication within the organization. it appears that schein's "learning culture" was similar to the one advocated by belenky, clinchy, goldberger, and tarule (1986). they suggested a culture based on connectedness among participants, where alienation, repression, and division are replaced with community, integrity, and power and where both minds and spirits are developed. members of the organization would feel an obligation to one another as individuals and colleagues. shared values drive members to listen, accept and appreciate the contributions of all members as equals. the organization would be more respectful of authentic voice, that which is original and meaningful, rather than that which is produced in an effort to please and conform. the study according to marshall and rossman (1989) human behavior can not be understood without understanding the framework within which subjects interpret their thinking, feelings, and actions. qualitative methods enable the researcher to understand, from the perspective of the participants, the complexity of their situations as well as the process and meaning of the events of their professional lives. they stress the importance of setting, context, and the subject's own frame of reference and permit the emergence of constructs which contribute to theory generation. moreover, because educational policymakers have not adequately altered organizational structure to incorporate the feminine voice, it was imperative to us that the voices of the marginalized, in this instance our participants, be heard through the study. the purpose of this study was to examine the organizational culture as it affected the professional lives of these women at entry levels of educational administration. particularly, the researcher was interested in the interaction of organizational attitudes and expectations with the participants' personalities, epistemological positions, work needs, performance-self-esteem, and sense of power over their own professional lives. participants the participants of this study were selected from 135 women enrolled in the educational administration leadership preparation programs at a large, southeastern university. the researcher first invited these women to participate in an earlier study which examined the relationship between their stages of epistemological position, determined by the results of the interview protocol developed by belenky et al. (1986) and their performance-self-esteem, according to the stakes scale (1979). sixty-seven women responded to this invitation and of these, the researcher and her assistants interviewed 24 women. the results of this earlier study are presented as archival data in this study. for the final stage of the study the researchers selected 10 of these 24 women to participate in the last rounds of interviews. they represented the subculture of women who held positions at the entry levels of educational administration, but performed their duties at varied sites and districts in a metropolitan area served by the university at which they were enrolled. this particular subculture was chosen because, though conspicuous in the school district, and considered administrative by position, they were, in the traditional sense, without meaningful power. that is, they were on lower rungs of the hierarchical ladder of the bureaucracies of which they were a part and were not included in decisions which affected policy development. this sample selection, which represented 10 different sites and several different positions, permitted a wider variation among the participants and encouraged later transferability of the findings, as recommended by dobbert (1982). the women of the study sally was a women in her 40s who had served as a high school assistant principal for seven years. she was working on her educational specialist degree in educational administration and supervision. sally was responsible for planning, implementing, and evaluating curriculum revision in her building. she also was responsible for staff development, assisting teachers with instruction, enforcing the school discipline plan and the teacher performance appraisal system. sally was active in her state and local administrative leadership organization and aspired to the high school principalship. sally felt she had to "do all the things you need to do to prepare yourself for what may be coming." sally was determined to be a procedural/constructed knower according to the results of the epistemological position interview conducted earlier and considered as archival data in this study. gloria was coordinator of a specialized curriculum area in a large consolidated county school district. for nine years she had been responsible for curriculum revision and staff development. she was a woman in her late 40s, a highly constructed knower based on the epistemological interview, who was working on her doctoral degree in educational administration. gloria was a "negative instance" of the study; she was not actively seeking another position and did not aspire to a higher level of administration. gloria wanted to "stay close to the kids" and wondered why she would want a job were she "didn't have the latitude" to use her "talents and strengths creatively to work with other people." helen was a middle school assistant principal. in her 30s, she aspired to the principalship after three years in her present position. helen felt her time was consumed with clerical work and was disillusioned that she had to "pinch out" time for curriculum issues. she described her position as "one step away from the principal, one step away from the custodian." helen felt "pigeon holed in the building" by a principal who granted her little release time to participate in district activities. she made an effort to attend after hours conferences, workshops, and get-togethers to try to keep her "face out there." helen was a doctoral student in educational administration who was determined by the epistemological interview to be a constructed knower. barbara was a special area curriculum supervisor for a large county school district. in her late 40s, barbara stayed home for 13 years to raise her family. pressured by her age and time, she was actively and visibly seeking promotion and aspired to the superintendency. restricted by the layers of hierarchy, barbara said: " i am on the ladder, planning, taking advantage of broadening myself in everything i do. every time i have an opportunity to accept responsibility i mentally check quickly to see how this will assist me moving up through the organization." based on the results of the epistemological position interview, barbara appeared to be a subjective knower. bev was a doctoral student who had just been promoted to a high school assistant principal. bev aspired to the principalship, but felt that she had to "work twice as hard and be twice as good" as a male to move to the same point. she felt that she didn't know how to "work the organization" which might explain why she held a teaching position for 17 years before moving into administration. bev aspired to become a curriculum director and attempted to find ways by which she was not " bragging" but was "out front" with what she was accomplishing. when first interviewed to determine epistemological position, bev was still a classroom teacher and was determined to be a highly constructed knower. linda had been a junior high school assistant principal for three years at the time of this study. in her mid thirties, she had spent 14 years in the classroom and was enrolled in an educational specialist leadership program. though linda aspired to the superintendency, she did not rule out the possibility of leaving the profession for the state legislature. linda was "aligning" herself with "creative problem-solvers who have vision." she felt she had begun to "open up" her mind to the fact that is "capable of doing things" within and outside of the profession. linda was a procedural knower as determined by the epistemological interview. along with gloria, ruth was also a "negative instance" in this study. according to the epistemological interview a highly constructed knower and in her 40s, ruth was a curriculum coordinator of a large county district who was responsible for curriculum, staff development, co-curricular activities, and textbook adoption. she had direct supervision over instruction in her academic area at 2 high schools and a junior high school. ruth felt she was in a "powerless position" but continued to "nudge the program along with new and different things." she knew the importance of staying literate and bringing new ideas to teachers. early in her career she said she "stopped working for the district and started working for students." ruth did not aspire to higher levels of administration: "if i'm good enough, if i'm competent, i'll move up if the job is right for me. i would worry very much about a job i got through political means because i'd have to hold on to it through political means." holly was an "acting" central office administrator who was in her early 50s and a doctoral student. her professional responsibilities included coordinating state standards, accreditation, and staff development. she spent 10 years in the classroom and had been a principal in a parochial school. holly dealt with a "hindering home situation" where she had to "squeeze things in" around her "spouse's very active professional and social schedule." though holly could see herself in the superintendency, she felt that transcending the levels dictated by the hierarchy were prohibitive. she also felt that her chances of attaining a superintendency were slim given that fact that she was "an outsider" to the region. the researcher and her assistants determined holly to be a subjective knower according to the results of the epistemological interview. susan was an assistant principal in a large urban high school after 22 years as a classroom teacher. in her late 40s and a received knower, she had served in that capacity for six years and described her career as "marked with the pursuit of knowledge and skills in instructional and curricular development" to enable her to be a "more effective, productive educator and leader." supported by her performance evaluations and her superior's encouragement, susan had applied for the "lead assistant" position at her school. she was denied the position which was awarded to a person who had not made the contributions to the organization that she had. she felt that because she was not included in the "in group" it "does not matter" what she does. she also felt that "decisions are not based on what's good for children." despite the disappointment, demoralization, and resentment, susan continued to do what she does best, being "there" for children. susan planned to complete her doctorate in educational administration and seek a higher level position elsewhere. she also entertained the idea of teaching at the post-secondary level. susan was a received knower, based on the results of the epistemological position interview. for the past six years gail served as the instructional coordinator in her elementary school. her duties centered around working with teachers for instructional improvement. gail also coordinated staff development activities in her school. before this position gail was a classroom teacher for 12 years. gail felt that it was her responsibility to "support children first...because we are in the business of working with children." gail continued to aspire to the principalship, the position for which she had applied and been denied twice. discouraged by favoritism in her district, illustrated by the high school coach who was awarded an elementary principalship, gail has begun to "rethink" whether her system is the one with which she wants to continue working to achieve her career aspirations. gail was a procedural/constructed knower, determined by the epistemological interview. research strategies according to marshall and rossman (1989), the purposeful selection of research strategies must satisfy three considerations: provision for adequate data and information, the efficient use of time, access and cost, and the respect for participant privacy by avoiding disruption of the everyday world. in this study, the researcher elected to do semi-structured ethnographic interviews through which the events, beliefs, attitudes, and policies which had shaped and were shaping the phenomenon under study were explored. the data collected through these interviews were triangulated with the results of the earlier conducted epistemological position interview, the scores on the stakes' performance-self-esteem scale (pses), and copies of the participants' job descriptions, performance reviews, and resumes. ethnographic interview questions were designed to probe into the participants' perceptions of the organizational culture in terms of personality-organizational congruence, organizational attitudes toward aspiring women, the participants' feelings of performance-self-esteem, compromises necessary for success, power, organizational control, inclusion, exclusion, equity, and discrimination. the following research questions served as the basis for analysis: 1. are the organization's beliefs, attitudes, and role expectations in conflict or in congruence with these women's personalities, epistemological positions, and work needs? 2. does the organization's perceived attitude toward the participants, as women aspiring to higher levels of administration, affect their feelings of performance-self-esteem and ability to advance? 3. are the participants able to be "themselves" or do they perceive that they need to compromise their own beliefs to be more attractive to the organization and advance their careers? 4. do these women feel a sense of power over their own careers or do they feel that others in the organization control what will happen to them professionally? 5. to what degree do these women perceive the organization as inclusive and equityconscious or exclusive and discriminatory? data collection data collected through the structured epistemological interviews, the less structured ethnographic interviews, the self-evaluative pses, and the examination of artifacts offered more than one lens by which to examine the issues of the study. the researcher asked each participant to complete the stakes' performance-self-esteem self-evaluative scale (pses) before her first interview. this scale was designed to measure the performance-self-esteem, a separate and distinct factor of self-esteem, of any person. the 47 item scale included characteristics which related to ability and performance and which were scored separately from the social self esteem items which were also part of the instrument. the first interview used was the women's ways of knowing (1986) structured interview to determine through etic analysis the participant's epistemological positions. questions were centered around issues of self-image, relationships of importance, education and learning, real-life decision-making, accounts of personal changes and growth, perceived catalysts for change and impediments to growth, and visions of the future. embedded in the interview were questions which were devised for assigning perry's (1970) epistemological positions as well as standard questions developed by gilligan (1982) and kohlberg (1984). the researcher conducted the second interview, the ethnographic interview, with participants to attempt to discover their perceptions of the organizational culture of which they were a part. questions were formulated to probe into the areas of performance-self-esteem, epistemological position, and perceptions of the organization. the nine basic questions were supplemented with particular questions for each woman designed to further explore and clarify data collected with the pses and epistemological interview. the second interview protocol is available from the researcher. the researcher also interviewed two "outside others," a superintendent and an associate superintendent, to verify the data collected from the participants. the researcher also conducted a participants' focus group in the final stages of the study to share the collective data, ask for verification, discuss tentative explanations, and note any discrepancies or negative instances. the focus group afforded the participants another opportunity to become engaged as co-researchers and assurde accuracy and truthfulness, and transferability. data analysis to analyze the data collected with the ethnographic interview, the focus group, the interviews of "outside others," the field notes, and the artifacts, the strauss and corbin (1990) model for coding data in stages was utilized. during open coding, each data unit was analyzed for evidence of the five categories designated to organize the data: types of roles, aspirations, what it takes to be successful, roadblocks, getting around roadblocks, and catalysts. the axial coding stage of data analysis followed and resulted in subcategories which were used to reassemble the data in new ways. the final stage of data analysis, selective coding, permitted the linking of the earlier determined categories to create stories of causal conditions, antecedents, contextual conditions, strategies, and consequences for action-oriented construction of grounded theory. this stage occurred after all the data had been collected and analyzed through the axial stage and had been verified by the "outside others" and the participants during the focus group. soundness of the study though qualitative analysis searches for common patterns, themes, and categories in the data, the researcher was also aware of "outliers" or negative instances. furthermore, to ensure credibility, dependability, and transferability, the researcher audio-taped interviews, recorded field notes, kept a researcher's diary and used the earlier described system for analysis of the data. the researcher also engaged an outside "research partner" when there were questions during the open and axial stages of data analysis. the additional data collected from the "outside others" interviews checked for match or mismatch of the data retrieved from the participants. this research was intended not only to examine the perceptions of this particular sample, but also to be of value to other individuals in similar situations. the selection of the multi participants from a number of different districts and sites and the triangulation of the data expanded the study's transferability to other settings, organizations, and professions. an audit trail consisting of the audio-tapes, field notes, researcher's diary, and a portfolio for each participant has preserved the data in an understandable and retrievable form. perceptions of the organization the women of this study discussed their perceptions of the organization through three major themes which emerged from the data analysis: validation, inclusion, and authenticity. when present, these conditions were found to nurture the individual's professional and personal development, contribute to feelings of community, encourage aspiration toward higher level position, and generally promote positive feelings toward the organization. when the women of the study spoke of validation, they referred to their perception of the organization's recognition of their importance. organizations which acknowledged hard work, expertise, and efforts beyond the expected with verbal praise, opportunities for more responsibility and authority, autonomy, and promotion were perceived more favorably. as gloria noted, when organizations "used people's good ideas to grow," individuals felt valued and important. conversely, when validation was not present in the organization, the women participants told of experiencing frustration and feeling, as ruth noted, that they "had more to give than the organization allowed." they expressed feelings of ineffectiveness, isolation, being stifled and held back. such conditions were said to "eat away" at self-confidence and self-esteem as individuals struggled to feel good about themselves in such work situations. susan, whose feelings were very strong, was the one negative instance whose sense of self was severely impaired an absence of validation. when asked about what the organization might think of her as an aspiring woman, she replied, "i don't think they think about me. period." she felt her instincts were stifled all the time by what she was asked to do in her position. she expressed feelings of self-doubt and said, "i don't think about changing things anymore. i've become tired." she went on to say that perhaps those making promotion decisions were right, maybe she couldn't handle a principalship. the second theme that emerged was the presence or absence of inclusion within the organization. inclusion referred to the individual's perception of belonging to the organization, the sense of involvement in decision-making and planning, and the ability to communicate and share information with persons at all levels of the organization. organizations that promoted "teaming," collegial work relationships, and "the omission of condescending attitudes of those at higher ranks," encouraged participatory management, invited more than an elite group into the "inner circle," and created an egalitarian environment were perceived more positively than those that were more traditional in nature. participants, especially susan and ruth, spoke disfavorably of organizations that exercised unilateral decision-making, created an "in group" and an "out group," and maintained a tight hierarchical structure. susan spoke of her new job description as designed by a new superintendent to "decrease power, limit responsibility, and exclude individuals from the inner circle." the third theme that emerged from the findings was authenticity as an organizational characteristic. the participants spoke of authenticity as the organization's practicing what it professed to believe. when present, authenticity was demonstrated by linda's reference to "visionary leadership" at the superintendent's level, clarity of organizational expectations, decision-making in the best interest of children, promotion based on meritocracy, and assignment of positions based on experience and expertise, as was most especially noted in gail's interview. all of the women of the study also felt that an authentic organization communicated clearly its expectation, developed leadership formally and informally, and recognized the need to care for its members as whole persons. within the work situations perceived as authentic, these women shared a faith that their hard work, performance, and expertise would be rewarded; they felt "underwritten" in their positions and received organizational support in their quest for higher levels of administration. when authenticity was absent in an organization the women of the study cited examples of weak, directionless leadership and politically-influenced decision-making. gloria said of her district that it was "not on any path to glory." they also spoke of the promotion of less than qualified persons as pay-offs for political favors, ambiguous organizational expectations, and an organizational view "that an individual's need for time away and rest was a sign of weakness" (ruth). in the absence of authenticity, participants were discouraged and disillusioned. they saw their efforts as having little effect in terms of career advancement. the organization's inability or unwillingness to sponsor leadership development programs, to clarify and communicate expectations for those new to a job, and to provide incentive for mentoring and coaching indicated to these women that the organization did not support that which it professed to be important and valuable, effective leadership. they also felt that hard work, performance, and expertise was not always rewarded. often promotions were not based on meritocracy but on political alliances. and, while their performance review and verbal remarks from supervisors recognized their contributions to the organization, they saw others, less able and experienced, offered positions at higher levels of administration. though feelings of validation, inclusion, and authenticity were appreciated and valued by these women, and though they affected their feelings of well-being about the organization, they did not always dictate the quality of work and feelings of professionalism these women held within themselves. as gail put it: i'm not looking for it (recognition) and i'm not counting on it. i feel that i am a professional woman not because of the recognition others might give me, but because of what i've been able to doreceive my education, my position. that's where i feel professional. and, as gloria summarized: i don't need a cheering section to feel good about what i do...it's like whipped cream on top. it's nice to have but i don't need 'their' approval to know i do good work. according to their own perceptions, these women's sense of self and quality of performance did not seem to be affected by organizational attention to validation, inclusion, and authenticity. what does seem to be affected by these factors is these women's attitudes toward their work environment and the degree of "match" they feel with the organization and its expectations. dealing with the organization the second set of themes that emerged from the study was based on data collected in the open coding categories. the four themes, which suggested ways that these women have dealt with conditions present in the organization in their pursuit of higher level positions, include internal standard/strengths/beliefs, sense of mission, making inroads into the organization, and proactive preparation of self. dominant among the women of this study was their strong sense of self: "who i am and what i am about." their belief in the value of their work, their importance to children, and their worth as educators and members of the organization helped them to overcome the often inauthentic, non-validating and exclusive conditions in their work situations. time after time, the researcher heard that though support and encouragement were appreciated, they did not need them to know they were doing a worthy job. they placed value on their own beliefs, respected hard work, effective performance, knowledge, expertise, and above all, integrity. the second theme of this set was the participants' sense of mission. they believed, without exception, that they were doing what they were, and enduring what they must, for the benefit of children. in several cases, these women felt they would not stay in their present positions if it were not for children. when they saw in the children the results of their work, they felt it was, as susan noted, "all worth doing." and, as bev said, "some days i ask: am i making any difference at all? yes, you make a difference to the children..." they expressed disgust for administrative decisions which were made for reasons other than the children's best interests. they were centered on the instructional program and protected it from encroachment. they envisioned that the superintendent's position should be one of highest instructional leadership. barbara expressed this action as "the superintendent having her finger on the pulse of what's happening in every classroom." these women seemed to be on a crusade for what was educationally right for children, striving to demonstrate it in practice each day. they needed to feel that their work was meaningful and purposeful and sought to ensure that this to be so. helen felt that given the opportunity she could "turn this school upside-down," leading the school organization toward a vision for the benefit of children. the third theme that emerged in this set is referred to as inroads into the organization. because the traditional paths to career advancement continue to be difficult for women to pursue, the women of this study spoke of other politically savvy measures they have taken. because so many organizations still view women as deficient in terms of the more traditional male model of leadership, the participants felt the need "to work twice as hard and be twice as good" as their male counterparts (bev). several of the participants told stories of doing much beyond expectations so that superiors would think they were capable of higher levels of administration. the need to prove themselves was a dominant motivation as they took on extra tasks and responsibilities beyond those which they had been assigned. as linda remarked, they were conscious of "aligning themselves with other bright, creative people." they networked with those they respected at higher levels of administration. they realized that it is often who you know and who knows you that affords individuals the opportunity for career advancement. they also felt the need to communicate their effectiveness with others both in and out of the organization and accepted invitations to speak with schools, cabinets, community groups, and other professional organizations. and, though they expressed little respect for a system which would permit others to attain their positions politically, they realized the need to demonstrate their abilities and achievements to those powers responsible for personnel decisions. the last theme centered around these individuals' proactive preparation for future positions. as sally explained, "you try to do all the things you need to do to prepare yourself for what will be coming." this preparation took on several forms as the participants discussed it. women have not had great success following the traditional paths to positions at higher levels of administration. consequently, these women saw the need to take alternative routes, to become known for a particular area of expertise, a niche of knowledge, or the ability to do something that others can not. they realized that the hierarchy in large systems often is prohibitive to women seeking cabinet level positions. rather than being totally discouraged by that condition, they were developing and polishing their skills in instructional and curricular areas to become marketable to smaller systems which might need and appreciate those areas of expertise. the participants also were pursuing experiences that would broaden their administrative backgrounds. barbara consciously chose to pursue those opportunities which might better prepare her for career advancement. helen, deprived of the leadership opportunities which would prepare her for a principalship, created her own, playing a game with herself, reflecting on how she, if she were principal, would handle situations, and make decisions as they would arise in her building. bev, through regular discussions sought the advice and input of her principal regarding the decisions she makes on her job. all of the women in the study acknowledged the need for advanced degrees. to be considered for a position for which a male might need only a master's degree, they recognized that they would probably need a doctorate. all were enrolled in either a specialist's or doctoral program at the time of the study. they also regularly participated in local, state, and national conferences and seminars for professional development. discussion as getzels and guba (1957) have written, organizations are social systems in which external and internal conditions determine organizational expectations. these expectations, in turn, interact with personalities and work needs to produce individuals' positive or negative orientations to the organization. the results of this research have suggested this to be true with this group of participants. the discussion of the results of the study illustrate the complexity of the interaction of epistemological position, performance-self-esteem, and perceptions of the organizational culture. as cropanzano, james, and cetera (1992) wrote, the interaction between the individual and the organization precipitates a positive or negative orientation to the organization, which translates into positive or negative self-esteem and work attitude. as found in this particular study, and as triandis (1989) theorized, the nature of the organization can influence the relationship between the individual's psycho-social needs, her performance-self-esteem, and the socio-cultural context of the organization. and, most importantly, as posited by bandura (1986), the congruence between the individual's needs and the goals of the organization promotes not only psychological well-being but greater attainment of organizational goals. personality needs and performance self-esteem the data collected in this study have suggested that when individuals' needs for validation, inclusion, and authenticity were met by the organization, it was reflected in the participants' expressions of performanceself-esteem and in higher (above the mean) scores on the performance-self-esteem scale (pses). the opposite was found to be true as well. organizational absence of perceived validation, inclusion, and authenticity was reflected in responses to interview questions and lower (below the mean) scores on the pses which indicated lower performance-self-esteem. when the women of the study spoke of feeling valued by the organization, being recognized for their performance, experiencing opportunities for leadership development, and seeing their ideas used, they communicated a positive orientation toward the organization. moreover, they exhibited stronger attitudes about their ability to not only do their own jobs but to aspire to higher levels of administration. the validation they felt from the organization was nurturing not only to their sense of self but also to their perceived ability to be successful in the organization. the women of the study also spoke of issues of inclusion and exclusion. feeling as though they belonged to the organization, feeling invited and welcome, and being included in planning and decision-making contributed to a positive orientation to the organization and higher sense of performance-self-esteem. the presence of "in" groups and "out" groups were debilitating to the participants. they were disillusioned with the political nature of their organizations and wondered whether their efforts and ideas made any difference at all to those in power. perceptions of the authenticity of the organization also triggered positive and negative orientations and levels of performance-self-esteem. in many instances, the women were disillusioned with the organization which failed to practice what it professed to believe, and for political reasons, promoted less than qualified individuals to higher level administrative positions. such organizational conditions led to a range of negative feelings from disappointment to anger. conversely, however, when personnel practices were congruent with the organization's espoused beliefs, these women felt valued for their contributions and hopeful about being rewarded for their work efforts. leadership emergence though these findings can inform organizations about how they might address conditions which precipitate negative work attitudes, they also reveal the real loss when potential leadership ability is underdeveloped. according to stakes (1979) if one's sense of performance-self-esteem is high, one behaves as a leader would and is often chosen by the organization as a leader. andrews (1984) found that participants in a study who scored highest on the pses were more likely to be chosen by the group as a leader. perception of leadership emergence was influenced by observation of key variables: assertiveness, confidence, enjoyment of a challenge, persuasiveness, and intelligence. thus, when performance-selfesteem is high, it is likely that an individual will behave more like a leader and be chosen by the group as a leader. if self-esteem is indirectly influenced by the group, there exist opportunities for the organization as a mediating force in creation of an environment where self-esteem can flourish. belenky, clinchy, goldberger, and tarule (1986) reiterated and expanded upon these leadership traits when they wrote about women at the constructed level of epistemological development. they described the constructed knower as one who has embraced humankind with responsibility and acceptance, and who has balanced the voice of reason with the heart and soul of intuition. their constructed knower is one who realizes the complexity of the world and its problems and recognizes the need for interdependence with others. she is self-assured, yet humble, is grounded in the present, yet possesses a vision for the future. possessing such a world view, the constructed knowers of the study, with the exception of bev, exhibited pses scores below the mean. (interestingly, bev's pses was first recorded while she was still a classroom teacher anticipating promotion to the assistant principalship and before she was actually working in the administrative world.) this might be explained by the fact that as a woman transcends the levels of the epistemological hierarchy to the level of constructed knowing she gains a stronger sense of self, a more articulate voice, and greater power. yet, what contributes to this development is her ability to analyze, question, respect the views of others, and even debate her own thinking. her truths become less definitive, ambiguity is more easily tolerated, external and internal integration becomes more complete. the resulting humility, which is characteristic of a constructed knower may cause her to doubt her own thinking, to assess situations conditionally, and to develop a voice to communicate and convince others of life's complexities. this often is not tolerated without conflict in the traditional organizationwhere success is measured by compliance with the ideas of the power holders. organizational expectations the traits of the constructed knower, though unquestionably desirable for collaboration, participatory decision-making, and leadership development, often are not valued in women aspiring toward higher levels of school administration. this may be explained by examining the nature of the traditional educational organization. the traditional organizational environment and culture often expect individuals to be "receivers" of male role authority. as noted by participants of this study, women often feel that their thinking is trivialized, not respected, and not validated by the organization. and though aspiring women often exhibit the leadership ability to obtain an entry or staff level position, they later encounter a culture which, intentionally or not, stifles them, holds them back, and sometimes requires them "to put a leash on" themselves to survive. in such an organizational culture, where knowledge and truth are authority-centered and the expectation is that individuals in lower level positions function in a received mode, the constructed knower experiences dissonance, frustration, disillusionment, and lower (below the mean in this study) performance-selfesteem. to produce more positive feelings toward the organization and better attitudes toward work, the more highly evolved knower would flourish in a more egalitarian culture, one characterized by teaming and collaboration, an organizational structure of "webs and nets" as opposed to the traditional "pyramids and hierarchies" (amey and twombly, 1992, p.144). orientation toward the organization as this study and earlier research determined, such egalitarian cultures do not exist in abundance. time and again, the participants of this study provided situational examples of that fact. yet, in most cases, they were able to deal with less than desirable organizational culture, maintain performance effectiveness, and sustain their strong internal standards and belief systems. marshall (1985) wrote of the dilemmas women face as they encounter uninviting cultures in their professional experiences. she theorized that women take one of three paths in their careers. they become satisfied with staff level positions and retreat from the higher level administrative arena. they give up aspirations of power and leadership and return to classroom teaching. or, they achieve by "passing:" they find a balance between their feminine and professional identities, buy into the "female as deficient" notion, work harder, and play games to achieve. the attitudes and organizational orientations of the participants of this study were reflective of marshall's premise. two of the participants, ruth and gloria, fit marshall's (1985) first category. they are content to remain in staff level positions for two reasons, their sense of mission and the unattractiveness of general administration. they love their curricular areas, working with teachers, and staying close to children. they feel individuals at the higher levels of administration are too removed from the business of schooling, have little opportunity to use their creative talents, and must engage in distractive political games to succeed. both women have rejected the traditional notion of power. they consciously have decided to remain where they are. with such a decision they feel they are better able to make worthwhile contributions and have greater influence. unfortunately, the absence of these bright, committed women in higher administration creates a loss to the organization and to children. these women's alternative voices will not be heard in the traditional positions of power where they might have made a noticeable difference in the educational program for all children. too, their perspectives will be denied to a culture in need of change. marshall's (1985) second category, that of giving up aspirations of leadership, explains another participant's, susan's, thoughts about returning to teaching. in her case, rather than continue to face rejection by the politicalbased power structure of her district, she is contemplating teaching at the postsecondary level. susan's sense of self has been badly bruised by the organization and it is only her sense of mission, being there for the children, which keeps her in her assistant principal's position. three of the other participants most typify the third category suggested by marshall (1985), the ability to "pass" in the organization. sally, helen, and bev exemplify "passing" by attempting to find the balance between their professional and feminine identities, working harder, and playing whatever games may be necessary to reach their goal of higher administration. they "read" the organization very well, though sally and helen are better able to "work" it than is bev. yet, they are intent on preparing themselves to meet organizational conditions for advancement. they all have faith that they will be able to make constructive changes in the organization once they "make it." though "passing ," these women maintain strong internal standards with commitment to the "way it should be," promoting a more child-centered educational program in their schools. the problem, however, is that in their working the organization, playing the political games, and accommodating those in power, the "good ole boy" status quo is perpetuated. without challenge, those who are in power will continue to make decisions under the same tired, traditional terms. though sincere in their intent to bring about change, those retreating from the administrative arena and those relinquishing their aspirations, as well as those few "passing," will find it difficult to carve out a niche from which to alter the established culture and move the organization toward change. as the female superintendent who was interviewed for data verification reflected, it is not only "extremely difficult" for a female to "break into" higher level administration, but it is then "extremely difficult" for a female "to relate to or become a part of the culture of most of the school systems." she explained that the cabinet and higher levels of administration are usually made up of "very veteran male educators whose direction and perspectives may be entirely different" from those of a female. implications for practice organizational cultures are products of people's attitudes toward their work. they are the product of the individuals' psychological contracts with the organization (james & jones, 1974). organizational leaders must realize that greater achievement of organizational goals necessitates a greater congruence between organizational roles and expectations and individual personalities and work needs. when the individual perceives a "fit" between her epistemological position and the organization, she feels more equipped to aspire to higher level positions, strive toward higher achievement levels, and often is considered by the organization for advancement (heilman, 1983). thus, if women are to stand on equal professional footing with males in educational administration, a new organizational paradigm must emerge. alternative voices, experiences, backgrounds, and histories must be acknowledged as valid. each and every individual must be considered valuable to the organization. compassion, respect, generosity, and connectedness must be the norm. organizational responsibility the educational organization which does not offer its members validation, feelings of inclusion, and authenticity is depriving not only the individual, but also the organization, of its potential. as bandura (1986) reminded, positive feeling can result in not only psychological well-being but in greater achievement of organizational goals as well. if complex and difficult educational challenges are to be addressed it must be with contributions from all members of the organization. in permitting the status quo to endure, the organization is not only perpetuating elitism and covert sexism, it is silencing the voices of those who, as advocates of children, might assume a greater responsibility for educational policy and decision-making. as a result of this study, it is suggested that organizations become more cognizant of their effect on the individual personality. as schein (1992) and belenky, clinchy, goldberger, and tarule (1986) have prompted, organizational leaders must become "learners" for constructive change to occur within the culture. they must become students not only of organizational theory and practice, but also of people, regularly using "other people's good ideas to grow." therefore, it becomes the charge of the educational leaders to stimulate professional conscience to confront disparity and exclusivity within the organization. those in more secure positions need to disassociate themselves from the prevailing paternalistic culture and begin speaking out, acting out, and encouraging new ways of engaging in the business of schooling. modeling collaboration, offering career and intellectual guidance, building friendships, diffusing power and disseminating information among all members of the school community must be their mission. furthermore, as mccall (1995) pointed out that "in striving to build a more democratic, egalitarian school structure in which caring for all people within the school community can thrive, the possibilities for change exist within collective action" (p. 191). therefore, educational leaders need to cultivate what belenky et al. (1986) referred to as an educational culture based on connectedness among participants., where alienation, repression, and division are replaced with community, shared power, and inclusion, where both minds and spirits are developed. to make this reality, organizational leaders need to listen, accept, and appreciate the contributions of each other. with care for the person, and an understanding of human development a the core in interaction, members of the educational community need to respect and encourage authentic voicethat which is original and meaningfulrather than that which is produced in a relentless effort to please authority or attain promotion. women in support of women women themselves can become the greatest proponents of an alternative leadership paradigm. they can take on a dichotomous "oppositional consciousness" (moglen, 1983, p. 131) where they oppose the very same culture they exist within. women can effect change in the culture by establishing coalitions among themselves and trusted others and by capitalizing on their increasing conspicuousness. together, women might heed the advice of a participant quoted in aisenberg and harrington (1988): "be loud and make waves and do what you want and be free" (p. 18). graduate leadership preparation programming our graduate educational leadership programs must also revisit their curricula and their programming. given the fact that an overwhelming majority of educational administration faculty continue to profess a traditional male leadership orientation, present graduate programs do not always prepare leaders who value diversity and appreciate an alternative leadership paradigm. the findings of this research suggest several considerations for those who are in positions to affect changes in graduate schools: 1. include more contemporary leadership theory into the program of study. though basic to the understanding of contemporary theory, traditional theory, alone, does not provide for other than the traditional white, male perspective. attention those theorists and researchers, such as those advocating transformational and relational leadership (giroux, bolman and deal, sergiovanni, starratt, regan and brooks, hargreaves, helgeson, mulkeen) would balance the programming with a multitude of perspectives. 2. encourage course work in organizational psychology and culture. attention to such topics are often relegated to elective status and not actively promoted to the graduate leadership student. without a psychological understanding of the organization the developing leaders is disadvantaged when attempting to bring about change. 3. require reading and evaluation of research done in the feminist perspective and in a variety of methods of inquiry. the study of positivistic inquiry still dominates research course work. discourse which expresses value for various forms of inquiry, and realizes their appropriateness dependent upon the questions being asked, would prepare developing leaders by exposing them to alternative voices, practices, and epistemologies, and a more critical perspective. 4. develop joint leadership programming which includes not only preparation for the traditional administrative roles but also includes preparation of teacher leaders who would assume active leadership roles and responsibilities within the schools of the future. conclusion admittedly, this study is contextually tied to existing traditional hierarchical organizations where power is defined by placement on the organizational chart and influence is measured by the ability to have impact on others with decisions which reach far and deep into organization. the women of this study recognized the reality of the present hierarchical definitions of power. they were fully aware that they would possess greater organizational power the higher up the ladder they were able to climb. nonetheless, they knew, without exception, that they were their own persons and were exhibiting leadership in their own ways. they capitalized on their present positions, exhibited their own dispositions toward leadership, and influenced their work environments. sally let teachers with whom she worked know that she was "with them every step of the way." helen envisioned different and better ways of practicing administration which would allow time for that which is most important, the children and their educational program. holly summarized it all: "if i really want to do something i will do it! i have the power over my career." sense of mission, collaboration, support of others, achievement, and internal strength: though working within the constraints of traditional hierarchical organizations, these women were not without personal power. for all people, self-confirmation and a supportive community are requisites for growth and development, success, and professional progress. thus, the goal of an organization must be to cultivate not only the intellectual and practical competence but also the affective dispositions including the moral, social, emotional, and esthetic aspects of the personality. doing so would help to develop within all members of the organization the competencies, self-worth, and efficacy which would permit them to overcome earlier socialized dependencies and ideas of conformity. where collaboration replaces competition, where community replaces isolation, where respect replaces distrust, and where there is room for all voices, traditional and alternative, there will exist the opportunity for all to be accepted, appreciated, and recognized for the contributions they bring to the organization. the organization and each individual within it can only enriched and energized as a result. references aisenberg, s. & harrington, m. (1988). women of academe: outsiders in the sacred grove. massachusetts: university of massachusetts press. amey, m., & twombly, s. (1992). re-visioning leadership in community colleges. journal of higher education, 15 (2), 125-150. andrews, p. (1984). performance-self-esteem and perception of leadership emergence: a comparative study of men and women. western journal of speech communication, 48, 1-13. bandura a. (1986). social foundations of thought and action: a social cognitive theory. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. belenky, m., clinchy, b., goldberger, n. & tarule, j. (1986). women's ways of knowing. new york: basic books. cropanzano, r., james, k., & cetera, m. (1992). a goal hierarchy model of personality, motivation and leadership. research in organizational behavior, 15, 267-322. dobbert, m. (1982). ethnographic research: theory and application for modern schools and societies. new york: praeger. getzels, j. & guba, e. (1957). social behavior and the administrative process. school review, 65, 423441. gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. graves, d. (1986). corporate culture diagnosis and change. new york: st. martin's press. heilman, m. (1983). sex bias in work settings: the lack off it model. research in organizational behavior, 5, 269-298. james, l. r. & jones, a. p. (1974). organizational climate: a review of theory and research. psychology bulletin, 81, 1096-1112. kohlberg, l. (1984). the psychology of moral development. new york: harper and rowe. marshall, c. (1985). the stigmatized woman: the professional woman in a male sex-typed career. journal of educational administration, 23(2), 131-152. marshall, c. & rossman, g. (1989). designing qualitative research. newbury park, ca: sage publications. mccall, a. (1995). the bureaucratic restraints to caring in schools. in d. dunlap & p. schmuck (eds.). women leading in education (pp. 180-196). albany, ny: state university of new york press. moglen, h. (1993). power and empowerment. women's studies international forum ,6 (2), 131-134. perry, w. (1970). forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: a scheme. new york: holt, reinhart, winston, inc. random, m., strasburg, g. & lipman-blumen, j. (1982). women in higher education. harvard educational review, 52, 189-202. schein, e. (1992). organizational culture and leadership. san francisco: jossey-bass. stakes, j. (1979). the ability/performance dimension of self-esteem: implications for women's achievement behavior. psychology of women quarterly, 3(4), 365-377. strauss, a. & corbin, j. (1990). basics of qualitative research: grounded theory procedures and techniques. newbury park, ca: sage publication, inc. triandis, h.c. (1989). the self and social behavior in differing contexts. psychological review, 96, 506520. dr. catherine eggleston hackney is an assistant professor in the departament of teaching, leadership, and curriculum studies at kent state university., kent, ohio. awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 3, summer 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com mailto:chackney@emerald.educ.kent.edu. file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/awl_summer98.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awnetwork/index.html copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; 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mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com aw home| jobsposting/search | search by google web or site | advertising | site map | awards | about us home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home business | entrepreneur |loan credit | web | network | balance |international| book store career strategies | employment | resumes | salary, benefits, employment, employee rights | negotiate career news | career indices, stats | career advice for execs,professionals |career advice for undergrads,mbas career paths | career planning for young women | mentoring and coaching | leadership development advancing women in leadership female leaders in educational administration: sabotage within our own ranks carole funk sam houston state university introduction professional women in australia have an interesting term for what happens to talented and outspoken females who rise quickly in their fields. they call it the "tall poppy syndrome" because a poppy that grows higher than the rest often gets its head lopped off (polley, 1996). such a phenomenon also occurs with women who achieve success in the field of educational administration, "the blue flamers" (funk, 2000), who rise quickly through the ranks but are often not supported and even sabotaged by other women who work with them. many females in educational leadership positions in the united states experience a spectrum of types of negative treatment from female teachers to female superintendents that can be defined as horizontal violence--a term used here to describe the harm that some women do to other women in the educational workplace. an illustration of a non-supportive female, a texas superintendent, was described by skrla and benestante (1998) who were spurned and summarily ignored by the female superintendent when they tried to give her brochures regarding the texas council of women school executives (tcwse) at the annual superintendents’ conference. the three women sitting in the women administrators' organization’s booth in the convention hall . . . noticed the nametag on the woman approaching them read “superintendent” . . . “are you a member of our organization?’. . . one called out. the woman did not answer; instead, she greeted a male superintendent standing file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///search.html file:///advertising.html file:///sitemap.html file:///awards.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/writing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/career_strategies/index.html file:///business.html 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literature; we’d love to have you join us.” the woman superintendent looked at the women in the booth, but she made no move to take any of the organization’s literature, nor did she reply. after exchanging small talk with the male superintendent for a few more minutes, she moved off down the aisle of the exhibit hall. (p. 57) based on their experience, skrla and benestante (1998) wrote a chapter, "being terminally female: denial of sexism is no protection against its effects" in the 1998 tcwse monograph, entitled females as school executives: realizing the vision. purpose of the paper the purpose of this paper is to explore the nature, origin, and effects of horizontal violence, including dismissive, negative, demeaning, or hostile behavior of some women toward others who have assumed leadership roles in education. although this phenomenon exists outside of the field of education, this paper will focus only on horizontal violence as it applies to females in educational leadership and its effects upon their behavior and the schools and districts they lead. a secondary purpose for the paper is to explore the effects of this horizontal violence on girls and young women within the schools that have female principals. horizontal violence the origin of the term, horizontal violence, is credited to paulo freire (1970), a champion of the poor and disenfranchised in south america, who explored the effects of oppression on minorities in his book, pedagogy of the oppressed. within his work, he proposed the use of horizontal violence as a term to indicate the curious behavior of members of oppressed groups who lash out at their peers in response to oppression instead of attacking their oppressors. using freire’s concept of horizontal violence, minorities and other oppressed groups (women who live in a male-dominated society) rage internally because of their lack of power but take out their anger and violence on their oppressed peers (other women). according to freire, the causal factor for this behavior is the powerlessness and impotence of the oppressed that would be severely punished if they attacked the powerful individuals who actually control their lives. having seen the usefulness of this new concept in working with people with little or no power themselves, freire (1970) warned people who were trying to free themselves from oppression of the hidden danger that they could become ‘suboppressors’ and identify strongly with the those holding the power because the "oppressed find in their oppressors their ‘model of humanhood’" (p. 30-31). within this context, he explained that people who are oppressed have the following characteristics that lead them to punish others like themselves: they (a) are reluctant or unwilling to resist the oppressors, (b) have low self-esteem, (c) are self-deprecating, and (d) fear autonomy and responsibilities because of the possibility of retaliation or sanctions from their oppressors. under these conditions, freire pointed out that the rage of the oppressed people reaches such levels that they attack their kin in order to reduce the pain of feeling powerless and devalued. in this paper, the term “horizontal violence” (a type of psychological displacement) will be applied to instances of female school administrators who lash out at other females rather than vent their internal anger toward the men who in effect have been their oppressors. in this author’s search for articles relating to horizontal violence, the first source found related to this phenomenon came from research in the nursing profession (blanton & lybecker, 1998). this predominantly female field had identified freire’s conceptualization as a descriptor for the female-to-female horizontal violence occurring between nurses in the workplace in order to begin to reduce the incidences of female horizontal violence in hospitals and clinics. freire’s theory applies to female nurses because male physicians and other specialists hold almost all of the power and authority in the medical field, while nurses are poorly paid and are subordinate to doctors in all situations. given their lack of power and input in the profession of medicine, nurses typify an oppressed group as defined by freire (1970). according to blanton and lybecker, instances of horizontal violence included backstabbing and sabotage among nurses that were so frequent that they began to seek causal factors and solutions to their problems. their research led them to find and then apply freire’s horizontal violence concept to a critical issue in their professional lives. blanton and lybecker’s (1990) position statement on horizontal violence reveals the types of behaviors that this nursing association categorizes as horizontal violence. horizontal violence is harmful behavior, via attitudes, words and other behaviors that are directed to us by another colleague. horizontal violence controls, humiliates, denigrates or injures the dignity of another. horizontal violence indicates a lack of mutual respect and value for the worth of the individual and denies another’s fundamental human rights. (p. 1) this author first learned about the concept of horizontal violence from a female methodist minister who spoke to a master’s class for women in education leadership. during the class, she discussed female-to-female harassment of women, especially successful women, and related the concept of horizontal violence to this behavior. the speaker’s seminary training had included the sociological concept of freire’s work with minorities who were oppressed. in her presentation, she shared ways in which she had seen similar behavior in female-to-female interactions that mirrored the horizontal violence concept. this newly ordained minister of a mixed-race congregation told the class how this concept applied to women who often treated each other with disdain and disrespect. after this female minister finished her presentation, the women in this leadership class shared their own personal stories. the stories revealed, not only nonsupportive behavior from their female peers, but also outright sabotage from female secretaries, colleagues, bosses, and even friends. they also discussed parallel metaphors for horizontal violence, including crabs in the bucket that try to pull back those trying to escape, iron maidens who wage war on their female assistants, and queen bees who keep every one below their own status. horizontal violence in educational administration most women in educational administration have had barriers, both internal and external, that have made their obtaining administrative positions more difficult than for men. schmuck (1986) found that 70% of female school administrators reported that they experienced obstacles to their careers simply because they were women, and 74% of these women reported having negative role models--half of whom were women. 57% said they were not part of a network of professional support, and only 17% declared that they did not need or want such support. after completing her research, schmuck described a thread of anti-feminism that ran through the stories of the women in her study and concluded that some of the women in her research appeared to deny their femaleness, caring solely about themselves and their own careers. the field of education administration certainly provided some surprises regarding horizontal violence for women beginning their careers in administration. as an example, gupton and slick (1996) discovered an "unexpected wrinkle" in a female high school principal’s new job regarding other women when she revealed that: i expected some of the faculty women to like me, and maybe even enjoy having a woman in leadership. . . . what a shock it was to find no loyalty and little support. . . . many of the teachers were . . . not inclined to accept leadership from a woman. and the women teachers were less inclined. (p. 5) gupton and slick (1996) also found that female administrators, new to their jobs, expected varying types of resistance to their leadership from men but appeared blindsided by the antagonistic behavior of the other women toward them. benton (1980) reported a related phenomenon and named it the "queen bee" syndrome-one that adds insult to injury in the plight of female administrators who seek support systems from within their own ranks. according to benton, a queen bee is a woman in a position of power and authority who works at keeping other women out of leadership in order to protect her queenly status. supporting the relationship of the queen bee to the concept of horizontal violence, ginn (l989) concluded that the queen bee phenomenon was about power and noted that there was not enough of this precious commodity to go around. she also indicated that the concept of shared power seemed difficult to grasp for those not usually included in the power loop, resulting in this counterproductive attitudes among many underrepresented female administrators. ginn’s conclusions parallel those posited by freire concerning the lack of power as an underlying cause for horizontal violence. in edson’s research study (1988), a female aspirant described her view of the painful blow that occurred when an established female administrator failed to encourage female aspirants by stating, "my experience with female administrators has not been positive . . . . from what i see, it’s every woman for herself. the men help each other a lot more than the women do" (edson, 1988, p. 76). she also noted, paradoxically, that many women in education find themselves drawing up battle lines instead of forming alliances. in addition, edson pointed out that a decided concern among many of her respondents was the failure of female educators to support other female administrative applicants. the results of edson’s study revealed that, in spite of many women who were supportive of other women within her study, female aspirants were still concerned with the jealousy, competition, and lack of support shown them by other female educators. because of these "worst detractors," a serious distrust of women in the field was reported. as one female educator noted: i’m concerned about the harm that successful women do to other women in this district. the men are supportive; the women are jealous and sabotaging. now that a few women have made it to higher levels, they seem to relish the opportunity to ‘do in’ other women. at least the men who were in power before were more innocent about it. (edson, 1988, p. 249) in a related vein, shakeshaft (1995) stated that the complexities in female-tofemale interactions in educational administration have not yet been made clear. she also reported that when she travels around the country and speaks with female administrative groups a common theme that has emerged from her audiences is the belief that women are their own worst enemies. despite considerable evidence to the contrary, the view that it is other women who keep women from advancing remains strong. therefore, we need to examine why we cling to a “blame the woman” explanation, while ignoring or discarding what we know about femaleto-female support systems and helping strategies. (shakeshaft in dunlap and schmuck, 1995, xiii) categories of supportive and non-supportive women shakeshaft’s concern, acknowledging that some females were antagonistic toward their peers, could be explained by matthews’ (1995) research study regarding views of equity that female administrators hold regarding other female administrators. in this study, matthews categorized four distinct points of view of female administrators regarding their peers. from the responses to interviews with female superintendents, assistant superintendents, high school principals, and assistant principals in her sample, she developed four categorizations that reflected differing views these respondents had of other women in administration. the categories that emerged from the responses of matthews’ subjects were: (a) "activists" whose concerns are gender equity and the active support of women into educational administration; (b) "advocates" who support other women, belong to female advocacy organizations, and believe that women bring unique strengths to school administration; (c) "isolates" who detach themselves from equity issues and do not believe that sex discrimination existed, was not worth worrying about, or was not even a problem; (d) and "individualists" who believe that the individual, female or male, took precedence over the group and did not believe in supporting or promoting women or taking action to correct the sexual imbalance in school leadership. using matthews’ categories, one can see that the first two categories, activists and advocates, have positive and supportive points of view with respect to other women in educational administration, while isolates and individualists hold views that result in diminishing the value of other female administrators, feeling detached from them, and believing that they were unworthy of their help. matthews’ conclusion would support the horizontal violence concept but also could explain the paradox of why certain women in educational leadership are supportive of their female colleagues while others are non-supportive. in relation to horizontal violence, two categories of non-supportive women, isolates and individualists, deserve a closer look. according to matthews (1995), isolates identified in her study were detached from issues of sex equity, were treated as tokens in their workplaces, took pride in being the “only woman,” and cherished the opportunity to speak from "the woman’s point of view." as two isolates in matthews’(1995) study stated: i am not one to really push the women’s thing and i guess it’s because i have always felt i could do whatever i wanted, it didn’t make any difference, and i just assumed that everyone else could, too. i just haven’t had the time and the energy to fight for other women or for their opportunities either…. [the second respondent stated] i’m not a real strong women’s lib person. i guess i feel like if you’ve got the credential and you’ve got the experience and can project that, you can get a job. and if you’re not confident, then you shouldn’t get it. (p. 259) in contrast to the individuals that matthews classified as isolates, the individualists appeared to be more concerned with the attributes of individuals, male and female, and not with the cause of sex equity in school administration. the responses of individualists, however, revealed a theme running through many of their comments--the fear of alienating men although they have, in reality, alienated themselves from other women. the voice of an individualist below clearly reveals this point of view: i have a lot of good feelings about the way i came into where i am. it makes me feel good in many ways that someone else kept saying, “you have the capabilities, you have the features that we want, you have the things that we need”. (p. 259) another individualist tells an even more revealing story about her views of other women: i was into my master’s program for a year, the second year it became the 'in' thing for women to get into administration. all of a sudden . . . there were all these women. and i know the guys used to protect me and said, “you were here first. they’re just jumping onto the bandwagon.” there were so many of them that just didn’t belong. they haven’t got the patience for it; they haven’t got the personality; they haven’t got the guts. some of the gals were in there just because they were women. (p. 259-260) then she stated the attributes that she believed made her right for the job: i am kind of a unique woman in that i have never let the ‘different sex’ stop me. i have always teased: i could out-drink, out-smoke, and out-swear any of the guys i needed or had to. and i find it a compliment that they consider me one of the guys. (p. 260) matthews’ (1995) typologies of females in educational administration provides a credible explanation for horizontal violence between female school leaders by revealing the characteristics of isolates and individualists and identifying their motives for anti-female behavior. according to this author, isolates obtained their positions with a high degree of district support (the highest of the four groups) and denied having experienced any type of gender discrimination. they are characterized by their ‘token’ status and are oblivious to any discrimination in their work area. these women appear to have no vocabulary or conceptual framework within which to categorize instances of discrimination as such. men, however, have recruited these individualists into school administration, and their mentees have a fear of alienating the men (their former and present mentors) who allow them to share some of their power. when viewing other women coming into school leadership positions, they see them as threats (especially those who want to "rock the boat" when they enter the established male system). their perceptions are based solely on the male point of view, and these individuals see men as the source of authority. individualists who have been mentored into the system by males often remain wards of their mentors and remain permanent protégés with no individual power without their men. because they were favored by males and continue to have their support (but at a high cost), these women cannot understand why other women say that they have experienced some type of discrimination when trying to enter the field of educational administration. according to matthews (1995), profiles of isolates and individualists also showed that these female administrators alienate themselves from other women, internalize the male voice as the external voice of authority, and deny the frustrations and experiences of other women who enter the field of school administration. isolates enjoy being the token females and getting the special attention they enjoy in this role, while individualists resent the women who advocate for gender equity and are highly opposed to separate advocacy organizations for female administrators. in doing so, however, they devalue their own identities and discount their own unique experiences as women. as matthews (1995) noted, individualists see the world through a male prism, and she believes that these women who see their own experiences through male eyes, distance themselves from other women. her insightful conclusions prove that women do speak in different voices. she also provided explanations for their behavior, noting that career patterns and sources of support may be two of the reasons why some women in administration view gender equity issues quite differently. in contrast to the isolates and individualists, female activists and advocates serve as agents for change and are strong supporters of other women because of the unique strengths that they bring to schools and districts (matthews, 1995). supporting matthews' (1995) categorization of women who are individualists, schmuck and schubert (1995) explained that some female principals must decide whether or not to join a women’s administrative group, but view this move as possible political suicide, while noting that others take a more sanguine view and enjoy the support and advice they receive after they become members of such associations. they are afraid, however, to splinter off from men (who hold the power). as these authors noted, "politically, and personally, women administrators are torn between being segregated into a culture of women and being integrated into a culture of men” (p. 282). bell (1995) supported the causes of this cultural dilemma, stating that women in school administration are in the unusual position of having one foot in each camp-being members of a majority (women in education) as well as members of the few (women school leaders). she also revealed that the positions that females hold in educational leadership places them on the fringes of groups of teachers and administrators, implying that they do not belong to either or to both. based on her research, bell concluded that experiences of females in school administration "encompass both authority and influence as leaders, and isolation as women in a male-dominated occupation" (p. 289). in a similar vein, kanter (1993) wrote that the effectiveness of women leaders is a response to opportunities and to favorable positions in the power structure and that men and women are able to exercise their authority more effectively when they have power. from these related research studies, it appears that the hidden agenda underlying horizontal violence between female administrators is power. horizontal violence appears to exist when female leaders realize that they have little or no power, except that given to them by men, and they try to appear powerful by "lording it over" other females. funk (2000) summarized the feelings of female administrators, isolates and individualists, who want to remain the "queen bees" or have adopted the mannerisms, values, and issues of the male administrators, thereby perpetuating horizontal violence. • i am in the spotlight as the only female administrator! i do not want to share. • these jobs are so scarce that i will do whatever i have to do to undermine other female applicants. • i am fearful that if i act feminine in my administrative role that they will not accept me! • i do not think that she earned her promotion. • she seems so competent! i feel unworthy and incompetent! • i made it without extra help! why in the world would i help her? • i do not want to have anything to do with the professional association for female administrators. as a female superintendent, joining this association would be the "kiss of death" with my male colleagues. dissociation from female identity dissociation and denial of certain female administrators regarding their own personal histories of sex discrimination led to another source of horizontal violence. crosby (1984) spoke to the anti-feminist attitudes among some women who have perplexed researchers in the field of women in educational administration. these women stated that they have never experienced gender bias nor discrimination, thereby supporting the fact that they are in denial regarding instances of their own experiences with discrimination and thereby dissociate themselves from other women. giving support to crosby’s work, schmuck (1995) also described her research that revealed that some women in educational leadership deny any discrimination against themselves, see themselves as exceptions to the rule, argue that they are not like other women, and state vehemently that they have never been victims of sex or gender discrimination. as they dissociate themselves from their female identity, they remain self-oriented and tend not to identify with other women but rather with those who are the gatekeepers of the profession. they often do not provide support for girls or women and ignore issues of gender equity. rather than offering a different voice, they perpetuate the status quo. (schmuck, 1996, p. ix) the dissociation between non-supportive females, isolates and individualists, creates significant negative consequences for experienced female school administrators as well as those entering the profession because of the negative impact that non-supportive women can have on their advancement or entry into educational administration. these women administrators, however, pay a high price for the benefits they receive from males--the loss of their "voice" and the inability to be themselves. in relation to this dilemma, matthews (1995) posed the question, "what is the price of being co-opted by men?" (p. 261). smith (1975) responded: we have difficulty in asserting authority for ourselves. we have difficulty in grasping authority for women’s voices and for what women have to say. we are thus deprived of the essential basis for developing among ourselves the discourse out of which symbolic structures, concepts, images, and knowledge might develop which would be adequate to our experience and to deviating forms of organization and action relevant to our situation and interests. in participating in the world of ideas as object rather than as subject we have come to take for granted that our thinking is to be authorized by an external source of authority. (p. 365) the "price" paid by women is also described by matthews (1995): the very thing that these women are striving to achieve—“working and making the right impression and not being any different from anybody else”--point to the very thing that is lost: their unique experiences as women and the values and beliefs that accompany that experience. (p. 262) horizontal violence and gender inequity non-supportive female administrators often do not provide support for girls or women and ignore issues of gender equity. rather than offering a different voice, they perpetuate the status quo. (schmuck, 1996, p. ix) given the female-to-female horizontal violence that continues to exist for women in educational administration, schmuck identified a hidden or at least unspoken area of female-to-female horizontal violence--the lack of support from female administrators, particularly principals, in making sorely needed changes in the academic, social, and cultural barriers that exist for female students in the nation’s schools. questions that arise include regarding gender equity are: (a) do the effects of horizontal violence affect the attention that female principals give to equity policies and practices in schools? (b) are schools with female principals still failing in fairness to girls and young women in their schools? (c) are aspiring female administrators learning about gender inequities in their preparation programs and making the necessary changes to level the playing field for girls and open their lives to opportunities yet unavailable to many girls in schools today? (d) are boys still being called upon more often, given more critical feedback, given cues to questions, and provided with more praise in the nation’s schools (and universities)? (e) what are the necessary changes that need to be made in curriculum, delivery systems, counseling practices, leadership role availability, etc. that would make a paradigm shift in the lives and self-worth of girls and young women in schools and universities? in response to such questions, schmuck and schubert (1995) designed a research study to test adkison’s (1981) prediction that women who have personally experienced institutional discrimination would be more sensitive to bias, serve as strong advocates for change, and shape local practice toward greater sex equity for employees and students. the overall purpose of this study was to determine whether or not the women who had become school administrators since 1981 have now become equity advocates and active proponents of shaping local school board policies and practices toward greater gender equity for students. the researchers chose nineteen female principals from three states who agreed to participate in their study to determine their attitudes toward gender equity in their schools. the results of this research indicated that female administrators had made few if any changes in their schools regarding gender equity following the 1980s. in their sample, schmuck and schubert (1995) found that none of the female principals, when asked to describe an important policy or practice for which they were responsible, gave an example of gender equity, and only four of the principals addressed any continuing and concerted school-wide efforts to address either student gender or racial inequities. the majority of these principals also reported that they had experienced no discrimination as a female while seeking the principalship. although these female principals reported some differential treatment they experienced in schools, they failed to label this behavior as discrimination. two of the nineteen women gave examples of sex discrimination, but neither of them gave a strong response nor provided evidence of promoting gender equity in their schools. as schmuck and schubert (1995) described their surprising research results, they concluded that “changing the gender representation of principals will not, alone, change equity practices in schools" (p. 285). these researchers also determined that female principals appear to adopt the prevailing norms of the male administrative school culture, ignore issues of equity, and are unable to translate their own personal experiences into administrative action to ensure that gender equity exists for their students or their employees. noting that these principals appear to disassociate from their own individual experiences and feel that their personal experiences are simply idiosyncratic, schmuck and schubert (1995) concluded that these women "fail to comprehend the more fundamental concept of how gender serves as a segregating factor in the culture of educational institutions” (p. 285). the following conclusion made by this research team should give all female principals reasons to take heed when considering the negative ramifications of their research. although we applaud continuing efforts to reach gender equity in administration and believe women have successfully demonstrated their administrative competence, we cannot presume because a woman is in charge, challenges to inequity will be made. we must continue to educate female and male educators about inequality through the universities and professional associations. women’s professional associations, especially, have taken too narrow a view; they should provide a more comprehensive and critical view of how our schools perpetuate inequality. (schmuck & schubert, 1995, p. 285) summary and recommendations the curse of horizontal violence remains a hidden issue for females in educational leadership, as it is with other minorities who are members of oppressed groups and lack sufficient power because of their lack of genuine status in their organizations. if it is difficult for some women to believe that women in school leadership are members of an oppressed group, the existence of the phenomenon of female-tofemale horizontal violence should give some credence to the differing types of status that women hold in educational settings. using the concept of horizontal violence provides an explanation of research results regarding the harm that some women do to others, thereby indicating that many female educational leaders dissociate to some degree in order to survive in often tenuous positions within school districts where men are still the providers of the power. in addition, some female administrators who are successful feel that the problem of gender discrimination in the field of education has already been solved and does not merit any more attention. women in educational administration, however, will not be rid of this destructive behavior until equity for females is achieved in most areas of their lives. until this time, female school leaders must be aware of the phenomenon of horizontal violence and not let it deceive or coerce them to practice this "dark art," causing damage to the girls and young women in the schools. the first step to change is the awareness of the concept of horizontal violence between females in educational settings that stalls the progress needed to allow women and girls to be the best they can be. bringing this behavior out in the open, teaching about it in the professional programs for female and male administrators, spreading the word to female administrators who could provide needed support to their female peers, and making changes in schools that will promote and eventually achieve gender equity for all of our students. feminine principles are entering the public realm because we can no longer afford to restrict them to the private domestic sphere, nor allow a public culture obsessed with warrior values to control human destiny. (helgesen, 1990, p. 255.) recommendations steps that might prove to be catalysts in this change effort include the following. • more research is needed regarding the phenomenon of horizontal violence and its negative impact on female administrators and female school students. • women and girls should become aware of the existence of horizontal violence and work together to understand this phenomenon, the psychological reasons behind female-to-female discrimination, and the powerful messages that such behavior has on others. allowing horizontal violence to continue will slow the progress of women and result in inequitable treatment that will not allow them to become equal members in our society. • women in administration should strive to enrich their schools and workplaces with qualities of female leadership that enrich schooling: collaboration, caring, courage, intuition, and vision (regan, 1995) instead of using the methods of male administrators. • females in administration should become aware of and acknowledge sexism and gender discrimination and strive to eliminate it. they should also work together to change the existing cultures in education by drawing on their female strengths (skrla & benestante, 1998). • preparation programs for educational administrators should include knowledge, skills, and appreciation for equity issues within our public and private schools. • in-service and aspiring female principals should educate themselves in specifics regarding the most critical inequities in their schools and develop strategies that will provide girls and young women (and boys and young men) with gender equality through the total school curriculum. • in-service female administrators at all levels should show the courage and strength necessary to take the risks to "make a difference" by challenging the status quo, ensuring that schools become places of acceptance and intellectual stimulation for girls and young women. references adkison, j. 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(1975). an analysis of ideological structures and how women are excluded: considerations for academic women. canadian review of sociology and anthropology, 12, 353-69. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home business | entrepreneur |loan credit | web | network | balance |international| book store about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2005 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/writing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/career_strategies/index.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/business-home-oview_index.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/loans-credit.html file:///web.html file:///networks/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/balancing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/networks/intlinks.html file:///amazingbookstore/index.php file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com 214 advancing women in leadership vol. 33, pp. 196-214, 226 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper understanding women’s career goals across ethnic identities dr. regina m. o'neill, dr. mary shapiro, dr. cynthia ingols, dr. stacy blake-beard regina m. o’neill professor of management, suffolk university, sawyer business school, email: roneill@suffolk.edu, phone: 617573-8393 mary shapiro: professor of practice, simmons school of management, email: shapiro@simmons.edu, phone 617-521-3860 cynthia ingols: professor of practice, simmons school of management, email: cynthia.ingols@simmons.edu, phone: 617-521-3837 stacy blake-beard: professor of management, simmons school of management, email: blakes5@simmons.edu, phone: 617-521-3833 accepted december 13, 2013 research on women’s careers has been evolving over the last 50 years. initially, research on men’s careers was used to explain women’s goals, barriers, and strategies; then white women’s careers were used to explain all women’s careers, regardless of race and ethnicity; finally, contemporary research breaks the homogenous, monolithic group of “women” into meaningful ethic groups. this study of 860 u.s. managerial women extends that research by comparing the career goals of white women, black women, asian women, and latina women. factor analyses show differences across all ethnic groups in how women strive for different career goals: contemporary goals (self-actualization and impact on the community), balance goals (claiming life outside of work), and conventional goals (measuring success by money and position). we offer explanations for the differences, directions for future research, and implications for women seeking leadership. keywords: women‟s careers, women of color, ethnic identities, career goal. since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of women‟s careers has come into its own. hewlett and luce (2005) indicated that women were being compared against a conventional career paradigm based on men‟s careers. this work-is-primary model connoted a commitment to work to the exclusion of non-work activities (rapoport, bailyn, fletcher, & pruitt, 2002) and suggested that women were deficient in their commitment to work and career advancement. recent research (shapiro, ingols, o‟neill & blake-beard, 2009a; shapiro, ingols, blake-beard & o‟neill, 2009b) went a step further, suggesting women act as career self-agents, a term combining peters‟ “self-employed” (1992), and hutchins‟ “free agents” (1999). through this model, individuals, acting as career selfagents, take control of their careers (hall, 1996), which includes setting goals. this early focus on women and their careers, however, was primarily on the careers of white women. mcdonald and hite (2008) speak to the responsibility of organizations to recognize career development programs for groups that are typically underrepresented or ignored in terms of understanding their career journeys. in response, scholars have looked at the career experiences of women of color (byrd, 2009; cocchiara, bell, & berry, 2006; flores, ramos, & kanagui, 2010; fouad & byarswinston, 2005; kamenou & fearful, 2006; muller, 1998; rosser-mims, 2010). as more research has attempted to understand the impact of gender and ethnicity on career development and goals, we recognize the importance of studying women whose lives do not fit into a standard model (kamenou, 2008). our study helps move this important research stream and help forward. 215 the following literature review and research compare the careers of diverse groups of women. researchers and practitioners who are interested in career research stand to benefit from the identification of differences and similarities across women of different ethnicities. rather than treating women as a homogenous group, we specifically look at white women, black women, asian women, and latina women. women’s careers and goals the history of career research mirrors the occupants of the managerial labor force. in the 1950s and 1960s, white, largely middle-class men built american corporations and career research focused on this population (hartung, 2002; wells, delgado-romero & shelton, 2010). in 1962, only 15.3% of managers were women, and less than 3.8% of managerial women were black (garfinkle, 1975). additionally, over three quarters of those women were managers in the female-dense occupations of retail sales, banks, restaurants, and offices (meyer & maes, 1983). powell and mainiero (1992) noted that scholars studying careers in the 1970s and 1980s believed that the theories and research on men‟s careers would transfer to women. in fact, women‟s careers were often viewed as special cases or as developmentally deficient (gallos, 1989), and were regarded as aberrations to the masculine norm because of women‟s emphasis on relationships and their socialized interdependence (powell & mainiero, 1992). by 2000, 31% of managers were women (padavic & reskin, 2002), the research on women‟s careers increased. as 20% of the new entrants into the u.s. workforce between 1990 and 2005 were non-euro-american women (sharma & givensskeaton, 2009), scholars began calling for studies to differentiate women as a monolithic demographic group and separately study women of color (bell & nkomo, 2001; proudford & thomas, 1999; blake-beard, 1999; shapiro, et al., 2009a; reynolds-dobbs, thomas, & harrison, 2008; hartung, 2002; ross-gordon & brooks, 2004; wells et al., 2010; flores, berkel, nilsson, ojeda, jordan, lynn, & leal, 2006). as hite (1996) noted: during the past two decades, an increasing amount of research has focused on career progress for women…. however, the aspect of race is rarely mentioned. in response, recent studies have begun to refute the implicit assumption that references to „women‟….include all women, and that the experiences of all women are similar….and in reality they are describing white women. (p. 11) fouad and byars-winston (2005) noted that little is known about the role of race and ethnicity in career processes. to help better understand this role, it is important to first understand women‟s career goals. the language scholars use to describe career goals varies in the literature. locke and lathan‟s (1984, 1990) goal setting theory links organizational goals to people‟s goals. maier and brunstein (2001) further define personal work goals as representations of what people are striving for in their lives. extending this further, scholars use “career success” to describe goals (heslin, 2005; mcdonald & hite, 2008). arthur, khapova, and wilderom (2005) defined “career success” as “the accomplishment of desirable work-related outcomes at any point in a person‟s work experiences over time” (p. 179). dik, sargent and steger (2008) studied “strivings” as a way of assessing goals. some scholars further divide goals into objective (status, rank and material success) and subjective (pride, self-worth and satisfaction) categories (nicholson & de waal-andrews, 2005; powell & mainiero, 1999). the question remains: how are goals formed? lent and brown (1996) built on bandura‟s social cognitive career theory (scct) to recognize the influence that personal, contextual and social cognitive factors have on learning, interest formation, and the development of career goals. people‟s beliefs about their ability to perform certain tasks (i.e., self-efficacy) and their beliefs about whether their efforts will ultimately be successful (i.e., outcome expectations) mediate whether individual preferences will become career goals (and eventually actions). (gushue & whitson, 2006, p. 379) additionally, scct recognized the role that person or personal factors (biological attributes such as gender and ethnicity), background contextual factors (such as social support and parental education levels), and proximal contextual factors (such as perceived barriers) have on individuals‟ learning experiences, which in turn affected their self-efficacy and outcome expectations, which in turn affected their goals (ojeda & flores, 2008). with the inclusion of personal factors, scct opened the door for exploring the impact of race and gender on the career goals of people. women of color: careers and goals research acknowledges difficulty in ascertaining women‟s career goals because of structural and cultural barriers (dainty, bagilhole, & neale, 2000), social norms about femininity and competition (fels, 2004), women‟s tendency to shift priorities 216 over their lifetimes (mainiero & sullivan, 2005), and the “adaptive” nature of women‟s goals as they flexibly accommodate to “the reality of the current situation” (hite & mcdonald, 2003, p. 227). likewise, gallos (1989) argued women‟s goals were more “holistic” than men‟s, implying their goals acknowledged many components of their lives. indeed, the work of shapiro and colleagues (2009a, 2009b) revealed this complexity. in their study of 389 managerial women, three categories of goals emerged: “contemporary” (making a positive impact, role modeling, intellectual challenge); “balance” (having time for personal relationships and interests); and “conventional measures of success” (marking success by status, leadership positions, and money). the inclusion of personal factors has permitted researchers to include the influence of social factors such as race, culture, and gender on career goals (gushue, 2006). lent, brown and hackett (2000) use their scct model to focus on self-efficacy, outcome expectations and goals, and discuss how these variables are influenced by gender and ethnicity. phinney and ong (2007) define cultural identity as “aspects of the self that are shaped and defined by one‟s culture and feelings of belongingness to cultural groups” (p. 413). byars-winston (2010) stated that racial and ethnic identities represent two types of cultural identity, noting that both are products of assignment by others and assertion by people within the group. brooks and clunis (2007) described the evolution of the concept of race, noting that historically it referred to biological differences between people and ethnicity may be defined as people with common cultural traits they see as distinct from those of others. ethnic identity may be defined as a multi-dimensional construct that includes feelings of ethnic belonging, pride, and a secure sense of group membership (phinney & alipuria, 1996). while scholars have begun seeking the role culture, race and ethnicity play on career goals and development, few have researched the simultaneity of race and gender (holvino, 2010), and fewer still have looked at inter-group differences. however, what have scholars learned about women‟s career goals in diverse cultural and ethnic groups? in framing our work, we chose the terminology for our women‟s categories based on the literature and our sample. scholars have noted the problem of using labels that obfuscate the many cultures subsumed under them (rivera, anderson & middleton, 1999). hite (2007) pointed out the dangers of these multi-dimensional labels and urged scholars to be cognizant of intra-group differences. in discussing the “black” category, byars-winston (2010) pointed out that black cultural identity was constructed against the backdrop of slavery, a context that erased ethnic identities and socially assigned them the racial identity of “black” in law and practice. sensitive to women‟s cultural identities, we attempted to choose terms that reflect the breadth of ethnicities in our sample. consistent with rossermims (2010) that there is no “essential or archetypal” black woman, our “black women” self-identified as african american, afro-caribbean, and african. our “latina women” self-identified as hispanic/latina, mexican american/chicano, many south and central american countries, spain, portugal, and puerto rico. our “asian women” self-identified as asian, asian american, chinese, indian, japan, korean, taiwanese, and filipino. black women gushue and whitson (2006) found that black, latina and biracial girls of color who integrated race, ethnicity and egalitarian gender-role attitudes in their self-identity demonstrated high self-efficacy. they speculated that this “more fully integrated sense of self” may generate a greater confidence in being able to manage racism and sexism, explaining that the “self” also related to an increased confidence in pursuing nontraditional (male, higher status and income) careers” (p. 383). this was reaffirmed by byarswinston (2010) who noted that higher ethnic identity led to higher self-efficacy, a mediated influence on goals. daire, lamothe, and fuller (2007) studied 155 white and black male and female college students and found future income and status had more influence on career choices for blacks than whites. their research was consistent with earlier work, including teng, morgan and anderson (2001), who found job security, good starting income, autonomy, a desire to serve others and community, and an important position were more important to black than white students. latina women riviera, anderson and middleton (1999) posited a model that recognized how self-efficacy interacted with cultural values (harmony, doing for others), social issues (discrimination and education level) and culture (the role of family and religion) and impacted mexican american women‟s goals. they proposed that cultural elements, such as family structure, religion, and gender roles added complexity to mexican american women‟s career development. since then, flores and o‟brien (2002) found mexican american adolescent women‟s career interests did not translate into career goals, and hypothesized that those women “may not have the luxury of choosing a career based on their interests” 217 (p. 24). their study did support scct‟s proposition that the presence of support (in this case, parental support, a strong factor in the hispanic collectivist culture) and the expectation of few obstacles did have a positive effect on career goals. recently, gushue (2006) studied 128 latino, ninth grade students and found ethnic identity affected outcome expectations through its impact on self-efficacy. asian women leong, hardin and gupta (2010) discussed how culture may impact the goals of asian american men and women based on the differences generated from originating from collectivist cultures which focus on the interests, values, and goals of the group versus individualist ones that emphasize the individual‟s goals (such as north america and europe). while individuals from collectivist cultures do not reject their own goals, they have internalized the group‟s goals to the point that it is difficult to differentiate between personal and collective goals. yet the authors go on to state that “personal concerns such as values and interests become less salient with individuals who possess collectivist selves” (p. 472) and are more likely to have goals that align with their families‟ values and interests. differences across and within groups while studies focusing on ethnicity are increasing, there are still few studies that compare groups. fouad and byarswinston‟s (2005) review of publications between 1991 and 2004 found only 16 studies that compared two or more racial/ethnic groups. their meta-analyses found similar career aspirations for all groups, while perceptions of the opportunity to realize their dreams differed by racial/ethnic group. lopez and ann-yi (2006) found no difference regarding self-efficacy across white, latina, and african american women. however, the african american women expected more career barriers than either their white or hispanic counterparts. moreover, it is important to recognize the potential differences within groups. fouad (2002) proposed that age and gender may produce greater differences in goals within an ethnic group than between groups. leong et al. (2010) also called for the recognition of generational differences in how people identify with their ethnic culture and the dominant culture. the purpose of this research is to build on previous work on women‟s career goals to consider the careers of women of color. we begin with two primary research questions: (1) what career goals do managerial women in the united states have? and (2) how might those goals vary across ethnicities? methods to help insure representation from as large a population of women as possible, we collected data from four sources. first, we collected survey data from attendees at an annual women‟s leadership conference sponsored by a northeast college. because most participants were white women, we then reached out to women of color through three organizations. approximately 2,200 women had the opportunity to respond and 860 replied. our survey was sent to 100 members of a nonprofit latina organization that supports women‟s careers; we received 78 responses. we also sent our survey to 1700 members or an organization that works to advance professionals of color; we received 235 responses from women. finally, we sent our survey to 400 members of an internal latina women‟s group at a large company, and we received 220 responses. we are not able to calculate a response rate because some surveys were collected via the snowball technique. given the difficulty in accessing professionals of color, we used this technique as a way to ensure a maximum number of responses. together, our full sample of 860 respondents consists of 207 black women, 40 asian women, 309 white women, and 304 latina women. these women average 42 years old and have an average work experience of 18 years. 85% hold college degrees, 60% are married, and 45% have children at home. additionally, 93% are currently employed full time, 81% contribute 50% or more to the household‟s total income, 40% are in middle or higher levels of management, and they have an average salary of $112,000. using a questionnaire from previous research (shapiro et al, 2009a), participants rated 16 goals on a five-point scale, ranging from 1 (not important) to 5 (extremely important). because this is an exploratory study, we used a combination of frequencies and factor analyses to understand different groups of women. analyses and results to first determine which career goals women identified as most important, we examined the percentages of each of the 16 goals women chose. table 1 presents the percentages of the goals that women – both in aggregate and across ethnicities – identified as being very important or extremely important. in comparing the top and bottom choices for a) all women, b) white women and c) women of different ethnicities, we see that women of different ethnicities‟ career goals can vary quite a bit. to understand these fine-grained differences, we conducted a series of exploratory factor analyses on the importance of goals. in all analyses, we used principal factor analysis with varimax rotation without specifying any particular number of factors. we performed factor analyses on all 16 of the goals: for all 218 women; for women of color; for white women; for black women; for latina women; and for asian women. to select items that best represented each factor, we selected all items that had a factor loading greater than or equal to .50. in addition, in interpreting our results we considered whether items had clearly loaded on one factor only; however, items that had similar loadings on more than one factor are presented in italics in each of the factors where they loaded. finally, factors with only two items are not given much consideration. table 2 presents a summary of all factor analyses, presenting those factor loadings and items that grouped into clear factors. examination of the eigenvalues for each factor analysis indicates that the derived factors for each group explain between approximately 57% and 70% of the variance; specific percentages are shown in table 2 in parentheses for each group. our first exploratory factor analysis on all 16 of the goals “for all women” generated four factors. the first and second factors consisted of five items each. the third factor consisted of three items, and the fourth factor consisted of two items. we believe the first three factors represent the goals of women and reflect the multi-dimensionality with which they approach their work and lives. we label these three strong factors: contemporary career goals, balance goals, and conventional measures of success goals. the fourth factor contains only two items, and it appears to reflect what we label as financial goals. we next conducted a factor analysis on the goals “for all women of color.” the first and second factors both consisted of five items each. the third and fourth factors consisted of three items each; however, the item “make a great deal of money as a measure of my success” loaded onto both factors as a third item (shown in italics). table 1 – frequencies of goals goals all women n = 838 woc n = 522 white n = 299 black n = 143 asian n = 36 latina n = 297 other n = 46 be intellectually challenged 93.6 93.5 93.6 99.3 94.4 91.9 84.4 develop my skills and expertise 92.2 92.7 91.4 92.3 97.2 91.9 95.7 have time for personal relationships 90.0 91.2 87.3 87.3 81.0 93.6 95.6 meet my financial obligations 88.9 88.2 90.3 88.5 86.5 86.5 87.0 create a secure financial future 88.9 86.6 93.3 83.9 81.1 88.6 87.0 do work i am passionate about 88.9 89.8 87.0 89.5 83.4 89.9 95.6 work with people i enjoy 85.2 83.8 88.0 83.8 86.5 83.4 84.8 do work that makes a positive impact on people and communities 85.0 87.6 80.2 87.4 89.2 87.8 84.8 have time for outside interests (philanthropy, travel, hobbies, personal development, etc) 85.0 84.9 85.0 86.8 70.2 85.8 84.8 be in a location of importance to me (proximity to family, job, geography, etc) 82.0 81.8 81.8 77.0 75.0 83.5 91.3 be a role model for others 79.1 78.8 79.4 83.8 72.2 77.5 76.1 receive recognition for making a contribution 78.6 76.6 82.1 72.1 91.8 75.6 84.7 have children 65.7 67.3 62.2 55.8 72.9 73.0 61.4 progress into top leadership positions 51.1 54.7 44.0 63.7 50.0 49.3 65.2 increase my status by advancing to a prestigious position or organization 36.4 39.6 30.9 44.8 58.3 35.3 36.9 make a great deal of money as a measure of my success 29.2 31.7 24.2 29.4 41.7 31.7 31.1 represents cumulative % of goals ranked by respondents as very and extremely important 219 table 2 – summary of factor analyses groupings factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 factor 4 factor 5 all women (57.74%) .778 do work i am passionate about .730 do work that makes a positive impact on people and communities .675 be a role model for others .674 be intellectually challenged .603 develop my skills and expertise .781 have time for personal relationships .709 have time for outside interests .679 be in a location of importance to me .635 have children .856 increase my status by advancing to a prestigious position or organization .787 progress into top leadership positions .645 make a great deal of money as a measure of my success .860 create a secure financial future .844 meet my financial obligations woc (58.81%) .781 do work i am passionate about .723 do work that makes a positive impact on people and communities .664 be intellectually challenged .657 be a role model for others .643 develop my skills and expertise .795 have time for personal relationships .741 have time for outside interests .670 be in a location of importance to me .647 have children .531 work with people i enjoy .857 increase my status by advancing to a prestigious position or organization .772 progress into top leadership positions .626 make a great deal of money as a measure of my success .535 make a great deal of money as a measure of my success .856 create a secure financial future .833 meet my financial obligations white (63.76%) .753 do work that i am passionate about .730 be a role model for others .725 do work that makes a positive impact on people and communities .708 be intellectually challenged .569 develop my skills and expertise .839 increase my status by advancing to a prestigious position or organization .827 progress into top leadership positions .625 make a great deal of money as a measure of my success .759 be in a location of importance to me .738 have children .660 have time for personal relationships .867 create a secure financial future .854 meet my financial obligations .735 receive recognition for making a contribution black (63.13%) .812 have time for outside interests .803 have time for personal relationships .751 have children .514 be in a location of importance to me .768 do work that makes a positive impact on people and communities .742 do work that i am passionate about .584 be intellectually challenged .572 be a role model for others .826 increase my status by advancing to a prestigious position or organization .811 progress into top leadership positions .619 make a great deal of money as a measure of my success .869 meet my financial obligations .721 create a secure financial future .843 work with people i enjoy .626 receive recognition for making a 220 * the percentage of the variance explained for each group is shown in parentheses. .533 develop my skills and expertise contribution latina (60.71%) .801 do work i am passionate about .725 be a role model for others .717 do work that makes a positive impact on people and communities .675 be intellectually challenged .646 develop my skills and expertise .793 have time for personal relationships .748 have time for outside interests .674 be in a location of importance to me .638 have children .567 work with people i enjoy .848 increase my status by advancing to a prestigious position or organization .726 progress into top leadership positions .678 make a great deal of money as a measure of my success .515 make a great deal of money as a measure of my success .870 create a secure financial future .829 meet my financial obligations asian (76.00%) .796 work with people i enjoy .789 increase my status by advancing to a prestigious position or organization .700 progress into top leadership positions .666 have time for outside interests .642 make a great deal of money as a measure of my success .626 receive recognition for making a contribution .578 have time for personal relationships .831 be intellectually challenged .822 develop my skills and expertise .805 do work i am passionate about .857 be a role model for others .653 do work that makes a positive impact on people and communities .570 have time for personal relationships .847 create a secure financial future .746 meet with my financial obligations .542 be in a location of importance to me .906 have children 221 we then conducted factor analyses on goals of each different group of women of color. white women, the first factor consisted of five items. the second and third factors consisted of three items each, and a fourth factor emerged with two items. a fifth factor with one item was not considered further (shown in italics). for black women, the first factor contained four items; the second factor contained five items; and the third factor contained three items. a fourth and fifth factor emerged with two items each. the factor analysis for latina women produced four factors: the first and second factors consisted of five items each; the third and fourth factors consisted of three items each; and, the item “make a great deal of money as a measure of my success” loaded onto both factors as a third item (shown in italics). for asian women, the first factor consisted of seven items; however, the item “have time for personal relationships” also loaded onto the third factor which consisted of three items (shown in italics for both factors). in addition, second and fourth factors emerged with three items each. a fifth factor emerged with one item (shown in italics), which is not considered further. interestingly, in understanding what different women of color identify as their most important goals, the results of our factor analyses point to a number of similarities as well as differences for each ethnic group of women. discussion in exploring the career goals driving women‟s career strategies, we identified three strong factors, which align with work by shapiro et al. (2009a). first, contemporary career goals (defined as: do work i am passionate about; make a positive impact; be a role model; be intellectually challenged; and develop my skills) support the aspen institute‟s (2008) finding that women voice a higher concern than men for doing work that has a positive impact, and women‟s late career stage dominate concern for authenticity (mainiero & sullivan, 2005). next, balance goals (defined as: time for personal relationships and outside interests; live in location of importance; and have children) include goals relating to the multiple roles in work and life. this need for balance has been well established by scholars (mainiero & sullivan, 2005; mcdonald & hite, 2008; perlow, 1997; stork, wilson, bowles, sproull & vena, 2005). finally, conventional measures of success goals relate to conventional indicators of success (defined as: advancement to prestigious positions or top leadership; and make a great deal of money). these latter goals are consistent with the literature on objective career success markers (arthur et al., 2005; nicholson & de waal-andrews, 2005). taken together, these three factors may help explain the complexity of women‟s careers as they juggle contemporary goals, the need for balance, and the traditional markers of success. it is interesting to note that two goals “create a secure financial future” and “meet my financial obligations” loaded onto a fourth factor for all women, women of color, white women, and each ethnic group of women. this loading may be explained by the financial responsibility facing our particular sample. on average, our participants covered 73% of their households‟ income; on average, 34% of the sample (up to 50% for black women) were responsible for 100% of their households‟ income. women of color goals for all the women in our sample are very similar to goals of women of color. while we see some similarities in what different women of color identify as their most important goals, there are also a number of striking differences. the intra-group variability that we see in our results clearly demonstrates the importance of not categorizing women into one large homogenous group. as brooks and clunis (2007) note, research has tended to focus on blacks and whites, and then generalize the results to other groups. however, our results show that hispanics and asians, for example, indicated that they view themselves differently. our first interesting result comes in comparing the goals of white women with women of color. in general, white women and women of color identify the same top goals, but their secondary and tertiary goals are almost exactly transposed. more specifically, while both groups had contemporary career goals as the strongest factor, women of color identified balance goals as second and conventional measures of success goals third, while white women identified conventional measures of success goals as more important than balance goals. these transposed findings may be explained in part by how women of color often lead rich community and religious lives (bell & nkomo, 2001; hewlett, luce, & west, 2005; byrd, 2009), and the gap between their work and personal lives is larger than the gap faced by white women. kamenou (2008) proposed that while white women often move from a white personal life to a white work life, women of color often move from their own ethnic personal lives to a white work life, decreasing the likelihood of overlap. the time demands of those very different outside-work activities may be at the root of women of color‟s balance goals. black women in examining the results for black women, we see a very different first factor compared with other ethnic and white women, namely the primacy of balance goals. balance goals may be primary for black women because of increased demands on their time, the misalignment of organizational policies, and stereotyping. first, hewlett, luce and west (2005) call out the increased demands on black women to participate fully in their ethnic and religious communities. in meeting those demands, black women find little relief from their employers whose flexibility policies are often limited to child and elder parent care (blake-beard, o‟neill, ingols, & shapiro, 2010). balance goals become central as black women struggle to find time to meet the demands beyond those of their immediate families. additionally, balance goals may be more important because of the larger penalties black women face 222 when unable to juggle family responsibilities. cocchiara, bell and berry (2006) point out black women are expected to miss work as single mothers, and when they do not miss work it is attributed to their need for income rather than work ethic. this difference may also be explained in part by the expectations these women have. for example, lopez and ann-yi (2006) found that black women expected more career barriers than either their white or hispanic counterparts. as such, perhaps these women adjust their personal expectations to reflect the expectations of career barriers, noting therefore the importance of balance. not surprisingly, doing work that makes a positive impact on the community loaded very strongly on a second factor, perhaps because, as cook, heppner and o‟brien (2002) write, people of color may define themselves as part of a community. the factor loadings underscore the vital part of community in the lives of these black women and the roles these women play in their communities. rosser-mims (2010) described these roles as refuges from hostile work places, and opportunities to be “caretakers‟ of the race.” hewlett, luce and west (2005) found that 25% of black women are active leaders in their religious communities (compared to 16% of white men), and 25% mentored and tutored (compared to 14% of white women). contributing to their ethnic community is a natural outgrowth of the deeply ingrained “ethic of giving back” that drives many black women (bell & nkomo, 2001; rossermims, 2010). in the third factor, blacks identified traditional success goals, placing these behind balance and contemporary goals. as noted earlier, a separate fourth factor around finances also emerged. while this factor has only two items, their loadings were quite high. the strength of these factor loadings make sense, given daire et al.‟s (2007) finding that future income has a greater influence on the career choice of black college students than on white students. other scholars have also found that black college students place high value on job security, income and financial independence (lewis & collins, 2001; teng et al, 2001). latinas in general, our findings indicate that latinas‟ goals are highly consistent with the goals of women of color. in particular, contemporary career goals, balance goals, and conventional measures of success goals were all indicated in the same order of loadings for latinas that they were for women of color. this loading could perhaps be explained primarily by the nature of our sample; a majority of our latina respondents were part of a large corporation, thus potentially limiting the variability in the types of goals these women have. contemporary career goals, the strongest factor, are indeed representative of women‟s desire for work that is meaningful. in addition, perhaps for the latinas, this finding may be somewhat consistent with their collectivistic culture where people want to do good for the community, put others before self, and be a role model (hartung, 2002; leong et al., 2010; rivera et al., 1999). for latina women, balance goals were second most important, followed by conventional measures of success goals. this emphasis on balance may highlight hite‟s (2007) perspective on strong family values in the latin community. perhaps life balance is more important than career success because of expectations latinas place on family priorities – including marriage and motherhood – ahead of advancement opportunities (hite, 2007). similarly, flores, et al. (2010) are very clear about the need for latinas to adhere to the traditional female role of family first, not allowing women to pursue careers that interfere with home responsibilities. asian women finally, it was very interesting to see that goals for asian women are completely different than any other group. the first factor included goals from each of the three categories. we propose two possible explanations. the first could be our sample composition. our sample is small (n=40) and our sample encapsulates many cultures in the “asian” category (as indicated in the footnote). as a result, this mixture of cultures may result in an amalgam of goals. a second explanation could be that this first factor is indicative of the complexity of asian cultures. on one hand, “work with people i enjoy,” “have time for personal relationships,” and “receive recognition for making a contribution” is consistent with asian collectivist cultures where harmony and fulfilling others‟ needs before one‟s own are valued (leong et al., 2010). on the other hand, hierarchy is well developed and maintained in these cultures, with strong vertical relationships (leong et al., 2010). an individual‟s status is determined, among others, by their title and the prestige of their employer (hall, 1976; hofstede, 2001). acting on those values, the conventional measures of success goals of “advancing to prestigious position or organization,” “progress into top leadership,” and “money as a measure of success” appropriately load onto the first factor for asian women. this is consistent with lent et al.‟s (2000) scct model, suggesting that asian american career choice will be more influenced by family involvement and acculturation than their own personal interests. limitations and directions for future research while this study provides noteworthy findings that extend research on the careers of women of color, it also has its limitations, providing multiple opportunities for future research. while our sample avoids ethno/racial homogeneity, our sample is closely aligned to class (as defined by educational level, working status, salary, and titles). the impact of class and socio-economic status may overwhelm ethnic differences. some scholars (emslie & hunt, 2009; hite & mcdonald, 2003; lautsch & scully, 2007) have identified the burdens of employees in low-wage jobs. as such, research is needed that moves beyond managerial women to understand how women at other socio-economic levels and in lower levels of organizations manage their careers. 223 additionally, this research studied women in the united states, and may be more indicative of cultural influences in the u.s. than from different ethnic groups. we urge caution in generalizing the findings from this sample of u.s. based, highly educated, managerial women to other populations. in addition, it will be critical to understand the many subcultures that exist within the “latina” or “hispanic” cultural label (riviera et al., 1999; hite, 2007), “black” culture (rosser-mims, 2010), and “asian” culture (leong et al., 2010). finally, our small asian sample may not have been large enough to reveal meaningful characteristics of this group. implications for women this research suggests how important it is for women to recognize and address the various threads of influence that impact their own career goals. clearly, following a one-sizefits-all career strategy has not, and will not, work. ethnic identity has, and will likely continue to have, dramatic impact on women, their careers and personal choices, and goals they set for themselves (fernandez, 1999). when women, and particularly women of color, find themselves in the minority at work due to their gender and/or racio-ethnicity, they need to resist pressure to conform to majority career goals, and instead hold fast to their own, possibly different, career aspirations. yet organization culture and structure will apply pressure for conformity: career paths, definitions of success, and criteria for promotions, are often set up to meet conventional goals (status, leadership, money). while these goals appeared in the first factor for asian women, white women (second factor) and black and latina women (third factor) may find many organizational practices incongruous to their own values and motivators. saying “yes” to those goals may mean feeling inauthentic, conflicted and unsatisfied. additionally, many organizational practices tend to preclude balance goals altogether (24/7 availability, extended “face time”, career-enhancing global assignments). this presents significant barriers for black women (first factor) and for white and latina women (second factor). and, if women use flexible work arrangements to meet balance goals, it may result in their commitment to work being questioned. finally, meeting contemporary goals (work i am passionate about, make a positive impact, role model), the first factor for all women, may be in the greatest misalignment and may explain why so many women leave established organizations to begin their own companies. while organizations continue to struggle to reinvent themselves to acknowledge, accommodate and benefit from diverse employees, how can women, who are in the midst of that struggle now, stay true to their own goals? women can equip themselves with strategies for achieving their unique goals. fletcher (1999) provides four strategies: 1) naming: articulate what your career goals are, and how the pursuit of those goals will benefit the organization. build your value through good work, measure it, and then “name” it in terms salient to the organization (carter and silva, 2011). 2) norming: point out the work practices that reward, and so motivate some employees, but are ineffective in rewarding and motivating others. point out the cost of not expanding the practices so that all employees can be encouraged to do their best work. 3) negotiating: deal with issues around power (shapiro, and create practices that address the broader spectrum of career goals. craft pilots or experiments that foster incremental change. 4) networking: build networks that will validate and support your unique career goals (deyton & marlino, 2012). conclusion the results of this study underscore the need for taking a finegrained look at the careers of diverse groups of women. the distinctions we identified clearly show that collapsing all women of color into one group could obfuscate subtle and not so subtle differences among women. awareness of the losses that accompany lumping groups together provides strong validation for the need for future research that examines ethnic groups as distinct entities, for the sake of scholars and for practitioners. references arthur, m. b., khapova, s. n., & wilderom, c. p. m. 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(2010). an analyses of race and ethnic categories in career research from 1990-2007. journal of career development, 37(2), 503-518. http://www.simmons.edu/som/docs/centers/workforce_reality_study.pdf http://www.simmons.edu/som/docs/centers/workforce_reality_study.pdf aw home| jobsposting/search | search by google web or site | advertising | site map | awards | about us home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home business | entrepreneur |loan credit | web | network | balance |international| book store career strategies | employment | resumes | salary, benefits, employment, employee rights | negotiate career news | career indices, stats | career advice for execs,professionals |career advice for undergrads,mbas career paths | career planning for young women | mentoring and coaching | leadership development advancing women in leadership revisiting the era movement in texas: an historical analysis of leadership among texas women katherine selber and william selber texas state university-san marcos the defeat of the national equal rights amendment (era) in june 1982 ended a period of organized advocacy about women's formal political status. policy analysts and researchers subsequently identified numerous reasons for the national failure: few state organizations developed for the ratification campaign, lack of preparation for anti-era challenges in traditionally-oriented states, fears that the era would change women's roles in the home, the unexpected legal benefits the supreme court gave women during the 1970s without the era, and opponents' effective linkage, however false, of the era to legal abortion (berry, 1988; boles, 1979,1982,1985,1989; marilley, 1989). in order to consider future legislation and women’s leadership issues, advocates and policy leaders must be better prepared both organizationally and ideologically to cope with such obstacles. this means educating younger women, such as university students, about the history of the era so that an appreciation of the work of a network of women can be engendered and utilized for developing future leaders. additionally, the use of historical analysis as a routine part of policy practice is important to create a better map of the lessons learned by such movements. most current undergraduate students were not even born when the era failed. few social justice advocates such as social workers have written in this file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///search.html file:///advertising.html file:///sitemap.html file:///awards.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html 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emphasis on the importance of such historical analysis for use in education of women for leadership roles. one resource future educators can use to accomplish this educational goal is state level case studies that connect state and national activity together. this article explores the equal rights amendment (era) in texas and the role of both anti-era and pro-era supporters in the state. the paper proposes that at the national level anti-feminist groups were able to exert considerable influence in stopping the era ratification, but that this differed in texas where both a state era and the national era were ratified. this is attributable to the fact that anti-feminist groups were not as active nationally or in the state at the time of the ratification process. in fact, texas had a strong pro-era group of women who were mobilized and had considerable ties to the national level. these factors made a difference in the outcome of the ratification process in the state (berry, 1988; boles, 1979, 1982, 1989; gammage, 1982). although the national movement was important, success at the state level depended on the work of texas women. thus, the texas era movement was reinforced but not dependent on the national movement. additionally, the presence of a strong group of texas women working at both the state and national levels gave rise to a pro-era momentum not found in some states. these factors created state legislative support, raised the visibility in the state for the amendments, and created leadership among texas women to effect these changes. almost twenty years after the failure to ratify the national era, many women are unaware of the importance of the long, arduous work of texas women to achieve advances for women's personal and professional lives. this article provides new evidence, especially utilizing presidential archive information, for the argument that the work of texas women, not only made a difference, but also provided momentum in the state for the creation of new leadership for texas. implications for future women's movements are also explored. methodology this study uses a qualitative methodology, historical analysis, to describe and interpret the era history at a state level. as rubin and babbie (2001) pointed out, qualitative methodologies are helpful in the policy arena when reinterpretation of policy is intended. also, the methodology of historical analysis of documents lends itself to an in-depth understanding across cases such as at the national and state levels (miles & huberman, 1994; rubin & babbie, 2001). first, secondary sources in the academic literature were reviewed to gain an existing understanding of the era at both the state and national levels. then, an extensive review of primary sources was conducted; especially those at the texas state-level (miller & greenburg, 1976). care was taken to obtain multiple sources of information from different points of view using both academic and special libraries such as the lyndon baines johnson presidential library. diverse primary sources were used to examine the state's era activity from a new perspective such as national and local newspaper articles, newsletters, correspondence from advocacy groups, white house correspondence from the johnson administration, texas legislative hearings material, and archives of organizations such as women’s groups. according to the literature, use of a variety of primary sources such as public records with differing perspectives strengthens the corroboration of the hermeneutic process and serves to build support for new interpretations (brower, abolafia, & carr, 2000; lincoln & guba, 1985; rubin & babbie, 2001). the use of historical analysis as a practice tool to build case studies and awareness of the importance of using original, primary source data is vital in a field such as social work where policy practice is considered a vital linkage at the undergraduate level to case management. the early women leaders the period of women’s suffrage in texas witnessed many gains and set the stage for the era movement in texas (enstam, 1990; gammage, 1982; velez, 1994). the early suffrage activists in texas waged broad campaigns for changes in the treatment of women. as early as 1868, texas women began to organize around the suffrage movement, inspiring an impressive list of groups such as the texas women’s christian union, the texas equal rights association, and the texas federation of women’s clubs (austin women’s suffrage association, 1922; enstam, 1990). these were replaced as the suffrage campaign wore on with more narrowly defined arguments, more skill and experience in the political arena, and expedient arguments for women's issues replacing lofty philosophical ones. in 1919, texas ratified the federal suffrage amendment, making texas the first southern state to approve the suffrage amendment (velez, 1994). once inspired by only a handful of women leaders in the beginning of the suffrage movement, the 1950s witnessed a resurgence of interest among the broader base of women's groups that had formed in the earlier parts of the century. these themes and strategies foreshadowed the era fight later to come, giving a historical presence to active women's groups in the state (gammage, 1982). the texas era dallas attorney hermine tobolowsky, thought to be the mother of the state era, proposed the texas era to the texas federation of business and professional women’s clubs (b&pw) at a 1957 convention (dudley, 1975). tobolowsky was accustomed early in her career to being among only a handful of women in professional circles. she was only one of eleven women in her university of texas law school class and only one of two to actually graduate. she became active in organizations fighting discriminatory laws including the right of women to sit on juries (texas state historical association, 1997). the b&pw decided to support a state era rather than fight endless statute revisions and proposed the amendment to the texas legislature in 1958. the state era was proposed as a broader amendment than the eventual national era, covering race and national origin as well. although the wording is similar in both amendments, both aimed to prohibit gender discrimination (velez, 1994). tobolowsky began her work on the era by providing study courses for women. an additional strategy was to promote the legislative foundation for the passage of the era in the state. she believed that state legislators "were hard to convince on the era proposal"(dudley, 1975, p.a 21). tobolowsky was persuaded of the decision to change strategies to a state era amendment after providing testimony on a pending property rights bill in the legislature and experiencing responses to her prepared comments such as "women never had it so good… go home and settle your family arguments"(gammage, 1982, p.128). in addition to campaigning with the legislature, the b&pw worked to educate texas women between 1959 and 1972 when the era was passed in the texas legislature. women supporters toured the state and letters were submitted to local newspapers. a handbook was provided to clarify questions about the state and federal eras (texans for era, 1975). tobolowsky concluded that the state era was successful in large part due to this grassroots support, to the lobbying of the legislature, and due to the fact that "most of the opponents [in the legislature] had been voted out of office" (velez 1994, p.26). this sentiment of the effort of texas women was also reflected in chattie slayton, the legislative steering committee chair of the texas federation of business and professional women's club of houston. she wrote, "i am doing everything in my power to keep the members of the business and professional women's clubs advised [regarding the era]."(slayton, 1968, p.1) this view was also noted in a b&pw newsletter stating " [let your legislators know] there is a grassroots interest in equal rights legislation" (the texas business and professional women’s [b&pw's] newsletter, 1968, p.4) various arguments against the era were circulated in the legislature and the press. according to velez (1994), the main argument against the era was the possible removal of protective legislation for women. in addition, when race was added to the state era as a protected group, pro-era supporters thought this was done more to defeat the era than to strengthen support. other arguments used against the era at this time included the draft for women, the changing role of women in the home as an equal partner, state-sanctioned gay marriages, and the impact of forcing women to support the family. likewise, the state bar of texas lobbied against the amendment, claiming that it would cause havoc in the courts in a community property state by diminishing existing protection of women’s rights to their spouses’ assets. the fear of loss of special rights and privileges already obtained, such as financial protection afforded by husbands, was another reason given to oppose the era in texas (velez, 1994). in texas the legislative leadership, the speaker of the house and the lieutenant governor, supported the state era. governor preston smith urged both houses to ratify the amendment in a march 1972 special session (session, 1972). members of the texas commission on the status of women were also requested to contact their legislators to register their support (boles, 1979). boles’ (1979) research on pro and anti-era activities across the states indicated little organized anti-era activity at this time. in texas this was true during the passage of both the state era and the federal era ratification (boles, 1982). for example, there was no floor debate in the texas senate for the ratification in 1972 (texas state legislature, 1972). boles (1979) also reported that the texas house sponsor of the amendment said: my speech lasted about 30 seconds. i explained what congress had done, what it was…there was a couple of questions from the floor… i moved off of the mike and sat down and it was a green [i.e., almost all "yes" votes on the electronic voting] board. (p. 156-157) additionally, groups that would later be visible opponents of the federal era and advocate for rescinding it in texas did not oppose the amendment's ratification at the time of the special session. boles' interview with a spokesperson for the john birch society revealed the lack of awareness of the opposition at that time. the spokesperson said, "there wasn't any alert made at this stage to do something about it. we just slipped up..." (boles, 1979, p. 118). opposition to the state era and federal era did not coalesce until after both had passed in texas (miller & greenburg, 1976). an article in the austin-american statesman (1972) stated that, "governor preston smith will probably not even need to include the matter in his special session call in order for it to get action" (p. 3). a houston post article prior to the state era vote only mentioned a handful of legislators' opposition to the issue of property rights as it related to the era, citing no other opposition groups or remaining issues (house, 1971). according to one author, "when the era to the u.s. constitution was passed by texas it raised as much interest as a sewer bond referendum"(fighting, 1978, p. 4). although public groups did not lobby in texas until after the era had passed, the male legislators became the primary barrier in the state. thus, the pro-era supporters spent most of their time lobbying the state legislators. after the state era had passed in march 1972, voters ratified it in november. with the success of the texas era, and the election of several women including representative barbara jordan, the women's movement gained support. a state national organization of women organization formed in 1973. many women's issues were initiated, including state-funded day care for women on welfare and changes in laws pertaining to rape. the issue of women's reproductive rights also generated controversy with the roe v. wade ruling argued before the u.s. supreme court in 1973 by texas representative and attorney sarah weddington (representative, 1977). as the texas pro-era movement gained support, the anti-era movement also grew. the most visible anti-era group in texas was the women who want to be women (wwww) with chapters in seven cities. their primary goal was to rescind both the state and federal era. according to the ft. worth star telegram in september, 1975, the wwww claimed that the era in texas had passed "by deceit" (brown, p. 3b). this group proposed to “educate the people so that when the legislature [met] again in january [1975] they [would] be getting letters…" (brown, 1975, p. 3b). the members began to lobby legislators to rescind the amendment and took their case to the newspapers. one wwww supporter said: we believe it is the will of the people [to vote on it again]… when this came up before the legislature in 1972, i was at home, along with many other women, and we were taking care of our families and husbands and were not aware of the impact of this at the time. the texas amendment was approved by the legislature without much consideration and …was worded [on the ballot] in such a way that i think most people were not fully aware of what they were voting on. (hilliard, 1975, p.3b) indeed, it was not until much later on the national scene that the opponents to the national era would begin to be more visible. for example, in an austin american statesman newspaper article in 1975, tobolowsky stated, "it [a national era] is a matter of justice. but in the minority are the ones that are so well-organized they give the impression they are the majority" (dudley, 1975, p. a21). the wwww succeeded in getting a representative to introduce legislation in the 1975 session to rescind the national era, but it did not pass despite the wwww organizing to march on the texas legislature. following texas passing the amendments, several initiatives gained momentum. on april 14, 1975 the texas legislature held hearings on rescinding the ratification of the era. these hearings were attended by 2,500 women called pink ladies for the pink sheets they carried advocating their anti-era slogans. political scientists brady and tedin (1978) surveyed the women and said they were well-educated, middle, and upper class women who held conservative beliefs. however, the effort to rescind failed and was not attempted again. houston, texas was the location for the 1977 national women's conference attended by 30,000 women from across the country. three first ladies, rosalynn carter, betty ford, and lady bird johnson, endorsed the era at the conference, giving visibility to a variety of women's issues and to the state's pro-era environment (women, 1977). during the years between 1972, when the amendments were ratified in texas, and 1982, the year the national era failed to be ratified by a majority of the states, little other anti-era organized activity was visible in the state. thus, texas remained in support of the amendments and pro-era women continued to gain strength and leadership. texas women and the national scene many of the same texas women active in proposing the texas era were equally active at the national level, especially during the years of the johnson administration. for example, according to the texas state historical association (1997) tobolowsky was also the legal counsel for the b&pw’s national office. during the sixties, a series of letters from texas women to then president lyndon baines johnson depicted the organization and strategies that texas women used regarding the issue of equality for women. in a lengthy 1964 letter to the president advocating for women's rights in general, and stating the case for the era in texas, modell scruggs, president-elect of the business and professional women of texas, wrote: mr. president, in the last two sessions of the texas legislature this proposal has been blocked by a small but powerful minority joined by at least two of the state's leading elected officials, who had by voice and pen endorsed its passage during their campaign for public office--both of them ardent members of the democratic party, and who are up for reelection this year and have republican opponents…. it is argued that there is no need for a constitutional amendment for the discriminations are solely statutory in nature and can be changed by act of the legislature, which as you know the texas legislature has consistently refused to any appreciable degree… mr. president, i ask only that you advise yourself of this situation…, and briefly advise me of your personal position in this matter for i sincerely feel that we have the right to be advised of your exact position in such a matter… i do request that your position in this matter be made clear to the women of the state of texas at your earliest convenience, and your silence can only be assumed to voice lack of interest or unexpected opposition as regards this portion of 'civil rights'. (p.1) the reply to scruggs from president johnson was drafted by still assistant secretary of labor esther peterson, who remained as one of the primary spokespersons for women's issues under the new lbj administration. in his 1964 letter president johnson replied, "the question of the best method of achieving this goal [texas’s era] in a particular state must, of course, be determined at the state level and is not an appropriate matter for official federal government comment" (p. 1). the president did agree that "greater recognition of the rights of women deserves full consideration" (p. 1) but cited the president's commission on the status of women and that group's recommendations concerning leaving these issues to the states (johnson, 1964). clearly, peterson had set the agenda for the president's response. texas women were also active in proposing amendments to the civil rights act being considered for passage at the national level. a group of eleven women, nine texans, sent telegrams in 1964 to president johnson regarding changing the wording of the civil rights act to include rights of women specifically. the telegram from tobolowsky (1964) read "… we urge that you now use your influence to see that civil rights bill is amended to include women's rights….” tobolowsky and scruggs (1965) again wrote to president johnson advocating for the passage at the national level of a proposed era. they wrote, "we texas women would like to have the first texas president of the united states of america initiate action on the first legislation which will free american women of legal inequalities" (p.1). texas women continued to press for a variety of women's equality issues at the federal level and in particular wanted a formal response from the johnson white house about the administration’s official position on the era in 1967. however, the johnson administration had still not clarified its stance on the era. in an internal white house memo dated september 29, 1967, don furtado, special counsel to the president, said to harry mcpherson, assistant to the president: seven years ago, before the title vii and several executive orders and presidential memos designed to counter sex discrimination, the then vice president [johnson] said: '…regarding the equal rights for men and women amendment. as i am sure you know, i have consistently supported this resolution, and i intend to continue with this support.' what official attitude do we now have toward this amendment? (p. 1) texas women also participated in the national organization for women advocacy of women's issues and in particular the era passage. a 1967 letter from the now board requesting a meeting with the president to discuss, among other topics, the era drew a negative response (national organization for women [now], 1967). an internal memo between white house staff revealed the nature of the johnson staff’s opinions about the now group. the memo read, "is it all right to regret this request?" the responding memo said, “it is all right to regret this request. these women are ‘inconsolable'-nothing you can say will satisfy them" (mcpherson, 1967). it appears that the pressure on white house staff to respond to repeated requests primarily from texas women had influenced the staff’s view of the women’s groups. a review of johnson’s 1967 administration correspondence (found at the lbj presidential library) from women in support of the era at both the national and state levels revealed that much of the correspondence came from texas women, an indication of the strength of their organization and level of activity at the national level. the national era in 1972, almost fifty years after its initial introduction into congress, a proposed era amendment to the u.s. constitution was finally sent for ratification to the states from congress. the era, providing that equality of rights should not be denied due to gender, received support in the houses of congress, passing by a vote of 354 to 23 in the house and 84 to 8 in the senate. the era enjoyed, at that time, considerable support from numerous national women's groups, social and cultural groups and associations, as well as bipartisan support from both the democrat and republican party platforms. some supporters included the american federation of labor-congress of industrial organizations, american association of university women, general federation of women's clubs, league of women voters, national organization of women, common cause, u.s. civil rights commission, and the american bar association, just to name a few. in texas, the national era had broad support. era coalitions were present in over twenty cities and the national amendment was endorsed by texas politicians such as senators lloyd bentsen and john tower, congresswoman barbara jordan, and lt. governor bill hobby. statewide organizations in favor of the national amendment included such entities as the american civil liberties union, league of women voters, texas afl-cio, and texas business and professional women's club. a review of the u.s. senate hearings in 1970 leading up to the 1972 passage revealed few organized opposition groups. the national council of jewish women and the national council of catholic women were the only groups issuing statements of opposition. the former argued that there already existed sufficient safeguards and asked, "...should we jeopardize a whole body of law dealing with complex personal and family relationships, military service, and age of consent" (stimpson, 1972, p. 261). the national council of catholic women stated, "we strongly reiterate our opposition to the proposed 'era' to the u.s. constitution as a threat to the nature of woman which individuates her from man in god's plan for his creation" (stimpson, 1972, p. 261). in view of the political and public support in favor of the era, many expected that the era would be ratified by the required 38 states before the original deadline of march 22, 1979 and certainly by the later extension of june, 1982. there were several phases in the states' ratification of the national era. the early stage was from 1972, when the era left congress, until the late seventies, when the majority of states ratified the era, including texas. in 1972 alone, the era was ratified in twenty-two states, eight ratified in 1973, three in 1974, and one each in 1975 and 1977 for a total of thirty-five states that ratified the amendment (boles, 1985). however, the era was defeated in june 1982 when the number of states needed to ratify failed to materialize. this failure ended a chapter of organized conflict about women's political status. analysts have identified several important political and social reasons for failure, including the growth of fear that the era would change women's roles in the home, the opponents' effective linkage of era to sexual permissiveness and legal abortion, loss of existing financial obligations for men to support their families, loss of consensus in congress, and poor organization by proera groups at the state level. however, the presence of phyllis schlafly's organized opposition is perhaps one of the key reasons for the defeat of the era at the national level (berry,1988; boles, 1979; marshall, 1991; marilley, 1989). phyllis schlafly’s opposition in february 1972, phyllis schlafly burst onto the national scene. schlafly, a republican conservative, former vice-president of the national federation of republican women, and founder of the anti-era groups eagles flying and stop era, began to advocate against the then certain era passage in congress. in february, 1972 she issued her, now famous, report “what’s wrong with ‘equal rights’ for women?” this report stated, "of all of the people who ever lived, the american woman is the most privileged. we have the most rights and rewards, and the fewest duties" (schlafly, 1972, p. 1). she portrayed pro-era supporters as "a noisy movement… afflicted with aggressive females on television talk shows yapping about how mistreated american women are" (schlafly, 1972, p. 2). with a forceful argument, she defended the anti-era position as being for motherhood, the family, and marriage (schlafly, 1972). this issue was followed by a may, 1972 report to her constituents calling the era a "fraud"(p. 1) which was "rammed"(p. 1) through congress by intimidation. she then called for people to oppose the era or in states that had already ratified the amendment, such as texas, to ask for it to be rescinded. later that year she launched the stop era group to take on what she called a nearly impossible task. in 1975, she founded the eagle forum, billed as a pro-life organization that took on the goal of fighting the era (schlafly, 1986). the contemporary anti-era women, under the leadership of phyllis schlafly, mobilized in response to the success of the women's movement in gaining state era ratification. however, the anti-era movement was characterized by strong national leadership and not by grassroots organizations. according to sociologist susan marshall, "phyllis schlafly was stop era"(marshall, 1991, p. 358). schlafly's success in large part was due to her organizational skills and her ability to build a broad network of coalition between the stop era group and other conservative groups such as the catholic church, the john birch society, and the mormon church. schlafly's ability to speak eloquently and her charisma engendered an intense personal loyalty. implications for future women’s advocacy and leadership there are many lessons to be learned that are still relevant for contemporary women’s leadership development. the history of the era points out the need for strong state and national ties. while national level ties may be important for impacting such national issues, the use of local ties for grass roots support may be an equally important strategy. the presence of texas women who worked the era issue at both the state and national levels was important to achieve the state’s success. also, efforts to both create and maintain intergenerational women’s networks are critical if future female leaders are to be developed. lessons learned are only important if lessons are not lost. this means finding the mechanisms to carry forward these experiences that have an empowering effect on younger generations. one of the most effective methods is the use of historical analysis around policy issues and the use of these case studies at the university level for educating a new generation of leaders. in addition, the nature of women’s leadership needs to be explored further in terms of what has worked in the past in such policy changes. creating large circles of participation, forging connections both inside and outside of government for broad scale changes, committing to the importance of change within policy delivery and regulatory systems, are all important factors found in this study of women’s leadership. but perhaps most importantly, women must use other forerunners of change as role models for their ability to see themselves as change agents. conclusion the significant advances that were made in texas during the early suffragist movement, as well as in the contemporary era movement, depended to a large extent on the efforts of texas women. although reinforced by national movements, texas pro-era women were highly visible and organized at the right time. this stronger organizational capacity in the state enabled the pro-era supporters to effectively handle the legislative initiatives regarding the amendment. they were able to move quicker, to mobilize better, and enhance the public's awareness regarding the amendment. in addition, the national ties forged by texas women such as those of hermine tobolowsky and modell scruggs reinforced the independent culture of texas women and continue today. these women and others in texas forged the necessary alliances to endure victory for the state and national amendments. anti-era supporters with leadership from phyllis schlafly were responsible for the ultimate failure of the national era ratification. however, in texas this mobilization of anti-era forces came too late and did not have a highly visible presence in the legislature until after the state era and the federal ratification had passed. such lessons of both success and failure for women’s issues need to be taught routinely in undergraduate courses as future young women learn the lessons of leadership that were hard fought. this is especially true of preparation for a vision of leadership that includes change and advocacy. references austin women's suffrage association. (1922). minutes book: 1908-1912. austin: mccalum collection, austin public library. berry, m. (1988). why the era failed. bloomington, in: indiana university press. boles, j. (1979). the politics of the era: conflict and decision process. new york: longman press. boles, j. (1982). building support for the era: a case of too much too late. ps, 15(4), 572-577. boles, j. (1985). the coalescence of controversy: conditions surrounding ratification of the proposed era. austin: university of texas press. boles, j. (1989). systemic factors underlying legislative responses to women suffrage and the era. women & politics, 1(2), 5-22. brady, d., & tedin, k. (1978). ladies in pink: religion and political ideology in the anti-era movement. social science quarterly, 56, 564-575. brown, k. (1975, september 2). equal rights laws not what it appears, opponents claim. ft. worth star telegram, p.p. b1, b3. brower, r., abolafia, m., & carr, j. (2000). on improving qualitative methods in public administration. administration and society, 32(4), 363-397. dudley, m. (1975, august 21). mother of era hermine tobolowsky named twpc woman of the year. austin american statesman, p.p. a21. enstam, e. y. (1990, october). working together: the men who fought for woman suffrage in texas. paper presented at the women and texas history conference, austin, texas. fighting the texas era: ladies mobilize. (1978, november 15). texas observer. furtado, d. (1967, september 9). memo to wilfred rommel, chief legislative reference section. austin: lbj library presidential holdings. gammage, j. w. (1982). quest for equality: an historical overview of women's rights activism in texas 1890-1975. denton, texas: university of north texas. hilliard's move against the era applauded by opponent. (1975, january 30). ft. worth star telegram. house ok puts sex bias amendment on ballots. (1971, april 28). houston post. johnson, l. b. (1964, april 23). letter to mrs. modell scruggs, texas federation of business and professional women's club. austin: lbj library presidential holdings. lincoln, y. s., & guba, e. g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. beverly hills: sage. marilley, s. (1989). towards a new strategy for the era: some lessons from the american women suffrage movement. women & politics, 9(4), 23-35. marshall, s. (1991). who speaks for american women? annals of american academy of political and social science, 348-362. mcpherson, h. (1967, september 25). memo to marvin watson: white house staff. austin: lbj library presidential holdings. miles, m. b., & huberman, a. m. (1994). qualitative data analysis: an expanded sourcebook (2nd ed.). beverly hills: sage. miller, a., & greenerg, h. (1976). the equal rights amendment: a bibliographic study. westport, ct: greenwood press. national organization for women. (1967, november 11). letter to president lyndon baines johnson. austin: lbj library presidential holdings. representative weddington believes texas' era here to stay. (1977, march 7). ft. worth star telegram. rubin, a. & babbie, e. (2001). research methods for social work (4th ed.). pacific grove, ca: brooks/cole. schlafly, p. (1972). what's wrong with equal rights for women? alton, illinois: eagle forum. schlafly, p. (1986, september). a short history of the era. the phylis schlafly report, 20(2). scruggs, m. (1964, march 12). letter to president lyndon baines johnson. austin: lbj library presidential holdings. session may eye rights act. (1972, march 25). austin american statesman. slayton, c. (1968). letter to honorable marvin watson, assistant to president johnson. austin: lbj presidential library. stimpson, c. (ed.). (1972). women and the era, senate subcommittee hearings on the constitutional amendment, 91st congress. new york: bowker, co. texans for era. (1975). the handbook of texas and the era [brochure]. austin: author. texas state historical association (1997). hermine tobolowsky. retrieved from http://www.tsha.utexas.edu texas state legislature (1972). 62nd session, senate joint resolution [brochure]. austin, texas: author. tobolowsky, h., & scruggs, m. (1965, january 23). letter to president lyndon baines johnson and attached petition signatures. austin: lbj library presidential holdings. tobolowsky, h. (1964, february 10). telegram to president lyndon baines johnson. austin: lbj library presidential holdings. the texas business and professional women's newsletter (1968). planning sets equal rights for 1968 [brochure]. austin: lbj presidential library. velez, m. b. (1994). the texas equal rights amendment: an historical and legal analysis. austin, texas: the university of texas. women's houston meeting called 'turning point'. 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file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership the view from the female principal's desk agnes e. smith, ed.d. rosalind p. hale, ed.d. smith & hale, spring, 2002 identifying problems that women who aspire to be school administrators face is an important component in the process of increasing opportunities for women who seek advancement. more than in past years, females are enrolling in educational administration programs and aspiring to be to school principals, central office administrators, and superintendents. efforts to increase the number of female employees by businesses, industries, and public agencies encourage women to work toward advanced degrees and apply for administrative positions typically regarded as male positions. successful women are written about in newspaper articles and magazine features more often than ever before. these women leaders serve as role models to inspire other women to follow in their professional wake. aburdene and naisbitt (1992) write that “the women’s movement has reached ‘critical mass,’ the point at which a trend becomes a megatrend.” if this trend continues, opportunities for professional advancement and increased salaries for women will result. while this news is good news, women continue to struggle with social biases, to face expectations unique to their gender, and to compromise their orientation to leadership responsibilities. according to imbra, steffens, mccartney, gerber, and o’neill (1995), girls’ experience a measured drop in self-esteem in “response to systemic messages that tell them they are second class citizens and ascribes to them identities and roles based not on who they are, but rather on who society thinks they should be.” women are forced to “act like men” (daresh, 2001) if they choose to compete for leadership roles and jobs. signals and established expectations such as these stifle the more positive qualities that women are socialized to develop and must be studied for women to consistently achieve success in educational leadership positions. women who aspire to be school administrators must identify gender specific factors that impede their professional growth and must develop skills to surmount these obstacles. contemporary problems faced by women the school environment of 2001-2002 presents pressures and challenges unique to this time. school administrators at all levels deal with a lack of respect for authority, and sometimes, violence. while the http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html numbers of women in school administrative positions are increasing, these challenges present problems for women appointed to traditional male roles. among the challenges women school administrators face in today’s times are differing expectations from those with whom they work, a feminine orientation to life, and leadership qualities that differ from those of men. the authors of this article interviewed sixteen female colleagues from five different school districts about the challenges faced by women school administrators. one of the most striking conclusions drawn from stories of these principals is that sometimes parents, students, and teachers hold different expectations for women administrators than for male administrators. for example, participants interviewed for this study described situations when they felt that parents unhappy with circumstances at school approached them as though they were easier to intimidate than male principals. when interviewed, one female principal described a confrontation with a parent who tried to intimidate her. the father tried unsuccessfully to have the principal change his son's consequences for a disciplinary incident from off-campus suspension to on-campus suspension. he resorted to yelling and threatening to call school board members if the principal did not comply with his request. the female principal countered his arguments with a calm and forceful resolve. when the father left the principal's office, he was heard to remark to his son, "i thought i could change her mind, son, but she's as tough as a man." students tend to view female principals as easier to manipulate than male principals. one of the participants in this study described working with two male students in a disciplinary situation during her first year as principal. as the two students left the principals' office. she overheard one student remark to the other, "i don't believe it. she's as tough as mr. jones." (mr. jones was the former principal.) one participant in this study noted the resistance she encountered from other women when she was first appointed principal. an older female teacher frustrated with changes in the school lashed out at the female principal saying, "who do you think you are? we've never had to work with a woman as boss before." this principal described much less resistance from male teachers on her staff than from female teachers. another participant in this study described a situation in which a male custodian sought the advice of a male teacher, because the custodian did not expect the female principal to have knowledge of certain information. the situation centered on a task the principal assigned the custodian. she asked him to weed and prepare flowerbeds for spring. when the custodian had a question about where to place the bedding plants, he asked a male teacher who, in turn, asked the principal. the custodian explained that he did not think a female would know much about gardening or plants. a third female principal interviewed about challenges women administrators face today told of a parent who called the superintendent to ask that a man be appointed principal when the administrative vacancy was advertised. tallerico (2000) suggests that women in traditional male leadership roles are “given less leeway to make mistakes and that this pressure and scrutiny can lead to high turnover.” another problem women in school administrative positions face is an orientation to life that is different than men. carol gilligan (1992) studied all major development theories from the perspective that the theories perpetuated a bias against women. gilligan asserted the two main points “that women are typically different in their basic orientations to life and that existing psychological theories devalue the female orientation.” the notion is raised by imbra, et.al, (1995) that women may value ideas based on their cultural, racial, and moral beliefs, while resisting ideas valued by society. one of the secondary female principals, the first woman assigned to the top administrative position where she was principal, recounted changes she initiated in the teaching staff. she hired highly effective teachers who coached as a secondary responsibility, while her male predecessors had always hired highly effective coaches who could teach if they had to. albino (1992) suggests that female leaders must learn how to develop and use work strategies, because women often perceive risk as potential for failure, while men perceive risk as potential for success. two of the female principals interviewed by the authors said that although they were encouraged to apply for a newly created assistant superintendent’s position, they didn’t because they were afraid of failure, while their male principal colleagues readily applied expressing a ‘nothing to lose’ attitude. a third contemporary problem faced by women school administrators relates to leadership skills different from their male counterparts that women exhibit. helgesen (1990) states that while similar in many ways, male and female leaders are very different in others. helgesen's study is significant because of the emphasis on what organizations, such as schools and public agencies, can learn from the ways women lead. for example, helgesen proposes that females appreciate mail as a way to enhance collaboration and connect with others, while males see it as interference. action skills for success women appointed to school administrative positions are more than just professional employees. very often, these women also are mothers, wives, and housekeepers. each of these roles, if done well, requires full-time effort. the demanding pace of their days and the contemporary problems they face requires that women hone skills and learn strategies to help them cope and achieve success in administrative positions. one of the most important strategies that women can develop is to internalize the thought that they are not all things to all people. the stereotypical and traditional role for women imagined women who prepared all the meals and washed all the clothes. this role is not possible for women who need to survive in a school administrative position with a schedule that demands a minimum 10-hour workday. married women administrators, and particularly married with children women administrators, need to establish clear understandings about shared responsibilities with their families. ludwig (1987) identified four major attributes that women who realize success in administrative positions possess. the ability to set priorities is one of these critical attributes. successful women administrators develop a list of priorities and refuse to allow non-productive tasks to take precedence over tasks high on their list. another strategy that helps women to cope with the responsibilities of an administrative position is to achieve balance in their lives and daily activities. time for exercise, adequate rest, social activities, and hobbies should be included in the day. all too often, women allow the responsibility of children and housekeeping duties to consume time that should be set aside for exercise or rest. the most experienced principal interviewed by the authors strongly encourages other women to claim the first 20 to 30 minutes each day when they arrive home for themselves. she calls this time her ‘time to rejuvenate’ and states that she uses these minutes to nap or simply rest quietly. when questioned about how she managed this quiet time when her own children were pre-school age, she said that time for mother to rest was established as a permanent habit in her household. her children understood that mother’s time to rest was not to be imposed upon. delegation is an important skill for all administrators, especially women. women school administrators who distribute responsibility for the many different assignments in a school accomplish three purposes. firstly, the workload is shared. deadlines are met and products are better when many people, instead of one individual, contribute to the final product. secondly, teachers and support employees asked to help with special assignments have a chance to understand other viewpoints and to experience difficulties involved in completing special assignments firsthand. criticisms are minimized when more people feel ownership and are involved in decision-making groups of a school. finally, the action of delegation also helps to mentor those who aspire to lead in the future. those who hope to be school administrators in the future gain valuable insights from opportunities to identify all factors involved in completing an assignment or resolving a problem and from experiencing the consequences for selecting the best option for the situation. helgesen (1990), gupton and slick (1996) and hale (1998) proposed that women also realize professional benefits from networking. networking with other female school administrators is a measure that helps women deal with daily pressures of the job. talking with a female school administrator who has shared similar experiences of frustration and discrimination can be reassuring, while sharing the same experiences with a male colleague may elicit a total lack of understanding. the opportunity to voice concerns to others who understand and will respect a confidence can help to place those concerns and difficulties in proper perspective. all of the female school administrators interviewed by the authors described a network of female colleagues on whom they relied for support and encouragement. in response to this need, more and more professional and community organizations are organizing seminars ‘just for women.’ these sessions offer encouragement, information, and the chance to meet professional women from many different geographic regions of the country. also, women participants represent school administrators and managers from many different fields. mail and email lists sometimes are developed during these conference sessions to provide a communication network for participants to 'stay in touch.' acknowledging that women possess leadership skills and approaches that are different than men also is an important action skill for women to develop. recognizing gender differences affords women the courage to prepare to take risks. establishing frameworks for assessing possible consequences, as well as benefits, prompts women to accept assignments previously relegated to men. women need to prepare to take risks when encouraged and to build on the strengths of their gender. helgesen’s (1990) conclusion that women see mail as a way of connecting supports the usefulness of time devoted to personal notes, such as thank-you notes, which results in positive feedback to others and highly positive public relations moments.. moreover, women have opportunities to capitalize on the natural instinct for women to nurture others. when asked why she did not choose to advance from the principalship to a superintendency, margaret jaskulek, principal in harrisburg, pennsylvania, recounted the satisfaction she realized from helping a student with a serious personal problem. jaskulek stated, “that’s why i don’t want to leave this office” (newton, 2000, p. 7a). ludwig (1987) conducted a study to identify attributes of successful women leaders. she concluded that major attributes possessed by women who succeed are a strong sense of self, the ability to work hard and set priorities, interpersonal skills, and the ability to strategize. in her study of verbal and nonverbal micropolitical communication of female school principals, carr (1994) concluded that communication styles of female principals were characterized by strong interpersonal relationships rather than interpersonal dominance; the use of environmental framing and ceremony as micropolitical strategies to mobilize support; promotion of the welfare of others; involvement with mentors, and use of language that reflects goals of persuasion, collaboration, consensus, and affiliation. conclusion the new millennium offers promise for female school administrative candidates to maintain the momentum of the 20th century for women educators to gain professional advancements. business, industry, and educational agencies continue efforts in the year 2001 to increase the number of female managers, supervisors, and administrators. school districts in california and texas have held seminars specifically to encourage women to apply for superintendent positions (newton, 2000). what women who aspire to serve as school administrators must do now is to view current problems from the perspective of the female principal’s desk. identifying problems that women who aspire to be school administrators face is an important component in the process of increasing opportunities for women who seek advancement. observations and studies related in this article contribute to insights that help women develop skills and techniques to achieve their professional goals. using action skills to address contemporary problems faced by female school administrators enables current candidates to achieve success. references aburdene, p. , naisbitt, j. (1992). megatrends for women. new york: villard. albino, j. (1992). strategy, the dirty word that women must learn. educational record, 73 (2), 47-51. carr, c. s. (1994, april). verbal and nonverbal micropolitical communication of female school principals. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educaitonal research association, new orleans, la. daresh, j. (2001). supervision as proactive leadership. prospect heights, illinois: waveland press, inc. gilligan, c. (1992). in a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. gupton, s. , slick, g. (1996). highly successful women administrators. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. hale, r. (1998). the development of career paths of women executives in j. irby & g. brown (eds.), women leaders structuring success (pp. 83-87 ). dubuque, ia: kendall/hunt. helgesen, s. (1990). the female advantage: women’s ways of leadership. new york: doubleday. imbra, c. (1993). the moral development of female leaders. unpublished master’s thesis, benidji state university, benidiji, minnesota. imbra. c., steffens, k., mccartney, c., gerber, s., & o’neill, e. (1995). social systems, girls, and self esteem: a report on the impact of social systems on the development of self esteem in girls. minnesota women’s fund monograph. minneapolis, minnesota. ludwig, j. (1987, january). what do you do when you run the zoo? paper presented at the conference on women in academic administration, orlando, fl. newton, c. (2000, october 26). women superintendents are rarity in school systems. mobile register, p. a7. tallerico, m. (2000). why don’t they apply? american school board journal, 187 (11), 56-58. authors dr. agnes e. smith is an assistant professor in the college of education at the university of south alabama. dr. rosalind p. hale is an associate professor and chair for the division of education at xavier university of louisiana. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content 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mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com aw home| jobsposting/search | search by google web or site | advertising | site map | awards | about us home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home business | entrepreneur |loan credit | web | network | balance |international| book store career strategies | employment | resumes | salary, benefits, employment, employee rights | negotiate career news | career indices, stats | career advice for execs,professionals |career advice for undergrads,mbas career paths | career planning for young women | mentoring and coaching | leadership development advancing women in leadership hearing the opus: the paradox for women leaders in the postmodern university elizabeth ritt north park university leading in an organization is much like conducting an orchestra. the conductor must stay one full beat ahead of the orchestra, envisioning the whole opus as it is to be played while keeping a keen ear to the ongoing performance. filled with unpredictability and contradiction, the musical interpretation of the opus flows through our bodies with great intensity. sometimes the inclination is to reduce the composition and the performance into distinct parts to better understand the intent of composer, conductor and musicians. often, this deludes us into the romantic notion that we can reduce the opus into discrete components that explain the unexplainable. the need to reduce the complex, explain the unexplainable, polarize rationality and intuition, and describe traits and attributes of successful leaders is reflected in decades of research and publication across a multitude of disciplines. yet, even the most sophisticated integration of these theories, coupled with self-awareness and introspection, seems to fall short when leading within the complex environment of higher education. the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the changing landscape of higher education and present a summary of theories that apply to the study and practice of leadership. furthermore, the author seeks to stimulate thinking about the potential integration of nomadic feminist practice and the central tenets of complexity theory as complimentary frameworks that can be employed by women leaders in the postmodern university. file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///search.html file:///advertising.html file:///sitemap.html file:///awards.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/writing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/career_strategies/index.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/business-home-oview_index.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/loans-credit.html file:///web.html file:///networks/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/balancing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/networks/intlinks.html file:///amazingbookstore/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/library/resume/index.html file:///career/salaries_emplmnt.html file:///career/negotiating.html file:///news/awblog.html file:///career/indices_stats.html file:///career/career_advice.html file:///career/career_advice_undergrad.html file:///career_path/career_paths.html file:///career_plan.html file:///mentor/index.html file:///leadership.html the changing landscape of higher education universities have long been seen as traditional sites of learning, knowledge development, and scholarship. however, the restructuring of higher education in the 1990s, in an effort to move toward a global knowledge economy, has led to profound and substantive changes in the identity and defining characteristics of the university. shrinking government funds, increased demands for accountability, demographic shifts, globalization, and an age of information technology in the midst of changing business culture are among some of the issues faced by leaders in higher education (wenniger & conroy, 2001). increasingly, university leadership is under siege by the process of globalization, and is employing frameworks for decision-making that are based on economic restructuring with a powerful thrust toward creating a corporate university environment. the base of the traditional university is increasingly being transformed into a privatized corporate commodity where the exchange of knowledge and learning is the source of ‘value’ to the consumer and is of high regard in a capitalist economy. ann brooks (2001) maintained that these changes have resulted in a shift from the epistemological foundations of the traditional university, with its westernized, humanistic frame of reference, to a more technocratic, instrumental emphasis in terms of knowledge, language, and goals. others argue that these movements can be seen as positive and an aspect of the “repositioning of universities within an emerging global knowledge economy” (robertson, 1998; pritchard, 1999, p.5). some claim that the direction of capitalistic economies is toward an intensified emphasis on the capitalization and misuse of learning and of knowledge practices and products (pritchard, 1999). over the last decade, a number of countries have witnessed direct political involvement in the reform of higher education. thus, government-sourced reform of higher education may be read as an outcome of alliances between state, private sector, and international consulting bodies and part of economic, political and social transformations involving an enhanced position for knowledge and particularly learning as a key source of value in capitalist economies (pritchard, 1999). critics of the changes contend that universities are being repositioned within an emerging knowledge economy. in the process, it is argued that the focus on careers, credentials, and managerial practices leaves little space for critical scholarship or challenging teaching (parker & jary, 1995). in addition, the focus on performance and transferability of the knowledge that is produced by academics has put the emphasis on ‘exchange value’ rather than ‘use value’ of such knowledge (willmott, 1995). prichard and willmott (1997) claimed that the use of performance measures and associated practices as well as the language of line managers, customers, and products is centrally concerned with the repositioning of the university as a site of economic and managerial transformation. in their comparative study of universities in australia, the united states, canada, and the united kingdom, slaughter and leslie (1997) described the scenario of academic capitalism. they noted that state funds are being supplanted by private funds; new and more dangerous liaisons are being struck with industry; university courses are being modularized, packaged, and marketed; and administrative officers shape programs and curricula, and standardize routine faculty work while costs are transferred to students. in general, academic work is being transformed. innovative universities are now increasingly characterized by their entrepreneurship rather than their scholarship, faculty and administrative values are in conflict, and funding favors those who are self-funding. universities across the globe are experiencing the pressures of: (a) globalization and e-commerce, (b) government policies for lifelong learning and widening participation, (c) changing markets, (d) greater research selectivity, and (e) new imperatives for community links (tysome, 2000). universities have responded to the need for ever-increasing efficiency through creating a more casual workplace, downsizing employees, strengthening accountabilities of staff by working in a more competitive manner, and encouraging mergers between institutions. the resulting culture is one that is suggestive of a marketplace, promoting individualism and individual achievement rather than collegiality and cooperative efforts. paradoxically, this change is occurring at a time when there is increased emphasis on universities to implement equal opportunity policies and anti-discrimination measures (hearn, 1999). the day-to-day operations of the university reflect the changes of globalization by an increased importance on the principle of optimizing performance where efficiency and effectiveness become the criteria for judging knowledge acquisition. performance is focusing on responding to the demands of market forces and the design of new processes that redefine academic work. at the same time, blakemore and sachs (2000) pointed out that the performance principle relies increasingly on exploitation of the emotional, intellectual, and physical work of academics and their desire to be successful in ways that many academics and educational leaders find distressing. they suggested that this focus on performance is mainly about image and efficiency under the new management approach, market order, and that these images of success are gender inflected. gender and the academic world despite significant changes in legislation, the women’s movement, and increased numbers of women who participate in education and the labor market, women continue to be underrepresented in positions of leadership. the demographics of female leaders throughout higher education illuminate the fact that there are far fewer women occupying positions of senior leadership than should be expected. according to chliwniak (1997), only 16% of college and university women are presidents, only 13% of chief business officers are women, and only 25% of chief academic officers are women. however, women comprise more than 52% of the current student body. this beckons the paradox: we say leadership in higher education is not gender based, but significant numbers of women do not occupy positions of leadership. dominant and diverse gendering of organizations has been the subject of extensive research and analysis. feminist and other critical feminist-influenced studies have examined the explicit and implicit gendering of organizations and management (acker, 1990; ferguson, 1984; hearn & parkin, 1995; mills & tancred, 1992; powel, 1988). in contrast, academia often is presented as gender-neutral, in both popular and academic representations. according to hearn (2001), academic life is incessantly, perhaps inherently, gendered organizationally, structurally and practically. like organizations, and managements more generally, universities have grown as institutions characterized by definite hierarchical patterns, themselves defined by and reproducing other social divisions and social relationships, including age, class, disability, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. furthermore, hearn (2001) elaborated that gender equality is not just about structures and procedures but also about the content of academic teaching and research, and the deconstruction of non-gendered mainstreams. unfortunately, it is still possible to be a respected male social science academic and not read, support or cite scholarship by women, especially feminist scholarship. these are common academic practices that are in need of urgent attention and change. it also must be noted that gender is but one expression of diversity. it exists with race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and social class, family of origin, gender preference, profession, and level of education to name just a few defining characteristics of individuals. research into the position of academic women in universities has focused on the structural and cultural impediments to women’s progression into senior levels (brooks, 1997; castleman, a., allen, m., bastalich, w. & wright, 1995) but little attention has been given to leadership attitudes, performance and the development needs of women holding leadership positions in universities. a challenging issue is that leadership traditionally has been studied employing male norms as the standard for behaviors. it is not unusual for women to adopt male standards of leadership success so as to fit into the patriarchal structures and systems that compose higher education. the management and business literature often portrays the leader as genderless or gender-neutral. however, according to chliwniak (1997) and other scholars such as barrie thorne and deborah tannen, who research gender differences, social norms and issues of gender-role ascription create differences between women and men. gilligan’s (1988) research on cognitive development has served as a catalyst for many of today’s contemporary scholars to examine, explore and revise the overall definition and understanding of leadership. gilligan (1988) argues that a single model or reasoning pattern and stages of moral development fail to capture the different realities of women’s lives. gilligan’s work identified a separate development pathway that results in personal and relational responsibility being of highest value for females and legalistic justice for individuals being highest in males (chliwniak, 1997). examining leadership through a critical lens the definition of leadership varies greatly according to theoretical, societal and organizational assumptions. however, there is general consensus that leaders are individuals who provide vision and meaning for an organization and embody the ideas toward which the organization strives. contemporary authors’ research and publications on leadership (bass, 1985, 1990; baum, locke, & kirkpatrick, 1998; bennis & nanus, 1985; house, 1977; larwood, falbe, kreiger, & miesing, 1995; sashkin, 1988) have argued that outstanding leaders are typically described by their followers as inspirational and visionary. generally, the literature on charismatic and transformational leadership appears to take vision as vital in terms of being a critical component of leadership that motivates people to enhanced levels of effort and performance. according to marriner-tomey (2001), leaders need to do the right things, are challenged by change, focus on purposes, and have a future time frame. they ask why and use strategies on their journeys to developing human potential. in an essay exploring the evolving nature of leadership research over the latter half of the last century, hunt (1999) described a period of leadership research he called the “doom and gloom” period (the 1970s and 1980s). this period was characterized by a generalized apathy with the development of the field and the emergence of critics who claimed that leadership research told us very little and had out-lived its usefulness. specific criticism included the belief that the number of non-integrated leadership models, prescriptions, and the like were mind boggling, and that much of the research was fragmentary, unrealistic, trivial, or dull. other criticism questions the implicit assumption of the importance of leadership, arguing instead that there are situations in which leadership would have no effect (kerr & jermier, 1978). hunt (1999) argued that this period ended with the advent of the “new leadership school” (bryman, 1992), including visionary, transformational and charismatic leadership approaches. he claimed this school constituted a paradigm shift in the leadership field. furthermore, hunt asserted that these new theoretical approaches transformed the field, and we acknowledge the continuing importance of current research that helps us incrementally increase our understanding of leadership issues. kouzes and posner (1987) described five leadership practices common to successful leaders. these practices involve: (a) challenging the process by seeking out opportunities, experimenting and taking risks, (b) inspiring a shared vision by envisioning the future and enlisting support, (c) enabling others to act by fostering collaboration and empowering others to act, (d) modeling the way by setting an example and planning small wins, and (e) encouraging the heart by recognizing individual contributions and celebrating accomplishments. bass and avolio (1993) suggested that transformational leaders change the organization by realigning the organization’s culture with the new vision and revision of assumptions, values and norms. they identified four components that characterize transformational leaders: (a) idealized influence, (b) inspirational motivation, (c) intellectual stimulation, and (d) consideration for the individual. the transformational leader promotes employee development, attends to needs and wants of followers, inspires through optimism, influences changes in perception, provides intellectual stimulation, and encourages follower creativity. bass (1985) described transformational leaders in terms of charisma, inspirational leadership, individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation. transformational leaders provide the language, symbols, and emphasis on mutual goals that can help lead to correlation (bass, 1985; hater & bass, 1988). they also lead followers to forgo their personal needs in an effort to meet the needs of others (bass, 1985). moreover, transformational leaders encourage followers to challenge ideas and assume responsibility because they show confidence in followers’ capability to take on assignments. this represents a facilitating rather than controlling leadership style (marion & uhl-bien, 2001). burns (1978) emphasized that transformational leaders seek to meet needs of the whole person. this results in a mutual relationship between the leader and the follower. according to chliwniak (1997), transformational leadership develops organizational consensus and empowers those who are like-minded in their goals. further, since patriarchy has been organized through men’s relationships with other men, a similar unity among women is an effective means by which to combat institutionalized forms and norms that exclude women. hollander and offermann (1990) addressed that the latest trends in research on power and leadership: reflect a shift in focus from a leader-dominated view to a broader one of follower involvement in expanding power … [and] presume the willingness of leaders themselves to embrace the notion of sharing power with subordinates, … [thereby fostering] the development of leadership in others. (p. 179-185) such approaches promote good interpersonal relations, team leadership, worker participation in decision-making, and the establishment of a climate of openness, mutual trust, respect, concern, and receptiveness (harris, smith & hale, 2002). a conceptual framework for women’s ways of leading can be found in the work of belenky, clinchy, goldberger & taruel (1986). in their discussion of women’s ways of knowing, they described a way of viewing the world that is characteristic of what they refer to as “constructed knowledge,” “a position in which women view all knowledge as contextual, experience themselves as creators of knowledge, and value both subjective and objective strategies for knowing” (p. 15). constructivist women “show high tolerance for internal contradiction and ambiguity” (p. 137) and completely abandon the “either/or” way of thinking. women who have achieved success in higher educational leadership possess the needed qualities and behaviors that are critical to educational reform and the creation of a truly humanistic educational community (harris, smith & hale, 2002). this allows both men and women to break away from the confining nature of stereotypes; and that can lead to fluid and productive communication among men and women as they work in collaboration to address the challenges of leading in higher education. reframing the leadership journey leadership is a dynamic and interconnected process that involves interacting with complex systems and structures within the university. feminist scholar braidotti (1994) provided an energizing and valuable perspective on leading within the changing university environment. hills and rowan (2002) discussed the strength of braidotti’s (1994) framework in that it showed a liberating representation of the work associated with transforming university environments. braidotti (1994) called for a nomadic type of feminist practice, “where discontinuities, transformations, shifts of levels and locations can be accounted for, exchanged, and talked about” (p. 172). the nomad appealed to braidotti because of its ability to pass through occupied territories (such as universities) while remaining in excess of them. it is precisely because of the nomad’s ability to make transient connections and its transitory and mobile image that braidotti (1994) chose this as her figuration for a new feminist subjectivity and politics. she went on to write that being a nomad, living in transition, does not mean that one is unable or unwilling to create those necessary stable and reassuring bases for identity that allow one to function in a community. rather, nomadic consciousness consists in not taking on any kind of identity as permanent. the nomad is only passing through; making those necessarily situational connections that can help in survival, but never taking on fully the limits of a fixed identity. an insistence on mobility and a refusal to be pinned down or trapped within the options offered by masculine approaches is one of the hallmarks of nomadic feminism. this framework is useful to female leaders because it frees them to move beyond traditional boundaries and provides opportunities to form connections between our lived experience and our current activity. it can also be used to form non-hierarchical and experimental alliances across diverse fronts in a feminist community. our differences become strengths not weaknesses (braidotti, 1994). hills and rowan (2002) wrote that by acknowledging that there are multiple ways in which women can de-territorialize traditional roles, images and spaces for women in universities are an important means of making diverse ways of being a ‘female academic’, a ‘feminist’, or a ‘woman’ visible. this allows women to recognize their own contributions to the broad political project of feminist reform, without requiring them to demonstrate how their contribution matches up to any feminist dogma. it is on this point, that nomadic feminism can be most useful in that it allows us to see that as our context changes so must our response to change. we cannot rely on habituated responses or purist dogmas but must be mobile enough to develop new strategies that are specific to the constantly altering selfrepresentations of a university (hills and rowan, 2002). nomadic feminism provides women leaders with an invigorating contextual way to frame leadership that fosters a healthy and joyful work experience for both men and women in higher education. complimentary to nomadic feminism is the theory of complexity. women leaders can readily use the central tenets of complexity theory in concert with nomadic feminism as a holistic and practical framework for leading in multifaceted organizations. complexity theory, according to regine and lewin (2000), moves away from linear, mechanistic views of the world, where simple cause-and-effect solutions are sought to explain physical and social phenomena, to a perspective of the world as nonlinear and organic, characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability. complexity science moves us away from reductionist perspectives that reduce holistic systems to isolated observations. instead, it encourages us to see organizations as complex adaptive systems composed of a diversity of agents who interact with one another, mutually affect one another, and in so doing generate novel behavior for the system as a whole (marion, 1999; regine & lewin, 2000). complexity theory asserts that effective leadership is about learning to take advantage of interactive dynamics (correlation, randomness and interaction) among and within organizational groups (defined as sets of individuals such as departments or other work groups that are characterized by common, direct interrelationships). thus, leadership effectiveness cannot be built exclusively around controlling the future; rather, it depends on being able to foster interactive conditions that enable a productive future. nor is it limited to human relations concepts that focus on the leader’s ability to foster relations with followers. complex leaders understand that the best innovations, structures and solutions to problems are not necessarily those that they, with their limited wisdom, proclaim, but those that surface when interacting groups work though issues. from a complexity perspective, relationship-oriented behaviors would enable effective networks rather than simply keeping peace or motivating enhanced effort. this changes the role of the leader to one who is able to create conditions in which followers’ behaviors can produce structure and innovation. this can be risky but it can produce remarkable and lasting results. complex organizations exist on a cusp, “the edge of chaos,” just shy of anarchy, risking catastrophe to enable creativity and fitness (marion & uhl-bien, 2001, p.396). marion and uhl-bien (2001) provided a valuable framework as to the application of complexity theory to leadership in higher education that is radically different from the past theories and leadership. they gave five specific examples as to how leadership roles are reframed through complexity theory: (1) foster network construction, (2) catalyze bottom-up network construction, (3) use leadership tags, (4) drop seeds of emergence and (5) think systematically. foster network construction in complex organizations, effective leaders learn to manage and develop networks. they foster and cultivate interdependencies within and without the organization (marion & bacon, 1999). regine and lewin (2000) concluded in their ethnographic study of leadership in a dozen us and uk industries that were operating according to complexity principles, “leaders generally felt that is was their responsibility to enrich connections in the system and to forge new connections where none existed or to improve existing connections” (p.10). networks not only provide contacts but it is the network itself, more than direct gain from a relationship, which benefits network participants. according to marion & uhl-bien (2001), networks provide the structure within which innovation can emerge and grow. systems within a network feed one another both directly (universities and students) and indirectly (employers that provide positions that require a degree in higher education). a sound network provides the university with a sense of organizational fitness and resiliency that is gained through interaction. catalyze bottom-up network construction the leader can serve as a catalyst for the development of networks within the organization. in this environment leaders effectively delegate, empower others to make decisions and trust colleagues to use their responsibility wisely. the atmosphere of the work area is designed to facilitate the building of community and face-to-face interaction. thus, the woman leader who sees herself as a nomad can readily move throughout the system in a fluid and highly effective manner. become leadership “tags” leaders catalyze network development by becoming what holland (1995) has called a “tag.” tags are not necessarily leaders. flags and ideas do not lead, yet they symbolize and draw people together. for example, the catalyzing dean might serve as a tag for developing a reputation that a university is a place where women are intentionally mentored into roles of leadership. tags promote and express an idea and an attitude. the tag does not control the movements of ideas as some charismatic writers suggest (howell & frost, 1989; kirkpatrick & locke, 1996). movements and organization systems are complex entities, and the wise leaders will not stifle their creativity with strict, top-down controls (marion & bien, 2001). drop seeds of emergence complex leaders identify centers of knowledge within an organization. they encourage these centers or groups to work and create together by taking on new projects. the complex leader does not closely control, for controls limit the organization’s potential; rather, the complex leader creates organized disorder in which dynamic things happen at multiple locations and levels within the system (regine & lewin, 2000). think systematically systematic thinkers are able to see the whole system (senge, 1990). it is an awareness of the interactive dynamics that are occurring at all levels within and outside of the organization. complex leaders create the conditions that enable interactions among employees to flourish, provide environments that foster healthy and productive organizational cultures, and cultivate innovative and fit systems that are fluid and resilient. in sum, complexity theory proposes that leaders must deal with the conditions of organizational activities more than their local manifestations. marion & uhl-bien (2001) insisted that complex leaders generate transformational environments, or the conditions necessary for innovation, rather than creating the innovation itself. complex leaders drop seeds of innovation rather than requiring innovation plans; they create opportunities to interact rather than creating isolated and controlled work spaces; they tend networks; they catalyze more than they control. complex leaders are tags, symbols, rather than brave ship captains guiding their vessels to port. leaders are seen as part of a dynamic rather than being the dynamic itself and are one element of an interactive network that is far larger than they. looking to the future leadership is practiced within the complexity of the human setting. the unpredictable, chaotic and fluid nature of the academic environment requires the leader to be able to transform himself or herself by valuing differences and acknowledging that there are different ways of leading. women leaders in higher education must resist the traditional and hierarchical leadership models entrenched in current university structures and systems. it is imperative that we stretch ourselves to create inclusive and innovative academic environments by looking at current practices through new and different lenses. in leadership roles women can take advantage of opportunities for change and demonstrate new models of leading that resist negative practices and create learning communities that ensure the future of the university. the central tenets of complexity theory in concert with the practices of nomadic feminism provide a stimulating and practical approach to leading in the postmodern university. references acker, j. 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(1995). managing the academics: co modification and control in the development of university education in the uk. human relations, 48(9): 9931027. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home business | entrepreneur |loan credit | web | network | balance |international| book store about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2005 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/writing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/career_strategies/index.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/business-home-oview_index.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/loans-credit.html file:///web.html file:///networks/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/balancing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/networks/intlinks.html file:///amazingbookstore/index.php file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership black academic women: progress but no parity shela t. gregory, ph.d. gregory, summer, 1998 although many black faculty women in this study found teaching personally rewarding as opposed to the politics of administration, other concerns such as unclear expectations of scholarly research and ambiguous requirements of promotion and tenure continued to be tremendous barriers towards advancement. gender has often had a significant impact on faculty salaries. comparable worth is often an issue because women professors are typically paid less than their male counterparts in virtually all employment sectors (aaup, 1989; mayfield & nash, 1976). the idea of "comparable worth" originated from the women's movement because many of the existing pay differentials between jobs were suspected of having their origin in gender bias. some salary differentials between those teaching different subjects may result in reasonable responses due to supply and demand, but they may also result from gender bias. studies have further indicated that black women are paid less, on average, than white women (aaup, 1989; mayfield & nash, 1976; smart, 1990). when black women enter the academy they often have a host of potentially rewarding experiences available. what limits those opportunities are the internal and external barriers that present themselves at various times during one's academic career. internal barriers are based on a combination of personal style and perceptions of one's capability to work within the department and college. one woman might hold a well-founded belief that this "parochial, chauvinistic, traditional system has worked hard to keep her out or to limit her involvement and advancement (barnes, 1986)." another woman might enter without these preconceived notions and learn to maneuver around obstacles that are placed in her path. both have the potential to become successful scholars and academics, but the first would be most likely to not succeed because of her preconceived notions, regardless of validity. external barriers are often described as those that an individual can only exercise minimal, if any, control over (biklen & brannigan, 1980). research on black faculty women have cited several external barriers which often stifle their success as scholars, such as: 1) undue burdens of non-research activities; 2) ambiguous, inappropriate and unfairly weighed tenure and promotion requirements; 3) lack of access to http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html necessary resources and support teaching and research; and 4) racism and discrimination. the first possible barrier to promotion and tenure for many black faculty women are the conflicting and extraordinary time demands placed on them due to their relatively small numbers (banks, 1984; gregory, 1995). astin (1969) argued that "highly educated women often find themselves unhappy and frustrated because of the barriers they encounter in their career development." according to graham (1973), "when there are but a few women on a faculty, excessive demands are made upon them; not only must each fulfill the usual academic requirement, but she must serve as a token woman on all kinds of committees" (p. 733). for example, merton (1957) argued that the demands of a particular role may often be in complete contradiction to other roles. one such example is the requirements of tenure. in many cases, some black faculty are torn between working to meet the requirements of tenure and advising and counseling disproportionately larger numbers of nontraditional students, as well as other duties, such as committee work (aquirre, 1992). these activities are often encouraged by departments, but are rarely taken into consideration during tenure review. furthermore, it often serves to penalize the faculty member for interfering with scholarly productivity (valverde, 1981). walker (1973) described a "double-consciousness among black university professors as they struggle to reconcile the demands of the academic and black communities. incompatibilities between action-research oriented towards the black community and the academic research oriented demand by promotion and tenure committees. the double consciousness is reflected in the goals black faculty pursue in their teaching and involvement in counseling black students, serving on disproportionately high numbers of committees, attending black events on and off campus, and maintaining strong relationships with the black community" (p. 69). moses (1989) claimed that "because there are so few black faculty women members...there is a tendency for the majority to see these women as spokespersons for all blacks rather than as individuals with other qualifications. black women are often asked to sit on committees as experts on blacks, and they are asked to solve problems or handle situations having to do with racial difficulties that should be dealt with by others. there is often no reward for this work; in fact, black women may often be at a disadvantage when they are eligible for promotion or tenure because so much of their time has been taken up with administrative assignments" (p. 15). for caribbean faculty, teaching is still a primary work activity for most although research is also required. in this study, caribbean faculty did not experience as many external barriers as they did internal barriers. none of the 44 caribbean women mentioned being over burdened by student advising, although 25 % mentioned having more committee work than they would have liked. this can, in part, be explained by the following: caribbean faculty in this study reported: 1) greater autonomy in the university; 2) had more dependents living at home which required their attentions; 3) had more opportunities for international travel which precluded them from spending as much time on campus; and 4) had more centralized academic departments which handled many administrative and advising functions faculty women in the states often must deal with themselves. the demands of caring for elderly parents were also concerns for both african american and caribbean women in this study. one faculty woman stated, "i think the main conflict i feel is really that of being a daughter. i think my mother brought us up to be very independent, but she is at a time now when she needs a lot of attention. it has also been very traumatic for me and i have also had to come to terms with myself by the fact that i have probably not been spending enough time with her, not making allowances for her or adapting to the changes that are happening in her life. so i think that has been one of the biggest conflicts. how do i deal with my mother and father as aging parents." another faculty woman expressed the same concern when she said, "strangely enough, the greatest conflict i have now is taking care of my aging parents. i have increasing work demands because of the stage in my career, and i feel the tremendous pressure of my parents and mother-in-law making demands on me. these demands cannot be delegated to other members of my family because i am the only child here in jamaica, so i have to face up to them and often i really get torn." many of the women in this study who reported being mentored by male scholars that were intellectually demanding, had been told to cut back on some of the time they devoted to teaching and service in order to concentrate on research. while well meaning and possibly appropriate, this masculine perspective mirrors sexist attitudes that are prevalent both within and outside the academy. the advice assumes that teaching, advising, mentoring, service and volunteer activities are not important or challenging, yet no argument is given as to why these activities are not important or even less important than individual research. if institutions are to survive someone must teach classes, advise students, and build community relations. as long as these tasks are devalued and maintained as "women's work," few faculty men will carry their fair share of these activities. one way to change the system to one that truly values women and fairly evaluates their contributions is boyer's (1990) suggestion to redefine scholarship to encompass discovery, integration, application, and teaching. by doing this we can begin to deconstruct this gendered hierarchy and focus on new criteria for promotion and tenure. recent studies report that tenure probationary periods often begin as faculty women are entering the prime of their childbearing years. this would suggest that women may be promoted less often due to the constraints of tenure (finkel, olswang, & she, 1994). "although some women have been able to balance careers and families, many women have had to leave academia or settle for positions on the periphery" (p. 260). finkel, olswang, and she concluded that institutions should consider offering deferrals for tenure to all faculty members who become parents. such deferrals, they argue, would give faculty members reasonable time to achieve tenure. "women should not be denied the opportunity to progress in academia because they have decided to have a family while pursuing their careers" (p. 268). hensel (1991) has also argued that some women who are not as successful in managing both family and career may feel pressured to leave the academy indefinitely after the birth of a child. although many black faculty women in this study found teaching personally rewarding as opposed to the politics of administration, other concerns such as unclear expectations of scholarly research and ambiguous requirements of promotion and tenure continued to be tremendous barriers towards advancement. for example, black faculty women typically engage in more teaching, advising greater numbers of students, and participating in more committee work than white faculty men (menges & exum, 1983). as a result, they may conduct less research and publish fewer articles than their white men or women counterparts (moses, 1989). numerous studies have mentioned that black faculty often indicate having research trivialized and devalued if it focuses on black issues or issues of a social concern (exum, 1983; gregory, 1995; mitchell, 1983). several studies indicated that minority faculty often find promotion and tenure to be inappropriate, unrealistic, or unfairly weighed (banks, 1984; gregory, 1995; ladd, 1979; lincoln & guba, 1980; and outcalt, 1980). some minority and women faculty never reach tenure because they were often caught in the "revolving door" syndrome. this often occurs when faculty members are appointed on tenure track, retained for four to six years, evaluated unfavorably for tenure, and required to leave. this "up and out" process may be repeated at numerous institutions until the individual eventually chooses to leave the academy altogether (aquirre, 1981; banks, 1984; gregory, 1995; valverde, 1981). since caribbean scholars who are able to apply for tenure more than once at the same institution, they are less likely to leave after being denied the first time but are at a tremendous disadvantage. in this study, 25 percent of the caribbean faculty women had been denied tenure at least once but chose to remain at the institution and try again. some minority faculty have reported that other non-minority faculty fail to recognize the actual quality of their research, and instead focus on their publishing sources (fikes, 1978). some minority faculty do not choose to publish in predominantly white journals often considered "scholarly." as a result, many black faculty have reported that the quality of their research is rarely considered (sudarkasa, 1987). furthermore, other reports indicate that research by minority faculty on minority populations are rarely considered 'relevant in the field' or are 'significant contributions to the academy,' and therefore not recognized as a scholarly piece of work (epps, 1989; wilson, 1987). for caribbean faculty women, this was less of a concern because there was a common understanding of which journals were more competitive and rigorous. however, a caribbean few women who published pieces on gender development did report experiencing difficulty in gaining the respect of their male counterparts. in support of this contention, astin and bayer found in a 1979 study of active male and female scientific scholars that women perceive themselves as having less control over how work is judged by peers. this can often block tenure for black and caribbean scholars, thus leading to greater numbers of black faculty leaving the academy. rafky's 1972 research on black scholars revealed that over one-quarter of black respondents perceived they were required to have better credentials than whites to be appointed and granted tenure at most institutions, particularly predominantly white institutions. blacks at historically black institutions were more likely to be tenured than those employed at predominantly white institutions (logan, 1990). the third external barrier is the lack of access to resources needed for teaching and research and the absence of support groups or formal mentoring. although there has been much debate about the impact mentoring has had on career success for both faculty and students, many studies confirm that mentorship and sponsorship type programs can provide greater access to resources for research, advice, and collegial networks (exum, 1983; gregory, 1995; moses, 1989; and wilson, 1987), which can often lead to greater academic productivity (clark & corcoran, 1986). white faculty men have traditionally benefited from this type of sponsorship, but it has been absent for most women and minorities (merriam, 1983). dodgson (1986) has contended that mentoring has often been a vehicle for upward mobility in the careers of women. many black faculty have reported a feeling of isolation. mentors can often nurture a sense of belonging for minorities in the profession (defour, 1990). the shortage of black faculty women appear to support the need for some type of mentoring and support networks (swoboda, 1990). african american women also tend not to be included in collaborative research projects with their peers. furthermore, they often lack sponsorship and rarely have access to resources for research (gregory, 1995; moore, 1981) which can lead to greater prestige, higher future economic gains, and enhanced job mobility. women have typically been found to teach more hours on average then men (austin & gamson, 1983; finkel, olswang, & she,1994). they also teach mostly undergraduates and have less contact with graduate students and are therefore less likely to be awarded teaching assistants (aisenberg and harrington, 1988; freeman, 1977). harvey and scott-jones (1985) have argued that often "in the absence of a support group... black faculty members are subjected to the aggravating aspects of the academic milieu without enjoying some of its compensating benefits: contemplation, independence, and social and intellectual stimulation from colleagues sharing the same interests and outlook "(p. 70). caribbean faculty women reported receiving greater resources for teaching and research but experienced similar events with regard to the existence of supportive colleagues. as one woman in the study stated, "being very ethnic i was often alone. i never had anyone to talk to the way that you would with other colleagues. being indian i rarely had anyone that i could share ideas with and whom i had similar experiences with as a woman." a fourth external barrier is what many consider discriminatory and/or racist practices against women, black and caribbean scholars. theodore (1971) defined discrimination against women professionals as occurring "when women of equivalent qualifications, experience, and performance do not share equally in the decision-making process or receive equal rewards, such as salary, promotions, prestige, professional recognition, and honors" (p. 27). in the academic workplace, black faculty often encounter prejudice and discrimination which can often create major obstacles to the academic success of faculty (frierson, 1990). in 1974, for example, moore and wagstaff surveyed over 3,000 black women scholars working with or in predominantly white institutions. moore and wagstaff found that 95 percent of all black respondents reported some discriminatory activity by persons within their institutions. black professionals from twoyear colleges have reported similar experiences. a 1995 study (singh, robinson, and williams-green) of black academics examined gender differences as perceived by black faculty and found that women faced additional challenges such as racism and discrimination. the study focused on tenure, institutional climate, professional life and promotion and revealed that women who were less satisfied with their careers were subjected to negative treatment and often felt isolated. according to clark and corcoran (1986) many female academics suffer from the "accumulated disadvantage," and whereas others term it "on sex discrimination" in the workplace. regardless of its name, it is apparent that there must be some type of ongoing social control that maintains differences in performance, opportunities and rewards. clark and corcoran describe a "salieri effect," whereby women as assessed by a dominant core group of men and often failed to "measure up" because of their social status in the department. the result is less overtly discriminatory as it is insidious because while it allows women to enter the academy, it severely limits opportunities for development and advancement. according to tack and patitu (1992), "black women who have gained access to higher education and higher-paying positions, often find themselves in less than optimal work environments. the racist and sexist attitudes of colleagues can often result in less than satisfactory work conditions and increased stress in the life of a black female professional" (steward, 1987, p. 3). epstein contends that black professional women are caught in what she terms a "double bind" between discriminatory racism and sexism, which can cause tremendous stress for black women scholars (epstein, 1970). for example, some women who choose to concentrate on scholarship to further the research of blacks, often report that the majority of faculty peers and superiors do not consider such work relevant or worthwhile. a study by mayfield and nash (1976) found that roughly one-third of faculty women perceive themselves to be victims of discrimination in salary and one-fourth discrimination in rank. also, one-fourth of the women in their study indicated that performance standards were higher for them than their male counterparts. when gender and ethnicity were combined, black women professors were less satisfied than both white women and black male colleagues. caribbean scholars reported virtually no racist practices and only a few discriminatory practices that were believed to be based more on gender and age than ethnicity. the debate over the tenure system has existed for quite some time, yet little has been done because few viable alternatives have been proposed. in the early 1960s, more than 20 states proposed legislation for the first time to reform or abolish tenure for new prospective faculty. in the book, scholarship reconsidered (1990), boyer examines the movement from teaching, to service, to research, and its implications on the roles of faculty. he begins by illustrating the renewed concern for undergraduate education, teaching, service, and the core curriculum. he states: "at no time in our history has the need been greater for connecting the work of the academy to the social and environmental challenges beyond the campus.... we need a renewed commitment to service" (p. xii). since scholarship is most often the primary requirement for tenure, it is important to explore ways to redefine scholarly activity. research on blacks in the academy offers a contrasting picture. some studies suggest, for example, that since black doctorate recipients tend to be women who are older when they receive their degrees, are most often married, have more dependents, incur greater debt by the time they complete their education, and earn their doctorates primarily in education, the social sciences and professions, greater salaries may be one of the more significant factors in the decision to leave academic employment (brown, 1988; zumeta, 1984). in summary, these four external barriers to promotion and tenure need to be addressed by: 1) revisiting the policies and practices surrounding tenure to ensure that requirements are equitably decided and policies are clear, appropriate, realistic, and fairly weighed; 2) providing rewards structures to encourage faculty success and offer support systems to reduce isolation; 3) ensuring black faculty women have the necessary tools required to succeed in the academy; 4) providing a conducive research environment by minimizing the number of undue burdens placed on many women scholars which tend to detract from scholarship and; 5) eliminating racist and discriminatory practices. the study methodology this study began in the winter of 1994 and was based on a 100 % sample of the 384 members and associates of the association of black women in higher education (abwhe). the purpose was to survey career mobility patterns of african american women professors from two-year and four-year american colleges and universities. of the 384 women surveyed, 336 (or 79 %) returned the survey instrument and of those 180 were eligible to participate. of the 180 member sample, 96 (or 53.33 %) of the women had remained exclusively in academic employment since completion of graduate training. fifty-nine (or 32.77 %) of the women had worked outside of the academy since completing graduate training but had returned and were currently working at a two-year or four-year american college or university. the third group of women totaling 25 in number (or 13.88 %) were those who voluntarily left the academy and had not returned. in the winter of 1995, a grant was awarded to expand the study to include those experiences of faculty women from the university of the west indies system-mona in jamaica, st. augustine in trinidad-tobago, and cave hill in barbados campuses. the 44 faculty women study which was conducted in the caribbean differed from the original 384 faculty women study because the author was able to interview all 44 women face-to-face as opposed to distributing the surveys by mail as in the first study. results and discussions framework and procedure for african american faculty women the conceptual framework for both groups was based upon a combination of economic, psychosocial, and job satisfaction theories to determine the effects of race, gender, and ethnicity. the inferential statistical technique employed for african american faculty women in the study was a discriminant analysis. this analysis was applied to the data to determine to what degree each of the designated independent variables would prove significant in predicting the factors which affect the decisions (dependent variable) of african american women professors to remain in, return to, or voluntarily leave the academy. the descriptive analysis included each of the three groups in the inferential analysis, however all respondents tended to fall into two distinct groups; those who were currently working in the academy (remainers and returners) and those who were not (voluntary leavers). a stepwise discriminant analysis was first applied to the data to identify and select from 21 possible independent variables (salary, tenure status, institutional type, intention to leave, marital status, number of dependents, support systems, external barriers, age, never married, when marriage occurred, education of spouse, employment of spouse, current employment status, job satisfaction, academic faculty rank, recent academic and nonacademic employment offers, type of community, discretionary activities, hours of domestic activities, and hours at work) those with the greatest statistical significance (p<.05) in the decision to remain in, return to, or voluntarily leave the academy. of the 21 possible independent variables, 5 were selected in the discriminant stepwise procedure and were presented in order of significance (see table 1). those who remained in or returned to the academy represented a total of over 86 percent of the sample and had two major characteristics. first, the members of this group were successful intellectual african american women scholars. they were most likely to hold tenure (.54 for those who remain and .37 for those who return, as compared to .20 for those who leave), and receive the greatest number of academic employment offers (2.75 for those who remain as compared to 2.39 for those who return and 1.04 for those voluntarily leave) from other four-year american colleges and universities. because of the demand for these academic women, many tended to have a high rate of mobility as they moved from institution to institution, receiving numerous attractive career opportunities. second, these academic women tended to have a high rate of job satisfaction (.65 for those who remain, and 64 % for those who return, as compared to 48 % for those who voluntarily leave). apparently, nearly two-thirds of these academic women were happy despite perceived barriers to career advancement, such as limited upward mobility opportunities within the current institution, unrealistic expectations of time to do the work, inability to manage role sets, and other personal factors. these barriers may have influenced some of these women to seek other opportunities. this would suggest that these women became mobile because they perceived the academy as having limited opportunities for advancement. although they often sought more attractive career opportunities elsewhere, they most often accepted alternative positions within the academy. those who were no longer working in the academy and had voluntarily left displayed a number of distinct characteristics. they were twice as likely to be non-tenured and have the lowest job satisfaction rate of all three groups. tenure status for those who left was the most significant of all 5 variables identified in the stepwise discriminant analysis. those who left the academy were: 1) most likely to hold a non-tenured position; 2) most likely to voluntarily leave exclusively from a four-year college or university as opposed to a two-year institution; 3) most likely to receive the fewest number of academic employment offers; and 4) least likely to experience other barriers which interfered with academic career success. framework and procedure for caribbean faculty women the conceptual framework for caribbean faculty women was also based upon a combination of economic, psychosocial, and job satisfaction theories to determine the effects of race, gender, and ethnicity. the inferential statistical technique employed for women in the study was also a discriminant analysis applied to the data to determine to what degree each of the designated independent variables would prove significant in predicting the factors which affect the decisions (dependent variable) of caribbean women professors to remain in, return to, or voluntarily leave the academy. the descriptive analysis included each of the three groups in the inferential analysis, however all respondents tended to fall into the first group; those who were currently working in the academy (remainers and returners). a stepwise discriminant analysis was applied to the data using the same 21 independent variables mentioned earlier. of these 21 independent variables, the following five were selected in the discriminant stepwise procedure and are presented in order of significance (see table 2). those who remained in the academy represented a total of over 68 % of the sample and had three major file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20all%20for%20pub/summer98/gregt1.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20all%20for%20pub/summer98/gregt2.html characteristics. first, they have the highest rate of job satisfaction (.72 for those who remain, as compared to .64 for those who return and .48 for those who leave), achieved the highest academic faculty rank (3.68 for those who remain, as compared to 3.20 for those who return and 2.84 for those who leave), and finally they were most likely to hold tenure (.62 for those who remain, as compared to .46 for those who return and .28 for those who leave). the mobility rate for caribbean scholars was not quite as high as african american scholars this may possibly be explained in part because caribbean faculty have the opportunity to go up for tenure more than once, although they often have little choice of academic institutions unless they choose to leave the caribbean altogether. in addition, almost a quarter of these academic women perceived barriers to career advancement, such as personal factors, inability to manage role sets, personal demands of family, and limited upward mobility opportunities within the current institution. these barriers may influence some of these women to seek other opportunities, especially if they are prepared to leave the caribbean. although they may have sought more attractive career opportunities elsewhere, most accepted alternative administrative posts or a combination of teaching and administrative positions within the current institution. finally, caribbean scholars appear to have higher rates of job satisfaction and are more likely to be tenured even though they have greater external barriers than their african american women counterparts. again, this may be attributed to their lack of mobility options in the caribbean and their ability to seek tenure more than once. conclusion black women--african american, caribbean and others--have traditionally entered higher education institutions because of the potential for challenging current paradigms and providing education and leadership for young developing students and scholars. this study indicates that the tradition will continue although the journey will often be difficult. mccombs (1989) stated that the "participation [of black women] and the struggle that ensues between academia and themselves is one of necessity, not choice... black women who decide to enter the university do so with the understanding that it will be a new experience, but it will also be a challenge to their traditions" (p. 137). she added, "for black women, the challenge is to enter and remain within the university and perform all responsibilities without losing integrity. the central problems of isolation, alienation, promotion, and tenure, play an important role in determining who will remain" (mccombs, 1989, p. 141). biography sheila t. gregory is assistant professor of higher education/educational leadership in the college of education at the university of nevada, las vegas. she received her b.a. from oakland university, m.p.a. in health care administration from wayne state university, and her ph.d. in higher education administration from the university of pennsylvania where she graduated with distinction. she received a dissertation award from the black caucus of the american association for higher education (aahe) and has been the recipient of numerous grants, two of which are currently in progress. she is the author of three books and a dozen articles. her main research interests are in the areas of faculty and student recruitment and retention, professional leadership and development, and academic achievement with a special emphasis on race, class, and gender. she has also lectured and consulted with numerous universities, community colleges, school districts, and tribal associations. bibliography aisenberg, nadya and mona harrington. 1988. women of academe: outsiders in the sacred grove. amherst: university of massachusetts press. american association of university professors. 1989 annual. the annual report on the economic status of the profession, issues annual. academe, (jul/aug.). aquirre, a. 1992. an interpretive analysis of chicano faculty in academe. social science journal 29: 124-140. astin, helen s. 1969. the woman doctorate in america: origins, career, and family. russell sage foundation. astin, helen s. and alan e. bayer 1979. sex discrimination in academe. in academic women on the move, alice s. rossi and ann calderwood, pp. 333-358. russell sage foundation: new york. austin, a. and z. gamson. 1983. academic workplace: new demands, heightened tensions. asheeric higher education report no. 10. washington, d.c.: association for the study of higher education. banks, william. 1984. afro-american scholars in the university: roles and conflicts. american behavioral scientist 27(3):325-338. barnes, denise. 1986. transitions and stresses for black female scholars, in career guide for women scholars. springer publishing, new york. biklen, sari k. and marilyn brannigan (eds.) 1980. women and educational leadership. lexington ma.: d.c. heath & co. boyer, ernest. 1990. scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professoriate, carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching. clark, shirley m. and mary corcoran. 1986. perspectives on the american socialization of women faculty: a case of accumulative disadvantage. journal of higher education 57:20-43. defour, d. c. 1990. some thoughts on ethnic minority mentoring. mentoring international, 4: 14-17.. dodgson, judith. spring 1986. do women in education need mentors? education canada 28-33. epps, e. sep/oct 1989. academic culture and the minority professor. academe 75: 23-26. epstein, c. 1970. a woman's place: options and limits in professional careers. berkeley, ca.: university of california press. exum, william h. 1983. climbing the crystal stairs: values, affirmative action, and minority faculty. social problems 30 (april): 383-399. freeman, b. 1977. women faculty in the american university: up the down staircase. higher education 6: 165-188. fikes, r. 1978. control of information: black scholars and the academic press. western journal of black studies 2(3): 219-221. finkel, susan k., steven olswang, and nian she. 1994. childbirth, tenure, and promotion for women faculty. review of higher education 17(3): 259-270. frierson, h. jr. 1990. the situation of black educational researchers: continuation of a crisis. educational researcher 19: 12-17. graham, patricia a. 1973. status transitions of women students, faculty, and administrators. in academic women on the move, alice s. rossi and ann calderwood, pp. 163-172. russell sage foundation: new york. gregory, sheila t. 1995. black women in the academy. university press of america, lanham, maryland. harvey, w. and d. scott-jones. 1985. we can't find any: the elusiveness of black faculty members in american higher education. issues in education, 3 (summer): 68-76. hensel, nancy. 1991. realizing gender equality in higher education: the need to integrate work/family issues. ashe-eric higher education report no. 2 washington, d.c. ladd, e. jr. 1979. the work experience of american college professors: some data and an argument. in faculty career development. current issues in higher education no. 2. american association for higher education, washington, d.c. leggon, cheryl b. 1980. black female professionals: dilemmas and contradictions of status. in the black woman, (ed.) la frances rodgers-rose, pp. 161-174. sage publications. lincoln, y. s. and e. g. guba. 1980. the distinction between merit and worth. in evaluation, educational evaluation, and policy analysis, 4: 61-71. logan, carol j. 1990. job satisfaction of african-american faculty at predominantly african-american and predominantly white four-year, state-assisted institutions in the south. unpublished dissertation. bowling green state university, ohio. mayfield, betty and william nash. 1976. career attitudes of female professors. psychological reports 39: 631-634. mccombs, harriet g. 1989. the dynamics and impact of affirmative action processes on higher education, the curriculum, and black women. sex roles 21(1/2): 127-143. menges, robert j. and exum, william h. 1983. barriers to the progress of women and minority faculty. journal of higher education, 54(2): 123-144. merriam, sharan b. 1983 spring. mentors and protégés: a critical review of the literature. adult education quarterly 161-173. merton, robert k. 1957. the role set: problems in sociological theory. british journal of sociology 8: 106-120. mitchell, jackie. 1983. visible, vulnerable, and viable: emerging perspectives of a minority professor. in teaching minority students (ed.) james h. cones iii, et. al. san francisco: jossey-bass. moore, k. m. and l. wagstaff. 1974. black educators in white colleges. san francisco: jossey-bass. moses, yolanda t. 1989. black women in academe: issues and strategies. project on the status of education of women. association of american colleges, washington, d.c. outcalt, d. l. 1980. report of the teaching faculty on teaching evaluation. santa barbara, ca.: university of california. rafky, david m. 1972. the black scholar in the academic marketplace. teachers college record, 74(2): 225-260. smart, john c. 1990. a causal model of faculty turnover intentions. research in higher education, 31(5): 405-424. steward, r. 1987. work satisfaction and the black female professional: a pilot study. lawrence: university of kansas. sudarkasa, n. 1987. affirmative action or affirmative of the status quo? black faculty and administrators in higher education. american association of higher education 39(6): 3-6. swaboda, marian j. 1990. retaining and promoting women and minority faculty members: problems and possibilities. university of wisconsin system, office of equal opportunity programs and policy studies, madison, wi. tack, martha w. and carol l. patitu. 1992. faculty job satisfaction: women and minorities in peril. report 4, ashe-eric higher education reports, george washington university. theodore, a. (ed.) 1971. the professional woman. cambridge, ma: schenkman publishing co. valverde, leonard a.. 1981. development of ethnic researchers and the education of white researchers, educational researcher, (oct.), 16-20. walker, g. p. 1973. effective and ineffective images: as perceived by the male afro-american university professor. doctoral dissertation, university of pittsburgh, dissertation abstracts international, 34: 2803. wilson, reginald. 1987. recruitment and retention of minority faculty and staff. american association higher education bulletin 39(6): 11-14. awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 3, summer 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the 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inclusion, exclusion, and erasure luncheon address given at the 29th annual fall conference of the aera sig: research on women in education by dr. olga m. welch, professor & interim department head, educational administration & policy studies october, 2003 she was preparing an assignment for her graduate research course and experiencing extreme writer’s block. it just seemed as if nothing of substance was occurring, and finally in frustration she decided to leave her cubicle and wander through the library stacks. her steps took her to the section marked “african american studies” where she began to scan the shelves. not long after, she found herself drawn to a book with the title, the contributions of blacks to the american military: a retrospective. intrigued by both the text and the promise of narratives and faded photographs, she removed the book and began to turn the pages. casually moving through pages that documented black men’s combat contributions from the revolutionary war to world war ii, she found herself drawn to the accounts and faces of “free men,” stoic foot soldiers, aviators, marines, and army battalions—and, quite unexpectedly to a picture of what appeared to be a ship’s hold with thirteen black officers seated on graduated steps. since there had been few photographs of blacks in the navy, she stopped to look more closely at the picture and to read the names. suddenly, her eyes widened with astonishment as she recognized the face file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///search.html file:///advertising.html file:///sitemap.html file:///awards.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/writing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/career_strategies/index.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/business-home-oview_index.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/loans-credit.html file:///web.html file:///networks/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/balancing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/networks/intlinks.html file:///amazingbookstore/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/library/resume/index.html file:///career/salaries_emplmnt.html file:///career/negotiating.html file:///news/awblog.html file:///career/indices_stats.html file:///career/career_advice.html file:///career/career_advice_undergrad.html file:///career_path/career_paths.html file:///career_plan.html file:///mentor/index.html file:///leadership.html of her own father. for the first time, at age 23, she was learning that he had been one of the first blacks commissioned as officers in the united states navy. in that moment, his/story had become her/story too. making the familiar strange “by the fall of 1943 the number of black enlisted men within the navy was increasing rapidly, but the v12 program to commission the first black officers was not scheduled to begin until march 1944” (stillwell, 1993, p. xxii). according to stillwell (1993), in 1943, secretary of the navy knox responded to external pressures from adlai stevenson, then serving as his assistant, and other individuals by reluctantly agreeing to commission twelve black enlisted men as officers. these were the men who would in time come to be known as the “golden thirteen.” the men who did become the first officers do not know how they happened to be chosen. the best guess is that they were men who had distinguished themselves by their performance and attitude as enlisted men. in the conference’s opening speech, nell noddings admonished us to “find a way to work on something that matters.” that is, to hold explicit conversations with ourselves in order to identify the research topics that have meaning for us. further, in welcoming us to this conference, barbara thayer-bacon quoted bell hooks’ discussion of theory and its meaning for women theorists as a means for achieving praxis by finding ways to make the pain of unresolved questions go away. yesterday, candace carawan reminded us how important listening to music, stories and poetry was to forming partnerships with the men and women who came to the highlander center to develop activist strategies for advancing social justice. therefore, the task i have set myself in this speech is to utilize the lens of hill collins’ work on afroamerican feminist thought and greene’s notion of making the familiar strange to provide one lens on my father’s experience as a member of the golden thirteen. i selected this focus because discovering this component of my father’s past is, in a real sense, a reclamation of my own in that both illustrate how erasure of any person or group’s story profoundly affects the reliability of “those taken for granted truths” that inform our collective history. you should know up front that i am situating my discussion squarely within my own epistemological standpoint as an african american feminist. for, as gloria ladson billings (2000) reminded us, “an epistemology is a system of knowing that has both an internal logic and an external validity” (p. 267). this distinction between epistemology and ways of knowing is not a trivial one. indeed, epistemology is linked ultimately to worldview, as shujaa (1997) argued in the same article: worldviews and systems of knowledge are symbiotic_ that is, how one views the world is influenced by what knowledge one possesses, and what knowledge one is capable of possessing is influenced deeply by one’s worldview. thus the conditions under which people live and learn shape both their knowledge and their worldviews. [moreover,] the process of developing a worldview that differs from the dominant worldview requires active intellectual work on the part of the knower, because schools, society, and the structure and production of knowledge are designed to create individuals who internalize the dominant worldview and knowledge production and acquisition processes. [indeed,] the hegemony of the dominant paradigm makes it more than just another way to view the world—it claims to be the only legitimate way to view the world. (p. 258) this is an even more invidious process in the history of this nation, where manifest destiny became the rationale for dispossessing native peoples of their lands, the need to link the east and the west provided an imprimatur for the import of thousands of chinese railroad laborers, and the biblical story of ham rendered perfectly acceptable the enslavement of thousands of africans in the name of christianity and civilization. for me, then, discovering my father’s military past marked an important milestone in my growing recognition of the interrelatedness of theory and practice. after all, i had been trained as a historian and, as such, realized the compelling primacy of first-person accounts over secondary interpretations. yet, i stood in the library stacks holding a part of my own and my father’s history that had been effectively omitted from my training in american history. the irony was inescapable. consider i had studied at howard university, arguably this country’s premier hbcu with one of the most prestigious and extensive black literary and historical library collections in the united states. and, yet in four years of preparation, i’d never read or seen anything about those men’s contributions in world war ii. in a very real sense, their stories had been rendered “visibly invisible.” without theory i would lack an important “healing mechanism”_ an important weapon in the struggle to both validate and reclaim my father’s place in american military history. as bell hooks and cornell west (1991) observed: theory is inescapable because it is an indispensable weapon in struggle, and it is an indispensable weapon in struggle because it provides certain kinds of understanding, certain kinds of illumination, certain kinds of insights that are requisite if we are to act effectively. (p. 34-35) in addition to theory, understanding the achievement of the golden thirteen requires both care and fidelity. as nottings (1986) noted, “fidelity connotes on the one hand a state or quality of faithfulness and on the other exactitude or high degree of accuracy” (p. 496). both meanings are important to my understanding of the golden thirteen because when we are reflectively faithful to someone or something we try to refine or fine tune our faithfulness. in this sense, we are in good faith when we know to what or to whom we are faithful, when we have reflected on the reasons and the emotions involved in our faithfulness, and when we are committed to fresh affirmations of faithfulness at ever finer and truer levels. we are, in essence, making the familiar strange by acknowledging inclusion, exclusion, and erasure. in offering this lens on the golden thirteen, i want to “make strange” their experiences by using three key themes articulated by patricia hill collins (1986) in her paradigm of black feminism. the themes are a) self definition and self-valuation; b) the interlocking nature of oppression; and c) the sociological paradigm of the “outsider-within.” knowing your place: public spheres and private realities self definition and self-valuation self-definition involves challenging the political knowledge-validation process that has resulted in externally-defined, stereotypical images of afro-american womanhood. in contrast, self-valuation stresses the content of black women’s self-definitions—namely replacing externally-derived images with authentic black female images. black feminists have questioned not only what has been said about black women, but the credibility and the intentions of those possessing the power to define. “when black women define themselves, they clearly reject the taken-for-granted assumption that those in positions granting them the authority to describe and analyze reality are entitled to do so” (hill collins, 1986, p. 517). i believe that this theme of “self-definition and self-evaluation also can be illustrated in the experiences of the golden thirteen. according to interviews by stillwell (1993), in 1943, those men who became the first officers did not know how they happened to be chosen. moreover, despite repeated requests for information dealing specifically with the selection and training of these first black officers, no documents have emerged from official sources such as the national archives, bureau of naval personnel, and the naval historical center. lacking such documentation, one can make several observations after reviewing the oral recollections of those who successfully completed the program. here is how some of them prefaced their stories, “the importance of inspiration,” “a more democratic navy than the nation it serves, and “living a respectable life.” in these descriptions and others, the men talked about how important it was for them to “carve out” an identity that both defined and validated them as they went through their training at great lakes. one officer began: soon after [arriving] we began this routine, we gathered as a group in our barracks and held a meeting. we came to the conclusion that we were involved in an experiment, and we determined that we were not going to fail. it was then that we vowed to follow the motto of the three musketeers: “all for one and one for all…” we decided not to compete with other members of the group. (p. 57) thus, from the beginning, they were aware that they were “trial cases,” and that some possessed stronger backgrounds or educational experiences in mathematics or science than others, they decided to pool their knowledge so that all would graduate or none would graduate. to make sure this occurred, they waited until night fall, placed blankets on the windows, and held night study sessions to prepare for every class. officer samuel barnes described these sessions to stillwell (1993): we were determined to succeed in spite of the burdens that would be placed on us… …what we had in class that day, we would go back over. that reinforced the thingswe had learned that day and prepared us mentally for the next day. the subjects we studied dealt with professional navy topics such as navigation, gunnery, aircraft recognition, naval history, navy regulations, signaling by flags and morse code, seamanship, and survival techniques. we learned all of these subjects in classroom lectures. we rarely left the barracks and never went aboard ship. we did receive rifle-range practice and leadership duties with assigned recruit companies. for the most part, though, we had to learn vicariously rather than through actual experience. (p. 57-58) by this pact and the activities associated with it, these men engaged in a process of self-definition, “we knew that we were the foot in the door for many other black sailors, and we were determined not to be the ones who were responsible for having the foot removed” (p. 57). self-definition and self-valuation for these men, as for black feminists, involved developing a counter hegemonic strategy of naming. thus, in this private reality, the golden thirteen’s saw themselves as all good officer candidates, without exceptions. in the public sphere, these men learned the effectiveness of this strategy when, after their separate graduation from the great lakes training facility that would one day be re-named in their honor, they were told by the commanding officer that they had been subjected to a harder curriculum than their white counterparts; one that should have taken twelve months rather than the six months they were given (stillwell, 1993). when the program was over, one instructor, lieutenant richmond, admitted to us that he had not asked to work with us but had been assigned to do so. he said, “i deliberately made the course work difficult for you. when you finished the courses, you actually had completed the equivalent of a semester at the naval academy. i want to congratulate you for the way you have handled the pressure and did so well under the circumstances.” (p. 58) these men also learned that they had scored higher on every test than their white peers had, but that they would not enjoy the same placement opportunities. the interlocking nature of oppression attention to the interlocking nature of race, gender, and class oppression is a second recurring theme in the works of black feminists. while different socio-historical periods may have increased the saliency of one or another type of oppression, the thesis of the linked nature of oppression has long pervaded black feminist thought. another construct, described by hill collins as “the construct of dichotomous oppositional difference” involves the categorization of people, things, and ideas in terms of their difference from one another. as hill collins (1986) noted: the terms in dichotomies such as black/white, male/female, reason/emotion, fact/opinion, and subject/object gain their meaning only in relation to their difference from their oppositional counterparts. moreover, another fundamental characteristic of this construct is that difference is not complementary in that the halves of the dichotomy do not enhance each other. rather, the dichotomous halves are different and inherently opposed to one another. (p.51) stillwell (1993) depicted how the golden thirteen were not expected to be as good as their white counterparts. once they graduated, this fact became even more of a reality: after we settled into a routine as ensigns, the honest-to-goodness reality set in. in a number of instances we were embarrassed and made to feel that we weren’t bone fide naval officers. we were denied the privilege of going to the officers’ club on the main side of great lakes. we were also denied the opportunity to become officers of the day. in our initial assignments, we acted as junior officers of the day; the officers of the day were white… we junior officers just trailed around behind the white officer while on duty; it was a demeaning position to accept. we also learned that the negro sailors were unhappy to see negro officers not being treated with the same respect shown white officers. (p. 62) thus, the golden thirteen were viewed in opposition to their white officer colleagues. despite having successfully completed the same training, they were positioned in a dichotomous relationship intended to emphasize their inferiority, rather than highlight their strengths. we felt that we were certainly capable of handling more responsibility, so we pressed for recognition. finally, the naval authorities decided to advance us to full-fledged officers of the day with complete authority while on duty. but we never were permitted to visit the officers’ club (stillwell, 1993, p. 62) despite this concession, then, the men remained outsiders –within. outsiders/within as merton (1972) observed, “white male insiderism…has largely been tacit or defacto. it has simply taken the form of patterned expectations about the appropriate” (p. 13). in contrast, a good deal of the black female, and i would add black male, experience has been spent coping with avoiding, subverting and challenging the workings of this same white male insiderism. the golden thirteen were no exception. as mcfadden and dill’s work (2003) illustrated, it could be argued that these men developed forms of insider elasticity, accommodation and dissembling behaviors to carve out and reinforce the choices they made as both officers and officer candidates. they knew they were an experiment, they knew that the then secretary of the navy knox did not believe negroes should be officers, and they also knew that after graduation their power would “migrate” in some situations. “rather than have to salute us, white seamen would cross the street to avoid contact with us or detour to cross paths instead with our white counterparts, whom they then saluted” (stillwell, 1993, p. 89). in the poem marginalized, by renard harris (2002), we can sense the situation created for the golden thirteen by people like knox: i don’t like being in the margin: it is like the corner of a room. i’m caged, my freedom is fenced with barbed wire, i wake up with ideas but go to sleep with rejections. i shout out dreams and i am hushed by reality, a reality that controls my choices, choices measured by someone else’s vision. what they cannot see cannot be my choice. i choose to have a voice, i choose to be heard! but i am in the margin. no one listens (harris, 2002, academic exchange, . used by permission of the author). conclusion in opening the textbook of this portion of my father’s life, i want to make clear that i do not gloss over the emergent complexities that noddings, carawan, and your own presentations at this conference have underscored. rather, by offering this abbreviated lens into the history of the golden thirteen, i have sought to support joan scott’s (as cited in olsen, 2000) comment that “experience is at once already an interpretation and in need of interpretation” as well as olsen’s assertion that “there remain a number of unrealized agendas within the feminist qualitative research realm. foremost among these is the deeper exploration of how meanings of race, class, and gender emerge and interlock, as well as their various effects.” (p. 235). as your conference presentations in concert with noddings’ and carawan’s speeches highlight, “the range of problems is too great, and the issues are too urgent, for feminist researchers to do otherwise. references harris, r. (2002). marginalized. university of tennessee, knoxville: academic exchange. hill collins, p. (1986) learning from the outsider within: the sociological significance of black feminist thought. social problems, 33(6), 514-532. hill collins, p. (1998). fighting words: black women & the search for justice. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hooks, b., & west, c. (1991). breaking bread: insurgent black intellectual life. boston: south end press. ladson-billing, g. (2000). racialized discourses and ethnic epistemologies. in n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), handbook of qualitative research (pp. 257-277). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. mcfadden, a., & smith, p. (2003, fall). tripping at the tipping point: why more female superintendents might not change our schools. paper presented at the 29th annual fall conference of the research on women in education sig, knoxville, tennessee. merton, r. k. (1972). insiders and outsiders a chapter in the sociology of knowledge. varieties of political express in sociology: an american journal of sociology publication. chicago and london: the university of chicago press noddings, n. (1986). fidelity in teaching, teacher education, and research for teaching. harvard educational review, 56(4), 496-510. olsen, v. l. (2000). feminisms and qualitative research at and into the millennium. in n. k. denzin, & y. s. lincoln (eds.), handbook of qualitative research (pp.215256). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications stillwell, p. (ed.). (1993). the golden thirteen: recollections of the first black naval officers. annapolis: naval institute press. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home business | entrepreneur |loan credit | web | network | balance |international| book store about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2005 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/writing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/career_strategies/index.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/business-home-oview_index.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/loans-credit.html file:///web.html file:///networks/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/balancing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/networks/intlinks.html file:///amazingbookstore/index.php file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership feminist academics as nomadic subjects: reconceptualizing women in universities elizabeth hills, ph.d. leonie rowan, ph.d. hills & rowan, winter, 2002 while nomadic subjectivity is primarily about the 'act of going', movement for its own sake is not the point: the goal of any nomadic journey is always to destabilize the binary terms that it moves between. introduction: women in universities an old, old problem from a feminist perspective, it is more than a little axiomatic to say that higher education has traditionally produced and reproduced, naturalized and valorized specific sets of behavior, specific forms of knowledge and specific versions of intellectual practice which celebrate that which is coded as masculine at the expense of that which is produced as feminine. the production of this opposition is attendant on the primacy of the western cultural separation of the public from the private and the celebration of all that is associated with the first term at the expense of all that is subsumed under the second. this, in turn, is based on the construction of masculinity as synonymous with rationality, intellect, reason, culture and the production of femininity as all that is not male: in this binaristic logic women are irrational, emotional and nurturing. braidotti (1994a) summarizes the situation well when she writes: the universalistic stance, with its conflation of the masculine to represent the human and the confinement of the feminine to a secondary position of devalued http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html "otherness", rests upon a classical system of dualistic oppositions, such as, for instance; nature/culture, active/passive, rational/irrational, masculine/feminine. feminists argue that this dualistic mode of thinking creates binary differences only to ordain them in a hierarchical scale of power relations. (p. 155) consistent with this logic, the university has been naturalized as a homogeneous male institution: the true home, if you like, of the 'enlightened male subject'. women's marginality within academic environments manifests itself in diverse and complex ways. women have been consistently absent, not just from the classrooms, offices, and meeting places of academe, but also from the discourses, texts, and subjects on which a university education is based (rich, 1979). there are fewer women academics in universities than men, they tend to be concentrated in the lower employment categories, and by extension, more likely to be engaged in teaching than in research. women have been under represented on decision making bodies, and have encountered a 'glass ceiling' in attempts to achieve promotion (porter, 1995). the phallocentric nature of university environment has prompted significant debate among feminists in academia and given rise to a wide range of activities designed, in one way or another, to challenge the dominant masculinist culture. despite many years of effort, however, universities remain male dominated environments within which women continue to be employed at lower levels, on shorter contracts, and with narrower career prospects. in other words, there exists a significant gap between the hopes many of us held for the future of women in universities and the current (on-going) realities faced by those of us working in these environments. it is this gap and what it tells us about the on-going need for feminist reform in academic circles that has inspired this paper. more specifically, we are interested in using the work of feminist scholar rosi braidotti as a basis for identifying a particular 'mindset' that is valuable for thinking about the on-going challenges associated with the cultural transformation of university environments. we will illustrate the need for and value of these mindsets through a discussion of one particular university, and one specific attempt by women within that university to improve women's participation in research activity. this introduction, then, is followed by four main sections. in the first, we demonstrate the ways in which our case site, central queensland university, reflects the same kind of phallocentric ideologies that can be seen to characterize university environments more generally. in the second, we outline some of the major (feminist) strategies developed within this university to improve women's research activity and discuss some of the differences of opinion concerning how this is best achieved. in the third section, we will explore what it is that rosi braidotti's model of nomadic subjectivity offers to those women engaged in the work of cultural transformation, and in the fourth and final section, we will provide a brief example of how nomadic consciousness can shape the day-to-day practice of women academics. as any exploration of gender and its consequences necessitates analysis of the particular context within which women are located, it is necessary for us to begin this paper with a brief overview of the particular university that we will be using to illustrate our points. section one: an old problem in a new context women at central queensland university defined as a multi-campus, integrated regional university, central queensland university (cqu) is one of australia's newest universities having been established first as an institute of education and awarded university status in 1992. it has its largest campus in rockhampton, queensland, and constituent campuses in the smaller cities of gladstone, bundaberg, mackay, and emerald catering for an enrollment of approximately 15,000 students (with most of these studying primarily in distance mode). the majority of the university's staff and students are located at one of these campuses although there are a range of employees located at campuses in brisbane, sydney, melbourne, and also in fiji, singapore, and hong kong. these students are distributed along traditional gendered lines with women occupying the majority of space in arts (73%), education (78%) and health science (79%) but moving only gradually into science (26%) and even more slowly into computing (8%) or engineering (8%). just as the student body continues to reflect long standing patterns of gender segregation, so, too, does the cqu staffing profile demonstrate an uneven distribution of men and women at the top and bottom of the academic scale. out of all of the academic women employed at the university, 37% are located at the lowest level, level a (compared to 17.62% of men); 41% are at level b (compared to 30% for men); 16% of women and 39 % of academic men are employed at level c; and a mere 5% of women (as opposed to 13% of men) are employed at associate professor or professor level. these staffing/student profiles are further complicated by the university's regional/rural location. the main campus at cqu is located in rockhampton, a city which prides itself on being the 'beef capital' of the world, and which is flanked at every entrance by oversize statutes of various breeds of bull. while clearly there is nothing automatically sinister about statues of these very worthy animals, it does, perhaps, go at least some way towards signifying a fairly broad based endorsement of masculine culture which underpins both central queensland generally, and the university itself. the individual experiences of women within the university indicate that there are still a great number of (mostly) men in senior positions who are often ignorant about and/or hostile towards any kind of 'feminist' or women-centred thoughts. to provide two brief examples, one staff member was advised that the feminist research she wished to undertake was "not a structural priority" within the university while another was told that feminism was not an appropriate methodology for postgraduate research. these brief anecdotes illustrate what is, by and large, a suspicious attitude within the university to feminism and feminists. this attitude, coupled with the staff/student profiles introduced above, has a number of consequences for women at cqu: consequences similar to those experienced by women at other universities throughout australia and the world. relative to men, women are more likely to be: employed on a short-term contract; combining higher degree study with full-time work; teaching higher numbers of students; supervising fewer post-graduates; applying for fewer research grants; in receipt of less grant funding; and employed at the lower end of the relevant scale. this context has given rise to considerable debate among-between women and men at cqu and various programs designed to improve the skills/opportunities/confidence of academic and non-academic women have been put into place. the past six years have seen the introduction of programs focused on improving women's research skills/abilities and profiles (women in research); a broad based professional development program (women at cqu: making a difference); a senior women's program; and a broad based professional development program for general staff (springboard). the university has also developed a detailed sexual harassment policy and a gender representation on committees policy. despite these initiatives, however, recent surveys of women at cqu have identified an ongoing belief that the university's 'culture' and its attitude towards women have been extremely slow to change (affirmative action working party, 1996; mulherin, gregor, rowan, 1996). these feelings appear to be well supported by analysis of the rise and fall of some of the key initiatives focused on women. a brief exploration of one of the highest profile of these initiatives women in research is instructive. women in research: a brief case in 1994, a research team at cqu began to investigate the relationship between gender and the research activities of women at cqu. the resultant "research factors" survey sought to identify those factors that impacted upon women's participation in various forms of research activity (cox, eade, gregor, mcnamee, 1995). when completed, the survey showed that women were significantly more likely than men to: have experienced a break in full time employment; be employed on a part time or fractional basis; be employed in their present occupation for less than six years; have been engaged in research activity for less than five years; be engaged in higher degree study; be less (formally) academically qualified; have lower levels of research activity; and to have not applied for research funding. in responding to the data reported by the research factors survey, a range of women at cqu met throughout 1994 and 1995 to debate the 'best ways' in which they could respond to this situation. this led ultimately to the creation of a group known as women in research. the group's overarching aim was to work to improve women's research skills, activities and profiles through a range of formal and informal mechanisms. financial support was sought and obtained from the vicechancellor of the university and after a sustained period of lobbying, the chair of the group was accepted as a member of the university's research management committee. in addition to this, the group supported the following kinds of activities: research training workshops (and follow up one-on-one support) intended to help women develop the skills necessary to undertake research activity visiting speaker series intended to provide information on specific topics and also to serve as positive role models work in progress forums within which women present and receive feedback on their research occasional papers publications designed to encourage women into refereed publications various networking opportunities (newsletters; lunches; amyl networks; and so on) from 1994 to 1998, the group's activities remained relatively frequent, and institutional awareness of and support for the group appeared strong. there was evidence that high numbers of women were participating in the group's professional development activities, and women were both more likely to apply for and to receive internal grant funding in 1996 than they were in 1994. despite the undoubtedly positive achievements of the group, this is not quite the success story that we once felt it to be. over the past two years the profile of the group has declined, the activities have fallen off, the group has lost its position on the research management committee, and few women on campus actively identify with the group. perhaps most significantly, women in a survey taken to respond to the federal government's call for submissions regarding the future of aa/eeo legislation, identified that while they were still unhappy about their current status within the university, they were disinclined to attend professional development programs targeted at women (affirmative action working party, 1996). in other words, despite a sustained effort on the part of a number of women, one of this institution's (women's) key attempts to respond to the particular needs of women came, for a significant time, to a halt. now, in the year 2000, the group is once again starting to come together, to meet regularly, and to attempt to develop a range of strategies that will respond to women's on-going identification of their 'marginal' status in the university; despite their continuing under-representation in research activities; their lack of success in attracting internal research funds; and the institution's increasing emphasis on the importance of research activity. in working, once more, to generate activities designed to support women engaged in research at cqu, those associated with women in research must deal with the same old problems concerning women's status and participation within university cultures and a new, but very real, challenge: how to sustain individual and organizational commitment to gender reform in an environment that has proven itself to be extremely resistant to transformation? in this paper we are interested in exploring some of the ways in which we believe challenges such as those faced by a re-emerging women in research group can be usefully approached. a crucial opening move involves acknowledging that there are significant differences of opinion among women (at cqu and elsewhere) about the need for, or possibility of, or ways to achieve this on-going work of cultural transformation. in the next sections of this paper, we will explore competing opinions concerning the underlying or fundamental nature of the problem that groups such as women in research must respond to and then go on to outline a theoretical framework that we believe provides a useful means for conceptualizing marginality, resistance, transformation, and the on-going nature of gender based reform. section two: debates over the nature of the problem firstly, then, many of the debates that have taken place within and about women in research have reflected a widespread uncertainty as to the nature of the problem faced by women. in many cases, discussions about the relative status of women and men and the necessary responses to this differential status fall within the longstanding sameness-difference debates that dominated feminist critical thinking at the turn of the century and intermittently ever since. the basic dilemma is quite simple is it better for women to assert their sameness to, or their difference from, men in the quest for 'equal' rights? either position, however, is decidedly complex and both have been well represented in the discussions among women in research members. the insistence that women are the 'same' as men is based on the claims of 'natural justice' and suggests that women deserve equal treatment to men because of the shared human capacity to reason (bacchi, 1990, p. 10). those who argue from the 'same as' perspective have generally sought to construct the female body as a 'neutral' site. the claim that women are 'different' from men says that women are in need of different kinds of support structures and different kinds of opportunities while also being likely to operate in different ways and for different reasons (for analysis see hills, 1996; 1998). those arguing from this perspective insist on the immediacy of the body to women's existence and argues that this difference must be acknowledged and valued within any particular contex such as a university, for example. let us illustrate both positions through reference back to the cqu context. firstly, if one argues that women are the same as men, then the quest for equal rights is generally limited to providing what could be seen as technically equal access to the same opportunities. in this equal opportunity model, the woman who is 'good enough' will ultimately reap the rewards associated with research success in a university environment. what is not attended to, in this model, is the extent to which women's progress continues to be measured against normative masculine models. similarly, the physical realities of being a woman tend to be denied with the institution displaying little real tolerance for the interrupted career pathways or the day-to-day realities of childcare or motherhood. to claim a similarity with men, therefore, is to continue to be defined by a male centered logic. that is, by arguing that we can be 'as good as', 'equal to', or even 'better than' men, we are continuing to define ourselves in terms of the criteria established to keep us out of the space in the first place. those who insist on 'sameness' ignore the fact that while women may well gain access to the same sites as men the meanings that will be made out of their presence in that site will continue to be markedly different. on the other hand, to hope for a recognition and valuing of differences is to pursue an impossible goal. in a patriarchal context, it is impossible for women to be defined as different from men and still accorded 'equal' value. within patriarchy men must always have higher status. in addition to this, where such arguments are based on either issues of biological or psychological difference, then we are off on the pathway to essentialist representations of women which are always used to justify different treatment of men and women; and to support the production of spaces such as universities as the 'natural' homes for 'men', 'masculinity', 'intellect', and 'rationalism'. it is within this version of the difference debate that women are reinscribed as fundamentally different (in nature, personality, and ability) from men, and thus as 'naturally' suited to different spheres of activity, or different activities within any particular sphere. this kind of argument has been used to support claims that men are, for example, naturally better researchers, while women's strengths lay primarily in the classroom. the dangers of both the same-different positions, then, are that we are constantly brought back to a masculine frame of reference within which women are constructed as the problem. as lloyd (cited in wearing, 1996, p. 49) notes: "both of these ideas accord males centrality, normality, and the power to define the female in their interests and on their terms." bacchi (1990, p. xvi) makes the consequences of this clear: "the assumptions...seems to be that, if we get an answer to the question of difference, everything else will fall into place. men do not have to change, nor does the system, except to the extent that it must 'accommodate' women." one of the major challenges facing those seeking to effect some kind of cultural transformation, therefore, is to develop a way of articulating the diverse experiences of women and their generally differential status in relation to men in ways that are not phallocentric. grosz (1989) writes: patriarchal systems of representation always submit women to models and images defined by and for men. it is the submission of women to representations in which they are reduced to a relation of dependence on men. there are three forms phallocentrism generally takes: whenever women are represented as the opposites or negatives of men; whenever they are represented in terms the same as or similar to men; and whenever they are represented as men's complements. in all three cases, women are seen as variations or versions of masculinity either through negation, identity or unification into a greater whole. (p. xx) these comments provide an uncanny reflection of the ways in which women in research have been positioned and conceptualized within the university. while women in research achieved some success, and won some concessions from university management, these successes depended largely upon the willingness of those 'in power' to accept either the sameness or difference perspective that was endorsed by whoever was speaking on behalf of women in research at any particular time. it is our frustration with this phallocentric bind that has driven us to look for alternative ways of conceptualizing women's location and activities within university contexts. however, the path towards finding new images for women in research has been far from smooth. searching for a new image the apparent difficulty of conceptualizing women, let alone female academics, outside the usual stereotypes of woman can be illustrated through the experience of finding a logo for women in research (wir). over several months, there were efforts to develop a logo: a logo which would be distinctive, draw on women's history through the callers of white, green, and purple and indicate our concern with research. several attempts by graphic artists to work to our specifications and suggestions came up with a number of ludicrous, even insulting rough drawings. the final straw for the committee was a stylized square made up of parts of women's bodies with a pen superimposed on a set of cheeks. this image was apparently offered in full seriousness and the artist responsible was quite upset by the rejection of his work. after the group managed to locate a different graphic designer, she came up with a stylized wir lettering which turned into a great banner and letterhead. this whole process took approximately 18 months and consumed valuable energy. it also reinforced the group's awareness of the need for them to continue to be mindful of the group's general public presentation. while this example offers a clear and literal illustration of the limiting ways in which women are constructed in university contexts, there are far too many examples that spring from 'everyday' practices. for example, individual women with ambition are described as 'macho', 'butch', or being 'on the make'; women who are promoted are seen as moving 'too far, too fast'; 40 year old men are 'young turks' but 40 year old women are 'no spring chickens'. in addition to this, we've been told that equity, is not a suitable goal for any research center that is committed to excellence. when we've conducted workshops specifically for women we've been called isolationist and discriminatory; when we've conducted workshops for women and men we've been accused of being co-opted by the establishment. we've been token women, phallic women, failed women, sad women and all the kinds of bunnyboiling vixens made famous by glenn close in the movie fatal attraction. within this culture, it seems almost impossible for women to be represented in any 'positive' way or outside of phallocentric logic. despite the ease with which we can access a ready bank of examples to illustrate our point the various positions offer no real choice at all. that is because these options circulate within the terms of the sameness-difference debate discussed above for they illustrate how feminist academics are so often judged against the impossible and undesirable ideals of becoming the same as men or becoming woman a specific and limited kind of woman and in both cases feminist academics will always be found lacking. from our perspective, however, these static definitions lack the ability to conceptualize feminist subjectivity in positive, celebratory, or multiple terms. clearly, new ways of thinking about and therefore practicing and living as feminist academics needs to be developed. we need new strategies new ways of conceptualizing difference if we are to chart a way out of the masculinist terrain of university culture. from our perspectives, then, what women at cqu are most in need of is a language for speaking about their on-going experience of marginality in ways that move beyond the limitations of the phallocentric models identified above. more than this, we need a way of recognizing two things. first, we need a means of acknowledging that there are different and equally valid ways of pursuing the feminist project of reinventing cultural space. second, we require a framework that can acknowledge that it is the multiplicity of feminist practice, (when the multiplicity is not read against a hierarchy where some 'feminists' are better than other 'feminists'), which will transform cultural contexts and lead us out of a phallocentric deadlock. we are not looking for a survival package we are looking for a positive way forward. for these reasons we find ourselves very much in accord with betsy wearing (1996, p. 68) who writes: "the way forward then is to deconstruct woman as 'other' to men, while retaining difference and the acceptance and respect of one's own body and that of the different sex." we are very committed indeed to identifying what is, for us at least, a positive way forward in this context. this leads to our exploration of new ways of thinking about this challenge. section three: a new way of thinking: women and nomadic subjectivity thus far, we have mapped out some of the limiting ways in which women have been positioned within the space of the university. universities, however, cannot be understood in homogenous, static, or monolithic terms. clearly, cultures and the individuals within them are sites for diversity and struggle. recent feminist theory, with its attention to the dynamics of power, has highlighted that while various social institutions (such as universities) reproduce dominant images, practices, and gender norms, they do not form a coherent or unchallengeable front. on the contrary, moira gatens (1996a) argues that "different aspects of contemporary liberal sociabilities jostle against each other, create paradoxes of all kinds, and present opportunities for change and political action" (p. xi). for this reason, gatens (1996b) argues that a rigid and exclusionary politics for feminism is not sufficient to address the complexity of our present. feminist politics, she suggests, needs to "engage with the sexual norms of our culture on two fronts: the macropolitical and the micropolitical" (gatens, 1996b, p. 178).she argues for the need both to address the ways in which female subjectivity is constructed in a restrictive manner through various patriarchal institutions and discourses and to experiment with the possibilities of creating new discourses, ways of speaking about and speaking as women. according to gatens (1996b) "we do not have to choose between this or that: we may say feminist politics this and feminist politics that" (p. 178). acknowledging that there are multiple ways in which otherness is constructed, and similarly, multiple ways in which it is deconstructed, makes room for political movement and opens spaces for multiple and varied contributions to this project. such a framework means that if women and feminism are invested in multiple ways, then accordingly their struggles will be multiple. judith butler (1990) recognizes this potential when she argues that: if identities were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects, a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old. (p. 149) rather than searching for a new essentialist unity, donna haraway (1990) argues that there has been a "growing recognition of another response through coalition affinity, not identity" (p. 197). haraway (1990) goes on to remind us that: the permanent partiality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. we do not need a totality in order to work well. the feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of a perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. (p. 215) taking up haraway's (1990) rejection of a "dream of a common language" (p. 215) and sharing butler's and gatens' concern for a new configuration of feminism, rosi braidotti (1994a) calls for a nomadic type of feminist practice, "where discontinuities, transformations, shifts of levels and locations can be accounted for, exchanged, and talked about" (p. 172). braidotti (1994a) draws on and extends deleuze and guattari's (1987) notion of nomadic subjectivity to detail a sexually specific kind of feminist consciousness that uses both the macro-politics of the fixed identity woman and the micro-politics of women in a politically transformative process she calls "becoming-post-woman-women" (p. 169). the nomad appeals to braidotti because of its abilities to pass through occupied territories (such as universities) while remaining in excess of them its necessity of operation on partial and discontinuous identities and its ability to make transitory connections. it is precisely because of the nomad's ability to make transient connections and its transgressive and mobile image that braidotti (1994a) has chosen this as her figuration for a new feminist subjectivity and politics. she writes: being a nomad, living in transition, does not mean that one cannot or is unwilling to create those necessarily stable and reassuring bases for identity that allow one to function in a community. rather, nomadic consciousness consists in not taking any kind of identity as permanent. the nomad is only passing through; s/he makes those necessarily situated connections that can help her/him to survive, but s/he never takes on fully the limits of the national, fixed identity. the nomad has no passport or has too many of them. (p. 33) as an insistence on mobility and a refusal to be 'pinned down' or trapped within the options offered by masculinist discourses is one of the hallmarks of nomadic feminism, we find that it provides the means to break out of the limited options detailed above. indeed, nomadic subjectivity exists in excess of the limitations of a context. in braidotti's (1994a) terms: "as an intellectual style, nomadism consists not so much in being homeless, as in being capable of recreating your home everywhere" (p. 16). the nomad, she argues: [i]s a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire or nostalgia for fixity...[it] expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts...without and against an essential unity...as deleuze put it, the point of an intellectual nomad is about crossing boundaries, about the act of going (braidotti, 1994a, p. 23) while nomadic subjectivity is primarily about the 'act of going', movement for its own sake is not the point: the goal of any nomadic journey is always to destabilize the binary terms that it moves between. furthermore, where one goes depends (for braidotti) on where one starts and one of the coordinates here is sexual difference. thus embodied identity is the starting point of nomadic journeys. three levels of sexual difference are central to braidotti's project of the feminist nomadism and they all have to do with theorizing difference as positive. first, the difference between the sexes; second, differences among women; and third, the differences within each woman. at each of these levels, braidotti's model of nomadic feminism answers our own need for ways of conceptualizing women in education and women in research that do not fall back into simplistic or essentializing categories. level one the central strategy of the first level of the project is the political need to locate subjectivity in the body. this is not a call for essentialist notions of a natural body but for embodied subjectivity which, as a site of difference, replaces the universal subject (male, white, middle-class, and heterosexual) with one structured by a multiplicity of intersecting axes such as gender, sexuality, race, age and ethnicity. such a strategy is extremely useful for feminist attempts to de-essentialize the body for it denies the universalizing assumptions of man as the norm against which woman is devalued and makes visible the specificities of both male and female subjectivities. as she writes: the starting point for the project of sexual difference level one remains the political will to assert the specificity of lived, female bodily experience... and the will to reconnect the whole debate on difference to the bodily existence and experience of women. (braidotti, 1994a, p. 160) at this level, the project of nomadic feminism provides a way of speaking about the differences between the sexes not in essentializing/phallocentric terms as deviations or devaluations but as differentially situated, embodied, and asymmetrical speaking positions. at this first level, then, braidotti's political project is concerned with the affirmation of embodied subjectivity that is combined, by necessity, with the critique of supposedly neutral theoretical models. for those of us working at cqu, this involves recognizing that women who undertake research do so in particular bodies that are positioned in different relationships to the university generally and the research culture/activities more specifically. level two the second level of braidotti's political agenda is based on acknowledging the differences among women. this involves conjugating the specifics of female subjectivity with the feminist concern for the deconstruction of the signifier 'woman as other'. here the coordinates of the molar identity "woman" set the specific starting points for a feminist process of becoming. the starting point for this strategy is the recognition that the political project of feminism has a commitment to deconstructing the phallocentric signifier of 'woman' and to celebrating the many differences between women. this second level is about denying the monolithic and essential category of 'woman' as it has been historically produced and moving to an understanding of women. at this level, women at cqu are challenged to acknowledge in more than just a tokenistic fashion the existence and significance of substantial differences between us. while our quest for a presence and a voice within the university culture has encouraged us to present a 'united front' it is vital that our attempts to communicate to those in powerful positions about our shared experiences of disadvantage do not become an excuse for denying the point that not all women at cqu nor anywhere else are disadvantaged in the same way or for the same reasons. nor, indeed, do they feel the same way about their positions/experiences. level three braidotti's final point is to highlight the differences within each woman. here, she uses the nomadic model of embodied subjectivity to view difference as internal to the subject where our desires cause a multiplicity within ourselves. subjectivity does not correspond to consciousness. instead, our multiplicity is characterized by both conscious and unconscious desires. according to braidotti (1994a): what feminism liberates in women is also their desire for freedom, lightness, justice, and self-accomplishment. these values are not only rational political beliefs, they are also objects of intense desire. (p. 167) this desire towards feminism connects the three layers of braidotti's (1994a) map of feminist subjectivity for it is activated by personal experience and is a precondition for the capacity to articulate feminist politics as "willful social transformation" (p. 167). overall, braidotti's political project is to provide female feminists with a map that depicts the multiple, sexually specific and often contradictory ways of conceptualizing female subjectivity. the feminist subject might use this map to navigate ways out of phallocentric gender dualisms and create new versions of "post-woman women" (braidotti, 1994a, p. 169). this is a call not for pluralism but for the interconnection of particularities that can be established through a recognition of diversity within feminists and feminisms. a crucial point here for women at cqu is that braidotti's identification of multiplicity as a 'real' and 'legitimate' characteristic of feminist thought and gender reform allows us to acknowledge and embrace our own diverse and multiple responses to our contexts. instead of searching for 'the one true path' to lead us out of a phallocentric culture, women are genuinely and consistently freed within this framework to recognize the multiple ways in which we can contribute to the transformation of university culture. processes of transformation braidotti's framework is valuable to us because it provides a liberating representation of the work associated with transforming university environments. as a critical strategy the multiple and mobile lines of nomadic feminism not only form connections between our lived experience and our critical activity, but they can also be used to form non-hierarchical, experimental, and transformative alliances across diverse fronts in a feminist community. our differences become strengths not weaknesses, as nomadic feminism charts political movement between different forms of resistance and conceptualizes multiple responses to specific contexts without privileging one form over the other. in this framework, the multiple ways in which women interact or represent themselves within specific contexts are not judged in relation to each other but, rather, can be conceptualized as multiple contributions to the process of social transformation. this is significant for it means that there is no need to work for one, essentially superior model of resistance or transformation. each response is conceptualized as contributing to social transformation. for this reason, braidotti (1994b) calls for a multiplicity of alternative subjectivities or what she (following haraway) calls feminist figurations. she argues: figurations are not pretty metaphors: they are politically informed maps, which play a crucial role at this point in the cartography of feminist corporeal materialism in that they aim at redesigning female subjectivity...in this respect, the more figurations that are disclosed in this phase of feminist practice, the better. (braidotti, 1994b, p. 181) braidotti also acknowledges the crucial point that while some figurations will constitute radical departures from norms for women, others may not; indeed others may have the appearance of fairly traditional feminine practice. what is significant is the way in which these traditions are taken into non-traditional spaces or territories. from this perspective, simply being a woman in a university can be a transgressive act. acknowledging that there are multiple ways in which women can deterritorialize traditional roles, images and spaces for women in universities is an important means of making visible diverse ways of being a 'female academic', a 'feminist', or a 'woman'. this allows women to recognize their own contributions to the broad political project of feminist reform, without requiring them to demonstrate how their contribution matches up to any feminist dogma. such a framework might prevent us from being immobilized in orthodoxy. in other words, it might enable us to move beyond feelings of inadequacy and anxiety about not settling in the 'correct' position: feelings that can have such an inhibiting effect on new feminist practice. relinquishing this desire for the one 'true' way forward, makes room for multiple, diverse and, at times, contradictory pathway towards social and political transformation. this is crucial, for, it is only by working across multiple fronts that the resistance and transformation of masculinist, patriarchal or phallocentric cultures becomes conceivable. just as importantly, this nomadic framework allows for the diverse pathways followed by individuals in their transformative projects to be acknowledged as important and strategic political interventions. section four: nomadic subjectivity and women in universities: what can it mean for us? rather than concluding this paper with a discrete example of nomadic practice, we want to highlight the politics and practices of nomadism in terms of multiple characteristics, which are themselves unstable, shifting and most importantly, open to negotiation and contestation. this can work as a framework to energize and sustain us in the work of gender reform, rather than as a set of prescriptive guidelines that would ultimately alienate and exhaust us. from our perspective, nomadic subjects are feminists engaged in the fundamentally political project of reconceptualizing difference as a positivity (hills, 1998). sustaining this project is a commitment to the creation of alliances across and within disciplines and physical locations. from this basis, a nomadic politics and different nomadic subjects may share some of the following characteristics: a commitment to identifying the phallocentric bias inherent in our culture, which manifests itself particularly in the tendency to leap from the particular to the universal (braidotti, 1994a, p. 219) and a determined insistence on the politics of sexual difference a commitment to occupying and deterritorializing spaces traditionally coded as masculine and feminine and opening up new possibilities for self-image and identification in women by attaching meanings to the site that transgresses traditional and dominant meanings; by occupying spaces traditionally coded as male women may make connections or assemblages with the signifying practices of that space in order to problematize, exhaust and denaturalize these conventions an associated commitment to the transgression and displacement of the cultural codes of gender and the interruption and deconstruction of conventional images of "woman" a refusal to rank or hierarchize various figurations and a critique of the implicit system of values conveyed by high theory in its support of a conventional image of thought (braidotti, 1994a, p. 211) a desire to make connections across disciplines and across time zones: in a process known as "female bonding" (braidotti, 1994a, p. 207) clearly, this list is not exhaustive. while the characteristics outlined above clearly operate in terms of the feminist commitment to personal and cultural change, they are not constrained within rigid or formulaic notions of what that change should look like or how it should be achieved. for example, the women in research group at the central queensland university has taken an inclusive approach to the support of research by, for, and about women, a significantly under-represented group in research endeavors at this university as in others across the country. this strategic choice has not been a 'watering down' of feminist agendas nor a 'failure of nerve' to be separatist but rather a recognition that multiplicity, diversity and the often unlikely alliances that spring from them are crucial political interventions into the complex and shifting institutional contexts of our present time. as braidotti (1994a) puts it, "nomadic politics is a matter of bonding, of coalitions, of interconnections" (p. 35). from our perspective, a new politics based on nomadic consciousness enables feminists to operate on multiple fronts and meet the increasingly diverse challenges within and across the shifting dynamics of university culture. we find the strategies of nomadic practice extremely productive because they allow us to challenge very different but equally phallocentric ways of defining feminists from positions, which remain in excess of binaristic structures. in other words, the figuration of the nomad appeals to us because it enables us to articulate our difficult relation to both the patriarchal discourses of university culture and the exclusionary discourses of political dogma while speaking as feminist academics. the figure of the nomad, then, is a way of articulating the paradoxical relation of women and university culture for it is both inside and outside the terrain it covers. it also allows us to celebrate difference among and within women. from this perspective, disagreement, opposition, and contradiction are not seen as signs of weakness but rather they are important markers of the necessarily complex, diverse and multiple positions taken up by feminists across the political spectrum. from this basis we would argue that it is a matter of political urgency for women to take up multiple positions within university culture: deterritorializing traditionally male environments and reinventing them for a post-gender age. thus, as women in higher education travel in diverse directions, resisting settlement and fixity, adopting fluid, multiple and mobile subjectivities, and operating across and against boundaries and borders, they open up new possibilities for post-woman-women within all spaces of the academy. some parting comments this paper has described the geographically and historically specific politicized space of the central queensland university and has charted some of the ways in which women are 'positioned' and how they can 're-position' themselves within this space. the feminist engagement with nomadism discussed above offers a particular means of surveying, contesting and transforming this territory. however, we do not want to argue that there is anything inherently radical about nomadic practices nor that they will be transgressive or transformative in every context. indeed, we want to make it clear that we are not arguing for the adoption of nomadic feminism per se. nomadic feminism is one strategy currently adopted by women at this university who are facing the dilemma of yet another backlash. ironically, the one constant we can count on is that the specificities of this context will shift. it is on this point, however, that nomadic feminism can be most instructive for it enables us to see that as our context changes so must our responses to it change. we cannot rely on habituated responses or purist dogmas but must be mobile enough to develop new strategies that are specific to the constantly altering self-representations of a regional university. such a strategy has the political ability to "call into being new, alternative ways of constructing the female subject" (braidotti, 1994a, p. 208). this new mode of appreciating feminist activity in higher education might then resonate with the feminist desire for personal and cultural change, and enable us to transform how we conceptualize both women and universities. dr. elizabeth hills is a lecture in multimedia in the faculty of informantics and communications at the central queensland university, rockhampton, australia. dr. hills can be reached via e-mail at e.hills@cqu.edu.au dr. leonie rowan is a senior lecturer in the faculty of education and creative arts at the central queensland university, rockhampton, australia. dr. rowan can be reached at l.rowan@cqu.edu.au endnotes iit is important to acknowledge that the structure, constitution, and eventual activities of this group were not easily developed. there were serious differences among those who attended initial meetings concerning the best way to address the problem as well as considerable disagreement concerning the nature of the problem itself. these differences of opinion related, among other things, to issues such as: the image the group wished to present; the extent to which it should identify itself as overtly feminist or even as targeted exclusively at women, whether or not men were entitled to membership of the group; whether or not it was possible for the group to work for change 'within' traditional university structures; or whether it was necessary/desirable to pursue a more radical model whereby the women declared their independence from existing university structures, and of course, the processes by which decisions about these preceding questions would be made. clearly, all of these debates have occurred among many different women in many different environments throughout the world. what we are interested in here is the collective anxiety of the group to forge a 'coherent' and 'singular' identity and the long-term consequences that this has had. ultimately, the 'majority' of the members were keen to ensure that the group developed a high profile within the university and that its eventual policies and activities were widely understood and uniformly promoted. inevitably, this meant that some members of the initial working party were dissatisfied by the decisions taken by the group and withdrew. those who remained within the working party adopted what might be called a "gorbachev" approach to reform seeking to effect change from within the existing university structures and through negotiation rather than confrontation. the resultant terms of reference and activities reflected this decision. references affirmative action working party. (1996). affirmative action initiatives for women at central queensland university. rockhampton: equity office, central queensland university. bacchi, c. l. (1990). same difference: feminism and sexual difference. north sydney: allen and unwin. braidotti, r. (1994a). nomadic subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. new york: columbia university press. braidotti, r. (1994b). toward a new nomadism: feminist deleuzian tracks; or, metaphysics and metabolism. in c. boundas d. olkowski (eds.) gilles deleuze and the theater of philosophy, (pp. 159-182). new york: routledge. butler, j. (1990). gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. new york: routledge. cox, r., eade, g., gregor, s., mcnamee, j. (1995). research factors: an interim report. rockhampton: equity office, central queensland university. deleuze, g., guattari, f. (1987). a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. b. massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. gatens, m. (1996a). imaginary bodies: ethics, power and corporeality. london: routledge. gatens, m. (1996b). through a spinozist lens: ethology, difference, power. in p. patton (ed.), deleuze: a critical reader, (pp. 162-187). oxford: blackwell publishers. grosz, e. (1989). sexual subversions. sydney: allen unwin. haraway, d. (1990). a manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology and socialist feminism in the 1980's. in l. nicholson (ed.), feminism/postmodernism (pp. 190233). new york: routledge. hills, e. (1996, november). becoming action-heroine: reconceiving images of powerful women in the new action cinema. paper presented at the deleuze symposium, university of western australia, perth. hills, e. (1998, march). the action heroine as feminist figuration: mapping the transgressive potential of hollywood's post-woman-women. unpublished ph.d. thesis. central queensland university, rockhampton. mulherin, j., gregor, s., rowan, l. (1996). challenging the glass ceiling: an investigation of the impact of structural factors on women's career advancement at cqu. interim report. rockhampton: equity office, central queensland university. porter, p. (1986). gender and education. geelong: deakin university. rich, a. (1979). on lies, secrets, and silence: selected prose. new york: norton. wearing, b. (1996). gender: the pain and pleasure of difference. melbourne: longman. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or 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and the superintendency, lessons learned diana m. bourisaw, ph.d. “the obstacle is the path.” zen proverb the tale the weather on the west coast was wonderful. days were sunny, scenery was beautiful, and the school district was challenging. her responsibilities as area superintendent in this sprawling urban setting far exceeded those of a ceo in smaller school districts. but this west coast wonderland was not where she wanted to rear her children. although dr. rita clark had been recruited for this challenging position, she soon yearned to return home to the midwest. so the job search began. through a network of friends and colleagues, headhunters learned of her interest in a superintendency and included rita on the interview circuit. with an updated resume she began interviewing in the midwest. the process was going well, but dr. clark was not on the receiving end of any job offers. it did not take long to realize that her inclusion in the interview pool was only as the token woman. the school districts, as well as the superintendent search firms, could then say they interviewed a diverse slate of candidates, including a woman. to expand her opportunities, dr. clark began interviewing in school districts with differing demographics than her urban roots. the superintendent search soon led dr. clark to a sprawling school district within an hour’s drive of her hometown. this school district was significant in size, 11,000 students. the previous superintendent had been dismissed, and a veteran assistant superintendent was serving as interim. dr. clark was eager to attain her first superintendency. the excitement of breaking through the glass ceiling, leading for success, and serving as the first female superintendent in the county led her to personally minimize some issues that would later resurface. the urban school district she was leaving had a wealth of diversity and high poverty. that school district embraced change and accepted its culturally diverse community and representative leadership. now rita was relocating to a predominately caucasian district with very few students receiving free or reduced price meals. the majority of community members were of the working class with a growing number of young file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/index.html professionals. but more importantly, a large church’s leadership and congregation dominated the power structure of the community, and many of its members filled district employment ranks. local city and county government had a history of turmoil, and school board elections were plagued with dirty politics. after several days of interviews with the school board, staff and students, dr. clark was offered the position. the minutes reported by the board of education meetings reflected a unanimous vote in favor of hiring dr. clark. behind closed doors, the vote was 5 to 2, a division that would be significant later on. although her three-year contract was signed in march, dr. clark did not begin her duties until july 1. school board elections were held in april, and before dr. clark arrived in the district, the composition of the board had changed. with each election this trend continued.... the district had a pattern of promoting through the ranks, teacher, and coach, athletic director, principal, then central office administrator. position, relationship, and loyalty rather than performance and certification were criteria for promotions. men dominated the promotion ranks, climbing the leadership hierarchy based on potential, not performance. within a few weeks of dr. clark’s arrival, a veteran assistant superintendent approached her. mr. o’donnell was a typical central office administrator in this school district. he was born and reared in the school district and had gone from winning coach to assistant superintendent. mr. o’donnell was not certified for the position nor had he demonstrated the desire to expand his education credentials. he described important concerns such as sexual harassment as “boys will be boys” and wanted nothing to do with recruiting “outsiders” to fill school district administrative ranks. “outsiders” referred to persons of color, not just women. dr. clark tried working with the existing staff through in school district professional development and formal certification coursework. knowing the relationship of these veteran administrators to school board members, rita planned to wait for their retirement, including mr. o’donnell’s. but mr. o’donnell’s comments at that moment were defining and would shape the remainder of her superintendency in the school district. “dr. clark, ” he began, “we weren’t so much surprised they hired a woman; we were surprised they hired a catholic.” while she was shocked and surprised at his remarks, rita minimized their significance. for a fleeting moment, she realized all previous school district superintendents attended the “church on the hill” and were male. additionally, two former superintendents were related by marriage, one marrying another’s niece. dr. clark assumed the new school board had decided to change this hiring pattern and would be supportive of other school district changes. indeed, this assumption was correct. the school board that hired rita would support change, but with each passing election the school board members who supported leadership from “outsiders” would become the minority. in the weeks that followed, dr. clark met with the assistant superintendent for business to develop a fiveyear budget projection and present it to the superintendent’s cabinet. he, too, had risen through the ranks from teacher and coach to principal and then business manager. mr. warren was not certified for his current position and received his training on the job from the former superintendent, another relative. while he was skeptical of making budget projections, mr. warren agreed to the task. at the next cabinet meeting, budget projections were presented, indicating the school district would be bankrupt in four years. the school district per pupil expenditure was significantly below state average already. additionally academic indicators reflected declining test scores, which would begin jeopardizing the school district and lead to reduced district accreditation. dr. clark assembled academic and fiscal task forces and began improvement efforts. within four years, school district fund balances climbed to 42%, all indicators of academic achievement improved, two new schools were completed ahead of schedule, class size was reduced, and the taxpayers’ burden was lowered. had dr. clark been ceo of a major corporation, the school board would have voted a sizable raise. however, this was not the case. in a closed session meeting with a 5-2 vote, the board passed a resolution to terminate her contract effective june 30th! warning signs were there warning signs leading to this resolution? why was dr. clark stunned by this seeming turn of events? why would a school board fire its ceo when results were improving? did the school board have to dismiss dr. clark? the list of district successes during dr. clark’s tenure was significant. why did the board choose this course of action? dr. clark received her school board evaluation in january of the current school year. with minor exceptions, the board evaluation was extremely positive. the vote was 7-0 to extend rita’s contract. but school board elections were held each april and two new school board members from the “church on the hill” were seated. the balance of power on the board shifted. the dismissal vote came seven weeks after the school board election, and at the beginning of her second three-year contract. this vote to dismiss occurred at the june board meeting, hardly a time to seek another superintendent or for dr. clark to begin job hunting. the school board had been micromanaging more than usual, becoming increasingly concerned about religious issues in the district. now five of the current school board members attended the same large church and held the same mind set about women in leadership. to work with this new male dominated school board and to address their concerns, dr. clark attended events at their church, with their pastor, and enrolled her two children in several church sponsored activities. dr. clark was unaware of the church’s stance regarding women. the church pastor believed a woman’s place was in the home rearing children and taking care of her husband. the church’s view of christianity was also limited to a specific doctrine excluding catholics such as dr. clark and her family. during the months that followed “church on the hill” members referred to dr. clark’s children as atheists, and rita was deemed a “bad mother” because she worked outside the home. the views of the church leadership were definitely different than those held by rita. prior to the school board’s vote to dismiss dr. clark, topics such as teaching evolution, prayer at school board meetings, and other issues surfaced on school board agendas. school board members, after all, were concerned about the children. even with the school board’s new focus, dr. clark believed the school district was on the right path and changing course at this time would be disastrous. the school district’s course of action was charted, and there were significant signs of progress. why would the school board change captains when the ship was headed in the right course? rita’s family had settled into life in the school district. her husband opened a small business close to home, and the children had adjusted well to their new schools. the clarks had no desire to relocate the family again. prior to rita’s entering the school building where the board meeting was held, a reporter approached a school district principal, mistaking her for dr. clark. the reporter received a tip that the school board would fire dr. clark that evening. was it true, the reporter asked? the principal thought the statement was misinformation and told the reporter so. the reporter stayed to write the story. the business meeting was unusually short, and the school board went into closed session. this time the board told dr. clark to step out of the room. rita had never been excluded from a closed session and was surprised by the school board’s request. nervously, she waited outside the door. school district central office administrators waited as well. like sharks in a feeding frenzy, these school district insiders were waiting for the smell of blood, waiting for the announcement of rita’s dismissal. they held inside information known only by school board members. these veterans knew what action would be taken that evening. the only one in the dark was rita. the closed session adjourned, and several school board members quickly exited the building. the school board attorney met with dr. clark to review the board’s discussion. the board approved a resolution to release dr. clark at the end of the fiscal year, june 30th. and, if no leaks were made to the press prior to this date, the school board would pay rita one year’s salary, less than the three-year contract they approved in january. in shock, rita left the meeting, confused and alone. over the next several days, dr. clark went to her school district office, limiting her communication with staff, debating and strategizing. she contacted a mentor and close friend to seek his advice regarding her course of action. should she take the settlement? her instinct was to reject the settlement, but she wanted to confirm her analysis with a trusted friend. this friend was a current superintendent and a former boss. jim provided her the direction she thought he would, telling her to stay and fight. rita respected jim’s opinion. she always had. he had helped her professionally and was a personal friend. many times she watched jim take the high road when the other path would have been easier on him. the need to make a decision to fight or flee was prompted by a leak to the local media. a local newspaper published an editorial cartoon portraying the closed session school board meeting. the editorial section of this paper was well read by the school community, and the newspaper’s veteran cartoonist had an uncanny flair for accuracy. clearly, someone other than dr. clark had leaked the story to the press. immediately the school board accused dr. clark of leaking the story. why would rita want information about her impending dismissal in the local paper, she asked? the media leak provided the school board a reason to remove dr. clark as their superintendent and not honor their “offer”. the day following the editorial cartoon, a courier knocked at the clark residence to deliver a letter from the school board attorney banning dr. clark from all school property. the school district’s director of safety and security would escort rita to her office to pack her personal effects. the school board was delivering dismissal charges. if dr. clark refused to vacate her position, the school board would proceed with dismissal. rita could not recall anything she had done or did not do as superintendent to warrant charges. what were these charges? moving a school district from bankruptcy to financial solvency? raising student achievement? lowering class size? dr. clark was banned from school grounds and from her own children’s school. she could no longer take the children to school or pick them up from school or school events. to remedy the situation, the school district director of safety and security escorted her children to and from her car while she parked on the side of the road off school grounds. the children attended a summer enrichment program and were confused and upset by this new routine. at the clark residence, the phone continuously rang. reporters, friends, and colleagues called to offer support and seek information. newfound friends arrived at the residence. letters, flowers, and cards poured into the clark home. rita’s was energized by this support. she decided to stay and fight. the dismissal rita’s phone rang from early in the morning until late at night. the word was out. a superintendent was going to fight dismissal. it was rarely done and rarely successful. it had every aspect of a good story: gender and religious discrimination. media calls poured in from all over the country. radio, television, and newspapers kept this story alive. dr. clark and her attorney were featured on every local radio talk show and television station in the area. additionally, a nationally recognized editorial writer and cartoonist supported rita by keeping the issue in the daily media and obviously lampooning the school board. groups from left to right covered this event. anytime dr. clark’s attorney called a press conference, it was well attended. the school board majority worked diligently to develop a list of charges upon which to base rita’s dismissal. they searched her computer for inappropriate emails. they scoured school district financial records to seek improprieties. they sought staff member accusations. the result was 19 allegations, and the charges were published in the paper for all to see. the conflict was heating up. dr. clark decided to let the community try her case. she was not guilty of any of these allegations. they were twisted statements about not hiring someone or promotion issues. rita knew they could be easily dismissed and decided to exercise her right to a public hearing. the school board attempted to limit attendance at the public hearings. tickets were issued and the event was scheduled at the school district’s small board office. the media coverage generated extensive public interest resulting in the need to move the hearing to the school district’s 1,500-seat auditorium. meanwhile, students and patrons picketed school board meetings protesting dr. clark’s dismissal. letters flew back and forth in the media, and a barrage of editorials, cartoons, and articles appeared in numerous publications. a grass roots group emerged to support rita’s battle and resulted in rallies, distribution of tshirts focusing on dr. clark’s experience, and websites devoted to her dismissal. at the first scheduled hearing, people waited outside the auditorium for three hours in order to secure a seat. newspaper columnists, patrons, staff, and television stations filled the seats and lined the corridors. signs and banners were seen throughout this large facility. while dr. clark maintained her innocence, she was aware the school board would not rest until they were vindicated in their dismissal decision. they had financial resources to do so, dollars rita had helped secure for the school district, and the 42% fund balance that existed as a result of rita’s leadership. dr. clark and her attorney arrived shortly before the first hearing began. it was difficult to locate a parking place and even more difficult for dr. clark to walk into the auditorium. the church the five school board members attended was powerful and demonstrated the ability to secure large crowds at any community event. the tone of those seated in the auditorium could impact the outcome of this public hearing. dr. clark walked into the auditorium to rounds of applause bringing the crowd to its feet. while there were supporters of the school board majority, they were in the minority during the hearings. and, as suspected, the school board’s allegations against dr. clark lacked substance. the hearings continued for several nights. eventually the school board dropped the charges and paid dr. clark the remaining amount on her contract, three years salary. within two months of her dismissal, dr. clark was offered a position as an interim state supervisor, supervising the school district that dismissed her. while dr. clark weathered the financial storm, the impact to her professional and personal life has yet to be determined. dealing with dismissal historically the dismissal or forced resignation of school district superintendents was a rare event and occurred with minimal public awareness. the departure of a superintendent was the result of the superintendent’s choice, not based on political conflict with the school board. now superintendents are fired or forced out by their school board at alarming rates. of those that do leave, 16.7% leave as a result of school board conflict, and 10% to 12% are forced out through resignation or retirement (pardini, 1999). school board and superintendent conflict can be traced to differences in values and philosophy. prior to seeking a school superintendency, dr. clark sought guidance from her mentor and friend, jim. jim advised rita that performance had little to do with longevity in the school superintendency. contract renewal was political, not performance driven. while jim’s words resonated in her ears, dr. clark chose to work hard, focusing on the needs of the district and children. rita worked diligently, without regard to the political changes occurring around her including her evolving school board. as with dr. clark’s changing school board, more and more school board candidates are running on special interest platforms (pardini, 1999). with a changing school board comes a changing district focus. school district superintendents are often hired by one school board then fired by another. today’s school boards are not the rubber stamp boards they once were. instead, these new school board members want to micromanage, becoming involved in day-to-day operations. dr. clark’s school board was no different. board members, motives and conflict “nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” abraham lincoln power in the hands of those with personal agendas can result in actions that have negative results for the organization. school boards and school board members have become increasingly self-focused, creating conflict between the school district superintendent and the school board (mountford, 2004). this conflict can be compounded when the school board is predominately male and the superintendent is a woman (hess, 2002). female and male school board members exhibit differing styles of power. male school board members are more authoritarian in their leadership style while female school board members use a collaborative approach to decision making (mountford, 2004). this same style of power applies to men and women in the school superintendency. male school superintendents tend to have an authoritarian approach to leadership and decision making while women are more collaborative. the top down leadership style of many male superintendent candidates appeals to these male dominated school boards. this leadership match increases the potential for selection of male superintendent candidates. no matter what their religious or gender beliefs, a male dominated school board and a female superintendent can have a natural conflict of style. the male dominance of school boards is a barrier to the hiring of female superintendents with male board members searching for leaders who mirror their own leadership tendencies. mountford’s (2004) research suggests that an increase in female board members could result in an increase in the hiring of female school district superintendents. until that time, female superintendent candidates have a reduced opportunity for selection and, after attaining the position, have a limited opportunity for success. finding the fit female superintendent candidates have limited opportunities for selection and fewer opportunities to find the right district for their leadership style. finding the right school district superintendency is much like finding the right pair of shoes. school districts, like shoes, come in many sizes and styles small, medium, large, rural, suburban, and urban. a school board should find the candidate that fits their superintendent vacancy. evaluating the candidate match includes reviewing previous experience, education and training, and success in similar districts. the superintendent selection criteria should not include exclusion based on gender. where are all the women in the superintendent selection process? has the number of women in educational leadership positions improved? there are an increasing number of women in the educational administration pipeline (ringel, gates, chaung, brown & ghosh-dastidar, 2004), but the number of female superintendents has remained fairly stagnant over the years, at about 13% (glass, 2000). women superintendents continue to be hired at a lesser rate than those of their male counterparts. where are these courageous women leaders? as dr. clark experienced, during the interview process women are often part of a diversity slate of school superintendent candidates. a school board interviews their slate of candidates searching for the right leader for their school district. school board members ask each superintendent candidate questions trying to determine the individual’s values, beliefs, and leadership style. the school board members, and often search consultant, try to find the perfect match for their school district’s vacancy. while candidate gender is rarely discussed during this selection process, it is an underlying criterion for many school boards (tallerico, 2000). school boards continue to select male superintendent candidates at an overwhelming rate. dr. clark was accepted a superintendency that appeared to fit, at least for a brief period. the school board making the job offer seemed eager for a change to a collaborative leadership style. dr. clark’s natural leadership emerged as she charged forward, building teams and trying to work with existing district staff. a deeper district analysis by rita would have uncovered a strong layer of resistance to this type of leadership, especially from a woman. epilogue during the several months following this experience, dr. clark joined the interview circuit again, making it to the final rounds of superintendent selection for several prestigious school districts. rita had lost her passion for the job, however, but not for education and children. while her gender and religion interfered with her longevity as superintendent of schools in the district she was in, it contributed to her life long passion as an educator who cares deeply for all children and their future. educating children is not about gender or religion – but it is about beliefs and values. dr. clark may have lost her job, but she did not lose her commitment to education. should dr. clark seek another superintendency, she now has knowledge about the role of gender and leadership, gender and school boards, and the power of a changing school board. most importantly rita has determined the importance of fit in the superintendency. prepared with this new knowledge, dr. clark has increased her chances of success in her next district. but more importantly, her leadership can once again benefit those that drew her to the profession – the children. references glass, t. e. (2000). where are all the women superintendents? school administrators quarterly 57(6), 2832. hess, f. (2002). school boards at the dawn of the 21st century: conditions and challenge of district governance (report prepared for the national school boards association). charlottesville: university of virginia, school of education and department of government. mountford, m. (2004). motives of power of school board members: implications for the school boardsuperintendent relationships. educational administration quarterly 40(5), 704-741. pardini, p. (1999, february). "when termination's in the air." school administrator web edition. retrieved from http://www.aasa.org/publications/sa/1999_02/pardini.htm. ringel, j., gates, s., chaung, c., brown, a., & ghosh-dastidar, b. (2004). career paths of school administrators in illinois: insight from an analysis of state data. wallace foundation, rand education. author diana m. bourisaw, ph.d. 7 toddington terrace st. louis, missouri 63128 home 314 843-8732 ce1l 314 -221-0147 fax 314-843-8734 dmbourisaw@ aol.com president, education options, ltd., www.edopts.com president, the bourisaw group executive vice president, dhr international, www.dhrintl.com adjunct professor, webster international university tallerico, m. (2000). accessing the superintendency. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.edopts.com/ http://www.dhrintl.com/ file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 19, fall 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] standing on the promises: the experiences of black women administrators in historically black institutions gaetane jean-marie university of oklahoma abstract earning a college degree was not easily attainable for black women during the civil rights movement. as the civil rights movement became a full-scale struggle, like many other blacks, the black women administrators in this study confronted and disrupted institutions thought to be responsible for their oppression. this study examines southern leadership discourses of black women administrators who came from a tradition of protest transmitted across generations by older relatives, black educational institutions, churches, and protest organizations (morris, 1984). what can an examination of university-level black women administrators inform with respect to the struggles, challenges, and successes they experience? only the black woman can say “when and where i enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole . . . race enters with me (giddings, 1984). -anna julia cooper, 1892 earning a college degree was not easily attainable for black women during the civil rights movement. the struggle for social justice was met with white resistance, denial, and hatred. black people and their allies persisted because social justice was at the heart of the economic, social, and political convictions that drove the women’s and black rights movements of the sixties and seventies (giddings, 1984) . as the civil rights movement became a full-scale struggle, like many other blacks, the black women administrators in this study confronted and disrupted institutions thought to be responsible for their oppression. after the brown v. board of education ruling to end segregation, blacks found themselves in new places where they were formerly denied entry. in these new settings, they experienced bias, discrimination, sexism, and racism as a result of gaining entry in historically white institutions. despite the injustices, women of color forged ahead to integrate public schools, and pursue higher education and professional careers. findings from research on black women administrators in one southeastern state are presented in this file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/index.html analysis. the study examines southern leadership discourses of black women administrators who came from a tradition of protest [that has been] transmitted across generations by older relatives, black educational institutions, churches, and protest organizations (morris, 1984). what can an examination of university-level black women administrators inform with respect to the struggles, challenges and successes they experience? background the participants’ narratives represent some of the complexities of black american identities and institutions in the 21st century. collins (1998) maintains that dialogue among black women that are attentive to both heterogeneity among them and shared concerns arise from a common social location such as historically black institutions. similarly, churches, families, and community organizations provide black women with the support to invoke dialogue as a dimension their epistemologies. a brief discussion of historically black institutions illuminates the role these institutions play in the academic preparation of black students. since their inceptions dating back to 1854 (garibaldi, 1984), the purpose of historically black institutions was to provide educational access to freed slaves, serve the black community, develop leaders, maintain historic traditions and values, and instill racial pride (sims, 1994). historically black institutions continue to serve as educational citadels and cultural repositories for the black community, as well as centers for social and political development. purpose of study and methodology the purpose of this study was to examine the southern leadership discourse and practices of black women administrators in historically black institutions. the focus of the study was to create a space for black women administrators to talk about their roles as educators, agency, and administrators. the qualitative method used is narrative research approach (casey, 1995-96, 1993; riessman, 1993). the participants’ life stories describe the diversity of their experiences providing an opportunity to hear voices rarely heard within the public domain (benjamin, 1997; fonow & cook, 1991; gilligan, 1982, gluck & patai, 1992; reinharz, 1992). participants were randomly selected after a search on how many historically black institutions were located in one southeastern state. nineteen participants were interviewed for the study over the course of four months; however, the data collected for use in this study were first obtained by jean-marie (2002) in her dissertation research. thematic issues explored in the study include identity; the impact of racism and sexism reflected and reinforced in historically black and white institutions; communal values; spiritual/religious, economic, and political discourses in historically black institutions. for the purpose of this discussion, the focus is on six participants whose leadership practices seek to advance social justice (jean-marie, 2004). to ensure anonymity, pseudonyms are used to identify participants to minimize disclosure of specific information about individual lives. the participants are dean frazier, drs. giddens, owens, royster, johnson, and president murphy. all of them except dr. royster have taught in public schools prior to their transition to higher education, and her work experiences are from the corporate world. president murphy’s, dean frazier’s, and drs. johnson’s educational experiences were at both historically black and white institutions; drs. giddens and royster attended only historically black institutions to pursue their studies. dr. owens obtained her degrees from historically white institutions. the administrators presently serve in the capacity of vice president and associate vice chancellor of academic affairs, dean of school education, university president, faculty professor (and former department chair), and vice chancellor of student affairs. discussion on becoming a social justice advocate: experiences of personal struggles because every text has a context (casey, 1993), the historical background of the women administrators’ narratives is essential to understanding their self-definitions. born and raised during the periods of segregation and integration, the women administrators experienced the social and political upheavals of that era. for some, “separate but equal” policy and norms applied while others experienced, during the early years of integration, the resistance of whites. despite the resistance of some southern states, blacks began to integrate white public schools. dr. royster, vice chancellor of student affairs, also recalls the transitional years of integration: i was in eighth grade in 1963 when they [school system] integrated the school system in hampton, virginia. so when they [her parents] said to me when i was 14, “yes, you have a choice about whether you should go to the all black high school or whether you go help continue to integrate this white high school”; it was really no choice. it was something you had to do. my father said, “well you have to.” he said, “we didn’t go through all this just because.” so i didn’t go reluctantly; it made sense to do it. that’s what the struggle was all about. (dr. royster, personal communication) this sense of urgency sets in motion dr. royster’s commitment to social justice, a cause many blacks advocated in the civil rights movements. blacks were involved in civil rights efforts “through demonstrations, marches and acts of civil disobedience” (willie, garibaldi, & reed, 1991) to improve the conditions of its people. their efforts to revolutionize american institutions, laws, and policies often came with personal sacrifices and suffering. while in their late teens and early twenties, the participants also confront other prejudices during the transitional years of integration. they include for examples being tracked because of their color and called “nigger” on a white college campus. one particular account of prejudice is that of dr. giddens, professor of biology & former administrator: i’ll never forget one professor on the first day of class. he told me in front of the class that i didn’t exist as far as he was concerned. i was a waste of his time. i was never to raise my hand in class or come to his office for help because i was taking up the space that a boy should occupy. all i was going to do is get married and have babies. so, i stayed in his class and true to his form, he never called my name on the roll or was available to me for any kind of assistance at any time. (dr. giddens, personal communication) despite the prejudices, dr. giddens determined she was going to succeed in college. she sums, “people predicted that i would never last which i should probably thank them for it. it made me determined that i would last until i decided to go and not when they decided for me to go.” these experiences, explains dr. royster “help make you tough. all were a part of god’s plan for me”. the discrimination experienced by the women administrators persisted in their pursuit of terminal degrees and professional careers. for some, they encountered racists and sexists demarcations within historically black and white institutions. dr. johnson illuminates her college experiences: the experience there at harvard university really toughened me. i had the misfortune of getting an advisor who was very sexist and racist. i remember one day being in the laboratory and this man said to me, “why don’t you go back to georgetown to get your degree? . . . then one day he took me in the office and said, “i think you need to take a master’s.” i asked him, “are you saying these things to me because i am a woman and black. he replied, “you are quite justified in your opinion.” (dr. johnson, personal communication) after that incident, dr. johnson concluded that harvard university was not the best environment to continue her graduate studies. with the hope of having a positive experience, she enrolled at another historically white institution; however, she soon realized that the climate of the department was also racist: towards the completion of my doctoral degree, my mentor, an asian professor decided that i was not going to finish. i really went through some changes with him. i said, “god is there some reason that i keep running into these experiences?” i really went through some major changes, but i never gave up. but in december of 1988, i shall never forget it; the man was telling me what i was indicating as the extract analysis was inaccurate. he said, “i’ve got a colored girl.” i said, “excuse me! this is 1988.” i said, “colored!” you mean to tell me, i’ve been going through all of this because of my color. so, i left the lab. for about four months, i never went back to the laboratory. dr. owens, associate vice chancellor of academic affairs draws attention to gender discrimination at her institution: i think there are times when assignments are given and resources are allocated, i don’t get as many resources as my male counterparts. it is as if you can always do more with less. but i don’t try to look at it that way. i try to figure out how i am going to get it done and move on. i can complain. i can make it known and then i have to move on. (dr. owens, personal communication) according to moses (1997),”black women, including faculty and administrators on historically black campuses, experience and must deal with not only the effects of racism but also those of sexism. racism and sexism may be so fused in a given situation that it is difficult to tell which is which (p. 25)”. after being asked to teach botany at norfolk state university, dr. johnson did not think she would face discrimination at a historically black institution. she sums: it was the harvard, the georgetown experience all over again. but this time, it was a black environment; it was because i was a woman. when i went there, they really needed me. they negotiated with me and at the time the governor had put a freeze on hiring so they had to put me on a temporary contract which i would get every semester. when my chair asked for a copy of the contract, i had no idea that he didn’t know what i made. he and the dean got together and cut my salary in half. i refused to sign it. (dr. johnson, personal communication) pay inequities were not the only problem of sexism toward black women in historically black and white institutions. dr. johnson’s probing into the sexist climate of the department led to other findings of inequities (e.g. women were typically paid less, the wife of a married couple in the same dept. made less than her husband, none of the divisions in the science dept. had a woman chair, etc.). committed to social justice, dr. johnson brought her concerns to the vice president of faculty affair but these issues were ignored. in protest, she declined taking a contract the following year. glazer-ramo (2001) asserts that as “more women earn professional degrees for entry into traditionally male professions, women faculty [and administrators] experience isolation, exclusion from informal networks, and systemic discrimination in higher education (p. 145)”. dr. johnson’s recollection of the sexism at her former institution speaks to glazer-ramo’s (2001) analysis on the challenges women face in their profession. given the challenges the women administrators encounter in their educational and professional experiences, with the exception of president murphy, they rely on their religious/spiritual beliefs to transcend their struggles. it is to their religious/spiritual beliefs the discussion draws attention. faith affirming stance: the significance of their spiritual/religious beliefs the women administrators’ determination to hold steadfast to their commitment to social justice despite the prejudices and discrimination is analogous to the gospel hymn of r. k. carter (1849), standing on the promises. deeply committed to their religious beliefs, this verse symbolizes the women administrators’ faith: standing on the promises that cannot fail, when the howling storms of doubt assail, by the living word of god i shall prevail, standing on the promises of god. in some instances, the women administrators view their negative schooling and professional experiences as part of their purpose. they conclude that these experiences have a greater meaning beyond the present circumstances. for example, dr. johnson recalls a difficult moment at a former university: i asked myself, “why am i going through these changes?” but, god did not want me to leave that university. he had me there for a reason. why do i have to stay in this wilderness so long? oh, i was going through. the children of israel stayed in the wilderness for forty-years. am i going to be here for forty years? i shall never forget it. and that is when it was revealed to me why i was there. (dr. johnson, personal communication) the close connection the women administrators assert they have with god helps them draw strength in times of adversities. they do not separate their work from their religious understanding; instead their belief in god guides their actions. the participants’ emphasis in the narratives on their religious/spiritual beliefs can be analyzed through williams’ (1993) deconstruction of hagar’s life, a slave figure in the bible, to address the “wilderness experience of black women.” the wilderness experience for hagar occurs in an isolated and lonesome desert. pregnant, hagar flees from sarai to the wilderness. on two occasions, she encounters god in the desert as revelation that hagar is not alone. obeying god’s command, hagar returns to sarai’s house in submission to her. god later directs hagar on how to receive the promise and provisions he has for her and her child (sanders, 1995). williams (1993) interprets the wilderness experience to mean, “standing utterly alone in the midst of trouble with only god’s support to rely upon (p. 108)”. hagar’s predicament strengthens her faith in god. the same can be said often occurs for many black women who manifest their faith in troubled times. as williams (1993) constructs a christian theology from the point of view of black women, she realizes the striking similarities between hagar’s story and the story of black women. in her quest to analyze god’s response to the black community’s situations of pain and bondage, she asks: “what was god’s response to hagar’s predicament? were her pain and god’s response to it congruent with black women’s predicament and their understanding of god’s response to black women’s suffering (williams, 1993, p. 4)?” hagar’s narrative reveals “the faith, hope, and struggle with which an african slave woman worked through issues of survival, surrogacy, motherhood, rape, homelessness, and economic and sexual oppression (p. 33)”, all of which black women bear evidence of throughout american history. williams (1993) argues that the “black community has taken hagar’s story unto itself because it has “spoken” to generation after generation of black women because her story has been validated as true by suffering black people (p. 33).” the story of hagar also depicts resistance, affirmation, and empowerment of black women in biblical perspective: the bible has been a significant source of spiritual, ethical, and political empowerment for black women who have used social service clubs, educational institutions, and advocacy organizations as bases for social activism. it has supplied the chief rationale for their resistance to human suffering and oppression, mandated their moral teachings and practice, resourced their affirmations of racial, cultural, and sexual identity. (sanders, 1995, p. 126) according to williams (1993), “black women often use their religion to cope with and transform the negative character of social processes in the african american and anglo-american community (p. 33)”. dean frazier espouses the nature of her spiritual life. raised in the methodist church, her father a minister, she speaks at length about her spiritual existence as an indispensable aspect of her personal and professional life: my spiritual connection gives me some stability. every day of my life i think about what that is. and recently i thought for example with my parents, there is a spiritual piece to them that moved me to the point where i am now even though they’re deceased. (dean frazier, personal communication) these profound moments of reflection also guide her work with students. providing a quality education is not the only focus for dean frazier, but in addition, “we need to help young people understand that you ought to be accountable to someone as a spiritual person.” that is the stability she has and wants to provide for her students. she views this mission as necessary for the extension and preservation of the black community. dr. royster also talks extensively about her religious faith: i have a positive attitude about life. and i think that’s because i know god is on the throne. he is going to take care of me and do for me what i can’t do for myself. he is my rear guard so he is watching my back all along. that gives me the strength to press on even when i’m not sure that i can or that i want to do so. i know that’s helped all of my professional life. (dr. royster, personal communication) dr. royster states that her religious views were influenced by her godly grandfather who always talked about god when she was a teenager and during most of her adult life. her grandfather would read the bible to her and tell her that “god can give her a new heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone.” in 1976, she remembers asking god to give her a new heart. her grandfather’s teaching leads to her conversion in a time of crisis. since dr. royster’s conversion, she has found refuge in god: that’s what grounds me. i know i’m somebody in him [god]. i can stand tall even if my knees are weak. even if my leg is shaking and my hands are sweating i can still stand. i can hold my head tall. i can stand direct as a black woman and not be concerned that i am a black woman, but that i am a human being. i can do what i have to do. i want my young people to know that same thing. i want my staff to know the same thing. that they can do it and that i am there for them. (dr. royster, personal communication) for many black women administrators, their faith is the focal point of their personal and professional lives. everything they do is interpreted and defined from their spiritual connection to god. their religious relationships exist on two dimensions. the first is the personal relationship with god these women openly shared in telling their life stories. for them, this relationship is the source of their strength to help them “negotiate” the world. throughout their life experiences, they rely on that spiritual connection to overcome the injustices they have encountered. the second dimension involves social relations developed through their church. the women administrators have strong ties to their churches either through their own ministry or active involvement in their church community, and they bring these values into their work environment. articulating and interpreting the complexities of their lives and search for meanings through biblical teachings are a way to break away from oppressive ideologies and systems that attempt to define their reality. embracing family and communal value of racial uplift while the black women administrators relied on their faith to overcome the prejudices, they also embrace the family and communal value of racial uplift. the expectations of families and members of the black community for young men and women to further their education weigh on the participants’ shoulders because the plight of the black community depended on their success. dr. johnson sums her college experience: “i felt like i was carrying the weight of my race on my back. i constantly felt that i had to do well because if i didn’t, i would be letting my people down” (dr. johnson, personal communication). similarly, dr. owens shares how she was the first female and the youngest to receive a ph.d. in her town “which was not important to me, but it was to my parents” (dr. owens, personal communication). these examples of black women being first in their families to attain a higher level of education and represent the black community demonstrate how these women administrators have been involved in altering the economical, intellectual, and social capital of the black race. as a black woman of haitian ancestry, i am inspired by the participants’ commitment to social justice and resilience to thrive in the face of adversities. i am reminded of our forefathers and mothers who were vigilant in the struggle for justice. they believed the cause was as equally important for them and generations to come. just as frances harper (1866) declares in her speech, “we are all bound up together”: “born of a race whose inheritances has been outraged and wrong, most of my life had been spent in battling those wrongs” and sojourner truth’s famous “ain’t i a woman?” speech given at the women’s rights convention center, so too do the black women administrators continue the fight for social justice. how they fulfill that commitment is through their leadership practices. critical leadership practices to elevate the students and community we serve as the black women administrators reflect on their lived experiences and address how their experiences shape their professional work, they articulate their commitment to provide quality education to students and examine institutional practices to improve upon them and the social conditions of the black community. foster’s (1986) critical model of leadership offer the lens to analyze the participants’ leadership practices and how they realize their commitment. foster (1986) proposes that an “administrator’s work involves the establishment of community and culture within an [institution] and the development of an [institution’s] self reflective ability to analyze its purpose and goals” (p. 10). the leadership foster (1986; 1989) advocates is one that promotes democratic processes and calls for political activism for social justice. as a result, this practice of leading is critical, transformative, educative, and ethical. these elements bear further analysis to tease out the important work involved in a critical model of leadership. critical and transformative leadership critical leadership is an ongoing analysis of what occurs in an [institution] with a commitment by those involved to engage in critical reflection and reevaluation of current practices (foster, 1989). evidence of how the participants engage in critical reflection centers on their discussions about the diverse needs of students who attend historically black institutions, the lack of resources, and other institutional challenges that impact students’ success . in their leadership practices, the women administrators emphasize how they draw from past experiences to change practices that deter the success of students and progressivism in the black community. recognizing that many college students come from impoverished homes and lack strong educational backgrounds, dean frazier asserts: we felt it was our responsibility to bring these students in and help them with language and basic academic skills. equally important, we must help them understand the culture and how the culture was changing. (dean frazier, personal communication) similar to dean frazier, the women administrators’ ongoing criticality of leadership practices creates visions of possibilities. in being critical, then, “leadership is oriented not just toward the development of more perfect [institutional] structures, but toward a re-conceptualization of life practices where common ideals for freedom and democracy stand important (foster, 1986, p. 52)”. a second component of foster’s leadership model is transformative leadership. transformative leadership is about social change with a belief that transformation is a process that occurs over time. the transformation is not only in structures but also with leaders and participants. the aim is to cultivate a willingness to examine one’s life, ideas, and causes to develop a critical framework for leadership. the civil rights movement was transformative: gaining equal rights for people of color and women, securing equal opportunity for employment, and providing access to education. when the u.s. supreme court ruled in brown v. board of education that segregation in public schools was illegal, blacks were confronted with the decision to integrate public schools. for many, it was not a matter to deliberate; it had to be done, thus the beginning of their commitment to advance social justice. the black women administrators in this study were among those who integrated public schools and higher education. over the course of their professional careers, they confronted other issues of inequity. presently, as administrators in historically black institutions, they continue their efforts because they recognize that their students are the hope and future of the black community. therefore, the preservation of the black community rests on them. they resolve to impart the knowledge, wisdom, and critical stance that will enable their students to be agents of social change. educative and ethical leadership also important to foster’s critical model of leadership is educative and ethical leadership. according to foster (1986), an educative leader “presents both an analysis and a vision, and devotes time to examine [institutional] history, purpose, and responsibilities (p. 186)”. engaging in discourse involves working as a community and being willing to listen and reciprocate leadership responsibilities. through discourse, diverse viewpoints from all members are heard; the institution, as a result moves in a direction of shared vision and practices. finally, ethical leadership involves moral relationships and is intended to elevate people to new levels of morality (foster, 1989), including maintenance of democratic values within a community. the role of a leader is to create other leaders. participants can assume leadership roles, and leaders can become followers when the situation calls for communal exchange. dr. owens reflects on how she guides staff members to examine institutional issues and practices: a whole lot of discussion will turn around and once it is turned around nobody remembers how they got where they are. i’ve had people observe me and they’d say that it is very smooth the way you do it. you redirect them. they don’t know that they have changed directions; they think it is their idea. (dr. owens, personal communication) dr. owens brings staff members together to solve student and university related issues. staff members are challenged to consider new perspectives and examine the implications of each likely decision. through this process of engagement, they form an educational community so that everyone involved “creates the conditions for learning and form a common ground (lambert, 1995, p. 29)” about the task(s) at hand. in accepting the responsibility to lead at their universities, the women administrators attach to that responsibility reflective inquiry and discourse on how to transform practices that hinder students from equitable access to education. they articulate an ethic of care and support of students; they embody a collective mission borne out their advocacy for social justice, thus to not let the past be repeated. the mission of the women administrator is to provide students with the tools to succeed academically, emotionally, and socially in society. there appears to be a strong correlation between the participants lived experiences, growing up in the segregated south during jim crow, and their belief in education as liberation that is endemic. they are concerned about the lack of preparation and the academic achievement of many black students in public schools and universities. the participants’ critique of the problems associated with the culture of schools is seen as one of the reasons black students are underachieving. according to dean frazier: my students at this university are students i know that most other universities would not touch. it is not because they don’t have the ability, because they do. but, you have to reach inside and pull that ability out. other institutions have such high standards, and they just don’t want to bother with that student. that’s the kind of student we have here. we have all kinds of students. we also have students that have had all kinds of experiences, and i believe that there is an opportunity to give credit for a lot of experiences. (dean frazier, personal communication) similarly, dr. giddens asserts: it has always been a struggle to develop students. because of the students we serve and the environment – lack of resources, equipment and working with faculty members who don’t care, it is a struggle. sometimes, the students don’t have initiative and drive. it has been a struggle to truly educate them. it has been a struggle for me to remain at [institution], knowing the potential that i have, but i stay for the students. i could go to some other place but, i truly love the students here. (dr. giddens, personal communication) in whatever conditions students matriculate to historically black institutions, students can expect to find individuals from administration, faculty, and staff committed to their success. many historically black institutions recognize their students’ deficiency and provide the resources need to help students achieve. according to dean frazier: many students are first generations coming to college. they need somebody to help polish them a little bit, refine them some. that’s the role i think i’ve played in my first twenty years as a professional in higher education. i think that’s the role you play at an hbcu. while you might not see the compensation early as years pass on, but when students come back, they talk about that. bring them into that village called [institution] university and work with them. but we must also prepare them to do as the eagle does the little eaglets, make you secure and warm in that environment, but at some time let them know you have to go back into the larger culture and prepare you for that larger culture by giving you good skills and then giving you a piece of confidence that says, you can go out, you can survive. (dean frazier, personal communication) in their present roles at historically black institutions, the women administrators commit themselves to taking marginalized students to a level of academic and personal success. the imprint they want to leave on students is that they become academically competent in their professions, intellectually informed about social issues, culturally knowledgeable and socially attentive to their own community as well as to the larger society. one way of exploring how the women administrators enhance education in economically disadvantaged areas is to look back at their historical positions as teachers, activists, and leaders. when communities were segregated by race, these women took on the responsibility of ensuring that black children had the tools they needed to be successful in a world that would deny them equal access and quality of life. while teaching in the south early in her career, president murphy contested what was occurring to black students at her school: it was the first year [city] had mass bussing, and i taught in an elementary school. it was set way up on the hill in the middle of an all white neighborhood and they bussed kids from [street] down below to the poorest section of [city] that you have. they bussed these kids up to what was at the time one of the more affluent communities in [city]. it was a more unlikely match you could have made. those kids just endured a horrendous and horrific year; and i was the youngest teacher on staff by 23 years, and i was the only one of four african americans on that staff. it was at that point watching what was happening to those kids, i realized what happens to people who look like me but hadn’t grown up charmed and didn’t have an advocate to address how bad off they really are. (president murphy, personal communication) this experience served as a consciousness-raising for president murphy. from a privileged family, it was the first time she witnessed the struggles of disadvantaged children in the black community. as a result, she felt compelled to advocate for the children and be the lonesome voice, risking her job to challenge the daily inequities she saw. exhausted by her failed attempts to change the conditions of these children’s experiences and the lack of support from colleagues and administration, several years later president murphy resigned from her elementary school. president murphy became more committed to advocacy, speaking and taking action against social injustices and inequities in higher education. transitioning to higher education gave president murphy the opportunity to be more involved in policy decisions that impact students’ educational experience. under the leadership of her mentor who was president of a historically black institution, president murphy learned about the university system and was appointed to positions that gave her the opportunity to be involved in multi-faceted projects and decisionmaking policies. her years of experiences resulted in appointment as university president at a historically black institution. as president, president murphy establishes a clear vision for what she wants to accomplish: well, i think this school has the potential to be not just a leader among hbcus but actually to be a leader among small colleges and universities across the country. we are going to prove that by staying close to the mission that if you provide access to education for kids, sat scores mean absolutely nothing. it is potential that makes a difference. that is the real predictor of how well kids are going to succeed. next year, we’re going to start what we’re calling a pilot program where we are going to admit about 150 of our freshmen class. they will be kids who may not have good sat scores or have all the credentials, but somebody in that community whether it is in the school or the church says, ‘this is a kid to take a chance on. trust me. take a chance on this kid.’ we are going to admit this kid and introduce them to a curriculum that is outside of the box. (president murphy, personal communication) garnering the support of the local community, schools, and churches, she continues the advocacy campaign she started in her early years of teaching. only this time, she has the support to implement educational programs to prepare disadvantaged students “who nobody else thinks they ought to take a chance on, except some momma, some daddy, some preacher, some teacher or some faculty member. we’re going to educate them” (president murphy, personal communication). in her present role, president murphy takes the lead in guiding her university and constituents to a level where social inequities are addressed and access to education for students is a priority. president murphy’s leadership involves putting together a team of people of different strengths: i’ve got to make sure i’ve got people working that do enjoy it and who are good at it. i can pretty much put a team together. . . i am continuously encouraging others to think outside of the box. i think that i’m a leader that validates people’s strengths and competencies. (president murphy, personal communication) her expectations are based on high standards and quality because anything less compromises the opportunities her university students seek. in contrast to president murphy, dr. royster’s advocacy for social justice began at the age of fourteen as previously discussed. advocacy continued into dr. royster’s professional life in the business sector and into her career in higher education. keenly aware of the challenges her university students face, she discusses the kinds of students at her institution: these young people have tremendous potential; but they don’t have the same resources available to them, not now and certainly not in the last 18 years and probably not the next 18 years. and they come with some unique, i don’t even call them handicaps, but they haven’t had the same opportunities in the educational system. they are african americans predominantly; so i want them to come into our institution. i want to take these “diamonds in the rough” and i want them to “shine” with brilliance when they leave. i want them to have confidence that they can do it. (dr. royster, personal communication) to move in a direction that will permit dr. royster to accomplish this undertaking, she does not rely on her solitary efforts; instead, she becomes involved in student affairs, challenges her staff, and partners with other constituents to move the university forward for the purpose and the benefits of students. she practices this by getting members of her university, from top to bottom, to focus on excellence: my job is to make sure that the playing field is level so that we have justice and equity. my job is to promote excellence and to demand it. whether it’s in the classroom or in the vice chancellor’s job or the chancellor’s job or the house keeper’s job, everybody’s got to be about excellence. if we are all about excellence then we’ll all succeed. we’ll get more money, we’ll get more students. and i believe in taking care of people at the bottom. i believe in social justice. so i don’t want to neglect anybody in the community. we can’t make it without the grounds keepers. we can’t make it without the house keepers. the people in the cafeteria are just as important as the chancellor because they’re the ones that are cooking that food. and they are the ones that are delivering the food. and if they don’t do that with the right applause, and smile, then our young people aren’t so pleased with it. (dr. royster, personal communication) everyone has a piece of the puzzle to fill; it is the collective efforts of many that will contribute to the development of students. if everyone is not committed to those efforts the university and the [black] community will suffer an economic loss. therefore, affirming everyone in their work promotes a value system that says everybody is important. as stated by dr. royster (personal communication), “as we move up in this pyramid and go down, we’re all in it together.” everybody serves a function in this business, even the cooks. drawing from her experience in the business sector, dr. royster approaches her leadership with an economic mindset: i’m interested in building confidence in young people. i want young people and myself to understand the business aspects of what we do. the business is education. you have to understand the competitive forces out there in the environment. if i want to grow my enrollment, i’ve got to be competitive. to be competitive, i’ve got to have first class products. i have to deliver services in a first class way. (dr. royster, personal communication) to deliver the goods, she places value in collaborating with colleagues, staff and students. they are driven by success and as she claims, “you have to be about excellence day in and out as partners in this whole enterprise” (dr. royster, personal communication). president murphy and dr. royster reveal they have had to stand alone in pursuit of social justice during critical moments when other individuals did not stand with them. they are risk takers and subsequently call forth other individuals to continue what they have started. they act in defiance against conditions abhorrent to their principles. in sum, when school systems provide inferior equipment and inadequate facilities, these black women administrators step in to make up the difference. they use their creativity and knowledge of the world, through the formal and informal education processes, to show adolescents in their institutions that they can be successful, educated, and respected. their students do not only learn the standard curriculum of school, but they are taught community ethics, racial pride, and how to protect themselves from the brutality that awaits them in a white dominated world. communal relations: the role of dominant institutions in the black community like historically black institutions situated in the heart of black communities, black churches too serve an integral role. historically black institutions and churches symbolize hope, aspiration, and refuge for the black community. black churches have been pivotal in revolutionary movements in the social and economic development of blacks. the women administrators whose foundations are strongly tied to their religious traditions express concerns about the declining presence of the black church in the lives of black people. here, dean frazier expresses the importance of the black church when she was growing up: what i suspect that i had coming out of the black church that children don’t have now was an opportunity for speaking, making presentations, and learning how to present ideas and activities that we probably don’t have at this time. (dean frazier, personal communication) the opportunity to pass on the “culture”, “traditions”, “heritage”, “legacy”, and “intellectual capital” of the black race is threatened because of the disconnection between the black church and community. church is likely to be the only institution where masses of african americans from different socioeconomic backgrounds assemble, and it is an opening for discourses to occur concerning the problems and needs of the black community. also, the church serves another purpose for children to find images of successful model who are a representation of them. with the diminished presence of the black church, the women administrators believe that historically black institutions must fill the role of the black church. in historically black institutions, the black community is extended so that successful african americans can give back to ‘whence’ they have come. dean frazier emphasizes the need to reach out to members of the black community: we have to go back into the communities and work with others and try to make a difference in what they do. i think again the keys to whether or not you are successful means someone has to mentor you. youngsters need models and mentors to help them be successful. they need to see that person who looks like them being successful. (dean frazier, personal communication) mullings (1997) agrees that throughout their history, “black women have been involved not only in work outside the home but also in transformative work (p. 55)”, individual, and collective action to improve social conditions. black women administrators whose belief and commitment to a quality education is more than a motto; it is realized in the experiences they provide for every student who attends their university. their interest in each student’s success begins with developing an authentic relationship between administrator and student. recognizing that they are in a position to make a difference, the administrators are guided by a vision for young african americans to develop their talents and gifts to become contributors to their community and society. the success of one child is seen as an advancement of the community. this analysis reveals how black women administrators as social justice advocates explore the circumstances of students who enroll at their institutions. concerned with change and creating opportunities for all students, they critically assess the limits society imposes on certain groups and the paths to removing those limits (foster, 1986), paramount to their practices of leadership. as a result, sacrifices are routinely made for the sake of developing better circumstances for students. summary and conclusions this collective group of women exemplifies how they survived the struggles of integration, triumphed over barriers in educational settings, and are committed to advocating social justice. looking back on their life’s journey, they share the significance of their religious and spiritual faith and identify the present struggles of students, the community, and church. one message the women administrators convey to members within and outside academia is that they, as administrators are not to be discounted in the collective project of working towards social change. for many of them, historically black institutions are where they are supposed to be and can have the most impact on students, administrative decisions, and educational reforms. although many of their struggles go unrecorded, only when these stories are told can individuals within and outside the black community understand the sacrifices of black women who fought against injustices and continue to pave the way for generations to follow in their lead. understanding their purpose, they stand firm on the promise to lead historically black institutions to a level of excellence despite the challenges of students and institutional practices and policies. references benjamin, l. (1997). black women in the academy: promises and perils. gainesville: university press of florida. carter, k. r. (1849). standing on the promises. [biogragphy]. retrieved december 8, 2004, from http://healingandrevival.com/biorkcarter.htm casey, k. (1993). i answer with my life. new york: routledge. casey, k. (1995-96). the new narrative research in education, chapter 5. review of research in education, 21. collins, p. h. (1998). fighting words: black women and the search for justice. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota. foster, w. (1986). paradigms and promises: new approaches to educational administration. buffalo, ny: prometheus books. foster, w. (1989). toward a critical practice of leadership. in j. smyth (ed.), critical perspectives on educational leadership (pp. 39-62). new york: the falmer. fonow, m. m., & cook, j. a. (eds.) (1991). beyond methodology: feminist scholarship as lived research. bloomington: indiana university. garibaldi, a. (ed.) (1984). black colleges and universities: challenges for the future. new york: praegar. giddings, p. (1984). when and where i enter: the impact of black women on race and sex in america. new york: quill william morrow. gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. new york: international publishers. glazer-ramo, j. (2001). shattering the myths: women in academe. baltimore, md: john hopkins university. gluck, s. b., & patai, d. (eds.) (1992). women's word: the feminist practice of oral history. new york: routledge. jean-marie, g. (2002). educational leaders as transformative intellectuals: examining leadership discourses of african american women administrators in historically black colleges and universities. (doctoral dissertation, university of north carolina at greensboro, 2002). dissertation abstracts international, 63, 1206. jean-marie, g. (2004). black women administrators in historically black institutions: social justice project rooted in community. journal of women in educational leadership, 2, 37-58. lambert, l. (1995). toward a theory of constructivist leadership. in l. lambert, d. walker, d. zimmerman, j. cooper, m. lambert, m. gardner & p. j. slack (eds.), the constructivist leader (pp. 28 – 51). new york: teachers college. morris, a. d. (1984). the origins of the civil rights movement: black communities organizing for change. new york: free press. moses, y. t. (1997). black women in academe: issues and strategies. in l. benjamin, l. (ed.,) black women in the academy: promises and perils (pp. 23-38). gainesville: university press of florida. reinharz, s. (1992). feminist methods in social research. oxford university. riessman, c. k. (1993). narrative analysis. newbury park, ca: sage publications. sanders, c. j. (1995). living the intersection: womanism and afrocentrism in theology. minneapolis, mn: fortress. sims, s. j. (1994). diversifying historically black colleges and universities: a new higher education paradigm. westport, connecticut: greenwood. williams, d. (1993). sisters in the wilderness: the challenge of womanist god-talk. new york: orbis books. willie, c. v., garibaldi, a. m., & reed, w. l. (eds.) (1991). the education of african americans. new york: auburn house. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact 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job positions of african american accountants lucy lim, allyson clarke, frank ross, and jean wells lucy lim: howard university, email: lucy.lim@howard.edu allyson clarke: howard university, email: allyson.clarke@gmail.com frank ross: howard university, email: f_ross@howard.edu jean wells: howard university, email: jean.wells@howard.edu accepted september 02, 2015 this paper examines the role of mentoring among african american accountants to contribute to our knowledge in using mentoring as a potential tool to increase diversity in the accounting profession. first, we test whether african american women have lower number of beneficial mentors than african american men to see whether they both have enough access to beneficial mentors. we then compare the supports received and the perceived benefits from mentoring between african american women and men. we test the impact of type of mentoring (formal, informal, or both) on current job positions to see which type of mentoring is more beneficial. we also test the impact of the quantity of beneficial mentors on current job positions to see whether quantity matters. in general, we find that african american women are less likely to have beneficial mentors than african american men. however, our results suggest that african american women perceived similar or better supports and perceived similar benefits from their mentors. lastly, we find that having informal mentors and having a greater number of beneficial mentors have positive impact in the current job positions. keywords: gender, diversity, african american, mentor, mentoring introduction a distinct lack of minorities and women in the accounting profession has been noted in prior research on public accounting firms and certified public accountants. an aicpa (moore, 2013) study found that although minorities accounted for approximately 25% of the professional staff positions, minorities only accounted for 10% of the partner positions. of those minorities, african americans accounted for 4% of the staff positions and 2% of the partner positions, while women accounted for 44% of the staff positions and 19% of the partner positions. thus, with the current outlook, the probability of a public accounting firm having an african american woman partner is relatively small. career advancement for women and minorities has been difficult. compared to their white colleagues, women and minorities in the workplace are much more dependent on formal objective factors rather than on a positive reputation (daley, 1996). weisenfeld and robinson-backmon (2007) found that african american men perceived race discrimination in their workplace, while african american women perceived both race and gender discrimination. milikens and martin (1996) showed that increasing diversity in the workplace could improve an organization’s effectiveness by increasing the pool of skills among its employees. having employees from various backgrounds, race, or gender will improve an organization’s ability to serve its diverse clients and will help an organization to get into untapped potential market since employees who have a similar background as their clients may be able to understand and connect with those clients better. therefore, having effective mechanisms for improving diversity should eventually benefit an organization. in this paper, we examine the mentoring experiences of african american women versus men to see how mentoring can be a useful tool to improve the representation and standing of minorities and women in the accounting profession. we first examined the associations between gender and the mentoring experience, in particular we would like to see whether there is a difference in the amount of beneficial mentors that african american female experienced in comparison to african american men. we then compared the perceived supports and perceived benefits of mentoring that african american women advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 194 received versus african american men. then, we analyzed whether getting involved in a greater numbers of beneficial mentoring have impacts on current job positions (as measured by job title) and whether having informal versus formal mentoring have differing impact on current job positions. our study makes several contributions. first, we contribute to the mentoring literature (e.g. weisenfeld & robinson-backmon, 2007; martin & bok, 2015; viator, 1999) by using a sample of underrepresented minority (african american) in the workforce and compare the mentoring experiences across gender and the perceived supports that they received. by analyzing an underrepresented minority we can directly examine how mentoring works best in this particular group. secondly, we try to resolve the conflicting results in prior research and offer additional evidence on the usefulness of informal versus formal mentoring by examining their impact on an actual result which is current job positions instead of using perceived results [e.g. viator (2001b) uses perception on promotion chances]. using different impact measures in the workplace, viator (2001b), chao et. al (1992) and ragins and cotton (1991) find a positive impact of informal mentoring while fagenson-eland, marks, and amendola (1997) did not find significant difference of formal versus informal mentoring. our results in general support the notion that informal mentoring is more beneficial than formal mentoring. third, we also try to resolve the conflicting results and complement prior research on the relation of the frequency/quantity of mentoring (the number of mentoring relationship a protégé has experienced) and its impact. ragins and mcfarlin (1990) found a negative relation between the frequency of mentoring relationships and the perceived value of mentoring supports, while fagenson-eland et al. (1997) found the opposite. our study differs with theirs in terms of how we measure the mentoring quantity and its impact. instead of using just ‘the number of mentoring relationship’, we argue that what makes a difference in the workplace is the number of beneficial1 mentoring relationship (the number of beneficial mentors) and not just any mentoring relationship. protégés can have many mentoring relationship but useless, thus do not feel any impact on their jobs. however, a good mentoring quality should have a more positive impact. we should see more consistent positive impacts of mentoring using the number of beneficial mentoring relationship (the number of beneficial mentors) and not just the number of mentoring relationship. unlike prior research that uses the perceived mentoring supports as the impact measures, we use current job positions as the impact measure. we complement prior research in this aspect by going one step further of just looking at mentoring supports into the end result that a protégé would want which is higher job position. the results from the analysis of the 2012 online survey data show that fewer african american women have beneficial 1 the definition of beneficial versus non-beneficial is based on the respondent’ opinion. mentoring experiences compared to their male counterparts. however, african american women perceived equal or even greater supports and perceived similar benefits of mentoring compared to african american men. there is a significant association between gender and advocacy support with a larger proportion of african american women felt they received advocacy support. there is also a marginally significant association between gender and support in developing critical job skills. again, compared to african american men, a larger proportion of the african american women said they received such support. the multivariate test’s results show that informal mentoring has positive effect on current job positions. the multivariate results also show that the quantity of beneficial mentoring relationship has positive effect on current job positions. however, the perceptions of mentoring benefits in their current workplaces do not have any effect on current job positions. the remainder of our paper is as follows. the next section provides literature review on mentoring. the third section describes the hypotheses. the fourth section explains the methodology used in this paper. the fifth section presents the results of this study and the final section concludes our paper. literature review mentoring is an important career development tool (hunt & michael, 1983) and a critical mechanism in developing talent in large public accounting firms (dirsmith & covaleski, 1985). although having mentor(s) in the accounting profession maybe more important in the setting of a public-accounting firm where firm-specific human capital is needed and cannot be acquired from education alone, mentoring in the corporate world may also be important since diversity is also an issue there. in 2013, among the fortune 500 companies ceos, there are approximately 4.4% women and 1.2% african american (diversityinc). using data from research and development companies, ragins and cotton (1991) found that women perceived greater barriers in obtaining a mentor than men. they explained further that one possible reason is the lack of female mentors, which then requires women to develop cross-gender mentoring relationships, which potentially create more barriers than same-gender mentoring relationships. also, higher job positions usually are male dominated; therefore women may have more barriers to initiating mentoring. nonetheless women appear to make the extra effort to get mentors since in the same study women reported that they were as likely as men to have mentors. in addition to personal efforts, firms can bridge mentoring access issues by formally assigning mentors. viator (1999) found that women in large public accounting firms did not believe they faced greater barriers to obtaining a mentor than men because of formal mentoring programs available in those firms. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 195 on the other hand, viator (2001) found that african-american public accounting employees are less likely to obtain an informal mentor and perceive greater barriers to obtaining a mentor than caucasian employees. thus, both african-american men and women perceive greater barriers to obtaining a mentor because of their race, and african-american women may perceive even greater barriers because of their race and gender. prior research has compared formal versus informal mentoring in various ways. viator (2001b) examined the association between formal and informal mentoring and role stress, job performance, and turnover intention. the study found that informal mentoring provides career development and psychosocial support function and reduces role ambiguity (understanding what are expected from an employee), but increases role conflict (different expectations coming from different higher rank persons, creating confusion on what is expected from an employee). viator (2001b) uses respondents’ perception on promotion chances and current performance evaluation as measures of job performance. chao, walz, and gardner (1992) found that protégés in informal mentoring reported higher salaries and more career-related support. ragins and cotton (1991) found similar conclusion, higher compensation and promotion rate. they defined promotions as involving two or more of the following criteria: significant increases in annual salary, significant increases in scope of responsibility, changes in job level or rank, or becoming eligible for bonuses, incentives or stock plans. in contrast to the more positive impact of informal mentoring found in viator (2001b), chao et. al (1992) and ragins and cotton (1991), fagensoneland, marks, and amendola (1997), did not find significant difference of formal versus informal mentoring in career-related support and role modeling functions. we try to resolve the conflicting results in prior results by examining the relationship between informal mentoring on current job positions. other than examining the type of mentoring (formal versus informal), prior research has also examined the relationship between the quantity/frequency of mentoring relationship and its perceived value. ragins and mcfarlin (1990) found a negative relation between the frequency of mentoring relationships and the perceived value of mentoring supports, while fagensoneland et al. (1997) found the opposite. in this paper we try to offer additional evidence to help resolve the conflicting evidence found in the prior results by examining the relationship between the number of beneficial mentoring and the current job positions. hypotheses if both african american women and men do not have difficulty in getting good mentors either through formal or informal mentoring, then we should see no difference in number of beneficial mentoring they have. thus, our first hypothesis stated in alternate form is: h1: african american women experienced different frequency of beneficial mentoring compared to african american men. prior research (e.g. viator, 1999) suggests that african american women and men both have access to some type of mentoring. however, considering that more men hold the higher level positions, it is very likely that african american women have men as their mentors. ragins and cotton (1991) results suggest the possibility that cross gender mentoring is less beneficial than same gender mentoring. thus, it is possible that african american women perceived less positive mentoring experiences since they may have to experience the less beneficial cross gender mentoring. we test that possibility in our second hypothesis: h2: african american women perceived less supports and perceived fewer benefits from mentoring than african american men. the next two hypotheses try to examine the impact of mentoring on current job positions. hypothesis three examines whether having a different number of beneficial mentors has an impact on the current job positions. having a greater number of beneficial mentors may offer various supports and various perspectives that can increase protégés’ knowledge and skills. thus, we argue that the greater the number of beneficial mentors one has, the more positive its impact on one’s current job position. specifically, we test the following hypothesis: h3: having a greater number of beneficial mentoring relationship has a positive impact on current job positions. lastly, we would like to compare the benefit of formal versus informal mentoring. in our paper we measure the impact of formal versus informal mentoring using current job positions which are actual benefits and not perceived benefits of mentoring. informal mentoring may offer more benefits than formal mentoring since the relationship are more based on mutual agreement between the mentor and the protégé. they pair by themselves. there is nobody forcing the relationship which makes the mentor to be more open and more willing to give in depth support to the protégé. however, with the current effort to increase formal mentoring, we may find that formal and informal mentoring have similar impact on current job positions. based on those arguments, our fourth hypothesis stated in alternate form is: h4: informal mentoring has a different impact on current job positions than formal mentoring. we are interested in comparing formal versus informal mentoring since viator (1999) shows that there is more access to mentoring for african american women via formal than informal mentoring. if formal and informal mentoring have the same effectiveness, then we can hope to see improved diversity in the future. method data in this study are obtained from an online survey conducted in 2012 by the center for accounting education (cae) at advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 196 howard university. the participants of the study are national association of black accountants (naba) members. naba represents the largest group of african americans in the accounting profession in the usa. the total number of respondents was 654. fifty-three observations are excluded since they indicated that they were non-african american. since the purpose of this study is to learn about mentorship in organizations where a person is employed, 129 observations are deleted for respondents that indicated that they are not employees of a corporation; an international accounting firm; a national, regional or local accounting firm; or a government agency; or a not-for-profit organization. sixty-six observations are removed because the respondents indicated that they never had a mentor. lastly, 56 observations are deleted since the respondents did not give any response on the mentorship questions. three hundred and fifty observations remain for the analysis in this study. of the 350 observations, 226 were women and 124 were men. we ran chi-square tests to determine whether african american women experience a different amount of beneficial mentoring than african american men (hypothesis 1). along with testing hypothesis 1, we will also present other observations on the mentoring experience of both african american women and men. hypothesis 2 compares the perceived supports and the perceived benefits of mentoring among african american women and men. we use chi-square tests to examine whether african american women perceived less supports from their mentors than african american men. we use t-tests to compare the perceived benefit of mentoring since the responses to the questions were measured on a five point likert scale anchored at “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree”. the first two questions capture respondents’ perceptions of mentoring benefits in their current work environment and one question captures respondent perception whether a powerful mentor is a success factor in the workplace. an ordered logistic model was used to test the benefit of mentorship on one’s career. in particular we test whether having a greater number of beneficial mentoring relationship has a positive impact on current job positions (hypothesis 3) and whether informal mentoring has a positive impact on current job position (hypothesis 4). we provided the details of the tests below. the model is as follows: cp = α0 + α1elength + α2degree + α3cpa + α4female + α5nbmentor + α6fmentor + α7bmentor + α8outmentor + ε. (1) the variables are explained as follows. cp is current position. it is classified into 3 levels and each level is coded as follows: sr. manager =3, manager=2, staff=1, and other=0. we argue that one’s current position is a function of experience proxied using employment length (elength) and capability proxied using the highest degree (degree) and cpa certification (cpa). more experience and more capability should have a positive impact on one’s job position (positive α2 and α3). we include a female dummy to control for a possibility of discrimination issue where a female is less likely to move up the rank. if that is the case, we will see a negative and significant coefficient on female (α4). to measure the usefulness of mentoring, we include several mentoring variables as follows. the quantity of beneficial mentoring experiences (nbmentor), the nature of beneficial mentoring is formal, informal or both (fmentor), and the perceived benefit of mentoring in the current work environment (bmentor and outmentor). if the quantity of beneficial mentors has a positive effect to one’s career, we should see a positive and significant coefficient on nbmentor (α5). we will see a negative and significant coefficient of fmentor if informal mentoring is more beneficial to current job position. we also include the perceived benefit of mentoring in the current work environment to control for the possibility that having more beneficial mentoring in the current work environment translate into a higher current job position. if that is the case, we will see positive coefficients on bmentor (α7) and outmentor (α8). the independent variables are defined and measured as follows. • elength is employment length, which is the sum of current employment and previous employment. employment length categories are recoded as follows: < 1 year =1; 1 – 3 years = 2; 3 – 5 years = 3; 5 – 8 years = 4; 8 – 12 years = 5; > 12 years = 6. • degree is the highest degree that a respondent has. the recoding is as follows: j.d. or ph.d. = 3. master = 2, bachelor = 1, other=0. • cpa is a dummy variable equal to 1 when a person has a cpa and 0 otherwise. • female is a dummy variable equal to 1 when a person is female and 0 otherwise. • nbmentor is the number of beneficial mentoring a person has been involved in. the recoding is as follow: none = 0; only 1 = 1; more than 1, but less than 3 = 2; more than 3, but less than 5 = 3; 5 plus = 4. • fmentor is the nature of the beneficial mentorship, where formal = 1, both = 0, and informal = -1. • bmentor is the level of benefit of mentoring aspect of the current work environment to one’s career. • outmentor is one’s perception whether having mentors from outside the organization have been more fruitful in their current work environment. results and findings the descriptive statistics of the respondents are in table 1. the majority of the female respondents are younger than the majority of male respondents. most of the female respondents were single advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 197 (61.06%), while a majority of the male respondents were married (56.45%). approximately half of the female and male respondents attended non-historically black colleges and universities (non-hbcu) public schools (50.88% and 58.06% respectively). most women currently work for a corporation (49.12%), while most men work either at corporations or at public accounting firms (both at 38.71%). the length of experiences of women and men at public accounting firms are approximately the same. most of them have up to five years working experience at public accounting firms. most of the respondents hold at least bachelor degrees. the majority of women do not have cpas (56.19%) while the majority of men have cpas (56.45%). table 1 descriptive statistics variable grouping female (n=226) male (n=124) freq. % freq % age 20-25 41 18.14 12 9.68 26-30 54 23.89 25 20.16 31-35 44 19.47 21 16.94 36-40 24 10.62 15 12.10 41-45 24 10.62 10 8.06 46-50 22 9.73 7 5.65 51-55 6 2.65 15 12.10 >55 11 4.87 19 15.32 marital status single 138 61.06 48 38.71 married 70 30.97 70 56.45 divorced 18 7.96 6 4.84 undergraduate hbcu private 23 10.18 10 8.06 hbcu public 30 13.27 23 18.55 non-hbcu private 58 25.66 19 15.32 non-hbcu public 115 50.88 72 58.06 employment corporation 111 49.12 48 38.71 public accounting 68 30.08 48 38.71 government/notfor-profit 47 20.80 28 22.59 variable grouping female (n=226) male (n=124) freq. % freq % years in public accounting < 1 year 31 13.72 18 14.52 1-3 years 45 19.91 19 15.32 3-5 years 48 21.24 20 16.13 5-8 years 23 10.18 14 11.29 8-12 years 14 6.19 11 8.87 >12 years 18 7.96 17 13.71 not applicable 47 20.80 25 20.16 degree bachelor 204 90.27 110 88.71 master 105 46.46 57 45.97 doctoral 0 0.00 5 4.03 cpa yes 99 43.81 70 56.45 no 127 56.19 54 43.55 table 2 panel a shows that contrary to our expectation, hypothesis 1 is supported by the data analysis. specifically, there is a difference in the number of beneficial mentorship experience by african american women versus men (the chi-square tests are significant at 5% level). the proportion of men that experience higher number of beneficial mentoring is larger than women. approximately 24% of men reported having more than five beneficial mentors, while it is only 16% for women. it seems that african american women still have some difficulties in obtaining beneficial mentors. the tests of differences in proportion (table 2) also show a significance difference in the associations between gender and the nature of fruitful mentoring-formal, informal or both (panel c). the majority of men experience informal mentoring (58.06%), while not quite half of women reported both formal and informal mentoring (46.90%). results from panel a and panel c questions the effectiveness of formal mentoring compare to informal mentoring since african american men receives a greater number of beneficial mentoring and they are also the ones who have more informal mentors. the multivariate analysis presented later in the paper will provide some resolution. the chi-square tests do not show significant associations between gender and: (1) the stage of career when mentoring is fruitful (table 2 panel b), (2) the mentor’s race (table 2 panel d), or (3) the number of non-beneficial mentors (table 2 panel e). this indicates that both men and women have some type of advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 198 mentoring in their career. also, most of african american women and men both have mentors of the same race. table 2 tests of association between gender and mentoring experiences panel a: gender*number of beneficial mentor only 1 >1 and <3 >3 and <5 >5 none freq % freq % freq % freq % freq % female 46 20.35 88 38.94 19 8.41 37 16.37 36 15.93 male 9 7.26 41 33.06 17 13.71 30 24.19 27 21.77 chi-square test 15.76 (p-value=0.003) panel b: gender*stage of career when mentorship is most fruitful first 3 years 3rd-5th year 5th-8th year after 8th year never freq % freq % freq % freq % freq % female 125 55.31 20 8.85 26 11.50 14 6.19 41 18.14 male 59 47.58 19 15.32 15 12.10 11 8.87 20 16.13 chi-square test 4.93 (p-value=0.29) panel c: gender*nature of the fruitful relationship above formal informal both freq % freq % freq % female 27 11.95 93 41.15 106 46.90 male 11 8.87 72 58.06 41 33.06 chi-square 9.21 (p-value=0.01) panel d: gender*mentor’s race african american caucasian multi-ethnic hispanic asian other freq % freq % freq % freq % freq % freq % female 121 53.54 73 32.30 8 3.54 1 0.44 1 0.44 22 9.73 male 64 51.51 34 27.42 7 5.65 1 0.81 1 0.81 17 13.71 chi-square 3.02 (p-value =0.70) panel e: gender*non beneficial formal mentor 1 2 3 4 6 freq % freq % freq % freq % freq % female 22 64.71 7 20.59 3 8.82 1 2.94 1 2.95 male 9 56.25 4 25.00 2 12.5 1 6.25 0 0.00 chi-square 1.45 (p-value=0.92) advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 199 the results to test for hypothesis 2 are presented in table 3 and table 4. table 3 presents comparison for mentoring supports and table 4 presents the comparison of the perceived benefits of mentoring in relation to the current work environment. the results in table 3 do not support hypothesis 2, specifically we do not find that african american women perceived less supports from mentoring than african american men. with the exception of advocacy support and job skill support where we find african american women perceive greater mentoring support than men, we do not find significant association between gender and most of the supports received from mentors (table 3). the percentage of women who said that their mentors were their advocates is greater (57.08%) than the percentage of men who perceived that (44.35%) (chi-square tests are significant at 5% level). we also find a marginally significant association (at 10% level) between gender and whether mentors helped in developing critical job skills. for these two supports, more african american women feel their mentors help them than african american men. these results in overall seem to indicate that women perceived equal or even greater mentoring supports from their mentors. table 3 tests of the association between gender and the support received from mentor(s) support received proportion that say yes chi-square p-value female (n=204) male (n=112) freq % freq % opened door to challenging assignments 83 36.73 52 41.94 0.34 provided critical career advice and counsel 173 76.55 90 72.58 0.41 helped develop my self-confidence and credibility with others 120 53.10 68 54.84 0.75 introduced me to the “right” social networks 64 28.32 41 33.06 0.35 provided help with technical issues 74 32.74 42 33.87 0.83 put forward my name as new opportunities for advancement were identified 90 39.82 42 33.87 0.27 was an advocate on my behalf 129 57.08 55 44.35 0.02* helped me develop critical job skills 104 46.02 44 35.48 0.06** helped me better balance my work and personal life 48 21.24 21 16.94 0.33 i did not receive any support from my mentor(s) 17 7.52 13 10.48 0.34 others 12 5.31 10 8.06 0.31 *significant at 5% level; **significant at 10% level most women and men reported that they received some kind of supports from their mentors, only a small percentage of women and men (7.52% and 10.48% respectively) feel they did not receive any support from their mentors. most women (76.55%) and men (72.58%) received counseling support from their mentors. however, smaller percentages of both women and men feel that their mentors were also their sponsors. 36.73% of women and 41.94% of men reported that their mentors opened door to challenging assignments. about the same proportion of the mentors put forward the respondent name as new opportunities for advancement were identified (39.82% and 33.87% for women and men respectively). smaller percentages said their mentors introduced respondents to the “right” social networks (28.32% and 33.06% for women and men respectively. similar percentages of women and men said that their mentors provided help with technical issues (32.74% and 33.87% for women and men respectively) and put forward their name as new opportunities for advancement were identified (39.82% and 33.87% for women and men respectively). the results show that the supports that most mentors give are on the level of giving advice and counsel. in order for the protégé to get more benefits in mentoring, a mentor may need to be more actively involved by being a sponsor, to give more help to the protégé in improving his/her skills, and to give more psychosocial support. table 4 results support prior conclusion on hypothesis 2. here we cannot find evidence that african american women perceived lower benefits from mentoring. the results show no significant differences between the means of either women or men perceptions on: (1) the benefits of mentoring in the current work environment to their careers, (2) the benefits of outside advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 200 mentoring in their current work environment, and (3) whether the respondent feel that a powerful mentor is a success factor in one’s careers. women and men on average feel that mentoring has been beneficial to their career (mean around 3.7). they feel somewhat, though not very strongly (mean about 3.5) that mentoring outside work has been more fruitful. nonetheless, both women and men felt strongly (each mean is 3.94) that a powerful mentor contributed to their success in the work environment. to sum up, from hypothesis 1 we find that compared to african american men, african american women experience a lower number of beneficial mentoring relationship. however, from hypothesis 2 we find that african american women feel that they receive similar or even more supports and they perceived similar benefits from their mentors. contrary to expectation, we do not find that the greater the number of beneficial mentoring relationship, the higher the perceived support received. a possible explanation is african american women may experience a lower number but higher quality of beneficial mentoring and african american men had a greater number of beneficial mentoring but lower quality of mentoring, which results in no difference in the benefits perceived by both african american women and men. to see the impact of mentoring to the respondents’ careers we are doing a multivariate test to examine whether the number of beneficial mentoring relationships and the perceived benefits from mentors impact the respondents’ current job positions. table 4 tests on difference in the perception on mentoring aspects related to the current work environment female male t-test mentoring has been beneficial to my career 3.77 3.74 0.29 mentoring relationship outside work have been more fruitful 3.42 3.40 0.14 perceived success factor female male t-test powerful mentor is a factor that contribute to success in the work environment 3.94 3.94 0.06 in support of hypothesis 3, the coefficient on nbmentor is positive and significant indicating that the more the number of beneficial mentoring experiences one has had, the higher their current job positions. however, one’s perception of the benefit of mentoring in his/her current work environment does not translate into a higher current job position (coefficients on bmentor and outmentor are insignificant). the results in table 5 show that informal mentoring has a more positive impact on current job positions than formal mentoring (the coefficient of fmentor is negative and significant) which is in line with hypothesis 4. with the existence of formal mentoring, african american women may have less difficulty in obtaining a mentor than in the past, they perceive similar and even more benefit in mentoring than african american men, however the effectiveness of formal mentoring is still questionable. the signs of the control variables are mostly consistent with expectation. more experience (elength coefficient is positive and significant) and capability (cpa coefficient is positive and significant) matters in defining current job positions. however, the coefficient of degree (as another measure of capability) is not significant in the model. it seems that cpa is a highly regarded title in the accounting industry. the coefficient on female is insignificant indicating that men do not receive preferential treatment over women in the career ladder. table 5 ordered logistic regression of career position on mentoring characteristics cp = α0 + α1elength + α2degree + α3cpa + α4female + α5nbmentor + α6fmentor + α7bmentor + α8outmentor + ε. variable coefficient chisquare p-value intercept (3) -5.4403 54.5641 <0.0001* intercept (2) -3.4485 24.4966 <0.0001* intercept (1) -0.1196 0.0311 0.8600 elength 0.3399 51.4032 <0.0001* degree 0.1296 0.4876 0.4850 cpa 1.2390 29.1926 <0.0001* female -0.1475 0.4361 0.5090 nbmentor 0.2193 5.1007 0.0239* fmentor -0.3386 4.3486 0.0370* bmentor -0.0414 0.1051 0.7458 outmentor 0.0734 0.5594 0.4545 n 350 pseudo-r2 32.89% *significant at 5% level cp = current position where sr. manager =3, manager=2, staff=1, and other=0. elength = employment length which is the sum of current employment and previous employment. employment length categories are recoded as follows: < 1 year =1; 1 – 3 years = 2; 3 – 5 years = 3; 5 – 8 years = 4; 8 – 12 years = 5; > 12 years = 6. degree = the highest degree that a respondent has. the recoding is as follows: j.d. or ph.d. = 3. master = 2, bachelor = 1, other=0. cpa = a dummy variable equal to 1 when a person has a cpa and 0 otherwise. female = a dummy variable equal to 1 when a person is female and 0 otherwise. nbmentor = the number of beneficial mentoring a person has been involved in. the recoding is as follow: none = 0; only 1 = 1; more than 1, but less than 3 = 2; more than 3, but less than 5 = 3; 5 plus = 4. fmentor = the nature of the beneficial mentorship, where formal = 1, both = 0, and informal = 1. bmentor = the level of benefit of mentoring aspect of the current work environment to one’s career. outmentor = one’s perception whether outside mentoring have been more fruitful in their current work environment. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 201 conclusion and future study we find that african american women did not receive similar number of beneficial mentoring compared to african american men. specifically we find that women receive less amount of beneficial mentoring. even then, african american women perceived similar and even greater supports and similar benefits from mentoring than african american men. our multivariate analysis also shows that after controlling for experience, capability, and mentoring experiences, gender is insignificant in determining current job positions. this indicates that there is no gender bias in determining one’s career. we also find that a higher number of beneficial mentoring is helpful in furthering one’s career. the quantity of beneficial mentoring matters possibly because different mentors give protégé(s) different points of views/ inputs and better suggestions on how to handle tasks in the work environment. however, we also find that the higher perceived benefits from mentoring do not translate into higher current job positions. the multivariate analysis also shows that informal mentoring has a more positive impact on current job positions than formal mentoring. therefore, we would like to suggest a better structured formal mentoring so that anyone who has difficulty getting an informal mentor can enjoy similar benefits through a formal mentoring program. as allen, eby and lentz (2006) suggested, high quality formal mentoring program should function similarly as informal mentoring. future research should try to examine the characteristics of high quality formal mentoring. other future research topic would be to look at a regular mentor who offers counseling advices versus a mentor who is also a sponsor. a sponsor who is willing to put the protégé‘s name forward and advocate for him/her whenever an opportunity presents will be useful in furthering one’s career. a mentor that functions as a sponsor may help in increasing the diversity in the organization’s middle and upper level positions (hewlett, 2013). references allen, t., eby, l., & lentz, e. (2006). mentorship behaviors and mentorship quality associated with formal mentoring programs: closing the gap between research and practice. journal of applied psychology, 91(3), 567-578. athey, s., avery, c., & zemsky, p. (2000). mentoring and diversity. the american economic review, 90(4), 765-786. barsh, j. & yee, l. (2011). unlocking the full potential of women in the u.s. economy. special report produced exclusively for the wall street journal executive task force for women in the economy 2011. mckinsey&company. chao, g., walz, p., & gardner, p. (1992). formal and informal mentorships: a comparison on mentoring functions and contrast with nonmentored counterparts. personnel psychology, 45(3), 619-636. daley, d. (1996). paths of glory and the glass ceiling: differing patterns of career advancement among women and minority federal employees. public administration quarterly, 20(2), 143-162. dirsmith, m. & covaleski, m. (1985). informal communication, nonformal communications and mentoring in public accounting firms. accounting, organizations and society, 10(2), 149-169. fagenson-eland, e., marks, m., & amendola, k. (1997). perceptions of mentoring relationships. journal of vocational behavior, 51(1), 29-42. hall, m. & smith, d. (2009). mentoring and turnover intentions in public accounting firms: a research note. accounting, organizations and society, 34(6-7), 695-704. hunt, d. & michael, c. (1983). mentorship: a career training and development tool. academy of management review, 8(3), 475-485. hwelett, s. april 13, 2013. mentors are good. sponsors are better. the new york times. johnson, n. & scandura, t. (1994). the effect of mentorship and sex-role style on male-female earnings. industrial relation, 33(2), 263-274. martin, d. & bok, s. (2015). social dominance orientation and mentorship: mitigating hierarchical preference through work roles or just low expectations?. personnel review, 44(4): 592-610. moore, s. (2013). 2013 trends in the supply of accounting graduates and the demand for public accounting recruits. aicpa. pasewark, w. & viator, r. (2005). mentorship separation tension in the accounting profession: the consequences of delayed structural separation. accounting, organizations and society, 30(4), 371-387. ragins, b. & cotton, j. (1991). easier said than done: gender difference in perceived barriers to gaining a mentor. academy of management journal, 34(4), 939-951. ragins, b. & mcfarlin, d. (1990). perceptions of mentor roles in cross-gender mentoring relationships. journal of vocational behavior, 37(3), 321-339. viator, r. (1999). an analysis of formal mentoring programs and perceived barriers to obtaining a mentor at large public accounting firms. accounting horizons, 13(1), 37-53. viator, r. (2001). the association of formal and informal public accounting mentoring with role stress and related job outcomes. accounting, organizations and society, 26(1), 73-93. viator, r. (2001b). an examination of african americans’ access to public accounting mentors: perceived barriers and intentions. accounting, organizations and society, 26(6), 541-561. weisenfeld, l. & robinson-backmon, i. (2007). upward mobility and the african american accountant: an analysis of perceived discrimination, perceived career advancement curtailment, and intent to remain. accounting and the public interest, 7(1), 26-49. where’s the diversity in fortune 500 ceos? accessed february 28, 2014. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 202 http://www.diversityinc.com/diversity-facts/wheres-thediversity-in-fortune-500-ceos/. miliken, f. & martins, l. (1996). searching for common threads: understanding the multiple effects of diversity in organizational groups. academy of management review, 21(2), 402-433. appendix a survey questions demographic questions 1. gender: male _____ female _____ 2. age: 20-25____ 26-30____ 3135____ 36-40____ 41-45____ 46-50____ 51-55____ 55+____ 3. marital status: single ______ married ______ divorced ______ 4. race ( ) african american/black ( ) multi-ethnic ( ) hispanic/latino ( ) caucasian ( ) asian/pacific islander ( ) native american ( ) other (please specify) 5. undergraduate school attended: hbcu public yes ____ no ____ hbcu private yes ____ no ____ non-hbcu public university yes ____ no ____ nonhbcu private university yes ____ no ____ other (please specify) ________________ 6. current employer: ( ) international accounting firm ( ) national, regional or local accounting firm ( ) corporation ( ) government including federal ( ) not-for-profit ( ) self-employed ( ) unemployed ( ) other (please specify) 7. current position: ( ) unemployed ( ) senior management (partner, vp, ceo, director, etc.) ( ) manager (sr. manager, manager, controller, chief accountant, etc.) ( ) staff ( ) other (please specify) 8. number of years with current employer: <1 year _____ 1-3 years _____ 3-5 years_____ 5-8 years____ 8-12 years_____ >12 years_____ not applicable_____ 9. degrees bachelor’s____ master____ j.d.____ ph.d.____ others (please specify) 10. do you hold the cpa certification? yes ______ no____________ 11. your previous employment was in non-public accounting_________ public accounting_____________ not applicable (i do not have a previous employer)__________ 12. how long were you employed?_________________ mentoring questions 1. how many beneficial mentoring relationships have you been involved in? none____ only 1____ more than 1, but less than 3____ more than 3, but less than 5____ 5 plus____ 2. at what stage in your career was your most fruitful mentoring relationship established? never____ within first 3 years____ between 3rd and 5th year____ between 5th and 8th year____ after 8th year____ 3. indicate the nature of the mentoring relationship referred to above formal____ informal____ both____ 4. the majority of my mentor(s) were ( ) african american/black ( ) multi-ethnic ( ) hispanic/latino ( ) caucasian ( ) asian/pacific islander ( ) native american ( ) other (please specify) 5. check all that apply to indicate the kind of support you have received from your mentors(s): ( ) opened door to challenging assignments ( ) provided critical career advice and counsel ( ) helped develop my self-confidence and credibility with others ( ) introduced me to the “right” social networks ( ) provided help with technical issues ( ) put forward my name as new opportunities for advancement were identified ( ) was an advocate on my behalf ( ) helped me develop critical job skills ( ) helped me better balance my work and personal life ( ) i did not receive any support from my mentor(s) ( ) others (please specify) ___________________ 6. how many formal mentors were not beneficial to you? 7. aspects of your current work setting a. mentoring has been beneficial to my career strongly disagree strongly agree 1 2 3 4 5 advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 203 b. mentoring relationship outside work have been more fruitful. strongly disagree strongly agree 1 2 3 4 5 8. factors that contribute to success in the work environment a. powerful mentor strongly disagree strongly agree 1 2 3 4 5 microsoft word eansor_occupational_and_mental_health_consequences_of_women's_experiences -kl edits.docx advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 1 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 204-213, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper occupational and mental health consequences of women's experiences of gender discrimination and negative workplace acts in the legal profession donna m. eansora & kathryn d. lafreniereb donna m. eansor: university of windsor, email: deansor@uwindsor.ca kathryn d. lafreniere: university of windsor, email: lafren1@uwindsor.ca accepted february 12, 2015 acknowledgement: this project was supported by a grant from the canadian bar association: law for the future fund. women have been entering the legal profession increasingly over the last three decades, yet continue to leave the profession at significantly greater rates than men. previous research has documented the influence of workplace discrimination in influencing women's entry and retention in the legal profession, but less research attention has been directed toward the occupational and mental health consequences for these women. the present study examined whether negative acts in the workplace, gender discrimination, and work-life conflict were associated with negative occupational and mental health consequences for women lawyers. questionnaires containing measures of negative acts in the workplace, gendered elements of the work environment, work-family conflict, job satisfaction, burnout, and mental health symptoms were mailed to a stratified random sample of canadian women lawyers, resulting in a sample of 277 women lawyers from alberta, ontario, new brunswick, and nova scotia. findings supported our hypothesis that negative workplace experiences, including gender discrimination, would predict lower levels of job satisfaction and greater levels of burnout in women lawyers. in terms of mental health outcomes, work-life conflict emerged as the strongest predictor of perceived stress and anxiety, while negative workplace acts significantly predicted depression. the findings of this study highlight the importance of addressing negative acts and gender discrimination in the legal profession in order to increase women's job satisfaction and to safeguard their health and well-being. keywords: law, women, gender discrimination, job satisfaction, mental health introduction since the 1980s, canadian women have been entering the legal profession in significant numbers. the percentage of women in the legal profession is impressive, comprising 39% of the profession in canada (gregg, kelly, sullivan, & woolstencroft, 2011). theorists maintain that the increase in women in the profession will transform the “culture of law” to facilitate the successful integration and retention of women into the profession (cooper, brockman, & hoffart, 2004). yet, in 2014 this transformation remains an “unfinished agenda” (rhode, 2001). the integration of women into the profession remains a formidable challenge. “women cannot move up the ladder in sufficient volume to influence significant change and the few who do either grow weary of fighting against the current, or become co-opted over time” (cooper et al., 2004, p.168). moreover, studies dating back to the 1990s reveal that women have been leaving the legal profession, especially private practice, at higher rates than men (gregg et al., 2011; kay, alarie, & adjei, 2013). retaining women in the profession is the focus of extensive study by the law society of upper canada (kay et al., 2013) and nine recommendations aimed at retaining women in the profession were adopted in 2008 (law society of upper canada, 2011). discrimination in the legal profession is a formidable obstacle to the integration and the retention of women in the legal profession. this has been well documented since the 1989 report by the law society of upper canada in women in the legal profession (kay, 1989). more recently, the final report, turning points and transitions (kay, curry, & masuch, 2004), and leaving law and barriers to re-entry: a study of departures from and re-entries to private practice (kay et al., 2013) confirm the continuance of the problem. seventy–four percent of women in the last cited study reported having experienced sexual discrimination in the legal profession (kay et al., 2013). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 205 it is possible that gender beliefs in canada contribute to the existence of the challenges women face in the legal profession and to the effects of these challenges on women’s health and wellbeing. in the annual review of law and social science, the authors state that the standard to which some women in the legal profession work demonstrates their desire to overcome the discrimination and stereotypes they face (kay & gorman, 2008). the literature review in a 2009 report, the law society of british columbia in a 2009 report, the law society of british columbia described some double standards for men and women in the canadian legal profession. first, it has been found that male lawyers are presumed to be competent and are, therefore, judged more often on their potential. their success is, then, attributed to their personal qualities and skills, and because of this, they receive larger rewards. in contrast, women lawyers are not presumed to be competent and are often held to higher standards, are subject to greater scrutiny, and must often prove their competency through their achievements (rhode, 2001). second, womens’ achievements are attributed to external or temporary situational factors, and they receive lesser rewards than men (law society of british columbia, 2009). the reverse is true regarding failures. men’s mistakes tend to be attributed to situational factors while women’s tend to be attributed to their personality traits. also, statements made by men and women lawyers are often interpreted differently as a result of gender stereotypes related to appropriate behaviour in the workplace. women lawyers are more often described as abrasive or aggressive whereas men are described as assertive and self-promoting (rhode, 2001). the annual review of law and social science found that employers often hold assumptions about women lawyers regarding their motivation and commitment, and these attitudes disadvantage women in their prospects for challenging work and career advancement. these assumptions regarding women’s personality traits can lead employers to offer women work assignments and career opportunities that are generally less challenging or in lower profile than those of men. furthermore, women in law often also risk appearing “too soft or too strident, too aggressive or not aggressive enough” as a result of gender stereotypes (kay & gorman, 2008). many of these stereotypes regarding women in the legal profession and regarding canadian women in general may be related to the prevalence of the negative events examined in the present study (i.e. discrimination, harassment, etc.). therefore, these gendered beliefs may also be related to the discovered effects of these negative events on women lawyers such as stress, anxiety, and depression (lafreniere, eansor, kraft and sardinha, 2009). although there is some research related to the manner and rate in which women are entering into the legal profession and the challenges canadian women face as legal professionals, such as harassment and discrimination, more needs to be discovered. very little is known about the effects of these challenges on women lawyers. as such, the purpose of this study is to inquire about women’s subjective experiences as canadian legal professionals, to discover the challenges and their effects that come with the occupation, and to bring these experiences to the attention of the legal profession in order to work towards their elimination. specifically, the impact of discrimination on the mental health of women lawyers is a topic of the present study (canadian bar association, 2013). evidence has been gathering since the early 1990s to suggest that women lawyers might be at a higher risk to experience some mental health problems1 like depression, anxiety and burnout at higher rates than women in the general population. there are three key links in support of this hypothesis. first, there is a link between an individual’s occupation and higher rates and incidences of mental health problems. there is a relationship between lawyers, both men and women, and elevated mental health risks (sells, 1994). second, women experience higher rates and incidence of depression. this relationship is globally established and runs across socioeconomic levels (world health organization, 2002). women are nearly twice as likely to experience depression, as compared to men (patten, 2006; &world health organization, 2002). third, there is a link between discrimination and poor mental health (world health organization, 2002). discrimination impacts negatively on a woman’s health and vulnerability to and risk of experiencing negative health consequences rises where a woman is subject to multiple levels of discrimination2. sexual harassment is recognized as a mental health issue-affecting women in the paid workplace (janzen v platy enterprises,[1989] 1 scr 1252) and is reported at consistently high rates by women in the legal profession (law society of upper canada discrimination and harassment counsel, 2012). canadian women lawyers in private firms report both job dissatisfaction and depression in contradistinction to women working in public legal careers such as government sector work. these women site the lack of occupational power in the organizational culture of private firms as well as being paid less than their male counterparts as contributing factors to job dissatisfaction and depression (hagen & kay, 2007). more generally, statistics gathered from lawyer assistance programs document the existence of mental health problems in the legal profession. many provinces have established assistance programs to help lawyers and law students meet health challenges experienced in the practice and study of advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 206 law. in ontario, for example, the ontario lawyer’s assistance program provides assistance to law students as well as clinical services to lawyers (ontario lawyer’s assistance program, 2013). in 2004, the greatest number of cases requiring clinical services involved mental health issues including stress, anxiety and depression, and a 13% increase in these cases was reported between the 2003 and 2004 annual reports (ontario lawyer’s assistance program, 2005). data collected and reported in turning points and transitions (kay, curry & masuch, 2004) revealed that mental health issues including stress, depression and burnout was a pressing issue for lawyers. health, particularly mental health, emerged as a new concern and a recommended future focus of research in the report. many lawyers wrote at length about their health struggles and many attributed their departure from the practice of law to mental health problems; some examples from women lawyers are listed below. why i left law: 1) total mental breakdown 2) major depression… (kay et al., 2004, p. 77). left practice of law due to depression/burnout. main challenges/reasons for leaving for many women seem to be stress and burnout” (kay et al., 2004, p. 76). i am currently on stress leave (for depression, posttraumatic stress, and other illness) that is work-related, caused in part by a bully boss…. ( kay et al., 2004, p. 77). i hit a wall this summer and, coping with my third major depression in 30 years, could not go on doing what i was doing. i’m on indefinite medical/disability leave and working with a therapist and medication to get well. then we’ll see if i go back to law. i feel the firm does not value the work i do or the folks i help –my values are at odds with theirs. my opinions are not respected at my work and service to clients is undervalued. “value” in my mind does not mean monetary value. i think i’m a classic case of burnout from family law and this particular firm. (kay et al., 2004, p. 76). most recently, leaving law and barriers to re-entry: a study of departures from and re-entries to private practice reported that lawyers who experience sexual discrimination leave private practice 29% quicker than lawyers who do not experience discrimination (kay et al., 2013). seventy-four percent of women lawyers reported that they had experienced discrimination in contrast with 11% of male lawyers (kay et al., 2013). moreover, many lawyers who left private practice did not return to the profession at all. some of these individuals attributed their decision to extreme stress, health issues and burnout. some examples are: left because of stress (kay et al., 2013, p.55). good old ‘nervous breakdown’. burn out…clinical depression. burn out…. would not return to practice ever (kay et al., 2013, p.56). the report concluded that the emotional and physical health of lawyers was worthy of study because of the stressful and demanding nature of the work in private practice (kay et al., 2013). in an earlier article by our research team, we focused on the relationship between work-family conflict and family-work conflict on women's job satisfaction and mental health consequences. our study revealed a relationship between higher levels of work-family conflict and family-work conflict and the experience of greater perceived stress, burnout, and mental-health symptomatology. higher levels of both conflicts negatively impacted on job satisfaction, and personal resilience improved job satisfaction. women's resilience also acted as a buffer to stress, reducing the negative impact of family-work conflict on health consequences including depression and anxiety (lafreniere, eansor, kraft, & sardinha, 2009). the present study the present study examined whether negative acts in the workplace, gender discrimination, and work-life conflict were associated with negative work consequences, including decreased job satisfaction and burnout, in a sample of canadian women lawyers. in addition, we wanted to examine mental health symptoms associated with these women’s work experiences, including an examination of women’s levels of depression, anxiety, and perceived stress. questionnaires containing measures of negative and positive events in the workplace, gender discrimination, work-family conflict, job satisfaction, burnout, mental health symptomatology, and demographic characteristics were mailed to a random sample of women lawyers from the canadian provinces of alberta, ontario, new brunswick, and nova scotia. research questions 1) to what extent did women lawyers experience negative events in the workplace, including bullying behaviors, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment? 2) how do positive and negative workplace experiences affect the occupational functioning and mental health outcomes of women in the legal profession? hypotheses 1) it was predicted that negative acts in the workplace, gender discrimination, and greater levels of worklife conflict would negatively affect women's occupational functioning. specifically, we expected that such negative workplace experiences would increase women's level of burnout and would reduce their job satisfaction. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 207 2) it was predicted that negative acts in the workplace, gender discrimination, and greater levels of worklife conflict would negatively impact on women's mental health, leading to higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. 3) positive workplace events were expected to be a positive predictor of job satisfaction, and to be negatively related to the mental health outcomes. methods participants and recruitment the sample consisted of 277 women lawyers who ranged in age from 27 to 77 years (median age = 38 years). the majority of women identified as heterosexual (95.7%), were married or living with a partner (72.9%), and reported having one or more children (56.0%). most women identified their ethnic or cultural group as english canadian (52.7%), followed by british (7.2%), and french canadian (6.9%). the remainder identified as eastern (5.1%), western (3.2%), or southern european (2.5%); far eastern (2.9%); aboriginal (2.5%); scandinavian (2.2%); and a number of other diverse cultural groups including middle eastern, african, caribbean, latin american, south american, and australian, with fewer than 1.5% of respondents in each of these groups. the majority of participants worked in law firms as counsel or associates (38.3%) or as partners (15.5%), as industry or corporate counsel (14.8%), as government lawyers (10.8%), or as sole practitioners (9.0%). the remaining participants worked in various settings including legal-aid clinics, as union lawyers or labor arbitrators, as in-house counsel to non-profit organizations, or had recently retired from legal practice. most of the women (58%) had practiced law for 10 or fewer years. participants' personal annual incomes ranged from less than $24,000 (1.1%) to greater than $500,000 (2.2%), with the majority of women indicating annual earnings in the $50,000 to $99,999 range (39.4%), followed by the $100,000 to $149,999 range (25.3%). questionnaires were mailed out to a random sample of 1,234 women lawyers from the canadian provinces of alberta, ontario, new brunswick, and nova scotia, based upon lists obtained from the canadian bar association. eleven questionnaires were returned unopened because the recipient was no longer at the same postal address. a total of 277 completed questionnaires were returned, yielding an overall response rate of 22.6%. response rates varied by province, with the highest rate of responding obtained from nova scotia (30.1%), and the lowest from new brunswick (17.8%). ontario and alberta had response rates of 22.8% and 18.0%, respectively. procedure and measures the entire questionnaire took approximately 35 to 45 minutes to complete and contained detailed demographic questions that included a number of questions regarding professional background (e.g., areas of practice, years practicing, current position, hours worked per week, and characteristics of the work setting), and personal background information. included in each questionnaire package were an informed consent letter that invited them to participate in a study of women's work experiences in the legal profession, the questionnaire, a postage pre-paid return envelope, and an individually wrapped teabag with a sticker that said “please enjoy this cup of tea while you complete our survey. thank you for your help!” dillman’s tailored design method (dillman, 2000) suggests including a token incentive to maximize response rates to mail-out surveys. in addition to the demographic questions, the questionnaire included the following measures: negative acts in the workplace. the negative acts questionnaire (naq; einarsen & raknes, 1997) was used to assess the extent to which participants experienced negative acts in the workplace such as ridicule, social exclusion, and harassing behaviors (e.g., "devaluing of your work and efforts"). one item was removed from the original 22-items measure ("funny" surprises) because it was ambiguous and could be interpreted to reflect a positive workplace event. the original naq was developed to assess harassment and victimization of male workers, but the items are neutrally worded and suitable for assessing negative acts toward female employees. previous reviews (e.g., out, 2005) have reported high internal consistency reliability, with cronbach's alphas ranging from 84 to 93. a cronbach's alpha coefficient of .88 was obtained for the modified version of the naq used in the present study. following a procedure used by out (2005), we added a separate item that asked if participants had been bullied at their workplace. we also included two items that asked whether respondents had experienced unwanted sexual suggestions or physical contact from supervisors, colleagues, or clients, based on items developed by goldenhar, swanson, hurrell, ruder, and deddens (1998) in their study of job stressors experienced by female construction workers. positive events in the workplace. positive events were measured by 9 items from the 18-item positive events subscale of the specific events in the workplace measure (keashly, trott, & maclean, 1994). items were selected that were most appropriate for women lawyers' work experiences (e.g. "given credit for initiative"). the original positive events subscale showed strong internal consistency, with cronbach's alphas of .78 to .84 (keashly et al., 1994), and a cronbach's alpha coefficient of .82 was found for the 9 items that were used in the present study. workplace gender discrimination. gender discrimination was measured through a 17-items scale that was comprised of items adapted from other inventories or generated by the researchers (e.g., "women lawyers are promoted to fewer partnerships and senior positions than men lawyers of equal competency and experience"). three advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 208 items were based on items from klonoff and landrine's (1995) 23-items schedule of sexist events (e.g., "how many times have people failed to show you the respect that you deserve because you are a woman?"), and 6 items were based on items from riger, stokes, raja, and sullivan's (1997) 35-item measure of female faculty perceptions of the work environment (e.g.,"sex discrimination is a big problem"). all items were reworded to make them applicable for the workplace context of women lawyers. the resulting workplace gender discrimination measure showed strong internal consistency in the present sample (cronbach's alpha = .94). work-family conflict and family-work conflict scales. work-family conflict (wfc) and family-work conflict (fwc) were measured using netemeyer, boles, and mcmurrian’s (1996) scale. this measure consists of five items assessing wfc and five items assessing fwc measured on a 7-point likert-type scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree). wfc refers to job-related demands that interfere with home and family life (e.g., "the demands of my work interfere with my home and family life"), while fwc concerns the conflict that arises from demands from family and home life impacting upon performing work-related duties (e.g.,"i have to put off doing things at work because of demands on my time at home"). both wfc and fwc have been found to be reliable and valid measures of work-life conflict in numerous previous studies, and the measures showed strong internal consistency reliability (cronbach’s alpha = .94 for wfc and α = .90 for fwc) in the present sample. job satisfaction survey. job satisfaction was assessed using spector’s (1985) job satisfaction survey. this measure is comprised of subscales assessing satisfaction with workplace experiences including pay, promotion, supervision, benefits, contingent rewards, operating procedures, coworkers, nature of work, and communication. to shorten the measure and make it more uniformly applicable to women lawyers employed in diverse legal settings; we eliminated the pay, benefits, and communication subscales, which yielded a 24-item instrument of total job satisfaction. a sample item of the retained items is "when i do a good job, i receive the recognition for it that i should receive". the abbreviated measure showed good internal consistency (α = . 91) in the current sample. maslach burnout inventory – 3rd edition (schaufeli, leiter, maslach, & jackson, 1996). the maslach burnout inventory (general survey) is a 16-item inventory that has been used successfully in previous research on occupational groups that included lawyers (e.g., langballe, falkum, innstrand, & aasland, 2006) and was used in the present study to assess three sub-factors of burnout: emotional exhaustion, cynicism and professional efficacy. internal consistency of the subscales was adequate in the present study (α = .92 for emotional exhaustion, α = .83 for professional efficacy, and α = .88 for cynicism). perceived stress scale (cohen, kamarck, & mermelstein, 1983). this 14-item scale is widely used as a measure of non-specific appraised stress (e.g., "in the last month, how often have you felt difficulties were piling up so high that you could not overcome them?"). the pss has been shown to have strong reliability and validity in previous studies (cohen & williamson, 1988). internal consistency reliability was strong (α = .89) in the present study. symptom assessment – 45 (sa-45). the sa-45 is a brief measure of psychiatric symptomatology that is suitable for use in both clinical and non-clinical samples (strategic advantage, inc., 2000). in the present study, only the 5-item subscales for anxiety and depression were assessed. internal consistency was adequate for each of these subscales in the present study, with cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .72 for anxiety and .84 for depression. the questionnaire also included some open-ended questions that asked for examples of challenges confronting women in the legal profession, and solicited other comments they might wish to make about their workplace experiences. results preliminary data considerations the data contained some missing values, with less than 5% missing values for the majority of items. exceptions were items that were not applicable to all lawyers (e.g., asking about supervisor support resulted in 7.6% missing values, since this item would not be applicable to sole practitioners). missing data were handled through imputing the scale mean for the missing items, unless the missing data exceeded 20% of the items on a particular scale, in which case, listwise deletion was used. inspection of skewness and kurtosis of each variable showed only the negative acts in the workplace scale to show moderate skewness and kurtosis, with less variation and more responses at the lower end of the scale. we performed a logarithmic transformation on this variable, and the transformed variable was used in all correlation and regression analyses. all measures showed adequate internal consistency reliability, with cronbach's alpha coefficients > .70, as indicated in the description of each scale in the measures section. prevalence of selected negative workplace events to address the first research question, we examined the percentages of women's responses to key questions regarding bullying, unfair treatment due to gender, and sexual harassment. of the 270 women who answered the item regarding workplace bullying, 86.7% reported never having been bullied in the workplace, while 9.3% reported infrequent experiences of workplace bullying (less than monthly), 2.2% reported being bullied on a monthly basis, 1.1% on a weekly basis, and .7% (n = 2) reported daily advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 209 experiences of workplace bullying. frequencies for reported experiences of being treated unfairly due to gender and sexual harassment are shown below in table 1. while reported experiences of sexual harassment by supervisors tended to be less prevalent, approximately 35% of women had received unwanted sexual suggestions by clients, and approximately 25% had received unwanted sexual suggestions from colleagues. only 34.5% of women in our sample said that they had never experienced unfair treatment due to their gender, while more than 65% reported experiencing unfair gender treatment at some point. table 1 percentage of women reporting unfair gender treatment and harassment at work, how often have you: never almost never smt fairly often very often experienced unfair treatment due to your gender? 34.5 25.5 28.7 7.3 4.0 had unwanted sexual suggestions made to you by supervisors? 81.1 11.6 6.2 .4 .7 had unwanted sexual suggestions made to you by colleagues? 74.6 18.1 5.4 1.4 .4 had unwanted sexual suggestions made to you by clients? 64.6 22.0 11.2 1.8 .4 had unwanted physical contact, including that of a sexual nature, made to you by supervisors? 88.7 8.0 2.6 .4 .4 had unwanted physical contact, including that of a sexual nature, made to you by colleagues? 86.3 10.5 2.5 .4. .4 had unwanted physical contact, including that of a sexual nature, made to you by clients? 84.8 13.4 1.4 .4 multiple regression findings to address our second research question and to test our hypotheses, we conducted a series of standard multiple regression analyses with job satisfaction, perceived stress, the burnout subscales (emotional exhaustion, professional efficacy, and cynicism), anxiety, and depression as outcome measures, and negative acts in the workplace, positive workplace events, gender discrimination, family-work conflict, and work-family conflict as potential predictor variables. although we had no specific a priori hypotheses about the influence of age, we found that it was correlated with a number of our outcome measures, so we also included it as a potential predictor variable. we first examined the pattern of intercorrelations among predictors and outcome measures, and included as predictors only those variables that were significantly correlated with a particular outcome measure. the highest correlation between predictor variables was r (220) = .64, p < .001 between negative acts in the workplace and gender discrimination, and examination of collinearity diagnostics indicated no problems with mulitcollinearity in any of the regression models. significant predictors in the final regression models for each of our seven outcome measures are displayed below in table 2. table 2 significant predictors of workplace outcome measures outcome variable predictor variables β t sr2 job satisfaction positive events .37 7.58*** .11 negative acts .40 7.12*** .10 gender discrimination .26 4.14*** .03 emotional exhaustion work-family conflict .46 7.56*** .16 negative acts .29 4.22*** .05 professional efficacy positive events .20 2.72** .03 family-work conflict -.14 2.05* .02 cynicism gender discrimination .30 3.50** .05 negative acts .16 2.04* .02 perceived stress family-work conflict .22 3.45** .04 work-family conflict .22 3.26** .04 negative acts .21 2.74** .03 positive events .16 2.38* .02 anxiety work-family conflict .24 3.36** .04 negative acts .27 3.30** .04 depression negative acts .35 4.25*** .07 note. n = 218; * p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001 the overall regression model for job satisfaction was significant, r2(adj) = .64, f(5, 177) = 66.20, p < .001. examination of the squared semi-partial correlation coefficients indicates that positive workplace events positively predicted job satisfaction, accounting for 11% of the unique variance, while negative acts in the workplace and gender discrimination were significant negative predictors of job satisfaction, accounting for 10% and 3% of the unique variance in this outcome variable, respectively. the burnout subscales of emotional exhaustion, professional efficacy, and cynicism were examined in separate regression analyses. the regression model for emotional exhaustion was significant, r2(adj) = .43, f(6, 190) = 25.88, p < .001. only work-family conflict and negative acts in the workplace emerged as significant predictors of emotional exhaustion, accounting for 16% and 5% of the unique variance in this outcome, respectively. professional efficacy, which is inversely related to the other burnout components, also produced a significant regression model, r2(adj) = .16, f(4, advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 210 197) = 10.36, p < .001. older participant age and positive events in the workplace emerged as significant positive predictors, accounting for 7% and 5% of the unique variance in this outcome, respectively, while family-work conflict negatively predicted professional efficacy, accounting for 2% of the unique variance. cynicism, the third component of burnout, also resulted in a significant regression model, r2(adj) = .30, f(6, 188) = 14.66, p < .001. significant predictors of cynicism were gender discrimination (accounting for 5% of the unique variance) and age, which accounted for 3% of the unique variance in this outcome. participants who reported more gender discrimination and those who were younger were higher in cynicism. the regression model for perceived stress as an outcome variable was also significant, r2(adj) = .31, f(6, 188) = 15.69, p < .001. family-work conflict, work-family conflict, and negative acts in the workplace all emerged as significant predictors of this outcome, accounting for 4%, 3%, and 2% of the unique variance, respectively. positive workplace events and older participant age predicted lower amounts of perceived stress, each accounting for an additional 2% of the unique variance in this model. the regression model for anxiety was also significant, r2(adj) = .16, f(5, 208) = 9.04, p < .001. here, work-family conflict accounted for 5% of the unique variance in anxiety, while negative acts in the workplace accounted for an additional 4% of the variance. although the overall regression model for depression was significant, r2(adj) = .22, f(6, 191) = 10.11, p < .001, only negative acts in the workplace emerged as a significant predictor of depression, accounting for 8% of the unique variance in this outcome. discussion findings from our regression analyses provided support for hypothesis 1, which suggested that negative acts, gender discrimination, and work-life conflict would negatively impact on women's occupational functioning by increasing their levels of burnout and reducing their job satisfaction. negative acts in the workplace and gender discrimination both emerged as significant predictors of lower job satisfaction, and negative acts predicted the emotional exhaustion burnout factor, while experiencing gender discrimination predicted cynicism. work-family conflict predicted emotional exhaustion, and family-work conflict was a negative predictor of professional efficacy. our second hypothesis, which predicted that negative acts in the workplace, gender discrimination, and work-life conflict would predict higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression, received partial support. family-work conflict and workfamily conflict were both positive predictors of perceived stress, along with negative acts in the workplace. workfamily conflict and negative acts in the workplace also predicted anxiety, but only negative acts in the workplace emerged as a significant predictor of depression. contrary to our hypothesis, gender discrimination did not significantly contribute to the prediction of these mental health outcomes. hypothesis 3, which stated that positive workplace events would be a positive predictor of job satisfaction, and would be negatively related to the mental health outcomes, also received partial confirmation. positive workplace events emerged as a strong predictor of job satisfaction, and negatively predicted perceived stress, but were not found to be related to anxiety or depression in the current study. taken together, findings from the present study suggest that women in the legal profession do report negative workplace events that include gender discrimination and, to a lesser extent, sexual harassment. while other factors, most notably issues related to maintaining work-life balance, were more strongly related to emotional exhaustion, perceived stress, and anxiety, negative acts in the workplace significantly predicted depression in women lawyers. both negative workplace events and gender discrimination negatively impacted on women's job satisfaction and were related to cynicism about one's work. consistent with our third hypothesis, positive workplace events, such as being praised for one's accomplishments, being given constructive feedback, and being recognized for one's work were strong predictors of women lawyers' job satisfaction and sense of professional efficacy, and also had a significant effect on reducing perceived stress. positive workplace events were not sufficient to reduce the other aspects of burnout, anxiety, or depression. these negative mental health consequences were largely determined by other factors, including high levels of work-family conflict and negative acts in the workplace. thus, the positive events that occur in the workplaces of women lawyers do not seem to mitigate the impact of negative workplace experiences that impact on their mental health and well being. our inclusion of age in the regression analyses revealed significant relations with burnout, in which older women were lower in cynicism and higher in professional efficacy. these findings suggest that burnout might actually be more prevalent among younger women, who are likely to be at an earlier stage of their career. while the idea that burnout might lessen over time might appear to be counterintuitive, it makes sense that women's sense of professional efficacy would increase with more time in the profession, and that this might empower women to make changes in their careers that could help to counter their earlier burnout and cynicism. the finding that younger age and greater work-life conflict were significant predictors of perceived stress suggests that women may be experiencing a sense of overload in their early career that may be exacerbated by pressures associated with child rearing or decisions concerning starting a family. it is also important to consider the possibility that the older women in our sample might represent a selective survival effect, in which the women who are managing their professional lives the best (due to either their favourable structural advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 211 circumstances or their personal efficacy and resilience) are the ones that remain in the legal profession longer. workplace events that lead to women lawyers' growing dissatisfaction, increased cynicism, and depression must be given serious attention, since they can ultimately have an impact on retention of women in the legal profession, as well as on the mental health of women who remain. while some women leave the legal profession altogether, other women move from private practice to other positions within the profession to escape discrimination and job dissatisfaction. in open-ended responses, many women in the present study reported that these employment changes can result in less challenging legal work, fewer opportunities for advancement and less remuneration. although a large majority (86.7%) of women in the present study did not report being bullied in the workplace, an inspection of the rate of endorsement of specific negative acts indicates that many women did experience specific negative interpersonal behaviors from others in their workplace. inspection of negative acts that occurred on at least a monthly basis indicated that 66% reported that others withheld necessary information from them; 65% reported that their opinions and views were neglected, and 57% reported that they were ordered to do work below their level of competence. smaller but notable percentages of women reported more direct bullying behaviors, including being gossiped about (34%), social exclusion from others (39%), and having others devalue their work or efforts (36%). thus, a number of women who reported never being bullied in the workplace did report specific negative interpersonal behaviors that are consistent with workplace bullying. coupled with the finding that over 65% of women in the present study reported experiencing unfair gender treatment at some point, it is possible that women lawyers have come to perceive gender mistreatment and negative acts in the workplace as a background feature of their work environment that does not garner their overt attention. at the same time, these negative and discriminatory events in the workplace do appear to negatively impact their mental health and lead to reduced job satisfaction. gender discrimination and negative events in the workplace appear to negatively impact the mental health of women and this leads to reduced job satisfaction. this in turn can impact on the retention of women in the legal profession. the specific and acute risk these links pose for women should be addressed to explore ways to prevent the disenfranchisement of women from the profession of law. without this exploration, changing the culture of the legal profession will remain an “unfinished agenda” (rhode, 2001). limitations and conclusions the present study was a self-report mail-out survey of a stratified random sample of canadian women in the legal profession. despite rigorous efforts to recruit a random sample, returned surveys were subject to the usual volunteer sampling biases, in which women who were more highly motivated to complete and return the survey, for a variety of reasons, would be over-represented in the final sample. volunteer bias may have interacted with some of the variables of interest, in that women who had more to say about experiences of discrimination and negative workplace acts may have been more strongly inclined to use the surveys to relay their stories. however, descriptive analyses of our measures indicated that most variables closely approximated a normal distribution, and where they didn't (i.e., for negative acts in the workplace), the responses were clustered around the lower end of the distribution, indicating lower rates of endorsement of negative acts for most respondents. the overall pattern of our findings showed that while the majority of women in our sample did not report that they were sexually harassed or bullied in their workplace, a substantial number (65%) indicated that they had experienced unfair treatment due to their gender. where women did experience gender-based discrimination, the consequences could be serious and detrimental, leading to reduced job satisfaction and higher rates of cynicism, a component of burnout. being subjected to other negative acts in the workplace also reduced job satisfaction, increased burnout, and influenced mental health outcomes in terms of increased levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. on the whole, our findings point to the need for the law profession to attend to and address negative workplace behaviors, including gender discrimination, in order to increase women lawyers' job satisfaction and safeguard their health and well-being. references aba commission on lawyer assistance programs (2010). 2010 comprehensive study on lawyer assistance programs [online]. chicago: american bar association. retrieved from: http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated /legalservices/colap/downloads/20110311_aba_2010_ colap_comprehensive_survey.authcheckdam.pdf. aba commission on women (2013). a current glance at women in the law 2013 [online]. chicago: american bar association. retrieved from: http:www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/marketing /women/current_glance_statistics_feb2013.authcheckd 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(1997). measuring perceptions of the work environment for faculty. the review of higher education, 21, 63–78. schaufeli, w. b., leiter, m. p., maslach, c., & jackson, s. e. (1996). ‘maslach burnout inventory-general survey (mbi-gs). in c. maslach, s. e. jackson, s.e., & m. p. leiter, mbi manual (3rd ed.). mountain view, ca: cpp, inc. sells, b. (1994). the soul of the law: understanding lawyers and the law. massachusetts: element. spector, p. e. (1985). measurement of human service staff satisfaction: development of the job satisfaction survey. american journal of community psychology, 13, 693-713. strategic advantage, inc. (2000). symptom assessment-45 questionnaire (sa-45) technical manual. toronto, on: mhs. the standing senate committee on social affairs, science and technology. (2004). mental health, mental illness and addiction: overview of policies and programs in canada interim report [online]. ottawa: senate of canada. retrieved from: http://www.parl.gc.ca/content/sen/committee/381/so ci/rep/report1/repintnov04vol1-e.pdf. 1 the terminology mental health problem(s) refers “to diminished capacities – whether cognitive, emotional, attentional, interpersonal, motivational or behavioral – that interfere with a person’s enjoyment of life or adversely affect interactions with society and environment” (the standing senate committee on social affairs, science and technology, 2004, p. 68). 2 each woman’s experience will be different as every woman is impacted by varying degrees of oppression affecting racial and ethnic minority women, aboriginal women, disabled and aging women, lesbians and immigrant and refugee women (capen, 1996). microsoft word pemberton_nterweaving_life_and_career.docx advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 89 advancing women in leadership vol. 36, pp. 89-100, 2016 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper interweaving life and career: the recursive impact of life and career decisions among female higher education faculty teri s. peterson, amy r. slack, & cynthia lee a. pemberton teri s. peterson: idaho state university, email: peteteri@isu.edu amy r. slack: idaho state university, email: slacamy@isu.edu cynthia lee a. pemberton: colorado mesa university, email: pembcynt@gmail.com accepted august 09, 2016 through this study the researchers sought to describe and understand the unidirectional and recursive impact of major life and career decisions on female higher education faculty, and subsequently scaffold emergent themes using life course theory. semistructured interviews were conducted with 12 female faculty members at an institution in the intermountain west. qualitative inquiry was used to analyze the interviews, providing rich descriptions and understanding from the perspective of the individuals’ lived experience. five themes emerged from the interview data. these themes were then scaffolded within life course theory to frame an understanding of the interplay of major life and career decisions on the career trajectories of female higher education faculty. the themes were geographical choice, family, support structures, job type, and time/balance. these themes illustrated the primary aspects of life course theory, particularly the timing of lives, linked or interdependent lives, human agency in making choices, developmental risk and protection, and diversity in life course trajectories. the usefulness of applying this theory when considering female faculty perceptions about their lived experiences was supported by the study findings; facilitating and deepening our understanding of the interaction of life events and career decisions among female faculty in the academy. keywords: work life balance, career trajectory, female faculty, life course theory introduction in this study we sought to describe and understand the recursive impact of major life and career decisions among female higher education faculty. life course theory was used to help scaffold an understanding of the emergent data. application of this theory facilitated the exploration of lived experiences of female faculty related to the work-family interface as they reflected on decisions made throughout their life courses. this study was cross-sectional in nature, incorporating interviews with women across multiple ages. participants were asked to reflect on their career trajectories specific to the interaction of major life events and career decisions. the u.s. conceptualization of work and family has been evolving over the past half century. the most significant historical transformation impacting being the increase in the number of women in the labor force, particularly married women and women with children (moen & sweet, 2004). as examples, from 1970 to 2014 the percentage of women working as dentists increased from 3% to 29%, lawyers from 5% to 33%, physicians from 9% to 37%, clergy from 3% to 19%, and judges from 7% to 52%; with over 50% of post-secondary teachers being female (u.s. bureau of labor statistics, 2013; u.s. census bureau, 2012). these numbers illustrate the extent to which work and family lived experiences have changed. the traditional male-breadwinner, female-homemaker model no longer describes the reality of the typical american family (moen & sweet, 2004), despite the fact that organizational adaptations to the evolving relationships between work, family and personal life remain more marginalized than mainstreamed (kossek, lewis, & hammer, 2010). riley, kahn, foner, and mack (1994) described this as a “structural lag” where formal and informal policies and practices within the american culture fail to keep pace with the changing realities of work and family life. as women have increasingly entered the workforce, many face what hochschild termed the second shift in his 2003 book of the same name, bearing a disproportionate share of domestic work and caregiving for children and aging parents (moen & sweet, 2004). although women have experienced her gains in the paid advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 90 work arena, according to walsh (1995), many feel they are living “divided lives” (pp. 24-25) unable to integrate work and family effectively and often overwhelmed with frustration and guilt (cownie, 2004). likewise, female faculty feel pressure, experiencing both the second shift and feelings of divided lives as they try to integrate work and family life while pursuing a career trajectory in the academy (applebaum, 2000; astin & leland, 1991; awis, 2012; bailyn, 2010; bristol, abbuhl & cappola, 2008; cheung & halpern, 2010; gerton, 2011; toutkoushian & conley, 2005; wolf-wendel, ward & twombly, 2007). using a descriptive approach and building on the literature, the interface of career and life decisions among female faculty was explored to seek a deeper understanding of work-life impacts by looking at the unidirectional and recursive nature of major life and career decisions. according to the survey of earned doctorates (nsf, 2015), “[o]verall, women earned 46% of all doctorates in 2014” (p.2); with a median age for completing a doctorate of just over 32 years. given that for faculty hired directly into tenure-track positions it typically takes 5 to 7 years to earn tenure, these data imply that the age of being awarded tenure would be 37 years or older. this is older than average for childbearing. in 2006, the average age at which a woman had her first child was 25 years old (livingston & cohn, 2010). in addition, the american college of obstetricians and gynecologists enumerate decreased fertility and increased risks with older childbearing (2011). taken together, the timeline associated with a tenure-track academic career path would likely impact family-associated decisions for women in the academy, particularly as they relate to childbearing. research by gappa, austin and trice (2007), helms (2010), mason, goulden and frasch (2009) and wolf et al. (2007) found that younger faculty were and are more concerned with worklife balance, and that increasingly faculty are part of dual career couples, as evidenced by the fact that the american association of university professors (aaup) now offers a recommendation for accommodation on this issue (aaup, 2010). in addition, the relationship between work and home life has led to research on the effect of family-friendly policies on career trajectories, particularly for female faculty (bailyn, 2010; gerten, 2011; wolf et al., 2007). assuming a desire for institutions to better understand the issue of work-life balance and attract and retain the best faculty talent, research focusing on the interaction of career and life choices is particularly relevant; and can potentially shed light on differences in choices associated with disciplines, institutions, academic job type (e.g., tenureversus non tenure-track, and balancing teaching and research), as well as help illuminate the considerations faculty might engage concerning work life. with this in mind, we explored female faculty perceptions about the interaction of major life events and career decisions in creating their life trajectories. the thematic framework provided by the life course theory was used to scaffold understanding of the emergent data. life course theory is described next. life course theory according to bengtson and allen (1993) life course theory is an interdisciplinary approach deriving from the fields of psychology, sociology and family development that emphasizes transitions and trajectories. from a life course theory perspective, a person’s life is considered his/her life trajectory and consists of a series of transitions or life events (elder, 1985; hutchinson, 2011). a transition is a change in role or status representing a distinct departure from a previous role or status (elder & johnson, 2003; hagestad, 2003), such as: marriage, birth, divorce, remarriage, and death (carter & mcgoldrick, 2004; hagestad, 2003). life trajectory is made up of life transitions. transitions are embedded in trajectories; and while trajectories do not necessarily exhibit straight lines, they typically reveal continuity in direction (hutchison, 2011). life events are significant occurrences that cause an abrupt change often producing serious and long-lasting effects (hutchinson, 2011; settersten, 2003). for female faculty, transitions associated with career trajectory and life events could include pursuing a faculty position that works best for them in terms of type of institution—research, comprehensive; type of position—tenure track or not, perceived support and family-friendly policies, and geographic location of the institution. elder (1994) identified four themes in life course theory. these are: (a) interplay of human lives and historical time; (b) timing of lives; (c) linked or interdependent lives; and (d) human agency in making choices. two additional themes were added by elder (1998), diversity in life course trajectories; and developmental risk and protection by shanahan (2000). according to mitchell (2003) life trajectories are influenced by the interplay of human lives and historical time, with historical events producing group effects on individuals living during the same time period (cooksey, menaghan & jekielek, 1997; elder, 1985; elder 1998). the ages at which specific life events and transitions typically occur is referred to as the timing of lives (hutchison, 2011). three types of time are important in life course theory: individual time, generational time and historical time. individual time refers to a person’s chronological age. generational time refers to the age cohorts in which individuals are grouped. historical time refers to social changes and historical events occurring in a person’s life (mitchell, 2003). life course theory emphasizes the fact that human lives are linked or interdependent. human relationships both support and control behavior. family life is typically interdependent in that parent’s and children’s lives are linked and mutually influencing. an individual’s life trajectory is made up of transitions constructed by human agency in making choices, with the choices made shaping the individual’s life trajectory (hutchison, 2011). life course scholars stress that the ability to make certain choices is contingent upon the opportunities and limitations presented (hutchison, 2011; mitchell, 2003). advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 91 diversity in life course trajectories is a result of variations in social class, culture, gender, and individual life choices (hutchison, 2011). settersten and lovegreen (1998) found that men’s life course trajectories were more structured and predictable than women’s. one explanation for this being the interwoven nature of women’s lives with family. developmental risk and protection are evidenced in life course trajectories. experiences with one life event or transition may have an impact on subsequent transitions and events that may either add protective factors or put the intended life course trajectory at risk (hutchison, 2011). methodological approach and sampling in this study we explored female faculty perceptions about the interaction of major life events and career decisions in creating their life trajectories. qualitative inquiry was used to identify emergent themes from a series of semi-structured one-on-one interviews with 12 female faculty. qualitative inquiry was deemed appropriate because of its value in providing rich descriptions of complex phenomena, and focus on seeking understanding from the perspective of the individuals’ lived experience (bogdan & biklen, 2007; creswell, 2007; denzin, 2000). the emergent themes were then scaffolded using life course theory to frame an understanding of the career trajectories of these faculty members. following institutional irb approval, we relied on a nonprobability, self-selection, convenience, criterion sample of 12 full-time female faculty, recruited via an electronic bulletin board and follow-up emails, employed at a carnegie classification, public doctoral university: moderate research activity institution in the intermountain west (creswell, 2007). the 12 faculty represented five different academic colleges on the campus, spanned three decades in terms of age, included both tenure-track/tenured and non-tenure-track faculty, and varied in terms of having children in the home. table 1 displays the participants’ demographics. the interviews were guided by a semi-structured interview protocol. the protocol queries were derived from the literature and based on an interpretive constructionist approach, using a responsive interviewing model as discussed by rubin and rubin (2005). this type of interview enabled the researcher to modify the topics and questions on the basis of the responses obtained, serving to help elicit participants’ perceptions of their life course trajectory and unidirectional or recursive impact of their career and life decisions. the interviews were audio recorded and lasted between 13 and 45 minutes. the researcher took notes during and after the interviews, transcribed the audio recordings, and sent the transcripts to participants for clarification and, if desired, elaboration—a process called member checking (ary, jacobs, razavieh, & sorensen, 2006). two interviewees added minor clarifications during the member checking process. data analysis followed a general inductive approach as described by thomas (2006). data transcripts were read and reread to develop categories using open coding. the categories were assigned to data units evoking issues of the unidirectional or recursive impact of career and life decisions, and organized into key themes. five themes emerged: geographic choice, family, support structure, job type and time/balance. units of text were then coded into one or more of the themes or left uncoded. the textual units consisted of phrases, sentences or groups of sentences conveying a coherent idea. a total of 410 textual units were coded. data saturation occurred by the twelfth interview and therefore no further participants were solicited. ary et al. (2006) defined data saturation as “the point at which no new information is forthcoming from additional participants or settings” (p. 631). table 1 frequencies for the demographic variables on the interview participants variable frequency college or division college of arts and letters 4 college of business 1 college of education 2 college of science and engineering 2 division of health sciences 2 tenure status not tenure track 2 tenure track, not yet tenured 5 tenured 6 highest degree ph.d. 10 other doctorate 2 age category 30-39 4 40-49 4 50-59 4 marital status no 1 yes 11 child/children no 5 yes 7 advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 92 results participants were representative of female faculty across disciplines and demographics. the demographic information, as presented in table 1, reveals that all colleges or divisions within the university were present in the sample, with participant ages being uniformly distributed across the three decades represented. one participant was not married and seven had children. all tenure statuses were represented. no participants had less than a doctoral degree. as stated there were five emergent themes. textual units were coded as geographical choice when they referred to decisions about where to go to graduate school, where to look for a job, and where to accept a position. if the textual unit indicated a decision concerning the spouse or children of the participant, or the intimate relationships of the participant, it was coded as family. support structure was identified when participants spoke of emotional, physical, or financial support that enabled them to pursue their careers. when the textual unit referenced the participants’ performance of, or feelings about their field of study, research, teaching or service performed as part of their academic position the unit was coded as job type. when participants spoke of the distribution of time across work and personal life, or making their work and personal life fit together the textual unit was coded as time/balance. table 2 displays the thematic response frequencies across the five themes. these data are discussed below. table 2 frequency of occurrence for each of the emergent themes on the recursive impact of career decisions and life decisions theme interview 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 tot geographical choice 8 5 6 6 4 6 2 1 2 3 4 4 51 family 6 5 8 19 1 2 6 14 17 6 15 21 120 support structure 3 0 3 11 2 2 5 3 8 15 12 2 66 job type 1 6 7 7 7 3 6 3 4 5 5 12 65 time/balance 1 2 7 5 4 3 3 1 3 2 8 10 49 geographical choice the interaction of life and career choices with respect to geographical choice was mentioned 51 times across the 12 interviews. only one participant did not mention geographical choice as an aspect of the unidirectional or recursive impact of their career and life choices. the location, or flexibility of location of the spouse’s job, the participant’s or spouse’s extended family, child custody considerations, and the location’s physical and demographic attributes were all aspects which influenced the decision to accept a job offer at this particular institution. the choice of geographical location for a career, rather than for personal reasons was more prevalent among faculty members younger than 40 years of age. three participants indicated that their husbands were flexible enough, or had flexible enough skillsets to follow them to an academic position wherever it was offered. one participant explained as follows, “…in academia, you don’t choose where you live. if you really want to be a professor, you have to be willing to just get up and go anywhere.” in contrast the participants in their 50s indicated they had modified career decisions based on the location of their husbands’ careers. geographical choices were strongly influenced by family responsibilities. eight of the 12 participants said they made geographical choices based on the location of their spouses, or proximity to their families of origin. child custody arrangements geographically limited two participants. additional geographical limitations came from mutual decisions on the part of the participant and her spouse based on the desire for a location that had the physiognomy and demographic characteristics they desired, such as the small town nature of the community, access to outdoor recreational opportunities and the cost of living: “…we’re both from smaller towns, pretty into outdoor activities, so when i was looking at places like this …, he was way excited about that” and “i was raised in a small town, my husband was raised in a small town, i kind of have always imagined raising a advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 93 family in a small town,” and “being somewhere that allowed us to [go camping] was important for us, but also important because we want to pass that love of the outdoors on to our kids.” family the unidirectional or recursive impact of career decisions and family was the dominant theme whether considering the impact of career on personal life or personal life on career. textual units related to the interaction of life and career decisions thematically classified under family presented 120 times, making this the most frequently occurring theme. all participants mentioned family at least three times in the course of their interviews. for some choices concerning life transitions, involving both the decision and timing of marriage and children, were interwoven with career decisions. two participants indicated that had their husbands not been willing to follow them, they were not sure they would have gotten married. in the words of one participant, “my career, i think, impacted my decision to get married because he made it so easy for me.” another stated, “i think honestly i prioritized my professional life over my personal life.” two participants stated they delayed having children so they could become established in their career. one said: my ambitions to have a certain kind of career superseded my desire to be married and to have children, and so that’s really where i put most of my energy…in whatever career path i was on at that time [sic]. i knew i did not want to have children until i was settled in my career, but it took me much longer to become settled in a career than i anticipated. two participants mentioned feeling compelled to have children because of their biological age: “i’m in my thirties, and so there is a limited amount of time that we can have those discussions [about whether or not to have children], so there is some frustration to that.” in terms of timing, another asked her major advisor’s permission to get married in the middle of the quarter. she then planned the timing of her children around her tenure decision. one participant, whose spouse worked in a similar field of study, mentioned conflict with her spouse arising from work situations. in two cases, participants were employed in a discipline based on fieldwork, requiring an absence of some weeks from their families. one, with children, mentioned the difficulty of being away from home during this time. another, without children, mentioned that the necessity of being away from home for her career might negatively impact her decision to have children since she would want to “be good enough in all of these areas,” that is both career and family. a third participant, reflecting on the unexpected advantage of combining fieldwork with having children said, “…when my son was born, i took him to the field with me, which was wonderful because all the people in the village there thought it was very strange that i had no children at 26.” only three participants stated that their career decisions had no impact on their personal life choices, although for these three personal decisions concerning family did impact their careers. two currently childless participants indicated waiting to have children until their career decisions were settled, yet, they still wanted to have children. concerning the choice of whether or not to have children one observed, “i think it’s always going to be a balance, the personal interpretation of what you’re doing professionally.” for one participant the recursive impact of the decision of whether or not to have a child was eased by the willingness of her spouse to be the primary caregiver so that she could continue to pursue her career. however, she expressed some concern about being the career-oriented parent while her husband would be the primary caregiver for a child: “i think i’m going to have some social awkwardness with that. culturally, i think it’s still very awkward for a woman to be in that position.” the most frequently occurring issue in this theme was the impact of having children on the amount of time that could be devoted to research. because participants felt their teaching duties were most pressing, it was often their research programs that suffered when the desire or need to spend time with children arose. as one participant stated: i had a son who was nine months old, in a good quality daycare, so i was not concerned about him, but i had no flexibility, i had no extra time, so my research was pretty much nonexistent that year. another, considering having a child, said, “something would have to give, at least for a little while.” in contemplating the changes she would make to her research program if she had a child to consider a participant stated: i would have to very intentionally try and shift my research focus to build it more, for a period of time, into laboratory work and computer modeling work, to be able to take the weight off the field component because some of the places i go are very remote, fairly inaccessible. two participants noted that because of their heavy teaching loads, they had to work on research more heavily in the summer. others chose this particular university because they felt it would allow them to balance teaching, research and personal lives in a reasonable fashion. they felt that a more heavily researchfocused university would not have allowed balance. in reflecting on why she chose this university over a “top tier, research one, university” one participant said, “if you want to be [at] a big research one, you work like 80 hours a week, and there was no way, that i knew i could do that and to have a family.” four participants mentioned concern for their parents as they aged and how that might impact their career decisions. one mentioned having to find a job closer to her parents if something happened to them. another stated: if one of my parents were to pass away, or something would happen to one, i don’t know in terms of my career… i have enough experience and i’m well enough established, i feel confident that i could find a job back home. advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 94 another subtheme in this category was the influence of family on choice of career. one participant entered her discipline out of a desire to more deeply understand her son’s illness. another had a family history (close relatives in the same field) of entering her particular field of study. finally, a participant spoke at length about the influence of religion on her personal and her career choices. she originally made choices based on marriage, child-bearing and not pursuing a career because of expectations associated with her religion. as her thinking evolved and she started a career in academia, she referred to the choice between career and children as a “false dichotomy.” support structures the second most prominent theme was support structures, both their presence and absence, impacting participants’ ability and career track success. this theme was mentioned 66 times, spread out over 11 of the 12 participant interviews. support was discussed as coming from participants’ department chairs, spouses, family and others. in addition, support was discussed not only for the impact of its presence, but also the impact of its absence. most frequently, spouses were mentioned as important sources of support. spouses were said to provide financial support when participants were in graduate school, support in caring for children, support in taking over housework, support in encouraging careers, and support through flexibility and willingness to follow participants on their academic career tracks. as one stated, “i would say that my husband is my biggest cheerleader.” another said, “from the very beginning he was willing to support me in what i wanted to do.” relative to other women who work a second shift (housework) after working a full day, one participant stated, “i have my own housewife by comparison, i married a man who is absolutely comfortable taking his share, and more of work around the house.” in terms of departmental support, a participant noted that her chair needing to pick up her own children at daycare while she was interviewing sent a strong message in terms of personal life support. in one case a participant spoke of the willingness of her chair to allow a sabbatical, and/or an unpaid leave of absence for a parent with two young children; thus providing the flexibility needed to deal with personal life events and enable continued career development. likewise, two participants mentioned feeling that their chairs sent messages of support concerning family and personal lives. one stated that both her “…previous…and… current department chair[s] have been very supportive both of my career, but also of my family life.” two mentioned liking their colleagues and deriving support. one said, “i’m in a supportive and safe place, within my colleagues, within my group…they are interested in my personal and professional development, and for me to be successful.” another commented on mentorship from colleagues who were combining career and family, while in contrast, another participant noted a lack of colleague support. finally, one participant mentioned the “stop the clock” policy, which allows an extra year before going up for tenure. interestingly, her fear was that the policy was too liberal and could be misused by faculty members. additional sources of support included children, teachers, coaches, mentors and parents. in the words of one participant, “i attribute, i would say 50% of my career success to mentors, to people that believed in me.” the valuing of higher education in the family of origin was important for at least two participants. one spoke of a community of support from her childhood years to adulthood. she was part of a hobbyist group from an early age and they ultimately created a scholarship for her to attend college in her chosen field of study. in contrast, two participants mentioned the lack of familial support as a hindrance in their careers. one indicated that her husband’s career took and still takes priority over hers: my husband's job definitely overshadows everything. so if the kids are sick, i stay home, i'm the one that gets up things. i mean he's pretty good, if there are things that are really pressing for me he steps in. but he's had to learn that over the course of our marriage, rather than just doing it. two participants mentioned lack of support for having children from people they worked with. according to one, “i had my older son in the middle of the phd, my own advisor wanted me to quit.” another, who decided to leave the air force after becoming pregnant, was told that she had made a good decision because a mother should be home with her children. finally, the flexibility of the work schedule allowing time for exercise had a supportive impact on the careers and personal lives for two participants. in order to enhance her feelings of balance, one described her time for running this way: right now i tend to work from home in the mornings, and then come in when i have my first actual commitments, that way i can get up and i can work, and then when it’s warm enough, i go for a run. she went on to say, this is a time that is “purely just mine, and i can think or be brain dead, whatever i want when i’m running.” another described the distraction impact on her job performance if she didn’t take time in the morning to work out. she said, “…i have a…meeting in the afternoon that goes late, and i’m thinking about trying to get a workout in, and i can’t be 100% focused.” job type job type referred to the academic job the participant ultimately chose to pursue. in the academy there are different types of contracts and institutions. some contracts are nine months and some 12. some institutions focus on teaching, others more on research. nine out of 12 participants commented on job type as it related to the interaction of career and life choices. their comments centered on three issues: flexibility of the academic appointment, ability to do work for which they had a passion, and negative impact of administrative duties on families. advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 95 although all mentioned that they worked in the summer, engaging both research and teaching, many noted that they enjoyed the flexibility that being off contract in the summer allowed them. as one stated, “i think the flexibility of this job allows for so much of a life too, a personal life too.” out of the 12 participants, seven mentioned a passion or love for their discipline, three mentioned a passion or love of teaching, three a passion or love of research, and two loving everything about their academic career. two commented on feeling a personal sense of identity with their career and discipline. thus the impact of their career decision on their personal life, was expressed through the personal satisfaction they received from their job/career performance. finally, two participants had taken on some administrative duties. both indicated that the additional work inherent in these duties, as well as the associated stress had negatively impacted their home life. within this theme, personal life influenced the type of job for at least three participants in their desire to have a job that also allowed a family life. this was reflected in choosing a university that they perceived allowed a balance between research and teaching, and a career that allowed schedule flexibility. while none of the participants indicated they worked less than 40 hours a week, they were able to work after the children went to bed, and/or felt they had additional flexibility with their time in the summer. external interests also influenced job type. one participant was strongly influenced by her participation in athletics when choosing a discipline. another by a desire to understand a family member’s disease in choosing a field of study. finally, one participant mentioned that she decided to go straight from a phd program into a tenure-track position so that she could start a family sooner. as she stated in response to her peers’ advice to apply for a post-doctoral research position rather than a faculty position: i don’t want to go to a post doc, i want to go somewhere where i can stay, and not have it be somewhere else temporary, part of the reasoning was well that’s gonna set back kids a couple more years. i’m not getting any younger. time/balance the time/balance theme addressed the issue of the impact of the time spent on their career spilling over into familial time and vice versa. all participants expressed this theme in their interviews resulting in 49 coded textual units. multiple participants mentioned taking work home in the evenings and on weekends. in the words of one participant, “if i don’t take work home, i just run out of hours in the day, and it’s not done.” in reference to working on research in the summer one stated, “also making sure that i’m not so focused on that [work], that it’s taking away from me being a good mom, and a good wife too, ‘cause you’ve got to maintain that relationship as well.” another mentioned working “60-70 hour weeks and absurd days.” another participant said that when she does actually take time off from work “i notice that i’m more relaxed, i’m healthier, i’m nicer,” indicating personal well-being was also impacted. some participants felt good about the balance of their time spent at work and at home, some felt bad about it, and some were concerned about future developments (e.g., need to care for aging parents) that could impact the amount of time they had to spend on their careers. at least four participants indicated that having children had reduced the amount of time they were able to devote to their careers. one stated that since her children were born, “it has hugely decreased the amount of time i spend working.” another began working half-time and worked her way up to full-time so that she would have more time with her children when they were small. one, whose son was grown, said this in reference to her high ratings on teaching, research and service: “i couldn’t do this if i had kids, or i had other responsibilities.” another, preferring the phrase work/life fit to work/life balance said, “if we’re women, we have children and our lives, that’s who we are, is always going to win over this 8 hour day thing called work.” one participant expressed concern about increased demands on her time as her children got older and became active in extracurricular activities. another expressed relief at the decrease in demands on her by her children as they grew up, allowing her more time to perform the tasks and duties necessary to succeed in her career. two indicated concerns that having children in the future would impact their ability to work at the level they are currently working. four participants discussed the importance of identifying boundaries between their career and personal lives. one stated, “i am always here for my students, i get my research done, i focus on my teaching. but at the same time i am also off limits at certain times.” another expressed that changing circumstances in her husband’s health will require a change in balance: “i love what i do, and i’m totally engaged in it, but i do think, and especially if my husband struggles more, that i’m going to need to find a little bit different balance.” another, in her second year on the tenure-track, described how she felt about the lack of balance in her life: i realized i was fantasizing about being hit by a car, because that would break a leg so i couldn’t teach… but i would still have my hands free to be able to type and finish getting out those final manuscripts that were sitting almost done on my desk. another, who had been granted tenure a year ago and whose children were a bit older stated, “i feel a lot calmer than i used to, i was so stressed, i just felt like i was failing at everything.” another participant when asked about the balance between work and life responded, “i actually think i manage to do a pretty good job. but i think a lot of times i feel guilty about it.” these data indicated that for these women the demands of career and personal life seemed to move along their life trajectories in an ever-changing dynamic balance, requiring give and take in terms advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 96 of the amount worked and time devoted to personal and family needs. scaffolding the emergent themes life course theory in an effort to describe and scaffold an understanding of the recursive impact of major life and career decisions on women’s life course pursuits and lived experience in the academy, the five emergent themes (geographical choice, family, support structure, job type and time/balance) were considered relative to the concepts and themes associated with life course theory. geographic choice. decisions concerning geography were reflected in three of life course theory themes: (a) interplay of human lives and historical time as evidenced in the age-related effects; (b) linked or interdependent lives in the interplay between participants, their spouses and their extended families; and (c) human agency in making choices. age-related/cohort effects, and thus historical time, human agency and linked lives were evidenced through the influence of personal life versus career in terms of geographic choice. among the participants in this study, generational trends were evident with younger faculty more likely to choose a position based on career impact, while faculty over 50 indicated more of an interaction between personal life or spouse’s needs and career needs. participants over 50 were more likely to create their career in the location dictated by their spouses’ needs. for most, though not all, career decisions were made in conjunction with their spouse’s expressed preferences and needs; that is, in linked or interdependent ways. finally, human agency was demonstrated in the relative weight individuals placed on their career, family and personal needs when making career-associated geographical choices. the importance of geographic choice in career trajectory decisions is evidenced in the literature. according to kulis and sicotte (2002) geographical constraints may lead to less advantageous career positions resulting in more part-time and non-tenure-track jobs. concerns associated with geographical choice were reported in a survey of over 8,000 doctoral students conducted by mason et al., (2009). their study noted that geographical issues were more important for women than for men. likewise, perrone-mcgovern et al. (2011) mentioned choice of geographical location as a major life decision; and marwell, rosenfeld, and spilerman (1979) and kulis and sicotte (2002) noted more geographical constraints on female than on male faculty. family. more so than any other theme, the interaction of family and career influenced the life and career trajectories of the women interviewed. the life course themes of timing of lives and linked or interdependent lives were strongly evident in the family theme. participants’ perceived career needs impacted the timing of life events such as marriage and the decision of, if, and when, to have children. the risk aspect of the theme developmental risk and protection was evidenced by a participant’s description of the conflict between her desire to have children and the perceived demands of her career trajectory. having put it off because of her career pursuit, having children was no longer an option. another participant demonstrated developmental protection by clearing the timing of her marriage with her doctoral advisor during her pursuit of her phd. the diversity in life course trajectories was seen in the variety of timing of not only personal life events, that is some participants had children before, during and/or after embarking on an academic career, but also in the timing of the pursuit of an academic career. the primary way in which the career path impacted personal lives appeared to be with regard to children. mason, wolfinger, and goulden (2013) found that for women in academia only one in three tenure-track professors ultimately became a mother. the choice to delay starting a family associated with career trajectories often leads to infertility issues. although not specific to the academy, a 2012 report by the association for women in science (awis) found that 40% of women scientists delayed having children because of their careers. issues of family have been reported in the literature with respect to the perceived impact of having children (mason et al., 2009), satisfaction with number of children, and likelihood of being married (ecklund & lincoln, 2011). the findings in this study were consistent with this literature, as well as with concerns reported about the congruence of the tenure and biological clocks (clark & hill, 2010). support structure. life course theory was seen in expressions associated with support structure. primarily, the diversity in life course trajectories was evident in the variety of sources of support, and times in the faculty member’s life course pathways when support was critical. although many of the participants spoke of spousal support, only one mentioned community support while growing up. some spoke of the support of their colleagues and/or department chairs. examples of the timing of lives was evidenced in the department chair’s support, allowing a sabbatical to deal with having small children, and the community group support in providing scholarship dollars. this support also demonstrated developmental risk and protection, in that financial support of a community group protected the participant’s life course trajectory by providing for her college education so she could continue to move forward in her career. in addition, the interplay of human lives and historical time was seen in the changes in the relative amount of gender specific housework and home-life activities these faculty perceived. linked or interdependent lives was illustrated in this theme, as the importance of support from familial, work-related and other sources was significant for almost all the participants to move forward in their career trajectories. the literature supports the importance of spousal, collegial and departmental support. among the younger faculty interviewed, male spouse support was mentioned in terms of taking care of the home and family. other participants mentioned help with homecare or children if they specifically asked for it. although we did not measure the relative amount of time spent on care of the home and family, considering that only two out of 12 advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 97 participants mentioned major support in this area, it seems this finding may be consistent with research indicating that women scientists do 54% of the core household tasks of cooking, cleaning and laundry, while men scientists only do 28% of these tasks (awis, 2012). mason et al. (2009) reported doctoral students’ concerns regarding a lack of departmental support for work-life balance. quinn, yen, riskin and lange (2007) noted the importance of departmental culture in encouraging faculty to utilize familyfriendly policies. one participant spoke to the importance of having developed a cohort of faculty in her department that supported each other personally and professionally. two reported a lack of support from their departmental colleagues. these issues speak to the necessity of a culture of support for work-life balance. thus, the study’s findings aligned with and supported the importance of the proximal departmental culture of acceptance as it relates to positive career impact on personal lives. job type. the job type theme also fit well with life course theory. an example of the timing of lives theme was seen in the choice of the faculty member who skipped the postdoctoral phase of her career and went directly into a faculty position so she could start a family sooner. the linked or interdependent lives theme was demonstrated in the influence of a family member’s disease in choosing a field of study, providing the passion for the subject. human agency in making choices was also seen in this theme. the choice to work at an institution purported to emphasize teaching, while simultaneously maintaining a strong research component, though not as intense as might be found elsewhere, in order to have more time with family was active and intentional. contrary to the literature suggesting that choice of entering a particular field could be influenced by social, romantic or other external considerations (curtis, 2011; park et al., 2011) the women in this study chose their discipline either because they were passionate about it from a very young age (as young as kindergarten) or because some other aspect of their lives had led them to develop an interest in the field. wolf-wendel, ward and twombly (2007) reported flexibility as a factor in type of institution selection (community college, four year, or high research). in this study, flexibility was frequently mentioned under the theme of job type. in addition, young faculty highly valued career flexibility (helms, 2010) which was consistent with the findings in this study as most of the female faculty interviewed valued flexibility. time/balance. considering time/balance in terms of life course theory, the most pervasive theme was that of timing of lives. in the balance between time spent working and focusing on personal aspects of life, such as children, spouses and personal well-being, the demands of these different aspects change with time of life. the issues of changing demands of children as they age, and the potential for increasing demands for aging parents demonstrated the relevance of where these women were in their own age groups, specifically biological age as reflected in the age of their children and parents, and where they were in terms of promotion and tenure in their academic jobs. summary conclusions through this study the perceptions of female faculty relative to the recursive impact of their career and life event decisions were elucidated. in particular faculty perceptions associated with the interaction of major life events and career decisions in creating their life trajectories was explored. the emergent themes of geographical choice, family, support structures, job type, and time/balance were found to interact with participants’ career and life decisions. in addition, aspects of each emergent theme coincided with the major themes of life course theory. geographic choice decisions were reflected through job location, in terms of availability, application, offer and acceptance. family was impacted by career, especially relative to timing of having children. often, participants’ expressed that the choices of if and when to have children were dictated by where they were in their career trajectory. family was also impacted regarding attempts to balance career time demands with personal and familial needs. the impacts were recursive in that time at home was sometimes co-opted for work demands, with home demands sometimes interfering with the performance of work duties. support structures were also recursive in their impact. support from family, particularly spouses, freed the participants to devote time and energy to their careers. support from department chairs and colleagues at work was evidenced both for career development and participants’ personal lives. job type and choice to pursue an academic career were driven by the expressed desire for flexibility and the professional need for freedom and autonomy. discipline choice appeared to be one of personal preference and/or passion. time/balance was perhaps the most recursive of the emergent themes, with participants expressing feelings of tension between heavy career demands and the demands of their personal lives. in fulfilling needs in both these realms, separation in location frequently broke down in the direction of taking work home, demonstrating a reframing of work-life balance into work-life integration. for the women in this study, as well as the women in leadership studied by cheung and halpern (2010), work and family were important and interrelated, demonstrating a continued need to integrate women’s lives. as displayed in figure 1, the life course theory themes were evidenced in the study findings. interplay of human lives and historical time was supported by the different ways in which faculty members across age cohorts dealt with geographical choice and support structures. younger faculty indicated that they responded to their careers in terms of geographical choice, rather than their spouses’ careers. in contrast, participants 50 and older were more likely to have had their spouses’ career dictate geographical location. likewise, younger faculty indicated they were more likely to have spousal support for housework than advancing women in leadership 2016 volume 36 98 were the 50+ faculty. timing of lives was strongly supported in the interaction of timing of children and timing of the career track. changes in career and life demands as faculty members moved through time was reflective of this theme. linked or interdependent lives was evident in joint decision making with spouses among this group of women, as well as in the importance of support structures within the family and workplace, and even extending out to the community. human agency in making choices was seen across four of the five emergent themes since faculty members had to make decisions about location, job type, family related decisions, and the decisions that impacted the time and balance of their lives. diversity in life course trajectories was demonstrated by the variety of paths these women took through their personal and career lives. none of their stories and thus life trajectories were identical. finally, developmental risk and protection was evidenced through support structures, and decisions made in terms of the ascendance of career or personal lives at various stages in their trajectories. the usefulness of considering female faculty perceptions about their lived experiences in terms of life course theory was supported by the study findings; facilitating and deepening our understanding of the interaction of life events and career decisions among female faculty in the academy. figure 1. emergent themes & life course theory references american association of university professors. 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(2007). faculty life at community colleges. community college review, 34(4), 255-281. advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership perception is reality: perceptions of employment characteristics of women in administration i. sue shepard, ph.d. shepard, summer, 1998 it is important for women to be aware of differences in perceived employment characteristics as they seek positions in educational administration. an awareness of these perceptions will allow women the opportunity to present themselves in a manner which will counteract these perceptions. perception is reality to the person who is doing the perceiving. this perception may not be the truth but that is not of priary concern to the person making the decision. perception is what an individual understands or believes to be true. the question addressed in this research was what was the perception of superintendents and school board presidents of the employment characteristics of women who are seeking positions in educational administration. were there still perceptions held by superintendents and school board presidents that are influencing the hiring of women? were the perceived employment characteristics of women any different today than in the late 1970's after the years of affirmative action? superintendents and school boards have great influence in the hiring processes within school districts. in the last twenty years the number of women enrolling in graduate programs which prepare individuals to be educational administrators in public schools has continued to increase. however, the number of women who have been employed in positions in educational administration is still far fewer than the number of men (bushweller, 1997). in 1978, the american association of school administrators (aasa) conducted research which utilized a survey that contained items that identified employment characteristics. this research found that there was a difference in the perceived employment characteristics attributed to men and women by superintendents and school board presidents (aasa, 1981). the issue of differences in employment characteristics between men and women has been a point of discussion and research by other individuals as well. shakeshaft (1989) listed differences in words and phrases used in describing male and female employees in the evaluation process. these characteristics were similar to those in the survey instrument used in the aasa research. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html in 1955 parson and bales (as cited in bell & chase, 1995) indicated that expressive or interpersonal leadership characteristics were attributed to women and instrumental or task oriented leadership characteristics were attributed to men. in more recent writings there has been further discussion of the perceived differences in the characteristics of men and women in leadership positions (bell & chase, 1995; regan, 1990). the descriptors in these writings were very similar or the same as those included in the research by aasa in 1978. the research conducted in this study in 1996 to determine if there had been any changes in perceptions regarding the employment characteristics of men and women since 1978 was a replication of research conducted in 1978 by the american association of school administrators the survey which was used included four sections "under the general heading 'employment characteristics of women.' the related subtopics were (a) work attitudes and habits, (b) interest and motivation, (c) temperament, and (d) aptitude, knowledge and skills." (aasa, p.15) methodology the survey in 1996, as in 1978, was a national survey of superintendents and school board presidents. a stratified random sample was chosen to assure representation of various size school districts. table 1 shows the strata used and the percent of the sample chosen in each strata. in the 1996 research, superintendents and school board presidents were mailed the science research associates opinion survey for men and women (sra). this was the same instrument that was utilized in 1978. in 1978, 200 surveys were sent to superintendents and school board presidents and 115 were returned. surveys were returned by 92 superintendents and 23 school board presidents. this was a response rate of 29 %. in 1996, 256 superintendents and 256 school board presidents received the survey and 130 were returned. there were 86 surveys from the superintendents. there were 44 surveys returned by the school board presidents. the combined response rate for the two groups in 1996 was 24.5 %. results of survey the response categories for each of the items in the four sections were (a) men much more than women, (b) men slightly more than women, (c) no difference, (d) women slightly more than men, and (e) women much more than men. there was a total of 68 items. in all of the four areas , the neutral choice of "no difference" would indicate that this characteristic was perceived as the same for both men and women and either gender would be considered equally for employment. on all items the shift in choice was in the direction of the "no difference" response between 1978 and 1996 by at least one of the two groups, superintendents and school board presidents. however the change in the distribution was only significant on 48 of these items for superintendents and on 35 items for school board presidents. a chi-square (p < .01) was utilized to determine significant change. in tables 2, 3, 4, and 5 the items are grouped based on the significance of change for both groups or for each group individually. work attitudes and habits for the 16 items in this area there was a positive increase in the choice of "no difference" on all items for superintendents and on 15 items for school board presidents. the change was significant on eight items for both groups. in the first five items listed in (table 2), the selection of the "no difference" category rose to almost 70 % or more indicating less of a difference in the perception of the employment characteristics of men and women. these changes were significant at the .01 level. file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept1.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept2.html for the item "work effectively with subordinates," there was a significant change away from favoring men to seeing no difference between men and women. the change was almost 20 percentage points for both superintendents and school board presidents. superintendents in the current research saw women as more dependable employees than in 1978. for the three items "are reliable in a crisis," "are often absent from work" and "are likely to quit," there was a significant positive change in the selection of the "no difference" option. school board presidents have increased the choice of "no difference" by 20, 35, and 44 % respectively which were also significant changes. on the last two of these items, this made the opinion of school board presidents much more similar to superintendents in 1996 than in 1978. those who saw a difference attributed these characteristics more to women than men. on the item "are reliable in a crisis," those who saw a difference, attributed this more to men than to women. for the item "put family matters ahead of their job" there has been a shift in attitude of almost 20 % by school board presidents and more than 20 % by superintendents to the "no difference" choice. however, women were still seen as putting family matters before the job much more than men. for superintendents in a combined "women slightly more than men/women much more the men," this was 41 %. for school board presidents this total was 57 %. superintendents were also showing a more positive attitude toward women on the item "view work as a social situation" by indicating no difference based on gender 66 % of the time as opposed to only 35 % in 1978. there was no change in attitude by school board presidents. however, nearly 30 % of the superintendents along with 50 % of the school board presidents still felt that this was a characteristic of women. superintendents were also showing a more positive attitude with respect to the item "work effectively with co-workers" where superintendents chose "no difference" 78 % of the time which was a 24 % increase and a significant change. the increase in this choice by school board presidents was five % which was not significant. other alternative choices were almost evenly distributed between men and women for both superintendents and school board presidents for this item. interesting continued trends were seen in several other items in this category. for the item "take too much time off for personal reasons," 24 % of the superintendents and 25 % of the school board presidents perceive this is a characteristic of women. nearly 60 % of the school board presidents and 40 % of the superintendents indicate women "put family matters ahead of their jobs" more so than men. women were still seen as able to "accept the opposite sex as co-workers" and "care about the quality of their work" more than men. there has been significant change by superintendents in choosing "no difference" on the later item. however, at least 20 % of both superintendents and board presidents favored women on this trait. men were seen as resisting new methods more than women. women were seen to "waste time socializing" more than men. these have not changed significantly since 1978. also, nearly 20 % of superintendents and school board presidents saw women as keeping up with new developments on the job more than men. this was a significant change for board presidents. interest and motivation in the section of the survey on interest and motivation, there were several additional items along with the item "set long-range goals and work toward them" where nearly 80 % or more of both school board presidents and superintendents saw no difference between men and women (see table 3 ). two of these items were "desire interesting and challenging work" and "want to develop their special abilities at work." file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept3.html on both items the selection of the "no difference" category by superintendents in 1978 was high. there was an increase in the selection of this category in 1996 by superintendents, but the change was not significant. however, for school board presidents the increase in the selection of "no difference" was significant on both items from 1978 to 1996. in a third item, "want to participate in training opportunities," the indication of no difference between men and women reached 80 % in 1996. this was a significant change for both groups of respondents. although there was a significant level of change on 6 of the 14 items by both superintendents and school board presidents in the choice of the "no difference" category, there were still a number of items where nearly 30 % or more of the individuals in both positions saw a difference between men and women. men are seen as (a) wanting to get ahead, (b) liking math, science, and high finance, and (c) preferring to work for men. women were perceived as (a) more home oriented rather than job oriented and (b) liking to help others. men were also perceived as (a) liking to work alone on a project, (b) wanting increased responsibility, and (c) needing novelty and adventure more than women. women were seen as (a) having a stronger desire for security than men, (b) wanting to participate in training opportunities, and (c) enjoying doing routine tasks. the item of greatest change for superintendents dealt with job orientation, "are home-oriented rather than job-oriented," where there was an increase in the "no difference" category of 31 %. however, in 1996 this item was still attributed more to women than men. for school board presidents the greatest change was 44 percent on the item "like math, science, and high finance." this attribute was still seen as more characteristic of men than women as has been mentioned. temperament in the topic area of temperament there were 18 items. as seen in table 4, both superintendents and school board presidents have significantly improved their perception of women in the area of sensitive to criticism and being independent and self-sufficient. in the items which addressed jealousy and emotionality, superintendents saw women in a significantly more positive light than did school board presidents who have not significantly changed perception. in fact, of all of the 18 items, only in the items "give up easily" and "are slightly timid rather than forward" did school board presidents chose the "no difference" category to a greater degree than superintendents. in all of the other 16 items, superintendents were more supportive of women than school board presidents as evidenced by choosing the "no difference" category more frequently. even though there was an increase in the choosing of the "no difference" category, when the entire distribution of choices was studied for each item it was noted that there was a distinct attribution tendency of certain temperament descriptors to men and others to women. this tendency has remained constant from 1978 to 1996. those descriptors attributed to women were (a) sensitive to criticism, (b) jealousy, (c) too emotional about their jobs, (d) cry easily, (e) slightly timid rather than forward, (f) strongly desire security and approval, (g) warm and friendly toward others, and (h) sensitive to others feelings. those descriptors attributed to men were (a) stand up under fire, (b) hide their true feelings, (c) competitive, (d) self-confident, (e) lose their tempers easily, (f) aggressive, (g) keep cool in emergencies and (h) narrowminded. aptitude, knowledge, and skills of interest in the set of characteristics which address aptitude, knowledge, and skills was the fact that file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept4.html there were eight items where the increase in the choice of "no difference" by school board presidents was from 10 to 25 % greater than superintendents (see table 5). even though in all eight of the items the change was greater for school board presidents than superintendents, this change simply brought school board presidents to a similar percentage as that of superintendents. this would indicate that the attitude of school board presidents has gradually reached the same degree of acceptance as superintendents. in all but one of these eight items the "no difference" category was chosen almost 75 % of the time or more. for the two items "make effective decisions" and "are capable administrators," it was interesting to note the choice of the "no difference" option was above 90 %. the change in the option of "no difference" as a choice on the first item was an increase of between 13 % for superintendents and 22 % for school board presidents since 1978. the greatest change in this category, 34 %, was of the school board presidents' perception of there being no difference between men and women as capable administrators. the change on this same item was 16 % for superintendents. for the item "have leadership potential," 96 % of the superintendents and 84 % of the school board presidents choose the no difference category in 1996. this was an increase of 14 % for superintendents and increase of 18 % for school board presidents which was a significant change for both groups since 1978. when the entire distribution is studied for all 20 items in this topic area, it was again evident that several of the aptitudes, knowledge and skills listed were attributed to women more than to men. these items were those that address (a) verbal ability, (b) accuracy and precision, (c) good at detail work, (d) ability to get people to work together, (e) clerical aptitude, (f) social skills and tact, and (g) creative and inventive. men more than women were seen as possessing the (a) ability to negotiate contracts effectively, (b) having mechanical aptitude, (c) understanding financial matters, (d) having mathematical ability, (e) holding their own in an argument, and (f) solving logical problems easily. for the aptitude or skill "size up situations accurately," 87 % of the superintendents and 75 % of the school board presidents chose the no difference category. for those not choosing the no difference category, superintendents favored men and school board presidents favored women. summary of findings the 68 statements in four sections of the sra survey were designed to assess the perceived employment characteristics of women. these four sections were titled (a) work attitudes and habits, (b) interest and motivation, (c) temperament, and (d) aptitudes, knowledge, and skills. a choice of "no difference" indicated both men and women were perceived as possessing the characteristic stated in the item equally. on all items the shift in attitude was in the direction of no difference between women and men by at least one of the two groups surveyed. however the change was only significant on 33 of these items for superintendents and on 32 items for school board presidents. a chi-square (p < .01) was utilized to determine significant change in the choice distributions from 1978 to 1996. a summary of the 68 items that were still seen as more characteristic of men or women is presented in table 6. the perceptions that were found in 1978 still hold in 1996 although these perceptions do not hold to the same degree. there are several conclusions and implications which result from these findings. conclusions and implications the results of this research indicated that the differences in perceived employment characteristics of men file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept5.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept6.html and women have changed since 1978. the change has been a positive change toward women. however, the change although significant in many areas, has not been significant in all areas as noted in the detailed discussion. worthy of further discussion are those characteristics where almost 20 % or more of the superintendents and school board presidents perceived the characteristics to be attributed more to women. some of these characteristics can be seen as a positive attribute while others have negative connotations and are ones that need to be of concern. these characteristics are shown in table 7. of the 68 items on the survey, 23 items or 34 % are listed in table 7. this is an indication that perceived differences between the employment characteristics still exist and can not be ignored. overall, these differences are more strongly held by school board presidents than by superintendents as seen in the percentages shown in table 7. on 28 of the 23 items the percent indicating an attribute is more characteristic of women is greater for school board presidents than for superintendents. when classifying these items as positive or negative, 12 were indicated as having a negative connotation. only three of the perceptions defined as negative are more strongly held by superintendents than by school board presidents. these were strongly desire security, are slightly timid rather than forward, and are accurate and precise. of those characteristics under the area of work attitudes and habits, the first four of those seen as negative by the author are believed to be closely associated with the responsibilities women have for home and family. the same is believed to be true of the two items seen as negative under interest and motivation. of the items under temperament, five of the six were thought to be negative. women were still perceived as being very emotional and as displaying this emotion in the workplace. a more positive perception was seen in the group of items under aptitudes, knowledge, and skills. when these items are combined with other items defined as positive in the other categories, this provides a case for employing women. these characteristics are all necessary for quality work and many are in the area of interpersonal relations. more people lose jobs because they are unable to work with others than for not having the job skills. three items were seen as being both positive and negative. these were seen as positive characteristics because they are necessary for quality work. however these items were also categorized as negative because these attributes were seen by the author to be the reason many women are encouraged toward or kept in middle management or staff positions. summary as has been noted the change in perception has been a positive change toward women. overall, the change has been greater for superintendents than for school board presidents in the four different areas of characteristics surveyed. it is felt that superintendents are much closer to more employment situations than are school board presidents and would be more accurate in their judgment of these issues than school board presidents. it is important for women to be aware of differences in perceived employment characteristics as they seek positions in educational administration. an awareness of these perceptions will allow women the opportunity to present themselves in a manner which will counteract these perceptions. superintendents will be key participants in these efforts as the survey results indicate because of their more positive perception of women. superintendents need to be encouraged to support women and to file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/shept7.html educate school board members as to the capabilities of women as educational administrators. superintendents through their words and actions can assist in changing perceptions of school board members. references american association of school administrators. (1981). survey: attitudes toward women as school district administrators. arlington, va: educational research service. bell, c. s. & chase, s. e. (1995, april). gender in the theory and practice of educational leadership. journal for a just and caring education, 1(2), 200-223. bushweller, k (ed.). (1996, december). education vital signs. the american school board journal, 182 (12), a 20. regan, h. b. (1990, summer). not for women only: school administration as a feminist activity. teachers college record, 91(4), 565-577. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. newbury park, ca: corwin. shepard, i. s. (1997). women as school district administrators: past and present attitudes of superintendents and school board presidents. 5th annual ncpea yearbook. lancaster, pa: technomic. dr. i. sue shepard is an associate professor of educational administration and counseling at southeast missouri state university, cape girardeau, mo . awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 3, summer 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other 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written consent is prohibited mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word 8. in quest of excellence, not power.docx advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 1 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 1-11, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper in quest of excellence, not power: women’s paths to positions of influence and leadership avigail moor, ayala cohen, and ortal beeri avigail moor: tel hai college, email: amoor@netvision.net.il accepted august 18, 2014 despite the tremendous advancement of women in western society, they are still exceedingly underrepresented in positions of leadership and policymaking in the public sphere. this study aims to explore the ways women may overcome the traditional barriers on their path to key positions of influence by examining the factors that contributed to the success of women who have reached senior policymaking positions in their organizations. the study combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies, consisting of in-depth interviews with high-ranking women in different spheres of israeli society, such as parliament members, directors in the public and private spheres, senior military commanders, and the like, along with self-report questionnaires. the findings identify diverse factors that contributed to the rise of these women to the top, including organizational properties, familial features and personal attributes. practical recommendations for the advancement of women to influential leadership positions are suggested in accordance with the results. keywords: women's leadership, women policymakers, leadership and gender introduction women in western society have been achieving greater representation in the corridors of power and higher management, where they are increasingly involved in policymaking and rule setting and have growing influence on the shaping of society. this is also true of israeli society, where unprecedented numbers of women have been reaching key positions in society and state (almagor-lotan, 2011). nevertheless, this representation still falls short of prevailing values of gender equality (ess-korlander, 2010). accordingly, although the increased ability of women to reach decision-making positions has enabled them to become a notable minority rather than merely a symbolic few, they still do not enjoy adequate representation in the upper echelons, and do not hold sufficient positions of influence and leadership in israeli politics and the economy (singh & vinnicombe, 2004). only around 15-25% of the top positions in israel are held by women; this is true for government and parliament, boards of directors in the public and private spheres alike, academia and the army, as well as most other institutions (almagor-lotan, 2011; dunn & bradstreet, 2012; kenig, 2013). this notwithstanding, while their numbers are not great, the women who have made it to the top have apparently managed to overcome barriers that typically impede women’s advancement. hence, it makes sense to carefully examine the conditions that enabled these select women to reach society’s highest echelons. drawing on their experience might help pave the way for larger numbers of women to attain key policymaking positions. to that end, it is crucial to understand the obstacles that they faced on their way to the top ranks, and to identify the factors that made it possible to overcome these hurdles. this is the focus of the present study, which aims to create a profile of the “trailblazing” women, who might serve as models for all those who aspire to the heights. obstacles to the equal representation of women in key influential positions the equal representation of women has typically been blocked by numerous barriers. one of the main obstacles facing women lies in the norms of the male organizational culture which define the qualities required for advancement according to the male model of leadership (davidson & burke, 2011; eagly & carli, 2007; kark & eagly, 2010). these include agentic traits such as ambition, competitiveness, aggression, and control, which are culturally assigned to men. conversely, there appears to be considerably less appreciation of communal traits, such as empathy, kindness, or concern for the needs of others, generally considered “feminine” (eagly & karau, 2002; eagly & sczesny, 2009; schein, 2001). in a similar vein, management positions, particularly senior ones, are generally considered to be “masculine” (schein, mueller, lituchy, & liu, 1996; schein, 2000). schein et al. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 2 (1996) identified this phenomenon as “think manager—think male”. such widespread exclusion of women from highranking positions, demands of women to adopt qualities considered “masculine”, such as competitiveness, aggression, rationalism and independence, in order to make significant progress in the ranks at the organization. moreover, this gender bias can have a negative impact on women’s ability to see themselves as suitable for top management positions (kark, waismel-manor, & shamir, 2012; phillips & imhoff, 1997). it is also reflected in the disparity between their high capabilities and their low self-confidence (corell 2001). the male organizational culture presents women with additional barriers as well. there is evidence that women are held to higher standards than members of the male hegemony (salas-lopes et al., 2011). in this particular study, women in the medical professions reported that they had to invest more energy in order to prove themselves and succeed in their managerial careers compared with their male colleagues. an additional major systemic obstacle that perpetuates men’s advantage in the rise to chief positions is the absence of suitable mechanisms that enable women to optimally combine career and family (davidson & burke, 2011). in a reality where women are still expected to be the primary caregivers and to take on almost exclusive responsibility for the private sphere, many women experience conflict between work and family (edwards, 2001; greenstein, 2000; lee, duxbury, & higgins, 1994). it has been shown that women’s choices of career tracks are frequently affected by their expectation of such a conflict even before they begin their professional track (mor & guy, 2006). accordingly, many choose to place family demands before their personal aspirations and end up compromising on less demanding and prestigious jobs that will allow them to maneuver through their multiple tasks (steir, 2005). some may even leave the job if they perceive it as interfering with their home and family commitments (mor & guy, 2006). women’s dual responsibilities may also slow down their professional advancement, as they are perceived as incapable of investing adequately in high-ranking, demanding positions as a result (tamir, 2007). furthermore, women who aspire to a demanding nontraditional career are frequently forced to make concessions in their family makeup (davidson & burke, 2011). some may postpone starting a family until they have established their career or might be satisfied with having a small number of children. others may even forego having children altogether (eagly & carli, 2007). in israeli society, the option of giving up on having a family is rather constrained by cultural norms that cherish the family above all. although women are encouraged to participate in the work force, they are also expected to marry and have a number of children. as a result, only a very small percentage (11%) of high-ranking women in israel do not become mothers, as compared to 40% of the most highly paid women in the us, for example (kark & waismelmanor, 2011). this puts an additional burden on israeli women who strive to advance to the highest-ranking positions. research has also shown that the conflict around combining work and family tends to create greater emotional strain for women as compared to men, and to have a more detrimental effect on their psychological and general health and wellbeing (adams, king, & king, 1996). women also experience guilt and shame about not filling either of their roles properly, above all, their maternal role (liss, schiffrin, & rizzo, 2012). all in all, the greater this conflict, the more they may experience work burnout, thereby contending with an additional barrier to their advancement to the top. factors that promote women to positions of influence and leadership although women continue to encounter serious obstacles on their path to key influential positions, growing numbers of women have been advancing to these ranks. the factors that promote the advancement of women to key positions can be categorized into three levels—societal, familial, and individual. on the societal level, organizational changes that introduce mechanisms for enabling optimal balance between family and career for both genders have been shown to allow women to make greater progress in the ranks of the organization (eagly & carli, 2007; eagly & karau, 2002; cheung & halpern, 2010; kark & eagly, 2010). it has also been shown that preparing and training women for leadership contributes considerably to their advancement to policy making positions, as do mentors, advisors, and supporters who supervise their path to leadership ranks (ibarra, carter, & silva, 2010). in addition, as the organizational domain undergoes changes in its perception of preferred leadership qualities, the demand for androgynous leadership and management style increases, creating more opportunities for women’s advancement to senior ranks (eagly & sczesny, 2009; kark & eagly, 2010). the family level. as the work–family conflict appears to be one of the major barriers to women’s advancement to the highest echelons in the public domain, a meaningful shift in the traditional division of labor within the family is imperative to overcoming this hurdle. research has shown that emotional or instrumental support at home contributes greatly to the advancement of women in the workplace (ezzedeen & grossnickle-ritchey, 2008; king et al., 1995; salas-lopes et al., 2011). expectations within the family for their success and achievement on the job played a meaningful role as well. for example, in a study of female managers in a variety of fields, aycan (2004) found that about half attributed their achievement of senior management positions to emotional and practical support from their partners, expressed in a more equal division of labor at home. the majority also pointed to roots in their family of origin, emphasizing the importance of nontraditional gender socialization and encouragement to succeed that they received, particularly from their mothers. similar findings were reported in a study of 744 women faculty members regarding the influence of their partners’ careers: the more the advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 3 supportive the spouse, the better the balance between career and family and greater the freedom of the woman to rise in the hierarchy, especially among those aged 35-50 (gordon & whelan-berry, 2004). the individual level. experiencing gender-neutral socialization from the youngest ages seems to contribute greatly to the development of androgynous personality traits, which facilitate the advancement to positions of influence in the public domain (ragins, 1998; singh & vinnicombe, 2004). the development of agentic traits, such as achievementorientation and self-confidence, while also preserving communal traits, such as sensitivity and kindness, makes it easier for women to adapt to the male-defined organizational structure (eagly & carli, 2007; ragins 1998; singh & vinnicombe, 2004). moreover, kark et al. (2012) found that female managers who possessed androgynous characteristics were more effective in their leadership than those who had either feminine or masculine traits alone. levels of ambition also have a strong impact on women’s progress within the organizational hierarchy, such that the higher they aspire, the greater their chances of reaching the top (therenou, 2001). finally, possessing a feminist worldview and feminist selfidentification, along with the insistence upon equal division of labor in the home, also emerge as factors that facilitate women’s progress to the highest positions in society (altintas & altintas, 2008; hallett & gilbert, 1997). the purpose of this research was to further deepen understanding of the factors that promote women to ranks of influence and leadership in israeli society by investigating the paths taken by women who have already attained high-ranking policy-making positions in this culture. based on the notion of “learning from success” (rosenfeld, 1997; schechter, sykes, & rosenfeld, 2008), we set out to sketch a profile of these trailblazing women, in order to draw on their cumulative experience as a reference point for feasible directions of action for the advancement of other women. in other words, the objective of this study was to isolate factors at the individual and organizational levels that have helped select women advance to chief positions and to apply this information to the creation of conditions that will promote greater representation of women in centers of influence in society. method sample the qualitative sample comprised 20 women who held positions of influence and policy making in diverse organizations in israel. five of them were present or former members of the knesset (the israeli parliament); another five served as ceo or deputy ceos in the corporate world. two of the participants were senior managers in large media corporations and another two were at the highest levels of academia. in addition, there was a single representative of each of the following: a former supreme court judge, a manager of a leading medical institution, and a high-ranking member of the finance system. the israeli army and law enforcement authority were represented by three high-ranking officers. most of the women in the sample were married or in long-term relationships. two of them were divorced and not in a relationship, and one had never married. seventy-five percent (15) of them have one to two children; four of them had a larger number of children, while one of them does not have any children. the ages of the women ranged from 38 to 69, with an average of 56. most of the women held masters or higher degrees and most were the eldest child in their families of origin. around 90% (18) of the participants were jewish, while the remaining two were arab—one being muslim and the other christian. approximately two-thirds of them defined themselves as feminists, and only three explicitly rejected this definition. the comparison group comprised of 60 women divided into three subgroups: junior managers, therapists, and low-ranking salaried employees. these women were recruited from the community by way of convenience sampling. women from various social and professional circles were invited to participate in the study, and to also extend a similar invitation to their networks. their level of education was fairly high: 43% held master’s degrees, 35.4% held bachelor’s degrees, 11.4% were ph.d.’s and only 2.5% had acquired a high-school education or less. the average age of this group of women was 47, with ages ranging from 26 to 66. most of the women (68.8%) were married, 5.2% were single, 14.3% were divorced, 4.7% were widowed, and the rest (7%) did not note their marital status. somewhat over a third of the women (37.3%) had three children, 29% were mothers of two children, and the rest were divided evenly between less than two and more than three children (17% each), with a maximum of six. the distribution of their order of birth was even, with about onethird in each category (eldest, middle, and youngest). measures the qualitative instrument. we employed a semistructured in-depth interview comprised of questions regarding factors that may have helped these senior women to reach the top, including why they were interested in these positions of influence, actions that led to their ability to overcome barriers encountered within and outside of the organization; work– family conflict and balances, including the division of labor within the family; characteristics of family of origin; views on feminism and women’s rights; and recommendations for action that could help other women reach the highest ranks in society, in equal proportion to their percentage in the population. a free-flowing conversation, in which the women could bring up any topic they wished, was also made possible in all interviews. the quantitative questionnaire. personality traits were assessed using the bem sex role inventory (bsri) (bem 1974), which measures “masculine,” “feminine,” as well as androgynous personality traits, expressed as the ratio between the two former sets of characteristics. the questionnaire advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 4 presents respondents with 60 personality traits (20 “masculine,” 20 “feminine,” and 20 gender-neutral). the respondents are asked to rank each trait on a 7-point scale with respect to the degree that each characteristic fits them, where 1 denotes “not at all” and 7, “always or almost always”. examples of the “masculine” traits include achievement-orientation, ambitiousness and assertiveness. examples of the “feminine” traits include gentleness, sensitivity to the needs of others, and warmth. the androgyny score was determined by the ratio between the “feminine” and “masculine” scores. the more negative the ratio, the greater the weight of the masculine traits; the more positive the ratio, the greater the weight of the feminine traits. in addition to this instrument, the comparison group also completed a demographic questionnaire, inclusive of items pertaining to the division of labor in their families, for the purpose of comparison with the interviewees. examples of these question include: “what percentage of the responsibility for the domestic sphere lies upon you in comparison to your spouse (out of 100%)?” or “do you consider yourself to be a career woman” (possible answers being ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’). procedure the data was collected using mixed methods—both qualitative and quantitative. the qualitative research design was based on a semi-structured interview, consistent with the “learning-fromsuccess” method, which aims to further future success by drawing on elements of past successful endeavors in a given domain (rosenfeld, 1997; schechter, sykes, & rosenfeld, 2008). the quantitative part of the research was intended to identify personality differences between the women that had reached positions of influence and leadership and those in the three comparison groups. the interviewees in the qualitative part of the research were recruited by way of invitations that requested their participation in the study. such appeals were sent to 50 of the highestranking women in israeli society in diverse fields of activity. the invitation letter described the purpose and importance of the study, while emphasizing the value of their participation. slightly less than half of the women who were approached (20) expressed their agreement to participate in the research. the researchers and trained research assistants conducted in-depth interviews with the women who consented. each interview took about an hour and a half to two hours, and was held at a location and time chosen by the interviewees. it ended with the administration of the quantitative instrument. to maintain anonymity in the quantitative part of the study, the questionnaires were not identifiable by name, but merely by group membership, and were placed directly by the interviewees into a blank envelope that was immediately sealed. the participants in the comparison group were recruited using the snowball technique, with the questionnaires being distributed to a list of contacts of the researchers and others. the participants received and returned the questionnaire by email, completing it in the privacy of their homes. to preserve the anonymity of the participants, as promised, the questionnaires were unmarked by name, printed immediately upon receipt of the e-mail, and placed blindly in an envelope in random order before any examination of the forms took place. using this method, we received over 100 completed questionnaires, which we divided into the three groups of occupations. in order to match the number of participants in each group to the number of the interviewees, we randomly chose 20 participants from each category to form the final comparison sample. results qualitative findings content analysis was used to analyze the interviews, so as to shed light on the various factors that contributed to the advancement to influential, policy-making positions. the factors that emerged can be grouped into three levels— organizational, familial and personal—although the central focus of most of the interviewees was on the latter. reference was also made to the price these women were ready to pay for leading such high-powered careers and to concluding recommendations for the training of future generations of female leaders. on the organizational level, some of the respondents spoke about the importance of mentors (men and women) who led them to success, or colleagues and/or professional partners, mainly women, who served as an important source of support: “it is very important to have a mentor…who will be there for you, actively show interest, help you to express yourself, and truly care” as well as “my management is made up entirely of women … i tell you, the experience of working with women is amazing.” mastering the rules of the male organizational culture, through determination not to accept any gender-based discrimination or to worry about how others perceive their gender-appropriateness, also helped them get ahead: i understood that if i wanted to advance, i had to play by the boys’ rules. the boys’ rules mean organizing and raising money” and, “people often view me as being masculine, but that doesn’t bother me.” at the same time, quite a few believed that they brought added value to their jobs by actually not adopting those rules entirely: “i think that my management is less rigid, softer, and more attentive to the employee.”, as well as by their ego free conduct “i never bother myself with ego considerations but only with the tasks at hand”. in a similar vein, many identified their ability to be overcome stereotypic expectations as key to their advancement: “assertive women are often seen as aggressive, but i was successful in separating between the two” or “i was the first to prove that women can be assigned tough diplomatic missions that were previously considered suitable for men only”. a lot more was said about the personal and familial factors that contributed in their view to their ascent to key influential positions. on the personal level, most attributed to themselves a conglomeration of both gender-congruent and incongruent personality traits, adding up to a rather androgynous advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 5 presentation. the “gender-appropriate” traits referred primarily to communal features such as sensitive management skills and the ability to communicate through dialogue and listening: “i think that it’s the aspects of emotional intelligence and the ability to manage people through positive feedback that succeeded in getting the most from them.” on the opposite side, they also described agentic traits of resoluteness, assertiveness, ambition, courage, self-confidence, belief in themselves, and commitment to hard work: “i am very determined and unyielding, independent, stubborn … i am opinionated, well-developed in my thoughts, willing to swim against the current,” or “so i decided i wouldn’t give in to them, and i would persist, and ultimately this worked, you know, in the end, it worked.” in addition to their gender-balanced personalities, many of the trailblazing women also identified themselves as feminists: “naturally i am a feminist, and very proud to be, since feminism for me is equality, so if i weren’t a feminist what have i been doing all these years” or “i began identifying myself as a feminist in my twenties, when i started standing up for what i believe in.” however, others did not define themselves as feminists, even though they usually endorsed its causes of gender equality: “i don’t know if i define myself as a feminist…but i do believe in gender neutral socialization and equal opportunities and pay for both sexes.” the family level, past and present, emerged as extremely significant in facilitating their advancement to the highest ranks. many of the participants identified family of origin as the foundation for their high self-esteem and confidence, as well as their aspiration to excellence. most of them came from egalitarian families where they witnessed a model of equality in their parents’ and grandparents’ division of labor: “i always saw my grandparents managing the household and there i learned that women’s status is exactly the same as men’s. the same was true of my mother and father.” children of both sexes received equal treatment, as their parents educated them equally toward excellence, achievement, and self-confidence: “i was educated towards excellence in everything,” and also: “all of us [brothers and sisters] received the same words of encouragement” or “i was always expected to be the top student.” the women noted that a strong and independent mother figure set a good example for them: “my mother was also a very independent and opinionated woman, and very well educated,” or “the truth is that my mother is also a pediatrician; in the previous generation this was less common.” some of the women had supportive, encouraging parents, who recognized their abilities and educated them to be self-confident, with the fathers playing a central role in this: “my father was always encouraging; in general he thought i was god’s gift to humankind and a shining star,” or “i grew up in a home with an open, egalitarian father, who educated me to overcome all obstacles … he was very proud of me.” mothers also contributed their part: “for my mother i was ‘queen of the universe.” in contrast, some of the women had experienced a harsher childhood, characterized by economic hardship and a fight for survival, absent or ill parents, and the like. they spoke of how their difficulties transformed them into survivors and fighters: “i’m not afraid of anything. i had enough blows as a child to not be afraid of anything,” or “i had a very complex childhood. it’s no secret and it surely had an impact. to stand on my own, to fight, to be independent.” the families created by most of the interviewees in their adulthood also contributed very significantly to their advancement. their reports focused on two realms: marriage and motherhood. with regard to marriage, the decisive majority of the married women reported that their partner fully shared the domestic responsibilities with them, thereby freeing them to devote equally to their professions: “fortunately for me, i have a partner who is very egalitarian, it is not that he does whatever i tell him—he actually shares the responsibility,” and: “my partner freed me, we pretty much divided [all responsibilities] equally.” nearly all the respondents indicated that without their partners’ collaboration they would not have been able to have such a career: “i say this, you know, i put it on the table as clearly as possible. i don’t think i could have done this if i didn’t have a partner who was this supportive,” and also “without my husband’s enormous support, i wouldn’t have succeeded.” some of the interviewees described sacrifices their partners made for the sake of their (the women’s) careers: “he’s simply an amazing, supportive partner and he never thought that i should give up on my plans so that he could carry out his. on the contrary: he would make concessions for my sake.” the equal division of labor with the partner also helped balance career and parenting. the knowledge that in their absence, their partner would fill their place was particularly relieving: “my partner was a real partner in caring for the children. this is an essential condition and it’s rare. he would come home at four or five and he was more flexible that i was.” nevertheless, some of the women reported an inner conflict due to the clash between their professional and maternal roles, including awareness that their children would prefer them to be home. however, in the same breath they described effective ways of coping with these feelings of guilt: “you’ll be torn, every once in a while you’ll cry about what a ‘bad mother’ you are. the practical response is to figure out solutions as you go along,” or “the girls want me to be home more. so i share everything i do with them so they can feel a part of it and be proud.” another thing that helped was focusing on the benefits the children derived from their work: “when the children were young there was undoubtedly a price, but i rationalize the situation by believing that it helped them develop character.” it is important to note that not all the women shared this maternal guilt, finding various angles to free themselves of it, while focusing on the upside of it all: “i have no guilt. i have advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 6 none because i have no reason. i look at my friends who were busy with other things, and believe me i was a thousand times more involved in my children’s lives,” or “i think many mothers talk about pangs of conscience but i never felt guilty that i wasn’t at home… never; i did the very best i could.” the motives for advancement cited by these women revealed that the majority did not reach their high positions out of an intention to reach the top of the pyramid or a desire for power over others and control. actually, a substantial portion of the women noted that they did not plan their organizational rise or even expect to get so far, but simply found themselves being handed these positions: “suddenly i found myself here—i didn’t plan it, it wasn’t the career that i had planned at that stage,” or “i didn’t set a goal to get here, my life just rolled along, and i was lucky to be in the right place at the right time.” they were not motivated by an ambition to amass power over others either “it wasn’t the power or dominance of being at the head of all this…that i really wanted.” nor were they motivated by ego: “i succeeded as a woman precisely because i’m not egocentric and i don’t dwell on matters of ego, but only on the tasks that i want to perform.” most of the women reported that their promotions arose primarily from their tendency to do their work as well as possible: “[my motivation] will always be to conquer the peak, but my own peak—to do my very best … what helped me is that i simply wanted to succeed in my work,” or “my history is that i always attempt to do my utmost and maybe even some more” and/or to promote values and ideals: “i always fought for my views and ideology,” or “i can define myself as a woman who wants to lead change.” as part of the examination of the factors that made it possible for these women to overcome the obstacles on their way to leadership positions, we must also take count of the prices they were willing to pay. in fact, most identified the willingness to pay these prices as a determining factor in enabling their advancement to the top. the majority referred to the inevitable familial price: “i think the price relating to the family is the price,” or “to my mind, the willingness to pay this price distinguishes those who made it to the top from those who didn’t.” some referred to their willingness to pay the price that arose from their multiple roles: exhaustion, lack of time for themselves or their families and friends: “as a mother you rock the cradle with your foot, make an egg with one hand, and talk on the phone with the office with the other hand,” or “there is a price in respect to your social life, time to read, time to do other things,” and also “you have to be willing to pay this heavy and painful price [of long hours of absence from the home]. those who don’t succeed in coping with this frustration quit halfway.” at the end of each interview, we asked the participant to offer her own recommendations for increasing women’s representation in the corridors of power and influence. some of them identified the need for system-wide structural changes that would promote women: “if the political sphere were more egalitarian, more woman-friendly, i think we would see many more women in the system. it’s necessary to make the system more accessible to women.” they also ascribed central importance to the advancement of women in the organization and spoke of the ways in which they promoted other women based on solidarity and support “i can’t tell you that i promote women solely because they are women. but i push women… and each woman here is the best, unequivocally.” the need to find proper solutions for balancing work and family was also indicated by many: “regarding the combination of work and family, you have to find the right mix.” another recommendation that was echoed in many of the interviews referred to the training of future generations of women leaders: “i would have as many preparatory workshops for women as possible … i would organize all sorts of training courses to familiarize them with the political arena,” or “i believe in the idea of looking for potential female leaders … enabling, directing, and providing opportunities, that is the key.” finally, the participants recommended that all young women be encouraged to never give up on their dreams and to persist all the way to their goals: “the main thing i say to them is don’t give up and believe in yourselves. i think it’s a matter of determination and a decision not to give up,” and to dare to dream: “i’ll tell her … dream big, be bold, and take all the opportunities that come your way.” quantitative findings in order to further hone in on the personality and family-related factors that help women advance to key positions, we contrasted the top-ranking women with the three subgroups of the comparison group: junior managers, therapists, and lowranking employees. a manova was used to compare the four groups on various personality traits. as can be seen in table 1, there was a significant difference between the seniorranking women and the other three sub-groups in levels of androgyny along with a whole set of traits. examination of the particular differentiation characteristics shows that the differences emerged from the characteristics considered “masculine” and not those considered “feminine.” the women in positions of influence demonstrated higher levels of ambition, leadership, assertiveness, independence, resoluteness, and the like. at the same time, they did not differ significantly from the other groups in qualities considered to be feminine, such as sensitivity, empathy, containment, and warmth. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 7 table 1 group comparison on various dimensions of personality, expressed as manova coefficients trait df f occupation means (sd) androgyny 3 9.64*** leaders -.64 (.72) managers 02 (.69) therapists .24 (.63) employees .52 (.77) leadership 3 5.93*** leaders 6.06 (.93) managers 5.85 (.87) therapists 5.40 (1.09 employees 4.61 (1.05) achievementorientation 3 3.62** leaders 6.12 (1.02) managers 5.38 (1.12) therapists 5.35 (1.14) employees 4.85 (1.32) independence 3 3.81** leaders 6.50 (.73) managers 6.28 (.96) therapists 6.50 (.69) employees 5.61 (.78) ambition 3 3.42** leaders 6.12 (.96) managers 5.52 (1.29) therapists 5.45 (1.15) employees 4.82 (1.49) resoluteness 3 3.26** leaders 6.12 (.63) managers 5.38 (.94) therapists 5.35 (1.18) employees 4.85 (.92) assertiveness 3 2.54* leaders 6.00 (.82) managers therapists 5.80 (.98) 5.2 (1.05) employees 5.19 (.02) *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .00 we performed several additional analyses concerning the division of labor in the families of the comparison participants. about two-thirds of the women reported that they bore the bulk of the responsibility for the home and the care of the children; half of them (one-third of the overall sample) were responsible for between 60% and 75% of these tasks and the other half undertook between 75% and 100% of the household chores, so that house maintenance fell mainly on them. the remaining one-third reported an equal division of labor. a significant correlation (r = .587, p < .00) was found between the degree of equality in role division and the women’s satisfaction with this division, such that women who bore most of the burden reported the lowest acceptance of the situation and vice versa. in addition, a significant correlation was found between the degree of equality in the division of labor at home and the rank the woman held on her job (r = .539, p < .00) as well as the degree to which she defined herself as a career woman (r = .608, p < .00), such that the greater the equality in the family, the higher the level the woman attained on her job and the more she defined herself as a career woman. discussion the present findings sketch a profile of the highest-ranking women in israeli society, and identify some of the factors that promoted their rise to the top. of the various factors expected to play a role in their ascent, the women in our sample seemed to focus primarily on the personal and familial ones and less on the organizational determinants. accordingly, we can account more for the former as compared with the latter. the picture that emerged is of ambitious, androgynous women who blazed their way to policymaking positions primarily through a dedication to excellence rather than aspirations for power and supremacy. they are highly educated, as a group, with many being self-identified feminists, and almost all advocates of gender equality. most of them experienced gender-neutral socialization in childhood along with parental confidence in their abilities and encouragement. in adulthood they generally proceeded to recreate an egalitarian nuclear family, characterized by equitable division of labor with their partners, while a minority never married at all. the mothers among them tended to have fewer children than average, and, as a rule, seemed to cook up with atypical solutions for the widely noted work–family conflict and maternal guilt. at the same time, by their own admission they were not immune to these emotions but rather willing to pay the price attached to their career paths, noting that the benefits outweighed the costs. an analysis of the organizational level reveals that the majority of these trailblazing women reached their high-ranking positions with minimal organizational help, although a few were aided by dedicated mentors or female colleagues or superiors. in keeping with previous accounts (e.g., davidson & burke, 2011; eagly & carli, 2007), many identified their mastering of the male organizational rules as a precondition for their advancement. similarly, they all had to devise individual solutions for the typical family–career conflict, in the absence of any systemic mechanisms for its resolution. lacking any substantial organizational backing, most of the interviewees identified familial and personal factors as being more central to their ability to progress to the highest ranks in their organizations. in the family realm, the majority of those advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 8 in a steady relationship singled out spousal equality and support as possibly the most important contributor to the materialization of their leadership aspirations, allowing them to reach the highest echelons by making the combination of a demanding career with family feasible. the patterns that emerged in the comparison group revealed that the greater the woman’s share of responsibility for the home, the less she was able to advance in the workplace. this resonates with similar findings in the literature demonstrating that the greater the balance between women and men in the private sphere, the vaster the opportunities for women to reach leadership positions in the public sphere (chang & halpern, 2010; eagly & karau, 2002; kark & eagly, 2010). the standpoint of the unmarried interviewees, both divorced and never married, appears to further support this conclusion. pointing to the potentially hindering impact of an unequal relationship on career prospects, these women tied their choice of being single to a determination to avoid a non-egalitarian relationship that could potentially jeopardize their chances of advancement in the world of work. taken together, these findings make it clear that women’s rise to the top is aided tremendously by an equal division of labor within the family. an additional significant factor that seems to have played a major role in enabling these women to devote themselves to their upward-bound careers is the successful solutions they found to the frequently noted maternal guilt. although not all of them experienced such guilt, it still came up in practically every interview, attesting to its significant centrality. in fact, most of the interviewees reported contending with considerable guilt. yet rather than letting it control their career paths, they managed to find ways to neutralize it by means of rationalization or conscious willingness to pay this price. others divulged a total lack of guilt, in a rather atypical manner. either way, the moderation of their guilt was linked in large measure to the equitable sharing of parental responsibilities with their partners, which assured them that there would always be a parental figure present for their children. additionally, their relatively small number of children may have also contributed to their ability to move ahead in the public sphere, in keeping with previous findings of an inverse relationship between number of children and women’s seniority (wallen, 2002). beyond the interviewees’ current family constellation, the characteristics of their families of origin were also associated with their achievement of top ranks. empowering family characteristics, such as a model of an egalitarian marital relationship between parents and even grandparents; a strong, inspiring mother; socialization to gender equality; parental confidence in their capabilities; as well as being the eldest sibling, were shared by most of them and related, not surprisingly, to their rise to the top. these findings attest to the decisive impact of socialization to gender equality on the path the daughter will take. in keeping with similar findings (e.g., hallett & gilbert, 1997), the more a young girl is allowed to believe that no path is closed to her, the greater her chances of gaining prominence in the public sphere as an adult. that so many of these women had a strong and determined mother for a model, whether accomplished or not, speaks to the importance of mothers’ own empowerment as a source of inspiration for their daughters, in keeping with similar accounts in the literature (e.g., o’reilly, 1998). also consistent with the literature (e.g., allgood, beckert, & peterson, 2012), is the finding that fathers seem to play a pivotal role in building the daughter’s self-confidence and the realization of her potential, highlighting the importance of fathers’ encouraging involvement in their daughters’ upbringing. at the same time, for some of the women it was actually the necessity to contend with hardship in their family of origin that apparently helped them to develop inner resources to confront adversity. on the personal level, the androgynous nature of their personality apparently placed these high-ranking women at a different starting point compared to many other women, as reflected by their distinction from the comparison group. in contrast to the latter, they appear to be considerably more achievement-oriented, ambitious, assertive, self-confident, and resolute. alongside these agentic personality traits, culturally considered as masculine, most of these women also displayed communal qualities, usually considered as feminine, such as empathy, warmth, and care for the needs of others, to no less a degree than the women in the comparison group. as it is the agentic cluster of traits that distinguished the senior women from the rest, it stands to reason that these particular qualities played a pivotal role in their ascent to the top of the pyramid, which is hardly surprising considering that the criteria for advancement in the male organizational culture are tailored to masculine norms and characteristics (e.g., davidson & burke, 2011; eagly & karau, 2002; eagly & sczesny, 2009; schein, 2001). at the same time, it is important to note that their equally extant communal traits did not stand in their way to the top, in keeping with reports of growing appreciation for androgynous management styles (e.g., kark et al., 2012). however, in a departure from kark et al.’s results, we did not find the communal traits to provide any particular benefit on their own. rather, it appears that the combination of both clusters of traits into an androgynous whole was the source of our interviewees’ advantage. an egalitarian value system appears to be an additional promoting personal feature. for many, this belief in gender equality also translated into self-identification as feminists, while others preferred to avoid the label, though almost invariably endorsing its cause. either way, these convictions may have provided them with the resolve not to surrender to the various obstacles encountered or to give in to feelings of guilt and blame that might have otherwise created a difficult choice between career and family (e.g. mor & guy, 2006). their selection of an egalitarian partner may have also resulted from this stance, as previously suggested (e.g., backus & mahlik, 2011), further easing the family–career conflict. in addition, there might have been a synergic interaction between their high levels of ambition and their belief in gender equality. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 9 perhaps the endorsement of egalitarian notions is one of the decisive factors allowing them to act upon their high ambitions instead of foregoing them like so many women feel forced to do (e.g. hallett & gilbert, 1997). conversely, it might be the case that it was their extraordinary ambitiousness that turned them onto feminism in the first place, possibly as a means for its expression. be the direction of the interrelation between these qualities as it may, they appear to function conjointly in influencing women’s rise to prominence. finally, the motivational system of these high-ranking women raises some interesting questions. the fact that they were not motivated to reach senior policy-making positions by a desire for power and control, but rather by a commitment to excellence, warrants special attention. does it imply that women as a group are not attracted to power, dominance, and control over others, or might it be that women feel uneasy expressing such aspirations due to their incompatibility with the female gender role? a similar finding was the reluctance of many of the interviewees to take credit for their accomplishments, attributing them instead to circumstances or luck, in accordance with consistent external attribution of success on the part of women. however, given that these women did not fear to reveal their androgynous nature in any way, it seems that their accounts should probably be taken at face value. hence, their rise in the organizational hierarchy should be viewed, in accordance with their point of view, as a result of the vast esteem they enjoyed there due to their excellence and accomplishments, rather than resulting from a quest for power in the sense of supremacy or dominance. in reading the results, one should bear in mind the limitations of this study, most of which concern the sampling methods used in both its qualitative and quantitative parts. the major limitation of the qualitative section is the selection of the participants from a pool of prominent leading women known to the researchers, thereby excluding unknown potential candidates, as well as leaders from additional domains. secondly, the rather low rate of participation is another concern. the fact that only one half of the approached women agreed to participate may have created systematic and meaningful differences between the current interviewees and other leading women who opted not to participate. clearly, these factors may influence the generalizability of the results. additionally, the convenience sampling of the comparison group makes it difficult to ascertain the exact source of the group differences documented in this study, as these may be related to factors that were not presently controlled. however, while these limitations may have made it impossible to account for all factors instrumental to paving women’s paths to the top universally, they, nevertheless, did not hinder the fundamental goal of identifying some very central ones. this notwithstanding, future research should repeat this investigation with prominent female leaders in additional domains and cultures, as well as conduct better controlled comparisons with other women. conclusions and recommendations for future action the picture that emerges from the current findings makes it possible to formulate recommendations for action on all three levels—the organizational, familial, and personal alike. on the social-organizational level, a normative change is called for, away from exclusive male-centered definitions and towards a more egalitarian system whose rules and standards are transparent and accessible to women. organizations can actively assist women’s ascent by intentionally seeking out those with leadership potential and appointing them mentors dedicated to their promotion to the highest ranks. there is a need for a change in attitudes and perceptions that associate leadership with maleness, coupled with a growing appreciation for communal traits alongside the instrumental. in addition, it is important to recognize the different paths followed by women and men on their way up and reward women, accordingly, for achievement orientation and persistence, even if they are focused primarily on performance excellence rather than acquiring power and position. our results show that this is the main route women take to the top. action is needed on all fronts to reduce the conflict between work and family. first, a far-reaching change is needed in the social norms that charge women alone with the primary responsibility for children and the home, while undoing the association between caregiving and womanhood. organizational mechanisms that enable women to combine career and family more reasonably should be devised. establishments must think creatively about solutions in this respect. for instance, flexibility and adaptation of work conditions for parents of both genders may encourage men to take an equal part in household chores, thereby enabling more women to reach senior positions. on the familial level, there is an obvious indication for a completely equal division of labor between partners, as indicated by nearly all the married interviewees, who singled this out as one of the most crucial prerequisites for reaching the highest echelons. accordingly, women should be encouraged to refuse to settle for any less than true equality in the home, while insisting on a supportive, egalitarian partner, who is willing to make mutual concessions for their advancement. the recommendations for family of origin include a call for gender-neutral socialization of girls that will instill in them the full gamut of qualities, “feminine” and “masculine” alike, while presenting them with a broad spectrum of opportunities devoid of all gender bias. concomitantly, parents should endow them with encouragement to fulfill their potential to its utmost and aspire to the highest goals. both parents have an important role in this process, with the father’s being confidence-building and the mother’s being role modeling. our results show that mothers’ own empowerment is one of the strongest inspirations for their daughters’. on the personal level, the development of a feminist identity, or at the very least a belief in gender equality, is indicated. such a value system will likely contribute to confidence that all doors advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 10 are open to them and self-fulfillment is their right. furthermore, the results of our study point to the advantage obtained by these senior women from focusing on the benefits that their achievements afford their children. working mothers should be encouraged to adopt such a perspective. this way, not only can they free themselves of any and all guilt but actually relish the value of their accomplishments, thereby removing a central obstacle to their advancement. they will then become free to seize promotion opportunities that come their way, as did our interviewees, without any fear or apprehension, even if they did not plan initially to go that far. and above all, it is essential to encourage women to believe in themselves and take credit for their accomplishments; to dream big and high and never forego 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(2002). balancing work and family: the role of the workplace. boston: allyn and bacon. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, fall 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        what's really at stake with high-stakes testing? dr. barbara polnick and dr. dianne reed sam houston state university high-stakes testing has the potential to make significant differences in the lives of children and adults across a variety of educational settings. decisions related to high-stakes testing can affect individuals and systems at the local, regional, state, and national levels (ysseldyke et al., 2004). advocates of high-stakes testing hope test scores will prompt schools and organizations to reform policy, encourage teachers to adopt more effective practices, and motivate students to work harder based on the school's accountability report (stecher, 2002). however, some studies indicate that high-stakes testing can have negative as well as positive consequences and that these consequences sometimes result in different experiences for females and minorities. in this article, we define high-stakes tests, describe both positive and negative consequences of these assessments as they relate to females and minorities, discuss reasons for performance differences among diverse groups, and share cautions regarding uses of high-stakes tests. high-stakes tests defined "high-stakes" tests are tests that have direct consequences for individuals, groups, or organizations, in which the stakes are high. in public schools, for example, teachers, principals, and superintendents are sometimes warned that their raises, bonuses, or even their jobs may be on the line if students are not successful on these tests. high-stakes tests have the potential to affect opportunities for students by impacting milestones such as graduations, promotions, and admissions into programs of colleges and universities. these tests, once largely used as monitoring devises in educational settings, can also be defined in terms of their direct impact on and changes to a campus, district, or organization as a whole (carnoy, elmore, & siskin, 2003). high-stakes tests include, but are not limited to, state-wide assessments; assessments used to measure "adequate yearly progress" (ayp) as required by no child left behind (nclb) federal legislation (u.s. department of education, 2002); college entrance exams; certification and licensure exams like those used in education, business, medicine, and legal professions; and some aptitude exams. depending on how they are used, some psychological and intelligence assessments could also be considered high-stakes assessments when used to "sort and select" individuals for specific programs. the use of high-stakes testing is what determines whether the assessment is "high-stakes"-not the design of the test. use of high-stakes assessments high-stake assessments have varied in how they have been used over the years. the current wave of assessment-based school accountability combines two traditions in american education: public accountability and student testing. in the past, when accountability and assessment were only loosely connected, assessments were used mainly to divide students into academic tracks, or for diagnostic purposes. most recently, high-stakes assessments have been used to measure the performance of organizations against a designated set of standards, thus holding individuals, groups, and schools all accountable for student performance (carnoy, elmore, & siskin, 2003). as accountability measures, these assessments have resulted in both positive and negative consequences. positive consequences new accountability measures based on high-stakes testing are designed to improve the quality of education and provide https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/www/awl/templates/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/www/awl/templates/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/www/awl/templates/index.html equity in instruction (stecher, 2002). by requiring states, for example, to assess and report student outcomes by diverse groups, emphasis is placed on all students achieving standards regardless of their socio-economic status, race, ethnicity, or gender. changes in school policies designed to make schools more effective in increasing student achievement can increase motivation on the part of the students (stecher, 2002). for schools, incentives to perform result in support from faculty to be successful, and praise and recognition all serve as motivators for individual students. when performance on high-stakes tests are analyzed for individual students, focused time and effort directed toward diverse population groups passing provides additional support to succeed. it is hoped that with increased pressure to help all groups perform better on the tests, gaps in performance between and among diverse population groups will diminish. high-stakes assessments that promote mastery of national standards may focus curriculum reform efforts toward meaningful content and research-based instructional practices. meeting those curriculum standards forces students to participate in coursework of the same level(s) in order to pass the exams. for example, all students (girls and boys) taking algebra ii, geometry, and calculus increases the likelihood that girls as well as boys will have the necessary pre-requisites for admission to prestigious universities. females, then, are necessarily encouraged to take the same higher level coursework as males because, unless they do, they will not pass the exams. this is especially important in states where accountability ratings are based on college preparatory exam results such as those offered by the advanced placement (ap) testing program. negative consequences there are several reasons to be concerned about the consequences of high-stakes tests for schools and individual students. in pk-12 schools where high-stakes assessments are associated with accountability systems, use of these assessments can result in rewards and/or sanctions for students and schools. these high-stakes assessments, depending on how they are used as accountability measures, have the potential to negatively impact schools and other organizations. increasing the gap . negative consequences may include an increased gap between low-and high-performing schools, reduced opportunities for females and minorities as well as students with disabilities, and decreased support for national curriculum reform efforts. schools whose students fail to pass such tests in sufficient numbers are sometimes sanctioned by the state or national government, which can result in a change in faculty and/or leadership, or a total reorganization of the school. when schools are held equally accountable for meeting performance standards, gaps between schools (the "haves" and the "have nots") may increase as sanctions are imposed because the negative effect for low performing schools and students is greater than the negative effect on high performing schools and students (shepard, 1991; carnoy, elmore, & siskin, 2003). graduation and completion. where high-stakes assessments translate into high school "exit tests" that all students must pass in order to graduate, completing or not completing school can result in students being marginalized from the mainstream, and becoming a social liability. this action can have significant consequences in high schools where lowincome young people-many of them african-americans and latinos-"make it or break it" educationally (mcdermott & mcdermott, 2002). high-stakes tests impact students with disabilities when high passing standards make graduation as a reward nowhere in sight (mcdermott & mcdermott, 2002; ysseldyke et al., 2004). reform efforts . states and national organizations may be affected by international assessments in a way that can significantly impact curriculum reform efforts-efforts which are sometimes put into place to reduce gaps and achieve equity. for example, the national assessment of educational progress (naep) is an international exam that has no direct consequences for how well individuals, schools, or even states do on the test. however, this test compares how educational programs in the united states rank when compared to other countries. it also compares how well males and females or different minority groups perform on specific sub-sections of the test. when this information is made public, different factions may use (or misuse) the information to promote or discredit current reform efforts and educational practices supported by various political groups. practices that have been put into place as a means to achieving equity in education may be discounted by the reporting of a lack of success on this high-stakes assessment. benchmarking and narrowing the curriculum. another negative consequence of high-stakes assessments occurs when schools design instruction to eliminate gaps by focusing instruction on the weak areas of students-not their strengths (mcdermott & mcdermott, 2002) . this type of instruction can sometimes negatively impact student performance through a continuous focus on students' failure(s) to perform well, which may serve as a catalyst for giving up or even dropping out of schools and/or universities. repeated testing, commonly known as "benchmarking," can also negatively impact students' efforts to do their best. this may be especially important for females who research indicates respond differently to pressure in anxiety-related situations (felson & trudeau, 1991; gierl & rogers, 1996; pappamihiel, e., 2001). this can affect female students, for example, who may develop anxiety behaviors (which also interfere with their potential to do well) if undue pressure is placed on them to perform ("if only you had gotten three more right on the test, http://www.questia.com/pm.qst?a=o&d=5000713282 http://www.questia.com/pm.qst?a=o&d=5000713282 our school would have received a higher rating"). additionally, achieving equity through increased opportunities may not occur because a minimalized curriculum and/or instruction focused solely on state or local assessments can reduce students' exposure to broad areas of knowledge often assessed on national or international exams, the same exams used for entry into educational programs. in other words, "you can get out, but you can't get in!" the scope of the curriculum is narrowed when there is a focus on national standards to the point that there are few opportunities for creative, innovative thinking, such as those needed for the fields of technology, leadership, space, and medicine. because creative opportunities can open doors for more students who may not be successful in traditional settings, diverse population groups can be negatively impacted by their elimination. student course placement . according to ysseldyke et al. (2004), using test results to place students in special programs does not always result in increased educational equity and accessibility to content, but can often lead to the development of de facto tracks that students are placed into once they fail high-stakes exams. these "tracks," in which students are assigned, usually on the basis of perceived achievement of skill level, often result in separate schools or programs, classes within grade levels, groups within classes (at the elementary level), and courses within subject areas (at the secondary level) (national research council, 1999). for females and some minority students, judgments about perceived achievement based on test results may not be accurate and, therefore, may result in these groups of students being inappropriately placed into courses and/or counseled out of some career opportunities. misuse of the mean. a danger in using high-stakes testing occurs when data from these assessments are analyzed and reported in terms of mean scores across population groups and findings are generalized for these groups which can include incorrect assumptions about females, african-americans, immigrants, etc. (caplan & caplan, 1997). for example, even though there are a range of scores across sections of an exam in which some females scored higher than some males, if females are reported at scoring lower (on average) on the quantitative section of the graduate records examination (gre), stereotypes about females and their abilities to do well in mathematics, engineering, and chemistry may develop. generalizing that females will not do as well in these areas can and does affect recruitment efforts, program design, as well as faculty and staff selection at universities. caplan and caplan (1997) caution us in gender differences in human cognition that it would be "both nonsensical and immoral to try to restrict flat out the education, treatment and opportunities of individuals simply on account of the phenomenon that the average member of one group scores higher than the average member of the other group" (p. 54). stereotyping based on scores can also affect perceptions regarding individuals' abilities to "do the job," creating barriers to the selection of certain groups from participating in programs after graduation. barriers created by the misuse of data reported from high-stakes tests like college entrance exams can, therefore, lead to certain groups being unable to access and succeed in programs that would lead to greater opportunities for success. use of assessments to sort and select . in pondering the concept of equity in testing and assessment, it is important to recognize that tests and assessments have traditionally served as sifters which, intentionally or unintentionally, filtered out groups of students from educational opportunities. these groups include, but are not limited to, females, languageminority students, students with low socioeconomic backgrounds, and students of color. this "sort and select" process often depends on the application of the bell-shaped curve, which by design ranks the performance of individuals and sorts them into categories of percentile rankings "below the mean" and "above the mean." standardized tests like the sat and gre tend to especially penalize females and many minority students, where females tend to do worse than males but consistently earn better grades than males. researchers consistently find that adding test scores to the admissions equations results in fewer females and minorities being accepted than if their academic records alone were considered (sacks, 2000). for example, historically, the major purpose of college entrance exams has been to predict the success of the first year college performance, but often such scores underpredict what females and minorities can actually do (aron, burton, & poole, 1999). gender differences in performance on high-stakes assessments used for program admissions can lead, therefore, to an "under prediction" of how well certain groups might do if they were otherwise selected for participation. this underprediction can diminish educational opportunities by denying females and minorities admission to the most competitive colleges and millions of dollars in scholarship money. reason for performance differences among diverse groups researchers have found several reasons that account for gender differences in test performance (langenfeld, 1997). some studies have found that the context in which test questions are embedded can make a difference in the test performance of females and males (langenfeld, 1997; wendler & carlton, 1987). females often score higher on questions about relationships, and males score higher on questions about science, sports, and the stock market (langenfeld, 1997). educational testing systems (ets) researchers wendler and carlton (1987) found that females perform better on test questions that are specific and concrete, as found in questions about science and practical affairs. designers for ets had not been successful in completely balancing verbal content with equal references to areas that interest each sex (wendler & carlton, 1987). another reason why gender differences in test performance might exist relates to the long term effects of stereotyping. steele and aronson (1995) found in their research that stereotyping can ultimately affect the performance of individuals for whom society has low expectations. a female who is taking a test in math, but who does not think she is supposed to do well, may become frustrated when faced with a very difficult math problem, thinking "why try when i can't do this anyway?" and ultimately may withdraw (steele & aronson, 1995). according to these researchers, stereotyping can especially impact the test performance of individuals who want to do well in a subject and for whom doing well is very important. steele (1997) found that in these incidences, stereotyping resulted in stress behaviors which manifested themselves as high blood pressure, anxiety, and/or reading difficulties (re-reading, second guessing, and going back and forth). anxiety is another factor which may explain gender performance differences. in a study of 1,112 students in a coaching class taking a practice sat, it was discovered that two and a half times as many females as males said they were "extremely anxious," and they scored lower on the math sat than the "somewhat anxious" females (steele, 2004). another reason for the gender differences in test performance may be explained by cognitive styles. females are less likely to be risk takers and to guess at the right answer largely because of their socialization and early education (denuys & wolfe, 1985; sadker & sadker, 1985). time pressure may be an additional reason for gender performance differences. in a recent study conducted by the national commission on testing and public policy (nctpp) (1990), students were not given time limits on the sat. when kathleen kelly-benjamin interviewed a sampling of 20 girls and 20 boys who took the untimed test about their approaches to test taking, she found differences in their strategies. the girls were more likely to work mathematics problems as they had been taught in the classroom; i.e., in a step-by-step manner using formulas or knowledge of geometry; whereas, the boys were more likely to use test-taking strategies such as substituting answer choices in the problem to see which one worked or noticing the answer choice that was different from all the others (usually the correct one) (nctpp, 1990). giving the girls all the time they needed seemed to work in their favor but not in the favor of the boys who answered fewer questions correctly despite the expanded time frame. cautions in using high-stakes assessments the american educational research association (aera) and the american psychological association (apa), in conjunction with the national council on measurement and education (1999), developed the 1999 standards for educational and psychological testing . these standards represent assessment principles designed to promote fairness in testing and avoid negative impact from the use of assessments. five standards specifically relate to the development, selection, and use of assessments to minimize potential negative effects on gender, ethnicity, race, socio-economic status, english language learners, and students with disabilities. these include: •  decisions about students' education, such as retention, tracking, or graduation, should not be based on the results of a single test, but should include other relevant and valid information. •  there should be evidence that the test addresses only the specific or generalized content and skills that students have had an opportunity to learn, when test results substantially contribute to decisions made about students' promotion or graduation. for tests that will determine a student's eligibility for promotion to the next grade or for high school graduation, students should be granted multiple opportunities to demonstrate mastery or materials through equivalent testing procedures. •  school district, state, or other authority mandated tests should clearly describe the ways in which the test results are intended to be used. it is also the responsibility of those who mandate the test to monitor its impact, particularly on racial and ethnic-minority students or students of lower socioeconomic status, and to identify and minimize potential negative consequences of such testing. •  special accommodations for english language learners may be necessary to obtain valid test scores. if english language learners are to be tested in english, their test scores should be interpreted in light of their limited english skills. •  special accommodations may be needed to ensure that test scores are valid for students with disabilities. not enough is currently known about how particular test modifications may affect the test scores of students with disabilities; more research is needed (aera, apa, ncme, 1999). leaders are encouraged to implement the above standards as they incorporate high-stakes testing into their programs. in so doing, they can facilitate equity for all diverse population groups and eliminate some of the misuses of high-stakes testing often found in educational settings today. conclusions and recommendations in summary, high-stakes assessments have the potential to both positively and negatively affect females and minorities due to several factors, depending on how the results are used. focusing on performance and expectations for all students can raise the level of awareness about individual students' needs. in such cases, high-stakes assessments can focus instruction and curriculum towards mastery of a unified set of standards. however, while high standards and expectations motivate some students to perform well, others find this type of pressure distracting and debilitating. high-stakes assessments can be an important tool in evaluating and improving educational programs. however, it is only a part of the formula for quality. when tests are used in high-stakes circumstances, it is important that all involved be aware of and follow the standards for educational and psychological testing in order to ensure that certain groups of the population of test-takers are not disadvantaged by the tests. such considerations may include genderand culturallybiased language, test design, and testing parameters. furthermore, users of high-stakes tests need to recognize that factors such as test anxiety may produce scores that are not representative of an individual's full potential. high-stakes assessments can negatively impact educational outcomes when stereotyping occurs. this occurs when the results of assessments are generalized and published for the general population to the point that they become a truth. furthermore, gender differences in performance outcomes on high-stakes assessments used for program admissions can lead to an "underprediciton" of how well females (and minorities) might do if they were otherwise provided the opportunity to participate. in addition, the nature of high-stakes assessments can create anxiety and pressure on people who are already feeling uncertain about their abilities, which can then interfere with how well they perform, producing an inaccurate measure of what they can do. this then can lead to a masking of the true potential of groups of people which are then generalized and purported as truth, perpetuating the stereotyping of individuals and their abilities. if tests are going to be used to determine which students will advance or be accepted into advanced programs, which courses and programs will be offered, and which type of instruction will be promoted, it is imperative that we understand how to effectively measure student learning and performance. in addition, educators should explore how best to use high-stakes assessments to impact student drop-out/completion rates, graduation rates, course content and design, levels of student anxiety, and instructional practices. because the stakes can be so high for so many, additional research should begin immediately in order to learn more about the intended and unintended consequences of testing in educational decision making (american educational research association, american psychological association, & national council on measurement and education, 1999). references american educational research association, american psychological association, & national council on measurement and education. (1999). standards for educational and psychological testing . washington, dc: aera publications, inc. aron, r. h., burton , d. n., & poole , d. a. (1999). underprediction of female performance from standardized knowledge tests: a further example from the knowledge of geography test. sex roles: a journal of research, 41 (7/8), 529-540. caplan, p. j., & caplan, j. b. (1997). do sex-related cognitive differences exist, and why do people seek them out? in p. caplan, m. crawford, j. s. hyde, & j. t. e. richardson (eds.), gender differences in human cognition (pp. 52-75). new york: oxford university press. retrieved february 19, 2006, from questia database: http://www.questia.com /pm.qst?a=o&d=57129854 carnoy, m., elmore, r., & siskin, l. s. (eds.). (2003). the new accountability: high schools and high-stakes testing . new york: routledge falmer. retrieved february 19, 2006, from questia database: http://www.questia.com/pm.qst?a=o& d=108631580 denuys, m., & wolfe, l. r. 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(1990). from gatekeeper to gateway: transforming testing in america . chestnut hill, ma: national commission on testing and public policy, boston college. national research council. (1999). high stakes: testing for tracking, promotion, and graduation. in j. p. heubert & r. m. hauser (eds.), committee on appropriate test use, board on testing and assessment, national research council . washington, dc: national academy press. pappamihiel, e. (2001). moving from the esl classroom into the mainstream: an investigation of english language anxiety in mexican girls. bilingual research journal, 25 , 1 & 2. retrieved february 10, 2006, from http://brj.asu.edu /v2512/articles/art3.html sacks, p. (2000). standardized minds: the high price of america's testing culture and what we can do to change it . cambridge, ma: perseus publishing. retrieved february 21, 2006, from questia database: http://www.questia.com /pm.qst?a=o&d=91066127 sadker, m., & sadker, d. (1985, march). sexism in the schoolroom of the '80's. psychology today , 54-57. shepard, l. a. (1991). will national tests improve student learning? (cse technical report 342). los angeles: national center for research on evaluation, standards, and student testing. stecher, b. m. (2002). consequences of large-scale, high-stakes testing on school and classroom practice. in l. s. hamilton, s. p. klein , b. m., & stecher (eds.), making sense of test-based accountability in education (p. 79). santa monica, ca: rand. steele, c. m. (1997). a threat in the air: how stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. american psychologist, 52 , 613-629. steele, c. m. (2004). not just a test. the nation , posted april 15, 2004 (may 3, 2004 issue), 1-4. retrieved february 10, 2006, from http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040503/steele steele, c. m., & aronson, j. (1995). stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of african americans. journal of personality and social psychology, 69 , 797-811. u.s. department of education. (2002). no child left behind act of 2001 . retrieved april 6, 2003, from www.ed.gov/offices/oese/esea/summary.html wendler, c. l.w., & carlton, s. t. (1987). an examination of sat verbal items for differential performance by females and males: an exploratory study . paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association, washington, dc. ysseldyke, j., nelson, j. r., christenson, s., johnson, d. r., dennison, a., triezenberg,h., et al. (2004). what we know and need to know about the consequences of high-stakes testing for students with disabilities. exceptional children, 71 (1), 75+. retrieved february 21, 2006, from questia database: http://www.questia.com/pm.qst?a=o&d=5007601130   dr. barbara polnick is an assistant professor in the department of educational leadership and counseling at sam houston state university. dr. dianne reed is an assistant professor in the department of educational leadership and counseling at sam houston state university. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should 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management skills of female business students jennifer flanagan jennifer flanagan: economics and finance, college of commerce, texas a&m university, email: jennifer.flanagan@tamuc.edu accepted september 02, 2015 stereotype threat, the threat of being stereotyped against (steele & aronson, 1995), regardless of the legitimacy of the stereotype, can impact not only productivity, but goals, behavior, and ultimately attitudes. stereotype threat impacts not only racial groups but men and women as well, each group impacted by the negative stereotypes about their intellectual and/or work performance. as the workplace becomes more and more diverse, managers must understand and brace for the impact stereotypes have on their workers. this study looks at the impact of stereotype threat on male and female business majors in the workplace and future entrepreneurs. the impact of stereotype was measured in their ranking of their own management skills, how they thought others would rank their management skills, and their goals in the workplace. keywords: gender, stereotype threat, management self-assessment introduction although african american women have been participating in certain groups have historically had an occupational disadvantage, namely due to prejudice, stereotypes, and old-world views, and women have felt this impact as much as any other group as they’ve attempted to move up the ranks (bound & freeman, 1992; fassinger, 2008; king, 1992), especially when comparing the performance of women to men. as the american workforce becomes more and more diverse and as the percentage of women moving into management positions increase, it’s important to recognize the role that stereotype threat has on the outlook and decisions men and women make in their careers. the evidence is clear – women have made a tremendous mark in the workforce. in fact, 47% of those in the labor force are women this equates to around 66 million women, with 73% full time and 27% part time, with the majority (40.6%) of those working full time in a management and/or professional occupation. but, even with women accounting for just under half of the workforce, in 2013, only 16.9% of fortune 500 board seats were held by women (catalyst, 2013), an increase from 14.7% in 2005 (catalyst, 2006). the same is true in higher education, where women earn 30% of phds in the science fields, yet only 13% of full professors are women (national science foundation, 2008). so, what is keeping women from moving into higher-level management positions? could stereotype threat have any sort of influence on how women see themselves in management? this question led to the following research on the impact of stereotype threat on the management self-assessment skills of future and current women in business. while there are countless stereotypes of women in various roles in business, they basically center on the main assumption that men are more than women (duher & bono, 2006; sczesny & stahlberg, 2002) in management positions. stereotypes are a natural part of human cognition. it is a way for people to categorize information, and albeit sometimes incorrect, it is a safety mechanism people use in filtering information when encountering new situations (mcgarty, yzerbyt, & spears, 2002). as a mélange of workers from different cultures, backgrounds, and walks of life, and as people bring with them preconceived ideas on how they view the world, other cultures, and themselves, misjudgments about certain groups can wreak havoc within an organization, since many of these ideas are based upon stereotypes, or overgeneralizations about a group of people (mooney, knox, & schacht, 2004). but, there is a difference in being in the presence of a stereotype, being aware of its existence, and actually fearing the stereotype, and more specifically, fearing confirming the stereotype, referred to as stereotype threat (steele & aronson, 1995; steele, 1997). stereotype threat, consequently, is often associated with a group or category, such as cultural, gender, racial, or ethnic group (brigham, 1971; barker, 1991; coon, 1994), in this case, women in business. literature review risk factors of stereotype threat advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 167 there are variables that make one more heightened and aware of stereotype threat, whether or not a real threat exists, especially for those in stigmatized groups. stress can impact cognitive load, for instance, impacting performance, as well as being aware of the stigma (stereotype) of your group. stress and cognitive load. the impact of stereotype threat can be facilities by stress, such as evaluation apprehension (test anxiety), which exists in the workplace in the form of micro-management of workers, one-on-one training, competence testing, and performance evaluations. minorities were found to exert less effort during times of extreme stress (steele & aronson, 1995). cognitive load refers to the amount of information and tasks preoccupying your brain. if cognitive load is high, the impact of negative stereotypes is greater. performance of complex tasks while under stereotype threat and other forms of stress can overload working memory, which can impact performance as well as predict future performance (engle & kane, 2004; schmader & johns, 2003). increased anxiety, paired with the fear of being under a stereotype, can further increase cognitive load (osborne, 2001; wicherts, dolan & hessen, 2005), especially impacting female subjects (bosson et al., 2004). stigma consciousness. stigma consciousness is the heightened awareness of stereotype threat, and it impacts female and minority workers disproportionately. in the service industry, for example, female workers in constant and even chronic stigma conscious situations were found to have decreased performance on work tasks and developed poor attitudes towards their job and supervisors, and exhibited subpar customer service skills (pinel & paulin, 2005). positive stereotypes and motivations in the workplace. positive stereotypes can have both a positive and negative impact on performance in the workplace. the adverse effects can include anything from setting unrealistic performance goals or the stress of living up to a positive stereotype (cocchiara & quick, 2004). but, stigmatized groups can, too, work hard to overcome the stereotype and thus live up to the positive reference. positive stereotypes can help women, for example, set positive reference points for goal-setting, with the stereotype, instead of being seen as an unattainable accomplishment, is seen as an obstacle to be overcome, leading to higher goals being set and employees working harder in reaching those goals (pinel, 1999). consequences of stereotype threat a major source of social oppression, anxiety, and fear can come from the job (blustein, 2008), and this is evident when analyzing the impact of stereotype threat on work performance. but it’s not only actual job performance, but changing goals, disengagement, and self-handicapping, to name a few, that can result from the fear of confirming a stereotype. change in goals. stereotype threat can impact the choices women make. for instance, the presence of stereotype threat can cause those affected to reevaluate career objectives and perhaps even take a different path or make a different decision than they might have chosen if not subjected to the threat of stereotype (pinel & paulin, 2005). employees can become frustrated for not meeting previous goals (spector, 1997), usually due to the factors within the organizational environment, and will change their goals to match what is closer to the expected outcome. this is also evident in managers as well (gibson & tulgan, 2002). decreased performance. first formally addressed in 1995, steele and aronson found that african american participants were significantly impacted by stereotype threat with decreased academic performance, making them anxious and stressed (steele & aronson, 1995). women under stereotype threat were found to have a notable decrease in math performance, although math skills were adequate for successful outcomes on the assessment (stricker & bejar, 2004; o’brien & crandall, 2003), and performance decrements increased in higher-skilled tasks, even in domains to which the participant identified (neuville & croizet, 2007; wicherts, 2005; o’brien & crandall, 2003; spencer, steele, & quinn, 1999). a parallel can be made to academic tasks and performance measured in the workplace, as those minority and female participants under stereotype threat were found to have decreased performance in mock workplace settings (flanagan & green, 2013). disengagement. stereotype threat can lead some to distance themselves from the assessed task, even going so far as to suggest the poor performance is not a reflection of self-worth or a proper assessment of the task in general (crocker, major, & steele, 1998; major, spencer, & schmader, 1998). this behavior can be used as a protection mechanism (major et al., 1998), but it can also reduce motivation, interest, and even achievement in the task domain (steele, 1997). disengagement can lead to avoiding the domain or detaching his or her identity from a domain (fryer, 2006; osborne, 2007; osborne & walker, 2006; steele, james, & barnett, 2002; zirkel, 2004), where they completely distance themselves from any association with the task domain. self-handicapping. self-handicapping, which is establishing a barrier to blame on underperformance, impacts minority and female participants (steele and aronson, 1995), causing them to exert less effort or create excuses to account for underperformance (keller, 2002; steele & aronson, 1995; stone, 2002). task discounting, also under the self-handicapping umbrella, includes qualifying poor performance to the lack of validity or reliability of the task (keller, 2002; lesko & corpus, 2006). the problem – the influence of stereotype threat in the workplace stereotypes are everywhere, in just about every aspect of life, and can be even more pronounced in today’s diverse workforce. the ever-changing workforce dynamic supports the need for research in the area of stereotype threat, specifically how female employees are impacted. the consequences of stereotype threat are apparent in studies focusing on academia, but can the same conclusions be made in the workplace? what influence does advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 168 stereotype threat have on female workers and their management views, especially about themselves? it can be reasonably hypothesized that similar results will be found in both academia and in the workplace, but will simply asking participants their gender, as well as telling them the study is a survey of their management qualities, be enough of to activate stereotype threat as produce similar results? hypothesis the following hypothesis was tested: female participants will have lower self-assessment scores on their own management skills when under stereotype threat as compared to male participants. by simply asking participants their gender prior to administration of the management skills assessment should be enough to activate stereotype threat in women and thus produce the hypothesized results. participants the study involved 56 participants, including male and female business majors and current workers, with 51% full time students, 49% part time students. out of these, 78% were currently working at least part time. all participants were aged 18 years and over. participants were asked to complete a survey online to assess management skills, management outlook, and career aspirations. the assumption is that business students will hold, if not already, management positions in their occupational field, and thus would be reflective of the present and future workforce dynamic. procedure participants were given a link to a survey via www.surveymonkey.com. they were then, after giving consent to the study, asked seven questions about management traits and how they viewed their own management skills. participants were prompted to rate their opinions on a 5-point scale, with 5 being a more favorable and positive opinion, and 1 being negative and critical. participants were asked the following questions, in addition to demographic information, rating each strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree. : 1. rate your leadership skills 2. how would others rate your leadership skills? 3. leaders are born and have natural abilities and traits 4. a good leader give detailed and complete instructions to subordinates rather than giving them gender direction and depending on their initiative to work out details 5. i take responsibility for my own success 6. i have dreams of being an entrepreneur 7. teamwork is an important part of success in the workplace there were two conditions under which participants were subjected: the experimental group, where participants were asked their gender before the management questions, and a control group, where the management questions were asked first. asking about gender initially made participants aware of gender and there is a heightened awareness of stereotype threat. findings data collected was analyzed using anova. only two main questions were analyzed during the survey, which involved how each participant rated their management skills, and how they thought others would rate their management skills. the following results were found: two of the seven questions were not analyzed (questions 3, 4, and 7) as they focused more on assessment of leadership skills, rather than the participant’s own assessments and goals of personal management traits. to specifically focus on management skills assessment, two main questions were examined closer (question 1: “rate your leadership skills”; and question 2: “how would others rate your leadership skills?”). female participants had a significant drop in how they ranked both their own management skills (f= 10.65, df 1, 27), and how they felt others would rank their management skills (f = 4.73, df = 1, 27). men were not significantly impacted on how they rated themselves or how they thought others would rate them, f = 3.90, df = 1, 25; and f = 2.31, df = 1, 25; respectively. therefore, female participants were more impacted by stereotype threat when answering the self-assessment questions. table 2 analysis by gender of select survey questions regarding management skills male nst st how do you rate your own management/leadership skills 4.13 4.58 how do you think others view your management/leadership skills 4.22 4.49 female nst st how do you rate your own management/leadership skills 4.35 3.33 how do you think others view your management/leadership skills 3.94 3.25 note: results are based on a scale between 1 and 5, with 5 being most agreeable/favorable, and 1 being least agreeable/favorable. the following questions were also analyzed according to gender and stereotype threat condition, representative of entrepreneurial female male control (non-stereotype condition) 12 15 stereotype condition 17 12 advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 169 goals and motivation of participants: “i take responsibility for my own success” and “i have dreams of being an entrepreneur.” female participants ranked their responsibility for their own success, and entrepreneurial dreams, significantly lower while under stereotype threat, f= 4.25, df 1, 27), and f = 4.24, df = 1, 27), respectively. men were not significantly impacted by stereotype threat on either question, f = .22, df = 1, 25; and f = .38, df = 1, 25; respectively. table 3. analysis by gender of select survey questions regarding basic entrepreneurial motivation male nst st i take reasonability for my own success 4.00 4.19 i have dreams of being an entrepreneur 4.27 4.06 female nst st i take reasonability for my own success 4.58 3.76 i have dreams of being an entrepreneur 4.25 3.35 note: results are based on a scale between 1 and 5, with 5 being most agreeable/favorable, and 1 being least agreeable/favorable. conclusions from the participants’ descriptions of their female participants rated their management skills significantly lower when asked about their gender first, as compared to their male counterparts. they not only rated their own management skills lower, they also rated how they thought others viewed their skills at a lower level. female respondents under stereotype also assessed their entrepreneurial goals and their ability to control their own success significantly lower. this is significant – that merely asking about gender can lead to someone viewing themselves a less effective manager and have different, lower goals. this lower self-assessment score could possibly be related to management skills and ability to set higher goals, and thus advance in the workplace. there are certainly limitations to this study, the main on being that many of the participants were not workers, the majority being full time students, and this could be expected to change the outlook of the participants. the researcher hopes to take this study to the field. additionally, comparisons should be made regarding age, graduate and undergraduate statue, and full time and part time workers. discussion: reducing the impact of stereotype threat in the workplace this study explored stereotype threat on female workers with regard to self-assessment on management skills rankings, and the finds show that stereotype threat does impact how female workers view themselves. in an effort to promote diversity, manager try to not only choose to hire those employees that are not only capable of the job, but also have the confidence and motivation to handle the position. women who feel they are being stereotyped might not exhibit the confidence of their male counterparts, although equally capable, and miss out on advancement opportunities in their careers. there is a growing need for attention in this area, for managers to be proactive in addressing, handling, and preparing for stereotype threat in the workplace. first, managers must acknowledge that stereotypes exist, and stereotype threat has an impact. stereotype awareness does not mean endorsement (adler, 2002), and learning about the consequences of stereotype threat can protect individuals against those consequences. further, managers should create a work environment that fosters diversity and discourages stereotyping. the stereotype threat process involves how much one personally invests in the task, the task difficulty, being aware of a stereotype, and, through perceived situational cues, reinforce the stereotype. to interrupt this process, managers can plan to provide a well-laid, tactical plan for completing the task, available and recognizable by all participating. managers and supervisors should not only implement plans to interrupt the stereotype threat process, but continually improve upon those techniques (roberson & kulik, 2007). research has shown that a proactive approach to warding off the impact of stereotype threat can do one of two things: draw negative attention to the stereotype (wheeler & petty, 2001) and lead to negative impact and stereotype-consistent behavior (johns, schmader, & martens, 2005); or, learning about the stereotypes and consequences of stereotype threat, it can, without endorsing the stereotype (adler, 2002), protect individuals prone to the impact of stereotypes from the consequences (wheeler & petty, 2001). the focus of tasks (i.e. performance evaluations) should not be on the complexity of analysis, but rather on the employee’s traits compared to desired trait of the position (spencer et al., 1999; roberson & kulik, 2007). the complexity or even the relevance of the task isn’t the only factor to consider when evaluating management skills of women. for instance, when a woman is the only woman in a group of men, those single members of a group placed in stigmatized situations, are more aware of and impacted by stereotype threat stemmed by perceived gender difference (roberson & kulik, 2007). managers should also let employees know that, if they feel discriminated against, there are remedies for this, including equal employment opportunity commission and human resource outlets. employees, especially supervisors and managers, should be trained on diversity issues. and, training advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 170 should go beyond the norms (i.e. race, gender, sexual orientation) and discuss other, less common stereotypes and prejudicial behavior. this training should continue, with open discussions and opportunities to learn from others’ situations. mangers should reassign work groups so employees have opportunities to work with those they might otherwise not interact with, but to do so in a logical manner (i.e. revolving around a group project). because requiring interaction and embracing of diversity can have unintended negative consequences, it is important for managers to set the stage for diverse interactions, but not force them upon employees. final thoughts women are a key part of the workforce, and as they continue to move up in ranks, so do the problems associated with stereotyping. as the workplace becomes more and more diverse, companies must be aware of stereotypes and their impact, and recognize both positive and negative stereotypes can negatively impact choices in business, including career aspirations and a manager’s own view of self. the workforce has a culture that is always evolving, changing to reflect the social and demographic transformations. as society becomes more diverse and accepting, so, too does the demographic fabric of the office. there are benefits to a diverse workforce, such as a more diverse communication network, more innovative strategic plan, and a more collaborative company culture (jackson et al., 1991). there is also an ability to reach a perhaps previously untapped market, to gain a creative edge, to view a more global perspective, and have an overall competitive advantage (roberson & kulik, 2007). with the world and our workforce becoming more and more diverse, managers must adapt to the new picture of their workplace family. as the workforce continues to change, so too should the companies for which we all work. managers must be proactive in addressing diversity within their organization, staying on top of possible issues employees might encounter. it’s important to educate others about stereotype threat prior to threatening situations, and ideally, ward off threatening situations before they occur. since a major source of social oppression, anxiety, and fear can come from the job (blustein, 2008), managing such a workplace is tricky and shouldn’t be taken lightly, but implementation and management of a harmonious diverse workplace is vital to a company’s long term organizational health, growth, and success. references bound, j., & freeman, r. (1992). what went wrong? the 1980s erosion of the economic well-being of black men. quarterly journal of economics, 107, 201–232. catalyst. (2005). connections that count: the informal networks of women of color in the united states. retrieved from http://www.catalyst.org/publication/52/connections-thatcount-the-informal-networks-of-women-of-color-in-theunited-states catalyst. (2013). 2013 catalyst census: fortune 500 women board directors. retrieved from http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/2013-catalyst-censusfortune-500-women-board-directors duehr e. e & bono j. e. (2006). men, women, and managers: are stereotypes finally changing?. personnel psychology, 5(9), 815–846. fassinger, r.e. (2008). workplace diversity and public policy: challenges and opportunities for psychology. american psychologist, 63, 252-268. flanagan, j. & green, r. (2013). the impact of stereotype threat in manual labor settings on hispanic and african american female participants. journal of business and economics, 5. gibson, d. e., & tulgan, b. (2002). managing anger in the workplace. amherst, ma: hrd press. jackson, s. e., brett, j.f., sessa, v.i., cooper, d.m., julin, j.a., & peyronnin, k. (1991). some differences make a difference: individual dissimilarity and group heterogeneity as correlates of recruitment, promotions, and turnover. journal of applied psychology, 76, 675-689. johns, m.; schmader, t.; & martens, a. (2005). knowing is half the battle: teaching stereotype threat as a means of improving women’s math performance. psychological science, 16, 175-179. king, m. c. (1992). occupational segregation by race and sex, 1940–1988. monthly labor review, 115, 30–37. mcgarty, c., yzerbyt, v., & spears, r. (2002). stereotypes as explanations : the formation of meaningful beliefs about social groups. london: cambridge university press, pp. 17. national science foundation. (2008). thirty-three years of women in science and engineering faculty positions. retrieved from http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08308/ pinel, e. & paulin, n. (2005). stigma consciousness at work. basic and applied social psychology, 27, 345-352. pinel, e. (1999). stigma consciousness: the psychological legacy of social stereotypes. journal of personality and social psychology, 76, 114-128. roberson, l. & kulik, c.t. (2007). stereotype threat at work. academy of management perspectives, 21, 24-40. sczesny s. & stahlberg d., 2002. the influence of genderstereotyped perfumes on leadership attribution. european journal of social psychology, 32, 815-828. spector, p. e. (1997). the role of frustration in antisocial behavior at work. in r. a. giacalone & j. greenberg (eds.), antisocial behavior in organizations (pp. 1-17). thousand oaks, ca: sage. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 171 spencer, s. j.; steele, c. m.; & quinn, d. m. (1999). stereotype threat and women’s math performance. journal of experimental social psychology, 35, 4-28. steele, c. & aronson, j. (1995). stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of african-americans. journal of personality and social psychology, 69, 797811. wheeler, s.c., & petty, r.e. (2001). the effects of stereotype activation on behavior: a review of possible mechanisms. psychological bulletin, 127, 797-826. advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 23, spring 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] women leaders and spirituality sandra harris, julia ballenger, and april jones women leaders and spirituality in addressing leadership, there are often two interlocking strands. one of these strands centers on the contributions of leadership grounded in men's leadership experiences (regan & brooks, 1995). the second interlocking strand includes feminist attributes. this contributes to nuances of meaning that arise from women's experiences of leadership. regan and brooks noted five attributes of leadership among women: collaboration, caring, courage, intuition, and vision. often these attributes are embedded in firmly held beliefs which are at the heart of a notion of relational leadership. over twenty years ago, jaggar (1983) further emphasized that "feminist theory is at its best when it reflects the lived experiences of women, when it bridges the gap between mind and body, reason, and emotion, thinking and feeling" (p. x). yet, most researchers acknowledge that there are differences in how women and men lead. for example, men are more likely to be oriented toward "rights," while women are more likely to be oriented toward "caring" (gilligan, 1977). women leaders tend to focus more closely than men on instructional tasks, as well as on students' individual differences (as cited in ortiz & marshall, 1988). other studies of superintendents noted that men exerted leadership within and without the organization while women exerted their leadership within the organization and in those activities most closely associated with their role (as cited in ortiz & marshall, 1988). other studies pointed out that male groups competed with each other and rarely expressed feelings; male groups were more likely to have a differentiated division of labor; female groups were more often characterized by interpersonal relations and concern for one another; and in mixed groups men developed a more personal orientation and were less aggressive (as cited in ortiz & marshall, 1988). clearly, the traditional public perception of femininity and a woman's ability to be an effective leader are often in conflict. in fact, for women to be seen as a leader in their field, women must have more credentials than male counterparts, be better prepared, and be more knowledgeable (jamieson, 1995). according to grossman and chester (1990), further research is needed that explores a deeper understanding of women's experiences by including research in which women leaders make meaning of their own experiences. consequently, the purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the personal and professional experiences of nine women leaders who have earned public recognition for their contribution to education as teachers, principals, superintendents, and university professors. this paper focuses specifically on women's lived file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm leadership experiences in relation to spirituality. leadership in education today, 70% of teachers are women (steffy, 2002) attributed in part to the fact that many women choose to teach because they feel career options are limited. yet, despite the prevalence of women in teaching, of even greater concern is that men continue to dominate in educational leadership roles. while female principals actually constituted 55% of elementary principals in 1928, by 1973 this number had fallen to only 19.6% (johnson, 1973). however, in the l980s, 25% of principals were women, and by the early 1990s this had risen to 48%. most women were elementary principals, with only 12% serving at the high school level (natale, 1992; saks, 1992). central office positions have typically been the most likely administrative level for women, with as many as 48.2% of women making up general administration positions, such as finance or personnel (ortiz & marshall, 1988). the superintendency has historically been conceived of in "distinctly male terms" (grogan, 2000, p. 121). the committee of ten of 1892, which formulated policies for superintendents, included only men. other early leaders recommended that education adopt a business model and hire administrators from these ranks, which, of course, excluded women. at the turn of the 20th century, the business influence on american schools became even greater. for example, from 1865 to 1910, the superintendent had been seen as a scholar-educator and a teacher of teachers, but in later years he became more of a "business manager-school executive type" (ortiz & marshall, 1988, p. 125). glass (1992) referred to the superintendency as the "most male-dominated executive position of any profession in the united states " (p. 8), and, until recently, even the language used to describe the superintendent has been almost completely male: statesman , he, warrior (grogan, 2000). even today, when over half of students enrolled in educational administration classes are women, only 13% of all superintendent positions are held by women (glass, bjork, & brunner, 2000). barriers to leadership in 1909, ella flagg young envisioned that "women are destined to rule the schools of every city. . . she is no longer satisfied to do the greatest part of the work and yet be denied leadership" (blount, 1998, p. 1). while certainly there are many more opportunities for women in leadership today, young's prediction has fallen far short of its target in schools. yet this conflict for leadership is not isolated in education alone but continues to dominate other career fields for women as well. typically, the barriers in this "woman or leader" conflict fall into two primary categories: marriage/family responsibility and cultural stereotyping. marriage and family responsibility women who have family responsibilities must consider several factors when making career advancement decisions, all of which focus on the effect their work will have on their family. thus, when women plan careers, they factor inequality into their futures by assuming they will move in and out of the workforce due to family responsibilities (orenstein, 2000). this phenomenon is called sequencing (jamieson, 1995). in fact, 7 out of 10 women surveyed indicated that they expected their spouses' jobs to take priority over theirs. thus, even before they begin their careers, most young women decide that their careers will be secondary to the careers of their husbands. prior to 1978, sequencing was often forced on many women, particularly in education. for example, an nea study in 1930-31 found that 77% of districts surveyed would not hire married women and 63% dismissed female teachers if they got married. as recently as 1974, the courts were considering school policies that required pregnant teachers to leave the classroom as early as the fourth month of pregnancy "to spare children the sight of pregnant women" (jamieson, 1995, p. 66). traditionally, lack of mobility has been another barrier to career advancement, limiting many women to only those opportunities that are in the same area where their family lives (harris, arnold, lowery, & marshall, 2001; ramsey, 1997). in fact, ezrati (1983) found that 90% of women would not even consider relocating unless husbands found jobs, yet 75% of men would relocate if they found a better job regardless of whether or not their spouse found employment. the influence of marriage and family responsibilities on a woman's work life extends to other areas as well. for example, ramsey (1997) suggested that a husband's support may exert such a powerful effect on women who become superintendents that it can influence her level of success in that role. also, other studies have indicated that career advancement for women in professions often causes some women to limit family size (hensel, 1991). cultural stereotyping an especially important barrier is the traditional stereotyping of leadership which has failed to address the female perspective and its related qualities (irby, brown, & trautman, 1999). after all, most of what is learned in administrative leadership courses comes from male-based experiences. this view is supported by hudson and rea's 1998 study which found that while female and male teachers identify the same qualities as desirable in a principal regardless of the principal's gender, male principals are viewed by females as having legitimate authority based solely on the position, whereas both males and females say that women must work to earn their authority. yet, colwill (1997) noted that while women are less able than men to influence others, they are more effective at getting things done. a barrier related to ingrained cultural perceptions of leadership is that of sponsorship or networking. historically, men have been encouraged toward management and women to instruction. for years, male organizational leaders have supported and mentored each other in "a good ole boy" network, filling administrative positions with friends and proteges, while largely ignoring qualified women for these positions (ortiz & marshall, 1988). over 30 years ago, barnett (1971) found that men tended to select careers based on interests, aptitudes, and financial possibilities, while women, on the other hand, tended to be influenced in career decisions by career role models or significant others. additionally, cultural stereotyping has placed women into non-leadership roles limiting women's goal orientation. while men typically enter education with the goal of becoming a principal or superintendent, women enter teaching with only one goal--becoming a teacher, not of becoming a leader in the classroom or in administration (ortiz, 1982; pankake, 1995). this same lack of goal orientation often results in women spending more years in the classroom than men. in fact, men often enter administration as early as their mid-20s, while women often wait until their late 40s (glass, 1992; shakeshaft, 1989; zemlicka, 2001). women and spirituality often educational leaders are faced with enormous "demands and pressures such as ensuring equitable outcomes for students, including parents into decision-making bodies, ..developing strong professional communities, and developing broad learning outcomes for all students" that they sometimes need deliberate intervention requiring the moral use of power (bogotch, 2000, p. 2). this leads educators to respond to our true meaning and purpose. our day-to-day quest for personal and professional meaning, our spiritual purpose, can be pursued as "the path with a heart" (shepard, 1984). according to best (1996), the word spiritual refers to anything that may be regarded as a source of inspiration to a person's life (p.77). characteristics of leadership that are echoed in our spiritual experiences include relationships, connectedness, power, influence, and transformation. for many, spirituality is the essence of an individual; his or her inner being; the real self (klenke, 2003). beyond that, most definitions of spirituality also acknowledge a dimension that is non-physical, unbound by time and place that transcends our five senses but is every bit as real as the physical realm. however, spirituality in leadership entails the way a leader is present to the people she or he works with and to the deep realities of the work they share in common (shields, edwards, & sayani, 2005, p. 67). further, fullan (2002) suggested that "spiritual leadership in education is an alluring but complex phenomenon" (p. 14). at the same time, solomon and hunter (2002) pointed out that pairing spirituality and educational leadership might seem incongruous and even dissonant. however, they resolved the incongruity by explaining that spiritually is one's "meaning system" (p. 38). along this same line, bolman and deal (2001) indicated that spirituality is a leadership challenge that is as forbidding as any challenge that educators will ever face. yet, wheatley (2002) noted the importance of this and implied that leaders strengthened by faith who act as servant leaders find the courage to face the challenges of life and their jobs. this led robert starratt to suggest that educators must "take the pulse of their own spirituality and understand how they are present to the most inner realities of their world" (shields, edwards, & sayani, 2005, p. 154). educational leaders must assess all actions, decisions, and ideas through a critical lens of spirituality, measured by the standards of ethical, moral, just, caring, equity, fairness, and democracy. thus, bolman and deal (2001) suggested that "integrity is rooted in identity and faith. . . one reason that spirit and soul are at the heart of the most successful leadership" (p. 42). they furthered argued that when individuals live superficially, they pursue goals limited to material success, and rarely stop to listen to the inner voice which indicates spiritual development. fostering the development of others and making a difference in their lives is the first order of spiritual leadership, and this is nourished by the quality of relationships between individuals. additionally, solomon and hunter (2002) argued that one's spiritual being influenced one's decision-making processes by pointing out howard gardner's concept of existential intelligence. gardner (1999) described existential intelligence as the capacity to locate oneself with the infinite and infinitesimal which is the significance of life. further, oladele (1998) insisted that "spirit is the heart of a meaningful education" (p. 62-65). methodology as stated earlier, our primary study explored the experiences of women leaders through written narratives. qualitative research methods appeared most appropriate since making meaning was essential in this study. according to creswell (1998), the use of qualitative methods helps researchers study things in their natural settings, creating a complex, holistic picture from which a narrative is formed. population the researchers purposefully selected nine women at various levels of education because we believe that leadership occurs at every level. all women had won public recognition for their contributions to education. the women, who ranged in ages from their mid-30s to their early 60s, included principals, university teachers, and superintendents. four of the women were white, one was american indian, and four were african-american. the women chose to use their own names rather than remain anonymous. data collection according to palmer (1993), "the interview, that favorite tool of social data gatherers, is meant to be an 'inter-view,' a way of looking into other people's behaviors and attitudes that opens our own lives to view" (p. 62). therefore, we developed a structured interview guide that included queries about these women's childhood, work ethics, career path, mentoring opportunities, leadership styles, and personal and professional barriers. using a personal experience design to frame our inquiry, we engaged participants in dialogue through face-to-face and telephone interviews to produce stories of women in leadership. all original data were drawn from the book winning women: stories of award-winning educators (harris, lowery, ballenger, hicks-townes, carr, & alford, 2004). this paper represents a secondary analysis of original findings and reports only on the spiritual aspect of leadership with these nine women. polkinghorne's (1991) analysis of narrative technique was used to re-examine the stories of these recognized leaders to further analyze the major theme of spirituality which emerged from the original study. a description of nine women leaders a brief snapshot of each woman is captured in the following section. donnya stephens donnya is an african-american woman who was born in rural east texas . she never married and has devoted her life to her career. her mother was a teacher and an administrator in rural east texas , and her father worked as a blue-collar worker in one of the local industries. her maternal grandmother was her greatest mentor. donnya received her high school diploma and bachelors degree from segregated institutions in east texas . while she has taught in both segregated and integrated institutions, she has taught for the past 27 years in higher education where she has won many honors, including being named a regents professor. sharon richardson sharon richardson is an african-american woman born in rural northeast texas . sharon is an only child. her father was the bus driver in the school district where she attended school as a child. she now serves this district as superintendent, the first african-american woman to serve in this role. she was honored recently with the naming of the elementary school, sharon richardson elementary school . sharon has one son. sandra lowery sandra is a white woman born in rural east texas . her father worked as a pipeline welder when she was a child, and the family moved frequently, every few months at least. consequently, she attended many schools every year. sandra learned at an early age from her grandmother that "you can't let someone tell you that you can't do what you know you can." she has served in nearly every position in the public schools. in addition to being a teacher and central office administrator, she has also served as elementary principal, high school principal, the first female superintendent in three school districts, school board member and president, and university leader. sandra has recently retired. she is married with 3 sons and 5 grandchildren. molly helminger molly is a white woman and the sixth of seven children who lived in a single-parent household from the age of six. molly's mother established the non-negotiable that every child would compete in at least one sport and learn one musical instrument. practice was expected, as was diligence to the task at hand. molly's musical and athletic talents were accompanied by strong academic skills, and this combination led to molly's career choice to become a music teacher and athletic coach. molly taught for five years, during which time she also earned a master's degree in guidance and counseling. focus and discipline grounded in faith and manifested in positive actions are molly's trademarks. with this combination, she has continued to rise in the educational field having already served as a school superintendent for 10 years by the age of 46. patsy hallman patsy, a white woman, was born and reared in a small town in northeast texas . patsy describes her parents as "smart, hard-working, ethical, and nurturing, with high expectations for their children and a commitment to do whatever was necessary for their children to achieve their goals." patsy's mother and father encouraged patsy through her graduation as valedictorian of her high school class, completion of a master's degree, and attainment of her doctoral degree. patsy taught for 22 years before moving into the field of university administration and ultimately becoming dean of the college of education . patsy is married and has grown children. candace newland candace, an african-american woman , grew up in a family of educators. when candace first went to the university of oregon as a freshman, her ambition was to be an international lawyer. but life intervened in her early plans when she married and had a child. she later re-enrolled in oregon state university , and went directly into elementary education to become a teacher. soon, she moved into her first administrative job. currently, candace serves as director of the portland state university center for student success. she has two grown daughters. bette davis bette is an african-american woman who has taught english and composition for over 35 years. the oldest of four sisters, bette ". . . played the grown-up with them, helping my mother, especially after our father died, leaving her a widow at twenty-eight years old." bette went on to graduate from rowan high school with honors. a couple of weeks later, she left home to attend alcorn a&m college , a predominantly black institution in mississippi . she attended alcorn for three years before leaving to work full time. when she returned to college, she completed her undergraduate at the university of southern mississippi , which had become integrated. bette taught at the high school for 27 years before retiring, at the junior college for 2 years, and is presently in her 8th year of teaching at the college level in her home state of mississippi . most recently, she was honored as humanities teacher of the year at william carey college . bette has grown children. dawn lynette smith dawn is a member of the klamath tribe. her father, a native american, was the first member of the klamath tribe to graduate from college. he became a high school teacher and coach, a civil rights activist, and tribal chairman. dawn's mother is white and was a librarian. as a junior high student growing up in salem , oregon , dawn became interested in the state school for the deaf and volunteered there. consequently, she went to the university of northern colorado in greeley to study deaf education. in her senior year, the tribal elders of the warm springs indian reservation recruited her to come to the reservation as a teacher. she accepted the call and transferred to oregon state university in corvallis . she stayed on the reservation as an educator for the next thirty years. in 2003, dawn was named oregon principal of the year. dawn is married and has children. dawn shelton-mitchel dawn, an african-american, decided when she was only seven years of age that she wanted to become a teacher. she began her undergraduate career at wayne state university . she completed a five-year degree majoring in the education of mentally impaired, homebound, and orthopedically impaired. since that time, dawn has gone on to earn two master's degrees. both master's degrees, one in learning disabilities and the other in working with the emotionally impaired, were earned at wayne state university . continually working to improve herself as an educator, dawn has earned an educational specialist degree from wayne state university and currently holds all but three certification endorsements in special education . she has taught in the detroit public school system for 25 years . dawn has two grown daughters. discussion as we re-analyzed the stories of these women specifically exploring spirituality, it became apparent that each story was different, yet, there were strong similarities. * dawn smith's story was one of dedication to "building a safe sense of community for children." * sandra's story resonated with achievement and the "importance of being encouraged to achieve." * molly shared her passionate "focus on high standards for herself, her faculty, and for children." * donnya's story was rich with "determination" as she opened new vistas for leaders to follow. * joy flowed from patsy's story "the joy of living, giving, and doing." * candace told a story that was rich with creativity focused on "improving schools for children." * bette told of being "called to teach" and of her "continued focus on excellence in learning for herself and others." * sharon 's story emerges as one of the importance of setting goals for oneself and the influence this can have on a school district. * dawn shelton-mitchell's story resonates with her life of service for others. from our original interviews, many themes had emerged, such as an early love of learning, strong work ethic, and the importance of mentoring. however, one major theme connected all of these stories: a sense of power nurtured in spirituality. within this theme emerged four sub-themes: cultural barriers, a sense of community, a sense of joy in serving others, and a sense of excellence for all. it was apparent that the women saw all of these issues as connected rather than in isolation. through their discussions, it was clear that their sense of self and sense of power in handling barriers and opportunities of leadership were rooted in a strong spirituality. cultural barriers within their communities, these award-winning women often faced cultural barriers caused by gender, as well as that of color; often the distinction was unclear. dawn smith spoke about "being brown" and did not know whether barriers were "due to gender or skin color, but the school board refused my first application to become principal at the elementary school." molly was told by her superintendent that the district was "not ready for a woman." donnya sat on committees at the university, "but my voice was not heard." sandra was called "the skirt" when she was principal at the high school. most of our women were place-bound. patsy failed to look for a deanship, although she qualified, because she "could not leave the area." families sacrificed, yet, by and large, the women were supported in their quest to become leaders. the time needed to do the important job of leadership and to do it well took a toll on families in many ways--loss of time together, strain on relationships, eating lots of peanut butter sandwiches, but almost invariably these women described how these sacrifices brought a stronger family commitment to their vision. for example, dawn shelton-mitchell described how even her two daughters committed to careers working with children, an outgrowth of their mother's influence. yet, despite these barriers, they drew strength and their sense of self from their spiritual commitment to doing something "bigger than myself" as sandra noted. sense of community developing a sense of community was a guiding, passionate vision that grew out of an almost spiritual desire to bring people together. the goal in every case was to make education better for children. whether it was "forging a respect for the school within the community," "creating a writing community where children could express their feelings safely," or in "leading a district to excel," repeatedly, the importance of a sense of community was articulated in their stories. this sense of community was created through an understanding of empowerment that was collaborative and collegial. while the leadership styles differed in each unique circumstance, each woman cultivated a team of professionals on her campus and invited parents to be part of the school leadership team. while donnya said, "i lead from behind," others were clearly more directive, especially at the beginning of their careers. for example, sharon pointed out that she was "most effective when [she is] direct, sharing [her] vision and goals up front." joy: finding a deep, abiding joy in serving others all of our women leaders shared that from the earliest times, they had strong, nurturing home support from family members, mothers, and grandmothers, generally, who instilled a joy in learning, a desire to achieve, as well as an understanding of hard work. several pointed out that their earliest memories centered around books and reading, and, as children, they found great joy in reading. bette remembered walking "the mile to our little 'branch' of the town's public library" when she was only nine and remembers the poetry that she would read. even as youngsters, these women found joy through the service of teaching. dawn smith said that from "the beginning she knew that she wanted to be a teacher." while sandra often "played at being teacher, complete with her own grade book," candace told about teaching children, even as a child of ten. several used the spiritual expression that they were "called to teach." all of the women noted the importance of mentoring that helped them find a spiritual, joyful satisfaction in teaching. each was mentored by family members growing up. professionally, however, they were mentored by other teachers, but, more importantly, by educators, both men and women, who were already in key leadership positions. invariably, their leadership qualities were observed, and mentors encouraged them to pursue greater challenges. often, mentors contributed to this happening by placing them in positions of greater power and authority. for example, sandra lowery described how her superintendent pointed out "the importance of achieving the superintendency through the high school principalship." when this position was available, with his support, she became a high school principal. patsy hallman noted that the previous dean "paved the way for me to move into this position." sharon attributed her "awareness of her leadership abilities" to her mentors. but mentoring actually played an even more profound role in the women's lives. in addition to providing opportunities for them through mentoring, each of our nine leaders expressed a spiritual awareness of their own need to give back and mentor others. thus, while they shared about the importance of mentoring to achieve greater positions of leadership, they also shared about their own commitment to mentoring others and the joy derived from service. for example, molly "spends a good portion of [her] day coaching and mentoring principals and other school leaders." additionally, as bette described tension in her work, the intrinsic joy of "connecting" her passion of teaching with a compelling need to mentor adolescent girls in the community--the intrinsic joy of serving was obvious. it was obvious through all of these stories that joy abounded in the job of these women leaders. candace described being an educator as "the best and most rewarding work in the world because of the opportunity to guide generations of children." when parents told dawn shelton-mitchell that she was "a blessing to them and their children," she responded that they "can't know how much a blessing your child is to me." excellence: standards of excellence for all the talk of standards of excellence in education today occurs so often that we were almost reluctant to use the word "excellence" for fear that it would seem a mere common phrase. however, each woman possessed a spiritual commitment to a true standard of excellence, which is clearly obvious in all of the stories. all of the women talked about the importance of having a high standard for children, and it was evident through the stories of their childhoods that even as very young children, each were held to a standard of excellence. for example, molly recounted taking music lessons and competing in athletic events as a youngster. donnya told of having a grandmother who required the children to "hold a book for an hour by a kerosene lamp, even if our lessons had been completed at school." bette was driven toward excellence by her desire "to be a better teacher." she lamented that she is "never quite satisfied with the quality" of her work and admitted that "i'm forever trying to do something to make things work better." being more excellent than others is often a necessity for women. some of the focus on excellence is from necessity. donnya told of racial barriers that she encountered at the university: "i was looked upon as an african american female professor to the faculty and to my students. everyday i walked into the classroom i had to prove to my students that i was worthy of having this position." molly emphasized that for women to be considered for leadership roles they must "be clearly outstanding. . . women must be well-prepared to compete." the women spoke of long days and exhausting struggles to accomplish all that should be accomplished. most of them did this while also having families and raising their own children. there is no doubt that the work day for a leader is long; "can 'til can't" was how sandra described it, and molly described herself as a "workaholic." the stories resonated with spiritual passion as the women discussed their drive for excellence to improve schools for children. dawn smith spoke of the problems of education on the reservation, yet student achievement has steadily improved under her leadership. molly described the school improvement process as one of "riding the rapids" and repeatedly shared her belief of how important it is "when we work to achieve a high quality education for every child." candace described the excitement of creating "her dream," an arts magnet school, and recounted that she "wrote continually for six weeks," "even waking in the middle of the night." bette's desire for excellence began with herself, but it extended to her teaching to provide the best for students. sharon "established credibility" through her commitment to excellence and became an "accepted insider" within her district, all because she had the credentials, knowledge, and skills to do an excellent job. conclusion through everything, the women's sense of self seemed to be drawn from a well of spirituality that provided courage, energy, and wisdom. thus, opportunities were created and barriers overcome. molly emphasized that her courage "is in response to god's abiding love." patsy talked of a strong faith and her commitment to her church. dawn shelton-mitchell recounted "the grace of god" in helping her overcome barriers. a sense of spirituality weaved inextricably throughout these stories. the process of sharing stories is an example of bette's mentor, jacquelyn jones royster's invitation to "bring all of yourself into this room." these nine award-winning women educators invited us in and permitted us a glimpse into their lives as leaders. in so doing, they brought to life an added understanding of leadership. with a sense of power and direction nurtured and fueled by spirituality, these women navigated cultural barriers, developed a sense of community, displayed a profound joy through service, and upheld a strong commitment to standards of excellence for all. in reading their stories, we better understand the role of spirituality in women leaders. references barnett, r. 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(2001). the career paths of texas public school superintendents . unpublished dissertation. huntsville , tx : sam houston state university . copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions 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and resources judith a. detrude, ph.d. vicki s. stanfield detrude & stanfield, spring, 2000 "women who are resilient and successful have incorporated creative rituals into their daily routines." stories of successful women often reflect the struggles they have overcome to reach great heights of excellence. what made the difference in these women when many others were unable to tame the demons that invaded their lives? this article examines the resiliency factor of several successful women and identifies their ability to rebound from early hardship to lead normal, fulfilling lives through the use of rituals and relationships. webster's (1989) definition of resilience is "an ability to recover from or adjust easily to change or misfortune. roget's thesaurus (1985) uses the word "elasticity" when listing synonyms. resiliency is defined by higgins (1994) as the ability of "subjects to negotiate significant challenges to development yet significantly 'snap back' in order to complete the important developmental tasks that confront them as they grow". walsh (1998) simply defines resilience as the "ability to overcome life's challenges". however we define the term "resilient", most definitions focus on the strengths of the individual versus those traumatic events they may have encountered in their past. in psychological and sociological literature, resilience describes people who possess the ability to recover from adversity while retaining a positive self-image and view of the world or who, because of their early home life, are at risk for developing personal and social problems (o'gorman, 1994). holocaust victims and children growing up in abusive homes have been described as resilient because of their ability to retain a positive self-image and view of the world. psychological resiliency, according to patricia o'gorman (1994), encompasses all aspects of the self: emotion, intellect, and spirit. how resilience manifests itself depends upon the individuals/s own worldview and means of coping with life. literature http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/hispanic.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/hispanic.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html addressing work with survivors of troubled families, identifies the ability, this inner strength to weather life's challenges and consistently come out on top as the quality of resilience (o'gorman, 1994 & wolin & wolin, 1993). other studies on resiliency mention an easygoing temperament and a higher level of intelligence. rutter (1985) identified a strong sense of self-esteem as the critical component for being resilient. seligman (1990) described learned optimism as an important individual trait in which people believe their actions and efforts can yield success. if we examine the literature on resiliency, we find the repetition of terms in describing this attribute. studies mention an easygoing temperament, and a higher level of intelligence. rutter (1985) identified a strong sense of self-esteem as the critical component for being resilient. learned optimism (seligman, 1990) is an important individual trait in which people believe their efforts and actions can yield success. rituals the case studies of the successful women presented in this article describe how each was able to access rituals on a regular basis to maintain balance in their lives. rituals are the repetitive acts that we perform daily and in special times to create this precarious balance. incorporating these rituals consists of preparing for them, experiencing them and reintegrating them into everyday life (detrude & stanfield, 1998). this repetition of the ritual helps create a much-needed sense of continuity in our lives by linking generations to one another and then becomes the lens to viewing family and close friend relationships. using rituals help a person create a protected time and space to make meaning out of how their lives have been and where they are going, and when we are discussing individuals who have experienced trauma and pain, this consistency of the ritual helps to guide them emotionally to a "safe" place. our self image and the image we have of others are developed in part through a process of identification between the individual and larger groups, be they ethnic, religious, political or whatever; rituals allow us to preserve ties, even during turbulent times (imber-black, 1992). there are four basic types of rituals. the daily ritual creates an organized framework from which people guide their lives. this type of ritual is perhaps the most significant when we speak of individuals being carried through everyday trauma. the other types of rituals are also very important and serve as strengthening tools for individuals, but they may be less influential in developing "hardiness" or "resiliency" simply because they occur less often in life. the second category is that of the family ritual and focuses on how families celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. they are strictly celebrations of the family and not printed on any commercial calendar. the third type of ritual is that of holiday celebrations that are common to the community and the larger system as a whole. the last type of ritual is for those events that take us from birth to death, how the family recognizes the birth of a child, graduation, marriage and death. while this last type can also be very significant in overcoming trauma, rituals of this type occur less often. if we focus on the daily type of ritual, we can summarize some rituals mentioned by successful women leaders. they refer to playing soft music, keeping flowers or candles in their offices. they also mention rituals to avoid stress not listening to the news before bedtime, driving "backroads" to avoid freeway traffic. regardless of the examples given, women who are resilient and successful have incorporated creative rituals into their daily routines. resources the second factor that seems to explain how women can achieve resiliency when facing multiple problems is that of being able to access resources. for the purposes of this article, we will define resources as significant others/mentors in the lives of resilient women. in their study of successful academicians, bland and schlitz (1986) register mentoring as one of the criteria responsible for guiding their careers. mentoring is described as a process of noncompetitive teaching and guidance for those who share one's interests. aspy and sandhu (1999) assert the importance of developing "good old women" networks aside from the connections usually associated with volunteering. case studies the following case studies represent a diverse group of women, but the one factor that ties them together is resiliency that has persisted through difficult times. maya angelou poet laureate when her parents' marriage ended, she and her brother went to live with her grandmother. in that community there was a strong network of african-american women who participated in church-related activities and who served as powerful role models for compassion, grace and courage (ashy & saddhu, 1999). one of these supporters was a woman named mrs. flowers who encouraged and helped maya with her reading. uncle willie, the grandmother's disabled brother, also lived in the home. these family members and mrs. flowers were the resources that encouraged and supported maya throughout her childhood. when maya was eight, her father took her to her mother's home for a visit, and during that visit she was raped. this was such a traumatic experience for her, and she did not talk for two years after the event. during this silent period, the ritual of writing poetry served as the healing process. her grandmother and mrs. flowers continued to encourage her in reading this poetry which was the vehicle for ending this period of silence. when maya found herself in periods of turmoil throughout her life, she relied on this creation of poetry to guide her out of the pain. the poem, "i know why the caged bird sings" is an account of her childhood up until the time of the birth of her child when she was 16. in an interview given in 1995, maya was asked what she would say to a sixteen-year-old who sees the world as so bleak. her response was, "i would read. i would read everybody, all the time" (kelly, 1995). years later, maya's son, guy, had experienced a terrible accident and was undergoing emergency surgery. maya immediately fell back upon a ritual that had sustained her throughout life prayer. she immediately reached out to a support and prayer network of friends from all denominations to pray for him. the doctors had told her he was paralyzed and would never walk again. she told them he would walk out of the hospital and said, "i'm going so far, so beyond you, you're not even in it" (kelly, 1995). maya's dependence on writing and spirituality supported her through many instances of trauma and is still mentioned by her today as the sustenance that provides her with strength and continuity. sandra day o'connor u.s. supreme court judge when one first looks at supreme court justice o'connor, one sees success and many firsts for a female who has attained such a high position in the courts. upon examining her life, this view changes to let the reader know resiliency was a key component for reaching the current status on the highest court. sandra grew up on an isolated ranch that had no phones and no neighbors. she learned from a very early age to be self-sufficient (aspy & sandhu, 1999). her daily rituals at a young age consisted of animal care on the farm. she learned to brand bulls and perform other necessary farm chores. recognizing the intellectual potential of their daughter, her parents sent sandra to live in el paso with her grandparents when it was time for high school, because their local school did not have all the academic resources they wanted for their daughter. as a child and then as a teenager, her supportive resources continued to be family members who wanted her to be challenged academically. she went on to law school at stanford, graduating third in her class, but back in 1952, she was in male territory and was offered a legal secretarial position while her male classmates were placed in prestigious law firms. she detoured her own professional career to travel and live overseas with her husband. she started to accept limited roles in political campaigns after returning to this country and gradually climbed through the ranks in these political campaigns to achieve the position she has today. in the presidential election between reagan and carter, the polls showed that reagan was trailing carter, so reagan made the announcement that he was going to appoint a woman to the supreme court. after that announcement, he never trailed in the polls again (aspy & sandhu). when a vacancy occurred on the supreme court in 1981, reagan followed through with his campaign promise and interviewed o'connor. reagan's attorney general, william french smith, was the responsible party for calling o'connor and offering her the position. ironically, he was also the attorney who had offered her a secretarial position years before when she had graduated from law school (aspy & sandhu, 1999). sandra also underwent a mastectomy and chemotherapy in 1988 and was courageous in sharing this with other women. sandra has had multiple resources in her life, one being the mpu (mobile party unit), an organization which does not allow husbands at their activities. the rituals of caring for animals as a very young child provided her with discipline; the isolation on a ranch solidified her self-reliance. sally ride astronaut sally ride was born in 1951 to parents who truly valued education, her father was a professor and her mother a teacher and a counselor at a women's correctional unit, so in this family environment sally knew how to read by the age of five. she was also very much interested in sports and was often the only girl in the neighborhood to play with the boys. as she got older, her daily rituals in practicing tennis provided her with discipline and a high level of skill so that she went to college on a tennis scholarship (ashy and sandhu, 1999). at times she did encounter prejudice for her interest in physics which was viewed by others as a major for only males. dr. elizabeth mommaerts who introduced sally to the significance of science and problem solving was a major resource and mentor for her (aspy & sandhu 1999). sally continued to be a promising scholar and became interested in the astronaut program. she was one of the first women to be inducted into the astronaut program, and the first american woman in space. she saw herself as a resource and mentor to all the other women in the space program who were aspiring to follow in her footsteps. after the challenger explosion, sally did not have the opportunity to fly in space again, but she actively served as a consultant on safety issues with the space program and went on to academia where she is a professor of physics at university of california, san diego. conclusion these three case studies reflect the importance of resources and rituals in obtaining success and providing the foundation for overcoming racial, cultural and sexual discrimination. one interesting commonality with these three women is their desire and ability to mentor others and give to others those crucial resources that they had experienced through their journey. this "giving back" is an identified factor that defines who these women are today. refernces aspy, c. & sandhu, d. (1999). empowering women for equity: a counseling approach. alexandria, va: american counseling association. bland, c. & schmitz, c. (1986). characteristics of the successful researcher and implications for faculty development. journal of medical education, 61 (1). detrude, j. & stanfield, v. (1998). the gift of ritual in creating balance. in g. brown & b. irby (eds.), women and leadership: balancing power with caring. (pp. 21-36). new york: nova science publishers, inc. higgins, g. (1994). resilient adults: overcoming a cruel past. san francisco, ca: josseybass, inc. imber-black, e. & roberts, e. (1989). creating rituals in therapy. family networker, julyaugust. kelly, k. (1995). visions: maya angelou [on-line]. available: http://bsd.mojones.com/mother_jones /mj95/kelly.html mish, f. (ed.). (1989). the new merriam-webster dictionary. springfield, ma: merriamwebster inc., publishers. morehead, p. (ed.). (1985). roget's college thesaurus. new york: penguin books usa inc. o'gorman, p. (1994). dancing backwards in high heels: how women master the art of resilience. center city, mn: hazelden educational materiels. rutter, m. (1987). psychological resilience and protective mechanisms. american journal of orthopsychiatry 57 (3). seligman, m. (1992). learned optimism: how to change your mind and life. new york: pocket books. walsh, f. (1998). strengthening family resilience. new york: the guilford press. wolin, s. & wolin, s. (1993). the resilient self: how survivors of troubled families arise above diversity. new york: random house. dr. judith a. detrude is an assistant professor at sam houston state university. edu_jad@shsu.edu vicki s. stanfield is the coordinator of shared counselor program at north harris montgomery community college district. awl journal home page awl journal volume 3, number 1, winter 2000 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or 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guramatunhu-mudiwa: leadership & educational studies, appalachian state university, email: mudiwap@appstate.edu accepted may 08, 2015 recent trends in higher education suggest that there are more women than men enrolled and that more degrees are being conferred to women across all levels at the associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and the doctorate levels (hussar &bailey, 2011; wang & parker, 2011). i offer theoretical perspectives about the rapid growing female enrollment in higher education, arguing that it is a major force in shifting college student demographics. the conclusions are based on an investigation of student enrollment patterns in a school administration program at a large comprehensive university in southeastern united states from 2000 through 2011. the results revealed that in this program, females outnumbered males by 2:1. chi-square tests revealed statistically significant gender differences in enrollment patterns across age, semester, academic year, type of program, and type of campus. a further test using logistic regression analysis confirmed these findings. these results mirrored national trends where females now outnumbered males in higher education. keywords: gender, enrollment, higher education, school administration introduction researchers in several studies and reports documented a gender shift in enrollment patterns in higher education. jacobs (1996) and hepburn and simon (2006) noted a growing trend in the united states as women outnumbered males in higher education. in fact, women surpassed males in degrees conferred as early as 1982. sax (2008) noted that, “a rapidly growing female enrollment depicts gender as a major force in shifting college student demographics” (p. 15). women, more than men, are seeing the value and benefits of a college education by experiencing personal and intellectual growth (wang & parker, 2011). in a recent study by hussar and bailey (2011) titled projections of education statistics to 2019, the authors showed that enrollment in postsecondary degree-granting institutions increased by 34% from fall 1994 through fall 2008. enrollment increases were projected to rise from fall 2008 through fall 2019 by 17%. in the same report, data indicated that since 1994 there were more women than men enrolled in higher education and that more degrees were conferred to women across all levels at the associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate levels. however, the authors reported that women continued to pursue traditionally gendered majors and careers such as education, nursing and other health professions while men enrolled in engineering, computer science, and business, but with almost gender parity in the fields of law and medicine (hepburn & simon, 2006; sax, 2008). the increasing gender shift in the college enrollment of women is a welcome development for which women’s movements and affirmative action groups have been clamoring (austin & leland, 1991). however, women are still underrepresented in executive positions in community colleges, four-year colleges, and doctorate granting institutions. the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions also permeates k-12 education. females are the majority in the teaching positions in k-12 education according to the national center for education statistics [nces] (2009). hepburn and simon (2006) noted that women have dominated enrollment in education degrees across all levels. additionally, in k-12 education, 75% of the teaching force is comprised by women (shakeshaft, 2006). however, when it comes to career development of women into the principalship, authors of independent studies confirmed that female principals are concentrated at the elementary level, with the numbers decreasing at the middle and high schools levels. studies conducted in texas revealed that female principals were the majority at the elementary level (73.5%), decreased at the middle school (41.3%), and further decreased (29.8%) at the high school level (roser, brown, & kelsey, 2009). mcgee advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 121 (2010), in a recent study in florida, reported a similar pattern of distribution where women were the majority at the elementary level and the minority at the secondary level. earlier studies also corroborated the underrepresentation of women in the principalship at the high school (wexler eckman, 2004; wrushen & sherman, 2008). the underrepresentation of women extended to the superintendency, where female leadership was disregarded or devalued (dana & bourisaw, 2006). this may suggest that the leadership competencies of women are questioned and that, therefore, women are not seriously considered as bona fide leaders. the tendency is to explain successful leadership according to gendered expectations where the benchmark for success is framed from masculine perspectives that focus on decisiveness, risk-taking, and aggressiveness (dana & bourisaw. 2006). based on this bias, hiring males to lead schools is regarded as effective and normal (witmer, 2006). i have made efforts to theorize why women are outnumbering men in higher education. i am aware of flaws in theorizing because of the possible inadequacy of the theories to explain the emerging phenomenon. the changing enrollment trends in higher education, where women outnumber males, can be explained by two theoretical perspectives, ethnomethodological approaches and poststructuralist discourses (kelan, 2010). scholars of ethnomethodological approaches view gender as a social construct enacted in a given situation, or something achieved through social interaction, but the behavior must conform to certain norms or else is questioned by others when it appears abnormal. “ethnomethodology assumes the omnipresent relevance of gender, and one way of undoing gender is when it loses its importance in social interactions’ (kelan, p. 189). in other words, when using ethnomethodological approaches, gender can be undone by referring to it or ignoring it. poststructuralism assumes multiple forms or pluralism of femininity and masculinity, thereby challenging the universalized gender binary of male/female. this multiplicity of gender enacts new forms of identity, deviating from accepted gender norms. poststructuralist thought upsets or destabilizes the status quo by embracing new expressions and practices of gender. what is common between these two perspectives is that gender can be done or undone, performed or not performed hence references to the un/doing of gender (kelan, 2010). poststructuralism, as expressed in foucauldian thought, may also explain the gender shift. paras (2006) stated “choice, freedom, reflection, experience, agency: these were the undisguised hallmarks of foucault’s last philosophical interventions” (p. 147). the proposition that power dominates people, but knowledge—that is—the truth—sets people free” (danaher, schrirato & webb, 2000, p. 63) may explain why women participate in higher education en masse. danaher et al. (2000) argued that “power can flow very quickly from one point or area to another, depending on changing alliances and circumstances” (p. 71). through experience, reflection and agency, women are now exercising collective transformation to improve their lives. modernization driven by economics, politics and technology could have been catalytic in shaping new ways of thinking among women. literature review an attempt to understand the new gender shift in enrollment patterns requires a definition of gender. gender is expressed, performed, and observed, and therefore, is a fluid concept (doan, 2010; good & sanchez, 2010). it represents the attributes and roles given to maleness or femaleness in society. these attributes vary across cultures (peterson & runyan, 2010). on the other hand, sex is biologically given, expressing the genitalia function/anatomical difference, while gender is a social construct which is differentiated based on race, culture, and ethnicity. gender is also expressed in a spectrum of public and private spaces (doan, 2010). it is a social construct that runs on a continuum because an individual can feel more masculine or feminine depending on the space and context (good & sanchez, 2010). in other words, males can behave like females or vice versa depending on the space and/or context. for example, female executives may engage in “double conformity” where they have to dress in dark suites like male executives and also may be aggressive to prove that they can lead. males and females can choose to lift these restrictions imposed upon their gender by challenging the engrained societal stereotypes. arguably there must be a new order of social reality that potentially attacks and threatens the traditional taxonomy of gender power and roles of masculinity and femininity (gardner, 2010). male supremacy and hegemony is cherished and idealized (bourdieu, 2001). traditional understandings of gender roles relegate women to being wives and pleasing their husbands, being mothers, and serving the function of reproduction through child bearing and rearing; while men do the hard work and provide for their families (becker & wagner, 2009; bourdieu, 2001; krais, 1993). under the traditional dichotomy of gender power, women are the recipients of benevolent sexism from men (becker & wegner, 2009). women do the work that is not quantifiable and not paid because “most of the reproductive labor of women is not seen as labor” (krais, p.163). for example, carrying a pregnancy to full term is not seen as amounting to any form of “work.” the taxonomy suggests that gender inequality precipitates a redefinition of quantifiable work by women in order to participate in the job market. this prompts the question: how have women challenged the stereotypes about gender and reached a point where they outnumber men in higher education and go into traditionally male dominated fields? this question is based on the claim by (danaher et al. 2000) who argued that understandings of ourselves and our lives are always filtered through the ideas, discourses and institutions that constitute society. following this logic, women have come to a collective understanding of their isomorphic experiences as the marginalized and disadvantaged in society, regardless of race and background. they have learned to perform gender, and challenge the status quo in order to satisfy their aspirations, despite the close surveillance of advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 122 society’s watchful eye. women have learned to “unlearn the gendered self” (flannery, 2000, p. 251). the exercise of gender impacts several aspects of life for several reasons. gender is the basis for inequality between men and women (peterson & runyan, 2010), and carries a perceived importance in society as krais (1993) stated, one of the most powerful and ubiquitous systems of classification in social practice—even in complex societies—is the taxonomy of male/female, and it is this taxonomy through which the division of labor between the genders is assessed, perceived, defined, and structured.” (p. 159) applying the hallmarks of foucauldian thought of choice, freedom, reflection, experience, and agency (paras, 2006), the first choice women have is the exercise of gender. it is important to note that gender conformity and non-conformity have negative effects in society (good & sanchez, 2010). diffusion of power and gender roles having defined gender as a social construct, its exercise is closely tied to power. gender cannot be discussed without reference to power because the exercise of “power is inscribed in the rituals and practices of gender yet it is both more or less than gender” (radtke & stam, 1994, p. 1), and is a product of gender relations. power is the capacity or potential to influence and manipulate the behavior of people so that people do things that they would not otherwise do. power is also described as “the capacity to have an impact or produce an effect” (lips, 1994, p. 90). the exercise of power is based on motives or to get what one wants. power can be classified into three categories: “stick (threat power), the carrot (economic power), and the hug (integrative power)” (radtke & stam, 1994, p. 3). this characterization of power conjures images of the destructive force of power, reciprocal exchanges, and the ability to create relationships with the powerful influence of gender controlling the process. the traditional conceptualization of power is centered on patriarchal values wherein women played a subordinate role in gender relations. economic power has been traditionally enjoyed by men and women stay at home to raise families or when they join the work force and are relegated to fields that pay less money while men enjoy employment in the more productive sectors (henig & henig, 2004). traditional relationships have been structured in ways which primarily satisfy the desires of men (bourdieu, 2001). under traditional power relationships, the appropriate behavior is for women to respect and to follow religiously the social norms of respecting male domination. lips (1994) argued that at a very early stage in life, girls were encouraged to develop roots, i.e., were offered fewer chances at mastering the environment while boys were encouraged to develop wings, giving boys a chance at mastery of the environment. lips (1994) refuted this cultural conditioning because once girls and women go against the traditional socialization that is based on sex stereotypes they “are at risk, first as targets of a‘wisdom’ that clips their wings, and then, eventually, as recipients of a strong message that a powerless stance works best for them in many situations” (p. 89). when women behave outside this socially established order, it is usually resisted by males and viewed as troublesome and socially unacceptable because it destabilizes the traditional gender power relations. the traditional perspective is myopic and oppressive in its conceptualization because it ignores the fact that women, just like men, are free human beings who also have aspirations, choices, and goals (witmer, 2006). the perpetual subordination of women is an oppressive and destructive force that can lead to revolution or revelation. women have since embraced the freedom, value and benefits offered by a college education (kochhar, 2012). through education, women are refusing to have their wings clipped, and metaphorically speaking, they want to fly like other birds (males). marginalized and oppressed people at some point seek freedom (freire, 2005) and some women may seek freedom from male domination in aspects of their lives (bourdieu, 2001). the changing cultural economy another factor that might contribute to why more women than men are enrolling in higher education is a shift in the cultural economy. lash (1993) cited bourdieu’s cultural-economic model as assuming the notion of a cultural market or economy where there is an exchange of symbolic gifts in the practice of culture. the symbolic capital and dependence, institutionalized in marriage, was once powerful, but is slowly diminishing as both men and women realize that they can still acquire this symbolism outside of marriage (bourdieu, 2001). women now realize that they can acquire the social and symbolic capital through education because of the perceived value and benefits a college education purchases. for instance, the recession of 20072009 might have triggered more women to enroll in higher education for skills acquisition as kochhar (2012) in a study indicated that more women than men were negatively impacted by the recession. arguably, the evolution in the cultural market implies a new kind of buyer and consumer. the new buyers are industries that are demanding the goods and services that require educated and skilled workers. in order to participate and compete in these new markets, women look at other role models and engage in collective action—an armoring process acquired through higher education. culture and economics are dynamic, and, therefore, the cultural-economic model requires new ways of thinking that may be responsible for changes in women’s ways of thinking and knowing. more economic power usually brings more autonomy. as women participate in markets, they gain more autonomy and free themselves from the shackles of “gender and symbolic violence” (krais, p. 156) engrained in society. krais further argued that domination has many faces that include “physical violence, coercion, structural violence as operated by the power of economic forces and social institutions, and symbolic violence” (p. 168). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 123 the exercise of gender and power dictates the division of labor. bourdieu (2001) argued that gender and power are fundamentally symbolic. he pointed to gender differentiation and the role of the mental representation of the division of labor. the question is, can the symbolic markers be re-assigned to the opposite genders, and if so, can there be a symbolic reconstruction of the division of labor? with the rise of industrialization in the 18th century and the world wars, women worked in factories, and thereby expanded their roles and assumed roles that were previously the turf of men. times have changed and new dictates about gender, power, and culture have been created. for example, the rising phenomenon of the stay-athome dad, initially frowned upon, is increasing and becoming acceptable in american society (gardner, 2010). as women address male domination in society, they upset the status quo and challenge the balance of power that has been in favor of men. participating in and responding to the new markets requires an exchange of gender roles where men take care of the family while women pursue careers or education. this requires attitudinal shifts and collaboration on both sides, on the part of men as well as women. furthermore, institutions such as the workplace are embracing women’s experiences, perspectives, and leadership styles. for example, fortune 500 companies now benefit from a value added component by bringing women in the boardroom because women broaden perspectives and discussion about stakeholders, bring a more collaborative approach to leadership and pursue answers to difficult questions than men do (konrad & kramer, 2006). influence of the feminist movement feminist movements in the united states alerted women about the need to voice their experiences in the public discourse. work by astin and leland (1991) revered the work of women predecessors, articulated women’s experiences, evaluated the progress made, and reminded women of the work that still needed to be done. for instance, policies that promote gender equity in colleges such as title ix are attributed to the feminist movement (austin & leland, 1991). today, women participate in higher education partly because of this landmark legislation in the women’s movement. work by belenky, clinchy, goldberger and tarule (1986) in their book women’s ways of knowing, celebrated the collective efforts of women. they recognized and touted women’s ways of knowing and contributed knowledge about strategies women could use to advance themselves in society. they interviewed american women from all walks of life and postulated that when women acquire subjective knowledge they seek “quest for self, or at least protection of space for growth of self…to learn to speak in a unique and authentic voice, women must ‘jump outside’ the frames and systems authorities provide and create their own frame” (p 131). tisdell (2000) claimed that such feminist education seeks transformation and freedom from a traditional educational system that offers gender privilege and opportunities to men. tisdell acknowledged the work of belenky et al. (1986) as a major contribution about how women (a) constructed knowledge, (b) shifted their identities as individuals, (c) shared authority between teacher and leaners, and (d) developed voice, i.e., how they described themselves to themselves. corroborating the work of belenky et al. boaler and irving (2006) suggested women acquired knowledge characterized as connected knowing that reflects “intuition, creativity, hypothesizing and induction” (p. 213). this connected knowing progressively moves from uncritical to critical, thereby challenging gender norms. traditionally, women have anchored their identity and success through their husbands and families (gardner, 2010). today that kind of tradition is waning for several reasons. first of all, the configuration of the traditional family of the father being the breadwinner and mother being the caregiver has changed. women now assume roles that were once the preserve for men and in some cases are earning more money than their husbands. with education, women have gained autonomy where they can compete as free agents in the economy because they now have bona fide expertise and knowledge. the women’s movement has managed to garner and mobilize women to reject benevolent sexism, where women are the recipients of patronizing patriarchal favors. evolution of women’s identities another theory that can explain the collective efforts to change traditional patterns is the evolution of women’s gender identities. there are several scholars that attempted to describe how women develop identities. gender identification is the importance placed on gender as a reference point to judge the behavior of self and of other women (wegner & becker, 2009). the development of women’s identity can be classified into four groups (marcia as cited in sax, 2008). the first group is the foreclosed, whose gullible commitment lies in the expectations, values and ideologies of their family. these women have never experienced crises and are cushioned by the comfort provided by their families. the second group is called the moratorium. these women reflect on their childhood and seek new identities but are engulfed in crises during the process of identity formation. these have not made up their minds about career and ideological choices. the third group is the identity achieved. these have gone through crises and have made up their minds about career choices. they are confident of who they are and do not seek validation about themselves from anybody. the fourth and final group according to marcia is the identity diffused. these are women who avoid identity formation and are neither committed to any career nor experienced any crises. another view of gender identity was proposed by wegner and becker (2009) who postulated that gender role preference is based on traditional or progressive identities. they developed a gender identity model (gim) that classifies women into four identities: (a) traditional identifiers, (b) progressive identifiers, (c) traditional nonidentifiers, and (d) progressive-non identifiers. the researchers described traditional identifiers as women who prefer the traditional gender role of domestication and being identified as the traditional woman and do not question their position in society. they cherish being a woman and advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 124 maintaining the status quo. they have no ambition for a career. contrary to this group are progressive identifiers or women who reject the traditional forms of femininity and subordination of women in society. like traditionalists, they are proud to identify themselves as women, but they see their status as lower than that of men in society and they seek to challenge the status quo. the third group, traditional nonidentifiers are women who place little value of being a woman, but still identify with traditional roles of femininity. the final group, progressive nonidentifiers, down play their identities as “women,” identify with masculine attributes, perceive themselves as different from other women, and use men as the reference group. they devalue women who are low achievers. according to researchers these identities help women to frame what is right or wrong for women. using the gender identity model (gim) becker and wagner (2009) concluded that “women reject benevolent (bs), hostile (hs), and modern sexisms (ms) and participate in collective action in particular when they are highly identified with the category women and have, at the same time, internalized progressive identity contents” (p. 487). what is clear from these models is that gender conformity for women plays a critical role in the development of self-esteem (good & sanchez, 2010). women have a choice of identifying themselves as traditionalists or progressives and perform genders that satisfy their projected identities. women also choose the relevancy of ‘their being women” as a basis to evaluate their actions and behaviors. how women describe themselves and how they form their identities ultimately influences their rejection of societal norms or acceptance of the status quo. the caveat, though, is that society rewards or punishes gender conformity or non-conformity depending on the context. impact of lifelong-learning and the democratization of education another possible explanation of why women now outnumber men in higher education is the impact of lifelong learning. women who may have missed the opportunity to advance their education and careers find it possible to do so because of the modes of delivery of education offered both synchronously and asynchronously via the internet. in the comfort of their own homes, women and men can access education through the internet while still being able to attend to other personal issues such as child rearing and caring, providing caregiving duties to elderly parents, and having regular jobs. the internet has made it possible for women who would have otherwise faced serious hurdles to pursue an education and graduate degrees. the access agenda offered by higher education today through the creation of virtual classrooms, delivering classes through faceto-face formats, and combinations known as hybrid formats have democratized the delivery of higher education. emphasizing the importance of virtual education, delgado-garcía and cuello (2010) stated that “it is a way of adapting to students’ needs, since it enables them to combine professional, personal and family commitments with their academic ones” (p. 784). arguably, women have adapted to these changes and taken advantage of the opportunities offered by online environments to access knowledge and skills and changing the redistribution of knowledge (delgado-garcía & cuello, 2010), thereby shifting enrollment patterns in higher education. explaining why more women in the united states of america pursue more higher education than men, jacobs (1996) postulated a combination of factors that included the preponderance of colleges and universities and the pursuit of individual ideology that offers opportunities for women leading to status achievement. method participants as noted earlier, authors in several studies pointed to the growing trend of females outnumbering males in enrollment and in degrees conferred in higher education (hussar & bailey, 2011; sax, 2008). the purpose of my study was to investigate whether there is a statistically significant difference as measured by gender in enrollment patterns in a school administration program at a large comprehensive university in the southeastern part of the united states of america. the school administration program at this university offers a master’s degree (36 credit hours), or if the students are already in possession of a master’s degree, an add-on licensure program (24 credit hours) to acquire principal licensure. all enrollment data of 29 cohorts for the master’s and add-on-licensure programs from 2000 through 2011 were used. the participants were enrollment records of 807 students, (267 [33.1%] male and 540 [66.9%] female; age range: 24-71, and mage = 41.9 years) obtained from the registrar’s office. instrument enrollment records of the school administration dating from 2000 to 2011 were obtained from the registrar’s office. the records indicated the names of students, gender of students, the year of enrollment, the semester, expected/estimated year of graduation, whether the program was a degree or add-on licensure, and whether the program was completed on campus or off campus. for purposes of reporting data, the student information was coded by the researcher to protect confidentiality and anonymity. design and analysis the study is a quantitative design. descriptive statistics, using the primary statistical test as the chi-square, were used to establish whether there was a statistically significant gender difference in enrollment in this school administration program. cross tabulations using chi-square tests were performed analyzing gender-age, gender-semester, gender-academic year, gender-campus, and gender-program. a logistics regression analysis was conducted with gender as the dependent variable and program, academic year completed, delivery campus, and beginning semester as covariates. the program uses a cohort model. twenty nine cohorts were analyzed in this study ranging from 2000 to 2011. from 2000 through 2005, the program was primarily offered on campus. thereafter, the program was advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 125 offered wholly off-campus through satellite campuses of the university. results presented in table 1 is a summary of the demographic items identified in the study. table 1 participant demographics demographic items participants frequency gender (n=807) % n. male frequency% n. female frequency% gender 267 33.1 540 66.9 age not stated 1 0.1 0 0.0 1 0.1 21-25 years 2 0.2 1 0.1 1 0.1 26-30 years 57 7.1 16 2.0 41 5.1 31-35 years 152 18.8 55 6.8 97 12.0 36-40 years 182 22.6 64 7.9 118 14.7 41-45 years 155 19.2 49 6.1 106 13.1 46-50 years 110 13.6 33 4.1 77 9.5 51-55 years 78 9.7 24 3.0 54 6.7 56-60 years 53 6.6 15 1.9 38 4.7 61-65 years 16 2.0 9 1.1 7 0.9 66-70 years 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 over 71 1 0.1 1 0.1 0 0.0 semester spring 284 35.2 117 14.5 167 20.7 summer one 101 12.5 24 3.0 77 9.5 summer two 50 6.2 15 1.9 35 4.3 fall 372 46.1 11 13.8 261 32.3 advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 126 table 2 cont’d demographic items participants frequency gender (n=807) % n. male frequency% n. female frequency% program other 2 0.2 1 0.1 1 0.1 msa degree 530 65.7 209 25.9 321 39.8 add-on licensure 275 34.1 57 7.1 218 27.0 academic year 2000 96 11.9 44 5.5 52 6.4 2001 49 6.1 25 3.1 24 3.0 2002 12 1.5 4 0.5 8 1.0 2003 68 8.4 26 3.2 42 5.2 2004 85 10.5 31 3.8 54 6.7 2005 48 5.9 21 2.6 27 3.4 2006 76 9.4 29 3.6 47 5.8 2007 77 9.5 15 1.9 62 7.7 2008 140 17.3 35 4.3 105 13.0 2009 67 8.3 17 2.1 50 6.2 2010 72 8.9 14 1.7 58 7.2 2011 17 2.1 6 0.7 11 1.4 total 807 100.0 267 33.1 540 66.9 note. enrollment for 2011 does not include fall and spring semesters the results indicated that in this master’s in school administration program, the majority of the students are female 540 (66.9%), with male 267 (33.1%) which translates to a ratio of 2:1. the age of students in the program ranged from 24 to above 71, with the average age at 42. the mode is the 36-40 age groups. there were more females than males in all age groups except 61-65 and over 70, which recorded more males than females. an analysis of the data by semester revealed that the majority of students typically enroll in the fall semester and a wide gender gap in favor of women at (32.3%) with males (13.8%). the enrollment pattern of females outnumbering males in this program is also consistent in the spring and summer semesters and more noticeable in the fall semester where the ratio is 3:1 in favor of females. the pattern permeates the pathways of the principalship licensure where the majority of students seek the msa degree with females outnumbering males at slightly above 2:1, and by 4:1 at the ad-on licensure level. figure 1 illustrates the enrollment patterns in this master’s in school administration program from 2000 through 2011. the frequency percent inserted in this figure is relative to the total enrollment from 2000 through 2011. enrollment by academic year revealed that the highest figures were recorded in 2008 with 75% female and 25% male, while the lowest figures were in 2002, but consistently comprising of advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 127 75% female and 25% male. after the highest peak in enrollment in 2008, it sharply decreased by 50% in 2009 and 2010. the years 2006 and 2007 had almost equal enrollments. chi-square tests on the following variables: (a) gender-age, (b) gender-program, (c) gender-academic year, (d) gender-campus, and (e) gender -semester were performed. the results are displayed in tables 2 through 6. all tests were performed at a pre-selected alpha level (α = .05). table 2 chi-square summary of gender and age age total n ot s ta te d 21 -2 5 ye ar s 26 -3 0 ye ar s 31 -3 5 ye ar s 36 -4 0 ye ar s 41 -4 5 ye ar s 46 -5 0 ye ar s 51 -5 5 ye ar s 56 -6 0 ye ar s 61 -6 5 ye ar s o ve r 7 1 gender male count 0 1 16 55 64 49 33 24 15 9 1 267 expected count .3 .7 18.9 50.3 60.2 51.3 36.4 25.8 17.5 5.3 .3 267.0 female count 1 1 41 97 118 106 77 54 38 7 0 540 expected count .7 1.3 38.1 101.7 121.8 103.7 73.6 52.2 35.5 10.7 .7 540.0 total count 1 2 57 152 182 155 110 78 53 16 1 807 expected count 1.0 2.0 57.0 152.0 182.0 155.0 110.0 78.0 53.0 16.0 1.0 807.0 there was not a significant relationship with the age and gender of the student χ² (10, n = 807) = 9.67, p = .469. the male age groups that enrolled and exceeded the expected counts were the 31-35 and 36-40, and 61-65. contrarily, females seemed to postpone and enrolled in the age ranges of 41-45, 46-50, 51-55, and 56-60. 2000   2001   2002   2003   2004   2005   2006   2007   2008   2009   2010   2011   number  of  students   96   49   12   68   85   48   76   77   140   67   72   17   frequency  percent   11.9   6.1   1.5   8.4   10.5   5.9   9.4   9.5   17.3   8.3   8.9   2.1   96   49   12   68   85   48   76   77   140   67   72   17  11.9   6.1   1.5   8.4   10.5   5.9   9.4   9.5   17.3   8.3   8.9   2.1   0   20   40   60   80   100   120   140   160   n um be r     of    s tu de nt s   academic  year   enrollment  trends  2000-­‐2011   advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 128 table 3 chi-square summary of gender and program program total other msa degree add-on licensure gender male count 1 209 57 267 expected count .7 175.4 91.0 267.0 % within gender .0 .8 .2 1.0 % within program .5 .4 .2 .3 % of total .0 .3 .1 .3 residual .3 33.6 -34.0 std. residual .4 2.5 -3.6 adjusted residual .5 5.3 -5.4 female count 1 321 218 540 expected count 1.3 354.6 184.0 540.0 % within gender .0 .6 .4 1.0 % within program .5 .6 .8 .7 % of total .0 .4 .3 .7 residual -.3 -33.6 34.0 std. residual -.3 -1.8 2.5 adjusted residual -.5 -5.3 5.4 total count 2 530 275 807 expected count 2.0 530.0 275.0 807.0 % within gender .0 .7 .3 1.0 % within program 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 % of total .0 .7 .3 1.0 the results of gender and program revealed a statistically significant χ² (2, n = 807) = 28.87, p = .000). expected counts and observed counts revealed that more males than expected enrolled for the master’s in school administration degree while females prefer to enroll for the add-on licensure. table 4 chi-square summary of gender and academic year academic year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 gender male count 44 25 4 26 31 21 29 15 35 17 14 6 expected count 31.8 16.2 4.0 22.5 28.1 15.9 25.1 25.5 46.3 22.2 23.8 5.6 female count 52 24 8 42 54 27 47 62 105 50 58 11 expected count 64.2 32.8 8.0 45.5 56.9 32.1 50.9 51.5 93.7 44.8 48.2 11.4 total count 96 49 12 68 85 48 76 77 140 67 72 17 expected count 96.0 49.0 12.0 68.0 85.0 48.0 76.0 77.0 140.0 67.0 72.0 17.0 advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 129 the results of gender and academic year revealed a statistically significant difference χ² (11, n = 807) = 37.23, p = .000. there were more males than expected in 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, while more females than expected enrolled in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. table 5 chi-square summary of gender and campus type of campus total on campus off campus gender male count 163 104 267 expected count 129.0 138.0 267.0 female count 227 313 540 expected count 261.0 279.0 540.0 total count 390 417 807 expected count 390.0 417.0 807.0 the results of gender and campus revealed a statistically significant difference χ² (1, n = 807) = 25.86, p = .000. the results suggest that more males than expected took class on campus than on off campus. the reverse is true for females where more females registered for off campus classes than males. table 6 chi-square summary of gender and semester semester total spring summer one summer two fall gender male (n=267) count 117 24 15 111 267 expected count 94.0 33.4 16.5 123.1 267.0 % within gender .4 .1 .1 .4 1.0 % within semester .4 .2 .3 .3 .3 female (n=540) count 167 77 35 261 540 expected count 190.0 67.6 33.5 248.9 540.0 % within gender .3 .1 .1 .5 1.0 % within semester .6 .8 .7 .7 .7 total count 284 101 50 372 807 expected count 284.0 101.0 50.0 372.0 807.0 % within gender .4 .1 .1 .5 1.0 % within semester 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 130 the results of gender and semester analysis revealed a statistically significant difference χ² (3, n = 807) = 14.39, p = .002. more males registered for the spring classes exceeding the expected counts, while more females registered than the expected counts in the summer and fall semesters. based on these results and in order to determine specific trends in these relationships, a logistics regression analysis was conducted with gender as the dependent variables and program, academic year completed, delivery campus, and beginning semester as covariates. all covariates were treated as categorical variables and dummy coded as such. the size of the data set (n = 807) was sufficient to allow all the covariates to be considered at the individual response level. the forward stepwise analysis generated the most significant model (chi-square = 40.095, df = 4, p < .000) that included two predictors, program and the semester that students began their program. the delivery campus and the academic year the student completed were not included in the final model as they were not significant in explaining any additional variation between the genders. table 8 the forward stepwise analysis of program and semester b s.e. wald df sig. exp(b) step 1a program(1) -.912 .173 27.717 1 .000 .402 constant 1.341 .149 81.310 1 .000 3.825 step 2b program(1) -.876 .178 24.068 1 .000 .417 semester 10.083 3 .018 semester(1) -.418 .169 6.115 1 .013 .658 semester(2) .161 .266 .365 1 .546 1.174 semester(3) .287 .334 .740 1 .390 1.333 constant 1.436 .171 70.795 1 .000 4.203 a. variable(s) entered on step 1: program. b. variable(s) entered on step 2: semester. the odds ratio (exp(b))is a measure of the difference in odds between the two levels of the dependent variable, males versus females. based on this data, females are 1.17 times more likely than males to initially enroll in the second summer semester, and 1.33 times more likely than males to initially enroll in the fall semester. when the odds ratio is less than 1 such as program differences (exp(b) = .417), the interpretation is less direct. but the observation that the ratio of males enrolled in add on licensure program (57 out of 266 or 21.4%) is much lower than the ratio of females enrolled (218 out of 539 or 40.4%) indicates that females are almost twice more likely to enroll in add on licensure programs. these outcomes would seem to indicate that when compared to male counterparts, female student completers are more likely to enroll in add on licensure programs beginning in the second summer or fall semesters discussion the results of this study seem to corroborate national trends (hauser & bailey, 2011; wang & parker, 2011) that indeed women are outnumbering men in higher education and that more degrees are conferred to women than men. kochhar (2012) claimed that more women than men were affected by the economic recession where job growth for women was lower than that of men. women may be enrolling in higher education in order to acquire skills to increase their chances of employability during this tough economic environment. in this study, women outnumbered males in each age category. of particular interest was the gender difference along the pathways to the principalship. women tended to take the longer route because they had a master’s degree first in their academic discipline before moving to the licensure degree. men tended to take a shorter route where they moved from a bachelor’s degree to a licensure degree gender and age another striking difference was the age of students when enrolling for the program as revealed by the chi-square test where more males than expected enrolled at the 31-35 and 36-40 age groups. women tended to postpone enrollment and higher counts than expected were observed at age ranges 41-45, 46-50, 51-55, and 61-65 years. a possible explanation using the age factor in enrollment consideration is that women tended to enroll as part-time students (jacobs, 1996) although all students in this program are parttime students and full-time employees. in reference to moving into administration, witmer (2006) observed that women usually considered career changes in the forties or fifties. generally more women than men are seeing the benefits of going back to college because a college education and the acquisition of knowledge results in enhanced feelings of self-efficacy. in this study, women faced a double-edged sword because although enrolling part-time increases time for parenting and for female teachers to attain the principalship, added time using the longer route often reduced professional mobility (witmer, 2006). postponing bearing and raising children goes against women’s biological clock. it therefore becomes a strategic and well calculated move for women to defer or postpone enrolling until after raising a family. men do not have to worry about the effect of the advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 131 biological clock in regards to associated risks of childbearing and age as would women. therefore, pursuing a career that takes considerable more time from the family is less appealing for women. perhaps males see better chances of entry into principal positions and the superintendency compared to females as reflected by national trends (dana & bourisaw, 2006). another reason could be that the principalship is predominantly a male field, giving males a perceived advantage in hiring considerations. if this is a shared view among women, it may trigger a sense of frustration, despair, and general dissatisfaction about the outcomes and chances of entry into the principalship because of the reality of the numbers. if principalship programs prepare more females, as in the case of this study, it appears males are disproportionally hired over women for the job. since results of my study revealed that men enrolled in the program in their younger years, there may be strategic reasons behind this as well. the considerations for males could be based on the perceived outcomes of better career mobility after graduation. enrolling in the program may have more economic purchase for males than females as supported by the gender disparity in the principalship, particularly at the secondary level. what is considered unproductive work becomes the burden of wives while husbands pursue careers. men may postpone marriage and pursue careers due to perceived benefits after graduation. it was not possible to obtain the marital status of the students, and yet such information would have established whether males in the study postponed marriage or not. gender and program in this program students have a choice of obtaining licensure via two routes. the school administration program at this university offers a master’s degree (36 credit hours), or if the students are already in possession of a master’s degree, students obtain a principalship certification through an add-on licensure program (24 credit hours). it is clear that male students preferred a shorter route, i.e., obtaining the master’s degree in school administration while women took the longer route of acquiring a master’s degree in another field, before enrolling for licensure. of the 267 male students in the study, 209 (78.3%) males pursued the master’s degree compared to the 540 females in the study where 321(59.4%) pursued the master’s degree. this means 22.7% of males and 40.6% females had a master’s in their teaching disciplines and enrolled as add-on licensure students. this suggests that more females than males choose teaching as their first career, acquire another master’s degree in their academic discipline such as master’s in curriculum instruction and then pursue administration as a second or third career. this is contrary to males, who spent a shorter time in the classroom, and pursued administration as their second career. witmer (2006) argued that for most men and women administration brings more benefits that include “more money, more autonomy, more status, and more power … the male culture often views power as power-in-itself and for themselves , while women view it as limitless, tending to empower others as they themselves acquire power” (p. 7). gender and academic year from 2000 through 2006 male students enrolled beyond the expected counts, but failed to meet the expected count from 2007 onwards, a trend that seems to have continued into 2011. the trend was totally reversed for women. from 2000 through 2007 female enrollment declined and never met the expected counts. however, from 2008 female counts went beyond the expected counts with the biggest gap between observed and expected counts recorded in 2008. one can arguably attribute this to the recession of 2007-2009 that affected more women than men (kochhar, 2012). women in general went back to school to enhance their chances on the job market amidst an ailing economy and to reap the benefit of a college education (wang &parker, 2011). gender and campus the school administration program was offered on campus from 2000-2006. during those years more males than females enrolled than expected as revealed by chi-square tests and logistics regression analyses. considering that students are full-time employees, the length of commute to campus, taking night classes, may result in women inclined to opt for off campus classes that are offered in locations reachable by most students. off campus programs have an added advantage to nursing mothers, students with young families, and/or those with elderly care responsibilities because this arrangement gives them time to balance these activities. fewer classes taken and avoiding the commute to campus, which in some cases could be more than two hours, may be more appealing. gender and semester clearly more females enrolled in the fall than males and more males enrolled in the spring than females. this may suggest issues that are germane to each gender that could not be established in the scope of this study, but suffice to leave it at conjectures. students have very little choice of transferring from cohort to cohort since the cohort model is not offered every semester. conclusion and recommendations the purpose of the study was to investigate whether there is a statistically significant difference as advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 132 measured by gender in enrollment patterns in a school administration program at a large comprehensive university in the southeastern part of the united states. using descriptive statistics and chi-square tests, the study revealed the following relating to gender: (a) more females than males enrolled for the program at a ratio of 2:1; (b) gender and age revealed a statistically significant difference with women preferring to postpone enrollment until middle ages; (c) males preferred to enroll for the degree program while females preferred the add-on licensure program; (d) gender and academic year revealed a statistically significant difference with highest enrollment figures recorded in 2008 and with more females enrolled, but enrollment sharply declined thereafter; (e) gender and campus revealed a statistically significant difference where more females enrolled off campus than males and vice versa on campus (f) gender and semester revealed a statistically significant difference with more males enrolling in the spring and more females in the fall. the implications of this study may inform several stakeholders in light of the disproportionate underrepresentation of women in the principalship. principal preparation programs in colleges and universities need to encourage female voices in school leadership by better training students, particularly women, to be able to navigate the nuances of the job and the hiring process. women aspiring for the principalship need to identify the challenges and barriers and participate in mentoring programs and academies to enhance their chances at early stages of their teaching careers. clearly males have a ready pool of potential candidates as they enter principal preparation programs early in their teaching careers, but this pool is developed later in the careers of women. women need to be encouraged to start early and use the shorter route to the principalship, i.e., the master’s degree rather than the longer route, the add-on licensure program. finally, school districts should groom female leaders and actively consider women in the hiring process of assistant and principal positions. hiring more women may close the yawning gender gap in the principalship. policy makers may need to examine the long term impact of the gender shift in enrollment patterns in higher education and the principalship. universities and colleges could be resorting to a reproductionist approach that ignores job market trends, an issue that could be addressed by policy makers and human resources directors altering recruitment procedures to target women. an investigation of whether women’s increased participation in school administration program correlates with interest to pursue a career in the principalship or whether there is a correlation with employment of women in the principalship would be a potential follow-up to this study. another possible study involves investigating retention and attrition rates in the program based on gender and other variables investigated in this study such as age, type of program, i.e., degree or add-on licensure, campus, and semester. it will be of interest to investigate how many women pursue the education specialist degree and the doctorate from the graduates of the school administration principalship cohorts of this program. references astin, h. s., & leland, c. 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(2012). the demographics of the jobs recovery: employment gains by race, ethnicity, gender, and nativity. pew research center . retrieved march 28, 2012 from http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/03/21/thedemographics-of-the-jobs-recovery/4/#iv-theeconomic-recovery-for-men-andwomen?src=prc-section konrad, a. m., & kramer, v. w. (2006). how many women do boards need? retrieved march 28, 2012, from http://hbr.org/2006/12/how-manywomen-do-boards-need/ar/1 lips, h. l. (1994). female powerlessness: a case of cultural preparedness. in h. l radtke & h. j. stam (eds.). power/gender: social relations in theory and practice (pp. 89-107). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. mcgee, j. m. (2010). to climb or not to climb: the probing of self-imposed barriers that delay or deny career aspirations to be an administrator in a public school system. forum on public policy, retrieved february 9, 2011, from http://forumonpublicpolicy.com/spring2010.vol 2010/spring2010archive/mcgee.pdf paras, e. (2006). foucault 2.0: beyond power and knowledge. new york: other press. peterson, v. s., & runyan, a. s. (2010). global gender issues in the new millennium. philadelphia, pa: westview press. radtke, h. l, & stam, h. j. (1994). introduction. in h. l radtke & h. j. stam (eds.). power/gender: social relations in theory and practice (pp. 1-17). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. roser, v., brown, m., & kelsey, c. (2009). principal gender as related to campus size, level, and academic rating. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(10), 1-14. sax, l. (2008). the gender gap in college: maximizing developmental potential of women and men. san francisco, ca: jossey bass. shakeshaft. c. (2006). gender and educational management. in c. skelton, b. francis, & l. smulyan (eds.). the sage handbook of gender and education (pp.497-511). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. wang, w., & parker, k. (2011). women see value and benefits of college, men lag on both fronts, survey finds. retrieved march 28, 2012 from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/08/17/wo men-see-value-and-benefits-of-college-menlag-on-both-fronts-survey-finds/?src=prcheadline wexler eckman, e. (2004). similarities and differences in role conflict, role commitment, and job satisfaction for female and male high school principals. educational administration quarterly, 40(3), 366-387. witmer, j. t. (2006). moving up: a guide for women in educational administration. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. wrushen, b. r., & sherman, w. h. (2008). women secondary school principals: multi-cultural voices from the field. international journal of qualitative studies in education, 21(5), 457469. international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle balancing parenthood and academia: the challenges and contradictions of academic careers elizabeth m. o'laughlin, ph.d. lisa g. bischoff, ph.d. o'laughlin & bischoff, winter, 2001 at the individual level, parent academicians themselves are likely guilty of increasing personal stress by trying to "do it all" rather than setting appropriate limits on both work and family expectations. introduction balancing career and parenthood is a challenging task for women and men from all career paths. however, there are aspects of academic positions that make balancing career and parenthood uniquely challenging. the balance may be especially difficult when individuals are making the transition into academia and parenthood during the same time period. in addition, there are stresses related to time pressures, multiple roles and incompatible expectations which can create work/family conflict for both tenured and non-tenured faculty striving to cope with competing family demands. characteristics of academia there are several characteristic aspects of employment in academia that likely impact balancing work and family. although employment in many vocations requires a six-month or one-year period of probation, non-tenured faculty members remain in a "probationary period" for up to seven years, or until tenure is granted (aaup, 1997). thus, academicians are in a position of evaluation, conducted primarily by colleagues, for the first several years of their academic career. although the specific tenure requirements vary considerably by type of institution, college and department, there are several experiences that nontenured faculty in general share. for example, individuals facing tenure review are generally in a position in which they are expected to demonstrate high levels of competence and proficiency in the earliest years http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html 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young academicians regarding time spent in pursuing tenure as the "requirements" for tenure are often arbitrary, the time required to meet requirements cannot generally be specified, and tenure is not guaranteed. this may be especially difficult for academicians who are also parents, as they may be giving up time with their families, with no guarantee of an eventual "payoff" (e.g. tenure). furthermore, unlike positions with hourly wages, or specific monthly or yearly goals, academicians may spend a great deal of time which does not always result in an immediate or even long term "product" (e.g. research proposals which are declined, inconsequential committee work), making it difficult to gauge progress and to obtain satisfaction from work completed. a second aspect, not entirely unique to academic positions, is the multitude of job responsibilities that must be managed on a daily basis. academicians often wear several different "hats" including, but not limited to: teacher, advisor, consultant, researcher, committee member, editor, and colleague. unlike professions in which many job responsibilities serve the same overriding purpose (e.g. representing a client in law, improving a client's health in medicine), there may be little overlap in the goals of research, teaching and service obligations in academia. multiple role responsibilities can create an environment in which academicians are "in demand" in multiple roles simultaneously, and the lack of overlap between roles can create a sense of dissonance while also perpetuating an expectation that one must be "all things to all people." a third characteristic of academia which is somewhat different from careers requiring a similar level of education, is the degree of independence and flexibility. although courses may be scheduled at specific times, there is generally freedom in how an individual teaches a course, in the area of research an individual pursues, and in the nature and extent of involvement in campus or community service. this degree of independence can be a double-edged sword for beginning academicians. without specific guidelines, or the advice of a mentor, new academicians may struggle to establish their teaching style, determine profitable (i.e. publishable) areas of research, and achieve an optimum level of service activities. although yearly evaluations may provide feedback in these areas, success in teaching and research is often individualistic, as well as field-specific, and requires longer term development of skills and competence. thus despite positive evaluations, new academicians may continue to doubt their abilities until granted tenure (mintz, 1992). the independence and flexibility of academic positions is often misperceived both by individuals drawn to academic careers and by the public. it has been noted that many individuals are likely attracted to the apparent autonomy and flexibility characteristic of academic careers. however, many academicians "find that in the early years...the time required to maintain a balanced life is not available " and thus find themselves "trapped by the contradiction built into the academic career " (rice, 1996, p. 24). although flexibility is an option for non-tenured and tenured faculty alike, the cost of less "face time" at work, or in taking summers off is likely much greater for individuals facing tenure review. this contradiction between expectations of flexibility and balance versus the reality of the pre-tenure experience, can be a source of frustration for many beginning academicians and their families. individuals outside of academia are also likely to perceive the apparent flexibility of the career as ideal for balancing work and family. a common public perception is that academics have summers "off", can set their own schedules, and have few responsibilities besides teaching a small number of classes. in reality, the demands of an academic position are generally quite demanding, often requiring a 50-60 hour work week during the school year, as well as frequent unpaid summer work. in addition, although there is often greater flexibility in academic positions than in other careers, this flexibility is offset by ambiguity in tenure requirements as well as lack of closure characteristic of many academic tasks (mintz, 1992). this discrepancy between public perception and the reality of academic career demands can further contribute to lack of support and understanding that parents in academia are likely to experience. finally, it has been noted by several women academicians that a woman's biological clock is often running in direct opposition to the typical tenure clock (e.g. hensel, 1991; wilson, 1999). women and men pursuing academic careers typically delay starting families until after they begin their first academic position, placing them in the position of making the decision to have a first or second child, while coping with the demands of a new academic position and working towards tenure. given that an academic position generally requires a doctoral degree at a minimum, and often additional postdoctoral experience, it is not uncommon for men and women to begin their academic careers at the peak, and sometimes the later end of a woman's reproductive years, thus making the decision regarding the timing of parenthood more difficult. men and women who become parents early in their academic careers are faced with the compound demands of new work and new family responsibilities, leading to significant role strain which can threaten both personal health and career success. the high level of stress associated with combining parenthood and academia perhaps may help to explain why a study of faculty at a carnegie i research university found that 44% of women assistant professors had no children at the time of the study, although one-third of these women were married or in permanent relationships. thirty-three percent of the childless assistant professors reported a desire to remain childless; a decision they reported was significantly influenced by their academic career goals (finkel & olswang, 1996). the bulk of research which addresses the issue of parenthood and tenure is focused almost exclusively on women. however, as more and more academician men have been involved in dual-career relationships, there has been a corresponding increase in expectations for greater involvement in childcare responsibilities (hensel, 1991). in addition, consideration of work/family conflict in academia tends to emphasize research productivity among academicians (particularly women) who become parents (e.g. cole & zuckerman, 1987; sonnert & holton, 1996), and says very little regarding the individual's success in coping with the emotional strain of balancing an academic career with family responsibilities. the types of work/family conflict discussed in the present article, as well as the recommendations for achieving greater balance in meeting career and family demands are not specific to either gender or tenure status. rather, many of the issues discussed here would likely apply to academician men and women, tenured or non-tenured, who are significantly involved in childcare responsibilities. work-family conflict in academia several types of work-family conflict have been identified (e.g. greenhaus & beutell, 1985). time-based conflict occurs when time pressures from one role make it impossible to comply with the expectations of another role. strain-based conflict occurs when the stress of one role impacts on one's performance in another role, and behavior-based conflict occurs when behaviors expected in one role are incompatible with behaviors expected in another role. overload and stress related to work-family conflict have been found to be associated with a variety of negative outcomes including health risks and depression for individuals, as well as business costs of poor moral, decreased productivity, and greater absenteeism and turnover (duxbury & higgins, 1994). each of these forms of work-family conflict have relevance for academician parents. time-based conflict is likely as it has been estimated that an average professor works approximately 55 hours per week (hensel, 1991). although academic positions generally have the advantage of a flexible work schedule, the outcome of this flexibility is that work is often accomplished at home in the evening or on weekends. working at home may create behavior-based conflict, as the focus and energy needed to fulfill work expectations is likely to conflict with demands for attention from children and/or spouses. strain-based conflict may be especially relevant for academicians, as job characteristics of academic positions generally involve a high degree of ambiguity and autonomy, as well as tension, worry and frustration related to disappointments, unfulfilled expectations and coping with a multitude of responsibilities. new academicians may be particularly susceptible to "spillover" as feelings of incompetence, fears of negative evaluation, and anxiety regarding job security are "taken home" on a regular basis. as a means of coping with feelings of job-related anxiety, academicians may work even longer hours, resulting in greater family-based stress as expectations of family members are neglected. related to both time and strain-based conflict, is the expectation that one will fulfill multiple role demands within the academic position. thus, individuals in academic positions are likely to be juggling roles within the work setting as well as between work and family roles, increasing the likelihood of work to family interference as well as role overload. one model of work-family conflict predicts that conflict stemming from family responsibilities can be lessened by gaining greater control over family demands, and that conflict originating from work-role responsibilities should decrease as one gains greater control over work demands (duxbury & higgins, 1994). considering the academic employment setting, this model would predict less job stress among academicians who maintain control over decisions such as taking time off, working overtime, or changing their work schedule. thus, the ability to maintain control over one's work schedule is clearly a potential asset for academician parents. likewise, greater control over family demands (e.g. satisfaction with division of household and child care responsibilities), may have the potential to lessen the impact of family-based stress. a supportive spouse or partner can serve as a buffer against role overload by minimizing family demands in periods of time in which work demands are high. however, in dual-career families, which is often the case for academician parents (sonnert & holton, 1996), partners who are also engaged in active careers are likely to be less willing and/or able to assume greater household and parenting responsibilities. another factor related to family and spouse support, is the degree to which the academician parent and his/her spouse share beliefs and values in regard to parenting, household responsibilities, and work priorities (e.g. short and long term emphasis on career vs. family). it has been suggested that it is not the pattern of sharing parenting and household tasks (e.g. both partners equally involved versus one partner assuming more responsibility) which determines greater satisfaction in dual career families, but rather each partner's perceptions of fairness and support (gilbert, 1994). similarly, couples who share a common view of the value or importance of either or both individual's career development as well as family priorities, are also likely to experience a greater sense of support from the relationship. gender differences in work-family conflict among academicians women in academia are paid less than men of similar rank, are promoted more slowly, and receive tenure at lower rates (manning, 1993; johnsrud & desjarlais, 1994). a 1997 survey of more than 2,200 academic institutions revealed a "small but persistent" gap in the salaries of men and women at similar ranks (bell, 1997). in addition, women continue to be significantly underrepresented among senior faculty. at category i doctoral-level institutions, 45% of women were tenured as compared with 73% of men (finkel & olswang, 1996). benjamin (1999) reports that a growing number of women academicians are accepting part-time and non-tenure-track appointments and may do so due to constraints imposed by lack of mobility and childcare responsibilities. women scholars have also suggested that women, more often than men, are shouldering greater household and childcare responsibilities (wilson, 2000). whether the constraints for women are institutional, self-imposed through gender role expectations, or both; it appears that woman entering into academic careers may experience greater work-related stress, and lower levels of professional success than men. thus, for women who are balancing parenthood and academic career demands, levels of both work and family stress may be somewhat higher as compared with men. conclusions the work-family conflicts described above are not unique to gender or to any specific occupation. we are not suggesting that the strain of balancing work and family responsibilities is significantly greater in academia versus other careers, or that men do not also experience work and family conflict. we recognize that many of the stresses discussed in this article are as relevant for academicians without spouses or children. we are suggesting, however, that support and understanding regarding family issues in academia is lacking at both individual and institutional levels. at the individual level, parent academicians themselves are likely guilty of increasing personal stress by trying to "do it all" rather than setting appropriate limits on both work and family expectations. at the institutional level, family-friendly policies have only recently come into existence at some universities. a 1996 survey of 3,343 higher education institutions found that 40% of respondents had stop-the-clock tenure policies (friedman, rimsky, & johnson, 1996). however this study also found that stop-the-clock policies were one of the policies most associated with career penalties and least likely to be used. thus it appears there exists the need for continued development and modification of family-friendly policies at the institutional level. with regard to gender, it appears that women in academia may face greater hurdles than men in the work environment, creating greater potential for work to family interference. the sociocultural expectations regarding women's role in childrearing may also lead to greater guilt and family to work interference among women versus men in academia. although there are likely many issues impeding the recruitment and promotion of women in academia, issues involving the balance of career and family is likely one important factor. we would argue, however, that exploration of work-family stress is also quite important for men in academia, as it is becoming much more common for men to assume a greater degree of parenting responsibilities. family leave policies and flexible schedules are equally available to both men and women in academia. however, men in some departments and institutions may experience greater criticism and less support in their endeavors to modify work schedules in order to share child care responsibilities. this may be particularly true in settings in which senior faculty and administrators are men who may have less experience and less understanding of role-sharing dual-career families. in summary, we believe greater understanding of issues and challenges facing academician parents is crucial to supporting the success of individuals entering academic careers. just as diversity in gender and ethnicity can contribute to the learning environment in higher education, so too can the experience of parenthood. raising a child promotes patience, empathy and understanding---all factors which could improve teaching, research and service skills. thus, rather than overlooking the evident stress and struggles to balance work and family common among many parent academicians, we are proposing that individuals, colleagues and especially institutions take steps to better support academician parents in achieving success in academia, while also striving for balance in work and family roles. recommendations for institutional support: 1. extended tenure: although a growing number of higher education institutions have formal or informal policies granting extended tenure for family related reasons (childbirth, adoption, illness in self or significant other), these policies are often not promoted or communicated to faculty members. in addition, there remains a great deal of concern about the possible career penalties associated with making use of such policies. informal policies may provide flexibility in individual cases, yet the burden of requesting extended tenure or other modifications is placed on the faculty member, who may be hesitant to draw attention to difficulties balancing work and family demands. formal policies of extended tenure, which are implemented and openly communicated at the administrative level are recommended. in addition, such policies should be viewed as an employee right, similar to the family leave act, rather than a privilege or special circumstance. in developing such policies, educational institutions may attract and retain more high quality individuals who are seeking employment in a family friendly institution. 2. quality daycare: high quality, available, on-campus childcare for both infants and preschool children is a key factor in providing support for faculty parents. however, at many institutions the availability of childcare for children under the age of two is often insufficient. in addition, daycare and school schedules may not coincide with the university schedule, creating the need for supplemental daycare arrangements. institutions unable to support large childcare facilities could assist parents in locating other reliable daycare in the community. by providing on-campus child care, sensitive to the needs of academician parents, institutions could promote faculty productivity, as on-site child care has been found to associated with greater worker satisfaction as well as less time spent commuting to and from daycare. 3. flexible work schedules: parents returning to work following the birth of a child may benefit from a schedule which minimizes early morning classes and high student contact courses, thus allowing greater flexibility in completing work at home and adjusting work schedules to accommodate child care arrangements. developing technologies, such as on-line teaching, could provide greater flexibility as parents could instruct classes from their home computer. 4. event scheduling: speakers and other events could be scheduled during daytime hours in addition to evening time slots, allowing parents to attend institution-sponsored events without sacrificing evening family time. 5. parent-academician mentors: new academician parents may benefit from mentoring offered by senior faculty who are effective in balancing work and family responsibilities. although valuable information and support may be gained from a mentor who does not share parenthood experiences, an academic mentor who is also a parent may allow academician parents to share their work-family stresses more readily. 6. sensitivity training: academician parents may avoid discussion of family life for fear of being perceived as being on the "mommy track" rather than the tenure track. this issue is relevant for both academician men and women. we encourage institutions to promote greater sensitivity of family issues by initiating discussion of family issues among faculty and administrators, thus facilitating more open discussion and perhaps greater support for individuals striving to balance work and family responsibilities. recommendations for individual academician parents: 1. make use of your support network. for individuals with partners or spouses, communication regarding division of family responsibilities as well as career orientation may help to increase support and to lessen family role strain. supportive friends and family members may also be able to assist during periods of high academic demands (e.g. research deadlines, end of the semester) to lessen family role strain. 2. seek out personal and professional mentors. we suggest that new academicians seek out multiple mentors, both within and outside of their department to gain as much support and information as possible in developing research, teaching, and service agendas. a mentor who has experience as a parent, may provide insight into developing realistic goals and a work schedules conducive to balancing work and family roles. 3. network with other parent academicians. consider establishing a playgroup, monthly parent-child activity, or babysitting cooperative with colleagues who also have children. through these types of activities, parents can develop familybased ties with colleagues, providing opportunities to share valuable information (e.g. daycare facilities, leave policies), while establishing support relationships in the work environment. references american association of university professors. (1997). defending tenure: a guide for friends of academic freedom. washington, dc: aaup. bell, l. a. (1997, march/april). not so good: the annual report on the economic status of the profession, 1996-97. academe, 83, 12-20. benjamin. e. (1999, jan/feb). disparities in the salaries and appointments of academic women and men. academe, 85, 60-62. beutell, n., & greenhaus, j. (1985). sources of conflict between work and family roles. academy of management review, 10, 76-88. billiard, l. (1993, may-june). a different path into print. academe, 79, 28-29. cole, j. r., & zuckerman, h. (1987). marriage, motherhood, and research performance in science. in zuckerman, cole & bruer (eds), the outer circle: women in the scientific community. new york: norton. desjarlais, c. d., & johnsurd, l. k. (1994). barriers to tenure for women and minorities. the review of higher education, 17, 335-353. duxbury, l., & higgins, c. (1994). interference between work and family: a status report on dual-career and dual-earner mothers and fathers. employee assistance quarterly, 9, 55-80. finkel, s. k., & olswang, s. g. (1996). child rearing as an impediment to women assistant professors. the review of higher education, 19, 123-129. friedman, d., johnson, a., & rimsky, c. (1996). college and university reference guide to work-family programs. new york: families and work institute. gilbert, l. (1994). current perspectives on dual-career families. current directions in psychological science, 3, 101-105. hensel, n. (1991). realizing gender equality in higher education: the need to integrate work/family issues. eric digest. washington, d.c.: the george washington university. holton, g., & sonnert, g. (1996). career patterns of women and men in the sciences. american scientist, 84, 63-71. manning, r. (1993). gender, moral orientation, and salary. paper presented at the women in higher education conference, el paso, tx. mintz, l. b. (1992). assistant professor: paranoid or self-preserving. the counseling psychologist, 20,39-46. rice, r. e. (1996). making a place for the new american scholar. new pathways: faculty careers and employment for the 21st century: working paper series. washington, dc: american association for higher education. wilson, r. (1999). timing is everything: academe's annual baby boom. the chronicle of higher education, a14-a15. wilson, r. (2000). female scholars suggest slowing the tenure clock. the chronicle of higher education, a18. dr. lisa g. bischoff is an associate professor of the educational school of psychology at indiana state university. dr. elizabeth m. o'laughlin is an assistant professor of psychology at indiana state university. dr. o'laughlin can be reached via e-mail at: pyolaugh@scifac.indstate.edu. subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style 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mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com aw home| jobsposting/search | search by google web or site | advertising | site map | awards | about us home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home business | entrepreneur |loan credit | web | network | balance |international| book store career strategies | employment | resumes | salary, benefits, employment, employee rights | negotiate career news | career indices, stats | career advice for execs,professionals |career advice for undergrads,mbas career paths | career planning for young women | mentoring and coaching | leadership development advancing women in leadership groundbreaking women: inspirations and trailblazers barbara polnick, dianne reed, carole funk, and stacey edmonson sam houston state university it is difficult to imagine or to underestimate the price many of these women paid in the currency of loneliness, self-doubt, ridicule, and insult. they were often considered to be in flagrant violation of the laws, written and unwritten, of god and man. many were jailed for their beliefs and activities. they were seen to be violating the natural order, the way “everyone” knew things were supposed to be. they persevered against odds that should have been seen to be overwhelming— and they triumphed (read & witlieb, p. 11). introduction what do a female pilot, a chief justice, a basketball player, and a fortune 500 ceo have in common? recognized as being the first to achieve or accomplish a particular honor, position, or skill in their various roles, these women are all members of a special group known as groundbreakers. in this article, we share the eleven common characteristics or traits of twenty-one women who, in addition to making significant contributions to their individual fields, inspired others to pursue goals previously unattained by women. descriptions of each of these traits are enhanced by examples from the stories of eleven of the twenty-one women—some whom you will know and some whom you probably will not. why study groundbreaking women? file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///search.html file:///advertising.html file:///sitemap.html file:///awards.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/writing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/career_strategies/index.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/business-home-oview_index.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/loans-credit.html file:///web.html file:///networks/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/balancing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/networks/intlinks.html file:///amazingbookstore/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/library/resume/index.html file:///career/salaries_emplmnt.html file:///career/negotiating.html file:///news/awblog.html file:///career/indices_stats.html file:///career/career_advice.html file:///career/career_advice_undergrad.html file:///career_path/career_paths.html file:///career_plan.html file:///mentor/index.html file:///leadership.html as researchers, the authors were intrigued with the idea that within the many lists of women who are recognized for their achievements, there was a special group of women whose character and actions led them to venture into unknown waters alone, with no previous role models or paths for success. by studying these female groundbreakers, the authors hoped to gain insights into what attributes these particular women possessed that might distinguish them from other people, thereby enhancing or changing the current leadership programs to include the development of these characteristics. several questions surfaced during this inquiry. in this article, we address three of them: (a) are there common characteristics or traits among women groundbreakers? (b) if so, what are they? (c) how can knowing the characteristics and achievements of these groundbreaking women, along with their stories, facilitate other women to reach their goals and become leaders? as women leaders, the significance of studying female groundbreakers became important to us when we reviewed the literature on females in school administration and determined that there was much work to be done in terms of facilitating women to obtain and sustain top leadership roles. research in this area indicates that the playing field for females in educational administration is still not level; 14% of superintendents are female and 86% are male (brunner, 2001). “for many policy experts, the persistent shortage of women at the highest levels of a field otherwise dominated by women—as teachers, principals, and central office administrators—is one of the most troubling leadership issues in public education” (keller, 1999, p. 1). helgesen (1990) further supported the need for more women in leadership roles in her description of female values related to leadership: as women's leadership qualities come to play a more dominant role in the public sphere, their particular aptitudes for long-term negotiating, analytic listening, and creating an ambiance in which people work with zest and spirit will help reconcile the split between the ideals of being efficient and being humane. this integration of female values is already producing a more collaborative kind of leadership, and changing the very ideal of what strong leadership actually is. (helgesen, 1990, p. 249) the current under-representation of women in top leadership positions is reflected in several research studies conducted on women in educational administration, which reveal many critical problems facing women when they try to enter or advance in administrative careers (brunner, 1999; gardiner, enomoto, & grogan, 2000; gupton & slick, 1996; hill & ragland, 1995; konek & kitch, 1994; shakeshaft, 1989). in spite of these difficulties regarding entry into leadership in education, the continuing discrimination in hiring and promotion, and other external and internal barriers, these women persistently pursue roles in leadership (edson, 1988). according to edson (1988), women who enter the field of school leadership do so because they wish to meet the challenges inherent in leadership roles and believe that they can provide children with more positive education experiences than they see currently provided in the nation's public schools. although the literature regarding female leaders in education revealed that more women than ever are entering administrative roles in education, "there is still much we do not know about sex discrimination, about female career patterns, about women leaders, and about inclusive conceptualizations of managerial and administrative theory” (dunlap & schmuck, 1995, p. xi). as noted by irby and brown (1998), it is important that we recognize that “… women's current poor representation in formal school leadership is not necessarily an inherent condition of the institution of schooling but rather is the result of social interactions that have unfolded in specific historical contexts” (p. 8). this statement shows the sociological nature of some of the problems embedded within our culture that need to be changed in order to reduce the barriers to equity. in a similar vein, shakeshaft (1989) explained that only a handful of models have been developed to explain the theoretical underpinnings of the barriers allowing women into leadership positions in the educational profession. she also stated that barriers for aspiring women in education are internal as well as external barriers that could originate from psychological factors such as motivation and self-efficacy. a quick review of the literature on women in leadership in education makes it is clear that female leaders need to be further researched to assist women in attaining and sustaining positions of leadership. given this need to study women leaders, this inquiry focused on those women who had made significant progress in their lives and because of their actions, opened doors for many other women. the study of groundbreaking women to address the needs of more women in top leadership roles, we began the study of female groundbreakers. in this article, the authors share the results of a study of twenty-one female groundbreakers. in selecting these women for this inquiry, we constructed a purposeful sample of groundbreakers who represented a crosssection of cultures, ages, and time periods in history and who came from a variety of professions (business, politics, medicine, science, sports, education, and sociology). women who had been previously recognized by organizations, institutions, professions and/or cultural groups for having achieved or attained a particular honor or position of national significance served as one source for the study. one such organization, the national aeronautics and space administration (nasa), featured groundbreaking women from a variety of careers, spanning one hundred years, from the 1890s through the 1990s. nationally recognized publications such as the 100 most influential women of all time (felder, 2001) and 1001 things everyone should know about women’s history (jones, 1998), along with several websites, such as http://www.distinguishedwomen.com, also served as valuable resources. from these lists, the authors constructed a purposeful sample of twenty-one groundbreaking women to study. table one includes the names of these women, their areas of recognition and the decades in which their contributions were made. focused group discussions were utilized to glean traits or characteristics of the women selected for study (n=21). examined holistically, the stories of these women provided a rich context for studying specific traits attributed to them as female groundbreakers. a content analysis of the descriptions of their lives and contributions resulted in the emergence of eleven common traits. these traits fell into the following categories: personal intelligences or talents; attitudes or beliefs about themselves and what they wanted to accomplish; and past experiences and people that influenced the success of the women. included below are descriptions of each of the eleven traits as they emerged from the stories of these groundbreaking women. results of the inquiry the women in this inquiry were already recognized by some outside entity for making an outstanding contribution to their field. additionally, the researchers selected them as being the first in their field to do so, thus identifying them as ‘groundbreakers’. the following eleven traits emerged from the study of these twenty-one women: (a) resilient or courageous, (b) visionary (c) self-efficacious (d) making a difference (e) persistent (f) valuing education (g) passionate about their work (h) believing in family first (i) advocating for the underrepresented (j) intellectually advanced, (k) and recognized by society as role models. examples from the lives of eleven of the twenty-one women are included in each of these eleven traits and their descriptions to illustrate how the traits emerged from their stories. resilient or courageous the women we researched demonstrated either courage in the face of threatening situations or resilience when confronted with hardships. these groundbreakers took the situations they found themselves in and used them as lessons to better themselves and make them stronger. amelia earhart, the first female to fly across the atlantic ocean solo, believed that “courage is the price life exacts for granting peace” (cmg, 2004, quote 7). her resilience was noted by long-time friend and navigator, fred noonan, when he described her as “a great companion and pilot.... who could take hardship as well as a man and worked like one, too” (cmg, 2004, quote 19). visionary women groundbreakers described themselves as having a vision or dream of what they wanted to do, often for others. able to see beyond the present circumstances, these women saw what was possible for themselves and others and drove themselves to achieve goals that would see their vision become reality. marie curie was a true visionary who believed in the potential of radiation’s curative power (jones, 1998). directing her efforts toward accomplishing a specific goal, she relentlessly pursued the scientific principles and discovered radium, created the study of radioactivity and opened a new field in physics. she was the first female to win a nobel prize and the only person to ever win two. self-efficacious women who were firsts demonstrated a sense of self-efficacy, a belief in their own power and ability to accomplish something, even when told they were not capable. ruth simmons, president of smith college, is the first female to head a major university. as the last of twelve children, she came from a family of tenant farmers that barely made enough to live on by raising cotton. but ruth believed in herself and her own abilities to accomplish great things. "the fact that there was definitely a really low ceiling for me didn't enter my mind," (nasa, 2004, para. 3). had a mission to make a difference while accomplishing amazing feats individually, these groundbreaking women were on a mission to make a difference for their profession and the lives of the people affected by their work. toni morrison, the first african american to receive the nobel prize for literature, is recognized as a visionary poet who used the language of african american slaves to articulate the reality of american life for black people. morrison proclaimed that her cause was about the restoration of the language that black people spoke to its original power, which was lost in the oral traditions of black slaves. morrison’s novels include an ongoing exploration of color, gender and identity, earning her worldwide acclaim as one of the greatest living writers in the world (felder, 2001). her achievements are remarkable, not only for their contribution to american literature, but also for the author herself, because morrison did not publish her first novel until she was thirty-nine years old. persistent our female groundbreakers exhibited a persistence to accomplish their missions even when facing obstacles such as physical illness, financial struggles, or prejudice with respect to gender and/or race. cheryl miller was the first female analyst to call a nationally televised national basketball association (nba) game on turner broadcasting system (tbs). as a modern-day athlete and sports commentator, she ov ercame many gender and racial obstacles to become a prominent black woman athlete. she was thirteen years old when she tried out for an all-male basketball team. after beating her coach’s son in a one-on-one game as a condition for playing on the team, she asked the coach when she should report to practice. according to her story, the coach looked her straight in the eye and said, "miller, the only court i'll see you in will be a court of law. no girl will ever play on my team” (miller, 1995, p.162). she then ran home crying and told her dad that she was quitting and that she never wanted to play basketball again. he sat her straight up and said: "i didn't raise any quitters. tomorrow you will try out for the girls’ team and become the best who ever played" (miller, 1995, p. 162). valued education the groundbreaking women we studied were referenced as seeing education as a way to better themselves and help others succeed. education was the vehicle to either transform their circumstances or to propel them towards their goals. this value was either implied through their advanced degrees or directly spoken of in their stories. mary mcleod bethune, the first african american to serve as a special advisor to franklin delano roosevelt, is closely identified with education. she is primarily known as a prominent educator who greatly enhanced educational opportunities for african-american girls. “her outstanding efforts on behalf of the black community at the national and governmental level further enhance her status as one of america’s most influential leaders and the most important africanamerican woman of her time” (felder, 2001, p. 145). passionate about their work women groundbreakers from our study spoke of a passion for what they were doing, either as a career or as their life’s work. generally speaking, they loved their work. juanita morris kreps, the first woman to serve as the u.s. secretary of commerce and member of the board of directors of the u.s. stock exchange, loved her work. as an economist, teacher, dean of the women’s college at duke university, and negotiator for the u.s.-chinese trade agreement, her true passion was her research on the changing role of women in the labor force and its effect on the overall structure of society (encyclopedia, 1999). believed in family first while maintaining a drive to accomplish their goals, these women would often pass up opportunities that may have put their families in jeopardy, thus delaying the accomplishment of their goals. it should be noted, however, that the families were often also the support upon which the individuals depended in order to make their great achievements. we saw this “family-first” philosophy when we studied sandra day o’connor, the first female supreme court justice, who set aside her career for four years to raise her three sons (felder, 2001). advocated for the underrepresented it was surprising that so many of the women groundbreakers were strong advocates for the rights of the underrepresented. across generations, women voiced their concern for the status and treatment of women and other underrepresented populations, such as children and ethnic minorities. one of the strongest advocates from our study was frances perkins who founded the social security act of 1935 and the fair labor standards act. these were two of the most powerful acts of legislation to ever come from any secretary of labor. frances was described as being pragmatic with strong beliefs in the social welfare of others and a leader who demonstrated high moral convictions and commitment to the principles of law and morality (pasachoff, 1999). her advocacy for the underrepresented can be captured in this conversation with franklin delano roosevelt, “do you want these things done? [unemployment relief, public works, minimum wage, child labor laws, etc.] because you don’t want me for secretary of labor if you don’t” (pasachoff, 1999, p. 3). intellectually advanced the women exhibiting this characteristic often graduated from high school and college far ahead of their peers. linda wachner was one of the first women to lead a fortune 500 firm (pearson, 2004). she was described as a diligent student, graduating from high school at 16, after which she moved to state university of new york in buffalo and studied economics and business administration. she started out as a buyer working in a variety of apparel industry jobs. within one year she became the first woman vice-president in the firm’s 100-year history (pearson, 2004). recognized by society as role models as we researched these female groundbreakers, we often found statements that recognized these women as role models for other women. clearly accepted as the best in their field, these women were held up as what other women should work toward. sally ride, one of the most inspiring female groundbreakers in our study, was the first american woman to become an astronaut and travel into space. with a doctorate in physics from stanford, she also developed her talent as a writer, publishing three children’s books describing her experiences in space. serving as a member of the president’s committee of advisors on science and technology and formerly director of the california space science institute she has set the pace for generations of women. she offers both challenges and hope to the many women that will follow in her footsteps (nasa, 1999). summary and conclusions our work with female groundbreakers to this point has led us to believe that women who are the first in their fields to achieve or accomplish a particular honor, position or task, do exhibit distinct traits and characteristics that support and promote their success as leaders in their fields. this inquiry resulted in the description of eleven common traits, viewed here as cumulative for the set of women groundbreakers in the study and described here through the stories of eleven of the twenty-one women from the study. while we were not able to find specific examples in the literature of all eleven traits for each of the twenty-one women, we felt that the lack of evidence may be a limitation of recorded history— not the women or the characteristics themselves. through this inquiry, we were able to glean responses to the question “how can knowing the characteristics and achievements of these groundbreaking women, along with their inspirational stories, facilitate other women to become leaders?” the set of characteristics derived from this study of women groundbreakers has significant curricular implications for promoting and developing the critical leadership skills needed in educational leadership, especially for aspiring future and practicing female educators from diverse populations—doors, heretofore, closed. incorporating the stories of these great women in leadership programs in education and other related fields can both inspire current and future leaders to address the challenges facing women in leadership and encourage women to pursue their dreams and achieve their goals. studying a set of characteristics belonging to these female trailblazers can be the basis for professional development for female aspirants who wish to break the glass ceilings and enter uncharted territory leading to leadership roles. leadership courses and professional development can facilitate the development of women as leaders through (a) inspiration, (b) development of character traits, (c) connections and networking, and (d) high expectations of achievement. inspiration knowing these women and hearing their stories can inspire other women to greatness which, in turn, will inspire others to succeed. for many women, just hearing the stories can inspire them to go beyond what they see as limitations, regarding their ethnicity, their financial situations, their educational background or their family circumstances. women, in general, have not been the focus of historical, scientific, or cultural studies. they are not the authors, the politicians, the doctors, the scientists that are named among the ‘great men’ studied in school. nor have women been brought to the forefront as major players in the cultural influences of entertainers, artists, film producers or poets. studying female groundbreakers raises the level of awareness that there were and are many women who were the first to achieve an honor or to make a significant contribution, and in some cases, they were not just the first woman, but the first person to do so. by sharing these stories with other women, we can inspire them to think of themselves as leaders of men and women. they can become the best in their field, not just “as good as” the male heroes whom they have studied most of their lives but better. development of the character traits and skills in professional development programs there is a need for current leadership programs to include both personal skill and character building in their programs. this may be done in a variety of ways, but some of the more popular are through professional development seminars, college and university coursework, and training centers. programs currently exist that build leadership characteristics and skills in a variety of professions, such as found in the business leadership training programs at thunderbird, the garvin school of international management, ranked number one in international business by the wall street journal. in their program, they profess to develop “leaders equipped to be creative, ethical, and visionary; bold leaders, not afraid to take well-calculated risks; and leaders taught to shatter through comfort zones, glass ceilings, and stereotypes; to be the stewards of the twenty-first century” (thunderbird, 2004). others who developed leadership characteristics include babson college of business whose executive education program is ranked by financial times as being among the top nine in the world for overall executive education, and by business week as being in the top ten for custom programs. (babson, 2004). with a master’s degree in business administration, a program that has been ranked number one in entrepreneurship by u.s. news & world report for eleven straight years, this university focused on pertinent topics for the student’s own personal and professional development. educational institutions for public school leadership development who follow this same trend would go beyond teaching concepts and their application, to improving areas of personal development of each student, individually, based on their identified need and the characteristics identified as important in female groundbreakers. connections and networking an advantage that many men have had over women can often be found in the networking of top leaders with potential leaders. linking women with other women who are recognized as groundbreakers in their field can be an avenue for success for many women who otherwise may not achieve their potential. once these groundbreaking women are identified, networking links may occur through direct contact, discourse at conferences, or with the exchange of written communication in which ideas are shared and connections are made. universities and professional development institutions may facilitate this networking by inviting these groundbreaking women to speak at conferences and to publish in their journals. in addition, established leaders in state and national organizations can facilitate networking through special interest groups and conferences within conferences. setting high expectations for achievement the study of women groundbreakers is like a circle that expands, and as the circle expands, so does the influence of these women to open doors for other women to be recognized for their work. the more discourse there is around women groundbreakers and the paths they chose to take, the greater the sense of normalcy regarding their actions—an expectation that ‘of course’ women need to be: courageous, visionary, driven by a mission and intellectually advanced, giving the message that is what great women are and do, and that is what is expected of you. clearly all of eleven of the women we studied could be considered role models for future female leaders in that they exhibited many of the characteristics that we attribute with success. however, it was not clear from all the descriptions of the women that we were able to find, that they were recognized for such. a more indepth study of female groundbreakers is needed, one that accesses information not currently available to the general public through popular reading and viewing. much of the information about these women may only be found in specialized museums and private displays of writings and other artifacts of their work. follow-up interviews with those women still living would no doubt provide first-hand data that would link the above and maybe even more traits to each female groundbreaker. are you a female groundbreaker? was your mother or grandmother one? do you know a woman who has the potential to be the first to achieve an honor or make a significant contribution? we challenge everyone who works with these future groundbreakers to read and share the stories of: amelia earhart, marie curie, ruth simmons, toni morrison, cheryl miller, mary mcleod bethune, juanita morris kreps, sandra day o’connor, frances perkins, linda wachner, and sally k. ride, to name a few. use their stories as inspiration for yourself and for the young women in your family, classroom or business who can and will some day be a groundbreaker. we encourage you to explore the lives of many other women who are recognized as groundbreakers. references babson college, retrieved september 20, 2004, from http://www3.babson.edu/see/sem_lip/default.cfm? utm_source=overture&utm_mediu m=ppc&utm_term=leadership+skill, brunner, c. c. (ed.) (1999). sacred dreams: women and the superintendency. albany, ny: state university of new york press. brunner, c. c. (2001) new faculty member examines power and female school superintendents. the link on the web. retrieved august 20, 2004, from http://education.umn.edu/alum/link/2001fall/female.html. cmg worldwide. (2004). amelia earhart: celebrating 100 years of flight. retrieved august 13, 2004, from http://www.ameliaearhart.com/about quotes/html). dunlap, d. m., & schmuck, p. a. (1995). women leading in education. albany, ny: state university of new york. edson, s. k. (1988). pushing the limits: the female administrative aspirant. albany, ny: state university of new york. encyclopedia britannica online. (1999). kreps, juanita morris. women in american history. retrieved july 20, 2004, from http://www.britannica.com/eb/article? tocid=9125835&query=janowitz%2c%20morris felder, d. g. (2001). the 100 most influential women of all time. new york: citadel press with kensington publishing corp. gardiner, m. e., enomoto, e., & grogan, m. (2000). coloring outside the lines. albany, ny: state university of new york press. gupton, s. l., & slick, g. a. (1996). highly successful women administrators: the inside stories of how they got there. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press, inc. helgesen, s. (1990). the female advantage: women's ways of leadership. new york: doubleday. hill, m. s., & ragland, j. c. (1995). women as educational leaders: opening windows, pushing ceilings. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press, inc. irby, b. j., & brown, g. (1998). women leaders: structuring success. dubuque, iowa: kendall/hunt publishing company. jones, c. (1998). 1001 things everyone should know about women’s history. new york: broadway books. keller, b. (1999). women superintendents: few and far between. retrieved september 20, 2004, from http://www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm? slug=11women.h19 konek, c. w., & kitch, s. l. (eds.) (1994). women and careers: issues and challenges. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. miller, c. (1995, november). 50 years of black women in sports. ebony, 51, 162. retrieved august 15, 2004, from http://www.questia.com nasa quest. (1999). sally ride. female frontiers questchat archive. retrieved september 13, 2004, from http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/chat_archives/ride03-2399.html nasa quest. (2004). ruth simmons. women of nasa: meet the inspirational women of nasa. retrieved september 13, 2004, from http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/women/todtwd97/simmons.bio.html pasachoff, n. e. (1999). frances perkins : champion of the new deal. new york: oxford university press. pearson education. (2004). linda wachner. infoplease. retrieved september 27, 2004, from http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/a0776488.html. read, p. j., & witlieb, b. l. (1992). the book of women’s firsts. new york: random house. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. newbury park, ca: sage publications. thunderbird garvin school of international management. retrieved july 20, 2004, from http://www.thunderbird.edu/students/index.htm. appendix a.table one. groundbreaking women area of recognition decade copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home 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file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/business-home-oview_index.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/loans-credit.html file:///web.html file:///networks/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/balancing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/networks/intlinks.html file:///amazingbookstore/index.php file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership intersections on the border crossings of black women’s standpoints janet k. pilcher, ph.d. pilcher, spring, 2002 as feminists, we interconnect race, class, gender, and other oppressive structures to highligh the diversity of experiences. in our local communities people are suffering from exploitation, oppression, and social injustice. places for sharing one another’s differences are scarce. therefore, we are facing a crisis where hearts and minds remain closed to pains and joys of social diversity. all the while, multiple standpoints shape people’s experiences in daily lives within our local communities. how we choose to value or de-value these standpoints determines individual oppression or privilege. thus, creating spaces for border crossing experiences on the feminist terrain promote new understandings of our histories and futures as women living in interlocking systems of oppression. four of my students who are black women and i intersected race, class, and gender as we talked and read about black women’s experiences and standpoints in the world and how these standpoints interacted with existing “white” feminist perspectives. as their teacher and a white woman, i understood that i possessed a privileged position in this space. thus, my goal was to follow patricia hill collins’ (1991) advice to place the black women’s experiences at the center of our discussions hoping that it would help me broaden mine and others’ insights on feminist perspectives. to write about border crossing, i knew that de-centering white female privilege would be an essential struggle for the black women and me. i also wanted to offer the black women new knowledge through black feminist readings about how their experiences could be empowering as they began to define their own realities (collins, 1991). bell hooks (1994) tells us that “contemporary discussions of relationships between black women and white women (whether scholarly or personal) rarely take place in integrated settings. white women writing their impressions in scholarly and confessional work often ignore the depth of enmity between the two groups, or see it solely as a black problem” (p. 101). four black female students and i worked to break these barriers that are referred to by bell hooks. together we remained committed to create social spaces for connecting our identities and collective struggles that crossed boundaries of race, class, and http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html gender. we kept the matrix of domination at the theoretical forefront of our discussions and interactions to combat overgeneralizations and examined how regulatory structures of society and culture define our multifaceted identities. we, thus, explored time and time again the ways “some peoples voices get authorized to get their way more often than not and [black women] learn that their preferences don’t much matter” (rogers, 1998, p. 31). these four black women show how those more victimized than privileged within the matrix of domination express themselves with tentative voices, while the more privileged express words freely. their words speak to how black women living in oppressed situations come to accept their own subordination because their daily realities get institutionalized and normalized. finally, they help us recognize that “voice is the key to understanding the lived realities of hierarchy, domination, and oppression” (rogers, 1998, p. 33). to promote opportunities for alleviating silenced voices and breaking existing hierarchical boundaries, teachers and their students must work through their own privileged positions within the matrix of domination. using the theoretical positions of black feminist thought i encouraged these women to embrace “border crossing dialogue” that fosters a paradigmatic shift on how we define power relations. our dialogue provides an example of how students and instructors can reconceptualize the social relations of domination and resistance by promoting a paradigm of interlocking systems of race, class, gender, and other social injustices (collins, 2000). silence and conformity on the border listening to paula, anita, drucilla, and roslyn over the past few years, i understood that first they needed to define and re-define their identities and standpoints. i first met these women in a graduate qualitative research class of 30 students in the spring of 1999 where i used a thematic approach to teach concepts aligned to a book chapter in patricia hill collins (1991) work on black feminist thought. the chapter was titled, mammies, matriarchs, and other controlling images. knowing that many, if not all, of my graduate students had yet to experience black female writers’ voices, i shared with them selected works of patricia hill collins, bell hooks, alice walker, toni morrison, maya angelou, and audre lorde. the goal was to give students a sense of these writers’ thoughts and perspectives on systems of domination, patriarchal hierarchies, and relations of ruling. we used the writings to engage in “talk,” creating a learning community based on “an interest in one another, in hearing another’s voices, and in recognizing one another’s presence” (bell hooks, 1994, p. 8). during the semester, these four black women predominately remained silent. their silence made me question whether my actions inhibited the flow of ideas and feelings. i feared that they felt isolated within our learning community. at times, i doubted that i created a social space where everyone’s voice was heard and valued. through their small amount of dialogue, the women spoke cultured, bourgeois, institutional talk. in most instances, their interactions in class did not differ from those of their classmates. like their classmates, the four women were highly concerned with traditional modes of classroom activities. they joined the class in ensuring that they met “my” course expectations. they, along with many students, expressed frustrations with me not telling them exactly how to structure, reflect on, and write their papers. the black women and their classmates expressed discomfort with my encouraging them to think creatively about their dialogue, actions, and reflections. the black women seemed to talk as if the women’s voices in black feminist writings were about “types” of women unlike themselves. they struggled with seeing their own voices and lacking privilege and authority. one black woman wrote, i think that this class made me more aware of people who are oppressed. i guess i can say i had been going about my day somewhat oblivious to the oppressed. this was not done intentionally. my mind and energy had been focused elsewhere…i do not want to be an oppressor, nor can i sit by and let the oppressed continue to be voiceless. talk, when it occurred, seemed distant and impersonal. the black women seemed to be sitting back, watching, listening to the interactions of the community of learners talking about black women, that is, themselves. although black women writers’ voices focused our class, students neither asked questions nor directed comments to the black women in their learning community. nor did i. this territory seemed too risky and uncomfortable. it was a place where we all needed to go, but could not travel. together we feared entering this dialogue, crossing a community border awaiting transformation. at the end of class, the black women and the rest of our community left with little uncertainty about where we could go from this class in order “to make a difference” to undermine oppressive practices in the world. the black women referred to these uncertainties and lack of assurances. one stated, i’m not all too sure if i learned what i should have learned in this class but i can say it had given me the opportunity to think about the way i view the world and not just my little world. i never realized how important it was to ensure that voices that were traditionally silenced be heard. notice how she continues to skirt the issue of how her black female voice gets oppressed in patriarchal social structure. this same sort of voice shows up again in another voice. i am not sure what i can do, but i know that as a black, educated female who has been entrusted with a leadership role, i have an obligation to help those less fortunate. through the reading of collins and other black feminists, i have come to better understand, and appreciate the plight of african americans, i realize that i am only one generation from the “mammy image.” the black women in this learning community have been entrenched in a eurocentric, bourgeois educational system. they felt uncomfortable with an engaged pedagogical approach even when that approach within our class laid the groundwork for privileging their voices. ironically, in class their actions and reflections failed to indicate that their voices needed privileging. their relative comfort prevailed within the educational system where they had over the years learned how to conform in order to succeed. black feminist standpoints across the border during the month following the end of class, i received emails from the black women sharing readings and other works of black feminist writers. as our dialogue continued, i realized that the learning needed to continue for me and the black women. it was at this point that we formed a black feminist reading group that has met twice a month for the past year. listening to the four black women’s voices who participated in the small group, i understood that their standpoints shifted as they moved interchangeably from oppressed to oppressors living within interlocking systems of race, class, gender, and other destructive hierarchies. collins (1991) claims that black women possess and share a unique standpoint as a group. beyond this historical and cultural perspective, the black women talked about being oppressed and oppressing others when conforming to the bourgeois structures. this new and smaller learning space, at first, felt uncomfortable. moving through my fears with the black women, i initiated intensified discussions by risking disharmony and tension. by choosing to be part of this informal learning community, i trusted our ability to create “honest talk.” through our “honest talk,” interweaving notions of engaged pedagogy with our personal stories, we used “theory as a location of healing” (bell hooks, 1994, p. 59). we sought to shape theory to educate ourselves and, eventually, the public. at the end of the year, together anita, roslyn, drucilla, and paula defined their standpoints by sharing common understandings as they continued to struggle with themselves, each other, and with me. authenticated in their lived experiences during the year, they wrote through a lens of difference. writing their reflections when participating in the black feminist reading group, the black women spoke of empowerment, transformation, eros, and morality. standpoint of empowerment anita wrote, when i entered the qualitative research class and saw that the theme was african-american women, i was unsure of what to expect. i still held on to the standards and systems that have always been the status quo. i was very skeptical about what was expected. i can be very verbal in my classes but i had no idea what i should say in this class. i had no idea how my thoughts and expressions would be viewed by the other members of the class. would these thoughts be held under close scrutiny by these other members of the class (especially those most unlike me)? would i be perceived as fitting one of the typical stereotypes that we focused on in class? by using my “voice,” would it be somehow taken away from me through the negativity that sometimes came through our discussions? i must admit that some of the conversations that came out stunned me, but how was i supposed to react? pretty much in the same way that i always do, talk about my feelings after class with others who may (or may not) feel the same way i do. i had a problem with some of the statements and comments arising during class. many of the members (who are in the majority) had problems with allowing others (african-american women) to even feel as if we could (perhaps) express our voices. my first reactions to the class included amazement and suspicion. i wondered if the professor had a hidden agenda. several other students and i discussed why we felt she had a “need” to discuss african-american women. i wondered what she wanted from me. through the research class (and our group), i feel that we have all grown and found different values in ourselves and others that we may not have known about or been able to express. empowerment involves resisting a system of domination. it is created with an emerging praxis characterized by self-determination as opposed to coercion, intentionality as opposed to reaction, creativity as opposed to homogeneity, and rationality as opposed to chance (bell hooks, 1989). anita moved through these oppositions by listening to her voice, voices of classmates, and the voices of the black feminist reading group. she recognized our abilities to act in a manner that fosters the creation and evolution of humane order by referring to chaotic questions of uncertainty and skepticism about her classmates and me. anita continued to remain the most doubtful of the four women. however, the social space with other women encouraged further dialogue that transcended differences among us. standpoint of transformation roslyn wrote, society has never recognized the voice of blacks or women. society/education has never glorified the voices of blacks or women. no one has ever told them to be proud of the black or female voice. at the beginning of the learning process i felt that i had a voice. now as think through this do i really have my own voice? or have i been using the voice that they assigned me? maybe that’s why i didn’t feel oppressed. i seemed to have found comfort in the voice they so graciously, but slyly gave me. where is my true voice? the voice of me as a black woman? i must find my voice. in my qualitative research class, i learned about those who do not have a voice in society or in education (schools). as a result of our small group meetings, i began to question “my voice.” i thought that i had a voice, but i was actually using the voice that society had given me. throughout the class, i did not believe that the instructor was referring to me. i sat like all the other non-black students having empathy for “the oppressed black women.” now that i have had an awakening, i know the importance of having a voice. i now know the importance of valuing each individual’s voice. i believe that one must see his/her voice in print, in oral work, and in the opportunity to share lived experiences. i feel that we must continue to empower black women. i have learned the importance of dialogue and reflection. dialogue begins within confronting my own biases my prejudices my oppressive behaviors i have had to work through some of my fears, and i have had to examine my ownership of the oppressor’s voice. this process has been uncomfortable at times. my professor wrote to me, “fear is what holds us back from transforming and changing.” she has provided a safe place for us to share our thoughts, our anger, our frustrations, and our guilt. she wrote to me in an email, “take pride in your voice and yourselfyou deserve that feeling.” this is the first time that anyone has said that my voice, as a black woman is something to be proud of. as i struggled with “my voice,” and my guilt, my professor wrote, “as painful as it is now, this revelation will be very healing for your soul as you move through life. doing it alone without a collective effort is not good enough.” i am thankful for the support and encouragement that i have received from our group. i will continue to work through my fears, i will continue the healing process. society/education must seek to provide safe places where collective groups can work through their fears and their guilt, and thereby facilitate transgression. roslyn experienced a revelation as she assumed responsibility for oppressing others. she understood that “women can and do participate in politics of domination, as perpetrators as well as victims” (bell hooks, 1989, p. 457). she examined indeed scrutinized her role in perpetuating and maintaining systems of domination. as roslyn participated with the group she resisted her oppressive reactions and rescued her inner voice. she concluded with what bell hooks (1989) suggested “must be the foundation of feminist movements” (p. 468). solidarity stems from our collective work to confront difference as we approach interlocking systems of domination and choose to cross borders to feel others’ pains and sufferings. standpoint of eros drucilla wrote, as a participant of this group, one of my eye-opening experiences was the lack of “true communication” and “understanding” that exist between black and white women. although there are many books, publications, articles, etc., that have been published by white women attempting to address issues for black women, the need for communication is still great. it is my belief that there is a lack of effort from both sides (black and white women) to communicate openly, honestly and effectively. therefore, due to this lack of communication we as women are not in the position to offer a normative platform to help better issues surrounding “all women.” i read an article the other day written by a white educator who was facing struggles and challenges with difference and diversity. brady, the educator explains, “we are all white. we seriously question if we have the right to speak "for" others while attempting to find ways to speak "with" others. many of us lack the practical experience of teaching to difference." the story goes on and on. as a participant of this group, i have enjoyed the experience and believe that it has been beneficial to me both professionally and personally. outside the group i have on occasion shared with my african american colleagues some of the group’s discussions and articles. repeatedly, i noticed that their responses about the group’s facilitator, who happens to be a white female, validated the opinion of brady and questioned her motives. we are all aware that many differences exist between white and black women. however, there are also great similarities and many of our struggles are the same. today, although we may or may not agree on the differences that exist between women across all races, we must agree that when any woman is educated, trained, motivated and encouraged, she is then empowered and has the ascendancy to change a new generation, i.e., her children, her family. drucilla continuously expressed compassion for our group members and for those individuals who experience domination. bell hooks (1989) labels this growth the “politicization of love” or people working to be loving, creating a culture that celebrates human and other life to move against dehumanization and domination. a feminist crisis that stems from privileging hierarchical, feminist positions over others begs us to “draw upon this love to heighten our awareness, deepen our compassion, intensify our courage, and strengthen our commitment” to each other (bell hooks, 1989, p. 27). drucilla’s thinking evolved as she crossed the borders of commonalities among white and black women. she sustained a mediating force of love to face the domination of black women in a racist society. drucilla found a way to confront differences constructively and successfully. because her life is fuller and richer from this experience she changed and grew politically to end domination. standpoint of morality paula wrote, whiteness is not about skin color or race. instead it is about position, oppression, and power. frankenberg defines 'whiteness' as a location of structural advantage, of race privilege. 'whiteness' has also been described as a standpoint, a place from which white people look at themselves, others, and society. our professor exposed, disrupted and interrogated whiteness in our qualitative research class. she experienced resistance (voiced and silently) from students immediately when she introduced african-american women as the focus of the class. this class was powerful because members were forced to examine their own 'whiteness' (including black members of the class whose 'whiteness' stemmed from their level of education). after looking at individual 'whiteness', the need for change was recognized. this realization brought with it much resistance as well as resentment. despite the anger expressed, particularly by white males in the class, and the fear surely felt by black women, our professor forged ahead by continuing to cross boundaries never experienced by most (if any) of the students in any other academic or professional setting. her sincere interest in the lives of black women was the first step in interrupting whiteness. she was successful because of her ethic of care and respect, which was communicated in the first session and throughout the semester. students who entered our classroom left changed no matter how hard they resisted it. as a result (or an extension) of the qualitative class, we formed a focus group with the black female students of the class. this group works to interrupt whiteness by exposing 'blackness'. our professor is the only white member of the group. group members are encouraged to share the influence that whiteness has had on our lives. i realized that whiteness had been interrupted for me in the group when a group member made a comment about white people and i was alarmed when she used the phrase, "you all" (referring to whites) directing the statement to our professor. paula referred to applying an ethic of care to disrupt ‘whiteness.’ she discovered others’ voices joining her own voice of blackness to cross foreign boundaries. gilligan’s feminist ethic of care supports that people’s lives connect to one another in subtle and not so subtle ways. the catalyst for this breakdown is what we labeled “honest talk,” the basis of moving out of one position to another by appealing for social change and border crossing. collins (1991) asserts that for black feminist writers, empathy is a component of the ethic of care. paula felt that the group created a social space for promoting an ethic of care where “honest talk” transpired to transform relationships from the way that all of us live in a patriarchal structure. summary while participating in the black feminist reading group, the black women defined their unique feminist standpoints with one another and with me. my place was to listen and understand their views about their histories and experiences. while listening, from time to time i was moved to de-center white feminist privilege to make room for their voices to be written and spoken. at one point i felt a need to break barriers and explore fears that are seldom examined. i began my talk: through my life i consciously and critically reflect imprints on me of others’ talk about black women. my ancestral roots embedded in rural america paint a picture of black women’s place within the historical context discussed by bell hooks and others. thankfully, i am young enough to not have witnessed the acts of rape and coercion by white men within my family line. my childhood interaction with black women was one of relating to a black woman caregiver whom as a family we continue to love and adore. within my small, three member family we don’t speak of hate for racial and gender difference. in essence, we do not speak of difference at all. most of what i have learned has been what i have heard from other white members of the world. consciously, i strive to unlearn portrayals of lived experiences of this outer world’s influence. each and every day, i now hear words that have always been spoken, that i used to not hear. these words are hurtful and unjust. what saddens me most is within white presence i am “privileged” to hear expressions that black women never know are spoken. it is a language that white some people speak among their own in the workplace, at home and in social settings that they dare not speak within the presence of black people. i was thankful that the women did not ask me to share this hurtful language with them. that is, they accepted my small, but significant step across the border. they seemed to trust that i wanted our encounters to be enriching and empowering. paula, roslyn, drucilla and anita did not give up their identities as black women, but crossed borders with each other and with me to inter-connect their new awareness to other oppressive structures. together we have produced a collective work that sends a revitalized message to the feminist movement while supporting bell hooks suggestions for “creating a context where we can engage in open critical dialogue with one another, where we can debate and discuss without fear of emotional collapse, where we can hear and know one another in the difference and complexities of our experience” (p. 110). by doing so, political solidarity will emerge (bell hooks, 1994) inviting border-crossing politics, transformational politics (bell hooks, 1989), and localist politics (ackelsberg, 1996). notions within these politics create spaces for “honest talk” to confront difference within communities, explore ways difference divides us, and brings us together to understand the pains and sufferings of daily lived experiences in our own local communities. patriarchal systems remain intact unless feminist writers and scholars impart an ideological foundation. this foundation implies that we share common experiences of unique oppressions, which encourage our coming together. as feminists, we inter-connect race, class, gender, and other oppressive structures to highlight the diversity of experiences. listening to black women’s standpoints reinforces feminist thinking. the black women’s standpoints teach us that we must avoid giving lip service to the idea of diversity by creating social spaces for collective discourse and critical feedback to change our efforts and renew ourselves, to raise our critical consciousness. anita, paula, drucilla, roslyn and i collectively struggled to cross unfamiliar borders by embracing and valuing each other while breaking down white feminist privilege and empowering black women’s standpoints. despite the significance of this collective work, our contributions can only serve as guidelines because what works in one setting may not work in others (collins, 2000). with any attempt to use feminism to cross borders from one social injustice to another, we must invigorate consciousness and undercut hierarchy, challenge domination, and temper oppression (rogers, 1998). in our academic environments, we can use the social margins embedded in formal educational organizations as a place of resistance and a location to raise feminist consciousness. crossing intersecting borders on the social sidelines reinforces us to grow our feminist consciousness with our students. to do this, we must link alienation and neglect to the matrix of domination to emphasize that various dimensions of systems of domination interplay and intersect within certain circumstances of our social lives. references ackelsberg, m. (1996). identity politics, political identities: thoughts toward a multicultural politics, frontiers xvi (1), pp. 87 100. collins, p. (2002). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). new york: routledge. collins, p. (1991). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. boston: unwin hywin. gilligan, c. (1995). hearing the difference: theorizing connections. in rogers (ed.), contemporary feminist theory: a text/reader. (pp. 341 345). hooks, b. (1989). talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. boston: south end press. hooks, b. (1994). teaching to transgress: education as a practice of freedom. new york: routledge. rogers, m. (1996). multicultural experiences, multicultural theories. mcgraw-hill companies, inc rogers, m. (1998). contemporary feminist theory: a text/reader. mcgraw-hill companies, inc. author dr. janet k. pilcher is interim dean for the college of professional studies at the university of west florida. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 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gretchen glasscock editors: beverly j. irby, & genevieve browen advancing women in leadership pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 41 table of contents preface ....................................................................................................................................................................42 credits ....................................................................................................................................................................43 guest and past reviewers ................................................................................................................................. 44 creating space for subjectivity: wandering discourses of female/teacher ................................................... 45 introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 45 story sources and context for the study ...................................................................................................... 45 stories of the unspeakable: how discourses restrict thinking .................................................................. 46 stories of the unspeakable: silenced politeness .......................................................................................... 47 the unspeakable and alternative space ...................................................................................................... 48 references ......................................................................................................................................................... 48 pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 42 preface advancing women in leadership on-line journal was launched in 1997 with the intent of publishing manuscripts that report, synthesize, review, or analyze scholarly inquiry that focuses on women's issues. the intent of this journal is to encourage and support the proliferation of women in positions of leadership in all aspects of professional and corporate america. in the encouragement of advancing women in leadership, we present the following manuscripts. they are: women faculty in higher education: impeded by academe by dr. dana e. christman working against the grain: rewards and consequences of developing a personal voice in academia by dr. pamela lepage and dr. gretchen givens-generett creating space for subjectivity: wandering discourses of female/teacher by dr. donna k. phillips and dr. j.camille cammack. magazines: what adolescent girls are reading and the way they shape body image by dr. rebecca a. robles-piña and heidi sauer a study of the correlation between the motives of female high self monitors and emergent leadership: a literature review by charles salter hispanic female superintendents in america: a profile by dr. margaret a. manuel and dr. john r. slate our intent is that this journal is viewed as a professional publication site for scholarly inquiry and perspectives that promote gender equity and advance women in leadership. it is our hope that you find this issue of advancing women in leadership thought provoking, enjoyable, and that you look forward to subsequent issues. suggestions for improvement, encouragement, and submission for upcoming issues are welcomed and appreciated. genevieve brown, ed.d. & beverly j. irby, ed.d. editors copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 43 credits publisher: gretchen glasscock ceo/president, advancingwomen.com editors: dr. genevieve brown dr. beverly irby sam houston state university assistant editor: danna ellington editorial review board dr. gypsy abbott university of alabama-birmingham dr. william m. alexander california polytechnic state university dr. gracia alkema president, corwin press, inc., a sage publication compnay dr. janice beal beal counseling associates dr. maenette benham michigan state university dr. c. cryss brunner university of wisconsin-madison dr. michelle collay bay area coalition for equitable schools dr. joanne cooper university of hawaii dr. geni cowan california state university-sacramento adrienne d. dixson north carolina state universtiy dr. claudia b. douglass central michigan university dr. p. kay duncan emporia state university dr. stacey edmonson sam houston state university dr. amy freeman lee national award-winning artist dr. carole funk sam houston state universtiy dr. minerva gorena ncela, the george washington university dr. marilyn grady university of nebraska-lincoln dr. sandra gupton university of southern mississippi dr. jean m. haar university of nebraska-lincoln dr. sandy harris stephen f. austin state university dr. kristy herbert, southern connecticut state university dr. sandra hollingsworth san jose state university dr. johnetta hudson university of north texas dr. janice hutchinson university of houston dr. janice koch hofstra university dr. rafael lara-alecio texas a& m university dr. sandra lowery stephen f. austin state university dr. ping liu california state university-long beach dr. robyn lock san fancisco state university dr. rosita marcano northern illinois university dr. patricia mathes university of texas-houston dr. linda orozco california state university-fullerton dr. rosemary papalewis california state university-sacramento dr. matteson pascal the meadows foundation, senior program officer dr. diane pollard university of wisconsin-milwaukee dr. barbara polnik sam houston state university dr. evelyn reid, clark atlanta university dr. becky ropers-huilman louisiana state university dr. isabel royo universidad iberoamericana, puebla, mexico dr. david sadker american university, author and distinguished educator dr. pam sandoval indiana university-northwest dr. jane strachan university of waikato, hamilton, new zealand dr. carole shakeshaft, hofstra university dr. sandra tonnsen university of south carolina dr. karen tonso wayne state university pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 44 rev. terry weber-rodriguez epworth-parker unithed methodist church, houston, texas dr. robert williams sam houston state university dr. rose lyn zanville president, lyn zanville, inc., leadership specialist ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- guest and past reviewers dr. joanne ardovini-brooker dr. joy carter dr. norvella carter maxine cooper dr. ken craycraft dr. sally craycraft dr. jo ann duffy dr. alice fisher dr. brigitta fringes dr. dashiel geyen dr. maxine greene ann halstead dr. jeanine hirtle dr. claudia iselt dr. patricia larke sharon lenhart dr. jim merchant margaree mithcell joy mullett deborah nyberg rocio pellezer dr. charol shakeshaft laurinda spear naomi tropp dr. pam zelbst dr. robin mcgrew-zoubi copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 45 advancing women in leadership fall 2003, pp. 45-49 available online at http:// https://awl-ojs-tamu.tdl.org/awl/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper creating space for subjectivity: wandering discourses of female/teacher donna k. phillips & j. camille cammack donna phillips: associate professor of education at george fox university j. camille cammack: assistant professor of education at saginaw valley state university by analyzing what we ignore, we can glimpse the discourses of the unconscious that influence our actions and attitudes. introduction in this paper, we draw from a cluster of stories to illustrate the need for new spaces in teacher education where preservice teachers can "speak the unspeakable" in order to open up possibilities in their teacher identities. we want to demonstrate how discourses surrounding what it means to be a teacher restrict preservice teachers' abilities to problem-solve and respond critically to important educational issues. we want to show how discourses silence students to a dangerous politeness where issues of importance are denied discussion. the stories told here lead us to theorize a need for a space where preservice teachers can "speak the unspeakable," and, through this, identify and deconstruct public discourses defining what it means to be "female" and "teacher." ultimately, we believe that such discussions are imperative if preservice teachers are to be prepared to work with sensitive issues such as gender, race, and class. as a metaphor for our work, we consider the natural beauty of such places as zion national park. hiking in the area, one cannot help but notice that the landscape is punctuated with human-made warnings. along the trails are signs such as "danger! sharp drop off!" and "do not go beyond this point! cliff ahead!" in the space of this park and the space of our collaboration as teacher educators, two opposing questions are raised: how are thoughts limited by the codified, persistent and authoritative warnings of danger? how do spaces uncharted by the persistence of our daily lives open up new possibilities for thought and action? we relate this metaphor to our practice as teacher educators and our ongoing research into "how women construct their subjectivities within the limits and possibilities of the discourses and cultural practices that are available to them" (st. pierre, 1997, p. 365). "subjectivity" here refers to the site of self, a site constantly changing and being both assaulted and wooed by competing powers, vying for allegiance. at this site of self, female preservice teachers struggle with what it means to be female and what it means to be teacher. there are "danger signs" warning them to conform and to not question authority. there are other signs reminding them to stay on the path of the popular notions of teacher. we want to explore how our preservice teachers (as well as ourselves as teacher educators) might resist these codified structures defining the teacher. we also theorize the possibilities for using this resistance to reinvent the teaching identity. one way of doing this, we propose, is to "speak the unspeakable" as a way to embrace desires, conflicts, tensions and questions, and as a space where we confront discourses of power. story sources and context for the study we first began studying how female preservice teachers constructed their teaching subjectivities within and among the cultural boundaries and discourses available in teacher education during two dissertation projects (cammack, 1998; phillips, 1998). through phillips (2002) close analysis of language we began to see the relationship between discourse and subjectivity. what became apparent was how the discourses of the codified, structured space of teacher education pressured participants into choosing between possible subjectforming positions. these dissertation studies helped us see the strong desire our students bring with them for a "tidy" or unified teaching identity. we noted the multiple and contradictory subject positions our students assumed to define female and teacher using labels such as feminist, care-giver, good wife, "girly" girl, business woman and religious woman. we also found participants unable to reconcile the contradictory nature of these subject positions. competition between possible identities troubled their emerging teacher identities: what "female" or "teacher" should they become if they could only become one? finally, we have noticed that their attempts to create and sustain a unified self ultimately advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 46 interfered with their ability to think in creative or new ways about the complex problems of teaching. we began to wonder, as ellsworth (1997) wrote, how do we give our students "future as undecidable, possibility as undeterminable"? (p. 173). how could we open up our classrooms to be a space for "emigrant thinkers who deterritorialize accepted notions of space" (conely as cited in st. pierre, 1997, p. 376), to strive not for resolution and acceptance of a "real identity" but rather embrace conflict and chaos and forever conflicting subjectivities? how could such a space be "liberating" for females donning the label "teacher" by opening up a kind of movement between what is "perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival" (deleuze & guattari, as cited in st. pierre, 1997, p. 369). we also began to wonder if this re-invention of the teaching identity could give preservice teachers space to think in new ways about issues of gender, race, and class. through our ongoing work as teacher educators, we have collected numerous stories that illustrate the allegiance preservice teachers feel to the development of a coherent, consistent teaching identity and the inevitable fissures and slips in these identities. from these stories we have selected six that illustrate how the need for a fixed identity makes certain topics "unspeakable" or "taboo" and how the regulating nature of the "unspeakable" traps female teachers in closed systems of thought. two types of stories are told here; those that illustrate how discourses restrict thinking, and those that show the limits of silenced politeness. finally, we theorize how we can use these stories to help us work with preservice teachers to "speak the unspeakable" as an act of resistance that opens up new avenues of thought and practice. stories of the unspeakable: how discourses restrict thinking the district recruiter. during a gender issues in education seminar for preservice teachers, a recruiter from a local school district met with the students. one small group of students had a lengthy discussion about what the recruiter had said. apparently the recruiter had specifically mentioned an interest in male elementary teachers. the female preservice teachers expressed fear over what this might mean to them as women. two notable discourses were evidenced in this discussion. first, was the discourse that men entering teaching will add an important element that they, as women, cannot supply i.e., men can provide necessary authoritative male role models for children. one participant said, "i see that it's important to have male figures out there in the field." the other members of the group agreed. another participant added, "it makes you wonder as a white woman, 'are my contributions as meaningful because i am not a man?' i mean right away it makes you feel defensive." the conversation then wandered into territory that further positioned them as women inferior to men. these preservice teachers began to discuss whether or not men were better suited as "authority figures." several told stories of young boys who did not respond when they gave directions, but did respond when a male teacher or counselor gave directions, adding leverage to the recruiter's preference for males. the second discourse present was that these preservice teachers trusted those doing the hiring. they assumed the recruiters would try to be "neutral" when selecting future teachers. they trusted those hiring to act in benevolent ways and do what was best for children. one participant said, "they want the best candidate." these preservice teachers were clearly troubled by what it might mean to assume the title "male teacher" as opposed to "female teacher," but they were unable to articulate these fears thus illustrating how the discourse of patriarchy can silence women learning to teach (miller, 1997). even within the space of a gender seminar, these preservice teachers could not speak outside the discourse of male superiority. the students took up a position of the submissive female. they lacked a way to analyze this situation believing those in authority must be "right" and know best thus rendering their fears, doubts, anger, or sense of injustice "unspeakable." the angry father. another story illustrates how discourses of gender regulate ways to think about solutions to problems. when discussing a scenario about an angry father, who was upset because his young son was playing in the housekeeping area at school, a group of preservice teachers struggled to find an acceptable way for the teacher to deal with this situation. they could only think of two possible ways to handle the problem. the preservice teachers decided they could either try to explain the activity to the parent or they could go along with his wishes. they discussed how they could explain the value of the activity to the father but they wanted to do this cautiously. they decided, "the way to approach it [is] that it is not a gender thing." they concluded that it might be more palatable to the parent if they sold the activity as a way to develop fine motor coordination. "what we are learning over here is how to button." they seemed satisfied with a solution that avoided the sticky issue of gender altogether. the students had a sense that there were conflicting desires related to gender here. they knew the father's desire for his son did not match the "educationally appropriate" desire for children to experience a wide range of gender roles that they, as teachers, are hailed to support. however, their discussion of this issue is circumscribed within the discourse of patriarchy; father's wishes must prevail. upholding the father's wishes demeans their own female identity and raises questions about their professional knowledge. to "keep the peace" they submitted to the male authority and the students were left feeling trapped by the power of this discourse. "i'm a sexist." one preservice teacher who was a participant in the dissertation research defined herself in a way she saw appropriate to the setting, "okay, i admit it, i'm a sexist," she confessed. later, however, she finds herself unable to fit this definition into her teaching identity. "yes, i did feel that way. but now, i mean, i don't feel that way at all because i was trying to help kids that needed help. and to me, now i'm going back to what's the purpose of me? who am i and what's advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 47 my purpose? my purpose is to help children. and so if i was helping those students, who were lower than other students, oh well. so, i'm kind of, i don't know this gender thing is getting to me." while the preservice teacher could use language sanctioned in the educational setting (okay, i admit it, i'm a sexist.), she could not sustain this language against a more powerful discourse of teacher as helper and, believing a need to choose between the two, returned to a more familiar definition of herself as a gender-neutral teacher. stories of the unspeakable: silenced politeness mat interviews. the next story illustrates how preservice teachers come to teacher education already steeped in discourses of "silenced politeness" that limit their speech acts. during the interview process for candidates applying to the master of arts in teaching program at one of our universities, prospective teachers are asked the following question: imagine that it is a year from now and you have just accepted a job in a fourth grade classroom. the class is 78% boys and 22% girls. the students are ethnically diverse with the majority of students being african american, asian, and hispanic; the minority is white. the school is located in a lower socio-economic neighborhood. what are your hesitations, questions, and wonderings as you consider this position? most candidates display physical signs of nervousness when this question is posed and are unable to engage (or refuse to engage) in the issues presented. during a typical interview cycle, only two of the multiple candidates interviewed even addressed gender and class as issues. most respond with something like this, "i would be concerned about creating a sense of community. it would be important in this situation to make sure everyone learned to respect one another and to appreciate the different cultures present. i would want to teach tolerance." this constitutes their "discussion" of race. although the question gives license for the candidates to discuss "hesitations, questions and wonderings," few are able to voice hesitations, questions and wonderings but rather form their response as i would statements of intention, using acceptable language like community, respect, appreciate and tolerance. this is clearly a situation where prospective teachers need to please, impress, and be correct. use of polite and appropriate language limits opportunities for exploration of possibilities. they are not able, then, to problem-solve or think critically; the discourse of silenced politeness denies them the ability to even "wonder or "question." acceptable language seems to deny the importance of race, class, or gender so that they remain unseen by the classroom teacher. delpit reading. a second story concerning silenced politeness has to do with a white female graduate student's reading of lisa delpit (1988). students in a graduate level initial certification program read and discussed a portion of the book for each class meeting. this student had shown signs of agitation in prior discussions but on this day blurted out, "i just don't get this. i mean, look here she says one thing and earlier she said something different. which way is it supposed to be? i just don't get this!" after a moment of silence, the student quickly smoothed over her statement with the help of other students. "politeness" reigned in the situation and students resumed the discussion using "correct" terms and expressions. what else might the student have said given a different kind of space to engage with conflictual discourses and defining moments of subjectivity? the frustration was directed at delpit for a lack of "alignment" of perceived concepts but the student stopped short of deconstructing what seemed wrong with the reading based upon her position as a white woman preservice teacher or how she saw this as "one more thing to do" in the classroom. african american male. a final story involves a white female undergraduate student during her student teaching experience. daily, the student teacher faced conflict with a young african american male in her class. at every student teaching seminar she would bring up her frustrations with the student. her comments were couched in terms "appropriate" for discussing classroom management in the academic setting. as the term continued, it became apparent the student teacher had grown to dislike the student and saw him as a hindrance to her own success in the classroom. she began to dread dealing with him and, in fact, dreaded going to teach. while she physically demonstrated signs of anger, the student teacher's careful language only occasionally leaked convictions that the situation was really one of race and gender. the topics of gender and race were touched upon but this was clearly territory the student teacher did not feel she could, or did not want to, trespass. in this case we see the student trapped in a sort of "political correctness' that keeps her from exploring the range of her own emotions. unable to reconcile her dislike of this student with her ideas about race and appropriate behavior for a teacher she is unable to problem-solve. how might exploring the unspeakable, as illustrated in these stories, be used to create new spaces and new ways for preservice teachers and us to think about these issues? we theorize that it is the very attention to the conflictual constructions of gender and race across discursive fields that allow for critique of the teacher identity. st. pierre (1997) worked with images from deleuze and guattari in describing "smooth space," spaces that "gnaw and tend to grow in all directions" (p. 369). this space unlike striated space, which is "coded, defined, bounded, and limited", has a nomadic quality. while smooth space does not promise "liberty" and is constantly being reversed to striated space, it "always possesses a greater power of deterritorialization than striated space" (deleuze & guattari as cited in st. pierre, p. 369). how would such nomadic space allow for female preservice teachers to "play" with discourses defining their subjectivities? how would such space resist efforts that code and bind? how would such space allow preservice teachers to say the scandalous and proper, allowing them to embrace advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 48 conflicting discourses, rather than attempting to resolve them? how would it allow them to resist the dangerous territory of "aligning" a "true" self to pedagogical decisions? we return now to stories from the data to first identify patterns of existing space in teacher education and then to propose possibilities for alternative space. the unspeakable and alternative space we see common patterns in each of these stories that illustrate why students were unable to critique conflictual constructions of gender across the various discursive fields. we see in these stories the space of teacher education being one that "binds" and "codes" students' responses and their subjectivities. but we also see in each story, the student cannot control the language she uses to react to the situation. "one speaks a language that is never fully one's own" (butler, 1997) so who else is present in these outbursts? whose language is speaking? ellsworth (1997) calls this the "third participant" (p. 64), or the unconscious voice. the preservice teachers in these stories find their unconscious voice speaking using discourses that express anger, frustration and/or hopelessness. the unconscious interferes with the conscious use of "politically correct language" in these brief seconds. students want to dismiss this participant once they hear the words. they want to dismiss the object of unspeakable-ness (the recruiter, delpit, and the african american male student) because to address the object would be to address a supposed "misalignment" of character, that is, a misalignment between the perceived "good" teacher identity and the leaked response. why does each response make the student feel angry, frustrated and/or hopeless? one explanation is that if the recruiter, delpit, or the african american male student is "right" then they are "wrong" and the student teacher becomes implicated. in part, this is the result of the belief in an essentialist self that forces a choice between "right" and "wrong" rather than allowing a space where the conflict of discourses can be deconstructed and exposed. how could space in teacher education be re-invented as nomadic space allowing for students to "play" with these conflictual discourses defining their subjectivities? how could such space allow for the discourses of the outburst and blurts to be confronted? we suggest that as teacher educators we need to speak the unspeakable for students. we need to pose the questions and re-frame them not as an implication of "self" but as a history of implications. imagine a student teacher that is learning to "hear" such implications, the very implications she speaks in moments of uncontrolled outbursts, as implications of discourses of historicity. imagine the same student teacher learning to interpret and to place such outbursts into a nomadic space that moves in multiple directions at the site of subjectivity. imagine a seminar where students ask, "where, when i read this author, do i get stuck, do i forget, do i resist? where, when i listen to a classmate's response to this reading, does my own project of 'becoming a teacher' get shifted, troubled, unsettled why there? why now?" (ellsworth, 1997, p. 73.) what if we would have asked of the students in the first group, "why do you want to believe the district will hire the most qualified candidate and do what is best for children?" what if the white graduate preservice teacher would have received a response like, "how does delpit bother your image of "teacher"? how does it make a difference that you are white and female?" and what if the white female preservice teacher was questioned with, "what is it about the fact that this student is male and african american that makes you feel most out -ofcontrol? what is the picture of control that you believe is rewarded in this situation?" this kind of questioning can open up a space that is otherwise pushed aside and as felman (1997) said, "ignorance itself can teach us something--become itself " (p. 26). by analyzing what we ignore, we can glimpse the discourses of the unconscious that influence our actions and attitudes. in the stories told, preservice teachers actively refuse to engage with the language of their outburst, but such engagement can be instructive. learning to re-position ourselves as teacher educators from a place where we engage with what both our students and we resist, with what is ignored, allows us to imagine a space where interpreting discourses, myths, teacher descriptions, and pedagogical choices becomes a space of possibility and change. in such instances where we speak the unspeakable for students, we embrace conflict and controversies, resisting a goal of resolution; we use ignorance as an instructive tool. by speaking the unspeakable, we take back some of the power of discourses to subject students to a teacher identity coded in genderless terms of neutrality. student teachers, interpreting their own responses, begin to see how discourses return, implicate, and subjugate, but in the naming of these discourses, they can restructure their own imagined image of "teacher." in this space of positioning, we see the returning of ignorance, the returning of the discourses that seek to bind and code, into a powerful form of resistance where female preservice teachers may find alternative visions of what it means to be "teacher." how could such a space "shatter the illusion of arriving?" (ellsworth, 1997, p. 163.) we realize that preservice teachers all stand in different spaces on the never-ending converging circles of their lives, but a space in teacher education programs that 1) actively identifies "myths" of female/teacher, 2) uses multiple "languages" or discourses to deconstruct such myths, 3) provides alternative descriptions of power-conflicting terms like "woman," "feminist," "care," and "dedication," and 4) approaches pedagogical choices as intersections of larger discourses of time and place, would be a step away from regulated teacher education and a step towards nomadic space where subjectivities are honored. references butler, j. (1997). excitable speech: a politics of the performative. new york: routledge. cammack, j. (1998). preservice teachers explore gender issues in education through talk. unpublished doctoral dissertation, oregon state university, corvallis. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 49 delpit, l. (1988). the silenced dialogue: power and pedagogy in educating other people's children. harvard educational review, 58, 280-298. ellsworth, e. (1997). teaching positions. new york: teachers college press. felman, (1997). psychoanalysis and education: teaching terminable and interminable. in s. todd (ed.), learning desire: perspectives on pedagogy, culture, and the unsaid (pp. 17-43). new york: routledge. miller, (1997). gender issues embedded in the experience of student teaching: being treated like a sex object. journal of teacher education, 48(1), 19-28. phillips, d. (2002). female preservice teachers' talk: illustrations of subjectivity, visions of 'nomadic' space. theory into practice, 8(1), 9-27. phillips, d. (1998). playing at twilight: subjectivity, discourses, and preservice teachers' talk. unpublished doctoral dissertation, oregon state university, corvallis. st. pierre, e. (1997). nomadic inquiry in the smooth spaces of the field: a preface. qualitative studies in education, 10(3), 365-385. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. introduction advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 27 advancing women in leadership vol. 34, pp. 28-37, 2014 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper perceptions of school leaders: exploring school climate data based on principal gender and student achievement joe d. nichols and get w. nichols joe nichols: indiana university purdue university at fort wayne, email: nicholsj@ipfw.edu get nichols: fort wayne community schools corporation accepted april 11, 2014 this project explored the climate data of 33 elementary schools in an urban school system to determine the relationship among perceptions of effective school leadership and student achievement. data was compiled from teachers (n = 847) at each elementary school in regard to their perceptions of effective leadership of their school principal. data was compared to student achievement and disaggregated based upon the gender of the principal. in summary, female principals were rated significantly lower on their leadership skills than male principals by their staff. in contrast, when student standardized test data were explored and cross-referenced with the gender of the principal, student achievement at schools with female leadership was comparable with that of elementary sites with male leadership. keywords: principal, leadership, gender, women, student achievement introduction throughout time, stereotypes of women and men have permeated society, resulting in the creation of obstacles for women in the professional world. words like nurturing, compassionate, emotional, expressive, communal, passive, uncertain, subjective, and supportive have historically been used to describe women, while words like intelligent, powerful, competent, objective, independent, methodical, and driven have typically been reserved to describe men (porat, 1991). these types of adjectives from a societal perspective have supported the social perception that men are superior and women are inferior (stufft & coyne, 2009), particularly in leadership roles. this perception creates a particularly significant hurdle for women in educational leadership positions where their underrepresentation as secondary school principals and in the superintendency provides a dismal social commentary on longstanding gender inequities. the central issues regarding school leadership and the whitemale dominance in this position does not simply revolve around gender disparity. continued underrepresentation of men and women of color in school leadership roles continues to be pervasive. limited research exists that explores minority men and women leaders’ lived experiences and fewer studies exist beyond limited self-report or anecdotal comments. data on school leadership among african american, asian american, native american, hispanic and other non-traditional categories of men and women are virtually non-existent (wrushen & sherman 2008). what small body of research that does exist certainly begins to suggest that these diverse leaders’ struggle for visibility and recognition as school leaders is impacted by their family, cultures, spiritual backgrounds, and the complexity of how gender, race, economic class, and/or sexuality creates a tension of struggle and a balance of duality (alston, 2005; jackson, 1999; grogan, 2000; marshall, 1999). although each of these underrepresented groups of school leaders merit considerable space in the literature, if we explore gender specifically for this project as a valid way of looking at leadership, (blount, 1998; brunner & grogan, 2007; grogan, 2000; grogan & shakeshaft, 2011; tallerico, 2000), we then need to draw from the specific experience of women in those roles. the purpose of this project was to explore the climate survey data of 33 elementary schools in a large urban school system along with student academic achievement data to determine the relationship between faculty perceptions of effective school leadership (disaggregated by gender) and student achievement. specifically, questionnaire data was complied from teachers at each elementary school in the system in regard to their mailto:nicholsj@ipfw.edu advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 28 perceptions and opinions of the leadership effectiveness of their current school principal. this data was compared to student achievement data and disaggregated based upon the gender of the principal at each school site. literature review one of the most interesting aspects of the careers of educational leaders (compared with other occupations) has been the dominance of women in the pool from which leaders traditionally emerge and the absence of women at the top of the hierarchy (bilken & brannigan, 1980, p.2). these phenomena encourage a social perception that men are have the potential capability to be superior leaders while women are inferior and lack these skills due to their “softer” characteristics. despite ella flagg young’s (the first female superintendent of the chicago public schools) prediction in 1909 that in 100 years, more women than men would be leading schools and school systems, conflicting information continues to fail to adequately describe these numbers. the digest of educational statistics (2004) reported that less than 5 % of public school superintendents are women and less than 27% of public and secondary school principals are women. according the us department of education in 1997, women held 34% of public school principalships in 1994. synder and hoffman (2002) reported that in 1999 and 2000, the representation of women in public school principalships had increased to 44%. more recent compilations of this type of data (grogan & shakeshaft, 2011) have found that women now comprise 50.3% of all elementary and secondary principalships and 21.7% of superintendent positions. of these numbers, 58.9% of the female principalships are at the elementary level while 28.5% are at the secondary level. despite the clear fact that a career in teaching remains a feminized profession with almost 80% of the teaching staffs being female, school administration continues to be dominated by males specifically at the elementary and superintendency levels, making this disparity one of education’s most challenging issues (dana & bourisaw, 2006a). sex-role socialization partially explains the history of women’s work in schools, specifically in educational administration (chafetz, 1990; edson, 1988; reskin & padavic, 1994). many would suggest that women have not broken into the ranks of educational leadership because the institutions (i.e., family, schools and churches) that have contributed to their socialization process also have stood as their greatest barriers (noel-batiste, 2009). goal oriented women have sought to move into leadership roles but have not been able to overcome the stereotypes and stigmas of a culture that consciously or unconsciously, believes that women in education are best suited for the classroom. many (brunner & grogan, 2007; grogan & shakeshaft, 2011; kruger, 2008; wrushen and sherman, 2008) have suggested that there is a definite pattern of gender division and labor in education and concluded that women have not made significant gains in educational administration because their “femaleness” appeared to be problematic in an area dominated by men. the biological basis for differences between men and women has become increasingly clear in recent years with the debate of nature-nurture continuing the discussion between genes and the environment. in the world of school leadership, differences between men and women and their specific leadership styles and characteristics is becoming increasingly important as the principal’s role has become progressively more complicated. grogan and shakeshaft (2011) provide some of the most recent explorations of these issues as the body of research that has examined female leadership suggests several components that are commonly associated with women leaders. based on women’s lived experiences of leading school and districts, grogan and shakeshaft’s work examines consistent themes in female leadership and how men and women have similar and also quite different interactions with their staff and students. unique to women leaders, grogan and shakeshaft (2011) identified the qualities of relational leadership, leadership of social justice, spiritual leadership, leadership for learning, and balanced leadership as key departures from traditional male leadership themes. relational leadership suggests that leadership is about being in relationships with others in a horizontal rather than hierarchical sense. planning and goal accomplishment is approached with others rather through others. grogan (2000) and bruner (2000) have both identified relational power as something that increases as it is shared and that power used to help others strengthens relationships, while power used to control damages relationships. women who enact this relationship leadership strategy tend to use decision making strategies that allow them to really hear input from others. in essence, relational leadership is about facilitating the work of others who share the power and authority to collaboratively craft direction for the school building or district (grogan & shakeshaft, 2011). women leaders are more likely to report that they enter the field of education because they wanted to change the status quo. women, more often than men identify educational careers as social justice work and their commitment to social justice as a motivator and continuing mission is well documented (grogan & shakeshaft, 2011; sanders-lawson, smith-campbell, & beckham, 2006; shapiro, 2004; strachan, 2002). social justice therefore, to women leaders means a passion for doing work that involves making a difference in the lives of children who have not been well-served by the current system. if the goal of leadership and change is to bring about greater social justice as an end product for women leaders, then hope, spirituality, and a belief in a superior being is the motivation that encourages their pursuit of leadership positions (lips & kenner, 2007; grogan & shakeshaft, 2011). the idea of leadership grounded in spirituality is a strong theme found in research on women leaders – particularly within the comments of women of color (grogan & shakeshaft, 2011; bailey, koney, mcnish, powers, & uhly, 2008; simmons & advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 29 johnson, 2008). more so than men, many women leaders draw on their religious beliefs to understand the impact of spirituality in their lives as school leaders (curry, 2001; dillard, 2006; ngunjiri, 2010). both women of color and white female administrators discuss the relationship between spirituality and the ways they model their behavior and inspire others (grogan & shakshaft, 2011). additionally, these women acknowledge the importance of their spirituality to their success and ability to move forward despite conflicts and difficult situations. many women in educational leadership positions report that it is their spirituality that gives them hope, increasing their resilience to effect positive change in their school systems or buildings (simmons & johnson, 2008). also tied to the spiritual aspect of leadership for women is a sense of commitment to improving educational service and that the focus should be on children and their learning (oplatka & mimon, 2008). brunner and grogan (2007) have established that women leaders in education spend much more time in the classroom than their male counterparts and therefore they are highly motived to make changes to create better learning opportunities as a result of the spiritual and moral criteria of the leadership role. a number of studies note that instruction and learning-focused leadership is central to women school leaders (beck & murphy, 1996). women leaders are much more likely to introduce and support strong programs in staff development, to encourage innovation, and to experiment with instructional approaches. they are also more likely to focus on the importance of instructional competence in teachers and to be more attentive to task completion with instructional programs (grogan & shakeshaft, 2011). by placing instruction and learning at the center of their leadership focus and mission, women leaders are more likely to push for instructional change that improves learning. their decisions based on the priorities of student learning allow them to acknowledge that schools must be managed well, but the focus on collaborative efforts to gain student growth and development are a priority. court (2005) has also suggested that examples of co-leadership that emphasizes collaborative planning and collective visionmaking is an attribute that women leaders enjoy and embrace. brunner and grogan (2007) also have found that female superintendents, who often served as district leaders for curriculum and instruction before they reached the superintendency, were twice as likely as male superintendents to participate in professional development activities since their leadership goals focus on curriculum, teaching and learning. balanced leadership is the final theme that grogan and shakshaft (2011) have identified as a critical component that women in educational leadership find important. as grogan has reported earlier (1996), many women leaders in education essentially manage two lives: one managing a household, and one managing a school or district. similar to men, women experience the day-to-day activities of leading a school or district as a consuming experience. unlike men however, many women leaders report extensive additional work when they go home as they continue to maintain the majority of traditional family and home responsibilities. women leaders desire to manage both work and home duties without the support of other family members and this consistent theme is prevalent in the research literature (bruner, 2000; mendezmorse, 2004; smith-campbell, 2002). although studies have reported the struggles women leaders experience with balancing family and work (gupton & slick, 1996), some women leaders have suggested that learning to balance these dimensions can actually enhance their performance. in a recent study by noel-batiste (2009), more than 80% of the respondents (208 female school administrators) to a questionnaire reported that women did not have the geographic mobility to improve their carrier opportunities. eighty-four percent of the respondents stated that women are still perceived in stereotyped roles and 80% stated that the “good old boy system” is still alive and well in school administration. would-be women leaders have to cope with persistent images of male dominance and often, the only professional literature on female leadership consists largely of information gathered by male policy makers or male administrators at several levels of leadership within the educational structure (green, 2000). grogan and henry (1995) studied the relationship between school boards and women superintendent candidates and found that the superintendency continues to be constructed in a male arena. they also suggested that a warrior, military, or business mentality predominates conceptions of effective superintendents and indicate that these androcentric perceptions disadvantage women superintendent candidates. cherryholmes (1988) has suggested that professions are constituted by what is said and done in their name and that consistencies in what is said and done are based on shared beliefs and values. consistent with this is the notion that male power holders in a given community (schools) are a dominant force, and the position of school leadership is viewed as powerful and masculine, so a woman wishing to move into leadership positions must define and use power in the same way as the community’s male power holders in the past (bruner, 1999). mainstream literature surrounding school leadership has historically been grounded in masculine theories of motivation and management (hertzberg, 1968; sergiovanni, 1967), with little emphasis on sociocultural or feminist theories of leadership (dillard, 1995). the power of a feminist lens that explores the struggles of women leaders makes it possible to focus on the gaps and blank spaces in male-dominant culture, knowledge, and behavior (bruner, 1999; gosetti & rusch, 1995; murphey, moss, hannah & wiener, 2005). research by lips and others (carli, 2001; eagly, makhijani & klonsky, 1992; lips, 2000, 2003; lott, 1985; rudman,1998) suggest the following: competent women may be viewed as unfeminine; women who have a no-nonsense, autocratic, directive leadership style are judged more harshly than men with a similar leadership style; when women do exercise authority or behave in competent or directive ways, they may receive negative evaluations because they have violated the advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 30 feminine stereotype; women who promote their own competence are judged less likable than men who do the same; and women who act in such highly assertive, confident, or competent ways sometimes find that their ability to influence others, particularly males, is reduced (dana & bourisaw, 2006). because of the cultural conditioning of gender roles for men and women, women who can be an authoritarian and directive choose to have “power with” their superiors, peers and subordinates, rather than “power over them” (lips, 2003). methodology this project explored quantitative school climate survey responses of elementary teachers on 5point likerttype scale anchored by strongly agree (5) and strongly disagree (1) that were provided by the school corporation to the authors. a growing body of research has confirmed the importance of the learning climate for children and adolescents. empirical research has also shown that a positive and sustained school climate promotes students’ academic success and healthy development. positive school climates have also been show to promote greater teacher retention which in itself promotes greater student success (center for social and emotional education, 2007; national school climate council, 2007; zins, weissberg, wang & walberg, 2004). data was compiled from teachers (n = 847) at each elementary school in regard to their perceptions of the effective leadership of their school principal. although parents and students also completed this climate survey, this project only explored those responses provide by the teachers in regard to their perceptions of the effectiveness of their current principal. this data was compared to student achievement data available through the state department of education web-site, compared for accuracy against the local school’s student testing data, and then disaggregated and explored using comparative inquiry techniques based upon the gender of the principal at each school site. the data sources for this project stem from a school climate survey that was distributed during the 2008-2009 school year at the 33 elementary schools of a large urban school system in the midwest portion of the united states. this school system includes an enrollment of just over 31,000 students. sixtyeight percent of these students are eligible to receive free or reduced-price meals while the ethnic breakdown for this school system is 50% caucasian, 25% african american, 13% hispanic, 4% asian american. more than 75 different languages are spoken in this school system. elementary school teachers in this system responded to 15 items relating to their building’s student atmosphere, communication with parents, inservice opportunities, personal growth, peer support, vision and student outcomes, and their perceptions of the principal’s leadership ability (see table 1). teachers completing this survey totaled 847 of the total of 1091 eligible for a response rate of approximately 78%. table 1 school climate teacher survey items 1. the vision for the district is clear. 2. the vision for the school is clear. 3. my principal facilitates communication effectively. 4. my principal is an effective instructional leader. 5. my principal treats me with respect. 6. as peers, we teachers treat each other with respect. 7. i have the opportunity to participate in in-service sessions that meet my needs. 8. i can learn a lot from my professional peers 9. i communicate with parents often about class activities. 10. students are safe at this school. 11. the school provides an atmosphere where every student can succeed. 12. quality work is expected of all students at this school. 13. i believe that improving my instructional practice will improve student achievement. 14. the student outcomes for my classes are clear to my students. 15. this is a good school. annual standardized test scores required by the state for all students completing the annual state exam at each school site were also gathered as indicators of academically successful schools versus those that were below the state benchmarks for adequate yearly progress (ayp) for this specific year. the percentage of all students at each school site that passed both the mathematics and english portion of the state exam were explored along with the socio-economic status of each school site based upon the percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. results to confirm what much of the literature states in regard to the relationship between student achievement and low socioeconomic status, the percentage of students at each school site passing both portions of the state exam were matched with the percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunch. a significant negative correlation was observed with r = .83, p < .01, suggesting the strong negative relationship between test scores and socio-economic status. in effect, the greater the percentage of free and reduced lunch students at each school site, the lower the student passing rate on the annual standardized exam. table 2 provides average teacher responses on the climate survey for schools with male leadership (principals) and table 3 provides demographic data for these schools that includes the average age of the faculty, the percent of female teachers in the building, the percentage of students at each building passing both the math and english portions of the state standardized exam, the percentage of each buildings’ student population advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 31 receiving free or reduced lunch, and the percentage of students designated as belonging to a minority class as defined by the school corporation. tables 4 and 5 provide this same data for schools with female leadership (principals). for the items on the school climate survey that measured effective leadership as indicated by their staff, male principals (n = 16) averaged 4.25 and female principals (n = 18) averaged 3.95, suggesting a significant difference based on a t-test comparison of these means t = 7.89, p < .05. five female principals averaged above 4.0 on the 5-point likert scale on the items that were explored while 12 male principals averaged above 4.0. despite the fact that 88% of the teacher respondents were female, male principals were rated as more effective leaders overall when compared to their female principal counterparts. for the five highly rated female principals on the climate survey (above 4.0), the percentage of students at their school site passing both portions of the state assessment test averaged 54.98%. for the twelve highly rated male principals on the climate survey (above 4.0), students at the school site passing both portions of the state exam averaged 54.78% (no significant difference). when comparing male and female principals that were low-rated leaders (below 4.0), lowrated female principals’ (n = 12) students passed both portions of the state exam at an average rate of 53.3% while low rated male principals’ (n = 4) students passed both portions of the state exam at an average rate of 51.6% (again no significant difference). in summary, although students in this corporation passed the state exam at an equal rate regardless of the gender of the principal or the teacher perceptions of the principals’ leadership, perceptions of female principals by the teachers at their school sites were significantly lower than male principals. when the data that included the percentage of students who received free or reduced lunch were explored, it was discovered that for school sites with 80% or more of its students with this designation, eight of these schools had female principals and only 1 had a male principal. the passing rates for the standardized exam for the eight low income schools with female leadership was 41.3% compared to 42.3% for the one low income school with male leadership. discussion and conclusion the literature is clear regarding the overrepresentation of male leadership in schools, particularly at the secondary level and in the superintendency. while female teachers represent the overall teaching population in the classroom setting (in this school corporation 88% of respondents at the elementary school sites were female), males continue to dominate leadership roles that include the school principalship and superintendency. understanding the significance of the “glassceiling” effect and the struggles of female leaders within our schools continues to be important to explore. there are gender specific assumptions regarding female administrators’ ability and competence to perform the role (shakeshaft, 1987). along with these stereotypes, the lack of necessities including adequate childcare and support systems (scutt, 1990), mentoring opportunities, lack of support and counseling from family and friends and coworkers (anastaski & koutra, 2005), and the view that leadership is unfeminine (lips & kenner, 2007), places women in the unfortunate position of neglecting their natural feminine role expectations to foster their leadership role expectations (stuff & coyne, 2009). when women do eventually move into leadership positions, particularly in male dominated areas, they tend to be judged more harshly than their male counterparts (eagly, makhijani, & klonsky, 1992) and coworkers are more tolerant of dominant behavior in men than in women, who are often penalized for exhibiting their power (carli, 2001). as suggested in the results of this project, females in leadership positions who are highly competent are often judged less likable than men who exhibit the same behaviors (rudman, 1998). in the case of this project, the results are clear in that students at school sites with male or female principals scored consistently the same on state exams. however, the perceptions of the effective leadership of female principals as rated by their teachers and staff were significantly less than their male counterparts in the principalship. these findings support the earlier work of researchers who continue to explore the prejudice and bias of male versus female leadership (carli, 2001; dana & bourisaw, 2006b; lipps, 2003; murphey et al., 2005; stufft & coyne, 2009), and the obstacles that females must continually overcome to be perceived as effective leaders in schools. the results of the study also support the earlier findings of lips (2000), carli (2001) and others that suggested that women in leadership roles may be viewed as less competent than male leaders with similar leadership styles and are often judged more harshly than men with comparable leadership traits. if women have violated the feminine stereotype by being strong, assertive, confident, and autocratic, they may often be judged as less likable than men who exhibit the same characteristics (lips, 2003), despite the fact that at least in this project, student academic success rates are approximately the same. in essence, female principals were overall rated as less effective by their building teachers and staff then male principals, even though student success was comparable. although it may be a unique finding with this particular school corporation, the observation of a large number of female principals assigned to low income schools is important to consider. low income or title 1 school student populations present unique challenges above and beyond the central focus of attempting to raise student test scores. working with parents from low income or poverty line backgrounds, working with families of single parent homes, student populations with high percentages of limited english skills, and working with students the school community. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 32 students with lower socio-economic status tend to have lower academic achievement, higher drop-out rates, and tend to fall further behind academically as they progress through grade levels (farkas, 2008; lee & bowen, 2006; sirin, 2005). the question to consider given the research that explores the difficult challenges of working with low income populations and the fact that women in leadership roles are often seen as less capable, is the one of the potential of overrepresentation of female leadership in some of the most challenging school settings. in the case of this corporation, 8 of the 9 elementary schools with low economic student populations had women in leadership roles. although higher socioeconomic school settings pose their own unique challenges, the issue of placing women in leadership roles in some of the most challenging schools in comparison to the placement of male leadership warrants further exploration. women, specifically in the elementary school setting, remain a dominate force in the teaching ranks and continue to have growing opportunities to provide leadership to these schools in the form of the principalship. less than 27% of public and secondary school principals are women (digest of educational statistics, 2004) and females in the role of school leadership will continue to struggle to overcome stereotypes and stigmas of a culture that directly or indirectly believes that women in education are best suited for the classroom. certainly the results of this study indicate that women in the role of school principal are as capable and can have as strong of an impact on student achievement as men in a similar role, but their impact on school climate as reported by their immediate staff warrants continued exploration in the future. in addition, placing an overwhelming number of women in leadership roles at low socioeconomic school sites where student and family struggles are even more of a challenge, constitutes further examination of the feminization of the educational profession where women continually are stereotyped to be more adept as compassionate nurturers rather than effective instructional leaders. references alston, j. a. 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(2008). african american female superintendents speaking the language of hope: reconstructing the multi-dimensions of passion. in w. hoy & m. dipaola (eds.), improving schools: studies in leadership and culture (pp. 223-249). charlotte, nc: information age. smith-campbell, s. i. (2002). exploring the world of black women middle school principals. doctoral dissertation. michigan state university. snyder, t. d., and hoffman, c. m. (2003). digest of education statistics 2002 (nces 2003–060). u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics. washington, dc: u.s. government printing office. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 34 strachan, j. (2002). feminist educational leadership: not for the fainthearted. in c. reynolds (ed.), women and school leadership. albany, ny: suny. stufft, d. & coyne, k. 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(2004). building school success on social emotional learning: what does the research say? new york: teachers college press. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 35 appendix table 2 climate survey average teacher responses for elementary schools with male leadership school district school eff. eff. prin. peer prof. learn parent school student quality inst. vision vision comm. inst. resp. resp. dev. peers comm. safety success work pract. fp 4.33 4.61 4.67 4.61 4.82 4.55 4.61 4.79 4.48 4.67 4.58 4.67 4.74 gp 4.08 4.31 4.19 4.54 4.54 3.46 3.92 4.31 4.27 4.38 4.08 4.50 4.38 ha 4.13 4.38 4.23 4.30 4.70 3.57 4.10 4.23 4.33 4.13 4.00 4.27 4.63 ho 4.30 4.45 3.45 4.55 4.70 4.79 4.33 4.48 3.91 4.55 4.27 4.38 4.70 fo 3.91 4.05 3.45 3.64 4.00 3.14 4.05 4.14 4.00 4.45 4.00 3.82 4.68 ir 4.65 4.85 4.05 4.35 3.95 4.55 4.05 4.70 4.35 4.75 4.80 4.70 4.90 li 4.44 4.33 3.70 3.93 4.07 4.37 4.33 4.48 4.30 4.11 3.96 4.22 4.78 ld 4.45 4.38 4.05 3.90 4.71 4.18 4.41 4.36 4.23 4.45 4.41 4.45 4.86 ma 4.23 4.40 3.67 3.80 4.62 4.27 4.21 4.47 4.14 4.34 4.33 4.27 4.63 no 4.45 4.54 4.00 4.18 4.64 4.30 4.11 4.46 3.50 4.25 4.25 4.07 4.79 pc 4.33 4.53 4.29 4.33 4.33 4.53 4.33 4.43 4.00 4.47 4.67 4.47 4.67 pr 4.33 4.24 3.50 4.00 4.48 4.29 4.14 4.48 4.43 4.43 4.38 4.52 4.57 sj 4.29 4.46 4.58 4.54 4.83 4.58 4.29 4.58 4.46 4.67 4.63 4.71 4.67 sh 4.26 4.13 4.57 4.48 4.74 4.52 4.09 4.26 4.22 4.70 4.36 4.39 4.83 so 4.39 4.25 3.43 3.37 3.71 4.00 4.32 4.64 4.26 3.68 4.11 4.21 4.64 wa 3.79 3.71 4.57 4.52 4.61 3.21 3.79 3.91 3.63 4.04 3.58 3.50 4.29 note: averages based on 1-5 likert-type scale where 5 = more positive and 1 = less positive. table 3 demographic data for elementary schools with male leadership school aver. no. of % of female % of students % of students % of student faculty respondents teachers in the passing english qualified for free population age building math istep or reduced lunch designated as minority fp 43 33 93 56.1% 78% 46% gp 48 26 78 62.8% 50% 39% ha 46 30 86 58.3% 57% 47% ho 47 33 83 51.1% 73% 46% fo 46 22 81 47.4% 79% 57% ir 43 20 95 74.8% 58% 59% li 42 27 83 61.1% 60% 49% ld 46 22 88 57.3% 72% 78% ma 42 30 95 38.8% 77% 65% no 41 28 84 35.3% 78% 68% pc 41 15 87 49.2% 64% 49% pr 46 21 88 55.7% 66% 29% sj 50 24 93 69.5% 40% 28% sh 46 23 88 54.0% 46% 33% so 45 28 82 42.3% 93% 72% wa 46 23 89 49.3% 73% 70% advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 36 table 4 climate survey average teacher responses for elementary schools with female leadership school district school eff. eff. prin. peer prof. learn parent school student quality inst. vision vision comm. inst. resp. resp. dev. peers comm. safety success work practice ad 4.46 4.79 4.36 4.71 4.68 4.50 4.46 4.71 3.96 4.61 4.64 4.75 4.82 ar 3.78 3.91 3.65 3.96 4.43 3.87 4.00 4.13 4.17 4.43 4.26 4.26 4.70 ab 4.13 3.50 3.20 3.00 3.96 4.20 4.12 4.12 3.88 3.60 3.52 3.40 4.32 bl 3.93 3.59 3.33 3.44 4.56 3.89 4.22 4.48 3.96 3.52 3.63 3.96 4.52 br 4.47 4.40 3.53 3.83 4.14 4.83 4.17 4.67 4.23 4.66 4.50 4.67 4.73 bu 4.07 4.50 4.50 4.50 4.50 4.14 4.36 4.64 4.43 4.86 5.00 4.93 4.86 cr 4.11 3.81 3.00 3.07 3.74 4.63 4.26 4.30 4.52 4.19 4.33 4.41 4.70 fa 3.79 4.40 4.42 4.42 4.60 4.49 4.26 4.53 3.81 4.57 4.36 4.49 4.33 ha 4.13 4.38 4.23 4.30 4.70 3.57 4.10 4.23 4.33 4.13 4.00 4.27 4.63 hh 4.28 4.06 3.61 3.61 4.33 4.25 4.09 4.44 4.19 4.28 3.94 4.36 4.50 iv 4.03 3.84 3.38 3.44 3.72 4.06 3.91 4.38 4.19 4.52 4.22 4.50 4.71 ne 4.62 4.48 3.24 3.71 4.00 3.95 4.38 4.24 3.89 4.24 4.43 4.19 4.65 sa 4.44 4.63 4.88 4.94 5.00 4.13 4.63 4.56 4.13 4.63 4.44 4.63 4.63 st 2.79 4.13 3.76 3.83 4.20 4.08 4.33 4.40 3.92 4.52 4.38 4.40 4.58 wa 3.79 3.71 3.67 3.71 4.33 3.21 3.79 3.91 3.63 4.04 3.58 3.50 4.29 wc 3.78 3.59 2.67 2.78 2.96 4.00 3.67 4.04 4.21 4.33 3.41 3.89 4.22 wp 4.13 3.87 3.96 3.96 4.11 3.98 3.61 4.33 3.76 4.35 3.85 4.04 4.28 advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 37 table 5 demographic data for elementary schools with female leadership school aver. no. of % of female % of students % of students % of student faculty respondents teachers in the passing english qualified for free or population age building math istep reduced lunch designated as minority ad 36 29 90 33.3% 89% 78% ar 45 23 91 56.3% 40% 39% ab 42 25 91 29.7% 97% 98% bl 40 28 86 40.5% 89% 60% br 47 30 83 65.5% 68% 54% bu 34 14 87 83.3% 44% 41% cr 42 27 74 85.0% 26% 30% fa 37 43 84 39.6% 94% 89% ha 42 24 86 65.1% 48% 47% hh 42 36 87 51.2% 76% 77% iv 42 32 86 52.0% 79% 53% ne 45 21 96 48.1% 91% 46% sa 34 16 87 44.9% 91% 78% st 37 24 90 49.3% 84% 74% home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership gender equity models in science teaching and learning mirrored structures, and designs for change doris ash, ph.d. ash, summer, 2001 a video is presented by an educational researcher from uc berkeley, and a large group of predominantly female teachers watches a series of vignettes featuring a variety of configurations of girls and boys doing small group math problem solving. they watch as one quiet young asian girl in a mixed-gender group attempts to voice her opinion. she is continually swamped by opinions of louder and larger boys. they watch as, later, other girls voice their uncertainties by saying things like: ã¬i feel stupidã®. throughout the showing of the vignettes there are frequent sighs by the teachers indicating their empathetic feelings. when the researcher states that one of her findings is that 'all female' groups spend more time collaborating and that females in general tend to express their uncertainty more, the teachers give a knowing laugh, as though they already know this and that, indeed, they have lived this particular experience. introduction over the past ten years research on gender equity in mathematics and science (linn 1992, klein, & ortman, 1994, kahle & meece, 1994) indicates that although the gender gap is closing there is still much work to be done at many different levels. according to the september 2000 congressional commission on the advancement of women and minorities in science, engineering and technology development's land of plenty report: diversity as americaã​s competitive edge in science, engineering and technology: despite the growing proportion of women in the workforce, the relative proportion of women in such fields as engineering, computer science, and physics lags far behind that of men. currently only 19% of the set workforce is female despite significant improvement among girls in mathematics and science achievement and course taking over the http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html last 20 years. there are now only small differences between girlsã​ and boysã​science and mathematics scores on the national assessment of educational progress (naep) tests, and girls are now taking the upper level mathematics and science courses required to enter set college majors at the same rate as boys. although the ability and basic academic background needed to continue in set careers exist for many girls, their interest in these careers is not maintained. among sat-takers, over three-fourths of students wishing to major in engineering and computer science are boys. the only science field attracting more girls than boys is the biological sciences. by eighth grade, twice as many boys as girls (independent of race/ethnicity) show an interest in set careers. (p. 26) in this paper i develop a 'mirrored structures' model that applies to three nsffunded gender and science projects aimed at improving girls understanding, attitudes, and abilities in science, mathematics, and technology. all are concerned with the under-representation of women in science, math, and technology. all three facilitate girls' success at critical educational junctures particularly the middle/ junior high transition where girls are lost to science. the three projects have developed rich and varied programs aimed at increasing understanding, confidence, and ability in the science, math, and technology for girls, and for their teache rs, their parents, and administrators. the projects are different but share some common underlying elements and in many ways are typical of the multi-tiered gender equity programs across the country. together the three programs offer powerful evidence for understanding systemic change within diverse geographies. all three programs share similar philosophiesã³there are many different ways to achieve equity goals but it is essential that participants at all levels capitalize on existing strengths, their particular "ways of knowing". i argue that the 'mirrored structures' model cuts across all levels of participation within all three projects. the projects, are: first (female involvement in real science and technology) in oakland, california; the voices project: rural and urban images: voices of girls in science mathematics and technology in rural appalachia, west virginia; and girls inc. of lynn, massachusetts's operation smart (science math and relevant technology). while the model offered in this paper was based originally on the first project, it is applied to the voices and operation smart programs. together they provide exemplars for examining systemic change because the programs emphasize not only the changes within the target audience, elementary and middle school girls, but also an expanded group of teachers, parents, and administrators within school districts that serve diverse student populations. by systemic change, i mean change at multiple levels of participation which can interact in both positive and negative ways. change can be better understood by analysis of these relationships and by maximizing the positive interactions as leverage points. background on the three programs first the model was originally developed within the first project, a cost-effective design experiment for museum-led, school-based, inter-community agency collaboration1. it provided a forum and a local urban laboratory in the form of a design experiment (brown, 1992) that simultaneously introduced a series of innovations and studies their effects. the project provided a model for systemic change, working with elementary and middle school girls, their teachers, and administrators within the oakland unified school district (ousd) a large urban district that serves a diverse student population. the project included these major design features: 1) a program specifically aimed at reaching girls at the juncture between elementary and middle schools; 2) a discipline that has long attracted the largest proportion of women scientistsã³biologyã³using an environmental studies emphasis; 3) a projectbased/inquiry format for all grade levels; 4) a community building component that emphasizes discourse and communication skills; and 5) multiple entry points for advancement of understanding for teachers, administrators, business and research mentors. programmatic structural elements include classroom activities2 for both boys and girls, after-school science clubs for girls, and specific leadership skills training for girls. first also collaborated with local industry and business in order to link female scientist/mentors with science club and leadership girls. voices the voices project3 focuses on the middle school juncture as a critical time to intervene so that girls do not become sorted out of mathematical and science tracks. the program focuses on the rural/urban split, particularly issues faced by rural girls living in poverty. the voices progra was designed to look at "the ways rural and urban places can support and hinder girls' sm t education without taking the networks and experiences of advantaged girls as the norm" (carter, keys, & kusimo, 1999, p. 4). voices tested a series of interventions to help girls do well and feel confident in science, mathematics, and technology. designed to promote middle school girls' interest and achievement in science, mathematics, and technology, they had two project's two sitesã³ one rural and one urban. programs included activities in science, math, and technology, mentoring, academic assistance, and an advocate network for families. they did not assume that girls raised in appalachian cultures, whether rural or urban, are deficient either developmentally or with respect to smt learning. instead, they look to what these girls, their families, and communities can teach about girls' development and possibilities. girls inc. the girls incorporated of lynn4 , massachusetts's operation smart program encouraged girls to persist in math and science and addressed issues of power, equity with students, parents, and their teachers. operation smart's programming provided girls with hands-on experiences and introduced them to careers in science, math, and technology. it also provided training and support, curriculum guides and materials for teachers, and advanced professional development both in and out of the classroom. girls. inc. mission is to build girls' capacity for responsible and confident adulthood, economic independence, and personal fulfillment. major program goals include: working with girls on hands-on science with activities that are open-ended and risk free; allowing girls and their teachers to understand and change their stereotypes about science; helping girls, parents, and teachers understand that they can enjoy science; and that science is everywhere, in the lab, in the kitchen, and outdoors; and it is accessible to all, equally. these elements are combined in a variety of programs for a wide audience including schools, clubs, and other social organizations. one unique feature of smart programming is its inter-mixing of core program elements that, while focussing on inquiry in science, examine other aspects of gender identification, for example, using activities such as role playing and stereotype reflections. these subtle aspects of professionalism, when brought to the surface, help make conscious personal views about science. these activities helped sensitize teachers and promote an attitude shift that decreased fear of science for female teachers and helped male teachers to understand gender differences. the proposed model all three projects share common features, for example: they make efficient use of already available and tested materials, a variety of geographic locations, participant structures and personnel; they encourage all participants to test, to adapt, and to share ideas that fit within their philosophical and practical guidelines; they work with many different levels of expertise simultaneously; and they combine real life with science seamlessly. when examined from the perspective of levels of participation and the way in which participants were guided to increase their professionalism some underlying systemic patterns emerged. the model outlined in figure 1 captures these levels of participation and layers of professionalism. the model, designed first for the first project, identifies three levels of participationã³students, teachers/parent, and researchers and three layers of expertiseã³foundational, scaffolded, and leadership. the three l yers of expertise reflect increasing ability to take on more sophisticated content and respo nsability. they include: foundationalã³provides the basic elements for examining science as part of the individual's life, as well as one's relationship to doing science, and thinking about it. this can include hands-on science activities, direct modeling of teaching techniques, and other direct communication techniques. examples include modeling hands-on activities for students and teachers, talks by women scientists and architects, and trips to laboratories, colleges, or nature sites. scaffoldedã³refers to the increasing abilities of learners as they are guided to improve their mastery with experience. the scaffolding process begins with the 'learning leader' at first doing most of the cognitive work. this phase is followed by one in which the teacher and learner share responsibility. "finally, the learner is able to perform independently." (campione, brown, ferrara, & bryant, 1984, p. 8). the 'scaffolding' is gradual, as the teacher maintains the interaction within the learner's zone of understanding. examples across the programs include ongoing work with women mentors, including professionals such as architects, scientists, or the teachers themselves. as the mentor/student relationship continued over time, the students become more confident and independent in pursuing long-term goals, such as independent investigations, preparing for standardized tests, or simply increasing competence in activities not considered typical for girls. leadership ã³characterized by increasing ability of individuals at all levels advance toward novel situations with success and, having learned the principles of project, to mentor others and to reach wider audiences. examples include classroom teachers becoming lead teachers in other schools and other districts, girls preparing to take pre-algebra in a hostile environment, and girls science club expanding to include school wide activities such as recycling. theoretical underpinnings vygotsky (1978) and the notion of the zone of proximal development (zpd), as well as the work of newman, griffin, and cole (1989) provides the theory that informs this work. "a zone of proximal development is the region of activity that learners can navigate with aid from a supporting context, including but not limited to people. it defines the distance between current levels of comprehension and levels that can be accomplished in collaboration with people or powerful artifacts. the zone of proximal development embodies a concept of readiness to learn that emphasizes upper levels of competence" (vygotsky, 1978; brown et al., 1993). i argue that a reciprocal interaction occurs between the ã«teacher and learnerã​ as they work together in the zpd so that so each is changed at all three levels of interaction. in short, both the ã«teacherã​ and the ã«learnerã​ inform each other in substantive ways, so that the role teacher and the role learner become interchangeable. working within the zpd, each acts as both teacher and learner in a mutual dance of appropriation of ideas and actions (brown, ash, nakagawa, gordon, rutherford, & campione, 1993). levels: girls, teachers, and researchers level 1: the girls "math, math, math is cool. it makes us want to stay in school" chant the voices of a group of bright-eyed, smiling sixth graders. --voices girls it is well documented that, at about the junior high level (orenstein, 1994), girls lose confidence in their abilities, even if they have heretofore displayed competence. research on classroom experiences for girls has been extensiveã³in short summary, girls say less, do less, get less attention and are encouraged less frequentl y to speak up, to analyze or to think deeplyã³when they get older they are less confident about their work, they spend more time checking it for accuracy, and they are more modest in speaking about their expertise (linn, 1992; sadker & sadker, 1994). thus, the target audience is elementary/middle high girls who typically become lost to science and math before high school. the intent is to: encourage and model an early and successful interest in science, its tools and ways of thinking; to keep this interest alive and lively within the transition from elementary to middle school; and to help mentor girls in the transition to high school. first worked with girls grade 3 through 8 across elementary and middle schools within the same large urban district. although originally intended for grade 5 and up, teachers in younger graders also insisted on being part of the program, suggesting that starting at younger grades might give a longer time to develop confidence and abilities. the voices project began with sixth grade girls of all interests and levels who came from two diverse environments, urban and rural. the comparison study did not take the urban experience as the 'standard', instead sought to identify the essential elements for success for rural girls. the girls were faced with distinct disadvantages that arose from a variety of sources including teachers, school policy (especially in relation to prepation for algebra), and general social conditions that afford success. smart worked with girls across a variety of ages in elementary through middle school and with a variety of formats. the emphasis was on working with students and their teachers simultaneously so that professionals can learn new teaching pedagogies by seeing them modeled by others, practice them and then reflect on that practice. the reflective environment with ongoing coaching fostered a collaborative community of teachers, students and parents. level 2: their teachers and parents "i feel like i should have been an engineer" "i wasn't encouraged to explore a variety of career areas, at home boys cut the grass, girls washed the dishes" "i was always interested in math and science and i wanted to be a scientist...i was encouraged to take liberal arts...i was told that's what females do..." -first teachers historically women have been perceived to play a minor role in the history of science. first's elementary school teachers, more than 90% women, had interest in science but typically have little formal training. many had been left out of the science and math track in their own educations and wished to: become part of the process of doing science; to learn along side the girls; and to foster and share their sense of excitement in making discoveries. in doing so these teachers illustrate (self-selected) professional development in science. significantly, they also act as role models in the process of acquiring the skills and concepts and especially the confidence that comes with doing science successfully. girls in the us are behind boys on a variety of measures in science and this is partially related to the differential teacher-student discourse in the classroom. teachers have been described as more likely to encourage boys than girls to ask questions, make integrative comments, and to explain (crowley, callanan, tenenbaum, & allen, in press). because research indicates that even teachers sensitized to gender issues typically favor white boys in the classroom (sadker & sadker, 1994) gender equity concerning discourse is a parallel professional development goal. teachers often lack time and practice for reflection on their own practice, a necessar component for their pivotal role in counteracting the effects of gender bias with their studen ts. classroom practice is slow to change even in cases where this is an explicit goalã³even teachers who wish to make changes sometimes need help. because gender and its relationship to science and math careers is not a major part of elementary school teacher training, first's and smart's professional development includedã³in-depth examination of gender equity issues including summaries of current research studies, model classroom and club materials, activities and curricula, as well as work with science content and pedagogy. the same can be said for the voices project. all three programs simultaneously work with attitudes and long held feelings about what science is (only for white males, who have test tubes and are absent-minded) and who can be allowed to do it. this sensitivity training comes side by side with the day to day logistics of doing hands-on science. as one smart director says: "the first hurdle you need to achieve is attitude shifts about who can do science, then participants can be concerned about the logistics of doing the actual activities" (j. martin, personal communication, april, 2001). the voices program had a larger challenge in trying to engineer attitude shifts at school-wide and district levels, by working to change existing views of what girls can do, for example, take complex math. they needed to pave the way for advanced courses to be offered, as well as to encourage the girls to want to take them. the teachers were pivotal in this change, as they themselves were changed by the program. the parents were an integral part of all three projects but were especially so in voices, where a vital component was advocating for family networks. in the rural mountain location, as a result of their work, the voices program led to reinstatement of pre-algebra and algebra courses and increased enrollment in pre-algebra. primarily women in the first and smart projects, the administrators came from the ranks of teachers and share the desire for more science but view the problem of equity more globally. their charge is to create a systemic view of equity science (and other subjects) and to disseminate this view throughout their school and their district. they look for efficient means for doing this while maximizing the structures that are already in place. they have also been the recipients of inequities in their own careers and seek to mentor teachers and students in their science efforts. level 3: the researchers i felt that i was ã¬too stupid to do mathã³girls donã​t do thatã® ruth cossey, mathematics educator, mills college --conversation with first teachers because gender equity has not become a reality in spite of years of research and implementation efforts; because new and systemic programmatic efforts are necessary; because those planning for future equity require models that address these needs, in this paper the mirrored structures model help identify research agendas matched to these needs. towards this end, first's, voices, and smart's design efforts are directed at deep understanding of inequity patterns, then feeding that research directly back to the practice of equity education. all women, the researchers for these projects, view their programs as models for creating and sustaining change. for example, research suggests that females (at many ages levels) express more uncertainty with their ability to do science even when their ability tests high. this is a dynamic that cuts across all educational levelsã³students, their teachers, administrators, and researchers. such systemic undercurrents must be dealt with at many levels simultaneously. thus while students gain confidence in their ability to learn science, teachers gain c nfidence in their ability to learn and teach science, administrators gain confidence in their a bility to understand, and foster good science teaching for girls and researchers attempt to capture these cumulative and singular changes as they occur. similarly, it is important to understand more deeply the interconnected nature of changing attitudes about science and resultant change in practice. if stereotyping is unmasked and if past views are adjusted, does actual teaching practice change, or does it go deeper than that? these are the kinds of questions these researchers in the three programs grapple with daily. the layers : foundational, scaffolded, and leadership the vertical dimension in figure 1 is the degree of advancement available for each level, the layers are foundational, scaffolded, and leadership. the foundational level includes the basic experiences, understandings, and ways of knowing that each level brings to the setting. for girls, their teachers and researchers the foundational level occured durning the classroom and field activities. girls are an integral part of a complex classroom social learning environment replete with activities and structures. teachers manage these complex environments, assess their students understandings and design complex classroom activities, and grow as professionals. researchers watch the complex interaction between them. the classroom experience is the stepping stone for increased opportunities for advancement and leadership. scaffolded experiences allow participants entry into expanded opportunities to work with peers, teachers, parents, mentors, administrators, and researchers, all of whom act as scaffolding for increased expertise and engagement. this includes girls science clubs, field trips, camping, coaching, tutoring, summer camps, and many other forms of participation that are self selected, guided, female only, and openended. these activities give opportunity to practice scientific processes in a safe, comfortable environment. in clubs and science camps, girls encounter a variety of scientific concepts, processes, and ways of reasoning (along with their leaders), and importantly they witness modeling by successful women in science, with science mentors, and their own teachers leading the way. they have a chance to practice file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/summer2001/ash.html#%20figure%201 using the thinking tools of scienceã³ the processes, such as predicting and hypothesizing as well as the physical tools, such as hammers and screwdrivers. girls science club/camp/field activities help level the playing field for the girls using teachers, mentors, and administrators as well as materials, activities, camaraderie, and time as leverage agents. for teachers, scaffolding occurd chiefly in peer settings, primarily in professional development sessions where science mentors and experts, new materials, and curricula, and most importantly, opportunities for self-reflection, provide multiple opportunities for growth. it is also important to tie professional development opportunities directly to classroom practice. smart and first programming for example typically asked teachers to reflect immediately after trying activities with children. in these sessions teachers were able to examine what just happened with a smart/first mentor to guide their examination. over time these reflections led to changed practice. the leadership level allows seasoned participants to move to newer areas, to touch new audiences, and to disseminate their work. for the girls, the leadership experience occurs in mixed-age groups in summer training at local colleges, science jobs, field sites, oe working with women professionals such as architecture. in the summer mixed-school, mixed-aged, and leadership training sessions, girls gain advanced skills in presentation, in athletics, and in ways of d ing science, as well as career information. for teachers this entails working with larger au diences, other schools, national audiencesã³in short, opportunities to grow and to disseminate without the support of the peer group as offered in scaffolded settings. the model in action i argue that the three layers and the three levelsã³a 3 by 3 matrix that includes nine cells, each of which has distinctive characteristicsã³are inter-connected, much like a biological ecosystem. to some extent each feeds and retrieves information from the others in reciprocal fashion. for example, assessing girlsã​ attitudes or learning at one level, the classroom or club for example, allows their teachers (administrators and researchers) to make parallel, related but personalized changes in their own work at their level of understanding. teachers become more sensitive to gender issues and more able to reflect on their own practice, and with administrator support, practice changes slowly. researchers find ever more interesting areas to explore within the design experiment as these changes occur. for these reasons the model is described as mirrored because movement, both vertically and horizontally, is mirrored by the levels and layers. below are three examples of interactions that begin to demonstrate these interconnections. one describes the interconnections between classroom activities and professional development, the second and third involve activities that cut across all levels of participation. examples of the model in action: example 1: firstã³the classroom and professional development. why women can't be president! at one urban elementary school site, 6th grade boys and girls spent a great deal of time creating a women's history dinner plate project, one that highlighted the role of women in history, especially women scientists, medical doctors, and mathematicians. in preparation for the dinner plate project the class had already had extensive discussions of what their life would be like if they happened to be born the opposite sex. narrowly defined gender roles dominated these discussions and students' opinions were highly charged. the teachers who led the plate project were surprised and informed by these comments. these activities acted as a formative assessment of students' attitudes and in turn directly affected teacher practice. teachers designed the plate project, in part, to change views of women's abilities over time. as a result of these discussions, the dinner plate project was designed so that each student became an expert on one woman's career and subsequently explained that particular women's role in history, artistically, in written form and orally to an assembled audience of parents, other students, and friends at a specially planned evening event. later, the teacher who organized this event used this as the focus for one of firstã ​s professional development sessions. the idea spread to another school, this time using the ã«if i were born a--opposite sexã® for third and fourth grades. third graders confirmed the same views of gender stereotyping observed in the first school and both teachers in the second school, in turn, were informed and surprised. in the third grade, students were convinced that a woman could not become president because there never had been one before. they argued: "if women could be president why hadnã​t there been one already?"ã³there was no existence proof. needless to say these discussion at younger grade levels also eventuated with their teachers designing a series of follow-up activities, similar to those of the sixth grade students, designed to highlight the role of women in the sciences. these activities are now following into a second year for younger and older students in both schools. example 2: first & smartã³clubs, leadership, and professional development leveling the playing field in first and smart, both the science clubs and the summer leadership training involve a mixed age group of girls. throughout the clubs5 and camps the girls, their teachers, and aides, sometimes their parents, their mentors and science buddies, together, explored a wide variety of science areas, some working towards a longterm, school-based, environmental project. during summer leadership training mixed age groups from many schools along with their school site liaison person (a parent, teacher, or aide), enjoyed in-depth training in the life sciences, athletics, career explorations, and presentation skills. in both clubs, camps, and leadership settings, girls learned new skills and gained confidence in their ability to do science, but so too do their mentors, aides, teachers, administrators, and parents. for example, in first's summer leadership cadre, while girls dissected and identified the reproductive parts of a flower, their supporting adults (parents, aunts, or teachers aides, etc.) did the same thing and in the process, they too felt the thrill of science as a "way of knowing ". adults and children gained in expertise simultaneously so that accomplishment passes between and across ages reciprocally. all the attending females, to some extent, gained ground while undertaking the same activity and while using the same materials, for example, a microscope. adults re-captured what had been left out in their science training and gained confidence in the role of life-long learner while, simultaneously acting as support for the girls. the women of many ages, all of whom entered the summer training with different backgrounds and expectations, advanced according to their particular need. among operation smart's goals are to guide participants to be more reflective about themselves as learners, to be learners of science in a different way; and for teachers to apply this information to their work with kids. parallel (for teachers and for students simultaneously) changes along these lines were evident as part of smart summer camp training. after modeling lessons with the students, teachers and smart trainers spent time reflecting on the experience. these reflections revealed profound changes by the teachers and students. for example a fifth grade student had been heard to say: "i'm going to do that experiment next week for the whole class", while a teacher discussed ways to pass on the information to other teachers by swapping classrooms temporarily. one teachers said: "i really liked the role modeling component of the operation smart training. i'm a visual learner, so i learn and retain things much better by watching them than by reading. also, i probably wouldn't have believed that these activities would work with kids if i hadn't seen them in action." similarly the director of the school program said: "at the head teachers meeting j. was full of ideas and enthusiasm about the things that she's been doing during the week that you've been here. we were discussing various methods for passing on the information to the other teachers. we will probably have some of the teachers, that you've t ained swap classes for a day, every so often, so the other kids can benefit from operation smar t. we may also try different combinations of team teaching. we'd also like to have an operation smart day some time during the summer so that other staff and kids can become as excited as the three who have been trained this week." it seems that activities of this nature 'level or flatten the playing field' for female science learners. each level of participant grew in learning, but on a different trajectoryã³the students as first-time to science participant, the teacher and parent as long left out of science participant. i consider this professional development6 according to adapted needs. these insights lead researchers to explore further how leadership can be developed and encouraged for all levels of participants in a variety of ways because: ã³science ability and materials are scarce for all women ã³certain activities act as gatekeepers to further science for females ã³across-age experiences can be powerful motivators for advancement example 3: changing voicesã³changing expectations: equal access to mathematics the voices program had far reaching impact across the rural community over its three years, especially regarding changing societal norms about expectations for their girls. voice had more success in the rural mountain setting than in the urban river setting. within the mountain community there had been a general malaise of mind regarding what the girls might be able to do. the assumption was: 'we can't expect too much of our students, given their background and lives at home", as a result children 'get by' because "low expectations permeate the systemã–they structure educational opportunity without being overt enough to challenge" carter et al., 1999, p. 11). voices did make substantive changes in the way math is seen as a gatekeeper to high school. because of their ongoing support at many different levels, the voices girls were able to take pre-algebra, to take the test that had limited their entry, and most importantly change the structure of the school that heretofore had not seen this as a necessity. to do so they needed to gather support at many levels. the girls needed to "want to take algebra" i.e. to see themselves as successful. the teachers had to see the importance and to help change the status quo. as part of this process of change, it seems that teacher mentors learned as much as the girls. voices " may have had more powerful impacts on the mentors than on the girls they mentored. because so many of them (mentors) were teachers and not science and math specialists, they had to seek ways to increase the girls' awareness of science and technology in nearby workplaces. in the process the mentors themselves learned a lot about the use of science and mathematics in jobs not usually scientificã³lessons that many took back to their classrooms to share with their students" (carter et al., 1999, p. 20). most importantly, the families had to learn how to be better advocates for their daughters "voices families got access to information about college, financial aid programs, scholarships and other opportunities...they also learned ways that they can make their voices heard in schools and (to) question sexist and economically elitist policies and procedures. one mother got her ged so that she could better support her daughter. ã– a number of families invested in computers for their girls and themselves" (carter et al., 1999, p. 17) discussion i have proposed a design model for studying systemic change in relation to gender equity in science for elementary and middle schools girls. this model posits important interconnections across levels of participation (girls, teachers, administr ators, and researchers) as well as between the layers of expertiseã³ foundational, scaffolded, and leadership. although only a beginning analysis, the model has allowed re-definition of several important components of systemic change in three nsf funded programs across the united states. specifically, first, it encourages focussing on the interactions between student attitude and expertise in science with similar components of teacher professional development; and second, it identifies the equalizing effect across age and science knowledge for females while taking part in gender/science activities. by assessing their own and their childrenã​s existing ideas about gender roles, teachers, parents, mentors, and researchers became more sensitive, more informed, more concerned and more able to design future activities for their students and for research that might begin to ameliorate gender biases. partially as a result of these projects, girls, teachers, parents and administrators began to take charge of their own inquiry into gender matters, to grow and to learn, to teach each other and to "step up" into gender/equity issues as models for their own schools and communities. and as teachers indicate, gender work spills over and becomes part of the rest of the curriculum and the entire school day. instead of being a part of one day, equity becomes part of every dayã³ "a way of life", in one teacher's words. thus there appears to be linked and interconnected change between student attitude and learning and teacher professional development in relation to science content, pedagogy, and equity sensitivity. last, there is need for re-definition of the meaning for the phrase professional development, since the experience of these three projects has shown us that this may occur at many levels simultaneously from students to researchers. working professional women, students administrators, university researchers, mother volunteers, as well as teaching professionals grow in awareness and ability to act upon equity issues and science within their own contexts. this is not a 'one size fits all' model, instead it a 'design your own' professional development model. the implication is that we need to look across groups, not just at teachersã³but to look at teachers and students in relation to each other and in relation to administrators and researchers, in a more systematic way. dr. doris ash is an assistant professor at the university of california-santa cruz in science education. dr. ash can be reached by e-mail at: dash5@cats.ucsc.edu funded in part by the national science foundation experimental program for women and girls footnotes 1first is a museum-district collaboration overseen by the chabot observatory and science center in oakland, with mills college, the university of claifornia, berkely, the east bay association of women in science, and the oakland museum. 2classroom design features are meant to enhance all learners opportunitiesspecifically by emphaizing fcl (fostering a community of learners; brown & campione, 1994; 1995) principles. 3the voices project is conducted by the appalchia educational laboratroy in west virginia. 4a local affiliate of teh national organization, girls incorporated, fromerly girls club of america, has ben operation programs for girls since 1942. 5activities range from electronic appliance or owl pellet dessection to visits to local science centers such as the exploratorium for behind the scenes tours, to visits by local female scientists and engineers 6professional development is defined more broadly for the multiple levels of participants including students, teachers, administrator, parents, and researchers. references american association for the advancement of science. (1993, april 15). gender and the culture of science. science 260, pp. 383-430 brown, a. (1992). design experiments: theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. journal of learning sciences, 2(2), 141178. brown, a. l., ash, d., rutherford, m., nakagawa, k., gordon a., & campione, j. c. (1993). distributed expertise in the classroom. in g. salomon (ed.), distributed cognitions, new york: cambridge university press. brown, a., & campione, j. (1994). guided discovery in a community of learners. in k. mcgilly (ed.), classroom lessons: integrating cognitive theory and classroom practice, (pp. 229-270). cambridge, ma: mit press/bradford press. carter, c. s., keyes, m. c., & kusimo, p. s. (1999). lessons from the holler and the streets: what appalachian girls, families and communities have taught us about implementing informal science and mathematics programs. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association, montreal, canada. congressional commission on the advancement of women and minorities in science, engineering and technology development. (2000). land of plenty report: diversity as americaã​s competitive edge in science, engineering and technology. [online]. avalilable: http://www.nsf.gov/od/cawmset/report.htm. (september, 2000) crowley, k. callanan, m., tenenbaum, h. r., & allen, e. (in press). parents explain more often to boys than to girls during shared scientific thinking. psychological science. klein, s. s., & ortman. p. (1994). continuing the journey towards gender equity. educational researcher, pp. 13-21. kahle, j. b., & meece, j. (1994). research on gender in the classroom, in d. gabel (ed.) handbook on research on science teaching and learning, (pp. 542-557), new york: macmillan. linn, m. (1992). gender differences in educational achievement. in j. pfleiderer (ed.), sex equity in educational opportunity achievement and testing. proceedings of the 1991 invitational conference of the educational testing service, princeton, nj. newman, d., griffin, p., & cole, m. (1989). the construction zone. cambridge: cambridge university press. orenstein, p. (1994). school girls. doubleday: ny. sadker. m., & sadker, d. (1994). failing at fairness: how our schools cheat girls. touchstone: new york. vygotsky, l. s. (1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. figure 1. mirrored structures levels layers girls teachers/parents reasearchers foundational classroom field activities classroom teaching ongoing reflection classroom design ongoing reflection scaffolded science clubs field activities professor development clubs, classrooms professor development design leadership summer camps mixed-ages mixedschool across schools dissemination dissimination across states (ash 2001) copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2001 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html 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generations of women that follow can live in a world where they are not forced to believe in male superiority. it takes a special woman to create enough impact to serve as a role model for women of the future. there have been several such women in history who have fought for what is right and what they are passionate about, and who have risen up, despite the rest of the world pushing them down. the lives of harriet tubman and susan b. anthony were dedicated to the truth and belief in equal rights for all races and genders. these legacies prove that they were women of vision, women of strength, and women of courage. born a slave, araminta ross, later known as harriet tubman, experienced first hand the terrors of slavery. at the age of thirteen, harriet was beaten on the head with a two pound weight after disrupting her supervisor from punishing another slave. this experience caused tubman's life to be laden by frequent blackouts, and contempt for her white suppression. tubman believed all slaves should enjoy the taste of freedom. there was no justification for the evils of slavery which lay in front of her. after escaping from bucktown, maryland to her own freedom in philadelphia in 1849, tubman vowed to help other slaves escape from slavery's grasp. tubman saw the passing of the fugitive act of 1850, which outlawed assisting in slave escapes, as a signal to act on her promise. bravely, tubman returned to maryland. using the underground railroad, she assisted in transporting many slaves to free states or canada. tubman totaled nineteen trips back to the south and helped more than 3,000 slaves find freedom. tubman's efforts prove capabilities of women. her undeniable strength and commitment illustrate a woman of great bravery, a woman willing to risk everything for others, a model of humility. another such woman was born in adams, massachusetts in 1820. susan brownell anthony came from a strict home where order and discipline came before play and enjoyment. her father pulled her out of public schools when a teacher refused to teach her long division. he set up a school in their house and brought in a teacher by the name of mary perkins. perkins gave anthony and her sisters a new perception of womanhood, and image which later inspired anthony. after completing school, anthony became a http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html teacher at an all female boarding academy named eunice kenyon's quaker school in upstate new york. in 1849, anthony retreated with her family to rochester, new york to settle down. it was there that anthony began to speak up on her crusade for women. the temperance movement was the first expression of feminism in the united states and susan b. anthony was one of the first involved. in 1849, anthony gave her first public speech to the daughters of temperance group about the danger of alcoholism and its destructive effects on families. from then on, anthony wrapped herself in many campaigns, dedicating herself to such causes as anti-slavery, women's civil rights, and her signature movement, women's suffrage. anthony demanded that women be granted rights given to black males in the 14th and 15th amendments. in 1872, she led a group of rochester women to the polls to vote in a local election. anthony was arrested and while awaiting her trial, attempted to vote in another election. susan b. anthony was convicted of violating voting laws, but continuing her objection to these laws, she refused to pay her fine. the rest of anthony's life was devoted to women's suffrage until her death in 1906. sadly, anthony never got to witness the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920, granting women the right to vote, but it is obvious that her hand played and enormous role in its passing. anthony believed that women were not what the world has led them to think. she did not feel that women should be confined to the home and repressed by their husbands. anthony stood up for herself and fellow women in the face of adversity and harsh criticism. forsaking her reputation in order to act on what is right. susan b. anthony gave all women a voice, an amazing privilege that has left generations of women forever indebted to her efforts. these women sacrificed their whole lives for their causes; a testament to the power of the female. the fruits of their labor are not only accomplishments for themselves, but for all humankind. but women such as harriet tubman and susan b. anthony still live today. their spirits are captured in every women trying to make her way in this decade of challenges and setbacks for women. today's women live in a world shaped by unspoken gender lines. the must deal with a society that views the "perfect women" as a 110 pound beauty, whose worth is measured in weight and appearance. women today must face sexual harassment, unequal pay, degradation, and sexual discrimination. today's women dare to play sports, join the military, or take on traditionally male occupations. these women must prove the old female stereotypes wrong and through their words and actions, and show the world that the female spirit is one that should not be ignored and will never go away. everyday, the female work force wakes up to these conditions and everyday they are reminded of today's guidelines. but these women are our doctors that saving lives, teachers that are educating our children, and politicians that are shaping our country. with strong wills and open minds, women set out to make a place for themselves in this society, shipping away at the barriers surrounding them. harriet and susan would be proud, for like them, today's women are making things happen and refusing to believe that they are or ever were inferior to men. like them, we are all women of courage. awl journal home page awl journal volume 3, number 1, winter 2000 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking 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map | awards | about us home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home business | entrepreneur |loan credit | web | network | balance |international| book store career strategies | employment | resumes | salary, benefits, employment, employee rights | negotiate career news | career indices, stats | career advice for execs,professionals |career advice for undergrads,mbas career paths | career planning for young women | mentoring and coaching | leadership development advancing women in leadership rebalancing the scale between the personal and the professional rita culcross louisiana state university work-life conflicts are hardly new, even in academia. amelia earhart, in a letter to her future husband, george putnam, wrote of “her reluctance to marry, my feeling that i shatter thereby chances in work which means most to me” (earhart, n.d.). earhart went on to become not only the most famous woman pilot, but also to hold an appointment during the 1930's at purdue university as a consultant in the department for the study of the careers of women. memories of her attempt to fly around the world are documented in her letters to putnam, whose careful preservation of those communications provides a lasting record to her achievements and the conflicts felt by talented women. (earhart, n.d.) today’s academics continue to struggle to balance personal and professional demands, albeit in new ways. academic couples search unrelentingly for two jobs in one location. women on the tenure track ponder whether to postpone pregnancy as their biological clocks tick away. men turn down better job offers that would cause relocation problems in a dual-career family. we in academia often think of our environment as an enlightened one. could we not set a model for society at large with respect to balance in life for both men and women? perhaps it is time to step back and consider what kind of a life is worth living and what kind of expectations we as a society should have for both men and women. what could be given up in the world of work that would ensure our children and parents receive the nurturing and care they need? what expectations could we abandon that would make for adults who are not always running on empty? file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///search.html file:///advertising.html file:///sitemap.html file:///awards.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/writing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/career_strategies/index.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/business-home-oview_index.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/loans-credit.html file:///web.html file:///networks/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/balancing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/networks/intlinks.html file:///amazingbookstore/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/library/resume/index.html file:///career/salaries_emplmnt.html file:///career/negotiating.html file:///news/awblog.html file:///career/indices_stats.html file:///career/career_advice.html file:///career/career_advice_undergrad.html file:///career_path/career_paths.html file:///career_plan.html file:///mentor/index.html file:///leadership.html as an academic with more than twenty-five years of postdoctoral experience in higher education and more than thirty years as the marital partner of a fellow professional, i offer a few simple suggestions. 1. let us acknowledge that current professional job expectations and full-time parenthood are incompatible. in research universities, ever-increasing demands to publish or perish coincide with the period when most young professionals are also seeking to establish a family. the expectation that one can devote fifty or sixty hours (or more) a week to professional work at the same time one is shuttling kids back and forth to after school activities, doing household chores, and caring for a parent with alzheimer’s disease is unrealistic at best. we need to put our collective feet down and challenge the notion that personal and family lives are not as important as career productivity. if we want to raise children to be emotionally stable, competent adults, we must invest our energies where (and when) they most count. if we want to show our parents the care and concern at the end of their lives that they showed us at the beginning of ours, we will need to reexamine our commitments. 2. let us support men and women who make choices that represent compromises over their work lives. indeed, because we have encouraged dual-career families and fuller participation of men in their children’s lives, men have begun to encounter the same kind of criticism that women of the past couple of generations have faced. in the days leading up to a recent major pga golf tournament, both ernie els and phil mickelson were chided for taking time off the tour to spend with their wives and newborn children. some commentators even went so far as to suggest that sergio garcia and tiger woods were more competitive because they did not have wives and families to attend to. never mind that both mr. els and mr. mickelson are top ten players with vast fortunes acquired through success on the tour. moreover, a brilliant woman or man whose dissertation shows real promise and potential has not wasted a position in a doctoral program if that person chooses not to pursue the highest professional track upon graduation. history is replete with outstanding doctoral graduates whose lives took them in different directions. many made significant contributions in other ways. in any event, we are mistaken if we equate education with preparation for a specific job. we need to revisit the classical notion that education is for life, not for a career. let us recognize that generation x and generation y do not necessarily share our single-minded careerism. 3. let us reject the notion that we are not doing enough–that our publication records are inadequate, that somehow we should have kept up with the (fill-in-theblank: professional literature, housework, etc.), that we didn’t live up to our potential. we should stop looking at our resumes (and those of others) with an eye toward the slumps, the digressions, and the omissions. instead, focus on the accomplishments and achievements with particular attention to the ways in which we added value to others’ lives. when i look at my own vitae, i note not the absence of publications during a couple of years but remember instead the last two years of my mother’s life and the closeness we achieved simply through spending more time with one another. we need to recognize that for all the planning and negotiating of one’s career, life sometimes just happens. a spouse becomes ill with cancer, a long-desired child arrives with special needs, or a parent’s failing health requires relocation to a nursing home or to the guest bedroom of one’s own home. 4. let us work to support our colleagues and staffs with policies and processes that acknowledge the importance of both work and family. the family medical leave act was a lifesaver for me during my mother’s illness. resources for emergency childcare for an ill child are cherished by some corporate employees i know. but we can do much, much more. after all, we academics are best known for our cuttingedge ideas. 5. finally, let us consider what we should not do. policies and practices should not disadvantage one group of employees over another. women without children should not be expected to do on campus advising while others with children are telecommuting. evening or weekend teaching assignments should be shared across all faculty rather than reserved for those who are single and childless. also, we should not blame our employers for the consequences of our choices. recognize that at particular times in our lives we will need to compromise our career goals for the good of ourselves, our private lives, and our organizations. faculty at different stages of their careers often make differential contributions in terms of teaching, research, and service. both we and our institutions should own those choices. if we are not willing to make some of these changes, we will be like the central character in the children’s book, little miss busy, “who didn’t rest all day long, not for a minute, not even for a second” (hargreaves, 1997). i am convinced we can reframe our thoughts and behavior about the appropriate balance between the personal and professional halves of our lives. i am also convinced that if we fail to do so, we will lose our best and brightest faculty to work environments that do encourage telecommuting, flexible work hours, and more generous family leave policies. if that happens, it will be the academy’s loss as well. references earhart, amelia. (n.d.) letter to george putnam. the george putnam palmer collection of amelia earhart papers. west lafayette, in: purdue university libraries special collections. hargreaves, roger. (1997). little miss busy. new york: putnam. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |employment | resumes | communication |write |successful women | business | home business | entrepreneur |loan credit | web | network | balance |international| book store about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2005 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html file:///careers%20employment/index.php file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/resume/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/workplace_comm/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/writing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/career_strategies/index.html file:///business.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/business-home-oview_index.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/loans-credit.html file:///web.html file:///networks/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/balancing/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/networks/intlinks.html file:///amazingbookstore/index.php file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership beyond mentoring: toward an invitational academe catherine eggleston hackney ph. d., marianne bock hackney & bock, spring, 2000 "with care for the person, and an understanding to human development at the core of interaction, members of the academy need to respect and encourage authentic voice-that which is original and meaningful--rather than that which is produced in a relentless effort to please authority or to attain promotion or tenure." when title vii of the civil rights act of 1964 was passed, it was applauded as a definitive step in controlling sexual discrimination. title ix of the education amendments of 1972 provided further protection for employees and students in educational institutions. these forms of legislation were milestones in the growing movement for women's rights in education and the workplace (random, strasburg, & lipman-blumen, 1982). progress was being made. women were entering fields that historically had been closed to them. women also were enjoying greater choice in determining the directions their professional lives would take. as the 60s and 70s came to a close, however, the political activism that had spurred the feminist movement waned with false complacency. as susan faludi (1992) described, the dawning of the 80s brought about a counter assault against women's rights: one third of all government budgetary cutbacks were from programs that served women, even though such programs represented only ten percent of the entire budget. sexual discrimination charges filed with the equal employment opportunity commission rose by twenty-five percent during the reagan years, and women's general harassment complaints more than doubled (faludi, 1992). at the end of the 80s, public opinion polls cited women's greatest concern still to be their lack of economic opportunity; their greatest cause for resentment and stress to be men's opposition to equality (roper organization, 1989, as cited in faludi, 1992). without a buffer against the waves of societal influence, it is inevitable that individuals in classrooms, in graduate schools, and on faculties of the academy experience and contribute to the subtle discriminations against women which exist to this day. today discrimination does not occur as blatantly as it once did; http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html nonetheless, women's success and advancement still are affected by gender issues. in the academy, women continue to be underrepresented in traditionally male professional schools, they continue to account for a smaller percentage of terminal graduate degrees, and they hold fewer senior faculty positions. we believe that higher education organizations have a responsibility to women as they enter and attempt to advance their careers in academia as faculty and graduate students. heretofore, higher education organizations have promoted mentoring as a vehicle by which neophytes, whether they are junior faculty or graduate students, might become socialized to the culture and supported in their professional pursuits. despite the fact that untold numbers of faculty members and graduate students have profited by mentoring in terms of career success and satisfaction (perna, lerner, & yura, 1995), many have not. this may be because historically, mentoring has been characterized more by exclusion than inclusion. only those with the most promise, connections, and the proper academic interests have been tapped for the mentoring process. others, especially women, have been excluded. hall and sandler (1983) confirmed that, "in higher education, where senior faculty and administration are predominately white and male, women are frequently excluded from the long established informal systems through which senior persons socialize their successors" (p. 2). even though "clear definitions of mentoring in academic settings are difficult to establish" (stalker, 1994, p. 362), some transference of the traditional thoughts about mentoring to higher education is possible. unfortunately, and, regardless of the definition, the pattern of mentoring in higher education has come primarily from the male perspective that has reinforced the hierarchical relationship between a valued faculty member and "his" protégé. while the effect women faculty members have on other women academics and graduate students can be both positive and productive (shapiro, et al., 1980) and can help to counteract that pattern, a problem still exists. on both a theoretical and a practical level women are not present in great enough numbers to endorse even the traditional mentoring model. males outnumber females by two to one at the associate level, and five to one at the full professor level (national center for educational statistics, 1997). this dynamic continues to affect the retention and promotion of women faculty members. left on their own within the often inhospitable climate of academia (hall & sandler, 1983; stalker, 1994; & wunsch, 1994), women without support can easily develop uncomfortable feelings of isolation, disassociation, and alienation which could result in stunted career growth (hill, et al., 1989; parson, sands, & duane, 1991) or worse, the cessation of their professional pursuits altogether. in addition to the lack of availability of women mentors, women have faced other barriers to building mentoring relationships on campus including the reluctance of some male faculty to mentor women and the discomfort some women feel about the mentor-protégé relationship (hall & sandler, 1983, informal interviews, 1998). in terms of career success, female faculty do not seem to benefit from traditional mentoring as much as their male counterparts (hill et al., 1989). our experiences, as well as those who have shared their stories with us, would support this claim. consequently, the purpose of this essay is to suggest that mentoring as it traditionally has been experienced by women in the academy is insufficient. we will advocate for an academic organization that is characterized by a more inclusive and egalitarian academic culture a culture where there is room for multiple voices and ways of knowing; where all members are recognized, validated, and appreciated; and, where each individual is enriched and energized as a result. nontraditional thoughts about mentoring: where do the problems lie? earlier studies of the organization centered on the analysis of relationships between and among males of the organization; yet, in the late seventies women themselves were beginning to investigate their roles and places in the organization (hennig & jardim, 1977; kanter, 1977). female theorists believed that the organization should assume some responsibility for a woman's professional success. though kanter (1977) felt a woman's background, social class, and outside connections coupled with her sense of drive, ambition, and inherent ability were the best predictors of her professional success, she also suggested organizational activities that would encourage a woman's professional development. kanter (1977) recommended clustering women rather than dispersing them throughout an organization, establishing task related networking for the recruitment and orientation of women, and creating a flexible organizational culture that would be more permeable to and less insulated against women and minorities. others, such as bolton (1980), charged organizations with developing networks for females in occupations where male/female representation was disproportionate. at the same time in late 70s and early 80s the mentoring relationship and its traditional definitions were being challenged and transformed by feminist theory and research. as more women became involved in the mentoring process both as participants and observers, their experiences helped to illuminate weaknesses and deficiencies in the model itself. shapiro et al. (1978) proposed that the traditional models of mentoring were paternalistic, hierarchical, and exclusionary. they cited that within and during the traditional mentoring relationship, the mentor is always the mentor and the protégé always the protégé, contributing to the superior-inferior nature of the relationship and setting up a hierarchical disadvantage. further criticism of the historically male model resulted in walkins' (1980) proposal of a new collegial model with room for diversity, experience, and cross-generational involvement. similarly, additional feminist critical analysis resulted in haring-hidore's (1987) recommendation that mentoring relationships should be part of career development programs, without the selectivity factor, offering an egalitarian opportunity for all women. toward a re-encultured organization the impact of the organization as instrumental in determining women's professional success has been documented by several theorists. even though kanter, as early as 1977, advocated a permeable organizational culture through which women and minorities might pass more readily, attitudes and behaviors have not changed easily. attempts toward openness and inclusion continue to meet resistance, though perhaps more subtly than in earlier decades. furthermore, mentoring, as organizations traditionally have practiced it, has bred an egocentricity, an essentialist notion of "the ways things are," often suffocating new and alternative views and behaviors. even today, the mentor, often in a superior position to the less experienced protégé, typically perpetuates the organizational history and the existing culture by enforcing traditional parameters of thinking, valuing, and behaving as hennig and jardim (1977) suggested years ago. recognizing women's struggles to overcome some of these barriers, hall and sandler (1983) recommended specific alternative practices in support of women's advancement in higher education: working with multiple mentors; creating formal and informal networks; using "paper mentors" (i.e., publications) (p. 5); utilizing peer mentors, courses, workshops, and small groups; and connecting with professional organizations. yet, women beginning their careers in the academy have continued to experience what clark and corcoran (1986) have termed an "accumulative disadvantage" (p. 24). women still struggle with questions about how they will fit in; how they will accommodate to the patriarchal institution and become part of it, or resist and risk "anonymity and marginality" (stalker, 1994, p. 366). they find it difficult to break into collegial networks from which they might receive advice, advocacy, and patronage. sorted by the bureaucratic, rationalistic structure of mentoring, their performance judged by the dominant inner circle of male senior colleagues, women new to academe often find the atmosphere in the academy at best inhospitable (hill, bahniuk, dobos, & rouner, 1989; informal interviews, 1998). though females have found it easier, of late, to secure an academic appointment, they are discovering that gaining acceptance, promotion, and tenure are more of a struggle (national center for educational statistics, 1997). unfortunately, traditional male biased professional development and promotion standards and a preponderance of often unwritten and culturally reinforced rules complicate women's navigation through promotion and tenure proceedings and dictate faculty members' work efforts. our conversations with women faculty and graduate students have revealed stories of women walking political tightropes, feeling silenced (or at least quieted) by senior male faculty, and learning very quickly the power of prevailing ideas. women junior faculty and graduate students experience confrontations over, and resistance toward, rethinking old ideas and accepting and valuing different ways of knowing. they often are rebuffed by expressions of territorial rights and of witnessing their male counterparts experience more affirmation, encouragement, and collegiality. women often describe losing much of the sense of authority they brought to academe, often having their ideas discounted or dismissed and feeling their presence diminished. moreover, they are often burdened with quasi-clerical tasks and other "programmatic" responsibilities, their time consumed by non-tenure, non-academically related tasks. women experience these conditions just at the time when, being new to academe and in pursuit of a line of scholarship and inquiry, they need the support of senior faculty. all of these conditions can contribute to overwhelming sentiments of disillusionment, potential failure, and despondency. the prevailing culture of the academy, then, can not be ignored for the powerful force it has on a woman's sense of professional self and her ability to succeed in the organization, or as andrews (1984) would describe it, her performance-self-esteem. when performance-self-esteem is high, andrews found that an individual is likely to emerge as a leader. moreover, the stronger the individual in terms of self-confidence and performance-self-esteem, the more she is able to become an influential part of the organizational culture. these considerations can help explain the psychological stress many women feel in male dominated cultures when they are not always held in the highest regard. when self concept levels are adversely affected by such an environment, their self-esteem suffers, their performance expectations drop, and their performance-self-esteem, which is critical for success, diminishes. if these notions are valid, then stronger, more pervasive support of women in the academy could result in higher rates of retention, increased productivity, faculty cohesiveness, and greater commitment to the organization (hall & sandler, 1983). women supported and affirmed would be in a position of strength to influence the organization toward a more egalitarian culture marked with feelings of community. their feelings of performance-self-esteem would be enhanced, their sense of efficacy would be affirmed, and their voices would be heard as a force for change in the academy. if women are afforded the opportunity to develop leadership abilities and enjoy professional success, they are more likely to have an impact on the organization of which they are a part. their leadership has the potential of reinforcing inclusion in the organization by strengthening and appreciating alternative ideas, voices and behaviors. more importantly, they will help to overcome what tompkins (1992) has referred to as the isolation, loneliness, and disconnection of life in the academy. we believe in an alternative to mentoring as it has been known. for the successful socialization and advancement of women within the academy, the higher education community must prioritize the replacement of conditions that may be dissuading and discouraging to women with those which result in an ethos where women are equally represented in the number of degrees earned, faculty positions obtained, and senior rankings achieved. this would be a culture where multiple perspectives are validated and different ways of knowing are respected. as wunsch (1994) proclaimed, "only when individuals and institutional values and goals converge will individual growth and a sense of community evolve" (p. 10). collective effort if women are to stand on equal professional footing in predominately male professions, a new organizational paradigm must emerge. alternative voices, experiences, backgrounds, and histories must be acknowledged as valid. each and every individual must be considered valuable to the organization. compassion, respect, generosity, and connectedness must be the norm. it is, of course, the legal responsibility of the institution to address directly those formal structures which are prohibiting a more egalitarian approach to promotion and success of women in the academy. however, if the existing socialization approach (the paternalistic mentoring of a select few) is unacceptable, then women and concerned male colleagues within the academy must accept the moral responsibility to combine their efforts toward the establishment of an altruistic and collaborative culture where relationships, diversity, and the development of minds and spirits become paramount. because the individual graduate student or junior faculty member, herself, is at-risk professionally to attempt to effect change, it becomes the charge of faculty as a whole to begin to stimulate a professional conscience to impact disparity and exclusivity within the organization. those in more secure positions need to disassociate themselves from the prevailing paternalistic culture, and begin speaking out, acting out, and encouraging new ways of engaging in the business of the academy. modeling collaboration, offering career and intellectual guidance, building friendships, diffusing power, and disseminating information among all members of the academy must be their mission. belenky, clinchy, goldberger, and tarule (1986) referred to such an educational culture as one based on connectedness among participants, where alienation, repression, and division are replaced with community, shared power, and inclusion, where both minds and spirits are developed. to make this a reality, individuals in the academy need to listen, accept, and appreciate the contributions of each other. with care for the person, and an understanding of human development at the core of interaction, members of the academy need to respect and encourage authentic voice--that which is original and meaningful-rather than that which is produced in a relentless effort to please authority or to attain promotion or tenure. moreover, in support of themselves, women must take on a dichotomous "oppositional consciousness" (moglen, 1983, p. 131) where they oppose the very same culture that they are within. women can effect change in the culture by establishing coalitions among themselves and trusted others, and by capitalizing on their increasing conspicuousness. together, women faculty members need to heed the advice of a woman academic quoted in aisenberg and harrington (1988): "be loud and make waves and do what you want and be free" (p. 18). conclusions perhaps then, mentoring, as it traditionally has been described, is a thing of the past. perhaps it is an antiquated concept, incompatible with an organizational model that advocates inclusion, egalitarianism, and the exploration and encouragement of new ideas. perhaps it is incompatible with a professional environment where differences are not measured vertically, but horizontally, without implying superiority or inferiority. if so, women in academe, along with committed, caring others, must influence the culture of higher education to acknowledge the competency, autonomy, and self-worth of women faculty and students. the ideal academic community is one in which collaboration displaces competition, where community displaces isolation, where respect displaces distrust, and where there is room for all voices, both traditional and alternative. by these conditions all might be accepted, appreciated, and recognized for contributions brought to the organization. the organization, and each individual within it, could only be enriched and energized as a result. the academy itself, mobilized by a committed, caring faculty is capable of eradicating practices which have resulted in women's marginalization and inequality. inclusionary practices, such as the support and sponsorship of all who have passed by the academic gatekeepers, would contribute to a more egalitarian, genuinely meritocratic culture (clark & corcoran, 1986). the campus, as community, would foster mutually supportive, facilitative educational relationships. if higher education culture were to change in this manner, no longer would there be a need for mentoring in the traditional sense. these changes need to occur in educational organizations so that women might feel the acceptance and success white males have known for generations. support, encouragement, and collaboration are those seeds which, when sowed, will reap a harvest of greater professional and academic success in a climate of caring, collegiality, and community. references aisenberg, s. & harrington, m. (1988). women of academe: outsiders in the sacred grove. massachusetts: university of massachusetts press. andrews, p. (1984). performance-self-esteem and perception of leadership emergence: a comparative study of men and women. western journal of speech communication, 48, 1-13. belenky, m., clinchy, b., goldberger, n., tarule, j. (1986). women's ways of knowing. new york: basic books. bolton, e. (1980). a conceptual analysis of the mentor relationship in the career development of women. education, adult 30, 195-207. bova, b. & phillips, r. (1981). the mentor relationship: a study of mentors and protégés in business and academia. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 208 233). clark, s. & corcoran, m. (1986). perspectives on the professional socialization of women faculty: a case of accumulative disadvantage? journal of higher education, 57,(l), 20-43. clawson, j. g. (1985). is mentoring necessary? training and development journal, 39, 36-39. faludi, s. (1992). backlash. new york: anchor books/doubleday. hall, r. m., & sandler, b. r. (1983). academic mentoring for women students and faculty: a new look at an old way to get ahead. washington, dc: project on the status and education of women, association of american colleges. haring-hidore, m. (1987). mentoring as a career advancement strategy for women. journal of counseling and development, 66(3), 147-148. hennig, m. & jardim, a. (1977). the managerial woman. new york: anchor press/doubleday. hill, s., hilton bahniuk, m., dobos, j., & rouner, d. (1989). mentoring and other communication support in the academic setting. group and organization studies, 14(3), 355-368. kanter, r. m. (1977). men and women of the corporation. new york: basic books, inc. kram, k. (1985). mentoring at work: developmental relationships in organizational life. glenville, il: scott, foresman. mccall, a. (1995). the bureaucratic restraints to caring in schools. in d. dunlap & p. schmuck, p. (eds.), women leading in education (pp.180-196). albany, ny: state university of new york press. moglen, h. (1983). power and empowerment. women's studies international forum, 6(2), 131-134. national center for educational statistics. (1997). digest of educational statistics (nces 98-015, tables 222-223). washington, d.c.: u.s. department of education. parson, l., sands, r., & duane, j. (1991). the campus climate for women faculty at a public university. initiatives 5a(l), 19-27. perna, f.m., lerner, b.m., & yura, m.t. (1995). mentoring and career development among university faculty. journal of education, 177, (2), 31-45. random, m. l., strasburg, g., & lipman-blumen, j. (1982). women in higher education. harvard educational review, 52, 189-202. shapiro, e., haseltine, f. p., & rowe, m. p. (1978). moving up: role models, mentors and the patron system. sloan management review 19, 51-58. stalker, j. (1994). athene in academe: women mentoring women in the academy. international journal lifelong education, 13(6), 361-372. tompkins, j. (1992). the way we live now. change, nov.-dec., 13-19. walkins, b. (1980). training educational opportunity researchers: some sobered thoughts of mentoring, some optimistic thoughts on community. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 193 322). wunsch, m. (1994). new directions for mentoring: an organizational development perspective. in m. wunsch (ed.), mentoring revisited: making an impact on individuals and institutions (pp. 9-13). san francisco: jossey-bass. about the author catherine eggleston hackney, ph. d. assistant professor 404 white hall kent state university kent, oh 44242 (330) 672-2580 (330) 672-3246 fax chackney@educ.kent.edu marianne bock 404 white hall kent state university kent, oh 44242 (3300 672-2580 (330) 672-3246 fax awl journal home page awl journal volume 3, number 1, winter 2000 file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/winter2000/index.html subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the 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ownership in recent years. one researcher stated in 1993 women were initiating businesses at twice the rate of men (buttner, 1993). according to the u. s. labor department october 1999 website, women were starting businesses in the us at a rate of 350,000 to 400,000 a year between 1987 and 1996. with such growth through the year 2010, there will be approximately four to five million female owned businesses added to the american economy. combined with the estimated 1999 total of eight and one-half million, there could be between 12 to 13 million women entrepreneurs in the us by the end of this decade. this statistical possibility speaks well for women achieving more financial independence. however, broad issues arise as a result of this extraordinary social and http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome 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https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html economic trend. one of these is what will be the long-term impact, if any, on american family life. another is how many of these new entrepreneurs will not succeed in their bid for business success, and what will be the economic and psychological costs to them and their families. there are more specific and near term issues. one of these has to do with the kind and amount of education and training this massive group of women will receive. a second near term issue involves the quality and quantity of the counseling and advising made available in the coming decade to insure these millions of women will make the best decision to undertake or not undertake the risky step of starting their own businesses. a recent study of the motivations and personalities of highly successful women business owners by the author deals directly with this last issue. the principal objective of this paper is to report the findings of more than 50 highly successful women entrepreneurs completing two well-known personality assessment instruments. this information is intended to establish a stronger foundation for the advising and counseling of the very large number of women who will consider becoming entrepreneurs in this decade. a review of the literature in this article will show that a minimal amount of attention has been paid to women's psychological make-up as it pertains to business ownership and that only one researcher in the last few years has focused on the kind of motivations and personalities needed by women in order for them to succeed as entrepreneurs. an in-depth analysis and discussion of the personality assessments of these women entrepreneurs will demonstrate to the reader's satisfaction that there are distinctive sets or patterns of motivations, interests and psychological needs for this group. this information should then lead to a more effective identification and preparation process for a valuable human resource category which is contributing to the vitality and well being of our country's economy. personality assessment and the woman entrepreneur although the history of psychological assessment in the us dates back to the period of world war i, the utilization of personality assessment as it pertains to entrepreneurship first occurred about four decades ago. the initial research efforts to study the linkage of personality to entrepreneurial success began in the 1960's, particularly with the work of mcclelland at harvard (mcclelland, 1961; 1965). a few others were also involved in this early period (collins & moore, 1964; smith, 1967). oddly, there was a general lack of research and publication on the subject in the decade of the 70's. investigation of the question of the personality's influence on a person's success in business ownership picked up in the 1980's. smith, assisted by others, renewed his research on the topic with a special emphasis on its tie to task motivation (smith & miner, 1984; 1985; miner, smith & bracker, 1989). several other social scientists began to match samples of men and women entrepreneurs in order to examine psychological traits which identified specific areas where men and women business owners differed in their personalities (welsch & young, 1982; carsrud & olm, 1985; sexton & bowman, 1986; masters & meier, 1988). at the turn of the decade other researchers were getting into the fray. bellu initially scrutinized the part task motivation was playing in the success of the entrepreneur (bellu, 1988; 1992; 1993), and then he along with sherman moved to examining attributional style (bellu & sherman, 1993; 1995). roberts in this period was investigating the personality's role in technological entrepreneurship (roberts, 1991). dugan and his research team concentrated on comparing the female entrepreneur's personality with that of women in the general population (dugan, feeser & plaschke, 1990). it was at the end of the 80's and the beginning of the 90's that a few scholars were drawing overall conclusions about the worth and value of the research being conducted concerning the motivations and personalities of entrepreneurs. a few of them (bird, 1989; guth, 1991) took a dim view of the effort saying the outcomes were not fruitful or promising. on the other hand, brush in a comprehensive study meticulously spelled out the kinds of research that had been undertaken in the field of entrepreneurship which were effective in examining the psychological make-up of the entrepreneur. she highlighted the need for more such research, especially on behalf of the woman entrepreneur (brush, 1992). one researcher, miner, stands out in the 1990's by making a significant break-through in the understanding of the motivations and personalities of the entrepreneur and by bringing more attention to the need for career advising and assistance to those thinking about starting their own businesses. only one other research group (scherer, brodzinski & wiebe, 1990) to this point had associated career choice and entrepreneurship. as brought out earlier, miner was a part of smith's team in the 80's that had done a considerable amount of analysis of task motivation as it related to entrepreneurship. miner, as he led this same team in several task motivation projects over a five year period (miner, smith & bracker, 1989; 1992a; 1992b; 1994) also began to strike out in a new direction with his individual research projects dealing with the personality of the entrepreneur (miner, 1990; 1991; 1993). the culmination of his individual work came in 1996 and 1997 when he published his theory and supporting documentation that there are four distinct and separate entrepreneurial personality types (miner, 1996a; 1996b; 1997). to give more detail about what he did, miner studied 100 established entrepreneurs (which included 12 women) over a seven year period assessing their motivations and personalities using 43 different measures from 17 psychological instruments. he drew a number of conclusions from his extended investigation: 1. personality and motivation exert a "dominant influence" on the future success of a person starting a business; 2. there are four types or patterns of the entrepreneurial personality ( the achiever, the empathic super salesperson, the expert idea generator, and the manager); and 3. a person's having a greater number of these types or patterns leads to a higher prediction of entrepreneurial success for the individual. miner's findings and conclusions have brought to the forefront specific information that deserves deeper exploration and substantiation. his assessments were primarily of male entrepreneurs resulting in a question of whether his results truly apply to the female entrepreneur. given the present social and demographic forces that have been operating in the last two decades and given that personality assessment of the entrepreneur has reached a higher level, an extensive study of the motivations and personalities of women entrepreneurs is needed to develop information that will permit in-depth advice and counsel to the huge number who will consider becoming business owners in the coming years. the sample and method of research in its may 1998 issue, working woman published for the first time its list of the top 500 women business owners in the us those on the list had the highest sales in the country for 1997. number one in sales of women owned businesses was pat moran of jm family enterprises located in deerfield, florida with 1997 revenues of 5.4 billion dollars. number 500 was billie jo wanink of interior system contract group headquartered in royal oak, michigan who had sales of $13.2 million. the author in the fall of 1998 sent a letter to everyone of these 500 women inviting them to participate in a study to identify the motivations and personality make-up of highly successful women entrepreneurs. it was explained that the purpose of the research was to increase the career advising knowledge of those such as teachers and counselors who will help provide guidance in the future to those many women thinking about going into business for themselves. two well-known personality assessment instruments, the birkman method (bm) and the attributional style questionnaire (asq) would be completed by them. over fifty of these highly successful women business owners (referred to throughout the article as hswbo) replied positively to the invitation and completed the two instruments along with a demographic form. demographically, the women in this sample are located in 23 different states, are involved in 41 types of businesses, and range in age from the early 30's to the early 70's with most of them being in their 40's and 50's. on average they began their entrepreneurial careers in 1979 with the earliest start being in 1950 and the latest 1994. they are well educated with three out of four attending or graduating from college. of this group of college educated a third have advanced degrees. annual sales for their businesses in 1997 ranged from $13 million to almost one billion dollars. the average annual sales for those in this sample for that year was $58 million. the number of employees in their firms in 1997 ranged from 15 to almost 8,000. the average size of employees for the 56 companies was 426. the general design of this study is mainly to test the previously mentioned conclusions of miner by asking and answering a series of questions concerning this group of 56 proven and highly successful women entrepreneurs already identified: 1. has motivation and personality been a major influence in their success? 2. are there four basic types or patterns of entrepreneurial personality possessed by these women? and 3. can a highly successful female business owner have two or more of these types of personalities, which leads to a greater probability of long-term success? a fourth major question to be examined deals with attributional style and asks: 4. are the women of this sample more optimistic and self-confident than the average person? the two personality instruments, the birkman method (bm) and the attributional style questionnaire (asq), are used to identify 65 personality, motivational and career guidance characteristics for this hswbo group. their 55 birkman method scores are compared to norm data of two groups: college educated women (cedw) with an n of 18640 and college educated men (cedm) with an n of 25032. the comparison of the hswbo group scores with those of these two norm groups who have completed the birkman will establish whether there is a statistically significant level of difference between the hswbo and the results of these two college educated groups on any and all of the birkman method scales. the norm information on the asq comes from the book learned optimism (seligman, 1991) and gives the reader a basis to compare how the average person views or perceives optimism-pessimism versus the hswbo group. the instrument has been extensively studied with a wide variety of groups or subjects (sweeney, anderson and bailey, 1986). the assessments or conclusions concerning the average scores of the 52 hswbo on the 10 dimensions of the asq come from learned optimism. it may be helpful for the reader to have a few more details about the background of these two assessment tools. since its initial development in the early 1950's, the birkman method has been completed by more than a million and a half people. more than a half million of these results are maintained as an active data base. millions of dollars has been spent on research to establish its validity and usefulness in its application in a variety of organizational settings including business and industry. career counseling is one of its primary areas of utilization. true colors (birkman, 1995) is an excellent source to learn about the instrument and its uses. the attributional style questionnaire has been developed over the last two decades mainly at the university of pennsylvania by martin seligman, one of the world's leading cognitive psychologists. it has been extensively used in clinical as well as professional business circumstances to explore learning theory, treatment of depression, helplessness and the perception of optimism-pessimism. learned optimism offers a comprehensive view of the development of attribution theory, the attributional style questionnaire and explains how the instrument can be helpful in an individual's self-understanding, psychological well being and success at work. findings and discussion the outcomes of the hswbo group's completing the two instruments are shown in a number of tables. tables i through iv report the results of the birkman method and table vii presents their scores on the asq. tables v and vi provide information to show the compatibility and linkage between the birkman method's and miner's personality types or patterns. the birkman method may be viewed as a battery of assessments. it develops a person's interest profile (table i) just as the kuder, edwards, and the strong and the campbell instruments do. ten interests are measured by the birkman. another aspect of the birkman method is its examination of eleven personality dimensions just as the myers-briggs type indicator studies eight motivation-behavior areas. however, the birkman method also delineates between a person's usual behavior (how the individual is inclined or predisposed to treat another, a group or the outside world) when not stressed and the person's motivational needs (how that individual wants to be treated by another, a group or the outside world) in each of the eleven categories or components. in other words, this area of the birkman method measurement gives two views of each of the eleven motivational elements. this data is reviewed in table ii. table iii provides an individual's professional style profile, which is made up of management style, work style, social style and thinking style. these four groups are broken out into 3, 4, 2 and 2 category scores, respectively. the data or scores in tables i through iii will do much to provide an answer to the first question posed in the research design segment of this paper. all of the information in tables i through iii when pulled together or combined show up in two birkman method formats: the career success profile and the life style grid. the first is reported in table iv and is comparable to the other three tables. the career success profile identifies twelve broad career fields and indicates the degree a person (given his or her combined interests, motivations and professional characteristics) is similar to people who have been well established in that career field for several years. the second format, the life style grid, takes all of the results from the bm's interests, motivational components and the professional style category scores and converts them into a four quadrant grid. an illustration showing how the scores from the first three tables are summarized in the career success profile and in the life style grid is presented in figure 1. the bm life style grid and a descriptor of each quadrant is displayed in figure 2. it is the birkman method life style grid which matches very well with miner's four personality framework for the entrepreneur, and these miner terms are written in figure 3 in the appropriate bm quadrant: doer achiever, talker empathic super salesperson, thinker expert idea generator and controller manager. proving or disproving questions two and three presented in this paper's research design portion will be aided by the bm's career success profile and life style grid. what do the scores in tables i through iii reveal when one delves into the question "has personality and motivation been a major influence in the success of this group of highly successful women entrepreneurs?" the interest profile shows eight of the twelve interest areas stand out significantly from the two college educated norm groups. the women entrepreneurs differ in only the one area of persuasion from their female counterparts. this difference may be an indication selling is a key consideration for the woman entrepreneur, and further study of the data my lend more support to such a conclusion. the fact that this group of women business owners and college educated women in general have a number of strong interest variances from men should not come as a surprise in that this kind of information has https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-7.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-7.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-5.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-5.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-5.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-5.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-1.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-1.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-2.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-2.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-3.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-3.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-4.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-4.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-1.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-1.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-2.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-2.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-3.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-3.xls been known for some time. the reader might take note for later reference that (even though there are no significant differences in the scores) both hswbo and the college educated women group have very high interest scores in the artistic, literary and musical areas which may suggest a creative side to the hswbo. fifteen of the 22 items in table ii provide special insight into how the motivations and personalities of the hswbo are dissimilar to the college educated norm groups. the esteem a (usual behavior) score of 13.00 indicates these women are very candid, direct, and honest in their communication with others (much as college educated men and more so than college educated women). however, relative to the other two groups, they would like others to deal with them on a warm and sensitive individual basis rather than in a candid and direct manner (esteem b). continuing down the list where there are significant levels of difference (women and/or men norm groups) these hswbo are very sociable and at ease when interacting in a group (acceptance a score of 81.38); are considerably less structured than both comparison groups (structure a); have a much higher need for individual recognition and material reward (advantage b); have a greater predisposition to be empathetic than both norm groups (empathy a) and have a greater need for empathy than males (empathy b); have a much higher inclination to be open to change (change a); desire more individual freedom than college educated women (freedom a); and need a less pressured or hectic environment in which to make decisions (thought b). the career counselor might be wise to pay attention to the combination structure a, change a, and freedom a scores of aspiring women entrepreneurs which denote a reinforced behavior on the part of successful hswbo to be independent. also those providing guidance to a possible future woman entrepreneur should double check her activity a score (very high for successful women entrepreneurs) and her thought a score (very low). distinctive characteristics of successful hswbo personalities as a result are for them to be very energetic and be quick decision makers. the data also suggest that if a decision is important the hswbo will reverse her usual quick decision process to deliberate longer on that crucial decision. women not having such energetic and rapid (but occasional deliberate) decision-making personalities may be less likely to succeed in an entrepreneurial role. this accumulated data would possibly cause one to begin to accept the idea that these motivations or motivational patterns being manifested by these hswbo's has helped them in their entrepreneurial careers. key information about the hswbo personality is provided by the professional style data of table iii. the clear primary pattern of this group's management style is that of knowledge specialist complemented by the secondary delegative management style. this combination style is in stark contrast to the college educated male's singular primary style of directive management. the work style information points out the hswbo compared to the male group 1) has a more diverse set of motivations than just a motivation to work (they as a group are not workaholics); 2) are remarkable learners having an unusually high self-development score of 81.66 which means they are strongly motivated to build their capabilities and their careers; and 3) very much prefer to work with and to contact the public versus working in an isolated detail type of job. the thinking or cognitive style of the hswbo group is one involving the global and conceptual orientation as opposed to one which is linear and concrete. https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-2.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-2.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-3.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-3.xls the latter style does appear statistically to be more frequently seen with college educated men. as already mentioned, the career success profile (table iv) is made up of twelve career fields. this profile is derived from the combining of the scores given in the three earlier tables (figure 1). table iv's scores are arranged in descending order according to the hswbo's likelihood of success in the various fields. the career area where the birkman method indicates these women as a group would have the greatest probability of success is in the arts field. the production field is where they would least likely succeed. their scores suggest they would probably be successful in the fields of sales, office administration and social services, but would probably not do well in the engineering or fiscal fields. it is interesting to observe these highly successful entrepreneurs from a personality and motivation standpoint lack an orientation toward the fiscal and production occupations. this condition may suggest their entrepreneurial success is founded fundamentally on other strong orientations such as people, new ideas, and sales rather than accounting, finance, and production, which are conventionally viewed by some as the heart of entrepreneurism and business. it may be the hswbo group as a whole turn to experts in these areas and delegate extensively to them. as a final note about the career success profile, the birkman method classifies these twelve fields by the quadrants of its life style grid (lsg). these designations are shown in column 2 of table iv and will be discussed below. to this point the hswbo birkman data has been reviewed and discussed table by table in an attempt to determine a "unique" motivational pattern which helps the woman entrepreneur be successful. further discussion might be directed at not only whether there is a distinct entrepreneurial personality for the hswbo, but at how this information can be useful in the career advising of aspiring women entrepreneurs. first, establishing in this case the fact women are dissimilar to men from motivational and personality standpoints might be reemphasized. although not given in tabular form here, statistical comparisons were made of the two norm groups, cedw (18640) and cedm (25032), and their results differed significantly on 50 of the 55 of the birkman dimensions. it is simpler to identify where they are the same: both have equally high scores for social adaptability, structure a and freedom b; both have the same moderate scores for advantage b and delegative management. (interestingly, the hswbo scores differ from these two groups on these dimensions with the exception of freedom b). as a way to demonstrate the extreme difference between the two norm groups, their scores were studied to locate instances where there was a separation of ten or more points. figure 4 is the outcome showing 16 categories with this wide gap. this data once again verifies what has been known for decades: women and men have substantial differences in their motivational and personality make-ups. moving from looking at the two comparison groups by themselves to an examination of the hswbo and the norm groups' results in order to build more and better advising information for women who are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs, one discovers there are 12 categories of the birkman method (both norm groups being considered) which stand out as distinguishing the hswbo. it is also possible to https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-4.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-4.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-1.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-1.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-4.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-4.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-%204.doc https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-%204.doc establish cut-off levels for the birkman scores in these categories so as to say to someone "if you score above or below this number for this particular dimension, it is meaningful for you from the standpoint of being similar or dissimilar to this group of hswbo." figure 5 displays these 12 categories along with whether the hswbo score is greater or less than the two norm groups (first parenthesis) and what the important advising cutoff score is (second parenthesis). when considering significant difference between just the hswbo group and the cedw collection of results, three more key advising dimensions are found with clear cutoff scores: persuasion (> 50), esteem a (< 15), and freedom a (> 56). another way of finding important categories for career guidance of aspiring women entrepreneurs which are automatic cutoff scores (even though there is no significant statistical difference between the hswbo and the cedw/cedm numbers) is to pinpoint hswbo high (scores = to or > 65) and low (those = to or < 35) results. figure 6 lists the 14 high/low dimensions that are drawn from tables i-iv. thus, there are a total of 29 birkman measurements (twelve from figure 5, three from the cedw results and fourteen from figure 6) that add weight to the conclusion this group of hswbo has a unique motivational and personality pattern. this information readily leads one to entertaining the idea this pattern contributes in a serious way to how, among other things, the hswbo communicates (esteem a), thinks (globally and conceptually), influences (persuasion), leads and manages (authority a and knowledge specialist with delegation), interacts with others (acceptance a) and functions entrepreneurially (structure a, change a, freedom a and activity a). these 29 measurements also provide specific cutoff points to aid a teacher, adviser or career counselor in guiding a woman to choose or not to choose the undertaking of a business venture. one aspect to this data, however, should always be kept in mind by a person playing such a role. the scores should never be considered solely by themselves, but in conjunction with knowledge dealing with the advisee's experience, expertise and technical know-how, skills and abilities. a considerable amount of data, especially that contained in tables i iii dealing with the hswbo birkman method results, has been explored in an attempt to answer question one presented on page 6. there appears to be evidence this group of 56 women entrepreneurs has a distinct pattern of interests, motivational behaviors and needs and professional characteristics. this information gives support to the premise that their motivations and personalities have been a serious influence on their business ownership success. the answering of questions two and three offered in the design approach of this study which concern the four basic types of entrepreneurial personalities and whether having more of them leads to greater business achievement will impact question one as well. scrutinizing more closely the birkman method career style profile and life style grid will in general assist in uncovering the complex role personality plays in the success of the hswbo and shed light on how motivational characteristics and personalities intermingle in a kaleidoscopic setting. https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-5.doc https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-5.doc https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-%206.doc https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-%206.doc https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-5.doc https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-5.doc https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-%206.doc https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/f-%206.doc in addition to separating careers into the twelve fields, the birkman method further classifies them into a color coded arranged four quadrant life style grid. these twelve are broken out equally into these four quadrants (three per quadrant). this arrangement is shown in table v. the birkman method gives all of the 56 hswbo a percentile score for each of these twelve career categories. the criterion in this study to determine if a hswbo score causes her to be classified or thrown into one or more of the color coded lsg quadrants (and therefore one or more of miner's four personality patterns) is the woman entrepreneur scoring at or above the 60th percentile in at least two of the three career fields of the quadrant/color code grouping. table vi reveals the outcome when each hswbo birkman method career success profile result is separated on this basis. examining the first portion of table vi in more detail may help the reader understand the manner in which the table was constructed. three hswbo have been placed in the quadrant i/red/doer achiever category because in at least two of the red career fields (production, enforcement, engineering) their scores are at or above the 60th percentile. as a matter of fact, one of the hswbo's has all three meeting the 60th percentile requirement, the second has two (production and enforcement) while the third has two red career fields (enforcement and engineering) and two yellow career fields (office administration and fiscal) at or above the 60th percentile. the red is dominant in this combination circumstance for the third hswbo because her percentile scores are higher in the red career fields compared to those in the yellow. this same procedure is followed for the 27 hswbo making up the quadrant ii/green, the 15 who compose the quadrant iii/blue and the 11 of the quadrant iv/yellow sector of the life style grid. a fuller analysis of table vi reveals 19 or 34% of the hswbo are found in a single color or quadrant (2 red, 11 green, 3 blue and 3 yellow) while 37 or 66% are a more complex combination of two or three personality types. this larger proportion of the hswbo group being of this complex composition adds credence to the idea that the more types of the four a person has then the greater the likelihood of long-term entrepreneurial success. however, the fact there is not an instance of all four personality patterns being possessed by a single hswbo may be an important finding bearing on the third research design question. the data being presented here is possibly suggesting that a woman is twice as likely to be highly successful as a business owner (66% versus 34%) if she has two or three of the combined personality types. one might go on to conclude there is a limit to this combining of types effect because no incidence of all four types of personalities are found with any of the 56 hswbo. this conclusion is not correct if the criterion of having at least two of the career fields at or above the 60th percentile is dropped. nineteen of the 56 (34%) hswbo have at least one career field in all four colors or quadrants at this percentile level. using this one career field at the 60 percentile standard there are no single color personality types among the 56 hswbo in that all have at least one career field in two or more of the quadrants/colors. as a consequence, one might be accurate in describing these woman as versatile and multi-sided in what careers they could pursue if they were not entrepreneurs and that all four personality types can be somewhat https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-4.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-4.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-6.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-6.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-6.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-6.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-6.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-6.xls involved in the personality of the highly successful woman entrepreneur. another way to look at the hswbo life style grid or the four personality color coding is to examine it from the aspect of a dominant color or personality. if one returns to a two career field criterion (60th percentile or above) to establish a dominant quadrant or color and if the objective is to determine which color of the single personality style is the most prevalent, green wins. there are 11 hswbo single personality greens while the red, blue and yellow added together total only eight. the idea that a woman's entrepreneurial success is centered around a sales interest, motivation, behavior, and personality may be reinforced when it is discovered 22 of the 37 complex combinations of the hswbo personality types involve the green set (at least two career fields at the 60th percentile or above). however, the odd circumstance occurs that 31 of the 37 contain the blue set, and there are 24 of the yellow. only six have the red set. the more appropriate statement may be that a woman possessing a combination of the green, blue and yellow sets of interest, motivations, behavior, and personality gives her the greatest probability of success in running and operating her business well. thus, there is evidence here with this birkman method data that for this group of 56 hswbo who represent the kinds of motivations and personalities that are the essence of entrepreneurial accomplishment 1. there are four basic types of entrepreneurial personalities as suggested by miner's earlier studies; 2. these basic types follow miner's characterizations of achiever, empathic super salesperson, expert idea generator, and manager; 3. these four basic types combine into complex sets with the refinement to miner's formulation that all four types may not be completely possessed by a women entrepreneur; and 4. the greater likelihood of entrepreneurial success lies with the woman who has a personality made up of interests, motivations, and behaviors that emphasize selling, generating ideas, and managing. the fourth and final question of this article's research design asks "does this group of hswbo have a more optimistic and self-confident personality than the average person?" to most the automatic response would have to be a rapid and resounding "yes". however, scientific curiosity and objectivity require a serious investigation of the query. the results of the 52 hswbo (four failed to return the asq along with the bm) who completed the 48 item questionnaire is presented in table vii. given what may be conventional thinking about successful people, there are a number of surprises to be found in this asq data. the asq provides ten categories or ways to view the optimism-pessimism spectrum. five deal with how a person perceives or interprets bad events on three bases: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization. four involve how a person perceives or interprets good events on these same three bases. the tenth score is derived by subtracting the person's overall bad event score from the overall good event score. none of the ten outcomes for the hswbo group https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-7.xls https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/davis/figures_tables/t-7.xls are given a "strongly optimistic" rating or assessment by the creators of the asq. "moderately optimistic" is achieved in only three of the scoring categories, all three dealing with bad events permanence, pervasiveness and hopefulness. quite surprising from a usual view of the successful is how the hswbo sees herself from a personalization or internalization stand point for both bad event and good event circumstances. she is moderately pessimistic about herself with a moderately low selfesteem. she sees herself as moderately the cause of bad events and not the cause of good events. this lower score (bad events) in the personalization area overrides the other two bad event scores of "moderately optimistic" to the extent that the overall bad event score becomes "neutral" (neither optimistic or pessimistic). the "moderately pessimistic" score on personalization (good event) impacts the other two good event results of "neutral" to such a degree as to have the overall good event score come out "pessimistic." and, the last quirk for the hswbo asq results is the overall score good events minus bad events which turns out to be "moderately pessimistic". what are possible explanations for the hswbo being moderately pessimistic and attributing her success to forces outside of herself? one is pessimists are realists, and optimists are not. whether a result of acquired learning, a conscious thought, intuition or a "sixth sense", the successful entrepreneur possibly sees her primary job as surviving by recognizing real problems and solving them realistically. a second possibility is the thought that the successful entrepreneur is upbeat about handling tough problems (bad events) and does not become overconfident or complacent when things are going well in good times (good events). last and possibly the most significant explanation is the internally held perception that even with her continuing success she has possibly a daily dissatisfaction with herself that she could have been doing better at a job, solving a problem or serving the customer. built into her perhaps by nature and/or by experience is the recurring thought that she cannot rest on her laurels, that she has to prove herself each and every day. it is intriguing to ask if these are true and accurate explanations of psychological drives behind the successful woman entrepreneur. to find the hswbo moderately pessimistic is unexpected. this asq data does not give us a positive answer as to how she explains her success. in her drive for success must the woman entrepreneur explain herself and many aspects of her life in non-positive terms? this kind of discovery, the degree to which it may be true and other questions which may follow underline the need to study more deeply the psychology of the motivations and the personality of the woman entrepreneur. several challenges face the social scientist wanting to improve the knowledge of psychology to help the woman business owner and our country's economy. the challenge of this study has been to explore the highly successful female entrepreneur. further study of this group would be valuable in pinpointing more clearly the psychological forces behind entrepreneurial success. other challenges are the examination of those who are marginally successful and those who have failed in their business ventures. what personality and motivational factors are lacking or contributing to this marginality or failure? perhaps the greatest challenge is the researching on long term time frames the question of how we can better develop young women at early stages, such as the high school period, to have an attitude, a perspective of career and life or a personality that leads to entrepreneurial success. researchers such as birkman, seligman, and miner have moved us some distance down this path. others, using the insights and discoveries of these social scientists, can accelerate and expand our knowledge and ability to advise and guide the great number of aspiring women entrepreneurs to come forward in this decade. conclusion during the first decade of the new millennium, millions of women will enter the u. s. economy as business owners. it would appear there will be a great need to provide these women with not only education and training but also with career guidance. a large number of women will start businesses during this period and not "make a go of it" possibly because they will lack the necessary entrepreneurial motivations and personalities. there may be substantial costs, both psychological and economic, associated with these business failures. since the 1960's a number of social scientists have been studying the motivations and personalities of both male and female entrepreneurs. one researcher, miner, has recently made extensive strides in establishing that the success of people as entrepreneurs can be predicted as a result of the nature of their motivations and personalities. he identifies four specific entrepreneurial personalities that, when combined, particularly lead to the higher probability of success as a business owner. this paper has sought to support this and other miner conclusions. it has reviewed the results of over fifty highly successful women business owners' completing two well-known and established personality assessment instruments, the birkman method and the attributional style questionnaire. the information from this assessment data suggests the existence of distinct female entrepreneurial profiles in the areas of interests, behaviors and needs, personality types and attribution. the outcomes on the birkman method for this group of women fit quite closely miner's personality type framework. for the fifty-six women studied there are sub-groups who reflect the achiever, empathic super salesperson, expert idea generator and manager patterns of personality. there is evidence from the birkman method data that as these types of personalities are multiply held by women a greater likelihood for entrepreneurial success occurs. this finding is in keeping with miner's research. the data from the attributional style questionnaire has produced some surprising results. conventional thinking might assume that highly successful women entrepreneurs would be optimistic and self-confident. in this case, the opposite is true. they are moderately pessimistic and have a moderately low self-esteem. this discovery for this sample of women entrepreneurs highlights the need to examine in more depth the psychological make-up of this group. it will be important in the counseling and advising of women in the future to be able to explain how women perceive their success and failure and to identify what they believe are the causes of this success or failure. as a result, there are a number of areas of research that are brought out in this study which, if conducted, could further the effort to provide effective advice and guidance to millions of aspiring women entrepreneurs. references anderson, k., bailey, s., & sweeny, p. d. 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(1995). predicting firm success from task motivation and attributional style: a longitudinal study. entrepreneurship and regional development, 7, 349-363. birkman, r. w. (1995). true colors. new york: a. a. knopf. bowman, n., & sexton, d. l. (1986). validation of a personality index: comparative psychological characteristics analysis of female entrepreneurs, managers, entrepreneurship students, and business students. frontiers of entrepreneurship research. babson college, 18-25. bracker, j. s., miner, j. b., & smith, n. r. (1987). correlates of firm and entrepreneur success in technologically innovative companies. frontiers of entrepreneur research. babson college, 337-353. bracker j. s., miner, j. b., & smith, n. r. (1989). role of entrepreneurial task motivation in the growth of technologically innovative firms. journal of applied psychology, 74, 554-560. bracker j. s., miner, j. b., & smith, n. r. (1992a). predicting firm survival from a knowledge of entrepreneur task motivation. entrepreneurship and regional development, 4, 145-153. bracker j. s., miner, j. b., & smith, n. r. (1992b). defining the inventor-entrepreneur in the context of established typologies. journal of business venturing, 7, 103-113. bracker j. s., miner, j. b., & smith, n. r. (1994). role of entrepreneurial task motivation in the growth of technologically innovative firms: interpretations from follow-up data. journal of applied psychology, 79, 627-630. brodzinski, j. d., scherer, r. f., & wiebe, f. (1990). entrepreneur career selection and gender: a socialization approach. journal of small business management, 28(2), 37-43. brush, c. g. (1992). research on women business owners: past trends, a new perspective, and future directions. entrepreneurship: theory and practice, 16(4), 5-30. buttner, e. h. (1993). female entrepreneurs: how far have they come? business horizons, 36(2), 59-65. carsrud, a. l., & olm, k. w. (1986). the success of male and female entrepreneurs: a comparative analysis of the effects of multi-dimensional achievement motivation and personality traits. in r. smilor & r. kuhn (eds.), managing take-off in fast growth firms. new york: praeger, 147-162. collins, o. f., & moore, d. g. (1964). the enterprising man. east lansing: bureau of business and economic research, graduate school of business administration, michigan state university. dugan, k. w., feeser, h. r., & plaschka g. r. (1990). a comparison of personality characteristics among women entrepreneurs and the general female population. in t. w. garsombke & d. j. garsombke (eds.), proceedings of the us association for small business and entrepreneurship. (pp. 88-94). dyer, w. g. (1992). the entrepreneurial experience: confronting career dilemmas of the startup executive. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. guth, w. (1990/91). director's corner--research in entrepreneurship. the entrepreneurship forum. winter, 11. masters, r., & meier, r. (1988). sex difference and risk-taking propensity of entrepreneurs. journal of small business management, 26(1), 31-35. mcclelland, d. c. (1961). the achieving society. princeton: d. van nostrand. mccelland, d. c. (1965). n achievement and entrepreneurship: a longitudinal study. journal of personality and social psychology, 1, 389-392. miner, j. b. (1990). entrepreneurs, high growth entrepreneurs, and managers: contrasting and overlapping motivational patterns. journal of business venturing, 5, 221-234. miner, j. b. (1991). individuals, groups and networking: experience with an entrepreneurship development program. international council for small business proceedings, 36, 82-90. miner, j. b. (1993). role motivation theories. new york: routledge. miner, j. b. (1996a). evidence for the existence of personality types, defined by personality tests, that predict entrepreneurial success. frontiers of entrepreneurial research. babson college, 62-76. miner, j. b. (1996b). the 4 routes to entrepreneurial success. san francisco, ca: berrett-koehler publishers. miner, j. b. (1997). a psychological typology of successful entrepreneurs. westport, ct: quorum books. miner, j. b., & smith, n. r. (1984). motivational considerations in the success of technologically innovative entrepreneurs. frontiers of entrepreneur research. babson college, 488-495. miner, j. b., & smith, n. r. (1985). motivational considerations in the success of technologically innovative entrepreneurs: extended sample findings. frontiers of entrepreneurial research. babson college, 482-488. roberts, e. b. (1991). entrepreneurs in high technology: lessons from mit and beyond. new york: oxford university press. seligman, m. e. p. (1991). learned optimism. new york: a. a. knopf. smith, n. r. (1967). the entrepreneur and his firm: the relationship between type of man and type of company. east lansing: bureau of business and economic research, graduate school of business administration, michigan state university. welsch, h. b., & young, e. c. (1982). comparative analysis of male and female entrepreneurs with respect to personality characteristics, small business problems, and information source preferences. proceedings international council for small business, 2-10. dr. jack davis is an associate professor of management at st. mary's university. dr. davis can be reached via e-mail at: jjdavis@stmarytx.edu subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines 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mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 29, number 7 july 30, 2009 issn 1093-7099 transformational learning in women’s leadership development training dr. gelaye debebe abstract recent years have seen a sharp increase in interest in women’s leadership development. however, the nature of change for women in leadership development training and the processes within the training setting that produce change remain under-explored. this paper examines the learning processes within training settings in the context of the women’s leadership series (wls), a leadership development initiative for scientists and managers within the consultative group for international agricultural research (cgiar). it documents this process within a multi-stage framework and concludes that transformational learning can indeed take place in the context of a classroom and in the specific setting of leadership development training. keywords: women’s leadership development, training, transformational learning citation: debebe, g. (2009). transformational learning in women’s leadership development training. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(7). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/� advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 2 introduction recent years have seen a sharp increase in interest in women’s leadership development (e.g., eagly & carli, 2007). however, the nature of change for women in leadership development training and the processes within the training setting that produce change remain underexplored. the few studies evaluating the impact of leadership development question whether participants effectively deploy their training upon return to their work settings (e.g., velsor 1998; markus 2001; young & dixon 1996). this paper, examines the leadership transformation process within a training setting that catalyzed leadership transformation in the context of the women’s leadership series (wls), a leadership development initiative for women scientists and managers within the consultative group for international agricultural research (cgiar). it complements previous assessments of leadership training such as those conducted by woltring, constantine and schwarte (2003). transformational learning engages the learner intellectually and emotionally (kegan 2000) and alters the learner’s assumptions and world view so that the he or she undergoes a significant and irreversible shift in understanding and behavior (mezirow 1991, 2000; clark 1993). according to adult learning theorists (kegan 2000; mezirow 2000; rogers 1961), the transformational learning process is an inherent part of expanding personal agency, a critical task in the process of becoming a leader. for example, zaleznick (1977) argued that leaders are twice-born individuals, and bennis (2003) noted that “what distinguishes the leader from everyone else is that he(/she) takes all of (his/her) life experiences…and makes himself(/herself) all new and unique” (p. 62). the question is how this relates to women leaders in training settings. in this paper, i view women’s leadership development training as a potentially transformational experience, one that enables women learners to expand their sense of personal agency in their leadership role. the training participant enters the learning environment with an identity or socialization based on a set of assumptions and beliefs acquired over a lifetime. the resulting world view is manifested in what mezirow (2000) called habits of mind, the broad, generalized ideas through which the training participant filters experiences. habits of mind shape expectations, intentions and purposes, and thereby provide adults with a sense of identity. they also provided a set of ideas and assumptions for interpreting leadership challenges. however, there are times when the training participant’s best efforts to achieve a goal are frustrated, and they are faced with what dewey (1938) referred to as a problematic situation. this sort of event can trigger a transformational learning process (mezirow 2000). in the present context, the problematic situation manifests itself in the form of what i call a leadership dilemma. adapting from mezirow (1991, 2000), the transformational learning process for leadership training involves the first four stages depicted in figure 1. the last stage in this figure emerged as one of the findings of this study. this stage-model, composed of the following four stages, is used as a framework for my data analysis: • articulating a leadership dilemma • meaning making • achieving transformative insight advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 3 • connecting insight to leadership practice figure 1. the process of leadership transformation. when a leadership dilemma is encountered, it becomes salient, occupies the forefront of the learner’s emotional and intellectual attention, and creates the conditions for meaning making. in an effort to overcome a problem and achieve a goal, the individual seeks new information that would enable her to understand what she has to do to overcome difficulties and effectively pursue desired outcomes. this leads to the third stage of transformational learning, achieving a transformative insight, described by mezirow (2000) as being “epochal, a sudden dramatic, reorienting insight or incremental involving a progressive series of transformations in habits of mind” (p. 21). once a transformative insight is achieved, it tends to be irreversible (clark 1993). finally, as documented in this research, the emerging woman leader must connect the transformative insight to her everyday leadership practice through an evolving shift in thinking and acting. leadership training before turning our attention to whether and how transformational learning processes can take place in training settings, i will briefly describe two components of leadership development training: design formats and training impact. leadership training programs typically make use of one of three design formats: 360 degree feedback, feedback intensive training, and skill-based training (velsor 1998). a 360 degree feedback design uses a structured instrument to collect information about how others perceive a feedback recipient’s performance on a set of leadership behaviors. observers usually include the feedback recipient’s peers, boss, subordinates, and customers. this instrument is also used to obtain parallel self perception information which is juxtaposed and compared to information from observers to provide insight into one’s leadership strengths and weaknesses. a feedback intensive design uses multiple activities and tools to help learners explore various aspects of their personality and effectiveness. together, these activities are intended to give a participant a comprehensive view of herself. the goal of a skill-based training program is to expand learner knowledge, enhance existing skills and build new skills. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 4 a wide range of activities can be used in the context of each training design format. among the most common activities are lectures and theoretical input, case study analysis, group work, role plays, simulations, and film analysis. each of these activities is tailored to the goals and purposes of the training. for example, in a 360 degree design the activities are geared towards fostering understanding and skill development anchored in the results of the observer feedback. in a feedback intensive design each activity is used to offer a different and sometimes complementary lens for understanding one’s leadership practice. the hope is that the synthesis of these inputs would foster more complete self-understanding. finally, in a skill based program the activities are aimed at building trainee knowledge and offering her with opportunities for practicing new behaviors. these activities are intended to facilitate leadership development as evidenced in change in six areas: knowledge acquisition, increased self-awareness, perspective change, and skill development (mccauley & hughes-james 1994; markus 2001; velsor 1998; young & dixon 1996; zimmerman-oster & burkhardt 2002). a key issue with any leadership training is whether these impacts will translate into effective deployment of new behaviors upon returning to their work settings. that is, can a learner sustain and further develop her new perspectives? can she bring remain self aware and use this awareness to do things differently? can she sustain this once she has re-entered into the workplace? for the answer to these questions to be in the affirmative, the learner needs to have experienced transformational learning in the training setting. as discussed above, transformational change is deep and fundamental such that the learner cannot return to old ways of seeing and doing. this study examines whether transformational learning can occur in a training setting such that perception change is permanent, leading not only to new behavior but a process in which a learner undergoes continual leering in the organization— incorporating a fundamentally new sense of self in an unchanged setting. research setting and methodology the consultative group for international agricultural research (cgiar) is a strategic alliance that seeks to use scientific knowledge to pursue the goal of achieving sustainable food security in developing countries. the alliance is composed of private foundations that support fifteen scientific research centers and international and regional organizations. these entities work with agricultural research centers and civil society organizations in developing countries with the goal of using scientific knowledge to inform policy formulation and implementation. the wls was launched in 1995 to help women overcome some of the everyday leadership and management challenges they faced, as well as to provide them with an opportunity for building a strong network within the cgiar. the wls is administered by the cgiar gender and diversity (g&d) program as part of its comprehensive program of increasing the percentage of highly qualified developing-country and female staff in the cgiar centers. three courses are offered as part of the wls: women’s leadership and management, negotiation skills for women, and advanced leadership. at the time of the study, the advanced leadership course was being offered for the first time. therefore, this study focused on the first two courses which had been offered for a period of ten years. by 2005, more than 300 cgiar women had participated in the wls courses. the total number of participants in any course range between 15 and 30 although the group tends toward the higher number. the initial advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 5 participants in the wls were international women scientists. more recently, the courses have included women in all types of managerial jobs at all levels of the research centers and across all recruitment categories. access to wls alumnae was gained through a web-survey with permission from the cgiar and 24 alumnae located around the world were interviewed. alumnae came from twelve of the fifteen research centers comprising the cgiar and were located at different levels of the cgiar system (headquarters, regional, country-level). as indicated in table 1 they came from a variety of countries in six regions of the world. these individuals took the wls course between 1995 and 2005. all but four of these years were represented. the interviewees were employed in various occupations and positions. specifically, they held the following positions: scientist/researcher (25%), scientist and program or theme leader (20.8%), theme leaders (16.7%), manager (16.7%), technician (8.3%), other, including a variety of administrative functions (12.5%). table 1. nationalities of interviewees region of world countries represented east asia and pacific (25%), malaysia australia indonesia north america (20.8%), united states canadian europe and central asia (25%), germany and italy (mixed ancestry) france britain germany austria sub-saharan africa (12.5%), tanzania nigeria kenya south asia (4.2%) sri lanka latin america and the caribbean (12.5%). colombia colombia peru note: although there are research centers in the middle east and north africa, this region was not represented in the sample. the interviews lasted for one to four hours and were conducted by telephone. the interview questions were designed to elicit significant leadership stories that explored the leadership experiences of alumnae before, during and after leadership training. the interview protocol has been included in the appendix. all names used in this paper are fictitious to protect the anonymity of the individuals involved. leadership stories were analyzed using standard advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 6 qualitative analysis techniques (e.g., bogdan & bilken, 1998) to ascertain whether the four stages of transformative learning described above were evident. figure 1 depicts the analytic framework resulting from my data analysis. this framework incorporates and expands the stages of transformational learning that oriented the analysis and interpretation of the interview data. specifically, the wls alumnae described going through the stages identified in extant literature, they also underwent a fourth stage of connecting insights to real-life practice. additionally, thematic reduction also identified three key moments in the revision of world view that accompany each stage: self awareness, perspective change, and conviction and confidence to act on transformative insight. findings in the subsections that follow, i use qualitative data from the wls interviews to describe findings pertaining to the process of transformational learning among women participants in leadership training. this description is organized in terms of the four stages of transformational learning identified above and incorporates key moments in the revision of world view. articulating a leadership dilemma articulating a leadership dilemma involves recognizing a salient leadership challenge. this leads to greater self-awareness: recognizing the unconscious fears and assumptions shaping one’s thinking and action, making the link between these habitual processes and one’s leadership dilemma, and the identification of internal barriers to leadership effectiveness. self-awareness was a significant moment in the transformational learning process for each wls workshop participant. in each case, the desire for change was strong because the problems the participants faced were very vexing to them. the articulation of a leadership dilemma was facilitated by feedback from peers, receiving one-on-one coaching from instructors, and engaging with learning materials including cases, readings and self assessments. the following story demonstrates how feedback from peers and a 360 degree instrument were pivotal to the articulation of rosaria’s leadership dilemma. during the leadership course, participants were put into groups that worked together on a variety of activities throughout the one-week period. after having worked together on several tasks, members of the group were asked to give one another written and oral feedback on their group participation. while participants in rosaria’s group felt that her feedback to them had been the most thorough and insightful, none had felt they could offer her any feedback in return: she had been too silent, and they did not know what to say. this in itself was invaluable feedback for her, allowing her to realize that her silence had prevented others from having a sense of her strengths and weaknesses. feedback from her colleagues at work, however, was less neutral. one comment she received from the 360 degree instrument was that she was “unimaginative,” yet she knew that this was not the case. this contrast with the wls participants’ feedback enabled rosaria to recognize her leadership dilemma. at best, her silence could be interpreted neutrally in that it made it difficult for others to assess her strengths and weaknesses, but at worst it could be advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 7 interpreted negatively. her silence was not serving her well. further reflection revealed her motivation and habitual ways of thinking. her hesitance to communicate her ideas stemmed from fear of possible rejection, but her team members’ positive reaction to her enabled her to realize that her fears were largely unfounded. one wls group member told her that her silence enabled her to be a keen observer and an insightful team member. members of her group advised her to share her thoughts more often. their comments resonated with her deeply. she knew she was a very creative and imaginative person, and she learned that her co-workers did not know this because she never shared her ideas. meaning making the second stage of transformational learning in leadership development is meaning making. the activities involved in meaning making precipitate the key moment of perspective change to effectively reduce the tension inherent in the leadership dilemma by changing the way the participant thought about pre-existing challenges and presenting new alternatives. beatrice’s story illustrates the use of several meaning making mechanisms in an effort to resolve a preexisting leadership dilemma. her pre-wls leadership story had to do with overcoming isolation as the leader of a new, system-wide initiative. despite her best efforts to interest and engage key decision-makers in the activities of her initiative, only a handful responded enthusiastically and indicated an interest in working with her. a second group of constituents responded negatively and a sizeable third group was simply silent, with a “wait and see” attitude. during the leadership course, she was presented with a tripartite model of three types of constituents involved in any change process: allies, opponents and fence-sitters. in the quote below, beatrice described how theory enabled her to frame and thereby articulate her dilemma: i remember during the course when this model of allies, opponents, and fencesitters, was presented—i just had this light bulb go off in my head. and (i said): “that’s what i’m facing!” i immediately pictured all of those (constituents) in those three categories—i could immediately place them, in my head. theory was also used in one-on-one coaching and collaborative and supportive interactions with workshop participants. as she explained, in these interactions she learned a lot about what would and would not work in the unique culture of her organization: once i had (the model in mind), i thought, okay, here are my allies. here’s who i can turn to for support and where i can deliver, right away, and start having results. for the others, i concretely thought about their information needs, and then i started thinking about how i could move fence-sitters and opponents into allies, but that was going to be a longer-term effort. i was first going to start with my allies. i wasn’t taking the easy way out—it really was the right thing to do. and yet, to make sure i gave concerted effort, giving information to the others and trying to understand what kinds of information would make them happy. and that’s when i became very data driven, recognizing the culture of the organization and doing lots of survey work and hitting them with data, more data. so it couldn’t be advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 8 denied—“there’s not a problem.” it couldn’t be denied because there it was in the numbers. facts, facts, facts—i moved us immediately away from jargon and theory. i never stood up and talked theory, although gender and organizational theory is so interesting to me. but i never talk about it, or very little do i talk about it in the cgiar. it informs my work, but it’s not what i present about. i present our own facts and figures and trends and challenges. so, i think the leadership course helped me understand that i needed to run a fact-driven program. achieving transformative insight meaning making, and the perspective change it entails, leads to transformative insight, and when a transformative insight occurs, there is a quality of irreversibility. the individual challenges the assumptions upon which an earlier thought pattern was based cannot go back to her old way of thinking. this leads to the third key moment, the conviction and confidence to act on the transformative insight, involving the capacity to change and handle previously thorny leadership challenges. for some workshop participants, the challenged assumptions had to do with internal factors—how the person thought and felt about herself. for others the assumptions had to do with external factors—how the person thought about the environment in which they operated. for a few individuals, internal and external factors interacted in interesting ways and had to be unraveled and challenged by the learner. the transformative insight achieved by hidden leaders primarily involved challenging internal assumptions such as recognizing how they thought about themselves—as persons who lacked valuable ideas and could not effect change on their environment. this group recognized the faulty nature of these assumptions and how these faulty assumptions constrained their effectiveness. once they became aware of their habitual pattern of thinking, hidden leaders crossed a threshold. they were unable and unwilling to see themselves in the same light—they had literally developed a new identity, albeit one that needed development and strengthening. the transformative insight achieved by constrained leaders involved challenging both internal and external assumptions concerning relationships. for some, the problematic assumption involved minimizing the importance of relationships and overemphasizing the importance of task focus to organizational performance. for others, like beatrice, it had to do with assumptions about how to build relationships that were not applicable in the culture of their organizational setting. these faulty thought processes prevented constrained leaders from building relationships and mobilizing others’ contributions towards the achievement of organizational goals. finally, those who came to the training as intuitive leaders had a clear sense of and commitment to their personal values, and they were guided by these values in what they did. however, they felt at a loss in situations where their values were not considered to be important. the transformative insight for these individuals came from the affirmation of their values in the training setting and the recognition that these values were indeed functional. this not only strengthened their commitment to their convictions but enabled them to envision how to creatively express their values. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 9 connecting insight to leadership practice the theme of connecting insight to leadership practice gives us some insight into the translation of learning from a training setting to the work settings. the evidence gathered in this study strongly suggests that the impact of the learning process did not wane once the wls training was over. indeed, wls alumnae described acting on the conviction to change, and they also sustained their changed behavior permanently. initially, efforts to leverage training in practice are mechanical and unrefined but, over time through continued reflection and adjustment of practice, there is increased self confidence and maturation in practice. this continual learning and maturation of practice is the last key moment in the revision of world view. the transformation from a previously-established leadership practice to a new one involves hard work and effort. this is not because there is a lack of commitment to change on the part of the learner. rather, to change practice one has to overcome the ease of reverting to old habits. one key means of doing this is through meaningful artifacts deployed by the trainers and taken up by participants. joycelyn’s description below aptly describes the way in which meaningful artifacts kept the urgency for change alive once she returned to her place of work. meaningful artifacts are objects given to participants in a training setting that have both collective and personal meaning attached to them. these objects are used by learners to maintain the immediacy and urgency to act on a transformational insight well after training by reminding, inspiring, and/or strengthening the learner to act on the learning breakthroughs achieved during a training event. joycelyn explained: one of the exercises during the workshop was working up and down the ladder of inference. they gave us some plastic ladders, and i brought it back with me and i have it here on my bulletin board, just to remind me that i should not take things for granted and should not withhold information that the other person might need to understand. this artifact is now a symbol. a symbol is an artifact with meaning added to it—you add meaning – something that you want to remember. if you don’t put meaning to it, the thing is meaningless. adding it and making yourself aware that this means what you want it to mean…is a conscious decision in which you tell yourself “when i look at this, i will remember this.” it is like (recreating the) conference with myself—when i see the ladder, i will remember that. that was my way of remembering. because my commitment—i went to this course and i learned, but i have to bring that learning back and put it to work. otherwise, it will be a waste of time. so, it’s going through that and it’s just the way you are going to remember—the reminders that you have selected so that you don’t forget. and the journal (another artifact) is something that helps you do that. implications transformational learning in women’s leadership development training refers to a process resulting in the revision of a woman’s world view. previous empirical studies of transformational learning have tended to focus on radical departures in world view resulting advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 10 from encountering significant disorienting events such as terminal illness (e.g., courtenay et al., 1993). however, such episodes are rare in the course of a woman’s life. in my study, i was concerned with whether transformational learning can be applied to the mundane problem of women’s leadership development. more specifically, i explored whether the stages of the transformational learning are applicable to women’s leadership development training, and how these processes are enacted in the formal training setting. the results suggest that transformational learning for women can indeed take place in the context of leadership development training. for all but one individual interviewed for this study, transformative insights led to real change in leadership practice. as noted by mezirow (1991, 2000) and knowles (1990), adults do not easily part with the ideas and assumptions that have previously given them a sense agency and control. nevertheless, despite the challenges involved, wls participants willingly undertook the task of revising the assumptions that previously guided their practice. this finding might be of interest to organizations sponsoring women’s leadership development training and the trainers themselves. sponsoring organizations can benefit from individuals returning with fresh ideas and a greater sense of agency. however, these individuals return to an organization that has not changed, to an environment that may not be supportive of their continued growth as leaders. thus, it is possible that, while organizations invest a great deal in the training of future women leaders, they may not change quickly enough to make it possible for them to reap the benefits of the training. for trainers, the model of transformational learning can provide a broad framework to use in designing training programs. for instance, trainers could create opportunities for women learners to explicitly articulate their leadership dilemmas. they could design the learning activities such that each learner can utilize other workshop participants as well as the coach in a process of resolving the dilemma they have identified. trainers can also create an environment in which women learners are willing to engage in deep and meaningful exploration of their problems such that transformative insights can be achieved. finally, trainers can devise ways in which women learners can connect insights from the workshop to their places of work. the findings of my study elaborate the stages of transformational learning by articulating the mechanisms through which each stage is enacted. many of these mechanisms have been identified in the adult learning literature and the organizational learning literatures. by articulating how these mechanisms relate to the transformational learning process, the analytic framework brings these different ideas together into a coherent framework of transformational learning. by introducing the idea of key moments in the revision of world view to the analytic model, this paper adds another dimension to our understanding of the processes of transformational learning. this dimension involves identifying the impact of each stage on the revision of a woman learner’s world view. two of these stages—self-awareness and perspective change—have received attention in the leadership development literature but have not previously been incorporated into a coherent framework of transformational learning. by bringing this dimension of the transformational learning process into the analysis, the analytic framework of this study incorporates key ideas from the leadership development literature and relates them to transformational learning in women’s leadership development training. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 11 references bennis, w. (2003). on becoming a leader. basic books: new york. bogdan, r.c., & bilken, s.k. (1998). qualitative research for education: an introduction to theory and method. boston, ma: allyn and bacon. clark, c.m. (1993). transformational learning. in s.b. merriam (ed.), new directions for adult and continuing education: no. 57. an update on adult learning theory. (pp 47-56). san francisco, ca: jossey bass. courtenay, b.c., merriam, s.b., & reeves, p.m. (1993). the centrality of meaning-making in transformational learning: how hiv-positive adults make sense of their lives. adult education quarterly, 48(2), 65-84. dewey, j. (1938). experience and education. new york: macmillan. eagly, a.h. & carli, l. (2007). through the labyrinth: the truth about how women become leaders. boston, ma: harvard business school press. kegan, r. (2000). what ‘form’ transforms? a constructive-developmental approach to transformative learning. in j. mezirow (ed). learning as transformation: critical perspectives on a theory in progress (pp. 35-69). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. knowles, m. j. (1990). the adult learner a neglected species. houston, tx: gulf publishing. markus, g.b. (2001). building leadership: findings from a longitudinal evaluation of the kellogg fellowship program. battle creek, mi: w.k. kellogg foundation. mccauley, c.d., & hughes-james, m.w. (1994). an evaluation of the outcomes of leadership development program. greensboro, nc: center for creative leadership. mezirow, j. (1991). transformative dimensions of adult learning. san francisco, ca: jossey bass. mezirow. j. (2000). learning to think like an adult: core concepts of transformation theory. in j. mezirow (ed.), learning as transformation: critical perspectives on a theory in progress (pp. 333). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. rogers, c. r. (1961). on becoming a person: a therapist’s view of psychotherapy. new york: houghton mifflin co. velsor, e. (1998). assessing the impact of development experiences. in c.d mccauley, r.s. moxley, and e. v. velsor (eds.). the center for creative leadership handbook of leadership development (pp. 262-288). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 12 woltring, c., constantine, w., & schwarte, l. (2003). does leadership training make a difference? the cdc/uc public health leadership institute: 1991-1999. journal of public health management and practice, 9(2), 103-122. young, d.p., & dixon, n.m.. (1996). helping leaders take effective action: a program evaluation. greensboro, nc: center for creative leadership. zaleznick, a. (1977). managers and leaders: are they different? harvard business review, may/june, 67-78. zimmerman-oster, k., & burkhardt, j.c. (2002). leadership in the making: impact and insight from leadership development programs in u.s. colleges and universities. battle creek, mi: kellogg foundation. biography dr. gelaye debebe is assistant professor of organizational sciences at the george washington university and faculty affiliate at the center for gender in organizations at the simmons graduate school of management. her research broadly centers on learning in organizations. her specific work has examined learning in the context of women's leadership development and cross-cultural relationships. she can be contacted at: gdebebe@gwu.edu. mailto:gdebebe@gwu.edu� microsoft word grappendorf_discrimination_low_pay_long_hours_i_am_still_excited-4_final.docx advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 12 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 12-21, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper “discrimination? low pay? long hours? i am still excited:” female sport management students’ perceptions of barriers toward a future career in sport kristin fowler harris, heidi grappendorf, thomas aicher, & cynthia veraldo kristin fowler harris: north carolina state university, kharris2426@gmail.com heidi grappendorf: university of cincinnati, heidi.grappendorf@uc.edu thomas aicher: university of cincinnati, thomas.aicher@uc.edu cynthia veraldo: mount st. joseph university, cynthia_veraldo@msj.edu accepted january 14, 2015 women continue to be underrepresented in the management and leadership ranks of sport. researchers have worked towards understanding the various challenges and barriers women face in the sport industry. this study sought to expand that research taking a new angle to explore the underrepresentation of women in sport by examining female undergraduates’ perceptions of their future careers within the sport industry. three focus groups with a total of 16 participants were utilized to gather data. two investigators coded and searched for emerging themes from the focus group transcripts. the following themes emerged in this study: (a) perceptions regarding potential job discrimination (i.e., gender stereotypes, gender discrimination), (b) perceptions regarding industry-specific concerns (i.e., difficulty networking, job market constraints, long work hours, low salary range, multiple-role conflict, excitement regarding entrance into the field), and (c) overall excitement regarding future careers in sport. keywords: women in sport, women and sport careers, job discrimination introduction due to the passage of title ix legislation, educational institutions receiving federal funding were prohibited from discriminating against students due to gender, thus opening up a world of educational opportunities for american women. in 1970 prior to the passage of title ix legislation, 57% of the 8.5 million college students in the united states were male (u.s. department of education, 2009). furthermore, by 2007 the enrollment of females in postsecondary educational institutions increased 195% with females making up the majority or 57% of the college student population (u.s. department of education, 2009). king (2006) suggested this is not due to a decrease in the number of men enrolling in college, but rather the increase of men enrolling in college is outpaced by the increase in women enrolling. while females have experienced increased access to male-dominated academic fields such as medicine (51% female) and other health science programs (53%), female enrollment in sport management academia is not equivalent to their male peers. sport management is an academic degree that is noted as one that prepares students for the sport industry (masteralexis, barr, & hums, 2009) as it is a specific sport degree that gets students ready for the uniqueness or “intricacies peculiar to the sport industry” (p. 19). the sport-specific curriculum has evolved extensively due to the exponential growth of the industry and the need for a systematic academic program to educate future sport professionals. however, hums (1994) found men comprised 75% of sport management students, while women comprised 25%. moore, parkhouse, and conrad (2004) also reported an underrepresentation of female undergraduate students in sport management as nearly one-half of faculty respondents indicated less than 40% of their program undergraduates were women. finally, jones and brooks (2008) found that 40% of sport management programs reported a female student population of 20% or less. the underrepresentation of female students mirrors the professional sport industry, which has received considerable attention in the literature; particularly senior administration and athletic directors in intercollegiate athletics (acosta & carpenter, 2012; cheslock, 2008; drago, hennighausen, rogers, vescio, & stauffer, 2005; lapchick, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2013; whisenant, 2003). acosta and carpenter (2012) advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 13 reported the proportion of women head coaches had declined from 90% in 1972 to 42.9% in 2012, while the percentage of female athletic directors declined to 20.3% from an estimated 90% during the same period. in the race and gender report card, researchers continued to demonstrate the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions within in professional leagues. lapchick (2013) noted that the nfl reported having only 28% of women in management, while in major league baseball (mlb) 38% of major league baseball’s front office is comprised of women. further, the national basketball association (nba) and major league soccer (mls) reported 42% of women hold positions in their management ranks (lapchick, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2012d). considering the underrepresentation of women within sport management undergraduate programs and the sport industry, it is important to examine the perceptions of female undergraduate sport management students who are likely to become the future work force in the sport industry. therefore, in this research, we focused on female sport administration students’ perceptions towards their future careers in sport. examining the perceptions of female students may provide some additional insight into the factors that influence the disproportion of women working in sport. results may also provide valuable information to assist sport academic and industry leaders in achieving gender parity within sport organizations. framework swanson, daniels, and tokar (1996) found certain perceived career barriers impact the vocational choices of college students. these barriers, whether the number perceived or the type, can influence the decisions students make about entering a particular field. this finding led to the creation of a standardized measurement referred to as the career barriers inventory (cbi) (swanson, et. al, 1996). the cbi was used to group applicable career-barrier literature for several disciplines, including psychology, counseling, business, and sport. the cbi’s scale measures the following 13 barriers: sexual discrimination, lack of confidence, multiple-role conflict, conflict between children and career demands, racial discrimination, inadequate preparation, disapproval by significant others, decision-making difficulties, dissatisfaction with career, discouragement from choosing nontraditional careers, disability/health concerns, job market constraints, and difficulties with networking or socialization. in the following sections, twelve of the 13 barriers that were deemed the most applicable to the current investigation were included. the only barrier excluded was concern over disability or health reasons related to one’s career due to the scope of this study including the nature of positions in management. the cbi described sexual discrimination as “experiencing sexual discrimination in the hiring for a job” (swanson et al., 1996, p. 225) and included items related to gender stereotypes that hinder the entrance and advancement of women in the workplace. steele, james, and barnett (2002) found undergraduate students in male dominated fields perceived higher rates of discrimination than their female counterparts in other majors. kirchmeyer (2002) found that sexual discrimination caused mid-career women to have fewer promotions and raises than their male counterparts. quarterman, dupress, and willis (2006) found that most female managers in male-dominated occupations believed that success for women was attributable to the possession of certain masculine personality traits. discrimination in the workplace has also been found to discourage the entrance of women in male-dominated occupations such as sport. for instance, grappendorf and lough (2006) found that a majority of female athletic directors believed gender bias and discrimination contributed toward the underrepresentation of women pursuing a career such as collegiate athletic director. grappendorf and lough also reported that 77% of female athletic directors believed the perception that women cannot lead men was a barrier to their overall career success. these findings reiterate that sexual discrimination persists in the workplace. lastly, with regards to discrimination, there is a plethora of evidence that notes the under-representation of people of color within sport management. lapchick (2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2013) has noted the lack of latinos, asian americans, african americans and those classified as ‘other’ in major league baseball, major league soccer, the national football league, the national basketball association, and college sport. it is consistently noted that the higher up one goes in the league offices (e.g. the higher positions with power) the less likely it is to find a person of color. within the management of sport, women are often found in positions that are limited in power where they have less decision-making responsibilities (whisenant, pedersen, & obenour, 2002). grappendorf, pent, burton, and henderson (2008) examined senior woman administrator’s (swa’s) perceptions regarding decision-making, and particular in the area of finances within an athletic department. experiences with financial decisions and matters is particularly important to career advancement for women in intercollegiate athletic administration (grappendorf, lough, & griffin, 2004). therefore, women’s roles may be limited in that they are not receiving experience with key decisions being made, ultimately limiting their abilities to move up. lack of confidence or feeling inadequately prepared were other barriers included in the cbi specific to educational and vocational choices and included statements similar to, “not feeling confident about my ability on the job” (swanson et al., 1996, p. 225). yang and gybsers (2007) studied male and female college seniors and found that a lack of readiness and external support negatively influenced the self-confidence needed for the transition from student to working professional. whitmarsh, brown, cooper, hawkins-rodgers, and wentworth advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 14 (2007) found a positive correlation between gender representation and self-confidence among women in genderneutral and male-dominated occupations. in other words, women in gender-neutral careers were found to possess higher career self-confidence than women working in male-dominated vocations. multiple-role conflict (e.g., traditional gender role responsibilities) was reflected in the cbi and included statements similar to “stress at work affecting my life at home” (swanson et al., 1996, p. 225). multiple-role conflict was found to impact the educational and vocational decision-making process, as well as influence the confidence and career motivation of working women. almquist and angrist, (1993) found that female postsecondary students had more difficulty making occupational plans than men which the researchers attributed to stronger desires by women to have a family. further, cinamon and rich (2004) found female college students were more willing to change their educational and vocational interests and ambitions to avoid multiple-role conflict. unlike men, women who did not alter career aspirations for family responsibilities were more likely to perceive the necessity to make compromises in other important life areas (whitmarsh et al., 2007). this conflict can ultimately create a dissatisfaction with one’s career. conflicts between family and work responsibilities were found to negatively influence women’s career motivation (gottfredson, 1996). specific to sport, grappendorf, et al. (2004) found that of the female collegiate athletic directors with children, nearly half (47%) believed that multiple-role conflict was a barrier facing women interested in head athletic director positions. equally noteworthy, female athletic administrators believed that men received greater leeway in meeting work and life demands; whereas women with the same responsibilities were seen in a negative light (drago et al., 2005). the conflicts between having children and fulfilling career responsibilities encompassed comments comparable to “feeling guilty about working while my children are young” (swanson et al., 1996, p. 226). women were found to be more likely than men to disrupt or discontinue vocational careers to focus on the care of their children (betz & fitzgerald, 1987). although childrearing conflicts have been found to influence the career entrance and advancement of women, research has noted the impact is greater for women in male-dominated occupations. quimby and o’brien (2004) found college women were more likely than men to choose gender-neutral vocations, due to the perception that male-dominated occupations resulted in more work-family conflicts. discouragement in choosing a nontraditional career and disapproval from significant others was also included in the cbi (swanson et al., 1996). research suggests that the value an individual places on potential educational and occupational choices can be influenced by their socialization experiences (e.g., gender-role beliefs). eccles (1987) speculated that individuals categorically reject educational and vocational options that do not align with their gender-role schema. further, a positive correlation was found between self-confidence and support from others. for example, whitmarsh et al. (2007) suggested parental support has the greatest impact on an individual’s self-confidence as women in gender-neutral occupations recalled strong parental messaging about what were excellent careers for women. additionally, parental discouragement in the pursuit of traditionally male-dominated occupations impacted their self-confidence negatively from these occupations (whitmarsh et al., 2007). perceptions of family members more generally (i.e., sibling, parents, etc.) were positively correlated with an individual’s confidence to pursue an occupation among high school and college-aged women (caldera, robitschek, frame, & pannel, 2003). whitmarsh et al. (2007) found that women in traditionally male-dominated occupations reported being told by others that they would be unable to appropriately manage their work and family responsibilities. specific to sport, yiamouyiannis (2008) found that female head coaches of men’s sports cited feedback and support from family and peers as one of the top career motivators. job market constraints refer to the potential lack of demand in the workforce for one’s particular degree or area of study and/or specialty (swanson et al.. 1996). with the enormous growth of sport management programs being offered in the united states, it may be a concern that there are simply too many programs producing too many graduates for the available jobs in the industry. sport management as an academic major did not exist until the late 1960’s (masteralexis, et al., 2009) but the growth of programs, however has increased significantly. further, in competing for jobs in sport, students in other related degrees and majors such as marketing, communications, etc., also compete with sport management majors for jobs in the field. finally, perceptions related to difficulty networking as a barrier in educational and vocational choices result in being “unsure of how to advance in my career” (swanson et al., 1996, p. 228). lent, brown, and talleyrand (2002) found that perceptions regarding the ability to network can affect the career choices of college seniors. participants enrolled in technical colleges reported access to mentors as a factor influencing their pursuit of career goals. specific to sport, 54% of ncaa division ii female athletic directors reported difficulties due to the “good ole boys’ network” (quarterman et al., 2006). lough and grappendorf (2007) found that 19% of senior women administrators (swa) regarded the “old boys’ network” (p. 201) as a barrier to their career advancement. method the purpose of this study was to examine undergraduate female sport management students’ perceptions toward their future careers in sport. examining the perceptions of female sport management students provided insight into a population that is advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 15 likely to become members of the future workforce in the sport industry. three focus groups comprised of undergraduate female sport management students at a large public institution in the southeast united states were used to collect qualitative data. focus groups are defined as a “carefully planned series of discussions designed to obtain perceptions on a defined area of interest in a permissive, nonthreatening environment” (krueger & casey, 2000, p. 5). krueger and casey (2000) found the best use of focus group instrumentation was to determine the perceptions and feelings of people about certain issues. to allow participants to feel comfortable in disclosing personal information in a group setting, they were given aliases to use throughout focus group discussions. additionally, focus group participants were asked to sign a statement of confidentiality. krueger and casey (2000) also recommended that a study employ several focus groups. therefore, three different focus group discussions, with a total of 16 different participants were included in this study. each focus group was audio recorded and transcribed to ensure greater accuracy during the data collection and analysis process (patton, 1987). additionally, participants were asked to use their alias names prior to responding to a question to help with the accuracy of the transcription process. notes were also taken to capture additional information on non-verbal participant behavior. at the conclusion of the interview, the notes were reviewed to assist in quality control and further guaranteeing the accuracy of the data obtained (krueger & casey, 2000; patton, 1987). procedures two sport management professors were contacted for permission to speak to their female sport management students prior to their classes. once access was attained, the purpose of the focus groups was explained to each participant, and they were asked to sign a consent form if they were willing to voluntarily participate. at the onset of focus group interviews, participants were given a survey that asked for demographic information (e.g., age, race, marital status, number of dependents), educational background (e.g., grade level, grade point average, collegiate athletic participation), and future career expectations (e.g., entry-level salaries and work experiences). this instrument was utilized in addition to the focus groups to provide more specific information about the participants (oblinger, 2003). participants were then given aliases to protect their identity. responses were later matched to participants’ aliases to provide additional insight into a given participant’s perceptions. a questioning route was utilized to elicit the feelings and perceptions of participants, without biasing participants’ responses (krueger & casey, 2000). the expert-approved questioning route incorporated open-ended questions to encourage open dialogue among participants. the questioning route was designed as follows: (a) opening questions, (b) introductory, (c) transition, (d) key questions, and (e) ending questions. the opening question was used to encourage everyone’s individual participation within the discussion. the introductory and transition questions were then used to initiate discussion about the topic under investigation. the ending questions were used to help enable participants to reflect on their comments, as well as add any additional last minute comments. probing questions were also used to better understand and confirm participant responses (krueger & casey, 2000). participants a convenience sample of female undergraduate sport management students from a large ncaa division i institution in the southeast were asked to participate in the focus group. randomization was not needed due to the purpose of the study was to explore the perceptions of the group rather than generalize to a broader population (krueger & casey, 2000). participants were grouped into three pre-determined focus group dates based on participants’ availability. the first focus group consisted of seven participants, the second consisted of three participants, and the final group was comprised of six participants. focus group participants (n = 16) were all in the age range of 20 to 22, were single, and had no children or dependents. the majority of focus group participants (n = 15) were white/caucasian with only one african-american student. nearly half of focus group participants (n = 7) expected a starting salary from $35,000 to $39,000, six more expected to earn less, and two participants expected to make $40,000 or more. all focus group participants (n = 16) reported having at least one year of relevant work experience, with half of them reporting they have four or more years overall work experience. data analysis two investigators coded and searched for emerging themes from the focus group transcripts. this was completed by identifying statements related to the perceptions of female sport management students in relation to their future careers in sport. each statement was assigned a code (e.g., industry-specific concerns) that best summarized the quote. then a label (e.g., difficulty networking, job-market constraints, long work hours, low salary range) was assigned to capture the essence of the quote. if any discrepancies in the codes were found, a third investigator would have been used until an agreement was reached (krueger & casey). however, there were no discrepancies, and thus a third member was not needed. credibility (i.e., internal validity), transferability (i.e., external validity), and dependability (i.e., reliability) were all addressed. credibility was established through the authenticity of giving a “fair, honest, and balanced account of social life from the viewpoint of someone who lives it every day” (neuman, 2000, p. 31). further, to increase credibility two coders were utilized and interpretations were discussed by the researchers. additionally, although the purpose of the study was to explore the perceptions of a sample of undergraduate female sport advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 16 management students and not to generalize about an entire population (merriam, 1998), necessary steps were taken to increase the external validity. to provide detailed information, respondents’ quotes from the focus group transcriptions were used to help illustrate the coding and themes. “thick description” (erlandson, harris, skipper, & allen, 1993) was utilized to validate the meaning of participants’ responses and the investigators’ interpretations. informal member checking, in which the investigator verbally summarized a participant’s statement, was used throughout the focus group process to validate the accuracy of participants’ responses (erlandson et al., 1993). results the following themes emerged in this study: (a) perceptions regarding potential job discrimination (i.e., gender stereotypes, gender discrimination), (b) perceptions regarding industryspecific concerns (i.e., difficulty networking, job market constraints, long work hours, low salary range, multiple-role conflict, excitement regarding entrance into the field), and (c) overall excitement regarding future careers in sport. qualitative results from focus group discussions are presented in subsections below. potential job discrimination a theme that arose from female sport management undergraduate students was a perception of potential job discrimination. the following sub-themes emerged regarding potential job discrimination: (a) gender stereotypes, (b) gender discrimination. gender stereotypes. participants indicated dealing with negative gender stereotypes associated with sport. in fact, statements indicate the participants were aware that sport is still a very traditionally male dominated domain and that they would have to work to break free from those stereotypes. mary indicated, “[because] you’re a girl you’re not going to be looked at as knowing enough about sports.” she further explained, “guys look down on girls in sport because they don’t think they know as much.” mary reported having experienced this since “high school [guys] picked on you during p.e. because you’re a girl.” pam agreed with these sentiments explaining that her female friends “who love exercising and sports and going to games” believe they must “enjoy it on a different level” because they view sports as “dominated by guys.” kris explained, “growing up as a woman, you couldn’t really like sports and really know a lot about it…the guys kind of look at me like i’m crazy.” kristy indicated experiencing the same stereotype and offered suggestions on overcoming the stereotype saying, “talk on their level [so] they will learn to respect you and know that you do know what you are talking about.” katie explained that women were placed in “front offices in either community relations or something to do with fundraising, positions where [they] have you out in public due to belief that [building relationships] is what women can do best.” katie was referring to the stereotypical belief that women are better at nurturing and fostering relationships and would be expected to fill that role in sport. all five of these women display frustration with the stereotype of being female equating to lack of knowledge about sport. their experiences show the added pressure to prove themselves in the field. gender discrimination. participants reported perceptions related to facing gender discrimination in their future careers in sport. mary indicated she “worried that [she] might not get the higher job because [she’s] looked down upon because [she is] a girl.” she added: if i decide i want to go into coaching, i know that the chances of me getting hired for a good di [division i] college team are very unlikely, that is frustrating… i also know because i’m a girl and i’m a coach… a lot of people don’t really want a girl coach. i feel like that is discouraging… in the sense that realistically i know that i may or may not get the job just because i am a girl and girls aren’t looked upon as qualified coaches. michelle explained that female coaches of women’s teams “might [have it] a little harder getting a job, [because] men are taking more female jobs like women’s basketball.” jane offered a recommendation for overcoming gender discrimination saying “the more you do, the earlier and the better it is [for yourself] because [females] are disadvantaged.” the participants continued to reiterate that they felt they were going to have to work harder to prove themselves due to being a female in a traditionally male dominated area and that they might be discriminated against because they are female. mel described previous experiences with workplace hiring within sport, saying, “i’ve been in a handful of job interviews for potential openings but a guy will get it… [even though] i had the same qualifications… it’s frustrating to see.” participants’ frustrations were obvious when discussing this topic as they felt being a female hurt them in getting jobs within sport. katie explained the negative effects that perceived gender discrimination has had on her career plans clarifying, so many people i have met want [work in sports]…and they’re all guys and it’s just such a male-dominated area… i feel like it was going to take so much effort to breakthrough that and i thought ‘well, i don’t know if i want to do that. pam expressed that as women “we are disadvantaged [and] the more you do, the earlier, the better.” interestingly, ellen, who participates in cheerleading and dance, expressed awareness that she has not yet had to deal with discrimination in a male dominated area of sport, but recognizes that when she applies for a job she will face some of the issues the other participants are discussing. she stated, i know specifically what i’m doing and fortunately for me cheerleading and dance are predominantly female sports… i don’t really feel like it’s going to be a advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 17 problem for me to find a job and be discriminated towards at all… i definitely understand totally what [you girls] are saying though. i’ve looked into other things and i’ve thought, ‘wow, that’s going to be scary because i’m not very… i don’t really stand up for myself that often.’ so that would be a hard thing for me to do, to get into a predominately male field. based on her comments, ellen may completely avoid a more male-dominated area of sport as she works toward a future career because of her perceptions of gender discrimination. industry-specific concerns the following themes emerged regarding industry-specific, participant perceptions about their future careers in sport: (a) difficulty networking, (b) job-market constraints, (c) long work hours, and low salary range, and (d) multiple-role conflict. difficulty networking. participants expressed concern related to networking in sport. jane indicated that she and other women have more difficulty networking because “historically, men have had more opportunities [to network] in sport, they have more connections… and they are more likely to get the jobs through networking than females.” pam indicated the desire to “talk to more professionals [in the field].” kristy expressed her “concern about how few women are in the field of being a sport agent” resulting in difficulties networking or socializing. kris explained that increasing network opportunities for women in sport would be beneficial, would help increase the number of women who actually want to do sport management because… a lot of women that are interested in sports are afraid to take that extra step of doing it because of a lack of a support system… [for instance] networking, what to do with internships and experiences in the academic setting. kris added that she wished she “had been able to actually talk to women in positions within sport because i haven’t met anyone like that so far.” she continued “it can deter you a little bit, like ‘there’s no one like me’ and it’s kind of like being lost.” ellen specified the underrepresentation of women in sport is caused by the “lack of networking.” jennifer suggested bringing “professionals in the classroom,” but understood the challenge associated with it in that “there’s just not that many to go after and find.” these women clearly place a great deal of emphasis on networking with other women in the sport industry and because they are exposed to so few women they perceive this as a barrier to their advancement in the field. job-market constraints. participants expressed perceived job market constraints in the pursuance of future careers in sport. it is reasonable to assume that students are aware of things like the economy and availability of jobs in their field. the participants in our study noted these constraints and indicated concern about them. this is a concern for female sport management students, as they congruently noted they are aware that as a female, getting a job in sport is already going to be challenging and yet they are also quite aware of other factors regarding their professional entry into the field. ann indicated concern with “the sport management programs being sold as a major for a lot of students, so they are getting a lot more students in, but not enough jobs to cover all the people in the programs right now.” michelle noted the state of the economy and “how it’s not as big as it was” as the reason for experiencing discouragement from outsiders regarding the sport industry. mel expressed, “it’s going to be a reality check when [we] actually go out and try to find a job” due to the state of the economy. emma attributed the job-market constraints to the popularity of the sport industry, saying: even though i’m a sport management major, and a lot of jobs i would want, do want me to be a sport management major, they also take a communications major, a marketing major, a business major. you’re not just competing with sport management, you’re competing with every other major. so if you like sport marketing, you’re competing with all of the other people who are in normal business and marketing majors that also want that job too. so that’s something that i always worry about. what if they like their experiences better than mine… so that’s why it’s important to find a specific thing that you want to focus on. the participants perceive barriers such as the availability of jobs, competition for jobs, as well as the economy as job constraints which may influence their future careers in the sport industry. long work hours and low salary range. participants noted concern with the (a) long work hours, and (b) low salary ranges specific to the sport industry. regarding the long work hours, ann indicated “you may be working one day, nine to five or something and then one day you’re working until midnight working a game or something… so that is definitely a concern.” mel suggested “if you’re single your whole life [then] sports is the job for you” implying that a majority of time will be dedicated to your career in sport. pam agreed saying “i’m almost more worried about how i’m going to feel later on when i’ve put in a lot more hours and probably not getting paid as much; i kind of worry about how that’s going to make me feel?” katie expressed that while she is young “the hours don’t concern me,” but looking toward the future when she “starts having a family” she will be more concerned. jennifer agreed with the inconsistency of work schedules in sport saying “the lifestyle is different [because] it’s not always a nine-to-five job.” a few participants communicated concern about the low salary ranges associated with sport. for example mel said with the pay, i think it will take a little bit more to advance up the ladder to get to a higher job than some other fields across the board. i think overall it takes advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 18 more time to get to the top… takes a little bit more time to make more money because as a whole it isn’t a super-paying industry. kris agreed, saying, the “entry level [salary] for sport management is not that much.” she further explained, a lot of internships are unpaid… i’m going to have to work a part-time job so i can pay the bills or whatever… since you’re either not bringing in any money or very little money, what back-up plan do i have to support me, pay is my concern, especially in this kind of economy with it being hard to get a job. likewise, emma was concerned with unpaid internships upon graduation, saying: with the nfl there is talk about there not being a season [in 2011]… they’ve cut a lot of positions and now there are unpaid internships. and they’re realizing that they can do a lot of stuff that way, unpaid. that is a concern going into it. i feel like there have been less jobs and now they’re being turned into unpaid internships and now sport is becoming more that way, because people are willing to bust their butt for nothing just to get in. the participants shared the perception and concern about the long work hours and low or no pay jobs in the sport industry. they realize long work hours and low pay may be expected and they are willing to start in the field with these expectations; however, there is concern with career longevity in a field with long hours and low pay. multiple-role conflict. participants perceived future conflicting work and family responsibilities. ann indicated her professors “talked a lot about as a woman if you want to have children that could definitely put a strain on your career, especially in sports because there are a lot of men in sports, they don’t really understand you.” mel believed once she “hit the age of wanting to have kids… [she] might want to move into an advanced administrative role where it’s a little more toned down with your work hours.” jennifer said “if you ever want to start a family it’s a little bit different because you might have to move a lot [because] it’s totally different hours.” kris explained that while she desires to have a family, it has been forced onto the “backburner” because she, thought [she] was going to have settled down by 24 or 25 [but] looking at the job landscape and what i’m going to do in my career…i’m going to have to put that off in order to advance what i want to do in my career, eventually i want to have a family but not now. the participants perceive the ability to balance family and work in the sport industry as a definite barrier in their future career and there is some uncertainty about how to navigate, both personally and professionally. they perceive a lack of understanding from others about the demands of family and the need to alter or delay their plans in order to manage both. excitement regarding entrance into the field despite perceived barriers to their future careers, participants were still excited about their entrance into the sport industry and beginning their career in sport. mary explained how her excitement is specific to the sport industry saying, i’m excited because i don’t want to have a job where you sit at a desk all day. sports kind of gives you that freedom … you can have a job where you’re up on your feet all day and you’re moving around and active instead of a job where you just have to sit at a desk…with sports…i’d much rather enjoy my job than not enjoy it…i think it’ll be fun. pam also exhibited excitement, stating; i’m looking forward to…when i’m done with college. i like using what i’m learning...and i’m also excited because i feel like i’m very much a relational person and i like to establish myself with people, so that is another thing that i’m really excited about. mel agreed saying “i’m really excited to put my ideas out there…i’m just looking forward to being a young professional…have something i can take the reins on and say this is mine…i’m just looking forward to real work.” jennifer described in detail what she looked forward to most about a future career in sport saying, “opportunities…travel…i want to do things that require more traveling…it’s cool that you get to meet a lot of famous people…people who have a lot of influence; there is a lot of glamour to the sport industry.” katie indicated that sport provides “opportunities…traveling and networking…as far as looking forward to it, being excited to get up and go to work in the morning, that’s my biggest thing.” all of the participants perceived barriers to their future career in a male-dominated field; however, they continued to look forward to and be excited about working in the sport industry. discussion the purpose of this study was to examine undergraduate female sport management students’ perceptions of barriers toward their future careers in sport. the following themes emerged: (a) perceptions regarding potential job discrimination (i.e., gender stereotypes and gender discrimination), (b) perceptions regarding industry-specific concerns (i.e., difficulty networking, job market constraints, long work hours, low salary range, multiple-role conflict, and (c) excitement regarding future careers in sport. the concern over gender stereotypes was prevalent in the responses from participants. stereotypes regarding women’s abilities and fit in sport is well documented (burton, grappendorf, & henderson, 2011; grappendorf & lough, 2006; quarterman, et al., 2006). it was clear that participants in this study were quite aware that they would face stereotypes of a advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 19 woman in a traditionally male-dominated area and that they would have to work hard to prove they belonged.. gender stereotypes can be major constraints for women in traditionally male-dominated fields and sport does not appear to be an exception. these constraints can constrict the types of jobs within sport women get as well as their mobility. further, it is a concern that if female students in sport management are aware they are going to face stereotypes and have to work twice as hard to prove themselves, some may opt out (i.e., not enter the field of sport management and choose a different career) if they feel they are going to have to fight an uphill battle. educators and managers must continue to encourage discussion related to gender role stereotypes so they do not limit women’s careers in sport management. the concerns involving job discrimination in the hiring practices of sport organizations included facing gender stereotypes and gender discrimination. kirchmeyer (2002) suggested discrimination in the workplace impacts the career progression and potential for raises of mid-career women more often than it does men. furthermore, grappendorf and lough (2006) found that a majority of female athletic directors believed that gender bias and discrimination was a contributing factor to the underrepresentation of women in the sport industry. it is concerning that students perceive they are going to face gender discrimination before they enter the field because as eccles (1987) noted, if undergraduate female students anticipate gender discrimination in their future careers, they lose confidence in their abilities in their field and choose to leave. this issue should be further investigated in the field of sport management. further, we suggest that administrators and leaders in sport continue to strive to achieve equity so that a perception of inclusiveness and equality is a future perception of students. due to the influence of gender discrimination on the number of women employed in sport (kirchmeyer, 2002; grappendorf & lough, 2006), female sport management students’ perception of potential gender discrimination in the workplace may impact women in making the education-tocareer transition. participants in our study indicated concerns specifically related to the sport industry. these concerns included difficulty networking, job market constraints, long work hours with a low salary range, as well as multiple role conflict. it may not be unusual for students getting ready to graduate to have concerns over whether or not they can get a job and how much they will be paid. however, the concerns of the participants in our study seemed magnified due to their additional concerns regarding being a woman, developing networks, and having a family or children and a career. participants indicated concern with multiple-role conflict due to the nontraditional nature of sport. this finding is consistent with grappendorf et al., (2004) who found that nearly half of female athletic directors believed multiple-role conflict limited the entrance and advancement of women within sport. quimby and o’brien (2004) also found that college women are more likely to choose traditionally female vocations due to the perception that nontraditional occupations result in more work-family conflicts. the field of sport in particular due to the nature of the job in that it involves non-traditional hours during nights and weekends when sporting events often take place warrants further research. alternative strategies that allow women in the field of sport management greater flexibility to deal with work-family conflicts is needed as the perception of multiple-role conflict may be deterring women from entering or staying in the field. participants were quite aware of the gender make-up of their classes and of sport management as an academic field. in fact, they perceived sport management as male-dominated and expressed some discomfort with that fact. it is possible to suggest that this too may be discouraging women from staying or entering the field. in addition to exploring how multiple-role conflict impacts female students’ career plans in sport management, faculty could create inclusive and encouraging academic environments for females, which could positively influence perception as well as retention of women in the field. further, efforts to recruit and retain students and faculty that are female, and making a conscious effort to increase diversity should be made. participants indicated a concern related to difficulty networking in sport. students expressed that they may be at a disadvantage because there are limited numbers of women working in sport, and their networking capabilities may be less. they indicated a concern over the lack of women to talk to and network with, as well as concern that they may lack the experiences practicing networks and working to develop those relationships. previous research regarding college students’ perceptions regarding networking/socialization may impact students’ career choice (lent et al., 2002). it is understandable that participants in this study felt they were the underrepresented population and may feel alone, isolated, or concerned that they will not have a network of other women available to them. further, in sport the existence and influence of the ‘ole boys club’ has been documented. the ‘ole boys club’ has received considerable attention in the sport management literature particularly as it relates to hiring white males for positions, limiting women’s involvement in decision making, and leaving women out of activities or meetings to preserve power (lough & grappendorf, 2007; whisenant, 2003). thus, forming student groups, encouraging conference attendance, develop women’s groups within organizations, and asking female sport management professors to mentor such groups, could assist female sport management students. furthermore, sport industry leaders should increase networking and social-support opportunities for women within the industry. lastly, successful businesswomen within sport should be encouraged to give presentations, speak to, and mentor female sport management students. participants expressed concern related to job market constraints. feelings that sport management majors are competing with other majors to get the coveted jobs in sport as well as concerns regarding the economy were present. job market constraints that any graduate would face appear to be compounded by the advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 20 fact the participants are females trying to get jobs in a maledominated industry. it will be interesting to see over time as sport management continues to grow as an academic field and the sport industry continues to grow if these perceptions persist as strongly. hopefully more women enter the field. a final theme that came from participants was that despite the perceived barriers, the participants still had feelings of excitement as they thought about starting their careers in sport. the optimism expressed by female undergraduate students is noteworthy and we can only hope they persist to enter and remain in the sport management field despite their concerns. related to future research, it would be interesting to do a longitudinal study to see where the participants are in their careers in several years and if their perceptions became their realities. limitations this study only included undergraduate female students at one university. in the future, we would recommend expanding the participant number, considering including male students, as well as increasing the geographic diversity of where information is obtained. further, considering only undergraduate students were studied, it would be interesting to include graduate level students. lastly, only one african american female participated in this study. we recommend conducting this study with more racial or ethnic minority students because we cannot assume experiences are the same across the board. due to these concerns, we caution against the generalization of our findings to all sport management students. bias is a concern in any study 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(2003). boomers, gen-xers, and millennials: understanding the “new students.” educase review, july/august, p. 37–47. retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen/ patton, m. q. (1987). how to use qualitative methods in evaluation. newbury park, ca: sage publications, inc. quarterman, j., dupress, a. d., & willis, k. p. (2006). challenges confronting female intercollegiate athletic directors of ncaa member institutions by division. college student journal, 40, 528–548. quimby, j. l., & o’brien, k. m. (2004). predictor of student and career decision making self-efficacy among nontraditional college woman. the career development quarterly, 52, 323–339. steele, j., james, j. b., & barnett, r. c. (2002). learning in a man’s world: examining the perceptions of undergraduate women in male-dominated academic areas. psychology of women quarterly, 26, 46-50. swanson, j. l., daniels, k. k., & tokar, d. m. (1996). assessing perceptions of career-related barriers: the career barriers inventory. journal of career assessment, 4, 219–244. u.s. department of education. (2009). digest of education statistics, 2008 (nces 2009-020), chapter 3. national center for education statistics. whisenant, w. a. (2003). how women have fared as interscholastic athletic administrators since the passage of title ix. sex roles, 49, 179–184. whisenant, w. a., pederson, p. m., & obenour, b. l. (2002). success and gender: determining advancement in intercollegiate athletic directors. sex roles, 47,485-491. whitmarsh, l., brown, d., cooper, j., hawkins-rodgers, y., & wentworth, d. k. (2007). choices and challenges: a qualitative exploration of professional women’s career paths. the career development quarterly, 55, 225–236. yang, e., & gybsers, n. c. (2007). career transitions of college seniors. the career development quarterly, 56, 157-170. yiamouyiannis, a. (2008). occupational closure in intercollegiate athletics: female head coaches of men’s sports teams at ncaa colleges. unpublished manuscript. the george washington university, washington, dc. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 22 advancing women network home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international advancing women in leadership appeasing women faculty: a case study in gender politics mara h. wasburn, wasburn, spring, 2004 consistent with decades of research, the present study suggests that career satisfaction of many academic women can be affected significantly by their experience and/or perception of the way in which their university deals with a number of specific gender-related issues. appeasing women faculty a case study in gender politics in 1988, at "sycamore state university," (ssu) a midwestern research i university, a task force of faculty women conducted a needs assessment to determine the support for an expanded women's resource office on campus. they invited all women faculty to submit a letter outlining concerns relevant to women at ssu. in their responses, words such as chilly … nonsupportive … unsympathetic … hostile … isolating … deplorable … disrespectful … sexually harassing … were used to describe the campus climate. subsequent to the publication of a needs assessment report, a number of policies were created and implemented by the university's upper administration in an apparent attempt to address the problems that the assessment had identified. to address underrepresentation of academic women on the campus, job searches were now carefully monitored by an expanded affirmative action office (aao) to ensure that the pools of applicants for faculty and upper administrative positions contained women and minorities. faculty salary equity studies were now conducted annually file:///macintosh%20hd/users/temp/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html by the aao. to address a problem commonly associated with promotion and tenure, women faculty were now able to "stop the tenure clock" for a year for child bearing. addressing worklife issues, a dual career couples policy was established to assist departments in hiring the trailing spouses of a prime candidate for a faculty position in another department or school; a relocation assistance program was initiated and a coordinator was hired to identify non-faculty employment possibilities for the spouse of a recruited faculty member. institutional support was provided with funding of a women's resource office and hiring a full-time director with the express purpose of improving the campus climate for women. an antiharassment policy explicitly forbidding, among other things, gender harassment and/or discrimination was developed. this spate of policy initiatives gave many the impression that ssu had adapted to the needs and rights of women faculty. many of those merely reflected changes in gender roles in american society. new policies and practices can give women faculty a false sense of comfort without actually producing changes in the conditions that underlie their problems. adoption of new policies does not necessarily result in effective new practices. this is what the data reported below suggest. these data are consistent with the findings of other studies indicating that, in so far as colleges and universities do change in ways that recognize the difficulties facing their women faculties, they are slow to do so. such reticence has been reported in the handling of issues such as promotion and tenure (tierney & bensimon, 1996), leave policies (laughlin & baretta, 1990), compensation (glazerraymo, 1999), and academic acceptance of feminist scholarship (martin, 2000). problems facing women in academe the issues perceived by faculty women at ssu in 1988 and 1997 are hardly unique; they have been a topic of study for decades. competing claims of the personal and professional realms can be staggering for young women academics. many are not only expected to be top professionals but good wives and loving mothers as well. those competing expectations can provide a type of stress that their male counterparts rarely if ever experience (williams, 1999). even senior male colleagues who are emotionally supportive of them can assign them work tasks that exacerbate work interference with their family relationships (bernas & majors, 2002). university professorships were designed for men with wives who provided childcare, edited and typed their papers, and in some cases, graded student work. unlike those in comparable professions, professors are more likely to take work home, and less likely to spend time with their children or assist with housework (theisen, 1997). even when they work full time, women still assume most of the responsibilities for household chores and childcare (hammond, 1996; hochschild, 1997). tenure and promotion decisions are usually made during the childbearing years. while most universities have policies that can slow the tenure clock for women, very few of them actually take parental leave (finkel, olswang, and she, 1994). women faculty are so concerned about being taken seriously as professionals that they often refuse the benefits to which they are entitled. many believe they must prove that they can bear and/or rear children without having their career paths deviate from those of their male colleagues (theisen, 1997). women faculty are often advised to curtail their teaching and service activities in order to publish more (park 1996). however, women, as well as minority faculty, are more likely to accede to institutional demands to devote time to teaching and service activities (astin & bayer, 1973). they commonly see themselves as having a special responsibility to women and minority students, often ignoring their own need to publish, creating "a possible mismatch between institutional demands and the perspectives of women and minority faculty members" (allen,1994, p. 28). spending a disproportionate time being "good citizens" can result in fewer publications, further damaging women's opportunities for promotion (blakemore, swtizer, diiorio, and fairchild, 1997; creamer, 1995). compounding the problems of women faculty is the fact that they often receive little respect in the classroom (sandler, 1991). students expect their female professors to be warm and nurturing, but when they are, they are perceived as weak. if they are more assertive, they are viewed as being "bitches" (sandler, 1991, p. 8). women's challenges in the classroom are significantly increased when they are combined with considerations of race and/or sexual orientation (bensimon, 1992; johnsrud & des jarlais, 1994; moses, 1997). minority and lesbian women are often evaluated more harshly by students than are their colleagues (johnsrud & sadao, 1998; felty, 1997; gerber, 1997; morgan, 1996; nieves-squires, 1992), again illustrating the point that women are differentially discriminated against by the varied intersections of other arrangements of social inequality (collins, 1990). women faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) disciplines described a "null environment for women" where they received little support or colleagueship on campus (betz, 1992, 89). rosser (1997) observed that the overwhelmingly male nature of stem disciplines has not only afforded women limited access to participation, but it has shaped the very nature of the disciplines themselves. she noted that the physical and life sciences, for example, are neither unbiased nor value-free. everything from what is studied to the subjects for the experiments is male-dominated. when women begin to enter a field, different questions are asked and methodological and theoretical assumptions challenged. this often leads to the trivializing of their scholarship. in the social sciences, women's scholarship is often devalued, especially if it focuses on race or sexual orientation (hyman, 1997; morgan, 1996; williams, 1992). often the only women in their departments, particularly in the stem disciplines, female faculty commonly are not part of the camaraderie that often develops among young colleagues. this can result in lack of access to information and professional opportunities (fox, 1996). johnsrud and des jarlais 's (1994) research revealed that faculty women report greater isolation and fewer mentors than do their male peers. their data indicate that women tend to be promoted more slowly than their male counterparts, and they are far more likely to leave an institution before gaining tenure. the situation is even more difficult for minority women (holland, 1989). women academics who aspire to become administrators (department heads, deans, vice presidents) also encounter the gender filters that accompany the profession (schmuck and schubert 1995). the persistent dominance of white males in administrative roles appears to hold despite the growing body of literature touting women's leadership styles as inclusive and empowering (adler & izraeli, 1994; burke & mckeon, 1992; morrison & von glinow 1990; noddings, 1991; gilligan, 1982). not surprisingly, the inequities between male and female faculty are reflected in their salaries. more than three decades after congress passed the equal pay act, women faculty still earn from 5 to 10 % less than their male counterparts (almanac, 2001). women who have two or more children can expect to earn 13% less than their male counterparts (waldfogel, 1997). findings of the 1988 needs assessment indicated that the problems identified in the research literature were present on the ssu campus. nine years after the publication of that report, a university task force on women's issues found that women faculty still experienced many of the same problems that initially were identified. however, the 1997 study was not a replication of the 1988 needs assessment, nor did it capture any of the voices that made the original study so powerful. the following research partially replicated the 1988 needs assessment, foregrounding the voices of academic women at ssu in 1997. the study also drew on the 1997 university task force on women's issues report. it explores the extent to which there were differences in the concerns expressed by women faculty in 1988 and in 1997, and whether these differences reflect actual changes that have occurred in the conditions they confront at ssu. this study illustrates that universities can adopt policies that reproduce the status quo by creating an aura of change without eliminating the conditions that create problems for women faculty. while the type of qualitative research used in this study cannot lead to findings that are demonstrably capable of generalization, the analysis is intended to provide some insight into continuing challenges facing academic women at many other colleges and universities. in 1997, ssu appeared to be typical of the research i universities that comprised its conference, which extended from iowa through pennsylvania, with an enrollment of 37,000 students, 1,700 full-time faculty members, an endowment of $857m, and research and development spending of $92m. the university differed somewhat from these peer institutions in its heavy concentration on engineering and the physical sciences. methods in october, 1997, two waves of questionnaires were sent to all 431 ssu women faculty members holding professorial rank. sixty-seven women responded for a response rate of 15.5%. in 1988, 48 of 201 women faculty responded to the needs assessment for a response rate of 23.8%. such response rates are not surprising given the open-ended nature of the questions, which require in-depth, and therefore time-consuming, answers. comparing the 1988 and the 1997 responses to the surveys is essential to understanding the changing climate for academic women at ssu. as part of the comparative process, i want to let the respondents tell their stories. at the same time, i recognize my responsibility to contextualize those stories. very few of the respondents to the 1988 survey chose to remain anonymous despite their ability to do so. by contrast, in 1997, very few women signed their names. it is difficult not to draw the conclusion that, despite reassurances, the women who did not respond to the survey were fearful of being identified. in fact, one assistant professor told me that while she had responded to my survey, one of her colleagues had mentioned that her fear of being identified led her to decide not to respond. i can only wonder how many other women failed to respond for the same reason. the extent to which there is dissatisfaction at present might well be underrepresented in this study. the schools and departments of which any university is comprised are highly diverse. they have very different and often competing goals. for example, primary committees, which determine promotions, use different standards to rate their candidates. while one department may only consider published articles, another can decide to privilege teaching and/or service. the ability to recognize individual female respondents is considerable in a study of university faculties such as that of ssu, where many departments, and some entire schools, have few women faculty. to ensure that anonymity could be guaranteed, the participants' data on department, school, rank, years at ssu, race, and sexual orientation, which taken together, could identify a particular respondent, were not gathered. therefore, the differences inherent between and among those schools and departments, as well as the differences between and among white women, women of color, and lesbians, must be borne in mind when reading and attempting to make sense of the participants' experiences. it seems reasonable to assume that women in more supportive departments and schools will experience the university as a whole more positively than will those in less supportive environments, and that white women may experience the university more positively than minority women. however, many concerns expressed by women faculty, such as childbearing and childcare issues, a meaningful women's resource office, and dual career programs, extend beyond the control of any school or department. in addition, the first questionnaire was sent to women with the express purpose of determining the need for an expanded women's resource office. therefore, the women who responded and the types of responses, may have differed sharply from those in the second survey, which had no such agenda. the qualitative study involved in answering these questions described the work lives of women faculty on the ssu campus in 1997. as in the case of the original study, questionnaires were sent to all women faculty on the ssu campus. i constructed a questionnaire that consisted of three open-ended questions, the second of which was identical to the one in the original study. these open-ended questions sought to capture the lived experience of the participants, which is the hallmark of phenomenological inquiry (patton,1990; van manen, 1990): 1. please describe your experiences as a woman working at ssu. feel free to respond with positive as well as negative experiences. 2. please outline your concerns regarding any issues relevant to women at ssu. you may address issues concerning the status of women at ssu that have touched you directly, that you know to be of concern to other women, or that characterize the general climate here. feel free to respond regardless of the nature or number of issues you feel are problematic. 3. please describe the changes for women you have seen at ssu during the years you have worked here. feel free to describe negative as well as positive changes. since this study was modeled on the 1988 needs assessment, i began by reading the report prepared by the university task force of women faculty. i examined the categories that were developed by the task force to organize the data. those categories were: 1. gender-based inequities a. distribution of women b. salary c. promotion and tenure 2. influence and power 3. institutional response to changing employee needs (worklife issues). 4. institutional support 5. general climate in order to ensure that the data were, in fact, categorized as systematically as possible, i first read through the 1988 survey responses, each of which is numbered. i had a blank sheet of paper with the categories written on top. whenever i read a statement that appeared to fit one of the categories, i entered the number of that respondent in the appropriate column. when i finished, i put the responses aside for several days and then read and categorized them a second time. in those cases where i had entered the same response in different categories, i attempted to understand why the differences had occurred, and decided which was the better category for the response. i followed the same procedure for the 1997 data. i also employed a second coder, who followed the same process i had, reading through the data twice and arriving at the best decision as to where each of the responses belonged. we compared our sheets, agreeing on 89% of the responses to the first survey. we then discussed the cases where there was disagreement. we were able to resolve three of those, which were the result of an error by one or the other of us. i coded the remaining four responses myself. we followed the same process on the new surveys. we again agreed on 89% of the responses. as before, we discussed the remaining cases. we were able to resolve nine of them, leaving nine for me to enter in the categories where i felt they belonged. patton (1990) recommended utilizing multiple methodologies when studying a phenomenon in order to strengthen the design. that process is termed "triangulation" (p. 187). to triangulate the data, i reviewed the literature cited above. quantitative data describing the distribution of women on ssu's campus in 1988 and 1997, ssu and national salary data for the same years, and internal reports on the status of women faculty at ssu provided the third point of triangulation. all tended to support many of the concerns voiced by the respondents, as well as their perceptions of the gains they believed women had made. perceptions of gender descrimination in 1988 and 1997 data in table i show that the proportion of respondents voicing their concerns about each of the issues had decreased. the magnitude of changes ranged from the dramatic reduction in the frequency with which they worried about institutional support (an 86 percentage point decrease) to a 10 point decrease in their expressed concern with the problems of promotion and tenure. data presented bear on the question of whether the perceived improvements in the status of women faculty at ssu can be adequately explained by the university's adoption of an extensive set of well-publicized administrative actions that produced structural changes or if reference to additional factors is necessary in order to account for present attitudes. distribution of women faculty access to the original data gathered by the 1988 faculty affairs task force permits me to present the voices of women as they told their own stories, informing our understanding of their perceptions of the career obstacles they confronted at ssu. in 1988, women faculty were greatly concerned about the dearth of professional women employed on the faculty and in the administration, and its impact on students: i feel isolated as a woman, and sense a lack of female role models. in addition, there is a lack of females within ssu's administration. without mentors and a support system, it is difficult to thrive in a institution dominated by males. respondent a-24 i am desperately concerned about the lagging number of women who are employed as department heads, deans, and administrators. women desperately need advocacy on this campus ... at issue here is not only a university that is lagging behind the times in employing women's skills but also the ebbing role-modeling that women and men students receive from a predominantly male staffed university. respondent a-6 in 1988, almost one third of the respondents commented on the small number of women on the ssu faculty. data in table ii indicate that in 1988, women were underrepresented among faculty both nationally and at ssu. data also indicate that, overall, the disparities at ssu were greater than they were nationally. file:///awl/spring2004/wasb_table.htm file:///awl/spring2004/wasb_table.htm nine years after the initial study, only 5 %of respondents stated their dissatisfaction with the percentage of women faculty at ssu. in fact, some women expressed satisfaction at the gains they believed had been made. there are many more women employed at ssu and i see them slowly moving into the upper level jobs. respondent f-24 i see more females on our faculty and i see more formal effort to provide support to the new male and female professors. more "female density" has led to more opportunities for affiliation with females, especially younger females. respondent f-42 there are more women faculty on campus now, and some are moving to full professor. i hope you do this survey again (or someone else does) so we can see what happens in the next 5 or 10 years. respondent f-47 while in 1997, expressions of women about their number had all but vanished, data in table iii indicate that women remained underrepresented among faculty both nationally and at ssu. data also show that the disparities at ssu were greater at all ranks, with the exception of the rank of instructor, than they were nationally. data in table iv show that inequality in the distribution of faculty by rank and gender at ssu had changed little between 1988 and 1997. women had made no proportional gains at all at the rank of full professor, while proportional gains at all the other ranks were 5 percentage points or less. while much was made of new university policies apparently intended to increase substantially the distribution of women on the ssu faculty, nine years after their implementation, little structural change had taken place. it is difficult to attribute the large reduction in the expression of dissatisfaction with the distribution of women faculty at ssu primarily to this meager amount of actual change. salary in 1988, more than half of the respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the salary differences of men and women faculty. many women saw discrepancies as indicative of the lack of value the university placed on them. i am concerned that women in the academic arena traditionally make less money for the same positions here at ssu. i do not understand why women should be paid less than a male for doing the same job. it bothers me to hear a department head (male) state that of two people with the same position, background, and responsibilities, the male should receive a higher salary because "after all, he has a family to support." how can women be expected to value their own worth when it is obvious that their employer does not value them as highly as their male counterparts? respondent a-3 statistics that break down faculty, pay scales, and rank by gender make it clear that without a strong affirmative action program, women will remain in file:///awl/spring2004/wasb_table.htm file:///awl/spring2004/wasb_table.htm low-level, low-paying positions. the problem at ssu concerns an entire class of people. thus, to address it, ssu must change the structure of the university. respondent a-18 data in table v indicate that, in 1988, there were considerable discrepancies between male and female salaries at ssu. at all levels, the differences were greater than those found nationally. at the ranks of instructor and assistant professor, the differences were more than twice the national average. by 1997, the proportion of respondents mentioning concern about salary inequality had been reduced by more than half. several of the women who responded to the 1997 survey believed that ssu had made great strides in addressing salary inequalities, and expressed views seldom heard on the campus nine years earlier: i'm tired of hearing women on the faculty complaining about how bad things are at ssu. it's time to get over it. money was probably an issue years ago, but not now. now we should be looking at other problems, like finding time to write and publish. respondent f-32 we're fortunate to work at a university were the administration actually looks for salary discrepancies and does something about them. at my last university, that didn't happen. that's one reason i left. respondent f-62 data in table vi show that considerable salary inequality continued to be found at ssu in 1997. they also show that, at all ranks, the amount of inequality was greater at ssu than that which existed nationally. data in table vii show that, between 1988 and 1997, virtually no progress had been made in closing the salary gender gap at ssu at the level of professor and associate professor. however, gain appears to have occurred at the assistant professor level, where a 12 percentage point reduction in salary differences is recorded. while this represents local progress, comparison with national data suggest that this gain is not as impressive as it might appear. in 1997, at the assistant professor level, nationally, women actually out-earned their male counterparts by 10.9 percentage points, while at ssu, their salaries were 8.7 percentage points below those of their male counterparts. in light of these data, the large reduction in the frequency with which salary inequality is an expressed concern of the 1997 respondents compared with the 1988 respondents is surprising. promotion and tenure in 1988, about half of the respondents expressed concern about promotion and tenure processes at ssu. many women faculty believed that promotion was more difficult for them to achieve at ssu than for men. no one expressed confidence in the equity of that process, citing undue burdens and limited opportunities. file:///awl/spring2004/wasb_table.htm file:///awl/spring2004/wasb_table.htm file:///awl/spring2004/wasb_table.htm in my annual tenure review, a panel of full professors (some not much older than i am) decide whether i can "go up" for tenure. they are all men. they have not been in my situation they have wives who help them. they have little idea of how truly committed i am to my profession and my field because they rarely talk to me. they have no idea of the sacrifices i make and my family makes because of my devotion to my career. in fact, they probably discount or diminish each of my considerable professional accomplishments because they see me as a woman with family responsibilities. respondent a20 concerns about promotion and tenure remained in 1997, but were identified by only 22% of the respondents as being an issue. some of the women faculty still spoke of the difficulties they encountered with the promotion and tenure process, particularly if they engaged in collaborative research or attempted to be promoted utilizing the criterion of teaching or service. i think tenure is still based on old standards and calls for faculty to follow the traditional path of publishing in mainstream journals in recognized fields. people doing non-traditional work in non-traditional fields are clearly at a disadvantage unless they produce above and beyond everyone else. respondent f-62 publish or perish certainly applies to our department, but although i have published, my publications are dual-authored … something that is not valued in our department. by the standards of our department, i have more than enough publications to be promoted. the head of our department asks me, "how do we know which part you did?" i have gotten tired of explaining collaborative research to men who can never understand it. respondent f-29 however, in contrast to the situation in 1988, a number of 1997 respondents reported that they had support from their colleagues and believed their advancement was no different from that of their male colleagues: i have never felt that my gender has prevented me from advancing … i have been promoted to associate professor while having 3 children and taking a total of 2 ½ years off. respondent f-18 i have felt well mentored by my male colleagues. there was never any doubt that i would be promoted if i was willing to do what was expected of me. it may be different next time, but i doubt it. ssu has been really good to me. respondent f-47 while such experiences may have been somewhat more common for women faculty in 1997, data in table iv above show that little change had occurred in inequality in the distribution of faculty by rank and gender at ssu between 1988 and 1997. influence and power file:///awl/spring2004/wasb_table.htm in 1988, 45% of respondents voiced their concern about the lack of influence and power of women at ssu. that year, the university had 654 full professors, 30 of whom were women. ssu had 61 academic departments, 2 of which had women as their heads. the university was comprised of 8 schools, none of which had a woman as its dean. perception of such inequality is reflected in the comments of several respondents: when every vice president and every school head is a male, the campus offers no ... sense that women have a significant place in the educational process at ssu . respondent b-5 most of all i find it reprehensible that a respected university like ssu does not see the importance of supporting its female faculty and staff. ssu should be a leader in recruiting and training women for a major role in the university and the world. it is time to rid the university of the 'old guard' thinking that the woman's place is in the home, or at least not in an administrative role in the university. respondent a-6 in 1997, the proportion of respondents voicing their concern about women's lack of influence and power at ssu had dropped to 29%. in 1997, the university had 710 full professors, 56 of whom were women, 63 academic department heads, 4 of which had women as their heads, and 10 schools, 2 of which, liberal arts and education, had women deans. in this context, two respondents offered their observations that: there has been progress at ssu, albeit slow. women are finally getting a seat at the table on this campus. respondent f-6 i see a few more females in high level administrative positions two academic deans and one vice president. i see more females promoted to full professor in our school. respondent f-42 reduction in concern about the influence and power of women at ssu does not seem warranted in light of the data in table viii. in 1997, women continued to constitute a very small minority of ssu's full professors and department heads. gains in these positions did not exceed 3.3 percentage points. the only apparent major gain involved the appointment of two women as deans. however, the two schools that they headed were not among the schools such as engineering, technology, and management on which the reputation of ssu is based. worklife institutional response to changing employee needs, or what is now termed work and family issues, was of great concern to women faculty in 1988. overwhelmingly, the issues they cited were childcare, particularly infant care, and the lack of a dualcareer policy for the spouses of faculty and administrative staff. there seems to be no commitment on the part of the university to making it file:///awl/spring2004/wasb_table.htm possible for parents to teach or attend classes or work here. i feel as if i am still being asked to choose between being a parent and a professor. respondent b-5 the university needs to recognize that dual career marriages are the norm now and needs to deal with issues about quality of life for faculty and their families. we should care more about the impact that job demands and lack of university support have upon children who are, after all, the future of our community and nation. respondent a-10 additionally, many women were struggling to find appropriate employment on campus either for themselves or their partners. it was often the women who were forced to accept positions that were not commensurate with their education, having come to the university as "trailing spouses." child care is a pressing issue for many dual-career marriages an issue for even more. my husband still lives and works in california. how can i ask him to give up a job that pays more than my salary to come live in economically depressed (name deleted)? ssu needs to recognize this problem, and attempt to find ways of mediating a very touchy issue or risk losing the bulk of its young female and male faculty. respondent a-32 the issue of dual professional couples is a growing problem which the university seems to have overlooked, ignored, or considered insurmountable. the university which deals with this concern effectively, however, will most likely be rewarded with the loyalty and long-term services of two individuals whose morale is likely to be much higher than is currently the case. respondent b-6 by 1997, ssu still had failed to address the worklife issue of childcare successfully. this was a major concern of several respondents: the problem of childcare for infants and toddlers is an issue that other schools seek to resolve rather than ignore, as ssu does. respondent f-25 i have been challenged as a woman to find adequate day care for my children. at times i thought i needed a wife like my colleagues! my department head was understanding and helpful, but it was difficult. i think i missed a great deal of my children's growing up years. i hope it was worth it. respondent f-26 no quantitative data were available to assess the impact of policies created to address such worklife issues as the number of successful job placements resulting from implementation of the dual career couples policy or change in the number of sexual harassment cases reviewed by the university reflecting application of the new explicit anti-harassment policy. research indicates that, while many universities have policies that can slow the tenure clock for women, such as that created at ssu, few women actually take parental leave for fear that doing so would damage their career (aisenberg &harrington, 1998; finkel et al. 1993). this worry was voiced at ssu: my heart goes out to women who decide to have children while working at this university. i never quite knew what my options were when i had my first child i asked another colleague, who had been in a similar situation. she did not know what the rules were either and told me that my trying to take leave would make things difficult for me when time for promotion came. i would be perceived as a risk by the university. she had not taken leave with her baby and had tried to keep a "low profile" while she tried to balance her need to be with her newborn against maintaining her appearance as a productive faculty member. her advice to me was to "lay low" and not take leave. respondent f66 i also believe that my male colleagues do not feel as constrained in making decisions to have children as i do. they all have (or are in the process of having) children. i, on the other hand, keep putting off the decision to have children. although i know i can take maternity leave, i am worried about the effect having a child would have on my productivity level. respondent f-57 another concern i have is for young women faculty trying to balance starting a family with the tenure clock. unfortunately, our stop the tenure clock policy, which i believe is accepted and recognized in some departments on this campus, is not valued in other departments. so women won't use it. i think the pressure on those women must be unbearable. respondent f-77 despite the continuation of childcare problems and despite the lack of available data on the effectiveness of adopted worklife policies, the proportion of women faculty mentioning worklife issues in 1997 nevertheless dropped to about one third from the 1988 level of about one half. in part, the reduced frequency in the expression of concern might reflect positive personal experiences with some policy outcome. it also might reflect some satisfaction with the mere existence of worklife-related policies, whether or not they are known to be effective. institutional support in 1988, almost all respondents voiced concern about lack of institutional support for women at ssu. the university' s lack of support for women and women's programs was seen as a critical issue. most responses centered around support for the women's resource office (wro) and/or a women's center (assessing support for continuation and expansion of the wro was the primary reason behind the survey) and the women's studies program, which many respondents saw as desperately underfunded and understaffed. a women's center available to all women students, staff, and faculty is a necessity on every college campus, and most have a women's center. it is especially needed here at ssu, where women have no central place where they can congregate; get emotional, academic, or intellectual support; have resources available to them on such issues as rape or incest; or just "own" a space of their own. such a place is badly needed in the women-alienated atmosphere here, and it would serve as a source of strength and renewal for women feeling battered by the system itself. respondent a-12 however, that issue had all but disappeared in 1997. two structural changes had occurred in that period: the appointment of a half-time director for the women's studies program, and the upgrading of the women's resource office to a separate office with a full-time director. the other form of institutional support sought by numerous women faculty, the creation of a women's center, did not appear to be anywhere on the university's agenda by 1997. while the two structural changes that did take place may have had symbolic significance for women faculty, other consequences are difficult to assess. indeed, in the case of the women's resource office, several respondents explicitly raised this question: when i first started at ssu, there was an orientation session for faculty to learn about the support services for conducting research, grant writing, etc. that was informative. i am also appreciative of the women's resource office newsletter and the lecture series that was presented this academic year. i think the lecture hit on the important issues of women and their career development. but, i wonder what happens besides a lecture? knowledge is empty without follow-through. respondent f-41 i see a few female administrators, but some of them seem to have been hired because of what they won't do rather than because of what they will do. specifically, i have seen the creation of a human relations area and a women's resource office, but what have they done for the campus? respondent f-54 in 1988, ssu had no program to assist married partners of new faculty in finding employment at the university or in or nearby the university community. nine years later, a relocation program had been established. however, some respondents were less than enthusiastic about it helpfulness: as the spouse of a tenure-track professor, it has been difficulty to find a good position for myself. well-educated, with a ph.d. myself, i have found myself stuck in the visiting instructor role … spouses are used for lesser paid, less benefit positions or stuck in part-time positions with little pay. respondent f32 i have found ssu to be unresponsive (to put it kindly) to the needs of dualcareer couples. the relocation program has been worse than useless for my family. not only has it been of no help in assisting my spouse to find employment here, but the information provided by the office prior to our making the decision to come to ssu has turned out to be simply untrue. the strains of having my spouse continue to commute hundreds of miles back to the job he held before we came here have added to the stresses i feel as a new faculty member. respondent f-48 campus climate in 1988 the climate at ssu appeared unfriendly to women at best and alienating at worst. the women faculty and administrative staff experienced feelings of isolation and marginalization. the concerns ranged from sexism and lack of respect to sexual harassment: the whole atmosphere at ssu is, in fact, anti-woman. this is easy to say and difficult to document, but it is a feeling that impinges on all the work women do at ssu. the feeling ranges from support staff who do not respect women professors to "colleagues" who do not accept women as equals to department heads that treat women differently from men, even to higher officials who deny that sexism (or racism) exist at ssu... women at ssu are well aware of the anti-woman ambiance here, in which we are devalued workers, though at present we have little power to change it. respondent a-12 at ssu, sexual harassment is regarded as a joke or is simply dismissed as a problem or is deemed the burden of its victims who are counseled not only to tolerate the offensive behavior but even to assume responsibility for it. from the sycamore chicks, whose purpose is to entertain men at athletic events to the little sis programs which are designed for the entertainment of male undergraduates to the old-boy faculty and administrative social networks that sustain the power of men by excluding women to the sexual jokes and innuendoes passed off as clever, humorous conversation by male colleagues in various professional and social settings, the very climate at ssu sanctions and encourages sexual harassment and the concomitant disrespect for all women associated with the institution. respondent a-25 with no hope that changes would come anytime soon, some women contemplated leaving the university: i've despaired thinking ssu will ever invite (or allow) women to join the men at the top and plan to leave the university in june. respondent x-1 i have seen a number of top-notch women leave ssu for better paying jobs in universities that are far more supportive of women faculty. this problem in retaining women faculty makes it difficult for the women who remain and the ones who seek to socialize new young faculty at ssu. respondent a-35 it is a sociological cliché that the pace of cultural change generally lags behind that of structural change. this appears to be the case at ssu. while complaints about the campus climate for women were less common in 1997 than they were in 1988, almost half of the respondents voiced concern about the issue. some of their concerns were strikingly similar to those expressed in 1988: the "good ole boys club" syndrome is gradually waning, but the process is extremely slow at ssu. respondent f-9 i feel that some men faculty here consider women less than equal, not serious competitors or otherwise limited by their feminine gender. these men are older, but unfortunately usually have more power because they are on primary committees … i have had some negative interactions with staff here at ssu. in some cases, i have not been given assistance because the staff person thought it was not her job to, for example, type an envelope for me or mail a package for me. there seems to be a feeling that women faculty can do it themselves because they are women, but men need to be helped. respondent f-62 i work with a department that, before i arrived, had few faculty women. moreover, the faculty are particularly conservative, and this feeling pervades the department. (i am) greatly disillusioned with the school and with the attitudes of the university toward even the very professionally productive women hires. i find myself, consequently, increasingly isolated within my department, interacting much more with colleagues in other departments and having little or no enthusiasm to participate in departmental affairs. respondent f-32 discussion decades of research documented a host of problems confronting women pursuing academic careers on america's college and university campuses. finally recognizing some of their concerns, college and university administrators introduced numerous policies and created various offices and programs in an apparent effort to make their campuses more "friendly" to women. the present case study, conducted at a midwestern research i university, compares problems identified by faculty women in 1988 with concerns voiced by their peers nine years later. the study finds that the frequency with which women verbalized their concerns with every one of a variety of issues had decreased in some cases rather dramatically. such changes should be expected at a university that had expanded its affirmative action office to monitor the hiring of women and to conduct salary inquiry studies, had adopted a policy permitting women to stop their tenure clocks for childbearing, had established a dual career couples policy, had instituted a relocation assistance program, had funded a half-time directorship for the women's studies program, and fully funded a women's resource office. however, a closer look at the results of the university's initiatives and attention to the voices of women faculty in 1997 provide reason to doubt that the impressive list of activities had significantly improved the situation for women at ssu. quantitative data indicate that increases in women's numbers, salaries, representation at higher academic ranks, influence and power were remarkably modest. qualitative data suggest that new policies and programs to assist women faculty and their families were either of little consequence or had yet to prove their worth. given such outcomes, why should women faculty seem to be so much less dissatisfied with their situation than they were in 1988? by initiating the policies and programs, the university granted legitimacy to many of the concerns long expressed by women faculty. perhaps this symbolic victory is the major factor accounting for the reduction in expressed dissatisfaction. for example, the comments of several respondents suggest that the very presence of a women's resource office might be satisfying to some women, regardless of the functions that this office actually performs. it is common within organizations that established inequalities in the allocation of values are maintained while changes are publicized that are reassuring to many even thought they make little difference in long-term social rewards (edelman, 2001, 1993). another factor reducing dissatisfaction might be the presence of the widespread, unscrutinized belief, stated by several respondents, that the new policies and offices had brought about significant changes, and that, in 1997, one found many more women faculty, better pay for women, more women in positions of influence and power, and so on, than were found in the not too distant history of the university. national sample survey data on attitudes toward political policies (day, 1993; henderson, et al. 1995; tedin, 1994) as well as experimental studies of attitude formation (crano, 1997; sears 2001, 1993) indicate that emotional responses to symbols of change can override evaluations based on understanding the tangible costs and benefits of the matters to which the symbols of change refer. consistent with decades of research, the present study suggests that career satisfaction of many academic women can be affected significantly by their experience and/or perception of the way in which their university deals with a number of specific gender-related issues. beyond this, the research suggests that women's present dissatisfactions may be reduced in the future if they believe that their university has taken action to address their grievances even though they are not aware of the results (or lack of results) of these actions and even though they have colleagues whose own observations and experiences call the effectiveness of the new programs and policies into question. the introduction of changes by university administrators, however limited the effectiveness of those changes might be for improving the status of women faculty, apparently can pacify many and silence others who are fearful of possible negative consequences for their careers of being identified as unreasonable critics of the university. future comparative research might investigate the career satisfaction of academic women working on campuses having demonstrably effective programs relating to women's interests with the career satisfaction of academic women working on campuses having newly created programs relating to women's interests but having, at best, uncertain effectiveness. the results of such research would reveal the potency of the symbolic politics of gender engaged in by college and university administrations. references academe. 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(1999). unbending gender: why family and work conflict and what to do about it. new york: oxford university press. author dr. mara h. wasburn is an assistant professor of organizational leadership and supervision, purdue university. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2004 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///macintosh%20hd/users/temp/awpublisher.html file:///macintosh%20hd/users/temp/content.html file:///macintosh%20hd/users/temp/advertising.html file:///macintosh%20hd/users/temp/privacy.html file:///macintosh%20hd/users/temp/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word davis_shattering_the_glass_ceiling.docx advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 48 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 48-64, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper shattering the glass ceiling: the leadership development of african american women in higher education deanna r. davis, and cecilia maldonado deanna r. davis, ph.d.: grand canyon university, email: deanna.davis@my.gcu.edu cecilia maldonado, ph.d.: university of nevada las vegas, email: ceciliam@unlv.nevada.edu accepted february 24, 2015 the purpose of this research study was to explore the intersectionality of race and gender for african american women through their lived experiences of how they developed as leaders. this qualitative study aimed to research the implications of race and gender for african american women in academia. a phenomenological research method was employed to capture the essence of the participants’ stories and to fully understand their common experiences. results show that the women in the study confirmed that race and gender informed their development as leaders in academia. five themes were generated from their stories. in general, most of them described how the intersection of race and gender affected their leadership development and career trajectories. in spite of the barriers they encountered, these women perform skillfully in an environment where inequities, negative assumptions and doubts are prevalent. even through adversity, they carry out their responsibilities but often in an atmosphere where they constantly have to prove themselves. yet, these african american female leaders have persevered and continue to demonstrate their ability to rise above and perform with tenacity. keywords: intersectionality, black feminist theory, leadership development, african american women, women in higher education introduction in the early 20th century, leadership traits were studied by scholars to determine what made certain people great leaders. these theories, called the “great man” theories, focused on identifying the innate qualities and characteristics possessed by great social, political and military leaders (northouse, 2010) mostly associated with white men (parker & ogilvie, 1996, bass, 1990; northouse, 2010). it was believed that people were born with these traits and only “great” people possessed these characteristics (bass, 1990; northouse, 2010; ott, parkes & simpson, 2008). horsford (2012) stated that “such theories have not similarly explored the natural, inborn or divine gifts and traits associated with the ‘great woman,’ and certainly not women of disadvantage and color” (p. 13). in recent years, the amount of literature on women’s leadership has increased; however, few studies explore leadership development of african american women in academia. much of the literature has been limited to the traditionally defined views of leadership; that is, most of the research concentrated on leadership and managerial aspects adopted by white males in the corporate world. there have been however, an increasing number of studies conducted on female managers and leaders that attempt to identify key success factors or pitfalls (morrison, white & van velsor, 1982). but, most of the research has been done with women at lower levels or in small organizations. bell (1992) points out that research on women in management and women of color have been largely ignored. waring (2003) indicates that much of the research on the leadership development of women has often been confined within studies of women’s history or feminist literature and states that “a review of the existing body of knowledge on women in management might lead to the observation that much of the scholarship addresses the experiences of only one group of women managers and does not address the effects of race and gender on african american women” (p. 1). research has also been conducted on how gender might influence leadership (waring, 2003). while some scholars have studied african american female leaders from a sociological perspective, few studies have researched how race and gender interacts to inform their leadership development (collins, 1990; stanley, 2009; byrd, 2009). furthermore, rarely is intersectionality considered and even less frequently are discussions of how one’s race and gender might influence one’s conception of leadership in academia. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 49 research on african american women as leaders is often subsumed within feminist literature (stanley, 2009), and as such does not contribute to the understanding, or lack of understanding, of the intersectionality of race and gender that african american women face in their leadership development. therefore, articulating how racial and gendered identities inform the leadership development experiences of african american women in academia is needed to challenge the traditional discourse. it is also useful for understanding the leadership experiences of this group. although some research has been conducted on african american women in leadership positions (byrd, 2009), most studies have generally focused on topics such as barriers to equal opportunity and a lack of career advancement for african american women rather than focusing on individual experiences. furthermore, the literature is often subsumed with how minority women fare and lead within predominantly white organizations and as such, do not add to an understanding of their leadership development. as a result, there is a marked absence of research on how african american women experience leadership and develop as leaders. toward this end, it might help our understanding to recognize the changing faces of leadership in organizations and make theoretical frameworks that are applicable to these identified groups available to practitioners and professionals (brinson, 2006). this research will report the results of a study conducted on african american women in executive level positions in academia; and represents a portion of a broader study on women in both business and academia. this study will be addressing the importance of studying the experiences of african american women to better understand the origins and conceptions of their development as leaders and answer the research question: in what ways did race and gender identities inform african american women leadership development experiences? review of the literature barriers to leadership opportunities are a global phenomenon where women, when compared to men, are disproportionately concentrated in lower-level and lower-authoritative leadership positions (northouse, 2010). these barriers are generally perceived to be against women, but to a larger extent are against african-american women executives (parker & ogilvie, 1996). according to parker (1994) and talley-ross (1992), african american women report that racism, rather than sexism, is the greatest barrier to opportunities in dominant culture organizations (as cited in parker & ogilvie, 1996). furthermore, only a few studies have examined how race impacts leadership in dominant culture organizations (parker & ogilvie, 1996; hooks, 1984, parker, 2005). ransford & miller (1983) suggested that attitudes towards women continue to be profoundly affected by past and current racial oppression. to capture the qualities of leaders that facilitate positive outcomes, leadership theorists are attempting to more fully delineate the qualities that constitute good leadership (eagly, 2005). when the female gender role is inconsistent with a leader role, prejudice toward women as leaders is a common outcome. people are unaccustomed in many organizational contexts to women possessing substantial authority that encompasses decision-making power (eagly, 2005). eagly contends “that not only do people doubt that women possess the appropriate competencies, but also they may resent the overturning of the expected and usual hierarchical relation between the sexes” (p. 465). the literature was replete with studies on the differences between male and female characteristics and traits that are normally associated with leadership, such as individualism vs. collaboration (loden, 1985; helgesen, 1990; cantor & bernay, 1992). modern discussions of leadership are based upon two concepts: transactional or transformational leadership (fisher & koch, 2001). according to parker (2005), transformational leadership places an emphasis on social change and emancipation. for african american women, transformational leadership has been closely aligned to their leadership style (walker, 2009; byrd & stanley, 2009; parker, 2005). according to a 2007 department of labor statistics report, women represented 46% of managerial positions across the united states (u.s. department of labor, 2007). in 2011, that number had increased to 51% (u.s. department of labor, 2012). however out of that number, there were relatively few women who were leaders in corporate ranks. in fortune 500 corporate positions held by women in 2013, only 4.0 % held ceo and senior level positions (catalyst, 2013). in october 2010, the white house released a special report, jobs and economic security for america’s women, written by the national economic council (nec) (2010) which noted that only 2.6 percent of fortune 500 companies are led by a female ceo, and only 15.2 percent of those companies’ board seats are occupied by women. valian (1998) indicated that inequality for women existed in many professions, such as in business, sports, military, academia and politics. currently, women constitute nearly half of the u.s. labor force, yet encounter discrimination concerning their positions, salaries, and possibilities for promotion (beck & davis, 2005). according to the national economic council report, only 1 in 14 women earn more than $100,000 a year, as compared with 1 in 7 men (zeidman, 2011). additionally, minority women are entering the labor market at an increasing rate but continue to lack the power and access to leadership positions at the executive level. in spite of having a college degree and work experience, this segment of the population continues to be passed over for promotions and are paid lower salaries than their counterparts (gibelman, 2003). many explanations have been posited about what prevents women from attaining executive-level leadership positions. catalyst (2005) surveyed fortune 1000 ceo’s and women executives about the challenges they faced in advancing to the highest level of leadership positions within their organizations. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 50 less than one-third of the 120 ceo’s and the 705 female executives considered a lack of desire to advance to senior levels a barrier to women’s advancement. wellington, kropf & gerkovich (2003) noted that women may not be aspiring to these roles because they are not aware that leadership positions are open to them. furthermore, female executives may be discouraged by superiors from pursuing these roles, or may not be in the talent pool when succession plans are made (wellington et al., 2003). leadership development in women double standards for female and male leaders are still perpetuated in today’s workplaces. oftentimes, women face challenges when working in male-dominated organizational cultures because to achieve success, women typically have to adapt to the organizational culture by taking on male attitudes and values (carli & eagly, 2001). “corporate policies and practices subtly maintain the status quo by keeping men in positions of corporate power” (lockwood, 2004, p. 2). sczesny (2003) indicated that holding leadership roles could be problematic for women because the schemas that people hold of leaders are different from those they hold of women. stereotypical assumptions about the gender differences between men and women make conditions difficult for women to obtain the opportunity to be placed in senior leadership positions (heilman, 2001). the traditional defined model of leadership assumes that good leadership is essentially masculine. such masculine characteristics as being a good decision-maker, organized, assertive and strategic, have been and continue to be associated with good leadership. on the other hand, women leaders have been described as sensitive, caring, compassionate, responsive, democratic, participative and nurturing (fisher & koch, 2001). feminine leadership styles offer attributes such as being collaborative, inclusive, democratic and participative (northouse, 2010). “female leadership styles are also credited with effectively managing and inspiring performance and possessing high levels of cultural competence” (traub, 2011, p. 36). according to traub (2011), “for too long, women have carried the water alone in the name of advancing themselves into leadership positions with limited success” (p. 36). women are scarce in top leadership positions and the managerial parity between men and women continues on a downward trajectory. a september 28, 2010, wall street journal article, slow progress for women in management positions, reported that at the rate women are moving into management – from 39 percent to only 40 percent of all management positions in the past 10 years – women won’t realize managerial parity in the near future (silverman, 2010). nevertheless, women are projected to account for 51.2 percent of the increase in total labor force growth between 2008 and 2018 (u.s. department of labor women’s bureau, 2010). the executive summary for the jobs and economic security for america’s women report stated, “as the majority of college graduates and nearly 50 percent of the workforce, women are in a position to drive our 21st-century economy” (national economic council, 2010, p. 1). while women in the workforce on average constitute 47% of middle management positions in u.s. organizations, this figure drops substantially at the executive management level where women hold 17% of the positions (guthrie & roth, 1999). as women ascend to leadership positions, the barriers to assure continuity and retention of top female executive talent become more complex. with the current pipeline already lacking female leaders, the issues of supply and demand have long-term effects for women breaking through the glass ceiling. on the supply side, women are increasingly outperforming men in college, and their sheer numbers outstrip men in gaining advanced degrees (hackett, 2011). while on the demand side, organizations cannot continue to afford to squander female talent and the strategic capability it represents for businesses. the constructions of diversity-as-capital discourse suggest that the same common sense discussions of women’s leadership may be taken up very differently depending on the nature of the field and institutional context in which it circulates (wilkinson & blackmore, 2008). even though women and minorities have increased their representation in the labor pool, female leaders in corporate america still only hold middle management positions. while women have been entering the workforce in greater numbers and making progress into management and professional positions, access to senior management remains limited (catalyst, 2001). moreover, there is a marked absence of research that focuses on the experiences of african american women who have ascended to leadership roles in academia (parker, 2005; stanley, 2009; bell, 1990). due to the changing workplace demographics and shifts in the global environment, new leadership and ways of managing people will be required. according to ready (2004), it is imperative for organizations to identify and develop female leaders who can work effectively across organizational and geographic boundaries. however, to be successful in the future, companies will need to select and develop leaders who are competent in managing organizations as a whole. organizations need leaders that have some charisma and possess the ability to inspire followers to subordinate their own interest for the good of the organization. it is important that today’s organizations have the ability to identify a diverse workforce which will include both women and women of color, to provide leadership skills that will transform these enterprises to meet the challenges of the new global marketplace. leadership development in african american women black and multiracial feminist theories argue that race and gender are socially constructed categories that contain inherent power differences (collins, 2000). black feminist theory articulates a framework that argues race and gender cannot be separate (beal, 1970). furthermore, beal posits that african advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 51 american women’s experiences are often characterized by “double barriers” which lead to disadvantages as a result of multiple marginalized identities. according to glazer-ramo (2001), as “more women earn professional degrees for entry into traditionally male professions, women experience isolation, exclusion from informal networks, and systemic discrimination” (p.145). according to meyerson and fletcher (2000), the limited progress of minority female executives has also been attributed to a “glass ceiling,” an invisible barrier to advancement based on attitudinal or organizational biases. in increasingly competitive global markets, firms are recognizing that barriers to the advancement of african american women can be detrimental to organizational effectiveness. nohria and khurma (2010) stated that “the barriers to women’s advancement undermine organizational performance and compromise fundamental principles of equal opportunity and social justice” (p. 189). since women are now a majority of college degree graduates and represent an equal share of the talent available for leadership, reducing the obstacles for african american women can also reduce the amount of attrition in organizations. in an increasing competitive and multicultural environment, organizations cannot afford to squander their human resources (nohria & khurma, 2010). “ accordingly, the glass ceiling can be costly to an organization, not only in terms of lost productivity among women of color who feel stymied in the careers, but also in terms of turnover costs and annual salaries (ragins & sundstrom, 1990). there have been a number of different views on the absence of women of color in executive leadership positions. one reason is due to overt and covert discrimination in employment. while this has become less acceptable in theory, in practice there is still an abundance of documentation that women and minorities still experience discrimination (carli & eagly, 2001). another factor that has been reported that supports barriers for advancement of african american women has been referred to as the “pipeline problem” (carli & eagly, 2001). according to carli and eagly, the pipeline concept implies that women with the appropriate education and background are not available; thus, they are not hired (2001). oftentimes, organizations do not create environments that support the advancement of highly skilled and capable african american women to be developed to assume leadership roles. lastly, the lack of access to informal networks maybe another reason that african american women are still underrepresented in upper management ranks (combs, 2003). as women and minorities increase their representation in the labor pool, it behooves organizations to compete to hire, utilize, and retain their best talent (donahue, 1998). in order for african american women to be empowered, identifying the power structures that constrain their power and how these structures can be resisted or eliminated is critical for successful leadership (collins, 1990). african american women in academia historically, education has been the familiar ground for african american women since it was always one of the respectable professions for african americans to pursue. in the nineteenth century, black women were schoolteachers among free blacks before and after emancipation; however few obtained positions higher than those employed in black elementary and secondary schools (benjamin, 1997). in 1993, lucy slowe published the higher education of negro women in the journal of negro education and argued for the necessary preparation of black women for the modern world (cardwell, 2008). through racism and discrimination, black men and women were remanded to historically black colleges and universities. furthermore, in the historically black colleges, sexism consigned black women to activities associated with the female arts including– teaching, home economics, or performing specific duties closely linked to the interest of students (benjamin, 1997). from early on, african american women in the academy were faced with oppositional alienation from the center of authority in the intellectual walls of higher education. during the past thirty years, african american women have entered the academy in greater numbers than ever before. however, although the number of african american women in the academy has increased, they still remain largely invisible (benjamin, 1997). while women and minorities have enjoyed some gains, the majority of college presidents are still predominantly white males (ross & green, 2000). recent data reveals that in 2006, 88% of college presidents were white males (association of american colleges and universities, 2007). according to the results from the study, the “typical” american president was a married, white male who had an earned doctorate and had served as a president for an average of nine years. the report also stated that women of color saw consistent but small gains. moreover, between 1986 and 2006, the percentage of african american women presidents rose from 3.9 percent to 8.1 percent (association of american college and universities, 2007). by 2011, two african american women led two prestigious, predominantly white institutions. in 1999, dr. shirley ann jackson became the 18th president of rensselaer polytechnic institute, and in 2001, dr. ruth simmons became the first black president of brown university, an ivy league institution. despite substantial advancements toward gender equity and equality, evidence of substantial disparity still exists within senior level positions in academia for african american women. according to dugger (2001) and williams (2005), a small number of women and minorities progress up the academic career ladder to become institutional leaders. researchers have underscored significant concerns that are specific to minority women administrators at dominant-culture institutions of higher learning (lloyd-jones, 2009). “such findings reveal that african american female administrators encounter significant barriers within academia itself that discourage them from becoming productive and satisfied members” (turner, myers, & creswell, 1999, p. 28). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 52 most of the research surrounding women in higher education postulated that universities have been and continue to be traditionally dominated and run by men (cullen & luna, 1993). for women of color, their dualistic roles of being both a women and minority continue to create role incongruity. thus, they face perceptions of having to perform gender-stereotyped roles within academia and experience greater barriers than their male counterparts. according to benjamin (1997) during the 1980’s, african american female administrators began increasing their share of positions in higher education. the american council on education reported that, “in 1989 african american women made up 4.2 percent of full-time administrators, which represents a 87 percent change from the previous decade” (ace, 1989, p. 26). for african american females, these numbers have not significantly changed in proportion to the number of women in educational administration (gilroy, 2005). nevertheless, african american women are still underrepresented in mid to upper-management level administrative positions. an examination of statistics of african american women in higher education revealed that few have reached the highest level positions in the administration of colleges and universities in predominantly white institutions. while both african american men and women have become presidents of more than 90 historically black colleges and universities (hbcus), in 2001 less than 6% of all college presidents were african american and less than 1% was headed by african american women (fisher & koch, 2001). current data revealed that women increased their representation as college presidents to 26% in 2011, but only 4% of all presidents were women of color (american council on education, 2012). in 2011, six percent of all college presidents were african american and african american women represented 34% of the total proportion (american council on education, 2012). according to ross & green (2000), african american women seeking high level administrative positions at predominantly white higher education institutions experience significant obstacles. sturnick, milley & tisinger (1991) conclude that because of gender and strongly patriarchal institutions, african american women have been treated differently; have labored within unsupportive systems, and have perhaps been required to perform at a higher level than their male counterparts in order to achieve success. “this is a value problem and is one that through observation, discussion, and verification should be eradicated in a democratic society based on merit” (ross & green, 2000, p. 15). for african american women, cultural differences and stereotypes should not be barriers in presidential search and selection processes. in the academy, an african american woman “work(s) to develop expertise and authority in her chosen field in order to balance her cultural values, beliefs, philosophies, and behaviors with those that are fundamentally different from her own” (benjamin, 1997, p. 243). j. nefta baraka’s, collegiality in the academy: where does the black woman fit, states that different cultural orientations intertwine with racism and sexism, making it difficult for african american women to fit into the white academe (as cited in benjamin, 1997). there is a consensus that african american women in general face a myriad of challenges in the academy that impede their professional growth and limits their ascendency to leadership participation in higher education (battle & doswell, 2004; benjamin, 1997). african american women in academia seek open access to the opportunities that their abilities, their interests, and their willingness to work entitle them. african american women in the academy “believe such equality of opportunity is their right and should be granted to them willingly” (furniss & graham, 1974, p. 6). giscombe (2007) asserts that while in pursuit of leadership positions, women still face social and cultural barriers pertaining to organizational norms, perceptions surrounding gender congruity, and stereotypes. by understanding these perceptions about gender roles and norms for african american women in the academia, existing barriers may be addressed and strategies developed to increase their representation in leadership positions within higher education. theoretical framework research in the 1980s and 1990s increasingly focused on uncovering connections among systems of oppression organized along constructs of social class, gender, race and nationalism (collins, 2003). social science research generally viewed social class as a descriptive, static system of individual classification (collins, 2003; eagly, 2005). viewing social class through these lenses created a monolithic view of leadership development operating in a historic fashion according to its own natural laws and rules (collins, 2003). these boundaries divided women from men who traditionally were given access to positions of substantial authority. the theoretical framework for this study incorporated feminist and socio-cultural theories for contextualizing the epistemological worldview of a group of people who had experienced racism, discrimination and marginalization (bernal, 2002). these theories challenge the dominant discourses in structures and processes that dialectically marginalize and emancipate (bernal, 2002; parker, 2005, hooks, 1984). the theoretical framework for this study (see figure 1) drew on the following theories: feminist, black feminist, socio-cultural and intersectionality. each theory is presented to explain the importance of the experiences of african american women in relation to their race and gender identities and leadership development. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 53 figure 1. study framework feminist scholarship has inspired fundamental changes in the ways individuals view social groups and processes. according to collins (2003), feminist scholarship challenges several dimensions of leadership development by focusing on the centrality of gender. feminist theories have focused on the oppression of women and aim to understand the nature of gender inequality. feminism’s narrow focus on gender equity has neglected to examine how both race and gender affect the oppression of women. thus, the intersection of race and gender on leadership development has received little attention within the confines of traditional literature. conversely, paradigms of black feminist theories have identified new directions and frameworks for studies on african american female leaders. black feminist theory provides african american women the opportunity to speak from an experience unbeknownst to other women. according to collins (2000), black feminist theory encompasses a place of marginalization in which african american women are different from white and other minority women. african american women may have different experiences of power, growth, and development compared to other women. thus, this research seeks to capture these lived experiences through the lenses of the participants in the study. the dual and systematic discriminations of racism and sexism remain pervasive and permeate throughout many organizational sectors (gaetane, williams & shermaine, 2009). miller & vaughn (1997) assert that, “the twin guise of racism and sexism still imposes great restraints on the utilization of the competence and talents of african american women” (p. 179). according to merriam & caffarella (1999), “socio-cultural refers to theoretical perspectives that consider race, gender, and social class in analyzing power dynamics within bureaucratic and other systems where power can be used to oppress (as cited in byrd, 2009). socio-cultural theories position african american women within an interlocking system of race, gender and social class, which in turn can create disempowering experiences as leaders in predominantly white organizations (stanley, 2009). according to parker (2005), intersectionality is a means for analyzing and interpreting the experiences that african american women encounter while holding positions of authority in predominantly white organizations. african american women have a connection through race and gender within society and can identify with other african american women from this perspective. stanley (2009) surmised that through intersectionality, “the lived experiences of african american women are not located within separate spheres of race, gender and social class. rather, these spheres intersect and shape social realities that are not captured within traditional feminist discourse” (p. 552). feminist theories research on feminism has examined feminist perspectives on the oppression and discrimination of women. key researchers on feminist discourse include liz stanley, mary belenky, gloria bowles, and sandra harding (wadsworth, 2001) who all focus on the rights of women. feminist theories have focused on the oppression of women (hooks, 1984; eisenstein, 2004). feminism’s presence has come about precisely because many women have rejected men’s interpretation of their lives (gottfried, 1996). through feminist theory, women can centralize their experiences and the social predicaments that bear the brunt of sexist oppression as a way to understand the collective social status of women in the united states (hooks, 1984). “feminist theory addresses among other things, the conditions for the actuality of men and women – historical, political, economical, and ontological along with the virtual forces this actuality contains and through which it can be transformed” (hooks, 1984, p. 101). feminist scholarship has contributed to developments in qualitative inquiry since the 1970s. feminist theories have focused on the oppression of women and address the possibility of considering the needs of women (eisenstein, 2004). according to harding and norberg (2005), “feminist research principles and practices are inclusive of awareness and are sensitive towards underrepresented groups” (p. 2015). grosz (2010) states that feminist theory and feminist philosophy share concern about a common subject of analysis –“woman, women, the feminine and their social, political, economic, cultural and conceptual relations – along with the need to understand how change is possible” (p. 102). feminist theories aim to develop and use concepts to articulate those spaces whose interference and elaboration may produce new alignment of forces, new relations of power and new concepts (grosz, 2010). a few scholars on feminism have identified the unique characteristics of women as leaders. gottfried (1996), vannoy (2001), eagly and karau (1991) found certain characteristic and management styles common among women. van velsor and hughes (1990) “found that managerial women are more likely intersectionality                               feminist   theories   black   feminist   theories   socio-­‐ cultural   theories   advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 54 than men to engage in reflective learning about self and others in connection with others” (p. 37), a finding echoed by cafferella and olson’s (1993) study on managers’ transformative leadership experiences. according to feminist perspectives on leadership, the traditional approaches to leadership have focused on serving and have included adaptive leadership and transformational leadership (parker, 2005). parker also posited that traditional masculine models of leadership are essentially “man stories” (p. 57). mezirow (2000) and parker (2005) suggested that servant leadership and some feminist perspectives are male-centered. according to parker (2005), the servant leadership model may fit the gender-neutral stereotypes for african american women, but contradicts the difference in which gender relations differ between men and women. traditional servant leadership and most feminist perspectives of leadership theories have originated in a male-centered, male-dominated view of leadership (parker, 2005). in feminism, there has been noted a direct correlation between feminist theory and the desires of women scholars to conduct gender identity and phenomenological research methods. butler (1988) postulated: feminist theory has often been critical of naturalistic explanations of sex and sexuality that assume that the meaning of women’s social existence can be derived from some fact of their physiology. in distinguishing sex from gender, feminist theories have disputed causal explanations that assume that sex dictates or necessitates certain social meanings for women’s experiences. phenomenological theories of human embodiment have also been concerned to distinguish between the various physiological and biological causalities that structure bodily existence and the meanings that embodied existence assumes in the context of lived experience. (p. 520) feminist research has focused mainly on white women and a small number of women of color (collins, 1990; hooks, 1994; parker, 2005). hooks (1994) suggests that from the very onset, feminism defined a social equality with men. hooks further believed that feminism became a movement that would primarily affect the social standing of white women in middle and upper class groups and only affecting the social status of working class and poor women in a very marginal way. according to hooks (1994), black women’s interests in the feminist movement are prone to a dualistic thinking of being black and feminist “which continually perpetuate the belief that the self is formed in opposition to another” (p. 34). given the fear of being misunderstood, it has been difficult for black women to give expression to their interest in feminist concerns. black feminist theories early feminist scholarship often theorized from the position of white, middle-class women, yet generalized their experiences to be representative of all women (vannoy, 2001). thus, a new set of feminist theories emerged from the challenges identified by women of color. black feminist theories have recommended the deconstruction of feminist theories according to the postmodern perspective (parker, 2005). black feminist research pioneers have developed and authored the concept of empowerment for black women, suggesting ways of communicating the oppression of black women (hooks, 1984; collins, 2000). lastly, hooks (1984) asserted that the goal of black feminists is to recognize the struggle of black women against multiple oppressions. according to parker (2005), the silencing of some groups of women and men while privileging others in the study of organizational leadership has resulted from the theoretical perspectives that frame an understanding of gender, discourse and organization. black feminist theorizing is the understanding of race, class and gender as simultaneous forces (vannoy, 2001). black feminist theories emphasize that in many contexts, race and gender cannot be separated (hooks, 1984; collins, 1990). african americans have not been exempt from the effects of diminished opportunities that accompany racial segregation and group discrimination. historically, the oppression and discrimination of african american women in the united states began as slaves and domestic servants (freeman, 1995). the domesticated worker has been closely attributed to african american women. the emphasis on participation in the paid labor force and escape from the confines of the home seemed foreign to black women. through their experiences of race and gender oppression, black women were strongly aware of their group identity, and consequently, more suspicious of white women who defined much of their feminism in personal and individualistic terms (dill, 1983). gender, race, ethnicity, and social class comprise a complex hierarchical stratification system in the united states, in which upper class white men and women oppress men and women of disadvantaged races, ethnicities and religions (vannoy, 2001). race, gender and social class are intertwined and multiracial feminism has shown that gender is intertwined with race and ethnicity (lorber, 1998). black feminism or multiracial feminism focuses on the intersectionality of race, gender, ethnicity and social class. researchers who study the concept of intersectionality argue that one cannot look at these social statutes alone, nor can one be added to another, but the synergy between them constructs a social location (vannoy, 2001). thus, the social location of men and women differ. according to hooks (1984), black women are in an unusual position in society. african american women not only are collectively at the bottom of the occupational ladder, but their overall social status is lower than that of any other group (hooks, 1984). black women’s lived experiences shape their consciousness in such a way that their worldview differs from those who have a degree of privilege (hooks, 1984). thus, hooks asserted that in the “feminist struggle, black women need to recognize the special vantage point their marginality advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 55 has and make use of this perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony as well as to envision and create a counter-hegemony” (hooks, 1984, p. 15). collins (1997) stated the notion of standpoint refers to historically shared, group-based experiences. the notion of standpoint refers to groups having shared histories based on their shared location in relations of power. “groups have a degree of permanence over time such that group realities transcend individual experiences” (collins, 1997, p. 375). for african american women, standpoint theory places less emphasis on individual experiences within socially constructed groups than on the social conditions that construct such groups. standpoint theory negates the individual experiences of sexism and racism, but collectively implies that the group will be confronted with those issues as well (collins, 1997). black feminism exists as a standpoint theory for african american women’s oppression. earlier works of black feminists determined that systems of oppression such as race, class, and gender create different standpoints among women (hooks, 1984; collins, 2000). black feminist standpoint theory provides an approach centered on african american women’s experiences. the standpoint theory provides a forum for african american women to construct realities and an outlet for documentation of their lived experiences. black feminist theories are ideologies that both aim to unveil the oppression experienced by marginalized groups and present opportunities for those groups to share about their experiences (byrd & stanley, 2009). a basic premise of black feminist theories is that african american women cannot be fully empowered unless intersecting oppressions such as racism, sexism and classism are eliminated (collins, 1990). in light of this, the existence of race, gender and social realities and experiences of african american women serves to minimize the existence of african american women as leaders (gostnell cited in stanley, 2006). thus, research on african american women as leaders has been subsumed with feminist literature and these studies have not adequately documented the phenomenon of leadership development from the experiences of african american women. lastly, research on feminist and black feminist theories is useful in articulating african american women’s leadership experience and how the intersection of race and gender affect their leadership development. socio-cultural theories socio-cultural refers to theoretical perspectives that consider race, gender, and social class in analyzing power dynamics within bureaucratic and other systems where power can be used to oppress (merriam & caffarella, 1999). given that african american women are simultaneously situated within at least two groups that are subjected to broad subordinations, sociocultural theories challenge the notion that problems can be viewed as mono-casual, or based on racial or gender discrimination (crenshaw, 1989). furthermore, systems of oppression contain multiplier effects such as– racism, sexism and social classism. the marginality of african american women in predominantly white organizations experience multiplier effects in ways that cannot be understood from the experiences of other groups in these settings. thus, from the ideology of history and culture, african american women have learned how to recognize, respond, and react to issues emerging from socio-cultural realities that have challenged their leadership experience (stanley, 2009). socio-cultural theories are useful for understanding african american women’s oppression and alienation within organizations for the purpose of emancipation and social change (creswell, 1998). in addition, socio-cultural theories are important to provide a framework for understanding how african american women’s construct and enact leadership within their professional contexts. intersectionality intersectionality is a socio-cultural theoretical framework that focuses on the interlocking system of race, gender and social class (byrd & stanley, 2009; davis, 2012). while the term intersectionality was coined by kimberle crenshaw in 1989, the concept’s origin can be traced to maria stewart in 1832 (jordan-zachery, 2007). stewart, a black female contemporary, articulated a critique of difference and challenged the functioning of race and gender which eventually evolved into the origin of intersectionality. kimberle crenshaw (1989) coined the term intersectionality and argued that race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of black women’s employment experiences (crenshaw, 1989). brooks (2012) stated that “slavery and residual effects left of that significant facet of american history on black americans is primarily why intersectionality was conceptually born out of the study of black women and black feminist thought” (p. 39). when race, gender and social class converge, they form a dynamic, interlocking system referred to as intersectionality (stanley, 2009). the interlocking systems of race, gender and social class give voice to african american women on encounters with intersectionality in their leadership development. intersectionality theories provide a framework for exploration of multi-dimensional research variables and present an approach that grew out of feminist and black feminist standpoints (witherspoon, 2009). intersectionality refers to the ways in which social and cultural (i.e. race and gender) constructs interact and are useful in better understanding the complexities of the dual status that african american female leaders face in the workplace (lloyd-jones, 2009). research on socio-cultural issues such as intersectionality is needed to provide a deeper understanding of ways that racism, sexism, classism, ethnicity and other social realities can affect an individual’s lived experiences in the workplace (jean-marie, williams & sherman, 2009). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 56 in intersectionality, gender differences coupled with race imbue perceptions and attitudes that contribute to the dearth of african american women at the executive level (stanley, 2009). according to lloyd-jones (2009), when race converges with gender, a double standard dichotomy surfaces for african american women, thus reducing access to leadership positions and generating ambivalence about their ability to lead. women and minorities may experience interrelated barriers that restrict advancement at the individual, group and organizational levels. the theory of intersectionality articulates a framework for understanding the complexities of minority women’s identities and experiences (horsford & tilman, 2011). parker (2005) described intersectionality as a means of interpreting and analyzing the experiences that african american women encounter while holding positions of authority in predominantly white organizations. when the spheres of race, gender and social class intersect, they shape social realities and inform the multiple dimensions of the lived experiences of african american women (parker, 2005). one’s history, culture and values provide a frame of reference for making meaning of common experiences. hence, african american women view the world from discrete perspectives based on their social positions, and within the confines of the larger social structures of race and gender (bloom & erlandson, 2003). although research literature exists on intersectionality (stanley, 2009; horsford, 2011; alston, 2005; byrd, 2009, collins, 2003), few scholars have addressed leadership development for african american women from the perspective of intersectionality in academia. the lack of research in this discourse is critical to the professional development of leaders positioned at the intersection of race, gender and social class. examining intersectionality in the leadership experiences of african american women offers opportunity for new perspectives of workplace values and beliefs to be heard. research from this paradigm seeks to explore the scientific study of domination, oppression, alienation, and struggle within institutions, organizations, and social groups for the purpose of emancipation, transformation and social change (creswell, 1998). methodology the purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the intersectionality of race and gender for african american women through their lived experiences of how they developed as leaders in the academy. the study employed a qualitative design, specifically the phenomenological research method that examined the lived experiences of five african american women who obtained leadership positions within academic organizations. the researcher used purposeful sampling for selecting research participants. the purposive sample of participants was selected because their ascendency captured the lived experiences associated with the topic under investigation. the participants were selected because they were african american women in senior leadership positions in academia. the criteria included women who were presidents, vice-presidents or deans in both four-year and two-year colleges in academia. five african american women from five u.s. colleges were selected as the study participants. both telephone and in-person interviews were used to conduct the interviews. a phenomenological research method was most appropriate for this study in order to capture the lived experiences of these individuals and to develop themes that challenge structural or normative assumptions (lester, 1999). phenomenology is a method of qualitative research that allows researchers to unassumingly examine participants’ lived experiences and steer clear of presuppositions; relying instead on the responses of the study participants (moustakas, 1994). approval was received by the irb and consent was received from each of the participants prior to their interviews. participant responses were recorded, but identities remained anonymous and responses kept confidential. pseudonyms were used to ensure confidentiality as well as an effort to protect the participant’s identity and confidential responses by modifying any identifying information. the interview protocol questions were designed to address how race and gender informed the leadership development of african american women and were organized into five different parts that included seven main and twelve probing questions. the five categorical sections were comprised of questions focused on each individual’s life history; career path; leadership; identity/intersectionality and life lessons. all of the interview questions were designed to frame the answer to the primary research question, in what ways did race and gender identities inform african american women leadership development experiences? the interview protocol consisted of the following seven main questions: 1. tell me generally about your early childhood? 2. please describe the person(s) who taught you the most during your career? 3. how has your race and gender shaped your development as a leader? 4. what lessons have you learned as a woman in a leadership position? 5. what lessons have you learned as an african american in a leadership position? 6. what lessons have you learned as an african american woman in a leadership position? 7. what advice do you have for future african american female leaders? advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 57 data collection and analysis the participants in the study responded to semi-structured, open-ended questions based on reflections of their lived experiences as african american female leaders. moustakas (1994) explained the “method of reflection that occurs throughout the phenomenological approach provides a logical, systematic, and coherent resource for carrying out the analysis and synthesis the researcher interviewed african american women in academia who were senior level executives. senior level executives included presidents, provosts and vice presidents & deans. interviews with each participant were conducted to develop themes and ceased when the interviewees refrained from introducing new perspectives on the topic. kensit (2000) posits that “researchers are cautioned to allow the data to emerge while conducting phenomenological studies because engaging in phenomenology means capturing rich descriptions of phenomena and their settings” (p. 104). the aim of the researcher is to describe as accurately as possible the phenomenon, refraining from any pre-given framework but remaining true to the facts (groenewald, 2004). through semi-structured, in-depth interviewing, the researcher was able to capture the true essence of each participant’s experience with the phenomenon under study. the qualitative, in-depth interviews were more like conversations rather than formal events with predetermined response categories (marshall & rossman, 2006). the researcher anticipated that the phenomenon of interest would unfold as the participants relayed their views and experiences. marshall and rossman suggest that the most important aspect of the interviewer’s approach is conveying the attitude that the participant’s view is valuable and useful (2006). researcher biases were addressed using the process of epoche. in phenomenology, “bracketing helps us to free ourselves from prejudices and secure the purity of our detachment as observers, so that we can encounter things as they are in themselves independently of any presuppositions” (husserl, 1962, p. 163). creswell (2007) emphasizes that qualitative researchers engage in at least two of these validation strategies in any given study. to ensure validity, the researcher utilized member checking to solicit the participants’ views of the credibility of the data so that they could judge the accuracy of the account. the use of rich, thick descriptions to describe in the participants under study was the second means of ensuring trustworthiness. gay, mills and airasian (2009) posits that the qualitative researcher begins data analysis from the initial interaction with participants and continues that interaction and analysis throughout the entire study. moustakas (1994) modification of the van kaam method of analysis of phenomenological data was used as the method of data analysis for the study. moustakas (1994) recommends that phenomenological inquiry should commence with a period of reflection in order to produce an initial phenomenological account. throughout the data analysis process, the researcher listened to each participant’s response to the research questions and transcribed the results from the digital recordings. the researcher analyzed transcriptions several times to capture meanings of the participants’ experiences as they related to the phenomenon. thematic analysis is a method for identifying, analyzing, and reporting themes within data to describe information set in rich detail (braun & clark, 2006). from thematic analysis, patterns or themes develop that should be combined and catalogued. themes come from both the data (inductive approach) and from our prior theoretical understanding of whatever phenomenon we are studying (deductive approach) (bernard & ryan, 2010). themes are defined as units derived from patterns such as "conversation topics, vocabulary, recurring activities, meanings, feelings, or folk sayings and proverbs" (taylor & bogdan, 1998, p.131). clusters of themes are typically formed by grouping units of meaning together (creswell, 2007). themes are identified by "bringing together components or fragments of ideas or experiences which often are meaningless when viewed alone" (as cited in aronson, 1994, p. 1). it is critical that the researcher carefully examine the themes that emerge from the participants’ stories. by carefully examining the data, themes are pieced together to form a comprehensive picture of the participants’ collective experiences. constas (1992) reiterates this point and states that the "interpretative approach should be considered as a distinct point of origination" (p. 258). findings and interpretation of the results the themes which emerged from the experiences of how these african american women developed as leaders were explicated from the text of the five participants in the research study. the women in the study confirmed that race and gender informed their development as leaders in academia. throughout the interviews, all of the participants made statements that described how the intersection of race and gender affected their leadership development and career trajectories. theme 1: predestined for success. the importance of family resonated with the early childhood experiences of most of the participants in this study. most of the african american women hailed from a tradition where family and extended family were extremely valued and influential in their lives. the women in the study commonly referred to parents and family members who provided strong guidance and support that profoundly impacted their development as leaders. williams and stockton (1973) states that it is in the family where personality is developed, identity is formed, status is assigned, and basic values and norms are learned. it became apparent that these african american women possessed certain qualities that can be attributed to their childhood rearing. many of the women expressed that their ability to become successful, maintain integrity, demonstrate advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 58 confidence and remain resilient were developed by a strong foundation from family members. through their early experiences, these women expressed that they had the tenacity to forge ahead and become successful. there was something remarkable in the minds of these african american women that they knew they had to succeed and beat the odds. family and early experiences were integral in planting the seeds for cultivating their desire to become leaders. the women learned that the role their parents and families played in instilling confidence in them at an early age, was integral in laying a foundation for them to achieve and believe in themselves; even when they faced adversity, their early exposure to self-pride and self-reliance enabled them to succeed in difficult situations. by growing up in environments that had a strong legacy of survival, determination and discipline, these african american women had been instilled with the characteristics that predestined them for success. the following excerpts from the participants’ narratives provide reflections on their early childhood experiences: participant #1: i can remember sitting on the edge of my aunt’s bed and she said, ‘well, you know that there is more than one kind of doctor. you can be a doctor of education which my family were all educators. the women in my family were teachers. at one of my family reunions, we had six women who had ph.d.’s in that group. one of my cousins was a state senator for california. so that really struck a chord in what she said and that stuck out that i really just wanted to have the title doctor. so then i went on and pursued my master’s and ph.d. in education. family was very important – women really. participant #2: in terms of my leadership development, i didn’t learn this until later until i was an adult, but my mother really instilled in me to be independent, not to rely on others. it wasn't as if no one can help you but you have to take care of you. and i think as i look back on it, i think that she always wished that she had done more with her life. theme 2: sponsorship from the unexpected. the participants acknowledged that sponsors significantly contributed to their career ascension to leadership. according to hewlett (2013), sponsors connect you to career opportunities, make you visible to leaders to leaders within the company and provide air cover when you encounter trouble. when it comes to opening doors, they don’t stop with one promotion: they’ll see you to the threshold of power (hewlett, 2013). a unique irony encountered by these women was that many of them received sponsorship from white men. white males are often sponsors for women of color by virtue of their predominance and access to senior level positions. since white males occupy the majority of leadership positions in organizations, they are in the position to have the decisionmaking authority to provide opportunities for these women. the significant relevance underlying this relationship is that since white men occupy the seats of power in academia, the participants found themselves developing strategic mechanisms to navigate career advancement. scholars note that having a white male as a sponsor has an obvious advantage since white men have greater access to networks of power (giscombe, 2007). some of the women received sponsorship from black males who had a direct connection to white male supervisors or had the power to advance their careers. in reflecting upon their career experiences, the participants described how relationships with sponsors influenced their career advancement. participant #3 describes her experience as follows: a mentor gives you some advice and talks to you about some issues and walks you through something, but they never give you anything in terms of a position or opportunity. a sponsor sticks their neck out for you and advocates in a way that a mentor does not. a sponsor will actually give you a career opportunity and advocate for your promotion and create a position for you. whatever the case may be. i started to pay attention to that. this white man started creating opportunities for me since he held a vice president position. in the end, this sponsorship impacted me indirectly and directly in a positive fashion because there were other people at the college who were trying to block my promotion. mentoring and sponsorship by males was prominent in the experiences of these african american women as they recognized that sponsorship was vital to their career advancement and provided support in their professional growth and development. the participants expressed that the sponsors often provided guidance, professional mentoring and upward career mobility. sponsorship from unexpected individuals was heralded as a key element of the success that these women attained. theme 3: double jeopardy of race and gender. intersectionality denotes the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of black women’s employment experiences (jordan-zachery, 2007). for the african american women in the study, almost of all of them felt the impact of both race and gender discrimination in their careers. the combination of race and gender for african american women still hinders the potential for their ascension to senior-level positions. race and gender are interlocking social constructs and are not separate entities that intersect, but are completely bound to one another, incapable of being separated (collins, 1990). feelings of race and gender bias resonated with all of the participants as they discussed intersectionality in the workplace. for these women, race did not trump their gender, nor did gender trump their race. in their development as leaders, they faced a double jeopardy despite their leadership abilities. when participant #3 reflected on a situation that she encountered with a white male advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 59 colleague, she discussed how she felt disrespected by this experience. as she stated, the only overt thing that i have experienced as a woman as far as the work environment was being talked over a couple of times by white men. i was talking in the middle of a sentence and he just started talking. i was so surprised that it happened that i had to check myself and ask did that really happen. the next time he does it, it is going to be a problem. so we get into a meeting several months later, now i am being nice and i got a very good memory. so we are in this meeting and we are talking about something and i am in the middle of a sentence and then he starts talking. so the guy starts talking and i continue to talk. he got slightly louder and i got louder. i have a deep voice so i got louder and drowned him out. then when he stopped talking, i said, ‘yes i thought i was still talking.’ then he says, ‘well, i’m sorry i didn’t realize.’ so, i said, ‘as i was saying.’ he never did that to me again. in describing her experience as being the only african american woman in senior leadership, participant #4 shared how she dealt with the situation. now getting back to that intersectionality, i don't know if it's personality, my personality because i told you i was pretty anal and compulsive, or if it’s my gender, race or all of the above. but, i do think for whatever reason that i have to work harder than everyone as a cabinet member sitting at the table because some of the things that they do as my colleagues and they get away with, i wonder how do they get away with that. for a long time, i was the only female vice president on the cabinet. i have to be conscious of that because when i'm in that room, if i don't speak out then i won’t get a word in edgewise. african american women in leadership positions experience a profusion of race and gender stereotypes. for the african american participants in the study, their race and gender had negatively affected their careers. some of the participants reported experiences of being invisible, voiceless, discriminated, isolated, undermined, treated unfairly, oppressed, challenged and demoted. these negative experiences of race and gender discrimination seemed to dominate the conversation when the participants reflected on their past experiences. cooper (1998) argued that black women, restricted from directly participating in many facets of political, economic and social life, and ignored by white men, but also by black men and white women, have a unique perspective that, if heard, would benefit not just black women but all of society. (p. 117) the strength, fortitude and determination that defined these african american women demonstrated their ability to rise above adversity and forge ahead into leadership roles. theme 4: learn how to play the game. bell hooks (1994) argued that “black women must recognize the special vantage point our marginality gives us and make use of this perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist and sexist hegemony”(p. 15). the influential networks in almost all organizations are usually composed solely of men and access to these networks is often difficult to penetrate. the study’s findings reinforced that african american women faced exclusion from informal social networks and did not have cardcarrying memberships to the “good old boys” club. however, the study participants confirmed that securing sponsors who were willing to advance their careers, provided opportunities for their career advancements. these sponsors were often white men who were the decision makers and had positions of authority in the organization. women regard work more holistically, but must be aware that many times their decisions are not going to be compatible with the male dominated business culture (evans, 2000). thus, women must know and understand the rules and leverage the playing field to their advantage. study findings showed that african american women learned to identify how the internal politics operated and developed strategies to decipher the organizational bureaucracy. by learning how to play the game skillfully, these women learned how to become politically savvy and navigate around potential organizational landmines. all of the african american female leaders felt that while playing the game they would never lower their standards, would always maintain integrity and never compromise their ethics. as african american women in the workplace, the participants understood the difference between how the “man” played the game and how they should play it. the participants expressed that the playing field was not level; however, they need to sit and remain at the table in order to make their presence known. participant #1: i am the only female vice president on the cabinet but now we have another woman who is general counsel. there is also the senior advisor to the president, but that is a rotating position, but i am the only female vice president. and it's funny because my husband will say to me you always talking on top of me and you never let me finish. i have to be conscious of that because when i'm in that room, if i don't speak out then i won’t get a word in edgewise. participant #3: they often need to come forward with professionalism and that they have to do more and be at the table and to have those discussions and to take on those roles sometimes. one bias that i have experienced in a meeting because i may be the only one or two woman in the room, but when it is asked to take notes, somehow the looks always come to me or the other woman like we are the only ones in the room who are capable of taking notes. it is those little subtle things that happen. even if you are the leader in the room and happen to be a woman, it is amazing how this type of thing continues to happen. and for me, my gender has been the critical piece in my career. it has caused me to think that i am advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 60 not just a black woman. i am black woman serving in a certain position in a college. your responsibility changes because it is not just about me. it is also ensuring that they see other women like me who can do the work and to better, improve, and be a leader in all of that. you try to fight the struggle for other women as well. participant #5: as an african american woman in a leadership position, we need to recognize that there is a game. there is the same old game being played, just with different pieces. we are victims of the race card. just like we have benefited from the race card we are also victims of it. people who have these -isms ideas, really move from one group to the next. it is like okay, we are tired of y’all. we are going to empower a different group of people and this is going to be disadvantageous to you. theme 5: pay it forward. according to catalyst (2010), research shows that a lack of mentoring opportunities is a frequent barrier to advancement for women and people of color. this research study showed that african american women recognize the vital role of mentoring other african american females, but not enough mentoring relationships are established to prepare african women for leadership roles. by paying it forward, the experiences of african american women senior leaders could provide a roadmap for african american women aspiring to advance to senior leadership roles in academia. participants emphasized the importance of providing guidance to other african american females to add value to the growth and success of future african american women leaders. participant #5 expressed that “mentoring is crucial to how we can sustain and increase the number of women in these positions. these women should not be only at historically black institutions either. they need to be at the predominantly white institutions, at the white house, or all segments of society and not be pigeon holed to working in one specific environment.” the experience of each participant could serve as a basis for programs designed to help young african american women starting their careers to have a smoother journey up the career ladder. implications for practice understanding the leadership development experiences of african american women in the academy is necessary for improving leadership development opportunities for them as emerging leaders. the facts still remain the same, in that african american women are not represented in leadership positions in academia. according to the american council on education’s (2012) national data in 2012, 87% of u.s. college presidents both male and female were white. out of that number, women made up 26% of all college presidents. of the women college presidents across the nation in 2011, 81% were white and only 8 percent were african american (ace, 2012). results from the current study, further substantiate the need for more women of color in academia, especially in leadership positions. it also exposes some of the barriers faced by african american women and might also provide an understanding of the experience of african american women and the contributions of these women as a collective group in executive positions. since research on the impact of race and gender on african american women’s leadership development in academia is understudied, this study could provide a framework for understanding their experiences. it can also serve as a reference point for those who seek to eliminate cultural barriers and obstacles that stunt the upward mobilization of african american women in their organizations. the african american women who demonstrated resilience, integrity, intrapersonal characteristics, and social skills were more likely to climb the career leader within their respective organizations, with the support of a mentor and/or sponsor. thus, african american women who aspire to become leaders must be willing to step outside their comfort zones to establish a network of people who are different from them and who hold higher rank or positions. establishing strategic relationships in the academy is a valuable tool for african american women to gain access to higher-level promotions and career opportunities. conclusion the focus on the inquiry process is on understanding how individuals construct and interpret their own personal experiences (ken, 2007). organizations, researchers, scholars and practitioners may use the findings of the study by focusing on the theoretical framework on intersectionality as it addresses race and gender in organizations and leadership practices (collins, 2000; crenshaw, 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(2011 may/june). post-recession strategies for women. diversity executive, 5(3), 42-43. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership women transitioning into leadership: gender as both help and hindrance martha b. hudson, ed.d. ronald d. williamson, ed.d. hudson & williamson, special rwe issue, fall, 2002 for those who prepare future leaders, the power of socialization to mold and shape behavior must be recognized. newly hired school leaders are confronted by the weight of tradition and prior practice (hartzell, williams, & nelson, 1995; marshall, 1992). they are frequently counseled to adopt “old” norms about priorities and decision-making. some find that to gain acceptance they must adhere to values and leadership behaviors counter to those that attracted them to school leadership or were espoused in their preparation (hartzel et al., 1995; marshall, 1992). this paper reports on an investigation of the impact of socialization on new assistant principals, particularly women graduates of a redesigned school leadership preparation program in north carolina. the subjects of this study were women, therefore the investigation also explored the impact that genderassociated leadership preferences had on their socialization. context of the study feminine perspectives on leadership creating better school leaders is more complex than merely altering preparation programs. it necessitates confronting and altering long standing norms about how principals do their work and also requires cultivating the capacity to resist socialization to these old norms. questions abound about whether differences in leadership style and preferences are gender related. without drawing distinct gender lines it is possible to discuss a set of leadership styles and preferences often associated with the feminine. they include the preference for democratic rather than autocratic http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html organizations, and cultures that are inclusive and collaborative (eagly, karau, & johnson, 1992; irby & brown, 1995; shakeshaft, 1987a). in addition, there is support for the premise that feminine leaders are more attuned to instruction, teachers, and children (frasher & frasher, 1979; mcgrath, 1992). finally, there is evidence that because women develop differently, they are more likely to demonstrate an ethic of care that is grounded in relationships rather than laws (gilligan, 1982, 1985; porat, 1991). women leaders often have an abiding concern for children, especially for marginal students and those without advocates (brown & irby, 1993; edson, 1987; lightfoot, 1983). such a preference aligns with expectations for contemporary school leaders (council of chief state school officers, 1996). language choice is another indicator of a more inclusive style. several studies found that women leaders tend to use more conditional, tentative language (marshall, 1988). based on the work of holmes (1984), marshall suggests that such language often used by women does not reflect uncertainty but instead is a deliberate effort to invite others into the conversation, to give others a voice. clear parallels between standards for school leaders and feminine leadership beliefs, styles, and preferences for practice emerge. given the alignment, it might be suggested that women graduates would have success holding on to what they believe when they transition from preparation into jobs. perhaps they are better equipped to resist the strong powers of schools as institutions to socialize new leaders into old norms. that question is at the heart of this inquiry. role socialization there is a rich history of research on socialization in varied settings (merton, 1968; peters & waterman, 1982; van maanen & schein, 1979). merton (1968) suggested that socialization is the process whereby one acquired the knowledge, skills and dispositions needed to perform a role. studies in educational settings suggest that the process is informal rather than formal, intense and short in duration (augenstein & konnert, 1991; crow, mecklowitz, & weekes, 1992; duke, isaacson, sagor, & schmuck, 1984; greenfield, 1985). the informality of the process, coupled with the short duration reflects an emphasis on what schein (1971) describes as a custodial orientation, an unwillingness to challenge traditional norms for the role. more recent studies of socialization in educational settings confirmed a continued emphasis on custodial socialization. reliance on such an approach in the face of newly trained school leaders, schooled in different approaches and emphases, may prove problematic for both schools and school leaders. the assistant principal perhaps no other role in school leadership is so fraught with ambiguity and role complexity as that of the assistant principal. for many, their experience as an assistant principal shapes and molds their long-term view of school leadership. it is during the assistant principalship when new school leaders are inducted, formally and informally, into the profession. the way they conduct themselves, based on either their own view of leadership, or that espoused by their principal, will shape their career-long response to similar issues (hartzell et al,, 1995; marshall, 1992; marshall & mitchell, 1991). role socialization is most powerful after assuming the role. essential to success as an assistant principal was conforming to expected patterns of behavior. they include a commitment to do whatever needs to be done, and to spend as much time as necessary to do it and keeping disputes and disagreements with the principal private. assistant principals were expected to place primary emphasis on work with students (e.g., discipline, lunchroom, buses, sports, and other activities). methodology data sources for this study were primary and naturalistic (bogdan & biklen, 1992; creswell, 1998; lincoln & guba, 1985). the importance of context was reflected in the use of the natural setting as the direct source of data, the researchers as instruments, and students as key informants. within the context of a standards-centered program, data collection allowed the researchers to explore student perspectives. student views on their transition to school leadership were collected using surveys, individual and focus group interviews, writing samples and reflections on program preparation. follow-up interviews with program graduates provided data about school contexts and their successes in maintaining personal and program-based values in the face of their socialization efforts to new roles. a grounded theory approach (glaser & strauss, 1967) was used to analyze student responses. this approach allowed themes to emerge from the analysis of disparate but interconnected data sources. these data, along with the surveys and interviews enhanced understanding of student perspectives and how those perspectives changed as graduates dealt with the effects of socialization. findings for such studies are very context-specific, reflecting the unique orientation of the subjects. therefore, the results of the study are not generalizable and cannot be construed to be applicable to programs or students in other locations. this investigation into the intricacies of role socialization by one cohort of new school leaders provides an opportunity to learn from their struggles, the tensions between their preparation and their practice, and to identify the strategies they adopted to cope with these tensions. their story can illuminate our understanding of how school leadership is shaped and molded generation to generation. findings the researchers studied these women during and after their preparation. their preparation program emphasized the importance of teaching and learning, democratic leadership, attention to relationships, and contextual decision-making grounded in an ethic of care, characteristics often associated with feminine leadership styles and preferences. the women of this cohort saw themselves practicing such leadership, as “living” leadership consistent with both the feminine and their preparation; they saw such preferences as helpful in their transition to leadership (williamson & hudson, 2001). the graduates felt prepared and supported in their efforts to resist socialization to old norms. simultaneously, they saw their style preferences and dispositions as potential hindrances. preferences for democratic organizations and cultures understanding that “feminine leadership” includes both female and male leaders, an accepted feminine characteristic is the preference for democratic rather than autocratic organizations and inclusive and democratic cultures (eagly et al., 1992; irby and brown, 1995; shakeshaft, 1987a). these women saw commitment to inclusive and collaborative culture, communicated through listening, as an asset. one stated that she learned from a particularly difficult situation that such preferences helped her gain acceptance by teachers. i think this critical incident showed the teachers and me that i could be there for them and that i sought their input and expertise. i began to see that there were no magic solutions. by addressing issues in a steady, reflective, inclusive manner, difficult situations will improve. by listening well, these women also learned about the school’s people, politics, and culture. as one described, i was in a brand new place, a place i had never worked. i needed to learn the politics, who to ask, who to talk with, how to know when things work or don’t work. i watched. i listened. i asked questions like, ‘how have things been done traditionally?’ typically, the subjects realized that, “stakeholders want to be heard, to learn, to have guidance, to be appreciated, to be a part of a successful school,” and they learned how to move toward new models without discounting the old. that required care with language. as one described, “i was careful about what i said. i was careful not to criticize what had been done in the past, but to choose words like ‘refine,’ ‘strengthen,’ or ‘enhance.’” attention to instruction, teachers, and children feminine leaders are more attuned to instruction, teachers, and children (andrews & basom, 1990; charters & jovick, 1981; frasher & frasher, 1979; mcgrath, 1992; pavan & reid, 1994). women leaders tend to evidence a special and abiding concern for marginal children and those without advocates (brown & irby, 1993; edson, 1987; lightfoot, 1983). the women in this study saw these characteristics as assets. early teacher resistance to classroom involvement was typically short-lived. quickly, that involvement was perceived as an indicator of caring —about teachers, teaching and learning, and students. as one student described her acceptance, i think i have a good relationship with the staff. …it has to do with having been a teacher for a long time. i can identify with them. but it has to do with being female, too. it seems to me that women just naturally build relationships quicker than men. classroom experience and knowing the children were important to another woman’s transition. it was not long until teachers were saying, “you’re doing a great job” or “i really appreciate the way you handled that for me.” caring about teaching, learning, and children also created additional stresses and workload. these women could not ignore problems that hurt children though it meant time-consuming documentation, conferences, assistance, even counseling adults out of education. ethic of care grounded in relationships because women develop differently, women are more likely to demonstrate an ethic of care, grounded in relationships rather than laws (gilligan, 1982, 1985; hudson, 1993; porat, 1991; shapiro & stefkovich, 2001). for these women, listening was a tangible manifestation of how they valued people and relationships, including the dissonant and unheard voices. one graduate insisted that students could not be ignored simply because they were poor, lacked academic talents, or could not speak english. in her mind, “there are not an acceptable number of casualties.” such active listening and caring also can be misinterpreted, perhaps because it is a “new norm” for many in the school. for instance, one leader struggled with other’s misperception that “listening means i agree.” she described a teacher who felt “validated” and “recognized” in a budget discussion, but was later surprised and hurt when the assistant principal disagreed. emotionally, the teacher attacked, “i can’t believe you would sway people like that. i thought you were listening to me.” care for the marginal student (shakeshaft, 1987b) associated with the feminine is revealed in the stories of these women. one works in a school where most students often come to school hungry. this woman worked with the cafeteria manager to ensure that on mondays and fridays, the children were served “larger than prescribed” portions because there was little to eat on weekends. in a high school setting, similar actions emerged from a commitment to, “look at kids individually, to serve the kids that we know right here.” as a result, we’ve changed policies, we’ve created options for earning credits, we’ve changed how credits are assigned, we’ve changed courses, we’ve hand scheduled students to match students’ and teachers’ personalities, we’ve bought pantyhose for the prom, we’ve fed kids, and on and on. the ethic of care emerged as an asset. many reported that others knew and appreciated that their decisions were grounded in what was right, not necessarily what was legal. in many stories, even though others affected could not know all the details, decisions were respected because others knew they were based on students’ best interests rather than just policy. inclusive and invitational language inclusive practices within the school and its community are both program emphases and characteristics of a feminine style. such an inclusive style is reflected in language. several studies found that women leaders use more conditional, tentative language (holmes, 1984; marshall, 1988) not to reflect uncertainty but to invite others into the conversation, to give others a voice. one student saw her principal escalate an angry parent who threatened to call the superintendent by saying, “go right ahead. it won’t do you any good.” faced with a similar situation, the graduate chose a different path. in response to the same threat, she replied, “that certainly is your right. here’s the number.” another student saw her commitment to seeking and giving feedback as a key to acceptance by teachers. it was not long, she said, until teachers began to “feel comfortable coming to me and asking for things.” on the other hand, some of the women feared that inclusive, invitational language could be “read” as uncertainty. one described her approach: you don’t have to rant and rave to be firm and get your point across. i’m careful that my ‘calm’ is not seen as a sign of weakness. i listen and respond, but i also need to be assertive occasionally. language is important. i’ll say ‘no, that’s not going to happen, but here’s what we can do.’ they need to know i listened. feminine as helpful, but not enough the women in this study perceived feminine styles and preferences as more asset than liability, but not as sufficient. while important, none saw those predispositions as “enough” to ensure their success as school leaders. as one women said, “it is ultimately how you deliver that matters.” another woman described it this way, everybody comes to me and asks me the hard questions. they want to come to me. i think it’s the female thing. part of why people come to me is that they know there will be appropriate follow-up. while teachers appreciate the fact that i listen to them, there is more. they know that i will follow up on their questions and requests, and they really appreciate that. that’s more style than gender. the toll of the feminine feminine preferences took a toll, both personal and professional, in obvious and more subtle ways. some experienced blatant and unpleasant behavior due to their gender. one woman assuming her first principalship in a small district of “good ol’ boys” encountered demeaning comments like, “don’t worry your pretty little head.” another woman detected discrimination in interactions with a district “superior” whose job included mentoring new leaders. she asked for feedback about why she was not offered a principalship. the director told me that i was the best candidate but because i was a woman and white, i wasn’t offered the job. when i informed her that i was unhappy with that decision and would consider moving, her reply was, ‘i didn’t realize you were mobile. you have a family.’ i felt insulted, as though because i’m a woman i’m place bound because of my spouse. how little do they know! more frequently, the graduates experienced a more subtle “testing.” some of their feminine preferences were questioned. one commented, “i needed to act aggressive to show i wasn’t a wimp.” another shared an instance where she dealt successfully with an angry parent and “disarmed” a potentially volatile situation. while she felt good about the outcome, she was careful that her calm demeanor “was not seen as a sign of weakness.” studies of leaders found that ambition, position power, and prestige were less important motivators for women than for men (helgeson, 1990; neuse, 1978; stamm & ryff, 1984). the experience of these women confirmed that finding. service and the personal and professional fulfillment that comes with “making a difference” mattered to them. caring, especially for the marginal student, was a hallmark of these women. such caring took a toll, however. one woman described an incident where police were called to remove an “out of control” student. as i watched them shackle him, hands and feet, to the back seat of the police cruiser and leave to take him home, i wondered what kind of madness i had stepped into. it was a heartbreaking experience. it was not the first time nor would it be the last. i prayed for help for the boy and strength for myself and went on. these women are competent, confident, and caring. they are good at what they do. they resist socialization to old norms and are truly “living” leadership styles consistent with the feminine. yet several are concerned about the cost and have begun to second-guess their decisions to become school leaders. as one of them put it, “is this really how i want to spend my time?” another, under some pressure to accept a principalship, commented, “it’s not that i can’t or that i don’t feel prepared. it’s just, ‘do i want to?’ i’m not sure i really want to.” there are more important things than ambition.” others wondered, “is it worth it?” and, “given how i have to spend so much of my time, can i really make a difference?” conclusion feminine preferences in leadership align closely with expectations for contemporary school leaders (council of chief state school officers, 1996). the women in this study graduated from a preparation program closely aligned with these expectations. it emphasized the centrality of teaching and learning, the importance of democratic and inclusive organizations and cultures, decisions grounded in an ethic of care, and the importance of context and relationships. this study demonstrated that such preparation could, indeed, serve graduates when they begin their careers. such preparation is essential. but, there is a need for more. for those who prepare future leaders, the power of socialization to mold and shape behavior must be recognized. beyond acknowledgement, preparation programs must help students create the capacity to anticipate and resist such socialization. they must help students learn to balance their care for others with care for themselves, to find a working balance between competence and burnout. one student described her emerging success: i see that i try to balance personal responsibility and passion with realism. there comes a point when i must recognize that i have done all i can do for today, when i must go home or to the gym, call a friend, do something to rejuvenate myself. i remind myself each day that this job is challenging and unpredictable. it will never be ‘done.’ i am not god, i am not responsible for everything, i have limitations. i am learning to put emotional and physical limits on what i do. that is the reason i love it and one of the reasons i am called to it. references andrews, r. l., & basom, m. r. 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(2001, april). new rules for the game: how women leaders resist socialization to old norms. paper presented at the annual conference of the american educational research association, seattle, wa. authors dr. martha b. hudson is a retired assistant professor in the department of educational leadership and cultural foundations at the university of north carolina at greensboro where she continues on as an adjunct professor. dr. ronald d. williamson is an assistant professor in the department of leadership and counseling at eastern michigan university. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a 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mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, fall 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] linking literacy and community development: a case study of women in new orleans jennifer e. subban wright state university abstract this paper examines the impact of a family literacy program in new orleans , developed in response to low literacy levels, high drop-out rates, and a corresponding lack of resident participation in community development efforts in the area. the program, toyota families for learning (tffl), worked to transcend disciplinary barriers by linking adult literacy education and community development through a communitybased approach to adult literacy. tffl continuously evolved to serve as a catalyst for transformation in the lives of the women it served, their families, and their communities. the experiences of the women in this study were explored in relation to the following indicators of community building: (1) developing the ability to express personal experiences and observed phenomena, (2) constructing one's own knowledge, (3) setting and following through on goals, (4) building a positive community environment, and (5) developing a vision of the community. qualitative data in the form of literacy narratives informed this inquiry. the narratives were triangulated with field notes and focus group data collected over a six-year period commencing in 1992. the findings of this research indicate that literacy programs can be structured to successfully build the capacity of participants to engage in community development processes. linking literacy and community development: a case study of women in new orleans women's leadership takes many forms and often exists in unexpected places. this study chronicles the transformation of five female adult learners in a family literacy program. their transformations positioned them as agents of change for members of their families and their communities. through their participation in the toyota families for learning (tffl) program, which adopted a community-based approach to literacy, these women were able to engage in a healing process that facilitated their empowerment and their ability to influence others around them. their transformations are explored through five indicators that were used to demonstrate the link between adult literacy and community development. their transformations represent an important stage in their development as leaders. the backdrop for this study is the toyota families for learning program in the city of new orleans . tffl was developed in response to low literacy levels, high drop-out rates, and a corresponding lack of resident file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/templates/index.html participation in community development efforts. the program was structured as a family literacy program, implemented by alma h. young and james r. garvin, with initial funding from the national center for family literacy, and a partnership with new orleans public schools and the city of new orleans. family literacy programs, as implemented by the national center for family literacy (ncfl), represented a novel idea at the time of implementation (1992). these family literacy programs represented an educational model in which family strengths became the center of curriculum design and implementation. attention was directed toward helping parents realize their strengths and their power to transform these into action that benefited their families. the programs were to provide a mechanism and an environment that encouraged critical thinking and problem-solving germane to matters in family life. in this model, growth occurs as the families in the program test various alternatives while recognizing their responsibilities as members of a unified group, whether of a family or of a larger family literacy unit (potts, 1992). according to ncfl, family literacy programs using this "family strengths" model would help participants develop a sense of self-worth, promote social interaction, encourage the development of both individual students and the group as a whole, and teach strategies that assist in dealing with everyday stresses. the experiences of the women in this study were explored in relation to the following indicators of community building: (a) developing the ability to express personal experiences and observed phenomena, (b) constructing one's own knowledge, (c) setting and following through on goals, (d) building a positive community environment, and (e) developing a vision of the community. these categories were based on fasheh's (1995) five sub-levels of community building at the invisible level but were altered to reflect the indications of community building observed through the experiences of women in tffl. the model prescribed by ncfl is the kenan model that centers program activities on four integral components: (a) academic time, (b) parent time, (c) pact (parent and child together) time, and (d) volunteer time. academic time focused on adult literacy and early childhood education. the adult literacy component was based on cooperative learning strategies that balanced non-educational and educational needs and incorporated the goals and needs of adult learners into the curriculum. parents participated in adult education classes while their children participated in the early childhood/preschool component of the program. parent time was designed to focus on parent education, but in tffl it was expanded to address a broader range of issues relevant to adult participants. together with the teachers, adult participants made decisions on topics of interest for discussion and study. topics included understanding and coping with children's behavior, improving communication between parents and children, sexuality, spousal abuse, racism, effective communication, working with caseworkers, access to community resources, and job and educational opportunities. parent time was designed to create an atmosphere among participants that promoted both their own identity within the group and a group identity, encouraged peer support, and helped ameliorate attendance and retention. during pact time parents and their children played together in the preschool classroom. the children were encouraged to take the lead in these activities while parents learned how to teach their children through play and practiced what they had learned about effective parent-child communication during parent time. volunteer time was designed to allow adult participants time to interface with school staff and resulted in important parent-teacher/staff relationships. the parents worked in the school office, the cafeteria, classrooms, and on the playground. during this time, parents and teachers became aware of the mutual benefits of having parents at the school. the kenan model allowed tffl staff to engage adult participants in learning activities that embraced key principles of community-based education and community building. from its inception, the tffl program in new orleans linked family literacy to community development. one of the first lessons learned by the administrative staff was that these linkages had to be nurtured if they were to develop the interest and capacities needed to foster engagement in community affairs. as such, it was necessary to develop community building as a subtext to literacy. within the second year of the program's implementation, this subtext was incorporated into the program's definition of literacy, following feedback from participants through in-depth interviews and staff reflection on program effectiveness. the impact of this expanded notion of literacy on the lives of the women participating in tffl is central to this study. adult literacy/community development theoretical framework the kenan model had already extended the traditional approach to adult literacy education by including a focus on issues of parenting, establishing a link between home and school, and building on the strengths of participating families. tffl recognized that while this was an important step away from the singular focus on functional literacy in many adult literacy programs in the city, building capacity to enhance communities required moving at least one sphere beyond the unit of the family. functional literacy by definition focused on the skills of reading, writing, and performing calculations ( freire & macedo, 1987; giroux, 1987; samant, 1996 ) with little attention to the structural factors that lead to low level literacy. focusing on the family, its members, and their strengths places the reality of learners within that context and recognizes that it affects one's life in significant ways. however, context extends beyond the bounds of family to the neighborhood in which one lives, the social structure and relations of power within which we are embedded, and the political and economic structures that affect our reality (bhattacharyya, 1991; fingeret, 1992; freire & macedo, 1987; kelder, 1996; smith, 1987; street, 1984; venezky, wagner, & ciliberti, 1990; weinsteinshr, 1993). proponents of cultural literacy suggest that the cultural context within which literacy experiences are embedded shapes how learners experience literacy, interpret texts, and apply their knowledge (asante, 1991; bhattacharyya, 1991; giroux, 1987; heath, 1985; marshall & rossman, 1995; shujaa, 1994). embracing the culture of learners within literacy programs recognizes the importance of learners' culture to the learning experience and to knowledge construction. despite its importance to how we define and understand ourselves and our communities, cultural literacy is not enough for transformation. community building and transformation rely on the combination of skills and processes inherent in functional, cultural, and critical literacy (freire & macedo; kelder, 1996; mccaleb, 1994; mcclaren, 1991; vella, 1994). critical literacy challenges existing relations of power, starting with the relationship between teachers and learners (freire, 1970; padamsee, ewert, & deshler, 1996; vella, 1994). in this approach, teachers shift from the position of authority to one of facilitator of learning, which creates an environment in which all engage, learn, teach, and investigate their reality relative to others (freire, 1970; mccaleb, 1994; vella, 1994). this learner-centered approach to adult literacy makes visible the multiple realities that exist at the nexus of language, culture, power, and history (kelder, 1996), and the impact of such on our lives. padamsee et al. (1996) wrote that adult literacy programs within the critical pedagogy perspective must be designed to promote respect for self-worth, collaborative learning, praxis, a spirit of critical reflection, and the " nurturing of self-directed empowered adults...[who]...see themselves as proactive, initiating individuals engaged in a continuous re-creation of their personal relationships, work worlds, and social circumstances" (as cited in brookfield, 1985, p. 48). this is critical to the transformation of communities. moreover, in a learning environment that seeks to transform communities, it is critical that the content of the curriculum and the material used to enhance basic literacy skills is relevant to the lives of individual learners, their families, and their communities. engaging students in this way increases the relevance of information exchanged within the classroom, consequently making the learning experience more meaningful. one outcome of the critical literacy approach is that learners develop reading skills along with decision-making, problem-solving, and leadership skills (padamsee et al., 1996). community-based education espouses principles consistent with the goals of the tffl. the unit of focus in community-based adult literacy programs is the community rather than the individual, as is the case with functional literacy. it is understood that each individual contributes their own strengths and capacities to the process of community building, but it is the combined effect of their individual talents, skills, and capacities focused on a collective goal that serves to enhance and transform communities. according to fasheh (1990), if education is to play a role in community transformation, it must engage learners in concrete things that have the potential to enhance life. through concrete experiences that address practical needs within the learners' environment, they can learn important skills, begin to understand the limitations of their action in changing the circumstances that result in the situation they have addressed, and develop solutions to problems they identify and prioritize. important aspects of these solutions lie in nurturing feelings of selfworth, empowerment, and self-acceptance among learners. the solutions lie both within and outside the communities in question, and networking, communication, and the exchange of ideas and experiences are necessary to address strategic needs associated with improving their status and their communities, and changing the power structures and systems that govern them (moser, 1993; asian development bank (adb), 2003). ultimately, the goal of community-based education is the development of human capital for the purpose of enhancing the community. it is a process that challenges those involved as they seek to confront traditional ways of thinking about and understanding their communities, their roles within it, and the existing social, economic, and political structures (fasheh, 1990). as described above, community-based education demonstrates its propensity for the development of human resources in ways consistent with the capacities required for community development. it is in the community-based education approach that the coincidence between adult literacy education and community development are most clear (bhattacharrya, 1991; padamsee et al., 1996; subban, 2005). community development, as we understand it today, is a multifaceted endeavor focused on the physical, economic, human, social, environmental, and political functions of a community. in large measure, and despite numerous perspectives and approaches to community development, they can essentially be broken down into the product-oriented functions and the process-oriented functions. while these functions must be linked for effective and sustained efforts at community development, adult literacy programs are best suited to nurturing process-oriented functions. process-oriented development focuses on building community capacity and human and social capital (bhattacharyya, 1995; fasheh, 1995; green & haines, 2002; korten, 1990). bhattacharyya (1995) defines community development as the pursuit of solidarity and agency, which resonates with green and haines' (2002) articulation of the need to build a range of community assets, including human and social capital, that facilitate community development. they speak to the urgent need to weave a tapestry that supports and sustains community development efforts. community-based education can serve as a vehicle for accomplishing this. moreover, these scholars recognize that in communities where the conditions necessary to support community development are not present, they must either be developed or reconstituted. hence, the importance of community building, the process through which a community's capacity to engage meaningfully in its development, is actualized. it is a learned process, the practice and discipline of which needs to be internalized by community members through formal instruction, observation, and their own participation therein (korten, 1990). it is the process through which ordinary people learn the public skills necessary for rebuilding community and exercising some control over their lives and institutions (boyte, 1980). efforts at community building must necessarily focus on the human resources within a community because the solutions to a community's problems can only come from within (fasheh, 1995). fasheh likens community building to developing the immunity of our bodies: building the internal strength of individuals, institutions, and the community. he divides the task of community building into activities that take place at the visible and invisible levels. visible level activities include social organization, building physical institutions, and accessing in technology. invisible community building activities are those at the human and institutional development level. they include developing an environment within institutions that is conducive to learning, commitment, taking the initiative, and developing community members' internal abilities to deal with, among other things, interpersonal problems and issues of control (fasheh, 1995). invisible level community building activities are the foundation for effective community development, particularly in distressed communities. indeed, meaningful development cannot take place without invisible level community building. when the communities targeted for development are able to direct its course, when members of the community are engaged in its processes, inform it and learn from it, and when it reflects the needs and interests of the community, then community development is considered most meaningful. attention to community building activities is necessary because they sustain visible level community building and product-oriented acts of community development. tffl program implementation the experiences of the women who participated in tffl are highlighted in a set of literacy narratives which provide some insight into the nature of invisible level community building required in the communities served by tffl. they also indicate participants' perceptions of tffl, which are important to understanding the structure of the program and its ability to facilitate community building. the discussion that follows explores participants' perceptions and the transformations linked to community building. based on the narratives in this study, a primary result was the development of the human spirit: helping people to see their potential, nurturing them so that they can develop a positive sense of self-worth, and providing external motivation until such time as they are able to motivate themselves. this, participants say, is critical! this study is informed by the literacy narratives of five women who participated in the program, triangulated with interview data collected annually from all participants, as well as participant observation notes collected over a six-year period commencing in 1992. the demographic profile of the families who participated during the period of this research reflect the following: the average age of adult participants was 24; adult participants ranged in age from 18 years to 65 years; 96% of all participants were africanamerican; 95% of all participants were female; 85% of the families were headed by a single female parent; 95% of the adult participants were unemployed; 94% of the participants had annual incomes of less than $10,000; 74% of the families received public assistance; and most participants dropped out of school between the 8th and 10th grades. the program operated at three sites within the city. participant perspectives of their experience in tffl analysis of the narratives revealed three themes relative to participant perspectives of the tffl program. the first documents the development of a sense of community among participants; the second explores the link between home and school as observed through the women's experiences in tffl; and the third discusses the impact of these literacy experiences on the women. creating a community of learners a critical difference between the women's school-based experiences and their literacy experiences in tffl was related to the purpose driving the work in tffl. in tffl literacy was seen as a catalyst for community development, and the intent was to create literacy experiences that reflected skills and attributes necessary for meaningful participation in development. from the narratives it is clear that women in the toyota families for learning program were part of an environment that encouraged them to find ways to be comfortable. tffl staff recognized that many of the participants entered the classroom with negative memories of past literacy and educational experiences, and they strove to replace them with new and positive ones. to this end the objective was that teachers develop a good rapport with students and encourage them to develop the same among themselves. by developing a sense of community in the classroom, staff (and participants) created an environment that fostered learning, communication, and peer support to facilitate greater participation in learning activities. this was critical to the participants' academic success because it was not unusual for them to hide their lack of skills. participants were encouraged, through various classroom activities, to rely on each other. they did this formally during academic time, through group efforts to develop solutions to problems discussed in parent time, and also informally. as a result participants came to realize that the answers to many of their problems lay within and among them, and that they had the capacity to effectively deal with them. another way in which teachers sought to develop a sense of community in the classroom was through fun learning experiences. such activities relieved some of the tension participants brought to the classroom through their expectations, their home experiences, and their feelings of inadequacy. role play activities were used to discuss such topics as conflict management, and field trips created shared experiences among participants as well as between staff and participants. additionally, the narratives indicate that staff tried to create a comfortable environment for participants by soliciting student input into curriculum development. most often ideas were solicited for parent time discussions, but these ideas were also incorporated into the academic component. this was critical to participants' developing a sense of ownership in the classroom and increasing active engagement in the learning. a critical issue for adult literacy classrooms in tffl was how to deal with the vast range of academic levels. peer tutoring helped in this regard, especially where one-on-one attention was needed. this issue was also dealt with through group discussions. group discussions were encouraged as a way of leveling the playing field in the classroom and an alternate way to recognize the strengths and knowledge of participants. participants were generally more comfortable with their verbal skills than they were with their academic skills and, consequently, their confidence and level of participation increased during group discussions. group discussions reduced the intimidation factor some participants felt when working on academic skills. they also reduced the barriers between those with higher and lower level academic skills, opening the way for peer tutoring that became important to and valued among participants. the relationship between participants and their teachers was critical to developing a safe and comfortable learning environment. participants who appreciated their teachers did so because they felt their teachers cared. the narratives indicate that the women had developed a bond with their teachers and were able to communicate freely with them. teachers took on a number of roles for participants and have variously been described as friends, mothers, big sisters, confidants, advisors, and, of course, teachers. teachers often provided an ear to participants who needed to discuss personal situations. participants appreciated their teachers' willingness to engage with them on a personal level, through the sharing of life experiences. they generally felt that their teachers respected them and that they were treated as adults. with the exception of one teacher, participants did not feel undermined by their teachers or the nature of their relationships with their teachers. these positive experiences with teachers in the program helped pave the way for learning. they broke down the barriers of hierarchy evidenced in the case where the teacher held onto relationships of power over students. teachers in tffl generally placed more emphasis on the effort of students than on the outcomes, helping students to relax around their "mistakes." teachers also learned to be motivators in their classrooms. past literacy experiences had created the need for this among tffl participants. in the final analysis, teachers in tffl assumed the role of literacy facilitators, balancing the various needs and interests of the adult learners they served and positioning themselves as learners and teachers. where this role was not assumed, students had a very different experience. until such time as the teacher involved could be replaced, participant interactions with other staff members, workshops, and other activities helped mitigate some of the negative effects of the situation and still resulted in the empowerment of participants. in this situation participants played a vital role in keeping their peers motivated. linkages between home and tffl in keeping with the philosophy of the program and the knowledge of transformative education, tffl tried to link home and school. this was necessary because many participants felt unwelcome as parents and were intimidated by the school environment. one of the ways in which this was accomplished was through parent time. during parent time participants discussed issues relevant to their lives. in these facilitated discussions participants generally revealed much about their reality, their perceptions, and their experiences. this is critical to the sharing of information that took place between the teacher as an outsider and the participants as insiders. it provided staff with some insight into the behaviors and perspectives of participants and vice versa. one such example involves parents who wanted their children to succeed in school, but who acted dismissively when asked to help with homework because they did not want to reveal that they "didn't know" how to help. at other times situations in the home environment resulted in behaviors that did not transfer well to the school environment. sharing information often provided opportunities for new strategies that were acceptable to participants, teachers, and the school. it is evident from the narratives that participants enjoyed the dialogue between their homes and communities and the learning environment in tffl. participants could identify with what was happening in the classroom and learned that their contributions in the classroom were valuable. the dialogue allowed new information to enter into both the classroom and the lives of participants, allowing them to make more informed decisions. the same can be said for staff and program outcomes. participants of this study revealed that they were more likely to appreciate new information if it was relevant to their lives. they did not, however, always feel that this was the case. the link between home and learning environment was established through the very nature of the program. parents attended school with their children. discussing issues of parenting was commonplace during parent time and pact time, but also during informal conversations with teachers during breaks. parents often reported transferring the activities of pact time to the home environment. an important lesson for parents was that they learned to identify what they wanted to achieve in terms of parenting. this often made decisions about parenting easier. the point, thus, was not to tell parents what was right or wrong, but to provide information and tools to facilitate effective decision-making. while the program was structured, it maintained flexibility regarding lessons for the day. this allowed home issues to enter the classroom more easily and proved particularly valuable when a crisis occurred within the communities served. the link between the tffl classrooms and the home/community environment of participants was also established through culture-centered workshops. these included writing workshops which dealt with the issue of linguistic hegemony, the "undoing racism" workshop which helped participants give expression to the phenomenon of racism, and the sexuality workshop which discussed the issue within the context of the african-american community in new orleans . participants were able to link their experiences to academic activities through these workshops, in a classroom environment set up to encourage interaction rather than isolate participants. the impact of literacy experiences in tffl as might be expected, the literacy experiences of the women in the toyota families for learning program differed from their school experiences. all the women talk about having renewed confidence in their abilities and a more positive sense of self-worth as a result of their participation in tffl. it is evident from the narratives that while the women may credit tffl with the change they experienced, they have changed because they have done the work to change. sometimes the change crept up on them as a result of things they were doing. other times it was directly related to their struggle to implement new ways of doing things in their daily lives. a major area of change, evidenced from the narratives, is the way in which participants related to others. often the change was as much physical, as it was social. the fact that participants felt more comfortable around "outsiders" meant that they could relax the stance they normally displayed with outsiders. the program had been a practice ground for some of the conversations they wished to have with family members, friends, employers, and their children's teachers. this brought a new level of comfort and effectiveness to their conversations and in some cases reduced participants' isolation. as a result of this personal growth and empowerment, participants were able to effect changes in their relationships with partners, other participants, and family members. based on the narratives, the most profound changes took place in their role as parents. as parents, participants generally began to feel more in control of their abilities to parent effectively. having more information on child development helped them to be more relaxed in their parenting because it changed their expectations. they also had support of their peers in frustrating situations. participants learned that they were capable adults who could realize their dreams. additionally, they realized that they could affect people around them. they affected their children, their peers, their children's teachers, their families, their neighbors, and those with whom they worked. while they recognized that this was not always easy, they knew that it was possible. participants went through the program and healed themselves of old scars and then current afflictions. their journey to having a positive sense of self-worth was only possible because they had the opportunity to heal themselves. the environment of tffl provided that opportunity. it was a place to talk about old hurts, to write about it, to read about it, and to learn about it. it was a place for sharing and caring, a place where you could be challenged around your thoughts and actions. it was a place where you could be held accountable for holding onto old ways when new and better ones were in your grasp. it was a place where you could make mistakes and try again, and be supported in doing so. it was a place where you could choose not to share but still be privy to the care. it was a place to be yourself, love yourself, and know yourself. it was a place that reflected participants and allowed the reflection to change as they did. it was a place of making decisions and solving problems individually and collectively. impact of literacy education on community development the experiences of the women in this study were explored in relation to fasheh's five sub-levels of community building which include: (a) developing the ability to express personal experiences and observed phenomena, (b) construction of one's own knowledge, (c) setting and following through on goals, (d) building a positive community environment, and (e) developing a vision of the community. these indicators of community building were used to assess the link between adult literacy education and community development. as discussed earlier, community building best describes the work undertaken to foster an interest in community issues and develop the capacity of participants to engage in community work. developing the ability to express personal experiences and observed phenomena it is evident from the narratives that participants were not always comfortable expressing themselves. this was as true in the classroom as it was in their daily lives. for some participants, their silence in the classroom was an extension of the ways in which they had been silenced in their homes, in their communities, and in society. for others, more accustomed to expressing themselves in their home environment, the classroom was disconnected from that environment and, hence, was a hostile and alienating place. it was a place where they dared not be themselves and, yet, suppression of their identity often erupted into altercations, frustration, and a lack of motivation to participate in the learning process. to reveal one's thoughts and feelings would be to lay oneself open to ridicule. protection against that possibility consumed much of some participants' time when they first joined the program. participants were often trapped in a pattern of behavior through which they sought to preserve their dignity, but at the same time deprived them of it. learning to express oneself is difficult because it forces one to bear witness to the true nature of one's life. during the course of the interviews conducted for this study, many tears were shed. however, participants considered them tears of healing. it was a relief to be able to express their experiences and some closely guarded secrets. it was a process of finding one's voice after being silenced over so long a time, in a space where others could identify with you. significantly, it was something they had learned to do in a safe classroom environment in tffl. the most profound impact of personal expressions on the life experiences of the women in this study was its healing effect. once the secrets and anguish were spoken, they could be reckoned with. they could be laughed at, cried over, written about, spoken back to, informed, understood, acted upon, and altered. this was the way in which the women dealt with many painful experiences. another level of developing the ability to express oneself is related to the expressions of observed phenomena. participants expressed their concerns about such phenomena as the nature of schooling and teachers' performance, the ways in which meaning is constructed and reconstructed, injustice and oppression, their experiences as children and as parents, and their lives as women and the actions of men. the dialogue around these issues played a critical role in many of the transformations which they made during the course of the program. some changed their children's teachers and schools; others began to want more from their relationships; parenting habits changed; learning became fun and less intimidating; communication with outsiders became easier and more relaxed. often the expressions of personal experiences were also expressions of observed phenomena. the women were aware that their experiences were not theirs alone. their common experiences, problems, hopes, and aspirations helped the women talk about observed phenomena. of significance also was the fact that the women were able to find the words to describe their experiences. sometimes participants had to help each other do this. at other times, even with the help offered, they still lacked the language to express the things they saw and experienced, a situation which fueled questions, requests for information, and ultimately, the curriculum. these requests were either dealt with in the classroom or participants ventured on their own to access the information and explanations they sought. expression, as realized in tffl, is critical because it can take place within the cultural context of the community. it represented a process where a community can come to know itself and the issues which confront it. developing the ability of expression allowed community members the space to explore their world, the world of others, and the interactions between them. construction of one's own knowledge developing the ability of expression is an important step in the process of knowledge construction. the ability of a community to construct its own knowledge is essential to its survival and growth. without such knowledge a community is at the mercy of others to define it. history has shown that "self-definition" based on others conceptions usually favors those who are defining. they generally do not inspire feelings of cultural pride and self-worth among those being defined. in tffl, the construction of knowledge was encouraged around issues raised by participants. thus, expression provided the stepping stone to the construction of self-knowledge. ​as participants engaged in group discussion, they were often held accountable for their words. they were often asked, "what did you mean? how did you come to your conclusions? what could have been done differently? how would you do it differently?" such questions were important given that participants were often tougher judges of each other than outsiders. they had internalized the measures used to assess their worth, and would use these measures to judge each other with greater fervor. it was through the exploration of participants' expressions that they were able to examine their own beliefs and values. the definitions of literacy that participants shared are an example of how they came to change from standard ways of knowing to ways of knowing that were relevant to their lives and the lives of others in their communities. each of the women in this study knew that literacy was the ability to read and write. they accepted this definition, and over time used it as the base for a definition of literacy which addressed the barriers which they, and others, faced in becoming literate. by necessity, their definitions of literacy allowed the women to express new meanings of the term. they saw how literacy, which was held in such high esteem, was limiting because even "literate" individuals were excluded from the promise "literacy" made. they understood that literacy was not an end in itself but rather a means to an end. as terri stated, "literacy is power." the implication is that literacy programs should teach people how to access their power so that they can transform their reality. the ability of participants to construct their own knowledge was related to their ability to access information and to an increased level of awareness. accessing information includes having knowledge of available resources and the skills necessary to access those resources. participants learned that texts came in many forms and that texts reflecting their interests were available. they also learned the value of the rich oral tradition in the african-american community and were encouraged to access it and other resources within their communities. through the resources mentioned above, participants were able to access information that increased their awareness. they read poems, stories, and novels; watched movies; and listened to and dialogued with guest speakers and each other. as a result they began to develop explanations for the experiences and phenomena they had previously described. they began to seek new information that they used to define themselves and understand the nature of their oppression and the roles they can and do assume within that context. of great significance was the fact that they began to question the knowledge of "experts," recognizing as they did so that all knowledge had to be weighed for its relevance to their lives. this is part of the process of recognizing the validity of one's own knowledge. another important aspect of knowledge construction in tffl was the products of participants' work. participants moved from functional skills and verbal communication to produce essays and poems about their lives and their dreams. these works stood as a record of their lives and a representation of their culture. over time they will became a record of their transformation. setting and following through on goals setting goals is one of the first exercises participants were asked to engage in when they entered the program. this was often a difficult task because participants were not accustomed to doing this, and because they were usually so focused on their day-to-day activities that having a vision of what lies beyond did not come easily to them. in some cases participants were afraid to set goals because not achieving them would represent yet another failure. it was usually the case that the goals participants espoused at the beginning of the year were markedly different from the ones they had at the end of the year. even the tone with which participants began to speak of their goals changed. by the end of the year goals were spoken of with a sense of conviction that they are possible. participants were usually passionate about their goals because they had come to realize their ability to achieve them and the power of having a sense of purpose. some would acquire the information necessary to develop a plan for achieving their goals. this was evident in the narratives. atlanta , chantelle, mandissa, and terri all want to attend college. each of them planned to work with a branch of the national service corporation to facilitate this. each of them accomplished that goal, working for a period of two years with organizations linked to their goals where possible. this work afforded them approximately $5,000 per year, which they used to pay for college expenses. atlanta also began tutoring in a local literacy program as a way of staying in touch with her skills and gaining information and experience to open her own literacy program. louella worked at mcdonald's and was being trained as a manager. at the time of this study she was trying to secure a job that would afford her training as a chef. even when life events got in the way of achieving goals, these women found opportunities to facilitate their goals. they indicate that their vision of what was possible for them is a result of their participation in the program. building a positive community enviroment the importance of building a sense of community among participants in tffl has already been noted. building a sense of community in the classroom was a critical element because it helped to create a safe classroom environment where participants felt comfortable talking about their personal experiences, exploring their reality, and asking for assistance. this was necessary in all components of the program. community building activities took place in academic time through group work and through peer tutoring. it also took place in pact time when children played with each other and experienced the support of adults other than their parents, and when parents worked together in fun activities. they were also prevalent in parent time when participants discussed personal information, advised each other, and offered support during difficult situations, or sought solutions to problems encountered. terri talks about the age divide between participants in her class but notes that this divide was abandoned during parent time (subban, 1998). a sense of community was also developed as participants came to realize that despite differences, their lives had many common threads. they were parents, dealt with partners and their own parents, had experienced teachers who denigrated them, stressed over their children, and had similar experiences with caseworkers at the welfare office. they were all african-american women who had to make ends meet on a meager budget and they did not talk "proper." equally important to efforts of community building in the classroom was the way in which learning was structured. this included the process by which participants shared information. issues such as confidentiality, respect for others' opinions and experiences, and addressing persons in the classroom in positive ways were constantly raised. it allowed participants to deal with such difficult situations as thefts and poor personal hygiene. it also allowed participants to deal with the diversity of interests, experiences, and perspectives which co-existed in the classroom. yet another critical element of building a sense of community in the classroom was the role of the teacher. as is evident from the narratives, the teachers' perspective and actions determined the tone of the classroom. this refers to the meaning teachers attached to their role as a facilitator of learning in the classroom and to the relationships they developed with participants. what is clear from the experiences of participants is their appreciation for the sense of community they experienced in tffl. for many participants it was this experience which fostered an interest in building a sense of community outside the classroom. an example of this is seen in louella's realization that adults should teach children in the community to manage their differences rather than further those differences through arguments among each other (subban, 1998). developing a vision of the community developing a vision for one's community is not a task that can stand alone. there are many levels of experience that connect one to one's community, contribute to the knowledge one has of the community, and increase one's familiarity with community issues. furthermore, one has to be able to identify issues that need to be addressed and formulate ideas for how to address them. participants generally felt connected to their communities. they were able to look beyond the negative stereotypes of their communities and recognize their positive aspects. they valued the transformations in their own lives and recognized what it took to make such transformations possible. they wanted to share their growth with others in the community and in so doing enhance life opportunities and the living conditions therein. the women in this study recognized that a vision for the development of their communities required a multifaceted effort. their narratives reveal that it was as much about the spirit of the community as it was about having the skills to make the changes they envisioned for it; it was as much about how people related to each other as it was about exposure to technology; it involved the nature of institutions, like schools, and how they served the community, as much as it was about the development of new institutions; it was about healing community members so that they could participate in the process of learning about oneself and one's cultural knowledge; it was both grand in scale and intimate in its effect. they saw the necessity of being primed to embark on the process of development as important to having a positive outcome and were certain that members of the community had to be a part of the process, defining their needs and developing solutions. summary this paper is a reflection of the transformation experienced by the women informing this study. as the women moved through various experiences in tffl they added new layers to their abilities, their knowledge, their resolution, their vision, and their sense of self-worth. each new layer made another possible. each was necessary for the transformations that transpired. the experiences of the women were explored in light of their relationship to community building. more specifically, it was community building at the invisible level; the kind of community building that develops the capacity of a community to engage in meaningful development. it is evident from the narratives that tffl served as a catalyst for these transformations. what happened in tffl affected the women's interactions with family, schools, teachers, and neighbors. the impact of the work of the women who informed this study is impressive and speaks to the effect that linking literacy and community development can have on participants and their spheres of influence. among their successes is the work in which they are engaged. except for one participant, all the women informing this study have opted for careers that develop human capital through education. all the women find time to be active in their children's education including volunteering at their respective schools. all the women have furthered their education beyond attaining their ged and are in various stages of completion. despite limited resources, illness, and now natural disasters, they have persisted in their attempts to attain their goals. they have used their knowledge, skills, and commitment to serve their communities by tutoring adult learners and school aged youth in need of assistance. they have created a forum to support adult learners, recognizing that the process of engaging in adult literacy is fraught with challenges, not least of which are the emotional challenges. they have become activists, speaking on behalf of women and men who have yet to find their voices, while helping them to realize their potential. post katrina they have been sought as a resource to set up a tutoring program for displaced children and adult learners. they have also been recognized for their work by being spokespersons for poor women and adult learners at various regional and local forums. they have transformed as leaders. references asante , m. k. (1991). multiculturalism: an exchange. american scholar, 60 , 267-276. asian development bank. (june, 2003). gender and development: our framework, policies and strategies. retrieved december 10, 2005, from http://www.adb.org/documents/policies/gender/gender0401.asp . bhattacharyya, j. (1991). towards a community development approach to http://www.adb.org/documents/policies/gender/gender0401.asp literacy. journal of the community development society, 22 (2), 84-98. bhattacharyya, j. (1995). solidarity and agency: rethinking community development. human organization, 54 (1), 60-69. boyte, h. c. (1980). the backyard revolution: understanding the new citizen movement . philadelphia : temple university press. brookfield , s. (1985). a critical definition of adult education. adult education quarterly, 36 (1), 44-49. fasheh, m. (feb., 1990). community education: to reclaim and transform what has been made invisible. harvard educational review, 60 (1), 19-35. fasheh, m. j. (1995). the reading campaign experience within palestinian society: innovative strategies for learning and building community. harvard educational review, 65 (1), 66-92. fingeret, h. a. (1992). adult literacy education: current and future directions, an update (information series no. 355). columbus , oh : u.s. department of education. freire, p. (1970). pedagogy of the oppressed . new york : the seaberry press. freire, p. m., & macedo, d. (1987). literacy: reading the word and the world . south hadley , ma : bergin & garvey publishers, inc. giroux, h. (1987). literacy and the pedagogy of political empowerment. in p. freire & d. macedo (eds.), literacy: reading the word and the world (pp. 1-27). south hadley , ma : bergin & garvey publishers, inc. green, p., & haines, a. (2002). asset building and community development . thousand oaks , ca : sage publications. heath, s. b. (1985). literacy and learning in the making of citizens: 1985 butt lecture. in civic education, pluralism and literacy . joint publication by aesa news and comment and the center for the studies of citizenship and public affairs, syracuse university , august 1986. kelder, r. (1996). rethinking literacy studies: from the past to the present. proceedings of the 1996 world conference on literacy . retrieved from http://www.literacy.org/products/ili/pdf/ilprocrk.pdf korten, d. (1990). getting to the 21st century: voluntary action and the global agenda . west hartford, ct : kumarian press. marshall, c., & rossman, g. b. (1995). designing qualitative research. newbury park , ca : sage. mccaleb, s. p. (1994). building communities of learners: a collaboration among teachers, students, families, and community . new york : st. martin 's press. mcclaren, p. l. (1991). essay review of "literacy: reading the word and the world" by p. freire and d. macedo, 1987 . in m. minami & b. kennedy (eds.), language issues in literacy and bilingual and multicultural education . cambridge , ma : harvard educational review. moser, c. o. n. (1993). gender planning and development: theory, practice and training . new york : routledge. http://www.literacy.org/products/ili/pdf/ilprocrk.pdf http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/literacy/referencematerials/bibliographyliteracy/freireandmacedo1987.htm padamsee, d. l., ewert, d. m., & deshler, j. d. (1996). participatory action research: a strategy for linking rural literacy with community development. proceedings of the 1996 world conference on literacy . international literacy institute, university of pennsylvania . retrieved from http://www.literacy.org/products/ili/pdf/ilprocdp.pdf potts, m. w. (1992). a strengths model for learning in a family literacy program . louisville , ky : national center for family literacy. samant, u. (1996). literacy and social change: from a women's perspective mi shiknar: i will learn. proceedings of the 1996 world conference on literacy . retrieved from http://www.literacy.org/products/ili/pdf/ilprocus.pdf shujaa, m. j. (1994). education and schooling: you can have one without the other. in m. j. shujaa (ed.), too much schooling too little education: a paradox of black life in white societies . trenton , nj : african world press, inc. smith, d. e. (1987). the everyday world as problematic: a feminist sociology. boston : northeastern university press. street, b. v. (1984). literacy in theory and practice . cambridge , ma : cambridge university press. subban, j. (1998). talking from the inside out: the link between literacy and community development . unpublished doctoral dissertation, college of urban and public affairs, university of new orleans . subban, j. (2005). linking adult literacy education and community development: bright hope or wild goose chase . paper s ubmitted for publication. vella, j. (1994). learning to listen, learning to teach: the power of dialogue in educating adults . san francisco: jossey-bass publishers. venezky, r., wagner, d., & ciliberti, b. (eds.). (1990). toward defining literacy . newark , de : international reading association. weinstein-shr, g. (1993). overview discussion: directions in adult literacy -an invitation to dialogue. tesol quarterly, 27 (3), 517-518. jennifer e. subban is an assistant professor of urban affairs and public administration at wright state university . she also serves as principal investigator on a new directions community development project and the community development work study program. the author acknowledges alma h. young for her support on this and other related projects. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or 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file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership crossing the great divide: changing the culture of women through gender equity in mathematics teaching and learning barbara polnick, ed.d. polnick, special rwe issue, fall, 2002 educators who are going to make the journey in the same vehicle to achieve gender equity must agree on what route to take. introduction “crossing the great divide” (of mathematics) involves a journey not unlike many arduous journeys. in order to reach your destination, the traveler must prepare for difficult road conditions and allow for alternate routes. in this presentation, consider gender equity as the destination and imagine there are a number of routes that we could take while making our journey. recognizing that there may be different definitions for gender equity and the route you take depends on your definition. in their definition of gender equity, grossman and grossman (1994) state that “gender equity can be viewed in terms of treatment of students, gender differences in roles for which schools prepare students and gender disparities in educational outcomes” (p. 119). koch and irby (2002) describe gender equity as “to be fair and just toward both men and women, to show preference to neither, and concern for both” (p. 4). walker and foote (2001) define gender equity within a culture to mean “all individuals having freedom from limits imposed by self or society that would prohibit both males and females from pursuing the fields of knowledge and skills suited for them” (p. 101). others describe gender equity in terms of the educational environment, one in which individuals have not only opportunities, but real efforts are made to equalize, reform, and improve (nash & dougherty, 1991). using these definitions, gender equity can be viewed as a subset of a larger set identified as educational equity. first step educators who are going to make the journey in the same vehicle to achieve gender equity must agree on what route to take. that is, faculty and staff involved in the same school improvement initiatives or http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html campus staff development activities must agree on what they are calling gender equity if they intend to achieve it. a first step towards gender equity, then, is to allocate time for the staff to read background information and then create their own collective definition of what is meant by gender equity based on their own needs and goals for the school. i was reminded of the importance of this step as i worked long distance with a partner to prepare for a presentation on this paper at the research on women in education conference in new orleans this year. while pulling our thoughts together, we each realized how important it was to first agree on where gender equity and mathematics achievement came together. in this paper, i concentrate on the “treatment” perspective of gender equity, analyzing behaviors, and teacher interactions most identified with successful problem solvers and compared those to the classroom opportunities and interactions documented to occur less often with girls than boys. included in this paper is a summary of findings from this inquiry. needs addressed through the inquiry one of the most significant trends in the united states labor force over the past three decades is the growth of working mothers, especially single working mothers (nash & dougherty, 1991; sadker & sadker, 1994). many of the children in our school systems are dependent on the incomes and well-being of these mothers. non-traditional jobs often afford the opportunity for better pay for women, because jobs traditionally held by men pay better wages. data indicate that girls participate less in higher level mathematics courses than boys do in high school (american association of university women educational foundation [aauwef], 1992). courses such as calculus and statistics often serve as “gatekeepers” for those fields and professions that are traditionally male-dominated: mathematics, chemistry, engineering, business, advanced medicine, and technology. girls who do not take these courses are often less prepared to score well on mathematics portions of college entrance exams and less likely to get into major prestigious universities (goodlad & keating, 1990). this track record of missed opportunities and experiences results in a limited number of girls (when compared to boys) who have access to higher paying and often personally satisfying jobs (brody, fuller, gosetti, moscato, nagel, pace, & schmuck, 2000). therefore, one critical need is that of educating girls to know that “unless they prepare for paid work by selecting and obtaining the necessary education and training for an occupation that interests them, they are more likely than males to be limited to low-paying, uninteresting jobs that provide little opportunity for economic self-sufficiency or advancement” (bitters & foxwell, 1993, p. 8). mathematics, then becomes "the great divide" that must be crossed in order to achieve and succeed in financially-enhanced and challenging jobs. another area of need is in the mathematics classroom itself. one of the best ways to achieve gender equity is to improve classroom learning in general. the culture of the mathematics classroom as well as the curriculum often fall short of meeting the needs of today’s girls and underrepresented populations. (aauwef, 1998). girls and minorities are in need of teachers who increase the chances of their succeeding, not diminish them, and they are in need of a culture that encourages and supports the idea of mathematics for all. “administrators should assist teachers in creating better learning environments where equity can be achieved” (lunenburg & irby, 1999, p. 145). if girls are not developing the skills and dispositions for problem solving and if they are not enrolling and completing higher level mathematics courses in high school and college, then no matter what definition for gender equity we use, the chances for women to develop their abilities, talents and interests, and aptitudes to their fullest potential are limited as they compete with men in the job market (goodlad & keating, 1990). guiding questions the following questions served to guide this inquiry into gender equity in mathematics to advance the achievement of women in a world where success is often dependent on economic prosperity and intellectual power: 1. why are girls underrepresented in higher level mathematics courses in high school? 2. why do girls consistently underperform their gender counterparts on college entrance and graduate entrance exams? 3. why are girls less likely to take higher level mathematics course work in college? 4. why are less girls pursuing careers in mathematics and mathematics-related fields than boys? results form the inquiry performance of girls in mathematics and science myra and david sadker in their book failing at fairness: how america’s schools cheat girls (1994), synthesized a number of behaviors from studies on gender performance in mathematics and science. of their findings, the following were found to be particularly relevant to this inquiry. when compared to boys, girls: 1. are less comfortable taking risks in the secondary mathematics and science classrooms; 2. are less persistent when seeking solutions to problems; 3. have less confidence in their own innate abilities to solve problems; 4. believe that others hold lower expectations for them to succeed and/or advance in mathematics studies; and, 5. are less likely to find alternative strategies for solving mathematics problems when their first attempts to solve a problem fail. characteristics of good problem solvers the level of success in higher level mathematics courses in high school and college is dependent on how well students are able to solve problems. according to the national council of teachers of mathematics (nctm, 1989), good problem solvers demonstrate the following characteristics: 1. risk-taking, 2. persistence, 3. confidence in their own abilities, 4. high expectations for success, and 5. resourcefulness. teaching strategies that promote and develop problem solving characteristics the following teaching strategies have been linked with achievement in problem solving (nctm, 1991). 1. incorporate active participation. 2. support risk-taking. 3. technology-enhanced and supported. 4. multiple opportunities to respond to higher level questions. 5. high level of expectations. 6. content which is relevant and meaningful to students and taught within the context of real-world situations. 7. lessons, which are integrated across strands. 8. incorporate multiple opportunities for collaborative problem solving. girls less than boys sadker and sadker (1994) relate a story in which the television news show dateline conducted an investigative story following a report they did on girls not receiving their “fair share” of education. in this story, hidden lessons of unconscious bias were uncovered after training the news team on how to look for gender bias. clearly the teacher who was purposely trying to demonstrate a non-biased classroom, segregated the math group into boys and girls, focused on the boys, teaching them actively and directly. when the teacher did call on the girls, it was for them to perform in a passive way, for example, holding the math book up (p. 3). other studies have received similar results where boys initiate more contact and receive a greater share of the teacher’s time (aauwef, 1998). subsequently, reinforcement of these passive behaviors in school can negatively impact the ability of students as indicated by declining iq scores where passive approaches to learning are reinforced (goodlad & keating, 1990; aauwef, 1989). of the above teaching strategies that are shown to promote better problem solvers, girls are less likely than boys to: a. actively participate; b. take risks; c. receive specific feedback on performance; d. experience, work with technology; e. be asked higher level questions; and, f. held to higher expectations. perhaps not so surprising, the correlation between the characteristics of good problem solvers and the characteristics identified as being less encouraged in girls than boys in both classroom and home environments is close to a perfect 1.0. recommendations from the inquiry provide teachers with training and follow-up support for implementation of strategies which both are correlated with increased achievement in problem solving and the learning styles of girls and other underrepresented populations. for example, strategies could include: a. teaching content that is relevant and meaningful to students. b. teaching skills that are taught within the context of real-world situations. c. developing lessons that are integrated across strands. d. providing multiple opportunities for cooperative problem solving. e. finding role models and mentors who encourage and support participation of girls in higher level mathematics. provide teachers and administrators training in to analyze both overt and subtle messages delivered through methodologies and materials in mathematics instruction and then require that these analyses be used to evaluate teacher and administrator performance and to set professional development goals. provide teachers with training in how to provide equitable opportunities in the classroom as they relate to high performance in mathematics for girls. district leaders and staff need to establish policies and procedures that support equity in student performance by way of the following: a. communicate with conviction that diversity is a strength. b. establish policies and procedures that require ongoing improvement efforts in equity of student performance or outcomes. c. use the knowledge gained from research to guide policy development and school improvement and to discontinue in effective practices. provide teachers, school administrators, universities and state departments with training in subtle and subconscious bias found in career awareness and guidance practices, counseling practices, curriculum design, school improvement initiatives, instructional practices and personnel evaluations. in conclusion, clearly there are specific actions that can be taken to reach a destination of gender equity in mathematics. how seriously universities, schools, and school leaders are about increasing the representation of girls in higher mathematics courses, as well as the employment of women in mathematics-related, higher paying careers, will depend ultimately on how we feel about the fact that we have not done so thus far. references american association of university women educational foundation. (1989). equitable treatment of girls and boys in the classroom. washington, dc: author. american association of university women educational foundation. (1992). how schools shortchange girls. washington, dc: author. american association of university women educational foundation. (1998). gender gaps: where schools still fail our children. washington, dc: author. bitters, b. a., & foxwell, s. (1993). wisconsin model for sex equity in career and vocational education. milwaukee, wi: wisconsin department of public instruction. brody, c., fuller, k., gosetti, p. p., moscato, s. r., nagel, n. c., pace, g., & schmuck, p. (2000). gender consciousness and privilege. london: falmer press. goodlad, j., & keating, p. (eds.). (1990). access to knowledge: an agenda for our nation’s schools. new york: college entrance examination board. grossman, h., & grossman, s. (1994). gender issues in education. boston: allyn and bacon. koch, j., & irby, b. (2002). defining and redefining gender equity in education. greenwich, ct: information age publishing. lunenburg, f., & irby, b. (1999). high expectations: an action plan for implementing goals 2000. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. nash, m. (ed.), & dougherty, b. (1991). changing roles of men and women: educating for equity in the workplace. madison, wi: vocational studies center school of education. national council of teachers of mathematics. (1989). curriculum and evaluation standards for school mathematics. reston, va: author. national council of teachers of mathematics. (1991). professional teaching standards for school mathematics. reston, va: author. sadker, m., & sadker, d. (1994). failing at fairness: how america’s schools cheat girls. new york: macmillan publishing. walker, c., & foote, m. (2001, march). equity in excellence for all learners: an unobtrusive look at racism, classism, and the differently abled in residence’s for portfolio growth summaries. paper presented at the 53rd annual meeting of the american association of colleges for teacher education in dallas, tx. author dr. barbara polnick is an assistant professor in the department of educational leadership and counseling at sam houston state university. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///021118_1911/awl/awpublisher.html file:///021118_1911/awl/content.html file:///021118_1911/awl/advertising.html file:///021118_1911/awl/privacy.html file:///021118_1911/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership context factors related to women attrition from a graduate science program: a case study maria madalena ferreira, ph.d. ferreira, special rwe issue, fall, 2002 these advisors had little awareness of the high student attrition rate in their department (especially female), or of the reasons that led many to leave before completing their degree. introduction seeing that the average brain-weight of women is about five ounces less than that of men, on merely anatomical grounds we should be prepared to expect a marked inferiority of intellectual power in the former. (romanes, 1887, p. 383) arguments such as this one, seeking to bar women’s access to higher education, were still common in the popular science press by the end of the 19th century. yet, in this unwelcoming climate, many women made important contributions to science (rossiter, 1974). some of them, jane colden (1724-1766), maria mitchell (1818-1889), and mary somerville (1780-1872), were mostly self-taught or learned science while helping their scientist fathers (rossiter, 1974). however, many at the time dismissed these early women scientists as aberrations as illustrated by an article in an 1887 issue of the popular science monthly: the savante the woman of science like the female athlete, is simply an anomaly, an exceptional being, holding a position more or less intermediate between the two sexes. in the one case the brain, as in the other the muscular system has undergone an abnormal development. (p. 205) although women have since secured access to all scientific fields, their representation in many areas continues to lag behind their male counterparts. in 2000, american universities awarded to women only 15.8% of the phds. in engineering, 24.2% in the physical sciences, and 46.9% in the life sciences (national opinion research center, 2001). women’s representation was even lower in some subhttp://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html disciplines in the aforementioned areas. for example, within physical sciences women earned only 14.7% of the ph.ds. in physics and astronomy and 16.5% of the ph.ds. in computer science (national opinion research center, 2001). the ph.d. thesis in science is primarily an apprenticeship in research (conefrey, 2000; holloway, 1993; widnall, 1988). during this period, students spend large periods of time in a laboratory setting sharing space and equipment with colleagues and research advisor. according to conefrey (2000), “participating in a laboratory is crucial to succeeding in science because it socializes novice scientists into what is valued by their laboratory and by the larger community of scientists to which they aspire to belong” (p. 253). thus, graduate students’ experiences “are strongly influenced by their department’s cultures” (national science foundation (nsf), 1998, p. 4). every ph.d. granting department in a university can set its own policies for recruitment, admission, and curriculum requirements (hirt & muffo, 1998; office of scientific and engineering personnel (osep), 1996). quantitative studies on graduate student attrition indicate that the department is the best unit of analysis when predicting graduate student completion rates (berg & ferber, 1983; ott & markewich, 1985, as cited in girves & wemmerus, 1988). according to hirt and muffo (1998), “departments are guided not by institutional standards but by the norms of the discipline, which in turn influence the climate for graduate students” (p. 18). although women have become increasingly visible in scientific areas, eisenhart (1994) contends that the norms of science continue to be “prototypically male” (p. 193). these norms are expressed in the pedagogical practices, which best meet male students’ needs (lipson & tobias, 1991; seymour & hewitt, 1994); in the communication styles, as those practiced in the science lab (conefery, 2000); and in the overall construction of scientific knowledge (eisenhart, 1994; harding, 1991; keller, 1985; sonnert, 1995; 1996; subramaniam & wyer, 1998). all these features of the culture of science interact resulting in a climate that has been “chilly” for women scientists and students (dresselhaus, franz, & clark, 1995; hall & sandler, 1982; meinholdt & murray, 1999; sandler, 1986; sonnert,1995, 1996). much of the research on the gender gap in science and engineering has focused on the reasons for females’ lack of interest and achievement in science. although investigators (hall & sandler, 1982; meinholdt & murray, 1999; sandler, 1986; sandler, silverberg, & hall, 1996) have uncovered some context factors that contribute to female attrition from undergraduate science programs, few studies have examined, in a comprehensive manner, female attrition in science at the graduate level. golde (1998) contends that, “to understand doctoral-student attrition, we must critically examine the role of discipline and program in shaping student experiences” (p. 55). the authors of a recent national science foundation report on graduate student attrition voice this concern and call for more qualitative or contextual studies at the department and program level. in the study reported here, qualitative and quantitative data were used to examine the extent to which the social climate in a chemistry department, as shaped by the students’ relationship with colleagues and research advisor, contributed to the differential attrition rate of female and male students in the doctoral program. method a case study approach was used in the design of this study. according to merriam (1988), “a case study is an examination of a specific phenomenon such as a program, an event, a person, a process, an institution, or a social group” (p. 9). the “case” consisted of a graduate science department (chemistry) at a large research university. setting the study took place in a chemistry department at a large research university in the midwest. the department offered only ph.ds in all the major areas of chemistry, from biochemistry to physical chemistry. however, students who decided to leave before completing their ph.d. were given a master’s degree if their work was deemed of adequate quality. the student’s research advisor controlled this decision, solely. the doctoral program was primarily based on research. incoming graduate students were funded for a period of five years in the form of research fellowships and/or teaching. students usually taught the first year and received research assistantships after joining a research lab. at the time of the study, the department had 34 faculty members, all male, 74% of them at the rank of full professor. of the 186 graduate students 30% were female. sample results were based on survey responses from 84 graduate students (31 females and 53 males) and semistructured interviews with 16 students (8 females and 8 males). five of the students interviewed (4 females and 1 male) had left the program before completing their degree. the selection of students for the interviews was done to insure a “representative sample” in regards to gender, self-confidence level, and intention to leave the program (lecompte & preissle, 1993). six faculty members were also interviewed. data collection data were collected through a 5-point likert-type scale survey questionnaire, interviews with students and faculty, and department records. students’ perspectives on their work environment, as shaped by their colleagues and research advisor, were based on 27 items on the survey and semi-structured interviews. thirteen of the items on the survey were used to assess students’ perceptions of their relationship with their colleagues (female and male). sample items included, “in my lab there is a lot of collaboration between my female and male colleagues” and “i feel welcome to ask for help from my female/male colleagues” (see table 4). item 8 in table 4 examined students’ overall satisfaction with their working conditions. eleven additional items were used to examine students’ perception of their relationship with their advisor. items included, “my advisor is often available for advice and/or support” and “my advisor has equal expectations for her/his female and male students.” another item “the level of mentoring in my department is very high,” was used to assess students’ perception of the level of mentoring in their department (see table 5). two other items, one examining students’ intention to leave the program, and another students’ perception of their ability to handle the work required for their degree were also part of the survey (see table 3). responses to the items on the survey were rated on a 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) scale, with a midpoint defined as “undecided.” each survey item included space for student comments. the alpha reliability coefficient for the 27 items on the survey was .84. demographic items in the survey included students’ major, ethnicity, gender, and marital status. students were also asked to report the average number of hours (per week) that they spent conducting research in the lab, and to rate their self-confidence level at two points in their program -when entering graduate school and at the time of the study. the scale ranged from 1 (very low) to 5 (very high), with a midpoint defined as “moderate.” department records were used to determine faculty and student composition of the department, student undergraduate and graduate gpa, and the student attrition rate (female and male) over a nine-year period. the semi-structured interviews were conducted after the surveys had been returned and were used to explore, more in-depth, some of the issues uncovered in the survey, including possible reasons for student attrition. interviews with faculty focused on questions aimed at assessing their awareness of the student attrition rate (female and male), and their perspectives on possible reasons that might cause students to leave the program. the interviews were audiotaped and took between 30 and 60 minutes each. file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e4.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e4.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e5.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e3.html data analyses independent sample t tests were used to identify significant gender differences in student responses to the survey items, students’ undergraduate and graduate gpa, the weekly number of hours spent in the lab conducting research, and self-confidence level when entering graduate school and at the time of the study. a chi-square test was used to determine significant gender differences in the student attrition rate. statistical significance was set at an alpha level of .05. the transcripts of the faculty and student interviews and of student comments to the items on the survey were analyzed using the techniques of naturalistic inquiry (lincoln & guba, 1985; miles & huberman, 1994). after the interview tapes were transcribed verbatim and students’ comments to the survey questions copied, a text-based coding was used (miles & huberman, 1994). as each transcript was read several times, oneor two-word codes were attached to each segment of the data. similar codes were grouped together and organized into broader themes. results as results in table 1 indicate, both female and male students entered graduate school with similar undergraduate grade point average and self-confidence. however, even though no gender differences were found in student graduate point average and number of hours spent doing research in the lab, the female students reported a significantly lower self-confidence level at the time of the study t (83) = -2.63, p = .01. the drop in female students’ self-confidence was also reflected in their consideration to leave the program (item 1 in table 3) and attrition rate (table 2). the student attrition rate was determined by counting any student who had left without a degree or with a degree different from the one originally sought. students who had been accepted to the ph.d. program but later changed to a master’s degree were included in the computation of the attrition rate. this method was consistent with the literature (nsf, 1998; osep, 1996). the attrition rate for female students, for each entering cohort over a nine-year period, averaged 45%, while the attrition rate for males, for the same time period, averaged 30%. these differences were statistically significant, x2 (1, n = 433) = 8.90, p = .003 (see table 2). yet, no gender differences were found in students’ response to one of the survey items examining their perception of their ability to handle the work required for their degree (item 2 in table 3). thus, female students’ drop in self-confidence (table 1), their high attrition rate (table 2), or their consideration to leave the program (item 1 in table 3) could not be related to their low academic performance (given their high graduate gpa), or perception of their inability to handle the work required for their degree. student relationship with colleagues because of the large number of hours spent in the research lab, the social climate for the students in this study was shaped, mainly, by their relationship with colleagues and advisor. research indicates that colleagues and advisor are key agents in the socialization of new graduate students into a discipline (baird, 1992; girves & wemmerus, 1988; lovitts, 1996). according to girves and wemmerus (1988), “the frequency and quality of student/faculty interactions appear to be important predictors of retention for men, whereas both student/faculty and peer interactions are important predictors of retention for women” (p. 164). analysis of the data uncovered significant gender differences in students’ perception of their relationship with colleagues. as results in table 4 show, the female students were less likely to agree that their comments were taken seriously by their male or female colleagues (statements 3a and 3b); that their male colleagues asked for their opinion or help (statement 4a); that they felt welcome to ask for help from their file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e1.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e3.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e2.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e2.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e3.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e2.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e3.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e4.html male colleagues (statement 5b); that they often discussed science with their male colleagues (statement 6b); and that they often socialized with their male colleagues (statement 7b). the female students were also less likely to agree that they were happy with their working conditions (item 8 in table 4). lack of collegiality the lack of collegiality identified in the survey was also reflected in student comments during the interviews. according to a female student, in her department “each group does their own thing. there are no interdepartmental collaborations at all.” another female student described the environment in her laboratory as “a very independent sort of, ‘you do your own thing.’” when asked if she interacted with other female students, she replied: “not really. the other girls that entered, particularly in my area, are at the other end of the hall.” the lack of collegiality in most laboratories and in the department as a whole, contributed to a sense of isolation particularly among female students. the absence of female faculty members and limited number of female students in most laboratories added to female students’ sense of isolation, especially in laboratories where female attrition was high. a female student described the lack of female faculty as having “no one to look up to.” another female student commented on the impact that the high attrition of female students had on her: “all around me women are leaving with their master’s degree. and they are all my friends, and i see what they’re going through, and it’s very discouraging.” competition data from the interviews suggested that the social climate in the chemistry department was best characterized as competitive. a female student described the environment in her department as “very competitive.” another one pointed out that “competitiveness comes where you do what it takes to get ahead without regard for other people.” some of the male students also commented on the competitive environment of their department and laboratories. one of them described the environment in his department as a “cut-throat atmosphere.” according to another male student the environment in his lab was “a highly competitive environment where you are constantly asked to prove yourself.” still another one pointed out that the high work demands created an environment that was “incredibly uptight and competitive.” student relationship with advisor as results in table 5 indicate, the female students also had a more negative perception of their relationship with their advisor than did their male counterparts. the female students were less likely to agree that they had learned a lot from their advisor (statement 4); that their advisor had the same expectations for them as for their male colleagues (statement 5b); that their advisor asked for the opinion of his female students even when male students were present (statement 6a); and that their advisor knew how to deal well with his female students (statement 7b). the female students were also much less likely to agree that the level of mentoring in their department was very high (statement 8). analysis of the interview data suggested that the advisor played a major role in the sort of social climate that existed in the research lab. furthermore, because of the large number of hours that students spent conducting research in the lab and the lack of collegiality that existed in the department, the environment that existed in the lab was the main lens through which students evaluated their experiences in graduate school. mentoring research on mentoring indicates that students who have a mentoring relationship with their advisors feel file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e4.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e5.html professionally affirmed and are more productive after graduation (heinrich, 1991; subotnik & arnold, 1995). successful scientists, especially women, consistently report on the important role that their advisors play in their careers (davis, 1999; jacks, chubin, porter & connolly, 1983; sonnert & holton, 1996). as illustrated by female students’ response to statement 8 in table 5, most of them did not feel the level of mentoring in their department was very high. conversations with students during the interviews also indicated that few of the advisors used a mentoring approach in their relationship with their students. indeed, students referred to their advisor as my/our “boss.” this perception was due to the organization of the research lab, which resembled to a great extent a small research enterprise. incoming graduate students became part of a research team when they joined a lab. the research projects were financed by grants secured by the advisor. the advisor provided financial support to the students who in turn performed the work necessary to the success of the project. according to a male student, it’s sort of a bargain, and the bargain is that you go in, they give you a project to do because, of course, they need to get this research done for their own purposes. you fulfill your part of the bargain by doing this research for three or four years and you get a ph.d. the advisor will then get a number of papers from that to then be able to secure more grant money to continue another research project. indeed, students reported working between 40-65 hours per week doing research in the lab and advisors expected, and many demanded, this level of commitment as illustrated in the comments from a male student: i feel that periodically i’m expected to prove to my advisor that i’m doing research. and in that sense then, it’s much like an employee-boss relationship where you have to prove to your boss that you’re worthwhile or else, you know, maybe you won’t be around much longer. some laboratories resembled small enterprises with as many as 25 students and a few post-doctoral fellows. in these labs most of the advisor’s effort was spent securing funds and in finding efficient ways of running the operation. this in turn created a social climate in the research lab and department characterized by a narrow focus, competition, and focus on fast results. according to a female student, her advisor “has used the term ‘survival of the fittest,’ and that’s how he believes his lab should be run. that’s how he believes the department should be run, ‘survival of the fittest.’” another female student described her advisor as running “his research groups so that we compete against each other. i’m competitive and i can compete against other people, but it’s not really the type of atmosphere that i’m interested in.” the attitude of some advisors toward their female students also contributed to their sense of isolation as illustrated in the following quote from a female student who had left the program, i felt that i was judged before i even had a chance to show what kind of scientist i was. for some reason i was judged negatively from the beginning. i don’t understand why. i worked on a project by myself and i worked so hard to try to learn and understand everything. why does my advisor have favorites? i would force my advisor to say hello to me in the hall, and he would barely do that. but right after that he would stop and talk to someone else, a guy, about drinking or skiing. a male student who had also left described another such advisor: i knew at least another professor who was terrible. he created a terrible environment for both file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e5.html men and women students in the lab, but particularly for women, though he did not do it in an obvious manner. no woman had ever gotten a ph.d. under him. he had a huge ego, although he had a good scientific mind. a friend of mine decided to leave before finishing. she hated him. i wasn’t his student, but he even had a negative impact on me. another male student replied when asked why so many female students left the program: there were probably thirteen graduate students in my subdiscipline when i came, half of them were female. i think two of them got master’s degrees and most left before or after their candidacy exams. all the female graduate students left before getting their ph.d. i think it has to do with the fact that several of those students went to work in very large male dominated groups. i’m left with the conclusion that somehow the environment isn’t friendly to women. these results suggested that in some labs the advisor’s excessive expectations created a competitive climate that led to student sense of isolation.among the female students, this feeling of isolation was compounded by their small numbers in most laboratories, their advisor’s lack of support, and the absence of female faculty in the department. faculty members’ perspectives when asked about the student attrition rate in their department, most of the faculty members interviewed provided much smaller figures than those computed in table 2. according to one of them, the student attrition rate was “about one third.” another faculty member responded that, “about 10% leave the first year and 20% leave with a master’s degree. everyone else gets the ph.d.” in addition, most faculty members believed the attrition rate in their department was similar for female and male students. when asked whether the attrition rate for female was higher than that of male students one of the faculty members replied: “i certainly don’t think so. the department has had an increasing number of females and we have certainly a good record of placing them well.” two other faculty members actually believed that student attrition rate was greater for male than female students. according to one of them: a few years ago it was much higher for females. i was involved in gathering that information and was appalled by it. the reasons were always good, they decided to get married or other things, but i believe a graduate student recently looked into this and the attrition rate was lower for females than for males. another faculty member was of the same opinion. in fact, he was concerned about male students’ seemingly alienation from science: my concern is the traditional male that we used to have in science who used to think this was going to be a great career. he loved doing science, thought he would make good money, have a family and a house, etc., etc. that guy seems confused. he is not totally committed to this. it used to be that women would come into chemistry, find a guy, get married, and would quit. now the women are staying and the male students seem to be drifting off. in addition to lack of awareness about the higher attrition rate of female students, these two quotes also reflect a common belief among the faculty in the department that women left because of a significant other. indeed, when asked why female students left, most of the faculty members provided similar reasons. according to one of them “some students who leave are women. they choose to get married and leave graduate school.” another faculty member replied: women more than men want the balance of work and family. in most cases women realize file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2002/ferreira/ferrei%7e2.html that they don’t want to give up what they will have to give up for a job in chemistry. so halfway through they say, “the heck with it, i don’t want it.” far too many women left with a master’s degree for that reason. two of the faculty members, however, did not believe marriage was the main reason for female attrition. according to them, students (female and male) left because “they are not up to it.” not being “up to it” signified that students either did not have the intellectual capability “they are essentially not smart enough,” or did not possess the necessary motivation for the long hours of research essential to success in science: they find how many hours a week they have to work in the lab; how many hours a day; that they have to do 2 or 3 things simultaneously, and while it is really nice around here because they have lots of friends to talk to, they aren’t accomplishing anything themselves. they’re just slowing down people around them. the faculty members’ lack of awareness of the student attrition rate, and their use of individual student characteristics as justifications for those who left, support lovitts’ (1996) contention that, “universities believe that the problem lies not with the graduate school and the dynamics of graduate education but with the students themselves” (p.1). discussion and conclusion according to lovitts’ (1996), “[graduate student] attrition has less to do with what the student brings to the university than with what happens to the student after s/he has been admitted” (p. 3). the results of this study support lovitts’ contention and illustrate the importance that context factors play in female student attrition from graduate science programs. in the department described here, female students’ relationship with colleagues and advisor were the main context factors that contributed to student attrition. furthermore, as the head of the lab, the advisor played the most important role in the development of the social climate that existed in the research lab. unfortunately, many of the advisors in this study contributed to a climate characterized by competition and lack of collaboration. although this competitive environment might have contributed to male student attrition, it had the most negative impact on the female students, as illustrated by their loss of self-confidence and high attrition rate. researchers contend that women tend to “shy away from very competitive projects more than their male counterparts” (sonnert & holton, 1996, p. 68). according to holloway (1993), “[women] respond to a challenge better if the process of meeting it is framed as a collaboration rather than a competition” (p. 99). the lack of collegiality in most labs and in the department as a whole, combined with the lack of support from their advisor, appeared to be contributing to a “null environment” for many female students in this chemistry department. meinholdt and murray (1999), contend that the blatant sexism that exists in science has been substituted by a “null environment” characterized by the exclusion of women from informal interactions with peers and professors. yet, according to girves and wemmerus (1988), “being treated as a junior colleague by the advisor accounts for much of the variability in degree progress” (p. 185). similarly, tinto (1993) contends that graduate student persistence in the last stage of their work is primarily the result of the student relationship with the advisor. this assertion is supported by research on graduate student success (davis, 1999; girves & wemmerus, 1988; golde, 1996; 1998; hollenshead, younce, & wenzel, 1994; jacks et al., 1983). students, particularly females, who receive high levels of support from their advisors, are more likely to succeed in graduate school and persist to complete their degrees (kluever, 1995; lenz, 1995). davis (1999) points out that advisors in fields with few women need to show genuine interest in their female students’ work and make an effort to help them feel welcome. unfortunately, the data suggest that few of the advisors in this study provided such support to their female students. indeed, one might argue that access to a ph.d. in the chemistry department reported here was controlled by the students’ advisors, all white males, most of them holding prestigious positions in the department and in the field. these advisors had little awareness of the high student attrition rate in their department (especially female), or of the reasons that led many to leave before completing their degree. researchers contend that many of the issues faced by graduate women in science are related to the lack of a “critical mass” of women students and professors (dresselhaus et al., 1995; meinholdt & murray, 1999). “critical mass” is defined as “the discrete point at which the presence of a sufficient number brings about qualitative improvement in conditions and accelerates the dynamics of change” (etzkowitz, kemelgor, neuschatz, uzzi, & alonzo, 1994, p. 51). researchers have found a direct relationship between the quality of the climate and the proportion of women faculty and students in a science department (dresselhaus et al., 1995). although 30% of the students in the department in this study were women, their subordinate status and isolation they experienced in their lab and department as a whole had little impact on the quality of their working environment. as etzkowitz and others point out, “a modest increase in the number of women in science, without a change in the structure of the scientific workplace, creates a paradox of critical mass” (etzkowitz et al., 1994, p. 51). the lack of female faculty, who could serve as role models and mentors, added to the sense of isolation that many female students in this study experienced. although research indicates that a mentor or role model does not necessarily need to be of the same race or sex as the protégé, seeing others of the same sex and/or race in positions of power and expertise helps affirm one’s career aspirations (astin & astin, 1993; janes, 1997; kegel-flom, 1995). the lack of female faculty in the department reported here was also an indication of the climate that existed in the department. as one of the female students pointed out: i chose this department because it seemed to be the best academically. so i disregarded the fact that it didn’t have female faculty. i should have paid attention to it because i really didn’t realize what kind of indicator it was. women have made considerable strides in their quest for science. however, even though they no longer confront the open barriers faced by their foremothers, their full access to scientific knowledge continues to be challenged by those in power. to the women in this study, institutional barriers, sexism, and stereotyping in educational and professional contexts served as gatekeepers to these women as they sought to reach their potential in science and develop identities as fully participating and legitimate members of the science community. 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(eric document reproduction service no. ed382143). lecompte, m. d., & preissle, j. (1993). ethnography and qualitative design in educational research (2nd ed.). san diego, ca: academic press, inc. lenz, k. (1995, april). factors affecting the completion of the doctoral dissertation for non-traditional aged women. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association, san francisco, ca. lincoln, y. s., & guba, e. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. beverly hills, ca: sage publications. lipson, a., & tobias, s. (1991). why do some of our best college students leave science? journal of college science teaching, 21(2), 92-95. lovitts, b. e. (1996, april). who is responsible for graduate student attrition the individual or the institution? toward an explanation of the high and persistent rate of attrition. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association, new york. (eric document reproduction services no. ed399878). meinholdt, c., & murray, s. (1999). why aren’t there more women engineers? journal of women and minorities in science and engineering, 5(3), 239-263. merriam, s. b. (1988). case study research in education. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass publishers. miles, m. b., & huberman, a. m. (1994). qualitative data analysis: an expanded sourcebook. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. national opinion research center. (2001). doctorate recipients from united states universities: summary report 2000. chicago: author. national science foundation, division of science resources studies. (1998). summary of a workshop on graduate student attrition. (nsf report no. 99-314). arlington, va: author. office of scientific and engineering personnel. (1996). the path to the ph.d.: measuring graduate attrition in the sciences and humanities. washington, dc: national academy press. romanes, g. j. (1887). mental differences of men and women. the popular science monthly, 31, 383400. rossiter, m. w. (1974). women scientists in america before 1920. american scientist, 62, 312-323. sandler, b. r. (1986). the campus climate revisited: chilly for women faculty, administrators, and graduate students. washington, dc: association of american colleges. sandler, b. r., silverberg, l. a., & hall, r. m. (1996). the chilly classroom climate: a guide to improve the education of women. washington, dc: national association for women in education. seymour, e., & hewitt, n. m. (1994). talking about leaving: factors contributing to high attrition rates among science, mathematics and engineering undergraduate majors. boulder, co: university of colorado, bureau of sociological research. sonnert, g. (1995). who succeeds in science? the gender dimension. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. sonnert, g. (1996). gender equity in science: still and elusive goal. issues in science and technology, 11, 53-58. sonnert, g., & holton, g. (1996). career patterns of women and men in the sciences. american scientist, 84, 63-71. subotnik, r. f., & arnold, l. s. (1995). passing through the gates: career establishment of talented women scientists. roeper review, 18(1): 55-61. subramaniam, b., & wyer, m. (1998). assimilating the “culture of no culture” in science: feminist interventions in (de)mentoring graduate women. feminist teacher, 12(1), 12-28. tinto, v. (1993). leaving college: rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition (2nd ed.). chicago: university of chicago press. widnall, s. e. (1988). aaas presidential lecture: voices from the pipeline. science, 241, 1740-1745. author dr. maria madalena ferreira is an assistant professor of science education in the college of education at wayne state universtiy. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///awl/awpublisher.html file:///awl/content.html file:///awl/advertising.html file:///awl/privacy.html file:///awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 23, spring 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] women in leadership: rocky road to the superintendency michelle hickey-gramke women in leadership: rocky road to the superintendency the inequities associated with gender imbalance in leadership require national attention. wilson (2004) found that of 435 seats in the house of representatives, only 59 are women; of the 100 senators, only 14 are women. only 24 women have ever been governors in the united states . women are nearly half the workforce, yet we make up only 12% of top executives and hold 12.4% of board seats in 500 of the country's largest companies. although these statistics are significant, they are not nearly as staggering as the statistics about the positions held by women in the superintendency. of our nation's 13,728 superintendents, 1,984 today are women. although 72% of k-12 educators are women in the united states , 87% of the top leaders in the school districts, the superintendents, are males according to the u.s. department of education. many questions have been posed and researched about why there are so few women in the superintendent position. also, search committees have been formed and new programs have been put into place to recruit women into administration. yet, there has been an inconsequential increase nationally in identifying and hiring women to the superintendency (nogay, 1996). in reviewing research on women in the superintendency, several common strands have been identified that speculate reasons why there are so few women in the superintendency and possible solutions to this significant issue. besides the commonly held belief that women are discouraged from the superintendency, there are six documented reasons that are substantiated across literature related to why women are not at the top of school districts. the six categories encompass a wide range of issues including credentials, school boards, positions held, job structure, age, and mentoring. credentials in a review of women in the superintendency, vail (1999) found that 99% of superintendents started their careers as teachers. this statistic would seem promising for this female dominated field, but when you head to the next step in the common ladder towards the superintendency, shakeshaft (1987) found the high school file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm principalship was a common position held. with only 14% of secondary principal positions held by women in the country, it is evident where the track for the superintendency halts to an abrupt stop. the position of a high school principal is complex, with a large staff, budget management, numerous stakeholders, night meetings, hiring, and staff development. they are almost seen as a school ceo because the responsibility of running a comprehensive high school includes academic arenas, sports programs, arts, special education, and vocational education. there is an aggressive recruitment of high school principals to become superintendents, although two thirds of the nation's schools are elementary where many women lead. the road to the superintendency rarely follows the elementary school principal track. this is where 97% of teachers are women and 40% are principals (gupton & slick, 1996). this substantial number of positions held by women in the elementary schools poses a problem for them in the superintendency track because some of the other common ways to the superintendency are through head coaching, which is usually at the high school level, or taking on an assistant principalship position, where many elementary schools do not have such employment. school boards/positions held the position of high school principal is viewed as training for a superintendent's position as glass (2000) noted that school boards in districts value experience in large budget and financial decisions. women often move from elementary principal to positions in the district office. this would seem to be a valuable way for women to get their foot in the door for the superintendency, but many women take positions in curriculum and instruction (glass, 2000). according to vail (1999), school boards find more worth in budget and financial experience than they do with curriculum development and leadership. this trend again favors males to become superintendents more than females. job structure the isolation of the superintendency is another area that is not conducive to most women's leadership style (goleman, 2002). "women administrators need support and a sense of connection with others who understand the world in which they live" (tripses, 2004, p. 2). the role of superintendent is isolated in that there is no one else holding a similar position in the entire school district. often the communication of the superintendent goes out by e-mail and internet. shakeshaft (1987) conducted a research study that looked at four successful women in the superintendency where relationships with others were central to all actions. "these women administrators spent more time with people, communicated more, cared more about individual differences, and were concerned more with teachers and marginal students" (shakeshaft, 1987, p. 4). the leadership role for women in the superintendency is difficult because their community style leadership does not fit well in a secluded position. this remoteness often does not interest women. another area that detracts women from the superintendency is the overall structure of the job: "the average superintendent spends more than 50 hours a week at work, including night meetings and sporting events. this type of work week is often not appealing because women prefer a better balance between work and family life" (glass, 2000, p. 4). the role of mother is another central reason to why many women do not go after the superintendency. many women are the figures that stay at home while their husband works at his career. it is more common for males to have the opportunities to work at the superintendency because their wife is raising their children. age with women staying at home to raise their children, women are entering the leadership roles in education later than men. the american association of school administrators ran a study on women superintendents over a ten year period and found that men start in school leadership roles around the age of 27, where women move into administrative positions in their early 30s. the study highlighted, "many potential women candidates for the superintendency might reach the central office in their early 50s and really don't want to proceed further or move into a new career since retirement is just four of five years away" (logan, 1999, p.7). logan suggests that another reason women are entering administrative positions later is that on average women spend two to three years longer in the classroom than men do. mentoring it is obvious that something needs to be done to recruit more women into top leadership positions in the field of education. it would be naive to think that to change the education system is going to be easy because "change invariably creates conflict" (bolman, 2003, p. 376). the role of the superintendency must be changed. the demand of time, work load, isolation, and structure of the position is not inviting to a woman's leadership style. mentoring, internships, and more time working in the schools are ways that might attract more women to this leadership role. mentoring supports women because it starts networks and provides role models for aspiring superintendents. "mentorship and responsible internship placements assist women's transition into school administration and continue to be important" (logan, 1999, p. 5). gupton and slick (1996) made recommendations to the board of illinois women administrators to create a support system for women in the superintendency. this would allow women to create a family like support system, traditional to the male networks. future direction the views and values of education are changing. many men that were hired as superintendents had experiences with budgets and politics from high school administration that was seen as the essential skill of the top school leader. with the current testing culture, the emphasis has been placed on instructional leadership. women in district office almost always are in the curriculum director roles, which is the top instructional role in school districts (glass, 2000). the times are changing from having a budget ceo of schools to a curriculum and instruction ceo of schools. this is a change that will most definitely benefit non-secondary candidates, usually women, because of their diverse knowledge in all curricular areas and their extensive experience in teaching. logan writes, "it is time for educational administration departments to reassess, adjust, and activate gender equity strategies that will bring about an equitable hiring context for all of our graduates. change comes slowly, and "real change only comes with commitment and proactive involvement directed at the source of the problem" (logan, 1999, p. 9). there is a high rate of principals and superintendents retiring across the country. trend data reveal that the nation is facing a crisis level administrator shortage (institute for educational leadership, 2000, p.3). this is the time to make the change in the roles and structure of the superintendency to recruit and retain women. references bolman, l. (2003). reframing organizations . san francisco : jossey-bass. glass, t. (2000). where are all the women superintendents? american association of school administration , 57 (6), 28-32. goleman, d. (2002). primal leadership: realizing the power of emotional intelligence . boston : harvard business school press. gupton, s., & slick, g. (1996). highly successful women administrators: the inside stories of how they got there . thousand oaks , ca : corwin. institute for educational leadership. (2000, october). leadership for student learning: reinventing the principalship . (online report). washington , dc : author. available: http://www.iel.org/prgrams/21st/report logan, j. (1999). an educational leadership challenge: refocusing gender equity strategies. american association of school administration , 22 , 4. nogay, k. (1996). the relationship of superordinate and subordinate gender to the perceptions of leadership behaviors of female secondary principals (doctoral dissertation, youngstown state university, 1996). shakeshaft, c. (1987). women in educational administration . beverly hills , ca : sage. tripses, j. (2004, spring). redefining the voice of women administrators. advancing women in leadership, 16. retrieved march, 4, 2005, from http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/spring2004/tripses.html vail, k. (1999). women at the top. american school board journal , december. wilson , m. (2004). closing the leadership gap . new york : penguin group. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.iel.org/prgrams/21st/report file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership making it work: women’s ways of leading charlotte matthews harris, ed.d. penny l smith, ph.d. rosalind pijeaux hale, ed.d. harris, smith, & hale, special rwe issue,fall, 2002 in order to be successful in the male-dominated public sphere, women in educational leadership have had to effectively integrate the best of what is stereotypically feminine (private) with the best of what is stereotypically masculine (public). an examination of women in leadership from a feminine perspective or point of view reveals that a female organizational culture exists and that women exhibit ways of leading that are distinctively different from the ways men lead. women’s ways of leading are consistent with recent trends in leadership research and theory and provide a model for education that could lead to “a more caring community and a safer world” (noddings, 1991, p. 70). yet, historically, society has been viewed as divided into two domains—the public sphere and the private sphere. predominantly male, the public sphere “demands independence, rationality, and self-reliance,” whereas the private sphere, predominantly female, reflects “dependence, emotionality, and support” (forisha, 1981, p. 10). that which is public is primary, and that which is private is secondary. since women have been relegated to the private sphere, their values and experiences have not been considered until recently. recent trends in research on power and leadership “reflect a shift in focus from a leader-dominated view to a broader one of follower involvement in expanding power” and “presume the willingness of leaders themselves to embrace the notion of sharing power with subordinates,” thereby fostering “the development of leadership in others” (hollander & offermann, 1990, pp. 179-185). such approaches promote good interpersonal relations, team leadership, worker participation in decision making, and the establishment of a climate of openness, mutual trust, respect, concern, and receptiveness. the shift in the way of thinking about leadership to a less bureaucratic, more interactive process, which is adaptive to the nature of the task, the talents of the individuals in the group, and the talents of the leader herself, allows for individual differences and encourages leadership behavior in others. this leadership paradigm is less male-centered, more holistic, more closely aligned with women’s worldview, and more conducive to change. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html using an electronic discussion format, we three women in higher education administration shared and reflected upon our stories of assuming positions of leadership in schools, colleges, or departments of education while untenured assistant professors. the excerpt below provides a glimpse of our personal perspective on a topic we feel is of interest to many other women in leadership positions. it all started this way woman #1. oh my! i often wonder about how and really why i said yes. i had been hired as a new tenure track assistant professor in the department right from a middle school principalship. prior to my position as a principal, i had been a high school principal and had been in other positions of leadership in my school district for a number of years. in addition, i had 21 years of experience in k-12 schools and a doctorate in educational leadership. after i had been a member of the department of educational leadership and foundations for one year, the chair decided to leave. rather than search for another person who would also be chair, a veteran faculty member asked me to do it. in turn i asked him why not him. he had been at the university for as long as i had been in k-12 education. however, he said my leadership background and the fact that we had a large number of students in the graduate program who were majoring in educational administration indicated we needed someone as chair who had that background. what a convincing argument! there was no discussion about getting tenure. i did not ask and he provided no additional input about it. so, i said yes. and now that i think back, i think i was somewhat honored that he asked me since he was a veteran full professor. woman #2. i think being flattered as well as the perceived status attracted me. i think i have always had this quiet ambitiousness about me. it started this way with me. i was a high school english teacher in maryland for 11 years when i was offered a position in development and public relations at an hbcu in ohio. this was my introduction into higher education administration and, spending eight years there, i learned a lot about the culture of higher education. while there i pursued and completed a doctorate in educational foundations at a large university in the area and decided to pursue an academic position. i was hired as an assistant professor at a small university in middle georgia to coordinate a master’s level teacher education program in secondary education. i really enjoyed this position. it was a position that required some administrative duties as well as teaching, advising, and field supervision. i loved the variety of it and the autonomy it allowed. during my second year, my department chair, who had been acting chair since my arrival, was taking the spring quarter off for maternity leave. she did not desire to continue as chair. the dean asked for two recommendations to fill the position from within the department. she asked me if i would consider it because i was the only faculty member in the department of foundations and secondary education whose background was in educational foundations. being “flattered,” i agreed to consider it as long as i could continue doing what i was currently doing. one other person in the department, one who had been there for several years, was interested, so both of us were recommended to the dean. i was appointed acting chair for the remainder of that quarter and then received the permanent appointment beginning july 1. i was the most junior member in the department, but the dean chose me. i served three years doing both the job of department chair and the full-time job of coordinating the master of arts in teaching program. woman #1. wow, do we work this hard all of the time? i continue to look at how women have to serve in a variety of positions prior to being selected for a leadership role. why is that? why does it seem like we have to prove ourselves? or is this just me being…oh, i don’t know how to describe the feeling. it just seems like we really come into our positions of leadership with an awful lot of experience. oh, i know it helps. but could we have been ready earlier if we had been given the chance in k-12 education? woman #3. my career in leadership began when i had been teaching third grade for three years at an elementary school. the day i completed my last class to add-on educational leadership certification at the master’s level, the assistant superintendent for instruction called and asked if i would interview for the assistant principal’s position at another elementary school in the county. why, of course, i was quite “flattered” (this is definitely one of the themes i see emerging!) and willingly agreed to take the challenge. i like risk-taking and new beginnings, so an opportunity like this one was hard to pass by. after two years as an elementary assistant principal, i was approached by an assistant professor at a local university who asked if i would come to the university level. who me? teach college? i had never thought of doing that. but, of course, being “flattered” i gladly accepted. i served in that position for two years when the chair resigned to take another position. i was asked by the assistant dean, whom i greatly admired, to take the position of acting chair of early childhood education. having had no university administrative experience, i could not fathom why she would ask me. there were others whom i felt could have done the job, but i took the challenge. there was no discussion of tenure or promotion at that point and, like woman #1, i did not ask. at the end of that year, i applied for the chair’s job when a national search was conducted. i got the job and the rest, as they say, is history. i served in this position three years. when the chair of the middle grades department resigned to take another position, the dean combined the departments of early childhood and middle grades into one department and asked that i be chair of both. after much discussion and negotiation, i was compensated for accepting another department as part of my already heavy teaching and administrative load. it is interesting to note that when i accepted the position of chair of early childhoodand middle grades, i didn’t feel flattered. i guess i’m getting wiser in this progression of leadership opportunities. woman #2. ok, so why do you think we were asked to assume these positions? what were the characteristics that we exhibited? what are the characteristics that make it work? do you think our paths to leadership were different from that of men? woman #1. why were we asked? i’m sorry but i think our skills were only part of it. i do not mean to blow anyone’s bubble, but i mean it. now that i think back, i really feel we were asked because they (men) knew we would be flattered and not ask the same kinds of questions a man might ask, especially the kind about tenure, promotion, and salary. ladies, we were naïve! yes, we just have to admit it. now, we are getting better, i mean smarter, but back then we were just naïve. i know a female who just accepted a position as dean and asked for an assistant up front. that is smart. did woman #3 think about asking for an assistant when she was given an extra department? maybe, but i doubt it. now what skills do we have? we are planners; we are communicators; we are doers. we have had to be all of our lives so it just comes naturally. we have never taken anything or anyone for granted so we do a lot ourselves. others call this characteristic being a workaholic. i hate that term, and it seems that term and being aggressive are used to describe women more than men. it is unfair. we are smart and we need to be given credit for that. do we have different paths to leadership than men? yes and no. i tend to think we have more time in the trenches, but then i meet people like woman #3 and i think maybe not. but woman #3 is a white female. then i meet people like woman #2 and then i think maybe not. she is a black female and she moved up pretty quick. but, both were naïve because, whereas i had been a principal and had a large number of administrative jobs behind me, neither of you had that kind of experience. still i think that if we look at the paths of women versus men, we will see more years of varied experience by women, whether in leadership positions or not, than by men prior to getting into a dean’s or chair’s position. woman #3. i like to think that i was asked to assume the chair’s position because of my work ethic and personality. the dean knew he had a hard worker who would at least try to get along with people. like woman #1, i am a workaholic. he mentioned my organizational skills, my ability to see the future and plan for it, and my tact and skill in dealing with people. boy, was i flattered! so much so that i didn’t ask for anything…except the great title of being chair. nothing about tenure, promotion, assistants, etc. when i was asked to take on another department, i successfully negotiated for compensation. all the while, i quietly contemplated if the negotiation would have been that difficult if a male had been asked to do the same job. woman #2. yes, our work ethic is different. we do. and we do everything. we don’t expect anyone else to do anything that we won’t do ourselves. we are self-directed. the leadership potential, i think, is evident. we’re smart, critical and creative thinkers, who work well with our colleagues. i am really curious to know who and why our male peers were tapped for leadership. and we always get the job done and done well. i really don’t think i would have been asked to assume a chair position, being a second-year untenured assistant professor, at another institution. yet, having returned to ohio, i have assumed the position of assistant to the chair in my second year as an untenured assistant professor in a college of education in a larger university. i just think the potential and the aptitude show. i mean, woman #3, why were you tapped to be assistant principal after just three years of teaching? your flair for leadership exudes. woman #3. what does all of this mean for us now? what do you think we do on a daily basis that allows us to survive? obviously, we are all very busy with many tasks. do you ever notice others don’t seem as busy? do we bring this on ourselves? do we work harder and longer because we’re women in a “man’s” world or because we are who we are? woman #2. i must say that i think i do what i do because of who i am. i don’t feel in competition with men—like i have to prove something. i like doing things for myself; i always have. it’s as if no one could do it as well, or like i want it done. i like multi-tasking. i like challenge; i like change. i like being in control, but i also like sharing control—team leadership. i just like to be in control of my own destiny. i guess i have a lot of confidence in what i do and how i do it. i like knowing and growing; understanding how things work. i find that i believe more in what people do than in what they say. i find that there are a number of folks in leadership positions who do not know which end is up, so i find that people have to show me that they know what they are doing and what they are talking about before i will trust enough to let go. i know that i try to do too much. i do think there is something in the how we are socialized as women that makes us want to make sure that everything comes together right. i think traditionally women are the worker bees. so when you put leading and doing together, you get us—superwomen! woman #3. like woman #2, i am independent. i too do not feel that i am competing with men…or other women for that matter. i am competing with myself. i have always had very high expectations for who i am and my actions. if i see a task that needs to be done, i like to research all angles and carry it out to fruition. i take great pride in my work, but that same pride and accomplishment is what tends to make me a very tired soul. in terms of survival, what do i do? i listen to jazz music, light candles in my office, and try to focus on one task at a time. the most important thing for me is to keep life in perspective. i am living and breathing and hopefully making a positive impact on those around me. that is what keeps me going. women’s ways of leading although the topic of our conversation is untenured women in higher education administration, our conversation itself, particularly the communicative style, is consistent with the literature on women’s ways of leading. a conceptual framework for women’s ways of leading can be found in the work of belenky, clinchy, goldberger, and tarule (1986). in their discussion of women’s ways of knowing, they describe a way of viewing the world that is characteristic of what they refer to as “constructed knowledge,” “a position in which women view all knowledge as contextual, experience themselves as creators of knowledge, and value both subjective and objective strategies for knowing” (p. 15).constructivist women “show a high tolerance for internal contradiction and ambiguity” and completely abandon the “either/or” way of thinking so characteristic of a man’s worldview—“the tendency to compartmentalize thought and feeling, home and work, self and other” (p. 137). constructivist women are devoted to “real talk,” which “requires careful listening” and “implies a mutually shared agreement that together you are creating the optimum setting so that half-baked or emergent ideas can grow”; it is “a way of connecting to others and acquiring and communicating new knowledge,” in which “domination is absent” and “reciprocity and cooperation are prominent.” in addition, constructivist women “resist premature generalization about what they would do or what should be done” and “insist on a respectful consideration of the particulars of everyone’s needs and frailties.” with an approach that is humanistic, caring, and empowering, they “show an immense respect for the world and the people in it” and resolve conflict by trying to understand it “in the context of each person’s perspectives, needs, and goals” (belenky et al., 1986, pp. 144-149). “real talk” is a style of communication that is conducive to effective leadership. managers devote a large percentage of their time to communication, and men and women have very different styles of communicating. hyman (1980) posits that effective leadership depends on effective interpersonal communication, and that “women have their own uniquely feminine communication style” that fosters good interpersonal relations and transmits “warmth, helpfulness, concern, and satisfaction” (pp. 41-43). women tend to use language that encourages community building and is more polite and cheerful than the language of men. a number of studies have documented that in verbal discourse, women are more likely than men to express courtesy, gratitude, respect, and appreciation. women show respect for their audience through listening, echoing, summarizing, polite speech, and nonantagonistic responses. (shakeshaft, 1989, p. 181) women who have achieved success in educational leadership possess characteristics and demonstrate behaviors that are essential for needed educational reform and the creation of a truly humanistic educational community. in order to be successful in the male-dominated public sphere, women in educational leadership have had to effectively integrate the best of what is stereotypically feminine (private) with the best of what is stereotypically masculine (public). the result is a female organizational culture and women’s ways of leading—a both/and worldview that is holistic, inclusive, and empowering; that can allow both women and men to escape the trap of their stereotypes; and that can potentially lead the way in bridging the gap between theory and practice in education and serve as a model for educational change. references belenky, m. f., clinchy, b. m., goldberger, n. r., & tarule, j. m. (1986). women’s ways of knowing: the development of self, voice, and mind. new york: basic books. forisha, b. l. (1981). the inside and the outsider: women in organizations. in b. l. forisha & b. h. goldman (eds.), outsiders on the inside: women & organizations (pp. 9-30). englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. hollander, e. p., & offermann, l. r. (1990). power and leadership in organizations: relationships in transition. american psychologist, 45, 179-189. hyman, b. (1980). responsive leadership: the woman manager’s asset or liability? supervisory management, 25(8), 40-43. noddings, n. (1991/1992, december/january). the gender issue. educational leadership, pp. 65-70. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. newbury, ca: corwin press. authors dr. charlotte matthews harris is an assistant professor in the college of education and human services at wright state university. dr. penny l. smith is an associate professor and chair of extended teacher education in the tift college of education at mercer university. dr. rosalind pijeaux hale is an associate professor and chair of the division of teacher education at xavier university of louisiana. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///macintosh%20hd/desktop%20folder/awpublisher.html file:///macintosh%20hd/desktop%20folder/content.html file:///macintosh%20hd/desktop%20folder/advertising.html file:///macintosh%20hd/desktop%20folder/privacy.html file:///macintosh%20hd/desktop%20folder/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com   home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international can you be an effective principal when you don‚t smoke, swing a club, or ride a harley? jacqueline e. jacobs, ph.d. jacobs, winter, 2002 perhaps, the day will come when men and women administrators will learn with, and from each other, without having to consider whether it earns (or costs them) "brownie point" with the superintendent. the increasing desire for essential leadership skills that promote collaboration, consensus building, and empowerment of others has resulted in more opportunities for women (logan, 1998) in educational administration. according to patterson (1994), there "exists a world view in which gender and racial equity issues are no longer considered to be a problem" (p. 2). and, logan (1998) suggests, "although problems still persist and much remains to be done to remove gender filters in the workplace, conditions are favorable for advancing gender equity" (p. 4). yet, at the most basic levels of interaction, administrators may not exhibit collaboration, consensus building and supportive empowerment when interacting with each other. consider this: if you don't smoke cigars, play golf, or ride a motorcycle, how effective can you be as an administrator? even when you know something about being a good principal and educational leader, if you don't participate in the social activities supported by the superintendent you can't help but wonder if your teachers and students would be better off if you did. patterson (1994) reminds us "we live in a society in which white men define and legitimate the dominant culture" (p. 3). this is a tale of how true that still is. in the beginning in 1995, a new superintendent was appointed, in a predominately middle class school district of 12,000 students on the east coast of florida. at the time there were eighteen schools (twelve http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html elementary, one special school, four middle/junior highs, and one high school), with males running the secondary and special schools, and seven males and five females in the elementary schools. not being sure that the sequence matters, i hesitate to give order to the list, but the golf outings appeared early on the scene. the superintendent in my former school district is a golfer, quite a good one by all accounts, and loves to share his golf stories. within a few days of his hiring, a number of the male principals invited him to play golf and soon came to be referred to by others as his "golfing buddies". since i am not, by nature, a cynical person, i do not choose to ascribe unsavory motive to their action. after all, they had been appointed to the principalship by a previous superintendent who supported a 'boys' club. however, as i reflect on the reaction of the female principals to the golfing relationship, i can't help but think about why we found it so aggravating. was it really because none of us played golf? or was it because we felt that the camaraderie shared on the golf course between the superintendent and our male colleagues was "off limits" to us or maybe in fact gave them an "advantage", however intangible, that we didn't have? after all, as gilligan (1982) suggests, women need connectedness in the workplace. maybe we just didn't think we "could" invite the superintendent to participate in an out-of-theworkplace activity. we never discussed our feelings about it, only shared the comments that come with seeing something happen for one school and not another when that "other" school is led by a "golfing buddy". sometimes the "something" was as simple as the fact that the superintendent talked about visiting the school of one of the golfing group and had never been to your school. was it jealousy or justified concern? new opportunities the cigar found its way into the principal arena around the spring of 1997, when the superintendent mentioned at an administrators' meeting that a "group" was getting together at a local establishment on "cigar night". in making the statement in front of the group, it could be assumed that anyone was welcome to join. several of the female principals felt that the activity was so "male" oriented that it excluded females just by its very nature. some joked that maybe we could "take up smoking" and become part of the group. others just felt that, once again, the message was clear: no women allowed. after all, we knew, as gupton & slick (1996) remind us, "old habits and time-honored gender roles are nebulous and stubbornly resistant to change throughout a society" (p. 145). this certainly appeared to be true for the men in the activities selected, and also true for the women in not addressing the behavior. the job of principal is demanding, stressful, exciting, and challenging. but, often, more than anything, it is lonely. so much responsibility, so many people counting on you, and very few people in the world that really understand what it takes to do the job. educators are frequently reminded that we have much to learn from business people. and, as a life-long learner, i'm sure that we can learn from business people. however, no one else in the world has responsibility for leading a group of adults who have to spend six to eight hours a day, with twenty-five to two hundred children or young people, while trying to teach those youngsters all the things they are expected to know. so, a chance to share time with principal colleagues has appeal. knowing that there really are others who walk in your shoes and understand all that you have to do in twentyfour hours could go a long way in helping you deal with the demands. and the chance to share with your superintendent in a relaxed, "we‚re all in this together" setting, might even make the job on its worst days, bearable. yet, the women principals often expressed that the demands of their jobs, the needs of their families, and their self-selected social responsibilities (e.g. professional groups, community service, and religious organizations) precluded such collegial time. however, i can't help but think that for women who made many things happen very successfully, we could have made time for the interaction. it seems to me, in retrospect, that our avoidance behaviors could be ascribed to the climate that exists when the activities endorsed by the district leader are not inclusive. in trying to fairly reflect on the social history that may have contributed to our feelings of disconnect, i am aware that some leaders have strong feelings about a need to keep some distance between themselves and their employees. while i, personally, think it is possible to maintain objectivity, even when you have personal relationships with employees, i understand why some administrators feel this way. however, when the leader clearly participates in and even initiates such social interaction, it is perhaps even more critical that efforts are made not to exclude. superintendents have learned not to ask principal candidates if they attend church. they certainly do not expect to ask them to attend theirs. yet, the careful examination of other social activities and their inclusiveness (or exclusiveness) has not arrived in some places, for some people. i wonder if one can learn how to include others in an environment that appears to be selective? who takes the initiative? which road will be traveled? perhaps, if we, as individuals or even a group of female administrators, had been more assertive ourselves, we could have initiated an activity just as the male principals did around golf. but, the motorcycle offer was probably the clincher for us that we "just didn‚t belong." in the spring of 1998, at another of our bi-monthly principal meetings, the superintendent told us that as a social activity, some of the male principals had gotten together and were buying motorcycles. they would all buy black motorcycles and anyone who would like to join this riding club, could get information on where they were buying these black motorcycles, and join them. i turned to one of my colleagues and commented, "i'm tempted to go out tonight and buy a purple motorcycle and join them!" she laughed and agreed that we should. but, of course, we didn't. we just talked, with other female principals, after the meeting about feeling excluded: again. so it seemed evident to us, that, even at the end of the 20th century, there was still truth in the reality that, "womenâ·are expected to conform to the leadership behavior valued and legitimated by the dominant culture" (patterson, 1994, p. 4). but, obviously not expected to socialize within that dominant culture. on our own at the initiative of one of our colleagues, the female principals started having dinner together once a month at a local restaurant. we talked about little things and big things and trivial things and important things, but we didn't have our superintendent. while it is true we didn't invite him, we developed the group almost in what we probably perceived as self-preservation. we knew we needed and wanted the camaraderie of colleagues who understood the demands of our work. but we didn't have the "connection" that seemed to come so easily for our male colleagues with the superintendent. we seemed to enjoy the "exclusivity" of our little group. i guess the men enjoyed theirs, too. could we learn to share? at the end of a century that saw women fight for equality in every arena, it would seem we could have discussed the exclusion we felt with our superintendent, or certainly our male principal colleagues. i wonder if they talked about the fact that women weren't part of their activities, or if they just expected to participate in the activities with the superintendent because of the nature of the activities and were not even aware that we were excluded? i think if we had tried to address the exclusion, the tone of exclusion was so clearly set that we would have received such a defensive reaction that we would have felt, not only excluded, but also in fact alienated. what strikes me as i think about the issue of socialization (what used to be called fraternization) in the workplace we know as schools, is that one of the goals of strong, competent principals is that they do everything possible to enhance the teaching and learning environment for which they are responsible. in our district the men seemed to have found a way to share and learn with, and from, each other. the women had to learn how to share and learn with, and from, each other. perhaps, the day will come when men and women administrators will learn with, and from each other, without having to consider whether it earns (or costs them) "brownie points" with the superintendent. because, after all, as patterson (1994) stated, "there is more at stake than just equity for women and minorities in school administration: the future success of our schools hangs in the balance" (p. 11). dr. jacqueline e. jacobs is an associate professor in the department of educational leadership & policies at the university of south carolina. dr. jacobs can be reached by e-mail at: jjacobs@gwm.sc.edu references gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. gupton, s. l., & del rosario, r. m. (1997). an analyses of federal initiatives to support women‚s upward mobility in educational administration. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association. chicago, il. gupton, s. l., & slick, g. a. (1996). highly successful women administrators: the inside stories of how they got there. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. logan, j. p. (1998, summer). school leadership for the 90‚s and beyond: a window of opportunity for women educators. advancing women in leadership journal, 1(3). retrieved december 3, 2000, from advancing women in leadership site on the world wide web: http://www.advancingwomen.com patterson, j. a. (1994, march). shattering the glass ceiling: women in school administration. paper presented at the women‚s studies graduate symposium. chapel hill, nc.   copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com . for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com . duplication without express written consent is prohibited  http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html http://www.zzn.com/ http://www.zzn.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership conversation and voice: feminist mentoring for social and political change kathleen s. sernak, ph.d. jill p. may sernak & may, spring, 2003 ...the books have become our personal intertextual guideposts in our mentoring conversations about why we speak out in defense of others when we would choose to remain silent, and how we perceive ourselves as intermediary guides for others in the academic milieu of tradition and power. although women have studied and written about their positions in the academy for some time, it is only through ground-breaking work of belenky, m. f., clinchy, b. m., goldberger, n. r. & tarule, j. m. (1986), that we have formally acknowledged that women learn, construct, and process knowledge and events differently from men. they determined that women learned in relation to one another, that collaborative learning superseded competition, and that females perceived teaching and learning in relation to self. that research in turn has led to further understandings of power æ power in relation to what is valued as the legitimate construction of knowledge and what is valued as knowledge per se. campbell (1997), gore (1993), lewis (1993) and others have commented articulately on the need to view women’s education as different in one way or another, yet recognize that such apperception, if accepted, concomitantly supposes a shift in power relations. aisenberg and harrington’s (1988) seminal work, women of academe, note that “women academics who do receive helpful career advice or direction often receive it from other women. but then there is another, sadder dimension to the role of the woman mentor in contributing to the advancement of younger women and that is the relative weakness or insecurity in many cases of the mentor’s position” (p.49). this paper further explores the position of academic women and their need to mentor and support one another in a re-definition of what is acceptable as http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html “scholarship” and as “academic writing”. it looks at current university power relationships as they affect females’ scholarship, or what is considered “sanctioned knowledge,” within the “acceptable processes” for knowledge modes. we accept the research on women’s ways of knowing (belenkey, et. al., 1986), and suggest that women not only revisit academic restraints on their writing within academe, but seek out ways of encouraging authentic and accepted writing voice through women’s traditional ways of interacting with each otheras multi-roled individuals: friends, mothers, wives, lovers, daughters, teachers, as well as scholars. in our paper we depict our coming together as colleagues and friends. we then explore the ways in which we intermingled that relationship with our mutual interest in children’s literature in order to dialogue about women’s scholarship that may be different from, but equal to, the norms for “acceptable” academic writing. in my, kathy’s, case, i completed a doctoral program as a single woman with grown children. my first position was that of a new-but-seasoned assistant professor— newly credentialed but with years of k-12, college teaching and administration behind me. i arrived with knowledge and experience, but without the recognition that it would not be valued as i was 1) a woman and 2) and older woman (sernak, 2000). my expectations of open dialogue, collaboration, and mentorship did not materialize. although the dean of the school of education and the associate dean of research were female, and although they used the rhetoric of feminist organization and pedagogy, they were held captive by the highly bureaucratic organization and expectations for administrators of university programs and schools. the rhetoric confounded me, for i wanted to believe it but saw and experienced the traditional models of top-down-authority and acquiescence to rules and norms that belied the language. having had very little mentoring in the doctoral program, i sought a mentor within my university. jill stood out because she seemed to share a similar philosophy about teaching, learning, and education with me, and willingly spoke out for her positions in faculty meetings and to colleagues. she enacted the rhetoric i heard from others æ but not towards me. we were congenial, i felt i had her respect, but she wrapped a shield around herself that allowed me to get only so close. we were on committees together, and i believed we each admired the other’s willingness to speak out in public meetings within the newly formed school of education. but, we remained solely polite acquaintances. i, jill, taught in the department of education when it had been a part of the liberal arts program at the university; i was the primary author of the school of education’s accreditation document when the department became a school. as a full professor who had taught children’s literature within education for the past twenty years, i knew that things changed very slowly in the education program. while i had hoped that a female dean might allow for more dynamic open discussions about gender issues, societal needs, and a strong philosophical base within the soon-to-be revised program, i quickly discovered that this was not to be. the administration in this new school made unilateral decisions based upon the perceived power base of various tenured faculty members. aisenberg and harrington (1988) note that women aspiring to administrative positions are educated to be competitive and to function in the bureaucratic tradition. female leaders, they observe, are aware of the need to identify and use the established power bases in order to make the changes necessary to reconceptualize and reconfigure the balance of power. there are, however, inherent problems with attempts to make change from within. change takes time and patience. despite an intellectual understanding, female staff often expect a new female administrator to address the power differentials directly and immediately, not realizing-or accepting-the need to maintain the delicate balance between gaining the support of those with established power, and simultaneously, opening spaces to provide opportunities for others to use their power. unfortunately, a woman in administration is often expected to represent the wants and needs of all the females in the unit. there also is the danger that the female administrator may become ensconced in the present imbalance of power. with the pressure to succeed as a woman in leadership, what begins as a unilateral decision to meet the expectations of those (usually male) above her so she can garner the necessary backing to accomplish her agenda, becomes the norm to meet their continued, escalating, and, often, implied demands. change from within carries with it the very real possibility that the leader will unknowingly adapt to the institution as she uses its tools, rather than effecting the changes she initially envisioned (greene, 1988; hooks, 1981). i felt that was happening in our new school. i was aware of the chances that kathy took each time she cautioned the school about plans for change or voiced an objection about a proposal. however, i did not immediately approach her about my concerns, for my position was not altogether safe. once at this university, i procured a position as visiting assistant professor that was not unlike the current trend of hiring adjunct professors. i taught in this capacity for several years, having no input into the classes i taught. furthermore, i could be called to teach as late as five days before the semester started. a woman supervised the school media program, of which i was a part. however, she did not possess the qualities that kathy described in school leadership: balancing power with caring. kathy argues for academic leadership that prefixes a sense of spirituality in caring, and writes, “to be a steward is to be accountable for the outcomes of the school or society without defining its purpose for others, or controlling, demanding compliance, or taking care of them” (sernak, 1998, p.160). as an illustration, my administrator applied for and was given a grant to televise my course in children’s literature. however, i was not consulted about or involved in writing the grant. her limited caring surfaced again when she realized i was pregnant with my second daughter. to this day i feel her frustration with me as she exclaimed, “if you are just a baby machine you can’t make it in this academic world!” i admired kathy’s work and her willingness to take risks, but as an outsider myself, i felt that she would probably fit best with those who were more directly established in education. as females working in academe, we know that relationships of interdependence and caring form the fundamental basis of both the private and public lives of women. blount (1993), gilligan (1982), grimshaw (1986), noddings (1984), and tronto (1993) have already spoken about these issues in their professional writings. further, we understand that women’s education has continually been viewed as something that fulfills a different purpose. nancy c. parrish’s (1998) recent study of hollins college pinpoints some of the early differences between the knowledge advocated for women and for men in colleges. in her discussion of the early movement for women’s colleges, parrish noted that as a member of the southern women’s educational alliance, hollins alumna eudora ramsey richardson spoke out against the narrowness in curriculum at women’s colleges in 1930. when richardson looked at the women studying in men’s universities, she dubbed them “step-sisters for whom life is rendered as intolerable as possible” (parrish, 1998, 18). throughout the early and mid-1900s women’s institutions in the south were largely controlled by white, middleto upperclass men who conceived what the proper women’s curriculum would be. thus, in 1957 hollins president john r. everett published “neglecting the wife can prove dangerous” in the hollins herald. he warned, “a woman must be prepared to move with her husband, and she must be wise enough to raise the children properly. the complexity of this modern world will not allow feminine ignorance to live with masculine learning” (p.31). he argued for “a feminine ideal æ as opposed to a feminist one” (p.31). by 1988 feminism had gained strength in the academy, changing the perception of the aim of formal education for females. margaret l. anderson (1988) observed that programs of women’s studies were formed around two goals: “to build knowledge and a curriculum in which women are agents of knowledge and in which knowledge of women transforms the male-centered curriculum of traditional institutions” (p.38). anderson suggested that women had largely been excluded from the process of creating the formalized canon of knowledge considered essential for undergraduate and graduate studies in the university, that a balanced curriculum could not simply add women’s voices to the already established male canon. she suggested that feminism should look carefully at the unarticulated paradigms “that govern what and how we teach, even when we are unaware of these ruling principles” (p.53). the dismissal we experienced from our colleagues for our independent attempts to change the knowledge in each of our courses and for the ways in which we taught eventually served as the “tie that binds,” connecting us and our ideas. we sensed our mutual dissatisfaction with the status quo in our university community. we perceived that the administration held control of the faculty through a powerful negative dialogic framed around consensus and team leadership. we independently watched a new female leader enact a bureaucracy that practiced discriminatory punishment against some of the most productive scholars because they dared to question decisions made in the leadership team. we realized jill from past experiences and kathy from continuous setbacks that each time we voiced concern we risked reprimand: jill might not be allowed to direct ph.d. studies or design graduate level courses in children’s literature; kathy might be denied tenure and promotion even if she had committed herself to the development of a strong professional record. we were both continually denied material and human resources to support projects that created dialogue about, understanding of, and the potential for social justice activism, and were buoyed only by the empty rhetoric of those with positional power. our involvement in the school’s reform was dynamic and committed. at one point jill served as the chair of the faculty affairs committee and later as coordinator of elementary education; kathy acted as facilitator for several elementary education retreats on collaboration and change and chaired the committee on multicultural education. yet, we recognized that our ideals would not see fruition in the final revised program; rather, they were dismissed without serious consideration. we realized that though we had a woman as our leader, her leadership style was not supportive. in fact, she supported the ideal of factional discord. as a scholar educated in critical theory and who had no other faculty in her division, kathy was isolated in her discussions. as a professor who believed that critical theory, philosophy, and literary analysis were basic components to effect any positive change in education, jill was viewed as inept in reconstruction discussions. our vocalizations of caution and concern about the change gradually drew us together. as we reflected on the literature and on our past experiences, we considered what we learned about women who are successful in academe and how the ways in which they thrive may affect junior faculty, particularly. dealing with setbacks, factional discord, and gaining voice are dependent upon building support among one’s colleagues. kathy assumed that because of her past experience in higher education that she had the credibility to put forth ideas she knew were well-thought out and had contributed to successful curricular reform in her former institution. that, however, was inaccurate. there were two problems. she had just received her doctorate, which put people in the mindset that she was new to academia, despite their knowledge of her ten years of work in a teacher education program, five of which were spent as chair. she also did not realize that because her voice was heard and respected previously, that the same acceptance in her new position was not guaranteed. key to that lack of awareness was her failure to note that females, benedictine sisters, lead the college where she first worked, while men held virtually all of the key positions at her current university, with only a small percentage of women holding deanships in the various colleges. female voices were heard and respected among the religious sisters (despite inequities in salaries between lay women and men). at the university, those voices were suspect and subject to male approval. the latter was clear when a panel of female full professors spoke to female graduate students and untenured female assistant professors on how to survive in the university. the advice, generally, was that because most women would be working for men, do as you’re told, don’t question, and don’t challenge until you have tenure, and then only if you know you can win. for kathy, the question was not solely survival, but change: what would it take to change the university so that women’s voices were heard as readily as men’s, and that women’s ideas, scholarship, and research were taken as seriously as their male counterparts’? those questions gave her the impetus to continue to open the door for dialogue with jill. early conversations we began to meet in one or the other’s offices where we talked about our curriculum ideals and pedagogical practices, comparing our views to those of the “reformers.” we began in the gossipy ways described by german sociologist jörg r. bergmann (1993) or feminist critic patricia meyer spacks (1985). bergmann explains that the “purest form” of gossip happens “either in a café or at a home in a living room” as the gossipers share “coffee and cake” (p.71). we began to meet over coffee at each other’s homes, and eventually, to cook and talk together. many of our conversations began by bemoaning the plight of students who would come under this “reformed” program. we talked negatively about the current jargon of the leadership team, laughing conspiratorially about words such as “stakeholder” and “collaboration.” jill suggested that a stakeholder in this case often resembled joan of arc on the stake rather than someone with a stake in the process. kathy struggled to collaborate with colleagues who consistently viewed her as the “multicultural ed. person” who taught a required course to all undergraduate elementary education students, but who had no legitimate connection to colleagues, each of whom belonged, unquestioningly, to departmentally recognized and sanctioned programs. we were aware of beginning our conversations negatively æ we needed to ventæ but also knew we would ultimately turn our attention toward the philosophical questions and underlying pedagogical and theoretical concerns that the larger community refused to acknowledge. those get-togethers eventually led to the serious function of gossip that spacks (1985) identifies when she asserts, “its participants use talk about others to reflect about themselves, to express wonder and uncertainty and locate certainties, to enlarge their knowledge of one another” (p.5). our first year of “gossip” opened our private and public spheres to each other and created a foundation fortrust. our conversations increasingly focused on the professional learning and knowledge we brought to our discussions. jill wanted to sit in kathy’s graduate class on caring and power, and kathy asked to read a copy of jill’s book. we shared ideas, readings, and questions that generated a synergy of ideas resulting in personal and professional energy and growth. we learned we had both written about minorities in literature and education, thought extensively about the role of women in contemporary society, and wondered about their roles as feminist educators. what did that mean? how did one practice feminism in academe? what effect did it have on the larger population? we finally had begun to examine how our one woman-to-woman mentoring relationship was changing our attitudes about women’s roles in academia. our insights were based on the recognition that our mentorship was reciprocal. we each informed the other; knowledge was not constrained by rank or disciplinary alliances. from the first, however, we acknowledged our frustrated experiences in academic institutions. throughout, our feminist mentorship centered on the need to transform the academic social and political climates from ones where women are imaginably considered equals as academics, but are allowed to speak only within the already established confines of male scholarship, into a feminist dialogue about women’s intellectual work. our hope was that reflection on women’s writing and “gossipy” practices could define a healthy dialogue about the academic female community’s habit of informal reading and discussions that might ultimately shape our ideals for women in academe. at first, children’s literature, as it portrays issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and social class, was the catalyst for our conversations about our roles, goals and frustrations as females in the university. however, our conversations soon veered beyond books for a younger audience. we began to consider three questions: 1) how did our reading, re-reading, and sharing of those stories about women æ written by women æ living in academia or in a paternal environment shape our individual perceptions about woman-to-woman mentoring in academia? 2) from the ensuing dialogues, how might we come to understand power in the academy as it relates to women’s perceived roles in society? 3) what is the significance of conversation and voice in intellectual thought and research practices? this paper is the result of many discussions æ intellectual, gossipy, griping, but always productive to our intellectual reflection and growth. during this past year, we have begun to find stories that might help us comprehend how our professional ideals could be webbed into the larger public attitudes about women as intellectuals and artists, but we are still far from framing a feminist stance for social and political change. our discussions have not been framed by the works of critical theorists, though we have turned to womenwho write feminist theory as our conversations evolve from the informal, unfocused position of “gossip” to the reflexive readings of the stories by women we had earlier read on our own. we wished to re-read women who had written both for themselves and a popular audience of women. we hoped that this reading might define how women’s roles are shaped by the popular press, in books and movies, and even in the classrooms at american institutions of higher learning. we wanted to discover how women describe women; what roles female fiction gives to older women established in society as compared to younger women who are being mentored by males and females; if the stories we remembered and wanted to share contained a feminine voice advocating social and political change. changing our venue we began to realize that while jill could not move from purdue university kathy would probably need to find a new professional home where others shared her interests. jill encouraged kathy to seek a position where her skills as a graduate student mentor would be used, and kathy accepted a job in rowan university’s graduate program in educational leadership. prior to kathy’s leaving for her new position, we agreed to read books by female authors of children’s, adolescent, and adult fiction. our initial negotiations of texts and authors happened via e-mail after kathy’s departure. it soon became apparent that we didn’t want to first turn to children’s or adolescent literature. our focus became women’s writing that discussed women’s roles in society. by the time we met for three “working days” in october we had identified several stories we hoped to share: virginia woolf was identified by kathy. jill suggested reading a room of one’s own and the voyage out. kathy wanted to re-read chopin’s (1972) the awakening. jill added charlotte perkins gilman’s (1973/1899) yellow wallpaper and sarah orne jewett’s (1997) white heron and country of the pointed firs. once kathy and jill had agreed to meet in october, they began planning. kathy wrote: i took out a video from our library of a british actress “giving” woolf’s room of one’s own address. you and i definitely need to watch that together. it is incredible. . . . i would very much like to read the voyage out and yellow wallpaper. i’ve been keeping notes as i read the awakening and will do so with the others. will get gilman’s concerning children as well1. kathy and jill had toyed with adding zora neal hurston and other minority writers to their list, but then jill wrote back: at this point i’m willing to deny my right to judge a-a female writers until i understand earlier women more like me better and what they say to us about ourselves. so, i’m definitely going to read gilman on children, and i will bring the book of criticism about chopin when i come. i’ve come to a conclusion that american women writers at the turn of the century faced a different literary and social venue than the women in england at the same time. i’m not sure if that would hold beyond woolf, and i have to remind myself that she is later than the other women. i guess we could look at something by another english woman in an earlier time, but who? jane austin? i’m sick of the “family” stories she writes. maybe we could watch an old movie of pride and prejudice and see if i’m wrong, but i think the reasons she has been popular with both men and women for so long and been accepted more solidly on the canon have to do with the fact that she is light and she writes about romance and her heroines always end their stories happily-ever-after--in marriage. so, maybe we could consider george eliot’s mill on the floss? we can talk about it when i get there. i’ll bring woolf, chopin, some [emily] dickinson, gilman and perhaps hurston. kathy was balancing the rigors of a new job in a new location, and she informed jill, ave not read as much as i wanted, but i have been swamped with the new reading material for my courses i’ve been asked to pitch hit while the prof is in malta. will tell you more about that when you get here. have read a room of one’s own, and the awakening. am in the midst of a voyage out and hope to get to yellow wallpaper before you arrive. don’t have time to address your questions now as have meetings and classes all day. personal voices within literary conversations our process for guiding our mutual reading began in a manner congruent with sara mills’s (1995)discussionof feminist stylistics: first, we need to make a close textual analysis of the text, identifying certain features of form literary conventions, syntax, lexis, genre and so on: the clues to interpretation. second, we need to make some generalized predictions about groups of readers’ background knowledge of language, of literary conventions and of their models of the world. by uniting these two kinds of information, it should be possible to build up a picture of how specified social groups might read a text. (p. 35) kathy picked jill up at the airport and drove her home. we became engaged in a conversation centered on the use of first person narrative and the dilemma of older women as mentors. we turned to virginia woolf (1991/1915). kathy confessed that she did not enjoy reading the voyage out, that she had not been able to finish it. jill had brought her copy of the book, and she had marked several passages that she wanted to talk about with kathy. however, we both realized that we weren’t willing (or ready) to discuss this book. kathy had rented the film version of virginia woolf’s a room of one’s own (shepherd, 1995), and we watched the film together that first night. we began an animated conversation about woolf’s ideal of a room of one’s own. kathy suggested she was not personally a part of the feminine intellectual ideal if one had to have independence and money to study and to write; she had always lived with little money. jill commented that having a good husband who made enough money to buy the room would not allow women to become scholars; in her experience, woman’s work as housekeeper had to be finished prior to sitting at one’s writing desk. as we talked about virginia woolf, we sensed that she had experienced these same frustrations. both kathy and jill thought that woolf was not telling her audience that she, as a woman who had been writing, had a room of her own. rather, she was bemoaning that the room she describes is an idealized place she hopes for, not one she had ever experienced. still, we sensed that the enclosed atmosphere contained duplicity in its imagery. woolf (1957/1929) writes, the rooms differ so completely; they are calm or thunderous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a prison yard; are hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers æ one has only to go into any room in any street for the whole of that complex force of femininity to fly in one’s face. how should it be otherwise? for women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. but this creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. (p. 87) woolf asks her reader, “ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?” (p. 88). we immediately noted woolf’s use of description: woman as an isolated artist; the confines of the room; the constancy of woman’s place in-doors. at the same time, woolf allowed us to pause and consider what “that complex force of femininity” was had caused the very walls to be “permeated by their creative force” (p. 87). and we acknowledged that our “rooms” had been very different, both during our youth and once we were married. our conversation lasted long into the night. we turned from woolf to chopin (jill didn’t like the woman in the awakening and couldn’t sympathize with her as a character; kathy found the portrayal honest. then we bounded off to read part of gilman’s concerning children since kathy hadn’t had time to read it before jill arrived. kathy was struck by gilman’s discussion of education. she began to wonder if gilman had influenced john dewey. she had recently read something in dewey that she felt sounded “almost like plagiarism.” at the end of the night, kathy took her dog for a walk to have some singular time to think while jill wrote in her journal: are there “roles” that set our imagery of women up? journals of the same period? books on victorian reading? how do women write for a female audience? letters, diaries, etc. of gilman chopin jewett woolf how do these people fit in today’s literary studies? journal articles? (when?--70s, 80s) presentations at mla, mmla (issues with topics) norton anthologies women’s studies programs are there mirrors in the stories that are timeless, universal? for instance, “fashioning women to fit into society” in the morning we began our conversations all over, this time spending a long time discussing why we might view particular characters in divergent ways. we used the background knowledge of our private and public experiences to discuss our worldviews, and read and discussed portions of the literature we had gathered to enhance our knowledge of ourselves as both intellectuals and artists in the academy. the process for our project is not linear. some of it has come from remembrances of our initial tentative contacts, the gentle experiments in trust, the growing awareness of a developing mentoring relationship, and the meandering of our hearts and minds as we tried to understand how we were teaching. we have come to realize we are informally mentoring each other about both our personal and professional ways of researching and writing. we have traveled beyond our common interest in children’s literature and extended our interests to women authors who contributed not only to our professional relationship, but also to our particular explorations of women’s place in academia. during our first extended "work"2 session at kathy’s new venue, we admitted as we drove to kathy’s new university that we hadn’t had so much intellectual fun in years. we confessed that though we had really used our brains and talked about women in society we actually felt as if we had been playing rather than working. although we acknowledged that we could not sustain such “playfulness” for great lengths of time, we did realize that the work we did revitalized us. our shared interest in children’s literature enabled us to see our work and “hardships” in a different light. we began to view our work as a continuation of that of women writers before us. we were not victims, but women carrying on the work for a different scholarship and a parity of acceptance with males within the academy. reading and reflection “to educate women to take themselves seriously at all is, in itself, a subversive act” (aisenberg & harrington 1988, p.139). perhaps that is why we felt out of place in our university: we taught each other to take ourselves and our ideas seriously, and to see ourselves as legitimate members of the academy, despite the values we held counter to it. as good teachers know, however, learning a concept is far from internalizing it. practice in living what we intellectually believed was necessary. through that need to try on in order to wear comfortably, we learned the importance of women-mentoring-women. there was not the need to explain ourselves to each other, or to rationalize our gossiping. we knew the code and the culture of womenspeak. our mentorship began simply. we found soulmates in our mutual delight and admiration for children’s literature. we shared our favorite stories, ones that we particularly liked when our own children were young; we debated the merits of past and current caldecott and newbery award winners. weaving in and out of those discussions were periodic wonderings about female children’s authors, the kinds of books they wrote, and the effect those stories had on children and their perceptions of gender and diversity. from those shared “office dialogues,” we shifted the place of our conversations into the social world. our gossip became more intimate as our focus became less academic discussion and more sharing of our professional lives through personal lenses. little by little we exposed bits of our inner-selves, beginning to trust that the other would hold those pieces with gentleness and respect. our private and the public lives shifted, one or the other foregrounding, but both always present. there was no need to explain or defend. our talk was natural, the process understood, accepted, and expected. the intimacy of our homes eventually emerged as our gathering place. we shared meals together, cooking, and gossiping. we opened the private spaces of our persona via our homes, as well as through our conversations both at work and in leisure. trust resulted. the personal and the professional merged as we began to understand our need to be connected through more than the academic. it became crucial to comfortably discuss the mundane aspects of our lives as well as the intellectual that was critical to our academic life, for the former inspired our interpretations of the latter. the relationship, which we cognizantly watched grow into friendship, had evolved into academic mentorship as well. questions pertaining to the importance of women mentoring women, not solely for success in the university, but as sponsors who advocate taking women’s creativity and conversations seriously, surfaced in our discussions. in chopin’s (1972), jewett’s (1992, 1973/1899), and gilman’s (1996, 1997) writings, we found poignant examples of women’s mentoring relationships. we specifically noted mature, experienced women aiding women on the cusp of a not-quite-conscious desire to extend the sexual and relational self, fostered by social encouragement, to include the intellectual, active self, aspects not revered by the prevailing social and institutional norms for change (aisenberg & harrington, 1988). we noted that artisans often mentored younger women, but the former were viewed by those young heroines with neutral skepticism since they had isolated themselves from the worlds of family and social power. we realized that more traditional older women often pushed younger women into conventional feminine roles. we have begun to acknowledge that women can change other women in both negative and positive ways. our year’s work has caused us to form many new questions: what sessions do we choose to attend at professional conferences? when and how do we empower others? how do women’s experiences that are personal and reflexive become professional? how do we activate our readings? how do we value the men in our profession? to ask how one might practice feminism in academe seems like an oxymoron. yet, after many discussions concerning our experiences as teachers, writers, and researchers, and our attempts to make sense of our experiences within the framework of our feminist3 beliefs, we realize that is our question. note that our concern does not revolve around discussing or debating feminist theory and precepts, but around enactment of them. how do we carry out our beliefs? how do we equate those based on the legitimate value of caring, nurturing, interdependency, within our understandings of self in relation to others? how can we create and sustain a sense of community where individuals are no more important than the whole, and at the same time recognize the whole derives its meaning from the individual? how could women’s mentoring fit within a system entrenched in hierarchical relationships, sexual exploitation and silencing of women and other non-hegemonic persons, and the other myriad of taken-for-granted power-as-control relations? through our writing and research, through our teaching, and through the business of our departments we have wrestled with the telling of complicated themes of power that disagreeably affect women, people of color, persons with disabilities, homosexuals, and those dealing with multiple discriminations. we have sought to go beyond simply re-telling our experiences, and to use our work as a catalyst to do shared acts of deconstruction. at the same time, we realize that we are not yet ready to seek ways of constructing communities that are nurturing and interdependent within the academy. in the end, we hope to use our newly-founded acts of feminism as models for legitimating difference both within and outside the walls of academe. at this point we are not ready to enact a code. we feel a need to explore more feminine works. mentoring for change we began by returning to our literary backgrounds, by choosing stories written by women that suggested ways that women mentor each other in a banal social and/or political setting where interaction is controlled by rules of the already established power base. we have returned to fiction, reading and re-reading in order to see what the authors suggest to us about change within our private, social, and professional situations. often, however, we find more questions within the texts than answers, and our conversations return to individual experiences, possible ways of changing our views about academia, and new ways of reading old traditions. our reflections on the stories and lives of women we read about have suggested that women’s sphere is multi-layered and circuitous: both the intellectual and the emotional touch when we talk. as we returned to the women who had earlier affected one of us through their writing, we have come to realize that our readings are not always the same. as we explore those similarities and differences, we realize that our conversations have mentored us to new actions and caused us to pose new questions. these fictional stories do not provide concrete answers about women's place in academic. rather, the books have become our personal intertextual guideposts in our mentoring conversations about why we speak out in defense of others when we would choose to remain silent, and how we perceive ourselves as intermediary guides for others in the academic milieu of tradition and power. while our conversations have not established a particular agenda for social and political change, they have shown us that our interactions on women’s fiction can guide our interpretation of how the personal feminine voice both the written and the spoken might transform current professional ideals for feminine mentorship within academe. footnotes 1 e-mail conversation is recorded as sent. as such, it is often colloquial in style. this writing has become an informal activity that allows our immediate ideas about our mutual readings to flow rapidly and regularly. 2 our "work" consisted of dialogue and discussion about the readings mentioned above; independent writing about our personal/professional understandings about the female characters, the writersõ intents about them, and ways in which we came to better understand our positions, womenõs mentoring women, and our scholarship within a university; dialogues about our writings; and questions to pursue regarding our work together regarding womenõs mentoring and scholarship. through our belief in social activism to change the place of women and their writing in the academy, we worked to enact dewey's ideas of freedom, not just for self, but for the community: "éthe basic freedom is that of freedom of mind and of whatever degree of freedom of action and experience is necessary to produce freedom of intelligence" (quote in greene, 1988, p.43). in essence, however, our work blended our personal and professional lives, the former providing a lens from which to view and understand the latter. our work resulted in two conference presentations and two papers, accomplished together. we continue to explore traditional ways of learning and how they affect women in academe and their scholarship. 3 we conceptualize feminism and social activism within the framework of freire's notion of conscientization, the possession of critical consciousness, understanding and addressing the reality one lives, having the consciousness of that reality, knowing that society and be made and remade by human action and organized groups, and transforming school and society away from authoritarian relations and undemocratic, unequal distribution of power (lankshear, 1993; schor, 1993). references aisenberg, n., & harrington, m. (1988). women of academe: outsiders in the sacred grove. amherst: university of massachusetts press. anderson, m. (1988). changing the curriculum in higher education. in e. minnich, j. o’barr, & rosenfeld (eds.), reconstructing the academy: women’s education and women’s studies (pp. 36-68). chicago: university of chicago press. belenky, m. f., clinchy, b. m., goldberger, n. r., & tarule, j. m. (1986). women’s ways of knowing: the development of self, voice, and mind. new york: basic books,inc. bergmann, j. r. (1993). discreet indiscretions: the social organization of gossip. trans. john bednarz, jr. new york: aldine de gruyter. blount, j. m. (1993). one postmodern feminist perspective on educational leadership: and ain’t i a leader? in spencer j. maxcy (ed.), postmodern school leadership: meeting the crisis in educational administration (pp.4760). westport,cn: praeger. campbell, j. (1997). a real vexation: student writing in mount holyoke’s culture of service, 1837-1865. college english, 597, 767-788. chopin, k. (1972). the awakening. new york: bard books/avon books. everett, j. r. (1957). neglecting the wife can prove dangerous. hollins herald, p. 31. gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. gilman, c. p. (1973/1899). the yellow wallpaper. afterword by e.r. hedges. old westbury, ny: the feminist press. gilman, c. p. (1992). herland. in b. h. solomon (ed.), herland and selected stories by charlotte perkins gilman (pp. 3-146). new york: penguin books usa, inc. gore, j. (1993). the struggle for pedagogies: critical and feminist discourses aw regimes of truth. new york: routledge. greene, m. (1988). the dialectic of freedom. new york: teachers college press. grimshaw, j. (1986). philosophy and feminist thinking. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. hooks, b. (1981). ain't i a woman: black women and feminism. boston: south end press. jewett, s. o. (1996). the country of the pointed firs and other fiction. oxford: oxford university press. jewett, s. o. (1997). a white heron. cambridge, ma: candelwick press. lankshear, c. (1993). functional literacy from a freirean point of view. in p. mclaren & p. leondard (eds.), paulo freire: a crticial encounter (pp. 90-118). new york: routledge. lewis, m. (1993). without a word: teaching beyond women’s silence. new york: routledge. mills, s. (1995). feminist stylistics. london: routledge. noddings, n. (1984). caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. berkley, ca: university of california press. parrish, n. c. (1998). lee smith, annie dillard, and the hollins group: a genesis of writers. baton rouge: louisiana state press. schor, i. (1993). education is politics: paulo freire’s critical pedagogy. in p. mclaren & p. leondard (eds.), paulo freire: a crticial encounter (pp. 25-35). new york: routledge. sernak, k. (1998). school leadership: balancing power with caring. new york: teachers college press. sernak, k. (2000, january). dinosaurs among the ivy. initiatives, 1, article 0001. retrieved from http//www.nawe.org/initiatives/jan00/html shepherd, b. (producer) & garland, p. (adapter/director). (1995). virginia woolf: a room of one’s own. princeton, nj: films for the humanities spacks, p. m. (1985). gossip. chicago: university of chicago press. tronto, j. c. (1993). moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethnic of care. new york: routledge. woolf, v. (1957/1929) a room of one’s own. new york: harcourt, brace & world, inc. woolf, v. (1955/1927). to the lighthouse. new york: harcourt, brace & world, inc. woolf, b. (1991). the voyage out. new york: a signet classic/penguin books. authors dr. kathleen s. sernak is an associate professor in educational leadership at rowan university, glassboro, new jersey. jill p. may is a professor of literacy and language at purdue university, west lafayette, indiana. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership mentoring females and minorities into higher education janice patterson, ph.d. karen dahle, ed.d. mary nix, ph.d. loucrecia collins, ed.d. gypsy abbott, ph.d. patterson, dahle, nix, collins, & abbott,special rwe issue, fall, 2002 if i wish to define myself, i must first of all say: 'i am a woman'; on this truth must be based all further discussion. (de beauvior, l952 p. xv.). whether we see through the lens of gender or ethnicity, the perception of self defines our work. the loss of women and people of color from tenure earning positions in higher education argues for more productive initiatives if we are to attract, retain, and promote female and minority faculty (howard-vital & morgan, 1993). the literature overwhelmingly supports the benefits of mentoring in easing the loneliness and confusion that can derail women and people of color in higher education (howard-vital & morgan). descriptions of mentoring in professional literature suggest that the relationships between individuals that perpetuate traditional academic culture. professional guidance includes assistance with research and writing, teaching, service, and grant writing. social support includes shared outings and recreational activities. few empirical studies exist on mentoring among faculty in academic settings. qualitative research offers thick descriptions of some programs, e.g., the work in colorado that investigated faculty mentoring in schools, colleges, and departments of education (goodwin, stevens, & bellamy, 1998) and the faculty-mentoring program at montclair state university (pierce, 1998). yet, research documents that the experiences of female and minority professors has been reported to be markedly different than their colleagues in terms of scholarship, advising assignments, teaching loads, as well as service to the community, profession, and institution. these professionals feel their load is skewed disproportionately toward advising, teaching, and service while the institution rewards research and publishing. several researchers (bensimon, ward, & tierney, 1994; granger, 1993; spann, 1990) report that faculty of color often have heavier loads of service and committee work than their colleagues. too http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html often, faculty of color feel they cannot refuse an invitation to serve on a committee or to work in the local community for fear of reprisals from other faculty. time spent in committees and other service activities are highly valued by many members of the faculty, particularly if the committee purpose is to address minority issues. however, the reality is that the time consumed subtracts from that available for research and publishing, the road to retention. for women of color, the path is unusually thorny as they often find themselves outside the informal networks that may exist for other women. this isolation is particularly limiting, considering that association with senior colleagues is a major factor in junior faculty's success and tenure. for instance, bjork and thompson (1989, p. 350) affirmed the critical nature of establishing relationships with senior faculty “recognized for excellence in teaching, research, publishing, and service.” further, granger (1993) reminded the reader that those who are mentored frequently gain access to resources and, indeed, even secure faculty positions. successful women establish mentoring relationships with both female and male mentors. research by ibarra (2000) of the harvard business school highlighted that many women were receiving “concrete, gender-related career advice” from more experienced women then they could get from men. two factors appear important for success: (a) consistently exceeding performance expectations, and (b) developing a style with which males are comfortable (duff, 1999; garner, 1994). in the quest to understand organizations, burrell and hearn (1989) argued the postmodernist perspective on a science that emphasizes logic, data, and other facets of a production model that are no longer relevant. instead, postmodernism places emphasis on lived and "deconstructed" experiences, stressing a cooperative network and developing sources of data from nontraditional venues including metaphor, description, explanations, and action research. the postmodernism stresses sense making; thus, requiring cooperative work between two or more people. gergen (1993, p. 214) argued “to control our own defining of what is truth, we must look to the practice of action research in which subjects speak for themselves and control their voices so that others do not manipulate them.” purpose using postmodernist theory as a starting point, the junior faculty involved in the mentoring program at the university of alabama at birmingham (uab) school of education (soe) began an action research project to investigate the perceptions of mentors and mentees in a sanctioned mentoring program. this paper presents a brief examination of those perceptions with a particular emphasis on mentees’ experiences on relationship, gender, and race. the most unique feature of the program is that these new faculty members were mentored by a tenured faculty member through the publication process using their own experiences as mentees as the focus of the research. conceptual model bolman and deal (1997) discuss the value of using new “frames” and “lenses” as we stretch to see organizations in new and different ways. the more perspectives available, the more likely it is that a rich, complex picture will emerge. bolman and deal proposed four frames that people rely on when viewing organizational behavior: human resource, structural, political, and symbolic. the human resource frame emphasizes the needs of individuals and the importance of a trusting, caring environment. those who see through a structural frame stress a linear process goals, efficiency, policies, a clear chain of command, and results. the political frame makes clear that the world has scarce resources and is composed of power and control; skills in conflict, negotiations, and compromise are key. finally, the symbolic frame highlights meaning and symbols, rituals, stories, ceremonies, or other ways that faith, hope, and meaning are communicated (deal & peterson, 1999). mentees may only see the higher education institution through one frame unless encouraged to look more broadly. for instance, some mentors may advise mentees to approach tenure as though following a policy that establishes goals, standards, and other specifics in teaching, research, and service. some may advise that junior faculty's work should revolve around individual needs, what can be contributed to the organization and to creating a caring, trusting environment. still others may see the route to tenure as a political process based on the power and control exercised behind the scenes. finally, some mentors and mentees may see the cultural or symbolic side of seeking tenure and emphasize actions that are meaningful to others, e.g., visibility in service or scholarship. therefore, it is suggested that successful mentor/mentee pair could use the bolman and deal (1997) model as a framework for describing their experiences. this model is comprised of four frames: (a) human resource, (b) structural, (c) political, and (d) symbolic.methodology context the school of education (soe) at the university of alabama at birmingham (uab) is located in an urban setting. university faculty and administrative turnover in recent years has been high because of the large number of individuals who have either been fired or retired. these events have created a greater than usual amount of uncertainty for faculty members seeking tenure and promotion. the soe has undergone considerable scrutiny by the uab president; thus, forcing a mandated increase in undergraduate enrollment. the state of alabama significantly reduced funds for education and the impact on faculty is no raises and insufficient faculty to cover required courses. in addition, as is often the case in university settings, tenured faculty were engaged in their own activities and directed little energy toward the acculturation of new faculty. this resulted in many new faculty describing themselves as “feeling alone” and unsure how to become part of the soe. although one department routinely assigned mentors to new faculty, new faculty was, generally, left to their own devices in establishing themselves. although the university has been designated as a minority serving institution, few faculty in the soe are of minority background. retention of qualified minority faculty has been extremely difficult. within this context, the soe faculty development committee began developing a mentoring program in fall 2000. as a starting point, using postmodernist theory and the four frames as described by bolman and deal (1997), those involved in the mentoring program at the uab soe began an action research project to investigate the perceptions of mentors and mentees in this administrativelysanctioned mentoring program. this paper presents an examination of those perceptions with a particular emphasis on mentees’ reports relative to relationship, race, and gender. population and sample all 14 nontenured faculty who had begun teaching in the uab soe during the 1999-2000 academic year were invited to join the mentoring program. there were five females and two males who chose to participate and they comprised the sample described in this study. the mentors included five males and one female. data collection there were four sources of qualitative data collected. first, mentors and mentees developed descriptions of their personal expectations of the mentoring process. second, mentors and mentees maintained field notes on activities, assistance, and experiences that described the mentoring process. third, detailed group meeting notes provided rich descriptions of “confidential” issues and concerns not revealed in the other data sources. fourth, written survey instruments, developed based on the theory of bolman and deal (1997), were developed for data collection (see appendix a). specific items on the surveys were created from a collective review of the field notes of the mentees. questions about the mentoring experience were designed to capture the thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of both mentors and mentees. data analysis procedures qualitative data from the responses of both mentors and mentees were analyzed using a phenomenological approach. actual analysis of data was conducted using the matrix approach recommended by miles and huberman (1994). this method provided a structure for analyses within the two groups as well as across the groups. initially, all data was put in the matrix format with the four dimensions of the theoretical framework across the top of the matrix and the concepts of relationship, gender, and race on the vertical axis of the matrix. responses to items in each of the categories were recorded for use in content analysis. the purpose of the content analysis was to examine the data for emerging themes. findings the results of this study confirm the position of bolman and deal (1997) that rich, diverse points of view emerge when multiple lenses are used to view organizational behavior. the co-mingling present in the findings confirms the efficacy of viewing the tenure earning process through all lenses available. three of the themes that emerged were (a) relationships, (b) race, and (c) gender. relationships. the mentor/mentee relationships were based on prior research; therefore, the mentees selected mentors using expert status and prior relationships as the primary criteria. two of the mentees were assigned a mentor within their department. these mentees were pleased with the mentor assigned and they maintained that mentor for this study. four of the mentees approached the selection of an expert mentor based on the structural lens and their perspectives of what it would take to achieve tenure. one mentee reported, “i knew that i needed to publish nationally to get tenure. i wanted a mentor who could guide me effectively in conducting research and getting published quickly. i also wanted someone who was active in national and international organizations.” one of the mentees selected a mentor based on shared professional interests. mentees used the human resource (hr) lens to guide their selection as reflected in the importance they assigned trust and confidentiality. the hr lens manifested a trust that the mentor would be emotionally and physically available and conversations between the mentor and mentee wereconfidential. because of the newness of some of these relationships, there was a natural wariness in some cases that changed as the relationship matured. several mentees echoed the voice of one who said, “i wanted someone who would become a colleague, whom i could trust with any issue… confidentiality, lack of gossip and politics is important to me.” in some cases, confidentiality was not addressed directly but was assumed, as with the mentee who said, “we never really addressed it. i just have trust and honor in my mentor and it's never been an issue for me. i would not hesitate to raise the issue if a question ever arose that brought that trust under suspicion.” other mentees reported a more direct approach; “initial promises were made on both sides that our conversations are held in confidence. i absolutely believe that is the case.” another mentee said, “[confidentiality was] addressed at the beginning…actually before this process began. i have full confidence in our agreement.” an unanticipated dimension of trust was expressed by one mentee who addressed the research component of the mentoring program, “because of the emphasis in the mentor project on research, i also wanted someone who would keep commitments and be interested and supportive of the research component [of the mentoring project].” at the symbolic level, mentees reported the financial and political commitment provided to the group. the dean provided funding for lunches for group meetings and transportation for mentees to present the findings of this project at the mid-south educational research association. the symbolic aspect of the mentor/mentee relationships reflected trust in a different sense. the mentees saw symbolic value in the mentors being available or communicating faith in their abilities (deal & peterson, 1999). because each of the mentors was professionally active and engaged, mentees recognize that time was a precious commodity and, when shared, symbolized the value placed by the mentor on the relationship. one mentee was very explicit about the symbolic message she received from her male mentor: “my mentor said that women professors couldbecomenomads wandering from university to university. my mentor is taking careful steps to guide me so that i will not become a nomad.” without exception, mentees' reported successes as a result of the mentor's guidance. responses included improved writing skills, grant work, publications, as well as presentations at regional and national meetings. another mentee pointed to specific acts by the mentor, “ …two quick publications (single authorship) and another article that we're currently doing together …introductions to key players at national meetings, a safety net from getting involved in internal politics, wise counsel about the steps necessary to get tenure.” one respondent pointed to the value of the mentor's activities in assisting the mentee progress toward tenure, “i have written two chapters for a book he is editing for spring release in our field; assisted with additional writing contract and suggestions for journal articles; provided a sample of his own resume; very articulate regarding the tenure process.” other examples included a mentor who “connected” a mentee with a publishing company for a proposed book contract. one of the mentor/mentee pairs focused on teaching and the use of technology in higher education. finally, mentees reported that their feelings of isolation were being suppressed and friendships were forming as a result of the mentees connections with their mentors as well as other mentees. race. race, a theme that emerged from these data, has been described as issues for minority faculty across the united states (alger, 2000). too often, we educators examine dominance and social injustices in history and fail to consider current inequities that may be perpetuated in our own institutions. those of us from dominant racial groups must look inside ourselves and our workplaces and be aware that these processes are not always comfortable. of the 10 mentors/mentees members who answered questions about race, nine were white and one was black; therefore, we believe that a discussion of white privilege is merited. fox (2000) defines white privilege as “pervasive and systemic ways that being white confers unearned advantage in u.s. society,” and she argues, “white privilege is often blatantly obvious to targeted groups but nearly invisible to whites until its various manifestations are pointed out” (p. 47). examples of white privilege mentioned in our data were the freedom from being used as a token on committees and the privilege of publishing comfortably in a broad array of journals. a mentee wrote, “my colleagues of color at other institutions tell me that they’re often placed on committees as token minorities. they feel particularly overwhelmed with committee work. as a white woman, that is not a dilemma that i face.” she also wrote, “while i have published in several african american studies journals and not had anyone question the quality of that scholarship, one of my black colleagues says that she has to limit the number of african american journals that she publishes in so critics (largely whites) won’t say that she’s not a true scholar.” biased faculty members may cloak their biases by criticizing minorities who publish in minority journals for “lack of rigor.” consequently, minority professors may feel constrained in the area of publishing. alger (2000) espouses that the traditional criteria applied in evaluations for promotion and tenure often appear to be neutral, but in practice they can have disparate effects on minority scholars. he argues, “in analyzing research, reliance on narrow definitions of ‘merit’ that emphasize publication in traditional journals may limit new or emerging areas of scholarship or practical applications of theory to real-life problems” (p. 160). similarly, garza (1993) maintains that institutions “need to assess what constitutes rigorous and legitimate scholarship, and its relationship to institutional barriers that may help maintain ethnic division” (p. 40). the nature as well as the extent of committee work may also be called into question. all committee work may not be valued equally when tenure and promotion decisions are made. in their book chapter entitled “developmental relationships of black americans in the academy,” bowman, kite, branscombe, and williams (1993) warn, service on minority-related committees is often pushed on minority faculty, yet those activities are often not as valued as other activities in tenure decisions. untenured faculty may well receive a mixed message if senior faculty encourage them to fulfill certain roles but later do not reward them for those efforts. (p. 36) bowman and colleagues conclude their chapter with the following words of caution. “mentors should understand that the adjustment issues of the typical new faculty member will probably be exacerbated for new black american faculty members” (p. 41). recognizing the issue of “white privileges” for the first time can generate emotional responses such as guilt or sadness on the part of whites. when analyzing our data on race and discussing privileges, one white woman expressed her regret saying, “i never thought about these things before.” thus, participation in the mentor/mentee study served to highlight ways in which minorities in academia are sometimes regarded. our research supports the findings of gregory (1995) who concludes “it is evident that we still have much work to do to encourage the permanence of black women scholars. regardless of their talent, a faculty member cannot reasonably function in an inhospitable academic environment” (p. 96). he also purports that departments can promote the careers of african american females by (a) encouraging service activities with system wide visibility and providing faculty incentives and rewards for service overload; (b) accepting differences in teaching styles and research emphasis; and (c) encouraging collaborative projects by providing resources and funding. gender.the literature consistently highlights the differences in the mentoring process for females and males (duff, 1999; west, 2001). however,in this study, gender was not identified as a salient issue across any of the conceptual areas. the composition of the soe programs and departments was either predominantly male or had only one full female professor in a tenure earning track. because the ultimate goal of the mentoring program is to achieve tenure and promotion, it is not surprising that with the single exception, all mentees selected a male mentor because of their availability, proven track record, and tenured status. mcguire (1993) identifies instrumental and socioemotional support as two types of support which mentors can offer their mentees. examples of socioemotional support include challenging assignments, increased exposure, and leadership opportunities. typically, women receive more socioemotional support in the mentoring process than do their male colleagues (mcguire). once again, gender differences were not demonstrated by the responses illustrated in these examples. every mentee reported increased opportunities for publishing, presentations at national and international conferences, and recommendations for appointments to national organizations. mcguire (1993) noted that males typically receive more instrumental support as defined by the political construct in this study. however, respondents reported no difference in female and male mentees level of instrumental support. their mentors were described generally as “both powerful and nurturing, depending on the circumstance.” mentees believed that mentors used their power and influence to protect them. in addition, mentees stated that their mentors showed confidence in them by extending formal praise, both publicly and privately, and “asking for [my] perspective on issues.” finally, we would be remiss not to acknowledge the administrative and final support for this project that the mentoring program has received from the male dean’s office. unanticipated outcomes we did not anticipate the extent to which the mentoring program would provide a forum for connections among the mentees and with other faculty members that led to new opportunities. we were particularly surprised by the productive relationships developed among five of the mentees, all females. they reported protecting each other, including their mentee colleagues in presentations, writings and publications, and teaching experiences. because the mentees are based in different departments, the relationships would have been unlikely without the mentoring program. this yields further evidence for bolman and deal’s (1997) argument that multiple lenses are needed; the group now looks through multiple frames during their monthly social meetings. the leader of the mentoring program, a tenured full professor, is included in the monthly social meetings. finally, other faculty in the soe has offered unsolicited support for the mentoring program whether they are tenured professors or new faculty. several said, “i wish i had a mentoring program.” conclusions mentees reported that they gained significant tacit knowledge that helped them understand and negotiate the particular culture of the university through the four lenses posited by bolin and deal (1997). these lessons came from both direct instruction and modeling. they included specific knowledge about research, teaching, and service, as well as the more elusive aspects of professionalism, integrity, and the ability to get along with other colleagues and professionals. of course, the ultimate “result” will be the number of mentees who are retained and obtain tenure at the university. to date, two of the five mentees have submitted their professional portfolios for the mid-tenure review process. both mentees have received positive feedback and encouragement from their department chairs. references alger, j. (2000, november 23). how to recruit and promote minority faculty: start by playing fair. black issues in higher education, 17(20), 160-161. bensimon, e. m., tierney, w. g., & ward, k. (1993). the tenure track faculty study. report prepared for the commission for women, pennsylvania state university. bjork, l. g., & thompson, t. e. (1989). the next generation of faculty: minority issues. education and urban society, 21(3), 341-355. bolman, l., & deal, t. (1997). reframing organizations: artistry, choice and leadership (2nd ed.). san francisco: jossey-bass. bowman, s. r., kite, m. e., branscombe, n. r., & williams, s. (1993). developmental relationships of black americans in the academy. in a. j. murrell, f. j. crosby, & r. j. ely (eds.), mentoring dilemmas: developmental relationships within multicultural organizations (pp. 21-46). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. burrell, g., & hearn, j. (1989). the sexuality of organization. in j. hearn, d. sheppard, p. tancredsheriff, & g. burrell (eds.), the sexuality of organization (pp. 1-28). london: sage publications. burrell, k. (1989). warranting voice and the elaboration of the self. in j. shotter & k. gergen (eds.), texts of identity (pp. 235-261). london:sage. de beauvoir, s. (1952). the second sex. new york: alfred knopf. deal, t., & peterson, k. (1999). shaping school culture: the heart of leadership. san francisco: josseybass publishers. duff, c. s. (1999). learning from other women. new york: american management association. fox, h. (2000). when race breaks out: conversations about race and racism in college classrooms. new york: teachers college press. garner, s. n. (1994). mentoring lessons. women's studies quarterly, 22, 6-13. garza, h. (1993). second class academics: chicano/latino faculty in u.s. universities. new directions for teaching and learning, 53, 33-41. gergen, k. (1993). refiguring self and psychology. brookfield, vt: dartmouth publishing co. goodwin, l., stevens, e., & bellamy, g. (1998). mentoring among faculty in schools, colleges, and departments of education. journal of teacher education, 49(5), 334-344. granger, m. w. (1993). a review of the literature on the status of women and minorities in the professorate in higher education. journal of school leadership, 3(2), 121-135. gregory, s. (1995). black women in the academy: the secrets to success and achievement. new york: university press of america. howard-vital, m., & morgan, r. (1993). african american women and mentoring. east lansing, mi: national center for research on teacher learning. (eric document reproduction service no. ed360425) ibarra, h. (2000). making partner: a mentor's guide to the psychological journey. harvard business review, 78(2), 146-155. mcguire, g., & reskin, b.(1993). authority hierarchies at work: the impacts of race and sex. gender and society, 7(4), 487-506. miles, m., & hubermann, m. (1994). qualitative data analysis: expanded source book. london: sage. pierce, g. (1998). developing new university faculty through mentoring. journal of humanistic counseling, education & development, 37(1), 27-50. spann, j. (1990). retaining and promoting minority faculty members: problems and possibilities. madison, wi: university of wisconsin system. west, m. (1995). women faculty: frozen in time. academe, 81(4), 26-39. appendix a university of alabama at birmingham school of education faculty professional development committee mentor survey instructions: please respond to the questions below in narrative form. if you do not wish to respond to a particular question or the question is not applicable to your mentor/mentee relationship, please record na. your confidentiality will be guaranteed by dr. abbott who will be assigning id numbers before analysis begins. please return the survey to dr. gypsy abbott by 5 p.m. wednesday, october 10, 2001. your response can be done by either e-mailing it to gabbott@uab.edu or printing and completing the response and placing it under the door in eb230. you can look forward to a review of our findings at an upcoming faculty meeting. thank you for your response. 1. how was your mentor/mentee relationship structured? 2. how were meetings structured (both formal and informal)? 3. what expectations did you have for the mentoring experiences? 4. in what ways were the needs of the mentee met? give specific examples, e.g. progression toward tenure. 5. in what ways were the needs of the mentor met? give specific examples, e.g. additional travel funds awarded from soe. 6. how did your mentee convey appropriate gratitude or disappointment with the relationship? 7. did your mentee demonstrate any feelings of vulnerability or insecurity? please explain. 8. how was the issue of confidentiality addressed and how confidant did you feel about it? 9. how did you feel that the relationship was valued by your mentee (importance as measured by things such as attendance at group meetings, keeping scheduled meetings, etc.)? 10. what message about your mentoring did you receive from your mentee's behavior? 11. in what ways did your mentoring relationship reach beyond the formal mentoring relationship? other comments: 12. in what ways were meetings structured to create equal/unequal power? 13. how powerful do your anticipate your mentee becoming and did that influence your agreement to mentor the mentee? 14. how was failure addressed and/or success celebrated? 15. how did having a mentee impact your relationship with other faculty? 16. was there ever competition between you and your mentor? if yes, please explain. 17. was there sexual tension in the relationship between mentor/mentee? 18. what actions has your mentee taken to demonstrate confidence in you to others? other comments: 19. was race a factor in your agreement to become a mentor? 20. did race influence the power relationship between you and the mentee? 21. did the mentoring program create a culture of acceptance for ethnic minorities? if so, describe the process. 22. did the mentoring program influence minority faculty retention? 23. does the mentoring program provide guidance toward tenure and promotion for ethnic-minority faculty members? if yes, please explain. 24. have you taken any steps to network an ethnic-minority mentee with other ethnic minorities in your profession? 25. as an ethnic faculty member, did participating in this program impact your relationship with other staff members? 26. did you and the mentee discuss issues of diversity regarding the tenure promotion process? 27. was race a source of conflict between you and the mentee? 28. was race a source of conflict between the mentee and other mentees of the mentoring group? 29. did the mentoring process provide support for exploring minority research issues? other comments: authors dr. janice patterson is an assistant professor in the school of education at the university of alabama at birmingham. dr. karen dahle is an assistant professor in the school of education at the university of alabama at birmingham. dr. mary nix is an assistant professor in the school of education at the university of alabama at birmingham. dr. loucrecia collins is an assistant professor in the school of education at the university of alabama at birmingham. dr. gypsy abbott is a professor of education at the university of alabama at birmingham. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///021118_1911/awl/awpublisher.html file:///021118_1911/awl/content.html file:///021118_1911/awl/advertising.html file:///021118_1911/awl/privacy.html file:///021118_1911/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership scarlett leads the schoolhouse: does being southern matter? anna t. hicks hicks, summer, 2000 "we love women here, they give us hope, and above all, they give us grace." james dickey, jericho, the south beheld introduction i was born and fastidiously bred in the heart of james dickey's south.. i did all the right southern white middle class things: music, art, and dancing lessons; professional tips on hair and makeup; a brief stint (though unsuccessful) with high school beauty pageants; acquisition of the right junior league cookbooks; a proper finishing at a southern undergraduate school for women and entrance into the teaching profession. but then, i broke the rules, entered school administration, and became my school district's first female high school principal, a four year experience i detailed in a 1996 publication speak softly and carry your own gym key: a female high school principal's guide to survival. last year, at a journaling workshop, i explored my life experience and became intrigued with how being born and bred in the deep south might have influenced my experience as a female high school principal. the larger context of the literature on women in educational leadership, southern women, and the benefits of journaling provide the framework and impetus for a suggestions for futher research with the following objectives: 1. to develop a statistical profile of women in the deep south (the eleven states of the confederacy) in the high school principalship and superintendency. 2. to identify a group of southern women in these roles for training in the ira progoff intensive journaling methodologylife experience to provide these women with a life review and introduce them to a possible coping strategy for managing the stress of the role. 3. to identify particular barriers to success (racial, gender, ethnic, cultural) for these women that may be indigenous to the region. 4. to develop for publication and dissemination recommendations for the training and retention of female administrators for these roles and a specific training model based on http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html journaling. literature review the movement of women into the ranks of administration in public education in the united states has slowly gained momentum. barriers still seem to exist, however, in the high school principalship as the following data indicate: 1987-88 male 90.6%, female 9.4%; in 1993-94, 86.2% were male and 13.8%, female. (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/ppsp/97455-2.html#sex). between 1910 and 1950 women represented 10 percent of school superintendents. today they represent only 4 percent (digest of education statistics, 1995). the significant work in this area is that of charol shakeshaft (1986) whose studies revealed that men and women approach the job of educational administration differently and respond in ways that are dissimilar. women tend to have a different leadership style and effectiveness may depend on this alternate approach. regan and brooks (1995) identified five feminist attributes to leadership: collaboration, caring, courage, intuition, and vision. a 1992 u.s. department of education study cited the following issues affecting the advancement of women in administration: lack of secondary principal and superintendent placement; lack of mentors, sponsors, and role models; guilt feelings about the implications of advancement; lack of encouragement from other women; cultural, social, emotional, mobility, and attitude barriers; dual demands of work and home; more maturity at entry time is against advancement; desire to stay in positions longer "for experience"; lack of networking skills; often male-oriented training; limited interviewing skills; lack of recognition of acceptable differences in leadership styles. edson (1988) identified "the queen bee syndrome" in which a woman who makes it into management neglects to support the advancement of other women. colflesh (1997) studied four female elementary principals looking specifically at the emotional side of school leadership. she used a quilting metaphor to explore the patterns and variations that emerged from their conversations about school leadership and life histories. females who enter the traditionally male roles of high school principal and superintendent face stress and pressure. napier and willower (1991) indicated that female high school principals believe they have to work harder and longer to obtain evaluations equal to that of male principals. petersen and beekley (1997) in their study of female high school principals noted that women reported a higher level of active engagement than men in the role did. hargreaves (1996) observed that within the prevalent culture of the high school principal, women are invisible, marginalized stereotypes. lad (1998) revealed reasons there are so few women high school principals: few have had adequate role models as children, the job as it is currently structured may be impossible for women with family commitments, women often feel they are "passed over" in favor of males, and high expectations for performance in the high school principalship get even higher when the candidate is female. similar stress and pressure exist in the superintendency. wolverton's 1998 study of the superintendency in the state of washington revealed that even though the state ranked 10th in the nation in the number of female superintendents, the superintendency there is still a "strongly held male bastion" (p.52) where when women do "men's work," they do it in less favorable locations, for lower pay, and with less help. chase (1995) in her study of women superintendents noted that while they found it easy to talk about their work as superintendents, discussing inequality was painful. she added that for these women "a lonely isolated struggle against inequality is the requirement and cost of personal success." (p.3) the issue of gender alone perhaps does not account for the stress and pressures of the job but rather the http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/ppsp/97455-2.html#sex issue of gender that also addresses, as mertz and mcneely (1998) suggested, sociocultural and contextual factors. bell and chase (1995) called for an examination of gendered contexts and processes through which men and women move. brubaker (1995) studied the autobiographies of 500 principals over the last 20 years. he noted, in particular, southern women educators who described themselves as growing up in culture that taught them respect for "good ole'boy administrators" in an "uncle-niece" kind of relationship. these women spoke of the agony of reconciling this cultural expectation with their new feminist consciousness.. they found themselves deferring to these men in social situations but saw the workplace in a different light. does being southern make a difference? research on the south and southern women provides a strong basis for the argument that being southern does indeed impact on women in traditionally male roles. clinton (1995) maintained that southern women construct their psychological and social selves within the confines of fixed, repressive gender stereotypes and occupational roles. the same author (1994) argued that southern women have been seriously handicapped by sexism in history in general and southern history in particular. she described a regional chauvinism in women's history and made a case for the tremendous impact of race, gender and class in a region of rigid, extreme economic and social nuances.she argued that context adds to and defines the study of southern women and stressed the power of the plantation myth with the stereotypes of mammy and the southern lady defining gender roles. the myths are indeed powerful. farnham (1997) said, "the civil war, perhaps more then any other period in american history, generated a veritable minefield of mythology." (p.121) clinton (1995) described the power of the tara myth where "the cult of the cause" (p.16) became a kind of religion in the postwar south with scarlett o'hara as the most significant symbol of america's love affair with the old south while the lives of black women remain obscure and uncelebrated. clinton maintained that while southern women may never escape the trappings of the myths of the belle and mammy, they must reshape their understanding of the plantation myth error. blackwelder (1991) argued that these myths have created tension between the ideals of feminine behavior and the reality of most women's lives and that "the centrality of good grooming" has not changed for women in the south. daniell (1980) in on sin, sex, and suicide in the deep south said it this way: "one's success as a women was immediately assessed by southern standards: an added pound, a less flattering hairdo, the state of one's wardrobe were all commented upon becoming the cause and effect of the failed husband, child, and marriage." (p. 6) she added that a southern woman's power comes only through a powerful man and that the only acceptable outlet for a woman's ambition was religious fervor. she described southern women as resorting to the roles of "manipulative magnolia or the hysterical matron." (p.33) have such stereotypes and pressures for southern women changed? lynxwiler and wilson (1988) argued that typifications of southern women are still used to structure women's own experiences as well as their audience. they described the code of the new southern belle: never forget your status lest others forget theirs; honor the "natural differences" between men and women; don't be a slut; remain loyal to the southern tradition; you can never be too rich or too thin; pretty is as pretty does. the researchers argue that these stereotypes function as controls in the lives of southern women, monitor their behavior and restrict their presentation. others react to them in ways that encourage continuation of the behavior. brabant (1988) described the "covert level of socialization of the southern female" (p.103) as well as a code of survival with dignity, responsibility for others, the ability to adapt to change, and the everavoidance of anything "tacky." examining the role of women in the progressive influence in southern education, fraser, saunders, and wakelyn (1985) indicated that women encountered a southern individualism that was very different from other regions of the country. women were denied a significant role in the administration of schools and were relegated to beautifying schoolhouses and engaging in home demonstration work and home economics. dehart (1997) maintained that southerners of both sexes resisted the dismantling of the gender hierarchy in 1920 and that half a century later most of the states refused to ratify the era. she cites protestant fundamentalists, scriptural traditionalists and the suspicion of federal intervention as the reason. how does such a persistent and pervasive culture impact southern women in traditionally male leadership roles in education and what are the best ways to enable women to survive in such roles? research to date is based on structured interviews, surveys, and observations. missing from the literature is a study of women in traditionally male leadership roles in public education in the deep south. also missing from the literature is the application of a journaling methodology as a way to study these women and to provide a possible coping strategy. the benefits of writing about experiences were documented in the april 14, 1999 issue of the journal of the american medical association. described are the results of a study conducted at the state university of new york. half of the 112 participants with arthritis and asthma improved significantly after writing about stressful events. dr. david spiegal, a stanford university psychiatrist, in an interview with the chicago sun, said the results of the study, "indicate that a very minimal psychological social interaction can have very substantial medical effects." kalb (1999) described the power of confessional writing. she notes that even healthy, well-adjusted people acquire emotional baggage through life experience and benefit from writing about those experiences. pennebaker's work with students at the university of texas at austin showed decreases in visits to the health clinic, an increase in the level of disease-fighting lymphocytes and modest declines in blood pressure. writing can be a cathartic approach that dulls the emotional impact of an experience or helps an individual confront it and enables people to read their own minds. kalb cites psychotherapist kathleen adams who sees journal keeping as a powerful addition to talk-therapy that builds self-trust and self-esteem. kalb recommended the intensive journal method developed by jungian-trained psychologist ira progoff (1997). the program involves a rigorous two day workshop designed to help the individual develop a structured journal method that can be continued on one's own. the importance and relevance of this work is that we must find a way to attract and retain more women in the high school principalship and superintendency and the management of stress through journaling may be a key. conclusion though we know women experience educational leadership in ways that are different from men, what we do not know is how women born and raised in the deep south experience educational leadership in traditionally male roles. are their barriers unique as a result of a specific gendered cultural context? is a structured journaling methodology a method for not only revealing the impact of southern culture on these women but also for keeping them in these roles? are southern girls really different? tina turner, southern born african american entertainer, maintains, " i'm a southern girl. we have mud on our feet." (p.150) further research should seek to define, explore, and determine the impact of that "mud" on the experience of southern women in the high school principalship and superintendency. references associated press, (1999). illness-stress link illustrated by n.y. study. the sun. april 14. bell, c. chase, s. (1995, april). gender in the theory and practice of educational leadership. journal for a just and caring education..1, (2), 200-223. blackwelder, j. (1991). ladies, belles, working women and civil rights in escott, p. goldfield, d,( eds). the south for new southerners. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. brabant, s. (1988). socialization for change: the cultural heritage of the white southern woman in dillman, c.( ed). southern women. new york: hemisphere publishing corporation. brubaker, d. (1995). how the principalship has changed: lessons from principals' life stories. nassp bulletin. november: 88. chase, s. (1995). ambiguous empowerment: the work narratives of women school superintendents. amherst: university of massachusetts press. clinton, c. (ed.).(1984).half sisters of history: southern women and the amercian past. durham: duke university press clinton, c. (1995). tara revisited: women, war, and the plantation legend. new york: abbeville press. colflesh, n. (1997). piece-making: the relationship between women's lives and the patterns and variations that emerge in their talk about school leadership. unpublished dissertation, michigan state university. daniell, r. (1980). fatal flowers: on sin, sex, and suicide in the deep south. new york: holt, rhinehart, and winston. dehart, j. (1997). second wave feminism(s) and the south: the difference that differences make. in farhnam, c. ed.women of the american south: a multicultural reader. new york: new york university press. edson, s.k. (1988). pushing the limits: the female administrative aspirant. new york: state university of new york press. farnham, c. (1997) women of the american south: a multicultural reader. new york: new york university press. fraser, w., saunders, f., and wakelyn, j. eds. (1985). the web of southern social relations: women,family and education. athens: university of georgia press. hargreaves, b. (1996, april). learning from the outsider within: five women's discourses within the culture of the high school principal. a paper presented at he annual meeting of the american educational research association. hicks, a. (1996) speak softly and carry your own gym key: a female high school principal's guide to survival . thousand oaks, california: corwin press. kalb, c. (1999) pen, paper, power! confessional writing can be good for you. newsweek, april 26, 75. kett, j. (1985) women and the progressive impulse in southern education in fraser, w., saunders, f., and wakelyn, j.( eds.). (1985). the web of southern social relations: women, family and education. athens: university of georgia press. lad, k. (1998). why are there so few women high school principals? in women as school executives: voices and visions. irby, b., brown, g. (eds.). commerce, texas: texas council of women school executives. (p. 73-81) lynxwiler, j. wilson, m. (1988). the code of the new southern belle: generating typifications to structure social interaction. in dillman, c.( ed). southern women. new york: hemisphere publishing corporation. napier, l. willower, d. (1991). female high school principals' perceptions of their jobs and their work interactions with males. high school journal. 74,(2). 11822. mertz, n. mcneely, s. (1998, april). women on the job: a study of female high school principals. education administration quarterly. 34, (2. ) 196. peterson, g. beekley, c. (1997, march) school principals' understanding of mutual responsiveness in effective leadership, paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association.. progoff, i. (1997) at a journal workhop. new york: dialogue house associates. regan, h. brooks, g. (1995). out of women's experience: creating relational leadership. california: corwin press. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. newbury park: corwin press. shuptrine, h. dickey, j. (1974) jericho: the south beheld. birmingham, ala: oxmoor house, inc. smyth, j., stone, a., hurewitz, a., and kaell, a. (1999, april). effects of writing about stressful experiences on symptoms reduction in patients with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis. journal of the american medical association. (vol. 281) 1304-1309. turner, t. (1997) in hell's belles: a tribute to the spitfires, bad seeds, and steel magnolias of the new and old south by bellinger, s. berkeley, california: conari press. u.s. department of education. (1992). strengthening support and recruitment of women and minorities to positions in educational administration: a resource manual. washington, d.c.: u.s. government printing office. u.s. department of education (1995). digest of educational statistics. washington. d.c.u.s. government printing office. wolverton, m. (1998) the school superintendency: male bastion or equal opportunity? in women as school executives: voices and visions. irby, b., brown, g. eds. commerce, texas: texas council of women school executives. (pp. 52-56). dr. anna hicks is an assistant professor in the department of educational leadership and foundations at western carolina university. ahicks@wcu.edu subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in mailto:ahicks@wcu.edu file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awnetwork/index.html leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 23, spring 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] testimonies of exemplary caribbean women educational leaders dennis a. conrad and deborah j. conrad abstract this study recognizes and honors the contributions and opinions of three exemplary educational and social institutions at national levels in trinidad and tobago. they emerged as leaders, despite the dominant patriarchy, pervasive bureaucracy, and elitist hegemony characteristic of "developing" countries. the testimonies of these women in leadership reveal glimpses of how they evolved as community leaders and their perceptions on what is critical to educational leadership. this study uses oral history methodology to develop thick narratives and aims to share, celebrate, and value the lessons of these participant-exemplars. findings from the study reveal leadership as an evolutionary process, nurtured by spirituality, community, and a sense of gender-equity--along with inter-relatedness--in the lives of the participants. testimonies of exemplary caribbean women educational leaders effective leadership is associated with valued educational policies and practices that serve as motivation to change when reform is warranted (algozzine, yselldyke, & campbell, 1994; kouzes & posner, 2003). such a leadership is characterized as voluntary progressive change in the beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes of its stakeholders toward the realization of a common vision. the compulsory and involuntary nature of education, the ages of clients, and the inherent power of educators make schools even more vulnerable to the influence of leadership. in the "developing world" of the caribbean, there is a pervasive perception that educational leadership is less a process of reform and more about the control and manipulation of systems by a patriarchal bureaucracy (morris, 1999). this is further complicated by a tendency to consolidate autocratic and transactional leadership styles, where leaders see themselves as followers of the policy makers and managers, as implementers not agents of reform. such a response--when schools are underfinanced, over-crowded with increasingly hostile and troubled students, and increasing numbers of disaffected teachers--does little to significantly address academic underachievement, teacher burn-out, and the need for authentic educational leadership (conrad & brown, 2003). this is not to suggest that educational leaders do not claim an active and informed voice nor challenge the established patriarchy. the more effective educational leaders do, but they generally seek a nonconfrontational stance in their interaction with the bureaucracy. they opt to present their differing file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm perspectives and positions not aggressively or sensationally, but as "connected knowers" (alfred, 2003). as such, their strategy for reform is achieved through relational and community based efforts. they use their influence with the community to facilitate an education for that community's economic advancement. the purposeful, resourceful, and resilient responsiveness of these leaders to teacher, student, and community needs is critical to the well-being of the community (nieto, 2003). some educational leaders in trinidad and tobago have successfully navigated the centralized bureaucracy and patriarchy. for the few women among them, their resilience and responsiveness to their communities have been silenced to the country and region as a whole by an under-recording of their contributions and skills (morris, 1999; taylor, 1997). this non-legitimization of women's roles and contributions is pervasive, despite a higher percentage of women in the teaching profession, more equitable numbers as principals, particularly at elementary and special schools, and higher levels of academic qualifications among women (dove, 1999; taylor, 1997). it is in this light that this study shares the stories of three exemplars. the researchers seek to celebrate their contributions and add their voices to the discourse on educational leadership. theoretical connections with over 75 years of research and some 350 proposed definitions, there is yet no clear unequivocal understanding or definition of leadership (stogdill, 1950). stogdill opts to describe leadership as a process, which influences group activities regarding goal setting achievement. benis and nanus (1985) refer to it as something known to exist, but indefinable. pfeffer (1981), along with smircich and morgan (1982), propose a move away from leadership as a process, to a product-oriented interpretation, where the leader is an identifier of the important, a facilitator of change and consensus. depree (1989) links leadership to communication, storytelling, and intimacy as an art-medium. senge (1990) equates leadership with developing vision and values, servicing by modeling, and teaching through fostering learning for all. bolman and deal (1991) describe leadership as a relationship based on shared vision, purpose, and values; stressing commitment to passion, trust, flexibility, interpersonal skills, and understanding of followers. understanding the complexities of leadership is not an overnight phenomenon. it is still evolving, from the focus on personality traits in the 1930s through to the "new paradigm" models of motivation based leadership (bryman, 1996). the theories include the path-goal (house, 1996; vroom, 1964); the charismatic (conger & kanungo, 1998); and the transactional and the transformational models (bass, 1998; benis & nanus, 1997). both the extrinsically and intrinsically driven behaviors--transactional and transformational respectively--are valued as essential to overall organizational effectiveness (kets de vries, 1998). to this, fry (2003) links the importance of "spiritual leadership" where the leader and followers' need a mission and meaning in an organizational culture that allows for authenticity (duignan & bhindi, 1997; pfeffer, 2002). women and leadership the objective of this study is to share the voices of three exemplary women and to place their experiences and perspectives center-stage. the centering of women's experiences, according to reinharz (1992), warrants its consideration as a feminist inquiry. feminist theorists believe that women are less valued and have less power in a male dominated world; are committed to working to empower women and improve their status; and acknowledge women's ways of knowing, experiences, and values as meaningful (acker, 1987). further, not only may the inquiry be "feminist," but it articulates the stories from within a caribbean context, which is often marginalized or ignored by second wave feminists of the pre-1970s (hernandez & rehman, 2002). the voices of the caribbean feminist movement resonate with, but are not synonymous with, mainstream western european, african-american, or african perspectives (leo-rhynie, bailey, & barrow, 1997). caribbean women have unique issues and struggles from those of the "sisterhood" in other regions and cultures (sutton & mckeisky, 1981). they are expected to be economically independent, and are accepted as leaders within the home and community. they have great variability of socially acceptable conjugal relations (not necessarily seeing marriage as a preferred option), and are essentially autonomous (morse, 1991). their autonomy has been ascribed to there being no sexual division of labor on the plantation that limited the economic participation of women and the social distance of free whites and enslaved blacks. this "minimized the imposition of the dominant class ideologies" and "facilitated the retention and development of distinct cultural patterns and concepts about the sex roles and attributes" of these women (morse, 1991, p. 495). regarding more generic perspectives of women in leadership, irby and brown (1995) recognize the role of bureaucratization in limiting women's aspirations to leadership, asserting that there is a need for reconceptualizing leadership theory to incorporate the contributions of both genders, and to limit the white male stereotype manifested in most traditional research. helgesen (1990), rosener (1990), and shakeshaft (1987) similarly posit that men are perceived as exemplifying power, dominance, and control, while women are perceived as exemplifying collaboration. such differences in leadership styles have been associated with learning experiences and positions within the society (klenke, 1996). astin and leland (1991) hold that women leaders more typically form networks with talented personnel, and highly value listening and interpersonal skills, along with collegial and consensual styles. these values are associated with transformational leadership styles (bass, 1998). one orientation of administrators, mostly male, is described as generally more "aggressive, independent, self-sufficient, forceful, and dominant" (eagly, karau, & johnson, 1992, p. 79). the other orientation, mostly women, is identified as more democratic, treating staff as colleagues or equals. partly to recognize the contributions and effectiveness of the participants, and to celebrate their contributions, this study sought answers to the following questions: (1) what do the testimonies of these women reveal about factors which contributed to their evolution as educational leaders? (2) what are some of the issues that characterize their experiences as women educational leaders? method the interviews were completed over a one year period, and comprised two guiding questions and a set of prompts, which were used sparingly to keep the inquiry focused. the guiding questions were aimed at getting participants to share their experiences as they apply to educational leadership. the questions were: (1) as a woman identified as an effective and exemplary leader, tell me about yourself and your journey as an educational leader. (2) what are the issues you identify as important to educational leadership? an oral history approach, characteristic of qualitative methodology, was used to emphasize the depth of experiences unique to this small population (reinharz, 1992). this approach facilitated participants to share self-determined, comprehensive stories with fewer restrictions. it also minimized intrusion on the participants' time, and afforded opportunities for discussion and exploration of concepts, views, thoughts, and memories. participants the selection of the three participants was taken from a pool compiled from a list of educational leaders generated at a meeting in trinidad and tobago of 15 special and regular education school principals in 1999. these principals were invited because of their commitment to inclusive education practices and their overall leadership roles. the primary researcher attended the meeting, but largely observed the process. the chair of the meeting conducted the list-generating activity at the request of the primary researcher. participating principals were asked to note outstanding and exemplary educational leaders who had taught for at least five years in schools in trinidad and tobago. principals were also asked to rank the list-members on the following criteria: personal knowledge of and experience with them as a means of verification; their impact upon emerging leadership; the contributions each made nationally; and whether they had previously shared their stories formally. the list was then sorted according to gender. for purposes of this paper, the testimonies of the three of the four most highly ranked participants are being shared. given the constraints in terms of space and scholarly writing, using a small sample of three participants afford the researchers an opportunity to share the stories and messages of these three exemplary women educational leaders, without sacrificing too much of the rich narrative gained from the oral history method. following the ranking of possible participants, the primary researcher contacted them by telephone, then by letter, to ascertain their willingness and readiness to be interviewed. the interviews were conducted at a location and time that was convenient to the participants. the researchers the co-researchers are both former teachers of trinidad and tobago, who have been supervised by, worked, taught, led, and/or inspired by the participants who constitute this study. the primary researcher completed the interviews and the secondary researcher led the analysis and discussion for purposes of this paper. both researchers have known the participants over the span of no less than 17 years. data collection data was collected through tape-recorded interviews, during which the participants were encouraged to share their stories fully, completely, and honestly (nielsen, 1990). two 45-minute interviews were initially planned with each participant, but in reality the interviews were no less than a hour and a half each. audiorecordings and transcriptions were completed by the primary researcher who made notes that provided contextual information. narratives were developed through a process of transcribing and editing the data. for enhancing credibility, we used member-checking (guba & lincoln, 1989; kuzel & like, 1991; merriam, 1998). copies of transcripts and first-draft of manuscripts were shared with participantinterviewees for feedback and to accommodate any amendments that they might wish to make. one participant expressed concern about confidentiality and made suggestions to facilitate her anonymity. the two most senior participants declared that they had no problem with even using their real names. initial pseudonyms were determined in collaboration with the participant-interviewee. signed consent forms were received from all participants. data analysis the constant comparison method described by glaser and strauss (1967, as cited in lincoln & guba, 1985) was used for data analysis. this method combines inductive category coding with a simultaneous comparison of themes or constructs observed. the narratives are coded, classified, systematically and continuously compared across categories, and common themes and relationships between constructs and interviews are determined. data analysis included seven phases: (1) initial review of all narratives, including reflective and field notes; (2) corrective feedback from the participants; (3) grouping of answers to the guiding questions; (4) noting the common and different perspectives of each interview as narrative on central issues; (5) coding the transcripts to reflect the major emerging constructs and themes; and (6) review of narrative, constantly identifying and establishing or sometimes changing links between constructs. during the seventh phase, the common and unique constructs and themes were identified and analyzed for messages pertaining to the purpose of the study and seeking links to the research field. celebrating their voices: the participants participant # 1: regine, fearless on the frontline regine is a former head of special education services and a pioneer in a myriad of philanthropic efforts. she pioneered and/or served at executive positions in an extensive range of associations involved in social welfare, childcare, and education issues at home and in the caribbean region. regine has been honored with an honorary doctorate and is profiled in caribbean and world editions of who's who publications. she has also been honored by the president's (u.s.) committee on mental retardation; a caribbean award for work in mental retardation; the national public service medal of merit (gold) for community services; the principal of the year award; individual of the year award; and the woman of caribbean award. experiencing leadership early connection. regine attributes much of her leadership style to her parents, her upbringing, and being the only surviving twin and sister "growing up in a family dominated by boys. i also felt equal to them in that we all were expected to do well." paths to leadership. although married and the mother of four children, regine was able to address her professional development. i entered the work force upon passing the public service examination and was appointed to a position in social work in 1953, after completion of the certificate in social work. later i was awarded a colonial scholarship to study in london, england. her involvement in working with children at the psychiatric hospital influenced her so much that she changed her plan of studies to special education, more specifically, the "education of the mentally handicapped as it was then called." she met some resistance to her proposed change but persisted and eventually the colonial office granted her leave and paid for her studies. "when i graduated, i did so well [that] they recommended that i do a tour on the continent [to observe service delivery models]." regine continued her studies, achieving certificates in residential care of children, social policy and administration, and the master of business administration. on her return to trinidad, but before she could make a commitment to complete doctoral studies, she had a traumatic experience paralyzing her for two and a half years. "eventually, after much prayer and care, i not only walked again, but also regained my hearing and vision, and my hair grew back." perceiving this phenomenon of healing to be "a miracle of faith," regine increased her philanthropic efforts. she journeyed from volunteer to principal of a hospital based special education facility; to director of the center for child care and education, under the ministry of health; and then to head the division for special education services in the ministry of education. as a woman in leadership. regine claims a late awakening to appreciating the role and responsibilities of women as leaders. she does not recall any significant experience where she felt threatened or intimidated because of gender. i celebrated their [men] involvement with me. i considered them my main supporters. i understand a lot of their feelings. too often we women subvert male leadership and men in general, rather than enjoy the reciprocal dimension of male/female relationships. of models and mentors. regine identifies the importance of mentors and models to her success. they came in either gender, but she identifies her mother for special mention. "my mother went to a university at aged 60 and she was a person who always did things [with us]. she kept us going." challenges. regine accepts that she had many challenges with the "bureaucracy." one of her most critical challenges was non-payment of salary on her return to trinidad "because they didn't know what [position] to place me in." it was one thing getting a position and remuneration, but she faced the invisible barrier of being an educator within the health sector. "it was very difficult to convince the bureaucracy that persons with disabilities were entitled to education, particularly those perceived as having "mental problems," which in those days included both emotional and intellectual difficulties. a significant challenge for regine was that of getting the established special education service accepted as "part of the ministry of education and attracting teachers to be part of it." eventually, she had to choose whether to complete her ph.d. or take responsibility for the development of special education services in trinidad and tobago. she remained working with the ministry of education developing policies and practices for special education services in trinidad and tobago and the broader caribbean region. leadership as "taking care of." regine recognizes her leadership as taking care of her community, which she links to experiences, as well as her philosophy of service. for regine, the driving force, the core to her leadership is her caring: i cannot serve if i cannot care and i cannot care if i do not feel. i must feel. i must care. caring is not something you could buy. it is related to your notion of what is spiritual . . . what connects you to the other side. she describes herself as "firmly grounded" and "deeply spiritual." she sees god reflected in everyone. on caring. she hypothesizes that caring is perceived as a feminine attribute related to careers, such as teaching and nursing, which offer non-competitive salaries: "this has always been so. you associate nurturing with children and women. a man who is seen as caring runs the risk of being perceived as effeminate. that's a no-no with caribbean men." regine believes in the use of mentors and exemplars and the recruiting of more male teachers that will help to resolve that situation. "we need to encourage young men to get into the classroom. we have to...help them to see that it's important for them to be leaders and teachers." perspectives on leadership and women leadership. regine conceptualizes that leadership is the acceptance of a responsibility for a cause that transcends ordinary love; it must be a "higher calling" that motivates you to bridge a gap between a need and a resource. on leadership and gender. regine does not identify any special attributes of her leadership being due to the fact that she is a woman, and rejects any construct of "feminism," which suggests denigrating men. we never talk about the women who violate men. in the discourse with men for equity...we have tried to take away [their] family headship. equality does not mean that since you work for the same or more salary you [can] put him out of the house...or talk to him any way you want. speaking from the perspective of a caribbean woman who has been on the front lines as academic and social liberator, regine shares her perspectives on feminism. she celebrates the power of "femininity as feminism." "a man would respect me as a woman and i would respect him as a man. i would be able to enjoy him doing the things i believe a man should do." expressing concern about what she perceives to be an evolving clash between men and women, she adds, "the generations after us must not see us as women who feel that we are stronger than men and we don't need them. we need each other." recognizing the increasing number of women in the profession and their eventual assumptions of leadership, regine warns that being in a position of--or having qualifications in--leadership is not synonymous with effective leadership. "we have to be continually reviewing, determining what it is that makes people want to follow." participant #2: shantalle-charisma in action shantalle holds an earned ph.d. in teaching and learning, and has taught at elementary, secondary, special, and teacher education sectors of the education system. she has developed and directed courses at undergraduate and graduate levels, served as leader of the national special education association, and also served on various policy making projects with the teachers' association and with the ministry of education. she was honored nationally for outstanding service as a teacher. experiencing leadership early connections. shantalle accepts the label of educational leader gracefully. she asserts that her leadership skills began in her early childhood when she was looked upon to be the spokesperson for her siblings. her experiences of "playing concert" also contributed to that confidence. she recalled being told that even at six-years-old she was a very eager learner and performer of songs and poems for all who would lend an ear. at age eight, shantalle's father migrated to england and "never came back...my mother would die soon afterwards." shantalle began living with her grandmother. at 11-years-old i had to write the national examination to go to high school. i had to fill out the parental consent forms and put in the choices of school i wanted. my grandmother, who did not read or write, worked very hard and left home very early. i [took] care of my grandmother's home and did all the chores, which included cooking. shantalle also attributes her effectiveness as a leader to the lessons learned through an early upbringing in the church and the "tough love" and care of her grandmother: [she] lived for her church. we would go to church all the time. i mean all the time. i went to a convent [her high school] more church! what stayed with me, however, was the ability to pray and [my] faith. she [my grandmother] was a vendor in the market. she was so strict, almost to the point of sometimes sounding tyrannical. i remember distinctly when i was going to write the national examination. i went to get her good wishes. she looked straight at me and told me: "child, you better pass that exam if you don't want to sell in the market for the rest of your life." i placed seventh in the whole island. pathways to leadership. by age 18, shantalle was a mother and wife. she described those as tough years, blessed with its triumphs. by age 30, she had four children, and was in her second marriage. she speaks fondly of those "challenging but empowering years." "i think if i want to look at a personal triumph, it would be the bringing up of my four children." shantalle acknowledges other dimensions to her success: being a life long learner, her desire to do better and to be self-sufficient, the role of models and mentors in her professional life, and her personality. "i am sociable, committed to my tasks...more people than task oriented, decisive, and not afraid of risk-taking." during a period of fifteen years, she journeyed from assistant teacher to teacher-candidate at teachers college to teaching in elementary, special, and secondary schools. she was awarded a government scholarship to complete a masters degree in education. half way through this she was granted a second scholarship to pursue a masters degree in special education. "this i took up without hesitating since this was my first love." on completion of studies, she was appointed to one of two teachers colleges in trinidad. five years later, she earned funding to complete her doctoral degree in teaching and learning. developing styles. in terms of her leadership style, shantalle describes herself as being "transactional and collaborative," having "a big heart" full of love for her charges and colleagues, and always ready to lend an ear. she shared that she has always been very assertive professionally, sometimes to the point of aggressiveness. i never had the time to develop fears, at least not for any length of time. i was just out there doing what had to be done. i see myself as charismatic in my approach to people with whom i work. you see i am a sweet talker. i think i can get anything that i want because of who i am and how i set about getting it. on models and mentors. shantalle acknowledges that there was never a shortage of models or mentors in her life. the persons who have helped me were mainly women, but there were men too . . . who were willing to listen and help me. caring may not be significant only to women. i found myself in close association with teachers, leaders, and policy makers who had the vision and foresight for a better education system and i learned from the best. i listened and watched. i respected the "elders" in the education community and i am referring to leadership and initiative not age. as a woman and educational leader. shantalle acknowledges many times of struggle, risk-taking, and challenges "that may have hindered many, but with the help of friends i was able to succeed and reach to my present position." there were times when i felt that i was unfairly treated by the policy makers in education, who used my experience and expertise, but gave others the job, stating that i was young and that my time will come. i never waited, however, i moved along trying to make changes wherever i could. shantalle shares how being a woman contributed to her evolution as a leader. she concluded that her gender sometimes handicapped her growth. you see, i am considered by many men to be a sensual, attractive woman. i also look younger than my age. this has served to keep me down in certain positions. of course i fought back. once i was told in an interview, "you are young, your turn would come" in a condescending manner. this was said among other women, who i suppose, had to wait their turn. another event is that i was once asked for a date with a top ministry official. i had to tell him that i never slept with anyone to get to where i was, and that i was not going to start now. shantalle recognized the role men have played in her life, "positively and negatively they did contribute." i may not have been very successful in my marriages, but i have been taught great, very strong lessons. i think sometimes that my strength frightens men away. i probably did not give the men in my life [struggling with her feelings] the chance to grow and develop along with me. perspectives on leadership shantalle shares her perspectives on a number of issues that she considers as most important to educational leadership. the leader as follower . she reminds us that leaders are placed in positions of power by others. we often trick ourselves into believing we hold the power. we need to value our followers and recognize that our position is really linked to their value of us. what is important though is that there will always be need for leaders. on gender and uniqueness. shantalle notes the many contributions of women in and to educational leadership, and the lack of formal recognition accorded them. few women have been respected for their contributions, and those that have been somehow always follow the patriarchal model. a common ground can also be sought in the styles of both men and women. i feel women can bring a different dimension to a leadership role. i am talking about ruling with sensitivity, with different moral standings. many women bring a softer side to leadership; they bring caring and nurturing with them. on feminism . shantalle admits to having had a problem with the notion of feminism, despite her readiness to identify with it: "i used to think that it was when you wanted to be like a man. i am wiser now, so my view of feminism is that it is the development of women's issues from the perspective of women." shantalle asserts that there is a unique role and perspective of the caribbean woman. i also believe that . . . feminism may be a bit different. our relationship with our men and sons are not necessarily the same as in the us or europe. we need to explore this more. i think in the caribbean, rich or poor, educated or not . . . we were always feminists. the sacred task shantalle offered some advice to future educational leaders. she argued for such persons to recognize the position they hold as developers of the next generation. she characterized such leadership as being "an almost sacred task." dare to care for your followers. let your caring be authentic and visible. show you believe in them. include reflective practice and social action as elements in training programs. encourage them to see themselves as change agents in the cause for social justice. participant # 3: daphne, preparing others for the front line daphne holds a b.a. (honors), an m.a., and the trinidad and tobago medal of merit (gold) for public service. she was born in the 1930s in northern trinidad. she is a woman who has given her life's service to the educational community nationally and regionally. she started as an elementary school teacher at her alma mater. daphne earned two scholarships to the regional university and completed studies in french and spanish. after graduating, she was appointed as a lecturer at the teachers college. on the retirement of the principal of the teachers college, and the rapid promotion of the next senior educator at the college to the ministry of education's central office, daphne assumed the position of principal to the only residential teachers college as lecturer, dean, and principal. she continues her contribution to the community through her involvement in the church and as a connoisseur of the local culture. experiencing leadership early connection. daphne identifies her mother as her first leader and mentor, who ensured that from an early age that she had a "very responsible" childhood, being initially one girl among five boys. "i got preferential treatment, which means i got many more 'don'ts' than 'do's.' [when] my sisters were born . . . i was already a teenager. i was godmother to them in more senses than one." whereas her brothers were sent to school regardless of the circumstances, she was kept home from school at times to stay with her grandmother, who had been recovering from a stroke. the fact [is] that i was . . . to apply myself to my schoolwork; to be useful; and to be obedient. i think many of these things helped me to advance; [having] the large family too, helped me to be able to deal with people. daphne remembers "starting to cook before i could even manage the weight of the pot." "my mother believed in the power of food, of eating and drinking and dining." household work took up most of her time, and because her mother and grandmother frowned at prolonged leisure, "play time" was a luxury. she was particularly grateful when there were adult visitors to the home. these "go outside and play" opportunities allowed her some creativity. paths to leadership for daphne, her paths to leadership involved a complex mixture of readiness skills being developed from elementary to university education. these included her propensity for reading, punctuality, responsibility, and personal discipline, particularly being punctual. primary education. thanks to the tutoring of her mother, she was an avid reader: "by age five i could read anything." her primary education extended beyond academics. on the staff, i was fortunate to have a lady teacher. [she] was among one of the first women into pan and folk music. she was a pianist, pannist, and the first woman to start a panside. although i could not join the steelband, nor could i participate, as an onlooker, i imbibed this atmosphere. many of her stories centered on punishment; not that she was particularly troublesome, but because the emphasis was on discipline. we never got up late . . . but here are some of the things we had to do before going to school: we had to fetch water from a standpipe; we would have to sweep up the whole yard, and in those days the yard had trees; we would [also] have to look after the chickens. i remember reaching to school late and finding the gates either closed or the head teacher waiting to give you "hot bakes and chocolate"[corporal punishments]. for her, punctuality extended to the home situation. you were supposed to be home at a certain time. they had their little jobs lined up. yet you would find things to distract you on the way: a mango tree or you might see a caterpillar. secondary education. this reinforced her leadership potential through a broad curriculum, with its focus on the history of the school, culture, and a sense of responsibility for persons and things. she continues with a description of experiences that made her proud to be a student at that secondary school. the school had a sense of its history. every year you would observe who founded the school, and why. then there was the religious and moral education, because all the children were not anglicans by any chance, but we all had prayers every morning. early professional life on graduating from high school, daphne was recruited to teach spanish. "i told them that i had never taught at that level before [but i did not refuse]. you never refuse." of models and mentors daphne acclaims the role of mentors of either gender in her professional evolution. she singles out three male mentors and one female colleague for very special mention. there was mr. mck, her former teacher, teaching colleague, supervisor, and advisor. "he had a system where every friday afternoon he [would] have the staff socializing. every staff member had to deliver the goods on one particular afternoon--a question of eats and drinks, laughter and chitchat." she describes father c, a parish priest, as her second primary mentor; a compassionate man who laughed easily. "once you had faith in young people, they could blossom and develop. he saw my potential and had a considerable effect on me, and by extension, my relationship with protégées." challenges for her, the challenges she faced were personal. her most significant was feeling unable to or uncomfortable with efforts to engage in "small talk." i was not the kind of person who could [just] relax and lime [to socialize for the fun of it] like some people can. one might say i was a workaholic. in modern day leadership, you have to learn to relax and socialize. leadership as "caring for" daphne described of her commitment to a leadership that she was sincere, responsive, and caring, which was shaped by her teachers and schooling. caring is a gift of love which i received from teachers and mentors alike. i was truly cared for, and i cared and still care for my students and protégés . . . one of the things that drew people to me was simplicity. in my particular circumstance, not only was i approachable, i was accessible. for daphne, her successes and accomplishments correlated with the lifestyles and readiness of her followers. among her primary achievements was the culture of the residential teachers college she nurtured. "residential training made them [the student teachers] blossom, and even those who have left teaching have carried that spirit into their various walks of life." perspectives on leadership and women leadership. for education to empower, change, and motivate others, daphne insists it requires a leadership that cares. leadership then for her is a matter of service and commitment to the community. this must not be left to chance, but must be addressed in educational leadership and teacher preparation programs. she recommends a residency requirement combined with community service. one of the most touching moments was when i used to take students to the prisons. it was a rough audience but it was amazing how the students were willing to go. we would go every year and put on a concert, and get the inmates to join in. teacher education and caring leadership. according to daphne, there are some essential elements to any successful teacher/leadership effort, such as the following: (a) a vision of what teacher training is; (b) high self-esteem; and (c) consideration, concern, and respect for the students. concerns with the low status of teaching. she contends that the status of teaching is not only shaped by the policy makers, but by the quality of teachers recruited and their preparation, which in turn determines how teachers are valued by the community. i don't think that people nowadays project teaching as a favorable profession as they used to. when i was a child, i longed to be a teacher; i looked up to my teachers. nowadays, children don't hear their parents and their elders celebrating teachers. on leadership and gender daphne shares her perspective on how men and women in leadership may be related to societal expectations and gender roles. "people have a feeling that men are heady, more intellectual in their leadership, whereas women are more emotional and what one might call affected, both effective and affectionate." she warns, however, that we must be cautious about the assumption of men being less responsive. "there are . . . men who respond to people and their need . . . caring men. some give the impression that they couldn't care less . . . although probably deep down inside they probably do [care]." daphne recognizes that women are gaining more positions of leadership despite the pervasive notion that they are the weaker sex. she identifies the broad experiences and academic curricula made available to women over the years as the catalysts. schools gave boys mainly an academic education, [where they] were taught and still are taught to develop physically, [and be involved] in sports, [and] outdoor games, mainly. women, [however], got a broader secondary education than boys, [which extended to] the home, too. daphne speaks about the need for clear roles for women in leadership. women, who are in leadership positions, have a very difficult role to make the men realize that even though they are there in positions of leadership they are not there to dominate; they are there to complement. feminism and femininity daphne identifies herself as a feminist, but offered some clarification: a feminist is concerned not just about women, but about children and men. i know the word has certain unpleasant connotations, but i think a feminist is one who brings out the best in womanhood. she suggests that women should revisit their interpretation and definition of feminism to be an assertion of love for themselves, which is not synonymous with excluding or denigrating men. discussion the narratives of regine, shantalle, and daphne show a path to leadership through individualized journeys and experiences from family, schooling, and early professional development. four common themes emerge from the analysis of the narratives. these include, (a) the development of leadership characteristics among these women as an evolutionary process, involving a consistent environment and the presence of an orientation toward achievement; (b) a sense of community and of experiences that include caring and being cared for; (c) regard for equity, inter-relatedness, and gender; and (d) approaches to responsibilities that reflect an recognition of a higher order and interconnectedness between leader and follower. leadership as developmental the participants, regine, shantalle, and daphne, characterize leadership as an evolutionary and social process involving preparation, appreciation for followers and the community, and an approach to responsibilities that reflect moral awareness. both participants construct leadership in a way that incorporated their journeys through childhood with their personalities, needs, and relationships with followers and mentors who all celebrated academic achievement and service to the family and community. although not limited to these characteristics, their evolution as leaders is intricately intertwined with their sense of purpose as learners and leaders. their uniqueness in personality needs and styles are evident. also, they both addressed and attempted to change organizational constraints through networking, flexibility, intimacy, being personable, and personal growth associated with transformational leadership (bass, 1985; conger, 1992). regine, shantalle, and daphne reveal the lessons they learned from models and mentors, particularly their mothers, and in shantalle's case, her grandmother. shantalle shared her tendency to run away, even as a child, to visit her grandmother and hear stories, which revealed an early readiness to build relationships and connect with her culture and meaning. for regine, even while in her fifties, her mother was actively engaged in her academic life as model and encourager. daphne's mother was also active in shaping and nurturing her. both mothers helped shaped their daughters to be independently minded women. the character of their mother figures lends evidence to the theoretical position of whitfield (1990) on the importance of a consistent environment for emergent leaders when they are young, especially one with a clear understanding of what is, or is not, acceptable. the mothers of the participants also share a value for education, as noted in studies about the role of mothers by cantor and barney (1992). with only one of the mother figures of the participants being educated, educational attainment of the mothers does not, however, feature prominently, as in the findings of shakeshaft (1987). the narratives challenge findings by cantor and barney (1992) that successful female leaders tend to grow up in two parent families. instead, the experiences of our participants endorse the findings of clay (1997) that single mothers constitute powerful motivating influences over their daughters. through appropriate models and mentors of all genders, regine, shantalle, and daphne gained the support, encouragement, friendship, sponsorship, career guidance, and information that facilitated their successes as educational leaders (morrison, white & van velsor, 1987). though the roles of mentors were valued, regardless of their gender, it is evident in the narratives that for these participants, women and mother figures were their primary mentors. sense of community the participants recognize and pay tribute to the communities that nurtured them. daphne's community was the residential facility where she taught, administered, and led. her concept of communal responsibility extended to her church. in that learning community, she was often referred to as "ma" and "tantie," an indication that her protégés cherish her nurturing leadership. shantalle's "community" appears to have emerged wherever she was located. she fostered community. she gave her best efforts to the cause at home, the various schools and associations she served in, or the teacher's college. regine invested considerable time with philanthropic efforts and remains involved in a broad assortment of social and professional agencies, serving in most of them as an executive officer. for her, the community extended from her family to the nation and the region's underprivileged women and children in particular. regine, shantalle, and daphne characterize a leadership where followers are valued. shantalle urge a deeper respect and value for the follower and recognition that many followers eventually become your leaders. through a readiness to listen to the opinions and feelings of their followers and to be accessible and accommodative of divergent views and needs, collaboration and community are identified as important elements in the leadership style and constructs of these women educational leaders. they epitomize a regard for leaders and followers, regardless of gender; one that nourishes the sense of community. these women educational leaders characterized interdependence, and created and maintained positive relationships with their communities (cantor & barney, 1992), while nurturing an ethic of care (gilligan, 1993; marshall, patterson, rogers, & steele, 1996; pazey 1995). equity, interrelatedness, and gender each participant recognizes the contributions of women in leadership, with concerns for equity and equality. sharing perspectives that women have made and continue to make unique contributions to leadership, primarily due to socialized roles and expectations, each participant argued for greater collaboration between men and women leaders, and recognition that equity and equality are cross-gender issues (taylor, 1997). all three participants acknowledge that they faced challenges being a woman in educational leadership but, excluding shantalle, they downplayed the existence, entrenchment, or patriarchy of a male hegemony. regine and daphne recognize aspects of their style as being representative of their experiences in dealing with their brothers, who set the standard and provided many opportunities for experience in negotiation and problem solving. none of the participants took positions on the worthiness of women mentors as opposed to men mentors. for regine, the key to working with men was her forthrightness; for shantalle--offering conflicted positions at times--it was charisma and style, laced with assertiveness but resilience. she refused to be blocked and found ways to navigate around the "glass ceiling." daphne's challenge laid perhaps her sense of stewardship that did not allow much socializing with male colleagues or followers. her successes, the key to successful relationships with men, were her refusal to recognize flexibility, readiness to network, and orientation to service. moral and spiritual awareness regine gives no detail about the role of the church and early education in her evolution as a leader. whereas the narrative speaks more about religion than her moral awareness, she does afford a framework of selfdescriptors as being "firmly grounded" and "deeply spiritual." she notes that for her "sharing is loving," and that it is the purpose of life. she expressed a concern too for a heritage of values and standards that were not just materialistic or competitive, but mindful of a higher order to which we are accountable: "god did not make eve and eva." shantalle and daphne remember their mother-figures as very religious persons. shantalle saw herself as being prepared for faith and character through her grandmother's commitment to church. for shantalle, the church was ever present, from primary school to the secondary [convent] school. church-going was a major aspect of her weekends, often being taken, despite her protestations, by her grandmother, who she describes as a "strong christian." indeed, she asserted that she has had "enough religion to last a lifetime." shantalle describes herself as having a "strong faith" that "someone out there loves me." she refers to leadership as being an "almost sacred task," and in discussing her perspectives on the ethic of care, she recognizes the uniqueness of individuals as part of the wider community. daphne benefited through her mother being methodist by upbringing and philosophy, but anglican [episcopalian] in practice. she recalled the beauty of her mother singing hymns all day over the washtub. she places great emphasis on mutual respect for all and service to the community of followers and leaders alike. she speaks of jesus as a model of a caring leader, noting that sensitivity, responsibility, and responsiveness are all aspects of caring leadership. these indicators--the participants' value of service and attitude toward the community of individuals and a higher calling--illustrate moral awareness and spirituality, which is considered fundamental to transformational, caring, authentic leadership (burns, 1978; duignan & bhindi, 1997; gilligan, 1993). morality is not analogous with religion, but is more akin to spirituality and a non-partisan sensitivity to deep and enduring meaning and interconnectedness to something greater than the self (duignan & bhindi, 1997). spirituality attests to a readiness to goodness, through helping others and concern for relationships and communication (gilligan, 1982). the participants shared concerns about the apparent decline of caring and spirituality in the contemporary world, and the tendency by some to see caring as a feminine attribute typified in nursing an infant and special education, and associated with non-competitive salaries. summary the canvasses of our three exemplars portray women who express their feelings, live life to the fullest, care deeply for people, and who, in turn, are people for whom others care deeply. this study recognizes and documents the contributions and roles of these three women educational leaders. further, the study shares the experiences and perspectives of these exemplars with regard to establishing and maintaining community connectedness; a critical bridge that keeps relationships alive and well within educational communities. in directing focus on the lives of these women educational leaders, we have sought to place them center stage. this centering of their experiences, perceptions, and sharing of their voices gives a formal recognition and legitimization of their service to the community. as researchers, it is our hope that this in turn would facilitate the further celebration of voices of other caring and authentic leaders in education. the "voices" of the participants serve as models and sources of encouragement to educational leaders, inclusive of administrators and teacher practitioners. serving as exemplars, the participants remind and coach us that leadership is a responsibility to followers; that caring is evolutionary; and that it is nurtured by one's sense of community, authenticity, and spirituality. the sense of community embraces elements of inter-relatedness and equity, and warrants an appreciation for collaborative practice in addressing common goals and needs. references acker, s. 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(1964). work and motivation. new york: wiley press. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women network home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international advancing women in leadership review of survival kit for leaders stacey edmonson, ed.d. alice fisher, ed.d. edmonson, fisher, spring, 2004 the book can easily be used for enriching coursework or training in leadership skills, but it also has a place as a personal motivational tool for practicing or aspiring leaders. in a world where scandals and corruption appear in the daily headlines, effective leadership is critical in just about any field. kunick and lester's survival kit for leaders offers a refreshing look at how to develop and/or maintain quality leadership skills. the book's eight chapters offer clear explanations on how to be most effective for new or experienced leaders. each chapter is concluded with thought-provoking questions suitable for discussion in a classroom or group setting. the book also offers easy to remember mnemonics to help aspiring leaders remember important concepts offered by the authors. well-known examples of outstanding current or past leaders such as jackie robinson and anne sullivan are used to illustrate key concepts as well. this interactive and motivational book offers a powerful yet practical approach to developing leadership skills. the book opens with a lengthy discussion regarding the definition or characteristics of an effective leader. kunich and lester advocate that the key to leadership is found not in power, but in empowerment. they note how good leaders are able to motivate and support their subordinates, and they are able to "couple technical expertise with credibility and trustworthiness." the authors focus on how to balance the differing skills needed for leadership and management; they also emphasize the importance of having a vision for yourself, your followers, and your organization. the book continues this dialogue for understanding what leadership is, noting that there is no single definition of leadership. being an effective leader is often situational and requires hard work and strong interpersonal skills. in the words of file:///users/nrahman/temp/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html these authors, there are "no simple solutions or 'trick shots' in developing sound leadership qualities." also included is a helpful list of 20 leadership characteristics, including such important qualities as responsibility, enthusiasm, integrity, and flexibility. a quite thorough description of the "profile of a leader" then follows, with an indepth case study of raoul wallenberg, the swedish citizen who saved the lives of almost 100,000 jews during world war ii. kunick and lester describe a set of leadership characteristics referred to as the "wallenberg effect." these characteristics include knowledge, objective, ingenuity, confidence, and courage. a modern-day application of these characteristics is offered in a description of the passengers of flight 93 on september 11, 2001 ; the authors analyze how the doomed passengers on this flight that crashed over pennsylvania demonstrated the five characteristics of the wallenberg effect. demonstrating the importance of good leadership in two distinct but critical time periods the holocaust and the tragedies of september 11 the authors are quite effective in making their point. mentoring and feedback are then featured in each of the next two chapters, each with an easy to remember mnemonic of what the authors believe to be most important about these qualities. mentoring is used to remember a leader's responsibility to do the following things: model, empathize, nurture, teach, organize, respond, inspire, network, and goal-set. most of these responsibilities are nicely illustrated with a real-life person who exemplified the quality being discussed. the authors use feedback to remind readers of what effective feedback should be: frequent, early, evidence-based, dialogue-oriented, beneficial, accurate, clear, and kind. with thorough explanations of how each of these items can be accomplished, prospective leaders should be well-equipped to provide constructive, resultsproducing feedback to their employees. the book then moves into a very thorough description of the difference between leadership doing the right things and management doing things right . the authors use a diagram of "quality quadrants" to demonstrate how leadership and management skills work together to produce the best results. from "doing right things right" to "doing wrong things wrong," the authors offer detailed explanation of what works and what does not. following this explanation, the authors point out that above all, a leader must be law-abiding. they emphasize that obeying the law is the absolute minimum a leader must do, and in today's world of fallen corporate leaders and political corruption, such a message should not be taken for granted. kunich and lester emphasize seven points for leaders in following the law: (1) don't be stupid; (2) don't discriminate; (3) don't cheat; (4) don't abuse your position; (5) be nice to your "mother nature;" (6) watch your mouth; (7) play fair. while these recommendations may seem simple, they are critical to the effectiveness of any leader. the book closes with a lengthy discussion of time management for leaders. essentially, the authors ascribe to the philosophy of jeffrey mayer: "if you haven't got time to do it right, when will you find the time to do it over?" they provide excellent ideas for a variety of concepts concerning time management, including how to budget your time, how to delegate, how to choose what things to leave undone, how to work from lists, how to stay organized, and how to manage technology. the tips are helpful yet easy to understand, and even those things that readers may already know are worth being repeated. two mini "survival kits" complete the survival kit for leaders; one is "a five minute survival kit for emergencies," which analyzes specific tasks for different levels of leadership (i.e., strategic, organizational, direct, and personal. the second appendix is a "survival kit for your pocket," which lists 26 one-line reminders for being an exemplary leader. both of these mini survival kits are handy tools for summarizing the book's intent with just a few words. while no substitute for reading the book in its entirety, they are useful pieces for reinforcement or review. the survival kit for leaders is an easy read, but one that is well worth your time. the ideas set forth by kunich and lester are simple yet powerful. they offer practical ideas for developing or maintaining strong leadership skills, and they do so with interactive questions and stories that keep the reader actively engaged. the book can easily be used for enriching coursework or training in leadership skills, but it also has a place as a personal motivational tool for practicing or aspiring leaders. the authors intended for the survival kit for leaders to cause readers to think, both actively and interactively. it was designed to foster opportunities for readers to develop, analyze, and evaluate their own ideas regarding leadership. with these goals in mind, the book is a huge success. authors dr. stacey edmonson is an assistant professor of education in the department of educational leadership and counseling, sam houston state university. dr. alice fisher is an assistant professor of education in the departmen of educational leadership and counseling, sam houston state university. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2004 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/temp/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/temp/content.html file:///users/nrahman/temp/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/temp/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/temp/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership attitudes toward women leaders analyzed by gender and occupations (1984-1998) jacqueline lougheed, ed.d. lougheed, spring, 2000 "women and men need to be aware of the attitudes held toward women leaders and the extent to which gender bias, that set of attitudes which creates a set of expectations of another's ability by sex, and occupations influence attitudes." in 1984, responding to the concerns of female graduate students, i founded oakland university's women in leadership forum. the forum was designed to provide skill sessions to assist women in their search for leadership positions in education and social service agencies. in addition to the skill sessions, panels of successful women in leadership positions provided valuable insights as well as strategies for success. the design also included a research component to study the prevailing attitudes of women and men toward women leaders with a comparison of leadership styles of women and men. attitudes are formed at an early age and are reinforced by prevailing traditions and society's socialization processes. it was deemed important to assess attitudes for attitudes in turn shape our reactions and assessments of ourselves and others. the female graduate students spoke often of the negative attitudes that held them back from realizing their dream of attaining self-actualization through positions of leadership. sadker and sadker (1985) stated that gender bias is a set of beliefs or attitudes that indicate a primary view or set of expectations of peoples' abilities and interests according to sex. problems concerning gender bias exist in the classroom, in the curriculum, and throughout various levels of the educational system. rosemary papalewis, gypsy abbot, genevieve brown and beverly irby in their article achieving gender equity in education (1997) stated in effect that educational policy sets that parameters which serve as the boundaries for the educational opportunities of young women and that educational practice provides the quality of the educational experience. the belief in early popular literature was that women had not been socialized to compete on even terms with men, and women would need to develop new skills to compete. gradually, interest grew in http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html situational variables to explain the lower status of women. roseabeth moss kanter in her men and women of the corporation, (1977) looked at the organizational settings and attributed women's lack of success not to innate gender differences but to the distribution of opportunities and power. women's behavior, success, and leadership styles reflected their lack of power and women were being held back by practices within organizations that were antithetical to their success. sex-role stereotyping powers these practices and historically women have had to deal with these barriers by themselves. in a review of the literature, adkinson (1981) stated: considerable evidence supports the argument that sex-role stereotyping and sex-role socialization reduce the probabilities that women will seek leadership positions and that organizations will be receptive to those that do. (p. 311) methodology this article was drawn from a longitudinal study conducted over a fifteen year period, 1984 1998, to assess the attitudes of women and men toward women leaders and to compare the leadership styles of women and men. attitudes were obtained through a structured interview with 17 major questions and 64 listen fores. the perceptual data were split by gender and several statistical procedures were used to analyze the data determining mean scores, standard deviations, and significant differences at the .05 level between the perceptions of men and women. the data were also analyzed to determine the influence of the variables of age, education, occupations, marital status, and upward professional mobility on perceptions. using factor analysis the perceptual data were divided into four factors and a key question for each factor was identified, and finally, the data were analyzed to determine significant shifts in perceptions over the life of the study. leadership styles were assessed using a likert scale leadership behavior questionnaire developed by j. william pfeiffer and john e. jones (pfeiffer, jones, 1974). the scale assesses leadership style on the basis of two dimensions, concern for task and concern for people. a score for each dimension was obtained from the individual answers to the questions and then using a leadership style assessment profile a style was determined. for the purpose of this article one segment of the larger study was expanded upon and analyzed namely, this article will, first of all, overview the analysis of the key questions for each of the four factors split by gender with significant difference noted. secondly, an in-depth analysis will be made to determine the impact of different occupations on the perceptions held by women and men toward women leaders. data gathered will be analyzed first by gender and then by occupations to determine if women and men have different attitudes toward women leaders and secondly if there are differences in attitudes by occupations. sample the sample for this study was stratified to insure that an almost equal number of females and males were represented. it was also drawn to include all age, education, occupation, and marital status groupings. in addition, the sample was drawn to represent a relatively equal number of educators and non-educators. finally, the sample was drawn from the detroit metropolitan area. the total sample was 3649 with 1846 women (50.6%) and 1803 men (49.4%). the average age was 42 years for both women and men. eighty-seven percent of the sample had college degrees and 56.7 % had advanced degrees. thirty percent of the sample were in business, 10% in medicine, 13% in government, law and public service, 26% in teaching, 12% as school building administrators, and 9% as central school administrators, in higher education and employed by state and county educational agencies. those in education represent 47% of the total sample and those in other professions represent 53%. in terms of marital status, 73% percent are married, 19% are single, and 8% are divorced. twice as many women are divorced and half again as many women are single. in terms of upward mobility, 61% of the women and 54% of the men in the sample state that they are aspiring to a higher position of leadership in their chosen careers. the percentage of women aspiring to a higher position has grown steadily over the life of this study. analysis of perceptual data split by gender as stated earlier, several statistical procedures were used to analyze the data. factor analysis was used to divide the perceptual data into four factors: factor 1 women's leadership potential, factor 2 discrimination and women leaders, factor 3 women in the workplace, and factor 4 selecting a woman leader. the key questions for each factor are: factor 1 can women be successful leaders? factor 2 are women leaders discriminated against as leaders? factor 3 do women and men have similar professional goals? factor 4 if you could select your leader, would you choose a woman? participants answered the questions using one of the following descriptors: strongly agree, agree, no opinion, disagree, and strongly disagree. means and standard deviations will be displayed in tables. using a multiple range test, student-neuman-keuls, significance will be determined between groups at the .05 level. in the interview, each interviewee was asked to explain reasons behind their answers to each question. these reasons will be included in the analysis. the first analysis of the data is by gender and is displayed in table 1. table 1. key questions to the four factors with significant differences between women and men (1984 1998) factor 1 both women and men are in strong agreement that women can be successful leaders and as demonstrated by the standard deviations, there is strong agreement among both the women and the men on this question. however, there is a significant difference between women and men with the women being in stronger agreement on this question. there has been very little change of these perceptions over the life of the study except that women have become more positive in believing in their own leadership potential and the leadership potential of other women. this is a very positive shift in perceptions. factor 2 on discrimination against women leaders, again both women and men strongly agree that women leaders are discriminated against and there is very little difference of opinion among the women and men on this question, as shown by the standard deviations. however, there is significant difference between the women and men with the women being in stronger agreement on this question. as in the first factor, there has been very little change in perceptions on this question over the fifteen years of this study. when asked why the participants believed discrimination exists, they stated they believed it was caused not by what women do but by traditions and the socialization processes. this is a change over the life of the study in that at the beginning of the study both women and men believed it was caused by the fact that women by their very nature did not meet established norms for successful performance as leaders. factor 3 both women and men agree that women have similar professional goals as do their male counterparts but when asked to explain their response they stated that even though there is agreement that file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/winter2000/l-table1.html women want to get ahead professionally, both women and men believe that women handle conflicts and relate to others differently. at the beginning of this study, both men and women viewed these differences negatively; however, over the fifteen years of this study there has been growing belief by both women and men that the differences are positive. this is a very positive shift in attitudes. factor 4 fifty-one percent of the women and 31% of the men would select a woman as their leader if they could make the selection. these percentages have increased gradually over the life of the study. there is a direct positive correlation between having worked for a woman and being willing to choose to work for a woman. from the reasons given to this question, it is clear that women who have been successful in acquiring a leadership position are helping to dispel the fear and anxiety associated with working for a woman leader. from this analysis, it is clear that the women and men in this sample believe women can be successful leaders, are discriminated against as leaders, that women's behavior in the workplace is different but is being viewed more positively, and that a higher percentage of both women and men would choose to work for a woman leader if they were afforded the chance. viewing women's leader behavior more positively and being more willing to select a woman leader are positive shifts which have taken place over the fifteen years of this study. analysis of perceptual data split by gender and occupations the perceptual data were analyzed to determine if there are differences of attitudes by the various occupational categories. results are shown in table 2. all participants were divided into the following seven categories: group 1 business; group 2 medical personnel including doctors, dentists, and nurses; group 3 those holding government positions, lawyers and judges, and those employed in social service agencies; group 4 teachers in public and private schools grades k-12; group 5 educational administrators in schools as principals and assistant principals; group 6 educational administrators in central office positions as superintendents, assistants and associate superintendents and directors of programs: and group 7 those employed in higher education, and county or state educational agencies. table 2. key questions by factors for female sample split by occupations (1984 1998). factor 1 as can been seen in this analysis, regardless of occupation, all women in the sample are in strong agreement that women can be successful leaders and no significant differences were found between the occupational groups on this question. factor 2 the women, regardless of occupation, believe that women leaders are discriminated against as leaders. on this question using the student-newman-keuls test, significance was found between teachers and women in business and teachers and women as principals and assistant principals in the schools. in both cases, women who are teachers are in stronger agreement that women are discriminated against as leaders than are women in business or as building administrators. even though significance was not found between teachers and the members of occupational groups 2, 3, 6, and 7, teachers are in strongest agreement that women leaders are discriminated against. over the life of this study, women teachers have consistently expressed the strongest agreement that women leaders are discriminated against. many have expressed their belief that the glass ceiling is very much a reality. other teachers have expressed how difficult it is for women to attain the superintendency. it is interesting to note that women in central administration (group 6) are not in as strong agreement as are the teachers that women are discriminated against. perhaps these women having already achieved a central office administrative file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/winter2000/l-table2.html position while strongly agreeing that women leaders are discriminated against feel less strongly about the discrimination women leaders face than do the teachers who at this point have not attained a leadership position. factor 3 all women are in agreement that women have similar professional goals as do men and they reason that women want success, power, and money as do the men. again teachers are at the high end of agreement and are very close to strongly agreeing on this question. it is interesting to note that the standard deviations for all occupations are above one standard deviation. factor 4 all women, regardless of occupation, agree that if given the choice they would choose a woman leader. however the women teachers are again in more agreement and there are significant differences between the teachers and the women in all other occupations. it is interesting to note that regardless of occupation, all women in the sample strongly agreed that women can be successful leaders, strongly agreed that women leaders are discriminated against, agreed that women and men have similar professional goals, and the majority of women agree that they would select a women as a leader if given the choice. do the men have similar views across occupations when the data are split both by gender and occupations and are these views similar to the views held by women in the same occupational group? results are depicted in table 3 . table 3. key questions by factors for male sample split by occupations (19841998) factor 4 we again see differences of opinions between the men. men in business, in teaching, as building administrators, and in higher education etc. barely agree that they would select a women leader if given the choice and men in medicine, law etc. and in central administration for the schools saying no they would not choose a woman leader. using the multiple range test there were no two groups significantly different between groups. however, the standard deviations for all groups except for the men in medicine are more than one standard deviation showing more variance in response. the men in medicine are in strong agreement with very little variance of opinion among these men that they would not choose a woman leader. conclusions this study was designed to assess the prevailing attitudes of women and men toward women leaders and to assess the possible differences in attitudes by occupational groupings. when the data were split by gender, women and men strongly agreed that women can be successful leaders and are discriminated against as leaders. the women and men agree that both have similar professional goals, and that they would select to work for a woman leader. when the data were split by gender and occupations, the women regardless of occupation strongly believe women can be successful leaders and are discriminated against. all the women, again regardless of occupation, believe women have similar professional goals to the men and that they would select a woman leader if given the choice. there are no significant differences by occupations on the belief that women can be successful leaders. however, on the next three key questions women teachers see more discrimination than do the women in the other occupational group. women teachers also believe that women and men have similar professional goals. as noted earlier, there is a direct positive correlation between having worked for a woman and being willing to select a woman leader and more women have worked for a woman in education. file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/winter2000/l-table3.html for the men, they are in strong agreement that women can be successful leaders however, men in business have a less strong belief that women can be successful leaders than all the other occupational groups. all the men regardless of occupation believe women are discriminated against and there are no significant differences between groups. in terms of women and men having similar professional goals, there is a split between the men who are teachers, building administrators and men in central administration who strongly agree that the similarities exists and the men in the other occupational groups only agree that the similarities exists. on the last question regarding choosing a woman leader, there are no significant differences between the groups; however, again there is a split with men in business, teachers, building administrators and men in higher education/state/ county educational agencies saying they would select a woman leader. this is in contrast to men in medicine, law/government, and central office administrators in the schools saying they would not select a woman leader if given the choice. it is clear from this analysis of the data that there are differences in attitudes for both women and men by occupations. this study is providing a clearer picture of the perceptions held by women and men toward women leaders. even though women and men believe women can be successful leaders, there remains discrimination against women leaders and questions remain whether or not a woman should be selected as a leader. in addition, this study was designed on the belief that awareness is the first step to change and that awareness levels need to be raised. it is the belief of this writer that all of us need to work together to bring about change, for in so doing, the quality of life for all will be enhanced. references adkinson, j.a. (1981). women in school administration: a review of the research. review of educational research. 51(3), 311 343. kanter, r. m. (1977). men and women of the corporation. new york: basic books. lougheed, j. i. (1998). fifteen year study, 1984 1998, assessing attitudes of women and men toward women leaders and a comparison of leadership styles of women and men. monograph, women in leadership forum, oakland university. papalewis, r., abbot, g., brown, g., & irby, b. (1997). achieving gender equity in education. in wildman, l. (ed.) school administration: the new knowledge base. fifth yearbook, national council of professors of educational administration. lancaster, pa: technomic. pfeiffer, j. w. & jones, j. e. (ed.). (1974). a handbook of structured experiences for human relations training. la jolla, ca: university associates inc. volume 1(rev.). sadker, m., & sadker, d. (1985) the treatment of sex equity in teacher education. in klein, s. (ed.). handbook for achieving sex equity in teacher education. baltimore: the johns hopkins university press, pp. 145-161. dr. jacqueline lougheed is a professor at oakland university. awl journal home page awl journal volume 3, number 1, winter 2000 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/winter2000/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awnetwork/index.html copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word 3. locus of control job satisfaction job stress among female headteachers at primary.docx advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 19 advancing women in leadership vol. 34, pp. 19-27, 2014 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper locus of control job satisfaction job stress among female headteachers at primary schools in makassar, indonesia nurdiana gaus, arianto ac nurdiana gaus: school of social welfare (stiks) tamalanrea makassar, indonesia email: nurdiana.gaus@gmail.com arianto ac: school of social welfare (stiks) tamalanrea makassar, indonesia accepted april 11, 2014 the aim of this study was to examine the relationship between internal locus of control and job satisfaction, job stress and sexes of female head-teachers of primary schools in makassar, indonesia. a total of 85 female respondents returned the completed questionnaires. this is a one phased quantitative research using questionnaire instruments to collect data. the questionnaires were distributed by mailing them to the schools’ address of each respondent. the data were analyzed using spss package. arithmetic statistics used such as mean, standard deviation, pearson’s product moment correlation and stepwise multiple regression analysis. to establish content validity which supported construct validity, a principal component factor analysis was applied. the results of this study revealed that there was a significant correlation between internal locus of control and job satisfaction and job stress of female headteachers at elementary schools in makassar. there was no relationship between sexes (married with children and had maid; married with children had no maid ) with internal locus of control of female headteachers in primary schools in makassar, indonesia. keywords: locus; control; job satisfaction; stress; female; headteachers introduction there are no bad soldiers, only bad officers (napoleon bonaparte) the phrase above suggests that the role of leaders is a paramount of importance in many spheres of organizations. leaders may affect the results of both education and corporate organization products as they are the people whose full authorities in leading and running the organizations thereto all members within the organization boundaries rely their highly positive expectation in terms of their welfare, success and pride (coleman, 1996). school principalship roles are important ingredients in determining the success of the schools’ activities in the process of learning and teaching effectively and efficiently to satisfy both primary and secondary clients to promote quality outputs. as coleman (1996) confirmed “without exception the most important single factor in the success of those schools is the quality of leadership at the head” (p.167). it is not surprising, therefore that more attention may need to be paid to the wellbeing of headteachers, particularly female headteachers to ensure that they can run the schools properly. one of the important aspects for female headteachers which is considered to have a great influence in dealing with problems in any given situation is their cognitive perception. according to chaplain (2001) the cognitive perception helps our understanding to the extent of making sense of any situation. if someone sees the situation is stressful, it would make her stressful and vice versa. one of the concepts of cognitive appraisal commonly used in the research related to job stress and job satisfaction is the locus of control or personal control by rotter (1966). job satisfaction and job stress of a headteacher are closely related to her kind of personality. according to brock and grady (2002), different personalities may cause the differentiation of headteachers in viewing the problems that arise in her school community. the importance of personality in assisting female headteachers to reach success and job satisfaction was found in research by advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 20 jiransinghe & lyons (1996), who stated “certain personality criteria are important in job success and job satisfaction in a particular occupation. these criteria may vary as a result of situational or individual differences and have considerable implications for headteachers” (p.50). regarding the prestige that principalship position espouses, many females envisage to occupy it. it is regarded as a capstone of one’s career in school leaderships regardless of the responsibilities with which they deal. the complexity of headteachers tasks was described by jirasinghe & lyons (1996). they suggested several criteria that were necessary for a headteacher in order to run her school properly. a head need to be affiliative, ensuring that they work effectively with people and groups; caring, they can give to and help those in need, deal with personal confrontation and balance this against a consciousness of the needs of all in their community; change orientated, ensuring that a balance can be provided between seizing on the new opportunity while not abandoning a well-proven way of working before it is demonstrably superseded; relaxed and worrying; critical; ad have emotional control. (p.88) referring the headteachers responsibilities above, one can imagine how complicated and difficult the tasks that headteachers carry out. therefore, it is not surprising if headteachers express themselves in “frustration, dissapointment, and anger because they often do not have sufficient control to achieve the level of success of which they feel capable.” as a result’‘they are prone to stress and may affect their performance as school leaders.” (woolfe et.al, 2003, p.586) how does it feel to be a female principal? what about female principals in primary schools in makassar? for women in makassar particularly married women being principal means that they have to be ready to commit to dual responsibilities; school administration and family responsibilities as a mother and a wife. the heavy workloads of school administrations sometimes ignite conflict with family responsibilities, such as child rearing and bearing. therefore, women headteachers are more likely to suffer from stress compared with male principals. (brock & grady, 2002). it would be immensely useful at the outset to provide informational background about the characteristics of makassaris households in relation with the issue raised in this research. households in makassar are typified with two types of households; households run with the auspice of maid or servant and those without maid or servants. the households with servants have been usually the characteristic of those who can be categorized as middle to upper class families and vice versa. female principals whose bigger incomes usually employ maids to assist them to undertake the household works. thus, the conditions of female principals in makassar are characterized within these two domains and such condition may impact on their ability to manage their time functioning in a dual responsibility. these conditions envisage that those with maids at home would not have faced constraints in performing their roles and vice versa. this research focused on this issue as well. a physically and mentally healthy principal is important to guarantee the sustainable development of a school she leads, as she could be averted from giving disastrous impact on the wellbeing of a school and those within it (cooper & fox, 2011). therefore, it is important to make sure that a principal substantially has high internal locus of control to help her cope with their work to generate job satisfaction and avoid job stress. this research looks at the relationship between locus of control of female headteachers and their job satisfaction and job stress. based on the literature review on works and functions of principal that may spark satisfaction and stress, two categories were collected for job satisfaction and three categories for job stress. the two categories for job satisfaction were related to tasks as an educator and as a manager. the three categories for job stress consisted of stress related to the tasks as an educator, as a manger and as a wife or mother. literature review a previous research performed by a researcher, for example nelson & quick (2010) provided us with important information that locus of control had significant effect in job satisfaction leading to better job performance. however, there has been a relative dearth of attention given to the locus of control, job satisfaction and job stress for female headteachers. the same research has been rife focusing on teachers. the following literature review looked at the locus of control and its implication for job performance gained through job satisfaction. the implication was supported by some research conducted in this sphere. job satisfaction was analyzed through the lens of principals’ tasks. job stress was explained through the lens of principals’ tasks as well and also through their tasks in family. locus of control. locus of control was developed by julian rotter (1966). it stemmed from his social learning theory. locus ascribes to the latin word loci which means ‘place’. from the interpretation of locus of control as a place of control, one may suggest that it was a theory studied where people embed their control over their lives outcomes or reinforcement. according to rotter (1966), individuals were categorized into two different of locus of control, they were individuals with external and internal locus of control. individuals with internal locus of control attribute the occurrence in their lives with factors inside themselves, for example their personality, thus they believed that they were the determiner, the agent, and the actor in achieving their goals, coping and changing environment in which they live. people with external locus of control believed that the event occurs to them was affected by external factors, such as luck, advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 21 fate, chance and powerful others. therefore, they usually associated their failures and even achievements with such external factors. they believed that they had no capability in determining to which direction their lives will go because they were not the important actor of their lives. it all depends on good or bad lucks (rotter, 1966). lefcourt (1982) and rotter (1966) stated that people with internal locus of control tended to be adapted at coping problems in hostile environment, not to be prone to stress, and highly motivated for achievements. on the other hand, people with high external locus of control were usually less optimistic in facing the challenges in their lives. they were vulnerable to stress and frustration, to succumb easily, less motivated, and less enthusiastic, especially in competing with others. schultz &schultz (2011) argued that individual with internal locus of control tended to be “physically and mentally healthier, less anxiety and depression better able to cope with stress, more popular and socially skilled and rank higher in selfesteem”. (p.257) research on locus of control had significant implications for organizations. nelson & quick (2010) claimed that individuals with internal locus of control had higher job satisfaction and performance, to be more likely to assume managerial positions, and to prefer participative management styles. as a result, they were substantially needed by corporate and educational management because they had a propensity to perceive that all events they befallen were substantially from themselves. they were the factors that drove their destiny and achievements. they had high positive expectation of their lives. they were optimistic, highly motivated, steadfast, determined, enthusiastic, and loved challenging circumstances. they enjoyed heavy and challenging jobs. they had ability to manage their emotions, therefore they were not easily to get frustrated as described by (woolfe et.all, 2003). hardy individuals would tend to ‘perceive difficult situations as challenges and not as stressful by using cognitive coping skills to keep stressors in perspective. unpleasant events would be interpreted as new opportunities instead of threatening situations. (p.586) in the midst of intensifying rate of workloads, principals should prepare themselves with strong self -concepts in order to make them easy to carry out tasks successfully, leading to job satisfaction and avoiding job stress. female headteachers with high internal locus of control will have a propensity to take their work responsibilities for their own actions and exercise more initiative in solving problems compared with those whose high external locus of control (yukl, 1994). job stress and job satisfaction alvy and robbinson (2003) defined stress as “state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by unrealistically high aspirations and illusory and impossible goals” (p.281). the definition of work stress according to vroom (1964) is the affective reaction of individuals towards their work. in the meantime, job satisfaction is defined as a pleasurable emotional state resulting from appraisal of one’s job; an affective reaction to one’s job; an attitude towards one’ job (national institute of occupational safety and health 1999) however, research addressing women headteachers’ job stress and job satisfaction is scant compared to the research on job stress and job satisfaction on teachers (grady & brock 2002, chaplain 2001). generally the research performed within this field has reported similar themes on what constitute the sources of stress and satisfaction at work. the themes revolve around problems of workload, relationships, and administration (cooper & fox, 2011). grady and brock (2002) by the same token, present the job related stress encountered by female principals. the stressor is in form of tasks delegated to principals in running their schools, such as evaluation of staff, teachers and student, and relationship with parent and government. in the evaluation of teachers and staff, principals are expected to carry out the tasks of evaluating teachers’ and staff performance. this research addressed this gap in this literature by investigating locus of control, job satisfaction and job stress of female headteachers at state primary schools in makassar. alvy & robbins (1998) confirmed that managerial tasks contributed to the stress of female headteachers. the managerial tasks comprised the tasks in introducing change; developing an instructional vision; understanding planning and implementing change; creating the school vision; and working with the classified staff. managerial works were very complicated and challenging responsibilities. therefore, headteachers sometimes expressed their frustration and their anger if they failed to perform them successfully. working with parents was also important for principals. parents were also part of the school activities and development. making good communication with parents could enhance the performance of schools as parents could contribute constructive feedbacks needed by schools to improve schools’ performance, thus it could bring satisfaction to the whole members of schools. (o’rourke & poverzano, 2007). interaction with other people was another stressor of a headtecher in a school. relationship with parents as community for example, parents’ complain in terms of disagreement to some schools regulation or curriculum, teaching method, the progress of their children my generate stress. the importance of working with other members of schools and other community was highlighted by (daresh, 2002). that principals are the manager and formal administrator of the campus. as such, it is your duty to ensure that the campus operates efficiently and effectively. but you will quickly appreciate an important reality of service as a administrator in public education: there are a lot of people who want to be in charge in your world they are teachers and teacher organizations, parents, community members and board of education. (p.149) advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 22 ostell & oakland(1995) also identified the stressor of women headteachers in their research, those were work overload, lack of management training, diminishing opportunity to teach, bureaucratic frustration and relationship with large numbers of people. cooper & kelly, (1993) ; hill, (1994) reported the results of their research that the dissatisfiers of women headteachers were paperwork, overload and low status. for married headteachers, stressor may manifold because they have dual responsibilities. the source of stress emanated from their additional responsibilities at home as wives and mothers. they had to balance their works and their domestic roles. inability to balance this, may lead to a stressful condition. research on job stress for married principal was reported by colleman ( 2002 ) and smulyan (2000). the result from their research indicated that married women had a more prevalence to become stressful than married males because they had additional responsibilities at home as carers of children and they had to balance this role. this was also confirmed by hall (1996) “generally they interpreted the problem of being a working woman who is also a wife/or mother or caregiver as their own personal problem, not one to be shared with others”. (p.58) the dilemma confronted by married women in pricipalship roles may lead to internal conflict within the psyche of women. on one side, women aspire to have careers outside home but on the other side they were confronted with unsupportive condition due to their domestic roles. the sex-role stereotyping has led women to feel unease to leave their families for such long hours and this condition triggers the feeling of guilty and anxiety. as adler & izraeli (1994) claimed “that many mothers recognize anxiety and guilt in combining the role of carer with their career“. (p.27) feeling of guilty which leads to a role conflict has become the main concern in many literatures addressing work stress on women headteachers. recent research indicated women’s family responsibilities continue to affect their professional lives. sobehart (2009) stated that: combining a senior position at work with motherhood is a difficult prospect that may lead women to make choices about which to prioritize. trying to successfully manage both can lead to role conflict and guilt. (p.18) it would be hard for women to choose a priority because both roles of carer and career are important for them. on the other hand, if they try to manage both, conflict may arise. the same phenomena occured in makassar. gaus (2011) in her study about factors deterring female teachers from holding principal positions at elementary schools found that family responsibilities had been the barriers for female teachers to aspire leadership positions. they were responsible for family responsibilities. the domestic roles had been attached to women and this value had been internalized by women themselves, thus they believed that they were the people who were fully responsible for the whole families. failing to fulfill this responsibility may lead to a bitter judgment from makassar’s society that they were irresponsible mothers. methodology research design the aim of this study was to examine the relationship between internal locus of control with job satisfaction and job stress of female headteachers at primary schools in makassar, indonesia. in order to be able to investigate the issue above, the research was designed using a cross-sectional survey research. the choice of the research design was determined by the purpose of this research that was, to establish or to express causal connections between variables; to apply a generalization to a larger population or sample, and to collect data at a single point in time (bryman 2012, creswell 2008). this research design is in the vein of the objectivism and positivism paradigm. working in this paradigm, therefore, the research was began by the data generation by providing a theoretical framework gained from the literature on the related topic (deductive method) (robson, 1992). this related literature helped in formulating research questions or hypotheses to test. the spss package was used in analyzing quantitative data. the arithmetical statistic was computed using spss package. those arithmetical statistics were mean and standard deviation, correlation of pearson’s product moment and stepwise multiple regression analysis. factor analysis was also used to establish content validity which provided support for construct validity. the external and internal locus of control of rotter (1966) were applied to measure the locus of control of the respondents. the locus of control then, was related to the job stress, job satisfaction and sexes (married with children had maid; married with children had no maid) of female headteacher respondents using pearson’s product moment. the measurement of job satisfaction was examined under two categories considered as the satisfier obtained from the literature review, while the job stress was examined under three categories. the satisfiers were those related to principalship tasks as an educator and as a manager, such as evaluating staff, evaluating teachers, disciplining students, and empowering teachers. the level of female headteachers’ stress was evaluated within the tasks as an educator, manager, and as a wife or mother. sexes were also analyzed, especially those married participants with children and maid at home and those of them whose children but had no maid at home. the purpose of this was to look at the difference in the level of job satisfaction and job stress among those groups of married female principals. this was also aimed at adapting to the living condition of households in indonesia which usually employed someone (maid) to help doing houseworks. in this category, problems raised were balancing family responsibilities and career; houseworks such as, cooking and cleaning; and additional home responsibilities such as taking care old members of family. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 23 in this study, the relationship between locus of control of women headteachers with job stress and job satisfaction at primary schools in makassar was examined. the overall aim of the research was to explore the source of stress (stressor or dissatisfier) and satisfier of those respondents related to their profession as headteachers in primary schools. there were three research questions relating to this issue. the questions are: 1. what is the locus of control, job stress and job satisfaction of female headteachers of makassar state primary schools? 2. is there a relationship between locus of control and their job stress, job satisfaction and their sexes? 3. is there an association in their locus of control, job satisfaction and their sexes? the data were gathered from female headteachers. the quantitative data were obtained through a questionnaire instrument. the female headteacher respondents were aged above fifty and all were married. the number of married female headteachers who were married and had children and had maid to help was 20 and those with children but had no maid to help was 65. the participants came from 110 elementary schools of 366 elementary schools in makassar. the questionnaires were distributed to 110 female principals. the schools were selected from the public website of makassar’s district education office. the schools were selected in each five districts in makassar city at random. the schools’ location ranged from inner to suburban area. the data collection was one-phased research using quantitative method. through the website the telephone number of the selected schools was found. the principals were contacted by phone, informing them the research and asking their confirmation to participate in the research. they were provided as well with the explanation about the nature of their participations that their participations were voluntary and their privacy was securely kept. once they agreed to take part, a package of a threepart questionnaires measuring their locus of control, job stress and job satisfaction was sent out. the questionnaire was already translated into indonesian language. the package of questionnaire consisted of the explanation of the research, explanation on how to complete and return the questionnaire and voluntary participation statement. they were told to return the unanimous questionnaires within 2 weeks time by mailing to my address using the postagepaid envelope i provided in the package. several questions were raised relating to their locus of control, work satisfaction and work stress as primary school women headteachers. the main intention to raise the questions was to explore the relationship between their locus of control and job stress and job satisfaction. three instruments were utilized in this research, they were; rotter’s external-internal locus of control, job satisfaction and job stress scale which were established using problems from the literature review. test-retest estimates reported by rotter (1966) for the external-internal locus of control ranged from 0.70 to 0.80 and the internal consistency of the scale ranged from .65 to .79. for this study the internal consistency was reported 0.95 (α cronbach). for the scale of job satisfaction the internal consistency using α cronbach was 0.95 and internal consistency for the scale of job stress was 0.97. a principal components factor analysis using a varimax rotation was used to establish content validity. this process provided support that the instrument had good construct validity. in job satisfaction measurement, two factors were entered into the equation. those two factors were satisfaction related to the tasks as an educator and satisfaction related to the tasks as a manager. the results of factoring established only one factor which can represent all variables in job satisfaction instrument. the following table 1 summarized the validity of job satisfaction instrument. table 1. factor analysis of job satisfaction of female headteachers eigenvalue % of variance explained 1. satisfaction as an educator 2. satisfaction as a manager 1.890 .101 94.942 5.058 the eigenvalue for job satisfaction as an educator was above 1 and job satisfaction as a manager was below 1. in order to determine the high positive relationship between factor, component matrix was presented in the following table. table 2 component matrix of job satisfaction of female headteachers component 1 1. satisfaction as an educator 2. satisfaction as a manager .974 .974 the data above can be concluded that there was high relationship among variables. it was indicated by the value of factor loading was above the (cut off point ) 0.55. thus, a factor formed can only represent all variables. because the relationship of variables entered demonstrated a positive relationship, it can be considered that the instrument of job satisfaction was valid. the same measurement of validity was applied to the job stress instrument. from three factors entered into the equation, only 1 factor established as well. there was a high relationship among variables with the value of factor loading was above the (cut off point) 0.55. therefore it can be concluded that the job stress instrument was valid. the following two tables presented the result of the factor analysis. table 3 factor analysis of job stress of women principals advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 24 eigenvalues % of variance explained 1. stress as an educator 2. stress as a manager 3. stress as a wife 2.850 .133 .018 94.942 4.417 .592 table 4 component matrix of job stress of women principals component 1 1. stress as an educator 2. stress as a manager 3. stress as a wife/mother .954 .987 .983 the locus of control of female participants was measured using a 13item scale of rotter’s external – internal locus of control. the scale was originally a forced-choice format. however, in this study it was modified into a five point likert scale. because internal locus of control constituted an important factor in influencing job satisfaction and job stress of female principals, only the internal locus of control of participants that was measured. therefore, only the internal locus of control of rotter was utilized. the levels of agreement towards the statements were indicated from (1) strongly agree; (2) agree; (3) neutral ; (4) disagree (5) strongly disagree. with an exception for the scale of job stress. the response levels of agreement were negatively reversed and they were arranged from (1). strongly disagree; (2) disagree; (3) neutral; (4) agree; (5) strongly disagree. the 13 internal locus of control by rotter was depicted below: 1. people’s misfortunes result from the mistakes they make 2. one of the major reasons why we have wars is because people don’t take enough interest in politics 3. in the long run people get respect they deserve in this world 4. the idea that teachers unfair to students is nonsense 5. capable people who fail to become leaders have not taken advantage of their opportunities 6. people who can’t get others to like them don’t understand how to get along with others 7. i have often found that what is going to happen will happen 8. in the case of well-prepared student, there is rarely if ever such a thing as an unfair test 9. becoming a success is a matter of hardwork, luck has little or nothing to do with it 10. the average citizens can have an influence in government decision 11. when i make plans, i am almost certain that i can make them work 12. in my case, getting what i want has little or nothing to do with luck 13. what happens to me is my own doing the job satisfaction of female headteachers was measured with 18 items which were obtained from the literature review. job stress of women principals was measured with 23 items, which were also derived from the literature review. the following tables 5 and 6 illustrated them. table 5 descriptive information regarding job satisfaction related to work of female headteachers scale description questionnaire satisfaction as an educator satisfaction as a manager this scale measures the principals’s satisfaction as an educator including in evaluating teachers, staff and students; implementing curriculum, vision and mission; enhance teachers growth through supervision. this scale measures the principals’s satisfaction with managerial tasks including the ability to create curriculum, vision and mission; the ability to introduce change, resolve conflict, rally community support and to create conducive environment. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 table 6 descriptive information regarding job stress related to work and family responsibilities of female headteachers scale description questionaire items stressor as an educator stressor as a manager stressor as mothers and wives this scale measures the job stress of principals related to the tasks as an educator this scale measures the job stress of principals related to the tasks as a this scale measures the job stress of principals related to their function as mothers and wives who have to be responsible for their families. 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 37, 38 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55 in this study, the data were analyzed based on the five research questions. the data analysis was explained below: advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 25 research question 1 : the internal locus of control of female principals. this was measured using arithmetical statistic of mean and standard deviation. dependent variable was internal locus of control, independent variables were job satisfaction, job stress and sexes. research question 2: the relationship between internal locus of control and their job satisfaction, job stress and their sexes. it was measured using pearson’s product moment. research question 3: the association between internal locus of control and job stress, job satisfaction, sexes of female headteachers. stepwise multiple regression analysis was applied. the use of this was intended to see the effect of independent variables (job satisfaction, job stress and sexes) on dependent variable (internal locus of control) or in the other words what were the predictive of independent variables on dependent variables. findings of 110 questionnaires distributed to female headteachers, only 85 completed questionnaires were returned. two were discarded because they were not fully completed. the other one was not completed at all. the low return rate may had been due to the timing applied to the return of the questionnaire. the distribution of the questionnaire was conducted in september 2011, and the expected time of receiving the returned questionnaire was by the end of october 2011. table 7 internal locus of control of female headteachers sexes internal loc job satisfaction job stress married with children have maid (n=20) mean std. deviation married with children no maid (n= 65) mean std. deviation 2.1 .78807 1.9933 .64 37.35 12.38112 36.16 9.458 55.8 19.7660 61 24.125 the results from the table 3 above demonstrated that there was no significant difference in internal locus of control, job satisfaction and job stress of both group of sexes of female headteachers. it was indicated by the mean score of 2.1 and 1.9 respectively for internal loc, and 37.35 and 36.16 for job satisfaction. in the meantime, there was a slight difference in the job stress that was indicated by the mean score 55.8 and 61 respectively. in order to find out the relationship between internal locus of control and female headteachers’ job satisfaction, job stress and their sexes, a pearson product moment correlation was applied. the following table highlighted the results of this relationship. table 8 correlation between job stress, job satisfaction, sexes regarding female headteachers’ internal locs locus of control job satisfaction job stress sexes internal loc r p 0.872 0.000 0.357 0.001 -0.072 0.511 ** p<.001 the overall pattern of relationship between internal locus of control with variables job stress and job satisfaction as shown in table 4 was indicating a positive relationship (p – value was smaller than .000), with the exemption for variable sexes which demonstrated a negative correlation to internal locus of control (p-value > .001). table 9 job stress, job satisfaction and sexes on internal locus of control of both sexes the stepwise multiple regression analysis was employed to investigate what variables from independent variables can be used as a predictive on dependent variables. in this case, the independent variables were job stress, job satisfaction and sexes of female principals, while dependent variable was internal locus of control. table 5 summarized the effect of independent variables on dependent variable. from the table above, either job satisfaction or job stress had a significant relationship with internal locus of control with p value .000 and .001 respectively (p-value < .05). the f test of both variables was bigger than f table, so it was concluded that the relationship was significant. sexes, in contrast was negatively correlated to internal locus of control with f value .511 which was bigger than p-value .05. discussion the results of this study demonstrated that internal locus of control played an important role in affecting job satisfaction and job stress of female headteachers in the primary schools in makassar, indonesia. the study revealed that gender/sexes of variabl es r r square adjus ted r squa re std. error of the estimate f p job satisfac tion .827 .760 .757 .33572 262.92 0 .000 job stress sexes .357 .072 .128 .005 .117 -.007 .68358 .68358 12.147 .436 .001 .511 advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 26 married female teachers, in these terms whether they had children and a maid or those with children but no maid had negative correlation on their internal locus of control. it meant that the gender was not a predictor for internal locus for female headteachers in makassar. therefore, to become an effective leader had nothing to do with their gender/ sexes of those respondents. according to some studies ( burke & nelson, 2002; brock & grady, 2002; cooper & kelly, 1993) which addressed locus of control, job satisfaction and job stress of female headteachers, reported that internal locus of control or personality aspects had significant influences in determining the level of job satisfaction and job stress of leaders. this study performed for female headteachers at primary schools in makassar demonstrated the similar pattern to those previous abovementioned research that job satisfaction and the job stress of female headteachers in primary schools in makassar apparently to correlate positively to their internal locus of control. because they had internal locus of control, they tended to be satisfied with their job and negated stress. they were certainly sure with their ability to perform tasks as leaders in schools, as a pedagogical entrepreneur, as cox and cooper called it. their function as an educator, as well as a manager and as a wife/or mother had aggregated the complex condition of female headteachers in makassar. it is surprisingly to note that these married female headteachers in primary schools in makassar indicated a higher level of job satisfaction, even though they had to conduct dual responsibilities. there was no different at all, whether they had children and had no maid and had children and had a maid at home. the study also revealed that there was no relationship between internal locus of control and their sexes. the results of this study may give us a direction that married women had significant potential to become effective leaders, especially leaders at schools level. limitation of the study the study cannot be generalized to the whole population. it was only valid for the sample. additionally, this study only investigated the relationship of job stress and internal locus of control and job satisfaction without measuring demographic independent variables, such as age, education, gender (females and males) and marital status (married, unmarried or divorced) . however, another kind of gender variables was employed in terms of married female headteachers which was classified into groups that was married with children with maid and married with children without maid. the purpose of doing this was to look at the pattern of these two married groups in their coping of their overburdened work. the study did not measure the effect of job stress and job satisfaction female headteachers either in makassar into their personal lives and their health. it would be good for the next research to include these variables. significance of the study the study investigated the relationship between job stress and internal locus of control and marriage condition of female headteachers of primary schools in makassar. this was important in order to assist female headteachers in developing their personality to cope with the stressful environment due to the pervasive and profound workload of principalship tasks. thus, they are more likely to be satisfied leading to a better performance in running schools properly. references adler, n.j. & izraeli, d. (1994). competitive frontiers: women managers in a global economy, usa : basil blackwood ltd , alvy, h.b & robbins, p. (1998). if i only knew success strategies for navigating the principalsips, usa : corwin press, inc. alvy, h.b & robbins, p. (2003). the principal’s companion: strategies and hints to make the job easier (2nd ed), usa : corwin press, inc brock, b.l. & grady, m. (2002). avoiding burnout: a principal’s guide to keeping the fire alive. usa : corwin press. inc brock, b.l. & grady, m. (2000). rekindling the flame: principals combating teachers burnout. usa : corwin press. inc bryman, a. (2012) social research method, fourth edition, oxford university press: oxford burke, r.j. & nelson, d.l. (2002). advancing women’s careerss, uk : blackwood publishers inc. chaplain, r.p (2001) stress and job satisfaction among primary headteachers: a question of balance? educational management & administration, vol 29, no. 2, pp. 197215 coleman, m. (2002). women as headteachers: striking the balance, london: trentham books ltd. cooper, c.l. & fox, j.l.(eds), (2011). handbook of stress in the occupation. london :edward edgar publishing ltd cooper, c.l. & kelly, m. (1993). occupational stress in headteachers. british journal of educational psychology. 63 creswel, j.w. (2008) educational research: planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research, third edition, prentice hall: new daresh, j.c. (2002). what it means to be a principal. usa : corwin press gaus, n. (2011). factors deterring female teachers from holding principal positions at elementary schools in makassar, indonesia. advancing women in leadership journal vol. 31: 175-188 hall, hall, v. (1996). dancing on the ceiling : a study of women managers in education, london: paul chapman publishing ltd hill, j (1994). the paradox of gender: sex stereotyping within statementing procedure: british educational journal 20 (3): 345-357 advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 27 jirasinghe, d. & lyons. (1996). the competent head. a job analysis of head’s task and personality factors. london : falmer press lefcourt, h.m. (1982). locus of control: current trend in theory and research, routledge. national institute for occupational safety and health (niosh), 1999. stress..at work.centers f for disease control and prevention, us department of helth and human serices, 99-101: 26 nelson, d.l. & quick, j.c. (2010). organizational behavior science, the real world, and you. london: sage publication o’rourke, a. & poverzano, j. (2007). countdown to the principalship: a resource guide for beginning principals, new york : eye on education ostell, a. & oakland, s. (1995). cited in cooper and cox, (2011). handbook of stress in education, london: edward edgar publishing ltd. robson, c (1993) real world research, second edition, blackwell: uk rotter j.b. (1996). generalized expectancies for internal vs external control of reinforcement. psychological monograph: general and applied, 80. 1-28 schultz, d.p & schultz, s.e. (2011). a history of modern psychology, usa : wadworth, cengage learnin smulyan, l. (2000). balancing acts: women principals at work. usa: state university of new york sobehart, h.c(ed). (2009). women leading education across the continents: sharing the spirit, fanning the flame, usa : rowman & littlefield education yukl, (1994). leadership in organization. usa: prentice hall vroom, v.h (1964) work and motivation, willey: new york wolfe, r. et all. (2003). handbook of counseling psychology. sage publication appendix (1) questionnaire 1. what is your age? 2. are you married? 3. how many number of children do you have? 4. do you have a maid? 5. i am sure with my ability to evaluate teachers’ performance 6. i can provide professional guidance and meaningful evaluation to staff and teachers 7. i can enhance teachers’ growth through supervision 8. i know how to implement my school’s vision and mission 9. i can boost staff morale 10. i can discipline students, teachers and staff 11. i can create curriculum, school’s vision and mission 12. i can work with other members of my school 13. i know how to introduce change with staff 14. i have the ability to resolve conflicts 15. i can rally community support for schools 16. i am able to develop strong, healthy relationships among school members 17. i am able to create conducive environment for learning 18. i am sure with my ability to make decision 19. i know how to plan and implement change 20. i know to manage organization 21. i am an innovative principal 22. educator tasks to do with evaluating of teachers’ performance made me stress 23. educator tasks to do with providing professional guidance and meaningful evaluation to staff and teachers made me stress 24. educator tasks to do with enhancing teachers’ growth through supervision made me stress 25. educator tasks to do with implementing my school’s vision and mission stresse me 26. educator tasks to do with boosting staff morale stresse me 27. educator tasks to do with disciplining students, teachers and staff made me stress 28. managerial tasks to do with creating curriculum, school’s vision and mission made me stress 29. managerial tasks to do with working with other members of my school stress me 30. managerial tasks to do with introducing change with staff made me stress 31. managerial tasks to do with resolving conflicts made me stress 32. managerial task to do with rallying community support for schools stress me 33. managerial tasks to do with developing strong, healthy relationships among school members made me stress 34. managerial tasks to do with creating conducive environment for learning made me stress 35. managerial tasks to do with making decision stress me 36. managerial tasks to do with planning and implementing change made me stress 37. managerial tasks to do with managing organization made me stress 38. family responsibility to do with balancing career and family made me stress 39. family responsibility to do with houseworks, cooking and cleaning made me stress 40. family responsibility to do with looking after children made me stress 41. family responsibility to do with additional responsibility to take care older member of family stress me. advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 23, spring 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] gender and the network structures of social capital in professional-client relationships yuliani suseno, ashly h. pinnington, and dr. john gardner abstract recent studies in industrialized economies document a shift in gender composition of the labor market. they report an increase in the amount of women entering the labor force and in the number securing toplevel positions in organizations (jacobs, 1992; kanter, 1977; reskin & roos, 1990). in professional labor markets, organizations' efforts to hire and promote women to senior ranks have assisted gender equality, but top-ranking male professionals still outnumber women professionals across many high-status professional sectors. this social phenomenon prevails in most professions and organizational forms, including professional service firms. gender stratification, for example, within the legal profession is very apparent, producing income differences that are more substantial than that exists in the total labor force (hagan, 1990). this paper proposes using social capital theory to examine the influences of gender in professional service firms. moving beyond the intra-organizational perspective, we argue for the significance of network structures that extend across organizational boundaries. we focus specifically on gender differences in network relationships with clients and on the structural nature of the professional's social capital. we advance four propositions for future research on how individuals' network structures influence the attainment of higher income and status position in the firm. finally, we make some suggestions on what individuals and professional service firms can do to promote more gender equality. gender and the network structures of social capital in professional-client relationships the increase in the number of women entering the labor force and securing top-level positions in organizations has improved gender equality in the labor market (jacobs, 1992; kanter, 1977; reskin and roos, 1990). however, professional firm's increased hiring and promotion of women has not eradicated the gender imbalance wherein top-ranking male professionals still outnumber women professionals across many of the high-status professional sectors, including the legal profession (australian financial review, 2004; file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm kay and hagan, 1999). research studies document that female professionals are promoted to partner at significantly lower rates than men (hull & nelson, 2000; kay, 1997; kay & hagan, 1998, 1999). substantial income differences remain despite the narrowing gap during recent years (hagan & kay, 1995). women also find themselves having less autonomy and are significantly less involved in decision-making on policy considerations (hagan & kay, 1995; kay, 1997). such inequalities as these have the potential to contribute to women's experience of higher levels of dissatisfaction than male colleagues (brockman, 1992, 1996). there has been a growing interest in examining why women professionals take home less pay and are underrepresented at the top level of the hierarchy in organizations. however, most of these research studies focus chiefly on the internal organizational perspective (dreher & cox, 2000). several explanations have been offered to explain this "male-dominated phenomenon" on professionals' income and promotion differentials. scholars have suggested that for entry into the lower level of management, women recorded less human capital in terms of not having adequate level of skills, knowledge, education, or expertise when compared to their male counterparts (becker, 1985, 1991; kornhauser & revesz, 1995; ragins, townsend, & mattis, 1998; stroh, brett, and reilly, 1992). developmental opportunities available for women were also found to be more limited than they were for men (dreher & cox, 1996; greenhaus, parasuraman, & wormley, 1990). research has recently begun to examine the differentials in income attainment and career advancement between male and female professionals relating them to mobility in the external labor market. brett and stroh (1997), for instance, found that male professionals who also changed companies when changing jobs received higher compensation than compared to female professionals. lam and dreher (2004) likewise found that the differential income between men and women was largely due to a larger proportion of men pursuing the external labor market mobility strategy, rather than was specifically a result of intra-firm gender discrimination. several other studies have found that the mobility of women has in fact been much more restricted than men, which consequently affects women's income attainment and career advancement. women continue to face more obstacles in their mobility due to constraints relating to their family and children (bielby & bielby, 1992; mcbrier, 2003; rosenfeld & jones, 1987). it has also been argued that women have insufficient time for work-related activities, such as time for networking and meeting prospective clients and senior partners (kay & hagan, 1999; seron & ferris, 1995), although others have in fact found that marriage and children had little or no effect on women's career advancement (tharenou, 1995, 1997). whereas the potential effects of gender on income and promotion differentials have been increasingly documented in the literature on organizational behavior as well as within the work and gender literatures, relatively few studies have investigated the influence of individual networks on the attainment of higher income and promotion. specifically, there has been a lack of emphasis on the context of professional service firms where women have been found to possess similar levels of human capital as their male counterparts (burt, 1998). in fact, previous studies have even indicated that no substantial difference exists in opportunities available to men and women for advancement to the top of the firm in areas of professional practice, such as law, accounting, architecture, engineering consultancy, and advertising. nevertheless, the reality is that the glass ceiling phenomenon--the invisible barrier that prevents women from advancing to the top--still remains (tharenou, 1998), and women have consistently recorded less pay than their male colleagues (judge, cable, boudreau, & bretz, 1995; truman & baroudi, 1994). burt (1998), using social network theory, argued that if human capital does not play a significant role in explaining the fact that there are fewer women partners in professional service firms, then the difference in income attainment of women professionals and the actual number of female professionals at the top may be partly explained by differences in social capital (between male and female professionals). in other words, it is not what the individuals know but who they know (nahapiet & ghoshal, 1998) that consistently maintains the gap between men and women's income and position attainment. burt's (1998) findings suggested that senior females cannot so readily achieve success on their own, contrary to senior men who are able to expand their networks more easily. success for females in terms of career promotion was most facilitated when they were tightly linked to a sponsor and effectively "borrowed" their sponsor's social capital. in other words, female managers were only able to achieve success if their networks were structured in a more hierarchical manner. from these insights, one can confidently infer that women's reduced likelihood of promotion to the top and lower rate of income growth are strongly related to the structure of their networks (adler & izraeli, 1994; burt, 1998; ibarra & smith-lovin, 1997). women have been said to perceive that they face a barrier to inclusion in informal networks among male executives (schor, 1997). they also seem to experience more difficulty in establishing and maintaining network ties at the top level which remains highly gendered (epstein, 1993; kay & hagan, 1998, 1999; mcbrier, 2003). although burt's (1998) findings shed some light on the nature of social capital and the network structures between male and female professionals, it concentrated on an intra-firm perspective. female managers received faster promotion only on occasions when they were closely tied to the sponsor within the organization and received interpersonal assistance from their sponsor. similarly, ibarra (1997) found that women who were promoted to executive levels relied much more on close informal networks of other women within the firm. tharenou (1995) discovered that australian females became ceos only when managerial hierarchies were less proportionately made up of male executives, and that these female executives had informal networks of support from other females. brass (1985) further found that successful women were more adept at building informal networks, especially with other women. in sum, previous research using social network theory has largely focused on two distinct intra-firm issues: (a) do female and male professionals' networks in the organization vary and what are the implications of these variations? (e.g., burt, 1998), and (b) how do intra-firm informal networks of female and male professionals vary in terms of the provision of opportunities for advancement? (e.g., ibarra, 1997). drawing on findings from social network research on gender stratification in professional service firms, this paper proposes a new perspective using social capital theory in the context of professional-client relationships. it seeks to identify how an individual professional's network structures influence the attainment of higher income and position in the firm. the social capital theory, we argue, provides the necessary foundation for understanding ways that the structures of female and male professionals' networks influence two outcomes--income attainment and a higher position in the firm. tharenou (1999) suggests that women accrue less social capital than men hindering their advancement to the top of organizations, and in this article we endeavor, moreover, to offer insights on how the network structures of social capital can instead be used to women's advantage. in examining the professional-client relationship, we attempt to break away from the intra-organizational level of analysis frequently adopted in the research literature. the client management of professional service firms is a relatively under-explored area (boccaccini & brodsky, 2002), especially considering the fact that the existing research on client management of professional service firms has tended to concentrate on client interactions with the firm (e.g., jones, 1987; skaggs & huffman, 2003). relationships between the two individuals who are representatives of their respective organizations--professional and client--have the potential to influence the professional's income and facilitate advancement to higher levels in the organization. accordingly, by focusing specifically on the multiple dyadic relationships between professionals and their clients, the paper contributes by demonstrating the implications of network structures of social capital at this important level of analysis (kostova & roth, 2003). this paper is structured as follows. we begin by providing a summary of social capital and its importance in the professional-client relationship. next, we present our conceptual framework for exploring the effects of individual professionals' network structures of social capital with clients and their potential for earning a higher income and career advancement to partnership. by focusing on the structural nature of a professional's social capital with clients, we predict ways that the current social phenomena of the shortage of women at the top level of the hierarchy and the seemingly slow rate of pay progression of women may be changed. finally, we conclude by discussing the implications of our approach. social capital in the last few years, a growing body of literature has developed on the concept of social capital. social capital has been described as a resource that is embedded within actors' social relationships (bourdieu, 1986; loury, 1977, 1987). research findings on social capital suggest that the creation and maintenance of social capital requires the existence of networks with other parties (burt, 1992; hitt, bierman, shimizu, & kochhar, 2001; kogut & zander, 1992; nahapiet & ghoshal, 1998; podolny & baron, 1997; tsai & ghoshal, 1998; yli-renko, autio, & sapienza, 2001). indeed, the distinctive characteristic of social capital lies in the importance of networks of relations for generating value for the actor. professionals rely on their social capital to deliver value in their professional services to clients. as professionals' outputs or services are intangible, clients often become the co-producers of the services provided by these professionals. clients rely upon measures such as quality as well as the interpersonal nature of the relationship with the service provider (iacobucci, 1999). this intense involvement of clients makes social capital a central feature of operations in these types of firms (pennings & lee, 1999). in this article, rather than focusing on relationships with colleagues as the common source of one's social capital, we instead conceptualize social capital as "the professional's privileged access to resources, established through his or her networks with his or her clients, from which the professional can derive actual or potential value for his or her benefits (adler & kwon, 2000, 2002; belliveau, o'reilly, & wade, 1996; coleman, 1988; fukuyama, 1995; leana & van buren, 1999; lin, 1982; nahapiet & ghoshal, 1998; putnam, 1995; tsai & ghoshal, 1998; yli-renko, et al., 2001). this conceptualization has several implications. first, social capital represents the actor's privileged access to resources. social capital is not located within an individual person or an organization nor even a community, but in the networks that exist within the actor's social context with other actors (coleman, 1988). therefore, our conceptualization of social capital involves an aspect of social structure (coleman, 1988). second, we posit that a professional's social capital can be attributed to his or her relationships with clients. while relationships with colleagues can certainly provide social capital, the focus of the paper is to move beyond intra-organizational linkages to focus on the professional-client relationship which has not received adequate attention in the literature. third, we argue that social capital promotes actual or potential instrumental benefits for the actor. following coleman (1988) and gabbay and leenders (1999), our conceptualization of social capital reflects the positive outcome of social capital, as relationships that are "helpful in attaining specific goals" (gabbay & leenders, 1999). in our context, these goals represent a professional's achievement of significant income attainment and the concurrent standing of the professional within the firm's structural hierarchy. social capital thus enables the achievement of certain outcomes that may be impossible or difficult to be achieved outside of the structure (coleman, 1990; nahapiet & ghoshal, 1998). rethinking gender and the network structures of social capital in professional-client relationships existing studies have documented a general agreement that gender plays a role on the professionals' income attainment and position as partners in professional service firms (burt, 1998; tharenou, 1995, 1999). there is a disproportionately higher number of male professionals occupying the top level of the hierarchy and earning higher incomes than female professionals. in using the social capital theory, we argue that while this inequitable phenomenon is undeniable, it can be changed. female professionals must look beyond solely focusing on their human capital and start building their networks around the firm's clients. in other words, we predict that the network structures of social capital moderate the effects of gender on the outcome variables, as illustrated in figure 1. figure 1. a conceptual framework on the influence of the network structures of social capital on the relationship between gender, income attainment, and position network structures of social capital illustrate the different types of networks and ties of relationships and their consequent effects on instrumental outcomes (suseno, pinnington, gardner, & shulman, 2004). we consider two different network structures of social capital that influence the extent to which a professional's social capital with his or her clients effects the professional's income attainment and position in the firm's hierarchical structure. the two variables are: (a) the centrality of the professional in terms of his or her work ties with the clients (tsai & ghoshal, 1998), and (b) the non-redundancy among the professional's client contacts (burt, 1992). centrality research on structural embeddedness focuses on the structural characteristics of social networks in explaining outcomes (granovetter, 1985). the fundamental tenet of this perspective is that the location of an actor in the network enhances or constrains access to certain resources (brass, 1984; ibarra, 1993). coleman (1990) notes that "having positions rather than persons as elements of the structure has provided one form of social capital that can maintain stability in the face of instability of individuals" (p. 320). in a structurally embedded relationship, the actor's location in a network of relations and interactions therefore provide benefits to that actor (tsai & ghoshal, 1998) in that it enables the actor to have unique advantages over access to resources (ibarra, 1993). in explaining one's structural position in a network, the actor's centrality is the most often applied as a property of social networks (marsden, 2002). one's centrality is defined as the extent to which an ego is connected to various alters within a specified network (wasserman & faust, 1994). an actor who is central is one who is prominent in the network and is involved in many ties (wasserman & faust, 1994). in other words, the actor's central location in a network of relations and interactions indicates that the actor is linked to many ties in the network and can thus command influence and control. one's centrality within the client networks can be achieved in several ways, most notably, by being more involved in a greater number of clients' work assignments. firms should provide opportunities for their professionals to share and "rotate" their client work. professionals are more likely to span across the boundaries of their networks through increasing the diversity of assignments. a professional's centrality can also be improved through building both formal and informal networks with other professionals, within the firm as well as with others outside the firm, such as joining and becoming active in external associations. building these kinds of networks provides reputation and referrals benefits which may influence the centrality of one's networks. while research has documented that gender differences play a role in influencing the outcomes of interest, what we argue here is that a professional's centrality in his or her work ties with clients plays a further role in contributing to such outcomes. in other words, centrality moderates the relationship between gender and the outcomes of income attainment and position in the firm. a professional with a high degree of centrality is one who is connected to many client ties. as a result of this network structure, the professional is expected to earn significant income because he or she is approached by many clients for undertaking new assignments or to seek advice. at the same time, the professional is also more likely to occupy a higher structural position in the firm as a result of the reputation that he/she has for having many clients approaching him or her for professional work and/or advice. therefore, we posit that female professionals can expect their income and position in the firm to improve by ensuring that they are located in a central network position within the client contacts. p1: there tends to be a smaller difference between male and female professionals' income attainment when female professionals are central in the work ties network with the clients. p2: there tends to be a smaller difference between male and female professionals' position in the firm when female professionals are central in the work ties network with the clients. non-redundancy of contacts the concept of the non-redundancy of ties indicates that people need to first learn about communication linkages (who talks with whom) and communication holes (who does not talk with whom) in the network (monge & contractor, 2003). when individuals learn about communication linkages and communication holes in their network, they will be able to invest in or exploit these linkages and holes. for example, if one knows who talks with whom in his or her network, one is able to gain benefits from these contacts by getting reliable and trustworthy information and knowledge from these sources. a range of non-redundant ties provides the actor with valuable access to resources, information, advice, status, and emotional support (brass, 1985; burt, 2000; campbell, marsden, & hurlbert, 1986; reagans & zuckerman, 2001). in examining studies of social capital conducted at the inter-organizational level of analysis, burt (1992) found that firms with inter-oganizational networks rich in structural holes were able to earn higher profits as compared to firms located in networks without these structural positions. actors who created and maintained ties with disconnected groups, or those that occupied structural holes, used boundary-spanning social networks to gain promotions and compensation (burt, 1992). in essence, actors who were in control of non-redundant ties have access to valuable key external resources, gained information benefits (burt, 1992), and obtained various other opportunities (granovetter, 1973). for professionals, information benefits can be gained by having clients in unrelated fields or who are not connected to each other. burt (1992, 1998) suggests that information derived from these non-redundant network ties facilitates access, timing, and referral benefits. access refers to information and knowledge that others are not able to obtain. in the context of the professional-client relationship, access might refer to information or knowledge from the clients, which can be used by the professional both to refer on to others and secure new business (gulati, 1999). providing services to clients enables the professional to learn about different industries and other information pertaining to specific markets and organizations. moreover, the non-redundancy of ties among the professional's clients enable the professional to gain control benefits because benefits to one client, such as a provision of a discount, will not be communicated and made available to all of the other clients. therefore, the professional is able to exploit the willingness and ability of certain client organizations to pay more by selectively passing on information ( jones, hesterly, faldmoelindquist, & borgatti , 1998). timing indicates being connected to the right contacts in the network so that one can obtain the right information and knowledge at the right time (gulati, 1999). professionals who possessed timing benefits could use the information and knowledge gathered from one assignment and transfer and customize it quickly and efficiently to other client assignments. timing is also important in professional-client services because a growing number of client organizations have more often made use of transactional strategies (baker & faulkner, 1991). the professionals and firms delivering the relevant knowledge and services to clients in an efficient manner are more likely to secure these contracts. the non-redundancy of ties further provides a professional with indirect referral benefits (gulati, 1999). professionals exploit the "structural holes" of knowledge from client assignments by brokering their knowledge from one client assignment to the next. in this way, they serve their clients more effectively based on knowledge acquired from different client assignments. they are also able to further leverage this knowledge for attracting new client business by informing prospective clients of their experience in doing specific assignments. while we anticipate the effect of gender on a professional's income attainment and position in the firm, what we are arguing here is that female professionals are more likely to earn a similar level of income and occupy similar positions as their male counterparts whenever they gain access, timing, and referrals benefits from the non-redundancy of their network within client contacts. thus, p3: the disparity between male and female professionals' income attainment is smaller when female professionals' client contacts are non-redundant. p4: the disparity between male and female professionals' position in the firm is smaller when female professionals' client contacts are non-redundant. discussion and implications although progress has been made toward ensuring gender equality for income and hierarchical position, clearly persistent gender gaps in income and position remain between male and female professionals (hagan & kay, 1995; kay & hagan, 1995, 1999; winkler, 2000). most existing studies have tended to approach this issue from the intra-organizational perspective, examining women's lack of investment in education and further training (becker, 1985, 1991) and their responsibility for household and childcare, which can contribute to the lack of promotion opportunities for women (kay & hagan, 1999; mcbrier, 2003). in sum, these studies concentrate on issues of human capital and its development. we argue that in the context of professional service firms, where there is scant evidence of significant differences between female and male professionals' level of human capital, research findings that are focused on the human capital theory cannot entirely explain the existing phenomenon of the disproportionately fewer number of women at the top of organizations and the persistent evidence of pay differences (burt, 1998; judge, et al., 1995; truman & baroudi, 1994). in this paper, we propose a new perspective using social capital theory in the context of professional-client relationships to identify how an individual professional's network structures influence the attainment of higher income and position in the firm. previous attempts that have examined social capital within organizations concentrate largely on electronics manufacturing and technology-based firms (e.g., tsai & ghoshal, 1998; yli-renko, et al., 2001), but studies on the importance of social capital rarely have been investigated in professional service firms. in particular, the nature of the professional-client networks remains under-explored, and we propose that future research examines in more depth professional service providers and their network linkages to clients. using social capital as a theoretical perspective, we argue, has the potential to enhance our knowledge of social processes in professional-client relationships. in this paper, our aim was to analyze the structural nature of a professional's social capital within professional-client relationships and its influence on the professional's income attainment and position in the firm. from a practical perspective, our propositions may motivate professionals to build their social capital, not only through forming and maintaining relationships with other professionals (lazega, 1999), but most importantly, with their clients. professionals can derive insights into the criticality of: (a) their position in the client networks, i.e., centrality, and (b) the patterns of connections within the network based on the nonredundancy of ties. female professionals who aspire to achieve the goals of higher income and position in the firm should ensure that they are located in a central position within their client networks, through getting involved in more client work, attending client seminars, providing training, and many other networking activities. we also propose that female professionals need to ensure that their client contacts are not redundant to simultaneously achieve these goals of higher income and position. we predict that gender will not influence a professional's income attainment and position so much as will the network structures of their client contacts. these we anticipate will have a strongly significant influence on the outcome variables. we thus propose a simple framework as a starting point for investigating optimal ways of organizing networks between female professionals and their clients, through building their centrality in the network, and by ensuring that client contacts are non-redundant. although professional service firms are still primarily male-dominated institutions, there is a degree of change in the top hierarchy of the firm with an increasing number of female partners attaining top level positions. this article, we hope, will be useful for assisting women professionals to examine their networks. we predict that female professionals will build their social capital when they are able to position themselves in a central location within their client networks, while ensuring (when acceptable) that these contacts are not linked to each other. social capital increases through exploitation of these two fundamentally different structural configurations. organizations would also benefit from analyzing more closely the network structures of their female and male employees. institutions can promote equality of opportunity for women in the workplace by providing more avenues for female professionals to be involved in a greater range of clients' work. greater client diversity increases the likelihood of being located in a central position within the network of clients. individual female professionals also need to be more aware of the importance of informal networks, not only among other female executives, but also with male professionals, so that their networks of clients are more widespread and non-redundant through their increased social capital. in sum, through examining professional-client relationships, we can attain a better understanding of the role of social capital for individual professionals' career promotion and rewards and in the continued viability of their firms. references adler , n. j., & izraeli, d. n. 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(2001). social capital, knowledge acquisition, and knowledge exploitation in young technology-based firms. strategic management journal , 22 , 587-613. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership reimagining our academic journeys through spiritual metaphor michelle collay sandra gehrig valerie lesniak carol mayer collay, gehrig, lesniak, mayer, winter, 2002 those who warn you about becoming marginalized by joining the sister hood have lessons to learn about what the academy can be. four mid-life women examine their individual and collective pilgrimages through, near and around the academy. our pilgrimages are spiritual, moral, social, and developmental in a variety of ways. our scholarship reflects these perspectives with language, research frameworks, and metaphors for understanding. we offer women of, within, and about the academy the metaphors as lenses to understand our academic journeys. so much of our language about recent membership in the academy depicts being "other" and about exclusion and indifference, we felt compelled to take a proactive stance about our own journeys. the language of these spiritually-grounded metaphors are a beginning. perspectives/theoretical framework much of the research on women and higher education reflects the conflict that arises when the personal journey is stymied by the unforgiving academy. in http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html subordination (kinnear, 1995), women of academe (aisenberg & harrington, 1988) bitter milk (grumet, 1980), and other such works highlight the perennial exclusion of "the other" by the academy, specifically women. cooper, benham, collay, martinez-aleman, and scherr offered a different perspective in their shared work about how women found a home in the academy. in a famine of stories, (cooper, et al., 1997) they look at how the academy shapes our understanding of ourselves as members of the academy, and the roles of our students, mentors, families, and colleagues in finding a home in the academy. this collaboration was inspired by that work. 1. why do women continue to flock to the academy in greater numbers than men if it remains so inhospitable? 2. how does such a personal, mid-life journey take place in such a hierarchical, patriarchal context? as we continue to seek answers to these questions, we feel that relationship and destiny play special roles in the spiritual and intellectual development of women. if women within the academy can understand their development from multiple scholarly perspectives, they might find new, proactive, and women-friendly forms to frame their experiences. the languages of moral, spiritual, and social development offer us such forms. modes of inquiry narrative and dialogue play a vital role in human development as our intertwined stories portray. four women from different research traditions such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, and spirituality offer stories of pilgrimage and process to each other and our readers for reflection and review. in stories lives tell, editors carol witherell and nel noddings present three central themes that are evident throughout that work and which guide our reflections. they suggest that: story and narrative are primary tools in the work that educators and counselors do; that education means taking seriously both the quest for life's meaning and the call to care for persons; and that the use of narrative and dialogue can serve as a model for teaching and learning across the boundaries of disciplines, professions, and cultures. (1991, p. 2) each of us has stories to tell about our journey; each is on a quest for life's meaning and feels called to care; and each of us uses narrative and dialogue in our professional work with students and in our colleague and mentoring relationships. we have interviewed each other, taken courses from one another, co-taught courses, and written together. we have parented each other‚s children, helped deliver another's child, held each other's hand in times of pain, and offered solace when the challenges of the journey loomed large. in the numerous small steps of our academic and personal lives lies the magnitude of our intellectual development. our shared story language within our narratives comes from a variety of intellectual efforts: coauthored work such as course syllabi, research papers, and presentations; letters and e-mail exchanges, journal entries, essays, phone conversations, and anecdotal materials. we have made meaning of these pursuits because of our personal convergence. over many cups of coffee and conversations at the kitchen table, we strived to make sense of our place in the academy and our place with each other. each individual has described a specific metaphor for our academic journey, and the four writers identify commonalities and differences in each metaphor and each journey. at the beginning of each author's description, her relationship to the other authors is sketched in italics. the path converges . . . sandy is the link between the four panel members. her story of re-entering the academy at mid-life is a poignant tale of a woman unsure of her intellectual capacity and fearful of being found a fraud. through the completion of two master's degrees, one in education and one in spirituality, she is mentored and co-mentors three other women. her story is about the convergence of our paths. learning and teaching as pilgrimage sandy's story in cultures where the sacred feminine is revered, that cycle is seen as central to a woman's biological life, her emotional development, and eventually, to her full spiritual unfolding. it is also regarded as a kind of wellspring for the entire community.... as a western woman, i grew up without any inkling of what that sort of recognition might feel like, but i think the hunger for it guided me at crucial junctures. carol lee flinders, 1998, p. 158 i never thought going to graduate school would evolve into a pilgrimage that would last for many years. it was not until i had graduated from hamline university with a master's degree in education and began my sojourn as a seminary student that i began to put to my path. my vocation as an elementary teacher and later a facilitator of adult university students does not at first glance provoke that perspective of sustained yearning . . . yearning nudges one to become a seeker. unlike attending school as a sightseer or as one traveling abroad, i experienced internal development throughout my learning that invited a different metaphor: pilgrimage. this path of pilgrimage offered new settings that revived me and sharpened my senses. this pilgrimage opened new spiritual dimensions, causing me to pay closer attention to what my life could be. i found that my teaching and learning pilgrimage is more than physical movement from my home to new surroundings. it was an inward journey as well as an outward journey, into the self as well as into new places. a pilgrimage is both a visit to a new place and awareness of an existing meditative quality within myself. i became attentive not only to my accomplishments but to the very process of the quest itself. i invite readers to value the aspect of 'taking stock' that accompanies the inward journey and the outward pilgrimage. when i became aware that i was living my pilgrimage i found that constant reflection during this sojourn greatly enriched my lived experience, perhaps more than any detailed planning. pilgrimages are not limited to the present but are shaped by the past world view. the expectations of the present provoke me to find new pathways toward my future. pilgrims continually enter new territory and must get their bearings along each new leg of the journey. taking stock is also essential as one learns and goes forth in this world as a teacher and learner. the need for introspection may seem elemental to some, but the disciplined practice of reflection and meditation has not always been a component of my daily life. it is not always an easy and uneventful process. questions arise and demand answers or focus attention of a different sort on previously hidden aspects of my life. pilgrimage opens reality to significance. in looking back over my experience, i have found that the basic mark of a pilgrimage is the quest for something important enough that i am compelled to devote myself to a committed search. i embarked on my first masters degree as a proposed trip that might yield what i yearned for: a graduate degree. what i found initially was all together different than i expected. in retrospect, i understand i was looking for something that was missing in my life. it turned out to be the movement and creativity i experienced through the process of earning my degree. walking the path as a pilgrim was more satisfying than reaching the destination. i was confronted with the perception that something i formerly valued had disappeared from my thoughts or important relationships seemed to have faded. i was slowly moving away from the rest of the flock as so often happens during a pilgrimage. the events and succession of involvement in my learning led me away from a sense of safety and wholeness i once took for granted. new learning shattered my concept of self. this is often the very essence of any spiritual pilgrimage or any significant event that causes us to question our place in the world (cooper, 1997). a common definition of pilgrimage most often involves the identification of a tangible goal toward which the quest is directed. in teaching and learning, there does seem to be some mystical attraction pulling us toward the holy grail or a degree. there is also a sense of heightened awareness to the world around us. the site may not be located in one geographic location, just as the degree is not the only outcome. there is a desire for wholeness that draws one to a place of higher learning where the process of pilgrimage might be experienced. as a mid-life student my search was not so much for a place or a shrine but a search for legitimacy as a learner. into mid-life, there was also an increased sensitivity to the passage of time. one wants to set out before it is too late. pilgrims need to move. in medieval times the pilgrim traveled to distant places and endured hardships. i view pilgrimage in modern times as a critical form of participation. one cannot merely spectate, this movement is not recreational. it has purpose and determination with something larger than the self. the journey really caused me to examine my vocational intentions and motivations. teaching and learning are not something one can do at home in isolation, but are a shared quest. while teaching and learning are not always grueling, it is a journey that requires much forethought and planning for the unexpected. how often is the unexpected part of our daily teaching a side trip away from the syllabus that is handed out to the students? if we acknowledge that both students and teachers are on a learning pilgrimage, all learners would benefit from much more than a degree. as a student and as a teacher, i know that timing is critical. as with a spiritual pilgrimage, time is needed from the beginning to meditate on the odd moments throughout the days and to honor the impact of the pilgrimage while it is still underway. i found that questions i raised ran deeper that i could know. the importance of reflection, whether intellectual or spiritual, is central to making meaning of the journey. reconciling outward movement and inner seeking requires time. timeliness was also a factor in my learning and teaching pilgrimage. without readiness and openness i would have never recognized the importance and value of the lessons and teachers i would meet along the way. the interaction with fellow pilgrims, michelle, carol and valerie, all who were my advisors and now my friends and colleagues, greatly enriched my pilgrimage as a graduate student. all played an invaluable role in my successful completion of degrees. i too entered their lives at timely intervals. we all converged as members focused on some ultimate goal. michelle was a new program director at hamline and i was one of the first students to complete her infant graduate program. carol was new to the region and we found each other because i was the teacher of her second grade son. she mentored me while i investigated the complicated writings of simone weil for my thesis. valerie was there for me as my advisor and spiritual director on my extended pilgrimage at the st. paul seminary. these three women met each other through me. i became the common denominator as our lives evolved. behind each relationship is a story of shared experience that became a pilgrimage. within this sketch i discern both a celebration and caution when it comes to companionship, pilgrimage, and teaching and learning. although community and having others there to share the excitement was most gratifying, there was a danger of depriving myself of the credit i deserved. i acknowledge my companions by saying, "i could not have done this without you." while this may be quite true, i did do something. i kept going, exploring and testing my new intellectual legitimacy. we all have. medieval pilgrims were individuals who came together through a common quest, rather than a common history. douglas vest suggests in his book, on pilgrimage (1998), that the traveler who must constantly refer to "back home" has not fully entered the process of true pilgrimage. pilgrims express awe about and reverence toward their journeys. i think of my work and the students i come in contact with and wonder what our world of education and life would be like if our intellectual pursuits were undertaken with the same conviction of those on pilgrimage. truly then would our precious time here on earth reflect our journeys as pilgrims. lastly, pilgrims, whoever or wherever we are, must be open to points of view that we have never known before. annie dillard (1982) portrays this place as where: the deeps are violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. but if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the worlds rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. this is given, it is not learned. (pp. 94-95) carol was sandy's thesis coach for her first graduate degree, and sandy was carol's son's second grade teacher. carol had moved away from the institution where she was "all but dissertation" (abd) and was a careful and supportive writing coach for sandy. michelle met carol through sandy and they became colleagues at the same university. now the circle was more closely focused on the institutional journey, and carol's lifetime of institution-watching became an asset to michelle. michelle encouraged carol to stay with her goal of completing her own graduate degree and they shared their interests in mid-life women's development. her story is about her experience as a doctoral student. walking the labyrinth to reclaim the self carol's story this reflection is undertaken with a certain dread and confusion: dread because i am unaccustomed to speaking publicly about personal issues, and confusion because these issues are now in process and the end is not in sight. this paper also begins in the unpopular passive voice. that, too, is appropriate, for this paper is about passivity and loss of voice in higher education. it is also about the intense hope of reclaiming the self at least partially through the use of the labyrinth as a process, with some suggestion that the metaphor could also support institutional reform. there are two goals for this description: first, to share information about how the labyrinth has been a tool for spiritual progress in the past and present; and second, to narrate my reflective experience using the labyrinth to understand my most recent journey in higher education. the labyrinth and contemporary spirituality the labyrinth played an important role in medieval mysticism, and its mystical qualities still speak to seekers today. walking the labyrinth then and now has been described as a mystical process consisting of three stages or a "three-fold path" to union with god: purgation, illumination, and union. in purgation, the seeker attempts to rid herself of whatever is blocking her relationship with god. it is the elimination of internal and external distraction for the sake of silence, peace, and preparation for the center where illumination occurs. in the center, one finds clarity concerning issues, challenges, and the meaning of one‚s life. the center is a place for prayer and contemplation. sometimes images and insights appear whose meanings become apparent weeks or months later. the final stage, union, means communing with god while walking the same route in reverse-exiting the labyrinth and reentering the world with ones inner resources unified within the person and with the transcendent. some walkers report feeling energized or empowered as they exit. the labyrinth as transformation my relationship with the labyrinth began in a strictly intellectual way. i was searching for a suitable extension of the pilgrimage metaphor with which to reflect on higher education, especially its reform. i was already aware of the growing interest in labyrinths and had walked one, but i hadn‚t connected it to this conversation until the labyrinth connected itself to me. it simply appeared in my consciousness with great certainty. since then, the labyrinth has been a powerful tool for my own professional and personal transformation, though the journey is far from over. as i stated earlier, the labyrinth describes a threefold mystical process of purgation, illumination, and union. because i am currently uncomfortable with a description of my journey as mystical (though it may well turn out to be so in the end), i have chosen to rename these stages as separation, vision, and reintegration. you will remember that the goal of the labyrinths entry route is the elimination of distraction, a "clearing of the decks" to prepare for clarity of vision in the center. i now believe that this first stage of separation is nothing less than a powerful psycho-dynamic effort to fully identify and consciously withdraw to separate--from people and processes which are destructive but in which we are nevertheless deeply invested. i now believe that the key to personal as well as institutional reform is to fully understand what it is that we wish to abandon and why we have been deeply invested in harmful traditions. stated differently, we can easily identify what we don't like. what we usually do not understand is why we endure and perhaps enable such traditions to continue. artress (1995) states that we all have an acute spiritual hunger for "healing, co-creation, and self-knowledge" (p.35) where self-knowledge includes knowing, in jungian terms, our shadow side. the shadow side is everything about our personalities that we have rejected and concealed in the shadows of consciousness. as these elements remain preconscious, they gain in power and eventually erupt in destructive ways. these jungian insights are not new; if anything at all is new, it is their application to the psychosocial dynamics of higher education. transformation will be incomplete personally and institutionally until what is in the shadows is brought into the light and named. as dysfunctional as our academic communities often are, their very dysfunction performs significant emotional service for us. until we understand our own complicity in this service, reform will remain quite literally "shadow-boxing." my own journey is illustrative. most of my adult life has alternated between student and professional roles, and i often speak with alternating voices. i have had four major life shifts: in my twenties i attended graduate school without any clear professional goals and completed an m.a. in philosophy. i then embarked on a 15year period of significant professional accomplishment as a college teacher and administrator. while these were years of genuine professional achievement and although i gained important experience, inwardly i did not recognize it as such. what seemed to matter most was the satisfaction i gained from pleasing people, especially quasi-parental figures. gumport (1997) writes of her own struggle for legitimacy and approval, of its influence on her choice of research, and its continuing impact on her writing efforts. the third major shift back into student life came in my 40's as i returned to graduate school to earn a doctorate. i was completely unprepared for the feelings of alienation and detachment that would engulf me. i no longer had a professional identity. these feelings were probably intensified by the fact that i was that rare bird, a full-time non-traditional student. but they were significantly increased by a highly traditional pedagogical setting in which lockean attitudes about learning and students were alive and well (in fact, they still are today). i was struck by the absence of any material pertaining to us as students--there seemed to be no place in student development theory for any of the students in the class, not to mention in any of the services that they would eventually render. nor was there any effort to acknowledge or include the substantial professional expertise that was present. during those four years of doctoral work, i now know that i participated in an odd symbiotic relationship: my peers and i became professional nonentities so that academe's most cherished notions and controls could remain intact. we permitted ourselves to be silenced in exchange for degrees. the most ironic twist of all is that far too many of us have not completed our dissertations to finally earn those doctorates: to write, one must have a voice. in a tentative way, i have returned to the professorial life. there is a historian of ideas within me who is watching and awaiting the death of rationalism---there are some promising signs---but for the most part it is alive, well, and fully controlling academe. it is powerful because the shadow side of our professional life has yet to be identified and known for what it is. for example, we have yet to face our inordinate desire to control students and their learning. we have yet to recognize the arrogance that creates class warfare within our profession and silences professionals learning on our campuses. and we have yet to admit that we are just as susceptible to deceit, treachery, revenge, and infidelity as were the ancient greeks. once we have undertaken separation from these powerfully destructive notions and relationships, however, we will be available in the existential sense for vision, and perhaps that vision will somehow involve the satisfaction of our spiritual hunger for healing, for co-creation in a productive community, and for further self-knowledge, as artress suggested. scholars such as anna neumann (1997) are making a start by turning their considerable research skills on the academic community of which they are a part. many more of us need to join in the effort if greater numbers of us are to become fully functioning professionals. as a consequence of preparing this paper, i now know that, although my entry into the labyrinth seems recent, i have been walking it for a very long time. what is new is my conscious reflection upon the labyrinth as a process of transformation and my awareness of the power of this reflection to shape my understanding of myself and academe and to free me for action within it. michelle was the program director of sandy's first graduate program, and met her just as she was scheduling her thesis defense. she found in sandy first a mentee, then a friend, then colleague, then doula. sandy held her hand in the doctor's office during a d & c that followed a miscarriage, and attended the birth of her first child. the shared path of co-mentorship and rebirth offers another metaphor for women in the academy. gestation, birth, and rebirth michelle's story if death is the boundary situation that brings into stark relief the fears implicit in circumstance, conflict, suffering, and grief, then birth stands parallel to it, forcing us to think through the fearful but essential aspects of love, accord, joy, and contribution. (ochs, 1983, pp. 103-104) i tell friends and colleagues that my intellectual and reproductive life converged in mid-life. after turning 40, i finally published my dissertation on its ten-year anniversary, published my first book as lead author, and had a baby. the obvious parallel of birthing the book was mentioned by several people, yet one year later i just begin to make sense of the parallels. while i often muse about starting my 40's with the above-mentioned experiences and wonder why i didn't do these things in my 20's, i remind myself that few academic women follow a linear path. rather, they move in circular patterns through cycles of life, tucking their personal, spiritual and psychic development between intellectual pursuits, and completing intellectual endeavors before children are born, after they go to bed at night, and amid the grief they feel as adult children leave home. sometimes, women take up intellectual and spiritual pursuits in conflict with the wishes of their families. within a circle of family are the joys and pains relationships bring . . . within the circle of colleagues in the academy, relationships bring their own rewards and despair. the circles are sometimes proximate, at other times they overlap. once in awhile, they are completely congruent. the dissertation and the book each had a gestation and birth, just like our infant george yvon. yes, there are parallels and differences as the two processes converge and diverge! both intellectual activity and physical birth have due dates . . . but one can procrastinate over intellectual tasks. the baby comes when it is ready to be born. the preparation can be all-consuming . . . one‚s mind is filled day and night with possibilities of what is to be in print or in flesh, but reflection about writing leaves one with some sense of control. waiting for the baby to be born is fraught with fear, anticipation, and hope, and all sense of control is lost. we read and consult as we write, and read and consult about pregnancy . . . in neither case was it very reassuring. i find it interesting that physical birth has a much more defined cycle than an intellectual activity like authorship. the tiny sac contains a living, then breathing fetus that develops along a completely predestined course. my writing feels much more random and happenstance, although in retrospect, perhaps the course was more defined than was evident in the early stages of gestation. during the dark hours of early morning, the baby begins to make itself known to me through movement . . . and during those same hours, i begin to make sense of my random thoughts and try hard the next writing session to capture them on the screen. the inexorable movement toward birth has far fewer moments which compare to seeing text emerge from my fingers . . . perhaps the swish-swish of the heartbeat heard through the monitor, or the visual image of the fetus on the sonogram come close. the moment of birth, however, is very definite, a life-changing event which no publication can touch. perhaps that is the lesson to be learned. why do i invite academic women to embrace the metaphor of birth and renewal? i offer this time-honored and perennial metaphor to women as they make their way in the academy as a reminder. many of us know about the physical act of birth firsthand, others from their experiences as sisters, aunts, and friends. this sacred event offers us language, emotion, and a tangible laying on of hands as we accompany another in our labor. too often, we have been forced to divide our loyalties, to take up the intellectual journey at the expense of our relationships, families, and psyches. finally, we lose access to critical ways of knowing which are firmly rooted in the feminine, and such ways have too often been casualties of the institutional shackles we have come to accept as the price of admission. the feminine experience offers many ways of knowing which can transform how we see ourselves in the academy. och's (1993) "love, accord, joy, and contribution" are traits not often associated with the academy. perhaps by adopting the language of birth, we can change the nature of the academy and the relationships within it. we have much to learn and more to teach ourselves and others, especially those we perceive as „mainstream‰ academics. we must make the experience our own and tell our stories. when sandy moved on to the seminary for her next degree, her mentor was valerie, the fourth author of this article. sandy invited michelle to attend valerie's course at the seminary, and the three shared an intellectual chapter together. valerie took a position in london, so the friendship moved into a new mode of email letters and twice-yearly visits. as she plans her return to the u.s., her story of migration is especially timely. perpetual migration valerie's story there is yet another wonderful metaphor for the experience of being within ourselves and within the academy. many women academics and students come to the academy seeking transformation, and our students' needs often become a mirror of our own. rather than casting our experiences within the academy as linear and hierarchical, we suggest that marge piercy's description of "perpetual migration" offers a more feminist and comprehensive image of our pilgrimage. piercy (1989) presents this powerful image in a poem by sketching wonderful pictures and linking them to several interesting metaphors. the first one i want to use is "we think in ebbing circles a rock makes on the water . . ." (p. 114) this is a feminist image . . . my older women students can relate closely to moving around in a circle which grows larger. these adult students are seeking an opportunity to open the circles of their inner world and see those circles reflected in their outer world. higher education "spare-time" students find the academy a place where they can make such a transition. it used to be that adult learners could make those changes in a therapist's office or a church. now people who come to the academy are seeking some kind containment, or safe place to find self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, to reconcile how their inner constellation and their outer constellation can become more harmonious. i believe that a master's degree that is accessible provides a place for this spiritual transformation. i call it that, but others might say, i'm in a liminal space, that is, being on the threshold, in-between. then they realize the liminality is perpetual, and they are in perpetual migration. one of the tensions which arises for our students and ourselves is that sometimes the academy doesn't want a larger circle, it wants smaller and more detailed circles. so as we collaborate on learning which responds to the stone dropped in the water, whatever life event that stone represents, we might find the academy is not ready for those lapping circles. the events that provoke our choice to move into the academy, for instance, are often personal life events, not scholarly whims. later in the poem, piercy (1989) describes the inner and outer map followed by a migrating bird: "the brightness, the angle, the sighting of the stars shines in the brain luring till inner constellation matches outer" (p. 115). i think that's what creates the migration . . . also how our inner work on ourselves is reflected by the institution in which we do the work. we don't always know how we can imagine the migration in the outer constellation, because the nature of the academy can appear so unforgiving, so limiting. we become perpetual migrators because we can't reconcile the inner journey with the outer world of the academy. for instance, there is a tension that exists for me about the value of and the place for education in the united states. in england, even though there is a rigorous system of education, i felt that education was much more a cultural event, that it enhanced the culture. here in the u. s., we talk about delivery systems. there is the sense that learning is a product, rather than something in which we immerse ourselves. our language here is focused on product and outcomes, and betrays what education is about. i find that difficult to reconcile, especially because higher education should be a place in which issues of social justice and transformation are paramount. in parts of the academy, however, there are people who are interested in the role of the institution in promoting or supporting social justice. in a recent interview, the faculty wanted to hear about my views on spirituality and social transformation. i chose the topic of tieneman square, ten years after the student uprising changed the face of the chinese political landscape. there is a statue of a woman there, a goddess of freedom. even in the face of oppression, she represented the goals of many chinese. i'm reminded of a phrase at the end of the piercy (1989) poem, "navigating by chart and chance and passion, i will know the shape of the mountains of freedom, i will know" (p. 115.) like the students in china, some faculty and students in the us continue to seek freedom within themselves and within the academy. this is where the role of the academic as teacher is so important. what i have experienced within my teaching is coming to really know myself. teachers in any setting must know what we can offer. i'm thinking more and more that the teacher's role is like a shape-shifter. we can provide the space for our students to experience "a chance to choose, a chance to grow, the power to say no and yes, pretties and dignity, an occasional jolt of truth" (p. 114). as academics, we must reconcile our inner and outer constellations. as teachers, we can't offer our students the freedom to choose, the chance to grow until we ourselves have experienced that jolt of truth. one might think the academy would support us in finding our truth, in receiving that jolt, yet the opposite is true. the eccentrics on my faculty have been homogenized, so they aren't allowed to be eccentric. and the young faculty never get to know their inner constellation because they get caught up in the outer constellation most apparent to them--the hierarchy, the bureaucracy, the criticism of colleague to colleague which is a tradition of the academy. these traditions which many women find repelling present the paradox we've been thinking about. mid-life women seek a place for personal and professional transformation, a place to experience spiritual growth. yet, their new identities or newly-exposed identities, like a newborn child, need protection. for women liken their intellectual journey to the whole notion of birth, to creating something within, and will consider the risk of placing it without. but no mother would willingly place a child into a hostile environment. they will choose a community where there's support, not danger. the youngest among us deserve a special form of protection, and the adult students and mid-career women returning to the academy on pilgrimage deserve the same. there are many important reasons we, as women academics and feminists, must not sell out to the perceived outer constellation of the academy. for ourselves, we must remain true to our spiritual journeys, our perpetual migrations. for if we are seduced by the surface status of the academic life, we will abandon the commitment to our own learning and spiritual growth. for our students, we are more than dispensers of information. we don't serve part-time students piecing together a few courses for a credential, we serve "spare-time" students. they are becoming educated in their spare time, after they have worked all day long. they need more than assigned readings and critiqued papers from us, they need a vision of what could be, of what the journey, the pilgrimage, a walk through the labyrinth, a safe place to give birth can bring them. we must hold steady on our path, live a life which is in harmony, inner with outer, and offer these metaphors to think differently about their roles. through our sisterhood, we offer an image of a community which can support them and ourselves on academic pilgrimage. sisterhood our shared story this last metaphor came to us after we had worked together and apart, sharing our stories from afar, and refining our stories when near. we four sisters have had very separate journeys in some ways, and very similar pilgrimages in other ways. the tremendous wealth of poetry, music, and other artistry has broadened our thinking beyond the more stoic academy as we embraced this poem by nancy wood. her vivid imagery and inclusive view of the four directions captures our hopes for our relationships within and beyond the academy: the four sisters of everlasting beauty the four sisters of everlasting beauty danced on a mountain top in order to summon fire from deep within the earth. they danced until flames poured from within veins in the rock, cleansing them of selfishness and blame. the first sister was the dancing woman of mirth, whose direction was east. she wore yellow, the color of awakening moments. she brought laughter, the first necessity in a world of sadness. the first sister said: the spirit of laughter is the same as wind or water. it soothes the troubled earth and makes hard edges disappear, even in the face of sorrow. the second sister was the woman of long experience, whose direction was south. she wore blue, the color of memory, she brought the imprint of fossils, also a collection of bones, the second necessity in a world filled with self-importance and envy. the second sister said: the spirit of fossils and bones is the same as long memory. a connection to the ancestors, it reminds the sick of health and to the healthy gives warning of their mortality. the third sister was the woman of unfulfilled dreams, whose direction was west. she wore red, the color of purpose and daring. she brought tears, the third necessity in times when cleansing is required. the third sister said: „the spirit of weeping is nothing more than human rain, shed for loss as well as love, and for children we never had. the unfulfilled dreams of warriors and women, of birds taken from the nest, and of animals denied their place in life, justify my gift of tears.‰ the fourth sister was the retreating woman of consciousness, whose direction was north. she wore white the color of beginning anew. she brought awareness, the fourth necessity in a world of schemes and invention. the fourth sister said: honor yourself before all else and you will embrace all life. all direction. all stars. all light. and the other three sisters agreed. (pp. 43-45, 1996, wood) sometimes those we perceive as being "less than" in the eyes of the institution (or anywhere else in our world) have the most of offer us. we must first honor ourselves and embrace all life. we encourage those of you who are fortunate enough to share your journey with other women to acknowledge them. for those who have been isolated or have chosen isolation from your sisters, re-engage. it is never a risk to affiliate with a community of like-minded souls. those who warn you about becoming marginalized by joining the sisterhood have lessons to learn about what the academy can be. conclusion five metaphors for meaning-making of academic journeys are presented. in a movement away from the language of exclusion or otherness evident in many feminist academic works, we offer alternative metaphors such as pilgrimage, journey through the labyrinth, birth and motherhood, perpetual migration, and sisterhood. the poems chosen offer additional language we might use to make deeper meaning of our singular and collective journeys. each of us is a survivor of and within the academy. but we are more than just survivors--we are pilgrims on a pilgrimage. rather than accept the masculine version of "right of passage, climbing the ladder," or even "stage development" which advanced degrees can represent, we have searched for and found new and re-considered language for our own use. these metaphors and research frameworks challenge us not to teach as we were taught or research as we were researched. we call upon ourselves and our sisters to imagine more. our imaginations are piqued by invention and invitation. we offer and are offered alternative images of ourselves and our movement within the academy. we have ways of being in relationship that transcend the hierarchy. personal and academic meaning-making become central to our membership, rather than the perennial struggle to maintain our wits in an unrelenting society we have not claimed as our own. dr. michelle collay is a school coach for the bay area coalition for equitable schools. she can be reached at: mcollay@prainbow.com sandra gehrig is a teacher at oakridge elementary school in minnesota. she can be reached at: sandra.gehrig@district196.org <mailto:sandra.gehrig@sistrict196.org> dr. valerie lesniak is an assistant professor in spirituality at seattle university. dr. lesniak can be reached at: vlesniak@seattleu.edu <mailto:vlesniak@seattle.edu> carol mayer is an assistant professor at hamline university. dr. mayer can be reached at: cmayer@gw.hamline.edu references aisenberg, n., & harrington, m. (1988). women of academe: outsiders in the sacred grove. amherst: university of massachusetts press. artress, l. (1995). walking a sacred path. new york: riverhead books. cooper, j., benham, m., collay. m., martinez-aleman, a., & scherr, m. (1999). a famine of stories: finding a home in the academy. initiatives, 59(1), 1-18. dillard, a. (1982). teaching a stone to talk: expeditions and encounters. new york: harper and row. flinders, c. l. (1998). at the root of this longing--reconciling spiritual hunger and a feminist thirst. san francisco: harper. graves, r. (1957). the greek myths. new york: g. braziller. grumet, m. (1980). bitter milk: women and teaching. amherst: university of massachusetts press. gumport, p. (1997). first words, still words. in p. peterson & a. neumann (eds.) learning from our lives(pp.183-193). new york: teachers college press. kinnear, m. (1995). in subordination: professional women from 1870 to 1980. toronto: university of toronto press. ochs, c. (1983). women and spirituality. totowa, new jersey: rowman & allenheld. neumann, a., & peterson, p. (1997). ways without words: learning from silence. in p. peterson & a. neumann (eds.), learning from our lives(pp. 91-120). new york: teachers college press. piercy, m. (1989). the moon is always female. new york: alfred a. knopf. vest, d. (1998 ). on pilgrimage. cambridge: cowley publications. welch, s. (1996). a feminist ethic of risk. minneapolis, mn: augsburg fortress. witherell, c., & noddings, n. (1991). stories lives tell. new york: teachers college press. wood, n. (1996). shaman's circle. (illustrated by howell, f.) new york: doubleday. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, summer 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] an indigenous perspective on women leadership: an example for higher education don jacobs and judy witt fielding graduate university an indigenous perspective on women leadership: an example for higher education fielding graduate university, founded in 1974, offers distributed graduate education and research programs in three social science areas: psychology, human and organizational development, and educational leadership. all three schools affirm a commitment to social change and social justice. the educational leadership and change (elc) doctoral program was developed in 1996 as a way to influence educational reform and to make doctoral education accessible to working adults, especially those from underserved communities. during its development, the program struggled and faltered as it tried to establish its identity and work toward its goals. after an abrupt change in leadership, two women emerged to form a co-dean leadership team: susan tiara, ph.d. and judy witt, ph.d. looking for a model that emphasized relationships and a more global outlook, they adopted total transformational management process (mink, esterhuysen, mink, & owen, 1993) as the conceptual framework for elc's governance. based on action research processes, ttmp utilizes an inclusive model for change that emphasizes the system, "paying special attention to the human side” (p. 11). ttmp was instrumental in developing elc’s way of simultaneously working at the individual, group, and organizational levels and in seeing participatory action research (park, 1992, 1993) as “transformation concomitant with intense learning” (mink, et al., 1993, p. 11). considering the complexity of fielding’s dispersed learning environment, such a transformational priority in leadership, communication, and decision-making became a critical priority for both fielding and elc. file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer2006/index.html although it is interesting to note that in 2003 fielding ranked number one (right alongside oklahoma state university) in graduating more american indian doctorates than any university in the united states (“top 100 degree producers,” 2003, p.73), neither indigenous people nor indigenous philosophy per se were involved in elc's early development. however, the natural power and vision of the "feminine principle of leadership" that has long been recognized and honored by indigenous people seems to inform elc's work. armstrong defines this principle as being …essential to our vision of healthy equality-seeking organizations…sharing power, authority and decisionmaking…(where) leaders work from a vision of shared power, providing opportunities for all members to develop and use their leadership skills. (2005, p.1) for thousands of years indigenous people have understood this vital role of women in guiding and maintaining healthy societies and egalitarian relationships. women have largely carried forth the values of their cultures. their creative and courageous ability to adapt to new conditions continues to renew community traditions throughout tribal life (medicine & albers, 1983). unfortunately, this role of women has largely been ignored in most social, historical, or anthropological studies of native america. barbara alice mann, a seneca scholar and author, points out this fact in her chapter for unlearning the language of conquest entitled, "where are your women? missing in action:" in the twenty-first century, it is incumbent upon (especially native american) scholars to rectify the western obliteration of women from the record, surely the most unconscionable of the many misrepresentations that have been foisted upon native america by euro-america. (in press) using dr. mann's chapter in part to help identify eight traditional leadership skills/concepts used by indigenous women, this article attempts to show how similar female leadership principles are employed in elc. it is important to note that elc has not attained all of its goals, but is a work in progress. nonetheless, both its successes and its goals are operational models for what can be and for how institutions can return to the wisdom embedded in the indigenous worldview. engaging freedom for indigenous people, freedom and justice refer to a way of life rather than to a set of laws. american indian women were confident, self-directed, and truly free in ways that might still seem ambitious in many contemporary western societies. in 1632 the dominican missionary, gabriel sagard, complained about the amount of freedom wyandott women enjoyed and about how they, as their own bosses, used this time to feast, party, and gamble (sagard, 1939). elc's leadership shares this commitment to freedom. although sometimes frustrating to those in need of more structure and specificity, elc's administration and faculty governance teams have intentionally avoided policies, rules, and procedures when they risked suppressing individual faculty or student voices. like traditional first nations' women, the elc community illuminates strong, independent, nurturing voices that demand to be heard.when issues emerge, whether from students, alumni, faculty, or staff, space is made on agendas and forums to hear those voices and deal with the issues they raise. accepting and handling political power with integrity another principle of leadership practiced by indigenous women is that issues are more important than individuals when attempting to resolve interpersonal conflicts. this kind of understanding may explain why most indigenous cultures were matrilineal and why "all the real authority" resided in the women (parker, 1916, p. 55). patriarchal systems of domination tend to focus more on power struggles between individuals. this is why european men set out to change things, using "pen-and-ink witchcraft" along the way to erase the truth (mann, in press). indigenous women used their authority in ways that gave balance to male and female energies, to human and non-human life forms, and to work and play activities. even today indigenous women activists around the world engage the most crucial issues of our time without compromising the vision of balancing vital relationships. political power was never self-serving. this idea of handling political power with integrity and humility is exemplified by fielding university's president, judith kuipers; the provost, anna distefano; and elc's current dean, judy witt. from the small things, like the president jitterbugging and salsa dancing at a party for new graduates, the provost doing a preposterous magic act at national session talent show, or the dean admitting she had forgot to put the gold tassel on her cap when presenting at the graduation ceremony, to more significant examples of down-to-earth transparency, honesty, and caring for others, all three women use their political power with the kind of genuine humility that keeps the focus on the community rather than on personal gain. the university’s strategic plan for 2003-2006 identified five priorities: fundraising, strategic growth, diversity, operational processes/knowledge management, and facilities. the president worked with her leadership team to identify “champions” to spearhead the work in each priority and become accountable for progress within it. the provost did not shirk responsibility, but stepped forward boldly to become the diversity priority champion. certainly, other areas would have held less controversy, less challenge, and certainly less work. yet, she did what is best for the university first and without hesitation. judicial wisdom when indigenous "leaders" evaluate important issues, they listen to everyone's voice before offering advice or recommending action. in so doing, they emphasize responsibility over rights. the woman's ability to effectively negotiate complex social issues was proven for tens of thousands of years in indigenous communities. referring to haudenosaunee councils, barbara mann states, judicial affairs so entirely belonged to women that any woodlands man who wished to become a jurist or a negotiator had first to have been "made a woman" in order to be qualified for the job. rendering judgments and untangling affairs was likened to pounding out the corn, reducing the hard kernel of a dispute to powder, easily blown away by the breath of reason. consequently, all judges, male or female, carried corn-pounders and wore skirts. (mann, in press) although the faculty, administrators, and students that sit on the elc governance committees at fielding are not required to wear skirts or carry symbolic corn-pounders, the feminine principle tends to dominate judicial decisions. decisions relating to such issues as faculty workload or student curriculum come from the grass roots up and employ every opportunity for students, faculty, staff, and administrators to engage the topic. when university-wide decisions must be made, faculty, student, and often alumni/ae members from each of the three colleges contribute to the dialogue, as occurred when fielding graduate institute became "university," and as is currently happening with questions pertaining to professional titles, budget priorities, strategic directions, program growth, etc. authentic honoring of alternative gender orientations early europeans did not understand distinctions between their sex-role stereotypes and the first nation's gendering of tasks. they often referred to councilmen, especially those wearing skirts, with derogatory sexual terms. yet, in indigenous cultures, homosexual orientations were and are respected, with no confusion regarding work relating to such orientations (lang, 1998). in fielding's elc, gay and lesbian faculty and students appear comfortably out of the closet. whether bringing beloved partners to social engagements or graduation ceremonies, or speaking with passion to sexual orientation issues, all participants in the elc community seem to regard sexual orientation in ways that match the respectful accord practiced by indigenous people. spiritual awareness indigenous spirituality is about a sacred realization that everything is related and that there is great significance in the "other" (jacobs, 2002). spirituality is essential and allows for emphasis on process and a commitment to restoring harmony. it understands the humanness of cognitive dissonance so that it is not rationalized or denied, but rather it is resolved through a respectful talking out process. it honored the role of women in creating and maintaining harmony. again, this feminine aspect of spirituality has been attacked by the dominating culture, beginning with the excising of women from creation traditions who, throughout the american continent, featured females as the progenitrices of creation (hewitt, 1928, p. 468; mann, in press). elc openness to integrating spirituality into its program manifests itself in numerous ways. in curriculum, elc is working on a certification program called "spirituality in education" where students study the numerous spiritual traditions of the world. in its coursework, many students incorporate spiritual concepts in either their in-depth or their applied work. recently, as a result of student activism and faculty receptivity, a new required course on "structural inequality" was established. organizationally, the awareness of connectedness is a conscious part of the day to day operations. still lacking in elc is a broader engagement with environmental issues, although it is at least recognized as a priority. indigenous terminologies used for nature have always been associated with a mother or a woman. emphasis on peacemaking and social justice transformative theory rather than retributive, hierarchical, adversarial, punitive, or codified assumptions guide action in traditional native cultures, and once again women have led the way throughout indigenous history. for example, the founding of the iroquois league was guided by a woman known as "the peace queen." without her involvement, the great peace movement that led to this council (and to the u.s. constitution) would not have occurred. she worked tirelessly to help create "the great law of peace," and she provided the ultimate solution to difficult problems blocking ratification of the new constitution (mann & fields, 1997, p. 105-163). today, indigenous women worldwide are taking on leadership roles in their communities to assert peace. as mentioned above, the elc management structure was based on transformative models. its vision as well as the larger university's vision clearly emphasizes social justice. the most revealing evidence, however, is found in the titles of elc student coursework papers and dissertations. examples include: awakened belonging: utilizing traditional stories to enhance self-perception of diné children (begay, 2002); emancipatory learning: a study of teachers’ perspective shifts regarding children of battered women (mccarthy, 1999); the mexican american leaders’ voice: reclaiming a cultural consciousness (bush, 2004); cultural literacy vs. cultural proficiency: a study of the effects of gender and ethnic biases on euro-american women and people of color form marginalized ethnic groups (davis, 2005); the criminalization of individuals suffering from symptoms of mental illness: an exploratory study (griffin, 2001); violentology: positive pedagogy to create a peaceful resolution to violence in schools through a prescribed course of study (harris, 1999); preserving a culture: practicity the navajo principles of hozho doo k'e (haskie, 2001), and tales from between the cracks: the quest for academic success following grade retention among african american male students (lee, 2004). these represent just a few examples. research relating to peace, equity, and transformational education pervades student work. effective use of economic power lionel robbins offered a popular definition for economics as a "science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means that have alternative uses" (quoted in stigler, 1984, p. 301). before their oppression, indigenous worldviews led to economic decisions that emphasized deep appreciation for resource scarcity, yet without the competitive associations regarding use of those resources. authoritarian systems were not needed to assure wise and equitable use of resources. such noncompetitive philosophies came from the feminine understanding of the world. they understood accountability in terms of restoring healthy relationships. as a result, they guided barter and minimized warfare between tribes for thousands of years. because fielding is a tuition driven institution, priority setting that struggles with the push-pull of market versus values is a constant challenge for students, faculty, and administration. the balancing act of keeping tuition affordable and continuing to offer the highest quality education program stretches fielding’s imagination and creativity every budget cycle. creativity leadership at elc is always ready for creative thinking that supports the nurturing model. the efforts correspond to how indigenous women around the world manage to cultivate healthful foods, even developing natural pesticides and fertilizers, in spite of being denied land ownership in many countries. in her acceptance speech for the prize for women's creativity in rural life, marta benavides emphasized this important creative contribution: it is women, especially indigenous women, who maintain traditional knowledge for food, and medicinal plants, as well as traditional methods to preserve seeds, for planting, for natural control of insects and plagues. they have safeguarded biodiversity. without doubt, rural women's work and creativity, make a great contribution to the family's economy, thus to the gross domestic product, to food security, to the caring of biodiversity, to the quality of life of rural families and communities and understood conservation. (benevides, 2003, p. 74) within elc, the governance structure has evolved based on an “issues up” process. an example was the creation of the equity council. several students came to the dean after becoming frustrated at a face-to-face session and observing students far into the program who did not demonstrate a basic understanding of issues of structural inequities, a cornerstone of the competencies and curriculum. instead of suggesting a quick fix, taking the issues on herself, or diverting them to an existing governance team, the dean challenged the group of students to begin exploring the issues together and created the space and support for them to join with faculty volunteers to do just that. within two years, a new governance team was formed and approved and the faculty members have added the course, structural inequality and diversity, to core requirements of the program. concluding thoughts this article has emphasized the employment of feminist and indigenous principles for leadership in higher education. at fielding, the leadership is genuinely working toward applying these principles to increase educational accessibility and quality at the graduate level. higher education today is struggling to find the leadership needed to move into this new century (altbach, berdahl, & gunport, 1999; van patten, 1990). elc’s leadership is evolving to be a timely example of efforts to bring forth a new way of doing leadership that is feminine, synergistic, and sustainable in ways that bring to mind the ancient wisdom of our indigenous ancestors, whose ideas about leadership may be essential for future health and survival (four arrows, in press). references altbach, p. g., berdahl, r. o., & gunport, p. j. (1999). american higher education in the twenty-first century: social, political, and economic challenges.baltimore: john hopkins press. armstrong, d. (2005). the feminist principle of leadership. retrieved february 22, 2005, from dawn ontario disabled women’s network web site: http://dawn.thot.net/feminism11.html begay, l. m. (2002). awakened belonging: utilizing traditional stories to enhance self-perception of diné children (doctoral dissertation, fielding graduate university, 2002). dissertation abstracts international, a 63(03), 150. benavides, m. (2003). in celebration of women's creativity in rural life. retrieved february 22, 2005, from http://www.humiliationstudies.org/news/archives/000337.html bush, f. g. (2004). the mexican leader's voice: reclaiming a cultural consciousness (doctoral dissertation, fielding graduate university, 2004). dissertation abstracts international, a 66(01), 147. davis, w. (2005). cultural literacy vs. cultural proficiency: a study of the effects of gender and ethnic biases on euro-american women and people of color form marginalized ethnic groups. unpublished doctoral dissertation, fielding graduate university. four arrows, aka jacobs, d. t. (ed.). (in press). unlearning the language of conquest: scholars expose anti-indianism in america. austin: university of texas press. griffin, p. g. (2001). the criminalization of individuals suffering from symptoms of mental illness: an exploratory study (doctoral dissertation, fielding graduate university, 2001). dissertation abstracts international, b 62(01), 88. harris, p. m. (1999). violentology: positive pedagogy to create a peaceful resolution to violence in schools through a prescribed course of study (doctoral dissertation, fielding graduate university, 1999). dissertation abstracts international, a 60(09), 165. haskie, m. (2001). preserving a culture: practicity the navajo principles of hozho doo k'e (doctoral dissertation, fielding graduate university, 2001). dissertation abstracts international, a 64(01), 147. hewitt, j. n. b. (1928). iroquoian cosmology, second part. (dhhs publication no. adm 4015). washington, dc: forty-third annual report of the bureau of government printing office, 468. jacobs, d. (2002). the red road: the indigenous worldview as a prerequisite for effective character education. paths of learning,9, 6-9. lang, s. (1998). men as women and women as men: changing gender in native american cultures. austin: university of texas press. lee, e. (2004). tales from between the cracks: the quest for academic success following grade retention among african american male students (doctoral dissertation, fielding graduate university, 2004). dissertation abstracts international, a 65(08), 226. http://www.humiliationstudies.org/news/archives/000337.html mann, b. a. (in press). where are your women? missing in action. in four arrows, aka d. t. jacobs (ed.), unlearning the language of conquest: scholars expose anti-indianism in america. austin: university of texas press. mann, b. a., & fields, j. (1997). a sign in the sky: dating the league of the haudenosaunee. american indian culture and research journal,21(2), 105-163. mccarthy, j. b. (1999). emancipatory learning: a study of teachers' perspective shifts regarding children of battered women (doctoral dissertation, fielding graduate university, 1999). dissertation abstracts international, a 60(09), 195. medicine, b., & albers, p. (1983). the hidden half: studies of plains indian women. lanham, md: university press of america. mink, o. g., esterhuysen, p. w., mink, b. p., & owen k. q. (1993). change at work: a comprehensive management process for transforming organizations. san francisco: jossey-bass publishers. park, p. (1992). the discovery of participatory research as a new scientific paradigm: personal and intellectual accounts. the american sociologist,23(4), 29-45. park, p. (1993). voices of change: participatory action research in the united states and canada. westport, ct: bergin & garvey. parker, a. c. (1916). the constitution of the five nations. albany: the university of the state of new york. sagard, g. (1939). the long journey to the country of the hurons. (g. m. wrong, ed. & h. h. langton, trans.). toronto, canada: the champlain society. (original work published 1632), p. 101. stigler, g. j. (1984). economics: the imperial science? scandinavian journal of economics, 86, 301-313. top 100 degree producers 2003 part ii: graduate degrees. (2003, july 3). black issues in higher education, 20(3), 73. van patten, j. j. (1990). college teaching andhighereducationleadership: contemporary problems and issues. lewiston, ny: mellen press. four arrows (aka don jacobs) is a professor at fielding graduate university's school of educational leadership and change and also at northern arizona university's department of educational leadership. four arrows earned his bs in economics from southwest missouri state university and his ma in health care administration from golden gate university. he followed with two doctorates: ed.d. from boise state university and ph.d. from columbia pacific university. former dean of education at oglala lakota college, he is the author of more than a dozen books, including a volume he is editing entitled, "unlearning the language of conquest" that will be available from the university of texas press next spring. he can be contacted via his website at www.teachingvirtues.net judy witt, phd, serves as dean of the school of educational leadership and change at fielding graduate university www.fielding.edu. witt earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology at linfield college, her master’s degree in special education at portland state university, and a second master’s in organizational development and doctorate in human and organizational systems at fielding graduate university. the thread of witt’s career has been to develop new programs and create collaborative teams to transform http://www.teachingvirtues.net/ http://www.fielding.edu/ visions into realities. after teaching in the k-12 system for 10 years, she moved into higher education where she has served several colleges and universities in faculty and administrative roles. in addition, she has worked extensively as program/organizational development consultant with her own practice focusing on assisting colleges and universities in both strategic planning and new program development. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership struggling for authentic human synergy and a robust democratic culture: the wellspring community for women in educational leadership catherine e. hackney, ph.d. diane runnestrand, ph.d. hackney & runnestrand, spring, 2003 as our struggles to develop our authentic selves as educators, leaders, women, and researchers continue, we all gain a greater appreciation for how difficult it is to incorporate the values of democracy into our lives. in this paper we will introduce a community of women educational leaders, their struggles for personal and professional accountability, and their inquiry toward the development of leadership wisdom in a democratic culture. such leadership wisdom is not the norm in today’s educational organizations. influenced by the work of researchers, educational leaders, and professors of educational administration, traditional leadership has been based on hierarchical thinking and prescriptive skills that have promoted the status quo (davies & foster, 1994; maxcy, 1994). this paper tells the story of a group of women educational leaders who are supporting each other as they challenge tradition and explore the application of democratic leadership in educational settings. their story is a result of the analysis of data collected over the first three years of the wellspring community’s existence. the authors of this article studied the wellspring community for women in educational leadership as participant observers through the qualitative examination of their own and other participants’ experiences. as participant observers, the authors have struggled with their own biases and have attempted to ensure the trustworthiness of their interpretations and reporting by “checking” each other’s perceptions for credibility and relying on other group members for data verification. where applicable, the authors have also utilized participants’ voices to ensure authenticity in reporting. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html democratic values, women, and educational leadership the overarching belief in the value and superiority of the democratic political system unites most americans. images of the american flag, political campaigns, and first amendment rights are pressing concerns that are fiercely defended across america. when our country was in its infancy, alexis de tocqueville identified the values of liberty and equality as the bookends that support democratic beliefs. de tocqueville identified many threats to the democratic society, but saw the “aristocracy of manufacturers” as perhaps democracy’s greatest threat. he recognized that the workplace had the potential to create conditions similar to the aristocracies that caused most americans to flee their european homelands. de tocqueville also recognized the leadership dilemma of the master and the workman in a democratic society when he said that the workman was “born to obey,” and the leader was born to command. as de tocqueville predicted, the american workplace has become one of america’s most powerful institutions and the struggle for democracy within this setting has become a pressing concern for leaders who seek toembrace a democratic, value-based leadership style. many women educational leaders articulate a heightened pressure to create and maintain more democratic workplaces for several reasons: a) their knowledge about any social phenomenon, including their leadership, is strongly influenced by their social, cultural, and historical contexts; b) their life experiences are closely connected to those of others about whom they care and with whom they work; c) they believe that female leaders do not have to exercise power over others (astin & leland, 1991); and, d) they believe that the american educational workplace should be more of a community than an organization. because schools are different in structure and purpose from the typical american business organization--different because most education in this country takes place in a not-for-profit or a publicly supported setting—their espoused missions resemble more those of human service agencies rather than those of large business organizations (sergiovanni, 1992). consequently, many women struggle to conduct their leadership in a more authentic, socially responsible manner. they are keen to create and maintain an enlivened educational culture grounded in the principles of democracy that profess human affairs to be conducted best through intelligent activity rather than through habit or force (dewey, 1932, 1936; garrison, 1997; hawthorne & henderson, 2000; henderson, 2001). however, women face a number of challenges as educational leaders today. because early theories of leadership failed to include the social, historical, and cultural contexts of women, the organization’s behavioral expectations for women leaders are often incompatible with women leaders’ world views and life experiences. furthermore, because women’s experiences are closely connected to those of others (gilligan, 1984; belenky, clinchy, goldberger, & tarule, 1986; helgeson, 1995; astin & leland, 1991; hackney & hogard, 1999), on a more personal level woman leaders are challenged as gender influences transactional relationships among themselves and others. a woman’s sense of self is highly affected by others’ perceptions of what constitutes being male or female and assuredly has impact on what it means to be a female leader. moreover, women in educational leadership historically have combated culturally engrained beliefs that self-assuredness, confidence, and directedness are not acceptable female traits. women who ascend into higher leadership positions must contend not only with their own development as their world views evolve, but also with cultural expectations and biases that are “added to the burden of legitimizing their positions among their followers” (curry, 2000, p. 3). the work of curry (2000) and others (hackney & hogard, 1999; hackney & bock, 2000; hackney, bock, & runnestrand, 2000) has suggested that women leaders are acutely aware of the development of their own leadership personae. they are readily able to reveal the effects of the intellectual, the cultural, and the experiential on their growth, and profess strong belief systems that have helped them to discern who they are. these findings are consistent with the research of josselson (1990) and marcia, waterman, matteson, archer, and orlofsky (1993) who posit that identity is a formative process influenced by values, beliefs, goals, interests, commitments, and relationships. if we accept these feminist constructs, along with the democratic principles discussed earlier, we are challenged to incorporate the social, historical, and cultural contexts of women into a reconceptualization of leadership characterized by interdependence, sharing of power, collaborative problem solving, and a focus on democratic values for more socially altruistic ends. greene (1988) eloquently described this as “opening spaces where freedom is the mainspring, where people create themselves by acting in concert” ( p.134). leaders who ascribe to this social philosophy will engage in collaborative, creative, and intellectual leadership activity. they will demonstrate a love of learning, embrace human growth, commit to continuous self-development, and at the same time remain sensitive to the beliefs, styles, and circumstances of others. they will readily demonstrate empathy and reject oppression, exploitation, segregation, and neglect. moreover, they will be morally driven to exhibit and engage in socially responsible practice (dewey, 1932, 1936; garrison, 1997; greene, 1988; hawthorne & henderson, 2000; henderson, 2001). women face challenges when they decide to engage in a reconceptualization of leadership. this prompted the authors and others to develop the wellspring community for women in educational leadership, a place where like-minded women leaders could come together, grow together, and explore what it takes to create a more democratically principled workplace. the women participating in wellspring believe that effective democratic, value-based leadership must begin with a personal and professional formative process. they believe that selfexploration and development are vital to a woman’s leading, and that this exploration and development happens more readily when they are involved in selfstudy and professional inquiry among like-minded others. the “creative tension” they experience as women leaders in traditional educational organizations encourages them to challenge prescriptive notions of leadership, to question the “taken-for-granted” roles and responsibilities traditionally ascribed to women (curry, 2000, pp. 87-101), and to activate their critical reasoning to construct their own conceptions of leading. they “engage dialectically with the determining forces around [them]” (greene,1988, p. 72). from self discovery to social action women need space where they can “break through the masked and the falsified, to reach toward what is also half-hidden or concealed” (greene, 1988, p. 58). for women to develop the confidence and courage to reconstruct leadership theory and practice, they need the support of other women leaders. participants are finding that support in the wellspring community for women in educational leadership. grogan (1996) attests that often “missing [among women] is a source of confidence for bringing about social change” (p. 32). though some women have succeeded in securing top-level leadership positions, they are often alone in the organization, without peers, and without the company of like-minded others. consequently, challenging the prescriptive notions of leadership, disrupting the rules, arbitrating conflicts from a “different” value base, and upsetting the balance of power become frightening endeavors for women serious about deposing the “truth” and broadening the accepted practices of leadership. practical considerations, such as keeping one’s employment and avoiding alienation of peers, often supercede a woman’s desire to precipitate change in the organization and in her life of leadership. “going public” (palmer, 1998) with beliefs and values for organizational change requires a security founded in knowledge, conviction, and the support of others. the transformation of culture by challenging existing value systems is a dangerous task, one that might easily never be initiated or might be abandoned in process. if women are to “create a clearing, a space, where in the midst of things” they might explore, challenge, and transform existing notions of traditional, hierarchical power and authoritywith any success, they must do so with the support of an enclave. reynolds (1995) suggests that for women to develop as authentic leaders true to their leadership personae, they must develop cultural and social insight; they must understand the politics of feminism and the “genderization process within an organizational culture;” and they must move beyond the “difference” paradigm (p. 8). this translates into women studying themselves in formal leadership roles, actively promoting the expansion of knowledge and experiences of all types of women in all types of leadership settings, analyzing barriers against and strategies for social change, and exploring how the male hegemony has affected women and men in formal leadership roles (reynolds, 1995). women need to continue to challenge authority as it has been prescribed historically and “create their own discourses about the ethical dilemmas of leadership in everyday practice” (harding, 1991, p. 49). the women of the wellspring community recognize that critique alone is insufficient if, as women leaders, we want organizational and social change to occur. likewise, they recognize that for multiple truths to be known and plural conceptions of leadership to be accommodated multiple voices must be heard. only then will organizational structures be altered through changes in policy, programming, planning, evaluation, and organizational development. more practically speaking, to displace the traditional hegemony that surrounds leadership theory and practice, harding (1991) suggests that women leaders will need to re-evaluate and disrupt the rules that have defined feminine dispositions toward leadership as inferior to the masculine. this would require the study of existing power relationships and open arbitration of value conflicts. the structures that have held the hierarchy in place, and power in asymmetrical balance, would need to be challenged so that an organizational reconfiguration can occur. the wellspring community was conceived with these ideas in mind and has developed over the last three years to address the unique needs of women educational leaders. our experiences are chronicled in the next section. the wellspring experience a group of women involved in educational leadership at a northeastern ohio university and local school districts had been talking about creating a professional group that would support, encourage, and provide resources to women school leaders in the area. everywhere we went--to meetings, conferences, and classes-we were hearing the voices of women who felt alone, isolated, excluded from the power players in the profession. because one of us taught a course on women and leadership, and the others held responsible positions at the county level, we were considered the locals who could “make something happen.” fortunately, at around the same time, the male superintendent of a local educational service center believed there was a need for such a group. he told us, “i know we need to do something for the ladies, i just don’t know what.” we assured him that we would find out “what” the women school leaders needed and would have a plan for him in the near future. when we presented our plan, he graciously pledged institutional support for the first year. establishing the need: what we learned in the years previous to the establishment of wellspring, several members of the group began hearing a common voice of concern among women leaders. through a series of conversations with other women leaders significant themes about who they were and how they felt about themselves emerged. a diverse group of educational leaders expressed a number of common concerns, but one theme emerged as dominant. as the only female, or one of a group of very few females, practicing leadership in their organizations, these educational leaders were experiencing an enormous sense of personal loss. specifically, these women expressed the feeling that what had been lost for the sake of survival or “fitting in” was a sense of self. missing was the authentic self and what remained was a shell of the former self. having to conform to the male structure and model of leadership and organization had forced many women into a chameleon role. for the sake of fulfilling the mission of the institution, these women had made huge personal sacrifices. and while each would have been described as successful, many of these women were emotionally exhausted. the denial of the self had left many of them with a feeling that their souls had been damaged. in order to survive, many women were opting out of leadership positions or leaving existing organizations. this pattern of flight was seen as a potential problem. what would happen to their organizations if the really talented women leaders left? through these conversations, the same idea kept emerging, what was needed was some way of assisting these women leaders in “maintaining their souls,” which would allow their authentic selves to prevail within their organizations “so that the next generation of women leaders would not be faced with the same dilemma.” we knew that we still needed more data than we had to establish a need for what we were thinking of as a “center.” we facilitated several focus groups and conducted many interviews with women educational leaders in a three county area. overwhelmingly, the results of the interviews confirmed what we were hearing and observing: a desire for professional, intellectual, and spiritual “renewal.” the women we interviewed envisioned a place “to confront issues of concern,” dialogue, reflect, problem-solve, and “move forward” together. these women did not want to come together to complain and commiserate, but to raise the “level of professional development out there.” they envisioned a shared place “to develop skills, to learn and grow with colleagues, and to challenge each other’s thinking.” they were interested in a multi-faceted program where they might research together, write together, and become better acquainted with women’s issues. they also felt called to social action. they wanted to understand the cultural and professional insensitivities in their professional organizations and to develop professional support systems. in doing so, they would be better prepared to challenge the status quo and to redefine educational leadership as more democratically inclusive and just. but most importantly, they wanted “to associate with a group of like-minded others,” to build collegial relationships, to find support, and to be intellectually challenged. collaborative planning after collecting and analyzing the data, the original group of planners invited a group of twelve women, representing local school districts and universities, to join us to plan for the future. we met several times to understand what we had learned and to translate it into a mission, to articulate them as a purpose, and to respond to them with a structured program. the planning sessions were enlivened with hope, commitment, and creativity! yet, we grew to know each other as individuals who did not always agree. biases were exposed. irritability levels were piqued. power relationships were negotiated. concerns were voiced. the group grew to understand the meaning of the term collaboration. we were determined not to reproduce the traditional male model of planning and implementation. yet, as women who had “grown up” in the hierarchical organization, we struggled with the process. a couple of the women who would become part of the group called us periodically to ask, “aren’t you ready yet? when will this group get-together?” finally, we felt it was time to expand our group to those who would accept our invitations to join us in this formative process. we invited positional school building and district leaders, university faculty, and doctoral students who had expressed interest in our work. these were women who were risk-takers, attempting to lead in alternative ways; they were women who were vocal about the place of spirituality in their work; and, they were intellectually active women who prioritized their own growth and development. fifteen women accepted our invitation and met for the first wellspring salon in december of 1999. we developed a position statement that would periodically undergo review and revision. the original statement included a mission, the purpose, and the proposed structure of the group. the mission stated: wellspring women’s leadership community is committed to linking female educational leaders together for constructive educational reform through leadership development, professional renewal, inspiration, and personal growth. it was decided that the community would invite female positional or non-positional leaders of both public and private educational organizations that serve students from pre-kindergarten through the university to become a part. the participants would be asked to commit to an active role in planning and leading the salon format, in sharing resources, and in setting the community’s course for the future. once participants were assembled, they conceded to a formal purpose statement: the wellspring women’s leadership community will provide a sustained intellectual, professional, and spiritual renewal for participants. through wellspring, women will find opportunities to share resources and find affirmation, support, nourishment, and inspiration as educational leaders. the community offers women educational leaders opportunities to reshape the educational culture through their collaborative efforts toward investigation of alternative dispositions to leadership, expansion, and redefinition of their conceptions of leadership, development of creative approaches to leadership, improvement of communication and collaboration across the continuum of roles and responsibilities in educational organizations from pre-k through the university, and renewal of their spiritual selves. structure of the wellspring experience the dream of the original group was that wellspring would become a place where women could meet and find resources. we thought of creating a data bank, stocking a professional library, editing a journal, and offering professional development programs and services. that dream was somewhat modified when the actual group-those who accepted our invitations to participate-assembled. we had methodically scheduled an inaugural two-day session together, our first “salon,” the first “regular meeting of distinguished guests” as webster would define it. we knew that we wanted the experience to be meaningful for the participants, to be characterized by serious professional and intellectual challenge, and to be a source of inspiration. we also wanted participants to shape the future direction of the community. that became reality when the group decided to abandon the planned agenda and recreate what our two days together would look like. the original planning group learned the first of many lessons: letting go. what we had scripted as a tightly programmed two days composed of “checking –in,” professional reading, dialogue, reflection, contemplative quiet time, and collaborative planning for the future turned into something that looked much different as authored by the newly conceived group itself. for the time being, putting aside the idea of a “center,” and responding to the desires of the participants, we formed a group that meets regularly, at least four times a year in a salon format. we share responsibility for planning each future salon. in enactment of our mission, at each salon we incorporate intellectual activity. we read together, discuss issues of concern, and acquaint each other with new theories and research. we have read works by heilbrun, blount, grogan, capper, and bateson, among others. yet, for many wellspring participants, the discussion of individual issues and concerns has been the most beneficial part of our time together. the practical application of theory and current thinking has guided the discussion of many topics generated for discussion: dealing with overbearing men in the workplace, handling changes in leadership in the organizational hierarchy, accepting a woman leader’s social responsibility to others in the workplace, knowing “when to leave and when to stay” in a position. during each salon, we also nourished our spirits through inclusion of the arts and humanities. we have enjoyed experiences with clay, collage, poetry, meditation, and inspirational prose. we are finding it more and more essential that we weave care of our spirit selves into the entire salon experience. we are finding that these experiences become the mettle that gives shape to our intellectual and the professional wisdom. after the first salon, three women decided that the group was not for them. two others have dropped out over the course of the past year, both for personal reasons. three more have joined and are active members. our group has stabilized with twelve committed members and has assumed the responsibility for its own sustenance. initial impact although this project is in a pilot phase, members have already reported benefits from participation. during each salon we ask each other three questions: a) what has changed for you in your life and leadership since our last meeting? b) how have you made your workplace a more compassionate and democratic place? c) how has your participation in wellspring influenced these changes? in response to these questions members have shared evidence of their growth and the growth of their organizations. such examples have included growth in self-confidence, accomplishment of projects or goals that were essential to the leadership potential of the individual, and advancement along career paths. many of the participants have attributed this growth to the intellectual, professional, and spiritual support and challenge they have received from the group. the narrative that follows is one participant’s reflective description of the intellectual development, the personal and professional growth, and the spiritual renewal she has experienced as a result of her participation in the wellspring community. lucy’s story after the first meeting of wellspring i felt empowered to take control of my life in a new way. putting my struggles out in the room where no one had an agenda regarding my success or failure was a safe process. this allowed me to be really honest. this “no strings attached” environment is one i rarely have the opportunity to enjoy due to my position. i believe that, because of the environment, members are able to give much more honest feedback to one another. when asked at our second meeting to describe what had changed in my life since the last time we were together, i felt i had a story of transformation to share. at our first meeting i was angry, hurt, and lost. due to a change in leadership and leadership style in my institution i felt that for the first time in 12 years i was needed but not wanted. i felt that in order to survive, i was going to have to become a new person or leave. this was reflected in our artistic spiritual renewal time when i created a clay woman with a giant hole in her middle. the group held up a mirror so that i could reflect on my choices. at the time i was debating on applying for a presidency in an area institution. in hind site i realize that my application for president would have been to prove my competency versus coming from a sincere desire to be president. one member of the group held up what i will call a reality mirror. she told me i wasn’t even being realistic. i didn’t have my ph.d. completed so i was wasting time debating whether or not to be a president. she advised me to finish the ph.d. now. she also told me to take my sabbatical. i felt the timing of taking the sabbatical during my new president’s first year would make me very weak. she felt it was the only way i would survive the situation. by leaving and finishing my ph.d. i would give him a chance to establish his own presence. i would allow him to see the benefit or lack of benefit my presence brings to the institution. i would have time to reflect and stop spinning around. i would finish my ph.d. and then no longer feel trapped should i decide that i, indeed, needed to leave. she shared a story with the group about stepping back. that was the best advice i received in a long time. she told a story about being a little girl and trying to learn long division in school. the more she struggled with the process of learning long division the more upset she became and thus the more confused she became. she became so upset about the process that her mother decided that “running around in all that confusion” couldn’t possibly be good for her so she took her out of school. she stayed home and played and left long division behind. after being out of school for a couple of weeks the school phoned to inquire as to why she was missing school. her mother explained the situation and said that "the school had her so confused that there was no way learning could take place and that when she was no longer confused she would come back to school.” a few more weeks passed and she finally went back to school less confused. she stated that this was her first sabbatical and that she had learned from thislesson that sometimes she had to step out of the situation in order to see clearly the appropriate path she needed to follow. a second piece of advice that came from that first wellspring meeting was the idea that “if you have to be present for your ideas to become a reality then they were only your ideas.” in other words, no one else had bought into them strongly enough to assure that they would be brought to fruition. in addition, if you always have to push ideas then maybe you are the one who is out-of-step. this idea of letting go and just seeing what would happen was foreign to me. but understanding this idea empowered me to take the sabbatical. i was certain that the projects led by me would not move forward without my presence, thus i could not find time for the sabbatical. this new realization helped me realize that my ideas or my projects might only be my priority and my absence would allow me to know what the community valued. in reflection on this experience i now realize that this process of letting go and letting the community accept or reject ideas is the enactment of democratic leadership. now that i have had this experience i recognize the value of creating a more authentic democratic community by applying this in my work. i am striving to weave this style of leadership into my life and am finding that it is freeing. the personal outcome of the first wellspring meeting was the completion of my ph.d. greater even than this accomplishment was the letting go of my accumulated anger and frustration. the decision was strategic. it allowed me to gain a clearer vision on how to work when i returned to the institution. the process validated my leadership style as authentic even if different than the changing style of the organization. in addition, i learned that i didn’t always have to push my ideas or be present for the ideas to become a reality. those ideas that were important to the community were completed. the lack of completion of some projects gave me the opportunity to reevaluate their appropriateness in the community. in response to our second question of how we are making our work places more humane, i responded that my absence had allowed all of us to breathe. it also created a greater understanding of my role as a leader by other members of the community. it allowed those who traditionally follow to lead in new ways. it forced me to look beyond myself and into the community for support, solutions, and leadership. because i gained a greater sense of peace, the division also gained a greater sense of peace. other women’s experiences members have shared several examples of the benefits of the group through their responses to the three questions. during our last salon, elaine reported to the group a “greater sense of self worth” as related to her role in an institution of higher education and to her primary relationship. this sense of self worth allowed her to negotiate a new position, salary, and other resources in a manner she previously would have found uncomfortable. in addition, the new sense of self worth and personal clarity allowed her to end a “nonproductive relationship.” mary had always felt that her female support staff at work was dependent on her leadership and direction for their success. after the first wellspring retreat, she “began to think about their development and success in a different way.” she began to realize that “leadership is the art of developing leadership in others” and that with her support, these women were capable of assuming responsibilities for their own growth, development, and success at work. with the change in her leadership orientation, the women began to change: they are now exhibiting greater selfesteem and collaborating among themselves. with the support of members of the group, alexa successfully assumed a new position at a women’s college. though she “loved the rigor and scholarship required of faculty in the research institution,” the patriarchal nature of the institution left her “frustrated, hurt, and often discounted.” she reported at the first meeting of wellspring as being tired of the “boys’ games” and feeling “sucked into them to survive in the institution.” members of the group encouraged her to find the courage to let go of dominant culture status issues and follow her heart to a more appropriate institutional setting. she is now the dean of graduate studies in a small private women’s college. many members of the group have reported the importance and benefit of being able to share the issues that are critical in their personal lives. karen openly has discussed her family obligations and how they have affected her work. meeting the needs of her husband, children, and her institution has left her “empty and exhausted.” the group has offered karen support and encouragement. she “arranges” home and professional commitments, including visits from in-laws, so that they do not keep her from group meetings. for its members, wellspring represents a place where they can be whole persons who do not have to compartmentalize their various life roles. members have found support for a number of concerns: dealing with empty nest issues, sibling relationships, conflict in the family, struggles and conflicts with significant others, and the issues of raising children. we participants feel that discussions around these concerns are vital to our well being; we make sure they are woven into the fabric of the salons and addressed with the same importance, authenticity, and support as those issues that stem from work related discussions. dilemmas: struggles for authentic human synergy the women of the wellspring community face concerns that have arisen out of the evolving personality and dynamics of the group: concerns based in conflicting and competing interests, honesty, balance of purpose, and moral and ethical responsibility. conflicting or competing interests some members of the community have wrestled with their relationships as employees in the same work organizations and as members of the wellspring community. to complicate this situation, after competing for the same position, one of the members was placed in a supervisory position over another. fearful of jeopardizing or damaging personal and professional relationships, the women involved were overly cautious with their words and actions. alexa wondered how these two members of the group were able to take full advantage of the community in which expectations are that others “listen, encourage, and renew each other’s spirits.” moreover, the strain the relationship was putting on the rest of the group became most uncomfortable. the tension between these two women became more and more tangible; within a few months, the woman in the subordinate position quietly made her excuses, retired from the group, and declined to discuss the situation any further. the group also dealt with a request that could result in a similar situation. joanne’s work supervisor had repeatedly expressed interest in joining the group. although her presence could create inner group conflict and could also cause discomfort for another woman who had professional difficulties with her in the past, joanne was concerned that if her supervisor was not invited to join, she could suffer a loss of friendship, or even withdrawal of support for her participation in the group. the community addressed this dilemma, and felt it healthiest to leave the group intact. yet, the community had been struck by a comment joanne had made: “how can we give back to the world? we need to help people to recognize what they have contributed. maybe our worth-while-ness comes from helping other groups to form.” thus, the wellspring community has assumed responsibility for outreach to other women leaders. it is often difficult for women to take care of themselves as well as they take care of others (gilligan, 1984), so joanne and alexa have chosen to be involved in expansion beyond the original group. they have agreed to assist another group of women, led by joanne’s supervisor, who are interested in forming something similar to what we now have. they share with them processes, experiences, and resources. alexa offered them a “home” at her institution; the group is meeting quarterly; it is healthy and growing! these dilemmas have forced the group into deliberative dialogue about our responsibility to support other women educational leaders. if, in fact, we are serious about promoting a democratic culture, rich in diversity and characterized by inclusion, why are we conducting our group in a way that suggests elitism and exclusion? we wrestle with questions: “is this an expression of selfishness, or is it responsible care-taking of a group that has become precious to us?” joanne stated she is “worried about our bigger purpose and mission.” if we are true to our mission and purpose should we not be “concerned with organizational and social reform beyond our own selves and our organizations?” do we not have a responsibility to others and to our profession? however, emily’s comment, “ isn’t it enough that we grow individually…why do we have to have a collective initiative?” illustrates the conflicting opinions within the group. over time, the group has settled into an intimate group of loyal friends and professional colleagues bolstered by their work with the extension group and the support they experience with each other. balance of purpose in preparation for the writing of this and other articles reporting on the wellspring community experience, concerns about our mission and purpose were expressed within the group. the wellspring mission states that the community exists to offer women educational leaders intellectual, professional, and spiritual renewal. earlier in this writing, we described the ways the group has attempted to infuse these components into every salon we collaboratively plan. because we are a group of academics and practitioners, there exists what mary calls “a natural, predictable tension” and we struggle with what constitutes a balance of these components. of course, some of the academics believe we are shortchanging the intellectual; and, of course, those who are practitioners believe that the application of theory is most important and essential to their leadership development and feel that we should not spend too much time on esoteric ideas. we have had discussions about this issue periodically and try to become more comfortable with the notion that we are all part of a profession: we have different roles, one group is not superior to the other, and we can learn from each other. the academics offer us lofty ideas; the practitioners keep our feet on the ground. this creates what suellen calls “an eclecticism, an interesting fusion of things.” this “interesting fusion of things” has evolved into more symbiotic relationships within the group. personal and professional barriers have been crossed and intellectual power has been diffused. through no real conscious effort, participants have ascended to a higher common place where roles have become irrelevant. our analysis suggests that the safe, open space created by the group has encouraged participants to relinquish hierarchical roles and traditionally defined superordinancies for more egalitarian, mutually respectful inter-relationships. honesty being able to share authentically one’s knowledge, beliefs, opinions, and feelings, is the bedrock of the group; commitment to authenticity is critical to the success of the group. mary expressed this well when she said, “the group is becoming so intimate that honesty is an imperative.” however, several situations have occurred that threaten authenticity within the group. one, of course, is the situation that has arisen among the co-workers discussed earlier in this section; the others are more reflective of some members’ apparent discomfort within the group. the group has hesitated confronting this dilemma and four women have decided to leave the group. their leaving is not perceived as a positive outcome, and at this writing we are not aware of why they chose to leave. we wonder: did they find the group process uncomfortable? were other members impositional with their opinions and beliefs? did they experience a philosophical rift with the group? elizabeth stated that these women’s leaving is the result of the group’s failure to deal with issues in a forthright manner: “maybe if we had talked to them about this they might have stayed.” at this writing, the four who left the group are still unwilling to discuss their decisions beyond a very superficial level. personal moral and ethical responsibility a more difficult dilemma we face, perhaps an extension of our problems surrounding honesty, is related to the responsibility we have to one another as it relates to the more personal sides of ourselves. more specifically, recent concern over one member’s apparent emotional problems caused lucy to raise the question: “to what extent do we intercede in one another’s lives?” if a group member develops a behavioral problem, such as chronic depression, personal anxiety, alcoholism, or an eating disorder, is it the role or responsibility of the group to confront that issue? also, as our group matures, closer relationships will develop among some of the members. if, for example, two women within the group were to develop a romantic relationship, what sort of effect would this intervening personal/social factor have on the group? the sharing and support found in our group encourages close ties and intimate relationships. yet, much in the way that nepotism can violate equity in the workplace, such relationships could threaten the constructive dynamics of the group. we wonder if future close relationships, or at worse, the dissolution of those relationships, will affect the group’s mission and purpose. issues of morality and ethics complicate the discussion as we debate these questions and we have not come to any consensus about how, or if, we would handle such problems. though composed of “successful” and powerful women leaders, the group has exhibited stereotypical female gender-linked behavior: we have hesitated to surface those issues that begin bubbling in the sidebars for fear of offending others, hurting others through confrontation, damaging fledgling relationships, and altering the group’s dynamics. as the group evolves, we do know that we will need to be gently confrontational and deal with these issues if and when they arise. this, too, must become the work of the group. conclusion the wellspring group has had many successes, but has also uncovered many concerns. though initially we did not begin with a stated value of democratic leadership, we have all come to characterize many of our leadership challenges as an effort to democratize our leadership style. the process of collaboration has helped us to name our challenges and identify our struggles. this is just one of many benefits of collaboration that we have grown to appreciate. the benefits of having many minds apply their unique talents to a specific problem or issue adds a dimension to our group that many of us find lacking in our workplaces. the recognition of the value of collaboration has increased our commitment to the development of a democratic workplace. though we are convinced of the wellspring’s value to each of us individually, we continue to be concerned about the effect our efforts are having on our respective organizations. the impact we have in the lives of our organizations and professions is primary; we all want to make positive contributions. perhaps our overarching conclusion is the difficulty of creating authentic experiences for ourselves and for the others with whom we share our lives. this struggle for authenticity takes on many dimensions. we struggle to make the wellspring experience authentic. how do we create an environment that is safe? how do we peel away the defense mechanisms we carry with us in other social settings? how do we remain authentic when sometimes an authentic response would threaten other members? how much challenge or disagreement is appropriate in this setting? to date, the wellspring members have avoided confrontations and disagreements, we wonder if this will continue and also wonder what will happen if it does not continue. another dimension to our concerns about authenticity relates to our future research efforts. can participant observers report honestly about experiences in which they are intimately involved? as researchers, we wonder how we will balance issues of safety and trust with the need to report accurately the experiences of the group. we realize that the group’s verification of data is imperative if we are to maintain the integrity of our research. this too will become the work of the group. as our struggles to develop our authentic selves as educators, leaders, women, and researchers continue, we all gain a greater appreciation for how difficult it is to incorporate the values of democracy into our lives. we struggle with how we will become more generous and generative; how we will respect autonomy, yet share a collective purpose; and how we will prioritize our own and the group’s learning and development. these questions have not dampened our efforts and enthusiasm, but have given us a new appreciation for the work that lies ahead. references astin, h., & leland, c. (1991). women of influence, women of vision: a crossgenerational study of leaders and social change. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. belenky, m., clinchy, b., goldberger, n., & tarule, j. (1986/1997). women’s ways of knowing: the development of self, voice, and mind. ny: basic books. curry, b. (2000). women in power: pathways to leadership in education. ny: teachers college press. davies, j., & foster, w. (1994). a postmodern analysis of educational administration. in s. maxcy (ed.), postmodern school leadership (pp. 61-68). westport, cn: praeger, dewey, j. (1985). ethics. in j. a. boydston (ed.), the later works of john dewey, 1925-1953 (vol. 7). carbondale, il: southern illinois university press. garrison, j. (1997). dewey and eros: wisdom and desire in the art of teaching. ny: teachers college press. gilligan, c. (1984). in a different voice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. greene, m. (1988). the dialectic of freedom. ny: teachers college press. grogan, m. (1996). voices of women aspiring to the superintendency. albany, ny: state university of new york press. hackney, c., & bock, m. (2000). beyond mentoring: toward an invitational academe. advancing women in leadership, 3(1). retrieved from http://www.advancingwomen.com. hackney, c., bock, m., & runnestrand, d. (2001). the woman behind the leader: life forces, purposes, and legacies. in c. funk, a. pankake, & g. schrowth (eds.), women as school executives: the complete picture (pp. 305-311). hackney, c., & hogard, e. (1999). women in transition: a mission of service. advancing women in leadership, spring. retrieved from http;//www.advancingwomen.com. harding, s. (1983). why has the sex/gender system become visible only now? in s. harding & m. hintikka (eds.), discovering reality. dordrecht: d. reidel publishing co. helgeson, s. (1995). the web of inclusion. ny: doubleday. hawthorne, r., & henderson, j. (2000). transformative curriculum leadership. upper saddle river, nj: merrill-prentice hall. henderson, j. (2001). reflectivce teaching: professional artistry through inquiry. upper saddle river, nj: merrill-prentice hall. josselson, r. (1990). finding herself: pathways to identity development in women. san francisco: jossey-bass. maxcy, s. (1994). afterword: postmodern directions in educational leadership. in s. maxcy (ed.), postmodern school leadership (pp. 153-162). westport, cn: praeger. marcia, j., waterman, a., matteson, d., archer, s., & orlofsky, j. (1993). ego identity: a handbook for psychosocial research. ny: springer-verlag. palmer, p. (1998). the courage to teach. san francisco: jossey-bass. reynolds, c. (1995). feminist frameworks for the study of administration and leadership in educational organizations. in c. reynolds & b. young (eds.), women and leadership in canadian education (pp. 3-17). alberta, calgary: detselig enterprises, ltd, sergiovanni, t. (1992). moral leadership: getting to the heart of school improvement. san francisco: jossey-bass. tocqueville, alexis de. (1991). democracy in america. in w. ebenstein & a. ebenstein (eds.), great political thinkers: plato to the present (5th ed.). orlando, fl: holt, rinehart, and winston. authors dr. catherine e. hackney is the dean of graduate studies at ursuline college. dr. diane runnestrand is assistant professor for the tap program at ursuline college. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | 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|business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 23, spring 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] designing a conference for women entering academe in the sciences and engineering jonathan howarth, pardha s. pyla, beth yost, yonca haciahmetoglu, deb young, robert ball, stelios lambros, and peggy layne abstract women are underrepresented among faculty in the sciences and engineering. the national science foundation's advance program seeks to address this issue through comprehensive and creative strategies aimed at institutional transformation. virginia tech's advance program (advancevt) hosted a conference for women in the academic pipeline to facilitate their entry into academic careers. this paper discusses our efforts in designing this conference; we hope that it will help to address the relative lack of literature on conference design and provide a starting point for others who are designing conferences. we first introduce four conference design heuristics that emerged during the process of determining what information to present at the advancevt conference and how to present it: (1) undertake requirements elicitation, (2) choose an appropriate modality for presenting information, (3) account for interactions, and (4) emphasize shared interests and traits. we then discuss the application of these heuristics to the first design iteration of the advancevt conference. included in the discussion of the application of the heuristics are the results of three requirements elicitation activities: an online survey, focus groups, and interviews. designing a conference for women entering academe in the sciences and engineering it is well known that women are underrepresented in the sciences and engineering. there have been various efforts at the national level to address this issue. as part of one of these efforts, virginia tech hosted a conference for facilitating entry and success of women entering academe in the sciences and engineering. in this paper, we describe the application of four design heuristics to our initial conference design effort and the results of requirements elicitation activities. • women in academe in the sciences and engineering women are not well represented among the faculty of scientific and engineering academic disciplines (cauble, christy, & lima, 2000) . women who are faculty members cite some of the following reasons for this situation: pressures to balance personal and professional obligations, typically unfriendly professional file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm culture/environment, and an apparent lack of adequate support networks for social and mentoring activities (riger, stokes, raja, & sullivan, 1997) . despite advances made in the numbers of women choosing to pursue science and engineering careers, women continue to be significantly underrepresented in almost all science and engineering fields, constituting approximately 25% of the science and engineering workforce at large, and less than 21% of science and engineering faculty in 4-year colleges and universities. women from minority groups constitute only about 2% of science and engineering faculty in 4-year colleges and universities (wyer, 2003) . • facilitating the entry of women into these fields in a move toward amelioration of this trend, the national science foundation has established a grant program entitled advance, which aims to promote an increase in the participation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers through comprehensive and creative strategies aimed at institutional transformation. virginia tech is a recipient of an advance grant and has embarked upon a comprehensive, multifaceted program aimed at transforming the university culture. one specific objective of the virginia tech program (advancevt) is to offer a conference for women in the academic pipeline to facilitate their entry into academic career tracks. this conference is to be offered in the summer of 2006 and will provide a learning system for women planning to enter academe in the sciences and engineering. • designing a conference to facilitate entry and success while a lot of literature on conference planning exists, including online manuals, services for purchase, and general books, for example, (burke, 1976) , we were unable to find any literature specific to conference design. conference design refers to a part of the much larger task of conference planning and involves determining the following: • what information to present • how to present that information conference design is a subset of conference planning because it only addresses the content of conference activities. conference planning takes into account other issues, such as budget, transportation arrangements, catering, etc ( figure 1 ). while practical conference planning concerns (budgeting, etc.) are consistent across conferences, conference design depends heavily on the specifics of the conference. figure 1 : conference planning decomposed we adopted a process-oriented approach to help structure and guide the design of the conference. many design approaches employ a process; one example is hix and hartson's approach to interaction design for computer interfaces (hix & hartson, 1993) . the conference design effort proceeded in three major phases: requirements gathering, analysis and design, and outcomes, as shown in figure 2. figure 2 : process employed in designing the conference the requirements phase consisted of a detailed literature review (section 2 ) and a four-pronged elicitation approach (sections 3 and 4 include information on client interviews, faculty interviews, a survey, and focus groups). at the end of this phase, we had a better understanding of the needs of conference participants. considerations during the analysis and design phase included participants' needs, meeting the constraints imposed by conference organizers, and considering the risks involved with different design decisions. this design process was aided immensely by the design heuristics and the two guiding questions of what information to present and how to present that information. the outcomes included a detailed conference schedule and evaluation instruments to measure the perceptions of the participants regarding the usefulness of this conference. the process-oriented approach to conference design is intended to be generic enough to be applied across a variety of circumstances. within each phase of the approach, however, there are many opportunities to tailor the design process to the needs of a specific circumstance. this paper focuses on the influencing factors, activities, and products that were important for designing the advancevt conference for women pursuing careers in academe. • 1.1 conference design heuristics in his book, how to solve it , polya (1957) defined heuristic as the process for discovering a solution to a problem. more recently, the term heuristics has come to be identified with techniques for searching a solution space quickly to find an adequate or "good enough" solution (for an example, see nielsen & molich, 1990) . the conference design heuristics presented in this paper integrate the two definitions in that they make designers more aware of the design space, which in turn facilitates the search for adequate solutions to issues. as we were designing the advancevt conference, several important issues emerged that influenced our thinking and decisions. these issues were recorded as they were encountered and then generalized to form the following heuristics for conference design: • undertake requirements elicitation perform a thorough review of the attendees' backgrounds and expectations. • choose an appropriate modality for presenting information explore the various possibilities available for disseminating the conference content and select the best subset given the constraints. • account for interactions consider and leverage the possibilities and opportunities arising from various interactions that are inherent in a conference. • emphasize shared interests and traits improve the conference content and activities by leveraging the commonalities of the attendees and the characteristics of the domain. • 1.1 organization of this paper the remainder of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents literature related to each of the four conference design heuristics. section 3 presents the methods used for requirements elicitation, including information on the survey, focus groups, and interviews. section 4 presents the results of the requirements elicitation. in section 5 , both the literature and the requirements elicitation results are applied to create the initial design of the advancevt conference. the final section contains concluding remarks. we hope that other conference designers will find the general conference design heuristics useful. we also hope that the specific results from the survey, focus groups, and interviews will be useful to others designing conferences for the advancement of women in the sciences and engineering. • literature review literature related to each of the four conference design heuristics is presented in this section. the works that we cite for previous research come from a variety of disciplines. our backgrounds are in the disciplines of computer science, industrial systems engineering, psychology, sociology, and women's studies. as we designed the conference, we noticed that many of the approaches to problems in our disciplines were applicable to problems that we were encountering with the conference design. as a result, the references that we cite are from a variety of domains. we believe that this interdisciplinary approach helped us to see the problems through a number of different lenses, which in turn limited the introduction of biases associated with the approaches used by any one given discipline. although the conference design heuristics are intended to be generic and applicable across a variety of circumstances, we particularly wanted to avoid introducing gender biases given the nature of the advancevt conference. the various models presented in the literature review were originally developed without reference to gender, but we believe that combining them to present a more holistic approach helps to limit gender biases that may exist. • undertake requirements elicitation the primary goal of the conference is preparing women for a career in academe and giving them the skills and information that they need to succeed in their first two to three years on the job. requirements elicitation in the context of conference design is the process of working with stakeholders (conference designers and participants who have different backgrounds, skill sets, understandings, and needs) to draw out their concerns, needs, and perceptions relevant to the conference goal. the success or failure of any conference is highly dependent on the requirements elicitation process. if the conference designers fail to elicit all that is desired, they cannot possibly organize or create what is wanted. sommerville, sawyer, and viller (1998) suggest three steps for addressing the concerns of stakeholders (albeit in a different context), which we believe are applicable to conference design. adapting this approach, the concerns for this conference include: • identifying the concerns that affect the design of the conference. • deriving a set of questions that will ensure that the information required to satisfy the concerns is collected. • eliciting and negotiating requirements to ensure that the conference design satisfies the identified concerns within the constraints. the requirements elicitation process is not completely driven by the designer; participatory design is common practice in a variety of disciplines. for example, literature in the field of participatory ergonomics suggests that system design is best accomplished by incorporating participation from the personnel most involved in the work system (haines & wilson, 1998) . another example is with the participatory design of information systems (merkel, et al . , 2004) . in participatory design, the participants are included in the design process early, so that their input helps to drive the design. to get participant feedback, we used surveys, conducted focus groups, and interviewed faculty. the requirements elicitation process should allow for iteration. in its early stages, a conference design is particularly dynamic. the goals and scope of the conference change as new challenges and limitations are encountered. it may be necessary to repeatedly perform various requirements elicitation activities to account for these changes. the idea of iteration appears in a variety of contexts and disciplines. for example, boehm and egyed (1998) recommend an approach for the development of software systems that iterates between requirements elicitation, design, evaluation, and risk analysis. the conference design presented here is a first iteration, and many more iterations are likely before the conference is held. • choose an appropriate modality for presenting information eliciting requirements helped determine what information to present, but we still had concerns about the best way to present that information. literature on discourse theory and learning theories helped generate ideas. • discourse theory people attend a conference for a variety of reasons, including learning new techniques, methods, and technologies. the conference activities are the necessary link between the attendees and the information that they want to obtain. in terms of clark 's (1994) work, this link can be considered a conversation that evolves as attendees interact with the activities. the attendees initiate interaction by attending activities, but the interaction represents a joint activity with contributions by both the attendees and the activities. appropriately supporting this joint activity requires an understanding of two main concepts: the activities as a language and constraints in grounding. the language for the interaction is the activities in the conference. the language only exists because the conference designers need a way to propose tasks and share information with and obtain information from attendees. the design of activities should ultimately be dependent on the information that the attendees want to obtain. attendees need not relay their entire mental states, and activities should not require it. both parties only need that which is necessary to carry the conversation. the implication for the conference design process is to structure activities to maximize the dispersal of relevant information and minimize time spent on unnecessary information. such a task is difficult, however, because information that is extraneous to the goals of an activity may be particularly useful in helping participants establish common ground. common ground is "the things we know about what is known by the person we are talking to" (monk, 2003, p. 4) . the theory behind common ground assumes that language in general is a medium for accomplishing some task. common ground lessens the amount of work that goes into collaborating. if two individuals share common ground, they can make inferences and assumptions and do not require explicit explanation of ideas or activities. female graduate students and post-doctoral researchers share a great deal of communal common ground by being members of the educational system and develop personal common ground by interacting with one another. constraints in monk's terminology are properties of a communication method that affect the grounding process. monk describes constraints such as visibility, audibility, reviewability, simultaneity, and sequentiality. as an example, supplementing a lecture with printed copies of powerpoint slides meets the constraint of reviewability; the lecture attendees can review the main points of the lecture at a later date. the activities should consider constraints to maximize the transmission of information. • learning theories a large number of learning theories exist in psychology. for an overview of various theories for learning and suggestions on how these theories can be applied for education, see kearsley, 2005 . jean piaget's work with theories regarding human thought and knowledge are relevant to this work (kalat, 1996) . piaget's theories provide guidance for conference planning in that participants must want to learn the material being presented during the conference and should be actively engaged with the material. for some information, it is appropriate to match information to the attendees' schemas to help them quickly assimilate it. for other information, such as information on confronting gender stereotypes, it may be useful to present the information in a novel way, so that the attendees need to create new schemas to accommodate the information. in addition to learning theories from psychology, educational theories on learning provide interesting ideas for the design of conference activities. behavioral learning approaches consist of repeating an action until it becomes automatic. in a discussion of bringing about systemic changes in educational technology, fishman, soloway, krajcik, marx, & blumenfeld (2001) identify the most common uses of technology as those rooted in behavioral learning techniques, such as drills. the constructivist approach to education differs significantly from the behavioral approach. in the constructivist approach, learning is the result of focusing on personal experiences to construct an understanding of the world. accordingly, learning is no longer the process of memorizing as it is in the behavioral approach, but instead a search for meaning (soloway, et al., 1996) . such an understanding of education matches well with a recent report by the national research council that indicates that students come to class with their own set of preconceptions of how the world works (donovan, bransford, & pelleginno, 1999) . in addition, the report emphasizes the benefits of a metacognitive approach to grading in which students set their own goals and monitor their progress toward them. a key to designing activities from the constructivist perspective is providing guidance and avoiding overstructuring. such an approach is related to suchman's (1987) theory of situated action. much like workflow analysis provides a general model for understanding what tasks are accomplished in a business setting without providing the low-level details of how they are accomplished, activities should give attendees a starting point and encourage exploration and inquiry. john dewey described this approach well with the following quote: "wherever an activity is broad in scope (that is, involves the coordinating of a large variety of sub-activities), and is constantly and unexpectedly obliged to change direction in its progressive development, general education is bound to result" (carroll, et al . , 2000, para. 3) . • account for interactions after eliciting the requirements and determining what information to present, the order and timing of activities must be determined. one of the difficulties with accounting for interactions is being unsure of how much the conference attendees would interact with one another and what influence those interactions would have on the attitudes, opinions, and choices of the attendees. for example, questions arise, such as: how should we structure the activities in such a way as to maximize learning? how much would the quality and content of an activity on the first day of the conference influence the attendee's desire to participate in related activities on subsequent days? these higher level problems prompted us to look at the more fundamental issues of human cognition, processing, and memory. previous work on cognition provided us with the background knowledge and grounding that we needed to better understand our design task. cognition is central to the conference design problem because each participant needs to process, remember, and apply the information presented in the future. in this section, we present a brief discussion of the theories related to human cognition as a background for our work. norman (1993) simplifies human cognition into two very abstract theories. the first hypothesizes that cognition by humans is based on symbolic processing and that this processing is internal to the human. this theory treats cognition as a representation-of-knowledge problem. as a result, the focus of this theory is entirely upon the processing structures of the brain and the symbolic representations of the mind. the second theory provides a more holistic approach that includes the interplay among the human, the general environment, the specific context, and the situations of other involved people. given the nature of the conference, we were particularly concerned with the latter theory. there is much previous work that in some way addresses or embodies the more holistic approach. in the field of cognitive science, for example, ed hutchins and colleagues developed the concept of distributed cognition (rogers, 1997) . it provides a paradigm for rethinking all domains of cognitive phenomena. distributed cognition proposes that cognition is better understood as a distributed phenomenon and that human cognition and knowledge representations, rather than being solely confined to the boundaries of an individual, are distributed across individuals, tools, and artifacts in the environment. since distributed cognition stresses the importance of the individual to the environmental objects (human or otherwise), it is a useful approach for (re)designing socio-technical cooperative environments. an example from psychology is the work of albert bandura on social cognitive theory (bandura, 1986, 2001) . social cognitive theory was developed out of earlier work by behavioral and social psychologists on social learning theory, which states that cognition serves as a mediator between stimuli received by a human and the human's responses to the stimuli. social cognitive theory extends or augments social learning theory by defining human behavior as the interaction among personal factors, the environment, and behavior. originally developed to help understand and predict human behavior, social cognitive theory is often difficult to apply because of its complexity. a more applied example from industrial systems engineering is the socio-technical systems model for work systems. this model, developed by trist and bamforth (1951), describes an approach to work system design that encompasses three sub-system elements: technical, personnel, and organizational. work system design, according to this model, can be optimized through a balanced approach that addresses all three subsystem elements and is called joint optimization. another example from industrial systems engineering is the discipline of macroergonomics. hendrick and kleiner (2002) describe macroergonomics as the design of work systems through attention to the internal environment, the external environment, and the organizational structure. the internal environment, in general, includes physical and psychosocial parameters. the external environment consists of those elements to which an organization must be responsive, such as political, cultural, and customer attributes. in the case of the design of a conference to address the advancement of women in academe, the holistic approach provides a structure for considering and, in some cases, anticipating interactions. for example, in terms of the macroergonomics model, the internal environmental factors to be considered would include those psychosocial factors such as cultural and gender schemas, and the external environmental factors would include such things as the university culture, departmental politics, and granting organization policies. a well designed conference would provide activities and events that would allow attendees to develop skills and enhance knowledge of all of these parameters. • emphasize shared interests and traits depending on the nature of the conference, the attendees may form a particularly diverse group. designing for diversity presents challenges because it is difficult to account for what could possibly be a wide variety of interests and needs. in this section, we discuss the challenges that we encountered when designing for a diverse group of female graduate and post-doctoral researchers. we dealt with these challenges by emphasizing the shared interests and traits of the attendees. even though the attendees of the advancevt conference were all women, they had a large variety of backgrounds and circumstances. the conference was for women from the sciences and engineering, meaning that their academic interests and approaches to problem solving vary considerably. within their own academic fields, the women had different perspectives: some of the attendees continued with graduate school directly after completing their undergraduate degrees, while others worked for a number of years before returning to academe to earn a more advanced degree. in addition, the women had different living circumstances; for example, some were single, while others had spouses and/or children. we wanted to emphasize shared interests and traits in our activities to give all conference attendees the opportunity to connect with the material and each other during activities. the benefits of emphasizing shared characteristics are briefly highlighted in section 2.2.1 in the discussion of common ground. for our particular conference, the major shared quality was easy to identify because it formed the basis for our conference. all of our attendees would be female and either would have already dealt with or would have to deal with gender issues in their academic careers. therefore, there is a potential for leveraging the experiences of some attendees to provide insights for the whole group. females are poorly represented in the sciences and engineering and face a unique set of challenges (cauble, et al., 2000) . many of these challenges have been identified through research on gender schema theory, which proposes that the phenomenon of sex typing derives, in part, from gender-based schematic processing--a generalized readiness to process information on the basis of the sex-linked associations that constitute the gender schema. in particular, the theory proposes that sex typing results from the fact that the self-concept itself is assimilated in the gender schema (bem, 1981) . the influence of the gender schema concept on promotion decisions for women was examined by lemons (2003) . the study evaluated contextual factors deemed as contributing to procedural justice or the "glass ceiling effect." contextual factors evaluated included the lack of female role models, gender bias, and limited networking opportunities. we wanted to design our conference activities to directly address many of the contextual factors associated with gender schemas. we describe these factors in the following subsections. • 1.1.1 lack of female role models there are a number of notable advances made by female researchers in the sciences and engineering; many of these advances, however, have not received sufficient recognition. for example, schiebinger (2002) highlights advances made by female researchers in three areas: medicine, primatology, and archeology. in medicine, research from the 1980s demonstrated that women's health was being negatively impacted by exclusion from medical studies, such as the use of aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease. the national institute of health, however, has since helped to define and improve women's health through studies that not only address female-specific problems, but also include females in the research process. in addition, female researchers have proposed a more inclusive model of women's health that has both a biomedical component and a social component. primatology has experienced a change in the understanding of relationships between primates. following world war ii, female primates were thought to be entirely submissive to the needs of dominant males. thereafter, however, female scholars studied matrilineal networks and discovered the cognitive capabilities and competitive tendencies of females. in archeology, female scholars have shown how gender assumptions have influenced the interpretation of findings. a primary example is the priority given to technical advances over social advances. • 1.1.2 gender bias gender biases exist for a number of reasons, such as cultural and social stereotypes, and are imposed on women in sciences and engineering, both through internal and external sources. one particular aspect of gender bias became very important as we designed the conference: technology bias. we used a variety of technologies to do requirements elicitation, coordinate among ourselves, and document our work as we designed the conference, and we planned to use a variety of technologies to run the conference and get realtime feedback from the participants. in addition, we planned to use technology to follow up on our efforts after the conference and establish a forum for communication for attendees. we questioned the effect that the reliance on technology would have on the ability to accommodate and support a diverse group of attendees. technology keeps the relationship that women have with the sciences and engineering in constant flux. it simultaneously enables and drives research and learning within the sciences and engineering. previous work describes a variety of sources of technology bias. some of the sources are internal. in a work on females' relationships with computers, turkle (1991) maintains that some competent and skilled individuals, particularly women, do not fear computers, but instead distance themselves from computers because they dislike the idea of a relationship with an object. their reticence limits their creative capabilities when they do interact with a computer. these individuals value human relationships and the shades of meaning present in human languages. other sources are externally imposed. ormond (1995) provides a discussion of the female relationship with technology in an article in which she argues against the black-boxing of gender and society, a process that she maintains blurs true relationships. in particular, she emphasizes that the source of female oppression in relationship to technology cannot simply be limited to patriarchy, as some feminists may believe. to do so would obscure the real source of subjugation, many widespread and diverse instances of oppression that collectively make an impact. she maintains that the real relationship between gender and technology is constantly constructed and destructed in a series of discourses. grint and woolgar (1995) support this idea with an argument that technical capacity is not necessarily inherent in a technology, but that it also results from the various circumstances of its development. regardless of the source, the meaning of technological bias is certainly influenced by individual perspectives within the bounds of a society. attendees came to the conference with relationships to technology that they had developed through their own experiences and circumstances. while it was not a primary goal of the conference to improve these relationships, technology should be used to include and involve attendees and not to exclude them. we wanted the attendees to have a favorable opinion of technology as it was used to support the conference. a variety of works, such as a study by the american association of university women (2000) on the central role of computers in modern life, address the importance of technology. it is imperative that future female academics feel comfortable and competent with technology, so that they can succeed in the technologically-driven fields of the sciences and engineering. • 1.1.3 limited networking opportunities for women a third contextual factor identified by lemons' work is the lack of networking opportunities for women. the conference design should promote networking among women in the sciences and engineering, as well as networking with women in other fields. • 2 requirements elicitation methods before we could begin designing the conference, we needed to better understand the needs, circumstances, and skills of our target audience. in this section and the following section, we discuss our approach to and the results of our requirements elicitation efforts, respectively. our requirements elicitation efforts consisted of an online survey, focus groups, and interviews. • 2.1 surveys to get a wide variety of opinions and ideas from women pursuing academic careers, we prepared an online survey and distributed it. the survey was created with virginia tech's web-based survey tool (survey.vt.edu). the survey had two separate sections: a multiple choice section and an open-ended question section. the multiple choice section had a total of 18 questions. the first six questions were used to collect demographic information, and the remaining questions were used to ask the participants about various aspects of pursuing a professorship in academe. the three open-ended questions were specifically designed to collect information that would help us choose topics for and plan conference activities. the online survey announcement and link were emailed to graduate students at other universities that had received advance grants and to the following national mailing lists: • women in engineering leadership group • national association of minority engineering program administrators • women in engineering programs and advocates network. a total of 1,026 graduate students responded, of which 97% were female and 66% were graduate students or post-doctoral researchers. thirty-five percent of the respondents were between 21 and 24 years of age, and 49% were between 25 and 30. • 2.2 focus groups • 2.2.1 focus group participants we conducted four different focus groups, lasting between one hour and one and a half hours with between five and seven participants. all participants were current female graduate students in the sciences or engineering at virginia tech recruited using targeted listservs. the participants were given ten dollar gift certificates and snacks for their participation. three of these focus groups were matched based on ethnicity (african-american, european-american, and international), and one group was of mixed ethnicity. the mixed ethnicity group was half asian-american and half european-american. the international group was heavily asian with four asians, two asian-americans, and a single european participant. hispanic/latina and native american focus groups have not yet been conducted because of time constraints, but will be held before the next conference design iteration. • focus group method to encourage all participants to participate equally, participants were given index cards and asked to respond to the following three questions: • what is one positive thing about the prospect of being a female faculty member in higher education in the us ? • what is one negative thing about the prospect of being a female faculty member in higher education in the us ? • how would a conference best address these issues? the main questions asked during the focus groups were created to coincide with issues cited in the literature. the four general questions asked during each focus group were • what do you find attractive about a career in academe? • what are your concerns about working in an academic field? • why do you think women are underrepresented as faculty in the fields of science and engineering in the united states ? what could be done to change this? • tell me about your experiences at previous conferences; what would you like to see at a conference? • 2.2.3 focus group procedure all focus groups started five to ten minutes after participants arrived to allow time for food, drinks, and mingling. the moderators started the session by giving an introduction to advancevt, providing a brief description of the conference, and then using the method with the index cards as described in the previous section. two note takers were present at each focus group. all moderators and facilitators were matched to the respective focus group based on ethnicity. it should be noted that the reliability of the results is limited by the different styles and procedures used by individual moderators. three raters were involved in the data collection and content analysis of the findings. these raters developed a coding scheme based on both the literature review and themes that emerged during the focus groups (krippendorf, 1980) . all focus group discussion content was coded according to these themes and the frequencies were then counted. only information discussed (and not information that was written on index cards) was included in the frequency counts. a critical component of content analysis methodology is ascertaining the degree of reliability of the coding to ensure consistency in the interpretation and application of the coding schemes. two coders each analyzed the set of notes independently and then came together for final coding. the coders spent a considerable amount of time to validate data and decrease the chance of individual interpretations. having two sets of notes was critical to recovering the missing/vague parts of the focus group data. • 2.3 interviews while the focus groups captured information on what female graduate students thought that they would like in a conference, the interviews provided the other perspective of what professionals wished they had known. • 2.3.1 interview participants ten virginia tech faculty and administrators were interviewed primarily to get personal accounts of their experiences as working professionals in academe. nine were faculty members and one was a senior administrator. one of the nine faculty members was male; all other interviewees were female. the administrator was a director of undergraduate studies in the college of engineering . one of the nine female faculty members was from the humanities; all others were faculty in the sciences and engineering. • 2.3.2 interview method for the interviews, we developed a list of questions that helped to initiate and maintain conversation. we grouped the questions into the following four categories: general understanding of the atmosphere in academe, preparing for an academic career, helping graduate students become faculty, and succeeding as a faculty member. we began by asking the interviewees one or two open-ended questions for one of the general categories, such as, "knowing what you know now on how to succeed as a faculty member, what would you have done differently to prepare yourself during graduate school?" if the conversation did not proceed for long with such open-ended questions, we probed with more specific questions, such as, "what advice would you give to current women graduate students with respect to succeeding in the first two years in academe." • interview procedure we conducted the interviews in the interviewees' offices and deliberately kept them informal to encourage the free exchange of ideas. the interviews lasted from 30 minutes to one hour, depending on the schedule of the interviewee. we started the interviews with an introduction to the advancevt project and information on our conference design team and our task. we also informed them that the interview was confidential and that their names would not be associated with their interview transcripts. we obtained a considerable amount of data from the interviews. due to the heterogeneous group of interviewees and the informal nature of the questions, the content analysis technique was adapted to the data collected (krippendorf, 1980) . we separately highlighted the interview transcripts for codes, concepts, themes, or issues that appeared to be important to the interviewees. we then combined, listed, and categorized the codes into clusters to form a hierarchy. finally, using the hierarchy of codes, we reviewed the transcripts a second time to determine the amount of emphasis placed by interviewees on particular codes and selected important quotes. for the purposes of our conference design task, we were most interested in the major ideas and themes brought up or discussed by the interviewees. as a result, our methods for analyzing interviews are not overly rigorous. • requirements elicitation results • 3.1 surveys results from multiple choice questions the multiple choice survey questions helped us identify several key characteristics of the group of potential conference attendees. first, the group is particularly diverse. more than half of the respondents identified themselves as belonging to an ethnic group other than european-american. in addition, one third of the respondents are married and 13% have children. second, the group could benefit from a conference similar to the one that we were designing. two thirds of the respondents have never attended a career-enhancement workshop, and half of the respondents do not have a mentor to help them with pursuing an academic career. third, the female respondents felt that they did have fewer career-advancement opportunities in academe (46% answered "strongly agree" or "agree") and seem to agree to a lesser extent that minorities have the same problem (37% respectively). fourth, the respondents felt competent in terms of skills necessary for obtaining and performing well in a faculty position, including writing cvs, resumes, and research statements and interviewing. one notable exception is that the respondents did not feel competent creating a professional website. open-ended survey questions the survey included three open-ended questions. only a fraction of the participants answered the openended questions (234, 121, and 233 responses, respectively). to provide a summary of the responses, we categorized them using the following procedure: • for each question, we sampled a random selection of 50 answers. • in each sample, we noted the unique ideas and grouped them to construct general categories. • we reviewed the ideas and assigned each to one of the categories. • unrelated and/or nonsensical answers were put into the "miscellaneous" category. the majority of respondents wanted more tools to help them locate existing academic positions, both faculty and post-doctoral. when asked what difficulties they have encountered so far, balancing career and family, as well as discrimination (sexism and racism), were the most frequent answers. another result from this question is that 4% of the respondents claim that being a female or a minority has made their pursuit easier. the minority students believe that support groups, mentoring and contact with other minority faculty, as well as equal treatment from the entire faculty would make their transition into a predominately white institution easier. • 3.2 focus groups the content analysis revealed the following major themes: work and family/life balance, role models, industry vs. academe, culture, tenure, respect, politics, interviewing/negotiating, networking, research, and teaching. the overall frequencies for each theme can be seen in figure 3. figure 3 : theme frequencies from all focus groups balance between work and family balancing work and family was the most frequently occurring theme in all groups except the africanamerican group. the participants commented on the difficulties of raising children and managing the tenure process. it was noted that these life events typically occur simultaneously. childcare, spousal support, and spousal job flexibility were common topics. international group members commented on cultural differences between their own and american cultures. it was noted that in many asian countries, women are expected to excel at all roles: professional and family. many comments were made expressing concern over the low likelihood of success in all these endeavors. in the european-american focus group, the participants discussed whether they can really attain the goal of being successful both in their academic and family lives. one participant said, "why am i doing this, can you have it all?" another participant supported this fear with negative examples from her department. she said, "i just can't do it [i] haven't seen anyone that has done it." one participant mentioned an article about higher divorce rates for tenured females and how tenured females have fewer children. another mentioned that most females stay at home or go to smaller universities, so that their husbands can be successful. role models an important theme is the need to see more women faculty in academe. this was the most frequently referenced theme from the african-american focus group and the second most frequent theme overall (behind only family/life/work balance). participants mentioned that they would like to see examples of women who have the lives that they seek: a successful career and happy family life. some of them believe that female professors can encourage female graduate students. some conflicting comments on the role of mentorship evolved from the discussion with some participants saying that they believed this would be helpful and others saying that they had negative experiences with mentorship. in the african-american focus group, some participants pointed out to the need for encouragement. one graduate student said encouragement helped her realize that "continued education is possible and [you] can be successful, there are opportunities." another woman from this focus group expressed her desire to serve as a role model/mentor to other underrepresented students. on the other hand, another student talked about being a role model to women in general and not only to peers. she believed that being a role model to nonminorities "shows that we are supposed to be there, to create acceptance." industry vs. academe the participants compared industry versus academe in terms of time commitment. some expressed a preference for academe because of flexible hours, control of research, and the ability to work independently. others pointed out that faculty flexibility does not translate into reduced workload. culture across focus groups there was a strong sense that academe is male dominated, and some of the female graduate students found this stressful and intimidating. one african-american woman cited faith as a way to help cope with the stress. the international women had the most cultural concerns because of language barriers. they expressed worry about not being able to get grants because of their writing and also about not being able to join discussions. for example, one international student said, "i cannot understand american cultural jokes. i cannot join discussions. i feel uncomfortable." during the conference they hoped to hear from professionals regarding how much weight is put on grammar when writing proposals and "what makes a bad impression." tenure the issue of tenure was discussed more frequently in the international and mixed groups than it was the europeanand african-american groups. some participants discussed the length of the process, the amount of work required, the lack of guarantee of success, and the conflict with childbearing years. one participant thought that the tenure process was difficult, but that "once you get your tenure, it is easier." others said that they felt it was too distant an issue for consideration at this time or that they did not know enough about the topic to have concerns. respect participants in the international group communicated that they tend to hold academic careers in high esteem. however, there was a concern that male colleagues would not have much confidence in female scientists' abilities. one participant stated that "when i talk [to] professors in my department, they really think females lack ability in engineering. it is really frustrating, but it is fact. [we] must face reality." another said, "they [men] are not taking us seriously." in the european-american and mixed focus groups, participants noted that female faculty members are held to a different standard of behavior than are males; they must not be informal or use humor, lest they undermine their own authority. however, the source of the problem is not always male faculty. one graduate student from the mixed focus group described a senior female faculty member who showed a negative attitude to other women in academe, such as, "i had to do it, they have to do it." participants in the african-american group described the stress of being a minority in the academic environment. this topic was the third most frequent in their focus group. one african-american woman stated that she was the only african-american in the entire building for a period of time. she said being the "only black, everyone knows who you are, so when i do something bad, i feel pressure." however, she stated that she now feels that she adapted to this and adjusted to the situation after realizing that she is not the only one in this situation. politics comments concerning the nature of the gender imbalance in academe and university policies to rectify the situation were coded in this theme. there was a general consensus among participants that women are still in the minority. policies concerning male partner accessibility to paternity leave and access to child daycare were discussed. one of the participants felt that her department tried to hire female faculty to achieve a balance or meet a quota. interviewing/negotiations interviewing for a job and issues related to negotiating emerged primarily in the european-american focus group. these participants expressed an interest in conference activities, such as having an opportunity to see examples of resumes, teaching statements, and cover letters. several participants expressed a need to know more about the process of negotiation once an offer has been issued. most of the women did not know that they could negotiate for childcare. those who voiced an opinion had a negative view of current childcare possibilities. there was also a positive belief that this can be changed relatively easily. the fact that the international focus group did not mention negotiations may be related to their culture. networking while this was one of the least frequently occurring themes across the groups, all groups did mention concerns regarding their ability to effectively network with male colleagues. specifically, several comments pertained to the "informal communication networks" that exist among colleagues who socialize in bars. the participants expressed some discomfort with the notion of socializing in a bar atmosphere in a large group of men, yet they described that this seems to be a norm in their fields. african-american participants described that their ethnicity adds a layer of complexity to this interaction. one participant described discomfort at being "the only black female among many white men." participants in all groups described feeling more comfortable in venues where they can network with people more like themselves. research the women in the focus groups had concerns about how to get funding and write grant proposals. one concern brought up during the mixed focus group was that there would not be enough time to do research because they might be assigned less important work than men. one woman said, "they give you a lot of service work. male[s] don't have to do that." teaching participants discussed researchand teaching-oriented schools. some expressed a need to know more about the different classifications. several mentioned a need to acquire more teaching experience prior to entering a tenure-track position. some african-american focus group participants expressed concern over cultural differences between themselves and the student body. summary overall, the expectations of the women regarding the conference were quite positive and encouraging. most provided specific ideas about conference activities and what they wanted to see in the advancevt conference. these sessions were quite productive in getting feedback from female graduate students from different backgrounds. • 1.1 interviews this section serves as a summary and is not a complete coverage of all the issues expressed by the interviewees. for this paper, we present the results organized by high-level category, followed by supportive subcategories and quotes. the two high-level categories are as follows: summary of interviewees' perceptions and interviewees' advice to women based on their experiences. summary of the interviewees' perceptions the interviews provided insights into a wide variety of issues that women face and perceive to be important in academe today. on one end of the spectrum, interviewees expressed opinions on issues ranging from the choices that a woman is likely to face at deeply personal and family levels, such as if and when to have children. on the other end of the spectrum were issues related to professional and academic skills necessary to make it in what is perceived to be a male-dominated arena. we provide a brief summary of the important areas that were addressed by the interviewees in the following subsections. importance of mentoring. the interviewees stressed the importance of having a good mentor. they agreed that it is important to work with professors established in a field to develop a broader understanding of and appreciation for the field. mentors help students learn the unwritten rules and practices of academe and the workplace. the majority were of the opinion that the gender of the mentor is not important. importance of networking. the interviewees felt that it is important to network with the top graduate students in one's field. according to one interviewee, "if you don't know them [the top graduate students], you are not one of them." it is also important to have connections because graduate school can be difficult to complete alone. collaboration and involvement often result in excellent research advances and make for a more engaging experience. developing the required skills. one interviewee summed this subcategory up well with the quote, "you want to distinguish yourself from others this is what is going to get you a job." the interviewees collectively discussed four basic skills: writing grants, working on projects, teaching, and negotiating. all are important skills, but some of the interviewees pointed out that women most often have the most difficulty negotiating for funding, equipment, and personnel. gender bias. the female interviewees felt that biases against women exist and that they themselves had been affected by these biases at least once during their careers. one interviewee even reported, "it is so bad that i [being a woman] have a sub-conscious bias against women." the women reported that these biases manifest themselves in harassment at the work place, being evaluated differently compared to men, and being perceived to be inferior to men. personal life issues. personal life issues include family life, particularly children and spouses. some interviewees reported that they would not have children because they perceive their careers to be more important. others mentioned that they had postponed having children until obtaining tenure. one interviewee mentioned that universities are sometimes apathetic with respect to supporting family culture and that it is not possible to "hide being pregnant." as for spouses, some of the interviewees felt that other men often times give more importance to the male spouse's career. interviewees' advice for women as mentioned previously, we started the interviews by providing a brief introduction of advancevt and our overarching goal of designing a conference for women considering careers in academe. this helped in keeping the interviews more or less focused on the high-level issue of what women should know to be successful in academe. we provide a brief summary of the advice the interviewees gave in the next few subsections. job search issues. the interviewees were of the opinion that different places have different cultures: "the kind of work that is appreciated in different places is different, and one needs to understand how people perceive themselves with respect to that culture." one interviewee encouraged women to find the most women-friendly places to work: "there are misogynistic factors almost everywhere and one has to choose the least misogynistic place." academic issues. the interviewees warned against taking on too much before obtaining tenure. a professor should have a minimum "repertoire of courses" that she already has prepared and is easily able to teach. preparing for new courses takes time that could otherwise be directed toward research and publications. in addition, female academics should be careful and selective about being on committees. it is common for academic departments to ask women to be on committees because of the tendency to want "at least one woman." a tenure track woman should compare herself with the men around her to see the number of committees that they are participating in and should learn to say "no" if she is feeling overextended. administrative issues. the interviewees had two major pieces of advice for young faculty members. the first is to learn and develop time and people management skills. "science is not management, and being a scientist does not imply management skills." the second is to get any promises or decisions from the department in writing. "young people are too trusting. they expect people to abide by their word." personality traits. the interviewees discussed a variety of issues concerning personality and the workplace. most importantly, a professor should "sell her skills, not her personality." competence in a field and confidence in that competence are the key factors in succeeding. summary the interview process was an enlightening experience and provided us with a rich set of information and varied insights with respect to the following: • there is a considerable bias against women in academe. this bias is not as pronounced as in the decades past, but it still exists and manifests itself in various ways. this bias is often concealed or made more subtle because it is considered "politically incorrect" to show bias. • there are certain gender-based differences in personality traits, communication styles, social behavior, and personal expectations. in other words, men and women have different attitudes, styles, and expectations with regard to professional and academic life. • people should be aware of and work toward eliminating the biases and the gender differences that exist when it comes to a career in academe. • being in the minority, women can benefit from additional support from structures such as social and professional networking, academic and administrative mentoring, awareness of gender biases and differences, and training for general and gender specific skills. • 2 application of results and heuristics • 2.1 general requirements some requirements and goals were set for practical reasons by the advancevt committee before the surveys, focus groups, or interviews were conducted. the following were the goals for the conference, general constraints, and the target audience. the conference goals included: • prepare the participants for a career in academe by providing them with an opportunity to acquire necessary skills and information that they will need to succeed in their first two to three years on the job. • explore the possibility of recruiting new female faculty members for virginia tech, preferably minorities. • help the participants establish professional and personal support networks. • accommodate and, whenever possible, leverage the diverse range of interests and backgrounds of the participants to enhance or empower the total attendee pool. • positively portray virginia tech and its efforts to increase the number and quality of female faculty in the sciences and engineering fields. these goals were subject to the constraints that the conference would start on a friday evening and end on a sunday afternoon. the location of the conference was fixed and approximately 75 participants could be included. the target audience included women considering pursuing careers in fields in academe in the sciences and engineering that are within 1-2 years of entering academe. these attendees were a diverse group and had a variety of academic interests, were of various ethnicities, and came from various life circumstances. • 2.2 conference schedule table 1 was the conference schedule that we developed for the advancevt organization. this schedule took into account the results of the requirements elicitation process, as well as the constraints set by advancevt. this conference schedule was iteratively reviewed and negotiated until the conference in the summer of 2006. in the following sections, we discuss the influence of the four heuristics on the design of the schedule. table 1: conference schedule friday registration early arrivals preconference events 6:00 pm 7:00 pm introduction/welcome 7:00 pm 9:00 pm dinner and socializing saturday keynote speaker and welcome 8:00 am 8:45 am breakfast and recognition 9:00 am 9:45 am keynote speaker topic: a positive and successful career in academe getting your first academic job 10:00 am 10:45 am general skills needed [lecture and role playing] 11:15 am 12:00 pm working environment expectations: teaching emphasis working environment expectations: research emphasis [videos, pictures, active discussion] 12:00 pm 1:30 pm lunch 1:30 pm 2:15 pm 2:30 pm 3:15 pm interviewing [active participation] 1:30 pm 2:15 pm 2:30 pm 3:15 pm negotiating [active participation] 1:30 pm 2:15 pm 2:30 pm 3:15 pm writing resumes/cvs [active participation] succeeding in academe part i 3:45 pm 4:30 pm importance of networking [lecture] 4:45 pm 5:30 pm family and work life balance [panel discussion] 5:45 pm 6:15 pm open session 6:30 pm until dinner and a social activity sunday 7:30 am 8:45 am breakfast and stress reduction seminar (optional) 9:00 am 9:45 am 11:00 am 11:45 am time management [lecture] 9:00 am 9:45 am 11:00 am 11:45 am personnel management [lecture and role playing] 9:00 am 9:45 am 11:00 am 11:45 am money management [lecture and active participation] 10:00 am 10:45 am bringing minority issues and discrimination into light [panel discussion] 12:00 pm 1:30 pm lunch 1:30 pm 2:15 pm open session farewell and good luck 2:30 pm 3:00 pm concluding remarks 3:00 pm 3:30 pm wrap up, survey • undertake requirements elicitation we devoted a major portion of our time and effort to requirements elicitation. research suggests that it is important to include participants early in the design process (section 2.1 ). we conducted the surveys, focus groups, and interviews to help us better understand the needs and interests of the target group of attendees. the questions and areas of interest for these activities, however, came from a review of trist and bamforth's (1951) work with an emphasis on specific issues faced by women wishing to obtain jobs in academe. to prepare female students for careers in academe, we needed to consider the technological, human, and organizational elements of the academic work system to optimize the effectiveness of the conference as a transformative tool. particularly, we needed to inquire about how these components were particularly altered by and for women. the technological subsystem includes elements of the work system that is higher education, such as grant proposals, tenure review, curriculum vitas, and interview techniques. personnel subsystem elements to be addressed by the conference include mentoring relationships, work/life balance, informal organization, culture and ethnicity issues, and interpersonal communication. organizational subsystem elements, such as university governance, departmental structure, and tenure hierarchy, should also be addressed to provide a balanced coverage of the entire academic work system. • choose an appropriate modality for presenting the information the literature review (section 2.2.2) and the variety of experiences, talents, and interests of potential conference attendees identified during the requirements elicitation helped us to determine that information should be presented using active, hands-on, discussion-based activities. such an approach not only helps with learning information, but also leverages the knowledge and experiences of each of the participants. each attendee brought a unique perspective and had something to share and learn from the other attendees in return. to facilitate this fluid exchange of information (which can be considered a conversation), attendees needed to communicate effectively. active participation formats, such as panel discussions, afforded more communication opportunities between the attendees. this choice was also supported by the literature on learning theories. active participation forces the attendee to repeat the concept in working memory in order to sustain the discussion. this implicit rehearsal aids learning. • 1.3 account for interactions previous work (section 2.3 ) indicated that cognition does not occur in isolation. we could expect a good amount of interaction among conference attendees. this interaction would result in new understandings of and attitudes toward the material presented in conference activities. there is a high likelihood that new areas of interest would emerge and new insights would be gained. we realized that this particular conference would be a dynamic entity. our experiences with the focus groups helped us realize that we could not anticipate all interactions and account for them beforehand. many ideas emerged in the focus group as a result of interactions among participants. in some cases, the interactions helped participants realize that they were not alone and that others were experiencing the same problems or successes; in these cases, participants opened up and voiced opinions or shared experiences. for the conference, we needed an approach to design that supported these interactions and leveraged the richness and possibilities arising with such interactions. this made it increasingly evident that the model of a "static" conference with all the information sessions pre-scheduled would not be the most appropriate approach. this understanding led to the concept of dynamic conference design. we define dynamic conference design as an approach to design that emphasizes the importance of interactions among conference attendees. a dynamic conference design is developed with change in mind. the conference should evolve as the sessions progress to best fit the needs of conference attendees. figure 4 illustrates the progressive narrowing of conference activities with time as inputs are collected from participants. the narrowing indicates not a loss of content, but the refinement of content to better fit the interest and needs of the participants. as an example, the conference may include one or more open activities toward the end of the conference, the content of which is negotiated upon by the attendees. this structure allows the attendees to take an active role in deciding what they want and perceive to be important. such activities would also have the benefit of being useful for finalizing unresolved issues or clarifying topics that many participants did not understand in earlier activities. figure 4 : dynamic conference activity selection a dynamic conference has the potential to be very useful for attendees, but it requires a great deal of effort on the part of the conference designers. the designers not only have to develop alternative activities, but also provide a forum for real-time feedback from attendees. depending on the nature of the conference, such demands on the designers may or may not be reasonable. given the goals of this conference and the characteristics of attendees, a dynamic conference design appeared to be a reasonable solution to ensure that the participants got the information that they want and need. for conference designers with few resources or less time to prepare, the amount of involvement may be overwhelming. the large demands on conference designers and the process of tailoring the content of the conference as it proceeds make dynamic conferences somewhat of a risky venture. risk analysis is a common theme that is well documented in many disciplines (see moses, 1995 , and budgen, 1992 for examples). risk analysis in terms of conference design involves anticipating possible breakdowns, estimating their costs, and developing mitigation strategies. for example, for the advancevt conference, a large component of risk analysis involves establishing the areas of expertise and time limitations of the individuals who run the conference. the variety of content that can be offered and the ability to dynamically change content are directly dependent on the designers' ability to anticipate the profiles of these individuals' expertise and time limitations. after developing the concept of a dynamic conference, we began to brainstorm on how to apply the concept to our particular situation. more specifically, we knew that we wanted to design for interactions, but we were not sure of specifically how to go about doing it. brainstorming and reviewing the literature helped us develop two particular approaches. the first approach consisted of removing unnecessary information and the second approach consisted of removing constraints. the motivation for the first approach was the fact that we had a large amount of information on a wide variety of topics that we believed would be useful to the participants, but only one weekend to present it. we developed a general approach after reviewing literature on supporting users who have to deal with vast amounts of information while using computer systems (lueg, 1998) . lueg proposed that reducing the size of the information available to a user based on a set of heuristics derived from user behavior supports situated action (suchman, 1987) . for example, consider a computer user presented with vast information content, such as news during an interaction session; a system may slowly filter away unimportant information from the user interface as time progresses to provide the user with more information that is relevant to the task at hand. this approach contrasts with many other approaches in which systems try to find the information that is important to the user instead of removing unimportant information. the heuristics to filter away unimportant information are derived by observing the user over a period of time and recording the information that is not accessed. as applied to this conference, this approach consists of narrowing the focus of the conference as it progresses. we propose using the relative frequencies of themes from the focus groups to determine which topics have a higher probability of being more interesting to attendees; for example, conference attendees may be particularly interested in workshops and talks related to balancing professional and personal life. in addition, designated conference designers will attend activities and observe attendees reactions and contributions. these designers will be intimately familiar with the planned conference activities and will be able to assess what information did not seem to be perceived as necessary or important by the attendees and how that information relates to future conference activities. for example, because our conference was intended to help female graduate students and post-doctoral researchers succeed in faculty positions, several potential activities related to the mechanics of working as a faculty, including workshops on writing curriculum vitas and grants, were possible candidate topics. if we found that the attendees were already comfortable with these activities, more time was devoted to other issues, such as confronting gender stereotypes, etc. the second approach developed as a result of zacklad's (2003) work on the design of computer supported cooperative work systems. zacklad defined structurally open situations as those within which participants can greatly influence both the structure of the task and the structure of the group participating in the task. within these situations, cooperative activities occur that are oriented toward achieving a certain goal, but the means for attaining that goal are not completely formalized. the attendees are, therefore, minimally constrained by the structure of the activity. if we treat a dynamic conference as a structurally open situation, then the various interactions among attendees at some level constitute cooperative activities. we wanted to provide a forum for these cooperative activities that provided a basic structure to encourage interaction, but that did not limit the expression of the interaction. one idea was to use what we define as social affordances, artifacts in any space physical or virtual, which invite and facilitate social interaction among the participants in that space. we planned to have a number of such social affordances in the form of different refreshment stands, each labeled with a different topic. the topic provided the basic structure for initiating conversations, but it in no way limited the conversations. the basic topics can be themes from the focus groups and topics considered important by interviewees. also, at these refreshment stands, we wanted to have a number of kiosks with computers with systems for collecting feedback on completed and upcoming activities. as mentioned previously, another idea was to have a number of blank sessions toward the end of the conference. the content for these sessions would be decided on by the attendees either through direct conversation with conference designers or through inputs from the kiosks. • 1.1 emphasize shared interests and traits the literature (section 2.4 ) and the results of our requirements elicitation process indicated that there was a need for more role models and networking opportunities. our conference design needed to highlight the accomplishments of women in the sciences and engineering to identify role models. the most direct method of doing this was a workshop or presentation on leading female researchers and teachers. another idea was placing a series of posters of accomplished women from a variety of fields in the rooms in which activities were to be held. this idea could be extended by including brief paragraphs summarizing the accomplishments made by these women and references to appropriate literature in the conference correspondence, on the conference website, and in the conference discussion forums. other ideas for leveraging shared interests included using social affordances, such as public kiosks, conference forums, and large displays to convey general information. to promote networking among women in the sciences and engineering, we worked with another team of graduate students to develop a set of post-conference tools. these tools included discussion boards, listservs, forums, and surveys. the women who would attend the conference would meet and exchange ideas and discuss experiences, and we wanted to continue to support these exchanges after the conference. in addition to encouraging networking and the exchange of ideas among women in the sciences and engineering, we wanted our conference design to promote "cross-pollination" (ulaby & calder, 2002) . women who are successful in other fields, such as law or business, have valuable perspectives and insights that may transfer well to women pursuing academic faculty jobs in the sciences and engineering. to enable this networking, our conference design included workshops led by accomplished female professionals from fields outside of the sciences and engineering. • 2 conclusion the underrepresentation of women in academe in the sciences and engineering can potentially be alleviated through conferences that help women enter these fields and be successful. designing any conference can be a challenge, and issues to consider include requirements elicitation, presentation of information, accounting for interactions, and emphasizing shared interests and traits. we hope other conference designers will find both the conference design heuristics and the results specific to the advancevt conference useful when undertaking their own conference design efforts. acknowledgements we would like to acknowledge the help and guidance we received from dr. tonya smith-jackson. her insights, feedback, and suggestions resulted in significant improvements to the structure and content of this paper. we also thank jia bochen, darshan baldev, jaideep godara, onekki jolly, and xiaoyu zhang for their help with the survey, the advancevt organization for their efforts, and all survey respondents, focus group participants, and interviewees. references american association of university women. 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(1995). feminist sociology and methodology: leaky black boxes in gender/technology relations. in k. grint & r. gill (eds.), the gender technology relation (pp. 31-47). bristol, pa: taylor & francis. polya, g. (1957). how to solve it (2nd ed.). princeton, nj: princeton university press. riger, s., stokes, j., raja, s., & sullivan, m. (1997). measuring perceptions of the work environment for female faculty. review of higher education, 21 (1), 63-78. rogers, y. (1997). a brief introduction to distributed cognition. brighton, uk: interact lab, school of cognitive and computing sciences, university of sussex. schiebinger, l. (2002). mainstreaming gender analysis into science. journal of woman and minorities in science and engineering, 8 (3), 381-394. soloway, e., scala, n., jackson, s. l., klein, j., quintana, c., reed, j., et al. (1996). learning theory in practice: case studies of learner-centered design. paper presented at the acm chi'96 conference on human factors in computing systems, vancouver, british columbia. sommerville, i., sawyer, p., & viller, s. (1998). viewpoints for requirements elicitation: a practical approach . paper presented at the third international conference on requirements engineering, colorado springs, co. suchman, l. (1987). plans and situated actions: the problem of human machine communication . cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. trist, e. l., & bamforth, k. w. (1951). some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal-getting. human relations, 4 , 3-38. turkle, s. (1991). computational reticence: why women fear the intimate machine. in c. kramarae (ed.), technology and women's voices (pp. 41-61). new york: routledge and kegan paul. ulaby, f., & calder, j. (2002). editorial proceedings of the ieee: 2003-celebrating the cross pollination of ideas. proceedings of the ieee, 90 (11), 1705-1707. wyer, m. (2003). intending to stay: images of scientists, attitudes toward women, and gender as influences on persistence among science and engineering majors. journal of women in science and engineering, 9 (1), 10-26. zacklad, m. (2003). communities of action: a cognitive and social approach to the design of cscw systems. paper presented at the 2003 international acm siggroup conference on supporting group work , sanibel island , fl. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 23, spring 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] prime minister mrs. margaret thatcher advancing gender equality: recruitment, roles, pay, and pensions in the armed forces dr. glen m. segell abstract margaret thatcher, the united kingdom 's first female prime minister, moved to initiate policy that would see gender equality in recruitment and pay in the armed forces, but not for pensions or combatant roles. in a review of the events and thatcher's formulation of policy toward women in the armed forces, as a debate on gender equality and social justice, the salient variables and issues taken into consideration include: thatcher's personal agenda; her ideological position; her policy priorities; her relations with women organizations; the domestic and international political situation in which she lived; and such concerns that she might have entertained, such as appearing to show favoritism toward other women or indeed appearing to be weak. thatcher, the member of parliament, had preference to gender equality, though, once elected prime minister, prioritized pragmatism and patriotism due to circumstances. prime minister mrs. margaret thatcher advancing gender equality: recruitment, roles, pay and pensions in the armed forces adrian kay (2005) succinctly summed up the debate on equality, noting that it exerts a powerful hold on contemporary thinking about justice (sen, 1992). kay quotes g. a. cohen (1989), who states that justice is about rendering people equal in some respect, and brian barry (1989) who affirms that "the central issue in any theory of justice is the defensibility of unequal relations between people" (p. 3). kay continues by highlighting that a question for all discussions of justice is: what is the right way to treat people equally? the answer to this question will always have two components: what is to be allocated equally (or in alternative terms, what is the distribuendum ) and how is it to be allocated equally (i.e. according to which principle). (2005, p. 545) taking these notions into consideration and to further debate them with evidence, this article will use the case of mrs. margaret thatcher, member of parliament and prime minister of the united kingdom , who by file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm way of legislation and executive decisions introduced certain but not other changes to further gender equality and social justice in the armed forces. there is no other writing that tackles this issue in such a fashion. the debate on equality and justice, in particular, gender equality and social justice, is salient to thatcher's political career as a member of parliament, and subsequently as prime minister. thatcher (1993, 1995, 2002) notes this frequently in her autobiographies and writings. these writings, and indeed the election of margaret thatcher as the united kingdom 's first female prime minister in 1979, might have led to an underlying assumption that she would necessarily champion equal opportunities and equal rights for women in all walks of life. this assumption has also been noted in many writings, including those of arnold (1984), cosgrave (1985), ewing (1990), harris (1988), kavanagh and seldon (1989), riddell (1989), and thomson, (1989). such an assumption might well have been based on the 1,287 public speeches on women and gender equality that thatcher had made reference to in the period 1945-1979 prior to having been elected prime minister. these speeches indicate that there is no doubt that thatcher was a protagonist of policy changes for women at work throughout her career as a politician. when thatcher (1999) was questioned about her stance on gender equality in an interview, "d o you not think women should be given extra help?", she responded, "i would do anything to try to give them extra help" (speech 47). when interviewed in a radio interview with radio new zealand on august 10, 1982, she expressed this as a social justice and not as feminism. she pragmatically stated, feminism-no, i get along quite well without it. i think that the main battles for women's right to vote and to stand in parliament were won quite a long time ago and it now is up to us what we do with those freedoms, but there's no need any more i think to be strident about them, i think we should see them wholly in perspective. (thatcher, 1999, speech 245) there is no doubt that when reading the hundreds of parliamentary speeches made by thatcher, both as a member of parliament and as prime minister, that she was an ardent supporter of gender equality. in speaking out, thatcher maintained independence of opinion and action and would not be cajoled by any women organizations of which she was closely associated with, such as the federation of business and professional women, women's international zionist organization, women at westminster, women in conservative politics, women's own, erith conservative women, women of our time, finchley conservative women, and women's royal voluntary service. despite fostering close working relations with these and many other women and women's organizations, there is no indication that any of these had an undue influence on her opinion or actions. however, once elected prime minister, and despite her personal stance, she would not always favour gender equality above everything else, especially in matters of defence and security. as prime minister, thatcher, in the same fashion as previous and subsequent prime ministers, would have to make decisions comparing options and selecting the best for the country. hence, pragmatism prevailed where patriotism would come before social justice and gender equality. this was exampled during the falklands conflict when thatcher sought the advice of the chiefs of staff and adhered to it, as noted by dorman (2002). in continuing to deliberate such matters, the emphasis of this article will focus on those parts of policy that thatcher personally authored or lobbied from her early career as a member of parliament through to her position as prime minister. this will be compared to policy changes as a whole in government to determine how commonly they addressed gender and, indeed, the specific role of thatcher. specific examples to illuminate this are drawn from the armed forces on the topics of recruitment, roles, pay, and pensions. this article will expand on kavanagh and seldon (1989) and seldon and collings (2000) to show the diversity of women's work lives under thatcher's government. thatcher the personal agenda a notable example of thatcher's ardent stance on gender equality and the significance of the legislative process to affect social justice a rose in the equal pay bill debate of february 9, 1970, some nine years before assuming the premiership. thatcher stood her ground in a fierce parliamentary debate, basing her argument on the two documents she had sponsored toward the bill--"fair share for the fair sex" and " opportunity for women." thatcher (1999) spoke her mind about the frequently quoted royal commission on equal pay in the civil services that had reported in 1946 that too little had been done over a prolonged period of time: the theoretical argument advanced by the majority to account for the lower wages of women in terms of lower efficiency, used in its widest sense, seems to us unconvincing and on the evidence their case is not proven. so many people have supported the idea of equal pay for so long that one wonders at the continuing inequality of payment between men and women. i believe that the bill will lead to better pay for many jobs and i support it as another step in the equal pay story. (house of commons, 1979) another example of thatcher furthering gender equality and social justice through the legislative process was on may 15, 1973, when thatcher was adamant that society needed a firm hand from government to move it in the right direction. to further this, she was instrumental in introducing legislation to assist in removing discrimination against women in the field of employment and training associated with employment. thatcher (1999) expressed this as no doubt you will wish to question us about those two areas, but i repeat, we are persuaded that legislation has a useful part to play. i hope that you will feel from that point of view that parliament and its instruments have indeed played a part in this process. (speech 567) placing such initiatives in perspective and in considering all prime ministers prior to thatcher, who were male, it is possible to specifically note thatcher's impact on gender equality and social justice. this is notable in the example of the armed forces where none of these previous prime ministers specifically addressed advancing gender equality. despite this specific example of the armed forces, which was clearly a thatcher initiative, previous prime ministers had addressed gender equality in general terms as one part of evolving norms in british society. thatcher was quick to point this out, with particular support for her political party, the conservative party, a topic that has been written on extensively by cosgrave (1978). on july 3, 1978, she gave a speech celebrating the 50th anniversary of equal female suffrage. in that speech thatcher (1999) stated, i am particularly pleased that the 1928 act on female suffrage was the work of a conservative government. women are tired of being patronized and condescended to. thus, in celebrating the anniversary of 1928, we also celebrate those measures which made this nation a true democracy-which involved men and women as equal human beings in the destiny of britain . (speech 761) such speeches and promotion of legislation provide insight to thatcher as a person, her political agenda, and her valuing the legislative process to effect changes. however, despite the 1,287 public speeches on women and gender equality that thatcher had made reference to in the period 1945-1979, thatcher was often criticized for not having done enough for women. thatcher was criticized as "too much talk too little action." this point was made i n tv coverage for central tv on june 18, 1986, when she was quizzed on her view about women. she said that she wished she could get more women into parliament, noting that in 1986 there were not any more really than there were in the 1930s (26 female members of parliament out of a then total 652 seats). she offered the explanation for as this resting in the nature of the british system of democracy--notably the gap between policy formulation and implementation. the governmental executive can do little to implement legislation unless the population actively wishes to have such changes introduced. recognizing that in a democracy legislation needs popular support to have successful and widespread implementation, thatcher (1999) was known to have said, "i cannot easily foresee the time when we have a woman minister of defence. but it would give me enormous joy to have the navy singing there is nothing like a dame" (speech 58). hence, despite the criticism, thatcher's ability to introduce such dry humour added to her popular support. the most famous example of such humour pertaining to gender issues arose during a "desert island discs" radio show interview with roy plomley in february 1978, when thatcher (1999) quoted socrates: "i think it was socrates who said long, long ago that when woman is made equal to man she becomes his superior, and i would not dissent from anyone as wise as socrates" (speech 79). although thatcher was unable to affect as many changes as she desired, she was able to generate a greater awareness than any previous prime minister for gender equality and social justice. this was occasionally expressed through her ability to laugh at herself, exampled when the press, and on some occasions the public, chose to portray thatcher as a masculine figure with the statement, "she is the best man in politics." thatcher (1999) commonly responded to this statement, "oh no, much better than that; she is the best woman" (speech 106). clearly t he public was extremely fond of having such an outspoken and witty female prime minister advancing gender equality and expressed this by electing her thrice to the position of prime minister. it was of no surprise that when thatcher advanced gender equality in the armed forces it also generated previously unheard of media coverage of security and defense affairs. gender equality, pragmatism, and patriotism indicative of one of the most prized virtues that held the public in esteem of thatcher was her consistency to her values and ideals. from the start of her political career, through her time as prime minister and subsequently in the house of lords, she maintained the same image, values of command, initiative, leadership, and symbolism. this was espoused in her nickname, "the iron lady." it was this nickname that also earned her global respect as a leader where her sex, her origins as the daughter of a shopkeeper, and her convictions to effect change in social justice and the economy also symbolized an overall transformation in the conservative party, and indeed that of government in the united kingdom . however, in terms of priority, patriotism would come before her political party, where gender equality would come third. examining this shows that thatcher was a pragmatic person and chose not to pursue avenues to advance gender equality that clearly would not result in any success. similarly, thatcher would prioritize, as any prime minister must do as noted by kavanagh (1985) , and frequently this resulted in decisions that did not favor gender equality. she was careful to choose her words, and when first questioned in 1979 which was more important, "gender equality or military efficiency," thatcher (1999) responded, you do not start to think: now look, i am a woman prime minister, i am different. you think: i am a prime minister. what do i want to do as representing my country? you do not think in terms of being a woman prime minister or a woman minister or a woman member of parliament. you think in terms of: this is my job, how am i going to achieve my objectives? how best can i do it? what is the best way to do it? (speech 231) she remained consistent on this stance, and when interviewed eight years later on february 18, 1987, by women magazine and bbc radio london, thatcher (1999) said, you see, you do not actually elect women prime ministers or women secretaries of defence. you elect a person, and when a person comes along who is right for that job, it is the person who is right for the job, and the fact that they are either men or women is secondary. (speech 301) such pragmatism and humour was also evident when she spoke of her family, often conveying the impression that her desire for social justice and gender equality was an expression of family and community values. this was throughout her political career most succinctly expressed shortly after becoming prime minister in 1979 in a conversation with kenneth harris when thatcher (1999) stated, "i'm a mum, and i like to think that those who believe in keeping britain strong, free and properly defended belong in mum's army" (speech 231). such patriotism and leadership qualities came to the fore when thatcher, as the united kingdom's last cold war prime minister, would lead the united kingdom to assert itself more on the world stage than at any other time since the 1956 loss of the suez canal, an event widely regarded as the end of the country's days as a major world power. pursuant to such assertiveness was thatcher's personality and stance on britain being an ardent participant in international affairs in addition to effecting domestic changes. this was exampled in thatcher's "leader's speech" at the conservative party conference in bournemouth in october, 1990, when thatcher (1999) trounced the labour party for even contemplating giving up the nuclear deterrent. in a patriotic flourish, thatcher announced to the house of commons, "this government will maintain our nuclear deterrent, guardian of the peace for 40 years. we shall keep britain strong and secure. we will never take risks with our defense" (speech 469). in a similar voice, she also announced that britain would not neglect its conventional forces. this vocal stance gained her respect from the armed forces that would be cemented in her decisive actions to regain the falklands islands using the armed forces with impeccable democratic civil-military control. such respect was recounted by admiral lewin, the chief of the defence staff, who recollected the admiration that the admirals had for thatcher in sending a military force to the falklands in 1982: we don't want somebody who vacillates, we want to be able to put the case to her, the requirements to her, and say this is how it is, this is the decision we want, we want it now and we want it quickly and we don't want a wishy-washy decision, we want a clear-cut decision. she was magnificent in her support of the military. ( house of commons written answers, 1990a) another example of her patriotism and continual support to the armed forces was reflected in her thinking on the cold war. campbell (2001) has noted that t hroughout her life and premiership she considered that the soviets had never given up their original objective, even after gorbachov pronounced glasnost and perestroika. she insisted that it was an obligation for britain to stand up for democracy if need be with the use of armed forces and with a credible nuclear deterrent. this stance was evident when thatcher (1999) responded to questioning by brigitte ades and patrick wajsman in january 1986: "their ultimate objective is a communist system throughout the world, and they will continue to pursue that objective by one means or another whether there is detente or not, and this must be opposed" (speech 606). this strength was evident when thatcher supported a nato initiative to install intermediate-range nuclear missiles in western europe to counter the soviet ss-20s. subsequently, at thatcher's pressure, the soviets, under the leadership of mikhail gorbachev, returned to the bargaining table to negotiate the inf treaty on disarmament in europe . president reagan recollected in may 1989 as being one of the great turning points in the post-war world. cole (1987) notes that thatcher made numerous attempts, especially in media interviews, to capitalize on the fervour of patriotism and reciprocal support of the armed forces. one of these was her first re-election campaign. another was to further gender equality in the military workplace. the choice of the military workplace was clearly the ability to enforce implementation by command as enactment of legislation. parliamentary reflection was positive on this and recognized this in hindsight: .she was so clearly the best man among them and she was an enormous advantage in being a woman too. i can't help feeling a thrill . . . i have been saying for a long time that this country was ready even more than ready for a woman prime minister. ( house of commons select committee report , 1999) it was due to this stead-fast continuity, firm patriotism, and support for the armed forces throughout her premiership from 1979 to 1991 that gave rise to the context through which she would be able to offer women workplace equality in the armed forces--in recruitment, pay, and pensions. she would initiate the legislation and use the respect gained to implement gender equality through the military command structure. as tony benn would later say in an interview with studemann (2005), "mrs thatcher said what she meant and meant what she said ... she did not do anything by deception." gender equality in armed forces recruitment the catalyst that gave thatcher an opportunity to offer and then implement policy changes from the legislation process into practice, in matters of gender equality, arose from recruitment and retention deficiencies in the armed forces. conscription was abolished in 1957 due to the dismantling of the empire and the onset of the cold war, neither of which required a large and expensive standing armed force. the all-volunteer armed force that arose from this situation did not see the need to debate the whys and wherefores of anyone, including women, who did not wish to volunteer for military service. nor did it see the need to make any provisions for any type of military other than one based and built upon single-sex facilities, such as accommodation and bathing. this was especially on ships seen to be too expensive to be altered to serve any form of privacy for anything other than single sex living--traditionally predominately male. however, by 1979, when thatcher was elected prime minister, the all-volunteer british armed forces were experiencing a recruitment and retention crises. thatcher was quick to announce it would be prudent to make policy changes allowing greater female opportunities to alleviate this crisis. to be sure neither the cabinet nor any member of parliament could oppose policy changes initiated by the new prime minister, it was made in the name of strengthening the armed forces and alleviating the overall recruitment and retention deficiencies. similarly, neither the public nor the press opposed these policy changes given that when thatcher announced them there was no immediate need to use the armed forces and hence no danger of loss of life. even in hindsight, parliamentary debates noted missed further opportunities for achieving greater gender equality in the armed forces given the pacific state of world affairs at the time ( house of commons debates , 1994). thus, in consideration of operational necessity, thatcher, on being elected prime minister in 1979, decided to introduce gender equality legislation based on the necessity to improve recruitment and retention in the armed forces. in making the offer of gender equality, thatcher's underlying goal was social justice. she did not contemplate sending women to their death in combat; even though thatcher was an ardent internationalist, she was not intrinsically militaristic to secure britain 's role in world affairs. the formal process commenced i n 1980 when thatcher issued her first annual statement on defense estimates as part of the annual budget that made clear "all three services have current plans to broaden the already substantial role of service women." the glimpse of thatcher's personal influence on this recruitment drive was a n initial one sentence low key-statement: "decisions taken over the last year will lead to a considerable expansion in the types of employment open to women in all three services" ( house of commons written answers , 1990a). the recruitment of women to the armed forces increased immediately. showing practicality, all branches of the armed forces implemented thatcher's recruitment policy initiatives according to their operational needs and job vacancies. for example, the raf started recruiting women in ground trades ( house of commons written answers , 1990a). the house of command evaluated thatcher's policy and found them to be well accepted within the armed forces reporting "there is no evidence that royal navy personnel are refusing to re-enlist or taking premature voluntary retirement because of the decision to employ women at sea"( house of commons debates , 1990). in thatcher's first year of office as prime minister, the number of posts opens to women in the regular army increased by 6,000 and in the territorial army by 4,000. similarly, in the initial recruitment drive of the royal navy, 278 wrns ratings and 90 officers volunteered to go to sea. of these, 147 female ratings and 16 female officers were trained to serve on the first group of five ships then being prepared to provide suitable accommodation. further, it would appear that most, if not all, female applicants were in fact accepted to the branch of the armed forces of their choice ( house of commons written answers , 1990b). nevertheless, in real terms, the increased female recruitment into the armed forces did not substantially make a major difference since that at the time, the total number of serving personnel in the armed forces was 320,000. the increased recruitment became an immediate publicity coup showing that the new prime minister meant business and that business was gender equality enhancing social justice. however, t he small number of female volunteers, the nature of an all-volunteer armed forces, and intensive training would not be affected in any fashion by gender. clearly then, t he few critics of the increased recruitment of more women into the armed forces were not able to substantiate the concern suggested that the military acceptance toward changes in gender composition could in part be symptom, part cause, of the decline of the role of the armed forces in a cold war environment (coker & elshtain, 2000; von creveld, 2000). further, there does not appear to be any traceable link that increased recruitment of women into the military would necessarily lead toward a weakening of the military. similarly, the operational tactics and strategy of the armed forces did not in any fashion alter with changes in the gender composition of the force structure. nor was there any indication that the new policy would evoke a growing feminist movement. the point was that the new prime minister was not apprehensive in voicing preference for gender equality and in introducing legislation to that effect. the public at large was further given this impression in 1982, when thatcher made claim that: "the battle for women's rights has largely been won. the days when they were demanded and discussed in strident tones should be gone forever" ( house of commons debate s, 1994). thatcher's recruitment policy to the armed forces would subsequently set a trend for other sectors of the economy, such as the civil service and defence industries. gender equality in pay and pensions it would be expected that increased gender equality in recruitment to the armed forces would be followed by increased gender equality in pay and pensions. the notable underlying assumption being that the same job desires the same rewards. there was no doubt that a single pay scale existed. if a person, man or woman, managed to reach a certain rank in the armed forces, then that person would receive the same pay as any other person at the same rank. this was a recent phenomenon. the immediate previous prime minister to thatcher, prime minister callaghan, had only introduced equal pay for equal work in the government sector in april 1978. this was a progressive step for gender equality in pay; however, not all pension schemes met the same criteria of gender equality. the personal pensions of service women, by virtue of pay, were in line with those of their male colleagues. however, unlike the widows and dependent children of service men, the widowers and dependent children of service women were not eligible for pensions at the time that thatcher became prime minister in 1979 ( house of commons debates , 1979). reading thatcher's autobiographies (1993, 1995, 2002) do not give any indication why she did not wish to tackle this issue immediately on being elected prime minister in 1979. it would have been a publicity coup to have done so and would have furthered thatcher's agenda of social justice. reading evans (2002), it may be assumed that her considerations were pure financial savings given that gender equality in pensions could have been achieved through allocating resources from the treasury by way of an executive decision. this would not have entailed a large amount of resources given that the number of women who would have benefited in 1979 from receiving an equal pension would have been less than 100, mainly from the northern ireland situation. reading dorman (2002), another assumption was perhaps thatcher was apprehensive that should the cold war deteriorate into battle then britain would be in a worse financial situation than she had been following world war ii that had forced the country into a welfare state environment. the issue of gender equality for all pension schemes would lie smouldering in the committee rooms of westminster from 1979 for ten years with constant deliberations but with no decisive decision or intervention by thatcher. it would take a bold move in 1989 by the then six surviving ex-chiefs of the defence staff and three former chiefs of the air staff to challenge the prime minister in public when they wrote a letter to the times newspaper on november 22, 1989, criticizing the unequal pension schemes . they described the sharp difference in entitlements as "cruel" and "unjust," and strongly condemned the division of war widows into first and second-class citizens ( house of commons debates , 1989). part of the ensuing fiery debate in the house of commons noted that the situation had arisen from a decision taken in march 1973, when the armed forces had moved into a new pension scheme that gave higher benefits, but that also cost them more. so those on pensions prior to march 1973 were not included in the new scheme. eventually in 1990, following intense and prolonged media coverage, the minister of state for the armed forces (mr. archie hamilton) announced to the house of commons "all widows of service men killed in northern ireland before 31 march 1973 should now be in receipt of the new tax-free special payment of £40 per week in addition to their war widows' pension" ( house of commons debates , 1990). this signaled an overall change granting gender equality in pensions. the change had come albeit too little too late bearing in mind the fact that by 1990 there were only 34 such widows. nevertheless, it is historically recorded that increased gender equality in the matter of pensions in the armed services was achieved under the premiership of mrs. margaret thatcher in 1990. however, in not introducing gender equality in pensions immediately on being elected prime minister in 1979, it would to a certain extent negate the positive public support gained by immediately introducing enhanced gender equality in recruitment to the armed forces in 1979. gender equality in roles the most controversial issue of gender and equality and the armed forces that persisted throughout thatcher's 11 years as prime minister was that of women in combat roles and tasks. legislative changes were not introduced by thatcher or by her successors, john major (prime minister 1991-1997) and tony blair (prime minister 1997-present). the protracted debate noted in thatcher's (1999) public speeches provides a fabulous insight on whether the overriding consideration was military or political and the role of thatcher, the prime minister. indicative of thatcher's personal views on women in combat was a statement delivered at a speech at the hoover institution in the united states, where thatcher (1999) pronounced: "equality of opportunity sounds fine as a principle; it must not override considerations of military effectiveness; to treat war-fighting as an equal opportunities activity is extremely foolish" (speech 1201). such a statement provides an insight to the intriguing nature of the role of the prime minister in british politics. thatcher, and indeed all other prime ministers (past and present), have the authority, jurisdiction, and legitimacy as elected members of parliament to initiate legislation and then as the governmental executive to exert their prerogative in interpretation of legislation. the select committees of the house of commons, other members of parliament, as well as the courts of law, closely monitor such interpretation, should the government in anyway not follow the spirit of intent of the legislation or in any manner infringe or violate the legislation. ultimately, in british democracy it is society that decides if they wish to accept and implement the legislation. exceptional legislation can be introduced by command in the armed forces, though society could still protest resulting in the changes being rescinded. in this instance, the official statement in the house of commons noted in the debate on legislation and government policy on the matter of women in the armed forces was "all applicants to join the ministry of defense and all members of staff are treated equally for employment and advancement on the basis of their ability, qualifications and suitability for work" ( house of commons written answers , 1990b). thatcher as prime minister voiced this interpretation of legislation as, "we have widened the opportunities for employment of members to include all posts except those which would deploy into forward areas in war" ( house of commons written answers , 1990a). in doing so and from the onset of her premiership in 1979 until john major succeeded her in 1991, thatcher was of the opinion that women should not have equal roles to their male counterparts in combat situations. from the commencement to the termination of her premiership, women in the army and the raf were not employed in direct combat duties, and women in the royal navy were not employed in the submarine service, in the royal marines, or as naval aircrew ( house of commons written answers , 1990a). as noted, there was no explicit legislation to bar women from such roles, nor was there explicit legislation to provide them with the right to take such roles. complicating the issue and firing the debate was the contention that the issue was not the physical presence of women in combat areas but of women's roles when in combat areas. as during the falklands war of 1982, so as in the gulf war of 1990, members of parliament in parliamentary opposition were astute to pick up the nature of such dichotomies. in an attempt to ascertain whether the instructions were coming from the prime minister or whether the decisions were being taken on the military level, the parliamentary opposition asked the secretary of state for defense whether naval commanding officers during the deployment of armed forces to the gulf in december 1990 were on instructions not to permit women reporters on naval vessels that would enter combat zones. the response being, "no such instructions have been issued; both female and male reporters are permitted, depending on the facilities available, to go on board royal navy vessels serving in the gulf" ( house of commons written answers , 1990c). it therefore appeared that the decision-making was more by the political echelons than the military chiefs. however, when first questioned in the house of commons in 1979 over this, thatcher placed the onus on the military by noting interpretation of general legislation to justify specific policy to the effect, "the armed forces are exempt from the sex discrimination act, [hence] our policy is to treat men and women equally except where there are good reasons for doing otherwise" ( house of commons debates , 1979). when pushed to elaborate on what such good reasons might be, she dithered and inferred that she was acting on the advice of the military decision makers by saying, "the ability of women to fly aircraft is not in question" (house of commons written answers, 1990a). it later emerged, eleven years after leaving office, when giving an acceptance speech in 2001 after receiving the chesney gold medal at the royal united services institute, that she clearly had been actively responsible for ensuring that gender equality in military tasks and roles had not been introduced. thatcher stated she was of the opinion that women should not be allowed to fight in the front-line based not on ability or qualifications, but on her own view of ad hoc suitability. neither the select committees, nor parliamentary opposition, nor the courts of law could take her to task on this since it conformed to the broad legislation that permitted distinction of roles in practice dependent upon ability, qualifications, and suitability (house of commons written answers, 1990a). further, to mitigate the expected backlash from women's organizations, thatcher (1999) quoted studies provided by the chiefs of staff to support her policy orientation and interpretations. to this end thatcher (1999) said, .it is a great error to suppose that women can in general play precisely the same role as men in the front line of our armed forces. even in the age of the cyber-warrior and smart weaponry, war still favours the swift and the strong. courage is not the issue. i hardly need say that. there is only one issue: military effectiveness. making sure that women pass the same tests of physical stamina as men will limit the number of women playing front line roles. (speech 1283) in hindsight, thatcher's political opponents, such as baroness dean of thornton-le-fylde in december 2001, would never forgive her for this ambiguity and dithering: i am not making a political point, but when mrs. thatcher was elected prime minister much as i did not agree for political reasons i felt that we might see more women in the cabinet and that they would drive forward policies for women. we were, of course, dreadfully disappointed. ( house of lords debates , 2001) similarly, a select committee report to the house of commons on march 23, 1999, could not have been more succinct when it noted on this issue, "during the 1980s and 1990s equal opportunities became a secondary priority. the priorities of the thatcher government in regards to the civil service and armed forces meant a severe abatement in the furtherance of equal opportunity" (house of commons select committee, 1999). it was only after the end of the cold war and well into the 1990s that the situation changed, not due to new legislation introduced by thatcher's successors as prime minister, john major and tony blair, nor due to their interpretation of existing legislation. the changes emerged due to decisions taken by military officers on an ad hoc basis in low-level decisions. these changes were a natural progression from gender equality in recruitment, pay, and pensions. the changes toward gender equality in combat roles can therefore be attributed to a process that thatcher had introduced many years previously even if she was not actively implicated. hence, increased gender equality was introduced into the armed forces when women were permitted to become pilots in the royal air force and to serve on royal navy ships at sea. a reading of this indicates how the united kingdom was amongst the first country to effect overall changes in the military (barkawi, dandeker, wells-petry, & kier, 1999; committee of women in nato forces 2002; dandeker, 1994; dandeker & paton, 1997; dandeker & segal, 1996; rosen, durand, bliese, halverson, rothberg, & harrison, 1996; titunik, 2000). however, in the grand scheme of british society, these changes did not signify an overall shift in social justice. the armed forces only provided direct employment to less than 1% of the overall work force ( house of commons written answers , 1991). conclusion in sum, thatcher succeeded in enhancing social justice through increased gender equality in the armed forces in the matters of recruitment and pay policy, dithered on pension's policy, and was intransigent on combat roles. in providing the above narrative and critique on these issues, this article has shown the diversity of women's lives under thatcher. this narrative has also shown that the conception and inception of thatcher's initiatives and policies were not as a response to any direct or immediate political, military, or civil pressure, or as a reaction to an escalation in any overall threat to britain . in fact, the opposite was occurring as the threats were reduced given the declining soviet union and eventually ending of the cold war with the fall of the berlin wall. the policies were fuelled by thatcher's personal agenda toward gender equality. moreover, the increased recruitment of women in the armed forces provides an insight of how the cause of gender quality in the armed forces was advanced without compromising on military effectiveness, either as a weakening of the military or as a feminisation of it. in doing so, the writings noted at the start of this article by kay, sen, cohen, and barry are recalled. kay and sen's view that equality exerts a powerful hold on contemporary thinking about justice has been substantiated given the numerous and fierce debates surrounding thatcher's initiatives. these initiatives and the debates also substantiate barry and cohen's writing that justice is about rendering people equal in some respect, and that the central issue in any theory of justice is the defensibility of unequal relations between people. further, it was kay's question, "what is to be allocated equally and how is it to be allocated equally," that was highlighted by the different attitudes of thatcher to recruitment, pay, pensions, and combat roles. these attitudes have shown that pragmatism, patriotism, and bureaucratic processes of government sometimes curtail even good intentions. consequently, the conclusions of this article tend toward the understanding that in democracies decisions on the legislative or policy level take many years to implement. ultimately, society will decide how society best wishes to interpret and adopt legislation. the example of this article on the armed forces is unique in showing how changes can be made through command in the armed forces and then accepted by society as exemplary. this is because there is no doubt that thatcher made good decisions with good intentions. it would be speculative to assume that without thatcher whether these changes would have happened in any event. nevertheless, it was mrs. margaret thatcher that started the ball rolling when elected prime minister in 1979. from this analysis, it is notable that the overall concept of gender equality and social justice in the armed forces provides a unique critique of the narrative that female leaders necessarily advance gender equality in the workplace--assuming that gender equality in matters of recruitment, pay, pensions, and combat roles in the armed forces is an advance. references arnold, b. 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(2005). territorial justice and devolution. british journal of politics and international relations , 7 (4), 554-560. riddell, p. (1989). thatcher decade: how britain has changed during the 1980s. oxford, uk: basil blackwell. rosen, l. n., durand, d. b., bliese, p. d., halverson, r. r., rothberg, j. m., & harrison, n. l. (1996). cohesion and readiness in gender-integrated combat service support units: the impact of acceptance of women and gender ratio. armed forces and society, 22 (4), 537-554. seldon, a., & collings, d. (2000). britain under thatcher. new york: longman. sen, a. (1992). inequality re-examined. oxford , uk : clarendon. studemann, f. (2005). old loyalties linger on as thatcher celebrates 80th birthday. retrieved october 14, 2005, from http://news.ft.com/cms/s/699458bc-3c52-11da-94fb00000e2511c8.html thatcher, m. (1993). the downing street years. london: harper collins. thatcher, m. (1995). the path to power. london: harper collins. thatcher, m. (1999). margaret thatcher: complete public statements 1945-1990 . oxford, uk: oxford university press. http://news.ft.com/cms/s/699458bc-3c52-11da-94fbthatcher, m. (2002). statecraft. london: harper collins. thomson, a. (1989). margaret thatcher: the woman within. london: w.h. allen. titunik, r. f. (2000). the first wave: gender integration and military culture. armed forces and society, 26 (2), 229-258. von creveld, m. (2000). less than we can be: men, women and the modern military. journal of strategic studies , 23 (4), 1-20. author's note: glen segell is director of the institute of security policy , a fellow of the royal geographical society, committee member of the london committee of the association of teachers and lecturers, and board member of the international political studies research committee on armed forces and society. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing 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volume 14, fall, 2003 issn 1093-7099 publisher: gretchen glasscock editors: beverly j. irby, & genevieve browen advancing women in leadership pg. 1 advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 table of contents preface ......................................................................................................................................................................2 credits ......................................................................................................................................................................3 guest and past reviewers ................................................................................................................................... 4 women faculty in higher education: impeded by academe .................................................................................5 introduction ..................................................................................................................................................... 5 institutional structure ...................................................................................................................................... 6 hiring practices ............................................................................................................................................... 6 salary .............................................................................................................................................................. 7 tenure ............................................................................................................................................................. 7 research .......................................................................................................................................................... 8 service ............................................................................................................................................................. 8 teaching and advising loads ........................................................................................................................ 8 climate and culture ........................................................................................................................................ 8 intradepartmental relations ............................................................................................................................ 8 socialization and mentoring patterns ............................................................................................................. 9 isolation ........................................................................................................................................................... 9 research support ............................................................................................................................................ 9 financial resources and child care ............................................................................................................... 9 improving the chances for women faculty success ................................................................................... 10 references ..................................................................................................................................................... 11 pg. 2 advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 preface advancing women in leadership on-line journal was launched in 1997 with the intent of publishing manuscripts that report, synthesize, review, or analyze scholarly inquiry that focuses on women's issues. the intent of this journal is to encourage and support the proliferation of women in positions of leadership in all aspects of professional and corporate america. in the encouragement of advancing women in leadership, we present the following manuscripts. they are: women faculty in higher education: impeded by academe by dr. dana e. christman working against the grain: rewards and consequences of developing a personal voice in academia by dr. pamela lepage and dr. gretchen givens-generett creating space for subjectivity: wandering discourses of female/teacher by dr. donna k. phillips and dr. j.camille cammack. magazines: what adolescent girls are reading and the way they shape body image by dr. rebecca a. robles-piña and heidi sauer a study of the correlation between the motives of female high self monitors and emergent leadership: a literature review by charles salter hispanic female superintendents in america: a profile by dr. margaret a. manuel and dr. john r. slate our intent is that this journal is viewed as a professional publication site for scholarly inquiry and perspectives that promote gender equity and advance women in leadership. it is our hope that you find this issue of advancing women in leadership thought provoking, enjoyable, and that you look forward to subsequent issues. suggestions for improvement, encouragement, and submission for upcoming issues are welcomed and appreciated. genevieve brown, ed.d. & beverly j. irby, ed.d. editors copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. pg. 3 advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 credits publisher: gretchen glasscock ceo/president, advancingwomen.com editors: dr. genevieve brown dr. beverly irby sam houston state university assistant editor: danna ellington editorial review board dr. gypsy abbott university of alabama-birmingham dr. william m. alexander california polytechnic state university dr. gracia alkema president, corwin press, inc., a sage publication compnay dr. janice beal beal counseling associates dr. maenette benham michigan state university dr. c. cryss brunner university of wisconsin-madison dr. michelle collay bay area coalition for equitable schools dr. joanne cooper university of hawaii dr. geni cowan california state university-sacramento adrienne d. dixson north carolina state universtiy dr. claudia b. douglass central michigan university dr. p. kay duncan emporia state university dr. stacey edmonson sam houston state university dr. amy freeman lee national award-winning artist dr. carole funk sam houston state universtiy dr. minerva gorena ncela, the george washington university dr. marilyn grady university of nebraska-lincoln dr. sandra gupton university of southern mississippi dr. jean m. haar university of nebraska-lincoln dr. sandy harris stephen f. austin state university dr. kristy herbert, southern connecticut state university dr. sandra hollingsworth san jose state university dr. johnetta hudson university of north texas dr. janice hutchinson university of houston dr. janice koch hofstra university dr. rafael lara-alecio texas a& m university dr. sandra lowery stephen f. austin state university dr. ping liu california state university-long beach dr. robyn lock san fancisco state university dr. rosita marcano northern illinois university dr. patricia mathes university of texas-houston dr. linda orozco california state university-fullerton dr. rosemary papalewis california state university-sacramento dr. matteson pascal the meadows foundation, senior program officer dr. diane pollard university of wisconsin-milwaukee dr. barbara polnik sam houston state university dr. evelyn reid, clark atlanta university dr. becky ropers-huilman louisiana state university dr. isabel royo universidad iberoamericana, puebla, mexico dr. david sadker american university, author and distinguished educator dr. pam sandoval indiana university-northwest dr. jane strachan university of waikato, hamilton, new zealand dr. carole shakeshaft, hofstra university dr. sandra tonnsen university of south carolina dr. karen tonso wayne state university pg. 4 advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 rev. terry weber-rodriguez epworth-parker unithed methodist church, houston, texas dr. robert williams sam houston state university dr. rose lyn zanville president, lyn zanville, inc., leadership specialist ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- guest and past reviewers dr. joanne ardovini-brooker dr. joy carter dr. norvella carter maxine cooper dr. ken craycraft dr. sally craycraft dr. jo ann duffy dr. alice fisher dr. brigitta fringes dr. dashiel geyen dr. maxine greene ann halstead dr. jeanine hirtle dr. claudia iselt dr. patricia larke sharon lenhart dr. jim merchant margaree mithcell joy mullett deborah nyberg rocio pellezer dr. charol shakeshaft laurinda spear naomi tropp dr. pam zelbst dr. robin mcgrew-zoubi copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. pg. 5 advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 advancing women in leadership fall 2003, pp. 5-12 available online at http:// https://awl-ojs-tamu.tdl.org/awl/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women faculty in higher education: impeded by academe dana christman dana christman: assistant professor in the department of educational management and development, new mexico state university set up through the beneficences of patriarchy, the academy tends to reflect the values of the same. women's experiences are not part of the dominant paradigm and are, at best, frequently misuderstood and, at worst, devalued and discounted. keywords: female, superintendent, aspiration, rural, leadership introduction the pursuit of social justice is an endeavor that should appeal to all. in the academy we recognize the concept of social justice, that we must deal with the issues of legal, moral, and economic obligations of both the individual and the collective. we may believe that gender inequity is a misdeed of the past, that raised consciousness and federal laws have addressed the problem. although we acknowledge the pursuit of social justice, we do not seem to be compelled to pursue it. academic women have been a part of the faculty at american colleges and universities for well over a hundred years; yet, we would be mistaken to believe that social justice has been embraced and embodied by the academy. this panacea has yet to correct all misdeeds. this paper attempts to synthesize literature available regarding the status of women faculty in the academy and barriers that hinder their success. first, a short treatise of the historical and sociological perspectives of women in higher education is provided. the institutional structure, culture and climate in postsecondary institutions will be examined. particular attention will be paid to such structural issues as hiring practices, salary, tenure, research, service, and teaching and advising loads, while intradepartmental relations, socialization and mentoring patterns, isolation, research support, and financial resources and child care will be covered under climate and cultural issues. both the experiences of the collectivity of women as well as individual women will also be portrayed. findings from the literature suggest that gender inequity is still a practice of the present, rather than a part of the academy's past. finally, suggestions for improving the chances for women's success in the academy will be provided. numbers of women faculty would be one way in which to demonstrate that the academy reflects an inequitable gender balance. although women comprise 51% of the u.s. population (u.s. bureau of the census, 1998), the national center for educational statistics reported that of full-time instructional faculty in 1992, 61.2 percent were men and 38.8 percent were women (u.s. department of education, 2001). historical and sociological perspectives this century has represented tremendous growth for american colleges and universities. record numbers of students entered higher education following world war ii. in the u.s. higher education total enrollments have grown from 2,338,226 in 1947 (hammack, 2001) to 14,502,334 in 1999 (u.s. department of education, 2001a), an increase of 12,164,108 students. greater emphasis of research was also encouraged by the u.s. government following the successful launch of sputnik by the ussr in 1957. such dramatic changes have not occurred in the composition of american faculty in higher education, however. in fact, the percentage of women faculty in the academy changed relatively little during the 20th century. during the years between 1930 and 1999, the percentage increase of women faculty rose only 11.7% (u.s. bureau of the census, 1975, p. 383; u.s. department of education, 2001b). while we note that the u.s. department of education (2001b) report states that there are 219,898 women faculty whose primary responsibility is teaching in our nation's institutions, this number still represents only 37.2% of the total faculty (u.s. department of education, 2001b). west (1995) chose to view percentages from the time of suffrage: "in 1920, when women won the right to vote, 26 percent of full-time faculty in american higher education were women" (p. 26). kelly (1993) lamented that the percentage of women instructors, professors, and presidents was higher in 1930 than it is today. eisenmann advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 6 (1995) claimed that in the 1950s women faculty represented only 19 percent of college instructional faculty. she discusses the impact of the launch of sputnik on not only scientific research in this country, but also on the prevailing opinions of the time regarding women's abilities to even enter higher education. examining the activities of a national science foundation (nsf) advisory committee in 1957, eisenmann (1995) explained that the group's task was to investigate a pool of very bright students who did not go on to college. they had defined "bright" as students with iqs, or something similar to that, in the top 10 percent of the nation. of the 16to 19-year-old cohorts with high iqs, 98 percent, perhaps 99 percent of those who did not go to college, were female…in other words, nearly all of the males with that kind of identified ability were continuing their education. (p. 23) finally, west (1995) looked at the last 20 years and reminds us that "while women's tenure rates show a net increase of only 1.5 percent over 20 years, men's rates have increased 8 percent" (p. 27). it would appear, then, that women faculty are still suffering from "a climate of unexpectation" [italics original] (west, 1995) in america regarding the use of their talents and training and how these talents and training are valued by the academy. institutional structure several scholars argue that the structure of american colleges and universities contributes to the barriers women faculty face (burns, 1994; johnsrud & atwater, 1993; johnsrud & des jarlais, 1994). research, teaching, and service constitute the formal structure in which most faculty in u.s. universities work. johnsrud and atwater (1993) suggested that structure supporting the retention and personal issues women face should become part of the "traditional" faculty structure. set up through the beneficence of patriarchy, the academy tends to reflect the values of the same. women's experiences are not part of the dominant paradigm and are, at best, frequently misunderstood and, at worst, devalued and discounted. female faculty members perceive that there are other institutional and departmental barriers to overcome. sandler (1992) contended that there is a hypothesis that the existing structure of the university is the "right" one, so the need for change is not present. johnsrud and des jarlais (1994) echoed this thinking: "the undergirding assumption of this view is that the academy is a given, as are its norms and expectations, and it is women who must learn how to cope and succeed in the prevailing system" (p. 338). such a structure is based on male career patterns only and those of women are not taken into consideration. yet, new female faculty are often contending with professional and personal issues in ways that new male faculty may not be, such as, figuring out the reward structure that leads to tenure, trying to earn respect for their research and publications, heavy teaching loads and advising responsibilities, finding sufficient personal financial resources, and locating available and adequate child care. these issues will be discussed at more length later under culture and climate issues. davis, ginorio, hollenshead, lazarus, rayman, and associates (1996) explained the confusion that many women faculty experience when trying to figure out the reward structure. women faculty often assume that hard work will be noticed and properly rewarded. they must learn to point out their contributions to management, take the leads on projects, and create a visible role for themselves…at the same time, they must not be seen as aggressive, boastful or blowing their own horn, since these are not "feminine" qualities. (davis, et al., p. 51) hiring practices perhaps, we should look at the academy from the viewpoint of new women faculty. but, to do so, we must first look at the hiring practices of colleges and universities. bentley and blackburn (1992) stated that "the record is clear that both the number and percentage of women earning doctorates in all fields has been increasing since 1965" (p. 697). with the increasing numbers of doctorates being earned by women, we might well assume that women are being hired as new faculty members in greater numbers. evidence to the contrary shows that women are not hired into full-time faculty positions at nearly the same rate as men (burns, 1994; west, 1995). west (1995) explained: in 1981-82, national data indicated that 27 percent of full-time faculty, at all ranks, were women. at this time, 35 percent of americans obtaining ph.d.'s were women, a difference of 8 percent. by 1993-94, 31 percent of faculty were women, but the percentage of women among americans earning doctorates had increased to 47 percent. the gap between these two figures had doubled from an 8 percent difference to a 16 percent difference twelve years later. (p. 27) in fact, burns (1994) indicated that the problem runs much deeper than just the number of women faculty hires. gender disparity can be masked when institutions include part-time women faculty in their numbers (blanke, 1999; blanke & hyle, 2000; burns, 1994). while, indeed, some of these faculty are men, a number of them are women who want to work full-time, too. burns (1994) ironically pointed out that a "…woman employed full-time on a college campus is (almost exactly) twice as likely to be found behind a typewriter or the cafeteria counter as in front of a classroom or administrative gathering" (p. 39). we find that "this disparity persists even though…higher education is that most closely linked to one of women's traditional occupations (teaching)" (burns, p. 39). west (1995) suggested that there may be other reasons for women not being hired at the same rate as men for faculty positions. she proposed that women may not be hearing about open faculty positions. west (1995) believes that colleges and universities are not conducting truly "open" searches, but are, instead, relying on the traditional academic grapevine, that is, a sort of "trickle-down" approach in finding their applicants. the advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 7 problem with using the traditional academic grapevine stems from the fact that the bureaucratic structure which constructed the grapevine uses the same grapevine to find new hires. if most of the faculty and department heads are male, then the same strong ties (granovetter, 1973, 1983) network is used to disseminate the message of open positions. thus, it is estimated that only 25 percent of searches are truly open searches. "the remaining 75 percent of new hires, then, are hired by way of some type of 'inside track'" (west, 1995, p. 29). women faculty and graduate students may never hear about open faculty positions. salary one of the most frequently documented structural barriers that women faculty face is that of salary. it is consistently reported that men's and women's academic careers are distinguished by the difference in salary which persists across all faculty ranks (american association of university professors [aaup], 2000; bentley & blackburn, 1992; davis, et al., 1996; hensel, 1991; johnsrud & des jarlais, 1994; u.s. department of education, 2000). men are hired at higher salaries than are women, and the disparity in salaries remains throughout their academic lives. figure 1 reflects the average salary of regular, full-time faculty as a whole as well as a breakdown by gender. according to an executive summary from the u.s. department of education (2000) report on salary, promotion, and tenure status of women faculty in the u.s., "female full-time faculty averaged lower salaries than male faculty by about $10,000 in the fall of 1992" (p. v). the average difference in salary between male and female faculty across all types of institutions and for all ranks was $10,234 or approximately 22%. seven years later, the average difference in salaries had been reduced to $9,741 (u.s. department of education, 2001), a gain for women of $470. in the executive summary, 66% full-time female faculty earned base salaries of less than $40,000 compared with 37% of men. in contrast, while 5% of women reported salaries of $60,000 or more, 19% of men did so (u.s. department of education, 2000). tenure the u.s. department of education (2000; 2001) reported that women are tenured at much lower rates than are men (see figure 2). women's salaries also indicate that they are disproportionately found in the lower ranks of faculty. data analyzed by the national center for education statistics for the national study of postsecondary faculty 1999-2000 (u.s. department of education, 2001) indicate that at all academic ranks and in all types of ranked institutions of higher education, women earn on average less than men (see figure 1). thus, faculty women must deal additionally with the tenure issue. figure 3 reflects the percentage of full-time, regular faculty by rank and gender, and figure 4 provides percentages of regular, full-time faculty by carnegie classification and gender. women are tenured at a substantially lower rate than are men (aaup, 2000; davis, et al., 1996). those with tenure are disproportionately found in the ranks of associate professors, rather than full professors [see figure 3] (aaup, 2000; blanke, 1999). figure 1: the average salary of full-time, regular faculty with u.s. citizenship by gender figure 2: tenure status by gender figure 3: full-time, regular faculty by rank and gender advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 8 figure 4: full-time, regular faculty by carngie classification and gender it appears, then, that the tenure-track agenda is a hidden one, at least for women and minorities. davis, et al. (1996) noted that similarities regarding promotion exist in industry as well. they stated that women are promoted after they have already proven that they can perform; men are promoted based on their perceived potential. women faculty often do not understand what is needed for promotion and assume that excellent research, quality teaching, and a strong service record will be rewarded with tenure. it is unfortunate that this type of thinking, while logical, is not necessarily true for women faculty. research if junior women faculty publish at the same rate as junior men faculty (hensel, 1991), then, it cannot be publishing rates that keep women from achieving tenured status. thus, we might review women's research. evidence here suggests that women's research is consistently not valued and is discredited or trivialized (burns, 1994). women are often considered outsiders in academe (aisenberg & harrington, 1988; kelly, 1993) and feminist scholarship challenges basic assumptions through alternative paradigms (kelly, 1993). such challenges can be threatening to stakeholders of the status quo, which provides impetus to discredit women's research. support for women faculty's research will be discussed further under climate and cultural issues. service service to the academy is another area in which there appears to be disservice done to women faculty. seen in the best light, women faculty may serve on an inordinately large number of institutional committees because their numbers are so few. kirkland (1997) stated that women faculty "are asked to serve on three or four times as many committees as men" (p. 99). viewed another way, women faculty are treated as tokens on such committees and really are not expected to have a voice. according to menges and exum (1983), women "may be expected to appear when the institution's policy toward women and minorities requires public affirmation or to serve on committees to guarantee representation of their group" (p. 131). teaching and advising loads women faculty often have heavier advising loads than do their male counterparts. they are sought out by women and minority students for not only routine advisement, but for career and personal guidance as well. teaching loads are usually heavier for women and female faculty are more likely to teach undergraduate courses than are male faculty (finkelstein & lacelle-peterson, 1992; johnsrud & des jarlais, 1994). the small number of women faculty members, then, serves to underline rather than undermine the majority culture. they are proportionately better represented in community colleges and liberal arts colleges than they are in research universities (see figure 4). they are found in lower ranks at all institutions (johnsrud & atwater, 1993), except for two-year colleges. they find it difficult, if not impossible, to gain entry into the proper socializing networks necessary for advancement because the dominant males in the cultures in which they work often deny the existence of such a network (davies-netzley, 1998). instead, the individual is praised and meritocracy is deemed to reign supreme. women must learn to "fit in," thus reemphasizing that "such cultural capital is gendered" (daviesnetzley, 1998, p. 349). thus, we find women faculty may perpetuate the problem by attempting to display in the academy certain qualities, such as individualism and competitiveness, which best fit in with the dominant male culture. climate and culture it is no wonder, then, that the climate for women in many institutions can be characterized as "chilly." of reasons given for leaving prior to tenure in johnsrud and atwater's (1993) study of new faculty, institutional sex discrimination was the only issue that appeared among priorities of women faculty, with 24 percent of women ranking it as first, second, or third. the issue of intellectual isolation was represented by 43 percent of those who left and the issue of career support and personal relations with the department chair was also commonly reported. intradepartmental relations women faculty experience more difficulties in relationships with departmental colleagues and chairs (johnsrud & atwater, 1993; johnsrud & des jarlais, 1994; johnsrud & heck, 1994; johnsrud & wunsch, 1994). johnsrud and atwater's (1993) study revealed that "chair and department relations appear as the next most frequently cited reason for leaving with women listing these relations twice as often as men" (p. 9). the conclusion from the study is that "women act on this perception [barriers to advancement]; they leave" (johnsrud & heck, 1994, p. 81). the barriers to advancement may be all too real for some women faculty. they may be all too aware that tenure achievement among women has not changed much through the years. they may even be aware of west's (1995) findings that "in 1995, 31 percent of full-time faculty in american higher education are women--an increase of 5 percent over seventyfive years" (p. 26) and concluded that they did not wish to wait that long for their chances to improve. beaman-smith and advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 9 placier (1996) aptly summarize the discrepancies women experience in higher education: "women in academe are initiates who wandered into a ritual designed for men" (p. 3). socialization and mentoring patterns hiring new faculty is a costly investment. most colleges and universities take the business of hiring new faculty very seriously and attempt to hire colleagues whom they believe will make important contributions to the institution and the discipline. but, of those who are hired, a number of false assumptions may be made. there is an assumption that new faculty have already been adequately socialized to the faculty profession through their experiences in graduate school. graduate school socialization patterns tend to favor men (beaman-smith & placier, 1996; berg & ferber, 1983; clark & corcoran, 1986; johnsrud & atwater, 1993; stein & weidman, 1989). men are more likely to receive mentoring, perhaps due to the majority of senior faculty being male. though numbers of female graduate students are increasing, they often lack mentors, male or female. the problem carries over into the first position aspirants obtain. female junior faculty also experience difficulty in finding mentors (sandler, 1992) despite the premise that productivity of junior faculty is greater for those who are advised by faculty of the same sex (menges & exum, 1983). there is not just difficulty in finding a mentor, the new junior faculty may find that she is one of the first or, perhaps, the only woman in her department. isolation such situations lead to feelings of isolation for new junior women. given that the first year is crucial for new faculty, the new junior woman experiences a double bind. she must overcome being "different" in at least two ways, being junior and being female. women faculty tend to feel like outsiders in their own departments (beaman-smith & placier, 1996; clark & corcoran, 1986; creamer & engstrom, 1996; hensel, 1991; johnsrud & atwater, 1993; johnsrud & heck, 1994; johnsrud & wunsch, 1994; kelly, 1993; ramey, 1995; rausch, ortiz, douthitt, & reed, 1989). if the woman hired is a member of a minority group, her first year experience is even more difficult (sandler, 1992). jackson and kite (1996) explained the conundrum of african american women faculty: "as a result of their double minority status, neither career interventions developed for women nor career interventions developed for african americans address the complexities these women face" (p. 4). sandler (1992) stated that it is not uncommon for departments to hire a "qualified minority woman" (p. 2) as a new faculty member. such a term unintentionally "implies that although minority women are generally not qualified, this particular woman is an exception to the rule" (sandler, 1992, p. 2). additionally, such women may be perceived as having entered the profession as a result of affirmative action, rather than through traditional means. due to this perception, "they may be seen as possibly less qualified than other faculty. this adds an external burden to prove one's academic merit and intellectual competence, defined in more or less traditional terms" (menges & exum, 1983, p. 138). research also indicates that women and minority members experience their academic careers differently than do white males (johnsrud & des jarlais, 1994). johnsrud and des jarlais' research indicates that a sense of isolation for these members is often a reason that such members leave institutions (p. 350). experiences and incidents in the first year may ultimately determine success or failure, retention or attrition. research support johnsrud and atwater (1993) found that the top three organizational problems faced by women faculty were research support, teaching load, and teaching/research balance. additionally, creamer and engstrom (1996) discovered in their study that most of their participants said their departmental work environments were "not supportive" of their scholarship, but that the work environments that they experienced as faculty members "ranged from 'hostile' to 'null,'" with null being further characterized as a sort of "benign neglect" (p. 10). this same study found that women faculty stated that sizeable teaching and advising responsibilities acted as inhibitors to their publication productivity (creamer & engstrom, 1996). female faculty spend less time in research activities and more time in teaching (creamer & engstrom, 1996; frohlich & holtz-bacha, 1994; johnsrud & atwater, 1993, johnsrud & des jarlais, 1994; johnsrud & wunsch, 1994; menges & exum, 1983; rausch, ortiz, douthitt, & reed, 1989). from creamer and engstrom's (1996) study, they concluded that "women academics consistently characterized their experiences in ways that suggest that they perceived their publication productivity was established and sustained without significant support from their institution" (p. 15). hensel (1991) stipulated that junior women faculty publish at the same rate as junior male faculty. kirkland (1997) aptly pointed out that with so few women faculty, "they are asked to sit on three to four times as many committees as men," but that "despite these extra demands, women faculty are expected to teach and publish as much as men" (p. 99). thus, we discover that women faculty do not receive the same returns on research productivity (burns, 1994; clark & corcoran, 1986; creamer & engstrom, 1996; hensel, 1991; national science foundation, 1994). financial resources and child care other ways in which women faculty often experience the academy differently than do men involve personal financial resources and child care. the issue of personal financial resources is discussed more fully below under salaries that women faculty receive vis-à-vis male faculty; however, women seem to have a tendency not to value their qualifications and experiences as highly as do men (kirkland, 1997) and, thus, find themselves with less financial support than men do from the hiring stage throughout their careers. additionally, childrearing appears to be only a women's issue. in hensel's (1991) study, she discovered that: advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 10 in a question about the availability and quality of child care, 40 percent of the male respondents with children under 10 years of age said the question had no applicability to them. closer examination of the data found that those responding "not applicable" were married men. (p. 49) whether these men's wives stayed home to care for the children or made all the child care arrangements is not the issue. such responses are presumably reflective of the views of academe that women should be the sole bearers of responsibility for childcare. such issues only serve to further the distance women faculty feel in the academy. improving the chances for women faculty success kelly (1993) reminded us that "to ignore the discrimination practiced against academic women is to condone and encourage it" (p. 28). there are a number of ways, then, in which the structure, culture, and climate of the academy can alter to improve women's chances for success. perhaps, the first barrier to be overcome is the ideology of individualism since it seems to conceal "systemic barriers that women face in their attempts to achieve positions of power" (chase & bell, 1994, p. 34). to understand how and why women are underrepresented among faculty numbers and in educational leadership, this devotion to individuality must come to an end. looking at each male faculty member individually and, supposedly, in terms of his own merit, and then viewing the actions of women faculty as a collective, is neither fair nor justified. it is also short-sighted and hegemonic. such hegemony subjugates women and places them in an untenable and unproductive situation. we must view the underrepresentedness of women in the academy as a problem. we must look at who the gatekeepers are and the power that they wield. further, the academy must commit to an honest attempt to understand women faculty members' experiences. if we wish to retain women faculty then we must recognize "the full picture of women's lives, which are different from men's lives" (kirkland, 1997, p. 42). in doing so, the academy opens itself up to reflection of women's research and stands as a possible defender, rather than a detractor, of their research. benign neglect is not an acceptable manner in which to treat the research potential and productivity of its own women faculty. yet, bentley and blackburn (1992) advise that "monitoring women vis-à-vis men will need to continue" (p. 705). examining women faculty members' experiences in the academy as well as those of men is important: "tetrault's bifocal phase cannot be completely abandoned" (bentley & blackburn, p. 705). they do, however, call for "creative energy to be directed to the feminist phase" (p. 706). particular attention should be paid to entry-level faculty and their needs. wunsch (1994) advised that survival needs should be a priority in the first year and that this is an obvious and appropriate time to lay the groundwork for professional development and advancement. department chairs should not wait for new faculty to come to them, but should check up on them regularly and make certain that new faculty realize that they have an ally. further, department chairs should encourage mentoring structures to support faculty women's scholarship. department chairs and other administrators must particularly guard against the "salieri" phenomenon, whereby access and progress to success is limited, much as the court composer for emperor joseph did to mozart (altbach, 1997). in pretending to be a benefactor to mozart, salieri actually blocked mozart's career, rather than helping to advance it (altbach, 1997). clark and corcoran (1997) described a modification of the phenomenon and applied it to the performance and behavior of academic women. from this, we learn that academic women are judged by a dominant, inner circle of men, who limit the women's progress to a relatively low level of advancement. johnsrud and atwater (1993) contended that scaffolding structures be put in place for women to succeed, stressing that scaffolding is not a form of coddling. instead, scaffolding structures provide ways for women to succeed by recognizing that women have different experiences than do men. they suggested that such structures are needed for personal issues, research, teaching, and service and noted that while some of their suggestions require funding, a number of them cost nothing at all. in this category, we find that awareness and commitment are integral parts to providing scaffolds for women to succeed. johnsrud and heck (1994) also placed emphasis on the need for leadership to change. they explained that leaders can "set a tone of collegiality, tolerance, and acceptance of differences" and that "deliberate efforts can be made to foster collaboration, intellectual cross-fertilization and social interaction" (p. 82). burns (1994) called for equity in hiring and promotion of women faculty. she discussed the inherent problem in hiring women into non tenure-track positions by demonstrating that women, who are quickly making up a "second tier" of faculty, are somehow "innately inferior" and that the "economy practiced by establishing a second tier of faculty has had grotesquely casteand gender-ridden side effects" (pp. 43-44). by denying women faculty equal access to career development and advancement, colleges and universities must view themselves as bastions of injustice, rather than leaders of the future. colleges and universities must promote women not only to tenured positions, but also to positions of leadership. they must also recognize the typical leadership paradigm is borne out of patriarchy and be prepared to accept alternative leadership paradigms. sederberg and mueller (1992) remind us that the key quality of leadership that is sought in administrators is generally one which is associated with men and male styles of behavior. davis, et al. (1996) advocated that more research on the institution as a primary source of gender inequity be initiated. they suggested changing the emphasis from telling women how to change to fit into the institutional culture to advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 11 finding ways to change the institutions to make them more hospitable to women. an international perspective about gender inequity supports the notion that american women faculty belong to a sort of underclass in the academy. this view posits that americans tend to "miss something" when they do not utilize women as well as they have prepared them (adelman, 1991). while not claiming to present or solve all the problems that women faculty face, the literature has provided us with a deeper, richer examination of the barriers that exist and suggestions for overcoming those barriers. ultimately, in order to effect change, the changes will have to have support from both men and women and from both faculty and administrators. the education of future american professionals and researchers lies in their hands. the current imbalance between male and female faculty has substantial consequences not only for female students, but also for society in general. the discrimination that exists in higher education is likely to be mirrored and expressed subtly and indirectly, inside and outside of the academy. references adelman, c. 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[1993 national study of postsecondary faculty (nsopf:93)] salary, promotion, and tenure status of minority and women faculty in u.s. colleges and universities, nces 2000-173, by m. t. nettles, l. w. perna, & e. m. bradburn. project officer: l. j. zimbler. washington, dc: office of educational research and improvement. u. s. department of education. (2001a). national center for education statistics, integrated postsecondary education data system (ipeds). fall enrollment survey. retrieved october 1, 2001, from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/digest/tables/pdf/table210.pdf u.s. department of education (2001b). national center for education statistics, integrated postsecondary education data system (ipeds), "fall staff, 1999" survey. digest of education statistics: table 229-full-time instructional faculty in degree-granting institutions. by race/ethnicity, academic rank, and sex: fall, 1999. retrieved december 20, 2002, from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/digest2001/tables/dt229.asp west, m. s. 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(1994). mentoring revisited: making an impact on individuals and institutions. new directions for teaching and learning, 57, 9-13. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership legitimated violence in schools: the power behind the paddle sharon shockley lee, ed.d. lee, spring, 2003 laws that defend the rights of the child, jesus’ model of valuing and embracing children, and female ethics of care and compassion offer hope of transformed schools where principals and teachers protect and nurture children’s lives and dreams. introduction corporal punishment is a form of discipline in which an adult deliberately inflicts pain on children to correct misbehavior (paintal, 1999). since the colonial period, corporal punishment has been accepted and practiced in american schools. although use has steadily declined since the 1970s, the center for effective discipline (2000) estimates that public school officials administer corporal punishment to more than two thousand american schoolchildren every day. this paper examines one principal's use of corporal punishment. the analysis unmasks four forces that legitimate corporal punishment: tradition, law, religion, and hegemonic masculinity. the conclusion identifies alternatives for just and humane treatment of schoolchildren. methodology, data collection, and ethical considerations data were collected during a two-year ethnographic study of an elementary school principal. the writer was participant-observer in this study which was conducted using established methods and principles of anthropological fieldwork. ethical commitments required replacing proper names with pseudonyms in published reports. (see lee, 2000, and lee & van den berg, in press, for a discussion of methodological and ethical considerations in this study.) the scope of the study was broad; only the issue of corporal punishment is discussed here. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html the principal, the school and the district principal haines, students suggested, resembled former president ronald reagan. for 31 years, this aging caucasian educator of rural, southern, religious upbringing served the riverside school district. as principal, he established a reputation as a "white knight" who rescued troubled schools. mr. haines was reassigned to washington school where i planned to study his efforts to improve the school. riverside school district was located in an economically and racially layered suburb near a major midwestern city. the district included 14 elementary schools, three middle, and three high schools with a total enrollment of over 11,000 students. the school district was divided geographically and racially by a small river known by insiders as the "mason-dixon line." district enrollment was 44% african american and 56% caucasian. south of the mason-dixon line, principal haines' domain, schools served predominantly african american poor and working-class communities. washington school was a p-6 elementary building with approximately 450 students and 30 staff members. african-american students comprised more than 77% of enrollment, the highest percentage of any riverside school. more than 63% of students qualified for free or reduced lunch, again the highest percentage in the district. washington was beleaguered by low student achievement, poor discipline, and weak teacher morale. principal haines explained: [w]hen i came… to roosevelt, they called it the armpit o' the district. but washington, it's worse. if ya take the left armpit 'n the right armpit 'n move 'em ta the center of the back an' slide 'em down, that's washington. (field notes) the following vignette offers an account of one afternoon at washington school. the subsequent analysis unmasks forces that legitimate corporal punishment in schools. "the strong arm of the law" principal haines sat down at his desk, pulled out the bottom drawer to serve as a footstool and leaned back in his chair. "ya know, sharon, i used ta be a pastor. well, in a way, i still am. god's given these people to me. i'm responsible for 'em. these kids and teachers are my congregation. this school is my church." a small african american boy burst into his office. "mr. haines, a girl up on a ladder in our room. miss yates can't git her to come down." principal haines stood, grabbed his paddle known as "the strong arm of the law,” slid it into the right sleeve of his jacket, and headed out the door. miss yates waited at her classroom door. her third graders sat motionless, staring at the girl screaming on the third rung of the stepladder. "who is she?" mr. haines asked. "she's one of mrs. farley's [special education students]," miss yates whispered. the principal strode confidently across the room, pulled the girl from the ladder and carried her to the hall. putting her down, without a word, he shook his right arm. the paddle slipped into his hand, and he gave her five quick, hard swats. mr. haines led her through the long hallway and up the stairs to the special education classroom. he opened the classroom door and pushed the child inside. as he walked toward the office, joan smith called out to him, "mr. haines! i have a couple of boys i want you to meet." "bring 'em on in.” mrs. smith and two african american boys came to the office. "mr. haines?” she handed him two completed discipline forms. "you already know andre." she pointed at a chair, and andre sat. "this is orlando. he just came to washington yesterday." "come on in, orlando." the boy entered his office, and mr. haines closed the door. in less than three minutes, the door opened. as orlando left, the principal concluded in a mock african american vernacular, "i don't know how yo' behaved at yo' other school, but yo' not gonna act like that here! ya hear? andre! come in." mr. haines and the boy stood facing each other. the principal spoke with quiet intensity. the boy did not respond. they glared at each other in silence. finally, mr. haines stood and reached for his paddle. he tapped it twice on the surface of his desk. andre obeyed the unspoken cue. the boy leaned over and placed his hands where the paddle had touched the desk. mr. haines took a long, deep breath and struck five sharp swats. the principal placed his hand on the boy's shoulder, spinning him around. andre turned, his eyes downcast. mr. haines stuck the paddle under the boy's chin and lifted his face until their eyes met. the man towered over the boy. the principal and the paddle dismissing the significance of corporal punishment would be relatively easy if these were isolated incidences, but sanctioned violence against children is routine in many american schools. official reports indicated that during principal haines' two years at washington school, haines paddled 80 students a total of 218 times. during the same two-year period, the 13 other elementary principals reported a total of 150 paddlings. mr. haines reported using corporal punishment more frequently than all the other riverside principals combined. significantly, the two schools headed by female principals reported no incidents of corporal punishment. of the students mr. haines paddled, 86% were african american; 14% were caucasian; 88% were male; 12% were female. statistics gathered during the study indicated that principal haines underreported corporal punishment. instances of students paddled several times in the course of a single day were reported as one only. he maintained no records regarding punishment of students with disabilities. joyce mitchell, an experienced and respected assistant principal, worked closely with mr. haines, but a male teacher, not the assistant principal, paddled when the principal was absent. ms. mitchell refused to use corporal punishment, instead practicing, and advocating more humane approaches. female teachers expressed confidence in principal haines' use of corporal punishment. firm discipline, they claimed, was his greatest strength as an administrator: there’s never any indecisiveness…. it makes me very secure knowing… i’m … gonna be supported in the office. i’m going to get backing…. [paddling] works. it really does. [students] know they’re not getting away with anything…. you feel like you have control of your classroom, and he has control of the school…. it’s very secure knowing he’s at the helm. (tape transcription) in an interview, superintendent samuel tate explained principal haines' use of corporal punishment: alvin sees great value in corporal punishment…. that's southern…. there are strong traditions… and discipline is a big thing in the south…. there was an absolute preoccupation with discipline, and kids were supposed to be afraid when the principal came around. and if that principal didn't come around with a little crop, whap! they weren't doin' their job. (tape transcription) legitimated violence in schools violence is the use of physical force to cause pain (jackman, 2001). corporal punishment, then, may be defined as violence that causes pain to control victims’ behavior. hall (in press) explains that violence is sanctioned by a specific social order as a means of social control. tradition tradition supports use of corporal punishment in schools. the practice has been well documented in the history of western civilization (demause, 1974; scott, 1938; welsh, 1978). american norms of corporal punishment originated in the new england colonies where strict discipline was intended to break children's wills and assure obedience. corporal punishment was “necessary and useful… an act of love" (spring, 1997, p. 36). the new england primer (1805), a textbook with multiple editions widely used from 1690 to 1900, reflected the legitimated violence of early american schools: “f the idle fool is whipt at school” (p. 13). ravitch (1974) documented severe discipline in new york city schools continuing through the 19th and into the 20th century. the u.s. department of education office of civil rights (1999) reported that corporal punishment persisted in american schools throughout the 20th century although frequency began to decline in the 1970s. in 1976, for example, states submitted reports to the office of civil rights indicating that more than 1.5 million children were paddled at school. in 1998, just over 365 thousand incidences were reported. hyman, zelikoff, and clarke (1988) warned of underreporting and estimated that actual numbers might be twice those reported. this study of principal haines provides evidence to support their hypothesis. the u.s. department of education office of civil rights (1999) and shaw and braden (1990) reported that corporal punishment was applied in a discriminatory manner: victims were usually male, poor, ethnic or language minorities, or students with disabilities. again, results of this study were consistent with those findings. law and corporal punishment since the colonial period, common law held that educators could use reasonable force against students to maintain order. at that time, corporal punishment in schools was embedded in a larger context of state-sanctioned violence: masters whipped slaves and indentured servants; husbands beat wives; guards caned prisoners; officers flogged soldiers and sailors; mental asylums beat and caged the mentally ill; parents spanked children; and educators paddled students. today, only the last two, violence against children, are legal in the u.s. legislation prohibiting corporal punishment has been approved in 27 states, primarily in the north and east (american academy of pediatrics, 2000). similar legislation proposed in other states was opposed by the bush administration. (see table 1). president bush supported a 2001 proposal in congress to protect educators from liability when corporal punishment was used (sealey, 2001). the u.s. supreme court upheld use of corporal punishment in schools in ingraham v. wright (1977). in essence, the court found that the eighth amendment's cruel and unusual treatment clause provided protection for criminals but not schoolchildren. the court deferred decisions about student discipline to local school authorities, a pattern perpetuated by lower federal and state courts (imbrogno, 2002). in general, u.s. courts emphasize the rights of school officials to maintain control rather than the rights of the child (roy, 2001). respect for the rights of children is growing worldwide. every industrialized nation in the world, except the u.s., has abolished corporal punishment in schools. adopted in 1989 by the united nations general assembly, 191 nations have ratified the convention on the rights of the child. only the u.s. and somalia have failed to approve the convention which calls for a worldwide ban on corporal punishment (imbrogno, 2002). religion and corporal punishment studies indicate that protestant fundamentalists are more likely than members of other religious groups to use corporal punishment (grasmick, bursik, & kimpel, file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/spring2003/leetab%7e1.html 1991; grasmick, morgan, & kennedy, 1992; oosterhuis,1993; wiehe, 1990). the admonition, "spare the rod and spoil the child," commonly quoted as scripture, is actually from a poem by samuel butler, a 17th century english writer. the biblical verse most similar to this is proverbs 13:24, "he who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him." the hebrew word translated "rod" in this verse is the same word used in psalms 23:4, "thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." the shepherd's rod, popcak and popcak (2000) explain, was used to guide, not beat, the sheep. they maintain that the rod of comfort would not be used to hurt children. the words discipline and punish are not synonymous. the latin root of the word discipline is discipuli meaning "student" or "disciple." discipline therefore implies a teacher-student or rabbi-disciple relationship. the purpose is literally to teach childen about loving, respectful relationships. the term “punishment” is derived from the greek poine and its latin derivative poena meaning revenge, the roots of the words pain, penalty, penitentiary, and penance. punishment involves inflicting pain as revenge. the relationship is punisher-victim; the goal is compliance and control. biblical hermaneutics, a continuing source of controversy and division among religious groups, offers contrasting interpretations of biblical events and themes. some writers (brock, 1988; brown & parker, 1989; heyward, 1999; hopkins, 1995; williams, 1993) contend that the bible not only allows corporal punishment, but actually encourages child abuse. to illustrate, they cite the patriarch abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son and jesus' crucifixion which, they contend, portrays god as a "divine child abuser." greven (1992) warns that the religious and authoritarian nature of corporal punishment leads children to believe that they are evil and accept violence as natural and normal. browning, bunge, and wall (2001) condemn christianity's "poisonous pedagogy" that emphasizes original sin, adult ownership of children, the need for absolute obedience, and physical punishment to break their wills. popcak and popcak (2000) and grasmick, bursik, and kimpel (1991) argue against corporal punishment citing the new testament's gentle, loving portrait of the adultchild relationship. in jesus’ story of the prodigal son, for example, the father responded with forgiveness to his son’s disobedience. jesus blessed and embraced children and encouraged adults to be more child-like. from this perspective, jesus was non-violent, challenging the brutality of the existing social order, defending the poor, healing the sick, and raising the status of samaritans, slaves, women, and children. deacon (2000) maintains that: the bible is essentially a history of love -divine love, reaching out to ever broadening circles of humanity as one category of prejudice and exclusion after another is overcome by love, the cohesive force that draws all god's creation together into one whole. jesus preached and practiced an inclusive, universal gospel that set aside cheap moralisms in favor of love. (p.292) hegemonic masculinity "hegemonic masculinity" (blackmore & kenway, 1993) also legitimates corporal punishment. schools, as gendered organizations, structure unequal power relationships between females and males. teaching is considered a feminine activity, an extension of the nurturing and child-rearing function of women in the home and family. educational administration has been constituted as a “masculinist enterprise” (blackmore & kenway, 1993). leadership functions, including paddling, are associated with masculine authority, control, violence, and virility (eisenstein,1993). harvard psychiatrist james gilligan (2001) argues that men often view "violence as proof of masculinity." zoologist desmond morris (1967) raised the dark image of corporal punishment as a sado-masochistic ritual: the adoption of the female sexual rump-presentation posture as an appeasement gesture…. is largely confined now to a form of schoolboy punishment, with rhythmic whipping replacing the pelvic thrusts of the dominant male…. [s]choolmasters… were performing an ancient primate form of ritual copulation with their pupils. they could just as well inflict pain on their victims without forcing them to adopt the bent-over submissive posture. (it is significant that schoolgirls are rarely, if ever, beaten this way -the sexual origins of the act would then become obvious.) (pp. 167-178) [parens in original] according to psychologist carol gilligan (1982), masculinist conceptions of justice are based on an “ethic of rights.” from this perspective, men may feel they have the right to paddle children. tradition, common law, the u.s. supreme court, and state and district policies sanction this "administrative assault" (diamond, 1997) on children. women tend to choose non-violent, humane approaches to help children develop self discipline. feminist understandings of justice emanate from an “ethic of care” and responsibility for others (gilligan, 1982; lyons, 1983; noddings, 1984). feminine ethics emphasize relationships, interdependence, empathy, and compassion. carol gilligan (1982) cited two biblical passages to explain masculine and feminine conceptions of justice. significantly, her exemplars also reveal how males and females tend to regard children. when god directed him to sacrifice his son, abraham obeyed without question. clearly, the patriarch valued obedience more than the life of his child. centuries later, two women appeared before king solomon, both claiming to be the mother of the same infant. solomon ordered the boy cut in two to give each woman half. to save the life of her child, the true mother lied, saying the boy belonged to the other woman. obviously, she valued the life of her child more than her rights, more than truth itself. conclusion not as spectacular or newsworthy as guns or knives in schools, american society does not “count” corporal punishment as “real” violence (stein, 2001). bandman (1977) argues, however, that children have rights to dignity, respect, self-respect and the "right to one's body" (p. 176). justice, he contends, requires that children have the right to "a decent and fulfilling life…. equal in care and resources to the most advantaged members of society" (p.178). because children cannot claim their rights, bandman maintains that adults are ethically and morally obligated to act on their behalf. it is better to live in a world with… obnoxious students than to live in a world of quiet, docile, and obedient students whom one drugs or beats into submission like donkeys. to have rights… is to be free of a masterslave, authoritarian relation. (p.170) this paper has argued that sanctioned violence in schools dehumanizes both child and adult, abused and abuser. paddling threatens the safety of schools and assaults the dignity of the human spirit. tradition, laws protecting adult rights, certain religious beliefs, and masculine views of justice legitimate adult violence on american schoolchildren. laws that defend the rights of the child, jesus’ model of valuing and embracing children, and female ethics of care and compassion offer hope of transformed schools where principals and teachers protect and nurture children’s lives and dreams. references american academy of pediatrics, committee on school health. (2000). corporal punishment in schools: policy statement. pediatrics, 106(2), 343. bandman, b. (1977). some legal, moral & intellectual rights of children. educational theory, 27(3), 169-178. blackmore, j., & kenway, j. 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(2001). corporal punishment in american schools & the rights of the child. journal of law & education, 30, 554-563. scott, g. r. (1938). the history of corporal punishment. london: t. werner laurie, ltd. sealey, g. (2001, july 23). spare the rod: corporal punishment in schools sparks debate over how to discipline students (abc.news.com). retrieved november 19, 2002 from http://www.nospank.net/n-i19.htm shaw, s. r., & braden, j. p. (1990). race & gender bias in the administration of corporal punishment. school psychology journal, 19(3), 378-383. spring, j. (1997). the american school 1642-1996 (4th ed.). new york: mcgrawhill. stein, h. f. (2001). nothing personal, just business: a guided journey into organizational darkness. westport, ct: quorum books. u.s. department of education, office for civil rights. (1999). elementary and secondary school civil rights compliance report. columbus, oh: national coalition to abolish corporal punishment in schools. welsh, r. s. (1978). delinquency, corporal punishment, & the schools. crime & delinquency, 336-354. wiehe, v. r. (1990). religious influence on parental attitudes toward the use of corporal punishment. journal of family violence, 5(2), 173-186. williams, d. s. (1993). sisters in the wilderness: the challenge of womanist godtalk. maryknoll, ny: orbis books. author dr. sharon shockley lee is an associate professor in the department of educational leadership at southern illinois university, edwardsville. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 23, spring 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] entrepreneurial career development: using human capital, social capital, and distance education to achieve success connie i. reimers-hild, susan m. fritz, and james w. king abstract individuals, especially women, must be increasingly entrepreneurial in the twenty-first century in order to achieve success. it is also important for women to take an entrepreneurial approach to career development. the first key component of an entrepreneurial approach to career development is investing in human capital. continuous investment in human capital increases earning power, opens doors to professional opportunities, and contributes to career advancement. the second key component of an entrepreneurial approach to career development is investing in social capital. women can increase their chances for professional success by developing networks that connect them to key individuals, assignments, and resources within and outside of organizations. distance education is the third key component of entrepreneurial career development. today, distance-delivered courses and programs create new educational opportunities that women and men can use to invest in their human and social capital as well as their potential. this paper presents the three keys to entrepreneurial career development along with evidence that supports the increasing importance for women to enhance their career success by embracing entrepreneurial strategies designed to leverage the connections among human capital, social capital, and distance education. entrepreneurial career development: using human capital, social capital, and distance education to achieve success today the term "entrepreneurial" is used to describe people or employees that are innovative, creative, and have the ability to keep up with change in a society that is evolving at an increasingly rapid pace (neuborne, 2003; o'connor & fiol, 2002). research has shown that entrepreneurial strategies are important components of success for both individuals and organizations (mcgrath & macmillan, 2000). entrepreneurial workers are even more important in the current knowledge economy, which is characterized by continuously evolving technologies and rapid change (brown & eisenhardt, 1998). entrepreneurial thinking and behavior encourages individuals to serve as leaders by embracing change; being innovative and proactive; recognizing and capitalizing on new opportunities; taking risks; and establishing strategic, long-term goals (bent-goodley, 2002; o'connor & fiol, 2002, 2003; sussman & kuzmits, 1986). entrepreneurial workers are vital to successful organizations; however, it is also important for women and men to be entrepreneurial in their careers in order to achieve success. an entrepreneurial approach to career development is even more important for women because they are still typically paid less than their male counterparts and have file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm difficulty obtaining top leadership positions in organizations. entrepreneurial behaviors like those described above can help women achieve success in their careers. the purpose of this piece is to demonstrate the importance of entrepreneurial career development in helping women achieve professional success. first, this paper will present information on two key components of entrepreneurial career development: human capital and social capital. second, this piece will present information on the increasingly powerful, yet complex, connection between human capital and social capital. third, this paper will present information how women develop their careers entrepreneurially by using distance education as a tool to develop both their human capital and social capital. human capital: the first key to entrepreneurial career development human capital encompasses an individual's knowledge, skills, and abilities, and is one of the key characteristics of entrepreneurial individuals. the theory of human capital is based on the premise that educational investments translate into economic advantages (becker, 1964; killeen, turton, diamond, dosnon, & wach, 1999; langelett, 2002). human capital has also been touted as a key weapon in the war against poverty (mingnat & winter, 2002; organization for economic co-operation and development [oecd], 2001) and linked to increases in noneconomic indicators such as better health and well-being (oecd, 2001, 2003). individuals must continuously invest in their human capital in order to develop and maintain their innovativeness (becker, 2002; drucker, 2001). women can obtain greater personal, social, and economic well-being by entrepreneurially investing in their human capital. they must actively seek out and obtain knowledge through formal education to build their credentials and increase their earning power. this initial level of human capital attainment helps women generate personal income while beginning their careers. human capital attainment helps women get started and advance in their careers, with some limitations. first and foremost, formal education does increase the earning power of women. according to the u.s. department of labor's bureau of labor statistics (2005), education contributed to the difference in the median weekly earnings of women. women holding less than a high school diploma earned $334 per week, while women who had earned a bachelor's degree or higher recorded a median weekly income of $860 per week . the earning power of women corresponds with their educational attainment (table 1) and has the potential to make a dramatic difference in earnings over the course of a career (table 2). table 1 women's usual median weekly, monthly and yearly earnings by educational attainment level of education median weekly earnings (2004)* monthly earnings (4 weeks) yearly earnings (52 weeks) less than a high school diploma $334 $1,336 $17,368 high school diploma $488 $1,952 $25,376 some college or associate degree $577 $2,308 $30,004 bachelor's degree and higher $860 $3,440 $44,720 * figures taken from table 1. median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by selected characteristics, 2004 annual averages, u.s. department of labor's bureau of labor statistics (2005), highlights of women's earnings in 2004, p. 7. table 2 difference in earnings between the categories of having less than a high school diploma and a bachelor's degree and higher level of education median weekly earnings* (2004) monthly earnings (4 weeks) yearly earnings (52 weeks) less than a high school diploma $334 $1,336 $17,368 bachelor's degree and higher $860 $3,440 $44,720 difference +$526 +$2,104 +$27,352 difference over 40 year time period $1,094,080 * figures taken from table 1. median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by selected characteristics, 2004 annual averages, u.s. department of labor's bureau of labor statistics (2005), highlights of women's earnings in 2004, p. 7. women have seen more of an increase in the value of their education over the past two decades compared to men. since 1979, women with college degrees have increased their earnings by 35%, when adjusted for inflation. earnings for males with college degrees increased by 20% during this same time period (u.s. department of labor's bureau of labor statistics, 2005, p. 1). formal education also impacts earning potential throughout various professional ranks. boushey and cherry (2003) analyzed the effects of the economic boom (1991-1997) on the wages of women. they found that professional women benefited more than working-class women during this period. as the gender-earnings ratio increased, the majority of pay increases were experienced by women in professions that required college educations. while they received higher rates of return on education when compared to men, women generally see lower rates of return on their experience (kilbourne, england, & beron, 1994). formal education increases the earning potential of both women and men; however, women still get paid less than their male counterparts. the multiplication effect of the disparity in earnings becomes even more apparent over time and the course of a career (table 3). data collected by the u.s. department of labor's bureau of labor statistics (2005) revealed that women earned less than men in every age category. the u.s. department of education's national center for education statistics (1998) found that women earned less than men at all educational levels, even when women were employed on a consistent basis. "consistent employment was defined as working at least 91.67% of the total months in the labor force after attaining his or her highest level of education, or 11 out of 12 months for each year in the labor force" (p. 9). women, even if they were consistent workers, were still paid less and received fewer pay raises compared to their male colleagues. these findings are contrary to the commonly held opinion that women typically earn less than their male colleagues because they take time off to raise a family. table 3 median weekly earnings of women and men who are full-time wage and salary workers and the multiplication of earnings differences median weekly earnings (2001) median weekly earnings (2004) female $511* $573** male $672* $713** weekly difference -$161 -$140 monthly difference -$644 -$560 annual difference -$7,728 -$6,720 5 year difference -$38,640 -$33,600 10 year difference -$77,280 -$67,200 20 year difference -$154,560 -$134,400 40 year difference -$309,120 -$268,800 * figures taken from the u.s. department of labor's bureau of labor statistics (2002), highlights of women's earnings in 2001, p. 1. ** figures taken from the u.s. department of labor's bureau of labor statistics (2005), highlights of women's earnings in 2004, p. 1. human capital is related to earnings; however, some women actually have more human capital than they need in certain positions. this situation results in frequent underemployment. glover and fielding (1999) found that female scientists in britain were generally overqualified for their positions. they also noted that female and male scientists with similar human capital differed in career choices. female scientists worked in more professional scientific jobs like teaching, and many of these positions did not pay as well as careers in research. women entered the teaching field 11% more often than males and were employed in associate professional jobs, such as technician positions, 9% more often than males (p. 67). human capital is a key characteristic of entrepreneurial individuals. thus, women can enhance their entrepreneurial savvy by investing in formal education and training. women can then use their entrepreneurial savvy to continuously invest in the knowledge, skills, and abilities that enhance their earning potential and chances for career success. although continuously investing in human capital is important, it takes more than knowledge, skills, and abilities to advance in organizations. women must obtain more formal education and credentials than men to compete for leadership positions (byrd-blake, 2004; davies-netzley, 1998), and women must invest in their social capital if they want to successfully climb the organizational ladder. social capital: the second key to entrepreneurial career development women must entrepreneurially invest their social capital by networking and building relationships that can help support their career advancement. social capital is different than human capital because it is relational in nature and is mostly considered to be a public good that is shared. "social capital resides in social relationships, and as a capital, may be conceived as a resource in which we invest to provide a stream of benefits" (oecd, 2001, p. 39). tharenou (1999) found that women need more social capital than men to advance in the workplace. she indicates that human capital is not the major obstacle that prevents women from moving up in an organization. according to tharenou, "gender differences arise in advancement to the top because women accrue fewer resources at critical stages and transitions. women accrue less human capital and social capital for advancement than men, more for social capital than human capital" (p. 128). douthit (1999) described the differences between social and human capital in the workplace: social capital theory predicts that returns to intelligence, education, and seniority depend in some part on a person's location in the social structure of an organization. while human capital refers to individual ability, social capital refers to opportunity. individuals with more social capital get higher returns to human capital because they are positioned to identify and develop more rewarding opportunities. (p. 68) catalyst (2000) found only two female fortune 500 ceos. by 2003, the number of female fortune 500 ceos had increased to seven (wellington, brumit kropf, & gerkovich, 2003, p. 18). to see so few women leading fortune 500 companies is surprising considering that a study conducted by catalyst (2004) on gender diversity concluded, "on average, fortune 500 companies with the best financial performance had more women on their top management teams than lower-performing teams" (p. 10). so, what are the obstacles that are keeping women from the highest executive levels? the "pipeline problem" has been used to explain the lack of women in executive ranks. this theory suggests that there are simply not enough women, who are ready for these types of promotions, in the workplace. this explanation can no longer be used because there are so many women in the workforce (carli & eagly, 2001; ragins, townsend, & mattis, 1998). from their survey of fortune 1000 ceos, wellington, et al., (2003) found that 79% of female executives ( n = 705) and 90% of the predominately male ceos ( n = 120) who participated in the study strongly agreed that "lack of general management or line experience" was the primary barrier to women moving into the highest positions (p. 18). ragins, et al., (1998) reported similar findings in the first national survey of fortune 1000 companies conducted by catalyst. the study included female executives ( n = 461) with the title of vice president or higher and executives ( n = 325) of fortune 1000 companies as well as follow-up phone interviews with female executives ( n = 20) and ceo's ( n = 20). eighty-two percent of the male ceos participating in the survey cited "lack of significant general management or line experience" as the most critical barrier that held women back (p.34). forty-seven percent of the women indicated significant experience as a barrier. according to male ceo's, another critical barrier was lack of time in the pipeline. sixty-four percent of the male ceo's indicated that women were not in the pipeline long enough, but only 29% of the female respondents indicated that time in the pipeline was a barrier to the progress of women. ragins, et al., (1998) also found that fortune 1000 ceos and female employees perceived barriers to equality in the workplace very differently: these pioneering women relied on career strategies that were adaptive, proactive, and characterized by hard work. they attributed their success to consistently exceeding performance expectations, developing a style with which male managers feel comfortable, seeking out challenging and visible assignments, and obtaining the support of an influential mentor. (p. 33) davies-netzley (1998) interviewed sixteen men and women working in the corporate world. each participant was either a president or ceo in a corporate organization. the women interviewed indicated that social networks were the most important factor for success at elite levels. each of the female participants discussed the "old boys" network as an issue that makes it difficult for women to succeed. further, davies-netzley discussed the strategies participants used to advance in their careers: the women in the sample reveal several strategies for making it to, and succeeding in, top corporate positions. among them are attaining further educational training, developing similarities with male peers, establishing networks with other women, and reconciling work and home responsibilities. (p. 348) berman (1999) examined barriers associated with upward mobility of female administrators ( n = 67) in american and international overseas schools . berman found that participants included mentoring as an important component related to career success. respondents also indicated a desire for additional opportunities to gain more training and professional development opportunities in the areas of self-confidence, networking, and leadership. burke and mckeen (1994) found that women participated in a number of career development activities when they examined the career development and advancement of managerial and professional women. further, they noted that participation in education, training, and development activities corresponded significantly with important career outcomes. however, women did not always have access to the types of activities, such as advanced management assignments, sponsors or mentors, or career-pathing, that were considered to be more useful when related to professional success. only 3.7% of the women in the sample ( n = 267) participated in advanced management activities, 20.2% had sponsors, and 28.1% participated in career-pathing (burke & mckeen, 1994, p. 56). these findings were very similar to a study that examined the factors that contributed to the lack of female executives in the federal government. mani (1997) studied the differences of female and male senior executive service members ( n = 138) in the federal government. the impetus for this study was that almost 50% of the workers in the federal government were female, but women only accounted for 13% of the executives. mani found that both female and males executives completed higher levels of education when compared with personnel in lower levels of the organization, although there were few opportunities for women to pursue the educational opportunities that would actually enhance their qualifications. thrasher mcgrath (1992) discussed similar problems that occur for women employed in educational settings when she studied issues related to inequity women face in the area of educational administration: sex discrimination is clearly one of the reasons women fail to gain administrative positions. women who aspire to leadership roles have usually been required to hold higher levels of certification than male candidates for the same position. the primary reason for not considering women candidates for leadership positions has often been their "lack of qualifications," defined as a track record of successively more responsible administrative positions. women have not been aware of this, nor have they known which career paths lead upward as opposed to which dead-end. (p. 62) gender stereotypes are one of the barriers keeping women from advancing in organizations (catalyst, 2005). when exploring issues related to gender and career, wilson (1998) summarized some of the myths about women and the workplace and the real barriers that women encounter while working: "women's careers have been characterised by limited opportunities, low paid part-time work, breaks of different lengths for child care and other domestic responsibilities, and unhelpful assumptions about commitment and capability" (p. 396). women must actively build networks and alliances in order to advance in organizations (crowell, 2004; daviesnetzley, 1998; kamberg, 2001; schor, 1997; wilson , 1998). further, women must build strategic relationships with key individuals in organizations who can help them obtain the "right kinds" of qualifications, skills, and experiences that have the potential to increase their upward mobility and chances for success. women need to use their entrepreneurial savvy to build and maintain important relationships and to dispel myths about their commitment to both the organizations in which they work and their careers. distance education: the third key to entrepreneurial career development "the foundation of an organization is not money or capital or technology--it's knowledge and education (human capital). by 2005, knowledge workers will be the single largest group in the labor force" (drucker, 2000, p. 11). access to both human and social capital will become increasingly important as the workplace becomes more reliant on knowledge to maintain a competitive edge and generate revenue in the global marketplace. continuing education and lifelong learning will also be increasingly important as countries continue to shift to more knowledge-based economies. employees can develop and maintain their skills and abilities (human capital) through continuing education and training opportunities. in fact, many employers are willing to invest in their employees. it has been reported that american corporations spent $10 billion on tuition reimbursement in 2003 alone (meisler, 2004, p.1). this investment helps explain the importance of human capital in the workplace; however, education, training, and skills development are not enough. the key to advancement is obtaining the right kinds of training, education, and experiences while building social networks within and outside of the organization in which an individual is currently employed. human capital is essential to success, innovation, and change in the knowledge-based economy (becker, 2002; drucker, 2001; oecd, 2003; peters, 2002). however, employees, employers, and educational institutions must work together to develop lifelong education programs that provide access to human capital. to keep up with the lifelong educational requirements in a knowledge-based society, flexible learning opportunities must be available. education and training must be available and accessible via on-line and distance-delivered instruction, and in the form of workshops, seminars, on-the-job training, and in traditional college and university courses. in his essay, "the age of human capital," becker (2002) predicted that individuals will have to continuously invest in the ir education and training, and distance education would become one of the most important elements used to advance the attainment of human capital. this prediction is becoming reality. distance education, more specifically the world wide web, is increasingly being used as a vehicle to enhance human capital. further, education itself is becoming a big investment for students, employers, and institutions of higher education. according to kommers and rainie (2002), "14 million american internet users who got more education or training for their career in the past two years say their use of the internet was crucial or important in upgrading their skills" (p. 2). increases in part-time student enrollment are supported by a number of reports, including a study conducted by the u.s. department of education's national center for education statistics (1999), which estimated that there were 1,363,670 enrollments in for credit distance education courses at post-secondary institutions between 1997 and 1998. a more recent study conducted by the u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics (2003) found that enrollments in distance-delivered courses offered by 2 and 4-year institutions grew to approximately 3,077,000 during the 2000-2001 academic year (p. iv). enrollments in online courses have continued to increase, and a growing number of academic leaders have suggested that online education will be a vital part of their long-term planning in the future (allen & seaman, 2005). the pew internet and american life project found that 37% of people with less than a high school diploma conducted work-related research using the internet. this study shows that more kinds of jobs, including lowskilled positions, are connected to the internet (rainie & packel, 2001). another survey conducted as part of the pew internet and american life project found that approximately 5 million adults have taken an on-line class for college credit (lenhart, simon, & graziano, 2001, p. 2). further, lenhart, et al., (2001) stated: five percent of internet users report taking a class online for college credit, and five percent also report having ever taken any other kind of class online. people under age 50 and those with at least some college education are the most likely to have taken classes online. on any given day, 1% of internet users are taking a class online. that amounts to about one million adults. (p. 9) in addition to increasing enrollments, demographic patterns of the nontraditional student population have changed. more students are enrolled on a part-time basis, and women now outnumber men in nontraditional programs. women represent 56% of the nontraditional student body (u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics, 2002b, p. 1). women's pursuit of additional human capital has become very apparent. further, continued enrollment in nontraditional and distance education courses and programs is evidence that these programs have become a vehicle for women to obtain human capital. embracing entrepreneurial career development: leveraging the connections among human capital, social capital, and distance education one dimension of effective online teaching and learning includes constructing rich learning environments that facilitate student-to-student interaction (levin, levin, & chandler , 2001). research has demonstrated that interactivity may serve as a motivational source for nontraditional learners due to its more cooperative nature (donohue & wong , 1997; frankola, 2001). i nteractivity may motivate learners and help them persist in distance-delivered courses and programs. it may also help facilitate social networks between learners and instructors, which enhances social capital (o'neill, 2004). student-to-student interactions have the potential to increase an individual's social capital, especially in the context of adult learning. adults participate in education for many reasons; however, some of the most important factors associated with participation are related to career advancement, earning college or advanced degrees, and personal fulfillment (kramarae, 2001; merriam & caffarella, 1999; u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics, 2002, 2004). adult learners who work full-time and attend school part-time are the "new" consumers of higher education. these new consumers of higher education must be entrepreneurial in order to be successful (reimers-hild, king, foster, fritz, waller, & wheeler, 2005). many adult distance learners serve in many leadership roles outside of the academic environment ( garland , 1994) and serve as valuable networks for each other. adult learners can enhance their social capital by developing and maintaining relationships with their classmates because these same individuals are leaders outside of the classroom and may be able to help them professionally. as noted earlier, interactivity helps learners persist in the online environment. this concept, along with the importance of building social capital via technology, is further supported by a study of 4,148 corporate e-learners from the united states , canada , and the united kingdom conducted by corporate university xchange, inc. (2001). participants cited the opportunity to pursue professional development as one of the positives of e-learning and limited interaction with instructors and other learners as negatives associated with distance classes. interactions between instructors and other participants helped to motivate learners and keep them engaged, and the participants in this study wanted more interaction with others in the distance environment. one way to increase interactivity in the distance environment is by forming online communities and discussion forums. an increasing number of people are participating in online communities to enrich their lives (scott & johnson, 2005). these types of interaction provide individuals with the opportunity to learn while building their social capital and sense of community ( hopkins , thomas, meredyth, & ewing , 2004; mclure wasko & faraj, 2005; misner, 2005). online communities and various technologies, such as e-mail, have the potential to increase the connectivity of people to institutions, organizations, and each oth er. women should be very entrepreneurial when participating in distance-delivered education and training to enhance their careers. not only can women invest in their human capital via distance, they can build their social capital by participating in online communities and discussion boards. further, social capital connections can be enhanced and maintained throughout the course of a career simply by using technology, such as e-mail, to keep in touch with key individuals. conclusions when discussing female chief executive officers (ceos) in fortune 500 companies, wellington , et al., (2003) posed a very important, yet complicated question: "three years into the new millennium, women make up more than half of the managerial and professional labor pool but account for just over 1% of all fortune 500 chief executives. what's holding them back?" (p.18). there are many things holding women back. obstacles range from myths about performance and dedication to a number of real issues such as the lack of human and social capital that help individuals secure leadership positions and move into the top levels of organizations. to be competitive with their male colleagues, women must take an entrepreneurial approach to their career development. entrepreneurial career development means that women must constantly behave and think entrepreneurially in order to be successful. entrepreneurial actions include taking a more proactive, creative, and strategic approach to success. women should establish a vision and long-term goals for their careers and then take an innovative approach to achieving them. they should do their best to recognize and pursue opportunities, irrespective of existing resources such as time, money, and personal support. women should continuously build their social networks as well as act as calculated risk takers who have the ability to keep up with and lead change. women must entrepreneurially invest in themselves, including their human and social capital, in order to achieve success. women need to approach their careers in an entrepreneurial manner to increase their chances of success in organizations. first, women should entrepreneurially invest in human capital. clearly, education has helped women increase both their paychecks and their earning potential. human capital helps women gain credentials and enhances their earning power. second, women must entrepreneurially invest in their social capital. women must develop and maintain relationships with key individuals within and outside of their organizations so they have access to information about the opportunities that will enhance their chances of career success. it is also important for women to build strong social networks and to develop relationships with mentors. these important social connections help provide women with the information they need to build their careers and move into the upper-levels of organizations. social capital is one of the key factors that will help women gain access to the "right" kinds of training activities, professional opportunities, and personal networks they need in to order move into higher level positions within organizations. third, women should be entrepreneurial and invest in both their human and social capital through flexible educational opportunities, including distance-delivered courses and programs. women who take the initiative to seek out, find, and capitalize on educational opportunities and make them work to their advantage are entrepreneurially investing in their careers. a number of barriers prohibit women's pursuit of additional human and social capital. for example, limited access to educational opportunities, skills training, and network building are problematic. time constraints are also often an issue for women because they have commitments to their jobs, families, civic, and social responsibilities. for these reasons, it is important for women to actively search for flexible and accessible programs that fit both their personal and professional needs. further, women need to enroll in programs designed to include the advanced networking and mentoring opportunities that are essential to professional advancement. there is a critical need to develop flexible and accessible distance education courses and programs. the demand for these types of robust courses and programs will only continue to grow as human and social capital become increasingly important in the evolving knowledge economy. fundamentally, educators have to create distance-delivered programs that provide both human capital and social capital. in addition, more research must be done to improve the understanding of the relationships between human capital, social capital, and technology. this research has the potential to provide guidance on how distance-delivered programs can be developed and disseminated via new technologies and contribute to career advancement in the twenty-first century. in the meantime, women must embrace and use their entrepreneurial skills and abilities to help advance their careers and achieve success. references allen, i. e., & seaman, j. 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(1998). gendered career paths. personnel review, 27 (5), 396-411. authors dr. connie reimers-hild is the unit leader and extension educator for the university of nebraska-lincoln kimmel education research center located in nebraska city , ne. she holds a ph.d. in human sciences with a specialization in leadership studies, a masters of science degree in entomology, and a bachelor of science degree in natural resources. in her current position, dr. reimers-hild performs educational and outreach activities for various clientele groups in both the private and public sectors in the areas of leadership, gender, entrepreneurship, and change. dr. reimers-hild's research focuses on exploring and developing characteristics associated with entrepreneurial individuals, and she is interested in developing the leadership capabilities of all individuals so they can discover, follow, and achieve their dreams while helping others do the same. dr. susan fritz serves as the university of nebraska-lincoln 's institute of agriculture and natural resources associate vice chancellor and as the associate dean of the college of agricultural sciences and natural resources. she received her b.s. in business administration, masters of education in adult education/agricultural education, and ph.d. in community and human resource development-training and development (1993) from the university of nebraska . her research interests include gender and leadership, community leadership, antecedents of leaders' behaviors, impact of leadership development programs, and acceptance and awareness of biotechnology. dr. king is an associate professor in the department of agricultural leadership, education, and communication at the university of nebraska-lincoln. he currently works on distance education and new technologies courses. dr. king graduated from indiana university in 1981 with an ed.d. in instructional systems technology. he has worked at the university of hawaii , indiana university , university of southern california , and mashed university in iran . dr. king has consulted with arthur d. little, united nations food and agricultural organization, w. k. kellogg foundation, ohio developmental disabilities council, iowa extension service, colorado state university, rodale institute, the pennsylvania state university, weed science society of america, american society of agronomy and others. his research interests lie in distance education, multi-media and instructional systems, international agriculture and diffusion, and adoption of innovation. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom2001.pdf file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word searby_climbing_the_ladder_holding_the_ladder ls final edits-2.docx advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 98 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 98-107, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper climbing the ladder, holding the ladder: the mentoring experiences of higher education female leaders linda searby, julia ballenger, and jenny tripses linda searby: educational foundations, leadership & technology, auburn university, email: ljs0007@auburn.edu julia ballenger: department of educational leadership, texas a&m university-commerce, e-mail: julia.ballenger@tamuc.edu jenny tripses: department of leadership in education and human services, bradley university, email: jtripses@bradley.edu accepted may 08, 2015 female administrators in comprehensive research universities were surveyed to gain their perceptions on their mentoring experiences. the females affirmed they had informal mentors in roles of sponsor, counselor, coach, and teacher, and they are also mentoring others. the findings both confirmed and contradicted former studies on females in higher education keywords: mentoring, higher education, administration, females, advancement introduction there is significant evidence that females are not holding leadership positions in higher education proportionate to their representation in the lower ranks (dean, 2009). female higher education leaders may face unique challenges in advancing their careers in higher education. females may not embody deeply held mental models of what leadership should be (i.e., having a strong hero image). they may face resistance and lack of encouragement from those who are empowered to promote them to leadership positions (dean, 2009; kanter, 1977; rhode, 2003). mentoring has been shown to benefit females in their career aspirations in general (burke & mckeen, 1996; ragins, 1989; ragins & sundstrom, 1989; scandura & ragins, 1993). ballenger (2010), in an article titled “research on female’s cultural and structural barriers to access to higher education leadership,” found that female leaders in higher education who had established in-depth mentoring relationships with other females and men made significant advancement in their careers. with that recent research in the background, the authors of this article sought to learn more about the mentoring experiences of females in higher education leadership positions who have acquired upper-level administrative positions such as university deans, provosts, and presidents. it was their desire to explore the mentoring experiences of females in higher education administration in order to add to the thin body of literature on this topic, and to inform aspiring female leaders of the possibilities that mentoring holds for those interested in developing their leadership potential. the definition of mentoring used in this study was: “mentoring is a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and psychosocial support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work, career, or professional development” (bozeman & feeney, 2007, p.722). the conceptual framework used for this study was the feminist perspective which validates females’ personal experiences. as further background for this study, the authors summarized the literature of two intersecting concepts – traditional and emerging mentoring constructs, and females and mentoring in higher education. the research questions were aligned with the concepts and terms found in these two bodies of literature. thus, the research questions for the study were: (a) what were the roles of the mentors in the lives of female higher education leaders? and (b) what were the roles of female higher education leaders when they were mentors to others? conceptual framework: the feminist perspective a common obstacle faced by many females is finding mentors and access to informal networks of advice and support. professional females have expressed both the perception and the reality of exclusion from “boys clubs” or “old boys’ networks.” the result is that many females remain out of the loop in career development (carr, 2012; rhode, 2003). the “old girls’ network,” if it exists, suffers from the comparatively few females in the upper echelons of higher educational leadership (dean, 2009). females aspiring to move up in an organization may also experience discrimination from other females who are in higher ranks – labeled as the queen bee syndrome in staines’ groundbreaking work on female executives in the workplace (staines, travis, & jayerante, 1973). consequently, females in advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 99 higher education leadership positions may be challenged when they seek out mentors or networks for advice, contacts, and support. early mentoring researchers indicated that mentors who have more power in the organization may be better able to provide sponsorship, exposure, and visibility than mentors with less power, and in general, white men have more power in organizations than females or non-white men (ragins, 1997; ragins & sundstrom, 1989). researchers have also found that the challenges of finding a mentor include availability of and access to mentors and difficulties for men and females to identify ways to work with one another in a mentoring relationship (dean, 2009). men may also prefer to mentor other men rather than females because of shared experiences (carr, 2012). a feminist tradition or perspective validates personal experience and recognizes marginal voices. gardiner, enomoto and grogan (2000) defined feminist tradition as follows: feminist research validates multiple and diverse perspectives, in particular the values of examining these perspectives to clarify one’s own beliefs and values, and for the pedagogical opportunities to help one to consider viewpoints of other individuals. women learn from other women’s voices and experiences. (p. 29) further explaining how feminist perspectives work, blackmore (1999) stated that such a perspective requires consideration of “responsibilities of and accountability to, females in leadership for other females” (p. 219). thus, mentoring from the perspective of females in professional roles takes into consideration experience, gender differences, power relationships, and authority conflicts. diverse perspectives are sought out and carefully considered (gardiner, enomoto & grogan, 2000). relevant related literature the body of literature accessed for this study and from which the research questions were derived consisted of traditional and emerging mentoring constructs and females and mentoring in higher education. highlights of this relevant literature are now provided. traditional and emerging mentoring constructs mentoring has become a commonly accepted phenomenon in business, industry, and academia as a process that enhances an individual’s professional development. previous researchers have shown that those who are mentored earn higher salaries, receive more promotions, and have greater career and job satisfaction than those who are not mentored (allen, eby, poteet, lentz, & lima, 2004). ehrich, hansford, and tennent (2004), in their analysis of over 300 research-based mentoring articles in the fields of education, business, and medicine, found that mentoring yields positive outcomes of learning, personal growth, and development of professionals. kram’s (1985) foundational work on mentoring was the first to identify the career and psychosocial benefits of mentoring for the protégé. the psychosocial benefits were labeled as role modeling, acceptance, confirmation, counseling, and friendship; the career benefits were identified as sponsorship, exposure, visibility, coaching, protection, and challenging assignments. a brief description of each of these roles is warranted. sponsorship involves the mentor nominating the protégé for promotions, lateral moves, and other recognitions such as awards, assignment to research projects, and recommendations for fellowships. exposure and visibility is provided when the mentor creates opportunities for the protégé to interact with senior colleagues and other gatekeepers who can open doors for the protégé. coaching is the practical act of helping the protégé develop work-related skills and leads to the mentor giving the protégé challenging work assignments to help him/her develop further as a professional. protection may be provided when the protégé needs shielding from individuals and situations that could be harmful, personally or professionally. wanberg, welsh and hezlett (2003) proposed that these career-related functions require the mentor to use his/her influence on behalf of the protégé, and that this will rarely occur in formal mentoring environments (such as a program which assigns mentors to protégés). the psychosocial benefits of mentoring are more personal, and are associated with the quality of the mentoring relationship. the mentor is a role model, and the protégé will frequently assimilate the mentor’s attitudes, values, and behaviors. social influence literature supports this premise, proposing that the norms, values, and beliefs of an ‘influence agent’ (such as a mentor) may have an effect on an individual even without that individual’s realization (forgas & williams, 2001). acceptance and confirmation occur when the mentor provides support, encouragement, and nurturing. counseling happens when the mentor has created a safe environment for the protégé to express and explore personal concerns and issues. friendship also frequently develops, with the mentor and protégé enjoying interactions both inside and outside of the work environment (dougherty, turban, & haggard, 2010; kram, 1985). stoddard and tamasy (2003) have labeled the roles that mentors play in the life of a protégé. they are advisor, coach, role model, spiritual guide, and sponsor. the traditional form of mentoring described by kram in 1985 was based on a mentoring dyad, in which one mentor was paired with one protégé. in more recent mentoring literature, the concept of a developmental network of mentors has been explored (higgins & kram, 2001), sometimes referred to as a mentoring ‘constellation’ (higgins & thomas, 2001), or a mentoring ‘mosaic’ (mullen & lick, 1999). this draws from social network theory and is based on the concept that individuals may rely on a number of different mentors to provide career support, and that the network may be quite diverse (higgins & kram, 2001). the developmental network or mentoring constellation consists of “the set of people a protégé names as taking an active interest in and action to advance the advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 100 protégé’s career by providing developmental assistance” (higgins & kram, 2001, p. 268). females and mentoring in higher education researchers have confirmed the influence that mentoring has on the career development of females in higher education (shults, 2001; wilson, 2001). however, gersick and kram (2002), in a study of high-achieving female managers, found that the females had to piece together help for themselves from various sources. they predominantly found help with career skills and advancement from male managers, and psychosocial help, such as identity, confidence, and support for their aspirations from female family members, friends, and female colleagues. only rarely did they find senior mentors who offered both. historically, even females with excellent credentials have still found it challenging to rise to leadership without the sponsorship of an individual already in a position of power, especially a male (moore, 1982). because men have traditionally dominated the administrative positions in higher education, females have less exposure and access to other females who can sponsor them for promotions (brown, 2005). haynes and haynes (2004) have emphasized the need for females to mentor other females into positions of leadership by doing what good mentors do: helping them find their voice, helping them understand obstacles in the career path, encouraging them by helping them to identify their strengths and skills, and helping them access resources for career development. brown (2005) also urges females in higher education administrative positions to mentor other females: female administrators should seek and prepare the next generation of female leaders. females in leadership positions should take the responsibility to serve as mentors and to legitimize mentorship because they have the utmost need and stand to gain the most. (p. 660) on the other hand, she counsels that females aspiring to college administrative posts should not wait for mentors to appear and offer to mentor them, but should take the initiative in seeking their own mentors. the extent to which females provide career assistance to other females through mentoring is not clear. anecdotal accounts of females who are not helpful and indeed may even sabotage other females exist (rhode, 2003; staines, et al, 1973; tarule et al. 2009). these behaviors may be a result of the pressures of working in male-dominated cultures that do not recognize or support them, leaving many females ambivalent about helping other females professionally (bell, 1995). ten years after the bell (1995) study, brown’s 2005 study of female college presidents found that females who are not helpful to others may be in the minority. according to brown (2005), females are mentoring other females. her study showed that 64% of the female college presidents responding were serving as mentors to others, with 50.8% mentoring both men and females, and 42.4% mentoring only females. older females (ages 50–59) were more likely than younger females to be serving as mentors (73.5%). ragins and cotton (1993) found that females primarily tend to have female mentors, because mentors tend to select protégés who are similar to themselves (johnsrud, 1991; moore, 1982; queralt, 1982; swoboda & miller, 1986). however, that is challenged in other studies. cross-gender mentoring has always occurred, and several studies indicate that it is important. vincent and seymour (1995), surveying female executives nationally, found that females are mentoring both men and females. brown (2005) found that most female college presidents had a primary mentor who helped them secure an administrative position, and the majority of their mentors (68.6%) were males, and the majority of those males (74%) had actually sought them out. “women may be encountering fewer barriers in gaining access to mentors because nearly three quarters of the female college presidents in this study reported that their primary mentors had actively sought them” (brown, 2005, p. 664), and since the majority of those mentors were male, this may indicate that “men are beginning to recognize the value of women in higher education administration” (brown, 2005, p. 664). men who mentor females may be doing some things right, according to allen and eby (2004), who studied male and female professionals engaged in mentoring others. they found that female mentors provided less career mentoring and more psychosocial mentoring functions than did males. female mentors also provided more psychosocial mentoring to female versus male protégés. however, male mentors provided similar mentoring to both genders. method procedures the purpose of this survey research study was to explore how female university administrators have experienced mentoring relationships in their career paths, either as mentors or protégés. the specific research questions for the study were: (a) what were the roles of the mentors in the lives of female higher education leaders? and (b) what were the roles of female higher education leaders when they were mentors to others? survey methodology was selected because the authors sought to gather information from a large sample of female university administrators and believed that the convenience of responding to a brief online survey would likely result in a higher response rate. survey research is appropriate when the goal is to collect participants’ opinions or perceptions on some issue (fraenkel, wallen, & hyun, 2012; gay, mills, & airasian, 2009). a combination of selected response and open-ended questions were included in the design of the survey instrument. the authors accepted the potential disadvantages of this methodology which include: (a) inconsistencies in length and content of responses, (b) possibilities of misinterpretation of questions and responses, and (c) difficulties in tabulation and synthesis of open-ended questions on the survey. open-ended responses, therefore, were viewed as a way to gain further descriptions advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 101 from participants and to identify potential areas for future research, but not to draw fully synthesized conclusions, especially on questions where there were relatively few comments (fraenkel, wallen, & hyun, 2012). participants a purposive sampling technique was used to select the participants for this study. the criteria for selection were that females must be currently serving as higher education administrators, and employed by research universities/very high activity doctoral granting universities in the following carnegie categories: (a) comprehensive doctoral with medical/veterinary; (b) comprehensive doctoral with no medical/veterinary; (c) doctoral, humanities/social sciences dominant, and (d) doctoral/stem dominant (the carnegie classification of institutions of higher education). the authors were very interested in exploring the mentoring experiences of female administrators who were in the top positions in these universities. the carnegie list of doctoral granting institutions provided potential participants from 163 different universities where the emphasis is on research. e-mails for 350 female administrators from these 163 universities were obtained by going to the websites of each university and perusing the names of the top administrators (presidents, provosts, vice provosts, vice presidents, associate vice presidents, chancellors, vice chancellors, deans) looking for distinctly female names. research design the authors designed a survey that participants could complete in a relatively brief time (about 5 minutes). the survey was developed based on concepts, terms, and definitions found in mentoring literature and it was reviewed by an expert panel of experienced female higher education administrators who also had knowledge of mentoring. the instrument and procedures were modified based upon feedback gathered from this panel. credibility for the authors to conduct this research was established based on their extensive background in the field of mentoring. their work in mentoring has been recognized through peer review in professional journals (a total of 17 research-based journal articles on the topic of mentoring have been published singly or jointly by the three authors). in addition, they have created and implemented mentoring programs in professional organizations and institutions (national council of professors of educational administration, illinois women in educational leadership, southwest educational research association, and their respective universities). the researchers employed their mentoring expertise in the development of the overall research design including survey questions, analysis of responses, and in final conclusions. after approval from the institutional review board at bradley university, a web-based survey service (qualtrics) was utilized for data collection. a solicitation e-mail was sent to participants, which included a cover letter of introduction and purpose of the study, contact information of the researchers, and a link to the online survey. participants were advised that their response implied informed consent to participate in the study. the survey was titled “mentoring and females in higher education administration.” the cover letter included in the email message began as follows: “you are likely aware that females remain significantly underrepresented in top academic leadership positions. we believe your insights into mentoring either as a mentor or protégé can help advance other highly qualified females aspiring to academic leadership. our interest in mentoring for academic female leaders stems from our roles as researchers and leaders in both state and national professional organizations solely devoted to female leadership development. we believe that females who have successfully achieved leadership pinnacles in higher education can help other females realize their career aspirations.” part i of the survey asked participants to provide demographic data including their current position, years of experience, highest degree earned, ethnic identification, age range, and professional affiliations. the female gender of participants was assumed since the introductory letter was addressed to “female higher education administrator,” specified the research as pertaining to female administrators’ experiences, and the survey explanation contained the phrase “help other females.” in part ii, participants were asked to respond to five questions, designed to provide information about their mentoring experiences, both as protégés and as mentors. for part ii, questions were formulated that asked participants to identify the roles that their mentors had played in their lives, as well as the roles they played when they were mentoring others. the terms for those roles were derived from a synthesis of the various terms used in mentoring literature: spiritual guide, coach, counselor, sponsor, and teacher. each of these forced-choice questions allowed participants the opportunity to write comments after selecting their response. part iii asked participants to provide advice to female leaders and female’s organizations to strengthen mentoring practices. data analysis descriptive statistics, in the form of frequencies and percentages, were generated by the qualtrics software program. the survey generated responses from 131 participants, for a response rate of 37%. the number of surveys completed was 120 because not all participants answered every question. the open-ended responses were downloaded into a microsoft word document for qualitative analysis. to achieve credibility and reliability in this study, the three researchers independently coded and analyzed the same transcripts of the open-ended survey responses. first, open and line-by-line coding was conducted. each researcher reached consensus on the initial list of codes. next, the dominant codes were chosen to categorize and were given labels. then, those categories were converted to longer-phrased themes. the themes were then used to organize the findings of the study (strauss & corbin, 1998). in addition, trustworthiness was established by the use of rich, thick descriptions of excerpts taken directly from the transcripts to support the findings of the study (merriam, 2009). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 102 results this study was designed to understand how female university administrators have experienced mentoring relationships, either as mentors or protégés, in their ascension to higher education administrative positions. the study was guided by the following questions: (a) what were the roles of the mentors in the lives of female higher education leaders? and (b) what were the roles of female higher education leaders when they were mentors to others? the majority of females who responded to the survey held administrative positions such as vice-president/associate vice president, had three to ten years’ experience (68%), held a ph.d. or ed.d. (53%), and were 46 years of age or older. the ethnic representation was 85% white, 10% african american, and 3% each hispanic or asian pacific (see table 1). table 1 demographics of participants percentages # responses positions university presidents 3 3 university provosts 7 8 university dean 3 3 other administrative positions (vice presidents) 87 96 total responses 100 110 years’ experience 1–2 11 12 3–5 35 38 6–10 33 36 11–15 11 12 16+ 10 11 total responses 100 109 ethnicity white or european american 85 93 african american 10 11 asian/pacific islander 3 3 hispanic or latina/o 3 3 total responses 100 110 highest degree ph. d. 46 50 ed .d. 7 8 masters 25 27 other 21 23 total responses 100 108 age group 26–35 0 0 36–45 5 6 46–55 31 34 56 + 64 70 total responses 100 110 research question one: what were the roles of the mentors in the lives of female higher education leaders? the first research question was designed to ascertain the characteristics of the mentors who were influential in the lives of the female university administrators. survey data revealed the majority (68%) of these female university administrators experienced multiple mentoring relationships, having had both females and males as mentors. it was interesting to note that only one percent of these females were mentored by a female only. another difference was observed in the data of females in the role of protégés. a majority (51%) of these females reported the role their mentor played was ‘sponsor.’ the role of counselor came in second (47%), with the role of spiritual guide listed last as indicated in table 2. table 2 the roles of the mentors when women in administration were the protégés responses percentages number spiritual guide 11 11 coach 39 41 counselor 47 49 sponsor 51 53 teacher 35 36 total 100 104 there were 28 open-ended comments to the question “when thinking of the mentoring experience(s) that assisted you most in acquiring your current position, which of the phrases below is most applicable?” consistent with other responses, the participants reported having had multiple mentors, both male and female. comments accompanying the responses ranged from “i didn’t have many mentors, and those who i would identify were both females and males” to “i have had many mentors for various stages and aspects of my career – men and women.” several commented that there were fewer females in higher positions, reducing the possibilities that a female might serve as mentor at higher stages of one’s career. one respondent commented that, in her opinion, female mentor sponsors can be viewed as less influential than men. another respondent stated that in her case, one female mentor was the most influential. two comments clearly stated that throughout their careers, they sought out mentors based upon their learning needs. fourteen females commented on the question “mentors play various roles in our career development. when thinking of your advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 103 most influential, helpful mentor as you were ascending to your current position, what role did he/she play in your life? (with the choices being spiritual guide, coach, counselor, sponsor, or teacher). the predominant response was ‘sponsor’ (51%). a sponsor was defined as ‘one who helped further one’s career with his/her connections.’ the role of counselor followed a close second (with 47%), being defined as ‘one who helped the protégé gain a perspective on self and actions/reactions.’ however, the participants were able to check as many of the choices that applied to the roles their mentors played, so the choices of ‘coach’ (one who helped you gain specific skills to do your job) and ‘teacher’ (one who helped you learn how to do something new, learn the culture), also were frequently selected (39% and 35% respectively). only the choice of ‘spiritual guide’ (one who helped you look at your values and mission) showed a distinctly low percentage (11%), as indicated in table 2. consistent with previous comments, females stated that their mentors played multiple roles, such as ‘role model,’ ‘sounding board’ and ‘counselor.’ distinctions the participants might have made between their mentors acting in those roles were not evident from their brief comments. females noted that having multiple mentors is helpful for developing varied skill sets. one woman pointed out the value of multiple mentors by stating that “i advocate for multiple mentors and mentoring moments where the person is less important than the message received. these could be what to do and what not to do. and given that life changes over time, multiple mentors are critical.” research question two: what were the roles of female higher education leaders when they were mentors to others? in the second research question, the kinds of mentoring relationships female university administrators experienced as mentors were examined. female university administrators’ responses were reported as a percentage of total responses for each item rather than a percentage of total participants. the higher the percentage, the more often the response was identified by those who commented. the survey data revealed that 92% of these female university administrators were currently serving as mentors, and the majority (88%) of them were mentoring both females and males in multiple mentoring relationships. the participants were asked to describe the roles they believed they played as mentors. these female university administrators reported that they served mostly in the role of counselor to their protégé (41%). the role of teacher came in second (24%), while the role of spiritual guide was mentioned the least (1%), as indicated in table 3. twelve participants chose to comment on the question that asked them to describe whom they mentored. those who commented stated that they mentored both men and females in higher education. one woman reported that she regarded mentoring as part of her job. nine participants chose to comment on the question asking them to characterize the roles they have played as mentors. the females who commented said that they played multiple roles as mentors. for some, the terms used to describe the roles (spiritual, coach, counselor, sponsor, and teacher) seemed limiting to them. the results on the questions that asked females to give advice to other females and to female organizations is not comprehensively reported in this paper, but will be outlined in future papers, due to the lengthy nature of the responses. table 3 the roles of women university administrators serving as mentors response percentages number spiritual guide 1 1 coach 19 20 counselor 41 44 sponsor 15 16 teacher 24 26 total 100 107 discussion the results of this study of top female administrators at doctoral granting research institutions were both contradictory and confirmative of reports in mentoring literature, and revelatory about the attitudes towards mentoring for females in higher education leadership positions. data from the surveys were analyzed to address the two central research questions of this study: (a) what were the roles of the mentors in the lives of female higher education leaders? and (b) what were the roles of female higher education leaders when they were mentors to others? the findings challenged the assumptions that often are held by observing females in roles of higher education administration; namely, that they do not have access to mentors and that they likely are not mentoring others. what was concluded after analyzing the responses of the surveys was that female higher education administrators are being mentored, and are mentoring others (at least in this representative sample). they are not only climbing their own career ladders, but they are also holding the ladder for others, paying attention to helping other females ascend to positions of greater influence. the findings of this study, of course, cannot be generalized to all females in top university positions, but the responses of the 131 females surveyed can be compared to previous mentoring literature concepts. selected descriptions and their alignment to mentoring literature follow. females are being mentored and are mentoring others first of all, the researchers in this study found that female higher education administrators are finding mentors for themselves or experiencing informal mentoring. at least, they are interpreting their multiple helping and developmental relationships as mentoring. even though none of the females mentioned being a part of any formal mentoring program, when given the definition of mentoring as “a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and psychosocial development” advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 104 (bozeman & feeney, 2007, p. 722), the majority of the females (68%) said they had mentors. the queen bee syndrome spoken of by staines et al. (1973), and rhode (2003) may likely exist, but it was not evident in the responses of the females surveyed. not one of the females responding to the survey mentioned experiencing queen bee behavior from females above them, although there was no direct survey question asking for examples of this. secondly, the majority of the female higher education administrators in this study (92%) were tuned in to mentoring others, both males and females, who are aspiring to higher positions on the career ladder. in contrast to studies that identified queen bee behavior (rhode, 2003; staines et al, 1973), there is evidence from other mentoring literature that individuals who have been previously mentored are more willing to serve as a mentor than those who have not (allen, russell, & maetzke, 1997; ragins & scandura, 1999), and female administrators are mentoring other females (brown, 2005). in addition, employees at higher levels of an organization are more likely to intend to mentor others, and report fewer barriers to mentorship (ragins & cotton, 1993). these behaviors were described by the participants in this study, and this sample of females in higher education administration were mentoring others. roles are interconnected and mentoring occurs crossgender a difference was noted in the mentoring relationships female university administrators experienced as protégés and the kinds of mentoring relationships they experienced when they were mentors to others. when these females were the protégés, climbing the career ladder themselves, they reported their most influential mentors in their career growth served them chiefly as a sponsor (51%), counselor (47%), coach (39%), and teacher (35%). it should be noted that the females commented on the interconnectedness of their mentor’s roles. several of the participants reported that their best mentors played all of these roles (i.e., sponsor, coach, counselor, and teacher); therefore, they had difficulty in choosing only one mentor role. some of the comments from the participants that supported this interpretation were: “it is difficult to choose only one [role] because my best mentors have played all of these roles,” and “i would have marked all [roles] if i were looking at the composite influence of many mentors.” however, when the females in the study were serving as mentors, the chief mentoring function or role changed. rather than seeing themselves as a sponsor to their protégés first, the majority reported serving as counselor (41%), followed by teacher (24%), and next as coach (19%). having been the recipients of mentoring assistance themselves, these females were now providing mentoring to others. they reached out to others to counsel, teach, and coach. another interesting finding from this study was that the career type, career stage, and academic discipline often dictated the gender of the mentors available to females in higher education. the majority of the females reported they had multiple mentors, both male and female (68%) and they also mentored multiple protégés, both male and female (88%). but, it should be noted that there were females who were mentored by only males (24%). this finding is interesting, with several females noting that early in their careers, females were underrepresented in their chosen field. responses representative of this finding were: “my strongest and earliest mentoring was from males;” “my significant mentors have been males, which is perhaps a reflection on my academic field of chemistry where females are underrepresented and the fact that university presidents are dominated by males;” and “coming into higher education as early as i did, there were few females in a position to serve [me] as a mentor.” in summary, when females were mentored, they saw their mentors mainly as sponsors and counselors, but when mentoring others, they saw their roles chiefly as counselors and teachers. in addition, several experienced only male mentors early in their careers, especially when they were in a career where females were underrepresented. mentoring relationships are intentional and informal females in this study provided anecdotal comments to the question about their mentors which indicated that many of the mentoring relationships were intentional. one woman said, “i have had a mentor at almost every level of my career. i sought them out and didn’t wait for them to find me.” the majority of the participants gave the title of ‘mentor’ to those assisting them in career development, which seemed to indicate that they viewed their interactions as a mentor/protégé relationship, even if it was not formalized. ensher and murphy (2005) purport that wise individuals “understand that their career development is in their own hands, and these employees know that to get ahead they need to be aligned with the movers and shakers of their organization” (p. 42). in today’s changing career environment, individuals must drive their own career growth, and since females may cross organizational boundaries more frequently than in the past, they cannot expect mentors to be available for long-term relationships (de janasz, sullivan, & whiting, 2003). thus, being intentional about seeking mentors for oneself may be a prerequisite for females seeking to rise in an academic organization. the comments provided by participants revealed that though their mentoring relationships were intentional, they were also likely informal. with the inclusion of the phrase “informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and psychosocial support” in the hosen definition of mentoring for this study (bozeman & feeney, 2007), the stage was set for female participants to think of mentoring in a broad sense. informal relationships are those that develop naturally or spontaneously without outside assistance (eby, rhoades, & allen, 2010). thinking of mentoring as informal also opens up the possibility of mentoring taking place without the mentor even being aware, as these participants noted: advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 105 • “i would characterize the females who influenced my career as role models as much as mentors;” • “mentors were not prominent when i was in junior positions. one had to simply observe those who could be positive and negative role models;” • “never formal mentoring engagements; leading by example, private conversations, on the job learning;” • “mentoring is perhaps overly generous in describing the information or support that others provided. i would call them positive interactions that i found useful to some degree in my professional attainment.” so, as forgas and williams (2001) have so aptly noted, an influence agent (i.e., role model or someone admired) may have an effect on an individual without the role model’s realization. the informal mentoring may take place in occasional positive interactions or by an individual watching the way a person of influence behaves. none of the participants in this study mentioned being in a formal mentoring program or being assigned to a mentor. therefore, the authors propose that informal mentoring relationships can be very valuable to females aspiring to positions of greater responsibility in an organization. female higher education leaders have multiple and diverse mentors kram’s (1985) early work on mentoring characterized it as a dyadic relationship, with one mentor and one protégé working together to assist the protégé in career and psychosocial development. however, more recently, the research of higgins and kram (2001) has reconceptualized mentoring to include multiple mentors in “developmental networks” (p. 264). the developmental network is defined as “a set of people a protégé names as taking an active interest in and action to advance the protégé’s career by providing developmental assistance” (higgins & kram, 2001, p. 268). it is unlikely that one mentor can meet all of the needs of a protégé (de janasz, et al., 2003). thus, individuals should seek to learn from multiple mentors, including those unlike themselves. mentoring research has increasingly found that having mentoring relationships across gender and racial lines yields benefits on both sides (ragins, 1997). people different from the dominant racial or gender group bring diverse opinions and perspectives, and can enhance an individual’s visibility in new places (ensher & murphy, 2005). the authors have affirmed the tenets of the feminist perspective as noted by gardiner, enomoto, and grogan (2000), as research participants echoed the importance of having diverse mentors and learning from multiple perspectives. one woman advised, “make sure that the mentoring process is diverse. many times i attend the meetings and i am the only woman of color. we have to reach across racial and ethnic boundaries if we are to be successful.” many females advocated including males as mentors: • “do not forget that men can be good mentors;” • “mentoring of both men and women is equally important. don’t just focus on women” • “do not limit your networks to only women. two of my most powerful and influential mentors were men. advancement is human, not tied to one gender.” female higher education administrators in this study demonstrated the understanding of the power of having multiple and diverse mentors, as higgins and kram (2001) describe in their research on developmental networks. therefore, the authors add this recommendation to the others made in this article: aspiring female administrators should watch for opportunities to learn from both females and males, and seek out diverse perspectives from a network of mentors. limitations of the study there are some limitations to this study that must be acknowledged. first of all, the return rate on the survey sent to the top administrators in the comprehensive research universities was 37%. even though there were over one hundred responses, with this moderate response rate, the authors cannot (and do not) generalize that the participants are describing mentoring experiences for the entire population of female higher education administrators. results of the study were descriptive in nature only, and the authors did not intend to make inferences or explanations as to why participants answered the way they did. it can only be speculated as to why 63% chose not to respond. one possibility is that they have not been mentored or do not mentor, thus, there could be a number of female higher education administrators whose message could be very different than the ones heard in this study. another possibility is that they were just too busy with their demanding administrative positions to stop and take the survey. conclusions and recommendations for further research this survey research was conducted to explore how female university administrators (presidents, vice presidents, provosts, deans) have experienced mentoring relationships, either as protégés or mentors, in their ascension to college administration. the first conclusion drawn from the data is that female university administrators in this study are currently being mentored. the females sought out mentors at all levels as they progressed on their career ladder. none of the participants in this study mentioned being in a formal mentoring program or being assigned a mentor. however, they all voiced the benefits of mentoring and recognized it as a career-enhancing activity. secondly, the females in this study affirmed that they had multiple mentors, both male and female, and they commented on the importance of seeking diverse perspectives. the third conclusion drawn from this study is that females are mentoring other females and males in higher education. they are reaching out to others who are aspiring to positions of greater influence. lastly, it can be concluded that their mentoring experiences, advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 106 whether as protégés or mentors, have been both intentional and informal. this study could be duplicated with surveys sent to a much larger sample of participants, including female administrators from all carnegie university classifications. in addition, the authors recommend that this study be broadened using a mixed methods approach, in which personal interviews would be conducted with a select group of top-ranking female college administrators. this would produce more detailed insights into the mentoring experiences of females climbing the ladder in university administration. in this research study, the authors confirmed the importance of the ‘mentoring constellation’ (stanley & clinton, 1992), and ‘mentoring mosaics’ (mullen & lick, 1999) in career development. the preponderance of data gathered in this study allowed for the feminist perspective (gardiner, enomoto, & grogan, 2000) to be illuminated. the personal experiences of female higher education administrators were validated as the participants shared their perspectives on the value of mentoring as reported here. females can learn from other females’ voices and experiences, and the voices in this study were loud and clear with the message: it is beneficial to find multiple and diverse mentors for yourself along your career path, and important to be intentional about mentoring others, as well. climb the ladder, then hold the ladder for others. references allen, t. d., & eby, l. t. 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(2001). the exchange relationship between mentors and protégés: the development of a framework. human resource management review, 10, 177–210. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 108 advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, summer 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] coming full circle: mid-career women leaving administration and returning to faculty gaye luna and catherine medina northern arizona university “leaving administration is part of the career cycle. however, if universities listened to those women who left their administration, they would have a better understanding of the problems facing their future and current female leaders and how to handle their exit, when time.” depending on how the numbers are viewed, women administrators have either made impactful strides in academe of they are still facing barriers to access and promotion in the administrative ivory towers. reports show the numbers of female leaders in higher education administration have risen, but whether these data are dramatic or not is more complicated. numbers may not tell the entire story of women as leaders as their roles and status in academe can be viewed from a variety of social patterns, institutional cultures, and power structures, creating a complex web not simple to digest. women administrators at u.s. public institutions increased by less than 1% from 1978 to 1987, from 21.3% to 22.3% of executive positions (“climbing the ladder very slowly,” 1990). in 1998, women held 24.3% of university and college presidencies, a change of only 3.5% since 1986. by 2001, the success of women in administration showed mixed progress (“women college presidents share success,” 2001; see also, office of women in higher education, 2002), and the increase in top female administrators was found mostly in public colleges, not research and doctoral institutions, with significant growth in community colleges. most female presidents headed schools with 3,000 or fewer students, with the situation explained: “the culture of the community may be less accepting of women in general, but it can be particularly harsh for single and minority women” (in “women collegepresidents share success,” 2001, para. 9). the file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer2006/index.html american council of education found the most difficult road for women seeking administrative positions in higher education was the one where race and gender intersect: “women of color are underrepresented in academic administration and not just because they’re newer to the pipeline. prejudice and marginalization bar them from midand senior level campus jobs” (office of women in higher education, 2002, p.1). coming full circle, from faculty positions and a return to faculty positions, females interviewed for this article provide a missing piece in the literature on women leaders in higher education – mid-career decisions to leave administrative positions and return to their academic roots of faculty. this study shares interview data from 12 women who have voluntarily or involuntarily left their academic affairs administrative positions and re-entered faculty ranks at their institutions. the voices of these women provide rich insights into why and how mid-career women leave administration and their perceptions of these experiences. few higher education studies have focused on the end of females’ administrative experiences, and the researchers feel the main reason for the dearth of literature is the continuing struggle for female entrance into administration, especially at upper level positions. after a comprehensive review of literature, the authors found only one study that addressed specifically and qualitatively women exiting administrative roles in institutions of higher education (schmuck, hollingsworth, & lock, 2002). review of literature some researchers believe the organizational and cultural environments of colleges and universities remain distinguished by traditional, bureaucratic, and male-oriented structures (brooks & mackinnon, 2001). within this context, the position of women leaders remain tenuous – women are “…still largely excluded form much of the power brokering” (blackmore & sachs, 2001, p. 63) in higher education institutions, and women’s leadership often remains marginalized and unrecognized. glazer-raymo (1999) concluded, “ultimately, the institutional culture of most universities is not compatible with the needs and concerns of women in academia” (p. 207). when women exit administration, it is often based on conflict between their individual goals and visions and direction of the larger institution. in the only study the authors identified regarding women exiting higher education administration, schmuck, hollingsworth, and lock (2002) stated, the gendered political relationships in educational organization create a different dynamic for female administrators than for male administrators. males who collide with institutional agendas are often given alternatives to withdraw from the collisions, such as lateral promotions or early retirements with favorable press releases to save face. women’s exits, especially feminist women, are more likely to be personally and professionally devastating. (p. 97) noting the culture of higher education, a study based on 13 roundtable discussions with women presidents (office of women in higher education, 2001) found leaving administration may be positive or negative – women make choices to try something new or balance their lives, while others internalize a sense of failure. in 2002, nuss encouraged female senior student affairs officers to think about their roles as assignments rather than permanent jobs. she explained, “…the needs of institutions and the demands on the role change over time,” further clarifying it is “…often difficult to accurately assess whether one’s leadership style is appropriate for the current challenges an institution or organization faces” (nuss & schroeder, 2002, p. 84). nuss and schroeder stated chief student affairs officers exit positions because of physical and emotional demands of the job, declining interest in the position, and feeling of goals accomplished. those officers involuntarily removed from positions often experienced more transitional difficulty. other studies exemplify the experiences of women administrators outside of higher education. for example, a study of 25 female k-12 public school administrators found numerous reasons why women were leaving school leadership, ranging from difficult, challenging school environments to demands of work and family (williamson & hudson, 2003). marshall (1995) studies 16 women in management in three countries who had voluntarily left employment, who were forced out of administrative positions, or who were considering leaving their jobs. these women’s accounts reflected (a) desires for a different life style, (b) need for a more balanced life, and (c) lack of support in facilitating organizational change. marshall (1995) concluded three themes appeared in her subjects’ stories: significant dissatisfaction in working in a maledominated environment, difficulty in maintaining a sense of self and authentication, and ongoing stress and tiredness. viewing this study the principles of mid-career development were used as the theoretical lens to understand women’s experiences in exiting higher education administration and transitioning back to faculty. herr and cramer (1996) characterized mid-career changes, whether negative or positive, as healthy, normal, and important parts of mid-career development, although neugarten (1976) argued unexpected life events or expected career events that occur off time are potential crises. while executive women experienced periods of stability in their careers, white, cox, and cooper (1992) noted periods of transition, questioning, and rebalancing of their personal and professional lives were often common. in discussing mid-career changes, schlossberg (1984) viewed transitions as having identifiable phrases: preoccupations with the change, disbelief of the situation, sense of betrayal by the organization, confusion, anger, and finally resolution. zunker (2002) found stressful circumstances for women evoke emotions of anger, sadness, and guilt, which can serve as springboards for developing coping skills for managing transitions. in developing a repertoire of coping strategies, men and women bring a combination of strengths and weaknesses to change (sargent & schlossberg, 1988). yet, long and kahn (1993) saw gender differences as critical to handling adversity: first, women experience more and different work stressors than men (e.g., sex discrimination and harassment). second, culturally shared beliefs (e.g., gender-role stereotypes) affect men’s and women’s perceptions of appropriate ways to cope with stress, such as disclosing to friends. third, women are disadvantaged with regard to coping if they lack workplace coping resources (e.g., power, perceived competence), or other personal resources (e.g., child care, finances). (p. 302) carter (2002) found the experiences of female business leaders in mid-career exemplified “…how permeable the boundaries can be between personal and professional lives” (p. 82). ongoing conversations with and emotional support from colleagues, supervisors, friends, and family members were important during change in women’s careers (greenglass, 1993; korabik, mcdonald, & rosin, 1993; zunker, 2002). after spending years in administration and developing a work identity tied to a university web of relationships, a disconnection from administrative status and identity can be disconcerting (brockner, 1988; kaufman, 1982). if a person has “…the ability to self-reflect, to continue assessing and learning about heror himself, and to change behaviors and attitudes, the chances are much better for a successful midcareer transition and a good fit with the new work environment” (hall & mirvis, 1995, p. 277). from an organizational perspective, louis (1980) explained institutions have given little thought to employees exiting positions, noting conceptualization of what is needed to help people leave, let go, and reinvest must be addressed. objectives of the study the study was based on the thesis that the cycle of women in administration is not complete without hearing the final chapter of women leaders – their exit from administration and a return to faculty. the study was guided by the following objectives: (a) to ascertain factors surrounding female administrators’ exit from administrative positions, (b) to determine female administrators’ feelings upon exit and levels of support and treatment, and (c) to examine female administrators’ perceptions and experiences of transitioning to faculty and the impacts of this on their lives. this study is a beginning, not an exhaustive examination of women in higher education administration who exit their positions. the researchers did not consider all internal and external variables that might impact these women’s experiences and believe the results may be context-specific reflecting unique orientations of the institutions and the subjects, thereby precluding generalization to all women in higher education exiting administration. research design and methodology most institutions do not conduct exit interviews of administrators, either male or female, and if they do, an exit interview may not be seen as an environment of trust, safety, and openness (especially if the individual will be remaining at the institution). confidential information and painful experiences of an individual leaving an administrative position are not easily obtainable or easily shared. such sensitivities presented the researchers of this study with challenges on how to gather qualitative data from exiting female leaders. in the spring of 2004, a study conducted by the authors examined the experiences of 12 females who had held mid-career administrative positions at two large public universities in the united states, and who had left their administrative positions either voluntarily or involuntarily and returned to faculty at the same institution. for the study, mid-career women were defined as having both faculty and administrative experiences with faculty career years remaining after exit from administration. these women’s years of administrative experience as department chairs, director, associate deans, deans, vice provost, and provost ranged from 4 to 15 years, with an average administrative tenure of 8 years. at the time of the interviews, the participants were asked demographic questions regarding marital status, ethnicity, and children. of the 12 participants, six were married, four were partnered, one was single/never been married, and one was divorced. in regard to ethnicity, four identified themselves as latinas, and the other eight women were white. when asked about children, 58 % of the women had no children and 42% had children. all study participants wished to remain anonymous and therefore pseudonyms are utilized in their stories. seidman’s (1998) in-depth interviewing procedures were utilized to understand the experiences and perceptions of administrative women returning to faculty ranks. this model of interviewing involved one 120-minute interview with each participant wherein open-ended questions were utilized to reconstruct the experiences of former females in administration. the authenticity of what is said makes it reasonable to have confidence in the validity of each woman’s story (seidman, 1998). by seeking to understand the meaning of events and interactions, the researchers and their interpretations can be influenced by interactions with the interviewees. therefore, the researchers asked: what do we understand now? what connective themes are among these women’s experiences? and how are these connections consistent with the literature? this qualitative research study captured participants in their own terms: their emotions, the way in which they view their worlds, their thoughts on their experiences, and their perceptions and values. though human behavior is complex and qualitative research can generate multiple interpretations and realities, the words of participants provide meaning that is often missing with quantitative data. voices of leaving the purpose of this study was to listen to the voices of experience – those of women who saw themselves as leaders, who held administrative positions in universities, and who were returning to the faculty ranks after varying years of administrative service to their institutions. why and how of exiting most of the former female administrators chose to leave their positions voluntarily, expressing they needed a change or had disagreed or experienced conflict with others and therefore elected to leave. three women described their individual exits as forced resignations. department chair nelson had served in a capacity of administrative positions within her university and was considered adept at “cleaning up” mismanaged areas and turning them around. more than once was she assigned faculty members who were considered by administration as disgruntled, problematic, and incompetent. when the opportunity arose to chair a newly created department within an established college, she was delighted with the challenge. within a short period of two years, dr. nelson realized that …the dean and the faculty would not let the new department, which i chaired, succeed. i was also the only female administrator in that college and did not receive support nor did i have parallel goals and ideals as the other male chairs and the male associate dean and the male dean. dr. nelson broached administration about returning to her faculty appointment noting, because i had faculty expertise in a very narrow area that was not duplicated in other departments and colleges, administrations saw that i could be a very productive, fruitful faculty member. i also agreed to move to a statewide site when most faculty members would not consider this possibility. administration was encouraged by this flexibility. of the three women who described their exits as involuntary, dr. wright, former associate dean, explained she had been mentored to advance to the next administrative level when things suddenly changed. she called her similar experiences of limited support as “wounding around the deanship:” this is a story that i have never told to any faculty member. i was the interim dean and had support of the president and vice president. the president had told me that i was ready for the deanship and i had faculty support. but then the vice president came to my office unexpectedly without an appointment…[the person] looked ashen and was very emotional. i was told that the president had decided that the deanship should be opened to a national search, and i knew their support no longer existed…so a national search was conducted and a candidate known personally to a state politician applied and was hired. i asked myself over and over again – is that all there is for me, after dedicating myself to this institution for so long? all of the female interviewees felt communications regarding their situations were handled poorly. ms. hernandez, a director who had reported directly to the president, noted the decision for her departure was made one week before the holidays without her input. former associate dean johnson, who said she felt unappreciated and not supported in administrative decisions, described the situation as untenable and too stressful. she explained, “i told the dean that i wanted to resign, and all he said was ‘i should have had you sign a prenuptial agreement.’” dr. sanchez, a former director, further articulated her disillusionment with the exit process. she stated, “they did nothing to keep me. the provost didn’t even know i was leaving. she was not aware that my contract had ended. she didn’t care. there was no communication.” although communications were limited and awkward, most of the women stressed they gave their supervisors input in how and when they would leave their positions. dr. garza, one of the only latina female chairs at her university who described her situation as intolerable with a dean who lacked integrity, stated, i determined how i would leave, and i negotiated salary and a semester of administrative leave. i wanted to leave on my own terms. i had great women mentoring me so i knew what to ask for – i made it work to my advantage as i returned to faculty. former provost smith explained her planning for administrative exit: there was nothing formal in writing because i was electing to leave. i told my supervisors that i wanted to leave the positions. i made a proposal in letter format, which included leave and a sabbatical; i made a recommendation for my faculty salary. the date of leaving was negotiated; staff members worked as my agents in proposing my exit salary and the date of exit. feelings and treatment although three of the participants said they felt find, good, and relieved when they exited administration, most of the women expressed less positive feelings and emotions, ranging from anger to quiet disenchantment, describing the experience with such words as sad, depressed, unappreciated, powerless, used, disillusioned, alone, and ashamed. former vice provost mesa, a latina, retorted, mad! a less competent person, in my opinion, and not a good fit for the situation, was hired. because i was actively applying and interviewing for other positions outside and was offered some, however, there was an ego booster. people and agencies came to me with concerns about the new person, and i couldn’t tattle. i felt pretty powerless. there was the question of presidential support – i felt that they were pushing to have something different. former associate dean wright expressed her feeling as angry, depressed, and then relieved. i felt a loss as i was out of the information loop, which is more important than the power loop. i said, “ok, you’re wounded here. what can i focus on, doing what i do best?” the former female administrators noted their feelings were indicative of their experiences of treatment by others as well as perceptions of the treatment between males and females exiting administrative positions. most of the study participants felt they were not treated well by administration with two women succinctly summarizing their experiences: “it was if i died, but they hadn’t buried me yet;” “out of sight, out of mind – for all parties.” a different woman, who felt her treatment by administration was awkward and uncomfortable, concluded she felt like screaming at the top of her lungs: “is that all there is?” two females stated they were treated fine, a former provost noting, “my institution even sent me to a conference on women and leadership when i wasn’t even in administration anymore.” another woman pointed out, “…at the college level, i was treated as a confidante by top administration. by university administration, i had a degree of affiliation. this affiliation has been the most long lasting.” the women talked about male administrators leaving their positions, and the researchers then inquired about perceptions of gender-equitable treatment. interestingly, the women said, i really don’t know the answer. i felt i was treated fairly – i negotiated hard – no one came to me with a package. i had to ask for it, and i had no problems asking. i think that we need to ask, “what are the rules of the game and who knows them?” since this is such a big secret, i’m not sure that i really know. but looking at men’s faculty salaries and women’s faculty salaries, i would say that men do a better job in negotiating higher faculty salaries upon leaving administration. a former director, ms. hernandez, noted her perception of inequitable treatment: absolutely not was i treated the same! men get back to their positions with full salary. with men, administration finds ways to assist, giving employment, finding them new employment. men and women are treated differently when they are asked to leave – women receive no benefits, no assistance. men are publicly acknowledged for their contributions. they are given plaques and awards; women just disappear. different treatment! another person – a man – was asked to leave and he got another position and retained his salary. there was a deafening silence when i left. it was uncomfortable. even friends could not really support me well – there was a climate of fear. study participants were asked about the level of personal and professional support received in their exit, with the women split on their responses regarding support. a former associate dean noted she did receive professional support: i received a good salary. i continued to have access to key administrators. i got incredible support for my promotion to full professor. i received incredible support from the dean and provost. my policy work weighed heavily in this promotion. on a personal level, i received no support. i never had a person ask: “how is this transition going?” when a different associate dean noted she received no support, she clarified by adding, no real professional or personal support. the problem is that i know don’t feel like i have personal referents. i fell that my administrative possibilities at this institution are over. i don’t know whom i can call for references. the former dean didn’t offer support at all. i feel that she lied. it feels bad to have no institutional support. in terms of personal support, most of the participants gave varying perceptions. former department chair nelson explained, my personal support was great. some of my friends thought that i was taking risks, but i don’t think that they worried about me. they knew that i was on a mission to improve my personal life (and my professional one at the same time). i hope that they missed me as a friend and colleague. it was hard not being in the same building anymore. it really was starting a new life. former department chair garza said, i really didn’t need much support. i had strong women around me – my mentors – they supported me. my partner, she supported me. i didn’t rely on the university community for support – i have never gotten my personal needs met at work. traditionally, i don’t look to people at work to fulfill me on a personal level. i have around five good friends within the institutional community; they are my support, but other than that i don’t look to people at work to support me. if i did, i think i would be disappointed. i went through a depression after i left administration, i couldn’t talk to many people about this – i felt the loss, both professionally and personally. back to faculty: transition and transformation the former female administrators were asked about their revived faculty appointments and the process of moving back to that position. when asked about settling in, most of these women defined their positions as renewing their teaching, developing courses, and advising students. all noted the transition was difficult, described, in part, as the following: when i went back to faculty, i realized that my life was pretty shallow. i had made work my life – i am just now learning to diversity my life. it is difficult, because my tendency is to work, work, work. now i have to learn to re-create parts of my life and figure out what i like to do again. i maintained a low profile. i read lots of poetry and re-evaluated my networks on a national campus level. i focused more on students. i purposely stayed away and worked more at home – i was not as visible. it’s difficult to transition and settle in when people always ask, “what are you doing now?” people are still confused about my status. i have not settled into my new position. i am held suspect as to why i left. age plays a part. men are looked at as seasoned professionals; women are looked at as old horses. when you are women, a woman of color, an older woman, one that speaks her mind and tells the truth, problems arise. the transition was difficult. because i was one of the first full-time faculty members to relocate away form the home campus, people didn’t know what to expect. they didn’t understand about the roles and responsibilities of faculty members and wanted to treat me like a staff member (e.g., wondered why i wasn’t clocking in as they had to or keeping an open appointment book for all to schedule). it was hard to do my job without a computer, bookshelves, etc. for the first few months. the staff members thought that i was being difficult to work with; i thought i had moved to hell. after one semester, i asked to relocate to a different office where the staff members were more comfortable with faculty folk. this turned out to be life saving for me. however difficult the transition, the women’s comments and perspectives were generally positive in nature upon final reflection of their new lives. a former associate dean exclaimed, “life is better.” a different woman said, “i am much happier, more relaxed, doing things i have never had time to do.” former associate dean wright noted, given that i have more freedom form pressure, i have been able to pursue creativity avenues. i wasn’t able to do that before. i have deepened my personal and spiritual life, redefined who i was beyond my professional positions. it happened to me 10 years away from retirement, so i got in touch with the fact that i was driven and unhealthily focused. now my life is more whole, healthy, and enjoyable. i know myself better. there is now no pressure of carrying the female gender on my back. former director hernandez pointed out, it has given me time to reflect on what’s important to me – the value of people in my life. i have also learned to reaffirm who i am as a good manager and leader, acknowledging my strengths. women need to reaffirm their belief system. former department chair garza, who had many differences in opinion and philosophy from her dean, explained, i spend more time in contemplative work. i am not so rushed or stressed. i have time to be to myself, and i am learning to reconnect with personal interests and i am making new friends. i am learning that work does not need to consume all aspects of my life. this has been a tough lesson for me to learn. i have been forced to question myself and ask, “why did i allow administration to define me so narrowly? why did i make it my life when my exit was a whimper?” all of the women expressed their appreciation for an opportunity to discuss their transitions from administration to faculty. one female noted the institution needed a support group for people in transition – a thoughtful comment considering most of the women expressed limited professional support and advocacy upon exit. one woman wanted to make sure people reading the interview data would not leave with all negative thoughts. she stressed, women should be administrators. you can impact a lot of people and can make considerably more money. your influence is for the good. women have to be in administration to do what needs to be done. and the fact is that women hire more women and minorities when they are in administration. women can take care of other women. without female administrators, the power of the female voice is lost in the work environment. discussion and reflections although men leave administration and return to faculty too, the added dimension of women in the male-dominant field of higher education leadership invites the examination of women’s forced or chosen exit from administration – a level of employment that took years to gain. some attention has been given to corporate attrition and women leaving positions of power and leadership in business and industry. while no singular reason dominates this literature, common themes appear in terms of a hostile and inflexible work environment where marital and family responsibilities conflict with high level positions (rosin & korabik, 1990). as reasons why women left senior management jobs, marshall (1994) found reoccurring stories of lack of control, negative work challenges, and re-evaluation of worth and values. the voices of the women in this study in many ways mirror the perceptions and feelings of women leaders in business and industry. from the selected theoretical lens, the exit of women from educational industry correlates to women’s career development lifespan and those choices and decisions made in mid-career stages. although there is some discussion that women’s development is different from men and women’s developmental patters are more individualized, there is general agreement that mid-career changes allow for reappraisal of the past, continued search for meaning in life, and examination of individual integrity while moving away from an intensive work identity (kram, 1985; super, 1977, 1980). although the why and how these women exited their administrative positions, as well as the degree of input to their leaving, may have determined their feelings, these women’s comments reflect developmental tasks of mid-career decisions (super, 1977, 1980). the final clarity of administrative position versus self in the leaving process (conflict of philosophy, integrity, or ethics) helped the women realize a major adjustment from leader to faculty member would be necessary (brooks, 2001). although the emotions described by these former female administrators are complex, multi-layered emotions demonstrable in women’s adjustment to their exit and transition are common themes in women’s mid-career development (schlossberg, 1984; zunker, 2002). most of the women in the study expressed negative feelings and shared discomforting experiences surrounding their leaving administration. while the exit of women from administration may be uncomfortable and negative, there are implications and possibilities women and institutions need to explore. treiman (1993) told us women’s departure might not be pretty when she poignantly stated, a women’s path to a top level post of the most hallowed, traditional, authoritative place in the intellectual world, is not doubt a unique one. conversations are fraught with disillusionment, mystery, misunderstanding and a sense of betrayal. they turn to whispers when women share intimate pain, stories are told of silent footsteps as leave takings, turning of backs and a quiet tip-toeing away into the darkness of vague things behind the well. (p. 176-177) although the women gave varied perceptions of support, it was clear they felt professional and personal support was or would have been important. this correlates to the career development concept of coping strategies during mid-career transition. in discussing treatment in comparison to male colleagues, the women made statements similarly supported in the literature: “many women are unaware of the pervasiveness and subtlety of gender discrimination in the academy or how their experiences compares with that of their male and female peers” (carli, 1998, p. 278-279). some researchers have documented women’s lower feelings of entitlement due to lower expectations and lack of awareness and information (carli, 1998). women’s resentment of perceptions of “…inequitable treatment or unreasonable behavior by senior male colleagues” is well documented by females in professions outside of education (becher, 1999, p. 133). although some of the study participants were married with children, none of the women noted the demands of work and family in their perceptions of their exit from administration. further interview data regarding balancing of work and home would be necessary to ascertain if marital status and children had any direct impact on these women’s administrative careers and their exit and return to faculty. for this study, a higher percentage of hispanic women were interviewed. this does not reflect the demographic profile of women of color either in faculty ranks or professional or managerial positions in the united states (see costello, wight, & stone, 2003). gender barriers continue to permeate higher education, and the added distinction of being a woman of color in administration contributes an additional disadvantage to females in leadership positions. however, women’s perceptions and experiences in this study were not tied specifically to ethnicity. more questions aimed at understanding female administrators’ experiences based on race would be required to determine if this factor were contributory to women’s perceptions of leaving administration and returning to faculty. conclusions given there are fewer women in administrative ranks at the university level, the institutional community needs to understand the experiences of women leaving administration, and exit interviews would be a good start in gathering information to assist women. as these women plan for changes in their professional lives, higher education institutions can make vital contributions toward women’s transition back to faculty by implementing initiatives that allow for internal support systems. one of the study participants noted the need for a support group, and higher education should examine such initiatives. when females leave administrative positions, they often find themselves forgotten or lost in the academy. they are no longer part of administration nor are they readily re-inculcated to faculty culture. their voices become muted or silenced; their professional frameworks change over night. one day they are administrators; the next day they find themselves sitting in smaller faculty offices focusing on teaching courses again and revitalizing old research agenda. mapping out new careers and lives becomes urgent. because women’s voices after they have left administration are rarely head, this study encourages listening to the stories of former female administrators. women’s voices need to be heard, and these voices need to inform the university as a whole how to assist women as they transition out of administrative positions and back to faculty. this study raises the issue that further mentoring is needed for women as they enter, maintain, and exit university administrative positions and return to faculty positions, coming full circle. references becher, t. 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(2001). women in higher education, 10(12), 1-5. retrieved june 30, 2004, from rds contemporary women’s issues database http://rdsweb1.rdsinc.com zunker, v. g. (2002). career counseling: applied concepts of life planning. pacific grove, ca: brooks/cole. gaye luna, ed.d., professor department of educational leadership college of education northern arizona university-west maricopa catherine medina, ph.d., associate professor http://rdsweb1.rdsinc.com/ department of educational specialties college of education northern arizona university-flagstaff nau west maricopa 9401 w. thunderbird plaza de rio, suite 150 peoria, az 85381 602-776-4654 copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 23, spring 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] the role of forgiveness in the leadership practices of women leaders in higher education beverlyn e. grace-odeleye and bramwell osula abstract this study examined the use of interpersonal forgiveness in the leadership practices of women leaders in higher education. six women, with senior level administrative positions in a large public university, were interviewed and asked a range of questions regarding their use of forgiveness in leadership practices. responses from participants were grouped together using cross-case analysis to discover meaning and interpreting themes. the interview guide sought to elicit a common definition of forgiveness, examined the use of forgiveness, and identified steps in the process of forgiveness in leadership practices. the evidence is that the participants in the study defined forgiveness as choosing and making a decision to reduce negative thoughts, such as blame and anger. recognizing the problem, identifying the nature of the problem, and addressing the problem were identified as key steps in the process of forgiveness. growth producing experiences and improved relationships are cited as additional benefits. working through conflict in a positive manner is a primary reason that the women studied utilized forgiveness in their leadership practices. modeling the behavior and mentoring others are additional approaches used to demonstrate the purpose and meaning of forgiveness. all participants identified mentoring as an important relationship and described a mentor as one who exhibited and used some aspect of the principles of forgiveness in their leadership practices. additionally, females were said to utilize forgiveness more often than males. the reason given for this was that females are seen as being more interested in maintaining relationships than are men. the study also provides some general insights into actions and behaviors associated with the exercise of forgiveness in leadership practices within the workplace. the role of forgiveness in the leadership practices of women leaders in higher education while there is an abundance of research on forgiveness and women leadership practices (butler, 1997; enright, eastin, golden, sarinopoulos, & freedman, 1992; helgesen, 1990; mccullough & worthington, 1994b), few studies have examined the specific use of forgiveness in the leadership practices of women leaders. recently, specific theoretical principles of forgiveness have been applied to conflict resolution and to the restoration of relationships in organizational leadership practices (butler, 1997; enright, gassin, file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm longinovic, loudon, 1994; levin, 1992; nelson, 1992). according to bradfield, aquino, and stanwyck (1997), forgiveness is another response to organizational conflict and restoration of relationships. given the problematic nature of revenge, forgiveness may be a significant alternative to holding onto one's anger, or acting on one's anger in an organizational leadership environment ( butler , 1997). forgiveness offers an avenue to reconcile individuals who are experiencing the bitterness of interpersonal hurts and injustices (mccullough & worthington, 1994a). little attention has been given to the individual characteristics of leaders who employ forgiveness in response to conflict in the workplace (butler, 1997; mccullough & worthington, 1994a), thus using forgiveness as a strategic leadership practice. as leadership paradigms are re-examined, it is becoming clear that leadership is inherently complex (burns, 1978; gatteau, 2000). some researchers argue that some aspects of female leadership are not only unique, but also better than traditional male-dominated models of human development (bales, 2000; belenky, clinchy, goldberger, & tarule, 1986; gilligan, 1982). in contrast to traditional leadership behaviors, some researchers assert that women leaders bring greater benefits to organizations than men in the leadership practices exhibited (bales, 2000; gatteau, 2000). according to billing and alvesson (1993), "women look at problems in a different way. they can point to different models for solving problems. they also have intuition" (p. 130). women also tend to focus on care and concern for others, building relationships, and communicating and resolving conflicts (belenky, et al., 1986; gilligan, 1982). similarly, gilligan (1982) and mccullough and worthington (1994b) proposed that forgiveness principles may be used as a problem solving strategy in organizational leadership practices. therefore, it is implied that women may tend to use forgiveness as a problem solving strategy. the relationship between forgiveness and women's leadership practices remains largely unexplored. this study expands our understanding of this relationship by exploring and describing the use of forgiveness in the leadership practices of women leaders in higher education. methodology this paper is based on research using a qualitative case study research design to examine and describe the relationship between forgiveness and leadership practices. the study subjects were selected from a large public university using the following criteria: (a) a minimum of 20 years of experience in higher education, (b) supervisory experience, (c) history of extensive committee work, (d) high visibility as leaders within the institution, and (e) high level of professionalism and administrative contributions to the university community. merriam (1998) suggests that a case study methodology is appropriate when researchers are interested in "insight, and interpretation rather than hypothesis testing" (p. 29). the interview questionnaire consisted of fourteen questions conducted for the first interview, lasting approximately 1 hour, and eleven questions conducted for the second interview, lasting 30 to 45 minutes (see appendix a). each respondent was instructed to provide answers strictly from personal experience and work-related applications to the research questions. three interview techniques were used: retrospective, structured, and semi-structured, as outlined by fraenkel and wallen (1996). these techniques proved useful in collecting evidence of past actions taken by the six subjects when utilizing the principles of forgiveness in leadership practices. the subjects reflected and responded to the interview questions based on their past leadership experiences and practices. defining forgiveness prior to 1980, there were relatively few studies of forgiveness within psychology or other social sciences. one reason for this is that forgiveness has traditionally been associated with religion and philosophy (enright, eastin, et al., 1992; mccullough & worthington, 1995; pingleton, 1997). while the concept of forgiveness is accepted and practiced in the fields of psychology and the practice of psychotherapy, there is still some confusion or inconsistencies as to the definition(s) of forgiveness (enright, eastin, et al., 1992). in addition, the diversity of definitions has made it difficult to arrive at a common understanding of the practices associated with forgiveness and application of the term to leadership practices (enright, eastin, et al., 1992; mccullough & worthington, 1994b; mccullough, worthington, & rachal, 1997). denton & martin (1998) identified forgiveness as an inner process which, without the request of the other, releases negative feelings and no longer seeks to return hurt. this process is said to bring physical, psychological, and emotional benefits. ferch (1996) defined forgiveness as ceasing to feel angry or resentful toward someone. forgiveness has also been defined as releasing resentment toward an offender (hargrave, 1994); an emotive change away from anger with behavioral and cognitive components (brandsma, 1982); abandoning negative and increasing positive thoughts, feelings, and behavior toward the offender (gassin & enright, 1995); giving up the right to hurt the offender (pingleton, 1997); not retaliating and wishing the offender well (rosenak & harnden, 1992); willingly pardoning without demanding restitution (wahking,1992); and, anecdotally, as a way of life (jones-haldeman, 1992). leadership and forgiveness although a few general models of leadership theory (e.g. transformational, psychological, and trait theories) have been proposed and studied, no single theory fully explains the inherent complexities of the leadership framework. two studies, using extrapolations from psychological, theological, and counseling research, suggested a direct correlation between the uses of forgiveness in leadership practices. nelson (2001) suggested strategies for utilizing forgiveness in leadership practices. forgiveness results in freedom for the forgiver. "whether or not you discuss the issue with your colleague, you become free from resentment," which is painful (p. 8). the leader provides guidance and direction for others. when, as a leader, you forgive, you implicitly establish a climate of compassion, a place where everyone feels free to try new things, make mistakes and relax. if others know that you utilize forgiveness in your leadership practices this reassures people that they can come to you as the leader with problems, challenges and mistakes. (nelson, 2001, p. 8) the leadership lesson of forgiveness simply "offers us all a way to learn from and move on" (p. 9). huggins (2000) described six leadership strategies for cultivating forgiveness as follows: • acknowledge and ask forgiveness for wrongdoings as soon as they are brought to your attention. regularly acknowledging our own failures and asking others for forgiveness are the only ways we can retain the moral authority and respect to lead others. • never grant yourself the privilege to withhold forgiveness or hold onto resentments toward anyone who has wronged you, no matter how private it may be. • use your teaching and example to build an environment among your people that makes it safe for them to talk honestly about their struggles and seek help. by our teaching and example we [leaders] create for our people either a shame-based environment or a grace-based environment. • when offenses occur among your people show them how they can use forgiveness in tangible ways to help each other experience redemption and restoration. every time an offense occurs in our community, it is one of the greatest avenues we have for mentoring others. it provides opportunity to deal with the psychological and theological problems in our people's hearts. • never turn a blind eye toward any wrongdoing going on among your people, no matter how much conflict it may create. • train people in your organization, who have made the forgiveness journey themselves, to be ready and available to act as guides for others who are having trouble forgiving. every community needs a team like this in order to experience widespread forgiveness by each other. the need for forgiveness work among any group of people is too extensive for any leader to manage. equipping others to help in this work must always be a priority. (p. 14-16) findings the women, each of whom had a minimum of 20 years of experience in higher education, had been selected on the basis of their (a) supervisory experiences, (b) history of extensive committee work, (c) high visibility as leaders within the institution, and (d) high level of professionalism and contributions to the university community. information, such as departmental unit, positional level or title, years employed at a large public university, ethnicity, or age, was not reported to protect the identity and maintain the confidentiality of the participants. the findings are organized into five distinct categories designed to clearly define the association and application of forgiveness in leadership practices. the five categories are (a) definitions of forgiveness, (b) practical principles of forgiveness, (c) forgiveness as an enhancement of workplace environment, (d) inspiring others to utilize the principles of forgiveness, and (e) other findings. definitions of forgiveness as the participants in the study responded to the questions related to thoughts and definitions of forgiveness, common themes emerged. four participants indicated that when they hear the term forgiveness they think of compassion, moving forward, reestablishing broken relationships, and making a decision to reduce negative thoughts, such as blame and anger. the remaining two participants said that their thoughts gravitated to the divine when they entertained thoughts of forgiveness. one woman described her thoughts on forgiveness in terms of god "forgiving us for our sins. god would not forgive us if we are unforgiving of others" (participant 2). the other participant viewed forgiveness as "coming from a divine place, forgiving others is a case of divine forgiveness as god forgiving us and ultimately feeling a sense of goodness" (participant 6). four participants identified compassion and moving forward as the key themes associated with the term forgiveness. one stated, "when i hear the term forgiveness, i think of compassion and the ability to move on regardless of what happened in the relationship" (participant 1). another participant commented, "when i hear the word forgiveness, i think of having compassion for others; understanding and mutual respect, and moving forward" (participant 3). a third participant echoed the same thoughts, "when i hear the term forgiveness, i think of compassion, letting go, being free from anger and retaliation and moving forward" (participant 4). finally, participant five stated, "when i think of forgiveness, i think of moving on with the situation, reestablishing a connection that may have been broken" (participant 5). one participant stated, "i think of god's divine intervention and love and the compassion shown for us by his forgiving us of our sins" (participant 2). in addition, another participant reflected, "when i think about forgiveness, i think that the motivation to forgive comes from a divine place, therefore a feeling of goodness comes from the action along with relief and resolution" (participant 6). the significance of spirituality and/or religious themes and motivations in the responses of the participants is perhaps worth studying in more detail. the religious thrust of the many of the participants' associations with forgiveness is possibly related to the religious convictions of the individual participants and would be worth testing in a comparative attitudinal study, perhaps looking at expressions of forgiveness in "sacred" and "secular" communities. however, such a study fell outside the scope of the present study. beyond the religious connotations reflected in many of the responses, other themes were expressed. the ability to release or "letting go" was an important one. in this sense, forgiveness was seen as a form of cathartic release. as one participant stated, "i define forgiveness as the ability to let go of anger and hurt, even if the other person doesn't apologize" (participant 1). another reflected, i define forgiveness as loving a person enough to let go [of anger]. when they hurt you, you love them enough to pray for them and be able to move on. sometimes that means you move forward in a positive relationship, and sometimes it means you move forward without the other person because they can't get past it [anger]. (participant 2) participant 3 stated, "i define forgiveness as letting go of the hurt and anger toward someone who has hurt you" (participant 3). finally, participant 4 stated, i define forgiveness as letting go of the anger and moving forward. it [forgiveness] is the strengthening of relationships that would otherwise be damaged and forgiveness is the only thing that enables human beings to stay in relationships with each other for very long and work together. in summary, analysis of the data revealed several recurrent themes among the participants. four out of six participants had thoughts of compassion and moving forward to the reestablishment of broken relationships. the data also revealed several themes among the participants' definitions of forgiveness. four participants defined forgiveness as choosing to make a decision to reduce negative thoughts, such as blame and anger. table 1 outlines the emergent themes found among the six participants. table 1 thoughts and definitions of forgiveness concepts themes frequency hearing the term forgiveness compassion moving forward 4 definitions of forgiveness release of negative emotions 4 practical principles of forgiveness when asked how they identified forgiveness in their leadership practices, five participants described being able to move beyond anger and reestablish a relationship with the offender. additionally, one participant cited giving the offender another chance. five participants identified forgiveness in their leadership practices by continuing to work with others they perceived to have offended them. participant 1 emphasized, i know that i am using forgiveness in my leadership practice when i am hurt by someone and i can continue working with him again without the anger. i can forgive myself and move beyond the hurt and resentment and move forward with forgiveness and a positive relationship. similarly, another participant stated, "i am using forgiveness in my leadership practices when i am able to work in a positive way with someone who has hurt me and i am able to move beyond the anger" (participant 3). participant 2 furthered commented, i use forgiveness when i move forward by reconnecting with the other person and whatever project we are working on. i must have been successful because several people have told me that i have a positive leadership style and that i work well with others. one participant asserted, "i am using forgiveness when there has been a conflict or an issue that has arisen that creates conflict or hard feelings, you decide that you have to move on and don't hang on to that [hurt]" (participant 5). another participant agreed, "i am using forgiveness when i can move on and don't hang on to the anger" (participant 4). when the women were asked to describe the forgiveness process and the steps that occur in this process, threads of similarity emerged. all six women agreed that the steps in the process should include recognition of the problem, identification of the nature of the problem, and addressing the problem. participant 6 described her approach extensively: the forgiveness process is a set of conditions existing within a unit when the leader has the respect of her/his staff, models fairness and understanding, and empowers staff through a mutual agreement of how the unit operates. steps involved in the forgiveness process to me are: • recognizing there is a problem • assessing the nature of the problem • determining who is involved • notifying those involved in the problem • requesting assessment of problem from all involved • discussing the problem and its ramifications (not the people but the problem) • discussing how the problem can be avoided in the future • creating an environment that will allow those involved to take responsibility and make apologies for the situation • developing necessary mechanism(s) to decrease the likelihood of a reoccurrence of the situation (i.e. policy, staff activity, staff development project, etc.). (participant 6) an analysis of the data revealed several themes. five participants identified the use of forgiveness as moving beyond the anger in order to reestablish relationships. all six participants stated that they utilized forgiveness by allowing others to make mistakes and understanding lessons learned from making mistakes. five participants identified working through conflict in a positive manner as the reason they utilized forgiveness in their leadership practices. all six participants described situations in which they demonstrated forgiveness in their leadership practices by extending forgiveness in different contexts and situations. four participants stated that they forgave others when it was necessary and warranted and when the same mistake had not been repeated. three participants identified the circumstances under which they first utilized forgiveness in their leadership practices as working through issues. finally, all six participants described the forgiveness steps and process as recognition of a problem, identification of the nature of the problem, and addressing the problem with the other person. table 2 outlines the practical themes found among the participants. table 2 practical principles of forgiveness concepts themes frequency identifying forgiveness moving beyond anger re-establishing relationships 5 how do you utilize forgiveness allowing mistakes lessons learned 6 why do you utilize forgiveness working through conflict in a positive manner 5 demonstrated the use of forgiveness extended forgiveness in different contexts and situations 6 forgiveness and under what circumstances necessary and warranted mistake not repeated 4 first time using forgiveness extending forgiveness by working through issues 3 steps in the forgiveness process recognizing problem identifying nature of problem 6 addressing problem enhancement of workplace environment when asked how they would describe their feelings or reactions to the subject of forgiveness, five participants described feelings of relief and an understanding that relationships could be influenced in a positive way. the final participant described being angry with herself because she let the situation get out of control. participant 6 summed up her feelings thus: • relief that a problem has been resolved; • improved understanding of how another operates; • strengthening of existing bond; • misunderstanding of forgiver as weak or someone who can be gotten over on; • improved growth and development of a staff person. when asked about the benefits of forgiveness, two principal themes emerged. these were a growthproducing experience and the improvement of relationships. five participants expressed painful growth producing experiences and improved relationships. the remaining participant commented that holding on to anger inhibits a leader's ability to practice leadership. the following statements are representative of the descriptions received from all five participants: forgiveness allows me to grow as a person, and as a professional you learn from painful experiences and therefore, you have to let go and move forward. you cannot remain in the anger because it takes a lot of energy. i think when forgiveness comes i make a decision to move forward with an improved relationship. (participant 1) participant 2 made a related comment, "forgiveness allows me to once again have hope in the human race. forgiveness involves experiencing hurt and anger. in order to move forward in an improved relationship, i must use forgiveness." participants 3 and 4 reflected similar thoughts concerning the benefits of forgiveness. "forgiveness allows me to learn from some pretty bad experiences and move forward to what you hope is an improved relationship with the other person. i could not be an effective leader without forgiveness because it makes me a better person" (participant 3). similarly, participant 4 stated, with forgiveness, i am a better person and a more effective leader, who is seen as human. i am also seen as a person who has learned from my experiences, i have learned from them to move forward by becoming a better person and with improved future relationships. participant 6 offered this insight, the primary benefit for me is growth producing because i learn from the experiences. in addition, it [forgiveness] is growth producing for the other person because he/she leaves the experience with an understanding of what forgiveness is because you have forgiven him/her. this person learns from this process and thus, will leave with some understanding of leadership. when asked how the utilization of forgiveness impacted their university, five women identified positive working relationships as a theme. one woman stated that the impact of utilizing forgiveness allowed her to accomplish things that would not have been accomplished before (participant 5). analysis of the data revealed several themes among the participants in terms of their personal enhancement and impact on workplace environment. five out of six participants described release from anger and development of understanding that they said impacted relationships in a positive way as a feeling associated with forgiveness. the data also revealed that growth producing experiences and improved relationships emerged as common themes among five of the participants. five participants identified positive overall working relationships that teach others as a theme that impacted their university in a positive way. table 3 outlines the emergent enhancement of workplace environment themes found among the six participants. table 3 enhancement of workplace environment concepts themes frequency feelings/reactions associated with forgiveness benefits of forgiveness impact on university relief from anger understanding impacts relationships in positive ways growth producing experiences improved working relationships positive overall working relationships teach others 5 5 5 inspiring others to utilize the principles of forgiveness when asked how they demonstrated to others the purpose and meaning of forgiveness, all six participants described leading by example. additionally, all six participants identified modeling the behavior and mentoring others as important approaches used to demonstrate the purpose and meaning of forgiveness. when asked what actions they had taken to set personal examples of utilizing forgiveness, modeling the behavior by demonstrating forgiveness emerged as a similar theme. all six participants demonstrated forgiveness through their actions. the following statements are representative of all six participants. i model the appropriate behavior in situations where the staff will have the opportunity to observe me extending forgiveness to others. there have been some situations where i have been angry, but i try to control the anger and work through the situation, especially where the staff is concerned. this may mean that it may take me a day or two, and in one situation, it took me two weeks. (participant 1) when asked what they would say in teaching someone about forgiveness, release of hurt, anger, and resentment; moving forward; and personal growth emerged as themes for five out of six of these women. one participant offered, forgiveness is giving others a second chance since we are in the business of developing students. you are able to release hurt feelings and resentment. forgiveness is a process of moving forward and learning from your mistakes, and you become a better person. (participant 4) participant 6 concurred, "forgiveness is a benefit. you learn from your mistakes through personal and professional growth and development. i think forgiveness becomes an asset to organizational efficiency when it is utilized in leadership practices." final analysis of the data revealed two themes among these participants when demonstrating to others the purpose and meaning of forgiveness. all participants identified modeling the behavior and mentoring others as approaches used to demonstrate the purpose and meaning of forgiveness. the data also revealed modeling the behavior as a recurrent theme among five of the participants in setting a personal examples. encouraging others to extend forgiveness by working through conflict emerged as a similar theme for all six participants when asked what actions they had taken to enlist the support and participation of others in utilizing forgiveness in resolving conflict. for five participants, release of hurt, anger, and resentment; moving forward; and personal growth emerged as themes that would be utilized if they were asked to teach someone about forgiveness. table 3 inspiring others to utilize principles of forgiveness concepts themes frequency demonstrated and articulated to others the purpose and meaning modeling the behavior mentoring others 6 setting personal example actions taken to enlist support challenged others to test own modeling behavior by demonstrating forgiveness working through conflict by extending forgiveness similar approaches in different 5 6 3 choice to forgive actions taken to help understand and establish forgiveness teaching about forgiveness contexts encouragement to continue working with others release of hurt/anger/resentment moving forward personal growth 3 5 other findings analysis of the data revealed two emergent themes among these participants when asked to describe some of the disadvantages of utilizing forgiveness. all six participants believed that others may perceive the use of forgiveness as a weakness. in this context, knowing when and presumably when not to utilize forgiveness emerged as important themes. the data also revealed that all six participants strongly believed that the forgiveness process was applicable to other non-academic work environments. the data also revealed that four out of six participants identified biblical and moral themes when articulating their concept of forgiveness. in other words, these participants utilized forgiveness because they believed either that it was morally right or biblically based. further, all participants identified having a mentor as important when identifying a person who utilized forgiveness. in addition, the data revealed that five out of six participants, when asked how they learned to utilize forgiveness, identified learning from mentors as critical. five out of six participants, when ask if females utilized forgiveness more than males, said yes. the articulation was that females utilized forgiveness more than males because women were felt to be more interested in maintaining relationships. finally, when asked if there were other issue(s) related to forgiveness that they would like to mention, four out of six participants maintained that forgiveness should be utilized in leadership practices. table 5 outlines the other emergent themes found among the six participants. table 5 other findings concepts themes frequency disadvantages of utilizing forgivenessperceived as a weakness when to use forgiveness 6 forgiveness utilized in other environments applicable to all work environments 6 biblical based or morally right biblical based therefore morally right 4 identify person utilizing forgiveness a mentor 6 learn to utilize forgiveness from mentors 5 females utilize forgiveness females more than males because of maintaining relationships 5 other findings forgiveness usage in leadership practices 4 conclusions the major conclusions of this study are: • women define forgiveness as choosing and making decisions to reduce negative thoughts such as blame and anger. this finding is congruent with previous research by denton and martin (1998). although these women defined forgiveness as making a decision to reduce negative thoughts, caution should be used when generalizing about forgiveness being defined in leadership practices as cited because a consistent definition of forgiveness is not reflected in the literature (enright, eastin, et al., 1992). • recognizing the problem, identifying the nature of the problem, and addressing the problem are important steps in the process of forgiveness. this finding is congruent with other previous research (enright and the human development study group, 1991; mccullough, & worthington, 1995; mccullough, worthington, & rachal, 1997). • growth producing experiences and improved relationships were cited most often as benefits of utilizing forgiveness. this conclusion is supported by previous research models on the stages of forgiveness (butler, 1997; fitzgibbons, 1986; freedman & enright, 1996; mccullough & worthington, 1994a). additionally, christ (1994) concluded, "personal growth comes from self-knowledge and from learning how selfknowledge affects actions and relationships" (p. 133). • all participants identified a mentor as a person who utilized forgiveness, and observing mentors is cited as how the participants learned to utilize forgiveness. this finding mirrored the conclusions of other studies on mentoring (chliwniak, 1997; graumann & moscovici, 1986; kanter, 1977; kram, 1985). participants, when asked if females utilized forgiveness in their leadership practices more than males, believed that females utilized forgiveness more because females were interested in maintaining relationships. this finding is similar to that reached in previous research (bales, 2000; 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(1992). a new theory of forgiveness . unpublished doctoral dissertation, purdue university , west lafayette , indiana . pingleton, j. p. (1997). why we don't forgive: a biblical and object relations theoretical model for understanding failures in the forgiveness process. journal of psychology and theology, 25 (4), 403-413. rosenak, c. m., & harnden, g. m. (1992). forgiveness in the psychotherapeutic process: clinical applications. journal of psychology and christianity, 11 (3), 188-197. wahking, h. (1992). spiritual growth through forgiveness. journal of psychology and christianity, 11 , 198206. appendix a interview guide #1 1. when you hear the term "forgiveness," what thoughts come to mind? 2. how do you define "forgiveness"? 3. how do you identify forgiveness in your leadership practices? 4. how do you utilize forgiveness in your leadership practices? 5. why do you utilize forgiveness in your leadership practices? 6. describe a situation in the past month or so in which you demonstrated the use of forgiveness in your leadership practices? 7. when do you forgive and under what circumstances do you forgive? 8. think about the first time you utilized the process of forgiveness in your leadership practices. 1. briefly describe the context in which the forgiveness process occurred. 2. how did the other person(s) respond to your forgiveness practice? 9. how would you describe the forgiveness process and the steps that occur in the process? 10. how would you describe the feelings or reactions associated with forgiveness? 11. how do you describe the benefits of forgiveness in your leadership practices? 12. in what ways do you think the utilization of forgiveness in your leadership practices impacts the university? 13. do you think the process of forgiveness that you utilize in this environment (higher educational institution) can be used in other environments (for example in a hospital or business environment)? 14. do you utilize forgiveness in your leadership practices because it is morally right, or is it biblical based? interview guide #2 1. identify a person whom you judge to utilize forgiveness in their leadership practices? 2. how did you learn to utilize forgiveness in your leadership practices? 3. how have you demonstrated and articulated to others the purpose and meaning of forgiveness in your leadership practices? 4. as a leader, what actions have you taken to set personal examples for utilizing forgiveness for those you are leading? 5. what actions have you taken to enlist the support and participation of others in utilizing forgiveness in resolving conflict? 6. describe a time when you challenged others to test their own choice to forgive in their leadership practices. 7. what actions have you taken to help others to understand and establish the practice of forgiveness? 8. if you were going to teach someone about the forgiveness process, what would you share? 9. how would describe some of the disadvantages of utilizing forgiveness in your leadership practices? 10. in your opinion, do you think females use forgiveness in their leadership more than males? 11. is there any other issue related to forgiveness that you would like to address at this time? copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html 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................................................................................................................................. 29 hispanic female superintendents in america: a profile ......................................................................................30 introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 30 theoretical framework ................................................................................................................................. 31 methods and procedures ............................................................................................................................... 31 results ........................................................................................................................................................... 32 discussion ..................................................................................................................................................... 33 references ..................................................................................................................................................... 36 pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 27 preface advancing women in leadership on-line journal was launched in 1997 with the intent of publishing manuscripts that report, synthesize, review, or analyze scholarly inquiry that focuses on women's issues. the intent of this journal is to encourage and support the proliferation of women in positions of leadership in all aspects of professional and corporate america. in the encouragement of advancing women in leadership, we present the following manuscripts. they are: women faculty in higher education: impeded by academe by dr. dana e. christman working against the grain: rewards and consequences of developing a personal voice in academia by dr. pamela lepage and dr. gretchen givens-generett creating space for subjectivity: wandering discourses of female/teacher by dr. donna k. phillips and dr. j.camille cammack. magazines: what adolescent girls are reading and the way they shape body image by dr. rebecca a. robles-piña and heidi sauer a study of the correlation between the motives of female high self monitors and emergent leadership: a literature review by charles salter hispanic female superintendents in america: a profile by dr. margaret a. manuel and dr. john r. slate our intent is that this journal is viewed as a professional publication site for scholarly inquiry and perspectives that promote gender equity and advance women in leadership. it is our hope that you find this issue of advancing women in leadership thought provoking, enjoyable, and that you look forward to subsequent issues. suggestions for improvement, encouragement, and submission for upcoming issues are welcomed and appreciated. genevieve brown, ed.d. & beverly j. irby, ed.d. editors copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 28 credits publisher: gretchen glasscock ceo/president, advancingwomen.com editors: dr. genevieve brown dr. beverly irby sam houston state university assistant editor: danna ellington editorial review board dr. gypsy abbott university of alabama-birmingham dr. william m. alexander california polytechnic state university dr. gracia alkema president, corwin press, inc., a sage publication compnay dr. janice beal beal counseling associates dr. maenette benham michigan state university dr. c. cryss brunner university of wisconsin-madison dr. michelle collay bay area coalition for equitable schools dr. joanne cooper university of hawaii dr. geni cowan california state university-sacramento adrienne d. dixson north carolina state universtiy dr. claudia b. douglass central michigan university dr. p. kay duncan emporia state university dr. stacey edmonson sam houston state university dr. amy freeman lee national award-winning artist dr. carole funk sam houston state universtiy dr. minerva gorena ncela, the george washington university dr. marilyn grady university of nebraska-lincoln dr. sandra gupton university of southern mississippi dr. jean m. haar university of nebraska-lincoln dr. sandy harris stephen f. austin state university dr. kristy herbert, southern connecticut state university dr. sandra hollingsworth san jose state university dr. johnetta hudson university of north texas dr. janice hutchinson university of houston dr. janice koch hofstra university dr. rafael lara-alecio texas a& m university dr. sandra lowery stephen f. austin state university dr. ping liu california state university-long beach dr. robyn lock san fancisco state university dr. rosita marcano northern illinois university dr. patricia mathes university of texas-houston dr. linda orozco california state university-fullerton dr. rosemary papalewis california state university-sacramento dr. matteson pascal the meadows foundation, senior program officer dr. diane pollard university of wisconsin-milwaukee dr. barbara polnik sam houston state university dr. evelyn reid, clark atlanta university dr. becky ropers-huilman louisiana state university dr. isabel royo universidad iberoamericana, puebla, mexico dr. david sadker american university, author and distinguished educator dr. pam sandoval indiana university-northwest dr. jane strachan university of waikato, hamilton, new zealand dr. carole shakeshaft, hofstra university dr. sandra tonnsen university of south carolina dr. karen tonso wayne state university pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 29 rev. terry weber-rodriguez epworth-parker unithed methodist church, houston, texas dr. robert williams sam houston state university dr. rose lyn zanville president, lyn zanville, inc., leadership specialist ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- guest and past reviewers dr. joanne ardovini-brooker dr. joy carter dr. norvella carter maxine cooper dr. ken craycraft dr. sally craycraft dr. jo ann duffy dr. alice fisher dr. brigitta fringes dr. dashiel geyen dr. maxine greene ann halstead dr. jeanine hirtle dr. claudia iselt dr. patricia larke sharon lenhart dr. jim merchant margaree mithcell joy mullett deborah nyberg rocio pellezer dr. charol shakeshaft laurinda spear naomi tropp dr. pam zelbst dr. robin mcgrew-zoubi copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 30 advancing women in leadership fall 2003, pp. 30-36 available online at http:// https://awl-ojs-tamu.tdl.org/awl/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper hispanic female superintendents in america: a profile margaret a. manuel & john r. slate margaret a. manuel: special education teacher in the roanoke county schools, virginia john r. slate: visiting clinical professor, university of missouri, kansas city hispanic women superintendents represent a dual anomaly in traditional constructs of societal perceptions of school superintendents. introduction many school districts across the country are searching for competent leaders to head their school systems (henry, 2000; johnson, 1996). tingley (1996), bowler (2000), and czaja and harman (1997) reported a growing concern over the shortage of qualified applicants to lead the nation's school districts. fenwick (2000) stated that higher turnover rates, lower job appeal and a decreased number of candidates characterize the modern superintendency. as evidence, fenwick (2000) quoted aasa director paul houston as stating that, typically at any one time, interim superintendents hold 15% of superintendent positions. to compound the shortage problem, krantz (2000) projected that 80% of superintendents are nearing retirement age. the lack of leaders to lead the nation's school districts may be a crisis confronting the future of public education (henry, 2000). with concerns of where future leaders of the nation's school system will come from, the question arises: why aren't more women entering the ranks of the superintendency? with the pool of superintendent applicants shrinking, the lack of female superintendents should be a significant concern (brunner, 2000; grogan, 1994; keller, 1999; shakeshaft, 1995). education is a field dominated by women. seventy percent of teachers are women; however, the superintendency is a position heavily dominated by men. more males than females are currently employed as superintendents (ikpa, 1995; norton, webb, dlugosh, & sybouts, 1996; papalewis, 1995). female representation in the superintendency has fluctuated in the past 60 years, yet the number of female superintendents has not been equitable with the number of males. in 1928, 1.6% of the nation's superintendents were females. that percentage had only increased to 7.1% by 1993 (montenegro, 1993). today, females comprise a mere 12% of superintendents nationwide, whereas males constitute 88% of superintendents (hornbeck, 1999). the underrepresentation of women in the superintendency has prompted many researchers to investigate the reasons why more women are not superintendents (bjork, 2000). according to grogan (1994) and brunner (1998a), gender is a factor in why women are not represented more in the ranks of the superintendency. only in the past 20 years have women superintendents been studied (tallerico, 1999). grady and wesson (1994) claimed that a paucity of research exists on women superintendents because most of the research has been focused on male superintendents. more knowledge about how women attain the superintendency is needed (grogan, 1996). brunner (2000) stated that the investigation of women superintendents has been a "previously neglected" area of research (p. 76). issacson (1998) recommended that further research on career pathways of female superintendents was required in future studies. investigations into the way female superintendents gain their leadership positions are limited (hodgkinson & montenegro, 1999; vail, 1999). grogan (1996) stated that the superintendency is "not a particularly well-researched leadership position" (p. 119). johnson (1996) characterized the research on the superintendency as "scant" (p. 19). in addition, researchers need to address the salient factors that influence superintendent retention and recruitment (czaja & harman, 1997). chase and bell (1994) noted that several state departments of education, university departments of education, and some state legislatures have publicly identified the underrepresentation of females in the superintendency as a problem. however, jackson (1999) asserted that "to date no one has compiled accurate, complete, and dependable information on women superintendents" (p. 143). the effort to acquire information on women superintendents has been minimal (keller, 1999). unreliable statistics on women superintendents, coupled with advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 31 the small number of women in the superintendency, has deterred many interested researchers from investigating the female experience in the superintendency (kowalski & stouder, 1999). more disturbing than the overall inequity between male and female representation in the superintendency is the sparse numbers of minority women who reach superintendency positions. hansot and tyack (1982) reported that minorities, in general, seldom obtained positions as superintendents prior to the 1960s. bell and chase (1992) asserted that 96% of superintendents were white. in consideration of hispanic women, rarely are they appointed to the position of superintendent (ortiz, 1999). according to mendez-morse (1999), information on hispanic women superintendents is almost nonexistent and this lack of information has created a "serious deficiency" in the knowledge base of educational administration (p. 126). a little over 10 years ago, bell and chase (1992) endeavored to quantify female and minority representation in educational leadership positions across the united states. they reported a total of nine hispanic women serving as superintendents across the country (bell & chase, 1992). a recent publication by the american association of school administrators (aasa) described a national survey in which issues of career pathways and perceived barriers for women superintendents were examined. there were 2,262 respondents in the aasa study. of that total, 297 were women superintendents, and only four hispanic females contributed responses (glass, bjork, & brunner, 2000). a need exists to conduct research on larger samples because, as litwin (1995) suggested, reliability of research is increased through sampling larger numbers of a population. theoretical framework in their theoretical model of the career choices of college women, betz and fitzgerald (1987) postulated that a combination of independent and dependent variables influence the career paths of women. the model specifies factors that facilitate a "goodness-of-fit" between a woman and the woman's career success (p. 146). how the variables interact for women who ascend to the superintendency may be clarified and explained by using this framework. betz and fitzgerald (1987) identified four exogenous latent variables and five endogenous latent variables, which influence the plausibility of a woman's career choice. independent variables presented in the career choice model are the cultural and social environments that influence a woman's career achievement (betz & fitzgerald, 1987). positive cultural and social contexts provide a basis for a woman to develop affirmative attitudes toward career progression. work experience, academic success, perceived encouragement, and role models are the four independent variables. according to betz and fitzgerald (1987), the variables of work experience, academic success, role models, and perceived encouragement are precursors to and positive attitudinal formation of work, self and sex-role, and lifestyle choices consistent with achieving high level executive positions like that of the superintendency. in this study, our purpose was to determine the personal and professional experiences of hispanic females in their pathway to the superintendency. we were interested in ascertaining what work experiences, academic achievement, and lifestyle choices characterized their ascension to the superintendency. in addition, we were interested in the presence and gender of role models and mentors for these women. finally, we wanted to determine if the women felt differently in their perceptions of barriers for themselves, versus their perceptions of barriers for women, in general. methods and procedures participants participants in this study were 23 hispanic female superintendents of public school districts across the united states. the senior researcher generated a list of possible female superintendents from the 50 website addresses for the 50 state departments of education in the united states. state department of education websites were accessed and the researcher navigated the websites to obtain lists of public school districts and superintendents. once the list of superintendents was obtained, the researcher reviewed the list to ascertain which superintendents were possibly female. the following criteria were used to identify possible females: 1) the superintendent's name is traditionally considered a female name (e.g, betty, margaret, candace, etc.); 2) an initial was used as a first name without the title mr.; 3) the name had the title ms., mrs., or miss.; 4) the name is commonly used by either males or females (e.g, jerry, tony, gerry, marty, pat, terry, etc.). once the list of superintendents was reviewed based on the stated criteria, the senior researcher composed a comprehensive list of possible female superintendents and entered the names into an excel database. other issues related to the possible misidentification of superintendents as female when they are male was addressed in the data gathering process by providing a clear statement that only females should respond to the survey. also contained in the survey instrument was a question for respondents to designate whether they are male or female and to specify their ethnicity. women who selected hispanic as their ethnicity were extracted from the larger group of responses from all women who responded to the survey. thus, this study is a subsample of the larger set of female superintendents who responded to the survey. instrumentation and procedures superintendents who responded to the survey completed a 53item questionnaire to measure their responses to career pathways and perceived barriers to the superintendency. the questionnaire, designed to procure information on the career experiences and perceived barriers of female superintendents, was divided into seven sections. section one, items 1 to 7, addressed demographic information. a second section on educational background, items 8 to 12, presented several choices for the respondent to document the educational advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 32 experiences that pertain to her. items 13 to 26, in the third section asked respondents to indicate their career paths to the superintendency. items 27 to 31, comprised the fourth section and contained questions about mentors and role-models. lifestyle choices were covered in the fifth section of the questionnaire. respondents delineated their marital status, history, and parental status. the sixth section consisted of five questions regarding school board/superintendent relations. a final section, items 42 to 53, contained two four-point likert scales, with responses from "important" to "don't know", to ascertain the level to which women believed the barriers precluded a woman's ascension to the superintendency, in general, and the level to which they believed the barriers hindered their own ascension to the superintendency. results descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data, including frequency distributions and percentages. frequencies and percentages of hispanic female superintendents responses to the survey items were calculated according to personal demographic information, district information, educational experiences, career pathways, and perceptions of barriers. readers are referred to tables 1 to 13 for the women's responses in frequencies and percentages to the survey items. demographics personal information on hispanic female superintendents included the following: geographical location, age, marital status, number of marriages, number of children, number of children under 18 living at home, number of siblings, and birth order. of the hispanic female superintendent respondents, 73.9% were between the ages of 46 and 55, with 8.6% reporting they were less than 46 years of age. only one woman documented being over 60 years of age. in regard to information on the birth families of hispanic women superintendents, the number of siblings women superintendents reported ranged from 0 to 5. seventy-three point nine percent of women reported having one to three siblings, with 4.3% reporting no siblings. birth order of women responding to the survey, indicated that 43.5% were the firstborn child in their family. almost 92 percent (91.3%) of women superintendents reported that they are first, second, or third-born children. only 8.6% of the respondents were fourth or fifth-born in their family. a majority of hispanic female superintendents reported being married (78.3%), with no respondents reporting being single at the time of completing the survey. being married one time characterized the marital history of 69.6% of the women. no respondents designated that they had been in more than two marriages. the number of children reported by hispanic women superintendents ranged from zero to five. more than half (56.5%) of the women have two children, and 17.4% have one child. 17.3% reported having three or more children. in-sofar as women reported on how many school-aged children lived with then, 73.9% claimed that no child of school age lived with them. district information. the size of the school districts that women superintendent respondents serve is depicted in table 2. serving in districts with enrollments of less than 3,000 students were 59.1% of our hispanic women superintendent sample, with 26.0% being superintendents in districts with student enrollments of 10,000 99,999. frequencies and percentages of students who receive free lunch in the districts of women superintendent respondents are depicted in table 3. no hispanic women superintendent respondents work in school districts where the percentage of students on free lunch was 20% or less. exactly, 25.0% serve as superintendents in districts where more than half of the students receive a free lunch. the majority of women (70.0%) serve in districts where at least 61 percent of students receive free lunch. educational experiences the undergraduate majors of women superintendent respondents are provided in table 4. over one-third (35.3%) of the respondents reported that they majored in education for their baccalaureate degree. the next most common major was social sciences at 17.6%. the master's degree majors of women superintendents are reported in table 5. it should be noted that this item required respondents to write in their master's degree major. combining all education-related majors yields a percentage of 76.2%. the most common specific major was educational leadership/administration at 23.8%. table 6 presents the distribution of respondents by level of education, and for those women who held a doctoral degree by doctoral major. holding a doctoral degree was 60.9% of our sample, with 4.3% holding an education specialist degree. reporting that they held a doctoral degree in educational leadership/administration/policy was 64.3% of our women superintendents who held a doctoral degree. only one respondent indicated that her doctoral major was educational psychology/counseling. regarding the distribution of women superintendent respondents by attendance at women's colleges and type of undergraduate institution, only 8.7% of the respondents indicated that they had attended a women's college, with 82.6% saying they attended a public undergraduate institution. career pathways the means and standard deviations for years of experience as a teacher, administrator, central office staff member and superintendent can be found in table 7. it is interesting to note that the average number of years women superintendents served as a teacher and an administrator are almost identical, 10.95 years and 11.13 years, respectively. these data indicate that the "average" female superintendent spends a significant amount of time as a teacher and an administrator before attaining the superintendency. women superintendents have served their school districts between four and five years (4.30 years). table 8 shows the career pathways of hispanic women superintendent respondents. the most common career pathway reported by the respondents was teacher, elementary principal, advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 33 central office (34.8%). the second most common career pathways were teacher, central office (13.0%) and teacher, high school principal, central office (13.0%). more than 6 in 10 respondents (60.8%) indicated that they had served as a school principal at some level before assuming the superintendency. it is interesting to note that 17.4% of women superintendents reported a career pathway that was not included as an option in question 20 of the survey instrument. however, the percentages of those females who have served as elementary, middle, and high school principals are strikingly different. approximately 70% (69.5%) of the respondents had central office experience prior to becoming a superintendent. women superintendents were asked to describe their career in relation to family. more than 5 out of 10 respondents (56.5%) indicated that they never took time off from pursuing their career because of family concerns. almost 18% (17.4%) describe their career path in relation to family as "double track" some time off with children. only 8.6% of hispanic women superintendents indicated that their career was interrupted for five or more years because of their children or for reasons other than family. table 9 depicts the career pathway of hispanic women superintendents in relation to family. the mentorship of women superintendents is presented in table 10. over three-fourths (78.3%) of the respondents reported that they had a mentor. of the women superintendents who had a mentor, more than 6 out of 10 (65.2%) were mentored by men. reporting they had a role model was 82.3% of the women superintendent respondents, with 42.9% of these role models being men and 38.1% being women. table 11 depicts the frequencies and percentages of hispanic women superintendents who reported a role model and the gender of the role model. when asked who encouraged the respondents most to obtain the superintendency, hispanic female superintendent respondents reported encouragement from self (34.8%) and colleague(s) (30.4%) as being the most frequent, primary sources of encouragement in their careers (table 12). slightly less than 22% (21.7%) reported that they received the most encouragement from their spouse. only one respondent indicated that a professor(s) was a primary source of encouragement. perceived barriers section vii of the survey instrument listed 12 possible barriers to attainment of the superintendency. women superintendents were asked to select the degree of importance each barrier was to women in general, and how applicable the barriers were to them in particular. table 13 shows women superintendents' perceptions of barriers for women in general. all perceived barriers, except one, were rated by a plurality of respondents as "somewhat important," or "important." only one perceived barrier, the perception that women have difficulty working with others, was perceived as "not important" by a plurality of respondents (56.5%), and only one barrier, lack of mobility of family members, received a plurality of support by more than half (65.2%) of the respondents. respondents had definite views regarding barriers to the superintendency. the percentage of respondents who responded, "don't know," ranged from 0.0% to 8.7%. the data in table 14 indicates respondents' perceptions of barriers from their own experience. only 1 of the 12 perceived barriers, that school boards do not actively recruit women, was rated equally as "important" or "not important" by 40.9% of hispanic women superintendent respondents. only one perceived barrier, a lack of mobility of family members, was rated as "important " by more than 40% (40.9%) of the respondents. it appears that the respondents had definite views regarding barriers to the superintendency based on their own experience. the percentage of respondents who responded "don't know" was 0.0% for 9 of the 12 barriers and 4.5% for 3 of the 12 barriers. discussion as bell and chase (1992) aptly stated, "any understanding of race and gender in the educational system in the united states needs to be based on information about where…women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds are located in that system." (p. 142). from a larger national sampling of 1010 women superintendents, we identified 23 hispanic women superintendents and where they were located in the 2000-2001 school year. furthermore, we gathered data on the personal demographic, school district information, education experiences, career pathways, and perceptual barriers these women reported. because ortiz (1999) estimated that only 25 to 30 hispanic women held the position of superintendency nationwide, a response of 23 was accepted as an inclusive representation of a plurality of hispanic women superintendents in the 2000-2001 school year. of our sample, 47.8% reported serving in the southwest or far west region of the united states. this finding supports the research of glass, bjork, and brunner (2000) who found greater minority representation in these geographical areas versus other areas of the united states. in addition, our finding is consistent with ortiz's (1999) contention that hispanic women superintendents are appointed mostly in western states. the concentration of hispanic women superintendents in the western states also suggests that hispanic women are more likely to be selected for superintendent positions in areas dominated by large populations of hispanic students, in comparison to areas where there is a low concentration of hispanic students. trueba (1998) stated that hispanic students are well represented in the southwestern states of california, texas, arizona, and new mexico. in profiling the personal demographics of hispanic women superintendents, we concluded that a plurality were married (78.3%), between the ages of 51 and 55 (43.5%), have entered into at least one marriage (100.0%), have two children (56.5%), and, the children were more likely to be over 18 years of age, not living in the female superintendent's home (73.9%). while we endeavored to create a personal demographic profile of a advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 34 hispanic women superintendent, hispanic women superintendents in our study resonated the findings of previous studies in which women superintendents, in general had been profiled according to personal demographic information. for example, glass et al. (2000) discovered that 23.1% in their national study of women superintendents were not married and grogan (1996) claimed that very few women administrators have never married. a majority of hispanic women superintendents in this study (91.3%) reported having children. this finding is consistent with obermeyer's (1996) and wright's (1995) assertions that most women superintendents are mothers. in the present study, hispanic women superintendents tended to be first-born children (43.5%). a paucity of research exists on the birth order of women superintendents. winkler (1994) and schuster (1987) detected more first-born children among female superintendents than later-born children. manuel (2001) concluded from her study of 1010 women superintendents nationwide, that close to 50% (49.5%) of women superintendents were first-born children. our findings related to the school district information of hispanic women superintendents in the present study were consistent, yet inconsistent, with the existing literature on the size of school districts women, in general, have been reported to lead. many researchers have purported that women serve in smaller districts (anderson, 1998; angulo, 1995; jackson, 1999; wright, 1995). glass et al. (2000) stated that the average school district size across the nation to be 3,000 students. in the present study, the highest concentration of hispanic women superintendents (21.7%) reported leading districts with less than 300 students; therefore, supporting the contention that women serve in smaller districts. conversely, the data of the present study showed that close to 45% (43.7%) of hispanic women superintendents served in districts with 3,000 or more students. findings in the present study were that half (50%) of hispanic women superintendents serve in disadvantaged school districts where 71% or more students receive free lunch. this finding is consistent with chase and bell's (1994) assertion that minority women are often leaders of disadvantaged school districts. however, manuel (2001) reported from her study of 946 women across the united states that a mere 11% of women led districts with 71 percent or more students qualifying for free lunch, thus suggesting that among all women superintendents, minority women are more likely than white women to be appointed to school districts with high percentages of disadvantaged students. in the present study, a plurality of hispanic women superintendents reported majoring in some field of education at the master's level (76.2%) and obtaining a doctoral degree (60.9%). these findings were consistent with glass et al.'s (2000) national study of superintendents whereby minority and female superintendents were more likely to have achieved a doctoral level of education in comparison to white male superintendents. in ortiz's (1999) qualitative study of 12 hispanic women superintendents, 9 of the 12 women she studied possessed doctoral degrees. particular significance was noted in the high percentage of women (64.3%) who majored in educational leadership, administration, or policy at the doctoral level. ortiz (1999) suggested that women tend to major in areas affiliated with curriculum and instruction, which does not prepare women for superintendent responsibilities in the areas of finance and personnel. though no respondents in our study reported majoring in curriculum and instruction at the doctoral level, we speculate that our finding may substantiate ortiz's (1999) contention in so far as hispanic women who actually obtain the superintendency are granted access to the position because they did not major in curriculum and instruction, but majored in leadership, administration, or policy. overall, our findings suggest that hispanic women who achieve the rank of superintendent majored in education at the undergraduate level, obtained a master's degree in some area of education, and acquired a doctoral degree with a concentration in education leadership, administration, or policy. the predominant career trajectory reported by over half of hispanic women superintendents (56.5%) was a teacher, principal (elementary, middle, or secondary), central office, superintendent pathway, with 34.8% of respondents designating that they served in the position of elementary principal. this finding negates findings by logan (1999) and tallerico (2000a) who reported that women who have served in elementary principalships seldom move up to the ranks of the superintendency, and alston's (1999) claim that the classic pattern for women is teacher-central office. only 13.0% of the women in this study reported a teacher-central office career pathway to the superintendency. findings in the present study are consistent with baumann (1999) who reported on the career pathways of women superintendents, respectively, that women superintendents more often serve as elementary principals sometime during their careers. in their study of 297 women superintendents across the nation, glass et al. (2000) reported that 45.9% of women superintendents followed a teacher, principal, central office career pathway; 20.6% followed a teacher, principal pathway; and 17.2% followed a teacher, central office pathway. we found similar career patterns among hispanic women superintendents. analysis of career pathways in relation to family revealed that 56.5% reported that their career path was uninterrupted by concerns related to their family. many researchers have commented on the importance of mentors and role models for women who aspire to reach the superintendency (flak, 1998; funk, 1986; renner, 1991; wenner, 1998). in our study, a plurality of women reported having mentors and role models, 78.3% and 82.6%, respectively. we speculate at least two reasons for this finding. first, hispanic women who were successful at attaining the superintendency actively seek advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 35 mentors to assist them in their career progressions. secondly, hispanic women who experience sponsorship or exposure to role models are more likely to achieve the superintendency than those women who do not experience sponsorship or exposure to role models. woodworth (1990), renner (1991), and bourdreau (1994) noted that sources of encouragement are an important influence in the careers of women leaders. the present study was aimed at ascertaining which sources of encouragement were more important among hispanic women superintendents. respondents to this study reported that their primary sources of encouragement were themselves (34.8%) and colleagues (30.4%). the finding that women cited themselves as their primary source of encouragement was not surprising. many researchers have noted a high sense of self-efficacy among successful hispanic women leaders (gandara, 1994; mendezmorse, 1999). comparatively, the assertion that colleagues are an important source of encouragement for female superintendents has been substantiated by bourdreau (1994), kowalski and stouder (1999), ortiz (1999), and winkler (1994). whereas spousal support has been emphasized by issacson (1998) and hensley (1996) in their research on women superintendents, findings in the present study indicate that spousal support was only mentioned by close to 22% (21.7%) of women as a primary source of encouragement and parental or sibling support was not indicated by any of the women as a primary source of encouragement in attaining the superintendency. these findings appear to dispute the assertions of renner (1991), dorner (1982), jackson (1999), mendez-morse (1999), and lundin (1993) who stated that family encouragement was a predominant source of inspiration for women superintendents. the respondents in this study reported a low percentage of professorial support (4.3%) for hispanic women superintendents, which is not surprising. logan (1999) found that professors view female students as having more barriers than male students in achieving the superintendency. an earlier study by delong (1986) suggested that professors perceived females as having less potential than males in educational administration programs. the presence of barriers for women who want to be superintendents has been a component of several studies of female superintendents and women aspiring to the superintendency. a number of researchers (chase & bell, 1994; kowalski & stouder, 1999; zumsteg, 1991) have reported findings consistent with this study, that barriers women face are factors in the underrepresentation of women in the superintendency. in our study, respondents indicated that for women in general, all 12 barriers were "somewhat important," or "important," with the exception of the perception that women have difficulty working with others. conversely, a plurality of hispanic women superintendents reported that, in their own experience, 6 out of the 12 barriers were not important factors for them in acquiring a superintendency. the remaining six barriers that women classified as "important" or "somewhat important" for women in general as well as in their own experience is a notable finding as previous researchers have purported a tendency for women superintendents to perceive the degree of barriers for women, in general, as stronger than the barriers for themselves. recent studies by stouder (1998), dobberteen (1996), and woodworth (1996) concluded that a preponderance of women superintendents evaluated barriers for themselves as less important than barriers for other women. manuel's (2001) aggregated data in a national study of 946 women superintendents indicated that women rated all 12 barriers for women, in general, as "important" or "somewhat important," yet the women rated barriers in their own experience as "not important." the opinions hispanic women superintendents diverged from this point. that is to say that hispanic women did not indicate that for women, in general, all 12 barriers were "important" or "somewhat important," and all 12 barriers in their personal experience were "not important." based on their own experience, 50% or more of hispanic women superintendents claimed that they perceived six of the obstacles as influential. these six barriers were: school boards not actively recruiting women, lack of professional networks, perception of school board members that women are unqualified to handle finances, perception that women will allow their emotions to influence administrative decision, perception that women are not strong leaders, and lack of mentor/mentoring in school districts. several explanations may be postulated why 50% or more hispanic women would rate these barriers as ""important" or "somewhat important" versus "not important." four of these obstacles on the survey requested that the respondents rate social perceptions of women in leadership positions. why hispanic women would classify these perceptions as formidable obstacles in their experience may be explained by the women's challenges to be recognized as leaders in educational systems where the overwhelming majority of leaders are white males. hispanic women superintendents represent a dual anomaly in traditional constructs of societal perceptions of school superintendents. in our culture, the position of public school superintendents is synonymous with being male and white (shakeshaft, 1995; tallerico, 2000b); therefore, hispanic women superintendents defy traditional ethnic and gender perceptions (mendez-morse, 1999; ortiz, 1982). this may offer a reason why 50% or more (50.0% 59.1%) of hispanic women have classified that they perceive school boards not actively recruiting women, the perception of school board members that women are unqualified to handle finances, the perception that women are not strong leaders, or the perception that will allow their emotions to influence administrative decision as being "important" or somewhat important" obstacles which they experienced in their quest for the superintendency. particular significance was noted in the large percentage of women who responded that a lack of professional networks advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 36 (63.7%) and a lack of mentor/mentoring in school districts (59.1%) were "important" or "somewhat important" barriers in their career paths toward the superintendency. professional networks and mentoring relationships involve interaction among or between the hispanic woman and the people she affiliates with professionally. by citing the significance of these barriers, hispanic women seem to suggest that they do not receive encouragement from people within educational systems. this finding appeared inconsistent with two other aspects of the survey in which a plurality of women (78.3%) responded that they had mentors, and that colleagues were a primary source of encouragement for at least one-third (30.4%) of the women. we can speculate at least three reasons for our findings. though hispanic women found mentors, the mentors were not readily available to the women. another plausible explanation may be that the hispanic women in our survey were not satisfied with their mentoring relationships, although they did have mentors. finally, the colleagues that served as a primary source of encouragement for 30.4% of hispanic women were not personal contacts within the domain of the women's professional networks. readers are urged to be cautious in the extent to which they make generalizations from these findings. our study is limited by its sample in that our sample comprised hispanic women superintendents who chose to respond to a survey on their career pathways and perception of barriers. second, the extent to which our hispanic women superintendents are representative of other hispanic women superintendents is unclear. third, the sample size itself is small. readers should note, however, that the actual number of hispanic women superintendents is not believed to be substantially larger than our sample of respondents. moreover, we used a quantitative survey as our measurement of attitudes toward career pathways and perceived barriers. the use of a different measurement instrument, perhaps one in which open-ended questions were present, might yield different findings. until these finding are replicated and extended to other settings, readers should be tentative in whatever generalizations they make from these findings. in addition, readers should not generalize these findings either to majority or to other minority women superintendents. readers should instead note that these findings are based solely on our sample of hispanic women superintendents. references alston, j. a. 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(doctoral dissertation, michigan state university). dissertation abstracts online, 217, aag9208872 copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership visionary leaders by design dr. paula s. montgomery, ph.d. dr. roslin growe, ed.d. montgomery & growe, spring, 2003 ...women as visionary leaders must keep in mind the advantages they possess over their male counterparts by way of facilitative leadership. with the advent of educational accountability and the increase in job related stress, school districts are having a very difficult time getting and keeping quality public school administrators. administrators across the country are finding themselves being pulled into a million directions. in some cases, administrators are facing each dilemma of the day alone – no assistant principal or key support to help with the stresses and strains they must face as leader of the phenomenon faced in schools. that same phenomenon has also had a great effect on university systems to produce quality administrators who “want” to serve in the leadership capacity. not only are school districts scrambling to attract certified and qualified leaders, universities are redesigning their leadership programs to try to supply the demands of the public school settings. the ever-changing dynamics of schools has had a great weight on what occurs in schools as well as the perception of school leadership. academics should be in the forefront, however, it often comes just after the mandates of paperwork, deadlines, discipline issues, building safety, morale building, technology needs, financial reports, parental concerns, community bridges, and student needs. the institute for educational leadership (2000) suggests the demands placed on principals do not equal the demands of the profession, and experienced principals are reporting the job is simply not doable. and yet, despite the demands, commands, and mandates of administration, there is an undeniable truth – leaders will always be needed to govern the operations of schools across the country. the institute for educational leadership (2000) http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html released a report of the task force on the principalship that explored the reinvention of the principalship. among the findings of this report, it was noted that schools of the 21st century would be compelled to have leaders who possess instructional leadership, community leadership, and visionary leadership. instructional leadership focuses on strengthening teaching and learning, professional development, data-driven decision making, and accountability; community leadership is manifested in a big picture awareness of the school’s role in society; shared leadership among educators, community partners, and residents; close relation with parents and others, and advocacy for school capacity building and resources; and, visionary leadership demonstrates energy, commitment, entrepreneurial spirit, values and conviction that all children will learn at high levels, as well as inspiring others with the vision both inside and outside the school building (institute for educational leadership, 2000). bennis (1990) suggests that all leaders have the capacity to create vision, one that takes people to a new place, and the ability to translate that vision into reality. he also writes that leaders “manage the dream” (1990, p. 45) thus the concept of visionary leadership. blumberg and greenfield (1980) indicate that visionary educational leaders have a clear picture of what they want to accomplish. the vision of their school or district provides purpose, meaning, and significance to the educational aims of the school and enables them to motivate and empower the staff to contribute to the realization of the vision. according to westley and mintzberg (1989), visionary leadership is dynamic and involves three stages: an image of the desired future for the organization (vision) that is communicated (shared), which serve to empower those followers so that they can enact the vision. (p. 19) visionary leaders embrace the unknown with a sense of security and assuredness that “the dream” will somehow come to fruition. sharing of the vision serves as the foundation as to how that vision will be shaped. a strong, clear articulation of this dream serves as the declaration of what is sure to come. that declaration will most often become the motivation for others as they participate in the events that lead to the expected outcome. the institutionalization of the vision is of great importance as noted by robert starratt (1995). although visionary leadership serves as one component of 21st century educational programming, it must be clearly understood that new visions do not automatically mean new implications for teaching (elmore, peterson, & mccarthey, 1996). consistent evaluation and re-evaluation of the vision process must be adhered to for the development of the vision to truly become a living reality. who will go for us? “although the pool of principal candidates is large – many individuals possess the required certification there is reason to believe the number of ‘highly capable’ applicants may be dwindling” (anderson, 1991, p.30). although the issue of principal supply and demand is complex, the growth of the number of school principals grew from 77,890 in 1987-88 to 79,618 in 1993-94 (up 2.2 %) (national center for educational statistics [nces], 1997). among the number of capable and qualified principal candidates, women gained ground in the area of principalship from 24.6% in 1987-88 to 34.5% in 1993-94. the percentage of new female principals also rose from 41.2% in 1987-88 to 48.1% in 1993-94 (nces, 1997). since the mid 1980s, women have comprised at least half of educational administration enrollments according to bell & chase (1993, as cited in logan, 1998). with the growing number of female leaders in educational administration, it is apparent that women must be adequately trained to participate in the rigorous demands of leadership while appropriately utilizing the female attributes of nurturing, being sensitive, caring, cooperative, and accommodative. those attributes are also increasingly associated with effective administration (growe & montgomery, 2000). women often lean toward facilitative leadership, which is contrary to their male counterparts. this type of leadership style allows others to make contributions through delegation, encouragement, and nudging from behind (porat, 1991). many women support contributive, consensual decision making and emphasize the process by encouraging feelings of self-worth, active participation, and sharing of power and information (porat, 1991; getskow, 1996). chliwniak (1997) states that while women embrace relationships and the sharing process, men often focus on the completion of tasks, achieving goals, the hoarding of information and winning. conner (1992) notes also that men tend to lead through concrete exchanges while eakle (1995) states that women are more interested in transforming people’s selfinterest into organizational goals through the empowerment process. the work of shantz (1993) outlined evidence that women administrators are effective at fostering collaboration, sharing power equitably, vision building, collegiality, and encouraging risk taking. this work was further supported by regan and brooks (1995) who defined leadership attributes as feminist (from women’s experiences) or feminine (given to women by their role in the culture). feminist attributes include collaboration, caring, courage, intuition, and vision, while feminine attributes include nurturance, compassion, and care. with the evidence indicating the growth of women in this most demanding career choice, these questions must be addressed: what are the visions of women in this male dominate industry? are women better suited to fulfill the requirements of school leadership? are women of vision part of the new redesigned leadership paradigm? vision: sustaining power of administrators although there are a myriad of statements attached to the term “vision,” the ultimate emphasis is discovered in the final result. what is the expected impact? the final destiny? the supreme outcome? while many school leaders have become diffident concerning the usefulness of vision, experts continue to maintain high regard for this make-or-break task for the leader (conley, 1996). conley (1996) equates the concept of vision to an internal compass. vision is further characterized as an “educational platform” which includes the school’s beliefs about specific aims, methods, and climate, thereby creating a “community of mind” all focused on behavioral norms (sergiovanni, 1994, p.170). servgiovanni (1994) further states that vision is the capacity to create and communicate a view of a desired state of affairs that induces commitment among those working in the organization. nanus (1992) agrees that vision provides guidance to an organization by clearly stating what it wishes to attain. the provision of a picture or mental image not only describes an organization’s direction or goal, but also the means for accomplishing it. vision then becomes the picture of the future for which people are willing to work. while vision may take on a variety of definitions, it is highly customary for resistance to become a part of the visionary process. “to prevent from becoming stranded on the mudflats of an obsolete ideology, you must become a champion of change” (david lodge, as cited by donald clark, 1997, ¶ 1). as noted by donald clark (1997), organizations experience four new changes throughout their growth: formative period – the founding vision is present; however, there are no formal definitions. experimentation and innovation usually takes place during this time. rapid growth period – growth and gains are sustained through direction and coordination. change is centered on the purpose of the organization and on the mainstream business. mature period – growth levels are off during this period. changes are needed to maintain what has been established and to assure maximum gains are achieved. declining period – this period includes tough objectives and compassionate implementation. the goal is to get out of the old and into something new. since visions must be periodically assessed, it is during this phase of change where decisions are made to continue the focus of the original vision or to take a new direction. with a clearly painted picture for the stakeholders to embrace, vision also serves to inspire, motivate, and engage people. manesse (1986) describes vision as the energy that structures meaning for the people of the organization. properly designed, vision will address the following questions: who is involved? what is the plan and how will it be accomplished? why is it necessary to stretch toward this vision or dream? for educational leaders who implement change in their school or district, vision is suggested to be a hunger to see improvement (pejza, 1985 as stated in mendez-morse, 1991). the power of a structured, attainable, articulated vision has far reaching results. the key is to create the vision while fundamentally allowing all stakeholders to participate in the development of this mantra. as vision statements are written across the country – in rural, urban, big, little, affluent, and at-risk schools – the focus should always be the same: to improve the quality of education received by all students. regardless of student backgrounds, the vision of successful educational leaders and the educational communities they serve is to attain a higher standard for all students. the power of a well-written vision statement points all stakeholders in the same direction with the same desired result focused in each and every action of those stakeholders. “statements about vision incorporate the values and commitments that guide the system as well as the beliefs about structure. these statements appeal to hearts as well as to minds; they command loyalty and emotional attachments and provide orientation for specific action” (schlechty, 1997, p. 31). the role of the visionary with the advancement of more women in the world of administrative leadership, could it be that the vision of women for these educational entities is an expression of their unbridled passion for education? women have made up at least half of educational administration program enrollments since the mid 1980s (bell & chase, 1993, as cited in logan, 1998). this indicates a strong desire to enter educational leadership as a qualified individual as well as the desire to understand the male dominated leadership structure of the present. the facilitative nature of women gives support to the visionary process. the work of aburdene and naisbitt (1992) characterized women’s leadership into twenty-five behaviors. these behaviors were clustered into six central patterns of behaviors that empower, restructure, teach, provide role models, encourage openness, and stimulate questioning. gillet-karam’s study (1994) suggested four behaviors that characterize women leadership: a) vision behavior -women leaders take appropriate risks to bring about change, b) people behavior -women leaders provide care and respect for individual differences, c) influence behavior women act collaboratively, and d) values behavior women leaders spend time building trust and openness. what more then is a visionary leader than the culmination of these notable behaviors? a persuasive body of research strongly suggests that the key to achieving high leadership productivity is through the school leader. empowerment is initiated by four key components of the leader’s behavior: vision, communication, positioning, and self-management (andrews, 1990; bennis & nanus, 1985; smith & andrews, 1989). here again, vision is the ability to see the future in its desired state. it has very little impact; however, without the ability to clearly, rationally, and concisely articulate exactly what the desire is toward the expected outcome. as the foundation for the vision is being cultivated, the leader must also position oneself to ensure things are done. the necessary actions that must be taken to secure the vision are often found in the self-management of the leader. the concept of “leading by example” may promote positive behaviors in others. planning your work and working your plan how are visions erected? how are they constructed? formulated? postulated? how do they serve as vehicles for momentum towards change? great visions are not born; however, the possibilities of conception lie within the minds and hearts of the stakeholders. visionary leaders recognize this is a multi-step process in order to develop a vision that can be lived with and serve as the catalyst for movement toward the desired outcome. those steps include: 1. organize the vision team! include representation from every group – administrators, teachers, students, parents, and community leaders – any one who can help others to embrace the message of the vision. the inclusion of a cross group of individuals helps to create a richer, more productive team. this leads to a variety of opportunities to stimulate questions for proactive rather than reactive decision making. 2. construct the vision statement! the vision statement should be short enough for all who come in contact with it to remember it and yet meaningful enough that all may walk away understanding the message. wording should be considerate of the school population as well as the school community. as the team evaluates and reevaluates the vision statement, new meanings may be revealed to the team. expect the team to experience the process of forming, storming, norming, and performing before adjourning with a statement that satisfies all and can be lived by all. 3. commit the vision to paper! include it in all correspondence from the school. post it boldly in high traffic areas. encourage all classrooms to post it in the same location, ie. near a door, on the front board, near the student work display area. post it anywhere students, parents, and teachers may view it quickly. 4. articulate the vision! principals should walk the walk and talk the talk. share the vision. include the vision in your daily announcements. require teachers and students to also be able to articulate it whenever necessary. encourage open discussions with faculty, parents, students, and community members about the stages of development toward the end result. these open discussions will create readiness for the acceptance of the vision and the mental and physical work involved. 5. recognize that vision brings about a change! restructuring mandates a state of discomfort. that discomfort is often the fertilizer needed to cultivate the expected desire. the challenge change brings will often force people to evaluate their commitment to the vision. 6. create readiness for the impact! properly implemented, vision statements have had far reaching effects on the educational institution with special emphasis on the children. visionary leaders promote “buy-in” by all who come in contact with their students. 7. evaluate the vision! spend time conducting informal interviews with all stakeholders. reconvene meetings with your original vision team to discuss the status of progress and what can be done to energize the workers. in conclusion, women as visionary leaders must keep in mind the advantages they possess over their male counterparts by way of facilitative leadership. a leader with an emerging, inclusive style of leadership could provide an institution with new values grounded in cooperation, community, and relationships within the community (chliwniak, 1997). the results of that shared vision, as noted by dufour and eaker (1998), can have a significant impact on the entire school community. shared vision will: motivate and energize people, create a proactive orientation, give direction to people within the organization, establish specific standards of excellence, and create a clear agenda for action. as women continue to prepare themselves for the awesome challenges of leadership, it is certain that each step of the journey will be clearer as they embrace the power tools of women of vision. references aburdene, p., & naisbitt, j. (1992). megatrends for women. new york: villand books. anderson, m. e. (1991). principals: how to train, recruit, select, induct, and evaluate leaders for america’s schools. retrieved august 29, 2002, from http://eric.uoregon.edu. pdf/books/principal.pdf andrews, r. (1990). beyond compliance: the obligations of leadership. educational perspectives, 27(1), 27-30. bennis, w. (1990). managing the dream: leadership in the 21st century. training: the magazine of human resource development, 27(5), 44-46. bennis, w., & nanus, b. (1985). leaders: strategies for taking charge. new york: harper & row. blumberg, a., & greenfield, w. (1980). the effective principal: perspectives on school leadership. boston: allyn & bacon. chliwniak, l. (1997). higher education leadership: analyzing the gender gap. retrieved august 22, 2002, from www.ed.gov/databases/eric_digests/ed410846 clark, d. (1997). big dog’s leadership page. retrieved september 10, 2002, from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leader.html conley, d. t. (1996). are you ready to restructure? a guidebook for educators, parents, and community members. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. conner, n. l. (1992). restructuring schools: will there be a place for women? clearing house, 65, 337-339. retreived september 6, 2000, from http://www.wpnet.com/cgi-bin/epwtop/page dufour, r., & eaker, r. (1998). professional learning communities at work: best practices for enhancing student achievement. bloomington, in: national educational service. eakle, s. a. (1995). going where few women have gone. thrust for educational leadership, 24, 16-21. retrieved september 5, 2000, from http://www.wpnet.com/cgi-bin/ewtop/page elmore, r. f., peterson, p. l., & mccarthey, s. j. (1996). restructuring in the classroom: teaching, learning, and school organization. san francisco: josseybass. getskow, v. (1996). women in community college leadership roles. retrieved august 25, 2002, from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/eric/digests/dig/dig9790.html gillet-karam, r. (1994). maxims for excellence in teaching: reaching the underserved. in g. baker (ed.), handbook on the community college in america: its history, mission, and management (410-422). westport, ct: greenwood press. growe, r., & montgomery, p. (2000). women and the leadership paradigm: bridging the gender gap. national forum journal, 17e, 1-7. retrieved june 25, 2002, from http://www.nationalforum.com institute for educational leadership (2000, october). leadership for student learning: reinventing the principalship. retrieved july 23, 2002, from http://www.iel.org/ programs/21st/reports/principal.pdf logan, j. p. (1998, summer). school leadership of the 90’s and beyond: a window of opportunity for women educators. advancing women, 1(3). retrieved november 12, 2001, from http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer98/logan.html manesse, a.l. (1986). vision and leadership: paying attention to intention. peabody journal of education, 12(4), 26-28. mendez-morse, s. e. (1991). the principal’s role in the instructional process: implications for at-risk students. issues … about change, 1, 1-7. retrieved june 5, 2002, from http:// www.sedl.org/change/issues/issues13.html nanus, b. (1992). visionary leadership: creating a compelling sense of direction for your organization. san francisco: jossey-bass. national center for educational statistics. (1997, february). programs for aspiring principals: who participates? (issue brief no. ib-2-97). porat, k. l. (1991). women in administration: the difference is positive. clearing house, 64(6), 412-415. retrieved may 15, 2002, from http://www. wpnet.com/cgibin/ epwtop/page regan, h., & brooks, g. (1995). out of women’s experience: creating relational leadership. thousand oaks: corwin press, inc. schlechty, p. (1997). inventing better schools: an action plan for educational reform. san francisco: jossey-bass. sergiovanni, t. j. (1994). building community in schools. san francisco: josseybass. shantz, d. (1993). collaborative leadership and female administrators: a perfect partnership for the future. the canadian school executive, 11(2), 17-21. smith, w. e., & andrews, r. (1989). instructional leadership: how principals make a difference. alexandria, va: ascd press. starratt, r. (1995). leaders with vision: the quest for school renewal. thousand oaks: corwin press. westley, f., & mintzberg, h. (1989). visionary leadership and strategic management. strategic management journal, 10, 17-32. authors dr. paula s. montgomery is an assistant professor at the university of louisiana at lafayette. dr. roslin growe is the department chair of the educational foundations and leadership department at the university of louisiana at lafayette. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership women who continue to pursue science: motivated not only despite but also by concerns about the future becky wai-ling packard, ph.d. packard, winter, 2002 like other struggles or problems, concerns can be seen as a catalyst for change, or a source of motivation that moves us forward. abstract the purpose of this paper is to explore how women pursuing science fields are able to do so despite their concerns about the future (e.g., difficulty combining family and career, undesirable work environment). do these women change their values, ignore the stereotypes, or manage in some other way? thirty college women pursuing science and engineering participated in a semester-long program where they discussed their concerns with several peers and female professionals. quantitative data showed students' concerns and values remained strong over time. qualitative data revealed students became aware that peers and professionals shared their concerns, and this helped them to feel part of the field. surprisingly, they were now motivated not only despite but also by the concerns that once discouraged them. these results suggest that career programs can help women to recognize shared concerns, become motivated to change the field in the ways that concern them, and to reimagine their futures. introduction many college women have concerns about their future lives and work, particularly in terms of combining their personal life and career (eccles, 1987; holland & eisenhart, 1990; mccracken & weitzman, 1997; stage & maple, 1996). this seems to be particularly the case for women pursuing natural sciences and engineering careers (seymour & hewitt, 1997; ware & lee, 1988). women may question the likelihood of having family or making a contribution to society when pursuing a science-related career (eccles, 1987; holland & eisenhart, 1990; seymour & hewitt, 1997) and they may expect to work in an isolating, http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html uninviting workplace (stage & maple, 1996). this is predictable because science has, over time, been defined as a "nerdy, male and white" occupation (eisenhart, finkel, & marion, 1996) and women are still underrepresented in the physical sciences and engineering fields (vetter, 1996). even though they may look to female professionals for ideas of how to successfully meld professional and personal lives (gilbert & rossman, 1992), college women report a lack of role models and mentors who discount negative stereotypes (astin & sax, 1996; mutha, takayama, & o’neil, 1997; osborn, ernster, & martin, 1992; sonnert & holton, 1996). many women who consider science careers become discouraged by negative stereotypes and the lack of women professionals makes it difficult to produce much counter-evidence. one way of conceptualizing this process is to see negative stereotypes as representing “possible selves” that students are motivated to become or avoid (markus & nurius, 1986). using this perspective, if women have negative images of science professionals, they may be less motivated to pursue science careers because they want to avoid becoming these negative images. however, women who pursue science are also likely to have positive, desirable images that lead them to pursue the career. this creates a tension among positive and negative future images, a tension that may lead some women to doubt whether they can be the kind of person they would like to be and still become a scientist. part of what contributes to the concerns college women have, then, is their uncertainty that positive possibilities or possible selves exist, or that they will personally be able to achieve them. this study aims to examine how these concerns about the future, and related negative stereotypes, influence women who do continue to pursue science-related fields. surely these pursuers of science too have (had) similar concerns about their future lives as scientists. how do these women stay in their fields despite their concerns about the future? do they change their values (i.e. decide to give up their personal life)? ignore the stereotypes? find a way to “have it all”? eventually leave? in order to study this, i invited college women who were in the midst of grappling with these issues and who were discouraged from continuing to pursue their desired science or engineering field to attend a one-semester program. in a workshop series/discussion group format, the college women could discuss their concerns about the future with peers, graduate students, and professionals. this allowed me the opportunity to examine the college women’s concerns about the future over time, and how, if at all, their concerns affected their actions or career decisions. method participants thirty college women attending a large midwestern university participated in the project (see appendix a for a list of pseudonyms and information). they ranged in age from 19 to 22; 4 were sophomores, 13 were juniors, 13 were seniors. eleven students declared majors in biological-sciences, 5 students in physicalsciences, 6 students in healthor medical-sciences, and 8 students in engineering. they reported a mean gpa of 3.22 (on a 4.0. scale). the group was diverse; 9 (30%) students were ethnic minorities and 11 students (36.7%) were first generation college students. procedure college student selection. students majoring in natural science or engineering received an electronic posting for a “future career concerns” program for women that would meet every other week over the fall semester. i posed these questions: “are you trying to decide if a science or engineering career is really for you?” and “do you have concerns about your future career path? (for example, having a personal life or family in the future, diversity in the workplace, wondering if your work will make a contribution?).” over 400 women expressed interest in participating, which illustrated the salience of the issue under study. (a shortened program was offered to accommodate some additional students during the second semester.) the pool was narrowed down based on students’ abilities to attend all sessions, intensity and specificity of concerns, and sophomore class status or higher. kayla’s application was typical of the group who participated. i am interested in the career workshop for women. my name is kayla and i am a senior majoring in physiology. i will graduate in may and plan to work in biological research, and then attend medical school. many of the issues you addressed in your e-mail are concerns of mine. i plan to get married and have a family but i am concerned about how everything will be juggled. my desire for a family conflicts with my desire to be a physician, and many of the people i have talked to say that i must choose or one or the other will suffer. i would like to believe that this is not so, and i hope your workshops would offer some insight. to make the sessions smaller, two sessions of the program were offered (a tuesday session or wednesday session); 15 women attended each session throughout the semester. because the sessions were identical and the two groups were similar, the results of the two groups are considered collectively. graduate students/professionals recruitment. the graduate students were recruited via a women-in-science electronic listserv and through peer recommendations. the female graduate students represented a range of scienceand engineeringfields and lifestyle choices; most attended the same university while others attended another nearby large university. similarly, the women professionals were recruited by recommendations of colleagues at the university and letters sent to nearby workplaces. the professionals lived within an hour’s drive of the university and represented a range of fields, degrees, and lifestyle choices; working in academics, hospitals, or industry, working part-time or from home, with children and without. there were between six and eight guests per session. role model web site. in addition, i created a role model web site showcasing a variety of science graduates, including men and women from various fields and of multiple ethnic backgrounds (contact author for more information). in the web site, 17 role models are showcased with pictures and share their reflections on their career choices, about their lives, and their struggles; all were available over e-mail. workshop series/discussion groups. students met six times over 12 weeks: 1) the first session consisted of peer discussion and exploring a role model web site; 2) discussion groups with graduate women; 3) career exploration among peers; 4) discussion groups with professional women; 5) future planning among peers; and 6) social event. in the second and fourth session, students were in small groups with two graduate/professional women for approximately 30 minutes, then in another group with two different graduate/professional women for another 30 minutes, and then engaged in an open-mixer for the remaining 30 minutes. this arrangement sought to maximize students’ exposure to different viewpoints and airtime to discuss their issues. data sources and analysis students completed a pre-post survey using a 6-point likert-type scale to assess their agreement with having future career concerns (1=strongly disagree to 6 =strongly agree). the items included combining career and personal life, combining career and having children, working alone, working long hours, competitive work environment, not feeling similar to others, and lack of role models. students also added open-ended comments elaborating their concerns. follow-up interviews with 10 students focusing on their experiences of concerns were transcribed. i also requested an update via e-mail from students 16 weeks after the program was over. first, i quantitatively compared students’ preand post-surveys to look for changes in the magnitude of their concerns. reports that their concerns increased or stayed the same would suggest they had not changed their values and continued to be concerned. reports that their concerns decreased would suggest they were ignoring stereotypes or had changed their values. regardless of the quantitative results, a closer look at open-ended comments would be warranted. i conducted a content analysis regarding the nature of their concerns from the qualitative data sources. that is, i read and re-read their open-ended survey answers within students from pre-post and looked carefully for patterns across students (e.g., reduction/increase of concerns, discouraged by/ignored stereotypes) and analyzed the content of student interviews in a similar fashion. results in order to discuss how the college women were able to continue to pursue science careers despite concerns about the future, i will first provide further context by offering a glimpse of the students’ concerns. then, i will report that the magnitude of the college women’s concerns remained high throughout the 12-week program suggesting retention of values and concerns. next, i will shift my focus to the qualitative data that will illustrate that the college women recognized shared concerns with peers, graduates, and professionals and as a result, they began to feel part of the field. collectively and individually, they could choose to stay, stake a claim, and help to reshape the field. finally, i will show that concerns that were once discouraging to their pursuit were now serving as a source of motivation. a glimpse of their concerns in the first meeting, students sat around a large table and shared their concerns with everyone in the group. as we went around the table to share, it was clear that the concerns that brought them to the program were intense in magnitude. it was also clear that students had concerns in common with one another, as evidenced by lori and rose’s exchange. lori: my main struggle right now is i don’t know if i really want to be a doctor anymore or what aspect of the medical field i want to be in. it is sort of like having a mid-life crisis. the unfortunate thing is because i have no direction. i don’t even want to go to class anymore (tears up). i feel like it is totally useless. rose: i kinda have the same concerns as you (looking at lori). i am not sure i want to go into medicine because i am not sure how much time i’m going to have for the rest of my life afterwards. this exchange illustrates that rose is speaking not only to the group, but also directly to lori, by saying that she has similar concerns. students continued to share their concerns as they went around the table; similar concerns affected natural science and engineering students. genoveva: i don’t know if any of you have heard, but engineers are dull people with stressful lives and no family life, and i just can’t believe that’s true. georgia: i have a whole bunch of struggles (laugh) but i want to go to grad school, i want to go into forensics also. one of my big concerns is that i have a boyfriend. he lives in another state and i want to be with him but i want to go to graduate school. i am torn. where do i go? do i put this on hold? or do i put him on hold? genoveva had an image of what her life might be like as an engineer and georgia had a more pending decision to make regarding her graduate training and boyfriend. across students, there was an “either/or” quality to their concerns. students perceived that they had to resolve the future career concerns by making a choice between 1) leaving the field so they could become who they wanted to become personally, or 2) by staying and becoming the negative stereotypical images. the open-ended comments on their pre-surveys were completed just before this discussion around the table, and for the most part, echoed the types of concerns and the “either/or” quality in their thinking about how to move forward in the face of these concerns about the future. although they were interested in pursuing a science career, they were trying to decide if pursuing the career would be worth the sacrifices evident in others' lives. women’s concerns remain strong students’ initial responses on the future career concerns survey provided a quantitative assessment of their future career concerns. their chief future career concerns (see table 1) were having a family and science career in the future, having a personal life and science career in the future, and working in a competitive environment. in their post-surveys, students still reported high means on the same items, including combining family and career, personal life and career, and working in a competitive environment. these high means indicated remaining concerns in those areas (see table 1). paired t-tests were conducted to examine pre-post changes within participants. the only significant change was that they became increasingly concerned with working long hours, from pre-intervention (m=3.96, sd=1.07) to post-intervention (m=4.65; sd=1.09), t (26)= -3.14, p=. 01. these results suggest that students held onto their values for family and personal life, and a desirable work environment. i turn to the open-ended comments pre-post to illustrate how their perspectives on their concerns changed over time. moving forward despite concerns: finding possible selves the students’ post-survey comments added insight into how they changed their perspective of their concerns. for example, estrella was representative of the students’ experiences. as a first generation college student, she was experiencing a great deal of self-doubt and did not have a great deal of support from her hispanic-american family. she wrote: another concern i have is, “will i make it?” because although i’m just starting my science courses, i feel that either i’ll be pushed down or “drop” myself. also, i’ll be the first in my family to pursue a bachelors degree, and go for my ph.d. my family is not really supportive. (pre-survey) these feelings of self-doubt and concern about pursuing science and medicine were even more apparent in our first meeting when she almost broke down in tears describing her concerns. by the end of the program, her concerns remained strong, but she now planned to stay. my concerns have somewhat stayed the same since the beginning of the semester. one thing that has changed is that i know i want to stay in science. remember i was having second thoughts. as hard as it seems right now to pursue this degree, i feel that switching my major to business or education, which are other majors that interest me, may be a “way out” and i don’t want that. (post-survey, emphasis hers) in other words, students like estrella began to see options for themselves within the sciences, rather than having to leave because of their concerns. she said in her interview, “the graduate students and the doctors that came in were helpful. i could see what i’m up against and what’s expected, what to look forward to.” it was clear that their interactions with several individuals who were part of the science field helped the college women to change their perspective on their concerns. corie, a computer science student, was concerned about a range of issues stemming from being a woman in a male-dominated field. females in computer science are rare. i am worried about competition and being seen as an equal. i am also worried about balancing family life in my future, and if i will be able to succeed if i start a family. (some companies will not hire if they feel you won’t be dedicated, and feel if you want a family, then you won’t be dedicated.) (pre-survey) at the end of the program she reported, “i have been able to think about what i want to do with my career, and allowed me to voice my concerns and have my questions answered [through the discussions with professionals].” in her interview she elaborated, “there was a couple of computer science people and they…told me to be prepared about things that you’re going to encounter.” these words of wisdom came from examples of real-life people who were doing all of the things they wanted, and gave them confidence it was a real possible for them. kate, a talented chemistry student with a 3.9 gpa, further supported this inclination to move forward despite concerns because of the good examples set by the professionals they met. she was frustrated with the lack of role models around her and it made it difficult for her to imagine a future for herself. kate contemplated leaving her field and even school. in the beginning of the semester she wrote: my biggest concerns are the lack of female role models in the academic environment. i’ve never had a female professor here. i am concerned about the sacrifice of family/personal time a science career seems to require. (pre-survey) by the end of the semester, it was clear that the discussions with professionals helped her to see possibilities for herself. this program helped me by allowing me to talk with different women in different areas of science. i was able to see that it is possible to have a science career and a personal life at the same time. you always hear that this is possible, but it always seems like there are so few examples out there. i have decided that some type of graduate school is in my future; probably dental. (post-survey) kate's outlook on life changed a lot since she started the program. being a dentist or a chemist became a more realistic possibility for her after she met women in science who were combining family and career. discussions with peers and professionals helped them to identify strategies and to anticipate and prepare for what they were going to face. it was through their connection and shared concerns with peers, graduate students, and professionals that they began to challenge stereotypical images in the field and began to feel a part of the field. shared concerns, values, and selves: becoming part of the field the college students recognized that they shared concerns and values with the women in the field whom they had met (peers, graduates, and professionals). by virtue of these other people having membership in the science field at large, they too, could have a place. josie wrote in her post-survey, "i feel the need to mention the impression of my field has taken a new shape since the beginning of the semester.” the field was now seen as a large entity containing pockets of diversity, rather than one homogenous, unchangeable being. students had described their images of the science field as they once saw it. words such as “genius”, “cut-throat”, “competitive”, “old white men”, and “bookworm” were used to describe the predominant images in their environments. there were other stereotypes too; students in the physical sciences saw most as lab-confined researchers, most pre-med students saw others as competitive, and computer science and engineering students perceived less gender and ethnic diversity and personality. after meeting several people who were part of the science field, the college students now saw spaces within the science field where women with their values and images could exist. zarah found that engineering was broader than she thought and that she doesn’t “have to go into automotive or steel industries.” robyn reported that she challenged the images in the field. she said, “science majors are bookworms with no social life…i don’t feel like i fit in but i don’t want to. you can have fun and get good grades too.” kellie, a student in engineering, added to what robyn had to say by highlighting that the students’ differences can be a source of growth for the field. she said, “in my field there are men with bad communication skills where i could be helpful to them.” having a social life and good communication skills could be values of the field in the future. their connection to peers helped them to imagine entering the field with a cohort of similar values and images. abha shared, “my impressions of my field are vast and confusing at times…i do fit in well with people in my classes and they’ll probably be the same kind of people i end up working with.” annie similarly reported, “medicine is very out-for-themselves but it’s nice to have a group of girls who want to help you succeed.” this showed that annie’s views of the field had changed to include the peers in the program. as jill concluded, “my field is what i’ve wanted to be part of for as long as i can remember. sounds nice to call it ‘my field’ since i’ve just decided that is really where i should be.” these quotes help to illustrate that these changing views of the field helped them to see a place for themselves. after they began to see their peers as future colleagues, the diversity represented by the professionals they met, and imagined their own contributions, students were more motivated to move forward. but by seeing themselves as part of a collective within the field, they also revealed a new perspective: they were now motivated not only despite their concerns about the future but also by their concerns. they wanted to create new possibilities and images for women in the field. motivated by their concerns: moving forward as a collective at the end of the semester, the college students were interviewed about whether their concerns had increased, decreased, or stayed the same. in addition, as a follow-up probe, they were asked about whether they saw a relationship or no relationship between their concerns and their motivation. recall that initially, students’ concerns (e.g., lack of female role models, combining personal life and career) brought them to the program and were cited as a primary factor for discouraging their pursuit of science careers. surprisingly, they reported that the concerns that once discouraged them now served to motivate them in positive ways. estrella explained this different way of looking at concerns, “when i think of this concern i think negative, but i guess it could be positive. i think some concerns can be positive.” kayla said, “it can go both ways but it’s a lot how you think, are you positive or more pessimistic; it’s your personality.” missy elaborated this point by saying, “i’m always the kind of person who worries a lot, but i think it motivates me because if i wasn’t concerned about my future i wouldn’t be as motivated in school.” their concerns guided them toward seeking strategies and help from others. kate described in her interview, "i think there are two ways you can handle concerns about the future, you can either get motivated and seek out help or you can switch your major." rather than seeing their experience of concerns as discouraging, they began to see the concerns as a guide toward gaining support. it gave purpose to their interactions with science professionals and drew them deeper into field and could make them more knowledgeable. carol described this in her interview: i definitely think that the more motivated you are, the more you will be able to seek out answers for your concerns and it will diminish your concerns. i’m worried about this so i’m going to go research it and look into it and that sort of thing. being concerned about something tends to motivate me because i don’t like being not "in the know." these college women began to see themselves as people who were reshaping the field in new ways, reminding them of women’s important place in the field. they could address the need for more women role models, women who could offer the positive future images that they sought. robyn explained this perspective of viewing these concerns as a source of fuel to challenge the field and move in new directions. it depends on what kind of spin you put on it. because if you’re concerned "i’m never going to make it", you probably will not work as hard. but if you are concerned because this person thinks they’re better than me but they’re not, then that would make me work harder…i told you this story once before [about my sorority sister]. this doctor said, “do you want to go to med school?” and she said, “no, i think i want to go to [physician assistant] school” and he said, “oh, well that makes sense, there aren’t very many pretty girls who go to med school.” she was gung-ho about pa school and now she’s going to go to med school. that person pissed her off so much that she’s going to prove him wrong. it’s funny how one person can set you off and you prove them wrong. annie elaborated this point: i got really, really concerned my sophomore year after i talked to my advisor [and he discouraged me]. i want to go back to him after i become a famous forensic pathologist and say “he told me i couldn’t do it, now look at me.” i think women in the sciences are different than just women. there are not a lot of women forensic pathologists-there’s none-that motivates me, too. both robyn and annie describe recognition of the few women in their fields and reported that many people, even students’ own advisors, went so far as to discourage them. discouragement sways many away from pursuing science fields, but not so anymore for these students. armed with their own talent and interest in the fields, they turned around their own self-doubt in the face of others’ doubts and discouragement. it was not so much a reaction to others as it was confirmation—that if they themselves did not move forward, things would never change and there would still be a dearth of female role models for women in the future. they did imagine that the situation for women in science was going to continue to improve. mostly it would continue to do so if more women entered these fields. kayla said: i think things are going to change a lot for women, i don’t think it’s always going to be this way, always having to quit our jobs… i think it’s changing, more options like breast-feeding and stuff like that. i think they will be more accommodating than places are now in understanding that. women are obviously a contribution to society and they have to start making exceptions, so i think it’s going to work alright, i’m not that worried about it anymore. whether based in reality or in lofty optimism, these perspectives allowed women who were genuinely interested in pursuing science careers the strength to move forward despite their concerns. and surprisingly, the concerns themselves served as motivation and reason to reshape the fields, individually and collectively. a postscript: 16 weeks later of the 30 students, 21 provided me with an update of their progress. four students (estrella, jane, keshia, and lori) who were particularly concerned reported that they continued to take courses in their majors and gained new career-related experiences such as volunteering with the red cross or finding cultural support groups and career mentors on campus. ten students (annie, carol, genoveva, josie, kate, latisha, michaela, robyn, rose, and ryan) shared that they continued the progress they had made throughout the semester. for example, they stayed in touch with graduates and professionals they met during the program, saw their advisors and sought connections with new professionals, and continued to identify professionals who represented realistic and desirable life options. seven students (abha, brianna, ebony, jill, kayla, tiffany and zarah) reported that they had taken their first major career-related internships and or first jobs in the field after graduation. their actions provided evidence that their perspectives on managing concerns and commitment to the field persisted over the school year. discussion future career concerns were salient in the lives of college women when they entered the 12-week program and remained strong in magnitude at the end. however, they began to see these concerns in a new light; rather than seeing the presence of concerns as a reason to leave the field, they now saw their concerns as manageable and as a motivation to reshape the field in new ways. they could personally contribute to changing the stereotypical images of scientists. discussions with graduate students and professional across various fields helped them to see their values and concerns were shared with others who considered themselves to be in the sciences. they began to see their concerns as on-going tensions managed by professionals across fields that were, for the most part, happy with their decisions to stay in the field. as eisenhart (1995) conceptualized, students were able to pave new paths by hearing the “stories of self” shared by more established members of the field. meeting others in their field, and learning about their values and concerns, helped students to see a place for themselves in their desired fields. there was evidence that their perspectives on managing concerns and commitment to the field persisted over the school year. it is hard to know whether their perspectives will last when they enter the field without ongoing support, but these longitudinal results are encouraging. this study suggests that not all concerns should be or can be resolved by women students. future career concerns may be viewed as on-going tensions that need to be managed by exploring one's career options and identifying mentoring and other types of support in one's environment. like other struggles or problems, concerns can be seen as a catalyst for change, or a source of motivation that moves us forward. gilligan (1982) discussed the idea that when women experience crisis or struggle, they also experience growth and development of character. this may especially be the case in science fields where women must progress without easily identifiable or accessible role models and take on a “pioneering” spirit. rather than being pushed out of the field, women want to stake a claim in the field and take more control in their career decision-making. women’s decisions to face those who discourage them, and to prove them wrong, represents a healthy form of psychological reactance (brehm, 1966; buboltz, woller, & pepper, 1999), that can energize women to keep toward their goals. the current study suggests that we may learn more about resilience from examining the experiences of women who pursue nontraditional fields. to conceptualize future career concerns as a motivational fuel complements the efforts to understand ways that “outsiderswithin” seek to reshape their fields (collins, 1986) and how women manage multiple commitments in creative ways to compose their lives (bateson, 1990). at a practical level, career and mentoring programs can help students to deal with ambiguity and on-going tensions in the future and to see their concerns as reasons for action. whether on career panels, in focus groups, or through informal advising, professionals can be encouraged to share their past and current career concerns, struggles, and paths, making them explicitly transparent and accessible. while researchers have extensively documented the benefits of modeling and vicarious learning (schunk, 1987), programs can try to target the personal life dimensions that students are most interested in. supporting other researchers (e.g., bird & didion, 1992), this study suggests it is critical for students to interact with multiple role models and mentors who can challenge the stereotypes. this will also help students to develop an understanding of the trials of career journeys and promote more realistic multiple role planning (mccracken & weitzman, 1997). in addition, programs can help students to reimagine their futures and see themselves as entering a field that is currently changing. there were some limitations of this study. there was not an alternative program that could act as a control to see how the context itself influenced the students’ concerns. future research could help to tease apart the relative importance of the mentoring they received from peers and professionals and the ability to vent their concerns. for example, programs could offer discussions with peers only; discussions with live presence of the professionals; or interactions with only the role model web site. although the program included students from different backgrounds, but there was not enough information to gauge the impact of gender, ethnicity, and class on the magnitude or management of students' concerns. future research can explore the generality and relative intensity of future career concerns across a range of nontraditional careers, across a larger population of female students. even though the women decided to continue to pursue their desired fields, this is clearly not an easy life struggle to manage. with continued efforts, students who are talented and willing to work hard will be able to envision and become what they desire, regardless of their desired lifestyle choices. with more women entering a range of nontraditional fields, we may see more and more diverse images, or possible selves, across individuals and institutions, and find ways to provide support for these women and their lives. while we tend to encourage students to be realistic, there is an important role for imagining and reimagining the future. thinking about what life could be like for women in science can help more women to move forward because of their concerns, rather than despite their concerns. with more emphasis on these perspectives, they can strive to create new images in the field for themselves and women who follow. dr. becky wailing packard is an assistant professor of psychology and education at mount holyoke college. she can be reached via e-mail at: bpackard@mthloyoke.edu. references astin, h. s., & sax, l. j. (1996). developing scientific talent in undergraduate women. in davis, ginorio, hollenshead, lazarus, & rayman (eds.), the equity equation, (pp. 96-121). san francisco, ca: josseybass. bateson, m. c. (1990). composing a life. new york: penguin books. bird, s. j., & didion, c. j. (1992). retaining women science students: a mentoring project of the association for womeninscience. initiatives, 55, 3-12. brehm, j. w. (1966). a theory of psychological reactance. new york: academic press. buboltz, w. c., woller, k. m. p., & pepper, h. (1999). holland code type and psychological reactance. journal of career assessment, 7(2), 161-172. collins, p. h. (1986). learning from the outsider within: the sociological significance of black feminist thought. social problems, 33(6), 514-532. eccles, j. s. (1987). gender roles and women's achievement-related decisions. psychology of women quarterly, 11, 135-172. eisenhart, m. (1995). the fax, the jazz player, and the self-story teller: how do people organize culture? anthropology & education quarterly, 26(1), 3-26. eisenhart, m., finkel, e., & marion, s. f. (1996). creating the conditions for scientific literacy: a reexamination. american educational research journal, 33, 261-296. gilbert, l. a., & rossman, k. m. (1992). gender and the mentoring process for women: implications for professional development. professional psychology: research and practice, 23, 233-238. gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. holland, d. c., & eisenhart, m. a. (1990). educated in romance: women, achievement, and college culture. chicago, il: university of chicago press. markus, h., & nurius, p. (1986). possible selves. american psychologist, 41, 954-969. mccracken, r. s., & weitzman, l. m. 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(1996). incompatible goals: narratives of graduate women in the mathematics pipeline. american educational research journal, 33, 23-51. vetter, b. (1996). myths and realities of women's progress in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. in davis, ginorio, hollenshead, lazarus, & rayman (eds.), the equity equation, (pp. 29-56). san francisco: jossey-bass. ware, n. c., & lee, v. e. (1988). sex differences in choice of college science majors. american educational research journal, 25(4), 593-614. appendix a. participants name year major corie sophomore computer science estrella sophomore pre-med genoveva sophomore civil engineering jane sohpomore pre-med annie junior human biology brianna junior zoology/museum sciences julie junior chemistry kate junior chemistry keshia junior medical technology latisha junior medical technology lori junior human biology michaela junior microbiology missy junior medical technolgy robyn junior human biology ryan junior bldg. construction mgmt. sunita junior human biology tiffany junior microbiology abha senior computer science/english april senior computer science carol senior chemisty ebony senior manufacturing engeineering georgia senior forensic chemistry jeri senior physiology jill senior zoology josie senior microbiology/botany kayla senior physiology kellie senior material science engineering lizzie senior medical technology rose senior biochemistry zarah senior material science engineering table 1. response to quantitative items assessing future career concerns pre-test post-test statement mean sd mean sd i am concerned about having a personal life and my science career. 4.67 1.60 4.90 1.60 i am concerned about having children/family during my career. 4.93 1.36 4.83 1.23 i am concerned about working alone or in isolation. 3.57 1.22 3.67 1.67 i am concerned about working long hours. 3.87 1.07 4.60 1.04 i am concerned about competitive, cut-throat behavior in the workplace. 4.37 0.96 4.70 1.02 i am concerned that my work may not directly impact or help others. 3.13 1.46 3.43 1.65 i am concerned that i do not feel similar to others in my field in terms of personality or lifestyle. 3.77 1.36 3.90 1.35 i am concerned that i do not feel similar to others in terms of gender or race. 2.93 1.26 2.93 1.17 i am concerned that i do not see people in my field who are role models-or how i want to be in the future. 3.60 1.33 3.70 1.21 copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, summer 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] exploring women's career development: implications for theory and practice i. surjani and dr v. suchitra mouly abstract with a few notable exceptions, most research into the occupational experiences of women is typically macro-social and based on large-scale, impersonal, aggregated, and static data. whilst such data reveal the position of women in the workforce relative to men, they do not provide sufficient processual insight into the career development of women. through a case study approach, this study aims to discern patterns in the career development of women managers , and to examine if these patterns conform to career models such as those proposed by white, cox, and cooper (1992) and white (1995, 2000). the case data comprise of the career journeys of 20 women managers from a broad cross-section of occupational sectors in new zealand. the data reveal that although the majority of women managers display high career centrality, they do not work continuously as they have several years of interruptions for bearing and rearing children, and work part-time and retrain themselves through further education before returning to the workplace. interestingly, they do not seem to plan their careers. exploring women's career development: implications for theory and practice the rise in the number of women entering the workforce has generally highlighted the need for greater understanding of the development of women's careers and the career choices of women. until now, most research in this field has been undertaken through large-scale, quantitative surveys. this type of research has been criticized for producing impersonal, aggregated, and static data that construct a firm judgment of the position of women in the work force and do not understand the processes by which they accomplished it (white, et al., 1992). traditional models of career development are based on middle-class working men and do not accommodate the occupational behavior of women (gilligan, 1979). this is because these models assume that career movements occur upward in organizational hierarchies in a predictable manner. the models are also principally founded on taxonomy of stages of career or age, which is inappropriate when applied to women. generally, the work cycle of women is less predictable and more complex than that of men (perun & beilby, 1981); women's career development does not simply lag behind that of men but may proceed in an file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/www/awl/templates/index.html altogether different manner (gutek & larwood, 1987). it is only recently that researchers (e.g., pringle & dixon, 2000; white, et al., 1992) have sought to examine women's career journeys empirically . such research aims to enhance our understanding of the phases that women professionals go through while attempting to balance their domestic and professional obligations. our study seeks to add on to this scant but increasingly important strand of research. in the context of new zealand, where the authors are based, the present research addresses the following questions: • what patterns are discernible in the career development of women? • how, if at all, do these patterns differ from the career models available in the literature? • how can one modify extant conceptualizations of career development to better describe the empirical career journeys at hand? literature review for the purpose of this study, we use the definition of careers from arthur, hall, and lawrence (1989) as it furnishes a flexible and broader interpretation of careers. they define a career as the evolving sequence of a person's work experiences over time; thus, careers involve relationships between employees and their organizations over time. this definition in fact encompasses what van maanen (1977) describes as the study of individual and organizational change as well as societal change (kanter, 1989). white, et al. (1992) held in-depth interviews with 48 women managers or entrepreneurs in commerce and industry or senior members of high status. the study revealed that successful women experienced specific life stages (white, 1995, 2000). although the nature, duration, and exact timing of certain life events differed, particular developmental tasks seemed to be predictable. the findings of white, et al. (1992) bore strong similarity to the career stages of levinson (1978), which were based on interviews with 40 men. the research of white and collaborators revealed that the majority of successful women evinced high career focus, and they worked continuously and full-time, fitting their domestic responsibilities around work or choosing to remain childless (white, 2000). it is revealed from this study that continuous full-time employment seems to be a condition for career success and if women want to reach an actual equality in organizations, then change is needed in the existing stereotype of a successful career. combining the triple helix model from rapoport and rapoport (1980), hall's (1976) theory of sub-identity, as well as her own prior research on successful women, white (2000) suggested an integrated model which she called a double helix model that illustrates the lifespan development of successful women. in this model, hall's sub-identities are a cross-section through the triple helix of rapoport and rapoport. rapoport and rapoport's (1980) triple helix model consists of three strands that interact in two different ways. the first interaction takes place during steady states between transitions. the issue here is balancing. the second interaction is at transition points and the issue is the critical impact of events. hall's (1976) theory of subidentities suggested that an individual's identity can be explained as consisting of several sub-identities indicating many aspects of the individual when performing different social roles. there is not enough explanation or justification from white (2000) as to why each strand from rapoport and rapoport's (1980) triple helix model has been linked to the hall's (1976) sub-identity theory, although she noted that there was no such direct correspondence in the diagrammatical representation itself. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 19, fall 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] black women teacher educators, race uplift, and the academic other-mother identity djanna a. hill-brisbane abstract this paper examines the intersections of teacher educators' identities and the notion of race uplift. it is based on a larger study that explores the experiences and practices of black women professors at three different higher education institutions. the author maintains that as a result of their outsider-within position and race uplift stance, black women teacher educators may produce an academic other-mother identity. while considering the concepts of womanist theory, this paper attempts to offer a thick description of the kind of race uplift practiced by teacher educators of color. the author defines the outsider-within position and the historical relationship between the race uplift theme and womanism, reviews current literature about teacher educators of color highlighting their experiences and how they view their work in the academy, and examines the outsider-within position in black women teacher educators. the author concludes with a discussion of the other-mother identity and black women teacher educators. research indicates that the experiences of black women faculty involve racist and sexist practices by colleagues and students. additionally, these women experience feelings of isolation, discrimination, and tokenism. collins (1998) cautions that being marginalized in intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and/or citizenship places a variety of well-meaning intellectuals engaged in higher education in common border zones, and these same systems of power reproduce hierarchies in "outsider-within locations." middle class african americans in the united states, for example, are aggressively recruited to join elite institutions of higher education and other sites of institutional power, only to find themselves, upon arrival, confined to a new designated "place", or "outsider-within location" (collins, 1998). professor annette henry, also a teacher educator, describes the outsider-within location clearly from personal experience: standing like an oak by the photocopier, a white male graduate student utters the only words he has ever said to me during his years in the college of education: "you're lucky you got this job;" he mutters, assuredly, un-stapling a document. "they don't usually hire, well;" he leans toward me and whispers,"outsiders," as if telling me a deep dark secret. (henry, 1998, p. 5) that is, they appear to belong, because they possess both the credentials for admittance and the rights of file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/index.html formal citizenship, "but that does not automatically translate into substantive citizenship rights" (collins, 1998, p. 5). several black women scholars have termed the race-, sex-, and class-based oppression they experienced in institutions of higher learning as "double", "triple", or "multiple oppressions" (anzaldãºa, 1998; guy-sheftall, 1995; james, 1999; james & farmer, 1993; king, d., 1993). these terms are meant to suggest the cumulative effect of experiencing, gender, race, and class exploitation (knight, 1998). these new spaces that marginalized black women occupy in the academy, coupled with the possible erosion of activism within teaching due to a growing black middle class (collins, 1990), led me to ask questions such as: what is the current relationship between agency and teacher preparation?; in what ways are teaching practices influenced by these new "outsider-within" locations?; and, how do contemporary black women teacher educators utilize notions of "race uplift" to shape their work? this paper examines the intersections of teacher educators' outsider within identity and the notion of race uplift. while considering the concepts of womanist theory, it attempts to offer a thick description of race uplift as practiced by black women teacher educators. it is based on a qualitative investigation of three black women teacher educators that sought to answer two questions: in what ways do their experiences inform their teaching practice, and how does the notion of race uplift inform their work? the sample was clearly purposive because the goals were to deepen society's understandings of the significant experiences and practices of black women who prepare teachers for k-12 classrooms. methodology as a teacher educator and aspiring womanist, i am enticed to unearth and document the experiences of historic black women in the teacher education professoriate. i am also interested in exploring the experiences and practices of my contemporaries. black women teacher educators and other faculty of color are remarkably underrepresented in higher education institutions and research about them remains underexplored (ducharme & ducharme, 1996; goodland, 1990). they have stories to tell, and i am interested in their stories. why and how did they enter the profession? how do they prepare students for teaching in k-12 classrooms? what are their accomplishments and their coping strategies? in what kind of research are they involved? what have been their experiences in being and in becoming teacher educators? in what ways do they work toward educational survival and wholeness? selection of participants was based on a six point criteria. each participant has a doctoral degree in education or social science; teaches, advises and/or supervises pre-service students at their respective college or university; teaches pre-service courses in educational foundations, and/or pedagogy; is at least a second year faculty member at their current institution; has prior experience teaching in a k-12 setting; and, has a womanist perspective. respondents' perspectives and criteria were assessed through a preliminary interview which questioned participants on their educational philosophies. specific preliminary questions included: "describe your perspective as a black woman teacher educator.", "what knowledge and skills do you think teachers should possess?" and, "what is your philosophy of education?" i employed these criteria because i wanted the sample to be able to speak from experiences in both k-12 classrooms and higher education institutions. participants were also available to meet with me at various times throughout the semester. in order to obtain research sites, fifteen institutions were chosen as possible research sites based on the institution's reputation, geographic accessibility for the study, and carnegie foundation classification. an internet search of each of the 15 institutions substantiated teacher education programs and indicated school of education faculty. a list of female faculty within the respective schools of education was compiled. potential participants were contacted by mail from that list. i also relied on recommendations from professors and students at these and other higher education institutions to obtain and narrow the research sample. at the time of the study, each participant was on the faculty at three different carnegie foundation (1994) classified institutions: comprehensive i, doctoral/research i, and liberal arts ii. one research site is also a historically black higher education institution, while another site was part founded by members of the caribbean community which the college mostly serves. as such, these environments provided a rich context for analyzing how race uplift might inform pedagogy. after obtaining institutional review and participant consent, data collection occurred in three forms: interview, shadowing, and document review. formal interviews lasted approximately one and one-half hour and commenced the data collection process. informal conversations took place during and/or immediately after each day of shadowing. in shadowing, the researcher was permitted to be with the participant for several hours at a time as she went about her daily life. (see appendix a for interview questions). i conducted intensive shadowing of each participant throughout the fall, spring, and summer sessions of the academic year 2000-2001. i spent a total of 30 hours throughout several weeks shadowing and observing each participant. on the days that i shadowed participants, i conducted preand post-interviews, and collected documents for review while observing a variety of teaching practices. specific documents that were reviewed included course syllabi, text books, student evaluations, letters to/from students, curriculum vitae, books, and/or other scholarly works authored by participants. portraits were developed to describe the research site, the participants' life histories, and their respective pedagogies. data analysis was ongoing, occurring simultaneously with data collection. transcribed interviews, observation and shadowing notes, and selected documents were analyzed for emergent themes that revealed similarities, as well as differences, among the participants. race uplift as a womanist ethic of care womanist traditions are a reflection and extension of black women's commitment to the eradication of oppression and to the establishment of a just society (collins, 1990; henry, 1998; james, 19p9; ladsonbillings, 1996; walker, 1984). they evolve out of the experiences with and developing consciousness of race-, gender-, and class-based oppressions and affirm the importance of grounding black women's activism, in this case seen in their teaching practices, within their own cultural heritage. historically, the major educational philosophy within black culture, characterized by the theme "race uplift," was embraced by black women who "grew up with a mission to help their race" (perkins, 1993, p. 275). during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this philosophy simply meant that the educational obtainments of all african americans, male and female, would be for the advancement and 'uplift' of the race. indeed, the term "race uplift," coined by booker t. washington in the beginning of the 20th century, is rooted in the american enslaved experience, where the overall philosophy of education was for group effort (washington, 1901). nineteenth century education for african americans was "not for individual gain, but to assist in the economic, political, and social improvement for the enslaved and later emancipated african americans" (collins, 1990, p. 148). taylor (1995) notes that, after the american civil war, african american women educators came from various parts of the nation and from diverse backgrounds to teach newly freed slaves. "their teaching conferred on the newly freed african american students the power that results from knowledge, and challenged prevailing notions about the abilities and educability of african americans" (taylor, 1995, p. 202). taylor further suggests that african american women's collective commitment to uplift their people "helped lay the foundation for the education of the freed men and women" (p. 202). perkins (1993) characterizes this "race uplift" philosophy as having a (black) feminist perspective "which stressed that the contributions of all members were necessary" (p. 265). womanist and feminist standpoints capture the cultural activism of black women who fulfill the need to uplift the race. walker (1984) defines a womanist as a black feminist or feminist of color who is committed to the survival and wholeness of an entire people. unlike a feminist care ethic that emphasizes colorblindness, a womanist ethic of care emphasizes knowledge and pays close attention to the issue of race (thompson, 1998). in the context of this study, "race uplift" is knowledge work for the betterment of the african american community and larger american community. teacher educators of color and the race uplift theme twenty-first century education for african americans continues to carry the tradition of race uplift. yet, collins (1990) contends that the changing social class structure of african american families and communities is affecting the shape and effectiveness of the long-standing tradition of black women's activism. many fail to see the importance of gaining an education either for group survival or institutional transformation. collins further maintains that, as an area of black women's political activism, teaching has been eroded by factors such as increased access to other careers. even still, some teacher educators of color see their work in the academy as a mission. (goodwin, 1996; kemp, 1997; ladson-billings, 2001). a commitment to change educational practices for themselves, their students, and future teachers was a major theme that emerged in kemp's (1997) study examining the life experiences of women teacher educators. one participant, an african american, spoke about her work as a "mission"; a mission to increase the number of black and hispanic teachers by creating an environment that supports their growth. this effort is collaborative and communal. by this, she means that education does not occur alone, but occurs instead through collaboration with and the help of others. goodwin's (1996) interviews exploring the perspectives of teacher educators of color suggests that their "empathetic understanding for the lives of children of color results in a strong desire to engage in social action and redress inequalities", (p. 17). her findings show that teacher educators of color hold themselves to a standard of commitment that they feel is lacking in the academy and that they will readily go against what is considered standard schooling, or the conception of education that is designed to legitimate and perpetuate the unjust hierarchical structuring of our society (goodwin, 1996). in goodwin's investigation, participants' work is defined as teaching, advisement, and supervision. as teachers, participants indicated that their perspective influenced the kinds of materials they used in classes, the ways in which the content was presented, and the kinds of issues raised. within advisement, respondents discussed how students of color perceived them. several participants felt that students of color seek them out and feel more comfortable speaking with them, particularly about non-school related concerns. respondents reported working with students even if they were not "'official advisees' " (goodwin, 1996, p. 14). participants' work as supervisors involved challenging students' views and helping students focus on the possibilities rather than problems in student teaching classrooms, particularly in classrooms where children of color are present. ladson-billings' (2001) interviews with seven african american teacher educators about their experiences in the academy indicated that the structures in the academy limit their intellectual work. they also expressed a desire to effect change both in their specific institutions and the larger teacher education community. moreso, participant interviews indicate that african american teacher educators expressed a desire to engage prospective teachers in more thoughtful and rigorous conceptions of teaching that challenged social inequity and cultural ignorance. ladson-billings (2001) looks at teacher education from the perspective of the "it" being the slavery "big house" and examines the tensions that african american academics historically had between "field work" and "house work." "field work" implies to those in the cotton fields during slavery. she asks about the responsibilities that those with access to the "house" (or academy) have to those who are left in the fields? ladson-billings notes that being "in the house" did not mean that one was "of the house". this notion connects to collins' idea of "outsider-within locations" that faculty of color share in the academy. the participants in ladson-billing's study share this tension. "they are in the academy but not of the academy. their roles are circumscribed by race and the social conditions of african americans in the broader society" (ladson-billings, 2001, p. 7). for example, ladson-billings' participants have research agendas that address the education and culture of people of african descent, and most have been challenged about this focus. one participant noted several occasions when colleagues and/or administration commented that her work was too narrow and should be less "multicultural." each participant in this study each indicated that her reasons for entering the profession were related to racial uplift and the opportunity for bettering society. yet, the new spaces that marginalized black women occupy in the academy coupled with the possible erosion of activism within teaching due to a growing black middle class led the author to the following question: how do contemporary black women teacher educators utilize notions of "race uplift" to shape their work as they become positioned in outsider-within locations in the academy? the black women teacher educator as an outsider-within the three study participants, olivia, tulip, and tulani are professors at three different higher education institutions in the northern and southeast regions of the united states: olivia teaches at a suburban comprehensive university where students and faculty of color number approximately 30% each. as 4.4 percent of the full time faculty, black women teacher-educators in the college of education are less than onefourth of the total percentage of faculty of color. tulip teaches at a liberal arts college in a largely caribbean community. at this institution, students of color exceed the percentage of faculty of color at the respective rates of 97.7% and 90%. yet, out of a total of 11 full time faculty members in the department of education where tulip teaches, three members are black women. tulani teaches at a historically black research university where the percentage of students of color is 99% of the total student body and the percentage of faculty of color is 90%. black women comprise 44 percent of the full-time faculty at tulani's institution. despite the fact that two study participants teach at institutions where they may find cultural and ethnic similarities to their groups of origin, each participant has had and continues to experience positions as an "outsiders-within." collin's (1998) notion of "outsider-within," defined as locations or border-zones that black women professors and other marginalized groups tend to occupy as faculty in institutions of higher education, accurately characterize olivia, tulip, and tulani's experiences in becoming and being teachereducators. "we are newcomers to a world defined and controlled by discourses that do not often address our realities, that do not affirm our intellectual contributions and that do not seriously examine our worlds" (turner, 2002, p. 75). this leads many black women academics to ask, "can i be both black and a professor without compromising my principles or my identity?" for this reason, professors of color often live contradictions, an experience that confirms their status as outsiders-within. olivia, tulip, and tulani were outsiders-within as graduate students, learning in environments that did not support diverse perspectives. as professors, they are outsiders-within by nature of the limited numbers of women of color in higher education institutions, and by virtue of frequently being the only black professor in their department or college. the academic other-mother identity how does the theme race uplift shape the teaching, supervision, and/or advisement of black women teacher educators in "outsider-within" locations? findings show that one way in which the theme of "race uplift" shapes the teaching, advisement, and/or supervision of black women teacher educators is in the creation of an other-mother identity. findings also show that the other-mother identity is enacted in two ways: by engaging in straightforward and honest dialogue with their students and emphasizing the importance of creating strong connections to community. african american patterns of mothering and other-mothering have stimulated what collins (1990) refers to as a generalized ethic of care that causes black women to feel accountable to all the black community's children and to "treat them as if they were members of their own families" (p. 5). tulip, for example, reflected on her first day of teaching in a low performing, predominately african american elementary school. "one of the things i establish when i walk into a classroom on the first day is that we're all family. i am the mother, and it doesn't matter what color you are, in this room, you are sisters and brothers" (personal communication). tulip explicitly positions herself as the mother of the classroom and her students as the children, providing the same components of mothering to all students. in the context of her classroom, students are informed that "we are family" and "it doesn't matter what color you are." her establishment of this family-focused environment helped tulip's students provide essential support for each other and pushed them to excel in their studies. participants almost always communicated with students using a certain straightforwardness and honesty likened to that of a mother and her children. indeed, participants could not describe their formal and informal teaching experiences without talking of their multifaceted roles as teachers or emphasizing community involvement. these characteristics gave rise to the two ways that other-mothering might be enacted: by engaging in straightforward and honest dialogue with their students and emphasizing the importance of creating strong connections to community. straightforward and honest dialogue stereotypically perceived as too authoritative and un-nurturing, black female professors are frequently asked not to be so demanding of their students. "our legacy of demanding excellence as an advantage against the racism of the world is viewed negatively" (randolph, 1999, p. 4). despite this perception, and with an understanding that the quest for excellence in learning is a protective device, honest dialogue is characteristic of the other-mothering styles of olivia, tulip, and tulani. exemplifying the notion of honest dialogue in the advising of students, tulip stated, when teachers are coming into my classroom, i tell student teachers, the only thing i want to know is, why? give me an essay on why you want to become a teacher? i had one student who wanted to become a teacher because he has a family; he has to make some money, so he can go to law school. then this is not the place for you! no, sir, i think you'd better find another job. and he was a lousy teacher. he was lousy in the classroom. (tulip, personal communication) in a womanist ethic of care, there is a black standpoint that recognizes that others don't have to like you, but it is imperative that you be responsible for your actions, professional in your work, and in charge of yourself and situations under your guidance. in the above quote, tulip pushes students to be honest with themselves about their reasons for wanting to teach. she notes that entering the teaching profession simply to make money or to have summers off are not reasons that work to benefit children. tulip understood that honesty is hard, that students are initially reluctant to hear the truth but, are finally grateful for the decisions that honest assessments allow them to make. part of her classroom mantra is the statement, "i have to be honest with you." she also insists that students be honest with themselves. while assisting students with a student teaching self-assessment, tulip notes: "i want you to do some soul-searching and to be honest with yourself. and if you need help, reach out". believing that teaching is not a job to be taken lightly and that good teachers must be multifaceted and welltrained, tulip also supervises students utilizing honesty in dialogue. she begins with positive reinforcement and continues with questioning. tulip discusses follow-through with classroom management and how a teacher must be a model for students. she explains that "follow through and making an effort to call every child is imperative in classroom environment and management in all classrooms, but especially in inclusive classrooms." during an observation, tulip notices that her student teacher, shakira, did not execute the planned lesson. instead of immediately telling shakira how poorly she did, tulip compliments her and asks for a selfevaluation. after questioning, tulip begins an honest dialogue. the first of shakira's methods that were "not in place" was not providing specific feedback for her students. twice, tulip makes mention of not being pleased with shakira's growth as a teacher. in the first instance tulip states that she has been telling shakira about her teaching voice for over a year. "before you were yelling. i had a problem with that." in another instance, tulip states that they have discussed the importance of modeling appropriate learning strategies for students. she advised shakira to watch her spelling, "children will pattern after you." likewise, olivia expresses an honest dialogue characteristic of other-mothering as part of her process of student advisement and, in her protective role, gives special attention to the needs of black students who might be experiencing outsider-within status in their institutions. for example, she attempts to help one student understand the importance of knowing the range of courses available at the university as well as requirements for completion of each specialty. picking up a university catalog, she states, "you must become familiar with the courses. get one of these books." simone, an african american secondary education major listens and takes notes on the following: get one before leaving campus today. don't be caught out there trusting others to advise you. when i was in college i advised myself. not that i didn't trust them, but i need to know for myself. you know what type of student you are. study and become more familiar with the (praxis) exam. take it early. (olivia, personal communication) olivia demonstrates other-mothering by honestly telling this student about the survival tactics that are important for african americans who attend higher education institutions. in this case, the guidelines caution against sole reliance on others for essential information. similarly, several participants in goodwin's (1996) study reported making sure that they held students of color to high standards or the same standards as all students because they, "feel and know that an excellent education is the key to survival for many people of color in this country" (p. 14). again, within a womanist ethic of care, black women teachers provide students with the strategies needed to survive racism. in the above example, knowing that the national teacher's exam is culturally biased, olivia advises her student to take it early enough "to have time to take it again if necessary". correspondingly, tulani has honest dialogues with her students. she talked about the difficult task of counseling some students against selecting teaching careers through use of a "concerned counsel form". so there were some people that i tried to counsel out. we had a concerned counsel form, sometimes we didn't get past that, sometimes it was just the counseling out, letting them know what it entails and trying to get people away from the whole idea that things have changed. people say that things have changed, and we are now expected to be like pseudo parents to the kids and i would say things have changed back because we were always expected to be pseudo parents to the kids. (tulani, personal communication) tulani's belief that a teacher is equivalent to a parent aids her decisions to counsel students who are not well-suited for teaching. her belief makes her comfortable in stating that those who are not ready for the responsibility of the multifaceted roles of teaching should find other professions. in tulani's eyes, "pseudoparenting" or other-mothering has always been a role for black teachers. honest dialogue also sets expectations of high performance for supervisees and outlines one's philosophy of instruction. for example, when working as an educational district supervisor for mostly white teachers, tulani's first statement to a female teacher emphasized the primacy of children in her considerations. she stated that "i am here to help you and more than help you, i am here to help these children. so none of this is about us. this is all about them, so don't take this personally." tulani was clear about her perspective and commitment. in turn, the student teacher became aware that she would be assessed in relation to what was "honestly" good for children. as a result of being an outsider-within, combined with the notion of uplifting african american's, tulani positioned herself as other-mother for the children who were taught by her supervisee. some might consider olivia, tulip, and tulani to engage in "tough love" with their students. participants also produced honest written feedback for students that were clear and helpful. participants were opposed to inflating students' grades, simply for attendance, like some professors are known to do. included in the feedback to one particular student who contested her c-grade, olivia writes: your actual grade point average in the course according to my grading scale meticulously outlined in the syllabus is a d, numerically a 68. i however issued you a grade of a cas a result of your class participation. it would be both unethical and unjust to grant you a grade of a c since you did not earn this grade in the course. (olivia, personal communication) similarly, tulani gives straightforward written feedback. reviewing what constitutes each grade during the first class session is used to support her decisions about student grades if questioned later. "and students always come to ask about a grade they thought they should have gotten, but i don't give a's". of all the professors in their departments, participants had high standards and were known by students as "hard" professors. in addition to the honest dialogue that characterized the other-mothering displayed by study participants, olivia, tulip, and tulani felt that a connection to community was important for their students. for these three teacher educators, womanist perspectives coupled with early experiences in their own communities aid their belief that teachers must have a strong knowledge of and commitment toward community. connection to community all participants were connected to their communities in ways that enhanced their teaching. tulip reflected that one component of effective teachers is relational, namely knowledge of the community or communities that supply students to their local school and provision of a positive context for parents whose children attend the local school. it is important to know how to work with other people. you must know the community in which you are teaching. when i was teaching i made it a point to get to know the owner of the candy store where i got my morning coffee. i got to know the grocer nearby. he always wanted to know when i gave parties so he could contribute. it is also important to include the parents. for many a year they never felt welcomed in the school, especially the black and puerto rican parents. when i was principal we had a room designated for parents. (tulani, personal communication) like students, parents need to feel welcomed into their child's classroom and the entirety of the educational experience. when teachers are teaching students who are different from themselves, they must call upon parents in a collaborative fashion if they are to learn who their students really are (delpit, 1995). olivia also values community knowledge among teachers. well, they need to definitely know about the backgrounds of the students in which they teach. that's paramount, and that might mean footwork, that might mean looking at books, that might mean holding conferences at schools, that might mean building strong parent-teacher liaisons and partnerships, so that's key, that has to happen. because if i don't know too much about who i'm teaching, i'm not going to probably teach them in the most effective way. so i need to know about them as a person, individually, and also racially. (olivia, personal communication) as a profession, teaching extends beyond the classroom and into communities and families. for example, while teaching high school in my neighborhood, i remember seeing my students at the local grocery store and reminding them to complete their homework. my identity as teacher did not stop when i exited the school building. olivia's belief about teachers knowing their students personally brings another important point about teacher education to the fore. teachers must know their students in order to teach them. they must know of the "baggage," background knowledge, and/or cultural knowledge that accompanies their students to school. in olivia's eyes, if teachers do not know their students, then instruction is less likely to be effective. knowing one's students is one of the core themes in culturally relevant teaching (ladson-billings, 1996). tulani expresses her desire to stay connected to oppressed communities as one of her personal goals as an educator. i will stress though that being connected to african people and all oppressed people is my goal here. people are different. there is a value attached to difference. if we pretend like everyone is equal and everything is fine we are destined to have this conversation [about hegemony and oppression] again and again. (tulani, personal communication) for most african american faculty, ties with the black community are extremely important, partly due to "the african heritage of communalism" (gregory, 1999, p. 8). yet african american teacher educators have frequently been criticized about what is considered a narrow, race-based research focus (ladson-billings, 2001). despite these concerns, participants also exemplify the standard of community involvement. olivia, for example, continues to be involved with teacher preparatory programs at her university with the adjacent urban community. tulip recently received an award from the parent teacher association of a nearby elementary school for her dedicated services to the school and community. tulip received honors from her college for dedicated service to the college and community for the past five years. tulani's participation in the community outside of her university includes coordinating a community program that she founded three years ago. her project focuses on bridging students in nearby urban schools with students at other national and international urban areas. she is also an advisory board member of a community recreation center near her home. this community involvement reflects an ethic of care, and is also a component of other-mothering. african americans have a tradition of other-mothering that is so engrained within the culture that it is present in literature, theater, and film. for example, the feminist writer and philosopher bell hooks describes other-mothering when she describes the commitment of african american teachers at her elementary school: almost all of our teachers at booker t. washington elementary school were black women. they were committed to nurturing intellect so that we could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers black folks who used our minds. (hooks, 1994, p. 2) with a strongly identified tradition of accountability (the ethic of care) to all community children, and status as other-mothers conferred as a consequence of maturity and dedication to the community's traditions and culture (collins, 1990), study participants brought their cultural protectionism into their classrooms as well. in the way that bell hooks describes, study participants are committed to creating scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers in k-12 institutions. discussion and implications participants' reflection in relation to race uplift as an outsider within indicated that "race uplift" and their work in the academy is strongly related to a womanist ethic of care that, while different for each participant, emphasizes shared knowledge and experience. knowing the position of some of their students as outsiders as well, these three women positioned themselves as other-mothers, women focused on and concerned with creating a realm of protection that facilitated learning and allowed them to make meaningful contributions to the growth and development of their communities. straightforwardness and community emphasis are two characteristics that comprise the core of their other-mothering qualities. there is a problematic nature of this finding in terms of the stereotypes of black women. black women have often been seen as mammies, matriarchs, (collins, 1990) and even superwomen (wallace, 1978). being a student's other-mother, may not allow black women to be seen as leaders with positions of power, but instead as caretakers. caretaking correlates to a reason why women in academia also face obstacles to productivity. there is a perception that women do less research and publishing than men, in a career that makes high demands in these areas (lewis, 1993; maitland, 1990). women spend more time teaching and preparing for teaching, counseling students, serving on committees, and are assigned more undergraduate courses than men (ducharme & ducharme, 1996; lewis, 1993; maitland, 1990). however, the roles that black women maintain as teacher educators have important and potential implications for practice in education. their pedagogies and those of their students are shaped, interpreted, and reinterpreted by other-mother support. how these professors support students encourages other college professors to think of new ways to teach, assess, and interact with prospective teachers. indeed some teacher educators may already take on this other mother identity. yet what seems ordinary and commonplace is actually extraordinary in practice. prospective teachers can only benefit from more of their professors emphasizing a connection to community. while considering the concepts of womanist theory, this paper offers a thick description of race uplift as practiced by black women teacher educators. i have defined the historical relationship between the race uplift theme and womanism, and highlighted current literature about how teacher educators of color view their work in the academy. highlighting the need for an expanded pool of historically underrepresented faculty nationally and internationally was an underlying sentiment. although black women are underrepresented in higher education institutions and concentrated in the lower ranks, their numbers in the u. s. outscore those in other countries. in britain for example, there are 16 black professors out of more than 7000 professors. in this paper, i have also examined the relationship between the outsider within location and race uplift and began to define a womanist identity that might be taken on by women of color in the academy. black women teacher educators with social justice philosophies and positioned as outsiders-within may develop an academic other-mother identity to continue in their pedagogical work to uplift the race. this kind of visionary pragmatism is indicative of the third wave of womanism where the struggle for freedom is different for everyone involved yet still accomplishes the same goal of a just society (hill, 2002). this paper adds to the literature that informs through use of stories about the methods, styles, perceptions and motivations of teacher educators. this form of inquiry is vital it helps us gain knowledge about who individual teacher education faculty are and what they do, offers knowledge about teacher preparation, and suggests alternative ways to document and collect qualitative data. these findings are one way of understanding how "race uplift" informs and shapes the teaching practices of three black women teacher educators and, from their contributions to their students, have potential to influence a new generation. references anzaldua, g. 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(1995) race, gender, and calling: perspectives on african american women educators, 18611870. in j. banks, (ed.). multicultural education, transformative knowledge, and action: historical and contemporary perspectives, pp. 201-216. new york: teachers college press. thompson, a. (1998). not the color purple: black feminist lessons for educational caring. harvard educational review, 68(40), 522-554. turner, c. (2002). women of color in academe: living the multiple marginality. journal of higher education, 73(1), 74-93. walker, a. (1983). in search of our mother's gardens: womanist prose. new york: harcourt brace jovavovich publishers. wallace, m. (1978). black macho and the myth of the black superwoman. new york: dial. washington, b. t. (1901). up from slavery. new york appendix a interview guide thank you for agreeing to participate in this study. this interview has three sections: choosing the academy; perspectives as teacher educators; and, the teaching of teachers. choosing the academy 1. tell me the story of how you became a teacher educator. what experiences led you to the field of teacher education? a. why did you decide to become a teacher, in k-12 and in higher education? b. how did you become interested in teacher education? 2. what were your experiences like while you were in the graduate school? a. what kind of informal or formal support did you have in graduate school? b. what encouraging experiences have you encountered in becoming a teacher educator? c. what discouraging experiences have you encountered in becoming a teacher educator? 3. what are some of the most rewarding aspects of teaching at the college level for you? 1. what research (or other contributions made to the field) has been most meaningful? 2. in what ways do you feel supported in your work? perspectives as teacher educators 4. describe your perspective as a black woman teacher educator? 5. how have your experiences shaped your perspective? 6. what ways do you believe your perspective as a black woman who educates teachers influences your work? a. in teaching, supervision, student advisement? b. in service to the community? 7. how is what you bring to the college classroom different from your colleagues of other races and ethnicities? the teaching of teachers 8. what knowledge and skills do you feel teachers should possess? a. what do pre-service teachers need to know? b. what kinds of information do you make sure you teach in all of your classes? c. what kinds of field experiences should student teachers be exposed to? d. how could teacher education programs be improved? 9. describe the ways in which you supervise student-teachers. a. how do you prepare students for student-teaching? b. how many times do you visit them at their placements? c. what kinds of feedback do you give students? d. how do you attempt to challenge students' sometimes normative views? 10. describe how you advise students. a. what kinds of standards do you set? b. in what ways do you try to relate to students? author djanna a. hill-brisbane associate professor hilldwpunj.edu 973-720-2260 dr. djanna hill teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in educational foundations and science methods. her research interests include womanist theory, teacher education for multicultural and urban contexts, experiences of higher education faculty, and qualitative approaches to inquiry. her recent publications include: the poetry in portraiture: seeing subjects, hearing voices, and feeling contexts in the journal of qualitative inquiry, volume 11 (1) 95-105. and with co-author m. gillette. teachers for tomorrow in urban schools: recruiting and supporting the pipeline in multicultural perspectives, volume 7, in press. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership a book review amy freeman lee, ph.d. at eighty two may sarton lee, summer, 1998 above all else, the substantive presence of poignancy created by her awareness of the failure to receive acceptance by her peers and the critics permeates the entire journal. may sarton's final journal, at eighty-two, calls to mind eleanor roosevelt's my day, though their days were quite different. in essence, sarton's journal is about approaching death. specifically, it is focused on the impending final days of this prolific poet, novelist and journalist. even though one brings to the reading experience enormous empathy and sympathy, the overall result is exceedingly depressing. sarton writes in such detail about the multiple facets of her illness and especially about her overpowering depression that the dark aura of the book is inescapable. not even her rich vocabulary and fresh turn of phrase relieved the overall gloom. however, one would have to be totally without feeling to criticize the books content in a censorial way because of this sober tone. all her journals are fraught with numerous reference to good food and her passionate appreciation of flowers, and this last journal is no exception. as usual, much of the culinary delights and radiant blossoms emanate from a plethora of friends with whom sarton shares them. along with her sustained attention to food and flowers is her preoccupation with the weather and animals. her day by day description of the weather is tantamount to an official forecaster's report. perhaps some circumstance made it necessary for her to remain in maine during the long winters that she found so disturbing. her description of the winter landscape and of the house she occupied is so vivid that it becomes virtual reality not only to those who have experienced them directly but also to the vicarious http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html travelers. some relief from the severe climate came from her love of animals. in this last journal, a very handsome cat named pierrot offers her comfort and companionship. not long before she died, she sent her manuscript about pierrot to norton, her publisher. her previous book about cats, the fur person, has sold more than one hundred thousand copies. sarton's deep devotion to pets did not make her oblivious to the suffering of humans throughout the world. she was particularly moved by those who were trapped in horrendous ethnic wars about whom she wrote with great sensitivity. while her life is characterized by many simple contradictions and complex paradoxes, the sustained presence of dichotomies comprises the leitmotif. the core dichotomy pertains to the universal experiences of solitude and loneliness. the compulsive and compelling concentration on her work so characteristic of the workaholic made a certain amount of solitude necessary. however, the supreme irony may well be that in reality it is work that interrupts the flow of life rather than vice versa. while sarton wrote that "...solitude is the richness of self and loneliness the poverty of self"... in the midst of her desired solitude, she suffered loneliness of cosmic proportion. because of her severe illness this last journal is inundated with more than the usual number of compound sentences in which the expression of pleasure in the first half of the sentence is canceled by repeated references to her prodigious overwhelming exhaustion. above all else, the substantive presence to poignancy created by her awareness of the failure to receive acceptance by her peers and the critics permeates the entire journal. not even her popularity among students, teachers and a large segment of the general reading public offered sufficient compensation. she longed to be known as a serious and accomplished poet, although her forte was really as a spinner of tales. late in life and late in her career, she was awarded the levinson prize for poetry in 1993. with the recent death of the eminent canadian author, robertson davies, whose deptford trilogy is one of the master-pieces of the 20th century, and the passing of may sarton, the literary world and those who love it are reeling from the double blow. like large trees, literary giants take a long time to grow, and in the interim, there are fewer places to rest in the shade and read. as a final gift, may sarton shares with us the many books she was reading as well as her opinion of them. for this and her own books, we are grateful. awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 3, summer 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational 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http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 20, winter 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] teachers’ perceptions of “smart” girls: what does it mean for developing girls and young women into leaders? by jacqueline e. jacobs, ph.d. abstract based on two studies, one of girls and young women in middle schools and high schools (n=802) and a random sample of their teachers (n=41), there is evidence that girls and young women are confident in their views of themselves as “smart” and do not see any differences in how they are treated by their peers or teachers for being “smart”. the evidence from the teachers supports these perceptions and provides a glimpse at what characteristics/behaviors teachers perceive as identifying girls and young women as “smart.” this evidence suggests that there is confidence among girls and young women relative to being “smart” which may well provide a basis for the development of skills which are needed to ensure girls and young women become leaders in our society. teachers’ perceptions of “smart” girls: what does it mean for developing girls and young women into leaders? in the most highly touted, free, democratic society, where over 51% of the population is female, but only 14 of the 100 u.s. senators and 59 of the 435 members of the house of representatives are women, it is evident that there is much work to be done to address how we prepare girls and young women to pursue active roles in leadership. as educational leaders concerned with advancing women in leadership, it is important for us to assess the k-12 environment in which girls and young women are educated to determine what steps might be necessary to ensure that we are developing those skills and abilities that will allow young women to become the leaders so needed in our society. “education is an investment that stays with a woman throughout her life, is hers to use as she wishes, and cannot be taken away” (the population council, 2002, para 1). the report of the population council goes on to provide information indicating that educated women are more likely to be involved in political issues, know their rights, and have a longer life expectancy. additionally, this report indicated increased economic productivity and more effective investments in the next generation for educated women. file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter2006/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter2006/index.html is being “smart” important in leadership for a diverse society? if more girls and young women are to become leaders for our society, it appears critical that they have the opportunity in their formative years, particularly through their educational environments, to develop their intellect, abilities, and skills to be leaders as adults. confidence in one’s ability to lead may be as important as the knowledge and skills to do so. “…many feel that a deep vein of prejudice still runs through corporate america, despite the upbeat talk about workforce diversity” (hopkins & hopkins, 1998, para. 13). in an increasingly diverse society, leadership must be more reflective of the population it serves. “all leaders have the capacity to create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place and the ability to translate that vision into reality” (bennis, 1990, p. 46). manasse (1986) suggested that visionary leadership includes four types of vision: organization, future, personal, and strategic, with personal vision including the leader’s personal aspirations for the organization which acts as the impetus for the leader’s actions. lucas (2002) reported a personal interview with donna e. shalala, president of the university of miami and former u.s. secretary of health and human services, in which she asked: “what kind of higher education leadership is needed in this time of national crisis?” (para. 47). dr. shalala responded: first of all, fundamental to all of this on whether we’re going to have the rule of law has to do with overcoming ignorance. ignorance about other cultures, ignorance about the challenges that other religions present to us and trying to understand different traditions, ignorance about terrorism itself. all of our knowledge is not going to come out of the cia, it’s going to come from college campuses with people who are really smart [emphasis added]. and we’ve got to be ready for all of that. our students want to talk about it. they want to talk about what the world and the future is going to be like, and what the threats are going to be to our country. (lucas, 2002, para. 48) elements of leadership, grounded in personal vision and knowledge from people who are smart, suggest that to ensure that we have more women pursuing leadership positions in government, business, and education we need to examine the schooling of girls and young women and their perceptions of self. with an understanding of how girls and young women perceive themselves and how their teachers indicate they view girls and the concept of “smart”, there is an opportunity to consider what needs to occur in our educational processes to ensure that more young women are prepared to be leaders and are confident in their abilities to lead. clearly, among our current female leaders, such as president shalala ( university of miami), there is a belief that we need “smart” people leading our country, what do we know about the schooling of girls? in order to determine some of the issues related to the education of girls and young women in public education in the united states, an examination of the literature on girls in schools indicates that kramer (1985) found that many girls use social interaction to determine the quality and acceptability of their academic achievement. kerr (1995), silverman, (1994/95), as well as, reis and callahan (1996) have suggested that the conflicting demands of academic success and social acceptance are a bigger challenge for girls who are gifted than their peers in regular education classes. girls who have demonstrated high achievement in elementary school display less achievement in middle school and high school, with girls valuing high achievement among same ethnicity girls more than in girls from other ethnic groups (taylor, graham, & hudley, 1997.) there is no evidence that students identify a specific teacher when considering whether they are smart or not. kamm (1999) addressing issues related to accountability suggested that; “one influence that the government cannot control in an educational setting is the attitude brought into school by the student” (para 8), going on to state, “the attitudes of the household can influence the classroom experience in positive and negative ways” (para 8) she suggested that the school environment for students is “…fabricated by the attitudes brought into school by some students, the textbooks used in the curriculum, and the teachers in the classroom” (para 7). these attitudes can affect self-perceptions, perceptions of others, and contribute to behaviors exhibited in the classroom. walker (1993) suggested that male students call out answers eight times more often than female students, and males are called on more than females. and, when extended to teacher behaviors, sadker and sadker (1994) reported that boys were much more likely to be encouraged to solve a problem while girls were given an explanation. orenstein (1994) reported information that some girls perceive that boys prefer it when they act helpless and “girly”. and, there is evidence that girls still face an enormous gender gap in testing (sadker, 1996). all of these issues are tied to how girls and young women perceive themselves and each other in the educational arena. what happens in the social milieu of middle schools and high schools may well be one of the most significant aspects in shaping the perceptions that girls and young women have about who they are and what they can accomplish, both of which are critical to their development as leaders. looking at perceptions of girls and young women about being “smart” based on concern about how “smart” girls are viewed and accepted, and aware of shalala’s view of the importance of smart people to provide leadership to address the problems in our current world situation, the initial step in looking at characteristics/beliefs that might lead to girls and young women developing skills and behaviors of leadership was to determine what middle and high school girls and young women perceive about being “smart”. a survey of over 800 middle school and high school girls was conducted in a southeastern u.s. state. no specific definition of “smart” was given as the researcher was more interested in the perceptions of girls and young women about themselves and others, however they chose to define “smart”. it was assumed that giving a specific definition of “smart” (e.g. good grades, high i.q.) would limit the range of possible views of what being “smart” is. the survey consisted of seven items which the girls and young women were to rate using a four point scale (see figure 1). rate each of the following as a: 1 = this statement is true 90 percent or more of the time. 2 = this statement is true more than half the time, but not more then 90% of the time. 3 = this statement is seldom true in my school (or of me). 4 = this statement is not true in my school (or of me). figure 1: response choices for survey the subjects ranged from sixth through twelfth grade with 78% being in grades 8-11; 10% in grades six/seven; and 12% being in grade twelve. reported grades by the girls and young women appear to distribute in a fairly traditional normal distribution. approximately 82% reported being in the a, b, c range, with 10.5% reporting all as and 6.6% reporting some ds or fs. the survey consisted of seven items to which all subjects were asked to respond and then only to respond to items eight and nine if they answered “1” or “2” to item seven. the items to which the subjects were asked to respond are presented in table 1. table 1: sample of percentage responses to items on survey of girls and young women item 1 (true 90% or more of the 2 (true more than half the 3 (seldom true in my school –or 4 (not true in my school-or for mean time) time but less than 90%). for me) me) 1. girls in my school talk about being smart with each other. 10% 65% 2.77 2. girls in my school want boys to think the girls are smart. 18% 10% 2.38 3. girls in my school get attention from teachers for being smart. 35% 39.3% 8% 2.02 4. girls in my school get more attention from teachers than boys for being smart. 19.6% 26.5% 2.61 5. girls in my school get teased by boys for being smart. 6.5% 44.8% 3.18 6. girls in my school get teased by other girls for being smart. 7.5% 43.3% 3.17 7. i think that i am smart. 57.6% 31.9% 2.9% 1.56 *8. i want people to think that i am smart. 60.8% 29.8% 3% 1.52 *9. i find it difficult to share with others that i am smart. 10.7% 31.7% 38.7% 2.86 notes: * only those who responded “1” or “2” to item 7, answered items 8 and 9. not all percentages were included in order to draw a visual awareness to the percentages by response areas. complete data is available upon request. in narrative responses to the prompt, “please write a short paragraph expressing how you feel about how girls who are smart are treated in your school”, general comments from the girls and young women suggest that girls think that all students are treated fairly in their schools and are not treated differently for being smart girls. analyses suggest that girls are confident about being viewed as smart. an astonishing 89% of the respondents rated the statement “i believe i am smart” as true 50% or more of the time. of that 89%, 90.6% “…want people to think i’m smart.” narrative comments suggest that many of the female students viewed being smart as an asset (e.g. “i wish that i could be as smart as some girls in my school so that i could have a good education”). however, 42.4% responded that it is difficult (50 % or more of the time) “to share with others that i am smart.” the majority of the respondents felt that girls do not get teased a lot for being smart by either boys or girls, yet in one of the middle schools, over 50% of the respondents made narrative comments that smart girls are teased and called “geeks” or “nerds”. this would suggest forces within that school or community are at work, since in the greater “community” statewide either girls do not view being “smart” as grounds for teasing, or the school environments are well supervised and appropriate behaviors are expected. in considering how students’ perceive teachers treat girls who are smart, the responses to “girls who are smart get attention from their teachers” was extremely positive (73.3% said it was true more than 50% of the time). however, 54.4% indicated that it was “seldom” to “never true” that smart girls get more attention from teachers than smart boys. this may well suggest that teachers treat boys and girls they view as “smart” equally. looking at teachers’ perceptions of girls and young women relative to being “smart” a random sample of teachers in the schools of the girls and young women who participated in the initial survey was asked to complete a survey on teacher behaviors and teacher perceptions of girls and young women relative to being “smart”. the word “smart” was considered a relative construct to an individual’s perception, therefore, the teachers in this study were asked to define “smart.” the researcher did not want to limit the range of possibilities that might be generated about the thinking of individual teachers relative to the concept of “smart”. each participant gave several characteristics of “smart” girls. the constant comparative method (lincoln & guba, 1985) was used to analyze the participants’ responses to the definition of “smart” girls. the data were analyzed thematically based on the proportion of respondents (male, female) for each characteristic given. seventy-five percent of the teachers responded to this item. as shown in table 2, the majority of the teachers (61.5% males, 55.0% females) defined “smart” girls as those who received good grades. ten percent of the female teachers defined “smart” girls as those who had common sense. none of the male teachers defined “smart” in that way. table 2: characteristics of “smart” girls by gender of teacher gender of teacher characteristics of "smart" girls male female good grades 61.5% 55.0% high achievement 38.5% 45.0% problem solving ability 15.4% 25.0% extra curricular activities 15.4% 0.0% responsibility 15.4% 5.0% standardized test scores 15.4% 5.0% good decision making 7.7% 5.0% common sense 0.0% 10.0% note: does not equal 100% of respondents since each respondent could provide multiple responses. using the same four point scale from the survey given to the middle school and high school girls and young women, teachers were also asked to rate their perceptions of behaviors and actions of teachers in their schools on items related to the perceptions, actions, and behaviors of girls and young women who are “smart.” (see tables 3 and 4) table 3: descriptive statistics for teachers’ actions on behavior subscale n mean sd encouarge girls to take difficult subjects 39 1.31 .521 acknowledge smart girls and smart boys equally 40 1.38 .667 encourage smart girls to solve difficult problems 40 1.43 .549 encourage girls to act smart 40 1.48 .679 discourage girls from "dumbing down" in class 40 1.50 .751 give more positive attention to smart girls for getting good grades than to smart boys 40 1.53 .679 talk to girls about being smart 40 1.82 .675 note: 1 is a positive responsemore than 90% of the time. 4 is a negative responsenot at all. table 4: descriptive statistics of teacher perceptions of the actions of smart girls toward other girls n mean sd smart girls assist other girls 41 1.95 .631 smart girls praise other girls 41 2.10 .768 smart girls talk to other girls about being smart 41 2.46 .711 note: 1 is a positive response-more than 90% of the time. 4 is a negative response-not at all. further analyses suggested that there were no significant differences in the years of experience, degrees held, or gender of teacher on teachers’ perceptions of smart girls academically or socially. discussion and implications for developing girls and young women into leaders overall female and male teachers identified good grades and high achievement as characteristics of “smart.” following those two highly identified characteristics, male teachers identified smart girls in terms of participation in extracurricular activities, responsible behavior, and high scores on standardized tests. conversely, female teachers were more likely to include problem solving abilities and common sense. teachers’ responses and student responses to the climate in their schools for girls were very similar. it would appear that teachers treat boys and girls who they view as “smart” equally and that the girls and young women themselves perceive that to be so. the responses that have, perhaps, the most serious implications for developing girls and young women into leaders have to do with the perception of teachers about what constitutes being “smart.” with the most attention being given to “good grades”, versus problem solving, responsibility, good decision making, or even confidence or vision, it is clear that the expectation for compliant behavior evidenced by good grades may well perpetuate the current dearth of women in leadership. conclusion since vision (manasse, 1986) and being smart (lucas, 2002) are deemed important to leadership for the 21 st century, and since there is a belief that we need smart people to solve problems (lucas, 2002), this study provided a basis for considering how girls and young women view themselves relative to being “smart.” with the powerful influence of teachers on the education of girls and young women, it is imperative that we examine how education contributes to preparing girls and young women to be leaders. in a country that clearly does not yet have the representation of women in leadership positions at any level that should be expected, it would appear that girls and young women have a positive vision of themselves and others relative to being “smart” and do not feel that that they are teased or treated differently for being so. with teachers’ perceptions lending support to the perceptions of the girls and young women that smart girls are treated equally and fairly, it would appear that the social milieu in middle schools and high schools is ripe for concerted efforts to capitalize on these perceptions and help girls and young women explore and develop their skills and abilities through growth and leadership in their current environments. sorely missing, though is a belief on the part of a number of teachers that problem-solving is a trait of “smart” girls. if this belief is wide spread, then it is critical that work be done with teachers to consider how those skills can be developed in young women. a narrative statement by one of the young women in the survey is particularly poignant about the power of teachers to contribute to the growth of girls and young women: girls that are smart are treated the same way as girls that have a slower way of learning. so there is really no, oh, your smart, i’m going to treat you better than him/her because she don’t get it as fast as you. but one teacher on this team does [treat students differently]. she figures if you don’t get it it’s your fault, not her cause she got her education. mostly girls are having problems with her. but if [she] took time to teach right everybody would do better. (jacobs, 2002, student response in survey) the opportunity appears before us to capitalize on the confidence and vision of the girls and young women in our schools to help them to become the much needed leaders for education, business and government well into the 21 st century. references bennis, w. (1990). managing the dream: leadership in the 21 st century. training: the magazine of human resource development, 27(5), 44-46. hopkins, s. a. & hopkins, w. e. (1998) diversity leadership: a mandate for the 21 st century workforce. journal of leadership studies. 5(3), 129. [on-line]: http://www.questia.com/pm.qst?action=print&docid6001503228&pgnum=1 accessed: december 2002 kamm, k. (1999, may 4). gender inequality in education. retrieved on-line 8/30/2002. http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/talulalady/genderhtml?mtbrand=aol_us kerr, b.a. (1995). smart girls two. dayton: ohio psychology press. kramer, l.r. (1985) social interaction and perceptions of ability: a study of gifted adolescent females. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association, chicago il (eric document reproduction service no. ed262535) lincoln, y.s., & guba, e.g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. newberry park, ca: sage. lucas, n. (2002) an interview with donna shalala. journal of leadership studies. 8(3), 3+. [on-line] http://www.questia.com/pm.qst?action=print&docid5000700212&pgnum=1 accessed: january 7, 2003. manasse, a.l. (1986). vision and leadership: paying attention to intention. peabody journal of education, 63(1), 150-173. orenstein, p. (1994). schoolgirls: young women, self-esteem, and the confidence gap. new york: doubleday. reis, s. m., & callahan, c.m. (1996). my boyfriend, my girlfriend, or me: the dilemma of talented teenaged girls. the journal of secondary gifted education, 17, 434-446. sadker, d. (1996, sept. 4). where the girls are. education week, [on-line] http://www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=01sadker.h16&keywords=sadker accessed: september 20, 2002. sadker, m., & sadker, d. (1994) failing at fairness: how america’s schools cheat girls. new york: charles scribner’s sons. silverman, l.k. (1994/95). to be gifted or feminine: the forced choice of adolescence. the journal of secondary gifted education, winter, 141-156. taylor, a.z., graham, s., & hudley, c. (1997) falling stars: the valuing of academic achievement among african-american, latino, and white adolescents. paper presented at the biennial meeting of the society for research in child development. (eric document reproduction service no ed 413366) the population council (2002) accelerating girls’ education: a priority for governments. [on-line] http://www.popcouncil.org/gfd/girlseducation.html accessed: september 20, 2002. walker, m. (1993, sept. 18). sexism in the classroom. newsday, 20. authors jacqueline e. jacobs, ph.d. professor department of educational leadership & foundations western carolina university cullowhee, nc 28723 e-mail: jjacobs@ wcu.edu jacqueline jacobs has experience as a teacher, administrator and professor on five continents and in five states. she is author of numerous publications and presentations and is active in professional organizations such as, national council of professors of educational administration and phi delta kappa. jacque does extensive work in schools throughout the southeast. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word sampson_women_superintendents.docx advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 187 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 187-192, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women superintendents: promotion of other women to central office administration pauline m. sampson, gloria gresham, stephanie applewhite, kerry roberts pauline m. sampson: stephen f. austin state university, sampsonp@sfasu.edu gloria gresham: stephen f. austin state university, greshamglor@sfasu.edu stephanie applewhite: stephen f. austin state university, sapplewhite@msn.com kerry l. roberts: stephen f. austin state university, robertsk@sfasu.edu accepted september 02, 2015 more women are leading schools in the role of superintendent, but numbers are still low when compared to men. there is limited research connecting women superintendents and the promotion of other women to leadership positions. archival data from texas schools showed that there is no difference between districts led by women superintendents or males for percentages of women central office leaders. keywords: superintendent, women, central office, promotion introduction approximately 24.1% of superintendents in the united states were women in 2011 (kowalski, mccord, petersen, young, & ellerson, 2011; muñoz, pankake, ramalho, mills, & simmonsson, 2014), and this number is an increase over the 13% revealed in 2002 (brunner, grogan, & prince, 2003). even though the numbers of women in the superintendency are showing an upward swing, the numbers remain low when compared to males. in 1993 bell and chase reported that 70% of all teaching positions were held by women. glass (2000) concurred with the large number of women teachers and reported that about 75% of elementary classroom teachers in the nation were women. this is important because the position of teacher is often the beginning of the career pathway to the office of superintendent (glass, 1992). barriers of family, time, mobility, gender bias (bjork & kowalski, 2005; dana & bourisaw, 2006; glass & franceschini, 2007; gosmire, morrison, & van osdel, 2010), and chosen career path may be some reasons why women numbers in the superintendency are consistently lower than male numbers (whitaker, 2006). oftentimes a direct career pathway to the superintendency is a central office position. when women are not afforded an opportunity to work in a central office position, they may lack mentors and role models to help in their career development and advancement (muñoz et al., 2014). one might consider that women superintendents would foster the development of women leaders. however, there is limited research on the connection of women superintendents and the gender of the central office administrative team. the purpose of this study was to determine if women superintendents in texas school districts have larger percentages of women central office leaders when compared to men superintendents to ascertain if women support women to pursue leadership roles such as the superintendency more than male superintendents. this study is significant as it examines the gender composition of a districts’ leadership team and examines whether women superintendents support other women in leadership roles and thus provide needed mentorship. conceptual framework grounding this study are political theory and frameworks of power. political theory asserts that the culture of an organization as determined by gender of leaders reflects how the organization treats networking and support related to gender diversity. promoting this theoretical framework are franzway and fonow (2011) who revealed gender is impacted by politics and viewed differently between genders. the majority of the work of franzway and fonow was with women in the politics of trade unions. however, they examined power and how women have attempted to achieve feminist goals in a formal network (p. 8). further, franzway and fonow (2011) stated, “power can’t be understood in isolation from historic patterns of gender arrangements. power is understood by productive networks that advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 188 reach into every part of the social field and everyday life” (p. 8). interestly, franznway and fonow (2011) shared that where men are seen as the norm, “their power is invisible and questions are rarely raised about how men achieved and maintained their dominance” (p. 9). collins, chafetz, blumberg, coltrane, and turner (1993) also stated that organizations needed to examine the unequal power between men and women. further considering power, women, and the superintendency, dana and bourisaw’s framework of power issues (2006) presented by muñoz, pankake, ramalho, mills, and simmonsson in 2014 directly related to this study. these authors consolidated the work of dana and bourisaw into four issues women superintendents navigate: (a) power of and over self; (b) power of social and cultural norms and expectations; (c) power in relationships with others; and (d) power through and to others. a review of each of these issues follows. power of and over self. the power of and over self relates to “those issues over which individuals have control, including the volition, and resiliency to fulfill and enact decisions” (muñoz et al., 2014, p. 765). for a woman, those decisions might pertain to who to marry, what job or education to pursue, and whether to stay in the classroom or not. a woman, in contrast to a man, may face barriers of family, time, and mobility depending on their situation or marital status. a woman in the classroom may not believe she has power over self to pursue upward job mobility due to one or more of these barriers. power of social and cultural norms and expectations. traditionally, the office of superintendent is held by males. as eagly and karau (2002) explained, when a woman seeks the superintendency, she may find role incongruity where women are expected by organizations to be secondary to males in leadership and also more communal than men; yet they see themselves as strong leaders (muñoz et al., 2014). it is the social and cultural expectations that the role of superintendent is filled by males (muñoz et al., 2014). women who rise to the office of superintendent are viewed negatively and assessed more stringently (muñoz et al., 2014). when a woman is perceived as one who seeks the role of superintendent or is viewed as one moving toward that role, colleagues or supervisors may thwart opportunities for promotion (chen, langner, & mendozadenton, 2009). power in relationships with others. a superintendent’s success is based on how well relationships are built with others such as staff, school board members, and community members. if a superintendent is female, it is imperative that she builds “strong social networks” (higgins & kram, 2001; muñoz et al., 2014, p. 765). nikkhah, redzaun, and abu-samah (2012) stated that women should search for or take advantage of opportunities with other women leaders to consider their own personal strengths and areas to improve. if women have built strong relationships with colleagues and have strong networks, they may be encouraged to apply for higher positions if they are viewed as having great potential (muñoz et al., 2014). power through and to others. according to muñoz et al., (2014), this power refers to “power transference” (p. 766) and relates to a typically female trait to be communal. brunner (1999) researched women superintendents and found they usually have a capacity to work collaboratively to build power. walker, hardi, mcmahon, and fennell (1996) cautioned that when women do show communal intent, this intent may cause a negative reaction of perceived weakness even if the woman is a competent leader. although as muñoz et al. (2014) indicated, the power of through and to others may foster student success and be a contributor to school improvement. as women seek the office of superintendency, they are faced with the politics of power and the frameworks of power. as the researchers considered these issues as they related to women superintendents and how leaders supported the development of women leaders, a search of literature concerning women in superintendent roles and the barriers women face who pursue these roles was implemented. additionally, the importance of networking to career advancement and the role of a central office or mid-level administrative position to the superintendency was investigated. review of literature women hold 75.9% of the teaching positions and 50.3% of the principal positions (grogan & shakeshaft, 2011). also, grogan and shakeshaft (2011) indicated that women remain in the teaching position longer than males; men have more years in administrative positions prior to accepting a superintendent position. women may attempt to increase their skills through advanced education since women superintendents hold more advanced degrees than male superintendents (grogan & shakeshaft, 2011). kowalski et al. (2011) found that almost half of women superintendents were in rural schools. however, this was not supported in a more recent study where, nationally, women superintendents are more likely to serve in large suburban areas than mid-size and small suburbs or rural areas (stuckey, 2012). women also hold the majority of administrative positions excluding the superintendent position (stuckey, 2012). however, the majority of those administrative positions were support positions such as program directors. men held the majority of the assistant superintendent positions. as researchers pondered reasons why women may not access the superintendent position, findings indicated barriers such as family constraints, limited mobility, perceived lack of skills in finance and facilities management by the school boards (gosmire, morrison, and van osdell, 2010). when considering the barrier of children or a family, derrington and sharratt (2009), termed this barrier the self-imposed barrier. these authors surveyed women superintendents and those aspiring to be superintendents in washington state in 2005 to ascertain barriers to seeking the superintendency. they found that women determined to put family responsibilities ahead of their desire to be a superintendent. as reported by derrington and sharratt, women with young children through high school age represent advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 189 the smallest percentage of women in the role of the superintendent (2009). gender bias was found to be a barrier to women seeking the superintendency. whitaker (2006) studied nine women superintendents and discovered that all nine had experienced gender bias. grogan (1996) revealed that women who are categorized as those of color find that gender is a greater barrier than that of their race. when a candidate for superintendency is a woman, it is more difficult to be considered for the position (muñoz et al., 2014). school boards sometimes block women from the role of superintendency (muñoz et al., 2014). oftentimes, school boards are not comfortable with a female leader because they do not see them as good managers nor as effective with finance management (glass, bjork, & brunner, 2000). gatekeeping as described by skrla, reyes, and scheurich (2000) comes into play. unwritten criteria are implemented during the hiring process hindering women from being viable candidates. lack of confidence or low self-efficacy is another barrier women face (muñoz et al., 2014). women often question their ability to hold the office of superintendent (dobie & hummel, 2006). usually women have more experience with curriculum and instruction rather than finance and management which causes them to question their ability (muñoz et al., 2014). dobie and hummel stated that women question their competency since they are defined as women and superintendents, not just superintendents (2006). the lack of role models impacts women’s lack of confidence (muñoz et al., 2014). improved networking, especially with other women leaders, could improve women’s lack of self-efficacy to take on the top role in a district. many studies have stressed the importance of networking to gain access to leadership roles (beem, 2007; gilmour & kinsella, 2008; mccann & johannessen, 2009; mcclellan, ivoryc & dominuguez, 2008; searby & tripses, 2006). however, women often use networking as a means for social support while men use networking overtly to advance their careers (singh, vinnicombe, & kumra, 2006). additionally, mentoring and networks are defined as formal or informal. formal networks are part of an organization and have some form of formal guidelines while informal networks have less structure and are more casual interactions (wierzgac, 2005). further, male leaders have traditionally mentored each other; while women leaders were often mentored by males (searby & tripses, 2006). brunner and grogan (2007) found differences in the networking and mentorship of women leaders who aspired to be superintendents and women leaders who had no aspiration for the superintendency. women who aspired to the superintendency were more interested in networking and seeking mentors than non-aspiring superintendents (brunner & grogan, 2007). both groups of women leaders stated that administration required long hours; however, the non-aspiring superintendents stated the work was hard at a higher frequency. dudek (2012) concurred with brunner and grogan (2007) that the majority of women superintendents had both men and women mentors; however, women superintendents sought support and friendship from their mentors. these authors also determined that formal networks were as beneficial as informal networks. peters (2010) found that women school leaders often had informal mentors that emphasized friendship with no set of preliminary guidelines for the mentorship. however, searby and tripses (2006) determined that women often did not receive mentorship and thus were reluctant to mentor other women. whitaker (2006) indicated that women do not have strong mentorships and actually resisted feminism as it was seen as negative. central office or mid-level administrative roles provide opportunities for mentorships. central office roles are often career pathways to the superintendency. grogan & brunner (2005) conducted a survey of women superintendents, and these authors revealed that many aspiring to the role of superintendent were assistant or associate superintendents for curriculum and instruction. yong-lyun and brunner (2009) reported the normal pathway to that of superintendent was teacher to coach-like jobs such as athletic coach or club advisor, to principal, to central office director or supervisor, to assistant or associate superintendent, and then to superintendent. glass (2000) relayed that women are not usually in positions that normally lead to the superintendency. yonglyun and brunner also stated that higher-ranking positions in organizations have more opportunity for upward mobility, thus, showing that holding central office positions is an advantage for women seeking the superintendency. to examine whether districts led by women superintendents have larger percentages of women central office leaders than districts led by male superintendents is the focus of this current study. method the study is exploratory research using archival data. the data for this study was collected from the texas education agency website as well as district websites in texas. this study used existing data from the 2013-2014 school year. there are 1,227 school districts in texas. only school districts categorized as major urban, major suburban, central city, and other central city suburban were included in this study as it is likely that smaller districts may not have a large central office. the gender of the following leadership positions was examined for each district: business manager or chief financial officer, human resource director, curriculum and instruction director or assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, deputy superintendent, and superintendent. additionally, the organizational chart and leadership team as identified on school districts’ websites were used for data collection and determination of the titles used by that school district for central office leadership team or senior leadership team composition. this was important as districts used different administrator titles for their leadership teams. the hypothesis of this study was that the gender of the superintendent will significantly relate to the gender composition of district central office administrators. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 190 results and findings there are 11 school districts categorized as major urban. there are 79 school districts categorized as major suburban and 40 districts categories as central city. there are 164 school districts categorized as other central city suburban. the other categories not used in this study were independent town, nonmetropolitan: fast growing, non-metropolitan: stable, rural, and charter school districts. findings of all major urban school districts in texas showed that nine of the eleven urban districts had easily determined data on their leadership teams. two of the nine districts (22%) were led by women superintendents although one of the women superintendents was the interim superintendent. the two districts led by women superintendents had central office leadership teams consisting of 36% women and 50% women, respectively, with an average of 43% women. the seven districts led by male superintendents (78%) had central office leadership teams consisting of women leadership ranging from 25% 64% of their identified leadership with an average of 46% women. the findings with the urban districts showed very little differences in the averages of women central office administrators in districts led by women or male superintendents. the 79 school districts (one district was consolidated with another district) for a total of 78 school districts categorized as major suburban showing 66 districts led by men (85%) and 12 districts led by women (15%). the districts led by women had central office leadership teams consisting of an average of 53% women. the districts led by male superintendents had central office leadership teams consisting of women leaders with an average of 52%. the findings with the major suburban districts showed very little differences in the average of women central office administrators in districts led by women or male superintendents. the 41 school districts categorized as central city showed 36 districts led by men (88%) and five districts led by women (12%). the districts led by women had central office leadership teams that consisted of an average of 47% women. the districts led by male superintendents had central office leadership teams consisting of women leaders with an average of 54%. the findings with central city districts showed a moderate increase in the average of women central office administrators in districts led by male superintendents over those led by women superintendents. the 164 school districts categorized as other central city suburban showed 121 districts led by men (74%) and 43 districts led by women (26%). the districts led by women had central office leadership teams that consisted of an average of 63% women. the districts led by male superintendents had central office leadership teams consisting of women leaders with an average of 64%. findings of the other central city suburban districts showed very little differences in the average of women central office administrators in districts led by women or male superintendents. conclusion the largest percentages of women as superintendents were found in major urban districts (22%) and central suburban districts (26%) in texas. there were minimal differences in percentages of gender for central office positions when compared within the same category of districts. the largest difference was seen in districts categorized as central city. this category had seven percentage point differences with more women central office administrators in districts led by male superintendents. the current study mirrored and contrasted findings of previous research. franznway and fonow (2011) indicated that men leaders are seen as the norm. this present study supported their data by showing that more superintendents are male. in addition, stuckey (2012) found that women superintendents were more likely to serve in large suburban area when compared to midsize and rural areas. this study differed slightly from stuckey’s findings in that the largest percentages of women superintendents were discovered in major urban districts. as grogan and brunner (2005) expressed, the central office is a general pathway to the superintendency. if a central office position is a stepping stone to that of the superintendency, the current study showed that women are not supporting other women more than men as reflected in the composition of central office leadership positions. supporting the research of brunner and grogan (2007) and dudek (2012), women central office administrators have found more men mentors helping in their career advancement than that of women. this shows that women may lack women mentors and role models to help in their career development and advancement which was revealed by muñoz, pankake, ramalho, mills, & simmonsson, 2014. so, not having opportunities for female mentorship will thwart women from seeking the superintendency, and the numbers of women in the role of superintendent will remain lower than men numbers. in this study, we did not attempt to explore the reasons for differences in gender between superintendents and central office administrators. the hypothesis that central office administrators would have more women in districts led by women superintendents was not supported by this exploratory research. additionally, this research did not support previous research that found more women superintendents in central administration positions than males. further research is needed to explore the reasons for advancement to central office administration by gender issues. references beem, k. (2007). superintendent mentoring the state way. school administrator, 64(4), 10-17. bjork, l. g., & kowalski, t. j. (eds.). (2005). the contemporary superintendent: preparation, practice, and development. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 191 brunner, c. c. (1999). sacred dreams: women and the superintendency. albany, ny: suny. brunner, c., grogan, m., & prince, c. (2003). the american association of school administrators’ national study of women superintendents and central office administrators: early findings. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association, chicago, illinois. brunner, c. c., & grogan, m. (2007). women leading school systems: uncommon roads to fulfillment. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield education. chen, s., langner, c. a., & mendoza-denton, r. 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(2006). breaking perceptions of ‘old boys networks”: women leaders learning to make the most of mentoring relationships. journal of women in educational leadership, 4(3), 179-195. singh, v., vinnicombe, s., & kumra, s. (2006). women in formal corporate networks: an organizational citizenship perspective. women in management review, 21(6), 458-482. skrla, l., reyes, p., & scheurich, j. j. (2000). sexism, silence, and solutions: women superintendents speak up and speak out. educational administration quarterly, 36(1), 44-75. stuckey, j. w. (2012). sexual politics in the california public k-12 superintendency and district office personnel system. (doctoral dissertation). retrieved from proquest dissertations database. (#3503299). yong-lyun, k. & brunner, c. c. (2009). school administrator’s career mobility to the superintendency. journal of educational administration, 47(1), 75-107. walker, h. a., hardi, b. c., mcmahon, a. m., & fennell, m. l. (1996). gender, interaction, and leadership. social psychology quarterly, 59(3), 255-272. whitaker, j. e. (2006). women in the middle: a qualitative study of the leadership experiences of women central office administrators. (doctoral dissertation). retrieved from proquest dissertation database (# 3226986). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 192 wierzgac, m. (2005). the power of informal networks. meetings west. retrieved from http://www.meetingsfocus.com/topics/articledetais/ta bid/162/articleid/4611/default.aspx.   home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international perceptions of gender differences in the real estate profession karen schmelzkopf, ph.d. donald moliver, ph.d.   schmelzkopf & moliver, winter, 2002 not only can we learn how women have changed the shape of a formerly male-dominated profession, we can also learn more about gender characteristics within the workplace, and the potential for women and leadership within other occupations. abstract until the mid-1960‚s most real estate agents selling residential real estate were male. over the next decade, increasing numbers of women entered the profession, and by 1980, female real estate agents outnumbered male real estate agents. in this paper, i explore some reasons for this increase by comparing female and male residential real estate agents‚ motivations for becoming real estate agents, their satisfaction with the profession, and differences in the amount of hours worked. the results show that the use of time and the amount of hours worked differs significantly for female and male real estate agents, and that female real estate agents believe more strongly than male real estate agents that the sex of the agent matters in residential real estate transactions. introduction various studies, including those by smith & smits (1994); rosener (1995); and buttner (2001), show that the presence of women in leadership and professional roles inspires other women to take on such roles. the residential real estate profession is an exceptional example of an arena in which women have demonstrated leadership and have achieved personal and financial success. until the mid-1960's, most real estate agents selling residential real estate were male, but over advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 1 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html the next decade increasing numbers of women entered the profession, and by 1980, female real estate agents outnumbered male real estate agents. in 1999, the national association of realtors noted that 61% of sales agents and 45% of brokers were female (evans, 1999). different explanations have been proffered as to how and why women have come to dominate the residential real estate profession. some accounts emphasize structural factors, other focus on cultural factors. structural explanations are concerned with the organizational and institutional constitution of work situations and families (evetts, 2000, p. 61). for example, in 1945, smedley and robinson (p. 179) encouraged women to pursue real estate, arguing that your own common sense and familiarity with the problems of running a house will tell you why certain properties are more valuable than others; why they can be rented for more money than others. research by reskin and associates has analyzed the impact of economic and political transformations of the real estate profession. reskin (1990, p. 41) maintains that when the market slump in residential sales occurred in the 1970's, instead of increasing commissions to entice men to stay in the profession, brokers actively recruited women at lower pay. thomas and reskin (1990, p. 205) add that this trend was exacerbated by the tax equity and fiscal responsibility act (tefra) of 1982, which determined that real estate agents would no longer be treated as employees for federal tax purposes. instead, they would have independent contractor status, receiving salesbased commissions rather than hourly pay or salary, with no obligation on the part of the firm to provide social security, unemployment insurance, pension plans, or fringe benefits. other structural explanations have focused on the flexibility of working hours (jud &winkler, 1999) and easy access to training (thomas & reskin, 1990). cultural explanations are concerned with socialization and ideologies about gender roles within the culture of work organizations and professions (evetts, 2000, p. 59). accordingly, women's dominance within the real estate profession is attributed to presumed correlations between characteristics important for success in real estate and those traditionally associated with women. such characteristics for real estate generally include empathy, integrity, professionalism, and responsiveness1 -traits consistent with the intuition, empathy, and nurturing capacities equated with women by conventional wisdom, and some theoreticians and observers.2 for instance, rolle davis, owner of a large real estate firm in new jersey, reflects this sentiment in discussing why she tends to hire mostly women. "it has been my experience," she explains, "that women seem to have more of the skills that are needed for this type of business. this is a very nurturing type of business and you need different skills than you do when you are selling office supplies or a piece of furniture. this business involves ongoing relationships. it can sometimes take years to sell to a particular person and i think women are often better suited for this business because they have more patience than men" (rose, 1997, p. g1). in other words, female real estate agents "sell a way of life that implies a traditional female role (crispen, 1978, p. 4). whether structural, cultural, or a combination of both, accounts of women in real estate primarily have been based on conversations with real estate agents. what is needed is a systematic investigation to validate this anecdotal evidence. this paper is an initial attempt to undertake such a project. the study i developed a questionnaire based on scholarly and popular accounts of gender differences in the real estate profession. i asked questions concerning structural and cultural dimensions, including the number of hours real estate agents predicted they would work when they first received a real estate license compared with actual hours they worked once in the profession; the criteria used for choosing a career in real estate; satisfaction with that career; characteristics considered advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 2 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm important for success in real estate; and some general perceptions about women and real estate. the questionnaire was mailed or delivered to 200 new jersey members of the national association of realtors and e-mailed to another 200 members. there was a 37% response rate (73 responses) from the first group and a 17% response rate (33 responses) from the second group, for a total of 106 responses. table 1 <#one> shows the make-up of the respondents. 58% were female and 42% were male. 77% of the women and 77% of the men were married, and 35% of the women and 52% of the men were parents of children under fifteen years of age. the average age was 39 for women and 37 for men. all the respondents had at least a high school degree, and 52% of the women and 55% of the men had college degrees. the average length of time in real estate was eight years for women and seven years for men. time devoted to real estate i first compared how many hours per week residential real estate agents predicted they would work when they first received their license to the actual number of hours they worked once in the profession. table 2 <#two> shows the results for male and female respondents, and for male and female respondents according to whether or not they have children less than fifteen years of age. a one-way analysis of variance indicates that the number of hours women predicted they would work was less than the number of hours men predicted they would work. no one predicted they would work more than 50 hours per week. the results of a chi-square analysis, shown in table 3 <#three> , indicate that the number of hours real estate agents predicted they would work was more than the expected count for women and less than the expected count for men. with respect to actual number of hours worked, women worked significantly fewer hours per week than did men (table 2 <#two> ). table 3 <#three> shows that the actual number of hours worked were less than the expected count for women and more than the expected count for men. table 4 <#four> shows the percentage of respondents in each time category. very few men and about one-third of the women worked part time (less than 40 hours), while less than one-third of the women and almost 90% of the men worked over 40 hours per week. in comparing actual hours vs. predicted hours, both women and men tended to underestimate the hours of work required. the correlation (using spearman's rho) between actual and predicted hours is not significant for women (r = 0.222; p-value = 0.083), but it is significant, although weak, for men (r = 0.328, p-value = 0.030) (table 2 <#two> ). for respondents with children under fifteen, differences between women and men were even greater (table 2 <#two> ). the number of hours mothers predicted they would work was less than the number of hours fathers predicted they would work. the number of hours predicted was more than the expected count for mothers and less than the expected count for fathers (table 3 <#three> ). in terms of actual hours worked, mothers worked significantly less than fathers. very few of the fathers and more than half of the mothers worked less than 40 hours, while very few of the mothers but almost all of the fathers worked 40 or more hours per week (table 4 <#four> ). the actual number of hours worked was less than the expected count for mothers and more than the expected count for fathers (table 3 <#three> ). none of the spouses of the married mothers worked less than 40 hours, while 22% of the spouses of the married fathers did not work and approximately 35% worked less than 40 hours per week. while no significant relationship (using spearman's rho) existed between the amount of hours mothers and their spouses worked (r = -0.054; p-value = 0.815), there was a negative correlation between the amount of hours fathers advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 3 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm worked and the amount their spouses worked (r = -0.419; p-value = 0.050).3 the hours mothers predicted they would work and the hours they actually worked were not significantly different (r = 0.024; p-value =0.912); fathers, however, significantly underestimated the amount of hours they would actually work (r = 0.462; p-value = 0.030) (table 2). a t-test of independent samples comparison of means also shows a significant difference in the amount of time parents worked during evening and weekend "family time", with fathers working an average of 15.19 hours and mothers working an average of 8.79 hours (p-value = 0.001). there was no significant difference between the hours worked by fathers and the hours worked by men without children under fifteen. however, women without children under fifteen work approximately three hours per week less than men either with or without children, while women with children under fifteen work the least amount of hours (table 2 <#two> and table 4 <#four> ). criteria influencing the decision to become a real estate agent table 5 <#five> shows how the respondents rated the criteria that motivated them to become real estate agent. for both female and male respondents, the ability to make money was very important. women also rated flexible hours, working with people, and balancing family and career as significantly more important than did men. the degree of satisfaction with different aspects of the job table 6 <#six> shows the results when respondents rated their level of satisfaction with criteria related to the job. both women and men felt relatively satisfied with most of the criteria, although women felt significantly more satisfied than men with the real estate profession overall. characteristics considered important in real estate table 7 <#seven> shows how respondents rated the importance of characteristics needed by real estate agents in attaining success in the profession. male and female respondents considered the same for characteristics to be important: negotiating skills, patience, professionalism, and selfconfidence. attitudes concerning gender and real estate respondents rated their agreement with three statements concerning female real estate clients and female real estate agents. as table 8 <#eight> shows, women and men agreed that in a heterosexual couple, the woman generally makes the decision about which house to buy. women agreed significantly more than men with the claim that female real estate agents have a greater understanding of women‚s needs in a home, while disagreeing significantly more than men with claim that the sex of the real estate agent doesn‚t matter in real estate transactions. discussion while female and male real estate agents agreed about many aspects of the real estate advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 4 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm profession, there were some clear differences, particularly related to hours of work. flexibility of hours and balancing job and family responsibilities proved the most important criteria attracting women to the profession, and women did in fact work significantly fewer hours than the men, the discrepancy was particularly strong for mothers of children under fifteen; having children, however, did not impact the number of hours men worked. this is likely connected to the fact that none of the husbands of mothers worked less than 40 hours per week while more than fifty percent of the wives of fathers worked part time or not at all. interestingly, when women first got their real estate license, they predicted they would work more hours than they actually did, while the reverse was true for men. once in the profession, flexibility of hours proved satisfactory for both male and female respondents, although the amount of time needed for work and balancing family and career proved slightly less satisfactory than other criteria. making money and working with people were strong motivations and sources of satisfaction for female and male respondents. while female real estate agents had a significantly greater overall sense of satisfaction, male respondents also indicated they were satisfied with the profession-which stands to reason since the respondents are people who have stayed in the real estate profession. in choosing characteristics needed for success in real estate, both female and male respondents indicated the same four criteria as most important: negotiating skills, patience, professionalism, and self-confidence. while both regarded empathy to be an important attribute, female respondents did in fact consider the so-called "feminine" characteristic of nurturing skills, as well as tact and desire to please, to be significantly more important to success in real estate than did men. female and male respondents agreed that in heterosexual couples, women generally make the final decision about the house that will be purchased. there were, however, significant differences in male and female respondents‚ perception of the role of female real estate agents, in that female respondents believed more strongly that female real estate agents have a greater understanding of women's needs in a home and that the sex of the real estate agent matters. this is an interesting difference that may well be related to female respondents‚ higher valuation of nurturing skills, and certainly warrants further research. conclusion the results of this research substantiate anecdotal claims that structural dimensions of the real estate profession fit the needs of women (and men) who have familial responsibilities. the results also show that female respondents consider cultural factors to be beneficial to success in the profession. these findings are important in understanding the attraction that the real estate profession holds for women, and this project sets up a road map for future research, including the determination of what characteristics actually do prove effective in real estate sales and whether there are any clear gender differences in the display of these characteristics; whether female agents, in fact, have an edge in real estate because of women's traditional association with the home; and the influence of such factors as ethnicity and class (of both real estate agent and client). continued research into women in real estate can have implications extending beyond the real estate profession. not only can we learn how women have changed the shape of a formerly male-dominated profession, we can also learn more about gender characteristics within the workplace, and the potential for women and leadership within other occupations. advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 5 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm note 1see, for instance, crispen (1978), johnson, nourse, & day (1988), roulac (1999). 2for general discussions, see gilligan (1982), chodorow (1999); for discussions in business, see rosener (1995), buttner (2001); for discussions in real estate, see crispen (1978), monroe (1988). 3only five of the respondents, three women and two men, were single parents and while no generalizations can be made from so small a sample, we can note that all worked at least forty hours per week. dr. karen schmelzkopf is an assistant professor of geography in the department of interdisciplinary studies at monmouth university. she can be reached via e-mail at: kschmelz@monmouth.edu dr. donald moliver is a professor of economics at monmouth university. references buttner, e. h. (2001). examining female entrepreneurs' management style: an application of a relational frame. journal of business ethics, 29(3), 253-269. chodorow, n. (1999). the reproduction of mothering, (reprint edition). berkeley: university of california press. crispen, m. (1978). how any woman can get rich fast in real estate. kansas city: sheed andrews and mcneel. evans, b. (1999). realtors® are better than ever, announces the nar. realty times, july 14, p. 1. evetts, j. (2000). analyzing change in women‚s careers: cultural, structural and action dimensions. gender, work, and organization, 7(1), 57-67. gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice. cambridge: harvard university press. johnson, j., nourse, h. o., & day, e. (1988). factors related to the selection of a real estate agency of agent. journal of real estate research, 3(2), 109-118. jud, g. d., & winkler, d. t. (1999). a model of real estate sales as a career choice. journal of real estate research, 18(3), 481-490. monroe, l. (1988). women in real estate. buildings, 82, 55-59. reskin, b. f. queueing and changing occupational composition. in b. reskin, & p. roos (eds.), job queues, gender queues: explaining women's inroads to male occupations, (pp. 29-68). philadelphia: temple university press. rose, c. (1997, november 30). from garment industry to selling real estate. asbury park press, p. g1, g3. advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 6 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm rosener, j. (1995). america's competitive secret: utilizing women as a management strategy. new york: oxford university press. roulac, s. e. (1999). the role of trust in real estate. real estate issues, 24(2), 8 -14. smedley, d., & robinson, l. (1945). careers in business for women. new york: dutton. smith, p. l., & smits, s. j. (1994). the feminization of leadership? training & development, 48(2), 43-46. thomas, b. j., & reskin, b. f. (1990). a woman's place is selling homes:occupational change and the feminization of real estate sales. in b. reskin, p. roos (eds.), job queues, gender queues: explaining women's inroads to male occupations, (pp. 183-204). philadelphia: temple university press. table 1. summary of respondents gender of respondents total married parents of children under age 15 average age college education average years as realtor female 62 (58%) 48 (77%) 22 (35%) 39 30 (52%) 8 male 44 (42%) 34 (77%) 23 (52%) 37 27 (55%) advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 7 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 7 table 2. analysis of variances of comparison of means for hours realtors predicted they work when they first received real estate license compared with actual hours worked once in the profession respondents hours predicted to work number mean standard deviation female 62 37.82 3.09 male 44 41.48 3.34 total 106 39.34 3.66 f=33.725 actual hours worked female 62 41.77 6.78 male 44 advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 8 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 48.07 6.40 total 106 44.39 7.29 f=23.223 df=1 p-value=0.000 parents and non parents hours predicted to work number mean standard deviation female parent 23 36.74 2.86 male parent 22 41.59 3.23 female non-parent 39 38.46 3.07 male non-parent advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 9 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 22 41.36 3.51 total 106 39.34 3.66 f=12.952 actual hours worked female parent 23 37.61 3.65 male parent 22 48.41 6.05 female non-parent 39 44.23 7.03 male non-parent 22 47.73 6.85 total 106 advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 10 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 44.39 7.29 f=14.367 df=3 p-value=0.000 table 3. chi-square results of hours real estate agents predicted they would work when they first received real estate license compared to actual hours worked. gender of respondents hours predicted to work hours 35 40 45 female count 31 27 4 expected count 21.1 28.1 12.9 male count 5 21 18 expected count 14.9 19.9 9.1 advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 11 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm chi-square = 26.134 df = 3 p=value = 0.000 gender of respondents actual hours worked hours 35 40 45 50+ female count 22 14 17 9 expected count 14.6 9.9 21.6 15.8 male count 3 3 20 18 expected count 10.4 7.1 15.4 11.2 chi-square = 22.390 df = 3 p-value = 0.000 parents and non-parents hours predicted to work hours advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 12 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 35 40 45 female parents count 16 6 1 expected count 7.8 10.4 4.8 male parents count 2 11 9 expected count 7.5 10.0 4.6 female non-parents count 15 21 3 expected count 13.2 17.7 8.1 male non-parents count 3 advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 13 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 10 9 expected count 7.5 10.0 4.6 chi-square = 32.912 df = 9 p-value = 0.000 parents and non-parents actual hours worked hours 35 40 45 50+ female parents count 14 6 3 0 expected count 5.4 3.7 8.0 5.9 male parents count 1 1 11 9 expected count 5.2 advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 14 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 3.5 7.7 5.6 female non-parents count 8 8 14 9 expected count 9.2 6.3 13.6 9.9 male non-parents count 2 2 9 9 expected count 5.2 3.5 7.7 5.6 chi-square = 38.349 df = 9 p-value = 0.000 table 4. percent of respondents in time categories for predicated and actual hours of work per week predicted hours per week advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 15 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm less than 40 hours 40 hours 41-50 hours 50 or more hours female 50% 44% 6% 0% male 11% 48% 40% 0% actual hours per week less than 40 hours 40 hours 41-50 hours 50 or more hours female 35% 23% 27% 15% male 7% 7% advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 16 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 20% 66% predicted hours per week less than 40 hours 40 hours 41-50 hours 50 or more hours female parents 70% 26% 4% 0% male parents 9% 50% 41% 0% female non-parents 38% 54% 8% 0% male non-parents 14% 45% 41% 0% advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 17 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm actual hours per week less than 40 hours 40 hours 41-50 hours 50 or more hours female parents 61% 26% 13% 0% male parents 4% 4% 50% 42% female non-parents 21% 21% 36% 23% male non-parents 9% 9% 41% 41% advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 18 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm table 5. t-test of independent samples comparing means of criteria for choosing real estate career criteria gender of respondents mean standard deviation p-value results of buying/selling own home female male 2.77 3.09 1.21 1.12 0.167 balancing career and family female male 1.92 2.59 1.25 1.09 0.004* flexible hours female male 1.50 2.14 0.92 1.00 0.001* can make good money female advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 19 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm male 1.65 1.70 0.98 0.79 0.731 can work from home female male 2.00 2.61 1.20 1.20 0.001* minimal boss supervision female male 2.40 2.45 1.23 1.13 0.825 enjoy working with people female male 1.53 2.11 0.86 0.97 0.002* advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 20 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm couldn't figure out what else to do female male 3.76 3.68 0.67 0.64 0.554 1 = very important, 2 = important, 3 = somewhat important, 4 = unimportant * = significant at the 0.01 level table 6. t-test of independent samples comparing means of satisfaction with real estate profession criteria gender of respondents mean standard deviation p-value balancing career and family female male 2.06 2.36 1.04 0.75 0.106 flexibility of hours female male 1.87 1.84 0.97 advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 21 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 0.83 0.864 income female male 2.02 1.98 1.00 0.90 0.835 minimal boss supervision female male 1.61 1.77 0.64 0.89 0.309 working with clients female male 1.81 1.80 0.79 0.82 0.945 amount of time needed to work female male 2.21 2.41 advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 22 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 0.98 0.90 0.280 real estate profession in general female male 1.85 2.20 0.74 0.79 0.024* 1 = very important, 2 = important, 3 = somewhat important, 4 = unimportant * = significant at the 0.01 level table 7. t-test of independent samples comparing means of ranking of characteristics considered important for success in real estate attribute gender of respondents mean standard deviation p-value tact female male 1.32 1.60 0.60 0.73 0.032* patience female male advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 23 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 1.14 1.49 0.37 0.67 0.002* desire to please female male 1.63 2.37 0.79 0.82 0.000* self-confidence female male 1.30 1.42 0.60 0.59 0.317 tolerance female male 1.32 1.56 0.60 0.73 0.073 nurturing capacity female advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 24 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm male 1.91 2.51 1.02 0.91 0.003* good grooming female male 1.54 2.07 0.83 0.83 0.002* professionalism female male 1.09 1.40 0.34 0.66 0.003* organizational skills female male 1.32 1.84 0.60 0.75 0.000* advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 25 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm assertiveness female male 1.58 1.81 0.80 0.76 0.142 empathy female male 1.70 1.98 0.91 0.71 0.103 negotiating skills female male 1.23 1.26 0.54 0.44 0.783 tenacity female male 1.42 1.74 0.65 0.83 advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 26 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 0.036* 1 = very important, 2 = important, 3 = somewhat important, 4 = unimportant * = significant at the 0.01 level table 8. t-test of independent samples comparing means of perceptions about women and real estate statement gender of respondent mean standard deviation p-value in heterosexual couple, the women makes the ultimate decision about which house to buy female male 2.05 2.19 0.86 0.70 0.368 female real estate agents have greater understanding of women's needs in a home female male 1.76 2.65 0.80 0.87 0.000* sex of the real estate agent doesn't matter female male 2.21 advancing women in leadership journal https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/schmelzkop... 27 of 28 5/8/2023, 4:20 pm 1.72 0.79 0.73 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journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] entrepreneurial skills in academia: a curriculum for teaching proposal writing to female graduate students katherine selber, william b. selber, and dexter freeman abstract this article addresses the development of entrepreneurial skills in academic and human service settings by reporting on a curriculum for teaching proposal writing for funded research and program development grants. the article includes a review of current challenges in preparing primarily female graduate students with skills needed for grant seeking in their careers in human services. a description of the proposal writing curriculum, teaching methodologies used, and outcomes obtained during the past six offerings of the course are described. in addition, preliminary evaluation data from a survey of a nonrandom sample of participants in the course (n=30) about their perceptions of the course and its utility are included. lessons learned and implications for using the curriculum with other populations, such as female faculty and agency-based human service professionals, are also explored. entrepreneurial skills in academia: a curriculum for teaching proposal writing to female graduate students a consensus in the literature reflects the continuing turbulent nature of the external environment of universities, human service organizations, and other public and civic organizations (hopkins & hyde, 2002; martin, 2000; patti, 2000). increasingly, private, non-profit, and public sector organizations operate in a competitive funding environment with limited resources to meet a growing demand for services and enhanced calls for accountability (austin, 2002; brooks, 2004; marx, 2000). for example, federal spending cuts to social services have resulted in non-profit organizations losing almost $46 billion in federal revenue between 1980 and 1996, pushing human service managers to rely on multiple streams of funding to meet the gap left between traditional federal sources of funding and rising demand for services (brooks, 2004; eikenberry & kluver, 2004). in addition, rapid technological changes, the post september 11, 2001 reprioritization of the country's needs, and mounting state government deficits have all contributed to a growing urgency to develop and maintain a diverse base of funding for organizations (farruggia, 2004; hopkins & hyde, 2002; martin, 2000; menefee & thompson, 1994; selber & streeter, 2000). indeed, the pressure on public sector managers for innovative and entrepreneurial responses to such financial challenges has never been greater (eikenberry & kluver, 2004; salamon, 1997; tropman, 1989). this is especially true file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm in academic settings where state governments have increased fiscal scrutiny of university budgets, pushing the academy to rely more heavily on budget monies drawn down by faculty grants and contracts from outside funders (boyer & cockriel, 1999). in this highly competitive marketplace for organizations, the challenge to enhance entrepreneurial skills, such as grant seeking, has increased in importance for top administrators. but how best to train these employees and professionals has been an ongoing debate in educational circles (ezell, chernesky, & healy, 2004; faherty, 1987; gummer, 1997; martin, pine, & healy, 1999; mcnutt, 1995; patti, 2000; rimer, 1987; wolk, 1994). discussions over the past two decades regarding training in proposal writing, especially within graduate education in human services, have called into question even the necessity for, as well as the structure of such training. other curriculum issues, such as the balance between technical and quantitative skills as opposed to theoretical and value-driven learning, have also been debated (edwards, 1987; hopkins & hyde, 2002; martin, et al., 1999; menefee, 1998; menefee & thompson, 1994; rimer, 1987; wolk, 1994). this article seeks to address one aspect of this debate by reporting on a training curriculum for teaching proposal writing skills to graduate students in human services and its adaptation for faculty and other health and human service professionals. the article includes a review of current challenges in training for proposal writing, a description of the curriculum, teaching methodologies used, and preliminary evaluation data about participants' perceptions of the course and its utility. lessons learned and implications for female graduate students, faculty, and health and human service professionals are also covered. the challenges retrenchment of organizations during the 1980s and 1990s enhanced the interest in resource development within both public and private sector human service organizations, as well as other organizations such as universities. today, it continues to be of primary interest, especially in organizations within the public and nonprofit sectors that often operate on a thin margin of funds. this happens at a time of increasing budget difficulties, enhanced performance expectations for organizations, as well as increased demand for government and civic services. all of these factors exacerbate limited resources and demand innovative, entrepreneurial responses to support even the core missions of these organizations (brooks, 2004; moxley & bueche, 2002). these competitive social markets require higher levels of performance, especially in the area of resource development. the challenge is how to prepare future professionals, such as human service managers, to navigate the complexities of the external environment and address the increasingly intractable budget problems that are part of these organizational environments. studies of nonprofit managers reveal that obtaining and managing resources were considered core requirements for their career preparation (mirabella & wish, 2000; moxley & bueche, 2002). furthermore, a fundamental expectation in the nonprofit community is that graduate students in feeder management programs, such as social work, public administration, and business administration, finish with knowledge about these outside functions and not just acquire the skills on the job. fundraising is considered among the most crucial categories relating to the management of the outside environment of nonprofits, a skill typically addressed through activities such as proposal writing (hopkins & hyde, 2002; mirabella & wish, 2000). within universities, for example, studies suggest that female faculty, in particular, feel unprepared to tackle one of the key aspects of their performance evaluation--that of research and associated grant seeking and proposal writing (boyer & cockriel, 1999; daniel & gallaher, 1990). in one study, female faculty reported lacking the training to pursue grants which became a reason not to pursue external funding. in most cases, women faculty reported that they were not knowledgeable about how to initiate the process of proposal writing which was cited as a reason for fewer proposals being submitted (boyer & cockriel, 1999). furthermore, overall proposal writing and other forms of resource development have not been given the prominence in university mentoring programs or in graduate education in human services. for example, social work graduate students commonly report feeling unprepared to face these tasks upon graduation and employment, primarily due to the lack of graduate training (haslett, 1997). this identified need for training can initially be offered through course content and experientially based activities in proposal writing. the proposal writing curriculum the following curriculum highlights the efforts primarily developed as part of a graduate program in social work management. in addition, much of the content is also beginning to be adapted for faculty in university settings as part of a book development process. in addition, the curriculum has been used in consultation with a variety of organizations, including public sector and nonprofit organizations in health and human services. all of these settings are characterized as placing a high premium on entrepreneurial activities, and thus keenly interested in this training. course theoretical frameworks the instructor blended three main theoretical perspectives to frame the course content. first, a systems perspective helped underscore the importance of the grant seeker within an organizational context. the instructor covered divergent perspectives--the grant seeker as a professional within an organization, the grant seeking organization, and the funder--across the various topics of the course. this systems perspective assisted in preparing participants in understanding both the dynamics of the program development, proposal planning, and evaluation processes from a more holistic framework. in addition, a capacity-building framework supported the understanding of developing fiscal, human, and informational resources to address needs at the organization and community levels. proposal writing was portrayed as part of a larger effort of building resources within organizations and connecting organizations to the community by addressing community needs. finally, a consumer-oriented framework provided a focus that supported topics, such as the choice of consumer methodologies for program evaluation of proposed grant activities. these theoretical frameworks were an important aspect of the course, embedding the overall technical skill of grant seeking and proposal writing within professional purposes, values, and ethics. without this type of theoretical framework, the course provides only a one-dimensional, technical perspective and limits the importance of seeing this as an issue of building social capital in organizations. course domains the course began by focusing on the new organizational models in the public and nonprofit sectors, such as quality management and consumer-oriented management theories. also, trends in funding across the united states were covered, including areas of funding priority and donor profiles. the importance of grants to the development and extension of resources in organizations and communities, especially to disadvantaged populations, were examined. next, the course addressed the process of funding and streams of funding within different areas of research and program development. diverse types of funders, including private foundations; corporations; and federal, state, and local government entities, were also examined and techniques for searching and matching these funders to organizations were covered. the basic parts of proposals were also explored using in-class exercises, critiques of requests-for-proposals (rfps), and sample proposals. cover letters, abstracts, literature reviews, methodologies, program evaluations, budgets, and organizational capacity statements were among the main proposal elements reviewed. the curriculum also emphasized the understanding of the proposal writing process within organizations and promoted the process as a teamwork effort. participants also learned about the ethics of proposal writing, the institutional review board (irb), and protection of human subjects process within organizational and university settings. in addition, a variety of research topics were covered, including such issues as survey development and methodologies for promoting consumer input, such as focus groups and consumer satisfaction surveys. several books were chosen for the course to give a balance of practice-oriented and theoretical information. a workbook that provided exercises on how to complete the proposal elements was also used (carlson, 2002; coley & scheinberg, 2000; lauffer, 1997). readings from the world-wide-web on funders and research articles on the needs of diverse populations were included in the reading requirements. a review of such important websites as the foundation center provided an impressive array of materials for training ( foundation center , 2004). another important source of readings was the articles that participants identified for the literature reviews for substantiation of the needs statements in their proposals. teaching methodologies and how the seminar operated a variety of teaching methodologies were used, including lectures, web-based activities, in-class exercises, and guest lectures with grant experts and former course participants who had successfully integrated proposal writing skills into their careers. classrooms with internet connections were vital to the course to facilitate learning about funding streams and proposal guidelines. as well, a classroom that accommodated small group exercises was equally important so that students could participate in activities, such as critiquing proposals and team reviews of rfps. however, the most important methodology used was the practice experience of teaming up with an organization in the community to provide the scenario for the proposal writing and program development activities. the emphasis throughout the course was on this experiential element. the instructor emphasized that the proposal was not a lab exercise but rather a real proposal developed within the constraints and opportunities found within a community and organizational context. thus, class discussions centered on the use of examples from the participants' projects. between 11 and 18 participants took the 45-hour classroom course during each offering. students were required, with instructor input, to negotiate with the selected organization the opportunity to work on a proposal and were responsible for consultations in the organization to complete the project. organizations readily participated and provided excellent resources to assist the participants with their work including access to staff, program material, information about budgets, and the technology to get the job done. the literature indicates that budgetary and evaluation information is seen as a proprietary element within organizations (kettner, 2002). however, participants reported no problems gaining data to complete drafts of budgets and suggest outcomes of proposed activities. assignments for the course focused only on the actual proposal and required that participants complete the proposal in stages and receive feedback, both written and verbal, during class and scheduled conferences. participants then used the feedback to rework further drafts of the proposal. during the last several course offerings, the instructor changed from requiring one proposal to two proposals; one proposal was to a private foundation or corporation, the other for a government entity such as a city, county, state, or federal unit. the two proposals were directed toward the same overall program so that participants mastered only one area of the literature. for example, a participant preparing a proposal to a foundation for a child advocacy center might prepare the second proposal for different budget items or different program components to a state crime victims program. organizational settings participants were free to choose agency settings that reflected their interests. the instructor encouraged, but did not require, participants to choose agencies with which they had some prior affiliation or knowledge, such as a volunteer, a student intern, or as an employee. having some familiarity with the agency was a key to both managing the up-front time commitment needed for engaging the agency and producing a richly valuable product that the agencies could utilize. a variety of agency settings were used, including public and private, non-profit settings in practice areas such as mental health, disabilities, child welfare, juvenile justice, school-based, and medical, just to name a few. course limitations although participants were enthusiastic about the course, they also routinely commented on the time consuming nature of the work outside of class. participants reported spending between 5 to 8 hours per week on meetings in the agencies, literature reviews, and reviewing rfps. this level of commitment was also true for the instructor's time. reading and editing drafts of proposals and heavy amounts of consultation with participants were needed. because of this, having a class size between 12 to 15 participants was essential. an additional challenge was the lack of a uniform guide for writing the proposal. most rfps for grants vary and this created the situation of not having a common framework for the proposals across participant projects. this was a trade-off with having a "real world" request-for-proposal versus one that the instructor prepared for all students. however, most proposals have similar, yet not identical, elements and this was deemed more important in order to keep the assignment from becoming "just another academic paper." evaluation methodology a web-based survey was distributed to a group of course participants of graduate students in a medium size school of social work in a southwestern state. of the 78 participants who had taken the course over the six course offerings, a total of 43 (55%) had email addresses on file. thus, the nonrandom sample included 43 participants, all former graduate students in social work. of these 43, a total of thirty (n=30) surveys were returned for a return rate of 69%. this represented an acceptable rate of return for surveys (rubin & babbie, 2001). the survey asked participants to respond to their perceptions of the course. the web-based survey included twelve categorical, likert, and open-ended questions that requested information about their backgrounds, current jobs, prior grant-writing experience, and current work experiences. as well, the survey asked the graduates to rate their perceptions of the utility of various aspects of the proposal writing course. findings regarding ethnicity, respondents were white (86%, n= 26), hispanic (10%, n=3), and african-american (3%, n=1). the total group of course participants had a similar make-up; the total course group was white (85%), hispanic (13%), and african-american (2%) (n=78). in terms of gender, the groups were also comparable. all survey respondents were female (100%, n=30) and between 30-37 years of age, with a mean age of 36 years (n=30). in comparison, the total course group was 73% female and 27% male. although the respondents were similar to the overall cohort in terms of demographics, the relatively small, nonrandom sample limits the generalizations of the findings. in terms of their current positions, 30% (n=9) of course respondents stated that their positions were primarily administrative, 37% (n= 11) said that their positions had both clinical and administrative duties, while 3% (n=1) said their positions were all clinical. about 30% (n=9) of respondents said that their positions were "other," such as dealing with policy and human resources. this data may suggest the variety of tasks that graduates are expected to perform and the generalist nature of many jobs within the human service profession. among the survey respondents, 47% (n=14) stated that prior to the proposal writing course they had no exposure to this task, while 33% (n=10) stated they had some exposure to the topic, and 20% (n=6) stated they had a limited role in writing proposals prior to the class. such a high level (53%) of students reporting some exposure to the content prior to class may reflect the pervasiveness of proposal writing in the world of agency-based human services and the fact that students have had some level of volunteer, field, or paid work experience in agencies prior to taking the course. most students reporting prior exposure to the topic stated that they had read or seen proposals in agencies prior to taking the course. in addition, about 63% (n= 19) of respondents reported that they had further proposal writing experience since graduation, while 37% (n=11) reported that they had not yet had more experience. this reflects a high percentage of students who have had experience since graduation, supporting the idea that graduates need this skill in a variety of jobs in human services. in terms of student perceptions of the course, respondents reported the usefulness of learning about streams of funding with 96% (n=28) reporting that gathering information about funders and funding agencies was helpful. only 4% (n=1) reported that they learned only some information on this topic. this was equally true regarding program development where 100% (n=30) of the respondents reported that learning about how to develop programs was very useful. such high positive responses to learning in these areas may further underscore the importance of using the proposal writing class as a vehicle for teaching policy issues, such as patterns of funding and funding agencies, and for teaching management skills like program development. another area the respondents reported as useful was the actual writing skills developed in the course. of those responding, 96% (n=28) reported that writing skills were very useful, and only one respondent reporting that this was not at all useful. this suggests that graduates recognize the importance of developing writing skills for external audiences, especially after being in the practice world where communication skills, such as writing, are crucial. in terms of research content, 88% of respondents (n=26) reported that the learning in this area was also very helpful, and only 13% (n= 4) reported that it was only somewhat helpful. this may reflect the importance of giving students opportunities for real practice situations for applying other areas of the curriculum, such as research content. in addition, 58% (n=17) of respondents reported that agencies appreciated their work, about one-third (31%, n=9) reported only some appreciation, 7% (n=2) reported little to no appreciation, while 3% (n=1) reported no appreciation shown by the agency for the work. although the study did not examine this question further, such high numbers of participants who did not feel that their work was adequately acknowledged may reflect that participants did not have time to properly terminate with the agencies after the proposals were completed and the course had ended. this is a topic for further exploration and may suggest that a mechanism be built into the course to accomplish this formal acknowledgement. in the future, it might be beneficial to ask agency staff to write letters to participants documenting their work as a way of recognizing these contributions. in addition, 44% (n= 13) of respondents reported that the experience was very helpful in finding a job after graduation, 38% (n= 11) reported it provided some help, and 17% (n=5) reported that the class did not help them find a job after graduation. with a total of 82% of graduates responding that the course was at least helpful in job acquisition, this may indicate that having a beginning level skill in this area is indeed marketable for human service job seekers. with job markets highly competitive in human services, this may be a strong selling point for graduates. finally, in terms of overall helpfulness of the course, 93% (n=27) found the course to be very or somewhat helpful, and only 3% (n=2) found the course to not be helpful. this indicates a high level of satisfaction with the course's utility. in addition, the course generated important agency-related and community outcomes. analyzing data from all participants during the six offerings of the course, a total of 69 proposals were completed for agencies. this represented approximately 11,770 hours of technical assistance provided to agencies in the local community by social work students enrolled in the course. the estimated value of such volunteer assistance was around $93,600, reflecting that the course provided substantial support to the agencies in their servicegiving capacities. based on feedback, at least 7 proposals were known to have been funded, or about one each time the course was offered, and represented approximately $420,000 in added funding for human service organizations and the community. such outcomes suggest added advantages in terms of connecting the university to the community in a tangible way. lessons learned in the dynamic environment of organizational practice, human service professionals must understand the importance of entrepreneurial skills, such as proposal writing, since their roles as future managers are now more consumed with maintaining adequate financial support for services. most graduate students in human services are not regularly exposed to fundraising techniques, such as proposal writing, despite the fact that many of them will face fundraising issues in their employing agencies, even in the short term in their careers. graduate programs in human services, such as schools of social work, can best help students prepare for this eventuality by requiring all students to take a course in which proposal writing is at least a major domain of the course. teaching the course is time consuming for the instructor and requires a substantial commitment to interfacing with the community as well. instructor knowledge of the community is important and the course works best when the instructor knows the community agencies well. in addition, participants must be able to quickly move into an agency setting due to the fast pace of the course. this was challenging, even under circumstances of a prior relationship with the agency. the explosion in knowledge and the access to a wide variety of information on funders, rfps, and the electronic submission of proposals over the world-wide-web makes the topic of proposal writing even more compelling as a topic of graduate study. the course is best taught with a high degree of technology support in order to better examine topics, such as websites of funders, streams of funding, and guidelines for proposal submittal. the instructor can also provide cutting edge instruction in the use of software programs, such as web-based survey technology for implementing surveys on the web, spreadsheet software for creating grant budgets, and research analysis software, such as qualitative programs for analyzing narrative focus group data. this is possible if the instructor can dedicate the majority of the course to proposal writing and resource development. it is an important source of learning that participants are from different interest areas and this proves useful for the class as participants are exposed to needs of diverse populations as well as diverse agency settings and communities. the course also exposes students to the possibility of collaborations across disciplines as participants work on program development projects with agency staff that are often from a variety of disciplines. in addition, the course is important in requiring students to struggle with the real world of agency-based research in terms of program development activities. many participants have had little or no previous experience with research except within an academic classroom. preparing program evaluation plans for the grant proposals pushes participants to connect research knowledge with practice. finally, participants are also required to work on budget items in their grants and to collect budget data from agencies. although this is a sensitive issue for some agencies, most participants manage to negotiate this data without concerns. in the process, students report that budgets and budget justifications become easier to discuss. overall, anecdotal feedback from agencies throughout the six offerings of the course has been very positive. one indication of this has been the number of agencies that regularly call inquiring about the possibility of receiving students from the proposal writing course for their agencies. in addition, agencies that provide the final internships for many of the course participants often assigned proposal writing tasks after learning that the students had taken the course. this further enhances the students' skills and the value of their work for agencies. in addition, the course has been used to provide consultation with numerous human service agencies to assist in training of their staff in program development activities. as well, the course is currently being developed for use with female faculty who identify the need for further skill development in this area. since female faculty often feel at a disadvantage in this area and universities often lack formal mentoring programs, the adaptability of the course for this purpose is being examined. conclusion human service organizations, especially nonprofits, face many obstacles within the social marketplace, especially in terms of resource development. educators must respond to these challenges by preparing graduate students with the knowledge and skills both in the classroom and in internships to meet these challenges early in their careers. indeed, in recent years a new type of resource development specialist has emerged in human service administration, primarily outside of social work, to fill the need in developing and managing resources (moxley & bueche, 2002). social work and other health and human service professions must provide students with these skills in order to continue to be relevant to nonprofit organizations, a traditional employment setting for many human service graduates. professionals in human services often view entrepreneurial activities as controversial due to a strong identification with mission-based perspectives. however, an array of resource development activities, such as proposal writing, fund development, and special event development can be seen as a form of advocacy in terms of better addressing goals and causes, thus, part of pursuit of a mission-based identity (brinckerhoff, 2002; wolk, 1994). if social work, for example, is to continue to contribute in the human services management arena, especially in leadership for advocating change, such skill sets must be covered in the graduate curriculum. although human service management is in many ways in its infancy in terms of empirical development, increased competition from fields, such as business management and public administration, argues for the need to enhance the tools and techniques at the disposal of graduates entering the work-force (menefee, 1998; packard, 2004; patti, 2000). with increased pressures to provide leadership in an external environment full of challenges for accountability and innovation, educators must arm graduates with tools and techniques to manage effectively in what has been called the "permanent whitewater" of human service management (martin, et al., 1999). if human service professions support the idea that its managers do indeed offer a unique perspective for managing human services, then efforts for inclusion of such entrepreneurial skills as proposal writing must be viewed as a critical core component of the curriculum that helps keep our graduates competitive. references austin, d. m. 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(1987). social administration education: reconceptualizing the conflict with map, mba, and mph programs. administration in social work, 11 (2), 45-55. rubin, a., & babbie, e. (2001). research methods for social workers (4th ed.). belmont , ca : wadsworth thompson learning. salamon, l. (1997). holding the center: america 's nonprofit sector at the crossroads . new york : nathan cummings foundation. retrieved september 22, 2004, from http://www.ncf.org selber, k., & streeter, c. (2000). a customer oriented model for managing quality in human services. administration in social work, 24 (2), 1-14. tropman, j. (1989). human service entrepreneurship: the four "c" approach. administrative leadership in the social services , 11 , 219-242. wolk, j. l. (1994). grant writing: linking the social work program with the community. journal of teaching in social work, 10 (1/2), 83-97. author note: correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: dr. katherine selber, associate professor, school of social work , college of health professions , texas state university, 601 university dr. , san http://www.ncf.org/ marcos , texas 78666 , e-mail to ks15@txstate.edu . william b. selber, m.a. was a graduate student in political science when the initial study was conducted. dr. dexter freeman is an assistant professor, school of social work , college of health professions , texas state university. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women 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file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word staib_leadership_practices_of_texas_female_superintendents.docx advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 160 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 160-165, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper leadership practices of texas female superintendents jessica garrett-staib and amy burkman jessica garrett-staib: chair of the department of educational leadership, foundations and counseling, university of texas of the permian basin, email: staib_j@utpb.edu amy burkman: assistant professor, texas a & m texarkana, aburkman@tamut.edu accepted september 02, 2015 for the purposes of this study, the leadership practices inventory was administered to 82 superintendents in texas and data including demographic information regarding the district size, gender, and age of the participants was collected. superintendents in texas were selected for two reasons: the study met the needs of universities in texas, and the superintendent pool in texas contains a wide variety of school sizes and demographics. the leadership practice inventory (lpi) was selected because the validity and reliability has been assessed nationally and because it measures individual leadership practices rather than theoretical applications. the goal of this study is to look at practices and behaviors of women compared to men in the superintendency. keywords: superintendents, leadership, gender introduction the leadership practices of educational administrators have significant effects on the environment, culture and climate of schools. school administrators can have a powerful impact on teacher efficacy and student outcomes through effectual leadership practices. school district superintendents are charged with shaping the overarching vision and implementing mission of the entire school district. understanding the successful leadership practices of superintendents and whether these practices vary by gender, is vital to superintendent programs in preparing successful candidates. the researchers will examine data about dominant leadership practices from survey responses of both male and female superintendents. statistical analysis will attempt to identify any leadership similarities or differences that may exist between genders. the basis of the study follows the research done by kouzes and posner (2012) related to the leadership practices measured by the learning practice inventory (lpi). kouzes and posner developed the lpi to examine the levels of leadership competencies in organizations. the lpi self leadership practices third edition (2003) is a one-page self-assessment consisting of 30 questions. each question asks the respondent to choose a response number between 1 and 10 and record it in the box to the right of each leadership behavior statement. based on kouzes and posner’s research (2012), five practices of exemplary leadership have been identified: • model the way the ability of the leader to “find [his] voice” and “set the example.” through these activities a leader is able to create a system of shared values. • inspire a shared vision the ability of the leader to envision the future and enlist others to give life to the vision. by creating a goal-oriented system with a shared vision the leader is successful. • challenging the process good leaders look for opportunities for risk-taking, and celebrate both success and failure by learning from mistakes. • enabling others to act others are encouraged to work together and become leaders themselves • encourage the heart recognize the gifts of others and celebrate their contributions. the lpi analyzes strengths and weaknesses of leaders by measuring these perceived leadership traits. literature review the leadership practices of school superintendents can vary according to the contexts in which superintendents operate. louis et al. (2010) stated that, “leadership success depends greatly on the skill with which leaders adapt their practices to the circumstances in which they find themselves, their understanding of the underlying causes of the problems they encounter, and how they respond to those problems” (p. 94). the types of problems faced advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 161 by school superintendents vary greatly based on district size and location. different leadership strengths are necessary to meet these varied needs. while leadership practices are considered as an individual measure of success, little research has been done to discuss leadership practices within specific contexts. leithwood, harris, and hopkins (2008) suggested that a core set of leadership practices indicate success for leadership in “turnaround schools,” although they did not look at specific contexts. leithwood et al. (2010) also stated, “the ways in which leaders apply these leadership practices, not the practices themselves, demonstrate responsiveness to, rather than dictation by, the contexts in which they work” (p. 31). so the question remains, are there specific leadership practices found to be more evident in male and female superintendents, in spite of context? leadership practices and gender underrepresentation of women in the superintendency is well documented. though the number of women in the superintendency has increased in recent years, it is still astonishingly low compared to the number of women who are in academics (silverman, 2004). since 1992, the number of women in this position has increased to 13% compared to the previous level of 6.6% (silverman, 2004). while the statistics show a positive trend, it will be approximately 2035 before we reach parity in the superintendency (derrington & sharratt, 2008). women have been historically underrepresented in the superintendency and important questions about why this disparity exists remain unanswered (derrington & sharratt, 2008). though in recent years there have been an increasing number of women aspiring to and becoming school superintendents, it is likely that there are still barriers in place that are preventing a parity of gender (derrington & sharratt, 2008). these researchers cited findings from a 1993 study indicating that women in administrative roles perceived that discriminatory hiring practices were deeply rooted in society, and that the discrimination seemed to be institutionalized. however, in the 2007 comparative survey, women perceived the barrier that impacted them the most to be self-imposed obstacles (derrington & sharratt, 2008). literature indicates the most discussed and potentially harmful barriers keeping women from the superintendency were women who were “less willing to relocate in order to obtain a superintendent position because of family or spouse's job” and “difficulty balancing the demands of the superintendent position and family responsibilities” (derrington & sharratt, 2008, p. 9). while there are still barriers to women obtaining the superintendency, they are having an easier time than those in a similar position in the past (silverman, 2004). changing demographics as well as an increase in accountability of teachers for the achievements of their students has caused the superintendency to grow more complex over time (bryant, 2010). after the implementation of the no child left behind act, leadership styles have changed so that administrators can meet the increasing demands for academic achievement (burns & martin, 2010); black (2007) stated that many schools want to raise student achievement, but do not really understand how effective leadership impacts student achievement. though women still have to face some discrimination within the education system, as schools are feeling more pressure to achieve higher and higher test scores, they are looking more often to women to lead the school (silverman, 2004). in 2004, richardson published research aimed at determining if there are gender differences in leadership styles and behavior by male and female administrators (richardson, 2004). richardson (2004) suggested the existence of differences in leadership styles related to differences in gender. richardson (2004) used face-toface interviews as a means of assessing these differences. though findings indicated that there are distinct differences in leadership styles, researchers did not indicate whether one gender is better equipped to lead over the other (richardson, 2004). leadership practices and the lpi the purpose of this research study is to determine if there is a statistically significant difference between the mean responses on each construct of the lpi and the gender of the participants. identifying the constructs in which there is a significant difference between gender responses could identify areas in which gender can impact leadership practices. understanding these areas can assist in professional development focus within schools and in hiring practices of school districts searching for school leadership. methods the population represented in the study is a purposeful sample of 918 superintendents in texas. a listing of superintendents from the state was extracted from the texas education agency database (tea, 2010). superintendents that lead charter schools, k-8 schools, or school districts that did not have all grades from kindergarten through12 were removed from the list for comparative purposes. approximately 213 entities did not meet these criteria. only superintendents in traditional (non-charter) k-12 school districts were included in the sample population, of these 918 superintendents approximately 82% were male and 18% were female. inquiries were sent to the 918 identified texas superintendents asking them to participate in a study focusing on the leadership of texas school superintendents using the contact information from the texas education agency. only sixty-six of the target population elected to participate. a letter containing an explanation of the project and a copy of the lpi survey were sent to the volunteer sample of 66 with a request that the survey be completed and returned within two weeks. a demographic survey was included with the lpi which asked each respondent for age, gender, ethnicity, the current district size, the number years at current position, the number years at previous position, the first teaching job, the first campus administrative job, the advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 162 first district level administrative job, and the age when first becoming a superintendent numbered and stamped return envelopes were included to assist in the follow up process. superintendents were numbered alphabetically to ensure that the researcher could identify which participants to contact regarding submission of the survey. superintendents were notified in the explanation of the project how the numbering system was designed in order to ensure anonymity in the reporting of findings. because the goal response rate was above 70%, all superintendents in the participant group that did not respond within the first week received a reminder in the format of an email. participants were allowed 3 days for initial delivery, 1day for response, and a 3-day return delivery. two weeks following the reminder, a follow-up invitation letter with another survey was sent to all participants who had not responded. the envelopes were numbered with the same numbers used for the first invitation. respondents were asked to complete and return the survey within two weeks. once the 2 weeks following the second invitation passed, surveys were collected and analyzed using the software purchased from the publisher, and each of the five leadership practices were correlated. the five practices were then analyzed based on the reported gender of the participants. all responses were collected and scored using the statistical package for the social sciences (spss). description of the sample for the purposes of this research paper the demographic data evaluated will be only the gender of the participants. as indicated in table 1, nine of the respondents, or approximately 14%, were female, and 57, or approximately 86%, were male. while not an exact demographic match, the response rate approximates the gender breakdown of superintendents in texas that fit study criteria. table 1. frequencies and percentages of respondents based on gender gender gender n % female 9 13.63 male 57 86.4 research question one research question guides this study: is there a statistically significant difference between the mean responses on each construct of the lpi and the gender of the participants. h1: there is a statistically significant difference between the mean responses on each construct of the lpi and the gender of the participants. h0: the is not a statistically significant difference between the mean responses on each construct of the lpi and the gender of the participants. one delimitation of this study is that the sample contains only 14% females. looking at a binomial analysis where there are a disparate proportion of participants can limit the generalizability of the findings. however, reporting the study findings is important to current assist in informing the leadership bestpractices knowledge base. it may also provide a basis for future studies investigating possible similarities and differences in male and female leadership styles. instrumentation the lpi was developed by designing a set of statements describing individual leadership behaviors. each statement was originally designed to be measured using a five-point likert scale, but was altered in 1999 into a more vigorous ten-point likert-scale. participants rate themselves; the higher the rating, the more frequently they believe they exhibit the particular leadership behavior being measured. the lpi contains 30 statements. there are six statements that measure each of the five key practices of extraordinary leaders (the constructs). the leadership practices inventory (lpi) was selected for this study due to its validity and reliability. validation studies have been conducted for over fifteen years, and the authors of the instrument consistently find the lpi to be both reliable and valid. kouzes and pozner’s (2012) studies indicate adequate internal reliability, with each construct obtaining a 0.75 cronbach alpha score or better., as indicated in table 2. table 2 reliability coefficients reported by kouzes and posner (2012) constructs cronbach alpha coefficients for the lpi model way 0.77 inspire and share vsision 0.87 challenge the process 0.80 enable others 0.75 encourage the heart 0.87 additional reliability analyses were conducted for the purposes of this research. these results do not achieve the same reliability coefficients reported by kouzes and posner (2012), but do have some similarities. ordinally, the constructs align themselves identically in both of the analyses. the most reliable construct is the final construct of the instrument. both the researchers and kouzes and posner received solid cronbach alpha coefficients for this construct. as seen in table 3 the weakest construct would appear to be the fourth construct addressing the ability of the leader to enable others. the data on the reliability of this construct was only 0.521 when analyzed by the researchers, and advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 163 0.75 when analyzed by kouzes and posner. the final three constructs fall somewhere between the fourth and fifth constructs with regard to reliability coefficients. table 3. reliability coefficients calculated by the researchers constructs cronbach alpha coefficients for the lpi model way 0.618 inspire and share vsision 0.767 challenge the process 0.611 enable others 0.521 encourage the heart 0.868 findings research question analysis the purpose of this research study is to determine if there is a statistically significant difference between the mean responses on each construct of the lpi and the gender of the participants. each construct was analyzed to determine if there was a statistically significant difference in any of the five practices of exemplary leadership related to gender. as seen in table 4, the means for each of the five constructs for female, male and the entire population were determined using spss. table 4 gender and mean score of the five practices of exemplary leadership female male total model way 8.65 8.37 8.41 inspire and share vision 8.02 7.95 7.96 challenge the process 7.83 7.85 7.84 enable others 8.63 8.80 8.78 encourage the heart 8.33 8.03 8.07 table 5 statistical significance variable and source df ss ms f p model the way between groups 1 0.596 0.5962 1.013 0.318 within groups 64 37.637 0.588 inspire a shared vision between groups 1 0.033 0.033 0.031 0.861 within groups 64 68.955 1.077 challenge the process between groups 1 0.001 0.001 1.349 0.970 within groups 64 48.881 0.764 enable others to act between groups 1 0.237 0.237 0.757 0.387 within groups 64 19.994 0.312 encourage the heart between groups 1 0.719 0.719 0.599 0.442 within groups 64 76.785 1.200 a statistical analysis of variance (anova) was performed in order to determine whether a statistically significant difference exists between construct scores. as seen in table 5, no construct analysis yielded significance at the .05 level. the largest numerical difference occurred in the fifth construct (encourage the heart). the difference between the scores of males and females reported here was 0.30. it is interesting to note that this is also the construct with the highest degree of reported reliability. the least amount of difference occurred in construct three (challenge the process). male and female averages on this construct were almost identical, with a reported difference of only 0.02. construct 1 (model way) had the second highest numeric difference with a reported 0.28. this is very close to the difference in the fifth construct. overall, while there were no statistically significant differences, there were differences noted. discussion the researchers note that the small sample size of the female superintendents severely limits the generalizability of the findings. with this in mind and based on the findings, the null hypothesis is not rejected. the researchers do note with extreme interest the ratio of group responses between male and female superintendents. these findings do seem to bear out some indications that female superintendents did rate themselves stronger on the leadership construct areas that have shown to have the greatest positive impact on institutions. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 164 there is a lack of statistical significance between the means of each gender on the constructs identified within the lpi, although there were some non-significant differences noted. the lack of statistical significance between the means of each response might indicate that the leadership practices of superintendents do not vary significantly between male and female superintendents. it is important to note that the gender breakdown of respondents was similar (at 14% female) to the overall population (at 18% female). as previous discussed, the discrepancy between the number of female participants and male participants makes the findings of this study somewhat limited, however, the alignment between the sample and population percentages of females lends credence to the information gathered even though the groups were not statistically equivalent. leadership style development is influenced by a numerous factors. most superintendents in the state of texas are male. it is easy to conjecture that female administrators most likely had male mentors and role models as they aspired to and assumed the superintendents position. since most superintendent preparation programs draw prospective faculty members from the current superintendent ranks males also dominate curriculum development and internships of superintendent candidates. based on the limited information available from this research, it may result that as female superintendents increase in number, and affect school district cultures, and superintendent preparation programs, the large-effect leadership constructs that they engender most forcefully will be transmitted to new superintendents regardless of gender further study will be required. the limited survey responses from an extremely limited pool of female superintendents necessarily delimit researcher results and conclusions. even had the entire population responded, there would have been a disparate number of male and female respondents due to the differences in the actual population. the researchers evaluated the need to alter the sampling protocol in order to get more numbers and decided to follow the procedures and not influence the metrics by making personal phone calls. further research would have to be done with a larger population or with a more diverse representative sample. to address this issue, data gathering at a professional conference or individual superintendent district visits would be required. future research future research should make greater attempts to increase response rates from the target population of female superintendents. the researchers also recommend including an analysis of the additional demographic data set and what relationship, if any, exists between these data, leadership practices and gender. this information from recommended future research can prove valuable to superintendent preparation programs, practicing administrators and school boards. a lack of significant difference in the leadership practices between men and women or various ethnic groups could reduce the discriminatory practices in hiring and could be used to rationalize a more diverse pool of applicants. finally, this information could be use when hiring future superintendents as part of the screening process. conclusion the field of education has made steady gains in the move toward expanding the role of the superintendent to be more than that of a district level principal. analysis of the efficacious leadership practices of school superintendents are important as to determine what patterns, if any, exists among successful school leaders. in this study, we found that there was not a significant difference between the practices of leadership based on gender according to responses on leadership practices inventory. the results showing that female superintendents do seem to have stronger self-concepts in two of the leadership areas that have the highest effect on positive institutional leadership outcomes. female superintendents in this research indicated they felt more able to “encourage the heart” and “inspire and share vision”. while the study needs replication with a larger, better balanced sample, this study provides early insight into what differences, if any, exists on daily practices between male and female superintendents. further studies will need to be done to determine if other demographic information impacts leadership practices or if it is simply individual eclectic leadership styles that work well based on the personality of the school board and the chosen leader. references black, s. (2007). leadership and learning. american school board journal 194(9), 56-59. bredeson, p.v., klar, h.w., & johansson, o. (2011). context responsive leadership: examining superintendent leadership in context. educational policy analysis archives, 19(18), 1-23. burns, g., & martin, b. n. (2010). examination of the effectiveness of male and female educational leaders who made use of the invitational leadership style of leadership. journal of invitational theory and practice 16, 30-56. derrington, m. l., & sharratt, g. (2008). female superintendents: breaking barriers and challenging life styles. delta kappa gamma bulletin 75(2), 8-12. hentschke, g. c., nayfack, m. b., & wohlstetter, p. (2009). exploring superintendent leadership in smaller urban districts: does district size influence superintendent behaviors? education & urban society, 41(3), 317-337. kouzes, j., & posner, b. (2012). the leadership challenge: how to make extraordinary things happen in organizations. hoboken, nj: jossey-bass. leithwood, k., harris, a., & hopkins, d. (2008). seven strong claims about successful school leadership. school leadership & management, 28(1), 27-42. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 165 louis, k. s., leithwood, k., wahlstrom, k.l., & anderson, s. e. (2010). learning from leadership: investigating the links to improved student learning. center for applied research and educational improvement, university of minnesota, new york, new york. richardson, a. m. (2004). characteristics related to female and male leaders. retrieved from http://www.eric.ed.gov/contentdelivery/servlet/ericse rvlet?accno=ed497750 silverman, f. (2004). superintendent slot still lacks females. district administration 40(3), 16. texas education agency. (2010). list of texas superintendents by school district name. retrieved from http://www.tea.state.tx.us/adhocrpt/adpea07.html..   home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international crossing borders: an analysis of the characteristics and attributes of female public school principals leslie a. holtkamp, ed.d. holtkamp, winter, 2002 the female principal‚s role is diverse, fragmented, and involves numerous decisions daily. it is important for women to be able to identify and evaluate their own personal characteristics. leadership has been the central focus of research in the field of educational administration. most studies have largely been based on the experiences of white males (blackmore, 1989; capper, 1993; glazer, 1991) in the field of school administration. historically, leadership roles have been held by men (capper, 1993; sloan, 1999). because of this social attitude, women have been reluctant to pursue educational, administrative leadership positions (epp, 1993). as of the mid-1990‚s, women comprised 50% of the workforce. women held 13% of management positions, and held only 7% of executive positions (hagberg, 1998). in the areas of school administration, men outnumber women four to one at the administrative level (lynch, 1990). "in the years between 1928 and 1984, the number of women principals continually dropped from 55 % to 18%" (lynch, 1990, p. 336). these data mirror the drop in the representation of women throughout the educational administration field (capper, 1993; sloan 1999). while a recent survey of school superintendents indicated that the number of women at all levels of school administration is slowly increasing; women's representation in school administration is far from being proportionate to their numbers in education (hagberg, 1998; sloan, 1999). sloan (1999) reported that the number of australian female principals have increased from 15.3% in 1991 to 29.5% in 1999. the australian department of education secretary, geoff spring, has increased efforts to train and promote female teachers to administrative positions (sloan, 1999). at a 1998 conference, spring said, "women make up almost 70% of the workforce in school education, are highly qualified and achieving increasing success as they seek and obtain formal leadership roles." he stressed the importance of pride and personal achievement of women in leadership roles but noted, "there is considerable distance to be traveled before women are present in http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html leadership roles in the same ratio as in the education workforce" (spring, 1998). a special leadership program has been designed for aspiring women educational leaders in australia to help close the gap (sloan, 1999). all women experience barriers. when black women enter educational administration, there are internal and external barriers to overcome (gregory, 1999). gregory (1999) stated that internal barriers are based on both perceptions of one's capability to work in a leadership role, and personal leadership styles. external barriers are described as barriers that an individual has no control over. external barriers might include lack of resources and not being included in collaborative projects. also, many black women have reported feelings of isolation (gregory, 1999). role of the principal in the 21st century, the principal's role will be different from principals of other generations (blackmore, 1989; calabrese, 1996; gorton, 1993). the 21st century principals will face different problems and concerns. these problems will be more complex and involve outside variables (calabrese, 1996). these problems will require a different way of thinking and a different way of solving problems. principals will need to examine their decision-making patterns. the changing demographics of students and parents will increase the need for flexibility. the continued restrictions in funding are a paramount concern for principals. the pressure and demands for higher academic performance will require increased need for action. increased community intolerance for discipline problems in schools will push for principals to develop new and innovative ways to decrease discipline problems (blackmore, 1989; calabrese, 1996). other changes include: increased demands of alternative forms of education and increased demands for immediate answers and solutions. principals will be expected to meet these demands and be expected to problem solve on demand. principals that can meet community expectations will be recognized as leaders (calabrese, 1996). to meet these expectations principals must clearly understand their role within the organization, their character and attributes, areas that need improvement, areas that build success, and their personal characteristics. organizational role organizations need effective leaders to meet daily challenges. "most administrators recognize that providing leadership is a major expectation for their role" (gorton, 1993, p. 67). cowley (1928) stated, "the leader is the one who succeeds in getting others to follow him" (p. 145). lipham (1964) made important contributions to the literature on leadership. he made the distinction between the administrator as "the individual who utilizes existing structures or procedures to achieve an organizational goal or objective" (p. 119). lipham viewed the administrator as the stabilizing force in the organization. character and attributes what is character? freeman (1996) described character "in the home, it is kindness; in business, it is honesty; in society, it is courtesy; in work, it is thoroughness; in play, it is fairness" (p. 5). according to lynch (1990), there are three critical attributes that women in administration should possess. the first is the "degree of compatibility" between the demands of the position and her career objective. a female principal should be intelligent and capable of performing duties that the position requires. a woman's perception of herself is a direct link to her success. (lynch, 1990). most women are able to successfully manage this role of administration effectively, and experience success, because they are able to manage the demands of their career and stay on task with career objectives (marshall, 1999). according to lynch (1990), a second attribute that a successful administrator should have is the ability to successfully negotiate barriers. this includes structural barriers and the informal filtering system that organizations use to test and train aspiring principals. this system controls upward mobility. some women are able to negotiate barriers more successfully than others. the third attribute is being able to "fit" in the organization. the successful administrator should be a good communicator and be able to assess the needs of an organization. because organizational cultures vary, the ideal administrator may differ in different schools or school districts (lynch 1990). the hagberg consulting group (1998) research concluded that women are significantly better leaders, outpacing men in several areas. the areas, or characteristics, that female leaders model are: being able to create and articulate a clear vision; goal setting and setting clear direction; being able to take charge in difficult situations; being inspirational role models; setting high performance standards; and being able to assume responsibilities. the report noted that women's style may be better suited to the leadership challenges of the 90's "because women are better communicators, have better social skills, put success of the team first, use influence skills rather than authority, and are better team players" (hagberg, 1998, p. 2). according to the study, women may be better at managing a diverse workforce because of less traditional values, and are more tolerant of differences and less bonded by social traditions. in the area of motivating, research supports that women are better at motivating others and are more likely to show appreciation for the efforts of others, more expressive of their feeling and thoughts, and more enthusiastic. the research further concluded that females in leadership positions often have better management skills than men and are more motivating and inspirational (hagberg, 1998). areas of improvement the hagberg consulting group offered areas that women need to improve. the areas of improvement include: start taking risks, let go of details, develop and motivate staff, lead by example, and stop rescuing and mothering. the consulting group concluded that women need to improve the most in the area of rescuing and mothering (hackney, 1999; hagberg, 1998; shepard, 1998). women who seek to help and try to fix every problem are often perceived as too soft. "women leaders who value relationships and are relaxed in their leading, are often perceived as too soft, indecisive, weak, and incompetent" (hackney, 1999, p. 2). women are still perceived as displaying emotion and being emotional in the work place (shepard, 1998; hackney, 1999). women who exhibit professionalism and intensity are often seen as too cold, too distant, and as a perfectionist (hackney, 1999; marcano 1997). these perceptions may, or may not be true. "perception is reality to the person who is doing the perceiving" (shepard, 1998, p. 1). this perception may not be the true but is the perception of others. areas that build success women must be conscious of what is perceived by others and develop strategies that are proactive in building success. wesson (1998) offered tips for aspiring administrators. the first is to "know yourself", which is the most important ingredient for success (marcano 1997). marcano (1997) described this as "know thyself" and further stated that it is important to be honest and objective when evaluating your strengths and abilities, as well as your goals. continual selfassessment is the key to longevity in administration. the second, "be prepared". some hispanic women reported that they must prove themselves twice, first because they are females and second because they are hispanic (marcano, 1997). continual professional growth and work experience are an important part of success in educational administration. be selective when choosing preparation programs, set realistic goals for yourself and others, and seek work experiences that will enable you to be prepared for leadership positions. the next tip is, "analyze and strategize." administrators make career moves that will maximize your potential for achieving your personal goals. make career decisions based on your own personal vision. a successful administrator is able to turn "negative work experiences" into positive ones. negative experiences can provide useful learning experiences (marcano, 1997). administration should be informed of "critical factors affecting advancement." these factors consist of structural barriers, role compatibility, and organizational fit. structural barriers are being at the right place at the right time. role compatibility is fitting the needs of the organization with the right person. organizational fit is how a person personally fits the structure of the organization. the researcher writes that administrators should be "affiliate." join professional organizations that will keep you abreast of the times. "share goals" and be supportive of others within the organization. when this is achieved, a win-win situation is established and relationships will grow. relationships can share common goals, teachers will be empowered, and professional networks will form. "find a mentor and be a mentor." find an administrator that you respect and emulate their good qualities. as an administrator learns from the mentoring experiences, their personal growth will be enhanced (duvall, 1980; marcano 1997; wesson, 1998). an administrator can grow by being a mentor to someone else. a final tip offered is "networking." it is the process of developing and using contacts for information, advice, and support (duvall, 1980). the relationship and contacts are very useful in accomplishing goals (wesson, 1998). personal characteristics fennell (1999) interviewed six women principals and focused on their perception of leadership. the results revealed some personal characteristics of female leaders. one leader believed that leaders need to have a clear sense of their own vision and beliefs. she stated that a leader's job is to monitor to ensure that the vision of the organization is being carried out. she also commented that modeling is absolutely crucial. this administrator also believed that leadership is based on two words, "pressure and support" (fennell, 1999, p. 267). another leader interviewed in fennell study was the youngest and least experienced of the six principals interviewed. she commented that "leadership is the power to influence people to move in a direction that you believe in your heart is a good direction for most people" (fennell, 1999, p. 269). further she stated, a good leader should be a good listener and have good interpersonal skills. she repeatedly emphasized her belief in the importance of valuing working relationships (fennell, 1999; marcano, 1997). if coworkers do not feel valued, they will not open up and talk to you when they have an idea or problem. she felt that her biggest strength as a leader was the ability to establish rapport easily and build lasting relationships with staff. the most experienced administrator interviewed in this study focused on relationships and showing staff that you care. sensitivity is the key to aid in the problem-solving process among staff. she believed that teachers should be good problem solvers and should empower students to make good decisions. another principal that was interviewed who had been a principal for four years believed in being a good listener and a friend. she described herself as being a hard worker with a full agenda. she had set many personal goals for herself and goals for her students and staff. a principal for eight years focused on sharing a common vision and having dreams. she believed that it is important for a leader to be generally liked but most importantly to be seen as a fair and honest person. women were driven by a desire to build a since of school pride and spirit in their community (hackney, 1999; fennell, 1999). another believed that her most import role as principal and leader was to support teachers and help them when they need support. she viewed her role as a supporter in the staff‚s professional and personal life. she noted that she is a good delegator and knows how to pull everyone together and to work together for the common good of everyone involved (hackney, 1999; fennell, 1999). several conclusions were drawn from this study. a school administration should have good interpersonal and listening skills. one subject felt that communication was number one. building relationships and caring for others were defined as characteristics of successful administrators. principals were other-centered (fennell, 1999; hackney, 1999). they prioritized relationship in their lives and their moral responsibilities. attention from the principal‚s individual need for admiration is transferred to consideration of other‚s needs (hackney, 1999). problem solving was a common theme discussed by fennell (1999). another study that focused on female hispanic principals reported that accurate self-assessment is a personal characteristic that is crucial to a leaders success (marcano, 1997). marcano‚s (1997) research findings included that it is also important to know your personal strengths and to be able to verbalize your beliefs. some hispanic women are unable to explain or verbalize their personal strengths. these women might be misinterpreted as lacking self-esteem by the educational community (marcano, 1997). significance the significance of my study is to increase awareness of the characteristics and attributes of female public school principals. my study was designed to identify the personal characteristics of female public school principals interviewed. characteristics identified will be based on principal's personal perceptions of their attributes and personal characteristics. additionally, the study discovered how and to what extent female principals perceive the impact of these influences on their personal success. subjects have benefited by gaining insight and being able to verbalize their personal insights about their characteristics as a leader. purpose the purpose in my study was threefold: (a) to identify the characteristics and attributes of female public school principals; (b) to develop a greater understanding of female principals characteristics, attributes, and attitudes; and (c) to demonstrate that personal characteristics are similar across cultural and ethnic boundaries. the study may provide insight to aspiring female principals and to superintendents when hiring prospective female principals. it is important for women to be aware of the positive characteristics of female principals as they seek positions in educational administration. awareness would provide women the opportunity to evaluate their personal characteristics and compare them to females that are presently in leadership roles. design i used a qualitative research method to examine personal characteristics of nine female public school principals. the research questions addressed in this research was what were the personal characteristics and attributes of female public school principals; and what did they attribute to their success? a semistructured interview was developed and included twenty-four questions that were designed to answer the research questions. qualitative analysis of the eight interviews involved identifying codes and themes generated by participants and the comparison of these themes with the existing literature. methodology the primary goal of this study was to add to the body of knowledge by focusing on female public school principals. the study is based on nine interviews (n=9). the research questions were designed to collect information for comparative analysis and to develop common themes. participants the participants in this study represented a "purposeful rather than random" sample (miles & huberman, 1984, p. 86). nine female public school principals were selected using the following criteria: (a) race; (b) gender; and (c) occupation. my goal was to obtain participation of females who work as public school principals. two of the female principals interviewed were costa rican, two mexican american, two african american, two white, and one australian. experience as building level principal ranged from first year to eight years experience. participants ranged in age from 36 to 53 years. procedure data collection in this study, 24 open-ended questions were asked in each interview with the nine principals. the interview questions consisted of twenty-four structured questions. each interview lasted approximately forty minutes. at the end of the interview, the interviewees were given the opportunity to share personal information that would benefit the study. research was conducted according to the ethical principles of the american psychological association (1996). prior to the interviews, a human subject form was submitted and approved by the committee for the protection of human subjects. participants signed a form indicating their consent to participate in an audiotaped interview. the interview was audiotaped and transcribed by the researcher. participants were further informed through a written letter that excerpts from their interview could be published in an anonymous format. participants were assured that all information would be confidential. finally, the participants were free to stop the interview and withdraw from the study at any time. the interview protocol was pilot tested on three female public school principals, their data was not included as part of the analysis. following the pilot interview, i talked with the three participants and reviewed the interview questions. as a result of the review, i totally removed one of the original questions and restated several other questions. examples of interview questions in the final protocol include: (a) what are you personal characteristics? (b) how do you personally measure success? (c) what do you attribute to your success? (d) what inner strengths do you pull from in a difficult situation? data analysis interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim by the researcher and rechecked for accuracy. i listened to the tapes while simultaneously reading the written transcription. a translator assisted me with transcribing the interviews that were in spanish. i listened to the participant's responses, took handwritten notes, and recorded the interview. most of the principal‚s interviews were conducted in their home or campus. the only exceptions were two of the interviews that were completed via electronic mail. principals were asked questions about their personal history, personal character, and personal feelings about success. interviews were transcribed and analyzed based on commonalties. analytic conclusions can be formulated by coding then categorizing similar ideas or statements of experiences from data. analysis of the data involved a systematic process of collecting it, organizing it, dividing it into manageable units, synthesizing it, searching for patterns, and determining what was important and what should be reported (bogdan & biklen, 1998). validity cross checking information and conclusion through several procedures and sources were utilized in my study (johnson, 1999). multi-data source was used based on ethnicity and location. low inference descriptors that were used in the research included direct quotes and field notes (johnson, 1999). findings identified characteristics many themes emerged from the interviews with the female public school principals. however, there were five personal characteristics that were identified and are highly significant. participants identified the following significant characteristics: driven to achieve (n=9), spiritual (n=9), involved in professional organizations (n=9). out of the participants, five felt it important to be community leaders (n=5). the five female principals that were included in this theme were two white, one mexican american, one costa rican, and one australian. also, five felt it necessary to value personal relationship (n=5). the five female principals that were included in this theme were two white, two mexican american, and one australian. qualitative results i identified a total of forty themes in the transcripts. a total of five themes emerged as noteworthy appearing in at least five transcripts. these themes are reported in summary form. the five emerging themes were: driven to achieve, spiritual, community leaders, involved in professional organizations, and community leaders. driven to achieve all participants interviewed mentioned that they set goals, and were driven by an inner voice to achieve their personal goals. this data mirrors research introduced in the review of literature. accomplishing goals (wesson, 1998) and sharing goals and visions (duvall, 1980; marcano, 1997) establishes a direct link to previous research. data indicated that all nine female public school principals interviewed had a passion in their work. excerpts demonstrating this theme are listed below: i believe a typical american woman is a woman who wants it all. who wants to be mom, be a provider, half of the provider. because i believe that as an american woman that we provide, and then we meet goals with another half which is the male species. and then we work hard, we want to be mom, we want to be provider, we want to be executives or administrators. we want to be in charge and be able to juggle the schedule. i think that is the american woman, juggling all the time, american educator, american woman. (december, 2000) aspiring administrators make career moves that will maximize their potential for achieving personal goals (marcano, 1997). another woman interviewed who was hired as a principal within the last year describes how she personally set goals in her life. personally, she focused on setting goals without time limits but, professionally goals had time constraints and action plans. the following excerpt describes her goal setting technique: a goal that has been met and i have set goals in my life. i never put years in it. i never put time into it, but i do say that this is what i want done-someday or this is what i‚m going to have donesomeday. the most recent being here in this role. i'm a go-getter. i'm eager. i am very hyper, without coffee or any other stimulants like that. (december 2000) another principal emphasized the fact that she was willing to take risks to accomplish goals that she has set for herself and for her school. she describes herself as hard worker and unafraid to ask tough questions. the following excerpt describes this characteristic: i am a perfectionist, very driven to excel and win. i am a risk taker who is not intimidated to ask questions or deal with hard issuesâ· i am a hard worker who does not quit until the job is done. (december 2000) hard work is a theme that is prevalent throughout many of the interviews. this principal best describes how women sometimes feel when compared with males within the organization (hagberg, 1998). the following excerpt is a personal perspective describing this characteristic: we work hard. we work hard to prove ourselves, especially in a male-dominated workforce, it is hard to prove yourself. in education, however, the women have been the dominant figures, however, only in the classrooms. we (women) struggle and we work hard. (july, 1999) spiritual one participant remembers a childhood experience that inspired her to make changes in her life. she did not want to be a statistic in her community. her belief in god gave her strength to help her make it through difficult situations. hagberg (1998) described women as being more motivating and inspirational than men. when asked what got her through difficult situations, she replied: i think faith, and the belief that i am not going to be a statistic. i was reared in a very low impoverisheded area and i remember thinking, and smelling the septic tanks, and thinking, "i don‚t want to live like this all my life." my parents tried, i don‚t blame them. it was the only thing that they knew but i also attribute it to my parents because they did not have, and wanted to make sure we had. their goal was for us to at least graduate from high school and not be pregnant, and that would suffice. after that they really didn't care much what we did. they were elated to know that both my sister and i went on to college. but again i was not going to be just another mexican-american, straight-haired, person who grew up to be pregnant and barefoot. i saw that going on and that was not going to be me. also, i believe that religion played a lot into it. my parents were very, very committed to the church and, thus, we were too as girls. we were there every sunday, every wednesday. (december, 2000) i was not surprised that faith in god was a factor that was mentioned by all the principals interviewed. it was their faith that helped them through difficult situations and their belief that things would get better and that encouraged them during trying times. the following excerpt describes this belief: my faith in god sustains me through my most difficult moments in life and in my work. i take each day as it is given to me and refuse to let a bad situation ruin it for me, or others. i am forever the optimist and i look for the good in all. (december, 2000) involved in professional organizations literature supported the fact that networking with other professionals was an attribute of a successful female principal (duvall, 1980; hackney, 1999; marcano 1997; wesson, 1980). every principal interviewed was a member of several professional organizations. networking was an important characteristic that was identified by the principals interviewed. professional growth and affiliation with profession organizations were important to the principals interviewed. members of professional organizations can bond together to have a greater voice in legislation. principals valued profession collaboration and professional dialogue. one principal reports: i'm a member of tepsa, elementary principals supervisors association. i‚m also a member of most recently with the texas music educators' association. but those are the only organizations that i affiliate with. i attend seminars and workshops of other organizations but i just go as a non-member. (december, 2000) community leaders this characteristic was prevalent with principal being other-centered; they were sincerely concerned with making the world a better place to live and raise our children (fennell, 1999; hackney, 1999). one principal described what being successful meant with children and personally: with children, are they making progress, they are making gains? do they feel good about themselves? do they like what they do? in my own success, it is. how do i feel about me as a person? what have i done to make the world a better place? so it would be from the people perspective. what kind of an impact have i made in the world? have i made it a better place? (december, 2000) the principals interviewed were not selfish. they were genuinely caring, concerned giving individuals with a mission in life (fennell, 1999; hackney, 1999; wesson, 1998). it was not necessary for the principals to be personally honored for their accomplishment in their work. what they wanted most was to visually see changes, to be able to set a goal and see it through. self-gratification was not their goal as explained in this excerpt: i'm not a person who seeks gratification or wants to be exalted in anyway. just to know that deep inside i had something to do with someone's success. even if i don't get the credit for it, but knowing that things are getting better. i guess it would be kind of how benjamin franklin felt when he knew that everybody would be able to see at night. (december, 2000) personal satisfaction is achieved through hard work and perseverance (hackney, 1999; hagberg, 1998). personal gratification is explained as making a positive difference in others lives. the following excerpt exhibits this idea: for me personally, if i'm satisfied with what i'm doing, if i feel like what i'm doing is making a positive difference. when i really think about what i really like to do, it's to make things happen with a group of people. so, i guess i measure success as being able to produce some of those things. make things happen, make a difference. (december, 2000) as leaders mature, and achieve administrative roles, they are concerned with the influence they have on a greater number of individuals (fennell, 1999). daily decisions that are made by these principals have an impact on the entire school building and sometimes the entire community. one principal mentions, "as i move up the ladder in my career i am able to have more influence, for good, over a greater number of people." value personal relationships as one might expect, principals valued personal relationship with students, staff, colleagues, and community members. women envision their leadership through collaboration, shared problem solving, and shared decision-making (fennell, 1999; hackney, 1999; marcano, 1997). building relationship with others to achieve the goal and mission of the school was a common theme. one of the comments included: generally, people know that i am authentic, that i really do care about individuals in this organization but i also really care that in this organization we have high expectations. so just like i would expect a teacher in the classroom to have high expectations, but be very aware of individual needs, that‚s what i think is important. being a good communicator, being a good listener, being someone who is not caught up in the title. (december, 2000) one principal emphasized the fact that the school and community needed to join together to accomplish a "common goal". she realized and valued personal relationships; when asked what do you attribute to your success, this is what she had to offer: the fact that i am smart enough to realize that you need other people to accomplish things. no man is an island, if you want to use clichés. everybody pulling together for a common good, a common goal. utilizing the best that each has to offer. (december, 2000) one principal included the fact that it is important to build relationship with community leaders. everyone can work together as one empowered community. hackney (1999) described this skill as a delegator that knows how to pull everyone together to work together for the common good of everyone involved. conclusions leadership has been the central focus of research in the field of educational administration. most studies have been based on the experiences of white males (blackmore, 1989; capper, 1993; glazer, 1991). historically, leadership roles have been held by men (capper, 1993; sloan, 1999). the female principal‚s role is diverse, fragmented, and involves numerous decisions daily. it is important for women to be able to identify and evaluate their own personal characteristics. women must be conscious of what is perceived by others and develop strategies that are proactive in building success (wesson, 1998). participants were able to verbalize their personal insight about their character, which made them think about their inner values, beliefs and leadership styles. the sample (n=9) of female public school principals were selected from three different countries and five different ethnic backgrounds but all had similar personal characteristics. i believe that it is significant to note that participants in this study were from different cultures, different ethnic groups, and some from different countries. we can conclude in this study that despite different cultural, ethnic backgrounds, years of experience and age differences, all of these women faced the same challenges, and they share a common set of values and a similar belief system. note at the discretion of the interviewees, the author will not disclose their names. dr. leslie a. holtkamp is a summer, 2001 graduate from the educational leadership & counseling program at sam houston state university in huntsville, texas. references american psychological association. 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"characteristics of female public school principals" 1. what is your nationality? 2. what year were you born? 3. where were you born? 4. where were you educated? 5. what university did you attend? 6. what degree do you have? 7. what are the educational requirements for your job as principal? 8. what languages do you speak? 9. other than school principal, what other professions have you had? 10. how many years do you have to teach in the classroom before you can become a principal? 11. what are your parents' education and their occupations? 12. what were your responsibilities as a girl growing up? 13. how many siblings do you have? 14. what is your birth order? 15. what are your siblings' occupations? 16. what are your hobbies and interests? 17. how many years of experience do you have in education? 18. are you a member of any professional organizations? 19. typically, what do other women from your country do for a living? 20. how do you personally measure success? 21. to what do you attribute your success? 22. what are your personal characteristics? 23. what inner strengths do you pull from in a difficult situation? 24. what are your future goals? 25. is there anything you would like to share?   copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com . for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com . duplication without express written consent is prohibited  http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html http://www.zzn.com/ http://www.zzn.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 19, fall 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] re-constructing the leadership model of social justice for african-american women in education dr. mary l. grimes the mainstream epistemology about women in educational leadership roles has been constructed, canonized, and theorized from a white hegemonic female perspective. the early literature about women as leaders include the managerial woman (henning & jardim, 1977); men and women of the corporation (kanter, 1977); paths to power (josefowitz, 1980); the androgynous manager (sargent, 1981); women and men as leaders (heller, 1982); in a different voice (gilligan, 1982); and feminine leadership (loden, 1985). this literature suggests that women lead from a different frame of reference due to their socialization process. because of male dominated managerial customs that exist in the workplace, in some instances, they experience obstacles to leadership. recent mainstream white female scholars like shakeshaft (1989) and bensimon (1989) suggest that the feminist perspective is not recognized in the leadership literature. shakeshaft posits that women's leadership experiences are generalized into one category and that the leadership discussion appears androcentric in nature. bensimon (1989) suggests that the prevailing leadership theories do not take into account that "women experience the social world differently than men do and that this translates into a particular epistemology and a particular ethic.it translates into a different experience of leadership.gender must be taken into consideration" (bensimon, 1989, p. 146). african-american women, on the other hand, experience the cultural, contextual, social, behavioral, and linguistic world differently than white females. to silence the african-american woman's voice in the leadership literature further marginalizes her and her experiences. historically, african-american women in leadership have been the catalyst that provides mutual aid and support to the community by enriching the lives of countless families, preparing future scholars for the academy, and supporting economic and social justice efforts for the betterment of the community (allen, 1997). thus, the african-american woman's challenges to leadership cannot be studied against a white hegemonic construct. mitchem (2003) asserts that the african-american women's voice has been systematically silenced from the western-culture perspective of leadership. moreover, the influence on mainstream leadership literature is to silence the sounds from african-american women; to dismiss her voice, devalue her pain, disengage her voice, or oversimplify the black leadership paradigm in intellectual contexts (mitchem, 2003). a working definition for social justice for this discourse comes from lewis (2001). he argues that social justice is a means of "exploring the social construction of unequal hierarchies, which result in a social groups' differential access to power and privilege' (p. 189). the researcher explains that to effectively explore issues file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/index.html of social justice one must also engage in the deconstruction of unjust and oppressive structures that give power to such constructs as racism and sexism (lewis, 2001). the purpose of this discussion is to deconstruct the idea that african-american women's experiences should be generalized into the white, hegemonic, mainstream leadership literature and to propose that leadership for social justice is a more accurate depiction of the african-american women's leadership paradigm. black feminisma social justice discourse epistemologies about african-american women from a feminist context began to take shape in the late 1970s, when an emergent group of black women scholars began to challenge the androcentric bias in the literature about black history (hine, 1992). groundbreaking work by bell hooks (1981), deborah gray white (1985), and patricia hill collins (1990) critically discussed the intersection of gender and racism in america. hooks' (1980) ain't i a woman : black women and feminism, discusses the impact of sexism on the black woman during slavery, the continued devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism and racism within the feminist movement, and the black woman's involvement in the study of slave women on the plantation. white's (1985) ar'n't i a woman? female slaves in the plantation south critically analyzed the institution of slavery and critiqued "the stereotypes of black women as jezebels, mammies, and sapphires that revealed the myriad of ways in which our society attempted to devalue and to dehumanize black women" (hine, 1992, p. 14). the author posits that african-american women had to develop a culture of "dissemblance and self-reliance in order to survive.they had no choice but to become creative agents for change and to embark upon the heroic task of re-imaging themselves and their sex" (p. 14). collins' (1990), black feminist thought : knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment, discusses the oppression of black women by constructs of race, class, and gender within the matrix of domination to control their sexual, economic, and family social structures. the author revisits white's (1985) stereotypes and re-defines the stereotypes of the mammy, the emasculator, the jezebel, and the welfare mother (collins, 1990). the rise of black feminist and womanist literature continues to link the past to the present social structures thatperpetuate the myriad of obstacles that women of color encounter in the mainstream leadership role. however, early african-american women leaders who overcame these oppressive structures have been traced back to the circum of slavery and the reconstruction. navigating through social networks early african-american women leaders were developed through social networks such as the church, family, and community structures (allen, 1997). a culturally relevant theory about african-american women in leadership is directly linked to social justice and education. allen explains that "black female leadership in the united states is a history of their struggle for liberation from oppression. it is a history of collective struggle to maintain cultural traditions in the black community" (p. 60). their leadership role in education has historically taken on communal contexts like serving as the community "othermother" caretaker, community spokesperson, entrepreneur, and political activist (allen, 1997; collins, 1990). smith and smith (1992) researched the history of early african-american women educational leaders. the earliest known school for slaves was that of milla grensen who held clandestine classes after midnight in nanchez, louisiana. it was there that the matriarchal society of african-american educational administrators began (smith & smith, 1992). as more women of color learned to read and write, they began teaching their children, other women, and their children in the community to read and write using the bible at sunday school or other religious gatherings. poor, orphaned, and run-away slave children of the south who came north via the underground railroad or other means, were taken in and educated by africanamerican women who survived the journey north. early known african-american women educators linked to social justice activism were women such as catherine ferguson, who opened one of the first schools for poor children in new york city in 1793; mary smith peake, who opened a school in her home for fugitive slaves in 1847; jamie porter barrett who founded the palace-of-delight, a home for children and teens without shelter; and, ann marie becraft, opened the first seminary boarding school in 1805 for black girls fifteen years old and older in washington, dc (smith & smith, 1992). these early african-american leaders began a long-standing tradition of mending a fragmented culture and rebuilding a people through education. cultural perspectives of leadership as african-american women have defined their world from a perspective of resistance, oppression, and creative struggle, they engaged in methods of survival, became community caretakers and role models for other women of color (parker & ogilvie, 1996). hence, the african-american woman's perspective of leadership tends to differ from her white counterparts. early in the african-american woman's socialization process, she is taught to value interdependence, mutual aid, spiritualism, reverence for elders, and the tendency to communicate indirectly. conversely, the eurocentric cultural perspective values individualism, competition, youth, and communicating in direct terms (meyers, 2002). as a result, there exists "problematic.interactions between the african-american woman and her white colleagues" (baraka, 1997, p. 237). meyers (2002), places more complexity on the leadership role for african-american women by affirming that race and gender (or racism and sexism) are issues inextricably linked as a major obstacle to effective leadership. the author also asserts that race and gender work together to oppress african-american women in the workplace because both perspectives are grounded in stereotypical beliefs and myths about african american women. in the mainstream environment, these "misconceptions and stereotypes about race and sex lead to the treatment of, and interaction with, african-american women as labels; thus mystifying the real persons behind the stigma and encouraging self-fulfilling prophecies about sex and race that hold power" (meyers, 2002, p. 23). according to bush (1999), african-american women have been forced to adopt a eurocentric norm to survive in the workplace. furthermore, she states that african-american women "must become bicultural or able to function in two cultures simultaneously, as well as not compromise themselves, their culture, and their inner-self in the process" (p. 22). furthermore, african-american females are challenged by a "quadruple jeopardy-being black, female, educated, and isolated, is a daily source of stress for the africanamerican female" (bush, 1999, p.22). re-constructing a social justice leadership frame for african-american women in leadership two major recurring themes in the literature about african-american women in leadership identify key issues that women of color have faced. these include: marginalization on two levels because the current mainstream literature narrowly contextualizes african-american women's leadership experiences from a white construct of race, it further marginalizes women of color's leadership experiences by generalizing their issues into a single category (meyers, 2002). resistance to leadership by african-american women this is described within the context of three basic premises, a) sex role stereotyping, b) organizational barriers, and c) the internalization of traditional female behaviors (moses, 1997; harvard, 1986). moses (1997) and harvard (1986) conclude that sex-role stereotyping and lack of career socialization opportunities result in prejudices and informal rules that deny women equal opportunities for administrative positions in higher education. women are expected to exhibit behaviors that conform to common societal beliefs about the females' role in the public sphere. acceptable characteristics include being passive rather than competitive or self-assertive and submissive rather than independent and dominant (moses, 1997). on the other hand, women who exhibit socially acceptable behaviors are believed to be lacking in the assertive ambition needed to lead an organization. moses (1997) argues that another organizational barrier for african-american women in leadership is tokenism. in some instances, women of color who land positional power are often "tokens" who have title but no real political power within the organization to make things happen. undermined by colleagues and superiors, the african-american woman administrator is under close scrutiny and often set up to fail (moses, 1997). despite the recurring obstacles to leadership, african-american women continue to prevail through a frame that is closely aligned with their early roots in leadership. jean-marie (2003) conducted a study to identify the challenges and leadership styles of african-american women administrators in their own words. participants of the study were administrators at predominately historically black colleges and universities (hbcu's). the vast majority of african-american women in higher education administration are concentrated in hbcu's, where the environment is conducive to professional growth and supportive of their academic and social development (grimes, 2003). jean-marie (2003) constructed three distinct models of leadership from data gathered from interviews and surveys of african-american women who participated in the study. participants identified a career model of leadership, embedded in individual achievement; a visionary model of leadership entrenched in economic success; and the social justice model of leadership deeply rooted in uplifting the community (jean-marie, 2003). characteristics of the author's social justice model of leadership for african-american academic administrators include preparing new black scholars to carry on the tradition of the black academic community, interpreting their role as a spiritual vocation that serves the greater good, and providing students with the moral and social assistance needed to ensure their success. participants in the study also noted that this model of leadership has strong spiritual implications. administrators frequently compared leadership to a "calling" and attributed their effectiveness and/or success to the guidance of a higher spiritual power that affects their lives in a profound way. in a study of four african-american women college presidents of minority serving institutions in america, each college president agreed that to be a successful administrator the african-american female must have some key characteristics: personal style and wit, as well as a profound knowledge of the many aspects of higher education administration. she must be an academician, able to win the respect of the faculty and the administrative cabinet leaders; she must be able to gain the respect and support of the external community; and she must never loose sight of the institutional mission of giving students of color access to educational opportunities that can change a generation (grimes, 2003). by carefully considering the historical and cultural aspects of the african-american woman's leadership paradigm of social justice, there is a distinctive communal model that merits further study. therefore, social justice, in this reference, reconstructs the idea that the african-american woman's is a model of social justice and empowerment for the community. bibliography allen, b.l. (1997). a re-articulation of black female community leadership: processes, networks and a culture of resistance. african american research perspectives, 3, 60-66. baraka, j.n. (1997). collegiality in the academy, where does the black woman fit? in benjamin, l. (ed.), black women in the academy: promises and perils (pp. 234-244). gainesville, fl: university press of florida. bensimon, e. m. (1989). a feminist reinterpretation of presidents' definition of leadership. peabody journal of education, 66, 143-156. bush, v.b. (1999). the seventh daughters: african american women presidents of predominantly white four-year colleges and universities. unpublished doctoral dissertation. claremont graduate university, pasadena, ca. collins, p.h. (1990). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. new york: routledge. gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice. cambridge, ma; harvard university press. grimes, m.l. (2003). unpublished doctoral dissertation. the efficacy of using an integrated leadership model to assess the leadership styles of african-american women in the college presidency. university of south carolina, columbia, sc. heller, t. (1982). women and men as leaders. south hadley, ma; j.f. bergin. henning, n., & jardim, a. (1977). the managerial woman. new york: anchor books. hine, d.c. (1992). the black studies movement: afrocentric-traditionalist-feminist paradigms for the next stage. the black scholar, 22, 11-18. hooks, b. (1981). ain't i a woman: black women and feminism. cambridge, ma: south end press harvard, p. (1986). successful behaviors of black administrators in higher education: implications for leadership. a paper presented at the meeting of the american educational research association, san francisco, california. jean-marie, g. (2003). the courage to lead: black women administrators speak. women in higher education. retrieved february 11, 2005, from http://www.wihe.com. josefowitz, n. (1980). paths to power. reading, ma.: addison-wesley. kanter, r.m. (1977). men and women of the corporation. new york: basic books, inc. lewis, j.b. (2001). social justice, social studies, and social foundations. the social studies, 92, 189-195. loden, m. (1985). feminine leadership or how to succeed in business without being one of the boys. new york: times books. meyers, l.n. (2002). a broken silence: voices of african-american women in the academy. westport, ct: greenwood. mitchem, s.y. (2003). no longer nailed to the floor. cross currents, 53, 64-74 moses, y. (1997). black women in academe: issues and strategies. in benjamin, l. (ed.), black women in the academy: promises and perils (pp. 23-37). gainesville, fl: university press of florida. parker, p.s., & ogilvie, dt. (1996). gender, culture, and leadership: toward a culturally distinct model of african-american women executive’s leadership strategies. leadership quarterly, 7, 181-214. sargent, a.g. (1981). the androgynous manager. new york: amacom, a division of the american management association. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. newbury park, pa: sage publications. smith, e.j., & smith, p.m. (1992). the legacy of african-american women in higher education. in welch, l. (ed.), perspectives on minority women in higher education. (pp.25-39). new york: prager press. white, d. g. (1985). ar'n't i a woman ? female slaves in the plantation south. new york: w.w. norton. author dr. mary l. grimes 2211 hudson road, #904 greer, sc 29650 864-322-5231 mgrimes@ scsu.edu dr. mary l. grimes is the greenville center director and asst. professor of educational leadership at south carolina state university. she earned her ph.d. in educational leadership with a concentration in higher education from the university of south carolina, columbia. her current research interests include the structural and cultural interception of race, class, and gender on leadership as well as the experiences of women of color in higher education. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 23, spring 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] an exploration of the trust-commitment cultural model and its role in the success of women entrepreneurs jack davis, david g. vequist, and ronald merrell abstract survey data analysis in three stages over a five year period is reported to explore the idea that successful women business owners develop and utilize a "culture of trust and commitment" in their firms and that this culture is a fundamental contributor to their high financial and organizational performance. responses of more than 1,000 employees from 18 small businesses (14 owned by women, 4 by men) to the 95 questions of the quality leadership survey (qls) are given. the qls in part directly assesses the broad concept of culture and the specific constructs of trust and commitment. extensive statistical calculations are employed to examine the possibility that trust and commitment are closely linked and are the foundation of a distinct culture created and nurtured by outstanding women entrepreneurs. the authors believe the education and training on the subject of culture will be very helpful to current and future entrepreneurs. an exploration of the trust-commitment cultural model and its role in the success of women entrepreneurs for more than three decades, women have been making extraordinary strides in the u. s. entrepreneurial arena. from 1970 to 2000, the number of women small business owners went from a half million to more than nine million (office of advocacy, 2005). if such a pace continues, this group could expand to 12 million or more in this current decade. the authors of this paper seek to explore what they believe is a major reason for this growth--the culture that is created by these women in their businesses. also examined here is the idea that future women business owners will benefit greatly from understanding the role of culture in their entrepreneurial success. one of the authors in previous writings has suggested that successful women business owners have entrepreneurial and team oriented personalities, as well as a participative/consultative managerial approach which strongly aid them in their entrepreneurial efforts ( davis , 2001; davis , 2005a; davis , 2005b; davis & hollingsworth, 2000). the authors in this paper propose another possible reason for the success of these women is their developing and employing a trust-commitment culture in their businesses, which leads to high employee and organizational performance over the long term. this essay explores this idea that file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm outstanding women business owners in this country, for a number of reasons, create a particular cultural model or, "blueprint," that guides their businesses on a daily basis. these women exhibit an extraordinary level of trust and commitment for their employees which then is morphed into an unusually high level of trust and commitment by employees for the owners and their businesses. this careful assessment of the kind of culture that is found with women entrepreneurs who stand at the top of the small business world proceeds in two phases. the first phase deals with a review of what has been published in terms of how trust and commitment have individually been studied and regarded in organizational functioning. this review suggests that these two concepts are linked closely together when considering the culture created in successful firms owned by women. the second phase of this paper reports on the in-depth analysis of the survey results of 18 small businesses (14 owned by highly successful women entrepreneurs and 4 owned by men). this analysis brings together, in practical and women entrepreneur developmental terms, what has been discussed in the first phase. trust and commitment as organizational culture concepts the history of trust as a theoretical construct in organization development, business systems, counseling, and education/learning can be traced to the 1960s (gibb, 1978). in recent years, there has been a considerable amount of interest shown here in the us and overseas in the concept of trust and its impact on organizational performance (ciancutti & steding, 2001; costigan & iter, 1998; dietz, 2004; dirks & ferrin, 2000; kramer & tyler, 1996; kramer, 1999; lane & bachmann, 2003; mccauley & kuhnert, 1992; o'brien, 2001; ramo, 2004; tyler, 2003). dietz carefully defines five different categories of trust as it operates within an organization. tyler argues trust is highly important, particularly to a modern organization which must manage its dynamics efficiently to ensure its survival and growth. ciancutti and steding (2001) write, we are a society in search of trust. the less we find it, the more precious it becomes. an organization where people earn one another's trust and one that commands trust from the public has a competitive advantage. it can draw the best people, inspire customer loyalty, reach out successfully to new markets, and provide more innovative products and services. you can intentionally create trust. you can drive a culture of earned trust that includes everyone and harvests opportunities to increase growth, productivity, profits and job satisfaction with virtually no cost to you. (p. 11) dirks and ferrin, in their 2000 meta-analysis of 47 studies on trust, concluded that trust in leadership has an important effect on employee job performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, intent to quit, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction. it would appear that substantial time and attention has been paid in the last several years to the impact of trust on the organization. for those who would go further into the history of what has been done by researchers in the past two decades as it relates to business performance, mccauley and kuhnert (1992) may serve as a valuable reference. these two writers conclude that the association between trust and performance has been expressed by most of the researchers they have reviewed. in a similar vein, there has been in the past ten years considerable american and worldwide attention given to the subject of commitment and what it means to individual and organizational performance (baron & kreps, 1999; becker, billings, eveleth, & gilbert, 1996; beyerlein, freedman, mcgee, & moran, 2003; brooks & zeitz, 1999; foote, seipel, johnson, & duffy, 2005; kim &rowley, 2005; meyer & allen, 1997). both the becker, et al., and the brooks and zeitz articles track back to the 1970s the extensive research that has taken place on the subject of commitment. from these many, the authors at this point would like to feature one longitudinal study done by the stanford graduate school of business, as reported by baron and kreps (1999), in order to highlight and to underscore the role of commitment in the design, creation, and evolution of a small business's culture. the stanford project on emerging companies (spec) began in the 1990s and continues to this day. in 1994, a group of researchers at the stanford graduate school of business began studying 186 young high tech companies located in the silicon valley . using interviews, surveys, and archival publications, their aim (then and to the present) has been to examine management's, especially the founder's and/or ceo's, thinking and actions on human resource practices, organization design, and business strategy. the team has been particularly interested in noting the evolution of this thinking and action taking, as well as looking at the impact of these early decisions on the firms' performance (stanford project on emerging companies, 2004). one of the overall findings by this stanford team that helps researchers involved with the study of small businesses dealt with the strategies of these firms. five primary strategies were identified by the spec research team as being those used by their silicon valley companies: 1) innovators companies striving to create novel products for new undeveloped markets; 2) enhancers those striving to improve upon products for already developed markets; 3) marketing those whose core competency lies in the marketing, distribution, and selling of their products; 4) technology/marketing hybrids those who have significant innovator/enhancer characteristics and who have marketing prowess as well; and 5) cost those competing primarily by providing their product at a low cost. a second important finding that pertains directly to the major interest of this paper, spec researchers narrowed to four the number of what they called "pure management/employment models or blueprints" utilized by the companies studied: 1) factory companies who tend to simply see their employees as a cost of production, which should be minimized just like any other costs of production; 2) commitment companies fostering a long-term friendly two way communication between employer and employee who emphasize training and development of employees seeking to retain employees for long durations; 3) star companies seeking to recruit the best and brightest talent in the industry; and 4) engineering companies seeking to organize workers into teams who can then be assigned to specialized tasks. twenty-nine of these silicon valley companies started their businesses with the commitment model (with all the five strategies being employed among the 29) in the mid-1990s. as of the last report, 22 firms were still using this model (all strategies involved). the authors of this paper would like to suggest that this commitment management or employment model found by spec is in theory and possibly in fact very much in keeping with the concept of a commitment culture, which values highly the training, development, and retention of its most important resource, its employees. stanford's work on the spec, consequently, gives to those of us who are pursuing the clarification of the role and importance of culture inside small businesses encouragement to proceed to examine the theory that commitment is possibly a vital key. as to the availability of past research that examines the trust and commitment constructs operating together in terms of a single culture, not much, if any, previous formal published research has occurred. one writer in the last few years (de gilder, 2003) has investigated the perceptual differences in trust and commitment between two types of hotel workers. he found a "significant" correlation between the two as independent variables. mentioned earlier was the work of dirks and ferrin (2000), who see the two as functioning together in a significant way. the two authors who come very close to the position of this paper are ciancutti and steding (2001), who, in their built on trust book, describe a culture of trust being founded on six principles, one of which is commitment. it might be worth bringing out at this juncture that this paper is exploring rather new ground by suggesting trust and commitment may be closely tied to one another in the creation and maintenance of a culture, which leads to the success of small businesses, especially those owned by successful women entrepreneurs. the logic being examined here is: "if employees have a high level of trust in the owner and the organization then a high level of commitment to the owner and organization will likely be an accompanying valuable outcome." the reverse logic of commitment creating trust does not seem as plausible. inside this logic is the idea that the woman business owner gets the trust/commitment "ball" rolling. in any case, the information in the next section is presented in order to provide some statistical substantiation that trust and commitment are in a marriage that serves as a fundamental basis for the culture developed and nurtured by highly successful women business owners. a survey study of highly successful women entrepreneurs in 1998, one of the authors began a long term examination of highly successful women entrepreneurs. the extraordinary movement of women into the ranks of business owners over the three decade period beginning in 1970 was cause for a closer scrutiny of what had been taking place, particularly from the standpoint of what needed to be done for the training and development of this mushrooming group. this researcher began by a serious study of the personalities of 56 of the top 500 women business owners (based on sales revenue) as identified by working woman magazine. several articles and a book, the succeeding personalities of women entrepreneurs ( davis , 2001), resulted. his next phase of research was the study of 14 of these 56 women and their managerial style. a primary question he sought to answer was whether their managerial approach was possibly a cause of their success. this survey data gathering ended in 2000 with over 500 employees from these women's 14 businesses completing the quality leadership survey (qls), a 95 item standardized instrument which measures 32 factors of organizational functioning across five organizational levels. in addition to this data, an almost equal number of employees from four men-owned small to medium sized going business concerns had responded to the same survey during the mid 1990s. the survey results from these men-owned firms allowed a comparison to note any gender difference in managerial style. what follows below reviews the three stages of survey data analysis which has taken place to get to the point now of examining what this survey data may mean specifically in terms of the creation and utilization of a trust-commitment culture. to aid the reader in avoiding confusion about the stages of data analysis, it may be helpful to put a "name tag" on each of the stages: stage i managerial style; stage ii managerial essentials; stage iii managerial culture. before getting deeply into the survey data diagnosis, it may be helpful to give some background on the history and theory of 1) employee survey assessment in general, and 2) the quality leadership survey in particular. the 18 businesses are briefly described. also given are some of the statistical highlights of the survey responses by the 1,000 plus employees. all of this leads to a discussion of how a trust-commitment managerial-culture model should be considered the cultural centerpiece of the way successful women entrepreneurs operate their businesses and how this may be significant information to use in the training and development of future women entrepreneurs. the history and theory of employee survey assessment surveys being used in the development of work groups and organizations began in the 1930s (likert, 1932). likert was a pioneer in the survey guided organizational improvement effort forming the institute for social research (isr) in 1947 at the university of michigan . the well-regarded survey of organizations (soo) (taylor & bowers, 1972) was developed by isr in the 1960s. this "grandfather" of employee organizational assessment surveys put to work likert's and other institute researchers' four factor theory of leadership along with likert's socio-technical and linking pin organizational functioning theory (likert, 1961,1967). employee organizational surveys have several purposes according to a number of researchers: pinpointing areas of concern, identifying long-term trends, monitoring program impact, and aiding communication. to some of these survey experts, the main purpose of these surveys is assessment and improvement (kraut, 1996; nadler, 1996; taylor & bowers, 1972). the center for effective organizations at the university of southern california has been tracking for a number of years how employee surveys have been helping major corporations achieve higher performance. the center noted in the decade of the 1990s how the employee survey, when combined with tqm and other employee involvement programs, resulted, as viewed by employees, in considerably increased employee and customer satisfaction, productivity, and profitability (lawler, mohrman, & ledford, 1992, 1995, 1998). burke and others have proposed models for helping organizations better their performance through formal change programs involving employee surveys (burke, 1994; burke, coruzzi, & church, 1996; burke & litwin, 1992). the quality leadership survey (qls) was designed in the early 1990s to assist a major military health care facility in its transitioning to a quality system and method. this large medical organization wanted an inexpensive and efficient means of assessing and tracking its quality improvement efforts over a multi-year period. the qls was modeled after the institute for social research's survey of organizations (soo) in that it seeks employee views of broad organizational dimensions (culture, policy, managerial leadership, peer leadership, and social outputs) by using a multi-question index format to isolate 32 key variables/factors (such as communication and teamwork) that reflect these dimensions and influence organizational performance. the theoretical framework of the qls incorporates likert's views of how organizations function and adds quality principles and methodology. since its inception, the qls has been used in a number of organizations from a variety of industries. the guidebook for the quality leadership survey was written to provide definitions, examples, explanations, and the processes for its effective administration, feedback, and long term utilization. there are also sections dealing with the development and the theory of the survey ( davis , 1993). the foundation of the qls resides with the measurement of an organization's culture. it is the first of the five dimensions making up the survey with the other four following in the order of policy, managerial leadership, peer leadership, and social outputs. the culture dimension is composed of seven factors indexed by 21 questions, three questions per factor: mission/vision, innovation, involvement, learning, consistency, improvement, and ethics. the qls culture segment assesses the organization's basic assumptions, beliefs, and values in these seven areas and identifies how the leadership and employees of the organization essentially approach the taking of action to solve daily problems in these vital areas of the functioning of the organization (schein, 1987). the natures of these factors are critically important to the formation of the factors in the follow-on dimensions. in other words, the culture factors impact the other dimensions' factors one after the other in a cascading manner (culture factors impact policy factors, policy factors impact managerial leadership factors, etc.). several writers have pointed out the significance of culture to organizational performance. schein sees culture as the values/beliefs/assumptions system used by the leadership and membership of an organization, which determines how the organization reacts to both crucial internal and external forces. he states culture is the single most important area of responsibility for senior managers (schein, 1987). in the mid-1980s, dennison, after studying more than 300 u.s. companies concluded, the company with a participative culture had twice the profitability of one with a non-participative culture ( denison , 1984). then, kotter and heskett in the early 1990s released extensive data of their 11 year study concerning more than 200 blue chip american companies, showing those with healthy adaptive and caring cultures had a much greater profit and stock price appreciation than those having unhealthy non-adaptive and non-caring cultures. looking at the other four qls dimensions, the policy dimension also has seven factors (systemizing, communication flow, team problem solving, sensitivity, bottom-up influence, knowledge , and teamwork). they measure the senior managers' guidelines, procedures, and practices in these seven key operating categories of the organization, which once again impact how managers and employees solve problems and take action on a daily basis. falling under the dimension of managerial leadership are seven critical kinds of behaviors and actions of an organization's middle and lower managers and its super-visors. these are self worth, teamwork, team goals, team problem solving, participation, learning, and technical/interpersonal skills. the peer leadership dimension and factors are the same as those found in mana-gerial leadership. the difference between the two is employees are asked how they see themselves as a team performing on these seven crucial behaviors and actions rather than how they see their formal managers and supervisors performing on these factors. the last of the five dimensions is social outputs. it deals with organizational non-financial outcomes. with these factors, employees assess what has been the results over the past twelve months of how work has been organized (systemizing of work), how much team effort has taken place (team effort), how much individual and group satisfaction has occurred (individual/group satisfaction), and to what extent trust and commitment have existed within the organization (trust/commitment). there are four questions which deal with the trust-commitment factor that is at the heart of this paper. they play a significant part in the statistical assessment of the survey results presented later in the paper. they are given here as they appear in the qls: to what extent 92. is there an environment of trust and trustworthiness throughout the organization? 93. is the organization dedicated to following a set of rules and practices which ensure a sense of "fair play" and honesty among all stakeholders, especially employees? 94. are you committed to the organization, its mission , and objectives? 95. is the organization committed to you, your goals, and welfare? a more complete understanding of the construction of the qls and why the initial seven factors in the culture dimension were chosen to drive the survey can be found by referring to the research of the authorities in each of the seven factor areas: culture (kotter & heskett, 1992; schein, 1987), mission/vision (deming, 1986, 1993); innovation (drucker, 1985); involvement (denison, 1990; likert, 1967); learning (senge, 1994); consistency (deming,1986; denison, 1990); improvement (deming, 1986); and ethics (covey, 1992). keep in mind the overall aim of the qls is to aid an organization in a long-term and difficult improvement effort to achieve a quality philosophy supported by quality systems, methods, processes, and practices. it is expected several annual administrations of the survey over a multi-year period with extensive feedback and action-taking on the part of both management and employees is necessary in order to move an organization from a non-quality condition to that of a predominantly quality way of operating. the business and the beginning of survey data analysis the full details of the continuing research of successful women businesses using the qls (including the sampling and research method, as well as extensive statistical findings) can be found in a recent article ( davis , 2005a). the surveying at the women-owned businesses was completed in 2000, while the surveying of the men-owned businesses had been done in the mid-1990s. there was similarity between the businesses of the two categories of owners. the female group of business owners was involved in 12 different types of businesses, and those in the male group had a female counterpart in terms of types of businesses. all had been in existence for at least ten years. the range of number of employees was 22 to 367 (women) and 15 to 310 (men). the average number of employees was 115 to 138, respectively. the average annual sales for the women owned firms were $28 million, which were approximately twice the average annual sales of the men owned companies. the female firms came from all regions of the u.s. , but unlike them, the male-owned companies came from a single region of the country. employee survey participation was 31% for the women-owned firms (507 of 1,612) and 90% for the men (499 out of 552). both hourly and managerial, female and male employees from the two groups of ownership responded to the survey (davis & hollingsworth, 2000). . starting out (stage i of the data analysis), the main purpose of the examination of the 14 highly successful women-owned firms with the qls in 1999 and 2000 was to identify their level of functioning in the 32 categories of the qls. the comparison with the four men-owned companies allowed a gender difference to be considered in the inquiry. likert held the view organizations having a participative and consultative approach to leading and managing would be higher performing than those with auto-cratic/authoritarian and bureaucratic styles (likert, 1967). thus, the 1999-2000 study in the beginning had the dual hypotheses the women owners would 1) lead and manage in a participative and consultative manner and 2) score higher on the 32 factors of the qls because they had much higher annual revenues. these hypotheses were accepted with one minor qualification (davis & hollingsworth, 2000). note that when this 1999-2000 study was begun, the pinpointing of a specific kind or type of culture was not the original intention in surveying the 18 businesses involved in the study. the early analysis of the survey results were examined in more detail as to what it is about the participative/consultative leadership styles that might cause the highly suc-cessful woman entrepreneur to be able to achieve such outstanding results. a broad statistical analysis on three fronts (reliability cronbach alpha; validity discriminant pearson product moment; and factorial extraction principal components) was employed to discover these key leadership and management activities. the survey data, findings, and early conclusions table i presents the data for the two groups on the 32 qls factors, which of course includes those of the culture and social output dimensions. a five point likert scoring scale is used in the answer format of the qls. an overall average for the women-owned businesses (wob) and the men-owned (mob) on each of these factors are shown. the low and high scoring companies for the two groups are also given in the table by factor. it may be interesting to note the overall averages for the wob were significantly higher to at least the .05 level (t-test analysis of significance of difference using spss software) for 30 of the 32 qls factors, including all of those in the culture and social output. it was found in the 1999-2000 study that the wob had cultures, policies, managerial actions , and peer leadership which were quite high on the five point qls measurement scale; were more participative/consultative in their general leadership approach compared to the mob; and produced more favorable social outcomes than the mob (davis & hollingsworth, 2000). as mentioned earlier, the qls data from the 1999-2000 study was examined statistically to determine the reliability, validity, and factorial characteristics of the survey following the approach the institute for social research used to establish the reliability and validity for its survey of organizations (taylor & bowers, 1972). using spss software, cronbach alpha reliability coefficients came to .9647 for the 32 factors and .9800 for the 95 questions. spss discriminant validity computations for the 32 factors and the 95 questions were also done. rather than provide the pearson product moment correlations for every factor with all of the remaining 31 factors-for the purpose of this paper and the sake of brevity--what is presented here are those relevant to the factors found within and between the culture and social output dimensions. the correlations for the culture factors (the seven compared to each other) had a range of .46 for the low and a high of .70, while the average was .57. the correlations for the four factors inside the social output dimension were .55 (low), .67 (average), and .78 (high). the correlations between the seven culture factors and the four from social output came out to .34, .50, and .69 for the low-average-high correlations. after a close examination of the entire matrix of factor correlations, the conclusion was drawn that the qls is generally characterized by strong discriminant validity across all its dimensions and factors. a correlation matrix was also completed for the 95 questions so discriminate validity could be analyzed question by question. thirdly, a principal components spss factorial analysis of the questions, factors, and dimensions was performed (harman, 1976). for the questions, 13 of them had eigen-values greater than one; for the factors, four; and for the dimensions, only one. this perplexing outcome led to a closer study of what were the forces really at work inside these highly successful women led and owned firms. stage ii of the data analysis was launched as a result. to make sense out of the statistics, the 95 question factorial analysis was scrutinized to identify the 13 questions which had the greatest number of correlation matches to at least the .50 level. these questions were then separated into four groups, each group seeking a common theme. upon this closer review, the questions were isolated into four specific successful entrepreneurial leadership essential characteristics: 1) team oriented; 2) ethical; 3) developing the knowledge and skills of its employees; and 4) trusted by and committed to its employees. this left the discovery of an explanation for the one component with an eigen-value greater than one that was found in the five dimension factorial analysis. the institute for social research provides a multi-faceted answer to this statistical question. the institute has found in trying to pinpoint the more precise composition of the four indices that make up the survey of organization's supervisory leadership dimension (support, goal emphasis, work facilitation, and interaction facilitation) that there is a general factor that makes up between 39 to 45% of each of these indices. in each instance, this is a majority of the explanation of the variance for any of the four indices. the institute states that there are probably at least four contributors to a general leadership factor: 1) "factorial impurity" in any leadership item (i.e. each item assesses more than one leadership factor); 2) each leadership factor is assessed by the same method or survey with the same respondents at the same time; 3) a general "halo" effect, which causes a respondent to view a manager in altogether positive or negative terms; and 4) a "real world" relationship with leadership behavior in which good things tend to be seen going together (taylor & bowers, 1972). at this time of stage ii analysis, the conjecture was made that this general leadership factor could be operating in the qls because it employs different dimensions than the survey of organizations (soo) and because it may be seen as more abstract in nature with the dimension of culture. this greater degree of abstractness in the qls could result in this general factor operating as much or more in it as within the soo. identified at this time was the plausible idea that the single force operating inside surveys such as the qls or soo could be a "leadership security" factor in which employees have a comfort level or a "secure" feeling that they know their leaders will do the right things to cause their organization to not only survive but to succeed. "leadership insecurity" could exist as well in organizations not well lead or managed. also brought forward in embryonic form was the idea that this single or general factor could be a specific kind or type of "culture" for these women owned businesses. further reflections on the data and findings a period of time has passed since the last reporting of the data presented in table i and its analysis ( davis , 2005a). this chance for greater reflection has allowed the authors to give deeper consideration to what these data possibly mean in terms of culture, not just the kind of managerial style or the essence of what that management approach should be, particularly when thinking about the training and development of new women entrepreneurs. there has been no change to the general suggestion that prospective women entrepreneurs seriously consider adopting a participative/consulting, team-oriented, and ethical management system that strongly trains and develops the firm's employees. rather, the modification to what has been previously proposed is in the idea that the woman entrepreneur starting out or one wanting to expand or improve her going concern be very conscious of the core responsibility to initiate and foster a "culture of trust and commitment." it is believed that this trust-commitment culture that achieves the strongest of bonds between employees and their small business employer and the highest levels of performance is established and furthered by the owner showing from the beginning an unwavering and unquestioned trust and commitment to her employees. to support this position, the authors offer three categories of statistical data. first, there is the factorial analysis of only one dimension having an eigen-value of one. the theory behind the structure of the qls is that culture is the prime consideration of the five dimensions ( davis , 1993). it makes sense to the authors that culture factors shape policy factors, policy factors shape managerial factors, and on down the cascade. the next category of statistical data adds weight to culture being the prime dimension. examine the highest scoring factors for the wob (at or above 3.75) in table i going from culture down to social outputs: mission/vision (3.75); ethics (3.80); sensitivity to customers and employees (3.84); bottom-up influence (3.78); building the employees' sense of self worth managerial leadership (3.95); teamwork managerial leadership (3.82); team goal setting managerial leadership (3.82); building the employees' sense of self worth peer leadership (3.76); team effort (3.77); individual/group satisfaction (3.84); and trust/commitment (3.87). with the arrangement of the above high scoring survey results, the authors believe successful women entrepreneurs create a values/beliefs/assumptions system founded on trust and commitment when they 1)have a mission/vision that is ethics driven, which then 2) creates policies (written or unwritten) that encourage sensitivity to employees' and customers' needs and that seeks to listen to the lowest level employee, then 3) builds the sense of self worth of employees while emphasizing teamwork and team goal setting, which then 4) gets employees to build each others sense of self worth, and then 5) results in an overall environment of high individual and group satisfaction, team effort, and trust and commitment. with this sequence, it seems a proper order and logic has been followed in concluding that high trust and commitment starts with a culture that is mission/vision/ethics driven. lastly, other new statistics are presented at this point in an effort to affirm this idea of a trust/commitment culture existing in these women's firms. reported now is previously unpublished data from the surveying of the more than 1,000 employees concerning the four questions which make up the trust/commitment factor in the social output dimension of the qls. question 92 asks about the extent of an environment of trust and trustworthiness in the company. question 93 asks about a set of rules/practices ensuring fair play and honesty especially among employees. question 94 asks about the employee being committed to the company and its mission/objectives. question 95 asks about the company being committed to the employee. the pearson product moment correlations among these questions are question 92 (trust) with 93 (ethics) is .73; question 92 (trust) with 94 (employee commitment to company) is .47; question 92 (trust) with 95 (company commitment to employee) is .64; question 93 (ethics) with 94 (employee commitment to company) is .48; question 93 (ethics) with 95 (company commitment to employee) is .64; question 94 (employee commitment to company) with 95 (company commitment toemployee) is .58. although there is no valid and genuine way of determining true cause and effect among these correlations and whether a larger correlation is more meaningful, it is feasible in the view of the authors to think that ethical actions by the company builds trust with employees (.73), trust comes with the company's commitment to the employee (.64), company commitment to the employee comes before employee commitment to the company (.64 compared to .48), and that employee commitment to the company comes with company commitment to the employee (.58). this arrangement of the correlation outcomes with these four questions concerning the trust-commitment small business company culture suggests that once the owner demonstrates an unquestioned trust and commitment to employees, then the trust and commitment by employees is reciprocated. we believe this data offers new insights into how trust and commitment is initiated and established in the firms of successful women entrepreneurs. after all this qls data study and analysis, it is suggested that a trust-commitment model, which is an amalgamation of what has been found separately by writers such as ciancutti and steding and the spec researchers, may be a key aspect to the success of the group of highly successful women business owners studied. what may have been done in using the qls survey with these 18 businesses is to tease out the distinct manner in which a trust-commitment management culture model originates and operates. as a result of this further extensive statistical analysis of the qls survey results of these businesses, we now propose the hypothesis that these women's management style has been one in which they have emphasized the training and development of their employees, been highly ethical in all their dealings with both employees and customers, and extensively utilized teamwork in order to create a "culture of trust and commitment." after considerable review of the survey data, the authors believe when an employee is well trained in the job, is treated fairly and ethically on a daily basis, views all employees in the firm as cooperating and collaborating to make the business a success, and is trusted by and is committed to by the owner, the employee (along with other employees similarly treated) will trust the employer and be committed to high individual and organizational performance. the writers of this paper believe it is reasonable to draw this conclusion and encourage other researchers to study the hypothesis proposed here. other researchers are needed to conduct additional studies of the trust-commitment cultural model, to expand the samples of both the number of employees and the number of firms involved. further use of the qls in additional research projects of this kind will add to the theory, reliability , and validity of this employee organizational assessment instrument. this study has explored new ground and provides initial statistical evidence that highly successful women entrepreneurs fundamentally lead and operate their businesses in a team oriented, ethical, and knowledge/skills building and trust/commitment building way that produces not only very good financial results, but also favorable social organizational outcomes. it appears these women develop and utilize a distinct type of culture when compared to a sample of male entrepreneurs. the information presented here, if corroborated by future studies, may assist in improving the future career guidance, education, training , and the mentoring of the large number of women who will aspire to become business owners in the u.s. this decade. conclusion the purpose of this paper has not been to establish any finality as to how women should operate their businesses in the future, but to encourage much more extensive research into the question of how millions of women might pattern themselves after already well established, proven, and highly successful women business owners. the writers would like to suggest that for employee survey assessment research of women owned businesses, a design found in the guidebook for the quality leadership survey (davis, 1993) be used. the design is very much in keeping with the deming-shewart plan-do-study-act action research model and involves the annual administration of the qls to the employees of a business over a three or four multi-year period. in a way, the training and development of entrepreneurs in this manner might be described as "action research training and development." with each administration of the survey and the feedback of survey results, the managers and employees are able to identify high priority improvement categories and to take action. the follow up surveying enables the owner/ manager and the organization to learn if the action taking achieved the desired results for improved organizational performance from both financial and social perspectives. this research/training and development pattern provides managers and employees a systematic way to deal with the complex evolution of their company while it is conducting its daily business in a competitive and changing environment. with this additional research, not only can small business 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(2003). trust within organizations. personnel review , 32 , 556-569. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership when the wrong woman wins: building bullies and perpetuating patriarch penelope w. brunner, ed.d. melinda l. costello, ph.d. brunner & costello, spring, 2003 through bully methods, women supervisors and managers may provide organizations with the underhanded behaviors that keep competent women from being noticed and promoted. some women are not good managers; and that is exactly why some companies keep them. for 30 years, researchers and working women have watched the progression of females into america’s corporate management positions, and in their examination of the glass ceiling phenomenon, corsun and costen (2001) report that 40% of us executives, managers, and administrators are now women. during the early years of the women’s movement, it was hypothesized that as the number of women entering the working public increased, a feminization or softening of business organizations would also occur. publications such as helgesen’s (1990) the female advantage, helgesen’s (1995) the web of inclusion, and rosener’s (1990) “ways women lead” led us to believe that kinder, gentler, and nurturing environments fostered by humane, caring, and intuitive leaders were developing. multiculturalism and diversity were the expected outcomes. the facts reported today do not support this earlier view. most women managers remain at the lower to mid-level ranks of management, and the workplace is more violent, competitive, and aggressive than before (corsun & costen, 2001). popular media such as time (labi, 2001), management today (kennett, 2001), and psychology today (bertucco, 2001) have all featured stories concerning bully pervasiveness, and as many as 21% of workers may have been targeted directly by office bullies (keashly & jagatic, 2000; namie & namie, 2000). in situations involving bullying, 81% of the bully behavior is attributed to employees in a http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html supervisory role (namie & namie, 2000). one expectation is that much of the bullying is perpetrated by males, perhaps threatened by the increased number of women in the management ranks. sadly, however, this is not the case. according to namie’s u.s. hostile workplace survey (2000), men and women are equally responsible for the bullying behavior, and 84% of those employees targeted for the abuse are female. surprisingly, women bullies target women employees more often than they target males (namie, 2000; namie & namie, 2000). in other words, despite the increasing number of women in america’s workforce, the corporate environment has become even more hostile, especially to women. instead of laying the groundwork for the advancement of the sisterhood, women have joined men in the harassment of their own gender. this in no way suggests that women should be denied admittance to the hallowed halls of corporate work; it does, however, encourage examination of the phenomena contributing to this unexpected outcome. what type of system fosters or maintains a bully’s growth? why do women bullies target women? are women bullies helping to perpetuate the existing workplace patriarchy? this paper explores the dynamics that promote the development of women as bullies and that encourage women, perhaps unconsciously, to support a system that keeps them subordinate. the bully model in her book why so slow?, valian (1999) contends that the glass ceiling continues to be held up, in part, by gender schemas: those stereotypes and biases learned in childhood and that perpetuate into adulthood and consequently into the workplace. the gender schema for men includes “being capable of independent, autonomous action…assertive, instrumental, and task-oriented” (valian, 1999, p. 13). for women, the schema is different and includes “being nurturant, expressive, communal, and concerned about others” (valian, 1999, p. 13). while everyone, regardless of gender, has and expresses all of the behavioral traits to a certain degree, men present to the world more of the masculine traits and women present more of the feminine (matusak, 2001; valian, 1998). the norms of organizations are defined in masculine terms, and “feminine attributes are valued only in the most marginal sense” (ely & meyerson, 2000, p. 109). the criteria for success that organizations have established are based on the stereotypical male characteristics such as aggressiveness, competitiveness, and autonomy (bailyn, 1993). over time, these leadership traits are taken for granted and become legitimized, though often invisible, guides for future leader evaluation. employees who want to advance up the corporate ladder may feel they must demonstrate that they carry the male leadership traits and that they are willing to use them. instead of embracing the feminine characteristics that could balance the historical male hierarchical model, corporations may force women to assume the characteristics of the dominant culture or may base promotions on the masculine traits that women possess (corsun & costen, 2001; ely & meyerson, 2000; valian, 1998). bully behavior is the amplified acting out of masculine behaviors that range from blatant demonstrations such as aggressively screaming, yelling, and threatening dismissals to subtle, underhanded displays. making unreasonable job demands, criticizing abilities, and excluding targeted employees from meetings and necessary information are all found in the bully’s repertoire (namie & namie, 2000). research on bully behavior and harassment concludes that bullies, like harassers, are driven by a need for power and control and choose to seek out a perceived weaker employee to dominate (namie & namie, 2000; kurth, spiller, & travis, 2000). the corporate world in which workplace bullies thrive is established according to the white male experience and represents an extension of the military and sports models followed by men for generations (corsun & costen, 2001; harragan, 1977; hornstein, 1996). “organizational power hierarchies, competitive work climates, and the bunker mentality of contemporary corporate life all provide a hospitable environment for the toxin of disrespect, and even induce it, from bosses who would otherwise be just” (hornstein, 1996, p.6). according to corsun and costen (2001), competitiveness and the desire to dominate are understandable consequences of the existing corporate system: the corporate office is the habitat of the powerful. corporate america is the kind of place that is natural for white males. the game of business has a unique military-sports theme, the rules of which were established years ago by white, anglo-saxon, protestant male ‘captains of industry.’ the military influence is evident in organizational form and structure, whereas the organization’s function (to win the game or make a profit) is influenced by team sports. (p. 4) the bully’s goals parallel those found both in military battles and in sports arenas; competition is the ultimate game in the bully’s mind, and winning requires a singular focus. in order to win, bullies believe that their targets must be beaten up and eliminated (namie & namie, 2000). new leaders stepping into this existing military/sports model must seek and destroy the weakest opponents in order to prove their worthiness to the powers that be. many managers who use these bullying techniques are viewed as effective and are rewarded for their take-noprisoners style of tough leadership (russell, 2001). divide and conquer is the mode of operation that allows the bullies to maintain control over their employees. any show of collegiality among ranks is perceived as threatening and quickly dispersed to forbid the development of strength in opposition (cox, 1993). as the numbers illustrate, women unfortunately are enlisting, or are being drafted, into the bully battalion at a rate similar to that of their male counterparts. and, more frequently than men, the opponents women challenge are other women (namie & namie, 2000). this becomes a more painful and confusing dynamic because the existing gender schemas indicate that women should be nurturing caregivers—especially toward the females who are already disadvantaged in the eyes of corporate observers. this is also a damaging dynamic, because women who oppress other women help to maintain the existing social order in which men remain dominant and women are subordinate (acker, 1990; brunner & costello, 2002). the bully’s role in perpetuating tyranny if there is a perceived lack of rewards for females throughout the corporate structure, the competition for power among women may be intensified. because feminine traits, skills, qualifications, and accomplishments are undervalued in a masculine system, certain women may feel a greater need to demean other women in order to protect the little power base they have already achieved (ely & meyerson, 2000). with lower rank and limited financial resources, the most vulnerable member of the corporation is typically the subordinate female, and she provides the bully with the easiest prey in the competition. thus, female bullies help limit the number of women able to challenge the existing hierarchy. through bully methods, women supervisors and managers may provide organizations with the underhanded behaviors that keep competent women from being noticed and promoted. when male executives allow female bullies to demonstrate these bad behaviors toward other women, the men remove themselves from the risk of legal and ethical concerns. thus, female bullies protect and preserve the male-dominated, existing structure while men are able to keep their hands clean. the bully behavior is tolerated because “organizations of all kinds keep a comfortable place for bosses who will do their dirty work” (hornstein, 1996, p. 103). workers who publicly question “why can’t women get along?” may not realize the part that the system plays in these power dynamics. the woman promoted to the highest levels in the organization may not need to possess great credentials or management skills. in fact, her sole strength may be her ability to puppet upper management’s traditional agenda. so in addition to keeping other, more competent women from advancing, the female bully also serves as a poor representative and role model for workingwomen in general. lewis maltby, president of the national work rights institute, states, “bullying is the sexual harassment of 20 years ago; everybody knows about it, but nobody wants to admit it” (russell, 2001, p. 4). however, when a mean woman discriminates, harasses, and mistreats other women and no man is deemed responsible, it is difficult for the victim to find protection or legal recourse. in 1980, the equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc) developed guidelines for identifying and dealing with a hostile work environment, but the interpretation is based on sexual discrimination and harassment, and bullying has yet to be defined in concrete legal terms. this means that the bully’s victim, unlike the victim of sexual harassment, has no clear-cut path of protection to follow. and without consistent legal avenues readily available, the bully’s victim cannotexpect an alteration of organizational behavior and may believe that changing jobs is her only option. according to the us hostile workplace survey (namie, 2000), 82% of bullied employees lost their jobs, and 38% left voluntarily. the target that chooses to stay in the organization may experience a drop in productivity, effectiveness, and opportunities for advancement. the canada safety council (institute of management and administration [ioma], 2001) estimates that up to 52% of a target’s day is devoted to counter-bully tactics such as building a defensive network, developing counteractive strategies, or seeking political allies. so, in reality, the bully has won, and the organizational structure remains intact. within this type of corporate atmosphere, other employees, wondering if they are the next target, understand that challenging the status quo may involve significant risk. in fact, employees often rally to support the bully out of fear of reprisals, thus weakening the prospects of other women forming support coalitions (namie, 2000). research shows majority group members are threatened by minorities who might join together for support (cox, 1993); so the female bully once again, albeit inadvertently, helps to maintain a structure that limits the opportunities for all women,including the bully. even though she may feel she has joined the “good old boys’ club”, the club ultimately may not provide the female bully with the same upper-level positions afforded to its other members. publicly, male leaders may compliment female bullies for demonstrating that “she kicks ass with the best of them” or “she’s hard as nails,” (martin, 1996, p. 191); and in only 7% of the reported cases was the bully punished, transferred or terminated (namie, 2000). but as ely and meyerson (2000) point out, aggressive, task-oriented women may also be criticized privately. while this criticism may remain secret because the organizational hierarchy does not want to appear discriminatory to women, it nevertheless may limit the bully’s advancement thereby blocking the route for other women. conclusion bully behavior, whether perpetrated by men or women, should be examined further because of the long-term costs allocated to both employees and the organizations in which they work. health problems, legal problems, and productivity problems tied to bully behavior all represent expenses that could be avoided (flynn, 1999; hornstein, 1996; namie, 2000). turnover expense also should be examined-and not just as it relates to replacing targets. women who do not buy into a masculine style of leadership may find themselves in a position where they feel forced either to conform to bully behavior or to take their talents elsewhere; and starting over slows their progress. “to the extent that employees find it difficult to conform to the image of the successful employee, or find it difficult to bring all of their relevant skills and insights to their jobs, important human resources are lost” (ely & meyerson, 2000, p. 128). like other researchers, we agree that corporate management needs to acknowledge that bullying is a major employment issue and requires education, training, and a zero tolerance policy. more importantly, bullied employees need to feel there is a place to be heard and that interventions are possible. existing laws concerning hostile work environment, defamation of character, and vicarious liability may need to be altered or expanded to include bullying behavior as a punishable offense (equal employment opportunity commission [eeoc], 1999; namie & namie, 2000). real change, however, is possible only when management is willing to examine the model that rewards just a fraction of the behavioral traits that all employees possess. until organizations recognize and reward “wholeness” of employees, the feminine and masculine traits we all embody, symptoms of a fragmented workplace will continue to rear their ugly heads. sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, and bullying fall on the same continuum and serve to maintain the existing corporate structure. while there is no shortage of change models available, what does seem to be missing on the part of executive management is willingness or desire to change. women, even more than men, should not accept that the established model is infallible and certainly should not contribute to its continuing devaluation of feminine characteristics. when the wrong woman wins, all employees lose. for thirty years we have wanted to believe that any woman manager would be a welcome change in any organization. we also have wanted to believe that as a woman climbed the corporate ladder she would extend her hand to other women following the leadership path. recognizing that women are more likely than men to bully other women is hard to accept and even harder to discuss in a public forum. but the statistics should not be ignored. if half of the bullies in the workplace are women, then women managers need to assume responsibility for analyzing their roles and contributions to this organizational dynamic. even one bully is too many. references acker, j. (1990). hierarchies, jobs, bodies: a theory of gendered organizations. gender and society, 4, 139-158. bailyn, l. (1993). breaking the mold: women, men and time in the new corporate world. new york: free press. bertucco, m. (2001, may/june). bad behavior. psychology today, p. 28. brunner, p. w., & costello, m. l. (spring, 2002). where’s the joke? the meaning behind sexual humor. advancing women in leadership. retrieved november 15, 2002, from http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/spring2002/ brunn%7e37.htm corsun, d. l., & costen, w. m. (2001). is the glass ceiling unbreakable?: habitus, fields, and the stalling of women and minorities in management. journal of management inquiry, 10(1), 16-25. cox, t. (1993). cultural diversity in organizations. san francisco: berrett-koehler publishers. ely, r. j., & meyerson, d. e. (2000). theories of gender in organizations: a new approach to organizational analysis and change. research in organizational behaviour, 22, 103-151. equal employment opportunity commission. (1999). enforcement guidance: vicarious employer liability for unlawful harassment by supervisors (report no. 915667). washington, dc: author. flynn, g. (1999, august). stop toxic managers before they stop you! workforce. retrieved may 28, 2001, from http://www.workforce.com/archive/ article/000/36/83.xci helgesen, s. (1990). the female advantage. new york: currency/doubleday. helgesen, s. (1995). the web of inclusion. new york: currency/doubleday. harragan, b. h. (1977). games mother never taught you: corporate gamesmanship. new york: rawson associates. hornstein, h. (1996). brutal bosses and their prey: how to identify and overcome abuse in the workplace. new york: riverhead books. institute of management and administration. (2001, april). workplace bullying: why you need to be concerned about it. safety director’sreport. retrieved may 29, 2001, from http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_ansset=gehaukoevyrmssevyruuwr keashly, l., & jagatic, k. (2000, january). workplace abuse and aggression. paper presented at workplace bullying 2000: redefining harassment, oakland, ca. kennett, m. (2001, march 5). first class coach. management today, p. 106. kurth, s. b., spiller, b. b., & travis, c. b. (2000). consent, power, and sexual scripts: deconstructing sexual harassment. in c. b. travis & j. w. white (eds.), sexuality, society, and feminism (pp. 323-354). washington, dc: american psychological association. labi, n. (2001, april 2). let bullies beware. time, pp. 46-47. martin, p. y. (1996). gendering and evaluating dynamics: men, masculinities, and managements. in d. collinson & j. hearn (eds.), men as managers, managers as men: critical perspectives on men, masculinities, and managements (pp. 186-209). london & newbury park, ca: sage publications. matusak, l. (2001, june 28). leadership: gender related, not gender specific. academy of leadership. retrieved june 28, 2001, from http://www.academy.umd.edu/scholarship/casl/salzburg/chapter3.htm namie, g. (2000). quick view fact sheet. retrieved january 8, 2002, from the workplace bullying, usa research 2000 web site: http://www.workdoctor.com/home/twd/employers/res/ surv2000qv.html namie, g., & namie, r. (2000). the bully at work. naperville, il: sourcebooks, inc. rosener, j. b. (1990). ways women lead. harvard business review, november/december, 125. russell, j. d. (2001, march 5). bully in the office. varbusiness . retreived may 29, 2001, from http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_ansset=gehaukoevyrmssevyruuwr valian, v. (1998) running in place. the sciences, 38, pp. 18-23. valian, v. (1999). why so slow? the advancement of women. cambridge, ma: the mit press. authors dr. penelope w. brunner is an associate professor of management at the university of north carolina at asheville. dr. melinda l. costello is an associate professor of management at siena college, albany, new york. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women network home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international advancing women in leadership governance gumbo brenda kallio, ed.d. gerald hudson kallio, hudson, spring, 2004 ...the ultimate goal of great recipes, especially this gumbo, is to be pleasing to the persons who partake of it. governance gumbo 4 c. school roux 2 lb. leadership style 2 c. ethic of care 1 c. ethic of critique 1 c. ethic of justice 1 tsp. theory x 1 tsp. theory y 2 t. theory z 1 c. public relations school roux school roux, the base of a governance gumbo, distinguishes a gumbo from an everyday bowl of stew. great chefs have long understood that quality ingredients and appropriate mixing procedures are critical to the creation of a robust gumbo. the first step in creating a school roux is to combine several principals, a superintendent, and a local school board into a large bowl. stir gently until all ingredients are well mixed and form a firm, cohesive unit. after careful blending of these first ingredients, add a dash of regional service centers and a pinch of state agency staff members. the inclusion of these last two ingredients will enhance the file:///e%7c/temp/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html knowledge base of the administrative core and add a flavorful depth to the roux. stir the mixture until it has a consistency that is free of lumps. (hint #1: when the mixture is the proper consistency, an untrained person will have difficulty identifying the individual components as they appear to have one common goal.) after refrigerating the state board of education for at least three hours (to prevent loss of nutrients), pour the chilled state board of education into a large legislative skillet that has been lined with mandates, both funded and unfunded, add the school roux and simmer over a medium heat for fifteen to twenty minutes or until the mixture turns a light honey brown. at this point, the ingredients will have melted together to form a roux capable of responding to the governance needs of the organization. leadership styles leadership style, the main source of protein in a governance gumbo, is obtainable in a variety of forms. leadership styles suitable for this recipe include autocratic and laissez-faire as each has a distinct flavor. (hint #2: chefs may use one leadership style or a combination of the two styles.) the use of autocratic leadership frequently yields a gumbo that is chewy and, at times, a little hard to swallow. chefs who choose autocratic leadership should expect a final product that is task-oriented, extremely directive, and concerned about status rather than people. the chef should also be aware that the use of autocratic leadership may create a bad taste in people's mouths and may foster a sense of distrust. despite its strong taste, a gumbo made with autocratic leadership may be suitable for serving untrained employees, when high volumes of production are needed, and when limited time is available for effective decision-making. a governance gumbo that uses a laissez-faire leadership style frequently lacks robust flavor and to the untrained palette, may appear to lack the leadership style ingredient altogether. a gumbo that uses a laissez-faire style of leadership will offer little guidance, supervision, or direction in the decision-making process. however, laissez-faire leadership may be an effective ingredient when the gumbo already has a sense of togetherness and a clear sense of the role each ingredient plays in the creation of the perfect gumbo. adding laissez-faire leadership to a gumbo is ineffective when other ingredients are weak or when the ingredients do not understand the purpose of the gumbo. (hint #3: leadership styles have the potential to enhance or destroy the flavor of the governance gumbo. therefore, the choice of leadership style should take into consideration the number and types of dinner guests and the over all stability of the school roux.) ethics in a large bowl, mix 2 cups of ethic of care (the type that seeks to nurture and encourage), 1 cup of pureed ethic of critique (use a brand designed to awaken the social inequalities in today's society), and 1 cup of caramelized ethic of justice (this stabilizes the gumbo by providing guidelines to solve issues with fairness and consistency). chefs have developed a fourth ethic, ethic of professionalism; however, this product has not yet received fda approval. (hint #4: although you may prefer one ethic over another, remember, the goal is to create a gumbo that satisfies the needs of the dinner guests.) theory x, y, and z combine 1 teaspoon of theory x, 2 tablespoons of theory z, and 1 teaspoon of theory y into a management bowl. theory x, y, and z add the necessary thickness to the educational governance gumbo. theory x has a flavor similar to the autocratic leadership style as it is typically used to control others and is full of directives. chefs typically increase the amount of theory x when they believe the workers avoid work. by increasing the amount of theory x, the chef may coerce employees to work harder by implementing threatening policies designed to punish. theory y, a completely unique flavor, enhances the gumbo when each of the other ingredients possesses an intrinsic enjoyment of their contribution to the gumbo. theory z, a bolder flavor than either theory x or theory y, is derived from a japanese root and is a wonderful addition to the stew when all of the ingredients have a high level of commitment to the gumbo. public relations with a good educational governance gumbo, the temperature is critical. should the gumbo begin to boil over, the addition of 1 cup of public relations releases enzymes designed to cool the gumbo. (hint #5: interestingly enough, these same public relations enzymes may be used to spice up a gumbo that has become too bland or unappealing.) public relations enzymes also release an aroma that makes the bouquet of the gumbo pleasing to a multitude of diners. procedures combine the school roux, leadership style(s), theory x, theory y, and theory z in a large cooking pot and simmer uncovered for twenty-five minutes. ten minutes before serving add the ethics of care, critique, and justice; cook an additional seven minutes. gently fold in the public relations, as needed, let the mixture breathe for five minutes before serving. note: dinner guests should be warned that not all governance gumbos look or taste alike. throughout history, gumbo chefs have been at liberty to substitute, increase, or eliminate ingredients as appropriate to their needs. after all, the ultimate goal of great recipes, especially this gumbo, is to be pleasing to the persons who partake of it. tip: serve to all stakeholders to increase cooperation. serving size: 1 cup preparation time: lifetime nutritional analysis per serving: calories 270 gm fat 12 gm carbohydrates 33 gm cholesterol 51 mg protein 25 gm sodium 665 mg references benton, d. a. (1998). applied human relations: an organizational and skill development approach. upper saddle river, nj: prentice-hall. mcgregor, d. (1960). the human side of enterprise. new york: mcgraw-hill. shapiro, j. p., & stefkovich, j. a. (1999, october 30). the ethics of the profession: a paradigm for the preparation of morally accountable educational leaders in the new millennium. paper presented at the annual conference of the university council for education administration, minneapolis, mn. authors dr. brenda kallio is a full time faculty member within the college of education at central michigan university. she is actively involved and serves as a regional reporter with the education law associaton and was the liaison and chief researcher in a two-year study of a newly instituted public alternative school in ohio. mr. gerald hudson is an assistant principal at naaman forest high school in garland, texas. he is currently pursuing a doctorate in education administration at the university of texas-commerce. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2004 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///e%7c/temp/awpublisher.html file:///e%7c/temp/content.html file:///e%7c/temp/advertising.html file:///e%7c/temp/privacy.html file:///e%7c/temp/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 23, spring 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] elizabeth cady stanton's philosophy of social justice in education brigid beaubien and karen l. tonso elizabeth cady stanton's philosophy of social justice in education historical discussions of social justice in education and its impact on society tend to focus on brown v. the board of education (1954), as an antidote to plessy v. ferguson (1896), which enshrined the infamous "separate but equal" dictum for racially segregated schools. one person rarely considered in the discussion, yet critical because of her enormous public influence in her day, is elizabeth cady stanton. most know cady stanton as a founder of the women's movement in america , and as an advocate for women. however, cady stanton also provided a well-documented, systematically developed theory on social justice in education. this surprised us, since her work received enormous scrutiny when feminists of the 1960s and 1970s worked to unearth forgotten women. believing that advancing women's place in educational thought requires understanding the contributions of women to educational thought, we set out to understand cady stanton's philosophy of social justice in education. this article begins with a brief introduction to elizabeth cady stanton (griffith, 1984; ward & burns, 1999) and examines her philosophy of social justice in education. then, the article turns to contemporary implications of her writings, especially the philosophical ideals of equal educational opportunity and social justice to: 1) examine how her views of equal educational opportunity fit in relation to contemporary thought regarding social justice, and 2) investigate the forms of oppression that interested her and guided her work relative to educational opportunity for women. in the final section, a case is made to add cady stanton to the growing list of women who historically contributed to philosophy of education. a two-step research process proved an especially effective approach to examining cady stanton's ideas, as represented in her published works (holland & gordon, 1991). in the first step, patterned on historical research, each piece of her published writing from 1855-1902 was screened for its relevance to research interests in early childhood education and social justice in education, the topic of this paper. from a comprehensive table indicating central conceptual issues for each area of interest, the most relevant writings were analyzed using an ethnomethodology patterned after spradley (1980). a comprehensive list of those items analyzed in a fine-grained fashion is included in beaubien, 2003. here, semantic domain analysis--a way of following patterns of sameness in qualitative data; taxonomic analysis--a way of organizing within and between domains; and componential analysis--a way of developing patterns of contrast across domainsfile:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/spring2007/index.htm -underpinned the work. preliminary taxonomies, outlines or webs of meaning drawn from cady stanton's writings, preserved her way of thinking about issues and provided a starting point for a constant-comparison approach (glaser & strauss, 1967) through which reading less relevant writings (which had not been analyzed) refined findings. using this approach preserved ideas in cady stanton's own voice, which made it possible to liberally quote from her writings. thus, trustworthiness was built into the process via referential adequacy, holding some data to the side and using it to check findings derived from other data, and by triangulating across different pieces of data (lincoln & guba, 1985). elizabeth cady stanton elizabeth cady stanton was the often-unknown political partner of susan b. anthony, famous women suffragette. born in 1815 and raised in a family that endowed her with unprecedented access to informal and formal education, she possessed both the desire to seek knowledge and abundant practice in forming and debating her own ideas and thoughts. cady stanton held a unique position for men and women in that time, learning--among other things--logic, physiology, and the law. throughout her childhood cady stanton was encouraged to think for herself, to form her own opinions, and to articulate them clearly. she would often debate legal professionals who worked with her father, and as a teenager attended emma willard's troy seminary . as a young adult, cady stanton became a fledgling activist in several causes. through these activities she met her husband, henry stanton, himself an abolitionist. they spent the early years of their marriage in boston socializing with some of the most influential thinkers of the day. being an advocate for diverse causes helped cady stanton find her calling in 1848 when she and lucretia mott conceived of the idea for the women's rights convention. cady stanton drafted the declaration of women's rights , modeling it after the declaration of independence . cady stanton 's prolific reading and time spent amongst notable thinkers provided her with theoretical underpinnings that were unfamiliar to most of the populace. energized by the women's rights convention, she began a career as an author and public speaker, a career so prolific in fact that her "views were sought on every sort of topic, and she rarely disappointed... in a single week in 1901, stanton had seven articles in seven different newspapers, as well as two longer pieces in monthly magazines" (ward & burns, 1999, p. 206-207). her ideas on many issues of the day were widely published and widely read, making her not only a prolific thinker of her day, but also giving the public unprecedented access to ideas. her theories on social justice in education, often a central theme, developed throughout the 50 plus years of her career, culminating in the last twelve years of her life as she became increasingly philosophical. roesch wagnor, in the 1999 pbs documentary, not for ourselves alone , summarized this period of cady stanton's life best when she stated: i think that the most interesting stanton is the stanton of the last decade. this is the woman i love the most. this is the contemplative woman who has a world of, a life of experiences that she brings to each thought, who has a pen so sharp that it is laser sharp. (ward & burns 1999). this laser sharp pen was often focused on obtaining social justice through education. cady stanton 's thinking about women, social justice, and education fell into three periods: early career from 1850 to 1869; middle career from 1869 to about 1890; and the final years from 1890 to her death in 1902. each is covered in turn below. early career cady stanton 's views on education and social justice, in the early years, centered around two main concepts, democracy and equalization. in particular, cady stanton believed that when "all vote all must be educated" and that "our public school system is the result of this principle in our government" ( thompson on suffrage , 1869) . she stated that when men were responsible for a ballot, they would rise to the occasion and educate themselves for this privilege ( thompson on suffrage , 1869). this process would become a step in the creation of productive citizens and would continue because as "the masses become educated they will govern; when they begin to govern, they will demand laws for their benefit" ( thompson on suffrage , 1869). holding a ballot required being educated; education would then promote civic action and continue the cycle. thus, for cady stanton, education was part and parcel of her early suffrage work. her beliefs also centered on education as an equalizing force within society between different socioeconomic classes of people and then between the sexes. education was a right, while providing the poor with an education was a christian thing to do because the "rich should help the poor" ( free schools , 1850). in fact, she firmly believed that the "bulwarks of aristocracy will, one by one, be swept away with education" ( thompson on suffrage , 1869). she was frustrated that "labor holds the ballot," but did not know how to use it, and that "educated women knew how to use the ballot yet couldn't have it" ( thompson on suffrage , 1869). she felt that "what elevates and dignifies men will educate and dignify women also" ( thompson on suffrage , 1869). cady stanton , as time progressed, increasingly believed that if women became better educated many of these injustices would be rectified, writing: "evils suffered by women would be extensively remedied by establishing institutions for training" ( women's education , 1869). in fact, as women became educated, society would have to make substantial changes to accommodate their increasing demands. cady stanton hoped an increased awareness of social justice would bring substantial shifts within organized religion and the oppression she viewed it as promoting. cady stanton frequently questioned the blind faith many women had in religion when it kept them in such a subordinate role. while "protestant clergy, preach on the honor and duties of the family state" ( women's education , 1869), she demanded that women's more-enlightened, that is educated, sense of themselves within marriage replace preaching of oppression of women in subservient roles to men. she further felt that once women could "translate the bible for themselves we shall have a new evangel of womanhood, wifehood, and motherhood" creating tremendous social change ( man marriage , 1869). cady stanton 's early ideas regarding education were not as clearly focused on social justice as they would become. however, one can clearly begin to see education as her way to promote civic responsibility. though she believed that educated citizens would make wise civic choices, which would create an improved society, and that improved society would create more educated citizens, education, in fact, became a clear class division for cady stanton. thus, those who held little or no education were, in her estimation, substantially below anyone with an education regardless of gender, social class, or race. but, cady stanton worried that too many women lacked interest in anything intellectual. she asserted throughout this first period that what women needed was either their own training institutions or that training institutions already in existence open to women. once inside these training institutions, women would need to be trained in taking care of themselves and receive skills for practical employment. cady stanton hoped also that by receiving an education, women would begin to understand that they were oppressed. although cady stanton did not clearly articulate what she thought the results of this education might be, her ideas continued to grow. by 1869, at age 54, cady stanton began traveling the country giving lectures on not only women's rights, but also a variety of other topics as well. these trips, ten in total, lasted through the next decade and kept her traveling eight months out of every year, thus beginning the second stage of her career. middle career cady stanton 's speeches and writings throughout the middle of her career began to articulate more clearly her reasons for education, including reforming society and creating equalization. cady stanton was frustrated that "man holds the key to knowledge and power yet never seems in unison with the world [where] he lives" because she thought that "the only hope for radical reform in social life lies in the education of children" ( begin at the beginning , 1889). she asserted that if society could only focus on children obtaining knowledge, then this would lead to a "marked change in the human family" with the "words and deeds of successive generations" building up "a glorified humanity" ( begin at the beginning , 1889). cady stanton saw several reasons that equal educational opportunity was important for girls. she noted how "dashing, noisy, happy, healthy girls grow calm and pale and sad when they awakened to the fact that they belong to a subject, degraded, ostracized class" ( our girls , 1872). cady stanton also viewed the differences in their futures as reasons for boys and girls to have access to equal education, stating, "boys and girls are one today in school, at play, at home never dreaming that one sex was foreordained to clutch the stars, the other but to kiss the dust" ( our girls , 1872). she believed instead that "every girl should be something in and of herself, have an individual aim and purpose in life" ( our girls , 1872), suspecting that "with the scientific education of our youth of both sexes and a strict observance of the great immutable laws of life, another generation might show a marked change in the human family" ( our girls , 1872). cady stanton outlined the steps needed by both men and women to create these marked changes, telling men, "men of the republic strike off these chains!" and demanding that "fathers, husbands and brothers inaugurate some grand reform" ( our girls , 1872). she hoped that young men would become educated "to demand something better than they have yet subsidized" and those young women would be educated to "call more for principle than pleasing" ( our girls , 1872). she asserted that once women were baptized "into the spirit of freedom and equality" and when men began to "demand healthy, happy, vigorous, self-reliant women" then "they will make their appearance" ( our girls , 1872). it is in this period that cady stanton began to define equal educational opportunity for herself. she began by asserting that children are born equal, but they move through childhood in such a way that boys begin to assume roles of power and girls become increasingly oppressed, becoming "pale" and "depressed" as a result of these socially constructed inequalities. cady stanton articulated her belief that all girls had a right to be their own person, and that if society would educate children in equality, the changes for society would be enormous. she began laying out a rudimentary argument supporting equal educational opportunity. first she felt that men must allow women to take steps toward equal opportunity. second, she saw women as needing to develop a better sense of self, her thinking being that if women had more respect for themselves they would set standards that men would have to rise to meet. interestingly, cady stanton viewed men as needing to allow these steps to equal educational opportunity, while women had no direct course of action except to better themselves and wait for approval. she seemingly failed to appreciate the contradiction between a demand for equality and seeking permission to obtain it, which clearly signaled that men held the power in gender relations. cady stanton hoped that these perceived inferiorities of women could be rectified by co-education. she disagreed with popular opinion that "the sexes differ; therefore the systems of education should differ," and was critical of educational funding disparities, calling attention to the imbalance of monies spent on education for women and men: "estimate[s] in dollars and cents on the education of men and women is 15 million against 1.1 million dollars" ( co-education , 1872). she stated that inferiority here [in the entire u.s. social system: funding, schooling, roles in society] is the whole difficulty in a nutshell judged alone by the comparative advantages we see for the education of the sexes. men are considered 'superior' hence their education has seemed to all primal importance; even women have ignored their own sex. ( co-education , 1872) cady stanton observed that in regard to co-education, men were "bound by custom and prejudice who have never fairly considered the ethics of the subject nor the facts that exist around them" ( co-education , 1872). she disagreed with society's assertion that women would "lower the standards of scholarship" and would "not have the physical health" to participate in the endeavor ( co-education , 1872). rather, she saw women as being able to "maintain good morals, manners, and health and also equally rank in scholarship," believing that "it is important for the girls knocking at the doors of these venerable institutions to know that they have a right inside" (co-education , 1872). cady stanton was of the opinion that women were "educated in superstition and subjection" ( women of wealth , 1875), so that they had "all the bravery educated out of them" ( health of american woman , 1882). she also felt that it was unjust "to educate all women for teachers and seamstresses, cooks and chambermaids to make the supply in the home sphere greater than the demand, thus terminally to keep down wages and degrade all these branches of labor" ( our girls , 1872). unlike in the first period, in which cady stanton accused women of having no interest in intellectual issues, she clearly saw in this middle period that women lacked self-respect. within her middle years, cady stanton recognized for the first time the role of mother as educator. in fact, while she believed that women held the most important job in the world, that of mother, it was their lack of respect that aided in the continuation of their oppression. cady stanton grew concerned, in these middle years, that if women did not begin to respect themselves, they would be stuck in lower paid, lower status, service occupations that would simply continue the oppression she was fighting against. contrasts between the first two periods became evident. in the first period, cady stanton felt that training institutions were needed to increase the opportunity for women to attend schools. now she believed that money was needed. she was baffled that women would give money for men's education, yet withhold funds for their own sex to receive a comparable education. in both of her first two periods, cady stanton envisioned women being trained in practical skills. however, in this second period, cady stanton also made new connections between education, self-respect, and freedom, believing that as women became educated, their self-respect would increase. unlike in the previous period, cady stanton saw clearly that through this education women would become self-supporting and demand better conditions for themselves, which would lead to the end of their oppression. throughout this middle period, cady stanton was an enthusiastic supporter of education. her ideas in this period led to an increasing focus on education in the final years as she began to see clearly that obtaining suffrage was not going to create equalization in the roles of men and women. rather, to gain true political equality, children would have to be educated in not only becoming productive members of society, but educated in the beliefs of equality and social justice as well. final period within the last 12 years of her career, cady stanton pointed with laser-like focus on issues of social justice in education, believing that education had a role to play in creating citizens, asserting that citizens should "learn their own organization and the laws that govern them" ( race question , 1902). she felt that people "should glow with the principles of justice, liberty and equality" ( bible in schools , 1897). cady stanton also wanted to "educate people that a moral revolution is possible" ( worship of god , 1901). she hoped to "educate the rising generation into these broader principles of government, religion, and social life and then ignorance poverty and vice will disappear" ( worship of god , 1901). similar to past periods in her career, cady stanton believed that organized religion had a large responsibility to educate its population on issues of social justice and to stop the oppression churches practiced against women, especially subservience to men's will and exclusion from holding central roles in religious institutions. however, in this period cady stanton thought that the wealthy had a role to play in education as well. she wanted the upper class to be educated in the "community idea of social life . . . teach[ing] them they have no right to enjoy luxuries when many do not have necessities" ( bible in schools , 1897). she hoped they would come to understand that they held an obligation to insure that those less fortunate received an education (i.e. her ideal sunday, when opportunities for learning would be made available to those who worked on other days of the week). cady stanton felt also that wealthy men needed to "plant schools, colleges, and libraries" ( education will do it , 1901; race question , 1902). she also believed that "common sense must be used in educating the impecunious classes in the south, whether black or white" and that "society doesn't admit ignorant labors regardless of color" ( education will do it , 1901). in this sense, society meant the upper, educated classes or the class of which she herself was a member--a euro-centered, class-based society. but, it is important to again note that cady stanton's connecting the vote with having an education underpinned her being a vigorous advocate for the education of all. she was opposed to ignorance, not intolerant of racial communities. the authors wish this point had been made earlier by other authors. as is the case in several of the concepts that became central to cady stanton's ideas, in this last decade of her life she clearly articulated, for the first time, steps to educate the citizens of the united states . she laid out a plan for education, how to create citizens, and how to encourage the wealthy of the nation to become more involved. she began to question for the first time how education funds were spent, determining that if more money was spent in schools rather than jails, good from evil would be taught and the morals of the laboring class would be elevated. probably the most forward thinking of her ideas concerned social justice. she began to clearly lay out her ideas regarding this, even going as far as utilizing the phrase that continues to underpin social justice in education today: equal educational opportunity. as discussed below in its own section, cady stanton's ideas on equal educational opportunity expanded substantially in the final period of her life and became closely connected to her ideas on social justice. also, cady stanton's ideas on women's education came a long way from her first period. in the final phase of her career, she discussed with pride the proven track record of women's education, something she could not have done in the previous two periods. however, for the first time she named obstacles to women's obtaining an education: being excluded from it and having social restrictions placed on them that kept them from utilizing what education they could acquire. her ideas about the curriculum that women should have in schools also changed. she no longer saw the curriculum being based on getting practical skills, learning to take care of themselves, and gaining selfrespect. during this final period, cady stanton's ideas on women's education were more revolutionary. she saw education as being based in not only building self-respect, but also in learning to demand justice, liberty, and equality. she viewed self-esteem as becoming a more critical self-reverence as well. unlike the previous two periods, she viewed the results of women's education as revolutionary in three ways: (1) the respect with which women treated themselves and demanded that others treat them with as well, (2) nothing short of complete emancipation of women, and (3) the education, self-respect, and freedom culminating in more power and influence within society itself. after attempting reform work, cady stanton seemed to realize that the only way to effect needed change was first educating both men and women to understand that they were critical in a just society and then, through being educated themselves, raising their children to believe that social justice was not only possible, it was expected. this period of cady stanton's thoughts demonstrated beautifully the culmination of a lifetime of profound work, not only on behalf of women, but for society as a whole. as her ideas filled with self-reflection, hindsight, and forethought, she clearly and concisely outlined a theory of education that is still part of the educational landscape today. cady stanton saw the ballot she strived for and the social justice she struggled to obtain intimately braided to the education of the masses, with education being the only sure way to bring about these changes she desired. here, she gave a central place to equal educational opportunity. equal educational opportunity throughout these last years of cady stanton's life, she increasingly saw equal educational opportunity as a way to cure many of society's flaws. first, she laid out her ideas on equal educational opportunity, followed by reasons for equal educational opportunity, and concluded with the steps needed to achieve it. her thoughts here are overwhelmingly about women, but on careful reading one gets a sense of her stance on issues of race, which challenge the widely accepted claim that cady stanton was thoroughly racist. gender equality in education in her day, acceptance of gender inequality in schools was common, but cady stanton argued against a sense that gender inequality was genetically determined, saying, "our theories of life are all wrong that these adverse conditions can and must be changed" ( lasting progress , 1891). according to cady stanton, "the only way out of this political, social labyrinth is through the education of the masses" ( lasting progress , 1891) and "to my mind the only hope for lasting progress of the race [and here she refers to the human race] and a radical reform in social life lie in the right [or healthy] birth, education and development of children" ( lasting progress , 1891). cady stanton felt what was needed was similar to the approach taken by "quakers, chartered by william penn," who believed in "equal advantages for both boys and girls" ( emma willard , 1893). cady stanton outlined reasons supporting equal educational opportunity, including her belief that "long experience has proved that all races are capable of profiting by education" ( race question , 1902), stating remarks also published in social progress (1891) that "lasting progress of the [human] race and a radical reform in social life lie in the right birth, education and development of [all] children" ( lasting progress , 1891). cady stanton , however, outlined substantial reasons for equal educational opportunity based on the differences of education between boys and girls: "girls are denied equal educational opportunity. the natural chivalry of their brothers is never called forth. the lesson of inferiority is taught everywhere and we have the result of wide spread degradation of women" ( first step , 1901). cady stanton saw boys as having "the whole field of knowledge open to them while girls [were] allowed only to sew, read the catechism, write the alphabet, and practice good manners" ( emma willard , 1893). girls were also "taught in dame schools" or with "inferior, cheaper teachers at inconvenient seasons and hours" ( emma willard , 1893). all of this she could not understand because "fewer girls fall behind in their studies from ill health girls [are] more vigorous in body and mind" ( emma willard , 1893). cady stanton urged a different tack: "let us try equality and independence; let every girl be educated to use her own hands and brains and to take care of herself" ( emma willard , 1893). racial equality in education cady stanton , however, rarely mentioned equal education for negroes, which some have taken to mean that it was inconceivable to her. yet, she stated, "progress of the [human] race is a reason to educate" ( lasting progress , 1891), and "how shallow the argument, that each class must be educated for the special work it proposes to do" ( solitude of self , 1892). here, near the end of her life, there is every reason to believe that she sees "classes" of humans--whether sorted along socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, or gender lines--as a product of society, not of biological givens. and, she repeatedly called for the education of all. she seems to be saying that for u.s. society to live up to the vision encapsulated in the bill of rights requires "complete individual development for the general good" ( solitude of self , 1892). thus, cady stanton's views on race may not be as simple as earlier thought. on one hand, she has been thought of as racist because of her outspoken rhetoric in opposition to black men being allowed to vote before white women. a key issue left out of that equation, and one critical to cady stanton's ideas, is the part played by education. cady stanton had a problem with uneducated black men voting before educated white women. education was her bias, not necessarily race. this is clearly demonstrated in her article education will do it (1901): in regard to society, no one asks that ignorant laborers, of whatever color be admitted into the higher classes. the hue and cry against booker washington dining with the president, came from those who either forgot or did not know that he is an educated, polished gentleman, laboring for the good of this race, a true philanthropist, in the best sense of the term. the duty of the american people at this hour, to atone for the wrongs of centuries, is to give to the black race all the opportunities for development that we are extending our own. in fact, similar to her views on women's education, she considered education to be the equalizing force between the races. steps for approaching equality in education cady stanton outlined six steps needed to reach equal educational opportunity, both for white girls and for negroes, in the terminology of her day. the first step was the use of common sense, stating that it was needed "towards educat[ing] negroes and impecunious class in the south, whether white or black" ( education will do it , 1901). for instance, providing them with an education that would assist them in becoming better citizens. cady stanton believed that education would produce a cyclical effect as people became better educated they would demand laws benefiting themselves. the more laws in place benefiting them the better educated the negroes and impecunious class would become. the second step was to educate the upper class into "the belief that our present society is based on false principles . . . that they have no right to live in luxury while others starve [, and] that they have no right to pleasure or comfort at the cost of welfare of another" ( lasting progress , 1891). the upper class must be educated "to believe our present conditions and environments can and will be changed" ( lasting progress , 1891). the third step toward equal educational opportunity was to educate the poor, primarily "that they have inalienable rights on this earth the right to life, liberty and happiness" ( lasting progress , 1891), but also to "see that the stratum of society see the masses are well clothed, fed, sheltered, educated and enfranchised" ( worship of god, 1901 ). the fourth step was to build a government that was "based on broad principles of equal rights to all" ( lasting progress , 1891). the fifth step saw religion as "teach(ing) the brotherhood of the race, the essential oneness of humanity" ( social progress , 1901). finally, cady stanton saw her schools on sunday as a kind of social justice, believing that "open(ing) railway systems and museums for free on sunday this is not charity simply an act of justice" ( ideal sunday , 1901). this radical work cannot be done with charity but by teaching sound domestic principles to our educated classes. showing that by law, custom and false theories of natural rights they are responsible for the poverty, ignorance and vice of the masses. ( worship of god , 1901) thus, by making public social institutions unavailable to those of limited means, cady stanton found a way to provide for the edification of adults. implications of cady stanton's thoughts cady stanton defined herself "as a leader of thought," knowing that her strength was in her ideas, thoughts, and philosophy. she viewed the world as unjust in significant ways, and she looked for solutions to aid these problems. cady stanton 's views on education demonstrate tremendous forethought and clearly advance the contemporary conversation regarding social justice in education. in fact, consider the contemporary political philosophy writings of amy gutmann and kenneth howe. late 20th century thoughts on equal educational opportunity gutmann (1987) began the contemporary discussion about schooling in a democracy. according to gutmann, "education, in a great measure, forms the moral character of citizens" (p. 49). ideally, "adult members are, and continue to be, equipped by their education and authorized by political structures to share ruling" (xi). this she called democratic character, which required knowing enough to deliberate about issues of importance. such individuals are .committed, at least partly through the inculcation of habit, to living up to the routine demands of democratic life, at the same time as they are committed to questioning those demands whenever they appear to threaten the foundational ideals of democratic sovereignty, such as respect for persons. (p. 52) gutmann's (1987) democratic theory of education suggests how .to consider ways of resolving those problems that are compatible with a commitment to democratic values. a democratic theory of education provides principles that, in the face of our social disagreements, help us judge (a) who should have authority to make decisions about education, and (b) what the moral boundaries of that authority are. (p. 11) furthermore, her philosophy of education goes on to develop a process through which such an ideal purpose might be attained . the principle of nondiscrimination .prevents states and other groups in society from denying anyone an educational good on grounds irrelevant to the legitimate social purpose of that good. in its application to primary schooling, whose social purpose is to develop democratic character in all citizens, the principle of nondiscrimination becomes a principle of nonexclusion: no educable child may be excluded from an education adequate to participating in the processes that structure choice among good lives. (p. 127) she will guarantee this with a process requiring first the democratic authorization principle, which "grant[s] authority to democratic institutions to determine the priority of education relative to other social goods" (p. 136). second, she proposes a democratic threshold principle that specifies "inequalities in the distribution of educational goods can be justified if, but only if, they do not deprive any child of the ability to participate effectively in the democratic process" (p. 136). this is a process model that provides a way to consciously create an education worth having, not the failing schools, staggering dropout rates, and standardized test scores one sees today. howe (1997) summarized gutmann's threshold, stating, gutmann (1987) establishes a limit on the requirement of equalization. in her case, once the threshold is met, the "democratic authorization principle" permits, but does not require, further efforts at equalization. that is, if a community achieves the threshold for all its children and decides this is sufficient, then it has discharged its responsibility; if a community achieves the threshold for all its children and decides it wants to do more, then it is free to do so. (p. 66) but to ensure that such a system operates fairly, a principle of justice is needed. since brown v. board of education (1954), equal education opportunity has been the central ideal for judging whether schooling meets social justice criteria. as howe (1997) summarized it, equal educational opportunity has been interpreted in three key ways: formal, compensatory, and participatory. formal, or equal access, interpretations place no formal barriers to participation regardless of race or gender. formalists are indifferent to issues that matter in education, or as howe says of the formal interpretation "it is far too often insensitive to the profound influence that social factors can have on educational opportunities, even when formal barriers are absent and resources such as funding are equalized" (p. 28). compensatory interpretations understand the importance of interactions between schools and individuals, realizing that these interactions have direct impacts on educational opportunity. but, compensating for mismatches between the characteristics of individuals and that of the school setting, in and of itself, is not enough to guarantee social justice, because this approach fails to take into account the opportunity that is being presented to those who fail to meet societal norms. as howe (1997) noted, "fail(ing) to afford educational opportunities of equal worth to individuals who have had no part in shaping the educational practices and curricular content that are deemed educationally worthwhile" is a hollow kind of opportunity (p. 29). these concerns led to the participatory interpretation, of which gutmann's democratic theory is the central example. the participatory interpretation states that mere compensation for disadvantages must be combined with equal respect for different views on what worthwhile needs, interests, and capabilities are, particularly where self-identity and self-respect are at stake. merely compensating for disadvantages is not sufficient. it must be combined with equal respect for different views; those who are disadvantaged need a voice in the process, and they need to consider the process of inherent value to themselves. young (1990) outlines this: groups with different circumstances or forms of life should be able to participate together in public institutions without shedding their distinct identities or suffering disadvantage because of them. the goal is not to give special compensation to the deviant until they achieve normality, but rather to denormalize the way institutions formulate their rules by revealing the plural circumstances and needs that exist, or ought to exist, within them (p. 134). howe agreed in principle with gutmann's model of distributed justice wherein an authorization principle guided democratic deliberation and a threshold principle placed limits on what must be taught. but, howe worried that deliberations could occur in which the voices of some were heard, but not listened to. as such, he found reason for concern about oppressive practices in the application of the authorization principle. he suggested that a nonoppression standard was required and used iris marion young's (1990) forms of oppression as a way to consider participation . young's (1990) theory of social justice forms a framework to clarify the "five faces of oppression.oppression designates the disadvantage and injustice some people suffer not because a tyrannical power coerces them, but because of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society" (p. 41), and she noted five forms: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. historically and in contemporary society, many women experience some of these forms of oppression daily. women's bodies are exploited through pornography, by lack of control over their reproductive life, and in their struggle to earn equal pay for equal work. women's voices are often marginalized in the press, academia, and often their own homes. throughout the world many women hold little power in their governments, corporations, schools, and homes. when the sort of success offered to women means they must become more like men, a form of cultural imperialism occurs. likewise, violence (domestic abuse, rape, and intimidation) continues to plague women. thus, women's oppression is multi-layered and also includes issues of social class and race that compound issues of gender. thus, with young's guidance, howe proposed that the participatory interpretation of equal educational opportunity require a nonoppression standard, a way to guarantee that deliberation does not impair justice. these philosophical ideas suggest two approaches in thinking about elizabeth cady stanton's work. using contemporary frameworks, what interpretation of equal educational opportunity did cady stanton use? how did oppression play a role in cady stanton's philosophy of social justice in education? evaluating cady stanton 's equal educational opportunity cady stanton 's views appear to fall along both the formal and the compensatory guidelines, and though less refined than current-day scholars, there is a participatory hint in her ideas as well. cady stanton clearly wanted no formal barriers to participation in education regardless of gender or race; as she put it, "the higher branches of education should be freely open to them, black or white" ( lasting progress , 1891). cady stanton 's ideas moved beyond simply removing barriers, however. she plainly saw that society constructed the role of woman, creating an inequality. her beliefs regarding the lower classes also demonstrated that she saw the wealthy constructing the realities, producing inequalities for the poor. because she saw these constructs, her views could also be defined as falling along the compensatory interpretation of equal educational opportunity. cady stanton suggested ways to compensate for women's inferior schools and exclusion from education through an academic curriculum and better access to schools that took them seriously as scholars. she also laid out a plan to compensate the lower classes though her concept of ideal sunday. while cady stanton was responsive to social factors that lessen educational opportunity, she did not respect competing views on what was worthwhile. this created a form of oppression between classes that allowed the poor to have no voice in their own education, demonstrating one of the major contradictions within cady stanton's beliefs. while she clearly saw the oppression that women coped with, she also unknowingly perpetuated class and race oppression. as young (1990) would opine a century later, "the disadvantage and injustice some people suffer comes not because a tyrannical power coerces them, but because of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society" (p. 41). furthermore, cady stanton's ideal education also seems to imply a participatory interpretation. this is true when she anticipates that the education of women, for instance, will change the way society works; the implication being that women will be more a part of society's decision-making processes and contribute to having their interests heard after becoming educated. this she also sees for those from marginalized racial community. cady stanton implied that once people became educated they would "know their rights and duties, their true place in civilization" ( worship of god , 1901), and "demand corresponding improvements in [his/her] environment" ( worship of god , 1901), leading to "uplifting humanity" to an "even platform" ( social progress , 1901). but, in her day, women's circumstances were far from just. cady stanton frequently discussed the exploitation, marginalization, and powerlessness of women. these forms of oppression prompted her to hold the first women's rights convention in 1848. from the time cady stanton was a child, she was frustrated that women held no rights to their property or offspring. cady stanton perceived that both women's lack of protection under the law and their lack of education led to exploitation, marginalization, and powerlessness. she struggled against these oppressions from the time she was very young until the day she died. also, cady stanton touched on violence in two ways: first, the violence women suffered at the hands of man, and second, the violence to which the poor were subjected. cady stanton viewed both as oppressive and asserted that those who experienced such violence felt demoralized. cady stanton likewise wrestled against the oppressive realities of cultural imperialism while ironically reproducing it at times. she asserted that the wealthy had an obligation to revise their present civilization because it was based on false principles. she also believed that they had no right to live in luxury while others starved. on the other hand, cady stanton was smugly confident that what the immigrants, blacks, and poor needed was an education that provided them with knowledge about their own governance. ironically, this would be a society and laws that were constructed on a european, caucasian, male ideals that others had no say in creating. therefore, cady stanton's views on oppression were contradictory. yet, she remained naively confident that regardless of the form of oppression, education could remedy the situation, stating repeatedly that "lasting progress" and a "radical reform of social life" came via children's "true" education ( lasting progress 1891; social progress , 1891). thus, in the final analysis, though her ideas are not as refined as modern scholars, and she certainly did not anticipate the difficulties of seeing her "radical" agenda, as she called it, through, her sense of the importance of education to producing a democratic state cannot be overstated. unfortunately, her vision of equal educational opportunity did not come to the notice of many, likely because she published in popular, and not scholarly, presses, and because she was a woman. however, her place among women philosophers appears warranted . cady stanton 's place in educational philosophy titone and maloney (1999) defined women as educational philosophers if they have thought "deeply and systematically about education" (p. 1). they advanced this definition by describing women they profiled as educational philosophers living .in a world that she experienced as wrongheaded in very significant ways, and she looked to find explanations for why things were wrong and what could be done to make them right. each developed her own analysis and solution to the problems based on her experience, background, and the time and place in which she lived. each sought a deeper sense of being human in order to liberate herself and others from oppressive social restrictions. because of these facts, each has the potential to contribute to our deep understanding of these same challenges as we face them today. (p. iii) cady stanton fits easily into these definitions. the contributions she made to the contemporary ideas regarding social justice and education included many ideas that her male contemporaries were discussing and that have placed them in historical texts in american education. like dewey, she discussed ideas similar to today's constructivist theories. stating that the "laws of nature [were] more imperative than any written or verbal command" and that children so full of "fun and frolic" should be better understood by the teacher ( free schools , 1855), she believed that "the instincts of children are quite as often right as the perverted reason of parents and teachers" ( education , 1855). similar to horace mann, she argued for the need for women's education both for the "republic of motherhood" and development of women in their own right. she also discussed how education could be used as both an equalizing force between classes and as a way of building one national identity. cady stanton believed that education was critical to achieving social justice within society. many of cady stanton's ideas on education could easily be contemporary thought. her well thought out and systematic ideas led to a clearly defined philosophy of education that was widely published and read, making clear that women philosophers of education contributed before the 19th century. cady stanton considered education a form of social justice; a way of fighting gender, social class, and race inequalities. this is demonstrated in her ideas that the wealthy have no right to so much when others have so little and her encouragement of the lower classes to understand they too have rights. cady stanton recognized that social justice would come only if first parents were educated into a life of respect for others consonant with democratic principles, and then second they taught their children the same beliefs. she hoped to "educate the rising generation into these broader principles of government, religion, and social life and then ignorance, poverty and vice will disappear" ( worship of god , 1901). as she reiterated in both social progress (1891) and lasting progress (1891), she could not untangle social reform from education, quite frankly seeing it as the "only hope for lasting progress." references beaubien, b. (2003). the only hope for lasting progress and radical reform lies in the true education of children: elizabeth cady stanton 's philosophy of education . unpublished doctoral dissertation, wayne state university , detroit . glaser, b. g., & strauss, a. l. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory . chicago : aldine. griffith, e. (1984). in her own right . new york : oxford university press. gutmann, a. (1987). democratic education . princeton , nj : princeton university press. holland , p. g., gordon, a. d. (ed.). (1991). papers of elizabeth cady stanton and susan b. anthony . wilmington , de : scholarly resources inc. howe, k. (1997). understanding equal educational opportunity: social justice, democracy, and schooling . new york : teachers college press. lincoln, y. s., & guba, e. g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. beverly hills , ca : sage publications, inc. spradley, j. p. (1980). participant observation . orlando , fl : holt, rinehart and winston. titone, c., & maloney, k. e. (1999). women's philosophies of education: thinking through our mothers. upper saddle river , nj : merrill. ward, g., & burns, k. (1999). not for ourselves alone: the story of elizabeth cady stanton and susan b. anthony. washington , dc : florentine films and weta. young, i. m. (1990). justice and the politics of difference . princeton , nj : princeton university press. quotes from cady stanton's writings indicate the title of the piece and the year in which it was written, following the naming convention of holland and gordan who archived cady stanton's writings (1991). author's note: bio: brigid beaubien is an assistant professor of early childhood education at eastern michigan university , ypsilanti , mi . she received her ph.d. in curriculum and instruction from wayne state university in 2003. her research interests include the historical and philosophical contributions of women in education as well as urban education. bio: karen l. tonso is an assistant professor at wayne state university in detroit , michigan . she received her ph.d. in educational foundations, policy, and practice from university of colorado in 1997. her research interests include qualitative research methods, cultural studies of engineering education, and philosophical underpinnings of social justice in education. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women network   home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international working against the grain: rewards and consequences of developing a personal voice in academia pamela lepage gretchen givens-generett, ph.d. lepage, givens-generett, fall, 2003 the idea of talking the talk and walking the walk is a nice idea, but what do you do when walking the walk could mean walking the walk right out the door and into oblivion? five years ago the two us met during an academic job search and found that despite our different backgrounds, we shared many similar experiences. most significantly, we both had written our doctoral dissertations around the topic of women's development and these studies had become an important part of our personal identities. one of us (pamela) is a white woman who conducted a study on women who achieved highly in academics and who were also disadvantaged as children. the other (gretchen) is a black woman who interviewed an older african-american woman who spent her life in the service of education in the south during the years of segregation and then integration. the following stories are told from a personal viewpoint. pamela was disadvantaged as a child and could have been a participant in her own research. gretchen described her older colleague's story as an intergenerational discussion in which the narrator passes on traditions and values that she associates with an african american schooling experience. in this article, we both look back over the last five years since we graduated from our respective institutions to reflect on our decision to write dissertations that were considered unusual at the time, and in the past would have been considered unacceptable. we also talked about our continued experiences writing material against the grain in academia, emphasizing both the rewards and https://www.advancingwomen.com/awnetwork/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awnetwork/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awnetwork/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/network_org.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/network_org.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html consequences. our research and our stories-pamela lepage as a topic for my dissertation, i conducted a two-year study to explore the experiences of women who achieved highly in academics and who were also disadvantaged as children (lepage-lees, 1997a). the women were considered high achievers since they had earned advanced degrees or were currently enrolled as advanced graduate students with at least two years of graduate work completed. women were considered disadvantaged if they were raised in low-income homes, were first-generation college students, and had faced stress as children (e.g., family dysfunction or instability, illness, or death, etc.). from this definition, the women's resources had been limited in three categories: financial, informational, and emotional. although i did not include this information in my dissertation, later when i adapted my dissertation as a book (lepage-lees, 1997a), i explained that i was initially motivated to conduct the study for reasons that related to my personal history. i was poor when i was a child, but i was also disadvantaged in other ways. for example, i went to 14 different schools in four different states by the time i graduated from high school. my mother was mentally ill and my stepfather was physically abusive. as a very young child, one of my first memories involved being placed in a "children's home." the guardians of that fortress put children into toilets and told them they would be flushed down if they cried or misbehaved. as a teenager, i lived with my mother on welfare, and those years were vividly marked by the death of my boyfriend who committed suicide in jail after getting caught burglarizing a restaurant with my brother. because of my history, i became interested in reading about women and disadvantaged children in books and journals. in most cases, i was disappointed with what i found. although many people had tried to explain why children from poor backgrounds fail, when they succeeded, they were usually ignored. those people who did write about poor children rarely wrote about their own experience with disadvantage. i still suspect that most academics come from a traditional middleor upper-class childhood. others hide their backgrounds, which perpetuates the common belief that all academics grow up privileged. for many years i tried staying away from educational issues that were too personal. i now believe that certain groups have been shut out of the academic process because people from the traditional majority subtly communicate that it is inappropriate for people from marginalized groups to reflect on their own experiences. in many ways, they suggest that only the "objective outsider" can truly conduct a scientific study. after studying education for many years, it became clear to me that there was no way to conduct a completely objective study in social science and that it was important for me to adhere to my beliefs and express my voice honestly. even so, as people include themselves in their own research, they often run the risk of being criticized for being too self-absorbed. this problem is often colorfully illustrated with the saying, "okay, enough about you, now let's talk about me." although my interpretations were influenced by my experiences, i made an extraordinary effort to accurately represent the women's voices. my research was appropriately qualitative. i used three methods of data collection including interviews, surveys, and documentation. in fact, for each of my participants, i sent away for school records (including transcripts) from high school all the way to graduate school. after i finished writing my dissertation, i sent the volunteers my interpretations of the interviews and asked them whether or not i represented their voices accurately. this feedback was especially important to me because often my explanations went beyond what any one person actually said in her interview. none of the women claimed her voice was misrepresented. in fact, all of the women who responded were very positive as i demonstrate in the following quotes (lepage-lees, 1997b, p. 4): maria: i think that my voice was well represented in this study. toni: i really enjoyed reading this study. it was interesting and amusing to see myself quoted alongside, within, and among others. many of your interpretations hit the nail on the head. for example, attitudes described on page... which motivate children and families to hide dysfunction rang true for me. janet: in sum, it was validating to read of other women's experiences and to realize there's a whole closet community of us out there. i hope your study can help others. helen: thank you for sending the results of your study. i appreciated hearing what others said and how you interpreted our material. in reading the quotes of the other participants, i found that many things that others said, i could have said too. i think you have done an excellent job of interpreting our material, and i can't say how glad i am to see such a study be done. anonymous feedback: i was very impressed with how similar my experiences and attitudes were to the other participants in the study, both in terms of the interpretation and the quoted passages. sara: i'm really impressed by the study-as i said when you interviewed me, this seems like a really important area of research, and you've done an excellent job! reactions from the academic community the research participants' responses to my book were very positive. the work also had a positive reception in other contexts. in most feminist organizations, i was celebrated. i won an award from the aera women educators. i also received many e-mails and letters from women who had read my work and told me they were moved by my work shown in this quote: your book made much more than a small impact on my life. you made me realize that my past is not some terrible secret and i don't have to spend so much time letting it eat away at me. i chose this quote because in almost every e-mail that i received, the women in some way talked about feeling as though they no longer had to "keep secrets" about their lives. on the other hand i also got some odd reactions, even from the feminist community. for example, i once submitted an article related to my dissertation to a feminist journal. the article was about the women's relationship with the term "disadvantage," how they defined disadvantage, when they disclosed information, and when and how they connected their education to personal experience (lepage-lees, 1997b). it was ironic that although the journal wanted the article, ultimately the article came back three times for revisions, and each time the reviewers gave me different instructions about whether i should include my personal history in order to give the reader a view of my perspective. they would ask me to put it in and then take it out and then put it in and then take it out. finally, i had to speak to the editor personally and explain my dilemma. it seemed ironic to me since in the article itself (lepage-lees, 1997b) i wrote: why do people have complicated relationships with disadvantage? the research suggests that sometimes associating with certain groups and disclosing information is helpful and sometimes it is detrimental; sometimes it is a sign of neurosis, while at other times it is a sign of mental health; sometimes it can help a student get into a graduate program and sometimes it causes them to be rejected. it seems an appropriate time to reflect on issues of disclosure, especially as they pertain to disclosure of "negative" experiences in educational settings. (p. 367) ultimately, it was very schizophrenic. on one hand, i was celebrated for my work in many ways, and on the other hand, i often felt the need to "hide" my own background and personal connection with the work. it became very clear to me that just because i was successful at exposing unhealthy norms and revealing injustices, these discoveries did not necessarily result in change, even in my own behavior. i often bowed to the norms that pressured me toward conformity. the idea of talking the talk and walking the walk is a nice idea, but what do you do when walking the walk could mean walking the walk right out the door and into oblivion? our research and our stories-gretchen givens-generett my research emerged out of the need to make sense of multiple schooling experiences. born in the early 70s, my primary and secondary schooling took place in predominantly white schools. i was the beneficiary of integration. my mother worked hard and saved long in order to offer us a home in the suburbs where the best schools were in walking distance. i worked hard to prove myself in this environment and ultimately left with many options and opportunities available to me. upon graduation from high school, i decided to attend a historically black female institution. moving from a schooling situation where i was one of a handful of african americans to where the entire class (including most of the professors) were african american forced me to question the real differences that existed between my previous schooling experience and that of my college years. i decided to attend graduate school and study education in an attempt to make sense of the two lived experiences. after months in graduate school where i felt marginalized and invisible i found myself in the office of an african american female principal. mrs. lacewell, as i eventually began to call her, helped me come to a better understanding of why i was interested in making sense of these multiple experiences. in reality, she modeled why it was necessary for me to do so. on the surface, my dissertation is an intergenerational discussion between african american women. i think it is more than that. it is an example of how an older member of the black community mentors and nurtures a member of a younger generation. in the end, mrs. lacewell helped me to embark upon a career in education. during our conversations, mrs. lacewell constructed a story ripe with the traditions and values she associated with african american education. by agreeing to tell me the story of her lived experiences as a black female student and educator, mrs. lacewell initiated conversations about schooling, how they changed and how they remained the same for black women despite our generational differences. her story was the beginning of a series of conversations that, for me, went full circle touching on the complexity of issues facing african american women educators. it was important to me that i write a dissertation that represented this journey in its presentation. letters to a friend begin and end each chapter. these letters serve as a window, if you will, to the conversations i had with friends my own age about my conversations with mrs. lacewell. questions such as, "have you ever thought about your school experiences? have you ever thought about what our generation thinks about segregated black schools? have you ever thought about what was lost?" are discussed. these very personal letters are followed by theory and an historical context to understanding segregation and integration in the american south. i decided to present mrs. lacewell's voice without the theory, uninterrupted. her words are presented on the paper without my questions or comments sprinkled throughout. instead her words are presented as the story that they represent. it was a deliberate decision on my part to present mrs. lacewell's voice in this form. i felt that her words did not need to be interpreted. they speak for themselves. the format of the dissertation is as important as the research and the story that is told. it was very important to me that my work be accessible. i was at the point in my journey where i needed to feel connected to a larger black community. fortunately, i worked with a group of intellectuals who understood the significance and need for that type of work. i met mrs. lacewell during a collaborative qualitative research project overseen by my academic advisor. my initial interest in her teaching philosophy lead me to keep in touch with her after the project was complete. our conversations ended up being my dissertation. ultimately, she chose me to tell her story to, to interview her about her experiences in the educational system as a student, teacher, and administrator. my conversations with mrs. lacewell are best described as qualitative research. qualitative research methodology is used as an umbrella to discuss several research strategies that share particular characteristics (bogdan & biklen, 1982). data in a qualitative research project is descriptive, offering rich, full detail of people, places, and conversation. metaphorically, some qualitative research has been compared to jazz. the dialogue that mrs. lacewell and i had was analogous to jazz and the improvisation of jazz musicians. oldfather and west (1994) wrote: jazz is adaptive and shared by the participants. their improvisations are collaborative and interdependent; the quality of the music depends on each musicians hearing, responding to, and appreciating the performances of the other players (p. 22). together we composed a story complete with values, traditions, and daily acts which helped me better understand how she views african american educators. like jazz, mrs. lacewell and i used our dialogical encounters, our conversations, like instruments to negotiate and improvise our multiple identities. qualitative research allowed us to shape our project in a collaborative and independent manner, according to our understanding, needs, and desires (oldfather & west, 1994). like musicians, we let the rhythm of the project lead the way. reactions from the academic community for the most part, my work was met with enthusiasm. as i gave job talk after job talk, i could see people nodding their heads. i was happy that people were getting it, that they understood how i had constructed this research. invariably, however, there was the person in the audience who questioned my methodology and the way i had constructed the research. "how do you address issues of validity? is your interpretation of this work valid? do you believe that you were being objective in this investigation?" i found myself having to defend the construction of the dissertation and my relationship with mrs. lacewell. unlike job talks that i had witnessed where people discussed the ideas as presented, i felt as if i were in a dissertation defense trying to get permission to write a non-traditional dissertation. while academia acknowledged that there was a need for the type of research issues that i discussed and wrote about, they were uncomfortable (some even seemed troubled) by my presentation of the information. the questions of validity seemed to say that yes, we agree with what you say, just not the way you are saying it. i was confused. in one case in particular, i interviewed for a non-traditional program that seemed to promote the very type of experimental writing that i had chosen. unfortunately, i could not explain to those on the committee how i was making a conscious decision to blur the boundaries of traditional academic research and how it was normally presented. in telling mrs. lacewell's story, i also told my own, ripe with the doubt and complexities that shape and propel my life. i wondered, how do i position myself as the knower and teller? who am i as a writer? who is going to read my work? these were just a few of the questions i was happy to espouse upon; instead they focused on whether or not my work was valid. the people who interviewed me seemed more concerned with whether or not the conclusions i drew were true. whether or not it was true was not paramount to me. sociologist laurel richardson (1997) wrote: postmodernism claims that representation is always partial, local, and situational and that our self is always present, no matter how much we try to suppress itbut only partially present, for in our writing we repress parts of ourselves, too. working from that premise, we are freed to write material in a variety of ways: to tell and retell. there is no such thing as "getting it right"; only "getting it" differently contoured and nuanced. when experimenting with form, ethnographers learn about the topic and about themselves that which was unknowable, unimaginable, using prescribed writing formats. so, even if one chooses to write a final paper in a conventional form, experimenting with format is a practical and powerful way to expand interpretative skills. (p. 91) unfortunately, my analysis was not seen as powerful. i was so surprised by some of the questioning that i must have sounded naïve or defensive. at the very least, i must have sounded like i did not know what i was doing and that my research really had no content but was merely fluff. in the end, this non-traditional program, dedicated to feminist values, hired a person with a traditional research orientation. two years later i was asked to apply for the same position that i was denied a few years earlier. i gave a similar talk for the interview. this time, there were no questions about validity, and this time i got the job. continuing our work against the grain since our dissertations, both of us have worked in a non-traditional master's program for practicing teachers that is dedicated to transformational change in education. because of this program and our own personal styles, we continue to conduct research and engage in teaching that rubs against the grain. and, we try to stay enthusiastic and energized in a context where we still receive conflicting messages about our scholarship. for example, as part of her work in this non-traditional program, pamela wrote a chapter for a book on the program that was meant to expose some of the internal problems of the program (lepage, 2001). the faculty members involved in writing and editing of the book agreed that in order to show that they had the capacity for self-reflection and critique, they needed to not only talk about what they did right, but also what they did wrong. they also agreed that collaboration should be the focus of an internal critique. still, many faculty members were upset when the chapter was first disseminated, feeling that the chapter pressed too hard against academic norms that prohibit academics from exposing dirty little secrets. at that time pamela had to endure some personal and professional attacks. later, however, she was celebrated for her honesty. most of the faculty came back to her at some time and admitted that she had "named" some difficult problems that needed to be addressed. at that time the document was used as a centerpiece for faculty discussions about how to improve the program. after teaching english as a second language in japan, gretchen returned to teach in the same nontraditional program. one week after returning to the united states, gretchen found herself in front of a cohort of teachers where the topic of the day centered on race. after giving a short talk on research and how it has been used to define race, she looked into the audience at the sea of white faces staring wide-eyed at her. she had forgotten how it felt to be an african-american female and talk about race in front of a group of white people. later during the day, she came back to a large group discussion where the day's discussions were readdressed. she began the dialogue by reading the class a letter she had written them during break. it began, "i had forgotten how difficult this work can be and how vulnerable i sometimes feel." after reading the letter, the teachers opened up and began sharing their own feelings about the morning discussion. in the end, people commented that it was the first real dialogue they had about race since starting the program. discussion as academics we have worked to integrate a personal perspective into the research process. our cases provide an example of the confusion, inconsistency, and ambiguity that is often experienced by many feminist scholars, especially during and after graduate school when they are searching for an identity and seeking acceptance in the academic community. pamela was confused about whether and when to integrate personal experiences into her work and when and how she might press against academic norms to create change. gretchen, whose research was conducted a few years later, was able to integrate herself in her work, but she found that many still focused on questioning her methods rather than probing her insights. over the years, many women have fought to develop a personal voice in educational scholarship (see for example, richardson, 1997). in the late 80's and early 90's, investigators emphasized the need for women to connect new knowledge with personal experience (clinchy, belenky, goldberger, & tarule, 1985; bartolome´, 1994; terenzini, rendon, upcraft, millar, allison, gregg & jalomo, 1993). for example, tarule (1988) described the problems associated with women bringing their experiences into the learning process: in classroom discussions, women often join the dialog starting with long stories that detail what seems relevant from their lives. they ground their learning and understanding in their experience, while the listeners, students and instructors alike, squirm, unable to hear the logic of connection, and therefore the essence of the idea. the listeners are simply mortified by an apparently inappropriate sharing of life experience. they roll their eyes, the instructor tries to figure out how to break in, and the speaker begins to perceive that her presentation of the ideas, as well as the way she thinks about them, are wrong. (p. 26) in many ways, our stories raise questions about academic norms surrounding disclosure. our dissertation work forced us to consider when it is appropriate to incorporate the personal into our research. how much autobiography is too much? how much is not enough? disclosing ourselves in our research is risky, and, at the same time, frightening. when the research is rejected as not valid, there is a way in which our lived experiences are simultaneously devalued. the difficulty incorporating personal experience can be interpreted through the lens of critical theory. according to foucault (1979), the normalization of society produces attacks upon the bodies and souls of individuals who, for whatever reason, reject society's norms. the attacks come not only from the state, in the form of legal authority; but also in manifestations of social control through a system of constraints and punishments evident throughout the entire social structure. foucault (1979) argued that each of us have become "our brother's keeper," watching over one another, making sure that norms are not violated and that dominant beliefs and values are upheld. educators interested in critical theory tell us that discursive practices refer to the rules by which discourses are formed (mclaren, 1994), rules that govern what can be said and what must remain unsaid, and who can speak with authority and who must listen. they are "not purely and simply ways of producing discourse. they are embodied in the technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behavior, in forms of transmission and diffusion, and pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them" (foucault, 1926, p. 200). insights offered by critical theorists are helpful, but the difficulty comes not when you analyze the norms or discursive practices in a traditional way, but when you choose to reject the norms and live up (sometimes) to your own rhetoric. other researchers have been working to redefine research and inquiry. in fact, many people in academics over the last 20 years have written about personal experiences including bell hooks (1996), mike rose (1989), jane tompkins (1996), richard rodriquez (1990), and lisa delpit (1995). these people, however, could be described as people who "made it" in academia in traditional ways which then gave them permission to be personal. but still, these pioneers paved the way for others to be open about who they are, integrate their personal stories, and question academic norms. in addition, beyond these few successful people, we were pleased to find such recent publications as those written by laurel richardson (1997) who made a powerful argument for including personal experience. we have also discovered edited volumes such as that organized by carl grant (1999) called multicultural research: a reflective engagement with race, class, gender and sexual orientation. in that book, the editor invited people to write chapters about what guided them during their research in the area of equity, social justice, power and/or the interrelationship between their life experiences and the theoretical underpinnings of their scholarship. in each chapter, the authors describe their personal relationship with their research and, although the book includes well-known voices such as michael apple and peter mcclaren, it also includes less experienced academics, such as jennifer obidah (1999), who described her experiences in graduate school. and, what makes her chapter even more unique is that her comments about a well-known graduate school are fairly critical, which is unusual since norms in academia often discourage people from talking about negative experiences and criticizing their institutions. this book is one of the first books to explore the motivations of researchers and how that impacts their work. conclusion in our dissertation studies (early to mid 90's), we took risks and we pressed against the norms. so, the question is where do we stand now? in this paper, we not only talk about our experience with our dissertations, we talk about how our nontraditional research has affected our lives and our careers since our research was completed. in conclusion, we offer four suggestions for change. first and foremost, we believe that it is important for academics to live up to their rhetoric. in countless situations in academia, we find people who argue for change, and yet they perpetuate entrenched norms in their own environment. for example, this often happens when academics suggest that k-12 teachers should do x (such as collaborate), yet in their own environments, academics have difficulty engaging in those practices themselves. this is also true of reflective practice. being a reflective practitioner demands that we examine and critique the internal and external forces that motivate us. in the end, we also have to examine what it is that sustains us. we believe that there has to be spaces available in academia for scholars to make sense of the world through the examination of their own lived experiences. the norms surrounding personal disclosures need to be re-evaluated in the light of reflective practice which demands that people not only look openly at their motivations, but also at their mistakes. second, educators need to continue to engage in serious discussions about philosophical questions surrounding educational research: how do we define and describe educational research? what is it for? how can we make it more useful? when and how should we imitate research norms and traditions already established and entrenched, and when and how should we forge our own path? we argue that knowledge is constantly evolving, rather than a fixed concept. while some people would argue that researchers should strive to be objective, we advocate a critical and constructivist epistemology (belenky, clinchy, goldberger & tarule, 1986; kegan, 1982, minnich, 1990; vygotsky, 1978) to guide our understanding of interpretive research. as diane wood (2001) stated, "knowledge is perspectival, relational, contingent, partial, and situated" (p. 36). we argue that researchers must acknowledge, not only their personal connection to research, but also the underlying threads of power and privilege that exist between research stakeholders as we conduct and interpret women's lives. we argue that it is not only useful to include (and weave) a personal experience throughout a research project, but that it presents a more "honest" presentation of the material. ultimately, being inclusive of the personal experiences provides a much wider range of narratives from which everyone can learn. if research fails to be inclusive of a variety of ways of knowing and being, then the written pool of experiences is limited, thereby silencing many of the voices that could help us come to richer understandings. whether or not something is valid has traditionally been based upon how the research is constructed, more specifically, the methods used. traditional thought suggests that research that has been triangulated offers one of the best options for validating qualitative data (richardson, 1997). research that has been triangulated presumes that however you put the pieces of the puzzle together, you still produce the same picture. like our research, issues of validity take a more personal approach. validity can be defined very differently by people who may not understand, for example, cultural differences such as the importance of the intergenerational responsibility to pass on important historical knowledge in the african american community. an argument can be made that one reason our research is valid is because the individuals and community members whose lives we discuss say it is so. finally, it seems obvious that we must continue to work toward change, but we also need to be realistic and cautious. graduate students need more training in developing a voice and facing the current confusion surrounding disclosure in educational scholarship. they must be prepared for mixed responses and ambiguity, even when they write insightful and useful prose. right now feminist researchers and critical theorists, to name a few groups, are trying to change the current paradigm, while functioning within an old paradigm. they are trying to do it differently with very little guidance, support, and time. working within a system that operates with different conventions means oscillating between two sets of epistemological norms and moral practices. finding a balance is hard because there is often tension between being politically suave and being honest, being diplomatic and being straightforward, standing up for your principles and being open to reconciliation, protecting yourself and being selfish. there are no clear boundaries. graduate students must be prepared to constantly negotiate these distinctions. they must learn to live with ambiguity and contradiction. our love for the work with teachers makes us intensely aware of how the bureaucracy of the university hinders our ability to achieve the aims we have listed. at the root of this very complicated problem, we believe, is a fear that plagues teacher educators. our eagerness to be seen as "hard scientists" often prevents us from doing the type of experimental work that sheds light on possibilities and prevents constraints on thinking. this path needs to be negotiated with a great deal of care for others, understanding of differences (including in our case, conservative voices), understanding of politics, persistence, and most important, -a managed heart (hochschild, 1983). references bartolome', l. (1994). beyond the methods fettish: toward a humanizing pedagogy. harvard educational review, 64, 173-194. belenky, m. f., clinchy, b. m., goldberger, n., & tarule, j. (1986). women's ways of knowing: the development of self, voice and mind. new york: basic books. bogdan, r., & biklen, s. (1982). qualitative research for education. boston: allyn & bacon. clinchy, b. m., belenky, m. f., goldberger, n., & tarule, j. m. (1985). connected education for women. journal of education, 167(3), 28-45. delpit, l. (1995). other people's children: cultural conflict in the classroom. new york: the new press. foucault, m. (1979). discipline and punish. new york vintage books. foucault, m. (1926). the archaeology of knowledge. new york: pantheon books. grant, c. a. (ed.) (1999). multicultural research: a reflective engagement with race, class, gender and sexual orientation. london: falmer press. hochschild, a. r. (1983). the managed heart. berkeley, ca: university of california press. hooks, b. (1996), bone black: memories of childhood. new york: henry holt. kegan, r. (1982). the evolving self: problems and process in human development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. lepage-lees, p. (1997a). struggling with a nontraditional past: academically successful women from disadvantaged backgrounds discuss their relationship with disadvantage. psychology of women quarterly, 2, 365-385. lepage-lees, p. (1997b). from disadvantaged girls to successful women: education and women's resiliency. westport, ct: praeger press. lepage, p. (2001). sustaining the moral framework: tensions and opportunities for faculty. in h. sockett, e. demulder, p. lepage & d. wood (eds.), transforming teacher education: lessons in professional development. westport, ct: bergin and garvey. mclaren, p. (1994). life in schools: an introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education. new york: longman. minnich, e. (1990). transforming knowledge. philadelphia: temple university press. obidah, j. (1999). born to roll: graduate school from the margins. in c. a. grant, (ed.), multicultural research: a reflective engagement with race, class, gender and sexual orientation. london: falmer press. oldfather, p. & west, j. (1994). qualitative research as jazz. educational researcher, 23(8), 22-26. richardson, l. (1997). fields of play: constructing an academic life. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. rodriquez, r. (1990). the hunger of memory. the education of richard rodriquez. new york: bantam books. rose, m. (1989). lives on the boundary: the struggle and achievements of america's underprepared. new york: the free press. tarule, j. (1988). voices of returning women: ways of knowing. in l. h. lewis (ed.), addressing the needs of returning women: new directions for continuing education (pp. 19-33). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. terenzini, p. t., rendon, l.i., upcraft, m. l., millar, s. b., allison, k., w., gregg p. l., & jalomo, r. (1993). the transition to college: diverse students, diverse stories. research in higher education, 35(1): 57-73. tompkins, j. (1996). a life in school: what the teacher learned. reading, ma: addison-wesley. vygotsky, (1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wood, d. (2001). teacher as citizen: professional development and democratic responsibility. in h. sockett, e. demulder, p. lepage, & d. wood (eds.), transforming teacher education lessons in professional development. westport, ct: bergin and garvey. authors dr. pamela lepage is an acadmic research and program officer, stanford university. dr. gretchen givens-generett is an assistant professor in the graduate school of education's intiatives in educational trasformation (ift) program, george mason university.   copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/network_org.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/network_org.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html http://www.zzn.com/ http://www.zzn.com/ file:///c:/temp/awpublisher.html file:///c:/temp/awpublisher.html file:///c:/temp/content.html file:///c:/temp/content.html file:///c:/temp/advertising.html file:///c:/temp/advertising.html file:///c:/temp/privacy.html file:///c:/temp/privacy.html file:///c:/temp/sitemap.html file:///c:/temp/sitemap.html advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2004 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com . for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com . duplication without express written consent is prohibited  mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 19, fall 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] a pedagogy of awareness: death education as an introduction to social consciousness dr. linda l. white i have been teaching a senior level college course entitled death and dying off and on for more than ten years. at my university it is a philosophy course, though it is multi-disciplinary and could be taught in other departments as well; it is taught around the country in departments of sociology, psychology, health sciences, and religion. i began teaching this course as a result of a tragic loss in my own life. i wanted to bring to others what i had learned as a consequence of that experience and my own exploration through the territory of grief and loss. it seemed to me at the time that most of us are unprepared to deal with some of the blows that life may deal us especially in contemporary america and some basic foundational knowledge in this area could enable people to function better in times of crisis than they might without this information. when i began teaching the course, i saw it as a fairly straightforward engagement with the issues as outlined in the text i used. some of those topics, as listed in the table of contents are: "attitudes toward death: a climate of change; perspectives on death: cross-cultural and historical; learning about death: the influence of sociocultural forces; facing death: living with life-threatening illness; survivors: understanding the experience of loss; and suicide" (despelder & strickland, 2002, pp. v xii). since i had specialized in the area of death and dying including loss and its many meanings and responses during my graduate work in clinical psychology, i found those topics thoroughly interesting and relatively uncomplicated to develop within the course. i sought the guidance of others who had taught the course prior to that first semester, particularly the literature in our library. i found that most experts recommended an approach that enlisted both the intellect and the emotions of the students either by itself was seen as incomplete and inappropriate (corr, 1978; kastenbaum, 1977) . these same sources also suggested encouraging the students to look at themselves as individuals and also as members of the larger society (anderson, 1972; corr, 1978; kastenbaum, 1977). though i have to admit to leaning over too far in one direction or the other occasionally, i have tried to maintain this balance of perspective and approach through the years. in those first few semesters, in addition to the excellent text referenced above, i also assigned outside readings, book reviews, and even an assignment called a "deathography." the authors of the text suggested this last writing assignment in which the students give autobiographical accounts of their encounters with file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/index.html death up to that point in their lives. it is a reflective writing assignment and includes their reactions to the relevant experiences as well as how they see it affecting them today. although it was time-consuming and often difficult reading and evaluating these written deathographies, it became for me one of the highlights of the semester. i believe it may have been these deathographies that opened my mind, and my heart, to the infinite possibilities inherent in this course. a bereaved person's ethnicity is determined not only by the person's country of origin, but also by who he says he is, what he does, with whom, and how he feels about it....ethnicity entails, among other things, the use of a cultural system to make sense of the world, including its sufferings. (eisenbruch, 1984, p. 324-325) i found this quote from an ethnographer while doing cross-cultural research in loss and grief. i realized later that, even though it only mentions ethnicity, it applies to all of us in other ways. how we make sense of our suffering, and how we weave it into our lives, is a big part of who we are. reading the deathographies was telling me who the students were, as well as telling them who they were and where they were and how far they might have come since a previous loss. over and over again i was told how much they learned from doing the assignment, even though many of them didn't really want to do it initially students rarely welcome writing assignments, i have found, especially one that might be difficult. i found that some of the students hadn't experienced much loss by the time they came to college, but others had lost a host of family and friends. i also realized that some of them were totally unable to engage with reflective material at all that in itself told me something about them. others poured out their experiences and the related emotions to me. i often found myself in tears reading through them, such was the depth of emotion and commitment to the assignment. although i graded them for content and mechanics, i often felt it a sacrilege to do so. i still experience such a sense of profound privilege that many of them trusted me to the extent they did, and still do. along with the subjects i outlined above, there were others in my text that were somewhat more difficult to grapple with: medical ethics, including access to medical care; the law and death, including physician assisted suicide; life after death, including one's religious beliefs; aids, including its transmission and our initial response; war, past and present; violence, and all its dimensions; and the death penalty brutality or appropriate response? these were issues that brought out our partisanship and our individual differences in ways that threatened to disturb class unity. should i simply gloss over them? should i lecture only, seeking and accepting no questions or opinions other than my own? it would have been easy to lose myself in the sheer magnitude of the material in our textbook 652 pages of text and indices! i have to admit to doing so initially, except for minimal discussion. however, as i gained experience in the course, and continued to read in the field, i realized i could no longer teach in that way. the following will serve to illustrate my transformation over time due to those experiences i had in the classroom, both as teacher and student. i will outline first how a seemingly harmless classroom discussion shifted my perspective radically and sent me searching for new answers to old questions. next, i will show how that search led me back to graduate school and provided the underpinnings for my current perspective on a host of life and death issues that i cover in the teaching of death and dying. though the connections between these theoretical underpinnings and my current practices in death and dying may not seem apparent initially, i will make the connections as the paper develops. i have come to believe that the most important thing i do is provide an environment in which my students can examine some of their assumptions about life and death. more and more this has come to mean encouraging them to grapple with a number of social justice issues within the field of death and dying. i cannot provide them the answers, but i do attempt to offer them the awareness they need to ask the right questions, and, hopefully, eventually find the answers for themselves. a major change in perspective this turning point in perspective began for me about two years after i began teaching death and dying (d&d). i have described the incident to others many times, and i can still remember the essence of that moment as if it happened yesterday. it had been disclosed in the news the night before that a young woman's (susan smith) children were not abducted as she had reported, but she had killed them instead. some of the students in my class (not a d&d class) couldn't wait to discuss it and tell me how they would punish her. the methods they devised were varied and inventive, and all quite punitive they almost seemed to be competing for how much they could make her suffer. one very kind young man, a good student i had really enjoyed up to that point, told us in very deliberate terms how he would tie her in a car and drive it into the water and watch her die the same way she killed her own sons. the expression on his face spoke volumes. i stood there in horror as this proceeded, slowly shaking my head at the display of raw violence i was witnessing, and realizing that few, if any, of them would ever associate their behavior with violence. i did see it as violence, and still do this need we have to punish and judge harshly. it reminded me of a section of our text that i had read and remembered, but not internalized as deeply as i probably should have, a table of "factors favoring violence" (despelder & strickland, 2002, p. 475) taken from a book called the psychology of death (kastenbaum & aisenberg, 1976). the two factors in the table that i see applicable here are (1) anything that physically or psychologically separates the potential killer from the victim, and (2) anything that fosters perceiving people as objects or as less than human. as long as we can separate ourselves completely from others and see them as much less than we are, we can envision and even plan all manner of violence against them. most of us do not carry out the violence that we imagine. we confine it to such verbal exercises instead; but the point is, for me, that we are still able to visualize it and believe in its suitability. if we can plan it and speak of it, then under the right circumstances, perhaps we can carry it out. that is what bothered me and caused me to perceive violence as multi-dimensional. because of that incident, the natural role of violence in the field of death and dying, and my growing conviction that most of us misunderstand violence, i began to review as much of the literature on violence as i could in the next few years, followed by a return to graduate school. after reading volumes of material for three years, i decided that prudence dictated establishing tangible proof of my scholarship. in some respects, the research i had conducted throughout that three-year period laid the foundation for what i did during my doctoral program. whenever possible, i returned to the subject that most fascinated me, violence and its alternative, non-violence. as it turned out, the avenues that opened up to me during my doctoral program served to fuel my convictions about violence, enlarged it considerably, and gave me theoretical foundations for my principles. chief among these were critical and feminist theories, which became the underpinnings of my work in many respects. i even found compelling support in the literature for a strong link between these two theoretical models, to which i will refer later. theoretical underpinnings my first revelation came during a course in educational epistemology wherein we learned of other models of research besides the prevailing logical positivism. there are, within education, at least three models of inquiry, each asking different questions and often suggesting different methods of research (bredo & feinberg, 1982). while i was quite familiar with the positivist paradigm, and the questions it poses, two other models, the interpretive and critical, were new to me. while the positivist model might be used to ascertain if some entity or construct exists, such as depression or anxiety, or if a program is effective in combating some malady. for instance, the interpretive paradigm seeks to know how, not merely if, a particular entity exists and operates within some sector of society or within individuals. an example of the first paradigm might be examining a program to determine if it is effective in changing the attitudes and adjustment of juvenile delinquents; this is often called outcome research. following along with this same area of inquiry, interpretive research might be used to establish how the program works from the differing perspectives of the people involved, both counselors and juveniles. as valuable as these two models of research are, especially taken together, there are those who find them incomplete for the tasks of inquiry. hence, the birth of the critical paradigm. critical theory critical theory has it origins in german philosophy, particularly the work of hegel, marx, the frankfurt school, and more recently, the writings of jurgen habermas (bredo & feinberg, 1982; giroux, 1982; merriam, 1991). the frankfurt school was made up of a group of talented historians, sociologists, and philosophers who worked loosely together from the late 1920s, locating for a time in the united states (fleeing nazi germany), and then eventually relocating in germany. theodor adorno, max horkheimer, and herbert marcuse were the primary representatives of the institute for social research where these critical theorists began their work (giroux, 1982; seidman, 1994). the goals of the institute were to examine how society's utmost faith in the power of reason and rationality to rescue it from any of the social ills of the day was misplaced. they sought to illustrate how marx had even fallen "victim" to this line of reasoning in his theoretical positions about labor and social revolution. he had so little considered the role of individual and social consciousness, they thought, that he had at least partially aligned himself with the positivist notions of reality and rationality (seidman, 1994). habermas decried this position: ".the spontaneity of hope, the art of taking a position, the experience of relevance or indifference, and above all, the response to suffering and oppression, the desire for adult autonomy, the will to emancipation, and the happiness of discovering one's identity—all these are dismissed for all time from the obligating interest of reason" (as quoted in giroux, 1982, p. 12). rationality, these theorists believed, when dispossessed of its cultural meaning, isn't rational at all; it is instead dogma that seeks to serve the interests of special groups, primarily those in power. critical theory takes a look at whose interests are served, and rejects notions of objective truth. positivism by its very nature precludes an understanding of how its neutrality isn't neutral at all; rather it is supportive of the status quo, because it does not question but simply reports (giroux, 1982; seidman, 1994). further goals of the frankfurt school were to participate in raising the consciousness of those groups that were living under conditions of coercion or oppression. they sought to look at what should be, not simply what was. compassion was at the heart of much of their inquiry and the basis of much of their critical thought (giroux, 1982). they saw their role as one of enlightenment and empowerment (merriam, 1991). they pursued not simply understanding of society, but the transformation of those structures within it that promoted and sustained hierarchies of power and prevented the full participation of all people (seidman, 1994). the questions asked by critical theorists are: whose interests are being served? how have those who are oppressed cooperated in their oppression? what are the oppressive structures, and how do we go about unmasking them? how can we educate the oppressed in order to empower them to break free from these repressive systems? is this irrelevant in america today? i will return to this question later, but first i will explain the other theoretical base from which i work, and then connect it to my philosophy of teaching d&d. feminist criminology the second theoretical basis of my work comes from feminist theory, developed during several graduate level women's studies courses. producing even a few thoughts on any feminist perspective is a large undertaking, certainly within the confines of a relatively short paper. to attempt to do that in the area of criminology is perhaps just as daunting a proposition. the reasons for both are the same: just as feminism itself is not one unified field of thought and theory, neither is criminology nor is their intersection, feminist criminology. almost any effort to expound on a particular issue produces a myriad of choices, and oftenperplexing ones, concerning which of the many feminisms or feminist criminologies we would wish to interpret. some brief explanation is possible, however, even within narrow confines. first of all, in addition to the fact that there is no unified set of principles of feminist criminology from which feminist criminologists draw their theories, it is important to realize that their theoretical constructs are not always about women only (alcoff & potter, 1992). men and masculinities are also of interest to feminists, as are the organizations and institutions of our culture, for women are affected by all these (daly & chesney-lind, 1988). feminist thought has much to offer the field of criminology, according to daly and chesney-lind. it can bring a more realistic perspective of women's issues within the field as opposed to the narrow focus on men and masculinity. feminists know intuitively that we cannot just add women to the theories about men, as in 'add women and stir.' additionally, it can bring to the attention of criminologists "that their discipline and its questions are a product of white, economically privileged men's experiences" (daly & chesney-lind, 1988, p. 506). the addition of women, as well as those of color, can provide a needed balance to the field. combined issues of class, race, and gender are vital to the full understanding of any area of concern within sociological endeavor, and this is clearly true within the confines of criminological theory. several groups within feminist criminology are particularly concerned with these issues and have brought pressure to bear on the leftist criminologists (critical and marxist, especially) to consolidate their theories with those of feminists (radical, marxist, and socialist) in order to truly transform the field. feminist criminology had its inception in the late sixties, with the advent of the first works to refer directly to the omission of women in theories of crime (daly & chesney-lind, 1988). it has proceeded through almost four decades of scholarship, posing a number of questions to the establishment within the field of criminology and criminal justice concerning these and other related issues: gender ratio in crime; gender and generalizability in methodology; sexism in their views and interpretations of women's and girls' crime and deviance; discrimination against women within the system; the very definition of violence; and, finally, the control of men's violence how can we do this without resorting to the same methods, violent ones, to do so? this last question has particular relevance for my own research and teaching the nature of our responses to violence being violent as well. peacemaking criminology: the link between critical theory and feminist criminology i had found in earlier research a new way of responding to crime restorative justice called a new vision, or even a new paradigm, by one of its early advocates (zehr, 1990). i was drawn to restorative justice by its message of non-violence, because i had come to believe that our criminal justice system, as currently maintained, was in some ways part of the long-term problem rather than the solution to all crime and violence. let me say here that i had not sought initially to do research in criminal justice or criminology. it sought me instead, once i began to explore violence and its alternatives. it was, ironically, during a consideration of feminist theory that i found a link between these two areas, restorative justice and feminist theory: peacemaking criminology. according to pepinsky and quinney (1991), peacemaking criminology is an area of criminology that concerns itself with human suffering and its role in crime. it focuses on issues of social, economic, and political justice; and is related to a concept called restorative justice. who are the peacemaking criminologists, and what is their relationship to feminism? pepinsky (1991a) tells us that in the late 1980s, he and richard quinney began to see a common thread in certain criminological traditions those of the religious, feminist, and critical criminologists (see also henry and milovanovic, 1991). not all, certainly, but many of these writers were linked by their commitment to peacemaking as a function of criminological processes. peacemaking criminology seeks to see crime more as harm to relationships than as crimes against the state, and asks how to address these harms and restore these relationships as opposed to simply assessing punishment. one of these peacemaking criminologists, harris (1991), explains a unifying principle that they share, a concept that is familiar to many of us: an ethical orientation that includes an ethic of care as postulated by carol gilligan (1977). gilligan found in her research with women that they made moral decisions based on a care/response mode more often than the rights/justice mode accepted by most psychologists as the ethical model for adults. the greatest hope harris (1991) has is that we will find a way to apply some of the principles of feminism to our thinking on crime and criminal justice. she outlines the major uniting standards of what she calls values central to a feminist future, what she understands the core values to be: "among the key tenets of feminism are three simple beliefs that all people have equal value as human beings, that harmony and felicity are more important than power and possession, and that the personal is the political" (p. 88). though she concedes that there are variances in feminist thought, she holds these ideals to be fairly transcendent of those variances. in an explanation of these values, she indicates that while people are inherently different, they are all entitled to respect as persons and an equitable amount of consideration because of that fact. secondly, she holds that feminists view the interconnectedness of people as a given, and this leads us to care for one another, to be mindful of their humanity. the hierarchical structures in our society that lead people to seek 'power over' others is the antithesis of this care orientation. and finally, the idea that the personal is political means (for her) that these humane values need to be lived out in our public spheres as well as in our private ones (harris, 1991). violence and the feminist response violence permeates much of what we are in america, much more so than in other highly developed nations [1]. we need, however, to be clear in our definition of violence. what many of us see in the news media relative to violence is only the tip of the iceberg. any worthwhile definition of violence must include the structural and systemic violence that pervades our culture. violence impacts our lives, not only in the more obvious ways, but in covert ones as well. our levels of interpersonal violence are the highest in the world; our structural violence is startling in its impact on us directly and indirectly in that it contributes to other forms of violence; and our responses to violence usually consist of adding more violence to that already extant (chasin, 1997; gilligan, 1996; tifft & markham, 1991). how this affects all of us should go without saying, but how it affects women is almost catastrophic. and, as we shall see, it is gendered (allen, 1989; braithwaite & daly, 1998). interpersonal violence most of us define violence somewhat narrowly the interpersonal violence that we see on the nightly news or in our newspapers and magazines and, certainly, this is a part of the overall picture. james gilligan (1996), a psychiatrist who has worked with violent criminals and directed the center for the study of violence at harvard medical school, is an expert on this kind of violence. he has developed his particular theoretical concepts about violence from his observations of men institutionalized for their violence. he draws on these experiences to explain the role of shame [2] and the lengths the men go to in order to avoid shame and being seen as weak, not manly. i have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo this "loss of face" no matter how severe the punishment, even if it includes death. (gilligan, 1996, p. 110) j. gilligan [3] (1996) suggests that the dialogue regarding violence must include women's voices if there is to be any hope for decreasing the level of violence in our society. he reveals that his work with violent men has informed his belief in the necessity for transforming our patterns of behavior along with the gender roles that we've adopted as part of our patriarchal culture. within our system, he relates, men are socialized above all 'not to be women' in any way. this channels both men's and women's behaviors into gender appropriate roles, and both sexes are rewarded and honored for remaining within these roles. "the fundamental challenge of our time, i believe, is to break the link between civilization and patriarchy so that we can continue to receive the benefits of the former without having to pay the cost of the latter" (gilligan, 1996, p. 267). chasin (1997), too, addresses this basic issue. she believes that men are socialized primarily to be more aggressive and achievement oriented than are women, but less responsive than women to their own and other's emotional needs. the desire of many men, therefore, is to be the antithesis of women. this contributes greatly to the homophobia that exists in many sectors of society and underlies much of the socalled gay bashing. because of the lower status of women relative to men, it is considered inappropriate to be 'like a woman' in any way. for a man, consequently, violence may frequently be a more viable and acceptable alternative than allowing oneself to be put down or seen as not dominant (chasin, 1997). structural violence chasin (1997) also deals eloquently with the issue of structural violence. she defines violence as "acts, intentional or not, that result in physical harm to another or persons" (p. 4). these can be of two types: interpersonal or structural. she characterizes structural violence as that occurring because of our stratification system, the fact that many of our citizens suffer physically due to limited access to certain resources. j. gilligan (1996) defines it likewise: "by structural violence i mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society." (p. 192) with some startling statistics, chasin (1997) indicates that the united states has a dismal record regarding several indicators of structural violence compared to the other ten wealthiest capitalist nations in the world, indicators such as infant mortality rate, rate of aids infection, and hazardous waste production. these indicators, and others, are routinely ignored by those who make our laws and construct our news, she maintains. they focus on the interpersonal violence instead, diverting our attention away from the policies that shape our world, sometimes in unsafe and unhealthy ways. she points out the necessity of expanding our definitions of violence to include the structural for some very important reasons. primary among them, she reports, is the fact that structural violence is a greater threat to more of us than interpersonal violence. j. gilligan's (1996) experiences have informed his scholarship regarding structural violence as well. citing example after example, he condemns our basic refusal to care for and about one another in america, tying it to the shame we unknowingly inflict on one another. agreeing with ghandi that "the deadliest form of violence is poverty" (p. xi), he is convinced that our fear of any form of dependence is at the root of much of our pathology. he decries our refusal to help our citizenry with the most basic of human needs, accusing us of being the least compassionate democracy on earth. and, he says, we have not restricted our violent propensities to our own country; we have exported it to other countries also. while we remain the most violent highly developed nation on earth, we have added to the levels of violence elsewhere with our policies (see also wolterstorff, 1983). a violent criminal justice system. not only is violence incorporated into the fabric of our lives structurally, it permeates our response to violence within the criminal justice system (danner, 1998). further, our recent attempts to redouble our efforts at controlling crime may have not only increased its effects on the whole of society, but especially its effects on women. for the last 30 years we have waged a war on crime and then a war on drugs, which many peacemaking criminologists would agree has been a war on the poor and on women in many respects, but particularly women of color (danner, 1998). in an interesting analogy of the 'three strikes you're out' laws passed in some states during the nineties, danner (1998) depicts how current policy affects women in disastrous ways. strike one, she contends, was the removal of many women and children from welfare rolls due to insufficient funding for these programs resulting from increased incarceration rates during the tough-on-crime regime. strike two was the loss of jobs of many women who had been over-represented in the social service jobs eliminated by the cuts in welfare funding. strike three was the increased incarceration rates of men, leaving greater numbers of women behind to care for home and children without help. add to this the fact that the whole cycle increases the level of poverty in these communities, and we have significantly affected women by these militant policies. the current get-tough, lock-'em-up, and three strikes policies will not reduce crime nor women's pain associated with crime. they will only impoverish communities as they enrich politicians and those corporations associated with this new prison industrial complex. although women have been largely left out of the debate, it is women who are the quiet losers the bigtime losers in the crime bills. criminal justice reforms such as these are politically motivated, unnecessary, ineffective, and far, far too costly. and last and most important, it is women who receive the least from the wars on crime and drugs, and it is women who bear most of their hidden burdens (danner, 1998, p. 12). a number of feminists have questioned the wisdom of our current approaches. referring to another of the new crime initiatives, morash and rucker (1998) point out the irony of featuring a model of aggression as a means of correcting young offenders at risk through the use of boot camps. many tactics used at these camps have been abandoned within the military itself as not effective, and empirical methods to evaluate these programs find them ineffective as well. in fact, research to date has indicated that these programs have actually promoted the very behaviors that they seem designed to discourage, aggression and a callous attitude toward others. yet they continue to be touted as the new wave in programming for juveniles, occasionally including females as well as males. in actuality, these programs are not really new, as their primary components have been tried and found wanting throughout the history of corrections; militarism, hard (and often meaningless) labor, and scare tactics. in her critique of the criminal justice system, harris (1991) highlights the lack of rehabilitation in many of the current reforms[4] and the ever-harsher attitudes toward offenders, as indicated by some of the policies of the last 20 years[5]. we need to reflect, she suggests, on our current beliefs that only these highly punitive means are appropriate to our needs to provide safety for the majority of our citizens. additionally, she urges us to refocus our attention on the social and economic causes of criminal activity, not merely see this as a problem of individuals who need correcting. increased levels of law enforcement alone will not address the questions that face us in the area of criminality, particularly since they are primarily reactive. harris (1991) also stresses the current practices within our penal system, those that promote feelings of despair and hopelessness among the inmates. these harsh environments encourage increased levels of violence, both while incarcerated and upon release[6]. rather than eliminating violence by responding with violence, we are simply escalating it. we have lost a historical perspective and believe, therefore, that incarceration is the only solution to the problems. along with many others, she holds that incarceration should be the court of last resort with a continuum of other means to deal with those acts we deem as criminal (see also braithwaite & daly, 1998). harris' (1991) feminist analysis of the criminal justice system points to its coercive and dominant nature as a given, but also to the fact that its total embodiment results in seeing offenders as less than completely human. a feminist vision of the future should include questioning the very basis of our manner of responding to harmful behaviors, especially those which objectify criminals and seek to exile them into cages or death (harris, 1991). power structures and practices should not be pivotal to all that we do, and punishment need not be assumed without debate, especially those that are overly harsh. the least restrictive measures to assure safety should be applied, generally speaking. compassion can be extended to offenders as well as to victims, she believes, for it "is not a fixed quantity" (p. 95). knopp (1991) adds her note of critique to that of other feminists that the system, as presently conceived misses the mark in our endeavor to curb the level of violence toward women. the structures of the criminal justice system are patriarchal and repressive in nature. using them to combat behavior that is intrinsic to the system itself may produce additional harms that we do not want. she reminds us that the system is fashioned in the interest of the dominant class, and that when we demand incarceration, "we legitimize the degradation and destruction of human beings in prison as a method of social control and we increase reliance on the patriarchal state to determine who is wrong or guilty" (sullivan, cited in knopp, 1991, p. 187). she reminds us as well that it is usually people of color and the poor who suffer in the most immediate terms in times of increased incarceration. knopp (1991) proposes a social justice model in place of the war model to which we have become accustomed. the system she envisions would address the needs of victims and offenders both, as well as the community. primary concerns are the safety and rights of all parties involved and the least restrictive and most restorative environment possible for the offender. included in the program is the effort to address all areas of concern, long term and short term: protection of the victim, including a full support system; offender prevention, education, and restoration; and elimination of structural conditions that continue the cycle of abuse. though knopp views prisons as inherently abhorrent, she agrees that there will likely always be those for whom incarceration is the answer, but she contends that just because this is true for some, is no reason to see it as the only solution for all offenders. many would agree with this assertion, particularly in light of the injustices within the system today[7]. while we have continued to pursue these self-defeating policies that victimize us all, but primarily the most powerless sectors of our society; women, children, and the poor, we have not succeeded in elevating the security level of the rest of society (chesney-lind, 1998; pepinsky, 1991b). certainly our perceptions of safety and security are weakened yearly as horrendous stories of violence flood the media and our national consciousness. and, as we pour greater and greater quantities of our budgets into counterproductive correctional institutions, we gradually strip away the needed funds for the support of social and educational programming, thus perpetuating the cycles of poverty and violence. chesney-lind (1998) reminds us that our childhood poverty rates are the highest among the world's developed nations, 46% of african-american children and 39% of hispanic children are born into poverty, compared to 16% of whites (sweden has a two percent childhood poverty rate by comparison). this is obscene in a country that controls so much of the world's wealth and claims to be democratic. making the connections as many feminist scholars have shown us, all the levels of violence we have talked about, interpersonal, structural, and correctional, are inextricably linked. they are linked just as surely to the classism and sexism of the culture we live in. so, how does that impact a d&d course? how is the subject of d&d related to social justice? in more ways than i can count, is my answer to both questions. first of all, those issues that i mentioned as being somewhat more difficult to grapple with; medical ethics, the law and death, life after death, aids, war, violence, and the death penalty, all these issues demand moral and social choices, choices that are usually political in nature. to ignore this fact is naïve and not very good education, as far as i am concerned. it is political to choose what is over what could be, and i believe that it is the job of an educator to challenge students' assumptions. they do not have to choose my ethics and moral choices, but they do have to be aware that they are making those choices and that these choices are being made in their names. i consider it vital, therefore, that i offer them the awareness of how political choices have life and death dimensions. when we consider medical ethics, we talk about informed consent, truth-telling, euthanasia, principles of autonomy and beneficence, and moral dilemmas within the medical arena. but we also talk about access to medical care in our country because that has life and death consequences. lack of access to medical care is a significant issue in the lives of a large number of american citizens, especially the working poor. as stated previously, limited access to certain resources increases the rates of death and disability in some of our citizens. (many of my students, and many other americans, as well, falsely believe that anyone who works has health insurance, and therefore, if you do not have it, you must be lazy or incompetent.) considering the law and death means discussing physician-assisted suicide. it may seem fairly straight-forward as a topic, but there are even special issues here. who pays for the medical care of those who linger for years and years with great disabilities that are not initially severe enough to claim the life of the patient? financial resources are not an inexhaustible resource, for us as individuals or as a society. who pays? and who decides? these are very touchy questions with great social policy significance. when we deliberate about life after death, we inevitably get into religion. this is difficult enough, of course, especially when there are those who wish to personalize and proselytize during this discussion. religion becomes more difficult, however, when aids is brought up. there is little doubt today that the initial response of the public health community was slow due to the belief that it was only a disease of gay men, a highly charged religious and political issue. when we reflect on issues of war, we inevitably engage in dialogue of its necessity and desirability. but we also speak of the fact that 90% of the people killed in war are non-combatants, mainly women and children. additionally, we discuss how it affects those who serve and how they are changed, both before and after killing. when we consider the issue of violence, we speak of all its dimensions, not just the interpersonal that dominates the media[8]. when we examine the death penalty, i ask the students to look at all its aspects. is it necessary? is it a deterrent? is it racist and classist? is it an appropriate response to certain crimes? but i also ask them if it serves us well as a society to kill our own citizens. does it say what we want it to say about us as a society? above all, i ask them (overtly, of course, but also in more subtle ways): what kind of a world do you want to live in? and, what kind of a person do you want to be? this is what matters most to me, to challenge them to reflect on these two questions. it is, after all, a philosophy course. and recently, i have realized that these two questions are not only applicable to the more demanding areas i have just outlined. they are also connected to our struggle with the idea of our own mortality, and why that often seems to be so difficult to do in the contemporary world we inhabit. i found the connection in an excerpt from a 1988 book entitled the politics of being mortal by alfred g. killilea (excerpted in despelder & strickland, 1995). after hearing elisabeth kübler-ross lecture many years ago on our denial of death in america, killilea realized how that denial affected our political and social choices. he indicated that our ability to focus only on the now and our acquisition of the good life and all it brings is linked to our denial of death. if now is all that matters, and along with that, we and what we accumulate are all that matter, then our choice to ignore the suffering and shortcomings in the lives of others doesn't really matter. that is his premise: that our inability to confront our own mortality is tied to our incapacity to look at ourselves as consumers for the sake of consumption. we are afraid to confront our choices and the "limits of self-interest" (despelder & strickland, 1995, p. 342). we seek meaning instead in the acquisition of things. shortly after finishing the book, his sixteen-year-old daughter was killed in an accident, and in an afterword to the book, he said that what he had written theoretically in the book had come home to him viscerally after her death. he wrote: i find it incredible that so many people in our society seek fulfillment and meaning in their lives by competing for a larger pile of possessions. the only thing that has allowed my wife and me to bear so far the loss of our child is the conviction that she knew that we loved her and that we know that she loved us. the ideology of quantity, of increase, of winning that one hears so much trumpeted in america today seems piteously irrelevant to the real life events that try people's hearts and souls. (killilea in despelder & strickland, 1995, p. 347) i have remembered that outpouring so many times as i have tried to encourage my students to reflect more closely on who they are and where they are going. i remember early in the last semester, i referred to an article in the newspaper about how much harder and longer we work in the united states than they do in europe; how we seem to even be afraid often to take a vacation lest the company find out they can function without us. i had hoped to encourage a discussion on how that might impact our family life, the stress level of the average american employee, and even our productivity. one of the students spoke up, "but, isn't that what we're supposed to do in order to have the big house and the fancy car? isn't that the american dream?" references alcoff, l., & potter, e. (1992). feminist epistemologies. new york: routledge. allen, j. (1989). men, crime and criminology: recasting the questions. international journal of the sociology of law, 17, 19-39. anderson, h. (1972). learning and teaching about death and dying. princeton, nj : princeton theological seminary. (eric document reproduction service no. ed075728) braithwaite, j. (1993). shame and modernity. british journal of criminology, 33(1), 1-15. braithwaite, j., & daly, k. (1998). masculinities, violence, and communitarian control. in s. l. miller (ed.), crime control and women: feminist implications of criminal justice policy (pp. 151-180). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. bredo, e., & feinberg, w. (1982). knowledge and values in social and educational research. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. chasin, b. h. (1997). inequality and violence in the united states: casualties of capitalism. atlantic highlands, nj: humanities press. chesney-lind, m. (1998). critical criminology: toward a feminist praxis. critical criminology newsletter [on-line], available: http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~critcrim/cc/meda.html. corr, c. a. (1978). a model syllabus for death and dying courses. death education, 1, 433-457. daly, k., & chesney-lind, m. (1988). feminism and criminology. justice quarterly, 5(4), 497-538. danner, m. j. e. (1998). three strikes and it's women who are out: the hidden consequences for women of criminal justice policy reforms. in s. l. miller (ed.), crime control and women: feminist implications of criminal justice policy (pp. 1-14). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. despelder, l. a. & strickland, a. l. (1995). the path ahead. mountain view, ca: mayfield publishing. despelder, l. a., & strickland, a. l. (2002). the last dance (6th ed.). boston: mayfield publishing. eisenbruch, m. (1984). cross-cultural aspects of bereavement: ii: ethnic and cultural variations in the development of bereavement practices. culture, medicine, and psychiatry, 8(4), 315-347. gilligan, c. (1977). in a different voice: women's conception of self and of morality. harvard educational review, 47(4), 481-517. gilligan, j. (1996). violence: reflections on a national epidemic. new york: vintage books. giroux, h. a. (1982). critical theory and educational practice. boston, ma: bergin & garvey publishers, inc. harris, m. k. (1991). moving into the new millennium: toward a feminist vision of justice. in h. e. pepinsky & r. quinney (eds.), criminology as peacemaking (pp. 83 97). bloomington, in: indiana university press. henry, s., & milovanovic, d. (1991). constitutive criminology: the maturation of critical theory. criminology, 29(2), 293-316. irwin, j., & austin, j. (1997). it's about time: america's imprisonment binge (2nd ed. ). belmont, ca: wadsworth publishing. kastenbaum, r. (1977). death, society, and human experience. st louis, mo: mosby. kastenbaum, r., & aisenberg, r. (1976). the psychology of death. new york: springer. knopp, f. h. (1991). community solutions to sexual violence: feminist / abolitionist perspectives. in h. e. pepinsky & r. quinney (eds.), criminology as peacemaking (pp. 181 193). bloomington, in: indiana university press. merriam, s. b. (1991). how research produces knowledge. in j. m. peters, & p. jarvis (eds.), adult education (pp. 42-65). san francisco: jossey-bass. morash, m., & rucker, l. (1998). a critical look at the idea of boot camp as a correctional reform. in s. l. miller (ed.), crime control and women: feminist implications of criminal justice policy (pp. 32-51). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. parenti, c. (1999). lockdown america: police and prisons in the age of crisis. new york: verso. pepinsky, h. e. (1991a). peacemaking in criminology and criminal justice. in h. e. pepinsky & r. quinney (eds.), criminology as peacemaking (pp. 299-327). bloomington, in: indiana university press. pepinsky, h. e. (1991b). the geometry of violence and democracy. bloomington, il: indiana university press. pepinsky, h. e., & quinney, r. (1991). criminology as peacemaking. bloomington: indiana university press. seidman, s. (1994). contested knowledge: social theory in the postmodern era. cambridge, ma: blackwell. tifft, l. l., & markham, l. (1991). battering women and battering central americans: a peacemaking synthesis. in h. e. pepinsky & r. quinney (eds.), criminology as peacemaking (pp. 83-97). bloomington, il: indiana university press. vanness, d., & strong, k. h. (1997). restoring justice. cincinnati, oh: anderson publishing. wolterstorff, n. (1983). until justice and peace embrace. grand rapids, mi: william b. eerdmans publishing. zehr, h. (1990). changing lenses: a new focus for crime and justice. scottsdale, pa: herald press. footnotes 1. in addition to ranking first in the rate of sexual assault, the united states also ranks first in homicides and imprisonment rates, all ratings of interpersonal violence by the united nations development program (chasin, 1997). [return to article] 2. this stands in stark contrast to the type of 'reintegrative shame' theorized by john braithwaite (1993). reintegrative shame respects the person and the relationship, deals with acts only, and focuses on forgiveness and repentance.[return to article] 3. within the text i will refer to james gilligan in this manner in order not to confuse with carol gilligan, also cited within the text of the paper.[return to article] 4. harris refers the reader to the (eisenhower) report of the national commission on the causes and prevention of violence, in 1985, for articles and ideas on reform. she discusses the problems associated with some of the reforms suggested.[return to article] 5. mandatory minimum sentencing, three strikes laws, proliferation of prisons, the reinstitution of the death penalty are all examples of those punitive policies, and information on all these are available from the u. s. department of justice. see also it's about time: america's imprisonment binge by j. irwin and j. austin (1997).[return to article] 6. a full explanation of this idea is beyond the scope of this paper, but see lockdown america by c. parenti (1999) or the work previously cited by james gilligan (1996).[return to article] 7. for an elaboration of some alternatives, see restoring justice by d. vanness and k. strong (1997). [return to article] 8. we also consider the media and its often unrealistic portrayals of violence, and how this affects our perceptions of death and dying.[return to article] copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap file:///index.html 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manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] factors influencing the willingness to mentor females in leadership positions within campus recreation: a historical perspective glenna g. bower, ph.d.; mary a. hums, ph.d.; and john l. keedy, ph.d. abstract the purpose of this study was to examine how mentoring played a role in advancing women in leadership positions within campus recreation from a historical perspective. the present study investigated two areas of inquiry within campus recreation: (a) what were the individual reasons for mentoring women within campus recreation? and (b) what organizational factors inhibited or facilitated mentoring women? a phenomenological research design was chosen to examine the mentoring relationship from the perspective of the mentor. a group of campus recreation professionals from the midwest were contacted for the study (n = 5, 3 female and 2 male). the participants were four directors and one assistant director of university campus recreation programs. the primary means of collecting data for this study was three indepth phenomenological interviews with each participant. the researcher used the constant comparative method of analysis throughout the study. analysis of the data produced personal life history portraits of each participant and provided themes and categories for each research question. the data produced a number of interesting findings. first, the study provided valuable information about the perceptions of the mentoring relationship. the personal life history portraits of the mentors showed how their trade of mentoring was conceptualized through their experiences during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. these experiences led to the mentors mentoring both male and female protégés. second, these mentors indicated the females did not have to be mentored any differently than the males within campus recreation after the early 1970s. mentors did not provide gender specific data unless discussing the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. study findings provided valuable information on how mentoring played an integral part in helping women advance into leadership positions within campus recreation. the study also provided valuable information for campus recreation directors wanting to know ways to successfully mentor not only females, but also males, entering the campus recreation profession. of the united states work population, 64.4 million women were employed in 2003 (u.s. department of labor, women's bureau, 2005b). in terms of leadership positions, females held 38% of the management positions (u.s. department of labor, women's bureau, 2005b). although women are making strides across file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter2006/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter2006/index.html many different industries as surveyors, space scientists, production helpers, architects, sheriffs, bailiffs, and other law enforcement officers (u.s. department of labor women's bureau, 2005a), females are still underrepresented in managerial positions within nontraditional occupations. a nontraditional occupation is one in which women comprise 25% or less of total employment (u.s. department of labor, 2005). women are underrepresented in managerial positions within nontraditional occupations such as business (catalyst, 2002; oakley, 2000), higher education administration (henry, 2004), and the sport industry (acosta & carpenter, 2005; bower & hums, 2003). often the lack of progress for women has been attributed to barriers which decrease women's chances of advancing within these professions (u.s. department of labor, 2002). these barriers include the glass ceiling (maume, 2004; ragins, townsend, & mattis, 1998), negative stereotypes (klenke, 1996), leadership style (oakley, 2000), balancing work and family (u.s. department of labor, women's bureau, 2005a), old boys network (jackson, 2000), tokenism (kanter, 1978; lyness & thompson, 2000), and lack of training and career development (oakley, 2000). one initiative receiving a considerable amount of attention for helping women break the gender-related barriers in business (keating, 2002; oakley, 2000; ragins et al., 1998), higher education administration (morris, 2004; savage, karp, & logue, 2004) and the sport industry (strawbridge, 2000; weaver & chelladurai, 2001) is mentoring. according to kram (1985), a mentor is defined as "an experienced, productive manager who relates well to a less-experienced employee and facilitates his or her personal development for the benefit of the individual as well as that of the organization" (p. 1). while the mentoring relationship is important in career development for both genders, it is particularly critical for women, especially those in male-dominated professions (dreher & ash, 1990; morrison, white, & van velsor, 1987; ragins, 1989). mentoring relationships are important to female protégés by helping them overcome barriers (ragins & cotton, 1991). mentors may buffer the female manager from overt and covert discrimination and help their female protégés circumvent structural, social, and cultural barriers to advancement in the organization (ragins, 1989). statement of the problem although women are underrepresented in leadership positions within nontraditional occupations, some progress has been made for women in leadership positions within the sport industry (acosta & carpenter, 2005; bower & hums, 2003). one particular segment of the sport industry showing some progress for women advancing to leadership positions is campus recreation. the national intramural recreation sports association (nirsa) was the first nationally recognized organization supporting campus recreation. women played a limited role in leadership and administrative positions in campus recreation during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s due to the history of the organization. women's involvement in nirsa began in 1950 when the organization held its first meeting at dillard university in new orleans. twenty individuals were present, including three women (yager, 1983). however, in 1959, women were barred from nirsa membership, a ban which lasted until 1971 (varner, 1992). in the last 30 years, women gradually began playing an integral part in the overall development of the organization. for example, between 1981-1992, 11 elections were won by women. these included the first woman elected to a national office serving as vice president (patti homes) in 1981 and the first woman president of nirsa (mary daniels) in 1986 (varner, 1992). yager (1983) examined career patterns of women in nirsa prior to 1983. one implication of her study was that more mentors were needed to help facilitate the professional advancement of women in campus recreation. with limited research on mentoring females in campus recreation, the purpose of the present study was to examine how mentoring played a role in advancing women in leadership positions within campus recreation. the study focused specifically on the history of the participants as protégés from the late 1950s through the early 1970s (when women were not nirsa members) followed by the history of the participants as mentors from 1972 to present (when women were nirsa members). research questions the present study focused on the following research questions: 1. what were the individual reasons for mentoring females within campus recreation during the late 1950s to the early 1970s and from early 1970s to the present? 2. what organizational factors inhibited or facilitated mentoring females within campus recreation during the late 1950s to the early 1970s and from the early 1970s to the present? methodology participants and procedures the campus recreation professionals identified for this research study were chosen on the following criteria: (a) the campus recreation professional worked as a director or assistant director, and (b) were identified through two purposeful sampling techniques. the two types of purposeful sampling techniques used to select the participants for this study were "criterion" and "snowball/chain sampling". the criterion sample was identified in a previous study by bower and hums (2003). the "snowball/ chain sampling" was identified by the criterion sample identifying additional participants for the study. a group of campus recreation professionals from the midwest were contacted for the study (n = 5). the participants consisted of four directors and one assistant director of university campus recreation programs. instrument this research study relied on three in-depth phenomenological interviews as the primary means of collecting data. demographic information was also collected from each participant. demographic data. the researchers used a background data collection form to determine the gender, age, race, highest level of education obtained, current job title, number of years in campus recreation, and number of years at current university of each participant. phenomenological interview. the initial mentoring interview procedures for this study were developed and used in a prior study (allen, poteet, & burroughs, 1997). a pilot study was performed resulting in a revised interview protocol. each interview ranged from 45 to 90 minutes. the first interview focused on the late 1950s to the early 1970s, asking the participants about their personal life histories as protégés. the researcher asked the participants to discuss their lives up until the time they became mentors, going as far back as possible. demographic data were also collected during this interview. the second interview brought the narrative to the present (early 1970s to present), asking participants about their personal life histories as mentors. the participants situated their experiences within the context of their social settings. finally, the third interview focused on integrating the two previous interviews in reflecting on the meaning of their experiences about how mentoring helped them advance as protégés and influenced their decisions to mentor females today. analyses a categorical strategy of analysis was used for the research study (rossman & rallis, 2003). the reduction of interview data was done by using lincoln and guba's (1985) organization, familiarization, generating categories/themes, and coding. first, hyperresearcher 2.0 was used to organize the data. second, the data was read and re-read to begin the process of coding and categorizing the data. third, an inductive analysis was used to identify categories within the data. the constant comparative approach was used throughout the study, allowing each interview to build on the next to further confirm or modify pre-existing categories. themes began to emerge during intensive analysis and categorization of data. finally, by coding the data, the researchers discovered a clear understanding of the meaning of words and/or phrases and elaborated on key concepts. results personal life history portraits personal life history portraits gathered information about the experiences of the mentor as a protégé. the information gathered for the personal life history portraits included the following: (a) demographic information, (b) the mentor as a protégé, and (c) personal histories as mentors. the demographic data included a detailed analysis for each mentor including, gender, age, race, educational background (including graduate assistantship information), official job title, number of years in campus recreation, number of years in current position, and number of years at current university. the demographic information can be found in table 1. table 1 demographic data data doug ray rachel sizemore kelly bond carmen stellar ted vister gender m f f f m age 46 49 52 59 36 race white white white white white undergrad degree education physical education physical education history/ political science broadcast journalism masters degree education recreation management physical education education recreation administration official job title director director director/ associate dean director associate director number yrs in campus recreation 24 25 29 32 17 number yrs at current university 24 23 29 26.5 7.5 number yrs at current position 21 23 12 5.5 3.5 number of mentors 3 3 1 1 3 the results of the mentors' experiences as protégés included number of mentors, gender of the mentors, initiation of the mentoring relationship, structure of the mentoring relationship (formal/informal, meeting place, times a week, etc), mentoring style of their mentors, mentoring characteristics of their mentors, and sustaining the mentoring relationship. the mentors' experiences as a protégés are found in table 2. table 2 portraits of the mentor experiences as a protégé indicators doug ray rachel sizemore kelly bond carmen stellar ted vister number of significant mentors 3 3 1 1 3 gender of mentor(s) m/f m/f m m m/f mentoring initiation both mentor mentor hiring process protégé structure of relationship formal both formal informal informal mentoring style empowering nurturing/ caring assertive/ aggressive authority authority mentoring character listening/leadership comm. skills emotional control organize tasks work ethic mentoring relationship sustained no 25-30 years no no 2 of 4 the mentors' personal life histories as mentors included information such as number of "significant" protégés, the structure of the mentoring relationship, number of years in the mentoring relationships with protégés, the initiation of the mentoring relationship, successful features of the mentoring relationship, advice about the mentoring relationship, and characteristics of the ideal mentor. the mentors' personal life histories as mentors are found in table 3. table 3 personal histories as a mentor indicators doug ray rachel sizemore kelly bond carmen stellar ted vister number of significant protégés 6 30 4 8 20-25 gender of protégé(s) m/f m/f m/f m/f m/f length of relationship (yrs) 12-15 2-20 22-28 5-30 7.5 mentoring initiation mentor both mentor both mentor ideal characteristics of mentor listening listening compassion interested caring emotional intelligence sincere caring patient listen caring the research questions the responses to the research questions were revealed through themes. the data findings for the research questions are displayed in a matrix in table 4. each research question was divided into pre and post women's nirsa membership responses to better reflect the historical aspect of women being mentored during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, followed by the early 1970s to present. table 4 themes for each research question ---------------------------------------------research question one: what were the individual reasons for mentoring women within campus recreation? 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s theme one: struggling times for women in leadership positions theme one: struggling times for women in leadership positions early 1970s to present theme one: helping both female and male students to learn and grow research question two: what organizational factors inhibit or facilitate mentoring women within campus recreation? 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s theme one: barriers to women advancing within campus recreation theme two: mentoring style of the mentor theme three: support for women early 1970s to present theme one: professional development opportunities research question one: what were the individual reasons for mentoring women within campus recreation? 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s the response to research question one, individual reasons for mentoring females in campus recreation, revealed two general themes that were conceptualized during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s when the mentors were protégés. the mentors as protégés utilized their experiences in describing reasons why women needed to be mentored in the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. those two themes consisted of struggling times for women in leadership positions and lack of female leaders. theme one was the mentors describing struggling times for women in leadership positions. the mentors described struggling times for females within campus recreation during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. k. bond (personal communication, august 18, 2003) illustrated the struggling times by explaining how women went through a period which was truly a "pioneering time." this distinctive set of experiences motivated women to mentor other women: i think the names that i've shared with you [referring to her mentors] have been sustained because we went through a period of time that was truly the pioneering time and so it kind of galvanizes a special relationship, and it was natural. . . . i think it is just something that happened because we really lived through a fairly distinctive set of experiences. . . . i think that the distinction gave us a bond that we've continued. . . . mostly i have gravitated to women. and i think it still probably somewhat "cause driven." the advancement of women and their experience in leadership. theme two was the mentors describing the lack of female leaders. the mentors described a male-dominated field where women were not seen as leaders and mentoring was crucial. r. sizemore (personal communication, october 24, 2003) indicated there was a different perspective on mentoring women to help them advance in leadership positions in the late 1950s, 1960s, and/or early 1970s as she illustrates: i do think probably it [mentoring to advance women] was different in the 1950 1960's. seventies i think and that was when i was coming up in the 70's i think by the 70's i don't know that was necessarily an intentional thing but i think it was probably a little bit more of influence than it is now. but today i don't think it [mentoring to advance women] has that much of an impact. but early on i'm sure it probably was. . . . and i think the early women in our profession were there for a reason. i think and i'm guessing probably those early women would say that there was a different feeling. early 1970s to the present one theme was conceptualized in research question one through the experiences of the mentor as a protégé during this era. the theme was helping students to learn and grow and was an excellent example of the protégé experience leading to the development of a mentoring philosophy. the mentors described having the desire to help students regardless if they were male or female. the mentors expressed ideas about how people in this profession need to be committed to working with students. they need to have a genuine interest in helping students develop and mature. k. bond (personal communication, august 18, 2003) mentioned, "you do need to commit the time to try and help influence these kids. you know if you don't, i think you're doomed." k. bond (personal communication, august 18, 2003) proceeded to describe how important it was to give back to the profession, "i think anyone who is going to be in a leadership position you need to give back to the profession. one of the best ways you can do that is being a mentor." research question two: what organizational factors inhibited and/or facilitated mentoring women in campus recreation? 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s the responses to research question two, organizational factors which inhibited and/or facilitated mentoring women in campus recreation, revealed three general themes conceptualized during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s when the mentors were protégés. those three themes consisted of barriers to women advancing within campus recreation, mentoring style of the mentor, and support for women. theme one was the mentors describing barriers women experienced in the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s as organizational factors which inhibited mentoring relationships. more specifically, the barriers in this study included the "old boys network," "lack females in the field due to lack of training and development," and "discrimination." this lack of acceptance in the field was an inhibiting factor to mentoring relationships during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. k. bond (personal communication, october 17, 2003) explained how it was a pioneering time for women because campus recreation was initially male dominated: we [women] had nowhere to go but up because there wasn't a systematic involvement of women. it was a response to male interest for the sport experience not how do we allow for, cultivate, even determine what women wanted out of a recreational sports experience. . . . so i know that initially it [campus recreation] was very gender driven and it was difficult to overcome the obstacles and history of discrimination. although mentors indicated these barriers are not as prevalent today, the mentors indicated they can still inhibit the mentoring relationship. theme two describes how the mentoring style of the mentor can be an organizational factor inhibiting the mentoring relationship. the mentors used their experiences as protégés during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s to conceptualize a mentoring style that was not intimidating but rather was supporting, encouraging, nurturing, guiding, and invested in the potential protégés within their organizations. t. vister (personal communication, october 21, 2003) reiterated the need for a mentoring style which is caring within the organization: i want the department that i work in to create the atmosphere that we care about them and we do. it's not a fake atmosphere at all. it's a caring atmosphere that i want to create. sometimes i don't have the time to do that. and that's frustrating. students look at that as "well he doesn't care." and that's not what i want to create. theme three illustrated the need for organizational support of women in campus recreation especially in the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. bond illustrated the need to show organizational support for women through her experience as a protégé. she indicated support from her boss as a key component for women to advance within campus recreation. k. bond (personal communication, august 18, 2003) described the importance of her boss helping her through difficult challenges in this male-dominated field: my mentor was dedicated to women in leadership. he was the most affirmative of anyone i know, and he was the one that influenced the institution to move in this direction. he influenced our national association [nirsa] to recognize how provincial the thinking was in the terms of women being excluded from membership. according to these participants, the need for support is not specific only to women. support is needed for males as well as females within the organization. early 1970s to the present one theme was conceptualized through the experiences of the mentor as a protégé for research question two. the theme was professional development opportunities, and the mentors spoke more in terms of late 1970s to present when women were a part of the nirsa organization again. during the late 1970s through the 1980s, the mentors illustrated how important it was for females to have professional development opportunities within campus recreation. r. sizemore (personal communication, october 24, 2003) indicated that professional development opportunities in the late 1970s and 1980s were targeted toward women: i think earlier on in the early 1970s maybe even in the 1980s there . . . used to be a women's breakfasts, women's lunches, professional there used to be more working moms, working whatever there used to be a few more things targeted for women and professional development opportunities that were more targeted. finally, the mentors expressed how important it was for the mentors to offer professional development opportunities to their protégés whether they were male or female. these professional development opportunities were geared toward helping the protégés obtain leadership positions regardless of gender. discussion personal life history portraits the average age of the participants was 48 with a combined average of 25 years in the field. the average age of the participants is significant because it indicates the majority of the mentors were active professionals during the late 1950s early 1970s. these were difficult times for women since campus recreation was extremely male-dominated during those years. the years 1950-1975 represented a period of time which was truly pioneering for women in campus recreation. k. bond (personal communication, october 17, 2003) explained her protégé experience was a pioneering time for women because campus recreation was initially male dominated: women had nowhere to go but up because there wasn't a systematic involvement of women. it was a response to male interest for the sport experience, not how do we allow for, cultivate, even determine what women wanted out of a recreational sports experience. . . . so i know that initially campus recreation was very gender driven and it was difficult to overcome the obstacles and history of discrimination. the only national organization for campus recreation professionals, the national intramural association (nia), held its first meeting in 1950 at dillard university. during that meeting only three women were present. in 1959, women were banned from the organization, not returning until 1971. it was not until 1987 that a woman took office as president. up to that point 28 men held the president position within the nia which eventually became the national intramural recreational sports association (nirsa). this was a time when mentoring was especially important for women in the field, but there were limited opportunities. if opportunities for mentoring did occur, they were with male campus recreation administrators. the personal life history portraits and research questions provided valuable information about the perceptions of the mentoring relationship. the personal life history portraits of the mentors showed how their trade of mentoring was conceptualized through their experiences during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. the majority of the mentors in this study were mentored by males. this is understandable since the mentoring experience happened mostly during the late 1950s to the early 1970s and the mentors mentioned a "lack of female leaders" and "struggling times for women in leadership positions." females were banned from the national campus recreation organization (nirsa) and had to survive in a maledominated field with a lack of female mentors. mentors stressed the importance of "support" for women during this time as a factor which facilitated the mentoring relationship. these experiences led to the mentors mentoring both male and female protégés. these mentors indicated the females did not have to be mentored any differently than the males within campus recreation after the early 1970s. the majority of the mentors did not provide gender specific data unless discussing the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. the information revealed significant factors which influenced the willingness to mentor females in campus recreation during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, but not today. this was a significant finding because it contradicted the findings of bower and hums (2003) which clearly established gendered responses for women in campus recreation today. during the 2003 study, women in campus recreation indicated a lack of respect. they were frustrated by needing to continually prove themselves, lack of recognition and support, not being taken seriously, and being mistaken as the "secretary" within the organization. women did not feel like a part of the network. the respondents often felt "left out," as evidenced by comments related to lack of female representation, "the glass ceiling," and the "good old boys network." research questions what are the individual reasons for mentoring females within campus recreation? the themes for research question one included: (a) struggling times for women in leadership positions, (b) lack of female leaders, and (c) helping students learn and grow. first, the mentors as protégés described struggling times for women in leadership positions as an individual reason for mentoring. when talking about struggling times for women, the mentors as protégés were referring to the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s when it was difficult for women to be in campus recreation. as illustrated in the introduction, the late 1950s through the early 1970s were difficult times for women in campus recreation because it was a male-dominated field (varner, 1992). the national intramural recreational sports association (nirsa) organization was formed in 1952 by a group of 17 men and three women (varner, 1992). by 1959 women were banned from organizational membership, only to return ten years later in 1969. during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, campus recreation was a typical maledominated organization (varner, 1992). this supports the literature on women having fewer formal and informal opportunities than men for developing mentoring relationships (kram, 1985). during this time, women in campus recreation did not have opportunities to participate in important projects. often mentors selected protégés partially on the basis of their involvement in such projects (hunt & michael, 1983). thus, the mentors had limited work experience with women, and this supported the "barriers" (old boys network, lack of trained females, and discrimination) to women advancing in campus recreation." second, the mentors described the lack of female leaders in campus recreation during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s as an individual reason for mentoring women in campus recreation during that time. due to the lack of females in leadership positions, the mentors described the importance of mentoring females specifically to help them advance within campus recreation administration. the lack of female leaders equated to a low number of female mentors within campus recreation. women were often denied an opportunity to develop a mentoring relationship with either a female or a male. this may be related to the reasons why there was a lack of female leaders in campus recreation. since there was a lack of mentors for females during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, and mentoring has been linked to professional advancement (kram, 1983, 1985), women in campus recreation were faced with a lack of upward mobility within their organizations. thus, mentors described the lack of female leaders in campus recreation as an individual reason for mentoring during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s; however, the study indicated very few gender related responses when the mentors reflected on the 1980s to the present. this seems unusual considering there is still a lack of females in leadership positions within campus recreation. according to the 2004 nirsa recreational sports directory, only 17% of all nirsa members are female (bower & hums, 2003). this perception also contradicted the study conducted by bower and hums (2003) which illustrated an under-representation of females in leadership positions within campus recreation. this would suggest an even smaller number of women in leadership positions compared to men. it seems the mentors in this study had a different perception on the reality of the current situation for women in campus recreation. although the 2004 nirsa recreational sports directory indicated a lack of female leaders, the majority of mentors in this study believed there currently was equal representation within campus recreation. this may be due to the fact the majority of the mentors were older and experienced the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s where leadership positions for females were scarce. the mentors believed the females have come a long way in campus recreation since the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, and therefore have a perception of women not being underrepresented in the field. finally, the third theme developed as a result of the mentors' protégé experience. the mentors described helping students to learn and grow as an individual reason for mentoring when talking about the early 1970s, 1980s, and today. this theme supports the literature linking the willingness to mentor to altruism (allen et al., 1997; aryee, chay, & chew, 1996). the mentors in this case are mentoring both male and female students, and thus their response to helping students to learn and grow is a motivating factor for them in their job. this is supporting evidence of mentoring being related not only to improving the welfare of others but related to improving the welfare of the self (allen et al., 1997). what organizational factors inhibited or facilitated mentoring females within campus recreation? the themes for research question two included, (a) inhibiting factors and (b) facilitating factors. the first theme, inhibiting factors, included two categories (1) barriers to women advancing within campus recreation and (2) the mentoring style. the first category included the mentors describing barriers to women advancing within campus recreation as an organizational factor which inhibited mentoring relationships during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. this was a time when women were not accepted by their peers within campus recreation. token women were placed in the organizational limelight and faced high levels of performance pressure and stereotypical expectations. this was predominately in the 1950s when women were allowed to attend a business meeting hosted by the national intramural association (nia), and there would be primarily men administrators and one female. k. bond (personal communication, october 17, 2003) explained, "so you were just trotting along your own ground. sometimes the men would make you feel inferior." this increased visibility for the "token" woman within the organization created barriers for women to advance within the organization, such as an "old boys network," lack of training and development to allow additional females in leadership roles, and discrimination. these barriers are illustrated in the research conducted by ragins (1996), which indicated women faced barriers within their organization because supervisors and co-workers disapproved of women working in the field. more specifically, the barriers in this study included the "old boys network," "lack of trained females," and "discrimination." the second category included the mentors describing the mentoring style as an organizational factor which inhibited the mentoring relationship during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. this may be due to the number of males in the profession at the time. males often are associated with an authoritarian style of mentoring which is characterized by competitiveness, assertiveness, and hierarchical control (van engen, leeder, & willemseen, 2001). this type of authoritarian mentoring style may be intimidating to the protégés, especially women, and often leads to conflicts between the superior and the employee. women are associated with transformational or charismatic mentoring styles which are characterized by nurturing and being sensitive to the needs to others (van engen et al., 2001). since there was a lack of female mentors in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, the only mentoring came from men, which may have been predominately authoritarian, thus a factor which inhibited the mentoring relationship for women. although the authoritarian style could carry a negative connotation, the mentors also mentioned it may be necessary to take responsibility for the decision making process in order to control the performance of the employee. in this case the mentor stresses the values of obedience, loyalty, and strict adherence to rules. some employees, regardless of their gender, need this type of style (smither, 1991). the second theme, facilitating factors, included two categories (a) support for women and (b) professional development opportunities. the first category included the mentors describing the need for support for women during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. the mentors described how their mentors guided, encouraged, and supported them. the mentors referred to support from supervisors, co-workers, and others within the organization. if the supervisor had a transformational or charismatic "mentoring style" which was supportive of women, the male co-workers were more likely to also be supportive of women. in some cases, however, male co-workers still created problems for women in the early late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s due to the low acceptance rate of women within this field. research indicates support from others is a precursor to developmental activity (allen et. al, 1997). the present study suggests that perceived support for women within the organization facilitates mentoring. the second category included the mentors describing professional development opportunities for women and men as organizational factors which influenced the mentoring relationship. this is important for both females and males within campus recreation because mentoring is how young professionals become prepared or socialized to accept powerful leadership positions (scanlon, 1997). the mentoring relationship is used frequently in organizations as an informal means of providing employees with guidance on how to develop within their profession (scanlon, 1997). implications this study has several implications for campus recreation professionals. first, the personal life history portraits and the research questions provided valuable information about the perceptions of the mentoring relationship. the personal life history portraits of the mentors showed how their trade of mentoring was conceptualized through their experiences during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. these experiences led to the mentoring philosophy used to mentor both male and female protégés today. these mentors indicated the females did not have to be mentored any differently than the males within campus recreation following the late 1970s. this may be due to the historical event of allowing females to be a part of the nirsa organization again in 1971. second, gender related responses to mentoring females in campus recreation were voiced by the participants more so in terms of the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. during this time period women struggled to enter the campus recreation field. the mentors believed the lack of female leaders was a reason for mentoring women in campus recreation. however, the mentors in this study also believe there is not a shortage of women in leadership positions today. a study by bower and hums (2003) and the 2004 nirsa recreational sports directory would contradict this statement. professionals in this field need to be aware there is still a lack of female representation in leadership positions. without this awareness, women would continue to be stagnant and in possible jeopardy of helping other young women trying to get into the field of campus recreation. therefore campus recreation professionals should more actively seek to initiate mentoring relationships with women entering the field. third, helping the protégé to learn and grow was an individual reason for mentoring both females and males. in order to help the protégé to learn and grow, professional mentors need to be aware that more mistakes are made in the field of campus recreation by students who may not have the developed the skills necessary to do the job right away (bower & hums, in press). while this may require a larger time commitment on the part of professionals in campus recreation, the time commitment is necessary to help students learn and grow. fourth, barriers (old boys network, lack of trained women, and discrimination) were displayed in gendered responses to women advancing within campus recreation during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. this was the time when women were not accepted within the field of campus recreation, and therefore were not rewarded with the same opportunities as men. this lack of acceptance into the field was an inhibiting factor to mentoring relationships during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. although participants indicated they believed the barriers are not as prevalent today, the mentors indicated the barriers can still inhibit the mentoring relationship. finally, organizational support for women was especially needed in the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. today, according to the participants, the need for support is not specific only to women. support is needed for females as well as males within the organization. fifth, mentoring style may be important to consider in the field of campus recreation. the mentors recommended mentoring females and males with a style that was supporting, encouraging, nurturing, and instilled strength and confidence within the protégé. the mentors also recommended awareness of when protégé needs to be taken under control and stressing the values of obedience, loyalty, and strict adherence to rules. sixth, professional development opportunities were important for females and males within campus recreation. since professional development is so important, campus recreation professionals who are mentoring need to be aware of the trends of the various segments in the field. students need to be encouraged to attend professional conferences such as the nirsa national convention, student lead on, state workshops, and/or the annual emsl emerging student leaders conference. future research the study revealed some interesting areas for future research in campus recreation administration. first, this study focused on mentoring as an initiative for improving the representation of women in leadership positions. however, the majority of the mentors in the study believed there currently was equal representation in terms of leadership between females and males in the campus recreation field. since the 2004 nirsa recreational sports directory and a study by bower and hums (2003) would not support such a statement, future research needs to focus on the representation of women in leadership positions within campus recreation. additional research in this area will provide awareness needed to bring the situation into reality. second, this study included four campus recreation directors or associate directors whose experiences as a protégé were predominately in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. a future study needs to focus on campus recreation directors or associate directors with work experience from the early 1970s to the present. will there still be non-gendered responses in terms of factors influencing the willingness to mentor females in campus recreation, or will there be gendered responses? third, this study may be duplicated in other industries such as business, higher education administration, or other segments of the sport industry. did mentoring play a role in helping women to advance in leadership positions within these industries? what were the individual reasons for mentoring females within these industries? what organizational factor inhibited or facilitated mentoring in these industries? all these topics for future research reveal that mentoring in campus recreation can be a complex and rich arena. conclusion the purpose of this study was to examine the historical perspective of mentoring to advance women in leadership positions within campus recreation. the research questions and personal histories of the mentors generated rich data on the mentoring relationship for both females and males in campus recreation. mentoring was a powerful tool for helping some of the female mentors in the study during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s to overcome barriers and become leaders in campus recreation today. the lack of gendered responses during the 1980s, 1990s, and the present contradicted what women voiced in a study by bower and hums (2003). the 2003 study clearly identified gender discrimination such as needing to continually prove themselves, lack of recognition and support, and not being taken seriously, all of which was not a problem for the male population. with the lack of conclusive evidence to support that mentoring helped to advance women within leadership positions within the 1980s, 1990s, and the present, it is hoped that numerous related studies on this topic will be conducted to 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(1983). career patterns of women in nirsa. personnel, 1, 113-124. authors glenna g. bower, ph.d. assistant professor university of southern indiana 8600 university blvd evansville, in 47714 (812)461-5269 (office) (812)461-5273 (fax) gbower@ usi.edu mary a. hums, ph.d. professor 110 hpes/studio arts building university of louisville louisville, ky 40292 (502)852-5908 (office) (502)852-6683 (fax) mhums@ louisville.edu john l. keedy, ph.d. associate professor room 336, education building university of louisville louisville, ky 40292 (502)852-0619 (office) (502)852-4563 (fax) keedy@ louisville.edu copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word sanford_finding_courage_and_confirmation.doc advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 31 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 31-41, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper finding courage and confirmation: resisting impostor feelings through relationships with mentors, romantic partners, and other women in leadership amy aldridge sanford, elaina m. ross, shawna j. blake, and renée l. cambiano amy aldridge sanford: texas a&m university-corpus christi, amy.aldridge.sanford@tamucc.edu elaina m. ross: northeastern state university, rossem@nsuok.edu shawna j. blake: northeastern state university, blakes@nsuok.edu renée l. cambiano: northeastern state university, cambiare@nsuok.edu accepted september 24, 2014 the impostor phenomenon (ip) has recently reappeared in popular culture as a result of the bestseller lean in. ip asserts that many successful people feel like frauds that will be discovered in time. twenty-nine women in leadership were interviewed in this qualitative study, and it was discovered that the majority of them do not have impostor feelings. their confidence can be attributed to strong relationships with mentors, romantic partners, and other women in leadership. keywords: impostor phenomenon, women in leadership, mentoring, lean in, cips introduction the impostor phenomenon, initially labeled in scholarly literature during the 1970s, resurged in popular culture in 2013 as a result of the best selling book lean in. in the book, author sheryl sandberg made the argument that the feminist revolution was stalled and that women needed to simply lean in to get it moving again: “women are hindered by barriers that exist within ourselves…my argument is that getting rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power” (p. 8). feminists called out sandberg for blaming women rather than existing patriarchal structures for the “feminist stall” (see brooks, 2014; dowd, 2013; hewlett, 2013; hooks, 2013; parsons, 2013; turner, 2013). hooks (2013) wrote: “sandberg uses feminist rhetoric as a front to cover her commitment to western cultural imperialism, to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (par. 29). copycat books followed lean in, including the confidence code (2014), which was promoted as a book to help women become more aware of their potential lack of confidence and how to resist it. like sandberg, the authors of the confidence code believed that cultural and institutional barriers were secondary to internal barriers or self-belief. these internal barriers are often referred to as the impostor phenomenon—the feeling that someone will, at some point, discover that you are actually a fraud, unworthy of current position or success. impostor phenomenon impostor phenomenon (ip), also known as impostor syndrome or fraud syndrome, was first coined by researchers clance and imes in 1974 (clance, 1985) and was inspired by an article authored by martina horner that appeared 5 years earlier in psychology today. in the 1969 article, horner discussed the double bind successful women faced: wanting to do well in both school and work to live up to their own expectations, but knowing that success outside the home meant not living up to society’s expectations of women’s traditional roles. clance, a college professor and psychologist with a private practice, had noticed that her own female students and female clients had doubts regarding their success. she and imes, another psychologist, interviewed 150 successful women and came to label this doubt as ip. clance was careful not to label it a syndrome because she was afraid people would just see it as “one more thing wrong with women” (personal communication, june 22, 2014). people who suffer with ip have intense, secret feelings of fraudulence (harvey & katz, 1985) and believe that most people are smarter than they are (kets de vries, 2005). ip victims do not believe they have what it takes to complete important work and are in constant fear of failure (clance, 1985; harvey & katz, 1985). they have to be the very best at advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 32 everything they do (clance, 1985). kumar and jagacinski (2006) found that women, in particular, feel they must outperform others to be competent; it is not good enough just to become better at tasks. sufferers of ip tend to be very capable, yet they look at their success as luck or a result of extremely hard work, personal charm, or knowing the right person. they never attribute the success to their capabilities or intelligence (clance & imes, 1978; li, hughes & thu, 2014). clance (1985) said that the most dominant characteristic of ip victims is their inability to believe compliments. harvey and katz (1985) explained that ip victims believe in one true self, and if the outer behavior (success) and the inner feelings (doubt of ability) don’t match up, they feel that they are being fraudulent. they believe the inner feelings are the truth (harvey & katz, 1985). kets de vries (2005) said it is a rare leader who has not suffered from ip. “all truly competent people know that to a certain extent they’re ‘impostors’” (young, 2011, p. 229). it is estimated that 70 percent of all successful people have experienced ip at some time (matthews & gibbs, 1985). young (2011) said it doesn’t bother a lot of people to know that they may have to fake it until the make it. ip researchers harvey (harvey & katz, 1985), clance (1985), and young (2011) have all written about their personal impostor feelings in their personal lives and careers. ip is not a recognized as a formal psychiatric condition or syndrome (jarrett, 2010) and should not be confused with insecurity or low self-esteem. as harvey and katz (1985) explained, people with ip like to keep it a secret, whereas, people who are insecure often do not keep their insecurity a secret. people with ip often have high self-esteem but feel like impostors in one particular area in their lives (young, 2011). how ip manifests ip victims tend to make very good initial impressions (clance, 1985) and seem remarkably able and accomplished to the outside world (young, 2011). “people with ip do want to be smart, to look smart, and they sometimes feel as if they are. it’s not that the impostor feelings are there all the time” (clance qtd. in jarrett, 2010). the ip feelings diminish with experience, observation, and on-the-job learning (hirschfeld, 1982), but never completely go away for a sufferer (young, 2011). comedian tina fey recognized ip on a continuum in her own life: the beauty of the impostor syndrome [sic] is you vacillate between extreme egomania, and a complete feeling of: “i'm a fraud! oh god, they're on to me! i'm a fraud!” so you just try to ride the egomania when it comes and enjoy it, and then slide through the idea of fraud. seriously, i've just realized that almost everyone is a fraud, so i try not to feel too bad about it. (“tina fey from spoofer to movie stardom,” 2010) vivian schiller, first female ceo of npr, told a reporter: i suffered from impostor syndrome [sic] for a long time. i would get promoted and i would think, don’t they know? what are they thinking? or i’d get a new job and i’d think, god, i’ve fooled them. wait till they find out. it wasn’t with me all the time, but it was a hum in the back of my head. (schiller qtd. in sherr, 2009, par. 33) researchers agreed that ip is most prominent when a person takes on a new job or project (clance, 1985; clance, dingman, reviere, & stober, 1995; harvey & katz, 1985; hirschfeld, 1982; jarrett, 2010; kets de vries, 2005; matthews & clance, 1985; young, 2011). it is during these times of change that people become most visible, often with less support and mentoring than they may have had before (ket de vries, 2005). ip victims need mentors to validate their ability, talent, and intelligence, particularly when starting a new job or taking on a new project. they need a stamp of approval, even if they do not believe the praise when they get it (clance & imes, 1978). clance (1985) described the ip cycle this way: new challenge à acceptance à joy/good feelings à denial of previous success à bad dreams/worry/fear à immobility/procrastination or overpreparation à frenzied work à success à praise à temporary relief. the most susceptible clance and imes (1978) only interviewed women for the study that ultimately coined the term ip. at the time, they believed ip predominantly occurred in women. harvey and katz (1985), who published a book on ip the same year that clance did, believed that ip was first discovered in women as a direct result of consciousness raising that occurred during women’s liberation. they believed that women were willing to examine their feelings in ways that men were not at the time. over the years, many studies have shown that men and women are comparable in their feelings of fraudulance (see cromwell, brown, sanchez-huceles, & adair, 1990; ferrari & thompson, 2006; langford & clance, 1993; matthews & clance, 1985). in fact, topping and kimmel (1985), who surveyed university professors, conducted the only study in which men scored higher on ip feelings than women in the same study. more recent studies have shown that women experienced ip at higher rates than men (see cusak, hughes, and nuhu, 2013; kumar & jagacinski, 2006; li et al., 2014). in 1995, clance et al. said ip is particularly hard for women because they must overcome society’s norms. kets de vries (2005) said that women who have success in a way that is contrary to what they were told about gender roles growing up are especially vulnerable for feeling like frauds. if their mothers stayed home, they often feel guilty for being working mothers. in additional to bucking societal norms, women may be more susceptible to ip than men because they: (a) have been taught to use charm to avoid coming across as unfeminine (harvey & katz, 1985); (b) tend to be other-oriented and do not want to hurt others by being more successful than them (young, 2011); (c) are insecure working in male-dominated corporate cultures (kets de vries, 2005; young, 2011); and (d) dwell on other people’s advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 33 opinions about them (dweck, 2006). matthews and gibbs (1985) said that women’s ip seemed more intense than men’s, and more difficult to modify. young (2011) believed that ip holds women back more than men. it is not just biological sex that causes a person to be susceptible to ip. other vulnerable groups include: (a) people who work in professional fields where the other biological sex dominates (harvey & katz, 1985; young, 2011); (b) people who have attained success very early in their careers, rapidly, and/or at a young age (matthews & clance, 1985); (c) those who are first in the family to achieve success or get a college degree (clance, 1985; clance et al., 1995; harvey & katz, 1985; young, 2011); (d) introverts (clance, 1985); (e) firstborn children (kets de vries, 2005); (f) people in creative fields, such as actors, artists, and musicians (young, 2011); and (g) students, probably as a result of regular high-stakes grading and evaluation (clance, 1985). causes of impostor feelings most researchers agreed that impostor feelings are rooted in early family relationships (clance, 1985; clance & imes, 1978; harvey & katz, 1985; kets de vries, 2005; li et al., 2014; want & kleitman, 2006). “many of our fundamental views about ourselves—and eventually our views about our own competence and our potential for success—began with our families and how our parents and/or siblings saw us and how they conveyed what they saw” (clance, 1985, p. 32). additionally, teachers, coaches, and other significant adults from childhood can also play a role (young, 2011). impostors are more likely to describe their families as unsupportive and emotionally distant. interactions in the family involve overt displays of conflict and anger (bussotti, 1990). imes (qtd. in kaplan, 2009) said that there might have been support for achievement but no validation for feelings within these families, “so they grow up thinking their worth or value is tied only to achievement” (imes qtd. in kaplan, 2009, p. 469). people with ip have a high need to please their families (bussotti, 1990). additionally, they don’t want to lose the affection of their families because they are different or more successful than them (clance, 1985). many people believe ip is related to cultural expectations (“academic culture feeds the impostor phenomenon,” 2005). this is particularly true for women: in addition to their career, work, or academic position, they [women] expect themselves and are expected by society to take on many responsibilities and care for the home and any children, work on their relationships, caretaker for parents and family, etc. they are expected to do well at their jobs and to do everything else. it is all right for them to have careers provided they fulfill all of their other duties first. guilt about the career is a common experience. (clance & o’toole, 1987, p. 54) a study conducted by galinsky et al. (2003) included nearly 2,000 executives (those within two levels of reporting to the ceo) from 10 global companies, including citigroup, ibm, marriott, and procter & gamble. about 60% of the respondents were from the united states. the contrast between men and women was startling: 79% of women were married while 94% of the men were married. seventy-five percent of the men were married to women who stayed home; 74% of the female executives had a spouse who also worked full-time outside the home. women just did not have the support in the home that the men did. with that in mind, it should come as no surprise that more men (54%) than women (43%) had aspirations to join the senior management team and that more men (19%) than women (9%) dreamed of being the ceo one day. impostor naysayers there have been a handful of researchers that have disagreed with the body of research surrounding ip. leary, patton, orlando, and funk (2000) found that research subjects showed signs of ip only when they thought others would know their scores on an intelligence test. the researchers, who doubted the validity of ip, believed that humility was a way to lower other people’s expectations and gain interpersonal benefits with a humble presentation of self. mcelwee and yurak (2007) said that people with ip do not feel like frauds because they do not believe that others view them more positively than they view themselves. basically, they just suffer from low self-esteem. mcelwee and yurak (2010) argued that since everyone in their sample could come up with a recall situation then everyone must experience ip and that it is not unique to anyone in particular. in response to these studies, clance (qtd. in jarrett, 2010) pointed out that they were conducted with convenience samples of college students who may or may not be considered successful. harms there are many harms related to ip, including: (a) reinforcement of the stereotype that women do not want to lead (tarr-whelan, 2009); (b) unrealistic perfectionism (cusak, hughes & nuhu, 2013; imes qtd. in kaplan, 2009; kets de vries, 2005; leung, 2006; thompson, foreman, & martin, 2000); (c) test anxiety (cusak et al., 2013, imes qtd. in kaplan, 2009); (d) self sabotage (cowman & ferrari, 2002; kets de vries, 2005; want & kleitman, 2006); (e) burn out (kets de vries, 2005; leung, 2006; parkman & beard, 2008); (f) fear of questioning the status quo (clance & imes, 1978; clance et al., 1995; parkman & beard, 2008); (g) dissatisfaction with self performance (thompson et al., 2000); (h) procrastination (clance et al., 1995; kets de vries, 2005); (i) inability to make a decision (kets de vries, 2005); (j) tolerating sexual harassment (clance et al., 1995); (k) not reaching full potential (clance & o’toole, 1987); and (l) higher absenteeism and high employee turnover (kets de vries, 2005). surprisingly, there is one advantage to feelings of fraudulence discussed by mcintosh (1985) in a speech referenced in the pages of lean in. it turns out mcintosh had very mixed feelings advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 34 about ip. on one hand, she believed it was deplorable that women have been made to feel fraudulent by internalized value systems in our society. on the other hand, she believed that ip allowed women to deeply refuse feeling good about roles in oppressive hierarchies. we feel fraudulent, i think, partly because we know that usually those who happen to get the high titles and the acclaim and the imagery going with them are not ‘the best and the brightest,’ and we don’t want to pretend to be so either. (mcintosh, 1985, p. 4) treatment for ip most of the ip research comes out of the discipline of psychology, so it should come as no surprise that therapy is recommended for those suffering from ip (clance & o’toole, 1987; langford & clance, 1993; matthews & clance, 1985; topping & kimmel, 1985). in fact, many ip sufferers have depression or anxiety and may need to seek medical help (clance et al., 1995; kaplan, 2009). for less severe cases, kaplan (2009) suggested finding a supportive and understanding mentor and a partner to talk through impostor feelings. mentors can help create confidence (mcintosh, 1985), but it is important for mentors to be aware of the protégé’s ip feelings (leung, 2006). ip victims typically suffer in silence and are often relieved when they find out others suffer from the same feelings of fraudulance (clance, 1985; matthews & clance, 1985). research questions most ip studies have been conducted quantitatively within the field of psychology. the populations tend to be convenience samples of university students. in the spirit of the original research conducted by clance and imes (1978), our study will also employ in-depth qualitative interviewing and the respondents will be women who identify as leaders. we hope to answer two questions: rq1: how do successful women discuss the presence of the impostor phenomenon in their lives? rq2: how do women in leadership resist feelings of fraudulence? research design this project was approved by the institutional review boards represented by the authors and was initially inspired by the best-selling book lean in and the controversial reactions to it. initially, the researchers developed a 96-question likert survey based upon statements made from cover to cover in lean in. (very little attention was paid to ip in the original survey). the instrument was sent electronically to 20 women who had volunteered as mentors for female college students at a midwestern regional university. most of the women were educators, law enforcement officers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and executives. the respondents were asked to complete the survey and send the link to other women within their professional and personal networks. at the end of two weeks, the researchers had 130 completed surveys from across the country. from the women’s responses, it was clear that they disagreed with sandberg or were split amongst themselves in a few key areas: (a) mentoring; (b) parenting; (c) romantic partners; and (d) a collapsed area that was labeled “women in leadership positions.” this fourth area included subareas of ambition, impostor syndrome, likeability, and equality. the three interviewers created a qualitative interview protocol to probe further into these areas. sixty-five of the survey respondents (exactly 50%) agreed to be contacted for qualitative interviews. of those, 61 had working email addresses and 33 women agreed to in-person interviews. in the end, 29 semi-structured interviews were scheduled and conducted either face-to-face or over the phone during the course of nine months. interviews took place until each of the three interviewers felt that she had reached theoretical saturation (the point at which no new themes are emerging and there is enough evidence to support the themes that were generated during the interviews) with her data set. it appears the interview experiences were fairly consistent for the respondents. all interviewers used the same protocol and were in constant communication with each other regarding the interviewing process. the average interview length for each interviewer (51 minutes, 49 minutes, and 49 minutes) was within two minutes of each other. overall, interviews lasted an average of 50 minutes, ranging from 24 to 80 minutes. the ages of the participants ranged from 26 to 79 years, with a mean of 45 years old. the majority of respondents reported their race as white (79%), and the rest of the respondents identified as mixed raced white/american indian (14%) or as american indian (7%). although this is well above the 2% of american indians who make up the nation’s population, this is not an unusual demographic considering that the research originated with 20 participants in a region of the country that has a large american indian population. all qualitative informants were given pseudonyms (see table 1 for more information about each respondent). all interviews were audio recorded and dominant themes were transcribed. the qualitative data was coded using the constant comparative method (see glaser & strauss, 1967). the researchers initially approached the data holistically and took note of the themes that emerged. the themes were generated inductively and were compared and collapsed until the surviving themes offered a problem to explore. as research professor brené brown (2012) pointed out, researchers should not come with a problem or a hypothesis or a literature review when employing grounded research. they should come with a topic and let the participants define the problem. it became clear during the coding and collapsing process that the impostor phenomenon was the dominant theme or problem for the respondents. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 35 table 1: information about the respondents pseudonym job title age ethnicity relationship status dependents length of interview in minutes alex director at a tribe 49 am indian married 2 children—ages 18 and 19 38 alyssa administrative assistant at business management consulting firm 26 white engaged adult brother lives with them from time to time 55 angela judge 45 white married 3 children—ages 10-15 52 ashlee community relations coordinator at a tribe 28 white/am indian long-term relationship none 35 barbara director at a regional university 61 white married 2 children in their 20s & occasionally cares for 2 grandchildren—ages 4-8 55 betty executive assistant at a regional university, retired 79 white married 3 children – in their 50s 45 brittany media coordinator at a regional university 27 white single none 24 cecilia director at a tribe 41 am indian married 4 children—ages 1-18 48 crystal assistant professor at a regional university 39 white divorced; live in 5 children—ages 3-10 57 diane owns a pr firm and is a firearms instructor 42 white single, twice divorced 5 childrenages 6,8,10,19,and 23 54 donna director at a regional university 46 white single; divorced none 52 edna mid-level administrator at a regional university, retired 66 white married 4 adult stepchildren 46 emily vice president of a large pr firm 34 white married 1 child—age 4 55 jennifer coordinator at a regional university 30 white married 2 children—ages 1 and 5 44 jill works at a retreat center 67 white married 2 children, ages 35 and 31 41 advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 36 karen manager at a nonprofit 54 white married caretaker for her aging parents 50 kate director at a regional university 35 white/am indian married 1 child—age 2 54 kathryn owns two health consulting firms 31 white divorced; dating someone for a month none 48 lisa administrator at a regional university 45 white married 4 children—ages 15-25 76 liz attorney at a tribe 36 white/am indian married 1 child—age 10; occasionally cares for 12-year-old niece 59 mary mid management for a national professional association 57 white never married, currently single mother—age 89 45 melissa director at a tribe 35 white/am indian long-term boyfriend; not live in none 80 michelle administrator at community college 46 white dating 2 years 2 children—ages 15 and 16 33 mona executive assistant at a regional university 50 white married 2 children—ages 24 and 27; recently started caring for aging parents 56 rhonda owns a small law firm 35 white married stepson—age 10; two daughters—ages 2 and 1 35 rosie instructor at a regional university 47 white married 2 children, ages 14 and 16 39 stephanie director at a community college 50 white live in 2 children in their 30s; 89 year-old-grandmother lives across the street 58 susan administrator at a regional university 53 white married 1 child—age 30 57 tammy elementary school teacher 40 white married 2 children—ages 14 and 20 46 advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 37 the clance impostor phenomenon scale (cips) allowed for triangulation of the data. the cips is a 20-question, 5-point likert scale developed by clance (1985) and used by researchers to determine whether a person has impostor feelings and to what extent the feelings are experienced (measured as moderate, frequent, or intense). with permission from clance (personal communication, june 22, 2014), we requested that the respondents complete the cips. all 29 interviewees complied. twenty-eight of them experienced impostor feelings at the levels of moderate (66% of the 29 respondents), frequent (24% of the 29 respondents), or intense (7% of the 29 respondents). one respondent had fewer than moderate impostor feelings. (see table 2 for information about each respondent’s cips score). a pearson r was computed to examine the relationship between the cips score and age. there was no relationship between the two variables (r=.008, n=29, p=.969). table 2 scores from the clance impostor phenomenon scale (cips) pseudonym cips category alex 50 moderate alyssa 44 moderate angela 76 frequent ashlee 59 moderate barbara 60 moderate betty 54 moderate brittany 68 frequent cecilia 62 frequent crystal 57 moderate diane 45 moderate donna 71 frequent edna 60 moderate emily 48 moderate jennifer 45 moderate jill 42 moderate karen 53 moderate kate 65 frequent kathryn 57 moderate lisa 83 intense liz 50 moderate mary 47 moderate melissa 39 few michelle 47 moderate mona 65 frequent rhonda 47 moderate rosie 64 frequent stephanie 52 moderate susan 53 moderate tammy 81 intense findings this study attempted to determine how successful women discuss the presence of the impostor phenomenon in their lives and resist feelings of fraudulence associated with ip. the results indicate that many of the participants did not experience ip, or experience it very little in their lives. two major themes were discovered: (a) the lack of presence of ip and (b) how the respondents resist ip through relationships with mentors, other women of leadership, and romantic partners. the themes will be addressed as they relate to the research questions. rq 1: presence of the impostor phenomenon the first research question asked how successful women discuss the presence of the ip in their lives. only about a quarter of our original 130 likert survey respondents agreed with sandberg’s notion that high-achieving women feel like impostors with limited skills or abilities. nearly 60% disagreed or strongly disagreed. the rest were undecided. the researchers were surprised by this response and wanted to explore it further during qualitative interviews. it was only one question in a protocol of more than a dozen questions, but the interviews quickly centered on ip. the respondents had a lot to say. only a small handful of our research participants (angela, rhonda, kate, tammy, and lisa) discussed a constant presence of impostor feelings in their lives. the other participants discussed their current lack of impostor feelings or saw their imposter feelings as something in the past or temporary. imposter feelings. for all participants, impostor feelings originate from (a) lack of experience or youth and (b) not giving herself credit for personal success. kathryn, a successful entrepreneur in her early 30s, felt like an impostor when she attended finance meetings in her 20s. both rhonda and alyssa have avoided mentoring others because they did not feel like they have anything to offer. kate, at 35 years old, constantly feels like she needs 10 more years of experience. tammy, a teacher, admits that she never credits her ability: “i don’t feel like the teacher they write about in my evaluations. i must be such a great actress.” both angela and jennifer said luck has played a significant role in their successes. impostor feelings have hurt the careers of the women interviewed in three fundamental ways: (a) career advancement; (b) self worth; and (c) honest communication with coworkers. career advancement. alyssa, who just started a new job, has no long-term goals and did not negotiate her current salary. brittney, who also just started a new job, says she is always second-guessing herself. angela will not volunteer for leadership positions, even when she feels ready. when liz was named chair of an important committee early in her law career, she referred to it as a curse: “i remember thinking, ‘why did you do this to me?’” both karen and barbara had to be talked into job promotions in the past. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 38 self worth. cecilia, who is in her early 40s, did not realize her self worth until she started at her current job a couple of months before the interview. they sought me out. when they made the offer, i actually turned them down and threw a number out at them, and they jumped on it. and that’s the first time in my life that i’ve ever thought “oh my gosh. what i know is worth something to somebody.” (cecilia) jennifer has a constant nagging feeling that people do not like her: “i have a weird sense of humor and personality and think people think i’m weird.” lisa does not believe she deserves any of the opportunities she has been given: “when i read that book [lean in], i cried during that section. i almost want to cry right now. i think they are going to find me out, that i’m not as good.” honest communication with coworkers. angela, a judge, couches what she says to coworkers because she does not want to be called “bitch” or “cunt.” rhonda, a lawyer, spreads her questions to different coworkers because she does not want to burden anybody with “stupid questions.” mona, an executive assistant, admitted it took her a long time to feel like she could speak up in committee meetings. lack of impostor feelings. most of our 29 respondents believe they earned every opportunity they have been presented. four common characteristics of these women include: (a) confidence; (b) goal setting; (c) seeking out opportunities to serve in leadership positions; and (d) experience. confidence. emily, a corporate vice president, has felt like a woman in leadership since birth. she has never felt like an impostor, even when she first began in her industry. when kathryn was in her 20s, she quit her job and went to italy for a while. quitting what you’re doing when you’re on your upper trajectory to focus on what you really want in life in your 20s is a fairly risky move… i just have a pretty unwavering belief that it’s all going to work out and that it’s all going to be okay. (kathryn) crystal, a college professor, said that her friends look up to her and that she is a good role model for her students. she made it clear that she does not believe that she has gotten all the honors and awards she deserves. jill currently fills multiple positions for a non-profit, and felt that if she got a promotion or award she was ready for it. susan described her current position as “a natural fit” because she has the credentials and experience. melissa feels that she has earned the respect of her employees and coworkers and does not understand why women have to be told to lean in. goal setting. the respondents who lack ip have very clear goals and can articulate those goals, no matter how far out they may seem. crystal did not hesitate when she shared her goals of opening up an organic restaurant and/or running for political office. kathryn plans to start focusing more on management of her consulting businesses and less on operations. michelle’s goal is to be a vice president at a university or college within the next couple of years. stephanie wants to use her leadership skills in lgbt communities in the coming years. seeking out opportunities. many of the women admitted to stepping up when things needed to get done. edna, a recently retired college professor, has filed to be the president of her state professional association. rosie calls herself a takecharge kind of person. it allows her to prove herself. diane has successfully reinvented her career in public relations to allow for more time with her children after her divorce; she also holds positions in numerous statewide associations related to her field. she credits her successes to “working her rear off.” experience. kathryn has not had any ip feelings in six or seven years. as she has conquered more projects, she has gained more confidence in her abilities. cecilia feels like she has gained more credibility with age. rosie figured all of her colleagues knew more than she did when she started teaching, but her experience over the years taught her that is not true. liz realized as time passed at her job that she could succeed at a difficult tasks even when she did not feel ready. rq2: resisting feelings of fraudulence the second research question ponders fraudulence and how women in leadership resist those feelings. the respondents in this study resisted their ip by turning to mentors, other women in leadership, and romantic partners. within these relationships, our participants found (a) courage to try new things and (b) confirmation or comfort. romantic relationships, in particular, have a large influence on impostor feelings. courage. participants drew courage from mentors and romantic partners. there was very little discussion about courage from other women in leadership; it most often was drawn from relationships with mentors. kathryn believes that a mentor shaved 10-11 years off her career as a result of the opportunities he gave her. michelle, a university administrator, got her first break in administration when her former chair asked her to apply for the department chair position. a mentor in tammy’s graduate program persuaded her to apply for a phd program. barbara’s first manager would discuss leadership books with her, send her to leadership workshops and offered her the opportunity to chair committees. “as you look back on it, you see people who have kind of guided you” (barbara). jill felt that her mentors “pushed me to do more that i was ready for, always with a good result.” rhonda, who went to law school while she worked as a police officer, has always felt encouraged by her romantic partner to go after opportunities. he gives her confidence. stephanie’s partner urged her to pursue a nursing degree. when they met, stephanie was driving a delivery truck. when cecilia was unhappy at her job, her husband inspired her to take a new job and gave her permission to risk failure. ashlee is unhappy in advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 39 her current job and her partner is always telling her to find something else. michelle’s partner helps her think of ways to reach her goals. confirmation or comfort. mentors, other women in leadership, and romantic partners all provided confirmation and comfort for our participants. mentors often help the women where they feel they have knowledge gaps. melissa’s former boss helped her understand that she did not need to know everything when she first started her job. kathryn has two mentors with whom she speaks nearly every day. they help her in areas in which she feels weak. rhonda has a fellow lawyer who acts as a mentor to teach her things she did not learn in law school. karen appreciates it when a mentor assures her that she can do something and believes in her. brittany often second guesses herself and looks to her mom and a former professor to assure her that she is making the right decisions. susan appreciates when her mentors take the time to not only suggest changes to her but also explain their thought processes in offering the suggestion. many of our respondents found confirmation or comfort from other women in leadership. karen and donna both made comments about how successful women recognize success in each other and look to one another for guidance and support. susan, a college administrator, finds it helpful to talk to other women in her profession because they understand the challenges. five women took rosie under their wings when she started her job and they continue to check in on her. mary works in an organization where the women will often get together for dinner. melissa will only surround herself with women who are positive to each other. the informants also found confirmation and comfort at home from their romantic partners. melissa, kathryn, and alex all look to their partners for serious career advice. alex’s husband has been very successful at business and understands the amount of the work required for alex to be successful in her career. cecilia’s husband brags about her accomplishments, and betty, who is 79 years old, says her spouse has always been appreciative of her work inside and outside of the home. tammy believes that if it were not for her mentors and her husband that she would have never gone to graduate school. the importance of romantic partners. it became very clear during the interviews that positive romantic relationships really helped resist impostor feelings for our respondents. in addition to courage, confirmation, and comfort, there were three other positive attributes that the women discussed when it came to their successful romantic relationships: (a) partners that share house responsibilities; (b) partners who were not intimidated or jealous of success; and (c) partners who had an understanding of career expectations. the women had far more expectations for their romantic partners than they did for mentors or other women in leadership. analysis most of our 29 interview respondents do not live with a constant presence of impostor feelings. it is something they did not talk about at all or discussed in the past tense during the interviews. the women that did admit to ip talked about their low self worth and the inability to give themselves credit for a job well done. young (2011) claimed that people with ip often have high self esteem, but that was not our experience in this study. clance and imes (1978) and li, hughes, and thu (2014) also found that ip sufferers never attribute their success to their capabilities and intelligence. on the other hand, the interviewees in our study who lacked ip made no apologies for their confidence. the ip sufferers also felt like they lacked experience or age. as mentioned earlier in the literature review, it is well documented that people are most susceptible to feelings of ip when they are taking on a new challenge, such as a new job, a promotion, a project, or an academic degree (see clance, 1985; clance, dingman, reviere, & stober, 1995; harvey & katz, 1985; hirschfeld, 1982; jarrett, 2010; kets de vries, 2005; matthews & clance, 1985; young, 2011). the women in our study who lacked ip admitted that experience helped them gain confidence. hirschfeld (1982) believed that ip feelings diminish with experience, observation, and on-the-job learning. young (2011) said that the ip feelings never go away. it seems that many of our respondents would disagree with young. clance and imes (1978) found in the very first empirical study regarding ip that sufferers need validation of their abilities, talents, and intelligence in order to combat feelings of fraudulence. in a 2009 magazine article, kaplan suggested ip sufferers should talk through their feelings with supportive and understanding mentors, partners, and friends. the advice was in a small box on the last page of the article, but our research suggests that perhaps that advice should be more prominent. the respondents in this study resisted fraudulence through their relationships with mentors, other women in leadership, and romantic partners. these are the people who give them courage, comfort, and confirmation. not surprisingly, the scholars in the discipline of psychology (where most of the ip research has been conducted) have focused on the intrapersonal aspects of the phenomenon and the early familial relationships that could have caused the fraudulent feelings. they have often prescribed counseling as the way to combat ip. this research suggests that perhaps healthy relationships with mentors, other women in leadership, and romantic partners could also help resist feelings of professional fraudulence. when looking at the respondents’ cips scores, the nine women who scored “frequent” or “intense” for impostor feelings become explainable in light of this analysis combined with previous research done in the field of psychology. three of the women are starting new jobs and one of them is starting a phd program. it is well documented that new challenges cause ip feelings (see clance, 1985). the other women have problems in their relationships. lisa, who scored “intense,” is in a maleadvancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 40 dominated field and has had negative experiences with male mentors. donna, who is divorced, does not currently have the support of a romantic partner. angela is married, but during her interview, she never shared anything that made it sound like her husband offers her courage, comfort, or confirmation. neither rose nor mona talked much about female support in their lives. researchers (see clance, 1985 and matthews & clance, 1985) have pointed out how relieved women are when they find out that other women suffer from impostor feelings. after mona took the cips, she sent this email to the first author: “interesting survey. i was surprised at my answers and didn't know other women felt the same way.” she might have known if she had relationships with women in leadership. limitations & future research in this research design, the phrasing of the initial online survey was ambiguous. for example, the question about ip was phrased: “high achieving women can’t seem to shake the sense that they will be found out for who they really are— imposters with limited skills or abilities.” the participants could interpret the question to be about women in general or the participant’s experiences specifically. this vagueness in phrasing could make the survey impersonal to the participants. additionally, the study’s initial focus was on women in leadership positions and their reaction to lean in, and did not focus specifically on the ip until qualitative interviews were conducted. this lack of initial focus could limit the depth of information regarding ip from participants. in this study, there was a reliance on recall data regarding relationships with mentors, romantic partners, and women in leadership. in the future, it could be fruitful to capture dialogue in real time between the women in leadership and members of their support team. an additional artifact for triangulation could be journals kept by the informants and/or her mentors, romantic partners, other women in leaderships, and/or members of the families of origin. future research could focus more on communication in families of origin and the development of ip feelings. there is a plethora of psychological research that indicates its importance, but there is a gap in communication research. respondents in this study did not mention members of the their families of origin, but there were also no prompts in the survey or interview protocols. expanding on their importance could be another insightful clue to the development of ip. additionally, the women in our study that did not have ip feelings also had the ability to set clear goals and to seek out leadership opportunities—two characteristics that lead to career advancement. the women in our study with impostor feelings had a history of struggling with job promotions and communicating honestly with coworkers. none of these ideas have been thoroughly explored in the ip literature but lend well to the areas of organizational communication, leadership communication, and interpersonal communication. conclusion it was discovered from this research that the majority of the 29 women in this study do not experience ip (aka internal barriers) as frequently as one might think after reading lean in. the implications indicate that a woman who is feeling like an impostor in her work environment should seek out a supportive mentor, romantic partner, and/or other women in leadership to talk through her feelings. these relationships can help her gain confidence, set goals, seek opportunities, and gain experience. the resurgence of ip in popular literature through sandberg’s lean in has allowed a new generation to realize they are not alone in their fraudulent feelings. hopefully, this resurgence will only continue to grow until women 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(2011) the secret thoughts of successful women: why capable people suffer from the impostor syndrome and how to thrive in spite of it. new york: random house. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership when women educators are commuters in commuter marriages sandy harris, ph.d. sandra lowery, ph.d. michael arnold, ph.d. harris, lowery, arnold, winter, 2002 "how difficult for [women], then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives." (anne morrow lindbergh, gifts from the sea in exley, 1996). she put down the telephone and shouted with glee! the dream job she had always wanted was hers. just 40, with a new ph.d. degree hanging on her wall, she was now officially a university professor. the new job was located 3 l/2 hours away from her home and she and her husband who owned a small business had already discussed how she would rent a small apartment and work there four days out of the week and drive back to their home for a long weekend each week. he had already committed to going to all of their oldest son's soccer games since, as a senior, this was his last year to play soccer before going away to university. their middle schooler was oblivious to just about everything, but she knew her husband's job allowed him to be flexible enough to be around when he was needed. this was may 20. on july 8, she arrived at the university, unpacked in the small, furnished apartment, and went to her new office. she had a great week teaching. on friday, she drove home to be with her family. the second week of summer school, her middle school-aged son, rode back with her, because he had missed her, and stayed with her that week in her apartment. on the weekend, they drove the 3 l/2 hours http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html back home. she spent the weekend running errands. the refrigerator was empty, the washing had not been done, and the house was a mess. when she left the house to make the 3 l/2 hour drive to her new "dream" job for the last week of summer school, she was crying. her husband, who had been so supportive, at first, was definitely not happy that things were not running very smoothly at home. she had not realized how stressed her oldest son was about starting his senior year, until his soccer coach had called her about some problems they were trying to work out. she finished that last week of summer school. on friday, she turned the key of her new apartment in to the leasing office. she put the key to her university office in an envelope with a letter of resignation. she drove home and never returned. she just could'‚t make it work. this scenario is not fiction. it happened and continues to happen frequently in america today as women, caught in the double bind of needing to work for family finances and wanting to enter satisfying professional positions, are caught between family and career conflicts; they are prepared but unable to practice their profession. what can they do? sometimes they wait, sometimes they do something else, and, increasingly, today, they commute. in order to understand the growing phenomenon of women who commute, this paper reviews some of the changing concepts regarding male and female roles within marriage and then explores what the literature says about career development of women and the impact of immobility. the purpose of this study is to explore the concept of commuting when women live away from home to work in another community for career purposes. why do they do this? what kind of problems occur? what suggestions would these women give to others who might be contemplating such a move? marriage: then and now "just don‚t give up trying to do what you really want to do." (ella fitzgerald in eisen, 1995, 33). recently, a study of l7 western nations, indicated that married persons reported a significantly higher level of happiness than those who were unmarried. additionally, a good marriage appears to benefit children both financially and emotionally (coontz, 2000). until the early 1800s, most married couples worked together in farming or in small household businesses. at about this same time a wage-labor system supplanted widespread self-employment and more work began to be conducted in workplaces away from the farm and the home. men began to work in these jobs and household work and child care became the domain of the wives. while poor women continued to work outside the home, other groups were likely to quit paid work after marriage (2000). during the l920s, an increasing number of office jobs in a much more urban economy drew many women into the work force. in the great depression of the 1930s and during world war ii, women of all but the wealthiest families once again began to work outside the home. after l970, the fastest growing group of female workers were mothers of young children and by the l990s, over 55% of working mothers went back to work before their child was even a year old (u.s. bureau of the census, 1998). today, in the 21st century, most marriages, even with children, have a husband and a wife who work outside the home. nearly thirty years ago, pleck (1977) reported that men did only about one-third of the work around the home as compared to a full-time working wife. still, three decades later, women continue to be more responsible for most of the housework and childcare than men (coontz, 2000). just as women's roles are changing by entering the work force, research on how marriage has changed focuses on the importance of the emotional side of marital relationships, and the importance of sharing that is necessary to nourish marriages (sollie, 2000). the changing state of marriage is leading to an emerging type of marital relationship called peer marriage. in peer marriages husbands and wives share in all aspects of their lives. consequently, in some marriages the roles of men and women are becoming increasingly more alike (2000). in fact, much of this research indicates that husbands who are accepting of their wives‚ influence within the marriage and who are able to remain "emotionally connected" have more stable marriages (p. 45). one of the influences of these types of marital relationships appears to be that of creating an environment that encourages women and men to seek satisfying careers. as more and more couples are willing to go the distance for "both love and career" literally, as well as figuratively, there is a growing number of couples who commute long distances to work (anderson & spruill, 1993; carter, 1992; gerstel & gross, 1982). women's career development "it's very important to define success for yourself. if you really want to reach for the brass ring, just remember that there are sacrifices that go along." (cathleen black in eisen, 1995, p. 184). research suggests that most women will work in jobs that are important to them outside the home at some time as adults (miller, 1986). in fact, miller (l984) found that 87% of women surveyed obtained feelings of personal accomplishments from their work, and 58% actually preferred working outside the home. traditionally, males and females perceive career paths differently. men consider work as a way to earn money and this influences their career decisions. women, on the other hand, see work more in terms of personal satisfaction. even though women plan careers, they continue to factor inequality into their futures by assuming they will move in and out of the workforce due to family responsibilities (machung, 1989; orenstein, 2000). sequencing. family demands have had the greatest influence on women‚s career patterns by causing women to move in and out of the work force based on family needs. jamieson (1995) refers to this as "sequencing" (p. 64). while some believe that education, family, and work can occur harmoniously in one's lifetime, others believe that sequencing is harmful to careers, because women ultimately have less professional experience than men of the same age. for example, the years between age 25 and 35 are critical for lawyers to become partners in firms, for academics to earn tenure, and for other workers to learn skills that will result in high earnings. even twenty years ago, this was also the time when women were most likely to have children and leave the work force (thurow, 1984) . prior to 1978, sequencing was often forced on many women. a national educational association study in 1930-31 found that 77% of districts surveyed would not hire married women and 63% dismissed female teachers if they got married. further, as recently as 1974, the courts were considering school policies in some districts that required pregnant teachers to leave the classroom as early as the fourth month of pregnancy "to spare children the sight of pregnant women" (jamieson, 1995, p. 66). in fact, even in the early l980's, studies indicated that career advancement for women in professions often caused women to limit family size (holt, 1981), while male university professionals, for example, were l8% more apt to have three or more children than were women at this same level (ezrati, l983). still, in the l990's, 50% of university level women remain childless (hensel, 1991). another example of the sequencing effect of family on career moves was pointed out in a study by lowery and harris (2000) when prospective female superintendents were advised by other women to "make sure your children are out of elementary school" before applying for superintendency positions. additionally, research suggests that a husband's support may exert a powerful effect on women who become superintendents, and, even, to a lesser degree, influencing if they succeed in it (ramsey, 1997). cultural stereotyping. twenty years ago, miller (1984) wrote about culturally related stereotyping of appropriate occupations for women and their influence on women‚s career patterns. women were influenced in career decisions by career role models. for example, daughters of working mothers tended to have a higher career orientation than daughters of mothers who did not work outside the home. the lack of women in some career fields contributed to the high number of women who still chose traditionally female occupations, such as teaching or nursing. even barnett (1971) observed in the l970's that whereas men selected careers based on interests and aptitudes, women tended to make career decisions based on their own goals, the influence of significant others, and when no goals were present, they made choices at the last minute. the struggle for women to gain leadership positions continues in the year 2000. for example, in education, there are more elementary school principals (39.7%) than high school principals (12.1%). furthermore, only ten percent of female school administrators reached the level of school superintendent in the l990's (natale, 1992) a number which has only risen to thirteen percent by the late l990's (glass, bjork, & brunner, 2000). yet, 65 percent of teachers are women (shakeshaft, 1999). clearly, culturally related stereotyping still occurs as "women are still battling the same myths they did years ago" (grady, lacost, wendel, & krumm, p. 83) . traditional perceptions of women. "the suspected witch was submerged in a pond. if she drowned, she deserved to; if she didn‚t she was a witch. in the first case, god was revealing her nature; in the second, the devil." (spee, 1632). the traditional public perception of femininity and competence or a woman's ability to be both "tough and caring" has also had an effect on women's career development (jamieson, 1995, p. 120). consequently, women frequently must have more credentials than male counterparts, be better prepared and have more knowledge (1995). assertiveness is a valued male characteristic, but not in women (morgan, 1993). there are concerns that women might not be able to do discipline, do the budget, or be tough enough (tallerico, 2000). in fact, if a woman is unsuccessful in being a school superintendent, the school board is unlikely to hire another woman, as though it was her gender that contributed to her failure (lowery & harris, 2000). today, however, successful women in leadership roles are changing many of these perceptions and the work force is beginning to view women in different roles as competent and able (jamieson, 1995). career gaps may be closing. "it is never too late to be what you might have been." (george eliot in eisen, 1995, p. l8). by 1991, both women and men were earning high school diplomas in equal numbers. at the same time, nearly the same numbers of men and women were finishing between one to three years of college. also, the number of white women and men who had completed four or more years of college was becoming more equal. at the same time, the income gap that separated college educated men and women was also closing somewhat, from women making 35% less than men in l986, to 31% in l991 (phelps & winternitz, 1992). perhaps, this suggests a trend that within the next few years, women will be more equally represented in a variety of roles that were previously held only by men. psychologists assert that when there are less than 15 to 25% of women in management, women are at highest risk of being appraised in stereotypical fashion. now, that more women are ready to move into upper management opportunities, perhaps the evaluative norms will change and managers will be viewed as managers, not as women managers (jamieson, 1995). despite the indications that there are cracks in the glass ceiling, there are still many subtle reasons that prevent women from advancing in many professions (watkins, herrin, & mcdonald, 1998). historically, a major barrier for women in advancing career goals is that of geographic immobility (ezrati, 1983; johnstonanumonwo,1992; ramsey, 1997). rarely does a married woman have the opportunity of relocating for job advancement. while 90 percent of women reported that relocating was not even a consideration unless husbands found jobs, 75 percent of men would consider relocating if they found a better job regardless of whether or not their spouse found employment (ezrati, 1983). in 1982, gerstel and gross reported that the husband's job was usually viewed as more important than the wife's job. even today, university of connecticut geographer, thomas cooke (smith, 2000) refers to the "trailing wife" phenomenon when he asserts that, "even when wives have higher-status jobs, the direction of migration is to help the husbands" (p. 1h). this is even more pronounced when children are involved, causing ezrati (1983) to suggest even twenty years ago that society actually "discourages family change for the sake of a wife's career" (p. 107). however, on the other hand even twenty years ago, a national study of university women administrators indicated that 78% would move more than 50 miles from their current location for job advancement purposes (curby, 1980). another study indicated that being married is not a barrier for the majority of university women, because only 44% are married, whereas 88% of male administrators are married (moore, 1983). in fact, during the 70's, university women were more mobile than their male counterparts and this was prior to major affirmative action efforts of the government (sagaria, 1988). commuter marriages. "it is ridiculous to take on a man's job just in order to be able to say that a woman has done it yah!‚ the only decent reason for tackling a job is that it is your job, and you want to do it." (dorothy sayers in eisen, 1995, p. 20). some couples demonstrate that traditional concepts of male and female roles are changing within the family by making decisions, such as that of tamar schapiro and dmitri petrov. this young university couple, in describing their recent job search, pointed out that "neither one was willing to take even a terrific job if the other one had to suffer professionally as a result" (leatherman, 2000, p. a14). other couples, such as theodore bromund and, shilpa raval, reflect the inherent nature of sacrifice when career goals conflict with job locations. "what it‚s probably going to come down to is one or both of us making a career sacrifice" (wilson, 2000, p. a18). however, as the rise of workplace demands (carter, 1992) and marriage relationships become more equal (sollie, 2000) a new phenomenon is occurring commuter marriages. it is estimated today that anywhere from 600,000 to 1 million couples are living apart much of the work week and commuting to jobs in different cities (carter, 1992; maines, 1993). dr. alvin poussaint of harvard medical school defined commuter marriages as "two people going back and forth rather frequently, maintaining relationships, seeing each other when they can, and staying in close telephone contact because they‚re not living together in the same city" (carter, 1992, p. 247). in fact, the typical commuter is well-educated, a professional, possibly in academics, a mean age of late thirties, and has been married for at least nine years. only 40-50% have children (anderson & spruill, 1993). why do people commute? certainly there are several reasons why married couples choose to live in different communities when they work. many are forced to do so because of employment trends. the average worker today will probably change careers or employers, at least, four or five times over the span of a career. sociologists feel that this will only increase the trend toward commuter marriages because relocation costs are very expensive, reaching $15 billion in 1992 (carter, 1992). many corporations help a relocated employee's spouse find a job, but more and more, "trailing wives" are likely to have satisfying jobs and do not want to leave their jobs (maines, 1993, p. 47). thus, the opportunity to pursue satisfying careers and increased potential of realizing professional success, play a major role in couples making this decision. commuting is just "a price they pay for satisfying careers" (p. 47). the good, the bad, the ugly of commuting. the greatest benefit for wives in commuting is the opportunity for career mobility. this allows them to concentrate as fully on work as they need. additionally, couples discovered an enhanced sense of competence regarding domestic duties that had previously been gender defined (gerstel & gross, 1982). however, these gains do not come without a price. one of the stresses of commuting mentioned by couples includes the issue of being alone. couples who commute note that they miss just being together. relationships with family and friends are sometimes altered due to cultural understandings of marriage in america and our "couple" society (1982). stress also appears to focus around attempting to balance career and family life. although, barbara bunker, state university new york, buffalo, has researched the phenomenon of commuter marriages and found that couples who commute do not suffer from higher levels of stress than other married couples because commuters are well-educated professionals and they have fewer dependent children (maines, 1993). mary and george garcia, agreed that "as soon as one of them got a job [as superintendents], they would move together...once there, the other would begin a local job hunt" (pardini, 2000). despite this agreement, they were offered jobs on the same day that were 400 miles apart. thus, they began several years of commuter marriage. their five children were grown, so they bought a house in one location and rented an apartment in the other location. they purchased two of everything "and for nine years they took turns commuting on weekends" (p. 46). they had fun, but it was expensive and they are glad to be living and working in the same town today. brett mcquade and his wife, katie, have been commuting for most of their four year marriage (franklin & ramage, 1999). they are well compensated, love their jobs and are committed to the marriage, but now that they are expecting their first baby, they are re-evaluating the decision to commute. linda stroh, a university professor, and her husband have been in a commuter marriage for five years. stroh has found that "commuters are able to compartmentalize your work and family life" (p. 56). the rasleys chose to commute because when george took a job in virginia, his new job did not include health benefits. so, nancy stayed in florida with her teaching job. two years into a commuting marriage, their daughter is still not at all interested in moving. george finds his job professionally satisfying, but he regrets missing special activities with his daughter (1999). spencer and lela have three children and they have been married for l0 years. when spencer was offered a promotion with a big raise, he accepted and moved several hours from their home. not wanting to take the children out of school, lela stayed behind. during this time she learned that she had "strengths that i never gave myself credit for" (carter, 1992). waltina and kevin have been in a commuter relationship for the past five years. her job required that she travel 95% of the time. kevin says that the idea of commuter marriages is a sign of the times and that just because individuals are not in the traditional right place at the right time, they still need to take advantage of economic and professional opportunities (1992). seifert (2000) described complications of a long-distance marriage when after twenty years of marriage he and his wife took jobs in different parts of the state. among the difficulties they experienced: two housing costs, double bills for electricity and other utilities, dual bank accounts, two family doctors, and increased transportation costs as they traveled back and forth to visit one another. a strategy recommended to create a successful commuter marriage was the ability and willingness of the husband to "modify his male role by taking on some traditional female roles" (p. 216). however, after two years, this couple decided to search for positions where they would have their "lives back together" (p. 218). the study while the estimated number of commuter marriages ranges from 600,000 to 1 million, traditionally, it is the male who commutes. however, today businesses indicate that 8 to l0 per cent of their transfers are offered to women (anderson & spruill, 1993). therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the idea of commuter marriages when women educators are the commuters and the effect this has on the lives of these women and their families. population. at university conferences and other professional meetings, women were identified who were commuters in a commuter marriage. they were invited to participate in this study and then surveys were mailed to them. fifteen women who were successful in their career fields participated in this survey. six were superintendents and nine were university professors. the respondents lived in different areas of the united state including texas, california, nebraska, nevada, massachusetts, and other states. eleven of the respondents had been married at least 21 years. all fifteen held advanced degrees. data collection. a survey was designed to explore the perceptions of married women in education who were commuting. survey questions asked why they chose to commute, the effect of commuting on their professional experiences and personal experiences. additionally, participants were asked to share their advice for others who might choose to be involved in a commuter situation in the future. the questionnaire was designed by two professors working in different universities. two other professors reviewed the survey and suggested revisions for better understanding and clarity of questions. twelve of the fifteen respondents gave permission on their returned surveys for the researchers to contact them by telephone or e-mail for additional information if it was needed. data analysis. responses were read by three university professors. primary meanings were formulated from the open-ended statements of the respondents. these meanings were then organized into emerging themes. this focus on the "subjects' points of view" allowed this phenomenological study to describe behaviors of this group from the group's point of view (dooley, 2001, p. 251). findings. because participants frequently responded with more than one answer percentages will not always equal l00%. what is/was the main reason you chose to live apart from your spouse/family? question one had a variety of different responses, including needing time to plan and the financial gain involved. however, eleven of the fifteen women (83%) indicated that it was the career opportunity available to them that caused them to be living and working apart from the family. in what ways did your spouse/family aid in the decision making process? the second question was concerned with the decision making process. answers fell into two categories: support (33%) and discussion (80%). types of support that aided in the decision process were helping with finances, offering moral support, and sharing tasks. overwhelmingly (12/15), most families discussed this possible move about whether or not the woman should begin a commuting job in great detail. two women commented that after all the discussion, "my husband gave me permission to do this." one university professor commented, "oh, i‚ve had a well-planned career. i taught wherever my husband was in medical school, internship, and medical practice." what professional problems have/did you experience? while there was no overwhelming agreement for the third question, it was interesting to note that four women indicated there had been no problems at all. four other women commented on the isolation of living in another area without family. other comments were that it was hard to work out of two offices, it was difficult to establish one's own identity by living in "just a work setting," and that it was difficult to make professional connections "especially with males, because i am an enigma to them." one commuting university professor described this by saying, "i'm just an oddity. in my small town, i'm frequently asked, why don‚t you just teach here locally at the high school?" what personal problems have/did you experience? when women commuters were asked to discuss personal problems that they experienced they focused on family issues and general inconveniences. thirteen (87%) responses centered around the family, such as missing their spouse or children ("i suffer mommy guilt") and being lonely. comments were poignant as women found themselves in this non-traditional setting and tried to deal with sometimes conflicting feelings, "it makes the heart grow fonder and more independent." one superintendent working on her doctorate was asked, "what are you going to do with it when you get it the nearest university is nearly an hour's drive from here." other comments reflected the general inconvenience of traveling back and forth, car problems, poor diet, forgetting to pack everything that was needed and the problems created from having to keep up two residences. three women commented on the high cost of being a commuter which led one family „to sell the family home. in trying to address these problems all 15 respondents indicated that they made daily phone calls, purchased phone cards, learned how to use e-mail and "never forgot my cell phone." what were the positive aspects of this situation? overwhelmingly, women identified professional issues as the most positive aspects of being a commuting wife. fifteen responses resonated with professional goals and "desires" being met through this opportunity. eight women mentioned the opportunity to "saturate" or "immerse" themselves during the week with "my work." only two responses in this category mentioned family issues. one woman indicated that she grew closer with her husband during this time and another found it to have been a good transition for her daughter who would soon be going away to college. what suggestions would you give a person currently experiencing a commuter marriage, or someone considering this type of arrangement? an interesting phenomenon occurred in this last question. every suggestion focused in some way on the family. responses given included: include all family members in the decision process. decide at the beginning if this is transitional or long term. include goals for the future of your family. be sure to have mutual trust because "if fidelity is in question, don't do it." recognize potential risks to your relationships. be sure to have your spouse's support make special time to be together; meet often; take long vacations. share tasks to reduce stress. establish clear boundaries at work and at home. recognize there will be added financial costs to your family. this was mentioned in 5 of the responses finally, six of the women gave one additional piece of advice to other women considering making a career change that would take them out of their home and place them working in another community and commuting to be with their families, "you can do it!!" discussion while this is not a large population from which to draw, the consistency of themes that emerged from this study indicates that when women educators are the commuters in commuter marriages the issues for the women are consistent with the literature. one can infer that many of these women were involved in marriages that were moving toward the non-traditional "peer marriage" (sollie, 2000) and had spouses who, in focusing on the importance of the emotional side of marital relationships, recognized the importance of women having satisfaction in their jobs and career opportunities. however, regardless of how forward-thinking a spouse might be, the conflict inherent in this decision was obvious. this was evidenced in the many responses that focused on family issues as they gave advice to others who might be considering this arrangement regarding trust, needing to communicate often, and becoming more independent. it was clear that for the women in this study, the husband still played a major role in whether or not a woman could do this, and further, if she did, how successful she would be. sequencing (jamieson, 1995) also appeared to play a major role in the decisions these women made regarding their job commutes. while a limitation of the study was that it did not ask for the age of children still living at home, the general age of the women, 46 years or older, indicated that, in most cases, children were either grown, or at least out of elementary school. several women commented about their high school age children. but, even then, there were references to "missing out on my children's games" and general guilt feelings of not being home and available for their children. for those women whose children were grown, this was a time when it was finally possible to seize a particular career opportunity. there is a paucity of information regarding commuter marriages and how this effects both men and women. while this explorative study has provided some information about the effect on women educators‚ careers and marriages, it is just a beginning. when considering the woman in the scenario at the beginning of this paper, perhaps, her marriage was still too traditional, perhaps her children were just too young, perhaps she was too young. obviously, the timing just was not right for her. we can only hope that, for her, there will be another chance for that career opportunity to come along and that when it does, she will have the freedom to accept it. the overwhelming responses in this study of career satisfaction, despite the risks involved, despite missing family members, and despite the inconveniences caused by constant travel, indicate that commuting to achieve job satisfaction might be worth the effort. one woman said, "this is the best job i've ever had. i love it!" the theme of having a great career opportunity and having the freedom to accept it resonated with depths of feeling that extended beyond job satisfaction into thankfulness, "i‚m so grateful to my family for the chance to do this!" and excitement, "what a great way to continue my career!" "mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at de sun". we might not land on the sun, but, at least, we would get off the ground" (zora neale hurston in eisen, 1995, p. 167). commuter marriages are a way today for many professional women to do just that! references anderson, e., & spruill, j. (1993). the dual-career commuter family: a lifestyle on the move. marriage and family review, 19(1-2). 131-147. barnett, r. (1971). personality correlates of vocational planning. genetic psychology monographs 83, 309-356. carter, j. (1992). commuter marriages. black enterprise, 22(7), 246-250. coontz, s. (2000). marriage: then and now. phi kappa phi journal, 8(3), 10-15. curby, v. (1980). women administrators in higher education: their geographic mobility. washington, d.c.: national association for women deans, administrators and counselors. dooley, d. (2001). social research methods (4th ed.). upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall. eisen, a. (1995). a woman's journey: reflections on life, love and happiness. kansas city: ariel books. exley, h. (1996). in celebration of women: a selection of words and paintings. new york: exley publishing. ezrati, j. (1983). personnel policies in higher education: a covert means of sex discrimination? educational administration quarterly, 19(4), 105-119. franklin, m., & ramage, j. (1999). till a long-distance job do us part. kiplinger‚s personal finance magazine, 53(1), 56. gerstel, n., & gross, h. (1982). commuter marriages: a review. marriage and family review, 5(2), 71-93. glass, t., bjork, l., & brunner, c. (2000). the study of the american superintendency: 2000. arlington, va: american association of school administrators. grady, m., lacost, b., wendel, f., & krumm, b. (1998). a pernicious problem: the absence of women from administrative roles. in c. funk, a. pankake, & m. reese (eds.) women as school executives: realizing the vision (pp. 82 94). commerce, texas: texas council of women school executives monograph. hensel, n. (1991). realizing gender equality in higher education: the need to integrate work/family issues. washington dc. eric clearinghouse on higher education. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 340 273 . holt, m. (1981). strategies for the ascent of woman in higher education administration in the 80's. journal for national association for women deans, administrators, and counselors, 44(3). infante, d. (1983). motivation to speak on a controversial topic. central states speech journal, 34, 96-103. jamiesen, k. (1995). beyond the double bind: women and leadership. oxford: oxford university press. johnston-anumonwo, i. 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(2000). beyond mars and venus. phi kappa phi journal, 80(3), 42-45. spee, f. cautio criminalis seu de processibus contra sagas liber. ad magistratus. austria: sumptibus ioannis gronaei. tallerico, m. (1999). accessing the superintendency: the unwritten rules. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. thurow, l. (1984). 62 cents to the dollar: the earnings gap doesn‚t go away. working mother, 42. us bureau of the census. (1998). statistical abstract of the united states:1998. 118th edition. washington, dc watkins, r., herrin, m., & mcdonald, l. (1998). the juxtaposition of career and family: a dilemma for professional women. advancing women in leadership journal, 2. [on-line], available: www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter98/awlv2_watkins5.html wilson, r. (2000, april 21). a couple's struggle to find good jobs in the same city. the chronicle of higher education, xlvi(33), a16-a18. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///ub/ultraboard.cgi file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2003 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 22, winter 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] the educational leadership of anna julia haywood cooper karen johnson anna julia haywood cooper (1859-1964) was one of the most influential african-american educators of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. heralded as a community activist, author, and scholar, cooper dedicated her entire life to the education and empowerment of african-american youth and adults. her commitment and passionate belief in the power of education as a vehicle to social, economic, and political freedom was a driving force in her life. as a classroom teacher, high school principal, and college president, cooper initiated and implemented pioneering educational reforms, which reflected her distinctive vision of education for blacks, females, and working-class people. cooper's vision of education challenged the dominant discourse concerning how african-americans, females, and working-class adults should be educated by offering alternative ways of educating these disenfranchised groups. indeed, her ideals of education were framed by her social location as a black woman in an era when few blacks and few women were educated, and when most were disenfranchised. cooper lived and worked amid a time frame when the political rights of african-americans were under systematic assault. it was also a period when women were oppressed politically and economically due to their gender status in society. "to be a black woman in nineteenth and early twentieth century america ," argued historian dorothy sterling (1984), "was to live in double jeopardy of belonging to the 'inferior' sex of an 'inferior' race" (p. ix). refusing to succumb to the yoke of oppression, cooper made noteworthy contributions to the field of education. driven by a deep commitment to helping her race and gender through education, cooper rose to head one of the most prestigious black high schools in the nation's capital--the washington high school for colored youth (later paul laurence dunbar high school ) by 1902. later on, in 1930, cooper served as second president of frelinghuysen university , an independent university for working-class african-americans. after working many years as an educator, cooper eventually earned a ph.d. in 1925 from the universite de paris, sorbonne in paris , france , at the age of 67. cooper was also a major player in the black women's club movement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. active in numerous social and civic organizations, and associations on the local and national level, cooper co-founded and assumed substantial leadership roles in community improvement, "racial uplift," and anti-lynching associations. as an author and feminist, cooper wrote a voice from the south in 1892. this book, considered a black feminist treatise, consists of a collection of essays that reflects a black feminist analysis on racism and sexism. it focuses on the race problem in 19th century america as well as file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/winter2007/index.htm educational concerns for african-americans and higher education for women. this article will examine anna julia cooper's role as an educational leader as well as her philosophical views on education. early life and socio-historical and educational influences anna julia haywood cooper lived to be 105 years old, witnessing several critical periods in united states history--from the antebellum era to the civil rights movement era. annie, as she was affectionately called, was born in august 1859 under the inhumane system of slavery to hannah stanley haywood in raleigh , north carolina . her father, george washington haywood, was her mother's slave "master." annie was the youngest of three children. her brothers, rufus and andrew, were 22 and 10 years older than annie respectively. annie haywood's early years were spent during a time of tremendous upheaval in the south. two years after her birth, the civil war started. during the war years, annie's state of north carolina was practically ravaged by the numerous military conflicts fought on its soil. finally, in 1863, freedom came to little annie (and approximately four million enslaved african-americans of this nation) when abraham lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation. two years later, the civil war came to an end. annie was six-years-old when the war ended. anna julia haywood's early childhood years were spent within this socio-historical context of devastation and despair . during the period of reconstruction, the hope for freedom served as a theme for many of the enslaved. annie, like many newly freed men and women, was "shaped spiritually and intellectually by the optimistic worldview of the reconstruction period" (baker-fletcher, 1994, p. 33). many of these formerly enslaved individuals, like annie, possessed a strong thirst and desire to read, write, and critically reflect upon their world. after 250 years of enslavement, freed african-americans were able to assert their rights for the first time. like annie, the majority of african-american north carolinians viewed education as the key to their true liberation. as educational historian james anderson (1988) notes, "for the freedmen [and women],.schooling was a matter of personal liberation and a necessary function of a free society" (p. 18). they believed that an education would remove the vestiges of slavery, illiteracy, and powerlessness, and would ensure their rights to american citizenship. several crucial events in haywood's early life contributed to her philosophical ideals about education and her development as an educator. when she was close to ten-years-old, annie enrolled in the saint augustine normal school and collegiate institute. this school, founded under the auspices of the protestant episcopal church, had as a mission to "educate teachers of both sexes [as well as provide] a training school for the preparation of colored men for the .ministry" (halliburton, 1937, p.1 & 73). annie haywood's academic preparation included the classical course of study, in which she did extremely well. the school had a great impact on her intellectual development and influenced her philosophical views about education with regards to blacks and females. she recalled the following of her schooling experiences: .that school was my world during the formative period, the most critical in any girl's life. its nurture & [sic] admonition gave not only shelter & [sic] protection from the many pitfalls that beset the unwary.the whole atmosphere contributed [to] growth & [sic] nourishment beyond the power of words to estimate. (cooper, n.d., ajc papers courtesy of msrc) annie's education at st. augustine was an enabling experience that enhanced her capacity to dream of a world of possibilities-one that would not limit her life chances. it was a setting, as annie saw it, that not only nurtured her talents and academic abilities, but which also ensured she would be prepared to fulfill her duty and destiny to uplift the african-american community (johnson, 2000). although annie haywood recounted her years at st. augustine with an optimistic perspective, she also recognized it as a place that attempted to stifle aspects of her intellectual growth, due to prevailing victorian social doctrines that dictated differing educational experiences for men and women. at st. augustine , female students such as annie were discouraged from learning greek and pursuing other classical studies; these intellectual paths were open to male theology students only. after encountering this discriminatory policy, annie became cognizant of the fact that higher educational opportunities between the sexes must be equal (johnson, 1997). no doubt, haywood realized that she was one of the few fortunate africanamericans (and even fewer black or white females) in the u.s. to be granted the opportunity to receive an education, particularly higher education. in 1870, just several years before annie began taking undergraduate classes at st. augustine , there were 582 institutions of higher education in the united states . fifty-nine percent of these were for men only, while 12% were for women and 29% were coeducational. of these percentages, the male and female students were predominantly white and middle-class. still, among the general population few americans, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or class, attended college (bohan, 1999; solomon, 1985). ten years later, when annie enrolled in college-level courses at st. augustine , the overwhelming majority of female collegians (who were obviously white and middle-class) between the ages of 18 and 21 represented 1.9% of the total college enrollment (solomon, 1985, p. 64). early educational opportunities for african-americans on the post-secondary level were extremely limited especially prior to 1861, with the exceptions of lincoln university (est. 1854) and wilberforce university (est. 1856). these two schools were established for the sole purpose of providing post-secondary schooling experiences for african-americans. wilberforce university , which began conferring bachelor degrees in 1867, was a coeducational institution. on the other hand, lincoln university was an all male school until 1952 when it began admitting african-american women. although the atlanta baptist female seminary, which was established in 1881 (later renamed spelman college ), provided elementary to post-secondary schooling experiences for african-american women, it did not open its first college department until 1897. so, veritably, annie believed it was vital for the empowerment and survival of the black community in the late 19th century that black females were granted the same educational chances that black men were offered on the higher educational level. concerns relating to the scarce educational opportunities for females, particularly in higher education, shaped cooper's work in education and civic activism. hence, issues of gender as well as race and class influenced her distinctive ideals on education. decades later, in her passionate argument for the higher education of women, cooper (1892) wrote: i ask the men and women who are teachers.for the highest interests of the race, that they give the girls a chance.. let us insist .on special encouragement for the education of our women and special care in their training.. teach them that there is a race with special needs which they and only they can help..the earnest well trained christian young woman, as a teacher, as a homemaker, as a wife, mother, or silent influence even, is as potent a missionary agency among our people as is the theologian..let us then, here and now, recognize this force and resolve to make the most of it-not the boys less, but the girls more. (p. 78-79) as explained by critical feminist sociologist patricia hill collins (2000), "the commitment to the value of [female] education by prominent black women such as anna julia cooper. [led them] to champion the cause of black women's education." (p. 210). like many african-american women educators of cooper's era, cooper deeply felt that the destiny of the race lied in the hands of african-american women. therefore, she argued that it was imperative that black females are granted the opportunity to become well-educated because it is the women of the race who must embark on the moral and social mission of guiding africanamericans to race, gender, and economic uplift (collins, 2000; harley, 1982; johnson, 2000). in the late 1870s, annie was successful in fighting for the rights of female students to take greek courses. as a result of her fight, she and other female students were allowed to take greek classes at st. augustine . it was at that school she met her husband, george christopher cooper, a theology student and greek instructor. in 1877, the two were married. unfortunately, george cooper passed away within two years from "hard work and exposure," according to annie cooper (cooper, n.d.). when she was eighteen, cooper completed her course of study. even though she was well prepared academically at st. augustine , the institution did not confer any diplomas or degrees. thus, two years after the death of her husband, cooper left north carolina to further her education at oberlin college (now university) in oberlin , ohio . oberlin college was founded by a minister and missionary of the congregationist denomination in 1833. according to james harris fairchild, oberlin's president during cooper's tenure as a student, "the two founders were both reformers, strongly impressed with the conviction that the church as well as the world needed to be lifted up to a higher plane of life and action" (fairchild, 1883, p. 14). further, this institution served as an underground railroad stop during the antebellum era. it was one of the few colleges in this nation to open its doors to women in 1833 and african-americans in 1835. unlike many women who enrolled in the school, cooper took the four-year "gentlemen's" course of study leading to the b.a. degree, rather than the two-year "adies'" course of study, which she felt was "inferior in scope and aim," only leading to a certificate (cooper, 1892, p. 50). she wrote that oberlin had been "the college of so many happy memories" (cooper, 1951, p. 3). for cooper, oberlin was one of the most influential institutions in her philosophical development with regards to issues on race, gender, class, and education. her professors at the institution cultivated in her a dedication to a life of service--especially toward the disenfranchised. three of her "intellectually stimulating" professors, she wrote, "inspired my faith, encouraged my hope, deepened my love in and privilege of a life of service" (cooper, 1925, n.p.). fairchild, one of her favorite professors, espoused that each student belongs.to the world, not isolated from sympathies and obligations and activities.. [therefore] [t]he college is a place for education, not merely for the acquisition of learning.. the great object is such a discipline as is qualified for service in the world. (fairchild, 1883, n.p.) fairchild was a significant role model to cooper. his ideas about educated students' role in the improvement of overall society inspired cooper's beliefs about "service in the world." upon receiving her b.a. degree, cooper was ready to devote her life to the struggle against the social inequities and exploitation that african-americans like herself were experiencing ( hutchinson , 1993). career, leadership, and educational and philosophy after earning her b.a. degree from oberlin college in 1884, cooper went to work at wilberforce university , a historically black institution in xenia , ohio . there she taught french and german languages and literature from 1884 to 1885. cooper left wilberforce university in 1885 and returned to north carolina to take care of her elderly mother and raise her deceased brother's six children. after this move, cooper soon earned a position at her alma mater, st. augustine 's normal and collegiate institute, teaching geometry, latin, and greek. during the two years cooper was employed at st. augustine , she invested her energies in an array of educational concerns. she fought to secure equal treatment and salaries between african-american and white teachers in north carolina 's segregated public schools. as an active member of the north carolina teachers association, she pushed for measures that would provide for the increase of equitable and quality educational opportunities for african-american youth. in addition, she established an outreach extension program under st. augustine 's aegis and she founded a christian mission guild and sunday school ( hutchinson , 1981). the period between 1887 and 1906 marked a turning point in cooper's professional career. by 1887, cooper accumulated three years of teaching experience on the collegiate level. based on this experience, oberlin college awarded her a masters of arts degree in mathematics, her undergraduate major ( hutchinson , 1981). in that same year, she was offered a teaching position at the washington preparatory high school for colored youth (commonly referred to by the nickname "m street" high), the prestigious public high school for african-americans in washington , d.c. this school, known for its academic excellence and highly educated teaching and administrative faculty, was established in 1870, nine years before any founding of a high school for white students in washington , d.c. unlike the majority of segregated public school systems in the u.s. , the school system in the district of columbia was almost totally controlled by an african-american superintendent and black school board members until 1901. these administrators wielded influence over teacher appointments and curriculum. they were strong advocates for high performing schools for the african-american population (dabney, 1949; gatewood, 1990; moore, 1999). the washington preparatory high school for colored youth graduated a multitude of students who would go on to achieve prominence in the local washington community as well as the national and international communities. an overwhelming majority of the teaching staff were african-american. further, they held college degrees as opposed to normal school teaching certificates, which was unusual for public or private school teachers during that era. many of the african-american graduates of oberlin college were educators at the school. it is important to note that three years prior to cooper's employment, "m street" provided a college preparatory, four-year classical arts curriculum, later expanding to offer trade and business curricula. for classical arts curriculum to be implemented in a school for african-americans was rare at this time, due to the fact that the prevailing viewpoint of dominant society promulgated the philosophy that an industrial education provided the best and most appropriate model for educating black students. an industrial education, among other things, was one way of keeping blacks in a place of economic subordination. "m street's" college preparatory program would later prove to be problematic and it would come under the attack of the d.c. school board. cooper herself would play a role in this controversy. i will discuss this issue later because it will become a major point of contention in cooper's later career. cooper spent a number of years at washington high school . her professional and personal growth and her development as a teacher and principal was cultivated at this institution. during her first two years she taught math and science. then, from 1889 to 1902, she served as head of the latin department. at this school, colleagues and students perceived cooper as a hardworking, loyal, and zealous teacher and strict disciplinarian who imbued in her students high ideals of scholarship, racial pride, and selfimprovement. she was described as being a "motherly" concerned educator who took personal interests in her students' cognitive and social well-being. one former student noted, ".i was a member of [mrs.cooper's].latin .class..i remember her.. put[ing] her whole heart and complete dedication into the performance of her job of teaching, demanding [emphasis from text] attention and participation from her students" (gabel, 1982, p. 66). this same student further recalled: "she showed the young girls .that it was possible to be a lady and a scholar" (gabel, 1982, p. 66-67). cooper truly enjoyed being an educator. she stated, "teaching has always seemed to me the noblest of callings," a profession which she desired to pursue "not far from kindergarten age" ( negro college graduates' questionnaire , n.d.). as an educator, cooper was interested in the complete development of her students' intellectual growth, as well as in their social and emotional development. she articulated, "the elemental principal and foundation of all education everywhere. [is] the fullest development of the individual in and by and for the best possible environing society" (lemert & bhan, 1998, p. 258). "any scheme of education," she asserted, "should have regard to the whole [person], not a special class or race of men, but [individuals] as the paragon of creation, possessing.infinite possibilities for physical, moral and mental development" (lemert & bhan, 1998, p. 258). cooper believed in the transformative power of education. for cooper, education was an instrument that should assist in the enlightenment and social uplift of the individual and collective black community. cooper, like many black women educators during the period of legalized segregation, believed that she had a special mission and responsibility to african-american students and to the black community as a whole-a mission that she alone could fulfill (harley, 1982). like other black women educators of her time, cooper saw herself as a social and moral change agent (collins, 2000). from her philosophical standpoint, education and educational institutions were meant to assist in the economic, political, and social improvement of african-americans. she argued, "if a child seems poor in inheritance, poor in environment, poor in personal endowment, by so much the more must organized society bring to that child the good tidings of social salvation through the schools.." (lemert & bhan, 1998, p. 258). hence, for cooper, education and schools were linked to the "creation of social practice," notes critical theorist peter mclaren: "they were the moral referents necessary for the construction of a democratic public sphere" (1994, p. 240). the compilation of the achievements of cooper's students was a significant number. many of the students who came under her tutelage and influence made major contributions and played prominent roles in american society. reminiscing on her educational experience at "m street," ursuline brooks, a former student, stated, "at 'm street,' we were taught that our lives were to be lives of service and uplift to our race and our country" (moore, 1999, p. 93). when washington high school 's principal, robert h. terrell, resigned from his position to accept a presidential appointment as a justice of the peace in 1902, anna julia cooper was appointed principal of the chool. during her four-year tenure as principal, the school's college preparatory program was considerably changed and expanded (terrell, 1917, p. 259). m. g. hundley (1965), a former student and school historian of the school's history, explained that cooper's vision and leadership "reaffirmed the college preparatory goals and standardized the curriculum" (p. 15). in a similar critique, another historian of "m street" high wrote, "[p]rincipal cooper strove unceasingly to prepare her pupils for successful admittance to nonsegregated northern and mid-western universities, [such as], amherst, brown, harvard, radcliffe, oberlin, yale, cornell." etc. (robinson, 1981, p. 6). during cooper's time as principal, the washington preparatory high school for colored youth achieved significant success and recognition. the school was accredited by harvard university (robinson, 1981, p. 6) and a large number of students were awarded admissions and financial support to ivy league universities (hundley, 1965, p. 19). throughout the time of cooper's leadership, "superior instruction was fostered by insistence on high standards of scholarship" (gabel, 1982, p. 49). in addition, cooper made provisions for "special tutorials to prepare promising students for college entrance examinations" (gabel, 1982, p. 49). some of cooper's "m street's" applied to their alma mater for scholarships for their students. hundley pointed out that teachers appealing to their former colleges and universities for scholarship aid for their students "became a school tradition which continued until the mid 1950s" (1965, p.131). cooper's leadership, contributions, and far-ranging accomplishments at "m street" speak to a remarkable legacy, particularly given the socio-historical context of her era. by the time cooper was appointed head of "m street," segregation had become a full-fledged effort to subjugate and stigmatize african-americans (cottrol, diamond, & ware, 2003). six years before she became principal of the school, one federally sanctioned 1896 supreme court decision, plessy vs. ferguson, "established the 'separate but equal' doctrine regarding public facilities and services used by" african-americans (la morte, 2002, p. 286). the sanctioning of legal racial segregation by the supreme court gave rise to numerous public policies that articulated the importance of maintaining a caste system catering to the political and economic interests of the white ruling class while oppressing and exploiting people of color. in terms of its effects on public schooling in the district of columbia and the south, the "separate but equal" dictum not only contributed to the solidification of a dual system of schools segregating blacks and whites, it also championed an educational ideology and curriculum that emphasized rudimentary literacy and industrial educational skills for african-americans. however, as mentioned previously, the district of columbia 's black high school was unique in that the liberal arts educational curriculum it offered was the norm, as opposed to an anomaly. unfortunately, cooper's educational practices and initiatives at "m street" eventually were tested and challenged. a year prior to cooper's inauguration as principal, booker t. washington was widely recognized as the preeminent leader and spokesman for african-americans. the tuskegee institute, b.t. washington's industrial training school, "was emerging as the model for black education and consequently was playing into the prejudices of whites who believed in black intellectual inferiority" (washington, 1988, p. xxxiv). also during this period, african-american public schools were reorganized in the district of columbia . many african-american board members lost their positions and the black superintendent position was abolished. in turn, a white male superintendent was appointed to control both the white and black public schools. after visiting the tuskegee institute, the white superintendent of the d.c.'s "colored" schools recommended that "m street" high school be reorganized to function more like the tuskegee institute. his rationale was that african-american students were "incapable of taking the same [classical] studies" as the students in the district's white high schools. he maintained they needed a course of study equal to their "inferior" status in u.s. society (hutchinson, 1981, p. 67-68). the curriculum at tuskegee institute was a replica of hampton normal and agricultural institute's curriculum, another historically black school, founded by samuel chapman armstrong in 1868. according to educational historian james a. anderson, "armstrong developed a pedagogy and ideology .that did not challenge [racist and classist views of] inequalities of wealth and power" (anderson, 1988, p. 33). armstrong espoused the philosophical belief that the "negro, was above all else immoral" (watkins, 2001, p. 47) and so, therefore, schooling should consist of "training in common morality as well as the habits of industry" (watkins, 2001, p. 47). washington, a student of armstrong, "developed a philosophy of racial uplift," according to educational historian william watkins (2001), "that accommodated existing racial or economic relations" when washington became president of tuskegee institute (p. 60). cooper, in response to this paradigm, adamantly opposed any lowering of academic standards at the high school and she fought to keep the curriculum classical and college preparatory. despite the fact that cooper's fierce struggle to maintain the college preparatory program at "m street" drew citywide attention and support as well as extensive coverage in the washington post newspaper , she was charged with insubordination and was eventually dismissed from her position as principal of the washington high school for colored youth. all too often educators such as cooper who implement anti-racist teaching practices and "who seek to redefine curriculum and social relationships inside and outside the classroom, find themselves in conflict with existing [racist, classist, and sexist] patriarchal ideology and hierarchical relationships," notes feminist educational scholar kathleen weiler (1988, p. 101). this was indeed the situation cooper found herself in. she ardently believed that education, especially for african-americans, should be one that focused on the classical course of study. in response to the call for industrial education for africanamericans, cooper argued for a strong push for classical education. in the following, she argued: teachers from aristotle to the present have sifted and analysed [sic] the various branches of learning to get at their worth as educative factors.. they are universally accepted by teachers and thinkers as a reasonable and proper basis for the education of [humankind] (lemert & bhan, 1998, p. 252). this curriculum "gives direction of thought-power, power of appreciation, power of willing the right.. and to the divine possibilities in all human development," cooper maintained (lemert & bhan, 1998, p. 252). cooper was removed from her position of leadership because she represented a substantial force against the narrow view of what african-americans should be. she argued, .no people can progress, without vivifying touch of ideas and ideals. the very policy of segregation renders all the more the necessary leadership that has been on the mount. if any group or class cannot be allowed living contact through seeing, hearing, feeling the best of life in their day and generation, there is no compensation morally or socially except to let them find their thrills through the inspiration of the broadest education and generously equipped schools. (cooper quoted in hutchinson, 1981, p. 83) to fully comprehend the dynamics of the controversy at washington high school , one needs to identify and deconstruct the relationship between education and the capitalist economy. interlocking structures of domination, power, privilege, and oppression "have, since the origin of public education, used schooling to reinforce dominator values," cultural theorist bell hooks argued (2003, p. 1). further, critical pedagogue peter mclaren (1994) stated that "the political space that education occupies de-emphasizes the struggle for teacher and student empowerment" (p. 1). as articulated by mclaren, educational programs are "designed to create individuals who operate in the interests of the state.[as well as] correspond to the demands of industry, thereby reproducing in schools the existing class, race, and gender relations in our society" (mclaren, 1994, p. 1-2). even though eurocentric western hegemonic masculinist values were taught in segregated black schools, many of these schools were sites where alternative ways of thinking gave rise to the insurrection of subjugated knowledge, marginalized experiences, and oppression (hooks, 2003, p. 1-2). implicit in the superintendent's proposal to reorganize and supplant "m street's" curriculum with an industrial education program was the design to prepare the black students for lives that would fulfill the expectations of the segregated order--lives based on racial and gender oppression and economic subordination (johnson, 1997). cooper was not opposed to "industrial training as such but to the proposed supplanting of the classical curriculum at her school.an industrial program supposedly more realistic and appropriate for [african-americans]" (gabel, 1982, p. 51). cooper also got fired because the board of education was opposed to her teaching methods, which cooper called "sympathetic" methods that enable "weak" students in their academic achievement. in addition, cooper and her staff collectively refused to use the board adopted textbooks, instead developing and using books that cooper felt were more appropriate for her students' academic achievement. it was the interest and for the betterment for black students and the black community, rather than racist, classist, archaic school policies that cooper did what she perceived was best. schools, particularly during cooper's era, have a long legacy of forcing teachers to live "lives of mechanical routine," and subjecting them "to a machine of supervision, organization, classification, grading. uniformity.etc" (giroux & mclaren, 1996, p. 301). schools in cooper's era, as one 19th century educator observed, did not allow for "room in the school culture for individuality, ideas, independence, originality, study, and investigation" (giroux & mclaren, 1996, p. 301). mclaren (1994) points out that too often in the public school setting teachers are stripped of their decision-making potential; this was because the school boards viewed teaching as "nearly synonymous with executing pre-fashioned methodologies and delivering prepackaged curricula" (p. 1). when cooper challenged the status quo by refusing to be what critical educator henry giroux calls a "clerk of the empire," she was in effect attempting to empower her students' and teachers' dreams, desires, voices, and rights to have access to an equitable and educational experience. this kind of educational leadership not only reflects a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance but also a form of black feminist activism essential to the struggle for african-american group survival and institutional transformation (collins 2000; hooks, 2003; johnson, 1997, 2000). cooper's presidency at frelinghuysen university if the washington high school for colored youth experience thwarted cooper's efforts in implementing pedagogical perspectives and practices, ones which did not reinscribe racial hierarchical forms of domination, her presidency at frelinghuysen university allowed her the freedom and autonomy to set her philosophies in motion. however, at this institution her educational focus was centered on adult education. on june 15, 1930, cooper was inaugurated the second president of frelinghuysen university in washington, d. c. she served as president until her retirement in 1940. despite her retirement as president, cooper continued working at the school in the capacity of the registrar, from 1940 to 1950 ( second decennial catalogue of frelinghuysen university , n.d., p. 3, c). frelinghuysen university , founded in the home of jesse lawson in 1906, was an institution created for working-class nontraditional african-american adult students who had limited or no basic literacy skills ( second decennial catalogue , n.d., p. 3; waugh, 1946). the school was named in honor of the late senator frederick t. frelinghuysen (1881-1885) who "had been of great service to the cause of the colored people" during his political years (hutchinson, 1981, p. 157). according to the frelinghuysen university second decennial catalogue (n.d.) , the aim of the school was to "enable men and women who cannot make their leisure time fit into the schedule of a.college or university to pursue.higher.education.as seen suited to their capacities and aspirations" (p. 3). although this institution was called a university, it was not one in the traditional sense. it did not confer degrees. nevertheless, frelinghuysen provided an excellent educational experience for its students with limited resources. it offered a complete high school education as well as academic work on the undergraduate and graduate levels. the hannah stanley opportunity school, a department named in the honor of cooper's mother, prepared individuals for community service and a general education course of study ( second decennial catalogue , n.d.). the college level course work included liberal arts, applied science, theology, law, and pharmacy (dabney, 1949, p.184). the hannah stanley opportunity school had a broad appeal because it "emphasized both booker t. washington's trade and semi-professional training approach and w.e.b. du bois' push for professional education" (chateauvert, 1990, p. 265). to accommodate the needs of its employed constituencies, frelinghuysen offered night classes; it implemented a "home college" whereby classes were held at various convenient locations to eliminate long distance travel to and from classes; and the tuition fee was very low and affordable (chateauvert, 1990; dabney, 1949; hutchinson, 1981; second decennial catalogue , n.d., p. 3). however, frelinghuysen had problems securing a permanent location. thus, cooper decided to house the school in her home. six rooms of her spacious home were used as classroom and the library space. she did not charge rent and only accepted a salary of 50 dollars a month. further, her devoted teachers worked for little to no pay ( negro college graduates' questionnaire , n.d.). cooper was 71-years-old when she became president of this institution. she brought to this institution many years of successful teaching, organizational and administrational skills, and a strong sense of commitment to her students. cooper stated the following as to why she accepted the presidency at frelinghuysen: .while there are [several universities, colleges, and night schools for white adults and middle-class blacks].there is absolutely no door open to the struggling [low-income] colored man or woman, aspiring for the privileges of advanced education and not able to make the hours scheduled at howard [university].we are poor, our constituency is poor, and it is hard. to realize this means. (chateauvert, 1990, p. 266) cooper wanted "frelinghuysen to represent the ideals i.stood for & [sic] worked for & [sic]. i plan to devote it to the education of colored people." (cooper, 1932, n.p.). she viewed educational opportunities as a human right which should be granted to all u.s. citizens regardless of class and gender status in a given society. it was the disenfranchised working-class unlettered adult students that cooper perhaps had the greatest impact on in her role as an educator. cooper stated that the university's purpose would be to reach the "lowest down, the intentionally forgotten man, untaught and unprovided [sic] for either in the public schools for all classes or in the colleges and universities for the talented tenth." (cooper, 1932, n.p.). for cooper, making frelinghuysen a "beacon of hope" for marginalized adult students was a fulfillment of her philosophy and pedagogy (cooper, 1932, n.p.). speaking of the necessity to cultivate hope, bell hooks (2003) makes the point that "educators who have dared to study andlearn new ways of thinking and teaching so that the work [educators] does not reinforce systems of domination. have created a pedagogy of hope" (p. xiv). arguing on a similar theme, brazilian educator paulo freire contended that "one of the tasks of .educators .is to unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be" (freire, 1994). in freire's view, "it is imperative that [educators] maintain hope even when the harshness of reality may suggest the opposite" (hooks, 2003, p. v). the hope cooper envisioned for the students was that frelinghuysen university would enable them to "stand on their own feet [and] pluck the fruit of the tree of knowledge.not for self-centered exploitation or childish glorification, but as a high responsibility for thoughtful investments in service for the common good" ( second decennial catalogue , n.d., p. 5). the frelinghuysen university consistently experienced financial problems. in spite of efforts to keep the school afloat, it permanently closed its doors in 1964. on february 26, 1964, at the age of 105, anna julia cooper died in her home. in honor of her memory and her contributions to the nation's capital, the district of columbia named a street anna julia cooper memorial circle (3 rd and t streets, nw), which is located in the landmark community of ledroit park . anna julia cooper's legacy anna julia cooper's legacy is that of a consummate educator who was an advocate for equitable educational opportunities for african-americans, females, and low-income, unlettered adults. for cooper, education was a liberating force. this force was needed to resist the interlocking structures of oppression that characterized the lives of disenfranchised groups during the post-reconstruction, victorian, and jim crow eras--through which cooper's professional career spanned. discontent with the prevailing societal notions that circumscribed the lives of blacks and women, cooper found the strength and resiliency to actively seek solutions to the problems experienced by these groups. she was truly dedicated to helping her students build better lives and realize their dreams and possibilities despite the institutional barriers that blocked them. she compassionately worked to produce successful students who would not only seek intellectual accomplishment and human fulfillment but who would "serve the best of one's powers in the advancement of one's generation" (cooper, n.d.). cooper's effectiveness as an educational leader provides a valuable resource and useful addition to contemporary literature on educational leadership, minority education, and social justice education. the themes of racial, gender, and social justice are found throughout her work as a teacher and administrator. these themes are significant, particularly in light of the fact that for many low-income, urban youth, the promise of educational equitable experiences continues to be a fleeting reality in contemporary society, fiftytwo years after the passage of the supreme court brown vs. board of education decision (a decision which reversed the 1896 plessy vs. ferguson decision by declaring that the "separate but equal" dictum had no place in public education). the continued persistent and pervasive disparities in the academic achievement among racial/ethnic student groups, students from low-income and affluent socioeconomic backgrounds, are a well-documented dilemma in this nation's public schools. this major problem has indeed drawn national attention to the urgent need to improve the academic achievement for all children via initiatives that would close the achievement gaps between various student groups. hence, in today's society, we need educational leaders, such as cooper, whose vision and activism would not only address and improve the academic needs of our young people, but would also prepare them to be life-long learners, cable of appreciating the world in which they live. also, they would have the competence necessary to learn and thrive as productive citizens throughout their lifetime. we also need educational leaders who will continue the tradition that cooper started--the tradition of tearing down the walls of race, class, and gender oppression; building institutions and supporting philosophies that are non-oppressive and inclusive of the experiences and perspectives of diverse racial/ethnic groups in the u.s. cooper's educational ideals embodied these concepts, and as a result she was successful in educating generations of students who in turn committed themselves to fighting for a better world. cooper's lifelong struggle for educational equity reveals continuous patterns of social activism on the part of black women educators of her time. in analyzing her life's work, one sees that her resiliency came from her ability to help develop and head significant educational institutions which provided quality educational experiences for african-americans. the courage, determination, and single-minded dedication displayed by cooper in her struggles to transform society and educate and uplift women and the african-american race best epitomize her overall legacy. references anderson, j. d. (1988). the education of blacks in the south, 1860-1935. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. baker-fletcher, k. (1994). a singing something: womanist reflections on anna julia cooper. new york : crossroad. bohan, c. h. (1999). lucy maynard salmon: progressive historian, teacher and democrat. in m. s. crocco & o. l. davis jr. (eds.), bending the future to their will: civic women, social education and democracy (pp. 50). new york : rowman & littlefield publishers, inc. chateauvert, m. (1990). the third step: anna julia cooper and black education in the district of columbia , 1910-1960. in d. c. hine (ed.), black women in united states history (pp. 261-276). brooklyn , ny : carlson publishing. collins, p. (2000). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. new york : routledge. cooper, a. j. (n.d.). autobiographical document by anna julia cooper, anna julia cooper papers, courtesy of moorland-spingarn research center , manuscript division, howard university, washington, d.c. cooper, a. j. (1892). the higher education of women. in m. h. washington (ed.), a voice from the south (reprinted new york : oxford university press, 1988). cooper, a. j. (1925). "dedication page," le pelerinage de charlemagne. paris , france : a lahure, imprimeur editeur. cooper, a. j. (1932). letter from anna julia cooper to francis grimke, francis grimke papers, courtesy of moorland-spingarn research center, manuscript division, howard university, washington, d.c. cooper, a. j. (1951). the third step. anna julia cooper papers, courtesy of moorland-spingarn research center , manuscript division, howard university , washington , dc : privately printed cottrol, r., diamond, r. t., &ware, l. b. (2003). brown v. board of education: caste, culture and the constitution . lawrence : university press of kansas . dabney, l. g. (1949). the history of schools for negroes in the district of columbia , 18071947 (doctoral dissertation, catholic university, 1949). decennial catalogue of frelinghuysen university (n.d.) lent to this author from the private collection of sterling smith. fairchild, j. h. (1883). oberlin: the colony and the college, 1833-1883. oberlin , oh : e.j. goodrich. freire, p. (1994). pedagogy of hope: reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. new york : continuum. gabel, l. (1982). from slavery to the sorbonne and beyond: the life and writings of anna julia cooper. northampton , ma : smith college . gatewood, w. b. (1990). aristocrats of color: the black elite, 1880-1920. bloomington : indiana university press. giroux, h. a., & mclaren, p. (1996). "teacher education and the politics of engagement": the case for democratic schooling. in l. p. woodrum & s. a. sherblom (eds.), breaking free: the transformative power of critical pedagogy (pg. 301-331). cambridge , ma : harvard educational review. halliburton, c. d. (1937). a history of st. augustine 's college, 1867-1931 . raleigh , nc : st. augustine 's college. harley, s. (1982). beyond the classroom: the organizational lives of black female educators in the district of columbia , 1890-1930. journal of negro education, 51 (3), 254-265. hundley, m. g. (1965). the dunbar story, 1870-1955. new york : vantage press hutchinson, l. d. (1981). anna j. cooper: a voice from the south. washington , dc : smithsonian institution press. hutchinson, l. d. (1993). anna julia cooper. in d. c. hine (ed.), black women in america : an historical encyclopedia (pp. 275-281). bloomington : indiana university press. johnson, k. a. (1997). uplifting the women and the race: the educational philosophies and social activism of anna julia cooper and nannie helen burroughs. (doctoral dissertation, university of california, 1997). johnson, k. a. (2000). uplifting the women and the race: the educational philosophies and social activism of anna julia cooper and nannie helen burroughs. new york : garland publishing. la morte, m. w. (2002). school law: cases and concepts (7th ed.) . boston : allyn & bacon. lemert, c., & bhan, e. (1998). the voice of anna julia cooper. new york : rowman & littlefield publishers inc. mclaren, p. (1994). life in schools: an introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education. new york : longman. moore , j. m. (1999). leading the race: transformation of the black elite in the nation's capital, 1880-1920. charlottesville : university press of virginia . negro college graduates questionnaire. (n.d.). anna julia cooper papers, courtesy of moorlandspingarn research center , manuscript division, howard university , washington , dc . robinson, h. s. (1981). the m street high school , 1891-1916 . unpublished paper lent to this author courtesy of dr. paul philip cooke's private collection. second decennial catalogue of frelinghuysen university . (n.d.). washington , dc : lent to this author from the private collection of sterling smith. solomon, b. m. (1985). in the company of educated women: a history of women and higher education in america . new haven , ct : yale university press. sterling , d. (1984). we are your sisters: black women in the 19 th century. new york : w.w. norton. terrell, m. c. (1917). history of the high school for negroes in washington . the journal of negro history, 2 (3), 252-266. washington , m. h. (1988). introduction. a voice from the south. by anna julia cooper. new york : oxford university press. watkins, w. h. (2001). the white architects of black education: ideology and power in america , 18651954. new york : teachers college press. waugh, i. m. (1946, september 14). frelinghuysen meets a need in d.c. washington tribune, p. 20. weiler, k. (1988). women teaching for change: gender, class and power. westport , ct : bergin & garvey. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women network home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international advancing women in leadership female perspectives on career advancement marie byrd-blake, ed.d. byrd-blake, spring, 2004 only through a collective, cohesive effort will the plight of females vying for top administrative positions in the school system improve. there are current inequalities in the representation of females in higher administrative positions in public schools that are a product of historical and societal patterns. these patterns have determined the constraints women have faced and continue to face when they attempt to enter public school administration. women represent the majority in the teaching profession and in school administration graduate programs, but are persistently absent from the highest and most powerful administrative positions in public education (shakeshaft, 1999). the top three administrative posts in public school education (superintendent, assistant superintendent, and high school principal) remain overwhelmingly filled by males (keller, 1999). according to mary hatwood futurell, former president of the national education association, in 2002 only 12 percent of the superintendents are women and just five percent are minorities (aauw, 2002). this astounding figure is approximately the same as was reported at the turn of the last century. the overall percentage of women who represent leadership positions is miniscule as it is. thus, the meager percentage represented by women of color demonstrates how severely underrepresented women of other racial and/or ethnic groups are in public school administration (gupton & slick, 1995). a report published by the national center for education statistics details this critical point. in the year 2000, 44% of all principals in the public schools were women. of the total number of principals represented, only ten percent were african american and four percent identified themselves as hispanic (nces, 2002). with the the united states census (2000) reporting 12.9% of the total u.s. population identifying themselves as as file:///e%7c/temp/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html black/african african american, and 12.5% identifying themselves as being of hispanic origin, a greater reprensentation of minority administrators is needed in the public schools to equate with the demographic population in the country. literature review in coloring outside the lines, mentoring women into school leadeship, gardiner, enomoto, and grogan (2000) proclaim that the overriding culture in educational administration is androcentric, meaning it is being dominated with norms defined as white and male. they also assert that although women have gained entry into educational administration, they are still viewed differently. the patriarchal values of white males still permeates throughout public school administration despite the gains women and minorities have made in recent years. when analyzing corporate positions, davies-netzley (1998) report that women continue to cluster near the bottom of corporate organizational charts and endure lower earnings and authority, and have less advancement potential in comparison with men. within gains that have been made, white women have made greater gains in achieveing uppermanagement and professional positions in comparison to women of color (davies-netzley, 1998). grogan (1996) conducted a study centering on women aspiring to the superintendency in kindergarten grade 12 public school systems. her study yielded five significant findings. first, it was revealed that there are alternative approaches to the traditional style of leadership. these alternative approaches are a necessity in light of the diversity educators are faced with which makes it a necessity to "approach administration from a relational, interpersonal standpoint" (grogan, 1996, p. 176). feminist inquiry scholarship proposes for the "re-vision of a leader as one who is a facilitator, a catalyst, or a member of a group that together works for social change" (grogan, 1996, p. 176). second, grogan revealed that the "personal and professional lives of the women who particpated in the study were inextricably intertwined" and the "white, gendered nature of the k 12 educational administration emerged vividly" (grogan, 1996, p.8). third, the women in the study felt they were viewed as women first and administrators second causing their gender to always be a factor in their superintendency preparation. fourth, grogan developed a greater understanding of the personal and professional factors that contributed to the paths taken by the particpants. some were prepared and ready for the position professionally, but not personally. mothering, partnering and homemaking were contributing factors. finally, it was revealed that the particpants resisted discourging outlooks by keeping focused on their aspirations when faced with difficulties. women have incorporated many strategies to assist them in remaining focused while entrenched in patriarchal systems. among them are attaining advanced degrees and credentials, establishing informal and formal networks with other women, and reconciling work and home responsibilities (davies-netzley, 1998). gupton and slick (1996), in highly successful women administrators: the inside stories of how they got there, cite many lessons of success stemming from their study of female public school administrators. the lessons include being prepared, career planning, persevering, being diligent and professional, honoring, perserving and protecting integrity, reaching out to and through others, mentoring, and leading by example. mentoring and sponsoring has been referenced by many in literature as a strategy for career advancement. effective mentoring has been described as communicating and connecting on an emotional level with the mentee while assisting with the physical, emotional and logistcal aspects of school leadership (gardiner, enomoto, & grogan, 2000). in a study of thirty-eight african american female school administrators, mentors and sponsors were revealed as playing important roles in their career success (allen, k., jacobson, s., & lomotey, k., 1995). respondents in the study, who had a mentor during the early stages of their, career acknowledged they received encouragement and moral support which led to higher levels of effort and expectations. this study defined mentors as those who help motivate others in achieving goals, and sponsors were defined as those who enable others to attain goals (allen, k., jacobson, s., & lomotey, k., 1995). the participants in the study viewed sponsorship as the most critical compopnent in relationships for aspiring african american women administrators. in a study focusing on the relationship between social support and stress as differentially experienced by african american women, white women, and white men both within and outside the workplace, baliey, wolfe, & wolf (1996) revealed that whereas social support was important for all groups studied, it was particularly important for african american women to develop sources of social support at home and at work. the job support assisted white men and women in the study reduce depression and strain, but did not for african american women. the same held true for home support for the particpants in the study. gardiner, enomoto, and grogan (2000) conducted a study consisting of eighteen women, of whom fourteen were african american and four were hispanic. the participants revealed six needs of women of color who seek to move into educational administration. four of the identified needs focused on mentoring and support. first, they expressed a need to understand the political dynamics of public schools and to develop the skills to succeed as both women and minorities. second, they wished to gain access into networks within and outside the school system. third, they desired mentors who were similar to themselves. fourth, because of the few women of color in positions of power, they also sought mentoring from those who were different from themselves. fifth, they expressed a need for more than one mentor with at least one being female and one being a person of color. lastly, they saw a need for alternative support systems beyond the formal and informal mentoring established in educational organizations. feminist approach this study was analyzed using a feminist approach. gardiner, enomoto & grogran, (2000) stressed the importance of a feminist orientation: (a feminist orientation is important for the) validation of multiple and diverse perspectives to…..clarify …. beliefs and values, and for the pedagogical opportunities to help one to consider the viewpoints of other individuals. women learn from other women's voices and experiences. the dominant perspective in educational administration has been androcentric or male-biased.the contradictions arising from this bias are best exposed by utilizing (a) feminist (approach). a feminist orientation values women's experiences as the focus of attention. for this study, it is imperative that the chosen analytic approach give voice to the realities of the female experience. m. k. tetreault (1985) identified the common ways (phases) of thinking about women as reflected in scholarship. the first is male scholarship, which sees the male experience as universal. the second, compensatory scholarship, entails a consciousness that women are missing, but males are still perceived as the norm and representative of all thought. the third phase is bifocal scholarship, which emphasizes the differences between women and men. phase four, feminist scholarship, emphasizes women's activities as the most valued measure. the final phase, multifocal or relational scholarship, analyzes how women and men relate to and complement one another. feminist scholarship assists in developing an appreciation of the differences among african american, hispanic, and white female public school administrators in relation to the barriers they perceive in hindering their climb up the ladder and their strategies for success. it "pursues new questions, new categories, and new notions of significance which illuminate women's traditions, history, culture, values, visions, and perspectives" by allowing the women's experience "to speak for itself." (tetreault, m. k. t., 1985, p. 370). objectives of the study this study examined a sample of female administrators serving in higher administrative ranks in the public school system to determine any similarities or differences between african american, hispanic and white females in three areas: 1) the perception of barriers to career advancement, 2) the perceived effects of barriers to career advancement and 3) the strategies utilized to overcome barriers to career advancement. this study also gathered data on the personal and professional characteristics of the respondents in order to provide a composite picture and to analyze any significant differences. research design and methodology the method of data collection was a survey questionnaire consisting of 49 items and a section for voluntary narrative responses. the population for the study was defined as full-time female administrators employed either as principals, directors or superintendents (region, assistant, associate or deputy) in a large, diverse urban public school system. of the 260 female administrators identified in the specified positions, 175 returned surveys. this yielded a total return rate of 67.31%. the population consisted of 104 elementary school principals, 14 middle school principals, three senior high school principals, 15 directors, three assistant superintendents, one deputy superintendent, and 16 other non-school site higher level administrators. the findings were based on the comprehensive information of all questionnaires received from these respondents. demographic data the racial classification of the respondents were evenly distributed among white (32%), african american (33%), and hispanic (35%). when analyzing the personal characteristics of the respondents, 62% were married, while 15% were single and 20% were divorced. fifty-seven percent did not have any children living at home. a majority of the hispanic females (75%) and a majority of the white females (68%) were married. the african american females reported being divorced at a higher level (38%) than the others with only 46% of them reported being married. in further analysis of demographic information, the number of children living at home proved statistically significant. a majority of the white female administrators (71%) and a majority of the african american female administrators (60%) did not have any children living at home. however, with the hispanic female administrators, 60% had one or more children living at home. discussion of results african american females the african american female administrators showed a significant difference with the number of years teaching prior to being appointed as an administrator. they had a greater number of years as a teacher with an average of 15.13 years. this indicates they have more instructional experience and it correlates with their perception of barriers hindering their initial placement into administrative positions. african american female administrators perceived the lack of a professional network as more of a barrier to their career advancement than the other respondents. along with that perception, more african american female administrators also felt they were excluded from the informal socialization process into the profession (i.e., the "good old boy network") in comparison to hispanic and white females. lastly, african american female adminstrators perceived that they needed more training in order to be competitive with other administrators in comparison to the other respondents in the study. in fact, in response to the 17 barriers to career advancement listed on the questionnaire, african american female administrators answered with a higher mean score on 14 (see table 1). hispanic female administrators sixty percent of the hispanic female administrators indicated they have children living at home and a majority reported being married. these characteristics underscore how important the role of the family is in the professional and personal lives of hispanic women in the study. in addition, hispanic female administrators file:///awl/spring2004/bb_table.html perceived the barrier, conflicts between the roles of wife/mother and career women, as more of a hindrance than the other female administrators. also, hispanic female administrators perceived their careers as being delayed due to family responsibility more than african american female administrators. they reported interruption in their careers more often than white female administrators. this is more likely due to the focus on family responsibilities. maintaining career aspirations and managing personal lives is a challenge faced by many female administrators (grogan, 1996). one hispanic female administrator wrote in the voluntary narrative portion of the study, "i feel that i have not been recognized professionally because i dedicate nights and weekends to my family." another hispanic female administrator wrote, "i do not seek job choices large distances from my home in order to avoid drive time that would take away from either my family or work." hispanic female administrators also appeared to possess more confidence in their careers. an overwhelming 94% of the hispanic female administrators rated themselves professionally as being very successful. only 78% of the african american and white respondents rated themselves professionally as very successful. when analyzing strategies utilized to overcome the perceived barriers, hispanic higher-level female administrators were more likely to 1) seek advanced training (84%); 2) become assertive in pursuing career goals (62%); 3) become professionally visible (74%); and 4) improve their professional image (82%). in fact, hispanic female administrators rated themselves more highly successful when using strategies to overcome barriers when answering seven of the ten questions on strategies. it became apparent that hispanic female administrators in the study perceived themselves as being successful in achieving what the white and african american female administrators were still finding troublesome: assertively utilizing available resources to enhance their careers (see table 1). an african american female respondent wrote the following in the voluntary narrative portion of the questionnaire: "black females have even more barriers, based on the number of black females in top adminstrative positions. the effects of the perceived barriers is reflected in the limited number of black females filling top level adminstrative positions." another volunteered this statement: "it is my opinion that competency, integrity, loyality and leadership are not components recognized for higher achievement in this school district." yet another african american female adminstrator stated, "minority applicants usually start at the more challenging schools, whereas, all others have the full range of available positions that are only accessable to non-black applicants." african american females also showed a significant difference when answering the questions on the effects of the barriers to career advancement. they felt they were excluded from informal networks more than white or hispanic female adminstrators. this barrier effect showed the largest significant difference among groups than any of the questions on the survey. when answering the question regarding problems finding a balance between feminine identity and professionalism as a barrier effect, african american female administrators felt that it was more of a difficulty. file:///awl/spring2004/bb_table.html white female administrators the white female administrators did not score significantly higher on any of the barrier questions to career advancement as compared to the others. of the eight respondents who wrote in the voluntary narrative portion that they had not experienced any barriers to their career advancement, six were white. an example is a white female administrator who wrote, " i believe my particular survey will not help you much. i have never encountered most of the things you have mentioned here. maybe i was just lucky." the only area in which white female adminstrators showed a significant difference from african american and hispanic female administrators was in the section regarding the perceived effects of the barriers. white female administrators perceived that they were denied access to power groups that make important decisions more than hispanic female administrators. this correlates with much of the research on the exclusion of females in general from top adminstrative positons (gupton and slick, 1995; whitaker & lane, 1990). although white female administrators in this study did not show significance with the barriers in comparison to african american and hispanic female administrators, there is still a glass ceiling hindering the level they are allowed to reach. one white female administrator wrote the following in the voluntary narrative portion of the questionnaire: "within the public school system, there is a definitive lack of women in top roles. this is a result of many males at these levels whom i believe are afraid to allow women into the ranks expecially competent, strong, bright women who speak their minds, as opposed to learn their place." another white female adminstrator stated, "the old-boy network is alive and strong." an area of concern voiced by a few white female higher-level administrators is the race/ethnicity issue. a white female adminstrator stated, "the ethnic/cultural barrier is a greater obstacle now than gender. gender is not the greatest concern verbalized by female adminstrators now." a few of the other narrative responses from white female higher-level adminstrators who viewed race/ethnicity as a concern were: "the biggest barriers to my becoming principal were my ethnicity and lack of visibility to those who make decisions." also, "once you understand they don't desire intelligent, thoughtful, competent people especially anglo females then you're okay." lastly, "your data (questions) did not address…the influence of race/ethnicity in decisions, re: promotions." summary of findings this study provided extensive information on three identified areas of inquiry. the first area of inquiry explored the differences among african american, hispanic, and white female public school administrators on the perception of barriers to career advancement. it was revealed that african american female administrators in the study perceived more barriers as hindering their career ascension in comparison to hispanic and white respondents. they answered with a higher mean score on 14 of the 17 areas identified as barriers. the significant areas were the following: the perception that they had lack of access to professional networks, the perception that they were excluded from the informal socialization process, and the perception that they needed more training in order to be competitive. the hispanic female public school administrators scored significantly in the area of conflicts between the role of wife and career. a majority of the identified areas of significance concerning hispanic females centered on the family and personal life. the second area of inquiry centered on the differences among african american, hispanic, and white female public school administrators on the perceived effects of barriers to career advancement. african american respondents scored significantly in the areas of being excluded from the informal network and having problems balancing femininity and professionalism. hispanic female public school administrators scored significantly in the areas of having an interruption of their career and having their careers delayed career due to family responsibilities. the only area in which the white female respondents scored significantly was the area of being denied access to power groups as an effect of the barriers to career advancement. the final area of inquiry referred to the strategies the respondents utilized to overcome barriers to career advancement. the hispanic female respondents scored significantly in two areas: improving their professional image and becoming professionally visible. the paucity of strategies showing significance among the female study participants indicates a need for an improved, concerted effort focusing on giving alternative options to assist in advancement endeavors. recommendations for change this research study provided available information on the major barriers to career advancement facing african american, hispanic and white higher-level female administrators in a large diverse urban public school system. the results of the study added to the accumulating body of research on female administrators and the factors that create barriers to their full participation in educational administration. a feminist orientation of analysis allows for the conclusion that barriers identified as significant provide strong evidence of the persistence of discriminatory practices that limit the representation of all female leaders, particularly those of color. mentoring and support networks to assist in the elimination of barriers, women of all races and ethnicities should take the initiative in counteracting the stereotypic attitudes regarding their roles in educational administration. an important advancement in that direction is the formulation of mentoring and support groups among those represented in this study as well as those not represented. the male administrators have mastered the informal network and actively practice its advantageous strategies. as cited earlier, a study by bailey, wolfe, & wolf (1996) revealed that social support was particularly important for african american women. a female administrator wrote the following in the voluntary narrative portion of the questionnaire: "the barrier presenting the most obstacles to me has been the "boys club" mentality of upper administrators. only the chosen "guys" get the jobs, and the top jobs go by direct appointment….not the interview process." women have yet to fully participate in the beneficial tactics employed by male administrators. as another female administrator wrote in the questionnaire, "women do not necessarily support other women. men are more supportive of other men." yet another female administrator stated, "females are sometimes their own worst enemies. in their quest for success, they are not willing to share their knowledge. in addition, rather than admit that they don't know a policy or procedure, they become defensive and aggressive toward other females." yet another female administrator summed up the barriers faced by women administrators by writing, "often, women are more of a barrier to other women getting advancement." only through a collective, cohesive effort will the plight of females vying for top administrative positions in the school system improve. as reported in the glass ceiling commission study sponsored by the department of labor (1995), women who obtained top positions attribute their success principally to individual effort and performance. the findings support the results of an earlier study by elman and gilbert (1984). they investigated how 97 women in dual-career families with preschool children manage typical conflicts between their professional and parental roles. two coping strategies, increased role behavior and cognitive restructuring were the most utilized strategies. increased role behavior involved efforts by the participants to "do it all," by working harder and more efficiently. cognitive restructuring and personal role redefinition involved thinking about the situation differently and altering personal role conceptions. it was concluded that the women in the study most typically used coping strategies in which the responsibility for conflict reduction remained with the individual. this correlates with the results of the present study in that a majority of the respondents reported never utilizing a "new girl network," which is the female version of the male "good old boy network." support systems are a must considering that many times shared success is more gratifying than individualized accomplishments. such networks will allow female administrators to form a collective voice to counteract the present status quo of male dominated power. school boards it is the responsibility of local school boards to become aware of the inequities that exist in hiring and employment practices. school boards and districts carry the responsibility to investigate the extent to which women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds are represented in the upper-administrative staff and closely examine their hiring/promotion practices and procedures in order to achieve equity. women are well represented among elementary school principals. an effort must be made to equalize their representation in the senior high principalships and superintendencies (region, associate, assistant, and deputy, etc.). school boards must be diligent about maintaining equitable work environments and leadership opportunities for all employees. when social justice and equity are modeled by the school leadership on a consistent basis, the potential exists not only to enrich the professional opportunities for female leaders, but, more importantly, to enrich learning opportunities for the children that are served. (tillman, b. a. & cochran, l. l. & 2000). reconciling professional and personal responsibilities it is advantageous for female administrators to strive to give equal energy to both the professional and personal arenas. in a study of women aspiring to the superintendency, grogan (1996) outlined several areas expressed by the participants as causing tension. fear of failing as a mother, responsibility for maintenance of relationships, and coping with household labor (partnering, mothering, and homemaking) were the areas cited. grogan concluded that the women in the study moved "back and forth between the different discourses, professional and personal, never at any time able or willing to abandon completely the practices that have constituted her as partner, mother, or homemaker" (grogan, 1996, p. 110). maintaining personal support systems (family, friends, informal groups) places women at equal advantage with males by allowing them to benefit from the very networks that assist males in advancing. receiving advanced education/training of the 156 female administrators who responded to the questionnaire, only 12 (8%) had doctoral degrees. in order to be competitive with males, more females must obtain higher educational degrees. education beyond the masters and specialist levels could assist female administrators in obtaining the knowledge, skills, and credentials necessary to overcome many of the barriers they perceive in hindering career advancement. as stated by davies-netzley (1998, p. 348), "earning advanced degrees and credentials (higher than those of most men) appears to be a way that women compete with men for elite positions." higher education it is imperative that university preparation programs in teacher education, educational administration, and related areas address issues of race, ethnicity, and gender in more authentic ways than in the past (tillman & cochran, 2000). strategies that would contribute to gender, racial, and ethnic equity in public school administration include recruiting and retaining diverse faculty, diversity training, offering courses focusing on gender, race, and ethnicity issues in leadership, and promoting a greater understanding of the alternative styles of leadership women offer. lastly, providing high quality field experiences in urban schools could result in greater sensitivity to diversity on the part of those preparing to teach and lead children in today's schools (tillman & cochran, 2000) albino (1992) summarizes the status of women in educational leadership by stating, "conventional wisdom says women are at a disadvantage in moving ahead in management. we …….. have not been playing the game as long. the fact is, there are many different ways to win; it all depends on how you play the cards you've been dealt. and you don't need dirty tricks; you just need to know the rules of the game." references albino, j. e. (1992). women as leaders: the dirty word they must learn. education digest, 59, 33-36. allen, k., jacobson, s., & lomotey, k. (1995). african american women in educational administration: the importance of mentors and sponsors. the journal of negro education, 64(4), 409-422. american association of university women (2002). pathways to educational leadership: advancing women as principals and superintendents. retrieved from http://www.aauw.org/7000/ef/pathwaysbd.html bailey, d., wolf, c. r., & wolf, w. (1996). the contextual impact of social support across race and gender: implications for african american women in the workplace. journal of black studies, 26(3), 287-307. davies-netzley, s. a. (1998). women above the glass ceiling: perceptions on corporate mobility and strategies for success. gender and society, 12(3), 339-355. elman, m. r. & gilbert, l. a. (1984). coping strategies for role conflict in married professional women with children. family relations, 33(2), 317-327. gardiner, m. e., enomoto, e., & grogan , m. (2000). coloring outside the lines: mentoring women into school leadership. new york: state university of new york press. grogan, m. (1996). voices of women aspiring to the superintendency. new york: albany state university of new york press. gupton, s. l. & skick, g. a. (1995). women leaders: who are they and how do they compare? in b. irby & g. brown (eds.), women as school executives: voices and visions (pp. 6-14). austin, tx: texas council of women school executives. gupton, s. l. & slick, g. a., (1996). highly successful women administrators: the inside stories of how they got there. thousand oaks, california: corwin press, inc. keller, b. (1999, november). women superintendents: few and far between. education week, 19(11), 1. national center for education statistics. (2002). chapter two, elementary and secondary education. retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d02/tables/dt085.asp. scandura, t. a. (1990). breaking the glass ceiling in the 1990's research project funded by the us dept. of labor, women's bureau. shakeshaft, c. (1999). the struggle to create a more gender-inclusive profession. handbook of research on educational administration (2nd ed.). san francisco: jossey-bass. tetreault, m. k. t. (1985). feminist phase theory: an experience-derived evaluation model. the journal of higher education, 56(4), 363-384. tillman, b. a. & cochran, l. l. (2000). desegregating urban school administration: a pursuit of equity for black women superintendents. education and urban society, 33(1), 44-59. united states census bureau (2000). profiles of general demographic characteristics. 2000 census of population and housing, united states. retrieved from: http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2000/dp1/2kh00.pdf united states department of labor (usdl). (1995). a solid investment: making full us of the nation's human capital. recommendations of the federal glass ceiling commission: washington, dc. retrieved from http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/earchive/ whitaker, k. s. & lane, k. (1990). is a woman's place in administration? the school administrator, 47, 8-12. author dr. marie byrd-blake is assistant professor in the department of leadership, university of memphis. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2004 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///e%7c/temp/awpublisher.html file:///e%7c/temp/content.html file:///e%7c/temp/advertising.html file:///e%7c/temp/privacy.html file:///e%7c/temp/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international advancing women in leadership the price of success: senior academic women's stress and life choices eugenia proctor gerdes, ph.d. gerdes, spring, 2003 they are proud of the way they have put their lives together to meet as many of their goals as possible-although they are aware that they had to work very hard to do so. the fact that stress has a detrimental effect on health and well-being is welldocumented, although the complex relationships are far from delineated. one major controversy involves whether women's traditional roles or the higher status professional and leadership positions, held predominantly by men, are more stressful for women. although some argue that women will suffer more stressrelated disorders as they move into high pressure jobs or as they combine work and family roles, the preponderance of data show that women are least healthy when they hold traditional family roles alone (see barnett & hyde, 2001). even so, the same work environment can be more detrimental for women than for men if the expectations of that environment are structured more appropriately for men than for women (see gerdes, 1995). higher education is just such a traditionally male environment; and it is an important environment to examine because of the increasing presence of women as faculty and administrators, and because higher education itself is more than a venue for women's leadership and success. institutions of higher learning prepare the men and women who become leaders across our society, and higher education arguably represents a society's highest potential for "preserving, transmitting and enlarging on what is best in the culture" (farley, 1990, p. 194). although the representation of women in american academe has increased continuously and cumulatively since the early 1970s, when affirmative action first applied to higher education, the situation of women may not be as much improved as we would like to believe (see, for example, glazer-raymo's shattering the http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html myths: women in academe, 1999). the growth in numbers of women has been very gradual and has arisen primarily from growth in the overall numbers of professional higher education employees (a 50% increase between 1976 and 1995), with a higher rate of increase for women than for men, resulting in women reaching 35% of full-time faculty and 44% of full-time administrators by 1995. women continue to be underrepresented in traditionally male fields, the upper ranks of faculty and administrators, and more prestigious institutions (billard, 1994; glazer-raymo, 1999; national center for education statistics [nces], 1998; valian, 1998). women also are disproportionately overrepresented in part-time positions and continue to earn less than men in comparable situations (billard, 1994; glazer-raymo, 1999; nces, 1998; ransom & megdal, 1993; valian, 1998). women's own experience of their situation is a more important determinant of their well-being than is their increased representation. unfortunately, the "chilly climate" concept (sandler, 1986) remains a familiar depiction of structural and attitudinal constraints impeding women's progress in academe. recent empirical studies demonstrate that women do perceive at least some aspects of the academic climate as chilly to their success (bronstein & farnsworth, 1998). women's nontraditional status in academe is related to potential sources of extra stress that a number of authors have described-above and beyond the multiple job responsibilities and time pressures that apply to all academics. in addition to the objective disadvantages in positions and pay listed above, women are considered likely to be stressed by subtle discrimination, outsider status, high demands for service activities, isolation and lack of social support, responsibility for household work and child care, expectations that a spouse's career comes first, and coincidence of prime childbearing years with pre-tenure evaluations (lease, 1999; o'laughlin & bischoff, 2001; tack & patitu, 1992). these factors would affect women administrators who begin as faculty members as well as women who remain in the faculty; both groups may discover that the independence and flexibility of a faculty career have the downsides of poorly defined expectations and "spillover" between career and the rest of one's life (see o'laughlin & bischoff, 2001). however, surprisingly few empirical studies of faculty and administrators include consideration of gender and report respondents' experiences of conflicts with other roles as well as work stress per se. using standardized questionnaires, lease (1999) found no gender differences in faculty members' ratings of work-role stressors; but women did report more responsibility for home tasks, and those faculty members who reported responsibility for more than 50% of home tasks also reported more interpersonal strain. in a much larger study, dey (1994) included outside roles in analyzing 1989-90 data on 18 sources of stress from the higher education research institute (heri) standardized survey of faculty and administrators teaching at almost 400 institutions. time pressures and lack of personal time received the highest ratings as stress sources with more women than men using the highest rating, extensive. from 39% to more than 50% of women in each group (grouped according to white versus non-white and tenured versus untenured status) rated these two sources of stress as extensive. although the level of extensive stress was lower for other sources of stress, women also were more likely than men to report extensive stress from subtle discrimination and from managing household responsibilities. among tenured faculty, more women than men rated the teaching load and the review/promotion process as extensive sources of stress (the review/promotion process was rated as more stressful by untenured faculty but without a gender difference). furthermore, the 18 sources of stress had different interrelationships for women than for men. dey (1994) concluded that the populations warranted separate investigations and that future researchers should explore additional stressors of particular relevance for different groups. standardized surveys with closed choices do not allow academic women to identify the stressors and conflicts most salient to them personally. women who began academic careers around 1970 still are working within academe and now have over a quarter-century of observations to share. rather than asking them to rate factors that i or other authors deemed important, it seemed preferable to assess the factors salient to senior academic women about their own careers in higher education using open-ended qualitative methodology (see kimmel, 1989). consequently, i began to ask senior academic women to describe their own careers in the spring of 1997. an earlier analysis of their perceptions (gerdes, 1999a, 1999b) documented the salience of changes over their careers; frequently mentioned were the increased presence of women, changes in policies or behavior, and/or improvements in beliefs or attitudes. however, almost half of those responding to a separate question concerning unchanged factors noted family problems that remain for women. further, about two-thirds described remaining areas of bias, primarily subtle or stereotypical biases. in a second analysis (gerdes, in press), the respondents were asked what we should be teaching our women students and what advice they would give to women just starting academic careers. almost half of those answering this question included either warnings to be on guard for negative factors that still affect women in higher education or descriptions of "facts of life" that women would have to accept if they choose an academic career, or both. in addition, advice concerning choices to minimize family-work conflict were included in the advice of about 15% of the respondents. these previous analyses suggest stresses and conflicts between work and personal life consistent with previous research. it is the purpose of the current analysis to directly address the respondents' perceptions of level of stress they experience, the sources of stress, and the trade-offs between other roles and their careers. method i distributed a letter of explanation and an open-ended questionnaire via electronicmail to women identified primarily through listservs of academic deans and higher education administrators and through interdisciplinary lists of faculty members. using snowball sampling (patton, 1990), the letter of introduction invited women to answer the questions confidentially and/or forward the questions to others who might participate. faculty members and administrators who began their careers with faculty positions around 1970 were particularly encouraged to respond. useable responses were obtained from 98 women. of these respondents, 11 were current or recent presidents or chancellors; 40 were academic deans, vpaa/provosts, or their associates working in academic or faculty affairs; nine were other administrators; and 38 were faculty members. respondents' disciplinary backgrounds spanned the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences including medicine; they were located across the country (plus several in canada) and at institutions of every carnegie classification. a more detailed description of the respondents is available in gerdes (in press), and the complete letter of introduction and questionnaire are available upon request. in short, a series of open-ended questions about these women's early experiences and the most important changes and unchanged factors they had observed provided the context for the questions relevant to this report. respondents were asked one question (with two parts) concerning stress: how would you rate the level of stress in your current position -very high, high , moderate, low, or very low? what are the major sources of stress in your current position? scores of 1 to 5 were assigned to stress ratings of very low to very high. also included were two questions concerning integration of other roles with careers: have factors in your personal life, such as family, made it easier or harder for you to succeed in your career? (if so, please indicate the stage at which each of these factors impacted your career.) has your career in higher education or advancing your career made necessary for you to give up or compromise other goals in your life? do you believe that the same sacrifices or compromises would have been necessary for a man in your careertrack? to classify sources of stress and the factors mentioned in response to the two questions concerning roles, an inductive method was used to form categories that were distinct and internally consistent. that is, as often suggested for qualitative analysis (e.g., marshall & rossman, 1995; patton, 1990), preliminary categories were determined by first skimming the answers. the separate points made in each answer were then placed into these categories, with new categories added when points did not fit and categories combined when the initial categories could not be distinguished. results stress the level of stress reported by these senior women was quite high. the average response for the 96 women who gave a rating on this question was 4.0, or high. the average for the administrators was 4.2 (with 47 out of the 60 administrators giving a rating of high or very high); whereas the faculty members averaged 3.6, between moderate and high. this difference between administrators and faculty members is statistically significant, t = 3.27, p < .002. two-tailed. sources of stress were listed by 90 respondents. volume of work, time pressure, and difficulties balancing different aspects of work were the most frequently mentioned sources of stress, cited by 51.1% of respondents. these time/workload pressures were mentioned by 26 of the 54 administrators (48.1%) who listed sources of their stress and by 20 of the 36 faculty members (55.6%) who listed sources. there were marked differences in the types of time/workload pressures described. faculty members typically referred to balancing teaching, research, service, and sometimes administrative commitments; whereas administrators frequently described the simple but severe situation of too much work for the time available or described their current jobs as consuming all of their time and energy. another frequent category of stressors included responsibilities to others and for others, others' expectations, and interpersonal conflict. this category of stressors was mentioned by 41 of the respondents who listed sources of stress (45.6%). but, such stressors were reported much more frequently by administrators, by 30 out of the 54 who listed sources (55.6%), compared to only 11 of the 36 faculty members who listed sources (30.6%). at least four of the faculty members who cited this source did so in connection to their work as department chair. presidents tended to express a sense of feeling responsible for everything or being held responsible by everyone, including conflicting constituencies; whereas the academic administrators and other administrators were more likely to mention personnel problems, other faculty issues, or difficulty addressing superiors' expectations and priorities. the third large category of sources of stress was resource problems, described either as difficult financial decisions or lack of adequate enrollments, funding, or specific resources such as staffing. resource problems were cited by 30 respondents (33.3% of those listing sources of stress). again, this source of stress was reported frequently by administrators, 26 out of 54 listing sources (48.1%), but only by four of the 36 faculty members listing sources (11.1%). these three large categories of stressors cover most of the specific points mentioned by administrators; faculty women cited more unique sources of stress, such as particular scholarly projects or the nature of their appointment. the only other source of stress to generate more than a couple of responses was having high expectations of oneself, which was cited by nine of the faculty members listing sources (25%) but only three of the administrators (5.6%). in connection with their overall lower ratings of stress experienced in their current job, it is important to note that several of the senior faculty women mentioned that their lives had been more stressful earlier, when they were less established, had young children, or had administrative duties. other roles the questions concerning other roles asked these senior women to consider their whole careers rather than just their current situations. answers to these two questions were difficult to separate because many women wrote about their difficulty balancing career and other roles, rather than specifically addressing the effect of other roles on career in answer to the first question and the effect of career on meeting other goals in response to the second. the answers were analyzed under the relevant question regardless of where the respondents placed them. the answers to both questions were dominated by the issues of marriage and family. in answering whether other factors in their personal lives made success in their careers easier or harder, 36 (36.7%) women answered harder, 30 (30.6%) easier, and 32 (32.7%) that their personal lives had both positive and negative effects or no effect on their careers. it should be noted that the women who reported both negative and positive effects sometimes were noting the simultaneous pros and cons of the same role (e.g., marriage or parenting) and sometimes were listing a combination of simultaneous positive and negative factors or different factors that impacted their careers in different periods. the fairly even division of answers obscures the fact that children were overwhelmingly judged to be detrimental to career progress-even though many women were careful to say that although their careers suffered, their lives were better overall for having children. of the 30 women who reported that their personal lives had made success easier, 11 said that it was being childless or both childless and single at crucial points that aided their progress. in addition, six of the 32 women who answered that factors in their personal lives had both positive and negative effects on their careers explained the positive effects in the same way. the most frequently reported factors that made career success harder fell into the category of children causing delay in the career, lower mobility, less time devoted to career, or lower productivity, which were reported by 48 of the 68 women who concluded that personal factors had an overall negative effect on their careers or both positive and negative effects. combining these counts, a total of 64 different women (65.3% of the 98 respondents) mentioned negative effects on their careers of having children and/or advantages of being childless (one mentioned both the advantages of being childless before tenure and the later time demands of having a child). ways in which having a spouse or partner limited careers also were frequently mentioned, by 30 of the 68 women who described negative effects. the answers of 20 women fell into the category of lack of mobility, nepotism rules, or commuting or moving to follow a spouse/partner; and the more general problems of time or attention needed by a spouse or some unspecified way in which the spouse or marriage interfered with success were reported by another 10 women. on the other hand, of the total of 62 women who described personal factors that have facilitated career success, 38 women mentioned supportive spouses or partners; and 12 (including some who also had mentioned supportive spouses) mentioned receiving support from children or the ability to focus on priorities at work and keep perspective on work problems because they had the family role (spouse/partner, children, or both) as well. in addition, another eight women mentioned either encouragement from parents or practical help in caring for children from another family member besides their spouse or partner. no other positive effects of other personal factors on their careers were mentioned by more than one or two women each. the question concerning whether other life goals had been sacrificed or compromised for the careers was answered by 94 women, and it was possible to gather information relevant to this question from the previous question on personal life effects on the career and from other questions as well. for example, it appears that few gave up the opportunity to have children. although not asked directly, 65 (66.3%) mentioned children in their answers to these two questions; so at least that many are mothers, and at least two more have stepchildren which appear to be a later or less constant responsibility. at least 29 (29.6%) do not have children (leaving 4 unknown); but only seven describe the fact that they did not have children as at least partially due to their career. another six reported that they had only one child because of their careers. although many did not specifically mention their spouse/partner as a positive or negative influence on their careers, at least 78 women appear to be married or have been married at some point as well as five women who have current or past domestic partners, at least two of which are same-sex partners; altogether this represents 84.7% of the respondents. another eight may well have had a spouse or partner at some point: two described themselves as single parents although they did not mention a past or present spouse/partner, and six more referred to parenting or family without specifically mentioning a spouse/partner. those who have never had a committed relationship might be limited to the seven who described themselves as currently single without mentioning a spouse/partner at any point in their careers. at least 21 of the respondents have been divorced and another described the loss of a long-term relationship (a total of 22.4% of the 98 respondents); nine of these do not appear to have current relationships. of those nine who have not replaced committed relationships, seven attribute their breakup and/or not forming a new relationship to their careers. in addition, four others attributed difficulty forming or maintaining committed relationships at some point to their careers, totaling 11 women who reported sacrificing or compromising the goal of a committed relationship. overall, 63 women (67.0% of those responding to this question) believed they had sacrificed or compromised other goals for their careers, 27 (28.7%) did not believe they had done so, four (4.3%) were uncertain or answered both that they had and had not, and four did not answer. the 59 women who addressed the second part of this question concerning whether men in comparable situations would have to make the same choices included some who did not report that they personally had made sacrifices or compromises; for example, some women who did not feel they had sacrificed goals (e.g., because they preferred to be childless or did have children or sacrificed their careers instead of other goals) also answered that men would not have to consider the same trade-offs. however, a good number of women who did report sacrifices or compromises neglected to answer this part of the question. of those responding, 39 (66.1%) did not believe that men would have to make the same sacrifices/compromises, 14 (23.7%) thought they would, and another six (10.2%) thought they both would and would not; as noted previously, 39 did not answer. aside from the problems with committed relationships and limitations on having children detailed above, the most frequently reported sacrifices/compromises due to career dealt with reductions in time for other roles. the most common category of sacrifice/compromise was a reduction in the amount of time for family (spouse/partner, children, or both) reported by 24 women. on the other side of the same trade-off, another 11 women stated that they put their family first and that is the reason that they did not sacrifice/compromise other goals; it was the career that suffered as detailed above. along the same lines, 17 women indicated that because they devoted all necessary time to career or to career and family, other personal interests and social life suffered; another two women reported that they had no time for any goals outside of their work. finally, 11 women reported reduction in the time available for scholarship/writing or artistic development; in addition, two administrators reported giving up teaching as a sacrifice. it should be noted that 12 women spontaneously mentioned that they would like to have a "wife" who would attend to such obligations as household chores and family scheduling and leave them more time for career or time to pursue personal interests; eight of these women stated that men do not have to make the same choices and compromises because such support still is more available to them. discussion this study demonstrates both high stress and trade-offs in roles for academic women. these problems appear to result from the combination of the demanding nature of academic careers, continued expectations for women's responsibilities outside of paid employment, and insufficient time to meet all expectations. although revealing high levels of stress, this study alone cannot demonstrate that senior academic womenare experiencing more stress than senior men in comparable positions. yet that conclusion is consistent with other studies. the gender differences previously demonstrated by dey (1994) continue, as demonstrated in large national surveys. the 1995-96 heri faculty survey national norms (sax, astin, arredondo, & korn, 1996) include an overall rating of stress and provide comparisons with the 1989-90 stress data used by dey. on the three-point rating of overall stress, 44% of faculty women and 27% of faculty men reported extreme stress. although subtle discrimination showed the greatest decline since 1989-90, especially for women, it still was rated on a three-point scale as extensive or somewhat by 34% of women as compared to 18% of men. as in 1989-90, women continued to be more likely than men to report stress from time pressures, lack of personal time, household responsibilities, and teaching loads; and caring for an elderly parent had increased as a problem for women but not for men. likewise, in the 1998-99 heri faculty survey national norms (sax, astin, korn, & gilmartin, 1999), female faculty reported more stress than men from subtle discrimination (now 35% compared to 17% for men), the review/promotion process, managing household responsibilities, and lack of personal time. although the heri sample of academic administrators is not as representative as the faculty sample, gender differences there also have demonstrated greater stress for women. in telephone interviews for the 1999 tiaa-cref/norc american faculty poll (national education association higher education research center, 2000), faculty members from 285 institutions gave yes or no answers to whether nine personal issues and workrelated topics interfered with their academic work and/or caused them stress in the previous year. for eight of the nine factors, more women than men reported interference/stress, including differences of more than 10% on the work load and physical or health problems. in addition, slightly more women (78%) than men (76%) rated time for family as very important; but fewer women (24%) than men (33%) were very satisfied with this aspect of their lives. from the comments of women in the current study, it is not surprising that 68% of women (as compared to 55% of men) in the american faculty poll rated a flexible work schedule very important. in spite of the high levels of stress reported, very few women in the current study referred to gender issues when asked to identify "sources of stress in your current position." (only eight women attributed current work stress to their gender, three more mentioned work stress due to commuting, and four others mentioned other family stress that intruded on their work.) for the rest of these senior women, it might be that discrimination was more of a problem earlier in their careers and that lack of institutional support for family issues is less of a problem now that they are past the childbearing and rearing stage of their lives. they are the women who have succeeded and who have conquered the gender disadvantages, to at least some extent. it must be remembered that this question on current stress appeared near the end of a questionnaire on which many had already described egregious instances of blatant discrimination and severe lack of institutional support earlier in their careers; the contrast could make them less prone to identify their current stress with their gender. that explanation would be consistent with their describing a decrease in blatant discrimination against women over their careers but also describing subtle discrimination and conflict with family roles as continuing problems for academic women in general (gerdes, 1999a, 1999b). in addition, it would be consistent with the problems they described in their own lives when asked to reflect on their whole careers in the questions about integrating other roles. the differences in types of stressors reported by senior faculty and administrators in this study are consistent with the more independent or autonomous nature of faculty members' work. the relatively lower level of stress reported by faculty women also could derive from their autonomy; or it could be specific to their career stage, which would be consistent with several faculty women's mention of greater stress at an earlier stage when career overlapped with childrearing and their jobs were less secure. for many of the administrative women in this study, who typically came from the faculty, a period of stress from establishing faculty credentials and/or childrearing was followed by increasing responsibility as an administrator; a few even commented that they could not have undertaken the administrative role until their children were older. most of the administrative women now hold positions that are very demanding, both in terms of time pressures and level of responsibility. few studies of stress include attention to the stages of an academic career. although they did not include outside roles, bronstein and farnsworth (1998) did separate established faculty women from women who had been at the institution less than six years; they found no greater disadvantage for newer faculty women in terms of perceived treatment by colleagues and administrators except in exclusion from social events and decision-making. in fact, some disadvantages, such as negative treatment by students and inappropriate sexual attention from colleagues and administrators, seemed to occur so infrequently that they had a greater impact on women who had been at the institution longer. lease (1999) defined new faculty as those with five or less years of postdoctorate experience; using combined scales of work-role stressors, she found no differences due to experience but did find the relationship between household work and stress reported earlier. it may be that five or six years into the career is not the best dividing point for academic women and that different types of stressors dominate at different stages of the career. although they did not separate men and women, sax et al. (1996) did analyze the 1995-96 heri faculty data for the level of specific stressors at different ages. for example, ratings of stress from childcare as extensive or somewhat peak in the 3544 age group, and ratings of stress from the review/promotion process and from research or publishing demands are highest in the under 35 and 35-44 age groups. the highest rated concerns were time pressures, lack of personal time, household responsibilities, personal finances, and teaching load; ratings of all of these stressors drop somewhat by the 45-54 cohort, drop more dramatically by 55-64, yet remain high at all ages. it should be noted that this is a cross-sectional rather than longitudinal comparison, and it is not clear that the stages of highest stress on different dimensions correspond as neatly to age for women as for men. for example, the current study included some faculty and administrative women who delayed their careers to care for children and some women who married late because of their careers, as well as those who integrated marriage, children, and career in the same timeline as typical of their male colleagues. in terms of interference from family and household roles, sax et al. (1999) note that men and women faculty have about the same number of children but that women are more likely to interrupt their careers for family reasons or health as well as being more likely to spend at least 17 hours per week on household and childcare duties. although most stress studies focus on faculty members, the change in stressors could be even more complex for administrative women, depending on when they move from faculty to administration. although the respondents in this study are senior women who could believe that gender-related stresses ended in the 1970s or 1980s, there is evidence that they do perceive continuing problems for younger women (gerdes, 1999a, 1999b, in press). it can be argued that it is no easier now for women to integrate career and outside roles and that institutional responses have not been sufficient. an interview study of early career faculty conducted by the american association of higher education (rice, sorcinelli, & austin, 2000) identified time pressures, balancing work roles, and balancing professional and personal life as major stresses for these faculty members, and identified these stresses and subtle discrimination as particularly intense for women. other recent articles describe the problems for academic women of balancing parenting and career (o'laughlin & bischoff, 2001), dual-career couples (wolf-wendel, twombly, & rice, 2000), and commuter marriages (harris, lowery, & arnold, 2002) and demonstrate the relationship between family responsibilities and faculty employment status (perna, 2001). perna (2001) questions whether increases in women's numbers in higher education will improve their job status and rewards because advancement may always be limited by their family responsibilities. likewise, glazer-raymo (1999) argues that women's progress in higher education is threatened both by the illusion that gender neutrality has been achieved and the shift in institutional priorities away from social justice to a more corporate mentality. the corporatization of higher education includes the backlash against affirmative action and greater use of part-time and nontenure-track faculty, who are disproportionately women. glazer-raymo (1999) believes these trends are unlikely to be reversed unless women speak with a collective voice, as in campus commissions. wolf-wendel et al. (2000) urge the development of institutional policies to assist dual-career couples to work and live in the same area. o'laughlin and bischoff (2001) list specific family-friendly policies needed by academician parents: extended tenure deadlines, high quality daycare, flexible work schedules, expanding event scheduling beyond evening hours that conflict with family, parent-academician mentors, and sensitivity training for colleagues and superiors. as perna (2001) and others point out, such policies would assist all faculty but are especially crucial to women's success. to end on a positive note, the senior women in this study clearly saw themselves as having choices. they did not report feeling powerless in the face of obstacles; instead, their answers conveyed the attitude that they have succeeded in optimizing the options now available to women. they are proud of the way they have put their lives together to meet as many of their goals as possible-although they are aware that they had to work very hard to do so. note the author would like to thank the busy women who gave generously of their time to participate in this study. references barnett, r. c., & hyde, j. s. (2001). women, men, and work: an expansionist theory. american psychologist, 56, 781-796. billard, l. (1994). twenty years later: is there parity for academic women? thought and action, 10, 114-144. bronstein, p., & farnsworth, l. (1998). gender differences in faculty experiences of interpersonal climate and processes for advancement. research in higher education, 39, 557-585. dey, e. l. (1994). dimensions of faculty stress. the review of higher education, 17, 305-322. farley, j. (1990). women professors in the u.s.a.: where are they? in s. s. lie & v. e. o'leary (eds.), storming the tower: women in the academic world (pp. 194207). new york: nichols/gp publishing. gerdes, e. p. (1995). women preparing for traditionally male professions: physical and psychological symptoms associated with work and home stress. sex roles, 32, 787-807. gerdes, e. p. (1990a). women in higher education administration: how much progress? in aauw educational foundation (eds.), higher education in transition: the politics and practices of equity (proceedings of aauw's june 17-19, 1999 college/university symposium) (pp. 155-170). washington, dc: aauw. gerdes, e. p. (1999b). progress since 1970? academic women's perceptions of changes. in d. calhoun-french (ed.), proceedings of the 12th annual conference-women in higher education (pp. 58-67). washington, dc: national association for women in higher education. gerdes, e. p. (in press). do it your way: advice from senior academic women. innovative higher education, 27. glazer-raymo, j. (1999). shattering the myths: women in academe. baltimore: johns hopkins. harris, s., lowery, s., & arnold, m. (2002, winter). when women educators are commuters in commuter marriages. advancing women in leadership journal, 10. retrieved april 8, 2002, from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2002/harris.html kimmel, e. b. (1989). the experience of feminism. psychology of women quarterly, 13, 133-146. lease, s. h. (1999). occupational role stressors, coping, support, and hardiness as predictors of strain in academic faculty: an emphasis on new and female faculty. research in higher education, 40, 285-307. marshall, k., & rossman, g. b. (1995). designing qualitative research (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. national center for education statistics. (1998). e. d. tabs: fall staff in postsecondary institutions, 1995, nces 98-228, by s. roey & r. rak. washington, dc: u. s. department of education. retrieved june 1, 1998, from http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp? pubid=98228 national education association higher education research center (2000, june). the american faculty poll. update, 6(3). issue prepared by d. pena & d. mitchell. retrieved april 20, 1001, from http://nea.org/he/heupdate/index.html o'laughlin, e. m., & bischoff, l. g. (2001, winter). balancing parenthood and academia: the challenges and contradictions of academic careers. advancing women in leadership journal, 4. retrieved april 8, 2002, from http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/index.html patton, m. q. (1990). qualitative research and evaluation methods (2nd ed.). newbury park, ca: sage. perna, l. w. (2001). the relationship between family responsibilities and employment status among college and university faculty. the journal of higher education, 72, 584-611. ransom, m. r., & megdal, s. b. (1993). sex differences in the academic labor market in the affirmative action era. economics of education review, 12, 21-43. rice, r. e., sorcinelli, m. d., & austin, a. e. (2000). heeding new voices: academic careers for a new generation. new pathways working paper 7. washington, dc: american association for higher education. sandler, b. r. (1986). the campus climate revisited: chilly for women faculty, administrators, and graduate students. washington, d. c.: american association of colleges. [reprinted in glazer, j. s., bensimon, e. m., and townsend, b. k. (eds.) (1993). women in higher education: a feminist perspective. ashe reader series. needham heights, ma: ginn press.] sax, l. j., astin, a. w., arredondo, m., & korn, w. s. (1996). the american college teacher: national norms for the 1995-96 heri faculty survey. los angeles: higher education research institute, ucla. sax, l. j., astin, a. w., korn, w. s., & gilmartin, s. k. (1999). the american college teacher: national norms for the 1998-99 heri faculty survey. los angeles: higher education research institute, ucla. executive summary retrieved march 13, 2002, from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/ press_faculty.htm tack, m. w., & patitu, c. l. (1992). faculty job satisfaction: women and minorities in peril. ashe-eric higher education report no. 4. washington, dc: the george washington university, school of education and human development. valian, v. (1998). why so slow? the advancement of women. cambridge: m. i. t. press. wolf-wendel, l. e., twombly, s., & rice, s. (2000). dual-career couples: keeping them together. the journal of higher education, 71, 291-321. author dr. eugenia p. gerdes is professor of psychology and dean of the college of arts and sciences, bucknell university. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © 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fall 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] nora barlow a modern cambridge victorian and 'the many lives of modern woman' louis m. smith an introduction: integrating divergent items the audience and thesis of a book carry multiple implications for what will follow in the discussion. in reading the many lives of modern woman (gruenberg and krech, 1952), i found the authors speaking to a number of issues about which i was concerned. in particular they seemed to offer a kind of subtext to the last chapter of the biography i am writing, nora barlow and the darwin legacy (smith, in process). if that works out, it is a major discovery or accomplishment. further, when colleagues sharon lee and kelly mckerrow sent a call for papers on women, leadership, and social justice, i thought the gruenberg and krech book spoke not only to the barlow life but also to the lee and mckerrow request. my intension and task is the integration of a review of a classic book, and a view and commentary of the life of nora barlow, a privileged 19th century woman. she was well to do and part of the intellectual aristocracy of england. a part of her life concerned the issues of community leadership and for her, at a very personal level, attempts at the resolution of the problems of equality and social justice. finally in this essay review i present, and try to integrate, a series of more autobiographical comments of the interrelationships between the book and my, and my wife's, personal lives. my hope would be that in accomplishing this complex task i would have a better grasp of several important issues in social science and more personally, how i want to end the biography of nora barlow. first, to begin the discussion, i present several quotes from the foreword to many lives. we have been especially concerned with the women who have some choice about the way they can spend their lives and some scope in which to create new designs for living. this is not as small and special a group as it might seem, millions of women, ranging in age from twenty to seventy or more do have some choice. .while we may at times have spoken more directly to the potential 'pace-makers,' we have throughout been speaking to all women who wonder about the lives they are living and about their role as modern women. . most of all, we hope you will share our enthusiasm for the opportunities you, as a modern woman have to enjoy lives -the different stages that follow in time one after the other, and the different aspects as wife, mother, and individual that are lived at the same time. with new file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/index.html insight and understanding it should be possible to build a life today that is rich, varied, and truly satisfying (gruenberg & krech, 1952, p 10-11). fifty some years ago, when i first read gruenberg and krech's 'call to possibilities' i was a young, early twenties, recently married graduate student. for reasons i no longer can clearly recall or specify my wife marilyn and i resonated at the time to their optimistic, full of hope view of the future. in thinking through how we wanted to live, we found ourselves dealing with many of the issues they raised in their book. "choices' and 'designs for living' were important for us, even though they seemed not a part of the skinnerian learning theory and the test and measurement approaches that dominated the university of minnesota psychology department curriculum. after four years at oberlin college, if not before, a kind of egalitarianism existed in our thinking. a concern for the 'rich, varied, and truly satisfying' life-style for each of us individually and both of us collectively were front and center in our thought. caveat emptor, for these are reminiscences of fifty plus years ago and they may be more sentimentalized than the reality of the time. in more recent years, and the reason i returned to their book, is that the invitation to contribute an essay seemed to reflect much of the life of nora barlow (nee darwin), born in the late 19th century, 1885, a woman whose biography i am trying to write. and now, even more recently, the possibility has arisen to carefully consider the book, many lives in a retrospective review integrating the book with some of these personal interests and the broader context of the journal issue, 'advancing social justice: women's work.' all in all, this synthetic task i have set for myself is a bit of a stretch. a word of nora barlow! first, she is a granddaughter of charles darwin and that immediately put her into the category that annan (1955) called the 'intellectual aristocracy.' but what first caught my eye is that she edited four books on the darwin materials, the first as she turned fifty, the second in her sixties, the third in her seventies, and the fourth in her eighties. remarkable late in life achievement, i thought. later i found that as a young woman studying at cambridge university she had done genetics research with william bateson and published two papers in the journal of genetics in 1913 and 1923. and she had presented papers with the cambridge university experimental plant physiologist w.w. blackman at the annual british association meetings in 1910 and 1911. later, she had a complex role in beginning what has come to be called 'the darwin industry,' the large amount of research on charles darwin. these are some of the highlights that i am trying to make sense of in the biography. 'choices,' 'a design for living,' and a life that is 'rich, varied, and truly satisfying' seem built into nora barlow's life, long before gruenberg and krech wrote about 'modern woman' in 1952. a fit seems possible. the content of 'many lives.' in eleven chapters, that seem to group this way, with the first two chapters on 'what's new about being a woman' and 'great expectations,' the authors set the stage for their analysis and perspective. then the authors assume that most women will marry and have children. they devote four chapters to 'the young wife charts her course,' 'can you be more than a mother?,' 'what about husbands?,' and 'the empty nest.' this becomes a kind of a 'seasons of a woman's life' to paraphrase the later levinson et al (1978) volume about men. then the authors leave the chronological strand and present three analytical chapters: 'guideposts for the lost women,' 'how some succeeded.' and 'the talented woman.' the last two chapters, 'education for uncertainty' and 'new vistas' are more in the way of guidelines for the future than narrow prescriptions. these chapters raise images of the last chapters of another book, "our educational problems in the light of samoan contrasts' and 'education for choice' of margaret mead's (1928) coming of age in samoa. gruenberg and krech do not cite this work of mead's. in one long sentence mead suggests the difficulties faced by young women in our society. 'the principal causes of our adolescents' difficulty are the presence of conflicting standards and the belief that every individual should make his or her own choices, coupled with the feeling that choice is an important matter.' (1928, p. 234-235). gruenberg and krech do spend time with another important book of that era, virgina woolf's (1929) a room of one's own. the imaginary account of 'shakespeare's sister' is a priceless metaphor. gruenberg and krech agree with woolf that choices are important, but woolf with slight tongue in cheek reports on being asked to give a lecture on 'women and fiction.' she then launches in on 'choices.' but at second sight the words seemed not so simple. the title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. but when i began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, i soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. i should never be able to come to a conclusion.(1929, p.3). so choices can be considered at several levels, from different communities, and across generations and oceans, with an astounding level of sophistication. modernism as a concept has a longer, more varied, and interesting history than gruenberg and krech imply. although gruenberg and krech's essay is stated in the rhetoric of the early 1950s,and has an almost quaint traditional ring to it, the ideas remain more generally important. similar strands were appearing in crosscultural studies such as mead's and in the initial statements of feminist writing in england such as woolf's. both were published in the late 1920s. the long middle section of many lives takes on 'the seasons of a woman's life.' although marriage and family are the modal pattern within these arrangements, less clarity exists than in a young woman's grandmother's life. continued schooling or a job are viable options. yet for many women the choice is a false one. yet this is not what she wants either. she is discontented and frustrated, seeing no way out, seeing nothing else ahead. both the choices before her are bitter choices. she therefore makes no clear-cut choice but vacillates between the two. she would like to chart her course, but, unable to do so, she drifts along aimlessly (gruenberg and krech, 1952, p.78). this kind of anomie, so argue gruenberg and krech, can extend further as they next ask, 'can you be more than a wife and mother?' at its worst, the young woman sacrifices much of her own life for her children. they cite an anonymous but exhausted writer who states the extreme position on child-centeredness. now that my children have reached college age i have reached what might be called the period of exhaustion. i am exhausted with too much parenting, exhausted not just for myself but for all my generation. . . people had come to believe in the paramount importance of the child. i wonder if ever in the history of the world there were -or will be -such devoted, self-obliterating parents as we were! when i recall the perfect orgies of anxious service we rendered i try to temper the severity of my judgment against the results -against the poor, over-cherished, over-parented, offspring against whom i now raise my unsympathetic voice. gruenberg and krech now pick up their own observations and judgments. we have wondered particularly about the daughter. her mother sacrificed so much that she held dear in order that the daughter might, in her time, sacrifice much of what she held dear for the sake of her own children. and so goes the endless chain (1952, p. 104-105). into problems of this sort, gruenberg and krech raise a chapter about husbands and their role in the family. the luck of the draw in choices of a spouse and the long day to day discussions and negotiations about working or not working, staying home totally or part-time, having some household help, all are issues for the young married woman. but as couples come from different traditions, ethnic backgrounds, and religions these are not simple issues. some couples are lucky, some work hard at these different perspectives, and some find both luck and successful negotiations. late in their book, almost in response to the above illustration and commentary, gruenberg and krech raise three major sources of problems of the modern woman. these are: isolation; the mechanisms/logistics of living; and the submergence of interests, talents, and ambitions from their earlier years. in contrast to earlier generations, many modern women are isolated from extended family and the social life and help that that brings to daily living. the isolation is compounded with the variety of modern appliances and 'labor saving' devices that suggest that the modern woman can do things quicker by herself, without needing help from friends and relations. perhaps most significant is the combination of these two aspects with the submergence of talent and interests and hopes that often never recover in the life of the 'modern woman.' gruenberg and krech's are quite clear that these interests and talents need not be earth shaking nor at some national or international level of competence. rather they are the items that bring personal satisfaction and often companionship with other young women. nora barlow's solutions to these problems, a halfcentury before, become a significant part of her story and this essay review. episodes from nora barlow's life the selection problem is critical in every story of a life or in using episodes from a life to make other points (smith, in press). here i will relate three major, vivid, and sometimes poignant, but not atypical episodes from nora's life. they speak to the theme of this issue of the electronic journal, leadership and social justice; and they illustrate important aspects of the gruenberg and krech's book, a modern even though victorian woman. the sidney argent relationship in the late 1940s, a workers educational association (wea) tutor, sidney argent, and his wife, muriel, came into nora's life. he was a philosopher based in the 'delegacy for extra-mural studies' at oxford university. on tuesdays in the 1950s they had weekly course meetings. in the course, they had been reading john bunyan's pilgrim's progress. for one of these meetings nora wrote a several page essay 'is equality an acceptable principle for social organization?' the instructor sidney argent commented: i feel that in this essay you have felt the obstructions of actual social conditions to clear philosophical thought more than you usually do. i have the impression of a writer who not merely glances over her shoulder at facts awkwardly placed in the way of straight theorizing, but turns right round in her path because she thinks she hears some of the facts rising behind her like lions to devour her (feb, 1951, barlow archives, cul) two weeks later nora responded with a two page 'dear dr. argent' letter: i certainly do want to discuss your general comments, now i have digested them, though i am not sure i have understood rightly. i suppose i value stubborn and awkward facts more than i do deductive theories. so that if christian's lions [from pilgrims progress] represent such facts, i feel he did wrong to go forward at the word of the porter watchful when he heard they were chained and mere trials of faith. he went past them, afraid: is that facing difficulties? the only advances one ever makes oneself is by going round and round between the outward certainties (the stubborn facts) and the inward convictions (faiths); perhaps by reconciling the latter to the former, but not by passing them by. but i may have your meaning all wrong. the straight path of theorizing may be the attempt to evaluate & preserve the immeasurables of art, literature, science and morality; the lions in this case are the despairing cry for justice& equality from the underprivileged. these lions devour me constantly, & they are hardly chained. it is no easier to pass them by, in the name of eternal values, than it is to pass by the lions of eternal values in the faith of justice and equality. (emphasis added) (barlow archives, cul) that seems a powerful statement to write an instructor after a comment of his. the language of 'devoured,' 'chained,' and 'eternal values' seems not offered simply or naively. much later, in another letter, after a hospital stay for hemorrhoid surgery in 1957, sidney argent wrote nora a long, 12 page, letter. he reminded her that he had called her attention to annan's (1955) article on the 'intellectual aristocracy' that 'dominated english culture.' he commented then: one of these families was of course the darwins. charles was not hostile to religion but doubtful about it: like his granddaughter i should say. at any rate, to jump to the point, i know in the best of all ways, experience, that your scientific enthusiasm is so far from being incompatible with christian charity. that true kindness is a major principle of your life. but my experience is of more than this; it is your friendship for me and m. i have felt it above all now, in this brief period of tribulation. thank you, thank you, my dear. a spiritually starved childhood taught me to distrust the world. you are among the one or two people who are at last teaching me to interpret it more generously. (letter, 12/16/57, barlow archives, cul) that concluding sentence from a sensitive poignant paragraph seems a telling commentary about nora. then, more than a decade later, in 1970, and in retirement argent continued the conversation with a couple of paragraphs in another letter. the garden is only part of my dartmouth life. mornings are taken with a thousand house jobs. the dark evenings alone are for reading and here i make no new advances. lately i have been reading a penquin history of the reformation, but i remain unmoved. how much i would have liked to have been one of the well known men i hear about, who are well known because they have been devoted to their subject ever since childhood. i on the other hand have been so busy shaking off my working-class past, that i have faced the future with nothing positive about it. indeed, now that i have got into that future, i find myself admiring men who have retained skill with their hands: like my father for instance, a joiner, who use to plan and make things on our kitchen table, while i played a child's game on the floor. i often wonder how you are getting on, both with your garden and your scientific art. who writes to you now with their problems, or who comes to you? and do you send them away satisfied? (emphasis added. letter, 10/28/70, barlow archives cul) at the time nora was 84, a widow, and living now in sellenger, her home in cambridge. argent, after the several decades, was now living in retirement with his wife in devonshire. in vivid form, her relationship with sidney argent and his wife muriel illustrate one item in nora barlow's attempt to resolve longstanding worries about the issues of privilege and her position in the intellectual aristocracy of england. the buckinghamshire natural history society for many years nora lived at boswells, her husband alan's family home, a large house on a large estate, in wendover, buckinghamshire. nora founded the county natural history group and was one of its leaders for many years. a mimeographed copy of one program indicates nora's influence on the group. figure 1. buckinghamshire education committee, missenden abbey, botany weekend [download a pdf version of figure 1] file:///awl/fall2005/smith_download.pdf even a casual view of the program suggests nora barlow's contributions. she gave the 'introduction to the course' on friday evening. then, immediately afterward, she gave the introductory presentation, with slides, 'darwin as botanist.' that talk had been presented earlier in poland as part of a celebration of the work of charles darwin and later published formally. on saturday morning, the group went by coach to her home boswells, in wendover, to see 'the chalk downland and beechwoods.' the evening address was presented by sir edward salisbury, an old friend who was past director of kew, the royal botanical gardens. it is not difficult imagining her overall organizing role in this particular meeting of the group that she was chair for several decades. it was a leadership role to which she brought considerable social and intellectual resources. but beyond that tilt toward leadership in this interpretation, more significant is her passion for gardening that began with her mother's, ida darwin, long term interests and talents and her garden at the orchard, her home in cambridge. nora's natural history interests began with study and research with blackman, a plant physiologist at cambridge university and bateson, and a geneticist at cambridge university. among her first writings were short biographical pieces on darwin and sir francis galton. her editing began with the well -received charles darwin's diary of the voyage of h.m.s. beagle (1933) that darwin kept of the voyage of h.m.s. beagle. this was the first major darwin manuscript published since her uncle frank had published the early outlines of what was to become the origin of species (1859). later, in 1958, nora published the 'de-edited' version of darwin's autobiography, now the standard version of the autobiography. these activities remained a core of her personal and professional life for decades as interests and talents merged, both as sources of satisfaction and as contributions to the world of darwin scholarship. one more illustration of nora barlow's 'modernist' thinking appears in her introduction to her de-editing of darwin's autobiography. she comments: he [charles darwin] still stands as the leading figure of that revolution in scientific thought which followed the publication of the origin of species in the middle of the 19th century, a revolution soon involving all realms of knowledge. but posterity must continually reassess the past, and accurate contemporary sources are specially needed to provide insight into those stormy seasons when the wind of accepted belief changes. the great figures must be seen in their own setting and their own words must be heard, cleared of the posthumous growth of later dogma (1958, p.11). with this in mind, nora restored some 6000 words from the original text that had been omitted in the earlier edition published in life and letters of charles darwin (1887). these omissions related mostly to darwin's religious beliefs and some not so gentle comments he made about some of his contemporaries. she had a vision of, and commitment to, truth and accuracy! the rise of neo-modernism neo-modernism goes by many labels and many definitions. for me, the key issue is the confrontation of traditional values of the modern era with an array of value conflicts, dilemmas, and differences of opinion and thought in most western societies. further, the politicization of these personal beliefs, values, and the conflicts among them came to the forefront. since about 1950 when gruenberg and krech were writing, huge changes have occurred in the world. many, if not most, of the changes were driven by technological developments, with others being driven by a reassessment of the core values of the culture. rather than enter a long discussion here i will list a number of items that vary in specificity and complexity, but at heart convey large social issues. atomic weapons viet nam war and dissent birth control pill population explosion religious extremism the right and left evolution, creation science, intelligent design civil rights affirmative action access to professional schools by women and minorities abortion gay and lesbian rights marriage contracts and civil unions working conditions: part time, flex time, job sharing global economy this list can be organized and expanded in many ways. my point is simple for this essay. the modern period reflected in gruenberg and krech's book opened many choices for women. technological and social change has complicated all of these choices and decisions. at one level it is a nightmare, at another level it reflects expanded opportunities for thought and action for women and men. in the midst of this, betty friedan , writing a decade after gruenberg and krech, published the feminine mystique in 1963. her book captured the public in a way that simone de beauvoir's majestic tour de force, the second sex published in france in 1949 and translated into english and published by knopf in 1953 did not. gruenberg and krech's call for modern women to have a life beyond marriage and children was a smaller subtext under the heading of personal development and not submerging of interests, talents, and ambitions. in friedan, several things happened. first she wrote in a mixed style of autobiography, conceptual analysis, and call for political action. she also had a talent for 'catchy' chapter titles 'the problem that has no name,' 'the happy housewife heroine,' 'the crisis in women's identity,' and the 'the passionate journey.' all in all that is a very powerful stance. her opening paragraph of chapter one captures her thesis. the problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of american women. it was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the united states. each suburban wife struggled with it alone. as she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured cub scouts and brownies, lay beside husband at night -she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question 'is this all?' (emphasis added) (frienda, 1963, p.11) in one illustration the problem was phrased as 'the problem is always being the children's mommy, or the minister's wife and never being myself.' (friedan, 1963, p.23). later in a discussion of women's identity she speaks of her own experience: i had come at seventeen from a midwestern town, an unsure girl; the wide horizons of the world and the life of the mind had been opened to me. i had begun to know who i was and what i wanted to do. i could not go back now. i could not go home again, to my mother and the women of our town, bound to home, bridge, shopping, children, husband, charity, clothes. but now that the time had come to make my own future to take the deciding step, i suddenly did not know what i wanted to be (friedan, 1963, p.62). in more general terms, for friedan the issue became a rallying cry as 'the problem that has no name.' in a strange way, to turn autobiographical once again, for my wife and i this postmodern discussion adds a dimension to our own discussions of personal identity. in our travels abroad to various conferences, seminars, and longer-term professional visits or fellowships, marilyn is 'lou's wife.' in kirkwood, missouri where we live and where marilyn started, directed, and taught in grace church preschool for three and a half decades, and seems to know everyone, lou is 'marilyn's husband.' we've puzzled over, and reveled in, that shift in status and identity. small illustration, big effects! these post modern world changes these days seem not so much in our thought about our selves, although living out one's retirement has its own complexities. rather these world changes turn our thoughts to our grown children, their partners, and to our teenage grandchildren. but still choices,' 'designs for living,' and a life that continues to be 'rich, varied, and truly satisfying' remain beliefs and values and a personal challenge. gruenberg and krech, friedan, and ourselves not to mention nora barlow seem to merge. conclusions the intent of this essay was a synthesis of a review of many lives of modern woman, a view of a victorian 'modern' woman, who in her action exemplified not only modernity but also a particular view of leadership and social justice, topics of interest in this issue of the journal. autobiography crept in on a number of times and occasions several conclusions, almost in the form of conjectures or lessons learned, seem plausible from the more descriptive account. perhaps it is the too easy concept of 'modern' that bothers me at this point. nora barlow, born in 1885, with the advantages well beyond virginia woolf's 'a room of one's own and l500, grew up as the kind of woman highlighted in gruenberg and krech's modern woman of 1950. arguably she is a modern woman today, of the 21st century. she married (a very successful civil servant), had six children (one of whom had major physical handicaps), ran a large household (with considerable servant help), and built a life that was 'rich, varied, and truly satisfying.' that latter dimension seems one of the most important contributions of gruenberg and krech's argument. within that life, i have presented a vivid illustration of her struggle with issues of social justice and one resolution lying in a long personal and intellectual relationship with a wea tutor, sidney argent and his wife. further, through another long illustration nora exemplified a kind of leadership in beginning and supporting the buckinghamshire natural history association. membership in that group was based on and drawn from people interested in natural history. a kind of egalitarianism existed there. finally her work with the darwin manuscripts led her early on into the center of 'the darwin industry.' she helped many of the major figures in their intellectual efforts. throughout this discussion i have argued, implicitly mostly, that the problems life presents are varied and each individual solves them in her own way and this was nora barlow's way. it would seem from gruenberg and krech's position, nora is a modern woman. but, alas, modernity seems overwhelmed by post-modernism. yet gruenberg and krech, and nora barlow as well, offer a significant starting point for considering these newer and broader societal claims and conflicts. their ideas and her life are latently echoed in the thought of writers like betty friedan and become touchstones for further consideration. models as it were! but all that belongs in another essay! references anna, n. (1955). the intellectual artistocracy. in plumb, j.h. (ed.) studies in social history: a tribute to g.m. trevelyan. (pp. 2243-281). new york: longmans, green. barlow, n. (ed.) (1933). charles darwin's diary of the voyage of the h.m.s. 'beagle'. cambridge at the university press. barlow, n. (ed.) (1958). the autobiography of carles darwin, 1809-1882. new york: w.w. norton. bunyan, j. (1678/1987). the pilgrim's progress. london: penquin books. darwin, f. (ed.). (1887). life and letters of charles darwin. london: john murray. debeauvoir, s. (1953/1974). the second sex. new york: vintage books. friedan, b. (1963/1974). the feminine mystique. new york: dell. gruenberg, s., and krech, h. (1952). the many lives of modern woman. garden city: doubleday & co. levinson, d. et al (1978). the seasons of a man's life. new york: knopf. mead, m. (1928/1961). coming of age in samoa. new york: morrow quill. smith, l.m. (in press) the selection process in biography: squeezing darwin into 2000 words. perspectives in education. smith, l.m. (in process). nora barlow and the darwin legacy. woolf, v. (1929). a room of one's own. new york: harcourt, brace, and co. author louis m. smith department of education washington university in st. louis st. louis, mo 63132, usa presented at the umsl-st. louis annual qualitative inquiry conference, march 12-13, 2004. submitted for publication in lee and mckerrow (editors) (2004),journal issue 'advancing social justice:women's work.' copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career 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| content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle a quantitative analysis of the personal characteristics and workplace experiences of women and men as professional and community leaders rose lyn zanville, ph.d. zanville, winter, 2001 though women and men leaders have similar backgrounds, life experiences tend to prolong the time required for women to attain leadership status. introduction in the past, the subject of leadership in women has been confined to anecdotal figures who are remarkable for their small numbers. women leaders have emerged as a more common phenomenon in american society in the last three decades, reflecting the transition in the status of women in society. according to dye and strickland (1982), between 1970 and 1980, the total number of women managers and administrators in the u.s. workforce increased over 100%. however, this change has not extended through all levels of leadership. hymowitz & schellhardt found that by 1985 only 2.7% of the top executives and directors of at&t were women and 8.3% and 15% of division and district managers were women. in contrast, 22% of second-level supervisors and 38.7% of first -level supervisors were women. http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/hispanic.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/hispanic.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html the slow progress of women on this front has two possible explanations. one is "the glass ceiling," a term that was coined in 1986 by hymowitz and schellhardt, two wall street journal reporters. this is an invisible barrier that blocks women from advancing to senior leadership positions in organizations. an alternative explanation to "the glass ceiling" might be a delay in the pipeline with appreciable numbers of women only now reaching the point in their careers where senior positions are available. with increasing competition for leadership positions, women will likely encounter a growing number of obstacles to promotion (pipelines of progress, an update on the glass ceiling initiative, 1992). in a survey of female senior executives, one-third believed that the number of female executives in their companies would remain static or decrease (business week, june 8, 1992). in 1991, the author was a participant in a yearlong program run by a private, nonprofit organization for women professional and community leaders. beginning that year, the author initiated a study of these women. the goal of this study was to discern how factors of personal background and workplace experience compare in successful women and men leaders. it was then extrapolated that these factors might influence the course of advancement for women leaders vis a vis men leaders. methodology study subjects the study group was leadership texas, a program of the foundation for women’s resources, an international non-profit organization started in 1982 in austin, texas to promote the achievements and advancement of women. women selected for leadership texas were leaders in their communities and professions. the selection committee was drawn from the organization’s board of directors, which included former governor ann richards. the control group was the texas lyceum, a predominantly male organization which emerged in 1980, and was composed of a group of young texas business, political, educational, and civic leaders. president george w. bush, is a lyceum alumnus. attendees in both groups were selected from applicants by committees, which based their choices on demonstrated leadership potential, interest in civic affairs, heterogeneity of interests, and personal background. four hundred ninety-eight questionnaires were sent to leadership texas members (classes 1991 through 1995). there were 298 replies (60% response). three hundred eighty nine questionnaires were sent to texas lyceum members. there were 71 replies (23% response). study instrument from 1991 to 1995, a mailed survey was made of study subjects and controls determining such demographics as age, income, family status, occupation, and education. in addition, the author asked questions regarding workplace experience, major barriers to and facilitators of success in career development, and descriptions of individual leadership styles. there were 66 questions in the questionnaire. sixty-two were quantitative; and some had multiple parts. four questions were qualitative. statistics where appropriate, comparisons were made between all men and all women using the chi-square test, student’s t-test or anova. for questions with binomial (i.e., yes/no, etc.) response, fisher’s exact test was used in addition to the chi-square test. the fisher-freeman-halton test, which is an extension of fisher’s exact test, was run when the chi-square test resulted in at least one cell of the contingency table having an expected value of less than 5. the cochran-mantel-haenzel test was used in questions involving differences in workplace experiences between men and women to adjust for the somewhat different career distributions of the men and women subjects. results as noted above, study subjects were selected by panels of the two respective organizations for their status as leaders. in order to verify that the subjects under study were, in fact, leaders, several accoutrements of leadership were measured: existence of subordinates, control of a budget, and the ability to hire and fire. better than 85% of each group had direct subordinates working at their direction and over half had four or more direct subordinates. more than half of both groups had ten or more direct and indirect subordinates. there was no difference between men and women in the number of subordinates. in both groups, more than 70% of respondees controlled budgets and had the authority to hire and to fire, with no significant difference between the study and control group. more than 95% of both groups held at least a bachelor’s degree, and over half of each group held higher graduate degrees as well. in excess of 30% of each group held doctorates. a significant difference in distribution of degrees was present between men and women due to the greater percentage of women with master’s degrees and the higher percentage of men with "other" post-graduate degrees (see figure 1). a majority of both women and men had total annual compensation of greater than $50,000. the male respondees were significantly better compensated than the women with over 90% making in excess of $75,000 and slightly less than 40% of the women compensated at that level (see figure 2). both groups were greater than 80% anglo ethnicity. the age distribution of both groups paralleled each other, with over 80% of respondees being between the ages of 35 and 54 (see figure 3). curiously, the birth order of both groups again closely paralleled each other. over 40% of both groups were oldest children, followed in frequency by middle children, youngest children, and only children (the latter representing less than 10% of each group, (see figure 4). the number of siblings in both groups followed a similar distribution. more than 50% of men and women had https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure1.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure1.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure2.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure2.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure3.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure3.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure4.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure4.html mothers who were homemakers, with no significant difference between the two groups with respect to their mothers’ professional and educational levels. the professional status and educational level of fathers, however, were different between female and male leaders with the men having more fathers in business and the professions. men also had substantially higher levels of paternal education (see figure 5) and (see figure 6). parental age at the time of the subjects’ births was not different between men and women. over 90% of both groups were not employed by their parents or friends of their parents. in general, the contributions made by parents to career advancement were similar on both groups. however, significantly more men had important contacts through their parents than women, i.e., 20% for men compared to 4.3% for women. although they did not reach statistical significance, essentially the same percentages were found in terms of professional contacts made via the subjects’ spouses. in analyzing marital status, subjects were categorized as single, cohabiting, married, separated, divorced, remarried, and widowed. seventy percent or more of the subjects were married or remarried at the time of the study. there was no significant difference between men and women across all of the categories. of all married respondents, slightly less than 50% of the women were in the first marriage, in contrast to 76% of the men. the distribution of spouse age was significantly older for the women than for the men. among the married participants, the spouses of women leaders had significantly higher incomes than those of the men leaders (see figure 7). a significantly higher percentage of the men had at least one child (approximately 80%) in contrast to just over 50% of the women. the men leaders had significantly more children at home, 1.6, compared to 0.7 for women. thirty percent of the women interrupted their careers for child rearing, while virtually none of the men did so. the distribution of time spent in volunteer activities was similar in the two groups. the final area of study was that of career and workplace experience. although majorities of both groups were employed by others, more men were self-employed than women (35% of men compared to 24% of women). there was a somewhat different distribution in career fields. the classifications of career fields were business, professional, health, education, government, non-profit-salaried, and other. more men were in business and the professions, while more women were in education and government (see figure 8). [all workplace questions statistically compensated for this varying mix of career fields]. a majority of both groups worked between 41 and 60 hours a week. on average, the men worked a greater number of hours per week than the women (see figure 9). the distribution of time employed was essentially the same in the two groups (see figure 10). however, the men were in their present position longer than the women (see figure 11). furthermore, the men appeared to have assumed a leadership position earlier in the course of their career and had maintained it longer (see figure 12). the two groups differed regarding their perception of their treatment by their https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure5.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure5.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure5.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure5.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure6.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure6.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure7.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure7.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure8.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure8.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure9.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure9.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure10.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure10.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure11.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure11.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure12.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure12.html superiors vis a vis colleagues of the opposite sex. when asked about credence given opinions, performance judgment, promotion opportunities, and advice given, it was found consistently that approximately 30% of women leaders did not believe that they were given treatment equal to that given men leaders. when all questions concerning treatment by superiors were considered together, 51.2% of the women leaders felt that they had received unequal treatment in at least one way. an overwhelming majority (greater than 80%) of respondents who felt that there was a difference in treatment given to the two sexes believed women to be at a disadvantage (see figure 13, figure 14, figure 15, figure 16, figure 17). both groups felt that the two sexes received equal treatment from subordinates. three-fourths of male respondents believed that the social connections made through their parents or spouses were of value in their career advancements, while only half of the women believed this to be the case. thirty percent of the women believed that being female interfered with the opportunities for professional advancement made through social relationships. only 10% of the men believed that being a male was disadvantageous in career-advancing social relationships. when asked, "in which type of social function was your sex a disadvantage?" over 90% of male respondents said none. nearly 40% of female respondents said none. just over 40% of female respondents cited participatory sports as an area of disadvantage. when asked if they had been the target of a sexual approach by a superior, equal, or subordinate in the workplace, the answer was in the affirmative among 41%, 37%, and 10% of the women, respectively, and 1%, 24%, and 39% of the men (see figure 18). women received direct sexual advances predominately from superiors. men received direct sexual advances predominately from subordinates. three fourths of both male and female respondents believed that a mentor was important in their career advancement. of those who had mentors, 98% of the men had a male mentor, and 67% of females had a male mentor (see figure 19). both groups viewed themselves as ethical in their workplace behavior. ninety per cent or more of the leaders surveyed denied being dishonest in their job responsibilities (see figure 20). more than 80% of both groups denied taking unfair advantage of others (see figure 21). discussion the subjects of this study were selected by distinguished panels as leaders in their professional fields and/or communities. that they were in fact acting in positions of leadership was supported by validating questions in the survey concerning control of budgets, authority to hire and fire, and the number of subordinates who answer to them. this study focused on women occupying positions of leadership in the posttraining world. a review of the literature revealed that previous studies of women leaders looked at students and/or managers (e.g., feather & simon, 1975; gutek & stevens, 1979; heilman & saruwatari, 1979). an exception was rosener’s (1990) unpublished leadership study, commissioned for the international women’s forum, https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure13.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure13.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure14.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure14.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure14.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure14.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure15.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure15.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure16.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure16.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure17.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure17.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure18.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure18.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure19.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure19.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure20.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure20.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure21.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure21.html which also utilized post-training women leaders as subjects. whether the subjects in the current study acted as leaders, or were simply managers of personnel, cannot be reliably determined from the opinions of the subjects themselves. what could be said of the subjects was that they were either leaders or they had the opportunity to act as leaders. the purpose of this study was to determine quantitatively the background characteristics of these men and women leaders as well as the personal and work life experiences which might be important in facilitating or inhibiting their advancement as leaders. ease in advancement to a position of leadership was implied by the time required to reach such a position. this study demonstrated that, in general, the women’s path to leadership required a longer time course. those differences in background characteristics, personal life experiences, and work place experiences demonstrated in this study between men and women leaders were hypothesized as partial etiological explanations for this longer time course to leadership. demonstration of the importance of these characteristics and experiences in determining the opportunity to function as a leader requires the repetition of this study in other populations and a comparison of the effect of these factors within each gender. a thorough search of previously published quantitative leadership studies failed to discover other reports that attempted to explain the differential ease or difficulty of men and women in reaching a position of leadership. the groups of men and women compared were similar in many aspects of their backgrounds. these similarities included age, high level of education, birth order, number of siblings, parental age at the time of their birth, professional and educational levels of their mothers. rosener (1990), likewise, found similar age distributions and education levels in men and women leaders. in the current study, both men and women leaders tended to be first born children. in contrast, other authors have found this to be a characteristic peculiar to women. for women, but not for men, sandler and scallia (1975) found a significantly greater likelihood for firstborns to serve as presidents or other officers of organizations. hennig & jardim (1977) observed that being firstborn was a common characteristic in a sample of 25 successful top-level women leaders. the two groups that were the focus of this study differed in the professional and educational level of their fathers, with the men as a whole having fathers from higher socioeconomic class and level of education than the women. in general, both groups appeared to be mostly self-made as leaders, rather than "inheriting" leadership positions by virtue of their families. twenty percent of the men furthered their careers through contacts made through their parents; a similar percentage of men made important contacts through their spouses. in contrast, less than 5% of the women had career-advancing contacts provided by parents or spouses. all in all, no enormous differences in personal background appeared to distinguish between women and men leaders. while a large majority of both men and women leaders were married at the time of the questionnaire (70%), a much larger percent of the men had children then did the women. the average number of children at home was greater among the men than among the women. these findings agree with rosener’s (1990) study. a possible interpretation of these results might be that women leaders were forced to sacrifice more in their personal sphere than men. perhaps this finding resulted from greater obstacles to overcome in their career pathways than those faced by men. alternatively, spouses of men leaders may have been more helpful in providing for the basis for a family life than were the spouses of the women leaders. it is notable that nearly onethird of the women interrupted their career for childbearing, while virtually none of the men did so. some 36% of women felt that the availability of childcare affected their career choices. carroll (1987) argued that the biggest obstacle married women leaders faced was coping with the conflict between career and family. women respondents appeared on average to achieve their leadership status at a later point in their career than did their male counterparts. this may have reflected either discrimination or self-imposed obstacles to advancement. in all questions relating to treatment by superiors, a fairly constant 30% perceived unequal treatment by their superiors. alternatively, they may have had a lower drive for advancement. the distribution of hours spent at work was weighted somewhat higher in men compared to women in this study. this finding contrasted with rosener’s (1990) findings that both sexes worked approximately 55 hours a week. approximately 30% of female respondents believed their sex put them at a disadvantage with regard to social functions that were important to career advancement, with participatory sports being the most cited example. hennig & jardim (1997) found that women’s lesser experience with team sports than men’s limited their ability to participate effectively in management teams. while the issue of sexual harassment was not specifically addressed in the questionnaire, large percentages of both men and women leaders had been the objects of sexual approaches, desired and undesired, in the workplace. for the women, the preponderance of those approaches were by superiors or equals. for the men, the targeting was by equals and subordinates. this may have reflected the relative proportions of women and men in the roles of superiors and subordinates, or it may have reflected the differing role of power relationships and sexual approaches between the two sexes. both groups believed mentoring to be important to career advancement. nearly all of the male leaders had mentors of the same sex, while only one-third of the women had mentors of the same sex. "fewer high-level women are available to serve as mentors (bass, 1990, p. 716)." questions of ethics and values were not extensively explored by this study. however, questions concerning honesty and fairness on the job indicated that both groups viewed themselves as ethical and fair individuals. this is in contrast to a 1987 wall street journal article that noted one-fourth of the 671 executives surveyed by a leading research firm believed that ethics can impede a successful career, and that over 50% of all the executives they knew bent the rules to get ahead (gini,1996). study limitations several limitations must be considered regarding the significance of this study. respondents were from a geographically limited area of the us. the validation of whether respondents were bona fide leaders was based on indirect criteria (selection committees, income, number of employees, etc.). no effort was made to confirm the honesty of respondents’ self-assessment. subjects and controls had non-symmetrical distributions of career stages, although their age distributions were symmetrical. this could have influenced their perceptions of workplace experiences. subjects and controls had different career field distributions. answers reflected a snapshot in time of the respondents’ careers (a longitudinal follow-up would be desirable). some bias may have resulted from non-universal responses of subject and control groups. no attempt was made to contact non-responders as many of the questionnaires were returned in an anonymous fashion. different selection panels functioned for the two groups (however, the similar demographic characteristics of the two groups suggested this may not be a severe problem). conclusions men and women leaders in this texas-based study had similar personal backgrounds. nevertheless, a large proportion of women leaders perceived that they had a steeper climb to success due to discrimination and conflicts between personal and workplace life. by definition, the women who are subjects in this study managed to overcome the unique barriers to success posed by their gender. however, figure 22 depicts the effect of various factors influencing career advancement. it suggests that the different experiences of men and women regarding personal life, treatment by superiors, and social connection resulted in a delay for women compared to men before a leadership role was achieved . one could hypothesize that other women who failed to become leaders were impaired by the same factors. references bass, b. m. (1990). bass & stogdill’s handbook of leadership. new york: the free press. brass, d. j. (1985). men’s and women’s networks: a study of interaction patterns and influence in an organization. academy of management journal, 28, 327-343. business week. (1992, june 8). carroll, s. j. (1987). gender difference and the contemporary leadership crisis. paper, https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure22.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2001/zanville/figure22.html wingspread seminar on leadership, racine, wi. dye, t. r., & strickland, j. (1982). women at the top: a note on institutional leadership. social science quarterly, 63, 333-341. feather, n. t., & simon, j. g. (1975). reactions of male and female success and failure in sex-linked occupations: impressions of personality, causal attributions, and perceived likelihood and different conditions. journal of personality and social psychology, 31, 1, 20-31. gini, a. (1996). moral leadership and business ethics. ethics & leadership working papers, kellogg leadership studies project. college park: university of maryland. gutek, b. a., & stephens, d. a. (1979). effects of sex of subject, sex of stimulus cue, and androgyny level on evaluations in work situations which evoke sex role stereotypes. journal of vocational behavior 14, 23-32. hennig m., & jardim, a. (1997). the managerial woman, garden city, ny: doubleday. heilman, m. e., & saruwatari, l. r. (1979). when beauty is beastly: the effects of appearance and sex on evaluations of job applicants for managerial and nonmanagerial jobs. organizational behavior and human performance, 73, 360-372. hymowitz, c., & schellhardt, t. d. (1986, march 24). the glass ceiling: why women can’t seem to break the invisible barrier that blocks them from the top jobs. wall street journal, section 4, 1, 4-5. rosener, j. b. (1990). leadership study, international women’s forum. unpublished manuscript. sandler, b. e., & scalia, f. a. (1975). the relationship between birth order, sex, and leadership in a religious organization. journal of social psychology, 95, 279-280. us department of labor (1992). pipelines of progress: an update on the glass ceiling initiative. washington, dc: secretary’s office. although study and control group participants were drawn from the membership of leadership texas (a program founded by the foundation for women’s resources) and the texas lyceum, respectively, this study and any resulting reports or papers are in no way sponsored, endorsed, or approved by, or affiliated, connected or associated with any of the organizations. all opinions and conclusions contained in this article are solely those of the author. correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to the author: rose lyn zanville, ph.d., lyn zanville, inc., p.o. box 25443, dallas, texas 75225. dr. zanville has a ph.d. in leadership from the graduate school of interdisciplinary arts & sciences, the union institute, 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journal index ] envisioning new forms of praxis: reflective practice and social justice education in a higher education graduate programs dr. kimberly a. kline and dr. megan moore gardner student affairs graduate programs tend to prepare individuals via theory but do not engage in dialogue that addresses how to transfer that theory into practice. in many cases, social justice issues are neglected. as student affairs scholars/practitioners and women, we find ourselves engaged in conversations with colleagues about a shared concern: entry-level student affairs professionals are not adequately prepared to survive the political environment of higher education. in an effort to illuminate our understanding of this dilemma, we focused on this shared concern with a deep interest in creating some type of actionable change within student affairs preparation programs. our research indicates that understanding individual social action theories is intrinsic to building a community that supports diversity. habermas (1990) speaks to the theory of “communicative action,” or a process of building understanding among groups of individuals. habermas’ concept of communicative action can serve as an analogy for both the instructor and the student in a student affairs graduate classroom. in accordance with this analogy, the instructor and students are oriented toward discovering their own meaning, personally and as a group, while accessing theories that are applicable in student affairs practice. context in recent years, student affairs master’s programs throughout the united states have enhanced and diversified approaches to student development by incorporating cognitive-structural theories, human development theories, and postmodern writings. such curriculum augmentations introduce a diverse array of theories to students. however, many programs lack both a deliberate incorporation of the actual act of critical discourse among students and instructors and the purposeful infusion of social justice issues into the practice. as educators of student affairs practitioners in training, it is necessary to facilitate critical discourse and learning congruent with the ideologies of the “learning paradigm.” this occurs by encouraging the intentional inclusion of social justice theories as students develop their own theories of praxis. according to bell (1997, p. 3), “the goal of social justice education is the full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs.” in order to be agents of social change, students must first learn how to critically analyze postmodern approaches to knowing. they must also be familiar with “praxis” and how to effectively utilize personal praxis techniques to address issues of social file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/fall2005/index.html justice in academic, professional, and personal situations. praxis includes both theory and practice as “intertwining parts of the interactive and historical processes” that assist students with active participation in discourse and reshaping their learned belief systems (bell, 1997, p. 4). in order to most effectively fulfill our roles as student affairs professionals, it is important to recognize the “isms” present in our learned belief systems and those of our students, peers, and colleagues. such “isms” include the following: racism; sexism; ageism; ableism; anti-semitism; heterosexism; and classism. the incorporation of social justice education into student affairs programs is one means of utilizing theory to enable students to recognize “isms” that manifest themselves in both formal and informal ways in practice. conceptual map first, we address the significance of incorporating social justice theory in higher education preparation programs. we then examine the use of reflection in social justice education. next, we describe two action experiments conducted to examine reflective practice and the incorporation of social justice theory in practical experiences. the paper concludes with our reflections about social justice education based on the theory and our own action experiments. why social justice? student affairs masters programs validate the importance of moral and interpersonal development. this is reflected in many of the student development and cognitive development theories that are found in program curriculums. what is often missing in the classroom, however, is a process that teaches individuals to work as social agents with students as they (the students) develop. cranton (1996) highlights the idea of transformative development in which individuals have the ability to be agents of change in both the learning and work environments. according to bell (1997), practice is always shaped by theory and theory provides a framework for questioning and challenging our practices, creating new approaches within our profession. in order to be agents of change in the classroom and in practice, students must develop an awareness of the daily acts of oppression woven into the threads of modern society. moreover, students must understand the manner in which such oppression affects their own practice and interactions with others. creating learning environments in which open and honest discourse about the aforementioned “isms” may take place provides students with the tools and confidence to participate in public learning. additionally, it may result in an increase in the level of influence new student affairs professionals have on overall institutional transformation and learning. social justice education provides an area of knowledge from which student affairs professionals may draw in order to enhance their professional praxis and reshape their learned belief systems (bell, 1997). the coupling of social justice educative practices in a student affairs classroom provides participants with an opportunity to experiment with critical theories and gain experience by transferring those theories into practice. both aspects are crucial to the level of preparation of the entry-level student affairs practitioner, as well as his or her perceptions of that preparation. although student development theory helps students gain a better understanding of what both they and others are experiencing at any given time, more recent studies demonstrate that this area of theory has not concerned itself with concepts such as social status, positionality, or different life experiences (bell, 1997; bidell & fischer, 1992; rogoff, 1984; rogoff, gallvain, & ellis, 1984). social justice education fills this gap in the literature by recognizing and supporting both personal and systemic oppression that may affect students and those with whom they interact in the professional work environment. the use of reflection in social justice education reflection has been defined as “a process or activity that is central to developing practices” (dewey, 1938; loughran, 1996, as cited in leitch and day, 2000, p. 180). two types of reflective thinking are commonly discussed in the literature. the first, reflection-on-action refers to the “systematic and deliberate thinking back over one’s actions” (russel and mumby, 1992, p. 3). the second, reflection-in-action, is described as “a way of making explicit some of the tacit knowledge embedded in action so that the agent can figure out what to do differently” (argyris, putnam, & smith, 1985, p. 51). during reflection-in-action, the practitioner pauses and reconstructs an actual situation in order to better understand and learn from it. reflection is recognized by bell (1997) as a personal tool that informs practice and enables student-centered learning to take place. congruent with the “learning paradigm”, which emphasizes the student as an active partner in the construction of knowledge, reflection enables each student to individually design a format that results in the acquisition of meaningful and useful information. incorporating reflection into student affairs master’s programs creates a learning laboratory in which they can better learn to navigate the unique environment of a university. reflection contributes to “public learning” within an organization, providing platforms for critical discussion and a culture that welcomes change (ramaley, 2000). infusing reflection activities into assistantships, practicum experiences, or into the traditional classroom encourages students to document behavioral, cognitive, and affective experiences in a structured manner and provides opportunities for critical discussion and analysis. by engaging in reflection experiences in a structured and intentional setting, students develop cognitive tools that assist with the identification of “isms” within everyday interactions and experiences. once recognized, students may address such “isms”, make informed choices, and contribute to a “community of learning” (ramaley, 2000). reflective practice and the incorporation of social justice theory in practical experiences schön (1987) proposed the use of a reflective practicum as a means to bridge the gap between the world of the university and the world of practice. application of learned theory and technique contributes to additional learning with reflection facilitating the learning process. additionally, schön identified the practicum experience as an opportunity for students to: “1) apply knowledge and skills in a practical setting; 2) progressively develop competencies through participation in a range of practical experiences; 3) test their commitment to a career; 4) gain insight into professional practice; and 5) evaluate progress and identify areas where further personal and professional development is needed” (as cited in ryan, toohey, and hughes, 1996, p. 357). during such experiences, students engage in activity in environments that encourage the discovery and construction of knowledge in ways that have individual meaning and provide powerful learning experiences (barr and tagg, 1995). according to schön, individuals may reflect on practice more frequently than they realize, in the form of “unarticulated intuitions, a detailed review of an experience, a logical analysis, or an evaluation of feelings” (as cited in cranton, 1996, p. 78). without awareness of one’s own reflection techniques, however, actual enacted theories remain unassessed and behavior remains incongruent with espoused theories. practicum experiences provide forums for students and professionals alike to explore personal theories-in-use in a purposeful and structured manner and enhance both personal and professional life. this prompted us to conduct two action experiments that are highlighted in the following paragraphs. the first action experiment was conducted in the spring of 2001. the results of this action experiment provided rich information that compelled us to examine some of the feedback we received in greater detail. this led to a second action experiment conducted in the spring of 2002. our goal for this experiment was to followup on the findings of the practicum research in greater depth, particularly focusing on the ways in which graduate students learn about and utilize action theories, social justice theory, and reflection. first action experiment during the fall of 2000, we designed a practicum discussion group curriculum based on reflection and critical dialogue. three main objectives guided our work: 1) connect students’ course content to their practicum experiences; 2) stimulate the examination of espoused theories and actual practices, and 3) develop effective communication within the professional context. we based the design on suggestions from past practicum participants and facilitators, in addition to information gleaned from two focus groups of a concurrent research project that queried second year higher education master’s students about their perceptions of various facets of the degree program. the feedback demonstrated frustration about assistantships that were required for matriculation in the program but which were rarely discussed once classes began. program faculty assumed that students made connections between theory and practice, but students felt that more could be done. moreover, focus groups prior to the spring semester indicated a tendency for individuals to withhold feelings of dissatisfaction. the containment of negative perceptions stemmed from a number of factors including the fear of repercussions, an inability to envision improvement in complex professional dilemmas, or a lack of energy/motivation/commitment to pursue potential improvements. results of preliminary studies indicated a definite need for tools for developing effective communication within the professional context and with regard to social change. the new practicum design was viewed as a means of enhancing the program. such a design aided in the formation of connections between theory and practice and connected critical dialogue about student affairs. in order to build the trust necessary for students to feel comfortable engaging in critical reflection and dialogue, we included a number of activities in the practicum discussion group design. for example, the group engaged in quadrant exercises at the beginning of each meeting in which students shared personal ideas based on common themes. additionally, “high-low exercises”, in which students shared one positive and one challenging practicum experience from the prior week, provided a mini-reflection activity; these prepared students for more in-depth reflection exercises later in the discussion group experience. in order to promote the development of practices more congruent with enacted theories and augment social change, we incorporated intentional dialogue about espoused theories and theories-in use. based on the model i and model ii theories of argyris and schön (1974), students dialogued, utilized organizational theory, and critically reflected in order to assess personal theory and effectiveness in communication. the process also illuminated the various models of communication and theories in use in professional practice. student feedback at the conclusion of the practicum experience indicated that the experience was valuable. the students also noted the effectiveness of the combination of action theory and reflection for connecting theory and practice. time constraints stemming from the one-hour time frame of the practicum discussion group meetings limited in-depth dialogue and reflection opportunities, providing for only an overview of the tools and theories for the participants. the students praised the utility of the tools and information provided; however, they articulated a need for more in-depth work with the model in order to determine its true merit. second action experiment we then examined the ways in which graduate students learn action theories, reflect on their own practices, and deal with social justice issues in their professional practice in greater depth. in spring 2002, we embarked on a semester-long journey with nine student affairs master’s students. the study employed classroom research to examine the use of reflection, action theories, and social justice readings in a student affairs master’s course. case studies, literature, and exercises introduced professional situations and enabled both students and instructors to collectively examine and reflect upon their own experiences and discourse within the field of student affairs. exploration of the following questions provided the backdrop for this study: 1. how do student affairs master’s students learn action theories? 2. how well prepared were student affairs master’s students to deal with issues of social justice in their professional practice? 3. how did the use of action theories in a student affairs master’s course on professional development enable students to reflect and make meaning of their experiences, both inside and outside the classroom? institutional setting and participants the institutional setting chosen for this part of the study is representative of many student affairs master’s programs across the united states in size, curriculum, and institutional type. the student affairs master’s program is housed within a school of education at a midwestern doctoral/research-extensive university. nine of 10 students enrolled in the professional development course chose to participate in this study. of the participants, five were female and four were male. some participants self-identified themselves during the first interview session. these self-identifiers described ethnicity, regionality, religious affiliation, traditional or non-traditional student, and sexual orientation. of the nine participants, two identified themselves as being born in a latin american country. in addition, one participant self-identified as a “southerner”, and another identified as jewish. three identified as “non-traditional students” ranging in age from 44 to 53 who were all in the midst of a career change. finally, one student identified as gay, while another identified as bisexual. the participants, overall, ranged in age from 22 to 53. a few students had several years of professional experience in student affairs, however, the majority of participants had two to four years of primarily paraprofessional experience. approach to learning the course was modeled after the professional development course previously taught at the doctoral level, in that it was frontloaded with readings and assignments for a two-credit master’s level course. the second half of the course was more loosely structured using open dialogue as the primary means of engaging theory, practical information, and insights. we added exercises and tools as needed in order to mold the structure of the second half of the course to best meet the needs of the entire class. we outlined guidelines regarding confidentiality and the group process during the first class and encouraged the students’ mutual contributions to a supportive classroom environment. the professor introduced us as action researchers and teaching fellows who would not be leading group discussions because of human subject guidelines but who would actively participate in the course. primarily, the professor conveyed a message that all participants in the course (i.e., 10 students, the two teaching fellows, and the professor) were equals and we worked to create an atmosphere of trust in the classroom. the professor had certain responsibilities, such as acting as lead discussant when we were working with the literature for the course, but the group shared joint responsibility for the direction of the course data collection interviews. data collection included the audiotaping of two sets of one-to-one interviews conducted with course participants. the first set of face-to-face interviews occurred midway through the spring 2002 semester. the second set of interviews took place via the telephone during the summer of 2002. written data. participants produced two types of written data and a group project that we analyzed in this study: 1. professional dialogue 1 and 2: students selected a dialogue from a professional situation, described the content for the dialogue, scripted the dialogue (in accordance with argyris and schön (1974) model i and model ii behavior theories) to mirror a scene from a play, and engaged in critical reflection of the dialogue. 2. group project: students participated in mini action experiments that engaged aspects of action theories. the projects required the student to collaborate on developing the design, conducting the experiment, and presenting the findings, insights, and conclusions. 3. praxis paper: students composed papers examining the evolution of their professional praxis and informed by course content. findings suggest that students benefited from the introduction of concrete exercises that helped to illuminate theories of action within a classroom setting. though initially struggling with the introduction of social justice frameworks into the classroom, many students later noted that they felt more equipped to effectively address the assumptions that they traditionally held with individuals who were different from them at the conclusion of the course. the risks the students took in the classroom, as well as in their personal praxis papers, illustrated such growth. our reflections the aforementioned action experiments provided insight into the professional challenges that student affairs practitioners may face on a daily basis. we introduced the notion of social justice within the framework of an academic community in order to provide the students opportunity to learn effective management skills in a supportive environment prior to professional practice. what is clear from a review of existing literature in student affairs, as well as from the participants in these two action experiments, is that a guiding educational philosophy is welcomed and needed within student affairs preparation programs. what remains to be seen, however, is a clear vision of how such an educational philosophy might be integrated into the student affairs field. upon a review of the data from focus groups, in and out-of-class discussions, and written assignments, we noted that students have difficulty describing who they are as professionals and why they make professional decisions. in some cases, particularly where social justice issues are concerned, many participants felt uncomfortable because they were not accustomed to a forum within a classroom or within their master’s program where challenging others, as well as being challenged, was perceived as being safe. as educators, we must ask ourselves the question: is the student affairs profession providing the foundation necessary for student affairs practitioners-in-training to become successful agents of social change? is providing this foundation the responsibility of student affairs preparation programs? the answers are still unclear. it can be gleaned from these action experiments, however, that reflection, achieving individual critical consciousness, and the testing of assumptions are matters of importance to the participants that we surveyed. in an effort to illustrate the experiences of students which culminated in the second action experiment, we suggest a “social justice development model for the student affairs scholar practitioner-in-training” (see page 15). students identified pre-existing attitudes toward the discussion of diversity issues in the classroom. as illustrated in the model, we attribute students’ pre-existing attitudes to three factors: 1) past classroom experience; 2) their perception of social justice issues; and 3) socioeconomic class. during the semester-long course, students encountered social justice texts, dialogues, and theories of action and experienced new methods and approaches to discussing difficult issues. in addition, students reflected, both orally, in class as well as in written assignments. the teaching team utilized action science as a process for co-constructing a communicative classroom setting among the instructor, teaching fellows, and students. the reactions of students are categorized in two primary ways: resistance towards discussing diversity issues and open conversation. both open conversations regarding issues of social justice and learning theories of action, along with a considerable amount of resistance to these issues took place simultaneously. eight of the nine participants initially expressed some form of frustration, anxiety and, in some cases, anger about discussing diversity issues “again”. these participants attributed their initial resistance to both personal and prior educational experiences; and, many cited that such resistance stemmed from past educational experiences or courses at the master’s level. friere (1970) speaks about the notion of situated pedagogy and dialogic education. situated pedagogy presents students with critical issues that may be most difficult for them to perceive. in the practicum and subsequent semester-long course, students utilized a syllabus situated within a critical framework. for some of the participants, it was difficult to grasp and discuss issues such as actionable knowledge and social justice. a majority of the latter half of the semester during the second experiment focused on issues, projects, and dialogues that the students experienced in the workplace. it can be compared to freire’s definition of dialogic education “that is situated in the culture, language, politics and themes of the students” (shor & freire, 1987, p. 4). students expressed initial discomfort with this format during both the practicum and semester-long course. many participants had never experienced “social connectedness and mutual responsibility” (shor & freire, 1987, p. 4). the analysis of written assignments, interview transcripts, and informal conversation suggested that laying a social and critical foundation within an educational setting may give students in preparation programs confidence that is necessary to achieve individual critical consciousness. achieving this consciousness could, in turn, provide opportunities for student affairs practitioners to act as agents of social change. references argyris, c., & schön, d. (1974). theory in practice: increasing professional effectiveness. san francisco, ca: jossey bass publishers. argyris, c., putnam, r., & smith, d. (1985). action science. san francisco, jossey-bass publishers. barr, r. b., & tagg, j. (1995). from teaching to learning: a new paradigm for undergraduate education. in j. l. bess & d. s. webster (eds.), foundations of american higher education (pp. 323-342). needham heights, ma: simon and schuster custom publishing. bell, l. (1997). theoretical foundations for social justice education. in m. adams, l. a. bell, and p. griffin (eds.), teaching for diversity and social justice: a sourcebook. new york: routledge. biddell, t., & fischer, k. (1992). beyond the stage debate: action, structure, and variability in piagetian theory and research. in r. j. sternberg & c. a. berg (eds.), intellectual development. new york: cambridge university press. cranton, p. (1996). professional development as transformative learning: new perspectives for teachers of adults. san francisco: jossey bass. dewey, j. (1938). experience and education. new york: collier books. freire, p. (1970). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. habermas, j. (1990). moral consciousness and communicative action. cambridge, ma: the mit press. leitch, r., & day, c. (2000). action research and reflective practice: towards a holistic view. in c. day, j. elliott, b. somekh, r. winter, & k. green (eds.), educational action research: an international journal, 8(1), pp. 179-193. ramaley, j. (2000). change as a scholarly act: higher education research transfer to practice. in a. kezar & p. eckel (eds.), new directions for higher education: moving beyond the gap between research and practice in higher education (p. 110). san francisco: jossey-bass publishers. rogoff, b. (1984). introduction: thinking and learning in social context. in b. rogoff & j. lave (eds.), everyday cognition: its development in social context. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. rogoff, b., gauvain, m., & ellis, s. (1984). development viewed in its cultural context. in m. bornstein & m. lamb (eds.), developmental psychology: an advanced textbook. hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum russell, t., & munby, h. (1992). teachers and teaching: from classrooms to reflection. new york: falmer press. ryan, g., toohey, s., & hughes, c. (1996). the purpose, value, and structure of the practicum in higher education: a literature review. higher education, 31, 355-377. schön, d. a. (1987). educating the reflective practitioner: toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. san francisco: jossey bass. shor, i., & freire, p. (1987). a pedagogy for liberation: dialogues on transforming education. s. hadley, ma: bergin & harvey. authors dr. kimberly a. kline research fellow center of inquiry in the liberal arts wabash college p.o. box 628 crawfordsville, in 47933 (765) 361-6188 klinek@ wabash.edu dr. megan moore gardner assistant to the vice president for student affairs john carroll university 20700 n. park blvd. university heights, oh 44118 216-397-1972 mgardner@ jcu.edu dr. kline is a research fellow at the center of inquiry in the liberal arts. she received a ph.d. in higher education from indiana university bloomington and her research focuses extensively on social justice education, women’s issues, and the use of action theory in higher education and student affairs graduate programs. dr. moore gardner is the assistant to the vice president for student affairs at john carroll university. she received a ph.d. in higher education from indiana university bloomington and her research focuses extensively on social justice education, student affairs assessment, women’s issues, and catholic higher education. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html 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in the 21st century teresa wallace teresa wallace, eastern kentucky university, phone: 859-622-7625, email: teresa.wallace@eku.edu accepted december 22, 2014 with the proportion of females in the superintendency being 23% in 2012, and increasing by only 0.7% annually, it will take nearly 80 years for females to be proportionately represented in public schools. this study sample consisted of 63 female superintendents, representing 51% of the overall population of female superintendents in the 6 southeastern states where the study took place. the 6 states were chosen because each has approximately the national average of female superintendents. female superintendents in the six southeastern states were asked what advice they would give to aspiring female superintendents and to recommend strategies for increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. participants offered valuable advice to aspiring female superintendents on how to navigate the system and be successful. they recommended practical strategies for attracting female candidates and increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. keywords: female superintendent, underrepresented, gender equity, feminist standpoint theory introduction in k-12 public education in the u.s., women dominate the workforce of teachers and staff members, but even in the 21st century, women are grossly underrepresented in leadership roles (usdoe, 2008). according to the 2012 u.s. department of education schools and staff survey report, 76% of teachers and 52% of principals in public elementary and secondary schools were female in 2011-12. but, even though women constitute 76% of the teacher workforce, the pool from which superintendents normally begin their journey, only 23% of public school superintendents were female (usdoe, 2012). according to grogan and shakeshaft (2011), the underrepresentation of females in the superintendency is not due to females not being motivated or certified for the position. they reported 40% of the women in central office administrative positions identified themselves as aspiring to the superintendency while 74% had earned, or were working toward earning, the certification required to fulfill the job. grogan and shakeshaft (2011) contend the underrepresentation is a result of females’ options being constrained by stereotypical expectations and beliefs. between 2008 and 2012, the percentage of female teachers in k-12 public schools in the united states increased from 75.6% to 76.3% while the percentage of female principals increased from 50.3% to 51.6% (usdoe, 2012). despite this steady growth in female representation in the roles of teacher and principal, female representation in the superintendency has seen little increase in the past few decades as shown in table 1. table 1 female superintendents year female superintendents 1990 10.5% 2000 13.2% 2012 23.0% u.s. department of education schools and staffing survey, 2008 & 2012 at the current average annual increase of 0.7%, it will take another 77 years for females to be proportionately represented in the superintendency (usdoe, 2008). in his welcoming remarks to scholars attending a meeting about women in educational leadership at duquesne university in pittsburg, pennsylvania, dr. charles daugherty stated: for the sake of justice, we must make efforts to bring the number of women working in leadership positions into closer proportion with the number of women in education. we owe this effort especially to our daughters, but to all future generations who will benefit from more inclusive educational institutions. (soberhart, 2009, p. xii) due to the continued underrepresentation of females in the male dominated profession of public school superintendent, there is a need for further research in this area. this study was advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 43 designed to find out more about the career paths of female superintendents, factors affecting females’ decisions to become superintendents, advice female superintendents would give to females who aspire to become superintendent, and female superintendents’ thoughts on how to increase the proportion of females serving in superintendent positions. theoretical framework a theory is defined as an explanation of observed phenomena that is organized into logical interrelated terms (gall, gall, & borg, 2008). a theoretical framework is a systematic explanation of phenomena related to variables within a given theory (lunenburg & ornstein, 2008). the theoretical framework supporting this study is the feminist standpoint theory. feminist standpoint theory emerged in the 1980s as a feminist critical theory about relations between the production of knowledge and practices of power, and was proposed as a method to guide future feminist research (harding, 2004). specific foci of the feminist standpoint theory are (a) identifying cultural values and power dynamics that account for the subordination of girls and women and (b) highlighting the distinct knowledge cultivated by activities that are assigned to females (wood, 2009). according to feminist standpoint theory, women’s lives differ systematically and structurally from men’s lives. each group engages in distinct activities and the two groups are accorded different rights and opportunities. women and men occupy different social locations, thus cultivating distinct kinds of knowledge (wood, 2009). according to harding (2004), feminist standpoint theory was presented as a way of empowering oppressed groups and valuing their experiences. feminist standpoint theory insists feminist concerns cannot be restricted to only social and political issues. we cannot pigeon-hole feminist issues and ignore them as only women’s issues. instead, feminist issues must be seen as valuably informing theoretical, methodological, and political thought in general. feminist standpoint theory was chosen as the theoretical framework for this study because the theory still holds true in the superintendency today. one way women’s lives differ from men’s lives is in the sexual division of labor, as is evident in the scant percentage of females serving as k-12 public school superintendents compared to the female representation in the roles of teacher and principal, even in the twenty-first century. feminist standpoint theory asserts males and females are accorded different rights and opportunities. this is again evident in the fact that in the u.s., women are twice as likely to have earned a doctorate in education, yet men are five times more likely to hold the job of superintendent of schools (sobehart, 2009). purpose of the study the researcher believed that giving current female superintendents an opportunity to share factors that influenced their decision to become a superintendent and advice for being successful in a male dominated role with females aspiring to become superintendents would motivate more females to pursue the job of superintendent in the future. the researcher further believed that allowing current female superintendents to share suggestions of ways to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency would have implications for university superintendent preparation programs and state and local agencies looking to recruit females for the position of superintendent. to this end, the researcher investigated: 1. positions females held in the field of education prior to becoming superintendents; 2. factors affecting a female’s decision to become a superintendent; 3. advice female superintendents would give aspiring female superintendents; and 4. suggestions female superintendents offer to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency open-ended questions included: 1. what advice would you offer to a female aspiring to become a superintendent? 2. which strategies for attracting female superintendent candidates do you think would be most effective? data were gathered using an online survey developed by the investigator specifically for this study. the survey was developed around the four issues to be investigated as listed above and included 17 multiple choice and two open-ended questions. in may of 2013, all female superintendents in alabama, florida, kentucky, north carolina, tennessee, and virginia were invited to participate in the study. an invitation to participate, survey link, instructions, and a deadline for responses were emailed to all 123 female superintendents in those states. a reminder email was sent in june. sixty-three superintendents, some from each of the 6 states, completed the survey with all participants remaining anonymous. after downloading data to a spreadsheet, each data element was carefully reviewed to identify emerging themes. analysis of data was limited to descriptive statistics. results to investigate the four issues above, female superintendents responded to questions, developed specifically for this study. to determine the career path female superintendents follow, participants answered questions related to previous employment and the number of years they had spent as classroom teachers. table 2 shows 67% of participants had served as assistant, deputy, or associate superintendent before securing a job as superintendent and 89% percent had served as a school-level administrator, either principal or assistant advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 44 principal. almost 90% had spent at least five years as a classroom teacher as shown in table 3. table 2 positions held prior to becoming superintendent position percent holding position associate/deputy superintendent 17.46% assistant superintendent 49.21% district level director 52.38% principal high school middle school elementary school 57.15% 11.11% 14.29% 31.75% assistant principal high school middle school elementary school 26.98% 7.94% 9.52% 9.52% teacher high school middle school elementary school 73.01% 22.22% 22.22% 28.56% table 3 years as a classroom teacher years as teacher percent less than 5 12.70% 5-10 47.62% 11-15 23.81% 16-20 14.29% more than 20 1.59% to determine factors affecting a female’s decision to become a superintendent, participants answered two questions. (a) what factors influenced your decision to become a superintendent? (b) what are the three most important incentives for becoming a superintendent? as shown in table 4, over 75% cited commitment to education as having the greatest influence on their decision and the opportunity to have an impact on student achievement as the second most influential. table 5 shows making a difference, leading learning, and team building as the top three incentives for becoming a superintendent. table 4 factors influencing decision to become superintendent factor percent commitment to education opportunity to have an impact on student achievement opportunity to serve the community interest in superintendent work opportunity to serve in a leadership position increase in salary 75.81% 66.13% 56.45% 40.32% 37.10% 14.52% prestige of the position 4.84% desire to leave building-level administration 3.23% note: participants were not limited to one response. table 5 most important incentives to become a superintendent incentive percent making a difference 74.60% leading learning 66.67% team building 49.21% addressing challenges 39.68% opportunity to manage a district 19.05% working with students 15.87% working with staff 9.52% compensation 7.94% prestige of the position 0% note: participants were asked to choose three incentives. female superintendents gave advice to aspiring female superintendents by responding to the following open-ended question. what advice would you offer to a female aspiring to become a superintendent? participant advice was categorized by common themes as shown in table 6. the top three categories by percent of responses were (a) learn how to do the job, (b) be aware of gender bias issues, and (c) prepare for job related stress. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 45 table 6 advice to females aspiring to become a superintendent advice category percent learn how to do the job 23% be aware of gender bias issues 13% prepare for job related stress 12% consider family support 10% consider moral and ethical aspects of the job 10% expect criticism 7% prepare to deal with politics of job 7% prepare to put job above self make sure the district is a good fit understand board and superintendent rolls take advantage of leadership opportunities 7% 5% 3% 3% within the responses, several made statements regarding the good of the students. perhaps best said was, “make all decisions on what you believe to be in the best interest of students. if you use this as your compass, even the most difficult decisions will be understood and accepted.” an opportunity to provide suggestions on how to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency in the 21st century was offered. participants were asked which strategies for attracting female superintendent candidates they thought would be most effective. the question gave four choices for participants to choose from and a comment box for them to make additional suggestions. responses to the four choices given are shown in table 7 below. table 7 ways to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency choice percent change nature of superintendency by funding more central office positions 28.57% allow female superintendent to excel in what she likes to do by shifting some work to other employees 21.43% provide incentives for females to gain superintendent certification 42.86% states reward districts for hiring female superintendents 35.71% the five most frequently recommended additional strategies for attracting female superintendent candidates were in the areas of (a) establishing mentoring programs, (b) equal pay for females, (c) establishing support systems, (d) changing board perceptions of females, and (e) making the job more manageable. through their additional comments, 71% of the participants made it clear they did not think there should be a consideration of gender when discussing the position of superintendent. they stated the board should hire the best person for the job, regardless of gender, and encouraged women to “throw their hats in the ring”. discussion in this study, practicing female superintendents in 6 southeastern states completed an online survey. the survey consisted of 17 multiple choice and two open-ended questions. participants responded to questions regarding jobs they held prior to becoming superintendents, factors that influenced their decision to become superintendents, advice they would give to females aspirin to become superintendents, and suggestions of ways to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency in the 21st century. findings are discussed below. according to kowalski et al. (2011), the general career path to the superintendency is the teacher-principal path. findings of this study are no different. seventy-three percent of participants had served as classroom teachers, with 71% of those spending 5 to 15 years in the classroom. fifty-seven percent had served as principal, with 32% of those serving as at the elementary level. not surprising, since the most frequent advice given by the participants to aspiring female superintendents was to learn as much as possible before applying for a position, 67% had served as either an associate, deputy, or assistant superintendent prior to securing a position as superintendent. this is consistent with the feminist standpoint theory idea that knowledge is based on experience, and different situations result in different knowledge (harding, 2004). these findings can assist females aspiring to become superintendents in planning their career path. they should pursue school-level administrative positions early enough in their career to work their way up to the superintendency. the top three factors influencing participants’ decisions to become a superintendent were commitment to education (76%), opportunity to have an impact on student achievement (66%), and an opportunity to serve the community (56%). this could be explained by the feminist standpoint theory as it identifies motherhood as part of women’s labor. serving others by helping them to develop and grow are important features of women’s activity as mothers (hartsock, 1983). in a 2007 aasa study, the top three incentives for females to become superintendents were making a difference (73%), leading learning (53%), and compensation (42%) (mccord, jordan, & jordan, 2008). participants in this study identified making a difference (75%), leading learning (67%), and team building (49%) as the top three incentives for becoming a advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 46 superintendent. compensation dropped from third to eighth with only 8% identifying that as an incentive. this could be a result of 67% of participants having served as assistant, associate, or deputy superintendent, all positions just below the superintendent on the salary schedule. advice given by participants to aspiring female superintendents through an open-ended question could be categorized by common themes. the most frequent advice, to learn and be prepared for the position, appears to be a result of gender bias that exists in the superintendency. garn and brown (2008) found that women believed gender bias created a major challenge to their path to the superintendency and to their performance after gaining the position. the majority of participants in this study appear to share the same belief. derrington and sharratt (2009) offered recommendations from female superintendents. they recommended a strong determination and an iron will, recognizing that women have to fight harder, wait longer, and survive more scrutiny to become a superintendent. the second most frequent advice participants in this study offered related to gender bias, and included a warning to females that the superintendency is still a majority male field and females should be aware that gender bias still exists, echoed this recommendation. females aspiring to the superintendency should be aware of this gender bias and realize they may have to work harder to get the job and even harder to keep it. this should be discussed in superintendent preparation programs at the university level. derrington and sharratt (2009) advised females to balance their personal and professional life, making time for family, self, and work. the third most frequent area of advice given by participants was just that; be aware of the long hours and stress of the job and the effect it may have on family. one participant advised taking a realistic look at the balance between work and personal life to determine a willingness to accept the demands of the job before pursuing a superintendency. this finding has implications for the university superintendent preparation program, also. practicing or retired superintendents should be invited to speak to the students, making them aware of the demands of the job and answering questions on how to manage the long hours and stress and how to balance personal and professional responsibilities. participants suggested ways to increase the proportion of females in the superintendency. de santa ana (2008) found mentors to be of paramount importance in navigating the superintendency. participants in this study verified this need. several offered the suggestion of finding a current female superintendent to serve as a mentor. magdaleno (2006) found that same gender mentors can provide support for personal experiences with gender barriers. this finding should be considered by state superintendent associations and universities as they recruit mentors for new female superintendents. they should keep in mind female mentors can help new female superintendents with the balance between their personal and professional lives. the most recent figures on superintendent salary indicate females still earn an average of $4,000 to $18,000 less than their male counterparts (www.payscale.com/research/us/country=united_states/salar y). several participants in this study recommended equal pay for females as a strategy for attracting female superintendent candidates and increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. another recommendation was to consider females for the largest, not just the smallest districts, which could have an effect on average salary. state superintendent associations should lobby for a salary schedule that is based on educational level and experience as with other public school administrators. gender should not play a role in who gets the job or the rate of pay. in interviewing more than 50 successful female superintendents about their strategies for success, gilmour and kinsella (2009) found a critical piece to the success of female superintendents was the match between the superintendent and the school district. another critical piece was the relationships with all stakeholders, including the community and staff, and especially with members of the board of education. kowlaski et al. (2011) found superintendents considered family support as essential for success. participants in this study agreed with all three; recommending a supportive board, community, staff, and family as a strategy for attracting female superintendent candidates and increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. before applying for a superintendent position, female candidates should research the district and determine if it is a good fit. if they find there is no support for a female superintendent from the board, staff, or community, then they should keep looking until they find a district that is a good fit. they should not apply just because there is an opening and they want to be a superintendent. without support, they cannot be successful. brunner and grogan (2007) surveyed 1,195 female superintendents and assistant/associate/deputy superintendents and identified major limitations on the advancement of females in educational leadership. they found board member perceptions of females were that they were not good managers and were unqualified to handle budget and finance. the females surveyed felt the good-ole-boy network still existed in the superintendency. participants in this study identified a change in board member perceptions of the effectiveness of female superintendents as a strategy for attracting female superintendent candidates and increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. this may take board members having experience with a female superintendent and her having a chance to prove her ability before a change in attitude takes place. the role of the superintendent is all encompassing; including collective bargaining, personnel, budget and finance, policy development and implementation, effective communication with stakeholders, strategic planning, and instructional leadership (callan & levinson, 2011). currently being in the advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 47 position of superintendent, the participants in this study recommended co-superintendency as a strategy for attracting female superintendent candidates and increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. participants felt the job to be big enough for two people regardless of the gender of the superintendent. conclusion this study confirms previous research in the areas of gender bias, career paths of female superintendents, the need for mentors, the necessity of a supportive board that is compatible with the superintendent, and a balance between personal and professional responsibilities. the study extends previous work by revealing valuable advice to aspiring female superintendents on how to navigate the system and become successful superintendents and by sharing effective strategies for attracting female superintendents, thus increasing the proportion of females in the superintendency. this study adds to the literature on females in the superintendency to be used in future research. the findings from this study benefit university superintendent preparation programs, state superintendent associations, and females aspiring to the superintendency. the advice and strategies shared can improve university superintendent preparation programs, better prepare females for the superintendency, and hopefully motivate and encourage more females to pursue the superintendency. as one participant stated, “if you would like to become a superintendent, do it! it will change your life.” references brunner, c. c. & grogan, m. (2007). women leading school systems. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. callan, m.f. & levinson, w. (2011). achieving success for new and aspiring superintendents: a practical guide. thousand oaks, ca: sage. desanta ana, t. m. (2008). opening up the superintendency. leadership, 38(1), 24-27. derrington, m.l., & sharratt, g. (2009). four attitudes of successful women. the school administrator, 8(66), 21. gall, m., gall, j., & borg, w. (2008). educational research: an introduction (8th ed.). boston, ma: allyn-bacon. garn, g. & brown, c. (2008). women and the superintendency: perceptions of gender bias. journal of women in educational leadership, 6(1), 49–71. gilmour, s.l. & kinsella, m.p. (2009). succeeding as a female superintendent: how to get there and stay there. lanham, md: aasa and rowman & littlefield. grogan, m. & shakeshaft, c. (2011). women and educational leadership. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. harding, s. (2004). the feminist theory standpoint reader: intellectual and political controversies. new york: routledge. hartsock, n. (1983). the feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism. retrieved from http://www.tu.ac.th/org/grad/master/pdf/paper/fulltext_th e_feminist__standpoint_developing_the_ground_for_a_ specifically_feminist_historica__materialism_nancy_har tsock%5b1%5d.pdf kowalski, t. j., ellerson, n. m., mccord, r. s., petersen, g. j., young, p., & american association of school administrators. (2011). the american school superintendent: 2010 decennial study. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. lunenburg, f. & ornstein, a. (2008) educational administration: concepts and practices (5th ed.). belmont, ca: wadsworth publishing company. mccord, r.s., jordan, t., & jordan, k.f. (2008). state of the superintendency mini-survey: aspiring to the superintendency. aasa center for system leadership.center for education policy studies, university of nevada, las vegas. magdaleno, k. r. (2006). mentoring latino school leaders. leadership, 36(1), 12-14. sobehart, h.c. 2009. women leading education across the continents: sharing spirit, fanning the flame. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. u.s. department of education (usdoe), national center for education statistics. (2008). schools and staffing survey. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/ u.s. department of education (usdoe), national center for education statistics. (2012). schools and staffing survey. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/ wood, j.t. "feminist standpoint theory." encyclopedia of communication theory. ed. thousand oaks, ca: sage, 2009. 397-99. sage reference online. www.payscale.com/research/us/country=united_states /salary advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 20, spring 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] graduate students’ description of the ideal science advisor: implications for graduate women’s success dr. maria m. ferreira abstract research indicates that doctoral students’ relationship with their advisor is the most important factor in the degree progress, and often the main reason for student attrition. in this study interviews with graduate students in two science departments, biology and chemistry, at a large research university were used to explore their concept of the “ideal” science research advisor and the extent to which their present advisor fits this ideal. students’ descriptions of the ideal research advisor included many of the traits that characterize the advisor as a mentor. however, student responses also indicated that most of their advisors deviated considerably from students’ descriptions of the “ideal.” this perception was particularly common among the female students in chemistry. introduction according to tinto (1993) the graduate education process progresses in three stages, (1) transition to the program, (2) acquisition of skills, and (3) the conduction of research. student persistence in the third stage is primarily the result of the student relationship with the advisor (girves & wemmerus, 1988; hollenshead, younce, & wenzel, 1994; tinto, 1993). studies show that students’ satisfaction with their doctoral program is directly related to satisfaction with advisement relationships (bargar & mayo-chamberlain, 1983; davis, file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/spring2006/index.html 1999; golde, 1996, 1998; hollenshead et al. 1994; office of scientific and engineering personnel, 1996). the quality of the interpersonal relationship between graduate students and their advisor has been found to be a better predictor of success in a doctoral program than a student’s gre scores and undergraduate grade point average (osep, 1996; sorenson & kagan, 1967). regrettably, the advisor-advisee relationship is often perceived as the most disappointing aspect of many students’ experiences in graduate school (curtin, blake, & cassagnau, 1997; ferreira, 1997; golde, 1998; osep, 1996). female students who join graduate science programs with few or no female faculty members, who can serve as role models, are particularly vulnerable and depend on their advisor for successful integration into the existing departmental culture (bizzari, 1995; davis, 1999; lovitts, 1996). these students are at a greater risk of leaving a promising career in science when their advisor shows little interest in their success. subotnik and arnold (1995) point out that women, in particular, who may question their ability to succeed, do best in colleges and universities that offer responsive advisors. according to widnall (1988), “the advisor is the primary gatekeeper for the professional self-esteem of the student” (p. 1743). the graduate advisor performs a minimum of five essential roles: 1) a reliable information source, 2) a departmental socializer, 3) an occupational socializer, 4) a role model, and 5) an advocate for the advisee (golde, 1998; lovitts, 1996; winston, miller, ender, & grites, 1984). mentoring researchers define mentoring as an intentional process in which a more skilled person (the mentor) serves as a role model and provides information, support, and guidance, to a less skilled or less experienced member of the organization (the protégé) (anderson & shannon, 1988; campbell & campbell, 1997; romberg, 1993). although most definitions of mentoring portray the protégé as the main beneficiary in the relationship, others contend that both mentor and protégé benefit from a mentoring relationship. while the protégé benefits from the mentor’s knowledge and experience, the mentor, in turn, benefits from the satisfaction of making a positive impact on another person and often receives admiration, respect, and gratitude from the protégé (fagenson, 1994; hall & sandler, 1983; healy & welchert, 1990). according to brown and others (1989), the mentoring process involves three stages: “modeling,” “coaching,” and “fading.” the mentor “models” by revealing his/her problem-solving strategies; “coaches,” by supporting the students’ attempts to perform new tasks; and “fades” after having empowered the student to work independently. ideally, advisors become true mentors to their students. students who have a mentoring relationship with their advisor feel professionally affirmed and are more productive after graduation. research indicates that successful scientists often had, at some stage of their career, supporting and influential mentors (davis, 1999; subotnik & arnold, 1995).however, for a mentoring relationship to develop, advisors of incoming graduate students must take the initiative in establishing sound interpersonal communication with their advisees that is grounded on trust, openness, and mutual willingness to grow (bargar & mayo-chamberlin, 1983; luebs, fredrickson, hyon & samraj, 1998). heinrich (1991) contends that advisors who have a mentoring relationship with their students use an “androgynous” approach and are “gender-sensitive.” these advisors tailor their mentoring to the needs of their individual students by using a combination of masculine and feminine principles. they combine “taskand goal-oriented” approaches while attending to the interpersonal dimension of the relationship with their advisees, and take on “father-daughter/son” and “colleague-colleague” roles with their advisees (heinrich, 1991). in contrast, to the “androgynous” and “gender-sensitive” approach, some advisors use a “traditionally masculine” or “traditionally feminine” approach. advisors who use a traditionally masculine approach to advisement are task-oriented and handle conflict with their advisees through direct confrontation, while those who use a traditionally feminine approach to advisement overly emphasize the interpersonal dimension and try to avoid conflict with their women advisees (heinrich, 1991). although the research points to the important role that the advisor plays in graduate student success, little is known about the qualities that students wish their advisors to emulate. this information is particularly important in scientific fields where the student/advisor relationship is often analogous to that of an employer/employee. unlike the humanities where the majority of doctoral students conduct research independently from their advisor, in most science areas incoming graduate students frequently become part of large research groups and work in research projects financed by grants secured by their advisor. thus, the ph.d. thesis in science is primarily an apprenticeship in research and students’ success depends primarily on their relationship with the advisor (widnall, 1988). in this study graduate students in two science departments (biology and chemistry) at a large research university were asked to describe an ideal research advisor and the extent to which their present advisor matched this ideal. students’ perspectives, often missing in the research, are an important contribution to the existing literature on academic advising and on the under-representation of women in science. method setting the study took place in two graduate science departments, biology and chemistry, at a large research university in the midwest. the biology department offered doctoral and master’s degrees in seven areas of biology from molecular biology to ecology. the department had 177 graduate students, 43 percent female. of the 48 tenure-track faculty members nine were women at various rank levels (2 of assistant, 5 of associate and 2 of full professor). the chemistry department offered only ph.ds in all of the major subdisciplines of chemistry, from biochemistry to physical chemistry. however, students who decided to leave before completing their ph.d. were given a master’s degree if their work was deemed of sufficient quality. the student’s advisor controlled this decision, solely. the chemistry department had 34 faculty members, all male, 74 percent of them at the rank of full professor. of the 186 graduate students in the chemistry department 30 percent were female. in both departments the doctoral program was primarily based on research. incoming graduate students were funded for a period of five years in the form of teaching and/or research fellowships. most students taught the first year and received research assistantships when they joined a research lab. participants the primary participants in this study were 32 doctoral students, 16 from biology and 16 from chemistry. the participants were selected using a short survey returned by 170 students from both departments. student responses to the survey were used to insure a “representative sample” (lecompte & preissle, 1993) in regards to gender, department, and students’ perception of the level of mentoring in their program. data collection and analysis data were collected primarily through semi-structured interviews with 32 graduate students (16 female and 16 male), and a short 5-point likert-type scale survey questionnaire returned by 170 students (86 from biology and 84 from chemistry). in addition to demographic items (gender, age, ethnicity, marital status), the survey included a statement addressing students’ perception of the level of mentoring in their department and asked students to report the weekly number of hours they spent conducting research in the lab and/or in the field. department records were used to determine student and faculty composition of each department, student graduate and undergraduate gpas, and the student attrition rate in each department over a nine-year period. interviews. according to bogdan & biklen (1992), interviews allow the researcher to “consider experiences from the informants’ perspectives” (p. 32). in this study semi-structured interviews were used to assess students’ perspectives on the attributes of the “ideal” science research advisor and on the extent to which the students’ present advisor reflected this ideal. the interviews were audiotaped and took between 30 and 45 minutes. the transcripts of the students’ answers to the interview questions were analyzed using the techniques of naturalistic inquiry (lincoln & guba, 1985; miles & huberman, 1994). after the interview tapes were transcribed verbatim, a text-based coding was used (miles & huberman, 1994). as each transcript was read several times, oneor two-word codes were attached to each segment of the data. after all transcripts were coded in this manner, similar codes were grouped together and organized into broader themes. the accuracy of the themes was accomplished through “member checking” and a peer reviewer (lincoln & guba, 1985). results all students interviewed for this study were asked to describe their “ideal” science research advisor and to comment on the extent to which their present research advisor matched this ideal. the results are presented in two major sections. the first section provides a thematic characterization of the ideal science research advisor based on students’ descriptions whereas the second provides students’ comments on the extent to which these characteristics were expressed in their present research advisor. characteristics of the ideal science research advisor the students in this study described their ideal advisor at two levels: personal and professional. these two broad themes are further broken down into sub themes. the ideal advisor is personable. even though students recognized their advisor’s main role was related to their scientific work, they also wished their advisors related to them outside the realm of the discipline. as a male student from biology pointed out, “if you work with someone for five years in the same room and they are never willing to talk about anything except the details of science, that’s emotionally not a very welcoming environment.” according to this student, one of the things i value a lot is a certain degree of candor and casualness in the relationship. my boss likes to talk about politics, about culture, and other topics. i consider him my friend as well as my scientific advisor. we have a relaxed relationship yet tense in the sense that in the back of our minds we are both focused on science. but he feels he can break out from his role as scientific mentor from time to time, and i really appreciate that. while the previous passage illustrates a “colleague-colleague” sort of relationship between the advisor and his student, the next quote from another male student in biology, portrays another type of relationship -“parent/child:” first the ideal advisor is a professor who genuinely cares about the students. it’s almost like a father and son or mother and daughter type of relationship. he has to have the basic skills of the field, but if he is not interested in the students, then the skills are lost; they won’t be transferred. he has to have that feeling for them. the ideal advisor is a “guide on the side.” on the professional level, the ideal advisor gives his/her students the proper combination of guidance and autonomy. students needed guidance to help them make progress in their research, but sufficient autonomy to test their creative ideas. guidance was particularly important during the students’ first two years in graduate school as reflected in the comments from a female student in biology: an ideal advisor is able to direct while allowing for the students to contribute their individual approaches. when you bounce off some ideas as you’re developing your research, the advisor helps direct your research but is not in control of it. the ideal advisor is someone who is willing to allow a lot of individualism on the part of the student. a male student from chemistry expressed a similar perspective: an ideal advisor should be supportive of your goal, and try to find some balance between telling you what to do, and letting you sort of run your own research project. i wouldn’t want an advisor who is completely hands-off, but i also wouldn’t want someone who just came in and told me what to do every day. the ideal advisor provides quality feedback. according to the students, providing meaningful feedback is an important aspect of the communication skills of an ideal research advisor. although making mistakes may be a useful aspect of the learning process for incoming graduate students, they can also be costly by robbing precious time needed for productive research. a female student from the same department stressed the importance of such communication in the following manner: an ideal research advisor communicates well with his students. he does not necessarily have to do hands-on work with them in the lab, but is in frequent communication with them -on the progress of their work and on their standing with him. i can’t emphasize how important the communication aspect is. a male student from chemistry used an example from his department to illustrate the importance of the advisor’s feedback: an advisor who was on my committee tended to let people flounder and continuously make mistakes. when his students made mistakes his attitude was like, “wrong, try again.” in my opinion an advisor like that is of no value at all because if you are just going through the process on your own, what is the point of being in graduate school? the ideal advisor is empathetic. the ability to show empathy and provide encouragement to his/her students is another important attribute of the ideal research advisor. although students recognized the importance of having their mistakes addressed, they also believed such acts should be followed by words of encouragement. the following statement from a female student in biology captures well the importance that encouragement plays in a student’s perseverance necessary to succeed in graduate science: my ideal research advisor or mentor would be somebody who is very positive because research can be very frustrating. and if you have somebody who is constantly on you saying, “when is this going to be done?” or “why didn’t that work?” you’re going to come down harder on yourself. you have to have somebody who says, “keep trying, it’ll work. keep going,” and help you move in the right direction. encouragement and support were especially important to students who did not intend to pursue a career in academia. even though they enjoyed science, their professional goals were related to careers in industry or teaching in a four-year college. they needed their advisors’ affirmation and support of their goals. in the words of a female student in chemistry, the ideal advisor “is supportive of whatever you decide to do in the future, which is kind of hard to find if you are not planning to go straight into academia.” the ideal advisor has good managerial skills. according to students, good managerial skills are particularly important in science where students work in research groups managed by their advisor. indeed, some of the research labs in this study comprised as many as 25 graduate students and a few post-doctoral fellows. running such a lab required comparable managerial skills to those akin to managing a small firm. as the main authority, the advisor’s managerial style set the tone for the work environment in the research lab. according to a female student from biology, an ideal advisor is somebody who has good managerial skills, somebody who can manage all the people that work under him or her and can handle confrontation really well. students have different personalities and will do things in different ways. it may get a little crazy sometimes and can get some people frustrated. a good advisor sets some basic rules in the lab for everyone to follow. the “ideal.” the characterization of the ideal advisor from a female student in biology reflects all the major attributes that students believed an ideal advisor would emulate: the ideal advisor is someone who rather than trying to dominate a student, provides the student with a language and a framework that allows the student to follow the interests that s/he has already instinctively chosen; is someone who is critical in the positive sense of the word; is someone who is engaged in your work at an intellectual level regardless of how far removed it may seem to his/her own interests; is someone who wants you to succeed and recognizes that your success is an extension of his/her success, and, is someone who is flexible and comfortable with the different rates at which different students make progress; it’s someone who appreciates that graduate school is tough and is sensitive to the fact that we all make a lot of personal sacrifices to be here. discrepancy between reality and the ideal when asked the extent to which their present advisor matched their ideal, students’ responses ranged from “very close” to “not at all. however, only one student, a male from chemistry characterized his advisor as the ideal: my advisor is excellent. he isn’t overbearing and never makes you stay in the lab for hours on end. he doesn’t push people; he wants people to push themselves. he trusts us and respects our ideas. you con go to him any time and talk about things. he tries to teach us more than chemistry. he teaches us how to write and how to work the ropes. i respect him and liked him a lot. in my mind my advisor is the ideal. when the interviewer asked, “would you consider him a mentor?” the same student replied, “certainly!” the advisor as “boss.” although most students spoke kindly about their advisors, rarely did they use the term “mentor” when referring to them. indeed, the great majority of them referred to their advisors as “boss.” a male student from biology provided the following explanation for the use of this term: in most science fields, when students join a graduate program (especially ph.d.) their research advisor gives them a project. i think they rarely understand why they’re doing this project and even less frequently have any real input into what they’re going to do. it’s sort of a bargain. they give you a project to do because they need to get this research done for their own purposes, you do this research for three or four years and get a ph.d., while the advisor will gets a number of papers published to help him get more grant money for another research project. although this symbiotic relationship benefited both parties -basic financial support for the student and cheap labor for the advisor -it limited students’ input in most aspects of their own training. furthermore, efficient use of resources and fast results often became a priority and instead of the “advisor as mentor,” the advisor became the “boss.” a female student from biology, who recently had left the program, responded when asked if she considered her advisor a boss. “absolutely!” she replied; “i guess i worked for him. in fact, it was more along the lines of an overseer instead of just a boss. our ideas as students counted almost nothing.” although few of the students in this study viewed their advisor as a mentor, seven of them considered their advisor to be very close to their ideal. these students usually felt fortunate to be under the supervision of such a person. when describing her advisor a female student from biology remarked, “i feel like i’ve been extremely fortunate. she likes to have more control than what i would like, but i think part of it is that she’s trying to train us in a way that she feels we need to learn.” according to a female student from chemistry her advisor “is willing to take special time to train the students. he spends special time with us. i’ve worked with other advisors and i’m very happy where i am now.” lack of collegiality. the ability to be personable was mentioned as a trait lacking in most advisors. these students, particularly those in the last stages of their program, wished their advisors treated them more like colleagues. when discussing his advisor a male student in biology remarked: he is pretty close to the ideal, except that he’s not very approachable. he’s not a very personable guy. he doesn’t really care at all about your personal life or any of that stuff, and although that’s not exactly required of him, i think that can also be a good thing. a male student from chemistry faulted the culture of the chemistry department for his advisor’s lack of personal rapport with his students. according to him, professors were discouraged from becoming too personable or from socializing with their students: some advisors do mix with their students sort of on a social level as well as outside of work, though apparently that’s frowned on by most of the professors in the department. when i’ve been to meetings with my advisor we go out to dinner together, we sit around and talk, and that’s something that doesn’t happen once we’re back at the university. returning students, in particular, resented the lack of collegiality with their advisor. as pointed out by a female student in biology, “one of the problems with being a grad student is not being treated as a colleague. i worked for a long time before going back to school and it irritates me to be talked down to.” lack of quality feedback. the nature of the feedback provided by advisors was another area of concern to some students, particularly those in chemistry. according to them, most professors in the chemistry department were more apt to providing negative feedback on students’ oversights, than positive feedback on their successes. the following account from a male student illustrates this issue: in six years that i’ve been here, i’ve been told i was doing a good job once, and that was this year. so i went for six years without it. it’s definitely a big hit on your morale. when you are working hard you definitely need to be recognized for that, to keep you going. this view was similarly portrayed in the comments of another male student from the same department: i don’t really get much direct pat-on-the-back type of deals. i gave a seminar last semester and actually got a letter in my mailbox from one of the professors congratulating me on one of the best seminars he had attended in a long time. it would have been nice if i had gotten that letter from my own advisor. lack of managerial skills. although most students had advisors who exhibited various degrees of the “ideal.” good managerial skills were often perceived to be a shortcoming for many advisors. even students, who described their advisor rather positively, felt they lacked good managerial skills. as pointed out by a male student in biology, “i have a very good boss. his downfall is managing people.” the advisor as the gatekeeper of student success. the last group of students had a rather negative opinion of their advisor. this view was especially prevalent among the female students in chemistry. students spoke of advisors who used favoritism and did not treat their students in an equitable manner. in the words of a female student in chemistry her advisor “did not encourage and help everybody; he just helped the people that he felt like helping, and that was never me.” other students commented on advisors who used a social darwinist approach in the running of their lab. according to a female student in chemistry her advisor “has used the term ‘survival of the fittest,’ and that’s how he believes his lab should be run. that’s how he believes the department should be run -survival of the fittest.” she further remarked: my advisor gives you enough rope to hang yourself, and if you’re making a wrong course he’s not going to stop you. another female student from the same department who had quitted commented on the competitive atmosphere that her advisor had created in the lab: i thought our group would work more as a team, and i thought professors would help you like a leader would. i think my professor runs his research groups so that we compete against each other. i’m competitive and i can compete against other people, but it’s not really the type of atmosphere that i was interested in. unfortunately these experiences where not uncommon in the chemistry department where the female attrition rate, for each entering cohort over a nine-year period, averaged 45% and was significantly higher than the attrition rate for males, which averaged 30% for the same time period x2 (1, n = 433) = 8.90, p = .003. moreover, all the students interviewed for this study who had left the program before completing their degree (4 females and one male), attributed their leaving to the poor relationship with their advisor. the following comments from one of them illustrates some of the issues that female students experienced in the chemistry department: i don’t mind having a hands off advisor, that part didn’t bother me, but the part that bothered me was that when i needed help, and when i asked for help, i didn’t really get very much help. well, i got maybe a tiny bit, but it wasn’t like the type of help that i saw other people getting, and i didn’t get any encouragement at all, not like some of the people in other projects. discussion and conclusion except for the managerial skills, students’ characterization of the ideal advisor included the attributes identified in advisors who use a mentoring approach with their students (belcher, 1994; heinrich, 1991; holland, 1993). although some students used more complex descriptions in their characterization of the ideal research advisor, a number of characteristics were common across most descriptions. according to the students in this study the ideal research advisor provides guidance, feedback, and encouragement within an atmosphere of respect for each student’s competencies. the ideal advisor treats each student as an individual and tailors his/her mentoring approach to each student’s needs. these results support the findings of other researchers who contend that effective advisors help their students reach their potential by showing interest in their students’ personal and professional aspirations (healy & welchert, 1990; randall, 1982; romberg, 1993). students wanted advisors who were approachable, and who could relate to them outside the realm of the discipline. in other words, students wished their advisors treated them as colleagues (heinrich, 1991). according to hollenshead and others (1994), being treated as a junior colleague by the advisor is critical at the doctoral level, and accounts for much of the variability in degree progress. although some students had advisors close to their ideal, students’ narratives also indicated that most of the advisors did not use a mentoring approach in their interactions with students. this view was particularly prevalent among the female students in chemistry. of the students in the chemistry department who returned the survey, only 24% of the females and 60% of the males agreed that the level of mentoring in their department was very high, x2 (2, n = 79) = 14.40, p = .001. in the biology department these figures were 57% for females and 56% for males, x2 (2, n = 81) = 1.56, p = .459. these results support the findings of othe researchers who have concluded that mentoring relationships are infrequent in most graduate programs and gender issues continue to exist in many graduate programs (heinrich, 1991; hollenshead et al. 1994; holland, 1993; golde, 1998; seagram, gould, & pyke, 1998). in the chemistry department the gender issues were compounded by the lack of female faculty members, and, as a consequence, lack of female role models and mentors. although research indicates that a mentor or role model does not necessarily need to be of the same sex as the protégé, seeing women in positions of power and expertise helps affirm female students’ career aspirations (astin & astin, 1993; hartman, 1995; janes, 1997; kegel-flom, 1995). researchers have also found a direct relationship between the quality of the climate in a science department and the proportion of women faculty and students (dresselhaus, franz, & clark, 1995). the lack of female faculty members in the chemistry department was an indication of the unsupportive environment that existed for female students, as indicated by the comments from one of them: i chose this department because it seemed to be the best academically. so i disregarded the fact that it didn’t have female faculty. i should have paid attention to it because i really didn’t realize what kind of indicator it was. another female student from the same department agreed. although she had attempted to ask revealing questions, the answers she received did not reflect the reality in many labs. as a consequence, she joined a research group that was not very supportive of women:when i came to visit this university i was given the impression that my advisor was interested in his graduate students, that he was there for them. i asked people (men) in the group whether it was different for men than for women. “no, i don’t notice any differences,” they answered. “how many women have graduated with a ph.d. as compared to men?” i asked. “oh, i’m sure it’s comparable to the ratio that enters,” they answered. instead i should have asked, “have any women graduated with a ph.d. while you have been here? how many left with a master’s degree?” researchers have found that female graduate students in traditional male fields, such as science and engineering, tend to report more negative relationships with their advisors than do their male peers (curtin et al. 1997; golde, 1998; seagram et al. 1998; sonnert,1995). davis (1999) points out that advisors in these fields need to show genuine interest in their female students’ work and make an effort to help them feel welcome. the ability to show interest and concern for all students requires that advisors tailor their mentoring according to the needs of their individual students. in the chemistry department, the lack of mentoring of female graduate students was a major contributor to their high attrition rate. interventions aimed at increasing women’s presence in science and engineering have traditionally focused on k-16 education or as it is known “the science pipeline.” the rationale is that if we convince girls and young women to choose courses and majors in these areas (enter the science pipeline) that they will become scientists and engineers (successfully exit the pipeline). this perspective has often overlooked the last “stretch” of the pipeline – graduate school. the results of this study indicate that regardless of their previous successes, the graduate school climate can play a major role in these women’s final decision to become scientists. a 45% attrition rate indicates that many choose not to do so – a major loss of talent to the nation’s scientific and technological advance. references anderson, e., & shannon, a. 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(1996). the path to the ph.d.: measuring graduate attrition in the sciences and humanities. washington, dc.: national academy press. randall, w. c. (1982). responsibilities of the mentor to his ph.d. student in physiology. psychologist, 25(3), 124-126). romberg, e. (1993). mentoring the individual student: qualities that distinguish between effective and ineffective advisors. journal of dental education, 57(4), 287-290. seagram, b. c., gould, j., & pyke, s. w. (1998). an investigation of gender and other variables on time to completion of doctoral degrees. research in higher education, 39(3), 319-335. sonnert, g. (1995). gender equity in science: still an elusive goal. issues in science and technology, 12(2), 53-58. sorenson, g., & kagan, d. (1967). conflicts between doctoral candidates and their sponsors: a contrast in expectations. journal of higher education, 38,17-24. subotnik, r. f., & arnold, k. d. (1995). passing through the gates: career establishment of talented women scientists. roeper review, 18(1), 55-61. tinto, v. (1993). leaving college: rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition, (2nd ed.) chicago: university of chicago press. widnall, s. e. (1988). aaas presidential lecture: voices from the pipeline. science, 241, 1740 1745. winston, r., miller, t., ender, s., & grites, t. (1984). developmental academic advising. josseybass: san francisco. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 20, winter 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] lock in on coordinates: mapping the glass ceiling with career women’s reflections on power by andrea hornett, penn state; and ro. finn, bryn mawr college abstract in an attempt to solicit career advice for young women by interviewing experienced career women, this study discovered the location of the proverbial glass ceiling and revealed distinct types of power operating in organizations. the careers of the women participating in this study were circumscribed by conflicts. if they developed technical expertise as a mode of insulation, they escaped high conflict but remained on a technical career path without access to higher executive opportunities. if they pursued executive opportunities through general management positions, they were surrounded by high conflict and became career casualties in powerful threat systems. a review of the literature revealed that each of these systems is similar to a type in boulding’s (1989) theory of power. we are members of an age cohort: baby-boomer women who started their careers in the late sixties, when a variety of factors made it possible for women with good educations or computer skills to pursue professional and managerial careers. we wondered what our generation had to say to college-age women who are about to embark on their careers. as the first female cohort in history to enter the managerial and professional workplace in considerable numbers, would we not help inform the next generation? when one of us became involved in an undergraduate course titled “engl 212: thinking sex: representing desire and difference” at an eastern women’s college of substantial repute, we saw our chance. we employed the praxis aspect of the course to assemble a team of student researchers to engage twenty-one career women in tape recorded interviews about the ingredients for success that women should adopt and the best advice they could give to young women. this article reports on that study. approach the study team included the two of us; one serving as praxis supervisor, the other as participant-leader; and three undergraduates with majors in english, economics, and math. we authors were the corporate crones, and the other three were the soon-to-be corporate virgins; as such, we represented both the source of and the intended recipients for the advice the study would provide. as the five of us engaged in weekly dialogues file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter2006/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter2006/index.html and as the interviews, assigned readings, class and on-line discussions progressed, an equality of bafflement ensued. across the board, our study participants told us not to sleep with the boss, but where was the really useful advice? our growing perplexity was inversely correlated with our initial confidence. proposal in our proposal, to both the institutional research review board and the course instructor, we were confident that our study would produce useful information for women who are new to or considering work in hierarchical organizations. one young team member wrote “i jumped at the opportunity to learn from the experiences of veteran working women, as i essentially view the information i will extract from these interviews as advice and tips on how to arm myself for success in the future” (g., class project paper, 2003). we proposed to use text-based research augmented with interviews of 12-20 adult female participants. research questions our initial research questions derived from our combined sixty years of professional work experience plus our entire research team’s understanding of the course objectives: 1. what would women with work experience in hierarchical organizations say about sex and sexuality and how they affect women’s careers? 2. how would women preparing to enter the workforce for the first time respond to this advice or insight? the study was interpretive, qualitative (lincoln & guba, 1985; miles & huberman, 1994), and iterative in its approach. we five researchers met weekly throughout the semester for several hours outside of class to launch the project and then reviewed findings in an iterative fashion. these discussions altered our approach in relationship to the participants and our objectives for the study. for example, we expanded our sample, selected some participants specifically for their sexual orientation, and rejected plans to hold a final focus group with young women. accordingly, our approach was open, evolving, and responsive to the participants’ narratives as we interpreted them. we reached a saturation point (glaser & strauss, 1967) at the twelfth interview but continued with nine more interviews to ensure an equal distribution of workload within the team and to provide participation from lesbian professionals. as a result, the redundancy in the narratives became a source of reassurance: career women had similar stories. the one major source of structure to our recursive investigative method was the interview questions (see appendix). our research team spent considerable time developing and refining these questions. this process served to improve our own shared understanding of the study, its purpose and methods, and to create a sense of group cohesion among the five research team members who had never worked together before. selection criteria participants were selected from a purposive convenience sample (creswell, 1994) from a list of 60 contacts we had. later, we added a sub-sample of lesbians in response to a perceived pattern in the narratives. others we added as recommended by contacts outside the study team. each participant met these criteria: at least ten years of work experience in a hierarchical work environment during which she was employed full-time and dependant on her salary in an organization (for profit, non-profit, academic, government) where there was potential to earn high salaries and/or other forms of compensation / aggrandizement. we did not want to interview women supported by trusts or husbands who were working for supplementary income or doing volunteer work. we did not want to talk to entrepreneurs; we saw them as autonomous. we were seeking women who were working for economic reasons, like most of the men in our experience, and who had first hand knowledge of organizational systems, hierarchies, and politics. significance the value in our approach and our sample is that our interviews captured the perspective of experienced career women while they considered what young career women need to know. the tapes represented their own voices, their language, recounting actual experience with power in the workplace. further, the empirical evidence of experiences with and feelings of power narrated by these participant career women fits well with boulding’s theories and reveals the location of women’s careers within power dynamics that reveal the proverbial glass ceiling. biases and limitations all of the investigators in this study were biased in that we were motivated to secure advice for young women entering the workplace and we assumed that sexual desire was present in the workplace. one of the study team members characterized this well. she said: my personal hopes for the project are that we gain an insight into the ways a professional space is sexually charged, and the ways this sexual tension is dealt with in people’s daily interactions with each other… i wonder if there are times when individuals sense sex or issues surrounding it and find ways to ignore it…. none of us really know what these women are going to say…it will be important to keep ourselves open to all kinds of unexpected responses and to realize that we do expect certain responses. this is important to remember not only during the interview but especially afterwards when we are looking at the data for certain tangible facts about sex in the workplace – we must make sure we are not hearing only the answers we want to hear. (l., class paper, 2003) as professional guides to the students and the study, our motivations were perhaps more complex. we had experience receiving and giving advice to other career women, and we shared a belief that the behavioral psychology-based approach to career coaching does not address the most significant cause of career derailment for women in hierarchical organizations: system dynamics. we were looking for advice that was less focused on individual personality and more aware of system dynamics and rules of the game. this study was limited to one semester and generalizability (miles & huberman, 1994) was not a goal. power as a surrogate for sex we conducted a practice interview to provide a supervised setting to develop skills at open-ended questioning and learning how to “follow the data” (seidman, 1991) and to test our interview questions for flow and length. our approach viewed sex as a biological status and gender as a social one. in this way, sexuality is an expression of biological drives at work, an erotic desire, a practice, or identity (jackson & scott, 1996). we soon learned we could not directly ask these women about sex. our pilot test study participant balked at answering questions about sex and sexuality and expressed discomfort and predicted others would also not want to participate. we believed, based on the strength of this experience, no one would readily agree to participate in the study if we told her during the initial qualifying/recruiting phone call that we were studying sex. so, we created questions about power that we thought would give us narratives about sex. the questions we have designed for these interviews are intended to start a dialogue about the ‘discourse of desire’ present in the workplace by asking women to talk about their experiences and observations of the ways men and women express or suppress their desire for power. (l., class paper, 2003) because the definitions of power used in organization theory sort into two essential themes: ‘power over’ and ‘power to,’ we assumed that the ‘power over’ stories would yield narratives of gender inequalities and the ‘power to’ stories would yield narratives of desire and success. definitions of power riker (1969) and cartwright (1959) have each reviewed many definitions of power in the literature of managerial and organizational sciences. there is a shared assumption that a relationship exists between two or more parties and that in this relationship an expectation exists that some action will manifest between the parties. in these definitions, power is characterized as resistance or acquiescence to this action. consequently, seduction and consent form the very foundation of power in management and organization theories (calas & smircich, 1991). if an employee consents to be governed by the authority others have over her in the hierarchy, that consent legitimates the other’s power. power is both an aspect of personality or social role and an attribute of position or organizational role and relies on the relationship with the follower for legitimacy (barnard, 1938, 1968; cartwright, 1969; follett, 1987; french & raven, 1959). however, not all theorists agree. in conflict theory (duke, 1976), power is observed when it manifests in conflict. therefore, power’s legitimacy is always contested and conflicted for structural reasons. both consent and conflict theories share a modernist (hatch, 1997) orientation to power which derives from a tendency in the functionalist and structuralist social sciences (burrell & morgan, 1979) to either search for or assume relationships of cause and effect. accordingly, the power to act, to get things done, is the essence of leadership in modern organizations (mcclelland, 1975). we felt uncomfortable with these theories of power. they posit a strong hierarchy of relationships that would stabilize organizations and promise little to women who have been marginalized and left out of leadership positions. we preferred boulding’s theory that power is manifest in systems and forms the background of relational and structural aspects of organization. boulding’s three power systems boulding’s (1970; 1989) typology consists of three categories: the threat system, the exchange system, and the integrative system. these systems range on a continuum from high to low conflict with ‘threat’ being high and ‘integrative’ being low conflict systems. in the threat system, power is obvious and explicit. members submit, defy, counter threat, or avoid. this is a zero-sum binary game: if one wins, another loses. in the exchange system, power is implicit, and members employ the proverbial carrot rather than the stick. in this system, power is an exchange medium (similar to money in an economy). this is not a zero-sum game; power circulates as value is added. power grows in this system of dynamic exchange dyads. in boulding’s third system, the low conflict integrative system, power is diffuse and possibly disguised to those looking for power in conflict. the carrot or stick is replaced by hugs (boulding, 1989). the integrative system provides a basis for what boulding labels comparatively 'less rational' manifestations of power such as altruism. power here is not relational but fluid, an omnipresent property of the integrative system. the link: power and sex to summarize, power is important to effective organizing because it is the basis of the relationship of followers with leaders and their joint relationship to their organizational context. this holistic concept points the way to considering narratives of power as indicative of relationships such as those between genders at work, including aspects of sexuality arising among coworkers. accordingly, we pursued narratives of experiences with power in our interviews. however, we did not define power for the participants: we went beyond our questionnaire (appendix) and asked spontaneous, open-ended questions to elicit their perceptions. if power was changing as a result of females occupying positions of responsibility, we wanted to hear it described first hand. findings surprise! there was very little advice for young career women beyond clichés. the stories we heard were about survival and provided idiosyncratic approaches to survival in alien environments. the participants considered their success factors so unique and particular to their circumstances that they failed to identify generic, applicable, transferable lessons for young women building careers. to our further dismay, these survivors were pessimistic regarding change. one participant warned us: “young women think the battle is won, that they’re going to be embraced with equality. they need to prepare for the realities of a lot of disrespect and discrimination” (k, taped interview, 2003). her battle metaphor was significant. as we reviewed the tapes, we noted that most of the participants seemed embattled. we had read that male dominance and male roles as elites in the work place generated metaphors of war, sports, and sex as the means to communicate the rules (tannen, 1995). clearly, this participant was working in boulding’s threat system. as conflict theory would predict, she narrated power as it manifested in conflict. this was a common occurrence in the interviews and impacted our ability to answer our research questions. answering the research questions we heard clichés in response to the first research question: what would women with work experience in hierarchical organizations say about sex and sexuality in the workplace and how it affects women? participants suggested that women need to trust and work with other women. they recommended mentors for young women. one executive said she was dedicating herself to helping young career women in her corporation, but with no clear strategy for how she will accomplish this goal. the young women on the study team were as frustrated as we were. one said: “that’s it? we’re not supposed to sleep with our bosses?” because of these clichés, we were never able to satisfactorily address the second research question: how would women preparing to enter the workforce for the first time respond to this advice or insight? we felt we had little to share with undergraduates to guide them in their career plans, as our study proposal had suggested. therefore, we turned our attention to seeing what the participants were telling us beneath the banal advice-giving. four themes initially, after completing half the interviews, we identified four thematic elements that seemed to us to be the predominant emerging patterns from the tapes, the transcripts, and our weekly dialogues. as we continued to interview, we revisited this thematic structure and made modifications. these four themes, with modifications, pertained throughout the collection of narratives. they are: (1) navigating the patriarchy women have a limited choice of roles and insulate themselves in alien or threat systems. (2) fantasizing some idealized asexual workplaces, possibly as a reaction to threat or as an acceptance of patriarchy and a desire to be untouchable, on a pedestal. (3) yearning all of the study participants desired respect. (4) escaping women’s orientation to power may offer a way out of threat systems and zero-sum games. navigating the patriarchy: a limited choice of roles the narratives involved navigating the patriarchy. in a traditional patriarchy, a woman’s identity is defined in relationship to men. accordingly, a woman can be a wife, a daughter, or a mistress to a man. the corporate roles that emerged from our interviews are the same: wife, mistress, or daughter. occasionally, a woman survived in the sister role. we had one very strong story of a woman who had achieved a longstanding “sister” role in the federal government in a male-dominated field requiring highly specialized technical expertise. she had developed true expertise and a solid reputation for expertise, and was accepted by her colleagues, the guys. we had one interview with a lesbian who flatly stated that there was no role for her in the patriarchy; so, she selected marginal attachments to the economy as the price of her liberty. to disconfirm this, we selected two other lesbians for interviews. their experiences tended to confirm this phenomenon which deserves considerably more attention and research. it appears that heterosexual women accommodate the patriarchy whereas homosexual women cannot / do not because they have no currency with which to do so. the need for new rules for all was evident in the narratives. “many women continue to fail because they need to look/smell/breathe etcetera like a man. i do not believe this is a correct formula for success” (n, taped interview, 2003). “we are interested in the inherent risks to early adopters and supporters during what appears to be a period of transition from rules that work for mostly males to rules for mostly mixed populations at work” (r., class paper, 2003). we believe that men need the new rules as much as women, and the study participants agree. “sadly, most men in my generation cannot look to their mother for that role model. my mother was a professional woman. but most were stay at home moms. they may have it (i.e. rules / role model) from a spouse, and i do think that men look towards them if they have it from a significant other or spouse” (n, taped interview, 2003). this theme of navigating or accommodating the patriarchy yielded some narratives of techniques for insulating oneself from workplaces that seem remarkably similar to boulding’s threat system. for example, evidence of a high conflict threat system is that no participant extolled her career’s managerial environments as places to learn from men about how to operate. there were no stories of appreciation for being allowed into the male-dominated world of work. there were several stories of changing directions to escape difficult situations, for example, a golden parachute – “a guy-size (exit) package” (m., taped interview, 2003). the participants’ approaches at insulation caused us to group respondents into two distinct categories regarding their environments. one group we labeled the “warrior women.” these women worked in highly competitive environments fostered by competitive market practices (e.g. finance, technology, software). the second group we labeled “nurturing women.” these women chose to work in professional environments that manifested little or no business competition (e.g. non-profits, schools, and libraries). these nurture settings are insulation strategies because they shield women from the world of the warrior, with its diminution of ‘mother.’ other insulation strategies included stories of women creating protection through expertise, for example, a pilot’s license, or a specialized graduate degree. asexual fantasy the division between warrior and nurturer contains another division among the participants: the asexual workplace. some women in this study fantasized about an asexual workplace where treatment was not a result of relationship, role, or a man’s personal expectations. other participants preferred to come to work as complete women, their biology intact. every participant overtly aligned herself with either the asexual or the sexual division during the course of our interviews. this division suggests a rift among women that must be addressed in order for them to partner in the creation of women-friendly workplace environments. “while none equated femininity with sex for favors, there were degrees of sexual agency in their comments” (r., in class presentation, 2003). “i don’t mind telling you, i was gorgeous. i flirted, dressed great, spent time on my makeup” (k., taped interview, 2003). the sexual approach offered disruptive powers, albeit temporary, and may have offered a route out of the threat system to the exchange system. another approach toward the exchange system may be offered by pairs who combine in support of their careers. this power couple may not necessarily evolve into a sexual relationship. however, it is intimate and sharing by design. it does seem that a woman is better off exercising sexual agency as part of a power couple. it may be the only success she has had in revamping, not accommodating, the rules of the patriarchal game. in the business environment, where power is seen as positive and pervasive, it makes no sense to recommend that women further handicap themselves by not using their own brand of power. (r., in class presentation, 2003) the proverbial power couple may have provided role models for integrating organizational position with private life in a socially acceptable manner. however, the fantasy of the asexual workplace provided resistance to the power couple. those questing for the asexual workplace were courting denial and repression because the evidence was strong that sex happens at work. “forty-two percent of people…are now in relationships with someone else at work; thirty-five percent are hiding that relationship from others at their offices” (hite, 2000, p. 208). unfortunately, despite our hopes, the participants’ narratives did not yield advice to young women on how to integrate their work and their sex. much more work needs to be done to provide approaches that work for everyone’s benefit in dealing with sex at work. mutual respect offers a beginning. yearning for respect the common denominator among the participants in this study was the desire for respect. in 21 interviews, there were 24 references to respect; for example: “outspoken women have earned more respect.” “most men who have worked for me have shown me respect.” “respect has to be earned.” “women with very specific expertise get more respect than those in general management.” “she gets a lot of respect from both [men and women] as being professional and a good listener.” “if an older woman has attained some power, she can bring some respect with her.” “i think men who have wives who work have more respect for women in the workplace than men who don’t.” “technical people, in general, give unilateral respect based on competence, not gender.” “she earned their respect.” “respect is key.” participants often blamed other women, not men, for the lack of respect toward women. “every woman i interviewed had at least one anecdote and usually several about being terribly hurt by another woman, and they told these stories with more anger, grief, and bitterness than they told about men” (fillion, 1996, p. 34). one of our participants offered a theory about why this occurs: “i think that women truly believe that society is better off if a man feels in charge and strong. they seem to be willing to do anything to perpetuate this. they need to stop” (a., in taped interview, 2003). nowhere is this concept of respect and its marriage to accommodation clearer than in the responses from the lesbian participants. nobody really knows what to do with a lesbian at work besides shove her identity under the rug…. my male bosses usually seem to have felt uncomfortable, so they tried extra hard (even too hard sometimes) to treat me equally, not like the other women i worked with… they would treat me as a man as long as i ‘kept up my side of the bargain’ and downplayed the lesbian part of myself – in other words, my personal life. (g’s taped interview, 2003) a lesbian does not fit the patriarch’s roles – wife, mistress, or beloved daughter. she is not really one of the boys, either. “what to do with a woman-loving woman? she clearly possesses some sort of power that her male colleagues find intimidating…. thus, she is excluded from the role-playing game” (k., in-class presentation, 2003). excluded, how does she behave? what are the rules for working with members of the organization who are not in the social system of the organization? in other research, “the word ‘respect’ is used ten times more frequently in replies about fathers than in replies about mothers” (hite, 2000, p. 101). reading hite’s study through the lens of this study, we would conclude that in the patriarchy, respect is the highest value because it is what is paid to the father, the patriarch. in this study, the desire for respect is a futile plea for recognition on the patriarch’s terms. a way out: escaping threat systems because the force cultures (hawkins, 1995), or threat systems (boulding, 1970; 1989), of organizations gave power to the elites and gave privilege to power, some of the women in the study were attracted to power as evidence of elite status and career success. this is partly what is meant, we believe, by the participants’ desire for respect. paradoxically, women did not communicate power (tannen, 1995) in ways that were recognizable to their male colleagues, causing misunderstandings and conflicts. one participant (who had been eased out as president of a mega-million dollar division of a corporation) told us, “you know how they say, ‘it’s not personal? it’s personal!” (m, taped interview, 2003). this participant acknowledged first hand the consequences of power in a zero sum game. in a threat system, the consequences of loss of status are totally negative. in an exchange system, to the contrary, a dyad simply does not do the deal. they live to trade another day. in light of the literature about power, we believe that the women in this study reported experiences in the threat system and suggested a means for elevating the workplace to the level of boulding’s exchange system, employing intelligent uses of power (hillman, 1995). they abhor the stick and seek the carrot. further, they seek carrots for all who merit them, not an exclusionary club, because that is in essence a threat system for those on the outside. figure 1 depicts the study’s findings in accordance with boulding’s systems of power and includes another dimension emerging from our analysis of this study, impact. the participants’ narratives provided ample evidence of the high conflict threat system. in our opinion, the evidence of high conflict means that those who are threatened in these systems have little impact when attempting to exercise power. some of our participants sought areas of low conflict. figure 1 labels this “exchange system #1” because in this system our participants meet boulding’s definition with reports of low conflict. in our opinion they had little impact on the direction or nature of the systems in which they were involved. this is less true for those who sought insulation from conflict by developing strong technical expertise than for those who sought insulation through careers in support or nurturing organizations. the highest conflict is for the warriors, the generalists who sought executive positions through general management careers. figure 1 labels these participants “exchange system #2” because they tried to meet the definition of boulding’s exchange system by demanding respect. indeed, their narratives in this study provided evidence of titles, staffs and budgets that imply figure 1 the glass ceiling’s coordinates pursuant to boulding’s theory respect and impact. however, they each had a story of losing positions in this system due to high conflict. figure 1 depicts the glass ceiling as residing in the exchange system, precluding access to the integrative system. we based that location on the absence of information on integrative systems in this study and in our own experience. figure 1 suggests that it is not possible to progress directly from the threat system to the integrative system without going through the exchange system. however, we had no evidence from this study that women sought the integrative system. there was evidence from the participants’ narratives that the role younger men are playing indicated that the workplace was evolving into a system more in line with boulding’s exchange system. a return to the literature helped to elucidate these findings. power in the literature coerced participation can be found in boulding’s threat system. "not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore spiritually -to be 'self-employed" (horkheimer & adorno, 1944, p. 133). this is the zero-sum game, and is, of course, very personal for losers. this system excludes those who cannot play the role altogether. accordingly, the lesbian participants in this study were the most removed from relationship to and accommodation of the patriarchy and hierarchy found in this system. patriarchy and hierarchy are relational systems and the relationships in these systems denote power. hollander and offerman (1990) delineate three kinds of relationship power: (1) 'power over' or dominance; (2) 'power to' or empowerment; and (3) 'power from' or the ability to resist demands of others, i.e., 'integrity.' each of these three kinds of power speaks of a relationship of the powerful with the 'other.' the first type, dominance, corresponds with boulding's (1970) threat system. types two, 'power to,' and three, 'power from,' fit with boulding's exchange system. the participants in this study appeared to be advocating an end to ‘power over’ and an increase in ‘power to’ and the ‘integrity’ from being powerful enough to resist the demands of others. in conclusion, the respect that these women desired would be evidence of exchange systems operating in corporate organizing systems. if this evidence is accurate, there are implications for leadership in a postindustrial era (hirschhorn, 1990). power and leadership linkages for several decades, organization researchers have linked power and leadership. mcclelland’s studies of leadership (1975) empirically determined that the need for power was the basis of organizational relationships formed around work. french and raven (1959) identified five types of power consistent with leadership theories: reward, punishment, legitimate authority, referent power, and expertise. yukl (1994) combined the first two, reward and punishment, as the functions of leadership. the third, french & raven’s legitimate authority, is structured, meaning that it comes with a position, a job in the organization. the fourth is power of expertise. the fifth, referent power, is power a person is accorded by others because the person is liked or respected by his/her followers. the first two of french and raven’s (1959) five types, reward and punish, are the positive and negative aspects of threat which might be placed, theoretically, in boulding’s threat system. in contrast, french and raven’s power of expertise operates in boulding’s exchange system. some participants in this study provided evidence of this power. their technical expertise enabled creation of micro-worlds of exchange (i.e. exchange system #1). french and raven’s (1959) legitimate authority is also theoretically in boulding’s exchange system because it is an aspect of job design and is based in the economic exchange between organization and employees and requires the consent of the employees to maintain legitimacy. power manifests as an economic metaphor in the exchange system, similar to parsons’ (1960) definition of power. parsons saw power as a property of social systems similar to the function that money plays in an economy (lukes, 1974). in parsons' social theory, power works as an organizing dynamic. if power is exchanged extensively in a system, power grows. if power is held closely and not expended, power deflates and the system has less power than it might. consequently, according to parsons, use of power is a way to increase total power in a social system. therefore, further research on boulding’s exchange systems provides a way to move women out of threat systems and increase organizational power at the same time. when we examined boulding’s power systems in comparison to several leadership theories (table 1), we saw a theoretical basis for improving women’s leadership. this basis for building women’s leadership results from two factors. first, boulding's typology is the most comprehensive of the leadership theories. second, boulding provides the additional concept of integrative systems, systems powered by love. accordingly, boulding’s typology is the only one that provides system characteristics for exercise of true transformational leadership. table 1 power systems / leadership definitions hollander & offerman (1990) boulding (1989) french & raven (1959) other theories dominance (power over) threat system reward punish political (e.g., pfeffer, 1981; 1982a; 1982b; 1992a ; 1992b) coercion & enablement integrity (power from) threat system (resistance) (acquiescence) expertise referent followers’ role (e.g., follett, 1987) empowerment (power to) exchange system legitimate transactional (e.g., parsons, 1960) integrative systems (e.g., schein, 1985) transformational (e.g., bass, 1985; sashkin, 1988; 1995; sashkin & sashkin, 2003; sashkin, rosenbach, & sashkin, 1995) in table 1, the more complete definitions of power in the threat and exchange systems are provided by french and raven (1959). however, boulding’s addition of the third system, the integrative, gives his approach more breadth and opens the way for consideration of power in collaborative settings. we believe boulding offers a system that might fulfill the desire of women in this study for respect. at the same time, boulding’s theory offers organizational management an orientation to power that can sustain organizations and grow systems with relatively less effort than threat systems. unfortunately, boulding’s metaphor for this system, “the hug” reintroduces notions of sexuality abhorrent to some of this study’s participants. additional research is needed to understand the nature of power in integrative systems and the implications for women’s leadership. this analysis of theories, coupled with the narratives from this study, suggests that women’s careers provide empirical evidence of change in the social norms of organizing and leadership. in this way, women’s desires provide energy for employment of new forms of power that value exchange and mutuality over dominance. if parsons (1960) is correct and exchange systems increase in power, then these new forms of organizing will be more powerful than those employed in the past. conclusions & further research this study provided evidence that women are creating exchange systems at work through some insulation practices, development of expertise, and power coupling. their practices were analyzed using theories of power, particularly boulding’s, to reveal the organizing dynamics creating the glass ceiling. further research is needed to confirm these patterns and to identify possible tipping points where organizing systems might morph from threat to exchange and accordingly increase their supply of power. what is the potential and what are the risks of such developments? what happens when organizing systems move from zero-sum games to mutual exchange? we saw evidence in this study that threat systems hold no value for women, even if they are succeeding at it. “these women are not frightened of power, just very thoughtful about the responsibilities that come with it” (l., in-class presentation, 2003). women preferred the exchange system and the promise it holds for mutual respect. we will need additional research to discern paths from the threat system to the exchange system and possibly beyond, past the glass ceiling. we thought we would be able to capture some rich language regarding sexuality and power from our participants and employ it to provide advice to young women. unfortunately, while participants could articulate small wins and successful tactics for insulation and survival, they lacked language for analyzing their repression and its corresponding liberation. because of the convenience nature of the sampling technique and because we were so focused on our research questions rather than the demographics of representation, we did not interview women of color. we know from our personal experiences and from the literature (bell & nkomo, 2001) that white women and black women misread each other. we assume that they also read the corporate rules with different perspectives and expectations as well. we know from bell and nkomo (2001) that black women prefer the asexual workplace since they do not see themselves as able to chose to leverage sexuality at work as some white women do. it is not an option available to them. similarly, the participants in this study who advocated or longed for an asexual workplace would rule out hugs, the evidence of boulding’s integrative system at work. we need to find metaphors of power and sustenance that transcend the biological approaches as long as women feel demeaned by sexuality at work. or, we need to liberate women’s sexuality so that everyone in the workplace can celebrate it as a generative power. how can we lead young women to a realization of power? there is little advice for them from this study; boulding’s integrative system seems unimaginable to our narrators, perhaps because they were too embedded in old paradigms (clegg & palmer, 1996). however, the study’s participants have found some paths out of threat systems and into exchange systems and as such have provided us with a powerful conceptualization of the proverbial glass ceiling and ways around it. * * * the authors thank nell anderson, praxis program director, laurel hankins, katherine bosch, laura grannis and their inspiring teacher, anne dalke, senior lecturer in english and coordinator of the gender studies program, for making this study a memorable learning experience. references barnard, c.a. 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(1994). leadership in organizations. englewood cliffs, n.j.: prentice hall. appendix praxis project for thinking sex: representing difference and desire interview questions for “women’s wisdom at work since the data on this tape will not include your name or identity, it would be useful for our study to have some information about your background: how old are you? married? what year? children? what years? education: where, what field? how many years at work? contiguous? what type of business or work? what positions (a brief list)? is a resume available? did you have mentors? when? male or female? what type or aspects of work are you passionate about? 1. can you describe how it feels—physically and emotionally—to wield power or have control over some success at work? what comes to mind? do those feelings lead you to want more, less? why? 2. what do you think men think about women at work in positions of power? 1. as heads of companies 2. as their boss 3. as their peer 3. can you describe a specific workplace situation in which you were acutely aware of being “on the outside” as a woman? do you recall any specific language or nuance that made you aware or uncomfortable? 4. have you ever felt that issues of sexuality (or sexual politics) are sensed by the parties involved, yet deliberately not spoken of? what do you suppose is at stake? what keeps them silent? 5. have you ever felt your femininity working to your advantage on the job? or witnessed that happening for other women? if so, please explain how and also how you felt about it. 6. in the following situations, is there a difference in how men are treated versus women and how that difference manifests itself? 1. at meetings 2. on business travel, alone or in mixed company 3. in situations of risk-taking and decision-making 4. in opportunities for promotion to highly visible, senior jobs 7. in the female attributes paired below, describe any differences (give examples) in the way one is treated versus the other. how do men talk about or act towards women who are… 1. younger versus older 2. married versus single 3. pregnant versus not pregnant 4. outspoken versus reserved 5. the [male’s] female boss versus the [male’s] female subordinate 6. can you think of other relevant pairings? 8. in your opinion, who are the role models for how men act towards women at work? for how women act towards men at work? in either case, who should they be? why? 9. how would you differentiate between overt and covert sexism? give examples and, if possible, any specific language used in either instance. 10. have you ever felt forced to change yourself—suppress your true characteristics or adopt ones unnatural to you? why? what happened? how did you feel? 11. what is your experience with sexual harassment legislation and awareness training? have you found it useful, benign, harmful? what is the atmosphere in the workplace like following a training session? 1. do you believe it’s common for a worker to decide not to report an incident of sexual harassment? 2. have you ever remained silent when you felt an incident had occurred? or did you voice a complaint? what happened next? how did you feel? 12. does sexuality have a place at work or should the work environment be totally asexual? please explain why you believe this. 13. in your opinion, what strengths do women need to cultivate to achieve all they want at work? why? 14. what weaknesses should women be aware of in themselves? in their male superiors, peers, or subordinates? 15. what haven’t we discussed that you think is important for young women to know about sexual politics and desire at work? copyright 2003 by daredevil coaching, llp. all rights reserved. this material, or parts thereof, may not be altered, reproduced, or distributed in any form without the written consent of the authors. authors ro. finn bryn mawr college andrea hornett penn state copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, 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prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 22, winter 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] educating for social justice: the life and times of septima clark in review mack t. hines iii and dianne reed abstract one of the most important goals of teacher education programs is to train preservice teachers on how to teach for social justice (atweh, kemmis, & weeks, 1998). educating for social justice is teaching people how to make just and democratic contributions to their communities and society. many teacher education programs use jean piaget's (1963), lev vygotsky's (1978), and other male theorists' learning theories to convey this idea to students. scant research shows how these programs provide minority groups' perspectives on social justice education. this paper fills these voids by highlighting septima clark's (18981987) endeavors of teaching for social justice. septima clark (1962) was a famous south carolina educator and civil rights leader who used reading and writing to enhance african-american leaders. a lifelong learner, she combined her daily life experiences with the fundamentals of reading and writing to teach african-americans how to become informed citizens of their communities. during this process, she continuously evolved and elevated her personal and professional philosophy of how to empower other people to change society. as such, her life and legacy bears significant implications for preparing preservice teachers to become lifelong leaders of graduating value-added, needs-satisfying citizens of society. educating for social justice:the life and times of septima clark in review teacher education programs are designed to create teachers who can educate for social justice (atweh, kemmis, & weeks, 1998). that is, professors use educational theories to train their students on how to prepare children for making meaningful academic and social contributions to the betterment of society. two of the most significant theories are jean piaget's (1963) cognitive learning theory and lev vygotsky's (1978) social cognition theory of learning. in his cognitive learning theory, piaget (1963) indicated that teaching and learning should be designed to facilitate students' innate ability to discover new information. lev vygotsky (1978) used his social cognition theory of learning to assert that culture is the primary determinant of children's development. he specified that culture helps children to grasp the academic and social meaning of knowledge. vygotsky also indicated that the interaction of language and culture determines the extent to which students sustain their acquisition file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/winter2007/index.htm of knowledge. these theories define many students' preservice teaching experiences (atweh, et al., 1998). however, they do not provide students with feminine and african-american theories on and examples of teaching for social justice. the researchers attempt to fill both voids by discussing the leadership style of septima clark ( clark , 1988). septima clark was an african-american educator and civil rights leader who used teaching and learning to enhance the academic and social development of african-american people. this study will highlight her use of a variety of teaching strategies to instill social justice in african-american communities and people. theoretical framework this study is grounded in constructivism and social justice. the constructivist theory indicates that learning is constructed in accordance to past experiences. this theory is guided by three principles. first, learning is a search for knowledge (piaget, 1963; vygotsky, 1978). second, knowledge is a construct that exists inside the learner (hines, cunningham, & curtis, 2005). third, the foundation of this construction is the synthesization of the five senses, imagination, and past experiences (hines, et al., 2005). in theory of justice, rawls (1971) maintained that justice is designed to facilitate the unification of races and genders to discuss and resolve issues that affect the overall welfare of their communities. he continued that the underlying dynamics of these communities are collaborative and mutual reflections of diverse thoughts, actions, and beliefs. rawls concluded that just and democratic societies inspire the creation of value-added citizens who evolve into displaying critical actions and beliefs. literature review this study describes how septima clark symbolized the principles of educating for social justice. this literature review sets the tone for that description by presenting three significant views on educating for social justice. in his book, pedagogy of the oppressed and education for critical consciousness , paulo freire (1970) indicated that educators must use three steps to educate for social justice. according to him, the first step is to acknowledge students' voices. a student's voice is a reflection of personal perspectives and experiences regarding issues and situations (giroux & mclaren, 1996). according to giroux and mclaren, students' voices should have as much value and influence as the instructor's knowledge and experience. the second step is to use students' voices and past experiences to develop the curriculum. the third step is to encourage and show students how to apply their voices and past experiences toward making significant changes in their communities. freire concluded that this instructional design empowers students to experience a sense of belongingness in the classroom and society. john dewey (1916) related educating for social justice to his ideas on progressivism. in describing his progressivist theory, dewey argued that teaching and learning should not focus on the memorization of isolated facts and skills. he strongly believed that teaching and learning experiences should be an inherent part of students' daily lives. he broadened his interpretation to include that teachers should create educational experiences conducive to the acquisition of lifelong critical thinking and problem solving skills. quinn (2003) continued that educating for social justice is predicated upon three transformations. they are a transformation of self, transformation of people, and transformation of culture. during the transformation of self phase, the learners examine their personal and professional views and feelings about situations. during the transformation of people, the learners use their views and thoughts to affect other people. during the transformation of culture, the learners begin to empower other people to affect social change in their communities. according to quinn (2003), the teacher assumes many roles to prepare students for becoming contributors of social justice. first, the teacher ensures that the students are able to reconcile new knowledge with preexisting knowledge. second, the teacher interacts with the students during their discovery of and reflection on new information. they particularly use critical thinking to arouse students' interests and motivation to internalize information. in addition, the teacher uses instruction to foster collaboration among students. third, the teacher evaluates students' acquisition of knowledge to determine if their thoughts are aligned with the lesson's theme. assessments are designed to allow students to provide multiple open-ended interpretations of the new information. this study highlighted how these theories relate to septima clark's (1962) use of innovative teaching to enhance african-americans' standing in society. case study humble beginnings septima clark (1962) was born in charleston , south carolina , on may 3, 1898. the second of eight children, she was raised by parents who believed in education. septima's parents taught her to always help and share ideas with other people. they also encouraged her to recognize the worth of other people. septima clark (1962) applied these principles towards negotiating her schooling experiences. in 1916, she graduated from charleston 's avery normal institute with a teaching certificate. because of her skin color, however, she was not allowed to teach in charleston county public schools. as a result, she accepted a teaching position on john's island , south carolina . island ambitions when septima clark (1962) accepted the teaching position on john's island , she found that the school was plagued by deplorable learning conditions. for example, the school did not have chalkboards, textbooks, or other educational resources. the school was also susceptible to hot summers and cold winters. clark also realized that she and another teacher were the only two instructors of the school. they were in charge of teaching 132 poverty-stricken students. the students were in grades that ranged from kindergarten to eighth grade. in addition, a wide disparity existed among the learning abilities of the students. in addition, most of them did not regularly attend school. the reason is that they were required to work in the fields with their families. in spite of these setbacks, septima clark (1962) was able to make an immediate impact on the students. her greatest accomplishment was creating innovative instruction in accordance to the students' personal experiences. septima clark (1962) taught fifth through eighth grade, focusing primarily on helping students develop reading and writing skills though personal experiences. in particular, she would listen to the students' island stories and record them on dry cleaner bags. after posting the stories around the classroom, clark and the students would translate key vocabulary words into the reading curriculum for the year. hines (2003) indicated that septima clark used similar teaching strategies to address the prevalency of illiteracy among the city's african-american adults. many african-american men formed secret societies to acquire reading and writing skills and deliver speeches. they continuously seeked clark 's assistance in achieving this goal. under septima clark's (1962) direction, they learned how to read and write their names and solve math problems. the men used these skills to become informed participants of john's island political community. these successes helped clark to realize her life mission: using education to improve the academic and social fate of african-american people. challenging charleston : part i in 1918, septima clark left john's island to take a teaching position at the avery normal institute (hines, 2003). during her tenure, charleston civil rights leaders launched a campaign to help african-american teachers gain the right to teach in charleston county public schools. septima clark immediately joined the cause and garnered 20,000 signatures on a petition (robnett, 1997). because of her and the other activists' commitment to the campaign, the charleston county school board changed its hiring policies to include african-american teachers. in 1920, african-american teachers were finally allowed to teach in charleston county public schools. that same year, septima clark resumed her teaching career on john's island . by 1929, however, she desired to take her career to the next level. consequently, she accepted a teaching position in columbia , south carolina . calling to columbia septima clark's (1962) years in columbia marked a period of self-reflection and self-improvement. she worked with c. a. johnson, a principal who engaged his teachers in activities conducive to professional growth and development. he also held faculty meetings that allowed teachers to discuss and reflect on their instructional strengths and weaknesses. these meetings inspired septima clark (1962) to pursue higher education and assume civic responsibilities in the community. a lifelong learner, septima clark took summer classes at columbia university . she also matriculated to atlanta university (now known as clark atlanta university ). while taking classes from dr. w. e. b. dubois, she learned how to create developmentally appropriate reading curricula. in 1942, she earned a bachelor's of arts degree in teacher education from benedict college ( clark , 1962). in 1946, she secured a master's of arts in teaching degree from the hampton institute (now known as hampton university ) ( clark , 1962). as a community activist, septima clark (1962) participated in many civic activities and organizations. for example, she served as an adult educator, teaching soldiers at camp jackson (now known as fort jackson ). she then worked with south carolina adult educator wil lou gray to teach other illiterate african-americans. by working in his program, clark developed additional strategies for training adults on the fundamentals of reading and writing (mcfadden, 1994). as a result, she quickly gained a statewide reputation for being able to provide people with literacy acquisition skills. septima clark (1988) was also an active member of the national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp) (brinson, 1994). as a member, she worked with thurgood marshall and other civil rights leaders to file a lawsuit for salary equalization among african-american teachers and caucasian-american teachers. many african-american teachers refused to support the lawsuit. they and other african-american leaders tried to pressure septima clark into withdrawing her support of the lawsuit. but septima refused to relinquish her involvement. she was extremely happy when the south carolina supreme court ruled in favor of salary equalization for all south carolina teachers. in spite of this favorable ruling, septima clark grew homesick for charleston . in 1947, she returned to her hometown to teach in the charleston county public school system challenging charleston : part ii in returning to charleston , septima clark (1988) maintained her mission of being an innovative teacher and community leader. she served as a reading specialist in a charleston county public school. she also integrated the tuberculosis association, uniting the african-american and caucasian-american divisions of the organization. clark was also instrumental in galvanizing the youth women christian association (ywca) to serve african-american people. she eventually became the vice-chairperson of the charleston county branch of the naacp. after the historic 1954 brown vs. board of education decision, south carolina required septima clark and other african-american teachers to list their memberships in civic organizations (robnett, 1997). in 1956, clark listed her membership in the naacp. consequently, she was fired by the charleston county school board. the south carolina state legislature then passed a law that prohibited public employees from joining civic organizations. clark unsuccessfully attempted to organize african-american teachers into fighting the law. she then enlisted the local and state branches of the naacp to support her fight against the school board's decision. however, they were still unable to convince the school board to reinstate clark (1988). even worse, the school board took her pension. consequently, she would spend the next 20 years on lobbying south carolina to restore her pension. in the meantime, she had accepted a job offer to work at the highlander institute in tennessee. highlander history in 1956, septima clark (1988) became the director of workshops for the highlander institute. the purpose of the highlander system was to equip african-americans with the literacy skills to become well-informed human beings (horton, 1989). the organization's immediate goal was to help them become literate registered voters. in the summer of 1955, clark conducted school desegregation workshops at the highlander institute. her workshops were attended by rosa parks and other african-american civil rights leaders. on december 1, 1955, rosa parks ignited the civil rights movement with her arrest for refusing to give her seat to a caucasian-american man (branch, 1988). during many interviews, she often stated that septima clark's workshops inspired her to refuse to vacate the seat. as the director of workshops, septima clark (1988) empowered other african-americans with her citizenship schools. the citizenship schools provided african-americans with the reading and writing skills to become registered voters. the success of the schools caused septima clark and her protégé bernice robinson to implement the program onto john's island . septima clark (1988) and bernice robinson conducted the first workshop in the back room of an old grocery store. at the beginning of the meeting, clark noticed that robinson was preparing to use elementary school materials to deliver instruction to the students. clark then informed her that the materials would not meet the interests and needs of adult students. clark also stated, "you don't tell people what to do. you let them talk to learn what they want to be done" (p. 152). she developed this idea by combining a "two-eye" theory of education with constructivist teaching. she used one "eye" to observe and gather participants' views on how they could acquire literacy skills. she used the other "eye" to envision strategies that would help them to independently fulfill these needs. afterward, clark and robinson used this vision to help the participants draw from their personal perceptions of words and letters to construct meaningful reading and writing experiences. through this interaction, the participants learned to read the bible and newspaper and write their names. septima clark (1962) enhanced these experiences by teaching them how to use their literacy skills to interpret the south carolina constitution. specifically, she coached them on interpreting the sections included on the voter registration test. as a result, the workshop participants passed the exam and received voter registration certificates. many of them even became actively involved, decision-making community leaders. this success was the impetus for creating additional citizenship schools in other parts of south carolina and the neighboring states of georgia and tennessee (branch, 1988). in 1959, the program ended, however, when the tennessee state legislature revoked highlander institute's charter. but in 2 years, septima clark would use the highlander concept to change the civil rights movement. the southern christian leadership conference (sclc) in 1961, septima clark accepted dr. martin luther king jr.'s offer to serve as the director of education for his relatively new southern christian leadership conference (sclc) organization ( clark , 1962). her most significant achievement was the creation of the voter education project. the voter education project was designed to create citizenship schools in the southern states. the project was also a response to the south's use of difficult interpretations of the united states constitution to prevent african-americans from becoming registered voters. following the highlander institute framework, the citizenship school teachers asked the participants to describe the voting issues of their communities. the teachers would then place the answers on dry cleaner bags. afterward, the teachers would help the participants to apply their interpretations of the answers toward solving the voter registration problems in their communities. in spite of these achievements, the citizenship schools never received the full support of the sclc leadership (branch, 1988). the reason is that dr. king and the other sclc ministerial leaders overlooked septima clark's (1962) potential to serve as a well-rounded leader of the organization. in effect, dr. king and the other key civil rights leaders strongly believed that women did not possess the skills to effectively direct any significant event of the civil rights movement. consequently, the sclc leadership failed to consistently provide septima clark (1988) with the resources needed to continuously conduct meaningful voter registration workshops. in addition, reverend ralph abernathy bitterly complained about clark 's membership on the sclc executive council (glen, 1988). other african-american preachers even refused to donate time, money, or resources to the project. septima clark (1988) responded to the criticism by politely confronting the sclc officials about their chauvinistic behavior. she particularly informed them that they should begin to empower other people to assume major leadership roles in the civil rights movement. clark would also indicate that the women's rights movement preceded the civil rights movement. she further continued to hold citizenship school meetings. many participants lost their jobs because of attending the meetings. moreover, the white establishment continuously threatened to kill septima clark and the other citizenship school teachers. but clark, a fearless leader, continued to help african-americans become registered voters. in addition, septima clark (1988) provided over 100 teachers with training on establishing citizenship schools in the segregated southern states. by 1965, the citizenship teachers had produced more than 1,000,000 literate african-american registered voters. these results galvanized president lyndon b. johnson to authorize the voting rights act of 1965 (branch, 1988). in addition, the results laid the foundation for many african-americans to be elected to as mayors, congressmen, senators, and commissioners. for the next five years, clark continued to use citizenship schools to create more informed african-american citizens. in 1970, she retired from the sclc. humble endings inspite of her retirement, septima clark (1988) continued to serve as an activist in her hometown of charleston (hines, 2003). in 1976, she finally received her pension from the charleston county school board. in 1978, she founded the septima clark day care center. in an ironic twist of fate, clark also became the first african-american women to serve on the charleston county school board. during the last years of her life, clark received numerous awards (hines, 2003). in 1979, president jimmy carter awarded the living legacy award to her. in 1982, south carolina honored septima clark (1988) with the order of the palmetto award. this award is the highest honor given to a south carolinian. charleston showed its appreciation of clark when the college of charleston made her the first person of color to receive one of its honorary doctorate degrees. the institution also named its auditorium after septima clark. clark cherished these awards and accomplishments until her death in 1987. discussion this case study highlights septima clark's (1988) ability to use education to arouse and sustain social reform and academic achievement. in essence, clark used people's past experiences to guide them to their individual and collective destinies. apparently, the underlying dynamic of her work was a constructivist approach to educating for social justice. these concepts are indicative of developmental leadership. belenky, bond, and weinstock (1997) define developmental leadership as the ability to help people become leaders. according to them, developmental leaders particularly focus on developing the leadership skills of silenced and disenfranchised people. they help these people to find and use their voices to become actively involved in effecting change in their communities. belenky, et al. (1997) continued that developmental leaders use dialogue and discussion to facilitate this achievement. first, they draw people into critical discussions by posing open-ended questions to them. using the constructivist approach to learning, they carefully listen to and relate all answers to people's past experiences. they also use these answers to learn from people. developmental leaders sustain these experiences by sharing and modeling their values and daily lifestyles for people. belenky et al. (1997) continued that this modeling represents an intersection between developmental leaders' personal lives and professional careers. in other words, developmental leaders' personal lives become a public symbol of enlightenment and empowerment for other people. hines (2003) stated that african-american women have always served as developmental leaders. according to him, they have thrived on helping silenced people. hines continued that the reason is society has often tried to silence african-american women. as a result, they have had to overcome to stigmas: racism and sexism. thus, of all interactive ethnic and gender-driven experiences, the african-american woman's experience is most closely aligned with the everyday struggles of disenfranchised people. these struggles are clearly a part of the life and legacy of septima clark (1988). this case study shows that because of septima clark's life experiences, she was extremely qualified to serve as a developmental leader. her leadership changed the lives of african-american people and communities. she facilitated this change by experiencing the three transformations of social justice. they are a transformation of self, transformation of people, and transformation of society (quinn, 2003). it appears that during the transformation of self, septima clark realized that her personal life and professional obligations could serve as a public domain of enlightenment on how to achieve equal rights. during the transformation of people phase, clark (1988) challenged african-americans to use their views and past experiences to affect each other's pursuit of becoming lifelong learners and leaders. she helped them to realize that these experiences could assist them with achieving equal rights and first class citizenry. as an example, clark taught them how to use reading and writing to overcome illiteracy. as a result, many african-americans departed her sessions and successfully passed the voter registration test. in addition, they developed a sense of ownership and belongingness to their communities. during the transformation of culture phase, clark (1988) inspired african-americans to use their individual and collective growth to change society's views and respect for african-american communities. evidence to this effect can be seen in how the citizenship schools forced the government to pass laws that preserved the civil rights of african-american people. these actions support paulo friere's (1970) call to teaching for social justice by: acknowledging students' voices and past experiences; using students' voices and past experiences to develop the curriculum; and applying students' voices and past experiences toward making significant changes in their communities. they also reiterate that teaching for social justice is using critical and civic-minded knowledge to convey relevant information to people. implications septima clark's (1988) achievements clearly highlight the significance of training teachers who can teach for social justice. to that end, the researchers have outlined some major considerations that should be shared with aspiring teachers. first, preservice teachers should realize that teachers are agents of social justice. that is, teachers are required to encourage their students to connect the curriculum to past experiences and the surroundings in the communities. second, preservice teachers must be taught that the role of the teacher is to create learning experiences that foster critical and reflective discussions among students. these discussions should also be extended through role playing, experiments, and other hands-on experiences. these interactive experiences will allow students to not only read about but also experience the curriculum. third, preservice teachers must realize that social justice classrooms reflect the larger context of society. students must be taught how and encouraged to use daily lessons to discuss and address the most oppressive conditions and issues of their communities. finally, preservice teachers should be aware of the significance of including students' voices in the classroom. the reason is that these voices are central to developing students' acceptance of the curriculum and instruction. as such, preservice teachers should understand that their in-service instructional practices must include: a) telling stories from students' perspectives; and b) seeking students' opinions and interpretations of the subject matter. in short, students' personal lives must be the center of all curricular experiences. overall, the significance of these arrangements is threefold. first, it highlights the need to use teaching and learning to promote and transfer democratic thinking from the classroom to the community. second, it reiterates the need to ensure that the learners' needs and experiences are central to all teaching and learning experiences. finally, it implies that in addition to creating a+ students, teachers must also be able to develop lifelong learners of society. the intersection of both goals is predicated upon the teacher's ability to listen with care, think with consideration, and teach with sensitivity. summary/conclusion septima clark (1898-1987) is one of the most influential educators and civil rights leaders in south carolina and u.s. history (hines, 2003). her greatest accomplishment is redefining the use of reading and writing to foster social change among people and within communities. during this process, her life became a public example of how to use education to promote social justice and social change in communities. clark 's developmental style of academic and social leadership benefits and redefines educational leadership in many ways. her leadership style implicates that all human beings can be leaders. the reason is that they have the ability to serve others. her efforts highlight the importance of using instructional leadership to ask two significant questions: "what do i want to learn?" and "how will i use knowledge to empower other learners?" her life and legacy should inspire teacher education programs to provide students with divergent views of teaching for social justice. in particular, her insights should inspire these programs to teach students that: teaching for social justice is a formative process of developmental learning and teaching; teaching for social justice is a formulaic mixture of nature and nurture; and teaching for social justice is the development of human potential through instinct, introspection, and intuition. finally, preservice teachers must realize that teaching is more than just the mere deliverance of instruction to students. as indicated by septima clark (1988), teaching is the ability to ensure that the instruction causes positive, permanent changes in self, other people, and society. as such, teacher education programs should include septima clark's developmental philosophy in the same curricula that discusses jean piaget's (1963) and lev vygotsky's (1978) instructional theories. the researchers strongly believe that clark 's pedagogy adds more diversity to the overarching and original objective of educating for social justice: maximizing human interests and needs. references atweh, b., kemmis, s., & weeks, p. (1998). action research in practice: partnerships for social justice in education. london : routledge publishing company. belenky, m., bond, l., & weinstock, j. (1997). a tradition has no name. new york : basic books. branch, t. (1988) . parting the waters: america in the king years, 1953-1954. new york : simon and schuster publishing company brinson, c. (1994, july 2). farmers sowed hopes, grew voting schools. the state newspaper (s.c.) , pp. a1. clark , s. (1962). echo in my soul. new york : dutton publishing company. clark , s. (1988). ready from within: septima clark and the civil rights movement. trenton , nj : africanamerican world publishing company. dewey, j. (1916). democracy and education . new york : macmillan publishing company. retrieved november 27, 2005, from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/dewey.html. freire, p. (1970). pedagogy of the oppressed and education for critical consciousness. new york : continuum publishing company. giroux, j., & mclaren, l. (1996). teacher education and the politics of engagement: the case for democratic schooling. in p. leistyna, a. woodrum, & s. sherblom (eds.), breaking free: the transformative power of critical pedagogy. cambridge , ma : harvard educational review. glen, j. (1988). highlander: no ordinary school, 1932-1962. lexington : the university press of kentucky . hines, m. (2003). 20/20: an inspirational look at 20 of south carolina 's most notable african-american women. florence , sc : mtb publishing. hines, m., cunningham, c., & curtis, c. (2005). reconfiguring the rainbow: a unique offering towards multi-coloring the diversity of middle school achievement. the arkansas association of middle level education (aamle) journal, 3 (1), 14-15. horton, a. (1989). the highlander folk school: a history of its major programs, 1932-1961. brooklyn , ny : carlson publishing company. mcfadden, g. (1994). septima clark. in d. hine, a. brown, & b. terbog-penn (eds.), black women in america : a historical encyclopedia. bloomington : indiana university press. piaget, j. (1963). the language and thought of child. new york : the world publishing company. quinn, c. (2003). flexible learning: mobile learning objects. knowledge anywhere paper. retrieved november 25, 2005, from http://www.knowledgeanywhere.com/mobilewhite paper.pdf . rawls, j. (1971). a theory of justice . cambridge , ma : belknap press of harvard university press. robnett, b. (1997). how long? how long?: african-american women in the struggle for civil rights. new york : oxford university press. vygotsky, l. (1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge , ma : harvard university press. about the authors dr. mack t. hines iii is an assistant professor of educational administration at sam houston state university. his work has been featured in the american association of school administrators (aasa) journal of scholarship and practice, national council of professors of education (ncpea) yearbook, current issues in middle level education, and the academic journal of educational leadership. a former middle school administrator, dr. hines has published articles in the premiere journals of numerous state middle level education associations. dr. dianne reed is an assistant professor of educational administration at sam houston state university. she has conducted numerous groundbreaking workshops on brain based learning. dr. reed was also the inaugural principal of the award winning colin powell elementary school. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.knowledgeanywhere.com/mobilewhite%20paper.pdf file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 23 2010 issn 1093-7099 authentic leadership: as exemplified by kamla persad bissessar implications for current and potential leaders dr. charmaine bissessar abstract the focus of this paper will be on the six seeds of authentic leadership as espoused by cashman (2003) and the relationship to kamla persad bissessar’s leadership. her strengths and weaknesses will be examined with a view to determining whether she displays qualities of an authentic leader. speeches, e-mails, her facebook pages and the party’s manifesto for 2010 will be used as touchstones to evaluate her level of authenticity as a leader. the six seeds are: (a) the need for leaders to manifest what is in their hearts, (b) ability to embrace both the good and the bad and learn from them, (c) the leader serves the parts and the whole through value creation, (d) the leader masters the ego and moves beyond the ego, (e) the leader displays social intelligence through his or her ability to connect with others, and (f) the leader is able to find the potential in others. a discussion ensues based on the example of authentic leadership and how potential and current leaders could capitalize on becoming more people-centered leaders. keywords: authentic leadership, potential leaders, current leaders, women political leaders citation: bissessar, c. (2010). authentic leadership: as exemplified by kamla persad bissessar – implications for current and potential leaders. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(23). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction how authentic is kamla persad bissessar’s leadership? the premise of this paper is to determine the level of authenticity, mrs. persad bissessar displays as leader of the opposition. written before she won the general election, there is a marked indication that mrs. persad bissessar exemplifies facets of cashman’s (2003) six seeds of authentic leadership. in a climate where legitimacy, transformation, and authentic leadership are capstones of charismatic leaders, mrs. persad bissessar used her feminine nurturing quality to garner support for her political campaign as both leader of the opposition and later for her bid to become prime minister of trinidad and tobago. defying the dictates of an adrocentric society, mrs. persad bissessar set the stage for women to embrace their aspirations, inspirations, and rise to the challenge of selfleadership and leadership of others. in this article, i document the speeches, given by mrs. persad bissessar in the lead up to the general elections in trinidad in may 2010. with the “kamlamania” hype prevalent at the time this article was written, i felt there was a need to examine her leadership style as an authentic leader and her ability to connect and engender trust in others. her facebook page was used an indication of her plans to implement change within the country if elected as prime minister. since writing this article, mrs. persad bissessar has been elected prime minister of trinidad and tobago and has been named in time magazine’s ten top female leaders. adams (2010) stated: since being sworn in, on may 26, 2010, the onetime attorney general has laid out ambitious plans to tackle the country's growing murder rate, boost pensions and slash the number of trinidadians living in poverty (now one-fifth of the population). (p. 9) the aforementioned statement illustrates mrs. persad bissessar’s authentic leadership in action and sets the tone for a leader who is a true example of what women can achieve. tenets of authentic leadership “to thine own self be true” resonates the hackneyed dictum and the precepts of authentic leadership are based on such principles. authenticity in leadership dates to the early years. walumba, avolio, gardner, wrensing, and peterson (2008) indicated that there is an increased need for leaders to cultivate and hone authentic leaderships. furthermore, within the political arena where there is need for transparency, accountability, and adherence to strict ethical and moral standards the need for an authentic political leader is a necessity to followers. researchers have indicated that authentic leadership raises the level of optimism, social intelligence, selfefficacy, and self-esteem (walumba et al., 2008). with the focus on moral, ethical leadership and leadership that inspires, motivates, and empowers, authentic leadership has emerged as one of the capstones of leadership theory and one to be aspired towards. harter (2002) defined authenticity as “owning one’s personal experiences, be they thoughts, emotions, needs, preferences, or beliefs, processes captured by the injunction to know oneself” (p. 382). amongst the cacophony of dissident views on authentic leadership, an indelible thread of authenticity appears. these congruent qualities include: selfadvancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 awareness, self-regulated positive behaviors, self-efficacy, and tenacity and continuous selfdevelopment toward fostering a more positive self-image. cashman’s (2003) six seeds exemplified a higher level of consciousness in relation to one’s responsibility as a leader. the first seed of purpose points to the need for leaders to define themselves by outwardly manifesting what is in their hearts. the second seed of authenticity urges the leader to embrace both the good and bad and learn from them. the third seed of value creation empowers the leader to serve the parts and the whole. the leader then promotes and fosters values. the fourth seed encourages the leader to move beyond the ego and master the ego rather than allow the ego to rule. the fifth seed of relationship promotes the need to connect with others, which is part of social style and social intelligence. the final seed of coaching encourages the leader to find the potential in others. application of authentic leadership to kamla persad bissessar kamla persad bissessar has indicated what is in her heart simply from the act of embracing diverse factions of society and welcoming them into the coalition party she helped form. a quote from her facebook account typifies this belief: everybody in this country is my “own kind.’ this is one country with one people. our history of servitude and struggle binds us together. everybody in this country is equal and that is how it will be with our people’s partnership government. (k. persad bissessar, personal communication, may 7, 2010) these aforementioned statements illustrate an authentic leader who is willing to accept differences and use these dissimilarities to foster harmony and strength within the coalition. her genuine ability to embrace everyone who wants to work with her and empower them using their strengths to benefit the party and people, while simultaneously highlighting their talents and skills, makes her an authentic leader. mrs. persad bissessar’s preoccupation with youths and expanding the tertiary level education also indicates an authentic leader who wishes to empower youths. from the onset, with her various speeches geared toward touching the hearts of the people and creating comic relief in an already tense environment, she displays the qualities of an authentic leader. k. persad bissessar stated in a personal communication on may 9, 2010: advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 i cannot emphasize this strongly enough: the people’s partnership is committed to continuing free tertiary education and we will expand the gate program to include technical and vocational education. our policies support the diversification of our nation's economy so youthe young people we are educatinghave real jobs and careers in your future. she charges every individual with the concomitant responsibility of being model citizens and finding his or her potential and unleashing it. the excerpt that segues from her facebook account shows her authenticity as a leader: the people’s partnership will not take away programs but we will make our educational system better. we need to make sure every young person has a marketable skill and the chance to live out and realize their dreams. in addition, young people must feel safe and secure. (k. persad bissessar, personal communication, may 5, 2010) here, she is concerned and this preoccupation is illustrated in her words and the fact that one of the five hierarchical needs postulated by maslow, safety, is one of the priorities of her party. thus far, she has displayed all the seeds of an authentic leader and shows a high level of selfefficacy, self-discipline, and self-awareness with self-epistemological beliefs. shamir and eilam (2005) described authentic leaders as having four attributes: (a) “role of a leader is a central component of their self-concept, (b) they have achieved a high level of self-resolution or selfconcept clarity, (c) their goals are self-concordant, and (d) their behavior is self expressive” (p. 399). from her speeches and her facebook account it is clear that mrs. persad bissessar emulates the aforementioned qualities: last night i was warmly received in laventille, a place overrun by crime, fear and a sense of hopelessness. why, you may ask, should you care? because if you believe, as i do, that everybody in this country is equal, then you want a better future for everyone in trinidad and tobago may 24th. (k. persad bissessar, personal communication, may 11, 2010) strengths of kamla persad bissessar as an authentic leader the manifesto for 2010, presented a meticulous proposal of her party’s projected plans when and if they do come into government after the may 24, 2010 elections. her strengths are definitely in uniting diverse groups in society. from the onset, future plans in the manifesto underscore a people-centered leadership typifying the authentic leader. throughout the people’s partnership manifesto (bissessar, 2010) an indelible thread highlighted that the safety and wellbeing of the national community is a major preoccupation. the seven pillars espoused in the people’s partnership manifesto for 2010 (bissessar, 2010) give a clear indication that she is genuine, interested in the welfare of all, trying to be optimistic, people-focused, and geared toward community improvement and involvement. the seven pillars challenge everyone to take ownership and responsibility for the country through active participation. the use of “we” and “our” bring a closer perspective to the public and indicated intimacy rather than distance. this advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 slight pronoun change foisted ownership for the manifesto on the part of the reader emphasizing her thrust toward people-centered governance. the issues discussed in the seven pillars underscore mrs. kamla persad bissessar’s strength as an authentic leader with the manifestation of care and concern for the gestalt rather than individual or disparate factions within the national community. these seven pillars include: (a) people-centered development, (b) poverty eradication and social justice, (c) national and personal security, (d) information and communication technologies, (e) a more diversified knowledge intensive economy, (f) good governance, and (g) foreign policy. the aforementioned pillars exemplify her authentic leadership where there is an underlying philosophy of clarity of goals with transparency and accountability at the helm of her modus operandi. such qualities are the forte of an authentic leader as defined by walumba, avolio, gardner, wernsing, and peterson (2008) and cashman (2003). another strong point is her ability to forgive by pardoning others for whatever may have happened in the past. for example, mrs. kamla persad bissessar openly embraced certain members of her government who opposed her bid to become leader of the opposition. this act in itself shows self-knowledge, self-efficacy and the qualities of a true authentic leader and selfconcordant an equal aspect of value creation. challenges of kamla persad bissessar as an authentic leader kamla persad bissessar exemplifies that manifesting what is in the heart also has disadvantages as illustrated in the following example. tearing up the people’s national movement manifesto 2010 may have shown what mrs. bissessar feels in her heart but it does not indicate a leader who is self-regulated and willing to embrace the positive and negative aspects of leadership. this aforementioned act may have shown strength and courage but it also displayed human frailty and the need to master the ego rather than letting the ego rule. a further issue facing the leader of the opposition is the ability to effectively merge the diverse groups of people into one synergistic gestalt. her true leadership skills will be tested if she wins the election and has to find a niche for each individual. mrs. persad bissessar’s true mettle will be determined by how effectively she governs and manages the unc, cop, njac, and the movement for social justice. not only does she have to remain true to her promises and proposals but she also has to sustain unity within a group that the public has seen torn by loyalty towards the new regime versus loyalty towards the old regime. how she eventually resolves such a dichotomy determines as much on her ability to know herself, her relationship with others, and her mediating skills. moreover, those members of her party with loyalties to the old regime will have to move from cognitive dissonance to a paradigm shift where change is ineluctable. the third challenge confronting mrs. persad bissessar is her high insistence on participation and inclusion. she proposed to set up different boards with diverse stakeholders within the community to regulate the various ministries. participation and inclusion lead to ownership and autonomy from all stakeholders. however, the sisyphean struggle would be to unite and regulate the boards. how would she determine when to include and when not to include? what measures will she use, if elected, to decide who should participate and who advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 should not participate? what measures will be in place for control and selection of what she takes under advisory? the e-view is a valid instrument which mrs. persad bissessar plans to implement as a means of generating public feedback. the e-view will be a website allowing citizens to air their views, issues, and concerns about what is taking place in the country. this will be in keeping with mrs. persad bissessar’s people-centered governance. implications for current and potential leaders in contemporary organizations, the epitome of leadership is the leader’s ability to discern, adapt, intuit, and internalize the underpinnings of environmental culture. rumination and introspection are natural processes of a leader’s growth. spawning a culture that inculcates transformation within the organization and creates authenticity is the concomitant and onerous responsibility of contemporary leaders. such leaders have the herculean challenge of merging the etic and emic voices in leadership. hypothetical theories of leadership are given validation or lack thereof through praxis. when considering authentic leadership and its application to potential and current leaders, one must first ask whether he or she is comfortable with the contribution to the organization and what type of legacy will be left behind. only through symbiotic dyads between the heart and actions taken in leadership can individuals espouse the embodiment of authentic leadership. the example exemplified in this article suggests to leaders to know themselves and in self-knowledge, true leadership and service to the organization and people can be attained. the second seed, the ability to embrace the good and the bad suggests the need for all leaders to assess their weaknesses and strengths and transcend these areas. when followers see that leaders are self-aware and willing to show frailties and power, this engenders trust. trust, according to covey and merrill (2006), is the single most effect measure in perpetuating change within an organization. current and potential leaders who are willing to embrace the flower as well as the thorn could reap increased reward in the followership confidence in them. value creation is another vital aspect of authentic leadership and one in which leaders should inculcate in quotidian life. according to maxwell (2006), every person is a leader whether at the top of the organization or the bottom or as is the case in a horizontally structured organization. leaders, who try to make a difference in each person’s life, lead and perform in a manner benefiting as many persons as possible. kamla persad bissessar personifies such a leader in her capacity as leader of the opposition in government in trinidad and tobago. communing with nature and embracing the self, when finding that contentment within oneself, is the fourth seed espoused by cashman (2003). when an individual is centered and operates and performs leadership functions from a position of contentment, such sanguine energies are infectious. optimism is contagious. potential and current leaders should master the ego and lead from a position of servant. social intelligence and being open, honest, and sincere generates trust and hope. leading from a point of trust, as exemplified by kamla persad bissessar, fosters trust and confidence in advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 leaders. leader’s ability to understand and comprehend social situations within the workplace also displays the use of visceral instincts and a higher level of understanding. goleman (2006) divided social intelligence into two facets: social awareness and social facility. social awareness encompasses; (a) primal empathy, (b) attunement, (c) empathetic accuracy, and (d) social cognition. social facility embraces: (a) synchrony, (b) self-presentation, (c) influence, and (d) concern. struggling leaders who have issues with change resistant behaviors could infuse some of these qualities into their leadership repertoire. additionally, leaders who allow followers to participate in and take ownership for the organization’s vision will dissipate resistant behaviors. followers feel valued and confident when they are given autonomy for their tasks and are part of the decision-making process. finding potential in others and acting as a mentor in a leadership position shows a level of selflessness and the desire for others to succeed. when there is clear purpose and the leader is a whole and authentic leader, the leader engenders trust and loyalty in followers. the leader who is in touch with his or her values and innate self resonates at a higher level and foments resonant leadership. resonant leadership affords a larger circle of influence with increased charisma and influence on others. resonant leaders possess legitimate and charismatic powers. the fish philosophy purported by lundin, paul, and christensen (2000) contains elements of all six seeds and includes: (a) improving communication through empathetic listening, (b) making work fun, (c) making someone’s day in a memorable way, and (d) choosing a positive mindset and attitude irrespective of what is taking place. current and potential leaders can implement these strategies to improve value creation and motivate followers to move beyond their expected potential. nothing shows authenticity and care more than finding ways to emotionally touch lives in a positive way. a wise leader uses praise effectively both formally and informally. extrinsic rewards should be memorable and one that can motivate followers to work harder. gostick and elton (2002) underscored the importance of extrinsic rewards, “leaders must not only understand the necessity to encourage, inspire and reward the top 20 percent, they must be sure that the high performance 70 percent is always energized to improve and move upward” (p. 14). rewards externally experienced intensify and motivate followers to work harder and set long-term and short-term goals. leading with the other five seeds as posited by cashman (2003) spawns the ability to ignite other’s passion and bring forth latent potential. as has been evidenced in kamla persad bissessar’s leadership, authentic leadership is people-centered leadership where the welfare of others is of paramount importance. leaders in all spheres will do well to inculcate such leadership strategies in their praxis. conclusions and recommendations the authentic leader foments a level of self-regulation, self-awareness, empowers followers, and possesses the ability to tap into the potential in others. mrs. persad bissessar has exhibited such qualities and can be deemed an authentic leader. if elected to lead trinidad and tobago, she must continue to strive toward staying an authentic leader with her declaration of advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 values as important touchstones toward increasing authenticity. values of selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, dialogue, and leadership hold mrs. persad bissessar in good stead to creating and sustaining a culture of transparency and authenticity. if elected into office, additional research and information can be used to determine whether mrs. persad bissessar is a true authentic leader. ultimately, if elected, after a period of time, additional research on her leadership styles and skills could support her effectiveness as a leader. furthermore, determining her style of leadership as either authentic rather than transformational could be another research paper. the issues discussed in this article add to the body of information on authentic leadership especially authentic leadership as purported by cashman (2003). there is a dearth of studies conducted on authentic leadership and its significance to leaders. more research should be conducted on authentic leadership and its impact on both followers and leaders in fomenting a more horizontal organization structure. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 references adams, w. l. (2010, september). top 10 female leaders. time. retrieved september 28, 2010 from http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2005455_2005458_201160 2,00.html avolio, b. j., gardner, w. l., & walumba, f. o. (2007). authentic leadership questionnaire. retrieved july 26, 2010, from http://www.mindgarden.com/products/alq.htm bissessar, k. p. (2001). prosperity for all manifesto of the people’s partnership for a united people to achieve sustainable development for trinidad and tobago. retrieved july 26, 2010, from http://www.coptnt.com/ver03/media/peoples-manifesto-2010.pdf cashman, k. (2003). awakening the leader within. hoboken, n j: john wiley & sons, inc. covey, s., & merrill, r. (2006). the speed of trust: the one thing that changes everything. new york: free press. goleman, d. (2006). social intelligence: the new science of human relationships. ny: bantam books. gostick, a., & elton, c. (2002). the 24 carrot manager: a remarkable story of how a leader can unleash human potential. utah: gibbs smith. harter, s. (2002). authenticity. in c.r. synder & s. j. lopez (eds.), handbook of positive psychology. 382-394. london: oxford university press. lundin, s. c., paul, h., & christensen, j. (2000). a remarkable way to boost morale and improve results: fish. ny: hyperion. maxwell, j. c. (2006). the 360-degree leader: developing your influence from anywhere in the organization. tennessee: nelson business. peoples manifesto 2010. retrieved may15, 2010, from www.unitednationalcongress.org segliman, m. e. p. (2002). authentic happiness: using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. ny: free press. shamir, b., & eliam, g. (2005). “what’s your story?”: a life-stories approach to authentic leadership development. leadership quarterly, 16(1), 395-417. walumba, f. o., avolio, b. j., gardner, w. l., wernsing, t. s, & peterson, s. j. (2008). authentic development and validation of a theory-based measure. journal of management, 34(1), 89-126. biography charmaine bissessar is a graduate of the university of phoenix, arizona. she presented the findings of her doctoral dissertation at the american society of business and behavioral studies in hawaii in 2008. she conducted a workshop on webquest, problem-based, and project-based learning for online and traditional classrooms on june 11th at the hyatt for the elearn conference 2009. in july 2009, charmaine bissessar presented a comparative assessment of trinidadian and bermudian college students’ use of emotional intelligence. she has recently published a book of short stories entitled grains of sand. she is an adjunct faculty with uwi roytec and an online facilitator for uwi open campus from september 2010. her main interests include emotional intelligence, motivation, and transformational leadership, women in leadership and politics, and social justice. i cannot emphasize this strongly enough: the people’s partnership is committed to continuing free tertiary education and we will expand the gate program to include technical and vocational education. our policies support the diversification of our nat... she charges every individual with the concomitant responsibility of being model citizens and finding his or her potential and unleashing it. the excerpt that segues from her facebook account shows her authenticity as a leader: advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership teachers' perceptions of women in the principalship a current perspective johnetta hudson, ph.d. dorothy rea, ph.d. hudson, summer, 1998 teachers appear to not want extremes and prefer a balance in both male and female principals. women are still under represented in educational administration during the 1990's. when one compares the number of women teachers with the number of women in hool administration the number is disproportionate. the majority of teachers are females. criswell and betz (1995) noted that 66% of the teaching force is female. however, the percentage of women in school administration is quite different. women hold 5% of the superintendent positions, 20.6% of assistant superintendent positions, and 30% of the principalships (restine, 1993). a survey conducted by the executive educator and xavier university (natale, 1992 ) revealed that in the 1990's women hold 39.7 % of the elementary school principal positions, followed by 20.5% at the junior high/middle school level, and 12% at the high school level. what factors contribute to the low numbers of women in educational administration? one of the most common reasons presented in the literature for the under representation of women in school administration is negative perceptions of women's leadership (tyree, 1995). studies of female and male approaches to leadership document a distinct difference in the way women and men manage (shakeshaft, 1989). management attributes traditionally associated with men, such as authoritative, decisive, controlling, and unemotional, are often more respected by potential employers in education than a more decentralized approach to leadership which involves the principal as a facilitator of a shared vision and shared decision-making. tyree (1995) stated that the under representation of women in educational administration is fostered through a series of myths: " (a) women don't have what it takes, and (b) women lack support of teachers and the community." according to helgesen (1990), women still must deal with the negative views of female administrators held by peers, parents, and employees of both sexes. gupton and slick (1995) quoted a female elementary principal as saying that "even after women have obtained administrative positions they are not afforded the status or the respect given their male colleagues," (p. 10). within the school environment, the attitudes which teachers have toward women administrators may have http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html a direct effect on how well the administrators' job performance will be evaluated by her supervisor. these attitudes may also be a deterrent to more women seeking administrative positions. recent school reform efforts which include transformational leadership, site-based management, empowerment of teachers, and other forms of decentralized decision-making now celebrate the stereotypical characteristics of women school administrators. in fact, contemporary theories and studies of leadership indicate that the characteristics of the leadership style used by most women are becoming the dominant model of leadership (aburdene & naisbitt, 1993; bennis & nanus, 1985; helgesen, 1990 as cited by gupton & slick, 1995). now that collaborative, participatory leadership styles are valued, has the attitude toward women elementary and secondary school administrators changed to the positive? purpose the purpose of this study was to examine teachers' attitudes toward women principals. do teachers perceive that women administrators foster collaboration, cooperation, participation, and shared decision making? how do women teachers perceive the effectiveness of the female administrator? how do male teachers perceive the effectiveness of the female administrator? do teachers prefer a female administrator over a male administrator? we developed a questionnaire to gather data relating to teacher perceptions of women and men in the principalship. each item on the questionnaire was developed from a review of the literature on women and men's ways of leading and leadership qualities principals need in order to provide effective leadership while transforming schools into the 21st century (crogan, 1996; dunlap & schmuck, 1995; lunenburg, 1995; restine, 1993; sergiovanni,1995; shakeshaft, 1989; tannen, 1994; tichy & devanna 1990; tyree, 1995). procedures the questionnaire was distributed during the spring of 1996 to 1,047 public school teachers in missouri and kansas. of the surveys distributed 479 were returned for a 45.7% return rate. the data were analyzed by gender. there were 349 female participants and 126 male participants. four teachers did not specify gender. results describe the qualities of a successful male principal and a successful female principal ? participants were asked to indicate which qualities they thought were desirable in female and male principals. table 1 presents the collective responses of male and female participants. good verbal communicator was checked by 92.5 % of the participants for a male principal and 93.1% as a desirable quality for a female principal. one can conclude that good communication between principals and teachers is important regardless of the principal's gender. the least desirable quality of a male (17.3%) and female (19%) principal was unemotional. the quality emotional was also one of the least desirable qualities for male (23.2%) and female (26.3%) principals. teachers appear to not want extremes and to prefer a balance in both male and female principals. the low percentage of responses for the quality authoritarian, (21.7% ) for a male principal and (19.4% ) for female principal, indicate that an authoritative style is also an unacceptable quality for any principal. there are eight qualities which were checked by 80% to 90% of all participants for both male and female principals. those qualities are: good verbal communicator, good manager, good listener, problem solver, knowledgeable of curriculum and instruction, shares power and credit, and seeks variety of input. the researchers concluded that these were the most desirable qualities for a principal to possess, regardless of the principal's gender. it is interesting to note that the quality shares power and credit received a higher percentage of responses, 82% for a male principal and 83.7 % for a female principal, than did the quality collaborative which received 74.5% for a male principal and 76.4% for a female principal. one would think that in an era of shared decision making "collaborative" would have been a much more desirable quality. it was also interesting to note that decisive was slightly more desirable in a female principal than in a male principal. is this because women traditionally are perceived to be less decisive than men? table 2 presents the desirable qualities of male and female principals by gender of the participants. file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20all%20for%20pub/summer98/hudt1.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20all%20for%20pub/summer98/hudt2.html women selected good communicator, good listener, knowledgeable of curriculum and instruction, personable, good manager, problem solver and seeks input as the top seven qualities for both male and female principals. being a good communicator was the most desirable quality. of the women participants, 92% thought being a good communicator was a desirable quality in a male principal while 94% thought this was a desirable quality in a female principal. male participants' responses differed slightly. men selected good communicator, good listener, knowledgeable of curriculum and instruction, good manager, problem solver, and seeks input as desirable qualities in both male and female principals. however, men felt being decisive was more important than being personable. of the male participants, 82% selected decisive as a desirable quality for male principals and 81% selected it as a desirable quality for female principals. personable was selected as a desirable quality by 75.4% of the male participants. the data on table 2 substantiates the data on table 1. do male principals have legitimate authority? the majority of female participants (63.9%) responded yes, that males do have legitimate authority (see table 3). slightly more than half of male participants responded that men do not have legitimate authority. this suggests that men are not in agreement amongst themselves as to whether men step into the position of principal without having to earn their authority. do female principals have legitimate authority? the information on table 4 overwhelmingly says no female principals do not have legitimate authority. female and male teachers equally say that women have to work to earn their authority. female principals in the 90's still have to prove themselves. comments on the surveys stated that this authority has historically been given to males in the american culture. by whom would you prefer to be supervised? although participants in this study were limited to the choices of male or female for their replies, many chose to add an extra line indicating either. as a result, the category of either was added as part of the data analysis. female and male teachers stated that gender of the principal did not make a difference. they had no gender preference for their supervision. comments such as the following were made by participants: "i respect the person and the job he/she does not gender." the data raise several questions. if teachers have no preferences for whom they work, why do female principals still have to prove themselves? to whom do they need to prove themselves? are teachers contradicting themselves? conclusion the primary purpose of this study was to examine teachers' attitudes toward female principals. the results show that female and male teachers want the same qualities in a principal regardless of the principal's gender. teachers want principals who are good communicators, good listeners, knowledgeable of curriculum and instruction, personable, problem solvers and who share power and credit as well as seek variety of input. this study strengthens the contention that in the 1990's characteristics traditionally attributed to women's ways of leading are desirable today in male administrators as well. several questions arose as a result of the responses to legitimate female authority: why do women still not have legitimate authority stepping into a leadership position? why must women earn the authority? if teachers are receptive to female principals, to whom must female principals prove themselves? the question still remains, why are women under represented as educational leaders? the answers may be within the responses to the questions above. a follow up study examining this issue and the questions above is warranted. references criswell, m. & betz, l. (1995). attitudes toward administrators among school board members: a current perspective. in b. irby & g. brown (eds.), women executives: voices and visions ( pp. 28-35). austin texas: the texas council of women school executives. grady, m. (1995). building a network for women in educational administration. in b. irby & g. brown file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20all%20for%20pub/summer98/hudt3.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20all%20for%20pub/summer98/hudt4.html (eds.), women executives: voices and visions (pp. 121-126). austin, texas: the texas council of women school executives. gupton, s. l. & slick, g. a.. (1995). women leaders: who are they and how do they compare. in b. irby & g. brown (eds.), women executive: voices and visions (pp. 6-14). austin, texas: the texas council of women school executives. helgesen, s. (1990). the female advantage: women's ways of leading. new york. doubleday. lunenburg, f. c., (1995). the principalship: concepts and applications. prentice hall, inc., englewood cliffs, new jersey. national center for education statistics (ed). (january, 1994). public and private school principals: are there too few women. washington, dc. papalewis, r. & yerkes, d. (1995). fe/male: the role of communication. in b. irby & g. brown (eds.), women executives: voices and visions, (pp.15-21). austin, texas: the texas council of women school executives. restine, n. l. (1993). women in administration: facilitators for change. newbury park, california: corwin press, inc. sergiovanni, t. j., (1995). the principalship: a reflective practice perspective. needham heights, ma: ally, and bacon. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. newbury park, ca.: corwin press, inc., tannen, d. (1994). talking from 9 to 5 women and men in the workplace: language, sex and power. new york: avon books. tichy, n. m. & devanna,m. a., (1990). the transformational leader. new york: john wiley & sons. tingley, j. c. (1994). genderflex: men & women speaking each other's language at work. new york: amacom. tyree, c. l. (1995). women in education: are we perpetuating societal attitudes by moving toward an androgynous leadership style. in b. irby & g. brown (eds.), women executives: voices and visions ( pp. 22-26). austin, texas: the texas council of women school executives. dr. johnetta hudson is a west distinguished professor in educational leadership at midwestern state university. wichita falls, texas. dr. dorothy rea is a principal of don bonjour elementary school in the shawnee mission school district , lenexa, kansas. awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 3, summer 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map mailto:johnetta.hudson@nexus.mwsw.edu mailto:borea@smsd.k12.ks.us file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20all%20for%20pub/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20all%20for%20pub/summer98/awl_summer98.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women network home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international advancing women in leadership redefining the voice of women administrators jenny tripses, ph.d. tripses, spring, 2004 some women administrators, because they work in male dominated fields, are reluctant to join networks of women and consequently have few means to develop a strong identity of leadership. voice has multiple meanings. voice is individual and unique, while at the same time requires another to listen and react. the journey towards an authentic voice requires courage and persistence (issacs, 1999). voice in feminist literature refers to a way of being that defines female development and encompasses women's value for connectedness (gilligan, 1982). voice is compared to vision, a leadership buzzword (belenky, clinchy, goldberger, & tarule, 1986; helgesen, 1990). voice differs from seeing (vision) which is a one-way process that can exist even if it is not communicated to others. voice and listening, on the other hand, suggest dialogue and interaction (helgesen, 1990, issacs, 1999). this paper chronicles the dialogue of an organization of women administrators as they redefined their collective voice. the board of illinois women administrators (hereafter referred to as iwa) decided in february 1999 to devote extraordinary time, attention, and resources to a process in order to discover the relevancy of iwa for women educational leaders. board members were concerned that iwa was not organized to provide necessary services and support to potential and current women administrators. membership activity of iwa was episodic and growing more limited to specific geographic areas, with most activity occurring in western and central illinois. the board wanted to know more about the status of the organization to determine if women administrators continued to need a professional organization like iwa and if so, how that organization should look. file:///users/temp/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html this action research project was based on the process employed by iwa, a statewide organization of women school administrators, as part of an organizational redefinition of purpose. action research is defined as "a disciplined process of inquiry conducted by and for those taking the action. the primary reason for engaging in action research is to assist the "actor in improving and/or refining his or her actions" (sagor, 2000). the purpose of this research project was to understand the unique strengths and challenges faced by iwa and, from new understandings, to redefine the direction of organization. the results are not necessarily considered to be generalizable to other statewide women's administrative organizations (mills, 2000). the paper reviews the literature from the perspectives of challenges and opportunities for women's leadership. following is a description of the methodology and results of the iwa data collection of the membership through three distinct processes. the last section summarizes the actions taken by iwa to recreate the organization. challenges faced by women's leadership organizations women's networks can powerfully impact the culture and policy of organizations and professions. they provide women avenues to develop talents, build relationships, and support job equity (catlyst, 1999). women administrators need support, encouragement, and a sense of connection with others who understand the world in which they live (helgesen, 1990, irby & brown, 1998). levine (as cited in irby & brown, 1998) reported that women participating in a small informal peer support group of professional women derived benefits from their association including new perspectives, opportunities to share stories, as resources to one another, and professional networks. levine concluded that small support groups for women leaders can have a significant impact upon women's potential and be a "mechanism for broadening perspectives, generating alternative solutions to managerial problems, and enhancing professional and personal esteem" (irby & brown, 1998, pp. 75). at the same time, many women's networking organizations struggle, based in part on members' ambivalence about identification with woman's groups. due to the pressures of working in androcentric cultures that do not recognize or support them, many women are ambivalent about women's rights and feminism. some women administrators, because they work in male dominated fields, are reluctant to join networks of women and consequently have few means to develop a strong identity of leadership. the resulting isolation results in inhibition of collective political action for social change (bell, 1995). in the year 2003, being a woman administrator was neither simple nor easy. the literature revealed internal conflicts women face as they move into traditional male roles in education (dunlap & schmuck, 1995; gosetti & rusch, 1995; kanter, 1977; schmuck & schubert, 1995; and shakeshaft, 1987). shakeshaft (1987) cited evidence from anthropological, psychological, sociological, biological, and political literature that supports a theory of the world in which men, in most cultures, occupy the most prestigious positions. she went on to assert that while there are differences among societies and cultures, in all cultures men and women divide labor on the basis of sex and male tasks are more valued that female tasks. this male worldview, called androcentrism, elevates masculine pursuits to an ideal. this tradition reinforces the belief in male superiority and a masculine value system in which female values, experiences, and behaviors are viewed as inferior. the system accepts two sets of rules, one for men, the other for women. discrimination can be overt or covert, but there is strong evidence that biases against women continue (shakeshaft, 1987). as they train to become leaders in education, women learn from theories that exclude their experiences and voice. administrative research and theory traditionally reflect a white male worldview (gosetti & rusch, 1995, shakeshaft, 1987, sergiovanni, 1999) that prizes competition and winning. the problem is not so much the singular white male orientation of research and theory as it is the lack of balance from other perspectives and experiences. when the behaviors of women or other minorities contradict androcentric theories, their leadership, and not the theory, is found inadequate (shakeshaft, 1987). women assuming leadership positions are confronted with the realities of their positions as outsiders in an androcentric culture. denial of this reality in one form or another is a common method of coping (crosby as cited in gupton and slick, 1996). schmuck and schubert (1995) illustrated women's ambivalence by using interviews with women who denied experiencing sex discrimination and, during the same conversation, reported being treated differently than men. denial protects women from the realities of discrimination, even as they voice examples of inequality. women in administration tend to cope with gender identity by remaining selforiented. they dissociate themselves from their female identity because they are the minority. these women tend to not identify with other women and instead identify with male gatekeepers of the profession. too often the consequence of women's denial perpetuates the status quo because women do not offer a different voice (matthews as cited in gupton and slick, 1996). the careers of most school administrators are relatively lonely (gupton &slick, 1996). women are especially isolated in that they function in an androcentric culture. edson (1995) conducted a ten-year longitudinal study on successful women administrators. she concluded "that despite all the obstacles for women trying to advance in a largely male arena, these female educators continue to be committed, resilient, and for the most part, successful." (edson, 1995, p.46). she went on to reflect on how little is needed to encourage women in administration with the recommendation for further study on the process of encouraging and supporting women professionals. opportunities for women's leadership organizations when illinois women administrators came into existence over twenty-five years ago, the obstacles to women's entrance and advancement in educational administration were clear. male administrator attitudes against hiring women were prevalent and overt, women were not motivated to seek administrative positions, and organizational procedures perpetuated discrimination in hiring and promoting women administrators (shakeshaft, 1987). while it is true that traditional leadership theory is based on male models of competition (sergiovanni, 1999), there are significant indications that change is under way. as society changes, female values of inclusion and connection are emerging as valuable leadership qualities. the female view that one strengthens oneself by strengthening others is finding greater acceptance (helgeson, 1990). in advocating for new dimensions of leadership through moral leadership, sergiovanni (1999, p. x) recognized the accomplishments of women's style of leadership when he wrote, " my reading of the literature on successful schools shows that while women are underrepresented in principalships, they are overrepresented in successful principalships, so there must be something to it" (that women's concern for community and caring is responsible for effective leadership). "studies of good administrators, male or female, find that they subscribe to many of the practices and approaches that women administrators in general hold" (shakeshaft, 1987, p. 216). shakeshaft (1987) in her study of women superintendents identified differences between leadership practices of men and women. for the women in her study, relationships with others were central to all actions. these women administrators spent more time with people, communicated more, cared more about individual differences, and were concerned more with teachers and marginal students. the major foci of their work was teaching and learning. these women had strong knowledge of teaching methods and techniques. they emphasized achievement, coordinated instructional programs, and evaluated student progress. they created climate for learning that was safe, orderly and quiet. and lastly, the women in shakeshaft's study emphasized building of community as an essential part of their administrative style. they were democratic and used a participatory style that encouraged inclusiveness through their speech and decision making styles. coming from the outsider status held so long by women administrators, women school leaders have unique and valuable perspectives to offer schools who are facing pressures to adapt and change. experiences outside the predominantly male value system have taught women to consider other points of view. dunlap & schmuck (1995) described the situation faced by successful women working in a culture that does not recognize them as marginalized. "those who are marginal in the dominant society, who experience life in more than one 'world', have access to more than one point of view. thus those who stand on the fringes of established roles can offer insights less available to individuals more thoroughly and consistently integrated into the established categories (ferguson as quoted in bell, 1995, p. 288). marginality can result in pro-equity action if women develop a sense of identity among themselves (minority consciousness). the opportunity exists for women to collaborate politically to reform the organization of schools. the first step is to acknowledge the contradictory perspectives in women administrators' work lives. women have both insider and outsider status that enables them to understand the "possibility of seeing the relations between dominant activities and beliefs and those that arise on the 'outside' "(harding, 1991, p. 131-32). women's organizations have the potential for action through outsider perspectives to transform schools into inclusive learning organizations that value all participants. women do not have a monopoly on democratic values of inclusiveness. many men share them as well. men are becoming increasingly alienated from and critical of the top-down hierarchies that organize the public world (helgeson, 1990). men see the results of bad decisions made by insulated executives issuing directives down the organizations from the top. the critical issue for women in leadership today is to clearly articulate those values within, understand the strengths of feminine leadership, and join forces with others, men and women alike, who are equally passionate about relationships, the strengths of diversity, and ways of organizing organizations that affirm everyone. iwa data collection the iwa quest for meaning began at the 1999 annual dare to be great conference attended by approximately fifty women. participants grouped according to the decade in which they entered administration to express their beliefs related to the purpose of iwa. the second stage of the data collection involved a two-day retreat for twenty-four women (including one charter member of iwa) working with a consultant through a strategic planning process. the final stage of data collection was a survey designed to determine member's hopes, dreams and frustrations with iwa that sent to all members of iwa. twenty-two members of iwa responded to the survey. through the three means of data collection, the board learned that iwa members have a strong sense of moral commitment that stems from a sense of purpose related to women's natural leadership strengths. iwa was regarded as a strong voice for women leadership in illinois. strengths of the organization included providing opportunities for women to develop relationships with other women through networking and the annual events such as the dare to be great conference. at the same time, the membership voiced a need to develop the strengths of iwa to become a stronger voice for women's leadership in illinois. the ambivalence that many women experience about association with women's organizations was revealed as an issue that needed to be addressed openly. the membership of iwa also recognized a need to reach out to minority women to develop a more complete voice of women leadership in illinois. the board of illinois women administrators reviewed the literature on women's administrator organizations as part of the process of redefining the purpose. in terms of addressing current needs of women administrators, iwa compared favorably to other women's administrative professional organizations (irby & brown, 1998). on the basis of membership, number and types of conferences, frequency of board meetings, and publications, iwa matched or exceeded the level of activity and service of similar statewide professional organizations for women in administration. in regards to recommendations for increasing support for women administrators (irby & brown, 1998), iwa was on target in terms of forming coalitions with other state agencies and organizations (iwa collaboration with illinois principals association), publicity about membership and networking, and research on women in leadership. while there was room for growth, the direction taken by iwa in the past few years was congruent with recommendations from the literature. specific recommendations from the literature on women's leadership organizations such as iwa centered on actions designed to deliberately transform the focus and emphasis of these organizations to understand and communicate more clearly the leadership strengths women bring to schools. women's organizations are encouraged through the outsider perspectives to consciously address issues of equity and diversity. (schmuck & schubert, 1995, p. 285). recommendations for action that were considered by the iwa board include the following taken from dunlap (1995) and gupton & slick (1996): 1. shift from women's lack of aspiration for administrative positions to their need for a better support system for aspirants. women need role models, mentors, networks, and family support to be successful as well as support systems through women's professional organizations and traditional male networks. 2. shift from women's lack of necessary qualifications and leadership ability to a greater concern about the quality of preparation and recognition of women's leadership talents. leadership theory must be broadened to include perspectives beyond white male images, experiences, and metaphors through additional research to increase understanding of women's leadership and how they fit into new organizational structures. 3. shift from focusing solely on too few women acquiring positions in educational administration to include on-the-job maintenance and retention issues. women must simultaneously understand the meaning of working as outsiders in traditional organizations and move towards creating new definitions for leadership based on feminine perspectives. women need to anticipate the creation of conflict as traditional norms are questioned. where conflict does not exist there are strong possibilities of dominance. advocates must understand the issues and find ways to use conflict to advance ways of new leadership. 4. shift from access to jobs in administration to equity of jobs. women must develop necessary political skills and networks to climb the career ladder. women already in positions of influence should work to eradicate discriminatory practices that bar advancement for women. 5. shift from focus on women's equity issues to creation of schools and universities that are good places for adults to work and learn. women must deliberately address issues of diversity and equity through agendas that are inclusive of all groups and recognize the emergence of values of inclusion and connection as effective leadership qualities. based on the data collection of iwa members, the board drafted a renewed mission to take to the membership with five recommendations to change the organizational by-laws. the proposed "mission of iwa is to improve schools by networking and mentoring women educational leaders into positions of influence in school administration." recommendations to change iwa goals in the by-laws included: (1) to be a voice through which women administrators positively influence illinois schools (2) to select, plan, and implement "passionate projects" that develop leadership in illinois schools as inclusive learning communities that value, respect, and promote diversity, (3) to mentor, promote, support, and nurture women administrators in all stages of their educational careers, (4) to conduct and/or disseminate research about women in administration. this research was first presented as a monograph to the iwa membership at the illinois women administrators dare to be great annual conference in april 2000. the revised by-laws and reorganization of local groups were approved at that conference and continue to change the agenda of iwa. as part of the dream of iwa to develop a voice in administrative leadership, iwa has sponsored a book about illinois women school leaders. the project is a collaborative effort by twenty women researchers who interviewed nineteen recognized women school leaders. the book seeks to explore relational leadership and discretionary decision making. illinois women administrators continues to redefine itself through the book project. the women who responded to the invitation to contribute to the book project teach in seven illinois universities with educational administration programs, creating new collaborations for iwa through higher education. the networks that will come from these women interviewing highly successful women administrators can only be imagined at this point. in the process of identification of women to be interviewed, careful consideration was given to inclusion of minority women. the stories of women who have faced and overcome significant gender and cultural barriers will provide positive models to all school leaders. finally, the excitement and interest generated by the project has been overwhelming. the theme of the proposed book resonates with many women. the future of iwa the organization and leadership from women in illinois is very different today than it was when the iwa board seriously questioned the need for its existence. iwa continues to discover a voice, both individually and as an organization. iwa is becoming their dream. references belenky, m., clinchy, b., goldberger, n, & tarule, h. (1986). women's ways of knowing. new york: basic books. bell, c. (1995). if i weren't involved with schools, i might be radical: gender consciousness in context. in d.m. dunlap & p.a. schmuck (eds.), women leading in education (pp. 199-224). albany, ny: state university of new york press. dunlap, d. (1995). women leading: an agenda for a new century. in d.m. dunlap & p.a. schmuck (eds.), women leading in education (pp. 199-224). albany, ny: state university of new york press. catalyst: creating women's networks. (1999). san francisco: jossey-bass publishers. dunlap, d.a. & schmuck, p.a. (eds.). (1995). women leading in education. albany, ny: state university of new york press. edson, s. (1995). ten years later: too little, too late? in d.m. dunlap & p.a. schmuck (eds.), women leading in education (pp. 199-224). albany, ny: state university of new york press. gilligan, c. (1992). in a different voice: psychological theory and women's development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. gosetti, p., & rusch. e. (1995). reexamining educational leadership: challenging assumptions. in d.m. dunlap & p.a. schmuck (eds.), women leading in education (pp. 11-35). albany, ny: state university of new york press. gupton, s., & slick g. (1996). highly successful women administrators and how they got there. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. harding, s. (1991). whose science? whose knowledge? thinking from women's lives. ithica, ny: cornell university press. helgeson, s. (1990). the female advantage. new york: doubleday currency. irby, b., & brown, g. (1998). exploratory study regarding the status of women's educational administrative support organizations. advancing women in leadership journal (winter). http://www.advancing women.com/awl/winter98 issacs, w. (1999). dialogue: and the art of thinking together. new york: currency. kanter, r. (1977). men and women of the corporation. new york: basic books, inc. mills, g. e. (2000). action research: a guide for the teacher researcher. upper saddle river, nj: merrill. sagor, r. (2000). guiding school improvement with action research. alexandria, va: association for supervision and curriculum development. schmuck, p., & schubert, j. (1995). women principal's views on sex equity: exploring issues of integration and information. in d.m. dunlap & p.a. schmuck (eds.), women leading in education (199-224). albany, ny: state university of new york press. sergiovanni, t. (1999). rethinking leadership: a collection of articles. arlington heights, il: skylight training and publishing. shakeshaft, c. (1987). women in educational administration. newbury park: sage. author dr. jenny tripses is the chair of the educational leadership and human development department at bradley university in peoria, illinois. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2004 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/temp/awpublisher.html file:///users/temp/content.html file:///users/temp/advertising.html file:///users/temp/privacy.html file:///users/temp/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 14 2010 issn 1093-7099 the role of balance in women’s leadership self-identity dr. robbie palmer hertneky abstract this study explores the role balance plays in the leadership self-identity of women college presidents. their understanding of themselves as leaders reveals the complexity of leadership. balance goes beyond juggling personal and professional lives and time commitments. it encompasses embracing weaknesses as well as strengths without losing competence or credibility, understanding that self-confidence and missteps are compatible, knowing that language can divide as well as unite, and recognizing that leadership includes loneliness and distance along with connection and praise. using narrative inquiry, the research examines the following: how these women describe and define themselves as leaders, what personal attributes contribute to their leadership, their past and future career intentions, how their relationships influence their leadership self-identity, and the stories they tell about themselves and their experiences. a clear picture of leadership self-identity as a holistic concept emerges, integrating five critical components—balance, authenticity, leading through relationships, composing a life, and learning. the complexity and nuance of balance as a facet of leadership, and the resulting implications for identifying and selecting leaders, is the focus of this article. keywords: women, leadership, college presidents, identity citation: hertneky, r. p. (2010). the role of balance in women’s leadership self-identity. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(14). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction leadership requires balance (mccarthy, o'connell, & hall, 2005). in an environment of complex change and paradoxical choices leaders are challenged to align actions with values, weigh options, navigate boundaries, manage multiple relationships, be self-aware and understand their capabilities, and juggle professional responsibilities while trying to maintain a personal life. leaders face the paradox of being a colleague and a boss, a team member and the decision maker; within this balance lives the loneliness of the leadership role. self-role merger, managing the boundary between herself as an individual and herself in the role of a leader, is a facet of leadership (conway, 2001; hiller, 2005). a leader is challenged to mesh her perception of herself as a leader with information she receives from her environment, while observing and controlling how she presents herself to others (brown, van ummersen, & sturnick, 2001; chandler, 1991; hiller, 2005; turner, 2007; waring, 2003). the motivation to lead can come at a personal cost, on the leader as well as her family (brown, et al., 2001; conway, 2001; sturnick, 1991). buffeted by conflicting demands requiring continuing negotiation and choices, she is trying to find enough time in the day to do it all. in my study of women college presidents, balance emerged as one component of leadership self-identity, the others being authenticity, leading through relationships, composing a life and learning. the study was based on the assumption that, to be able to be effective in a formal position of leadership, a person must perceive herself as a leader. the way people see themselves is so basic to how they behave and yet so “invisible” because it is such an internal and often privately held process. yet many of the activities of individuals in organizations—and certainly of leaders in organizations—are motivated by how people perceive themselves and how they hope to have others perceive them. (hall, 2004, p. 173) a leader’s perception of self, distinct from the perception of her by others, is leadership self-identity (hiller, 2005). leadership self-identity is a subtle and complex concept. it is a selfconstruction of experiences and self-knowledge that develops over time. one of the challenges of exploring leadership self-identity is that it may be called other things (i.e., self-knowledge, selfconcept, mind-set), or it may be discussed implicitly and not labeled at all. a clear picture of the leadership self-identity of this group of women college presidents emerged from the study. their understanding of themselves as leaders reveals the complexity of leadership. in the interviews i asked each president to describe: herself as a leader and those whose leadership she admires; personal attributes, those that contribute to her leadership and those she needs to develop; leadership self-perception transition, when she first thought of becoming a college president; and how she sees herself now in the role of president and looking forward. we talked about how their relationships have influenced their leadership self-identity. i asked participants to reflect on their leadership at different times in their career—the present, the time at which they decided they wanted to be a college president, and future considerations such as longevity and legacy. i was curious to hear the stories they told about themselves as leaders and leadership in general. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 participants in the study the purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the concept of leadership selfidentity in a particular population of formal leaders—women college presidents. as my doctoral research for the antioch university phd in leadership and change program, i complied with antioch’s institutional review board standards and procedures and received approval for the project. the participants in this study were a purposeful sample of women college presidents who meet the following criteria: (a) they have been in their current presidency for a minimum of two years and a maximum of six years; (b) they are in their first presidency, and (c) they are president of a private, liberal arts institution or a campus of a state university system. working from an american council on education list of college presidents, i identified a convenience sample of women presidents fitting the selection criteria in new england and mid-atlantic states. eighteen presidents were invited to be interviewed—twelve accepted the invitation. the participants fall into the following age categories: two are between 50–54 years old, five are between 55–59 years old, four are between 60–64 years old, and one is between 65–69 years old. the ethnicity of the participant pool includes one latina, one african-american, one middle eastern president, and nine caucasian women. four are the first women presidents of their institutions and one is the first latina president. ten presidents matriculated through the faculty into administrative leadership roles, one came up through higher education administration, and one came from outside the academy into the presidency. nine presidents came to their institutions as president and one moved from one campus within the state system to another campus to assume the presidency. two were interim presidents of their institutions before the permanent appointment and both of those institutions were in a financial crisis at the time. all institutions are not-for-profit. interviews were scheduled and conducted between march and may, 2008. with the twelfth interview, no new themes emerged, an indicator that redundancy had been reached and the data gathering phase was completed. i analyzed the narrative data thematically, looking for categories, connecting threads and patterns, and themes within and across each participant’s narratives. nvivo software was used in the content analysis for organizing and coding interview transcripts and, wherever possible, i used the words and phrases of the participants in the coding process. a response group of two other doctoral students checked my coding and interpretation for clarity. balance the participating women presidents talk about themselves as leaders in relationship with their constituents, as representatives of and in service to their institutions, as communicators and facilitators, as people with strengths and weaknesses, willing to make mistakes and committed to learning, for themselves and others. their career paths have been guided by mentors, shaped by choices for their own learning and development, and driven by the desire to make a difference. the presidency is a challenging position, requiring the commitment of time and energy and the advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 ability to balance life within and outside the role. the developing and sustaining of relationships, personal and professional, are a focus for these women. leading complex lives requiring balance and reflection, these women rely upon deliberate use of language in their leadership expression. the balance these women seek goes beyond balancing personal and professional lives and time commitments. they also weigh when to step in and when to hold back and let a colleague try something on their own; they understand that self-confidence and making mistakes are compatible; they serve both as a team member and make the difficult decisions as a leader; they can embrace their own weaknesses as well as strengths without losing competence or credibility; they know that language can divide as well as unite; they accept that leadership includes loneliness and distance as well as connection and praise. balance, for them, becomes a dance of integration and living with paradox. the literature on college presidents often mentions the strain on an individual’s personal life, which is one reason why few women choose to pursue a second presidency (brown, et al., 2001; sturnick, 1991). although the women presidents i interviewed shared the challenge of balancing their personal and professional lives and competing demands, they seem to enjoy the challenge. the more mature the president, the more at ease she seems with balancing her personal needs with the demands of the professional role. this may be due to her current age and stage of personal development, the outside demands of her stage in life, such as ages of children and familial expectations, and the age at which she assumed the presidency. two presidents interviewed assumed the position in their late 40s and early 50s, four became president in their mid-50s, and six stepped into the role in their late 50s and early 60s. family demands vary according to the age at which a woman assumes a presidency. one of the youngest presidents interviewed for this study said, “we have an 11-year-old son who has mixed feelings about this. you know it’s kind of cool to say your mom’s a president on the one hand, on the other, a little jealous of the time.” another participant, who falls into the more mature group, waited until her youngest child was in college to pursue a presidency. the different circumstances and choices of these two presidents represent the breadth of experience of the women in this study; they may also represent a generational shift. it would be interesting to look at the trends of the age at which women are stepping into the role and if there is a trend toward women becoming presidents at a younger age than in the past. it would also be interesting to note whether male presidents follow a similar trend. two aspects of leadership self-identity recognized by hiller (2005) are self-role merger and the personal cost of assuming a leadership position. both of these balancing aspects emerged from the findings of this study. these women understand that, as presidents, they lose the ability to speak or act as a private citizen. “it’s a role, it’s not a job, it’s a role,” one president said. they speak as the voice of the institution and act on behalf of the institution. i think it’s a weighty responsibility even though i joke about it. i’m still very conscious of the fact that people see me as the institution and not as a person. so i don’t talk politics, i don’t talk religion. weather is a good topic. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 another president commented about the consequences of another college president’s widely publicized remarks: what happened to larry summers was that he forgot for a little while that the president of harvard can never not speak as a president of harvard. . . . you don’t step outside the role, you’re always in it. in assuming the role of president and losing the ability to speak as an individual rather than as an institution, these women must be diligent in their self-censorship and how they present themselves publicly, careful about what they say and how they dress. the importance of physical appearance of women leaders emerged from the literature (brown, et al., 2001; chandler, 1991) and had been a controversial topic recently with a female candidate for president of the united states. the women in my study accept the importance of their self-presentation as the living logo of their institution and even mention how much easier it is for a man to put on a suit and tie and be ready to go. one president says with humor, “the only thing that i say that is not fair when you look at the genders: i have to get up an hour earlier to do my hair and my makeup.” these women do not waste time bemoaning the injustice. they find a style that works for them, and they move on. the most poignant example of a president balancing self and role is a young president who recognizes her naiveté. i hadn’t anticipated how tricky it would be to be a gay president. . . i feel like i’m always sort of pushing the envelope just a bit because i want to be as honest, have as much integrity, i want to live as openly and honestly as i can, but the line that i can’t cross is to the detriment of the university. and it’s hard to find that line sometimes. this is an added level of complexity in that she is not only watching herself, as others are, as a president and as a woman president, but also as a gay, woman president. she mentions having a gay, woman president as a colleague and role model, a clear example of the importance of having role models of people similar to ourselves in gender, race, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and ability. it would be interesting to speak with her again in ten years to see if the balancing has become easier. as reflected in the literature (brown, et al., 2001; conway, 2001; sturnick, 1991), these women talk about the commitment of time that the presidency requires. “if you look at my schedule i’m scheduled back-to-back. i think that’s the toughest part because you really want to respond to everybody, and you still have to prioritize.” another president said, “i knew it would be a 24/7 position but i guess i didn’t imagine that it would be quite so consuming. there is no life outside a presidency. not in my opinion.” although always expected to be in the role of president publicly, these women leaders balance playing the demanding presidential role, without being consumed by it, while maintaining a personal sense of self with authenticity and humanity. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 i am very comfortable, though, not necessarily being in the leading mode. when i go home, i don’t have to be the leader, although i do find sometimes i tend to take a leadership role in projects, much to my family’s dismay, only because i tend to be wellorganized. with family and friends, their networks of support, the role of president can be dropped. “i think my private life balances me very well. i’m very clear about that.” another president said, “i do nothing else except enjoy a terrific relationship with two wonderful daughters. and that’s been lifesaving throughout.” time away from performing as a president may be spent relaxing and enjoying family, restorative activities which may be active sports or quiet reflection, or conferring with colleagues for advice and support. relationships help them find their balance. you need to have someone that you can call, that you can rely upon for good advice. not necessarily the advice that you would like to [hear], but someone who can give you an unbiased opinion, and probably someone who has been there so they know the perspective. knowing what they do now about the demands of the position, the presidents clearly stated that they would still take the position. none of the women expressed regret in their decision to take on a presidency or that, now having done the job for a number of years; they feel it was a bad choice for them. the cost of leadership for these women includes the lack of a personal life, due to the expectation that the president is always representing her institution and the time and energy the role demands. the presidents interviewed for this study are willing to pay the personal price of the leadership role. it is a self-selection criterion for the role of president, and not all women are willing to pay such a high price. i realize that the women in this study chose to be interviewed and other presidents, who did not accept the invitation to be interviewed or were not invited due to the sample size of the study, may respond differently. balance is an issue in the consideration of a subsequent presidency. brown, et al. (2001) included second presidencies, whether the option exists for women and whether women see it as the next step in their career, as one of the five concerns of women’s leadership advancement in the role of president. the women i interviewed for this study, whether or not they go on to a second presidency, offer a vibrant and laudable example of the strength of a single presidency. these woman presidents have composed their lives to make time for the balance of family and career, focus on their work and the learning it offers, build and nurture important relationships, choose an institution to lead that most matches their values and talents, give the institution their full attention to make a difference for the community, and, when the time comes, will retire from the full-time commitment to pursue other adventures. i expect this scenario might be attractive to women considering a presidency, and at a cost they would be willing to pay. attention is given to balancing and shaping a career and life in the demanding role of president, rather than viewing the role as a temporary step toward advancement. although the women interviewed for this study might not expect a second presidency, they could still accept such a position if offered. accepting a second presidency, and the inherent balancing challenges, may depend upon the age of the woman when she first stepped into the role and how long she served in her first presidency. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 mccarthy, et al. (2005) reported balanced leadership as a combination of identity and adaptability and that “a [balanced] leader must be a balanced person” (p. 468). they include reflection, managing paradox, and being comfortable with change as facets of balanced leadership. i would include curiosity, maturity, the ability to prioritize and alignment. i would call the female presidents i interviewed balanced people, and therefore balanced leaders. they engage in reflection for both self-renewal and as a way to learn from their experiences. they are not only comfortable with change, they are agents of large-scale change efforts. “it isn’t change for the sake of change, but change in order to make a stronger institution, and also change [so] that an ideal situation is really embraced by the members of the organization,” one said. these presidents have the personal and professional maturity to prioritize the needs of the institution with their own needs. another president spoke of “finding the balance between what i’m willing to do as a person and what i have to do as a leader of the institution.” sometimes it means choosing to attend a daughter’s graduation over the institution’s ceremony. i sent an email in the beginning of april last year to the community and i called it “probability” and i said, “what is the probability that my daughter’s graduation from medical school will be the same day, almost the same time, as the commencement?” i said, “it doesn’t matter what the probability is. it’s going to happen and i’m choosing to go to my daughter’s graduation,” and i pushed the send button. people said to me, “the community is going to be upset, it’s unheard of.” the chancellor said, “i think you should go to your daughter’s graduation” and then i got a slew of emails back from people saying we wouldn’t respect you if you didn’t choose your daughter’s graduation. and other people said, “that’s great, we believe that you made the right choice.” roberts (2007) discussed balance as alignment. “each woman’s source of strength was the alignment she experienced between her identity (professional, gender, and cultural) and the work in which she fully engaged” (p. 348). this alignment, balance, integration of selves and source of strength allows the women roberts profiles, and the women participants in this study, to act with authenticity, bring their whole selves to work, and, “mobiliz[e] others to achieve joint successes, connecting with others to foster high-quality relationships, and passionately pursue their goals” (p. 336). the duality of managing a career and acting as a woman is expected to act is represented in the literature (hennig & jardim, 1978), as is the duality experienced by women of color in leadership positions (lindsay, 1999; turner, 2007; waring, 2003). the women i interviewed hold the complexity of the demands of the presidency and understand the rigor and challenges of the role. for them, balancing is a dynamic, on-going process, requiring a level of comfort with duality and complexity, and an ability to manage seemingly incompatible components of paradox. they choose to carry the responsibility of the position and feel it counterbalances the privilege and an honor to be able to serve their institutions. i think being a president of a university is a big privilege, because you really can make a huge positive impact on the lives of your students . . . i know it requires a lot of time, but again i enjoy what i do. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 leadership self-identity balance, along with authenticity, leading through relationships, composing a life, and learning, are the critical concepts of leadership self-identity emerging from this study. these women presidents are engaged in balancing—their time, their personal lives, the needs of their families, the demands of the job, and themselves in and out of the role of president. age and experience appear to help as they better manage priorities and as their children leave home, but they still recognize the time and energy required to do the work of the president. these women see themselves as leaders, although the label of leader is more comfortable for some than others. they describe themselves as collaborators, facilitators, change agents, role models and teachers. working with others and developing relationships is a priority because they see it as effective and they prefer to work that way. these presidents perform in service to their institutions, understand that they are representative of their institutions, and feel it is a privilege to be able to make a difference in the lives of their communities. as leaders they are able to assess their deficits as well as their strengths, and they often do so using humor. standing at the center of the work of these leaders are learning and teaching, which are also personal values and the behaviors they model. for most of the women, the goal of becoming a president emerged as they took on administrative positions of greater responsibility and had the opportunity to see what the position entailed. they were intrigued and thought it was something they could do and do well, and have fun in the process. a story they hold in common is that of a mentor seeing their potential earlier in their career and planting the seed of a possible future presidency. the seed is remembered upon reflection, rather than driving their career choices. these women leaders make choices largely by seizing opportunities that look interesting and offer learning; the inherent risk is recognized without deterring the pursuit. the women have ideas about the future with few definite scenarios; they will see how events unfold and make decisions accordingly—what one president calls drift and planning. the mark that they want to make with their presidency will be one of leaving their institutions stronger than when they arrived, not one of self-aggrandizement. relationships are primary in their work lives and how they understand their work. the presidents see mentoring and role-modeling as part of their leadership role, because they were mentored and learned from role models in their development. they delight in collaborative efforts, which also present some of the true difficulties of the position. personnel issues, board relations, student and faculty-related issues are mentioned as some of the greatest challenges these women face as presidents. they value communication and language, intrinsically and as tools of leadership. the presidents recognize the power of their voice, in joining them with others and setting them apart. there is an unfolding nature to their narratives—the unfolding of their careers, their presidencies, their families and their lives. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 although they do not use the term leadership self-identity, ruderman and ohlott (2002) presented similar findings from their study of high-achieving managerial women. they are interested in the “choices about ‘how’ to be a woman leader” (p. xii) and are looking to identify the “underlying forces guiding the personal choices and trade-offs in the lives of managerial women” (p. 5). the emerging themes of their study are authenticity, connection, controlling your destiny, wholeness, and self-clarity. ruderman and ohlott explained self-clarity as selfknowledge. “women high in self-clarity approach transitions and chaotic situations with the perspective that they can learn something from them regardless of what happens, and they can admit mistakes and learn from failures as well as successes” (pp. 136-137). their emerging themes correspond to the leadership self-identity concepts of balance, authenticity, leading through relationships, composing a life and learning. clearly emerging from my interviews is the holistic nature of leadership self-identity, greater than the sum of its parts, driving the actions and behaviors of the women presidents. it provides the women leaders in this study with the strength and power, even fearlessness, to act with integrity and authenticity. it encourages them to accept the paradoxical complexity and ambiguity of leading through relationships and being the lonely decision maker, and to trusting themselves as they compose their lives and careers. it equips them to face the uncertainty of taking the leap to accept a presidency, and allows them to live with and to thrive on the conditions of risk. the holistic nature of leadership self-identity helps them keep their lives in balance and supports their vulnerability as continuously learning leaders. this model of leadership self-identity provides a structure to study the subtleties of leadership and offers a template and vocabulary for the evolving leadership discussion. complexity, balance and leadership the female leaders interviewed for this study, through their concept of themselves as leaders, reveal the complexity and nuance of balance that is a facet of leadership. they have strength of character and conviction, while practicing a style of inclusion and soliciting the input of others. they like being a team member and speak highly of their senior teams, while stepping aside to make the necessary decisions and take responsibility for them. they value loyalty and integrity, in themselves and others, believe the president sets the ethical standard for the institution, and are clear about what is expected of them and what they expect of themselves. although they truly enjoy collaborative work, they list personnel issues among their greatest challenges as president. they have shaped their personal and professional lives according to their goals and circumstances at the time. they assumed the presidency at different ages and stages of their lives, requiring different degrees of negotiation with partners and families. their families are important and often mentioned. the presidents present themselves as integrated—wives, mothers, daughters, friends, partners, colleagues, scholars, teachers, and presidents. they strive for balance in their lives, juggling the demands on their time and maintaining their personal identity while fulfilling a challenging institutional role. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 these leaders reach out to others, as others reached out to them. mentors, role models and teachers are an integral part of these women’s concept of leadership and themselves as leaders. mentors helped them recognize their leadership potential, and role models have shown what leadership can look like. these presidents are excited by the learning environments of their campuses and see their leadership role as a privilege and honor, an opportunity to influence and make a difference in the lives of their students, faculty, and communities. the conceptual model of leadership self-identity that emerges from these interviews encompasses character and authenticity, connectedness, empathy, courage, confidence, passion and commitment, creativity, individuality, balance, wholeness, humor, integration, learning, voice and language, mentoring and teaching, preparation, curiosity and energy. the breadth and range of the list reflects the complexity of leadership. as such, it presents significant implications for how leaders are identified, selected, educated, and trained. can a person learn how to apply this model of leadership self-identity to develop herself for leadership? can a person learn to be honest and have integrity? can she learn to respect the opinions of others and work as a member of a team? can she develop the ability to improvise and create her life as she lives it, responding to the world around her and her core values? how does she learn to be a balanced person in order to be a balanced leader? does she have the patience, curiosity, and stamina to learn and change? can she learn courage, what one president calls, “a kind of quiet, consistent resolve?” these questions point to some skills and talents that can be learned and developed and to aspects of a person’s character that are more elusive. according to this leadership self-identity model, leadership requires, among other things, the capacity for critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, strong communication skills, an ability to interact effectively with a variety of people, cultural competence, courage, self-knowledge and the finesse to manage large-scale change efforts. all of these may be nurtured and encouraged by a strong liberal arts education, broad reading, a passion for language, travel and multiple professional and community service work experiences. although skills and strategies for leadership can be taught, aspects of character— temperament and personality—lie at the core of the individual. this speaks to a more oldfashioned development of the well-rounded, integrated, whole person for leadership, rather than specialized training in aspects of leadership. as one president interviewed said, “i’m not sure that it’s [leadership] something that can be taught in a series of steps. i think it’s more than that. it has to do with qualities of mind and soul and experience and belief.” from this study of women college presidents a rich and complex portrait of leadership, and women’s leadership in particular, emerges. these women lead fulfilling personal and professional lives, constantly balancing conflicting demands, and have the inner resolve and courage to often be the only women at the leadership table or the first woman president of their institution. they have the energy to try something new and all the while keep the big picture clearly in mind. compelled by curiosity and eagerness to examine the world around them and understand the people with whom they work, they learn from failure and success. they have the confidence to take risk and make mistakes, along with the wisdom and the perspective that comes from self-knowledge and self-clarity. and, as role models, they exhibit the humanity of leadership with their humor and the ability to laugh at themselves. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 limitations of study and suggestions for future research this study is an exploratory, qualitative study, producing narrative data for analysis and interpretation. the strength, and limitation, of this study is my intuition, skills of interpretation, and judgment, as is the case with all narrative inquiry. i see this as the beginning of a line of research on balance and the complexity of leadership; the results of this study provide a basis for exploring other populations of leaders to ascertain commonalities and differences. it will take further studies to determine what this says about balance and leadership self-identity in general, and what is applicable only to the this small sample of female leaders. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 references brown, g., van ummersen, c., & sturnick, j. (2001). from where we sit: women's perspectives on the presidency. district of columbia: american council on education, washington, dc. office of women in higher education. chandler, a. (1991). first woman anything: my experiences as first woman chair of aascu. in j. a. sturnick, j. e. milley & c. a. tisinger (eds.), women at the helm: pathfinding presidents at state colleges and universities (pp. 24-29). washington, dc: aascu press. conway, j. k. (2001). a woman's education (1st ed.). new york: a.a. knopf. hall, d. t. (2004). self-awareness, identity, and leader development. in d. v. day, s. j. zaccaro & s. m. halpin (eds.), leader development for transforming organizations: growing leaders for tomorrow (pp. 153-176). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. hennig, m. j., & jardim, a. (1978). the managerial woman. new york: pocket books. hiller, n. j. (2005). an examination of leadership beliefs and leadership self-identity: constructs, correlates, and outcomes. dissertation abstracts international, 66 (12), b. (umi no. 3202503) lindsay, b. (1999). women chief executives and their approaches towards equity in american universities. comparative education, 35(2), 187-199. mccarthy, j. f., o'connell, d. j., & hall, d. t. (2005). leading beyond tragedy: the balance of personal identity and adaptability. leadership & organization development journal, 26(5/6), 458. roberts, l. m. (2007). bringing your whole self to work: lessons in authentic engagement from women leaders. in b. kellerman & d. l. rhode (eds.), women and leadership: the state of play and strategies for change (pp. 329-360). san francisco: jossey-bass. ruderman, m. n., ohlott, p. j., & center for creative leadership. (2002). standing at the crossroads: next steps for high-achieving women (1st ed.). san francisco: jossey-bass; center for creative leadership. sturnick, j. a. (1991). the second presidency. in j. a. sturnick, j. e. milley & c. a. tisinger (eds.), women at the helm: pathfinding presidents at state colleges and universities (pp. 96103). washington, dc: aascu press. turner, c. s. v. (2007). pathways to the presidency: biographical sketches of women of color firsts. harvard educational review, 77(1), 1-38. waring, a. l. (2003). african-american female college presidents: self conceptions of leadership. journal of leadership & organizational studies, 9(3), 31. biography dr. hertneky is on the faculty at antioch university new england in the department of organization & management. she received a ph.d. in leadership and change from antioch university, a m.ed. in administration and supervision from antioch university new england and a b.a. in art history from williams college. microsoft word slater.docx volume 14, fall, 2003 issn 1093-7099 publisher: gretchen glasscock editors: beverly j. irby, & genevieve browen advancing women in leadership pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 51 table of contents preface ....................................................................................................................................................................52 credits ....................................................................................................................................................................53 guest and past reviewers ................................................................................................................................. 54 a study of the correlation between the motives of female high self monitors and emergent leadership: a literature review .............................................................................................................................................. 55 charles slater .................................................................................................................................................... 55 introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 55 literature review .............................................................................................................................................. 55 leadership emergence .................................................................................................................................. 55 self-monitoring behavior ............................................................................................................................. 55 conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................ 57 references ......................................................................................................................................................... 57 author ........................................................................................................................................................... 58 pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 52 preface advancing women in leadership on-line journal was launched in 1997 with the intent of publishing manuscripts that report, synthesize, review, or analyze scholarly inquiry that focuses on women's issues. the intent of this journal is to encourage and support the proliferation of women in positions of leadership in all aspects of professional and corporate america. in the encouragement of advancing women in leadership, we present the following manuscripts. they are: women faculty in higher education: impeded by academe by dr. dana e. christman working against the grain: rewards and consequences of developing a personal voice in academia by dr. pamela lepage and dr. gretchen givens-generett creating space for subjectivity: wandering discourses of female/teacher by dr. donna k. phillips and dr. j.camille cammack. magazines: what adolescent girls are reading and the way they shape body image by dr. rebecca a. robles-piña and heidi sauer a study of the correlation between the motives of female high self monitors and emergent leadership: a literature review by charles salter hispanic female superintendents in america: a profile by dr. margaret a. manuel and dr. john r. slate our intent is that this journal is viewed as a professional publication site for scholarly inquiry and perspectives that promote gender equity and advance women in leadership. it is our hope that you find this issue of advancing women in leadership thought provoking, enjoyable, and that you look forward to subsequent issues. suggestions for improvement, encouragement, and submission for upcoming issues are welcomed and appreciated. genevieve brown, ed.d. & beverly j. irby, ed.d. editors copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) 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church, houston, texas dr. robert williams sam houston state university dr. rose lyn zanville president, lyn zanville, inc., leadership specialist ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- guest and past reviewers dr. joanne ardovini-brooker dr. joy carter dr. norvella carter maxine cooper dr. ken craycraft dr. sally craycraft dr. jo ann duffy dr. alice fisher dr. brigitta fringes dr. dashiel geyen dr. maxine greene ann halstead dr. jeanine hirtle dr. claudia iselt dr. patricia larke sharon lenhart dr. jim merchant margaree mithcell joy mullett deborah nyberg rocio pellezer dr. charol shakeshaft laurinda spear naomi tropp dr. pam zelbst dr. robin mcgrew-zoubi copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 55 advancing women in leadership fall 2003, pp. 55-58 available online at http:// https://awl-ojs-tamu.tdl.org/awl/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper a study of the correlation between the motives of female high self monitors and emergent leadership: a literature review charles slater charles slater: ph.d. in leadership studies at lady of the lake university if women do have a tendency to elicit high self-monitoring behavior because they have a need to get along with others, and if men elicit a high self-monitoring behavior because they have an acquisitive disposition, an acknowledgement of those apposed motivations would lead to a better understanding of the diverse talents that each group brings to the job. introduction in 1972, researchers reported that only 4% of the master of business administration graduates were women. this figure now exceeds 33%. similarly, in 1972, women occupied about 20% of non-clerical, white-collar jobs. this figure has now grown to more than 46% (sharpe, 1994). sharpe also contended that in 1972, only 17% of all managerial positions were held by women, but by 1994 that number had increased by 43%. although women have flooded managerial positions in recent years, concern still remains about what some refer to as a "glass ceiling" that prohibits women from reaching the topmost levels of corporate leadership. ragins, townsend, and mattis (1998) stated that, of the most highly compensated corporate executives in fortune 500 companies only 2% are currently women and only .4% of the fortune 1000 chief executive officer, (ceo), positions are held by women. maruca (1997) promulgated that male ceos blamed the "glass ceiling" on women's lack of experience and time in organizations. in the same study, however, female executives disagreed citing exclusionary corporate cultures as the reason for their lack of advancement to top management positions. this paper looks at one of the human behaviors known to be compatible with emergent leadership, self-monitoring behavior, and its possible relationship to the "glass ceiling" prohibiting women's advancement within corporations. literature review leadership emergence bass (1981) made a major distinction in leadership research between individuals who are formally appointed to positions of leadership and individuals who emerge as leaders of formal groups. de souza and klein (1995) concluded that groups with emergent leaders outperformed groups without emergent leaders. most of the research investigating emergent leadership has been directed by the trait approach, which assumes that leaders are endowed with certain innate characteristics that predispose them to be effective leaders in a wide range of situations. empirical support for the trait approach has been lacking and because of this some researchers have concluded that a leadership trait does not exist (jenkins, 1947). however, lord, de vader, and alliger (1986) found that some variance in leader emergence could be predicted by the dominance, intelligence, and masculinity-femininity of the leader. hollander (1961;1964) identified task competence and identification as traits of emergent leaders. task competence encompasses the set of characteristics that are required by a group to attain its goals and includes social competencies. identification entails a clear involvement with the group task and loyalty toward group members. sorrentino and boutillier (1975) found rate of verbal participation to be a predictor of emergent leadership. emergent leadership has also been positively related to extroversion, openness to experience, and cognitive ability (kickul & neuman, 2000). kenny and zaccaro (1983) proposed that persons who are consistently cast into leadership positions possess the ability to perceive and predict variations in group situations and pattern their own behavior accordingly. dobbins, long, dedrick, and clemons (1990) concluded that kenny and zaccaro's (1983) characteristics of persons regularly cast into leadership roles were consistent with snyder's (1979) description of selfmonitoring behavior. self-monitoring behavior snyder (1974) related that people who engage in high selfmonitoring behavior regulate their behavior in ways that are highly sensitive to situational cues. high self-monitors have a strong concern that their behavior is appropriate for the social situations in which they find themselves. individuals who are high self-monitors are particularly sensitive to the social cues and self-presentations of others, and use social cues as advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 56 guidelines for managing their own behavior and or creating desirable impressions (synder, 1986). in contrast, low selfmonitoring persons display less concern for the situational appropriateness of their behavior, which appears to be guided from their internal cues, rather than by situational specifications of appropriate behavior. therefore, one might say that high self-monitors are impression managers who are to a great degree concerned with the impression their actions have on others. their concern for the impression they make results in their adjusting their behavior so as to present themselves in the most favorable light. low self-monitors are more inclined to act in accord with their own true feelings, attitudes, and values in social settings (synder, 1986). it has been suggested by turnley and bolino (2001) that high self-monitors elicit the same five personality characteristics as those reported by costa and mccrae (1988). the big five personality traits are said to help predict a person's success in organizations. in summary they are: 1) extroversionor the extent to which a person is outgoing, 2) agreeableness-or the degree to which one is cooperative, 3) openness to experience-defines a nature to be curious and creative, 4) emotional stability-or a persons propensity to be calm, self confident, and cool, and 5) conscientiousness-the degree to which an individual is hard working, dependable, and persevering. barrick and mount (1991) reported that these personality characteristics were valid predictors of success for many occupational groups. some research has found a strong relationship between selfmonitoring and leader emergence in groups (cronshaw & ellis, 1991; ellis, adamson, deszca & cawsey, 1988). other research has suggested that these effects are moderated by the sex of group members and the nature of the task confronting the group (ellis, 1988; garland & beard, 1979). ellis (1988) examined the effects of self-monitoring on leader emergence in natural mixed-sex groups and found that leader emergence and high self-monitoring behavior were related for males, but not for females. dobbins et al. (1990) found that high selfmonitoring men emerged as leaders in groups of high selfmonitoring women and men disproportionately to women. nyquist and spence (1986) reported that 90% of high dominant men became leaders over low dominant women, and only 25% of high dominant women emerged as leaders over low dominant men. wentworth and anderson (1984) found that men emerged as leaders in 86% of mixed-sex groups. carbonell (1984) showed that females with leadership ability assert leadership in interactions with other females but fail to do so in the company of males. it is plausible that high self-monitoring females in mixed-sex groups inhibit leadership behavior because they fear such behavior will be viewed as inappropriate according to sex role stereotypes. in contrast to ellis' (1988), finding that high self-monitoring behavior correlated with leader emergence in males, garland and beard (1979) found that high self-monitoring females, but not males, emerged as leaders in their respective groups. these results in regard to high self-monitoring females can be explained by sex role research demonstrating that females will assert leadership in interaction with other females (carbonell, 1984; megargee, 1969). kent and moss (1994) found in their study on emergent leaders that masculine subjects emerged as leaders more often than feminine subjects. another study indicated that sex differences in emergent leadership are due to role-induced tendencies for men to specialize more than women in behaviors strictly oriented to their group's task and for women to specialize more than men in socially facilitative behaviors (eagly, karau, & steven, 1991; karakowsky, leonard, & siegel, 1999). most if not all the traits that have been studied about emergent leadership are characteristics of those who are high self-monitors. other differences in female and male high self-monitors have been documented. shaffer and pegalis (1998) reported that high self-monitoring females failed to elicit more self-disclosure than their low self-monitoring counterparts, while male high self-monitors did elicit more self-disclosure. men high selfmonitors clearly promoted male self-disclosure in a collaborative or work setting context, whereas female high selfmonitors actually inhibited self-disclosure in collaborative work settings. in contrast to women's reported tendency to selfdisclose to other women more in social-expressive contexts, shaffer and ogden (1986) and shaffer and pegalis (1998) found that women high self-monitors did not elicit more selfdisclosure from female acquaintances in social-expressive contexts than in collaborative contexts. guarino, michael, and hocevar (1997) reported differences in the social integration of female high self-monitors and male high self-monitors in relation to student integration into community college life. specifically, they found that male high self-monitors were socially integrated faster and to a greater degree, than female high self-monitors. the questions that arise, are: what makes female high selfmonitors less likely to be emergent leaders than male high selfmonitors in mixed-sex groups? and what stimulates women high self-monitors to be less likely to elicit self-disclosure from other women in a collaborative work setting, and less socially integrating in college environments? briggs and cheeks (1988) and lennox and wolfe (1984) stated that people vary their selfpresentation style for different motives and that these motives should be taken into account in studying self-presentation. according to wolfe, lennox, and cutler (1986), high selfmonitors vary their self-presentation for two reasons: 1) acquisition-or trying to get ahead, or 2) self-protection-trying to get along. research also discovered that the occurrence of protective and acquisitive self-presentations is contingent on: the audience of the presenter, the context, and the person making the self-presentation. wolfe et al. (1986) also reported that self-presenters chronically adopt either a protective or an acquisitive self-presentation style. he further reports that factors associated with self-presenters adopting a protective style include: social anxiety, shyness, conformity, reticence, low self-esteem, modesty, and neutrality. conversely people adopting an acquisitive self-presentation style are characterized as being more self-confident and higher in self-esteem. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 57 understandably a high self-monitor that did not elicit traits found to be those of emergent leaders, such as self-confidence, would probably be less likely to be named as a leader by others. conclusion in conclusion more research should be done to identify the motivation of women high self-monitors. are those motivations concerned more with the facilitative behaviors or trying to get along with others' motivation rather than an acquisitive desire. also, more study should be conducted on the differences in the men and women relate to tasks and group goals and the way men and women engage in problem solving. one would prefer to believe that male bias is not the reason for the "glass ceiling" effect for women. one would further prefer to believe that if this barrier does exist it is borne of a misunderstanding of the differences in which men and women conduct conflict resolution as well as goal setting and attainment. by understanding the motivations of people, even if they are not similar to our own, we can understand the principles on which they base decisions. by understanding the logical reasoning constructs on which they base decisions we can more easily predict their behavior. being able to predict a manager's behavior is a source of comfort to any superior and leads to a better relationship and more fluidity of communication. if women do have a tendency to elicit high self-monitoring behavior because they have a need to get along with others, and if men elicit a high self-monitoring behavior because they have an acquisitive disposition, an acknowledgement of those apposed motivations would lead to a better understanding of the diverse talents that each group brings to the job. we could then, as corporate managers, make the best and highest use of all the personnel resources available to us. today in corporate boardrooms throughout the united states, we see companies that are finding themselves in one type of predicament or another. many of these problems are intensified because of a collegiate atmosphere, or a reciprocity that emanates from like thinking. this reciprocity results in board members being hesitant to question the actions of those colleagues that are the chief executive officers of these corporations. for the abovementioned reason alone, we need to foster an understanding of the motivations of men and women and welcome the difference, if one exists, into a system mired down in like-mindedness. references barrick, m. r. & mount, m. k. 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(1998). gender gap in the executive suite: ceos and female executives report on breaking the glass ceiling. academy of management executive, 2, 28-42. shaffer, d. r., & ogden, j. k. (1986). on sex differences in self-disclosure during the acquaintance process: the role of anticipated future interaction. journal of personality and social psychology, 51, 76-96. shaffer, d. r., & pegalis, l. j. (1998). gender and situational context moderate the relationship between self-monitoring and induction of self-disclosure. journal of personality, 66, 215-234. sharpe, r. (1994). women make strides, but men stay firmly in top company jobs. the wall street journal, march 29, 1994. sorrentino, r. m., & boutillier, r. g. (1975). the effect of quantity and quality verbal interaction on ratings of leadership ability. journal of experimental social psychology, 11, 403-411. synder, m. (1974). the self-monitoring of expressive behavior. journal of personality and social psychology, 30, 526-537. synder, m. (1979). self-monitoring processes. advances in experimental social psychology, 12, 86-128. synder, m. (1986). public appearances/private realities. new york: freeman and company. turnley, w. h., & bolino, m. c. (2001). achieving desired images while avoiding undesired images: exploring the role of self-monitoring in impression management. journal of applied psychology, 86, 351-360. wentworth, d. k., & anderson, l. r. (1984). emergent leadership as a function of sex and type. sex roles, 11, 513-524. wolfe, r., lennox, r., & cutler, b. (1986). "getting along" and "getting ahead": empirical support for a theory of protective and acquisitive self-presentation. journal of personality and social psychology, 50, 356-361. author charles salter received his masters in business administration from the university of houston, tx and is currently working on his ph.d. in leadership studies at our lady of the lake university in san antonio, tx. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership education and women's resiliency: exploring the experiences of successful women from disadvantaged backgrounds pamela lepage-lees, ed.d lepage-lees, summer, 1998 while some research has explored the needs of minority women, very little research has focused on women who have faced other disadvantages beyond those associated with minority status. a few years ago, i talked to a friend about hiring practices in academia. she had served on several search committees during her first year in a tenure track position. i was seeking a position in higher education and she was gave me advice as a result of her recent experiences. although i was most interested in educational psychology and women's issues, i also had quite a bit of experience in other areas of education, for example, educational technology. i wondered if having interests, experiences and publications in other areas would seem a benefit (broad experience) or a detriment (unfocused). much of my more current research was related to my true interests, but i was afraid of being judged by what i had done in the past. the response from her department was of particular interest to me since many of the women in her department considered themselves feminists. she responded that the search committee members had great sympathy for "people like me." they recognized the problem as being related to lack of mentorship as opposed to lack of focus or talent. ultimately the results were the same. candidates without a singular focus were overlooked. in some ways these women were correct, i did not always have good mentoring, although this is a simplistic interpretation of my situation. lack of mentoring is a common problem among women and nontraditional students. the questions then becomes, what are other problems and what should be done about them? in this situation a few academics understood the barriers to inclusion for women and nontraditional applicants, and were concerned about this issue, but could not find a way to put their moral beliefs into practice. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html this paper is not a personal anedote, it is a research paper born out of my dissertation where i interviewed women who achieved highly in academics and who were also disadvantaged as children. in that study, stories such as the example described above were commonplace. the purpose of my dissertation was to understand how education assisted these women in their academic achievement or hindered them in their progress. in this paper, i would like to explore the barriers to education for women in higher education and report how some women have overcome these barriers. women and high achievement other authors have addressed why some women achieve highly despite barriers to their success. in this area, most authors have solicited input from successful women in minority groups or in particular occupations (flores, 1988; furumoto, 1980; gotwalt & towns, 1986; hobson-smith, 1982; o'connell & russo, 1980; wyche & graves, 1992). for example, hobson-smith (1982) interviewed 12 africanamerican women who have achieved highly in academics and who also worked in higher education. the profiles in that research indicate that these women became aware of their potential in their formative years. each was nurtured and encouraged by strong family members and occasionally by professionals, such as teachers. these high-achieving african american women possessed a keen awareness of their strengths and a commitment to better the lives of all people, especially african-americans. the majority of them felt they had been victims of both race and sex discrimination and had to exert energy to fight both. this wasted time, which could have been better utilized doing other things. hard work and preparation were believed to be the essential ingredients for career success. while some research has explored the needs of minority women, very little research has focused on women who have faced other disadvantages beyond those associated with minority status. specifically, few researchers have attempted to understand and describe the special needs of women who have faced multiple disadvantages, especially those who experienced traumatic stress as children. harrington and boardman conducted a study that used biographical information to explain why some people from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve (in wells, 1989). these investigators interviewed 30 men (15 anglo and 15 african-american) and 30 women (15 anglo and 15 african-american) whom they described as people who were disadvantaged as children and were now successful as adults. subjects were considered disadvantaged if their parents did not graduate from high school or if their parents had low-status jobs. these investigators also interviewed 40 people whom they described as not being disadvantaged. subjects were not disadvantaged if at least one of their parents had graduated from high school or held a higher-status job. according to their findings, men and women who were successful despite their disadvantage were willing to confront obstacles directly rather than indirectly were more likely to turn failure around to their advantage were better trained for failure had an internal locus of control were self-sufficient were strongly motivated to achieve were reward oriented some of their conclusions are similar to mine, even though harrington and boardman's project (in wells, 1989) is different in many ways. for example, similar to harrington and boardman's results, the women in my study often turned their disadvantages to their advantage. many recognized, for example, that although disadvantage made the education process more difficult, it also motivated them to achieve and gave them a better understanding of different perspectives. other similarities and differences are described in the findings section of this article. harrington and boardman's study is different than mine mainly because their definition of disadvantage is very different. although parent education level has been recognized as an important achievement factor, it is not the only source of disadvantage. finally, in another study, gandara (1982) interviewed 17 mexican-american women who were from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and who also succeeded in completing a j.d., m.d., or ph.d. degree. although the author did not focus on her participants' childhood stress, they could easily be labeled disadvantaged not only because of their race and economic status, but also because they were first generation (in this country) and most of their families spoke only spanish in the home. in her study, gandara emphasized family influences. specifically, her findings showed that a mother's encouragement to persist, a strong work ethic in the family, a nonauthoritarian style of parenting, and equal treatment for girls and boys were all important factors in promoting success. although it was reported that a large percentage of these women lived in homes where they spoke spanish, the women also attributed some of their success to the fact that they were comfortable with both hispanic and anglo culture. the investigator credited their comfort to the fact that most of these women had attended highly integrated schools. finally, one last relevant finding was that the women in gandara's study most often credited their successes to their families, while men most often attribute their success to inner strength. this was also a characteristic of the women who were interviewed for this study. they often blamed themselves for their failures and credited their families with their successes. method participants in this project, in-depth interviews were conducted with 21 academically high achieving women who were also disadvantaged as children. qualitative measures were used to explore how education assisted these women in their academic achievement or set up barriers to their success. to qualify as disadvantaged, the participants had to have these experiences in common, 1) they lived in either a poor working class or lower class family as a child, 2) they were first generation college students, 3) they experienced at least one type of familial dysfunction or traumatic childhood stress (physical and or sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, severe illness and, or other stress). this identified women as disadvantaged if they did not have access to resources in three categories: financial, informational and social/emotional. to qualify as high achievers, the participants had to have an advanced degree or currently be enrolled as an advanced graduate student with at least two years of graduate work completed. women were recruited from all disciplines including, but not limited to, education, law, medicine, engineering, business, literature and psychology. the group of resilient participants included representatives from different ethnic groups including, african-american, european-american and hispanic. data collection methods and procedures data were collected in three ways, through in-depth interviews, questionnaires and historical records. when appropriate, information from one source was used to enrich information provided from another. interviews. in-depth personal interviews were used to describe and explain the educational experiences of each participant. these interviews provided the opportunity to explore in detail each participant's ideas and feelings about her education. the interviews were open-ended; the interviewer guided the inquiry, but the participants were allowed to discuss in detail what they considered important about their lives and their educational experiences. the interviews were audiotaped and then transcribed verbatim in preparation for analysis. questionnaire. after the interview was completed, an experience questionnaire was administered to each participant. the design of this questionnaire was guided by pilot study findings. the questionnaire provided a second opportunity for the participants to express their attitudes about education in a completely different format. the answers from the questionnaires were compared to the interview data to ensure that consistent answers were provided by each participant. transcripts. historical records were also used as a third and final check for consistency. participants were asked to sign a letter of permission so that the investigator could send away for transcripts from high schools, colleges and graduate schools. by analyzing transcripts, not only was the investigator able to compare actual records with self-report data, but these records were also used to identify the types of classes taken by individual students, grade levels in certain subjects, patterns of class enrollment and elements of transition from high school to college. data analysis the challenge of qualitative data analysis is to make sense of massive amounts of data, identify significant patterns, and construct a framework for communicating the essence of what the data reveal (patton, 1990). transcripts were made from each interview and descriptive data were presented in a way that people could draw their own conclusions. for example, dialog quotes were coded and listed as evidence, and demographic information was presented in tables. interviews were analyzed with an inductive cross-case analysis. inductive analysis means that the patterns, themes and categories emerged out of the data rather than being imposed on them prior to data collection and analysis. a cross-case analysis means that the information was grouped together according to different people, themes, perspectives or issues. in this project, data was organized topically. in the final step, the data was interpreted. interpretation, by definition, goes beyond description. interpretation means attaching significance to what was found, offering explanations, drawing conclusions, making inferences, building linkages, attaching meanings, imposing order and dealing with rival explanations. rigor within the positivist paradigm, a study's rigor is judged through measures of reliability and validity. lincoln and guba (1985) have offered the following four alternative terms which are more applicable in determining the rigor of a study conducted within an interpretivistic paradigm including, credibility, comfirmability, dependability and transferability. to check for credibilty, the interview data was supplemented with information provided in the questionnaires and in other historical documentation (transcripts). as an additional check for credibility, the women in this study were given a copy of the final report and asked to provide feedback on whether or not the results accurately reflected their voices. the women's response were very positive. to check for confirmability, two outside observers (in addition to the dissertation committee members) were asked to evaluate the interpretations. both outside observers were men. one outside observer is a psychologist who has ten years of clinical experience. the second outside observer has a ph.d. in mechanical engineering. by allowing the interpretations to be analyzed by two people with perspectives other than that of the researcher, additional objectivity was added to the evaluation process. dependability refers to the researchers attempts to account for changes in the design created by a refined understanding of the setting, this represents assumptions different from those shaping the concept of reliability. positivists assume an unchanging universe where an inquiry could be replicated. interpretivists believe that the social world is always changing and replication is itself problematic (marshall & rossmanm, 1989) it was not necessary to make changes during this investigation. finally, transferability refers to the applicability of the findings to other settings, contexts and groups. the results of this study cannot be generalized to other women who have achieved highly in academics and who were also disadvantaged as children. however, by using detailed information that was gathered through multiple methods, other researchers can explore the data and the results and determine the applicability of the findings to their specific situations. triangulation of methods through the use of multiple cases, multiple outside observers, multiple sources of data and multiple theories strengthen the transferability of the results. results the results of this study are organized into five sections . these five sections include, 1) relationship to disadvantage, 2) personalities of resilient women 3) what women want from schools 4) patterns of achievement and development, and 5) family and community influences. in the original report, the results of this study were described in two hundred pages. the results have been condensed for readability. relationship with disadvantage many of the participants questioned their status as disadvantaged. when women volunteered for this study, they often wondered whether they were qualified. this was interesting since most of these women had experienced serious difficulties as children including poverty, sexual and physical abuse, mental illness, alcoholism, family discord, racism and sexism and many other stressors. still, some participants had difficulty categorizing themselves as disadvantaged. obviously, the word "disadvantage" had different meanings to various people. there are many reasons why the women in this study may have been hesitant to adopt the label of disadvantage. first, disadvantage is often defined according to some type of imaginary scale. it is inevitable that someone else is more disadvantaged than you. it can seem pretentious to claim that you have faced adversity. and, the participants were extremely modest. also, some definitions of disadvantage are associated with functioning. in other words, some believe that a person can only be disadvantaged if the stress they endure negatively affects another part of their life. schools often adopt this definition and label students "disadvantaged" if they do poorly in school. in the late 70's and early 80's it became unpopular to describe children as disadvantaged because of family functioning because this classification was considered racist (wilson, 1987). in the past, the word disadvantage has been associated with deficiencies in the child-rearing practices of african-american families (ford, 1993, bronfenbrenner, 1979). the women of color were most cautious about claiming they were disadvantaged. yet, they were less reticent to claim that they had been oppressed or discriminated against. in fact, none of the women who were ethnic minorities claimed to be disadvantaged because of their race. however, all agreed that they had experienced some type of discrimination because of their ethnicity. this is an interesting contradiction since most would agree that discrimination puts people, especially children, at a disadvantage. nonetheless, because of their personal feelings about the word disadvantage, women were uncomfortable describing themselves in that way. how women define and experience disadvantage and race can be important, especially if people achieve at higher levels when they are not aware, or do not acknowledge, their disadvantages. in this study, women blamed themselves, rather than the system, for their difficulties. yet, they attributed their success to family members or school interventions. these women had extremely high standards for themselves and saw achievement as completely dependent on their own abilities, not on the school and not on their family. also, most of the women believed they achieved at a higher level because professionals in educational settings did not know who they were as individuals. they actively hid their nontraditional histories. one participant said: i've never told anybody about my life. i think if people knew, they'd be shocked because i certainly don't give the appearance of someone that grew up totally abused like i did. when i was at harvard, going to school full-time and working full-time, i got really good grades and a couple of friends at the time would say, gee, we're not working, we live on campus and it's hard for us. how are you doing this? so i did get some peer support in that way, but i've never told any person about my background. they didn't know. did these attitudes allow the women to achieve at the level they now enjoy? or did they drain their energy, making academic achievement a difficult challenge? the data in this study suggest that these women faced consequences from hiding their true identity. for example, these women felt they were different and ultimately believed they did not belong in positions historically reserved for the privileged majority. also, these women were not able to seek help or promote themselves and were often misevaluated as a result. so, although these women were independent, and able to achieve, they had to struggle to reach their full potential. personalities of resilient women some of the participants' common personality traits were explored in detail. often, investigators ignore the influence of personality and focus on family functioning. this is unfortunate since high achieving children often have siblings who do not achieve highly. in this study, personality, and individual responses to environment, were considered important. the common personality traits discussed include, maturity, confidence, benevolence, perfectionism and perseverance. these women were independent and mature for their age which made them more interested in an independent (adult-like) style of education. unfortunately, it also caused educators and counselors to believe these women did not need help. so, often they did not receive adequate counseling in high school and college. most of these women grew up as good girls and later became women who cared about making the world a better place to live. this is important because many girls act nice to gain the teacher's attention which causes the teacher to respond positively to their behavior and pay less attention to their academic needs (sadker & sadker, 1994). this may provide some explanation as to why girls often do well in elementary school and do less well in high school. the women in this study were ambivalent about their confidence. sometimes they were confident to the point of arrogance and at other times they were afraid to talk to professors because they felt unworthy. ultimately, they found enough confidence to try even when they faced rejection. the women were also perfectionists. although this trait helped them achieve at a high level, it also made the educational process more unpleasant because their style was at odds with instructional methods that focus on what students do wrong. the participants were dependent on positive feedback from school. criticism was intolerable. finally, the women were persistent, but in a way that precluded them from recognizing the difference between the level of work they demanded of themselves compared to that required of other students. for example, many believed that working full-time during school was a normal way to support themselves through college. there was no recognition that many other students did not work full-time during their undergraduate experience. what did women want from schools? what women need from teachers. with 21 participants, it was possible to recognize some common educational needs and experiences. first, teachers' personalities were more important than their teaching style. participants claimed they could easily adapt to different styles, but it was important for them to have teachers who were caring and attentive. participants were also interested in teachers who were somehow different. they connected with radical teachers who were nontraditional in their teaching style. one participant commented: what stands out for me are the radicals, the people who weren't behaving as they were supposed to, but somehow held up in this system. their nontraditional behavior was somehow excused because their students were learning and they were doing good. and that's who i thought i was going to be. participants also mentioned their disappointment in female professors. although these professors were role models, they were not as supportive as was expected. many of the participants felt that female professors acted like men (e.g., competitive and ambitious) to compete successfully in a educational system developed by and for men. also, the participants not only wanted women teachers, they wanted women who were like them. for example, they wanted to see women of color and women from disadvantaged backgrounds in positions of power. many thought that women who achieved highly were all caucasian women who had come from privileged backgrounds. guidance and mentors. only a few of the participants had any guidance in high school. there is some evidence of discrimination. for example, some students received bad counseling. in these cases, the participants were told they should pursue careers as secretaries or grocery clerks even though their grades were high and they were interested in college. in most cases however, the participants believed that professionals in the schools did not know, or were not fully aware, of their disadvantage. results suggest that the participants' disadvantages affected them in a way that made it difficult for them to take advantage of the counseling opportunities that were available. these women did not know how to seek advice or were too scared to ask for help. one participant suggested: i think this business of mentorship, i think you have to be receptive and seek someone out, and i didn't do that, and that's one of the things i learned how to do. i think there might be problems with people who have experienced trauma to the extent that they can't reach out to other people. they're really handicapped in the mentorship area. guidance in college was also important. those who had mentors were aware of the importance of that guidance. the women who did not have the proper guidance chose the wrong majors, attended the wrong schools and expended extra energy to accomplish at levels comparable to those with mentors. not only did each woman need academic guidance, it was also important for each women to be validated for being smart or special. in fact, it was important for these women to get validation for being above average. when the participants were considered average or below average, they often felt as though they should quit or change directions. success in school strengthened their self-esteem, when often it was being weakened at home. ingrained structure and attitudes that discourage learning. the participants provided examples of the norms and structures within the school system that discouraged their progress. many problems stemmed from a hierarchical system that encourages certain behaviors and attitudes. for example, people on the bottom of a hierarchy are often expected to be compliant and to show deference to those in positions above them. this structure is offensive to these women because they want to be valued as an equal. these women believed they have had more life experiences than their privileged counterparts and therefore had difficulty accepting the traditional role of a student or as a low level professor who is considered inexperienced and less knowledgeable. another reason that women have difficulty accepting a hierarchical structure is because they were often at the bottom of an abusive hierarchy associated with their families. in these situations, they had no control or recourse for unfair treatment. for this reason, they were uncomfortable when they found this structure replicated in the school system. some of the structures that are in place to support the hierarchical school system are the elitist way colleges are stratified, traditional testing methods that misevaluate nontraditional students, and competitive, rather than cooperative, methods of teaching and learning. patterns of academic achievement and intellectual development it was found that these women did very well in elementary and graduate school and did less well in high school and college. the data suggest that these women enjoyed the individualized attention in elementary and graduate school, and they were more comfortable in graduate school when they were given the opportunity to decide what was important for them to learn. the data also suggest that these women developed higher level thinking skills at an early age. many of the women seemed to develop what has been described as inter-and intra personal intelligence (gardner, 1983), or emotional intelligence (goleman, 1995). unfortunately, since they did not always present themselves well, they were evaluated inaccurately and provided with educational opportunities that bored them. later, these women often felt they had special abilities and were disappointed when these abilities were never (or seldom) recognized. one woman said: i know so many women who have always wanted someone to say, "i can tell you're gifted, and i want you to stay in my class because you're really good in this particular area." i know so many women who have wanted that to happen. they all have this seed of awareness that they've got something really great to offer, they just don't know which direction to go. i never had that. i had a couple of people that i sort of poked at enough and they finally helped me work things out, that kind of thing. family and community influence it is surprising that even those participants who faced an enormous amount of childhood stress described at least one member of their family as influential. in fact, many participants listed family members (especially mothers) as the one factor in their lives that was most important in helping them achieve. when the women spoke about significant others, usually they described them as helpful and encouraging. however, some were not, especially when the women had experienced traumatic divorces during their school experience. none of the women credited their husbands, boyfriends or significant others for their achievement. however, many claimed that their children motivated them to continue because they wanted to provide something better for them. women also mentioned the importance of the community. although their experiences were most affected by their family of origin, their extended family, friends and neighbors were also helpful at various times. conclusions so why did these women achieve? whether positive or negative, they adapted and assimilated to the majority culture. they hid who they were because they believed their backgrounds reflected on them negatively. their circumstances at home motivated them to seek out reinforcement in other places, and they sought reinforcement in the only way they knew how, by being good girls and excelling in school. since most girls develop faster in elementary school than boys, elementary school was easy for them. this was especially true for this group, since they acquired higher-level thinking skills early to protect themselves from childhood stress. later, in high school, academics were not as easy, because in elementary school these girls had concentrated on gaining reinforcement through behaviors rather than through learning. still, since these women were convinced in elementary school that they were smart and special, they never gave up the idea that they had something special to offer. and although it was difficult, they adjusted in high school and especially in college to the amount of effort needed to compensate for the changes in expectations. as adults, they continued to attract some attention and some rewards for their accomplishments, so their belief that they could earn rewards (money, status, etc.) continued to motivate them on their difficult journey. their motivation was enhanced by the fact that they were drawn toward something (e.g., graduate school, positions at work, etc.) where they could use their intellectual abilities. they were never satisfied with jobs that did not challenge their intellect. although these women achieved highly, the process of being educated was not always enjoyable, because often they lacked confidence, felt out of place, and clashed with an educational system that is often still more suited to traditional students. still, these women persevered because they were motivated to change their lives and prove they were capable. references bronfenbrenner, u. (1979). beyond the deficit model in child and family policy. teachers college record, 81(1). 95-104. flores, j. (1988). chicana doctoral students: another look at educational equity. also in garcia, h. s., & ghavez, r. ethnolinguistic issues in education (1988). (eric document reproduction service no. ed 316 041). furumoto, l. (1980). biographies of eminent women in psychology: models for achievement. psychology of women quarterly, 5 (1): 55-139. gandara, p. (1982). passing through the eye of the needle: high-achieving chicanas, hispanic journal of behavioral sciences, 4. (2).167-179. gardner, h. (1983). frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences. new york: basic books. goleman, d. (1995). emotional intelligence: why can it matter more than iq? new york: bantam books. ford, d. y. (1993). black students' achievement orientation as a function of perceived family achievement orientation and demographic variables. journal of negro education, 62 (1). 47-66. gotwalt, n., & towns, k. (1986). rare as they are, women at the top can teach us all. the executive educator, 8 (12): 13-29. hobson-smith, c. (1982). black female achievers in academe. journal of negro education 51 (3): 318341. lincoln, y.s., & guba, e.g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. newbury park, ca: sage. marshall, c., & rossman, g. (1989). designing qualitative research. newbury park, ca: sage. o'connell, a. n., & russo, n. f. (1980). models for achievement: eminent women in psychology. psychology of women quarterly, 5 (1): 6-54. patton, m. q. (1990). qualitative evaluation and research methods . newbury park, ca: sage. sadker, m., & sadker, d. (1994). failing at fairness: how america's schools cheat girls. new york, ny: charles scribner's sons. wells, a. (1989). the disadvantaged: paths to success. ncee brief number 3. national center on education and employment, new york (eric document reproduction service no. ed 309 252) wilson, w. j. (1987). the truly disadvantaged the inner city the underclass, and public policy. chicago il: the university of chicago press. wyche, k. f., & graves, s. b. (1992). minority women in academia. psychology of women quarterly, 16 (4): 429-437. dr. pamela lepage-lees is an assistant professor at the institute for educational transformation, graduate school of education at george mason university,washington, d.c. awl journal home page awl journal volume 1, number 3, summer 1998 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:plepage@osf1.gmu.edu file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer98/awl_summer98.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership school leadership of the 90's and beyond: a window of opportunity for women educators joyce p. logan, ed. logan, summer, 1998 in the midst of thes school evolution, vacancies for principal and superintendent positions are increasing at a time when more women than men are enrolled in preparation programs for educational administration. changes taking place in today's schools open a window of opportunity for more women to move into educational administration. education reform brings a new governance structure, modifies leadership practices, and emphasizes accountability for results. in the midst of this school evolution, vacancies for principal and superintendent positions are increasing at a time when more women than men are enrolled in preparation programs for educational administration. this article examines conditions favorable for advancing gender equity and proposes that now is the time to reactivate and energize equity strategies. changes and challenges a number of conditions that currently exist affect educational administration and have potential for redirecting hiring practices for these positions. a convergence of school reform, supply and demand for administrators, and societal changes enhances opportunities for more women to become school administrators. six specific circumstances are addressed in this discussion: 1. school-site governance structures emphasize local accountability for student achievement (hallinger, 1992; harvey, 1991; wohlstetter & mohrman, 1994). 2. essential leadership skills in restructured schools promote collaboration, consensus building, and empowerment of others (common & grimmit, 1992; cuban, 1988; leithwood, 1995; murphy, 1995). 3. nationally, an increasing number of vacancies and a dwindling applicant pool for positions of principal and superintendent create high-demand conditions for qualified aspirants for http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html these positions (american association of school administrators [aasa], 1988; brockett, 1996; klauke, 1990). 4. antidiscrimination legislation has fostered a more open environment for hiring women in nontraditional roles (flansburg & hanson, 1993; gupton & del rosario, 1997; national women's law center, 1997). 5. women have made up at least half of educational administration program enrollments since the mid-80s (bell & chase, 1993; logan, 1998; national association of secondary school principals [nassp], 1998; tingley, 1996). 6. an increase in the percentage of women in the educational administration professorate (mccarthy & kuh, 1997), as well as mentoring programs for women administrators, provide role models that validate school and school system administration as a career choice for women (wesson, 1997). these six changing conditions that collectively offer an opportunity for advancing gender equity in hiring practices for school principals and superintendents are discussed in succeeding paragraphs. women have been historically underrepresented in these two top-level school positions in contrast to the number of women teachers (gupton & slick, 1996; tyack & hansot, 1982; shakeshaft, 1989). school-site governance and accountability school governance reforms such as school-based decision making (sbdm) and teacher empowerment change the rules for who makes hiring decisions. in kentucky, for example, school council members make the final selection for employment of principals (kentucky acts, 1990). in addition, principals must consult their school council when staffing other positions. although officially school boards hire all employees, selection for employment of school-based personnel now resides at the school level. thus, school boards are no longer the predominant gatekeepers for the principalships. school councils share in these decisions. although national figures on gender composition of school councils are not yet readily available, research in kentucky and kansas show that women in these states represent the majority of school council membership (kentucky department of education, 1996) and that more women than men participate in council meetings (furtwengler, furtwengler, holcomb, hurst, & owens, 1995). it should also be noted that women constitute a majority of teachers in the nation's schools, therefore, teacher empowerment (as well as council membership) gives women a strong voice in school decisions. this change does not presuppose that women will hire women. it does, however, lead to a speculation that school reform has shuffled the players who influence hiring decisions. school boards still select superintendents. school council influence for this position will be longer in coming. studies have shown that career patterns that lead to the superintendency generally come via the principalship route and that the most likely route is the high school principalship (shakeshaft, 1989). it follows, therefore, that changes in who occupies principalship positions will in the long run have an effect on staffing the superintendency. school-based governance and the changing leadership paradigm affect the role of both superintendent and principal and, therefore, call for a new look at the knowledge and skills required for these roles. accountability places more emphasis on the job to be done than who does the job. student achievement is paramount to school success; therefore, the school councils and school personnel must focus on teaching and learning that fosters high achievement by all students (capper, 1993). legislative and community pressures demand quantitative evidence of gains in student achievement. states such as kentucky link rewards and sanctions for schools to student results. high stakes accountability for student achievement shifts attention to the job to be done rather than who does the job--another factor that can contribute to open access for women or men administrators who demonstrate requisite characteristics to get the job done. essential leadership skills the traditional bureaucratic model of schools was led by administrators who governed teachers, students and staff through formalized goals and procedures (lee, smith, & croninger, 1996). in top-down hierarchical organizations, authoritarian leadership was most often the pattern for school administration. public perception tended to favor men as better able than women to handle discipline, particularly at the secondary level. men were also viewed as more suited than women for working with predominantly male boards of education and dealing with political influences of the superintendency. culturally defined, desirable feminine behavior was nurturing and caring for others; placing importance on relationships and the quality of life; and using interpersonal skills, consensus, and negotiation for solving problems (bass, 1981; broverman, broverman, clarkson, rosenkrantz, & vogel, 1970; hofstede, 1991; shakeshaft, 1989). organizational leadership of the 90s requires facilitative leadership that empowers others and values diverse discourse as a means of reaching better decisions (grogan, 1998). school principal and superintendent roles are being reconceived, renegotiated, and reshaped (bredesen, 1998; brunner, 1998; grogan, 1998). brunner (1998) notes that literature on women in positions of power supports the notion that women bring to administrative practice many characteristics necessary for school reform. with a redefinition of requisite skills and characteristics of an effective school administrator, a teachable moment exists for erasing gender stereotypes and focusing on desirable characteristics that applicants (men or women) bring to the position. the dissonance created by changing perceptions about schools presents an opportunity for educating school council and school board members to identify the best candidates to fill school administrative positions based on strengths and skills that are not gender specific. principalship and superintendency demand and supply both principalships and superintendencies are experiencing high rates of turnover and a shrinking applicant pool (nassp, 1998; tingley, 1996). turnover rates for school administration have more than doubled in recent years (nassp, 1998). more than half of all superintendents and principals are becoming eligible for retirement (bowles, 1990; hess, 1988). the demand for school administrators is likely to become even greater with a predicted 10 to 20% increase in the need for school administrators through 2005 due to increased enrollments (nassp, 1998). a report by the new york state council of school superintendents (cited in tingley, 1996) called attention to a growing concern about the size and quality of the candidate pool for administrative conditions. educational reform narrowed the gap between teacher salaries and those of administrators and, at the same time, increased the complexity of school leadership line positions. educational reform initiatives since the 80s have significantly affected the superintendency (bredeson, 1998). changes in traditional sources of power for the position and priorities for the work role have placed superintendents in the position of legitimating their influence with constituents and competing with other local officials for scarce resources (bredeson, 1998). the stress and uncertainties of the superintendency are likely factors in a high rate of turnover for the position (gmelch, 1990; sweeney, 1982). brockett (1996) expressed a nationwide concern that superintendency positions in the next decade will become vacant faster than they can be filled. the nassp (1998) in a national survey of 403 superintendents asked about principalship shortages and found that 55% of the respondents reported a shortage in the labor pool for secondary principal positions. insufficient compensation compared to responsibilities, job stress, and time requirements are cited by educational leaders and personnel officers as deterrents to the attractiveness of this position. what does this shortage of principal and superintendent applicants mean for women administrative aspirants? search committees, school boards, and councils will be hard pressed to find sufficient qualified applicants. opportunities exist for well qualified applicants. the job openings are there. legislative and cultural change title ix and supporting legislation such as the women's educational equity act opened doors for women in education and extended employment protections of the civil rights act to include gender (flansburg & hanson, 1997). changes brought about by legislation show up directly in visible processes and procedures. attitudes toward these changes and acceptance of different ways of thinking take much longer but must occur before culture and societal expectations are modified. in spite of its limitations, title ix has made significant change in u.s. education and within society (flansburg & hanson, 1997). more women moving into higher education and filling nontraditional occupational roles as a result of antidiscrimination legislation, a national focus on inequities, and more successful women visible in a variety of roles have influenced societal expectations and helped to create a more favorable environment for women in administrative leadership. women have moved into more executive jobs in the corporate world. an annual census of women corporate officers by the research group catalyst showed that women hold 10.6% of corporate officer posts in the fortune 500 companies (cited in jackson, 1997). the study noted that work is still needed to help women advance in business but that the number of women among the top five earners at fortune 500 companies has more than doubled since 1994. times have changed dramatically in the last 20 years, and women leaders have been evident in every walk of life for sometime (west, 1997). possibilities for women to move into top-level school administrative positions are more optimistic than ever before. today's world is rapidly changing and change has become a way of life. although problems still persist and much remains to be done to remove gender filters in the workplace, conditions are favorable for advancing gender equity. women's leap into the hiring pool in school administration programs, the percentage of women students now outnumbers men. a 1997 survey of member institutions in the university council for educational administration (ucea) showed that 74% of certification programs in respondent institutions had from 51% to 72% women (logan, 1998). thirty percent of these institutions had more than 60% women students in these programs. the survey response rate was 50%. results from this survey correspond to other research that shows women entering educational administration programs in increasing numbers since the 1970s (cunanan, 1994; grogan, 1996; edson, 1988). bell and chase (1993) reported that women have made up at least half of educational administration program enrollments since the mid-80s. the number of women awarded superintendent certificates increased nationally between 1970 and 1984 by 15% (grogan, 1996) women enrolled in doctoral educational administration programs reflect only a slightly lower percentage than certification enrollments. the ucea survey showed 59% of respondents with a majority of women doctoral students (logan, 1998). of those with less than 51% women in educational administration doctoral programs, 30% had between 41% to 50% women. the percentage of women completing these doctoral programs experienced the greatest gain after 1980. thirty-seven percent of reporting ucea institutions had 41% to 50% women doctoral completers since 1980, 30% had between 51% and 60%, and one institution reported over 51% women doctoral completers after 1980. other research has shown that women often believe that in order to be hired for administrative positions they must be better prepared than men (gupton & slick, 1996); therefore, more women than men educational administrative aspirants may seek a doctorate degree. the low percentage of women employed in school administration line positions cannot be attributed to a lack of aspiration to be principal or superintendent. with the number of women who have entered and completed educational administration programs since 1980, lack of aspiration is clearly not a barrier. more women than men are entering the applicant pool. work remains to be done to gain attention for women and minorities as potential school leaders (bowles, 1990). support systems for women a noticeable increase in the percentage of women faculty members in university preparation programs has been an encouraging influence for women to become educational administrators. in 1986 only 12% of educational administration faculty were women compared to 27% women for college faculties overall (bell & chase, 1993; mccarthy & kuh, 1997). by 1994, women in ucea institutions made up 29% of all educational leadership faculty (mccarthy & kuh, 1997). women professors serve as role models for aspiring women administrators and help to validate students' decision to prepare for school administration. literature since 1980 has shifted emphasis from explanations for underrepresentation of women in educational administration to a need for better support systems (benton, 1980; coursen, 1989; gupton & slick, 1996; johnson, 1991; swiderski, 1988). this attention to mentoring, role models, and networks for women is one plausible explanation for the greater numbers of women preparing for these positions. mentorships and responsible internship placements assist women's transition into school administration and continue to be important. as more women become principals and superintendents, support strategies should be redirected toward helping those who enter the field succeed and advance. career advancement and career mobility continue to be concerns (grady & gosmire, 1995; irby & brown, 1995). women need connectedness in the workplace (gilligan, 1982). the internet and e-mail add new media for networking and communicating (glasscock, 1997). communities of interest on the internet enable worldwide communication in an instant. electronic networks such as advancing women can be important tools to build a sense of community among women leaders. these electronic support systems help women connect with one another as they develop an identity as administrators (glasscock, 1997). strategic advancement strategies now is the time for university educators to move away from sos "save our ship" strategies that recruit women and bolster educational administration enrollments. this article is not an sos call but rather a sas challenge--a challenge to educational administration faculty to develop and implement new strategic advancement strategies that level the playing field for women and men and that promote high expectations for all persons who enter the profession of school leadership. today's schools can afford no less. as one of the prime gatekeepers of the field, faculties in educational administration preparation programs can be catalysts for change. communities look to universities for leadership. higher education reform expects universities to serve their constituencies through education and support of local leadership. reforming and reframing schools presents an opportune time to set new goals for the profession and to activate strategies to get there. equal access in hiring practices for qualified school administrator candidates can be advanced through information and training for school council and school board members; through a relevant, rigorous administrative preparation program appropriate for the context of today's schools; and through continuous efforts to focus public attention on respect for diversity and desirable leadership skills for schools. bateson (1996) emphasized that change represents an ongoing adjustment and adaptation to new contexts and is not something that will ever be done once and for all (p. 7). equity and equality should be regarded in the same manner. advancement in these areas requires continuous effort. new contexts require strategic action. educational administration is at the apex of systemic school reform. the context of schools has changed significantly since 1990. if equity in employment, advancement, and retention of highly qualified school leadership is where we want to go, we must rethink and reactivate a plan to get there. conditions are right to adapt, adjust, and advance the cause of equity and quality. change is underway but we cannot rest. the job is not done. references american association of school administrators. 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(1997). title ix at 25: report card on gender equity. washington, dc. (eric document reproduction no. ed 408 693) shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. beverly hills, ca: sage publications. sweeney, j. (1981). research synthesis on effective school leadership, 39, 346-352. swiderski, w. (1988). problems faced by women in gaining access to administrative positions in education. education canada, 28(3), 24-31. tingley, s. (1996). pooling our resources: why are there so few candidates for superintendent? maybe we're looking in the wrong places. education week, commentary, pp. 38, 48. tyack, d.b., & hansot, e. (1982). managers of virtue: public school leadership in america 1820-1980. new york: basic books, inc. wesson, l.h. (1998, winter). exploring the dilemmas of leadership: voices from the field. advancing women in leadership. [on-line]. available: www.advancingwom.com/awlv2_ wesson4final.html west, p.t. (1997). the changing role of women in society. record in educational leadership, 16 & 17(1 & 2), 7-10. wohlstetter, p., & mohrman, s.a. (1994, december). school-based management: promise and process. cpre finance briefs. 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advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership "turning anger into knowledge": exploring anger and advocacy with women educators judith dorney, ph.d. dorney, summer, 2000 "what merged in my psyche were images of anger, women, teaching, and death. on some level school must have seemed a dangerous place for women teachers." in exploring the connections among gender, schooling, and knowledge, this paper draws upon bodies of work which have been examined many times. however, the purpose of this essay is to frame a new question and begin to consider the relationships between and the effects of the silencing or expression of anger in women and their work as educators. the roots of this inquiry are located in my girlhood as i witnessed the various women in my life and their relationships with anger. but the questions framed here emerge from two particular action research projects, the "women teaching girls project" and the "exploring gender and knowledge project." each consisted of a series of retreats designed to enable educators to identify and reflect on how their gender socialization and gendered knowledge informed their educational practice. in the first of these projects, consisting only of women, the discussion of anger was prominent. while this particular project was completed several years ago, i have returned to the data from this work, as well as theoretical work on gender and anger, in order to consider the value of anger in the educational work of women. path of entry there is one prominent life experience at the heart of my desire to identify and understand the role of anger in the work of women educators. it is a memory centering on my mother, who was a teacher at st. eugene's elementary school. at the time, i was 11 and she was 52. it was a friday night in late january. my mother, father and myself were in our small kitchen. she was describing to him an incident that occurred earlier in the day. i don't recall the content of the words. i do recall the tone and her actions. she was recounting a strong disagreement that she had with the principal of the school, sr. jean. my mother was angry. she showed us how, in expressing her feelings she moved physically away from sr. jean, backing into the wall. she moved her arm up to her face and let out a very loud and deep sound. it was not a sound i had heard from my mother. it was more the sound of a non-human animal. it was crusty. it came from below her belly. i had rarely seen my mother angry. i had never seen this form of anger. on saturday afternoon she had a stroke. on sunday afternoon she died. http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html while i was not aware of it at the time, what merged in my psyche were images of anger, women, teaching, and death. on some level, school must have seemed a dangerous place for women teachers. certainly, anger was a very costly emotion. the sanctions against anger were reinforced for me by cultural and religious messages communicating the iconic standard of the "good woman." while on one level i have been able to consciously disentangle these messages and defuse their psychic power, on another level i see certain wisdom in recognizing that expressions of anger can be and have been deeply problematic for women in school. however, my three decades as a teacher and my work with teachers have also led me to see anger as a powerful tool for advocacy and change in school and in the world. the silenced anger of women in schools stunts the potential for both. theoretical background within the last few years a number of educators have written about the development of the teacher as an essential element in the work of education. my research underscores the message of other educator/researchers like maria harris (1988), parker palmer (1983/1993, 1998), and jane tompkins (1996), who argue that the inner life of teachers, including their emotional and spiritual development, influences what happens in the classroom, with students, colleagues, and curricula. audre lorde's essay on the erotic (1984) also speaks to the need for disciplined attentiveness to the inner life and suggests that teaching does have an erotic component. lorde places the erotic, which she describes essentially as deep feeling and the scrutinization of feeling, at the heart of passionate living since this activity offers a continuing source of insight and connection to our deepest selves. if we want to encourage the growth of teachers as passionate learners, knowers engaged in a passionate relationship with the world, lorde's claim holds great possibility and challenge for the development of teachers. her two-fold process is reminiscent of dewey's threefold process of inquiry which he asserts begins in feeling, moves to the articulation of a question and ultimately to its resolution (garrison, 1997). accordingly, if access to feelings in general, or certain feelings in particular, is blocked then development and knowledge will be constricted. since schools are places that should support the continuing construction of knowledge, the typical absence of feelings from schooling can certainly be construed as problematic. there are, of course, particular emotions which are documented as gendered and consequently unacceptable for public expression. these emotions are what alison jagger has called "outlaw emotions" -feelings which are "conventionally unacceptable" (p. 160) since they violate the standards of what it means to be a good woman or a real man. jagger challenges such prohibitions asserting that these emotions are, "appropriate if they are characteristic of a society in which all humans thrive, or if they are conducive to establishing such a society...it is appropriate to feel anger and perhaps disgust in those situations where humans are denied their full creativity or freedom" (pp. 161-62). it seems no coincidence that jagger identifies anger specifically as an outlaw emotion. other women have written about anger and its potential as a force for change. the theologian beverly harrison (1984) claims that anger is an essential emotion in the work of love. it signals that something is wrong thus it provides necessary information for relational work. carol gilligan (1991) identifies anger as the "political emotion par excellence." anger often provides the spark or fuel behind the work of justice. anita barrows, another psychologist, makes a distinction between rage and outrage. with outrage, anger takes a leap into the arena of injustice...outrage leads to resistance...we have learned that the oppressor may be undermined by resistance; not by superior force, but by fortitude, faith, conviction, defiance of authority. outrage is the conjunction of rage and eros, where what informs rage is love and the absolute determination that what we love shall be preserved...its aim would be not to continue the cycle of suffering, but rather to interrupt it and establish something new in its stead (1996, p. 54). barrows goes on to ask, "can we allow our anger not to dissolve, not to lose itself, until we have found what it is asking of us" (p. 56)? her words call to mind lorde's erotic process of feeling and the scrutinization of feeling in order to garner the knowledge embodied therein. because anger has been silenced in women, it is an outlaw emotion. and its existence as an outlaw emotion works to insure that it will be denied, that what might be learned from it will not develop and that the "desire to preserve what we love" will not be acted upon in the form of advocacy. based on my experience with women who are also educators, the silencing of feeling knowledge takes on added urgency as i wonder what the righteous anger of women might do for schools? if women educators were able to find a way to tune into outrage as barrows describes it -"the conjunction of rage and eros," what would be interrupted and what new thing might be established. in talking about what is silenced or acted upon by teachers, we want to remain mindful that these words and behaviors are witnessed by students. there is evidence in the work of brown gilligan (1992); brown (1998); debold, wilson malave (1993); leadbeater way (1996); taylor, gilligan sullivan (1996) to suggest that girls do learn from what they observe in women. girls also learn in their relationships with women. while additional work can be done to examine these connections more thoroughly, it makes sense to imagine that the cultural restrictions informing women's expression and action shape what girls see and hear and offer girls a sense of permission or transgression in speaking and acting in the world. consequently, an intervention in the speech and action of women and men has a good chance of influencing the development of girls and boys. methodology the "women teaching girls" and "exploring gender and knowledge" retreats were action research projects designed to intervene in the education of girls and boys by promoting a reflective awareness on the part of the adults who worked with them. the first set of retreats was conducted with sixteen teachers, counselors, and administrators from the laurel school for girls in ohio and three researchers from the harvard graduate school of education. the retreats grew out of a larger project on girls' development headed by lyn brown and carol gilligan. they took place at the initial request of one of the teachers after a group of teachers decided to meet regularly to consider the messages they might be communicating to girls. at a faculty meeting, during the second year of the five year study, a few of the women spoke about how they silenced themselves at such meetings because of a desire to avoid conflict. because this was also something the researchers were hearing the adolescent students admit as well, the teachers wondered about the possible connections between their own socialization and the socialization of their students. in consultation with pat hall, an administrator at the school, i designed and facilitated two of the three retreats. i drew largely on the work of maria harris who in women and teaching (1988) identifies five generative themes necessary in an education for girls and women. the themes are: silence, remembering, mourning, artistry, and birthing. based on these themes, i developed a curriculum for the retreats (dorney, 1991). the process was akin to an experience of consciousness raising and it strongly influenced the relationships among all the women. it provided a space for the women to speak up and out both individually and collectively within the retreat community and later in the public world of the school. two of the three retreats were taped and transcribed and i interviewed each woman participant three to nine months after the last retreat. there were two "exploring gender and knowledge" retreats, designed and facilitated by myself and dr. craig flood. the participants were female and male middle school educators from nine schools across new york state. we developed a curriculum grounded in but different from the "women teaching girls" retreats. in considering the influence of the retreats on the participants, dr. flood and i drew on field notes, correspondence and interviews with participants after the final retreat (dorney flood, 1997). anger was a theme for the women in both projects and while it was identified as an issue in personal relationships it was also very present in their work. although anger was acknowledged in the analysis of each retreat experience, it was not a major focus. for the scope of this essay i returned specifically to the data from the "women teaching girls" project in order to look for the presence of anger and how it was linked to silence or expression. the questions i posed at this juncture were: 1. where is anger identified? 2. in what context? 3. was it silenced? if so, why or how? 4. was it expressed or used for action? if so, why or how? 5. what fostered the expression? 6. what knowledge does it suggest? i have chosen to highlight a portion of the dialogue from the second "women teaching girls" retreat and interview excerpts from three of the women participants. the sample of voices is small. nevertheless, i have found that these women offer insight into the dynamics that work to either encourage or stifle the expression of anger for, at least some, female teachers in schools. the women represented here are all of european american descent. they are well educated and middle class. they were, at the time of the retreats, between the ages of thirty five and fifty. their social location may make them especially vulnerable to the "good girl" standard identified below. however, this does not mean that other women educators might not be held to this standard in schools where white, middle class norms are still dominant. the stories: claiming anger through connection the second retreat began with the women in pairs responding to four questions. they were: what has been the best thing to come out of our work together for you? what has been the best thing for the school? what has been the hardest thing for you? what has been the hardest thing for the school? ann and betty were conversation partners. betty had been the school psychologist at laurel for 4 years. ann had been one of the top administrators in the upper school for 3 years. in commenting on how the first retreat had influenced her life, betty admitted: and i think over the course of time i have really come to realize that the problems that i face have a lot to do with the fact that i always want to be the good little girl. and that so much of the message that i learned in my model of my mother and how she was, was to be the good little girl and you were loved, and you got all these positive things and everyone thought you were wonderful. and i really see that impacting more and more at laurel... (dorney, 1991, p. 73) she went on to suggest that because they are primarily a female faculty, "we all got into being good little girls" and "we confuse our professional roles with our personal relationships." anger is a challenge to this good girl model of behavior. as betty continued she admitted that, "...i really have a hard time being angry" (p. 74). her conversation partner, ann, picked up this thread of conversation. contrary to betty's experience, she noted that anger had been a "source of energy" for her. whenever ann had been in situations where she had to change her life "for the sake of [her] mental health, [her] energy came from being angry" (p. 74). although ann saw her anger as a positive the difficulty for her came in feeling that this source of energy was not valued at laurel. she asserted that, "the hardest thing for me, and of course this work has made me get much more in touch with it, the hardest thing at laurel school is that there is no place to be angry" (p. 74). with this admission, ann delineates the contours of acceptable professional behavior within the school. so that even though she has individually been able to resist the "good girl" mandate against anger, the school culture prohibits anger. this is too much for ann to take on. she molds herself to the school's image of what is appropriate and valued. and although anger is a source of personal energy in confronting a hard situation (of which there are many in just about every school), ann silences herself. at this point, carol gilligan entered the conversation with a challenge. she cut to the heart of much of what had been said. carol raised questions about the kind of relationships possible when this kind of silencing is part of the dynamic. "the best thing for me in this [retreat work]," she said, "and the hardest thing for me in this is how to be in what i do. and to think that if i'm not in what i do, who's doing it? and what am i doing with my life? and if i am in it, i mean, will i survive? will anybody else survive? you know, isn't this sort of terribly disruptive" (p. 75)? the psychologist anita barrows in her essay, "the light of outrage: women, anger, and buddhist practice," poses a similar question. "is our longing to be 'good' greater than our longing to be whole" (1996, p. 55)? several of the women spoke following carol's questions. but, for the most part, they focused on the potential losses associated with speaking up and the discussion shifted to a focus on power differences and the risk inherent in speaking one's mind or disagreeing with an administrator. jean, an administrator in the elementary branch of the school who had been at laurel for 13 years, mentioned the "humiliation" that can come from being silenced publicly at a meeting by the head of the school, also a woman. as jean spoke directly about her humiliating experience i was aware that in that situation there were probably other women from the group present. i asked, "...where are you all when jean needs to speak and is silenced?...how can you help each other to speak..." (p. 78)? these questions signaled the entry of a new focus in our conversation and the issue of collusion ultimately became a critical examination for us in the remainder of our work together. carol inserted a question about what it is girls observe and learn from women when women opt not to express authentic and, at times, disruptive feelings. connie, who had been at laurel for 6 years and who worked with the primary level students, took on carol's question. she spoke, i later realized, from a place of experience as one who often was willing to put herself out there. connie did speak her mind and was often the only one who did so. thus, she often found herself at odds with female colleagues and dismissed by other administrators who were looking for agreement rather than a genuine response. with some emotion, she asked, "how many times can i buck it and demonstrate to the children that i lose and get squished down again, or you know, humiliated or whatever, and then set them up for a very uncomfortable thing of, 'hey, not me'" (p. 79). she then turned to me and said, "and that's why i like what you were saying, that together, supported it can work. but if you try to do it in isolation by yourself, you keep demonstrating over and over again to your students why you shouldn't do this. because you are going to be humiliated" (p. 79). these conversations were essential in isolating some of the internalized knowledge and behaviors of the women both as individuals and as members of a group. for the purpose of summation i want to suggest that these internalized messages and responses to the desire to express one's ideas, to make one's genuine contribution, and the injunction not to feel or act on certain feelings as women and as educators resulted in behaviors that created a rather repressed environment in the school. there are multiple consequences to such repression. if we consider only the effects on the construction of knowledge we can reasonably ask what happens to inquiry in a school when people live largely out of fear, when people cannot get angry? during the third retreat one focus of our work was analyzing and responding to a decision that had been made by joan, the head of the school. there was a conference being planned to announce the findings from the laurel work to a national audience. the harvard researchers would all be presenting different dimensions of the work. however, no one except joan, the head of laurel, and a few other administrators would be in attendance because school was in session. joan wanted us to have a mini-conference at the school following the conference. everyone in our retreat group felt this was unacceptable, but it was the laurel women who imagined a response. through much discussion, they decided that all faculty and staff should be able to attend the conference. they proposed switching a professional day that was scheduled for may to the april conference day in order to accommodate this. they consulted with the hotel to insure that seventy-five more people could be accommodated. they decided they would all meet with joan to propose their plan. if she refused, they agreed that each one of them would take a personal day and attend the conference but their first choice was to provide access for all the faculty. they met with joan who thought it was a wonderful idea. the day of the conference all laurel faculty were present and the women retreats participants lead discussion groups on the work we had on the retreats. together, they had disarmed their own powerful image of the head of the school and this enabled them to act. what moved them initially was a sense of injustice, to some extent outrage, that faculty would be overlooked on this occasion. because they had come together as a group they could also identify and face the fear that would prohibit them from speaking and acting on their own behalf and as advocates for the larger faculty. one of the women admitted being "nervous" and "scared" that such a stance might cost her job. the cornerstone of their action was the ability to feel their anger and their fear and to stand together in responding to these feelings and to the knowledge they revealed. at the end of may and the following october i interviewed each of the women. i focus here on the words of betty, ann, and connie. each describes a form of advocacy that involves breaking a pattern of collusion.. central to this shift is a valuing of anger as a source of valuable information. these are small instances of change but as one of the women noted, if we can have the "courage to act in a small way...it might begin to change the structure a little bit" (dorney, 1991, p. 111). betty i asked betty what she knew now that she didn't know before our work together. thoughtfully, she replied: i think what i really know is that i need----, i can't be happy, truly happy, not listening to what i truly feel. by trying to either not listen to that voice or deny[ing] that voice or deciding not to give expression to that voice, any of those, i pay a real price. and i don't have to pay that price. i do have a choice about it. and i don't think that i always recognized that either i had that choice or the price i was paying (dorney, 1991, p. 145). she then spoke particularly about the conversation the morning of the second retreat between herself, ann, and carol. that discussion helped her to reconsider relationships and "what kind of relationship [it] is if your needs aren't met and you can't be angry" (dorney, 1991, p. 146). this awareness had a profound influence on her relationships with her family and she described three incidents where she responded differently to her husband and children than she would have before that discussion. but she also described a change in the nature of her responses at school. one particular incident involved her refusing to facilitate a meeting between one of the women administrators and her staff. this woman, leslie, had received some negative evaluations from her staff. leslie decided she wanted to have a meeting with them, go through the evaluations, and talk with the staff members about what she thought she could do to respond to them and then invite their responses. joan, the head of the school asked betty, as the school psychologist, to facilitate the meeting against leslie's will. betty refused. joan told betty the meeting would happen whether she chose to facilitate or not, suggesting that by opting out of this she might make the situation worse. betty replied, "that might be...but i can't be a part of something i don't agree with" (dorney, 1991, p. 146). in the past, betty said, her tendency would have been to facilitate the meeting, because someone had asked her for help and because she might be able to "smooth out a situation" or "justify" her collusion in a bad situation feeling that if she went along in this way she might have a greater impact in other ways. she no longer believed this to be true. betty did not feel she had to protect leslie. leslie had to do that for herself. but betty did want leslie to be clear about what she wanted and she wanted to be an "advocate" for leslie as well as herself. betty described her feelings when joan asked her to facilitate the meeting. betty could feel her anxiety level rising. she felt a need to "breathe deeper" and her "heart beating faster." in the past she would not have attended to these visceral responses but she found herself asking, "why am i feeling this way?" and my first response was, "leslie, i have to tell you this feels wrong to me" (dorney, 1991, p. 147). she described her new found tendency to stay with these emotional and bodily responses and claim them as a source of knowledge. in situations she is now more likely to ask, "why am i responding emotionally?" "what is this touching in me" (dorney, 1991, p. 148)? and she listens to that voice. she no longer finds it tenable to split her emotional and professional responses. she has come closer to healing the "divided heart" as parker palmer (1998) identifies it. and her ability to act as an advocate comes from her ability to see a situation from a place of wholeness rather than a place of fear or a "good woman" injunction to smooth things over. ann when i interviewed ann she was no longer at laurel school. she had a new position at another private school in the midwest and much of what she spoke about in her interview was her decision to leave laurel and her changed way of being there after the third retreat and her decision to leave. her decision to leave came from her deepening awareness that she could not be herself and remain at laurel. the cost of this division was finally too great. speaking directly, ann said, "what i know is that if i say aloud everything that i believe and feel in professional and social situations that it will be unacceptable or disruptive or will lead to rejection or distancing that i don't want" (dorney, 1991, p. 150). but part of the paradox of silencing oneself is that, "a lot of energy goes into being careful instead of living your life...[and] the energy one expends in being careful...becomes habitual as well" (dorney, 1991, p. 150). leaving laurel was necessary for ann in order to break that habit. she further explained that before she left laurel her relationships with colleagues began to shift, at least in part, because of her desire to speak and act from a less divided place. she noted that these conversations, "would not be called good administrative policies at times [but]...it was really being able to say what i believed and what i thought and being able to express the feelings i had about things that happened" (dorney, 1991, p. 151). one of her male colleagues commented that she had never "talked like this before." although ann felt he was a bit uncomfortable about this more direct communication, she added that, "at the same time the nature of our conversation about other things got funnier and warmer...out of that i think came a trust from him that i hadn't had before...so in a sense it dropped the barrier for just the human stuff to happen" (dorney, 1991, p. 151). while the shift in ann's way of being is not a direct response to anger, it was anger that helped her identify the problems for her at laurel. her silencing and the incongruence of her feelings, speech, and action made her angry. when she was able to find a group and a place at laurel where she could be angry and scrutinize the anger, she was able to take action on her own behalf and on behalf of more honest collegial relationships. she highlighted the importance of the group in this process: the need in me to act on the effects of being silenced at laurel school was made authentic by my participation in the group...to get in touch with my own self and what i've always known and to act courageously about it. and it was the experience of the group, not just the support, but the experience of the group...that made it possible for me to act that way for the first time in a public setting, which i hadn't done before. (dorney, 1991, p. 152) i do not know if ann has found the need for such a group in her new school or if entering with this determination to speak her truth has been sufficient for her to continue to do so. she did admit, at the time of our interview, that there was a "greater congruence" between what she felt and how she acted publicly. it is my belief that over the long haul we need not only an attitude and desire for wholeness but, as ann herself said, "a place to be angry" or an outlaw community to support those efforts. connie connie, a reading specialist and associate director of the primary level of laurel school, had the habit of being outspoken. her tendency at laurel as well as at previous schools had been to speak her mind. the issue for connie was that there had not been a direct connection/awareness of feelings.. what she illustrated in her interview was that this emotional awareness was essential in helping her to respond differently to colleagues and to students. early in the interview she commented that in spite of her intuition that particular relationships were inauthentic she could, "never tell you what i was after...now i know the words to talk about it, to bring the feelings out" (dorney, 1991, p. 166). emphasizing the importance of connecting with her feelings she added, "i have been able to take what was anger and turn it into knowledge" (dorney, 1991, p. 167). additional conversation clarified what some of this knowledge might be. prior to our work together connie felt isolated from colleagues due to her willingness to speak out. her participation in the retreat groups gave her new insight into the reasons why women silence themselves and don't support each other. she described herself as more "tolerant" toward women.. their knowledge, "may be buried so deep ...that we'll never see it in this lifetime, but i know it's there. i know that. and i didn't know that before. so it's almost as though i have seen this core or this soul or whatever..." (dorney, 1991, p. 167). when i asked connie if she could describe a situation in school in which this newly constructed knowledge was influential, she narrated a story about having to discipline a fourth grade girl. the grade level seems particularly significant since it was in speaking with fourth graders that we first heard a shift in girls' voices toward silencing. the incident involved three girls and one computer. one girl had been using it for ten minutes. there were ten minutes remaining of class time and two girls who had not yet used it. when the second girl started her turn, the third girl, katie, suggested they each take five minutes. the second girl refused. katie thought that was unfair and she removed the disk from the computer so no one could use it. there was some kind of altercation and katie scratched the second girl. katie was sent to connie. connie said: and i realized at this moment, and this is really significant, as a result of this work, i realized that the reason i have always been uncomfortable with this {disciplining} is because i have to act, respond in a way i know is wrong. but that's what the institution expects...that being...the traditional kinds of things. "you have to be a good little girl and very cooperative and not get into arguments and not get into fights and get along with everybody and love the world and everything will be hunky dorey" (dorney, 1991, p. 169). but this time connie asked the girl to tell her what happened. she told me what happened. i said, "okay, you know, what were you feeling?" ...it came down to validating the fact that she was angry, that she had a right to be angry, that it's okay to say it...the only thing that i am unhappy about is that you chose to hurt her physically. that is really bad. we can't do that...and then we talked about what she could have done instead ...what would have been a better way to resolve it? what would have worked for her...i said, "what are you going to do about this?" i wasn't going to step in as an institution. i explained to her that if she got into a physical thing again we would be singing a different tune...but this was the first time she was involved in something like this... and she decided that she needed to talk to the girl that she had scratched...i said, "why would you want to do that?" it turns out that they were friends. we talked about that. "what would you accomplish by talking to her?' "maybe she would forgive me" katie replied (dorney, 1991, p. 169). taking this approach with katie made connie feel good. she explained why. because i had allowed her to be herself...i hadn't lied the lie...i hadn't disciplined her and told her...it's not okay to be angry. i had hung with the truth. as she was talking to me she started to cry about why she felt badly that she [had] done it and what the risk was of having hurt someone and maybe she would lose her friend. i started crying...but i felt her pain. her pain was real. so i allowed her to have whatever was real to be there and have it be okay...this work has enabled me to get what is going on, what matters to these kids. what is it they really care about? (dorney, 1991, p. 169) with an awareness of the knowledge embodied in anger, connie was able to allow katie to hold onto her experience of being angry and to consider the reasons for it. while not negating the feelings, connie also helped katie to see the inappropriateness and potential danger of her physical response to her anger and she guided katie to an imaginative vision of other potential responses. connie's ability to do this can be construed as an act of advocacy for katie. in this situation a girl was told by a woman that anger is an important feeling and she is helped to think about her angry feelings and how she can respond to them. this is a step toward holding onto feelings, voice, and what one knows from one's experience. if girls had more women guides like this perhaps there would be fewer girls who lose themselves, who become divided in adolescence. conclusion: an outlaw community a homeplace for women educators in her essay, "homeplace: a site of resistance" (1990), bell hooks describes the radical political activity of homeplace construction. this involved african-american people, primarily women, creating sites where racism could be opposed and the internalized messages uncovered and exorcised. it was a place of activism, advocacy, and healing. hooks writes, "we could not learn to love or respect ourselves in the culture of white supremacy, on the outside; it was there on the inside, in that 'homeplace', most often created and kept by black women, that we had the opportunity to grow and develop, to nurture our spirits" (p. 42). certainly the retreat work seemed to provide that kind of homeplace where spirits were nurtured and healed through the active deconstruction and resistance of messages of oppression and repression. what would it take for schools, which are also largely in the hands of women, to be made into such places? terry tempest williams, in her essay exploring the connections between women and homemaking, resistance and advocacy asks, "what are our preoccupations as women" (1994, p. 134)? her question cuts to the heart of the matter. what is of ultimate value? what are we doing to make the schoolplace, a homeplace, and a site of resistance and advocacy? tempest williams suggests that part of the answer might lie in the visible presence of wild cards. as she describes the wild card she suggests that each woman would carry a deck of cards: wild cards -cards that could not only portend the future but create it. if a woman saw an act that violated the health and integrity of her community, she would leave a card on-site. if she was moved by a particular piece of legislation on behalf of or against the land, she would dash off a card to her senator or representative. and if she found her self in a board of directors meeting and the truth as she felt it was not being told, she would place all her cards on the table as a sign that the games of men are not the games of women. (p. 135) both hooks and tempest williams suggest a dimension of what i see as evident in the work here described. it is necessary to have a space, a place and even a small group of women who can create an environment designed to heal the wounds of a larger culture and dismantle, even in small ways, institutions that work against the full and healthy development of their members. part of the work of healing and resistance involves claiming anger and learning from it. when anger is denied in homes and in schools, change is unlikely. there is no wild card to mark the violation. consequently, the work of healing and advocacy has no context. the presence of this kind of outlaw community or homeplace enabled betty, ann, and connie to throw down their wild cards. in so doing they helped to make the school a safe space to be angry and a site where the joining of feelings and thoughts contributed to more holistic development and an active relationship to knowledge. references barrows, a. (1996). the light of outrage: women, anger, and buddhist practi= ce in buddhist women on the edge .dresser. berkeley: north atlantic books. brown, l. (1998). raising their voices: the politics of girls' anger. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. brown, l. gilligan, c. (1992). meeting at the crossroads. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. debold, e., wilson, m., malave, i. (1993). mother-daughter revolution. new york: addison-wesley. dorney, j. (1991). the courage to act in a small way: clues toward community and change among women teaching girls. unpublished dissertation, harvard university. dorney, j. (1995). teaching toward resistance: a task for women teaching girls, youth and society. 27, (1). 55-72. dorney, j. flood, c. (1997). breaking gender silences in the curriculum: a retreat intervention with middle school educators. educational action research journal. 5, (1). 71-86. garrison, j. (1997). dewey and eros. new york: teachers college press. gilligan, c. (1990). joining the resistance: psychology, politics, girls, and women. michigan quarterly review. 29, 501-536. harris, m. (1988). women and teaching. new york: paulist press. harrison, b. (1985). the power of anger in the work of love: christian ethics for women and other strangers in making the connections: essays in feminist social ethics. boston: beacon press. pp. 3-21. hooks, b. (1990). homeplace: a site of resistance in yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. boston: south end press. pp. 41-49. jagger, a. (1989). love and knowledge: emotion in feminist epistemology in gender/ body/knowledge: feminist reconstructions of being and knowing (eds.) jagger bordo. new brunswick: rutgers university press. leadbeater, b., way, n. (1996). urban girl: resisting stereotypes, creating identities. new york: new york university press. lorde, a. (1984). uses of the erotic: the erotic as power in sister outsider. trumansburg: the crossing press. pp. 53-59. palmer, p. (1983/1993). to know as we are known. san francisco: harper san francisco. palmer, p. (1998). the courage to teach. san francisco: jossey-bass publisher. taylor, j., gilligan, c., sullivan, a. (1995). between voice and silence: women, girls, race and relationships. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. tompkins, j. (1996). a life in school: what the teacher learned. reading, ma: addison wesley. williams, t. (1994). the wild card in an unspoken hunger. new york: vintage books. pp. 133-141. dr. judith dorney is an associate professor at suny-new paltz. dorneyj@matrix.newpaltz.edu subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in mailto:dorneyj@matrix.newpaltz.edu file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awnetwork/index.html leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership    editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university   volume 29, number 11 october 25th, 2009 issn 1093-7099  educational leadership: where are the women? dr. derry stufft kelly coyne abstract throughout time, stereotypes regarding women and men have permeated society, creating many obstacles for women, especially in the professional world. where words like nurturing, compassionate, emotional, expressive, communal, passive, uncertain, subjective and supportive have historically been used to describe women; words like intelligent, powerful, competent, objective, independent, methodical and driven have typically been reserved to describe men (porat, 1991). these adjectives have long supported the social perception that men are superior and women are inferior. obviously times are changing. women are emerging as powerful leaders in business and government and are disproving many long-standing skewed perceptions of females. despite these advances, however, certain labels for women continue to impede their efforts to be strong leaders in other areas. key words: education leadership, women, society, leaders citation: stufft, d., & coyne, k. (2009). educational leadership: where are the women?. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(11). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 2 introduction in education, women are perceived as being better teachers than leaders (gold, 1996). the us department of education (2007) reported 75 percent of teachers are female while 25 percent of teachers are male. this may be a result of women’s stereotypical innate ability to nurture and care for children, which sets the foundation for their dedication to the profession. their unwillingness to let children fail or be failed by the system serves as the motivation for them to remain in the classroom, to have the most direct influence on their students. men characteristically take on the leadership roles as principals and superintendents (gold, 1996). according to the us department of education (2007), 50.3 percent of principals are males and 49.7 percent of principals are females. this breakdown does not reflect the male/female ratio in the teaching ranks. while many female applicants actively pursue administrative positions, data indicates that male applicants are commonly chosen (reis, young, & jury, 1999). it can be speculated that this phenomenon might be attributed to men’s stereotypical innate ability to be strong, powerful and intelligent, which drives them to want to be in charge, to want to be the almighty decision-maker. consequently, men, according to limited social perceptions, naturally seem to fit the mold of educational leader. “teaching is a good job for women but a career with prospects for men,” (burgess, 1989, pg. 90). one pertinent fact consistently remains overlooked. although men may fit the stereotypical role of leader, it is forgotten that women are just as capable. women of all backgrounds manage households, raise children, and quite often maintain status as full-time employees. if this is not indicative of women’s potential to be leaders, then what does leadership entail? a plethora of definitions of leadership have evolved over the decades. lunenburg and ornstein (2008, p. 115) discuss much of the research associated with educational leadership. leithwood and duke (1999) classified leadership into six categories: instructional leadership, transformational leadership, moral leadership, participative leadership, contingency leadership and managerial leadership. according to leithwood & duke (1999), instructional leadership focuses on “the behaviors of teachers as they engage in activities directly affecting the growth of students” (p. 47). transformational leadership encompasses “the commitments and capacities of organizational members” (p. 48). moral leadership emphasizes “the values and ethics of leadership” (p. 50). participative leadership stresses “the decision-making process of the group” (p. 51). contingency leadership focuses on “how leaders respond to the unique organizational circumstances or problems they face as a consequence of the preferences of coworkers, working conditions and tasks to be completed”(p. 54). finally, managerial leadership encompasses “the functions, tasks or behaviors of the leader” (p. 53). according to lunenburg and ornstein (2008) each type of leadership has as its focus “student achievement, ethics and values, democratic principles and social justice” (p. 116). they further explain that despite the existence of six realms of leadership, a leader adopts not one single style, but rather a combination of styles, depending on the time and situation. the realms advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 3 of leadership are fused to create the most effective and productive setting within the organization. with such a liberal view of educational leadership, why do women struggle to find their place among male school leaders? in education, women face obstacles and barriers, known collectively as the “glass ceiling” (morrison, white, & van velsor, 1987). there are sexist assumptions and sex-role attributes regarding female administrators’ ability and competence to perform the role (funk, 1986), shakeshaft, 1987). apparently there is a lack of a multitude of necessities including adequate childcare and support systems (scutt, 1990). traditional mentoring opportunities are lacking for women (randall, 1994). women tend to be denied access to socialization processes, which limit them from aspiring to leadership positions (jacobs, 1994). some believe that there are separate promotion routes for women and men for teaching and educational administration (nicoll, 1992). in addition, for women, there is a lack of support, encouragement, and counseling from relatives, friends, coworkers and superiors (anastaski & koutra, 2005). women manage the dual role of performing unpaid work in the home, rearing children and working in the workplace (davies, 1994). promotion by merit is not a neutral concept but is one based on the values of the dominant group in the organization, which typically is a group of men (burton, 1997). leadership is viewed as unfeminine (lips & kenner, 2007), which puts women in the unfortunate position of neglecting their natural feminine role expectations to foster their leadership role expectations. and when women do arrive in leadership positions, particularly in male dominated areas, they tend to be judged more harshly than their male counterparts (eagly, makhijani, & klonsky, 1992). people are more tolerant of dominant behavior in men than in women, who receive penalties for exhibiting their power (carli, 2001). finally, females who promote their own competence are judged as less likable than men who exhibit the same behaviors (rudman, 1998). as a result of these barriers, women in education, regardless of qualifications and aspirations, seem to stay behind the scenes and do work that continues to be overlooked and underpaid. unfortunately, the good old boys network does not have a counterpart known as the good old girls network. consequently, the opportunities for women are narrowed. women not only deserve to be in educational leadership positions but have earned the right to be leaders if not for equity for style and influence. in terms of equity, legislation dictates that women have the same access to power and resources as men. women often lead and manage differently than men. they bring a clearer set of values about developing and supporting colleagues and students and a closer understanding of interpersonal relationships than men (gold, 1996). women can effectively lead even though their approach differs from men because they bring a style that fosters relationships and growth (gold, 1996). gender stereotypes aside, women are equally as capable of being effective leaders as their male counterparts. effective leaders can adapt to varying situations. they tend to be in tune with their social environment. effective leaders are ambitious and achievement oriented, assertive, cooperative, decisive, dependable, dominant with a desire to influence others, energetic in terms of their high activity level, persistent, self-confident, tolerant of stress and willing to assume responsibility (lundenburg & ornstein, 2008). it is imperative for them to be intelligent, creative, organized, persuasive and social; to show strength in conceptualization; to display diplomacy and advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 4 tactfulness; to speak fluently; and to have knowledge of group tasks; (lundenburg & ornstein, 2008). goleman, boyzatzis, and mckee (2002) conclude that qualities of effective school leaders are either innate or developed. effective leaders inspire others by relating to their feelings. they work through their emotions whether in a large urban school district, in a small classroom or in a pta meeting. goleman (2002) and his colleagues have studied the effectiveness of leaders for the past two decades. they found that highly respected and successful leaders exhibit “motivating power, empathy, integrity and intuitive ability” (goleman, 2002). most importantly, goleman (2002) believes that leaders are developed and not born with leadership ability, thus supporting the notion that anyone, women included, can foster and develop leadership qualities and be effective leaders if given the opportunity and necessary support. ultimately, women need to exhibit the qualities that define effective school leaders and not be leery of outwardly displaying those characteristics. research has described qualities of a successful leader and has discussed the obstacles women need to overcome, but what will it take to be an effective educational leader in the 21st century? the national association of secondary school principals (nassp) developed a leadership model entitled selecting and developing the 21st century principal . components of the model include “educational leadership, resolving complex problems, communication and developing staff and others” (nassp, 2002 p.3). the nassp defines the first component, educational leadership, as having three facets: “setting instructional direction, teamwork and sensitivity” (nassp, 2002 p.3). setting instructional direction focuses on implementing strategies for improving teaching and learning including putting programs and improvement efforts into action. it is developing a vision, establishing clear goals and providing direction in achieving stated goals. setting instructional direction encourages others to contribute to goal achievement and to secure commitment to a course of action from individuals and from the group. the second facet, teamwork, emphasizes seeking and encouraging involvement of team members; modeling and encouraging the behaviors that move the group to task completion; and supporting group accomplishment. finally, the third facet, sensitivity, revolves around perceiving the needs and concerns of others. sensitivity is dealing tactfully with others in emotionally stressful situations or in conflict and knowing what information to communicate and to whom. sensitivity is the ability to relate to people of varying ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds. the second component of the nassp’s principal selection model is resolving complex problems that are also defined by three aspects: ”judgment, results orientation, and organizational ability” (nassp 2002). judgment refers to reaching logical conclusions and making high-quality decisions based on available information. it means giving priority and caution to significant situations. judgment requires seeking out relevant data, facts and impressions and analyzing and interpreting complex information. results orientation requires assuming responsibility. it is the ability to recognize when a decision is required and then taking prompt action as issues emerge. results orientation requires resolving short-term issues while balancing them against long-term objectives. organizational ability focuses on planning and scheduling one’s own work and the work of others so that resources are used appropriately. it includes scheduling the flow of activities and establishing procedures to monitor projects. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 5 organizational ability requires the individual to practice time and task management and knowing what to delegate and to whom. the third component of the model describes two forms of communication, oral and written. oral communication refers to the leader’s ability to clearly communicate and make oral presentations that are clear and easy to understand. written communication refers to the leader’s ability to express ideas clearly in writing, demonstrate technical proficiency and write appropriately for different audiences. developing self and others is the fourth component of the nassp’s model for selecting and developing a principal for the 21st century. this component contains two aspects, the development of others and the understanding of one’s own strengths and weaknesses. the development of others focuses on teaching, coaching, and helping others coupled with providing specific feedback based on observations and data. understanding one’s own strengths and weaknesses requires an understanding of personal strengths and weaknesses. it means taking responsibility for improvement by actively pursuing developmental activities and striving for continuous learning. it is apparent that developing into an effective school leader in the 21st century entails harboring and exhibiting desire, diligence and dedication. with all professions, including education, leaders need an inherent desire to want to lead. potential leaders must demonstrate diligence with respect to doing whatever it takes to create a productive and inviting environment. they must be dedicated to the cause of providing the best experience for all involved. none of the cited literature is gender specific. essentially, effective school leaders, male or female, must keep the interests of students at heart, be a leader of learners, act ethically, put instructional leadership first, practice efficient management, build strong relationships, know what to expect, orchestrate school-community partnerships, be a lifelong learner and build a positive school climate (alvy and robbins, 2005). women have been training to be effective leaders since the beginning of time in the home and recently in business and government. unfortunately, they have not been equally afforded the opportunity to display their adeptness and competency in education to the level at which women dominate education. society must develop a greater trust in women to lead our schools and school districts just as they have developed trust in women to teach our children. women must tackle the obstacles before them with full determination. when this is accomplished, women will experience equity as leaders in the educational world. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 6 references alvy, h. & robbins, p. (2005). growing into leadership. educational leadership 62, 50-54. anastasaki, a. & koutra, c. (2005). the gender issues in the teacher’s professional development. journal of science education, 6, 44-46. blackmore, j. (1989). critical perspectives on educational leadership. educational leadership, 93-129. blackmore, j. (1995). breaking out from a masculinistic politics of education. gender and changing educational management, 44-56. burton, c. (1987). merit and gender: organizations and the mobilization of masculine bias. australian journal of social studies, 22, 424-435. carli, l. (2001). gender and social influence. journal of social issues, 57, 725-742. gibbons, l. (2001, september). why it hates women (and the women who stay away). cio newsletter. retrieved september 29, 2007 from http://www.cio.com/archive/091501/women.html gold, a. (1996). women and educational management, paper presented at the european union-funded conference. gender equity for 2000 and beyond, dublin, ireland. goleman, d., boyzatzis, r., & mckee, a. (2002). primal leadership: realizing the power of emotional intelligence (boston: harvard university press). leithwood, k. & duke, d. l. (1999). a century’s quest to understand school leadership, in j. murphy and k.s. lewis (eds.), handbook of research on educational administration, 2nd. ed. (san francisco: josset-boss), p. 45-72. lips, h. m. (2000). college students’ visions of power and possibility as mediated gender. psychology of women quarterly, 24, 37-41. lips, h. m. (2001). envisioning positions of leadership: the expectations of university students in virginia and puerto rico. journal of social issues, 57, 799-813. lips h. m. & kenner, e. (2007). effects of gender and dominance on leadership emergence: incentives make a difference. sex roles, 56, 563-571. lunenburg, f. c. & ornstein, a. c. educational administration: concepts and practices. (belmont, ca: thomas wadsworth, 2008). national association for secondary school principals. (2002). selecting and advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 7 developing the 21st century principal. rudman, l. a. (1998). self-promotion as a risk factor for women: the costs and benefits of counter-stereotypical impression management. journal of personality and social psychology, 74, 629-645. rudman, l. a. & glick, p. (2001). prescriptive gender stereotypes and backlash toward agentic women. journal of social issues, 57, 743-762. u.s. department of education, national center for educational statistics (2007). the condition of education 2007 (nces 2007-064). washington, d.c: u.s. government printing office. biographies derry l. stufft is retired from serving public schools after 35 years of service. twenty-eight of those years were in public school administration. he is currently an assistant professor in the education department at the university of scranton. his teaching area is teaching courses for aspiring principals and superintendents. this is his third year with the university. his ed.d is in school administration. email: stufftd2@scranton.edu kelly coyne is a graduate student having earned her master’s degree in supervision from the university of scranton. she is currently a third grade teacher in the scranton city school district. she is enrolled in the principal certification program at the university currently involved in a secondary school principal’s practicum. email: kabattle7@yahoo.com mailto:kabattle7@yahoo.com mailto:stufftd2@scranton.edu microsoft word robles-piña.docx volume 14, fall, 2003 issn 1093-7099 publisher: gretchen glasscock editors: beverly j. irby, & genevieve browen advancing women in leadership pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 60 table of contents preface ....................................................................................................................................................................61 credits ....................................................................................................................................................................62 guest and past reviewers ................................................................................................................................. 63 magazines: what adolescent girls are reading and the way they shape body image ................................ 64 introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 64 review of related literature ............................................................................................................................ 65 statement of hypothesis ............................................................................................................................... 66 method .............................................................................................................................................................. 66 participants .................................................................................................................................................... 66 instrument ..................................................................................................................................................... 66 design ........................................................................................................................................................... 66 procedure ...................................................................................................................................................... 66 results ............................................................................................................................................................... 67 discussion ......................................................................................................................................................... 68 recommendations ............................................................................................................................................. 70 references ......................................................................................................................................................... 70 pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 61 preface advancing women in leadership on-line journal was launched in 1997 with the intent of publishing manuscripts that report, synthesize, review, or analyze scholarly inquiry that focuses on women's issues. the intent of this journal is to encourage and support the proliferation of women in positions of leadership in all aspects of professional and corporate america. in the encouragement of advancing women in leadership, we present the following manuscripts. they are: women faculty in higher education: impeded by academe by dr. dana e. christman working against the grain: rewards and consequences of developing a personal voice in academia by dr. pamela lepage and dr. gretchen givens-generett creating space for subjectivity: wandering discourses of female/teacher by dr. donna k. phillips and dr. j.camille cammack. magazines: what adolescent girls are reading and the way they shape body image by dr. rebecca a. robles-piña and heidi sauer a study of the correlation between the motives of female high self monitors and emergent leadership: a literature review by charles salter hispanic female superintendents in america: a profile by dr. margaret a. manuel and dr. john r. slate our intent is that this journal is viewed as a professional publication site for scholarly inquiry and perspectives that promote gender equity and advance women in leadership. it is our hope that you find this issue of advancing women in leadership thought provoking, enjoyable, and that you look forward to subsequent issues. suggestions for improvement, encouragement, and submission for upcoming issues are welcomed and appreciated. genevieve brown, ed.d. & beverly j. irby, ed.d. editors copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 62 credits publisher: gretchen glasscock ceo/president, advancingwomen.com editors: dr. genevieve brown dr. beverly irby sam houston state university assistant editor: danna ellington editorial review board dr. gypsy abbott university of alabama-birmingham dr. william m. alexander california polytechnic state university dr. gracia alkema president, corwin press, inc., a sage publication compnay dr. janice beal beal counseling associates dr. maenette benham michigan state university dr. c. cryss brunner university of wisconsin-madison dr. michelle collay bay area coalition for equitable schools dr. joanne cooper university of hawaii dr. geni cowan california state university-sacramento adrienne d. dixson north carolina state universtiy dr. claudia b. douglass central michigan university dr. p. kay duncan emporia state university dr. stacey edmonson sam houston state university dr. amy freeman lee national award-winning artist dr. carole funk sam houston state universtiy dr. minerva gorena ncela, the george washington university dr. marilyn grady university of nebraska-lincoln dr. sandra gupton university of southern mississippi dr. jean m. haar university of nebraska-lincoln dr. sandy harris stephen f. austin state university dr. kristy herbert, southern connecticut state university dr. sandra hollingsworth san jose state university dr. johnetta hudson university of north texas dr. janice hutchinson university of houston dr. janice koch hofstra university dr. rafael lara-alecio texas a& m university dr. sandra lowery stephen f. austin state university dr. ping liu california state university-long beach dr. robyn lock san fancisco state university dr. rosita marcano northern illinois university dr. patricia mathes university of texas-houston dr. linda orozco california state university-fullerton dr. rosemary papalewis california state university-sacramento dr. matteson pascal the meadows foundation, senior program officer dr. diane pollard university of wisconsin-milwaukee dr. barbara polnik sam houston state university dr. evelyn reid, clark atlanta university dr. becky ropers-huilman louisiana state university dr. isabel royo universidad iberoamericana, puebla, mexico dr. david sadker american university, author and distinguished educator dr. pam sandoval indiana university-northwest dr. jane strachan university of waikato, hamilton, new zealand dr. carole shakeshaft, hofstra university dr. sandra tonnsen university of south carolina dr. karen tonso wayne state university pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 63 rev. terry weber-rodriguez epworth-parker unithed methodist church, houston, texas dr. robert williams sam houston state university dr. rose lyn zanville president, lyn zanville, inc., leadership specialist ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- guest and past reviewers dr. joanne ardovini-brooker dr. joy carter dr. norvella carter maxine cooper dr. ken craycraft dr. sally craycraft dr. jo ann duffy dr. alice fisher dr. brigitta fringes dr. dashiel geyen dr. maxine greene ann halstead dr. jeanine hirtle dr. claudia iselt dr. patricia larke sharon lenhart dr. jim merchant margaree mithcell joy mullett deborah nyberg rocio pellezer dr. charol shakeshaft laurinda spear naomi tropp dr. pam zelbst dr. robin mcgrew-zoubi copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. pg. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 64 advancing women in leadership fall 2003, pp. 64-70 available online at http:// https://awl-ojs-tamu.tdl.org/awl/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper magazines: what adolescent girls are reading and the way they shape body image heidi sauer & rebecca robles-piña heidi sauer: master student counseling program, the department of educational leadership and counseling, sam houston state university rebecca robles-piña: assistant professor, the department of educational leadership and counseling, sam houston state university this study answers the questions: what are the contents of the magazines that girls read? who most influences girls' perception of their appearance?, and what does an ideal woman look like? introduction the right way to kiss. look hot, feel great. would you date this guy? will you survive real life? 10 ways…to smell pretty all summer. quiz: are you boy crazy? these are headlines in current issues of popular teen magazines seventeen, cosmogirl, and ym. the number of teenagers in this country is on the rise, and magazines and advertisers are desperately vying for the billions of dollars of discretionary income that teenagers spend on entertainment (dobosz, 2001). however, the teen market is fragmented and fickle, so magazine publishers struggle to keep up with shifting tastes (merrill, 1999). the traditional "big three" teen magazines are seventeen, ym, and teen (dobosz, 2001; merrill, 1999; norton, 2001; thomsen, weber, & brown, 2002). just these three magazines have a combined readership of over 10 million (norton, 2001). while the popularity of these three giants is incontrovertible, teenage magazine readers have recently been given more options to choose from. in 1998, people magazine introduced teen people into the market (dobosz, 2001). this magazine is notable for drawing both male and female teen readers by featuring topics, such as celebrities, interracial dating, and school shootings that are relevant to both genders. to keep up with ever-changing audience interests, teen people hires "trendspotters" who test new products and take surveys (merrill, 1999). dobosz (2001) reported that, in the wake of the successful launch of teen people, three new teen magazines were unveiled between the summer of 1999 and the summer of 2000, and all three are offspring of successful adult magazines: cosmogirl, teen vogue, and mh-18 (from men's health). these magazines focus heavily on celebrity and incorporate real-life teen stories, not just the beauty, fashion, and romance information typically found in teen magazines. not surprisingly, these magazines are rich with advertisements for clothing, cosmetics, perfumes, personal hygiene, and gadgets. because of their young audience, the advertisers in these magazines target lowto mid-price budgets (unlike the adult versions of these magazines), are trendy, and feature ageappropriate models. layout and design is bold and bright with boxed information, web addresses, nontraditional fonts, and text rife with slang (dobosz, 2001). such measures may draw in readers, but what does one find inside these magazines? it is important to evaluate the messages, both actual and implied, that teenage girls take from the magazines they read. for example, the major topic in these magazines is dieting. dieting is the primary method most females choose to lose unwanted weight (mccabe & ricciardelli, 2001). at any one time, as many as two-thirds of all high school girls are either on a diet or are planning to be on one soon (thomsen et al., 2001; thomsen et al., 2002). research implies that most teens do not choose healthy methods of weight loss; they take diet pills, force themselves to throw up, and restrict daily caloric intake to dangerously low levels (thomsen et al., 2001; thomsen et al., 2002). these behaviors can result in development of disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. these eating disorders typically manifest in adolescent girls because these are the years when they are particularly sensitive to cultural pressure to be thin (thomsen et al., 2002). as currie said in girl talk: adolescent magazines and their readers, "our core identities are social projects, not biological destiny" (1999, p. 3). so, how do we explain this cultural phenomenon of a thin ideal? stice's dual pathway model (as cited in thompson & heinberg, 1999) proposed that the unhealthy messages in the media can lead to eating disordered behavior when those messages are reinforced by family and peers. additionally, the developmental transitions model developed by levine and advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 65 smolak (as cited in thomspon & heinberg, 1999) maintained that childhood perceptions about the significance of being thin are sustained by teasing and modeling of weight concerned behaviors by family and peers. there are other theories to consider. feminist theory tells us that the humanist concept of the self as "essential, coherent, and unified" (norton, 2001, p. 299) is not applicable any longer. weedon and davies argue that the self is "multiple, changing, and a site of struggle" (as cited in norton, 2001, p. 299). this is a wisdom that some teens already know. take kathleen, a 14 year old writer for the magazine reluctant hero as an example, she questions, "why not be gothic, athletic, popular, and a brainer all wrapped up in one?" (norton, 2001, p. 299). that is a good question. perhaps the most useful theory to consider in pondering the effect of reading magazines on body image is "social comparison theory". a basic tenet of this theory is that people are constantly comparing themselves to others who are perceived to represent physical perfection, and then acting in such a way that will lead to attainment of that ideal (thomsen et al., 2001). the purpose of this study was to evaluate which magazines teenage girls typically read, to assess girls' self-perception of attractiveness, and to assess the effect of articles, advice columns, advertisements, and pictures in those magazines on perception of the physical self. review of related literature research shows that media, especially magazines, play a significant part in body image and eating disorder behavior among adolescent girls (mccabe & ricciardelli, 2001). mccabe and ricciardelli (2001) found that adolescents as young as twelve adopt behaviors necessary to conform to society's ideal of a thin female body and a muscular male body. they also found that body image dissatisfaction increases with grade level, suggesting a correlation between development of fat deposits during puberty and dissatisfaction with one's appearance. eating practices that would have been considered detrimental in the past are now considered socially normal habits (thomsen et al., 2001). the trend in dieting has been parallel to an increasing readership of women's health and fitness magazines by women and teenagers. teenagers choose to read women's health and fitness magazines because they believe the information on diet and weight loss contained therein is useful (thomsen et al., 2001). thomsen et al. have studied the relationship between reading health and fitness magazines (2001), reading beauty and fashion magazines (2002), developing eating disordered behaviors (taking laxatives, appetite control/weight-loss pills, vomiting intentionally, and limiting caloric intake to less than 1,200 per day) among adolescent girls. in their 2001 study, thomsen, et al. found that girls who are frequent readers of health and fitness magazines are more likely to use risky, unhealthy diet practices. this supports the authors' belief that adolescent girls who read women's health and fitness magazines may perceive the ideal images presented in photographs, advertisements, and articles as realistic goals and aspire to use the dietary methods presented in the magazines. similar results were obtained from thomsen's et al. study (2002) using beauty and fashion magazines. they found that greater anxiety about weight in an adolescent girl, combined with frequent reading of beauty and fashion magazines, leads to a greater likelihood of eating disorder behaviors. this study also considered frequency of exercise as a factor. the authors found that teenage girls who are infrequent exercisers and frequent readers of beauty and fashion magazines look for quick and easy solutions to obtaining the "ideal" body rather than rely on healthier solutions. mccabe and ricciardelli's study (2001) found that exposure to television and magazines has a greater impact on adolescent girls than on boys since the media have engendered a clear ideal of female appearance. when women and girls look at thin models, they report feelings of anxiety and insecurity about their bodies, which can lead to eating disorder behaviors (mccabe & ricciardelli, 2001; thompson & heinberg, 1999). these thin models echo the beauty standard society holds for women. this standard is not realistic, so women are made to feel inadequate, and these inadequacies are encouraged by cosmetic and weight loss industries that promise perfection through their products or programs (malkin, wornian, & chrisler, 1999; thompson & heinberg, 1999). malkin, wornian, and chrisler (1999) researched the messages regarding weight and body image found on the covers of popular men's and women's magazines. they assessed both visual images and text on the covers, and noted the placement of each. content was evaluated as a message about diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, or general weight loss. placement of visual and textual messages was reviewed to determine existence of conflicting messages. results indicated that men's popular magazines place emphasis on entertainment and bettering one's life through knowledge, hobbies, and activities. on the other hand, women's popular magazines emphasize improving one's life by improving one's appearance, implying that the thinner a woman is, the happier, sexier, and more worthy of love she is. our culture's visual world is inundated with images on the web, television, ads, videos, and magazines that define desirability as "slim and muscular bodies with white features" (oliver, 2001, p. 145). for adolescent girls, these images are a potent source of information to determine self-worth (oliver, 2001; thomsen et al., 2001). girls decide what to read based on what they find to be realistic, useful, and relevant (currie, 1999). adolescent girls use popular teen magazines as a primary source of health and nutritional information, but the messages portrayed in these magazines tend to depict unrealistic standards of beauty and thinness as the ultimate desired physical state (thomsen et al., 2001; thompson & heinberg, 1999). adolescent girls describe the ideal teenage girl as 5'7", 100 pounds, size 5, having blonde hair and blue eyes; however, a girl with these proportions is in advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 66 the anorexic and amenorrheic range (thompson & heinberg, 1999). in fact, messages found in magazines "support, and even encourage, the perception that female happiness and success is tied to physical appearance, with ultra-thinness being the hallmark of beauty" (thomsen et al., 2001, p. 134). additionally, articles about nutrition in teen magazines actually place an emphasis on physical attractiveness rather than health. girls need to learn that their identity is tied to more than their physical beauty and shape. oliver (2001) asserted that adolescents ought to be educated in how to criticize texts and images that purport to contain facts about their bodies. this call for media literacy is echoed throughout the literature. media literacy is defined by the center for media literacy as the capacity to make personal meaning from the various symbols we take in on a daily basis from visual and print media, and to consciously analyze and evaluate the information around us (schwarz, 2000). thompson and heinberg (1999) reported on the prevalence of photographic techniques, such as airbrushing, soft-focus cameras, composite figures, editing, and filters in magazines (and other media). these techniques create an illusion of flawlessness that is deceptive to the consumer who believes the models are representative of an actual person. strategies for critical analysis of media messages have been created that target teens; however, results so far indicate that teens are better-educated, but still fall victim to eating disorder behaviors and low self-esteem in terms of body image. adolescents can find alternatives to mass media in the form of "zines"-some of these hand-made publications are in hard print, others are on-line. in either case, they "challenge the stereotypes, commercialism, and superficiality of the mainstream mass media" (schwarz, 2000, pg. 52). they cover a wide range of interests that teenage girls have in common (norton, 2001). additionally, there are some teen magazines that do offer discussion on issues such as feminism, atypical careers, identity, sexual abuse, media literacy, anger management, objectification, and legal concerns teens may have to contend with (norton, 2001). one aspect common to both traditional and non-traditional teen magazines is the prevalence of conflicting messages. in reading the magazine, a girl is at once urged to be true to herself and at the same time beset with images of what is considered fashionable and beautiful in our society (norton, 2001). thomsen et al. (2001) wisely pointed out the possibility that magazines are not the cause of unhealthy diet practices; instead they simply reinforce attitudes about weight loss and body image that already exist. teenagers take cues from a variety of social, cultural, familial, and environmental sources in determining their behaviors and attitudes. statement of hypothesis it is clear that magazines play a crucial role in providing information, both actual and implied, to adolescent girls. it is hypothesized that none of the young women surveyed read beauty and fashion magazines, that they have an accurate perception of their body size, and that they do not engage in unhealthy diet practices. additionally, this study answers the questions: what are the contents of the magazines that girls read? who most influences girls' perception of their appearance?, and what does an ideal woman look like? method participants the participants for this study were eight young women who are recent high school graduates of a high school in southeastern texas. the majority of the participants were white. all the girls in this sample expressed willingness to participate by responding to an e-mail with a mailing address. consent was given by actually filling out the survey, as explained in a cover letter. instrument a cross-sectional, self-report survey was constructed to assess self-perception of appearance (weight and attractiveness), dieting and exercise habits, and beauty and fashion magazine reading habits. demographic data such as height, weight, and ethnicity were gathered. the height and weight measurements were used to calculate body mass index (bmi) to determine whether or not the respondent is overweight. the survey then asked participants to indicate which beauty and fashion magazines they read. the magazines on this list were compiled from an initial, informal e-mail question addressed to 75 former female students, age 16-19, asking "what magazines do you read?" the survey consisted of five-point likert-scale statements, a ranking statement, and open-ended questions. likert-scale statements addressed satisfaction with one's appearance, unhealthy diet practices, and magazine content. the ranking question addressed the influence of others on one's perception of appearance. open-ended questions required respondents to evaluate cultural and personal ideals. content validity of this survey instrument is established because the content of the survey was derived from a review of existing literature. for this research, a survey was the most effective method to gather information about preferences, attitudes, practices, and interests regarding satisfaction with one's appearance and magazine reading habits. design this research is descriptive in its design. it assesses attitudes, preferences, and practices of young women on the topics of appearance, beauty and fashion magazines, and eating disordered behavior. procedure after selecting the topic, an initial, informal e-mail was sent to 75 former female students asking what beauty and fashion magazines they read. responses were tallied for use in the survey. the sample was purposive and homogenous: all participants are former english iii students with whom the researcher has a friendly relationship. existing literature on the topics of body image, magazines, and adolescents was reviewed. to determine willingness to participate in this research assignment, participants were e-mailed with a brief explanation of the requirements of the survey. students were advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 67 asked to respond to the e-mail with a physical mailing address. twenty responses were received. after the beauty and fashion magazine survey was created, these 20 participants were mailed a cover letter, survey, and reply envelope. data analysis the surveys were analyzed using measures of central tendency and variability (mean, median, mode, standard deviation, and range). results out of the 20 surveys sent out, eight (40%) were returned. the ages of the respondents are between 18 and 19; seven of the girls are 18, and one is 19. the ethnicity is broken down into six (75%) white participants and two (25%) hispanic participants. the self-reported height and weight of each girl were used to calculate bmi: all but one participant (88%) fall into the normal range. however, six (75%) of the girls perceive themselves to be overweight. the initial, informal e-mail query of 75 female students about magazine readership resulted in 20 responses that provided the magazine options for the survey see table 1). these girls reported reading the following magazines most frequently: cosmo (13 girls; 65%), cosmogirl (5 girls; 20%), entertainment weekly (2 girls; 10%), glamour (5 girls, 20%), instyle (1 girl; 5%), people (2 girls; 10%), seventeen (13 girls; 65%), teen (1 girl; 5%), teen people (5 girls; 20%), vanity (1 girl; 5%), vogue (1 girl; 5%), and ym (8 girls, 40%). the 20 girls who received the survey (these are not necessarily the same 20 girls who replied to the informal query) were asked to indicate which of these magazines they read. space was provided to list others. the eight girls who responded to the survey read the following magazines: 5 read cosmo (62%), 1 reads cosmogirl (12.5%), 6 read people (75%), 6 read seventeen (75%), 2 read teen people (25%), 1 reads vogue (12.5%), 3 read ym (37.5%). pregnancy, brio, allure, time, psychology today, bust, bitch, and the progressive were magazines listed by respondents under "others" on the survey. respondents were also asked to indicate how often they read beauty/fashion magazines (never, a few times a year, once a month, once a week, or a few times a week). four girls (50%) read beauty/fashion magazines once a month, 2 girls (25%) read them a few times a year, and 2 girls (25%) read them once a week. based on these results, cosmo, seventeen, and ym are the three most-read magazines for this sample, so current issues (july 2002) of each were reviewed. cosmo has 238 pages, 109 of which (46%) are full-page advertisements. the cover features 27-year old fashion model molly sims and advertises content on being sexy, understanding what guys are thinking, on-line dating, and tricks rapists use. the table of contents lists the following departments: cover stories, life and work, all about men, sex and love, health and fitness, stars and entertainment, beauty and fashion, and regular features. seventeen has 176 pages, 81 of which (46%) are full-page advertisements. the cover features 25-year-old actress sarah michelle gellar and advertises a feature about "stuff she only tells her best friend," a column about actor josh hartnett, a quiz testing ability to survive in the real world, and the "summer special": hot guys, movies, concerts, working out, summer hair, do-it-yourself pedicures, and jeans. the table of contents lists: fashion, beauty, boys, real life, all access, fiction, and columns as content headings. ym has 144 pages, 56 of which (39%) are full-page advertisements. the cover features 26-year-old singer brandon boyd from the band incubus (his band and others are the main story) and advertises a poll about what guys think, a quiz about boy craziness, a booklet of embarrassing moments, and cooling beauty products. the table of contents lists regular features, diary, beauty, boys, stars, style, and stories. the next section asked respondents to rank the people who most influence their perception of how they look. choices included parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, boyfriend, peers and celebrities. results indicate that 6 girls (75%) ranked peers who are not friends as the first, second, or third most influential person; 4 girls (50%) ranked female friends as the first, second, or third most influential person; 3 girls (37.5%) ranked male friends, parents, or siblings as the first, second, or third most influential person; and 2 girls (25%) ranked a boyfriend, best friend, or celebrity as the first, second, or third most influential person. participants were asked to circle a response to several likertscale statements in the next section of the survey. statements were on a 5-point scale. on the scale for statements about weight and appearance, a 1 indicated strongly disagree and a 5 indicated strongly agree. on the scale for statements about dieting/exercise habits and magazine content, a 1 indicated never, a 3 indicated sometimes, and a 5 indicated always. complete results of this section are reported in table 1. the total mean for the likert statements was calculated. the total mean and median are both 61.50. the range of possible scores is zero to 105. a score of zero is possible if a participant chooses not to fill out this section of the survey, and a maximum score of 105 can be achieved by answering "strongly agree" to all 21 likert statements assessed for this study. for this survey, the range is 41. the lowest score is 40 and the highest score is 81. specific results on some of the likert statements are worth mentioning here. first, with regard to girls' perception of weight and appearance, 4 girls (50%) believe they are overweight, 2 girls (25%) were neutral, and 2 girls (25%) do not think they are overweight. for the statement i am overweight, x=3.38 and sd=1.4. based on the heights and weights reported in the survey, bmi measurements for 7 of 8 girls (88%) are in the normal range. in responding to the statement i want to weigh less, all participants indicated some level of agreement by circling a 3, 4, or 5 on the likert scale (x=4.62, sd=.74). asked if they would rather be thin than healthy, 3 girls (37.5%) responded in the affirmative (x=2.63, sd=1.77). finally, regarding the statement how i look is more advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 68 important than who i am, 7 respondents (88%) disagree and 1 respondent (12%) remained neutral (x=1.38, sd=.74). second, in examining diet and exercise habits, results indicate 7 girls (88%) always or sometimes (likert statements range from 1= never, 3= sometimes, 5= always) exercise at least 30 minutes 5 times a week (x=3.63, sd=1.69). seven girls (88%) also indicate that they are on a diet sometimes or always (x=3.38, sd=1.41). with regard to unhealthy diet practices, 4 girls (50%) report taking diet pills (x=2.25, sd=1.49), 1 girl (12%) takes laxatives (x=1.13, sd=.35), 2 girls (25%) induce vomiting (x=1.75, sd=1.49), and 2 girls (25%) restrict food intake to less than 1,200 calories (x=1.5, sd=.93). a third focus of the survey rests on the portions of magazines that respondents read. all respondents look at advertisements (x=3.25, sd=.89), 7 girls (88%) read advice columns (x=3.38, sd=1.3), 7 girls take quizzes (x=3.38, sd=1.51), all respondents read stories about real life or tragedies (x=3.38, sd=1.06), 7 girls read fashion information (x=3.13, sd=1.25), 7 girls read about guys or romance (x=3.5, sd=1.41), all respondents read the cover story (x=3.75, sd=.89), and 7 girls read stories about or interviews with celebrities (x=3.25, sd=1.17). the final section of the survey involved four open-ended questions. the first question asked, what can you do to improve yourself? seventy-five percent (six girls) indicated that exercise and healthy eating would be a way of selfimprovement. other individual responses included being a nicer person, building a better relationship with christ, developing self-confidence, becoming self-sufficient, seeking knowledge, being an activist, and exhibiting tolerance. the second open-ended question asked respondents to describe the ideal woman. these are the responses in the girls' own words: 5'7", 120 lbs., bust size 36d, waist size 24", hips 36"; nice personality, sensitive, caring; dressed nicely with make up on and hair and nails done the ideal woman is not a size 0, nor is she overweight. her appearance should be appealing and attractive, so she should be about a size 8 or 10. she presents herself gracefully and is very intelligent. thin, but toned and not too bony. healthy, tan, confident, but not cocky. the ideal woman is someone who takes care of herself (healthy, job). she is also confident and takes her life seriously, but of course has a lot of fun doing it. a happy, healthy, friendly girl. reacts to different situations well. has inner peace. is womanly in appearance; looks healthy. is happy. sans makeup; does not conform to traditional standards of feminine beauty (shaving, perfume, painted nails); vastly knowledgeable-not deferential in the face of men, nor reactionary and thoughtless when expressing her beliefs; an advocate of egalitar-ianism, not preferential treatment of women; a subversive factor within the system. the ideal woman is fit. she has muscles that are toned, but not too bulky and thin. she is not short and stalky, but about 5'4" to 5'8". she has beautiful skin, is outgoing and athletic, and has a great personality. the third open-ended question asks, what woman do you most admire and why? a variety of responses were generated. both hispanic respondents admire jennifer lopez for her success and appearance. two girls mention their mothers, and one girl mentions her boyfriend's mother. other responses include a professor, a teacher, and a family friend. the reasons include appearance, intelligence, christianity, strong work ethic, selfsacrifice, self-sufficiency, humility, and tolerance. the final open-ended question asked participants to select an advertisement, tear it out, and explain what makes the ad appealing. only five out of the eight girls (63%) fulfilled this part of the survey. one ad features a pregnant woman in formal attire. the respondent was drawn to the model's elegance, her "gorgeous hair" and the dress. another respondent selected an ad featuring singer vanessa carlton promoting abstinence until marriage. she chose this ad because she likes the singer, appreciates the positive message, and feels less "different" about her choice to remain a virgin since "there are famous celebrities doing the same thing." two girls chose ads for hair products by thermasilk and pantene because the hair on the model is so smooth and pretty. finally, one girl chose an ad for acuvue contact lenses in which the model has vivid green eyes. she always wanted her eyes to be like her grandmother's green eyes. she also says eyes are the first thing she notices about a person. discussion this study hypothesized that none of the young women surveyed read beauty and fashion magazines, that they have an accurate perception of their body size, and that they do not engage in unhealthy diet practices. however, results indicated that the young women surveyed do read beauty and fashion magazines about once a month, that most perceive themselves as being overweight even when they are not, and that some do exhibit unhealthy diet habits (such as taking diet pills and/or laxatives, purging, and restricting food intake). additionally, the results of this study partially support the widely held assertion that seventeen, ym, and teen are traditionally the beauty and fashion magazines most frequently read by teenagers. in this study, the top three beauty and fashion magazines read by the participants are seventeen, cosmo, and ym. this is interesting because cosmo is not intended for a teenage audience. while survey participants were all age 18 or 19, they still do not fit the age demographic for cosmo. additionally, in the initial, informal e-mail query regarding magazine readership, the girls were aged 16-19, and advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 69 cosmo was still the top choice. malkin, wornian, and chrisler (1999) studied the messages that appear on the covers of popular men's and women's magazines. in examining the covers of current issues of seventeen, ym, and cosmo, none overtly advertise diet or weight loss strategies. however, within the magazine's pages, it is implicit in the images presented through advertisements and photographs that women should be slender, attractive, wear makeup, and dress fashionably. it is clear from the table of contents in all three magazines that a primary concern for females is attracting and pleasing men (methods for doing so are very explicit in cosmo). it is the explicit nature of cosmo that raises a concern that 16-19 year old girls (and almost certainly ones who are younger) read this magazine. self-improvement, as implied by these three magazines, is limited to improvement of the physical self. not only are women objectified in these magazines, but men are too: cosmo has a section titled "guy without his shirt: this month's half-naked hunk," seventeen has a feature called "would you date this guy?," and ym has a department called "ym boys: the cutest ones we could find this month" (a canoe paddling team from a high school in hawaii). as a final comment regarding magazine choice, it is important to note that while teenage girls do read beauty and fashion magazines, they read other magazines as well. according to this study, just as many girls read people as read seventeen. responses from the initial, e-mail query and the survey provided a broad picture of the varied interests of teenage girls when it comes to magazines: discover, brio (a christian teen magazine), time, national geographic, scientific american, rolling stone, fitness, shape, psychology today, and a variety of specialty magazines (i.e. ones that focus on tattoos or raves). this simply suggests that even though our culture is saturated with messages promoting a feminine ideal, gender is merely one facet of identity, and these girls are cultivating interests beyond physical appearance. magazines may well play a role in how a young woman perceives herself, but so do the various people in her life. survey results indicated that the people who most influence a girl's perception of herself are peers who are not friends. perhaps peers who are not friends are more influential because these people can only pass judgement based on appearance since they are not close friends or family. parents, siblings, friends, and boyfriends all might know the whole person, so perhaps the opinions of loved ones about appearance are less influential because affection and acceptance are already present and based on more than external factors. another interesting result also regards self-perception. although only one of the respondents is actually overweight (based on calculation of bmi), six of the eight respondents indicated some level of agreement with the statement i am overweight. all the girls, including the two who do not consider themselves overweight, still agreed at some level with the statement i want to weigh less. this suggests the indoctrination of a feminine ideal that is slender. however, respondents overwhelmingly disagreed with the statement, "how i look is more important than who i am," which implies an awareness on some level that there is more to the quality of a person than appearance. thomsen, weber, and brown (2001) found that as many as two-thirds of high school girls are either on a diet or plan to start one and that women and girls engage in unhealthy dieting practices in an effort to imitate the ideal images prevalent in magazines. results show 88% of the girls surveyed are sometimes or always on a diet, which is consistent with the research. unhealthy eating practices were reported by girls in this sample; notably, half the respondents take diet pills with varying degrees of frequency. finally, the open-ended questions on the survey yielded interesting results. in the first question, what can you do to improve yourself?, all the girls interpreted yourself in the context of improving physical appearance through increased exercise and diminished food intake; four girls also added other improvements not related to the physical self. this result suggests that respondents most fully understand the self as a primarily physical entity. one reason for this could be that the survey clearly addresses perception of the physical self, so perhaps the participants were responding within that context. similarly, in the fourth open-ended statement, all respondents who tore out advertisements commented on some physical aspect of the model, specifically the hair, skin, or eyes. the second open-ended question asked for a description of the ideal woman. one girl's response is consistent with thompson and heinberg's study (1999), where the perceived ideal height and weight are not at all healthy. the individual responses reveal that these girls have a very specific mental image of how a woman should be. none of the respondents acknowledges that women come in various shapes and sizes, or that beauty does not have just one measurement. the one atypical reply to this question is from a respondent who has completed a year and a half of college; she has been exposed to other ideas and the wider world outside of high school, and this is clear from her description of the ideal woman. there are several limitations to this study. first, the sample size is too small and does not represent a diverse ethnicity to generalize to the larger population. additionally, some of the literature reviewed deals with teen magazines, and the respondents for this survey are at the end of their teenage years. furthermore, only one issue of seventeen, cosmo, and ym were examined closely for this study. while contents are likely to be similar from issue to issue (based on departments listed in the table of contents), there is also the likelihood that some of the articles are reflective of the summer season. another limitation comes from the likert scale. a 1 meant strongly disagree and a 5 meant strongly agree; however, a specific meaning was not assigned to a 3. therefore, it is difficult to interpret what exactly is meant by a 3, and many of the means for the likert responses are a 3. advancing women in leadership journal-fall 2003 70 recommendations this study focused on the beauty and fashion magazines that young women read; however, the results suggest that a broader study needs to be done that investigates other types of magazines regularly read by teenagers. do these magazines have a different or more positive message about body image, or do they also promote an unrealistic feminine ideal? what messages do they send in general? similarly, since magazines rely heavily on advertising dollars, further education in media literacy is necessary. consumers, especially young and impressionable ones, should be aware of how pictures of people can be manipulated. additionally, the results of this study raise the issue of peer influence. results showed that peers who are not friends are most influential. why is this? finally, evidence of unhealthy diet practices suggests a need for education about the risks of engaging in such detrimental practices. the premise behind these recommendations is that, as social comparison theory holds, people compare themselves to a perceived ideal and act to attain it; such actions should be based on knowledge and motivated by a desire for overall well-being. references cosmo. (2002, july). currie, d. h. (1999). girl talk: adolescent magazines and their readers. toronto: university of toronto press. dobosz, a. m. (2001, january). teen glossies. print, 55(1), 28+. retrieved june 13, 2002, from psycinfo database. malkin, a. r., wornian, k., & chrisler, j. c. (1999). women and weight: gendered messages on magazine covers [electronic version]. sex roles, 40(718), 647-655. mccabe, m. p., & ricciardelli, l. a. (2001, summer). parent, peer and media influences on body image and strategies to both increase and decrease body size among adolescent boys and girls [electronic version]. adolescence, 36(142), 225-240. merrill, c. (1999, october). keeping up with teens. american demographics, 21(10), 27+. retrieved june 13,2002, from psycinfo database. norton, b. (2001, december). when is a teen magazine not a teen magazine? journal of adolescent and adult literacy, 45(4), 296-299. oliver, k. l. (2001). images of the body from popular culture: engaging adolescent girls in critical inquiry [electronic version]. sport, education, and society, 6(2), 143-164. schwarz, g. (2000, fall). exploring media literacy with young adults. the alan review, 50-54. seventeen. thompson, j. k., & heinberg, l. j. (1999). the media's influence of body image disturbance and eating disorders: we've reviled them, now can we rehabilitate them? [electronic version] journal of social issues, 55(2), 339353. thomsen, s. r., weber, m. m. & brown, l. b. (2001, may/june). the relationship between health and fitness magazine reading and eating-disordered weight-loss methods among high school girls. american journal of health education, 32(3), 133-138. thomsen, s. r., weber, m. m., & brown, l. b. (2002, spring). the relationship between reading beauty and fashion magazines and the use of pathogenic dieting methods among adolescent females. adolescence, 37(145), 1-18. retrieved june 6, 2002 from academic search premier database. ym. (2002, july). authors heidi sauer is a masters degree student in the counseling program in the department of educational leadership and counseling, sam houston state university. dr. rebecca robles-piña is an assistant professor in the department of educational leadership and counseling, sam houston state university. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership women as leaders: piecing together their reflections on life and the principalship nancy anne colflesh, ph.d. colflesh, spring, 2000 the artists of quilting have used form, materials, and practices quite different from those that, until recently have been identified with "art" . . . . you are clearly in the presence of artists of high technical excellence and design quality who were not treated or recognized as artists until the women's movement. a quilt was made to be used. it was integrated into particularistic relations the piece of her grandmother's dress, her daughter's pinafore and was sometimes made by a group of women working together. the making itself and the friendships were built into the design, the collection of fabrics, the stitching . . . . (smith, 1987, p. 23) just as the women who, for generations, worked alone and together to piece together the scraps and remains of former clothing to provide warm coverings for their family members, were not acknowledged as legitimate artists until the women's movement, women leaders have not, until more recently, been acknowledged as legitimate leaders in organizations. some writers have noted that there is a new paradigm of leadership developing in contemporary organizations, due partly to the strengths that women http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html are realizing they bring to the workplace. the paradigm has been there for some time, but there is now enough of a critical mass of women in formal organizations and unique entrepreneurial efforts that the effects of that paradigm are being felt (bancroft, 1995; lee, 1994). called "the subtle revolution," the increase in numbers of executive and management women has changed, and will continue to change, the attitudes and actions of organizations (helgesen, 1990; leavitt, 1988; towery, 1998). this need reinforces harding's (1987) position that, until the less powerful raise their voices to articulate their experiences, all leaders and their organizations will not benefit or gain perspective from those experiences. undoubtedly, attention must be paid to the need for leadership theory that acknowledges and incorporates women's experiences and perspectives (helgesen, 1990; regan & brooks, 1995; shakeshaft, 1989; waggoner, 1998). feminist researchers in educational administration and other professions have yearned to contribute women's voices to the field of study that informs leadership practice and preparation programs in the field. the appearance of women in studies of educational leadership is relatively recent (ah-nee benham & cooper, 1998; fennell, 1994; brown & irby, 1998; waggoner, 1998) and is beginning to counteract the long-held view of k-12 administration as a male activity (dunlap & schmuck, 1995; regan & brooks, 1995; shakeshaft, 1989). admittedly, my research study of four exemplary women elementary principals contributes a miniscule amount to the literature of educational leadership with its examination of the relationship between women's life experiences and their leadership values and beliefs. nevertheless, its findings have struck a familiar, yet emotional, chord for women already serving as educational leaders in schools, districts, and universities. an extensive review of the literature on leadership, women as leaders and learners, educational administration, and the psycho-social development of women provided the basis for what i identified as the feminist attributes of leadership. the women in the study consistently exhibited these attributes throughout their life lines, responses to interview questions, stories and examples from their leadership practice, leadership artifacts, sketches of their schools as organizations, journals, and metaphors about life and the principalship: a strong caring ethic with value placed on inclusion and connection. a view of the leader's work as cyclical and unending, accomplished through relationships and connections. preference for competence and trustworthiness over loyalty when hiring. leadership by giving voice to vision and using that voice to empower others to work toward common goals. integration of personal and professional aspects of life. view of the organization as nonhierarchical with the leader in the center. communication as key to organizational success, with emphasis on the importance of conflict resolution. view of power the ability to get the job done as not finite, but expanded when shared through collaborative and participatory styles of leadership. ongoing learning from a variety of sources; view of leaders as learners. these four women, ranging in age from 48 to 56, had secured their first principalship after the age of thirty-five. none had aspired to an administrative role, mostly due to the lack of meaningful role models and their desire to continually fine tune their teaching practice and serve as teacher leaders within their schools and districts. one had earned a graduate degree in educational leadership after starting with counseling course work, whereas the other three had degrees in curriculum and instruction, reading, and child development. interestingly enough, the nudging forces behind each of these women to consider the principalship when opportunities emerged were male university researchers/professors and a superintendent, who, in the women's words, exhibited the above feminist attributes of leadership. these women spoke about their life experiences, both professionally and personally, and constructed meaning for themselves, and for me, about the connections between their life experiences and the women's thinking about school leadership. like the quiltmaker, each woman used fabric pieces, some leftover scraps and some new fabric, that were available to stitch together the practical and meaningful "quilt of life" that was uniquely her own. carolyn used a similar metaphor, "making sense of my life and work has been a quilt in the making each square from life's carpetbag, representing success or challenge, pieced together in a beautiful pattern of memories" (carolyn, p. 96). brief summaries of their portraitures follow. although she had retired near the end of my study, jean had been a principal in a fairly large suburban district, serving as the leader of a k-5 school with 200 children from both financially privileged and disadvantaged families. i gave her the title of "the cultural, connecting leader" to symbolize her style of leadership, commitment to diversity and cross-cultural education, and her passion for a healthy school culture. she had been an only child, was educated in a quaker high school, served as a music teacher, dealt with alcoholism in her family, and had traveled extensively. carolyn, "the trusted, family-focused leader", served as the principal of an early childhood enter with nearly 400 kindergartners and first graders from a variety of backgrounds in a medium-sized suburban district. she regarded her work as a trusted coach and advisor for young parents as the cornerstone of her role as a school leader. also an only child and accomplished musician, she had found solace in school from her troubled home environment, married at a young age and reared four children while her alcoholic spouse squandered their resources and reputation. she taught in elementary classrooms and served as a reading specialist prior to her principalship. as "the servant leader", mary was the principal of a pre-k-5 christian school, located in an urban setting, with an enrollment of 350 students. she clearly saw her role as serving and supporting the teaching and learning experiences in the school. one of four daughters, her father had played a positive and significant role in her early years, especially in his encouragement of her peace corps and mission work. she married and reared three daughters while teaching a variety of elementary grades. last, patricia, "the leader of the school family of learners", served as principal in the largest elementary school in the study, which had an enrollment of more than 400 students from all socioeconomic levels. she placed a significant priority on learning for everyone in the school and held dear the requirements of special-needs learners and at-risk children. she grew up with an older brother, married young and reared four sons, and taught most of the elementary grades. these women's personal lives revealed the pieces of life's quilt that they had sought or earned as well as those pieces that were rudely provided, left over, or left out: promising educational experiences, advanced degrees, professional work, friendships and relationships, as well as the impact of alcoholism, loss of babies before birth and within the first year of life, divorce, and betrayal of spouses and administrative colleagues. the commonalities in their professional career choices accentuate the limitations that existed for them as bright young women 25 to 30 years ago. yet, consistent with the findings of mitchell and helson's (1990) work with women in midlife, these women elementary principals exhibited commitments to people, their careers, and their school communities. moreover, their stories and experiences exhibited the feminist attributes of leadership. they cared deeply about the quality of education provided in their schools and about the people who worked together, through a variety of relationships, connections and shared power, to provide that education. jean summed it up by stating, "i did the role of the principalship very differently and did not do it with a conviction that it was right as much as it was just the only way i knew how to do it. if i could start it over again, i would make these connections with conviction! (jean, p. 96). it seemed difficult for them to take credit for, or even acknowledge, change initiatives in their schools, because these efforts, in their minds, never really ended, simply built foundations for next steps. mary voiced that hesitation, "... i never feel entirely certain ... that is a scary thing to think that people have that much respect for the things i say and think, because to me, they are not set in concrete ..." (mary, p. 39). they gave voice to their vision through written communication, reminders, feedback, study groups, and frequent individual and group conversations. although they did not actively seek conflict, they accepted it as a necessary component of healthy relationships and quality work. both jean and mary used the phrases of "having my antennae out all of the time" and "synchronicity ... if i am listening" (jean, p. 97; mary, p.54 & 82). above all, each of these women were committed learners who learned from their own reflections as well as many other sources, "i learned to be a leader as i learned to live and become a person" (mary, p. 79). for them, on-going learning was the energy source that fueled their leadership practice. in jean's words, "making sense of my life and work has been an endless journey through my own journals, literature, biographies, meditation, and even this dissertation research" (jean, p. 73). one strong commonality that emerged in both the women's conversations and their artifacts was the nonhierarchical way in which they viewed their schools as organizations and where they viewed themselves in the organizational structure. each saw themselves as leaders in a central location within a sketch of a rounded figure showing connections between and among stakeholders working together on behalf of the children in the school. the figures showed a central catalyst with many avenues of multiway communication and a sense of fluidity. jean's sketch of her school as a wheel emphasized that the attachment of her school to central office administration and the board of education provided both support and limitations as she attempted to maneuver the school down the bumpy road of life dealing with parents and students in her school. she said, "i never felt secure that i could go very far afield... and get support from central administration. i had to keep listening and learning and keep that balance so that the wheel wouldn't collapse" (jean, p. 42). describing the relationships as protons and neutrons in the nucleus, carolyn's nested identicallysized circles, drawn with dotted lines interfacing with each other, showed how each person's role was equally important and always evolving in the education and support of young learners. she further explained, "in order for all of us to feel as though we are in this together, we all have to value the jobs that everyone does and support one another in that respect" (carolyn, p. 73) "i don't want to be here in the center by myself" (carolyn, p. 62). patricia drew a simple design depicting the school as a family with the students at the center with her near them working with interconnecting oval-shaped groups of staff, parents and community. she said that each oval showed that no one's work was bigger or more important than another's, "good communication and acceptance going from teachers to kids and from kid to kid" (patricia, p. 54). at the end of the study, all three women agreed that mary had drawn the sketch that most accurately represented the reality of the principalship, "a jellyfish with its feelers out" (mary, p. 59). looking like neurons and synapses in the brain or some kind of electronic or transportation network, the principal appeared hooked, in a fluid and moving manner, to web-like structures with every group and individual who worked in the school. in her words, "i am the center of the web and things are going on from me. increasingly, i see one of the centers of the webs, but there are other centers where things are going on that i maybe set the atmosphere to make it possible, but i don't continue to control it" (mary, p. 58). the women's metaphors about their lives and work as school leaders captured the feminist attributes of leadership from the literature as well as their own unique personalities, values and beliefs. both jean and carolyn used the metaphor of a symphony to describe their work as principals: a symphony with parts for many different instruments, themes and variations, fast and slow parts, harmony and dissonance, the hope of introduction, the complexity of development and the joy of occasional resolutions. the symphony was a work of art in which i had some artistic license and yet i was also bound by many musical laws and traditions. the symphony, my life as an elementary principal, could be said to be a successful composition and performance although it fell apart in some places. certainly the themes were clear but the tension in some places was more than the audience or i could bear. the test of time will tell where the themes have touched the lives of children who will have a chance to perform in the future. (jean, p. 73) my practice as an elementary principal has been a symphony orchestra practicing for opening night. there are sectional rehearsals, sight-reading challenges, opening night jitters, late night practices . . . all leading to a successful finale and a standing ovation! (carolyn, p. 95) mary's metaphor of an ophthalmologist's office experience described her vision and yearning for change in the school whereas patricia's metaphor captured the combination of unpredictability and patterns in the principalship: a machine in front of me changes lens as the doctor asks if it is clear, is it better, how about this? i reply that it is fuzzy, better, can't see anything now. at times, i see things very clearly, then new set of lenses makes things look askew. some astigmatism makes certain parts of the picture distorted while others remain clear. i think that the vision continues to grow clearer and broader and richer, overall, in life and work. but it does take into account the continual adjustment needed and the times when the vision is out of focus and unclear. (mary, p. 94) my practice as an elementary principal is like a roller coaster ride wit its many ups and downs, leaving me feeling off balance, ready to scream, thrilled and ending on a level track before beginning all over again. (patricia, p. 132) in her landmark research about women in educational administration, shakeshaft (1989) made the point that it is not so much the questions that our individual research studies answer, but the additional questions they raise that contribute to the literature and future inquiry. an unexpected piece in this study emerged which prompts further inquiry into what i later called the emotional side of school leadership. although a major lesson from their life experiences was an increase in their acceptance of process and how long things take, the most staggering and unexpected theme in their stories of life and leadership beliefs and values was the impact of loss. two of the women had lost babies through miscarriage and death. one could not remember her childhood and acutely felt the loss of those years and experiences as she worked to shape her children's lives at home and school. two of the women had recently experienced loss of parents: the death of both parents and the loss that accompanied a step-father's early stages of alzheimer's disease. personal and emotional loss surfaced in their stories of absent fathers, alcoholic family members, unfaithful husbands who were unethical and law breaking, and divorce after long years of separation and single parenthood. losses existed on the professional front as well: a mentoring superintendent who left the district as soon as the woman assumed the principalship, the increasing levels of physical tiredness as the number of evening commitments increased, the heartache when tragedy happened to school children and their families, the broken relationships that occurred in times of conflict and reassignment of roles, grief for the toll their work had on their own families, and the realization that not all administrators shared their passion and commitment for leadership in the district. perhaps another researcher could further explore the role of loss in women's lives and leadership values and beliefs. in this study, i attempted to "put women's faces" on the literature of school leadership through an examination of the relationship between women's life experiences and their values and beliefs as educational leaders. carolyn's comment confirms that attempt, "... you have captured my soul" (carolyn, p. 112). as i moved into the conversations with each of the women, i was haunted by the distant voices of feminist researchers who had wondered whether the feminist research process of women interviewing women might be a contradiction in terms and that the meandering journey of the research path might be too unpredictable (oakley, 1981; wagner-martin, 1995). as each woman reflected on the parts of her self and her work of which she was most proud, angry, frustrated, and accepting, i felt the strength of her pride, the intensity of her anger, the seriousness of her frustration, and her eventual acceptance. as i reflected on the study's findings, i was, most of all, saddened by the women's collective sense of loss as they admitted that their administrative colleagues, both principals and central office, often did not share their passion for leading change in the district: i was angry that so many of the administrators in my district were relatively uneducated, narrow minded and anti-intellectual. their intelligence, dedication and goodness is unquestionable but it was frustrating and boring to work with them (jean, p. 74). it seemed as though, in their own individual quilts of life, these women had delicately handled the needle to add these emotional pieces to the design of their work. yet, to omit them because the pain or regret would have been too great or uncomfortable would indeed, have been inauthentic something none of them would have found acceptable. therefore, the concept of piece-making took on further meaning when i realized that it meant not only the parts of life that women purposefully seek, but also the parts of life that are handed to them, and then the emotionality of it all as they muster the cognitive and creative energy to make the pieces fit together in some kind of useful pattern or design. perhaps the emotions of leadership are the threads that hold the pieces in place to create a lasting design that is simultaneously and wonderfully aesthetic, but also pragmatically functional, as in women's quilts of long ago. feminist stress on women's socially constructed "difference" from men can go along with recognition of diversity among women themselves, if we acknowledge that multifaceted entity the patchwork quilt, so to speak that is the group called women (cott, 1986, p. 60). references ah-nee benham, m. k. p., & cooper, j. e. (1998). narratives of diverse women in school leadership. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. bancroft, n. h. (1995). the feminine quest for success: how to prosper in business and be true to yourself. san fancisco: berrett-koehler. brown, g., & irby, b. (eds.). (1998). women and leadership: creating balance in life. commack. ny: nova science. combs, a. w., miser, a. b., & whitaker, k. s. (1999). on becoming a school leader: a person-centered challenge. alexandria, va: ascd. cott, n. f. (1986). feminist theory and feminist movements: the past before us. in j. mitchell & a. oakley (eds.), what is feminism? (pp.375-398). new york: pantheon books. dunlap, d. m., & schmuck, p. a. (eds.). (1995). women leading in education. albany: state university of new york press. fennell, h. a. (1994, november). women principals as leaders: a case study. journal of school leadership, 4, 672-707. fullan, m. (ed.). (1997). the challenge of school change: a collection of articles. arlington heights, il: skylight. garmston, r. j., & wellman, b. m. (1999). the adaptive school: a sourcebook for developing collaborative groups. norwood, ma: christopher-gordon. hargreaves, a., & fullan, m. (1998). what's worth fighting for out there. new york: teachers college press. harding, s. (ed.). (1987). feminism and methodology. indianapolis: indiana university press. helgesen, s. (1990). the female advantage: women's ways of leadership. new york: bantam doubleday dell publishing group. leavitt, j. a. (1988). women in administration and management: an information sourcebook. phoenix: orynx press. lee, c. (1994, november). the feminization of management. training magazine, 25-31. lester, j. s. (1996). taking charge: every women's action guide to personal, political and professional success. berkeley, ca: conari press. mitchell, v., & helson, r. (1990). women's prime of life: is it the 50s? psychology of women quarterly, 14, 451-470. oakley, a. (1981). interviewing women: a contradiction in terms. in a. j. roberts (ed.), doing feminist research (pp. 30-61). london: routledge & kegan paul. regan, h. b., & brooks, g. h. (1995). out of women's experiences: creating relational leadership. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. inc. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. newbury park, ca: corwin press. smith, l. m. (1987). the everyday world as problematic: a feminist sociology. boston: northeastern university press. towery, m. (1998). powerchicks: how women will dominate america. atlanta: longstreet press. waggoner, f. i. (1998). leadership skills in the balance. in g. brown & b. irby (eds.), women and leadership: creating balance in life. commack. ny: nova science. wagner-martin, l. (1995). telling women's lives: the new biography. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. about the author nancy a. colflesh, ph.d., is a former elementary teacher and principal in both public and independent school settings. during the past decade, she has worked as a staff developer and organizational development consultant in mid-michigan with school and district leaders in rural, suburban and urban environments. currently, she is working independently as an organizational and educational consultant providing services through presenting, facilitating, consulting, and leadership coaching. she is expanding her work to include keynote presentations and the specific development of women leaders in schools and districts. she is planning to move soon to a more southern location with her son. the author's research earned the 1996 american educational research association distinguished dissertation award from its special interest group: research on women in education (aera:sig:rwe). her dissertation is available from umi dissertation services in ann arbor, 734-7614660 ext. 2143. she can be contacted at 517-339-5268, 5688 bayonne avenue haslett, mi 48840, fax 517-339-7059, or email ncolflesh@aol.com. awl journal home page awl journal volume 3, number 1, winter 2000 subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:ncolflesh@aol.com file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/awl.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awl%20backup-2/winter2000/index.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/content.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/dropbox/awl/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 29, number 8 july 30, 2009 issn 1093-7099 gender differences in placement, support, and participation in early school programs for urban hispanic students in advanced placement courses dr. raul hinojosa dr. rebecca a. robles-piña dr. stacey edmonson abstract this study investigated differences between males and females of 352 urban, predominately u.s.-born hispanic students enrolled in advanced placement (ap) courses. the gender composition was 131 (37.2%) male and 221 (68.2%) female and the majority of students was enrolled in 11th and 12th grades. our findings indicated that (a) more females than males were enrolled in ap courses, (b) females perceived school support as more important than males, and (c) participation in elementary and middle school programs, such as gifted and talented programs and magnet schools were important for participation in high school ap courses. implications for school policy are noted. key words: gender difference, school, hispanic students, woman citation: hinojosa, r., robles-pina, r., & edmonson, s., (2009). gender differences in placement, support, and participation in early school programs for urban hispanic students in advanced placement courses. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(8). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/� advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 2 introduction one of the best predictors for short-term as well as long-term academic progress for students is participation in advanced placement (ap) courses (burdman, 2000; college board, 2007; fitzsimmons, 2005; planty, provasnik, & daniel, 2007). given this importance and the prediction of hispanic students as the largest growing student population (u.s. bureau of the census, 2000), it becomes critical that strategies for inclusion of hispanic students in ap courses be addressed. further, it becomes necessary to study the strategies from a gender perspective, since females tend to place a higher value on academic achievement than do males (okagaki, 2001). thus, the purpose of our preliminary study is to describe the differences between hispanic males and females in high school ap courses. specifically, participation in elementary, middle, and high schools programs will be investigated to determine the educational trajectory of hispanic students enrolled in a calculus ap course in high school. potentially, the findings from this study can be used to provide educators with information on the specific elementary, middle, and high school programs that can provide the necessary support for students’ future participation in ap courses. further, an investigation of gender differences can lead to development of different strategies to use in advising of hispanic females to enroll in science, math, and engineering programs at the university level. historical account of academic discrepancies historically, the plight of the achievement gap between hispanic, african american and white and asian american students has been studied. the earliest studies defined the achievement gap and established policies for its reduction. for example, in 1996, the president’s advisory committee on educational excellence for hispanic americans released its first comprehensive report titled our nation on the fault line: hispanic american education (president’s advisory commission on educational excellence for hispanic americans, 2000). reaction to these policies led to the formation of committees and a series of scholarly papers. one such paper was that of lockwood and secada (1999) who supported the president’s advisory committee hispanic dropout project. this was followed by a report known as the no more excuses (secada et al, 1998) including a comprehensive set of articles on successful practices in the education of hispanic students. other reports such as the report on the white house strategy session on improving hispanic student achievement (u.s. department of education, office of civil rights, 2000) and our nation on the fault line: hispanic american education and no more excuses (secada et al, 1998) were the basis for the creation of the hispanic education action plan (heap) and other initiatives (u.s. department of education hispanic dropout project, 1998). heap was responsible for the formation of five national goals for hispanic education (u.s. department of education, office of civil rights, 2000). the goals were produced in a series of meetings between advocacy groups, non-profit organizations, educators, members of congress, and the president’s advisory commission on educational excellence for hispanic americans. the five goals included: (a) providing access to quality early childhood education, (b) ensuring english proficiency, (c) closing the achievement gap on assessments of academic performance, (d) increasing the rate of high school completion, and (e) doubling the rate of postsecondary degree attainment. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 3 these national goals were specifically designed to help support increased academic achievement for hispanic students, including the provision of “high quality education with appropriate resources and support to ensure equal opportunity for all students to eliminate the achievement gap between hispanic students and other students on appropriate state assessments and other indicators by 2010” (u.s. department of education, office of civil rights, 2000, p. 17). the u.s. department of education, office of civil rights (2000) noted that “closing the achievement gap necessitates action on a number of fronts, starting with a focus on improving access to and quality of early childhood education and opportunity and english language acquisition” (p. 17). more specifically, the strategies the u.s. department of education, office of civil rights (2000) recognized the importance in closing the achievement gaps included ensuring that all students are pursuing a rigorous curriculum such as found in ap courses, allocating resources effectively to address the learning needs of hispanic students, ensuring quality teaching, and involving parents in their child’s education. in spite of these initiatives, the achievement gap for hispanic students is still very much an issue: school efforts to close the gap in academic achievement between ethnic and racial minority students and white students have been largely unsuccessful to date; differences in educational performance persist at all achievement levels, with the gap greatest between students of color and immigrants and their white and asian american peers at high achievement levels. (schwartz, 1999, p. 10) this achievement gap is apparent through a number of critical measures. for example, hispanic students are outperformed by white students on the national assessment of educational progress (naep) tests (nevarez, 2001). additionally, white and asian students, on average, have higher grade point averages in school than hispanic students (orfield, losen, wald, & swanson, 2004). although the disparity between hispanic student achievement and that of white and asian students has been an area of concern for both policy makers and educators for a number of years, the improvement in this area has been minimal (weiher, hughes, kaplan, & howard, 2006). ap courses – a current strategy in keeping with the goals of doubling the rate of postsecondary degree attainment (u.s. department of education, office of civil rights, 2000), some research has investigated the achievement gap by studying the participation of underrepresented groups in ap courses. the number of high school students participating in the college board’s advanced placement program has increased more than 140% in the last 10 years (planty et al., 2007). this program, established and run by the college board, allows high school students to take advanced coursework in high school and earn, through rigorous end of course exams, college level credit in various subject areas. there are currently 37 ap examinations in 22 subject areas, including two new tests offered for the first time in 2006-07. in 2006, the advanced placement program was offered in more than 15,000 schools worldwide. more than 1.3 million students took 2.3 advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 4 million ap examinations in 2006, numbers that continue to increase every year (planty, et al., 2007). the importance of performing well and even simply participating in ap courses should not be underestimated. in a study involving 21 colleges, burdman (2000) concluded that students who had been enrolled in at least one ap course in high school significantly outperformed their peers who had not taken an ap course, but who had the college-level prerequisite course. william fitzsimmons (2005), dean of admissions and financial aid at harvard university said, “one of the best standard predictors of academic success at harvard is the performance on ap examinations” (p. 1). thus, advanced placement participation is not just important for the success of high school students, but it directly impacts future academic success of all students as well. as the popularity of ap courses continues to rise and programs expand throughout the world, the college board has explicitly stated its commitment to the achievement and academic success of all students, especially those that have historically been underrepresented in advanced or college level work. in fact, the college board specifically addresses the achievement of underrepresented groups in the advanced placement program in its access and equity initiative, first established in 2002. the college board and the advanced placement program encourage teachers, ap coordinators, and school administrators to make equitable access a guiding principle for their ap programs. further, the board encourages the elimination of barriers that restrict access to ap courses for students from ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups that have been traditionally under-represented in the ap program. schools should make every effort to ensure that their ap classes reflect the diversity of their student population (college board, 2007). school support for hispanic students in ap courses studying the participation of hispanic students must go beyond investigating ethnic and gender group differences and examine the school context and school program support for hispanic students enrolled in ap courses (gánadara, 2005; jodry, robles-piña, & nichter, 2004; ndura, robinson, & ochs, 2003; tapia & lanius, 2000). the rationale for examining the achievement gap from this perspective is to investigate how students who are faced with adverse circumstances, such as low socioeconomic status and low parent educational attainment are able to overcome obstacles if they are placed in schools programs that prepare them for the demands of ap courses. it is important to determine what types of school, community, and parental support are needed to engage in rigorous academic courses (epstein et al., 2002). there have been a couple of qualitative studies investigating support in hispanic student participation in ap courses. one such study was jodry’s (2001), who interviewed six hispanic students enrolled in an ap calculus program in a large urban high school. through interviews, jodry found that students perceived home support when (a) parents were interested in school work, (b) good role models at home provided structure for learning, (c) there was a safe home environment, and (d) language and culture were valued. students perceived school support when (a) teachers advocated on the students’ behalf about information regarding courses, college advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 5 scholarships, and financial assistance, and (b) teachers valued students’ language and culture by allowing students to speak with them about personal matters. students perceived community support when (a) information about dual enrollment in high school and college was provided, (b) work opportunities for students and parents were provided, and (c) language and culture were valued, such as when the community provided services to students and parents in ways that did not demean them. a second study by the national research center on the gifted and talented involving interviews with 12 hispanic students was conducted to investigate the home, school, community connection (kloosterman, 1999). it was found that supportive environments had the following characteristics: (a) a strong maternal role, (b) hispanic legacy, (c) maintenance of the spanish language, (d) a safe school environment, (e) flexible grouping, and (f) english support (speakers of other languages) (esol) students. additionally, kloosterman found a series of conflicting issues related to the characteristics, values, and perspectives of the home and school cultures. these conflicting issues between the home and school cultures included a difference in the level of support schools gave to bilingualism, family involvement in education, and knowledge of curriculum and instructional methodologies used. other studies based on quantitative methodology have indicated high achieving hispanics’ student participation in ap classes. a first study conducted by gánadara (2005) examined two national databases and found that (a) hispanic students were more likely than white students to have parents with very low educational levels, (b) hispanic students benefit more from early grade interventions than do white students, and (c) schools have a greater influence on the academic success of hispanics than on white students. a second study was conducted in eight high schools in a large, diverse school district. ndura et al. (2003) found that with the exception of asian students, minority students are underrepresented in ap courses and that their parents’ educational status, profession, and income are positively related to student enrollment in ap courses. a third study investigating a large school district in california indicated that even in districts where there is a large representation of hispanic students, participation in ap courses for hispanic students is low (solarzano & ornelas, 2004). a fourth quantitative study indicated that students enrolled in ap courses are more likely to have mothers who had earned at least a bachelor’s degree (robles-piña & hinojosa, 2007). in general, studies investigating enrollment of hispanic students in ap courses have been limited to quantitative studies describing enrollment figures and qualitative studies interviewing a small number of students. gender differences along with the increase of students taking ap courses and exams, the number of women and minority students taking these challenging academic endeavors has also increased. for example, from 1992-2002, the number of female students who took the ap history exam increased 124% (college board, 2007). during this same time frame, the number of hispanic ap test-takers increased an astounding 266%; chicano/mexican american female participation increased 308% (eric development team, 2001). further, increases in numbers for hispanic and female students are likely to continue to rise (venkateswaran, 2004). advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 6 despite the growth in the participation of women and minorities in ap coursework and testing, recent research still recognizes that the advanced placement program demonstrates performance differences between female and minority students and white males (buck, kostin, & morgan, 2002). for example, long-term results have shown that female and minority students achieve better results on the essay portion of the examinations and achieve poorer results on the multiple choice sections (venkateswaran, 2004). because there is research that demonstrates that males have better visual, numerical, and computational abilities while females have stronger verbal skills (cole, 1997), this gap between the performance of males and the performance of females and minorities on the multiple choice sections is not surprising. still, with the importance of the ap exams on future success and the increase of students taking these exams, this gap, however small, can be critical. “concerns about gender equity and diversity have transformed the ap exam over the last decade, even as issues of gender, race, and ethnicity have had a major impact on the ways in which we teach” (venkateswaran, p. 510). our study goes beyond describing statistics and interviews of a few students to investigating variables heretofore not researched, gender and support through school program participation. information from this study on gender differences in enrollment of ap courses is important. first, the information can be used to share with school districts about how to provide support for males and females on the enrollment of ap courses. second, the information can be shared with students so that they can be made aware of the differences between males and females. third, the information can be used in professional development courses with math instructors so that they can know how to support and what type of support to offer both males and females in math-related ap courses. fourth, the information from this study can help to support placement of hispanic students, a group known to be under-performing in math-related courses. the following questions guided our investigation: (a) are there gender differences in the enrollment of urban hispanic students in ap calculus courses? (b) are there gender differences in the type of school program support received by urban hispanic students in ap calculus courses? method participants participants were selected from a large urban school district in the southeastern part of the u.s. from the 29 high schools available, 10 were selected for participation due to similar demographics, such as students at-risk (determined by those students in free and reduced lunch programs), and high percentage of hispanic students taking advanced placement (ap) precalculus and calculus courses. from these 10 schools, four (a, b, c, d) were randomly selected to participate. school a had 12% honors classes, 96% hispanic population, 84% at-risk, and 68 students enrolled in preand ap calculus courses. school b had 20% honors classes, 88% hispanic population, 78% at-risk, and 98 students enrolled in preand ap calculus courses. school c had 67% honors classes, 27% hispanic population, 11% at-risk, and 186 students enrolled in preand ap calculus courses. lastly, school d had 29% honors classes, 29% hispanic population and 121 students enrolled in preand ap calculus courses. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 7 the ethnic composition of this group was 248 (57%) hispanic, 87 (20%) african american, 62 (14.3%) asian/pacific islander, 20 (4.6%) white, 15 (3.5%) other, and 2 (.5%) did not respond to this question. the gender composition was male 171 (39.4%), female 262 (60.4%) and missing 1 (.2%). not all students responded to all of the questions regarding program participation, thus, only complete questionnaires were used and those amounted to the 352 analyzed in this study. instrument the hy-success (jodry & hinojosa, 2003) instrument was developed to collect data on the degree of school, family, and community support hispanic students perceived when enrolled in ap courses. the hy-success instrument consists of two parts. the first part contains 20 questions related to demographic items (enrollment in special courses, educational history, post secondary aspirations, grade point average, number of siblings in the family, educational background of each parent, mother’s heritage, father’s heritage, family history in the united states, and family configuration). the second part contains a 62-item questionnaire. the information was collected on a likert-type scale with four possible response options: (a) 1 = strongly disagree (b) 2 = disagree, (c) 3 = agree, and (d) 4 = strongly agree. the scores were based on the following three sub-tests: (a) home, (b) school, and (c) community. the items making up each of the three sub-tests were 19 questions regarding the home; 25 questions regarding the school; and 14 questions regarding the community. an example of a question related to home support was “my parents or relatives have proudly taught me our family traditions and family culture.” an example of a question related to school support was “there have been adults at school who have cared about how i am doing academically.” finally, an example of a question related to community support was “members of the community have high expectations for my academic achievement.” evidence for content validity was established in three ways. first, the items for the hysuccess were taken from the literature reviewed. second, the instrument was pilot-tested on five persons who had similar characteristics as those in our sample. third, the instrument was sent to five experts in the school district who taught ap courses. feedback was used to revise the instrument and subsequently reliability was established. a cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .92 was obtained and considered reliable; thus the hy-success was deemed psychometrically sound enough to be used in the collection of the data. results the purpose of our study was to investigate the gender differences in the enrollment of urban hispanic students in ap calculus courses and the type of school program support received in elementary, middle, and high school and several differences were noted. first, more females (221; 62.8%) than males (131; 37.2%) enrolled in ap courses. second, there were statistically significant gender differences found for school support (t, 351 = 4.55, p < .01) with females perceiving higher school support (m = 75.35, sd = 9.71) than males (m = 70.64, sd = 9.59). questions on the hy-success related to school support were summed up to make up the dependent variable – school support. third, individual questions related to program participation advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 8 in elementary, middle, and high school were investigated and the following were noted in descending order. both males and females reported that when they were in elementary school, they had participated in the following programs: (a) gifted and talented programs, (b) magnet school, (c) bilingual education, and (d) english as a second language, with female participation higher in all groups. both males and females reported that when they were in middle school, they had participated in the following programs: (a) magnet schools, (b) gifted and talented, and (c) english as a second language, with female participation higher in all groups. further, both males and females reported that when they were in high school, they had participated in the following programs: (a) ap courses, (b) magnet schools, (c) dual credit courses, and (d) english as a second language, with female participation higher in all groups. in summary, more hispanic females than hispanic males participated in ap courses in this urban school district in texas. further, there was a statistically significant difference between males and females on perceived school support with females perceiving more school support. moreover, participants ranked participation in elementary and middle schools’ magnet schools and gifted and talented programs higher than other school programs. discussion the implications of the findings of this study will be discussed using the following framework: (a) limitations, (b) referencing supporting literature, (c) impact on research and school policy. there were a couple of limitations to this study. first, the results of this study can only be generalized to urban hispanic students with the demographic characteristics of this study. we hope that this will initiate a dialogue about examining gender group differences, because it may be the case that problems and solutions are defined differently by gender as they were in this study. second, in it may be the case that programs in this particular sample located in an urban school district might not be available at other school districts. if indeed enrollment in ap courses is a great predictor for academic success (college board, 2007), then the findings from our study might assist in knowing more about what weiher et al (2006) noted with hispanics being one of the most under-represented groups in ap courses. our findings concur with statistics that indicate that the number of hispanic females taking ap courses has increased (college board, 2007). gender differences found in our study support the notion that females tend to place a higher value on academic achievement than males (okagaki, 2001). some studies have investigated ethnic group differences in the achievement gap and enrollment in ap courses by examining performance on (a) visual, numerical, computational skills (cole, 1997), (b) differential responses to essay questions (venkateswaran, 2004) , and (c) differential responses to multiple choice tests (venkateswaran, 2004). other studies have recognized the need to examine systems that support enrollment in ap courses for minority students (gánadara, 2005; jodry et. al., 2004; ndura et al., 2003; tapia & lanius, 2000). in particular, jodry et al. indicated that students wanted teachers who would advise them on the type of courses to take. our finding in this study that indicated that school support is considered more important is consistent with jodry’s work; however, our finding suggests that school support is more important for females than males. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 9 the findings of our study indicated that participation in particular courses early on in school (gifted and talented, magnet schools) was a precursor to enrollment in ap courses in high school and supports jodry’s findings that teacher input on early course placement is necessary for later participation in ap courses. further, the findings of our study support gánadara’s research that stated that hispanics benefit from early school interventions and that school support has a greater influence on the academic success of hispanics. finally, our study brings us one step closer to the goals once proposed by the president’s advisory commission on educational excellence for advancement of hispanic americans that included: (a) providing access to quality early childhood education, (b) ensuring english proficiency, (c) closing the achievement gap on assessments of academic performance, (d) increasing the rate of high school completion, and (e) doubling the rate of postsecondary degree attainment (u.s. department of education, office of civil rights, 2000). there are several implications of the findings on research and school policy. it is important to note that differences to interventions between gender are almost always found. this means that when conducting research disaggregation of data for these groups is important to avoid making general and specific statements about how programs and interventions affect groups differently. moreover, for school policies it means that norms have to also consider gender group differences. in particular the findings of our study indicate the need to further investigate the relationship between early program participation and future enrollment in ap courses. regarding policy, it would be prudent for school district personnel to use this information in assuring early placement of female students who show potential in gifted and talented courses and magnet schools to prepare them for participation in ap courses that are known to be variables influencing placement in ap courses and predictors of future academic success. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 10 references burdman, p. (2000). extra credit, extra criticism. black issues in higher education, 17, 28-33. buck, g., kostin, i., & morgan, r. (2002). examining the relationship of content to genderbased performance differences in advanced placement exams. (college board research report no. 2002-12). new york: the college board. cole, n. (1997). ets gender study: how females and males perform in educational settings. princeton, nj: educational testing service. college board (2007). ap access and equity initiatives. retrieved october 13, 2007, from www.collegeboard.com eric development team. (2001). differences in educational achievement within racial and ethnic groups (report no. ed455341). new, ny: eric clearinghouse on urban education. (eric document reproduction service no. (ed455341) epstein, j. l., sanders, m. g., simon, b. s., salinas, k. c., jansorn, n. r., & van voorhis, f. l. (2002). school, family, and community partnerships. (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, california: corwin press inc. fitzsimmons, w. (2005). college applications: should the “savvy shopper” get the prize? retrieved august 15, 2005, from http://www.collegeboard.com/forum/2005/prog/detail gánadara, p. (2005). fragile futures: risk and vulnerability among latino high achievers. policy information report. princeton, nj: educational testing service. jodry, e. (2001). hispanic academic advancement theory: an ethnographic study of students participating in an urban texas high school advanced diploma program. unpublished doctoral dissertation. sam houston state university, huntsville, tx. jodry, e., & hinojosa, r. (2003, january). factors influencing hispanic student success. paper presented at the meeting of the texas association of school administrators, austin, tx. jodry, e. o., robles-piña, r. a., & nichter, m. (2004). hispanic academic advancement theory: an ethnographic study of urban students participating in a high school advanced diploma program. the high school journal, 88, 23-31. kloosterman, v. i. (1999). socio-cultural contexts for talent development: a qualitative study on high ability, hispanic, bilingual students. storrs, ct: the national research center on the gifted and talented. lockwood, a. t., & secada, w. g. (1999). transforming education for hispanic youth: exemplary practices, programs, and schools. ncbe resource collection series, no. 12. ndura, e., robinson, m., & ochs, g. (2003). minority students in high school advanced placement courses: opportunity and equity denied. american secondary education, 32, 2134. nevarez, c. (2001). mexican americans and other latinos in post-secondary education: institutional influences. eric clearinghouse on urban education (eric digest no. ed 459038) okagaki, l. (2001). triarchic model of minority children’s school achievement. educational psychologist, 36, 9-20. orfield, g., losen, d., wald, j., & swanson, c. (2004). losing our future: how minority youth are being left behind by the graduation rate crisis (report no. ed489177). harvard education publishing group. (eric document reproduction service no. ed489177) advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 11 planty, m., provasnik, s., & daniel, b. (2007). high school coursetaking: findings from the condition of education 2007 (nces 2007-065). u.s. department of education. washington, dc: national center for education statistics. president’s advisory commission on educational excellence for hispanic american. (2000). latinos in education. [on line]. available: http://www.ed.gov/offices/oiia/hispanic/newfact.pdf robles-piña, & hinojosa, r. (2007). the tipping point in home, school, and community support for hispanic students’ participation in advanced placement courses. in l. k. lemasters & r. papa (eds.). at the tipping point: navigating the course for the preparation of educational administrators. lancaster, pennsylvania, proactive publications, inc. secada, w. g., chavez-chavez, r., garcía, e., muñoz, cipriano, oakes, j., santiago-santiago, i., & slavin, r. (1998). no more excuses: the final report of the hispanic dropout project. eric clearinghouse on urban education (eric digest no. ed 461447) solorzano, d. & ornelas, a. (2004). a critical race analysis of latina/o and african american advanced placement enrollment in public high schools. high school journal, 87, 15-26. schwartz, r. (1999). coping with the effectiveness dilemma: strategies adopted by state auditors. international review of administrative sciences, 65, 511-526. tapia, r., & lanius, c. (2000). dispelling the culture of mediocrity: expanding advanced placement. invited paper presented at the meeting for the college entrance examination board, department of education, new york, new york. u.s. bureau of the census (2000). national population projections i. summary files: projections of the total resident population by 5-year age groups, race, and hispanic origin with special age categories. retrieved february 2, 2002, from http://wwwcensus.gov/hhes/www/poverty/poverty01. u.s. department of education hispanic dropout project (1998). no more excuses: the final report of the hispanic dropout project. washington, d.c.: authors. [on-line], available: http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/miscpubs/hdp/final.html u.s. department of education, office of civil rights. (2000). office of civil rights elementary and secondary school survey. washington, dc. . venkateswaran, u. (2004). race and gender issues on the ap united states history examination. the history teacher, 37, 501-512. weiher, g. r., hughes, c., kaplan, n., & howard, j. (2006). hispanic college attendance and the state of texas gear up program. the review of policy research, 23, 1035-1051. biographies dr. rebecca a. robles-piña is associate professor in the department of educational leadership & counseling at sam houston state university in huntsville, tx. her research interests include: ethnic achievement gap, depression and retention rates, school violence, and measurement. dr. raul hinojosa is a director of the faithwest catholic school in houston, tx. his research interests are community, school, and family supports for hispanic students. dr. stacey edmonson is professor and acting chair in the department of educational leadership & counseling at sam houston state university in huntsville, tx. her research interests include qualitative research, leadership and legal issues in education. http://www.ed.gov/offices/oiia/hispanic/newfact.pdf� http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/miscpubs/hdp/final.html� advancing women network home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international advancing women in leadership outstanding female superintendents: profiles in leadership carol funk, ed.d. funk, spring, 2004 being committed to do the right thing for the children is one of the more powerful traits that a superintendent can have. women are destined to rule the schools of every city . . . . in the near future we will have more women than men in the executive charge of the vast educational system. it is a woman's natural field, and she is no longer to do the greatest part of the work and yet be denied leadership. it will be my aim to prove that no mistake has been made and to show critics and friends alike that a woman is better qualified for this work than a man.(glass, 2000). ella flagg young, 1909, at her appointment to the superintendency of chicago city schools introduction suffrage efforts in the early 1900s boosted women into educational leadership roles. at this time, superintendents throughout the united states were selected through county elections (blount,1999). because many of these county districts had male superintendents who were corrupt and used dishonest financial and administrative practices, women were elected to replace many of the men who had previously held these positions. the victories of these female superintendent were sustained by honesty, credibility, and success in their roles, and by 1930, blount noted that women held nearly 28% of the nation's superintendencies. in a move to "turn out the ladies," however, male superintendency groups began a national political effort to have school superintendents appointed instead of electing them. file:///users/temp/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html these powerful men did not want women to retain their elected positions as superintendents and argued that superintendents should not be elected in public elections that were so "politically charged." the voters did not see through this political ruse and agreed to the appointment of school superintendents instead of an elective process. because the people who were set up to appoint the superintendents were all men, the women who previously held superintendent postitions began to decline; thereafter, males were appointed to nearly all of the superintendent positions across the nation. as a result, female superintendents all but disappeared in the united states after several decades of progress had been made. the struggle in the twentieth century for all women in the united states, but particularly for those in education, has been to find their individual and collective voices in order to proclaim their significance (dunlap & schmuck, 1995). voices once silenced, however, have now been heard as more women than ever before have begun to seek leadership roles in american public schools. although about 14% of women now hold positions as school superintendents (brunner, 2001), female leaders at all levels continue to be constrained in many ways in their efforts to become successful school administrators. research studies regarding women in educational administration reveal many critical problems that women face in entering and being successful in administrative careers. in spite of the difficulties regarding entry into educational leadership, however, female educators continue to enter the field of administration regardless of the continuing discrimination in hiring and promotion and other barriers, both external and internal (edson, 1988). history and background according to edson (1988), women who enter the field of school leadership do so because they wish to meet the challenges inherent in leadership roles and believe that they can provide children with more positive educational experiences than they see being provided now. although the literature regarding female leaders in education reveals that more women than ever before are entering administrative roles, "there is still much we do not know about sex discrimination, about female career patterns, about women leaders, and about inclusive conceptualizations of managerial and administrative theory" (dunlap & schmuck, 1995, p. xi). recent research studies regarding female administrators in leadership positions in education reveal that they differ not only by gender from male administrators but also lead quite differently as well. the leadership styles of these women reveal that they are perceived by others as change agents (wesson & grady, 1995), use interactive leadership (funk, 1998), practice transformational leadership (aburdene & naisbitt, 1992), provide a leadership advantage through webs of inclusion and nuturing (helgesen, 1990), and exhibit empathy, sensitivity, caring, supporting, compassion, patience, organization, and attention to detail (funk, 1998). with regard to the need for more women in school leadership positions, shakeshaft (1989) indicates that women more often than men are identified as highly successful principals. although research results reveal that female administrators lead quite differently from males and are gaining some ground in administrative positions and power, many have not been able to make their intended leadership impact because of barriers that continue to prohibit them from being selected for key leadership roles. women with new leadership styles are desperately needed for successful school reform efforts with their communicative and integrative styles (funk, 1998). by utilizing their unique strengths, including collaborative and transformation leadership, a focus on curriculum and instruction, inclusion of all clienteles in decision-making, empowerment of teachers, students, and parents, and articulation of new visions of what schools should be, female leaders of public schools and school districts could make the difference needed to ensure successful changes in education. at this point, however, these women continue to be underutilized by school boards and superintendents who do not use the talents of their aspiring and practicing female school leaders to make a real difference in the quality of schooling in our nation. as noted by irby and brown (1998), however, "it is important that women's current poor representation in formal school leadership is not necessarily an inherent condition of the institution of schooling but rather is the result of social interactions that have unfolded in specific historical contexts" (p. 8). this statement reveals the sociological nature of some of the problems embedded within american culture that must be remedied in order to remove these barriers so that equity for women in leadership can be acheived. in a similar vein, shakeshaft (1989) noted that only a handful of models have been developed to explain the theoretical underpinnings of the barriers that prohibit or limit the entrance of many women into leadership positions in education. according to this author, these barriers for aspiring women in education are internal as well as external and could originate from psychological factors such as motivation and self-efficacy. in addition, organizational theory could provide information on the impact of the structure and operation of schools and determinants of opportunity and power on female leadership aspirants or those who wish to be promoted to higher levels. one of the most critical barriers that shakeshaft describes is that of androcentrism--the practice of viewing the world and shaping reality from a male perspective that leads to sex discrimination. not much is known about the 14% of female superintendents who are serving as school districts in the united states (brunner, 2001); however, recent research does indicate that more diversity exists among female superintendents than their male counterparts. female superintendents are more often minorities, democrats, catholic or jewish, and either never married or are widowed or divorced. this reveals very different profiles from male superintendents who are anglo, republican, and married. bruner also indicates that many women who have been able to achieve the position of superintendent have resigned their school leadership roles and have taken a lower position in another school district because of the lack of support from some school board members and district stakeholders soon after they occupied these positions. at this point, however, many of the reasons why these executive women have left their positions as superintendents are either not known or not well understood. without more information regarding the characteristics of female superintendents who are highly successful in their roles, changes cannot be made regarding alterations needed in superintendent preparation programs to assist those women who are now walking away from their positions as superintendents. according to brunner (1999), research studies that focus on women in school administration are conducted almost entirely by women, perhaps indicating that this literature is not considered to be an important field of study for many other researchers in education. purpose of the study and methodology the purpose of this study was to identify professional and personal characteristics and styles of leadership in order to develop profiles of six outstanding female superintendents in texas. the intent of the research was to find similarities between and among these women that could provide insights into their backgrounds, relationships, feelings, and beliefs. the use of a qualitative methodology based on an inductive content analysis technique revealed patterns and frameworks that helped create an overall profile of a successful female superintendent. the data collected for use in this study were first obtained by pankake, schroth, and funk (winter, 2000) in their study regarding ways in which six outstanding female superintendents learned from failures in their lives (2000). the six subjects in this study were current or retired female superintendents who had been nominated for or awarded the texas association of school boards' outstanding superintendent of the year award. warren bennis (1989) developed the interview questions for his book, on becoming a leader (1989) and gave his permission for the researchers to use the questions in the structured interviews that were conducted. characteristics themes of outstanding female superintendents the characteristics and themes revealed in the data analysis of the qualitative research provided a collective view of six outstanding female superintendents and led to the identification of the qualities of leadership that were identified in the content analysis process. they include the leadership characteristics, essential superintendents' roles, necessary qualities of leadership, and critical skills that define these outstanding female superintendents. leadership qualities the following leadership qualities include characteristics, essential leadership roles, qualities, and critical skills for outstanding female school superintendents. leadership characteristics of these outstanding superintendents include: being brave, caring, creative, courageous, committed, confident, energetic, healthy, honest, industrious, introspective, intuitive, knowledgeable, open-minded, passionate, pragmatic, reflective, responsible, risk-taking, trustworthy, and well-informed. essential leadership roles that these women school executives described were: analyzer, change agent, communicator, delegator, dreamer, hirer, nurturer, reader, risk-taker, and team-builder. qualities needed by successful superintendents include character, integrity, vision, courage, and passion. critical skills for female superintendents are visioning, determining the real needs for their districts, communicating, hiring the right people, delegating, developing team support, working effectively with people, and producing meaningful and lasting change. leadership themes eight recurring leadership themes that emerged from the inductive data analysis included: being a visionary, acting professionally and ethically, allowing time for dreaming and creating, communicating effectively and often, motivating staff and self, being truly committed to their leadership role and to children, having a strong work ethic, and possessing the energy and stamina in order to do their jobs. each of these themes presented below are more fully entitled and described, and relevant quotes are presented in an effort to provide a more personal view from the participants. 1. vision, shared vision, and visioning the most frequently mentioned theme of leadership by the female superintendents was vision. these women spoke of having their own visions, their process of visioning, and ensuring that everyone who worked with them shared their vision with one another, creating a collective vision. most of these outstanding leaders noted that vision was the most important quality to have as superintendents. these women described how they operationalized the vision concept, and one of these women even noted that you "can't teach it but you could "hone it." the following quotes from these women show the necessity of visioning as an educational leader. being a visionary is part creativity and part courage; a visionary has to have some glimpse of what can be. it has to be a little bit out beyond where the rest of the group is but not too far beyond because if you don't share the dream, you begin to lose them. part of being a visionary is being able to put pieces of information together and come up with a new slant or a new way to look at things--that is part of what sets a leader apart from an administrator. i think leaders need vision, and i was at one time of the belief that you could teach that, but i no longer have that belief. we have a lot of management people who are clearly outstanding in crisis-to-crisis management, but if you give them a blank sheet of paper-(and ask) where do you want to be, they will ask me, 'what do you want me to do.' they can't see really what it looks like in their minds. to establish a vision for the organization, it can't be done unilaterally. probably the most important thing i do is to get out front and make sure that i'm not out there by myself. 2. ethical and professional behaviors. within this area, these female superintendents noted that character, integrity, honesty, determination, commitment, fairness, and responsibility were important characteristics as well as acting on their principles, not compromising, and doing what is right regardless of the circumstances. the following quotes represent some of the strong feelings held by these female leaders about being professional and ethical in the superintendency. keep to your principles! don't compromise! i was known for my honesty and integrity, and the community trusted me. i think that the qualities of leadership are integrity and honesty. to be honest you have to be brave, and bravery is having the ability to do what is right regardless of the consequences. character is integrity and the basis for everything else! if you don't have integrity, then you don't have anything. if you are not going to deal fairly with people, if you are not going to keep faith with the best, then you don't have any business being in this business. just don't attack my personal integrity. and when somebody does, that's it. 3. dreaming, thinking, creating, intuiting, and introspecting. this "inward-looking" set of affective skills and feelings is closely related to visioning, and these internal activities could also be viewed as the central components necessary to build a vision. items in this category were often mentioned, however, without addressing visioning, thereby earning its own place in this skill set needed to be a visionary leader. some of the quotes that provide some insights into examples of these prominent skills in the study are given below. i think leaders are more intuitive than other people. not everything is something for which there is a rule or law. i think that it is especially important in dealing with people, to be intuitive to be able to get a feel for what is going on because you know it. i believe firmly that a leader has to be a visionary. one of my favorite things is to ask them to dream about the future--beyond what they can do. i think it is essential that you build in thinking and dreaming--visioning time. i've finally figured out what my greatest fear is. . . (that) i am going to be so inundated with putting out fires and administrivia that i won't have time to dream. . . (that) i won' t have time to look ahead. each one of my principals knows that they have to have a designated "dream person." 4. communication. this category of skills includes communicating with people, keeping them informed, having the ability to relate to people, and specifically communicating well with the school board in order to have good board-superintendent relations. the skill of reaching others through open and honest interaction with all stakeholders appears to be a "make or break " issue for a successful superintendency. i think leadership carries with it a real need to clearly communicate. i've found that about 90% of the difficulties i've encountered have been based on lack of or no communication. i didn't want them (the board) to read it in the paper. i never wanted them to be surprised. and i didn't want them to surprise me either. i didn't want to hear at the board table something i should have heard ahead of time. i told them going in, that i would try never to surprise you, and i won't let you get caught by questions in your civic club. another area of leadership that you really can overlook is superintendentboard relations. if you do, you won't be here very long. board-superintendent relations are critical. if you can't pull that off, then you can forget your vision. be up front with everything (with the board), i tell all--don't omit anything! i knew how to keep my mouth closed-a very important attribute wherever you are in school administration. information is power and an organization that doesn't keep people informed or doesn't even want them to be informed--that is cruelty of the first order. it shows that you don't trust them and don't respect them. if you really want to keep someone from growing or getting promoted, don't let them know what is going on. 5. motivation being committed to do the right thing for the children is one of the more powerful traits that a superintendent can have. these successful school executives revealed that it is necessary to be determined to make things better for students, keep to your principles, be responsible, do what is right regardless of the circumstances, and don't compromise when student welfare is involved. commitment is also reflected in a superintendent's initiative, industry, and perseverance. the critical nature of the presence of commitment is revealed by the comments these outstanding superintendents who were the subjects in this study. i think that the most important thing any superintendent does is to hire the right people. if i were to take it one step further than that, i think probably the most important people i hire are principals. i think that leadership has to be based on valuing other people--encouraging and offering them opportunities to grow and develop capacity. i guess that lots of people have potential for leadership if given the opportunity to have the potential freedom to grow. my style of leadership is to always recognize that it truly takes a team. i think a reward system is important. we don't have merit pay, but there are lots of ways to recognize people for their accomplishments and their good jobs as leaders. you tell someone that they are doing a good job and they will bust it to do an even better job next time. 6. commitment being committed to do the right thing for the children is one of the more powerful traits that a superintendent can have. these successful school executives revealed that it is necessary to be determined to make things better for students, to keep to your principles, to be responsible, to do what is right regardless of the circumstances, and to not compromise when student welfare is involved. commitment is also reflected in a superintendent's initiative, industry, and perseverance. the critical nature of the presence of commitment is revealed by the comments of these outstanding female superintendents who were the subjects in this study. don't go into school administration if you are not willing to work and work and work. you don't count hours; you do what needs to be done. i think you have to be willing to persevere and stick with it and give what it takes in terms of time. i hung in there because it was right for the children. if you are not willing to go out on a limb to make things better than they have been, willing to do something different, willing to lead people and lead your school and your board into different ways of looking at things and into adopting new programs and approaches, you won't make it. it takes courage to do that-to continue to stand for something you think needs to be done badly when nobody else wants to do it! when something doesn't work or when something works wrong, it's a challenge to get it right. my attitude is that you can kill me but you can't eat me! 7. work ethic and industry the characteristics of outstanding female superintendents include a strong work ethic, industry, initiative, determination, responsibility, and being a willing worker. these skills appear to be evident in each of these executive women. make sure you want this job before going for it. this job involves lots of work! we had a strong middle-class work ethic. i don't ever remember my mother or father missing a day of work-that wasn't an option in our home. work was fun; they never came home complaining. that ethic was a strong factor in who i am, no question. i admired my dad because of his work ethics and his personality. everyone was equal in my dad's eyes. he never met a stranger, and it didn't matter if you were rich or poor. well, i go back to my father; most certainly, i did admire him. i don't have a whole lot of respect for people who don't have strong work ethics. i admire hard work. i also admit i don't have a whole lot of respect for people who don't have strong work ethics. 8. energy and stamina this category represents the need noted by these women school executives for energy, stamina, and good health in order to be able to do their work successfully. the following statements reveal these superintendents' need for physical stamina and high energy to do all that they need to accomplish. you need to be healthy and have physical stamina to do this job. i think it takes an extraordinary person who can cope with the demands of school administration, especially the superintendency, and not be a strong person physically. i hate to say this but i see so many waiting to get prodded to go and do things, things that they know should be done, but it is easier not to add one more thing to their plate. they are tired and it is really sad. one of the reasons i retired was because i saw that i was not as strong. that played a large part in my decision to retire. profiles of outstanding female superintendents based on the synthesis of the qualities and themes, the statements below represent an integration of the categories and themes of this study that led to the creation of the profiles presented below. successful female superintendents are knowledgeable, hard-working women who select the right people for positions in their districts, motivate them to share a collective vision, model their strong commitment to children, and produce meaningful and lasting change in schools. successful female superintendents are creative, energetic executives who take purposeful risks on behalf of schools and children by developing strong team support, communicating effectively with all stakeholders, and operationalizing their collaborative vision into clear patterns of action that make a difference in the lives of children. successful female superintendents are professional, ethical, and honest leaders who have a passion and an intuitive feel for their educational roles, and model a strong work ethic and life-long learning for all district personnel. successful female superintendents are caring, reflective leaders who brave the currents of discord and politics in order to create a supportive climate throughout the school district, work effectively and confidently with all stakeholders, and use delegation as a powerful tool in order to ensure trust and confidence in all personnel. successful female superintendents are passionate, courageous professionals who act on their principles, do the right thing regardless of the circumstances, and are trusted by district stakeholders. successful female superintendents are fair, determined women who model integrity in their roles, are pragmatic, intuitive, and introspective leaders, and they remain open-minded in their decision-making processes. successful school superintendents are responsible, well-informed school executives who exhibit strong personal character, reach others through open and honest interactions, and maintain effective superintendent-school board relationships. successful female school superintendents are passionate, confident women who are dreamers and creators, think outside the box, use their imagination to see and realize their visions, and have a true feel for what is going on in the district. successful female school superintendents are open-minded, introspective role models who care and value all clienteles, encourage them to develop capacity, and give them the freedom to grow. summary and conclusions this research study regarding profiles of six outstanding female superintendents in texas revealed strengths, styles, attitudes and beliefs of women who have been highly successful in the demanding and often difficult role of school superintendent. in spite of the complicated and challenging environments in which all superintendents operate, some female superintendents more often have a difficult time becoming superintendents than men, while others have more difficulty in retaining their positions, much less becoming highly successful in their roles. this analysis of outstanding female superintendents has provided some insights into the leadership typologies that were revealed through their participation in this research project. through their participation with the researchers, they now provide aspiring female administrators with the knowledge that women can and will be outstanding school superintendents and have provided the field of educational administration with important insights into their leadership profiles, characteristics, critical styles and skills, administrative strengths, personal insights, character, creative abilities, communication styles, motivational strategies, and commitment to doing the best for children. references aburdene, p., & naisbitt, j. (1992). megatrends for women. new york: villard publishing. bennis, w. (1989). on becoming a leader. reading, ma: addison-wesley. blount, j. (1999). in c. brunner (ed.), sacred dreams: women and the superintendency. albany, ny: suny press. brunner, c.c. (fall, 2001). new faculty member examines power and female school superintendents. the link. retrieved from http://education.umn.edu/alum/link/2001fall/female.html brunner, c. c. (1999). sacred dreams: women and the superintendendency. albany, ny: state university of new york press. dunlap, d. m., & schmuck, p. a. (1995). women leading in education. albany, ny: state university of new york. edson, s. k. (1988). pushing the limits: the female administrative aspirant. albany, ny: state university of new york. funk, c. (1998). what women bring to executive school positions. in b. j. irby & g. brown (eds.), women leaders: structuring success (pp. 33-42). dubuque, ia: kendall/hunt publishing company. glass, t. (2000). where are all the women superintendents? the school administrator web education. retrieved from http://aasa.org/publications /sa/2000_06/glass.htm helgesen, s. (1990). the female advantage: women's ways of leadership. new york: doubleday. irby, b. j., & brown, g. (1998). women leaders: structuring success. dubuque, ia: kendall/hunt publishing company. pankake, a., schroth, g., & funk, c. (winter, 2000). successful women superintendents: learning from failure. ers spectrum: journal of school research and information, 18(1) pp. 3-13. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. newbury park, ca: sage publications. wesson, l.h., & grady, m. (1995). a leadership perspective from women superintendents. in b. irby & g. brown (eds.), women as school executives: voices and visions (pp. 35-41). huntsville, tx: sam houston state university. author dr. carol funk is a professor of educational leadership, sam houston state university in huntsville, texas. copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | education | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2004 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///education/index.html file:///network_org.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html file:///international.html file:///users/temp/awpublisher.html file:///users/temp/content.html file:///users/temp/advertising.html file:///users/temp/privacy.html file:///users/temp/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com 341_vancour_pub check.docx volume 42, 2023 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, and brad bizzell assistant editor:jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 42, 1-11, 2023 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper career trajectories of women faculty who became academic administrators michele l. vancour executive director of healthcare programs, southern connecticut state university, vancourm1@southernct.edu accepted august 17, 2020 women faculty often view academic leadership as incompatible with their work-life balance, detracting from research and teaching commitments, resulting in a loss of autonomy and an abandonment of discipline, promoting change in their relationships with colleagues, and placing an increased emphasis on budgeting, regulations and compliance (dezure et al., 2014). many researchers suggest that institutional culture works against leadership development for faculty, making the transition from faculty to administrator unlikely (barden & curry, 2013). it is increasingly important to identify the key factors that make the difference for women faculty to assume these roles. as such, in this study qualitative methods were employed to examine the experiences and career trajectories of 16 academic women who held tenured, fully promoted faculty positions prior to becoming administrators. the researcher found evidence to support future recruitment and retention in higher education leadership. keywords: faculty development; higher education leadership; women’s advancement; work-life support. although many faculty are leaders, scholar-leaders are becoming increasingly rare. furthermore, fewer faculty are choosing to move into administration despite the fact that they have the potential to be successful academic leaders. the reasons many faculty with leadership potential cite for overlooking administrative roles and opportunities are: incompatibility with work-life balance, reduction in research and teaching commitments, loss of autonomy, abandonment of discipline, changes in relationships with colleagues, and increased emphasis on budgeting, regulations and compliance (dezure at al., 2014). women make up almost half (49.7%) of tenure-track faculty positions in the united states. while this data is encouraging, only 39.3% of women occupy tenured positions and they still lag behind men as they are promoted to full professor. as of 2018, women held 34.3% of the full professor positions at degree-granting post-secondary institutions (catalyst, 2020). according to teachers insurance and annuity association (tiaa) institute, only one in ten women (or about 9%) achieve promotion to full professor (flaherty, 2016). the same is true for women’s presence in administrative leadership positions. while 48% of newly appointed provosts and 42% of newly appointed deans are women, only 30% of presidents are women at bachelor’s and master’s institutions (american council on education (ace), 2017), which has increased from 26% in 2016 (johnson, 2016). gender inequality in higher education administration continues to be a widespread problem, illustrating pervasive gender-based obstacles that permeate academia. for example, women continue to be recruited to administrative positions less and service roles more often than men (dominici et al., 2013; mirsa et al., 2012; mirsa et al., 2011). in addition to issues of inequality, women often hold back on administrative opportunities due to concerns around the impact on future choices, as well as politics and professional sabotage (oguntoyinbo, 2014; tiao, 2006; ward & eddy, 2013). further, many women expect advanced academic positions or appointments to be out of their reach, especially if they desire a work-life balance. the perceived imbalance is highlighted in several articles (bothwell, 2018; ward & eddy, 2013) suggesting many women are not interested in leadership positions at this critical time when the need for administrators is growing, indicating the need to better understand the reality faced by women leaders in academia and create a supportive climate and culture on campuses. persistent societal and personal economic strains have caused many university employees to delay retirement plans, but there is no denying the aging of university faculty and senior leadership. just over half of tenured faculty are 55 years of age or older (the center for worklife law, 2013), and current estimates from the american college president survey 2017 advise that 58% of college presidents are older than 60 years of age with 11% over age 71 (ace, 2017). further, 54% of presidents have plans to retire within the next five years (ace, 2017). as women continue to increase their presence in numbers among faculty ranks, the need for female administrators grows to fill the gap of retirements and bring more diversity to administration in institutions of higher education. this presents an urgency for campuses to cultivate women’s sense of agency and purpose to realize the administrative shortage soon to be left by retiring baby boomers. 2 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 literature review the literature underscores the absence of women in higher-level administrative roles in academia (ace, 2017). among those in administrative roles, many women report being coaxed, persuaded, or sponsored towards their positions often resulting in non-traditional trajectories (woollen, 2016). while these women’s intentions may not have been set on administration, they ultimately served, often in short-term, temporary roles that led to lengthier administrative work. why aren’t women occupying college presidencies and other top tier administrative roles (dean/provost/vice president) at the same rate as their male counterparts? the answer may be related to several factors, which fuel the gender gap in the top roles. they include: pay inequity, differiential standards, nontraditional pathways, and inadequate support (fitzgerald, 2014; gibson, 2021; woollen, 2016). among women whose careers culminate in administrative appointments, the research demonstrates that trajectories are non-linear instead of a linear progression from faculty member to department chair to dean to provost. according to ward and eddy (2013), “women actually lean back from the ladder of academic progress, promotion, and leadership, because of a perception that advanced positions in academe are not open to women, and particularly women who hope to make time for a family or life beyond work.” there is abundant data supporting the zero sum outcome when women’s professional work is combined with family and other interests. this ideology is commonly recognized in higher education and often dissuades women from advancing their careers into the administrative realm. results from a work-life balance study (bothwell, 2018) showed that children restrict women’s progress. women tend to make decisions either to forgo children or delay advancement to administrative roles until children become independent young adults (ahmed, 2017). woollen (2016) interviewed 6 women presidents who experienced nontraditional journeys to their positions. the results of her research echoed those of fitzgerald (2014), who found that women’s advancement is often delayed, disrupted or due to their competing demands, lack of quality mentoring, and training. interviews with 17 tenure-track women with preschool children across four public universities demonstrated some women’s slow progress to full professor (vancour, 2012). the findings of this qualitative study were consistent with the results of mason and goulden’s (2004) seminal research about the leaky pipeline which results in some women leaving academia and others falling short of their goals to becoming full professors. with many executive positions in higher education administration requiring promotion to full professor, this equates with some women unqualified and others fearful to leave their faculty roles for administrative ones (ward & eddy, 2013). this underscores the importance of mentoring, training and development programs to prepare women for administrative roles and to demonstrate the importance of embracing opportunities along their professional paths that will enhance their leadership potential. there are opportunities for environmental changes, as well. ahmed (2017) found that academic “women with young children are likely to leak out of the pipeline.” lack of family friendliness results in some tenure-track faculty leaving academia in search of a better balance. this presents a shortage of candidates for administrative roles, and it also creates an unsupportive climate. family-friendly policies and practices, however, facilitate healthy work-family integrations and enhance the overall climate in higher education (lester & sallee, 2009; vancour, 2012; vancour & sherman, 2010; ward and wolf-wendel, 2012). purpose of the study deeper insights into the unique experiences of women in administrative leadership is important to remove barriers and close the gender gap. much of the literature suggests that institutional culture works against leadership development for faculty, positioning the transition from faculty to administrator as unlikely (barden & curry, 2013). even among faculty, evidence suggests that they want leadership with academic experience, but seldom support their colleagues and programs designed to develop leaders (barden & curry, 2013). yet, with the persistent need for female administrators to assume leadership positions, it is critical to identify the key factors that make the difference for current female academic leaders holding administrative positions at universities across the country. in an era focused on creating workplace flexibility to support faculty development and success, it is necessary also to examine workplace supports, family supports, and intrinsic characteristics that enable some women to overcome obstacles and realize their administrative goals. considering the reasons faculty, especially female faculty, cite for ignoring leadership opportunities, it is important to examine what factors enable some women to overcome barriers and boundaries to secure leadership roles in academic administration. in this research study, i sought to answer the following questions with regard to academic women administrators’ career trajectories to direct future work rooted in theory: (a) what enables women leaders to triumph over barriers and challenges to find success; (b) which factors supported their development toward their current administrative positions; and (c) which best practices exist for effective workplace offerings and leadership development initiatives to support women’s advancement. methods women’s unique experiences, perceptions, and expressions that resulted in their current administrative positions were examined in this study. qualitative inquiry was used to identify emergent themes derived from one-on-one, in-depth interviews with 16 female administrators that focused on items relative to the three aforementioned research questions. specifically, a phenomenological framework was used to understand the unique lived experiences of women leaders from their perspectives. 3 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 further, the researcher asked a series of open-ended questions derived from the literature that provided rich narratives and descriptions, enabling her to identify themes and make generalizations regarding how their phenomena was perceived and experienced (creswell, 2007). the interview protocol included the following questions: (a) describe your transition into academic administration. (b) describe the challenges of your position in academic administration to your work-life-family balancing act. (c) how is your balancing act better or worse? describe the obstacles encountered on the pathway to your position in academic administration. specifically, what stood in the way of your success? (d) if you were involved in previous leadership roles, explain how those experiences shaped your decision to pursue your current academic administrative position. (e) how has your schedule changed with your position in academic administration? in what ways is an improvement over your prior faculty schedule? (f) how would you describe others’ perceptions of women in academic administrative positions? what did you experience from colleagues when you decided to pursue and then occupy your current academic administrative position? (g) how would you describe your training and preparation to occupy your position? do you feel that academia adequately prepares faculty to occupy administrative positions? did your institution nurture your interest in academic administration? what do you know about succession planning? (h) if you think that there is a better time in a faculty career to pursue an administrative position, when would that be? do you think it’s possible to return to a faculty position after a position in administration? do you think you would want to go back to being a professor? (i) how do you think institutions can better support faculty climbing the administrative ladder? what supports are you aware of that you believe make a difference? and (j) what qualities are essential to future leaders? how do you think these qualities shape academic administrators? nonprobability sampling was used to engage academic women employed at universities across the united states and in canada who represented institutions of various carnegie classifications. once irb approval was obtained, participants were recruited through a professional association listserv, and through the recommendations of women participating in this study. the participants occupied either the position of associate dean, dean, associate vice president, vice president/provost, or president. each 45-60-minute interview was audio-taped. the researcher transcribed the audio recordings verbatim to facilitate analysis. data was analyzed, categorized, and coded for emergent themes. results sixteen women were interviewed over the course of fifteen months beginning at the end of 2015 and 2016. five interviews were conducted in person and eleven were conducted via skype or facetime. interviews involved: two university presidents, six provosts, two associate provosts, five deans, and one associate dean. the years in their current roles ranged from as little as two months to as many as 12 years. however, the majority of administrators were experienced, having served an average of 11 years in various administrative roles. while the majority of women held only one administrative role at a time, a few women occupied two roles. for example, one woman held two interim dean positions, while another woman was a chair and an associate dean and another was an associate provost and dean simultaneously. a few women built their careers at the same institution where they served as administrators, while the majority moved around rising on their career ladders with each new position. the universities where the administrators were employed at the time of the study were located in: california, connecticut, kentucky, louisiana, maryland, massachusetts, new york, north carolina, oregon, rhode island, and ontario, canada. five of these institutions were private. the administrators originated from the following academic discipline areas: arts (9), stem (4), health (2), and business (1). in terms of training, four women were ace fellows; eight women participated in a harvard, ace new provost, or leadership training for women in higher education (hers) training; three women attended local professional development seminars; and one woman reported that she received no training. in terms of their domestic demographics, diversity was expressed and/or observed as related to their sexual orientation, partnering, and motherhood. fourteen women were partnered with eleven of these women describing themselves specifically as married. about one-quarter of the women were in same-sex relationships. seven women reported that their partners were employed in academia either as faculty or administrators. eleven women had children, ranging in ages from 8 to 22 years at the time of their interviews. each participant was assigned a pseudonym to protect her anonymity in the presentation of findings that follows. additionally, participants are not described in a manner that includes specific personal, geographic or institutional characteristics. the information shared cannot be linked to anyone in particular. see table 1 below for a breakdown of the relevant demographic characteristics for each administrator. the themes–normative career path, gendered issues, necessary sacrifices, job security, and supports and training–emerged in response to the three aforementioned research questions as significant to women’s progress in the academy. the themes can be categorized as personal, interpersonal, and organizational. they are described generally and specifically with supporting evidence below. overall the results of this study underscored important facets of administrative life, career trajectories for success, and best actions for facing present and future leadership challenges. while women often described unplanned entries into administration followed by struggles to overcome self-doubt, competing demands, and institutional issues, they also told stories of strength, determination and perseverance. 4 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 table 1 relevant demographic characteristics specifically, in response to the first question (what enables women leaders to triumph over barriers and challenges to find success?), participants discussed the importance of being fully promoted and having supportive relationships to overcoming obstacles that were associated with gender bias, rigid schedules, and workload. comments originating from question two (what factors supported their development toward their administrative positions?), provided evidence that it takes a village at home and at work to support women’s development in higher education. while credit was given to amazing partners at home and support staff at work as critical to their success, women also emphasized the importance of flexibility, training, and mentors. the third question (what best practices exist for effective workplace offerings and leadership development initiatives to support women’s advancement?), reinforced the need to change women’s attitudes towards the college presidency as a viable and attainable position. it is important that there are opportunities for them to learn more about this professional path. faculty need to better understand what chair, dean, provost and presidency roles involve. effective workplace practices to support women’s advancement in the academy should incorporate opportunities for women that showcase the relative advantage and compatibility, as well as the complexity of these roles, while allowing women time to observe and practice alongside other administrators. each of the five themes are presented in detail below. normative career path participants emphasized the value of being fully promoted to professor before entering long-term administrative roles. most noted that they knew it would be very difficult to become fully promoted after becoming an administrator, mostly because there would not be adequate time to focus on their research and writing. others emphasized the need to experience the promotion process to enhance their ability to prepare evaluations and better understand faculty roles. most women transitioned through each of the sequential administrative roles–chair, dean, provost, and president–or they were on track with a plan to progress in this order. they all described to a similar ideology premised on a ‘normative career path’ that is considered critical in developing a trajectory towards the presidency (woollen, 2016). a few women noted that they believed it was essential to stay the course and spend time in each position in order to learn the ropes. a couple of women followed slightly different paths as department/university committee chairs, directors, and then deans. however, each woman interviewed was successful in that she had upwardly climbed her career ladder. universities like the straight ladder approach, according to a provost who skipped one rung along her path. she explained that it helps to develop a strong foundation in understanding budgets, revenue streams, promotion and tenure processes, and chairing committees. administrators expressed great value of competence in these areas. “i wouldn’t recommend anyone jumping levels no matter how good they are. there is something about developing the skills, the communication, and the approaches that one learns as they go up through that hierarchy,” stated provost isabella. sophia noted that these experiences taught her about budgets, revenue streams, promotion and tenure process. in terms of crossing the great divide, emily explained that she always wanted to be an administrator, while all of the other administrators described the opportunity as either something that “opened up,” resulted from “being at the right place at the right time,” or something they “initially said no to.” however, no woman reported regretting her career move. in terms of presidential aspirations, most women felt similarly uninspired to occupy that position. even the two presidents interviewed had different perspectives and experiences. lily felt it was a natural career progression, and she shared, “you reach a point when you realize you are ready to inhabit that next level.” however, 5 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 amelia’s transition was much like her first introduction to administration. she said, if you asked me two years ago, i would have said that i could not imagine a scenario in which i would be a college president…i can’t say that my steps were toward this as an end. it was definitely not a goal of mine until it happened. among the remaining administrators, the sentiment was that presidency would not fit with their lifestyles, family, and/or ideals. the presidency was viewed as being all consuming and rooted in politics and fundraising. possibly it was the combination of women’s perceptions and the reality of the position that did not fit their career expectations. madelyn, a dean with 19 years of administrative experience said, “i have no desire to become a president. when you are a president, you don’t have a life. i value my life too much.” necessary sacrifices regardless of the level of administrator interviewed, there were important challenges encountered that hindered their progress. some challenges were related to the shift in responsibilities and schedule resulting in work-life imbalance, while others had to do with gender, age, personality and relationships. moving from the fairly flexible schedule of teaching, office hours and meetings to a rigid, planned schedule was noted as requiring a considerable adjustment period. much of the adjustment came from a lack of control over their schedules. women reported meetings and events occurring from early in the morning to late in the evening that other people added to their calendars. it took time to learn the ebb and flow of the administrative calendar, like when there were busier times during the year. commencement was cited as an overscheduled season thanks to multiple student convocations, award ceremonies, and faculty recognition activities all occurring around the same time. mia said, “some weeks i’m out every night. if it’s an important component, you have to put up with it.” most women understood and accepted the all-consuming and pervasive nature of their administrative roles. in response, isabella, a new provost replied: your role really does change and the culture and the work environment are different…i think it’s really important that we set our own boundaries. we aren’t necessarily going to change the job pressures and challenges and expectations. although we can manage some of that, part of the work is accepting that. it is common for academic leaders to cite conflicting responsibilities of family and work (selzer et al., 2017) and women generally are willing to share their struggles to find balance. the women in this study were no different. from associate dean to president, no administrator claimed to have achieved a work-life balance. amelia described the roles she occupied as very demanding, pervasive, and never ending. however, women appeared to be satisfied with their administrative choices. a provost, olivia, confessed: it took me a while to get used to the schedule. i am not going to lie about it. i am a writer and a scholar. it was tough to pull me away from that, but then i fell in love with administration because of the leadership and the vision. some administrators discussed their work-life imbalance as it specifically related to motherhood. they shared feelings of guilt associated with being absent from family activities and missing opportunities for work. they described periods when they needed to craft a web of family-related support services and enhance their reliance on their partners to meet their work goals. they also noted that motherhood led to delays in their professional advancement and adjustments to their expectations for success. the concerning question is whether or not the costs were worth the benefit. while administrative schedules are less flexible than most faculty schedules, the tradeoff usually was more money. while women said it was worth it, considering the expressed impact they described their roles as having on their lives, it is not certain whether or not they received a fair return on their investment. the women interviewed reported important time missed with family, increased stress and time pressures, infertility, and declining health among the costs. emily, a dean whose training was in health shared, “i’m exhausted. i don’t exercise. i’ve gained 35-40 lbs. the hours are tough. it’s hard to turn it off. i have to be present which takes away my time for me and family.” ava, an associate dean, similarly disclosed, “the biggest sacrifice is exercise. the work is really hard. just the work load. the first couple of years i felt like i worked in an emergency room–constantly managing crises–student crises and faculty crises.” the implications related to their competing demands may result in irreversible health and other issues. while mothers did their best to be present for their children’s activities, they described sacrifices and missed events. those with older children and/or young adults repeatedly noted that they would not have become administrators while their children were small. those who had small children during their administrative tenures reported spending small fortunes on after-school drivers and childcare. avery, a dean noted that her family hired a driver to help alleviate the stress when talking about the demands associated with the extracurricular activities of three children close in age and the impossibility of getting them to and from activities on time while both parents were working full-time, demanding hours. sophia, a vice-provost addressed the pervasive nature of her role and the inability to unplug on weekends and vacations because no one else could cover her responsibilities. she said, “i am the provost when the provost is gone, but no one is the vice provost when the vice provost is away.” she credited her amazing support staff to her ability to keep her head above water. a provost and a president both shared their philosophy: “you can do everything just not all at once.” provost zoe added, “i have done it on the backs of both my research and the rest of my life.” consistently, these women expressed their continuous struggles 6 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 to maintain rigorous research and writing agendas throughout their administrative careers. gendered issues there were some stereotypical gender challenges faced by the administrators in this study that were fueled by gender bias. this appears to interfere with how women see themselves and possibly how others see them, too (ely et al., 2011). some women recalled instances when they perceived that they were not listened to or taken seriously based upon their gender. it was shared that it left them questioning their effectiveness as leaders. for many, administration was described as male-dominated, a culture to which both genders subscribe. traditional leadership development programs are designed either to get women to subscribe to male-oriented approach or help women to fix what is wrong with them (ely et al., 2011). as a result, women find themselves on an endless treadmill. this translated in this study to women expressing feelings that they have to work harder than their male counterparts to prove themselves. gender bias was underscored when women discussed their internal struggles. they described their lack of confidence, self-efficacy, in the face of struggles, especially when competing against male colleagues for resources. “i have to wonder am i ‘good enough?’ being young and a woman there is a perception that i am being held to a higher standard. it’s exhausting having to prove myself,” shared emily who was 46 at the time of her interview. she said she felt that this was a double standard for women compared to men. three women simultaneously occupied two administrative positions at the time of this study. one woman held two interim dean positions, another woman was a chair and an associate dean, and the third woman was a dean and an associate provost. while there is no research specifically addressing the perils of holding two full-time, demanding administrative roles at the same time, it seems futile and unfair to the women confronted with this reality. the pressures dual-position careers impose upon women may lead to burnout, unsatisfactory performance evaluations, and their decision to lean out of future opportunities (ward & eddy, 2013). dual-position careers likely originated from gendered ideals that support women’s participation in service, mentoring and caregiving (flaherty, 2018; mirsa et al., 2012). research shows that women identify and are viewed as helpers, which may lead to them being asked and their acceptance of two positions when institutions are in need (mirsa et al., 2012). women in this study described the exhaustion their increasing demands fueled, how their fear of failure caused them to work longer hours, and their perception that they were the only ones able to step forward when asked. additionally, they recalled feeling sensitive toward words used to describe administrative prowess. they acknowledged witnessing other women who were evaluated on gender, and they shared comments that their colleagues made: “it’s her personality;” “she was very ego-conscious;” and “she really couldn’t cut it.” job security while about half of the women served one university across their careers, the other half of the women climbed their administrative career ladders by moving from university to university. the latter found themselves in at-will appointments without the protection of tenure, a safety net allowing them to return to their faculty role if their administrative positions were terminated. there were drawbacks noted to being in both situations. if women remained loyal to one university, they reported always feeling like the faculty member in the room to other administrators. they also worried about one day having to return to their faculty role, and the perception of failure that may accompany it. grace, a provost, described the awkwardness she found while occupying an interim position to which she also applied as a national search ensued. she knew that she had no other role aside from faculty to return to, and she did not want to teach again, recognizing how her field had changed since she last taught. she also worried about the changing relationships with colleagues and having to earn their respect again in a new role. grace had spent her entire career at the same institution, and she felt very fortunate and relieved when she found out she was selected to be the permanent provost. women who changed universities feared being out of a job at the whim of a new president and being back on the job market. while rose, a provost, was grateful to have been provided with a faculty position until she found a new job at another institution, she felt deflated having been removed without notice when a new president was hired. while this is the nature of these positions in many institutions, efforts to mitigate the impact on these professional roles may mitigate the feelings of rejection described by some of the women interviewed. unique stories describing similar obstacles that stood in the way of becoming and sustaining leadership roles were told by each woman interviewed. perseverance and determination were obvious characteristics these women leveraged to triumph over personal, interpersonal, and organizational barriers while overcoming new position challenges, loneliness from changing relationships at work, recognizing areas for development, and renegotiating their work-life roles. identity is tied to sense of purpose, especially for women whose leadership approach is aligned with consensus building, fostering relationships, and authenticity (ely et al., 2011; selzer et al., 2017). mentors, sponsors, and informal networks, can help to script a new leadership identity for women. support and training many women underscored the value of great mentors in helping them advance in their administrative roles. while several women noted that there were not good women role models, especially among those in stem disciplines, there was preference shown for and the benefit of mentors expressed regardless of gender. mentors were credited with advising, 7 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 coaching, and identifying their leadership potential, as well as making important introductions and collaborating with them on research. a few women recognized their sponsors who, as they described, promoted their movement into leadership roles. their sponsors mostly were influential men in their institutions. while informal networks are important, they can be unreliable as the women in this study realized. one of the most predicted, but challenging occurrences shared was the changing relationships women encountered. a few women shared that their transitions from faculty to administration were collegial. mia, a veteran dean said, “i had been a faculty member for 17 years prior to becoming dean, so they didn’t see me as selling out, but rather as a good liaison.” the majority of women, however, described their transition, consistent with the literature, as going to the dark side. they shared their experiences being treated differently by even their closest academic friends/colleagues. another dean, emily said, “i was warned. i thought ‘i’m the same person,’ but it’s true. there really is this ‘us’ and ‘them’ thing.” lily, a president said, “they did this ‘us versus them’ routine. it was like i had a scarlet a as an administrator.” as surprised as many women were by the unexpected and unpleasant changes in some of their relationships in their informal networks, they were overwhelmed by the support they found among their partners and new allies–their staff. twenty-five percent of the women interviewed originated from stem disciplines, so it was not uncommon to hear tales of demanding large grant-funded research projects and labs that required significant time onsite. a few of these women also told stories of returning to work as faculty within days of birthing their babies in order to maintain their studies. women credited their partners, especially those who adjusted their careers in some way to support their advancement. a few partners switched positions and schedules to provide more childcare, while others were willing to give up tenure and start over in new states with new jobs. a team approach was taken to raising families and maintaining fulfilling partnerships when women became administrators. while the team-parenting approach was hailed, it also was described as precarious. advance planning, willing partners, a support system, and flexibility were keys to their success and their sacrifices were evident. provost zoe felt torn between being present at work and at home, which was evident when she spoke about her teenage daughter. she shared: balancing schedules and responsibilities with my husband and knowing when i can make the compromise i need to make with my kids…my daughter is in grade 11 and she is at the point where i don’t know when she is going to talk to me but i want to be there when she chooses her incredibly ill-timed moment. the majority of the women interviewed did not enter into administration until their children were either in high school or college. they expressed that it would not have been fair to their families to engage in this role while their children were younger and needed them more. a few administrators credited their “amazing staff” as instrumental to their success. in some instances, they credited their staff for being their cheerleaders, encouraging them when the going got tough. at other times, they described their staff as their protectors, who guarded their schedules and them from too many meetings or convinced them to take more time for themselves and their families. no matter what it was, it made a difference in the day-to-day function for these administrators, and they were thankful. the heartfelt way they described this support demonstrated its significance to their development. in addition to partners, staff, and mentors, support from their institutions and supervisors was valued as an ingredient of their success. each of administrative position held prepared these 16 women in intangible ways. some reported increased confidence while others focused on new knowledge of how her university worked and its culture. chloe, an administrator nearing 60 years of age at the time of her interview shared: now the only obstacle is my age. i am a dean, a low-level administrator, with big ideas. i feel like i can have a national impact. i’ve organized all of these regional consortiums. i like to accomplish things, but i feel as though i have a limited number of years left to be able to accomplish stuff. while time spent in their positions was invaluable to shaping the careers of these women, investing in training and professional development opportunities for all levels of administration appeared to make a difference. while some leadership training was afforded to the majority of the women interviewed, it wasn’t uniform and it usually was at their request. additionally, some women had to first overcome a few hurdles, such as seeking approval from several levels, waiting–sometimes for years–until funding was secured, and attending a less than optimal training to get to the training they felt they needed. women also suggested that they had to be creative in negotiating the funding for their training by knowing who to ask, where the money was and how the university could cover their leaves of absence. four administrators (provost emma, dean chloe, president amelia, and provost grace) were ace fellows, but this came at a cost beyond the financial expense that their institution experienced. they made a point of noting that it wasn’t easy on their families. for a few women, it was a challenge to arrange for their partners to accompany them when the host institution was farther from home. in order to make this work, partners negotiated leaves or they made the farther-than-they-liked commute on weekends. a few other administrators noted that they wanted to be an ace fellow, but it was impossible given the increased pressures on their families and/or their institutions. dean avery said: i wish i was able to take advantage of the ace fellow program. i met a lot of people who really thought that was critical, but the kind of family life that i had didn’t afford me to be gone for a year. even among some administrators who were ace fellows, the challenges were voiced strongly. emma, who before becoming a 8 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 provost was able to commute to her fellowship university, described the commute as a “huge time sink,” before adding, “i think it’s the best program, but i think it’s the hardest one, if you are trying to balance or to have a life and a fellowship at the same time.” eight administrators participated in a formal training such as hers or the harvard management development program. while these programs also required travel, they weren’t as far from their homes or they didn’t have to be gone for as long, making them doable. almost every woman reported that she attended at least one administrative training (e.g., chair training, dean training or a new provost seminar) held on their campus. it was clear that regardless of the program, women reported selecting the option that was the most valuable, convenient, accessible, and affordable. recommendations administrators generously shared their experiences and knowledge of effective workplace practices and leadership development initiatives to enhance interest, participation and retention in administrative roles while supporting women’s advancement in the academy. they addressed their efforts to provide opportunities for women at all levels of administration on their campuses. this will enhance retention and succession planning, saving valuable financial resources and time. provisions with work-life considerations and supports are likely to have the greatest return on investment but need to be thoughtfully constructed. developing qualified faculty with aspirations to become future administrators makes good business sense when recruitment and retention efforts are demanding and budgets are constrained. while institutions stand to benefit from what women will gain through formal training and development offered by organizations like ace, harvard, and hers, these opportunities will continue to be out of financial reach for many institutions and women with leadership potential and aspirations. where resources are limited, alternate creative solutions should be developed on campuses, within systems, and in partnership with local leadership development programs. the literature suggests faculty see academic leadership as presenting an unwelcomed challenge to their work-life balance, scholarship, and relationships (selzer et al., 2017). in response to this divergence of incongruities, there are quality, affordable opportunities that can enhance recruitment and retention of academic leaders. a new approach to leadership development that addresses the needs of women today is warranted. since traditional approaches to leadership are structured around a male-focused work ideology that is an all-consuming commitment to one’s career, it is not surprising that the qualities of leaders include: competitiveness, authority, assertiveness, self-promoting, and risk-taking (parker et al., 2018; selzer et al., 2017). further, women’s leadership development initiatives attempt to strengthen these qualities in women, forcing them out of their comfort zone without a safety net, while oftentimes ignoring the development women need and desire. women in contrast to men more often lead by building relationships, inspiring followers, and adopting a leadership identity that is tied to a sense of purpose (ely et al., 2011). as such, effective women’s leadership development requires a culture that supports their exploration in the role, provides opportunities for authentic and candid conversations, concentrates on realizing their purpose, and allows them to consider gender issues while developing their leadership identities (elly et al., 2011; parker et al., 2018; selzer et al., 2017). the women interviewed shared the following recommendations based upon programs they were a part of or knew of from their colleagues: establish a future leaders program; offer system-wide leadership trainings; provide regular opportunities for women administrators to gather, communicate and release stress; create tools to communicate work-life supports (e.g., childcare, adult care, dual career), and develop options for job shadowing to establish transparency of the demands and expectations. the administrators interviewed also emphasized the importance of following special considerations when developing leadership development training initiatives for women. initiatives should consider transparency and focused preparation that enables women to overcome the barriers to assume positions, like the presidency. several administrators noted that campus/system-wide initiatives need to provide safe spaces free from direct supervisors that engage women from different disciplines and areas. opportunities that engage women from different institutions, even women from outside of academia, can provide a safe environment for training. they cautioned that events not be convened between women and their direct reports. other administrators recommended that opportunities include a combination of informal and formal opportunities to accommodate various levels of interest and commitment among diverse groups of women. there is a need to abandon outdated notions and inaccurate gendered stereotypes about what it means to be an administrator (dunn et al, 2014). authentic conversations may have an altering effect on women’s professional development in this area. finally, a recurrent piece of advice was to make sure leadership development initiatives address women’s work-family responsibilities by offering support on campus and in the community. conclusions the results of this research are meaningful to the advancement of women in academia and aim to enhance the literature. they provide evidence to support immediate practical applications and to reshape the imminent career development of faculty and administrators. the findings portray the specific experiences of 16 women leaders and underscore work and family factors that enabled them to break through the academic glass ceiling. they also identify effective workplace practices in higher education, and support solutions to shape future recruitment, retention and advancement of women in administrative positions. 9 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 the continuing challenge for institutions of higher education is identifying talented faculty along with quality and effective initiatives for their development into academic leaders. it is not likely that a surplus of qualified faculty suddenly will enter higher education with the desired interest and requisite skills to assume administrative roles. this is why the future of higher education depends upon concrete strategies designed to cultivate interest in administrative positions, while demonstrating a commitment to diversity in hiring, mentoring, and promoting faculty (reid, 2012). professionals should not have to choose between being an effective leader and being a happy, healthy person. policies in higher education traditionally have focused on faculty, staff, and students, while the unique needs of administrators have gone unnoticed. one of the popular reasons why women said they were not interested in assuming administrative roles had to do with their assumptions about the all-consuming, pervasive and unbalanced demands that would be imposed upon their lives. even though most women expressed that their expectations in this regard were realized to some extent, all agreed that there may be a better way to meet the requirements of their positions. while work-life balance may pose a challenge for women who want to work their way up the academic ladder, workplace supports are a solution to helping these women achieve success. transparency in job expectations, setting limits and seeking balance across roles and responsibilities are the keys to effective succession through the ranks. research shows that work-life supports pay off, exceeding the obvious benefits. employees are more committed to their employers when work-life supports are offered, even if they cannot take advantage of them at the time, and the payoff far exceeds productivity and job satisfaction. they include enhanced recruitment, higher retention rates, lower health insurance costs, decreased absenteeism, and improved focus. the literature and promising practices underscore the increasing relevance of childcare, lactation support and adult care to meet the needs of faculty and administrators in academia across their lives (mooney, 2013). innovative supports are gaining popularity and improving caregivers’ experiences. following the lead of professional associations like the college and university work-life-family association, promising practices can be shared and the results can be realized. references ahmed, s. 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(2013, december 9). women and academic leadership: leaning out. chronicle of higher education commentary. http//:www.chronicle.com/article/womenacademic-leade rship-/143503/. ward, k. & wolf-wendel. (2012). academic motherhood: how faculty manage work and family. rutgers university press. woollen, s. (2016). the road less travelled: career trajectories of six women presidents in higher education. advancing women in leadership journal, 36, doi:10.21423/awlj-v36.a15. 11 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1573-7861.2012.01319.x microsoft word smith_&suby_long_women_leaders_and_narratives.docx volume 39, 2019 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 1 advancing women in leadership vol. 39, pp. 1-11, 2019 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women leaders and narratives: the power of reflecting on purpose and career deborah nelson smith & sallie suby-long deborah n. smith, department of first-year and transition studies, kennesaw state university, dsmith1@kennesaw.edu sallie suby-long, interdisciplinary leadership doctoral program, creighton university, ssubylong@comcast.net accepted april 06, 2019 in this qualitative study, we explored ten women leaders’ perspectives about the processes associated with constructing their leadership and purpose stories or narratives. the study participants first wrote, and then talked about their stories in a semistructured interview. an overarching theme emerged from the data narrative sharing was a challenging, yet beneficial process for the participants. three sub-themes also emerged from the collective narratives. first, the process of reflection helped women identify times when their actions and decisions were purposeful, even though they may not have recognized it at the time. second, reflection on purpose led participants to a clearer identification and articulation of leadership philosophy. third, citing that sharing their narratives helped them identify times of leadership authenticity, participants indicated they intended to use similar practices to make current and future leadership/career decisions. recommendations are included for organizations, educational institutions, and individuals who are interested in using narrative sharing as a leadership development tool. keywords: leadership, women leaders, career paths, purpose, reflection, narratives, story introduction researchers have studied multiple aspects of women in leadership, with findings about continued inequity being reported in both academic and popular venues (barsh & yee, 2011; gerdes, 2010; mckay, 2010; mckinsey & company, 2012; the white house project, 2009). in response to research findings, many organizations created women’s networking sessions, mentoring programs, flex schedules, resource centers, and/or leadership development programs (clark, 2011; foustcummings, dinolfo, & kohler, 2011; jyothi & jyothi, 2012; linehan & scullion, 2008; pyrillis, 2011; singh, vinnicombe & kumra, 2006). overall women have made substantial gains in education and wage earnings (slaughter, 2012), yet despite wellintentioned and sometimes successful organizational efforts, women are still underrepresented in senior leadership roles (carter & silva, 2010; eagly & carli, 2007; howard & wellins, 2009; kellerman & rhode, 2007; roebuck & smith, 2011; smith, roebuck, & maendler, 2013; sandberg, 2013; the white house project, 2009). underrepresentation of women in senior leadership positions multiple possible explanations for the lack of representation by women in senior leadership roles have been posited by researchers. schein (2001), for example, suggested that leadership is often equated with masculinity, while chin (2004) reported society in general values and rewards masculine over feminine modes of leadership. a wage gap, which increases with age (the white house project, 2009), or the glass ceiling, a term hymowitz and schellhardt (1986) used to describe the barriers women seeking workplace leadership experience, have also been identified as reasons women are underrepresented in senior leadership roles. meyerson and fletcher (2000) theorized that the glass ceiling still existed nearly fifteen years later in their study because gender discrimination is deeply, yet subtly, embedded within organizations. ibarra, ely, and kolb (2013) concurred describing the “subtle gender bias that persists in organizations and society” (p. 62). similarly, hannum, muhly, shockley-zalabak, and white (2015) reported subtle discriminatory practices of higher education institutions that served as barriers for women seeking senior leadership roles. according to eagly and carli (2007) many women leaders’ paths can be described as a labyrinth with multiple confusing options often resulting in dead-ends. slaughter (2012) asserted advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 74 that until women are equally represented at the highest ranks of government, and have the power that comes with those types of positions, women will not be significantly represented as senior leaders across the board. still other researchers contended organizational programs intended to promote women failed or never really offered women what they needed (birigwa & sumberg, 2011). conversely, sandberg (2013) suggested that it is not others who hold women back, but it is often women themselves. she stated: women rarely make one decision to leave the workforce. instead, they make a lot of small decisions along the way, making accommodations and sacrifices that they believe will be required to have a family. of all the ways women hold themselves back; perhaps, the most pervasive is that they leave before they leave. (p. 9) shambaugh (2008) and frankel (2004) agreed noting that women in their study engaged in sub-conscious behaviors that hindered career success. similarly, babcock and laschever (2003) found that women didn’t ask (for opportunities, promotions or raises), or they were ineffective in their use of the formal and informal career networks (van emmerik, euqema, geschiere, & schouten, 2006). an often-cited reason for the underrepresentation of women in senior leadership positions is that women, more so than men, struggle with work-life balance (guillaume & pochic, 2009; roebuck, smith, & elhaddaoui, 2013; schueller-weidekamm & kautzky-willer, 2012). consequently, some researchers have concluded that women are more likely than men to decline leadership positions or as belkin (2003) put it, opt-out. however, in fine’s (2009) study none of the women she interviewed left a leadership position in order to achieve work and family/life balance. instead, she reported: a common theme that runs through my conversations with women about their decisions to continue or not continue to climb the organizational ladder is that the traditional (i.e. male) definitions of leadership, success, and professional fulfillment are not consonant with their values or how they want to live their lives. many of them talk about the emptiness of organizational life, about how organizational success doesn’t always provide the personal satisfaction that they expected it would. (p. 198) leadership and purpose fine (2009) further described the motives for leadership most often cited by the women in her study – believing they had the skills and characteristics needed to effectively lead and the desire to make a positive contribution to the world. other researchers agreed with fine’s findings reporting that many women in their studies made career decisions with their perceived callings or purposes and benefitting others in mind (dahlvig & longman, 2010; dahlvig & longman, 2014; ibarra, ely, & kolb, 2013; wresniewsiki, 2003). the literature often uses terms such as purpose or calling interchangeably. however, calling is typically associated with religious contexts (dik & duffy, 2009; conklin, 2012). historically the work of clergy, who were thought to be supernaturally called to their work by god, was considered superior to the work of lay people. however, in modern terms calling is more closely aligned with purposeful work (dik & duffy, 2009; hall & chandler, 2005). hall and chandler defined calling as “a sense of purpose, that this is the work one was meant to do” (p. 155). as work became more central to people’s lives, researchers began to examine the intersection of purpose and work. for example, ryff and singer (1998) stated that having a sense of purpose was a critical factor in well-lived lives, and work environments were places where purposeful living could be expressed. gazica and spector (2015) studied the opposite effect finding that individuals who did not follow their occupational callings suffered from physical and physiological distress. other researchers concluded that ascribing meaning to work was closely associated with individuals’ definitions of self (berg, grant, & johnson, 2010; hall & chandler, 2005; hirschi, 2011), as well as increased satisfaction and purpose (dik, duffy, & eldridge, 2009; haney-loehlin, mckenna, robie, austin, & ecker, 2013; steger & dik, 2009). personal purpose is often considered by employees who pursue, obtain and/or leave workplace leadership roles (o’connell, 2014). for women in particular, ibarra, ely, and kolb (2013) noted that one effective way to support women as they moved into leadership positions was to “anchor women’s development efforts in a sense of leadership purpose rather than in how women are perceived” (p. 63). dahlvig and longman (2010) similarly found the women leaders in their study felt it was important they stood up for something, and that leadership and service were synonymous terms. in a later study conducted by dahlvig and longman (2014), women participants reported being more inclined to accept leadership roles if they felt a relational responsibility for others or would have an opportunity to mentor or be a role model. similarly, fine (2009) concluded from her research that “moral purpose is a guiding principle of leadership” (pg. 190). purpose, however, is not singular (baumeister & wilson, 1996), nor an isolated discovery made in one’s youth. callings and purposes can change over time and determining callings or purposes is a dynamic process that is experienced rather than found (dobrow, 2013; o’connell, 2014). reflection, narratives, and leadership development binks, smith, smith, and joshi (2009) further suggested it is not the experiences themselves, but rather the reflection on those experiences and the resulting informed decisions that enable learning. for leaders in particular, tunheim and goldschmidt (2013) found “critical reflection is necessary when leaders are hearing a calling or interpreting data that suggests they move in one direction or another” (p. 33). other researchers asserted that providing a space for critical reflection is a crucial component of advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 75 effective leadership development programs (longman, dahlvig, wikkerink, cunningham, & o'connor, 2011). reflection can be accomplished by utilizing a variety of tools (e.g. portfolio creation or journaling), but binks et al. (2009) concluded that the reflective process was most effectively developed when the participants in their study engaged in structured storytelling. as opposed to traditional career assessments and measurements, the construction of stories or narratives is a post-modern approach to career counseling. narratives emphasize connections, meaning, and growth (savickas, 2005), and allow individuals to reveal, deconstruct or unpack, and re-author their stories (brott, 2011). narrative building typically involves having individuals create a life timeline that includes major events, with someone such as a counselor, facilitator, or researcher asking reflective questions about the major events (bennis & thomas, 2002). the process of writing about and articulating one’s narrative brings a consciousness to behaviors and decisions that subsequently helps one see life themes and patterns (corso & rehfuss, 2011). additionally, through narrative/story creation “individuals become empowered to construct their careers in a proactive manner as they adapt to the numerous transitions, adjustments, and career dilemmas throughout their lifetime” (corso & rehfuss, 2011, p. 335). for leaders in particular, kegan (1983) concluded life-stories provide a meaning system that enabled them to act authentically and provided a structure for thoughts, feelings, and actions. other researchers posited that the reflective component of a leadership narrative was crucial for leaders as they needed time to consider how various events (both positive and negative) worked into their stories and how those events changed, if at all, their identities and actions (avolio & gibbons, 1988; luthans & avolio, 2003; pallus, nasby, & easton, 1991). shamir and eilam (2005) agreed stating: from a narrative perspective, leadership development is the development of life stories, and therefore the construction of life stories is what leadership development studies should focus on. this construction can be assumed to be an ongoing process, which is performed not in isolation but in interaction with others, and which is influenced by others’ responses to initial versions of the story. (p. 26) in later research shamir and eilam (2005) similarly postulated that: it is through life experiences and the way they are organized into life-stories that people can develop a self-concept of a leader that supports and justifies their leadership role because the life-story not only recounts but also justifies…. they include at least implied answers to the questions, “how have i become a leader?” and “why have i become a leader?” in other words, in constructing their life-stories leaders explain and justify their present self, which includes their leadership motivations. (p. 403) narrative development aligns with transformational learning theory which brooks (2000) defined “as learning that leads to some type of fundamental change in the learner’s sense of themselves, their worldviews, their understanding of their past, and their orientation to the future” (p. 140). in merriam and caffarella’s (1999) definition of transformational learning theory there are three components related to life experiences: (a) construction and engagement; (b) critical reflection; and (c) development and action toward trying out new skills or roles. mezirow (1991) noted that transformational learning cannot be guaranteed, it can only happen when individuals feel they are in a safe environment, such as women’s only leadership development programs that allow women to claim their own voices (brooks, 2000; debebe, 2011). purpose and rationale for study while a significant amount of literature is focused on purpose/calling or women in leadership, there is a literature gap about the intersection of all three constructs – women, leadership, and purpose. dik and duffy (2009) suggested a need for more research on gender, calling and work experiences over time. additionally, while a modest amount of research has been conducted on the benefits of storytelling/narrative sharing, shamir and eilam (2005) concluded from their study on lifestories as an authentic leadership development tool: research on leadership from a life-story point of view is still scarce in general, and virtually non-existent with respect to the topic of authentic leadership development. both the explicit arguments and the implied propositions presented in this paper need to be substantiated and tested. (pp. 412-413) thus, the purpose of this study is to further contribute to the literature by examining how women leaders might benefit from sharing their purpose and leadership narratives, particularly as related to career decisions. method theoretical framework to explore women’s sense of purpose as related to leadership and career decisions, the authors used narrative survey methodology (shkedi, 2004), a type of narrative analysis. narrative analysis refers to the phenomenon or story itself, as well as a method of inquiry (clandinin & connelly, 1998). taylor (2003) noted that the use of interviews is a common element in narrative analysis. a small number of interviews is appropriate for a narrative survey (fine, 2009), as the goal of narrative survey methodology is not to present each narrative separately or generalize to a larger population, but rather to find commonalities across the narratives which can be connected to broader theoretical constructs (shkedi, 2004). participants the authors used a purposeful, convenience sample, with one of the authors personally inviting women in her professional and advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 76 personal network to participate in the study. ten women accepted the invitation to participate in the study. all of the women were mid to senior level leaders ranging in age from 4072 years old. the participants were of varied religious affiliations, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. all participants were parents, both married and single. the participants also represented multiple professions and industries including education, non-profit organizations, small businesses, and the corporate sector. procedures the researchers asked the study participants to write about times and ways in which they believed their personal purpose(s): (a) were developed; and (b) how those purposes had an impact on the choices they had made as leaders in their careers. participants were instructed there were no writing parameters, and were encouraged to write about what they thought was important, taking as much space as they needed. following the submission of their written narratives, participants were invited to engage in a follow-up interview. interview protocol the authors developed their interview protocol with the literature findings in mind. for example, dik and duffy (2009) suggested using simple open-ended writing exercises to encourage participants to broadly consider purpose, while fine (2009) stated using open-ended questions allowed participants to authentically share their stories and not be steered towards predetermined categories. additionally, the authors of the current study used a semi-structured interview. the questions they developed served as a starting point for conversation, a qualitative strategy suggested by conklin (2012) and gibson (2008). the semi-structured interviews conducted by one of the authors included the following questions: 1. besides the story you recently wrote, had you ever formally written about your personal purpose(s) as it relates to leadership and your career? what were your thoughts about the process(es)? any initial reactions, likes, dislikes or surprises? 2. you probably wrote about this in your purpose story, but how in general have you determined your purpose in the past? 3. are you or do you think other women leaders are intentional about taking their purposes into account in their career decision making processes? 4. how, if at all, does your purpose help you make decisions about leadership roles and commitments such as: (a) when is it the right time to leave a leadership position; (b) accept a promotion; or (c) move to another leadership experience? 5. is writing or verbally sharing your purpose, leadership and career story or narrative something you might do again in the future? why or why not? 6. is there anything else you would like to add to this conversation? data analysis each of the interviews were recorded and analyzed using qualitative data analysis techniques. the authors identified keywords and phrases, and built a scaffolding of themes until they deemed the data had been saturated and no new themes emerged (boyatzis, 1998; corbin & strauss, 1998; lieblich, tuval-mashiach, & zilber, 1998; shamir, dayan-haresh, & adler, 2005). the authors also discussed the possibility of researcher bias, since both authors had personal and professional experiences similar to those of some study participants. to deflect possible researcher bias the authors discussed and noted their potential biases with one another, a technique suggested by gibson (2008). additionally, the authors utilized a student assistant to conduct her own analysis of the data. finally, the authors employed member checking and sent the draft of findings to each of the participants for verification. the utilization of such measures helped ensure data trustworthiness (boyatzis, 1998; corbin & strauss, 1998; gibson, 2008; hoshmand, 2005). results an overarching theme emerged from the data narrative sharing, as related to leadership, career, and decision-making, was a challenging, yet beneficial activity for the study participants. when participants took the time to reflect and share their stories they found it to be crucial, even cathartic. the interviewer detected peacefulness and acknowledgement of courage and resilience among the participants through the process of writing, reflection, and conversation. as one woman shared: so, it was a really interesting process. it was an emotional process. after i wrote the first paragraph, i just started crying. i started sobbing crying. i am not exactly sure why, whether it was just looking back over my life and seeing what i had done with it. that’s looking back at a lot of years; that’s probably a twenty-eight year career, so that’s a big chunk of your life. in speaking about the process, another woman indicated: it was challenging at first, because i didn’t know the answers to the questions. i didn’t think i knew the answers, but i think it was really beneficial and productive to kind of narrow what you think you know and identify what kind of drives you. yet another woman stated: i felt the narrative piece was engaging for me. just right away the narrative of leadership gave me permission to tell a story and i appreciate that because that’s probably what i advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 77 do best is to share a story of what has happened in my life in terms of leadership. other women also commented on the narrative sharing process noting, “you have to stop and think about it more. as i am writing, i am finding myself listening to myself and thinking, ‘well i didn’t think i was going to write that, or i wonder what does that mean?’” and “i think even the word ‘purpose’ is specific. i have been thinking and writing why i am here or who i am more. but, using the word ‘purpose’ my ‘life purpose,’ that was new and specific.” from the general theme, three sub-themes became evident. first, through the process of reflection, the participants named and discovered that the guiding principles from which they made decisions and acted were purpose related, even though they may not have recognized it at the time. structured reflection helped women see that patterns of purpose may have always existed and perhaps their career and life choices were not random. as one woman articulated, “i think the process was very interesting because i really didn’t think there was a purpose that was guiding my career or the work that i did, but, as i wrote it down i realized there was and that i can see the purpose more clearly after writing it.” another participant agreed noting: no one has ever asked me about my personal purpose before. this is an interesting question. it’s hard to pinpoint how and when my sense of purpose developed, because i think it has evolved over time. in fact, it is still evolving and perhaps only now, as a graduate student making a transition in my 50s, can i reflect on a lifetime of experiences and see patterns of purposefulness. other women made comments such as “so, in fact, i did have a bigger purpose than just earning money. and it seems that purpose certainly has been reflected in my leadership, and my role as a business owner,” and “looking back i can recognize, in my job and life, the times i was probably living this purpose and that the purpose was present, but again i was not pursuing a career or leadership role consistent with recognizing a guiding purpose.” second, reflection on purpose led to a clearer articulation of leadership philosophy for the participants. patterns of purpose in leadership were illuminated through choices the participants made and the accepting and rejecting of opportunities. as one of the women stated, “writing and reflecting on purpose brings clarity about decisions i’ve made as a leader in a professional setting and what made me thrive in that setting.” another participant shared, “i strongly believe having a defined mission and purpose creates a better equipped and successful leader. in addition, leadership is more fulfilling and invigorating when the project is aligned with a clear purpose.” other illustrative statements supporting this sub-theme include “good leadership is about being honest, respectful and having a clear vision of the purpose of the organization,” and “leadership is a quality that can’t be defined by a title or salary range, i feel it is a piece of a person’s character that is developed over a lifetime.” finally, as one woman mused, “i step back from time to time, and again it’s that reflective thinking. you kind of think, ‘what is going on here? why is this?’ and, when i do that, i know i am a much better leader.” third, discovering that narrative sharing helped them identify times when they felt most authentic as leaders, participants indicated they intended to use the process again to make current and future leadership/career decisions. several women shared they were in a state of career transition. as leaders, they were used to taking action and not accustomed to being reflective or still. one woman concluded, “it’s okay just to be; you don’t always have to do.” yet another participant stated, “there is that constant question of ‘am i doing what i am here to do?’” pondering the value of being an authentic leader, one woman surmised, “once you start living that way you don’t ever want to go back,” while another stated “i learned that when i am in alignment with my true self, my contributions and performance will be at the highest level.” with the exception of one individual, who had already gone through several reflective exercises due to her profession, all participants concluded that intentional narrative sharing was a powerful leadership development tool. in reflecting on leadership, purpose, and career choices, participants frequently used the following key words claiming, balance, reflective, authenticity, intentional, and integrity (cited most frequently). these key words appeared in all three subthemes. the key words also provided a framework for discussion of additional findings including the influence of parenting, work/life balance, leadership challenges, and faith/spirituality in women’s leadership. discussion a discussion of the study follows including examination and interpretation of results, recommendations for practice, limitations of the study, and recommendations for further research. the purpose of this study was to explore women leaders’ perspectives associated with constructing leadership and purpose narratives. the gathered data demonstrated an overarching theme articulated by all ten participants – narrative sharing was a challenging yet beneficial process. this finding affirmed the collective findings of other researchers that had indicated reflection and narrative story-telling as crucial for women’s leadership development experiences because they emphasize connection, meaning, and growth (binks, smith, smith, & joshi, 2009; corso & rehfuss, 2011; dahlvig & longman, 2010; debebe, 2011; fine, 2009; savickas, 2005). the three sub-themes that emerged from the combined narratives suggested specific aspects of narrative sharing that were beneficial for women in this study. sub-theme one – actions and decisions were often purposeful, even when not planned the process of reflection helped women identify times when their actions and decisions were purposeful, even though they may not have recognized it at the time. the participants found advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 78 the process of writing about and talking about their leadership actions and decisions helpful in identifying presence of purpose throughout their careers. this pathway to recognition of purpose in actions and career decision-making may contribute to the sense of meaning that ibarra, ely, and kolb (2013) found as supportive to women’s development as leaders. several women discussed the fulfillment they experienced as they recognized how their leadership decisions had been in alignment with their purpose(s) throughout their careers. as they reflected, they were able to claim this reality and the accompanying knowledge of their leadership authenticity in decision-making. women in the study noted this knowledge as meaningful and supportive for their leadership endeavors. as stated by binks, smith, smith, and joshi (2009), opportunities to reflect on purpose can result in informed decision-making and can also enable learning. through narrative sharing, women in the study discussed meaningful learning regarding purpose formation. the participants’ written stories and interviews pointed to three factors contributing to formation of purpose. these factors included relationships, events, and circumstances. the women in the study clearly noted relationships as a strong and relevant factor in formation of purpose. several participants spoke of meaningful relationships with people who modeled qualities they valued such as integrity, hard work, respect, and courage. the women in the study were subsequently inspired to incorporate these values to guide them in their lives and in their leadership. parents, grandparents, and trusted mentors were most often named as people who helped participants form their core values. while writing their leadership narratives, several participants became aware of the specific values that were central aspects of their purpose. one participant noted engagement with colleagues in professional organizations as supportive in recognizing her purpose and career path. parentchild relationships were central in nearly all of the women’s stories and had an impact on the participants’ formation of purpose and leadership decision-making. in addition, many women spoke of a commitment to modeling the leadership qualities they wanted their daughters and sons to learn. participants also told stories of significant life events that had shaped them and influenced their formation of purpose. for example, one individual discussed her struggle with a serious health concern as a source of learning that gave her clarity of purpose. another individual noted becoming a single parent as a primary event that formed the core of her purpose. a third individual reflected on how a series of difficult events in her workplace were instrumental in shaping and affirming her purpose. one participant noted; “crises are turning points in making professional choices.” according to women in the study, valuable learning comes from both good and bad experiences. life events, perhaps especially the difficult ones, appeared to be instrumental in shaping purpose. another factor related to formation of purpose for the women in the study was life circumstances. one participant referenced new professional opportunities as one of the primary contributors to her purpose and leadership. another woman identified her parents’ experience of discrimination as a key factor in her realization of purpose. still another participant named the social and political circumstances during her early career as meaningful in the formation of her purpose. the participants’ comments suggested that narrative reflection assists women in claiming their purposeful leadership actions. each of the women in the study appeared to be encouraged and energized as they shared stories of how their purpose was formed. by telling their stories, they recognized greater meaning in their careers and their leadership. as noted by ibarra, ely, and kolb (2013) securing women’s development in purpose is an effective way to support women as they engage in leadership positions. sub-theme two – reflection helped leaders identify and articulate their leadership philosophies women in the study clearly named reflection as a powerful tool that helped them identify, recognize or affirm their leadership philosophy. the women also noted reflection as a process that either did help them or would help them develop greater intentionality and clarity regarding leadership and life choices. every woman in the study articulated her leadership purpose and philosophy through the writing and interview process. as the participants discussed their experiences, they expressed their philosophies with clarity. the dialogue allowed the women in the study to hear and claim their own voices. by providing women with a safe space to share their stories, reflection can be an important tool for women’s development as leaders. at least two participants used this reflective process for discernment and, after using reflection on purpose as a tool, made deliberate leadership decisions. another participant reaffirmed her leadership philosophy through the narrative reflection process and began intentional planning for her next personal and professional actions. as posited by sandberg (2013), intentionality in women’s leadership is necessary. sandberg further affirmed the importance of constructing and reflecting on narratives and creating a safe space in which they can be shared. regarding the power of reflection on leadership purpose and philosophy, one participant offered a clear recommendation; “once you know your purpose, it is time to act!” sub-theme three – leaders intend to use intentional reflective practices to make future career and leadership decisions citing that narrative sharing helped them identify times of leadership authenticity, participants indicated they intended to use similar practices to make current and future leadership and career decisions. in both writing and conversation, the participants were able to identify how their past leadership practices had been successful and in alignment with their advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 79 purpose(s). the knowledge of this alignment was helpful for many of the women as they recognized how previous authentic leadership actions could be applied to their current and future leadership responsibilities and challenges. taking ownership of successes may strengthen women’s acknowledgement of their leadership expertise and thus empower them in future leadership decision-making. additional findings in addition to the primary theme and the sub-themes that emerged in the study, some other findings are worth noting. nearly every study participant referenced the following factors as influential in their career and leadership decision-making: (a) parenting; (b) work/life balance; (c) embracing leadership challenges; and (d) faith/spirituality. following are observations on these factors. parenting was a central contributing factor in leadership decision-making for all participants. the women leaders noted their commitment to their children’s needs as a primary consideration in making career decisions at various phases in their lives. similarly, work/life balance was noted as important for creating a fulfilling life. more than a focus on building a career, participants referenced building a life and spoke of their leadership and lives as fully integrated. this commitment to integration of personal, professional, and community involvement appeared to strongly influence participants’ career decisions. embracing leadership challenges provided growth for the majority of the study participants. there were multiple examples of participants “leaning in” (sandberg, 2013) to new professional challenges that helped them gain clarity of purpose and clarity regarding leadership abilities. through embracing leadership challenges, the women in the study learned what they loved and what they did not love. learning based on professional challenges, complex organizational dynamics, and stepping into increased responsibility shaped the participants’ leadership decision-making. several women said jumping into roles for which they were not fully prepared generally led to growth and realization of greater leadership capacity. finally, faith/spirituality was noted as an important factor in participants’ awareness of leadership purpose and decisionmaking. as noted by dik and duffy (2009), purpose or calling is typically associated with religious contexts, however more recent definitions of purpose or calling are defined as having a sense of purpose (hall & chandler, 2005). the majority of the women in this study discussed faith/spirituality as a factor in identification or formation of their purpose. faith/spirituality was also noted as influential in the participants’ leadership decision-making. recommendations for practice in light of the study findings, the following recommendations are suggested for women leaders, employers, supervisors, organizations, and educational institutions interested in narrative reflection as a leadership development tool: 1. provide safe, confidential environments for women to write about and discuss their stories related to leadership, purpose, career, and decision-making. 2. create intentional support for women to write their leadership narratives by providing coaches and mentors to be present with women as they tell and reflect on their personal and professional stories and leadership experiences. 3. encourage women to take on leadership responsibilities that are beyond their current experience since these roles often develop greater leadership skills and create realization of extended leadership capacities. 4. encourage women to reflect on their formation of purpose and leadership decision-making related to relationships, life events, and life circumstances (both good and bad) and to the factors of parenting, work/life balance, leadership challenges, and faith/spirituality. 5. engage women in reflective discussion regarding their leadership and life experience and how their experiences have shaped their purpose and influenced their leadership and career decision-making. 6. develop focus groups within women’s leadership development programs, organizations, and academic programs that encourage personal/professional narrative and story-telling related to leadership experiences. 7. create multiple opportunities for women to claim their voices and leadership abilities by writing about and reflecting upon purpose related to leadership and by engaging in increasingly challenging leadership responsibilities. limitations of study the study served as an initial endeavor to explore women leaders’ perspectives about the processes associated with constructing leadership purpose and narratives. while the qualitative research methodology was effective overall and provided useful data about narrative and reflection related to purpose and decision-making in women’s leadership, the researchers noted possible study limitations: 1. the research results may have limited transferability based upon the small sample size. 2. the study participants represented only generation x and baby boomers therefore limiting access to the perspectives and experiences of younger women leaders. 3. the study participants knew the researcher who conducted the interviews. familiarity with the interviewer may have influenced participants’ comfort or lack of comfort in openly discussing their narratives. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 80 4. some of the research participants were familiar with the leadership and theoretical constructs included in the study. this may have had an impact on how participants responded to the questions. 5. researcher bias could have been a factor in the study since the researchers were in life situations similar to some of the participants. the researchers may have heard and analyzed responses through an unintentionally biased lens based on their own experiences. recommendations for further research for enrichment of practice and literature on narrative reflection related to purpose in women’s leadership, the authors offer the following recommendations for further research: 1. to enhance transferability, the research could be replicated with a larger sample size. 2. to ascertain the validity of the findings for groups other than generation xers and baby boomers, the study could be replicated with a sample of millennial leaders. 3. to determine whether results are consistent among women leaders, the study could be replicated with larger numbers of women in a variety of age groups, professions, industries, geographic locations, and career phases. 4. future research could replicate this study with women leaders representing greater diversity in race/ethnicity to note any differences that may exist. 5. according to fine (2009), narrative surveys provide conceptual ideas that can inform theory building. the findings from this study could serve as a foundation for the creation of further theoretical knowledge on women’s leadership development. 6. future research on this topic could be conducted with prescribed questions rather than open-ended questions to determine whether different responses would be elicited. 7. to expand this study, further research could investigate the actions women leaders take as a result of identifying or recognizing their purpose through narrative reflection. conclusion effective development and engagement of women leaders’ expertise is crucial for organizational success and for the vitality of communities. for transforming leadership to emerge, and to build a strong economy and better institutions, it is crucial to have outstanding female leaders (the white house project, 2009). in spite of well-intentioned and sometimes successful organizational efforts, women continue to be underrepresented in senior leadership roles. therefore, highly effective women’s leadership development experiences are critical. narrative reflection supported the women in this study to identify times when their actions and decisions were purposeful, helped women identify and articulate a clearer leadership philosophy, and assisted women to identify experiences of leadership authenticity to inform future leadership decisions. the women in the study identified written and verbal narrative as a process that helped them identify or affirm their purpose in leadership and in life. in addition, the women experienced purpose as integrated in all areas of their lives and held integrity as a vital aspect of their individual leadership philosophies. experiences that effectively support women’s advancement and representation in leadership are needed to access the talents women contribute toward stronger and healthier organizations and communities (ruderman & ohlott, 2005). employers, supervisors, educators, and all who are interested in the development of women leaders can play an important part in creating relevant practices, such as narrative reflection, that fully engage the leadership expertise of women. references avolio, b. j. 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(2003). finding positive meaning at work. in k. cameron, j. e. dutton, & r. e. quinn (eds.), positive organizational scholarship (pp. 296-308). san francisco: berrett-koehler. the authors acknowledge and thank savannah bronson for her assistance with data analysis. microsoft word 377.docx volume 40, 2020 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 49 advancing women in leadership vol. 40, pp. 49-55, 2021 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women in the workplace: an empirical analysis of the challenge of the workload mufeed ahmed & wani ambreen mufeed ahmed: senior professor and dean, school of management and commerce, university of kashmir, mufeedku@yahoo.com wani ambreen: research scholar, business school, university of kashmir, ambreen@kashmiruniversity.ac.in accepted august 17, 2020 female employment throughout the world has witnessed a drastic paradigm shift. several factors like improving literacy, change in the socio-economic scenario, and zest for financial independence and ambition are responsible for this changing trend. education sector is the largest employer of women in india and is witnessing drastic changes. the present study examines how these changes have specifically impacted this sector. work-life balance (wlb) of women working in various universities of jammu and kashmir (j&k) is examined. special emphasis is laid on the work pressure women face in the course of trying to balance their professional life with their personal life. the method draws on the survey of 104 married female staff working on a substantive basis in higher education. the analysis of the paper measures the impact of workload on the work-life balance of women professionals. the results show that most working women are upset with the amount of workload in the universities. women who work for longer hours tend to be more dissatisfied with their work-life balance. the study strongly suggests that academic expectations must be attuned with the demands of a woman’s personal life or else a woman can never give her best! keywords: paradigm, work pressure, workload, dissatisfaction female workforce has grown rapidly in the past few decades worldwide. rise in literacy, need for financial independence, changing socio-economic scenario and attitude are considered some of the reasons. however, a working woman often finds herself at cross-roads between her professional and personal obligations. many women succumb to these enormous pressures and quit their jobs. according international labor organization (ilo), india labour market update (july 2017), the labor force participation rate for women is one of the lowest in the world. according to world economic forum, the global gender gap report (2017), the labor force participation rate for women in 2017 was only 28.5% compared to 82% for men. by 2025, $700 billion can be added to india’s gdp if women’s labor participation is increased by 10% (woetzel et al., 2015). therefore, factors like better job opportunities, more educational opportunities for women, better family and social attitudes towards women can go a long way in increasing labor force participation rate for women. as a matter of fact, women employment is more or less dependent upon the inter-play of above-mentioned factors. it is pertinent to mention that the nature of a teaching job is taxing because it requires a deep commitment in terms of time requirements, skills and knowledge (sadler, 2010). all these requisites can sometimes adversely affect the other important aspects of a woman’s life. working women often find themselves trying to optimize their time and efforts vis-à-vis to the divergent demands of work and life (hildebrandt, 2006). the increasing career graph of women is a testimony to this fact and as a consequence work-life balance is a matter of serious concern. philipsen and bostic (2010) support this fact by providing a fresh perspective on the career graph of women and its collision with their work-life balance. the authors report on the experiences of women at early, mid and late career stages and strongly stress on the need to strive for a healthy work-life balance. according to the quarterly employment survey (qes) released by labour bureau of india for fy-2017; women had a higher share of employment in education sector with 24.47 lakh workers. the survey covered major 8 sectors and 18 sub-sectors of indian economy namely construction, manufacturing, transport, trade, education, health, it and bpo, accommodation and restaurant (the indian express, 2019). in the light of the above facts, education sector employs a significant number of women. henceforth, their work-life balance equation is a matter of paramount importance. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 50 the higher education sector in india has witnessed a dramatic change. focus has been on increasing student enrollment, privatization of education, employment generation in addition to improving the overall quality and standards. since, education is a service sector with stakeholders like students, parents, employers, society and other broad forces; employees are often under the pressure of tremendous expectations from all these quarters. the current era is an era of knowledge economy and is fueled by teaching, research, collaborations, project work, workshops, seminars and better curriculum from various colleges and universities. the quest to grow and flourish has changed the culture and working pattern of every educational institute and has more or less molded it on lines of corporate culture. undoubtedly, there have been many positive takeaways from corporations but elements like long working hours, deadlines, work pressure etc. have also made inroads into higher education. this has further burdened female employees who often find themselves unable to cope up with the unprecedented pressures of many roles and responsibilities they have to perform. the picture of female labor force participation does not look very promising in the developing world. sorsa et al. (2015) were puzzled that despite sturdy growth, female labor force participation is on a decline over the past decade. women labor participation can induce inclusive growth; however, the labor force participation rate of women does not look good. a report by international monetary fund (imf) titled ‘women workers in india: why so few among so many?’ finds that india has one of the lowest female labor force participation among peer countries (das et al., 2015). according to annette dixon, world bank south asia vice president, “in 2012, only 27 percent of adult indian women had a job, or were actively looking for one, compared to 79 percent of men. in fact, almost 20 million women had dropped out of the workforce between 2005 and 2012. this is equivalent to the entire population of sri lanka. india ranks 120 among 131 countries in female labor force participation rates and rates of gender-based violence remain unacceptably high. it’s hard to develop in an inclusive and sustainable way when half of the population is not fully participating in the economy. at 17% of gdp, the economic contribution of indian women is less than half the global average, and compares unfavorably to the 40% in china, for instance. india could boost its growth by 1.5 percentage points to 9 percent per year if around 50% of women could join the work force.” literature review numerous scholars have defined work-life balance in different ways. clark and his co-authors define work-life balance in simple terms as “equilibrium or maintaining overall sense of harmony in life” (clark et al., 2004, p. 121-140). the construct has been modified gradually and for some the term ‘balance’ means “mutual reinforcement of the two spheres, such as work– personal life integration, work–life articulation, or work– personal life harmonization” (crompton & brockman, 2006). work-life balance of employees is measured by three parameters: (a) working time arrangements in terms of total working hours and flexibility; (b) for those with parenting or other care responsibilities, parental leave entitlements in terms of maternity, paternity leaves etc.; and (c) child care provisions (mcdonald et al., 2005). according to grzywacz and carlson (2007), work life balance is “an accomplishment of different roles related to expectations that are shared or negotiated between an individual and role-related partners” (grzywacz & carlson, 2007, p. 455-471). researchers have further explored the concept of work-life balance, increasing the necessity of understanding some holistic definitions also. kalliath and brough (2008) define work-life balance as “a balance among six factors related to roles, such as multiplicity, equity, level of satisfaction, fulfilment of role salience, conflict and facilitation, and perceived control between multiple roles” (kalliath & brough, 2008). some researchers define work-life balance in an absolutistic way and press on the requirement of adopting a situational perspective to understand the construct. definitions framed from a situational point of view imply that meaning of work-life balance varies person to person. in other words, depending upon personal context, the definition of work-life balance can vary according to life-stage, income level, gender or family structure (reiter, 2007). valcour (2007) examined the relationship of work-life balance with work hours, job complexity and control over work time; and found an association suggesting that job characteristics influences an individual’s work-life balance. conversely, factors like high work pressure, unsupportive management, long working hours and less control over one’s workload have a negative effect on work-life balance (allan, loudoun, & peetz, 2007). women have to face unique challenges in balancing the opposing demands of their work and life aspects as they are supposed to fulfill so many additional roles like the role of a wife, mother and home-maker. combing a career with marriage often results in uncertainty. this ambivalence is further heightened by the birth of children. marriage, children and the load of other responsibilities; all adversely affect a woman’s career prospects as well as progression (saleem et al., 2014). research indicates that women are less satisfied with work-life balance then men (tomer et al., 2015). gender discrimination over-burdens women with tasks which ideally should have been divided between the sexes. this negatively affects a woman’s satisfaction with work-life balance (tomer et al., 2015). thus, female employees often face difficulties in achieving a healthy work-life balance (rehman & roomi, 2012). creating equilibrium between their personal and professional roles often creates conflicts (greenhaus & beutell, 1985). studies have indicated that women need flexibility and control over their work and prefer to start their own businesses (agarwal and lenka, 2015). women academicians view about their work-life balance is heavily influenced by their socio-cultural life and attitudes about advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 51 paid-work and unpaid care (toffoletti & starr, 2016). the problem of work-life balance, particularly for women is acknowledged by many studies and a lot of research has been done on women in academics. however, there is a paucity of research on women in higher education sector (bradley, 2000). this sector remains largely uninvestigated and merits attention. therefore, despite of the incredible progress women have made, there are areas where their growth has been limited. better worklife balance practices will ensure an appropriate presence and participation of women in the higher echelons of education. methods the present study included the female staff at three universities in jammu and kashmir (j&k). the state presents a dismal picture of female employment percentage which increased from 12.3% to 16.4 % during 2012-14; however, it fell sharply to only 7.9% during 2015-2016 (labour bureau, ministry of labour and employment, 2016). many factors, including non-economic and social factors can be held responsible for this decline (swain & wallentin, 2008). in this context, the number of women working in higher education is lower than their male counterparts (beede et al., 2011). the respondents were limited to female employees in the largest universities of the state in terms of student enrollment. therefore, the top three large universities have been selected. working in a large institute may also mean a higher level of work pressure which in turn has an impact on work-life balance (white et al., 2003). frone et al. (1992) suggested that factors like work pressure and work overload may cause interference between work and family roles. hence, concepts under investigation are expected to manifest the challenges of work load especially work pressure and working hours on the worklife balance of working women. according to toffoletti and starr (2016), married women in academia tend to experience additional hurdles that exert a negative influence on their work-life balance. therefore, the scope was limited to married female staff working on substantive basis to avoid any significant differences in faculty roles in terms of marital status and nature of appointment. furthermore, only permanent married teaching staff was selected as the respondents for this study. preliminary inquiries at the offices of these universities indicated that the total number of female teaching staff in these universities was approximately 200. of which only 157 could be contacted for the survey, and 110 completed responses were collected within the target time, wherein 6 responses were rejected because of incomplete data fragments. therefore, 104 responses were considered suitable for data analysis. the instrument used for data collection is described in the section following later. objectives and hypotheses of the study the primary objective of this article is to explore the status of work-life balance, and the challenges and problems encountered by female staff at various universities in j&k in terms of work load. the secondary objective was to investigate how in particular work load is a significant challenge in terms of working hours and work pressure. the following hypotheses were formed to explore the context of female employees at various universities of j&k. h1: do factors like working hours and work pressure influence work-life balance? h2: are demographic factors crucial in influencing work-life balance? instrumentation the items in the questionnaire used the likert scale response (1= strongly agree to 5 = strongly disagree). the instrument included the following two sections: (a) work related information such as extra hours of work done, whether additional work is taken home, energy level at the end of the end, ability of manage multiple projects/deadlines and work pressure experienced. (b) demographic information including age group, number of children, designation, work experience etc. data analysis and interpretations sample characteristics in the sample, 5%, 44%, 19% and 32% respondents were in the age group of less than 30 years, 31-40 years, 41-50 years and above 50 years respectively. among the respondents, 17.1%, 23.7%, 22.7% and 36.8% had a teaching experience of up to 5 years, 6-10 years, 11-15 years and above 15 years respectively. almost half i.e., 42% had one child where as 46%, 12% had two and more than two children respectively. the respondent sample had the following designations: assistant professors (66%), associate professors (13%), professors (14%), administrators (3%) and others (4%) (see table 1). among the respondents in the sample, 57.2% worked for extra hours, whereas 49.5% took additional work home. only 14% respondents indicated that they feel energetic at the end of the day. moreover, 34.6% of the respondents indicated that they cannot manage multiple projects whereas 26.5% respondents were unable to meet prescribed deadlines. an overwhelming 55.4% feel pressurized while working on a deadline. the data has been presented in the following figure. table 1 sample characteristics demographic variable percentage age less than 30 5.0 31-40 44.0 41-50 19.0 above 50 32.0 teaching experience up to 5 years 17.1 6-10 23.7 11-15 22.7 above 15 years 36.8 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 52 number of children none 0.0 one 42.0 two 46.0 more than two 12.0 designation assistant professors 66.0 associate professors 13.0 professors 14.0 administrators 3.0 others 4.0 figure 1 data analysis validity and reliability the items in the questionnaire were prepared after conducting a through literature review on the subject. the questionnaire was also adapted as per nature of the current study. the issue of determining the appropriateness of the questionnaire to be able to measure the construct of work-life balance was also discussed with a few experts in the field of marketing, human resources, english and psychology. discussions were also held with some respondents. the reliability was tested using cronbach’s alpha test. the test result (cronbach’s alpha = 0.745, and number of items = 50) indicates that items used in the current study were reliable for measuring work-life balance as a construct. the generally acceptable value of cronbach’s alpha is 0.70 (cronbach, 1951); however, it is better to have its value close to 0.80 (nunnally, 1978). table 2 reliability analysis cronbach's alpha number of items 0.745 50 similarly, table 3 presents the results of validity analysis and the results indicate that the items have sound validity parameters. table 3 validity analysis constructs/ factors sfl ave msv cr 1. work load .813 .621 0.371 .835 2. work-life balance .817 .677 0.241 .805 the results show sfl (standard factor loadings), ave (average variance extracted), msv (maximum shared variance) and cr (composite reliability) of various constructs. in order to establish the convergent validity of the scale, ave should be more than 0.5 and sfl greater than 0.6 (greene, 2008). it is observed from the above table; all the given constructs have satisfied the requisites confirming convergent validity. in order to establish discriminant validity, msv must be less than ave (lucas, diener & suh, 1996). the same has been observed in our case (see table 2). henceforth, reliability analysis suggests that items in the questionnaire are convincing enough to enable the measurement of the said constructs correctly. work-life balance and the challenge of work load the present study hypothesized that work load has an impact on the work-life balance of working women. table 4 presents the mean scores. the test results indicate that there is a negative impact of work load on work-life balance of working women. table 4 impact of work load on work-life balance of working women independent variable dependent variable work-life balance beta r2 work hours .274* .249 .374 work pressure -.326** .231 overall work load -.565** .374 *p < .001; ** p < .01; ns = not significant as can be observed from the above table, all the antecedents of work-life balance for work load explain a variance of (r2=0.374) in the construct of work load. the more significant antecedent is work hours(β=.249), followed by work pressure (β=.231). also, there is a highly significant negative relationship between work load and work-life balance(p=-.565). findings by wirtz, nachreiner & rolfes (2011), omar, mohd & ariffin 24% 21% 6% 15% 11% 23% worked for extra hours took additional work home felt energetic at the end of the day could not manage multiple projects advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 53 (2015) & skinner & pocock (2008) also arrive at a statistically significant negative association between work load and work-life balance. descriptive statistics of responses among the respondents, 52.7% reported that they work for extra hours to get work done; 45.9% take additional work to home; just 18% respondents reported that they felt energetic at the end of the day; 36.4% reported that they were not able to manage multiple projects; 54.5% reported that they felt pressurized while working on a deadline; however a considerable 76.5% feel successful in managing home and work demands; 81% reported that they were happy with the contributions that they make towards home and family; 60.3% reported that they had time to reach their personal as well as professional goals satisfactorily; and 67.7% reported that they were satisfied with the way they divided time between work and personal life. this data indicates that work load is a dominant predictor of work-life balance. most individuals find work load too challenging or overwhelming. unmanageable work load is bound to create an imbalance in the work and non-work equation of an employee. as observed in table 5, among the items in the questionnaire regarding work load, the descriptive statistics indicate that the minimum value was 8 and the maximum score was 24 with a mean of 17.03 and standard deviation was 2.751 for the sample size. the responses for work-life balance indicates a minimum and maximum score varied from 3 to 22 and the mean was 9.88. standard deviation for the sample is 2.959. table 5 descriptive statistics of responses for work-load and worklife balance. construct n minimum maximum mean std. deviatio n work load 104 8 24 17.03 2.751 work hours 104 3 11 5.35 1.982 work pressure 104 3 19 12.77 2.220 work-life balance 104 3 22 9.88 2.959 a comparative demographic analysis the following hypotheses were to be tested on the total worklife balance score: a. h1: wlb has no relation with the age of the female employees: generally, family as well as professional responsibilities are expected to be higher among individuals in a higher age group. this can have an adverse bearing on the wlb score. also, the result of the anova [f=1.692 and sig=0.300] indicates no significant difference between the wlb scores among age groups. therefore, the null hypothesis is accepted. b. h2: wlb does not differ among individuals with teaching experience of the female employees: the result of the anova [f=0.987 and sig=0.605] indicates no significant differences among respondents with varying teaching experience. therefore, the null hypothesis is accepted. c. h3: wlb has no relation with the number of children of the female employees: in general, more the number of children, lower their wlb becomes. the result of anova [f (4, 41) = 2.930 and sig=0.029] indicates that the wlb score depends on the number of children (see table 6). therefore, the null hypothesis is rejected. d. h4: wlb has no relation with the designation of the female employees: the result of the anova [f=0.879 and sig=0.705] indicates no significant differences among respondents with varying teaching experience. therefore, the null hypothesis is accepted. table 6 anova for work-life balance w.r.t number of children. demogr aphic variable categori es n me an s.d ano va (f) sig. number of children one 42.0 9.65 2.157 2.930 0.02 9* two 46.0 8.07 2.000 more than two 12.0 7.47 2.217 *p < .05; **p < .01; ns = not significant findings and discussion the results indicate that work load is a problem and impacts the wlb of working women. the management and experience of work load in terms of length of working hours and work pressure, in light of our findings, supports our argument that excessive work load does not ensure a healthy work-life balance. as a matter of fact, work load emerged as a strong predictor of negative work-life balance. the repercussions of excessive work load show remarkably as strain on an individual’s time and emotions. such kind of strain clearly disturbs one’s life outside of work (frone, yardley and markel, 1997). the results indicate that excessive work load is an important factor that disturbs the work-life balance equation of working women. long working hours and undue work pressure were found to be predominant factors that create a negative work-life balance for women in this study. their age, teaching experience and designation did not incur any significant difference in their perceptions regarding work-life balance in general and problems created by work load in particular. however, the number of children did influence their perception of a low work-life balance. the results of the current study are in tune with other research findings discussed already in the literature review. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 54 a related study on female teachers indicated significant differences in work-life balance caused by age, marital status and dependent children (sturges & guest, 2004). furthermore, long working hours were predominantly found to affect worklife balance. among the respondents, 92% worked for more than five days a week with 71% respondents claiming that they work for more than eight hours per day. the results therefore indicated a significant correlation with working hours. moreover, those who could either delegate their work or did not stay in the office for long reported significantly higher levels of work-life balance. all these findings also indicate that over-time at work is an impediment towards obtaining a positive work-life balance. respondents who were unable to manage long working hours that resulted in a low work-life balance also had difficulties caused by work pressure. the respondent’s perception of work pressure also had a significant effect on work-life balance. too much pressure in terms of overtime hours, tight deadlines and performance pressure can lead to fatigue, irritability, mood swings and burnout at last. this not only affects the health and well-being of employees but also has severe repercussions on the organization’s bottomline. thus, a greater understanding and an improved approach towards the issue of work pressure needs to be achieved. the respondents who perceived their work pressure as satisfactory, reported a higher level of work-life balance score. a probable interpretation for this may be that work-life balance is not a stand-alone concept but is deeply affected by work load. some of the factors affecting work-life balance due to work pressure can be improved by working on a deadline with absolute discipline so that undue pressure is not felt later on. this can also be achieved by avoiding procrastination. similar findings were reported by syrek, apostel & antoni (2013) in their study establishing a negative and significant relationship between work pressure and work-life balance. results also indicated that age, designation and teaching experience of working women is not significantly correlated to work-life balance. teaching experience of the female is not differentiated by the perception of attaining a satisfactory worklife balance. similar relationship is observed regarding designation and age. however, number of children have shown a significant relationship with work-life balance. this relationship can be attributed to several factors such as number of dependents especially children. for females with young children work load tends to accumulate drastically. in fact, female employees perceive higher levels of challenges in maintaining work and home after having children. implications, suggestions and limitations several implications and suggestions can be made from the study. dissatisfaction with work-life balance seems to increase among those women who work for long hours. therefore, workplaces must sensitize towards the set of expectations women can have from them for example child care provision, maternity leave, separate feeding room and similar other things. organizations need to frame policies that are compatible with the personal life of a woman e.g. her parenting needs. woman have achieved a lot in various professions. therefore, is an important responsibility of organizations to ensure that the progress made by women does not stall due to their continuous work-life balance concerns. women must not be allowed to get unfairly tossed between the tall expectations of being great mothers and successful career women at the same time. furthermore, they must be made to take up fair and justifiable work load. the lack of empathy and compassion in this regard can adversely affect the delicate balance they try to maintain between work and life. the present study was limited to only some universities of j&k; therefore, a larger sample size that includes other universities as well as colleges is required. this will enable the researchers to attain more conclusive findings regarding the impact of work load on work-life balance. the results can also be compared with males in the chosen field and other professional fields as well. references bajdo, l. m. (2005). the effect of individual differences on stereotypes of male and female managers. wayne state university. carlson, d. s., kacmar, k. m., & whitten, d. (2006). what men think they know about executive women. harvard business review, 84(9), 28. catalyst. (june 5, 2019) women in the united states workforce. new york: catalyst. retrieved from https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-the workforce-united-states/ dubno, p. (1985). attitudes toward women executives: a longitudinal approach. academy of management journal, 28(1), 235-239. duehr, e. e., & bono, j. e. (2006). men, women, and managers: are stereotypes finally changing?. personnel psychology, 59(4), 815-846. frank, e. j. (1988). business students' perceptions of women in management. sex roles, 19(1-2), 107-118. huckle, p. (1983). a decade's difference: mid-level managers and affirmative action. public personnel management, 12(3), 249-257. massengill, d., & di marco, n. (1979). sex-role stereotypes and requisite management characteristics: a current replication. sex roles, 5(5), 561-570. norris, j. m., & wylie, a. m. (1995). gender stereotyping of the managerial role among students in canada and the united states. group & organization management, 20(2), 167-182. powell, g. n., butterfield, d. a., & parent, j. d. (2002). gender and managerial stereotypes: have the times changed?. journal of management, 28(2), 177-193. powell, g. n., & butterfield, d. a. (1979). the “good manager”: masculine or androgynous?. academy of management journal, 22(2), 395-403. schein, v. e. (1975). relationships between sex role stereotypes and requisite management characteristics advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 55 among female managers. journal of applied psychology, 60(3), 340. schein, v. e., mueller, r., & jacobson, c. (1989). the relationship between sex role stereotypes and requisite management characteristics among college students. sex roles, 20(1), 103-110. stevens, j. h. (1984). black grandmothers' and black adolescent mothers' knowledge about parenting. developmental psychology, 20(6), 1017. stoker, j. i., van der velde, m., & lammers, j. (2012). factors relating to managerial stereotypes: the role of gender of the employee and the manager and management gender ratio. journal of business and psychology, 27(1), 31-42. tomkiewicz, j., & adeyemi-bello, t. (1995). a crosssectional analysis of the attitudes of nigerians and americans toward women as managers. journal of social behavior and personality, 10(4), 189. 400+korenman+copyeditied+8-22 final.docx volume 42, 2023 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 42, 123-131 , 2023 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper voices of leadership: the effects of voice pitch on perceived leadership capabilities lisa m. korenman, elizabeth l. wetzler, & samantha leahy, lissa v. young, dr. lisa m. korenman: associate professor, department of behavioral sciences & leadership, usma, west point, ny dr. elizabeth l. wetzler: associate professor, department of behavioral sciences & leadership, usma, west point, ny cpt. samantha leahy: department of behavioral sciences & leadership, usma, west point, ny dr. lissa v. young: associate professor, department of behavioral sciences & leadership, usma, west point, ny accepted july 7, 2023 previous research shows that voice pitch plays a significant role in leadership selection (mayew et al., 2013) and that more masculine traits, including voice pitch, are typically associated with successful individuals in leadership roles. the present study extended prior research by examining how sex and gender characteristics of voices influence the perception of leadership qualities within a military environment. specifically, the design of the study was a 2 (sex of voice: male, female) × 2 (gender of voice: masculinized, feminized) × 2 (sex of participant; man, woman) mixed model design, with the sex and gender of voice serving as the within subjects factors, sex of participant as a between subjects factor, and ratings of military leadership potential serving as the dependent variable. results from an analysis of variance showed that participants rated men’s voices significantly higher than women’s voices for leadership potential. however, feminine voices were rated significantly higher than masculine voices. additionally, there was a significant interaction between sex of voice and gender of voice that showed that the masculine female voice received the lowest ratings of leadership potential. male participants also provided lower ratings on average to all voices when compared to female participants. we discuss these findings in terms of gender role congruity and the influence of androgyny and gender norms on perceptions of women’s leadership potential in a male-dominated, hierarchical environment. keywords:military leadership, voice, gender, sexual dimorphism, gender role congruity leadership is an essential component of any organization, and the quality of leaders plays a significant role in the success of the organization. perceivers rely on various sources of information to determine the efficacy of a leader, including visible characteristics like face and body and invisible characteristics like voice. the timbre and sex of the voice can influence the perception of leadership efficacy. this paper will examine the impact of voice pitch on perceptions of military leadership potential for men and women. pitch is an important voice characteristic that can influence the perception of an individual's level of status or power. we will also explore how gender biases and stereotypes in male-dominated institutions, such as the military, may be related to perceptions of leadership potential based on both a person’s sex and voice pitch. literature review when determining the quality of leaders, perceivers rely on several sources of information, which include visible characteristics, such as body and face (antonakis & eubanks, 2017; korenman et al., 2019; nana et al., 2010; re et al., 2013), as well as less visible characteristics, such as voice. there are significant, distinguishable differences in every person’s voice depending on their age (klofstad et al., 2015), ethnicity (podesva & callier, 2015; thomas & reaser, 2004), and sex (aung & puts, 2020; mendoza et al., 1996; o’connor & barclay, 2017; zhang et al., 2016), and these specific characteristics serve as the basis for judgments of the target’s leadership efficacy. this suggests that people can (and will) judge a leader based on the timbre and sex of their voice before they have physically seen or interacted with them. pitch difference is a quality present in all voices and is determined by physiological differences whereby men have lower pitched voices than women. to that end, research has investigated the influence of pitch on judgments of ability and found voices that are lower in pitch are typically perceived to be more capable or qualified for leadership roles (anderson & klofstad, 2012; mahrholz et al., 2018; puts et al., 2007; tsantani et al., 2016). in order to see the effect of pitch differentiations on social and physical dominance, puts et al. (2012) manipulated men’s voice pitch to be either lower or higher and asked 124 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 participants to rate the voices. they discovered that recordings of men with voices that were lower in pitch were perceived as being more dominant compared to the recordings that were higher in pitch. given that dominance is a quality valued in leaders, those voices with a lower, or more masculine voice pitch, may be viewed as more effective leaders (puts et al., 2012). status and power, two additional qualities typically valued in leaders, may also be influenced by voice pitch. ko et al. (2015) examined the relationship between hierarchy and vocal acoustic cues, exploring how hierarchical rank affects the acoustic properties of a speaker's voice and how these hierarchy-based acoustic cues affect perceivers' inferences of a speaker's rank. they found that listeners use pitch, loudness, and loudness variability when making inferences about a speaker’s rank and discovered that people use voice pitch to reflect and identify a hierarchy for categorization. similarly, tigue et al. (2012) determined that lower pitch voices are associated with more favorable qualities, such as trustworthiness, honesty, intelligence, dominance, physical prowess, and integrity when compared to higher pitch voices. taken together, these findings strengthen the link between voice pitch and leadership perception, in that lower pitch voices are often preferred and associated with higher positions within a hierarchy and greater leadership capabilities. an individual’s willingness to follow those appointed to lead them has the potential to be influenced by voice regardless of the leader’s sex. previous research conducted in military settings supports the notion that voice pitch impacts perceptions of ordering of hierarchies, influence, trustworthiness, dominance, and a variety of other attributes linked to leadership (cheng et al., 2016; o’connor & barclay, 2018). the influence of voice pitch on perceptions of leadership effectiveness is consistent across different social contexts and domains of leadership. both male and female leaders with lower-pitched voices (i.e., masculine pitch) tend to be preferred by men and women (anderson & klofstad, 2012). this suggests that both male and female participants favor men and women with lower-pitched voices and believe they may be more successful in obtaining positions of leadership. thus, the mere fact that women typically have higher pitched voices than men may be a component that contributes to fewer women holding leadership roles compared to men (klofstad et al., 2012). this implication has led researchers to investigate how gender of voice and sex of voice are perceived, as well as how sex of the perceiver moderates those perceptions (ko et al., 2015; puts et al., 2007; tigue et al., 2012; tsantani et al., 2016). to comprehensively evaluate the impact of voice pitch on leadership and to understand why masculine or lower-pitch voices may be perceived most favorably, we should consider sex and gender components in leadership-based institutions such as the military. heilman et al. (2004) explored the existence of gender biases and stereotypes in the military and discovered that when women were more successful than men, and subsequently recognized for this success, they were viewed more negatively than their equally successful male counterparts. these gender-based biases affected women’s job placement and promotion rates (heilman et al., 2004). in a predominantly male environment, such as the military, merit and performance are purportedly assessed to determine job placement and promotion rates, rather than gender, sex, or voice pitch. however, the less obvious characteristic of vocal pitch may be playing more of a role in creating the archetypal leader than we think. leadership roles are created within hierarchies to add order and manage direction and productivity. hierarchies are social structures where high-ranking individuals have greater influence, deference, attention, and valued resources than those who are lower ranking. although the literature has documented a wide range of attributes and behaviors that influence rank attainment and positions of leadership, these findings lack a coherent, unifying framework integrating the various points into a comprehensive and theoretically supported understanding of rank differentiation (cheng et al., 2016). to address this, cheng et al. (2016) created an empirically supported evolutionary model, the dominance-prestige account, which may be used to unify the extant diverse findings. their account proposes that differences in hierarchical rank within human communal groups are the result of both: (a) coerced deference to dominant individuals who induce fear through their ability to inflict physical or psychological harm and (b) openly recognized regard of others who possess valued skills and abilities. this finding links dominance and strength, commonly associated with masculinity, to the prevalence in preference and respect for masculinity and the male figure within leadership roles. another essential component of leadership within the military is trust, specifically the level of trust that subordinates place in their leaders (o’connor & barclay, 2017). perceptions of trustworthiness are an important predictor of social outcomes, especially regarding the attainment of leadership roles. o’connor and barclay (2017) measured the influence of voice pitch on perceptions of trustworthiness across general, economic, and mating-related contexts. they found that in the context of trust, voice pitch and the sex of the speaker both influenced perceived trustworthiness. all listeners were more trusting of higher pitched male and female voices in economic and mating-related contexts, but lower-pitched women’s and men’s voices were perceived as more trustworthy in general (o’connor & barclay, 2017). these findings provide evidence that while voice pitch alone is sufficient to influence trust-related perceptions and demonstrates that listeners use voice pitch as a cue for trustworthiness and ultimately the decision to place trust in a leader, the sex of a leader also remains relevant. to understand why characteristics defining leadership are aligned more closely with men, and quite possibly leading to the disapproval faced by women occupying positions of leadership, we consider role congruity theory (eagly & karau, 2002; eagly, 2007; heilman et al., 2004). gender role congruity refers to the degree to which an individual's gender identity and behavior 125 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 align with societal expectations for their gender. these societal expectations are often informed by traditional gender roles that have been reinforced over time through cultural norms, media, and institutions. gender role congruity has been shown to have a significant impact on various aspects of individuals' lives, including their mental health, career aspirations, and relationships. the concept of gender role congruity is rooted in the social constructivist perspective, which posits that gender is a product of socialization and cultural norms rather than inherent biological differences (eagly & wood, 2012). according to this perspective, individuals learn about gender roles and expectations through various socialization agents such as parents, peers, media, and schools. these gender roles and expectations inform individuals' behavior and attitudes, creating gendered behaviors and expectations. gender role congruity theory posits that when individuals' gender identity and behavior align with societal expectations for their gender, they experience a sense of congruity, which can lead to positive outcomes such as increased self-esteem, sense of belonging, and reduced anxiety (eagly & wood, 2012). however, when individuals' gender identity and behavior deviate from societal expectations for their gender, they may experience incongruity, which can lead to negative outcomes such as decreased self-esteem, feelings of isolation, and increased anxiety. one area in which gender role congruity has a significant impact is in individuals' career aspirations and choices. studies have found that women who conform to traditional gender roles are less likely to pursue careers in male-dominated fields such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) (diekman et al., 2010; stout et al., 2011). this is because these fields are often associated with masculine qualities, such as competitiveness, assertiveness, and independence, which are not traditionally associated with femininity. as a result, women who value achieving communal goals, such as helping others, may perceive a poor fit between their goals and work in stem fields, which may discourage them from pursuing stem careers. examples of this theory at play in a military environment can be seen in results from studies using service academy cadets or other military students as participants (boldry et al., 2001; boyce & herd, 2003; looney et al., 2004). research conducted with cadets at texas a&m revealed that men are believed to possess greater motivation and leadership qualities necessary for effective military performance than women (boldry et al., 2001). instead, women were believed to possess more feminine attributes that would interfere with their ability to adequately execute duties and excel within the environment. it is relevant that the sex-differentiated appraisals by participants reflected the impact of gender stereotypes rather than performance differences between sexes. similarly, boyce and herd (2003) reported that there is still a disparity in men’s perceptions of the similarities that exist between women and leaders. women, more than men, were able to recognize similarities between women and leaders, though senior military students possessed stronger masculine gender role stereotypes of successful officers. experience with being led by women did not affect men’s masculine gender stereotypes of leaders. however, successful women cadet leaders perceived effective officers as having attributes that are common in both men and women. women recognize their own sex’s potential as leaders whereas men do not typically associate effective leadership attributes with women (boyce & herd, 2003). the results of these studies may explain underlying constructs revealed by the effect of participant sex on perceived leadership qualities varying in sex and gender. gender role congruity also may play a role in perceptions of promotability. midshipmen from the united states naval academy perceived male and female leaders as having attributes that would be both positive and negative with respect to promotion, but only female leaders were associated with characteristics having emotional bases, supporting these attributes as stereotypically female (looney et al., 2004). moreover, individuals displaying more masculine traits were considered equal in terms of leadership potential, but those displaying more stereotypical feminine traits were perceived as weak, regardless of their sex (looney et al., 2004). women are often seen as lacking in the masculine attributes needed to be successful in the military and relative leadership roles when compared to men (boldry et al., 2001). this less than favorable perception of women in the military is echoed across the branches to include the army, where it was discovered that united states military academy cadets were the least approving of women serving when compared to rankings made by civilians and rotc cadets (matthews et al., 2009). furthermore, findings have indicated that students at the united states military academy prefer individuals with gender congruent faces, which may reflect a preference for physical prowess and abilities (korenman et al., 2019). gender biases and gender-role stereotypes appear to influence the perception of men and women comparatively as leaders. role congruity and the impact that it has on individuals’ perceptions of leadership based in the masculinity or femininity of a man’s or woman’s voice has direct implications to leadership in the military. this is particularly relevant within the context of this study as the judgments made based on voice may influence an individual’s willingness to work with or to follow those placed in command. thus, voice pitch appears to play a crucial role in the perception of leadership efficacy and may influence how individuals are perceived as leaders across various social contexts and domains. lower pitch voices are often associated with higher positions within a hierarchy and greater leadership capabilities, while higher pitch voices are associated with more negative qualities. these effects are consistent across both male and female leaders, suggesting that voice pitch may be a contributing factor to the gender disparities in leadership positions. further research is needed to explore the extent to which gender biases and stereotypes influence the perception of leadership based on voice 126 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 pitch and how these biases can be addressed to promote greater diversity and inclusivity in leadership positions. research question and hypotheses the following research question and hypotheses were used to guide this study. research question how do sex and gender characteristics of voices influence perceptions of leadership potential within a military environment? hypothesis 1 participants will give higher leadership potential ratings to the voices of men than they will to the voices of women. hypothesis 2 participants will give higher leadership potential ratings to masculine voices than they will to feminine voices. hypothesis 3 both male and female participants will give higher leadership potential ratings to congruent voices (masculine-men and feminine-women) than they will to incongruent voices (feminine-men and masculine-women). method research design this quantitative study was conducted using a quasi-experimental design with three independent variables (sex of voice, gender of voice, and sex of participant) and one dependent variable (leadership potential ratings). the independent variables of sex of voice and gender of voice were manipulated and controlled by the experimenters and were within subjects variables: all participants experienced all conditions and the order of presentation of the voices used for each condition was completely randomized. sex of the participant served as a quasi-experimental independent variable. the dependent variable was a composite rating of leadership potential. this design allowed us to analyze the data statistically using a mixed model analysis of variance (anova) to test the hypotheses that there would be main effects of both sex of voice and gender of voice on perceptions of leadership potential, as well as a higher-order interaction between sex of voice and gender of voice. the resulting design of the study was a 2 (sex of voice: male, female) × 2 (gender of voice: masculinized, feminized) × 2 (sex of participant: man, woman) quasi-experimental design, with the sex and gender of voice serving as two within subjects factors and sex of participant as the between subjects factor. more details on participants, materials, the data collection procedure, and our planned analytic strategy are provided below. participants participants included 70 male and 75 female cadets from the united states military academy. the average age was 22.82 years (sd = 1.04). approximately 72% of the participants were caucasian, 10% african american, 8% asian, 6% hispanic/latino, and 4% from other backgrounds or more than one category. all participants were enrolled in psychology courses and received extra credit in exchange for participation. materials the primary materials for this study consisted of a total of 32 audio clips, each 6-8 seconds in length, specifically constructed for this research. the 32 clips underwent pilot testing and those verified to be moderate for the average man or woman’s voice, respectively, were used, resulting in 16 clips. the resulting 16 clips were divided: 8 clips were spoken by a man and 8 spoken by a woman, both of whom were cadets at the united states military academy. each voice clip was recorded under controlled conditions in an otherwise silent room, using a dell laptop computer and a basic external microphone. the gender variations were created by artificially increasing the male voice pitch by four fundamental frequencies and lowering the female voice pitch by four fundamental frequencies. the male voice was left unaltered at the recorded pitch for its relative “masculine” quality and was artificially raised 4 fundamental frequencies from the recorded pitch to simulate the “feminine” male voice. the same approach was used for the female voice wherein the original recorded voice was not edited and remained the “feminine” voice and then was artificially lowered to reflect a “masculine” female voice. the voices were evaluated and normed to ensure all variations sounded natural. each of the voice recordings were made to portray a military setting of a superior speaking to a subordinate. the 8 different messages recorded by each sex were non-threatening and equally communal in nature, as opposed to agentic, malicious, or disciplinary messages. for example, one message was “pvt smith, it seems you’ve been down lately. i don’t mean to pry, but i want you to know that i’m here to talk if you need me” (see appendix a for all statements). for determining leadership ability, we employed the 14-item leadership questionnaire used by korenman et al. (2019) (see appendix b for questionnaire). this questionnaire bases the definition of a competent leader on qualities identified in the army’s leader development manual (department of the army, 2012). the questions ranged from professionalism, well-being, trustworthiness, ability to develop oneself and others, and social competence. based on the voice sample, participants rated leadership capabilities using a 7-point likert scale, with 7 options ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. the perceived leadership capabilities were determined by calculating an average of the rankings from the 7-point likert scale, across the 14 leadership qualities, to arrive at an overall leadership score. 127 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 presentation order for the voices was randomized, and participants were able to listen to each voice clip repeatedly if necessary. participants listened to the voices via headphones and all responses were collected electronically via qualtrics. data collection procedure upon arrival at the research site, participants were briefed on the process of the experiment and given an overview of the intent of the study. no more than 15 participants were present in the experimental area at any time. each participant was given a set of bose headphones to connect to their school issued computer to listen to the stimuli. by doing so, we hoped to normalize the quality of the voices across participants. once connectivity to the internet was established, participants were given a link to the qualtrics site to begin the study. each participant was presented with the 16 voices, eight male and eight female, each in its masculine and feminine forms, and thus rated all voices. voices were presented as pairs, for an unlimited amount of time. these pairs consisted of the feminine and masculine forms of the voice, so that direct comparison between the voices could be made. participants were asked to listen to the voices and determine the extent to which that voice represented each of the 14 leadership statements located below the recordings. they were allowed to listen to the recordings as many times as they liked. once the participant rated the voices on all 14 qualities, they could move on to the next voice pair, continuing this process for all 16 voices in the experiment. neither the presentation order of the voices nor the time that participants spent listening to each voice was known to the experimenters. after rating all 16 voices, participants were asked to complete a short demographics survey and allowed to leave the research area. analytic strategy we used a 2 × 2 × 2 (gender of voice × sex of voice × sex of participant) mixed model anova to analyze the effects of gender of voice and sex of voice on men’s and women’s ratings of leadership capability. sex of voice and gender of the voice served as within-subjects variables and the sex of the participant as the between-subjects variable. this analysis allowed us to test both main effects of sex of voice and gender of voice, which corresponded with hypotheses 1 and 2, along with the sex of voice by gender of voice interaction, which corresponded with hypothesis 3. post hoc simple effects tests were chosen because they allowed us to determine what specific differences among the group means were driving any observed interaction to further evaluate support for hypothesis 3. we used an alpha level of .05 for all statistical tests. results results from the mixed model anova showed a main effect for sex of voice, f(1, 143) = 6.081, p = .02, with male voices (m = 5.34) receiving higher ratings than female voices (m = 5.23), thus supporting hypothesis 1. contrary to hypothesis 2, results from the anova showed a main effect for gender of voice, f(1, 143) = 15.787, p < 0.01, with feminine voices (m = 5.35) receiving higher ratings than masculine voices (m = 5.22). additionally, there was a significant interaction between sex and gender of the voice, f(1, 143) = 21.736, p < .01, partially supporting hypothesis 3. post hoc simple effects tests revealed that participants differed significantly in their ratings of incongruent and congruent women’s voices, but not incongruent and congruent men’s voices. women with masculine voices received lower ratings than women with feminine voices (m = 5.10 andm = 5.37, respectively), whereas the masculine male voices and the feminine male voices received similar ratings (m = 5.35 andm = 5.34, respectively). we found that male and female participants differed in their ratings of voices, f(1, 143) = 10.91, p = .001, with men rating leadership potential lower than women (m = 5.08 and 5.49, respectively). however, there was no difference between men and women when rating voices based on sex of voice, f(1, 143) = .575, p = .450, or gender of voice, f(1, 143) = .541, p = .463. in addition, there was no significant three-way interaction between sex of voice, gender of voice, and participant sex, f(1, 143) = .588, p = .450. all means and standard deviations may be found in table 1. table 1 means and standard deviations for male and female participants’ leadership ratings of voices as a function of sex of voice and gender of voice discussion the purpose of this study was to investigate how the masculinity or femininity of male and female voices affected perceptions of their military leadership potential. consistent with hypothesis 1 results showed that men rather than women tended to be perceived as well suited for leadership positions, especially in 128 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 masculine domains (boldry et al., 2001; heilman et al., 2004; yukl, 2012). we also detected a significant main effect of sex of voice; participants’ ratings of leadership potential for male voices were significantly higher than for female voices, regardless of whether they were masculine or feminine. this finding is also consistent with prior research in a similar military context that used sexually dimorphic faces as stimulus materials (korenman et al., 2019). inconsistent with hypothesis 2, we detected a main effect of gender of voice with participants rating feminine voices as having higher leadership potential than masculine voices. this finding is contrary to previous literature that found masculine voices to be rated highest in terms of leadership and hierarchical dominance (anderson & klofstad, 2012; cheng & tracy, 2014; o’connor & barclay, 2017; puts et al., 2007; tsantani et al., 2016). most important, and in partial support of hypothesis 3, these two main effects were qualified by a significant interaction that involved sex of voice and gender of voice, where participants gave women with masculine voices lower ratings than all other groups. in short, participants appeared to reject the leadership potential of women with masculine voices. in this context, the masculinity of her voice did not equate to perceptions that she would be well suited for military leadership. preference for gender role congruity participants in the current study displayed a distinct preference for gender congruity in female voices, with feminine-female voices rated much more favorably than masculine-female voices. this disparity and lower ratings for masculine-female voices likely pulled the overall average masculine voice rating below the average feminine voice rating. we suggest this might be driven both by role congruity and the masculine environment of the military academy. judgments of one’s ability based on physical traits, such as voice pitch, may be partially influenced by biased beliefs regarding gender roles, with the intersection between voice pitch and role congruency reflected in masculine male voices and feminine female voices. role congruity theory suggests that characteristics associated with leadership are aligned more closely with men, leading to more disapproval of women in leadership positions (eagly, 2007; eagly & karau, 2002). gender stereotyping and perceived leadership ability appear to be tied to gender role congruity and the expectation that behavior aligns with societal expectations for gender. eagly and karau (2002) describe biases regarding female leaders wherein the perceived incompatibility between the female gender role and leadership roles leads to two forms of prejudice: perceiving women less favorably than men as potential occupants of leadership roles and evaluating behavior that fulfills the prescriptions of a leader role less favorably when it is enacted by a woman. ultimately this may make it more difficult for women to obtain and succeed in leadership roles. evidence validates that these consequences occur, particularly in situations that intensify perceptions of incongruity between the female gender role and leadership roles (eagly et al., 2002). within both military and civilian samples, matthews et al. (2009) and looney et al. (2004) found negative attitudes toward women in the military and lower approval ratings for women in military leadership roles. despite considerable progress in the advancement of women in the military and the opening of combat arms roles to women, women likely still face gender bias when serving as or striving to become military leaders; recent studies examining role congruity and other factors affecting perceptions of women’s leadership ability in military samples support this notion (e.g., balraj, 2019; korenman et al., 2019). this may be especially true for women whose physical characteristics, such as voice pitch, appear less feminine. challenges in evaluating leadership potential people who favor role congruency also may find it difficult to evaluate leader potential when considering individuals with androgynous traits or who appear to violate traditional gender roles. they may assume that the masculine or feminine qualities of voice pitch correspond to the overall masculinity or femininity of the individual (kark et al., 2012). even military uniform standards blur the line between masculine and feminine appearances. cadets of both sexes wear the same uniform (with minor adjustments), take the same classes, participate in the same athletic activities, and undergo the same rigorous summer training together. moreover, androgynous individuals are characterized by both masculine and feminine traits. androgynous men are equally as masculine as masculine men, but they are also higher in feminine traits, and androgynous women are equally as feminine as feminine women, but they are higher in masculine traits. androgyny and leadership theories predict that the most effective leader is an individual who possesses high levels of both instrumentality and expressiveness (korabik, 1990). bem (1974) contends that androgynous people will be more effective than sex-typed individuals because of their broader repertoire of expression of behaviors and greater flexibility. previous research supports that women and men behaving in traditional social roles as well as taking on expected leadership styles are perceived more favorably (bartol & butterfield, 1976; petty & miles, 1976). perhaps as women integrate into any predominantly male culture, maintaining the social expectation of femininity and having an accompanying feminine voice pitch leads to more positive perceptions of leadership (kark et al., 2012). additionally, military roles have evolved in recent decades to include both peacekeeping and warfighting, which suggests that women may be viewed as better suited for leadership in the more gender-congruent peacekeeper role (ferguson et al., 2019). this notion is supported by research findings that masculine features are preferred for leaders when participants have been primed with a need for conflict resolution from their leader versus the preference for feminine features for a leader when participants are primed with the need for leader cooperativeness (little et al., 2012). in other words, masculine men may be perceived as most ideal for warfighting, while feminine women may be viewed as most suitable for cooperative tasks and peacekeeping, also reflecting role congruency. 129 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 limitations and future directions there are several limitations to the study, which also indicate possible directions for future research. to begin, the recorded voice samples reflected primarily communal messages. however, authentic leader communications consist of a mixture of positive and negative messages. the possibility that participants would respond differently to voice samples that were more agentic or that included more critical or disciplinary content was not examined in the current study, although it could be the focus of future research. additionally, participants’ attitudes and beliefs also may have affected how they rated leadership potential. specifically, ambivalent sexist beliefs (glick & fiske, 1996) may account for some of the variability observed in participants’ ratings because high levels of hostile antipathy toward women who are perceived to be pushing themselves where they do not belong (i.e., in the military) may be associated with rejection of their leadership potential. a study is underway to evaluate the role of hostile and benevolent sexism in perceptions of military leadership potential for men and women with both masculine and feminine physical characteristics. additionally, a comparison of civilian participants’ ratings of military leadership potential for men and women with masculine and feminine voices would help clarify whether the pattern of results observed in the current study would also be detected in a non-military sample. finally, these findings may generalize more to how people view the leadership potential of women with masculine voices in other male-dominated professions, such as law or medicine, as opposed to domains such as education or office administration. conclusions the current study provides evidence that the masculinity and femininity of male and female voices affect ratings of leadership potential in a military context. although both types of male voices, as well as female voices that were feminine, were rated as similarly high, women with masculine voices were rated as showing the least leadership potential. at least within this context, voice masculinity for women was not associated with high military leadership potential ratings. references anderson, r. c., & klofstad, c. a. 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(2016). low vocal pitch preference drives first impressions irrespective of context in male voices but not in female voices. perception, 45(8), 946–963. https://doi.org/10.1177/0301006616643675 zhang, j., reid, s. a., gasiorek, j., & palomares, n. a. (2016). voice pitch variation and status differentiation in mixed-sex dyads: a test of expectation states theory, role congruity theory, and the biosocial model. communication research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650215626976 131 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 microsoft word allred_what_women_know.final.fixed.6.20.17.docx volume 37, 2017 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 table of contents what women know: perceptions of seven female superintendents ............................................................................................................... 1 polly d. allred, gerri m. maxwell & linda skrla ........................................................................................................................................1 introduction ...............................................................................................................................................................................................1 rationale ....................................................................................................................................................................................................2 problem statement, purpose, and significance of study ..........................................................................................................................3 research questions ...................................................................................................................................................................................3 methods .....................................................................................................................................................................................................3 research design ........................................................................................................................................................................................4 findings and results .................................................................................................................................................................................4 summary and discussion of findings .......................................................................................................................................................7 implications for future research ..............................................................................................................................................................8 recommendations for preparation programs ............................................................................................................................................9 conclusion .................................................................................................................................................................................................9 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 1 advancing women in leadership vol. 37, pp. 1-11, 2017 available online at http://www.awlj.org issn 1093-7099 full length research paper what women know: perceptions of seven female superintendents polly d. allred, gerri m. maxwell & linda skrla polly d. allred: texas a&m university-kingsville, email: polly.allred@tamuk.edu gerri m. maxwell: texas a&m university-kingsville, email: kugmm001@tamuk.edu linda skrla: university of the pacific, email: lskrla@pacific.edu accepted january 27, 2017 an anomalous concentration of female superintendents in mostly rural south texas prompted this inquiry. south texas faces critical shortages in personnel due to impending retirement and turnover of existing school administrators and superintendents (wesson & marshall, 2012). it is difficult to recruit and retain the best talent necessary to solve tough school improvement challenges—high dropout rates, high poverty, low student achievement, and complex multi-cultural issues—in high needs, hispanic majority, primarily rural school districts (trevino jr., braley, brown, & slate, 2008; wesson & marshall, 2012). krüger (2008) stated women are stronger educational leaders than men. females seek and obtain leadership credentials for the express purpose of impacting education for students (young & mcleod, 2001). schools of all sizes and levels with female administrators achieved higher student success than schools with male administrators, according to a 7000 campus texas study, in the 2006-2007 academic year (roser, brown, & kelsey, 2009). in every ethnic group, women earn more doctoral degrees in education than men; women earn bachelors and masters degrees in education in proportion to their representation in the field; and women have more years of teaching experience than men (shakeshaft, brown, irby, grogan, & ballenger, 2007). women also outnumber men in education administration preparation programs (petrie & lindauer, 2001). yet women are not ascending to the superintendency in proportion to their representation in the education profession (shakeshaft et al., 2007). this naturalistic study of seven female superintendents in south texas, including leaders in large and small rural districts, illuminated perceptions and experiences of female school leadership through portraiture and lent insight into common themes of aspiration and motivation. keywords: female, superintendent, aspiration, rural, leadership introduction the skillsets, values, temperament, characteristics, and appearance desired in an american superintendent are determined by expectations ingrained in the fabric of the collective community consciousness relative to historical precedents and cultural influence (blount, 1999). gender and the superintendency are societal constructions, and society has constructed the superintendency as masculine, which has been reinforced by those who research, teach, and publish about the superintendency (skrla, 2000). the term gender connotes the socially mediated (enacted, established, produced, and constructed) differences between individuals rather than biological differences between persons, and just as gender is an agreed-upon social construction, “the package of norms associated with the superintendency in u.s. public schools is constructed based on the assumption males will inhabit this role,” (skrla, 2000, p. 296). grogan (2003) noted the gendered perspective of the extant body of research literature: i have thus found it to be very useful to examine the research on educational administration and on the superintendency, in particular, from the point of view that it represents necessarily gendered perspectives: the majority of both practitioners and researchers in the field have been men. this is not to judge such perspectives as good or bad, right or wrong. it is to acknowledge that they are, for the most part, male ones (p. 17). this qualitative study sought to collect, analyze, and contribute to the body of research, the perspectives of a set of seven south texas female superintendents. south texas experiences an urgent teacher shortage and a large number of principals and superintendents nearing retirement (wesson & marshall, 2012). the talent pool of qualified applicants available in texas, for advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 2 principal and mid-management positions, is diminished by the critical shortage of teachers, and because superintendents arise from the ranks of mid-managers, this shortage reduces the number of experienced, technically superior superintendent candidates (sharp, malone, walter, & supley, 2004; wesson & marshall, 2012). according to statistics published by the texas education agency (tea) in october 2011, approximately 30% of south texas regions 1, 2, and 3 superintendents were female—higher than the national percentage of women superintendents (24.1%) in 2010 and the state average percentage of female superintendents (12.7%) in 2001 (kowalski, mccord, petersen &young, 2011;tea, 2012). thus the ratio of female superintendents in south texas to female superintendents in texas is approximately 2.5: 1, and the ratio of female superintendents in south texas to female superintendents in the u.s. is approximately 1.25: 1. therefore, south texas is an anomalous area rich in potential female superintendent participants for naturalistic research. rationale difficult challenges faced by school systems require equitable input and effort from the entire school organization talent pool (glass, björk, & brunner, 2000). education policies and leadership preparation programs will be better able to support effective schools led by mixed gender administrative teams when they have developed deep insights into characteristics of feminine school leadership (krüger, 2008). administrator preparation programs are filled with females, and there is a national shortage of qualified administrators, yet women don’t fill these posts, resulting in a waste of female preparation and talent (adams & hambright, 2004). women do not yet serve in educational administration positions in proportion to their representation in the field of education or in proportion to currently trained and certified administrators (shakeshaft, brown, irby, grogan & ballenger, 2007). according to a decennial study by the american association of school administrators (aasa), approximately 1.3% of superintendents in the u.s. in 1970 were female and all served in districts with fewer than 10,000 students (wesson & marshall, 2012). a 10-year study by the aasa in 2000 showed the number of female superintendents in the u.s. had risen to 13.2% (glass et al., 2000; wesson & marshall, 2012). the aasa’s most recent large-scale survey reported that close to one in four superintendents were female (kowalski et al., 2011). no state or national government agency collects data correlating sex and gender and the superintendency (sanchez & thornton, 2010). despite the apparent gains in female representation in the superintendency, disparity still exists: the general population is half female, half of the student population is female, 72% of the nation’s professional educators are female, yet 75.6% of the superintendents are men (lemasters & roach, 2012). in texas, the percentage of female superintendents vacillates below the national percentage—13.5% in 2003, and 16% in 2009 (sampson & davenport, 2010). most of the research on women in educational leadership focuses on females as mid-managers rather than superintendents; moreover, most of the published research on women in the superintendency has been contributed by a few female scholars who dominate the field of study, and the majority of research on sex, gender and educational leadership remains unpublished and unread in dissertations (lemasters & roach, 2012). the number of published studies on women and the superintendency or women and educational leadership since 2000 is far fewer than in the previous decade, indicating a recent decrease in emphasis and interest in research in the field (lemasters & roach, 2012). yet in order to address the recruiting, retention, and mentoring of quality administrators and superintendents in texas, there is a great need for studies to illuminate the experiential characteristics of educators who successfully achieve top jobs in educational leadership (wesson & marshall, 2012). the perpetuation of male dominance in the profession of educational leadership can be better understood by scrutinizing the underlying masculine normalizations which have traditionally structured discourse, practice, and research on women in educational leadership (skrla 2003). leadership theory predicated upon studies of males isn’t entirely pertinent for females nor is it helpful for males or females in education leadership settings who are endeavoring to understand the disproportionate number of females in the education profession (shakeshaft et al., 2007). lemasters and roach (2012) explained that, for many decades, leadership theories have been developed by men from the experiences of men, and have been described or taught by men. women have different experiences of leadership, so it is unreasonable to assume a singular (male) perspective of leadership experience, interpretation, and theory can fully inform the educational leadership profession (lemasters & roach, 2012). sometimes concepts of gender equity in educational leadership are obscured in the limited research literature available. in a 2006 meta-analysis of six previously conducted naturalistic studies, researchers rusch and marshall stated women continue to dominate elementary principalships. this is misleading because fewer than 60% of the u.s. elementary principals are women, yet over 70% of all k-12 educators are female (kowalski et al., 2011). another example, pointed out by skrla (2000), was thomas e. glass’ report to the aasa in 1992 that only 14% of u.s. superintendents believed discrimination adversely affected a significant number of female superintendents, though glass did not report that his respondents were overwhelmingly (93%) male (glass, 1992; skrla, 2000). in a final confusing example from a tri-state study of female superintendents, sharp et al. (2004) stated, “the truth of the matter is that women head larger districts more than men, 11% to 8%” and, “women lead men in heading small rural districts…28% to 14%” (p. 26). a reader might mistakenly believe more women than men serve in urban and rural superintendencies (glass, 1992; glass et al., 2000; kowalski et al., 2011). advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 3 problem statement, purpose, and significance of study many female educators are reluctant to acknowledge or discuss gender imbalances in relation to their jobs, even when presented with clear evidence of gender discrimination (moreau, osgood & halsall, 2007). there is a need for woman-focused research design and new knowledge about how best to research and educate female educational leaders because there is a shortage of qualified educational leaders, most educators are female, and females express constraint in speaking about matters of inequity (skrla, 2000). this study did not weigh in on the causes of gender imbalances in educational leadership. the purpose of this inquiry was to reveal aspirations, motivations, needs, and constraints of female south texas school district superintendents, to better understand how women perceive and experience the social constructions of gender and the superintendency as practicing educational leaders (skrla, 2000). this study was chosen to illuminate the perceptions of female educational leaders who have ascended to the top school leadership role, because there is a need for gendered perspective on the superintendency, and a need to better understand the superintendency from the perspectives of women (skrla, 2000, 2003). the theme of how and when female educators experience and evidence aspiration to leadership was an intended purpose of this study. female educational leaders’ perceptions of rural superintendency and hispanic school leadership, though not intended initial targets, clearly emerged as themes from this flexible, naturalistic study, forming results and recommendations. research questions the following research questions served to guide this inquiry, which employed feminist research techniques of semi-structured and unstructured interviews, correspondence, and conversation analysis (bernard, 2006; robson, 2002). 1. what are the perceptions of south texas female superintendents regarding their aspirations, motivations, challenges, and successes in their roles as superintendents? 2. what were the perceived motivations and supporting factors causing the female participant to seek and obtain the superintendent credential? 3. what does the participant perceive caused her to aspire to be a superintendent, and at what point in her career did she experience that aspiration? 4. what, in the participant’s perception, enables her to sustain the post of superintendent? methods …there is considerable virtue for real world research in taking on board feminist proposals—particularly in acknowledging the emotional aspects of doing real world research, and the value of emphasizing commitment as against detachment. robson, 2002, p. 370 this research was of a rich, flexible (qualitative), naturalistic design, based on: case study analyses (with a feminist approach) of the perceived experiences, motivations, and needs of each individual subject; the emergent themes distinguishing and unifying the subjects as a group; and the researcher-asinstrument of data collection (grogan, 2003; robson, 2002). naturalistic study seeks to construct shared meaning and knowledge from divergent realities collected from multiple, personal, contextual, real-world perspectives, of the subjects and the observing researcher (erlandson, harris, skipper, & allen, 1993; lincoln & guba, 1985; robson, 2002). this naturalistic research was progenerative, giving life and shape to its design as data was collected and the study emerged. naturalistic study was thus specifically appropriate to investigate the questions being posed to a marginalized population (females) and questions not studied adequately in the research heretofore. “the traditional literature on the superintendency might provide only a partial understanding of what it is all about” (grogan, 2003, p.18). researcher as instrument the researcher knowingly acted as an adaptable human instrument, critically reflecting as “inquirer and respondent” (lincoln & guba, 1985, p. 187, 191). the researcher’s constructed learning in the naturalistic process of the study, informed subsequent inquiry and allowed the researcher to adapt her efforts. the researcher’s feministic approach to the study, ethic of care for the participants and their perspectives, and the need to provide full transferability of the data to readers of the study led the researcher-as-instrument to a methodology of collecting and reporting the data related to portraiture, used in a similar study of latina superintendents (gonzales, 2007; grogan, 2003). the portraiture method advocates conveyance of richness and texture of the data, without distortion of the participant’s meaning to facilitate a “representation of social reality” (lawrence-lightfoot & davis, 1997). the portraits of the participants, individually and as a set, were presented as narrative case-study descriptions and employed a large amount of the interview response data from each participant to allow a thick, rich, undistorted representation of school superintendency as perceived by the female participants. participant selection a purposive sample (erlandson et al., 1993) was initially identified for potential participation in the study and included current and former colleagues of the researcher who were serving in south texas school districts as superintendents. snowball sampling was in turn utilized to identify more potential participants (gall, gall, & borg, 2003). nineteen area superintendents were invited in person or via email, online social networks, or text; nine expressed interest in the study and seven were able to schedule interviews. data collection and analysis the study employed the use of semi-structured open-ended interview questions (interviews were 1-2 hours long) and advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 4 informal preand post-interview dialogue between the investigator and the research participants for triangulation and member checks (bernard, 2006; erlandson et al., 1993). research data was generated in qualitative and naturalistic form, allowing respondents to engage in conversation about their goals and aspirations prior to obtaining superintendent certification, compared to their present career intentions (robson, 2002). confidentiality was guaranteed through anonymous transcription and coding of interviews, the use of pseudonyms, and signed informed consent statements per the researcher’s university guidelines for human subject study. interview data was painstakingly transcribed, verbatim, soon after meeting with each participant. the data was scrutinized: statements were discretized and pre-coded to determine emergent themes relevant to the guiding research questions. the data was compiled using a critical charting method informed by study of colin robson’s real world research and his suggestions for development of coding schemes in naturalistic observational methods research (robson, 2002). research design case studies. in this research, a case study refers to the detailed account of one female subject, exploring contextual factors related to the superintendency, perceptions, attitudes, deterrents, motivations, and possible causes, determinants, experiences, and contributors (robson, 2003). precisely because case study allows for dense reporting of both methodology and data, lincoln and guba (1985) have asserted it is the research design most appropriate for naturalistic study (1985). it is important to note that the purpose of conducting a set of case studies was to provide a wealth of feminine perspective on the superintendency, not to attempt analytic generalizability of conclusions, for as robson (2003) warned, “case studies and their outcomes are likely to be multifaceted and difficult to capture adequately within a simple theory” (p. 183). this study was too small to support generalizable claims but may suggest themes for further research. feminist approach. grogan (2003) stated, “feminist scholarship advocates action that results in a more equitable distribution of resources and opportunities for those who have been marginalized” and recommended the researcher harbor an “ethic of care” and a constant “focus on equity” (p. 18). these feminist scholarly principles were employed in discourse with the participants and in communication about the research. trustworthiness and credibility validity. trustworthiness and credibility can be thought of as two types of validity—two ways the research can be accurate, true, or correct. the trustworthiness of a research inquiry refers to a combination of truth-value, potential application, neutrality of findings, and external judgments made about the consistency of its procedures (lincoln & guba, 1985). the credibility of a study refers to the measure of agreement on the findings of an inquiry, by the subjects of the study, within the context of the study (lincoln & guba, 1985). trustworthiness can be thought of as an external judgment of an inquiry, whereas, credibility is an internal judgment of a study. trustworthiness and credibility in naturalistic inquiry, which may enable the researcher to substantiate to observer’s claims made by the study, were ensured primarily by triangulation of data, member-checks, and purposive sampling techniques (erlandson et al., 1993). triangulation efforts included asking all participants the same set of questions to provide a framework for developing common themes among the responses. the researcher collaborated with the respondents to clarify interview responses and build background knowledge (member checks) via post-interview conversations in person, in telephone conversations, and through emails, and each participant previewed her own case-study portrait as well as portions of the transcribed and themed data from her interview (erlandson et al., 1993). efforts to ensure trustworthiness and credibility of the research involved peer debriefing and support from the researcher’s colleagues, including negative case-analysis, to ensure personal knowledge, or lack thereof, did not misdirect emerging themes in the data (erlandson, et al., 1993). the researcher did not cherry-pick data or participants. all respondents who could participate were included in the study. transferability. in traditional research design, applicability of the findings is judged based upon the generalizability of the result to another situation, population, or time. in a naturalistic study, transferability refers to a desired level of similarity between the sending and the receiving contexts (erlandson et al., 1993). exhaustive and careful verbatim transcribing of interviews, followed by member-checks of the summarized participant descriptions by the superintendents in the study, was used to ensure full transferability of the data. the researcher took these measures to ensure the readers of this study will receive exactly what the participants of the study intended to convey. findings and results the researcher collected perceptive data from the seven practicing superintendents that agreed to participate in the study. the district chiefs ranged in experience from a first year, emergency certified superintendent, to a woman who has served as a superintendent in south texas school districts for almost 30 years. the women participating had served as superintendents in south texas for over 75 years combined, with over 30 years experience in rural districts. five of the 7 participants were leading rural districts (see table 1, p. 6). the researcher focused on the respondents’ perceptions, to allow participating south texas female superintendents’ voices to inform the field about their aspirations, motivations, challenges, and successes in their roles as superintendents, as they recalled and knew them. the researcher included ethnic descriptors and information about marital and family status only when provided by the participants in response to the guiding questions of the interview, but did not apply a cross-case comparative survey of demographic, cultural, or ethnic descriptors. the terms advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 5 ‘hispanic’, ‘latina’, and ‘anglo’ were used by the participants to describe themselves. table 1 rural district experience among the superintendent participants participant name district size rural? years of rural superintendent experience gloria 5,400 yes 9 sarah 3,800 no 2 diana 1,900 no 3 sonia 3,500 yes 1 laura 1,000 yes 4 erika 320 yes 4 christina 315 yes 9 totals: 5 out of 7 led rural school districts 32 years rural leadership the purpose of this study was to allow women the opportunity to define female superintendency (grogan, 2003; skrla, 2003). specific examples of experiences and perceptions—anecdotes, quotes and narrative summaries—were included in case-study portraits of the participants to provide excellent transferability of the data (erlandson et al., 1993). overview of the participants this study included interviews with seven female superintendents serving in south texas districts ranging in size from approximately 315 to 5,400 students. the participants of the study had between less than one year and close to 30 years individual superintendent experience. a summary review of each of the participant descriptions, derived from interview data revealed by participants, is presented in table 2, (see p. 7). aggregate findings detailed individual responses to guiding questions of the study were used to present aggregate themes as they emerged from transcribed interview data to answer the study’s research questions for the participants as a set of case studies. the feministic approach of the methodology of the study (the “ethic of care” employed by the researcher in handling the participants and their data) was a qualitative research effort to ensure transferability of the participants’ intended messages to readers of the study (grogan, 2003, p. 25). it was, therefore, crucial to include the participants’ words in the report. findings addressed the guiding questions of this inquiry in the aggregate, and also allowed each participant the opportunity to “define the superintendency” in her voice (grogan, 2003, p. 17). seeking and obtaining the superintendent credential. gloria began her career with the intention to become a superintendent. laura made her own decision to pursue the credential during her service as special education director. five of 7 participants, sonia, sarah, diana, erika, and christina, decided to certify for the superintendency only after a mentoring supervisor or professor suggested it to them. sarah was encouraged to pursue the superintendency by a professor, and did not consider it until he noted her capacity and aptitude. i didn't really ever think i would be a superintendent. that was never the plan. and it kind of comes back to, how many women superintendents did i know? aspiring to become a superintendent. only 4 of 7 study participants admitted they aspired to become superintendents, even though all participants clearly prepared for the role. gloria always intended to become a superintendent. three other participants developed the aspiration to the superintendency. laura’s aspiration developed during her service as special education director for a large co-op, where she saw ineffective instructional leadership she thought she could remedy. christina’s aspiration developed in response to frustration with an ineffective interim superintendent in her district. diana’s aspiration developed when she experienced the leadership and mentorship of first female superintendent she had ever known. growing up as a kid it was always males, specifically white males. so i never thought that it was even an option for me. so it wasn't until i saw the first female superintendent that i'm like, wow, there are some females out there. and you know, she was white, but she was female, and so i could identify with her. sarah, sonia, and erika, stated they never wanted to be superintendents, despite seeking the credential and preparing for the role. three of 7 participants said they had searched for superintendent jobs, completing application and search processes. four of 7 participants had only considered jobs they were recruited for or were pushed to apply for by a spouse or mentor. aspirations: professional and personal goals now. all participants planned to finish their current contracts and expressed a desire to finish work they had begun in their districts. sarah, erika, and gloria were already retired from education, and sarah had told her board to begin looking for her successor. some common professional goals were expressed: the three retired-rehired superintendents all mentioned consulting as a possibility in the future; three of the participants stated they planned to teach in their content area at the university level; and three of the superintendents expressed a desire to experience the challenge of leadership in a larger district before they retire. most had difficulty distinguishing between personal and professional needs and goals. nevertheless, a few common themes emerged in the personal goals stated by the superintendent participants. three mentioned that building, renovating, or moving back into a home was a personal goal at this point in their life. two mentioned entrepreneurial plans unrelated to education. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 6 table 2 summary overview of the participants name participant summary description sarah • didn’t know she wanted to be a superintendent until she was asked to do it. • never applied for any superintendent position. • over 29 years as superintendent, hired five times in three districts. • passed multiple bond elections and trained other superintendents. • wife, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. • had achieved balance in her personal/professional life; said they are the same. erika • denied ever wanting to be a superintendent. • had only applied when recruited or strongly urged by her husband. • was a fourth year superintendent, retired and rehired by a rural district. • had interim superintendent experience at a large urban district. • expressed great difficulty balancing her personal/professional life, and stated she couldn’t sleep. sonia • didn’t know she wanted to be a superintendent until asked by her district. • did not apply for the superintendent job until solicited by her local board. • was serving her first year as superintendent in rural district, emergency certified. • superintendency role improved her work-life balance. • relied on great family support. • wife and mother of a two-year old. laura • aspiration emerged in response to dissatisfaction with inadequate leadership. • began applying after being passed over for a less qualified junior male. • fourth year superintendent of a rural district, facing a bond election. • expressed desire to lead a larger district, be a professor, and publish curriculum. • expressed struggles with work-life balance. • wife, mother of four and grandmother. diana • did not know she aspired to superintendency until she met a female superintendent. • did not directly apply for her first superintendent job, which she took at age 32. • served as a superintendent for over 15 years in three districts. • worked to maintain family/work balance. • expressed desire to lead a larger district and participate in state-level policy-making. • wife and mother of three young boys. christina • did not know she wanted to be a superintendent until her board asked her to do it. • nine consecutive years as superintendent of a pk-8 district. • never applied for a leadership position she wasn’t recruited for. • worked to maintain family/work balance. • expressed desire to lead a district that has a high school, or build a high school. • wife and mother of three young boys. gloria • aspired to be a superintendent from a young age (high school). • had nine years of combined superintendent experience in two districts. • was retired from public school service and rehired serving in a large rural district. • described herself as a workaholic. • expressed struggles with personal politics in superintendency. • wife, single mother of four for 15 years, and grandmother of sixteen. motivations. the set of superintendents in this study shared the common motivations summarized in table 3 (p. 8), presented in descending order of frequency of response. these factors contributed to decisions to certify for the superintendent credential, initial aspirations to become superintendents, and the ability to sustain the post of superintendent. successes and sustaining the post of superintendent. the three retired-rehired study participants all made references to the strength they had drawn from their retirement accomplishment. they were not completely dependent on their income from the hiring district, and the district had known this when they were interviewed and during their tenure. they felt free and advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 7 compelled to act in the best interest of kids and the district and were not beholden to special interests or the school board’s whims. gloria explained her position to the board that hired her: you have a lot of hard decisions to make, and we are all going to take a beating. if you don't want that to happen, don't hire me, because that's what i need to do! these superintendents felt comfortable that they could walk away with their heads held high in clear conscience if their school boards decided they no longer supported their work. table 3 motivations of female superintendents in the study female superintendents are motivated by: out of 7 personal drive for excellence 7 desire to make a difference 7 acknowledgements of achievement/progress 7 obligation to positively represent latina leaders 3 out of 4 desire to lead 6 perceived obligation to serve 5 passion for education/love for kids 5 leadership suggestions by others 5 opportunities that arise 4 examples of female leaders 4 desire for challenge 4 "i can do this", or "i can do this better" 4 every participant in the study was a wife and a mother, three were grandmothers, and one was a great-grandmother. five mentioned they are proud of their own children. four reported pride or satisfaction in seeing children (in their districts or anywhere) succeed as a result of opportunities they had been instrumental in providing. some described specific programs or improvements and detailed the hard work of participating staff and communities as a contributing factor in student success. three stated that their life choices in general, or the professional path they had chosen, was a source of pride and/or satisfaction. the seven participants in this study were all married and had been married the entire time they had served as superintendents. five cited their husbands as significant sustaining influences, and three said their husbands were the greatest sustaining factor in their ability to do their job. four described their teams— specifically their central office administrators and campus principals—as powerfully sustaining. three of the seven cited their own internal drive or personal passion as one of the biggest forces enabling them to sustain the difficult job of superintendent. a couple of the participants stated they had to fight their personal drive in order to maintain balance in their lives, and two stated that their deep faith sustains them in the role of superintendent. challenges: rural superintendency and work-fit balancing act. five of 7 participants were leading rural school districts and described challenges related to operating the school organization without personnel dedicated to help expertly manage distinct system components. sarah and diana were not leading rural districts, but had in the past. gloria, who led the largest district in this study, stated her 5-year experience in a smaller rural district had actually prepared her to lead a much larger district. sarah and diana expressed similar perceptions regarding the challenges of previous rural superintendency posts and the preparation they gained there for larger school district leadership. erika described challenges faced by rural superintendents: when you are a rural superintendent, you're everything. you are the chief financial officer, you are curriculum and instruction, you are human resources, you are special education, you are the bus driver. and when you go into a 5a or a 6a district, you surround yourself with the best people you can. you can depend on them. but here? you run up your legal bills. because you don't know everything. when you are a rural district, there are very unique issues. the most common challenge for the superintendent participants was balancing their lives. even though they all stated they had excellent support from their husbands and families, most mentioned an effort to balance the job and family. christina described: i find myself feeling torn between needing to do the job, and being mom. so i struggle with that occasionally. working to have that balance is very important. sarah stated that balance is very important, and she purposefully maintains it even though it’s a challenge. sonia asserted that the superintendency has strengthened her family and support system. laura explained how hard it is to maintain balance: of course you know i'm a workhorse. i enjoy the work. but i do let it kind of take over, if i don't kind of put the reins on. i'm not real good at that at all. erika described work-fit challenges related to pursuing the superintendent credential, earning degrees, and sustaining the post of superintendent: the superintendency, the ph.d., the whole thing was…your life, there's no balance in your life. you get so driven that you forget the rest of you. summary and discussion of findings if we accept gender as a useful category of analysis to help us understand the superintendency...we need to draw on the experiences of women in the position. we need to take particular notice of how women define the superintendency. grogan, 2003, p. 17 there is a need for a gendered perspective on the superintendency, and a need to understand the superintendency advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 8 from the perspectives of women who are successfully accomplishing it (skrla, 2003). according to grogan (2003), “candidate pools for the superintendency are not perceived to be as deep as they once were” (p. 27). the reported perspectives of female superintendents in this study will inform aspiring female leaders, educational leadership programs, and researchers in the field of educational leadership and gender. by examining the perceptions and experiences of women serving as superintendents perhaps, as grogan (2003) states, “…a reconception of the superintendency might rekindle educators’ interest and enthusiasm for this pivotal position” (p. 27.) a famous and often-quoted large-scale study and decennial report by thomas e. glass to the aasa posited seven reasons why american women weren’t ascending to the superintendency in proportion to their male counterparts in the field of education (glass, 2000). his report attempted to explain the underrepresentation of women in the american superintendency with a list of seven ‘reasons’ for the motivations and aspirations of female professional educators. aspirations: preparing for and becoming a superintendent glass stated that many women take breaks from their careers to bear and raise children; by the time they have the credentials and experience to transition into mid-management or central office positions, they are often nearing retirement and may be reluctant to embark on a new and uncertain career path towards the superintendency (2000). the participants of this study had all raised children at different stages of their careers. some had waited to prepare for superintendency until their children were older, and some had nurtured children and careers concurrently. retirement or near-retirement had not dissuaded these women in their leadership aspirations. the three retired-rehired participants cited their retirement status as a power source in school board relations. a nationwide study of female superintendents in 2005 showed women entering the superintendency at earlier ages than previously reported; most of the women in the study had secured a superintendent position by 50 years of age, and 36% had become superintendents by age 45 (shakeshaft et al., 2007). the findings of this study did concur loosely with these results, with 3 of 7 participants ascending to the superintendency before age 47. the women in this study had many years of experience in education prior to accepting superintendent positions, as research shows for women in general (shakeshaft et al., 2007). glass’ seven reasons pertaining to aspiration (for why women weren’t superintendents) included that he didn’t think women were personally interested in the superintendency and women weren’t obtaining the superintendent credential (glass, 2000). the findings of this study showed the participants clearly indicated their interest in the role of superintendent through their active preparation for the role. preparation was evidence of aspiration, according to the findings of this study. these women had made personal and professional choices and sacrifices to prepare to be superintendents. glass was incorrect. women are personally interested in the role of superintendent—interested enough to prepare for it. what motivates female educational leaders? the research literature does support glass’ assertion that women enter the field of education and want to lead in education for different reasons than men (glass, 2000). female administrators serving in poverty-stricken communities are motivated more by intrinsic rewards and personal relationships than salary, holidays, or title, and instructional leadership matters more to women than salary (krüger, 2008; lawson, 2008). however research literature on perceptions and motivations of female educational leaders is sparse, and most has focused on barriers, career path, and the attainment of leadership roles (lemasters & roach, 2012). this study provided insight into the motivations of female educational leaders by revealing the perceived motivations of the set of seven participating superintendents. the aggregate findings of this study indicated these female superintendents are motivated by: a deep personal drive for excellence; a desire to make a difference for students, teachers and community; acknowledgements of district achievements or progress; an obligation to positively represent female and/or latina leaders; an obligation to serve others; a passion for education, love for kids, and desire for their success; leadership suggestions by others; opportunities; examples of other female leaders; desire for challenges; and a feeling that “i can do this,” or “i can do this better.” challenges faced by female superintendents a profound unifying emergent theme among the seven cases was rural school leadership. lemasters and roach stated that 60% of female superintendents lead rural school districts of under 3,000 students, with small support staffs (2012). a survey of all female texas superintendents revealed that 68.8% served in rural districts with fewer than 1,500 students (sampson & davenport, 2010). rural school leadership is a gendered issue because women serve in rural districts in higher proportions relative to their representation in the superintendency. one tristate study reported 28% of female superintendents served in rural districts whereas 14% of male superintendents served in rural districts (sharp et al., 2004). five of 7 participants were serving as superintendents in rural texas school districts, and two were leading suburban districts. this study used a definition of rural school district, provided by the texas administrative code (tac), as a texas public school district having a majority of its schools located in a county with population fewer than 50,000 (texas legislative council, 2014). this study contributed the important perspectives of seven female superintendents who have over 30 years of combined rural school district leadership experience (see table 1, p. 6). implications for future research according to shakeshaft et al. (2007), women accounted for less than 10% of the scholarly inquiries in educational administration advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 9 between 1995 and 2005. thus, females in educational leadership are still underrepresented in research, underscoring the continued and unabated need for woman-focused research designs and knowledge about how to best research female educational leaders’ experiences (skrla, 2000). an important emergent contextualizing characteristic in this study was hispanic female school leadership. this study contributed the perspectives of four successful female superintendents serving south texas school districts who identified themselves as hispanic, three of whom were leading rural texas school districts. most female educational administrators in south texas are hispanic and they preside over hispanic serving schools and systems (quilantàn & manchacaochoa, 2004; trevino jr., braley, brown, & slate, 2008). there is sparse research literature to inform the field of educational leadership on hispanic female superintendents (quilantàn & menchaca-ochoa, 2004). there is little research base in the area of minority female contributions to educational leadership, and the few studies on minority female educational leaders focus on african american women (santiago, 2008). recommendations for preparation programs the educational systems and organizations in texas and the nation must foster further study and improve data collection and dissemination on sex and gender issues in the field of educational leadership and in education administration preparation programs, which must address women’s experiences, reflections upon and responses to those experiences, career aspirations, and need for mentorship (sanchez & thornton, 2010). educational leadership preparation programs in south texas must give greater attention to the placement of talented female educational leaders within its districts (young & mcleod, 2001). leading educational leadership and gender researchers have asserted that female educational administration candidates have specific needs and challenges, which must be addressed programmatically (shakeshaft et al., 2007). stephens (2009) stated that without greater knowledge of the behaviors and characteristics of successful female school district superintendents, leadership preparation programs cannot make the adjustments necessary to provide focused instruction to assist new female superintendents. traditional leadership theory, which has excluded women’s experiences and voices, has resulted in sexist curricular material in educational leadership preparation programs (shakeshaft et al., 2007). the predicted impending retirement of currently serving educational leaders and the critical shortage of educators to fill those posts requires preparation programs to provide gendered solutions by addressing needs and concerns raised by the women inhabiting the role of superintendent in the region (young, 2003). all of the participants in this study were either leading or have led rural districts in south texas. each participant mentioned rural superintendency as a concern. females are twice as likely to serve as superintendents in rural districts as males (kowalski et al., 2011). most female superintendents (60%) serve in rural districts (lemasters & roach, 2012). thus, leadership preparation programs must address rural school district leadership concerns because females, who make up the majority of educational leadership program participants, are more likely than males to serve in rural districts during their careers. erika said this about her superintendent preparation program: in my particular role as a rural superintendent, it did not prepare me. and i went to...i would love to say...if not the top, the second top, university in the state of texas. rural superintendency should be a prerequisite for any superintendent. conclusion five out of 7 women in this study did not acknowledge their aspiration to certify for superintendency, and 3 out of 7 did not acknowledge their aspiration to be a superintendent, even though all had obtained the credential, and all were superintendents. given that school districts need the most talented, technically prepared professionals to serve as superintendents, the profession must acknowledge the manner in which females— dominating education at a participation rate of 72% and earning advanced degrees proportionally to their numbers in the field— express aspiration to leadership. women express aspiration through preparation, which often follows from the suggestion and mentoring of a colleague, supervisor, or professor. consider a hypothetical example of 20 superintendent jobs chosen from 100 educators. women earn advanced degrees and participate in educational leadership preparation programs in proportion to their dominating numbers in the education profession, and they have more years of experience in the classroom. figure 1 below illustrates: 72% of educators are female, and 28% are male; 24.4% of superintendents are female. thus, the ratio of female superintendents to male superintendents is approximately 1:3. in this example of 20 superintendents, 5 will be female and 15 will be male. female talent and preparation is being wasted (adams & hambright, 2004). figure 1. is the profession hiring the best-prepared educators for the job of superintendent? ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ~72%!female! ~28%!male! 20#superintendents#out#of#100#educators# ! advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 10 south texas leadership preparation program instructors and successful administrators serving in districts will need to actively mentor or sponsor newly certified (especially hispanic) entry-level female administrators in south texas school districts in order to retain them and their expertise and talent (adams & hambright, 2004). this has begun in south texas, which has many rural districts, where 30% of superintendents are female. perhaps a burgeoning culture of successful female leadership (superintendents and principals) in south texas has afforded local school boards a willingness to recruit, groom and hire women for leadership. school boards and the search firms they hire are gatekeepers to the superintendency (shakeshaft et al., 2007). therefore leadership preparation programs and school boards need to be educated on research that indicates hiring female superintendents will increase program quality (krüger, 2008; roser et al., 2009). precisely because women so heavily dominate the field of education, they must contribute their voices and perspectives to bring about better clarity and depth of understanding of the practice of leadership in the education, which will serve to open greater opportunities for women in leadership (lemasters & roach, 2012). the participants of this study, seven female south texas rural superintendents, contributed their voices to this end. references adams, k. l., & hambright, w. g. (2004). encouraged or discouraged: women teacher leaders becoming principals. clearing house, 77(5), 209-212. doi:10.3200/tchs.77.5.209-212 bernard, h. r. (2005). research methods in anthropology: qualitative and quantitative approaches. lanham, md: altamira press. blount, j. m. (1999). manliness and the gendered construction of school administration in the usa. international journal of leadership in education, 2(2), 55-68. doi:10.1080/136031299293101 erlandson, d. a., harris, e. l., skipper, b. l., & allen, s. d. (1993). doing naturalistic inquiry: a guide to methods. newbury park, ca: sage publications. gall, m. d., gall, j. p., & borg, w. r. (2003). educational research: an introduction (7th ed.). boston, ma: pearson education. glass, t. e., bjork, l., & brunner, c. c. (2000). the study of the american school superintendency, 2000: a look at the superintendent of education in the new millennium. arlington, va: american association of school administrators. glass, t. e. (1992). the 1992 study of the american school superintendency: america's education leaders in a time of reform. arlington, va: american association of school administrators. glass, t. e. (2000). where are all the women superintendents? the school administrator, 57(6), 28-32. retrieved from http://www.aasa.org/schooladministratorarticle.aspx?id=1 4492 gonzales, i. (2007). latinas aspiring to the superintendency: a portraiture study (doctoral dissertation, washington state university, pullman, washington). retrieved from http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/dissertations/spring2007/ i_gonzales_043007.pdf grogan, m. (2003). laying the groundwork for a reconception of the superintendency from feminist postmodern perspectives. in m. young & l. sklra (eds.), reconsidering feminist research in educational leadership (pp. 9-34). new york, ny: state university of new york. kowalski, t. j., mccord, r. s., petersen, g. j., young, i. p., & ellerson, n. m. (2011). the american school superintendent: 2010 decennial study. blue ridge summit, pa: rowman & littlefield education. krüger, m. l. (2008). school leadership, sex and gender: welcome to difference. international journal of leadership in education, 11(2), 155-168. doi:10.1080/13603120701576266 lawrence-lightfoot, s., & davis, j. h. (1997). the art and science of portraiture (1st ed.). san francisco, ca: josseybass. lawson, j. e. (2008). women leaders in high-poverty community schools: work-related stress and family impact. canadian journal of education, 31(1), 55-77. retrieved from http://www.csse-scee.ca/cje/articles/fulltext/cje311/cje31-1-lawson.pdf lemasters, l., & roach, v. (2012, spring). 3-dimensional portrait of the female ceo. international journal of educational leadership preparation, 7(1), 1-12. retrieved from http://www.eric.ed.gov/pdfs/ej971686.pdf lincoln, y. s., & guba, e. g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. newbury park, ca: sage publications, inc. moreau, m. p., osgood, j., & halsall, a. (2007). making sense of the glass ceiling in schools: an exploration of women teachers' discourses. gender and education, 19(2), 237-253. doi:10.1080/09540250601166092 petrie, g., & lindauer, p. (2001). princessipal: the travails of a female administrator breaking through in the rural south--a case study. research for educational reform, 6(1), 51-63. retrieved from http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/6350802/princess ipal-travails-female-administrator-breaking-through-ruralsouth-case-study advancing women in leadership journal-volume 37 11 quilantàn, c. m., & menchaca-ochoa, v. (2004). the superintendency becomes a reality for hispanic women. kappa delta pi record, 40(3), 124-127. doi:10.1080/00228958.2004.10516421 robson, c. (2002). real world research (2nd ed.). oxford, england: blackwell publishing, ltd. roser, v., brown, m. s., & kelsey, c. l. (2009). principal gender as related to campus size, level, and academic rating. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(10), 1-14. retrieved from http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/vol29_2009/valer_ rosser.pdf sampson, p. m., & davenport, m. (2010). the current women superintendents in texas: still in the minority. journal of women in educational leadership, 8(3), 143-158. retrieved from http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1 011&context=jwel sanchez, j. e., & thornton, b. (2010). gender issues in k-12 educational leadership. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(13), 1-15. retrieved from http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/vol30_2010/sanche z_jafeth_awl_vol_30_no._13_final_9_21_10.pdf santiago, m. (2008). a case study in public k-12 education: hispanic female (latinas) school administrators' perceptions of their role and experiences as principals within central florida (doctoral dissertation, ). retrieved from scholarcommons.usf.edu shakeshaft, c., brown, g., irby, b., grogan, m., & ballenger, j. (2007). increasing gender equity in educational leadership. in s. klein, b. richardson, d. grayson, l. fox, c. kramarae, d. pollard & c. dwyer (eds.), handbook for achieving gender equity through education (2nd ed., pp. 103-129). new york, ny: taylor & francis group. sharp, w. l., malone, b. g., walter, j. k., & supley, m. l. (2004). a three-state study of female superintendents. educational research quarterly, 27(3), 22-37. retrieved from http://www.eric.ed.gov/pdfs/ej792860.pdf sklra, l. (2000). the social construction of gender in the superintendency. journal of education policy, 15(3), 293316. doi:10.1080/02680930050030446 sklra, l. (2003). normalized femininity. in m. young & l. sklra (eds.), reconsidering feminist research in educational leadership (pp. 247-263). albany, ny: state university of new york press. stephens, l. (2009). barbed wire, bumpy roads, and begonias. journal of philosophy & history of education, 59, 50-66. retrieved from http://www.journalofphilosophyandhistoryofeducation.com/ jophe59.pdf texas education agency [tea] (2012). certified superintendent demographics by preparation route 2007-2011. retrieved from http://www.tea.state.tx.us/workarea/linkit.aspx?linkidentif ier=id&itemid=2147509963&libid=2147509950 texas legislative council (2014, september). definitions of "rural" in texas statutes and the texas administrative code as of july 2014. retrieved from research division website: http://www.tlc.state.tx.us/pubspol/def_rural_statutes.pdf trevino jr., d., braley, r. t., brown, m. s., & slate, j. r. (2008). challenges of the public school superintendency: differences by tenure and district location. florida journal of educational administration & policy, 1(2), 98-109. retrieved from http://education.ufl.edu/fjeap/files/2011/01/fjeap_spring2008_slate_et_al.pdf wesson, s., & marshall, r. l. (2012). career pathways, experiences, and challenges of texas public school superintendents. national forum of educational administration and supervision journal, 30(1), 88-100. retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/110716746 young, m. d., & mcleod, s. (2001). flukes, opportunities, and planned interventions: factors affecting women's decisions to become school administrators. educational administration quarterly, 37(4), 462-502. doi:10.1177/0013161x01374003 young, m. (2003). troubling policy discourse: gender, constructions, and the leadership crisis. in m. young & l. sklra (eds.), reconsidering feminist research in educational leadership (pp. 265-298). albany, ny: state university of new york press. advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 22, winter 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] finding my voice:an african-american female professor at a predominantly white university aretha faye marbley abstract drawing from her personal experience, the author shares concrete examples from her promotion and tenure review, including the experience of social integration issues and the ramifications that the higher education environment had on her personal and professional attitudes as an african-american female faculty member. included in the discussion is her feeling isolated, devalued, and unwelcomed. she discusses how her value systems, culture, ethnicity, and behavior patterns often conflict with those held by the university and white faculty members and students, and finally, how these conditions disempowered and suppressed her voice as a female faculty and faculty member of color. finding my voice: an african-american woman at a predominantly white university "when and where i enter, in the quiet undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole . . . race enters with men" (giddings, 1985, p. 13). i stepped slowly and cautiously onto the bottom set of escalators taking me to the lower-level of the crown center shopping mall in kansas city , missouri , where an array of restaurants was located. my attire (black suit with gold buttons running down the front of the blazer, coffee-colored stockings, and matching black suede shoes) had the look of elegance, success, and status. i was a newly-tenured professor at a research i university. on the outside, i had it going on, while on the inside, my heart was heavy and i felt no joy. i had accomplished another milestone in my life-receiving promotion and tenure-but in the place of joy there was sadness and an ethereal kind of silence. as i made my way to a table in the back of a restaurant to wait on my friends and co-presenters, i reflected on the conversation i had with my mentor 10 minutes earlier; he wanted to know how i was doing and to congratulate me on getting tenured and promoted. i commented that it had been positive, but i did not feel like celebrating. he listened intently as i talked about my six years of turbulence. we spent the last few moments discussing my future plans with him giving me tips for my continued success and my pursuit of full professor and beyond. as we hugged and said goodbye, he looked at me with his piercing and kind eyes and quietly said, "aretha, i wonder when you will find your voice." file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/winter2007/index.htm he was right. i had spent six years on the job, speaking often, and yet no one, neither i nor my colleagues, heard my voice. i wondered if this was my plight as an african-american female in a predominantly white institution (pwi). was my experience any different from other women, people of color, african-americans, or african-american women? women and faculty of color in the academe in a 1975 address at the lyndon baines johnson school of public affairs in austin , texas , barbara jordan said, the women of this world-as the women of texas, and women of the united states of america-must exercise a leadership quality, a dedication, a concern, and a commitment which is not going to be shattered by inanities and ignorance and idiots..we only want, we only ask, that when we stand up and talk about one nation under god, liberty, justice for everybody, we only want to be able to look at the flag, put our right hand over our hearts, repeat those words, and know that they are true. (blue & naden, 1992, p. 91) women and faculty of color have made noteworthy gains. sadly, 30 years later faculty of color continue to hold nontenured positions, remain among the ranks of junior faculty members, and are employed at twoyear colleges (antonio, 2002; manzo, 2000; opp & gosetti, 2002; perna, 2003 ). in research i and ii institutions nationwide, only 3% of the faculty is of color (alger, 2000; smith, 1996). for african-americans, the good news is that blacks earned more professional degrees in 1994 (black women earned twice the number of law and medical degrees) than in 1976 (college fund, 1996). and in 2003, black doctorates (6.5% of all doctorates awarded) were at the highest ever ("good news," 2005). on the other hand, the not-so-good news is that despite the increase in enrollment and degree-earning gains, african-americans continue to earn a disproportionately small share of degrees at all levels, from associate to doctorate (dembner, 1997; nettles & gray, 1999). although their numbers are higher, women faculty experiences are similar to those of faculty of color. in 2000, women earned 44% of the doctorates with substantial variation in that percentage across disciplines (krefting, 2003). further, women earned at least half of the doctorates in education, humanities, and social sciences, but earned less than one third of those in engineering, physical sciences, and business. while the number of doctorates awarded to women continues to increase, women still disproportionately exit doctoral programs without earning the degree (toutkoushian, 1999; valian, 1998). in addition, once employed as faculty women are less successful than men (toutkoushian, 1999). women are slower and less likely to be tenured and to be promoted to full professor, and they also earn less than their counterparts; these are patterns that have persisted for some time (toutkoushian, 1999). women's accounts entail three common concerns: authority and respect, isolation, and work/family balance (aisenberg & harrington, 1988; conley, 1998; cyr & reich, 1996). because research in the u.s. on the status of women and faculty of color in academic employment is fragmented across disciplines and marginalized within disciplines, this research is not widely known or assimilated. although diversity is essential to a pluralistic campus, students and faculty of color have been underrepresented in undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools for nearly six decades; faculty of color are more flagrantly underrepresented (johnson, 1996). according to the research on the retention of students of color, increasing diversity of students is closely linked to increasing diversity of faculty and administrators (kobrak, 1992; marbley, butner, burley, bush, causey-bush, & mckisick, 2002; rowser, 1990 ). in fact, the small number of faculty of color hired and retained in academe is thought to hamper the retention and graduation of students of color in pwis. therefore, it is important for institutions of higher education to increase the number of qualified people of color and women at all levels of faculty and administration, especially in leadership positions. in doing so, barriers that block the success of women and faculty of color must be removed. the hiring and retaining of women and faculty of color involves, among other things, addressing the issues involved such as negative labels, faculty attitudes, faculty expectations, lack of institutional commitment and academic support services, mentoring, and unwelcoming institutional climate (brayboy, 2003; gloria & rodriguez, 2000; gonzalez, 2001; lee, 1999; stromei, 2000; tierney, 1999; turner & myers, 2000). in that regard, in order for qualified women and women of color to successfully navigate their way through the ranks of promotion and tenure to administrative positions, possibly presidency, they must be supported. african-americans in academe "p erhaps the most difficult career for the woman who wants to have it all-that is husband, family, and full professional career-is to be a college president" (riesman, 1982, p. 35). perhaps this is true, but for women faculty of color, the path that leads to the presidency is a path that is paved with personal, professional, and academic obstacles through the ranks of the professoriate. statistics cited by turner and myers (2000) show a 1% increase in the number of faculty of color in the last decade: the number of faculty of color in the professorate increased from 9% in 1989 to 10% in 1997. for most african-american faculty, completing the doctorate and acquiring tenure and promotion is an affirmation of crossing the finish line (to the dismay our white fellow students and white colleagues and sometimes to the dismay of their own families). they are weary, tired, burned out from both the doctoral and the promotion and tenure experience. their backs are heavy-laden and their hands scarred and scraped from the friction of endless running while holding tightly to an old, hard baton, worn and splintered from being carried by so many of the african-american ancestors. and for african-american women, the fatigue and burn out are more pronounced. yet, they continue to hold tightly to the adage of "he, who has much, owes much." when they look behind and in front of them, they feel such an awesome honor and debt to their people that they carry on in spite of the weariness. for faculty of color in general, the socialization integration process can be categorized into three areas: career development, didactic relationships, and socialization. social integration barriers, segregated networks, mutable manifestations of racism and sexism, and lack of mentors for support, guidance, and advocacy also have negative effects on the success of women and african-american faculty (bonner, 2003; turner, 2002). faculty of color feel isolated, unwelcome, devalued, alienated, torn between family and career, and responsible for representing the race on minority issues. interestingly, the socialization integration processes show similar patterns for women faculty, regardless of race (bowers, 2002). most black female professors are often times the only black or black female in academic departments outside of african and african-american studies (mckay, 1983). not surprisingly, the african-american women report having a lower sense of community, less satisfaction with their interaction with the majority, and less satisfaction with the climate and organizational structure. most of the black professorate is scattered across different disciplines and may not become an active part of campus life. for the africanamerican female, there is a constant reminder that she is less accepted in the academic community (singh, robinson, & williams-green, 1995). for example, black women faculty report experiencing angry verbal attacks on their authority and qualifications to teach or administer a grade (bernal & villalpando, 2002; munoz, rosario , young, & mclaren, 2004; vargas, 2002). for black women professors, there is the pressure of holding the double-edged sword -black and female and having to choose which side to be identified with: woman or nonwhite ( fleming, 1984; hooks & west, 1991) . with the double-edged sword comes a sense of a perverse visibility and a convenient invisibility. as a black female professor, one never takes oneself for granted and one never forgets one is black and female. therefore, i have chosen the following feminist approaches to provide insight, both historically and contemporary, into my experiences as a black female in the professoriate. feminist approaches to viewing the experiences of african-american women sojourner truth, a nineteenth century abolitionist, spoke out in 1853 for the rights of black women at the fourth national woman's rights convention in new york city : "i've been lookin' round and watchin' things and i know a little 'bout women rights, too. i come to keep the scales a-movin" (truth, 1972, p. 570). there are very few, if any, models that uniquely provide a framework to understand the nature and complexity of my experiences as an african-american female professor, that is, of being both a woman professor and a professor of color. therefore, i offer a combination of black and multiracial feminist theories. i present them as congruent and mutually compatible frameworks for addressing not only the historical, political, and interlocking experiences, but also as frameworks that wrestle aggressively with interlocking agendas, identities, oppressions, realities, and marginalities of african-american women. historically, the african-american woman has faced adversity with uncanny strength, perseverance, courage, and willfulness; however, many african-american women in the united states experience unique stressors that adversely affect their struggles and success. for african-american female professors this is further compounded by additional professional stressors associated with academic success such as social isolation, racism, and sexism (hart, 2003; jones, 2004; reay, 2003; saunders, 2004). thanks to the tireless work of black feminists during the abolition (gerda, 1998; truth, 1972) and civil rights (stone, 1979) eras, black women have made monumental strides. these early feminists have provided strong foundations and platforms for the struggles and consequent achievements of third-wave feminists including african-american, white, and other feminists of color. even though black feminism existed during the abolition era, it was not until the end of the civil rights era and the beginning of the thirdwave feminism in the 1980s that it surfaced in both black scholarly and activist work (e.g., hamer & neville, 1998; hooks & west, 1991; lorde, 1979; springer, 2001; taylor, 1998) . these early feminists set the stage for understanding black women's resiliency. though certainly oppressed, the african-american female, from slavery to the 21 st century, has always bounced back against the odds and reclaimed her voice (oyewumi, 1999; taylor, 1998). black feminists, like white feminists, are well-educated and middle-class. their agenda, like that of white feminists, expands beyond those issues relating to educated and middle-class women. black feminist agenda encompasses not only feminism, but the economic status of black women and issues associated with poverty such as educational opportunities, environmental racism, employment policies, and welfare reform (marbley, in press; nadesen, 2002). in addition, it addresses the political rights, marital and family issues, and health and survival issues affecting black women and all women. therefore, together black and multiracial feminism approaches can be meaningful in understanding the personal and professional lives of african-american female professors. first, both theories are similar in ideology and their attention to white and male privilege. although similar in ideology, they differ in that multiracial feminism is a race-solidarity theoretical approach that gives voice to and empowers many races of women with different histories. its tenets emerge out of the experiences of women from many minority groups (zinn, & dill, 1996). other women of color, like african-american women, have voiced their discomfort at feeling forced to choose between their race and gender. in contrast, black feminism views race and gender, to a lesser extent, as power systems that interact with other structured inequalities (springer, 2001; taylor, 1998). according to taylor (1998), black feminism more closely addresses the multiple dominations that black women face. as a consequence, it is important to have frameworks that reflect the complexity of black women's experiences together with the strengths and the unique and historical ways african-american women have and continue to successfully conquer and trounce their oppressive realities. for those reasons, it is important to frame my experience as an african-american woman faculty in theories and literature that address the uniqueness of their multiple identities; ones that are grounded in an oppressive background of being black, female, and other less privileged statuses. first, i give my reflection on my initiation into my first tenure-track faculty position, and then i introduce personal journal excerpts written during the year of my tenure review. these entries capture my perceptions of the micropolitics of the academe played out in the tenure and promotion process and lived thoughts and feelings of being a female african-american professor pursuing promotion with tenure in a pwi, such as feeling isolated, devalued, and unwelcomed. micropolitics and my lived experience "the prominence of women of color feminism in academia does not necessarily translate into power in the real world of politics-or even the real world of academia" (mansbridge & smith, 2000, p. 6). thinking back to when i began writing this manuscript, i recalled one of my students who humorously shared with me ways of becoming a texan: "doc there only two ways to become a texan: by birth or by coming in fast." my memories of coming to texas are vivid. in early spring of 1997, i boarded an american eagle (21seater) flight in fayetteville , arkansas , first stop dfw airport transferring to american eagle flight 3624 on to lubbock , texas . it was my first venture into west texas, and my subconscious mind was circulating some of the stories (a few of them horrors) that i had heard about texas . most black folk knew not to "mess with texas ." nevertheless, my first flight into lubbock was anything but familiar and smooth; it was mystical, bumpy, and turbulent. i remembered that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach every time the plane would rock from the turbulence and the passengers (native texans) would clutch different items within their reach and grip their seats. i thought to myself that the rocking of the plane seemed a bit more than mere wind. i looked out the window as the plane began its descent and saw nothing, just unfamiliar miles and miles of flat, dry desert. that sinking feeling continued in the pit of my stomach as i thought to myself, "my god, where am i?" my flight landed at 4:58 p.m., and i later learned that a tornado sighting was reported as at the lubbock international airport at 5:06 pm. my return visit to lubbock three months later to start work, like my previous arrival, was anything but smooth. in short, the original scheduled movers cancelled, and my friend's boyfriend reneged on driving my moving truck. and i, who had a license for less than a year and zero experience of driving any vehicle bigger than a crown victoria, ended up driving (with me and my three kids in the cab of the truck) a 24-foot truck through the ozark mountains in rainy weather. in addition, i had to drive 100 miles with a blown tire. we ended up stranded for a day in a little town (with a grand total of one hotel, one service station, and one dairy queen restaurant) about 200 miles from our destination. to add insult to injury, the clerk at the hotel tried to find (what seemed to us) a million excuses to keep black folk from staying overnight in that town, or at least in that hotel. surprisingly, my shock and disbelief at such blatant racism did not dull my excitement about joining the professorate. i vividly recalled feeling so excited about the prospect of working in this learnt environment. all my life i had been attracted to the pursuit of knowledge. i loved and adored philosophy, literature, and libraries. as a child, i would read anything that i could get my hands on. it was an adventure and opportunity to do things, go places, and meet people that the reality of my poverty-stricken upbringing forbade. not only did this pursuit of knowledge provide me with world travel, adventure, and new people, it soothed my soul. though i reframed my mystical, bumpy, and turbulent initiation into texas and perhaps the first six months of the first year as warm, welcoming, and cordial, the reality of the next few years mirrored my first two initiations into lubbock . that is, feeling isolated, devalued, unwelcome, and the awesome burden to represent african-americans and minority issues. prior to entering the academy, i had spent 25 years in social services and education. although i held higher education positions such as instructor, academic and vocational counselors, dean of students, and director of student services, entering academe was still treading on unfamiliar territory, the other side of education. as a brand new assistant professor in academe, the experience has been mystical, mainly because the rules and politics of the university and academe in general were unfamiliar and unrecognizable. the first couple of years i felt supported by my department, but yes, i was still isolated. some colleagues gave me kudos, praises, and positive feedback; some were real, some were helpful, some were entrenched, and others were phony. despite these rituals, there was a feeling of magic in the air. i was very excited about the infinite amount of wonderment to be discovered in the books that i would read and share, the research i would review and conduct, the students that i would teach and learn from, and the collaboration and camaraderie of my fellow faculty members. i had always enjoyed the spiritual connectiveness and richness found in the therapeutic relationship, and i looked forward to experiencing more of the same. after all, there were data supporting the satisfaction of being in the professorate. at 40-years-old, i was not exactly naïve about what it meant to be black or female in america . i had experienced more than my share of discrimination, racism, sexism, and oppression. i had grownup in the rural south and had lived with the jim crow laws. thus, i was fairly well-armed with ammunition to safeguard against blatant attacks on my personhood, such as high self-esteem, what helms (1995) referred to as a high level of racial identity status, had lived over 20 years in a large urban city, was educated and degreed, and had a proven track record at work and at play that was reflected in my curriculum vitae. most of all, i loved and respected people, all sorts of people, and had spent my entire adult life entrenched in human diversity. as i look backward, coming to the academy was just one more adventure into human diversity. unluckily for women and faculty of color, the same subtle, unspoken requirement my student jokingly told me was required for citizenship in texas unfortunately applies to their experiences in the academy. without the natural citizenship enjoyed by white men, women and faculty of color have no choice but to come in pretty fast. it certainly has been a fast and bumpy road for me. below are selected excerpts from the journal that i kept during the promotion and tenure process. it is my goal to share, perhaps in an unconventional manner, via my journal entries, memorable moments from my promotion and tenure experience. i present my journal entry narratives as a technique (from a nonpositivist perspective) rather than a research method. according to erickson (1986), what makes research interpretive or qualitative is substantive focus and intent, rather than a procedure in data collection. hence, in an effort to share intuitive meanings of what the tenure process has meant to me, i present a descriptive day-by-day narrative of my feelings, thoughts, and reactions to various steps throughout its progression. i hope to show through a nonpositivist, interpretative approach the importance and the effect of exposure to the promotion and tenure process on my personal and professional life as an africanamerican female. private journal entries august 28. thank god for frank. if it was not for him helping me through this process, i would be totally lost. i believe that there is a level of nonunderstanding for me as a faculty of color that is directly related to being in a white institutional culture. it relates to the existing covert knowledge and nuances of any culture. nevertheless, there is this feeling of i know what the words are, but i don't know what they really mean. i attempted to approach the assembling of the p & t dossier with one of my white female colleagues. we had met a couple of times, but for me, our little get-togethers did not go well. after our brief collaborations, i left feeling ignorant, a little depressed, and out of sorts. i think perhaps what i thought i would get from the interchange, a sense of "we are in this thing together" and, therefore, the information shared would be more on a personal, emotional, woman-to-woman level; that it would include an exchange of our reactions to the process and as a consequence, we would support each other. as i think about it now, to me, my work is very emotional. it is an extension of family, my values, beliefs, people, culture, and me. it represents everything i believe in, exist for, and have worked hard for. i suppose one ultimate goal for me through this p & t process would be validation. september 26 . i felt so validated when i received a copy of one my external reviewers' letter. she (an african-american female professor from a research i university) wrote, it is with extreme pleasure that i write a letter of unqualified support on behalf of dr. aretha marbley's application and promotion to the rank of associate professor with tenure . . . in the final assessment category of professional service, dr. marbley's record indicates extensive involvement and leadership at the department, college, university, and counseling profession levels. dr. marbley has been a leader and a catalyst in the overall lubbock community as well as instituting a much-needed bridge between the university and the communities of color. wow! it feels great to have someone understand what i have done. september 30. today i received another letter from another one of my external reviewers (a hispanicamerican female professor from a large research i university) who wrote, i am in total support of dr. marbley's promotion to the associate professor with tenure. i believe she displays the commitment to higher education by virtue of her attention to topics and issues that are often difficult to discuss. she seems able to address some of these untouchable topics in her writing and presentations alike. i have confidence that dr. marbley will continue to be an outstanding contributor to the university and profession alike. i give dr. marbley my endorsement for promotion and tenure. yes! things are looking good! october 9. today i received a copy of my third and final external reviewer's letter (an asian-american female professor from a research i university). she began her letter with this statement: i am writing from my research framework on the acculturation and ethic identity concerns of immigrants, diversity competence of mental health practitioners and trainees, and multicultural measurement and assessment. i am also framing my review within my teaching background, professional service, and community outreach, as well as my experiences as an ethnic minority academician. in summary, she wrote, dr. marbley has presented diversity programs to various organizations locally. due to her research focus on communities of color and her commitment to social justice and advocacy, volunteering in community organizations has been a necessary initial step for her to gain access to communities in order to conduct community-based research. thus dr. marbley's research and service are integrated. . . all in all, dr. marbley is engaged in high-demand teaching and service activities, and at the same time, has found opportunity and energy to do quality collaborative research. the total picture of her performance in faculty roles and responsibilities suggests that she be granted tenure and promoted to associate professor. i am really feeling good that all three of these women faculty of color (all from different ethnic backgrounds) understand not only my research, but also the struggles of what it means to be a faculty of color in a predominantly white institution. through their evaluations of my dossier, they show an understanding of the importance of service to my research and how that plays out in my commitment to my community. and they get what it means to teach in a predominantly white classroom. wow! october 24. i received a copy of my department's recommendation letter for p & t. i feel crushed. i feel that i have worked hard for nothing. no, what i really feel is that i was worked hard and in the end, none of that mattered. i feel stupid, used-up, and a need to challenge my own purpose. as i was reading the letter to frank, the tears started to fall. i did not know from where, for i was surprised by the contents, but in my mind's eye i knew that this was just part of the academic game. as i began to focus on my feelings, the content of the letter became more painful for me. the letter read, "taken together, the evidence regarding her teaching paints a mixed picture . . . the results of student evaluations do not support a conclusion that compared to other tenured and tenure-seeking faculty members; she is a consistently effective teacher." the pain in my chest rises when i recall the unfair, racist comments from students on evaluations such as, "if she was the last person on earth, i would never take another class with her," and "she forces her values on us," or "she is incompetent." the pain was even greater when i was summoned to respond to the unfair and unfounded allegations. no one in any of the annual review committees thought to ask me how does it feel to have students constantly be rude, make racist remarks, attack my credibility, and evaluate me on my status as a woman faculty of color. no one in any of the annual review committees ever suggested ways that we could improve the attitude of students and their reception of me as a faculty of color. no one ever considered that perhaps the issues with the teaching had anything to do with anything other than my lack of ability to teach. and yet i persisted, believing that both white students and students of color benefited from my presence and my approach to teaching; that is, one that challenged students to think outside of the box. oh yes, someone from the tenure and review committee did ask me why one of the other african-american faculty receives high student evaluations. i continued to read the letter, it said i had been given suggestions on how to improve my scholarship, reduce my service, and improve my teaching. no mention of the constant requests for my service, the extra work within the college and my program, the importance of my service agenda to the betterment of my community, the recruitment of students (especially students of color), and of my research agenda focusing of the experiences of people of color in academe and mental health. no mention of how i followed through on the suggestions my chair suggested. as i read the final ballot of votes from the qualified faculty in my division: promotion vote (approved = 1; disapproved = 8; and abstain = 1), tenure vote (approved = 2; disapproved = 7; and abstain = 0), i am disappointed. i am certain that they did not mean it in malice, but i do believe it was out of ignorance. and i am certain that both gender and cultural values played a critical role in the interpretation of their decision. it seemed as if the assessments of three external reviewers' (all renowned in my field) comments were ignored. i put in an emergency call to my friend frank a few minutes after i received this letter to share how devastating reading the letter was for me. i told him that i was hurt and deeply saddened, and i felt invalidated through to this leg of the journey. he immediately pointed me to literature that we both had read and presented on about the experiences of faculty of color in the academy. i knew all of it by heart, and yet it brought little comfort to my present feelings. it is time for me to go to bed, too tired to worry about it anymore tonight. i am closing my eyes, but not my heart. i must find a way back from this darkness for i still believe in people and what i do and why i do what i do. well, i will do as i have always done: call my other colleagues of color to talk about this experience. november 18. i read the dean's letter over and over again; i felt vindicated. someone really understands what it means to be a woman faculty of color. i cannot believe it. she captures my sentiments as if she had lived my experiences. i read her words again: in 10 years of repetitive studies conducted at arizona state university by the faculty women's association and the commission on the status of women, it is consistently reported that women of color traditionally receive lower evaluations of teaching. analysis of bias´ perceptions by students who are not used to women of color as authorities, and who view them as less credible than either men of color, or white men and women, also point to stereotypical attitudes toward african american women in particular, as having chips on their shoulder, being overly bossy, or prejudiced against whites. in my own experience, every faculty member i ever evaluated that taught multicultural education and challenged white privilege or touched upon sensitive content dealing with race, class, gender, or sexual orientation has paid the price with lower evaluations or even defiant, indignant student reaction. in predominantly white institutions, dominant-culture students are not used to challenges to their thinking or to the status quo in power-relations. i mention this, not to make excuses for dr. marbley, for none are needed, but only to point out that the issue of her not being at the mean in her division, given the focus of her academics, is entirely expected and not to be held against her. february 1. the letter from the provost office read, "congratulations! you have been granted. . . ." it looks as if i still have lots of work to do. the old formula for success still applies to me as an african-american woman; that is, "if you are a woman or a person of color, if you do as much as men and white people do, then you are behind. if you do twice as much, then you might be equal. but, if you want to get ahead, you must do at least three times as much." conclusion in terms of leadership, my first-generation academic accomplishments are not without responsibilities. for me, being first generation, along with being an african-american female means that i have inherited the honors and awards, as well as the responsibilities described therein. as a consequence, i feel fully obligated to give back to my family, church, and the african-american community, reaching back to help others make it. as indicated in my experiences and the experiences of other women and faculty of color, there are indeed major challenges and hurdles to overcome that are unique to me as a woman and as a person of color. it has been a difficult "row to hoe." in spite of these hurdles and challenges, african-american women throughout history have always spoken out. therefore, for me, finding my voice means not having my voice or african-american women' voices tuned out or marginalized. making substantial progress in the academy is not up to african-american women. rather, it is incumbent upon white and male faculty to eliminate racism and sexism existing in the academymechanisms that drown out, marginalize, and sometimes erase my female african-american voice. i was indeed promoted with tenure to associate professor. yet, at that crossroad and junction in my professional life, what should have been a reason to celebrate was for me an intense moment of sadness. my experience of promotion and tenure reminded me of a colleague, who during a presentation, reflected on the category "if i can make it there i can make it anywhere" published in a book he coauthored titled, how minority students experience college (watson, terrell, wright, bonner, cuyjet, gold, et. al., 2002). from bonner's analysis, he found that although students of color felt that their experiences with the rigors and challenges of being students of color in predominantly white contexts absolutely prepared them for the outside world, their feelings that they were ready for the vicissitudes of life were somewhat disturbing. the message this inferred was that because their collegiate experience was so tumultuous, they were primed and ready for the outside world. in essence, the battle scars they received as students prepared them for the world of work. yet, what does this say about the collegiate experiences these students were having in the academy? college is supposed to be the best time of your life, but for these students it was cluttered with challenges. to say that you are ready for the world because your experience in college was so bad-that cannot be positive. if my success in the professoriate is measured in terms of promotion and tenure, then at this time and place in my career i am successful; that is, with the support of my dean and those further up the chain of command within the institution. yet, like students of color, because of my experiences as an africanamerican woman in a pwi, i am ready for the vicissitudes of life. that is, if my success is measured in terms of having a meaningful, rewarding experience, feeling welcome, validated, valued, or perhaps finding my voice then. . . . well, at least i am hopeful. i am fully equipped with a resiliency, strength, and voice from my african foremothers' experiences (more than 400 years) of being slaves and chattels because of their gender and their color. like them, still i rise. for me, finding my voice means tapping into the gifts of my ancestors. i am as the poet writes, "into a daybreak that's wondrously clear/ i rise/bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave. / i am the dream and the hope of the slave. /i rise/ i rise/i rise" (angelou, 1994, p. 123). i remain hopeful because "african-american women now stand at a different historical moment, black women appear to have a voice" (collins, 2000, p. 9). i think to myself that perhaps the most difficult career for the woman who wants to have it all-that is husband, family, and full professional career-is to be a college president . i reflect on the truth of barbara jordan's sobering words, that is, i, like other women of the world, must exercise a leadership quality, a dedication, a concern, and a commitment which is not going to be shattered by inanities and ignorance and idiots..we only want, we only ask, that when we stand up and talk about one nation under god, liberty, justice for everybody, we only want to be able to look at the flag, put our right hand over our hearts, repeat those words, and know that they are true. 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(1996). theorizing difference from multiracial feminism. feminist studies, 22 , 321-331. about the author: aretha faye marbley is associate professor and clinical director in counselor education at texas tech university in lubbock, texas. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word diaz_leadership_self-efficacy.docx volume 38, 2018 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 27 advancing women in leadership vol. 38, pp. 27-34, 2018 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper leadership self-efficacy: a study of male and female mba students in mexico eduardo r. díaz eduardo r. díaz, cetys universidad, eduardo.diaz@cetys.mx accepted july 25, 2017 a disproportionate share of men holds leadership positions in mexico. relatively new studies on gender and leadership selfefficacy conducted under transformational leadership models have started to challenge the idea that gender moderates leader effectiveness. this study was developed to analyze differences in leadership self-efficacy between 80 female and 73 male mba students in the city of tijuana, baja california, mexico. the results contributed to the growing number of studies on leadership self-efficacy conducted under transformational leadership models that support the claim that gender does not moderate leader effectiveness. keywords: transformational, leadership, gender, mexico, lpi introduction mary van kleeck was a classical management scholar in the early 1900s and one of the first individuals to document the integration of women into the labor force (hyland & heenan, 2004). she was concerned that cultural norms at the time meant that female employees had to comply with the demands of the workplace while managing a high share of domestic responsibilities (hyland & heenan, 2004). her research was influential in the passing of legislation designed to prevent employers from requiring female workers to spend unreasonable amounts of time at work, thus, allowing them to fulfill their roles at home (mcguire, 2011). since then, organizations implemented policies designed to prevent gender discrimination, creating a more favorable work environment for women (peterson, 2011). however, there is still much to work ahead in terms of ensuring a fair and unbiased path for women to advance into top management positions within the private and public sectors (eagly & carli, 2007). one of the issues that may be contributing to the slow advancement of women as they try to climb the corporate ladder is the belief that leadership is mainly a male practice (eagly & carli, 2007). burns (2010) cautioned that women have been ignored for participation in leadership roles for so long that it may have sunk into their consciousness. it is important for everyone that women overcome this belief to correct the gender gap in leadership roles. research problem the problem of underrepresentation of women in leadership roles is evident in mexican society. even though gender equity in educational attainment and inclusion in the labor force has been achieved (kral, covarrubias, & iturribarría, 2012; moctezuma navarro, narro robles, & orozco hernández, 2014), the gender gap in leadership roles has persisted (zabludovsky kuper, 2015). the world bank (wb) estimated that women occupy top seats in only15% of the firms operating in mexico (2016), and the international labour organization (ilo) noted that women account for less than a third of all managers in the country (2015). because of reduced opportunities for advancement, women on leadership tracks may become frustrated and choose to remove themselves from their organizations (carnes & radojevich-kelley, 2011). purpose of the study the purpose of this study is to compare male and female leadership self-efficacy to determine whether women in mexico have reduced their chances for advancement into leadership roles due to internal factors. a correlation between gender and leadership self-efficacy may signal the need for key stakeholders to implement strategies to help women improve their perception of leadership efficacy and eventually reduce the gender gap in leadership roles. a lack of association between gender and leadership-self efficacy would suggest that key stakeholders responsible for promoting individuals to leadership positions have more confidence in males than in females to occupy top management positions. proving that leader effectiveness is not moderated by gender could help reduce the gender gap in top advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 28 management positions by reducing the effects of biased beliefs that associate effective leadership with being male. although this study will not suffice to make any claims for proving the relationship between gender and leadership selfefficacy, it may serve to add to the list of studies on gender and transformational leadership, which may help address the problem of underrepresentation of women in leadership roles. in that sense, the main contribution of this study will be that women in mexico who are working on obtaining a graduate degree in business can be effective transformational leaders. this should appeal to organizations looking for a wider talent pool to recruit personnel for management positions. this is especially true for organizations that constantly deal with change and complexity. weinberger (2011) argued that aspiring female leaders who are highly trained and have high earning potential are the groups most vulnerable to experience gender discrimination while trying the climb the corporate ladder. the logic behind this argument rests in the assumption that women who are underqualified for top management positions would not have to be discriminated based on gender to be denied this type of opportunity for advancement. however, well-qualified female workers may be denied a chance for a leadership position because of their gender. for this reason, the individuals invited to participate in the present study were mba students. because of their training, male and female mba students place themselves in a position to occupy leadership roles in the future. therefore, the women in the sample may be vulnerable to gender discrimination now or in the future. with this in mind, a convenience sample of 80 female and 73 male mba students from the city of tijuana, baja california mexico, were asked to participate in the study. the study was designed to measure leadership self-efficacy through the leadership practices inventory (lpi) self (kouzes & posner, 2013). the lpi is commonly used to conduct research under the five practices of extraordinary leadership model developed by kouzes and posner (2012), a model that is consistent with transformational leadership theory (northouse, 2016). the dependent variables for the study were the five practices measured through the lpi self (model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart). the independent variable was the gender of the participants. once the data were gathered, independent-samples t-tests were calculated to determine whether there were statistically significant differences between male and female participants in terms of each of the leadership practices measured through the lpi self. the findings from the study may be used to influence aspiring female leaders, educational leaders, and organizational decision-makers interested in creating more diverse management teams in organizations operating in mexico. the study may also be added to previous works conducted on gender and transformational leadership that support the claim that gender does not moderate transformational leadership self-efficacy. literature review gender discrimination in leadership roles female workers in mexico can be categorized into those with low earning potential and those with high earning potential. both types of workers experience undesirable circumstances. women with low-income potential (low educational achievement) are less likely to enter the workforce because the return on their investment would be negligible, so their time and effort would likely be better spent performing domestic tasks (arceo-gómez & campos-vázquez, 2014). on the other hand, women with high income potential have no problem finding financially rewarding employment, but are more likely to experience organizational barriers directed at women, and may have to make difficult work-life balance choices to improve their chances of climbing the corporate ladder (arceo-gómez & campos-vázquez, 2014). the latter category of women are said to experience what is known as glass-ceiling effects (eagly & carli, 2007). the glass-ceiling can be perceived in the form of having women make difficult choices in terms of work-life balance, which often means that they have to sacrifice their family lives to improve their standings at work (eagly & carli, 2007). the glass-ceiling may also be perceived in organizations that promote a culture where conducting one-self in accordance with male patterns of behavior is preferred over stereotypical female behaviors. these two glass-ceiling effects are further explained in the next paragraphs. brumley (2014) analyzed qualitative data on the experience of female employees in one large organization in mexico that adopted an institutional policy aimed at supporting women who were in the process of starting a family. the policy ensured that women could go on maternity leave without fear of losing their jobs. however, corporate culture in that organization was known to favor men for advancement to top management roles. therefore, even though women no longer had to fear losing their jobs for starting a family, they had to accept that their chances for advancement were limited. similarly, castro (2012) studied the corporate culture of a major accounting firm in mexico. the results of the study indicated that female employees were expected to work unreasonably long hours to be considered for advancement. according to castro (2012), the senior leadership at the firm valued workers based on time spent at work, which often went well into the night. employees who are willing to promote advancing in their careers at considerable expense to their personal and family lives are often referred to as "ideal workers" (sallee, 2012). organizational cultures that favor having male leaders may put pressure on their female employees to conduct themselves in ways that are inconsistent with their gender identities. barragan, mills, and runte (2010) studied successful female leaders in mexico and concluded that these individuals had been willing to adopt traditionally-defined masculine characteristics and behaviors to achieve success in their organizations. leskinen, rabelo, and cortina (2015) conducted their own study with 425 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 29 aspiring female leaders. they confirmed barragan et al.'s (2010) findings that suggest that women on their way to top management roles feel the need to adopt an expected leadership approach, which is consistent with masculine patterns of behavior. however, leskinen et al. (2015) argued that these individuals experienced discrimination for failing to behave in a manner consistent with their own gender. therefore, women who aspire to top management roles should act more like their male cohorts, but will likely be penalized for deviating from traditionally established gender roles. it is curious that women who manage to reach top management roles by adapting their approach to fit a more masculine way of behaving actually end up reinforcing gender inequity (muhr, 2011). the logic behind this argument is that when women achieve success by acting more like men, they support the claim that leadership is a male role. what is most troubling about this situation is that women (not just men) accept the notion that the practice of leadership is more consistent with being male than being female. this places women in an unfavorable position when they try to climb the corporate ladder, and suggests that leadership self-efficacy plays a role in addressing the gender issue in leadership. as noted before, burns (2010) identified leadership self-efficacy as a factor linked to the gender gap in leadership roles. it seems that organizations that value workers who are willing to forego their domestic responsibilities to climb the corporate ladder, and organizations that prefer to have leaders who fit a traditional male prototype, have reinforced the notion that leadership effectiveness is moderated by gender. several studies support this claim. these will be explained in the following paragraphs. leadership self-efficacy and gender. leadership theories largely ignored the role of women in leadership roles prior to the 1970s (chemers, 2000). studies based on leader personality or behavior tended to associate leadership efficacy with men and not women (jogulu & wood, 2006). traditionally female behaviors like being caring and considerate have been deemed useful and even preferable in certain contexts, but generally hurt aspiring female leaders by confirming gender stereotypes associated with leadership efficacy (crites, dickson, & lorenz, 2015). schein (1973) conducted a study to compare male and female workers with effective managers in terms of characteristics and behaviors. she surveyed male participants to gather her data, and concluded that the characteristics and behaviors of effective managers were more closely associated with men than with women. schein repeated her study two years later using female workers as her subjects (1975). in spite of this, her conclusion was the same as before, which suggested that men and women believed that leadership efficacy was more aligned with male personality and patterns of behavior. thus, leadership self-efficacy was lower among women than men. this basic premise was supported in a laboratory experiment, which involved having male and female undergraduate students rate their performance as leaders (heilman, simon, & repper, 1987). heilman et al.'s (1987) work concluded that female undergraduate students were more likely to underestimate their leadership skills, fail to take credit for positive outcomes, and prefer to yield the opportunity to remain in a leadership role to others. in a study involving male and female project managers, cohen, ornoy, and keren (2013) used the myers-briggs type indicator (mbti) to compare the characteristics of male and female project managers with those of the general population. their conclusions supported the notion that project managers more closely resemble those of the male general population than the female general population. again, the implication was that leadership roles more closely align with being male than being female. flanagan (2015) assessed the impact of gender stereotypes on perceptions of leadership efficacy with a sample of male and female subjects. the participants in flanagan's study rated themselves in terms of leadership traits and skills. these participants were asked to estimate how others would rate them in terms of leadership efficacy. flanagan (2015) concluded that female subjects were more likely to rate themselves lower than their male cohorts and expected that others would rate them lower as well. once again, leadership self-efficacy was lower among female subjects. in another study concerned with female evaluations of leadership efficacy, sturm, taylor, atwater, and braddy (2014) noted that women under-estimated the way their bosses assessed their leadership skills. strum et al. (2014) pointed to learned gender roles as one of the reasons why women expected to be rated less favorably than they were in terms of leadership efficacy. after a review of 49 years of studies on gender and leadership efficacy, paustian-underdahl, slattery walker, and woehr (2014) concluded that internal measures of leadership efficacy yielded higher scores for males than females in low and top management positions with no statistically significant differences for middle managers. paustian-underdahl et al. (2014) noted, however, that external measures of leadership efficacy tend to yield higher scores for women in middle and top management positions than for men. again, the implication is that men are more likely to rate themselves higher than women in terms of leadership efficacy. these studies were developed under early leadership models that focused on traits and initiating and consideration structure behaviors that tended to support the claim that leadership was predominantly something that men could do better than women (chemers, 2000; jogulu & wood, 2006). however, works conducted under transformational leadership theory seem to be more neutral in terms of gender (eagly & carli, 2007). eagly, johannesen-schmidt, and van engen (2003) examined several contributions to the study of gender under transformational leadership theory. they noted that women fared well relative to men in their assessments of leadership behaviors as measured through the multifactor leadership questionnaire (mlq), a prominent transformational leadership instrument. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 30 bass, avolio, and atwater (1996) compared male and female mlq scores and noted that women edged out men in terms of the transformational leadership dimensions covered in the instrument. moreover, garrett-staib and burkman (2015) surveyed a sample of male and female superintendents in texas using the lpi to compare their mean scores in terms of the model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart leadership practices. they found that there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups. in the state of tamaulipas, mexico, researchers used the lpi to measure the leadership practices of managers in the commercial sector (pedraza melo, lavín verástegui, delgado rivas, & bernal gonzález, 2015). although the study was not designed specifically to compare male and female mean scores, the researchers noted that there were no statistically significant differences between males and females in the sample. this conclusion was taken with caution because of the disproportionate share of men in the sample. therefore, male leaders have traditionally exhibited higher levels of leadership self-efficacy than female leaders. recently, however, studies of leadership self-efficacy have documented similar levels in male and female leaders. these, more recent, studies have been conducted under transformational leadership theory, using both the mlq and the lpi as the preferred research instruments to gather data from participants. kouzes and posner's (2012) five practices of exemplary leadership model, which is measured through the lpi, will be further analyzed in the following paragraphs. transformational leadership models. in the 1960s, the works of max weber helped bring to the forefront of leadership thought the notion of the charismatic leader (derman, 2011). to weber, the source of leaders' influence derived from their legal roles within society, traditional or historical significance, or charisma (taylor, 2012). gandhi, martin luther king, jr., and john f. kennedy are three leaders that displayed charismatic qualities (northouse, 2016). the first discussions on transformational leadership theory have been attributed to james downton, who in 1973 wrote about a type of leadership that combined charismatic qualities, developed transactional relationships with their followers, and inspired them to perform above expectations (bradley, 1975). in the late 1970s, james mcgregor burns stated that transforming leadership takes place "when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality" (2010, p. 20). in the 1980s, bass (1985) continued to work on the development of transformational leadership theory. along with bruce avolio, bass developed the full range leadership model, which included four transformational, three transactional, and one nonleadership dimensions (northouse, 2016). since then, the models developed by bennis and nanus, and kouzes and posner have contributed in important ways to the study of transformational leadership (northouse, 2016). the present study was developed under one of these models, kouzes and posner's (2012) five practices of exemplary leadership model. as noted before, kouzes and posner's (2012) model covers five dimensions: model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart. these dimensions were designed to reflect how often leaders engage in behaviors aimed at making sure that the actions of the group of followers are aligned with their values, creating consensus and support toward a common goal, finding new ways to exploit opportunities, developing trusting relationships, and rewarding good performance (kouzes & posner, 2012). research conducted under this model makes use of the lpi, a 30-item questionnaire that uses a 10-point liker-scale to measure respondent engagement in each of the five practices of exemplary leadership (kouzes & posner, 2012). over the past few decades, several studies conducted under this model addressed male and female leadership practices (posner, 2016). in the united states, garrett-staib and burkman (2015) used the lpi to determine whether the leadership practices of superintendents in texas were moderated by gender. their results yielded no statistically significant differences attributed to gender. in mexico, pedraza melo et al. (2015) used the lpi to assess the leadership practices of managers in the commercial sector in the state of tamaulipas. in the process, they compared mean scores by gender. they did not find statistically significant differences. both studies were similar in their results and the fact that they used a small number of women in their samples. to summarize, the gender gap in the labor force has been reduced considerably in part because of the enactment of policies aimed to protect the right of women to work, female educational attainment, and increased participation in the workplace. however, the glass-ceiling effects can still be felt because women continue to be discriminated at work, especially when they seek to comply with their culturally-assigned gender role while trying to advance to top management positions (eagly & carli, 2007). early leadership models facilitated the development of studies on gender and leadership by focusing on traits and initiating and consideration leader behaviors (chemers, 2000). these studies often suggested that effective leadership is more closely associated with being male than being female. after the 1970s, this started to change with the emergence of transformational leadership theory (chemers, 2000; eagly et al., 2003; jogulu & wood, 2006). research questions and hypotheses to guide the present study, the following general research question and five hypotheses were addressed: research question: are there statistically significant differences in lpi mean scores between male and female participants in the study? h1: there are statistically significant differences between male and female participants in the model the way dimension. h2: there are statistically significant differences between male and female participants in the inspire a shared vision dimension? advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 31 h3: there are statistically significant differences between male and female participants in the challenge the process dimension? h4: there are statistically significant differences between male and female participants in the enable others to act dimension? h5: there are statistically significant differences between male and female participants in the encourage the heart dimension? methods the present study was developed under a post facto research design, which is common in quantitative research where the effects of the independent variables on the dependent variable are perceived in the participants without manipulation on the part of the researcher (abbott & mckinney, 2013). the aim was to measure the effect of the independent variable (gender) on the dependent variables (the five practices of exemplary leadership). the sampling, data gathering, and analysis processes are described in the following paragraphs. participants. this study was designed to collect data from a sample of 80 female and 73 male mba students in the city of tijuana, baja california, mexico, through survey research (fowler, 2015) using the lpi self (kouzes & posner, 2013) as its instrument. three different universities agreed to participate in study by allowing access to their students. at the time the survey took place, there were 589 mba students in the city of tijuana, baja california, mexico (asociación nacional de universidades e instituciones de educación superior, 2015). however, there were only 513 students among the three participating institutions. therefore, just under 30% of the students enrolled in the three participating institutions responded to the survey. procedure. first, six mba program administrators running mba programs in tijuana were invited to participate in the study. three agreed to allow the researcher to survey their mba students. second, the lpi (spanish version) was administered to the 153 mba students in the sample during class time under the supervision of their program administrators and/or faculty. before administering the lpi to the mba students, the researcher collected signed informed consent forms from each participant and made sure that everyone in the sample understood that they were not required to participate in the study and that they could withdraw at any time. there were no incentives promised or delivered to the mba students who responded to the lpi self. third, the completed lpi self questionnaires were collected and responses were entered into the statistical package for the social sciences (spss) spreadsheet that had been created to run the statistical tests necessary to identify any potential correlations between the five leadership practices and gender. it should be noted that permission to use the lpi in its paper form was obtained from the publisher of the instrument. last, reliability coefficient, descriptive statistics and independent samples t-tests were calculated to compare mean scores for each dimension in the lpi self between males and females (chen, 2012). the alignment between each lpi dimension and its corresponding items on the questionnaire are illustrated on table 1. table 1 alignment between lpi dimensions and items on the lpi. lpi dimesons item number on the lpi model the way 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, and 26 inspire a shared vision 2, 7, 12, 17, 22, and 27 challenge the process 3, 8, 13, 18, 23, and 28 enable others to act 4, 9,14, 19, 24, and 29 encourage the heart 5, 10, 15, 20, 15, and 30 note: adapted from lpi: “leadership practices inventory self” (4th ed.) by j. m. kouzes and b. z. posner, 2013, san francisco, ca, leadership challenge. cronbach alpha coefficients for the five leadership dimensions are illustrated in table 2. table 2 cronbach alpha coefficients for the lpi dimensions. lpi dimensions cronbach alpha coefficient model the way .724 inspire a shared vision .845 challenge the process .782 enable others to act .667 encourage the heart .871 as noted in table 2, four out of the five leadership dimensions in the lpi have a cronbach alpha coefficient that is above the .70 norm. the enable others to act dimension scored below the norm. this represents a limitation for the present study. while the results for the enable others to act should be taken with caution, for the purposes of the present study, both validity and reliability for the lpi have been established in previous studies (vito & higgins, 2010; pugh, fillingim, blackbourn, bunch, & thomas, 2011; quin, deris, bischoff & johnson, 2015; posner, 2016). results a total of 153 mba students participated in the study. female mba students accounted for 52.3% of the participants while male mba students represented 47.7%. three different mba programs were included in the study. the results suggested that there were no statistically significant correlations between gender and leadership-efficacy under kouzes and posner's (2012) transformational leadership model. these results can be appreciated by identifying the p values in table 3, which show no statistically significant differences in lpi mean scores between male and female participants. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 32 table 3 independent samples t-tests for the lpi dimensions. lpi dimensions mean (sd) t p male female model the way 46.69 (6.89) 47.17 (6.40) .443 .659 inspire a shared vision 42.36 (9.87) 42.32 (10.48) -.027 .987 challenge the process 43.95 (8.40) 43.41 (9.27) -.380 .704 enable others to act 50.26 (5.90) 49.95 (5.47) -.337 .736 encourage the heart 47.21 (7.69) 47.30 (9.92) .057 .955 therefore, the response to the general research question used to guide this study is that there are no statistically significant differences in lpi mean scores between male and female participants across the five leadership practices (model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, encourage the heart). thus, h1-h5 were rejected. discussion and conclusion the present study was designed to analyze leadership selfefficacy in a group of 80 female and 73 male mba students to better understand the underrepresentation of women in leadership roles in mexico. by itself, the study serves to show that the participants in the study engage in the model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart leadership practices at similar levels. these findings only apply to the individuals who participated in the study. because of the use of a convenience sample, this information may not be generalized (creswell, 2014) to the general population in mexico or mba students. the true value of the study rests on its contribution to the study of gender and transformational leadership, which can serve to support the claim that gender does not moderate transformational leadership self-efficacy. the present study joins several works conducted using transformational leadership models that suggested that leadership is not exclusively or primarily a male task (bass, et al., 1996; eagly, et al., 2003; garrett-staib & burkman, 2015; pedraza melo et al., 2015). the accumulation of works under transformational leadership can contribute significantly to make the argument that both males and females can enact leadership roles and move others to action without having to comply with gender-based expectations for people in leadership positions. aspiring female leaders, educational leaders, and organizational decision-makers may use these findings to ensure that stakeholders understand that leadership is not inherently a male task; therefore, creating environments where female leaders can perform based on their own values and comply with their culturally-developed gender roles without suffering genderrelated discrimination. aspiring female leaders may use the findings from the present study to raise their own consciousness regarding the similarities they share with their male cohorts in terms of leadership efficacy and feel confident about their ability to lead. this may help women who are similar to the group in the study to engage in self-promoting activities that may lead to leadership opportunities. educational leaders may use the findings presented here to replicate the study and design educational programs to help their students develop the type of leadership approach prescribed by kouzes and posner’s (2012) model or other transformational leadership approaches. this represents an opportunity for educators to help address the gender imbalance on leadership roles. organizational leaders may use the findings presented here to promote buy-in on the part of their stakeholders to create a more gender diverse and inclusive work environment that may lead to more creative and innovative outcomes. this kind of initiative may help motivate talented female workers climbing the corporate ladder to stay the course and not give up on their careers. by showing that male and female participants engage in transformational leadership behaviors at similar levels, this and past studies (bass, et al., 1996; eagly, et al., 2003; garrett-staib & burkman, 2015; pedraza melo et al., 2015) make the argument for a more equitable society. the argument is that more women can engage in leadership roles without having to act according to traditional male behaviors or stereotypical female expectations. to develop this argument in full, more studies on gender and transformational leadership will be required. the present study focused on mba students, a logical group for future leadership opportunities, but other interesting samples include middle managers, undergraduate students involved in leadership programs, males and females who belong to different age groups, geographic locations, and so on. moreover, the present study focused on leadership self-efficacy, which is an internal factor. more work will be needed using external sources, like information gathered through observer groups to describe leadership efficacy in middle and top managers (brandt & laiho, 2013). the lpi is available in observer form, which should facilitate this type of research. one concern that was raised during the development of the present study is the below the norm cronbach alpha coefficient for the enable others to act leadership dimension. future studies conducted outside the united states, particularly those using the lpi self (spanish version) should explore the reliability coefficients of the lpi to address this concern. through additional research, the gender gap in leadership roles in mexico and other places may be readily addressed by informing key publics who can create a more just, egalitarian and prosperous society through diversity and leader effectiveness. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 33 references abbott, m. l., & mckinney, j. 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(2015). las mujeres en los ámbitos de poder económico y político de méxico. revista mexicana de ciencias politicas y sociales, 60(223), 61-94. 374 mbepera copyedited final.docx volume 42, 2023 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 42, 62-71, 2023 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women teachers in school leadership: a case of community secondary schools in rural tanzania joyce mbepera joyce mbepera: lecturer at the university of dodoma, college of education, department of educational management and policy studies. joymbep@gmail.com/joymbep@yahoo.com accepted april 5, 2023 this study sought to determine the barriers to women teachers’ access to top leadership positions in rural community secondary schools in tanzania. the study adopted a qualitative research approach involving 77 participants [7 women heads of schools, 68 women teachers, 1 regional education officer (reo) and 1 district education officer (deo)]. the methods of data collection comprised interview and focus group discussion. the results show that there were only a few women in leadership positions in rural community secondary schools due to lack of support from the family to the societal level. furthermore, poor working environment, perceived witchcraft and superstitious beliefs scared women teachers of taking leadership posts in rural areas. the study recommends sensitisation programmes on gender equality. such sensitisation programmes should be incorporated into the education curriculum right from the low level of education to make children aware of the importance of having women leaders in secondary schools. teamwork is also needed to unlock the hegemonic culture that dominates tanzanian societies and restricts the number of women in leadership. keywords: women leadership, under-representation, rural, community schools, tanzania. women are still under-represented in leadership positions in almost all sectors (morley, 2013). for instance, the number of women in decision-making positions is still very low worldwide (ingham, 2022; unicef, 2022). globally, in the education sector, nearly 5 out of 10 secondary school teachers were women, and unfortunately, they are less presented in leadership (unicef, 2022). in the uk, 63% of teaching staff in secondary schools were women, and only 40% were head teachers (dfe, 2022). in niger, women teachers were 58% in 2020/2021, while women leaders were only 17% (unicef, 2022). unicef further noted that in zambia, women's workforce in primary schools was 59%, yet only 21% were leaders in 2021. in 2020/2021, women school head teachers in ethiopia only comprised 12% of primary schools and 7% at the secondary level (education development trust, 2020). similarly, in rwanda, only 42.4% of women were heads of secondary and 34.5% were head teachers of primary schools in 2011 (uwamahoro, 2011). in kenya only 12.8% and 27.3% were female heads of schools in primary and secondary schools, respectively, in 2011 (chonge, 2015). tanzania is not different from other countries. in 2006, only 12.7% of women heads were in secondary schools (bandiho, 2009). in 2010, the number of women teachers was 48.8%, yet only 18% of them were heads of schools (hungi, 2010). by 2013, the overall percentage of women leaders in secondary schools increased slightly to 18.7% in tanzania (adem, 2013), yet there was an uneven increase in all areas. for instance, women heads of schools in secondary schools in iringa municipal was only 34.8% in 2022 (district educational office, 2022). in dar es salaam region, the percentage of women heads of schools was (48.7%) and male heads of schools was (51.3%). in 2013 (adem, 2013) which is almost equal. this trend is possibly caused by the status of dar es salaam as being a major city in tanzania, where many women prefer to live with their husbands. hungi reported in 2010 that the southern highlands zone of tanzania had no woman heads of schools despite an equal number of women and male teachers. although the government has made efforts to increase women in different sectors across the country in tanzania, women leaders in education still remain few (bhalalusesa & mboya, 2003: mbepera, 2022). literature revealed that advancement of women into senior leadership positions was limited with challenges encountered in the execution process such as organizational constrained efforts of attaining gender equality in appointment of school heads (dlanjwa, 2018: mbepera, 2017). 62 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 nonetheless, research on women’s underrepresentation in the educational sector remains scanty and speculative in sub-saharan africa (mulkeen et al. 2004; oplatka & hertz-lazarowitz, 2006). in tanzania, studies on women's leadership (bandiho, 2009; bhalalusesa & mboya, 2003; lindsay et al. 2017; mlama, 2005) have not majored in women's leadership in rural context and on obstacles faced women advancement to leadership positions in community secondary schools. similarly, most of these researches were conducted more than ten years ago. as a result, the researcher deemed it necessary to conduct the present research to discover obstacles that bar women teachers from attaining leadership positions in the education sector in rural areas in this era of globalisation. the findings of the study close the gap of knowledge on obstacles to women’s educational leadership in developing countries. this study focused on rural community secondary schools because they comprise the majority and are mostly located in remote rural areas. the study specifically answered the following question: what bars women teachers from accessing leadership posts in rural community secondary schools in tanzania? literature review the problem of underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in organisations is caused by individual, socio-cultural and economic factors (cubillo & brown, 2003). the situation is worse in rural areas (oluoch, 2006). the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions strongly relates to gender stereotypes and societal culture because leadership is a culturally bound practice (dimmock & walker, 2006). that is, the culture shapes the men’s and women’s behaviours within a society, which ascribes the roles of men and women. this implies that society categorises males’ and women’s roles which creates opportunities for men and women, in turn, to have access to different opportunities, such as involvement in leadership (dimmock & walker, 2006). the roles ascribed by society control women more than men. in other words, women have less access to different opportunities than men. in that regard, women are regarded as home and family carers, while males are perceived and trained to be office workers, breadwinners, and heads of families (fagenson, 1990a). researchers observe gender-based socialisation, fear of failure, limited mobility, lack of ambitions and interrupted career development due to childbearing and rearing roles as among the internal barriers hindering women from becoming leaders (oplatka & hertz-lazarowitz, 2006). the research shows that women teachers have greater satisfaction in teaching, and they are, therefore, interested more in teaching than being in leadership (iqbal et al., 2013). women are also unwilling to apply for leadership posts (gaus, 2011). the study conducted in the united states of america revealed that some women teachers were satisfied with the leadership of their heads (young & mcleod, 2001). hence, they wish to refrain from taking leadership posts in future. this implies that women teachers become less active in leadership issues by depending on men to lead them. in england, women preferred taking care of children at home to being leaders, an act which restricted their career development (moreau et al., 2005). in turkey, because of the patriarchal system, celikten (2009, p. 173) reported that women prefer teaching because it allows them to continue motherhood and femininity. this implies that women teachers perceive balancing family and leadership responsibilities as challenging. hence, they prefer teaching to leadership. in tanzania, the research report that women do less acquire leadership posts because of many family tasks, culture, and the patriarchal system (bandiho, 2009; bhalalusesa & mboya, 2003; lindsay et al., 2017: mbepera, 2022). the researcher assumes that few women are in leadership positions in rural tanzania because of socialisation and the hegemonic culture obstacles, which do not value women's contribution. therefore, with this handful of empirical evidence, this study aimed to determine the obstacles to women teachers' occupation of leadership posts in rural tanzania. theoretical framework this study was guided by the gender organisational system (gos) approach. this approach is centred on women’s leadership advancement (fagenson, 1990a). the approach assumes that the involvement of women in top leadership is influenced by the interaction among the individuals, societal and institutional systems in which the organisation operates. rowley & yukongdi (2009) hold that this interaction may lead to the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in the education sector. this approach incorporates the assumptions and arguments of the gender-centred and organisational structure perspectives (fagenson, 1990b). the gos approach argues that an individual and their organisation cannot be understood separate from the society (culture) in which they work. women are few in decision-making positions due to internal factors from socialisation. the gos perspective suggests that women’s internal factors resulting from socialisation and organisational structure impact and shape their actions and behaviours at work (fagenson, 1990b). furthermore, the gos perspective considers that the organisation's culture, rules, stereotypes, policies, and ideology hinder women from becoming senior leaders (fagenson, 1990a). therefore, the organisational culture shapes women's behaviour, and hence, many chances are given to men (akpinar-sposito, 2013; mbepera, 2017). it insists that principles and knowledge imparted to women from childhood influence them positively or negatively to take top leadership posts (fagenson, 1990a). according to gos, women are instilled with individual ambition, fewer aspirations for power, kindness, unselfishness, sympathy, submission, respect, inactiveness, irrationality, and a great concern for their personal lives (hoyle & mcmahon, 1986). women are socialised to put more effort into their lives and to value peers more than their careers. this study assumes that a few women's leadership presences are caused by factors that are within women, the society surrounding women and organisations where women 63 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 work. therefore, this has a significant influence on women's representation in leadership. societal beliefs, gender role expectations, stereotypes concerning the role of men and women, and cultural values may affect structures, institutional practice, and women's behaviour at work. methods the qualitative approach was used to collect in-depth information on experience, feelings, and women’s behaviour in leadership in community secondary schools. non-probability sampling technique was used to select women heads of schools (creswell, 2009). the study involved seven female heads of schools, 68 women secondary school teachers, one regional educational officer (reo) and one district educational officer (deo), totalling 77 participants. the women heads of schools were purposively selected with the expectation that they could reveal information about their experiences as leaders. they were also expected to reveal the obstacles they encountered on the way to top leadership positions. they are involved because they also recommend teachers to district education office (deo’s office) for appointment to leadership positions. since the district had only seven women heads of schools, all of them were involved in the study. the regional education officer (reo) and district education officer (deo) were purposively selected because their roles and positions in education equip them with crucial information about this study. deo and reo were accountable for all educational issues in the district and region, respectively. they also recommend and appoint the heads of schools. their experience, feelings, perceptions, and views on the participation of women in leadership were essential for this study. since there was one deo in the district and one reo only in the region, both were involved in the study. moreover, a purposive sampling technique was used to select the teachers due to their roles and working experiences. women teachers were included in the sample of this study because they are the ones recommended by the heads of schools for leadership positions. however, only women teachers with more than three years of career experience were involved in the study. the interviews were conducted for heads of schools, reo and deo. the interviews took place in their offices to ensure their freedom and flexibility. the interviews lasted about an hour and were tape-recorded after seeking the respondents' consent. in addition, focus group discussions (fgds) were conducted with teachers to obtain balanced and detailed information and validate them. the fgds were conducted in the classrooms and lasted less than one and a half hours. during the discussion, the final agreement by all participants was regarded as their data. the fgds were audio-tape recorded, and the notes were taken to ensure no important information was left out. all the participants willingly agreed to participate in the discussions and were informed about their freedom to withdraw from the study at any time without any bother. the procedure for analysing the interview and fgds data was adapted from (creswell (2009), which involved the following steps: first, organising and preparing the field information. this step encompassed the activities such as transcribing raw data, typing field notes and classifying and arranging raw data based on its source. the second step involved repeatedly reading through the transcribed data to obtain general information about the respondents’ views and reflecting on the overall meaning. the third step involved a comprehensive analysis of the coding procedure. in this step, the transcribed data were categorised into sections and subsections with the same theme (creswell, 2009). the fourth step involved the production of the description and themes for analysis using the codes. the fifth step involved the presentation of the description and themes in terms of qualitative story or description. creswell (2009) reports that the best means to present qualitative information is to use the story passage to present results obtained from the analysis. findings this section presents the findings in response to the research question, which aimed to find out the obstacles to women teachers’ access to leadership posts in rural community secondary schools. the section is organised based on themes that emerged during data collection as follows. women teachers’ satisfaction with being classroom teachers the interviewed heads of schools, reo and deo, believed that women teachers were more satisfied with their teaching careers than being leaders. similarly, the women teachers in fgds supported that women teachers were more contented to remain classroom teachers than being leaders because they wanted to be free from leadership responsibilities and use most of their time in taking care of their families. one of the women teachers had the following to say in one of the fgd sessions: in my life, i do not think of being a leader. i am content with remaining a normal teacher, as i am free from leadership responsibilities and have time to take care of my family. this statement was supported by deo, who reported: some women teachers are not interested in being leaders because they avoid leadership-related stress and spend more time on child-rearing. during the fgds, teachers reported further that some women teachers perceived leadership as being against their culture. they reported patriarchal system hindered them from aspiring to become leaders even though they were interested. in support of the argument, one-woman teacher stated: patriarchy and religion are problematic. women may be interested in leadership but are hindered by the patriarchal system instilled from the family to the community level. it seems they do not like leadership responsibilities, but deep inside, they do. the problem is the patriarchal system. the findings of the study suggest that women teachers remain classroom teachers because of family responsibilities, culture, 64 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 and the patriarchal system, which strongly contributes to women teachers’ negative attitudes towards leadership positions in secondary schools. women teachers’ acceptance of gender imbalance in education heads of schools, reo and deo, through interviews and fgds with women teachers, revealed that some women teachers accepted gender imbalance in education due to the culture and patriarchal system. they further reported that society still believed men had a greater responsibility for their families and should attain higher education. at the same time, women should take care of their families. women teachers revealed that their male counterparts were breadwinners and should be more educated and become leaders. one-woman teacher commented the following during the focus group discussion: women accept remaining with a low level of education because they believe that men are culturally responsible for meeting the family needs and thus are the ones who should be more educated for the benefit of the family. the women teachers further pointed out that society expected men to be breadwinners and women only to supplement what men earn. such attitude made women unwilling to strive for a higher level of education which would qualify them to be leaders. one teacher commented: most males are breadwinners; hence they are dissatisfied with being ordinary teachers. they struggle to develop their careers to acquire the ability to support their families. the women teachers added that society does not value highly educated women because they believed educated women tend to disobey their spouses. the attitude made some women teachers contented with their low levels of education. a woman teacher remarked: you know, we remain uneducated because society has a negative attitude toward highly educated women, particularly if you earn more money than your husband. it is believed that more educated women are less respectful to their husbands. the reo, deo and heads of schools also pointed out the tendency of women teachers to maintain their low level of education. the reo reported that some women teachers who married rich husbands do not see the need to develop their careers. he had the following opinion: most women teachers married to rich men are less concerned about their career development. they are satisfied with their husbands’ income and fail to use available opportunities to develop their careers. therefore, women teachers retain a low level of education not because they like it but because they are limited by their culture and society, which socialise them to value the family more than a career. women teachers’ tendency to decline leadership appointments heads of schools, reo and deo and women teachers reported that some women teachers would decline appointment posts in rural schools for various reasons. the reo had the following comment regarding the women teachers’ tendency to decline taking up appointment posts: some women teachers reject appointment posts when they are appointed and located in rural and remote schools. this discourages us from appointing them. it is a waste of time and resources as they tend to decline the posts as soon as they are appointed. reasons given by the respondents for the women teachers’ tendency to decline taking up posts in rural areas are given in the following subsections. poor transport facilities participants reported the poor transport facilities as one of the causes for posts’ rejection by some women teachers in rural areas. the motorcycles, which constitute the significant means of transport in rural areas, were inconvenient for most women teachers due to their socialisation. women feared using motorcycles frequently due to recurrent accidents involving motorcycles. one-woman head of school commented: we mostly use motorcycles to travel to town. i had accidents involving motorcycles. people are dying due to accidents. it is also risky travelling through the forest. so, we get scared since we do not have reliable alternative means of transport, which causes some women teachers to decline the position. deo also conveyed a similar view regarding the use of motorcycles for transport in rural areas: reliable transport is a challenge in this area. women teachers are more challenged by the transport means from rural to town. motorcycles are often used to travel through the thick forest. it is too risky for women considering that they are always ridden by young men. therefore, the findings revealed the serious transport challenge among women teachers and heads of schools in rural areas as one of the obstacles for women to accept leadership posts. lack of important social services heads of schools, teachers and deo reported the lack of important social services, such as safe and clean water, housing, reliable health care and electricity, among the causes for women to reject leadership positions. one-woman head of school commented the following during the interview: i refused the post in this area at once because the area lacks important social services such as clean and safe water. i only took the post when all my children were grown up and lived on their own in boarding schools. 65 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 otherwise, i would not have managed to live with them in this environment without water and poor housing. another head of school commented: the little water we get is neither safe nor clean because people and animals share wells and boreholes providing seasonal water. the women teachers with children who are not native need to tolerate living in this unsafe environment. so, some women teachers decline to take leadership posts in this area. the teachers and heads of schools also indicated that living and working in rural areas exposed women teachers to dangers and rape since the rural area is less secure. a woman teacher observed: imagine the environment of my school (the school’s name is mentioned). it is so harsh. there is only one teacher’s house. sometimes, there is rape at night…walking for more than 10 kilometres fighting for unclean water which is shared with cattle. it is so discouraging. the findings indicate that the cause of rejecting the rural environment was not within women themselves but caused the poor provision of important social services such as water. witchcraft, sorcery, and superstitious beliefs all respondents reported that women teachers were scared of taking posts in rural areas because they feared being bewitched. one of the heads of the schools commented: due to sorcery, women cannot easily accept taking up leadership positions in these rural areas. imagine that sometimes you cannot sleep the whole night. you may hear voices in your room, yet you cannot see anyone making such noises. the reo also had the following views regarding witchcraft practices in rural areas: teachers reject the posts fearing witchcraft practices. many people in this area believe in witchcraft. some teachers complain about finding themselves sleeping outside their houses when they wake up in the morning. regarding the same idea, one of the women teachers had the following observation: working in this area is like a punishment because we sometimes experience things which are not obvious, terrible, and fearful. heads of schools and teachers added that they reported the witchcraft incidences to the top district educational leaders. they also talked to the villagers through the meeting about such behaviours. the villagers were alerted that all teachers would be transferred to urban areas and that their schools would remain without teachers. the teachers reported that the meetings helped to minimise the witchcraft incidents, although they still existed. appointment of school heads the participants reported that the guidelines for appointing heads of schools were unfair. the women teachers and reo revealed that the processes of appointing heads of schools were based on religious belief, nepotism, and sex rather than the teachers’ credentials. one of the women teachers remarked: you know that most leaders appoint and recommend school heads based on their interests, like home mates, friends and same-religion members, rather than one's qualifications. all these are based on the fact that there is no advertisement for the post, no interview, no competition and a straightforward guide. reo had the following comments in support of the argument in question: it is a waste of time and resources to appoint someone who eventually declines to take the headship position. we mainly appoint male teachers who rarely refuse the post. the reo, deo and heads of schools further reported the lack of a specific gender-based appointment policy for appointing heads of schools. they articulated that the current educational training policy of 2014 does not explicitly support an equal representation of women in leadership positions in secondary schools. discussion this section discusses the study's findings based on the barriers to women teachers’ access to leadership posts in rural community secondary schools. literature indicates that women teachers were happier to remain normal teachers than being heads of schools (iqbal et al., 2013). similarly, the current study found that women teachers prefer remaining classroom teachers to leadership positions in community secondary schools. their preference was influenced by culture, traditional orientation, religion, and beliefs regarding women's leadership. this finding supports gender centred perspective that due to culture and socialisation; women are more likely to accept lower-level qualifications (fagenson, 1990a). cultural and patriarchal systems are reported to contribute to women teachers' negative attitudes towards leadership and force them to remain normal teachers. iqbal et al. (2013); luke (2001) revealed that cultural values, religion, and patriarchy affect women to decide in involving in decision-making. the findings revealed that due to culture, women denounce leadership posts at the expense of their families and spouses. haonga (2013) supported that male prejudice stops capable women from participating in leadership. this suggests that culture and women’s socialisation from early childhood contributes to their lower status, lack of self-confidence in making decisions about their lives and career and less involvement in leadership positions. literature revealed that women belief in their ability and capacity of being leaders (mccormick et al., 2002) but they perceived the role of leaders 66 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 as more challenging in terms of effort compared with their male counterparts. however, at early academic-career stages, women are more likely than men to hold low self-efficacy beliefs for leadership (hoyt, 2005) this is probably because of they lack exposure and early socialisations. although women themselves like to involve in leadership culture and patriarchal system block their aspiration from childhood. the implication is that if no deliberate actions are taken to change this belief, women teachers will continue to be underrepresented in community school leadership. the findings further revealed that women accepted that their male counterparts were the breadwinners and that males should be more educated than them and make important decisions as dictated by cultural and hegemonic systems. these findings are similar to oakley (2000) that gender stereotypes and cultural or traditional beliefs task men to provide everything for their families and make decisions while women take care of the family. the findings are also in consonant with the gender perspective, which argues that since childhood, women's socialised to take care of the family and be leaders’ bystanders (fagenson, 1990a). in this study, findings revealed further that women remain in low status because highly job titles; well-paid and educated women were sometimes not getting married as perceived to be stubborn and disrespectful to their husbands. similarly, raburu (2011) revealed that some highly educated women are unmarried as males hesitate to marry them as they are perceived to be too authoritative and irrespective. correspondingly, those who are married are prohibited by their spouses from developing their careers. haonga (2013) reported that tanzania has many "talented women" who could develop their careers to higher levels but fail due to their husbands' prohibition. therefore, this indicates a limited understanding of men for the career development of their wives, which was attributed to cultural factors. being jealous of their wives who go away for studies may constitute further explanations for prohibiting married women from developing their careers. it should be noted that degree qualification is a criterion for appointment to school leadership posts in tanzania. hence lack of such qualifications means a minimal chance for women to be appointed to leadership posts. although the problem still exists, the economic changes have encouraged some men to allow their wives to develop their careers to degree level, hoping they would contribute to the family's income. this slight change is expected to transform the perception of most rural men and women in the future. the findings further revealed that women declined to take up rural leadership positions due to poor transport facilities, lack of safe and clean water, poor housing and witchcraft beliefs which dominated the rural areas. literature indicates that teachers in rural schools work in a more challenging environment and are more demotivated than those in urban schools because of poor living and working conditions and reject the posts (international labour organization, 2016). for example, in tanzania in 2003, about 2,000 out of 9,000 newly qualified teachers refused rural posts (international labour organization, 2016). the findings are consistent with chisikwa (2010) that women rejected leadership posts when appointed, a fact which leads to few women leaders in schools. the literature further supports that many teachers from urban backgrounds may find it challenging to adapt to living in rural areas and often resist being posted to rural schools (international labour organization, 2016). the implication is that if the rural environment is not improved, schools will remain with few leaders and unqualified teachers. previous studies also revealed that rural africa is dominated by poor transport and communication (mlama, 2005). it was revealed that the motorcycles which constitute the dominant means of transport in rural areas, were prone to accidents due to poor roads and sometimes carelessness of the riders. women were the most affected because they frequently travelled to towns to visit their families. mulkeen and chen (2008) also observe that due to poor infrastructure, most women teachers in rural schools spend more time on the way visiting their families who live in town than their male counterparts. this suggests that if women leaders in rural schools will continue to be underrepresented will hamper girls from getting role models and stop them from aspiring for leadership roles. furthermore, the lack of safe and clean water sometimes forces women teachers to walk more than 10 kilometres to find unsafe and unclean water from boreholes. this finding is supported by usaid (2010) in that women had to walk many kilometres to fetch water in some tanzanian districts. the usaid showed that women and young girls were the most affected group. for instance, girls are sometimes raped on the way to fetch water (mbepera, 2015). this is due to the fact that the traditional division of labour in most african societies requires women to fetch water for their families. in tanzania, fetching water is not only a gendered role but also a cultural manifestation of respect by wives for their husbands. mlama (2005, p. 2) is of the opinion that "gender-based constraints to education tend to be more pronounced in rural areas than urban areas due to the fact that the environment in the rural areas is normally more accommodative of gender inequality”. therefore, limited provision of social services in rural areas, such as safe and clean water, prevents women teachers from taking up leadership positions, leading to under-representation in leadership. in addition, witchcraft incidents limit women teachers from taking leadership posts in rural schools. to support the findings, eboiyehi (2017) revealed that the witchcraft practices in sub-saharan africa constitute a major problem as many older women are accused of witchcraft. similarly, loitare (2016) reported that witchcraft is a significant problem which affects many people in rural tanzania. the government of tanzania has the witchcraft law of 1928 under act 25, amended in 2009 and required individuals not to exercise witchcraft, yet witchcraft still persists in tanzania. the explanation is that issues of witchcraft are very contextual and associated with cultural and spiritual beliefs, which need to 67 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 be handled with care as one may not prove its existence. witchcraft is sometimes based on fear, psychological perception, and hearsay, which affect innocent teachers who have devoted their lives to work in rural areas. the issue of witchcraft is dominant in rural areas probably since the majority of people are characterised by low income and low education. indeed, witchcraft may be associated with poverty. the wicked behaviour of the witchcraft hinders the teachers from working with morale and causes some of them to reject the posts in rural schools. the implication is that rural areas would remain with limited number of women teachers and heads of schools if this community does not change behaviours of witching teaching. furthermore, the literature indicates that women are under-represented in educational leadership positions due to sex discrimination during promotion (lindsay et al., 2017; sperandio & kagoda, 2010). equally, the current study revealed that gender bias causes many women teachers to lag behind in leadership during the appointment. this finding implies that the society is dominated by a patriarchal system whereby the children were instilled from childhood that women cannot be good leaders as their main role is to take care of the family. therefore, it appears that those who recommend and appoint the heads of schools still have such prejudice and practice during their appointment. furthermore, the study findings revealed a lack of clear educational policy which guides the appointment of the heads of schools by gender. this may lead to a low number of women teachers in leadership posts. the current educational policy is limited emphasises the appointment of heads of schools by considering gender equality (urt, 2014). this is also informed by bensimon and marshall (1997), who contended that recommending and appointing senior leaders is based on a policy that does not consider gender equality in leadership, leading to unfair recommendations and unequal appointments. the lack of clear appointment policy and guidelines means that those who appoint leaders are likely biased due to the patriarchal system and culture dominated in some areas of tanzania. the implication is that gender inequality in rural community schools' leadership will continue to exist. due to the lack of clear gender policies in the appointment of school leadership, findings indicate that educational officers hesitate to appoint women to leadership since some of them reject the post when appointed. the decision of educational officers to ignore appointing women teachers to leadership positions hoping that they would reject the positions, may be inappropriate. the leaders should take the responsibility of encouraging women to take the post and provide quality services in rural areas. it was observed that those who appoint leaders to leadership positions are mostly men and have a negative attitude toward women leaders, thus appointing those who share the same interest. these findings in question are similar to those of sperandio and kagoda (2010), who revealed that male domination of top leadership discourages women from seeking leadership positions. this is also supported by gaus (2011), who reported that women's under-representation in leadership is due to recruitment procedures dictated by corruption, ethnicity, nepotism, and discrimination. generally, the bias and discriminatory practices in the appointment of the heads of schools in tanzania are caused by early socialisation, patriarchy, and culture, which consider women's roles to be that of taking care of the family. conclusion despite the individual barriers which result from culture and socialisation, and which keep women classroom teachers with low-level educational qualifications, the current educational policy and gender bias in appointment limit qualified women teachers from acquiring leadership positions. cultural beliefs such as witchcraft also affect women’s desire to take leadership positions in the context of this study, as they were physically and psychologically tortured. environmental factors such as poor transport and the lack of water caused women to hesitate to take leadership responsibilities in rural areas. although women's rejection of rural posts sounds like an individual factor, the underlying cause is government, which provides limited social services to rural areas and cultural values and beliefs that affect women to take posts in such areas. in other words, women teachers face obstacles in all spheres at the family, societal and organisational levels, thus discouraging them from involving in leadership positions. although individual, societal, and organisational factors are interconnected and linked with women's under-representation in leadership positions, the hegemonic culture, norms, and values are the most influential factors at a deep level. this implies that the culture, social beliefs, and practices affect the individual women teachers in terms of accepting posts in rural areas. furthermore, culture, values and norms affect the rules and regulations for recommending and appointing the heads of schools. society has low expectations of women, a fact that influences the minds of those who practise bias along gender lines in appointing school leaders. similarly, society influences women to be less confident. this makes them put more emphasis on the family, thus ending up occupying low inferior positions. therefore, the holistic view of society, organisation and individuality should be used to understand obstacles that cause women to be under-represented in school leadership in rural tanzania. consequently, this study adds new knowledge to the existing literature on the obstacles which hinder women from accessing school leadership posts in rural areas in tanzania. issues of the poor working environment and witchcraft beliefs are new in the literature concerning women's underrepresentation in leadership. recommendation for action in consideration of the findings of the study. the study has several recommendations for addressing gender equality in 68 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 workplaces and for further investigation by other researchers. in this light, the study recommends the following: mainstreaming gender in policies there is a need for educational policies to consider gender equality during the appointment of senior leaders of community secondary schools in tanzania. through the ministry of education, science and technology, the government should review the education and training policy of 2014 to stipulate gender equality in recommending and appointing school heads. sensitisation of rural communities about the importance of gender equality the government should sensitise rural communities, which constitute the home of most tanzanians. the sensitisation programmes should be embedded in the education curriculum so that children can develop a sense of gender equality in their childhood. people in rural communities should also be sensitised about gender equality from the family, societal and organisational levels. this should be done through awareness campaigns such as workshops, seminars, and media like radio, which reach the majority of rural dwellers. recommendation for improvement of infrastructure and social services through the ministry of education, science and technology, the government should improve infrastructures and social services in rural areas by providing water, better housing, good and reliable transport facilities, security, and power. recommendation on witchcraft although witchcraft is still a myth, serious actions should be taken by the community leaders and local government against the suspected witches in rural areas. sensitisation programs and warnings should be provided to rural people regarding the impact of oppressing teachers through witchcraft. continuing oppressing teachers through witchcraft practices will render the teaching and learning activities in rural community secondary schools ineffective. the investigation should continually be made, and solutions should be found by local leaders and government officials. recommendations for further studies this study was limited to community secondary schools in rural areas. a similar study should be conducted in primary and secondary schools in both rural and urban areas. in addition, since the current study was mainly conducted on women teachers and leaders, further study should involve male teachers to get their perception of women teachers' involvement in educational matters. this will allow researchers to achieve more conclusive results concerning the obstacles women teachers face in attaining leadership positions. limitations of the study despite achieving the aim of this research, some limitations were unavoidable. firstly, the researcher is a woman in the field of educational leadership who is knowledgeable about women in leadership. this implies that her personal beliefs and feelings could be reflected in the study. however, professionalism was strictly observed in the whole data collection and analysis process on the assumption that she was new to the subject matter. secondly, the findings of this study may not represent the experience of the other areas due to differences in culture, beliefs, and organisational structure. however, the findings significantly contribute to understanding women's leadership in community secondary schools and provide the baseline for similar studies elsewhere. references adem. 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(2001). flukes, opportunities and planned interventions: factors affecting women’s decisions to become school administrators educational. educational administration quarterly, 37(4), 4622–502. 71 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 29, number 4 may 03, 2009 issn 1093-7099 wake up sleeping beauty: strong heroines for today’s world dr. tricia kuon dr. holly weimar abstract fairy tales have been described as the remains of ideas and social practices of the past (yearsley, 1924). as thumbprints of history, fairy tales teach about the cultures of people while entertaining and explaining the world to the next generation (yolen, 1992; zeece, 1996). while the tales are valued as a kind of historical archive and a great source of entertainment, researchers have found that fairy tales have an impact in shaping the ways children view the world. bettelheim (1976) stated that fairy tales are instrumental in stimulating the imagination of children. he and others maintain that fairy tales answer important questions about the world and how it works. these perceptions of how the world works are influential and long-lasting because the impressionable child will make judgments concerning what is admirable in terms of acceptable behaviors and character traits of people based on what they learn in fairy tales (hurley, 2005; storr, 1986; yolen, 1992). key words: women, fairy tales, history, leadership citation: kuon, t., & weimar, h. (2009). wake up sleeping beauty: strong heroines for today’s world. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(4). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/. http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/� advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 2 introduction the realization that fairy tales may influence how children believe the world works has led to substantial study of specific portrayals of characteristics, themes, and morals learned from fairy tales. one area of focus has been on gender portrayals, specifically in regard to portrayals of women in fairy tales. this focus brings up several questions: what do fairy tales teach about women? what characteristics are considered to be valuable for a fairy tale heroine? how could gender portrayals of women in fairy tales have an impact on training women to be leaders? interestingly, parsons (2004) found that fairy tales, even newer adaptations, portray women in almost exclusively traditional roles. heroines are often pictured cooking, cleaning, singing, tending to children, talking to animals, dancing and day dreaming primarily about what life will be like when a handsome prince arrives. beauty is by far the most common and revered attribute of the fairy tale female but the traits of patience and passivity are also highly regarded (lyons, 1978; yolen, 1977; stone, 1975). if the majority of female characters are most prized for their beauty, ability to clean, and the fact that they are passive, meaning they are not in control of their lives in large and small ways, what will children who are inundated by fairy tale images in print and media learn about appropriate feminine behavior? in short, children will learn that beauty is the most important trait a girl can possess. furthermore, it is best for a girl or woman to be fairly helpless because amazingly good things happen to sweet, quiet, demure fairy tale princesses. indeed, most of the strong, capable, assertive women in fairy tales are also evil as is the case of countless stepmothers including those in snow white and the seven dwarves, cinderella, and sleeping beauty. usually, these evil women end up being punished severely which further sends the message to girls that passivity is a good quality in a female but assertiveness is definitely a bad quality. in terms of teaching girls to be leaders who will grow up to be women in leadership and teaching boys that it is acceptable and admirable for girls to be leaders, it is important to provide children with examples of fairy tale female characters who are adventurous, capable, and strong. by sharing tales that depict capable and clever females in conjunction with traditional fairy tales which tend to portray females in more traditional ways, we can broaden the perceptions of children and help them to value and accept strength and leadership abilities as qualities to be sought for both genders. fortunately, a new group of modern tales, sometimes called fractured fairy tales, has emerged, many of which feature heroic females (crew, 2002). the fractured tales depict female protagonists who are, overall, more capable, clever, and adventurous than traditional fairy tale females. following is a description of five fractured tales that are excellent examples of stories featuring stronger, less traditional heroines. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 3 often, fractured tales take a familiar story and retell it in a new way. such is the case in cinder edna by ellen jackson. cinder edna is a tale with two stories in one. cinder ella and cinder edna are friends with different approaches to life. while both women are forced to work for a stepmother and stepsisters, beautiful ella plans to escape her life of drudgery by marrying a wealthy man. cinder edna, however, is a new breed of fairy tale heroine. although she is beautiful, she is said to be strong and spunky. she knows a few good jokes and has learned a great deal from doing housework including how to make 16 different types of tuna casserole. when invited to the ball, ella and edna have different reactions. ella cries until her fairy godmother appears and magically provides transportation. edna, not one to believe in magic, rides a bus to the castle. while at the ball, both women meet princes who happen to be brothers. ella falls in love with randolph, a dashingly handsome man who, when asked what his duties as a prince involve reviewing the troops and sitting around on the throne looking brave and wise. in contrast, edna is drawn to prince rupert who is not particularly handsome but who does have great depth of character; he runs a recycling plant and a home for orphaned kittens. although both couples marry, the tale hints that only one couple lives happily ever after. another example of a familiar tale retold is sleeping ugly by jane yolen. because physical beauty is often the single most defining characteristic of fairy tale heroines, in an effort to focus on the fact that there are traits other than beauty that are praiseworthy in women, fractured tales often feature plain and even ugly heroines who have personality attributes that make the characters likeable. the heroine of sleeping ugly is plain jane, an orphan whose hair is not attractive, whose nose is long and turned up. either way the story goes, plain jane would have just been plain. however, jane is said to love animals and is kind to strange women. in the same forest where jane lives, a mean and nasty-tempered princess named miserella also resides. although miserella is beautiful on the outside, inside she mean and horrid. in a humorous twist, a good fairy, plain jane, and miserella meet and end up in a 100-year sleep. when a prince happens by, he begins to do his princely duty which includes kissing sleeping women. he first kisses the fairy, then he kisses jane. when jane awakens to see the prince, she loves him and says that she wishes he would love her. hearing her wish and knowing the goodness of her heart, the fairy grants jane’s wish so jane and the prince live happily ever after. all concerned decide it would be best to let miserella continue to sleep. sometimes fractured tales will use familiar fairy tale motifs and tell a new story that is fairy tale-like. the paper bag princess by robert munsch is such a story which features a spunky princess named elizabeth. elizabeth is also beautiful, intelligent, and planning to marry a handsome prince named ronald. when a fierce dragon smashes elizabeth’s castle, burns her lovely clothes, and abducts prince ronald, elizabeth puts on her paper bag, the only unburned thing she can find to wear, and goes quickly to rescue prince ronald. realizing that she cannot overpower the dragon, elizabeth relies on her intelligence and wit to save ronald. surprisingly, once freed, ronald is not very grateful to elizabeth. in fact, he criticizes elizabeth’s bag-clad, charred-hair appearance. elizabeth responds by telling ronald that his clothes are pretty, and his hair is neat, but he is a bum. the two do not marry after all which does not bother elizabeth who is seen on the last page of the book still dressed in her bag dancing away into the sunset. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 4 another way of fracturing a fairy tale is when an author writes a sequel to a well-known story. rumpelstiltskin’s daughter by diane stanley first retells the story of rumpelstiltskin: once there was a miller’s daughter who got into a heap of trouble. it was all because her father liked to make up stories and pass them off as truth. unfortunately, the story he told was that his daughter could spin straw into gold, which, of course, she could not. even more unfortunately, he told this whopper in the hearing of a palace servant who rushed right off to tell the king. since the king loved nothing in this world more than gold, he had the miller’s daughter hauled up to the palace immediately and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. he put her in a room full of straw and ordered her to spin it into gold by morning, or die. magically, a little man named rumpelstiltskin shows up each morning at 3:00 a.m. to spin the straw into gold for the miller’s daughter, meredith. on the third night, rumpelstiltskin told meredith that he wants her first-born child in exchange for spinning the straw into gold, because he desperately wants to be a father. meredith decides that she prefers rumpelstiltskin to the king so she marries rumpelstiltskin. the two are happily married and have a daughter who is bright and clever. when the king learns that she is the daughter of the man who could spin straw into gold, he quickly has her brought to his castle. although she knows she can call on her father to help her, rumpelstiltskin’s daughter decided instead to carry out a plan to change the king’s life perspective and transform his kingdom for the good of he and all who live in the kingdom. another common practice of fractured fairy tales is to tell a familiar story placing the woman in the male’s role and the man in the woman’s role. the cowboy and the black-eyed pea by tony johnston is an adaptation of the princess and the pea set on a texas ranch. farethee well, the tale’s heroine, is warned by her father shortly before his death that when he dies and she inherits the ranch, cowboys and men pretending to be cowboys, will flock to the ranch in hopes of marrying her and her fortune. her dad wisely instructed farethee well to find a real cowboy who would love her for herself and not just for her cattle. her daddy also told farethee well the secret of recognizing a real cowboy by his sensitivity. he said that at the slightest touch, the real cowboy would bruise. given her father’s advice, farethee well decided that the best way to determine if a man is a real cowboy is to slip a black-eyed pea under his saddle blanket and send him out on the range. if he is unbothered by the pea, she will know he is a fake. as predicted, several fakes do show up on the ranch sporting big mustaches and neck scarves. when the real cowboy appeared, the unseen black-eyed pea caused him great pain. even riding atop 100 saddle blankets, the real cowboy’s sensitivity was apparent and farethee well fell in love. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 5 due to the always present popularity of traditional fairy tale literature and the increasing interest in fractured tales, new titles similar to those just detailed are published each year. just as traditional tales have influenced the way children perceive and understand the world and how it works, exposure to fractured tales can balance and broaden these learned perceptions and teach children the essential messages that girls can be strong yet sweet, adventurous and nurturing, capable, clever, and caring. valuing all of these characteristics as models of femininity to strive towards will empower and lead to great things for girls including high self-esteem, a desire to succeed in all areas of life, and the knowledge that girls can grow to be great women in leadership. more fractured fairy tale titles we suggest other modern fairy tales as indicated in table 1. these tales place women in a not so vulnerable position with men and shed a different light on gender within stories. perhaps these fractured fairy tales will be told in the future alongside old ones to disrupt traditional stereotypical thought related to women’s roles. table 1. fractured fairy tales atwood, m. (1995). princess prunella and the purple peanut. ny: workman publishing company. banks, l. r. (1992). farthest-away mountain. ny: harpercollins. berenzy, a. (1995). rapunzel. ny: henry holt & company. chin, c. (1997). china’s bravest girl: the legend of hua mu lan. ny: children’s book press. cole, b. (1997). princess smartypants. ny: penguin young readers group. huck, c. (1994). princess furball. ny: harpercollins. kellogg, s. (1995). sally ann thunder ann whirlwind crockett. ny: harpercollins. lansky, b. (2000). girls to the rescue, vol. 7. ny: meadowbrook press. lowell, s. (2000). little red cowboy hat. ny: henry holt & company. lowell, s. (2004). dusty locks and the three bears. ny: holt, henry books for young readers. lurie, a. (2005). clever gretchen and other forgotten tales. ny: iuniverse, incorporated. ragan, k. (2000). fearless girls, wise women, and beloved sisters: heroines in folktales from around the world. ny: norton, w. w. & company. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 6 san souci, r. (2004). the well at the end of the world. ny: chronicle books llc. stanley, d. (2001). saving sweetness. ny: penguin young readers group. yolen, j. (2000). not one damsel in distress: world folktales for strong girls. ny: harcourt. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 7 references applebee, a. (1978). the child’s concept of story. chicago: university of chicago press. bee-gates, d. (2007). i want it now: navigating childhood in a materialistic word. new york: palgrave macmillan. bettelheim, b. (1981). the uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales. new york: vintage books. chukovski, k. (1963). from two to five. us: unversity of california press. crew, h. s. (2002). spinning new tales from traditional texts: donna jo napoli and the rewriting of fairy tale. children’s literature in education, 33(2), 77-95. favat. (1977). child and tale: origins of interest. gould, j. (2005). spinning straw into gold: what fairy tales reveal about the transformations in a woman’s life. new york: random house. hurley, d. l. (2005). seeing white: children of color and the disney fairy tale princess. journal of negro education, 74(3), 221-233. lieberman, m. (1972). someday my prince will come: female acculturation through the fairy tale. college english, 34, 383-95. luthi, m. (1976). once upon a time: on the nature of fairy tales. us: indiana university press. opies, p. & i. (1974). the classic fairy tales. london: oxford university press. parsons, l. t. (2004). ella evolving: cinderella stories and construction of gender-appropriate behavior. children’s literature in education, 35(2), 135-154. perez-sable, m. (2005). discovering the united states through children’s folk literature. social studies, 96(2), 86-93. sale, r. (1978). fairy tales and after: from snow white to e.b. white. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. stone, k. (1996). things walt disney never told us: women in folklore. austin, tx: university of texas press. storr, c. (1986). folk and fairy tales. children’s literature in education, 17(1), 63-71. tatar, m. m. (1992). off with their heads!: fairy tales and the culture of childhood. princeton, nj: princeton university press. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 8 yearsley, m. (1968). the folklore of fairy tale. london: watts and company. yolen, j. (1977). america’s cinderella. children’s literature in education, 8, 21-29. yolen, j. (2000). touch magic. new york: august house. yolen, j. (1992). introduction in once upon a midlife: classic stories and mythic tales to illuminate the middle years. new york: putnam. zipes, j. d. (2006). why fairy tales stick: the evolution and relevance of a genre. new york: routledge. biographies dr. tricia kuon is an assistant professor in the library science department at sam houston state university in huntsville, texas. tricia’s ph.d. is in curriculum and instruction with emphasis in literature for children from the university of wyoming. she was an elementary school librarian for several years and currently teaches library science courses at sam houston state university. dr. holly weimar is a faculty member of the library science department at sam houston state university in huntsville, texas. holly’s ed. d. is in curriculum and instruction with emphasis in teacher education from the university of houston. she was an elementary and intermediate school librarian for many years and is currently teaching courses in library science at sam houston state university. volume 41, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, and brad bizzell assistant editor: jordan donop 51 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 advancing women in leadership vol. 41, pp. 51-63, 2022 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper gender and organizational culture: perceptions of leadership style and effectiveness nicole l. cundiff nicole l. cundiff: boise state university, college of business and economics, nicolecundiff@boisestate.edu accepted october 24, 2022 the purpose of this paper was to demonstrate changes in the perception of effective leadership as it relates to perceptions of female leaders. estimations of effectiveness were compared between female and male leaders, while taking into consideration organizational culture. scenario methodology was used to manipulate leader gender, leadership styles, and organizational culture through an experimental online survey. findings, in part 1 of the study, show that female leaders were viewed as more transformational than male leaders with no significant differences in perceptions of leadership effectiveness. leadership style, however, mediated relations between leader gender and perceptions of leadership effectiveness. in part 2, organizational culture was shown to increase the associations between gender roles and leadership style with perceptions of effectiveness. female leaders may over time be perceived as effective as male leaders, if the present shift in effective leadership styles continue to align with feminine gender roles and organizational cultures embrace collectivistic practices. keywords: leadership style, leadership effectiveness, gender, organizational culture, perceptions of leadership, women in leadership despite progress for women in leadership roles, there remains a relative dearth of female leaders that endured obstacles on their path to being accepted and valued as a leader. the barriers women face in reaching top levels of management have been attributed to stereotypes that women do not possess the requisite characteristics needed for leadership (heilman, 2001; schein 2001). nonetheless changes can be found in the number of women taking on leadership positions (e.g., see www.catalyst.org), and according to duehr and bono (2006), this may be partly explained by the shift in effective leadership being defined more by transformational than transactional behaviors. transformational leadership conforms to attributes traditionally ascribed to women or communal gender roles (eagly & karau, 2002). therefore, definitions of leadership effectiveness could be shifting in a way that is more congruent to feminine gender roles. in this article, we examine two parts to a study that looks at gender issues in leadership. the first part examines the paradigmatic shift in leadership effectiveness perceptions that correspond to prescriptive feminine qualities (duehr & bono, 2006; eagly & carli, 2003; 2007; furst & reeves, 2008; powell, butterfield, & parent, 2002). in the second part of the study, we consider perceptions of male and female leaders in the context of organizational culture. both studies use scenario methodology, which adds to the literature for replicated outcomes using novel methods (e.g., assessing transformational leadership as more effective than transactional leadership). these studies also add to the literature when considering congruency of leadership styles with organization culture, as it relates to perceptions of leadership effectiveness. leadership styles management theories have undergone many changes over the last fifty years, and they continue to be shaped by dominant socio-cultural values that are impacting organizations through advances in technology and the process of globalization. a paradigm shift is evident in leadership theory, which moves from emphasizing transactional qualities being defined as effective to transformational ones (bass, 1985, 1990; avolio, bass, & jung, 1999). the following details this shift in leadership effectiveness. in historical studies, transactional leadership has been found to be highly effective across many situations (bass, 1985; bass & riggio, 2006). this type of leadership “appealed to subordinates’ self-interest by establishing exchange relationships with them” (p. 815, eagly & carli, 2003). for instance, effective managers would arrange to give bonuses to employees, aiming to increase their productivity or output. in the literature taskoriented leadership style, also known as initiating structure, has many similar or overlapping characteristics with transactional leadership and is also strongly related to organizational productivity (judge, piccolo, & ilies, 2004). activities within mailto:nicolecundiff@boisestate.edu 52 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 task-oriented leadership includes the leader letting group members know what is expected of them, deciding what shall be done and how, assigning group members to tasks, and maintaining standards of performance (bass, 1990; judge et al., 2004). on the other hand, transformational leadership occurs when leaders are able to motivate followers towards organizational goals and increase followers’ sense of group identity over self (seltzer & bass, 1990). characteristics of transformational leadership include individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence or charisma (avolio, bass, & jung, 1999; bass, 1990). transformational leaders personalize their interactions with followers, and therefore such leaders are successful at obtaining commitment from them (avolio et al., 1999). relationships with employees should be highly salient to the transformational leader, and relationship-oriented leadership or consideration can be defined as the amount of importance leaders place in having good interactions with their subordinates, by expressing gratitude and showing respect and concern for their follower’s wellbeing (judge et al., 2004). many characteristics between transformational and relationshiporiented leadership overlap, such as strong associations with employee satisfaction and motivation (judge et al., 2004), and duehr and bono (2006) found a strong positive relationship (r = .89, p < .01) between the constructs. research in the early 21st century generally shows that transformational leadership is perceived as more effective than transactional leadership; although the impacts of these different leadership styles on actual organizational outcomes is unclear (judge et al., 2004; paris, howell, dorfman, & hanges, 2009; parry & proctorthomson, 2002; yukl, o’donnell, & taber, 2009). perceptions how employees perceive a leader is critical to the leader’s ability to be effective. leadership perceptions are implicit or unconscious processes that occur automatically when followers interact with a leader (lord, brown, & freiberg, 1999; lord, brown, harvey, & hall, 2001; lord, foti, & de vader, 1984). followers possess mental representations of leaders or prototypes, which are not rigid depictions of characteristics a person must have to be considered a member, but are ‘fuzzy categorizations’ that can be shaped by context and demographic characteristics of the leader (hogg, 2001; lord et al., 1999). therefore, when subordinates encounter a new leader within their organization, for instance, they compare this person to their leadership prototype, subconsciously taking in information about the leader’s gender and the organization’s culture. the closer the leader matches followers’ prototypes the more likely they will be perceived as a leader (lord et al., 1999). influences of gender according to gender role congruity theory, female leaders are expected to be communal (i.e. being cooperative and nurturing) and conform to feminine gender roles, whereas male leaders are expected to be agentic (i.e. being dominant or ambitious) and conform to masculine gender roles (eagly & karau, 2002). however, prototypes of leaders have been found to change with environmental fluctuation in social expectations (hogg, 2001; hogue & lord, 2007; lord et al., 2001). for instance, duehr and bono (2006) found the emphasis on agentic and task-oriented prototypes for successful middle managers decreased, while the emphasis on transformational and communal leadership prototypes increased, using a modified descriptive index (schein, 1973) over a 15-year timespan. they also found transformational and relationship-oriented leadership prototypes to have a strong positive correlation with communal characteristics (r = .60, p < .01; r = .68, p < .01). these changes in what constitutes a prototypical manager seem to match prescriptive feminine gender roles. extending this thought, duehr and bono (2006) also found that managers rated “women in general” and “female managers” as being more transformational than “men in general” or “male managers.” similarly, eagly and johannesen-schmidt (2001) conducted a meta-analysis of 47 studies, examining sex differences in the transformational and transactional leadership styles. they found female leaders were rated as more transformational than male leaders on three of four transformational subscales (idealized influence, inspirational motivation, and individualized consideration), as well as on one subscale of transactional leadership style (contingent reward). whereas, male leaders exceeded female leaders on the transactional leadership subscales of active management-byexception, passive management-by-exception, and laissez faire leadership. according to these studies, female leaders may be more likely considered transformational in their leadership style than male leaders (eagly & johannesen-schmidt, 2001). additionally, koenig, eagly, mitchell, and ristikari (2011) conducted a meta-analysis of three leadership paradigms examining changes in gender-based leadership perceptions. the three paradigms investigated were schein's "think manager think male" paradigm, powell and butterfield's agenticcommunal paradigm, and shinar's masculinity-femininity paradigm. these historical paradigms were then related to eagly and karau's theory of gender role congruity. they found that social role theories allow flexibility in gender roles in relation to leadership roles based on changes in social recognition of these roles across time. in other words, it is possible that prototypes of both women and leaders are becoming more congruent over time, as leadership characteristics are becoming less agentic and more communal. indeed, implicit leadership theories predict that the time for changing leadership representations to incorporate female leaders may be long but inevitable (lord et al., 2001). although conceptually leadership is now starting to align with communal characteristics, the changing face of management currently frames gender “equality” for middle organizational layers only and has yet to be evident in upper-echelon positions (annabi & lebovitz, 2018; badura, grijalva, newman, yan, & jeon, 2018; catalyst, 2020; cho, park, han, & ho, 2019; duehr & bono, 53 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 2006). research has shown that evaluations of female leaders are partly based on gender roles, leading to biased judgments and negative reactions when these women do not match contextually activated expectations of leadership roles (eagly & karau, 2002; jago, & vroom, 1982; martins, milliken, wiesenfeld, & salgado, 2003). women may not be facing the same degree of stereotyping and discrimination that they have in the past but obstacles still exist (annabi & lebovitz, 2018; badura et al., 2018; cho et al., 2019; duehr & bono, 2006; holliday, siker, chapman, jagsi, bitterman et al., 2018; post, 2015). for example, garciaretamero and lopez-zafra (2006), found that female managers in non-gender role congruent industries are more likely to experience bias than female managers in gender congruent industries. very little has changed with the move from the 20th into the 21st century in regards to female gender roles, therefore prototypes of leadership must be changing by incorporating more communal characteristics while maintaining some agentic qualities (koenig et al., 2011). on the one hand this will mean that women face harder challenges than men in being perceived as effective leaders. on the other hand, because the view of effective leadership is shifting, women may be perceived as more prototypical in leadership positions than they have in the past. part 1. gender roles based on past studies, we know that female leaders have been prescribed to be communal, which corresponds with the transformational style of leadership more so than the transactional style of leadership (eagly & carli, 2007; hogg, 2001; eagly & johnson, 1990). similar to past studies, we expect female leaders to be rated as more transformational than male leaders, and in the case of this study, using scenario methodology extends the research in this area if the relationship is confirmed with this novel methodology. we also predict that female leaders will be rated as more effective than male leaders due to predicted associations between transformational leadership and effectiveness. the following hypotheses reflect this: hypothesis 1. female leaders will be rated as more prototypical than male leaders on transformational attributes. hypothesis 2. female leaders will be rated as more effective than male leaders. hypothesis 3: perceptions of transformational leadership will mediate the relationship between leader gender and leader effectiveness. for comparison purposes, the following hypotheses look at the mediation effects on effectiveness for male leaders in conjunction with the transactional leadership style. transactional leadership style is not expected to mediate leadership effectiveness, as it recently does not have as high an association with leadership effectiveness as transformational leadership. hypothesis 4: male leaders will be perceived as more transactional than female leaders. hypothesis 5: perceptions of transactional leadership will not mediate the relationship between leader gender and leadership effectiveness. method participants participants were working adults who responded to an e-mailed request for research participation. an announcement of the study was sent out with a link to an on-line survey to business-related or professional listservs, such as the american evaluation association, cio council xml community of practice, education and behavior science, and gender and diversity in organizations mailing lists; among others. participants voluntarily selected a link that was embedded in an email they received through their respective list serve. respondents were selected for inclusion in the study if they were employed for an organization based in the u.s. or if they resided in the u.s and worked more than 20 hours a week. five hundred and sixty-eight participants started the survey, and 133 did not finish, giving a completion rate of 76.6%. twenty-seven participants were removed due to non-u.s. residency or employment and 15 due to unemployment. further, one respondent took less than 3 minutes to complete the study and was removed. four cases were deleted due to multiple attempts at participating; identified through computer ip address. the first completed survey was retained from this respondent. overall, 388 participants were included in the final analysis. the mean age of the participants was 45 years old (sd = 12.7) and the majority were women (64.5%). the composition of participants’ ethnic background was 80.2% european american, 4.6% african american, and 3.2% “other.” of the participants, 65.5% reported that they received some form of advanced higher-education degree, 20.1% had received a bachelor’s degree, 9.4% had some college, 3.2% had achieved some other type of educational certificate, and 1.9% had a high-school diploma. with regard to employment status, 90.7% of the participants were employed by an organization, 6.9% were self-employed, and 2.4% reported other, and they worked on average 44.1 (sd = 10.1) hours per week. most participants reported being from the education industry (52.1%) and 84.4% reported having been a supervisor before. further, out of the participants that had a supervisor, 56.6% reported their supervisor to be male. overall, participants came from a variety of industries, organizations, and occupations. procedures participants were randomly assigned on the basis of their birth month to one of four conditions in a 2 (gender of leader) x 2 (leadership style: transformational vs. transactional) betweensubjects design. participants were instructed to imagine that they 54 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 worked for the organization depicted in the scenario, which portrayed a first encounter with the company’s new ceo. participants then read the scenario, completed the measures, and answered demographic questions. there are various issues that correspond with this method of data collection, such as reduced experimental control, potential multiple responses, and increased dropout rates. based on a review of the literature, birnbaum (2004) suggested different steps a researcher should go through to decrease potential bias and increase validity for on-line surveys. the following controls were based on birnbaum’s suggestions: participants were not allowed to go back to previous survey pages once they submitted a page; only one respondent per computer was allowed to complete the survey; no rewards were given for participating; the surveys were timed and exceedingly short response times were removed from the analysis; and the survey invitation email included a password that was necessary in order to participate. materials one male and one female picture were used to manipulate leader gender. the pictures were selected based on similarity of attractiveness, intelligence, and age from pilot study data. the tone of the leader was varied to represent either a transformational leadership style or a transactional leadership style as follows: transformational leadership style (emphasis added to highlight condition-relevant manipulations). coming into this place and seeing the team inspires me to imagine what we can all do together to make this company great. our company is driven by all of our work, which will exceed expectations when everyone works together as a fully functioning business unit. therefore, we should all get to know even more about each other, since everyone's skills in this unit are important when put together. with this understanding, we should get a sense of how to challenge each other to perform the work to our greatest combined abilities. the recent ceo of this company reported that this generation of workers is very talented and it shows in your group evaluations, and therefore, if we ever have any problems, we should all come together to make decisions about the problems that we face. transactional leadership style as i come into this place, i am getting ideas of the things that you need to do to become successful individuals and keep this company great. i am interested in knowing more about your background and what you can bring to this organization. my job will be to get you to excel for the good of yourself and the company. therefore, i am going to work hard to help enhance your knowledge, skills, and abilities so that you exceed even my expectations. i believe the best way to motivate and challenge people is to reward them for the amount of effort they put into the job. if you have problems with the new tasks that you are assigned come see me, and i can help you to make decisions regarding the problems that you face. measures leadership prototypes leadership prototypicality was measured, using a version of the schein descriptive index (sdi; schein, 1973) that was enhanced by duehr and bono (2006). the revised sdi is comprised of five scales derived from duehr and bono’s analyses, giving the following subscales: agentic (7 items, r = .78; e.g. aggressive, ambitious, and self-confident), communal (7 items, r = .73; e.g. helpful, kind, and sympathetic), transformational (13 items, r = .94; e.g. considerate, encouraging, and sincere), taskoriented (10 items, r = .80; e.g. competitive, independent, and objective), and relationship-oriented (10 items, r = .87; e.g. compassionate, inclusive, and sociable), and consisted of 47 items. table 1 resulting leadership prototype items component 1 2 3 1. cooperative 2. aware of the feelings of others 3. attends to the needs of others 4. encouraging 5. compassionate 6. supportive 7. good listener 8. considerate 9. considers others' ideas 10. kind 11. inclusive 12. shows appreciation 13. understanding 14. open-minded 15. helpful 16. inspiring 17. sympathetic 18. sociable 19. optimistic 20. fair .786 .758 .747 .746 .744 .743 .739 .735 .721 .712 .702 .666 .653 .649 .649 .614 .611 .608 .584 .547 -.068 -.152 -.153 .198 -.156 -.083 .001 -.081 -.053 -.179 -.205 -.030 -.225 -.123 .119 .210 -.265 .017 .221 .078 .039 .203 .172 .100 .117 .266 .210 .232 .076 .233 .091 .305 .363 .384 .104 .075 .159 .176 .152 .181 1. assertive 2. ambitious 3. energetic 4. aggressive 5. decisive 6. self-confident 7. submissivea 8. competitive 9. passivea -.132 -.086 .228 -.266 -.013 -.001 .049 -.213 .007 .809 .770 .766 .735 .713 .696 -.682 .673 -.661 .177 .146 .041 .006 .222 .257 -.142 .032 -.133 1. knowledgeable 2. logical 3. intelligent 4. self-controlled 5. well-informed 6. skilled in business matters 7. consistent 8. speedy recovery from emotional disturbances .253 .218 .273 .153 .333 .273 .226 .026 .220 .322 .296 .095 .206 .402 .199 .277 .715 .708 .688 .676 .623 .600 .589 .573 55 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 because duehr and bono’s (2006) enhanced sdi is fairly new, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis to examine the subscales that would emerge from the data set, which revealed six factors using the “eigenvalues over one” rule of thumb; however, a scree plot depicted only three relevant factors. a further examination into the six factors revealed only three interpretive factors, with remaining factors depicting multiple cross-loaded items and relatively few items with high loadings (i.e. two items or less). after removing cross-loading items, the factor analysis with a varimax rotation was re-conducted specifying a three-factor solution. the first factor contained 20 high-loading items consisting of communal, relationship-oriented, and transformational adjectives. the resulting scale was labeled the transformational prototype (α = .95) that we used for this study, see table 1 for item loadings. the second factor consisted of 9 items and reflected agentic and task-oriented items. this resulting scale was labeled the transactional prototype (α = .88). finally, the last factor had eight items that reflected emotional control. the reliability of this subscale was acceptable (α = .88), but because this dimension of leadership was not central to our research questions, it was not analyzed in the current study. effectiveness leadership effectiveness was measured with four questions, “the new leader would…” (a) “…be effective in representing you to higher authorities”; (b) “be effective in meeting your jobrelated needs”; (c) “be effective in meeting organizational requirements”; and (d) “overall, lead a group that is effective.” the measure was rated on a 5-point scale ranging from 1-not at all to 5frequently, if not always. items were borrowed from awamleh and gardner (1999) that originally used items from the multifactor leadership questionnaire (mlq-5x/short form) perceptions of leader effectiveness (ef) subscale (α = .87). results descriptive statistics means, standard deviations, and inter-correlations among the study variables are provided in table 2. overall, leaders were rated as moderately effective and were perceived as more transactional than transformational. however, perceptions of leadership effectiveness were strongly and significantly related to perceptions of the transformational prototype (r = .58, p <. 001), and less strongly but still significantly related to perceptions of the transactional prototype (r = .14, p = .009). there was a non-significant trend for female leaders to be perceived as more effective than male leaders [mmale = 3.49, sd = .85; mfemale = 3.66, sd = .87; t(df = 366) = -1.86, p = .064]. female leaders were perceived as more transformational than male leaders [mmale = 3.51, sd = .69; mfemale = 3.74; sd = .64; t(df = 331) = -3.16, p = .002]; whereas male leaders were perceived as more transactional than female leaders, [mmale = 4.10, sd = .67; mfemale = 3.94, sd = .69; t(df = 344) = 2.21, p = .028]. although female leaders were perceived as more transformational than male leaders, and transformational leadership was strongly correlated to perceptions of leadership effectiveness, female leaders were not perceived to be significantly more effective than male leaders. table 2 means, standard deviations, and correlations note. ***p<.001; **p<.01; *p<.05; +p<.10 mediation analysis the series of hypotheses 1-3 tested the general hypothesis that female leaders would be perceived as more transformational and thus more effective than male leaders and that perceptions of transformational prototypicality would mediate the effect of leader gender on leadership effectiveness ratings. as indicated by the results, female leaders (regardless of leadership style) were perceived as more transformational than male leaders and there was a trend for female leaders to be perceived as more effective, but this was not found to be statistically significant. table 3 mediation analyses 56 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 hypothesis 4 and 5 examined whether perceptions of the transactional prototype would mediate associations between leader gender and leadership effectiveness. we predicted that it would not. although male leaders were perceived as more transactional than female leaders, as reported above, perceptions of transactional leadership did not mediate gender differences in leadership effectiveness (see table 3, analysis ii). indeed, when both leader gender and transactional leadership prototype perceptions were simultaneously entered into the regression equation to predict leadership effectiveness both variables were significant. the significant, positive beta weight on leader gender indicated that female leaders were perceived as more effective than male leaders and the significant positive beta weight for the transactional prototype indicated that perceptions of transactional leadership was associated with leadership effectiveness. however, perceptions of transactional leadership did not mediate the gender difference in leadership effectiveness, as indicated by the non-significant sobel test (sobel, 1982; 1986). part 2. organizational culture leadership organizational culture needs to be taken into consideration in this study, as perceptions of effective leadership behaviors will be affected by organizational culture type (bass & avolio, 1993; triandis, 2004). for instance, house et al. (1999) reported that leaders in collectivistic organizational cultures were positively related to relationship-oriented leadership styles. attributes of transformational leadership, such as idealized influence, inspirational motivation, and individualized consideration, relate closely to collectivistic ideals. for example, bass and riggio (2006) described a sample item from the multifactor leadership questionnaire’s (mlq) idealized influence subscale as “the leader emphasizes the importance of having a collective sense of mission” (p. 6). additionally, they stated that inspirational motivation should enhance “team spirit” and that the leader should “demonstrate commitment to goals and the shared vision” (p. 6). therefore, the transformational leadership style is likely to be perceived as more congruent with collectivistic cultural values than to individualistic cultural values. gender roles collectivistic organizational cultures also tend to align with prescriptions for female gender roles. for instance, women are expected to be attuned to others needs and create harmony within groups, which may be simultaneously regarded as communal or collectivistic (for more information see: abele & wojciszke, 2007; cuddy, fiske, & glick, 2008). therefore, female leaders embedded within collectivistic organizational cultures are more likely to experience gender role congruence. adding together the transformational leadership style, collectivistic cultural values, and gender roles all seemingly align, increasing the possibility that followers will effectively perceive female leaders as prototypical. in contrast, individualistic organizational cultures that emphasize personal goals, competition, and achievement relate more to the prototypes associated with the transactional leadership style. individualistic cultures, therefore, are not congruent with feminine gender roles, as women are expected to be nurturing towards others and focused on developing community (eagly & karau, 2002). the resulting combination of the transactional leadership style within an individualistic organizational culture should serve as compounding incongruities for female leaders. in contrast, male leaders are generally perceived to have prototypical leadership characteristics across different environments. in other words, they have not been found to experience the “double-bind” from gender role incongruity that their female colleagues face (eagly & karau, 2002). therefore, there should not be implicit bias expected for male leaders. additionally, employee commitment, according to a study conducted by averin (2019), was found to be higher for collectivistic leaders than individualistic leaders, and employees were more likely to be innovative when congruence was found between leadership styles (i.e., transactional and transformational) and organizational culture (i.e., individualistic and collectivistic, respectively; zheng, wu, xie, & li, 2019). therefore, one could expect that leaders embedded within collectivistic organizational cultures should be rated higher on transformational leadership characteristics and effectiveness, than those embedded within an individualistic culture due to associations noted above (averin, 2019; zheng et al., 2019). the next hypothesis predicts that leaders in general will benefit from the congruence of transformational leadership when embedded in collectivistic organizations. hypothesis 6. leaders embedded in collectivistic organizational cultures will be perceived as more a) transformational and b) effective than leaders embedded in individualistic organizational cultures. our final hypothesis examines whether female leaders will be able to achieve congruity between gender and leadership roles within the collectivistic organizational context. specifically, if women leaders are found to be more transformational and effective and are embedded within a gender role congruent organizational culture, then they may benefit from fitting the prescribed leadership prototype. hypothesis 7. female leaders embedded in collectivistic organizational cultures will be perceived as more a) transformational and b) effective than any other condition. methods participants and procedures participants were the same as in the first part of the study and were randomly assigned to the conditions based on a 2 (gender of leader) x 2 (organizational culture: collectivistic vs. individualistic) design. 57 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 stimuli scenarios were used to manipulate organizational culture. the scenarios were modeled after those used by cuddy, fiske, and glick (2004), cundiff (2006), and paul, costley, howell, dorfman, and trafimow’s (2001) organizational scenario descriptions. a marketing organization was used as the scenario setting, as it has been found to be a gender-neutral industry (cabrera, sauer, & thomas-hunt, 2009). the organization depicted in the scenario was the same except for references to collectivistic (in italics) or individualistic (in parentheses) cultural characteristics: “you have been working for this company for the past 4 years and have a good understanding of how things work around the office; everyone here works together as a team (individual achievement is very much valued here). in fact, the company's mission describes its dedication to enhancing collaborative (individual) employee efforts, and group projects are encouraged so employees seek out colleagues to work with on projects (the company fully supports outstanding levels of individual achievement.). recently a new program was established where rewards are given out for outstanding team (individual) efforts (meeting pre-described individual objectives.). the goal of this program is to create an atmosphere that focuses on using a group's (uses an individual's) expertise to problem solve, allowing for more creative application of organizational resources.” measures the organizational culture manipulation was assessed by asking participants, whether when working for the organization they were expected to work on projects individually or in teams, using four questions that had 5-point rating scales (α = .88). an example item is, ‘this organization probably rewards: 1 independent work completely over teamwork to 5teamwork completely over independent work.’ a reading check assessed whether participants were attuned to the information presented in the scenario by asking them to identify the name of the organization depicted from four categorical choices. participants were also asked the scenario leader’s gender, age, and ethnicity to throw them ‘off’ from guessing the main hypothesis. results manipulation checks a fisher’s exact test was used to check the gender manipulation, which was found to be successfully manipulated (n = 387, p < .001). further, manipulation checks for organizational culture were found to be successful with statistically significant differences in how participant’s rated the collectivistic (m = 4.18, sd = .49) and individualistic organizational culture (m = 1.94, sd = .71; t(293) = 35.18, p < .001) on the collectivism manipulation scale. analyses a 2 (gender) x 2 (culture) between-subjects factorial manova on leadership prototypes and effectiveness, using type iii sums of squares, was performed in order to examine the remaining hypotheses. participants' gender has historically affected outcomes in gendered leadership studies (eagly & carli, 2007; schein, 2001). therefore, the participant's gender was entered into the equation as a covariate to examine potential effects. no statistical relationship was found for participants’ gender, and differences were not evident between the findings using or not using a covariate in the equation. therefore, the more parsimonious test (i.e. no covariate) was used for the main analysis. the dependent variables’ distributions were checked for normalcy prior to running the analysis. a violation of the homogeneity of variance-covariance assumption was found [box’s m = 74.16, f (30, 180500) = 2.41, p < .001]. this is likely due to unequal sample sizes per condition. going with the recommendations of tabachnick and fidell (2001), all multivariate statistics were assessed using pillai’s criterion as opposed to wilk’s lambda. the omnibus ftests for the main effects of leader’s gender and organizational culture were significant (pillai’s trace = .06, f (3, 277) = 4.59, p = .001, η2p = .06; pillai’s trace = .04, f (3, 277) = 2.48, p = .044, η2p = .04; respectively). further, the interaction between organizational culture and leader’s gender was insignificant (f (3, 277) = 0.17, p = .954); see table 4. therefore, further inspection of hypotheses 6 and 7 concerning the main effects for gender and organizational culture was warranted. table 4 multivariate analysis of variance for leadership perceptions 58 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 hypothesis 6a proposed that leaders would be rated more transformational in collectivistic rather than individualistic organizational cultures. looking at the main effect for organizational culture, this hypothesis was supported. there was a statistically significant difference (f(1, 279) = 5.47, p = .020; η2p = .02) between collectivistic (m = 3.75) and individualistic (m = 3.58) organizational cultures on transformational leadership prototypes. additionally, there was a statistically significant difference (f(1, 279) = 8.52, p = .004; η2p = .03) found between collectivistic (m = 3.74) and individualistic (m = 3.46) organizational cultures on perceived leader effectiveness, providing support for hypothesis 6b. according to these findings leaders in collectivistic organizational cultures are perceived to be more effective and transformational than leaders in individualistic organizational cultures. table 5 means and standard deviations hypotheses 7a & b predicted that women leaders embedded within collectivistic organizational cultures would be perceived as more transformational and effective than other conditions. these hypotheses were supported based on the significant main effects previously tested, see table 5 for means and standard deviations for each condition. figures 1 and 2 demonstrate the combination of these main effects, with female executives in collectivistic organizational cultures being perceived as more effective and transformational than female executives in individualistic cultures and male executives in both collectivistic and individualistic cultures. figure 1 perceptions of leadership effectiveness across gender and organizational culture figure 2 perceptions of transformational leadership across gender and organizational culture discussion examining perceptions of effectiveness for female leaders in relation to that of male leaders is a sensitive topic. evidence of stereotyping and bias in the workforce has for many decades brought about large differences in the acceptability of women in leadership positions. many of the reasons for this gap in perceiving females as leaders had to do with the incongruence between feminine gender roles and leadership roles, which have historically been more agentic (eagly & karau, 2002). whether followers perceive a newly encountered supervisor as possessing leadership characteristics is an important component to the leader’s ability to gain acceptance and support from their workforce (riggio, chaleff, & lipman-blumen, 2008), and changes in expectations for leaders to be more transformational than transaction assists female leaders as gender roles become more congruent with leadership roles (koenig et al., 2011; pirson & lawrence, 2010). this research examined the impact 59 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 of gender and organizational culture on follower’s perceptions of effectiveness and prototypical leadership categorizations. part 1: gender differences in perceptions of male and female leaders on leadership prototypes and effectiveness were considered first. replicating past research, female leaders were found to be higher in the transformational and lower in the transactional leadership styles than male leaders (eagly & johannesenschmidt, 2001; paris et al., 2009). this study extends these findings using scenario methodology, which to the best of our knowledge is not evident in the literature. the definition of effective leadership seems to be shifting from transactional to transformational leadership styles, and we were interested in finding out if female leaders would be perceived as more effective than male leaders due to gender role congruence with the transformational leadership prototype. in this scenario, we found that female leaders were perceived just as effective as male leaders but not more effective. these results do not directly support our original hypothesis of having higher ratings, as female leaders were rated similarly on effectiveness as male leaders. our findings demonstrate the following possible interpretations: a) women are no longer perceived as incongruent with effective leadership styles; b) there is still some level of bias due to prescriptive stereotyping of female leaders. it appears that participants used their own gender and leadership schemas when they viewed these scenarios and rated the female conditions as more transformational than the male conditions, while the male conditions were rated as more transactional. however, even with the high correlation between transformational leadership and managerial effectiveness, the female conditions were just on par with the male conditions for perceived effectiveness. a mediation analysis was conducted in order to further examine the relationship between gender and perceptions of leadership effectiveness, while taking into account the effects of leadership style on effectiveness ratings. perceptions of transformational leadership were found to completely mediate the effect of leader gender on leadership effectiveness. therefore, female leaders were likely to be perceived as effective not due to prescriptions related to their gender directly (i.e. communal), but in how stereotypical prescriptions of female roles relate with the transformational leadership prototype. implicit bias is likely still a major factor for women in leadership positions, it is possible, however, that due to changes in expectations for leadership in general that subconscious reactions towards female leaders are being mitigated by the congruency with feminine gender roles. therefore, if female leaders are starting to match leadership role expectations, embracing their gender roles should result in more positive than negative reactions; especially if the association between transformational leadership and effectiveness continues to increase. part 2: organizational culture organizational culture was also considered in this study for its potential to impact perceptions of leaders' prototypicality and effectiveness (hogue & lord, 2007; lord & brown, 2001; lord & maher, 1993; lord et al., 1999, 2001). collectivistic organizational cultures are expected to enhance perceptions of transformational leadership qualities, whereas individualistic organizational cultures likely enhance perceptions of transactional leadership qualities. indeed, we found that leaders embedded within a collectivistic organizational culture were perceived as more effective than those embedded within an individualistic organizational culture; likely due to the congruency between collectivistic cultural values and effective leadership styles. as noted in previous research, congruency between organizational culture and leadership style enhances innovative behaviors (zheng et al., 2019). it would not be a far stretch to extend this to the relationship between leadership style and organizational culture on perceived effectiveness of the leader. in other words, having congruency between a leader’s style and their organizational culture will likely enhance their followers’ perceptions of the leader’s effectiveness. it was also expected that female leaders would be rated positively within collectivistic organizational cultures due to leader and gender role congruence. based on the findings from this research, the hypothesis was supported with female leaders embedded within collectivistic cultures being rated higher on effectiveness and transformational prototypes than all other conditions examined. although this seems to give women an advantage in organizations that have cultural values matching feminine gender roles, male leaders also displayed greater ratings of transformational and effective leadership characteristics in the collectivistic culture scenario. based on these findings, both male and female leaders should consider modifying their leadership style to match their organization’s culture. managerial applications practitioners need to take into consideration how organizational culture could help ‘level the playing field’ for male and female leaders. for instance, as organizations become more organic in order to stay competitive within the global market, more transformational leaders will be needed to lead these efforts. similarly, as departments and groups within organizations further embrace teamwork and horizontal coordination processes, their cultures are going to move towards collectivistic values (schaffers, gareis, stanoevska-slabeva, & vartiainen, 2008). in this sense, the global arena is forcing organizations to embrace transformational leadership and collectivistic values that both men and women should benefit from. depending on the industry and context, it might be a pertinent time for all leaders to consider influencing a change to their organization’s culture. this could be done through mission redevelopment, value statement adjustments, and associated policy changes that emphasize collectivistic qualities. 60 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 managers can use the information from this study by encouraging women to not disregard their gender roles when aspiring to a leadership position. shifts in perceptions of what constitutes effective leadership can aid female leaders through gender role congruence, especially within collectivistic organizational cultures. for example, kalev (2009) looked at over 800 organizations and found that restructuring jobs using cross-functional teams is effective at increasing the number of women into management positions through augmented intergroup contact. cross-functional teams promote surfacing of unique personal characteristics and allow for members of a group to get past initial stereotypic thinking when working with female colleagues. experience with female leaders in a team setting, challenge and potentially alter stereotypic thought processes, creating an environment that ‘re-categorizes’ leadership prototypes as women leaders emerge (christman & mcclellan, 2008). female leaders, however, still need to be intentional in their role as a leader, ensuring that there is alignment between their leadership style and the organization’s culture. for instance, findings show that both transactional and transformational elements of leadership are related to leadership effectiveness (duehr & bono, 2006). therefore, female leaders may also need to take on transactional leadership styles in order to align with their organization’s culture, while also maintaining a gender role congruent transformational style as well (koenig et al., 2011). in other words, “walking a fine balance.” this is possible by taking into consideration the behaviors associated with both transactional and transformational leadership. for instance, a female leader could leverage communal gender roles, while also fitting into an individualistic culture, by taking on individual consideration of each subordinate and initiating structure through individual goal setting. vroom’s (1964) expectancy theory of motivation aligns with this recommendation and for more information on this alignment with leadership styles see isaac, zerbe, and pitt (2001). eagly (2005), however, argued followers need to perceive leaders as legitimate in order for them to be viewed as authentic leaders and since female leaders have a harder time being perceived as legitimate, they will also not likely to be perceived as authentic leaders. although change is becoming evident, there are still a lot of obstacles and inequitable barriers for female leaders to overcome (for more information, see annabi & lebovitz, 2018; badura et al., 2018; cho et al., 2019; hoobler, wayne, & lemmon, 2009; prasad, 2009; tyler & mccullough, 2009). researchers and practitioners need to remember that these biases are not simple and it takes much effort and motivation for organizations to change. future research considerations and limitations although leadership prototypes are undergoing a paradigm shift that corresponds with feminine gender roles, women still encounter many barriers in leadership positions. for instance, lee and james (2007) found using 10 years of data examining top executive announcements that shareholders react more negatively toward new female ceos than male ceos. additionally, women in executive positions tend to have reduced retention rates and face glass cliffs. looking at retention, becker-blease, elkinawy, and stater (2010) found that within standard & poor’s (s&p) top 1500 firms, female executives were more than twice as likely to leave a position than male executives. further, women in their study had higher turnover rates than men, whether the reason for leaving was voluntary or involuntary. glass cliffs may help explain why female executives are turning over faster than male executives. a glass cliff is a position that comes with an enhanced degree of risk for failure at the beginning of the assignment (ryan & haslam, 2007). in other words, failure tends to be imminent in these positions. ryan and haslam (2007) found that women are more likely than men to be selected for boards of directors in financially precarious organizations. although the women were not responsible for the firms’ poor performance (i.e. declines were evident for the organizations before the women were placed in the positions), they tend to be blamed for it. the research on glass cliffs, conducted by morgenroth, kirby, ryan, and sudkämper (2020), showed at least moderate effects by three meta-analyses and provided a compelling description of the realities that female executives face: such women, having cracked the glass ceiling, are faced with often insurmountable challenges. although the existence of the glass ceiling was confirmed (morgenroth et al., 2020), several recent studies argue that female executives are not being placed in firms that are more financially precarious than male executives and that the glass ceiling is a myth (ahn & cunningham, 2020; bechtoldt, bannier, & rock, 2019). therefore, more research is needed on barriers female leaders encounter in order to provide guidance to managers on how to mitigate the negative ramifications of these obstacles. this study’s generalizability is limited, as respondents mostly identified as european americans. it would be interesting to see variations in outcomes if men and women of color were assessed on their perceptions of leadership effectiveness across both gender and organizational culture. research examining the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity in leadership is more important than ever, and replication of this study with participants that identify as african american, for instance, would be extremely informative. landy (2008) identified several issues that arise when using scenario methodology in order to measure bias in research, such as not having enough background information about the leader. therefore, additional research should be conducted on organizations as they hire new executives in order to establish “real world” differences in perceptions of male and female leaders. additional external factors, such as a leader’s reputation or ethnicity, competitive or turbulent industry environments, and type of industry, could influence followers’ perceptions of their leaders (furst & reeves, 2008; paris et al., 2009; stanley, 2009). for instance, cabrera et al. (2009) found that female managers 61 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 were perceived similar to male managers on expected performance in masculine industries but were rated higher in gender-neutral industries. future research needs to take into consideration a combination of these factors to determine which environments support or hinder female leaders’ success. the outcomes assessed in this study assumed that task-oriented would be a separate dimension from relationship-oriented leadership style (barrow, 1977) and more aligned with agentic leadership characteristics (eagly & johannesen-schmidt, 2001). the transactional scale was redefined by the factor analysis and included task-oriented characteristics, whereas relationaloriented items corresponded with transformational and communal characteristics. these characteristics may have altered the outcomes one would expect to see when assessing gender differences in perceptions of leaders. more research is needed on these scales and other measures assessing transformational leadership in order to determine additional differences in the perceptions of male and female leaders. finally, the effect sizes from this study were relatively small. past research, however, has shown that single studies tend to have small effects but as they are aggregated across “multiple observations” the effects become much larger (eagly, 2007). in other words, all of the little differences that occur between male and female leaders on a day-to-day basis add up over time, having large overall impacts (martell, lane, & emrich, 1996). additionally, scenario methodology does not have as large an impact on participants than if they were experiencing a real-life interaction with another person (landy, 2008). therefore, reallife cases offer an expectation for larger effects. if a scenario can produce effects in the ratings of leadership styles and effectiveness, then real-life interactions are likely to have even greater impacts and should be explored further to confirm. conclusion in the business world today, there has been a change in what constitutes effective leadership. over the last 50 years, changes in what constitutes effective leadership (i.e. transformational) is evident. this paradigm shift has proven beneficial to women seeking management careers, as we see more women in middle management positions and some filtering into the executive suite. however, female executives still encounter obstacles; even if they are perceived to display effective leadership characteristics within congruent organizational cultures. references abele, a., & wojciszke, b. 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(2019). leadership, organizational culture, and innovative behavior in construction projects: the perspective of behaviorvalue congruence. international journal of managing projects in business, 12, 888-918. advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 22, winter 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] telling stories: examining the views of an african-centered female minority leader elizabeth k. davenport, ph.d. abstract many educators believe that unless a determined effort is made to include cultural relevance in public school curriculums, public education will continue to fail african-american students. in fact, the quality of one's experience in education and in the community is often identified as a critical determinant for gaining a foundation for higher intellectual pursuits. this article examines the beliefs of an african-centered educator as she uses her own african-centered model to empower african-american students and solve this serious problem in her community. telling stories examining the views of an african-centered female minority leader there is an increasing interest in the leadership of schools. during the past two decades of school research and reform efforts, one insight from this focus is the realization that the leader sets the direction for a school and plays a pivotal role in facilitating change. according to fullan (1993), the leader is not only an instructional guide and moral compass for the school, a leader is a key agent for change in the public school environment. likewise, as women enter leadership roles in increasing numbers, research indicates that their experiences differ from those of men, both in their preparation for leadership and how they manage their leadership responsibilities in the school (hegelsen, 1990). research demonstrates that women appear to be less influenced by hierarchy in their thinking, integrate different roles more fully, accent the building of relationships, and work at making connections among organizations. women leaders are also intensely concerned with efficiency and effectiveness (gilligan, 1982). despite this relative breadth of research, however, very little research has been directed toward how african-american women assume and implement leadership tasks. most studies of leadership focus on white, european, and middle-class tradition and thought; they rarely consider the ways in which race, ethnicity, and culture influence administrative behavior and decision-making. this article focuses on the life experiences of dr. freya rivers, a minority female who acted as founding leader of a newly created african-centered charter school in lansing , michigan , sankofa shule. dr. rivers discusses her views and beliefs concerning teacher, student, and parent empowerment through an africanfile:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/winter2007/index.htm centered empowerment model. the school's african-centered model aims for continuous change and learning to take place on multiple levels among teachers, students, administrators, parents, and the greater community. in this model, the school becomes a learning organization for the entire community. the initial focal point of earlier research with dr. rivers' school was on how teachers changed their teaching perspectives and incorporated new ways of teaching and learning. however, the focus of this article will be the views held by dr. rivers, an african-american founding leader of the school and a female in her fifties, and her life experiences. this data was culled from interviews conducted during the earlier qualitative research concerning the teaching and learning at the school. methodology according to cotte (1986), feminist stress on women's socially constructed "differences" from men can go along with recognition of diversity among women themselves, if we acknowledge that multifaceted entity the patchwork quilt, so to speak-that is the group called women. (p. 60) this research was an attempt to explore the importance of one woman's experiences in creating her leadership style and beliefs. it was an attempt to explore a woman school leader, her life, her perception and experiences, and its effect on her leadership style and aspirations. as i observed the teaching and learning taking place at sankofa shule, i wondered how dr. rivers' life experiences impacted the development of her african-centered theories and ideas, as well as her role as a leader in this new, evolving organization. shakeshaft, nowell, and perry (1991) proposed that research about women and leadership should be conducted from a female-defined paradigm that included a method of inquiry growing out of personal experiences, feelings, and the needs of the researcher. they encouraged researchers to look at the world as women experience it and try to document those perspectives in order to help expand the knowledge base of practices in educational administration. in addition, she suggested that interviews with women administrators would help us understand the way they think and speak about their worlds. review of relevant literature because i was a participant-observer at the research site and decided to tell the stories of these teachers, i considered elliot's (1991) six features to determine whether a study should be qualitative: field focus; self as instrument; interpretative character; the use of expressive language and presence of voice; attention to specifics; and believability based upon the researchers coherence, insight, and instrumental utility. for me, it was important to use the context and setting of the school and the participant's work to delve more deeply into her life experiences and how it affected her work as a school leader. an examination of the literature of women leaders revealed that several characteristics were commonly found in women's view and influences their leadership practices, such as a strong caring ethics (gillian, 1982; nodding, 1986); accomplishment of work through relationships (caffarella & olson, 1993; gillian 1982); value placed on inclusion and connection (lipman-bluman, 1992); use of voice to empower others; communication as the key to success; and the integration of the professional and personal aspect of life. therefore, in conducting this research it was most important for me to capture dr. rivers' voice and how it had been influenced by her history. mama freya's world the first thing i noticed as i conducted my research at sankofa was that dr. rivers' discussions were permeated with words such as "caring, culture, community, and holistic teaching and learning." at her school, dr. rivers created an environment where students, teachers, parents, and community members freely care and support one another. at sankofa shule all female teachers are called "mama" and all male teachers are called "baba." these terms stress the familial relationships, as well as the caring exhibited between teachers and students. the african-centered worldview and paradigm, derived from the teachers' and the administrators' cultural history, promoted this type of caring. in an african worldview, the community is stressed and the individual is de-emphasized. in african society, the village and the villagers take care of the needs of all participants. the setting the school sankofa shule academy is a public school academy established pursuant to act no. 416 of the public acts of 1994; a law that proposes to improve public education for students in the state of michigan . according to its charter, the mission of the school is "to educate and nurture each and every child, with special emphasis on at-risk african american male students, to achieve their maximum potential, and develop productive citizens" (sankofa shule charter, 1995). the philosophy of the academy is "that all children can learn and will learn to their maximum potential." the goal of the teachers and administrator of the school is to eliminate every barrier to student success by any means necessary to allow students' dreams to be their only boundaries. sankofa implements this philosophy and mission by providing a holistic program that produces students who are academically competent, behaviorally confident, and socially conscious in all endeavors. the curriculum the staff of the school uses an african-centered curriculum that incorporates themes for effective teaching. the steps are: 1) heshima (respect) for self, others and the environment; 2) expect the best in every child; 3) success begets success through design, implementation, coordination, and evaluation based on needs, interest, ability, and purpose; 4) rip for positive reinforcement by re warding often, i nvesting time and interest, and p raising, praising, praising; 5) tap when all else fails. in other words, take away privileges to reinforce rules, order, responsibility, and self-control; 6) multisensory strategies of seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting, smelling, dancing, cooking, singing, acting, and any other experiential activity that engages students in active, participatory learning; 7) multimodal strategies of traditional methods including basal, phonic, and linguistic experience units, as well as non-traditional modes of individualization including workshops, whole language, themes, contract, and experiences; 8) multicultural strategies of respect of knowledge and inclusion of all cultures; 9) multi-dimensional perspectives of holistic development of body, mind, and character; 10) hotep in the medu neter (hieroglyphics) that signifies the ultimate state of self-actualization in reaching one's maximum potential while serving the community (sankofa shule charter, 1995). this philosophical basis of the curriculum, which was created by the founding leader, reflects the goal of african-centered education enumerated by lee, lomotey, & shujaa (1990) which states that this type of education must: 1. legitimize african stores of knowledge 2. positively exploit and scaffold onto a productive community and cultural practices 3. extend and build on the indigenous language 4. reinforce community ties and idealize service to one's family, community, nation, race, and world 5. promote positive social relationships 6. impart a world-view that idealizes a positive, self-sufficient future for one's people without denying the self-worth and right to self-determination of others 7. support cultural continuity while promoting critical consciousness. (p. 50) finally, the school's model uses assante's (1988) african-centered paradigm, which provides that one must define oneself from an african perspective by putting africa in the center of the environmental system (its original position). this paradigm defines reality from an african viewpoint. according to dr. rivers, "afrocentricity is necessary for the inclusion of african contributions to the world. the theoretical model of an african-centered perspective presents a global perspective of people, histories, and cultures" (rivers, 1994, p. 7). according to rivers, the african-centered perspective is offered for inclusion in the academy's curriculum as an african cultural frame for self-esteem, economic independence, cultural socialization, and for the survival of the african-american family in all their environments (rivers, 1994, p. 10). her philosophy dr. rivers believes that african-centered education represents empowerment of the african-american family, and its children display conscientization through education, transformation through ancient ecological and spiritual development, and self-actualization through economic and cultural independence. rivers asserts that african-centered education develops responsible adults in families and empowers them to leave a legacy of various talents and economic and academic skills to their children. accordingly, her first goal in designing the school was to develop strong, positive "self-concepts" that can help youth to become productive, responsible adults. the second goal of sankofa shule is to provide families and students with the knowledge about their afrocentric heritage and culture in order to instill the pride, dignity, and values of their ancient african ancestors. according to dr. rivers, the mission of the school is to provide leadership for african-american families by maximizing knowledge, spirituality, entrepreneurship, and the opportunity for an enhanced afrocentric quality of life. dr. rivers states that her role as a leader is "basically to facilitate the process. to make sure that we have competent staff, that our materials are bias-free and to assist them whenever they need assistance, whether it's in subject matter area or african-centeredness or classroom discipline" (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999). she adds that, i really don't like to go in and tell people how to run a classroom. if i hire you, i expect that you have the expertise to do it. i don't mind assisting people, but i'm not a person that goes in on a day-to-day basis. i pretty much hire people with leadership qualities, so that they can go in and get the job done. every morning we do have the staff meetings where we get together as a group and discuss it, to make sure that we operate as one and basically, that's all that i do. i'd like to remain in that type of position, as a facilitator. (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999) however, as the originator of sankofa shule, her influences on the direction of the organization drew on her cultural history and personality to fulfill administrative goals. like most leaders, dr. rivers has a high level of self-confidence and determination. in addition to designing, dr. rivers created a curriculum for her school and another african-centered charter school in the same midwest community, less than one mile from sankofa shule. when charter school legislation was adopted in 1995, parents in this midwest community created a committee to take advantage of this new legislation. in the end, however, the group splintered and two african-centered charter schools were formed within one mile of each other. in creating both curriculums and charter school proposals submitted to central michigan university, the governing board of a state public university have the authority issued to charter to schools, dr. rivers relied on her extensive background in african and african-american history and culture. freya's story dr. rivers is a graduate of louisiana state university with a bachelor of science degree in speech and hearing, and holds a masters of elementary education from southern university of baton rouge, louisiana. she also has an ed.d. from the george peabody college of teacher education of vanderbilt university . her résumé is filled with detailed listings of the various african locations she has visited over her lifetime-places, such as senegal , nigeria , ghana , and egypt . in her educational biography, provided at the beginning of the study, dr. rivers listed five critical lifechanging events in her educational history. it appeared after reading her biography that the fuel for the changes or its ignition or spark was dr. rivers' sense of empowerment or her call to action which began early in her childhood. in her educational biography, dr. rivers described her education as beginning at two years of age when her working parents sent her to nursery school. at four, she started at her aunt's (she was the principal and the teacher) one-room schoolhouse that educated students from pre-k all the way through eighth grade. at that one-room schoolhouse, dr. rivers recalled competing in spelling bees and reading competitions with seventh and eighth grade students. her formal education began the next year, when her mother enrolled her in a catholic elementary school, st. francis. at the catholic school she was skipped to the second grade. dr. rivers credits the education she received in her aunt's school for the grade promotion. "they wanted to move me up higher, but my mother didn't like the idea of skipping it [first grade] at all because she thought my age just was not appropriate" (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999). in her second year at st. francis, she remembers being in a regular structured program that "just drove me up the wall because i always wanted to read more and do more in school. it seemed like i was always being held back because you can only read a sentence at a time with seventy kids in the room" (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999). very large classrooms characterized her elementary education: in fact, in my second grade year, there were eighty kids; in my third grade year there were seventy kids; in my fourth grade year we had gone down to like sixty; and by sixth grade i think we had like fifty-four kids in a room to one teacher. and all of us learned. so, it was amazing, but they did it because of the structure and each child got a chance to read one line. (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999) smaller classes were a signature concept at sankofa, and rivers created sankofa based upon her lifelong commitment to african-centered education and political/social activism. the first critical influence that she experienced as a person and an educator was the teacher she had in the seventh and eighth grade. "she made education a wonderful experience," dr. rivers reports, "had i not had her, i probably would never have enjoyed my educational experience, but she was fantastic" (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999). the second critical influence was her teacher corps experience at southern university. she states, "i think it allowed me the freedom to be creative in learning how to teach and not stifling me like most teacher education programs do" (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999). she cites her doctoral program at vanderbilt as the third critical event "because not many universities offer that kind of off-campus experience that doesn't require you to just sit in a desk and listen to a professor all day. again, it gave me a chance to be creative" (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999). the fourth critical event was her experience of actually entering classrooms during her masters program. she states that during her observation i saw children who don't know anything and there's nothing wrong with them; just that they haven't been taught. i think that was the most gut-wrenching experience i've ever had in my life. i can still recall my second class of second graders, who didn't even know their names, couldn't write their names. i thought something is wrong with this. and that's when i went back to my master teacher and said, 'sister bruce, how do you teach reading?' and i sat at the foot of a master teacher to learn. (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999) dr. rivers believes that all these factors, combined with her personal experience of being "put out of school every year because the teachers were not able to understand a creative child" led to the teacher that she is today (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999). however, she believes that the ultimate responsibility for who she is comes back to her family. "my mother's an educator, my father's a dentist, but he's been involved in civil rights all of his life, so that has to be where i get my drive for working with black children and trying to teach the african american experience (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999)." dr. rivers states that the values that most strongly affected and directed her adult professional life are her african-centered values, which she teaches at the school. these are the values that her family instilled in her. according to dr. rivers, one of the most profound quotes from our african culture is "i am because we are, and because we are, therefore i am." i don't exist in isolation. i only exist because of the family that i came from, and that family is the community that created them, that i exist in. therefore, i need a total community to exist and that community also needs me. (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999) therefore, she believes that it is important for her to teach these same values to the african-american students, making african-centered education more than an educational theory, but a way of life. she tries to live the kemetic principles of truth, justice, righteousness, order, balance, harmony, and reciprocity. those are the truths that we operate from in the school; the ethical values that you must have to be human. the rules of the school: respect self, others, and the environment, and the nguzo saba. those are the principles and the values that i live by, and i hope to instill them in the children. i truly believe that if you could ever get even a small portion of our society to try and live by ethical principles, we'll make a better world that can exist in harmony. (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999) in 1995, when michigan's new charter school legislation was passed, dr. rivers' took a leave of absence from her local public school teaching position (she later retired from the district) to create sankofa shule academy. her vision was african-centered because of her belief in afrocentric education as a means of improving the academic achievement of african-american students. dr. rivers summarized her beliefs concerning african-centered education in a book written several years prior to the opening sankofa shule academy . she stated: [a] n afrocentric perspective is essential to attain educational excellence and peace. the infusion of an afrocentric perspective will not be easy but it is vital for the future of the children. "the opening of the american mind must be a high priority topic" (hillard, stewart, & williams, 1989). the first objective is to change the way people perceive themselves.. lenore bennett, jr. states "if you want to change a situation, you have to change the image that men have of themselves and their situation" (manhubuti, 1978, p. 5). the second goal [of an african-centered education] is to provide students and people of the world with the truth of history. at the current time these truths are omitted, distorted, stereotyped, and presented as lies. finally, the third goal is to recognize the traditions and cultures through an afrocentric perspective for the future of all people, the world, and all its environments (nobel, 1990). (rivers, 1993, p. 1-2) according to dr. rivers, to teach in an african-centered manner means several things. first, educators accept her concept of african-centered education, a concept that is based upon on the readings and teachings of molefi assante, asa hillard, and maulana karenga. this method requires knowledge and acceptance of the principles of maat, the principals of kemit, and the principles of nguzo saba . to teach from an african-centered framework also means supporting those we teach from an african-centered perspective, focusing on ourselves, black people, as the agent of the curriculum. everything else is peripheral to us. not that we do not study everything else in the world, but we look at it from our perspective first. then we try to view it from the eyes of other cultures. in doing this you must look at a timeline to make sure that you understand the frame of reference. the most important thing about this is when, especially in teaching african history, we seem to focus on the last three hundred years of history, which is where we started to decline, without looking at the other seven thousand years, five years in which we were in ascendancy. dr. rivers believes that students, teachers, and parents are the agents of the sankofa shule curriculum. she believes that to teach african-american students one must look at the total timeline of african and africanamerican history, not only period of african capture, slavery, and independence in america . the third implication of her concept of african-centered education addresses how to teach the children. at sankofa shule, she stressed that the teachers instruct a multisensory, multimodal, and multi-dimensional manner, because there is not one way to teach any particular subject that you're going to succeed with everybody. but if you use a lot of different ways to teach children, maybe you could reach them in one of those ways. (freya rivers, personal communication, april 1, 1999) the school's curriculum, a developmental program filled with arts and humanities, aims to develop the child's readiness level in music, art, movement, and creativity in order to foster readiness skills for future learning. cooperative teaching and the formation of cooperative groups for students are encouraged for social skill and self-discipline actualization. according to dr. rivers, the rationale behind sankofa shule is that students educated in an african-centered perspective and involved in constructive work and leisure activities will become self-actualized and demonstrate positive behavior. it is her goal that the possible success of sankofa shule can become a model for public school systems, university teacher training institutions, and further educational and community development. test results during the research period demonstrate that students entered sankofa shule at one level but showed significant growth thereafter. the total reading scores for students across all grades also indicate significant changes in literacy in the development and comprehension of sankofa students. how did the teachers at sankofa create these results? sankofa shule created opportunities for professional growth for its teachers, administrators, and staff through various programs, materials and research, personal and job development, in-services, workshops, seminars, and travel based on its african-centered empowerment goals. the professional development model was consistent with the school's goal of sharing and developing information. the school emphasizes experimental learning in and outside the community for students, teachers, staff, and administration. dr. rivers implemented several instructional reforms at the school, such as: expanding the school day to increase opportunities for learning; extended day classes, summer sessions, team teaching, mentoring, and tutoring sessions; and community-based activities-along with special programs to ensure that students had opportunities to try and try again until success is achieved. students are grouped for learning, which includes cooperative learning, cross-age tutoring, and grouping students of varying abilities together in order to help them learn material faster and retain it longer, as well as develop critical reasoning power. teachers instruct by academic matter rather than by grade. from pre-k to second grade, teachers at the school instruct in a traditional elementary school manner: one or two teachers instructing or co-instructing a group of students for an entire day. however, from second grade on, teachers instruct students by their academic subject, allowing the students to experience several teachers each day, which allows teacher to delve in-depth into their subject matter. the school also made the changes to facilitate teacher learning: by giving teachers an opportunity everyday within the school day to read, research, and to discuss student problems. each morning the teachers at sankofa have an indiaba, zulu for "a very serious discussion," from 8:00 to 8:30 a.m. in which they read african-centered literature, discuss african-centered philosophies, etc. the results since its creation in the fall of 1995, sankofa shule has created a credit union, conducted rites of passages seminars, conducted a voters' registration drive , and has become politically involved in the affairs of its local community. the school has also conducted economic classes, parenting classes, and mentoring groups. it has served as the forum for african-american community issues in this midwest community. the school has also enacted institutional changes and created a professional development environment that produces teachers with strong professional relationships and increased instructional and pedagogical knowledge that in turn works actively to create a supportive and caring learning environment for students. the school responds to the basic needs of teachers and students in part because of its small size and carefully adapted space. teachers can take on diverse roles that increase their opportunities and responsibilities. the school has also developed an individualized student curriculum, which allowed teachers to be more responsive to student needs, while appropriations created additional academic work and responsibility when needed. whenever possible, the school hires from the community of parents and families. as a female leader, dr. rivers exhibited many of the feminist attributes of women leaders, such as: 1) a nonhierarchical view of the organization (bancroft, 1995); 2) a focus on relationship (gilligan, 1982); 3) inclusion and connections to work accomplishment (bancroft, 1995); 4) a strong caring ethic (nodding, 1986); 5) leadership by voice and vision (gilligan, 1982); 6) ongoing learning from a variety of sources; and 7) the integration of professional and personal lives (lee, 1994). most importantly, she was a change agent. the leader's ability to influence and lead change efforts in curriculum, teaching, and learning through thoughtful efforts is the cornerstone of school leadership practices. this role is increasingly being taken over by women. respect self; respect others; and respect the environment nguzo saba is based on the principles of unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibilities, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith the rites of passages activities (conducted by caring adult role models) teach men and women that responsible people love themselves, support and care for their families, and they must plan each step of their lives so that they can remain on a path to success. men and women learn strategies to help them deal with the real world via a series of teaching and hands on experience that are organized into ten areas. these rites are: personal rite of passage -life is a series of problems to be solved and questions to be answered. you must equip yourself. life is hard but you cannot quit. men and women need a vision and a plan for living. spiritual rite of passage -men and women often exhaust personal wisdom and knowledge needed to overcome problems. you may have to call upon a spirit, a being, an authority bigger than yourself to get you through economic rite of passage -men and women know the power of money and a job. they know how to stop, to save, and manage their earnings. they support businesses in their communities to help the community to survive. emotional rite of passage -men and women must master their emotions and subdue unhealthy, negative urges. they manage and can communicate in positive ways about their feelings. they do not tolerate violence in a relationship. references assante, m. k. (1988). afrocentricity . trenton , nj : africa world press, inc. bancroft, n. h. (1995). the feminine quest for success: how to prosper in business and be true to yourself . san francisco : berrett-koehler. caffarella, r., & olson, s. (1993). psychosocial development of women: a critical review of the literature. adult education quarterly, 43 (3), 125-151. elliot, j. (1991). action research for educational change. albany , ny : open university press. fullan, m. (1993). change forces: probing the depths of educational reform . new york : the falmer press. gillian, c. (1982). in a different voice: psychological theory and women's development. cambridge, ma : harvard university press. hegelson, s. (1990). the female advantage: women's way of leadership. new york : batam double dell publishing group. lee, c. d. (1994, november). the feminization of management. training magazine , 31, 25-31. lee, c. d., lomotey, k., & shujaa, m. j. (1990). how shall we sing our sacred song in a strange land? journal of education , 172 (2), 45-61. lipman-bluman, j. (1992). connective leadership: female leadership styles in the 21st century workplace. sociological perspectives , 35 (1), 183-203. noddings, n. (1986) caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. berkeley : university of california press rivers, f. a. (1993). heshima to hotep: ten steps to educational excellence . lansing , mi : rivers and rivers. rivers, f. a. (1994). empowering the african american family . lansing , mi : rivers and rivers. sankofa shule. (1995). sankofa shule charter. lansing , mi : sankofa shule. shakeshaft, c., nowell, i. , & perry, a. (1991). gender and supervision. theory into practice, 15 (2) , 134139. about the author: elizabeth k. davenport, ph.d., is a graduate of michigan state university 's (msu) college of education, receiving a doctorate in teacher education, curriculum, and social analysis. dr. davenport holds a bachelor of arts degree in education and a juris doctorate from the university of michigan and an ll.m from new york university school of law. an associate professor at florida a&m, she also has master's degrees in telecommunications and adult and lifelong learning from michigan state university. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the 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file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 20, winter 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] helping non-tenured education faculty get published in peer-reviewed journals by dr. joseph sanacore school of education abstract if university trustees and administrators in the united states require junior faculty to publish or perish, then they should provide extensive support for this requirement. such support is evident in the school of education at the c.w. post campus of long island university, where administrators and faculty became team members and held cooperatively planned informal get-togethers with non-tenured faculty. these informal sessions focused on pertinent topics aimed at getting published in peer-reviewed journals. the topics included: (a) synthesizing a dissertation and condensing it into a manuscript format; (b) increasing an awareness of the format, content, editorial policy, and audience of journals for which authors intend to submit a manuscript; (c) realizing creative potential and being aware of methods that kill creativity; (d) becoming a serious critic and editor of one’s own work; (e) weighing the benefits of submitting manuscripts to themed issues or regular issues of journals; (f) selecting journals that represent one’s current developmental level of research and writing and that the university considers acceptable; (g) considering electronic journals as viable options for publishing; (h) thinking about presenting a paper at a convention but realizing its pros and cons; and (i) managing a busy academic year while being productive and visible, but not exhausted. getting tenure at most schools of education in the united states is usually a sixor seven-year process. typically, junior faculty are expected to demonstrate excellent teaching, to engage in rigorous committee work, and to publish books and articles in peer-reviewed journals. my experience in academe during the past three decades suggests that non-tenured education faculty sustain incredible stress as they simultaneously strive to become savvy about university politics, cope with low entry-level salaries, and juggle university expectations. probably, the most challenging expectation for junior faculty is getting published. this milestone is considered a major requirement for gaining tenure, and tenure is viewed as a necessary foundation for being promoted and for advancing to leadership positions. in the school of education at the c.w. post campus of long island university, my colleagues and i formed a team to support publishing efforts among junior faculty. spearheaded by dean robert manheimer, assistant dean kathy lusteg, several professors, and me, this project was designed to help junior faculty increase their quality and quantity of articles in peer-reviewed journals. although books and book chapters file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter2006/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter2006/index.html are valued in the school of education , we focused on helping faculty publish articles in print and electronic journals because they are a priority. initially, we considered our faculty resources, which included four editors of national journals, members of editorial review boards, and researchers who published extensively in refereed journals. these experienced academics joined our team, and we cooperatively developed pertinent topics for discussion during informal get-togethers with non-tenured faculty. the following topics served as guidelines for supporting their publishing efforts. synthesize your dissertation and condense it into a manuscript format when i was a doctoral candidate, an important requirement was to convert the dissertation into a manuscript so that it was ready for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. i recall the challenge of condensing a structured, comprehensive document into a user-friendly paper of fifteen to twenty-five pages. this reflection served as a foundation for our first informal session with junior faculty. we highlighted their recently completed dissertations and the ways in which their hard work could be used as a published study in a reputable journal. as expected, some dissertations consisted of the type of data collection and data analysis that was appropriate for research quarterlies. other dissertations had greater value for being converted to several shorter manuscripts. for example, one participant’s study focused on improving middle school students’ literacy learning through interactive discussions, drama activities, and independent reading. we talked about ways of converting this study (especially the comprehensive related literature chapter) to three manuscripts. we also specified that each manuscript should consist of its own introduction, related literature section, practical application, summary, and bibliography. furthermore, we stressed the importance of maintaining a conversational tone, eliminating jargon, and avoiding stereotyping related to race, gender, age, and disability. as the participants helped one another, they gained insights about their colleagues’ research and about ways of improving their own writing for publication. know the format, content, editorial policy, and audience of the journal for which you intend to submit a manuscript whether junior faculty are using their dissertations or considering other manuscripts for publication, they must be aware of different journals’ individual or collective emphasis on theory, research, practice, or all the above. intimacy with a journal usually involves reading many issues of it and knowing the instructions for authors, which are often available in the journal or a related website. in the reading teacher, the editors welcome “feature articles,” “teaching tips” submissions (brief pieces explicitly applied to a classroom), and “filler” submissions (annotated bibliographies of published articles or websites concerning a topic). in intervention in school and clinic, types of submissions include “feature articles,” “current topics in review,” “an interview with,” “technology trends,” “what works for me,” “books and more,” “20 ways to,” and “spotlight on students.” author guidelines for this journal indicate that manuscripts should be practitioner-oriented and from 9 to 18 pages. no extensive reviews of professional literature are accepted, and a one-paragraph introduction for the topic is considered adequate. the editors of current issues in education, an online journal, welcome articles concerning theory, research, and practice. manuscripts for this journal may be submitted in a variety of ways: url(so the related pages can be downloaded for blind review ready to run on cie’s intranet.) attached to an email. all documents must be in microsoft word or they will be returned to the sender. also, if tables are utilized, it is the author’s responsibility to submit them in microsoft word table format. in addition to these three publications, other journals provide space for opinion or argumentative articles, and some journals designate entire issues or parts of issues for articles concerning themes. furthermore, most journal editors maintain a policy concerning manuscript style and require specific guidelines, such as those indicated in the publication manual of the american psychological association (2001). preparation guidelines vary in certain journals; however, with some editors requiring apa style for the references section and the chicago manual of style (2003) for other sections of the manuscript. we used these and other issues to help junior faculty understand that they must know a journal intimately before submitting a manuscript to it. this insight helped the participants recognize that the more they know about a journal, the more credible their manuscript will be to the editor and peer reviewers. realize your creative potential, and be aware of methods that kill creativity i am amazed at how many academics do not consider journal articles to be creative. granted, some articles are dense with technical data collection and data analysis, but even these contributions can demonstrate unique ways of synthesizing ideas and applying research findings to practice. teresa amabile has published extensively in the field of creativity, and her research has implications for both industry and academe (amabile, 1988a, 1988b, 1992, 1998; amabile, hadley, & kramer, 2002; amabile & sensabaubh, 1992; collins & amabile, 1999; conti & amabile, 1999; hennessey & amabile, 1999; hill & amabile, 1993). for more related publications by amabile and her colleagues, visit http://www.hbs.edu/research/index.html. also, see florida and goodnight (2005), specifically, amabile discovered the following methods that undermine people’s interest and creativity when they are involved in an interesting and potentially creative project: expected evaluation: people who focus on how their work will be judged are less creative than individuals who do not have to worry about this evaluative constraint. surveillance: individuals who are conscious of being observed while working are less creative than individuals who are not conscious of being observed. reward: individuals who perceive themselves as working mostly for a tangible reward are less creative than individuals who are not working mainly for a reward. competition:people who perceive themselves in direct and threatening competition with colleagues are less creative than those who are not focusing on competition. restricted choice: individuals whose choice is restricted are less creative than individuals who have a freer choice. scientists who are engaged in creativity seem to be especially affected by choice. specifically, freedom of choice for scientists was the most important aspect of environments that supported high creativity. restricted choice was the most significant factor that affected low creativity. extrinsic motivation: people who think about all the external purposes for doing something are less creative than people who think about all the intrinsic purposes for doing something. during our get-togethers with non-tenured faculty, we unanimously agreed that these six methods can stifle, or kill, creativity in industry and in academe. we also agreed that they appear to be embedded in most universities’ expectations for faculty. we further concluded that these expectations can reduce or hinder creativity. for example, faculty expect to be: evaluated by students and administrators; observed in classes and during committee work; rewarded with tenure, promotions, and grants; stressed about competing for tenure, promotions, and grants; restricted in their choice of teaching schedules and research priorities; and involved in tasks for extrinsic reasons, such as achieving tenure. of course, one can argue that the “real world” encounters much of the above and that intrinsic motivation is idealistic and in conflict with real-world expectations. one can further argue that journals also foster extrinsic motivation for writing, including writing that focuses on themed issues, that meets the readership’s expectations, and that fulfills the requirements of journal editors and peer reviewers. http://www.hbs.edu/research/index.html how do we reconcile these external dichotomies? the work of amabile and her colleagues indicates that more and better creativity takes place in the context of intrinsic motivation. common sense, therefore, suggests that faculty members are more likely to produce creative, authentic journal articles when external forces are eliminated or reduced. not surprisingly, neither university nor journal expectations represent a perfect world. both are similar in requiring prospective researchers and authors to meet external criteria for publishing. universities usually require faculty publications to advance knowledge, to bring prestige to the campuses, and to achieve tenure and promotions. journal editors and peer reviewers are equally concerned with issues of advancing knowledge and of gaining prestige for the journals and the professional associations that sponsor them. educational journals, however, provide a variety of print and electronic alternatives, offering options to prospective authors to write about theory, research, and practice. thus, writers have opportunities to reach their comfort zone as they match their interests, preferences, and talents with journal expectations. during our get-togethers, we reflected on the creative process and its connection to the vitally important role of imagination in the development of knowledge. in their thoughtful chapter, “imagination and the growth of the human mind,” kane and carpenter (2003) provide essential insights for nurturing playful environments that stimulate children’s imagination and establish a foundation for the development of knowledge into adulthood. as adult academics, we probably came from backgrounds that either stimulated imagination in natural, meaningful contexts or encouraged abstraction—“the removing of something from its context, [which] necessarily tears it away from the forces that generate its particular form and substance” (kane & carpenter, 2003, p. 128). thus, as children, some of us experienced fascination dwelling on bugs and worms found in soil, their natural habitat, while others might have been exposed to direct instruction about bugs and worms. regardless of our backgrounds, academics have potential to engage in (serious) imaginary play as they construct manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals. at the very least, we need time to think, reflect, and imagine before we engage in thoughtful writing. the last-minute, or eleventh-hour, perspective usually does not work well in writing with creativity and imagination. in addition to time, when we engage in actual writing, we need to remind ourselves not to overemphasize explicit aspects of knowledge; otherwise, “we underestimate the importance of the implicit, the imaginative, components of human knowing that provide the context rendering meaning and understanding rather than information alone” (kane & carpenter, 2003, p. 129). manuscripts should reflect a balance of pertinent information, accompanied by imagination and creativity, as they lean toward representing authentic contributions. during our informal meetings, we discussed these and other issues related to creativity and imagination. these discussions seemed to provide non-tenured faculty with a clearer sense of direction and to reduce some of their anxieties. become a serious critic and editor of your own work most junior faculty have strong content backgrounds concerning their specialties. their work sometimes lacks credibility, however, because it has not been carefully revised and edited. to demonstrate credibility with editors and their peer reviewers, we stressed the importance of writers not only generating substantive content but also reading their manuscripts (sometimes aloud) at least five times, spaced over several weeks. during this process of revision, we suggested that authors share their drafts with colleagues for the purpose of receiving constructive feedback that could result in more credible rewrites. we also encouraged authors to edit their work carefully while focusing on such criteria as: brevity: omit words that add nothing to meaning. examples: change “during the course of” to “during” and “few in number” to “few.” clarity: do not use vague adjectives when specific ones are called for. do not write “we considered numerous strategies.” instead write “we considered 9 strategies.” tone and style: make sure your words sound as if they come from a human being—not an institution. example: change “further notification will follow” to “i’ll keep you informed” and “in the judgment of this author” to “i believe.” variety: avoid starting each sentence with the same part of speech, such as a noun or pronoun. caution: do not try to start each sentence with a different part of speech. just strive for some variety. content: make your purpose immediately clear. do not force the reader to wade through several pages before understanding why you wrote the piece. paragraph strength: each paragraph should deal with only one topic. including too many topics will make your reader work too hard. also, when needed, use transitional devices between paragraphs. these six suggestions were adapted from when editing your own work (2004). other suggestions for revising and editing one’s work were also considered, with the following reminder: “don’t expect journal reviewers to do this work!” ( mckinney , 2005). both junior and senior faculty seemed to benefit from this perspective. weigh the benefits of submitting manuscripts to themed issues or regular issues of journals another concern that surfaced was writing for themed versus general issues of peer-reviewed journals. not surprisingly, both have merit. for example, themed issues approach an important area from a range of perspectives and, thus, provide opportunities for targeting manuscripts toward specific aspects of themes. general issues provide more topics for readers and more choices for potential authors. in support of writing for themed issues, henson (1995) found that 31% of articles appearing in 49 journals … were related to designated themes. the advantage of writing on a designated theme is that most journals that publish at least some themed issues receive only one-third as many manuscripts for their announced themed issues as for their general issues. put another way, writing for a themed issue reduces the competition by about two-thirds and so can double or triple your manuscript’s potential for acceptance. (henson, 1995, p. 803) another point of view suggests that only extraordinary manuscripts should be sent to themed issues of journals. one reason is that editors designate specific issues for particular themes, and this publishing schedule can result in a manuscript being held for review. for instance, manuscripts submitted for a theme in the may issue of a journal might have a deadline submission date of december 1. realistically, this timeline means that the manuscripts might be reviewed from december to march and that busy editors might send rejection letters to the authors between march and april. if the authors completed and submitted their manuscripts in september, then the manuscripts will be held for most of the academic year as the editors and peer reviewers make decisions about acceptance, rejection, or revision. another reason is that themed issues tend to attract “big names” who are well-known in the thematic area, and their experience and expertise increase their chances of getting published in the thematic issue. regrettably, well-known authors sometimes receive preferential treatment, even if their manuscripts are not excellent. recently, my colleagues and i read all the articles that addressed an important theme in a respected journal. most of the articles were excellent, but two were embarrassingly mediocre. we believe that the editor relaxed the standards for these two articles and published them because of the authors’ worldwide reputations. we also feel that better manuscripts were rejected because the authors were not well-known. simply put, politics can affect journal writing. these issues were discussed at our meetings, and they seemed to provide junior faculty with realistic insights about choosing themed or regular issues of journals as writing outlets. select journals that represent your current developmental level of research and writing and that your university considers acceptable becoming an effective writer for peer-reviewed journals involves developmental growth and savvy. serious writers are continuously improving their craft by reading extensively, engaging in deep reflection, and seeking constructive criticism of their work. savvy writers are also aware of the degree to which their manuscripts fit the needs and expectations of different journals and simultaneously fulfill the publishing requirements of their universities. “publishing in the right journal is recommended to aspiring authors, although determining the right journals in which to publish can be a problem for the beginning writer. one method of determining what constitutes a top journal is the publication’s acceptance rate” (shelley & schuh, 2001, p. 11). according to cabell and english (1998), manuscripts that represent significant contributions tend to be published in journals with the lowest acceptance rates. one criterion for top journals is an acceptance rate of 10-20% (murningham, 1996). during our get-togethers, we talked about these issues as well as resources that are available for helping faculty match their manuscripts with potential writing outlets. one such resource was developed by the education department faculty for the committee on rank and tenure at le moyne college. specifically, journals were given designations, such as above first tier (with multiple blind reviews and an acceptance rate of less than 10%), first tier (with blind reviews, usually by less peer reviewers, and an acceptance rate of 11-20%), and second tier (with or without peer reviewers and an acceptance rate beyond 20%). then, journals were listed under these designations. for example, above first tier journals included american educational research journal, harvard educational review, reading research quarterly, and the reading teacher. first tier journals included english journal, journal of adolescent and adult literacy, journal of literacy research, and language arts. second tier journals included behavioral disorders, english education, journal of learning disabilities, and middle school journal. for more information concerning these journal designations and related periodicals, visit education department faculty (1997) of le moyne college at http://www.lemoyne.edu/faculty_senate/rank_tenure//standards/education.html. consider certain electronic journals as viable options for publishing faculty also engaged in thoughtful discussions about the value of publishing articles in peer-reviewed electronic journals. we considered e-journals as potential writing outlets because some of them seem to be having a greater impact on their readership (rudner, miller-whitehead, & gellmann, 2002). for example, tenopir and king (2000) estimated that a typical article appearing in an american scientific journal will probably be read about 900 times. in contrast, “it is not uncommon for an article in education policy analysis archives (epaa) to be read more than 10,000 times; several articles have been viewed more than 30,000 times. the 100 articles in practical assessment, research & evaluation (pare), a more specialized electronic journal, had averaged more than 7,000 views per article as of february, 2002. in september, 2002, pare readership reached the one million mark.” (rudner, miller-whitehead, & gellmann, 2002). many scholars, however, believe that e-journals are not as esteemed as traditional print journals. nontenured faculty, therefore, might be apprehensive about the possibility of tenure committees’ negative view of online publications. undoubtedly, some tenure committees will underestimate the value of e-journals and not give them as much credit toward tenure. a related issue is that some e-journals might fail or “are likely to be less permanent than printed journals” (kiernan, 1999, p. a25). on the contrary, rudner, miller-whitehead, and gellmann (2002) believe online “journals are often as rigorous as print journals and have a much greater impact in terms of educating readers.” these researchers offer recommendations to editors and publishers of e-journals. some of the recommendations are also pertinent for authors. these include: (a) submitting articles on current topics, (b) selecting e-journals in which articles are permanently archived, (c) choosing online journals that are indexed by current index to journals in education and education index, (d) researching e-journals with a focus on their usage statistics, and (e) providing colleagues and tenure committees with information concerning the value and impact of certain online journals. http://www.lemoyne.edu/faculty_senate/rank_tenure/standards/education.html think about presenting a paper at a convention, but realize its pros and cons chairingsessions and presenting papers at conventionsare exciting activities for academics. these conventions provide excellent opportunities for meeting new colleagues, solidifying friendships, and sharing ideas. participation at conventions can also lead to authorship and co-authorship of articles, especially when the presenters are thoroughly prepared, attentive to audience feedback, and committed to transforming the presentations into manuscripts. making contributions at conventions, however, is time-consuming. presentations involve months of preparation, travel and hotel arrangements, and related groundwork. though exhilarating, these activities can siphon time and energy away from publications. realistically, most convention presentations do not result in articles, book chapters, and books. as we discussed these and related concerns at our meetings, both novice and experienced faculty talked about their experiences at conventions. we agreed that judiciously getting involved in convention activities is important for both sharing and learning. we also concluded that these activities have potential for creating articles in peer-reviewed journals. manage your busy academic year while being productive and visible, but not exhausted during some of our get-togethers, new faculty talked about being overwhelmed with the challenge and frustration of getting published in the context of other time-consuming responsibilities. they felt inundated with (a) planning, teaching, and assessing their students’ progress; (b) serving on curriculum, personnel, academic standing, and ad hoc committees; (c) becoming involved in partnerships with local school districts; (d) attending department and faculty meetings; and (e) becoming savvy about politics. compounding their stresses are low salaries and expenses for college loans, which can cause new faculty to teach course overloads during the academic year and summer sessions. this harried context can drain the human mind of cognitive and creativity energy, which is necessary for clear thinking and effective writing. expecting junior faculty to be overly involved with university responsibilities and to still find time to publish substantive articles is unrealistic. as new faculty struggle to survive the tenure process, they need support, not more stress. during our informal meetings, we talked openly about the stresses encountered by new faculty, and we considered potential solutions. these solutions included having junior faculty choose only one committee on which they would like to serve and supporting their efforts and growth on this committee. for example, as members of the curriculum committee, junior faculty might work closely with mentors to revise standards, goals, and course syllabi. these new faculty, therefore, would have the opportunity to choose the one committee on which they prefer to serve, to receive help in completing committee tasks, and to learn from this process. in addition to committee work, we considered ways of helping non-tenured faculty publish articles. again, mentors can be helpful, especially if they have good track records as researchers, writers, and editors. to increase the chances of matching the right mentors with the right faculty members, we sought potential mentors and asked them to list their areas of expertise. we also asked new faculty who were interested in being mentored to list their research and publication priorities. this approach provided new faculty with opportunities to decide if they needed a mentor and, if so, to choose a mentor closely connected to their research agenda. these types of assistance seemed to help junior faculty to be more productive and visible and less frustrated and exhausted. conclusion as we reflected on the informal meetings and mentoring sessions in the school of education, we noticed faculty developing a greater willingness to conduct research and to publish related articles. we also recognized some differences in the research agendas of the female faculty and their male counterparts. in general, most of the women conducted research at a somewhat slower pace (bellas & toutkoushian, 1999), probably because they were extremely careful about their data collection and data analysis and because they were more likely to collaborate and coauthor articles with colleagues. understandably, these research styles resulted in most of the women taking more time to submit their manuscripts to journal editors, and they, therefore, did not publish their work to the degree that men did (bellas & toutkoushian, 1999; boyer, 2004; harper, baldwin, gansneder, & chronister, 2001; schneider, 1998; tesch, wood, helwig, & nattinger, 1995). these tentative comparisons of the women’s and men’s research styles are not intended as indicators of quality in research methodology or in published outcomes. rather, they suggest differences in comfort zones of the female and male faculty who conduct research and publish their findings. the informal meetings and mentoring sessions scheduled for next year will focus, in part, on supporting the different research agendas, interests, and styles of female and male faculty. overall, we are pleased with the dedicated efforts of our colleagues who are working cooperatively to instill a commitment toward scholarly writing. although our work is not a panacea, it represents steps in the right direction. thus far, both junior and senior faculty have demonstrated genuine interest in continuing their research and publication in print and online journals. in a sense, this vitally important growth and development have increased the key players’ academic empowerment through a reconceptualization of their roles as reflective, dialogical, and mindful educators (kane & snauwaert, 1999/2000). during the next few years, we will continue to monitor these efforts as we reflect on the quality and quantity of articles published in peer-reviewed journals. references amabile, t. 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(2001). washington, dc: american psychological association. rudner, l., miller-whitehead, m., & gellmann, j. (2002). who is reading on-line education journals? why? and what are they reading? d-lib magazine, 8. retrieved march 5, 2005, from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december02/rudner/12rudner.html schneider, a. (1998). why don’t women publish as much as men? the chronicle of higher education, 45(3), a14-a16. shelley, m., & schuh, j. (2001). are the best higher education journals really the best? a meta-analysis of writing quality and readability. journal of scholarly publishing, 33. retrieved november 28, 2004, from http://www.utpjournals.com/products/jsp/331/read2.html#9 tenopir, c., & king, d. (2000). towards electronic journals: realities for scientists, librarians, and publishers. washington, d.c.: special libraries association. retrieved march 5, 2005, from http://www.sla.org tesch, b., wood, h., helwig, a., & nattinger, a. (1995). promotion of women physicians in academic medicine: glass ceiling or sticky floor. the journal of the american medical association, 273, ​1022. when editing your own work. (2004). communication briefings, 22, 6. authors dr. joseph sanacore school of education department of special education and literacy c.w. post campus of long islanduniversity dr. joseph sanacore is a professor of education at the c.w. post campus of long island university, brookville, ny 11548. he is the author of more than 100 articles and book chapters. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word rosser-mims_a_legacy_of_leadership.docx volume 38, 2018 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 21 advancing women in leadership vol. 38, pp. 21-26, 2018 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper a legacy of leadership: black female adult educators dionne m. rosser-mims dionne m. rosser-mims, college of education, troy university, drosser-mims@troy.edu accepted december 28, 2017 this paper profiles the lives of four black female adult educators whose leadership, power, and activism influenced the educational and political advances of the black community. while it is not the author’s intention to marginalize the stories of the women presented in this manuscript, anna julia cooper, charlotte forten grimke, ida b. wells, septima clark, and fannie lou hamer made significant contributions as activists and educators who embodied teaching as a leadership style that focused on the development of others. their struggles and lessons learned remain relevant even today. the biographical summaries presented on these remarkable female adult educators are an important reminder of how education became and remains the vehicle for social mobility and economic success that black women used to not only improve their lives but also the quality of life for the black community as a whole. keywords: forten grimke; ida b. wells; septima clark; fannie lou hamer; adult educators; black women; adult/continuing education; women and gender studies; race, ethnicity and class introduction dr. anna julia cooper completed a ph.d. in latin at the age of 62 and later wrote her best-known 1892 publication, a voice from the south by a black woman of the south. anna julia cooper is recognized as a public educator and leader in improving the black american circumstance. as the united states embarked on the 20th century, cooper’s vision included new opportunities for women, especially black women and was an accurate prediction of how black women have come to be seen as central to the survival of black american community (cooper, 2000; hill collins, 2000; may & guy-sheftall, 2007). the new opportunities to which cooper refers are evidenced today as more women are holding leadership positions in traditionally male professions (i.e., presidents of higher educational institutions, ceos in corporate america, and elected and appointed government positions). indeed, black women have made significant advances, yet still face historic race and gender barriers to reaching their full potential. cooper (2000) states, [black] women of to-day occupy [sic], one may say, a unique position in this country…her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. she is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both. (p. 92) cooper suggested that the approach of the 20th century should call for the recognition of women’s greater status in society and that they have and will continue to play a significant educational leadership role in guiding the country to “greater plains” (p. 92). more specifically, it is black women who will be the guiding force in “lifting” the black community out of subjugation to greater self-empowerment. cooper’s predictions have come to fruition as we now see black women in senior level leadership positions historically filled by men in the areas of government, business and industry, and education, many of whom are firsts in their respective positions. the purpose of this paper is to highlight the important contributions of key black female adult educators whose leadership and political stances remain examples for contemporary adult female learners to follow to combat today’s education and social ails facing black america. with cooper as an example of a black female educator and leader with a political agenda, the following sections identify and describe the contributions of other black women educational and community leaders: charlotte forten grimke, septima clark, fannie lou hamer, and ida b. wells. why are these women’s sorties relevant in the year 20017. countless numbers of black women’s contributions to improving the political, social, economic, and educational standing of all americans, all of advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 22 whom cannot be recognized in this manuscript, in the collective represent reservoir of strength. as a member of the x generation and rising leaders within the adult and higher education profession, we are reminded of the importance of this manuscript. we have at hand the proverbial play book from which we can continue to learn to manage today’s social, educational, and economic challenges. yes, these challenges may be packaged differently today in comparison to earlier times; however, they still require a strong grounding in education, selflessness, perseverance, a desire to uplift the communities to which we serve. it is not our intention to marginalize black american women’s stories but to give voice to the significant contributions black women have made as activists and educators who embodied teaching as a leadership style that focused on the development of others. their struggles and lessons learned remain relevant even today. in order to understand fully black women’s leadership role and contributions as educators, it is foremost essential to explore their leadership exhibited during slavery. it is also important to understand how education became the vehicle for freedom, social mobility, and economic success that black women used to not only to improve their lives but also the quality of life for the black community as a whole. sheroes: a legacy of strength historically, black women have been at the forefront of the struggle for human and civil rights promulgating their blood, sweat, and tears, with the goal of sustaining families, communities, and to building the very foundation upon which the united states is built. in spite of barriers and obstacles of many kinds, black women have excelled in all fields. education is perhaps the oldest and most important among them for it is here that black women have given great service and struggled the longest for opportunity and equality (allen, 1997; hazzard, 1982; king & ferguson, 2011; peterson, 1996;). the educational opportunities for black women and girls for the period preceding emancipation were limited. in america as slaves, black women were at the very bottom of the social ladders, deprived of all rights and vulnerable to the constant abuses of men, black and white as well as to the hatred and scorn of white women (hazzard, 1982). black women like harriet tubman and sojourner truth who were the “titans of the abolitionist movement” (murray, 2000) exhibited unbridled leadership qualities (e.g., self-sufficiency, selfsacrifice, militancy with an egalitarian spirit, resilience, and spiritual grounding) during a time when black women’s ‘womanhood’ was being defined and exploited by a racist, sexist, and oppressive patriarchal system of dominance. according to marble (1990), one decisive form of sexist oppression is the control slave owners had over black women’s reproductive rights. slave owners raped black female slaves; they were told when and how to have children, subjected to a eurocentric construction of the “black female matriarch,” and worse yet, were not considered “women.” to combat these forces black women exerted their power through the form of resistance. sojourner truth, for example, bared her breasts to prove that she indeed was a woman before an antislavery rally comprised of white women more than one hundred and fifty years ago. men from the audience yelled back at here that they did not believe she was a woman, which “unwittingly voiced america’s contempt and disrespect for black womanhood” (hooks, 1997). later, truth in her famous ain’t i a woman speech delivered in akron, ohio in 1851 at the second annual convention for the women’s rights movement, become one of the first feminists to call attention to the “lot of the black slave woman, who compelled by circumstance to labor alongside black men, was a living embodiment of truth that women could be the working equals of men” (marble, 1990, p.407). with respect to racism, scales-trent (1990) suggested that black women’s struggle for the right to vote is a compelling illustration of the impact of the combined racist and sexist oppression they endured. black women’s source of political powerlessness was attributable to two factorstheir positionality in both the black and female groups which resulted in tem having to fight-even in the 21st century-for social, political, and economic parity. hence, the case of the black woman in america is very special. the circumstances of whether serving in the slave owner’s house or working in the plantation fields, the black woman remained easy prey with few defenses (hazzard, 1982). yet, it was the black woman who held the black slave family together often without the aid and companionship of a black male. in her role as mother and provider often for her own children and the children of others, the black female slave became educator as well. according to hazzard (1982), historical documents reveal that it was not uncommon for a slave woman to use the late night hours after work to study a “purloined spelling book or dictionary” in an effort to learn to read and write. denied the opportunity for a formal education and fearful that their white owners would punish them for having educational aspirations, many black mothers feigned ignorance and taught their children to do the same and at the same time sought to lean and teach as much as possible (hazzard, 1982). viewing education as the “road to freedom” (peterson, 1996) many black women as slaves and emancipated slaves were encouraged to become educated to ‘lift’ their race out of educational and economic subjugation. in fact, “the notion of ‘race uplift’ was the expected objective of all educated blacks; however, after the civil war, the implementation if this philosophy was place primarily on the shoulders of black women” (allen, 1997; perkins, 1993). according to perkins, unlike women of white society, black women were encouraged to become educated to aid in the improvement of their race. perkins quotes from an 1837 article entitled ‘to females of colour’ in the weekly advocate, a new york black newspaper urging black women to get an education for the ‘uplift’ of the race. the articles states, black women to obtain an education…in an enterprise for the improvement of our people, either moral or mental, our hands would be palsied without woman’ influence…let our beloved female friends, then, rouse up, and exert all their power, in advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 23 encouraging, and sustaining this effort (educational) which we have made to disabuse the public mind of the misrepresentations made of our character; and to show the world, that there is virtue among us, though concealed; talent, though buried; intelligence, though overlooked (perkins, 1993, p. 266). to carry out this charge, promote and demonstrate the race’s intelligence, morality and ingenuity (perkins, 1993), black women like charlotte forten grimke, ida b. wells, septima clark, and fannie lou hamer made significant contributions to this end as activists and educators who embodied teaching as a leadership style that focused on the development of others. biographical summaries of historical and contemporary black women educators charlotte forten grimke charlotte forten grimke “provides one of the best nineteenth century examples of a life devoted to a personal quest for knowledge and selfless service to the race” (hazzard., 1982, p. 277). her life and career covered a period when the lives of black men and women in america underwent momentous changes, the experience, challenges, and opportunities she faced were intimately connected with those of her race (hazzard, 1982). grimke was exposed to the abolitionist cause at an early age due to her grandfather, father, and two aunts’ abolitionist work. after being denied admission to white schools in philadelphia, she was sent to salem, massachusetts to live with a prosperous black family, the remond’s. mr. remond was a noted antislavery lecturer, which again exposed her to the abolitionist cause (peterson, 1996). as a result, grimke developed a strong desire to find ways to help fight against the injustices blacks were suffering at the time. on way of accomplishing this was to become a teacher. grimke undertook study in the salem normal school and a year later became the first black teacher at the salem eps grammar school. after two years and failing health, grimke returned to philadelphia for a brief period in 1861 to teach school with her aunt margaret. with health complications following here there too, she moved back to salem and involved in what is considered by some, the first unofficial federally funded adult education project, the port royal experiment (peterson, 1996). the purpose of the experiment was two-fold: to prove that former slaves had intellectual ability and to expose the bravery of black soldiers in combat. grimke as the only black instructor along with other teachers struggled to teach math, reading, and writing to children and adults in the same classroom (peterson, 1996). although she was hired to teach, “grimke considered her task also one of instilling self-pride, self-respect and self-sufficiency” (hazzard, 1982, p. 278). although the conditions for learning were unfavorable and supplies were inadequate, grimke managed to impart a rudimentary program of instruction. she also managed to fulfill a long-cherished dream-to share stories of great black men and women with her pupils as a source of pride and inspiration. once again, due to health complications, grimke left port royal in 1864 to assume teaching positions in massachusetts, then charleston, and finally in washington dc at preparatory high school. at age forty-one, she married reverend francis grimke and spent the rest of her life remaining active by writing letters to newspapers and journals, ida b. wells barnett ida b. wells barnett was an educator and a social activist. she formed her first class as a child in her father’s store, teaching any black child or adult who wanted to learn (thompson, 1990). while a student at age sixteen beginning collegiate level work at shaw university, barnett’s parents were stricken with yellow fever thus leaving her responsible for her five younger brothers and sisters. she as a result, curtailed her college career to accept a teaching position in memphis, tennessee (thompson, 1990). with the knowledge she had acquired at shaw, she passed the examination required for country schoolteachers. she later secured a teaching job in woodstock in shelby county, tennessee which paid her a higher salary. she then prepared to take the city schoolteacher examination. “it was here also that had her first experiences of ‘jim crowism’ and began her career of protest” (as cited in thompson, 1990, p.13). barnett became heavily involved in advocating for the exposure of crimes against blacks, especially lynching. while serving as editor of the free speech in memphis in which she wrote about the unjust lynching of black males, she began receiving violent threats against her life, which lead to the termination of her teaching position. thompson (1990) reports that barnett left memphis in 1892 because she wanted to continue her journalism career in new york and chicago. moreover, in 1895, she published the red record, which was the first statistical analysis of lynching in the united states. she became a virtual crusader against lynching and a staunch advocate of women’s rights. in this vein, she along with other women leaders with a pioneering spirit, initiative, courage, and perseverance helped women to organize themselves to form clubs and organizations on the local and national level (wesley, 1984). barnett contributed greatly to the development of the national association of colored women’s clubs; she served on national committee denouncing the lynching of blacks, especially women. in 1898, she accompanied a delegation of illinois congressional representatives to present a protest to president william mckinley stating the statistics had shown that nearly 10,000 american citizens had been lynched in the previous twenty years (wesley, 1984). barnett also traveled around the country as a lecturer expressing her “conviction that the nation’s indifference and apathy about the primitive practice of shooting, hanging, and burning persons without recourse to law were due to ignorance of mob action in the south” (thompson, 1990, p.35). she explained that she assumed the task of crusader against lynching not because she had a natural inclination to recite its horrors, but because she had witnessed society’s need to be informed about it (hazzard, 1982). advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 24 ida b. wells barnett’s youthful experience as guardian and provider for five siblings was preparation for the independence and determination that she exhibited throughout her life. barnett’s anti-lynching crusade branded her with the title, “agitator” and thus enabled her to influence the making of antilynching laws. although barnett never completed college, she continued taking classes that would enhance her intellectual skills. it is through her leadership as an activist, model of resilience, her respect and love of education and teaching, youth and adult and the power of her journalism skill, which helped her to improve the lives of many african americans for years to come. septima poinsette clark a native of charleston, south carolina and born in 1898, clarke is recognized as a leading educational, social, and political activist. teaching was one of the few professions available to black women at the beginning of the twentieth century, clark took the state examination in 1916 after having completed the twelfth grade at avery normal institute in charleston, south carolina and secured a teaching position at johns island (mcfadden, 1990), a sea island near the harbor of charleston (easter, 1996). she remained on the island for three years during which time she became a “crusader for the equalization of teachers’ salaries as well as an active proponent for black teachers being able to teach in charleston’s public school and becoming public school principals” (mcfadden, 1990, p. 86). clark’s civil rights work began in 1919 when she returned to charleston to teach at avery normal institute, her old high school. during this time, she worked closely with the president of the naacp to generate support for black teachers to teach in public schools for blacks. their efforts among others persuaded the legislature to pass a law in 1920 granting them this right (easter, 1996). while in charleston, clark married and had two children and then separated from her husband who later died. clark moved to columbia, south carolina and began her most famous work in citizenship education. during her years in columbia, she helped design citizenship training programs for illiterate soldiers stationed at camp jackson (now fort jackson) following world war i. (mcfadden, 1990). according to mcfadden (1990), the programs trained soldiers to sign their names to pay slips, read bus routes, and learn to count. clark’s ability to link social reform with educational advancement became the basis for the citizenship schools she designed at highlander folk school and the southern christian leadership conference (sclc) (mcfadden, 1990). clark worked in the charleston public schools from 1947 to 1956. after being fired for refusing to conceal her membership in the naacp, she turned adversity to her advantage by accepting the position of director of workshops for the highlander folk school and she later joined the sclc staff as director of education and training in 1961. clark essentially spent her time providing citizenship training, voting, literacy, and leadership education (mcfadden, 1990)-teaching people how to obtain political power. as a social activist, clark also advocated for the training of women in citizenship education. she believed it helped women to realize their worth in society. although this was not the goal of the training schools, clark however contended that women who participate in citizen education become aroused citizens and assumed positive roles in quest for civil as well as women’s rights (mcfadden, 1990). clark’s leadership roles with the naacp, highlander folk school, and cls had tremendous influence on her personally and professionally. she served as the first black female elected to the executive board of sclc and the first black woman elected to the same school board in charleston that did not renew her teaching contract (easter, 1996). like hamer, clark brought america one step closer to dismantling the barriers keeping african americans on the periphery of political involvement. through education and the power of their leadership within the black community, they and other black female adult educators were able to reach the poor and underprivileged as a means to help them raise themselves to better status in life (easter, 1996). fannie lou hamer fannie lou hamer, born in 1917, as the twelfth child of a mississippi sharecropper family, brought america face to face with itself-it’s racism, bigotry, intolerance, hatred, and hypocrisy (locke, 1990, p .27) after experiencing at a young age and witnessing her parents’ experiences with racism, she grew up determined to change the unequal and discriminatory practices directed toward blacks. as a young political advocate, hamer became a member of the student non-violent coordinating conference (sclc) in 1962. in defying laws and political mores of mississippi, she was launched into a life that would remain politically active until her untimely death in 1977 at the age of fifty-nine (locke, 1990). one important aspect of her life is her legacy in the formation in 1964 and activities of the mississippi freedom democratic party (mfdp) (locke, 1990). with hamer’s leadership, the freedom party developed a national reputation challenging the seats of the all-white mississippi delegation because blacks were not allowed to exercise their rights as citizens to participate in electoral politics in that state (reagon, 1990, p. 215). when the mfdf began a slow descent into obscurity, it left its mark on national democratic party politics. more important, it catapulted to fame a magnificent woman who sought to expose america’s hypocrisy and dispel the image of america being the land of the brave and the home of the free. she sought to transform the ideal into reality. through mfdp and other grass roots efforts, fannie lou hamer brought america one step closer to dismantling the barriers keeping african americans on the periphery of political involvement. this strong, invincible woman, without benefit of formal education, showed the country that knowledge, wisdom, and organizational skills did not come with the acquisition of a formal degree (locke, 1990). advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 25 as hamer states, “whether you have a ph.d., d.d., or no d., we’re in this bag together” (locke, 1990, p. 35). hamer was more than a talker, organizer, and singer; her efforts brought results. for example, when she failed the literacy test the first times she tried to register to vote she told the registrar that she would return every thirty days until she passed the test, and she did (locke, 1990). hamer was an activist and a cultural leader who assumed major responsibility for the creation and maintenance of the environment within which those who struggle for freedom lived and worked (locke, 1990). she positioned herself so that she was constantly in great danger; she operated in the open, aboveground, confronting an entire system that was organized to keep her and all black people subjugated (reagon, 1990). when ms. hamer found her voice as a fighter, she became a transmitter of the culture of that struggle and urged others to join in battling racism poverty, and injustice. as a leader in the movement and in her community, she did not hesitate to criticize men who wanted to lead but were unable to confront their fears (reagon, 1990). she believed that leadership came from actual work and commitment and was not preordained by sex, she clearly stated her position on this when urging people to face the danger: “you see the thing what [is] so pitiful about it, the men [have] been wanting to be the boss all these years, and the ones not up under the house [are] sic under the bed” (reagon, 1990, p. 213). fannie lou hamer, standing among a chorus of black women leaders like grimke and septima clark, taught something else about being a leader in the movementthese women made their political and social stances primary in their lives. from the past to the present black women have contributed to african americans’ educational advances not only at the familial and community level, but also by their “assumption of roles of leadership and influence in the policymaking and other administrative bodies which govern american education” (hazzard, 1982, p. 316). in fact, the greatest numbers of elected black women officials are educators. they have pioneered as commissioners, superintendents, and supervisors of education. hine and thompson (1998, p. 54) state it best, “more than a story of struggle, black women’s history is very much a story of hope,” in the face of great obstacles, black women strengthen their communities through providing leadership in women’s groups, charitable organizations, political groups and their contributions to the larger community as writers, activists, educators, and artists (hine & thompson, 1998). as evidenced in the late 19th century, ida b. wells, notorious for her crusade against lynching, and other matriarchs like septima clark, fannie lou hamer, and charlotte grimke helped to pave the way for many african american youth and adults to obtain quality secondary and post-secondary education advocating for and by helping to found schools and organizations for the personal and educational development of black women and men (giddings, 1984; mccluskey, 1994; murray, 2000). similarly, literary scholars in the early 19th century, mary prince whose work published in 1831,the history of mary prince, a west indian slave story, related to herself, and mary seacole’s 1837 work, wonderful adventures of mary seacole, were the first black women to have their worked published (reynolds, 2002). they paved the way for what then followed a 131-year gap before any work by a black woman was published (reynolds, 2002). if it were not for these women’s leadership, contemporary black scholars like audre lorde, alice walker, bell hooks, angela davis, and paula giddings would perhaps have had a longer wait to ascertain power to shift black women’s lived experienced from the margins to the center of traditional literary scholarship. contemporary activist leaders like rosa parks who played a fundamental role in sparking the mass struggle for civil rights in the south; coretta scott king who carried and continued to carry her husband’s legacy into the 21st century; and shirley chisholm, the first black woman to make a serious bid for the united states presidency in 1970, collectively forced america to no longer ignore and silence the reporting of black women’s experiences, but to acknowledge their plight as manifestations of racism, sexism, and economic exploitation. the work of the black women aforementioned, alone, attests to the intellectual and political contributions black women have made towards attaining equality, especially educational equality for black americans. although black women’s voices have been silenced for centuries they did not sit idle waiting for the dominant culture to release its hold on their intellectual rights. they, instead, from their peculiar coigne of vantage [sat] as quiet observer[s],…whisper[ing] just the needed suggestion or the almost forgotten truth. the [black] woman, then should not be ignored because her bark is resting in the silent waters of the sheltered cove…watching the movements of the contestants none the less and is all the better qualified, perhaps, to weigh and judge and advise because not herself in the excitement of the race. (cooper, 2000, p. 93) cooper’s poignant prediction is reflected in the social and economic climax of the year 2012. the good news is that more scholarly attention is being devoted to studying and learning more about how black women leaders used education as an empowering tool for activism, especially those who were adult educators (imel & bersch, 2015; gaetane, williams, & sherman, 2009; hopkins o’neil, passarelli, & billmoria, 2008; king & ferguson, 2001). the adult education field certainly benefits most from this new information such that its knowledge base is enriched with a more accurate picture of the contributions marginalized groups have made toward the field’s development. more importantly, as a field that promotes inclusivity it is our belief that students and scholars will be provided with a greater appreciation for the longstanding role adult education activities have had and continue to have in improving the quality of life for all people. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 26 references allen, b. 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(1984). the history of the national association of colored women's clubs: a legacy of service. washingtion, dc: tha association. advancing women in leadership journal jeni hart univeristy of missouri researchers note that to improve the climate for academic women, institutional leaders must become change agents (etzkowitz, kemelgor, & uzzi, 2000; glazer-raymo, 1999; valian, 1998). although some institutional leaders may be willing to pursue strategies to benefit academic women, not all leaders are so altruistic nor are they able to see past their own privilege. as such, the strategies of academic women, both individually, and as this study emphasizes, collectively, are instrumental in trying to create an equitable academic climate. for this study, i was interested in the organizations that are both feminist and activist. in part, i was interested in them because they helped bring about changes that continue to improve the climate in academe for women. evidence that campuses are becoming more inclusive of women includes the fact that women are actively participating in higher education now more than ever before. more than 50 percent of all undergraduate students are female. in addition, the numbers of female graduate, professional, and doctoral recipients and faculty are increasing (chronicle, 2003). over 700 campuses house women’s studies programs or departments (thorne, 2000) and many campuses house women’s centers and other resources for women. however, the existence of these organizations suggests that while the climate may have improved for some women in recent years, there are still concerns that need to be addressed and there are women who want to mobilize as a result. the purpose of this study was to explore the strategies that networks of feminist faculty women use to improve the climate for women on their campuses. to do so, i presented a review of the literature that examines the nature of activism among women in the academy. this scholarly framework reinforced the need to additional research, like this study, to better understand how courageous academics mobilize and work for an equitable campus climate. by analyzing interviews, documents, and observations of meetings, i was able to get a richer picture of how two feminist faculty organizations advance their activist agendas. the stories that emerged from the data told two related, but differing stories of how academic women pursued their activist goals. in addition, their stories provided meaningful examples for other successful academic women who want to improve the climate for women on their own campuses and suggested that there is still more to be learned about the nature of activist work in the academy. a diverse conceptual framework supported my research question and inquiry. three theoretical perspectives interwove to form the fabric of my literature review, design, and analysis. because i was interested in women as subjects and believed that power within the academy is primarily patriarchal, i explored this study from a feminist perspective. moreover, for this study, faculty and faculty work were central; therefore, professionalization theory also informed my research. finally, the connection of activist faculty women to the women’s movement, and the potential for organizational change, influenced by activism, called for inclusion of the social movement literature. my review of the literature is embedded in the theoretical frameworks described above and focused on the mechanisms women faculty have pursued to transform higher education. specifically, i explored the scholarship on the activist strategies in which they engage. many researchers have focused on strategies that individual academic women have pursued to create a more equitable campus community (astin & leland, 1991; caplan, 1994; garner, 1996; valian, 1998; theodore, 1986). often these strategies are embedded in liberal feminist efforts to better the situation for one woman or a small group of women within the existing institutional structure. for example, garner (1996), valian (1998), and glazer-raymo (1999, 2000) advocated that women consider serving on committees that shape policy for women, assume administrative positions, or become members of a college or university board of trustees or regents. theodore (1986), in her study of 470 academic women protesters, shared multiple stories of women who used institutional grievance procedures or filed complaints with government agencies, including seeking legal action in the courts. she also shared the experiences of women who have resigned from their own academic or administrative position or refused to be considered for a promotion because they disagreed with an institutional decision or policy (theodore, 1986). however, theodore’s (1986) study found that these predominantly isolated efforts of academic women in the 1970s and 1980s experienced little success. instead, “campus troublemakers,” as she called them, were faced with sexism in the grievance and legal systems; red tape; inaction; lies; lack of financial, psychological, and social support, including reluctant unions; and often faced retaliation from colleagues and administrators (theodore, 1986). although scholars described strategies to foster institutional change that center on the efforts of an individual academic woman rather than on collective action (astin & leland, 1991; caplan, 1994; garner, 1996; glazer-raymo, 1999, 2000), many of the tactics described or suggested can be pursued either individually, by an individual who is a member of a network, or collectively. ultimately, to improve the institutional climate for the next generation of women, academic women must anticipate, confront, and address expectations that limit the advancement of women (glazer-raymo, 2000). to do so, activists should prod search committees to increase the diversity of the applicant pool, work with women outside the institution who can put pressure on the university or college, host and publicize events like speakers and conferences, request that the university president make a public statement that gender discrimination will not be tolerated, and support administrators who are sympathetic to feminist scholarship and inquiry (astin & leland, 1991; caplan, 1994; garner, 1996; glazer-raymo, 1999, 2000). other scholars whose work reflects the experiences of faculty activists focus on the power of the collective to transform the academic climate (baldwin, blattner, johnson, peden, & shepard, 2000; childers, rackin, secor, & tracy, 1981; desole & butler, 1994; glazer-raymo, 1999; hyer, 1983; o’leary & lie, 1990; smallwood, 2001; swogger, 2000; taylor, 1989; theodore, 1986). most of the women in theodore’s (1986) study described their activist work as wrought with negative experiences. as such, she learned from the stories of individual protestors that collective strength is the best way for a movement to achieve its goals and to be considered a positive experience for those involved. in addition, theodore (1986) stated that collective action among faculty women can be effective. she also identified strategies that activists can use, including arranging meetings with administrators, writing letters, collecting funds for defense purposes, sponsoring rallies and lectures, and creating petitions and demonstrations (theodore, 1986). o’leary and lie (1990) referenced theodore’s (1986) study as they categorized the activist strategies of academic women. they indicated that evidence from theodore’s (1986) work helped to shape personal strategies. further, recommendations from theodore’s findings characterized institutional strategies (o’leary & lie, 1990). institutional strategies were considered the most effective to bring about policy changes that benefit large groups of individuals, accomplished through well-presented, data-driven arguments. collective action, particularly within women’s studies programs, has been successful at using data to initiate institutional change (o’leary & lie, 1990). several scholars have used case studies to describe models of collective action that academic women are encouraged to replicate to transform the institutional culture to one that is more welcoming to women (baldwin et al., 2000; desole & butler, 1994; hyer, 1983). these models are very much in line with what o’leary and lie (1990) referred to as institutional strategies and are described below. in her research on the implementation of affirmative action policies in the early 1980s, hyer (1983) found that faculty women’s groups were instrumental in the establishment of such policies, as well as in the creation of other changes for university women. respondents at cksu, denby, and newton described strategies that their campus women’s faculty groups used to foster change. although one group, and interestingly the least effective of the three, was connected to a union, all three used similar tactics. the groups met with administrators; encouraged the appointment of senior women to administrative posts; wrote position papers, letters, and resolutions; and educated junior faculty about professional issues, like tenure and negotiating the institutional bureaucracy (hyer, 1983). in the end, the groups tried to raise awareness and affect change, not only around affirmative action, but on salary, childcare, maternity leave, spousal hires, mentoring, and the creation of women’s studies programs (hyer, 1983). to remind academic women that the full participation has not been realized and work still needs to be done, desole and butler (1994) presented a model of a multidimensional network at the state university of new york, albany. to frame the need for such a network, they indicated that academic women have been co-opted by partial success. this is to say that academic women who have fought for change and have witnessed some minor improvements interpret these small tokens as achieving equity (desole & butler, 1994). the university drew 14 groups together, comprised of faculty, administrators, and students, whose energies are focused on promoting opportunities and furthering common interests of women at albany. the interlocking network was loosely managed by the university, unlike some of the other groups previously described, which were more grassroots in origin. however, the strategies of the “albany model” were strikingly similar to those grassroots networks. this model network hosts an annual reception for new women faculty and professionals, conducts and analyzes surveys on the climate for women at albany, publicizes findings in reports and in public forums, and meets with administrators to share results and encourage remedies for documented inequities (desole & butler, 1994). more recently, the vice president for student affairs formed a collective of faculty, administrators, professional and clerical staff, and students at southeast missouri state university (semo) to address climate issues for women at the university (baldwin et al., 2000). it is unclear as to whether the network was established as an administrative mandate of her position or as a grassroots effort in spite of her position. however, the network at semo was differentiated from the others discussed in this paper in that it is a chapter of the american council on education/national network (ace/net). this affiliation made the organization unique in that it was linked to and supported by a broader national network housed in the ace office on women in higher education. yet, like all other networks studied thus far, the strategies to promote the professional and personal development of women were similar. the network created mentoring programs, provided advocacy for women’s issues, sponsored women’s history month programming, published a newsletter and website, and implemented studies on gender. this ace/net group also conducted town-gown events (baldwin et al., 2000), emphasizing the need to create liaisons within the local community, which was a strategy that is not often mentioned in the scholarship on academic activist networks. perhaps the most visible activism among faculty in the immediate past has been pursued by part-time and adjunct faculty. part-time and adjunct faculty are often poorly treated, poorly paid, and lack benefits. they are even referred to as the “migrant workers of the information economy” in the documentary film degrees of shame (smallwood, 2001). further, women comprise this group of faculty more than any other (e.g., assistant, associate, or full professors), making the plight of parttime faculty a gendered issue. while there has been little documentation of academic women’s groups addressing the concerns or trying to improve the conditions of part-time faculty, these contingent faculty (women and men) have engaged in collective action (smallwood, 2001; swogger, 2000). some part-time faculty have unionized, while others, especially in right-to-work states have formed activist http://chronicle.com/daily/2001/10/2001103006n.htm http://chronicle.com/daily/2001/10/2001103006n.htm networks to improve their work life conditions (swogger, 2000). in either case, these faculty activists (again, not all women, as is the focus of the study in which this literature review is embedded) have picketed, generated media coverage, and pressured other institutional unions to support them (swogger, 2000). other examples of activist strategies were visible during campus equity week in 2001, sponsored by the american association of university professors. part-time faculty activists constructed a life-sized elephant handing out peanuts with a sign reading, “will work for peanuts,” and presented guerilla theater skits depicting the situation of adjuncts (smallwood, 2001). of the models described by researchers, only the women’s faculty caucus at denby, the women’s forum at newton, and the part-time faculty movement were truly grassroots networks that did not have to answer to the institutional hierarchy (hyer, 1983). however, in the literature reviewed, it was only the recent part-time faculty movement that included nonviolent demonstrations as a strategy. further, scholars who study feminist networks outside of academe warn that “the master’s tools” (lourde, 1983, p. 99) will never create genuine change (faver, 1994). this suggests that the more radical strategies must also be pursued. those that are part of the daily work of academe (e.g., conducting research, attending committee meetings, meeting with administrators, providing educational seminars) will never be enough (ropers-huilman, 2000). in addition, to be successful, feminist networks must create coalitions outside of the institution, as they did at semo, to best leverage the network’s power base (nelson & johnson, 1991). however, by examining the scholarship on activism among women academics, the sorts of networks that seem to be discussed are those that are perceived as less radical and are embedded in the institutional structure. does this mean that those sorts of organizations are not part of scholarly discourse because they do not exist? are there other strategies that feminist faculty organizations use to advance their agendas? based upon the review of the literature, there appeared to be a lack of scholarship on activism among collectives of women faculty. as such, i wanted to explore the experiences of feminist activist academic women, self-identified by their involvement in campus grassroots organizations for women faculty, to gain a deeper understanding of how these women succeed in an academy often considered hostile to women. specifically, the research question i sought to answer was: how do women faculty in campusbased grassroots feminist organizations construct their activist strategies?  to clarify, a grassroots activist organization is one that, for the design of this study, is formed and maintained by women faculty to address concerns of and improve the climate for women faculty. such organizations are not created by boards of trustees or regents, university administrators, or parties outside the institution as those that were described by baldwin et al. (2000) and desole and butler (1994)—they are constructed and led by women faculty. further, i define activist strategies as the purposeful methods in which members of an organization engage in order to raise consciousness and foster change. in order to address my research question, i conducted an exploratory qualitative study. i used a comparative case study design to intensively investigate two feminist faculty organizations at two public research i universities (referred to in the most recent carnegie classification of institutions as doctoral/research-extensive) over the course of an academic semester. i selected two feminist faculty organizations that serve as the foundation of my study. the first organization was the association for women faculty (awf) at the university of arizona (ua). i chose this organization, in part because i was a board member of the awf at the time of investigation, and therefore, had easy access to all aspects of the organization. because of my involvement in this organization, i was a participant observer throughout the collection and analysis of the data. for the second case, i selected the faculty women’s caucus (fwc) at the university of nebraska at lincoln (unl). for comparative purposes, i selected another women's faculty organization at a public, landgrant, research i institution. the two settings, the university of arizona and the university of nebraska, had several similarities that make them ideal for comparative analysis. they were both public research i, land-grant, universities and the main campus institution within their state system. in addition, both institutions had a women’s studies department or program and an active, administratively-supported commission on the status of women. third, the numbers of instructional faculty at the two institutions were very similar. in 1999, there were 1485 faculty at the university of arizona, of which 412 were women. for that same time period, the university of nebraska had 1487 instructional faculty members, among which 453 were women. for the awf, i read and coded 23 newsletters (a temporally representative sample from 1983-2000) published by the organization and the organization’s constitution and by-laws. i observed six board meetings, a luncheon with the organization and the board of regents, and two meetings with the awf board and university leadership. in addition, using purposive and snowball sampling techniques, i conducted interviews with 11 active awf board members, six former awf board members, and the director of women’s studies at the university of arizona. for the fwc, i analyzed 18 documents that included electronic mail messages, meeting agendas, petitions, and letters all initiated by fwc members related to organizational business. the fwc did not meet on a regular basis, but conducted meetings only as issues emerged. however, i was able to observe one meeting related to the work of that organization while i was on campus collecting data. using purposive and snowball sampling, just as i did with the participants affiliated with the awf, i conducted interviews with eight active fwc members (including the director of women’s studies at unl), and one former fwc member. after the data were collected, i conducted a cross-case analysis. this analysis allowed me to group perspectives from different data sources to shape the themes that guided my research (patton, 1990). by using a variety of field methods (document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and observations), i gathered comprehensive, in-depth information about each case and was able to triangulate the findings based on patterns and themes that emerged from multiple data sources. the interview transcripts, observation field notes, and documents were analyzed and interpreted using the constant comparative approach (strauss & corbin, 1990) looking for convergence and divergence in the data (patton, 1990). these categories were modified as each data source was analyzed. this process is described by lincoln and guba (1986) as the “saturation of categories” or the “emergence of regularities” (p. 350). comparative pattern analysis was used to illuminate recurring patterns in the data. to accomplish this, i searched for patterns that converged into categories exhibiting "internal homogeneity" and "external heterogeneity" (patton, 1990, p. 403). data were analyzed for each case, as well as across cases, in order to identify both similarities and differences among patterns and themes. in the end, the most powerful patterns and themes that emerged from the data served as the framework for my findings that follow. in addition, i worked closely with a peer research group throughout the process to help me refine my protocols, address issues of bias, and reinforce the salient findings from this study. the concept of professionalized activism permeated nearly every aspect of the strategies in which the awf engaged. unlike strategies that are often recognized as part of social movement activism (e.g., picketing, sit-ins, walk-outs), professionalized activism focuses on tactics that mirror the professional work in academe in order to advance the awf agenda. from the beginning of the awf in 1982, many professionalized activist strategies were documented in newsletters, such as: letter writing to the president; meeting with the provost; asking the provost, president, and regents to attend meetings; and forming committees. meeting with administrators and making them aware of issues, as well as reminding them of past efforts (like recommendations that, to date, remain unmet from a ua study completed in 1988) seemed to be key strategies to foster change. “what we have done in past generations is to have the subcommittee chairs, if they are working on a certain issue, bring that forward in the meeting with the president.” (olivia nelson [awf], personal communication) “we have set up our panels to bring people together who have interests in different issues. i think that the meetings with the president and the provost are another way that we do that. those would be our primary ways. to the extent that our subcommittees have meetings and in addition contact individuals on campus with things we are concerned with, that is kind of how we operate.” (nora islip [awf], personal communication) “education, exposure, communication, some of the travel grants and opportunities to help women further their education and their careers [are our main strategies].” (young [awf], personal communication) creating subcommittees, scheduling meetings, presenting educational seminars, and providing funds for research all reinforced professional academic work. these strategies enhanced the legitimacy of the organization in the eyes of academe, and by engaging in them, the organization also appeared less radical and more friendly to non-feminists. for the awf, professionalized activism is currently the sole strategy. this is to say, that for the awf, if a particular strategy didn’t result in change, the group found another professionalized way to reinforce its position. as the following quote suggests, instead of looking for a more confrontational strategy, the awf put forward different people or waited out the administrators and tried to use a professionalized strategy with a different, and perhaps more willing, administrator. “[if something doesn’t work,] i think you do try in a different way. as somebody who has been fighting for change for many many years, i think you try again in a different way. i think different people step forward to try. a lot of it has to do with waiting out administrators. i think that you wait for another day. come back and maybe it is other people. you keep on trying it from a different angle.” (claudia macintosh [awf], personal communication) patience, perseverance, and pragmatism are necessary. using these tactics, change will likely be slow and incremental, if it comes at all. other strategies served to reinforce the awf’s professionalized activism. for example, newsletters report that in the early years of the organization, programs were held annually for women to share their scholarship with one another. while the annual research program was discontinued after about five years, scholarship still had a place in programs (e.g., dr. leslie lawrence presented a paper on gender and retrenchment to the membership in the mid-1990s). by creating an opportunity for faculty to hone their presentation and research skills and speaking to gender-relevant research, the awf supported women faculty, and at the same time, an academic activity that is consistent with the university’s reward structure. another way in which the awf helped faculty in their professional roles was through travel grants. newsletters documented the application process for faculty and graduate students. this process, not unlike other small academic grant processes, required the submission of a curriculum vitae, a research proposal, evidence as to how the work will benefit the awf, and a follow-up report about the completed research. based upon the criteria, it appears that those who will receive grants to travel to a conference or to conduct research are judged by standards similar to academic peer review processes, further evidence of a professionalized activity. while i am referring to these sorts of activities as professionalized activism, many of the strategies are not activist in the traditional sense of the word. the intended goal for many of these efforts is to provide professional opportunities and support for women faculty, not necessarily to transform the institution. more recent meetings of the awf showed the desire to reinforce professional legitimacy, critical to professionalized activism. in a board meeting in february, 2000, the president of the board reaffirmed her position about a proposed interdisciplinary program in early childhood development, asserting that, “as faculty, i can’t support this; it is educational malpractice.” (wanda solidad, awf). the educational malpractice to which she was referring was that the program was proposed by an administrator with a master’s degree and an adjunct faculty member—not tenure-track faculty with ph.d.s. this was further emphasized during a meeting with the board in april when she suggested that the board vote on whether a ph.d. must be the leader of a ph.d. program. this attitude establishes the place that credentialing and the academic reward structure should have for the women in the awf— traditional and professionalized. in another meeting with the board, ua president, and ua provost, wanda presented preliminary results from a research study about faculty salaries in the college of medicine. wanda went into great depth about the study’s methodology, including the variables and statistical tests used. although this particular study was not completed by the awf, the presentation from the awf to the administration showed the value of collecting data and using statistical rigor, again using a fundamental aspect of professional academic work to advance the organization’s agenda.  it is important to mention that there was some emphasis in the early years of the awf on more radical types of efforts. numbers of receptions that the organization hosted indicate that informal networks and social support were a part of the awf, as documented in newsletters from the early and mid-1980s. also, many of the receptions, even some where the president, provost, or regents were present, were held at homes of women faculty, showing a bridge between personal and political that becomes less evident in the more recent years of the awf. on one noted occasion, there was a performance from women’s literature and music that was the focus of one of the receptions in 1986, an experience often connected to radical feminism. also, speakers focusing on menstruation and menopause showed an interest in the personal issues of women. this bridging of the personal, professional, and political was evident in the early 1990s as well. receptions and luncheons included women’s music, art, and literature, as well as the continuation of programs on body, health, and the provision of childcare at receptions (specifically documented in the newsletters for 1993-94). respondents supported the strategies from the early years of the awf that were evidenced in documents with lived experiences of more radical activism. “we went to the organizing meetings and you would get 100 pissed off women faculty per meeting. it was pretty powerful stuff. and we knew that there were administrative representatives there, [so we would confront the administration].” (lisa bartholomew [awf], personal communication) “it was at a time when the university of minnesota lost a [salary sex discrimination] case and there was an underlying, very genteel threat of our suing if we didn’t have salaries looked at. it was done in a very feminine way but it was also saying that we had strength and we could do that.” (sallie edgar [awf], personal communication) the strategies described above diverge from the professionalized activism that characterizes most of the recent tactics of the organization. however, they are important aspects of the awf history and indicate that while one strategy, professionalized activism, may be dominant, the nature of activism, even for this organization, is not strictly defined by one category. the newsletters, in and of themselves, also demonstrated the complexity of strategies. newsletters were written to educate and to raise the consciousness of the membership. “we have used our newsletter to disseminate that we are a group who is interested in [women faculty] issues.” (nora islip [awf], personal communication)  “the newsletters are the way to keep the membership really in touch. historically, we even sent out newsletters to those who weren’t dues paying members to keep people still a part of the loop.” (olivia nelson [awf], personal communication) the newsletters were an important way to keep the membership connected and informed of the issues that were salient to women faculty. the newsletters often provided information about the status of women and encouraged the membership to act. however, the newsletters continually reprinted articles from national sources, professional newsletters, and scholarly books and journals as a way to raise awareness (e.g., awf newsletters from january, 1982; september, 1999; and february, 2000). this reliance on scholarly evidence to inform the membership of climate issues mixes the radical feminist strategy of consciousness raising with professionalized activism. this is further evidenced in the newsletters from 1999-2000. in these issues, there was considerable mention of professionalized activist strategies used at other elite institutions to make the climate better for women faculty (e.g., harvard university, massachusetts institute of technology, university of michigan), as well as efforts to create national networks to raise consciousness and to get ideas. attending academic conferences, joining e-mail lists for professional associations, reaching out to the american association of university professors committee w were among the strategies encouraged. by informing the awf of strategies used by prestigious institutions and professional associations, the newsletters, and hence the awf, encouraged isomorphic behavior of other professionalized activist tactics. in sum, professionalized activism became the primary strategy of the awf. there had been circumstances when the organization utilized techniques that bridged the personal, political, and professional, like consciousness raising in the newsletters and providing programs about work life issues. yet, these tactics did little to call the professional legitimacy of the women involved in the awf into question. in fact, even in some of those more radical situations, there were some underlying efforts toward professionalized activism, like providing supporting scholarly evidence about campus climate issues in the newsletters and asking administrators with professional experience in work life to share their perspectives. in the early years of the awf, there were threats of a class action suit, and large rallies of women gathering around salary equity concerns. however, these activities fell into the background as more professionalized activism began to dominate the work of the awf. the fwc also used professionalized activist strategies, but unlike the awf, they pursued other strategies to a greater extent. this is not to say that professionalism and professionalized activism didn’t have a significant place in the work of the fwc. rather, the fwc prioritized the types of strategies differently than the awf, conceptualizing their members as activists who were also professionals, foregrounding the former identity. like the awf, the fwc used the university system and tools used by academics and administrators to draw attention to the fwc’s causes. “we have used a number of strategies. we have put people on committees. in order to do that, we have had to get on the committees that make those appointments.” (irene north [fwc], personal communication) “[we have worked at] gathering the data, getting the comparative data, and using our peer institutions [to show] where we stand and where we are deficient.” (karen smith [fwc], personal communication) central to the professional work within academe is conducting research, writing memos, following the bureaucratic rules, and serving on committees. the fwc used all these techniques to shed light on their concerns and to potentially change the status quo. the members of the fwc also created networks with in the university and used their status as respected academics to foster these connections. “we have done our time. some of us at a level we wish we really didn’t have to do. we have used the internal procedures of the university…we have enough people who hold, not just tenure, but respect on the campus, that we can work in from a variety of directions and get an ear. it doesn’t mean we are going to get the change we want, but we are going to get an ear.” (irene north [fwc], personal communication) “for one thing, the faculty [on the fwc] have gained more authority. over the last 5 or 8 years, the women leading the caucus have become full professors. they have won all the [research and teaching] awards that i have mentioned to you.” (karen smith [fwc], personal communication) the caucus recognized that those who have the power to make decisions were influenced by the tools of the academy. many of the members earned their academic status by being respected professionals, and they learned how to use their status to benefit the fwc. professional prestige has provided some legitimacy to the caucus, which has included getting an audience to listen to its concerns. in a may 3, 2000, letter to the board of regents and system-wide president, the fwc shared concerns it had about the data sources that were used annually to report the numbers of women faculty and faculty of color to the state legislature. to emphasize the revered place of rigorous research, the letter stated: “in a research laboratory, such data manipulation would be immediately suspect and indeed would not be condoned by any reputable scientist, and should not be used in this case either.”  the fwc used the professional language of the academy to encourage change. in a subsequent report to the state legislative committee on gender equity, the fwc again reinforced the need to conduct rigorous research. the report explained the shortcomings of one particular data source and suggested using another, more comprehensive source. it also critiqued the manner in which the data was compared to peer institutions. the content of the letter to the regents and the report to the legislature demonstrated how professional activism (i.e., conducting research) was used by the fwc to advance its agenda. drafting resolutions and using the academic senate to provide support and a voice for the resolutions were other ways that the fwc used the professionalized activism. the fwc worked from within the system, using “proper channels,” to educate the community about issues that were important to women faculty. they also wrote letters, including a letter to the university football coach, expressing their concerns about how a student-athlete was disciplined. in addition, the fwc has encouraged women faculty, as evidenced in the agenda and minutes from a june 1993 meeting, to volunteer for a task force to create a more inclusive curriculum and to identify other women as potential honorary degree recipients. all of these professionalized activist methods worked within the university system to create change and to advance the fwc’s agenda. while the fwc engaged in several professionalized strategies, the members put more emphasis on other tactics, connected to, but outside of, the university. the documents analyzed supported this. for example, they included more press releases, petitions to the board of regents, resolutions to the legislature, calls to attend legislative hearings and regent meetings, and descriptions of university-wide forums to discuss gender equity rather than data-driven memos and invitations to meet with university administrators. in two different electronic mail messages to the members of the fwc, home and office phone numbers of legislators and regents were listed and members were encouraged to call them to voice their concerns about recent propositions in front of these groups. the fwc did not intend to sit on the sidelines; the documents, interviews, and observation of the academic senate meeting showed that the caucus wanted to be involved and have a voice. in a march 2000 message to the members of the fwc, the co-chairs asked them to attend an upcoming state legislature meeting. the co-chairs said of the legislature, “they need to know we’re watching them, just as the university needs to know the legislature is watching.” the fwc’s vision and strategies went to outside the campus-proper, because for the fwc, professionalized activism was not enough.  “[the fwc] always [tries] to go through channels…but it never works, so we have to go elsewhere.” (nancy nichols [fwc], personal communication).  “we know we have to go outside and piss everybody off. go to the papers. go to national organizations.” (irene north [fwc], personal communication) it is the sense that their voices were silenced or ignored by the administration that prompts the fwc to use other strategies in order to put additional pressure on the university. nonetheless, it is significant to note that the group did use the chain of command and the university structure initially to try to advance their agenda—but it was not limited to those tactics. another example of the difference in activist strategies between the awf and the fwc was evidenced in a 2000 resolution written by the caucus to the board of regents, demanding the resignation of the system-wide president due to his lack of initiative and response toward gender issues. this adversarial stance toward the administration often sparked controversy, made good copy, and ultimately attracted the attention of the public. in fact, the activism of the fwc has been mentioned throughout the media, from the campus and local community newspapers to the chronicle of higher education, 48 hours, and sports illustrated. the fwc welcomed the press, for it raised the public’s and the university’s consciousness. at unl, the women involved in the fwc often concentrated on strategies that put pressure on the university from outside the campus. going to the local newspapers and testifying in front of the state legislature were not unusual tactics used by the group. in fact, every woman with whom i spoke mentioned going to the media to expose unfair campus situations as a critical strategy for the fwc. “it was a small media market [compared to chicago, where i am now] and things that happened at the university were a big deal…anything that has a whiff of controversy is a big deal. anything at the university is a big deal, so it is pretty easy to get the word out and to find out who will release this information. we did campaign in the newspaper...” (fran cousins [fwc], personal communication) “[our main strategies are] publicity and being willing to go outside the university to speak to the media, [and] to speak to the state legislature.” (catherine eller [fwc], personal communication) “nicole and catherine and beth are really good at mobilizing press. a few years ago, i can’t even think of what the issues were, i went over and was interviewed with nicole and some others about a particular issue we were talking to the administration about. so, getting the attention of the press, figuring out who we need to go to [is a strategy].” (karen smith [fwc], personal communication) the women in the fwc recognize the value of forging relationships with individuals and groups outside the organization who can assist them in their activist work, as evidenced by their affinity toward working with the local press, as well as with external groups nationally. “as you can see, we don’t just talk to ourselves. that is what makes [the administration] so mad, that we talk to the broader community. it is the fact that we know the editorial board. and it is the fact that we know [state] senators. it is the fact that we don’t just remain cloistered like a lot of academicians that makes them so mad.” (beth newman [fwc], personal communication) “i think irene and beth and nicole—i don’t know how they do it—they know a lot of other people on other campuses and they seem to be able to draw or make comparisons, and know strategies that other campuses have used.” (catherine eller [fwc], personal communication) “i mean networking. one of the ways we have been able to address [the fact that our insurance doesn’t cover] birth control is by hooking up with a women’s legal defense fund in washington before the eeoc ruling came down. we were beginning to find people who were willing to join in a class action suit. i think that is important.” (karen smith [fwc], personal communication) for the fwc, professionalized activism was a tactic to use so that other strategies can be implemented. by strategically working within the system and gaining professional prestige, the fwc has gained some legitimacy, despite the animosity perceived between the administration and the organization. because the fwc used the chain of command and included well-respected researchers and teachers in its membership, it was difficult for the university to completely dismiss the issues of the fwc. in some ways, professionalized activism has allowed the fwc to be more radical. they have a professional foundation upon which more radical strategies can be used. this differs from the awf, where professionalized activism was the primary strategy. the women in the awf engaged primarily in what i have called professionalized activism. the academic tenets of teaching, research, and service were perpetuated through the work of the awf. as a result, the organization, while intended to be grassroots and feminist, also fit neatly into the institutional structure. the teaching aspects were demonstrated through information sharing in newsletters; consciousness raising; and hosting professional development panels and seminars, designed to assist academic women in navigating the professional bureaucracy. the research-focused activism was evidenced through data collecting, creating empirical reports about the status of university women, and contracting with scholarly experts and consultants to conduct climate studies and make recommendations. the organization itself served the university; however, participants mentioned that volunteering to be part of the organization didn’t “count” toward promotion and tenure. further, the women in the organization considered one of their most important activities to be meeting with university administrators, replicating service work in the academy. the professionalized strategies of teaching, research, and service were also an important part of the activism in which the women in the fwc engaged. because these professionalized strategies were integrated into their work, i have dubbed these women activist professionals. their strategies differ enough from those of the awf that professionalized activism was an insufficient categorization. this is to say that the women academics in the fwc engaged in professionalized activism, but their strategies went beyond that to include others. the concepts used to identify each organization’s primary strategies were intended to be linguistically similar, as the women in both organizations validate their work as professionals, while still being activists. however, the women in the fwc were more akin to feminist activists of the second wave because their strategies included creating resolutions, petitions, and press releases; and attending and speaking out at campus and state legislative meetings. although the distinction is subtle, i saw these women prioritizing their activism slightly before their profession; whereas, the women in the awf prioritized their profession slightly before their activism. in the end, this research leads to several implications, not only for organizations like the awf and the fwc, but for the institutions that have such organizations. first, campus-based grassroots feminist faculty organizations are faced with multiple influences that ultimately shape the way academic feminism is defined for these groups. the ways that women involved in such organizations define and embrace feminism, coupled with how they see themselves influenced by their profession, shape the sorts of strategies and agendas that they use. this means that organizations and professional socialization can have an impact on the sorts of activist strategies academic women pursue. while context is critical, it should not diminish the fact that the strategies described in this study can serve as examples for other academic women who are working to improve the climate on their own campuses. next, institutions can benefit from these sorts of organizations. this is not to suggest that administrative leaders should seek out members and establish an organization. to do so would erode the power germane to grassroots activism. in fact, the effectiveness of such organizations would be undermined, as is often the case with campus commissions on the status of women (glazer-raymo, 1999). although upper-level administrators may view these organizations as annoyances or problems, as was the case at unl, the successful women in these organizations have institutional loyalty. they are committed to improving the climate on their own campuses, not only for themselves but for the successful women who follow them. in a time when faculty have become increasingly more nationally and internationally focused, this is particularly meaningful. finally, and most importantly, the changes that have occurred due to the activism from campus-based grassroots feminist faculty organizations, whether through a formal policy change or through an increased sense of support for one woman, are tremendous benefits for any institution. a change that leads to greater access and equity should be embraced by any institution, and that change is often sparked by the activist agenda and strategies of organizations like the awf and the fwc, whether pursued by professionalized activists or activist professionals. the data and findings from this study provided an analysis of how women faculty in campus-based grassroots feminist organizations construct their activist strategies. in addition, they reinforced the understanding of multiple strands of feminism that weave together to create a complex view of academic feminism. the academic women in this study sought to create a delicate balance between the influences of feminism, activism, and professionalism. they demonstrated that such a task is not easy and, in a changing academic profession, is on-going. the findings and contributions to the literature about feminist faculty that are referred to in my study are important, but not exhaustive. in fact, based upon my research, i hope additional studies will explore activism among feminist academics. my study explored the shared influences of professionalization and feminism on the activism of women academics. a similar study that explores the how academic women create their strategies and agendas in feminist organizations within a professional disciplinary association would demonstrate how, or if, professionalization and feminism contribute to the activism in a national or international setting. my study shared the strategies used by women academics at research i institutions. further research should be pursued to examine whether the issues and strategies differ for organizations in different types of institutions, including those that employ more women (e.g., community colleges, liberal arts colleges) (glazer-raymo, 1999; u.s. department of education, 1999). in addition, studies should be undertaken that consider how the lifecycles of feminist faculty organizations shape the nature of the activist strategies employed. finally, future research should address the following questions: does activism differ for academic men? if so, how? what do activist agendas and strategies look like for faculty of color and other underrepresented groups? given the recommendations for future research, it is clear that this study served its initial purpose as an exploration. many questions about the nature of activism among feminist academics remain unanswered. however, this study has presented the rich experiences of academic women in two different grassroots feminist faculty organizations that have shed light on how they construct their strategies. this study can also serve as a springboard for future research that can provide more insights into activism among feminist academics. in the final analysis, women in the association for women faculty at the university of arizona and in the faculty women’s caucus at the university of nebraska have integrated feminism and professionalism to construct activist strategies. while their strategies may have limitations and there are other ways to pursue change, including structural, systemic change, these women and these organizations are successful and make a difference for other women and for the institutions of which they are a part. perhaps these women haven’t started a revolution, but that doesn’t diminish their success nor does it mean that change has not occurred. rather, the women in the awf and the fwc show that grassroots activism is alive in the academy. moreover, they challenge us to expand our preconceived notions of academic feminism and activism to include a broader range of strategies that have resulted in institutional change. astin, h., & leland, c. 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(2000, september). adjunct activism: maintaining the professionalism and integrity of academic life. the writer's chronicle. retrieved march 13, 2001, from http://www.awpwriter.org /swoggerl.htm taylor, v. (1989). social movement continuity: the women’s movement in abeyance. american sociological review, 54, 761-775. theodore, a. (1986). the campus troublemakers: academic women in protest. houston, tx: cap and gown press. thorne, b. (2000). a telling time for women’s studies. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 25(4), 1183-1187. u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics, integrated postsecondary education data system. (fall, 1999). staff, 1999 survey. [data file]. available from national center for education statistics web site, http://nces.ed.gov valian, v. (1998). why so slow? the advancement of women. cambridge, ma: mit press. * hyer (1983) used pseudonyms for the names of the institutions where she conducted her study. *at the time of the study, this was the most recent comparable data available. *each individual interview followed a semi-structured format and was audio taped and transcribed verbatim. http://chronicle.com/daily/2001/10/2001103006n.htm http://chronicle.com/daily/2001/10/2001103006n.htm http://www.awpwriter.org/swoggerl.htm http://www.awpwriter.org/swoggerl.htm http://www.awpwriter.org/swoggerl.htm http://www.awpwriter.org/swoggerl.htm *olivia nelson and all other names of respondents are pseudonyms created to protect the confidentiality of each participant. microsoft word johansson_the_gendered_parenting_of_political_leaders.docx advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 178 advancing women in leadership vol. 35, pp. 178-186, 2015 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the gendered parenting of political leaders joakim johansson, linda asplund bergström joakim johansson: mälardalen university, department of business and social science, email: joakim.johansson@mdh.se linda asplund bergström: the swedish public employment service, email: linda.asplund-bergstrom@arbetsformedlingen.se accepted september 02, 2015 do we have different expectations of male and female politicians regarding parenting when young children are involved? if so, what are the implications for political citizenship? the aim of this article was to examine the construction of parenting and gender in the portrayal in swedish print media of high-ranking politicians gustav fridolin, leader of the green party, and birgitta ohlsson, a liberal party member of the swedish government. the study covers reporting from 2010 up to the end of 2012. methodologically, a discourse analysis based on discourse theory was performed, implying a textual analysis of 39 articles through gender theoretical lenses. although fathers were seen as primary caregivers in some of the articles, a recurrent phenomenon was the repetition in swedish newspaper articles of the idea that mothers rather than fathers should be considered primary caregivers. furthermore, since ohlsson was criticized for not choosing parental leave and the critical remarks about fridolin were instead about him choosing parental leave, the different expectations on women as mothers and men as fathers in politics imply that even in a nordic country context young children are a greater obstacle for female rather than for male politicians. thus, gender inequalities between women’s and men’s political citizenship continue to persist in sweden. keywords: parenthood, gender, politicians, leadership, citizenship, discourse introduction numerous studies of media representations have revealed the gendered expectations of female politicians (van zoonen, 2005, 2006; garcia-blanco & wahl-jorgensen, 2011; hammarling & jarlbro, 2012; ross et.al 2013); and male politicians (kimmel, 2006; messner, 2007; whitehead, 2008; katz, 2013). these portrayals hamper efforts to achieve a gender equal political citizenship. many of those studies comment upon motherhood and fatherhood. however, few of them deal with the new expectations of women as mothers and men as fathers, related to the introduction in the nordic countries in the 1960s of a dualearner/dual-carer model. still fewer include both men and women and relate their findings to ideas about fatherhood and masculinity as well as to motherhood and femininity. the aim of this article was to examine the constructions of parenting and gender in swedish print media's presentation of two leading swedish politicians: birgitta ohlsson (bo), a liberal party member of the swedish government, and gustav fridolin (gf), green party spokesperson in the swedish parliament. these two politicians both became parents, and as a result, the subject of media attention, at around the same time. in february 2010, bo was appointed minister of eu affairs, despite the fact that she and her husband were expecting a baby only a few months later. as long as the four party alliance that had governed sweden since the autumn of 2006 remained in office, bo would make use of none and her husband of all of the available parental leave. in july 2011, just a few months after gf had been appointed one of the two green party spokespersons, his wife gave birth to the couple’s first child. his wife was on parental leave for the first year, while gf took over on 1st july 2012, remaining on parental leave for the following six months. we do not claim that the cases of bo and gf are similar other than in terms of timing and national context, but both involve images presented in the swedish print media about the appropriate way for a political leader to deal with trade-offs between the demands of work and family life with young children. on the contrary, our intention is to highlight the difference between them as bo’s choice not to make use of any parental leave constitutes a more obvious challenge to swedish gender norms than gf’s decision to take parental leave for six months. the comparisons we make in our study therefore mainly concern relating bo’s parenting to various ideals of motherhood and femininity, and gf’s parenting to those of fatherhood and masculinity. our empirical study was guided by the following questions: what images do the swedish print media present of bo’s and of gf’s parenting? what kinds of discourse emerge? to what advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 179 extent are fathers also constructed as primary caregivers? how is gender constructed to support specific views of fathers and mothers as caregivers? the first question contains elements of media evaluation of the approach to parenting taken by political leaders. in contrast, the other questions explore the basis for the evaluations, which includes the gender ideals in which these evaluations are grounded and subsequently reproduced. literature review historically, expectations on male and female parents have differed. attributes and practices associated with motherhood have been considered essentially different from those related to fatherhood. a key difference is that in traditional motherhood mothers are the primary caregivers, while fathers are breadwinners rather than caregivers. to a great extent, the different expectations on mothers and fathers were a result of the ideology of separate spheres in society for women and men (moen, 1989; axelsson, 1992). this ideology also implied totally different expectations concerning politics, as the exclusion of women from the public sphere meant that for a long time they were denied political rights, such as suffrage and being entitled to run for political office. politics were in the public sphere and therefore not appropriate for women, who were expected to fulfill their duties as mothers in the private sphere (lister, 2003). this is in sharp contrast to the current situation in the nordic countries where the proportion of women in cabinet and parliament is more or less equal to that of men, and women do become prime ministers and presidents as well (dahlerup, 2011). however, the remarkable recent advances in women’s political citizenship do not of necessity imply the end of different expectations of women and men in nordic politics. despite being political leaders in the present nordic context, women might still have to comply with expectations on them to be primary caregivers when young children are involved in comparison to male politicians who do not. if so, young children are a greater obstacle to women’s than to men’s political citizenship. in her seminal work the cultural contradictions of motherhood, hays (1996) referred to a dominant late modern cultural image of appropriate motherhood, labelled the ideology of “intensive mothering”. this ideology constructs the good mother as the sole primary caregiver and as users of intensive mothering methods, i.e. practices that are guided by experts, child oriented, labour intensive, emotionally absorbing and financially draining. importantly, hays considered the logic of intensive mothering to differ fundamentally from that of the (labour) market. the former constructed children as innocent and pure and mothers as unselfishly registering and responding to their needs without a view to personal gain, while in the latter there is no innocence but only competition among rational, self-interested actors maximizing their own material interests without caring about the needs of others. the tension between the two logics means that women face a fundamental dilemma, as femininity and economic independency/career seem to preclude each other. in sweden, the introduction of the dual-earner/dual-carer model in the 1960s has supported women’s efforts to combine intensive mothering with work on the labour market (forsberg, 2009; klinth, 2002; klinth & johansson, 2010). thereby became a norm of two workers within the household established, implying that, from now on, it was considered normal for women to work, and thus strange or deviant not to, as this was seen as essential to a modern womanhood and modern women’s strife for gender equal relations with men. it also paved the way for an ideology or cultural norm of “involved parenthood”, referring to an idea that fathers should also “be responsible for their children, spend as much time as possible with them, and try to develop close relations to them.” (forsberg, 2009, p. 11). particularly in the nordic countries, the new expectations of men as fathers implied the emergence of new, child-oriented masculinities (holter & aarseth, 1994; klinth, 2002; klinth & johansson, 2010). furthermore, ylva elvin-nowak and heléne thomsson (2001) found in a study on swedish women discursive positions where modern femininity was partly separated from motherhood, as well as discursive positions where femininity even when constructed as motherhood still was dependent on women’s paid work. the authors also found a third discursive position, where femininity was harder to combine with paid work. however, this position was much more challenged in their material than in the study conducted by hays in an american 1990s context. thus, studies of femininity/motherhood and masculinity/fatherhood need to be sensitive to country context. particularly relevant in a nordic context is the strong commitment to gender equality between men and women and the dual-earner/dual-carer model associated with it (holter & aaarseth, 1994; bäck-wiklund & bergsten, 1997; aarseth, 2009; egeberg holmgren & hearn, 2009; klinth & johansson, 2010). the dual-earner/dual-carer model rested in sweden on two main pillars. first, there was a huge investment in public day care centers, relieving families from practical hindrances to be at work and also employing many women. second, there was the replacement in 1974 of maternity leave by parental leave. from then on, it was considered illegal for employers to stop men from abstaining from work for the purpose of taking care of young children. it also implied the replacement of a maternity leave benefit by a parental leave benefit. paid parental leave has since then been perceived as an important policy instrument in sweden for establishing gender equal distributions of responsibilities and possibilities regarding work and family (kamerman, 2000; klinth & johansson, 2010). since its introduction in sweden in 1974, the parental leave benefit has been subject to several minor revisions, which, however, do not have changed its main characteristics and principles. currently, the following applies: in most cases, i.e. when mothers and fathers have joint custody, both parents are entitled to parental leave benefit for 240 days. 60 of those days are reserved for each parent. the remaining 180 days can be transferred to the other parent. 390 of the days are on a so called advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 180 sick leave benefit level. most of the parents then receive 80% of the income from work in parental leave benefit. the remaining 70 days are on a basic level that is not related to declared income from work. the intention was to introduce a public policy that would bring the swedish fathers back home (klinth, 2002). currently, men account for 24% and women for 76% of the outlet of parental leave (statistiska centralbyrån, 2012). thus, men still account for only a minor, although increasing, part of the total outlet of parental leave. by the existence of a “paternity leave deficit” it becomes clear that although the dual-earner/dual-carer model in sweden has its merits, it has its shortcomings as well. particularly relevant for the empirical study that we conduct, allocation of formal decision-making rights/responsibilities or distributions of the total amount of time spent with/for the child, do not exhaust the subject concerning distinctions between primary and secondary caregivers in discussions about motherhood and fatherhood. although not generally recognized as being connected to the nordic/swedish gender equality model by scholars or policy makers (bekkengen, 2002; eriksson, 2003; klinth & johansson, 2010), our own approach acknowledge the allocation of parental leave the very first time of the newborn’s life as a matter of locating primary and secondary caregivers as well. method our study is based on social constructivism. since our premise is that it is neither possible nor relevant to discuss a reality that could be unrelated to our assumed perspective and categorizations, the critical methodological question pertaining to the research design is not how to select cases that maximize the opportunities to make generalizations but how to reason in relation to the selection of an appropriate interpretative context for the analysis. we employed discourse analysis for textual interpretation. as there are different discourse analysis approaches, the one we used was mainly inspired by the discourse theory presented by ernesto laclau and chantale mouffe in hegemony and socialist strategy (laclau & mouffe, 2001). thus, our discourse analysis was grounded in relativistic ontology. this also implied using theory-driven interpretation rather than local contexts where others, for example newspaper readers, set the interpretative context. the reason we dealt with the methodological problem in this way is the current lack of empirical studies on gendered parenting on the part of political leaders. it is therefore extremely important to ensure that our reading of the articles focuses on gender and parenthood in relation to political leaders, which would be far more difficult to achieve using local contexts. the concept of discourse can be applied in different ways. our use of the term is based on the poststructuralist premise that individual perceptions of the world have an impact through language (winther jørgensen & phillips, 2000). furthermore, we employ the term "discourse" to refer to the pattern of norms and values that occur in statements about what men and women do and should do and make no distinction between language and practice. the starting point of our analysis is that virtually everything can be understood as text/discourse including that which is unexpressed (hill, 2007). our empirical study began in 2010 and continued until the end of 2012. the data were collected through google.se and mediearkivet.se, using the keywords "birgitta ohlsson”, plus one of the following: "mamma” (mother, mum), “mammaledighet” (maternity leave), “föräldraledighet" (parental leave), and "gustav fridolin" or "fridolin" plus one of the following: "pappa” (father, dad), “pappaledighet” (paternity leave) and “föräldraledighet" (parental leave). based on assessments of relevance to the aim, 22 (fridolin) + 17 (ohlsson) articles were retrieved, thus 39 articles formed the basis for the empirical analysis. from our discourse theoretical perspective, it is not very relevant to make distinctions between types of article, such as editorial articles, journalistic reports or letters to the editor submitted by the general public. or between articles that appeared in newspapers and weekly magazines. nor is our aim to compare the form and content of the different types of articles. having said that, an overwhelming majority of the articles included in our study are journalistic reports, i.e. written by journalists employed by the newspapers in our sample. they have no (party) political agenda and are not editorial articles. however, we did include some editorial articles as well as one article submitted by a member of the general public. two articles were published in weekly journals and the remaining 35 in daily newspapers either in print or digitally via the internet. results and findings parenting and gender in swedish print media presentations of birgitta ohlsson image and discourses the data revealed that bo’s parenting is controversial, opinions appear to be polarized and include expressions of direct condemnation: she is not only a dangerous role model. she also shows that she has not understood anything about herself, about life and what it means to be a parent. birgitta ohlsson says we cannot live in the past. but she is no precedent, but a relic from the days when we did not understand what children need. (sternberg, 2010, p. 4) the article states that there are expectations that women should be more like men in order to further themselves and their careers, but that society must realize that women and men are different, primarily because women should be honest to themselves and their children (sternberg, 2010). this theme recurs in an article criticizing the "way of thinking that women should be like men" as well as the alleged feminists who adopt "the man as a role model": "they do not represent women today, who think that motherhood is the most important thing." (karlsson & sörbring, 2010). it also argues, with reference to a tv series, that bo's parenting primarily reflects a metropolitan phenomenon. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 181 that one should be like a man is a metropolitan phenomenon. this is what the "sex and the city" series is about. welleducated women in large cities with high paying jobs. but the series also ends when they marry and have children. (karlsson & sörbring, 2010) in another article, a famous person expresses the view that ministerial assignments are not ordinary 9-to-5 work and that bo's decision should therefore be accepted (utter, 2010a). nevertheless, the author "developed stomach ache thinking about how women and men in politics and business live, women popping out kids and rushing to work" (utter, 2010a). other articles presented opinions, where people expressed that it was inappropriate for bo to take the job as minister for eu affairs, as she was expecting a baby (karlsson & sörbring, 2010; magnusson, 2010; mamma vet bäst, 2010; thurfjell, 2010; winberg, 2010). what all these criticisms seem to suggest is that bo does not live up to the ideal of “intensive mothering” discussed by hays (1996) and as a result is deserving of criticism. first, bo is presented as a mother who resigned from the role of sole primary caregiver. second, she is described as not sufficiently child-oriented. in fact, she is depicted as the total opposite because she seems to be more interested in and occupied with her own career, i.e. as a woman who selfishly acts in accordance with a logic that may be appropriate in the marketplace and when doing business in a corrupt world outside the family, but which is completely at odds with what is deemed appropriate behaviour when the innocence and purity of a child and its needs are taken into account. in accordance with the ideology of intensive mothering, the negative image of bo's parenting seems to be mainly based on a discourse about the difference between the sexes, where men and women are constructed to differ fundamentally in their characteristics and expected activities. more sporadically, a gender power perspective (criticism of feminist projects with "men as role models") and a diversity perspective (criticism of which women bo can claim to represent) also occur. however, based on a discourse emphasizing the fundamental similarity between men and women, other parts of the material provide more positive images of bo's parenting. here, her parenting is linked to a gender equality project, as in one article she is described as a symbol of gender equality (lundqvist, 2010), while another presents her as a “role model for young women” (winberg, 2010, p. 4). other sections of the data describe a shift in the statistics by women continuing to work and allowing men to take parental leave, which is considered unusual but necessary for gender equality (mellin, 2011). bo is also said to have a "gender equal partner [...] who has been on parental leave from the day stella was born" (utter, 2010b).1 while the diversity perspective is invariably missing in articles that express support for bo, a few contain a gender power perspective. it's a totally different yardstick for male and female ministers […] male ministers […] never get any criticism or have to explain how they manage to be both father and politician. a male minister with children is called "super dad", a female one accused of being a bad mother. (brolin, 2010)2 in summary, the view of bo's parenting is polarized, with several articles criticizing it and others expressing support. while support is consistently provided in the name of gender equality, it is somewhat less clear what the criticism indicates. however, our interpretation is that it is mainly formulated as gender equality projects. what distinguishes the antagonists in the debate is that rejections of bo’s parenting are formulated from a perspective on gender equality emphasizing the fundamental difference rather than the similarity between women and men (nordberg, 2005). however, the conflict also involves different views about the child’s best interest (elvinnowak & thomsson, 2001). constructions of caregivers and gender the divergent views about bo’s parenting indicate different opinions related to the issue about whether both fathers and mothers rather than just mothers can be considered primary caregivers, in particular regarding the very first time in the newborn’s life. the articles that draw on sex difference discourse construct mothers as the only possible primary caregiver while those who draw from the sameness discourse construct both fathers and mothers as primary caregivers. moreover, the diverging views can be supported by different attitudes to gender. the criticisms of bo’s parenting seem to consider compliance with the ideology of intensive mothering as a way for women to be regarded as feminine. this means that a woman with a newborn cannot abstain from being the sole primary caregiver without losing much of her femininity. however, such a view on femininity does not by necessity imply that there is no place for paid work or even a career within it – giving that up is not necessarily what the critics want from bo. thus, it should not in any simple way be seen as an ideal of traditional femininity. in our interpretation, what the authors of these articles seem to defend is a particular version of modern femininity. this construction should be seen as a hybrid consisting of attributes that have been traditionally associated with men – paid work and orientation towards career – and attributes traditionally ascribed to women such as being the sole primary caregiver for her own children. however, as those who support bo’s parenting approach seem to suggest, the new woman can also be constructed in a different way where not only career orientation but also abstaining from being a sole primary caregiver become a part of what defines womanhood. furthermore, such novelties in the construction of womanhood can co-exist with attributes traditionally ascribed to women, paving the way for yet another version of hybrid femininity. such attributes may be constructions of women as heterosexuals and as empathetic and caring, especially towards other women but also towards men and children. advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 182 focusing instead on the constructions of men, a defining feature of the new man referred to in studies on men and masculinities is often said to be his orientation towards children (messner, 2007; klinth & johansson, 2010). in the literature, such orientation towards children is typically equated with taking parental leave. although an understanding of bo’s husband is never explicit in the articles, he nevertheless appears as a "shadowy figure" justifying both the criticism against and support for bo. what can be said is that although the articles expressing support for bo’s parenting constructs her husband as embodying the new fatherhood and associated new masculinity (werner, 2010), the critics rule out the possibility of a (sufficiently) child-oriented masculinity, constructing him instead as relatively fixed in a traditional male role. parenting and gender in swedish print media presentations of gustav fridolin image and discourses the sources mainly describe gf’s parenting in terms of appreciation. it is argued that gf contributes to new attitudes, including a more accepting view of parental leave among politicians (hammarqvist, 2011; mamma + pappa = mp, 2012). in so doing, the value of having the father at home is emphasized, which is said to be beneficial for both the child and the father. with regard to the latter, it is argued inter alia that gf develops his political role by taking care of his family (fridolin tar pappaledigt, 2011).3 gf’s parenting is also constructed as part of a gender equality discourse. a struggle is described between the parents about the distribution of parental leave benefits, where the mother’s right initially wins, but that after discussions with his family gf decided to enjoy as much parental leave as possible (sundberg, 2011). gf’s parental leave is constructed as a consequence of a gender equal family relationship, which has a positive impact on his decision. other articles highlight the relationship between gf’s parental leave and gender equality by means of assumed implications for the spokesperson åsa romson: for the first time, it gives her an opportunity to be a party leader without having to fight for space with gustav fridolin – a young man who rarely misses an opportunity to speak to journalists. (larsson, 2012) gender equality is also in evidence by the description of gf as “a young man”, due to the fact that it is commonly perceived as an age issue where young individuals are considered more gender equal than older ones (höök, 2001).4 although the link to a gender equality discourse is an integral part of the positive evaluation of gf’s parenting, we note the absence of any gender power or diversity perspectives in the articles that express approval of gf’s approach to parenting. criticisms of gf’s parenting were not found in the data. however, some ambivalent attitudes were expressed, in that it was claimed that gf’s parental leave caused problems for himself or for the green party, or was something that does not have any proper care orientation. the ambivalent attitudes can be seen in descriptions of how gf missed an important political event, the almedal week (almedalsveckan) on gotland (engqvist, 2012; fridolin missar almedalen – är pappaledig, 2012; p. karlsson, 2012a) because of his parental leave. there are also hints that gf risks being overshadowed by åsa romson (engqvist, 2012). an image of what gf is missing is provided, without any reference to the opportunity for personal and professional development offered by parental leave. in some articles, it is claimed that gf’s role as green party spokesperson has been damaged due to parental leave (gt, 2011; blandade betyg bland bossarna, 2012; fridolin missar almedalen – är pappaledig, 2012;; jakobson, 2012). it is stated that gf will lose political credibility by his failure to participate in public discussions about policy. one of the articles presents a survey on trust in party leaders over time, where gf’s ratings dropped because of paternity leave, which the author states should not influence voters but nevertheless has an impact when politicians do not appear often enough in the media (k-j. karlsson, 2012). in another article, the green party is said to have been completely silent as a consequence of gf taking parental leave (frisberg, 2012). the question of how the party will cope without him was also raised (p. karlsson, 2012a). one article seems to suggest that although men (like gf) take parental leave, their parenting is not really care oriented: now, one of the two green party spokespersons chooses to take a short break from politics, instead focusing on nappies and baby food. from july 1, gustav fridolin will be on parental leave for six months. (p. karlsson, 2012b) gf’s parental leave is described as if he had abandoned an important assignment to devote himself to nappies and baby food, rather than as an expression of love for and wishing to be emotionally and physically close to his child. the authenticity of the care orientation of gf and men in general seems to be questioned. this article also contains a sarcastic comment about gf being praised for his parenting skills even before taking parental leave as he was voted “public dad” (“papa”) 2011 in a poll conducted by a magazine. this can also be understood as questioning the authenticity of gf’s alleged concern for his child; was it not mostly about marketing himself as a politician? thus, it is hinted that gf’s approach to parenting is that of the traditional man rather than an expression of a new masculinity.5 however, one can also interpret the quotation in terms of a new, positive masculinity, where the coupling of care orientation and extended parental leave on a voluntary basis becomes so obvious that it does not require comment. this means that a boundary has to be established in relation to the “soft man” by making references to traditional masculinity expressed in terms of a man who can ‘choose’, ‘focus’, is sustainable and interested in gadgets. what was interpreted as a quirk must also be advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 183 understood as raising the credibility of parental involvement by emphasizing continuity and others’ appreciation of it. in summary, a positive view of gf’s parenting is dominant, in which he is portrayed as a desirable part of the gender equality project and as promoting men's use of parental leave. however, there are some more ambivalent statements, which describe gf’s parental leave as problematic for him or for the organization of which he is a member. constructions of caregivers and gender irrespective of whether the focus is on the distribution of parental leave during the first months or overall, gf is not constructed as a primary parent, but rather his wife. in the articles, his wife was reported as being on parental leave for the first and longest period. although this could have been discussed by the swedish print media as problematic, especially in terms of gender equality, this aspect was not addressed. however, in the articles gf is not depicted as a traditional but rather as a new, modern man. first, he is seen as representing a child-oriented masculinity, constructed and framed as desirable for other men. second, he is constructed as oriented towards gender equality. in studies of men and masculinity, both of these attributes are considered central elements in the construction of new masculinities. as already indicated by the fact that gf is not constructed as a primary parent, the image of his child-oriented and gender equal parenting also contains elements of hybridity, where the descriptions of the new masculinity contain traditionally male coded properties. furthermore, he is associated with a traditionally male coded area, political leadership, while traditionally male-coded properties also occur, for example when gf is considered a ‘fighter’, comfortable with “the project manager role” (berg, 2011); someone who makes a choice, is sustainable, interested in gadgets and good at ‘focusing’ (aftonbladet, 2012b). our interpretation is that the many references to traditional masculinity can explain much of the positive evaluation of gf’s parenting and the associated new masculinity. thus, in contrast to a perceived ‘soft daddy’, he can take parental leave without running the risk of losing his masculinity. importantly, the child-oriented masculinity associated with the new man might be embodied differently by men depending on whether they are constructed as secondary or primary caregivers. correspondingly, for women who opt to pursue their own career, the new career oriented femininity may take a different form, depending on whether or not they are constructed as sole primary caregivers to their children. in the articles the ‘shadowy figure’ of gf’s wife is constructed as a new woman in that she has her own career and lives in a gender equal relationship. however, in the reporting about gf’s parenting, the new woman could have been constructed differently. the same, of course, holds for the new man. conclusion although fathers are sometimes seen as primary caregivers, a recurring phenomenon in our study is the perpetuation in the swedish print media of the idea that mothers but not fathers are primary caregivers. taking the different contexts concerning media descriptions of bo’s and gf’s parenting into account, we see no reason why this should not also hold for media accounts of other swedish political leaders, or of political leaders in other countries, although we have to await further empirical studies before making any stronger claims. thus, the overall pattern in the data indicates a lack of media support for the idea of fathers as primary caregivers. remaining paternity leave deficits in countries legally supportive of parental leave should be viewed against this background. furthermore, since bo was criticized for not choosing parental leave and the only critical remarks about gf, although more implicit than explicit, were instead about him choosing parental leave, our study implies that even in gender equality model countries are young children still a greater obstacle for female than for male politicians. thus, gender inequalities between women’s and men’s political citizenship continue to persist. a result of our investigation is that gf’s parenting and approach to gender are questioned far less and are more widely approved than bo’s. thus, the analysis indicates that men who choose parental leave create a modern masculinity and are perceived as innovative and positive for political development, while women who choose careers are not necessarily perceived as modern and desirable. the “hegemony of men” (hearn, 2004) can thus be seen in the images of political leaders' approaches to balancing parenthood and work. in addition to this, our empirical findings also give further support to liesbet van zoonen’s idea about the greater difficulties women face as compared to men in both being personal and respected as political leaders (van zoonen, 2006). in previous gender studies conducted by scholars from the nordic countries, orientations towards gender equality have often been presented as something peculiar to the construction of “the new man” or “the new woman” in a nordic context. our study indicates that this also applies to the gendered constructions of men and women as political leaders, which has not previously been investigated to any great extent. in contrast, the studies available on this topic in other contexts have often highlighted other attributes as being more central. however, this discursive emphasis in the nordic context on gender equality does not imply that there is also consensus about what gender equality really is. in fact, there is one particular aspect of the criticism of bo that was not emphasized in the empirical part of this article, but that we want to highlight here instead. this aspect is less about notions of motherhood/parenthood specifically, but more about something we interpret as a critique of the fundamental starting points of swedish gender equality policy in general. our interpretation is that the criticism of bo's parenting blend into a critique of the focus on traditional male "virtues" that guided the gender equality policy in general. a number of commentators have advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 184 pointed out that gender equality policy since its introductions in the 1970s had a bias towards labour market policy and economic autonomy, rather than the issues of care and shared parental responsibility. not infrequently, a more right-wing feminist movement criticized these starting points, but criticism has also come from the left direction. furthermore, also in the contemporary nordic context do attitudes on gender equality restrict what is perceived intelligible and legitimate ways to express femininity or masculinity. central to the modern masculinity represented by some of the ‘new men’ is the role of primary caregiver. correspondingly, for some of the ‘new women’, sharing the role of primary caregiver with a male partner is equally central to the modern femininity they represent. in our view, the fact that such positions might be perceived as peripheral to prevailing gender norms in society makes it even more important to highlight them. references aarseth, h. 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(2012b, february 28). fridolin tar politisk paus – ska vara pappaledig i sex månader [fridolin takes a political time-out – will be on daddy leave for six months]. aftonbladet. retrieved from http://bloggar.aftonbladet.se katz, j. (2012). leading men: presidential campaigns and the politics of manhood. northampton: interlink publishing. kerpner, j. (2010, february 4). babyboom – till ödesvalet [babyboom – at the destinate election]. aftonbladet. retrieved from http://aftonbladet.se kimmel, m. (2006). manhood in america – a cultural history. new york: oxford university press. klinth, r. (2002). göra pappa med barn [making daddy with children]. umeå: boréa. klinth, r., & johansson, t. (2010). nya svenska fäder [new swedish fathers]. umeå: boréa. laclau, e., & mouffe, c. (2001). hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (2nd ed.). london: verso. larsson, m. j. 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(2011, march 7). jo, det går faktiskt åt rätt håll, kvinnor [yes, it actually moves in the right direction, women]. aftonbladet. retrieved from: http://mediearkivet.se messner, m. (2007). the masculinity of the governator: muscle and compassion in american politics. gender & society 21, 461–480. moen, p. (1989). working parents: transformations in gender roles and public policies in sweden. madison, wi: the university of wisconsin press. mp:s toppkandidat väntar barn [mp’s high-ranking candidate awaits a child] (2011, march 25). göteborgs-posten. retrieved from http://www.gp.se/nyheter/sverige/1.580699-mp-stoppkandidat-vantar-barn?m=print mp:s toppnamn redo för pappaledighet [the mp with the highest rank ready for daddy leave] (2011, march 24). expressen. retrieved from http://web.retrieverinfo.com/services/archive/displaydocu ment?documentid=050910201103248258297&serviceid= 2 nordberg, m. (2005). jämställdhetens spjutspets – manliga arbetstagare i kvinnoyrken, jämställdhet, maskulinitet, femininitet och heteronormativitet [the spearhead of gender equality – male workers in female occupations, gender equality, masculinity, femininity and heteronormativity]. göteborg: arkipelag. ross, k., evans e., harrison, l., shears, m., & wadia, k. (2013). the gender of news and news of gender: a study of sex, politics, and press coverage of the 2010 british general election, the international journal of press/politics, 18(3). advancing women in leadership 2015 volume 35 186 sternberg, e. (2010, february 3). eva sternberg: birgitta ohlsson borde stanna hemma [eva sternberg: birgitta ohlsson should have stayed at home]. expressen. retrieved from http://www.expressen.se. sundberg, m. (2011, march 25). fridolins oro: det kan bli en politiker [fridolin’s uneasiness: it might be a politician]. kvällsposten. retrieved from http://mediearkivet.se thurfjell, k. (2010, february 2). birgitta ohlsson vill driva jämställdhetsfrågor i eu birgitta ohlsson wants to push for issues of gender equality within eu]. svenska dagbladet. retrieved from http://www.svd.se utter, h. (2010a, february 4). ”klart man kan vara minister och föda barn” [”of course you can be a minister and give birth to a child”]. aftonbladet. retrieved from http://aftonbladet.se utter, h. (2010b, december 4). minister & mamma? [minister & mother?]. aftonbladet. retrieved from http://mediearkivet.se van zoonen, l. (2005). entertaining the citizen: when politics and popular culture converge. boulder, co: rowman and littlefield. van zoonen, l. (2006). the personal, the political and the popular: a woman’s guide to celebrity politics, european journal of cultural studies, 9(3), 287‒301. werner, m. (2010, september 13). svårt kombinera barn och politik [difficult to combine children and politics]. retrieved from http://www.sydsvenskan.se whitehead, s. (2008). metrosexuality! cameron, brown and the politics of ‘new masculinity’. public policy research 14, 234–239. winberg, m. (2010, february 5). jag torkade tårarna för politikens skull [i wiped the tears for sake of politics]. expressen. retrieved from http://www.expressen.se winther jörgensen, m., & phillips, l. (2000). diskursanalys som teori och metod [discourse analysis as theory and method]. lund: studentlitteratur. wollin, m. (2010, february 4). ”ta med din bebis – amma överallt” [”bring your baby with you – breast-feed everywhere”]. aftonbladet. retrieved from http://aftonbladet.se 1see also utter, 2010a and brolin, 2010. 2also see winberg, 2010. 3for more examples of how gf’s parenting is described in positive terms, see berg, 2011; mp:s toppnamn redo för pappaledighet, 2011; mp:s toppkandidat väntar barn, 2011; sundberg, 2011. 4as exemplified by the statement that he “never misses an opportunity to speak to journalists”, constructions of gf as gender equal do not exclude that he simultaneously can be given attributes associated with the traditional rather than the new man. 5in view of the fact that this is not the only possible interpretation of the citation above and as we have not found an unambiguous perspective on the differences between sexes in other articles about gf’s parenting, we do not wish to place too much emphasis on the sex difference discourse, although we do acknowledge that the citation can be interpreted as an expression of it. advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership a personal account of leadership in an academic setting teresa morris, ph.d morris, summer, 2000 "i learned that leadership for a woman like me is partly being out in front,'in the lead' and partly about stewdship of power" the combination of intuition, compassion, social skills and direction became my leadership task during two years as a faculty senate chair. i developed my leadership style in an academic setting that was experiencing a period of rapid fundamental change. both our campus and our university system were going through major leadership changes and shifts in strategic directions. my leadership style in this context was of both the weaver and the warrior. there was a constant need to scan the organization to see who was affected, or disaffected, by change and to build networks between faculty members and decision makers that would give voice to concerns while silencing the meddlers and mischievous. leadership styles tend to be dichotomized between "task focused" and "follower focused" or "direction and collaboration" or "democratic and autocratic" (eagley and johnston, 1990; regan 1990; dunlap and goldman 1991; parsons and bales, 1955) however, bell and chase (1995) suggest an integration of these dichotomies. in their qualitative study of 27 women school superintendents, bell and chase (1995) found that such distinctions broke down "when we listen closely to how leaders talk about what they actually do. thus we propose a conception of leadership that integrates rather than separates orientations to tasks and followers" (p. 4). this is the starting point for my account of a two-year leadership experience. i want to suggest that i integrated the above orientations by developing four traits. these were internal dispositions of intuition and compassion and external behaviors of social/political skill and direction. in some ways, i'm returning to the old leadership literature of the first half of this century that has been referred to as the "great man" era of leadership theory. i'm suggesting a "great woman" approach to understanding leadership. this is offered, not as a replacement of current dichotomous contextual theories, but a supplement to such ideas. intuition by intuition, i mean a sense of when and how to communicate with whom.. for me, it was also a growing capacity to predict reactions to events and know how to preempt or respond. it was also about http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html trusting my instincts. i had no set of objectives or identified goals at the start of my tenure as faculty senate chair. i simply wanted to play a role in stewardship of power and decision-making. i wanted to be a team builder in an academic community where individuality and competitive territoriality tended to be rewarded. i was surprised to find that others, who know more than i do, were prepared to go along with my desire. compassion my compassion matured as i developed a belief system that suggested the organizational community is a positive force and its leaders have a responsibility to develop that positive force. it is difficult to hold on to a naive trust and awe of people when confronted by cynical, self-serving territoriality. a leader who appears trusting, is either dismissed as weak or judged as "slick" by the cynical. once, i was scathingly dismissed as someone who believes that the emperor is wearing clothes! however, i knew that compassion was a key to getting permission to lead. social/political skills i honed those "day to day" human contact skills that allow people to feel comfortable with me and slowly learn to trust me as an opinion leader and organizer. there is tension between interpersonal leadership where human contact creates trust and re-energizes people and efficiency where paperwork gets handled and reports get written. i found that the first gave me a personal network and the second gave me credibility as someone who "follows through" on projects. direction this is a polite way of suggesting that my style of leadership combined my feminine compassion with a need to set boundaries. on the one hand, i needed to listen and facilitate, on the other, i needed to be known for predictability and consistency. the setting our university is a member of a twenty-two campus state university system. we have approximately 12,000 students. our primary mandate is teaching lthough faculty members are expected to also develop a publishing track record. we offer four-year undergraduate degrees. in addition, 25% of our students are in graduate programs. the campus is unionized, and a memorandum of understanding (mou) negotiated between the faculty union and the university system governs much of what we do. we have about 400 faculty members, 1000 staff and various part time and adjunct faculty. in this setting during my tenure as senate chair, i was involved in both high profile projects and routine events that i will describe below. these included a merit pay initiative, selection of a new president, strategic planning and routine meetings and functions. i will tell the story of these activities, give my perception of my role, and suggest how each event taught me the leadership traits noted above. merit pay merit pay was introduced after a faculty vote on an mou developed as a result of the most recent round of collective bargaining. our campus had been a "union shop" with automatic pay increases each year tied to a favorable annual promotion and tenure review. the introduction of merit pay was a major change in the campus faculty culture. however, faculty salaries had been frozen for four years. some faculty members saw merit pay as the only way of "thawing" salaries. the campus had voted overwhelmingly supported this new mou. however, most faculty members probably did not know exactly what they had endorsed. the senate was given a very short time span (three months) to develop policy and procedures for measuring merit and selecting meritorious faculty.. the process of developing the policy made the senate chair, i.e. me, one of the link-persons between several factions and leaders: the "old timers"; the union leaders; concerned faculty; the president; the system's central office; the vice president for academic affairs (avp); the senate; and the larger faculty body. in this role i listened to faculty and administrators, consulted with other campuses, tracked down the source and substance of various conspiracy theories and stayed in touch with the president and avpon practically a daily basis. at each stage of the policy's incarnation, different factions would start to understand the form that was emerging. they were not always pleased with what they saw. the first group to recognize and react to the implications of the new policy was the old timers. one of them, after several meetings, expressing protest, agreed to write the first draft of the policy. the next group was the faculty affairs committee, the lead committee working with the administration. although suspicious, these two groups were convinced that it was better to develop the policy ourselves than to have something imposed on us in three months by the system office. after passing this milestone things were progressing quite well until the central system office called in all the presidents to a private meeting and gave them a briefing on what they would and would not accept in campus policies. presidents were assured that if campuses did not follow these instructions then their merit pay policies and procedures would be rejected at the system office. news of this meeting leaked out through conspiratorial gossip. once i heard the gossip, i had to go directly to the president and ask about the meeting. he responded promptly and supplied the new set of instructions. these were quite restrictive but i, and other leaders, were still able to persuade a critical mass of the factions noted above that it was worth continuing to develop our own merit pay policy and procedures. we did this by again appealing to these faculty members' desire for autonomy. however, many faculty leaders were disgruntled and the process was barely alive. my nurturing and social/political skills were over-taxed and finally i had to move to a directive mode and make threats! we had no choice. if we did not develop an acceptable policy by the three-month deadline then the administration would impose a policy. if this were to happen, our credibility as faculty leaders would be seriously undermined. this was a risky threat because many felt that having anything to do with developing the policy was undermining our credibility. however, there were enough key leaders willing to continue with policy development, the deadline was met and merit pay was implemented on our campus. the merit pay initiative emerged during the first month of my period of office. it was a major policy change and i was an untested leader on campus. i stayed informed of the policy process although i did not always know the content of the current version of our policy. i insisted on being consulted by both the administrative leadership and the faculty leaders writing the policy. i was new, including me in their deliberations was not the habit of these leaders but, once reminded, they did make me a habit. in fact a key leader invited me to one particular meeting to help him force a decision in that committee. i was there and so was the academic vice president (avp). we were both directive in insisting that decisions should be made to move the policy to the next stage. later, that meeting was referred to as having brought out the "big guns". i knew i had arrived when, as a woman, i was being referred to with war metaphors. this whole process tested and stretched my: intuition, in terms of knowing who was going to be critical of the process and how to convince them that it was worth continuing; my compassion, in terms of trying to see criticisms of my integrity for being involved in this, not as personal attacks, but as expressions of concern for our community; my social/political skills, in terms of building credibility and trust across a number of entrenched interest and power groups; and my direction, in terms of being a new leader but having to insist on continued work on the policy. i did not always succeed. for example, when i needed the vote of the senate executive committee on the final draft of the merit pay policy; they were suddenly out of town. the senate leadership basically abandoned the project and was unavailable for final votes. this lead to a fairly tense meeting where we clarified our definitions of leadership. presidential search my most "high profile" task as senate chair was to serve on the committee that was selecting a new president for our campus. since our campus opened in the 1960s, we had had only two presidents. so this was another major upheaval for our community. a recruitment committee was established by the system office comprising of system trustees, representatives of the local community, students, alumni, staff, and faculty. thus, the system gave campus representatives a say, but not final control of the appointment decision. faculty, staff, and student representatives on the selection committee were elected and we (five) became the guardians of the selection process for the campus. since the system-wide board of trustees had the final say on the appointment of presidents, the campus representatives on the committee had to convince the trustees on the committee that campus concerns should be a major factor in trustee decision-making. campus paranoia suggested the new president had already been selected and we were just "puppets of the regime" going through the motions of a pretence of shared decision-making. there were various stages of the appointment process. stage one was the formation of the "first tear" committee, which was responsible for short-listing the candidates and the first round of interviews. three faculty members, representing the 400 faculty on campus, were to be elected to this committee. i facilitated this election and ran for one of the positions. to do this i had to educate interested faculty on the new electoral process we were using while having a "hands off" approach to the administration of the election. i did get elected and, along with my two colleagues, proceeded to a series of meetings of that "first tear" committee to select the interview pool. we campus representatives quickly realized that we should caucus often on potential candidates and present a united front to the trustees. the next stage of the appointment process was the selection of a "second tier" committee, which involved expanding campus representation in the process to about twenty faculty, staff, students and administrators who could give feedback but not be a part of the final decision making. at the same time as this second election was being carried out, the "first tier" committee interviewed the short list of nine candidates, where we had surprising consensus on most of the candidates, and reduced the pool to six candidates. the newly elected second tier committee now interviewed these six candidates and developed a strong consensus on the leading candidates. there was then a meeting of first and second tier committees to exchange impressions and build consensus. however, at the end of this meeting many faculty members questioned the intent of the first tear committee assuming that the first tier committee would not take the opinions of the second tier committee into consideration when making the final decision. indeed,at the meeting that selected the final three candidates, although there was general consensus, the trustees made it clear that they had the power to ignore the opinions of both committees. then came campus visits by final candidates, where there was a surprisingly up-beat sense of the campus community coming together to consider its leader and glimpse its future. at each stage of the above process i found that all my developing leadership traits got a thorough workout. during election phases i had to negotiate with the system to structure the elections so that the campus's limited representation was spread across as many constituent groups as possible. to do this i developed a strong collegial contact with, a key administrator at the system office. i spent considerable time assuring him that our campus would cooperate with his administrative procedures. on campus i had to convince faculty that it was worth running for a position on either of the committees given such a limited role in the process. i had to talk to faculty members about the worth of at least having a minimal role in such a dramatic change for us. in the first tier committee meetings i had to, on the one hand, hold firm with my campus colleagues and on the other, develop credibility with the trustees. thus in heated discussions i walked a fine line between mindless agreement with either group and independence of thought. i was establishing myself as both an opinion leader and collaborator. in the end we got the leader that we wanted and i learned about the costs of trying to be credible to all factions. at worst my campus colleagues saw me as a collaborator with the enemy (the trustees) and the trustees saw me as a faculty member who, by definition, has no expertise in running a university. at best, both sides saw me as an independent leader tied to neither group. one incident in the process illustrates the dichotomy. the earlier stages of the presidential search process were confidential. however, the short list was leaked to the local press. every faction blamed another faction for the leak. the trustees and the system-wide chancellor quickly informed me that this confirmed their assessments of the immaturity and irresponsibility of faculty members. the faculty quickly let me know that they had a conspiracy theory that involved the trustees (and maybe me) in purposely leaking the list to implicate faculty. my theory was that any student reporter could have found out about he list if they tried hard enough. this incident was never satisfactorily explained away and i was unable to allay anybody's suspicions. at the end of the process i wrote a report on the selection experience from the campus perspective. i got a letter from the chancellor of the system, thanking me for my work but assuring me that i was part of the irresponsible faction that he held responsible for the press leak. so, i had a welcome to leadership. as a facilitator of decision-making, i was getting recognition but i was also arousing suspicion. strategic planning i spent two years of weekly meetings on strategic planning. it was one of those experiences that can only be written about in a "dave barry" kind of style. so here goes (with apologies for my poor imitation of his style). this is what i learned about strategic planning and leadership. strategic planning is a process whereby you bring a group of leaders together to do what nobody can do, predict the future. consequently, everybody gets frustrated with the vagueness of the task and starts to criticize the process. on the one hand, the leadership group likes to feel it has expertise, so lots of models are "trotted out" on how to predict the future but of course we can always criticize each model because we are on safe ground. we don't have models that predict the future. on the other hand, at some level we are all aware that we cannot predict the future so we sort through the present and the past to explain why we are where we are today. we turn over issues like diversity, distance learning, budget cutbacks, demographic trends, political attacks on higher education and soon, but the core problem is that we cannot predict the future. after a year of not predicting the future, we get frustrated and decide that we need a common vision and so we go on a retreat to do "team building." we do one of those exercises, usually revolving around a plane crash of some kind, and we get the message from our facilitator that we are not a team, therefore we will not be able to predict the future. we all go home feeling better somehow and write our interim reports. these reports basically list the issues we have currently identified, suggest how we could do what we do now more effectively and have a "get-out" clauses suggesting that all of this could of course change if something totally unpredictable should happen, or not happen. this was a process that tested both my compassion and intuition. i wanted to believe that all this talking about planning was worthwhile and would give our campus a direction and vision for the future. however, i did not really understand my role. i would leave meetings with a mixed feeling of excitement that i had spent time discussing some exciting possibilities with the most talented leaders on campus and frustration with our inability to focus. in the end i concluded that strategic planning is really a strategy for getting people to talk to each other about what matters to them. it is the emotional investment that is the product and this, hopefully, adds energy and life to the organization. in terms of leadership, in this context, my role was to struggle, along with everybody else. everyday politics there were various routine activities that required my attention. these included curriculum issues, linking our campus with the larger system, regular committee meetings, and general politicking. curriculum issues curriculum, you would think, is the heart and sole of the university function. it's the blue print for what we do each day. on our campus there is a curriculum committee that has procedures for curriculum development and change.. they have trouble getting people to come to their meetings. also, the issues that become "hot issues" revolve around the affects of any decision on faculty workload and/or departmental power over certain courses. heated discussion of whether the content of courses is of an adequate standard,whether the type of courses we teach are appropriate for our university and our students or about the rationales for various approaches to learning, take place between a small group of dedicated souls. for the rest, the full senate is a rubber stamp and the curriculum development process is a bureaucratic procedure rather than a hot bed of intellectual discussion of ideas and cutting edge knowledge. i had accepted my minimal role in this process as normal, until once during an open with an uncomprehending look, "but you have power over curriculum, what more power could you have". to us, as faculty, this was a new idea. i did not change my role but it gave me fodder to feed my compassion and intuition. links with the larger system our university is part of a system of universities, and every so often we meet together to compare notes and review system wide issues. for me, a senate chair at a small campus distant from the central office, this was a time of revelation. i would have no idea about the hot issues at central office and would arrive to find a fiery battle going on about, say, "the outstanding faculty member award" and be able to make no sense of the strength of feeling being expressed. however, this was the time when i was introduced to the "big picture." questions would be raised and answered. what are the central administration issues that are making distance learning such an urgent issue? what are the political pressures that are forcing a "yes" or a "no" on remedial education? who is the key player, at the central office, on merit pay who is dictating campus policies? who are the key players overall? what is the culture of the central administration and where does our campus fit in all of this? i usually got caught up in the intensity and self-importance of these one-day meetings. however,when i got back to campus it all lost its significance. knowing these things gave me credibility in conversations over a beer but they didn't seem to affect our lives. committee meetings my schedule, as faculty senate chair, was filled with meetings. i would sit through, sometimes focused sometimes rambling, discussions of what was on people's minds. this seemed to be the most crucial activity for all of us since we spent so much time at it. and, although we complained, we seemed to enjoy the company. we would catch up with each other and we had an excuse for not producing a report at our desks. we had no guilt because we were at an "important" meeting and, therefore, were "working". ultimately, it was a bonding strategy, i think. it was the foundation that made it possible to get something done when the time came to act. the danger, of course, was that sometimes we didn't act because we were busy at our meetings.. everyday politicking i should not end this section without saying something about the routine politics of it all. this role of predicting who the ambushing party was and heading them off at the pass! as well as that other role of finding the supporters of an initiative and getting them into the pass! in an open active process this means a lot of consultation before a meeting, in a closed process this means cynical exclusions and limited information. again we come down to compassion and intuition. i concluded that open communication was the most pragmatic long-term strategy. cynical manipulation might get one policy through but the damage to trust and shared community would be so profound that there would be a long-term loss of involvement and energy from the community. conclusion and so, where did all this lead? well at the end of the two years, i stepped down as senate chair and became a departmental chair. i grew from being a naive leader to someone who was a little more hardheaded but was still guided by intuition and compassion. since i had been the first female senate chair on our campus in the last fifteen years, i began my tenure with a feminist notion of being a followerfocused leader who would revolutionize the senates understanding of leadership! however, as i was challenged by both the high profile projects and the routine politics of leadership, i held onto an internal perspective of compassion and intuition towards my colleagues and community but i developed my taskfocused social/political and direction skills.. i learned that leadership for a woman like me is partly being out in front, "in the lead" and partly about stewardship of power. i was new to the campus leadership group that was mostly a male group. for them to respect my authority, there were times such as with merit pay and moving the presidential selection process along, where i simply had to tell the faculty leadership group that, although there were attempts to sabotage, we would proceed with our leadership tasks. there were some who suggested that carrying out policy was somehow "collaborating" with the enemy. after trying to address their concerns but still getting resistance, i eventually had to insist that we would proceed with our assigned responsibilities. the stewardship of power was much more of a facilitator role. faculty had trusted me with representing their interests in decision-making situations. i needed to be mindful of this. however, i also needed to understand how my role as a faculty leader interwove with the roles of the vice presidents, campus president and the union leaders. this meant comprehending their agendas,pressures and needs and acting accordingly. for example, with the implementation of merit pay, i needed to understand and work with the bureaucratic pressures on the president, the ideological orientation of the union leadership and the administrative responsibilities of the vice president for academic affairs. i would look for information and support as the processes moved on with this in mind. overall, i learned a lot and hope that i made a difference. this is a role that female faculty may decide to take on to test the waters for further leadership roles. i hope my account of my experiences and reflections will help. references bell, c., chase, s. (1995). gender in the theory and practice of educational leadership. journal for a just and caring education 1 (2) 200-223. dunlap, d. m. goldman, p. (1991) rethinking power in schools. educational administration quarterly, 27, 5-29. eagly, a. h. johnson, b.t. (1990) gender and leadership style: a meta-analysis in psychological bulletin, 106 (2) 233-256. eagly a. h., karu, s. j., johnson, b. t. (1992). gender and leadership style among school principles: a meta-analysis. educational administration quarterly, l28 (1). 76-102. regan, h.b. (1990). not for women only: school administration as a feminist activity. teachers college record 91, 565-577. parsons, t., bales, r (eds.) (1955) family, socialization and interaction process. new york: free press. dr. teresa morris is an associate professor and chair of the department of social work at california state university. tmorris@csusb.edu subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:tmorris@csusb.edu file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awnetwork/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///workplace.html file:///biztools.html file:///awcareer.html file:///business.html file:///finance.html file:///networks.html file:///lifestyles.html file:///web.html file:///education.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///news.html file:///com.menu.html file:///sitemap.html file:///excite/html/at-advancing_women_sitequery.html file:///guestbook/index.html file:///awards.html file:///support/support.html file:///college.html http://www.traderspressbookstores.com/traders-advancingwomen/ http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awpublisher.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/content.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/advertising.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/privacy.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com 410 norander_ copyedited_lz_sn.docx volume 42, 2023 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 42, 12-22 , 2023 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the invisible labor for emerging women leaders: a critical analysis of literature in higher education stephanie norander & leslie zenk stephanie norander: professor, university of north carolina at charlotte, snorande@uncc.edu leslie zenk: assistant provost, university of north carolina at charlotte, lzenk@uncc.edu accepted january 2, 2023 in this article, we present findings from a review and synthesis of contemporary research on women in higher education leadership. through the use of critical analysis, we argued that to understand the stubbornly small percentage of women who comprise upper leadership positions in higher education, we must examine the dominant discourses in the vast body of literature addressing this topic over the past 20 years. despite this ever-growing literature, institutions retain patriarchal structures that women must navigate, an approach that has yielded slow and modest change. second, we argued that the literature unifies around three predominant and well-worn categories of proposed “solutions”: (a) institutional change; (b) identity work; and (c) professional development. we interrogated problematic framings within each of these categories that reinforce the notion that women, individually, are responsible for additional, often invisible, labor to be successful, which leaves alternative solutions unimagined. keywords: gender, leadership, leadership development, institutional change in recent years, a key concern in higher education leadership and administration in the united states has been on facilitating women leaders. as the numbers of women college students have swelled, scholars have noted the stagnant state of women in high profile roles such as the presidency (johnson, 2016). according to a 2022 report by the american council on education (ace), women accounted for just 30% of all college presidencies (johnson, 2022). moreover, for women of color, the statistics tell an even starker story with slower gains on leadership positions (stefanco, 2014). as of 2017, only 5% of college presidents were women of color (woc) (american association of university women, 2020). as such, a profusion of scholarship and practical advice has emerged to examine and propose solutions for increasing the number of women leaders in academic institutions. given the slow rate of change, there remains ample reason to generate further questions and possible paths forward in order to achieve progress. for years, higher education literature and popular culture have perpetuated the “pipeline myth” that there were too few women in the pipeline to fill leadership positions in higher education. recent data however, including that described the 2022 ace’s report as well as a 2017 study conducted by the college and university professionals association of human resources (cupa-hr) (johnson, 2022; mcchesney, 2017), indicated that there are more than enough qualified women in the pipeline. ace’s 2022 report, as of 2017, women had earned more than 50% of all doctoral degrees since 2006, 50% of all master’s degrees since 1991, and 50% of all bachelor’s degrees since 1981 (johnson, 2022). despite this, women are not obtaining senior-level positions, including president, chief academic officer, and even full professor at the same rate as their male peers, and women hold a greater share of service, entry-level, and teaching-only (less prestigious) positions (johnson, 2016; snyder et al., 2016). consistent with the phenomenon described by nidiffer (2002) as “the higher, the fewer,” these recent analyses found that the higher in position rank or selectivity of institution, the fewer women are found at the top of the institution. according to cupa-hr, the percentage of women in high-level positions is less than 30% (mcchesney, 2017). similarly, the wage gap between men and women in higher education has not changed in 15 years, with an average gap in salaries of $20,000 (bichsel & mcchesney, 2017). specifically, women administrators experience an approximate 20% gender gap and college presidents a gap of under 10% (american association of university women, 2020). thus, what may look like a “pipeline” issue on the surface is actually a much more nuanced problem. scholars and administrators continue to 13 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 grapple with the complexities and stubbornness of gender diversity in leadership. given the scope, scale, and longevity of gender inequities in higher education leadership, it is no surprise that scholars have developed abundant literature on the topic over the past 20 years. motivated by the need for new, creative solutions to a persistent problem and in light of our own subjectivity as emerging women leaders who seek guidance from such writing, we critically analyze three predominant themes in the literature: (a) professional development; (b) identity work; and (c) institutional change. within the theme of identity work, we pay particular attention to woc and marginalization. we assert that much literature reinforces the idea that women must take on additional labor in order to be successful (an idea that places responsibility for success on individual women), is targeted primarily at an insular, gender exclusive audience, and promotes working within existing structures even while acknowledging the need for structural change. our goal, ultimately, is to develop new ideas and questions for future research and not to discount the rich body of existing research and advice. as such, we frame this review around the guiding question, “what are the available discourses surrounding women and higher education leadership in the u.s.?” method critical analysis in analyzing the literature as discourse, we followed the lead of higher education researchers turner, norwood, & noe (2013), looking at how meanings are configured at a macro-level, leading us to analyze which issues about women and leadership in higher education are important, dismissed, and unexplored in the literature. critical analysis, a heterogeneous approach to language and discourse, allowed us to examine the relationship between language and power. from a critical perspective, power and hierarchy are produced and reproduced in language. the goal of critical analysis is to provoke social criticism and “expose hidden power and taken-for-granted assumptions” (holland and novak, 2017, p 295). critical analysis and meta-synthesis it is important to note that this research is interdisciplinary, both in terms of the literature analyzed and the intended scholarly audience. when undertaking an interdisciplinary project, it is important to carefully consider methodological approaches and how to situate them for an interdisciplinary audience. it makes sense given both the topic and the author’s disciplinary expertise, that we would first draw upon our own expertise. the first author is in the field of communication studies, in which a macro-interpretive literature review of a topic or theme is a common and identifiable scholarly output. for example, the journals review of communication and communication yearbook have published extended literature reviews that use critical analysis to advance thinking about certain topics, themes, and questions. the second author is in the field of higher education, in which critical literature reviews can be found as a primary methodology. for example, the journal review of educational research provides a forum for such scholarship. given the authors’ disciplines and the object of inquiry (women in higher education), we primarily drew upon past educational research to guide our methods. as such, we used a a meta-synthesis process to conduct our literature review. according to educational researchers wolfe and dilworth (2015), in meta-synthesis, the researchers aim to synthesize qualitative content, past literature in this case, in order to identify categories and interpret greater meanings (wolfe & dilworth, 2015). following the lead of educational researchers wolfe and dilworth (2015) in their approach to literature review methodology, we first developed a guiding research question, “what are the common, available messages in the literature on women and leadership in higher education?” second, we embarked upon a phase of selecting literature, developing and refining criteria to analyze an array of literature that was manageable, relevant, and timely. the next two phases involved deep reading, analysis, and synthesis – iterative processes that mutually informed each other. although we relied primarily on previous education research to guide our literature review methodology, it is important to note that many disciplines engage in forms of meta-synthesis as a valuable genre of inquiry. for example, as management scholars point et al. (2017) asserted, findings and discussion from this type of literature review can “push the discipline – or the disciplines – forward in their theoretical and practical insight” (p. 197). in the field of psychiatry, lachal, et al., (2017), advocated for metas-synthesis as a way to systematically review the findings of qualitative studies, specifically. they assert that this is a way to bring a measure of objectivity and scientific rigor to analyzing qualitative studies that are contextual, and ultimately to impose generalizability on such empirical work. our review of literature is informed by this broad-scale concept of meta-synthesis. more specifically, though, we use a critical interpretive lens to analyze the literature, commonly found in communication and education scholarship, to understand the texts as discourse (see above). in the following section, we outline the procedures we used to engage in selection, analysis, and synthesis. procedures to begin answering our research question, our literature search began simply with the terms “women and leadership in higher education.” quickly, we realized the enormous scope and scale of this work. for example, a google scholar search of those terms in the past three years yields over 75,000 results. we developed selection criteria, ultimately focusing on: (a). research dated from 2005 till present; (b) scholarship focused on the u.s. higher education system; and (c) peer-reviewed journal articles and academic edited volumes. we also chose to focus primarily on literature in education journals, using our library databases (i.e. academic search complete, communication and mass media complete, eric database, and jstor) to target journals 14 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 by subject area. this, however, was a softer criterion as the field of education is broad, with porous disciplinary boundaries that overlap with other disciplines. although this review covers a broad range of scholarship, it is important to note that the critical analysis approach is not intended to be exhaustive. rather, the depth and breadth of the literature reviewed yields a viable analysis of the prevalent discourses surrounding women, gender, leadership, and higher education. in the initial phase, working with the selection criteria above, we reviewed approximately 125 articles. we then identified approximately 50 key articles and traced their citations to see how ideas evolved in the discourse over time. in phase two, continued in-depth review of the approximately 50 articles, generating categories and themes within each category to delineate our findings (see wolfe & dilworth, 2015). first, we read and annotated the literature, identifying broad categories that characterized the main topics, concepts, and questions. the primary categories developed in this phase included identity, institutional change, and professional development. second, we constructed themes by interpreting possible category meanings. for example, one early primary category we identified was mentoring, and we analyzed this category by asking, “what does it mean for women leaders if mentoring is theorized and presented in these ways?” we also looked for counter-points and counterexamples in the literature to our developing themes. this phase allowed us to see patterns of discourse in the selected texts and to conceptualize extensions of and alternatives to the current literature. our third phase of literature review research involved analyzing concept saturation. concept saturation occurs when further literature search on a specific idea or concept leads to more of the same understanding and approaches to that concept. to extend the above example, mentoring is a concept and practice often discussed in this literature. once we developed analytical themes about mentoring based on our selected literature, we again searched for additional literature on this topic specifically. we read this additional literature to discover if there were other conceptualizations of mentoring dominant in the literature, and if the additional sources lead us to deeper analysis. once we reached concept saturation, we chose not to include additional literature. finally, we moved into deeper critical analysis of the literature as our synthesis evolved. we questioned the limits of dominant categories and themes that characterize the literature, interpreting assumptions underlying, for example, the overwhelming quantity of literature focused on professional development for women. we observed in this process several ways in which the discourse of “women and leadership in higher education” could shift and change to create new normals of leadership – ones that are more inclusive, less deficit-based, and not purported on women’s ongoing invisible labor. ultimately, our goal was to support new ways of thinking about and researching women and leadership in higher education in order to promote deeper, more systemic gender inclusiveness, equity, and diversity. we acknowledge that it remains clear that the vast majority of literature over this time period focuses on cisgender, white women and reinforces a gender binary, although the discourse is slowly changing as the field of higher education changes and as a result of increased opportunities for academic publishing such as this one. it is important to note that our selection terms above, presentation of our themes, and critique of literature conducted and reported from a gender binary perspective is not done as an endorsement or perpetuation of the idea that only cisgender men and women work in higher education, but rather as a reflection of the literature that exists. we hope to spark conversation that shifts discourse and practices of how we frame our research on women and leadership in higher education. limitations a limitation of literature review as a method can be selection bias and the quality of the search conducted. we have attempted to address this limitation through the design of our search strategy which drew clear boundaries around our search criteria and dates as described above. we do however acknowledge some limitations of our review. first, although we reviewed and synthesized a select range of literature that is not intended to be exhaustive, exclusive use of the databases available through our library may have resulted in an incomplete set of articles. second, our results that follow do not include a critical review of each individual study’s validity, but rather assume that each study is indeed valid. third, the search selection terms themselves may have limited our findings; a broader set of terms certainly would have allowed for more research to be considered and analyzed for its contribution to our research question. finally, as qualitative research, it is important to acknowledge our own personal biases as researchers and the ways in which our world views and experiences shape our analyses and assumptions. findings in this section, we present the findings of the critical analysis of the literature. the findings are organized into three main sections that emerged in analysis: identity work, institutional change, and professional development. in each section, we highlight how meanings are constructed and reinforced in ways that both enable and constrain the discursive possibilities for women leaders in higher education. ultimately, we argue that a common thread woven throughout the literature is an expectation of invisible labor for women leaders, a concept we engage in depth in the discussion. identity work the first theme identified through this critical review is that of identity work. the literature on women and leadership in higher education often emphasizes the work involved in embodying a “female identity” while pursuing advancement. on one level, these messages raise awareness about the realities of gender bias in the academy; but, on another level, the messages reinforce the 15 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 notion that women cannot succeed without laboring to overcome and compensate for their identities. for example, according to sulpizio (2014), women must first develop a gender-aware identity before they can effectively learn leadership skills. when solutions like this prescribe a linear path to success, they imply additional steps (work) women must take. scholars sometimes even refer explicitly to gendered identities as obstacles, framing the problem as, “women can be successful leaders when they recognize and know how to overcome the complexities of female leadership” (wilson, 2011, p. 263). messages that are meant as helpful how-tos in the literature can be discerned as reminders that a gendered identity as a woman is a liability when it comes to leadership. this framing, used repeatedly, assigns the work of increasing women leaders to a limited audience, those women seeking leadership positions. another iteration of the focus on identity work in the literature can be found in the many accounts of personal experience from women leaders in higher education. these accounts include, for example, women university presidents (madsen, 2008), midto senior-level leaders (smith & suby-long, 2019), women moving from clerical to professional positions (iverson, 2011), and women college presidents at historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) (cubbage, 2020). one of the purposes of this first-person account research is to advise other women on how to become leaders. much of the advice echoes’ themes found across the broader literature and can be summarized as: ● take control and strategize your career advancement (cubbage, 2020; irby et al., 2014; jackson & johnson, 2011; madsen, 2008; wolverton et al., 2009) ● seek mentorship ● seek professional development ● network ● be participatory and consultative ● be adaptive ● commit to lifelong learning ● enact a high level of integrity and ethics ● be a good listener ● have a sense of humor ● be commanding and assertive women’s stories vary, though their “lessons learned” remain relatively consistent as does the intended audience — other women. several scholars have deepened and broadened the repertoire of available personal narratives from women leaders by focusing on the additional complexities and challenges facing women of color (woc). this literature centers gender and race as sources of marginalization. as sims (2020) pointed out, all aspects of higher education are racialized and gendered, from texts assigned in classroom learning to bureaucratic management practices in the organization. as such, these narratives also pass on stories of identity work and the differing expectations woc face to perform leadership identities, with strategies emphasizing survival and overcoming adversity (jackson & johnson, 2011; irby et al., 2014). although there is increasing attention to the intersections of gender and race, other identity intersections receive little or only implicit attention in the literature. class is addressed often implicitly in personal narratives of struggle. for example, in a profile of former berkeley college president and current president of the american association of state colleges and universities (aascu) mildred garcia, she shared, “i identify with my students because our lives run parallel. i was born in brooklyn...when i was twelve, my father passed away and we moved into the farragut housing project” (wolverton et al., 2009, p. 39). esterberg and wooding (2013) also mentioned class in relation to students, citing from their research that faculty from working-class backgrounds working at institutions serving primarily working-class students were happiest. when acknowledged, class is either an implicit factor in the stories women share of their backgrounds or it is mentioned in connection to first generation and underrepresented students. sexual orientation receives scant explicit attention in the literature on women in higher education. however, cisgender and heterosexual norms permeate stories of women and the presidency both in telling of their couplings and singlehood (see wolverton et al., 2009). at issue here is the conceptualization of gender as a primary source of identity and marginalization in the academy, as an obstacle to be overcome by individual women, and the narrow audience to which the rich and provocative personal accounts are aimed. women’s voices need to be heard, in all their plurality, and especially those who have been historically (and continue to be) oppressed by the white, patriarchal, elite, and hetero norms of u.s. higher education. moreover, women need to be able to enact leadership identities that are multifaceted and intersectional, not just gendered. we assert that the emphasis in the literature on identity work reinforces the well-worn ideas that: (a) gender identity is an obstacle; (b) success is dependent on individual ability to overcome gender identity; and (c) women are the primary audience, and therefore stakeholders, for research and discourse about how to advance more women in the academy at the expense of foreclosing discussion about sustainable institutional change. institutional change institutional change is the second theme we identified. it is increasingly recognized in the literature on women in higher education as an acknowledgement of the structural and systematic barriers to success and advancement. literature within the past 10 years has been consistent on the ways in which the experiences of women leaders differ from that of men in the academy, including increased rates of incivility from colleagues and students (neuman & keashly, 2010; lampman, 2012), increased rates of part-time employment (glazer-raymo, 2008), higher levels of academic service loads for faculty (guarino & borden, 2017; o’meara et al., 2017), and a persistent wage gap that has not changed in 15 years, with an average gap in salaries of $20,000 (bichsel & mcchesney, 2017). 16 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 research points to several institutional and organizational considerations for these phenomena, not the least of which includes the history of the structure of academia in the u.s. which was by and large created historically for men, influencing the process and timing associated with the tenure process which coincides with women’s reproductive years (jamieson, 1995; national academy of sciences, national academy of engineering & institute of medicine, 2006). despite attempts to enact family-friendly policies that “stop the tenure clock” and allow timing extensions for large stops in productivity such as caring for an infant, recent studies indicate such policies may not actually benefit women (antecol et al., 2016). the academy also provides an ideal environment for bullying due to the fact that productivity, tenure and promotion are assessed subjectively by faculty colleagues (keashly & neuman, 2010). finally, recent literature points to major historical practices within academia that contribute to the current gender pay gap including the use of student evaluations in promotion and tenure and the use of obtaining outside offers to increase earnings. ratings of evaluations of teaching have been consistently shown to be biased (fan et al., 2019; magel et al., 2017; merritt, 2007; peterson et al., 2019; stark et al., 2016). in an analysis of salaries at a research institution, magel et al. (2017) found that when male faculty student ratings went up, so did their salary; when women’s student ratings went up, salaries decreased. additionally, the common higher education practice of using outside offers to negotiate a higher salary at your current institution also has implications for the gender wage gap, as rank and gender have been shown to be two factors that affect who receive outside offers; men receive more outside offers than women, and bias based on partner status can affect offers as well (o’meara et al., 2017). institutional solutions: work within the system or change institutional best practices and solutions cited to address barriers for women in higher education abound, from calls of transparency for hiring, evaluation and promotion practices, to trend analyses and self-audits, to systematic review of policies and procedures (babcock & laschever, 2008; erickson, 2015; simmons, 2014). these considerations often offer a nod toward inequalities but focus mostly on how to advance within current organizational structures. the articulated systemic barriers, while met with suggestions for policy change at an organizational level, are also often met with suggestions for the woman to work around, navigate or overcome something such as invest in more professional development, develop stronger professional networking, and increase the pipeline through mentoring as previously discussed (bornstein, 2008; glazer-raymo, 2008. for example, a common solution posed to address the wage gap is to improve the negotiation skills of women (babcock & laschever, 2003, 2008; compton & palmer, 2009; falcon, 2016; kelsky, 2019; kennedy et al., 2017; kugler et al., 2013; leibbrand & list, 2012; simmons, 2013 & 2014). proposed solutions to reducing barriers for women in educational leadership also may exacerbate the problem; for example, a common solution of including women on search committees results in women spending significantly more time on academic service (including committees), devaluing their work and increasing time to tenure (guarino & borden, 2017). finally, solutions proposed for institutional change speak to a limited audience, often focusing on the experiences of white, cisgender women. in the earlier example posed, guarino and borden (2017) found that members of underrepresented minority groups spend significantly more time on academic service including committees and mentoring due to issues of proportionality (there are fewer women and people of color in some academic units), meaning the very solution proposed to enact change has the unintended consequence of overburdening women of color. professional development over the past 20 years, researchers and practitioners have steadfastly promoted professional development for emerging leaders within the literature and discourse on women and higher education perhaps more than any other concept or practice. professional development receives frequent attention across policy-oriented, empirical, and personal narrative genres. for example, one predominant approach in this literature is to focus on specific, formal professional development programs for women. these include campus programs funded through the national science foundation’s advance program (brown & severin, 2014) and other well-known national level programs such as the american council of education (ace) fellows program (turner & kappes, 2009) and hers institutes (white, 2012). scholars and seasoned leaders also frequently laud mentoring and networking as professional development activities essential to the success of women leaders. professional development, then, refers to a wide range of formal and informal activities promoted, primarily to emerging women leaders, as not just worthwhile but necessary for advancement. profiles of professional development programs generally advance the argument that “professional development opportunities in higher education are critical, especially for women seeking leadership positions in the field” (turner & kappes, 2009, p. 149; emphasis added). according to the literature, the important components of formal programs include leadership skills, managing organizational change, and developing mentoring and networking relationships within and beyond participants’ home institutions. although researchers frequently prescribed such programs as essential to the ability for women to attain and maintain positions of influence (madsen, 2012), many also noted that prestigious national programs have high barriers to access due to cost, selectivity, and time and that the majority of u.s. colleges and universities offer leadership development programs for women (dean, 2009). mentoring mentoring is one of the most commonly discussed practices in literature promoting women and leadership. lauded for its 17 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 benefits to both institutions and individuals, mentoring is a facilitative and developmental relationship between protégé and mentor (briscoe and freeman jr., 2019; see also eby 2010). in managerial and human resources development literature on higher education, mentoring is discussed as a recruitment and retention strategy and formal mentoring programs are encouraged in institutions. in literature on higher education and individual development, scholars position mentoring as a critical component to individual advancement (turner, hale tolar, 20120) and women are guided to seek and cultivate mentoring relationships, as well as serve as mentors, throughout their career. in empirical research on female university presidents and other female leaders, mentoring features prominently as a critical intervention to their success (hill & wheat, 2017). scholars most often situate the work of mentoring with individual women. for example, women are encouraged to seek out productive mentoring relationships. the idea is that university presidents, successful in their leadership quest, cite the importance and value of these relationships. the literature largely portrays this as “the presence of mentoring is expected to benefit and advance an individuals’ development, and the absence of mentoring is understood as a deficit” tolar, 2012, p. 173). another way mentoring labor is situated with individuals is through encouragement to give back, and to reciprocate by mentoring others. there is an undercurrent of selfless giving within this literature. although scholars have documented the plentiful benefits of mentorship, there are increasing examples of more nuanced arguments that question the efficacy of mentoring as a one size fits all solution for emerging women academic leaders. for example, hale tolar (2012) found that mentoring is a critical factor in career development, but as both a help and a hindrance. in the study, about half of women reported not having a mentor, and discussed the benefits of developing self-determination and independence in decision-making. women also expressed the need for opt-out strategies, and alternatives to mentoring as traditionally conceived. buzzanell et al. (2015) also picked up on the contradictions of the “grand mentoring narrative” rife throughout literature on women and academic leadership. this narrative, they argued, suggests that “mentoring is required for academic career and life success…” (p. 441). calling this normative, master narrative into question, they found that women of color expressed a lack of faith in formal mentoring systems and discussed the emotional and performative labor involved in adhering to unquestioned and assumed positive outcomes of participating in mentoring. in addition to interpersonal challenges to mentoring relationships, scholars also acknowledge access to consistent, high-quality mentoring as a structural barrier for emerging women leaders. this problem becomes more challenging the higher up the career ladder women aspire to climb. many women chief academic officers (caos), for example, report that they do not intend to seek a presidential post, thus suggesting the challenges are not only related to creating robust leadership pipelines of women candidates (stefanco, 2014). one reason for this, researchers cite, is an absence of mentoring; caos can experience tension in relationships with their presidents rather than encouragement and support for career development. in addition, there are few opportunities through formal organizations and networks for cross-institutional mentoring among presidents and caos, with much professional development aimed at one group or the other. to date, the college presidency remains predominantly white and male, thereby limiting possibilities for women to seek mentorship from other women in top positions. this limitation is yet starker for minority women leaders seeking mentorship perspectives from other minority women leaders (cubbage, 2020). studies of women who have advanced through academic leadership ranks also point toward the invaluable role of mentoring in their ascent. drawing on studies of women and work in corporate settings, higher education researchers make the case for mentoring as essential to women’s success (vongalis-macrow, 2014). in general, this research argues that mentoring is an active, generative relationship that yields both professional and psychosocial benefits for mentees (brown, 2005). for women mentees, strong mentors can help in developing an expanded knowledge base, greater organizational visibility, and access to important professional networks both formal and informal. in addition, psychosocial benefits can include friendship and emotional support (dean, 2009). given these positive effects, it makes sense that mentoring features prominently in research and policy writing on how to increase the numbers of women higher education leaders. taken together, the vocabulary of professional development, including that centered on mentoring and networking, often situates women as needing to learn and do more in order to succeed. the literature on women and leadership in higher education places emphasis on how individuals can engage in development activities that better situate them for career advancement. drawing on a wealth of data from personal experiences of women leaders, the advice to seek mentorship and develop strong networks is grounded in, and reinforces, the idea that these are essential activities for women’s advancement and success. while prescriptive messages proliferate, this research in general does not significantly explore the outcomes of mentoring and networking nor does it consider the gendered labor of engaging in these activities. this practice allows, for the most part, a grand narrative of “shoulds” directed at women, and assumptions about individual achievement to go unquestioned. although educating women leaders in higher education about the benefits of mentoring and encouraging them to seek it out is important, it is a problematic solution in and of itself. networking is also prescribed to women academic leaders in ways both similar to and distinct from mentoring processes. advancing one’s individual career, rather than seeking developmental feedback or relational support, underscores the push for women to build their capacity to network. as with mentoring, researchers present networking as both a problem 18 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 and solution. the advice, though, can be contradictory and confusing. for example, vongalis-macrow (2014) offers that networking is a challenge for women, arguing that women are generally “good at formal networking,” the type that happens through committee participation and other forms of traditional service work, but challenged by informal networking. the author suggests that women are excluded from informal networks because (a) they are centered around male interests and activities, and (b) they undervalue them in relation to their daily tasks. the author uses the following as evidence to support this point: a female colleague came to work and from the moment she arrived until the moment she left for the day; she hardly left her desk. she was working hard to finish all that she had to do within the tight frames of a typical day. it used to annoy her to walk past her two male colleagues who would be in their office talking about their weekend and their passion for yachts. she often wondered where they got the time to sit and chat. my colleague understood the formal networks at work, and the need to be included on committees and power teams and so forth, but she could not decode the value of the informal networking as demonstrated by her male colleagues. what she saw was a waste of time, was something else. (p. 79) networking, then, is essential to career progress, and especially to those at risk of mid-career stalling. the solutions, when presented this way, rely on women learning to better collaborate, speak up about their aspirations, and learn to spend more time and attention on informal, personal interactions. discussion the literature on women and leadership in higher education revolves around the central question of how to increase and support women in leadership positions. although the research continues to grow in volume, the topics discussed and solutions offered have largely coalesced around the same themes over the past 20 years. this claim resonates with gangone and lennon’s (2014) assessment that the major discussion points coursing throughout the literature have remained stagnant; in order to make progress on gender equality in higher education we need to reimagine our questions, concerns, and solutions in ways that push beyond the current available discourses. our review highlights the ways in which emerging women leaders are messaged, explicitly and implicitly in the literature, that they must undertake substantial labor, often additional and invisible, in order to advance successfully. professional development activities are recommended repeatedly, affirming the idea that individuals are exclusively responsible for their success and upholding grand narratives of unquestioned positive outcomes of such activities (buzzanell et al., 2015). the theme of identity work demonstrates how female gender identities are rendered liabilities in the literature, even with the benign intention of teaching women how to advance. although moves toward more inclusive examples of women as inhabiting multi-faceted and intersectional identities are becoming more common, the overarching emphasis remains on the unquestioned assumption that “women” leaders are a monolithic group that incur certain identity limitations. woc academic leader identity narratives and marginalization experiences can be found, but the discourse of advice remains primarily one that ignores critical engagement of race, as well as sexuality and class. the invisible labor for emerging women leaders finally, our review shows that while there is much acknowledgement of the need for institutional change, the actual labor involved in doing so receives little attention. our aim in highlighting these themes through the lens of labor is to surface problematics and offer possible paths forward. the first problematic area our review demonstrates is that of the gendered division of labor for developing dynamic university leaders. as mentioned, women are told repeatedly of the work they must take on in order to become a leader; work that involves individual time and resources on strategizing, bettering, learning, and cultivating relationships. at issue here is the contrast with how messaging occurs to leaders who are men; certainly, they are encouraged to engage in professional development activities, but, to what extent do we assign and expect additional preparatory labor to women, by framing these activities as “essential” and why? what would it look like to create expectations for leadership that were gender inclusive? the over-reliance, in the literature, to prescribe professional development also ignores issues of limited access to programs and relationships, as well as the differential experiences women have of these various activities. instead, we propose work that disrupts these limitations in productive ways by focusing on how women experience mentoring, networking, and professional development, the limitations of self-improvement in addressing gender inequities, and the strategy fatigue women experience in being prompted to give time, energy, and resources to one professional development program after another often without empirical clarity on how it transforms gender inequities. second, our review of the literature makes clear that the implied audience is overwhelmingly, women. this stems, in large part, from the framing of gender equality as equal to “women in leadership.” we contend that the prevalence of audience insularity forecloses possibilities of discussing gender relations, and of developing solutions that go beyond what individual women can do to further their career. widening the audience for this work can be a productive step in creating collective responsibility for transformational change. finally, the way that institutional change is discussed in the literature is problematic for the ways in which it eschews real talk about the unintended consequences and labor involved in taking on such change. for example, as illustrated above, many ways in which institutions strive toward change result in unintended burdens of labor for women and people of color in the academe. similarly, calls for systemic institutional change with regards to more equitable institutional policies and practices 19 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 fail to consider very real questions of who is expected to lead and be involved in change efforts, and the fact that such change efforts, particularly for faculty, are not rewarded. in addition to tangible time and resources involved in such efforts, the interpersonal and political considerations of working to change old and established institutional norms and structures make the very idea of undertaking the work virtually impossible, particularly for those members of the academy with limited job security and power, which are often the positions in which women are more overrepresented. we therefore call on institutions to make explicit the institutional values that guide this work and to protect those taking on this invisible labor. references american association of university women. 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(2009). women at the top: what women university and college presidents say about effective leadership. stylus. 22 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, fall 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] succeeding in academia: practical strategies for achieving tenure and promotion at research universities maria m. ferreira wayne state university abstract achieving tenure and promotion is an integral process to becoming a member of the academy's community. tenure provides job security, ensures academic freedom, and protects faculty from institutional threats. as newcomers in the academy, women and minorities face challenges not previously encountered by their white male peers. research indicates that in addition to scholarly, pedagogical, political, and personal issues, the tenure process for women and minorities also includes issues of gender and race. this paper provides women and minority faculty on the tenure track at research universities with practical strategies intended to facilitate their tenure and promotion process. the strategies focus on the three areas used in tenure and promotion decisions: research, teaching, and service. background according to lave and wenger (1991), an individual's participation in a specific community of practice is at first "legitimately peripheral," increasing progressively as one's level of competence increases, leading eventually to full participation and membership in the community. however, the process by which newcomers become old timers in a community of practice is by no means linear. instead, meanings and relations are continuously negotiated in a "conflicting, synergistic structuring of activity and relations among practitioners" (lave & wenger, 1991, p. 56). for junior faculty entering a new career in the academy, negotiating their department and/or college's culture can be a daunting process. achieving tenure and promotion is an integral process to becoming a member of the academy's community. tenure protects faculty from institutional threats and ensures academic freedom (premeaux & mondy, 2002). tierney (2002) contends that without tenure there is no academic freedom and that "without the professorate's freedom to stretch boundaries and limits, society is at peril" (p. 60). others maintain that the tenure and promotion process results in greater faculty productivity in the areas of research, teaching, and file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/templates/index.html service (hum, 2001). although women and minorities have made strides in attaining doctoral degrees and academic positions, their numbers continue to cluster at the lecturer and assistant professor levels. according to a report by the american association of university women (aawu), only one-fifth of the full professors and one-third of the associate professors in american universities are women (dyer, 2004). as newcomers in the academy, women and minorities face challenges not previously encountered by their white male peers. research indicates that in addition to scholarly, pedagogical, political, and personal issues, the tenure process for women and minorities also includes issues of race and gender (cooper & stevens, 2002; dyer, 2004; hamilton, 2004). women and minorities are often viewed as "outsiders," particularly when their perspectives about and approaches to research, teaching, and service deviate from the status quo (cooper & stevens, 2002). sex discrimination cases indicate that overt and subtle forms of sex discrimination in the tenure and promotion process play a role in the under representation of women in the higher levels of the professoriate (dyer, 2004). many women also experience role conflicts between their career's progression and parenthood and must balance their career paths with their goals of motherhood (armenti, 2004; collay, 2002). at research universities the tenure and promotion review process takes place at the department, college, and university levels. divergence among members of the tenure and promotion committees about a candidate's qualifications often occur, particularly at the university level, when committee members have differing perspectives about the value of research compared to that of teaching and service (hearn & anderson, 2002). journals that publish research from department areas such as women or minority studies are sometimes viewed as less prestigious than the more traditional journals (dyer, 2004). one of the most often mentioned concerns of junior faculty is their institution's lack of clear expectations and guidelines regarding the tenure and promotion process (austin & rice, 1998; cooper & stevens, 2002; diamantes, roby, & hambright, 2002). women and minority faculty, in particular, report ambiguous guidelines and contradicting messages from administrators and colleagues at their institutions about the tenure process (austin & rice, 1998; dyer, 2004; olsen, 1993; rice, 1996). periodic reviews often lack clear, constructive feedback that might help junior faculty address areas of concern. as a result, women and minority faculty must take proactive measures regarding their tenure and promotion process. the main goal of this paper is to give practical strategies to women and minority faculty on the tenure track at research universities to facilitate their tenure and promotion process. method although this is not a study in the usual sense of the word, it may be viewed as a "self-study" or as a reflection of "lessons learned" on my tenure and promotion process or, as lather (1991) put it, "dialectical theory-building that aspires to focus on and resonate with lived experience. . . ." (p. 55). according to heron (1981), "persons, as autonomous beings, have a moral right to participate in decisions that claim to generate knowledge about them" (in lather, 1991, p. 56). the practical strategies provided in this paper are based on my experience and that of colleagues as we went through the tenure and promotion process, and on my current work on the college and university's tenure and promotion committees at a carnegie i research university. in the years prior to my tenure, i organized a junior faculty support group and since then have mentored and shared my tenure materials and strategies with other women colleagues undergoing the tenure process. preparing for tenure and promotion seeking information drawing on case studies, cooper and temple (2002) contend that often women and minorities "are marginalized in the academy because they are unaware of the tenure politics and processes at their university" (p. 26). indeed, the lack of clear procedures and guidelines on the tenure process is often the greatest concern of junior faculty on the tenure track. as newcomers women and minority faculty often feel uneasy requesting information from administrators and senior colleagues due to a perceived power differential. yet, having clear information about what is expected is essential to one's preparation for the tenure and promotion process. request clear information from your administrators regarding what is expected in the areas of scholarship, teaching, and service (e.g., what counts as "scholarship," number of refereed articles expected, etc.). ask for a copy of your college and university's written guidelines for tenure and promotion (cooper & temple, 2002). meet with your department chair or assistant dean every year and ask for honest and constructive feedback on your activities and progress for that year. meet with senior faculty members who recently served on your college's and/or the university's tenure and promotion committees and ask about procedures and expectations for tenure and promotion. ask this person for feedback on your professional record (format, organization of activities, and overall presentation). speak to colleagues who have recently gone through the tenure and promotion process and ask them to share with you their materials and strategies. mentoring the transition from graduate school to the professoriate can be a daunting and lonely process as one navigates the department's and institution's cultures. as pointed out by bronstein and ramaley (2002), "the culture of the academy creates possibilities and barriers that inexperienced newcomers need to identify and manage" (p. 31). mentoring facilitates newcomers' integration into the institution's culture, leading to feelings of connectedness and increased satisfaction with the work environment (schrodt, cawyer, & sanders, 2003). senior faculty can play an important role in the socialization of women and minority faculty (cooper & temple, 2002). furthermore, senior faculty often chair important committees where they can serve as advocates for junior faculty. actively seek mentoring from successful senior faculty who are receptive to your needs. some institutions support mentoring dyads composed of a junior and a senior faculty member. if your institution does not support such mentoring approaches, suggest it to your administrators. get to know your colleagues within your college and others in the university: their research interests, current projects, etc. explore with them opportunities for collaboration in grants and/or publications. develop collaborative relationships with colleagues outside one's department or college to help build support when departmental politics threaten one's tenure and promotion process (cooper & temple, 2002). begin a "junior faculty support group" and mentor each other: read each other's work, collaborate on grants and publications, observe each other's teaching, and provide emotional support to each other. do not isolate yourself; other junior faculty in your college will most likely be experiencing similar doubts and tribulations to yours. stay away from departmental and college "politics." stay as neutral as possible, without compromising your integrity. networking at research universities the tenure and promotion review process takes place at various levels: department, college, and university. divergence among members of the tenure and promotion committee about a candidate's qualifications often occur, particularly at the university level, based on committee members' perspectives about the value of research compared to teaching and service (hearn & anderson, 2002). disagreements among committee members also tend to occur about candidates from disciplines viewed as "soft" (hearn & anderson, 2002). as a result, committee members rely on external reviewers for their evaluation of a tenure candidate's scholarship. as newcomers to the academe, women and minority junior faculty are often reticent about developing collaborative relationships with others in the academy. in a study comparing tenured and untenured faculty's perspectives about the importance of collaboration and collegiality to the tenure process, a significantly smaller percentage of untenured faculty rated collaboration and collegiality as important (diamantes, roby, & hambright, 2002). furthermore, female respondents rated external evaluators as less important to the tenure process than did males (stone, 1996). my experience in college and university tenure and promotion committees is that letters from external reviewers are crucial in tenure and promotion decisions. be active in professional organizations. this will put you in contact with potential external reviewers of your tenure materials. begin a file with names, contact information, and research area(s) of colleagues in your area or related areas of research (co-presenters at conferences or presenters listed under topics related to your research area, session chairs, discussants, or persons you meet in association committees). develop informal relationships with them; seek their opinion about your work and consider asking them about serving as outside reviewers of your tenure and promotion materials. note that usually for tenure decisions, external reviewers must be at the associate or full professor level and from institutions ranked at the same or higher level as the candidate's institution. do not list potential external reviewers who do not appear to appreciate your work or who appear to disagree with your research paradigm; they probably will not rate your work very favorably. research scholarship, grants (ideally from large federal agencies), and publications (in peer reviewed journals) play the most important role in tenure and promotion decisions at research universities. as a result, women and minority faculty on the tenure track must allocate the majority of their time and effort to research and scholarship (foster-fishman & stevens, 2002). if you just finished graduate school, use your dissertation to develop conference presentations and journal articles. new research projects take time to develop and members of tenure committees do not like to see large periods of inactivity in a candidate's record. as suggested by bronstein and ramaley (2002), ". . . capitalize on what you have already done" (p. 38). often courses in doctoral programs require large assignments (e.g., a review of the literature on a topic; an action research study in a research course) that can be used for conference presentations and/or publications. revise such course assignments from your doctoral program and submit them as conference presentations and publications. use grants as a source of new data. all grant projects, even non-research grants, must be evaluated and a project's evaluation data can be used for conference presentations and/or publications. fosterfishman and stevens (2002) also suggest "community-based outreach work" (p. 180) as scholarship. the students in your classes can be sources of data for presentations and publications, as long as there is no conflict of interest. protect yourself by getting such studies approved through your institution's human subjects committee. bronstein and ramaley (2002) also suggest involving students in research projects such as in collecting and analyzing data. make a list of journals in which you can publish your work. make a file for each of them and include a copy of the submission guidelines and copies of recent articles published in the journal. read the sample copies carefully and pay attention to formatting, language style, etc. the closer your article is to what the journal tends to publish, the greater the chances your article will be accepted. when the reviews of one of your articles are too daunting, go over the article again and send it to a different journal that might be a better fit for your work. as suggested by bronstein and ramaley (2002), ". . . keep it [your work] circulating until it finds a home" (p. 39). note that it takes 1-2 years or more for an article to be published from the submission date. teaching for many faculty including myself, teaching is the first priority, although it counts second to research in tenure and promotion decisions at research universities. however, poor teaching will not secure tenure even in research universities (cooper & nojima, 2002; tierney & bensimon, 1996). the recent budget cuts have led to greater competition for students among universities and, as a result, even research universities are placing increasing scrutiny on teaching quality in tenure and promotion decisions. tenure committee members expect faculty with appointments in teacher education programs to have especially good teaching evaluations, given their specializations in pedagogy. electronic communication also facilitates student access to the highest college and university administrators, and increasingly, students use such technology to voice their concerns about a course and/or faculty member. your reputation as a teacher will be established with your first course and once established it will likely follow you throughout your career. as a result, dedicate the necessary time to develop good courses that illustrate best practices. take seriously the student comments in your course evaluations and try to address legitimate student concerns about your courses. practice what you preach. have regular office hours and try to answer promptly your students' emails and/or phone calls. service women and minority faculty often find service activities to be one of the most rewarding areas of their academic career. however, in most institutions, particularly research universities, service-related activities are not rewarded to the same level as research or teaching in tenure and promotion decisions, even though counting service as scholarship can lead to positive institutional outcomes. o'meara (2001) found that carefully implementing service as scholarship can lead to consistency in faculty's workload and reward system, expand the institution's view of scholarship, increase faculty satisfaction, and strengthen the institution's service culture. while some colleges/departments assign few service activities to junior faculty in order to help them focus on their scholarship, others use women and minority faculty as "tokens" to increase their institution's minority representation in service areas (cooper & temple, 2002). women and minority faculty are often responsible for the advising and mentoring of minority and women students, particularly in fields where they are underrepresented; and are asked to be involved in community projects and to serve in service activities that are of little interest to the more senior faculty. be parsimonious with the amount of time and effort you dedicate to service activities before achieving tenure and promotion. to the extent possible, choose service activities that are in some way related to your research interests and use them as sources of possible publications. learn to say no! do not volunteer for committee tasks such as "secretary" that require additional time input. serve on one or two committees a year and choose committees that do not require additional work outside the committee meetings. become involved with the research associations in your field and do editorial work for journals in your research area. such activities facilitate networking and although they are still classified as "service," they have more "weight" in tenure and promotion decisions because they foster the visibility of your institution. organization managing time is one of the greatest challenges faced by junior faculty, as they struggle with the many roles and demands related to research, teaching, and service (cooper & stevens, 2002). being well organized is essential to every stage of the tenure process. as newcomers, women and minority junior faculty are often bewildered with the many roles they are asked to play: teacher, researcher, advisor, mentor. even though tools such as computers help facilitate these roles, managing one's physical and technological clutter is essential to one's success and sanity. because tenure and promotion decisions are based on evidence of one's performance in the areas of research, teaching, and service, it is important to know what "evidence" is worth saving over the first 5-6 years of one's academic career. label three folders: one "research," another "teaching," and another "service." as you receive artifacts related to each of these areas, place those materials in the appropriate folder: awards, media clips, emails/notes from students that highlight some aspect of your teaching, advising or mentoring, emails/letters from colleagues in your field requesting copies of conference presentations and/or publications, letters from committee chairs thanking you for your service in a committee, etc. make a good copy of each of your publications that includes the cover page of the journal in which the article is featured. organize your publications in chronological order beginning with the most recent. attach the letter of acceptance to a copy of any article that is either in press or has been accepted for publication. these articles will have the same weight as any other published article. organize your cv using the format provided by your institution and update it regularly. list your activities in chronological order beginning with the most recent: publications, presentations, grants, service activities, etc. if you co-author publications or grant proposals with others, write one or two sentences under the publication or grant reference in your cv explaining your contribution to the publication or grant. for example: "authors' names are listed chronologically; all the authors contributed equally to the manuscript;" or "i analyzed the quantitative data and wrote the portion of the manuscript that dealt with the results on these data." time management the variety of roles and responsibilities related to a career in academia require good time management skills. many junior faculty struggle with finding a balance between the various roles they are asked to play (cooper & temple, 2002). women and minority faculty often focus on the activities that are most rewarding to them: teaching and service, which may consume most of their time, leaving little for the most important area in tenure and promotion decisions: scholarship (cooper & temple, 2002). set aside 2-3 days/week for writing. choose the setting (e.g., your home office) where you are least likely to experience distractions and/or interruptions. to minimize time conflicts, schedule your office hours outside your writing days and preferably on the days you teach. tell your students those are the only days they can schedule meetings with you. save at least a day a week for you to reenergize. our well-being (physical and emotional) is essential to our success and is usually the aspect of our lives that we are most likely to overlook. being able to compartmentalize and separate ourselves from our work, even if for only short periods of time, is essential to achieving balance in our lives. as suggested by cooper and temple (2002), "be sure to play on occasion" (p. 28). exercise regularly and eat appropriately to reduce stress and promote physical and psychological well-being. this is essential to surviving the tenure and promotion process. was it all worth it?-a personal reflection in the previous sections i tried to provide some clear, practical strategies in the areas used by institutions to make tenure and promotion decisions: scholarship, teaching and service. in this section i would like to share some of my personal experiences as a junior faculty at a research i institution to help the reader understand my perspective as i reflect on the first five years of my career in the academy. as lather (1991) points out, "for praxis to be possible . . . theory must be open-ended, non-dogmatic, speaking to and grounded in the circumstances of everyday life" (p. 55). as a doctoral student at a carnegie i research university, the challenges related to tenure and promotion were already familiar to me as i witnessed some junior faculty lose their positions for failing to meet their institution's tenure and promotion expectations. indeed, many of us in the doctoral program considered seeking for our career paths institutions whose tenure and promotion decisions were primarily based on teaching and service, rather than on research and publications. ironically, my first job interview and job offer, which i accepted, was from a carnegie i research university. my first few years as a junior faculty were challenging. as i navigated my college's and institution's cultures, i had to face subtle sexism and/or prejudice from colleagues, and became involved in excessive service-related activities that consumed much time and effort, and counted little toward my tenure and promotion. i even considered leaving and applied for a position at a less research-oriented university. a few weeks later i withdrew my application after deciding that if i were to leave my institution, i would do so after achieving tenure. once i made this decision, i was able to prioritize my activities better and allocate my time more efficiently. in the fall of my sixth year as an assistant professor on the tenure track, i submitted my tenure folios. the following april i was awarded tenure and promoted to the rank of associate professor. i was also asked to become the chair of the science education program. the following year i was asked to serve on the college and university's tenure and promotion committees, where i serve as an advocate for those who are viewed by some of my fellow committee members as "not good enough for tenure." in addition to my advocate role in my college and university tenure committees, i also try to play an active role in the success of my women and minority colleagues through guidance and mentoring. i have shared my tenure folios with many of them and gone over theirs before they submit them for review. conclusion as more women and minorities enter academic areas traditionally dominated by white males, their research interests, approaches to teaching and service activities will begin challenging the existing notions of the value placed in each of these areas (cooper & stevens, 2002). research indicates that the increased presence of women and minorities in non-traditional fields is followed by an increase in conflict and turnover until their representation reaches a critical mass (hearn & anderson, 2002). thus, change can only be achieved when women and minorities achieve tenure in sufficient numbers to overcome their "token" status and become a sufficient force to tip the scale of the status quo. as gittell, ortega-bustamante, and steffy (2000) pointed out, members acting together in association with common values and norms are able to build networks among themselves and with others, further increasing the strength of their social capital. networking leads to the formation of coalitions, increased status, and increased power. (pp. 123-124) according to moody (2000), "tenured faculty control the hiring and retention of their junior colleagues; faculty of color [and women] can defend their presence and interests in higher education, only by gaining tenure themselves" (p. 32). as more women and minorities enter the upper echelons of the professoriate and reach a critical mass, they will begin to effect change from the inside and help reshape the academy's culture and policies (collay, 2002; cooper & stevens, 2002; park, 1996)-changes that will help make the academy a more welcoming environment for newcomers; "forging a welcome ground not only for ourselves, but also for those who come after us . . ." (cooper, ortiz, benham, & scherr, 2002). moreover, ". . . a diverse faculty brings us closer to a representation of the world we live in" (cooper & stevens, 2002, p. 9). references armenti, c. (2004). women faculty seeking tenure and parenthood: lessons from previous generations. cambridge journal of education, 34 (1), 65-83. austin, a. e., & rice, r. e. (1998). making tenure viable. american behavioral scientist, 41 (5), 736-754. bronstein, p., & ramaley, j. a. (2002). making the persuasive case: pitfalls and possibilities. in j. e. cooper & d. d. stevens (eds.), tenure in the sacred grove (pp. 31-55). albany : state university of new york press. collay, m. (2002). balancing work and family. in j. e. cooper & d. d. stevens (eds.), tenure in the sacred grove (pp. 89-106). albany : state university of new york press. cooper, j. e., & nojima, s. e. (2002). teaching: academic whitewater rafting. in j. e. cooper & d. d. stevens (eds.), tenure in the sacred grove (pp. 163-177). albany : state university of new york press. cooper, j. e., ortiz, a. m., benham, m. k. p., & scherr, m. w. (2002). finding a home in the academy: confronting racism and ageism. in j. e. cooper & d. d. stevens (eds.), tenure in the sacred grove (pp. 7187). albany : state university of new york press. cooper, j. e., & stevens, d. d. (2002). the journey toward tenure. in j. e. cooper & d. d. stevens (eds.), tenure in the sacred grove (pp. 3-15). albany : state university of new york press. cooper, j. e., & temple , j. b. (2002). case studies: learning from others. in j. e. cooper & d. d. stevens (eds.), tenure in the sacred grove (pp. 17-29). albany : state university of new york press. diamantes, t., roby, d. e., & hambright, g. w. (2002). an analysis of faculty attitudes toward promotion and tenure. (eric document reproduction service no. ed471741) dyer, s. k. (2004). tenure denied: cases of sex discrimination in academia. washington , dc : american association of university women foundation. (eric document reproduction service no. ed485718) foster-fishman, p. g., & stevens, d. f. (2002). outreach in a new light: documenting the scholarship of application. in j. e. cooper & d. d. stevens (eds.), tenure in the sacred grove (pp. 179-202). albany : state university of new york press. gittell, m., ortega-bustamante, i. , & steffy, t. (2000). social capital and social change: women's community activism. urban affairs review, 36 (2), 123-147. hamilton, k. (2004). faculty science positions continue to elude women of color: oklahoma professor's study finds hiring, tenure remain stumbling blocks. black issues in higher education, 21 (3), 36-40. hearn, j. c., & anderson, m. s. (2002). conflict in academic departments: an analysis of disputes over faculty promotion and tenure. research in higher education, 43 (5), 503-529. hum, d. (2001). tenure, academic freedom and accountability in universities. journal of educational administration and foundations, 16 (1), 61-76. lather, p. (1991). getting smart: feminist research and pedagogy within the postmodern . new york : routledge. lave, j., & wenger, e (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge , united kingdom : cambridge university press. moody, j. (2000). tenure and diversity: some different voices. academe, 86 (3), 30-33. olsen, d. (1993). work satisfaction and stress in the first and third year of academic appointment. journal of higher education, 64 (4), 453-471. o'meara, k. (2001). scholarship unbound: assessing service as scholarship in promotion and tenure decisions. (eric document reproduction service no. ed463712) park, s. m. (1996). research, teaching and service: why shouldn't women's work count? journal of higher education, 67 (1), 46-83. premeaux, s. r., & mondy, r. w. (2002). perspectives on tenure: tenured versus nontenured tenure-track faculty. journal of education for business, 77 (6), 335-39. rice, r. e. (1996). making a place for the new american scholar. (aahe forum on faculty roles and rewards working paper series). washington , dc : american association for higher education. schrodt, p., cawyer, c. s., & sanders, r. (2003). an examination of academic mentoring behaviors and new faculty members' satisfaction with socialization and tenure and promotion processes. communication education, 52 (1), 17-29. stone, d. (1996). getting tenure in accounting: a personal account of learning to dance with the mountain. issues in accounting education, 11 , 187-201. tierney, w. g. (2002). tenure and academic freedom in the academy: historical parameters and new challenges. in j. e. cooper & d. d. stevens (eds.), tenure in the sacred grove (pp. 57-71). albany : state university of new york press. tierney, w. g., & bensimon, e. m. (1996). promotion and tenure: community and socialization in academe. albany: state university of new york press. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 15 2010 issn 1093-7099 black feminism: an epistemological framework for exploring how race and gender impact black women’s leadership development dr. dionne rosser-mims abstract this paper presents, through the lens of black feminism, a historical review of the contextual forces that have shaped and hindered african american’s women’s leadership development. keywords: black women, leadership development, black feminism citation: rosser-mims, d. (2010). black feminism: an epistemological framework for exploring how race and gender impact black women’s leadership development. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(15). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction anna julia cooper, by many accounts is one of the first black women to speak publicly from a black feminist platform, although at the time she would not have considered herself performing as such. cooper, who died in 1964 at what was probably the age of 105, declared herself “the voice of the south.” she also declared that she spoke for its black women, who had only been relatively recently freed from the degradation of legalized slavery when her bestknown book a voice from the south by a black woman of the south was published in 1892 (palmer, 1990; rogers, 2005). scholars consider a voice from the south by a black woman of the south the first work by an african american feminist. cooper lived and worked in an era when the fledgling feminist movement in the united states all but ignored the plight of black women. she also combated the “attitudes of prominent african american men who entertained their own biased views” (palmer, 1990, p. 447). hence, cooper effectively spent her life demonstrating how far black women could succeed with all things being equal. in the late 19th century, cooper spoke about the united states embarking on a new era (the 20th century) and accompanying it would be new opportunities for women, especially black women. the new opportunities to which she refers are evidenced today—more women are holding positions of leadership in traditionally male professions (i.e., presidents of higher educational institutions, ceos in corporate america, and elected and appointed government positions). indeed, black women have made significant advances, yet still face historic race and gender barriers to reaching their full potential. cooper (1969) stated, [black] women of to-day occupy [sic], one may say, a unique position in this country…her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. she is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both. (p. 92) cooper suggested that embarking on the 20th century calls for the recognition of women’s greater status in society and that they have and will continue to play a significant leadership role in guiding the country to “greater plains.” more specifically, it is through black women, many as black feminists, who will be the guiding force in leading the black community out of subjugation to greater educational, political, and ideological self-empowerment. thus, this paper explored from a “black feminist lens” how the confluence of power, race, and gender influences the process through which black women activists acquire leadership skills. imbedded in black women’s lived experiences is how they come to leadership, which is characteristically different from the experiences of white women, black and white men (allen, 1997; eagly & johannesenschmidt, 2001; collins, 2000). in order to understand this phenomenon and to identify specific actions to take to ensure that those unique experiences do not remain oppressive, it is foremost essential to explore black women’s leadership exhibited during slavery and their emerging leadership and role in the feminist movement. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 black women and slavery historically, black women have been at the forefront of the struggle for human and civil rights promulgating their blood, sweat, and tears with the goal of sustaining families, communities, and to building the very foundation upon which the united states is built. women like harriet tubman and sojourner truth who were the “titans of the abolitionist movement” (murray, 2000, p. 187) exhibited unbridled leadership qualities (e.g., self-sufficiency, selfsacrifice, militancy with an egalitarian spirit, resilience, and spiritual grounding) during a time when black women’s ‘womanhood’ was being defined and exploited by a racist, sexist, and oppressive patriarchical system of dominance. according to marble (1990), one decisive form of sexist oppression is the control slave owners had over black women’s reproductive rights although davis (1983) would contend we are seeing the vestiges of reproductive control even today. slave owners raped black female slaves; they were told when and how to have children, subjected to a eurocentric construction of the “black female matriarch,” and worst yet, were not considered “women.” to combat these forces black women exerted their power through the form of resistance. sojourner truth, for example, bared her breasts to prove that she indeed was a woman before an antislavery rally comprised of white women more than one hundred and fifty years ago. men from the audience yelled back at her that they did not believe she was a woman, which “unwittingly voiced america’s contempt and disrespect for black womanhood” cites hooks (1997, p. 22). later, truth in her famous ‘ain’t i a woman’ speech delivered in akron, ohio in 1851 at the second annual convention for the women’s right’s movement, became one of the first feminists to call attention to the “lot of the black slave woman, who compelled by circumstance to labor alongside black men, was a living embodiment of truth that women could be the work-equals of men” (marble, 1990, p. 198). with respect to racism, oesterreich (2007) suggested that black women’s struggle for the right to vote is a compelling illustration of the impact of the combined racist and sexist oppression they endured. black women’s source of political powerlessness was attributable to two factors—their positionality in both the black and female groups which resulted in them having to fight—even in the 21st century—for social, political, and economic parity. women such as tubman—a runaway slave who worked for 12 years to lead over 500 slaves out of the south—truth, and cooper “embody and display strength, directness, integrity, and fire. they are not ‘ladies’ in the genteel connotations of the word: they are ‘womanly’, without affection or false reticence, and so ideally admirable in the eyes of women today” (palmer, 1990, p. 449). these women and others shared a vision for freeing black women’s minds and bodies from the clenches of patriarchy. hooks (1997) wrote that: [u]nlike most white women’s rights advocates, tubman, [truth, cooper and others] could refer to [their] own personal life experiences as evidence of women’s ability to function as a parent; to be the work equal of men; to undergo persecution, physical abuse, rape, torture; and to not only survive but emerge triumphant. (p. 207) hence, their legacy indisputably continues to touch the lives of many women today. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 black women and the feminist movement the history of feminism in the united states is marked by two distinct periods or waves that are directly connected to, and outgrowths of, two key movements in african american history: the abolitionist movement (which culminated with the suffragists securing passage of the nineteenth amendment in 1920) and the modern civil rights movement (which peaked with the enforcement, during the 1970s, of title vii and title ix of the civil rights act of 1964). during both of these monumental historical periods and the third wave that followed them, countless numbers of black women activist developed a feminist consciousness that gave them an agency to strive for empowerment on their own terms (oesterreich, 2007). collectively, their feminism was more expansive than the agenda put forth by white women, in that specific social, economic, and political issues facing african american communities were incorporated into a theoretical paradigm that today we call black feminism (collins, 2005; oesterreich, 2007). the ultimate goal of black feminism is to create a political movement combating the interlocking systems of racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, but that also “seeks to develop institutions to protect what the dominate culture has little respect and value for—black women’s minds and bodies” (taylor, 2001, p. 18). ongoing debates exist concerning whether black—a women’s standpoint—should be named womanism or whether black feminism reflects the basic challenge of accommodating diversity among black women. in her acclaimed volume of essays, in search of our mothers’ gardens, alice walker (1983) introduced four meanings of the term “womanist.” according to walker’s first definition, a “womanist” was a “black feminist or feminist of color” (p. xi). thus on some basic level, walker herself uses the two terms as being virtually interchangeable. like walker, many african american women see little difference between the two since both support a common agenda of black women’s self-definition and self-determination. as barbara omolade (1994) pointed out, “black feminism is sometimes referred to as womanism because both are concerned with struggles against sexism and racism by black women who are themselves part of the black community’s efforts to achieve equity and liberty” (p. xx). moreover, african american women who use the term black feminism also attach varying interpretations of this term. as black feminist theorist and activist bell hooks (1997, p. 198) defined it, feminism is “the belief that women are full human beings capable of participation and leadership in the full rage of human activities—intellectual, political, social, sexual, spiritual and economic.” hence, using the term “black feminism” positions black women to examine how the particular constellation of issues affecting black women in the united states are part of issues of women’s emancipation struggles globally (oesterreich, 2007). moreover, using the term “black feminism” disrupts the racism inherent in presenting feminism as a for-whites-only ideology and political movement. inserting the adjective “black” challenges the assumed whiteness of feminism and disrupts the false universalness of this term for both white and black women. notably, the term black feminism makes many african american women uncomfortable because it challenges black women to confront their own views on sexism and women’s oppressions (collins, 2000; oesterreich, 2007). collins stressed: that no homogeneous black woman’s standpoint exists. there is no essential or archetypal black woman whose experiences stand as normal, normative, and thereby authentic. an essentialist understanding of a black woman’s standpoint suppresses advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 differences among black women in search of an elusive group unity. instead, it may be more accurate to say that a black woman’s collective standpoint does exit, one characterized by tensions that accrue to difference responses to common challenges. (p. 28) black women’s leadership within race and gender oppression eurocentric oppressive forces that relegated black women to subordinate positions in society have unequivocally affected the manner in which their leadership emerged. black women historically have been forced acquire leadership and power in nontraditional ways in comparison to their male counterparts both black and white. hence, the emergence of black female leadership in the united states represents a history of their struggle for liberation from oppression to “lift” the black community out of racial, economic, and educational subjugation (hanson, 2003; rogers, 2005, rosser-mims, 2005). affirming this point, hill collins (2000, p. 219) quoted angela davis stating in her 1989 book, women, culture, politics, “we must strive to ‘lift as we climb’…we climb in such a way as to guarantee that all of our sisters and brothers, regardless of social class, and indeed all of our brothers climb with us. this must be the essential dynamic of our quest for power.” from a black feminist analysis, even classical leadership theories and contemporary leadership models have all but ignored black women’s contributions to their communities and impact of the seamless web of class, race, and gender oppression. for example, “black women have traditionally formed networks that provide the structure for the emergence of their community leadership. yet, these community structures are often ignored by social scientists in general and community leadership/development specialist in particular” (allen, 1997, p. 1; delaney & rogers, 2004). eagly, karau, and makhijani (1995) conducted research on this very phenomenon however their studies failed to extract black women’s leadership experiences. in their study of gender differences in leadership effectiveness which builds on previous research exploring gender related variables that define women’s leadership style from men’s, eagly et al., (1995) found that differences indeed exist between women and men’s effectiveness, which is influenced by socially constructed gender roles. the researchers purported that women in general are more effective in leadership roles that are stereotypically feminine and for men; stereotypically masculine roles increase their effectiveness. the researchers acknowledged that various challenges exist to studying “effectiveness” in the context of leadership, especially when conflicting theories are used to explain leader effectiveness. they cited numerous studies that on one end, present evidence suggesting leadership effectiveness is related to socially constructed gender roles, that is, women who exhibit traditional masculine leadership qualities are less effective, while other studies indicate that gender does not impact one’s actual effectiveness as a leader. another set of studies go as far as to suggest that because women still must work twice as hard as men they in the long run effectively benefit from oppressive conditions because over time as more women obtain high-level leadership positions negative perceptions of women’s leadership ability diminishes (king & ferguson, 2001; parker, 2004; rosser-mims, 2005, thomas, 2004). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 eagly, karau, and makhijani (1995) stated that it would be irresponsible to generalize their study findings given the lack of consensus that exists around leadership effectiveness. this is at least one indication of their possible awareness of racial differences in women’s leadership. the researchers explain that, at best, the only conclusion one can draw from their findings is that “female and male leaders are differentially effective in many settings….and that gender role expectations spill over onto leadership roles within organizations and groups and produce important consequences for the effectiveness of leaders” (p. 140). i concur with the researchers in that paying closer attention to the mechanisms that produce those consequences can be used to help make the barriers to effectiveness less impenetrable for men who lead in feminine defined settings and white women and especially black women who lead in masculine defined settings. since the publication of this study, more research studies have focused on understanding the value of racial and gender diversity in all leadership contexts thus broadening the knowledge base around leadership studies (king & ferguson, 2001; parker, 2004; rosser-mims, 2005, thomas, 2004). as our society becomes more ethnically diverse and as more women move into leadership positions traditionally held by men, tremendous implications exist in the area of adult leadership training. therefore, this study and other related research can assist leadership development specialists designing leadership programs for women and historically underrepresented groups. as evidenced, these theories based on the white male experience attempt to generalize leadership characteristics and as a result do not reflect and devalue black women and other disadvantaged groups’ leadership experiences. with the help of black feminist social science scholars, a growing body of literature exists which de-centers traditional sexist and racist leadership literature and places at the center of scholarly discourse black women’s unique leadership experiences, especially the complex process through which they and people of color, in general, come to leadership. historically, black women have held positions of leadership in organizations “whose mission is institutional change” (collins, 1997, p. 23). moreover, there is evidence showing that black women activists have held a decidedly different standpoint from the traditional and contemporary conceptions of ‘leadership’ about the use of power through leadership and the purpose and role of a leader. black women’s organizational style within predominantly black organizations reveals much of how many u.s. black women exercise power. understandings of empowerment gained as community othermothers and cultural workers shape black women’s political activities. drawing on the models of education as empowerment, many black women routinely reject models of authority based on unjust hierarchies. (collins, 2000, p. 218) for example, the leadership style of two renowned black civil rights activists septima clark and ella baker carried “distinctive notions of leadership and empowerment into the black civil rights struggle” whereby they believed the purpose of any leadership is to cultivate and develop more leaders and to promote group solidarity (allen, 1997, p. 62). although neither woman held formal positions of authority during the movement, the model of leadership they exercised reveals that they “wielded considerable power within their organizations, which grew from their perspective on social change” (collins, 2000, p. 34). in so doing, both women challenged the leadership style of black male dominated organizations where the general belief for some was that black women could certainly work behind the scenes, but that they should not try to come advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 forward and lead. because black women not only had to contend with sexism from black men, but also race, sex, and class oppression from white men and women, black women essentially have been forced to “create safe havens from the hostile work environment that prohibited personal growth and community survival” (allen, 1997, p. 64; king & ferguson, 2001; marble, 1990). black women, as a result, developed a “culture of political resistance” that required them to “expand their roles as homemakers and laborers to incorporate that of “caretakers’ of the race” (collins, 2000). black female leadership was therefore cultivated and operationalized by their role in the family and the community (i.e., churches, schools, political organizations) (delaney & rogers, 2004; hanson, 2003). in essence, black female leadership emerged from and is shaped by both the external and internal forces that affect their everyday experiences. in the black leadership literature, no one universal definition exists. however, three themes focused on black female leadership have emerged in the literature. first, black female leadership exemplifies survival techniques in family, church and community organizations that encompass the creativity and commitment for group well-being (allen, 1997; rogers, 2005, rosser-mims, 2005). secondly, black female networks, formal and informal, are dynamic and interrelated entities that form a matrix of reinforcements that hold the black community together while developing leadership for a better future. lastly, black female leadership represents the collective experiences and action toward community empowerment. for these reasons, black women tend to formulate ideas and models that express the reality of their own experiences while opposing the ideology of domination (allen, 1997; rogers, 2005; rosser-mims, 2005). consequently, the “term leader is not one that black women accept readily” (allen, 1997, p. 62). moreover, despite the growing awareness of the importance of black female networks in the black community scholars still have not provided a definition of black female leadership. however, allen (1997) presented the following working definition of black female community leadership as: the struggle for group survival whereby group collective experience, and group socio supports, as well as the instrumental aspects of developing and maintaining internal female networks for institution building, merge to form collective action for cultural maintenance and black community empowerment. (p. 63) the underlying message from this definition is that black women and their male counterparts have the tenable responsibility of ensuring community survival. it is through black female networks that provide the structure for the emergence of black women’s community leadership. moreover, black community survival means, more specifically, that black female leaders play a vital role in improving the black community. even more critical is the black female networks which are crucial to the “transmission of tradition from generation to generation” (allen, 1997, p. 64) and that which enables them to work together to combat institutional and social barriers that (e.g., the existing power structure) adversely affects disadvantaged groups. hence, it is through these networks that black women’s leadership emerges. conclusion hine and thompson (1998) stated it best, “more than a story of struggle, black women’s history is very much a story of hope.” in the face of great obstacles, black women strengthen advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 their communities through their leadership in women’s groups, charitable organizations, political groups and their contributions to the larger community as writers, activists, educators, and artists (hine & thompson, 1998). as evidenced in the late 19th century, ida b. bells, notorious for her crusade against lynching, and educational matriarchs like mary mcleod bethune and mary church terrell helped to pave the way for many young black girls to obtain quality secondary and postsecondary education by founding schools and organizations for the personal and educational development of black women (murray, 2000). literary scholars in the early 19th century, mary prince whose work published in 1831, the history of mary prince, a west indian slave, related to herself, and mary seacole’s 1837 work, wonderful adventures of mary seacole, were the first black women to have their works published (reynolds, 2002). they paved the way for what then followed a 131-year gap before any work by a black woman was published (reynolds, 2002). if it were not for these women’s leadership, contemporary black scholars like audre lorde, alice walker, bell hooks, angela davis, and paula giddings would perhaps have had a longer wait before ascertaining power to shift black women’s lived experienced from the margins to the center of traditional literary scholarship. contemporary activist leaders like rosa parks who played a fundamental role in sparking the mass struggle for civil rights in the south; corretta scott king who carried and continues to carry her husband’s legacy into the 21st century; and shirley chisholm, the first black women to make a serious bid for the us presidency in 1970, collectively forced america to no longer ignore and silence the reporting of black women’s experiences, but to acknowledge their plight as manifestations of racism, sexism, and economic exploitation. the work of the black women aforementioned, alone, attests to the intellectual and political contributions black women have made for equal treatment of black americans and for all oppressed groups as well. although black women’s voices have been silenced for centuries they did not sit idle waiting for the dominate culture to release its hold on their intellectual and political rights. they, instead, from their …peculiar coigne of vantage [sat] as quiet observer[s], …whisper[ing] just the needed suggestion or the almost forgotten truth. the [black] woman, then, should not be ignored because her bark is resting in the silent waters of the sheltered cove…watching the movements of the contestants none the less and is all the better qualified, perhaps, to weigh and judge and advise because not herself in the excitement of the race. (cooper, 2000, p. 93) hence, black women have and will continue to persevere as they maneuver through the web of sex, race, and even class domination. analyzing historical accounts of how black women came to leadership through the prism of black feminism creates an entirely different picture than the one produced by the dominant culture—a picture of intellectual inferiority and powerlessness. the picture presented from the black feminist lens, however, not only poignantly reminds us of how the oppressive forces have become institutionalized and thus invisible to the uncritical eye, but also that through education, political activism and engagement on all levels, and group solidarity, black women and all oppressed groups can continue on and succeed in the fight for radical social, educational, and economic parity. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 references allen, b. (1997). re-articulation of black female leadership processes, networks and a culture of resistance. african american research perspectives, 7, 61-67. collins, p. (2000). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. (2nd ed.). new york: routledge. collins, p. (1997). towards an afrocentric feminist epistemology. in sandra keys and judith squires (eds.), feminisms, (pp. 198-206). oxford: oxford university press. collins, p. h. (2005). healing identities: black feminist thought and the politics of groups. hypatia, 20(4), 227-230 (an 18236848). database: academic search complete cooper, a. j. (1969). a voice from the south. by a black woman of the south. new york: negro universities press. davis, a. (1983). women, race, and class. new york: vintage books. delany, j., & rogers, e. (2004). black women’s leadership and learning: from politics to afritics in the context of community. convergence, 37(2), 91-106. eagly, a. h., karau, s. j., & makhijani, m. g. (1995). gender and the effectiveness of leaders: a meta-analysis. psychological bulletin, 117(1), 125-145. hanson, j. a. (2003). mary mcleod bethune & black women's political activism. columbia, mo.: univ. of missouri press. hine, d. c., & thompson, k. (1998). a shining thread of hope: the history of black women in america. new york: broadway books. hooks, b. (1997). black women and feminism. in sandra keys and judith squires (eds.), feminisms, (pp. 198-206). oxford: oxford university press. king, t. c., & ferguson, s. a. (2001). charting ourselves: leadership development with black professional women. nwsa, 13(2), 123-141. marble, m. (1990). groundings with my sisters: patriarchy and the exploitation of black women. in darlene clark hine, black women in united states history. black women’s history: theory and practice (vol. 2, pp. 407-439). brooklyn, ny: carlson publishing inc. murray, p. (2000). the liberation of black women. in wendy kolmar & francis bartkowki (eds.), feminist theory, a reader, (pp. 187-194). mountain view, ca: mayfield publisher company. oesterreich, h. a. (2007). from ‘crisis’ to ‘activist’: the everyday freedom legacy of black feminisms. race, ethnicity & education, 10(1), 1-20. doi: 10.1080/13613320601100344 palmer, p. m. (1990). white women/black women: the dualism of female identity and experience in the united states. in darlene clark hine, black women in united states history. black women’s history: theory and practice (vol. 2, pp. 447-466). brooklyn, ny: carlson publishing inc. parker, p. s. (2004). race, gender, and leadership: re-envisioning organizational leadership from the perspectives of african american women executives. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. reynolds, t. (2002). re-thinking a black feminist standpoint. ethnic and racial studies, 24(4), 591-606. rogers. e. (2005). afritics from margin to center: theorizing the politics of african american women as political leaders. journal of black studies, 35(6), 701-714. http://web.ebscohost.com.libproxy.troy.edu/ehost/viewarticle?data=dgjymppp44rp2%2fdv0%2bnjisfk5ie46vch9%2bnyjazj34hspooa7enywk%2bnru2tqk5it5avuq%2brueyuls5lporweezp33vy3%2b2g59q7ubkmsuquqrzkpolfhuwz44ak2ubv36%2fmpvlx5vw%2fxkr57lovulcptfcyrqr%2b7ejrefkz5i3q4vj99uoa&hid=6� javascript:__dolinkpostback('','mdb~~a9h%7c%7cjdb~~a9hjnh%7c%7css~~jn%20%22convergence%22%7c%7csl~~jh','');� advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 rosser-mims, d. (2005). an exploration of black women’s political leadership development (doctoral dissertation, the university of georgia, 2005). taylor, u. y. (2001). making waves: the theory and practice of black feminism. the black scholar, 28(1), 18-28. thomas, a. p. (2004). factors contributing to the career success of african american women executive leaders in community and technical colleges. unpublished doctoral dissertation, university of georgia, athens. walker, a. (1983). in search of our mother's gardens: womanist prose. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich. biography dr. dionne rosser-mims currerntly serves as an assistant professor and program coodinator to the master of science in post secondary education degree program at the troy university campus located in covington, georgia. she teaches graduate level coursework in the following areas: adult education, higher education, and public administration. her research interests include women’s leadership development, adult learning, higher education administration, and parental involvement. dr. rosser-mims holds a master’s degree in public administration and a doctorate in adult education from the university of georgia. black women and slavery black women and the feminist movement international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle preview volume 1, number 2, fall & winter 1997 1998 as awl readers will recall, the first issue of the journal was composed of invited papers. this issue was the first reviewed issue. the editors and publisher greatly appreciate our colleagues at the university of southern mississippi, hattiesburg, ms, for providing the initial pilot for the reviews and editorial procedures for this new journal. in particular, we appreciate the mentoring of dr. larry daniel, professor in the department of educational leadership and research and co-editor of the professional journal, educational and psychological measurement. the reviewers for this pilot are experienced women in leadership positions and worked closely with dr. daniel. we appreciate their feedback on the process of review. the review team consisted of janice thompson, field experiences supervisor and former acting assistant director for field experiences, usm (janice.thompson@usm.edu); lisa williams, teaching assistant, department of human performance and recreation (l.williams@usm.edu); sue roche, educational technology consultant/owner infotectives (infotective@worldnet.alt.net); althea jackson, former director of student activities, ms valley state university (aljackso@ocean.st.usm.edu); and dr. kimberly griffith, assistant professor, department of professional pedagogy, lamar university, beaumont, tx (e-mail: griffithkg@hal.lamar.edu). we sincerely appreciate usm's assistance in the first round of reviews and the establishment of procedures for the review process for the journal. this issue addresses a variety of concerns of women and of society. four of the articles http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/hispanic.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/hispanic.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html mailto:janice.thompson@usm.edu mailto:janice.thompson@usm.edu mailto:infotective@worldnet.alt.net mailto:infotective@worldnet.alt.net mailto:aljackso@ocean.st.usm.edu mailto:aljackso@ocean.st.usm.edu mailto:griffithkg@hal.lamar.edu mailto:griffithkg@hal.lamar.edu target the experiences of women in leadership, two of the articles offer insights on the dilemmas facing professional women, and one article discusses the spread of hiv among black women. in the first article, wesson explores the dilemmas of women in leadership, sharing facts and figures on gender stratification. next, watkins, herrin and mcdonald discuss strategies used by women to combine career and family. cannella, in the third article, examines postmodern perspectives and methodologies that can be tied to multicultural education in the pursuit of social justice. a study on the national status of women's educational administrative support organizations is discussed by irby and brown in the fourth article. gupton and del rosario describe and analyze a few of the more significant federally funded initiatives related to increasing sex equity, paying particular attention to those aimed at improving the status of women aspiring to or currently in educational administration. communitybased intervention and education for preventing the spread of hiv among black women is discussed by geyen, et al in the sixth article. in the final journal entry, griffith and thompson review gupton and slick's book, highly successful women administrators: the inside story of how they got there. we hope you enjoy the second issue of advancing women in leadership in its entirety and that you look forward to the subsequent issues to be published in spring, summer, and fall of 1998. we want this journal to serve women and girls around the world and to be viewed as a professional publication site for the scholarly inquiry that advances women in leadership. we always welcome suggestions of topics for upcoming issues and encourage the submission of manuscripts. 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2007). however, women now earn 58% of all bachelor’s degrees and 45% of all doctorates (u.s. department of education, 2005). these findings suggest something may be interfering with the pool of capable women moving through the pipeline to attain higher education administrative positions. gender differences in career aspirations, professional assets, and various personal variables have been suggested as potential contributors to this disparity. the purpose of the research was to survey women and men holding administrative positions of dean or higher (excluding presidents) within the institutions in the minnesota state colleges and universities (mnscu) system to examine these potential contributors. based on the findings, with the exception of geographic mobility, factors other than career aspirations, professional assets, and personal variables may be the cause of barriers to female advancement to high level administrative positions. key words: gender, higher education, career, women citation: lepkowski, c. c. (2009). gender and the career aspirations, professional assets, and personal variables of higher education administrators. advancing women in leadership journal, 27(5). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/� advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 2 introduction a survey conducted in 2006 by the american council on education (2007) indicated that 23% of higher education institution presidents were women. at doctoral-granting institutions, women comprised only 13.8% of presidents. increasing the number of female administrators and thus decreasing this gender disparity in higher education leadership has been recognized as critically important (nidiffer, 2001; touchton, shavlik, & davis, 1993). as harrow (1993) argued, “leadership, when dominated by one segment of society, suffers from a narrow perspective, a lack of richness of ideas and ideals” (p. 146). indeed, college and university policies often indicate a commitment to the issues of diversity, equity, and opportunity and this gender disparity that exists today can be seen as one measure of the effectiveness of this commitment. a number of authors have argued that women will increase in number at the highest ranks of the academy over time as larger numbers of female undergraduate and graduate students make their way through the academic pipeline to create a larger pool of women available for such positions (camp, 1997; kulis, sicotte, & collins, 2002; mcbride, 2002). however, women have been earning over 40% of doctorates since 1996 (hoffer et al., 2006) and today earn 58% of all bachelor’s degrees and 45% of all doctorates (u.s. department of education, 2005). white (2005) found that despite the growing numbers of women earning doctorates, the number of women in full professorships does not reflect this increase. only 19.3% of full professor tenured positions at doctoral degree-granting institutions, 28.3% at master’s degreegranting institutions, and 46.9% at associate’s degree-granting institutions are held by women (american association of university professors, 2006). despite the large number of women earning doctorates, they are not appearing in comparable numbers in the professoriate. additionally, while the number of women faculty has increased in the last 30 years, the largest increases have been in part-time and non tenure-track positions (chronister, gansneder, harper, & baldwin, 1997; lomperis, 1990). birnbaum and umbach (2001) used survey data from 2,297 university presidents in 1995 and found 66.3% of college presidents came to their positions through a traditional career path of a scholar moving up through the academic ranks. because women are not advancing in the professoriate, it may be that much more difficult for them to attain high level leadership positions such as the presidency. while these numbers suggest women are not making it to key levels in academia to be in position for further advancement, they also indicate a disparity between the number of females in the professoriate and the number of female presidents. additionally, no research was found in the literature regarding potential leaks and blockages in the pipeline once women attain the higher education administration position of dean or higher. therefore, i sought to examine the pipeline between these two points in higher education administration. for the last three decades, there has been much research regarding the academic pipeline (blickenstaff, 2005; perna, 2001; white, 2005) with many studies looking for potential blockages in the pipeline such as discrimination (american council on education, 2005) or leaks due to gender differences among factors such as career aspirations, professional assets, and personal variables. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 3 career aspirations career aspirations include the positional goals that administrators strive to achieve, the leadership styles that they believe they must use to advance, and career commitments or what they hope to accomplish in their careers (young & mcleod, 2001). this section explores these three areas of career aspiration and how they impact women in higher education. positional goals one factor potentially affecting the number of women in high level administrative positions in the academy is positional goals, which are the types of positions they are interested in pursuing. do women actually want to achieve high level leadership positions? three studies have indicated the possibility that women have lower positional goal aspirations than men in higher education. shultz and easter (1997) surveyed 170 faculty members at a public, mid-sized university in the eastern united states to compare the aspirations and obstacles perceived by men and women. more women aspired to middle level administrative positions of director, coordinator, department chair, and academic dean than men. aspirations for the position of vice president were almost equal for men (16%) and women (15%), however aspirations to the presidency were higher among men (10%) than women (7%). wolverton and gonzales (2000) found similar results in a national study of deans. twenty-three percent of women deans planned to seek a higher level academic leadership position, while 28% of men said the same. in both of these studies, the differences cited were slight, descriptive in nature, and not tested statistically. therefore it is unclear if these percentage differences represent real differences or natural variations expected by chance. in a more recent study of 1,715 responding chief academic officers (eckel, cook, & king, 2009), fewer women (25%) than men (33%) aspired to the presidency. while this finding was also not tested for significance, the number of respondents suggests a stronger possibility of a significant difference in men’s and women’s desire to be president. leadership style and abilities some research has found that women exhibit different leadership styles, priorities, and qualities than men in leadership positions (astin & leland, 1991; helgesen, 1995; kezar, 2000). helgesen (1995) found that women set aside time for sharing information within the organization, whereas men did not as easily share information with others. women viewed themselves and their roles in life as complex and multidimensional, however, men primarily viewed themselves through their jobs and position. however in 1987, bayes studied women and men in high level leadership positions in the federal government. this study found that that women and men had similar views of leadership style, and that they acted similarly in comparable situations. a gender difference was found in only one area – dedication to work. women were perceived to work harder than men (bayes, 1987). advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 4 even though women may have different leadership styles than men (astin & leland, 1991; helgesen, 1995; kezar, 2000), their effectiveness as leaders may not be so different (rosser, 2001). rosser (2001) asked faculty and staff to evaluate the effectiveness and leadership performance of 22 deans (16 males, 6 females) at a major research university. the 865 respondents rated the female deans to be more effective than the male deans in all areas, including communication skills, research, community, professional endeavors, interpersonal relations, and the management of the unit. career commitments career commitments are what people hope to accomplish during their careers. in a study of academic deans, gmelch, wolverton, wolverton, and hermanson (1996) found that men’s and women’s career commitments, or why they took the job of dean, differed. more women than men listed reasons such as contribute to and improve the college, personal growth, and help faculty develop. more men than women listed reasons such as advance career, financial gain, power, and control. if what is expected of higher education administrators matches more closely to male career commitments this might impact the disparity in advancement. professional assets the advancement of women’s careers has been shown to be affected by several professional variables or assets, which include career planning, mentoring, networking, and leadership training. this section details the research in these four areas. career planning career planning has been defined as having a goal and a plan for how to achieve that goal. research has shown that career planning has a positive effect on women’s career development and advancement (hirsch, 1994), as well as on the achievement of high level leadership positions in higher education (leblanc, 1993; touchton et al., 1993). no studies were found comparing the rates or nature of male and female career planning in higher education, which if such differences exist, could impact the disparity in advancement. if males, for example, have the presidency as a specific goal at greater frequency and earlier in their careers than females, this might help explain the disparity. mentors mentoring has been viewed as a vital strategy for women in higher education, while a lack of mentoring is construed as a barrier (cullen & luna, 1993; nies & wolverton, 2000; ragins & cotton, 1993; scanlon, 1997). women in higher education who have been mentored have been shown to attain higher levels of career advancement than women who have not had mentors (maack & passet, 1994). brown (2005), in a study of 91 female college presidents, found that the majority had primary mentors and were also mentors to others. nies and wolverton (2000) found in a national survey of academic deans that 55% had mentors. “from tenure to other career advancement processes, mentoring can be critical in assisting potential advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 5 deans through the often confusing process of academic advancement” (p. 12). it would be valuable to know if there are gender differences in the rate and nature of mentoring as this could influence female advancement. networking networking refers to relationships with others for the express purpose of information sharing, and it differs from mentoring in that it typically includes people both inside and outside of the organization as well as people of all levels and positions (nies & wolverton, 2000). some researchers have found that up 75% of all jobs are attained through networking (heim & golant, 1993). for higher education administrators, networking entails getting to know administrators from other colleges and universities, going to conferences, and fulfilling leadership roles (o’leary & mitchell, 1990). in addition, networks can be nurtured through many types of organizations, such as business, academic, professional, political, and women’s groups. in a national study of academic deans, nies and wolverton (2000) found that female deans tended to use their networks to cope with frustrations and to explore ideas, whereas men tended to use their networks when making difficult personal choices or decisions. leadership training researchers have suggested that leadership training is important to career advancement of higher education administrators (mcdade, 1990; touchton et al., 1993). harrow (1993) recommended that women administrators “take every opportunity to practice and reflect upon leadership skills of communications, negotiations, analytical thinking, decision making, conflict resolution, political posturing, and analysis” (p. 156). in a national study of chief academic officers, 37% of women and 24% of men reported that they have participated in formal leadership programs (eckel, cook, & king, 2009). personal variables personal variables such as gender, marriage and childrearing, and geographic mobility might differentially affect men and women and can possibly act as barriers to the development and advancement of women’s careers in higher education. gender researchers have demonstrated ways in which gender bias (ayman, 1993), gender role stereotypes, and biased promotional practices have played a role in the low numbers of women in management positions in various settings (astin & leland, 1991; buttner, 2001; moore & buttner, 1997; payne, fuqua, & canegami, 1997; swanson, 2000). in higher education specifically, valian (1998) reviewed the literature and stated, “the data demonstrate that women in academia are substantially underrewarded. they are paid less, promoted more slowly, and tenured more slowly” (p. 248). advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 6 marriage and children marriage and children have been found to have more detrimental impact on the career advancement of women. in a study of doctoral recipients from 1973 to 1999, mason and goulden (2002) found women were less likely to achieve tenure when they had babies early in their careers as compared to men with similar family circumstances. also, women with tenure were less likely to have children and twice as likely to be single. this study also found that 59% of married women with children were considering leaving the academy, and were more likely to indicate that children were one of the reasons why. indeed, one of the most significant differences found between male and female presidents is that 89% of men are married while 63% of women are married. additionally, three percent of men never married, while 10% of women never married. consistent with the differences in marital status, 91% of male presidents have children, while 68% of female presidents have children (american council on education, 2007). household and childrearing responsibilities have been found to affect male and female faculty differently, with female faculty shown to spend significantly more time on household and child-related activities than male faculty (suitor, mecom, & feld, 2001). dey (1994) found that these issues are more significant sources of stress for faculty women than for faculty men. additionally, only one-third of men stated that they felt overwhelmed by attempting to balance child care needs and their jobs, while two-thirds of women faculty reported feeling overwhelmed for the same reason (riemenschneider & harper, 1990). geographic mobility career advancement can often mean having to move to accept a new position. “not just actual mobility, but also being perceived as potentially mobile can enhance career progress,” (rosenfeld & jones, 1987, p. 493). rosenfeld and jones found that academic women were less likely to move than men, primarily at the beginning of their careers to their first jobs. after the first position, geographic mobility was similar for both men and women (rosenfeld & jones, 1987). shauman and xie (1996) found that female academics with children are more geographically constrained than academics who are male and/or child free. purpose of the study women continue to be underrepresented at the highest levels of higher education administration (american council on education, 2007). research on the low number of women presidents has primarily examined the career paths and histories of current or previous presidents. three studies did suggest potential gender differences in career aspirations, but did not test these specific findings for statistical significance (eckel, cook, & king, 2009; shultz & easter, 1997; wolverton & gonzolas, 2000). professional assets and personal variables have also been suggested as possible contributors to the gender disparity in higher education administration. the purpose of the study was to compare the career aspirations, professional assets, and personal variables of women and men who are currently in positions that could potentially lead to college and university presidencies to see if any gender difference exist. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 7 method participants the participants of this study were individuals in positions of dean or higher (excluding presidents) from the minnesota state colleges and universities (mnscu) system. of the 389 invited to participate in the study via an electronic survey, it is estimated that 196 (50.4%) of the 389 administrators in the population were female based upon assumptions of typically-gendered first names. respondents included 155 (39.8%) administrators from which 139 (35.7%) valid responses were obtained. the 139 cases included 60.4% females and 39.6% males. the participants ranged in age from 32 to 69 years, with a mean age of 51. ninety-seven percent identified as caucasian/white (non-hispanic), and three percent identified as african-american/ black (non-hispanic), american indian/native american, asian american/pacific islander, or chose not to respond to the question. seventy-one percent of the respondents were from two-year community and/or technical colleges, while 29% were employed at four year universities within the mnscu system. the mnscu system is comprised of seven state universities, five community colleges, seven technical colleges, 13 combined technical and community colleges, and is the sixth-largest system of its kind in the country (mnscu, 2007). the percentage of female presidents in the mnscu system were similar to that of national statistics for similar institutions. of the seven state universities, one of the seven presidents was female (14.3%). nationally, women hold 21.5% of presidencies at master’s institutions (american council on education, 2007). of the remaining two-year institutions, eight out of 26 presidents were female (30.8%). nationally, women hold 28.8% of presidencies at associate’s institutions (american council on education, 2007). instrument i developed the instrument for my study. the items on the instrument initially were created based upon a review of the literature and specifically were influenced by items used in a national survey of women chief academic officers conducted by dean (2004). the questionnaire consisted of 48 items, including demographic information, questions based upon the research hypotheses, and exploratory questions. the items were designed to measure the career aspirations, professional assets, and personal variables of the participants. the instrument was piloted in its online format by three associate deans in the mnscu system. it was then modified to clarify questions and add in missing items based upon feedback from the pilot study. the internal consistency of the instrument was not tested. procedures a list of names, titles, and electronic mail addresses were obtained from the mnscu chancellor’s office to determine the population of administrators at the level of dean or higher (excluding presidents) in the mnscu system. the data were reviewed for accuracy, and people who did not meet the criteria of the population were deleted from the list. potential participants were emailed a request to participate, consent form, and hyperlink for the survey. two weeks advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 8 after the initial request, a follow-up email was sent to the administrators. data were collected over a total of three weeks during the spring of 2008. the data were then compiled and analyzed using spss software to address the research questions and hypotheses. research questions three research questions were examined by testing six null hypotheses. research question 1: do females and males differ in their career aspirations? h1. females and males will not differ in their desire to advance to a higher administrative position. h2. females and males will not differ in their perceptions of the degree to which they would need to change their leadership style to advance to a higher administrative position. research question 2: do females and males differ in their professional assets? h3. females and males will not differ in their level of career planning. h4. females and males will not differ in their number of current mentors. h5. females and males will not differ in their participation in programs designed to enhance leadership skills. research question 3: do females and males differ in their perceptions of the influence of their personal characteristics on their career plans? h6. females and males will not differ in their perceptions of the influence of five personal characteristics (gender, marital status, number of children, age, and geographic mobility) on their career plans. results all data were screened for missing cases and outliers, and the satisfaction of the assumptions of normality and linearity were evaluated and met prior to statistical analysis. a bonferroni correction was calculated for hypotheses one through five, requiring a p < .01 to be obtained for significance. research question 1 research question 1 asked if females and males differ in their career aspirations. two null hypotheses were tested to address this question. hypothesis 1 a chi-square test of independence was conducted to determine if females and males differed in their desire to advance to a higher administrative position. the analysis indicated x2 (1, n = 131) = .29; p > .01, phi = .047, therefore the null hypothesis was not rejected. females and males did not differ in their desire to advance to a higher administrative position. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 9 sixty-seven individuals aspired to higher administrative positions. a second chi-square test of independence was conducted to determine if the 67 females and males who aspired to a higher administrative position differed in their desire to be president. of those 67, twenty-eight individuals indicated a desire to be president (12 females, 16 males). the analysis indicated x2 (1, n = 67) = 2.288; p > .01, phi = .185, so females and males did not differ in their desire to be president. hypothesis 2 a mann whitney u test was conducted to determine if females and males differed in their perceptions of the degree to which they would need to change their leadership style to advance to a higher administrative position. the analysis indicated u = 1965.5; z = -.901; p > .01, η2 = .006, therefore the null hypothesis was not rejected. females and males did not differ in their perceptions of the degree to which they would need to change their leadership style to advance to a higher administrative position. research question 2 null hypotheses 3, 4, and 5 were developed to examine whether females and males differ in their professional assets. these hypotheses were tested to address three categories of professional assets, including level of career planning, number of current mentors, and participation in leadership development programs. hypothesis 3 a chi-square test of independence was conducted to determine if females and males differed in their level of career planning. the analysis indicated x2 (2, n = 139) = .133; p > .01, phi = .031, therefore the null hypothesis was not rejected. females and males did not differ in their level of career plan development. hypothesis 4 an independent groups t-test was conducted to determine if females and males differed in the number of current mentors. the analysis indicated that the calculated t(133) = 1.745, p > .01, d = .328, therefore the null hypothesis was not rejected. females and males did not differ in the number of current mentors (m = 1.19 for females; m = .87 for males). hypothesis 5 a chi-square test of independence was conducted to determine if females and males differed in their participation in leadership development programs. the analysis indicated x2 (1, n = 138) = 4.943; p = .026, phi = -.189, but not less than .01. no significant difference was found with the bonferonni correction, although this result appears to approach significance. while a more powerful analysis might indicate a difference, this result indicates females and males did not differ in their reported rate of participation in leadership development programs. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 10 research question 3 research question 3 examined if females and males differ in their perceptions of the influence of their personal variables on their career plans. one hypothesis was tested to address the research question. hypothesis 6 a stepwise two-group discriminant analysis was conducted to determine what, if any, combination of the participants’ perceptions of the influence of five different personal variables on their career plans could be used to predict their gender. all five variables were analyzed and included gender, marital status, number of children, age, and geographic mobility. stevens (1992) indicated that the ratio of total sample size to the number of variables must be approximately 20 to 1 to maintain the integrity of the discriminant analysis. the ratio in this analysis was 26 to 1. the analysis generated only one function that was significant, λ = .960, x2 (1, n = 131) = 5.413, p < .05, with 4.04% of the function variability explained by the influence of geographic mobility on career plans. females perceived geographic mobility as having a more negative influence on their career plans than males. none of the other four personal variables were perceived to impact career plans differently for females and males. table 1 displays these results. table 1 hypothesis 6: results of the stepwise discriminant analysis tests of equality of group means personal characteristic wilks’ lambda (λ) f df1 df2 sig. gender 0.997 0.421 1 129 .517 marital status 0.975 3.370 1 129 .069 number of children 0.999 0.149 1 129 .700 age 0.999 0.086 1 129 .770 geographic mobility 0.960 5.413 1 129 .022 summary of the results the results found no difference in the career aspirations or professional assets of female and male participants. a difference in one of the five personal variables, geographic mobility, was found indicating that women felt more constrained in their career mobility. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 11 discussion career aspirations one reason suggested for the gender disparity in higher education administration has been that women have lower aspirations for such positions as compared to men (eckel, cook, & king, 2009; schultz & easter, 1997; wolverton & gonzales, 2000). results of my study indicate that females and males did not differ in their desire to advance to a higher administrative position. additional analysis indicated there was also no gender difference for those individuals who specifically aspired to the presidency. researchers (eckel, cook, & king, 2009; shultz & easter, 1997; wolverton & gonzales, 2000) found that women have lower positional goal aspirations than men and that fewer women than men aspired to the highest level of leadership positions, but none of those researchers tested these specific results for significance. the results of my study found no such difference and instead found that the number of female and male administrators in the mnscu system who desired to advance in general or to be president specifically were similar. these findings suggest that the academic pipeline is not leaking due to women not aspiring to higher education administration positions at the same rates as men. in hypothesis 2, i examined whether participants would differ by gender in their perception of the degree to which they felt they would need to change their leadership style to advance to a higher administrative position. the results indicated that females and males did not differ. this finding suggests that the academic pipeline is not leaking by females believing they would have to more dramatically change their leadership styles to successfully advance as compared to their male colleagues. professional assets career planning has been found to have a positive impact on women’s career advancement (hirsch, 1994) and is helpful in achieving high level leadership positions in the higher education setting (leblanc, 1993; touchton et al., 1993). hypothesis 3 resulted in the fact that females and males did not differ in their level of career planning suggesting the gender disparity may not be due to women having less clear goals and plans to advance. mentoring has also been found to play an important role in career development in the academy, while a lack of mentoring is seen as a barrier (cullen & luna, 1993; nies & wolverton, 2000; ragins & cotton, 1993; scanlon, 1997). in hypothesis 4, i found that females and males did not differ in their number of current mentors and therefore lack of mentors may not be contributing to the gender disparity in higher education administration. leadership development training has been recognized as important to higher education administration advancement (mcdade, 1990; touchton et al., 1993). no gender difference in the reported rate of participation in leadership development programs was found in hypothesis 5. however, the results appear to have approached significance and therefore may suggest women participate more in leadership development. either way, the gender disparity in the presidency advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 12 does not seem to be influenced by a lack of female participation in leadership development training. according to the results of my study, it appears that the academic pipeline is not leaking due to women lacking these key professional assets. indeed, the level of career planning and number of current mentors is no different by gender, and women may actually have an advantage when it comes to leadership development preparation although this is yet to be demonstrated. personal variables personal variables have been researched and suggested to potentially contribute to the gender disparity in female administrative advancement. the results of this study suggest that of five personal variables examined, only geographic mobility may play a significant differential and potentially inhibitive role for female advancement. however, this role may be relatively minor as the results indicated only a small degree of difference. this finding is consistent with prior research by rosenfeld and jones (1987), who found that academic women were not as geographically mobile as academic men. women may be slightly more constrained in their mobility, and this may play a part in the leaking of the academic pipeline. limitations and recommendations for future research several limitations of this study are important to consider when interpreting these results. first, the self-reported nature of the data is a limitation. because this data was collected from a survey, there is the possibility that self-reported perceptions do not match reality. it would be helpful to gather other forms of evidence to either corroborate or contradict self-report evidence. second, while the quantity of factors such as the number of mentors was measured, significant differences may still lie in the qualitative nature of such variables. it would be helpful to explore these variables in more depth by, for example, more closely examining the nature of the mentoring relationships that female and male administrators experience. finally, there may be qualities unique to the sample in this study which inhibit generalization to other higher education administrators. a national study examining these questions could therefore add valuable insight and strengthen the external validity of any findings. conclusion women continue to be significantly underrepresented at the highest levels of higher education administration. the results of this study indicate that, with the exception of the personal variable of feeling more constrained by geographic mobility, female administrators do not differ from males in their aspirations to advance or their level of certain professional assets. these findings provide increased evidential support that the academic pipeline from dean to the president may not be leaking through characteristics or 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(2001). flukes, opportunities, and planned interventions: factors affecting women’s decisions to become school administrators. educational administrative quarterly, 37(4), 462-502. biography christine lepkowski has an m.s. in higher education administration and currently works as a special projects coordinator for the herberger college of business at st. cloud state university. all correspondence related to this article should be addressed to christine lepkowski email: cclepkowski@stcloudstate.edu. mailto:cclepkowski@stcloudstate.edu� participants instrument procedures advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 22, winter 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] black women teacher educators: creating enduring afriographies as leaders and change makers djanna a. hill-brisbane and jeannine e. dingus abstract ithin the womanist tradition, black women have fought against multiple oppressions through the construction of enduring afriographies , as leaders and change-makers, and as scholars committed to research and service in and for communities of color (henry, 1998; hill, 2002; ladson-billings, 1996). this study investigated the perspectives, experiences, and practices of three black women teacher educators using womanist theory and portraiture methodology. in interviewing and shadowing participants, and reviewing documents related to their teaching practices, two questions were posed: a) in what ways are their teaching practices informed by their experiences?; and, how does the theme of "race uplift" help to shape their work within the academy? this paper explores findings from the latter question and considers participants' power to lead and effect change in their academic roles and in their creation of enduring afriographies. black women teacher educators: creating enduring afriographies as leaders and change makers although faculty women of color have obtained academic positions, their successful navigation of the road to tenure and to retention within higher education is fraught with challenges and difficulties. despite active recruitment efforts to join elite institutions of higher education, women of color find themselves, upon arrival, confined to designated places or "outsider-within locations" (collins, 1998). as outsiders-within, women of color faculty experience feelings of isolation, discrimination, and tokenism. they also report incidents of student resistance across disciplinary fields, questioning of their credentials, confrontational situations with students and colleagues, and even verbal and physical threats of violence ( gregory, 1999; guy-sheftall, 1995; james & farmer, 1993; turner, 2002) . additionally, as turner notes, junior level black women faculty work under social constraints that white colleagues do not labor under. her work also highlights the "black tax" black faculties incur on student evaluations, describing how student responses are consciously filtered through a racial (and we would argue, a gendered) lens (p. 356). these situations incur negative expenditures of energy in ways that distract and redirect black women faculty from meaningful work that contributes directly to tenure and promotion. file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/winter2007/index.htm the womanist tradition illuminates how black women have fought against multiple oppressions as builders/creators of enduring afriographies, as leaders and change-makers, and as scholars committed to research and service in and for communities of color (collins 2000; henry, 1998; hill, 2002; ladsonbillings, 1996). this study investigated the perspectives, experiences, and practices of three black women teacher educators. interviews, observations, document review, and portraiture methodology were guided by two overarching questions: a) in what ways are black women teacher educators pedagogical practices informed by their experiences?; and b) how does the theme of "race uplift" help to shape their work within the academy? here, race uplift is defined as teaching for the educational betterment of the african-american community and the larger american community . this paper highlights study findings related to the way in which participants overcame their outsider-within status through a womanist ethic of care for leadership and change. we present each participant's enduring afriography related to how they "professionally maneuvered" (dingus, 2006) within the academy to help create individual and institutionalized change. methodology at the time of the study, each participant was a member of the faculty at three different carnegie foundation (2000) classified institutions, including comprehensive i, doctoral/research i, and liberal arts ii. one research site was also a historically black higher education institution; another site was partly founded by members of the caribbean community, which the college has mostly served. as such, these environments provided a rich context for analyzing how race uplift might inform pedagogy. the selection of participants was based on six criteria: each participant earned a doctoral degree in education or social science; taught, advised, and/or supervised pre-service students at their respective college or university; taught pre-service courses in educational foundations and/or pedagogy; was at least a second year faculty member at their current institution; had prior experience teaching in a k-12 setting; and had a womanist perspective. respondents' perspectives and criteria were assessed through a preliminary interview. transcribed interviews, observation and shadowing notes, and selected documents were analyzed for emergent themes that revealed similarities, as well as differences, among the participants. data analysis was ongoing, occurring simultaneously with data collection. portraits were developed to describe the respective research sites, participant life histories, and individual pedagogies. this type of q ualitative research methodology, also referred to as portraiture, allowed the researcher to organize a narrative around central themes within the data and write layered stories (lightfoot & davis, 1997). portraiture has been considered a suitable methodology for capturing the "complexity and aesthetic of human experience" (p. 4). portions of participants' portraits have been highlighted in this paper and noted as their enduring afriography. study participants olivia, tulip, and tulani were professors at three different higher education institutions in the north and southeast regions of the united states . olivia taught at a suburban comprehensive university where students and faculty of color number approximately 30% each. as 4.4% of the full-time university faculty, black women teacher-educators in the college of education were less than one-fourth of the total percentage of faculty of color. tulip taught at a liberal arts college in a largely caribbean community. at this institution, students of color exceeded the percentage of faculty of color, with respective rates at 97.7% and 90%. out of a total of 11 full-time faculty members in the department of education (where tulip taught), three members were black women. tulani taught at a historically black research university where the percentage of students of color was 99% of the total student body and where the percentage of faculty of color was 90%. black women comprised 44% of the full-time faculty. despite the fact that two study participants taught at institutions where they may have found cultural and ethnic similarities to their groups of origin, all of the participants have and continue to experience positions as "outsiders-within." collins' (1998) notion of "outsider-within," characterized by the locations or borderzones that black women professors and other marginalized groups tend to occupy as faculty in institutions of higher education, accurately characterized olivia, tulip, and tulani's experiences in becoming and being teacher-educators. "w e are newcomers to a world defined and controlled by discourses that do not often address our realities, that do not affirm our intellectual contributions and that do not seriously examine our worlds" (turner, 2002, p. 75). this experience led many black women academics to ask: "can i be both black and a professor without compromising my principles or my identity?" for this reason, professors of color often live contradictions, an experience that confirms their status as outsiders-within. olivia, tulip, and tulani were outsiders-within as graduate students, learning in environments that did not support diverse perspectives. as professors they were outsiders-within by nature of the limited numbers of women of color in higher education institutions, and by virtue of frequently being the only black female professor or the only professor of color at an upper level rank in their department or college. however, in spite of their outsider-within status participants were aware of and effectively exercised their power to lead and to effect change. data suggest that this power is exemplified in two ways: in their academic roles and in their creation of enduring afriographies. above and beyond experiences in individual institutions as outsiders-within, black women teacher educators find themselves working in a field where whiteness is centered, as evidenced in programs addressing the experiences of white middle-class student dispositions and views. while this work is necessary given the overwhelming presence of white teachers in culturally, linguistically and economically diverse classrooms, it often precludes the experiences of pre-service teachers of color. academic roles: the power of being a teacher educator there is power in educating other people's children (apple, 1995; bey, 1995; delpit, 1995). teachers have the power to pass on values, morals, and viewpoints to their students. they have the power to transform and change one's consciousness, to uplift. gordon (1986) contended that because teachers were at least a part of two worlds--a larger society and the educational mechanism and its power structure--they hold the key to transforming those worlds. teacher educators have the power to educate not only students in their classes, but to also indirectly influence those who are subsequently taught by their students in positive and negative ways. annette henry (1994), an afro-canadian woman professor, declared, "i am a teacher educator because i believe in the power to change people's understandings about themselves, others and the world" (p. 1). like the leadership observed in the past example, olivia, tulip, and tulani also provided guidance that sought to reveal and thwart dominant perspectives. for example, as chairperson of her department, olivia acted as a member of the retention committee at the college, the faculty council, and the faculty senate. she was also a member of the search and screen committee for college-wide departments. being department chair and a member of these committees gave olivia the authority and power to add her perspective to a table comprised mostly of those from the dominant majority. in this way, olivia had an opportunity to make decisions, develop courses, and provide information to faculty; this situation also helped her to make explicit the underlying power relations within the institution and to reveal conditions of those who were kept out of the mainstream. during data collection for this study, for example, olivia was co-planning a multicultural education course with another professor. in a post-shadowing interview, olivia explained, "i don't think that students are getting what they may need in terms of multiculturalism in their classes. i think there needs to be a separate course that helps students understand the intricacies of multicultural education." this course, teaching diverse learners , was approved and accepted in the revised post-baccalaureate curriculum for secondary teacher certification at her university. tulip has held many power-filled positions in education that identify her as an agent of change. for example, she was a director of special programs and grants for auxiliary services for several high schools, coordinator for special education title i, and educational consultant for the public high schools division on multicultural education. tulip's womanist perspective in these roles aided in her goal to "help prevent injustice." as a graduate student tulani noticed the exponential power of effective education. she felt that it was important to "share this information with thirty people and then they go back to their classrooms of thirty and so on." in fact, recognition of this power was what helped her to make the decision to pursue a ph.d.--a choice that allowed her power to be seen in her teaching and scholarship. she recently received an "excellence in teaching" award from her institution. tulani holds a leadership position as a book review editor of a scholarly journal and she has published in both referred and non-refereed journals. o livia also recognized her power to effect change by teaching a class of thirty teachers who will in turn teach in k-12 classrooms. she has seen her power as a continuation of the education that students have received in all other academic settings. "it's really a continuation, because some of the students are now teaching students i would have taught, maybe, eight years ago, as ninth or tenth graders, so it's really a continuation." it was interesting to consider whether this was a continuation of the inequalities of social class or a continuation of leadership that sought to diminish inequalities in the system. of course, olivia was hopeful that her strategies and leadership were those that other teacher educators would share to gain further impact. olivia was apprehensive when she started teaching at a predominately white institution, but she was pushed by the need for teacher educators of color, the reality that most teachers are middle-class white women, and the power to be a part of a professoriate that prepares teachers for urban classrooms: "there's going to be a need for teacher educators, and the people who are going to be teaching out there are going to be these white students that i am instructing. they might very well wind up in an urban setting either against their will, or as something that they decided they wanted to do." olivia recognized her power to prepare white teachers for urban classrooms: "i have not seen [the k-12 students they will teach], but their teachers will, under my tutelage. so i'm touching them." olivia felt that by educating teachers she was touching more students, thereby uplifting a mass of people. by teaching teachers, she was able to effect change on a greater scale than if she were teaching in her own k-12 classroom. in the next section, we highlight participants enduring life stories describing how they professionally maneuvered within the academy to help create individual and institutionalized change. enduring afriographies--a lived experience participants' recognition of their power to effect change is also illustrated individually through enduring afriographies. three themes emerged that describe how race uplift informs the work of these three black women teacher educators. tulani emphasizes praxis, tulip models a love for the teaching profession, and olivia emphasizes a notion of teaching for right now in her classes. tulani--emphasizing praxis we can't only talk in terms of black and white because then we are leaving many people out of the discussion. we often do this in classrooms. in recognition of her power to effect change, tulani has emphasized praxis. she stressed an acquisition of knowledge over grades and assigned work that pushed students to theorize their everyday lives. for example, in her introduction to the course, multicultural education and the community , she talked about grades: "the whole purpose of this is not about grades. if this was up to me i would get rid of grades. what we get out of this is not the grade." tulani recalled her own experience in a gifted and talented elementary school where the mission was to obtain knowledge for its own sake. speaking to the students at this specialized school about their suburban counterparts, she explained: they can have knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but we don't have that luxury. we need to be able to do something with our knowledge. we are privileged by being here (at this university). i am suggesting that we move towards a freirian model, which suggests a concept of praxis and liberatory pedagogy. how can i use new information to change or rethink something? or we could use an african centered principle, like nia, which means purpose. we are going to build ourselves up to the place we can be. here, tulani indicated a sense of educational and political empowerment of african-americans. she urged students to ask how they can use this new knowledge to uplift or improve lives. by assigning students work that pushed them to apply their experience of everyday life, tulani emphasized praxis. as evidence, assignments in her multicultural education course included reaction papers in response to readings, analysis of a movie of their choice, a public observation, and a cultural activity. each assignment directed students to "apply the theory and concepts from class to your experience." tulani's intent is indicative of a womanist ethic of care that emphasizes knowledge. her theoretical vision is linked with an application of knowledge in order to change one's life, curriculum, teaching practice, workplace, or community. thus, her emphasis of knowledge over grades also represents a type of visionary pragmatic pedagogy, likening a caring theoretical vision to informed practical struggle. although tulani focused on praxis, she was aware of the difficulties involved in doing so. tulani has found that educating teachers about concepts of self and identity was "the hardest part about preparing white teachers to educate our students." for instance, tulani taught predominately white students at a previous institution; she recalled how students understood the degradation of ascribing the town football team with a native american name. still, they would attend games and shout the moniker with pride. "i asked them at the end of the class once, 'how many people get this'? and they all raised their hands. and i asked, 'how many people are going to do something different'? and they're like, 'realistically, no. we have season tickets. sorry'." tulani saw the difficulty in applying theory to life, but drew upon her spirituality praying for change in her students' behaviors and responses. "how can they have this knowledge and not use it?" she wondered. interestingly, tulani encountered this same difficulty in educating black teachers at her current institution. she led activities with students to try to give them the skill of being able to center themselves: so i tell them to create an african centered school, or create a black school, if that makes people feel more comfortable, and inevitably they start talking about, "well maybe we shouldn't make it black, maybe we should."and i am thinking, "we are in class, no one can hear you. there is no ramification, and you still can't center yourself." here, tulani found that even prospective african-american teachers, when given a culturally relevant assignment, also found it difficult to center themselves. tulani's challenge was to make theory real for all students. her power to lead and to effect change was found in her insistence upon helping students to locate praxis and to use knowledge as power. tulip--modeling a love for the teaching profession i try to instill love, love for the profession, and love for humanity. and i do it--i try to do that by example. because you can tell people to do it this way and that way, but students learn from what they see you do. tulip envisioned and understood her power in teacher education as a quest to "instill love for the profession and humanity." a power such as this can only produce caring educators who love their students and who believe in change. "and i see teaching as a mission, and a calling in my life. and i feel that i'm fulfilling that calling." tulip's description was similar to that of kemp's (1997) respondent, who also spoke about her work in teacher education as a "mission." yet, where the mission of kemp's respondent was to increase the number of black and hispanic teachers by creating an environment that supports their growth, tulip's mission was to teach and to claim knowledge. one rewarding aspect of teaching at the college level, tulip asserted, is to see students "using what i have taught them in the classroom." tulip was the only study participant who has lived and taught long enough to see her students become successful professionals. she recalled an experience during her tenure as an assistant principal in which one of the students she had previously taught became a teacher at her school: this young woman came over to me, she said, "are you miss wise?" i said, "no, i'm not, i'm mrs. ofelder." and she said, "but were you ever wise?" i said, "yes." and she said, "well, you were my sixth grade teacher, or seventh grade teacher." and at that time, they had district people who were.speech coordinators or speech therapists and she was one of them for my school. she was one of the students from that jewish yeshiva, and she said, "you taught me something that i'll never forget." this was a black school. she said, "i want to reach out and help people in need, and i want to instill the kinds of things in children that you instilled in me. i'm so glad that you were here to see me do it today!" in this example, tulip was able to see the "fruits of her labor" as an elementary school teacher. she made such an impression on this particular student's life that she (the new speech therapist) wanted "to instill the kinds of things in children" that tulip, as her teacher, had taught to her. she was elated that tulip was going to witness her effort to "model a love for the profession." but there was another example of tulip's capacity to recognize her power to affect change. a fter a student presentation on classroom bias, tulip urged students to do something about it: "there are a lot of biases in schools and classrooms. they are biased according to what? race, learning styles, etc. now what i am expecting you to do is to change the system, to get in there and begin to react to these situations." here, tulip taught students to teach and to change the system of oppression. olivia--teaching for today and again, you are preparing them for life now; you want them to problem-solve and think creatively right now. some enter teaching to prepare productive citizens for society, implying that students will not be productive citizens until they reach adulthood. conversely, olivia found it necessary to prepare students "for life right now." for example, throughout both observed classroom sessions, olivia repeated the quote "you are preparing students for life right now" in an effort to assist teachers in their understanding of and capacity to use the real-life situations that students encounter daily. "you want (students) to problem-solve, think creatively," so that they may apply critical understandings to their own lives. focusing on the present with students and supervisees, olivia emphasized knowledge for right now to students in any grade or at any age. when preparing teachers for student teaching, for example, olivia tried "to be realistic about what students will be confronted with in the classroom." olivia's emphasis on knowledge is indicative of a womanist ethic of care that emphasized the sharing of knowledge to enhance and support community. the grounding structures of meaning and value (as components of a black knowledge base) directly contradict both views forwarded by colorblind theories of care and perceptions of innocence often found in white literature (thompson, 1998). the racial difference is easily understood--one must have knowledge in order to act upon experienced oppressions. knowledge of how to think critically about life in the present helps students seek to change and act upon present oppressions in their everyday lives. this kind of teaching is rooted in freire's (1996) notion of liberatory pedagogy and is also indicative of tulani's personal views on praxis. in an interesting way, olivia's agency to prepare students for the here and now interrupts the need to make society more just for "generations yet unborn." olivia's perspective calls for preparing educators who can design and implement learning activities that simultaneously develop students' academic skills and capacities to critique and act on the structures of oppression which impose on their daily lives (larkin, 1995). of course, these actions ultimately impact the future, but they are grounded in the knowledge that justice denied now is justice denied in the future as well. similarly, interviews conducted by ladson-billings (2001) indicated that african-american teacher educators expressed a desire to engage prospective teachers in more thoughtful and rigorous conceptions of teaching that challenged social inequity and cultural ignorance. this kind of perspective also sought to prepare teachers for the current realities of teaching in diverse classrooms. olivia continued to comment about what she shares with prospective teachers: just really being truthful and giving a candid account of the realities of teaching, and how it's immediate.and teaching is not a job that stops at three, but can go well into the wee hours of the night, if you're grading papers and preparing and planning. then it just becomes a part of you. emphasizing a here and now concept means educating pre-service teachers about the realities of teaching. these realities may include the unpredictability of student outcomes, the difficulty of assessing students' learning, the impact of teacher attitudes on instruction and management, and the drama and immediacy of teaching (parkay & stanford, 1998). conclusion the experiences and practices of the black women teacher educators in this study are indicative of the womanist tradition as these women are also builders of enduring afriographies as well as teacher-leaders and change agents. participants' interviews, classrooms observations, and reviews of documentation indicate that the concept of race uplift as well as the participants' work in the academy are strongly related to a womanist ethic of care that, while different for each participant, emphasizes shared knowledge and experience. olivia's emphasis on the here and now, tulip's modeling a love for the teaching profession, and tulani's emphasis on praxis are three themes that emphasize knowledge: knowledge for right now, knowledge about the profession, and knowledge about applying theory to life. within the current and third phase of womanist theory, womanism takes on a different and enhanced meaning that builds upon the notion of visionary pragmatism. this development posits that the struggle for freedom is different for everyone involved yet it still accomplishes the same goal of a just society (collins, 1998). that is, womanist teaching is seen (in the third phase of womanism) through change agents who continue to fight against multiple oppressions by creating innovative academic curricula, fulfilling community-based leadership roles, and by teaching courses that allow students to analyze their perspectives in relation to the oppression in society. hill (2005) explored how race uplift created an academic other mother identity. this notion of agency seems to also recognize the power to lead and effect change. "race uplift" is exemplified in participants' leadership as professors, department chairpersons, or program coordinators, all of which produce a type of power that afford a wide-angle vision or perspective advantage (ladson-billings, 2001). thus, those with outsider-within status have an advantage that "does not speak to the economic, social, and political advantage that subordinated groups experience, but rather to the way that not being positioned in the center allows for 'wide-angle' vision" (ladson-billings, 2001, p. 3). similarly, goodwin's study (1996) implies that the experiences of teacher education faculty of color "give them a unique perspective on the teacher education enterprise" (p. 17). this perspective guides their teaching, advisement, and supervision of students so that questions of culture are central to their work. in this paper we presented each participant's individual and enduring afriography as related to their leadership role and how they "professionally maneuvered" within the academy to help create institutionalized change. these findings are one way of understanding how race uplift informs and shapes the teaching practices of three black women teacher educators and, judging from contributions to students, how it has potential to influence new generations. hill (2003) uses the term afriography to describe a kind of chronicle of the past, a story, or a record of experiences about people of african descent as told through the eyes of black women. novelist alice walker (1983) describes a womanist as one whom "appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women's strength; sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or non-sexually; committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. not a separatist, except periodically, for health; traditionally universalist... loves struggle. loves the folk. loves herself. regardless" (xii). walker 's description provides a framework for womanist leadership in that a womanist recognizes that struggle exists, yet, is motivated by love to actively work toward the collective well-being. a womanist leader is one who thinks broadly; she sees her leadership role as intricately connected to the fate of her people. collins (2000) defines black feminist thought as a theory of empowerment and activism based black woman's experience and legacy of struggle. black feminist theory highlights the interlocking nature of race, gender, and class oppression; calls to replace denigrating images of black women with self-defined images; and shows black women's activist nature in mothering, teaching, and leading the community. all names and study settings are pseudonyms. references apple, m. 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(2002). women of color in academe: living the multiple marginality. journal of higher education, 73 (1), 74-93. walker, a. (1983). in search of our mother's gardens: womanist prose. new york : harcourt brace jovavovich publishers. about the authors: dr. djanna hill-brisbane teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in educational foundations and science methods. her scholarly interests include womanist theory, teacher education for multicultural and urban contexts, experiences of higher education faculty, and qualitative approaches to inquiry. dr. jeannine dingus teaches masters level educational foundations courses and doctoral seminars in curriculum and pedagogy. her research interests include african-american teachers' pedagogical and epistemological stances, black feminisms, urban education, and african-american youth development. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, summer 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        article header goes here attribution goes here running head: the paradox and the price the paradox and the price: a case study of female academic managers in an australian regional university michelle wallace southern cross university abstract this case study presents empirical data regarding the experiences of female academic managers in an australian regional university. in australia regional universities are situated in rural towns or cities outside the seven state capital cities and the national capital. this study is intended as a basis for further research in relation to women working in universities and has informed the development of a survey of female middle managers in australian universities, which will be reported in another paper. this case study focuses on female academics in front-line roles to more senior management roles in what still remains a male-dominated management context. the study is also set within the context of a number of pressures on australian universities, including increased student numbers, decreased government funding, corporatisation and managerialism. the broader restructuring of tertiary education is often accompanied by organizational restructuring at institutional level and this is the case in this study. the management lives of a number of women academics, who are front-line and more senior managers, are examined in the context of sectoral and organizational restructuring, the competitive expectations of managing in new times, and in the context of working in a university in an australian regional area. discussion examines human resource development practices and other experiences that have prepared the women for their current roles. issues surrounding leadership and management styles, workplace culture, work/life balance, and work identity are examined. conclusions are drawn about the organizational value attributed to the management activities undertaken by these women, the paradoxes a number identify in their roles, and the price several believe they have paid in undertaking managerial leadership.   the paradox and the price: a case study of female academic managers in an australian regional university for the past decade in australia, women have been entering academic frontline, middle, and senior management in somewhat greater numbers. however, this is occurring in a climate of shrinking government funding and globalisation pressures that have resulted in corporate managerialism, economic restructuring, and competition (blackmore & sachs, 2001; currie & thiele, 2001; ramsay, 2000). managerialism may be defined as the promotion of efficiency through corporate style bureaucracies with an emphasis on quantitiative standards and measures of performance, with a shift in emphasis away from administration and policy to a new emphasis on management. new public management (npm) has had major impacts on the public sector, including universities in the uk, australia, new zealand, and canada, and has heralded a shift in culture from the collegial to the competitive (fitzsimmons, 2005). within the context of npm in australia it has been maintained that universities have been reconstructed as “knowledge https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html factories” where knowledge is commoditized as a source of value in the capitalist economy and the humanistic foundations of the traditional university have given way to the global knowledge economy, more technocratic management processes, new work environments, and the need to be entrepreneurial in earning funds for the university as government funding decreases (brooks, 2001, p. 15). how are women who commenced their careers as academics within this more humanistic framework now faring as academic managers in the new culture of corporate managerialism in universities, which have long been acknowledged as highly gendered organizations (allport, 1996; aitkin, 2001)? what is their experience of management and what do they perceive is expected of them by their organizations? how do they live their management lives (knights & willmott, 1999)? are there any particular issues faced by female academic managers in the relatively more isolated context of a regional university? this paper presents some results from a qualitative study of female academic managers in an australian regional university (hereafter called university x). discussion focuses on human resource development (hrd) practices and other experiences that have prepared the women for their current roles. issues for the women surrounding leadership and management styles, workplace culture, work/life balance, and work identity are examined in the light of concepts of work identity and the enterprising subject (du gay, 1996). comparisons are drawn between these findings and other research on female academic managers and conclusions are drawn regarding the organizational value attributed to the work undertaken, the paradoxes that a number of women identify in their roles, and the price several believe they have paid in taking on managerial leadership.  context there is a comprehensive literature regarding women academics in higher education in australia. everitt (1994) identified a number of factors that illustrate women’s disadvantage in higher education employment. she found that gender differences in rank were not caused by differences in age, higher degree, publications, and time at one’s university. also, women gained much lower rank than their qualifications would provide if they were men and these effects were pronounced at senior lecturer level and higher. however, in a more recent and comprehensive analysis, castleman et al (1995, p. 18) have argued that women who are successful in australian academic life are those who have emulated the characteristics of a male career path, namely overseas degrees, publications in international journals (not australian) and overseas sponsors, and speed of promotion and number, but not quality of publications. more recent figures support the above observations that the academic population is vertically segregated. currently, women make up approximately 37% of academics in australian universities, yet 25% of these women are clustered at lecturer level and below (department of education, science and training, 2001). in the australian tertiary education sector, achieving a professorship is comparatively rare, however, even within this framework women still lag behind men in more senior academic positions. recent figures indicate that of those academics above senior lecturer level, 17% were women and 83% were men (department of education, science and training, 2001). nevertheless, women from senior lecturer level and above have been taking on management roles in greater numbers than would be expected given their underrepresentation. while women make up approximately 37% of the academic workforce in australian universities (12,535 women and 20,913 men) (department of education, science and training, 2001), they are somewhat underrepresented in the most senior academic management roles. they make up 24% of managerial positions overall, 25% are vice-chancellors, and 22% deputy vice-chancellors (australian vice-chancellors' committee, 2002). at the executive dean/deanship level, women make up around 32% (australian vice-chancellors' committee, 2002). figures regarding women at department/school headship and directorship level could not be accessed but it could be surmised that they make up around 35%. in relation to regionality, while there is a body of literature pertaining to the labour market situation and social position of women in regional and rural australia (for example, alston, 1996; johnston, 1997), this issue has not been extended to women working in regional universities. it could be argued that these women form part of a national labour pool of academics; highly educated and mobile. however, as the regional literature indicates, many women working in regional australia have their career progression circumscribed because they are not geographically mobile (johnston, 1997). it may be extrapolated that some female academics in regional universities also have such constraints. female academics working in metropolitan, capital city areas may have career mobility within their geographical area where there may be three or more universities, whereas more severe disruption may be caused to the lives of regional university women in taking up a post at another university. relative isolation from networks due to cost of travel to conferences and development of initial contacts may also be a factor for women in regional universities. however, with the advent of electronic communication this may be a harder argument to sustain. the relatively tighter funding in regional universities and their more conservative host climates may also be factors to consider. while the literature discussed below does not take geography or its effects into consideration, it is worth remembering as it resonates in some of the empirical data reported in this study. as the new managerialism, corporatisation, and restructuring of work practice started to impact in the mid-1990s in australia, wyn et al. (1997) examined the experiences of senior women academics working in faculties of education in australia and canada. themes of marginalisation both in the discipline area and within the masculinist culture were cited, from non-merit related failure to gain promotion to the need to power dress in order to feel that one could be taken seriously. however, marginality also gave some women the courage to be more outspoken as a way of asserting rights, creating change, and offering a voice of dissent. speaking out was regarded by a number of the women as important and having a voice was seen as an act of bravery. one of the interesting factors in this study was that once women had come through to higher levels a large number maintained a very real commitment to supporting collegial and democratic practices, recognizing staff members’ emotional needs and life responsibilities, emphasizing open information networks, and placing a priority on issues of social justice and equity and advocating for students (wyn et al., 1997). wyn also perceived that the new managerialism provided a crack in the institutional practices, which may have advantaged women or through which women could effect change. wyn et al. (2000) found that their participants referred to leadership in terms of making a difference, using the concepts of equity, democracy, anti-sexism, anti-racism, mentoring, and participatory work and decision-making practices. many of these factors confirm the finding of more broadly-based scholarship on women in management and leadership roles in the public and private sectors where collaboration rather than competition and contribution rather than selfadvancement were seen to be part of a more transformative leadership/management style (cox, 1996; sinclair, 1998). wyn’s empirical australian work was conducted over ten years ago and related to women working in education faculties and occurred just at a time when the australian higher education landscape began to change. more recent scholarship (blackmore & sachs, 2000) has argued that discursive practices relating to flexibility, productivity, and “performativity”  reflect the values of contemporary higher education and now shape worker identity in the academy. blackmore and sachs (2001) examined the situation for australian women academics across a number of discipline areas, exploring how educational restructuring had changed the nature of the academic work and how leadership was viewed in that changing context. they argued that australian universities had become ______________ 1.efficiency and effectiveness become the criteria for judging the worth of knowledge (bloland, 1995); being seen to perform rather than performing itself (blackmore & sachs, 2001). ____________ …less like public institutions imbued with a sense of service and a history of social trusteeship and more like a corporate international company of expert professionals who sell to the highest bidder in a global market. (brint, 1994 quoted in blackmore & sachs, 2001, p. 48) furthermore, they suggested that management work and the identity formation of the academic manager was situated within practices of aggressive competition, measurability, marketability, and redefinitions of what was seen to be progressive, innovative, or meritorious. they also identified many of the practices that reconstitute individuals according to these values as highly gender inflected. blackmore and sachs saw the practices of competition, entrepreneurship, client-focused, market-led course production, and self-promotion as evidence of the “managed-self at work” (blackmore and sachs, 2001, p. 55). their views resonate with the work of several post-structuralist scholars who have explored work identity. townley (1994) has observed that work identity formation occurs as … the individual becomes tied, through the desire to secure the acknowledgment, recognition and confirmation of self, to practices confirmed by others as desirable. (p.142) similarly, du gay (1996, p. 7) has argued that discursive practices at work “construct particular identities for employees” and has explored “how the latter negotiate these identities in everyday life.” he has theorised the concept of the “enterprising” or “self-governing” subject, who, through a range of management practices, is reconstituted into the “strategic human resource” of an organisation. blackmore and sachs (2001) have discussed this reconstitution in terms of the adaptations success-oriented individuals make to fit in to new organizational cultures, for example, tailoring research to fit funding objectives, repackaging learning in online or other modes, or participating as a manager in organizational restructuring and downsizing operations. while the blackmore and sachs study evidences some informants’ appreciation of the paradoxes of their roles, the interviews evidence a sense of powerlessness and defeat rather than resistance or pro-action. is this the complete picture or is there more? the study reported below builds on some of the concepts explored by the scholars cited above in the intimate environment of one specific university. the close observation also opens the space for the female academic managers to explore the pleasure and satisfaction their roles afford them as well as the paradoxes and dissonances of their situations in a context that involves both sectoral and organisational restructuring. white (2003) maintains that the continuing underrepresentation of women at the top of australian universities is a result of the dominant anglo-celtic, middle-class, male executive profile and that male managers tend to promote men (and some few white, middle-class women) in their own image while ignoring or regarding as light-weight the majority of women. furthermore, constructions of merit and informal networks that operate within senior management are part of a male hegemony boys club that marginalises women from the informal communication and decision-making channels. she identifies the corporatisation of higher education, where middle managers, such as heads of schools, are charged with managing budgets and changes set by senior management as a cause of stress. she suggests that such factors have made many women think twice about taking on management roles. white also maintains that diversity programs in higher education have not really worked and there is still an element of tokenism in relation to women; change to the masculinist cultures of universities are needed if the situation for women is to improve. most recently, eveline (2004) has documented and analysed a gender equity change process at the university of western australia where an inclusive climate and culture was fashioned from a highly traditional, male-centric work environment. this culture made practical diverse changes such as modifying the promotion system to acknowledge teaching, and implementing a leadership development program for women that supported their promotion aspirations and making the physical environment safe for women. by giving permission for this cultural change and by having more women at or near the top of the organisational hierarchy, symbolic support was also offered to academic and administrative staff women, raising their expectations of themselves and of a fair and equitable workplace. somewhat in contrast to this, probert (2005) has argued that national data does not fully support women’s underrepresentation at higher levels in australian universities. she maintains that women are not clustered in the ranks of casuals any more than men, are not less successful than men at applying for promotion (although fewer women put themselves forward and are less likely to have multiple tries at promotion than men) and do not have higher teaching loads. however, they do have lower qualifications and entry levels than men (12.2% with phds on entry compared to 38.3% of men; 50% of women enter at level a compared to 34.4% of men), are less likely than men to apply for promotion, have a lower research output, and spend more time on administration and student issues. at the university of new south wales where probert conducted her case study, it was apparent that fewer female academic staff lived with a partner than is the national higher education average and that a number of women divorced during or just after their ph.d. studies leaving them with greater family responsibilities (probert, 2005). furthermore, the impact of caring fell more heavily on all female academic staff, not just for young children, but for teenage children (more complex life issues, which could not be dealt with by anyone other than a parent) and aged relatives. probert concluded that the gendered pattern of ph.d. completions, which was a human capital factor in promotion, was related to women often being too exhausted to take up or complete ph.d. studies. their full time work in the academic job that never ends and through which they cannot exert the power of absence (ability to work from home is a double edged sword meaning more juggling over most waking hours), and the gendered nature of their family responsibilities (gender politics of the home, absent or no partner) leave little time for research. background this study focuses on an australian, regional university. since the mid-1990s this university has participated in all of the sectoral restructuring that has been effected in university education: increase in student numbers with little increase in academic staff, constraints in government funding, pressure to perform in research and money making activities, and development of management structures and processes that are more corporate. in addition, its very regionality may pose a number of challenges surrounding career development and mobility, isolation, and funding. in the past seven years this university has undergone two major organizational restructures. the first changed the structure from faculties to a larger number of smaller academic units while the more recent restructure has clustered these units into three mega-faculties. the first restructure afforded a greater number of opportunities than previously for academic women to enter front-line and middle management. the paradoxical effects of this engagement and the effects of the second restructure form part of the contextual frame of the women’s management lives are reported here. at the time of the study in this university there were 36 men above senior lecturer level (80%) and 9 women (20%) (university x eeo profile, 2001). there were 45 men at senior lecturer level and 17 women. in all, the ratio of males to females in senior academic positions was81:26. however, at this first restructure of the 19 academic line managers (not including the vice-chancellor) drawn from these people, 9 were women and 10 were men, indicating a higher number than could be expected of women academics in management roles. this represents almost 50%, which appears to be higher than the national average of women in academic management roles. this situation was partly due to a previous senior manager’s perspective in the restructure; recruitment of some senior women managers and existing female academic staff putting themselves forward in a less-chilly-than-usual climate. however, it must also be acknowledged that from 1994 to 2002 the number of women above senior lecturer level had only risen from 6 to 9, whereas the number of men above senior lecturer level had risen from 27 to 40 (university x quality audit portfolio, 2003). in this restructure a number of early to mid-career women at senior lecturer and associate professor levels were offered the opportunity of headships. in relation to higher education in the uk, pritchard and deem (1999) have noted a feminisation of lower levels of management in higher education tied to an intensification of work and high expectations of performance. in this case study, heads of academic units were expected to carry a 40%-60% teaching load, undertake research, and manage their schools/colleges. for those in higher level roles the leadership/management element of their roles was fore-grounded and teaching was not expected. this study took place just as the second restructure commenced. seven of nine female academic line managers participated in the study. one of these women was an indigenous australian; the other six were white, middle class australians with a predominantly anglo-irish heritage. two of the seven women were professors at senior academic management level (dean and above). of the five heads of school/college director, one was a professor, one an associate professor, and three were senior lecturers. four of the women had been in management/leadership roles for ten or more years, while some had been in their roles for between two and five years. four of the women had phds or equivalent and two were undertaking ph.d.s. none of the women had children of primary school age, while two had children under 15 years of age. the other women did not have children or their children were living more independently. all of the women were aged between their late forties and mid-fifties and several did not have partners. particularly, at head level, these women were somewhat older than their male counterparts in similar positions reflecting their more circumloquitous career paths. methodology this study may be said to be post-positivist (the researcher accepted the real reality of the context albeit imperfectly apprehendable) employing qualitative methods (guba & lincoln, 1994) of document analysis (such the organisation’s eeo report and policies), interviews, and observation, and may be said to conform to a one-case, case study methodology (stake, 1995). while not employing forms of discourse analysis, concepts of subjectivity and identity formation that may be said to have a poststructuralist perspective were drawn on. this work may thus be sited within theoretical perspectives that inform both critical management studies (alvesson, 2000) and feminist scholarship (fonow & cook, 1991; oleson, 1994) with a standpoint perspective. standpoint epistemology (harding, 1991, 1993, 1997) locates and foregrounds the accounts of women on the margins, in this case some women, who, while engaging in management roles, see themselves positioned less centrally in the power relations in comparison to their male colleagues. feminist standpoint theory thus produces the reference point for gathering women's accounts of their experiences of management in academe in rich detail rather than attempting to generalize. within standpoint theory, these women have a double vision of what goes on: they see their own situation as a marginalized group and can also have specific critical insights into the dominant mind-sets, which govern their lives (smith, 1987a, 1990). this perspective is not available to those in the dominant group because of their super-ordinate position in relation to power and resources. feminist standpoint epistemology as theorized by harding and others (harding, 1986a; harstock, 1987; smith, 1987b, 1990) also challenges the notion that so called value free or objectivist knowledge can be produced. those that support this perspective argue that all methods of enquiry, including so called scientific methods, are supported by values and presuppositions about who can legitimately generate knowledge and what knowledge can be about. it is argued that those who produce such knowledge are generally the dominant, male members of society and it is their interests or others' interests seen from a male perspective that are regarded as legitimate forms of knowledge. in arguing that so-called objectivist knowledge actually serves subjective male interests, harding (1992) advocates that the pretence of neutrality be dropped from research. she suggests that objectivity can be strengthened by articulating the purpose of the research through examining the social position of the researcher and through making transparent researcher values and biases. i have attended to this in this paper. in supporting what harding (1992) calls strong objectivity, the perspective or bias of the researcher can also be seen as a resource rather than a threat to reliability, as olesen (1994) emphasises: if the researcher is sufficiently reflexive about her project, she can evoke these (biases) as resources to guide data gathering or creating and for understanding her own interpretations in the research... what is required is sufficient reflexivity to uncover what may be deep seated but poorly recognised views on issues central to the research and a full account of the researcher's views, thinking and conduct. (p. 165) harding (1993) maintains that feminist standpoint epistemology must especially take into account and make clear the social location of the researcher and her role in interpreting the experiences of women. in studying my own backyard i have used member checks, reflexivity, and a time lag in order to interrogate my perceptions of the data. i acknowledge any perceived biases to be my own. the seven women were interviewed for a minimum of one hour each and supplied with an audiotape of the conversation for member checking. one interrupted interview was continued some time later after analysis of other’s interviews and several women were re-interviewed again after initial analysis for more in-depth discussion on certain issues. these semi-structured interviews explored issues around the women’s preparedness for their management role, their perceptions of their change management/leadership style, their embodiment as a female academic manager and issues of satisfaction and stress in their role, sectoral issues, and their perceptions of how the organisation valued their contribution. unsurprisingly, the interviews became more like conversations (devault, 1990; oakley, 1981). although precise transcription of every word did not occur, the audiotapes were intensively and repeatedly listened to and extensive verbatim passages were transcribed once the key themes had been identified and confirmed. this research has a feminist intent. research was once said to be feminist if it was about, for, and by women. fonow and cook (1991) and brooks (1997) suggest that this is no longer strictly applicable as research about men can also shed light on the lives of women and research by women may not necessarily be feminist. the guiding principle in this research is that it illuminates the situation of women and through doing this opens the space for dialogue and change. in undertaking research, which claims to be feminist and especially where women are research participants, there emerge a range of ethical issues. in addition to the ethical considerations inherent in all research, such as gaining informed permission, confidentiality, and the purposes for which the research is used, feminist research also pays great attention to relationships within the research process, to issues of control over the process, and control and use of the outcomes (fonow & cook, 1991). ethics clearance was obtained from the organization’s ethics committee and individuals’ informed consent obtained. however, there were feminist research ethics issues that needed to be considered. the first surrounded my dual relationship to the participants as both colleague and researcher in a shared workplace and involved issues of trust and confidentiality (oakley, 1991) and the bifurcated consciousness (smith, 1990, 1991) of my insider/outsider role. for this reason i have been at pains to obscure the identities of the women with aliases assigned to larger quotes and have not identified opinions with level of appointment. this has also necessitated not identifying the indigenous woman’s voice, although the reader may still recognize some resonances. this has led to a letting go of a large amount of analysis pertaining to women of colour/australian indigenous women in the academy and this is a regret. the second and related issue involved my participant observer role. my own insider viewpoint and understanding of the context as well as the reciprocal nature of the discussions offer the rich bifurcated consciousness (smith, 1999) of a standpoint perspective. however, i have utilized only documentation that is on the public record. in relation to analysis of research material, holland and ramazanoglu (1994) advocate that the researcher explain the grounds on which selective interpretations have been made while making explicit the process of decision-making and the logic of the method on which decisions are made. thus the processes, which produce the interpretation, can be made explicit to the reader, acknowledging the complexity and contradictions in interpretation and recognising the possibility of the silences and absences that maynard and purvis (1994) highlight. this is linked to the feminist standpoint issues of the researcher's strong objectivity and reflexivity (harding, 1993) and also to a feminist poststructuralist perspective that acknowledges that the interpretation presented here is one of many possible readings of the interview data. the limitations of this study are acknowledged. it explores the experiences of a small number of women in one organization and thus generalization is inappropriate. however, some of the issues raised are supported by those identified in other studies. this case study illuminates the way for a broader investigation and indeed has informed the development of a survey of female middle managers in australian universities. it has probably been because of my personal involvement with the workplace that i have found this research challenging to write up and have paused for just over a year between undertaking the research and presenting it. this has enabled me to engage in strong objectivity, gain perspective, engage in some critical self-examination, talk again with some of the women, and observe another cycle of organizational restructuring. i acknowledge that the themes and issues presented here are my interpretations of the material that emerged from the interview material, some as the result of my direct questions and some suggested by the participants. i acknowledge any misinterpretations as my own and thank the participants for their generous participation and for feedback on this paper. findings the main themes entailed human resource development practices and experiences that had prepared the women for their current roles, behaviors that indicated the womens’ leadership/ management styles, work/life balance, and those elements that can be interpreted as pertaining to the paradoxes surrounding work identity in the context of restructuring and the new managerialism. straight in the deep end it has been identified that “little attention has been given to the leadership attitudes, performance, and development needs of women holding leadership positions in universities” (joyner & preston, 1998, p. 35). in this study few of the women had experienced any structured development for their current or previous management roles but went “straight in the deep end.” only one woman had participated in a three-day development exercise at the commencement of her role. this had mainly been about university processes and procedures and did not involve management or leadership development. for those with less management experience their preparation had been on-the-job as course cocoordinators, project managers, directors, and non-line-manager centre heads.             the more senior women came from a background of pro vice-chancellors, deans, registrars, and project managers. again, their experience involved little formal development in their previous organizations. for all of the women it had been learning on the job, and as stephanie said, …taking myself off to conferences and workshops and other staff development opportunities. the majority of these were one off. nothing more than a couple of days. i matched these to my areas of lesser strength. for another woman, previous roles in other institutions, particularly in the area of financial management and skills she had developed as a political animal, were useful. several women also mentioned observing the management behavior of others, including what not to do as well as effective behaviors. concern was expressed that an individual and organizational opportunity had been lost at the case study university in not getting all managers together for strategic planning activities. clearly, in this and other universities, human resource development practices, which may be quite comprehensive for administrative staff, are not strategically implemented for those academics undertaking management roles. several of the women discussed those who had been influential or mentors in their working lives. for a few, it has been those who initially taught them, encouraging them into higher degrees, or to apply for jobs. for another, it was a director or vice-chancellor at a previous institution who was a source of encouragement, advice, and most importantly, information. a number of women spoke of the developmental advice offered by an immediate previous supervisor. in these cases there were more male informal mentors than female, unsurprisingly as more senior academic personnel are male. although several did report some mentoring from their more senior female or male supervisor in the case study organization, a number felt that they had not been supported in their roles and they had not been mentored. it was seen that a greater amount of informal mentoring went on with male senior and more junior staff whereas the women felt that they needed to go out of their way and explicitly ask for mentoring from a male or female supervisor. ramsay (2000) offers evidence that women in universities are less likely to be mentored than their male colleagues and that exclusion from informal networks, career sponsoring relationships and other avenues, which provide the basis for career advancement and advantage to their male colleagues has been identified as critical for women in all forms of organizations, including universities. (p. 6) for one woman, it was the experience of higher education that was liberatory. the very nature of her research had thrust her into a leadership role as a spokesperson on contentious issues. she perceived that a great deal of her life and educational experiences prepared her for her current role: “i was always coming to this.” for another woman, members of the business community and retired politicians also offered a different perspective that was generative to the managerial role. development also came from the school of hard knocks, as lorraine stated, …at this particular time, one of the men had been very abusive verbally to me and i had to go into my old office (where he was) and get a file and i was terrified to go in there because i knew i’d get some more abuse. i remember standing outside the door and thinking “i have to do this; i can’t just walk away because that’d be like… cowardice. what’ll i do? what i have to do is hold my head up, walk in and look them in the face and say ‘good morning, good morning’ and go over and get the file.” and i walked in there and said “good morning, good morning,” and one of the men looked at me and said, “you are so resilient. we knock you down and you just get up again, don't you?” and as soon as he said that…that was the first time i truly understood that this was deliberate. this was not just because they were uninformed or behaving out of their own pathology. this was deliberate and that gave me a lot of strength. i have learned that when i put my feet on the ground i can stand up and i can speak with quiet dignity but i will stand my ground and nobody will knock me down again. that situation gave me the strength to walk into this place (current organization) and function as i do now. it was a valuable tool. experience, and often a bitter experience as that above, some judiciously and pro-actively targeted skills-based learning, and mentoring had given these women some preparation for their roles. one woman noted the lack of formal or senior management supported development activities for academic women managers in the case study institution commenting, “our equal opportunity figures are good, so it seems we don’t need further development.” another noted, “what happens when these older experienced women retire? are we supporting our younger ones’ development?” the more formal and effective programs that exist in australia, such as the colloquium of senior women executives in australian higher education or the australian technology network’s wexdev (see ramsay, 2000), were not mentioned by any of the women. while at face value human resource development interventions may be seen as benign, it should also be acknowledged that specific women in management programs can also be seen as an appropriation by the new corporate culture of women’s strengths (brooks, 2001), and that mentoring can be viewed as a practice that clones or reconstitutes the academic identity to organizational ends (townley, 1994). notwithstanding this, most of the women identified areas of unmet development needs including industrial relations, financial management, strategic management, and further understanding of sectoral issues. while laudable from one perspective, it must also be acknowledged that all of these skills also better fit the individual for the demands of the more corporatized and managerialist university sector, making them better managers. this paradox of the incorporation of women “into the new masculinist managerialism” (leonard ,1998, p. 79) was not lost on some of the participants and will be discussed later. it’s about building shared leadership as may be expected, their own leadership styles were seen by the women to be consultative with an emphasis on communication. four of the women were now managers with staff they had worked with as peers in the past – “mature work groups” as one woman put it – therefore, a more collegial style was seen as the most appropriate. shared leadership was mentioned several times, sara stated, each individual is part of a collective or whole…none of us is perfect, we bring real skills to the job but also make mistakes and there should not be judgment on that, but we should both be responsible for who we are in the workplace and prepared to work together as a team. it’s about building that shared leadership process up. a commitment to success and the active facilitation of planning were seen as part of moving their unit through change processes. taking a longer-term view, engaging in strategic planning, and adopting some more innovative business planning and accountability practices was also seen to be part of their change management focus. a number of the women took advice from formal or informal management advisory groups made up of academic staff and professionals in their unit. some also had the practice of delegating tasks, forming advisory committees and working parties, and using facilitators and process skills to enable shared visioning and decision-making. the development and support of staff and accountability to their peers was seen by all as an important part of their role: “the people issues are 90% of the job it’s the responsibility you have to other staff.” one woman saw her role specifically as a motherly one, nurturing each staff member for the overall good of the work group. another felt particular responsibility for the career development of the large number of professional staff in her unit. similarly, valuing people was also seen as important: “you need to recognize people for what they do.” this ranged from giving public praise and recognition to staff for achievements to offering practical support to staff undertaking higher degrees. as liz stated, you need to allow them to grow…you need to create in people a sense of their own self worth and ability to do the job they have to do – that inside them is what they need. create in people a process of reflection about who they are and what they do in their job and be able to share that with others and look at their process of moving together. several leaders discussed bringing together factionalized and often-hostile groups among academics or between academics and professional (administrative or technical) staff or of bringing back into the fold individually disaffected staff. it was perceived by a number of the women that an understanding of different group cultures and grievances was needed. individual approaches, communication with staff as well as facilitated group meetings that sought common ground, and a shared vision and commitment to the future success of the unit were seen as proactive ways to move groups forward. honesty to staff was also perceived as very important. this included the sharing of information, lack of dissembling or favoritism, transparent policies and decision-making, and honesty to …tell it like it is. i say, “there are going to be changes in work practices – i can’t tell you otherwise, i can’t sit here and pretend – you are going to be part of the changes.” this is a style of management that has never come back to bite me. (stephanie) a high level of personal integrity and accountability was highly valued among the women. several women attributed their success as a manager to personal attributes such as my upbringing, principles for treating people, engendering trust, treating people fairly, values and morals. (marcia) i don’t ask the staff to do anything that i wouldn’t do myself, i don’t see myself as above them but i do have more of a big picture view just because of the meetings i go to and people i talk with. i try to give this view to the staff so they can see the reasons for decisions and can contribute in an informed way. (liz) in summary, each of the women discussed behaviors and attitudes that are consistent with those leadership styles identified in the literature as transformative, exhibiting a range of behaviors such as, 1.         an orientation towards people 2.         a collaborative, co-operative style with peers, supervisors, and subordinates 3.         an orientation toward empowerment and teams 4.         a concern with implementation 5.         fairness 6.         an external perspective 7.         an orientation toward systems 8.         a contextual approach 9.         pragmatism, flexibility, and an ability to deal with ambiguity 10.       an orientation toward the future (cox, 1996; ramsay, 2000; sinclair, 1998) however, sara also commented that these may have been the very qualities that made her a compliant and effective manager in the organization. these issues will be discussed later in the paper. it’s the challenge to be recognized appropriately recognition from their superiors and peers as leaders and skilled managers was important to a number of the women. for some women, there was an issue in being taken seriously as a manager.  as stephanie said, “we need to rise to the challenge to be recognized appropriately.” in relation to being taken seriously by their peers or staff, behaviors such as displaying fairness, an open door policy, a commitment to success, maintaining confidentiality, and not holding grudges were identified by the women as important factors. however, being taken seriously also involved actively confronting certain practices or individuals rather than letting things go on as before. one woman recounted confronting a range of work allocation practices that unfairly privileged certain staff members. another recounted how she had gone out of her way to consult those who had been most resistant to her in the past. consultation, sharing rather than withholding of knowledge, and being open and fair were ways of being recognized by peers and staff. however, it was also acknowledged that to be taken seriously as a manager one had to “call on reserves, do lots of homework for funding and grants, provide skills to others, not take any bullshit, watch my back and stand up for my discipline area” (hayley). their credibility as an academic as well as a manager was important for some but not all of the women. however, sara, who had a wealth of background in management, said, “but i’m a woman and therefore do i really know?” ramsay (2000) has identified this continual imperative for women in leadership positions to reestablish credibility with superiors, peers, and subordinates as a factor that drains morale and threatens productivity. other factors were also seen to be important in achieving recognition from more senior managers. earning extra funds for the organization was seen as a behaviour that was rewarded in managers in terms of organizational kudos and respect from senior management as sara stated, “those who advance the university in dollar terms advance their own career.” initiating entrepreneurial activities and winning large dollar research grants or consultancies were perceived as among the behaviors most valued in the organizational culture. it was also observed that money generation through entrepreneurship or obtaining grants was publicly praised in the organization.  lorraine noted, “i think what we’re doing well is the people stuff and that’s not recognized.” at the same time there was concern that “they say they value the person but what they say they value and what they promote (promotion to a higher level) are two different things” (gwenda).  while all acknowledged the need for the university sector to earn income through entrepreneurial activities, some saw the need to make money as less well-fitting their discipline area and the associated temperaments. others relished the ability to be entrepreneurial within the parameters of offering access to quality education to a broader group of people, indicating a clear preference to ally the humanistic values of the traditional university culture with the newer corporatist imperatives. there was recognition among the women below professorial level that concentrating on the people issues that formed the social glue of the organization was giving them a pause in their careers rather than furthering them. obtaining a ph.d., research and publications, and a high profile in their discipline area were seen to be the most expedient way to promotion, not “doing the invisible work really” (gwenda). the several women below professorial level particularly discussed stalling their careers because of their management roles within the juggling act of teaching and research. these women saw themselves spread too thinly over each area and recognized that possessing higher degrees and having a robust research profile as well as making money were needed if they wished to further their careers. these women saw getting time for research and completion of higher degrees as problematic. sara stated that in her fifth year as a manager she was just starting to take a weekly research day.  another three women had postponed taking study leave because of institutional needs and now regretted that they had not been able to advance their higher degree studies. in attending to the people issues, all of these women seem to be undertaking a great deal of emotional labor for the organization (hochschild, 1983). several mentioned organizational expectations of them as managers related to “keeping the lid” on issues, “controlling the troops when the flack hits,” “being responsible managers of the budget,” and compliance and conservatism. however, the qualities that some of the women identified in themselves and other women managers as selflessness, humor, and a high ethical stance were noted as the very qualities that worked against them in terms of playing the politics of managing up for recognition and patronage and gaining time to research or publish. in addition, while a number of the more senior women had been geographically mobile in their careers, for others, mobility was an issue. at least three of the women discussed ties to the geographical area (mostly due to partners’ jobs and responsibilities for older relatives) that made career progression through movement difficult: “there was an opportunity but i couldn’t persuade the family.” several of the women also commented on the tremendous benefits of attending conferences or meetings within their discipline but lamented the relative cost. isolation within their discipline, “i’m the only one of me here!”, and mentoring and development opportunities were identified by some as an issue. the majority of the women commented on having to find their way in a male environment: “our workplace is still very male-centric” (marcia), “this university is a model of a bureaucratic hierarchy. the plum positions are given to men – women are called in to clean things up” (hayley) echoing burton’s (1999) observations of women’s “care-taking” roles. several women critiqued the practices of certain male staff at the same level for being aloof from their staff, less inclusive and consultative, keeping power and information to themselves, and being less supportive of the people beneath them. these colleagues were viewed as more overtly ambitious for themselves and not team players, findings that concur with those reported by ramsay (2000). although it was recognized that there was not an overt boys club in the organization, especially when women were present, it was perceived that such behaviors were latent among some staff: there is a bravado and point scoring – never when we are all together although it’s there and wouldn’t take much to get a hold. in a male dominated situation even though individual males have the capacity not to function as “one of the boys,” when you have a number of them together it’s hard for them not to slip into “one of the boys” behaviour.  there are a lot of men who have the capability to operate in a feminist mode but it’s a question of what’s happening around them and whether they have the permission. in other territory they slip back into the behaviours – a withholding of information and it’s a “see how clever i am” set of games that are constructed and played through. (stephanie) on the other hand, being a female manager was also seen as an advantage at times as more subtle ways of managing the power politics could be engineered. one women stated that she did not take contentious or sensitive issues through the main management forum but rather chose to speak with individuals first. similarly, a woman is not seen as the same level of competition particularly where and how you get the decision made. i think it’s easier for a woman to get the end she wants. you get a lot more confidences (as a woman) and (have the communication skills) to get your own way. they also condescend to you. you have to think of what you want as an outcome. (liz) it was also recognized that a number of women were more outspoken than male counterparts in similar roles. wyn (1997, p. 121) discusses marginality as giving some women the courage to “speak your mind in terms of dissent and critique.” in this case women who had talked back were discussed by at least two of the women: “those who have spoken out, it has not been well accepted.” clearly, there are ways to effect decisions and the more overt ways in public forums, which some women often use in playing by the rules, are not those that influence. it was noted that there appeared to be some embarrassment on the part of some managers that gender equity issues still needed to be discussed.  as liz stated, “after all, there are other issues like race and disability. it’s like…we’ve had eeo. everything’s fine here. look at all the women in management roles.” you’re always juggling each woman displayed a deep understanding of the pressures on the higher education sector: massification in a climate of quality audit, packaging of knowledge as a product, client service, and research for quick results rather than longitudinal studies. they displayed in-depth appreciation of the financial constraints on the sector and on regional universities in particular and the need to source funds through entrepreneurial activities. however, these increasing pressures were seen to impact on management roles. six of the seven women commented on the high workload involved in their roles. while some relished this, “i enjoy it so much – i would work seven days a week, all day” (gwenda), others found that they sometimes felt overwhelmed.  a marcia stated, “it’s not having enough time, having too many things to do, always juggling priorities, the amount of work that builds up when you have to go away…everything is in short grabs.” for all of the women there was a large amount of paperwork, e-mails, meetings, and people issues. the volume of work is more apparent “only when you get away from it” and “realize what you have done.” as one woman mentioned, a huge amount of time is spent doing things for people that have no benefit for yourself personally. i made no progress on my ph.d. because i was doing the work that doesn’t show. (gwenda) the volume of written material was also commented on: “i’m always writing words – reports, submissions, reviews, curriculum documents, handover reports. does anyone read it?” (hayley). all women had techniques for dealing with high volume and complexity: i get up at 5 a.m. and do an hour and a half’s worth of e-mails. i make lists, stuff rarely falls off the bottom.  i do things once when they come across the desk.  i stay behind or work at home a few hours every night to get all the e-mails done. i’ve got my own phone line at home, computer, and fax. i can work 24 hours a day. it gets you on a treadmill and unfortunately, the more you do, the more comes your way. (marcia) harvey (1990) identified the compression of time and space in contemporary corporate behaviours. examples such as getting to work before the boss or staying at work late into the evening, always being contactable by fax, e-mail, or mobile phone even while on holidays are commonplace. kerfoot and knights (1993) also have identified the gender inflected nature of long hours, visibility, and competition. collinson and collinson (1997) demonstrated how such practices highlight the difficult relationship between work and home and leads to a re-masculinization of management where women managers only survive where they emulate the behaviors of the male colleagues. as sara stated, “i think our workplace is still very male-centric. men can stay behind for a drink, are expected to travel at short notice. there is back up at home for men.”  several women regretted lack of time to have a social life or look after their health and well being: “i spend too many hours in front of a computer, i sit in meetings, i puff upstairs.” “i’m, concerned about my weight,” and “i used to be a very fit person” were typical responses. tretheway (1999), in examining women’s professional, embodied identities, illuminated ways in which the female body is physically and emotionally disciplined; fit not fat, built for endurance, ready to perform in time and space. of more concern were the effects of stress on the female managerial body. during stressful times a number of women noted “i had a tight chest, heart palpitations,” “i was not sleeping, waking up in the middle of the night,” “i was using alcohol to relax.” as hayley and lorraine said respectively, i’ve been feeling less well in the last couple of years, not recovering as quickly as i used to. i’m getting tired, not taking leave breaks like i advise others to do. there have been a few big things and the emotional angst of not being able to sort it out. you wear some of the guilt and emotional stress for things like that. it does get you down but you try not to take it home. undertaking the emotional labor of the people issues; physical availability allied to time and space compression; and the sedentary work of meetings, computers, and travel appear to have taken their toll on the wellness of some of the women. however, all of the women stressed that they were in their roles by choice: “not everyone dances to the same drum as i do. the long hours – it’s my choice, not everybody’s” (marcia). all mentioned that they obtained great satisfaction from their roles. liz’s and hayley’s responses are fairly typical: i feel great when i do something that enables good things to happen – curriculum innovation, helping students through the maze of bureaucracy, supporting someone through promotion. that’s what makes it worthwhile. (liz) it’s about moving things along, influencing senior management decisions. (hayley) these activities involved being able to achieve things, make a difference, and influence their institutions’ direction as well as enabling others to develop. all women reported pleasure and satisfaction in being in the thick of it, and experiencing stimulating, challenging work. however, most saw these elements in terms of service rather than as part of developing their own careers. others were able to leave work behind at the end of the day: “if the budget’s blown you’re not going to die” (sara). “i think, god i’ve go to do this. god, i’ve got to do that,” and another part of me says, “so what, the world is not going to stop’’ (lorraine). however, there are frustrations and doubts: …i fell pretty diminished when i’m condescended to or my contribution to something is discounted. i don’t mind being ignored..it’s more when my work is ignored or marginalized, that’s when it gets to me. and when they trot out my ideas as their own …we’ll i’m either the greatest change agent or totally used…it’s hard to tell sometimes. conclusion a number of the women articulated the paradoxes in their roles in relation to the expectations of the new public management. the very skills and qualities that made them good people and conflict managers have recently been identified by eveline (2004) as “glue work” and her research has indicated that women in universities engage in a disproportionate amount of it. the women in my case study also recognized the paradoxical nature of such work. on the one hand, it positions them as part of the managerialist culture, “doing the dirty work for management” when difficult matters needed to be dealt with. several of the women appreciated that their consultative styles could be seen to be appropriated by the new managerialism to keep the workforce involved and compliant, particularly in relation to industrial relations issues such as intensification of work. on the other hand, these women also perceived that they brought a more humanistic orientation to often difficult staffing and budgetary matters and argued that because of their transparent management practice “it would be worse if we weren’t in there working” (stephanie). they keenly recognized that this work also was undervalued in the masculinist culture of the organization and took them away from other activities such as completing ph.d.s, building a research profile, or well-regarded entrepreneurial activities. munford and rumball (2001) identify that many women experience greater discomfort or tension if they are operating in situations that seem contrary to their own philosophy. a number of the women expressed an awareness of the considerable pressures on academic managers to reconstruct the self to performativity criteria and thus gain the goodies of recognition from senior management and promotion. however, alongside this was a very clear commitment to equitable and inclusive practices: much as we’d like it there’s no going back – we have to bring the best values forward into the new context. the challenge is to operate with integrity in the new environment. (liz) it appears that the humanistic values of the old university context are being employed in the new and that the identity of academic and manager/enterprising subject sit, often not comfortably, side by side. blackmore and sachs (2000, p. 2) have identified a number of paradoxes that shape the work of women in leadership and management in australian universities, including, “…the notions of academic identity which are collegial while merit is rewarded on the basis of individual achievement.” at one level, the work identities of the women in this study have been reconstituted to performativity criteria as they have taken on the contemporary values of the sector and the organization in governing the workforce. the paradox is that while there is also a level of resistance on the part of the women to certain practices or management roles that are not humanistic and empowering, their very women’s way of managing is also co-opted to organizational ends. furthermore, in undertaking the often invisible emotional work of the organization a price is paid by those women in more front-line positions as they have little time or energy to “do the things that really count” in terms of organizational values. while these women recognized that they were being good people managers, the perception was also expressed that the real action was happening elsewhere and that they were putting inordinate time into maintaining organizational health. chesterman, peters, and ross-smith (2003), in their broad study of australian senior female university managers, have observed a similar phenomenon. another paradox for some of the women surrounds the absorbing work of their discipline bases that they have put aside to undertake management roles. discipline specific work offers another identity closer to that constituted by the more traditional, humanistic academic culture. a number saw this as a comfort zone and area of personal satisfaction as well as a pathway to promotion. having experienced the management life, at least two women echoed sara’s views, “management is not where we want to be.” at university x, an analysis of the organizational structure and climate a little over a year after the initial research reveals some interesting phenomena. two further mini-organizational restructures have occurred with a number of amalgamations of academic units on the grounds of efficiency and cost savings rather than academic rationale. frontline management roles at head of school level have been aggregated from 14 positions to 9. in at least 3 of the cases there has existed potential for competition between female front-line managers still trying to lead in a humanistic, collegial manner. munford and rumball (1999) note that with downsizing and restructuring the relatively few women in management roles often, and paradoxically, find themselves in competition with each other. in this case, it appears that female participation in management is declining through both restructure and a disinclination of some women to continue in their paradoxical roles. in this case, the competitive climate of new public management has pitted women against each other with some stepping back from management roles in the current climate. whether the factors analyzed above are prevalent in the wider university sector and have a particular regional overlay is the subject of further investigation. these factors also need to be considered in the light of another sectoral phenomena. chesterman et al (2003) have identified that relatively large numbers of senior academic women, who were the trailblazers in tertiary education management, will be retiring in the next few years. it may be speculated as to the readiness and willingness of the next cohort of women to take on these roles given the identified sacrifices and paradoxes. it may also be speculated as to the willingness of some universities to support the development of this next wave of academic leaders. references aitkin, d. 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(2000). making a difference: women in management in australian and canadian faculties of education. gender and education,12(4), 435-447.   copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 29, number 2 may 03, 2009 issn 1093-7099 black women employed in the ivory tower: connecting for success dr. wilma j. henry nicole m. glenn abstract the purpose of this article is to continue the dialogue regarding the impact of lack of critical mass and systemic racism on the success of black women employed in higher education. while the literature suggests that it is essential for black women to connect with one another in order to overcome the obstacles they face within the academy, the effects of systemic racism and their underrepresentation in the profession makes this recommendation extremely difficult to implement in some settings, and nearly impossible in others. black feminist thought and critical race theory provide a theoretical framework for discussing innovative connective opportunities that promote the success of black women working in higher education. individual as well as institutional strategies are presented as a means to address the obstacles encountered by black female faculty and staff in predominantly white institutions (pwis). implications for practice are discussed and recommendations for research are offered. keywords: women, racism, black women, higher education citation: henry, w., & glenn. n. (2009). black women employed in the ivory tower: connecting for success . advancing women in leadership journal, 29(2). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 2 introduction “it is evident that universities are still perceived by black women to be ivory towers as the structures and culture fail to acknowledge or value their contributions to society” (henry, 1994, p. 54). although black women have been participating in american higher education for more than a century and have certainly made great strides towards occupying their rightful place within academia, they continue to face a myriad of personal and professional challenges (gregory, 2001). researchers continue to document a multitude of barriers encountered by black female students, faculty, and staff (bonner & thomas, 2001; gordon, 2004; gregory, 2001; henderson, 2005; hughes & howard-hamilton, 2003; nichols & tanksley, 2004; robinson, 1996; simpson, 2001; thomas & hollenshead, 2001). among the literature, studies reveal findings of co-occurring discrimination related to race and gender (zamani, 2003), lack of support systems and networks (patton & harper, 2003), and unwelcoming, insensitive, and isolative environments (watt, 2003). according to gregory, black women have demonstrated a great deal of resiliency despite being hidden behind the tripartite-layered veil of persecution that is the result of their race, gender, and class. underlying and perpetuating these oppressive conditions are the interrelated global obstacles of systemic racism and the lack of a critical mass, especially at predominantly white institutions (pwis) (bagilhole, 1994; henry, thompson, & richards; 2006). for example, howard-hamilton (2003) notes that one of the issues that black women face when participating in higher education, is that they are confronted with a multitude of “conscious, unconscious, verbal, nonverbal, and visual forms of insults [that] are directed toward people of color, [which] are called microaggressions” (p. 23). in addition, due to the lack of a critical mass at pwis, many black women in the academy are left to wade through the numerous barriers they face by themselves. the significant challenges oftentimes inherent in small numbers coupled with institutional racial and gender inequality, have prompted black women in academia to employ a variety of coping strategies that have been key to their academic and professional advancement (bagilhole, 1994; thomas & hollenshead, 2001). specifically, black women connect with mentors within their academic discipline, establish supportive networks of colleagues in and outside of their departments and institutions, work to achieve high visibility in their communities, and rely on their personal contacts to create useful professional alliances (gregory, 2001). central among these major mediators of goal attainment are all forms of connecting, especially with other black women, to bridge the physical gap on campuses caused by lack of a critical mass and to lessen the pain of racism. while several success strategies have been proposed to help black women navigate the treacherous conditions in which they commonly find themselves, the effects of systemic racism and lack of critical mass intertwine to make connecting with one another difficult in some cases, and virtually impossible in others. unfortunately many black women find themselves navigating the socio-political complexities of the ivory tower in isolation. the purpose of this article is to further the discussion surrounding the impact of systemic racism and the lack of critical mass on the success of black women working in higher education settings, particularly in predominantly white institutions (pwis). black feminist thought and critical race theory advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 3 provide a theoretical framework for discussing opportunities that may assist black women professionals in overcoming some of the continuing obstacles that plague them within higher educational institutions. the use of technology and creative programming in developing connective opportunities to address the obstacles that black female faculty, staff, and administrators face in pwis are presented in this article. implications for practice are discussed and recommendations for research are offered. literature review the issues and obstacles faced by black women that impede their full participation in and contribution to higher education are not new (elman, 1991). they are old issues that have not yet been fully acknowledged, discussed and resolved. for example, two decades ago, noble (1988) provided a sweeping review of the motivations, challenges, and advancements of black women pursuing postsecondary education in the united states during the 1900s. this historical work highlighted research findings that illuminated the black woman’s persistent struggle to discover and occupy her rightful place within the academy by exploring the chronic competing interests of race uplift, personal fulfillment, and social and economic mobility (noble, 1988). in addition to the challenges encountered by black female college students, mosley (1980) spoke to the dearth of black women employed in leadership positions within higher education. this author suggested that black women were few in number; occupied positions that afforded them little, if any power; received little or no support from their peers and; were underpaid and overworked. the problems cited by mosely in 1980 were among the same concerns that several researchers identified as barriers facing black women in academia in the 1990s. for example, among these recurring issues were the chilly and unwelcoming campus climate (henry & nixon, 1994), feelings of isolation and salary inequities (bagilhole, 1994), competing personal and professional obligations (leonard and malina, 1994), and the fact that black women faculty at pwis “give more, receive less and burn out sooner” (mobley, 1992, p. ). unfortunately, the same types of concerns and issues identified in the 80s and 90s have persisted into the 21st century (gregory 2001; hughes & howard-hamilton, 2003; nichols & tanksley, 2004; patitu & hinton, 2003; rosales & person, 2003). the effects of systemic racism that black women face in the academy can be directly observed in and attributed to the underrepresentation, or lack of critical mass of black in higher education in general. although blacks have made significant strides in participating in and completing postsecondary education, there remain glaring disparities between the educational achievements of black and white americans. for example, 32.6% of all black americans ages 18-24 were enrolled in higher education in 2006, compared to 41.0% of all white americans ages 18-24 (journal of blacks in higher education, 2008). as a result of blacks’ lower participation rates, their completion rates also lag behind the completion rates of whites. in 2007, only 19.5% of black adults ages 25-29 held a bachelor’s degree, compared to 35.5% of white adults in the same age range (journal of blacks in higher education, 2008). the statistics for blacks working in the academy paint an equally disparaging picture. in 2005, there were 145,936 white, full professors at colleges and universities in the united states; during this same year, there were 5,484 black full professors (journal of blacks in higher education, 2008). in 2003, blacks in general working in executive, administrative, and managerial staff positions in institutions of higher education represented only 11% (perna, gerald, baum, and milem, 2006). advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 4 systemic racism & its impact on the success of black women employed within the academy current research continues to reveal that issues of racial and gender inequality remain extremely salient features within american higher education, especially for black women working in higher education (hughes & howard-hamilton, 2003). the systemic racism that black women face in the academy can be observed in a wide variety of professional experiences. recruitment and retention patitu and hinton (2003) asserted that the recruitment activities of some institutions disadvantage black women. for example, the existence of de facto segregation, in which many hiring decisions favor and reflect the race of the dominant group on campus, was noted by hughes and howard-hamilton (2003) as common disadvantage black women face. furthermore, when black women do obtain professional positions within higher education, they can expect, in general, to be paid less than white men and white women. gregory (2001) contended that women and minorities consistently receive lower starting salaries than members of the dominant culture who are equally qualified and experienced. guillory (2001) also observed that black females were more likely to have lower average salaries than both black and white males (in absolute terms). black women’s membership in both a minority race and a minority gender, continues to place them in double jeopardy within the context of administrative and faculty salary negotiation processes. patricia hill collins (2000) refers to this social phenomenon as the intersectionality of multiple marginalized identities. she defines intersectionality as systems of race, social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and age forming features of social organization, which shape a population’s experiences and in turn are shaped by the population. promotion and tenure an example of the systemic racism that black women faculty encounter within higher education is related to the promotion and tenure process. according to gregory (2001), surviving promotion and tenure is usually directly correlated with professional success and retention in academia. she pointed out that black women are still grossly underrepresented in tenure-earning faculty positions and that when they do achieve these positions, they are likely to suffer emotional and psychological abuse during the tenure review process. patitu and hinton’s research (2003) support this assertion and indicated that black women in their study reported more negative than positive tenure-related experiences. patitu and hinton cited the following as the most common barriers these women faced in the pursuing tenure and promotion: “conflicting information, unwritten rules, lack of direction and mentoring, and nitpicking or triviality” (p. 87). additionally, these researchers noted that racism, as opposed to sexism, presented greater challenges for black women seeking promotion and tenure. along with the traditional demands that faculty encounter, black women faculty must also find time to informally mentor and advise black students who seek racially similar role models (hughes and howard-hamilton, 2003). as a result, these women may be less productive in their research endeavors thus jeopardizing their opportunities for promotion and tenure (gregory 2001). advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 5 professional interpersonal interactions black women in academia must also grapple with an overwhelming lack of support and respect which results from the dominant culture’s elitist attitudes and exclusionary practices (bagilhole, 1994). evidence of this devaluing can be observed in almost every type of interpersonal encounter in which the black woman engages within the academy (with superiors, colleagues, and students). as harris (2007) reported, she feels that she has been in the “precarious position of defining and defending [her] professional identity because of [her] race and gender” (pp. 57). since the beginning of her career in academia, harris has insisted on being addressed by her professional title, doctor harris, to deal with the lack of respect within and outside of the classroom—places where her "intellect, authority and credibility" (p. 59) as a professor are questioned. hughes and howard-hamilton also (2003) reported that: evidence of systemic racism…can be found in the classroom when students question, query, challenge, and dismiss the intellectual ability of an african american faculty member. in all of these situations, no amount of experience is enough to prove that she is highly capable when the group comprises people who do not look like her. (p. 99) additionally, crouther (2002) contended that when the grade point average of some white students is threatened by a grade lower than an “a,” from a woman faculty of color, there can be problems to include unfavorable faculty evaluations. black women also continue to suffer ostracism from their colleagues and superiors. research conducted by patitu and hinton (2003) revealed similar patterns of isolation among the black women faculty and administrators in their study. the women in their study reported that they experienced marginalization and lack of support from both their peers and managers. for example, some of these women reported being sexually harassed by an immediate supervisor, being denied budgetary resources, and being ignored and/or alienated altogether. furthermore, in some instances when black women do form collegial relationships with peers, the results are just as devastating and demeaning. being viewed as a “twofer,” someone who counts as a female and minority race hire has been a salient attitude that allen (1998) has encountered in academia. allen recounts being blatantly told by a departmental colleague that she was “an affirmative action hire and not qualified” for the tenure-tracked professorship (p. 579). the picture is not much different for black women campus administrators. as hughes & howard-hamilton (2003) noted subtle expressions of incompetence and inexperience are made, often in cases where an african american woman oversees a unit on campus. in research pursuits thomas and hollenshead (2001) label the result of the widespread lack of support that black women experience, “a feeling of invisibleness” (p. 166). these researchers suggest that even in one of the most highly regarded academic activities within the academy, scholarly research, black women faculty oftentimes find little support for their research, especially if they are interested in studying issues that affect or are related to people of color. furthermore, many black women academicians believe that their research is not valued, their opinions regarding research ideas do not matter to colleagues (thomas & hollenshead, 2001) and that they are less advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 6 likely to be asked by a senior white faculty member to be a co-author on a publication (patitu & hinton, 2003). in summary, black women faculty and administrators who are fortunate enough to infiltrate the elitist ranks of higher education face an incredible amount of distress as a result of these racially motivated, pervasive psychological assaults. lack of critical mass & its impact on the success of black women in the academy black women in higher education, whether employed as faculty or administrators, are also confronted with a myriad of issues related to their underrepresentation in the academy, which is also referred to in the literature as lack of critical mass. as defined by miller (2003), critical mass: exists whenever, within a given group [of individuals], there are enough members from a particular group such that they feel comfortable participating in the conversation and that [others] see them as individuals rather than as spokespersons for their race. (¶ 18) in examining the current status of black women faculty, researchers contend that although gains have been made in the numbers of black women working in higher education, they remain severely underrepresented and have not yet obtained the same participation levels as their white male and female counterparts (gregory, 2001). as of 2005, black female faculty represented 6.7% of the 274, 117 female faculty and 2.7% of the 675, 624 total faculty employed at degreegranting institutions (us department of education, 2006). at the assistant professor level, black female faculty numbered 5,438 with only 1,986 employed as full professors. conversely, white female assistant professors numbered 54,226 with 36,808 employed as full professors (us department of education, 2006). as several researchers have indicated, black women are not faring much better in administrative position within higher education either (moses, 1997; belk, 2006). for instance, in the 2006-07 chronicle of higher education almanac, it was reported that in the fall of 2003, black women were employed in approximately 5.6% of all college and university executive, administrative and management positions. although it is difficult to ascertain the exact number of black women who are employed in university administrative positions, according to belk, “data from 2005 indicated that fewer than 3% of [acpa] members were classified as midlevel black administrators at four-year institutions” (p. 18). the preceding data suggests that black women continue to be severely underrepresented in both faculty and administrative positions within the academy and their ability to overcome the obstacles that result from systemic racism is severely hampered by this underrepresentation. one primary issue that emerges when analyzing the impact of the lack of critical mass black women face in higher education is the scarcity of other black women to serve as role models, mentors, peer advisors, and confidants. this unavailability is the result of not only the low concentration of black women at pwis overall, but also their dearth in specific administrative roles and academic disciplines. hughes and howard-hamilton (2003) provided evidence that supports this assertion and contend that many black women faculty are forced to look outside of their academic discipline for support. as these researchers concluded, the advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 7 physical isolation that is the result of the low numbers and dispersion of black women in academia, causes them to connect sporadically and haphazardly. another factor that is attributed to the lack of critical mass is the manner in which black women are disproportionally overloaded with professional obligations that completely absorb the time they have to engage in formal and informal supportive relationships. gregory (2001) noted the lack of opportunity that black women have to reap the benefits of professional support networks while phelps (1995) reported that black faculty women considered it essential to “have access to others who could validate their experiences, welcome their input, and critique their work” (gregory, 2001, p. 130). black women, because of their low numbers, are also called upon to work with black students more than their white colleagues, because these students naturally seek advisors who look like them (i.e. race and gender) (hughes and howardhamilton, 2003). in addition, they are sought out to represent the minority opinion in institutional service activities, such as committee meetings, leadership groups and training programs, far more frequently than their white peers (gregory, 2001). all of these demands diminish the time that black women have to identify, establish, cultivate, and maintain relationships that will empower them for success in the academy. theoretical framework black feminist and critical race perspectives suggest that creating and sustaining strong connective relationships with other black women are essential to their social and psychological wellbeing (hughes and howard-hamilton, 2003). majority monocultural human development theories are harmful when they are used as the primary lens to understand the developmental needs and experiences of black women because these theories are validated on non-black persons. according to howard-hamilton (2003) black feminist thought and critical race theory provide an appropriate framework which adds an important element of depth to our understandings about the struggles and needs of black women in academia. black feminist thought black feminist thought is a theory that centralizes and validates the intersecting dimensions of race and gender that are uniquely experienced in the lives of african american women. it is grounded on the premise that the majority of black women share certain commonalities, perceptions, and experiences. the distinctness of their worldview is due in large part to the larger sociopolitical development of american culture (collins, 2004; howardhamilton, 2003; smedley, 2007; waters & conaway, 2007; white, 2001). this sociopolitical context represents a common experience among african american women and is one feature of their collective identity (howard-hamilton, 2003). according to collins (2002), at the core of black feminist thought is the concept of standpoint, which suggests that the inherited struggle against racism and sexism is a common bond among african american women. collins contends that while all african americans experience racism, they do not experience and/or respond to racism in the same way due to the diversity (i.e., class, age, religion, sexual orientation, etc.) that exist among these women. additionally, race and gender are often internalized in ways that contribute to a significant advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 8 portion of one’s worldview (smedley, 2007; zamani, 2003). as members of two groups-african americans and women-who have been historically oppressed and marginalized, their unique voice offers important insight into the needs and aspirations of this group (collins, 2004; simien, 2006). collins (2000) also suggests that there are four themes inherent within black feminist thought. the first theme, “the lived experience as a criterion of meaning,” refers to the knowledge black women gain as a result of their life experiences. the next theme, “the use of dialogue,” suggests the importance of establishing bonds and relationships since oppressive and contentious events are seldom solved in isolation. the “ethic of caring” theme incorporates the use of expressiveness, emotion and empathy as a means for greater understanding of the black woman’s unique experiences. recognizing that personal values influence knowledge, the fourth theme, the “ethic of personal accountability” refers to knowledge claims which lack objectivity. the expression of these themes by black women may vary given differences in class, region, age, ethnicity and sexual orientation, which impact the lives of these women individualistically (collins). despite the significance of black women’s distinct perspectives, there is a paucity of research that accurately expresses the unique, yet common experiences of black women—and even less research originates from the perspective of the black woman herself. central to collins’ paradigm is the role of black female intellectuals “… to produce facts and theories about the black female experience that will clarify a black woman’s standpoint for black women” (2002, p. 469). applied to higher education, black feminist thought is important in assisting black college women to effectively deal with the wide array of “microagressive” indignities (i.e., racists attitudes and behaviors) encountered in their daily campus experiences (howard-hamilton, 2003). black feminist thought (collins, 1990, 1998, 2002) recognizes the marginalization felt by many black women in academia, which is sometimes described as the “outsider within status” (howard-hamilton, 2003, p. 21). critical race theory critical race theory (delgado and stefanic, 2001; villalpando and bernal, 2002; smith, altbach, and lomotey, 2002) was developed in response to racial oppression in society and seeks to “deconstruct [the] racialized content” (howard-hamilton, 2003, p. 22) of institutional practices, curriculum, and research. it takes a stand against avoiding issues of race and history through colorblindness and a historicism. in particular, critical race theory deeply values the knowledge of people of color that is grounded in their daily life experiences. this theory is centered on the transforming empowerment experienced by people of color that is the result of examing the various contexts that construct their identities. within this theoretical framework, black women share their experiences, also referred to as “counterstories” with one another in welcoming and hospitable counterspaces (hughes and howard-hamilton, 2003, p. 101). conversations may include recounting of the many racial vituperations that these women face on a daily basis (howard-hamilton, 2003). critical race theory recognizes that in order for black women to survive in a racially hostile society, they must identify environments in which it is safe to discuss their plight among those with similar experiences. hughes and howard-hamilton (2003) describe the theory in practice: advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 9 support systems include opportunities for african american women to form sister circles and share counterstories that refute some of the negative information they may have received during their daily campus routines. such support systems are not intended to portray or reinforce a debilitating sense of self and hopelessness but, instead, to provide settings in which to create an identity not based on gender roles or racial stereotyping. the role models and facilitators of these support groups should be african american women. (p. 101) discussion although the literature suggests that it is essential for black women to connect with one another (hughes and howard-hamilton, 2003; collins, 2000), their underrepresentation in the field makes this recommendation difficult to achieve, especially in face-to-face interactions, in some cases. in other cases, it is virtually impossible to find another african-american female and/or male to interact with in the same unit, department and/or division on some college campuses (brightharp, henry, hinton, et al., 2005). both black feminist thought and critical race theory provide useful cues for redressing the disenfranchisement that black women continue to experience in institutions of higher education. the concept of standpoint, which describes the bonding that occurs among black women as a result of their common struggle against racism and sexism, suggests that connective strategies may work to strengthen and empower these women. furthermore, critical race theory relies heavily on the sharing of personal experiences (known as “counterstories”) and the creation of supportive and welcoming environments (“counterspaces”) in helping black women overcome the challenges related to systemic racism that are compounded by the lack of critical mass. it is within this context that the following individual and institutional strategies are offered to counter some of the difficulties that black women working in higher education face when attempting to establish and sustain relationships with one another. individual strategies connecting through mentoring there are several connective strategies that black women in the academy may employ to counter the isolation, lack of support and marginalization they face. according to gregory (2001), one of the most detrimental obstacles to the academic success of black women is the absence of mentoring relationships. moreover, a study conducted by noble (1988) revealed that having a mentor was reported to enhance black faculty women's opportunities for promotion and tenure as well as provide important information needed for professional mobility. patton and harper (2003) asserted that black women would be served best by same-race female mentors because they would “understand the complex intersection of race and gender in the academy and society” more than mentors from other racial backgrounds (p. 71). the pressing need for black women in higher education to engage in healthy mentoring relationships is in direct conflict with their underrepresentation in general and within specific academic disciplines. even when they are present in adequate numbers, they are unavailable to fulfill the mentoring role due to the overwhelming professional demands they face. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 10 in attempting to identify same-race mentors, black women in the academy may have to explore building cross-functional and/or cross-disciplinary connective relationships. for instance, black women faculty may have to venture beyond the confines of their department or academic college to find same-race mentors. similarly, black female student affairs professionals may have to seek the support of black women faculty or other black women employed in seemingly unconnected functional areas within student affairs (i.e. a director of student health services connecting with the director of career services). additionally, black women working in higher education are encouraged to identify the external sources from which they can develop mentoring relationships (i.e. church, social organizations, family, friends, etc). furthermore, black women may also benefit from forming mentoring relationships with individuals outside of their race. however, hughes and howard-hamilton (2003) warned that some black women have reported that in attempting “to make a connection with their white advisers or faculty members [they] were rebuffed” (p. 101). similarly, patton and harper (2003) noted that mentoring relationships with individuals from other racial or ethnic backgrounds resulted in less favorable outcomes. black women must take initiative and continue to proactively forge meaningful formal and informal mentoring relationships with one another if they are to survive and thrive in professional settings where they are significantly underrepresented. connecting through spirituality spirituality has also been documented as useful in helping black women combat “the everyday struggles that come with living in a socially and politically oppressive system,” (watt, 2003, p. 29). researchers have defined the role of faith and spirituality as a coping mechanism (constantine, wilton, gainor, and lewis, 2002; thomas, 2001), a point of psychological resistance (robinson and ward, 1991; robinson and howard-hamilton, 1994, brookins and robinson, 1995) and an identity construct that is emphasized in the black woman’s plight to develop a positive identity (stewart, 2002; watt, 1997). according to watt (2003), “the search for an integrated identity is intense for african american women who exist in a culture where being female and being black are devalued” (p. 32). in essence, the unique intersectionality of the constructs of race and gender contributes to the formation of black women’s developmental and social identities (howard-hamilton, 2003; stephens & phillips, 2005). from this perspective and within the common context of their underrepresentation, spirituality may be employed as a connective strategy to assist black women in overcoming the issues of isolation and marginalization they experience in higher education. constantine, miville, warren, gainor, and lewis-coles (2006) noted that several connective spiritual activities such as attending church and participating in group bible study were used by participants in their study as a means to deal with career-related challenges. furthermore, williams, frame, and green (1999) asserted that “because spirituality is interwoven with african american identity, it becomes a powerful resource for personal growth with african american women in groups” (p. 262). black women in the academy who are over burdened with a plethora of competing personal and professional demands may be more likely to pursue supportive relationships with other black women that are based upon their spiritual connectedness and common struggle. connecting through involvement in professional organizations advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 11 another strategy that black women faculty and staff may find useful in connecting with other black women in the academy is participation in local, regional, and national professional organizations. twale and shannon (1996) have noted the findings of several researchers who contend that “association involvement has often offered a more hospitable environment than the academic workplace” for women in higher education (p. 117). additionally, the following benefits that positively impact career success and satisfaction have been noted from participating in professional associations: “camaraderie and networking among colleagues to fulfill social and psychological needs not met on campus; influencing one's field and advancing and disseminating scholarship; professional development; and career stature. historically, professional conferences and workshops have provided a forum for blacks in general, and black women in particular, to share and exchange ideas related to their personal and professional development. for example, the african american women’s summit has been offered as a pre-conference workshop at the national association of student personnel administrators (naspa) and the american college personnel association’s (acpa) annual conventions for a number of years (henry, brightharp, powell, et al., 2008; henry, brightharp, howard-hamilton, et al., 2007; henry, brightharp, brazzel, et al., 2006; brightharp, henry, hinton, et al., 2005; howard-hamilton, henry, hinton, et al., 2004). this gathering has provided a venue in which black women in the academy can connect with one another and share their personal and professional struggles and success strategies (w. j. henry, personal communication, june 10, 2008). as facilitators and participants engage one another in interest sessions geared toward the issues and concerns of black women, as suggested in black feminist thought and critical race theory, inevitably the sharing of “counterstories” occurs. these types of opportunities have become especially important for a number of blacks in higher education who find themselves in positions at institutions where there is a lack of a critical mass of black peers and few role models who “look like them” with whom they can connect. institutional strategies connecting through programming it is imperative that colleges and universities take an active role in establishing connective programming that decreases the obstacles that black women contend with on a daily basis when attempting to connect with one another (hughes and howard-hamilton, 2003). patton and harper (2003) asserted that “the most important step for institutions that wish to prove that they are sincere about wanting to retain african american women, be they faculty, administrators, or students, is to provide support systems” (hughes & howard-hamilton, 2003, p. 101). it is essential that black women be provided the space and time to engage in meaningful and safe interpersonal exchanges with one another. watt (2003) recommends holistic programming that “create[s] an environment in which women can discuss what it means to experience life being both female and black” (watt, 2003, p. 38). to assist black women to “operate from a position of strength” (tatum, 1999), the university would institute well advertised and integrated programming to provide ongoing connective services to black female students, faculty and staff. for example, among these services, the university may provide space and promotional assistance for sister circles and ‘waiting to exhale’ indiana university style advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 12 retreats for black and white women to foster positive understandings through sharing personal life stories (howard-hamilton, 2003). this connective programming approach, while driven and embraced by the institution itself, would be supported collectively by all university stakeholders. african american faculty would contribute to its success by supporting outreach and encouraging women to create peer mentoring circles/sister circles. students would establish and grow cross-disciplinary connections, join student and professional organizations, and when desired or necessary, engage with other-race or male mentors (patton & harper, 2003). non-african american faculty would “be aware of the politics of difference” (patton & harper, 2003, p. 76) and would reach out to black students in true caring and mentoring capacities in addition to working to become aware of and eliminate “personal biases and stereotypes” (p. 76). connecting through technology the utilization of technology is an important means by which black women may overcome challenges related to their lack of critical mass within the academy. thus, it is recommended that they explore and take advantage of the benefits that can be derived from accessing virtual support systems available through computer-mediated communication mediums (i.e. chat rooms, online social network sites, discussion boards, etc). miller (2007) asserted that the use of internet-based communication mechanisms is supplemental form of communication that does not rely on traditional geographic proximity. this suggests that black women who are physically isolated can overcome the lack of opportunity to engage in face to face interpersonal interactions with one another. furthermore, lampe, ellison, and steinfield (2006) found that the participants in their study who used the online social network, facebook, more intensely reported being more engaged in the university community and having more social connections at their institution. connective strategies such as mentoring, support groups and sister circles can be enhanced by utilization of technology. for example, universities could implement networking databases, such as through a university run facebook© type program, manned video/audio chat q&a lines, and listservs via the university website. these software programs would be geared toward providing academic, professional, and social networking opportunities for black female peers, colleagues, mentors/protégées to connect across the campus or the world for much needed on-the-spot advice, information, or to simply to afford access to a much needed friendly face or voice. conclusion black women have been extremely resourceful in using their position of marginalization to resist the oppression they have encountered within the academy and society at large despite the enduring history of disenfranchisement they have faced (thomas and hollenshead, 2001). in order to maintain this position of resistance, black women in the academy must pool their collective energy and continue to proactively identify and participate in formal and informal mentoring relationships; they must pursue both conventional and unconventional connective opportunities. additionally, black women interested in spirituality should be encouraged to advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 13 continue to rely upon their individual and/or collective conviction as a coping mechanism, point of psychological resistance, and an integrated identity conception in order to create a barrier against the isolationism they face. furthermore, black women must recognize the value of professional development opportunities that allow them to connect with one another and must negotiate with their employers for those opportunities. black women should be given the necessary support to pursue professional development opportunities through participation in national, regional, and state professional organizations. they should be encouraged (and empowered) to facilitate conference presentation, but their willingness and/or ability to do so, should not determine if they are permitted to attend. the disproportionate workload that black women in the academy are challenged to manage, may discourage them from taking advantage of these highly productive and personally fulfilling activities. institutions committed to promoting and facilitating the success of their black women faculty and staff might be wise to consider initiating university-wide connective programming since black women’s needs are generally not met by majority programming. black feminist thought may serve as a useful and appropriate framework in developing activities that give voice, self-definition, and belonging to black women (collins, 2004) working in higher education. additionally, the use of technology (specifically computer-mediated communication mechanisms) is an innovative approach that institutions may employ in helping black women manage the challenges they face due to the lack of critical mass and systemic racism they face within the ivory tower. although researches have focused some attention toward the success and challenges of black women in the academy, a great deal more qualitative and quantitative research is needed to determine effective ways to assist them in overcoming some of their obstacles. thus, research exploring the use and effectiveness of mentoring, spirituality, and involvement in professional organizations as well as creating and maintaining connective opportunities for black women professionals in higher education should be conducted. research regarding the use of computermediated communication technologies to facilitate connective opportunities for black women in the academy is nonexistent and should also be examined. moreover assessments of current effective institution-wide initiatives and strategies to include connective programming for black women are warranted. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 14 references allen, b. j. 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(2003, winter). come to the river: using spirituality to cope, resist, and develop identity. in m. f. howard-hamilton (ed.), new directions for student services. meeting the needs of african american women (vol. 104, pp. 29-40). san francisco, ca: josseybass. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 18 white, e. f. (2001). dark continent of our bodies: black feminism and the politics of respectability. philadelphia: temple university press. williams, c.b., frame, w. m., & green e. (1999, september). counseling groups for african american women: a focus on spirituality. journal for specialist in group work, 24(3), 260-273. zamani, e. m. (2003, winter). african american women in higher education. in m. f. howardhamilton (ed.), new directions for student services. meeting the needs of african american women (vol. 104, pp. 5-18). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. biographies wilma j. henry is an associate professor and coordinator of the college student affairs m.ed. program at the university of south florida. nicole m. glenn is a doctoral student in the department of adult, career and higher education at the university of south florida conclusion advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, summer 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] women in hospital chief executive officer positions: fact or fiction mary ann keogh hoss, eastern washington university abstract are women represented in hospital ceo positions? twenty-three hospitals in three counties were surveyed to answer this question. surveys were done to determine the number and percentage of women in hospital ceo positions. also identified were the beds controlled by women hospital ceos within each county. from the county with the lowest percentage of women in ceo positions, an american college of healthcare executives survey, gender and career in healthcare management (gchm), was conducted. two counties were above the national average for women ceos at 23.3%. one county was at 25% and the other county was at 33%. the first county was at 52% and the second county was at 27% for control of percentage of beds by women hospital ceos. the third county which was below the national average for women was at 11% with 1.3% of the beds controlled by women. in the results of the gchm, women respondents were satisfied with advancement, infrequently engaging in informal networking within their current organizations, and perceived male stereotyping and preconceptions of women’s roles and abilities as the primary barrier to advancement. more research needs to be conducted on the counties with women hospital ceos to identify the strategies that helped make these women in ceo positions a fact. women in hospital chief executive officer positions: fact or fiction women in senior executive management positions have been a topic written about for many years. the barriers preventing women from executive management have been referred to as the “glass ceiling.” the literature for healthcare has mirrored business in regards to women obtaining senior executive management positions. this study looks at three counties for women in hospital ceo positions. this study initially sought file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer2006/index.html to look only at spokane county in washington. it was expanded to include two additional counties, one within the state of washington and one midwest county in ohio. the percentage of women as hospital ceos and number of beds controlled by women were determined for all three counties. women in leadership positions in the hospitals and healthcare systems in the past and currently in spokane county in washington were surveyed to determine their thoughts regarding gender and careers in healthcare management. the responses of women surveyed from spokane were compared with national results from the surveys conducted by the foundation of american college of healthcare executives (2002). background spokane, washington is located in the heart of the inland northwest and serves as the medical hub for eastern washington, eastern oregon, north idaho, western montana, and southern portions of alberta and british columbia in canada. spokane is on the eastern side of washington bordering northern idaho. healthcare plays an important role in the spokane economy. the hospitals serve as large employers within the community. a recent study stated that “health care is the leading industry in spokane county,” and that healthcare accounts for 22 % of the county income (bunting & jones, 2004, p. 4). statistics from the state of washington employment security department for the first quarter of 2004 showed that 78% of the hospital and clinic workforce for spokane county were women. the city of spokane is home to some 195,500 residents. there are around 416,000 residents in the metropolitan area. the median household income in the county in 2003 was $36,446 according to the us census bureau 2003 american community survey. spokane is the second largest city in the state of washington and is the largest city between seattle and minneapolis. within spokane county there are nine hospitals. four of these hospitals are specialty hospitals, one is a rural hospital, and four are acute care hospitals. the ceo category for all areas in the 2000 census from spokane county, in the detailed occupations of the civilian labor force, identified 1,165 individuals. of those identified, 964 were male and 204 were female. the females in this category made up 17.5% of the total identified. snohomish county is located in northwestern washington just north of king county where seattle is located. everett is the largest city in the county. in the us census bureau 2003 american community survey snohomish county had a population of 629,672 and a median household income of $50,886. within snohomish county there are four hospitals. the ceo category in the 2000 census from snohomish county, in the detailed occupations of the civilian labor force, identified 2,260 individuals. of those identified, 1,829 were male and 429 were female. the females in this category made up 19% of the total identified. lucas county is located near the northwestern section of ohio bordering michigan and the western tip of lake erie. toledo is the largest city in the county. the us census bureau 2003 american community survey showed lucas county as having a population of 443,913 and a median household income of $36,804. within lucas county there are ten hospitals. lucas and ottawa counties report their occupation data results jointly. the ceo category in the 2000 census from lucas-ottawa counties, in the detailed occupations of the civilian labor force, identified 1,905 individuals. of those identified, 1,555 were male and 245 were female. the females in this category made up 13.4% of the total identified. ceo facts in her book entitled women and leadership in health care, robinson-walker (1993) points out that 85% of the us health care workers are female, yet women simply are not present in the most senior management positions. ninety-two percent of the seventy-five respondents to the question “do you think gender plays a major role in leadership practice in health care?” responded yes in a 1997 gender and leadership in healthcare study by robinson-walker. fifty-five of the respondents were female and 20 respondents were male. males responded yes at 90% and females responded yes at 91%. the american college of healthcare executives (ache) has published results of a survey conducted every five years on gender and leadership in healthcare. in the 2000 ache survey, 1,601 affiliates were selected with 906 responding. major findings indicated that while “both gender groups could ascend the organizational hierarchy, about 11% of women, compared to 25% of men healthcare executives, achieved ceo positions” (p. 2). in salary, women tended to earn about 19% less than men in comparable positions. in education, more men than women majored in healthcare management, and women more than men had clinical backgrounds. in networking, the study demonstrated that “men continue to interact with other executives informally to a greater extent than women do” (ache, 2000, p. 4). ache also has tracked hospital ceo turnover rates since 1981. the 2004 rate for short term, general-service, and non-federal hospitals showed a turnover rate of 16% for 4,566 hospitals. turnover rates for hospital ceos are an important aspect for women attaining these senior executive positions. if the turnover rate is low, it decreases the accessibility of these positions. washington was rated a low-turnover state at 36th with a turnover rate of 14%. ohio was rated a highturnover state at 10th with a turnover rate of 20% (ache, 2004). in a report by garman and tyler (2004) on ceo succession planning in freestanding hospitals in 2004, the issue of gender was not reviewed. seven hundred twenty-two institutions of 1,651(44%) identified or completed the survey. this question was asked, “who was considered as a potential successor?” one hundred fifty-four institutions responded to this question, 62(56%) indicated that “only internal candidates were considered” with 34(31%) considering both internal and external candidates. literature review in an article by weil and mattis (2003), a recent national survey of healthcare executives has shown that 90% of women but only 53% of men favored efforts to increase the proportion of women in senior healthcare management positions. the study states that women have made some progress in entering the managerial ranks of us healthcare but not at the highest levels: “there was nearly universal agreement among women that special efforts should be made to advance their careers” (p. 4). various reasons were given for this: women are a large part of the available talent pool. women possess valuable leadership skills that complement those of men. women have a unique perspective to contribute to decision making and problem solving. it’s the right thing to do. (p. 4) social responsibility and share and stake holders demanding greater representation were also cited. weil and mattis state, when questioned about possible factors that prevent women from achieving high level positions in their current organizations, both men and women agreed with three major existing hurdles: male stereotyping and preconceptions of women’s roles and abilities exclusion of women from informal networks of communication failure of senior leadership to assume accountability for women’s advancement (p. 6) weil & mattis included this quote from a male respondent: for many years, healthcare leadership (including ache) has been an old boys’ network. i don’t necessarily mean that in a disparaging way, but that has been the face of healthcare leadership. in our organization, 85% of the workforce is female and that is consistent throughout the care delivery system. the designated healthcare decision maker in most families is a woman. other healthcare professions have advanced greater diversity than executive management…it is long past time that senior executive leadership in healthcare better reflect the rich diversity of our customers and our workforce in all ways. (p. 7) weil and mattis conclude that research shows that the majority of ceo’s (64%) believe that a significant barrier to women’s advancement is the length of time they have spent in the organization pipeline. however, an even larger percentage of ceo’s (82%) responding to the same survey cited women’s lack of significant management and line experience as a major barrier….as one ceo ...stated: “it’s not that women haven’t been in the pipeline long enough, it’s what they have done in the pipeline.” organizations will have to take deliberate steps to address women’s lack of experience in core business functions-experience that will enable them to compete with men for top-level positions. (p. 7-8) the united states has examples of women who have been able to achieve senior executive positions. haugh (2002) discussed a women management team in a 107 bed facility, round rock medical center 20 miles north of austin, texas: “in the male-dominated c-suites of health care, a small texas hospital is bucking the trend with an all-female executive team” (p. 22). the ceo, cfo, and cno were all women and did not consider their style or the situation unique. three of the four of austin’s hospitals had women cfo’s. in an interview with susan stout tamme, president of baptist hospital east in louisville, kentucky, kelly (2002) stated that “ in kentucky, 20 percent of the hospital chief executive officers are women” (p. 30). con sue lo diaz, ceo of rancho los amigos national rehabilitation center in downey, california expressed this view: “the health care industry is still controlled by men who, for the most part, instinctively gravitate toward candidates who look like themselves and in whom they see a little (or a lot) of themselves other white males” (p. 30). in a doctoral dissertation titled, “managing gender expectations: a competency model for women in leadership” by mitchell (2000), findings suggested that executive men have a general discomfort with their female colleagues, and that women therefore must carefully manage their relationships with men. this managing of relationships by women may be the cause of not engaging in informal networks at the same rate as men. sloane (2003) discussed the push by the american college of healthcare executives, the national association of health services executives, the american hospital association, and other groups to bring healthcare closer to the national business averages on minority hiring. the old boys’ network in health management is alive and thriving: “diversity remains an uncomfortable topic for most businesses, but for healthcare, it’s a particularly pinched nerve” (sloane, 2003, p. 25). sloane’s comments lead one to question what the national statistics are for women ceos in all areas. the term “glass ceiling” was coined by the wall street journal 20 years ago to describe the apparent barriers that prevent women from reaching senior management positions. ten years ago, the us government specially appointed “glass ceiling” opinion commission published that the barrier remains (economist, 2005). the main issues identified for lack of attainment are exclusion from informal networks, stereotyping of women’s capacity, and lack of role models. from a 1999 society of human resources management’s 1,999 barriers to advancement survey, “a corporate culture that favors men was the top barrier to career advancement, followed by stereotyping or preconceptions based on race or ethnicity” according to sappal (2000, ¶ 2) in an article on women taking a backseat in business. exclusion from informal networks is also mentioned in the top five barriers to advancement. the issues reported for business in general are also those reported in healthcare. chief executive officer statistics are found through the bureau of labor statistics division of labor force current population survey table of employed persons by detailed occupation and sex 2000-2004 (department of labor, 2005) under management, professional, and related occupations. in 2000, the percentage of women holding these positions was 18.8%. in 2004, the percentage of women holding these positions was 23.3%. this four year period has shown an increase for women of 4.5% this study given the information in the literature, the present study seeks to look at specific counties through phone surveys and internet searches to determine hospital ceo gender and gender control of beds. the study identified percentages of women hospital ceos. the study also sought to identify for the three counties surveyed if the percentage of women hospital ceos is similar to the national average of women ceos. for the county not achieving the national average more information was sought to look at the issues of advancement, networking, and barriers. methodology sample the spokane regional health district was contacted to identify other counties similar to spokane that could be identified within and outside the state of washington for review of hospital ceo leadership. the assessment center for the spokane regional health district identified snohomish county in washington and lucas county in ohio. information was gathered through phone interviews, state records, and internet sites to determine type of hospital, licensed bed size, and gender of ceo in each identified hospital in all three counties, and whether or not the hospitals were part of a healthcare system or network. this was completed in the spring of 2004 for 23 hospitals. in the spring of 2005 a follow up phone survey was conducted to determine if there was a change in leadership during the year and the gender of the current leader. this was done with all 23 hospitals. after the initial hospital survey was completed, the gender and careers in healthcare management survey was sent to spokane women in healthcare leadership positions. questionnaire permission was obtained from the american college of healthcare executives to use the gender and careers in healthcare management (gchm) survey tool used in their 2000 survey. the gchm is an 18 page survey with 5 sections. the sections include the following: career origins and current position current organization career aids and aspirations work, rewards, separations and discrimination background and personal information also used in this survey was a portion of appendix c from leadership in healthcare: values at the top by carson dye (2000). this questionnaire assessed one’s professional and personal values. the survey contained 17 questions. an institutional review board (irb) expedited review was conducted through the eastern washington university irb committee for this study identifying survey tools. commentsonmethodology initially information from one county was obtained. the study was expanded to three counties. means were used to obtain percentages of women hospital ceos and percentage of beds controlled by women hospital ceos. on the gchm survey and questionnaires given, means were used to obtain the average for responses. these are reported out in the results section. the data set is not overly large with 23 hospitals reviewed in 3 counties and 14 women respondents for the survey and questionnaire. as the number of women in hospital ceo positions in one county was low, it was difficult to identify possible respondents. this work provides a starting point from which further studies might continue. results/discussion sample in december 2004 a small group of women with previous executive management experience in spokane hospitals met to identify women who had worked or currently were working in spokane in healthcare, having had or currently had a title of chief operating officer, executive director, vice president, or administrator. all those women who could be identified were included in the survey mailing. in january 2005 letters, along with the two survey documents, were sent to 20 women who had been identified. the letter identified the researcher, the purpose of the study, and identified that the responses were not to be signed so identification would not be made. a return stamped and addressed envelope was enclosed for information to be sent back to the researcher. the letter also identified that there would not be a follow up to the initial request. it also stated that everyone who had received the letter and surveys would receive a copy of the study results whether the survey was completed or not. because of the format of the surveys, the researcher was not able to identify the respondents. by the end of january, 13 responses had been received. one additional response was received in february for a total of 14. one survey was returned without being completed as the individual was out of the country for an extended period of time. five sets of surveys were not returned. the completed return rate with no follow up and with one person not accessible was 14 of 19 or 74%. based on the number of women who could be identified it was felt that the return rate was adequate. survey responses from the phone survey and internet search regarding the hospitals in three counties and the representations of women, tables 1-5 show the information obtained. table 1 identifies the hospitals in spokane county. table 2 identifies the hospitals in snohomish county. table 3 identifies the hospitals in lucas county. table 4 compares the three counties by number of hospital beds, women ceos, and percentage of beds controlled by women in 2004. table 5 gives the same comparison for 2005. table 1 shows that spokane county has nine hospitals with a total of 1,872 beds. all hospitals are part of a healthcare organization system. in table 2 snohomish county has four hospitals with a total of 699 beds. only one hospital is part of a healthcare organization system. snohomish county borders king county where seattle washington is located. this county has a greater population than the other two counties and it has fewer hospital beds. lucas county has ten hospitals with a total of 2,954 beds. nine of the hospitals are part of a hospital system as shown in table 3. table 4 compares the three counties in number of hospitals, bed size, and percentage of women as hospital ceos, and the percentage of beds controlled by women ceos. snohomish and lucas county have a higher percentage of women as ceos than the national healthcare statistics, and women control a higher percentage of the hospital beds in these counties. spokane county demonstrates a lower percentage of women as ceos than the national healthcare statistics, and a relatively low percentage of hospital beds are controlled. a change in leadership occurred in both spokane and lucas counties. for spokane, there was no change in percentage of beds controlled. for lucas, there was a percentage change from 40% controlled by women in 2004 to 27% in 2005 as shown in table 5. from the mail survey, the following information was obtained (table 6). the spokane women surveyed had an average of 24.6 years of experience in healthcare management with an average of 17.6 years at their current organization. a series of questions on the gchm survey addressed the issues of satisfaction in current position, networking with individuals within the current organization, and barriers that prevent women from advancing to the highest levels. this information is provided in tables 6, 7, and 8. in table 6, respondents to the survey expressed a high level of satisfaction. highest rated was overall advancement and lowest rated was recognition/awards. respondents were not highly involved with other executives in non-work activities as shown in table 7. this confirms information state earlier in national ache gender and leadership surveys. respondents agreed that male stereotyping and preconceptions of women’s roles and abilities were barriers to advancing to the highest levels of organization leadership as shown in table 8. the findings were consistent with the information presented by weil and mattis (2003). respondents disagreed that women’s lack of desire/ability to do what it takes to get to the top was a barrier. the information in table 7 on networking and in table 8 on the barrier of male stereotyping and preconceptions of women’s roles and abilities was further demonstrated in the additional survey mailed with the gchm. in the evaluation of professional and personal values from the two highest and lowest rated responses were discussed. the two highest leadership in healthcare: values at the top rated questions were: “to what extent do you keep your word?” and “to what extent are you a highly dedicated person?” the lowest rated questions were: “to what extent are you willing to trust others?” and “to what extent do you seek to develop positive and wholesome relationships with others?” the highest rated responses are the self-perception of the individual and how they relate their own efforts in the work place. the lowest rated responses discussed relationships and trust issues with others in the work place. as indicated in the discussion, women do not communicate informally and network as men do. one section of the gchm asked questions about discrimination. three of 14 respondents stated that they had experienced or personally witnessed sexual harassment. four of 14 stated that they failed to receive fair compensation because of gender. three of 14 stated they were evaluated with inappropriate standards. this information is similar to that found in earlier ache gender and leadership surveys (ache, 2000; sloane, 2003; weil & mattis, 2003). a part of the gchm survey discussed the reasons for organizations to increase their representation of women. ninety-three percent of the respondents felt there should be an effort made to increase the women in senior healthcare management. they strongly agreed that women possess valuable leadership skills as well as a unique perspective to contribute to decision-making. they disagreed that shareholders/stakeholders are demanding greater representation of women. in an open-ended question regarding whether gender affected career progression in the last five years, there were six comments. four felt that because of their individual skill set, gender had not influenced their career path. two felt that gender had influenced their career with one stating, “i have observed that women can progress to the vice president level without significant difficulty. however, if a woman aspires to a coo position, particularly in a large organization, i have very little optimism that she will be successful.” the last question of the survey related to general comments about gender issues in a career progression of healthcare executives. the following were the comments made: the female gender in the healthcare systems across the country are proving their capabilities daily and everyone is taking notice. i see major need for reality based leadership “training.” women don’t usually speak the three languages needed: nursing, dr. (medical), and ceo (organization). nsg=best for patient, dr=good outcome (for me), ceo=rd (research and development), investment, & other. i see most women taking no for an answer and not “sorting” well how to come back again – no sense of politics – no planning to plan – no thinking about how/what it will take to get someone to buy an idea – not able to express self in fewer words. summary/conclusions this research contributes to the advancement of women to senior executive positions. two of three counties surveyed for women’s hospital ceo leadership demonstrated that women have obtained these positions. percentages are above reported county and national norms. one county was substantially lagging behind national norms. when surveyed regarding gender and careers in health management, female respondents from spokane county responded that they were satisfied with advancement, infrequently engaged in informal networking in their current organizations, and perceived male stereotyping and preconceptions of women’s roles and abilities as a barrier to advancement. these results were similar to the results obtained from national surveys. the challenge for areas not meeting national norms lies in identifying how to advance women. this means that steps must be taken to adequately prepare women for senior executive management positions regarding work experience, challenges, networking, and actively advocating within organizations and with governing boards for female hospital ceo successors. the two counties with women hospital ceos above the national average need to be studied further to identify the strategies that helped advance these women to ceo positions making women hospital ceos a fact. references american college of healthcare executives. (2000). a comparison of the career attainments of men and women healthcare executive: executive summary. retrieved april 20, 2005, from http://www.ache.org/pubs/research/gender study_execsummary.cfm american college of healthcare executives. (2002). a race/ethnic comparison of career attainments in healthcare management summary report – 2002. retrieved march 2005, from http://www.ache.org/pubs/research american college of healthcare executives. (2004). hospital ceo turnover 1981-2004. research publications. retrieved april 20, 2005, from http://www.ache.org/pubs/research/ceoturnover.cfm bunting, d., & jones, d. p. (2004). the economic impact of health care in spokane county [monograph]. spokane, wa: eastern washington university, institute for public policy and economic analysis, college of business and public administration. department of labor. (2005). employed persons by detailed occupation and sex 2000 2004. retrieved july 28, 2005, from http://www.dol.gov/ detailed occupations of the civilian labor force by sex, race & origin. (2000) detailed categories by race/ethnicity and sex table 1c. retrieved july 8, 2005, from www.workforceexplorer.com dye, c. f. (2000). leadership in healthcare: values at the top. chicago: health administration press. the economist. (2005). special report: the conundrum of the glass ceiling: women in business. retrieved july 27, 2005, from http://0 proquest.umi.com.libsys.ewu.edu:80/pqdweb? did=872471611&sid=10&fmt=3& clientld=5545&rqt=309&vname=pqd foundation of american college of healthcare executives. (2002). gender and careers in healthcare management: a national survey of healthcare executive. chicago: american college of healthcare executives. garman, a. n., & tyler, j. l. (2004). ceo succession planning in freestanding u.s. hospitals: final report. retrieved march 2005, from http://www.ache.org/pubs/research/ceosuccession.cfm haugh, r. (2002). not for men only. hospitals and health networks, 76(12), 22. kelly, j. (2002). does health care still have a glass ceiling? hospitals and health networks, 76(5), 30. lucas county ohio. (2005). lucascounty home page. retrieved august 4, 2005, from http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/broker mitchell, c. v. (2000). managing gender expectations: a competency model for women in leadership. dissertation abstracts international, 61(3-b), 1682. ohio state university: extension data center. (2005). lucas county profile: county breakout. retrieved july 21, 2005, from http://www.osuedc.org/profiles/profile _entrance.php? fips=39095 robinson-walker, c. (1999). women and leadership in health care: the journey to authenticity and power. hoboken, nj: john wiley and sous, inc. sappal, p. (2000). cwi, educationabs, psycinfo 1887 (eastern washington university detailed record). retrieved july 28, 2005, from http://0-newfirst search.oclc.org.libsys.ewu.edu/ sloane, t. (2003) the club needs new members. modern healthcare, 33, 25. snohomish county washington. (2005). snohomish county home page. retrieved july 21, 2005, from http://www.snohomish.org/index.html spokane county washington. (2005). spokane county home page. retrieved july 21, 2005 from, http://www.spokanecounty.org/ spokane regional health district. (n.d.). u.s. census bureau american fact finder. (2000). three countries for comparison. retrieved february 24, 2004, from athompson@spokanecounty.org stewart-zimmerman, m. (2002). lucas county ohio: county information. retrieved july 21, 2005, from http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~maggieoh/mlucas.html u.s. census bureau, american community survey. (2003a). lucas county 2003 american community survey data profile highlights. retrieved july 21, 2005, from http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/acssafffacts?_event+search&geo_ id=05000us530 u.s. census bureau, american community survey. (2003b). spokane county 2003 american community survey data profile highlights. retrieved july 21, 2005, from http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/acssafffacts?_event+search&geo_ id=05000us530 u.s. census bureau, american community survey. (2003c). snohomish county 2003 american community survey data profile highlights. retrieved july 21, 2005, from http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/acssafffacts?_event+search&geo_ id=05000us53061&_g weil, p. a., & mattis, m. c. (2003). to shatter the glass ceiling in healthcare management: who supports affirmative action and why? health services management research, 16, 4. work force explorer. (2000). detailed occupations of the civilian labor force by sex, race & origin. retrieved august 3, 2005, from http://www.workforceexplorer. com/admin/uploadedpublications/snohomish!a1 table 1 hospitals in spokane, washington hospital type size part of system deaconess nonprofit 388 yes deer park nonprofit 25 yes eastern government 273 yes holy family nonprofit 272 yes sacred heart nonprofit 623 yes shriners nonprofit 30 yes st. luke’s rehab nonprofit 102 yes valley hospital nonprofit 123 yes veteran’s hospital government 36 yes total beds: 1,872 table 2 hospitals in snohomish, washington hospital type size part of system cascade valley nonprofit 48 no providence everett nonprofit 362 yes stevens government 217 no valley general government 72 no total beds: 699 table 3 hospitals in lucas, ohio hospital type size part of system flower nonprofit 313 yes greene memorial nonprofit 200 yes medical college of ohio nonprofit 319 yes mercy children’s hospital nonprofit 64 yes st. anne mercy hospital nonprofit 96 yes st. charles nonprofit 390 yes st. luke’s hospital nonprofit 314 no st. vincent mercy medical center nonprofit 556 yes toledo children’s hospital nonprofit 161 yes toledo hospital nonprofit 541 yes total beds: 2,954 table 4 women leadership in 2004 county hospital/licensed beds female ceos/ perecentage of female ceos percentage of beds controlled by female ceos lucas 10 hospitals / 2954 beds 4 ceos / 44% 1188 or 40 % snohomish 4 hospitals / 699 beds 1 ceo / 25% 362 or 52 % spokane 9 hospitals / 1872 beds 1 ceo / 11% 25 or 13.3 % table 5 women leadership in 2005_________________________________________________ county hospital/licensed beds female ceos / percentage of female ceos percentage of beds controlled by female ceos lucas 10 hospitals/ 2954 beds 3 ceos / 33% 798 or 27% snohomish 4 hospitals / 699 beds 1 ceo / 25% 362 or 52 % spokane 9 hospitals / 1872 beds 1 ceo / 11% 25 or 1.3 % table 6 satisfaction in current position type of satisfaction scale of 1-4 4 meaning very satisfied recognition / awards 3.14 availability of mentors 3.2 job opportunities 3.2 balance between work and family 3.28 compensation 3.5 overall satisfaction 3.64 overall advancement 3.71 table 7 non-work activities with other executives at least every 2 months at least every 3 months less than every 3 months informal lunches informal dinners sporting events health / fitness clubs sports activities bars, restaurants family activities cultural events table 8 barriers to advancing to highest levels of organizational leadership (1 – strongly disagree to 4 – strong agree) barriers rating women’s lack of desire/ability to do what it takes to get to the top 1.71 discrimination by male supervisors or colleagues 2.21 inhospitable organizational culture toward women 2.29 lack of awareness of organizational politics 2.36 lack of opportunities for visibility within the organization 2.36 women’s lack of significant general management/line experience with profit and loss responsibilities 2.43 exclusion of women from informal networks of communication 2.57 lack of professional or executive development opportunities for women 2.57 lack of mentoring for women 2.64 commitment to family responsibilities 2.64 failure of senior leadership to assume accountability for women’s advancement 2.79 male stereotyping and preconceptions of women’s roles and abilities 3.15 copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 10 2010 issn 1093-7099 differential participation of graduate men and women in two scientific communities of practice dr. maria m. ferreira abstract in this paper the differential participation of men and women in scientific communities of practice was examined in two graduate science departments. data from a survey questionnaire and interviews with graduate students and faculty members were used to examine students’ level of participation in their community of practice. within each department, vital areas were identified which either limited or facilitated students’ participation. collaboration among the members of research teams, collegiality among research groups, and diversity within the academic and student bodies facilitated students’ participation at various levels. in contrast, competition, lack of collaboration, and lack of collegiality and diversity, limited students’ participation in their communities of practice. keywords: women, men, scientific communities of practice, graduate student participation citation: ferreira, m. (2010). differential participation of graduate men and women in two scientific communities of practice. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(10). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction investigators of organizational culture contend that organizations can be conceived as cultures. according to morgan (1997), organizations as cultures “focus on the values, ideas, beliefs, norms, rituals, and other patterns of shared meaning that guide organization life” (p. 7). a number of researchers have applied the concept of organizational culture in their study of academic life (aguirre, 2000; cohen, 1993; folch & ion, 2009). however, few researchers have used this concept in the study of departments within large universities. in research universities every ph.d. granting department sets its policies for recruitment, admission, and curriculum requirements (hirt & muffo, 1998; office of scientific and engineering personnel, 1996; schuh & kuh, 2005). quantitative studies on graduate student attrition indicate that the department is the best unit of analysis when predicting graduate student completion rates (berg & ferber, 1983; nettles & millet, 2006; girves & wemmerus, 1988). according to girves and wemmerus (1988): the department characteristics directly influence doctoral degree progress. the norms and expectations of the faculty vary by department. the nature of the department, including the attitudes of the faculty and the activities that they value and engage in determine, in part, the kind of experience that a graduate student has. (p.186) macgilchrist, mortimore, savage and beresford (1995) defined culture as “the procedures, values, and expectations that guide people’s behavior within an organization” (p. 36). similarly, schein (1992) contended that culture comprises “the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously, and that define in a basic ‘taken-for-granted’ fashion an organization’s view of itself and its environment” (p. 3). these definitions imply that culture is “logical, coherent, shared, uniform, and static” and portray culture as if it were a “concrete and bounded body of beliefs and practices,” (sewell, 1999, p. 39; 44). yet a number of researchers contend that cultural understandings and beliefs are not equally shared among the members of a culture (cole & engestrom, 1993; habrowski & maton, 2009; lemke, 1994; sewell, 1999). as cole and engestrom (1993) pointed out: there is no doubt that culture is patterned, but there is also no doubt that it is far from uniform, because it is experienced in local, face-to-face interactions that are locally constrained and, hence, heterogeneous with respect to both “culture as a whole” and the parts of the entire cultural toolkit experienced by any given individual. (p. 15) in view of its contextual nature, culture is best understood “as practice” or “as a category of social life” (sewell, 1999, p. 40). in this framework culture is viewed as “a sphere of practical activity shot through by willful action, power relations, struggle, contradictions, and change” (sewell, 1999, p. 40). within this notion of culture, learning takes place in communities of practice. thus, learning becomes “situated” within the community, or communities, in which it takes place or what lave (1997) called, “the situated character of learning” (p. 17). this perspective is “based on assumptions that knowing, thinking, and understanding are generated in practice, in situations whose specific characteristics are part of practice as it unfolds” (lave 1997, p. 19). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 according to lave and wenger (1991), an individual’s participation in a specific community of practice is at first “legitimately peripheral,” increasing progressively as one’s level of competence increases, leading eventually to full participation and membership in the community. however, the process by which newcomers become old timers in a community of practice is by no means linear. instead, meanings and relations are continuously negotiated in a “conflicting, synergistic structuring of activity and relations among practitioners” (lave & wenger, 1991, p. 56). thus, it is also within communities of practice that culture is produced and reproduced. the process whereby newcomers become full participants also requires that they have access to a variety of activities, information, resources, and persons within the community (lave & wenger, 1991). furthermore, the interactions of persons and resources are affected by gender, race, and socioeconomics. thus, the organization of access can promote, limit, or prevent participation and we must carefully examine trajectories of participation of the various members in a community of practice (habrowski & maton, 2009; lave & wenger, 1991; lemke, 1997). although full membership is to be an expected outcome of increasing participation, lemke (1997) argued that “some communities have ways of denying women and members of other oppressed groups full membership no matter what their level of participation” (p. 42). as a result, the focus of research is no longer on the individual as the unit of analysis but on the nature of the participation of individuals in the social processes of cognitive activity (kirshner & whitson, 1997). science is an area in which although women’s participation has been steadily increasing, they continue to be under-represented as full members of scientific communities (conefrey, 2000; eisenhart, 1994; ferreira, 2009; nettles & millet, 2006; subramaniam & wyer, 1998). eisenhart (1994) asserted that in spite of the increasing presence of women in scientific fields, the norms underlying most environments in science continue to be “prototypically male” (p. 193). thus, women’s participation trajectories in scientific communities of practice are of outmost importance to gender equity in science. the study of departmental culture is particularly important to gender equity in science because graduate school marks the point in which most graduate students begin to participate in the reproduction cycle of the scientists’ community (lave & wenger, 1991; schuh & kuh, 2005). indeed, the ph.d. thesis in science is primarily an apprenticeship in research (conefrey, 2000; holloway, 1993). it is during their work in a science laboratory that graduate students, as novice scientists, are socialized “into what is valued by their laboratory and by the larger community of scientists to which they aspire to belong” (conefrey, 2000, p. 253). often the graduate education experience is also shaped by specific situations such as the student’s relationships with specific faculty (conefrey, 2000; ferreira, 2002). research designs, therefore, should capture the complex nature of graduate school. yet, few researchers have examined the various ways in which departmental culture impacts graduate student success. in this study data from a survey questionnaire and interviews with graduate students and faculty members were used to examine students’ level of participation in communities of practice in two graduate science programs. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 methodology setting the study took place in two graduate science departments, biology and chemistry, at a large research university in the mid-west of the united states. the biology department offered doctoral and master’s degrees in all major areas of biology from molecular biology to ecology. the department had 177 graduate students, 43% women. of the 48 tenure-track faculty members nine were women at various rank levels (2 of assistant, 5 of associate and 2 of full professor). the chemistry department offered ph.d.s in all of the major sub disciplines of chemistry, from biochemistry to physical chemistry. however, students who decided to leave before completing their ph.d. were given a master’s degree if their work were considered to be of sufficing quality. the chemistry department had 34 faculty members, all men, 74% of them at the rank of full professor. of the 186 graduate students in the chemistry department 30% were women. in both departments the doctoral program was primarily based on research. incoming graduate students were funded for a period of five years in the form of teaching and/or research fellowships. most students taught the first year and received research assistantships when they joined a research group. after this first year, most of students’ effort was utilized conducting research as members of sometimes large research groups managed by their research advisor. participants the primary respondents for this study were 12 faculty members (six from each department), and 170 graduate students, 86 from biology (46 men and 40 women) and 84 from chemistry (53 men and 31 women). of these, 32 students (16 from biology and 16 from chemistry) were interviewed. the selection of students for the interviews was done to insure a representative sample of men and women in each department representing a variety of perspectives (lecompte & preissle, 1993). to maximize diversity of perspectives, the selection of faculty members to be interviewed was based on age, gender (only in biology), ethnicity, rank, number of years in the department, and sub-discipline. data collection the students’ perspectives on their department were obtained from their answers to 10 items on a 5-point likert-type scale survey questionnaire, their comments to these items, their responses to an open-ended question in which they described their department to a prospective graduate student, and student interviews. sample items in the survey include: “the level of mentoring in my department is very high,” “my advisor is often available for advice and/or support,” “in my class there is a lot of collaboration between male and female students.” each survey item included space for student comments. two other items, one addressing students’ perception of their ability to handle the work required for their degree, and the other one regarding their thoughts about quitting the program, “i seldom think about quitting the program,” were also part of the survey. the alpha reliability coefficient for the 10 items in the survey was .83. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 demographic items in the survey included students’ major, ethnicity, gender, and marital status. students were also asked to report the average number of hours (per week) that they spent conducting research in the lab and to rate their self-confidence level at two points in their program -when entering graduate school, and at the time of the study. the survey-questionnaire also included an open-ended question in which students were asked to describe their department to a prospective graduate student. student interviews were used to clarify and/or discuss in greater depth individual student’s responses to the items on the survey, and to explore additional issues/themes that emerged in their responses. the faculty members’ perspectives on their department were obtained from one interview question in which they were asked to describe their department to a prospective graduate student. the interviews were audio taped and took between 30 and 60 minutes each. departmental records were used to determine the faculty and student composition of each department, student undergraduate and graduate grade-point average (gpa), and the student attrition rate (female and male) over a nine-year period. data analyses analysis of variance was used to determine significant gender differences in student responses to the survey-questionnaire, their age, graduate and undergraduate gpa, and the weekly number of hours spent in the lab conducting research. chi-square tests were used to determine significant gender differences in the student attrition rate and in their ratings of their self-confidence level before entering graduate school and at the time of the study. the transcripts of the faculty and student interviews and of student comments to the items on the survey were analyzed using the techniques of naturalistic inquiry (lincoln & guba, 1985; miles & huberman, 1994). after the interview tapes were transcribed verbatim and students’ comments to the survey questions copied, each comment was coded with the respondent’s assigned code number, department and gender. as each transcript was read and categorical themes were identified, a text-based coding was used (miles & huberman, 1994). while categorical themes were identified, markings were made on the margins of the transcripts to code each theme (e.g., “competition”; “collegiality”; “sense of isolation”). these codes were revised and new ones added as the transcripts were read several times. the accuracy of the themes was accomplished through “member checking” and a peer reviewer (lincoln & guba, 1985). results statistical analyses of the data did not uncover significant gender differences in: (a) students’ age, (b) their undergraduate and graduate grade point average, (c) the ratings of their incoming self-confidence level, and (d) the weekly number of hours spent conducting research in the laboratory. however, significant gender differences were found in the student attrition rate and in the ratings of their self-confidence at the time of the study. the attrition rate of female students, over a nine-year period, was significantly larger than that of males x2 (1, n = 726) = 14.81, p = .001 and was significantly higher in the chemistry department x2 (1, n = 726) = 12.86, advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 p = .000. the female students also rated their “present” self-confidence level much lower than did the males x2 (1, n = 170) = 12.09, p = .002. community of practice # 1: the biology department as results in table 1 indicate, no gender differences were identified in student responses to the survey items in the biology department. both female and male students appeared to have a considerable positive view of their department. for example, approximately 80% of the students (female and male) agreed with statement 8 “overall i am happy with my working conditions.” table 1 student perspectives on the biology department: survey results statement females m (sd) males m (sd) t p 1. my low income is a source of dissatisfaction in my present situation. 2.59 (1.21) 2.50 (1.32) .29 .77 2. the level of mentoring in my department is very high. 3.44 (1.21) 3.33 (1.12) .39 .70 3. more female faculty would make the environment in my department more supportive for female students. 3.47 (.90) 3.25 (.91) 1.02 .31 4. more female faculty would make the environment in my department more supportive for male students. 3.06 (.65) 3.06 (.86) .02 .99 5. in my department women often keep quiet because they are afraid of being labeled “troublemakers.” 2.21 (1.07) 2.06 (.95) .62 .54 6. in my department men often keep quiet because they are afraid of being labeled “troublemakers.” 1.94 (.81) 2.06 (.86) .57 .57 7. the most difficult part of my work is dealing with all the issues in my department. 2.29 (.65) 2.52 (.76) 1.47 .14 8. overall i am happy with my working conditions. 3.88 (.88) 3.69 (1.12) .78 .44 9. i feel i can handle the work required for my degree. 3.82 (.46) 3.78 (.53) .55 .58 10. i seldom think about quitting the program. 3.13 (.98) 3.51 (.84) 1.93 .06 students’ positive views of their department were also reflected in their comments during the interviews and responses to an open-ended question on the survey asking them to describe their department to a prospective graduate student. moreover, students’ perspectives on their department paralleled those of the faculty as illustrated in the common themes, collegiality and diversity, identified in each groups’ responses. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 collegiality in the biology department both faculty and students perceived collegiality as the most important aspect of their department. their comments indicated that collegiality existed within laboratories, as well as between research groups, subdivisions, and even across departments. according to a female student the atmosphere in her department “is based on cooperation/ collaboration with other people. grades are viewed as secondary.” a male student described the social climate in his department as “wonderful” and added that “all post-docs and new faculty are thrilled by the diversity of research and the extraordinary degree of cooperation, openness and discussions.” another male student pointed out that in his lab “the graduate students get along fairly well and socializing is common, particularly among cohorts. the lab is extremely friendly to both male and female students and ideas are shared openly.” the opportunity to consult with faculty members within or outside the student’s subdiscipline was also viewed as an important aspect of the collegial atmosphere in their department. according to a female student, “the faculty members in my particular field are very approachable. if i have a question about something i can go to anybody and talk to him/her about what i’m doing. i’ve never been turned away.” collegiality was similarly reflected in faculty members’ comments. according to one of them, “this is a very collegiate department. faculty and students are on a first name basis.” another one pointed out that “being in a very friendly and interactive department [had] been very good for [him].” faculty and students also remarked that this collegiality extended into an abundance of seminars, research clubs, and brown bag seminars. according to them “there are many opportunities to interact with other scientists, to present your work in an informal way.” the high level of interaction cherished by faculty and students went beyond the department. some faculty members were involved in research projects that included faculty from other science departments across campus. these scientists were solving scientific problems using innovative approaches that integrated the expertise of investigators in various scientific fields as indicated by the following comments from a faculty member: i am a core member of the faculty of a graduate center for the integration study of animal behavior, consisting of one half faculty from biology and one half faculty from psychology and neuroscience, some even from medical sciences. interest in diversity faculty and students in the biology department believed that diversity was reflected in the organization of the department itself, which brought together a diverse group of people with different perspectives. according to a female student, “our department is different from most universities in that the biology building encompasses everyone -evolutionary people, developmental, microbiology people, eukaryotic geneticists, and so forth, so it’s very diverse.” another female student added: “the things that i really like about my department is that there is a really diverse group of people.” faculty members expressed similar opinions. one of them stated: “one thing i love about this department is that it is a broad integrated department and my research has been strongly and positively influenced by my colleagues in the other areas.” the biology department’s stance on diversity also permeated the individual research groups as advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 illustrated in the following description of his lab from a male student: in our lab there is a wide range of diversity both in people and in ideas. we have graduate students and post-docs from all over the world. all of us work on separate projects but enjoy working and learning from each other. each one of us has responsibilities that benefit the lab as a whole. the large percentage (43%) of female students in the biology department and the level of visibility that female faculty members had achieved were also viewed as evidence of their department’s support for diversity and equity. according to a female student, “overall the department is very comfortable for both male and female students.” although only 19% of the faculty members were female, the fact that they had reached all rank levels contributed to students’ view that gender was not an issue in their department. as a female student pointed out, “female faculty members are very visible and well respected within the department.” a male student shared a similar view. according to him, the biology department (much more than in other schools) is a place that values females. i think that the grad students and faculty see beyond gender; i have been very impressed about the degree to which equality is manifested in our department. although students were impressed with their department’s diversity of people and ideas, some students felt that the department was still far from having a fair representation of female faculty and of other minorities. one of the female students interviewed expressed rather well this concern: i think it would certainly be beneficial to the department and the graduate program as a whole to have more balance, male-female ratio, but also, representing more cultures. i think that would be especially beneficial just in terms of how people think and getting a greater diversity of perspectives. the department’s administrators were aware of the need to increase the representation of female faculty and of minority groups. although they did not use affirmative action strategies in their hiring practices, they had implemented a number of approaches intended to attract quality female candidates and accommodate the family needs of their junior faculty. a few of the faculty members had dual appointments with their spouses and untenured faculty members could stop their “tenure clock” when faced with the birth or adoption of a child. according to a female faculty member, “many of my colleagues have small children and it’s normal for us to run out of meetings to pick up our kids.” she added: “i stopped my tenure clock when i adopted my son and now one of my male colleagues also did it.” another female faculty member mentioned that, “families are smiled upon.” she added: “when i gave my tenure seminar i was 5 months pregnant and i felt no discrimination from anyone because i was choosing to have a family.” some faculty members and administrators were also directly involved in increasing the representation of minority students in their department. according to the department’s chairman: in the last two years we have tried a fellowship program to attract more minority students. in fact i’ve spent the last 3 years trying to get people into our graduate advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 program. i have gone to meetings of the society for the advancement of chicanos and native americans, the national minority research symposium and have talked to people about this issue. we started mailing schools with large minority enrollments. one of the faculty members added: i am very much involved in increasing diversity in our department. i am directing a program this summer sponsored by the national science foundation that focuses on how to get undergraduate minority students into research and then recruit them into graduate programs. to this faculty member, the department’s interest in issues of diversity was very much at the heart of the concept of “equity.” according to him, “some people have had all the breaks while others haven’t. we need to help those who haven’t had breaks by no fault of them.” the future although all the faculty members interviewed for this study were very positive in their descriptions of their department, some of them were somewhat concerned about the future. these faculty members believed that the biology department would be facing future challenges. according to them, the enrollment of high-quality, american, graduate students had decreased and in order to keep their high standards, the department was contemplating increasing their pool of international students. the department also appeared have difficulty keeping their best research scientists who were receiving better offers from more prestigious institutions. the department’s efforts to keep its more prestigious faculty members appeared to be demoralizing and alienating some faculty members as they saw their colleagues’ salaries increase because of outside offers. according to one of these faculty members: we should try to maintain a balance. we cater too much to some people just because they get outside offers. we may keep them for another year after increasing their salary by so many thousands of dollars but eventually they might leave. we should concentrate on those who have a sense of loyalty to the institution and the department. in spite of these concerns, the faculty believed the future of their department looked promising and would continue to undergo positive changes. as more women and younger faculty joined the department, the progressive attitudes already visible in their department were expected to become even more prevalent. some faculty members would like to see graduate students become more involved in various aspects of their department, including decision-making. others hoped for a better balance between teaching and research in tenure decisions. the graduate students in the biology department shared the faculty’s views on the future of their department. some students expressed the hope for greater participation of graduate students in the various aspects of the department. according to a female student, graduate students needed to have a greater voice in departmental decisions that affected them directly. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 community of practice #2: the chemistry department student perspectives as results in table 2 indicate, the female students in the chemistry department had a less positive view of their department than their male counterparts. five items in the survey showed significant gender differences. the female students were less likely to agree that the level of mentoring in their department was very high (statement 2) and that overall they were happy with their working conditions (statement 8). they were also more likely to agree that more female faculty would make the environment more supportive to women students (statement 3) and those students in their department (especially females) kept quiet for fear of being labeled “troublemakers” (statements 5 and 6). table 2 student perspectives on the chemistry department: survey results statement females m (sd) males m (sd) t p 1. my low income is a source of dissatisfaction in my present situation. 2.96 (1.29) 3.02 (1.25) .19 .85 2. the level of mentoring in my department is very high. 2.48 (1.12) 3.59 (1.12) 4.03 .00** 3. more female faculty would make the environment in my department more supportive for female students. 4.56 (.80) 4.09 (.91) 2.18 .03* 4. more female faculty would make the environment in my department more supportive for male students. 3.56 (.93) 3.30 (.82) 1.23 .22 5. in my department women often keep quiet because they are afraid of being labeled “troublemakers.” 3.07 (1.11) 2.41 (.97) 2.65 .01* 6. in my department men often keep quiet because they are afraid of being labeled “troublemakers.” 2.59 (.80) 2.14 (.70) 2.53 .01* 7. the most difficult part of my work is dealing with all the issues in my department. 2.93 (.91) 2.59 (.86) 1.67 .10* 8. overall i am happy with my working conditions. 3.52 (1.01) 4.02 (.76) 2.38 .02* 9. i feel i can handle the work required for my degree. 3.72 (.53) 3.83 (.38) 1.01 .32 10. i seldom think about quitting the program. 2.93 (1.38) 3.36 (1.20) 1.41 .16 *p < .05 **p < .01 advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 female students’ negative views were also reflected in their comments during the interviews and in their responses to the open-ended question in the survey asking them to describe their department to a prospective graduate student. although male students were not as negative as their female peers in their responses to the survey items, during the interviews many of them were also critical of some aspects of their department. analysis of these qualitative data uncovered four main issues in the chemistry department: (a) lack of collegiality, (b) competition, (c) lack of diversity, and (d) issues of power. lack of collegiality student replies to interview questions examining interand intra-lab collaborations indicated that although a certain level of cooperation existed within some groups, collegiality was low in the chemistry department. a female student commented about the chemistry department as follows, “it’s just a total lack of collegial environment." another female student commented that in her area of chemistry, “each lab is very much a little island; each group does their own thing. there is very little borrowing of equipment, or trying to work together.” she added: “there are no interdepartmental collaborations at all.” the lack of collegiality that appeared to exist in the chemistry department limited students’ perspectives to their experiences in their own research lab where students reported spending 40-65 hours a week. furthermore, because the research advisor (or principal investigator) was the head of the laboratory, the students’ relationship with their advisor framed their overall perspective of the program. in fact, there was a strong relationship between students’ level of satisfaction with their advisor and their opinion of the department as a whole. the power of individual advisors in shaping the social climate in their research lab is illustrated in the following descriptions from two female students. the inorganic department at [this university] is very well-respected. my research advisor is very well-known and good to work for. he has a ‘hands-off’ approach in that he is not looking over your shoulder in the lab, but he will have you read/review articles or present papers at group meetings to get you involved in the field of chemistry. he encourages his students to take vacations and time off when needed. (female student one) you will receive minimal feedback and support from your advisor. intra-lab politics make it difficult to work in the group. of the over 40 ph.d.’s granted by the advisor in the past 25 years, only 4 have gone to women (and many more than 4 have tried). this is an important indicator of the type of environment that exists. (female student two) these two descriptions portray rather different working climates in each research lab. the first example illustrates an atmosphere of respect and fellowship among the students in the laboratory. the advisor is portrayed as a key figure in the development of this atmosphere. in the second description the advisor once again plays a key role in the sort of working environment that exists in his lab. however, instead of collaboration this advisor has fostered an atmosphere of competition. according to one of his female students, “he has used the term ‘survival of the fittest,’ and that’s how he believes his lab should be run. that’s how he believes the department should be run.” advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 competition student comments indicated that the social climate in the chemistry department was best characterized by competition. a male student described the environment in his department as a “cut-throat atmosphere.” another male student depicted his lab as “a highly competitive environment where you are constantly asked to prove yourself.” female students made similar comments. according to one of them, the environment in her lab was “very competitive. a very independent sort of, ‘you do your own thing.’ not a lot of teamwork.” according to another female student, “competitiveness comes where you do what it takes to get ahead without regard for other people.” furthermore, students often mentioned their advisor as responsible for the development of such competitive atmosphere. a female student described her advisor as running “his research groups so that we compete against each other.” lack of diversity the need for female faculty in the chemistry department was well recognized by both female and male students. most of them believed the presence of female faculty members was particularly crucial to female students. as illustrated in the comments below from a female student, they needed female faculty who could serve as role models and mentors and who would help them believe in the possibility of female success in academia: it would help if we had at least one female professor. because that makes you think, “what’s wrong? is there something going on here?” you don’t realize that until you are actually in the department and you look around and you want someone to talk to. male students were empathetic of their female colleagues’ situation and the effect that the lack of female faculty might have on them. when asked about the importance of having female faculty in his department a male student replied: i think that female students need role models even at this level. the chemistry department right now does not have a single female faculty member, and what does that tell female students? students did not understand their department’s apparent lack of success in securing prospective female faculty members. although some students attributed this problem to the low number of female candidates, others believed the culture of the department itself might discourage some of the candidates. according to a male student “some of the professors have very sexist attitudes. i don’t know how big of a role that has played.” other students believed that the chemistry department might be searching for a specific type of female candidate -one who would fit within the culture of the department. those who had personally known the only successful female faculty member in the chemistry department (she had left two years earlier) believed her success was due to her “personal male characteristics in dealing with people.” according to a female student, “she was very high-powered and she didn’t care whose toes she stepped on.” she further noted that “the female graduate students who are the most successful are the ones who can joke with the older professors and laugh about things. that’s how they get their respect because they don’t act like women.” advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 students also believed diversity should extend to hiring minority faculty. they wondered if the low enrollments of minority students might be due, at least in part, to the composition of the faculty. the number of minority u.s. nationals was very small and although the department had a significant number of international students, most of them were european. a female student remarked: for a chemistry department, we have very few asians compared to other chemistry departments and practically no african americans. i would have to say that if you’re an european international, you’re going to fare much better than if you were of asian or african descent. a male student expressed of similar opinion: i look around in my graduate program and we have pretty much white males and females, mostly males, and there aren’t a lot of minority students, and i wonder if that has to do with the fact that the faculty members are all white males. issues of power just as the individual professors set the tone in their laboratories, the department’s chairman was responsible for setting the tone in the chemistry department. indeed, students attributed the negative climate in their department, at least in part, to the department’s chairman. according to a male student the department chairman “has a big ego.” the same student added: “very few women leave with a ph.d. under his supervision, although many join his group.” the department chairman’s demeanor also added to the sense of isolation that some students were experiencing. when a female student was asked if the department’s chairman was aware of the issues that females students were experiencing in the department a female student replied: the chairman has the reputation of being quite a bastard. if i had a problem, there’s no way i would ever go to him about it because he would be the last person that would back me up. faculty members and students also perceived the department’s chairman as having a significant amount of power in any issues regarding the chemistry department. this power was particularly visible in tenure decisions. according to a faculty member, the department’s chairman had the last say on whether or not a junior faculty member was awarded tenure. when discussing a recent controversial incident, in which a junior faculty member was denied tenure, a male student commented: i’m sure that a lot of political things happened, although in this case funding was used as an excuse. this guy was excellent; everybody liked him and he got along with everybody. as a matter of fact, this guy was an excellent teacher, his research was moving along very quickly and he was a prolific writer and got a lot of publications. he won the tenure vote, but at the last minute the chairman vetoed it. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 according to the students some of the senior faculty members also had a considerable amount of influence in departmental matters, including tenure decisions as illustrated in the comments from a male student: as far as gaining tenure here i know that we’ve had several faculty members that haven’t gained tenure recently and the rumors go that’s because they didn’t really tow the line. i think they were a little bit too progressive, a little bit too outspoken and their viewpoints didn’t follow those of the more senior faculty around here. faculty’s perspectives department ranking. analysis of the faculty interview data in the chemistry department identified one major theme: the importance of the national ranking of their department. the following comment reflects most of the responses from those interviewed: “we are number 1, 2, 3, or 4 in the country in some people’s estimation. this allows us to get the “‘cream of the crop.’” the importance placed in the ranking of the department was visible in the high scrutiny and pressure to achieve that new faculty members experienced. the department awarded tenure to about one third of its assistant professors. some faculty members seemed to pride themselves on the poor tenure record of their department and used it as additional evidence of their department’s high status. when asked about possible reasons for the low success rate of junior faculty in achieving tenure, a senior faculty member replied: they don’t have a sense of commitment and don’t want to achieve at a very high level. this university is interested in giving tenure to people who are internationally recognized scientists. obviously if someone says, “i am going to take time off; i’m not going to publish this year because i am going to do something else” -it might be a guy who decides to go canoeing or a female who decides to have a baby -either way, they lost a whole year of productivity. their concern for maintaining the high ranking of the department prevented them from taking any action, such as hiring couples or women who wanted families. when asked about some innovative approaches, such as dual appointments, that could facilitate the hiring of married female candidates, a faculty member replied: the dean is concerned about the ranking of the department, which would certainly go down once you start hiring people as couples, because one of them is going to be inferior to the standard you would like to maintain. you would look at grants and the quality of papers published and the average of the quality of the department would go down. the unwillingness to do anything that may affect the ranking of their department was also illustrated in the lack of active involvement in other areas related to diversity. the argument “lack of qualified applicants,” was used to justify the absence of female faculty as well as the small number of minority graduate students. according to a faculty member “the number of female applicants is very small.” when questioned about the low enrolment of minority students the same faculty member replied: “we have one oriental, no blacks, one spanish. i am aware of advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 15 this. i also look at the list of applicants. it’s hard to find minorities.” yet, when asked about initiatives that could be used to increase the presence of minorities in the department the same faculty member replied: “none that i know of.” the future. maintaining the high ranking of their department in the future was the main concern of the faculty members interviewed. when asked if any aspects of the department would change in the future, the following reply reflects most of the responses of the faculty members: no, it can’t because schools like this one are based on the tradition of being excellent in the sense that you hire only those faculty members who are internationally super stars who have access to a lot of federal grant money. after all, salary and promotion are based on research grant dollars and outside offers; it’s not teaching or service. most students too, did not foresee any significant changes in the existing culture of the chemistry department. although a large percentage of the faculty would be retiring in five to ten years, students believed the department was taking the necessary measures to perpetuate the existing culture as illustrated by the comments from a male student: anytime someone comes in as a candidate they give a seminar, so you can kind of keep tabs on who the potential hires are and i don’t see any trend, any kind of preference being given to minorities or women. so, i don’t feel there is any reason to believe they’re going to change very much. a female student had a similar opinion: they had openings for a few new people and they hired two new male faculty members in the analytical department and they don’t seem any different than the older faculty. i was kind of hoping that the new people, since they were younger, would have new attitudes, but it doesn’t seem like they do. discussion lave and wenger (1991) proposed that “learning is a process of participation in communities of practice, participation that is at first legitimately peripheral but that increases gradually in engagement and complexity” (p. 17). for most students in science, graduate school marks the point in which they begin to participate in a community of practice and in the reproduction cycles of the scientists’ community (lave & wenger, 1991). however, the reproduction processes of the two communities of practice illustrated in this study varied greatly. the community of practice in the biology department was more “progressive/democratic,” which resulted in greater “changing forms of reproduction” (lave & wenger, 1991, p. 115). this was evident in the common themes, collegiality and diversity, identified in students and faculty members’ perspectives on their department. in the chemistry department no common themes were identified in student and faculty responses and students’ answers reflected absence of descriptors such as collegiality and diversity, which would have facilitated participation in their community of practice. tinto (1993) found that a collegial environment was crucial to the successful integration of new graduate advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 16 students into their department culture. this integration was facilitated by the student’s relationship with colleagues and professors, especially, the student’s research advisor. diversity also facilitates integration of novices into their community of practice. as milem (2000) pointed out, “students who interact with peers of different backgrounds or who take courses with diversified curricular content show greater growth in their critical thinking skills than those who do not” (p. 28). these students also rate their educational experiences more satisfactorily and are better prepared to function in an increasingly diverse workplace and society. integration and participation in communities of practice is also facilitated by those in leadership positions. research in organizational culture suggests that effective organizational leaders are culture builders (peterson & deal, 1998; prestine, 1993; schein, 1992). in the biology department the administration had played an important role in the development of the progressive atmosphere that existed in their department. they had implemented measures such as dual appointments and postponing of tenure to facilitate the success of junior faculty, particularly those with young families, and were actively involved in increasing minority student enrolment. the changes in the biology department were also facilitated by the high visibility of female faculty and an almost 50/50 ratio of female to male students which helped bring women’s issues to the forefront. researchers contend that areas in which women have reached a “critical mass,” the environment is much more hospitable to women. “critical mass” is defined as “the discrete point at which the presence of a sufficient number brings about qualitative improvement in conditions and accelerates the dynamics of change” (etzkowitz, kemelgor, neuschatz, uzzi, & alonzo, 1994, p. 51). hence, reaching a critical mass implies that the members of an underrepresented group have climbed the various levels of the hierarchical ladder of an institution or organization (waxman, 1992). this was evident in the biology department where even though only 19% of the faculty members were women, they had reached all rank levels and were, as a result, in a position to affect their department’s cultural norms. researchers have found a direct relationship between the quality of the climate in science departments and the proportion of women faculty and students (dresselhaus, franz, & clark, 1995; sonnert & holton, 1996). the assumption that a culture’s most important beliefs are consensual, agreed on by virtually all society’s members, is contested in the concept of culture as practice. contemporary scholars are aware of the different areas of “resistance” by subordinated groups based on gender, race, ethnicity and class. however, areas of resistance did not appear to exist in the chemistry department. female students left in silence, aware that even after leaving, their advisors held much power over them – the decision of whether or not their work was deserving of a master’s degree and letters of recommendation needed in job seeking applications or applications to other programs/universities. their small numbers in most labs and the lack of interlab collaborations led to a sense of isolation which was compounded by the feeling that there was no one in the department to turn to, including the department’s chairman. many of the graduate students in this study left their community of practice before becoming full participants. issues of gender limited many female students’ legitimate peripheral advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 17 participation and prevented them from ever reaching “roles of expert performances” (lave & wenger, 1999, p.17). this was particularly evident in the chemistry department where “much cultural practice [was] concentrated in and around powerful institutional nodes” -the department’s chairman and some of the senior faculty (sewell, 1999, p. 56). indeed, the department’s administration appeared to be doing whatever possible to maintain the existing culture. this was most evident in the lack of female faculty members and poor tenure record of junior faculty. although the senior faculty members believed these measures were necessary to maintain the high ranking of the department, students felt the existing culture benefited only those in power. culture is a social construction. it is created and changed through the interactions and activities of people over time. however, for change to take place, new ideas must infiltrate an existing culture and be given the opportunity to take root. in academia tenure and promotion imply power and unless women and minorities reach the upper ranks of the professoriate their presence will have little impact on an institution or department’s existing culture. thus, it is critical that we examine carefully trajectories of participation of the various members in a community of practice because “some communities have ways of denying women and members of other oppressed groups full membership no matter what their level of participation” (lemke, 1997, p. 42). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 18 references aguirre, a. jr. (2000). women and minority faculty in the academic workplace: recruitment, retention, and academic culture. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. berg, h. m., & ferber, m. a. (1983). men and women graduate students: who succeeds and why? journal of higher education, 54(6), 629-648. cohen, s. (1993). academia and the luster of capital. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. cole, m.. & engestrom, y. (1993). a cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition. in g. salomon (ed.). distributed cognitions: psychological and educational considerations, (pp. 1-45). cambridge: cambridge university press. conefrey, t. (2000). laboratory talk and women’s retention rates in science. journal of women and minorities in science and engineering, 6(3), 251-264. dresselhaus, m., franz, j., & clark, b. (1995). update on the chilly climate for women in physics. the american physical society committee on the status of women in physics gazette, 14(1), 4-9. eisenhart, m. (1994). women scientists and the norm of gender neutrality at work. journal of women and minorities in science and engineering, 1(3), 193-207. etzkowitz, h., kemelgor, c., neuschatz, m., uzzi, b., & alonzo, j. (1994). the paradox of critical mass for women in science. science, 266, 51-54. folch, m. t., & ion, g. (2009). analyzing the organizational culture of universities: two models. higher education in europe, 34(1), 143-154. girves, j. e., & wemmerus, v. (1988). developing models of graduate students degree progress. journal of higher education, 59(2), 163-189. habrowski, f. a. iii, & maton, k. i. (2009). change institutional culture, and you change who goes into science. academe, 95(3), 11-15. hirt, j. b., & muffo, j. a. (1998). graduate students: institutional climates and discipline cultures. new directions for institutional research, 25(2), 17-33. holloway, m. (1993). a lab of her own. scientific american, 269(5), 94-103. kirshner, d. & whitson, j. a. (1997). situated cognition: social, semiotic, and psychological perspectives. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. lave, j. (1997). the culture of acquisition and the practice of understanding. in d. kirshner & j. a. whitson (eds.). situated cognition: social, semiotic, and psychological perspectives (pp. 17-35). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum,. lave, j. & wenger, e (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lecompte, m. d., & preissle, j. (1993). ethnography and qualitative design in educational research. (2nd ed.), boston, ma: academic press. lemke, j. l. (1994). discourse, dynamics, and social change. cultural dynamics, 6(1), 243-275. lemke, j. l. (1997). cognition, context, and learning: a social semiotic perspective. in d. kirhsner & j. a. whitson (eds.), situated cognition: social, semiotic, and psychological perspectives (pp. 37-55). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. lincoln, y. s., & guba, e. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. beverly hills, ca: sage publications. macgilchrist, b., mortimore, p., savage, j., & beresford, c. (1995). planning matters: the impact of development planning in primary schools. london, uk: paul chapman publishing ltd. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 19 milem, j.f. (2000). why race matters: the individual and institutional benefits of diversity in higher education. academe, 86(5), 26-29. miles, m. b. & huberman, a. m. (1994). qualitative data analysis: an expanded sourcebook. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. morgan, g. (1997). images of organization (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. nettles, m. t. & millett, c. m. (2006). three magic letters: getting the ph.d,. baltimore: the johns hopkins university press. office of scientific and engineering personnel. (1996). the path to the ph.d.: measuring graduate attrition in the sciences and humanities. washington, dc: national academy press. peterson, k. d., & deal, t. e. (1998). how leaders influence the culture of schools. educational leadership, 56(1), 28-30. prestine, n. a. (1993). extending the essential schools metaphor: principal as enabler. journal of school leadership, 3(4), 356-379. schein, e. h. (1992). organizational culture and leadership: a dynamic view. (2nd ed.) san francisco: jossey-bass. schuh, j. h., & kuh, g. d. (2005). promoting student success: what department chairs can do. occasional paper no. 10. eric reproduction service. ed506536. sewell, w. h. (1999). the concept(s) of culture. in v. e. bonnell & l. hunt (eds.), beyond the cultural turn (pp. 35-61). berkeley: university of california press. sonnert, g. & holton, g. (1996). career patterns of women and men in the sciences. american scientist, 84, 63-71. subramaniam, b. & wyer, m. (1998). assimilating the “culture of no culture” in science: feminist interventions in (de)mentoring graduate women. feminist teacher, 12(1), 12-28. tinto, v. (1993). leaving college: rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition (2nd ed.), chicago: university of chicago press. waxman, m. (1992). strategies for improving the representation of women in the medical sciences. journal of college science teaching, 21(5), 293-98. biography dr. maria m. ferreira is an associate professor and head of the science education program at wayne state university where she teaches graduate courses in science education. her research focuses on the social contexts of education and how the culture of educational organizations facilitates or limits access to knowledge, specifically the culture of science and its impact on gender equity in science and engineering. methodology setting participants data collection data analyses results community of practice # 1: the biology department table 1 student perspectives on the biology department: survey results community of practice #2: the chemistry department table 2 student perspectives on the chemistry department: survey results faculty’s perspectives in the chemistry department no common themes were identified in student and faculty responses and students’ answers reflected absence of descriptors such as collegiality and diversity, which would have facilitated participation in their community of p... references berg, h. m., & ferber, m. a. (1983). men and women graduate students: who succeeds and cole, m.. & engestrom, y. (1993). a cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition. in dresselhaus, m., franz, j., & clark, b. (1995). update on the chilly climate for women in hirt, j. b., & muffo, j. a. (1998). graduate students: institutional climates and discipline lave, j. (1997). the culture of acquisition and the practice of understanding. in d. kirshner & lemke, j. l. (1997). cognition, context, and learning: a social semiotic perspective. in t advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 29, number 5 may 03, 2009 issn 1093-7099 female high school principals: leadership practices and individual traits dr. tony horst giese dr. john r. slate dr. michelle stallone brown dr. carmen tejeda-delgado abstract the views of 56 female high school principals in the state of texas were obtained regarding their leadership practices in three areas (i.e., relationship building and decision making, giving and seeking information, and influencing people) which they believed had been beneficial in their positions as high school principals. respondents viewed supporting employees by being helpful, developing employee skills, and managing conflict as being essential to their success as principals. moreover, they reported involving their employees in decision-making practices, particularly when critically important decisions must be made. motivating and inspiring employees was rated highly, although providing tangible rewards was regarded as less important. individual traits of communication skills, trustworthiness, honesty and sincerity, and good listening skills were very important factors in their success as high school principals. the two individual traits deemed to be less relevant for success in their positions were aggressiveness and tolerance for ambiguity. finally, cautions regarding generalizability are offered. key words: female, leadership, high school, principal citation: giese, t., slate, j., brown, m., & delgado, c. (2009). female high school principals: leadership practices and individual traits. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(5). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/� advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 2 introduction as a result of the current trends in educational reform, the role of the principal has experienced dramatic change (hess & kelly, 2007). various examinations into this phenomenon increasingly point to new and demanding leadership standards by which today’s campus administrators must operate (atkinson & wilmore, 1993; cistone & stevenson, 2000; hallinger, 2005). across the country, school districts are holding principals more accountable for how their schools perform (kimball & sirotnik, 2000; o’donnell & white, 2005) than in previous years. education week, in january 2000, published a series of articles indicating that school leadership is key to success with the standards-based accountability systems in place in many states (olsen, 2000). steinberg (2000) suggested that “a growing number of schools are rudderless, struggling to replace a graying corps of principals at a time when the pressure to raise test scores and other new demands have made an already difficult job an increasingly thankless one” (p. 3). practicing administrators, in a recent survey, cited increased demands: escalating expectations for accountability; lack of support, statutes, and mandates that dictate practices; and long hours and stressful political environments as major factors that tend to dissuade many from accepting positions as school administrators (leighwood, steinbach, & jantzi, 2002; su, adams, & mininberg, 2000; trevino, braley, stallone-brown, & slate, 2008). researchers have also noted that the principalship requires a high degree of political acuity, visibility and accessibility, the ability to delegate tasks, and the ability to see the big picture (davis, 1998). the school principalship is today an increasingly complex and demanding position (goldring & greenfield, 2002). new conditions and expectations in education and society are combining to create newly emerging challenges and perspectives for the contemporary role of the principal (cistone & stevenson, 2000). davis (1998) suggested that the precarious nature of the principalship reinforces the need for continued research on factors related to leadership behavior. principals in today’s environment must rely more on their abilities and skills as decision makers and problem solvers than in the past (goldring & greenfield, 2002). further, they are now required, at least in the state of texas, to foster a new commitment to the vision of the learner-centered community (texas education agency, 1995). to accomplish this task, principals must be not only creative in their decision-making responsibilities, but also must build cohesive working relationships within their school’s community of stakeholders. in the state of texas, the texas education agency (1995) has mandated that school administrators base their decisions on new and ever-changing ethical and legal principles. davis (1998) suggested that, at best, principals strive to provide vision and unity of purpose within challenging, dynamic, and highly political settings. school districts flounder without and flourish with leadership (cooley & shen, 2000). this situation is evident in the variety of factors related to leadership behavior by principals. differences may be great or minimal, however, most researchers note that some overall leadership practices appear to be common to decision makers. yukl (1994), in his work, examined managerial practices in four general categories: (a) making decisions; (b) influencing people; (c) building relationships; and (d) giving-seeking advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 3 information. within these four practices, yukl noted 14 specific leadership practices that may influence the managerial practices of school leaders. these practices as identified by yukl included: (a) developing and mentoring; (b) clarifying roles and objectives; (c) motivating and inspiring; and (d) consulting. in a study of outstanding female superintendents, funk, pankake, and schroth (2002) suggested the presence of eight recurring leadership themes: (a) vision, shared vision, and visioning; (b) ethical and professional practices; (c) dreaming, thinking, creating, intuiting, and introspecting; (d) communication; (e) motivation; (f) commitment; (g) work ethic and industry; and (h) energy and stamina. in an israeli study on women principals, fuchs and hertzlazarowitz (1992) stated that the role of career planning and aspiration in attaining the principalship was ambiguous. however, they suggested that the respondents’ leadership styles, based on interpersonal relations and communication skills, contributed to school effectiveness and to positive school climates. additional characteristics related to success included diligence, a need for change, and the capacity to turn hardships into challenges. purpose of the study the purpose of this study was to determine the leadership practices of female high school principals. a dearth of literature is available in which the leadership practices of female educational leaders has been investigated. given the recent report by the national center for education statistics (nces, 2007) that “between 1993–94 and 2003–04, the percentage of public school principals who were female increased from 41 to 56 percent in elementary schools and from 14 to 26 percent in secondary schools” (indicator 34, u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics, 2007), more information is needed about the leadership practices of female principals. research questions the following research questions were addressed in this study: 1. what are the relationship building practices of female high school principals? 2. what are the decision-making practices of female high school principals? 3. what are the giving and seeking information practices of female high school principals? 4. what are the influencing people practices of female high school principals? 5. what are the views of female high school principals concerning individual traits that have facilitated their success as high school principals? method participants from a target population of all public high school principals in texas (n = 1,176), a random sample of female (n = 222) high school principals were selected for the study. female participants were identified by first names from a list of principals developed using the 2004advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 4 2005 texas school directory (texas education agency, 2004) in which public high school principals in texas were identified. from the 222 female high school principals who were sent surveys, 56 returned completed surveys for a return rate of 25.2%. the majority of the respondents were white (n = 44, 78.6%), followed by hispanic (n = 8, 14.3%), african-american (n = 3, 5.4%), and 1 person of other ethnic membership (1.8%). instrumentation a review of the literature was conducted to identify factors associated with managerial practices among high school principals. from the literature reviewed, particularly yukl’s 14 managerial practices (yukl, 1994) and lopez’s personal attributes (lopez, 1994), an instrument titled, individual traits and organizational factors associated with managerial practices of high school principals in texas, was developed. with the exception of the demographic items, respondents were asked to respond to a five point scale concerning the extent to which each item (i.e., behavior) had been helpful to them in their position as a high school principal. the initial version of this questionnaire was used in a pilot study to obtain the opinions of educational administration graduate students and faculty members concerning the instrument’s content, clarity, grammar, and appropriateness. from feedback provided by these 33 students and 3 faculty members, the initial version of the survey was modified to incorporate their opinions and suggestions. after the survey had been administered to the participants in this study, a varimax factor rotation was performed to determine the extent to which these items would cluster together. to determine the number of factors to retain in conducting the varimax factor rotation, k1, or the eigenvalue-greater-than-one rule (kaiser, 1958), was used. by using this rule, three factors were yielded. an analysis of the scree test, a plot of eigenvalues in descending order against the three factors, provided support for the three factors (cattell, 1966; zwick & velicer, 1986), which are depicted in table 1. in determining the minimum value for structure/pattern coefficients, we used the recommended cutoff correlation of .3 (lambert & durand, 1975). table 1: factor loadings of survey items survey item factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 developing employee skills and mentoring employees in their career aspirations. .76 .10 .13 solving problems decisively, systematically, and effectively. .74 .09 .37 managing conflict and team building. .73 .31 .20 planning long-term objectives and organizing human and material resources efficiently. .71 .07 .31 allowing employees to assume important job responsibilities and delegating tasks. .07 .76 .12 recognizing the special contributions and efforts of employees. .11 .76 .17 networking through formal and informal contacts with .13 .69 -.04 advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 5 other professionals. motivating and inspiring others. .42 .59 .31 supporting employees by being approachable, considerate, patient, and helpful. .09 .54 .50 informing employees of key decisions and information necessary to accomplish organizational tasks and goals. .39 .18 .73 clarifying employee roles and objectives. .28 .22 .70 monitoring employee work, organizational outcomes, and environmental influences. .28 .07 .70 consulting with employees and inviting their participation in critical decisions. .20 .49 .50 rewarding employee performance with tangible rewards. .50 .39 -.508 the internal consistency of the first factor, labeled relationship building and decisionmaking, was ascertained by using cronbach’s coefficient alpha. this analysis resulted in an internal consistency of .81 for the four items, with the corrected item-total correlations ranging from .56 to .69. the second factor, termed giving and seeking information, had a cronbach’s coefficient of .74 for the five items. corrected item-total correlations for these five items ranged from a low of .44 to a high of .61. for the third factor, labeled influencing people, the cronbach’s coefficient alpha was .79 for the four items. corrected item-total correlations were again good, ranging from .50 to .71. the 14th survey item was discarded from further analysis, even though it had a significant factor loading. the reason for this item being discarded was that the coefficient alpha for factors two and three were significantly lower when this item was present than when it was removed from the analysis. all three factor scores had coefficient alphas that were more than sufficiently reliable for research purposes (cf. nunnally & bernstein, 1994). procedures participants who had been randomly selected were sent a copy of the survey along with a cover letter in which the purpose of the study was explained. to permit a follow-up letter to be sent to non-respondents, surveys were numbered for identification. using a master list to record returned surveys, a reminder letter, along with a second survey and self-addressed stamped envelope, was sent two weeks after the initial request to participants who had not responded. participants were assured that their anonymity was protected. results concerning research questions one and two about the relationship building and decisionmaking practices of female high school principals, participants’ responses to the four survey questions in this area are depicted in table 2. more than three fourths of the sample reported that supporting employees by being approachable and supportive had helped them a great deal in their position as a high school principal. managing conflict was also ranked as a behavior that had helped them a great deal in their position. both planning long-term objectives and solving problems decisively were related highly. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 6 table 2: participant responses in percentages to relationship building and decision-making survey items survey item a great deal quite a bit some very little not at all developing employee skills and mentoring employees in their career aspirations. 39.3 46.4 12.5 1.8 0.0 managing conflict and team building. 50.0 35.7 12.5 1.8 0.0 planning long-term objectives and organizing human and material resources efficiently. 48.2 42.9 7.1 1.8 0.0 solving problems decisively, systematically, and effectively. 69.6 25.0 5.4 0.0 0.0 concerning research question three, in which participants were asked about their giving and seeking information practices that they found helpful, responses can be found in table 3. informing employees of key decisions was rated by almost all respondents as being quite a bit or a great deal of help in their positions as high school principals. a similar response was present for monitoring employee work and organizational outcomes. also rated highly was consulting with employees and inviting their participation in critical decisions. clarifying employee roles and objectives, though not rated as highly, was still viewed as being helpful in their positions. table 3: participant responses in percentages to giving and seeking information survey items survey item a great deal quite a bit some very little not at all informing employees of key decisions and information necessary to accomplish organizational tasks and goals. 64.3 32.1 3.6 0.0 0.0 clarifying employee roles and objectives. 51.8 35.7 12.5 0.0 0.0 monitoring employee work, organizational outcomes, and environmental influences. 53.6 42.9 3.6 0.0 0.0 consulting with employees and inviting their participation in critical decisions. 55.4 41.1 3.6 0.0 0.0 participants’ responses to the fourth research question regarding their influencing people practices are depicted in table 4. being approachable, considerate, patient, and helpful to employees was rated as being a great deal to quite a bit helpful by 100% of these female principals. motivating and inspiring others, as well as recognizing the special contributions and efforts of employees, were ranked as being quite a bit to a great deal important in their positions as high school principals. interestingly, networking received the lowest rating of these items in terms of being helpful in their current work position. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 7 table 4: participant responses in percentages to influencing people survey items survey item a great deal quite a bit some very little not at all supporting employees by being approachable, considerate, patient, and helpful. 80.4 19.6 0.0 0.0 0.0 recognizing the special contributions and efforts of employees. 48.2 41.1 10.7 0.0 0.0 motivating and inspiring others. 55.4 32.1 10.7 1.8 0.0 allowing employees to assume important job responsibilities and delegating tasks. 46.4 41.1 10.7 1.8 0.0 networking through formal and informal contacts with other professionals. 33.9 25.0 33.9 3.6 3.6 whereas the previous four research questions have examined principals’ managerial practices, research question five deals with the perceptions of these principals concerning individual traits that have facilitated their success as high school principals. table 5 contains participants’ responses to these 13 individual traits. the highest rated individual traits were communication skills, trustworthiness, honesty and sincerity, and good listening skills. traits rated as less important were aggressiveness and having a tolerance for ambiguity. table 5: participant responses in percentages to individual traits items survey item a great deal quite a bit some very little not at all aggressiveness 12.5 33.9 33.9 17.9 1.8 honesty and sincerity 83.9 16.1 0.0 0.0 0.0 self-confidence 71.4 25.0 3.6 0.0 0.0 communication skills 89.3 10.7 0.0 0.0 0.0 human relations 75.0 25.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 tolerance for ambiguity 25.0 32.1 28.6 12.5 1.8 a cohesive value system 60.7 32.1 5.4 1.8 0.0 critical thinking skills 66.1 30.4 3.6 0.0 0.0 trustworthiness 87.5 12.5 0.0 0.0 0.0 a sense of humor 67.9 21.4 10.7 0.0 0.0 knowledge of oneself 67.9 26.8 3.6 1.8 0.0 well defined organizational vision & purpose 64.3 33.9 1.8 0.0 0.0 good listening skills 80.4 17.9 1.8 0.0 0.0 advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 8 discussion the female high school principals in this study indicated that they viewed supporting their employees, developing their employees’ skills, and managing conflict and team building as being important in their positions as high school principals. moreover, respondents indicated that involving their employees in key decisions, monitoring their employees’ work, and clarifying employee roles and objectives were essential for the principals to be effective. motivating and inspiring employees and recognizing their special contributions, albeit not necessarily in tangible ways, were regarded as important elements of being successful. making decisions in decisive ways, while seeking input from employees, was deemed to be helpful in their positions as high school principals. concerning the individual traits deemed as important, this sample of female high school principals reported that communication skills, trustworthiness, honesty and sincerity, and good listening skills were very important traits in their success as high school principals. the two individual traits deemed to be less relevant for success in their positions were aggressiveness and tolerance for ambiguity. participants’ views regarding tolerance for ambiguity are incongruent with vornberg’s (1996) conclusion that people who cannot tolerate ambiguity in their lives should never consider being a school administrator. it may be that this sample of respondents tolerate ambiguity quite well and simply do not assign it the degree of importance to which vornberg (1996) attributed. research on the impact of gender on decision-making and other leadership practices is essential. despite the growing numbers of women in administrative positions in schools, a lack of research exists regarding the experiences of women (kripiewnicki & shapiro, 2001). the current investigation sought to add to the existing body of knowledge regarding the leadership practices and individual traits of female high school principals. readers are urged to be cautious in the extent to which they generalize from this study. for several reasons, this study has substantial limitations. first, the sample size is small and from a geographically limited region of the country. second, data regarding leadership practices were obtained from a researcher-developed instrument. though the instrument scores had a high degree of reliability for participants in this study, more research is needed on the validity of this survey. finally, the extent to which the female principals who participated in this study were successful or unsuccessful in their schools is unknown. thus, the leadership practices depicted in this study may not be limited to only those female principals who are successful in leading their respective school campuses. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 9 references atkinson, j. n., & wilmore, b. e. 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(1986). comparison of five rules for determining the number of components to retain. psychological bulletin, 99, 432-442. advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 24 2010 issn 1093-7099 african american women in student affairs: best practices for winning the game dr. wilma j. henry abstract current research regarding the experiences of african american women in higher education clusters staff, faculty, and students together, overlooking the unique contributions and challenges of each cohort. the purpose of this article is to explore the opinions and experiences of african american women in student affairs administration, in order to add to the body of knowledge regarding women in student affairs. implications for best practices for african american women in student affairs administration are discussed, and recommendations for further research are provided. keywords: african american women, student affairs, higher education administration, workplace experiences, black feminist thought citation: henry, w. j. (2010). african american women in student affairs: best practices for winning the game. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(24). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction african american women in higher education contend with a common set of multiple marginalizations due to their membership in at least two groups – african american and female – both of which have been historically oppressed (collins, 2004; gregory, 2001; simien, 2006). though the historical subjugation of african american women is often acknowledged, the perspectives of these women are repeatedly undermined within society, and they are often left unconsidered or misunderstood. the result of this reality places african american women at a disadvantage, especially in the professional world where their societal status can overshadow their achievements and successes. nichols and tanksley (2004) charged african american women in the academy “to be smarter, work harder, and be more articulate in their efforts to combat racism and sexism” (p.178). regarding the plight of african american women in higher education, it was noted that most research regarding these women tended to aggregate the somewhat similar experiences and opinions of african american female students, faculty, and staff (howard-hamilton, 2003a). similarly, in the classic work by moses (1989), she noted that “most research conducted on racial/ethnic minorities [in higher education] continues to treat minority groups as sexually monolithic; it assumes that what is true for minority men is also true for minority women” (p.2). since moses’ foundational work, the literature still seems to focus on african americans and african american women in higher education as collective groups (guillory, 2001; jackson, 2001), rather than to answer moses’ call to decouple, examine and honor the distinctive contributions of these unique subgroups and subcultures within academia. while african american women and african americans in the academy do share many commonalities (i.e. marginalization, oppression, cultural beliefs and values, etc.), they also make inimitable contributions and provide distinctive insights that are shaped by their individual experiences serving in diverse professional roles. thus, detangling the experiences of african american female administrators, faculty, staff and students may provide valuable insights for the specific groups of similarly situated women who may be following in their footsteps. one cohort in the academy warranting specific attention for their contributions is african american women in student affairs administration. a recent report of current articles published in 2009, by approximately 14 higher education and student affairs refereed journals, revealed only 13 articles related to women in general, two articles related to women in student affairs administration, one article related to african american women in higher education, and no articles related to african american women in student affairs (women in student affairs current research sub-committee, 2009). this report is indicative of the lack of research that exists regarding women in student affairs in general and the even more scant studies of african american women in postsecondary student affairs administration in particular. among the scarce literature that exists regarding african american women in student affairs, some researchers have acknowledged the significant roles that these women play in facilitating the learning and development of not only students of color, but all students (jackson, 2003). similarly, african american women also contribute to the professional lives of their colleagues of color, as well as their colleagues “of less color” (c. brightharp, personal communication, march 8, 2009) in a variety of supportive and collegial roles (patitu & hinton, 2003). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 an important forum where african american women in student affairs engage in supportive dialogue is the african american women’s summit, which is typically held at the national conferences of the national association of student personnel administrators (naspa) and the american college personnel association (acpa). during this professional development program, african american women often tell stories about their victories, share success strategies and present data about the successful student outcomes they facilitate in their pivotal roles as student affairs professionals (c. brightharp, personal communication, march 8, 2009). unfortunately, many of these success strategies are not empirically studied nor documented in scholarly literature. the purpose of this study is to add to the body of knowledge regarding african american women in student affairs by exploring the experiences and opinions of these women, who comprise a unique professional cohort in the academy. this research also attempts to identify specific individual and institutional practices that have facilitated these women’s success as student affairs practitioners in order to assist future generations of african american women who aspire to embark upon similar careers. black feminist thought is used to provide a conceptual framework to facilitate a deeper understanding of the experiences of african american women in student affairs. theoretical framework black feminist thought illuminates the distinctive standpoint of black women’s social and developmental identities (collins, 2002; howard-hamilton, 2003b; stephens & phillips, 2005). in addition, this theory suggests that black women share experiences and thoughts about themselves, their community, and society based on their gender, race, and class. the results of encounters stemming from the interrelationship of racism, sexism, and classism in the daily lives of black women are often internalized and play a huge role in shaping their worldview (smedley, 2007; zamani, 2003). within the context of black feminist thought, it is detrimental for a black woman’s identity to be defined by the highly charged sociopolitical environment, which exists in contemporary society. instead, black feminists assert the need for black women to define their own sense of self-identify based on their personal experiences, beliefs and values. the notion of standpoint is central to black feminist thought, and represents the shared experiences and ideas of black women (collins, 2002). collins (2002) asserted that black women’s standpoint can be understood within the context of several common threads, which link black women together. one theme that is common among black women is the struggle against racism, sexism and classism, which affects their independence and self-reliance. this is not to suggest that all black women experience and respond to these oppressions in the same way, rather black feminist thought asserts that these women are linked by the common strife of being denigrated in society. standpoint acknowledges that the occupational and familial experiences of black women, as well as experiences grounded in black culture, lead to a black feminist group consciousness. while not all black women will identify with the group consciousness, most women will consider the group’s standpoint when attempting to develop their own standpoint. ultimately, “the struggle for an afrocentric feminist consciousness requires embracing both an afrocentric worldview and a feminist sensibility and using both to forge a self-defined standpoint” (collins, 2006, pp. 10-11). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 literature review despite the significance of african american women’s distinct worldview, there is little research that accurately expresses the unique, yet common experiences of african american women in the student affairs (jackson, 2003). a review of the literature revealed that most research regarding african american women in the academy clusters african american women at all levels together (i.e. administrators, faculty, staff, and students) and fails to acknowledge differences between the groups of african american women in higher education (guillory, 2001; jackson, 2001). early research about african american women in the academy focused on issues affecting recruitment, retention, promotion and tenure, and job performance and satisfaction of midto senior-level african american women administrators and faculty (benjamin, 1997; james & farmer, 1993; ladd, 1979; marshall, 1997; mintz & rothblum, 1997; rusher, 1996; smith & stewart, 1983). current research continues the discussion of the aforementioned factors and focuses on presenting the successes and challenges of african american women in the academy, while offering guidance for those entering the professional field (guillory, 2001; jackson, 2001). the limited literature that exists about african american women in student affairs has focused on similar topics (i.e. recruitment, retention, promotion, and job performance and satisfaction). to date, there is some research that has examined african american student affairs professionals in general (scales & brown, 2003; turrentine & conley, 2001), while other research has focused on the aggregated experiences of all women in student affairs (blackhurst, 2000; walker, reason & robinson, 2003). however, little research has investigated the interplay of race and gender in the experiences of african american women in student affairs. hence, this literature review summarizes research regarding african american women in higher education, african americans in student affairs, women in student affairs, and african american women in student affairs in an effort to sift through and arrive at literature regarding contributions and challenges of african american women in student affairs. african american women in higher education research regarding african american women in higher education continues to indicate that african american female students, faculty and staff face barriers due to their race and gender (gordon, 2004; gregory, 2001; hughes & howard-hamilton, 2003; nichols & tanksley, 2004; simpson, 2001; thomas & hollenshead, 2001). specifically, several researchers have identified co-occurring racial and gender discrimination (zamani (2003) and a lack of support systems and networks (patton & harper, 2003). watt (2003) found african american women to be situated in unwelcoming, insensitive, and isolative environments. despite the challenges that african american women continue to face in higher education due to their race, gender, and class, gregory (2001) noted that this group of women has demonstrated tremendous personal and professional resiliency. african americans in student affairs the importance of research that focuses on african americans in student affairs has been noted (jackson, 2003; turrentine & conley, 2001). in particular, jackson (2003) indicated that advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 african americans play a very significant role in the development and education of students. additionally, turrentine & conley (2001) suggested that although diversity in student affairs is heavily valued, minorities are underrepresented altogether, and women in general are especially underrepresented in senior-level positions. jackson (2003) cited the need to focus on the recruitment, retention and advancement of african american student affairs professionals. “decisions to include african americans into student affairs administration, particularly in some senior-level positions, appear to have far-reaching effects on the experiences of african american students at intuitions of higher and postsecondary education” (jackson, 2003, p. 9) . in his review of the available literature concerning african americans in student affairs, jackson found themes in support of the notion that student affairs administration must continue to diversify at the same rate that student bodies are diversifying. these types of issues, according to jackson, are grounds for further exploring the careers of african american student affairs administrators. women in student affairs in one of the earliest studies regarding women in student affairs, bender (1980) found that women were not very satisfied with the student affairs profession. results indicated that up to 90% of the women left the profession within seven years of obtaining their master’s degree. blackhurst (2000) reexamined women’s career satisfaction in the field of student affairs. from a random sample of 290 female student affairs administrators, results indicated that career satisfaction among these women had increased since the 1980’s, with 70% of the participants reporting feeling satisfied in their career, and 45% planning to remain in student affairs throughout their careers. in addition, findings in this study revealed that almost one-third of the 500 female student affairs participants selected from the 1996-1997 naspa member handbook indicated “low salary or limited opportunity for advancement” as reasons for leaving student affairs (p. 410). similarly, walker, reason and robinson (2003) found age and gender as the most stable predictors of salary inequity in upper-level student affairs positions at both private and public universities. though this research does not specifically examine african american women’s experiences, it helps to provide information and an understanding about the climate of student affairs relative to women in this professional field. african american women in student affairs some research on african american women in student affairs found that women and minorities are promoted and receive salary increases less than white men (benjamin, 1997; walker, reason & robinson, 2003). conversely, engstrom, mcintosh, ridzi and kruger (2006) found that educational attainment, enrollment, region of the country, and degree impacted the salary level of senior-level administrators more than race and gender. in a study that examined african american female student affairs administrators’, perceptions of career advancement, findings revealed that this group is exposed to unique barriers to career advancement, including lack of a supportive professional environment, lack of professional networking support, and gender discrimination (belk, 2006). this author also found that african american female student affairs administrators were more likely to hold positions at 4-year, small, public universities with a high minority and female population that were situated advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 in urban communities. in essence, while there are many women entering the student affairs profession, african american women continue to be underrepresented and will continue to be disproportionately represented in relationship to the number of african american female students on campus (turrentine & conley, 2001). method in an effort to add to the body of knowledge regarding african american women in student affairs positions, the current study aims to answer the following research questions: (a) what are some of the positive work-place factors for african american women in student affairs? (b) what are some of the work-place challenges faced by african american women in student affairs? (c) do african american women in student affairs experience or perceive racism in the workplace? (d) what advice do african american women in student affairs offer to new african american women entering the profession? (e) what services and resources can colleges and universities offer to assist african american women in student affairs? in the present study, the experiences of african american women in student affairs administration were explored using a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis. according to bogdan and biklen (2003), qualitative researchers "set up strategies and procedures to enable them to consider experiences from the informants' perspectives" (p. 7). this approach has been cited as an appropriate research strategy when researchers are interested in understanding how people make meaning of the world around them at a particular time and place (merriam & associates, 2002; rossman, 1998). procedure data were collected via individual interviews in an attempt to gain a comprehensive understanding of each participant’s experiences, thoughts and feelings as african american female student affairs professionals. maxwell (2005) noted that “[research] methods depend not only on your research questions, but on the actual research situation and what will work most effectively in a situation to give you the data that you need” (p. 74). within the context of this study, it was imperative that the participants had the opportunity to speak freely about their experiences. the interviews were conducted using a combination of six closedand open-ended questions. participants the participants in this study were three african american women employed in entry-, mid-, and senior-level student affairs positions. the three women were full-time employees at a large, predominantly white, research i university in the southeast. the names of the participants were concealed in order to ensure confidentiality. due to the sensitive nature of the data being collected and in an attempt to ensure the anonymity of the participants, additional demographic information regarding the participants has been purposefully omitted. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 instrument data were collected via face-to-face interviews, which were conducted by the researcher. the researcher is an african american woman with more than 25 years of professional experience as a student affairs administrator and faculty member whose research agenda focuses on the experiences of black women in higher education. the interview protocol contained six questions, was developed by the researcher, and was based upon an extensive review of scholarly literature regarding women in student affairs. the first two questions were used to gather participants’ demographic information. the last four questions were designed to elicit information regarding the participants’ experiences as african american female student affairs administrators. the four prompts that were used to guided the individual interviews were: (a) discuss three factors related to work-place climate that have positively influenced your professional career, (b) what have been the three greatest work–place challenges you have faced as a african american woman in student affairs, (c) based on your personal experience, discuss three pieces of advice you would offer to african american women who are entering the student affairs profession, and (d) based on your personal experience, what services/resources could colleges/universities offer that would be beneficial to african american women in student affairs? each interview lasted approximately 1 ½ hours and was conducted in each of the participants’ respective offices. data analysis data were analyzed using glasser & strauss’ (1967) constant-comparative method. this method contends that data be examined by: (a) organizing the data (i.e. qualitative coding); (b) using the data to generate categories, themes, and patterns; (c) testing the emergent propositions against the data; and (d) searching for contrary evidence or alternative explanations of the data (marshall & rossman, 1989). accordingly, the researcher examined the transcribed interviews to organize and code the responses into themes, and to identify patterns that emerged relative to the data. finally, the researcher identified contradictions in the data and attempted to recognize alternative explanations for inconsistencies. the researcher’s interpretations of the participants’ responses were derived from personal experience, familiarity with related scholarly literature, and assertions contained within black feminist thought (collins, 2002). limitations although this study helps to fill a void in the literature and further the discourse regarding challenges and successes of african american women in student affairs, it has limitations that should be noted when interpreting its findings. first, the study was limited to participants at only one large, predominantly white, research i university in the southeast. as a result, the generalizability of the findings of this study to other types of colleges and universities is tenuous. second, only one participant at each professional level was interviewed, which produced a total of only three participants. interviews with a larger sample size at each of the professional levels of student affairs administration might have produced more reliable results. in addition, the researcher’s positionality as an african american woman with extensive experience advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 in higher education administration should be considered as a source, which may have influenced the interpretation of the participants’ responses. findings among the three women that participated in the study, one was an entry-level professional (coordinator) that had been in her position only one year, one was a mid-level professional (director) who had been at the university for approximately 5 years but had only been in the director’s position for approximately 8 months, and one was employed in a seniorlevel administrative position (vice president) and had begun the second year of her appointment. the results of the participants' responses were organized in 5 categories: positive work-place factors, work-place challenges, experiences of racism, advice to new african american females entering the profession, and services and resources colleges and universities can offer. organizing the data into these categories allowed for the recognition of differences among the participants' patterns of responses and to present the emerging themes. positive work-place factors the factors related to work-place climate that positively influenced the professional success of the women seemed to have been related to their relationships and interactions with mentors, supervisors and colleagues. the major theme that emerged related to support from their supervisors and staff. support from supervisors and staff. all of the women seemed to be very pleased about being in their current positions and believed the work-place climate to be positive. in addition, they mentioned that their supervisors had been very helpful in assisting them to settle in their positions and had shown interest and care as they attempted to acclimate to the work environment and their specific roles. assistance from staff was also pointed out by these administrators as being an important work-place climate factor that had positively affected their level of success in their roles. it is interesting to note that the mid-level student affairs administrator in particular indicated that she had strong interpersonal relationships with some colleagues in her previous position at the university that had assisted her in having a successful 5 years. she further indicated that “so far, the staff and supervisor in my new position seem supportive of me but you never know around here—i’ll have to wait and see.” an additional noteworthy comment came from the senior-level administrator who indicated that she was respected by the larger university community regarding her abilities, opinions, and decisions, which she believed to be beneficial to the work-place climate. work-place challenges contrary to the perceived positive support these women received from their supervisors and staff, they also believed that many people in their work environment did not understand the worldview of african american women, which often presents climate challenges. lack of understanding the world view of african american women. the participants seemed to believe that the question or possibility of racism was constant in their work-place, advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 which has stemmed from the historical effects of discrimination. it was not surprising that the senior-level participant in particular noted the pressure to always “prove herself more than anyone else” as a work-place challenge as well as “being the lone voice.” interestingly, this participant also noted the challenge of working with other african american women who were “not good colleagues” and asked for promotional favors or who remained distant and aloof. experiences of racism although none of the participants reported direct incidences of racism in their work-place environment, concerns regarding discrimination or stereotypes were evident in their responses. discrimination and stereotypes. in discussing their notions regarding racism that existed in their work-place, the participants were reluctant and or unwilling to provide examples of direct incidents, but rather spoke in general terms. the mid-level administrator reported questioning whether some behaviors she observed were racist or rather the result of ignorance. although, she indicated that she has experienced racism and believes that racism is at the core of academia and the american conscience. interestingly, the senior-level administrator recalled a racist encounter she faced in another position at a different university and never answered the question of whether she had faced racism in her current work-place. additionally, the entry-level participant indicated that she had not experienced any direct work-place racism but has experienced a great deal of curiosity about her appearance such as her hair, which suggested that she may have been stereotyped. advice to new african american females entering the profession the participants gave several recommendations for african american female novices entering the professional field of student affairs. the major themes that emerged included the importance of understanding the work environment, having familial support and knowing one’s self. understanding the work-place environment. participants at each of the administrative levels indicated the need for new student affairs administrators to understand the culture and expectations of the work-place. this theme appeared especially important to the entry-level professional who commented “you cannot be successful unless you learn something about your environment.” importance of support. all of the participants indicated the need for new professionals to remain close to their family members and close friends—those individuals who provide nurturance and support. one of the administrators indicated that student affairs employees “should not isolate themselves from friends and family when they get into new positions.” knowing one’s self. the participants believed that it is important for african american females to know who they are. “african american women need to be grounded in their selfconcept" was a part of the advice given by the senior-level administrator. similarly, the midlevel administrator suggested that one should “have a vision and know where you want to go in life." this participant also emphatically stated that it was crucial that new african american advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 women student affairs professionals be sure to develop and maintain a life outside of their work in order to try to prevent burnout. she specifically mentioned how her involvement in and connection to the local community (i.e. church) had helped her balance the demands of her job. the entry-level administrator suggested that “do not think you have to be a representative for all african american women; do not be afraid to do things because you are the only african american person.” mentors. lastly, two participants report the importance of mentorships, and advised that new-comers should seek multiple mentors and role models from a variety of cultural backgrounds (i.e. african american or white and male or female) as the diverse perspectives of these individuals can help develop a well-rounded sense of professionalism. services and resources colleges and universities can offer the services and resources institutions can offer to assist african american women were key to the participants. they believed that the types and amount of support the university provides is indicative of the institution's commitment to the success, failure, and positive acclimation of african american women employed in their student affairs divisions. increase the critical mass. the participants strongly believed that more african american women in administrative leadership and faculty positions should be hired. this finding suggests that the participants feel isolated in their current departments, thus perpetuating feelings of discomfort. the senior-level professional indicated that she saw herself as “the lone voice,” possibly insinuating that she is the spokesperson for her race and carrying the responsibility to act as such. this finding parallels the participants’ suggestions to seek mentors and supportive networks within their own race. establish supportive networks. a formal mentoring program seemed to be a priority for these women in terms of a supportive network to assist african american women in student affairs. “the university should have some type of mentoring program so the more seasoned african american administrators can work with the new staff; it’s hard to get to know the few african american administrators who might want to serve as a mentor on a large campus like this” was the sentiment expressed by the entry-level participant. similarly, the senior level administrator mentioned the “need to connect with other african american women” at the university. additionally, these women seemed to believe that greater support and recognition of the african american faculty and staff association should be given by the university. “the university should do more to assist and disseminate information about support such as the african american faculty and staff association” was expressed by one of the participants. discussion the women in this study represented african american women who are typically employed in professional roles in student affairs at institutions of higher education. in terms of their professional roles, these women were classified at the entry-, mid-, and senior-levels as suggested by burkard, cole, ott and stoflet (2005). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 results seem to suggest that central to the beliefs these women held about their workplace climate is the fact that their supervisors and staff had been supportive and assisted them in acclimating to the environment. this finding is not surprising since most of the women were new to the university and/or their professional role. thus, it could be that they were still experiencing the “honey moon” period of their relatively new roles, which is typically a period of agreement, harmony and positive relationships in the work-place. nevertheless, this finding may be especially refreshing and empowering for other african american female student affairs professionals who need to be made aware of the potential for positive work-place environments even at predominantly white institutions (pwis). as suggested in black feminist thought (collins, 2006), black women’s identity is tremendously influenced by their occupational experiences. therefore, these findings are significant in that they contradict the majority of existing research, which underscores the oppressive experiences of african american women in higher education. albeit, the negative experiences of african american women in higher education are important factors that should not be overlooked. in expressing their perceptions of work-place challenges, women in this study believed that they are not appreciated by members of the dominant society. as noted by collins (2006) in black feminist thought, when the history of african american women’s oppression is acknowledged, the depth of the impact of that oppression on their professional lives is better understood. for example, of particular concern to the senior-level administrator was the notion of having to “prove herself more than anyone else.” conversely, this senior-level administrator also indicated that she felt that she was respected from the larger university community “regarding her abilities, opinions, and decisions.” clearly, the dissonance between the two responses communicated by the vice president for student affairs in this study is a result of the historical oppression faced by black women and the workplace expectations of a senior-level administrator. perhaps this senior-level administrator is experiencing the “imposter phenomenon” (trotman, 2009), which in this case may result from the feeling that she must publicly project what she actually believes about herself even though she also believes that her colleagues might not feel the same way that she does about her competency. in other words, “the perceptions that african american women [must prove themselves due to the pervasive stereotype that they] are incompetent pervades much of their career forcing upon them the undeserved stress of providing a defense they should not need to give and fighting to prove merit when merit is unquestionably apparent” (myers, 2002, pp.21-22). also noteworthy was the aloneness expressed by the african american senior-level administrator in this study, suggesting that in some instances her african american sisters appeared unfriendly and distant and some seemed only to be interested in receiving promotional favors from her. unfortunately, at many colleges and universities, the only senior-level position occupied by a african american administrator is in the division of student affairs (jackson, 2003) and only in recent years has this position been filled by african american women. consequently the few african americans in lower levels of the administrative hierarchy may respond to the african american senior-level individual reluctantly due to the mistrust that some african american individuals may attribute to people in power especially, in predominantly white settings. additionally, in recognizing the power that a senior-level administrator holds to hire and promote personnel, some african american lower level employees may expect that an african american female senior student affairs administrator from the same racial background advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 should favor them regardless of what the employees have to offer professionally. in other words, the unfortunate and historical effects of oppression due to race and gender may have left many african americans suspicious and/or with unrealistic expectations of other african americans and females in power particularly at pwis. while most of the african american female student affairs administrators in this study seemed to question whether some of their negative experiences were due to blatant racism on the part of their white colleagues, they did comment on acts of discrimination and disparaging stereotypes that were present in their work-place environments. black feminist thought (collins, 2006) can be used to better understand this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon and defines these types of experiences as the presence of microaggressions, which are “conscious, unconscious, verbal, nonverbal, and visual forms of insults [that] are directed toward people of color” (howard-hamilton, 2003b, p. 23). hughes and howard-hamilton (2003) determined that in order to survive these microaggresive indignities, african american women need to share their experiences and receive support from other african american women who can accurately empathize with one another. interestingly, building and maintaining a strong foundation of support was a theme of advice from all of the participants in this study. the women appeared eager to share advice with new african american women entering the professional field of student affairs. the advice they offered included: the need to understand the culture of the work-place, remain close to family and friends, know one’s self, and engage in mentorships. although these are the same types of factors that have been recommended by other researchers who have studied the experiences of african american women in the academy (gregory, 2001; howard-hamilton, 2003b; thompson & louque, 2005), it is especially important for african american women in student affairs to model these behaviors due to the extremely visible role they occupy in the lives of impressionable undergraduate students. similarly, the women were fervent to express recommendations for services and resources that colleges and universities could offer to assist african american women student affairs administrators to be successful in the academy. the major themes included increasing the critical mass of student affairs administrators at various levels and providing supportive networks –formal and informal mentoring programs and support of african american faculty and staff associations. again, while these recommendations are not new to the literature regarding african american women in the academy, they are very important to the success of african american female administrators in student affairs (gordon, 2004; hughes & howard-hamilton, 2003; patitu & hinton, 2003; watson, 2001) because one of the central theoretical frameworks that undergirds the work of student affairs professionals is providing the appropriate balance of challenge and support to students. implications since major findings in this research seem consistent with results in other studies and commentaries regarding african american women in the academy, an important question that might be raised is what has been learned from this study that can assist african american women student affairs administrators? a critical notion illuminated in the findings suggested the need for advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 african american female student affairs professionals to become more aware of the emotional dissonance they may experience in their attempt to confront the daily racist and sexist indignities they face in the work-place, and simultaneously fulfill their expected roles and responsibilities as educational leaders. steps in this direction could include regular mental health check-ups with a culturally sensitive counselor or psychologist in order to assist the african american female student affairs professional to “get in touch with her challenges and particular needs [and]... express sadness, disappointment, pain, and rage” in a safe and supportive environment (trotman, 2009, pp. 80-81). according to black feminist thought (collins, 2006), chief among culturally relevant strategies that may assist african american women cope with the realities of their professional lives as student affairs administrators, is a need for women-centered networks of emotional support (williams, 2005), which provide black women with “a place to describe their experiences among persons like themselves” (howard-hamilton, 2003b, p. 25). as such, african american women student affairs administrators should be encouraged to “form sister circles and share counterstories in settings which help [them develop stand points] and form healthy identities not based on gender or racial stereotypes” (hughes & howard-hamilton, 2003, p. 101). peer support (patitu & hinton, 2003), mentorship (nichols & tanksley, 2004; patton & harper, 2003), networking (gregory, 2001; watson, 2001), and group counseling (howardhamilton, 2003b; hughes & howard-hamilton, 2003; jones, 2004; williams, 2005) with other african american women can also be extremely helpful. it is in the company of other trusted african american women that the african american female student affairs administrator may experience a safe environment in which she can speak expressively and directly about issues and experiences that have the potential to impact her emotional, psychological, and physical health (howard-hamilton, 2003b; hughes & howard-hamilton, 2003; jones, 2004; williams, 2005). in the safety of these sister circles, the african american female student affairs administrator can not only explore her options in terms of acquiescence versus assertiveness, but can also get feedback as to how she might be coming across in reacting to racial and gender oppression. as these african american women engage in honest and supportive communication, they also subtly and simultaneously identify the details and mechanisms of their achievements, “thereby demystifying success and making it accessible to the [other] african american female group members (trotman, 1984, p. 105). however, it is important to note that african american women’s underrepresentation in higher education and in student affairs administration make it difficult to connect with other african american women, especially in face-to-face encounters (henry & west, 2008). though the literature acknowledges that group experiences validate african american women’s perceptions, help to decrease stress, and prevent illness (hughes & howard-hamilton, 2003; collins, 2000), this recommendation may be difficult to achieve in traditional ways, especially among african american women student affairs administrators at pwis. additionally, results from this study seem to suggest the need for african american women in student affairs to become greater advocates in speaking out against negative messages regarding african american women by promoting their strengths and contributions. for example, the myth of the “angry black woman” must be demystified, debunked and replaced with the image of an assertive and socially savvy african american female activist who exudes a advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 strong, balanced self-identity and advocates on her on behalf and for other african american women. as discussed in black feminist thought (collins, 2006), in order to facilitate a more confident group consciousness among african american women who are student affairs professionals, the successes and contributions of these women should be recognized and celebrated throughout the academic community and society as a whole. african american female student affairs administrators must continue to research and document their experiences, while specifically focusing on their contributions and successes in an effort to chisel away at the boulder of victimization that often obstructs the accomplishments of african american female student affairs administrators. by adhering to this recommendation, african american women employed as student affairs administrators are better positioned to demand both the individual and institutional support necessary for dismantling the racist and sexist practices that pervade the academy (smith 2000). research regarding african american women in student affairs is virtually nonexistent and is warranted. qualitative and quantitative studies regarding the strategies that african american student affairs administrators use to assist students in the achievement of their academic goals would provide valuable information about the contributions these women are providing to students and the professional field overall. similarly, research conducted by african american female student affairs professionals regarding the degree to which their creative programs, services, activities and policies have impacted the lives of college students, their work-place environment and the university overall would also assist in showcasing their importance as a highly valued, contributing cohort within the academy. additionally, studies regarding the professional development initiatives in which african american women in student affairs are engaged (i.e., local, regional and national association involvement) are also important in promoting and maintaining a diverse perspective, while simultaneously recognizing the contributions of these women in enhancing the professionalization of the field of student affairs. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 15 references belk, a. 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(1984). psychotherapy of black women and the dual effects of racism and sexism. in c. m. bordy, women helping women (p. 96-108). new york: spring publications. trotman, f. k. (2009). the imposter phenomenon among african american women in u.s. institutions of higher education: implications for counseling. in g. r. walz, j. c. bleuer, & r. k. yep (eds.), compelling counseling interventions: vistas 2009 (p. 77-87). alexandria, va: american counseling association. turrentine, c. g., & conley, v. m. (2001). two measures of the diversity of the labor pool for entry-level student affairs positions. naspa journal, 39, 84-102. walker, d. a., reason, r. d., & robinson, d. c. (2003). salary predictors and equity issues for student affairs administrators at public and private institutions: from dean to director of security. naspa journal, 40, 134-152. watson, l. w. (2001). in their voices: a glimpse of african-american women administrators in higher education. naspa journal, 4, 7-16. watt, s. k. (2003). come to the river: using spirituality to cope, resist, and develop identity. new directions for student services, 104, 29-40. williams, c. b. (2005). counseling african american women: multiple identities-multiple constraints. journal of counseling and development, 83, 278-283. women in student affairs current research sub-committee.” (2009). current research on women in student affairs and higher education (3rd ed.). women in student affairs knowledge community of the national association of student personnel administrators. retrieved from http://www.naspa.org/files/kc/wisa/wisa%20current%20research%20february%20200 9.pdf zamani, e. m. (2003). african american women in higher education. in m. f. howard-hamilton (ed.), new directions for student services. meeting the needs of african american women (vol. 104, pp. 5-18). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 18 biography wilma j. henry is an associate professor in the department of psychological and social foundations and coordinator of the college student affairs m.ed. program at the university of south florida. she earned a doctorate in counselor education from texas a&m university and a m.ed. in counseling and student personnel from the university of georgia. she has over 25 years of experience as a student affairs administrator at different types of institutions, and has provided leadership at the senior level for various student affairs functional areas. microsoft word kraft_culver_din_cayer_navigating_the_labyrinth_of_leadership_in_sport_(clean version)feb 16th, 2020.docx volume 40, 2021 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 13 advancing women in leadership vol. 40, pp. 13-22, 2021 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper navigating the labyrinth of leadership in sport: a community of practice of femininity erin kraft, diane m. culver, cari din, & isabelle cayer erin kraft, school of human kinetics, university of ottawa, ekraf090@uottawa.ca diane m. culver, school of human kinetics, university of ottawa, dculver@uottawa.ca cari din, faculty of kinesiology, university of calgary, csdin@ucalgary.ca isabelle caver, coaching association of canada, icayer@coach.ca accepted september 11, 2020 the following qualitative study examines a social learning initiative to support the leadership development of women in sport. specifically, a community of practice (cop) of femininity was cultivated to inspire women (and male allies) to develop their leadership capacities in the male-focused and dominated field of sport. data were generated from 12 sport leaders (10 women and two men) over a year and a half to collect their experiences of participating in this initiative. data collection included interviews, observations, surveys, and informal discussions. subsequently, the data were analyzed using thematic analysis. the themes discussed include: supports to develop confidence, improved leadership skills, self-awareness of leadership capacity and influence, increased leadership opportunities, men supporting women in leadership development, and the value of social learning. the findings provide steps that can be used to nurture women leaders in other fields where masculinity is dominant. this may allow other cops of femininity to emerge to support women in their leadership development. keywords: leadership development; community of practice; sport; social learning introduction when it comes to leadership positions, it is promising to note the progress women have made in several fields such as business and politics (lyness & grotto, 2018). women are now securing positions of power in many private and public sector organizations (rhodes, 2017). this progress for women in leadership is important for a variety of reasons. women can see themselves reflected in roles with positional power when leaders are female. role modelling and mentoring of women by women holds leadership development promise, when mentoring focuses on “helping women traverse the route to the top from role models they can identify with” and helps them achieve leadership success (chrobot-mason, hoobler, & burno, 2019, p. 117). research from a range of contexts and sectors clarifies the value and impact of having women in leadership positions. according to goethals and hyot (2017), women may apply different leadership strategies than men and bring unique perspectives to values and ethics when they lead. despite knowing the evidenceinformed benefits of bestowing positional power to women in organizations, they continue to be underrepresented in government, education, and non-profit leadership positions (madsen & dahlvig, 2018). one key factor that restricts women from moving into leadership roles is their lack of access to meaningful and effective leadership development opportunities (ely, ibarra, & kolb, 2011). our purpose in this paper is to describe how access to a leadership development opportunity supported women sport leaders in building their leadership capacities, and the impact of this opportunity on male allies. similar to other disciplines and fields, leadership opportunities for women in sport are limited. in some cases, such as head coach positions, there has actually been a decline in the number of women in these leadership roles in recent years (acosta & carpenter, 2019). thus, studies examining development opportunities to promote and retain women in sport leadership positions are needed. the research question which guided our inquiry is: how is leadership learned using a community of practice (cop) approach and a two and a half year initiative focused on improving leadership skills and capacities for women in sport? the next section delves into social learning theory (cops) and how this theory informs the project of focus specifically and leadership and sport broadly. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 14 barriers to leadership development according to mate, mcdonald, and do (2018), women experience barriers to leadership development opportunities through both covert and overt instances of discrimination in male-dominated organizations. the discrimination that inhibits women’s career advancement opportunities is prevalent across several fields including healthcare, academic, and business (kalaitzi, czabanowska, fowler-davis, & brand, 2017), despite the evidence showing that offering women leadership opportunities may increase the productivity of an organization (coleman, 2010). this access barrier was originally referred to as the glass ceiling, an invisible impediment preventing women from attaining leadership roles. more recently, this phenomenon has been labelled in the literature as the labyrinth of leadership. eagly and carli (2007) describe this metaphor as “passage through a labyrinth is not simple or direct, but requires persistence, awareness of one’s progress, and a careful analysis of the puzzles that lie ahead… for women who aspire to top leadership, routes exist but are full of twists and turns, both unexpected and expected” (para.6). although the labyrinth may exist regardless of whether women have access to leadership development opportunities or not, having access to these opportunities could at the very least prepare women for navigation through the labyrinth. literature exploring women’s experiences developing their leadership capacities and how to effectively develop women leaders remains scarce (gipson, pfaff, mendelsohn, catenacci, & burke, 2017); it is a central focus of our inquiry. the purpose of this paper is to describe and examine a social learning initiative framed to develop the leadership skills and capacities of 10 women leaders in sport. women’s leadership in sport women in sport experience many challenges along their paths to reaching leadership positions, because sport is a deeply gendered space where women are often considered the “other” (burton, 2019). when a dominant group defines, diminishes, and disempowers another group we witness othering. groups who are othered are reduced to subordinate status relative to the ingroup or those in power (jensen, 2011). through the process of othering, women experience discrimination in many forms, for example, when women are not provided with the same organizational resources that their male colleagues can access, they experience treatment discrimination (greenhaus, parasurman, & wormley, 1990). treatment discrimination and the negative stereotypes associated with women in sport impact how they are viewed and limit their access to leadership opportunities (sartore & cunningham, 2007). in addition to these negative perceptions of women, lavoi, baeth, and calhoun (2019) explain that in some cases, men hold gatekeeper positions in sport and decide who will have access to leadership in sport programs. gatekeepers control access to resources and experiences in a group – they determine who is welcomed and who is denied access to positions in a group. when gatekeepers in sport organizations are male, they are more inclined to give leadership opportunities to other men (taylor & hardin, 2016). to address the barriers to leadership development and positions for women in sport, a social learning initiative was framed to support women in sport organizations through access to leadership development opportunities not otherwise available to them. we describe this initiative, the alberta women in sport leadership impact program (awisl), in the following section. alberta women in sport leadership impact program in 2017, the awisl received a grant from the federal government (women and gender equality) to develop a program to increase gender equity and leadership diversity across the province of alberta, canada. to frame this initiative, the program lead initiated a social learning approach, more specifically a cop (wenger, 1998). one of the aims of this program was to provide 10 women and two male allies, (the 12 were universally referred to as sport leaders in this project and paper) from various sport organizations, with leadership development opportunities. in addition, each of the 12 sport leaders was tasked with developing and implementing a project in their sport organizations aimed at increasing gender equity. examples of these projects included implementing a women’sonly coach developer program to increase the number of female coach developers, and facilitating women’s-only clinics and training opportunities for coaches and referees. six mentors were also a part of this cop and played an important role in supporting the sport leaders and each other in developing their leadership capacities. these mentors also worked with the sport leaders to facilitate the achievement of their specific gender equity project goals. the cop met approximately once a month for two and one-half years, both in person and online. these meetings included professional development activities, checkins, and informal discussions. example topics from these meetings included workshops on presentation skills, unconscious biases, and the skill of confidence. learning opportunities focused on developing communication and time management skills were also included over the span of this cop. in addition to the group meetings, one of the mentors facilitated a leadership skill-development online course in which a small number of the sport leaders and other mentors opted to participate. this group met regularly to learn about evidence-informed leadership best practices, to read and discuss leadership literature, to identify and live into their core values, and engage in other social learning activities to develop their leadership skills. theoretical framework communities of practice – social learning theory the cop approach was originally presented by jean lave and etienne wenger in situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation (lave & wenger, 1991). wenger subsequently took a deep dive into the concepts in his 1998 text communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cops are described as a group of people who engage in learning because they care to make a difference. more specifically, members of a community of practice may engage in the same practice while working on different tasks in advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 15 different teams. but they can still learn together. a learning partnership around a practice is a different structuring process than working on a joint task (farnsworth, kleanthous & wenger-trayner, 2016, p.143). cops have been used for many purposes and in many fields including medical education (cruess, cruess, & steinert, 2018), teacher education (trust & horrocks, 2017), business (harris, james, & harris, 2017), and sport (bertram, culver, & gilbert, 2016). a cop offers a site for knowledge sharing and developing and improving practice among other goals. in our case, the ongoing interactions between the awisl cop members were focused on developing the sport leaders’ leadership capacities and increasing gender equity across the region. in the next section, we discuss gendered cops and what this means for leadership cops. cops of masculinity and femininity according to paetchter (2003) cops are aligned with masculinities or femininities because knowledge and power are associated with the masculine or feminine. burkinshaw (2015) builds on this point by explaining that roles in the workplace have specific gender expectations. for example, cops in higher education and leadership are generally cops of masculinity because of the underrepresentation of women in higher education and leadership. that is not to say that women are not present in these cops, rather they are predominantly populated with men, and leadership is generally associated with masculinity (burkinshaw, 2015). as a result, women experience challenges in leadership cops: “women are disadvantaged and disorientated within leadership communities of practice of masculinities. often women doing leadership means many women face a contradiction between their identities that arise from societal roles and contexts” (p. 39). burkinshaw (2015) continues that in higher education and leadership cops, there is a constant negotiation of meaning. women are negotiating the meaning of being a leader while facing a misalignment with their feminine identity. sport is also very much associated with the masculine. burton and leberman (2017) argue that “all processes in sport operate within a shared understanding of sport as masculine” (p.19). so, how do we nurture a cop to develop women leaders when both leadership and sport are associated with the masculine? in this program and our research, we have deliberately fostered a cop of femininity to enable women sport leaders to develop their leadership capacities in a setting that predominantly focused on women and women’s needs. acknowledging that sport and leadership align with the masculine, we intentionally developed a cop of femininity. we believed this could empower women to negotiate their identities and develop leadership skills without being obligated to replicate male leadership characteristics. our design and facilitation of this cop was focused on supporting women sport leaders in building the characteristics they sought in service of becoming successful leaders. methods this study was conducted using a qualitative inquiry approach and aligned with a constructivist lens. both the participants and the researchers played active roles in co-constructing realities (lincoln, lynham, & guba, 2018) as they were able to meet and discuss the sport leaders’ experiences in the cop on several occasions over the year and a half period. participants as mentioned above, 12 sport leaders (10 women, two men) participated in the cop evaluation. initially, the cop consisted of 15 sport leaders, but three leaders had to end their participation for reasons such as employment changes. all participants held an administrative position at a sport organization, with positions ranging from coaching development coordinator to executive director. the types of organizations also ranged from regional sport organizations, to multisport organizations, to sport clubs. data collection in 2018, two researchers were invited to conduct a program evaluation of the awisl cop to assess leadership development, gender equity change, and knowledge transfer. in this paper, we focus on the leadership development piece. upon receiving ethics approval from the university’s research and ethics board, the researchers sent a recruitment text to the lead of the cop to distribute to the sport leaders. the primary researcher then attended a cop meeting and received signed consent forms from all interested participants. data collection began in 2018 and continued over a year and a half. although data were collected from the sport leaders and mentors during the project, the data included and analyzed in this paper are solely from the perspective of the sport leaders, focusing on their experiences in a cop of femininity. the majority of sport leaders participated in an initial survey, two semi-structured interviews (that were conducted one year apart) as well as a number of informal interviews and discussions with the primary researcher. a few sport leaders were not able to participate for the full duration of the awisl initiative. the researchers did however retain the data collected from those participants and have included their accounts in this study. examples of interview questions included: did you engage in any memorable conversations/interactions with others from the cop (mentors/sport leaders) which may have impacted your leadership development? did this program allow you to take on any additional leadership opportunities/roles? the primary researcher also participated in several of the cop meetings and took field notes to supplement the survey and interview data. in addition, a small group of sport leaders, mentors, and the primary researcher participated in the abovementioned opt-in opportunity called the leadership legacy course. the course meetings were usually hosted online, and the group had on-going interactions via slack (an online collaboration hub) where they could engage asynchronously in discussions, share resources, create threads for sharing books or podcasts or other relevant information mainly related to advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 16 leadership. the primary researcher participated in a number of these meetings and used the slack channel to collect additional observational data on the sport leaders’ experiences with leadership development. the researchers chose to engage with various data sources to capture the richness of the sport leaders’ experiences in a cop of femininity for leadership development. data analysis data were analyzed iteratively and inductively throughout data collection using braun, clarke, and weate’s (2016) six-phase guide to thematic analysis. this guide was chosen as it has “entered the ‘cannon’ as a recognizable and reputable method of qualitative analysis” (p. 191) and has been used in previous research focused on leadership in sport (slater, barker, coffee, & jones, 2015). the six phases include phases 1-2: familiarization and coding, phases 3-5: theme development, refinement, and naming, and phase 6: writing up. the primary researcher was responsible for collecting most data, which she sent to graduate students to transcribe verbatim or used nvivo transcription software, resulting in 260 pages of transcriptions. after familiarizing herself with the transcripts, she engaged with the other forms of collected data, such as surveys, observations notes, and field notes. although the interviews accounted for the majority of the data, mathison (1998) suggested using other sources to triangulate the data and explore any convergences, inconsistencies, and contradictions that occurred. following, the primary researcher developed initial codes which she then discussed with the second author. examples of these codes included: confidence, leadership development, organizational supports, barriers, male allies, social learning, and knowledge transfer. the authors then collaborated on the development, refinement, and naming of themes. considering data were collected and analyzed over a year and a half, new codes were constantly generated, and preliminary themes were developed as new data were introduced. specifically, the authors reviewed the transcripts and codes for instances of leadership development and examples (positive and negative) of the sport leaders’ experiences participating in a cop of femininity. the themes were then adjusted overtime as the sport leaders continued to develop their leadership capacities. these adjustments were necessary to ensure the themes continued to be reflective of the sport leaders’ experiences as they evolved during their participation in cop activities. the write up was also an iterative process as data were used to write a series of focused papers on this program (e.g., culver, kraft, cayer, & din, 2019; culver, kraft, & cayer, 2020; kraft & culver, 2020; kraft, culver, & din, 2020). research quality the use of the term validity for assessing the quality of qualitative research has long been contested (eisner, 1991) as it is argued that this notion is fundamentally aligned with quantitative research and that qualitative data may continuously be reinterpreted (angen, 2000), therefore rendering “validity” an ill fit. according to lincoln, lynham, and guba (2011), criteria to determine the so-called “validity” of research should be relative to the case. thus, the authors aligned with a relativist approach to develop criteria that were relevant to the research at hand. burke (2016) suggests a list of criteria that may be suitable for research in sport and exercise, of which the following were deemed appropriate for the current research on women in sport leadership: substantive contribution, width, and credibility. as mentioned above, sport and leadership are generally associated with masculinity; in our research, we have created a substantive contribution by developing a cop that aligns with femininity. the activities and interactions were not geared towards replicating typical, masculine leadership styles, but rather supporting women in developing their leadership skills and capacities relative to their own needs. as for width, the primary researcher conducted a survey, interviewed the participants both formally and informally, monitored the slack channel, and engaged in numerous in-person discussions and conversations with the sport leaders. this immersion into the cop, allowed the researcher to collect numerous accounts and narratives of the sport leaders’ experiences with the cop of femininity to substantiate the interpretations of the data. finally, the researchers gained considerable credibility with the cop. one author was the lead of this project, one was a mentor and led the leadership legacy course, and two of the authors became immersed in the program through attending the online and inperson cop activities over a period of a year and a half. findings and discussion in this section, we present the six major themes that reflect and describe the sport leaders’ experiences participating in a cop of femininity to develop their leadership skills and capacities. these themes are: supports to develop confidence, improved leadership skills, self-awareness of leadership capacity and influence, increased leadership opportunities, men supporting women in leadership development, and the value of social learning. we discuss these themes in relation to current literature to contextualize our findings. supports to develop confidence many of the women credited the cop activities and opportunities to engage in leadership discussions with likeminded women and male allies, as a contributor to their increased confidence. jane explains: i definitely would say i have more confidence now. i think we had a lot of opportunities to stand up in front of a group of people and talk about something that we were passionate about in a lot of different formats. lots of those were formally prepared, lots of them were informal. so, i have a lot more confidence maybe kind of speaking like my truth or what’s important to me. that’s another thing i think i really took away [from the cop]… the thing about our presentations and our slides and not having a lot of words and how when you stand up there you should just be talking from your heart or talk about what’s important to you. and i think even advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 17 outside of just presenting, i can take that to my every day when i’m in meetings or when i’m in different groups just talking about like, what i know or what i believe in more confidently. in rebecca’s experience, she had previously described herself as an introvert. but being a part of a group of individuals who supported her growth, enabled her to gain more confidence in herself: i definitely have prospered from it; the confidence i guess is the big one knowing that the social aspect for me, it’s confidence. and i’m quite an introvert, so to be put into that position where i have to…i have to socialize, and i have to do that it’s been very beneficial in that sense. it’s forced me to get out of the shell a bit. karen mirrors this sentiment, feeling that not only has her confidence grown, but her identification with the term leader: “i did not view myself as a leader before, i think the change in me is profound and my confidence has grown so much. i have a real, truer perspective and, i think, appreciation of the value i can bring… yeah, it’s been huge for me”. in wenger’s (1998) cop text, identity is a key element in negotiating and developing one’s practice. karen’s quote captures the augmented alignment between her identity and leadership, stemming from her increased confidence. this seems to differ from women’s previous experiences in cops of masculinity, where their identities and leadership created an internal conflict. according to burkinshaw and white (2017): “in order to ‘fit in’ women were continually walking a tightrope because of the exclusionary structures and practices embodied through communities of practice of masculinities that made their leadership much more precarious than was the case for male colleagues” (p. 7). for the women in this cop of femininity, they were not faced with the same tension of attempting to align with masculinity, when this was not authentic to their values. although many leadership traits are often seen as masculine, the sport leaders were in a space where they could build their confidence and develop leadership skills that aligned with their personal values, rather than trying to ‘fit in’ to a role. further to their identity development, the increase in the sport leaders’ overall confidence may play a key role in their access to future opportunities. mathipa and tsoka (2001) explain that confidence is a possible barrier in the advancement of women into leadership positions and that, “confidence is important in leadership because performance is based on it. confidence actually drives performances” (p. 327). by supporting these women in building their confidence, they may have gained the necessary self-perception to take on future leadership roles. improved leadership skills in addition to feeling more confident in themselves and their leadership capacities, many of the women touched on the specific skills they developed as a result of their participation in the cop. ellen discussed the changes in her communication skills: i’ve definitely developed on the communication side, again just always being reminded how important communication is and the way you communicate, and [that] different people will respond in different ways. and communication, i know i’ve kind of always considered a strength of mine and relationship building, but at the same time, i feel like i’ve developed more of a professionalism over the last two years. and knowing, like i used to get offended really easily and now i’ll sit back and listen and be like ‘ok is this really something to be offended about? or respond to? or do i just kind of let this one go?’ earlier this year, ellen was unexpectedly placed into a new leadership position in her sport organization. because ellen was prepared with important new leadership skills, this sudden change gave her the opportunity to effectively put them into action: actually, just recently, just before our last meeting took place, my supervisor was let go and i was then assuming the role of the head of our [sport] department. so, there were a lot of pieces in there about communication and leadership and organization that i had to put into practice right away. susan’s job included using her communication skills to have discussions with different groups across the sport system. by participating in the cop, she gained a sense of support from the women and male allies, which enabled her to become more confident talking about gender equity and refined her communication skills: i think it has increased my competency to just kind of take tasks head on. we’re actually doing meetings with every league, so it’s my job right now. i’m going up to every one of our leagues and discussing exciting stuff like bylaws, regulations, and policies to make sure they understand [the importance of gender equity]. sometimes i might have been intimidated a bit to do that.… go into these groups or talking about the females in the sport and coaching and why it’s important. danielle found that her communication style improved across her time participating in the cop and she is now more secure in her leadership style. she also attributed a higher effectiveness across her team to this improvement in her communication skills. just in everyday interactions with our team. i think the biggest thing it has made me more comfortable in my authentic leadership style, which is huge… because i am communicating better with the team, upwards and downwards like all the way around, three-sixty. yeah, we are more effective as a team. and personally, yes because it makes me feel more confident and comfortable in who i am. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 18 another sport leader (jane) found that her access to new leadership skills also had an impact on her role in her organization. she expressed that some of these new skills were not anticipated: so, i got really unexpected things i think from participating in [the cop]. i think presentation skills were really big one. i think also leadership skills because we had that opportunity to work so closely with [one of the mentors] through the leadership legacy group. we also did really great work with brené brown’s work in giving us little projects to kind of focus on more of… the connection side of leadership, which i think is often undervalued or ignored but has a really big impact on my work. previous literature has suggested that leadership cops produce and reproduce hegemonic masculinity (karatas-özkan & chell, 2015). however, we can see in this case, that the women were able to develop leadership skills that are not necessarily a reproduction of hegemonic skills, but skills that aligned with their authentic leadership styles. for the sport leaders, developing their communication skills was important for their workplaces. in a cop of masculinity, developing strong and confident communication skills may not be considered a priority, but for women, a lack of assertiveness has been identified as a barrier in sport (allen & shaw, 2009; kilty, 2006) and therefore those skills are important. as mentioned in jane’s quote, another strategy that was appreciated by the sport leaders was the use of resources from other well-known women leaders (including brené brown, 2018) to support their specific development needs as women. self-awareness of leadership capacity and influence as mentioned above, leadership (especially in sport) is often associated with masculinity. kristen experienced considerable backlash from other sport organizations (particularly from men) while leading a new sport program. however, she realized that despite the struggles she endured, she knew that by pushing through and maintaining her leadership role, she would inspire other women to do the same: because i was a female leader heading [the program], i think my role inspired other women. i actually heard that a lot from other women. i even heard it from mothers who i would see [playing the sport] because we encourage parents to come because we need additional people to be at the end of the group…. so, we try to have a very inclusive program. and so, i noticed that a mom would say ‘you’re the one that inspired me to get into [the sport]; i haven’t [played] since i was young’. so, i think i never really thought of myself as a leader. i knew i was beginning a group, but i thought of it more as an organizer type of a leader. i didn’t know that i was a female leader that people looked up to. similar, to kristen, amanda did not recognize the importance of her influence in a leadership role prior to her participation in the cop. by developing a newfound awareness, she knew that she could use her influence to keep pushing gender equity forward in sport: i think now i understand a little bit more just the impact i have within our organization. so, it was still the same role, but understanding that, you know, my behavior or the words i use has an impact on the people around me every day. so, understanding that piece of it, then i guess just making sure that we’re always working towards pushing [gender equity] forward and not taking for granted the opportunity that we have to develop things right now. in karen’s experience, she became more aware of her reactions to others. she deliberately reflected on her reactions and changed her actions to enhance her leadership role as a female sport leader: well, i think one thing that i’ve learned from [cop mentors] for sure is really being self-aware and thinking about, you know, ‘why am i feeling like this and why am i reacting like this? how do i want to react to this? how am i going to be the most effective kind of leader in this situation?’ so, i think those [are] very specific practical tools. so, here is where i am. ‘why am i feeling like this?’ you know, ‘how can i adjust and head in a better direction?’ so yeah, i think just sort of practical everyday kind of tools and thought processes to put into place. i think it has made me more effective in my role. the sport leaders described a heightened awareness of their influence and how they believe it inspired others in their organizations and other women. kane (2016) suggests the absence of women in leadership roles can create a vicious cycle for other women: one could even argue that the lack of women in leadership roles sets up a classic catch-22 dynamic. research has shown that under circumstances of insufficient information – which is certainly the case if we don’t see or experience women as leaders – people rely on traditional (stereotypic) notions about gender and leadership capacities (p.37-38). this organizational dynamic reinforces the masculinization of leadership roles and upholds gendered beliefs about who should lead, thus perpetuating discrimination against women and keeping them out of positions of authority and power. increased leadership opportunities the women in the cop proudly described their increased confidence and leadership skills which they see serving them well in their futures in sport. it is vital to note, many women in this study took these skills and confidence and secured new leadership opportunities they may not have otherwise had as a advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 19 result of their participation in this two and a half year cop of femininity. for example, ellen’s opportunity to move up to a new leadership role appeared quickly after joining the cop: i mean being part of this community of practice, my first year in this role i was standing in front of our entire group of athletic directors and board and executives presenting on the importance of developing female coaches in all of our sport. and without this community of practice, i would not have been in a position to do that. i would have just been a body sitting around the table raising my hands to vote every once in a while. rebecca was also recognized as a leader in her organization and was entrusted with running her gender equity project on her own. today, she is the primary point of contact for a women’s mentorship program: yeah… i’ve been able to take the project and completely run with it. so, the fact where everybody just refers back to me with any questions. whereas before i went to the meeting and presented and it was still kind of a shared project. hayley described a similar experience, where she was originally part of a larger collaborative group running her sport’s regional gender equity project. she was then supported by her ceo to take on a leadership role and ownership of this project with one other colleague: so, my role evolved with the organization. you know at first, we’re like cool here are these projects and it was like i…had a hand in it. and then [the ceo] was like ‘you know what, i don’t, i can’t own this. i need you to own this with [a second sport leader] supporting’. so, i think for both [the sport leader] and i, we were able to then dive into our academic backgrounds, our previous and current experiences of being in school and being able to talk to researchers. you know it was just something that wouldn’t have happened otherwise or at least not within this timeline. the sport leaders felt that having the support of the cop enabled them to take on additional leadership opportunities in their own sport organizations. this mirrors other initiatives supporting women in sport. for example, in the united states, there is the alliance of women coaches, which is an organization that supports women as they develop as leaders (lavoi, 2014). on a global scale, there is the women’s sport leadership academy which aims “to be a central point of reference for scholars and activists involved with women and sport, and to support the education and development of women leaders from countries where women face particular challenges” (pike, white, matthews, southon, & piggott, 2018, p.812). having this kind of community available in canada supports another group of women in developing these skills to take on leadership opportunities. it is also important that the sport organization recognizes the sport leaders’ leadership skills and capacities. kilty (2006) explains that women have felt that they have been passed over for leadership opportunities for “exhibiting an atypical/unfamiliar leadership style” (p.224). this is another reason to have a leadership network of supportive women and male allies to provide additional credibility to the sport leaders’ skills and capacities. men supporting women in leadership development although the cop was primarily focused on developing women’s leadership capacities and skills, two men chose to participate in the cop to support women in leadership. shawn acknowledged that: “for me as a guy in the room, one of the few guys in the room, there is tremendous personal learning for me”. this shows that the cop was also an important learning opportunity for men. the male sport leaders also shared their experiences working in an androcentric field and identified some of the work that still needs to be done to promote more women in leadership. shawn described the stereotypes that he sees in sport: if a guy screws something up, he screwed it up. you know, tim or johnny screwed it up. whereas when a woman screws it up in high level sport it’s ‘that woman screwed it up’. and it’s a gender thing, it’s not, it’s not an individual, it’s the gender. she screwed it up, ‘i told you, women can’t be at this level and they don’t know what they’re doing’. and so that dynamic, i think is, for me… teaching men just some of the differences in the approaches [to support women in leadership] … and maybe some different applications for how we enable, support, inspire, and sponsor our women leaders. shawn had recently moved to a different region and expressed that he was seeing the same barriers for women in leadership all over the country: it’s amazing having moved across the country from the alberta program in the challenges that we’re facing and trying to address with the projects out there, and listening to some of the challenges out here that our organization is hearing; and trying to plan out the projects this week, they are so similar… it’s interesting to me, similar organizations, but the two sides of the country and how the rhetoric is very similar in looking at these sort of leadership projects and the need for them. the second male who was part of this project, paul, was able to leverage his participation in the cop to support more women in leadership roles and hoped that this would lead to future generations of women enriching sport through positions of authority and power: we were able to push to the point where we now have these two women as certified learning facilitators who are now going to be able to go in and deliver a course, which we’ve not been in a position to do before. so, for us, it has helped push that agenda forward. by putting advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 20 these two women in a role where they will now have influence over this generation; that’s next. you know, for example, generations of [women] coaches coming in by virtue of the fact that we have them certified and they’re going to go deliver that course. it was all really through the support and the interest behind it from this program. the male allies in this cop developed a strong understanding of the gender inequities that exist in sport and may use their leadership positions to promote and support women in leadership. in recent literature, kraft, culver, and din (2020), also found that strong male allies played an important role by leveraging their leadership in sport organizations to support women in breaking down barriers in sports culture. lavoi and wasend (2018) also highlighted the significance of having male and female allies in sport organizations to create a climate where women are supported and valued and have the opportunities to secure leadership roles, such as head coach positions. the value of social learning the sport leaders expressed the value of participating in a cop of femininity which enabled them to achieve their goals and develop their leadership capacities. caitlyn considered the cop to be important in making her feel like she was not alone in her journey to develop as a leader in sport and push for gender equity: honestly, i sometimes feel like the [cop] is like a big support group. and so, for me, the confidence comes from knowing, i sound really cheesy, but from knowing that i’m not alone and that this is something that others value. and so, it’s not me being idealistic or, selfserving isn’t the right word, but it’s helpful to know that there are other people who are fighting the same things… [this] adds credibility to what i’m doing. shawn builds on this by sharing his appreciation for having a group of women leaders together working to overcome their shared challenges: “i think the power of the community is in getting of bunch of motivated female leaders in the room and getting them working together, and hearing the commonalities between their challenges”. finally, karen found considerable value in meeting with a group of like-minded individuals to build connections and learn from the various opportunities the cop offered: i think that coming together and actually being able to be together in person, you have like those real comfortable one-on-one conversations and learning concepts together. all of that really kind of bonds you. another one would be the optional offerings like the leadership courses and stuff. those are kind of interesting too because it was a different way to learn from each other, but in a smaller group setting… with a specific focus. ten years ago, in a session conducted by dr. penny werthner, women coaches were asked to describe why there was a lack of women coaching at the national level. one participating coach mentioned that “the best aspect of the session was hearing the voices of other female coaches – voices that she noted were a silent minority when they gathered at her sport organization meeting” (werthner, culver, & mercier, 2010, p.49). we found similar accounts from both the women and the men participating in this cop of femininity. there was great value in having a group of women and male allies come together to create a space for underrepresented voices in sport leadership to be heard and strengthened. implications and conclusion the results of this study provide insight into sport leaders’ experiences participating in a cop of femininity for leadership development. this two and one-half year experience enabled them to negotiate and identify the meaning of leadership, rather than participating in a cop of leadership that explicitly or implicitly reproduces characteristics of masculinity. the implications of this study highlight that women may be supported in their leadership development through a cop that aligns with concepts of leadership as they pertain to women. organizations, including sport, education, medicine, and others, may consider replicating a similar social learning initiative to enable women (and male allies) to engage in ongoing learning opportunities to support each other in their leadership development journeys. specifically, the authors recommend that similar initiatives are carefully designed and facilitated in maledominated contexts like sport. framing cops of femininity could disrupt the othering and gatekeeping features of organizations where women are diminished and prevented access to leadership positions. the cop of femininity we co-created with sport leaders in this project positively impacted participants’ leadership development. we imagine similar impacts in unique contexts are possible based on our collective experience of this social learning initiative. we recommend framing a cop of femininity in relation to the needs and projects participants identify and seek support for implementing in their unique context. more specifically, the lead of this initiative made a point of relying on the sport leaders to drive the selection of activities (workshops, presentations, etc.) the cop undertook based on their specific and changing needs. this enabled the sport leaders to develop leadership skills that were relevant to their own contexts, rather than hyper-masculine and hegemonic skills that are typically associated with leadership and sport. the authors recommend readers to (culver et al., 2019; kraft et al., 2020) for practical insight into the inner workings of this cop including specific activities used to facilitate and promote learning, challenges, and lessons learned. an example learning activity cop participants engaged in was an interactive workshop on unconscious biases, which is suggested as an important topic in women’s leadership development opportunities (madsen & andrade, 2018). the authors also suggest reading (culver et al., 2020; kraft & advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 21 culver, 2020) for additional information about social learning theory. more specifically, to host an effective cop, learning how to frame, facilitate, and assess this type of social learning initiative is important. finally, this study primarily used the perceptions of the sport leaders for data collection. future iterations of this research may include collecting accounts from those who work with the sport leaders to further support (or oppose) the accounts of the sport leaders’ development, including more men. considering women are still faced with a number of barriers when accessing leadership development opportunities and leadership positions in sport, it is important to create nurturing environments to support 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(2010). changing the androcentric world of sport: is it possible? in s. robertson (ed.), taking the lead: strategies and solutions from female coaches (pp.37-56). edmonton, ab: the university of alberta press. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 23 advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 21 2010 issn 1093-7099 we did it our way: motivations, satisfactions, and accomplishments of senior academic women dr. eugenia proctor gerdes abstract in a survey of senior academic women whose careers began around 1970, over half of the 98 respondents cited the desire to serve or make a difference and sought personal fulfillment in their work. most saw men’s motivations as dissimilar, typically as more self-interested and competitive. despite generally high satisfaction, dissatisfaction with time pressure/workload and with support was common. satisfactions and accomplishments overlapped. frequently mentioned were teaching, scholarship, and their discipline, especially by faculty, and programmatic accomplishments, especially by administrators. many respondents mentioned helping women; many mentioned a collaborative, nurturing style as integral to their success and as different from their typical male colleagues. context is provided by the metaphor of immigration (martin, 1997, 2000), the concept of ambivalent sexism (krefting, 2003; glick & fiske, 1999), and recent work on women and leadership by eagly and colleagues (e.g., eagly, 2005; eagly & carli, 2007). keywords: women, higher education, academic women, accomplishments citation: gerdes, e. p. (2010). we did it our way: motivations, satisfactions, and accomplishments of senior academic women. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(21). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction the situation of women as professional employees in higher education has changed dramatically since the early 1970s. this change can be examined on several levels, beginning most simply with the sheer number of women. in approximately 20 years, from 1976 to 1997, women as a percentage of full-time employees increased from 25% to 36% of faculty positions and from 26% to 45% of executive-administrative-managerial positions (nces, 1998, 2001); and the gradual increase in representation of women continues, reaching 42% of full-time faculty and 53% of full-time executive-administrative-managerial positions by 2007 (nces, 2010). on another level, the change in representation of women and in attendant attitudes can be viewed in terms of the underlying causes, powerful influences that began in the early 1970s—most notably, the application of affirmative action to higher education (astin & snyder, 1982), the creation of commissions on women (glazer-raymo, 1999, 2008a), and, perhaps more subtly, the development of women's studies and feminist perspectives in many disciplines (boxer, 1998). finally, on the most personal and complex level, women whose academic careers began in the 1970s were both affected by the transformations and responsible for many of them. few empirical studies have dealt with the lived experience of these women as they changed the landscape of higher education, an omission this study seeks to correct. two conceptual models seem particularly appropriate to viewing academic women as active, rather than passive, participants in the changes since the early 1970s. these models also address some of the obstacles faced by academic women, particularly gendered expectations. jane roland martin (1997, 2000), an eminent philosopher of education, introduced immigration as a metaphor for women’s increasing representation in higher education; she described women as moving from the private sphere and traditionally female occupations into the somewhat hostile male-dominated land of the professions, including higher education. martin argued that, to succeed as students and later as professors, women must neglect the private sphere’s “three cs of care, concern, and connection” and assimilate into higher education’s emphasis on logic and competition. moreover, because the traits associated with success in the academic culture are valued when they are possessed by men but not when they are possessed by women, women academics must become “living contradictions” unless they enter traditionally feminine (i.e., “ghettoized”) academic fields. a similar double bind for academic women is described by linda krefting (2003), using glick and fiske’s (1999) social psychological concept of ambivalent sexism (see cikara & fiske, 2009, for a more recent review of ambivalent sexism). academic women who are perceived as highly competent violate prescriptions that women should be nurturing rather than competitive, and thereby lose likability and influence. according to ambivalent sexism, regardless of academic women’s accomplishments, they cannot be seen as simultaneously competent and likable when they are competing with dominant (i.e., male) interests for positions and resources. krefting’s essay also included a more optimistic possibility, the post-structural feminist perspective that academic women themselves can deconstruct and resist dominant ideologies, including ambivalent sexism. krefting mentioned women’s consciousness raising during the 1960s and 1970s as an example, and she associated women’s resistance with their progress in higher education since that time—but her review did not include evidence on whether such resistance is common among academic women, and she acknowledged the power of dominant advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 interests to contest change. martin (1997, 2000) likewise held out an alternative to assimilation; she advocated changing our criterion for academic women’s successful immigration to acculturation, making the distinction that the dominant culture also changes when acculturation occurs. under acculturationism, women would not be expected to totally adopt the androcentric culture of higher education or to the hide traditionally feminine strengths in order to be successful in higher education. the resulting culture would be a blend that is no longer a harsh filter or chilly climate for women and that extends the benefits of care and connection, as well as rationality, to both men and women. martin assumed that assimilation still was the usual path to women’s success in her 1997 article, and she seemed more pessimistic about the possibility of acculturation in her 2000 book—but there is little evidence on whether women whose careers have spanned this transitional period since the 1970s feel that they have assimilated to the dominant norms or, instead, that they have made their own way (resisting the dominant expectations as suggested above) or even changed the culture of higher education in line with martin’s ideal of acculturation. in spite of the historic position of this cohort, surprisingly few studies ask senior academic women to look back over their careers and assess the factors in their own success. for example, although krefting (2003) noted the importance of examining lived experience as well as statistical data in assessing outcomes for women in academic employment, the sources she cited are autobiographical reports or case studies of problems faced by small numbers of women in specific disciplines or situations. two cross-disciplinary studies of a small number of senior women are more relevant to the current project. in their classic study of women educational leaders, helen astin and carole leland (1991) collected 77 case studies, separated into three “generations.” their youngest generation, the inheritors, began to assume leadership in the mid1970s and reported receiving greater support than the earlier generations. the inheritors often reported developing an awareness of the problems remaining for women as they confronted disparities themselves or became involved in women’s studies or feminist groups. according to astin and leland, the inheritors believe in collective action; and they see themselves as problemsolvers who lead by enabling and empowering others, but also as politically savvy. unfortunately, evidence from the inheritors is limited both because they were treated primarily in comparison to the earlier cohorts and because most had only reached their early to mid-forties by the 1991 publication date. more nearly completed careers were examined in florence hamrick’s (2003; hamrick & benjamin, 2004) mid-1990s interviews of 26 women who were full professors at a large research university, and whose average completion date for their terminal degrees was in the mid-1970s. in describing the competing demands for their time over their careers, these women communicated the difficulty of “doing it all.” they described compromises they had made during their careers and their acceptance of the consequences; and even though some referred to gender bias or to academe being premised on men’s lives, they emphasized their own choices in allocating time among teaching, scholarship, and service activities and between work and personal/family life (hamrick & benjamin, 2004). both the one-third of these women who were fullor part-time administrators and the two-thirds who were full-time professors described their current willingness to assume leadership roles to improve their departments and the university (hamrick, 2003). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 in order to collect retrospective reflections from a larger and broader sample of academic women before those who were newcomers in the early 1970s reached retirement age, i began to survey senior academic women from a variety of institutions in the spring of 1997. previously published analyses of these data demonstrated that those surveyed were aware of the tremendous changes for women over their careers but also aware of continuing problems. as reported in gerdes (2006), these senior women often cited the increased presence of women, improved policies or behavior toward women, and/or improvements in beliefs or attitudes toward women. however, almost half noted continuing family problems for women, and over two-thirds described continuing biases, primarily subtle or stereotypical biases. further, in describing their own careers, these senior women, especially the administrators, reported a high level of stress (gerdes, 2003b). major sources of stress included time/workload pressures; responsibility to and for others, others’ expectations, and conflict; resource problems; and high expectations of oneself. difficulty balancing work with other roles over the course of their careers also was described by a majority of these academic women. their advice to younger women, reported in gerdes (2003a), included appropriate cautions about remaining pitfalls but also striking optimism about current prospects for women if appropriate strategies were followed. statement of purpose the lived experience of women who began academic careers in the 1970s is important. yet, their story is incomplete— more research has covered barriers to their success than their resistance to expectations and their accomplishments in changing the landscape of higher education. my three earlier analyses raise the question of whether senior women’s assessment of their achievements will accord with their high stress and the cautionary aspect of their perceptions of higher education or, instead, with their sense of agency and optimism concerning women’s progress. what were their goals and priorities in their careers? what do they identify as their accomplishments? are they satisfied with their careers? do they see their gender as determining their motivations or accomplishments? moreover, are their answers on the whole indicative of concern about being judged according to stereotypical prescriptions (ambivalent sexism) and assimilation or more in accord with resistance to ambivalent sexism and acculturation? a qualitative research design is most appropriate to address these questions. many authors have noted the natural link of qualitative methods to studying lived experience and listening to women’s voices, goals emphasized by feminist scholars since the 1970s (kitzinger, 2004; marshall & rossman, 2006). for this qualitative study, i chose to use open-ended survey questions rather than structured interviews in order to produce a large sample that was geographically diverse, represented different institutional categories, and allowed the possibility of comparing different types of academic women. motivations, satisfactions, and accomplishments would be expected to diverge for those who chose different paths over the course of their careers. given the large sample, frequencies of similar responses were counted, a strategy that facilitates nuanced conclusions from qualitative research (deem, 2002). the design can be characterized as “mixed” because of the use of statistical analysis (patton, 2002); in addition to collecting qualitative data and performing content analyses to assign answers to categories, the frequencies in categories were statistically compared across groups of women. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 method survey in order to maximize the number of appropriate respondents, i used one of the four dominant types of qualitative research sampling, snowball sampling (gobo, 2004; patton, 2002). in the spring of 1997, i emailed a letter of explanation and an open-ended questionnaire to women identified through acquaintances at my own and other institutions, multi-disciplinary listservs of faculty members, and listservs of academic deans and higher education administrators. the letter invited confidential participation by faculty women and academic administrators or other administrators who began their careers with faculty positions, especially those who assumed their first positions in higher education in the 1970s or a few years earlier. the letter also asked recipients to forward my invitation to other academic women who might fit these criteria. a series of open-ended questions addressed respondents’ positive and negative experiences early in their careers and in their current work. the three questions relevant to the current report appeared near the end of the questionnaire, before the final questions about higher education in general, and asked respondents to reflect on their own careers as a whole: looking over your career, what do you think has motivated you? do you think your goals and priorities have been any different from those of men in comparable positions and on similar career paths? have women’s issues been a priority for you? what would you describe as your major accomplishments and innovations in your career? do you think there are contributions you have made that arise from your being a woman, that might not have been made by a man in your position? how would you rate your overall satisfaction with your career—very high, high, moderate, low, or very low? what are your greatest sources of satisfaction? what are your greatest sources of dissatisfaction or disappointment? respondents ninety-eight women responded to the survey. of these, 11 were current or recent presidents or chancellors; 40 were academic deans, vpaa/provosts, or their associates working in academic or faculty affairs (hereafter called deans); nine were other administrators; and 38 were faculty members. respondents’ disciplinary backgrounds spanned the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences including medicine. they were located across the country (plus several in canada) and at institutions that represented every carnegie classification and that included some women’s colleges. respondents were invited to identify characteristics besides gender, including ethnic background, that might have affected their treatment; few identified race or ethnicity, so it must be assumed that most are white. it appeared that either date of degree or date of first academic job could indicate the start of their academic careers. although 96% had received doctoral or terminal m.f.a. degrees, a advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 good number began academic positions before obtaining the terminal degree; other women received their final degrees well before they sought or were able to obtain a full-time position. as intended, these respondents began their careers in the crucial juncture when affirmative action was beginning to be applied to higher education and women’s studies were beginning to be introduced as a discipline. only five women had not received their highest degree or begun an academic job before 1980, and 84% either received their highest degree or began an academic job by 1976. for more information on the respondents, see gerdes (2003a, 2006). qualitative analysis each question was analyzed separately. the questions allowed respondents to state multiple motivations, accomplishments, and sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction; so each respondent’s answer was broken into separate elements where the respondent appeared to shift to a new point. an inductive process was used to determine categories that were distinct and internally consistent (see marshall & rossman, 2006; patton, 2002). after familiarizing myself with the answers, i formed preliminary categories based on patterns in the data; new categories were added when elements of an answer did not fit any existing categories, and categories were combined when elements appeared to fit either of two categories. each separable element from a respondent was placed into only one category. answers were counted in each of the categories for which they contained an appropriate element; consequently, the number of motivations, accomplishments, sources of satisfaction, and sources of dissatisfaction is greater than the number of respondents. this process reduced a large amount of written material to a manageable number of meaningful categories by decisions that, admittedly, were subjective, and appropriately so in a qualitative analysis (marshall & rossman, 2006; patton, 2002; kelle 2004). however, the decisions are transparent because the respondents’ own words are used in describing the content of the categories below; this both preserves the women’s voices and allows the reader to evaluate the distinctions between categories. quantitative analysis respondents were counted only once in each category regardless of the number of elements in their answer that were relevant to that category, so the percentage of respondents who fit that category could be calculated by dividing the number of respondents represented in that category by the total number of respondents answering the question. yates chi-square tests, corrected for continuity, are reported when significant. tests generally were conducted between combined groups of participants (e.g., comparing administrators to faculty) because of the small numbers in most subgroups. findings motivations all but eight respondents explicitly stated one or more motivations for their careers. the separate elements of their answers fit into six categories (see table 1). most answers contained advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 elements fitting one or two categories, but some contained elements fitting three or four categories. table 1 percentage of those answering question who listed each type of motivation note. number of those answering question = 90. service, making a difference. the most frequently mentioned category of motivations was the desire to make a difference, to be a change agent, to solve problems, to be of service, or to help others; this type of motivation appeared in the answers of 51 respondents (56.7%). the difference in prevalence between administrators (64.9%) and faculty members (42.4%) was marginally significant, x2 (1, n = 90) = 3.44, p = .0636. nine of the 11 presidents (81.8%) gave this explanation for their career motivations, as did 24 of the 38 deans (63.2%) and four of the eight other administrators (50%). three presidents provide good examples of these answers: what has motivated me is the desire to make a difference. with individual students at first, with larger groups, and later with institutions, and perhaps the direction of some educational policy. i think i got into administration out of some desire to serve and some desire to build things. my motivations have been to create things and to see change and improvements. i am now heavily motivated by how much of a difference i can make to the institution and energized by seeing the changes i have been able to make. i’ve always cherished the academy and looked for ways to enhance its best aspects for faculty and for students….my goals have been more to make a difference than to make a reputation. intrinsic— traits or characteristics. over half of the respondents mentioned their own intrinsic traits or characteristics as motivating their careers. examples of the traits or characteristics mentioned by 48 women (53.3%) include: love of ideas, learning, knowledge, or challenges; competitiveness; fear of failure; desire to excel, prove oneself, or to do one’s best; desire to lead or participate in teamwork, wanting a job that is fun; love of variety; desire to use skills. for this intrinsic trait category the emphasis was on acting as necessary given one’s nature or benefiting oneself by fulfilling a desire or doing what one loves. the intrinsic trait category of motivation percentage of those answering question service, making a difference 56.7% intrinsic—traits or characteristics 53.3% intrinsic—discipline, teaching, scholarship 18.9% combined intrinsic motivations 64.4% external rewards or recognition 13.3% unplanned career progression 12.2% family influence 12.2% advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 category was difficult to distinguish from the service category, as well as from certain external rewards (see below). benefiting others was the emphasis for the service category. some answers had separable elements of both service and intrinsic traits and were counted in both categories. the third president quoted provides one example because, in addition to service, her answer included the sentence, “i love work, i love change, and this career has always offered plenty of both.” intrinsic—discipline, teaching, scholarship. a related, but uniquely academic, category contained answers that referred specifically to love of one’s discipline, the subject matter, teaching, and/or research, which were given by 17 women (18.9%). even though the question referred to one’s career as a whole, these answers were more common for current faculty members (36.4%) than administrators (8.8%), x2 (1, n = 90) = 8.66, p = .0033. combined intrinsic motivations. because the academic-specific motivations could be considered intrinsic motivations, the small academic-specific category also was folded into the larger category of intrinsic motivations, adding those women who were not already counted in the larger category. there were only five administrators whose answers contained the academicspecific intrinsic motivations; all of them were already counted in the larger category because their answers contained more general intrinsic traits or characteristics. however, 10 faculty women who did not express general intrinsic motivations gave these academic-specific intrinsic motivations, yielding 25 of the 33 faculty women (75.8%) who expressed some kind of intrinsic motivation. considering the answers specific to one’s discipline, subject matter, teaching, and/or research as intrinsic motivations in addition to intrinsic traits and characteristics, a total of 58 of the 90 respondents (64.4%) expressed intrinsic motivations for their careers. external rewards or recognition. a surprisingly small category was external rewards, which was expressed as ambition or desire for specific outcomes such as money, power, status, success, or recognition. somewhat surprisingly, only 12 respondents (13.3%) mentioned such external motivations as a driver for their careers. to avoid underemphasizing these women’s interest in external rewards and status, ambiguous phrases (i.e., ambition, power, love of status, desire to succeed, desire to be respected) were counted in the external rewards category rather than in the intrinsic traits category—however, eight of the 12 answers citing external awards also included separate elements dealing with intrinsic traits (and another dealt with the academicspecific intrinsic category); so the decision to categorize these ambiguous answers as external rewards did not much diminish the intrinsic categories. other small categories. two other categories were used infrequently. first, 11 respondents (12.2% of those addressing the motivation question) mentioned that their career progression was not a deliberate path but natural, unplanned, or circumstantial or that they were drafted rather than having aspirations for higher status roles. not surprisingly, given their change in direction from their initial faculty positions, 10 of these 11 comments came from the presidents (27.3%) and deans (18.4%). second, the influence of parents, spouse, or family in general was mentioned as a motivation by 11 respondents (12.2%). comparison to male colleagues. these senior academic women also were asked whether they believed their motivations were different from those of their male colleagues in advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 similar positions or career paths. for a few women who expressed their motivations in the first part of the question in terms of their gender or women’s issues, it could be inferred that they considered their male colleagues’ motivations necessarily different even when they did not address the latter part of the question separately. for example, “i am fascinated with organizational culture and the possibility of moving it from old, male-created models born of logical, linear thinking, to newer ones that may draw more on the perspective of women and make deliberate use of non-linear models.” however, beliefs concerning men’s motivations could not be inferred for 26 other women who neglected to address this part of the question or the four who explicitly stated that they preferred not to make comparisons. of the 68 women who responded, 49 (72.1%) described differences or simply stated that the motivations are different, although some women expressed reservations about generalizing. consistent with these senior women’s prevalent use of service/change-oriented and intrinsic motivations as explanations of their own careers and their low prevalence of explanations in terms of external rewards or recognition for themselves, 27 different women (39.7% of those answering the question and 55.1% of those expressing their belief in a gender difference) stated that men tended to be more self-interested or competitive in their motivations. these answers fell into two subcategories. in the first subcategory, men were described as more typically motivated by desire for power, advancement, status, recognition, or money or as less interested in helping others or solving problems by 16 women (23.5% of those answering this question and 32.7% of those expressing their belief in a difference). in the second subcategory, men were described as having a style that is more authoritarian, competitive, or confrontational or as being less likely to work collaboratively or nurture others by 12 women (17.6% of those answering this question and 24.5% of those expressing their belief in a difference). only one answer contained elements fitting both categories; it provides good examples of both: i think my teaching and research have very much been influenced by my gender and my gradually increasing consciousness of gender issues. i think my teaching style and my interactions with students have always been, if you like, more nurturing than confrontational….fame and scholarly recognition have never been a big value for me; for some reason (i suspect gender-related) i just don’t seem to have the kind of ambition my male contemporaries have. the only other descriptions of gender differences dealt less with motivations for academic careers and more with factors that impact men and women differently in academic careers. the belief that women care more about family priorities or domestic and personal satisfaction or that they are more aware of other roles was expressed by eight women. in addition, another woman stated that her late start for family reasons made her more motivated than males in similar situations. and, 10 women expressed beliefs that it was more difficult for women to achieve due to family, difficult circumstances such as part-time or temporary positions or lack of mobility, differential treatment, lacking a planned trajectory, or lacking wives. these answers came from 19 different women (27.9% of the women answering the question and 38.8% of those expressing their belief in a difference). in addition, nine women (13.2% of those addressing the question and 18.4% of those judging there to be a difference) suggested that they believed their desire to prove women can make contributions or to address women’s issues in the advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 academy or to bring women’s perspectives was different than the typical motivation of their male colleagues. women’s issues. the part of the question asking whether women’s issues have been a priority yielded a high percentage of positive responses. of the 86 women who addressed this part of the question, 79 (91.9%) declared that women’s issues had been a priority in their careers; plus, four others who said that women’s issues were not a priority per se stated that these issues were an interest or present or important. level of satisfaction/dissatisfaction one dean did not answer any part of the question on satisfactions and dissatisfactions. of the 97 respondents, 83 (85.6%) stated that their satisfaction with their careers as a whole was high or very high. treating this question as a quantitative measure yielded average satisfaction of 4.3 on the five-point scale (with very high scored as 5, high as 4, moderate as 3, low as 2, and very low as 1). sources of dissatisfaction in spite of their relatively high level of satisfaction, 84 of the 97 respondents (86.6%) did offer at least one source of dissatisfaction or disappointment. one respondent explicitly stated that she had no major dissatisfactions; it is not clear whether the other 12 respondents who failed to answer this part of the question simply overlooked it or also intended to communicate that they had no dissatisfaction, so the prevalence of categories of dissatisfactions is stated both as a percentage of all 97 respondents and as a percentage of the 84 who stated any dissatisfaction. the majority of answers contained elements fitting only one category, but about of a quarter of the answers had elements fitting two or more categories. the sources of dissatisfaction could be broken down into six categories (see table 2). lack of support. disappointment in support for themselves or for their agendas was expressed by 26 women (26.8% of respondents and 31.0% of those giving any source of dissatisfaction), nine of whom related the lack of support to gender. this perceived lack of support occurred on the personal level (e.g., male organization lonely for a woman, let down by others), on the institutional level (e.g., general lack of institutional support or, more specifically, lack of acknowledgement or recognition by department or institution, resources not in line with goals, next level not implementing or supporting decisions, respondent’s program eliminated), or on the level of higher education or society (e.g., lack of respect for women in academe, marginalization of women’s issues, too few senior women in academe, society’s negative attitudes toward respondent’s field or academe, affirmative action being undone). this type of dissatisfaction was especially prevalent among deans, being expressed by 15 deans (38.5% of the 39 deans and 42.9% of the 35 who gave any source of dissatisfaction). the comparison between deans and those in all other job categories who gave any source of dissatisfaction was marginally significant, x2 (1, n = 84) = 3.08, p = .0793. lack of support was the only category holding more than three of the 14 women (listing a total of 19 sources of dissatisfaction) who rated their career satisfaction below high; nine of the 14 less satisfied women (one president, three deans, and five faculty members) stated dissatisfactions that fit this category. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 table 2 percentage of those answering question who listed each source of dissatisfaction note. number of those answering question = 84. time pressure/workload. dissatisfaction due to time pressure, workload, lack of time to do everything or to do it as well as they wanted or to have a balanced life was expressed by 25 women (25.8% of respondents and 29.8% of those who gave any source of dissatisfaction). teaching, scholarship, credentials. the next largest category was respondents’ concerns about their scholarship or teaching—especially productivity of scholarship, not having time for teaching (administrators), or not achieving a credential such as tenure or the terminal degree. this type of disappointment was expressed by 20 women (20.6% of respondents and 23.8% of those expressing any source of dissatisfaction). smaller categories. regret over limits to their advancement, career progression, or salary was expressed by 16 women (16.5% of respondents, 19.0% of those expressing any source of dissatisfaction). the category of dissatisfaction due to dealing with conflict, lack of collaboration, criticism, intransigence, or irrationality also contained 16 women. finally, a source of dissatisfaction in their personal life was expressed by 10 women (10.3% of respondents and 11.9% of the women expressing any source of dissatisfaction). the most common regret in this category was a commuting marriage; other dissatisfactions included a failed marriage, husband being punished for respondent’s success, inability to relocate, moving too frequently, and inability to help parents financially. sources of satisfaction many respondents did not distinguish their sources of satisfaction carefully from their motivations and/or accomplishments, and explicit answers on sources of satisfaction were missing for seven women who had rated their level of satisfaction. one answer (”everything”) did not actually give a source of satisfaction. most elements of other answers could be placed in one of three large or two small categories (see table 3). the majority of answers fit only one category, but about a quarter had elements fitting two or three categories. service, making a difference. one of the largest categories for motivations also was stated frequently as a source of satisfaction. being able to make a difference, to be a change agent, to solve problems, to lead, to improve programs or the careers of others, to be of service, category of sources of dissatisfaction percentage of those answering question lack of support 31.0% time pressure/workload 29.8% teaching, scholarship, credentials 23.8% limits to career advancement 19.0% conflict, intransigence 19.0% personal life 11.9% advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 or to help others (including helping students) was cited by 45 women (50% of those answering this part of the question). all 10 of the presidents who responded gave this type of answer. table 3 percentage of those answering question who listed each source of satisfaction note. number of those answering question = 90. discipline/academe, teaching, scholarship. pleasure in their discipline, scholarship, teaching, working in academe, and/or working with students was explicitly mentioned as a source of satisfaction by 31 women (34.4%). these academic-specific satisfactions were cited by a higher proportion of faculty members (62.2%) than administrators (15.1%), x2 (1, n = 90) = 19.34, p < .0001. inherent job characteristics. women also described other job characteristics that are less unique to academe that fit with their personal preferences. some of these were general, such as independence, creativity, variety, control of their own activities, flexibility, intellectual stimulation, learning every day, or generally enjoying what they do. others were narrower, such as being involved in planning and priorities or opportunities for public speaking. these types of inherent job characteristics that fit with women’s personal preferences were cited by 20 women (22.2%). smaller categories. a specific instance of recognition or accomplishments in general were cited as a source of satisfaction by 13 women (11.1%). in addition, people with whom they work or a broader network outside their institution was mentioned by eight women (8.9%). only one woman mentioned income as a source of satisfaction. accomplishments one dean did not answer any part of this question. two answers did not include a clear accomplishment, and a few contained only one category of accomplishment; but the majority of the 97 respondents listed elements fitting two or three categories of accomplishments. accomplishments were categorized in four large categories and one smaller category (see table 4). the small category will be described first as it represents the most literal interpretation of the question; the position they had achieved (e.g. tenured position, full professor, chair, dean, president, board member beyond their institution, office in professional organization) or their trajectory (e.g., rapid promotions) was listed as an accomplishment by 14 women (14.4%). category of sources of satisfaction percentage of those answering question service, making a difference 50.0% discipline/academe, teaching, scholarship 34.4% inherent job characteristics 22.2% accomplishments 11.1% colleagues or network 8.9% advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 table 4 percentage of those answering question who listed each type of accomplishment note. number of those answering question = 97. a includes some elements also placed in other categories. scholarship or teaching. overall, 59 women (60.8 %) mentioned their scholarly achievements and/or the quality of their teaching, including successful mentoring. among faculty members, 86.8% mentioned scholarship, teaching, or work with students. it is perhaps more surprising that 44.1% of the administrators mentioned accomplishments in these areas that are the traditional areas of evaluation for faculty members. the difference between faculty members and administrators was significant, x2 (1, n = 97) =16.00, p < .0001. separating scholarship and teaching, scholarly accomplishments were listed by 51 women (52.6%) who mentioned, for example, well-regarded publications, grant funding, discoveries, scholarly reputation, and awards but also more specific accomplishments, such as advances with applications that help others, textbooks, scholarship with students, path-breaking interdisciplinary work, nontraditional publications, and feminist scholarship. scholarly accomplishments were listed more frequently by faculty members (71.0%) than by administrators (40.7%), x2 (1, n = 97) = 7.38, p = .0066. success in teaching one’s own courses, development of one’s own courses or, in one case, work with students, or serving as an unofficial advocate for teaching was mentioned by 37 women (38.1%), 57.9% of faculty members and 25.4% of administrators, x2 (1, n = 97) = 9.00, p = .0027. the lower prevalence of teaching accomplishments than scholarly accomplishments should not be taken to mean that these women consider teaching less successful. teaching or working with students was mentioned as a source of satisfaction by many women, including five who did not identify it as an accomplishment. from their answers to other questions in the longer survey, it is clear that almost all of these 97 women have taught college courses at some time in their careers. no woman stated that she felt unsuccessful in her teaching, although a few stated dissatisfaction that they had too little time to teach up to their own expectations, or to teach at all (i.e., administrators). programmatic, administrative. some respondents described the accomplishments above as individual achievements. another large category contained accomplishments on the programmatic level. success in completing institutional projects, their role in improving their institution or the quality of the education delivered, institutional or national programs that they had developed or fostered, or simply the fact that they were effective administrators was mentioned by 69 women (71.1%). not surprisingly, administrators (84.7%) were more likely to list programmatic accomplishments than were faculty women (50.0%), x2 (1, n = 97) =11.95, p =.0005. among the administrators, 10 (16.9%) specifically mentioned financial category of accomplishment percentage of those answering question programmatic, administrative 71.1% scholarship or teaching 60.8% advancing women, diversitya 39.2% style, process 38.1% position, promotions 14.4% advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 accomplishments: solving financial problems, funding new facilities, finding new resources, attaining institutional grants, or fundraising. all of these women also identified other programmatic accomplishments as well. style, process. another large category was formed by women who described their style as integral to their achievements. that is, 37 women (38.1%) addressed process as well as products among their accomplishments or as the skills underlying accomplishments. of these, 34 women described themselves as: nurturers, healers, facilitators, sensitive listeners, or collaborators; or as being caring, consultative, cooperative, conciliative, nonthreatening, open, people-oriented, or skilled at teamwork; or as people who respect individuals, establish trust, motivate people, empower others, build connections or consensus, seek compromise and winwin situations, create positive environments, use networks, or seek better relations between constituencies. in addition, another three women mentioned that they do not shirk from leadership or are more likely to do the tough stuff than men. these process comments were made by 49.2% of administrators and 21.1% of faculty women, x2 (1, n = 97) = 6.59, p = .0103. advancing women’s issues, equity, or diversity. it was necessary to form one final category with four subcategories, two of which overlapped with categories above. for 38 women (39.2 %), one or two elements of their answers involved advancing women’s issues, or more broadly equity or diversity. of these women, 12 were already counted in the programmatic category for developing or supporting women’s studies; developing support programs or offices for women employees and students; or, working for women through commissions on the status of women, professional organizations, or outside boards. beyond this programmatic subcategory, 18 women listed serving as an exemplar/role model or mentor: achieving a position as a first for women (e.g., first woman department chair), proving that a woman could succeed in a tough position (e.g., single parent, non-tenure track position, “man’s field”), representing women well, or serving as a role model or mentor for younger women or students. to avoid an artificial distinction, two women were included here whose statements on mentoring students were reported previously as teaching accomplishments. finally, additional comments not previously classified included six by women who cited enhancing the climate for women or generally supporting women and six by other women who cited enhancing tolerance, diversity, or equity as an accomplishment. four women listed accomplishments fitting two of the four subcategories, so 42 accomplishments were categorized for these 38 women. accomplishments due to gender? over one-quarter of the 97 respondents failed to give an explicit answer concerning whether some of their accomplishments were due to being a woman and might not have been made by a man in their position. perhaps some interpreted the question as requiring an answer only if they had accomplishments unique to a woman in their position; or, alternatively, perhaps some interpreted the latter part of the question as asking them to list accomplishments made because they were women rather than directly addressing whether that was the case. in fact, the answers of nine of the women who failed to directly address whether gender contributed to their accomplishments could be classified positively because of the accomplishments listed (e.g., being the first woman to hold a position or achieve a landmark, founding women’s programs or professional organizations, serving as a role model for other women). overall, with these nine women, the belief that some of their accomplishments might not have been made by a man in their position was expressed explicitly or implicitly by 67 advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 15 women (69.1%). only 13 women (13.4%) stated explicitly that they didn’t know, couldn’t or wouldn’t compare or generalize, or that men’s accomplishments were equivalent. adding the 17 unclassifiable answers of those who did not explicitly engage this aspect of the question yields 30.9% of respondents as the highest estimate of the proportion of the respondents who do not attribute their accomplishments at all to their gender. thus, a large majority of these women do believe that some of their accomplishments arose from their gender. discussion the major advantage of an open-ended survey is that it avoids predetermining the answers considered by respondents. however, the corresponding limitation is that the openended technique generates the most salient answers, not necessarily the only answers with which the respondents would agree if other alternatives were offered; and the open-ended technique loses the opportunity to pursue the same alternatives with all respondents. in this study, respondents obviously interpreted the questions differently as well as answering on different levels of specificity. a possible self-selection factor also must be acknowledged; that is, highly successful women may have been more likely than less successful women to accept the invitation to participate. also, because men in comparable positions were not sampled, we cannot directly compare the stated motivations, satisfactions/dissatisfactions, and accomplishments of women and men; and we do not know if their male counterparts would agree with the respondents’ characterizations of the differences between women and men. that being said, certain results are striking. asking about motivations might be expected to pull for one’s needs and rewards. it is surprising, and admirable, that these successful women mentioned service to others so frequently and rewards so infrequently. although a good number of these women seek personal fulfillment through their work, few profess to seek external rewards or recognition. many, especially among administrators, appear to be doing what they are doing more out of concern for others; and those who expressed a belief in a gender difference in motivations also gave answers consistent with women being more motivated to make a difference and to serve and less motivated by personal ambition and competitiveness than men. making a difference, solving problems, or serving as a change agent also was frequently mentioned as a source of satisfaction; and nurturing, caring traits were mentioned again by a number of women who focused on process in describing their accomplishments or explaining why their accomplishments might not have been made by men. in accord with these senior women’s low emphasis on external rewards and recognition, many of their impressive accomplishments would not have been weighed heavily by the typical faculty evaluation system, which values service least and scholarship most highly, and which, within scholarship, favors traditional disciplinary contributions (park, 1996). due to expectations for tenure, promotion, and appointment as an academic administrator, we know that most of these women must have scholarship; however, 47.4% did not list scholarship as one of their major accomplishments, and many women who did list scholarly accomplishments were proud of contributions that would be considered less prestigious than those traditionally esteemed in their disciplines. although administrative women, understandably, listed more programmatic accomplishments, 50% of faculty women also listed programmatic accomplishments, which would be considered service in faculty evaluation systems. an advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 16 important distinction must be made—even if not valued by the current evaluation systems, these women’s accomplishments are valuable to higher education to the extent that change is considered desirable. as one example, a social scientist listed her role in starting her institution’s daycare center, writing program, women’s center, women’s studies program, and a national feminist organization and journal in her discipline. she worked with other women in some of these efforts and often was an unofficial activist for women’s issues, particularly when she became one of the institution’s few tenured women. early on, she worked with other junior women to respond to her president’s tenure quota plan that would have consigned almost all of the faculty’s untenured women to the “revolving door.” although this woman did not mention her teaching accomplishments, she mentioned her joy in seeing students grasp a topic and learn to think critically as satisfactions. even though, given her institution, she must have a credible publication record; she did not emphasize her scholarship except for starting and editing the feminist journal. the priorities that can be inferred from similar histories among both administrators and faculty in this study fit with park’s (1996) conclusion that faculty women care more about collective, transformative efforts and less about individual efforts to advance. park’s analysis and the current study suggest that why higher education undervalues such accomplishments may be a more fundamental question than why women, on average, are less productive scholars than men (krefting, 2003; park, 1996). nevertheless, strong evidence that these senior women are content with their priorities comes from their high ratings of satisfaction. the high level of satisfaction might seem surprising, given an earlier analysis (gerdes, 2003b) that documented the high level of stress reported by the same women. one point of agreement between the current study and the stress analysis is that time pressure, workload, and difficulties balancing time demands were reported frequently as a stressor and, in this analysis, as a source of dissatisfaction. another connection with previous analyses is noteworthy; although over two-thirds of these women noted remaining biases against women as a group (gerdes, 2006), they did not frequently mention such biases as a source of stress operating for them personally (gerdes 2003b) or as a source of dissatisfaction in the current study. only nine women in this study mentioned gender in connection with their disappointment over lack of support, plus one other who mentioned being behind men in salary. likewise, although eight women (one of whom was in the lack of support category as well) mentioned geographical constraints due to spouses or family, and one of them and one other woman explicitly mentioned difficulty balancing demands of children and career in connection with dissatisfactions, the prevalence of such dissatisfactions is far below the prevalence of family-career conflict revealed in response to direct questions in the study on stress (gerdes, 2003b). in that earlier study, many women pointed out positive effects of family for their lives as a whole although not for their careers. the overall impression from the current study in combination with the earlier analyses (gerdes, 2003a, 2003b, 2006) is that many of these women have chosen to try to “have it all” in spite of the stress and that they believe they have balanced the competing demands as well as possible, as indicated by their high level of satisfaction. their lack of regret over their choices echoes the acceptance of past choices and the consequences found by hamrick and benjamin (2004) in their smaller sample of full professors. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 17 certainly, higher education still is a male-dominated culture, where women often are marginalized and their contributions devalued, as described by martin (1997, 2000) and krefting (2003) among others (e.g., glazer-raymo, 1999, 2008b; may, 2008). but, for the most part, these senior women at a wide variety of institutions gave answers that agreed with more optimistic aspects of martin’s and krefting’s conceptions of women in higher education. they see themselves as successful and do not see themselves as having assimilated. almost to a woman, they were willing to make women’s issues a priority in their careers. some are consciously aware of their status as resisters of dominant ideologies, and some have just made their own way. most see themselves as having had different motives than their male counterparts—motivations that fit the traditional expectations for women of “care, concern, and connection”—and they proudly include these traits along with their accomplishments and point to accomplishments that would not have been made by their male counterparts. their perception of their traditionally feminine traits is more consistent with sally hegelson’s (1990) book, the female advantage: women’s ways of leadership, than with the idea that care and concern for others are logically incompatible with competence or success. in fact, trends discovered in research on women’s leadership could help explain these senior academic women’s resistance to defining themselves as clones of male academics. the complex relationships among roles, stereotypes, and behaviors suggested by alice eagly and her colleagues are especially relevant. note that the explanations advanced by martin (1997, 2000) and krefting (2003) both are based on prescriptive stereotypes that limit acceptable behaviors, rather than on essential differences in traits possessed by women and men. similarly, eagly and colleagues have used role incongruity, specifically the mismatch between women’s traditional gender role and agentic expectations of the leadership role, to explain prejudice against women leaders, particularly in male-dominated leadership situations (eagly, 2005; eagly & carli, 2003, 2007; eagly & karau, 2002). however, eagly’s work has demonstrated positive trends that may apply to academic women as well as to women leaders. although arguing that progress has slowed, eagly’s and carli’s (2007) book-length review, through the labyrinth, also argued that the glass ceiling now is a less appropriate metaphor for barriers to women’s leadership than the more complex but permeable labyrinth. eagly’s social role theory holds that gender stereotypes are based on the roles in which men and women typically are observed, which are changing as women’s representation increases in high status occupations. women are perceived as becoming more agentic while maintaining feminine attributes (diekman & eagly, 2000), and they also are developing more of the characteristics associated with previously male work roles (eagly, 2005; eagly & carli, 2003). prescriptive stereotypes as well as descriptive stereotypes appear to be evolving with social roles; college students’ perceptions of past, present, and future women show increasing positivity over time toward male-stereotypical characteristics along with continued positive evaluations of female-stereotypical communal characteristics (diekman & goodfriend, 2006). a mix of agentic and communal behaviors appears to be helpful for women leaders; disapproval of assertive, highly competent behavior is moderated by the presence of warm, communal behavior (eagly & carli, 2003). going beyond stereotypes, eagly and carli (2007) compiled convincing evidence that women are more likely than men to demonstrate highly effective transformational leadership behaviors. eagly (2005) argued that women and men differ ideologically, with women placing more emphasis on social compassion; the recent shift in leadership norms to advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 18 supportive and collaborative behaviors, particularly transformational leadership, gives women greater leeway to express such values and “allows some resolution of women’s role incongruity,” (2005, p.469), while reducing the pressure on women to model themselves after their male colleagues. in a recent review, cheung and halpern (2010) used the work of eagly and colleagues and the concept of transformational leadership to explain their own and other’s findings: women leaders’ narratives that feature service to others and conscious intention to promote gender equality rather than concern with competition or their own power. the recent work on women’s transformational leadership is consistent with these senior academic women’s reports of their motivations and of having succeeded in their own manner rather than assimilating to male norms. on the other hand, it would be hard to argue that these women perceive higher education today as demonstrating true acculturation, as described by martin (1997, 2000). earlier analyses (gerdes, 2003a, 2003b, 2006) indicate that these women, while acknowledging that higher education now is more open to women, are not yet convinced that the culture of academe is truly appreciative of women’s presence and contributions. like the inheritors (astin & leland, 1991), women’s issues became a priority for many as they confronted and observed disparities. they share the political savvy as well as the problemsolving orientation of the inheritors, but they probably would not label themselves as “inheritors” because they accomplished so many “firsts” themselves and are so aware of the distance remaining to full acceptance by the dominant culture. they are somewhat buffered from disappointment by the fact that they generally are not oriented toward external rewards or recognition. although not totally buying into the dominant culture of higher education or convinced that the culture is changing, these senior academic women are comfortable with themselves and their accomplishments. they see themselves as having made advances that they themselves value—but they apparently underestimate the transformative effect that their accomplishments and their presence will have on expectations of women working in higher education and on the overall culture of academe. acknowledgements the author wishes to thank the busy women who gave generously of their time to participate in this study. an earlier version of this paper was presented at the art of gender in everyday life iv conference, idaho state university, pocatello, id, april 5-6, 2007. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 19 references astin, h. s., & leland, c. 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(1996). research, teaching, and service: why shouldn’t women’s work count? journal of higher education, 67, 46-84. patton, m. q. (2002). qualitative research and evaluation methods (3rd ed.). thousand oaks, ca.: sage. biography eugenia p. gerdes, ph. d., is professor of psychology and dean emerita of the college of arts and sciences at bucknell university. she has studied discrimination in hiring and stress for women in traditionally male work roles throughout her career; most recently, she has focused on advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 21 the experiences of women in academic careers and on other issues in higher education. email: egerdes@bucknell.edu. method survey respondents qualitative analysis quantitative analysis respondents were counted only once in each category regardless of the number of elements in their answer that were relevant to that category, so the percentage of respondents who fit that category could be calculated by dividing the number of respond... level of satisfaction/dissatisfaction sources of dissatisfaction sources of satisfaction accomplishments discussion acknowledgements references astin, h. s., & leland, c. (1991). women of influence, women of vision. san francisco: josseybass. astin, h. s., & snyder, m. b. (1982). affirmative action 1972-1982: a decade of response. change, 14(5), 26-31,59. advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 16 2010 issn 1093-7099 the leadership discourse amongst female police leaders in sweden malin österlind and dr. ulrika haake abstract female leaders within the police force in sweden are in a minority. although their numbers are increasing, little is known about their experiences. by using interviews and discourse analysis, this article aims to analyse and construct the leadership discourse articulated by female leaders within the swedish police. it is argued here, as in previous research, that female leaders experience a range of different aspects in their roles as leaders. the female leadership discourse within the police is constructed around five themes of discussion: (a) the leadership style of good leaders is generally a transformational one; (b) a transactional approach to leadership is visible in relation to crisis situations; (c) extensive experience as a police officer is of importance; (d) leaders need support in different ways, and (e) experiences of being a ‘token’ female in a maledominated organisation is common. above all, this article challenges the notion that a ‘feminine leadership style’ exists. it is also argued that an intersectional perspective on police leadership is preferable, and that co-workers have an impact on leadership processes. keywords: female police leaders, police leadership, leadership discourse, women citation: österlind, m., & haake, u. (2010). the leadership discourse amongst female police leaders in sweden. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(16). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction within the police organization as well as in many other occupations, women are underrepresented at leadership level. even though women in the police are increasing in number, they still face difficulties in reaching managerial positions and are also a target for harassment and discrimination (somvadee & morash, 2008). according to silvestri (2003), the lack of research on police leaders reflects a general problem in reaching elite groups. in contrast to this, lack of research on female police leaders can be explained by way of their low numbers in the organization. however, silvestri (2003) stated that “women in police leadership positions may offer a significant contribution to the project of organizational change within policing” (p. 2), and moses schultz (2003) underscored the importance of learning more about police leaders. there are few studies in general devoted to discovering the complex construction of gendered police leadership discourses, particularly from a swedish perspective, which is why this study should offer additional information to the field of gender, leadership and police research. for this reason, the present article aims to analyze and construct the leadership discourse articulated by female leaders within the swedish police. the majority of employees within the police are men and the police culture is looked upon as being imbued with masculinity, male values and norms (e.g. åberg, 2001; andersson, 2003; åse, 2000; dahlgren, 2007; metcalf & dick, 2002; silvestri, 2003). in the swedish police, equality in general is seen to be an important factor in order to attract more female leaders, which is why various activities are put in place in order to increase the number of women in the organization (the national police board, 2008). about 40% of all employees in the swedish police are women and among police officers specifically, they form 25%. the number of female leaders has increased over the years and at present approximately 22% of police officers are women who are leaders at different levels. the majority of all employed men are sworn employees and the majority of all employed women are non-sworn employees. being a sworn police leader means that you have formal police academy training. being a non-sworn leader means that you are a civilian employee without formal police academy training. in january 2009, for the first time ever, the number of men and women accepted in the police academy for police officer training was entirely equal (the national police board, 2008). various training programs for leadership development exist for leaders at different levels and some police authorities also have specific programs for women. a gender perspective is supposed to be integrated in most programs in the organization (the national police board, 2008), a trend that is also pertinent to the uk police force (metcalf & dick, 2002). according to van der lippe, graumans and sevenhuijsen (2004), the swedish police is shown to be a front-runner in gender equality and sweden is said to have a long history of political will and policy for attaining gender equality. in comparison, the swedish police has the highest number of women in managerial positions. however, the authors state that employees in the swedish police force experience organizational culture as being the main disincentive to maintaining women in the force. they argued that: advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 however, even in sweden, the only country where gender mainstreaming has been incorporated in policies, it has not been successful yet. the percentage of women in managerial positions is low, and a male-dominated culture is still present (van der lippe, graumans and sevenhuijsen, 2004, p. 403). earlier research on women in the police varies in terms of aim, methodology and theoretical perspective and when viewed from a swedish perspective, it is apparent that limited research is to be found. overall, as has already been noted, little is known about police leaders in general and even less is known about the gendered aspects of police leadership. the first part of this article outlines earlier research within the field of women in the police as well as the theoretical stand and methodological considerations of its authors. the second part draws on the statements made by female leaders on the subject of leadership, which make clear their acknowledgment that a good leader uses a transformational leadership style in carrying out the regular work of a leader and a more transactional approach in managing crisis situations. also shown is the importance of being an experienced police leader with a long history of service. different kinds of supporting activities are also discussed, as is the significance of being a ‘token’ female in a male dominated organization. the discussion considers the merits of taking an intersectional perspective to shed light on minority groups, by directing criticism at the notion that there exists a feminine leadership style, and by emphasizing the importance of recognizing the impact of co-workers on leadership processes. earlier research on women in the police even though there is no consensus among leadership scholars of what constitutes good and efficient leadership, the majority argue that the leader plays a significant role in organizational success. however, leadership is no longer viewed as a set of individual characteristics; rather, it is looked upon as a holistic feature, a complex dynamic process affected by numerous factors within an organization (avolio, walumbwa, & weber, 2009). there is, however, a growing interest in adopting ‘transformational’ leadership styles within the police organization (silvestri, 2007), since the traditionally autocratic or transactional leadership style is, according to villiers (2003) and silvestri (2007), outdated and looked upon as counterproductive for the development of the police organization. this traditional leadership style is, nevertheless, still a part of the organizational culture of the police force and the authors stress the need for change. transformational leaders are defined as being participatory, relational and interactive, as being those who put organizational goals and vision before self-interest and who motivate personnel by increasing their self-esteem and autonomy (villiers, 2003). power and information are shared between the leader and the employees, as well as there being adopted an open communication approach (silvestri, 2007). transformational behaviors have been shown to have a positive effect on subordinates’ attitudes, job satisfaction and commitment to the organization (silvestri, 2007) as well as having a positive influence on leadership effectiveness and organizational outcomes (avolio, walumbwa & weber, 2009). transformational learning for women can take place and be supported in formal leadership development training (debebe, 2009). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 the more common transactional leader, on the other hand, sees personnel as being instrumental functions (villiers, 2003), and he or she uses a top-down approach, power and authority to exchange rewards for services (rosener, 1990). rosener’s (1990) study is cited as being influential in showing the gendered aspects of transactional and transformational leadership styles (silvestri, 2007), and it is argued in rosener’s (1990) study that women are more likely to adopt a transformational leadership style while men adopt the more transactional one. silvestri’s (2007) study on the descriptions provided by senior policewomen of their leadership styles is in line with rosener’s (1990) results, showing that the female leaders emphasize good relations, the sharing of power and information with subordinates, the use of open communication to create loyalty, and working through processes and promoting cooperation as well as working to reduce conflict, competition and hierarchy. the concept of transformational leadership stresses the need for organizations to become less hierarchical and more flexible, team-oriented and participative (kark, 2004). even though such issues are not directly related to the police, mano-negrin and shaeffer (2004) examined whether crisis awareness and preparedness are affected by gender. by using questionnaires sent out to leaders of israeli companies, they show that transformational leadership styles associated with a feminine orientation are better suited when it comes to managing crisis situations. female managers are, in their opinion, more likely to have a holistic, democratic and participative approach to leadership than are their male counterparts. moving beyond the bureaucratic, paramilitary structure of police organizations, pagon (2003) suggested that new forms of organizational design and leadership style need to be adopted. this change includes extensive organizational transformation and the training of police leaders. pagon (2003) concluded that police leaders should focus on increasing their communication skills, being sensitive to cultural diversity, and working on interaction, participation, networking, problem solving, and motivating employees. not only are leadership styles of interest in the literature available on women in the police force but so are aspects of pursuing a career within it (e.g. burke & mikkelsen 2005; dick & cassell, 2004; gaston & alexander, 1997; metcalf & dick 2002; silvestri, 2006). by way of interviews with female leaders in the police, silvestri (2006) described carrier paths within the police organization as well as the way in which female leaders construct their leadership. by making and managing time and by working full time and pursuing a long and clearly established period of service, policewomen can maintain their police identity and prove their commitment and trustworthiness as well as secure a career within the organization. the difficulties women experience in attaining the top jobs in the police are created by a traditionally male career model that hinders the opportunity they might have to reach managerial positions (dick & cassell, 2004; silvestri, 2006). by way of questionnaires sent out to police officers in norway, burke and mikkelsen (2005) showed that female police officers experience greater difficulties in pursuing a career, they rank their leadership qualities as being lower than those of their male colleagues, and they experience more sexual harassment and less equality than do their male colleagues. in another study, the traditional view of women being less committed to pursuing a career in the police is challenged, and shows instead that men and women display more or less the same levels of commitment (metcalf & dick, 2002). however, they stated that this fact “may not capture the totality of the female working experience in a male-dominated organization […] advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 women in male-dominated professions tend to develop the same attitudes and values as men in the profession” (metcalf & dick, 2002, p. 400). this adaptation on the part of women, prompted by the desire to fit in, and this acceptance of the existing culture is also identified in other studies (dick & cassell, 2004; silvestri, 2003). this is given expression in the swedish context by cedermark hedberg (1985), who concluded that female officers have limited opportunities to change the typically male police role, and that they adapt to the prevailing system of norms by identifying with stereotyped male characteristics synonymous with the role of a police officer. by the use of surveys, somvadee and morash (2008) showed that us policewomen experience sexual harassment in terms of suggestive jokes, offensive stories and behavioral and verbal sexism. jokes and remarks were shown to be seen as part of the male-dominated culture, and, by accepting these, women could become part of the group the price for fitting into the organization. other studies on the experiences, attitudes and behaviors of men and women at the beginning of their police careers describe the under-representation of women in positions of leadership (e.g. gaston & alexanders, 1997). after a couple of years within the police force, women are three times less likely to be interested in pursuing a career and engaging in the promotion process within the police compared with their male colleagues. this is seen as due to there being a smaller amount of perceived support and encouragement from senior management as well as a lack of female role models at leadership level. senior managers are said to constitute significant role models and it is recommended that managers become mentors for their subordinates (gaston & alexander, 1997). metcalf and dick (2002) also stated that support from management is influential in shaping organizational commitment among both men and women. in contrast, archbold and moses schultz (2008) found that female police officers who had been strongly encouraged by their male supervisors feel dissuaded from engaging in the promotion process. this was due to the women feeling that they were being promoted only because they were women and not because they were looked upon as effective leaders. archbold and hassel’s (2009) results revealed that family related issues as well as lack of confidence affect the decision women take to become leaders, even though it is shown that the majority of the women in the study perceive themselves to have the characteristics of leadership needed for the job. being a woman in a male dominated organization can be lonely and kanter’s (1977) study showed that “those women who were few in number among male peers and often had ‘the only woman’ status became tokens: symbols of how-women-can-do, stand-ins for all women.” (p. 207). tokenism has been said to affect those who are few in number in a way that makes them more visible than the dominant group, as well as overstating their differences and bending their qualities to fit with the stereotyped image of them (kanter, 1977). perceptions of tokenism are shown to have an impact on the decision taken by women to participate in the promotion process in order to become a leader within the police (archbold & moses schulz, 2008; wertsch, 1998). wertsch’s (1998) interview study of female police officers demonstrated that tokenism combined with family responsibilities and organizational structures affect women’s opportunities of engaging in the promotion process to become leaders within the police. one explanation for this is the reference to feelings of being trapped in gender-appropriate roles. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 being a woman is not the only incentive for becoming a leader within the police; there are also seen to be difficulties in being a non-sworn leader, as these are generally regarded as having a weaker position within the organization (rowe, 2006; stenmark, 2005). non-sworn staff, seen from a swedish perspective, is looked upon as a collectively heterogeneous group with limited opportunity for acting in relation to other sworn groups of employees. about 70 percent of the non-sworn staff in the swedish police is women (the national police board, 2008). this gap between non-sworn and sworn employees is said to impact negatively on the organization’s ability to act as a comprehensive unit (stenmark, 2005). rowe (2006) stated that non-sworn leaders “have to overcome considerable internal resistance” (p. 765) if they are to gain legitimacy in the police organization, as they lack the long experience of policing that is so important and that police leaders normally have. according to stenmark (2005), research on the police organization, its culture and leadership has so far left the experiences and conditions of non-sworn employees out of analysis. other studies from a swedish perspective that are of interest include andersson’s (2003) research on the age-specific constructions of masculinity that affect the way male police officers describe and pursue their daily work. åberg (2001) and dahlgren (2007) stated that there exists an internal segregation according to sex of the division of tasks and that a stereotyping of male and female practices creates barriers that prevent female patrol officers from being regarded as ‘real’ police officers. dahlgren (2007) as well as cedermark hedberg (1985) show that female police officers are looked upon as invaluable for their social skills and gentle way of dealing with women, children and the elderly. åse’s (2000) study focused on the way in which the female body is used for subordinating women in the police force and shows that women experience difficulties in being looked upon as “real” police officers. as can be seen in this review of earlier research, little has been explored regarding female police leaders from a swedish perspective, a discourse analytical point of view or a qualitative interview approach, which is why this study can be seen as an effort to fill in part of that gap. also of interest to bear in mind is the study made by van der lippe, graumans and sevenhuijsens (2004), which illustrated the swedish police as being a model for the good work done on equality, a factor which implies that women’s narratives from a swedish perspective might differ from those of other nationalities. moving on from this review of past research, the next section provides a description of the theoretical frame of reference and methodological considerations running through the whole research process. a gender perspective on leadership and organization in taking a gender perspective on leadership, it proves interesting to study the conditions that exist for male and female leaders as well as the way in which male domination in leadership positions affects our ideas about leadership, masculinity and femininity. the critique, as set out by gender scholars on leadership research, is directed at the gender neutral view on leadership that has unthinkingly characterized a good leader as one based on male features (freeman, bourque & shelton, 2001). even though there is a large amount of literature on leadership, there is no consensus about what effective leadership looks like or in what way gender affects leadership. however, rhode (2003) stated that good leadership is affected more by context and other circumstances than by individual characteristics and qualities. there are different models advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 for explaining the low number of women in managerial positions, but it is common for the under-representation of women to be connected to individual characteristics rather than to the features of the organization (connell, 2006; silvestri, 2006). this article draws on the notion that organizations are not gender-neutral, a perspective that has its background in kanter’s (1977) and acker’s (1990) influential work on gender and organizations. these authors are said to be the most important originators of the development of a systematic theory on the gendered processes that infuse organizations at both institutional and individual level (e.g. silvestri 2003 & 2006; connell, 2005 & 2006; ford, 2006). a definition of gender that focuses on processes and social relations rather than on personal traits and characteristics is the one used in this research (connell, 2003; haake, 2009). social and cultural ideas about gender and leadership are both constructed and reproduced by way of societal and organizational structures and practices (acker, 1990). the ways in which we act in different situations are thus dependent on normative ideas and broad structures in society. this study adopts due billing and alvesson’s (2000) ideas on taking a critical approach to the term of feminine leadership. their critique is directed at a rather general and stereotypical view of men, women and leadership that has a tendency to essentialize gender and reinforce stereotypical views of women. they stress that variations are as great within the categories of men and women as between them: the social construction processes of gender are complex, multifaceted and heterogeneous. masculinity and femininity are not static traits but change over time and over the lifetime of the individuals, and vary with class, race, occupation, organization, age, and individual conditions (due billing & alvesson, 2000, p. 152). while research in the areas of leadership and organization has been criticized for being centered on masculinity, gender research has been criticized for failing to consider the differences in the lives and experiences of men and women and for over-generalizing the subordination of women to men (hesse-biber & yaiser, 2004). it is therefore important to consider which women are being studied as well as which women have become leaders within the police. in doing so, hesse-biber and yasier (2004) indicated that the researcher can shed light on social structures that otherwise would be hard to see. social constructionism and discourse analysis social constructionism can be looked upon as an umbrella term for many approaches within the social sciences, whereas discourse analysis, by way of example, is but one approach (burr, 1995). when discourse analysis is applied, a basic social constructionist starting point is necessary for the research to be undertaken. a number of key issues are stated by burr (1995) and winther jörgensen and phillips (2000) as being central to a social constructionist point of view: taking a critical approach and questioning knowledge taken for granted, as well as seeing that our way of understanding the world is the product of our history and culture. other key features mentioned are the fact that knowledge is constructed through social interaction between people and that knowledge in turn affects our social actions. the social constructionist standpoint, according to burr (1995), takes a non-essentialist view, which means that human advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 nature is not a given, determined condition but that our manner of being is a product of social processes, with language being a pre-condition central to our understanding. human dialogue constructs the meaning of one’s surroundings and can thus be seen as a kind of social action. by being conducted in conjunction with other people, this interactive process sustains as well as develops our knowledge and understanding. knowledge is thus something that requires action on our part, not something that we have inside us; the focus within the field of social constructionism is therefore on processes. doing leadership and doing gender is thus the focus (haake, 2009; pesonen, tienari & vanhala, 2009). our work draws on the discourse theory set out by laclau and mouffe (1985), which is also described and quoted by such authors as howarth (2000) and winther jörgensen and phillips (2000). this perspective embraces not just language but also all social practices and relations as being discursive. central to discourse theory is the notion of a discursive structure; that is, a social and cultural construction of relations between objects and subjects, which gives social agents a variety of available subject positions. discourses are not closed units; rather, they are discourses that constantly change in relation to others, a variation termed a discursive struggle. discursive structures are articulatory practices which constitute and systematize social relations. articulatory practices “consist of the construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning” (laclau & mouffe, 1985, p.113). nodal points are described here as privileged discursive points that try to fix the discourse around a centre of meanings and to bridge the differences that are articulated in the discursive field. nodal points tie elements ambiguous signs that are constantly struggling for meaning to a chain of significance. a sign (for example, a word) acquires its meaning from a system of distinctions called chains of equivalence. this means that elements have both positive and negative functions in the discourse. from this perspective, one might say that discourses form symbolic systems and social orders which eventually become natural and ‘true’ to us (howarth, 2000; winther jörgensen & phillips, 2000). discourse analysis then becomes a method for analyzing how these practices, systems and orders are constructed and which consequences result from this for forming our view on reality. trying to be objective and establishing empirical generalizations are thus not in the interest of discourse theorists (howarth, 2000). methodological considerations in order to construct the leadership discourse among female leaders in the swedish police, material from interviews has been used. the choice of interviews as a method is based on the notion that discussion about leadership is an articulatory practice. the leadership discourse forms what is said by the leaders and also in what way, and interviews then constitute a method of capturing the articulated in its spoken form. in this case, in-depth interviews that followed a semi-structured interview format were conducted with four female sworn police leaders (police academy trained officers) and one female non-sworn police leader (with academic background). the participants were leaders at middle management level from two county police departments. four of those were in leadership training at the time. the leadership program dealt with a range of topics within the fields of organizational theory, leadership theory and communication. with geographical concern, the five women (of totally nine) that worked in the capital were contacted to participate in the study. four of those accepted to participate. two more female leaders in another district were contacted after the human resource department had been approached. one advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 of those accepted to participate. the intention has not been to look upon women as a homogenous group who share common characteristics, experiences and opinions; however, a purpose can be served in shedding light on a group that finds itself in a minority in a maledominated organization (due billing & alvesson, 2000; hesse-biber & yasier, 2004). the leaders interviewed were women in the age of 32, 45, 48, 49 and 54. one aim of this study has been to focus on a small group in order to in-depth analyze the discourse on leadership (howarth, 2000; kvale, 1997). our focus was on what was said (articulated); hence the interview questions were open ones to leave space for the interviewees to speak freely about their thoughts of leadership. an interview guide was constructed in a semi-structured format around the areas covered by the questions, which allowed for follow up questions as well as for changing the order of the questions. the main areas covered by the questions focused on issues such as what it felt like to be a leader within the police, what constituted a good leader, and what organizational factors and support functions were important in order to be a good leader. the interviewees were also asked about their thoughts on recruitment and pursuing a career. the interviews were recorded and transcribed word for word to supplement the notes taken during the interviews. by way of introduction, the informants were asked about their background within the police force. the interviews lasted about one and a half hours. as the theoretical point of reference is based on the notion that the informants articulate the discourse (laclau & mouffe, 1985), the analysis was directed at an understanding of the way in which different meanings were articulated. once the interviews had been conducted and transcribed, the work of analysis began. interview transcripts were analyzed by means of close reading and rereading in order to capture what leadership aspects the informants expressed in the interviews this constructing the leadership discourse. the analysis resulted in the emergence of a number of related themes repeatedly touched on by the leaders. the emergence of a theme did not have to follow the structure of the interview questions but could be constructed by other general discussion. however, this could also constitute an element of a discussion not necessarily voiced by many of those taking part but showing the ambiguity of the discursive theme. this type of work implies a categorization of nodal points (laclau & mouffe, 1985); namely, a significant subject of discussion raised by at least three leaders on different issues of leadership that construct the themes within the leadership discourse. for example, the theme of ‘support’ was developed by way of the leaders discussing what kind of support they needed in order to be good leaders. all discussion about support was written down, and nodal points emerged as it became apparent that support could take many forms such as that coming from management, from mentors and networks, and from shared leadership and leadership training. the nodal points (e.g. support from management) in each theme (e.g. support) construct the leadership discourse. by drawing on the female leaders’ discussion on leadership, the following section will address the various ways that leadership is approached in the studied discourse. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 findings from the study the aim of this study was to analyze and construct the leadership discourse as articulated by female leaders within the swedish police. in common with previous research, the findings from this study show that female leaders articulate a range of different aspects in their role of leader. the following sections provide details on the way in which the leaders interviewed talked about leadership and show that the leadership discourse was constructed around five themes. the nodal points within each theme are marked in italics. a transformational leadership style in the discussion on how to be a good leader, different individual characteristics were mentioned that were similar to the approach regarding adopting a transformational leadership style (kark, 2004; rosener, 1990; silvestri, 2007). the theme of the transformational leadership style emerged from the leaders’ discussion on the important characteristics for what constitutes a good leader. good leaders are said to be successful in the work they do by their use of communication, involvement and participation and creating and maintaining good relations. it is also stated that there are differences between men and women and the way they lead, implying that women are more transformational in their leadership style than men are. a good leader is said to use communication as a tool in order to be successful. this involves listening, inviting people to talk, conducting dialogue and discussion with co-workers, and communicating through cross-groups composed of both employees and civilians that have a range of competences, as well as passing on relevant information to co-workers. communication is closely linked to the notion of realizing that the leader does not possess all types of competence or the answers him or herself. instead, he or she has to be able to pinpoint where such competence can be found within the working group. involvement and participation is another significant nodal point, one articulated as an important feature for being a good leader. this means showing one’s co-workers and others respect for their opinions when making decisions, a strategy that serves to increase feelings of motivation and involvement in the day-to-day work and strategic planning of the organization. if employees take part in the decision-making, they will also feel more motivated to participate in the implementation of new strategies: […] when you are about to take a decision on a number of matters, you gather people from different backgrounds in order for them to feel involved and to have an influence on those decisions. we try to get a lot of input from under, because if you involve people in the decision-making process you will then have the staff behind you in another way […] because if you have participated in the discussion it will be easier to implement […]. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 this way of working aims both to effectively reach decisions and move the organization forward and also to increase feelings of involvement and motivation. the top-down perspective is perceived as negative and a majority of the leaders interviewed stated that it is actually the police officers on the front-line and carrying out the work who know best and who come up with many of the good ideas that are eventually implemented. an additional nodal point that arose from the interviews, one helping to construct the leadership discourse, is the notion that creating and maintaining good relations is something positive. this can be done by way of communication and involving people, and also by way of taking a sympathetic approach; for example, by being thoughtful, sensitive and prestige-free towards co-workers, as well as being natural, daring to be oneself and staying true to one’s personality without being autocratic or authoritarian. having an optimistic attitude, a sense of humor and the ability to appear humble are other features mentioned, as are proving your credibility and showing a genuine interest in the development of others. the interviewees reported that in order to maintain good relations, a leader should not distinguish between his or her co-workers, butt in too much, steamroller one’s way through, or pass over one’s subordinate leaders regarding information that is supposed to go through them. rather, leaders should let their subordinates take their own decisions and responsibility. all the leaders stated that there are differences between men and women in the way they lead; men and women have different ways of expressing themselves, and their approach and ability to tackle problems differ. this is, however, a complex view: i guess this is a generalization, because i know a lot of men who are really good at this […] but i still believe that we women have that little bit extra in this regard […] well, now i am contradicting myself. i know that there are men who are really social and really […] but i think that we provide a more social type of leadership, where we work more with the group dynamics in another way. it is perceived that women are more social and more socially oriented in their leadership than are men, which means that they focus more on relations, communication, dialogue and the group dynamics. critical consideration of these statements about the existence of feminine and masculine leadership styles, in line with the approach taken by due billing and alvesson (2000), means challenging stereotypical notions about the differences between men and women, emphasizing the fact that femininity and masculinity are social and cultural constructions, and thus emphasizing the use of other expressions in order to promote gender equality. a transactional approach however, talk about leadership in relation to making tough decisions or leading a crisis situation brings to mind a more transactional view on leadership. the theme of ‘a transactional approach’ emerged from the leaders’ discussion on the subject of being a good leader in situations tougher than that offered by the leader’s everyday work. significant nodal points in this theme that construct this leadership discourse are being able to make tough and uncomfortable decisions and to give orders. this contradiction between taking a transformational advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 approach to leadership in general (in calm situations) and the feeling of having to switch to a more transactional approach (in urgent situations) is mentioned as being a difficult factor and one that also affects at times one’s actions in a negative sense: you have to be able to make tough decisions, and that might then unfortunately sometimes result in you having to be cooler. well, i haven’t changed my own personality but i have changed who i am in the organization; in some decisions and situations and at meetings i might have to take on a leadership and managerial role […] to be a good leader, i have to do that, but i can feel that sometimes it isn’t me. discussion about the “leadership and managerial role” shows that this is not that of the usual transformational leader but more that of the traditional transactional leader. making tough and uncomfortable decisions and standing up for them is mentioned in general as an important trait for a police leader when managing difficult situations. the leader has to be firm and straightforward and be brave enough to communicate difficult issues and also to take controversial decisions because he or she believes in them. making tough decisions often means giving orders and being more authoritarian. this means having to be an active leader, being able to make fast decisions and make people do what they are told. this was said to be even more important in a crisis situation while dialogue, something looked upon as a female trait, was reported as being “good at times and less good at other times for example, in a crisis than the straight communication is needed”. it was perceived by the leaders interviewed that giving orders without there being a consensus was accepted within the police, and also that subordinates do not expect to be as involved in decisions as they normally would be. there exists a culture of no argument: the advantage in the police force is that when you have acute situations out in the field and you are the task force commander, it is legitimate to be more authoritative. in line with silvestri’s (2007) argument that “the culture of police management demands quick decision making and decision makers; the transformational approach takes too long and is therefore perceived to be ineffective when adopted by women” (p.48), these women perceive a transactional leadership style as being more appropriate in managing crisis situations, and that such a style of leadership is easier because of not having to consider other people’s points of view. even though these leaders talk in terms of a more transactional approach when referring to various crisis situations, they still believe that good relations with employees are crucial and state the benefits of having a large network of good relations with others to turn to when necessary. working in teams during a crisis situation means that you are able to use the right competences in the working group. having a transformational approach to leadership in one’s everyday work means that when crisis situations occur, one is well prepared for taking fast, difficult decisions and giving orders to subordinates. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 the experienced police leader a good police leader is, however, characterized not only in terms of leadership style but also as someone who has had long experience in the police. the theme of ‘the experienced police leader’ emerged from the leaders’ discussion about having long experience as a police officer, the significance of being a sworn police leader, and the importance of being encouraged and recruited to leadership positions. a significant characteristic needed for being a good leader within the police force was to have long experience as a police officer before becoming a leader, according to these four leaders who had themselves been sworn police officers for between twenty and thirty years. it is also shown by silvestri (2006) and rowe (2006) that experience gained from a long and clearly established police career is perceived as being important by both leaders and subordinates in order to gain legitimacy and trust in the role of leader within the police. one finding in this study is that having long experience of the core activities of police work, e.g. patrolling, is said to bring about an understanding of the responsibility that police officers face in their daily work; become connected to the ‘reality’; bring about an understanding of what can be implemented practically; and to provide the competence to translate strategic thinking into practical work. a leader with policing experience and the ability to manage crisis situations is said to gain greater respect, credibility and trust in the organization. by being experienced, one also acquires competences that are needed in critical situations: then you have to have this knowledge and broad experience to lean on, and you rely in part on your experience as well […] it doesn’t mean that just because you go to the police academy for a couple of years, it takes quite a long time to become a good police officer; simply because you face so many critical situations, and as an individual you just have to learn to deal with it […]. connected to the notion of having long experience, when assuming a position of leadership within the police, is the nodal point that expresses the importance of being a sworn police leader. non-sworn police leaders, also discussed by stenmark (2005), are looked upon by the sworn police leaders in this study as being not particularly suited as operational leaders or those who lead other police officers: “there are some functions that non-sworn employees can’t have, due to their lack of formal competence as police officers.” this is shown to be a common view within the police force (rowe, 2006; silvestri, 2006), a view which in turn must affect nonsworn leaders, since they have to overcome internal resistance in the organization due to their lack of legitimacy in comparison with sworn leaders (rowe, 2006). the non-sworn police leader who participated in this study had an academic background, and, while acknowledging the importance of having experience, she felt that the argument for always putting the most experienced police officers in leadership positions was an overstated one. arguments for employing non-sworn leaders from sectors outside the police force is, according to rowe (2006), an effect of the current debate that suggests that non-sworn employees with valuable experience from outside the force would open up and modernize the police service. this is, however, perceived as a practice now loosening up for those who are non-sworn; non-sworn investigators are, for example, a recent feature of the police organization: advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 to gain authority i think you should have some knowledge of your craft, and whether you are a non-sworn or sworn officer doesn’t matter […] in the same way that it is loosening up for non-sworn investigators, it will loosen up for leaders as well. we are not there yet, however; police officers are of the conservative kind. the majority of the leaders interviewed had no specific strategy for pursuing a career. their identities lay more in being experienced police officers than in having a focus on pursuing a career as a leader. even though individual choices to apply for posts in the job are made, it is apparent that being encouraged and recruited was an essential factor for helping them on their way up to a position of leadership. being asked by senior managers to take on leadership responsibility affects self-esteem in a positive way as well, since it sends out signals to others that you have earned their feeling of trust. encouragement and support from partners, colleagues and supervisors are shown by gaston and alexander (1997) to affect one’s decision to engage in the promotion process. as can be seen in contrast to archbold and moses schultz’ (2008) results these women have presumably not felt dissuaded from participating in the promotion process because they were encouraged. even though these women had worked hard within the police organization, it was recognized that not having one’s career plans set in stone was something positive: if i had focused on goals, then maybe i would have turned down opportunities that weren’t part of the plan. i could never have dreamed that i would end up being the head of this unit. i don’t have a career plan. if i had, i would probably not be here. getting support in order to be a good leader the female police leaders interviewed all expressed the need for support in order to cope with being a leader this was a significant theme in the leadership discourse. four nodal points within the theme on support arose: support must come from senior management, mentors and networks, shared leadership and leadership training. when asked about what kind of support women need in order to be good leaders, all the leaders reported that the need of support from senior management was important in order for them to feel secure and trustworthy in their role as leaders. metcalf and dick (2002) also stated that managerial support is important for creating a feeling of organizational commitment. this study shows the importance of being able to go to senior managers on an everyday and informal basis to talk, reason and brainstorm about different issues as well as to be shown respect for knowledge and performance. informal discrimination does occur, although rarely, and it was stressed that support from management was crucial in such situations. one example mentioned, and one in line with archbold and moses schultz’ (2008) study, was their having to face comments about being taken on as a leader only on the basis of their being a woman. having a manager who defended and described women leaders as competent and suited to the post advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 15 regardless of gender was looked upon as being a significant support, as was their being backed up in other situations involving discrimination: if you don’t have managers, senior managers, that are observant and see this, and have the ability to stop it, then you have to deal with it yourself […] i have always been in work places where i have had senior managers who are observant and who don’t fall into the trap, so to speak […] you have to be backed up by the senior management, otherwise it doesn’t work. managerial role models in general and female managerial role models in particular are mentioned as constituting a good support (see also gaston & alexander, 1997). due to the masculine nature of the police culture, it is perceived as particularly important that female managers are visible to female police officers and that the women in the police force support each other in order to pursue their careers. it has been shown in earlier research that male officers tend to get more support then female officers and that a lack of female role models affects the confidence of women in their considering becoming a leader (gaston & alexander, 1997). discussion about the need to have mentors and networks arose from the interviews as another nodal point in the theme of support. having a mentor, network or someone else to reason with creates an environment where problems and different situations can be discussed, as well as creating a feeling of belonging among women in the same situation. it is recognized in this study that it is lonely to be a leader high up in the hierarchy: well, i think all leaders need mentors for certain, but i think we (women) need mentors and networks that bit more, to feel that support, you could say. because it is kind of lonely to be a leader, and to be a female leader is probably even lonelier, because there are so few of us. because men have got their men talk and women have got their women talk. i mean, you need women talk even at leadership level. it is perceived by all the women interviewed that being a leader means having a work overload, which is why the benefits of shared leadership are acknowledged. recruiting someone to share the role of leadership means that the other person can make up for any weaknesses, share responsibilities and convert ideas and analysis into reports and strategic plans: i am not asking at all to have an assistant head of section but i can see, especially now when i am undergoing (leadership) training, that it is grueling because there is no one to share my responsibilities, my thoughts or my longterm plans […] everything that should be written and done is lying there, waiting for me when i come back. if i could have had someone who was more informed about what i want and about the way we work what we in this section want then that person could offload me and do those things when i am not around […] you share some of the responsibilities. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 16 adopting a shared leadership approach is consistent with having a transformational leadership style and favoring an organizational structure with less hierarchical levels; working on relationships, participation, dialogue and communication as well as putting the organizational goals before personal interest (murphy & drodge, 2004). this means that leadership is seen as a social process engaging many members of the team (avolio, walumbwa, & weber, 2009). four of the leaders interviewed were at the time undergoing a program in leadership training and all of them were positive to this, believing that it would help in their development and support them in their roles as leaders. they believed it would help the development of the leaders within the police to take the role of employer more seriously, to fill in the gaps in their knowledge, to create a better foundation and understanding, and also to spread the new knowledge to employees. murphy and drodge (2004) said that training for transformational leadership is possible, and in their review of training and development research, auginis and kraiger (2009) summarized that training in work organizations reaps benefits for individuals and teams as well as organizations and society. it was also shown by dvir et al (2002) that follower development and performance are enhanced in the training of leaders to adopt a transformational leadership style. even though the leaders in this study were positive to the idea of training, there was some ambiguity in what they said: they noticed, for example, that while they were away on their training those who were left behind had to work harder to manage the work load and also, there was a lot of catching up to do on their return. they also reported that it was hard to fit in time for studying and a further problem mentioned was the demand for making savings and therefore the limited opportunity available to undergo leadership training in general. as concluded by auginis and kraiger (2009), training alone is not beneficial if it is not implemented together with other human resources functions or if other organizational structures do not ease the work load of the leader. tokenism in a male-dominated organization in the discussion about being a female leader in a male-dominated organization, a number of nodal points similar to the notion of being a token emerged (wertsch, 1998; archbold & moses schultz, 2008). this means that being in a minority renders the person more visible, which leads her to adapt to the culture, creates feelings of being treated differently and generates feelings of having to work harder than her male colleagues. the female leaders in our study said that they had learned to adapt to the culture, which is in line with research showing that women in the police tend to adapt to the prevailing culture and thus reinforce dominant masculine values (e.g. dick & cassell, 2004; metcalf & dick, 2002), as a result of their not being fully accepted into the dominant police culture (gaston & alexander, 1997). this aspect of being in a minority in a police culture based upon male values contributes to the women within it considering their way of behaving, talking and thinking in a variety of situations. the following quote represents a common view: advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 17 i am a leader in a world that is very male and with a male way of looking at leadership […] through the years i have understood how it works. i sort of understand more and more […] you adapt, yes. you have to, for good and for bad. […] i wouldn’t have got this far as a female leader if i hadn’t understood the rules of the game. none of the leaders interviewed said that they had been directly discriminated against or that there had been any problems relating to them as female leaders. this can be interpreted as one effect of succeeding in adapting to the police culture: i can’t say that i have had any problems. but i have what are most likely important attributes within the police […] some people talk about how many years you have worked, and i have worked here quite a long time; i have been tested, shown that i can manage. i have landed at this level when you sort of get the ok. and then you have quite a lot of trust invested in you. however, some of the leaders interviewed felt that they were sometimes treated differently, and one leader said that “some men have a hard time only seeing that this is the leader of this unit; they also see that it’s a woman.” another leader said that “there is a category of men with low self-esteem who, when they feel threatened, react in a non-healthy way […] so that i am sort of overridden”. it is also perceived that if a woman acts in a male way, that of being sharp and sure of what she wants, that is not looked upon as something positive compared to when a man behaves in the same way. although these women did not experience direct discrimination in terms of sexism, as shown in somvadee and morash’s (2008) study, it could be interpreted that they accepted being treated differently or subjected to harmful comments about being a woman in order to fit into the organizational culture. the fact that women must prove their competence by working harder than their male colleagues and the fact that there is more focus on their gender if something goes wrong, constitutes another nodal point within the theme of ‘tokenism’: as a woman you have to do everything twice as well as a man […] you really have to show your competence when you apply for a job. and girls do that in the police; they don’t apply if their cv isn’t packed full. you don’t stand a chance. these kinds of statements are in line with silvestri’s (2003) results that “women must work harder and longer than men to justify their place” (p. 120), and also shows that other female police leaders experience the fact that “every man is good until he proves he’s not, and every woman is not good until she proves otherwise” (p. 120). as was also demonstrated by archbold and hassel (2009), we found that female officers, in general, lack confidence about the amount of police experience they have, a reason for them not applying for higher positions. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 18 discussion in summary, the results in figure 1 show the arrangement of the themes and nodal points that construct the leadership discourse articulated by female leaders in the swedish police: theme a transformational leadership style a transactional approach the experienced police leader support in order to be a good leader tokenism in a male-dominated organization nodal point 1 communication making tough and uncomfortable decisions having long experience senior management adapting to the culture 2 involvement and participation giving orders being a sworn police leader mentors and networks being treated differently 3 creating and maintaining good relations being encouraged and recruited shared leadership working harder 4 differences between women and men leadership training figure 1: the leadership discourse. as can be seen, the female police leaders in our study talked about leadership from a range of perspectives, similar to findings in other studies. the leadership discourse should be interpreted from a social constructionist point of view. with this in mind, the leadership discourse constructed is suggested to show that knowledge and attitudes to leadership are products of history, culture and social interactions, and that this in turn has an effect on social actions e.g. leadership practices. according to discourse theory, social and cultural constructions of relations between subjects and objects provide social agents with a variety of available subject positions. it can, for example, be understood that the police culture traditionally demands a more transactional leadership style, and it can be seen that the female leaders in this study reproduced these ideas when talking about leadership in crisis situations. however, they also talked about having a more transformational leadership style in their everyday work as leader, which is in line with more modern thought about leadership and therefore says something about the ambiguity of the discourse. recruiting more women to leadership positions can have positive effects, such as potentially increasing the number of female role models and also influencing tokenism. however, it cannot in itself change the existing organizational culture within the police, which is why a broader perspective needs to be taken. tokenism is still an important concept, principally because it describes all individuals who find themselves in an under-represented, marginal subgroup within any organization (kanter, 1977). with this in mind, further research within the police could focus on analyzing from an intersectional perspective how other minority groups e.g. persons with different sexualities, ethnic minorities or even non-sworn employees perceive their situation. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 19 the advantage of investigations from an intersectional perspective is, according to acker (2006) and due billing and alvesson (2002), that the researcher can focus on more than one factor, such as gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality which are complex and contradictory factors that reinforce each other. this is based on the notion that gender in itself cannot be studied without considering the impact of other variables that affect one’s sense of being, say, a woman. this is also why one starting point, which draws on hesse-biber and yaiser’s (2004) thoughts, has been to recognize that gender research has been criticized for failing to consider the variety of women’s experiences or identities. the women leaders in this study might reflect a homogenous picture of what kind of women are actually recruited to leadership positions within the police. even though it is interesting to study those who have become leaders “such an approach reveals little about the attitudes and experiences of the majority of officers who do not make it to the top” (gaston & alexander, 1997, p. 47). one point made here is to recognize the fact that there may be a certain kind of female officer (or non-sworn employee) who is recruited to take on a position of leadership. encouragement and recruitment are shown, both in this study as well as in others (e.g. archbold & moses schultz, 2008; gaston & alexander, 1997; metcalf & dick, 2002), to be an influential factor for women in their becoming leaders. it is therefore reasonable to ask which women are being encouraged and recruited within the swedish police. by way of example, it has been discussed in many studies that women in the police tend to adopt stereotypical male behaviors in order to fit into their organization (cedermark hedberg, 1985; dick & cassell, 2004; metcalf & dick, 2002; silvestri, 2003). female leaders who are recruited to become leaders within the police might thus use for their frame of reference the person traditionally looked upon as a good leader as being someone with male leader characteristics. however, it can be interpreted in this study that the female leaders interviewed expressed their preference for a more transformational leadership style, which breaks with the tradition of authoritarian (male) police leaders. it is not implied here, however, that male leaders within the swedish police would adopt another leadership style essentially male by nature. this study proposes that gender stereotypes are often visible and highlighted in leadership discourses, and that these stereotypes can act as a restraint on both men and women and the way they (are supposed to) lead (due billing & alvesson, 2000; haake, 2009). within the leadership discourse it is acknowledged that the female leaders do not have a specific strategy for pursuing a career. with the above reasoning in mind this can be understood as if the gender stereotypes within the police organization generally and within the leadership discourse specifically act, as restraint on what is acceptable for women to express in relation to career ambitions. in taking into critical consideration the notion that there exists a feminine leadership style, it becomes questionable to suggest that the transformational leadership style is a feminine one. doing so lays open the risk that such views then reinforce stereotypical ideas about women and men leading in opposite ways. even if there are some differences of leadership style, there can be greater variation within the group of women as well as within the group of men. it is also noticeable that leadership style does not come about without the influence of the organizational context (rohde, 2003). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 20 murphy and drodge (2004) suggested that the transformational leadership style is dependent on the organization embracing collectivist goals and a strong group identity. increasing the number of women in the police, and especially those in leadership positions, may have a positive effect on making them less visible and thus reducing instances of tokenism, but this cannot be looked upon as a single factor in transforming attitudes and behaviors within the organization. other researchers have noted the impact that followership has on the leadership process (avolio, walumbwa & weber, 2009; rowe, 2006), something which is of interest for future research. if the swedish police wishes to develop its leadership, one challenge would be to understand the complex relationship between police leaders and police officers. exploring the construction of follower identity, collinson (2006) argues that followers are an integral part of the leadership process and that researchers must consider the complex ways in which leaders and followers interact with one another. followership also has an impact on the employing of nonsworn leaders, and, as is suggested by rowe (2006), if non-sworn leaders are supposed to gain legitimacy within the police force, the assumed benefits of employing non-sworn leaders must be clearly outlined among the subordinate officers. connected to the notion of accepting non-sworn police leaders is the demand for police leaders to have had a long and clearly established sworn police career (see, for example, silvestri, 2006), an obstacle which needs to be overcome. limitations of the study having a social constructionist perspective on research means having the understanding that knowledge and perceptions of the reality are products of history and culture (burr, 1995). therefore, when reflecting on the limitations of this study, it is stressed that the leadership discourse must be put in a broader societal and organizational context as well as being seen as an interactive process between the interviewer and the interviewee. according to dick and cassell (2004), the research interview is conceptualized by the existing power relations between the researcher and the participant, meaning that what is said during the interview is a reflection of these complex power relations and one also affected by broader social and cultural beliefs about gender, leadership and policing. according to this line of reasoning, the researcher interprets what is said on the basis of prior knowledge, and can motivate the interviewee to express herself in a certain way or only to follow up answers perceived as being the most interesting. another limitation is the small number of informants who participated in the study. with more informants, a richer and maybe somewhat different leadership discourse expressed by female police leaders might then be able to construct. also, by including more leaders as well as coworkers in the study it might be possible to say something about the effectiveness of the leaders, which has not been the case with this study. however, in-depth interviews and discourse analysis of a small number of narratives can also give a rich and detailed insight in the discourse by analyzing the discussion of only a few women leader (howarth, 2000; kvale, 1996), and it is not suggested here that generalizations or transferability have been an aim of the authors. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 21 conclusions this study contributes to the current field of gender, leadership and police research as seen from a swedish perspective. at a time when the national police board (2008) are working on diversity and equality issues and when a gender perspective is supposedly running through the organization, the narratives of the female leaders interviewed add knowledge to this important work. also, this study contributes to research in the area from a broader, international perspective, by offering a different perspective and methodology compared to most other studies on the gendered aspects of police leadership. in conclusion, we would argue that the challenge for the police organization goes beyond the question of recruiting more female leaders and creating women-friendly policies because organizational and societal culture plays a significant role in shaping leaders. it is important to keep in mind that, although the swedish police is struggling with implementing a gender perspective in the organization (the national police board, 2008), the police culture, which is shown to be based on male values and masculinity, may hinder the work to increase the number of women in the organization generally and that of women in leadership positions particularly. however, as stated by van der lippe, graumans and sevenhuijsen (2004), the swedish police is a model for the good work done on equality when compared to other countries, which is why more research on police leaders as well as co-workers could provide more knowledge in order to develop the organization, and to change the police culture by making it more inclusive of both women and other minority groups, in sweden as well as in other countries. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 22 references acker, j. 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(1998). walking the thin blue line: policewomen and tokenism today. women and criminal justice, 9(3), 23-61. winther jörgensen, m., & phillips, l. (2002). discourse analysis as theory and method. london: sage. åberg, b. (2001). samarbete på könsblandade arbetsplatser – en könsteoretisk analys av arbetsdelning mellan kvinnor och män i två yrken: akutsjuksköterskor och ordningspoliser. [cooperation in mixed gender workplaces – a gender theoretical analysis of the division of labor between men and women in two occupations: emergency nurses and police officers.] (doctoral thesis, örebro university, sweden). åse, c. (2000). makten att se. om kropp och kvinnlighet i lagens namn. [the power to see. about body and femininity in law and order.] malmö: liber. biography malin österlind has a degree of master in leadership and organization from umeå university, sweden, and is now a doctoral student at the department of education, umeå university. ulrika haake is assistant professor at the department of education, umeå university, sweden. her research broadly focuses on leadership and organizational culture questions in relation to gender within the police and within the higher education system. all correspondence related to this article should be addressed to malin österlind, email: malin.osterlind@pedag.umu.se volume 41, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership 1 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 advancing women in leadership vol. 41, pp. 1-12, 2022 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper what’s power got to do with it? seeking gender-equity in organizations through male ally initiatives mary shapiro, maria elena rivera-beckstrom, cynthia ingols, stacy blake-beard, lan gao, regina o’neill, &elisa van dam mary shapiro, professor of practice, simmons university school of business and research fellow, institute of inclusive leadership, mary.shapiro@simmons.edu maria elena rivera-beckstrom, research associate, institute for inclusive leadership, simmons university, mariaelena.riverabeckstrom@simmons.edu cynthia ingols, research fellow, institute of inclusive leadership, simmons university, cynthia.ingols@simmons.edu stacy blake-beard, professor, tuck school of business, dartmouth, nh, stacy.blakebeard@tuck.dartmouth.edu lan gao, director of institutional research at simmons university, lan.gao@simmons.edu regina o’neill, professor of management, sawyer business school department of management & entrepreneurship, suffolk university, roneill@suffolk.edu elisa van dam, vice president, allyship and inclusion, institute for inclusive leadership, simmons university, elisa.vandam@simmons,edu accepted july 1, 2019 with the persistence of women’s limited advancement into senior leadership, organizations have employed an arsenal of diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies such as implicit bias training, intentional mentoring, and efforts to authentically support work-life policies. male allyship has emerged as a recent strategy aimed at gender equity. yet the outcomes of those efforts, usually measured by women’s advancement and/or retention, have often been disappointing. as we worked with male allies in organizations and witnessed the time, energy and commitment devoted to their work, our research question emerged: in what ways might organizational issues around power play a role in the outcomes of male ally initiatives?” central to allyship is the asymmetry of power between advantaged and disadvantaged groups. this is evident in studies across disciplines, such as sociology, social justice and economics. management scholars have identified power, specifically the requisite sharing of or fear of diminishment of, as a barrier to men participating in gender equity initiatives to advance women. in promoting gender equity, organizations are essentially seeking to distribute power more broadly to enable both men and women to fully contribute. we draw on the literature, and ongoing work with men and women engaged in male ally initiatives. we use two frames of the bolman and deal organizational model to understand the collision between well-meaning human resource efforts and the reality of power in the form of organizational politics. we argue that practitioners must understand the role that power plays in both advancing and hindering male ally endeavors. we conclude with recommendations for practitioners, male allies, and women in addressing power while building gender-equitable organizations. keywords: male ally, power, gender-equity, hr, diversity, equity, inclusion with the persistence of women’s limited advancement into senior leadership in organizations (catalyst, 2017; aauw, 2016), scholars have examined both what women and organizations have done and failed to do in attaining gender equity (kossek, su, & wu, 2017). women have been admonished to ‘lean in’ (sandburg, 2013); to protect their career decision making from the influences of socialized gender roles (wood & eagly, 2009; diekman, brown, johnston, & clark, 2010) and stereotype threat (su & rounds, 2015); and to recognize differences in career goals and values that put them at odds with ascending to top leadership positions (o’neill, shapiro, ingols & blake-beard, 2013; major, morganson, & bolen, 2013). organizations have also received advice in relation to advancing women in leadership. they have been urged to address implicit and explicit bias, recognizing that women are less likely to be mailto:mary.shapiro@simmons.edu mailto:mariaelena.rivera-beckstrom@simmons.edu mailto:mariaelena.rivera-beckstrom@simmons.edu mailto:cynthia.ingols@simmons.edu mailto:stacy.blakebeard@tuck.dartmouth.edu mailto:lan.gao@simmons.edu mailto:roneill@suffolk.edu mailto:elisa.vandam@simmons,edu 2 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 promoted (heilman, 2012; roth, purvis, & bobko, 2012); have limited access to social networks (casciaro & lobo, 2005); have fewer role models and female mentors (hoobler, lemmon, & wayne, 2011); receive less mentoring (murrell & blake-beard, 2017; wanberg, welsch, & hezlett, 2003); face a hostile work climate as leaders (eagly, 2013); and work in masculine organizational cultures (moor, cohen & beeri, 2015). implicit bias training, standardized checklists for hiring and promotions, intentional mentoring, and the authentic support of work-family policies are some of the strategies that have been deployed. yet the scarcity of female leaders persists. in organizational behavior and leadership scholarship, male allyship has emerged as a recent strategy in organizational efforts aimed at gender equity (catalyst, 2009; sawyer & valerio, 2018; trefalt, et al,. 2011). yet in other fields, such as economic development, violence, and social justice, men have long been part of the change effort (flood, 2011; karkara, karlsson & malik, 2005; kaufman, 2004). men have often served as allies to feminists and in struggles led by women (jardine & smith, 1987; digby, 1998; kimmel & mosmiller, 1992; messner, greenberg & peretz, 2015). as men have become allies in organizational change efforts, scholars have examined what motivates them to take up that role (burke, pratt & smith, 2014; connell, 2005); the challenges they face when doing so (casey, et al., 2013; dubow & ashcraft, 2016; kark, 2018); and the organizational and individual benefits of their efforts (curtis, schmid, & struber, 2012; woetzel et al., 2015; salter & migliaccio, 2019). central to the concept of allyship is the recognition that there is an asymmetry to power: women are in a lower power position and need assistance, and men are in a higher power position and can provide that assistance. dubow and ashcraft (2016) explicitly named power when defining the gender equity work conducted by men as “work that aims to mobilize a socially privileged group to work toward dismantling a system that it stands to benefit from” (p.164). scholars have identified power, specifically the requisite sharing of or fear of diminishment of, as a barrier to men participating in gender equity initiatives (casey et al., 2013; flood & pease, 2005; mergaert & lombardo, 2014). a shift in power presupposes a shift in privilege and advantage. we witnessed this first hand as business faculty working with male allies in the university’s executive education programs. in our inquiry with male allies, many were resistant to even acknowledging their current position of power arising from their advantaged position in senior leadership and/or their advantaged social identity position of being male. to explore our research question regarding the possible impact that power plays in male ally initiatives in an organizational context, we look to bolman and deal’s (2017) four frames. many scholars have used those frames to explore wide ranging topics from building data governance strategies (fruehauf, alkhalifa, & coniker, 2015) to investigating the leadership capabilities of physiotherapists (mcgowan, elliott, & stokes, 2018). in this article, we propose that male ally programs as an organizational strategy to promote gender equity are part of the human resources frame, which seeks to align people and the organization to the benefit of both. however, the success of these programs depends on how organizations manage the political frame, which examines how individuals compete for scarce resources to meet often-competing interests. in promoting gender equity, organizations are essentially seeking to distribute power more broadly to enable both men and women to contribute fully. by asking men to be male allies as part of that reallocation process, organizations are asking men to give up (by sharing) some of their power. bolman and deal’s political frame provides a way of analyzing the power dynamics that surround the role of male allies and a way of identifying strategies for addressing those dynamics. to examine the dynamic of power when using male ally initiatives, we draw on the literature, situating allyship and power in a broader and historical context. we discuss our ongoing experiences working with both male allies and women in the university’s executive education programs. we extend the extant scholarship that suggests ways to increase the effectiveness of male allies (metz, 2016; prime & mossracusin, 2009; sawyer & valerio, 2016, 2018) by examining the implications of power through the political frame and offering recommendations that acknowledge power as organizations seek to advance women through gender-equity initiatives. situating allyship in the literature the concept of ally is not new in the gender, anti-racism, civil rights, feminism, and social justice literature. washington and evans (1991) crafted an early definition of ‘ally’ contemporaneous with the lgbt movement: "a person who is a member of the 'dominant' or 'majority' group who works to end oppression in his or her personal and professional life through support of, and as an advocate with and for, the oppressed population" (p.195). subsequent scholars used this concept of allyship across diverse contexts (almassi, 2015; casey, 2010; drury & kaiser, 2014; ravarino, 2013;russell & bohan, 2016; salter & migliaccio, 2019). central to the definition of ally across all fields was their advantaged position vis-à-vis those who were the beneficiaries of the movements they supported (myers, 2008). myers recognized that allies were, indeed, separate from the beneficiary group because their experiences and belongingness in the advantaged group were different from the beneficiary group. bishop (2002), however, provided a caveat that such conceptions need to be more nuanced because a person may be an oppressor or an ally in a given setting. individuals have multiple social identities which, set in different contexts, may put them into an advantaged or disadvantaged position. this concept of intersectionality (crenshaw, 1997; collins & bilge, 2016) suggests organizations implementing male ally initiatives should exert caution: men can be both the preserver and enforcer of norms that oppress women, and an ally in changing those 3 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 same norms. additionally, men’s membership in the advantaged group changes based on the situation. in some situations, men may be advantaged, and in others, they may not be. ironically, one dimension that can affect men’s position in advantaged or disadvantaged groups is the mantle of ‘male ally’ itself. anicha, burnett and bilen-green (2015) stated, “although gender privilege is operative for men when they adhere to gendered norms, when men attempt to interrupt sexism and gender injustice in the workplace by “deploying [their] social power against the system that confers it” (deturk, 2011, p.569), they face the same social and institutional pressures as do their women colleagues” (p. 24). rudman, mescher and moss-racusin (2012) found that gender-egalitarian men suffer stigma-by-association (from both men and women) due to their perceived alignment with women, the low-status group. more costs associated with working across advantageddisadvantaged groups are pointed out by connell (2005) as he wrote, “globally, men have a lot to lose from pursuing gender equality because men, collectively, continue to receive a patriarchal dividend” (p. 1808). patriarchal dividend refers to the benefits, advantages and privileges that men gain from the subordination of women (connell, 1987). brown and ostrove’s definition of male allies further captures this loss. male allies are “dominant group members who work to end prejudice in their personal and professional lives, and relinquish social privileges conferred by their group status through their support of nondominant groups'' (2013, p. 2211). clearly, the idea of power dynamics between advantaged and disadvantaged groups is central to understanding the male ally experience as men consider taking up gender equity work. it is critical for organizational leaders to recognize that there is no cost-free disruption to the existing power structures as they seek to share power across a greater number of people. exploring the concept of power consistent with our exploration of the concept of allies beyond organizational research, it is instructive to look at power more broadly. in feminism and feminist literature, the concept of power is central to the system of patriarchy (anderson, 2009; becker, 1999; bennett, 2006; lerner, 1986). it also includes the power dynamics between white women and women of color, particularly, the ‘exclusionary practices’ of dominant feminism that is mainly based on the experiences of white, middle-class women (bulkin, et al., 1984; caraway, 1991; garcia, 1997; hooks, 1981; smith, 1983; springer, 2005). power dynamics are also central to the critique of white-western/eurocentric feminism vis-à-vis non-white, non-western feminism (ang, 2013; mohanty, 2003; zimmerman, 2015). concurrently, social scientists initially described power with competitive, win-lose language. max weber, in 1946, defined power as “the chance …. to realize their will…even against the resistance of others” (miller & cummins, 1992, p. 416). power was also defined as “the capacity to overcome part or all of the resistance” (etzioni, 1970); “the ability to introduce force into a social situation” (bierstedt, 1970); and “to get people to do things they would not otherwise do” (pfeffer, 1992, p. 30). other more neutral power definitions evolved, including kanter’s (1977) definition as the potential to achieve goals; power “defines what people are able to do in a particular situation” (cervero & wilson, 1994, p. 29); and power is “the potential to mobilize energy” (valley & long-lingo, 2002, p. 1). in this paper, we pull from bolman and deal’s definition of power, “the capacity to get things done,” grounding their earliest work on their four frames (1991, p. 165). they argue that organizations are coalitions of divergent interests with continuous differences under situations of scarce resources. because of these conditions, “...conflict (is) at the center of dayto-day dynamics and make(s) power the most important asset” (2017, p. 184). decisions, they continued, are reached through negotiations and bargaining as people and coalitions jockey for their own interests. our understanding of the literature, and the consistent link between power, coalitions, and conflict, led the authors to craft this definition of male allyship: a role that men take up to use their influence and power to build an inclusive and equitable organizational culture. consistent with the literature on power, it recognizes that influence is needed to create organizational change. organizational leaders acknowledge this as they turn to those most likely holding a disproportionate amount of power, namely men, to go beyond moving individual women into senior positions, to changing the actual systems, processes, and culture that have advantaged men and disadvantaged others. what do men and women involved in male ally initiatives think about power? to explore this question, we offer findings from our qualitative research. in our work with organizations with male ally initiatives, both men and women revealed a discomfort with the concept and definitions of power and male allyship, even as they simultaneously argue for gender equity. methods for eight years we held conversations with both women and men engaged in a women’s leadership development program. the program was sponsored by a global organization, organized by the university’s executive education department, and delivered by business school faculty. over those years of conversations, the concept of power emerged as a consistent issue impacting both women’s attitudes towards male allyship and men’s attitudes towards being allies. those conversations, as they grew more persistent and strident, became both the basis of our research question and the qualitative sources for our work. the organization’s goal was to retain and advance women into senior leadership. over eight years approximately 700 midto senior-level women from across their global footprint participated in a two-week program. after the pilot program, a male ally component was added to both support women individually but also to support their work in breaking down gendered organizational barriers. 4 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 qualitative discussions with women: during the women’s leadership program for the organization, faculty engaged with around 700 midto senior-level women. these women came from all functional areas of the organization and across its global footprint. while the curriculum was fairly consistent across the 22 cohorts, during its last eight cohorts, women participants also worked with male allies in identifying gendered organizational barriers, brainstorming how to address selected barriers, and then, during 6 months following the program, implementing change. following each program, faculty and organizational sponsors shared their observations and insights. these debriefs were captured and distributed to both the faculty and the corporate sponsors. the debrief discussions about the male allies component is salient to this paper. qualitative discussions with male allies: a group of male allies was identified for each cohort of the women’s program, starting with cohort 2. these were men at the leadership level of their global organization’s business units, and were from multiple countries. for cohorts 2-14, male allies had two roles: during the program they listened to women discuss organizational barriers to gender equity to hear first-hand the challenges women faced; and then following the program they served as coaches. to prepare for those roles we provided an hour of onboarding: familiarizing male allies with the concepts of leadership and gender that their women colleagues (often their direct reports) were engaged in, and expectations for post-program support. for the last eight cohorts of the program, the role of the male allies was expanded. during the program, male allies worked with a group of 5-6 women to brainstorm strategies to address a selected structural issue. for six months after the program male allies, with that same team of women, worked on changing policies, expectations, and culture to address that issue. to prepare male allies for this additional work, the short onboarding conversation evolved into a half day workshop that included prereading and reflection. during the workshop, male allies explored the concepts of implicit bias, power, advantage and gendered organizational structures; related those concepts to their own experiences; and analyzed a custom-written case that explored the challenges of men supporting other men in the hard work of being male allies. following each male ally session, faculty and male allies shared their observations of both what happened in the male ally program and their work in the women’s leadership program. these conversations were captured in notes, and used for this paper including all quotes. results and discussion with male allies the discussions with the 2018 cohort of seven male allies is particularly informative to this article as they not only repeated the theme of power from the previous seven cohorts, but they were also responsive to our more persistent probing about the concept. interestingly, male allies revealed a strong reaction to the word ‘power’. some male allies resisted the word ‘power’ as evidenced by one quote: “women have power too, and this definition ignores or diminishes that”. they spoke of not wanting to be the “benefactors” for women. they did not want to emphasize the hierarchy, stating, “the word ‘power’ segregates me above others.” some believe that “power is part of the problem” and sought a more ‘inclusive’ term for power such as ‘influence.’ the word ‘influence’, said one, “allows me to be ‘on the field’, in an active role.” another male ally said, “using my time and effort are more important than using my power.” these reactions are consistent with feminist scholars’ reframing of power from ‘power over’ (the historical struggle of one person’s dominance over another) to ‘power to’ which is about empowerment (miller & cummins, 1992); and ‘power with’ (fletcher, 2004; guinier, 1998). in offering a new paradigm, guinier (1998) argued that “the notion of power with…. involves people working together as collective actors in a common cause” (p.1). ‘collective actors’ or alliances have been part of feminist politics (scott, 1998), women-related endeavors (pease, nd; macomber, 2014), and between feminists and male feminists or pro-feminists (flood, 2011; kimmel & mosmiller, 1992; schmitt, 1998). they have also been present in many other social movements, including the white southerners in the civil rights movement (chappell, 1996). given that genderequity is a vision for the entirety of an organization, both male allies and women need to work as a collective. it is notable that these 2018 male allies, representative of earlier cohorts, were uncomfortable with legacy definitions of power stemming from formal titles and hierarchy. they were reluctant to ‘own’ the power that came with their titles, the decisions they alone were authorized to make, and the control they have that impacted individuals and the organization. instead, by using words like ‘influence’ or ‘being on the field with them’, male allies were aligning themselves with the feminist ‘power with’ paradigm. the question was why? both faculty and male allies, in exploring this, identified several possible reasons. one, the sample itself most likely was skewed. given that men were selected (by talent development at the organization) to be male allies, and agreed to take up that role, they may have been more likely to recognize the dampening effect formal power structures have on people’s contributions and engagement. they also recognized that male allies came from countries all over the world, and in many cultures, an overt direct use of power is not acceptable. finally, they attributed strong female role models (mothers, sisters, early bosses) as challenging notions that women are incapable of using power to achieve goals. discussion from our qualitative inquiry of women starting with the second cohort where we introduced the use of male allies, we immediately fielded questions as to why male allies were part of the program. women shared their concerns about having men in the classroom (usually around issues of confidentiality and potential suppression of candor, and reputational harm) and also about what was implicitly conveyed by including men: that women could not advance their careers 5 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 and promote gender-equity without help. this early resistance was addressed by proactively positioning male allies as consistent with the reality of who had the power to make systemic organizational changes. over time, according to the organization sponsors, as the reputation of the program grew in esteem, the use of male allies became accepted practice. when the role of male allies expanded in cohort 14, the challenge to the need for male allies reappeared. from our review of our faculty debriefing notes across eight cohorts of women regarding male allyship, it became clear that many women were uncomfortable with the power dynamics of male ally relationships. one particularly insightful and representative conversation arose prior to their work with male allies. in asking, “why do we need men to help us?”, these women’s resistance to male allies echoed one of kark’s (2018) four primary sources of resistance from women. the “the knight in shining armor” response captures how women may regard male allies as a “paternalistic attempt to take over effecting change toward gender balance” (p. 7). kark called this larger pattern of female resistance “gender equity gatekeeping” (p. 6). built on the literature around ‘maternal gatekeeping’ (allen & hawkins, 1999; gaunt, 2008) where mothers limit or control the fathers’ involvement in childcare, kark proposes that women in organizations may engage in similar behaviors to limit men’s involvement in gender equity efforts. another possible source of our women’s resistance to ‘needing’ men to help foster gender-equity may be avoiding the difficult conclusion that they are members in a low power, disadvantaged group. women who are highly educated, highly accomplished executives, may resist admitting that they still need men, who as members of the advantaged group (being male, holding the majority of leadership positions), have the power to make organization-wide changes. this conclusion reinforces ‘power over’ rather than ‘power with’ interactions. these qualitative findings prompted us to seek an answer to our fundamental research question: what role might power play in using male ally initiatives to address gender-inequity in organizations? specifically, how can male allyship initiatives be successful given their prerequisite of requiring those in power to share their power? these questions recognize multiple realities that decrease the likelihood of the success of gender-equity initiatives and preserve the status quo. on the organizational side, power is a dynamic embedded in all organizations. it is codified by the way an organization is structured and who is authorized to make what decisions and control specified resources (bolman & deal, 2017). as a result, any structure produces advantaged and disadvantaged groups. while most organizations allocate power and resources by hierarchy, and since most people at the top of organizations are men, women are often in the disadvantaged low power group. an effort to move women into senior positions by definition implies a loss of power for those currently occupying those positions. on the individual side, each person requires power to do their job and to achieve their personal and organizational goals. as a result, it is in an individual’s self-interest to build and hold power. given those two dynamics, how might organizations implement male ally initiatives while recognizing the countervailing desires of individuals to hold onto their power? to answer our research question, we turned again to the work of bolman and deal (2017). bolman and deal’s four frames model since the early 1990s bolman and deal offered four frames to analyze both the rewarding and dark sides of complex, modern organizations. they define a frame as: “…a coherent set of ideas or beliefs forming a prism or lens that enables you to see and understand more clearly what’s going on in the world around you” (bolman & deal, 2017, p. 43). they begin with the structural frame which descents from the field of sociology. drawing on the work of frederick taylor, whose “scientific management” sought to design organizations for maximum efficiency, and max weber, whose desire for rationality identified many components of modern-day bureaucracies (division of labor, hierarchy, the separation of personal from official property and rights), the authors state that the “central beliefs of the structural frame reflect confidence in rationality and faith that a suitable array of roles and responsibilities will minimize distracting personal static and maximize people’s performance on the job” (217, p.47). bolman and deal’s fourth frame is the symbolic frame which draws from the field of anthropology and asks about organizational cultures with their embedded stories, myths, heroes and heroines, rituals, symbols, and celebrations. this frame suggests that managers think of themselves as directing and/or being part of a play and ask themselves how to influence the situation through the stories, rituals and celebrations that they create and pass on, and the outcomes that they wish to attain. it is bolman and deal’s second and third frames (human resource and political, respectively) which we use to analyze male ally programs. bolman and deal’s human resource frame borrows heavily from the field of psychology. the assumptions of the hr frame center around the debate of what should be the relationship between people and organizations. one side sees people as expendable clogs who need to perform the work of the organization for their pay. the alternative perspective is that people and their organizations should be closely aligned and that the organization should provide an ideal working environment in exchange for a committed, engaged workforce. under the latter hr assumptions “organizations exist to serve human needs rather than the converse” (bolman & deal, 2017, p. 118). the conditions of employment should serve both the needs of individuals as well as the organization: in short, the organization and its people both get their needs met. the political frame draws from the field of political science. here the concepts of power, influence, negotiations, and win 6 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 win or win-lose come to the forefront of organizational processes. bolman and deal (2017) posit: “scarce resources and enduring differences put conflict at the center of day-to-day dynamics and make power the most important asset.” (p. 184). the underlying inference is that all organizations have limited resources over which people may have honest disagreements about how they should be allocated and spent. although there are undoubtedly a few exceptions, most who inhabit organizations understand precisely the tension around different perspectives and the allocation of scare resources to strengthen particular goals and paths. what can bolman and deal’s model tell us about male ally initiatives? we suggest that organizations tend to view male ally initiatives primarily, if not exclusively, through the hr frame. given that human resources departments (and the hr frame) focus on hiring, retaining, training and promoting people, organizational goals, such as moving towards gender-equity, are often in their purview. the use of male allies as a strategy towards those goals are often launched and managed by hr. organizations often use diversity recruitment, retention and advancement as metrics to measure hr’s success, and as factors impacting hr’s budgets. hr then invests time, focus and budgets to doing all their work to achieve those metrics, such as broadening searches to diverse candidate pools, training managers and employees in diversity and inclusion best practices, building performance appraisal and promotion instruments that attempt to recognize and mitigate the impact of diverse social identities. even in the face of those efforts, women may still leave as they encounter gendered (and often invisible and unintentional) cultural, structural or process barriers. their departure represents a painful loss of talent (nayak, 2020; oldapo, 2014). the hr frame identifies organizational behaviors and systems that seek to build a mutually beneficial relationship between organizations that need the ideas, energy, and talent of their people, and employees who need jobs, salaries, careers and opportunities to learn and grow. clearly, gender-equity and male ally initiatives are important strategies in maximizing that relationship. from our experience working with organizations, we have found that managers often ignore or underplay the importance of the political frame in setting up gender-equity programs. in turning our attention to organizational politics, power and influence, we argue that practitioners and their male ally programs may benefit from a realistic assessment of the role that power plays in both hindering and advancing such endeavors. the political frame (bolman & deal, 2017, pp. 179 – 234) is based on a number of assumptions that can dramatically affect any hr initiative. the first assumes that organizations are coalitions of individuals and interest groups. those coalitions have enduring differences in values, beliefs, information, interests, and perceptions of reality. all of them are competing for the scarce resources the organization has available for current and future operations. scarce resources, such as finances, time, approval, networks, and visibility, and enduring differences put conflict at the center of day-to-day dynamics and make power the most important asset an individual can have. individuals need power to obtain and use their allocated resources. to build power they may seek high status positions, build alliances and networks, and control scare resources, such as finances and career advancement opportunities. what does this mean for male allies? through the lens of the political frame, competition between people for scarce resources is fundamental in every organization. two examples of scarcity include positions and decision making. the number of senior leadership positions is increasingly limited as one moves up the hierarchy. decisions become broader and more significant as one moves up the hierarchy. through the hr frame, often men at the top of the organizations are tasked with acting as male allies, and yet through the political frame, those same men are being asked to either give up some of their existing power and/or step back from competing for scarce resources. men at the top of organizations may also have abused their power in their interactions with women, now widely exposed through the #metoomovement (carlsen, 2018). as male allies they are now being asked to use their power for the good of individual women; and for the good of the organization rather than their own advancement. there are significant tensions between the hr and political frames that male allies and gender-equity initiatives straddle. we summarize them below in table 1. the primary difference arises from the target for accruing benefits: in the human resource frame, actions are aimed at benefiting the organization; in the political frame, actions are aimed at benefiting the individual actor. what can bolman and deal tell us about power? bolman and deal (2017, p. 192-193) provide a list of sources of power that individuals build, use and maintain in competing for scarce resources. table 2 lists those sources in the left-hand column. in the middle column we recognize how male allies may have a particular power source stemming from their membership in the advantaged group, based on their position as senior leaders in an organization, and/or by being in the majority social identity group). we also recognize the advantages arising from each power source that men are being asked to give up or share in their role as male allies. in the far-right column we offer some possible alternative enactments of each power source based on our work in organizations engaged in male ally initiatives. these include both activities that are either being enacted or are being considered for enactment. we list those practices that offer alternative manifestations of those sources that continue to accrue benefits to the individual holder of that power source while encouraging gender-equity work 7 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 table 1 the tensions male ally initiatives must navigate between hr and political frames hr frame political frame goal alignment between people and the organization to the benefit of both. the advancement of individual interests. these can be at odds with the organization, or in alignment with and in the service of the organization. factors in the decision what’s best for all people and the organization? what’s best for my ideas, agenda, and/or initiatives? metric of success recruiting, empowering, developing, and retaining good people. winning resource decisions; capturing scarce resources; getting my ideas, agenda and initiatives funded and approved. rewards retention and promotion of people; high morale and organizational commitment; inclusive organizational culture; engaged and empowered employees. my ability to contribute to the organization in a way that is important to me: my budget is resourced and expanded; i am promoted up the hierarchy and amass larger responsibility and control as i expand my sphere of influence and power. male allies an hr initiative in the service of empowering all people, enabling all people to fully contribute, and building an inclusive work culture. a role taken up by men which requires them to draw on their limited resources (time, energy, focus, social capital, and networks) away from what benefits their own agenda towards what benefits others and the larger organization. table 2 sources of power, how each may be enacted by a senior male leaders, and possible alternatives to encourage male allyship source of power enactment of power as it benefits the individual as a senior male leader potential alternatives to encourage male allyship positional power (legitimate authority) as senior leaders in an organization they have legitimacy and authority. they can choose to address and make decisions about enterprisewide and business unit-wide issues, such as gender inequity. they may also choose not to. assign new titles of authority, such as “male ally”; formalize that moniker by including a label or indicator in employee databases that permits individuals to ‘find and select’ male allies; have this group report directly to the ceo or executive committee so they can showcase their power as they convey progress, make recommendations, and brainstorm new initiatives. control of rewards (ability to deliver jobs, money, access, support) they ‘control’ the rewards by virtue of being at the table where limited resources are distributed; this enables them to ‘reward’ themselves in ways that are meaningful to their own interests. provide added collective responsibilities and control of resources to this special cohort such as nominating women to leadership programs, or having a voice in ensuring diversity when hiring senior people. set aside new funding resources dedicated to advancing women. information and expertise to solve important organizational problems because of their senior level position, male allies have the benefit of seeing across business units, and seeing the big-picture issues facing the organization. this enables them to anticipate and capitalize upon changes that they choose to make, acting either in their own self interests or in the interest of the organization. use that perspective by bringing male allies together to share their expertise, and tackle additional problems that are important to them beyond gender equity. for example, discuss their own struggles to be involved fathers or the challenge to reach and maintain a work-life balance. 8 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 personal and referent power: people who are attractive, socially adept; people want to work with you or be like you individual male allies may or may not have this source of power. create a ‘status’ association with being a male ally and part of an important cohort; have a charismatic leader/owner of this initiative who other men want to be affiliated with; provide special opportunities for male allies to get together, to connect, to build their network between themselves and other senior leaders. recommendations for practitioners in organizations as leaders in organizations contemplate launching male ally initiatives, they often begin by determining the degree to which gender inequity currently exists (latimer et al., 2019; madsen, townsend, & scribner, 2020). having looked at the numbers of women present at each level in the leadership hierarchy, rarely are senior leaders surprised to see the decreasing number of women in the top levels of the hierarchy. many have long recognized and actually attempted to increase those numbers by advancing individual women through mentoring and sponsorship. organizations may also examine how genderinequity is maintained by current organizational systems and practices. every system along the typical career path (from recruitment to hiring to the distribution of high-visibility assignments and promotions) has the potential to be impacted by gender assumptions and unconscious bias. often practices that appear gender-neutral (i.e., meetings at 7am or all-nighters to meet deadlines) may disadvantage women in invisible and unintentional ways. “second generation” gender issues, which include work cultures and practices that reflect ‘masculine values and the life situations of men”, can create barriers for women and people of color (fletcher, 1999; trefalt, et al., 2011). identifying these practices, rules and norms help identify where the work needs to be done and what changes to the organizational context could lead towards gender-equity. from the political frame perspective, we urge leaders to add this critical question: are men, who have benefitted from these organizational practices, ready to change those practices and possibly diminish their advantage in doing so? to ascertain male readiness, the organization needs to engage in conversations with senior men in three capacities. the first is to help them see and understand the contextual practices that disadvantage women; and to help them see and understand the organizational benefits of removing those barriers, not just to women but to all employees. doing so contributes to motivating them to act on behalf of gender equity so that it’s not seen as a zero-sum game (salter & migliacco, 2019). kimmel (2018) wrote about his work in a global insurance company where he worked with men focused on supporting one another. they encouraged each other to acknowledge, strategize and get emotional support for dealing with family issues, such as sick children. a year later the men reported higher levels of job satisfaction. kimmel proposed that concurrently these men also developed a critical insight into the context women found themselves trying to exercise leadership while dealing with families, and the organizational practices (i.e., no sick care days) that prevented them from doing so. however, explicit conversations also need to address the issues of power, privilege and advantage. it is only when men recognize their power in both maintaining the status quo and in changing it that their commitment to foster gender-equitable practices will be authentic (salter & migliacco, 2019; lund, meriläinen, & tienari, 2019; warren, samit, & warren, 2021). we have found that just providing our definition of male ally that overtly names power elicits an unsettled reaction and discussion: what is your response to being named as having power? what does the word ‘power’ conjure up for you? what power do you have? from where does it originate? in what ways does your power advantage you? what may happen to your power as the barriers to senior leadership are reduced? a final suggestion for male allies is to encourage them to use an intersectionality lens not just to understand the experiences of women; they may also look at their own work experiences with a more nuanced perspective. an intersectionality lens requires that men acknowledge their multiple identities. some of these identities (like gender) confer privileges but there are identities that handicap them too. for example, in our work with senior executives, identity dimensions that they believe may possibly put them at a disadvantage are the type of school they attended, their socioeconomic status, and even their height. reflecting on the experiences when they have felt in a “power under” position may allow them to empathize with women and better understand their organizational experiences. this kind of understanding is a necessary catalyst to communicate the importance of male allies using their power to interrupt systems that lead to gender inequity. our last recommendation is to include women when launching male ally initiatives. organizational leaders need to have conversations with women who need to be receptive collaborators with male allies in working towards gender equity. as we learned from listening to the women in the university’s executive education programs, women need to wrestle with ‘gender gatekeeping’, and not see men as benefactors, white knights or saviors, all of which reinforce their low-power position. instead, women need to recognize that while male allies bring the necessary power to change the institutionalized systems of advantage/disadvantage, it is women leaders who need to embrace, support, and validate those efforts. 9 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 recommendation for future research our work with men and women in gender-equity efforts has prompted us to explore, through qualitative research, and the use of established models, such as bolman and deal, as platforms for critical thinking, what role the concept of power plays in male ally initiatives. however, as with most research, the more we learn the more questions arise. some of the questions that will guide our future research, and we anticipate the research of other scholars include: how might we understand both the men and women involved in gender-equity efforts in more nuanced ways? how does the dynamic of intersectionality push us to recognize people’s multiple social identities and the subsequent conveying of advantage and disadvantage to male allies and women inside organizations? how might power as a component in male ally initiatives be regarded differently across world cultures? in our own work we found that u.s. male allies felt slightly more comfortable with both the concept of their power as well as the responsibilities for change being placed on those at the top of their organizations. with the great variability of the concept of power across world cultures, global organizations implementing male ally initiatives may need to identify how to appeal to men to step up into the male ally position differentially based on how gender-equity is perceived and enacted in their culture. finally, our contribution to the literature has been to explore and emphasize the need to pay attention to the political frame (with its acknowledgement of power and competition as an inevitable dynamic in organizations) when rolling out hr initiatives, such as male allies. yet we also anticipate that there will be implications for the symbolic and structural frames as well. how might leaders shift the culture to one more genderequitable through the use of narratives, symbols, and structure? how might they use changes in structure to ‘freeze’ organizational changes that prevent the inevitable backsliding? and overarching all efforts, how might we measure the impact of different strategies? conclusion the use of male allies as a strategy in fostering gender-equitable organizations provides great promise in chipping away at the stubborn gap in female leadership. in this paper we propose that organizations cannot overlook the need to address the power and political dynamics when rolling out male ally human resource initiatives. ignoring the power that male allies are asked to share for the good of the entire organization while still rewarding individual contributions (achieved through a dogged commitment to their own agendas) will not result in organizational change. hr good-for-organizations initiatives must be balanced by political issues and power. we ignore those dynamics 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what’s power got to do with it? seeking gender-equity in organizations through male ally initiatives mary shapiro, maria elena rivera-beckstrom, cynthia ingols, stacy blake-beard, lan gao, regina o’neill, &elisa van dam mary shapiro, professor of practice, simmons university school of business and research fellow, institute of inclusive leadership, mary.shapiro@simmons.edu maria elena rivera-beckstrom, research associate, institute for inclusive leadership, simmons university, mariaelena.rivera-beckstrom@simmons.edu cynthia ingols, research fellow, institute of inclusive leadership, simmons university, cynthia.ingols@simmons.edu stacy blake-beard, professor, tuck school of business, dartmouth, nh, stacy.blakebeard@tuck.dartmouth.edu lan gao, director of institutional research at simmons university, lan.gao@simmons.edu regina o’neill, professor of management, sawyer business school department of management & entrepreneurship, suffolk university, roneill@suffolk.edu elisa van dam, vice president, allyship and inclusion, institute for inclusive leadership, simmons university, elisa.vandam@simmons,edu accepted july 1, 2019 with the persistence of women’s limited advancement into senior leadership, organizations have employed an arsenal of diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies such as implicit bias training, intentional mentoring, and efforts to authentically suppo... keywords: male ally, power, gender-equity, hr, diversity, equity, inclusion with the persistence of women’s limited advancement into senior leadership in organizations (catalyst, 2017; aauw, 2016), scholars have examined both what women and organizations have done and failed to do in attaining gender equity (kossek, su, & wu,... organizations have also received advice in relation to advancing women in leadership. they have been urged to address implicit and explicit bias, recognizing that women are less likely to be promoted (heilman, 2012; roth, purvis, & bobko, 2012); have ... in organizational behavior and leadership scholarship, male allyship has emerged as a recent strategy in organizational efforts aimed at gender equity (catalyst, 2009; sawyer & valerio, 2018; trefalt, et al,. 2011). yet in other fields, such as econom... central to the concept of allyship is the recognition that there is an asymmetry to power: women are in a lower power position and need assistance, and men are in a higher power position and can provide that assistance. dubow and ashcraft (2016) expl... to explore our research question regarding the possible impact that power plays in male ally initiatives in an organizational context, we look to bolman and deal’s (2017) four frames. many scholars have used those frames to explore wide ranging topics... to examine the dynamic of power when using male ally initiatives, we draw on the literature, situating allyship and power in a broader and historical context. we discuss our ongoing experiences working with both male allies and women in the university... situating allyship in the literature the concept of ally is not new in the gender, anti-racism, civil rights, feminism, and social justice literature. washington and evans (1991) crafted an early definition of ‘ally’ contemporaneous with the lgbt movement: "a person who is a member of t... central to the definition of ally across all fields was their advantaged position vis-à-vis those who were the beneficiaries of the movements they supported (myers, 2008). myers recognized that allies were, indeed, separate from the beneficiary group ... ironically, one dimension that can affect men’s position in advantaged or disadvantaged groups is the mantle of ‘male ally’ itself. anicha, burnett and bilen-green (2015) stated, “although gender privilege is operative for men when they adhere to ... more costs associated with working across advantaged-disadvantaged groups are pointed out by connell (2005) as he wrote, “globally, men have a lot to lose from pursuing gender equality because men, collectively, continue to receive a patriarchal divid... clearly, the idea of power dynamics between advantaged and disadvantaged groups is central to understanding the male ally experience as men consider taking up gender equity work. it is critical for organizational leaders to recognize that there is no ... exploring the concept of power consistent with our exploration of the concept of allies beyond organizational research, it is instructive to look at power more broadly. in feminism and feminist literature, the concept of power is central to the system of patriarchy (anderson, 2009;... concurrently, social scientists initially described power with competitive, win-lose language. max weber, in 1946, defined power as “the chance …. to realize their will…even against the resistance of others” (miller & cummins, 1992, p. 416). power w... in this paper, we pull from bolman and deal’s definition of power, “the capacity to get things done,” grounding their earliest work on their four frames (1991, p. 165). they argue that organizations are coalitions of divergent interests with continuou... what do men and women involved in male ally initiatives think about power? to explore this question, we offer findings from our qualitative research. in our work with organizations with male ally initiatives, both men and women revealed a discomfort w... methods for eight years we held conversations with both women and men engaged in a women’s leadership development program. the program was sponsored by a global organization, organized by the university’s executive education department, and delivered by busi... the organization’s goal was to retain and advance women into senior leadership. over eight years approximately 700 midto senior-level women from across their global footprint participated in a two-week program. after the pilot program, a male ally c... qualitative discussions with women: during the women’s leadership program for the organization, faculty engaged with around 700 midto senior-level women. these women came from all functional areas of the organization and across its global footprin... qualitative discussions with male allies: a group of male allies was identified for each cohort of the women’s program, starting with cohort 2. these were men at the leadership level of their global organization’s business units, and were from multip... for the last eight cohorts of the program, the role of the male allies was expanded. during the program, male allies worked with a group of 5-6 women to brainstorm strategies to address a selected structural issue. for six months after the program m... following each male ally session, faculty and male allies shared their observations of both what happened in the male ally program and their work in the women’s leadership program. these conversations were captured in notes, and used for this paper i... results and discussion with male allies the discussions with the 2018 cohort of seven male allies is particularly informative to this article as they not only repeated the theme of power from the previous seven cohorts, but they were also responsive to our more persistent probing about the ... these reactions are consistent with feminist scholars’ reframing of power from ‘power over’ (the historical struggle of one person’s dominance over another) to ‘power to’ which is about empowerment (miller & cummins, 1992); and ‘power with’ (fletcher,... it is notable that these 2018 male allies, representative of earlier cohorts, were uncomfortable with legacy definitions of power stemming from formal titles and hierarchy. they were reluctant to ‘own’ the power that came with their titles, the decis... discussion from our qualitative inquiry of women starting with the second cohort where we introduced the use of male allies, we immediately fielded questions as to why male allies were part of the program. women shared their concerns about having men in the classroom (usually around issues of confi... when the role of male allies expanded in cohort 14, the challenge to the need for male allies reappeared. from our review of our faculty debriefing notes across eight cohorts of women regarding male allyship, it became clear that many women were uncom... another possible source of our women’s resistance to ‘needing’ men to help foster gender-equity may be avoiding the difficult conclusion that they are members in a low power, disadvantaged group. women who are highly educated, highly accomplished exe... these qualitative findings prompted us to seek an answer to our fundamental research question: what role might power play in using male ally initiatives to address gender-inequity in organizations? specifically, how can male allyship initiatives be s... given those two dynamics, how might organizations implement male ally initiatives while recognizing the countervailing desires of individuals to hold onto their power? to answer our research question, we turned again to the work of bolman and deal (2... bolman and deal’s four frames model since the early 1990s bolman and deal offered four frames to analyze both the rewarding and dark sides of complex, modern organizations. they define a frame as: “…a coherent set of ideas or beliefs forming a prism or lens that enables you to see and u... they begin with the structural frame which descents from the field of sociology. drawing on the work of frederick taylor, whose “scientific management” sought to design organizations for maximum efficiency, and max weber, whose desire for rationality ... bolman and deal’s fourth frame is the symbolic frame which draws from the field of anthropology and asks about organizational cultures with their embedded stories, myths, heroes and heroines, rituals, symbols, and celebrations. this frame suggests tha... it is bolman and deal’s second and third frames (human resource and political, respectively) which we use to analyze male ally programs. bolman and deal’s human resource frame borrows heavily from the field of psychology. the assumptions of the hr fra... the political frame draws from the field of political science. here the concepts of power, influence, negotiations, and win-win or win-lose come to the forefront of organizational processes. bolman and deal (2017) posit: “scarce resources and enduring... what can bolman and deal’s model tell us about male ally initiatives? we suggest that organizations tend to view male ally initiatives primarily, if not exclusively, through the hr frame. given that human resources departments (and the hr frame) focus on hiring, retaining, training and promoting people, organizational ... from our experience working with organizations, we have found that managers often ignore or underplay the importance of the political frame in setting up gender-equity programs. in turning our attention to organizational politics, power and influence,... what does this mean for male allies? through the lens of the political frame, competition between people for scarce resources is fundamental in every organization. two examples of scarcity include positions and decision making. the number of senior le... there are significant tensions between the hr and political frames that male allies and gender-equity initiatives straddle. we summarize them below in table 1. the primary difference arises from the target for accruing benefits: in the human resourc... what can bolman and deal tell us about power? bolman and deal (2017, p. 192-193) provide a list of sources of power that individuals build, use and maintain in competing for scarce resources. table 2 lists those sources in the left-hand column. in the middle column we recognize how male allies ... in the far-right column we offer some possible alternative enactments of each power source based on our work in organizations engaged in male ally initiatives. these include both activities that are either being enacted or are being considered for en... table 1 the tensions male ally initiatives must navigate between hr and political frames table 2 sources of power, how each may be enacted by a senior male leaders, and possible alternatives to encourage male allyship recommendations for practitioners in organizations as leaders in organizations contemplate launching male ally initiatives, they often begin by determining the degree to which gender inequity currently exists (latimer et al., 2019; madsen, townsend, & scribner, 2020). having looked at the numbers of w... from the political frame perspective, we urge leaders to add this critical question: are men, who have benefitted from these organizational practices, ready to change those practices and possibly diminish their advantage in doing so? to ascertain male readiness, the organization needs to engage in conversations with senior men in three capacities. the first is to help them see and understand the contextual practices that disadvantage women; and to help them see and understand the ... however, explicit conversations also need to address the issues of power, privilege and advantage. it is only when men recognize their power in both maintaining the status quo and in changing it that their commitment to foster gender-equitable practi... a final suggestion for male allies is to encourage them to use an intersectionality lens not just to understand the experiences of women; they may also look at their own work experiences with a more nuanced perspective. an intersectionality lens requi... our last recommendation is to include women when launching male ally initiatives. organizational leaders need to have conversations with women who need to be receptive collaborators with male allies in working towards gender equity. as we learned fro... recommendation for future research our work with men and women in gender-equity efforts has prompted us to explore, through qualitative research, and the use of established models, such as bolman and deal, as platforms for critical thinking, what role the concept of power plays in male... how might power as a component in male ally initiatives be regarded differently across world cultures? in our own work we found that u.s. male allies felt slightly more comfortable with both the concept of their power as well as the responsibilities ... finally, our contribution to the literature has been to explore and emphasize the need to pay attention to the political frame (with its acknowledgement of power and competition as an inevitable dynamic in organizations) when rolling out hr initiative... conclusion the use of male allies as a strategy in fostering gender-equitable organizations provides great promise in chipping away at the stubborn gap in female leadership. in this paper we propose that organizations cannot overlook the need to address the powe... references aauw (2016). barriers and bias: the status of women in leadership. https://www.aauw.org/aauw_check/pdf_download/show_pdf.php?file=barriers-and-bias alcoff, 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(2015). young arab muslim women’s agency challenging western feminism. journal of women and social work, 30(2), 145-157. advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 6 2010 issn 1093-7099 hillary clinton’s race: did she match the presidential prototype? dr. amber m. gaffney and dr. danielle l. blaylock abstract the present research addresses how voters’ perceptions of hillary clinton’s warmth and competence influenced decisions to vote for her in the 2008 democratic primary. we apply research on gender stereotypes and perceptions of women leaders to demonstrate that voters perceived clinton as highly competent but relatively less warm. further, this research examines how perceptions of clinton’s warmth and competence contributed to decisions to vote for her. results suggest that perceptions of clinton’s warmth and competence differentially predicted voting behavior for voters strongly and less strongly identified with their political party. this research provides a descriptive analysis of how voters’ beliefs about leaders can be colored by gender, and how such beliefs contribute to electing women candidates. key words: gender stereotypes, gender roles, leadership, politics citation: gaffney, a., and blaylock, d. (2010). hillary clinton’s race: did she match the presidential prototype? advancing women in leadership journal, 30(6). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/� advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 the 2008 presidential primary election will doubtlessly be declared a monumental achievement for women’s progress in american political history. fifty-three percent of people who voted in the california state primary cast their votes in support of hillary clinton’s bid to become president of the united states of america (johnson, 2008). people turned out across the united states to vote in a presidential primary where for one of the first times in american history, a woman’s name appeared on the democratic primary ballot as a potential candidate for the nation’s top political office. the results of this primary, and the mere fact that a woman appeared on the ballot as a contender for president, highlight a dramatic departure from earlier perceptions of the viability of women candidates in the u.s. in 1936, a gallup poll demonstrated that 65% of americans surveyed claimed that they “would not vote for a woman for president, even if she was qualified in every other respect” (dolan, 2005). dolan (2005) pointed out that the wording in this question implies that being a woman is the disqualifying characteristic in a woman who is seeking the office of president. in 2000, however, a survey of potential voters showed that 57% of those surveyed believed that having women in government is positive for the country (dolan, 2005; simmons, 2001). though supporting women for the presidency is qualitatively different from more generally supporting women in government, this survey no doubt demonstrates that americans today believe that having women in government positions is a less foreign concept than it was in 1936. further, 1992 marked the year of the woman, an election year where the number of women in national senate seats tripled from two to six, highlighting an increase in voters’ desire to vote for women candidates. currently there are 92 (17%) women in the u.s. house of representatives. though these numbers clearly do not reflect equal representation of men and women in u.s. politics, they do reflect an increase of women into political positions. the apparent change in voters’ perceptions of female candidates’ viability for top-level offices may lead to the assumption that voter hostility toward female candidates has all but diminished. on the contrary, alexander and anderson (1993) have warned against dismissing the “apparent lack of gender bias in the voting booth” by adopting the viewpoint that gender bias no longer exists among voters (pp. 527-528). following this warning, the question arises as to whether voters’ perceptions of hillary clinton during the 2008 primary were colored by beliefs regarding her gender. gender and leadership traditional stereotypes characterize women as warm, nurturing, and kind, but not necessarily competent (e.g, fiske, cuddy, & glick, 1999; fiske, cuddy, glick, & xu, 2002). such stereotypes rest in perceivers’ assumptions that women are powerless, but cooperative; thus, people like women, but do not respect them (fiske, cuddy, & glick, 1999). other researchers have labeled stereotypical women traits as communal (eagly, 1987), a definition that encompasses the aforementioned traits. the characterization of women as communal, however, stands in stark contrast to people’s leadership schemas. for example, in an analysis of managers’ leadership qualities, schein (1973; 1975) demonstrated that respondents believed that successful managers are agentic, aggressive, good leaders, self-confident and competitive. further, respondents reported that successful managers were more similar to men than to women. indeed, advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 at the core of stereotypes regarding masculinity, people tend to characterize men as strong, independent, aggressive, and competent (see eagly & karau, 2002). americans tend to strongly associate beliefs about leadership with traditionally masculine characteristics. research findings suggest that survey respondents tend to rate leadership roles such as managers and politicians as highly agentic, but not communal positions (powell & butterfield, 1979, 1984, 1989; rosenwasser & dean, 1989). moreover, past research examining voters’ perceptions of politicians’ warmth and competence has found that competence is a more favorable candidate trait than warmth (funk, 1997). hogg and van knippenberg (2003) suggested that competence is closely associated with perceived leadership ability, thus implying that people support leaders whom they perceive as highly competent. further, people tend to believe that both men and leaders possess agentic traits such as aggressiveness, dominance, and competence (eagly & karau, 2002; schein, 1983; 1975). in sum, people’s beliefs about leaders’ traits and abilities are more closely aligned with masculinity than femininity. leadership theories and women kinder, peters, abelson, and fiske (1989) demonstrated that people cognitively represent an image of a prototypical president that embodies the traits of competent and knowledgeable. an examination of leadership categorization theory (lord, 1977; palich & hom, 1992) and social role theory (eagly, 1987) can explicate differences in beliefs regarding men and women’s abilities to lead. leadership categorization theory posits that people have a prototypic image (i.e., a cognitive representation) of a leader to which they compare all other leaders and potential leaders. if leaders and potential leaders suitably match the prototype, followers perceive them as competent and worthy of support. leadership categorization theory strongly implies that only those who are perceived as possessing certain traits will match the prototypical image of a leader and these will be the individuals whom constituents support as leaders. similarly, social role theory (eagly, 1987) asserts that people hold beliefs and stereotypes regarding men and women’s roles within society because of the historical distribution of men and women into certain roles (e.g., women have historically occupied “nurturer” roles, such as teachers, while men have occupied leadership roles, such as politicians; eagly, 1987). the roles that women have traditionally occupied tend to be communal and also lower in status and prestige than the agentic roles that men have traditionally occupied (eagly, 1987). taken together, leadership categorization theory and social role theory suggest that because women and men have traditionally occupied different roles, people perceive women and men as differentially equipped to occupy leadership positions. specifically, people observe men more frequently than women in roles associated with leadership; thus the prototype of a leader is more often a man, not a woman, as most individuals believe that men possess the attributes that prototypical leaders embody. in a similar vein, eagly and karau (2002) developed the role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. they asserted that people judge women leaders more harshly and negatively than their male counterparts because people view women as incongruent with leadership roles. this is due to the gendered nature of leadership, which, according to these authors, derives from people having little experience perceiving women in leadership roles (e.g., advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 eagly, 1987; eagly & karau, 2002). this is consistent with duerst-lahti and mae kelly’s (1995) argument that socialization from an early age leads individuals to learn and accept gender roles and gender stereotypes, and such gender roles for women rarely include leadership positions. other prominent leadership theories seek to describe when and how leaders come to power, without thoroughly examining followers’ beliefs grounded in gender. the social identity theory of leadership (hogg, 2001; hogg & van knippenberg, 2003) seeks to explain when and how individuals will endorse a leader, as well as what leaders provide for their followers. this theory posits that people prefer leaders who express traits that embody group norms as well as leadership traits (hogg, 2001). specifically, followers view a leader as prototypical when they believe that the leader matches the cognitive representation of not only a leadership prototype, but also traits representing the group prototype. moreover, leaders should possess traits that are conducive to the group’s success and should act in the best interest of the group. a leader’s perceived prototypicality and the traits s(he) possesses are particularly important among followers who strongly identify with the group to which the leader seeks to represent. thus, followers’ identification with a group is an important predictor of leader support. group identification or social identification is the part of the self-definition that is defined by one’s group memberships (hogg, 2006; tajfel; turner, hogg, oakes, reicher, & wetherell, 1987). people can derive a strong sense of self and meaning from the groups to which they belong; thus those who identify strongly with a group view the group as an important part of the self-concept. in line with the social identity theory of leadership (hogg, 2001, 2008; hogg & van knippenberg, 2003), the present research suggests that perceptions of a leader are strongly influenced by identification with social groups. in the context of elections, voters’ identification with political parties is highly salient, thus party identification will strongly influence voters’ perceptions of a candidate’s viability. moreover, people who strongly identify with their party should be particularly concerned with a potential leaders’ ability to lead their group to success; as a consequence they should rely heavily upon their perceptions of a candidates’ traits that provide information about the candidates’ prototypicality and viability as a leader, in sum, the candidates’ competence. with respect to women, being viewed as a prototypical leader is a difficult task, as beliefs about gender do not align with leader prototypes. the current research suggests that voters who strongly identify with their political party will place a great deal of emphasis on traits that they believe allude to women’s ability to lead as well as to traits commonly associated with political leaders (i.e., candidates’ competence, as it directly speaks to the candidates’ abilities). the aforementioned theories illustrate how women seeking to occupy leadership positions (such as high level political offices) may face a variety of obstacles because beliefs about women’s abilities are strongly associated with gender and are therefore incongruent with leadership prototypes. with a record number of women currently presiding in the united states congress (74 women sit in the house out of the 439 members and 16 of the 100 members of senate are women) it is clear that many women politicians have been able to enter into politics, albeit at drastically lower rates than their male counterparts. how are women politicians perceived, and more importantly, how do such perceptions impact support for women politicians and affect their paths to achieving the nation’s highest political office? advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 gender and political office though attitudes toward women politicians have markedly improved since 1936, there exists a plethora of evidence suggesting that voters may often rely on gender stereotypes with respect to making political decisions regarding women candidates. in line with traditional gender stereotypes, voters tend to perceive women politicians as warm, friendly, and kind but perceive men politicians as aggressive, dominant, strong, independent, aggressive, and knowledgeable (e.g., huddy & terkildsen, 1993). quite often, women who occupy agentic positions suffer a backlash with respect to perceivers’ beliefs about their personalities, because such women violate traditional gender roles. research on stereotype content and person perception demonstrates that people organize their perceptions of others’ traits along two basic dimensions: warmth and competence (judd, jameshawkins, yzerbyt, & kashima, 2005). perceivers then form attitudes toward others through a combination of these two trait dimensions (fiske, et al., 1999; fiske et al., 2002). for example, women leaders, such as female ceos (e.g., brenda barnes), are often perceived as competent and cold (fiske et al., 2002), and the resulting attitudes are negative and hostile toward such women. competence is a laudable trait in males; however, research on stereotype violation and stereotype content suggests that people believe that highly competent women lack warmth (fiske et al., 2002). this mismatch of high competence and low warmth can lead to feelings of hostility and dislike toward such women, due in large part to a perceived violation of traditional feminine stereotypes of women as warm and caring (rudman & fairchild, 2004; rudman & glick, 1999; 2001). the united states’ highest and most prestigious leadership position is the office of presidency. voters’ gender expectancies may significantly impact their perceptions of a woman seeking to occupy this position. along her journey through the democratic party’s primary, hillary clinton was characterized as “… cold and absolutely flawless” by news personality chris mathews (bohlert & foser, 2008, ¶ 4) and as a “stereotypical bitch” by cnn’s glenn beck (m.b.b., 2007; ¶ 1). these comments strongly suggest that mathews and beck perceived clinton as a competent candidate, but neither viewed her as particularly warm. this anecdotal evidence begs the question, how did voters perceive hillary clinton in the 2008 presidential primary and did their perceptions of her traits influence voting behaviors? the current research tests two primary hypotheses via a random sample of california voters. survey respondents completed a battery of items regarding their opinions of hillary clinton as well as measures of their identification with their political parties. hypothesis 1. in line with previous research that suggests women who occupy leadership positions violate traditional gender stereotypes (e.g., fiske et al., 2002), we hypothesized that voters would perceive hillary clinton as more competent than warm. hypothesis 2. we predicted that perceptions of warmth and competence would differentially impact decisions to vote for clinton among people strongly and weakly identified with their political party. specifically, for people highly identified with their party, warmth would be positively related to voting for clinton, only among those who perceived her as advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 competent. somewhat conversely, we predicted that perceptions of clinton’s warmth would be more important for people who weakly identify with their political party than for those more strongly identified. these predictions are based on the assumption that if perceptions of a potential leader’s competence are indicative of her prototypicality and thus her ability to effectively lead a group to success, then competence should be particularly important for strong identifiers (in line with predictions of the social identity theory of leadership; hogg & van knippenberg, 2003). warmth, however, may imply not only leader prototypicality, but also a personality dimension (i.e., nice, friendly) that speaks directly to gender stereotypes. those less concerned with the welfare of their political group may be more influenced by traits that are indicative of a woman’s conformity to gender roles than a woman’s ability to lead. overview of the research survey respondents completed a questionnaire that assessed perceptions of hillary clinton’s traits (warmth and competence), and also indicated level of identification with respondents’ political parties. the questionnaire additionally assessed the candidate for whom participants intended to vote in the primary election, the likelihood that they would for clinton vote if the election were held tomorrow, participants’ party affiliation, and demographic variables. method participants one hundred and seventy-two adults (56.5% women, 43.5% men) who intended to vote in the california state primary participated in this study. we administered surveys using venuebased sampling, allowing for a diverse sample of voters. participants completed a paper and pencil survey about voters’ attitudes. ages ranged from 18 to 75, with a mean age of 38.5; 38% of participants identified themselves as white, 25% as hispanic, 12% as black, 8% as asian, and 16% as other. additionally, 54% of participants were democrats, 24% were republicans, and 22% claimed to be members of another political party. though there were clearly more democrats who participated in this study than republicans (and members of other parties), this breakdown is roughly representative of the number of people who are registered as democrats and republicans in california (russo, 2008). predictor variables party identification. we employed an adapted version of mael and tetrick’s 1992 group identification scale (e.g., when someone criticizes my political party, it feels like a personal insult; α = .78) to measure party identification. perceptions of clinton’s warmth (warmth). we adapted seven items from fiske et al.’s 2002 work to assess participants’ perceptions of clinton’s warmth. participants indicated the extent to which they agreed that each adjective (e.g., friendly, approachable) was true of advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 clinton’s characteristics on 7-point likert scales (α = .88). we averaged the items to form a composite measure of warmth. perceptions of clinton’s competence (competence) we adapted six items from fiske et al.’s 2002 work to assess participants’ perceptions of clinton’s competence. participants indicated the extent to which they agreed that each adjective (e.g., intelligent, confident) was true of clinton’s characteristics on 7-point likert scales (α = .88). we averaged the items to form a composite measure of competence. dependent measure: likelihood of voting for clinton (voting decisions) to explore how perceptions of warmth and competence predicted participants’ decisions to vote for clinton, participants responded to the following question: if the presidential election were held tomorrow, what is the likelihood that you would vote for hillary clinton? this item was on a 7-point likert scale with 1 being extremely unlikely to 7 being extremely likely. demographics to conclude the questionnaire, participants completed a series of demographic questions (e.g., age, ethnicity/race, sex) as well as indicated their political affiliation and whether or not they were registered to vote. results exploratory analyses though we did not hypothesize differences in men’s and women’s voting behavior, research on social identity (tajfel & turner, 1979; turner, hogg, oakes, reicher, & wetherell, 1987) and research on sharing double ingroup identities (brewer, ho, lee, & miller, 1987) strongly suggests that women, particularly democratic women would perceive clinton as more positively on both warmth and competence dimensions. to examine this, a two (gender: male vs. female) x 2 (party: democrat vs. republican) analysis of variance (anova) assessed participants’ perceptions of clinton’s warmth. there was no main effect for gender on warmth (p = n.s.), and the interaction between gender and party was not significant (p = n.s.), however there was a main effect of party, f(1, 125) = 33.09, p < .001, η2 = .22. democratic participants perceived clinton as warmer (m = 5.06, sd = 1.36) than republicans (m = 3.43, sd = 1.54). for competence, there was a main effect of gender, f(1, 125) = 3.87, p < .05, η2 = .03. female voters perceived clinton as more competent (m = 5.96, sd = 1.55) than did male voters (m = 4.91, sd = 1.53). there was also a main effect for party, f(1, 125) = 30.99, p < .001, η2 = .20. democratic participants perceived clinton as more competent (m = 5.72, sd = 2.01) than did republicans (m = 4.19, sd = 1.18). the interaction was not significant (p = n.s.). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 perceptions of clinton hypothesis 1 predicted that because women in high status positions are seen to violate traditional stereotypes, participants would perceive hillary clinton as highly competent, but relatively less warm. a paired sample t-test compared participants’ ratings of clinton’s competence and warmth. as expected, participants rated hillary clinton as more competent (m = 5.2, sd = 1.6) than warm (m = 4.5, sd = 1.6), t(164) = 7.6, p < .001, cohen’s d = .44 (see figure 1). figure 1. comparison of participants’ perceptions of clinton’s warmth and competence ratings. voting decisions hypothesis 2 sought to examine how participants’ perceptions of clinton’s warmth and competence predicted intentions to vote for her. furthermore, we predicted that perceptions of warmth and competence would differentially predict voting for clinton based upon participants’ level of identification with their political parties. to examine this hypothesis, we constructed a 3way interaction between participants’ ratings of clinton’s warmth, ratings of her competence, and party identification. following guidelines on constructing and interpreting interactions using multiple regression (aiken & west, 1991), we centered the predictor variables (warmth and party identification) and the moderator (competence) means of zero to avoid mulicollinearity issues. in the first step of the regression analysis, we regressed participant age, race/ethnicity, gender, and party affiliation (e.g., participants’ status as a democrat, republican, etc.) onto the dependent measure, likelihood of voting for clinton (this statistically controlled for demographic 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 competence warmth m e a n advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 characteristics). we entered all main effects into the second step of the regression, two-way interactions into the third step, and the three-way interaction into the fourth step of the regression analysis. results indicate that there were significant main effects for all of the predictors. as party identification increased, likelihood of voting for clinton decreased (β = -.14, seb = .14, t = 2.21, p = .03). competence and warmth were both positively related to voting for clinton, such that, as perceptions of clinton’s competence (β = .32, seb = .14, t = 3.46, p = .001) and warmth (β = .50, seb = .14, t = 5.30, p < .001) increased, so did the likelihood that participants would vote for her. all of the two-way interactions reached statistical significance; however, these 2-way interactions, as well as the main effects were qualified by the presence of a three-way interaction. table 1 summary of hierarchical regression analyses predicting likelihood of voting for hillary clinton from final model (main effects and interactions). variable b seb β party identification (pi) -.484 .149 -.231* warmth (w) .665 .129 .450** competence (c) .696 .138 .496** w x c .173 .048 .234** w x pi -.299 .130 -.237* c x pi .424 .127 .366** w x c x pi .102 .036 .243** note. all predictor variables were centered at their means. all analyses controlled for participant’s age, sex, ethnicity/race, and political party. *p < .05, **p < .001. to decompose the three-way interaction, we analyzed the simple slopes (see figure 2 and figure 3). these analyses yielded support for the hypotheses. first, for participants who strongly identified with their political party and perceived clinton as high in competence, warmth was positively related to voting for clinton (β = .57, seb = .22, t = 3.77, p < .001). further, as predicted, among those high identifiers who perceived clinton to be low in competence, warmth was unrelated to voting for her (p = n.s.). for participants weakly identified with their political party, warmth was positively related to voting for clinton, regardless of perceptions of competence. specifically, for low identifiers, among those who perceived clinton as high in competence, as perceptions of warmth increased, intentions to vote for clinton increased (β = .65, seb = .19, t = 4.92, p < .001). likewise, among advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 those low identifiers who perceived her as low in competence, as perceptions of warmth increased, so did the likelihood of voting for clinton (β = .58, seb = .19, t = 4.37, p < .001). figure 2. the relationship between warmth and competence among high identifiers in predicting voting for clinton. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 figure 3. the relationship between warmth and competence among low identifiers in predicting voting for clinton. discussion the present results generally supported our hypotheses and are consistent with previous findings on perceptions of women who occupy leadership positions. hypothesis 1 results can be applied to research on perceptions of female leaders and competent women. our findings indicate that participants viewed hillary clinton as higher in competence than warmth, suggesting that participants noted that she possesses strong leadership qualities, but believed that she was less warm than competent. due to prescribed gender norms, women are expected to be warm, and to some extent incompetent (eagly & karau, 2002). a true competitor for president is doubtlessly a competent individual in the political arena (an area that few women occupy), hillary clinton being no exception. competent women violate traditional gender roles and are often perceived as low in stereotypically feminine traits (e.g., warmth). our results corroborate this ambivalent view of competent women: competence is a positive trait, however high ratings in competence for women tend to be accompanied by lower ratings in warmth. this suggests that competent women are often disliked as a result of their competence in a male dominated arena. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 glenn beck’s characterization of clinton plainly demonstrates how many people view women who are competent in realms that are inconsistent with traditional gender roles. hostile sexism is characterized by overtly adversarial feelings directed toward women, where women are perceived as trying to control men and trying to gain special favors through hiring practices that favor them (glick & fiske, 1996). hostile sexism predicts negative evaluations of women who occupy nontraditional traditional roles (fiske et al., 1999). our results indicate that many participants may have ascribed to a similar line of thinking by admitting clinton’s competence, but thinking of her as relatively cold and unkind in comparison. though some scholars argue that competence is a more important trait for politicians to possess than warmth (e.g., funk, 1997), we argue that for women politicians, being perceived as both competent and warm is important, particularly with consideration of identification with political parties. people often characterize competent women as cold; however, voters demonstrate a preference for competent leaders. this begs the question; can we elect a qualified and competent woman to the white house? hypothesis 2 sought to shed light on how the dual contribution of participants’ perceptions of clinton’s warmth and competence were related to decisions to vote for her. results from hypothesis 2 provide evidence that among those who identify strongly with their political party, perceiving clinton as warm was related to voting for her, only among those who also deemed her as highly competent. conversely, for those who rated her as low in competence, perceiving clinton as warm was unrelated to voting for her. in general, our results support the notion that for those heavily invested in the outcome of the election and its implications for the success of their social group, competence is weighed strongly in decisions to select a candidate, while warmth appears to be an important trait in its relation to high but not low competence. a different pattern of results emerged for people who were relatively low in their identification with their political party. these individuals tended to weigh considerations of clinton’s warmth heavily, regardless of how they perceived her competence. this finding may have significant implications for when voters will apply gender stereotypes in candidate selection: when they weakly identify with their political party, as in this case, they appear to rely on perceptions of warmth rather than competence. furthermore, this finding may suggest that leader prototypicality is not important among people who do not strongly identify with their group, perhaps because they are less invested in the outcomes of their group’s success. the current research highlights how voters perceived hillary clinton during the 2008 primary; however some limitations to this research should be noted. first, these findings are based on correlations, and thus should not be used to imply causation between predictor and outcome variables. the findings suggest how voters’ perceptions of clinton’s warmth and competence may have contributed voting decisions, but we cannot state that these perceptions caused voters to cast their ballots for clinton or for one of her competitors. we chose to examine the impact of identification with political parties on voting behavior for the current study. these social groups are important in the context of elections, as parties are often the most salient feature of elections and politics. identification with other social groups advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 may be important for examining the likelihood of voting for women candidates. for example, identification with gender groups may be particularly important, as may ethnic identification. we controlled for the effects of these variables in the current analyses; however, future research may examine how identification with such groups impacts support for women in the contexts of elections, particularly with respect to the group memberships of her opposition. finally, these findings are bound in a particular historical context as these data were collected in california, where clinton won the democratic primary. clinton’s primary opponent in the democratic primary, barack obama, is also an untraditional politician, given his multiple heritage background and may not match a traditional president prototype (americans only have experience witnessing white men as president, and neither obama nor clinton conformed to that image). taken together, these findings suggest that voters’ perceptions of both warmth and competence are important predictors of voting for women politicians. additionally, these results highlight the important challenges that women face when seeking to occupy this country’s highest levels of political office. the 2008 presidential election gave americans the opportunity to imagine a woman occupying the highest level of political office and perhaps the ability to start to incorporate women into leadership prototypes. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 references aiken, l. s., & west, s. g. 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(1987). rediscovering the social group. oxford, england: basil blackwell. http://mediamatters.org/items/200703150011� advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 19, fall 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] factors influencing successful it women’s career choices: a qualitative study dr. peggy s. meszaros, dr. carol j. burger, and dr. elizabeth g. creamer virginia polytechnic institute and state university abstract women and minorities continue to be underrepresented in information technology (it) career fields. in this study, we examined critical self-descriptions of women who selected and excelled in information technology careers. analysis of six narratives revealed that family support, teachers, and hands-on learning experiences were critical sources of women’s development of self-authorship leading to selection of an it career path. findings from this research suggest intervention strategies for parents, teachers, and counselors that will encourage more women to pursue careers in information technology. factors influencing successful it women’s career choices: a qualitative study information technology, not withstanding the current economic downturn, will provide the greatest job growth in the coming years (braddock, 1999; hilton, 2001). the term information technology (it) was coined to describe a variety of jobs concerned with the development, installation, and implementation of computer systems and applications. careers in it encompass occupations that require designing and developing software and hardware systems, providing technical support for computer and peripheral systems, and creating and managing network systems and databases (governor’s commission, 1999). despite the tremendous growth in the number of women entering the professional workforce over the last two decades, women and minorities remain underrepresented in it jobs (babco, 2001; commission on professionals in science and technology [cpst], 2001; panteli, stack, & ramsay, 2001). in bureau of labor statistics projections (bls, 2001), the women’s labor force will grow more quickly than file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer2006/index.html men’s. however, when we look at the pool from which it workers will come, we see persistent patterns of few women and minorities in engineering, computer sciences, and other computer-related fields. a number of explanations have been offered for women’s under-representation in the it labor force (kovalski & behrens, 2002). while recent studies, including our own, suggest that women and girls, particularly girls in high school and younger, no longer view using computers as a particularly male activity, many studies show girls having less positive attitudes than boys about the usefulness of computers, and deriving less enjoyment from using them (american association of university women [aauw], 2000; volman & van eck, 2001). margolis and fisher (2002) conclude that women’s departure from it majors during college is not explained by lack of ability, interest, or confidence. instead, they argue, it is caused by disaffection with a culture and curriculum that enshrines male values, including a single-minded focus on technology. if we are to increase the number of girls and women in it careers, it is important to study and expand the research documenting gender differences in attitudes, access, and use of computers and the factors influencing the choice of an it career path for women (aauw 1992, 1998; badagliacco, 1990; ray, sormunen, & harris, 1999; rosser & kelly, 1994; rosser, 1995; sadker & sadker, 1995). studying successful women in it careers offers an opportunity to examine the events critical in their career choice and extract meanings relevant to young women today. the research reported here is an outgrowth of a national science foundation (nsf) study that uses selfauthorship as a theoretical framework to identify the pivotal transitions in girl’s lives that lead them toward or away from careers in technology fields. specifically, we examine the critical incidents reported by successful women in it careers to better understand early influences on it career decisions for women and minorities. in this paper, we outline the theory of self-authorship and its relevance to studying female non-traditional career choices. we provide information about the influences and barriers related to how women and girls approach their career choices, especially it careers, and suggest implications for practice based on our findings. the theoretical basis for this work is the concept of self-authorship, a constructivist developmental framework first developed by kegan (1994) and extended by magolda (1998, 1999). self-authorship is the ability to reflect upon one’s beliefs, organize one’s thoughts and feelings in the context of, but separate from, the thoughts and feelings of others, and literally make up one’s own mind. self-authorship is a complex phenomenon involving three dimensions: (a) cognitive, (b) interpersonal, and (c) intrapersonal. the cognitive dimension is what people believe and how they make meaning and judgments. the interpersonal dimension is how people view the opinions of others in relationship to their own judgments. identity or an internal sense of self is the intrapersonal dimension. in this paper, we advance magolda’s conceptualization of self-authorship in two important ways. first, we look at how self-authorship applies to the way adult women describe critical incidents in their past associated with their choice of a career in a non-traditional field. second, it is our hypothesis that it is not only educational experiences that promote self-authorship, the focus of magolda’s work, but also parents and significant others who play a crucial role in the development of self-authorship in young women. research methodology our basic research question was: what are the critical incidents that successful women in it careers identify as influencing their career choice? sample selection participants in this qualitative study were six women who currently hold senior level technology and science positions in government, business, and education. this includes those holding ceo or executive level positions in small it companies, as well as those in executive-level positions in government, education, and business. because of the underrepresentation of women in senior level positions, the proportion of women in these careers is small, making them a difficult sample to find. participants in this study were selected by a combination of network selection and primary contacts. women serving as an advisory committee to the nsf funded research study being conducted by the article authors constructed an initial list of virginia women in senior level technology and science careers. from this small group of identified women, participants were solicited via phone and/or email contact. six women executives, five european-american and one african american, agreed to participate in the study, signed an informed consent document, completed a brief demographic questionnaire, and supplied a copy of their resume. data collection to allow for the unique narrative to emerge when individuals reflect on their own development, we designed an open-ended protocol containing items inquiring about family influences and supports, influence and support of others such as peers and teachers, significant barriers and turning points that impacted their career decision, preferred learning styles, decision making processes, and advice for girls thinking about a career in technology. we conducted both telephone and face-to-face interviews. these interviews lasted from 45 to 60 minutes, were audio taped, and a verbatim transcript completed for each. analysis all audiotapes were transcribed by trained research team members and then imported into atlas.ti qualitative analysis software for data management and analysis. two team members cross-coded all interviews simultaneously and met periodically to check each other’s coding to ensure consistency. they worked together to develop a list of emergent themes and to identify critical incidents. the critical incident technique is an interpretive, qualitative research strategy that uses structured and unstructured interviewing to identify self-contained events or occurrences on a specific topic that carries a particular meaning for a participant (chell, 1998; tirri & koro-ljungberg, 2002). a critical incident is one that a participant identifies as central to understanding their experience and where the cause and consequences of the event are sufficiently clear for the researcher to draw inferences. rather than focusing on feelings or perceptions, the interview protocol is designed to elicit descriptions of incidents that focus on behavior or an event as the unit of analysis (carpenter, 2000; chavez & oetting, 1995; flanagan, 1954). critical incidents are used both to test and extend theory. table 1 summarizes key demographic characteristics of the participants, who are referred to throughout the paper by pseudonyms. participants range in age from 29 to 60. all are married and half have children. they hold a range of different types of executive-level positions in both the private and public sectors. only half earned undergraduate degrees in technical fields. results we asked interview participants to reflect on how a number of factors affected their decision to enter an it career. these are described in the following section. family support family environment and family support are important factors in the positive development and socialization of women. parents serve as significant interpreters for children of information about the world and children’s abilities (hall, kelly, hansen, & gutwein, 1996). during adolescence, the family influences vocational development, identity formation, and establishing independence in a variety of ways. experiencing a sense of unity and attachment to parents has been demonstrated to have an impact on adolescents’ career development (bregman & killen, 1999). all the women in our study reported receiving strong messages of support from their families. the message of “you can do anything you set your sights on” was consistently given to the women and backed up with actions of support. their families expected them to succeed. this support and expectation was revealed in the words of one participant who is now 29, married with no children, and the ceo of a small, private company: i would have to say that my family has had a pretty profound affect on me in that my parents are both college educated---i am actually third generation college educated. because of their enlightenment and their vision, i believe that my parentsthe biggest thing that they did for me—they never told me that i couldn’t do anything, you know what i mean? (melissa) the messages that the it women executives reported receiving from their parents were not so much that they should pursue a specific career as it was a more general “can do” attitude. lisa is a senior vice president in a large power company and is married with three children. she illustrates this attitude: it wasn’t so much the job you are going to have as you can, should, and will do anything you want. you make your own opportunities and it is important that you understand that there are all kinds of different things out there that you can do. (lisa) in addition to the consistent messages of support, parents also served as powerful role models of perseverance and role diversity. their attitude was not only reflected in what they said, but also in what they did. one participant, who is now 40 years old, married with no children, and ceo of a small it company said, i grew up in a family that was very involved civically in lots of things. my mother and father worked together in business as far back as i can remember, and so i was used to seeing women work. i was used to seeing my father take off in the afternoons to go watch football practice with my brothers and my mother run the shop. they did buying trips together. there was nothing that they didn’t in a sense do together. therefore, i never stopped to think this was the man’s role or this was the woman’s role. (vicki) the significance of the parents’ messages appears to be in their open-endedness and the absence of a prescription about the path their daughter should take while building their strong sense of identity. teachers and others that influenced career choice in addition to family influences, participants identified significant others in their lives who influenced their career decision and their choice to enter an it field. both influencers and mentors gave the women a new way of looking at themselves and their options as career seekers. the effect appeared to be deeper than merely a source of career information although that was also part of the relationship in most cases. while one participant noted female role models were important because they validated that women belonged in the field, most of the other participants found that interaction with fathers, brothers, and other male figures prepared them for a career in a male-dominated field. supportive male teachers were equally effective in giving the women a sense of confidence in their love of math and science. five of our six participants identified high school teachers, often by name, which played a significant role in their choice to pursue a non-traditional career. three specifically mentioned their middle or high school mathematics teacher, one mentioned supportive high school english and music teachers, and another was encouraged by a teacher in her high school pre-engineering class. these teachers validated them as knowers and confirmed for them that it was acceptable for a female to be good in math and science. martha is the ceo of a small it company. she has a master’s degree in computer science and a ph.d. in information technology. she is married and has two children. of a high school math teacher, she said, i have to stop and tell you about the person, a huge influence in growing up was a teacher i had in high school…she was a strong woman. she was a very accomplished individual, and she was a tough teacher, a fair teacher, but an exciting teacher for me…she confirmed for me that it was okay for a woman or girl to like math and science. (martha) none of the participants identified a counselor or academic advisor as being influential to their career choice. none mentioned being part of any organized mentoring program. this may be the result of the age of our participants and the lack of these types of programs up to 15 to 20 years ago. self-authorship and career decision making self-authorship is central to professional and career decision making (magolda, 2002). integral to complex ways of making meaning, self-authorship is "simultaneously the ability to construct knowledge in a contextual world, an ability to construct an internal identity separate from external influences, and an ability to engage in relationships without losing ones' identity" (magolda, 1999, p. 12). a key way that self-authorship is demonstrated is when supportive messages like "you can do anything you want" are no longer accepted because they come from an authority figure, but because they are internalized and integrated as part of one’s identity; they become a core self-definition. the process of listening to others’ ideas about what kind of career might suit you, weighing it against a core sense of self, and then making a decision is reflected in a critical incident described by one of our participants, vicki. she described an incident in high school that she perceived as instrumental to her ultimate choice of a career. after she took apart and re-assembled her middle brother's stereo, he became a strong proponent that she enroll in an engineering program. her brothers, however, had different ideas of what engineering field was most suited to her. her older brother advocated mechanical engineering. he said, "well, maybe you should try mechanical engineering, i find it easier." she tried mechanical engineering, but ultimately settled on electrical engineering. she said, i mean that was just not my train of thought. when i did try to go in mechanical engineering, it's just not the discipline for me. electrical engineering was really truly much more of what i was doing. i think he was amazed. i mean, you know, considering i wasn't very old at the time. (vicki) we interpret this participant's words to reflect self-authorship because she considered the input of those important to her about her career choice but made a decision after considering her own skills and her interests. lisa, now 51 years old and the owner of her own it company, regrets that she did not realize when she was younger that many different fields were open to someone with her skills. she was reinforced by positive feedback about her math skills and strong female role models who "confirmed for me that it was okay for a woman or a girl to like math and science," but she simply did not know how many careers were open to her. she said, …inside of myself today there are many people. i wish that i had the options mentally that i have today. i am not sure what i would have become. i really, i might have become an architect. i might have become an electrical engineer. i might have become a mechanical engineer. i might have ended up in aerospace -i love robotics. i often assess my life at that age and wonder why i never thought any of those could be an option for me, but i never gave them a consideration. i had been validated that mathematics was what i was good at, it was okay, but i didn't see the application of mathematics across all kinds of problems. i just went to mathematics. and i look now and say, boy, i wish i had maybe a broader influence, and that there are a lot of people inside of me that have not quite gotten out.(lisa) both lisa and vicki actively construct knowledge by recognizing they had a number of different types of skills and there were many options for a career they might pursue, but they reached this awareness at different stages in their lives. they were not born with a sense that an it career was their destiny -an it career was only one of many options open to them. both participants initially accepted the input of significant others. vicki quickly saw, before finishing college, that other career paths were better suited to her, while lisa did not come to realize this fully until she reached adulthood. learning styles self-authorship is also evident in the way our participants described critical incidents during their lives that they later related to their decision to pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering, or math field. many of these were related to early interest in and exposure to hands-on activities. hands-on activities validate students as learners and knowers. for the younger participants, these were more likely to be related to technology than for older participants. martha, 51, recalled a fond memory of her father and how she learned to use a slide rule. she said, i had four younger siblings. my father did all the grocery shopping… if you were one of the older children and could mind your manners, you could go to the store with daddy. one of the things that daddy did that was entertaining was that as an engineer at that time in the 1950s and 1960s, he always had a slide rule in his pocket. he bought me a slide rule probably when i was 7 or 8 years old. i was his best grocery shopping buddy. and i tell you, as a memory, it is one of my best memories because my other siblings did not excel at all in using the slide rule. i could stand in the grocery store long before they posted price per ounce or unit price, and i could use the slide rule. i could compare 32 ounce price to the 16 ounce size and tell my father which was the better buy ounce per ounce. (martha) april, who earned an undergraduate degree in business, married, and now works as the chief technology architect for a school system, showed similar early aptitude and resourcefulness. in her case, her interest in an it career seemed to be an outgrowth of an early critical incident with computers involving games: when i was in 5th or 6th grade, my father had a computer that was something like a dumb terminal. it had a basic compiler so you could write some basic code. we wanted to play games on the computer and he said if you want to play games, you have to write the code. so i got a book, wrote code, and played space invaders. i could play space invaders and pong on it. since i wrote the code i knew where all the defects were or the bugs and so i knew how i could beat the computer and my brothers and sisters. (april) these situations show participants experiencing success and being rewarded for learning situated in their own experiences. mothers are notably absent from these accounts. fathers played a key role in nurturing selfauthorship by validating their daughters as capable. the experiences the successful it women in our sample report contrast sharply with classroom settings where girls more often assume lower order tasks in group work (rosser & kelly, 1994). conclusions and implications for practice we began this project with the hypothesis that women who have developed self-authorship would be more likely to enter and persist in a career that is non-traditional for women, such as information technology. by examining the critical incidents that successful women in it careers identified as influential in their nontraditional career choice, we were able to see the types of incidents and factors that shaped and developed their self-authorship. what do these findings suggest for effective interventions we might plan to insure more girls and women are prepared to choose a non-traditional it career path? we found that our participants were able to weigh conflicting viewpoints and come to a decision that was in harmony with an inner sense of self, a key determinant of strong self-authorship. our women heard consistent messages from their families that they could achieve and were expected to seek education. each of our six participants reported receiving a strong message from their family that “you can, should, and will do anything you want.” three stated specifically that they were raised to be independent thinkers and most had family responsibilities from a young age. roe, an early career theorist, proposed that early childhood experiences play an indirect role in shaping later career behavior (brown, lum, & voyle, 1997). particularly significant in these women’s choice of a nontraditional career appears to be belief in the consistent statement from their family that there is nothing they cannot do if they set their mind to it. these statements of support appear to go hand in hand with real-life, everyday experiences where they saw their ability confirmed. positive experiences both at home and at school seem to have provided the context for these women to reject stereotypical conceptions of women’s roles and to adapt a definition of self that is positive, competent, and genuine. interventions for parents through parent education programs stressing messages of confidence, a “can-do” attitude, and a consistent message of the value of education can bolster a girl’s confidence in her ability to tackle barriers. parents who provide opportunities for responsibility and decision-making from a young age can also help develop a set of inner beliefs and values leading to self-authorship as girls grow and develop. parent education programs that emphasize developing partnerships between parents and teachers in the formative years when girls are growing up are also important. deridder (1990) suggests that teachers work directly with parents, collaborating with them, and helping them to improve their effectiveness in guiding their children. he encourages parents not only to communicate about work and careers with their children, but also to show faith in their children’s abilities to be successful, providing them with encouragement and information. intervention strategies that build self-authorship and, therefore, self-confidence are necessary to bring more women into it careers and retain them to high levels of success. none of those interviewed mentioned a school counselor as being an influence on their career choice. participants made their way through their education with the encouragement of family members and teachers but without the stated help of those whose job description included career advice and counsel. this is consistent with burger and sandy’s (2002) work with virginia public school counselors in an nsf-funded project counseling for gender equity. they found that most counselors had the same gender stereotypes of occupations – girls are nurses, boys are doctors – and of girls’ math and science abilities. books and articles written for a counselor audience usually do not address gender while they now almost all address the needs of racial/ethnic minority populations. only when a publication is written explicitly for girls like the book cool careers for girls in computers (pasternak & thornburg, 1999), is there any discussion of gender issues. gender specific career materials need to be disseminated widely to parents and to teachers. guidance counselors can help parents by meeting with them individually and sharing career resource materials as they discuss how to facilitate their adolescents’ career development. in addition to career materials, counselors can also help institute organizations such as swe (society of women engineers) and awis (association for women in science). these groups can disseminate career information and promote networking and support for girls and women. the teachers of our women were role models and validators of their worth as females capable of achieving. this belief in them, coupled with hands-on learning activities, whether with computers or other devices, helped them gain further confidence in their abilities. this corresponds with the constructivist developmental pedagogy espoused by many educational researchers. women in this study are lifelong learners. several did not use computers until they were out of school, while others wrote programs while still in the elementary grades. these generational differences will continue to be seen as children as young as three years old use computers for entertainment and learning. in one of our recent surveys of high school students, we found no significant difference between males and females in their computer access, use, or types of applications they used (creamer, burger, & meszaros, 2004). girls are playing games, accessing the internet, and using instant messages as much as their male peers. the stereotypes, while they still exist, do not seem to be as strong as they once were. both girls and boys thought of computer users as smart, good in math and science, and able to interact with others. it career options will expand through further encouragement of a hands-on learning environment that builds on the knowledge and experience base of the girls and provides equal access to computers for both girls and boys. in order to satisfy the growing need for it workers and expand women’s participation in the field, it is important that we examine the experiences of those who have entered and excelled in reaching high levels of responsibility. this study helps us understand the role self-authorship and other factors play in successful it women’s career paths. references american association of university women (aauw) educational foundation. 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(2002, april). an evaluation of the gender gap in the field of information technology: what it looks like, why it exists, and what can be done about it. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association, new orleans, la. magolda, m. b. (1998). developing self-authorship in young adult life. journal ofcollege student development, 39(2), 143-156. magolda, m. b. (1999). creating contexts for learning and self-authorship. nashville, tn: vanderbilt university press. magolda, m. b. (2002). making their own way: narratives to transform higher education to promote selfdevelopment. sterling, va: stylus press. margolis, j., & fisher, a. (2002). unlocking the clubhouse: women in computing. cambridge, ma: mit press. panteli, n., stack, j., & ramsay, h. (2001). gendered patterns in computing work in the late 1990s. new technology, work, and employment,16, 3-17. pasternak, c., & thornburg, l. (1999). cool careers for girls in computers. manassas park, va: impact publications ray, c. m., sormunen, c., & harris, t. m. (1999). men’s and women’s attitudes toward computer technology: a comparison. office systems research journal, 17, 1-8. rosser, s. v. (ed.). (1995). teaching the majority: breaking the gender barrier in science,mathematics, and engineering. new york: teachers college press. rosser, s. v., & kelly, b. (1994). educating women for success in science and mathematics. west columbia, sc: wentworth printing. sadker, m., & sadker, d. (1995). failing at fairness: how our schools cheat girls. new york: touchstone. tirri, k., & koro-ljungberg, m. (2002). critical incidents in the lives of gifted female finnish scientists. journal of secondary gifted education, 13(4), 151-163. volman, m., & van eck, e. (2001). gender equity and information technology in education: the second decade. review of educational research, 71(4), 613-616. table 1 demographic characteristics of the participants as adults _______________________________________________________________ college degrees age children position name ba/bs graduate melissa journalism none 29 0 ceo april business none 36 0 chief technology architect vicki engineering none 40 0 ceo martha math ms; phd 51 2 ceo lisa engineering mba 53 3 senior vp pat english & journalism none 60 2 ceo _______________________________________________________________ dr. peggy s. meszaros william e. lavery professor of human development, and director, center for technology impacts on children, youth, and families 200 wallace hall virginia polytechnic institute and state university, blacksburg, virginia 24061 meszaros@vt.edu (o) 540-231-9428 (f) 540-231-9157 ph.d. degree received from university of maryland, college park, 1977 dr, carol j. burger associate professor, interdisciplinary studies cjburger@vt.edu ph.d. degree received from virginia tech, 1983 mailto:meszaros@vt.edu mailto:cjburger@vt.edu dr. elizabeth g. creamer associate professor, interdisciplinary studies creamere@vt.edu ed.d. degree received from virginia tech, 1983 the authors would like to thank katherine m. hertlein, a doctoral student, for her assistance with this project. this project was supported with funds from the virginia tech center for information technology impacts on children, youth, and families. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:creamere@vt.edu file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com volume 41, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell assistant editor: jordan donop 113 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 advancing women in leadership vol. 41, 112-127, 2022 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women and professional generativity: voices from the field precious guramatunhu-mudiwa & roma angel precious guramatunhu-mudiwa: precious guramatunhu mudiwa, leadership and educational studies, appalachian state university, mudiwap@appstate.edu roma angel: department of leadership & educational studies, appalachian state university accepted december 19, 2022 aging brings with it a certain commitment to improving the lives of future generations and to giving back by engaging in productive pursuits that provide psychological well-being (versey & newton, 2013). leaders and adults develop a heightened sense of communion with self and others and derive meaning and satisfaction through serving others (slater, 2003). we present findings from a focus group comprised of nine college-educated women professionals from three countries, gathered for the purpose of discussing generativity in educational leadership. purposeful sampling was employed to allow variation and representation of women in educational leadership. positions held by focus group members ranged from principals, directors, professors to deans. the specific purpose was to obtain an in-depth understanding of experiences of women as they engaged with the concept of generativity in their personal and professional lives. the results suggested that commitments to generativity activities varied by experience, age, and race. another important finding was the categorization of participant women into distinct identity markers of pathmakers, guardians, searchers and drifters (josselson, 1996) as reflected by the focus and nature of their generativity activities. further studies with women from different socioeconomic backgrounds and fields other than educational leadership need to be conducted to establish the universality of our findings. keywords: women, educational leadership, generativity aging brings a certain commitment to improve the lives of future generations, where adults give back and engage in productive pursuits that provide psychological well-being (erikson, 1959; versey & newton, 2013). this stage of adult development is characterized by an ego shift from selfcenteredness to other-centeredness (slater, 2003). it is similar to a kind of parental responsibility where adults develop a strong interest in establishing and guiding the next generation. adults will give guidance, ideas, skills, pass knowledge and remove barriers in order for the next generation to inherit a better world. adults invest in the enrichment and development of the next generation as an acknowledgement of the mortality of life and the desire for a legacy of immortal symbolism in which the impact of one’s good work should continue even if one’s life ends. this concept of guiding and enriching the lives of future generations was coined as generativity by erikson (1950). we adopted erikson’s (1950) theory of stages of adult development as a conceptual framework to guide the study. bradley (1997) acknowledged that most studies done on generativity have been based on the ericksonian model and suggested the need for further research that provides comprehensive models of the generative-stagnation stage of adulthood. although erikson’s (1950) initial study was conducted using privileged white middle class men, we believe that the theory still carries relevancy on other populations because of its focus on adult development and lifespan and that generativity is performed by both men and women. in our case, we adopted it to interrogate the intersectionality of women’s identities and generative pursuits at the different stages of their life’s span and development. for example, did the generativity pursuits of the women in the study follow a sequential and linear pattern of the stages of adult development as espoused by erikson (1950)? how does the social milieu affect their generative work? what other aspects of women’s lives influenced their generative work? these questions cannot possibly be answered by one theory alone. acknowledging the nuances of the complexities of women’s lives, josselson (1996) concluded, “psychology has no adequate theory for women’s development, particularly development in adulthood” (p. 9), and we acknowledge that the results of erikson findings cannot be viewed as universal and adequate in explaining women’s identities and generative experiences. we, therefore, adopted the heuristic model (pringle & dixon, 2003) that relies on prior research (e.g., gilligan 1982, helson & srivastava, 2001; josselson, 1996; versey & newton, 2013) to guide, explain, and critique our results. contrary to erickson’s model, pringle and dixon’s (2003) heuristic model offers the argument that women’s lives are complex, and they evolve in a non-linear and deterministic fashion. the model offers others lens of understanding women’s identities given ethnic, cultural 114 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 and socio-economic variabilities as women continually explore, focus, rebalance and revive their lives. we also critiqued erikson theory in the literature review given the harsh criticisms from feminist scholars who questioned the universal application of the theory to women and other minoritized groups (gilligan, 1982; helson & srivastava, 2001, sorell & montgomery, 2001). literature review the theory of human development, or life cycle, is the seminal work of erik erikson (1950) who posited eight stages of conflicts in life which are: (a) trust vs. mistrust; (b) autonomy vs. shame and doubt; (c) initiative vs. guilt; (d) industry vs. inferiority; (e) identity vs. identity diffusion; (f) intimacy vs. isolation; (g) generativity vs. stagnation; and finally, (h) integrity vs. despair. erikson (1950) postulated, “at any stage of the life cycle, the solution of one more nuclear conflict adds a new ego quality, a new criterion of increasing strength” (erikson, 1950, p. 233). this stage theory assumes the development criteria apply to everyone (helson & srivastava, 2001). generativity is primarily the “interest in establishing and guiding the next generation” (erikson 1959, p. 97) through one’s acts of care or selfless caring (bradley, 1997; erikson, 1950). generativity begins at 40 (erikson, 1980) and manifests in adulthood. according to sagaria and johnsrud (1988), “the commitment is to invest oneself in others’ lives and to live out the values of caring and empowerment in the daily activities of one’s own professional and personal spheres” (p. 25). it is demonstrated by fighting personal stagnation, a concern for guiding the next generation, and optimism about humanity (slater, 2003, versey & newton, 2013). it is based on extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, i.e., the desires to respond to cultural demands and for personal satisfaction and the desire to leave a legacy (cheng, 2009). the degree to which an adult is concerned with guiding the next generation is determined by the intensity of involvement and inclusivity (bradley & marcia, 1998). inclusivity refers to “caregiving activity in terms of who or what is excluded” (bradley & marcia, 1998, p. 41). generativity is “the instinctual power behind various forms of selfless caring, potentially extends to whatever a man generates and leaves behind, creates and produces (or helps to produce)” (erikson, 1974, p. 131). generativity means that “one participates otherwise in the establishment, the guidance, and the enrichment of the living generation and the world it inherits” (erickson, 1974, p. 123). it is about the generation of new things and “encompasses procreativity, productivity, and creativity” (erikson, 1997, p. 67), i.e., the nurturance of what one produces. generativity also implies two things: imparting wisdom, knowledge, and a better future for the next generation, and working with urgency towards virtuous things given that time is of the essence because of the mortality of human life (erikson, 1974). the hope is that “adults will learn to help each other, not to burden the next generation with the immaturities they themselves inherited from previous generations (erikson, 1974, p. 125). at this stage adults must be ready to become role models or what erikson (1997) called “a numinous model in the eyes of the next generation and to act as judge of evil and a transmitter of ideal values” (p. 70). care is a critical element in generativity. according to erikson (1964), “care is the widening concern for what has been generated by love, necessity, or accident; it overcomes the ambivalence adhering to irreversible obligation” (p. 131). however, where generativity fails, “regression … or a pervading sense of individual stagnation” (erikson, 1950, p. 231) follows. stagnation can occur even in people who are productive and creative, and may also be overwhelming “to those who find themselves inactivated in generative matters “erikson, 1997, p. 67). of particular importance is the decline of generative activities as one gets older or if generative work is not valued and respected (cheng, 2009). in advancing generational pursuits in adults there are three choices to make. erikson (1974) concluded, “in youth you find out what you care to do and who you care to be—even in changing roles. in young adulthood you learn whom you care to be with—at work and in private life….in adulthood, however, you learn to know what and whom you can take care of” (p. 124). learning whom you can take of involves “rejectivity, that is, the unwillingness to include specified persons or groups in one’s generative concern—one does not care to care for them” (erikson, 1997, p. 68). there is a selectivity/rejectivity binary, and an adult has the prerogative to select whom they can and cannot care for. despite the choices an adult makes about whom to care for, the danger is negative perceptions about the value of generativity one generation pursues. feedback about the worth of generativity is subjective and may be viewed as valueless or irrelevant, potentially causing regression or decline in one’s generative work. chen (2009) warned that “it is important to consider the declining status of older persons in contemporary societies and the normative feedback that they receive from younger generations” (p. 46). this is an important reminder considering perception gaps that exist between baby boomers and millennials in the workplace. slater (2003) suggested that “case studies of leaders could provide further knowledge about generativity as the intersection of society and the human life cycle” (p. 53). in particular, relative to women in leadership positions, generativity becomes an interesting topic to investigate amid challenges women face in the workplace, especially those in senior executive positions, be it in industry, politics, academia, or any other sectors. sandberg (2014) in her book lean in, urged women to have the gumption to put themselves forward, speak up, take risks, seek challenges and pursue their careers with zeal, passion, and gusto. this is critical because “implicit pro-social power motivation serves as a basis for generative concern, which, in turn, leads to conscious generative goals as well as life satisfaction” (hofer et al., 2008, p. 21). in organizations, “leaders with a sense of generativity will be able to care about both the mission and the employees” (slater, 2003, p. 57). 115 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 in generative work and psychosocial adjustment, individual identity plays a significant role. maintenance of individuality in competing dynamics is anchored “in centrality, originality, choice and initiative,…attributes of what we call identity” (erikson, 1964; p. 86). it is important to understand how women self-identify as they engage in generative activities. marcia (1966) conducted research on how 86 male participants to determine ego identity achievement using self-reported measures based on semi-structured interview protocol. his study revealed four classifications of ego identity statuses: (a) identity achievementsomeone has experienced a crisis and is committed to an occupation and ideology, (b) moratoriumsomeone is in a crisis and actively struggling to make commitments (c) foreclosuresomeone has not experienced a crisis but has a commitment, and (d) identity diffusionsomeone may or may not have experienced a crisis but lacks commitment to any occupation. expanding on prior work conducted by bradley (1997), bradley and marcia (1998) conducted an empirical study based on levels of involvement (active of concern for the growth of self and others) and inclusivity (scope of caregiving concern). they classified participants into five categories (generative, conventional, agentic, communal, and stagnant) of generative functions. their results showed that generative individuals are high on involvement and inclusivity. conventional individuals are high on involvement but low on inclusivity for self and others. the agentic are high on involvement and inclusivity for self, but low for others. communal individuals are high on involvement and inclusivity for others but low for self. stagnant individuals are low on both involvement and inclusivity. studies that involved women participants also revealed similar categorization of women’s identities. josselson (1996) provided a categorization of women experiences into distinct identity markers, i.e., pathmakers, guardians, searchers, and drifters in a study that involved college educated women from non-elite colleges. a later study by helson and srivastava (2001) comprising of 111 women from a private college in california identified four configurations of mental health: achievers, conservers, seekers, and depleted. these two female identities of josselson (1996) and helson and srivastava (2001) have common characteristics. pathmakers or achievers experienced a period of exploration/crisis and then made identity commitments on their own terms. guardians/conservers have made identity commitments without a sense of choice, carrying forward the plans for their life mapped in childhood or designed by their parents. they absorbed values and attitudes of their families and were groomed to achieve according to josselson (1996). searchers or seekers were still in an active period of struggle or exploration, trying to make choices but not having done so. drifters or depleted were without commitments. they avoided decision-making with values and standards shifting with each situation. later studies show different dimensions of generativity. beaumont and pratt (2011), using self-reported measures of identity styles among youths and adults, reported that middle aged adults scored higher on generativity than youths. a crosscultural study of adults in german, cameroon, and costa rica suggested that “implicit pro-social power motivation serves as a basis for generative concern, which, in turn, leads to generative goals as well as life satisfaction, as revealed using a generative model involving nested comparison statistics (hofer et al., 2007), an observation concurring with cheng (2009). a later study by versey and newton (2013) conducted among caucasian and african american women investigated the relation between generativity and successful aging. the results confirmed a positive relationship between successful aging and generativity. the study also revealed that spiritual commitment is associated with generativity and successful aging, and it is especially prevalent identified with african american women. however, viewing women’s work through using the erikson stage of generativity versus stagnation is problematic as several scholars suggested that studies that involve only men as participants cannot be universal for all people (elderstein, 1997; gilligan, 1982; josselson, 1996; pringle & dixon, 2003; schuiling & low; 2006). gilligan (1982) argued that erikson only studied men in his studies; therefore, the theory does not address women’s developmental experience. evans (1985) argued that “[t]he life stage perspectives are based almost exclusively on the male experience and may not make sense for women” (p. 12). pringle and dixon (2003) opined that “the study of women’s development has been distorted, narrow, and is a logical derivative of men’s experience” (p. 293). in fact, gilligan (1982) stated, “the discovery now being celebrated by men in mid-life of the importance of intimacy, relationships, and care is something that women have known from the beginning” (p. 17). other scholars concurred with sagaria and johnsrud (1988) noting that “the caring and nurturing of others and the enabling of others to grow and develop are values long recognized in women…they are tasks of mature adulthood, tasks that should influence how we lead” (p. 17). this has to do with socially “prescribed gender roles of femininity than with biologically differing pathways for development” (schuiling & low, 2006, p. 24). similarly, edelstein (1997) concurred noting women’s generative work started early in life and does not follow sequential stages as outlined by erikson. rather, women’s developmental stages are cyclical rather than linear, with women caring for both others and for themselves. edelstein (1997) outlined three flaws of erikson theory in relation to women. these are: (a) identity formation for men and women is not identical; (b) silence on how sexual differences may be a result of cultural conditioning, influence generative pursuits; and (c) “generativity fails to address the midlife shift, and fails to appreciate that women have already devoted years to nurturing others and may be moving into a natural self-focused period” (p. 6). that period focused on the self in midlife women was coined as interiority by neugarten (1968). women start nurturing others early on in life through raising families, caregiving to elderly parents, necessitating that women constantly balance coequal 116 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 responsibilities rather than choosing between this vs that according to elderstein (1997). in midlife women take a pause and look into their inner selves, start discovering and creating their authentic self (edelstein, 1997). while theorists, such as kohlberg and gilligan, have contributed immensely to the study of moral development, their studies were criticized as not universal, sexist, and representative only of western cultures (woods, 1996). they also are criticized because their participants are primarily privileged participants from elite colleges who may not represent the general population (josselson 1996). according to sherblom (2008), gilligan was “critiqued for overgeneralizing from small sample qualitative studies to all women and for not adequately specifying sample selection and analytic techniques in her publications” (p. 83). despite these criticisms, bradley (1997) acknowledged that most studies done on generativity have been based on the ericksonian model and suggested the need for further research that provides comprehensive models of the generative-stagnation stage of adulthood. understanding women’s identities is critical in informing women’s generative work. gilligan (1982) stated that “women…define their identity through relationships of intimacy and care” (p.164). several feminist scholars acknowledged the complexity of women’s identities and described it in metaphorical terms. mcguigan (1980) described woman identity as “a braid of threads in which colors appear, disappear and reappear (p. xii). josselson (1996) used the metaphor of a weave to describe the complexity of women’s lives. [t]he threads merge, sometimes tightly, sometimes not fitting well together. sometimes a portion must be undone to make it for something lovelier to replace it, sometimes layers are crafted on top of other older patterns. the parts form a whole, but the whole is more than the sum of the parts…what women weave into their identities has been the major silences in psychological literature. a woman is how she weaves it all into a whole, articulating herself to the world with others and simultaneously making private sense of it. (p. 8) josselson (1996) was of the view that “psychology has no adequate theory for women’s development, particularly development in adulthood” (p. 9). in other words, psychology does not adequately capture the nuances of the complexities of women’s lives. acknowledging the complexity of women’s identities, pringle and dixon (2003) used heuristic model which is not linear and age related and uses previous research to describe women’s career experiences. their “model consists of four facets: explore, focus, rebalance and revive, each of which are interspersed by periods of reassessment.” (294). explore refers to time of testing limits and potential often discovered through relationships, work or educational demands. focus involves devoting energy to one aspect of life, for example, raising children, or career advancement, but does not preclude other competing aspects of life. rebalance refers to a conscious choice to alter life’s course triggered by a desire for congruence of values and activities where women “settle into themselves” (p. 297) marked by increased self-confidence and assertion. rebalance can be precipitated by major events in life such as death of a loved one, divorce, job loss, retirement, etc. revive refers to finding the freedom to consider other activities and interests after living a life of selfless giving to others. borrowing from the heuristic model we will also use previous research to guide our results and discussion. in summary, it is important to identify how dimensions of erikson’s seminal work are included in generative repertoires. the literature suggests that involvement in generational pursuits is motivated by the desire to give back and to leave an immortal legacy. adults have a choice in generative activities and whom to care for. understanding the generative work of women should be juxtaposed with how women self-identify in their life stages. several scholars acknowledge the shortfalls of using erikson’s work to understand the generative work of women due to exclusion of women in his study and failure to understand the nature of women as cyclical and not linear as suggested by the stages. gilligan (1982) argued that the standards for morality and maturity used in psychological studies were tested based on the experiences of men, and therefore, did not hold true for women. other scholars critiqued gilligan (1982) as work that is elitist as participants were from rich and private colleges (josselson, 1996) and as only including white privileged and middle-class women (schuiling & low,2006). women’s lives are complicated, the essence which cannot be captured by psychology alone (josselson, 1996); therefore, we will employ pringle and dixon’s (2003) heuristic model as our framework of informing our discussion on the generative work of participants in our study. their approach uses previous research to describe women’s experiences. in this study we conducted interviews performed in a focus group setting, following the pattern established by previous studies to understand women’s identity (gilligan, 1982; josselson, 1996; sagaria & johnsrud, 1988). in the next section, we present our study. methods research design to best obtain stories of generativity with women in leadership, we used qualitative methodology focused on narrative research with focus groups. narrative research focuses on collecting stories from individuals or groups using interviews as the primary source of data collection to capture experiences about a certain phenomenon (creswell, 2007; doody, slevin, & taggart, 2013a). we used purposeful sampling to identify women with a variety of leadership experiences and interviewed these women in a focus group. focus groups are group interviews led by a skilled moderator to solicit ideas, opinions, and experiences of others on a given phenomenon and occur in small groups of four to twelve people (carlsen & glenton, 2011). focus groups use “interaction data resulting from discussion among participants to 117 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 increase the depth of the enquiry and reveal aspects of the phenomenon assumed to be otherwise less accessible” (doody et al. 2013a, p. 16). the primary research question is: how do women in educational leadership engage generativity in their personal and professional lives? population the targeted population was women in educational leadership who participated at a conference. the conference provides a platform where issues germane to women in educational leadership are discussed, and it included over 140 participants from eight states and 13 foreign countries. the conference was international and included women from the public and private sections of k-12 education, community colleges, higher education, and support agencies. the list of attendees ranged from classroom teachers, principals, superintendents, professors, deans, presidents, vice presidents, and entrepreneurs. participants/sample the participants in this study were all college-educated women initially drawn from australia, kuwait, uganda the united states. the participants represented k-12, community colleges and university levels. of the 17 women invited to participate, nine women joined the focus group. three participants were principals and were all from the united states (two elementary and one high school). three participants representing the community college system were all from the united states. two had recently retired where one had served as a vice president of academic affairs at a community college, and the other had served as a senior vice president and chief of technology at the state level. another participant was serving as a dean of public services and academic support at a community college. the university level was represented by three women: one participant was from uganda and held the rank of professor; the second participant from the united states had served as dean of libraries and had had recently stepped down; and the third was from the gulf region of the middle east and served at the rank of director. all of the participants’ ages ranged from 37 to 64. six (66, 7 %) of the women held doctorates. two (22.2%) were in the process of finishing their doctorates, while one (11.1%) held a master’s degree. table 1 (following page) shows demographic data of participants; pseudonyms are used to protect their identities. procedure after obtaining irb approval, invitation letters to participate in the focus group were hand delivered by conference support staff to purposefully selected participants. as directors of the conference, we felt that personal delivery of the letters could cause undue pressure for our participants. invitational letters were delivered on the first day of the conference, and each participant had to sign a consent form before participating. the consent form, stating the purpose and length of the focus group, emphasized that participation was voluntary and members could withdraw at any point during the study, without penalty or consequence. the findings were coded to protect anonymity and confidentiality and were released as aggregate findings. data collection and analysis at the beginning of the focus group, the directors as co-principal investigators of the study restated the purpose of the study and double checked if all participants had signed the consent form. they also restated issues of confidentiality and the focus group interview protocol. when this was all finalized, the video tape was rolled by a technology expert using panopto on a university computer to allow for maximum security of data. the focus group discussions lasted for one and a half hours and were conducted in a secure room where there were no interruptions. the investigators used an interview protocol to guide the discussion. immediately after tapping, the video was downloaded by the technology expert and converted to a cd. each investigator was given a cd that is kept under lock and key in cabinets in the investigators’ offices. data were transcribed by a staffer who was involved with the conference. the constant comparative method provided the method of analysis (cresswell, 2013, doody et al, 2013b; rosenthal, 2016). we read data and re-read data until we identified themes that emerged. results the nine women who participated in the focus group pursued activities that showed how each explored the concept of generativity. it was clear that the majority of participants six (66.7%) were influenced to become a leader in educational leadership by a previous school administrator, while the minority three (33.3%) were influenced by a parent. to better present the data, what follows are detailed profiles of participants grouped by the educational sector they represent. principals three principals participated in this study. one is a high school principal, while two are elementary principals in urban cities of the same state in the united states. we provide a profile of each participant and the generative activities that they pursue in order to get a sense of the values they cherish and the commitments they make to improve the lives of the next generation. lisa the youngest of the participants at 37 years old stated, “i’m a generation x-er/millennial born in the middle of a generation shift. i'm a cusper.” she is a mother to five, a preacher’s wife, and she is completing her doctoral studies. she was drawn to education by her five-year-old sister at the time. her sister came home from school very excited about learning what a ‘patterin’ [sic] was. “i said, ‘what is a patterin?’ and she said, ‘a patterinbean-paperbean-paper…a patterin.’ and i said, ‘oh, a pattern.’ and, she said, ‘a patterin.’” lisa stated that this incident prompted her to apply for a teaching scholarship because this experience with her sister ignited her passion for teaching. later in her career an e-mail from her superintendent encouraged her to go into educational leadership. 118 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 gwen aged 45, is self-described as african american, divorced, and a mother to one son. she decided she wanted to be in education while she was in elementary school. she stated, i had some great elementary teachers, and actually elementary school for me was a safe haven when everything at home was not the best. so, school was my safe place and [i] figured as i went through my years of schooling that there was something about me that wanted to help others that [sic] were like me to feel loved, to be respected, and to be told that you are going to be awesome, great, and amazing. and i want to give that back to other children…that help i received to help me to be who i am today. a phone call from a friend landed her a job as a third grade teacher. she enjoyed the experience of teaching for four years and realized that she had so many ideas about the direction of how the school could be going, though she hesitated to take leadership roles because of the politics. to her amazement, she ended up in leadership positions without ever applying for a single job. she has always been asked to take the leadership roles and interviews were private and just a formality. laura aged 48, is caucasian, a mother of six children from two marriages and, like lisa, she is completing her doctoral studies. she described herself as a very driven person. she went into teaching partly because her mother, a teacher, always encouraged her to obtain a teaching license with her degree. laura’s desire was to be a lawyer, but after interning throughout high school, she got married and had to shelf the idea of law to look after her children; she later finished her degree in english. she did substitute teaching for a while and enjoyed the experience, but she still kept in her mind the goal of going to law school. when it was time to go to law school, she had an epiphany. the kids got older, they were in middle school, and i said okay, “now is the time for me to go to law school,” and i thought about it. and, the more i thought about it i thought, “why?” i realized that the depth of my knowledge about teaching in curriculum was deep enough that i didn’t want to let go of what i wanted—to build on that. it was like a crossroads for me. laura ended up in education because she wanted to see what leadership looks like. she stated that as a teacher she realized she did not have much autonomy, and she applied to graduate school. she said of being a classroom teacher, “that was sort of a frustrating position for me to be in because you really couldn’t create things. you couldn’t be in charge of a vision. you were just kind of doing what needed to be done.” as a driven person, laura started pursuing higher degrees and applying for school leadership positions. community college three participants from the community college system had all served in senior positions. unlike school principals from the k12 sector whose goal was to become a school administrator, these participants followed very different and unconventional pathways to their senior positions. sydney aged 53, is african american and recently retired, having served at the rank of senior vice president and chief of technology for a state system. she is married and a mother to one son. she started with a corporate job as an engineer, a job she really loved. she stated, “i taught my father, my dad, how to do fractions when i was in the fifth grade, and it literally changed our economic status because he was able to get a job at the railroad. so, i know when you learn something, your life will change and i remember that from the fifth grade.” she revealed that in her job as lead engineer she taught other smart engineers but wanted to learn how technical subject matter experts can learn to be good teachers. she decided to go back to school to earn a doctorate, and afterwards she decided to leave the corporate sector altogether to start a career in higher education. ingrid. at 58, ingrid is a mother to adult sons and, like laura, she had always dreamed of becoming a lawyer, though her mother, early on had advised her that she needed to get a teaching certificate regardless of her degree. she is african american and she described herself this way, i grew up during a time when pretty much the only professional options for african americans were teachers and preachers, and i was kind of pushing back against that. and, you know i was at the end of that point in time and wanted to do something different. so, my interest was in practicing law. she completed an undergraduate degree in criminal justice and soon realized that she was no longer interested in law school. instead, she spent time working as a paralegal doing community education. she realized she enjoyed the teaching aspect of the job and enrolled in a master’s program with the local university to study adult education. she discusses this move i started to be just so enamoured by the whole teaching experience that i decided i would really like to get back on a college campus in some capacity. so, a position came up at my community college for a paralegal instructor. they really liked my resume, and …i got the position. she stayed on the job and after four years, she was promoted to the position of program coordinator, and now she serves as dean of public services and academic support. she never dreamed of becoming a dean, but she was encouraged by colleagues to apply for that position. ingrid just completed the doctorate at age 58. 119 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 table 1 demographic data of participants participant age race country represented educational level job title marital status number of children lisa 37 african american usa completing doctoral studies elementary principal married 5 gwen 45 african american usa doctorate elementary principal divorced 1 laura 48 caucasian usa completing doctoral studies high school principal married 6 sydney 53 african american usa doctorate retired as senior vice president and chief of technology married 1 ingrid 58 african american usa doctorate dean of public services and academic support. married 2 michelle 60 caucasian usa doctorate retired as vice president of academic affairs at a community college divorced 2 olivia 60 caucasian kuwait doctorate director married 2 natalie 61 caucasian usa master’s stepped down as dean of libraries married 0 heather 64 african uganda doctorate professor married 2 120 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 michelle she is a 60-year-old caucasian and a divorced mother of two. she is retired after serving as vice president of academic affairs at a community college. unlike other participants, she started her career in nursing working in an intensive care unit (icu). a nearby community college was starting a nursing program, but it did not have teachers for advanced programs. michelle went on to obtain a master’s degree in nursing and started teaching in a community college. she stated, still to this day nursing excites me. …it was amazing to watch the transformation on the faces of students who are afraid to come into a room until the end of the rotation [when] they were actually caring for the patients. i thought i like that. michelle rose to the rank of dean of health sciences in the community college system, and she had thought she had reached the pinnacle of her career until the day a senior administrator asked her if she had the doctorate. she started pursing the doctorate at age 50, but retired at 58, two years after obtaining a doctorate in educational leadership. michelle wanted to focus on herself. higher education olivia working in kuwait, olivia, a caucasian, and a mother to two adult children serves as the director of the foundations program at a university. she did not plan to work in education; it happened by accident. a phone call from a friend changed her career trajectory. she stated, “after teaching third grade for four years, i realized i had lots of ideas of how i thought the school could be going. and when the elementary principal left, i decided to apply for the job.” she accepted the job despite her limited experience with third grade teaching and zero experience in school administration. the job provided her with the needed experience and confidence, and she has never looked back. natalie a caucasian woman at 61, natalie is married with no children and is a career librarian who rose to the position of dean of libraries and worked at several prestigious universities in the united states. she started working in libraries at age 17 while she was still in high school. in college she tried music performance and anthropology but was drawn to libraries. she enrolled for a master’s degree in library science. she said: if there is [sic] any librarian at my age that tells you they did not do it for the love of books, they are lying to you. but it’s a fascination with learning and, uh, discovering and watching people change…. we believe librarians are very transformational also in that experience, and [we are] partners with teaching if not teaching ourselves. she attributed her love for learning to her father who was a bridge engineer during day time and who taught evening classes in astronomy. she was fascinated by watching him teach, and she always enjoyed playing school. natalie recently stepped down as dean of libraries. heather she is the oldest participant at age 64. she is an african from uganda, is a married mother to two adult children, and works at the rank of a professor. like olivia, heather joined education by accident at the time her country was going through political turmoil. she outlined her journey: i finished high school when my country was going through being ruled by a military man, idi amin and many foreigners were kicked out of the country, and there was a shortage of teachers. so, all the students entering the university that year were forced to do education. so, although i was not able to do a bachelor of commerce, i was forced to do education. she became a deputy head teacher in a large urban school. she ended up teaching at university. while at university she applied to pursue a ph.d. in canada. upon her return she continued teaching at the university and rose to the rank of deputy dean academics. she was the only deputy dean with a ph.d. she has been appointed to many positions such as member of the faculty senate and department chair. she attributed her success to her strong drive and hard work. she stated, “[for] me i am proud of being what i am, no man can claim. i am one of the first few people in the university to become a professor … i feel proud that i did it myself. i read my books…i have been ahead of the men in the faculty” generative activities of participants when asked about how they perceived their roles in generative pursuits, participants revealed a wide array of activities. themes that emerged were consistent with literature of women’s distinct identity markers of pathmakers, guardians, searchers and drifters (josselson 1996) and helson and srivastava (2001) categorization of women identities as achievers, conservers, seekers, depleted. we used these to classify the generative work of the women. guardians/conservers women who feel obligated and committed to helping others improve their lives are classified as guardians (josselson, 1996). they have a sense of urgency about it and carry the values and standards set by their families. several women engaged in these generative pursuits in several spaces that included the home, work and community. for women managing young families, a full-time job, and obligations to other communities, they expressed that they had no choice but to commit to those activities. lisa, a mother of five children ranging in age from four to 16, looked after her younger family, had a full-time job, and was involved at her church in her role as the pastor’s wife. in addition, she spent countless hours with children at her church mentoring and providing guidance. 121 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 i saw a need to kind of support guidance counselors who are not able to give students that access as much as they would like to because of different barriers in their field. so, i work as a scholarship coach externally to high school students, so i can help them get access to funding. she feels uniquely enabled to do the work as she fondly stated, “but i thoroughly enjoy all children, um, and i have been called a ‘child whisperer.’ [i] listen to children and hear what they're saying no matter how old they are.” to balance work family life, lisa has regular dates with her husband and also what she called mandatory family time (mft). each child is at liberty to call an mft that could be in the form of activities that include ball games, day road trips, etc. while laura had similar work family life like lisa, she did not emphasize on her family life but expressed how exhausted she was about her job. she expressed how she constantly battles balancing her roles of wife and principal. [my husband and i] both have really demanding jobs, and i have to renegotiate what my role as a wife looks like now that i have this role [at work]. it’s like you're constantly renegotiating how to make things successful as you move throughout your life. i mean it's all good, but you have to say, “ok now, how am i gonna make this work because not working is not an option? so how are we gonna make this work”’ both lisa and laura expressed how hard their jobs were but recognized that somebody had to do it. laura expressed how gender affected her job but felt obligated to march forward: i will be honest right now; i am really tired and what is getting through right now is, “i'm just too dang stubborn,” because i started, and i don't want to stop. and i feel like if i do...we have limited gender scripts as females. we can talk about it all day, but until more of us do it we are not expanding those options. lisa added another layer of the complexity of leadership as a black woman, and supervising white teachers who grew up in times when it was unheard of for blacks to supervise white people. she summarized her experience this way: it's hard being a female, and then when you add your race on top of that...it's hard being a black female school administrator, period. because we have a whole different set of barriers…and then youth is also an issue that i struggle with just age, especially with white female older teachers who look at me like... “first of all, you could be my daughter. i have children older than you. what do you know? who do you think you are?” i did not have a black woman or a black man, no black person—not even a half-black person was my boss … so that is a huge barrier for me. lisa and laura demonstrate resilience and commitment despite the less than optimal conditions they face in their generative pursuits. olivia felt the burden to apply for a leadership position in school administration because she felt the school was going in the wrong direction. she believed she had the ideas to turn around this school despite having no experience in educational leadership. she wanted to change that school by being the opposite of the then current administrator. olivia also invests her generative activities in the youth. she stated: for me, it started with my own children who are now 31, 29 and 25. and so as they were growing up, i felt it was very important for them to feel they had someone they could come to and ask questions and find out more. and i sometimes did that for their friends also, and as time went by people would come to me. she also coaches and mentors the youth. in fact, people are referred to her for advice. natalie a long time career librarian feels the impetus to give back because she believes the future is important and feels obligated to pass on the knowledge and wisdom. i am pretty far along in my career, and so if i feel that i need to pass it along as well. and there a number of ways to do it in higher education. you can provide opportunities for people, so i advise people on how to get on committees for their professional service. i nominate them, advocate for them for being a leader or chair. if i have the power over a taskforce, i make sure they are involved with that…. i will always talk to anyone who calls me for a survey or advice or how do i become a librarian or anything because that future is so important that they are successful and engaged with what they are trying to do. natalie was also involved in coaching and mentoring and believes that every new recruit on the job needs to have a mentor and a sounding board. she takes those roles seriously as she shapes and influences the careers of others. she summed up her work: “i tell them i am always there for you, and i have been there for a lot of librarians just as people have taken care of me throughout the years whether i work with them any longer or not or don't work with them or see them much.” it is clear natalie maintains the traditions and is a gatekeeper in her field. on the other hand, gwen simply tells her story about how she landed in school administration without applying for positions. she said women find her story compelling, and she realizes the power in her story and how she has seen other women transformed because of it. pathmakers/achievers these are women who have gone through crises in life and make commitments to improve the lives of others based on their own terms (josselson, 1996). in other words, for pathmakers, commitment to help, unlike guardians, is a choice and not an obligation. achievers made sacrifices in their family lives for their careers (helson & srivastava, 2001). in the current study, the women worked hard to pave the way for others and to 122 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 remove obstacles in the profession. ingrid best described her pathfinder role this way. i always tell the folks in my division that i consider one of my biggest jobs to be to plow a road. i want to come in and try to remove as many obstacles as possible to facilitate them in doing their jobs, which is educating students. i also have the goal to leave whatever i enter somehow better than it was when i came in. yet others saw their role as that of doing trailblazing. for example, michelle saw her role as somebody who inspired other women to work towards their career and educational goals despite her challenges of single parenthood and being a primary caregiver to aging parents. in addition, her roles initially as dean and, subsequently, as vice president of academic affairs, normally would have stopped other women from pursuing doctoral studies, but michelle was undeterred. she stated: i think now … i have gotten older and, in retirementtype-age talk, go back and see folks that have told me, “michelle, you are a single mom, and you are able to juggle working part time as well.” i guess i was the silent mentor. i guess i did not realize at the time and growing your profession, serving professional organizations and then go back and work on a doctorate at 50 because you had to wait until the kids were in college. they said that is why i did it because they saw that i could do it, and there was no reason i couldn't do it. so, i guess sometimes we don't know. but i think encouraging others to break those barriers, to go and do. another perspective of being a pathmaker was offered by sydney, an engineer who ended with an executive position of vice president in educational leadership. because of the underrepresentation of women in her field, she often finds herself being the only female in the boardroom and how lonely it is at the top. her approach to generational pursuits is rooted in selfidentify, role of religion and skills set she brings to the table. she believes a balance of these attributes draws other women to her work. she described herself this way, if you see me in the boardroom, i have to be who i am wherever i am because i tried switching. i tried being what you wanted and what you wanted and what you wanted....and it wore me out and i didn't know who i was. now i am at a point where you know what, i am an african american female, a brilliant, not just smart, i am a brilliant african american female who can mentor others, who loves the lord. who says you know what this is me. now do i go out and do all in the love the lord… my faith is who i am, and i have found that women are drawn to that and they want to know how can they do that without being overbearing in the boardroom. i have to admit it is a skill. sydney also stated that she is very frank and candid about the advice she gives. she warns that if people do not like her advice, they shouldn’t waste her time: “i am very intentional, and i tell people, ‘don’t ask me to mentor you if you cannot take the mentoring i am going to give you because i don't want to waste your time and i choose not to waste mine.’” clearly these three participants exemplify that pathmakers have the role of paving the way for others by either removing obstacles, inspiring others vicariously, and projecting the skills needed to survive in the field. they are unaware that they are silent mentors as stated by michelle. searchers/seekers these are women who are in an active period of searching (josselson, 1996; helson & srivastava, 2001). in our study, only one participant, lisa, still appeared to be searching. she was the youngest in the focus group and identifies as a “cusper,” partly generation x-er/millennial. she supervised teachers who were old enough to be her mother and has experienced generational differences that leave her searching for answers. she said she exudes confidence that she perceives annoys her mentors who are of an older generation. lisa expressed her frustration when she said: the confidence that i might exude that is just who i am. i am not trying to be anything different. i am just trying to be ‘confident lisa,’ trying to be a confident person. but at the same time, i need the mentorship of others, and i have put it out there, that, that is what i need. but i have learned to put it out there. originally the confidence was a turn off, so older people would say, ‘she has got it; she doesn't need it.’ what i'm trying to tell you, ‘i am not gonna be weak looking and not encourage you that i want you to mentor me. i'm gonna be strong, but i also want you to mentor me. can you mentor a strong young woman?’ that is really the question that i'm gonna ask, ‘if you can’t mentor a strong young woman, then let's negotiate how we are going to make this relationship work.’ i have had lots of mentors; i still do keep in contact with them. but i think that is a huge barrier, older women say, ‘no, not even gonna try.’ and i, i am like, ‘what? why do i intimidate you? i am just trying to learn? please do not be turned off by my confidence or by whatever you think i have because in my head. i need a lot and what you see and what you think i need are not matching, and we repel each other.’ it is clear that lisa is frustrated by this generational difference and may not be getting the mentoring she needs because perceives that the older generation is repelled by her confidence. she still needs to learn the art of portraying her confidence so that she does not come across as aloof. she suggested that the communication styles of the older generation are not direct, and this leaves room for one to come up with unintended results that stifle progress. for example, lisa pointed out that when older adults use language, such as “...we really should, need to, we would love for you to,” in a vertical professional learning community with generation x and y, this could give the younger 123 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 generation options and work does not get done. she suggested language that is direct, such as “we should definitely collaborate on this math lesson and work together. what do you think?” and they always say, “yes i agree.” she believes this is the kind of language generation x and y understand because “they spoke their mind when their parents raised them to be like that.” lisa is still searching about the best way to navigate that intergenerational challenge in the workplace. drifters/depleted these are women who were without commitments. they avoided decision making, and their values and standards shifted with each situation (josselson, 1996; helson & srivastava, 2001). at 60, michelle decided to scale down her involvement. she had inspired and mentored other women as she progressed in her career. after getting her doctorate she decided to retire much to the disappointment of her friends and colleagues. they would have wanted her to go on and use her doctorate to reach higher career goals, such as becoming a president of a community college. michelle justified her decision to retire by saying: i lost 2 parents in 7 years, traveling down east every weekend, and then had finished the doctoral program…then children finished college and married. and then i had the opportunity. i was retirement age and decided to retire. i got a lot of backlash, “how can you waste what you have done?” and it was a courageous step because part of me was going i know i could be president. i know i could have done it, but you know what, i found bigger gifts. in two years, i had to take that pause that we were talking about. i got healthy. i lost 76 pounds. but it was finding health again to re-establish, um, a healthy lifestyle, to start part-time teaching again in educational leadership where you have to get back in there, do research, and then have a personal life that i haven't had in 19 years. i hadn't dated, and now i am getting married. to say that sometimes we have to be courageous, to close doors for you at that moment. i had to breathe. i had been a single mom, run[ning] up that ladder like i was supposed to be a good girl. i was exhausted. so [it was time to] breathe. after giving so much to her career and family, michelle deliberately decided to reduce her generative pursuits and concentrated on improving her life which she had neglected for a long time due to caregiving roles, such as being a single mom raising two children. then she was an empty nester and was at a stage where she was negotiating new meaning and direction about her life. she was “taking the pause” or slowing down despite the backlash she received, and, in her own words, “had found bigger gifts” that she wanted to enjoy. michelle also refers to her ego identity, i.e., her physical psychological and emotional attributes (helson, stewart & ostrove, 1995) when she referenced her weight, lifestyle and enjoying an empty nest as aspects that needed her attention. discussion all the nine women in this study were well-accomplished professionals, authority figures, and respected women who engaged in some form of generativity work; hence, they were, as erikson (1997) pointed out, adults ready to be a numinous figure in the eyes of the next generation. as generative leaders, the women felt obligated to empower others (sagaria & johnsrud, 1988) and also felt motivated to keep the same tradition by passing it on to others, be it their children or colleagues, in order to make a difference and improve the lives of others. they wanted others to avoid the same mistakes and traps they had made. each participant was productive, creative, and nurtured their work. generative functions were carried out in spaces that included the family, workplace and the community as a “balancing act of this and this, an attitude that shows coequal responsibilities and not conflicting choices of this vs. that” (elderstein, 1997, p. 11) as suggested in erikson stage theory. the tenets of generativity as expounded by erikson (1950. 1964, 1974, 1997), such as meaning making, teaching, and keeping the meaning, held true for women in our study however, in light of the criticisms levelled against erikson’s theory of adult development as linearly ordered and claiming universality (edelstein, 1997; helson & srivastava, 200; gilligan, 1982; josselson, 1996, pringle & dixon, 2003), we employed pringle and dixon (2003) that relies on prior research on women’s identities to guide our discussion. pringle and dixon’s (2003) heuristic model offers the argument that women’s lives are complex, and they evolve in a non-linear and deterministic fashion. in this model they postulate four evolving facets where women continually explore, focus, rebalance and revive their lives. the points at which women explore, focus, rebalance and revive vary from woman to woman as these aspects are largely influenced by events in life (pringle & dixon, 2003), family life cycle, and not necessarily by chronological age alone (harris, elliot & holmes, 1986). this does not mean exclusion and ignoring events ordered by biology, such a menopause. participants in our study started generative work early in life through building relationships, caring for families, and building careers, or engaged in resolving problems in their communities, contradicting the age 40-65 as years of the generativitystagnation stage (erikson, 1950). for example, sydney was already retired at 53 and michelle at 60, while some older participants did not discuss any retirement plans. at age 37, lisa was focusing on doctoral studies while michelle at 58, and ingrid at 60) had just finished their doctoral studies. heather showed no signs of scaling down in her career. she showed assertiveness and independence. she had inner strength, was uninhibited and courageous, and she was a paragon at her work despite working in a poorly resourced institution in comparison to other participants. she exhibited pride for becoming the first woman to attain positions that had been historically held by men at her institution. she had earned a ph.d. and become a full professor, and served in the faculty senate, just to name a few 124 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 of her achievements. she stated, “[for] me i am proud of being what i am, no man can claim. i am one of the first few people in the university to become a [full] professor … i feel proud that i did it myself. she commands respect, and helps other faculty publish and attend conferences. she also showed moral courage by investing in the youth by securing scholarships for disadvantaged young girls to pursue their education. this highlights the continuous assessment that goes with women’s lives, and that this assessment is not universal but rather unique for each woman. the balancing of life (pringle & dixon, 2003) is best illustrated by lisa, the youngest of the participants. as a mother of with five young children, she had to balance being a mom, student, principal, pastor’s wife, mentor, and a host of other responsibilities at her church and community, yet she scheduled mandatory family time (mft) and regular dates with her pastor husband. laura’s experience also illustrates the balance and reassessment of life (pringle & dixon, 2003) where she constantly negotiated her multiple roles as wife, principal, and mother. for professionals such as gwen and michelle, who were also single parents in our sample, they had to sacrifice their careers for their families. gwen, a pathmaker (josselson, 1996) worked hard to create a better life for herself having experienced a difficult childhood and, later, a divorce. she always told her story about how she rose to be an educational leader and shared how her story inspired others. michelle postponed getting her doctorate until the children had finished college while also being a caregiver to her elderly parents. several women in the study had high levels of involvement and an uninhibited sense of purpose. laura’s best experience about her job was hiring because she realized there are not many women in her position and wanted to contribute to building a future pool. she also invested in offering quality coaching and professional development to new hires to increase productivity. natalie, a former college dean enjoyed hiring and working with new hires, and she provided them with the resources they needed. she emphasized to each new hire that she was always ready to give assistance whenever they needed it when she said: i have talked to all of them and said, i am still here for you. i still have your back, come talk to me if you need to know the process you need to go through or if you need someone to talk to, i am always there for you. a statement from ingrid, another dean, illustrated the high level of commitment and her identity of a pathmaker (josselson, 1996), “i always tell the folks in my division that i consider one of my biggest jobs to be, to plow a road”. cheng (2009) stated that generative work is motivated by a cultural demand to address the needs of society and the satisfaction and well-being derived from the meaning of one’s work, i.e., generative work has to address the needs of the community. olivia stated “i feel like i'm making a difference, that is what keeps me going.” not only did participants in the study attended to personal and workplace generative pursuits, but they also served the broader communities. their work reflected social generativity exemplified by each participant identifying a need in the community and taking steps to address it (morselli & passini, 2015). the investment in others, particularly in youth as demonstrated by participants like lisa, olivia, ingrid, and heather was an effort to build a legacy and to ensure barriers and obstacles are removed for future generations. like lisa, ingrid counselled and mentored youth at her church and olivia had youth referred to her from friends and the community. although ingrid did not pursue her childhood dream of becoming a lawyer, she is a board member of paralegals for her state. heather created a scholarship fund targeted for the education of young girls in her country. each participant was intentional about the focus of the generative work they chose and the people they served. they each birthed an idea involving programs affecting their families, work, or community and labored hard to sustain these, demonstrating the critical components of generativity: “procreativity, productivity, and creativity” (erikson, 1997, p. 67). this clarity about the parameters of generativity is consistent with erikson’s (1974) statement, “in adulthood, however, you learn to know what and whom you can take care of” (p. 124). the statement from sydney illustrated whom you can take care of: i am very intentional and i tell people, “don’t ask me to mentor you if you cannot take the mentoring i am going to give you because i don't want to waste your time and i choose not to waste mine.” this means there is an element of selectivity and exclusivity (erikson, 1997). therein also lies the danger that one’s generative work may not be valued and respected, and this causes a decline or regression in one’s generative pursuits consistent with a clash of values between the younger and older generations (cheng, 2009). in this study, the clash was evident between lisa, a searcher (josselson, 1996 or seeker (helson & srivastava, 2001), who described herself as a “generation xer/millennial born in the middle of a generation shift,” and two older participants. lisa revealed issues with her confident demeanor, thus: “originally the confidence was a turn of, so older people would say, ‘she has got it; she doesn’t need it.’” older participants, such as sydney, advised that from experience, such over confidence caused younger people to be resented because of the way they communicated with the older generation. younger people needed to get enculturated in the mores of the workplace. that kind of confidence can alter power relationships, and, usually, this is not tolerated in the workplace. younger people need to learn from those who have the wisdom and experience. sydney summed it all when she stated: i teach my son all the time, ‘hey, you ‘the man,’ but when they take that confidence and they don't learn at the same time from people who have been there who are much wiser notice, i didn't say smarter, but wiser in 125 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 certain areas. and they don't take that and don't use that, then, it is to their disadvantage, especially coming out of college and get[ting] in these jobs. besides intergenerational perception gaps about workplace etiquette, there were also notable racial differences about generative work. african americans made reference to their spiritual work and to god as they engaged in their generative work. besides her professional role and family responsibilities, lisa stated “christ sustains me. i am a regular church attendee. adding to the spiritual dimension, sydney categorically stated, “my steps are ordered by the lord.” she shared that she was well known for praying while in a meeting in the boardroom. there are times i would be in a meeting, nothing would happen and i would go (bowed her head). oh god she is praying again! [laughter] but then again i had to learn to be my authentic me… and i am 53 years it took years to get there. these generative experiences of lisa and sydney are consistent with versey and newton (2013) who associated spiritual commitment with generativity and successful aging, and, more so in african american women. interestingly, caucasian women in this study never alluded to spirituality in their generative work, perhaps suggesting a cultural difference. another important finding was the role played by gender and race. all the women had risen to positions that were historically occupied by men. they alluded to challenges including feelings of loneliness, role incongruence, and issues balancing familywork life. laura stated: i will be honest right now i am really tired and what is getting through right now is i'm just too dang stubborn....we have limited gender scripts as females and we can talk about it all day but until more of us do it, we are not expanding those options. and you know right now, the smart thing to do is give up something. but i’m just not going to do it. you know, right now it's just stubbornness… it's just hard being a female leader. corroborating on this complex dynamic, natalie stated, being a woman leader and things like this are wonderful, and the results you achieve as a leader is [sic] often what sustains me and to see other people achieve is what sustains me. it is a hard road. i have been through it in a number of places, and i am different enough, um, in my thinking and my leadership that some people don't get it. and then they, for some reason,… make it even harder…[it] is lonely at the top and everyone has got their story of why. you have to accept that loneliness and often, if you are a woman of any kind of makeup in leadership, you will be lonely and you won't have other women to speak up for you around the table. you have got to put yourself out there and be willing to be shot down. lisa added the complexity of race to the gender issue when she shared that the situation was worse for african american women in leadership who supervise white people who grew up in an era when white, and even black, people were not supervised by black people. she pointed to her youth and race as challenges that potentially devaluate her leadership. when she stated, it's hard being a black female school administrator, period, because we have a whole different set of barriers that we have to fight and mitigate every single day. there are some days where i think if i was just female this might be a little easier notable, was also how african american participants referred to their identity markers of race, professional contributions, and intelligence as premium assets. according to pringle and dixon (2003), “identity has the double function of articulating the place of individuals in society and affording them a sense of their uniqueness” (p. 998). sydney was proud of her achievements and the quality of her work as the only black woman in the boardroom. she stated. i have to be who i am wherever i am because [i] tried switching, i tried being what you wanted and what you wanted and what you wanted....and it wore me out and i didn't know who i was. and now i am at a point where you know what, i am an african american female, a brilliant, not just smart, i am a brilliant african american female, who can mentor others, who loves the lord who says you know what this is me. lisa described herself as confident and strong. this is important because it addresses negative stereotypes that have been associated with african americans, especially the myth of the inferiority of black women’s intelligence. these women have achieved identity statuses that help them to function and live uninhibited and showing inner liberation. another important finding is that there were cross cultural differences in the motivations for generational pursuits. heather and lisa worked hard at improving access to education for students coming from economically depressed communities they served. the revive facet of life (pringle & dixon, 2003) is best illustrated by michelle, aged 60. having spent her adult life taking care of her family and elderly parents as well as her job responsibilities and arriving at the pinnacle of her career as dean, she decided to retire and focus on herself, much to the surprise of her friends and family. she decided to focus on herself by concentrating on weight loss which resulted in renewing her dating life-something she had not done for 19 years. she stated she was going to be getting married soon at the time of our interview. based on erikson’s stages she would fall into the category of stagnant as she was devoting her time for self-care, but this is where gender makes a difference. this is perfectly normal for women after 50 who would have spent most of their adult life caring for others. neugarten (1968) called this process “interiority” p. 140), i.e. where adults in the second half of life refocus on self needs instead of others’ needs. in fact, edelstein 126 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 (1997) summed it all when she stated, “for many women, middle adulthood is a time to pause and consider a personal definition of accomplishment, whether it be work, children, relationships, integrity, authenticity, health, survival, or another value” (p. 9). josselson (1996) and schuiling and low (2006) concurred that women can go back to things deferred in youth or to take care of things that were neglected. michelle, in the study, said she had to take a pause despite the backlash. michelle’s example demonstrates pringle and dixon’s (2003) heuristic model about the evolving nature of women identities, which josselson (1996) as previously mentioned warned “psychology has no adequate theory for women’s development, particularly development in adulthood” (p. 9). conclusion the participants in this study held senior positions in educational leadership involving k-12 education, community colleges and four-year colleges/universities. most women in the study saw a need and used their professionalism, knowledge and talents to address identified needs in their communities. the women were motivated by making a difference in the lives of others. each woman played the role of mentor and provided guidance and enrichment to others. the women worked hard in their generative pursuits in their families, workplace, and community. they exhibited high levels of involvement and selfless giving of their talents and expertise, capturing the essence of generativity procreativity, productivity, and creativity” (erikson, 1997, p. 67) and care erikson (1950, gilligan, 1982; josselson, 1996). the women’s generative pursuits placed participants into the distinct identity markers of pathmakers, guardians, searchers and drifters (josselson, 1996), sometimes with women finding similarities and differences in each other. women who had professional parents were influenced by family values to pursue an education and a career, while those who came from difficult backgrounds carved their own careers and became paragons in their own right. as professionals, all women gave back to their communities and professions, became functionalists by empowering others and making sure skills and knowledge were passed on to the next generation. african american participants added the role of spiritualism and participated in church activities in their generative work, a sentiment not shared by caucasian participants. absent from the participants was any mention of sustainability and looking after our planet as a generative role because erikson defined generativity as the “establishment, the guidance and the enrichment of the living generation and the world it inherits” (erickson, 1974, p. 123). although our study used a small sample employing a focus group model, the contribution of this study is important not only because it explores the role gender plays in generativity but also because there are no studies known that have investigated generativity among women in educational leadership with a racially diverse sample such as ours. this study adds to closing the literature gap and charts possibilities of new lines of research that involve other variables in educational leadership. further studies with women from different socioeconomic backgrounds and fields other than educational leadership need to be conducted to establish the universality of our findings. because of our small sample size involving one focus group of highly educated women, there are limitations to the generalizability of this study. however, this study provides a sampling of the richness with which women participate in generative knowing and leadership, both personally and professionally, and it shows how they pay forward their generative knowledge to the generations that follow in the field of educational leadership. references beaumont, s. l., & pratt, m. m. (2011). identity processing styles and psychosocial balance during early and middle adulthood: the role of identity in intimacy and generativity. journal of personality, 18(1), 172-183. bradley, c. l. (1997). generativity-stagnation: development of a status model. developmental review, 17, 262-290. bradley, c. l., & marcia, j. e. (1998). generativity-stagnation: a five category model. journal of personality, 66(1), 4164. carlsen, b., & glenton, c. (2011). what about n? a methodological study of sample-size reporting in focus group studies. people medical research methodology, 11 (26), 1-10. creswell, j. w. (2013). qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five approaches. sage. doody, o., slevin, e., & taggart, l. (2013a). focus group interviews. british journal of nursing, 22(1), 16-19. doody, o., slevin, e., & taggart, l. (2013b). focus group interviews. british journal of nursing, 22(5), 266-269. erikson, e. h. (1950). childhood and society. norton. erikson, e. h. (1964). insight and responsibility. norton erikson, e. h. (1974). dimensions of a new identity. norton. erikson. e. (1980). identity and the life cycle. norton. erikson. e. (1997). the life cycle completed. norton. evans, n. j. (1985). womens’ development across the life span. new directions for student affairs, 29, 9-26 gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. harvard university press. harris, r. l., elliot, a. m., & holmes, d. s. (1986). the timing of psychological changes in women’s lives: an examination of women aged 45 to 60. journal of personality and social psychology, 51(2), 409-416. helson, r., & srivastava, s. (2001). three paths of adult development. conservers, seekers, and achievers. journal of personality and social psychology, 80(6), 995-1010. helson, r., stewart, a. j., & ostrove, j. (1995). identity in three cohorts of midlife women. a cross cultural investigation. journal of personality, 69(3), 544-557. hofer, j., busch, h., chastiotis, a., kӓrtner, a., & campos, d. (2008). concern for generativity and its relation to implicit pro-social power motivation, generative goals and satisfaction with life: a cross cultural investigation. journal of personality and social psychology, 76(1), 130. 127 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 josselson, r. l. (1996). revising herself: the story of women’s identity from college to mid-life. university press. marcia, j. e. (1966). development and validation of ego identity status. journal of personality and social psychology, 3(5), 551–558. morselli, d. & passini, s. (2015). measuring prosocial attitudes for future generations: the social generativity scale. journal of adult development, 22, 173-182. pringle, j. k., & dixon, k. m. (2003). re-incarnating life in the careers of women. career development international, 8(6), 291-300. rosenthal, m. (2016). qualitative research methods: why, when, and how to conduct interviews and focus groups in pharmacy research. currents pharmacy teaching and learning, 8, 509–516. sagaria, m. d., & johnsrud. l. k. (1988). generative leadership. in m. d. sagaria (ed.), empowering women: leadership development strategies on campus (pp. 13-26). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. sandberg, s. (2014). lean in. new york: alfred a. knopf. sherblom, s. (2008). the legacy of the “care challenge”: reenvisioning the outcome of the justice care debate. journal of moral education, 37(1), 81-98. slater, c. l. (2003). generativity versus stagnation: an elaboration of erikson’s adult stage of human development. journal of adult development, 10 (1), 5365. sorell, g. t., &, montgomery m. j. (2001). feminist perspectives on erikson 's theory: their relevance for contemporary identity development research, identity, 1(2) p. 97-128, doi: 10.1207/s1532706xid0102_01 versey, h. s., & newton, n. j. (2013). generativity and productive pursuits: pathways to successful aging in late midlife african american and white women. journal of adult development 20:185–196. woods, c. (1996). gender differences in moral development and acquisition: a review of kohlberg’s and gilligan’s models of justice and care. social behavior and personality, 24(4), 375-384 home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 19, fall 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        preface advancing social justice: women’s work sharon shockley lee, ed.d. and kelly mckerrow, phd guest editors over the last few years, we have observed a renewed interest in social justice. some of it is mere fascination with the latest issue du jour. some of it is gives academics an opportunity to write, to intellectualize, or to study in the abstract. some of it makes a substantial difference in our lives and the lives of others. all of it heralds an opportunity to turn our collective attention to important, democratic work facilitated mostly by women. the notion of social justice is hard to capture. it is demanding, fraught with controversy, and highly contextualized. most people believe it is important but far fewer take the time or energy to actively pursue it. thinking about social justice from a theoretical or historical perspective is a necessary but insufficient condition for actually achieving social justice. social justice is defined not only by what it is but also by what it is not, namely injustice. by seeking justice, we anticipate the ideal. by questioning injustice we approach it. integrating both, we achieve it. it is one thing to agree that discrimination is wrong. that is the easy part. it is another to make a conscious choice to confront the discrimination that emerges from everyday interactions in organizations and communities. that brings out another element of social justice – the necessity for courage. and so it seems that social justice requires interactions among a well-developed theoretical/historical viewpoint, a penchant for activism, the choice to meld the two and the courage to do it. individual leaders for social justice seek to change political, economic and social structures that privilege some and disadvantage others. they challenge unequal power relationships based on gender, social class, race, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, language, and other systems of oppression. as women achieve positions of influence and participate in policy decisions, they have opportunities to open up access to knowledge and resources to those with less power. women from all levels of the social hierarchy, not just those with official status positions, have a role in social justice leadership. as social justice leaders, women work to alter the undemocratic culture and structure of institutions and society, improving the lives of those who have been marginalized or oppressed. theory and practice, advocacy and action to counter injustice have emerged from civil rights, feminist, postmodern, critical, multicultural, queer, postcolonial, and other movements. grounded in these movements, social justice leaders strive for critique rather than conformity, compassion rather than competition, democracy rather than bureaucracy, polyphony rather than silencing, inclusion rather than exclusion, liberation rather than domination, action for change rather than inaction that preserves inequity. with that view of social justice we selected articles for this special edition of advancing women in leadership. these articles are only a few of the many that wait to be told about social injustices, the individuals who are its victims, and those who refuse to be held captive to its hegemony. more importantly, they reflect only a few of those that reveal hopeful stories of justice, hard choices, and profound acts of courage. https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html 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https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html in the encouragement of advancing women in leadership for social justice, we present the following manuscripts. they are: standing on the promises: the experiences of black women administrators in historically black institutions by gaetane jean-marie, ph.d. inscription on the past from present inquiries historiography of nineteenth century chinese immigrant public women by carol huang, ph.d. a pedagogy of awareness: death education of an introduction to social consciousness by linda l. white, ph.d. nora barlowa modern cambridge victorian and ‘the many lives of modern woman’ by louis m. smith “they hired a woman and a catholic!”: dismissal and the superintendency, lessons learned by diana m. bourisaw, ph.d. envisioning new forms of praxis: reflective practice and social justice education in a higher education graduate programs by kimberly a. kline, ph.d. and megan moore gardner, ph.d. re-constructing the leadership model of social justice for african-american women in education by mary l. grimes, ph.d. black women teacher educators, race uplift, and the academic other-mother identity by djanna a. hill-brisbane copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the 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the majority of the workforce would be women and minorities, who traditionally have not pursued such careers (bae & smith, 1996; johnson & packer, 1987; nsb, 1998; oakes, 1990; stumpf & stanley, 1996). the nsb (1998) predicted a 44% increase in science and engineering (s&e) occupations from 1996 to 2006. however, women constituted 22% of the s&e work force in 1995 and 25% in 1999 (nsb, 1998, 2004). the largest percentages of women were in the biological sciences (40%) and mathematics/computer science (33%), with much lower percentages in physical science (22% to 23%) and engineering (9% to 10%) (nsb, 1998, 2004). females’ preferences for the biological sciences and males’ for the physical sciences (dawson, 2000; rayman & jackson, 1996) are reported as early as fourth grade (kahle, 1996; kahle & rennie, 1993). young women’s high school achievements in mathematics and science do not necessarily lead to positive attitudes towards these subjects or related careers (catsambis, 1995; greenfield, 1996). in light of projected job trends in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) fields, we must foster the mathematics and science interests and achievements of all students to increase their prospects of entering high demand stem occupations. the purpose of this study was to trace changes in the degree level and career aspirations of a group of young women over three time periods, from middle school, where they indicated interest in stem fields, to high school, and into college. one objective was to determine whether young women’s degree expectations and file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer2006/index.html stem career interests were sustained or decreased over time. the characteristics of stem careers that young women reported as most and least desirable were reviewed to understand the aspects of such work that were attractive or turned young women away from these fields. i compared the desirable and undesirable characteristics reported by young women who maintained stem career goals versus those who did not to determine whether distinct perceptions or beliefs existed within a group. this analysis might suggest appropriate intervention strategies or types of knowledge and experiences needed to develop a more balanced view of stem occupations. review of the literature obstacles that lead to the loss of talented women from mathematics and science-based fields are complex factors that may interact and reflect the opportunities available in our society (catsambis, 1995; hanson, 1996; national center for education statistics (nces), 1997; trauth, 2002). public policy, local norms, school experiences, and family values influence the gender identity and work of women and men in different ways (trauth, 2002). varied research approaches have been used to identify the factors that contribute to young women’s under-representation in stem fields (casserly, 1980; catsambis, 1995; clewell, anderson, & thorpe, 1992; hanson, 1996). this work has examined young women’s (a) beliefs and attitudes toward mathematics and science, (b) access to mathematics and science courses and extracurricular experiences, and (c) knowledge of and exposure to the stem professions. beliefs and attitudes toward mathematics and science some research suggests that girls’ beliefs and attitudes are primary influences on their interests and science experiences (catsambis, 1995; hanson, 1996). compared to girls, boys have more positive attitudes toward mathematics (hyde, fennema, ryan, frost, & hopp, 1990) and science (weinburgh, 1995). compared to boys, girls’ beliefs about their competence more often affect their mathematics and science achievement and participation. girls may feel less adequate and have lower expectations for success in mathematics and science (guzetti & williams, 1996; kahle, 1996; lappan, shaughnessy, & boggs, 1996), although they achieve at the same or higher levels than males (greenfield, 1997; sax, 1995; seymour, 1995). there is a decrease in mathematics and science self-concept from junior to senior high school, but it arrives earlier and is more prominent for females (byrne & shavelson, 1987; greenfield, 1997), so they are more vulnerable (smith, 2000). girls’ attitudes toward math and science may also stem from their beliefs about the usefulness of these fields or male-dominance in these fields (eisenhart, finkel, & marion, 1996; hill, pettus, & hedin, 1990; taber, 1992; weinburgh, 1995). parents, teachers, and school counselors foster sex-role stereotypes (vetter, 1996) when they encourage the mathematics achievement of boys more than girls (kahle & meece, 1994), or have different educational and career expectations for boys versus girls (greenfield, 1997; kahle, 1996; kahle & meece, 1994; shakeshaft, 1995; shephardson & pizzini, 1992). if mathematics and science are viewed as masculine, young women experience conflict between their interest in these subjects and their personal life and popularity (clewell, et al., 1992; stage & maple, 1996). women may turn away from stem fields because their math and/or science teachers emphasized competition rather than collaboration and cooperative approaches, or characterized stem work as lonely and very demanding (astin & sax, 1996), requiring “super woman” qualities (miller & silver, 1992). some research has noted women’s perceptions of a role conflict between stem careers and family responsibilities (betz, 1994; mccracken & weitzman, 1997; nauta, epperson, & kahn, 1998; packard, 2002; seymour & hewitt, 1997; smith, 2000) because a stem career is very demanding (nauta, et al., 1998). women more than men experience pressure when managing career and family responsibilities (lips, 1992; seymour & hewitt, 1997), and women in stem professions more often report that family duties interfere with their work (burlew & johnson, 1992). access to mathematics and science extracurricular activities females are as likely as males to complete advanced mathematics and science courses, except physics (nces, 1997). while males and females take similar courses, their extracurricular mathematics and science experiences are very different (catsambis, 1995, greenfield, 1996, 1997; hanson, 1996; nces, 1997). compared to girls, middle school boys are more likely to have visited science museums, participated in science fairs or math competitions, used a microscope, and met a scientist (hanson, 1996; jones, 1991). these extracurricular experiences may arise from students’ interests, but they also increase the perceived intrinsic and utility value of math and science and positively affect students’ attitudes so there is less decline throughout junior and senior high school (hofstein, 1990). applications of mathematics and science in authentic real world contexts reinforce concepts and processes learned in school and affect students’ career expectations (smith, 2000; vetter, 1996). exposure to role models and career information females and minority students may have little stem career information or limited exposure to stem role models (hill, et al., 1990; schuck, 1998). hence, they may not understand that math and science education are essential to enter stem fields. local occupational norms also influence adolescents’ career aspirations (ianni, 1989). for example, girls use limited female representation in stem fields to conclude they are white male domains (eisenhart, et al., 1996; taber, 1992). however, meeting female scientists improves adolescents’ attitudes toward both science and women in science (smith & erb, 1986; terry & baird, 1997). female role models encourage girls to take risks (smith, 2000) and counter stereotypes about appropriate work for men and women. interacting with a scientist of one’s own race and gender is a powerful influence on a student’s science-related career choices (hill, et al., 1990). research methods research focus in this paper, i report data collected at three points over six to eight years, from 26 of 34 young women who had attended a week-long summer institute designed to support middle school girls’ interests in mathematics and science-based careers. the purpose of this study was to trace the stability or changes in the degree level expectations and career aspirations of a group of young women over three time periods, from middle school, to high school, and into college. were young women’s degree level expectations sustained, or did they increase or decrease over time? degree expectations and attainment could expand or limit young women’s career options. did young women maintain a “very strong” level of interest in stem professions, or did their interest fade from junior to senior high school and into college? did participants’ stem career choices reflect past trends with the largest percentage preferring the biological sciences versus mathematics, the physical sciences, or engineering in decreasing order? the characteristics of stem careers that young women reported as most and least desirable were reviewed to understand the aspects of such work that were attractive or unattractive to young women. were different desirable and undesirable characteristics reported by young women who maintained stem career goals versus those who did not indicate different and distinct perceptions or beliefs within a group? would this analysis suggest appropriate intervention strategies or types of knowledge and experiences needed to develop a more balanced view of stem occupations? participants the young women in this study represented varied school districts in southeastern pennsylvania, and, through a survey, expressed a desire to explore stem careers at the 1994 to 1996 summer institutes. three to five years later, in 1997 to 1999, 34 institute participants completed parallel forms of the initial survey as described in previous work (vanleuvan, 2005). a second follow-up survey was completed by 26 of the 34 young women in 2002 to 2003; contact was not possible by mail or phone with eight of the young women. at the time of the third survey, most of the 26 respondents were enrolled in college: one freshman, two sophomores, nine juniors, and eleven seniors or graduates. fifteen girls (58%) stated their ethnicity as white american, while eleven (42%) were minority students, eight african americans (31%), and two asian americans. one problem encountered in this study was the difficulty in maintaining contact and obtaining responses from students six to eight years after their initial participation. the 26 respondents represent a subgroup that may be more intrinsically interested in mathematics and science and/or more conscientious than those who did not return the college survey. the findings might change significantly if the pool of respondents was increased. nearly all of the participants had indicated an interest in exploring mathematics and sciencebased careers as junior high school students, but many (62%) indicated very different career aspirations several years later. the results reported here are not limited to participants who maintained stem career preferences into college. research procedures a survey was developed using guidelines established by davis and humphreys (1985) and in consultation with campbell kibler associates, experts in the evaluation of mathematics/science intervention programs for young women. copies of the initial and follow-up surveys are available in a previous article (vanleuvan, 2004). students’ responses were entered as ordinal ranks or nominal codes when categories of like responses occurred. a test of intra-rater agreement of coded responses over the survey yielded 85.3% agreement. test-retest reliability measures resulted in r = 0.86 for the entire survey, with comparable results for particular sections: r = 0.83 for degree expectations, r = 0.74 for level of interest in math and sciencebased fields, r = 0.88 for career preferences and influences on career choice. junior high school students completed the initial survey prior to the summer institute and the follow-up surveys when they were close to graduation from high school and later enrolled in college. this study focuses on responses to three sections of the survey. the first set of analyses centered on participants’ degree expectations. the second relevant section addressed the participants’ levels of interest in stem careers and actual career preferences. in the third section, participants’ reported aspects of stem careers that they liked most and least. analysis of degree expectations. prior research has noted that young women set lower educational goals over time (holland & eisenhardt, 1990; miller & silver, 1992; vanleuvan, 2004), especially after they marry or become parents (haggstrom, kanause, & morrison, 1986; hanson, 1996; marini, 1984). the level of education completed affects students’ career options. perhaps young women view the educational requirements for stem careers as out of reach, unattainable, or undesirable aspects of these fields. to determine differences, students’ degree goals were assigned ranks of 0 (no degree), 1 (associate), 2 (bachelor), 3 (masters), or 4 (doctoral degree). two c2 tests were completed to ascertain significant differences from junior to senior high school and into college in participants’ degree expectations; first across all levels from no degree to doctoral degree goals, then for participants with graduate degree goals versus those without graduate degree goals. i also performed a mcnemar test for significance of change, a c2 test for dependent samples involving nominal data, to compare degree expectations from junior to senior high school for two groups of students (a) those who set higher goals from an undergraduate to a graduate degree versus (b) students with lower goals from a graduate to undergraduate degree. interest in stem careers. a primary question of this longitudinal study focused on the strength and stability of young women’s stem career aspirations. for this purpose, students’ who expressed levels of interest in stem careers were assigned rankings of 3 (high), 2 (moderate), 1 (low), or 0 (no interest). i performed the mcnemar test for significance of change in the proportion of students who (a) increased to a very strong level of interest versus (b) those who decreased from very strong to a lower level of interest in a stem career from junior to senior high school and into college. the study also compared the career preferences of these young women to typical female representation in stem fields. did the stem career preferences of these young women mirror past trends with the largest percentage choosing the biological sciences versus mathematics, the physical sciences, or engineering? from the girls’ listed specific career preferences, types of responses were grouped to form categories, (a) the health professions including medicine, physical therapy, dietician, or nursing, (b) veterinarian, (c) biological science, (d) physical science, (e) engineering, (f) computer science/technology, (g) mathematics, and (h) non-stem career options. desirable and undesirable characteristics of stem careers. a final study objective was examination of characteristics of stem work that were attractive versus unattractive to young women. would students who expressed stem versus non-stem career preferences identify the same features of this work as desirable or undesirable? similar descriptors were grouped to determine common desirable versus undesirable features of stem work. the categories described in the study results section were developed over three data sets: the current study, and studies of a 1991-1992 cohort (vanleuvan, 2001), and parallel 1995-1996 cohort of young women (vanleuvan, 2004). study results degree expectations participants reported the highest level of education they hoped to attain on the initial and two follow-up surveys in senior high school and college (see table 1). four junior high school respondents had no plans for higher education and two hoped to complete an associate degree. the other 20 girls consistently set very ambitious goals. in high school, 50% of the respondents reported master degree goals, exceeding the proportions of collegebound seniors in 1998 and 1999 with master degree goals both nationally (31%) and in pennsylvania (27% and 26%) (educational testing service (ets), 1999, 2000). another 31% of high school respondents expected to earn a doctoral degree (ph.d. or m.d.), also exceeding proportions of college-bound seniors nationally (23% and 22%) and in pennsylvania (17% and 16%) in 1998 and 1999 (ets, 1999, 2000). graduate degree expectations were reported by 16 young women (62%) in junior high school, 21 (81%) in senior high school, and 19 (73%) in college. there were not statistically significant differences in the proportions of students who identified particular degree level goals from junior high school to college, c2(6, n = 26) = 9.59 < 12.59, p = .05, or the proportion of students who reported up to a bachelor degree versus those with graduate degree expectations from junior high school to college, c2(2, n = 26) = 2.41 < 5.99, p = .05. i then examined individual changes to higher versus lower degree goals from junior high to senior high school and into college. while the degree goals of some students were stable and did not change, more respondents decreased versus increased their degree expectations over time. from junior to senior high school, twice as many students reported lower degree goals (12) compared to six students who set higher degree goals. the mcnemar tests of significance of change indicated no statistically significant difference, c2(1, n = 26) = 2.00 < 3.84, p = 0.05. however, the differences were more pronounced from senior high school to college where 4students set higher degree goals and 11 reported lower degree goals and approached statistical significance, c2(1, n = 26) = 3.27 < 3.84, p = .05. interest in a stem career the number of young women who reported a strong interest in at least one of the stem career areas dropped markedly from 24 students (92%) in junior high school to 17 (65%) in senior high school, and down to 10 (38%) in college. the mcnemar test for significance of change was calculated and indicated statistically significant differences (a) from junior high school to college, where one young woman reported increasing to a strong level of interest in a stem career versus 15 respondents had decreased levels of interest, c2(1, n = 26) = 12.25 , p = .05, and (b) from high school to college, where one student reported an increase, while eight indicated decreased levels of interest, c2(1, n = 26) = 5.44 , p = .05. specific career preferences on each survey, students reported up to three specific career preferences. hence, the percentage of students who indicated particular career preferences as listed in table 2 may exceed 100% if they are summed, as students reported interest in more than one area. young women’s declining interests in stem fields are reflected in the lower percentages who indicate specific stem career preferences from junior to senior high school and into college. however, across all three surveys the health professions were the most popular category of stem occupations followed by the sciences and engineering, with little reported interest in mathematics or computer/information system sciences. lawyer was the most popular non-stem occupation followed by some form of business management or accounting and teaching. if the health professions are seen as part of the biological sciences, the stem career goals of these young women were similar to past occupational trends indicating the largest percentage of women in the biological sciences and lower percentages in mathematics/computer science, physical science, and engineering (nsb, 1998, 2004). a previous study by benbow and minor (1986) found that girls preferred biology more often than boys, who ranked chemistry and physics highest. in related work, eccles, barber, and jozefowicz (1998) reported that girls’ preferences for the biological sciences contribute to their higher levels of confidence and expectations for success in the health professions, but lower expectations for success in physical science and engineering when compared to boys. characterizations of stem work desirable features of stem work. on each survey, young women described what they thought they would like most and like least about a stem career. three categories of desirable characteristics appeared most often on both the high school and college surveys (see table 3). five high school students and eight college women, including those with and without stem career preferences, indicated they would most like the exploration, discovery, or learning that they associated with stem work. four high school students with non-stem career goals reported that the most desirable aspect of a stem career would be helping others or giving back to society through their work. on the final survey, five college majors in stem fields agreed, indicating increased awareness of the potential for societal contributions in stem fields. comments by four high school students and five college women reflected their enjoyment of and interest in science or mathematics as the most appealing feature of stem work. on the high school survey, the type of thinking or mental challenge of stem work was the most frequent category of positive descriptors as reported by six students. only two college women majoring in stem fields mentioned mental challenges. the majority of college women with non-stem career preferences did not respond or report desirable features of stem professions. in the current study, college women with stem career preferences more often found the most appealing aspects of stem work to be the generative, exploratory qualities, mental challenge, and the capacity to contribute to society, when compared to college women with non-stem goals. the categories of desirable characteristics of stem fields identified here are consistent with those found in previous work with other groups of young women. discovery and learning formed the largest category of positive descriptors for high school girls in two longitudinal studies (vanleuvan, 2001, 2004). a smaller percentage of high school girls in these research cohorts mentioned opportunities to contribute to society as most desirable; 8% (vanleuvan, 2001) and 6% (vanleuvan, 2004) versus 19% of high school and 31% of college respondents here. undesirable features of stem work. the constellation of undesirable characteristics or negative descriptors of stem careers was more varied (see table 4). the most frequent category of response was a dislike for or difficulties in doing the mathematics required in stem fields, as stated by six high school students (23%) and four college women (15%), most with non-stem career goals. in previous work, the use of mathematics in stem work also formed the largest category of negative descriptors for one cohort of high school girls (18%) (vanleuvan, 2004), but a smaller percentage of another cohort (4%) (vanleuvan, 2001). three additional categories of undesirable characteristics appeared on both the high school and college survey. the years of study required for stem work did not appeal to two high school students and three college women. one high school student and three college women mentioned the competitive nature of stem work and difficulty entering stem professions. on the other hand, four high school students thought that stem work could become boring or repetitive, while one college women offered a similar comment. these categories of negative descriptors were also identified by a comparable percentage of high school girls in two previous studies (vanleuvan, 2001, 2004). two high school students (8%) disliked the challenge or hard work required for a stem career, but no college women did so. in previous work, 9% of high school girls likewise reported the challenge or rigor required for stem work as undesirable (vanleuvan, 2001, 2004). two new categories of negative descriptors emerged on the college survey. three college women mentioned the lack of social contact or isolation they associated with stem work. in a previous study, 6% of high school girls mentioned the isolation and limited social interaction they associated with stem work (vanleuvan, 2004). among the college women who expressed stem career preferences, four stated that they would not like the “long hours of work” or time devoted to a career versus family seen as necessary within stem occupations. only one high school student in a previous study shared this concern (vanleuvan, 2004). summary discussion and conclusions the young women in this study had set extraordinary degree goals as high school students, with 73% expecting to complete a graduate degree. these aspirations seem very optimistic given past indicators that women earned 55% of master’s degrees and 39% of doctorates awarded in 1995, while in science and engineering women earned 38% of the master’s and 31% of the doctoral degrees (national science board [nsb], 1998). however, 19 of the respondents still expressed graduate degree expectations as college students. other studies (holland & eisenhart, 1990; miller & silver, 1992) and research with another group of young women (vanleuvan, 2004) indicate a decline in the educational aspirations of young women over time. longitudinal tracking over several years will enable us to see whether the ambitious educational goals of these young women come to fruition. young women’s interest in and characterizations of stem fields while nearly all of the participants had indicated an interest in exploring mathematics and science-based careers as junior high school students, it is clear that the majority had developed very different career goals several years later. the number of young women with stem career preferences decreased from 92% in junior high school to 38% in the college years. these college women most often reported a very strong preference for the health professions (23%), with only one reported preference each for biology, chemistry, engineering, and computer/information sciences. these expectations match work force trends, with the largest percentage of women employed in the biological sciences (40%), followed by mathematics, physical science, and engineering (nsb, 2004). the biological and health professions are certainly more genderbalanced. other researchers have noted that girls’ preferences for the biological sciences increase their levels of confidence and expectations for success in the health professions versus the physical sciences or engineering when compared to boys’ preferences (eccles, et al., 1998). prior research suggests that women are more likely to enter a stem field when they believe their work will solve societal problems (davis & rosser, 1996; hynes, 1995; rosser, 1993; sax, 1994) or help people (astin & astin, 1993; vetter, 1996). five (19%) of the college women in this study shared these views about the importance of helping others or giving back to the community through their stem occupation. young women may choose the health professions because they believe they will provide opportunities to address societal concerns as well as the flexibility to balance career and family responsibilities (miller & silver, 1992). one implication of these findings is that young women might sustain and increase their interest in stem fields beyond the health professions if they were more aware and appreciated the societal contributions of chemists, physicists, or engineers, how their work improves our lives or the environment, or support medical research. college women with stem goals also described as desirable (a) the exploration and discovery (19%) and (b) the mental challenge or stimulation they viewed as integral to stem work (8%). these results are consistent with previous research with other groups of high school girls (vanleuvan, 2001, 2004). career exploration programs or guest speakers in junior and senior high school could feature female stem role models who highlight the societal contributions as well as the opportunities to learn and explore new ideas and techniques in their job. female professionals could also share their views regarding the most rewarding aspects of stem work, potentially offering students new perspectives. meeting and interacting with female engineers or research chemists would broaden students’ perceptions of what is appropriate, valuable, and satisfying work for women. students with non-stem career goals reported the largest category of negative characterizations of stem careers as their dislike for or lack of success in math and/or science (19%). using mathematics formed the largest category of negative descriptors (18%) in previous research with one group of high school girls (vanleuvan, 2004), but a smaller percentage (4%) of a second group (vanleuvan, 2001). students may have transferred negative feelings about their mathematics and science experiences to careers that rely on these competencies. they also may have erroneous views of the ways that mathematics is used in various stem fields. career exploration programs, guest speakers, or shadowing experiences in junior and senior high school would provide a more accurate picture of mathematical applications to stem work and the role that computers play in removing the burden of tedious calculations. other college women characterized the stem professions as isolating, providing limited social interaction, or requiring long hours of work (8%), exacting a costly personal toll. six percent of high school girls in a previous study voiced similar concerns about the long work hours in stem professions (vanleuvan, 2004). however, the college women who disliked the long hours of work in stem fields still indicated stem career preferences in spite of reported concerns about these demands. young women view stem occupations as especially burdensome when they anticipate or have family responsibilities (seymour & hewitt, 1997; ware & lee, 1988). stem career goals may be rejected when young women do not see ways to combine their career and family roles (arnold, 1993; betz, 1994; burlew & johnson, 1992; lips, 1992: livingston & burley, 1991; nauta, et al., 1998). career exploration programs and shadowing experiences would provide 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(1983). action for excellence. denver, co: education commission of the states. terry, j. m., & baird, w. e. (1997). what factors affect attitudes toward women in science held by high school biology students? school science and mathematics, 97, 78-86. trauth, e. m. (2002). odd girl out: an individual differences perspective on women in the it profession. information technology and people, 15, 98-118. vanleuvan, p. (2001). views of mathematicsand science-based careers expressed by young women in southeastern pennsylvania. pennsylvania educational leadership, 21(1), 43–50. vanleuvan, p. (2004). young women’s science/mathematics career goals from seventh grade to high school graduation. journal of educational research, 97(5), 248-267. vanleuvan, p. (2005). young women’s stem career goals from junior to senior high school. journal of research in education, 15(1), 86-108. vetter, b. m. (1996). myths and realities of women’s progress in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. in c. s. davis, a. b. ginorio, c. s. hollenshead, b. b. lazarus, & p. m. rayman (eds.), the equity equation: fostering the advancement of women in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering (pp. 29-56). san francisco: jossey-bass publishers. ware, n. c., & lee, v. e. (1988). sex difference in choice of college science majors. american educational research journal, 25, 593–614. weinburgh, m. (1995). gender differences in students’ attitudes toward science: a meta-analysis of the literature from 1970 to 1991. journal of research in science teaching, 32, 387-398. patricia vanleuvan is an associate professor of education at the penn state delaware county campus, where she teaches mathematics and science pedagogical methods courses and the mathematics content course for elementary education majors. she also is the coordinator of the math options career days and the summer institute programs. dr. vanleuvan received both a ph.d. in educational studies with a major in instructional psychology in 1987 and a m.a. in educational psychology in 1985 from the university of delaware. a version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association, san diego, ca, april 16, 2004. a previous article traced changes in the career aspirations of these young women from junior to senior high school (vanleuvan, 2005). table 1 young women’s higher education degreelevel goals time of the survey junior high school high school college years degree goal no. % no. % no. % no response - - 1 4 - -high school 4 15 - - 1 4 associate 2 8 - - - -bachelor’s 4 15 4 15 6 23 master’s 7 27 13 50 13 50 doctoral 9 35 8 31 6 23 note. dashes indicate no responses for that degree level and time of the survey. table 2 young women’s stem career goals time of the survey stem junior high school high school college years occupations no. % no. % no. % health professions 20 77 9 35 6 23 medicine 16 62 3 12 3 12 sciences 7 27 7 27 2 8 biological 2 8 4 15 1 4 earth 3 12 3 12 - - chemical 1 4 1 4 1 4 physical 1 4 - - - -engineering 6 23 3 12 1 4 mathematics - - 1 4 - -computer/info sciences 1 4 2 8 1 4 note. dashes indicate no responses for that occupational category and time of the survey. table 2 continued young women’s non-stem career goals time of the survey non-stem junior high school high school college years occupations no. % no. % no. % lawyer 8 31 5 19 5 19 business & accounting 2 8 3 12 2 8 teacher 2 8 3 12 2 8 other 6 23 4 15 7 27 table 3 what young women liked most about stem careers time of the survey high school years college years career aspirations career aspirations desirable stem non-stem total stem non-stem total characteristics no. % no. % no. % no. % no. % no. % to discover & learn 2 8 3 12 5 19 5 19 3 12 8 31 mental challenge 3 12 3 12 6 23 2 8 2 8 helping people 4 15 4 15 5 19 5 19 enjoyment interest in mathematics 2 8 2 8 1 4 1 4 in science 1 4 1 4 2 8 1 4 3 12 4 15 other responses 2 8 2 8 4 15 2 8 2 8 liked nothing 2 8 2 8 no response given 1 4 1 4 2 8 10 38 10 38 _____________________________________________________________________________ table 4 what young women liked least about stem careers time of the survey high school years college years career aspirations career aspirations undesirable stem non-stem total stem non-stem total characteristics no. % no. % no. % no. % no. % no. % mathematics used 6 23 6 23 1 4 3 12 4 15 math & science used 1 4 1 4 hard work/challenge 1 4 1 4 2 8 years of study needed 1 4 1 4 2 8 3 12 3 12 long work hours 4 15 4 15 it’s boring/repetitious 2 8 2 8 4 15 1 4 1 4 competitive/difficult to enter field 1 4 1 4 3 12 3 12 isolation on the job 2 8 1 4 3 12 dislike nothing 1 4 2 8 3 12 2 8 1 4 3 12 other responses 1 4 1 4 2 8 4 15 4 15 no response given 4 15 3 12 7 27 1 4 3 15 4 15 copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com 331 g-mudiwa copyediting-071923.docx volume 42, 2023 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 42, 80-87, 2023 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women and multitasking: strategy or pitfall for career advancement? precious guramatunhu-mudiwa & jewel b. cherry precious guramatunhu-mudiwa: professor, appalachian state university, mudiwap@appstate.edu jewel b cherry: president of equity and inclusion, forsyth tech community college, jcherry@forsythtech.edu accepted july 11, 2023 despite its ubiquitous adoption in the workplace and home, research suggests that multitasking is not an effective strategy for productivity (cabrera, 2016; crews & russ, 2020). workplace demands and the disproportionate division of labor in the home make multitasking unavoidable, indispensable and a necessary coping tool, especially for women with professional and domestic responsibilities (holdsworth, 2020; kirchberg et al., 2015). women multitask more than men do and are also perceived to be better multitaskers than men but sadly multitasking decreases productivity and increases error rates (cabrera, 2016; crews & russ, 2020). the purpose of this concept paper is to share research on multitasking and its effects on productivity and to assist women in making informed decisions about whether multitasking is a strategy or a pitfall for career advancement. we offer perspectives on why women multi-task, the challenges associated with multitasking and cultural differences to be considered. we conducted a literature review and concluded that multitasking is the de facto coping strategy for most women in the modern-day era given the competing demands on their time. we also suggested strategies for career advancement in professional and personal spaces. keywords: multitasking, women, productivity, stress, time management, cultural differences multitasking is a way of life for most people and has become an epidemic in modern life as it takes a toll on people’s health (healy, 2004) and a temporality for the 21st century where “there is a collective sense of dystopia about family and working lives” (holdsworth, 2020, p. 678), and indispensable in the workplace (kirchberg et al., 2015). in fact, multitasking is actually rewarded in the workplace as “the ability to multitask has become a de rigueur requirement in many job postings” (crews & russ, 2020, p. 1301). women multitask more often than men (cabrera, 2016; cui et al., 2021; offer & schneider, 2011). although a necessity in the workplace, several studies documented the negative effects of multitasking that include reduced cognitive functions, decreased productivity, frequent errors, high levels of stress and burnout (cabrera, 2016; crews & russ, 2020). such negative outcomes definitely impact worker morale and yet studies show that happiness of workers results in higher performance (bellet et al., 2022). the purpose of this concept paper is to share research on multitasking and help women make informed decisions about whether multitasking is a career strategy or a pitfall in their career advancement. we discuss perspectives on why women multi-task, the challenges associated with it, and propose solutions to these problems. this topic is significant and timely to most professional women, particularly those with young families, caregiving responsibilities, and very high pressure and, or demanding jobs. although there is variation of intensity in the pressure of work, most would agree that the challenge for most women is the lack of time in the day to accomplish daily tasks and to balance work-life responsibilities. such antecedents to the careers of women leave them with very little to no choice and are forced to resort to multitasking as an unavoidable coping tool despite the negative outcomes. multitasking defined multitasking refers to “engaging in two or more activities simultaneously, without disengaging from any one of them” (amichai-humburger & etgar, 2016, p. 827). according to the american psychological association (2006), “multitasking can take place when someone tries to perform two tasks simultaneously, switch from one task to another, or perform two or more tasks in rapid succession.” (para. 2). multitasking was also defined as “people switching between multiple contingent tasks” (buser & peter, 2012, p. 644). examples of multitasking abound. one can carry a baby on their lap, talk on the phone and jot something at the same time. some can drive, talk on the phone, and listen to the news or music on the car radio while others engage in dangerous practices of drinking, driving and texting. multitasking can also be referred to as task-switching. this is when an activity is temporarily abandoned, such as switching among the smartphone, computer and watching television (amichai-humburger & etgar, 2016). it is quite clear from the definitions that multitasking is an ability and arguably not all people are good at it. 81 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 conceptual framework we live in a world that is replete with stimuli and activities competing for time and attention that make multitasking almost unavoidable. the process of task switching places extra burden on cognitive function as the brain requires time to activate rules of the new task. in fact, “it will take more time for the brain to switch among tasks than it would have to complete one and then turn to the other” (healy, 2004, p. 1). the extra response time the brain takes to process task-switching reduces productivity, creativity and accuracy (american psychological association, 2006; cabrera, 2016). extra processing time demanded during multitasking means loss and mismanagement of time. we argue that multitasking is not an effective strategy because it creates an inflated sense of productivity (american psychological association, 2006; cabrera, 2016; ophir et al., 2009; stoet et al., 2013). arguably, though necessary and unavoidable on rare occasions, multitasking is not a sustainable strategy as it negatively affects job performance. both men and women multitask but women multitask more and are perceived to be better at it than men (cabrera, 2016; cui et al., 2021; offer & schneider, 2011). ophir et al. (2009) argued that people who multitask are often worse at it. in addition, there are also hidden and long-term costs of multitasking associated with health, productivity and career advancement (american psychological association, 2006; healy 2004). why women multitask the three major reasons why people multitask are “the changing nature of work, the enablement of information and communication technologies (ict), and time demands” (crews & russ, 2020, p. 1303). with more women participating in the labor force today, unpaid house work is still disproportionately the work of women than men, giving women a de facto second shift. chores such as preparing meals, cleaning the house, laundry, etc., are still the burden for women and are “subject to the whims and demands of other family members” (bianchi et al., , 2000, p. 195). while crews and russ’ (2020) three reasons are true, bianchi et al. (2000) offer three other reasons. first, is the availability factor. this is predicated on the division of housework being tied to the availability of household personnel and the work to be done. women and girls are conditioned by society to take care of household chores compared to men and boys. historically, men have spent their time in the labor market while women were relegated to house or unpaid work. second, is the relative resource perspective, which argues that division of labor in the home is a function of the resources brought in by the parties involved. this highlights how resource input in the home determines power relations and the division of labor. even if the man does not earn more money than his female partner, a woman might not ask for help with household chores in fear of upsetting or shifting the balance of power. third, is the gender perspective, which argues that women and men perform roles assigned to them by society. from early childhood, socialization processes are oriented toward producing proper male or female adults. this process hinges on the mastery of gender-prescribed roles. this results in creating turf wars in adult life when a male partner might spurn performing feminized tasks. using this narrow perspective of enacting gender in the home, women will continue to engage in unpaid and unattractive work. housework is demanding and exhausting and, in many cases, women are left with no choice but to multitask as a coping strategy. additionally, the burden of looking after children and attending to their demands creates another layer of complication in the division of labor. bianchi et al.,(2000) observed that “husbands tend not to respond to their wives’ constraints or to the demands of children” (p. 195). although there is a prevailing assumption and myth that women are better at multitasking than men (cabrera, 2016), there is no scientific evidence to support such claims (buser & peter, 2012). many women perhaps resort to multitasking under the veil of this myth and stretch themselves thinly over too many activities. inevitably, this leads to exhaustion, stress, feeling overwhelmed, irritability, and a lost opportunity to ask help from family members. why women should limit multitasking as stated earlier, women and mothers still carry more of the burden of house work and childcare than fathers, indicating an unequal division of labor (holdsworth 2020; sullivan & gershuny, 2013). this expectation that they be nurturing, caring and giving of themselves comes at a cost to women’s health. a study by offer and schneider (2011) concluded that “for mothers, multitasking activities at home and in public are associated with an increase in negative emotions, stress, psychological distress, and work-family conflict” (p. 809). the american psychological association (2010) completed longitudinal studies from 2007 through 2010 on stress and gender and reported the following: (a) women are more likely than men to report higher levels of stress; (b) money and the economy stress women more than men while men report their job as a great source of stress; (c) women are likely to report physical and emotional symptoms of stress than men; and (d) married women report higher levels of stress than single women; for example, being irritable or angry, having headaches, and feeling fatigued. added to these are the daily activities in the home, especially domestic work, such as cleaning and attending to younger children. such activities involve long hours and the work is physically and emotionally draining. these tasks force women to resort to multitasking in order to get things done in the home. research also indicates that multitasking negatively affects job performance (bregman, 2010), people who multitask are often worse at it (ophir et al., 2009), increases stress levels (cabrera, 2016), reduces productivity by up to 40% (american psychological association, 2006), and finally it increases the chances of risky errors on the job, communication lapses, rudeness and employee stress (healy, 2004). despite its prevalence, multitasking is only associated with a sense of 82 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 increased productivity that may not correlate to actual productivity. lastly, it is perceived as a negative experience in the workplace (offer & schneider, 2011). scholars point to a relationship between multitasking and brain functions. the american psychological association (2010) reported that women are more likely to report physical and emotional symptoms of stress than men. prolonged and chronic stress leads to suboptimal performance or malfunction of multiple body systems, including the executive part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (healy, 2004), digestive, reproductive and immune systems (chrousos & gold, 1992). this also results in the death of brain cells in the hippocampus. a critical function of the hippocampus is the formation of new memories that enable humans to learn new information and skills (healy, 2004). overwhelming stress also kills the ability to learn new information (healy, 2004). multitasking causes people to function like robots because automaticity, i.e., performing tasks without conscious thought does not require higher level thinking. during multitasking, the brain takes a momentary rest and suspends high order thinking. the result is robotic behavior characterized by role overload, forgetfulness, irritability, errors, misjudgment and anxiety. according to healy, (2004) for women in their 40’s and 50s, “their forgetfulness appeared to be a function of depression, stress and ‘role overload’—the multitasking of many roles at once” (p. 3). in light of these negative factors of multitasking, women should reconsider the potential harm of multitasking both at home and in the workplace as multitasking is considered a factor in serious mishaps (healy, 2004). is multitasking a successful strategy or pitfall for career advancement? as stated earlier, multitasking is unavoidable in many jobs and especially for women with professional and domestic responsibilities. although there are perceptions that women multitask better than men (buser & peter, 2012; stoet et al., 2013) and that women multitask more than men (cabrera, 2016, offer & schneider, 2011), it is vital to understand the hidden and long-term costs of multitasking on health, productivity and career advancement (american psychological association, 2006). despite the ubiquity of this practice, there are several reasons why women should reconsider multitasking as a coping strategy in the workplace and home. first, multitasking is a challenge for human cognition (ophir et al, 2009; stoet et al., 2013). the human brain cannot handle two activities at a time, let alone, five multitasking activities that women are reported to handle at a time (cabrera, 2016). multitasking results in declined productivity because it places extra demand on cognitive processing that results in a longer response time during task switching (american psychological association, 2006; cabrera, 2016; ophir et al., 2009; stoet et al., 2013). the compromised cognitive function is due to abnormal stress that causes “amygdala hijack” (nadler, 2009, p. 1), the emotional part of the brain that is responsible for fight or flight. the hijack causes irrational behaviors that cause regrets in life (nadler, 2009), and the aftermath ‘what was i thinking?” for working mothers, cortisol, the potent stress hormone, is particularly high in the morning as they manage multiple activities for their children while also mentally and physically preparing for the work day (larsson et al 2009; hibelet al, 2012). the excessive excretion of cortisol under stressful conditions potentially causes amygdala hijack in the morning for mothers resulting in parenting stress, irritability, anger, frustration, fatigue. sustained high levels of cortisol in the morning are also related to general life stress, post traumatic stress, and chronic fatigue (hibel et al., 2012) and weight gain (larrson et al, 2009). also, in their study larsson et al., (2009) reported that there are higher levels of cortisol in women than in men. given that the workplace involves activities that require undivided attention, including deliberate thought process, listening attentively, planning, and efficient execution of tasks, multitasking becomes a liability to one’s productivity (healy, 2004). a lack of focused attention amid competing demands for time and attention from family responsibilities such as child care, elderly parent care and household chores, make it imperative for women to come up with strategies that boost productivity at home and in the workplace. in fact, child care responsibilities, looking after elderly parents and the daily house chores are full-time jobs that clearly cannot be done by a woman holding a full-time job elsewhere. women cannot carry this burden of unpaid work in the home single handedly and expect to perform the job demands efficiently without the work taking a toll on productivity and personal health. the whitney houston song i’m every woman in the early 1990’s, whose lyrics “whatever you want done baby, i will do it naturally” perpetuates the notion that women can do everything and are there to serve others at the detriment of their own health. according to holdsworth (2020) assumptions about busyness and prioritization are framed from a patriarchal perspective and advises that to do less is more and distracting tasks can be deferred or delegated. strategies for successful career advancement in the era of multitasking research suggests that multitasking should be avoided as human beings are not wired to do so much at once (cabrera, 2016, healy, 2004). as stated earlier, research suggests that women multitask more than men (offer & schneider, 2011), but there are ways to lessen multitasking on the job. first, intentionally practice mindfulness, i.e., focus on one thing at a time and complete tasks sequentially (cabrera, 2016), or single task (bregman, 2010). second, plan activities and allot time to each activity and maintain focus (cabrera, 2016). third, if resources permit, seek outside help/domestic sourcing (sullivan & gershuny, 2013) to give more time to focus on tasks and activities or can defer or delegate activities. 83 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 other methods of managing multitasking include effective use of executive control functions (ecf) according to royall et al. (2002). executive functions “encompass a set of cognitive skills that are responsible for the planning, initiation, sequencing, and monitoring of complex goal-directed behavior” (p. 378). in real life these functions translate to task planning, postponing tasks and ignoring task irrelevant information. rubinstein et al. (2001) discussed the complementary stages of executive functions during task switching which are goal shifting (keeping track of current and future tasks) and rule activation (turning off the rules of the previous task and selecting a new set of rules for a current task). these functions are conscious decisions about what to do and which rules to follow during task switching. making fundamental changes to routines requires critical examination of ethos (cherished values), pathos (anything that touches feelings, emotions and passions), and logos (reasoning and rationality that seeks harmony and understanding) as postulated by vyas (2013). perfectionism in house chores such as cleaning, meal preparation and laundry may mean relinquishing these tasks to others as they place competing demands on schedules for professional women. completing these tasks makes perfect sense and creates harmony in the home, but at whose, and at what cost to the well-being of women? multitasking and cultural differences multitasking is inherently a cultural trait and determined by monochronic vs. polychronic preferences in task completion, terms coined by hall (1959). monochronic is the preference of completing one task at a time while polychronic is the preference to complete multiple tasks simultaneously. these preferences occur at the individual and cultural group and impact time management and perceptions of time. western cultures are monochronic in nature and observe the cultural cherished values of rigid time keeping while failure to observe time is considered inappropriate, incompetent, ineffective and inefficient (guenther, 2019). also, there is a very clear demarcation between work and personal time. activities are linear and sequential and everyone understands the idea of giving undivided attention. for example at a business entity, one customer is served at a time. those in line don’t complain about the time given because of the shared value of respecting the customer and focusing on one customer at a time. whereas, in polychronic cultures such as african, asian and south american, multiple tasks are completed simultaneously and family responsibilities must be addressed concurrently with workplace responsibilities (guenther, 2019). maintaining relationships and human interactions is paramount and time rigidity may or may not be observed depending on the task demands, but the tasks will get done although not within the allocated time. agendas may be suspended because of distractions. unplanned interruptions are embraced and entertained, and one can always go back to the tasks at hand after the interruption. in these cultures, it is perceived as rude if one does not entertain interruptions. in polychromatic cultures, multitasking especially for women is admirable behavior as it is perceived to be a sign of strength, resiliency, power, discipline, stamina, and a strong work ethic. there is a high premium placed on multi-taskers because they are perceived as highly productive and ideal. these two preferences to multitasking underscore the importance of cultural differences considerations in the workplace. although there is a dearth in studies that investigated multitasking and cultural differences, research revealed that american adults who owned multimedia gadgets tended to multitask more compared to taiwanese (kononova & chiang, 2015), contradicting the view that western cultures are monochromatic. it also demonstrates how the privilege of ownership of multimedia technologies in western cultures has increased multitasking and polychronicity for business, scheduling, entertainment, networking, and control purposes. for instance, multimedia tasking enabled by smartphones is a case in point (crews & russ, 2020; srivastava et al., 2016). one can choose to answer an incoming business call and give undivided attention to that call thus choosing the monochronic option. however, another individual may use the smartphone to answer a call, and at the same time text, email and read messages coming through different platforms such as twitter, instagram, facebook, etc., thus engaging in polychromatic multitasking. in both monochromatic or polychromatic cultures, media multitasking is influenced by variables such as access, age, race, educational level (srivastava et al., 2016) other studies attributed happiness to employee productivity in multitasking environments. bellet et al. (2022) studied the effects of employee happiness on productivity at call centers at a british telecommunications company. their study revealed that as the measurement of happiness increased and so did their performance and productivity in sales. conversely, low levels of employee morale hurt levels of productivity in an organization. another study at a university in malaysia investigated happiness among islamic women who self-identified as multitaskers (rosli et al., 2020). the women perceived their religion as playing a significant role in sustaining their multitasking behaviors. they highlighted five aspects that are worth considering. the first is the physiological as reflected in financial stability to alleviate worries, good accommodation, and the length of commute to and from work. the second is the cognitive factor where it is important to know self-worth, understand their role as wife, mother and manager of the household. one relies on god as the ultimate helper and sustainer in carrying family responsibilities and the burdens of life and to remain optimistic about life. the third element is psychological as evidenced by a carefully thought out schedule, self-regulation, allocating time to tasks, giving the best at all times and using the best way possible to complete the tasks. rewarding oneself after achieving a goal was seen as positive self-affirmation. the fourth is social support from spouse, family, friends, colleagues, and babysitters. the final is the spiritual element where one accepts fate and to be always thankful. the perception of islamic women in the study is that they are expected to multitask in order to fulfill obligations to family and god. given these systems of support, 84 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 the women reported that these would be ideal and will enable them to manage work-life balance. organizational solutions to multitasking busyness has become the defining temporality of the 21st century (holdsworth, 2020). furthermore, work is one of the unhappiest activities that people do on a daily basis in the usa and the united kingdom (bryson & mackerron, 2016). the use of information and communication technologies (ict) has increased multitasking in the workplace despite the problems associated with intensive multitasking such as decreased productivity, low levels of critical thinking, frequency of high error rate, decreased concentration (crews & russ, 2020). according to holdsworth (2020), “delays in parenting are concurrent with an intensification of multitasking activities, with women in particular combining motherhood with labor market commitments, as well as increasing caring responsibilities for older care responsibilities” (p. 681). it requires companies and organizations to redesign work environments that help women to mitigate the busyness that leads to multitasking. as unavoidable as multitasking is in the workplace, not all workers are good at it and employees need training to make informed decisions about preferences to task completion. we suggest several ideas that may help to reconfigure work environments. flexible work options and scheduling a study conducted in india using 250 employees from banking, hospitality, and information technology to test the relation between work from home (wfh) and employee productivity during the covid-19 pandemic revealed that productivity in general decreased but women tended to benefit more as the scheduling allowed them to attend to both work and family responsibilities although productivity for men did not change (farooq & sultana, 2021). corroborating the men's advantage during the pandemic, research productivity among women faculty in top research universities decreased compared to male faculty (cui et al., 2021). the gender gap in productivity may have been caused by women striking a balance between work and family while males might have used the pandemic to concentrate on research productivity as holdsworth (2020) stated: [m]ale authored accounts of time management assume family as a source of fulfillment, rather than responsibility and the challenge is to make time for family, rather than acknowledging how family practices are time consuming activities that need to be coordinated with others (p. 691). the assertion by holdsworth suggests women still carry the burden of household chores, child and elderly care responsibilities. post pandemic work restructuring and redesign should include policies that mitigate multitasking for women such as giving them work from home options if the nature of the job permits. other options include having day care centers within the workplace, equitable salaries with men to avoid financial stress, and requiring workers to work from the office once or twice a week or bi-weekly. collaboration and communication different units should collaborate and communicate to avoid working in silos as this causes fragmentation and mistrust when working towards a common project or goals. communication that utilizes vertical, horizontal and organic approaches should reflect priorities and the press for urgency. deadlines must be clear and shared in advance to give workers time to plan and to have autonomy of their own schedules. too often, sudden and short deadlines put employees into hyper multitasking mode and may lead to sub-par performance, higher rates of error, high levels of stress, poor product quality, malaise, and leaving employees overwhelmed. there must be regular check-ins by managers to capture snapshots of what is happening with employees and to target support needed to deal with workforce stress. women faced with competing tasks in the home and work environment may find work-life balance impossible to sustain and will resort to high multitasking which compromises their work, family and health. in high pressure jobs, failure to complete tasks should not necessarily be equated with incompetence alone, but with a flawed work environment that fails to cater to the needs of employees. employee training while multitasking is considered a requirement in many job descriptions, training on worker monochronic and polychronic preferences is a must to make informed decisions about worker productivity. employees must be aware of the consequences of multitasking, perceived advantages and disadvantages to help them exercise self-regulation and discipline to ensure task completion. considerations should be given to monochronic individuals, who might struggle on heavy workload and unplanned work days. polychronic workers might perform better under high pressure. for example, scenarios and targets could be given in training and a comparison of work quality and time of task completion can be made between monochrats and polychrats so that employees are intentional about their preferences given task completion demands, deadlines and quality of work. in addition, data on multitasking needs to be shared, especially the negative impact of task switching on the brain functions and productivity and the general cost of multitasking on the economy. for example, work interruptions take an average of two hours of the working day which is equivalent to $588b annually to the us economy (spira & feintuch as cited in crews & russ, 2020). organizations should listen to the needs of workers, implement solutions with fidelity to harmonize organizational and staff needs. bearing in mind worker idiosyncrasies in multitasking, managers and supervisors must set realistic targets and time frames to complete tasks. additionally, knowing employee monochronic or polychronic preferences helps to better chart ways for collaboration, inclusivity, and empowerment in the workplace. 85 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 holistic performance appraisals companies and organizations hire people to perform mandated tasks and jobs. given that multitasking is a necessary evil for women, and promotions are based on merit, therefore, to increase productivity in the workplace, organizations need to empower women by creating structures and practices that promote women’s participation, promotion, and chances of career mobility and advancement. when women are in positions where they have power in the workplace, then they can influence workplace decisions that better address the needs of women, especially for those with young families and elder care responsibilities. such practices will pay off as this may lead to increased productivity, commitment, loyalty and relational trust. the negative effects of multitasking suggest that organizations should evaluate employee productivity holistically by appraising every aspect of staff well-being and to retain talent. conclusion despite the high prevalence of multitasking in everyday life, it is an unavoidable coping tool in task completion, but needs to be mitigated because it negatively affects performance. furthermore, it is not an effective strategy because it reduces productivity by up to 40% (american psychological association, 2006), bleeds the economy in billions of dollars (drew & russ, 2020), and gives a false sense of productivity (cabrera, 2016). task switching places extra demands on cognitive processing and slows response time. in the workplace, employers use productivity as one of the measures for continued employment. it becomes imperative for the individual to assess their multitasking abilities especially in high pressure jobs. depending on the situation, it might be better at times to perform one task at a time, a practice called mindfulness, to avoid a decline in productivity. women may potentially improve their productivity if they reduce multitasking both in their personal and professional lives. they need to implement strategies such as sharing household chores with family members. women and men should learn to relinquish traditional household roles and tasks to alleviate stress. the constraints imposed by gendered labor jeopardize chances of career 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(2013). managing the dimensions of ethos, pathos and logos of change through transformational leadership. the iup journal of soft skills, vii(3), 7-22. 87 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 https://doi-org.proxy006.nclive.org/10.1073/pnas.090362010 https://doi-org.proxy006.nclive.org/10.1073/pnas.090362010 http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/jnp.14.4.377 http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/jnp.14.4.377 http://dx.doi.org.proxy006.nclive.org/10.1186/2050-7283-1-18 http://dx.doi.org.proxy006.nclive.org/10.1186/2050-7283-1-18 microsoft word 380_sarah andreas.doc volume 40, 2021 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership 87 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 advancing women in leadership vol. 40, pp. 87-98, 2021 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper exploration of women's leadership development challenges and transformational learning: a positional paper sarah andreas wisewood, llc, owner, sarah@wisewoodllc.com accepted july 24, 2020 my review of the positions that involving decision-making roles shows that women still hold less than 26% of the decisionmaking roles within fortune magazine’s list of top 500 companies, higher education, and politics. fortune 500 boards of directors and entrepreneurs show increasing rates of women in decision-making roles. surveys related to the division of labor in households show that women are still responsible for the majority of the work needed to keep the household running. these factors, along with challenges such as a lack of positive social feedback for aspiring women leaders, gender stereotypes, educational methods, and a lack of prominent role models, can affect women’s development as leaders and the number of women in leadership roles. this paper explores social feedback, gender stereotypes, conditional teaching, and lack of role models as affecting women’s potential and development as leaders. this review also explores applying lessons from the transformational learning literature to women’s leadership development process. keywords: transformational learning, leadership development, identity development, women's leadership development, gender stereotypes, social constructs women's leadership development and learning this positional paper offers a deeper understanding of genderspecific challenges that some women may face in envisioning themselves as potential leaders, their developmental process to become leaders, and the importance of transformational learning as an essential part of their leadership development. the web of challenges faced by women trying to develop as leaders includes social feedback, gender stereotypes, the way they are taught in formative years, identity as a leader, and the skills needed to lead. understanding transformational learning and the challenges women may face trying to become leaders may help facilitators of women’s leadership development create the environment, conversation, and education that supports and challenges women in their leadership development. transformational learning is a theory developed by mezirow (2012), in which an individual goes through a process of examining and questioning beliefs, values, “uncritically assimilated assumptions” (cranton, 2016, p. 2), and perspectives to shift their frames of reference or ways of knowing (cranton, 2016; mezirow, 2012). this process of questioning, critically reflecting and becoming aware of things we believe, where those beliefs came from, and the “consequences of taken-for-granted beliefs” (mezirow, 2000, p. 19) is essential in leadership development. transformational learning leads to a change in self-perception (cranton, 2016), consciousness (kegan, 2000; taylor, 2000), what is known and how they know it through changing frames of reference or meaning perspectives (mezirow, 2000). our frames of reference make up our deeply held beliefs about ourselves, others, and our world “that we are smart or dumb, good or bad, winners or losers – are inferred from repetitive affective experience outside of awareness” (mezirow, 2000, p. 16). these frames of reference become how we see the world and interpret our experiences. frames of references are strongly influenced by cultural norms or social paradigms and may have been unconsciously assimilated from the culture or the “personal perspectives derived from the idiosyncrasies of primary care givers” (mezirow, 2000, p. 16). frames of reference anchor our sense of self and deeply held values which give us identity, a sense of community, and stability (cranton, 2016; mezirow, 2000). our identity is a “set of meanings attached to the self, this set of meanings serves as a standard or reference for a person” (burke & stets, 2009, p. 50). when other viewpoints seem to go against our frames of reference, there is a tendency to sometimes emotionally and vigorously defend our perspective (mezirow, 2000). however, these viewpoints that challenge our current frames of reference can be the beginning of the transformational learning experience by causing a disorienting dilemma (kegan, 88 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 2000; mezirow, 2000; taylor, 2000). taylor (2000) made the point that when there is little exposure to people who have different cultures, values, or frames of reference that there is less opportunity to experience disorienting dilemmas to challenge the current frames of reference and begin the transformational learning process. leadership development can be complicated and challenging. facilitating transformational learning by offering support and challenge to the process of critically questioning and exploring unconscious assimilated long-held beliefs about self, others, and leadership may help more women show up as leaders. while transformational learning may require profound changes in social, educational, and individual ways of knowing, understanding the challenges women face in becoming a leader, we can raise our awareness and the awareness of the women who are being impacted by unexamined beliefs. raising awareness allows women to feel discomfort with their current ways of being, which may begin the transformational learning process they need to challenge and change long-held beliefs about themselves and women in general as leaders. the role of being a leader provides the opportunity to be a part of discussions, make critical decisions, and influence the outcome in business and society (kanadlı et al., 2018; walters & manicom, 1996). yet the proportion of women in prominent leadership positions in the united states is very small (catalyst, 2020a; catalyst, 2020b; ebrahimji, 2020; kelly, 2019). as a businesswoman and scholar whose primary focus is leadership development, i have developed, trained, coached, and supported leadership development in myself, men, and women over the years. i am choosing to focus on american women's development as leaders for two reasons: (a) i am a woman who has experienced these issues, and (b) i am concerned about the relatively small number of women who have prominent leadership roles. i firmly believe that we need more prominent women leaders. to facilitate this, we need a greater understanding of the challenges that women may face in seeing themselves in leadership roles and in developing into leaders. there are fewer studies that focus on women’s education and ways of learning. english and irving (2012), in a comprehensive review of learning and gender showed that the category of gender has almost entirely disappeared from the adult education literature. they pointed out that this may be due to an attempt to connect with other causes such as race, class, sexual orientation, and disability. race, class, sexual orientation, gender, and disability are all interlocking issues faced by women who seek to become leaders (eagly & carli, 2007; english & irving, 2012; kelly, 2019) and not all training professionals have an educational background that has exposed them to researchers’ insights related to gender or feminism, which is needed to understand the interlocking issues and challenges faced by women (english & irving, 2012). according to english and irving (2012), "by naming women's transformative learning as a central concern [it] puts a spotlight on these interlocking issues and on women specifically" (p. 246). if researchers examining adult education fail to give special attention to women's needs and causes, it depoliticizes these issues and causes them to remain hidden. these hidden challenges disrupt a woman’s leadership development (cranton, 2016; davies et al., 2005; eagly & carli, 2007; ibarra et al., 2013; simpson et al., 2016). transformational learning in women’s leadership development is beginning to show up in research (debebe, 2010; english & irving 2012; megheirkouni, & roomi, 2017). in women-only leadership development programs, debebe (2010) found evidence of transformational insights such as challenging beliefs, challenging internal and external assumptions regarding relationships, and affirming personal values. english and irving (2012) stated that it might be "the right time for theorists focusing on women to learn and benefit from the transformational learning literature" (p 246). transformational learning can be challenging to facilitate because emotions and feelings play a role in transformation (english & irving, 2012; taylor & cranton, 2012). while there is a need for more research on transformational learning in women’s leadership development, english and irving (2012) cautioned researchers not to "further essentialize women and their experience or contribute to their further marginalization in society" (p. 255). this statement led me to research more about women, femininity, and gender. walters and manicom (1996) emphasized that "in working with conceptions of women and gender there is always a fine line between reinforcing particular constructs and meanings and questioning not only the relations that produce women's oppression but also the prevailing conceptions of femininity" (p. 20). it is not just the reinforcement of marginalization of women's leadership in society that needs to be considered; it is also the acknowledgment that major systems of oppression are interlocking and reinforce each other, causing a belief that they are correct (debebe et al., 2016; ely, & padavic, 2007; english & irving, 2012; walters, 1996). the web of underlying challenges according to walters and maincom (1996), if we want to empower women, we must challenge two pillars of patriarchal ideology and practice. patriarchy is a legitimating ideology and a social structure in which men have more power and privilege than women (walters & manicom, 1996). these two pillars are the labor division between genders and "male control of women's sexuality which both seriously constrains women's space and physical mobility and shapes conceptions of what 'women' should be” (pp. 23-24). when writing about women in south africa, walters and manicom (1996) asserted that if women want to move away from patriarchy, that they need to “attain real power as part of a process of economic, political, and cultural transformation. in other words, women must gain access to and participate in decision-making structures at all levels in society” (p. 24). stephenson-abetz and aleman (2012) found that students in their classes often question if feminine issues apply to them. 89 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 these underlying challenges have built worldviews and frames of reference that influence how women see themselves regarding their leadership roles and abilities. those same underlying connections impact how others see and perceive women as leaders. cranton (2016) explained, "becoming aware of assumptions or the habits of the mind that consist of a web of related assumptions is difficult" (p. 50). to become aware of the frames of references that make up her beliefs about herself and leadership (mezirow, 2000), a woman may have to pull apart her interconnected web of assumptions (cranton, 2016). this interconnected web of assumptions and frames of reference is built from a lifetime of unnamed and hidden messages about ideas of what a woman should be. a woman may have to battle her beliefs about herself, leadership, and society’s beliefs, to build her leader identity and see her potential to become a prominent female leader. women in leadership roles in the united states, a country in which women have rights and freedoms, one may argue that gaining access to and participating in decision-making structures is not a pressing concern for women. to understand whether women are gaining access to and participating in the decision-making structures that walters and manicom (1996) called for, i began by investigating women’s decision-making roles, looking at data for women in leadership roles in business, politics, higher education, and entrepreneurship. business. in fortune 500 companies, only 7.4% of chief executive officers (ceo) are women (catalyst, 2020b; ebrahimji, 2020). the ceo is the top decision-maker in a company or organization. also, concerning antiracism, there are only three black women ceos, and no latinas hold a ceo role in the top 500 (ebrahimji, 2020). there is an encouraging trend in the fortune 500 boards of directors. since 2010, the number of women and minorities on boards has tripled to greater than 40% (catalyst, 2020b). politics. within the political realm, the numbers are a little higher. according to the center for american women and politics, eagleton institute of politics at rutgers university, in 2020, 127 women hold seats in the united states congress, 23.7% of the seats. of those 127 women, 47 are women of color. in 2019, 22% of us cities with populations over 30,000 had a woman as mayor. higher education. in higher education, women earn 57% of bachelor’s degrees (fry, 2019). gender research has found that gender stereotypes become weaker for women attending women’s colleges (eagly & carli, 2007, p. 89). this prevalence was correlated with experiences and interactions with female faculty members in a women's college. while the representation of women as students is high, the representation of women in tenured professor roles is low in higher education. according to kelly (2019), 26% of the tenured professors are women, a decrease of 1% from 2003. women are less likely to hold high ranked roles and become tenured (catalyst, 2020a; kelly, 2019). instructor positions are considered the lowest ranking positions in academia, and 57% of the instructor positions are held by women (catalyst, 2020a). in 2016, only 30.1% of college presidents were women (women presidents, 2017). entrepreneurship. entrepreneurship was the most significant area of women showing up in leadership. 13 million womenowned businesses represent roughly 42% of the firms in the united states (american express, 2019). much of the growth comes from minority women. firms owned by “women of color grew 43%, and african american women-owned firms grew even faster at 50%” (lesonsky, 2020, para. 9). while this may seem exciting and promising news, these women-owned businesses often produce low revenue, employ fewer people, and are less profitable (american express, 2019; hechavarria et al., 2019). as entrepreneurs’ women often face gender-based barriers in their business, including getting access to traditional networks, capital, and misperceptions regarding market opportunities (lesonsky, 2020). faced with these challenges women often leave their business and return to the primary workforce (american express, 2019). distribution of labor in households. i also reviewed the role of labor distribution in households. brenan (2020) shared a 2019 gallup study that showed whether married or partnered, women working full time jobs outside the home are more likely than men to "take the lead on everything from doing laundry, cleaning, shopping for groceries, and preparing meals, to planning family activities, caring for children and furnishing the house" (para. 1). the current covid-19 pandemic is forcing many people to work full-time from home. a morning consult survey of 2,200 adults showed that 67% of women reported that they were fully or mostly responsible for the housework (miller, 2020). homes with children also had to home school their children, 80% of women reported primary responsibility to ensure the schooling gets done (miller, 2020). each of the challenges and statistics mentioned above seems to indicate that patriarchal social constructs are still affecting women, thus affect women in leadership. the more i read, gathered information, researched, and reflected on the representation of females in leadership positions, the more i began to see a need for a deeper understanding of the challenges that women face in trying to become leaders. as i reflected, i began to notice a pattern; it became apparent that there are more significant concepts such as gender stereotypes, societal expectations, assumptions, worldviews, and individual frames of references that are still at play in a web of interconnected barriers and constraints. when looking specifically at women's leadership development, these deeper webs of underlying challenges are connected to identity, education, societal assumptions, and cultural expectations involving women's roles. these need to be explored, understood, and addressed. the awareness of the underlying challenges needs to be heightened within the education and developmental efforts of all disciplines. ideas for solutions 90 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 this battle requires transformational learning and the development of a leadership identity at a deep level. transformational learning is a process of examining and questioning “uncritically assimilated assumptions” (cranton, 2016, p. 2), values, beliefs, and perspectives to shift frames of reference (cranton, 2016; mezirow, 2012). transformational learning is the process of examining beliefs to understand where they came from, why we believe them, and considering what the implications are for continuing to accept that knowledge as accurate in light of new experiences or information (mezirow, 2000). transformational learning can change both frames of references and habits of the mind. it encourages a more in-depth exploration of long-held beliefs and views. however, each woman who wants to be in a leadership position must be willing to go through the cycle of identifying her outdated frames of reference and identities; naming them as obsolete, as no longer valid or applicable to her; and then building new frames of reference and new identities (berger, 2012; burke & stets, 2009; day et al., 2017; mezirow, 2000). leadership development is intensely connected to challenging frames of reference (berger, 2012). for a woman trying to become a leader, these challenges may include frames of references related to gender-related social feedback (burke & stets, 2009; ibarra et al., 2013), stereotypes (eagly & carli, 2007; simpson et al., 2016), education (cranton, 2016; ely & badavic, 2007; langer, 2016), and societal expectations (debebe et al., 2016; eagly & carli, 2007; ruminski et al., 2012). these possibly outdated frames of reference require women to undertake transformational learning experiences, requiring changes in their worldviews about themselves and others, and sometimes the core of their identities as women. social feedback ibarra et al. (2013) pointed out that to become leaders, individuals need to take on challenging assignments, learn from mentors, and practice new behaviors. if the potential leaders’ performance is praised or affirmed through social feedback, it reinforces their leadership identity; they will continue to repeat the process and develop a stronger leader identity (burke & stets, 2009; hall & lord, 2005; ibarra et al., 2013; komives et al., 2005). social feedback validates the potential leaders’ views of themselves as leaders. if others do not accept, confirm or validate these attempts at leadership, it may be much more difficult for a potential leader to establish themselves as a leader, both physically and mentally (burke & stets, 2009; hall & lord, 2005). a potential leader's ability to develop an awareness of themself as a leader, build self-confidence in leadership skills through successful application, and receive positive feedback from other individuals impacts the potential leader’s leadership identity development (burke & stets, 2009; ibarra et al., 2013; komives et al., 2005). ibarra et al.’s (2013) research showed that the process of becoming a leader is "often more difficult for women than for men because of subtle biases. for example, behavior considered assertive in a man is seen as aggressive in a woman and thus denigrated rather than rewarded" (p. 63). when there are subtle biases, women may not receive the social feedback they need to validate their attempts at leadership, thus challenging their ability to become a leader (ibarra et al., 2013; komives et al., 2005). this lack of validation may affect a potential woman leader’s self-identity as a leader (burke & stets, 2009; ibarra et al., 2013). as leadership development facilitators we have an opportunity to provide social feedback to help validate women’s view of themselves as leaders. we must understand and be aware of our own subtle biases and work to mitigate them. we can also ensure that our programs provide the opportunities for women to take on challenging assignments, learn from mentors, practice new behaviors, and actively receive positive social feedback. gender stereotypes gender stereotypes are woven into the fabric of our culture and society through books, plays, and movies that become narratives that shape the “contemporary collective memory” (xu et al., 2019, p. 1). in social psychology, gender stereotypes are biased, inaccurate, or generalizations about different gender roles and abilities (ellemers, 2018). these gender stereotypes do not automatically go away as we mature, and everyday activities can reinforce them, even tv commercials (davies et al., 2005; eagly & carli, 2007). there are gender stereotypes that are connected to leadership. in our culture, the gender stereotype is that leadership is primarily masculine, and "the mere activation of the female stereotype can undermine women's interest in leadership" (eagly & carli, 2007, p. 91). the social construct that leadership is primarily masculine seems to imply that the activation of the female stereotype begins early in a woman's life through symbolic meanings assigned to identity (burke & stets, 2009). in their first study, davies et al. (2005) provided a control group with gender-neutral commercials to watch; the treatment group watched gender-stereotyped commercials. the genderstereotyped ads showed women in the content; one was excited about face care, and another was dreaming about being a homecoming queen. the gender-neutral commercial did not contain any gender-stereotypical products or situations. after the study participants watched the commercial, both the test group and the control group were given the same description of a leadership task to read. the study participants, who were both men and women, were then offered an opportunity to lead or be a problem-solver (follower), after watching the commercials. the women who were exposed to the stereotypical ad showed less interest in being a group leader. the content of the ads did not affect the men’s interest in leading. interestingly, davies et al. (2005) repeated the same experiment with new participants in their second study with one crucial change. each group was randomly assigned to read either the original description or a modified version designed to "eliminate women's vulnerability to stereotype threat" (p. 281). in the revised description, the researchers added the sentence, "there is a great deal of controversy in psychology surrounding the issue 91 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 of gender-based differences in leadership and problem-solving ability; however, our research has revealed absolutely no gender differences in either ability on this particular task" (p. 281). by adding this identity-safe condition, they eliminated the relationship between the gender stereotype activation and the leadership aspirations of the women in that test group. davies et al. (2005) research offers several ideas that can help leadership development facilitators to support women’s leadership development. using identity-safe wording is an example that can be used in facilitation of leadership development programs. raising our awareness to the types of images we use in our powerpoints and presentation materials. understanding the activation of stereotype threats that can decrease women’s interest in leading and actively work to minimize them. conditional and unconditional teaching societal expectations of women's performance and behavior are prominent in educating girls (belenky et al., 1997; cranton, 2000; langer, 2016). developing the ability to question authority can be particularly challenging for women, as "young girls are taught to be 'good little girls,' which translates into 'do what you are told'" (langer, 2016, p. 20); however, the ability to question authority is essential for advanced meaning making and leadership development. langer (2016) shared that the way information is presented and taught to students impacts their creativity, ability to question cultural norms, and challenge assumptions. langer (2016) while studied the results of conditional and unconditional teaching found that the girls' performances improved significantly when mindful learning and conditional teaching was involved. conditional instruction requires flexibility in the transfer of knowledge instead of absolutes (langer, 2016). langer (2016) discovered that teaching students about an object using conditional information encouraged more creativity in how those objects could be used. while data and knowledge taught unconditionally based on experts or people viewed as authority figures, it tends to be accepted without question, and there is no room for creativity (cranton, 2016). this discovery amplifies the importance of presenting information and knowledge with conditional information when educating girls and raising the awareness of women that information is conditional. cranton’s (2016) research seems to indicate that unconditional learning continues in adulthood. this unquestioning acceptance of information aligns with kegan’s (1994) adult development theory and specifically the socialized mind, and also agrees with belenky et al.’s (1997) epistemology of received knowledge. adult development theory explains how individuals progress through complex stages of cognitive development (kegan, 1994). the socialized mind is the most common stage of adult development (kegan & lahey, 2009). in the socialized mind, individuals adopt other people’s emotions and ideas as their system of meaning making (kegan, 1994). this system of meaning is influenced by the ideologies, institutions, or individuals who are viewed as authority figures or as important (belenky et al., 1997; kegan, 1994). if an authority figure says that something is true, then there is no room for doubt. cranton (2000) emphasized that it is not easy to change the way we learn, and langer (2016) shared that girls are strongly impacted when they are taught with unconditional information. langer (2016) emphasized that "when females were taught conditionally, their performance was not different from their male counterparts" (p. 21). teaching unconditional information silences questions, stifles creativity, and undermines self-esteem (langer, 2016). there was a need to consciously develop the ability to challenge underlying assumptions and to question authority and cultural norms (belenky et al., 1997; belenky & stanton, 2000; kegan & lahey, 2009; kegan, 1994); it added to the challenge when what was learned was taught as unconditional absolutes. even though research has shown that women learn differently than men, cranton (2016) cautioned that there is a danger in suggesting that women and men learn differently; "given that women's learning is depicted as less valued in our society, this could also serve to further marginalize women" (p. 34). facilitators, educators, and coaches should work to support and challenge the people they are guiding. understanding the path to empower women's learning may increase our effectiveness in developing leaders. the research on adult development, transformational learning, and women's ways of knowing and learning shows that it is essential to empower and support women in learning to process information as conditional. langer (2005) shared that "conditional information leads us to be more mindful, and when we are mindful, we see more" (p. 175). educators and facilitators have the opportunity to present information with opportunities to question, emphasizing that there is no right or wrong and that there may or may not be meaning to be made, and allow the participants to make up their minds as they progressed through the program, which can impact women’s leadership development. women as leadership role models there is a cycle that needs to be disrupted; often, we do not see many women as prominent leaders, so women are not viewed as leaders. it is critical to understand the impacts of how we educate young women, how we build their awareness of social assumptions, and the cultural influences impacting their leadership development. visibility is an essential part of this process. the very act of being a visible woman in leadership can change the construct of what a leader looks like in society. there is a need for women to be visible leaders so that young women have examples of women in leadership roles. ely et al. (2011) stated that one of the challenges for women trying to become leaders in organizations is the lack of role models. it is through observational learning that an individual receives cultural instructions for behaviors through the process of interacting with 92 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 and watching others (ancona, 2000; andreas, 2019; bandura, 1977; bonk & kim, 1998). it is through the observation of behaviors and the consequences of their actions that observational learning occurs. the observer then chooses to emulate or ignore an observed behavior based on the perceived results (ancona, 2000; bandura, 1977; bonk & kim, 1998). while addressing the issue and the importance of role models, eagly and carli (2007) shared that "because our mental associations about women and men follow from our observations of these groups, they can change with new observations" (p. 89). visible role models play a part in observational learning, not just for women who are trying to become leaders but for the whole community, which may then start to see more women as leaders. this visibility can change the social construct of what a leader looks like. leadership development more than education leadership development and transformational learning calls for more than educating the participants. transformational learning calls for the participants to choose to learn and to engage in learning actively. a willingness to engage in challenging concepts that do not align with the learner’s current worldview or frames of references because the learner is seeking knowledge is needed (knowles, 1980). this difference also calls the facilitator of leadership development to go deeper into their own personal and professional development to better support and challenge the individual who chooses to engage in the more profound developmental work required to become a leader. leadership skills and identity some leadership development programs and initiatives focus on skills-based learning only (day et al., 2017). however, acquiring leadership skills alone cannot truly impact a person’s leadership behaviors, beliefs, and frames of reference. day et al. (2017) argued that skills-based approaches alone could not capture the complex nature of leadership development. they argued for leadership development programs to focus on both leadership skills and leader identity. a leader identity is a "sub-component of one's identity that relate to being a leader or how one thinks of oneself as a leader" (day & harrison, 2007, p. 365). when an individual identifies as a leader, that identity influences their self-perceptions and directs their behaviors and interactions concerning the cognitive schema which holds their knowledge and information (burke & stets, 2009; kegan, 2000; komives et al., 2005; montero et al., 2008) related to leadership processes and roles (day et al., 2017; day et al., 2009;). the traditional educational process for leaders is delivered, in many aspects, by a method that is built for explicit knowledge (ancona, 2012; faller et al., 2012). explicit knowledge is the knowledge that can be learned by reading a book or attending a class or webinar. understanding and knowing explicit information or knowing that does not automatically translate into knowing how (janson & mcqueen, 2007, emphasis added). it is not easy to transfer tacit leadership knowledge into explicit know how instructions for developing a leader (janson & mcqueen, 2007; lam, 2000). tacit knowledge is intuitive, unarticulated, and cannot be understood, communicated, or used without knowing the subject (lam, 2000). because of the complexity of tacit knowledge and leadership development, traditional leadership training often does not go deep enough or provide the time needed for real transformation to occur (day et al., 2017). kegan and lahey (2009) shared an example of why learning about leadership, but not taking the information to a deeper level into the tacit knowledge, is like new files and programs brought to the existing operating system. they may have certain value—new files and programs do give you greater range and versatility—but your ability to use them will still be limited by your current operating system. true development is about transforming the operating system itself, not just increasing your fund of knowledge or your behavioral repertoire. (p. 6) while there is a need to build an individual's explicit knowledge about the topic of being a leader and the practice of leadership, as leadership development facilitators and educators, it is our role to support and challenge individuals to upgrade their operating system. to do this type of upgrade often requires transformational learning and leader identity development for the individuals involved. leadership development facilitators and educators must understand that the transformational learning process can leave individuals feeling emotionally vulnerable (taylor & cranton, 2012; watkins et al., 2012). individuals must feel safe, valued, supported, and respected within the social environment in which they are exploring the transformational process (kasworm & bowles, 2012). besides providing a supportive environment, kasworm and bowles (2012) suggested supporting selfreflection and critical reflections on roles, culture, self, and other worldviews. transformational learning should be a holistic process that includes multiple ways of knowing, embracing emotions, and spirituality to explore new possible ways of being (kasworm & bowles, 2012; lawrence, 2012). transformational learning in leadership development in my dissertation work, the main subject areas that i studied were the experiences of individuals during their leadership development; the framework of the literature i used included adult development, identity development, spiritual development, and transformational learning (andreas, 2019). i wanted to understand how individuals experience leadership development, and there seemed to be a strong connection between these areas of study. the internal development of a leader requires individuals to work on themselves as a leader and to move away from the social influences that helped create their previous concepts of leadership (burke & stets, 2009; r. j. hall & lord, 2005). this shift requires an individual to access a way of making meaning that allows them to view themselves as both a part of the system and as separate from that system (r. j. hall & lord, 2005; kegan, 2000). internal leadership development work requires the potential leader to build awareness of frames 93 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 of references, examine them, and possibly engage in transformational learning (kegan, 2000; mezirow, 1997; mezirow, 2000). while transformational learning is happening inside the leader, it is not happening on just one level (clark, 2012; dirkx, 2012). transformational learning is a process in which an individual must engage, and progress through, on their own with external support. educators and facilitators can provide opportunities, knowledge, and experiences to activate challenges to the individual’s existing ways of knowing and being; however, unless an individual is willing and able to engage in the process, they will miss the opportunity for transformational learning (dirkx, 1998; kegan, 2000; knowles, 1980). dirkx (1998) expressed that the part of an individual that is engaged in transformative learning "is active, with a strong sense of agency, acting on and often creating the worlds which it inhabits. it is a reflective, dialogical, expressive, and deeply emotional and spiritual self that constructs and re-constructs itself through experiences of learning" (p. 10). as individuals engage in leader and leadership development, they may challenge themselves on a new level of understanding about themselves as leaders and the practice of leadership, thus starting their transformational learning. transformational learning often requires the person’s full engagement through social, psychological, and epistemological exploration. transformational learning focuses on social, psychological, and epistemological capacities (mezirow, 1997; e. w. taylor, 2007). social-transformational learning recognizing and understanding the connections between society and individuals in leadership development and transformational learning is an essential piece of the transformational process. while scott (2003) gently chided mezirow (1991, 2000) for decoupling "transformative learning from the dimension of societal structures in the mechanisms of transformative learning theory" (p. 265), kegan (2000) recognized the importance of educators’ understanding, not just the "students' present epistemologies but the epistemological complexity of the present learning challenges they face in their lives" (p. 48). scott (2003) pointed out that we must recognize that there exist "within the collective (problems across families) and a reality of power structures out there that constrain families and an adequate quality of life" (p. 275). an individual must learn to recognize both internal and external influences on their frames of reference. while environment and social connections influence and impact an individual's experience, some experiences may start the transformational learning process; others may influence them to continue embracing their current frames of reference without question. bandura’s (1991) work on social cognitive theory described the effects of environmental factors on learning. the experiences one has within their environment and society are not the only factors; it is also the "agentic action in exploring, manipulating, and influencing the environment that counts" (bandura, 2001, p. 4). transformational learning asks individuals to "change the whole way they understand themselves, their world, and the relationships between the two" (kegan, 2000, p. 67). kegan (2000) stated that this is part of the process of developing personal authority; "we acquire personal authority, after all, only by relativizing—that is, only by fundamentally altering-our relationship to public authority” (p. 67). sometimes this authority is general, political, cultural, and other times it is familiar. psychological-transformational learning the process of developing one’s identity as a leader practicing leadership is both complex and psychological (burke & stets, 2009). this complexity comes from influences and experiences that challenge an individual to explore and process their experiences, interpretations, and knowledge with new frames of reference, as well as their identity, through transformational learning (andreas, 2019; brookfield, 2000; burke & stets, 2009; cranton & taylor, 2012; kim & merriam, 2012; k. taylor, 2000; m. malik, 2016). challenging cultural and social norms and how individuals view themselves can take a toll on individuals emotionally and cognitively (andreas, 2019; mezirow, 2000; rowland, 2016). researchers have recognized the role that identity creation plays in supporting and motivating the growth of leaders (burke & stets, 2009; day & dragoni, 2015; day et al.,2017; van kippenberg et al., 2004). the development of leadership identity is a more profound developmental process then just gaining leadership skills. how "we perceive ourselves, our self-concept, or identity has profound effects on the way we feel, think, and behave, and for the things we aim to achieve" (van knippenberg et al., 2004, p. 827). identity development demonstrates how individuals view themselves and their experiences (burke & stets, 2009; kegan, 2000; komives et al., 2005; montero et al., 2008). the process of developing a leadership identity as described by day et al. (2017), while not directly citing transformational learning, closely mirrors mezirow's transformational learning process. in transformational learning, individual experiences a disorienting dilemma that leads to self-examination and sometimes includes feelings of guilt or shame. this step then instigates a critical assessment of the individual’s epistemic, sociocultural, or psychic assumptions. from the critical evaluation and the self-discovery, an individual then seeks out others who have experienced and navigated similar change; finding others who have shared similar experiences leads an individual to explore options for new roles, relationships, actions, and planning a course of action. this course of action prompts the acquisition of the knowledge and skills needed to implement the plan. the individual then begins to try new roles and builds competence and self-confidence in the new roles and relationships. confidence then leads to the integration of new views in their life (mezirow, 2000. p. 22). another challenge that developing leaders face is that of longterm identity changes (burke & stets, 2009; day et al., 2017). 94 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 day et al. (2017) described long-term identity changes as challenging and externally initiated. these external events trigger conflict between the individual's current identity and the "new set of identity meanings" (p. 607). in leadership development programs, the external event may be exposing the leadership students to an ideal leader or examples of exceptional leadership. the student then compares their leader identities to that of the ideal, and the comparison stimulates a reconstruction of "the meaning of his or her currently held identity, which manifests itself in changing identity strengths" (day et al., 2017, p. 607). in their work on organizations' influence on identity, alvesson and willmott (2002) remarked that individuals "are continuously engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening, or revising the constructions that are productive of a precarious sense of coherence and distinctiveness" (p. 626). they also noted that stress, tension, specific events, transitions, and even surprises serve to raise an individual’s awareness of the quality of their self-identity and compels them to conduct more focused identity work. epistemological-transformational learning epistemology is "not what we know but our way of knowing” (kegan, 2000, p. 52, emphasis in original). epistemology is developing a new set of ideas about ideas, addressing questions such as where the idea came from, and who or what makes the idea true (kegan, 2000, p. 57). kegan (2000) studied adult cognitive development, and belenky et al. (1997) identified ways of knowing that they attributed explicitly to women. both of their theories show that transformational learning must move to the next level of understanding. kegan (2000) explored transformational learning and cognitive development. belenky et al. (1997) described the process of moving to the next level of development using similar underlying concepts of transformational learning, cognitive development, and ways of knowing and how they lay the foundation of understanding from the standpoint of women's beliefs, developmental opportunities, and challenges. received knowledge: listening to the voices of others. women who use this way of knowing may struggle with leadership. they have not developed their voice of authority. they rely on authorities outside themselves for answers. this approach emphasizes dualistic and concrete belief in the words of others. there is only right or wrong, black or white, good or bad (belenky et al., 1997). because these women put so much faith in the words of others, they have little confidence in themselves; in fact, they silence their own voices to hear others (belenky et al., 1997). the silencing of their voice aligns with langer's (2016) assertion of how strongly girls are impacted when unconditional information is taught. belenky et al. (1997) explained that the women who relied on received knowledge struggled when they were asked to produce original work. they could not construct knowledge independently because they believed that only an external authority could provide the right answer (belenky et al., 1997). subjective knowledge/self-authoring mind. from this level of development forward, the possibility of an individual identifying themselves as a leader becomes viable. belenky (1997), studying subjective knowledge, and kegan (1994) examining the self-authoring mindset, explored the process of individuals gaining the ability to consider themselves as knowledge authorities and create a new way to obtain information. according to kegan and lahey (2009), by using a self-authored mindset, an individual can examine the rules, opinions, and expectations of outside authorities and mediate among the authorities’ differing views utilizing the individual’s internal self-governing system. according to belenky et al. (1997), by using subjective knowledge, women found that truth and knowledge reside inside themselves, and they can negate answers that authority figures supplied. the women also learned more about themselves and their preferences, and they began to redefine themselves using their subjective knowledge. they also become their own authority, the author of their lives. becoming their own authority was a major developmental transformation that impacted the women’s self-concepts, relationships, self-esteem, behaviors, and morality (belenky et al., 1997). mindfulness in transformational learning transformational learning calls for mindful practice. according to dong et al. (2018), mindfulness could help integrate professional and personal identities. mccall (2010) pointed out that it is an individual's ability to learn from experiences, and not just have the experience, that is crucial. mindfulness is defined as "the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment" (kabat-zinn 2003, p. 145). langer (2016) shared that "from a mindful perspective, one's response to a particular situation is not an attempt to make the best choice from among available options but to create options" (p. 111) and the power of transformation lies within mindfulness (baer, 2017). transformation calls for "deep introspection and perception to ordinary experience" (baer, 2017, para. 11). deeper introspection of ordinary experiences brings the realization that "there is no such thing as 'ordinary experience.' everything is extraordinary" (baer, 2017, para. 11). this type of mindfulness is a way for an individual to be more aware of themself. mindfulness becomes a catalyst to a new way of ongoing learning and healing (baer, 2017; dong et al. 2018). mindfulness, according to birnbaum (2009) and dong et al. (2019), is a compassionate and non-judgmental mindset that is essential for the advancement of self-acceptance. conclusion if we want to see more women in prominent leadership roles where critical decisions are being made as educators and leadership development experts, we need to be aware of the underlying challenges faced by women trying to develop as leaders. these challenges are often woven in a web that 95 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 reinforces each other. leadership development is complex and challenging, even without the web of underlying challenges that women may face. transformational learning offers excellent opportunities for exploring frames of references and requires profound changes in social, educational, and individual ways of knowing. as leadership development professionals and educators, being aware of and understanding transformational learning and the particular issues faced by women will help us to effectively encourage and aid women during their transition to becoming visible, impactful leaders who are involved in critical decision making at every level in our society. reference alvesson, m., & willmott, h. 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(original work published 2011) microsoft word aggarwal_meta-analysis-final.docx volume 39, 2019 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 13 advancing women in leadership vol. 39, pp. 13-20, 2019 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper journey of women entrepreneurs for two decades: a meta-analytical review ansita aggarwal ansita aggarwal, entrepreneurship development institute of india, ansita04@ediindia.org accepted march 29, 2019 in this study, we exhibited meta-analytical consolidation of results from two decades of women entrepreneurship research. the objective of this study is to make an index of challenges, factors affecting challenges and moderators from the past studies. tables are also drawn which would briefly disclose all of them in a meticulous manner. the principal component analysis (pca) test is run on all those tables to determine the factors which are the consequential or principal one of all. findings are relevant for practitioners (educators, policy makers) and for future research. the findings of this research would be of utmost use for the researchers who would like to carry their research forward on the same line. it will support them in recognizing a concise number of challenges and factors affecting those challenges which needs to be taken as the foundation for any future research. this research also helps in identifying all the significant moderating variables from past studies. keywords: women entrepreneurship, challenges, factors affecting challenges, meta-analysis, moderators introduction women are no longer pigeonholed just as the home-maker or procreator, they are nowadays walking on the same pace as their male counterparts. this is also true for business as nowadays as women are becoming entrepreneurs maybe less in number than men but they have strong impact on a country’s economy (alam, jani, & omar, 2011; chakraborty, desai, ghosh, & majumdar, 2011).the entrepreneurs play crucial role in job creation, economic development and social change as the entrepreneurs starts a business that provides jobs and it led to the increase in the gross domestic product (gdp) of that country that finally helps in increasing the standard of living of peoople (carter, gyoshev, manev, & manolova, 2007; tambunan, 2009). in past entrepreneurship was frequently replaced with the word male pronoun. this has resulted in major shortcomings in the research of women entrepreneurs as they lacked theoretical grounding and explicit feminist analysis; omitted structural and power perspective, historical and cultural factors and used malegendered measuring instruments (ahl, 2006). the perspective of the society has changed towards women so much that now if they are managing their personal and work life together they are considered as proficient in their work (alam, jani, & omar, 2011). in india women entrepreneurs unable to get the same platform to display their virtuosity because they have barely started coming out of their shell and competing with men with the help of selfhelp groups, support from ngos, level of education and liberalisation (mathew & panchanatham, 2011). there are agencies like federation of ladies organization (flo), the technology development board (tdb) of department of science and technology, the entrepreneurship development institute of india (edii) and the federation of indian chambers of commerce and industry (ficci) which provides women with specialized training that empower them to start their own venture (mathew & panchanatham, 2011). most of the studies done on indian women entrepreneurs relate to the liberation and a handful of successful women entrepreneurs (mathew & panchanatham, 2011). the men and women are like two poles but still they have resemblance on things like motivation, risk-aversion, start-up activities, self-fulfillment, inclination towards the internal locus of control and so forth (alsos, isaksen, & ljunggren, 2006; coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006).women and men entrepreneurs are like two faces of a coin if they have similarity then they have dissimilarity too. morris (2006) observed that women entrepreneurs are tending to be older, married and to have children before starting business and they also exhibit a preference for being the sole owner and inhabit themselves in advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 14 lower-profit industries. they also manifest lower level of confidence as compared to their male compeer (coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006). objective the main objective of this paper was to make a synopsis of last 20-year studies with regards to the challenges faced by women entrepreneurs and factors affecting those challenges. the paper presents the list of all the main challenges, factors and moderating variables composed from the literature review. afterwards, it will curtail all the factors to give minimum factors with maximum loading. the paper is trying to represent following research problems: • what are the main challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in last 20 years? • what are the factors that affect women entrepreneurs’ success in last 20 years? • what are the moderating variables that affect women entrepreneurs’ success in last 20 years? methods to do so we utilise the principal component analysis (pca). pca is a multivariate analysis that transforms a number of correlated variables into a smaller number of uncorrelated variables called principal components. it helps in narrowing down the number of inter correlated variables to a smaller set of variables explaining overall variability. it produces new variables which are linear combinations of the original variables called principal components (pc’s) or factors with the first pc explaining the most variation. these new variables can be used as a base in further analysis. in this paper, we do a mixed research as here qualitative study has been done by doing a descriptive analysis on articles and quantitative study is done by getting questionnaire filled with women entrepreneurs. the questionnaire was sent to all those women entrepreneurs who at least have been sample for literature review the factors in the research were taken after an exhaustive research of numbers of papers from the last two decades. after scrutinizing all the studies, the following papers were selected for the research on the basis of the challenges covered. these studies incorporated renowned attributes which was necessary for this kind of research. table 1 shows 17 articles from which factors have been selected and their main information: table 1 (summary of past studies) study country of research entrepreneur's size business age research methodology number of entrepreneurs researched women men mathew &panchanatham, 2011 south india (india) not mentioned not mentioned qualitative 227 na alam, jani, & omar, 2011 southern region of malaysia not mentioned not mentioned quantitative 194 na cliff, 1998 greater vancouver area of british columbia, canada small sized not mentioned mixed 88 141 huarng et al, 2012 valencia not mentioned not mentioned quantitative 155 na shelton, 2006 not mentioned not mentioned not mentioned not mentioned na na alsos, isaksen, & ljunggren, 2006 norway not mentioned not mentioned mixed 79 281 manolova, 2007 (human & social capital) bulgaria small sized with less than 250 employees less than 6 years quantitative 255 287 coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006 15-county region in central new york not mentioned not mentioned mixed 103 na arora, hartman, & stoner, 1990 illinois and california small-sized with less than 100 employees at least 1 year quantitative 92 na advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 15 jennings & mcdougald, 2007 not mentioned not mentioned not mentioned qualitative na na ahl, 2006 not mentioned not mentioned not mentioned qualitative na na lee & seow, 2001 singapore not mentioned not mentioned quantitative 102 na tambunan, 2009 member countries of the asean small and medium enterprises not mentioned qualitative na na das, 1999 tamil nadu and kerala (southern india) small and medium enterprises at least 5 years qualitative 35 na verheul et al, 2011 netherlands nascent entrepreneurs less than 42 months quantitative 745 aziz, 2004 national capital region (ncr) not mentioned not mentioned quantitative 264 na chakraborty, desai, ghosh, & majumdar, 2011 kolkata (india) not mentioned not mentioned quantitative 300 na sample for questionnaire the factors which were selected from all the above studies needed to be confirmed by the women entrepreneurs. data were collected through mail survey of women entrepreneurs in gujarat state. the sample frame consisted of 500 women entrepreneurs, and we received responses from 234, representing a 46.8% response rate. due to missing values of the responses 7 samples were discarded from this research and finally 227 samples were then processed and analysed. this sample was large enough to allow sophisticated statistical analyses such as the principal component analysis applied in this research according to gorsuch, 1983. challenges faced by women entrepreneurs a women entrepreneur has to play diverse roles in her life and that too with same passion. most of the time she has to give more significance to their primary role of being mother and wife (ahl, 2006; ; arora, hartman, & stoner, 1990; chakraborty, desai, ghosh, & majumdar, 2011; coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006; das, 1999; jennings & mcdougald, 2007; lee & seow, 2001; mathew & panchanatham, 2011; tambunan, 2009). a research done in canada has a totally opposite result as that shows that women entrepreneurs are able to manage their work and personal life easily when they are involved in entrepreneurship (mathew & panchanatham, 2011). they are unable to balance their work and personal life because of the factors like role overload, health maintenance problems, poor time management, dependent care issues and lack of sufficient support networks (das, 1999; ; jennings & mcdougald, 2007; lee & seow, 2001;mathew & panchanatham, 2011;tambunan, 2009). the intensity of the problem varies according to age, marital status, education, experience and level of income (aziz, 2004; das, 1999; lee & seow, 2001; mathew & panchanatham, 2011). the level of education, training and past experience can be identified under the heading of human capital. human capital isof two types generalised human capital and specific human c apital. generalized human capital comprises an essential part of growth but specific human capital has more superiority towards growth of a business (carter, gyoshev, manev, & manolova, 2007). women entrepreneurs face problem in making into the closed knit group of men network in male-dominated industry (carter, gyoshev, manev, & manolova, 2007). as observed by manolova (2007), the other important type of capital is human capital which consists of social network an entrepreneur has at his own disposal to provide him with valuable guidance. the contact can be both formal and informal which help entrepreneurs in dynamic and cutthroat environment (carter, gyoshev, manev, & manolova, 2007). women entrepreneurs who recently got married and are young having lower level of life satisfaction and marital satisfaction is more prone to get expose to work-home role conflict (arora, hartman, & stoner, 1990; jennings & mcdougald, 2007). one can deftly see the traverse among business and personal dimensions of life in women entrepreneurs. some factors like marital status, number of children and hours worked which were having significant influence in past studies didn’t have any effect on small business women entrepreneurs (arora, hartman, & stoner, 1990). the launch stage of the business endures the most crucial time for the women entrepreneurs (arora, hartman, & stoner, 1990). women struggle in getting equity capital for their business because of structural barriers; it is their strategic choice and lack of imperative skills and expertise. women entrepreneurs are seen to be growing at slow pace for the first 19 months after registration; this reveals that there are inconsistencies between men and women funding cognizance and actions (alsos, isaksen, & ljunggren, 2006; rao, 2018). these inconsistencies advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 16 disappear as they enter the stage of controlling their financial capital (alsos, isaksen, & ljunggren, 2006; rao, 2018). the inimical cognizance that women entrepreneurs have less probability to succeed in their business than men have resulted in less trust by the financial institutions on them (coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006, rao, 2018). this shows that how finance is one of the most significant hurdle in women entrepreneurs’ life. factors affecting entry of women entrepreneurs women enter entrepreneurship as they are able to acquire flexibility in balancing their prominent role of being a mother and house-maker, which is a discourse loosely defined by the society (ahl, 2006; alam, jani, & omar, 2011; aziz, 2004; das, 1999; jennings & mcdougald, 2007). women entrepreneurs in a developed country inspire to become entrepreneurs because of their need for achievement and in developing countries it is because of push and pull factor (alam, jani, & omar, 2011). women emerge as entrepreneurs when they realize that there is no other appealing professional avenue for them. juxtaposition men emerge as an entrepreneur is to achieve economic liberty (carter, gyoshev, manev, & manolova, 2007). women entrepreneurs are classified as chance, forced or pushed and created or pulled entrepreneurs (tambunan, 2009; das, 1999). this classification has its roots in the motivation or reason behind starting business (tambunan, 2009; das, 1999). women are tending to bend toward entrepreneurship when they encounter the problem of glass ceiling (das, 1999). women entrepreneurs are most likely to hand-pick one or more of the strategies i.e. role reduction, role elimination and rolesharing on the basis of their internal family salience and accessible external resources. the strategy manifested by women entrepreneurs is pivotal for the success of the organization and for personal satisfaction (shelton, 2006). work-family conflict can be managed at varied level i.e. individual level and couple level. women entrepreneurs stand tall here by using different strategies in comparison to men entrepreneurs like they are more tilted towards engaging in integrating strategy than segmenting strategy, more complaisant towards family domain than work domain at individual level (jennings & mcdougald, 2007). at couple level women entrepreneurs does not get that much support from their spouse in comparison to their male equivalent, they are also tended to delay their venture development owing to family contemplation (jennings & mcdougald, 2007). women entrepreneurs are able to leave their mark on the canvass of developed countries like australia, canada, the germany, united kingdom, and the united states. the prevalent environment in the developing countries is unsuitable for the growth of women entrepreneurs (mathew &panchanatham, 2011). women are setting their foot in entrepreneurship at approximately twice the rate of men (alam, jani, & omar, 2011; huarng et al, 2012). women entrepreneurs have a unique perspective to overcome the problem, discern opportunities, human relations and management approaches (coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006; huarng et al, 2012). majority of the women entrepreneurs start their business with less finance (alsos, isaksen, & ljunggren, 2006; coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006; tambunan, 2009). there are many explanations of this like lower ambition, their choice of industry (service), perception of part-time business, education level, wealth, income, work and life experience etc(alsos, isaksen, & ljunggren, 2006). factors affecting success of women entrepreneurs main dilemma at this point is that women entrepreneurs decide for themselves whether they would like to grow further or it is decided by prevailing environment and the type of venture they are running. women entrepreneurs need to decide upon the threshold because that is the voluntary and licit option they have at their disposal (coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006). majority of times women entrepreneurs doesn’t want to grow after reaching a particular target as they feel that it would affect their personal life. this decision is taken by them at their personal level and that does not get affect by any prevailing environment (coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006). family support plays an immensely influential and significant role in maintaining emotional stability of women entrepreneurs both in start-up and expansion of their business (alam, jani, & omar, 2011; jennings & mcdougald, 2007; das, 1999). the strong social ties among the women entrepreneurs facilitate them in brain storming and troubleshooting. this type of ties is not extremely conventional among the women entrepreneurs as there are many social barriers (alam, jani, & omar, 2011). the women entrepreneurs consider more likelihood of attaining success if they become entrepreneurs because of their internal motivation (alam, jani, & omar, 2011; das, 1999; mathew &panchanatham, 2011; verheul et al, 2011). the ever-changing role of technology has currently provided women with same opportunities as their male counterparts. as now women can deal with their clients on the internet which reduces the chance of discrimination. the information and communication technology do not affect the success of women entrepreneurs directly (alam, jani, & omar, 2011). the chances of women entrepreneurs’ success depend on the factors like possession of business degree, experience at management level or industry level or ownership and level of household responsibilities (carter, gyoshev, manev, & manolova, 2007; cliff, 1998; huarng et al, 2012). furthermore, factors like hard work, quality of product, uniqueness of design and management skills equally contribute towards the success of women entrepreneurs (das, 1999). in transitional economies women entrepreneurs take the escape route whenever adverse or combative situations prevail in the industry. female entrepreneurs face more difficulty in acquiring possession of resources than men entrepreneurs (aziz, 2004; carter, gyoshev, manev, & manolova, 2007; tambunan, 2009). their belonging to information technology industry face rolestress because of resource inadequacy, role overload and advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 17 personal inadequacy, as the essential factors (aziz, 2004).male entrepreneurs are more likely to possess educational degree in technical and business-related subjects than women entrepreneurs (coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006). they are also tending to select partners with pertinent skills and not on the basis of familial connections like women (coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006). they also give weightage to the intellectual property issues at the launch stage of the business. this basically differs with men and women entrepreneurs in their growth prospect and scaling up of their business (coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006). women entrepreneurs role-stress and in turn effect on ambition of growth is majorly affected by marital status of the women. the reason behind this unbridgeable gap is that most of the factors affecting role-stress exert an influence on married women only (aziz, 2004). women entrepreneurs in india can be classified into two groups one who are working from home and one who works full-time outside her protective space. women who are working full-time faces more stress than home-based working entrepreneurs and experience less satisfaction but scores more on self-esteem (chakraborty, desai, ghosh, & majumdar, 2011). factors affecting growth of women entrepreneurs every person measures success from their own viewpoint. some of the researchers agree to measure success on the basis of economic or financial measures or extrinsic outcomes which include return on assets, sales, profits, number of employees etc; and non-pecuniary measures or intrinsic outcomes, such as customer satisfaction, personal development, independence and personal achievement (alam, jani, & omar, 2011). as it is difficult to measure non-pecuniary measures so to measure success or growth, size of the firm and hiring of new employees is taken as a base. the growth of an organisation moderately depends upon entrepreneur’s intent and his enthusiasm (cliff, 1998). the size and pace of the business headed by women entrepreneurs would be small and slow as compared to the male entrepreneurs (alsos, isaksen, & ljunggren, 2006; cliff, 1998; coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006; jennings & mcdougald, 2007).the business size threshold determined by women entrepreneurs would be at an earlier stage than the male entrepreneurs (alsos, isaksen, & ljunggren, 2006; cliff, 1998). the exception here is the educated women who would like to grow their business further (alsos, isaksen, & ljunggren, 2006). women entrepreneurs and their business demographics do not affect the growth aspiration. the factors which were considered important in other studies like education level, gender discrimination and type of business came to be the least censorious among all factors (coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006). they set this threshold so as to manage their principal role smoothly. they also adopt for calculative growth so as to avoid any chances of losses which make them an attractive avenue for banks (cliff, 1998). another reason which was identified as the crucial factor of slow growth and disappointing performance is lack of capital. capital or the financial resource is supreme of all resources as it can be transmuted to other resources when entailed by the entrepreneur (alsos, isaksen, & ljunggren, 2006; carter, gyoshev, manev, & manolova, 2007). the reason of different growth aspiration among women depends upon their reason of entering the business whether it is push or pulls strategy. if they establish their business because of pull strategy then they are more likely to be interested in expanding their business further (coombes, miyasaki, morris, & watters, 2006). nascent entrepreneurs who have fear of failure in their business have low probability of having any aspiration to expand their business further. even the entrepreneurs who have the relevant skills for the business do not have anything to prove to anybody so they also lack growth aspiration. age of the business have also come as a surprising element as the newer business are more interested in growing further than older business. gender has not come up to be a relevant controlling variable in case of the nascent entrepreneur’s growth aspiration (verheul et al, 2011). to maintain the control over the organization, to spare a reasonable amount of time and energy and balancing personal and work life together most of the women are uninterested in growing above a particular line. they have revealed reasons for halting their growth like threshold size attained, size is not that important, substitute size with other business goals, doesn’t want to bear cost and struggle, external factors are to be blamed for and no long-term planning for the business. the women entrepreneurs who want to grow would like to be on the lookout so as to avoid any complication in future (cliff, 1998). result and discussion the pca has been done on the tables as mentioned above. before doing pca the reliability of data is tested using kmo and bartlett’s test. the result of the same is shown in table 2. table 2 kmo and bartlett’s test kmo and bartlett's test kaiser-meyer-olkin measure of sampling adequacy. .628 bartlett's test of sphericity approx. chi-square 1562.503 df 91 sig. .000 challenges faced the analysis of articles of the last two decades has resulted in various challenges faced by women entrepreneurs who are related to growth, success, role conflict and problems faced by them. presently, growth and success are the main challenges advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 18 which need to be explored further in detail so that it can become a strong pillar of any country’s economy. factors affecting challenges i have done pca on the table constructed after taking all the factors of the last two decades. there were a total of 25 factors and out of these 8 factors were extracted having maximum loading of around 87%. table 3 shows the result of pca rotated component matrix: table 3 rotated component matrix component 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 accessible external resources .893 information & communication technology .887 strong social ties .878 risk attitudes .771 obstacles encountered .689 support network .884 time management .821 quality of health .669 role isolation .940 role expectation conflict .791 inter role distance .760 self-role distance -.506 .624 business-satisfaction .881 personal characteristics .820 role erosion .747 goal & aspiration -.946 motives for starting the business .942 dependent care role overload .814 role stagnation .694 perceived financial health .534 .578 business age .906 role ambiguity .737 type of venture .548 .670 life satisfaction .595 the factors which were combined together to form new variable on the basis of factor analysis is shown in table 4. table 4 the factors which were combined together to form a new variable socio-techno risk perspective family support & health work-home diversification motivation personal – business satisfaction business age work-life balance role clarity strong social ties support network role overload motives for starting the business business satisfaction business age life satisfaction inter role distance advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 19 information & communication technology time management role stagnation personal characteristics role ambiguity role expectation conflict accessible external resources quality of health role erosion role isolation risk attitude obstacles encountered moderating variables the pca done on the table constructed after taking all the factors of the last two decades. there was a total of 24 moderating variables and out of these analysis is done on 14 variables. the dropped variables are responsibility for kids, firm size, monthly income, percentage of equity capital, sales revenue, ethnicity size of the family, hours of housework and gender. these variables have been dropped because some were difficult to measure and some were unimportant. in these total 14 moderating variables pca has given 4 variables with the maximum loading. after analysis 3 variables have been selected as business age has already made its place in factors affecting challenges. table 5 shows the result of pca: table 5 component matrixa component 1 2 3 4 kids at home .942 age of children .939 age of children .907 age .707 marital status .692 birth hierarchy number of employees .878 education .826 past working experience -.576 type of business .791 conflict with family .775 source of funds .719 firm age -.803 partner .651 extraction method: principal component analysis. a. 4 components extracted. table 6 shows the factors which were combined together to form a new variable. table 6 factors affecting women entrepreneurs home status business status personal status marital status type of business education age source of funds past working experience kids at home conflict with family number of employees age of children limitations this study tried to understand the woman’s entrepreneurs’ circumstances in present world and also to guide the future researchers in their further study. for doing so, the data have been collected from women entrepreneurs from the state of gujarat so it can be done by taking women from different parts of india as that can change the result. the moderating variables which have not been taken in the study to make it easy for the analysis. future implications this paper can be taken as a milestone for researches to be carried on in the future as researchers can take the factors from this paper only. this needs to be studied further as in most of the researches done above marital status has been taken as a moderator or the controlling variable, but in fact this has come to represent a noteworthy factor on the success of women entrepreneurs. this needs to be explored further in detail by the future researchers. the researchers can also look in the present scenario and make addition to the factors chosen here. this needs to be done as according to changing environment women entrepreneurs have also changed a lot. conclusion this article describes a multiple-attribute approach based on the use of principal component analysis, aimed at helping future researchers, educators and policy makers to understand the women entrepreneurs’ circumstances. an application of the methodology using actual data retrieved from women entrepreneurs residing in the area of gujarat. after due analysis it has been observed that 8 variables need to be studied further which are socio-techno risk perspective, family support & health, work-home diversification, motivation, personal-business satisfaction, business age, work-life balance and role clarity. the advancing women in leadership journal-volume 39 20 results have also generated 3 moderators which need to be taken into consideration which are home, business and personal status of women entrepreneur. growth and success have come out to be the main challenges which need to be explored in detail in future. references: abdi, h., & williams, l. j. (2010). principal component analysis. wiley interdisciplinary reviews: computational statistics, 2(4), 433-459. ahl, h. (2006). why research on women entrepreneurs needs new directions. entrepreneurship theory and practice, 30(5), 595-621. alam, s. s., jani, m. f. m., & omar, n. a. (2011). an empirical study of success factors of women entrepreneurs in southern region in malaysia. international journal of economics and finance, 3(2), 166. alsos, g. a., isaksen, e. j., &ljunggren, e. (2006).new venture financing and subsequent business growth in men–and women–led businesses. entrepreneurship theory and practice, 30(5), 667-686. aziz, m. (2004). role stress among women in the indian information technology sector. women in management review, 19(7), 356-363. cliff, j.e. (1998). does one size fit all? exploring the relationship between attitudes toward growth, gender, and business size.journal of business venturing, 13(6), 523-542. das, m. (1999). women entrepreneurs from southern india: an exploratory study. the journal of entrepreneurship, 8(2), 147-163. desai, m., majumdar, b., chakraborty, t., & ghosh, k. (2011). the second shift: working women in india. gender in management: an international journal, 26(6), 432-450. huarng, k. h., mas-tur, a., & yu, t. h. k. (2012).factors affecting the success of women entrepreneurs. international entrepreneurship and management journal, 8(4), 487-497. jennings, j. e., &mcdougald, m. s. (2007). work-family interface experiences and coping strategies: implications for entrepreneurship research and practice. academy of management review, 32(3), 747-760. lee siew kim, j., &seow ling, c. (2001).work-family conflict of women entrepreneurs in singapore. women in management review, 16(5), 204-221. manolova, t. s., carter, n. m., manev, i. m., & gyoshev, b. s. (2007).the differential effect of men and women entrepreneurs' human capital and networking on growth expectancies in bulgaria. entrepreneurship theory and practice, 31(3), 407-426. mathew, r. v., & panchanatham, n. (2011). an exploratory study on the work-life balance of women entrepreneurs in south india. asian academy of management journal, 16(2). morris, m. h., miyasaki, n. n., watters, c. e., &coombes, s. m. (2006). the dilemma of growth: understanding venture size choices of women entrepreneurs. journal of small business management, 44(2), 221-244. rao, d. k. (2018). growth and development of women entrepreneurs in india challenges and empowerment. growth, 3(1). shelton, l. m. (2006). female entrepreneurs, work–family conflict, and venture performance: new insights into the work–family interface. journal of small business management, 44(2), 285-297. stoner, c. r., hartman, r. ., & arora, r. (1990). work-home role conflict in female owners of small businesses: an exploratory study. journal of small business management, 28(1), 30. tambunan, t. (2009). women entrepreneurship in asian developing countries: their development and main constraints. journal of development and agricultural economics, 1(2), 027-040. verheul, i., & van mil, l. (2011). what determines the growth ambition of dutch early-stage entrepreneurs?. international journal of entrepreneurial venturing, 3(2), 183-207. advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, summer 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] gendered emotion management and perceptions of affective culture in a military nonprofit organization jamie l. callahan texas a&m university abstract this paper explores the emotion work conducted by men and women in a nonprofit organization and their perceptions of the feeling rules in the organization. the study found that qualitative differences showing that women performed more emotion work than men were supported by a quantitative survey that measured perceptions of affective culture. specifically, women were more likely than men to say that the culture of the organization required members to be affectively neutral (p<.007). keywords: emotion management, gender, air force, volunteers gendered emotion management and perceptions of affective culture in a military nonprofit organization do gender and gender role affect how organization members feel about their organization’s culture? a number of studies highlight that very young boys and girls handle emotions quite similarly; however, as they mature, girls begin to respond differently than boys in many situations (brody & hall, 1993). one must therefore question whether such differences are due to gender per se or are a consequence of social conditions. damasio (1994) points out that emotions have both a “nature” and a “nurture” component, and empirical research has supported the concept of a strong social influence on emotion patterns (simon & nath, 2004). thus, while gender may well imply different emotional perceptions in adulthood, socialization may well modify individuals’ emotional responses. that is, socialization may not only affect how one file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer2006/index.html experiences emotions, socialization may also determine how individuals perceive the environment that drives emotion. it is, therefore, very possible that women have different emotional responses to situations not only because of gender differences per se, but also they have learned to perceive situations differently than men. in this paper, i focus on “situation” in terms of organizational culture and, more specifically, in terms of the emotional or affective aspects of organizational culture. i look at men and women in a military nonprofit organization and explore differences in both how they manage their emotions and how they perceive their organization's culture determines the way they are expected to deal with their feelings. the present study was an outcome of a much larger study that looked at how patterns of managing emotions are associated with actions in a nonprofit organization that is largely affiliated with the united states air force (fabian, 1998). a key finding of that study was that men and women in that organization had different patterns of emotion management. specifically, women performed proportionately more emotion management than did men; this was manifested particularly in actions associated with the culture of the organization. the present study further explores male and female differences in emotion management in the organizational context. in addition, the current study builds on earlier work that looked at differences in perceptions of leadership among men and women (alima-metcalfe, 1995). the study presented here explores how perceptions of organizational affective culture differ for male and female leaders. because the organization has strong ties to the armed forces, the organizational culture is heavily influenced by the military culture. the culture of the military has traditionally been considered highly masculine (dunivin, 1988; snyder, 2003). snyder (2003) articulates many of the socialization practices that stress a celebration of the masculine at the expense of the feminine. because emotion is traditionally considered feminine (simon & nath, 2004), it is reasonable to expect that affective neutrality would be perceived more favorably in a military culture. in such environments, women tend to adopt a perspective of “ungendered professionalism” (rosen, knudson, & fancher, 2003) and attempt to appear as one of the guys (dunivin, 1988). therefore, i believed that women would be more likely than men to emphasize the socially-desirable state of affective-neutrality in this organizational culture. conceptual framework this study is grounded in emotion systems theory (hochschild, 1979) and informed by parsons’ (1951) conceptions of organizational culture, with a focus on military culture. therefore, this section includes an overview of emotion systems theory, especially as it relates to affective culture, and organizational culture theory, in particular, as it relates to emotion systems theory. the section ends with background on the military culture that served as the context for this particular study. emotion and emotion systems theory philosophers have pondered the meaning and nature of emotions for centuries. the study of emotion in organizations is primarily a 20th century phenomenon. until the 1980s, most studies of emotion in organizations were confined to issues of job satisfaction and motivation. hochschild’s (1979, 1983) explorations in the sociology of emotion were a milestone in looking at emotion in organizations. since then, the concept of organizations as emotional spaces has been gaining increasing acceptance (bolton & boyd, 2003). hochschild referred to her work as “emotion systems theory” because it is comprised of “a system composed of individual acts of ‘emotion work,’ social ‘feeling rules,’ and a great variety of exchanges between people in private and public life” (hochschild, 1983, p. ix-x).emotion management is defined by hochschild (1983) as the active attempt by an individual to change, in either quality or degree, an emotion held by that individual. she identifies two primary types of emotion management–suppression and evocation. suppression of emotion occurs when an individual tries to eliminate or, at the very least, subdue an emotion that is present. evocation is just the opposite. this type of emotion management occurs when an individual tries to draw forth an emotion that is not present. the second major component of hochschild’s work is that of “feeling rules” (1979, 1983). feeling rules are the “socially shared, albeit often latent (not thought about unless probed at)” (hochschild, 1979, p. 563) guidelines that govern how individuals wish to feel. they guide the expression of emotion, and they guide the attempt to internalize what is an acceptable emotion (as defined by the situational rule). feeling rules are embedded within a culture and thus constitute an important part of the affective culture of the organization. organizational affective culture. in general, organizational culture may be considered the internalized and institutionalized patterns of beliefs, symbols, and assumptions within an organization (parsons, 1951). while controversial, parsons’ perspective of organizational culture has been revitalized (frank & fahrbach, 1999) as an effective means of understanding complex organizational cultures and is now considered “strikingly contemporary” (turner, 1999, p. 17). one type of culture within an organization is affective culture. parsons used the concept of affectivity-affective neutrality as a means to describe a system’s affective culture (ritzer, 1992). affective culture is similar to conceptions of social display rules (ekman & friesen, 1969) or feeling rules (hochschild, 1979) that guide either how people believe they should appear affectively or how they believe they should actually feel. affective culture is a more comprehensive term that goes beyond rules and includes the general assumptions and values that guide how individuals should experience and express emotions in an organization. thus, the emotions that are displayed within an organization may be more aligned with the organizational culture than with the individual’s personal experience or desired expression of emotion (poynter, 2002). the organizational culture may foster either emotional freedom or constraints for the individual (ratner, 2000). however, once individuals step into an organizational culture, they unconsciously adopt the values of that affective culture in order to thrive (rafaeli & worline, 2001). organizational culture in the air force because organizations are subsystems of larger social systems, it is important to describe the cultures of organizations as they relate to the institutionalized values of the systems in which they are embedded (parsons, 1956). although the organization presented here is not formally affiliated with the united states air force, its relationship with the air force and aerospace industry and its overwhelming number of current or former air force personnel as members suggest that the air force may be considered the superordinate system for this organization. indeed, it may even largely represent the culture of this air force non-profit organization. the air force culture, of course, is embedded within the larger culture of the military. many would argue that the culture of the military is best exemplified by the famous words uttered by general douglas macarthur—duty, honor, country (taylor & rosenbach, 1996). however, these three words are perhaps more indicative of the espoused values held within the military. the latent or operational basic assumptions which truly define the nature of the culture can best be characterized as having a “combat, masculine-warrior” orientation (dunivin, 1994, p. 533). although the military conducts many different kinds of activities, combat is the defining activity of any military organization. throughout history, a fundamental value of all militaries has been the preparation for and execution of battle, or, in other words, combat (janowitz, 1971). this connection to combat may reflect an affective culture that broadly encourages emotional neutrality so as not to appear weak or incompetent (rafaeli & worline, 2001). the masculine-warrior image is the second component of this view of the military culture. dunivin describes the origin of this image: as an institution comprised primarily of men, its culture is shaped by men. soldiering is viewed as a masculine role—the profession of war, defense, and combat is defined by society as men’s work. thus, a deeply entrenched “cult of masculinity” (with accompanying masculine norms, values, and lifestyles) pervades military culture. (dunivin, 1994, p. 533-534) this underlying combat, masculine-warrior culture is based upon a traditional model of the military that “espouses conservative moralistic ideology as reflected in its ethics and customs” (dunivin, 1994, p. 534). the traditional model reinforces socialization practices that complement and, in turn, foster the masculine norms and values of the underlying military culture. the military typically recruits and rewards those individuals who embody the combat, masculine-warrior ideology. this has resulted in an officer corps that is dominated by white men who perceive themselves as masculine warriors. however, the changing perspectives in american culture have begun to influence the traditional foundations of the military culture. a new model of the military, the evolving model, has begun to challenge the traditional model. this evolving model is marked by more inclusionary beliefs, policies, and practices, largely as a response to social pressure (dunivin, 1994). the underlying premise of this alternative model is that the best-qualified person should be selected for assignments, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. despite the growing influence of the evolving model among many military members, the military is still marked by the underlying culture of the combat, masculine-warrior. thus, conflict and change are inevitable, yet the outcome is not certain. as dunivin (1994) points out, this uncertainty leads to an enduring culture that embodies both change, with the evolving model, and continuity, with the traditional model. since the air force is the newest of the military services, one might think that the culture would have shifted more toward the evolving model than the traditional model. moreover, as compared to the other service branches, the air force has a higher percentage of non-combat occupations which suggests that there is potential for a corresponding higher rate of female participation (stoddard, 1993). as the evolving model opens more occupational specialties to women, that percentage will probably increase. nevertheless, stoddard (1993) found a smaller proportion of women in air force roles than in the other services, despite the fact that the air force had fewer combat roles and occupational specialties that women could enter. thus, stoddard (1993) concluded that the limited involvement of women in the air force could not be due to organizational constraints based on the nature of tasks but rather “might well be an informal consequence of gender preferences by its leadership” (p. 30). in fact, such a gender preference among senior air force leaders was made public by then air force chief of staff, general merrill mcpeak when he testified before congress in 1991: …if ordered to choose between an inferior male pilot and a much better female pilot, he would choose the male. ‘i admit it doesn’t make much sense, but that’s the way i feel about it,’ he said. in other words, for general mcpeak the issue is not job performance or ability, or even military effectiveness. the existence of female combat pilots would simply offend his sense of proper gender roles. (dunivin, 1994, p. 536-537) more examples of the gender preferences institutionalized in the air force can be found at the elite proving ground of the united states air force academy (usafa). academy graduates, in particular, are often considered to be the professional soldiers who are responsible for being the bearers of the military culture (janowitz, 1971). although recently removed, the inscription that for decades greeted every individual who approached usafa read, “bring me men.” this was a very clear message to cadets being indoctrinated into the air force culture. further, the memorials of fighter aircraft that are prominently displayed on the terrazzo at usafa serve as reminders that it has only been ten years since women first had the opportunity to fly these aircraft (williams, 2003). the recent scandal of rape allegations at usafa (weller, 2004) also highlights systemic power distinctions between men and women in the culture. nationally, in a five-year college experience, 20 to 25% of college women are sexually victimized (i.e. threatened, attempted, or completed sexual assault or rape) (national institute of justice report, 2000); however, at usafa, 26% of female cadets surveyed indicated that they had been victims of either sexual assault/attempted assault (19%), or rape/attempted rape (7%) in a four-year period (mcintyre, 2004). further, these female cadets perceived that the culture discouraged them from reporting these assaults; this may shed light on the notion that these women may have different perceptions than their male colleagues regarding the nature of their organization’s culture. despite the dominance of the traditional model of military culture, (dunivin, 1988) this evolving model of military culture certainly influences the air force. the changing mindsets of internal air force members and external forces for social change have combined to create a space for cultural change. a starting point for this change is increased diversity, resulting in the integration of women and minorities into most air force specialty fields. this shift in diversity was based upon laws and policies that required the acceptance, or at least broader official tolerance, of minorities, women, and homosexuals. these civilian directives are generally accepted by and eventually assimilated into the air force because the service adheres to the belief that the military is at the disposal of the civilian political leadership of a nation, not because war is simply an extension of politics, but by other means (paret, 1986). thus, when given a directive, even one that conflicts with the very nature of the air force culture, the air force follows the directive, even if reluctantly. in this manner, the evolving model of organizational culture may begin to take a foothold. method sample this report presents quantitative analyses and results, drawing upon data from a larger, primarily qualitative, study (fabian, 1998) using naturalistic inquiry techniques (lincoln & guba, 1985). the research site was a nonprofit organization associated with aerospace and national defense. the organization identifies heavily with the united states air force because the majority of its members are current or former usaf personnel. the sample from this study was drawn from the paid professional staff and volunteers from the board of directors and the senior state leadership. the organization had over 150,000 members. most volunteer members are air force retirees between 61-70 years of age, while paid staff is generally under 30; most volunteers were retirees from the usaf, with 21-30 years of service, who had been members of the nonprofit organization for 10-20 years. measures data were collected using a survey, the organizational affect assessment questionnaire (oaaq). the five items that comprise the oaaq were drawn from two studies on role expectations and conflict using parsons' (1951) affectivity-affective neutrality pattern variable (podell, 1966, 1967). this instrument was selected because it was the only instrument in the literature which had explicitly used parsons’ (1951) conception of affective culture. the original studies focused on marriage and family contexts, so the items were modified for use in an organizational setting for this study (see table 1); namely, the term family was adjusted to read organization instead. the five likert-type items had face validity and had shown reliability in the earlier studies (podell, 1966, 1967). the cronbach alpha performed on the data from the present study was .72. this was considered to be a sufficient indicator of reliability for a scale with less than ten items (cortina, 1993; spector, 1992). the survey was administered to 242 members of the professional staff, the board of directors, and the leadership of the states. there were 153 responses received from 119 men and 34 women. as part of the larger study from which the present findings were derived (fabian, 1998), interviews were conducted with 14 men and 9 women who had completed surveys. the interviews were approximately one hour in length and sought information related to incidents in which emotions had been managed. these interviews were coded based on hochschild’s (1979) and parsons’ (1951) theories of emotion and culture. disinterested colleagues performed coding and data interpretation verification for structural corroboration and consensual validation (eisner, 1991) of what could be equated to the internal reliability (lecompte & preissle, 1993) of the qualitative component of the larger study. the present study incorporated the emotion management actions coded in the larger study. for the purpose of the present study, the number of emotion management incidents mentioned by each participant was tabulated and served as the basis for measuring the amount of emotion management conducted by participants. analyses a t-test was conducted using the 153 survey respondents to determine if the qualitative differences found between men and women in the performance of emotion management could be supported by the quantitative survey that captured perceptions of the affective culture, or feeling rules, in the organization (see table 2). as noted, the two comparison groups (men and women) differed in size (119 men, 34 women). however, a homogeneity of variance test indicated that the distribution of the two groups was not significantly different (p<.500). therefore, further comparison between the two groups was warranted. finally, an anova was conducted using the interview participants (n=23) (see table 4). the purpose of this test was to determine if there were gender differences associated with both the oaaq and the emotion management actions among the interviewed participants. results a t-test was performed to determine if women and men, in general, had a different perception of the extent to which displays of emotion were accepted in the organization. a significant difference would both support and help to explain previous findings showing that women perform more emotion management (callahan, 2000b; fabian, 1998). that is, women may perform more emotion management as compared to their male counterparts because of their perceptions of organizational feeling rules (i.e., affective culture). a higher score on this scale indicates a perception of a more affective culture; a lower score indicates a more affectively neutral culture. based on the qualitative findings, one would expect to find that women perceived a more affectively neutral culture in this organization (i.e., they would have a lower score). the mean score for women was 19.7; the mean for men was 21.7. the difference between the male and female scores on the affective culture scale was significant at p<.01 (see table 2). a more detailed analysis of the interviewed sample was then conducted. the descriptive statistics for this analysis are in table 3. an anova revealed that the interviewed men and women differed not only in their perceptions of the affective culture, but also in their performance of emotion management (see table 4). the women perceived the culture as more affectively neutral than the men did (m=21.07, f=18.00, p<.05). further, women conducted significantly more emotion management actions (m=5.85, f=10.22, p<.02). discussion the quantitative findings in this study supported the qualitative findings in the larger study. women performed more emotion management than men, and women were more likely to perceive that the culture of the organization required affective neutrality (i.e., emotional suppression). thus, the emotion management performed by women in this organization may largely stem from their perceptions of this organization’s air force-based combat, masculine-warrior culture. certainly the male dominated culture of the organization and the more pronounced minority status of women in the organization may be a factor in the higher levels of emotion management conducted by women. this concept is supported by the work of simon and nath (2004) who suggest that lower status individuals experience more negative emotions that may require more management to conceal. it is also possible that women are more in tune with their feelings as some literature on encoding (expressing) and decoding (interpreting) emotion suggests (gallois, 1993; mcconatha & deaner, 1994). women may also report more instances of suppressing anger than men because of the negative cultural perception associated with women expressing such emotions. research suggests that assertiveness is perceived more favorably when it is performed by men than when performed by women (davis, larosa, & foshee, 1992). male volunteers made a variety of comments that highlighted their perception that women should engage in volunteer and professional activities that served to support their husbands. there was also a belief that women had not risen to the highest leadership ranks of the organization because those who were otherwise eligible tended to be too masculine or too aggressive. in other words, they did not fit the cultural model either for women or for organizational leaders. in any case, there is a power differential between men and women in this organization that suggests a need for the women to manage their stronger negative emotions in order to succeed (davis et. al., 1992; gallois, 1993). when individuals perceive a narrow range of display rules, they are more likely to feel disempowered and dissatisfied (halberstadt, dunsmore, & denham, 2001). even in those situations when women do achieve higher leadership positions in this organization, they are unlikely to feel that they have the power to facilitate change. dunivin (1988) and tetreault (1988) argued more than ten years ago that women in the military did not have a critical mass to have a voice for change. because the military is still more than 85% male (snyder, 2003), the lack of critical mass is probably still true for the active duty military, however, it is definitely true of this military-influenced organization which has an even smaller percentage of women members. rindfleish & sheridan (2003) point out that a simple increase of women is a necessary but not a sufficient factor in changing organizational culture. to handle their relative lack of power within a masculine organization, women in the air force “internalized the male-defined work identity and role” (dunivin, 1988, p. 64). a similar phenomenon may be occurring among the female volunteers. this internalization may have created a kind of dissonance for the women. as noted in the larger, qualitative study of this organization (callahan, 2000a; 2002), female volunteers discussed the importance of not only maintaining a leadership identity among the male volunteers, but also maintaining relationships with the wives of the other leaders. they seem to have recognized that many of the men, at least subconsciously, considered the wives to be the peer group of the female volunteers. but, by becoming active as volunteers, these women were no longer considered peers by the wives of the male volunteers. as a result, the women volunteers “accentuated work roles that were rewarded” and “downplayed devalued gender roles” (dunivin, 1988, p. 64) in order to fit in. the imbalance in the performance of emotion management by men and women in this organization has several implications for this organization and perhaps other organizations. this organization has had difficulty promoting women into leadership positions. this may be partly due to the emotion management conducted by women because of their perceptions of the organizational culture. they perceive that their emotional inclinations are not valued and, perhaps, that may translate into a devaluing of them as members of the organization. as indicated earlier, women in the air force culture downplay feminine emotional roles in order to highlight their (perceived) more valued roles associated with masculinity (dunivin, 1988). in other words, perceptions that encoding and decoding emotions (gallois, 1993; mcconatha & deaner, 1994) are not valued skills may lead some women to suppress what may be key to their ability to perform in leadership positions. not only is it possible that emotion management and the perceptions of affective culture would inhibit women from seeking and/or achieving the highest levels of leadership, it is also possible that emotion management has other influences on leadership factors in the organization. damasio (1994) highlights the critical importance of emotion in cognitively based leadership functions such as decision-making; bodtker & jameson (2001) contend that emotion management can be used to navigate decision-making. not only do leaders need access to their own emotions, but they also need access to the thoughts and feelings of those involved in the decision. the ability to express emotion can influence resolution of conflict while the absence of expression may hinder that conflict resolution (bodtker & jameson, 2001). however, if individuals perform emotion management to hide what they perceive as inappropriate emotions, leaders’ decisions will not be as effective as they could be. an example of the interconnection of emotion management and decision-making is the process of training in the military. the type of simulated training models that are predominately used in combat training do not take into account emotions, but seek to train the combatant from decision, logical deduction, and game theory perspectives (bodtker & jameson, 2001). this narrow focus not only diminishes the human behavior in real-life situations, but also sets up a gendered context that imparts biases by not recognizing the different perspectives of emotion by military and civilian men and women influenced by military operations. if what informs the military culture in simulated training is reduced to only rational and planned behavior, then the resulting implications of the culture would not fully prepare soldiers, but induce stress. in addition, a culture that devalues the expression of emotion may disrupt the ability to recruit new members, especially female members. the lack of women in leadership positions, the perceptions about emotion, and findings from more comprehensive studies on gender issues in this organization (callahan, 2000b) suggest that the culture may not be accepting of women. also, too much emotional management may lead to unrealistic demands on the individual and create stressful working conditions (bodtker & jameson, 2001). as a result, some volunteers who align themselves with the evolving approach to military culture may become disillusioned with an organizational culture that is hostile to women. they may decide to restrict, or even suspend, their active involvement with the organization. by failing to include a large segment of society that is increasingly represented in the organization’s largest constituency base, the air force may distance itself from the very people it was created to serve. finally, members may find it difficult to educate a more enlightened public about the importance of air power, a key organizational mission, if they are out of step with the larger culture. while macarthur’s inspiring words of “duty, honor, country” serve as a rallying point for military members, they may not be very representative of the essence of the actual military culture of today. indeed the combat, masculine warrior culture that undergirds these words may not prove to be effective in the daily operations of a volunteer organization, albeit a military-influenced organization. in this organization, women felt that it did not value emotional expression—a key strength of women leaders—and, in response, the women spent energy on managing their emotions in order to be perceived as being more rational and objective. the responses of the women in this study indicate that affective cultures may influence leaders to such an extent that they fail to use the broad range of their leadership skills. references alima-metcalfe, b. 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(2003). women aviators finally fill cockpits of military aircraft. in series women aviators finally fill cockpits of military aircraft. retrieved may 31, 2004, from http://www.defense.gov/news/mar2003/n03192003_200303193.html table 1 test items affectivity/neutrality item in this organization: too much emotional involvement can lead to unrealistic plans. a certain amount of emotional detachment is necessary to achieve success. i would not be successful if i became too emotional. you cannot let sentiment overcome objectivity if you want to be effective. decisions regarding issues that affect the organization should not be influenced by sentimental factors. table 2 descriptive and t-test results gender descriptive t-test results mean sd t df sig males (n=119) 21.73 3.74 2.74 151 .01 females (n=34) 19.74 3.74 table 3 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0%2c2933%2c80746%2c00.html http://www.defense.gov/news/mar2003/n03192003_200303193.html descriptive statistics gender oaaq emotion mgt actions (ema) n mean sd n ema total mean sd males 13 21.07 3.37 14 83 5.85 3.63 females 8 18.00 3.46 9 91 10.22 5.23 table 4 anova table for affective culture perceptions and emotion management sum of squares df mean square f sig. oaaq between groups within groups total 46.886 220.923 267.810 1 19 20 46.886 11.628 4.03 .05 emotion mgt actions between groups within groups total 104.382 391.270 495.652 1 21 22 104.382 18.632 5.60 .02 author bio: jamie l. callahan is an assistant professor in the educational human resource development program at texas a&m university. she is actively involved in the academy of human resource development and the academy of management. her primary research interests focus on emotion management and its relationship to organizational learning, leadership, and culture. her work has appeared in journals such as human resource development quarterly, human resource development international, management learning, organization studies; she recently edited a special issue on emotion for the journal advances in developing human resources. a former united states air force officer specializing in human resources and organization development consulting, she continues to actively consult with public, private, and nonprofit institutions. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 18 2010 issn 1093-7099 gender typing in management: evaluation of managerial subroles for sport dr. laura burton and dr. heidi parker abstract this research examined the gender typing of managerial subroles for entry, middle and seniorlevel positions to evaluate if gender typing serves as a barrier to women’s advancement into senior level positions. interscholastic athletic directors and managers in the sport industry (n = 167) evaluated the importance of 19 managerial subroles for entry, middle, and senior level managers. results indicate feminine managerial subroles were more important for entry and middle level managers than masculine managerial subroles (p < .05). there was no significant difference between masculine and feminine subroles in senior level manager positions. feminine subroles may be more important than masculine subroles for entry and middle level positions while both feminine and masculine subroles are important for senior level managers. keywords: gender, role congruity, stereotyping, sport management, athletic administration citation: burton, l., & parker, h. (2010). gender typing in management: evaluation of managerial subroles for sport. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(18). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction despite significant increases in the number of girls and women participating in sports since the passage of title ix, there is continued evidence of a decline in women’s roles within the administration of athletic programs at the intercollegiate level (acosta and carpenter, 2008) as well as a continued overrepresentation of men within interscholastic athletic administration (whisenant, 2003, 2008). at the professional sport level, women continue to be underrepresented in senior administrative positions (lapchick, 2009). despite the low representation of women in senor management positions within sport organizations, researchers have not specifically examined if senior level administrative positions are constructed in a manner that may be biased toward women. the purpose of the current study was to explore if the managerial roles of senior administrative positions in athletic administration and sport management preclude certain individuals, in particular women, from advancing into and holding such positions. under representation of women in senior executive positions in business management has been examined from the perspective of gender role theory, including examination of managerial roles being gendered as masculine roles, attitudes toward women as managers, and negative perceptions of women in managerial roles (atwater, brett, waldman, dimare, & hayden, 2004; eagly & karau, 2002; powell, butterfield, & parent, 2002; schein, 1975). further, research has examined if managerial roles can be divided into subroles, and whether those subroles are gender-typed. specifically, atwater et al. examined if there were feminine and masculine subroles within the overarching management role. findings indicated that managerial roles were in fact gender-typed. subroles identified as masculine included allocating resources, delegating and punishing; feminine subroles included providing corrective feedback, planning and organizing, and supporting employees (atwater et al.). given the findings presented by atwater et al., the purpose of this research was to extend that work in the context of sport management and interscholastic athletic administration. in particular, researchers sought to examine the gender-typing of managerial subroles for entry, middle and senior-level positions within sport management organizations and interscholastic athletic departments. the following sections will elaborate on the underlying conceptual framework as well as advance specific hypotheses pertinent to this study. women’s experiences in athletic administration the majority of the work identifying barriers women face within management has been within the field of intercollegiate athletics (cuneen & sidwell, 2007; grappendorf & lough, 2006; inglis, danylchuk, & pastore, 2000; stahura, greenwood, & dobbs, 2004; whisenant & pedersen, 2004). however, there has also been research examining women’s underrepresentation in interscholastic athletics (miller, whisenant, & pedersen, 2007; mullane & whisenant, 2007; whisenant, 2003, 2008; whisenant, miller, & pedersen, 2005). barriers to women’s advancement into senior administration include limited opportunities for female sport management interns while working in sport organizations (cuneen & sidwell, 2007), masculine hegemonic influence and sexism in sport organizations (sagas & cunningham, 2004; whisenant, 2008; whisenant, et al., 2005), the “old boys’ network” and homologous reproduction (grappendorf & lough, 2006; whisenant & pedersen, 2004), relegation of women to less advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 important administrative positions (inglis, et al., 2000), unfair hiring practices (stahura, et al., 2004) and stereotypes regarding women’s managerial and leadership abilities (grappendorf & lough, 2006). women may experience discrimination in sport organizations at the very onset of their careers. cuneen and sidwell (2007) identified differences in experiences of male and female sport management interns working in intercollegiate athletic departments. their findings suggest that female interns were more likely to be only part-time staff, to be supervised by female administrators, and to be relegated to positions that included more clerical functions. in contrast, male interns more often worked full-time, were mentored by male and female administrators, and were provided work opportunities in communication and corporate sales (cuneen & sidwell). the experiences of student interns have significant impact on their immediate and long-term career development in sport, as the internship is considered one of the most important and valuable steps in the career path of a sport manager (moorman, 2004). masculine hegemony in sport administration the influence of hegemonic masculinity in the domain of sport and its influence on keeping women on the margins of sport has been well established (coakley, 2009). as women’s sports gained status following the passage of title ix, and the subsequent merging of men’s and women’s athletic departments at the intercollegiate level, there has been a continual decline in the number of women in positions of leadership in athletic administration (acosta & carpenter, 2008). men have, and continue to maintain, institutionalized control over the most senior levels of both interscholastic and intercollegiate athletic administration (mullane & whisenant, 2007; whisenant et al., 2005; whisenant, 2003, 2008). the propensity of men in high ranking positions within an athletic department has effectively established an ‘old boys’ network to which women have been excluded or have had limited access. the importance of networking as a tool of advancement in athletic administration has been well established (whisenant & pedersen, 2004). networking can include interaction with individuals outside and inside the organization, including public relations, contact with significant stakeholders, internal socializing and politicking (whisenant & pedersen). however, if women do not have an adequate source of mentors or access to person’s influence in which to create networking opportunities, their opportunities for advancement in athletic administration are hindered (whisenant & pedersen). homologous reproduction has also been discussed as a barrier to women’s abilities to reach senior levels of administration. homologous reproduction describes the propensity of individuals to hire others similar to them. given that more men are in positions of power and are making final decisions regarding hiring practices in athletic administration, women are placed at a disadvantage when employment decisions are made (grappendorf & lough, 2006; hovden, 2002; whisenant et al., 2005).women have also reported that when in administrative positions, the particular managerial task to which they are assigned also hindered their ability to advance into more senior levels. evaluation of the importance of managerial work in intercollegiate athletics has indicated that financial management, performance assessment, and conflict resolution are some of the most important managerial tasks for athletic directors (danylchuk & chelladurai, 1999). tasks identified as more important at the assistant director level included information seeking, and coordination and marketing (danylchuk & chelladurai). women reported inequities in distribution of administrative responsibilities in intercollegiate athletics, advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 including being relegated to compliance and academic counseling activities, activities that are not identified as important at the senior level of administration (inglis et al., 2000; suggs, 2005). women in administration also reported spending more of their time on managerial activities that would not provide them opportunities for advancement, including spending more time on communication activities (e.g., processing paperwork and formal exchanges of information) and less time on networking, a powerful mechanism for advancement (whisenant & pedersen, 2004). stereotypical perceptions regarding women’s abilities in senior athletic administration have also constrained women’s advancement. women working in athletic administration have reported the continued perception that women do not have the ability to lead athletic departments (grappendorf & lough, 2006; inglis et al., 2000). when asked about the most significant barriers to their advancement in athletic administration, women reported that within their roles as athletic administrators they have experienced negative perceptions about their knowledge of intercollegiate athletics, questions regarding their ability to be effective leaders, and lack of respect. these challenges influenced career advancement for women in athletic administration (grappendorf & lough, 2006). gender role stereotyping in management if female administrators have identified stereotypes regarding their leadership ability as significant constraints in their advancement to senior level positions, then use of theoretical frameworks that examine gender role stereotyping can assist in understanding why women experience such challenges. role congruity theory explains that when women engage in masculine or male-dominated roles or behaviors (i.e., aggressive, ambitious, independent, selfconfident), such as those necessary in leadership positions, they are evaluated less favorably than men because such management and leadership roles are more stereotypically associated with men (eagly & karau, 2002). typically, people have congruent beliefs about men and leadership, but dissimilar beliefs about women and leadership. this creates similar expectations for male leaders, and contradictory expectations for female leaders. in addition, when engaging in the masculine roles necessary in those leadership positions, women are evaluated less favorably than men, because such behavior is perceived as less desirable in women than men (heilman, wallen, fuchs, & tamkins, 2004). that is, women who behave in a confident, aggressive, independent manner are seen as behaving incongruous to their societal gender norm. this creates dissonance and less favorable impressions than their male counterparts given that gender norms suggest males should demonstrate aggressive, confident, and independent behavior. however, managerial roles are not universally considered masculine; there exists variation in understanding of the different types of managerial roles (atwater et al., 2004; eagly & karau, 2002). yukl (2002) developed a taxomony of managerial subroles that can be used to better understand the variety of roles that managers engage in to be effective within management. using yukl’s (2002) subrole classification, atwater et al. were able to examine if particular subroles are associated with stereotypical masculine or feminine behaviors. by examining subroles through the lens of gender stereotyping, researchers can explore if men and women are constrained from particular management positions which may contain gender typed managerial subroles identified as inappropriate for a particular gender. atwater et al. (2004) identified 13 of 19 managerial subroles as either more masculine or more feminine (table 1). providing corrective feedback, developing and mentoring, recognizing and rewarding, advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 communicating and informing, motivating and inspiring, planning and organizing, and supporting were identified as more feminine managerial subroles. punishing, problem solving, disciplining, delegating, strategic decision making, and allocating resources were identified as more masculine (atwater et al.). given this stereotyping of subroles, men and women can be perceived as acting outside of their appropriate gender roles when engaging in certain managerial roles (atwater et al.). table 1 managerial subroles as more masculine and more feminine (atwater et al., 2004) managerial subrole feminine masculine developing and mentoring problem solving recognizing and rewarding disciplining communicating and informing delegating motivating and inspiring strategic decision making planning and organizing allocating resources supporting punishing providing corrective feedback the managerial subroles atwater et al. (2004) identified as more masculine correspond with the characteristics and descriptions of senior level management positions. thus, one could expect senior level administrators to rate masculine subroles as more important than the feminine subroles in successful senior level managers. therefore, the first proposed hypothesis: hypothesis 1: masculine managerial subroles, will be rated as more important than feminine and gender neutral subroles for senior level managerial positions. additionally, as the above literature has indicated, entry and middle level managers are often assigned tasks that center on traits or characteristics, which atwater et al. (2004) identified as feminine. thus, it would seem likely that gender neutral and feminine subroles would be more important in entry and middle level manager positions than masculine subroles. given the previous findings noted, the following hypotheses were proposed: hypothesis 2: feminine managerial subroles will be rated as more important than masculine subroles for entry level and middle level management positions. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 hypothesis 3: gender neutral subroles will be rated as more important than masculine subroles for entry and middle level management positions. finally, given that sport leadership positions are dominated by men (acosta & carpenter, 2008; whisenant, 2008) and previous research that has reported men rate leaders as possessing more masculine characteristics (powell et al., 2002; schein, 2007), it seems likely that masculine subroles would be viewed as more important by men in senior leadership positions than by women in similar leadership positions. this leads to our final hypothesis: hypothesis 4: participant’s gender will significantly influence the ratings of importance of managerial subroles. male sport managers/interscholastic athletic directors will rate masculine subroles as more important for senior level management positions than female sport managers/interscholastic athletic directors. method this study was conducted using online survey research procedures. participants were interscholastic athletic directors and individuals holding manager or director titles at various sport organizations. the interscholastic athletic directors were identified through an interscholastic athletic conference directory representing private schools in new england and through a random sampling procedure identifying managers or directors of sport organizations using a publicly available sport organization directory (sports marketplace directory, 2007). all participants were sent an initial email letter of introduction and information regarding the research project as well as a link to the survey hosted by an online survey company (survey monkey), which they were asked to complete. a follow-up email was sent to non-responders two weeks after the initial introductory email was sent. a final email was sent to non-respondents four weeks after the initial introductory email was sent. the instructions to the survey asked participants to indicate on a five-point likert type scale (5 = most important to 1 = least important) the importance of the managerial subroles used by atwater et al. (2004) for three levels of manager: entry-level (athletic intern), middle-level (assistant athletic director), and senior-level (athletic director). the primary researcher consulted two faculty members in sport management and one interscholastic athletic director to establish that the management levels (entry, middle, senior) were appropriate for interscholastic athletic administration and sport management, and that the managerial roles provided by atwater et al. were relevant to the work of interscholastic athletic administrators and sport managers. participants were asked to indicate the level of importance of each subrole for each level of manager. the following managerial roles were listed on the survey instrument: providing corrective feedback, allocating resources, planning and organizing, evaluating employees, developing and mentoring personnel, delegating, managing conflict, recognizing and rewarding employees, disciplining, consulting others, motivating and inspiring, strategic decision making, communicating and informing, problem solving, networking, punishing, supporting, monitoring work activities, and clarifying roles and objectives. participants also completed a series of demographic questions including information regarding age, gender, and number of years of work experience as mangers or administrators. participants (n=167) included interscholastic athletic directors and sport organization managers of which 107 were male and 53 were female. seven respondents did not indicate their sex on the survey. participants indicated their years of advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 work experience in athletic administration or sport management ranged from one to five years (n = 63), five to ten years (n = 35), 11 to 15 years (n = 20), 16 to 20 (n = 12), 21 to 25 (n = 26), and 26 or more (n = 3). prior to the primary analysis of the data, exploratory factor analysis using principal components analysis with varimax rotation was used to collapse the 19 managerial subroles into four gender role categories, two masculine role categories, one feminine roles category, and one gender-neutral roles category (atwater et al., 2004). items loading above |.60 | on only one factor were deemed acceptable (stevens, 1996) and are listed in table 2. table 2 varimax-rotated factor pattern matrix from principal component analysis of managerial subroles items masculine 1 masculine 2 feminine gender neutral allocating resources .61 delegating .66 managing conflict .66 strategic decision making .84 problem solving .80 punishing .88 disciplining .89 providing corrective feedback .66 planning and organizing .66 developing and mentoring personnel .67 motivating and inspiring .67 communicating and informing .66 supporting .74 evaluating .69 recognizing and rewarding employees .76 clarifying roles and objectives .69 consulting .64 networking .71 monitoring work activities .61 the masculine management subrole 1 included the following items from the scale: allocating resources, delegating, managing conflict, strategic decision making, and problem solving, with an eigenvalue of λ = 2.91. the two items that loaded on a separate factor were punishing and disciplining, which were labeled as masculine subrole 2, with an eigenvalue of λ = 1.27. the items included in the feminine management subrole included providing corrective feedback, planning and organizing, developing and mentoring personnel, motivating and inspiring, communicating and informing, and supporting, with an eigenvalue of λ = 2.57. for the gender neutral management subrole the following items were included: evaluating employees, recognizing and rewarding employees, clarifying roles and objectives, consulting others, networking, and monitoring work activities, with an eigenvalue of λ = 2.38. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 analyses prior to analyzing the hypotheses, a mean score was calculated for each of the four gender managerial subroles. a score for a gender managerial subrole was calculated by summing the individual scores for each item in the subrole and then calculating the mean score for that subrole. for example, for masculine subrole 1, a mean was computed from the item scores for allocating resources, delegating, managing conflict, strategic decision making, and problem solving. cronbach alpha reliabilities were calculated for the four gender managerial subroles; for masculine subrole 1, α = .81, for masculine subrole 2 α = .73, for feminine subrole, α = .84, and for gender neutral subrole, α = .78. means and standard deviations of the subroles across all managerial position levels were obtained for the four subroles (table 3). table 3 means, standard deviations for managerial subroles scores for entry, middle and senior level positions (n = 167) and gender typing of role (feminine = f, masculine = m, gender neutral = gn) entry level manager middle level manager senior level manager managerial subroles gender typing of role providing corrective feedback f 3.28(1.3) 4.11(.90) 4.64(.71) allocating resources m 2.89(1.1) 3.83(.87) 4.73(.64) planning and organizing f 3.89(1.0) 4.30(.82) 4.66(.73) evaluating employees gn 2.72(1.2) 3.81(.90) 4.59(.68) developing and mentoring personnel f 2.83(1.3) 3.86(.89) 4.55(.78) delegating m 2.75(1.2) 3.71(.92) 4.68(.62) managing conflict gn 3.36(1.2) 4.05(.90) 4.62(.72) recognizing and rewarding employees f 2.94(1.3) 3.86(.95) 4.55(.71) disciplining m 2.5(1.2) 3.39(1.0) 4.23(.96) consulting others gn 3.84(1.1) 4.02(.79) 4.28(.89) motivating and inspiring f 3.33(1.2) 4.05(.86) 4.68(.65) strategic decision making m 2.99(1.2) 3.9(.89) 4.88(.42) communicating and informing f 4.21(.98) 4.44(.77) 4.80(.47) networking gn 3.77(1.0) 4.05(.82) 4.43(.92) problem solving m 4.16(.92) 4.35(.80) 4.62(.71) punishing m 1.88(1.0) 2.57(1.1) 3.37(1.3) supporting f 3.89(.99) 4.33(.86) 4.56(.73) monitoring work activities gn 3.32(1.1) 3.97(.82) 4.04(1.1) clarifying roles and objectives gn 3.07(1.2) 4.03(.85) 4.62(.73) advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 results descriptive statistics, including means and standard deviations, were obtained for each managerial subrole across the three management positions (table 3). to evaluate the hypotheses a repeated measures manova (multivariate analysis of variance) was conducted. the within subjects factor was position and consisted of three levels (entry-level manager, middle-level manager, senior-level manager). the between subjects factor was gender of evaluator. the dependent measures were the importance ratings on the four managerial subroles (masculine subrole 1, masculine subrole 2, feminine subrole, gender neutral subrole). the results of the repeated measures manova indicated that there were significant differences due to the within subject factor of position on the dependent measures, wilk’s λ = .285, f(8,151) = 47.36, p < .001. the results for the between subjects factor of gender of evaluator (wilk’s λ = .988, f(4,155) = .46, p = .765) and the interaction of gender of evaluator by position were not significant (wilk’s λ = .918, f(8, 151) = 1.68, p = .107). follow up univariate anovas on each dependent measure revealed that the anova for masculine subrole 1 was significant f(2,77) = 239.89, p < .001; the anova for masculine subrole 2 was significant f(2,97) = 123.91, p < .001; the anova for feminine subrole was significant f(2,49) = 141.16, p < .0001; and the anova for gender neutral subrole was significant f(2,50) = 137.44, p < .0001. follow up tests were conducted to evaluate significant differences among these mean scores. hypothesis 1 stated, masculine managerial subroles would be rated as more important than feminine and gender neutral subroles for senior level managerial positions. results show that the importance rating for masculine subrole 1 was highest for the senior level management position (m = 4.70, sd = .42), and significantly higher than the entry-level position (m = 3.21, sd = .84) and middle-level position (m = 3.95, sd = .68). in addition, masculine managerial subrole 2 was highest for the senior level management position (m = 3.79, sd = 1.04), and significantly higher than the entry-level position (m = 2.15, sd = .99) and middle-level position (m = 2.96, sd = .94). thus, hypothesis 1 was supported. hypothesis 2 posited that feminine managerial subroles would be rated as more important than masculine subroles for entry level and middle level management positions. results show feminine managerial subroles were rated significantly higher for senior level management positions (m = 4.64, sd = .46), than for entry-level (m = 3.54, sd = .81) and middle-level management positions (m = 4.17, sd = .65). thus, hypothesis 2 was not supported. hypothesis 3 stated gender neutral subroles would be rated as more important than masculine subroles for entry and middle level management positions. analyses indicate gender neutral managerial subroles were rated significantly higher for senior level management positions (m = 4.41, sd = .58) than for entry-level (m = 3.24, sd = .84) and middle-level management positions (m = 3.95, sd = .63). thus, hypothesis 3 was not supported. finally, there was no support for hypothesis 4 that participant’s gender will significantly influence the ratings of importance of managerial subroles. there were no significant differences found between male and female participants on the ratings of importance of managerial subroles for each of the three employment level. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 discussion the results of the study indicate that sport managers and interscholastic athletic directors perceive different levels of importance for managerial roles (i.e., masculine, feminine, or gender neutral) based on entry, middle and senior level management positions. masculine managerial subroles 1 (allocating resources, delegating, managing conflict, strategic decision making, and problem solving) were rated as more important for senior level managers when compared to entry and middle level managers. also, masculine managerial subroles 2 (punishing and disciplining) were rated as more important for senior level managers when compared to entry and middle level managers. in addition, feminine managerial subroles (providing corrective feedback, planning and organizing, developing and mentoring personnel, motivating and inspiring, communicating and informing, supporting) and gender neutral subroles (evaluating, recognizing and rewarding employees, clarifying roles and objectives, consulting) were also rated as most important for senior level managers when compared to entry-level and middlelevel managers. therefore, these findings only provide partial support for gender typing of managerial positions as described by atwater et al. (2004). specifically, all four subroles increased in importance as the level of manager increased. gender-neutral, feminine, and masculine subroles (1 and 2) were all most important in senior level management positions and least important in entry-level positions. essentially the participants in the current study indicated that as the manager position increases so does the responsibility to fulfill a variety of managerial subroles. in retrospect, this finding seems somewhat intuitive. certainly organizations want their best employees in the top positions. however, given the disparity in numbers between men and women in upper level management positions within sport management and athletic administration, the question to be addressed is whether men are perceived as more capable of performing both masculine and feminine subrole duties, or are there additional prejudices against women to prevent them from having the opportunity to perform both masculine and feminine subroles as managers? role congruity theory indicates that women will not be perceived as competent in demonstrating masculine managerial roles (eagly & karau, 2002), however, there is no available research which has examined if men are perceived as not capable of performing feminine managerial roles (atwater et al., 2004). given the significant number of men in senior level administration positions in sport, it would appear that men are perceived as capable of performing the feminine and masculine managerial roles that are important in those senior level positions. certainly this is an area in need of much further research. the results from the current study indicate that there is a perception that managers need to perform successfully both masculine and feminine managerial subroles in senior level positions. as women’s representation in senior level athletic administration positions continues to decline (acosta & carpenter, 2008) it appears that gender role stereotyping has had a detrimental impact on women, but not on men. again, this research lends support to role congruity theory of prejudice against female leaders (eagly & karau, 2002). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 eagly (2007) discussed a potential double standard for women in senior leadership positions such that women who embrace the requisite masculine subroles are chastised for straying too far from their appropriate gender norms and thus ‘acting like a man’, while women who do not fully embrace masculine subroles are said to be ‘too soft’. however, eagly further noted that women who are able to walk the fine line between these two extremes often develop a leadership style more advantageous to fostering success within an organization. based on the results of the current study, it would appear that women and men should be perceived as having the abilities to successfully perform in the position of senior level athletic administrator. limitations this research was also subject to some notable limitations. first, the researchers did not specifically define the various management levels and instead chose to allow the respondents to interpret the titles entry, middle, and senior level management. while this was beneficial in some respects as those titles mean different things within different companies, for these very same reasons this could also have been problematic. with more specific descriptions of the various management levels, future research may find somewhat differing results. in addition, interscholastic athletic administrators may not be considered senior level administrators within a school system, as the superintendent would be considered the most senior level administrator. however, within an athletic program, the athletic director has control over budgeting, scheduling, and hiring of coaches, among other responsibilities, which are functions characteristic of a senior level position within athletic administration. also, the sample of athletic administrators was limited to only interscholastic athletic administrators and did not include intercollegiate athletic administrators. undoubtedly, differences exist between the varying types of organizations and future research should look specifically at gendered subroles within university athletic departments. conclusion and future recommendations in sum, these results lend support to previous literature that has examined the existence of gendered subroles within management positions (atwater et al, 2004). however, while previous research has focused on the senior level management position being a ‘masculine’ position, the results of this study suggest possessing both feminine and masculine subroles is important for senior level managers. it is also worthy to note that despite previous work that has suggested men rate leaders as possessing more masculine characteristics (powell et al., 2002; schein, 2007), the findings from the current study did not reveal differences in evaluation based on the gender of the respondents. this finding may support other research that has indicated there may be changing perceptions in the characteristics necessary to be successful in management and leadership (dueher & bono, 2006). the findings from the current study make a contribution to our understanding of perceptions of management roles within athletic administration. our most significant recommendation to managers and administrators in sport is to be aware that both masculine and feminine managerial subroles are viewed as important for senior level managers. managers and administrator should seek to employ, train, and promote those individuals who can fulfill all of these contrasting duties. additional research is needed to better understand differences in perceptions by male and female managers and administrators in the sport industry regarding the advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 characteristics perceived necessary to be successful in management and leadership. given the propensity of males in senior level management positions, future researchers should fully examine whether male administrators are competently performing both these masculine and feminine subroles. finally, future research should continue to examine the barriers women face when trying to advance into senior level management positions as well as the difficulties male and female senior level managers face when trying to successfully fulfill both traditionally feminine and masculine managerial subroles. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 references acosta, r.v., & carpenter, l.j. (2008). women in intercollegiate sport: a longitudinal study thirty-one year update (1977–2006). retrieved april 16, 2009, from http://www.acostacarpenter.org/ atwater, l. e., brett, j. f., waldman, d., dimare, l., & hayden, m. v. (2004). men’s and women’s perceptions of the gender typing of management subroles, sex roles, 50, 191-199. coakley, j. (2009). sport in society: issues and controversies (10th ed.). boston: mcgraw-hill. cuneen, j., & sidwell, m. j. (2007). differences on the job for female and male sport management interns, sport management education journal, 1, 1-17. danylchuk, k. e., & chelladurai, p. (1999). the nature of managerial work in canadian intercollegiate athletics, journal of sport management, 13, 148-166. duehr, e. e., & bono, j. e. (2006). men, women, and managers: are stereotypes finally changing? personnel psychology, 59, 815–846. eagly, a. h. 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(2005). successful when given the opportunity: investigating gender representation and success rates of interscholastic athletic directors. physical educator, 62, 178-186. powell, g. n., butterfield, d. a., & parent, j. d. (2002). gender and managerial stereotypes: have the times changed? journal of management, 28 (2), 177-193. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 sagas m., & cunningham, g. b. (2004). does having “the right stuff” matter? gender differences in the determinants of career success among intercollegiate athletic administrators. sex roles, 50, 411-421. schein, v. e. (1975). sex role stereotyping, ability and performance: prior research and new directions. personnel psychology, 31, 259-268. schein, v. e. (2007). women in management: reflections and projections. women in management review, 22, 6-18. sports marketplace directory (2007). millerton, ny: grey house publishing. stahura, k. a., greenwood, m., & dobbs, m. e. (2004). hiring patterns in intercollegiate athletics: an introductory investigation into the relationship between athletic directors and head coaches. international journal of sport management, 5, 197-214. stevens, j. (1996) applied multivariate statistics for the social sciences (3rd ed.). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. suggs, w. (2005). faces in a mostly white, male crowd. the chronicle of higher education, 51(31), p. a34. whisenant, w. a. (2003). how women have fared as interscholastic athletic administrators since the passage of title ix. sex roles, 49, 179-184. whisenant, w. a. (2008). sustaining male dominance in interscholastic athletics: a case of homologous reproduction…or not? sex roles, 58, 768-775. whisenant, w. a., miller, j., & pedersen, p. m. (2005). systematic barriers in athletic administration: an analysis of job descriptions for interscholastic athletic directors. sex roles, 53, 911-918. whisenant, w. a., & pedersen, p. m. (2004). the influence of managerial activities on the success of intercollegiate athletic directors. american business review, 22, 21-26. yukl, g. a. (2002). leadership in organizations. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. biography laura j. burton is an associate professor of sport management at the university of connecticut. her research interests include stereotyping in leadership and management in sport. heidi m. parker is an assistant professor of sport management at the university of southern maine. her research interests center on the areas of sport endorser effectiveness, issues surrounding women in sport, and sport fan behavior. eagly, a. h., & karau, s. j. (2002). role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. psychological review, 109, 573-598. advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 22 2010 issn 1093-7099 unmasking the sociocultural constraints to career growth of married women in ghanaian organizations dr. mohammed-aminu sanda and jocelyn sackey abstract this study investigated the question of how culture and activity can be explored towards understanding the professional career development of married women and the relative constraints associated with such development in the ghanaian environment. guided by the cultural–historical activity theory (chat) framework, data was collected from a sample of 141 married ghanaian women professionals engaged in white collar jobs in the public and private institutions located in accra. it is established that the acceptance by the ghanaian traditional society of the married professional woman as a capable person who can equally perform in an organization and thus need to be trusted, supported and recognized is of relevance to her career development. this observation provides learning on the impact of the inflow of socio-cultural dynamics into a gender-oriented organizational life and the complexities that it generates in understanding the constraints to the professional career development of married women. keywords: sociocultural constraints; professional married woman; career growth; organizational culture; organizational constraints citation: sanda, m. a., & sackey, j. (2010). unmasking the sociocultural constraints to career growth of married women in ghanian organizations. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(22). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction in the ghanaian socio-cultural environment, most married women who work as professionals in organizations are mostly confronted with the challenges of trying to draw a fit between their professional personal-selves, as shaped by their organizational culture, and the behaviors they are expected to portray as shaped by established socio-cultural norms (sackey & sanda, 2009). in this regard, the societal roles of most professional women as wives are clearly defined and this has evolved the perceived notion by most ghanaian women that they have no alternative but to endure the impact of marriage as a cultural artifact on their professional career development. the question that emerges here is how can culture and activity be explored towards understanding the professional career development of married women and the relative constraints associated with such development in the ghanaian environment? in other words, how can the contradictions entailed in the dual effort of the professional married woman to draw a fit between her marriage (as a socio-cultural artifact) and the organization’s culture (as an organizational artifact) of her workplace be analyzed and understood? in the pursuit of finding answers to these questions, cultural–historical activity theory (chat) was used to appraise the dual role of the ghanaian professional married woman (as an individual) in trying to relate to both her socio-cultural settings and the organizational culture, and which two cultural artifacts tend to conflict, with consequent impact on her career development. the use of chat is informed by the fact that it is one among a number of approaches that move away from the individualist and mentalist notions of human development, toward viewing it as embedded within sociocultural contexts and intrinsically interwoven with them. in underlying the conceptual approach, this study related to the observation by holzman (2006) that among the numerous articulations of organizational activity theory is a psychology that focuses not on the individual but on the interaction between individual systems of artifacts and other individuals in historically developing institutional systems. this is motivated by the sense derived in polkinghorne’s (1983) observation that “scientific activity for the ‘systems’ system of enquiry involves conceptualizing the phenomena under investigation as a totality by defining its specific organizing principles, and showing that the events are the results of the interaction of these principles with the structures behind the event” (p. 166). this observation by polkinghorne, as argued by sanda and fältholm (2005), is underlined by the argument that activity theory is both forward looking and emancipatory in its implications. it encourages exploration of the origins of these patterns, of what presently sustains them, of the imagery used in describing them, of the inconsistencies and conflicts that they embrace, and of the stimulation that new challenges may provide. theoretical framework cultural–historical activity theory (chat) is known to belong to a vast family of sociocultural theories united in a quest to overcome the pitfalls of traditional cognitivist thinking about human development. the base of such cognitive thinking, as stetsenko (2005) noted, is the marxism notion that it is a mistake to theorize society and history in terms of the laws of individual behavior. this is based on the presumption that history, economy, and society, obeys social and historical laws, not the laws of the individual psyche. yet, this presumption never advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 prevented the founders of chat, from theorizing the individual psyche in terms of society (stetsenko, 2005). conceptualization of the individual, society and culture one of the current and most distinctive ideas of chat, as outlined by stetsenko (2005), is that human psychological functioning and development are object-related. the grounding premises of activity theory, however, are much broader. one of the central pillars of chat is the idea that human development is based on active transformations of existing environments and creation of new ones achieved through collaborative processes of producing and deploying tools (stetsenko, 2005). these collaborative processes, which involve the development and passing on, from generation to generation, the collective experiences of people, ultimately represent a form of exchange with the world that is unique to humans the social practice of human labor, or human activity. in these social and historically specific processes, people not only constantly transform and create their environment; they also create and constantly transform their very lives, consequently changing themselves in fundamental ways and, in the process, gaining self-knowledge. therefore, human activity material, practical, and always, by necessity, socially collaborative processes aimed at transforming the world and human beings themselves with the help of collectively created tools is the basic form of life for people (stetsenko, 2005). this practical, social, purposeful activity (or human labor) as the principal and primary form of human life, and the contradictions brought about in its development, lie at the very foundation and are formative of everything that is human in humans. the “individual-society-culture trichotomy” as subject of analysis in the view of blunden (2007), chat is founded on a trichotomy. in supporting this view, blunden noted that several suggestions can be found for such a basic trichotomy, citing as examples, leontiev’s (1978) mentioning of the subject–activity–object relation, and vygotsky’s (1987–1999, vol. 3.) mentioning of the stimulus–psychological tool–response relation. according to blunden (2007), “in the american tradition, peirce (1931–1958) has object–sign– interpretant” (p. 255). blunden noted that it is a mistake to theorize individual agency in terms of interactions between social and individual levels or domains, despite the strong temptation to do so. in this respect, the basic unit of analysis (or trichotomy) which encompasses both individual and social must be the subject. blunden explained that in chat terminology, the trichotomy is: (a) the individual, that is, the single, mortal human psyche; (b) the culture, that is, the mass of objects or artifacts that are inherited from the past and only spring into life when they are used by individuals—buildings, languages, crops, laws, libraries, technology, and so on; and (c) the society, that is, the particular, continuing corporate activities in which individuals use culture in collaborative activities or conflict and are taken up by one individual as another leaves off. he points out that each of the three aspects of human life listed above can be the subject of sciences in their own right, since psychology is concerned with the individual psyche, natural science and the arts with culture, and the social sciences with society. in this respect, the individual psyche can be understood only as an aspect of this larger, fundamental unit of analysis the subject (blunden, 2007). expatiating on these, blunden noted that the same is true of the study of social institutions like business enterprises, states, markets, social movements, and so on, as much as it is also true of the study of language, art, technology, nature, and so on. according to blunden advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 (2007), “this poses the problem of reframing the study of the social and cultural aspects of mind based on the subject as the common unit of analysis” (p. 255 256). based on the above perspective, blunden (2007) proposed that the subject should be conceived as entailing three components (i.e., the unity of the individual, the particular, and the universal). he explained that first, the subject reflects the individual, simply understood as a mortal individual human spirit or psyche, with whatever capacity for moral responsibility, whatever knowledge, beliefs, and ideology they hold and with a certain identity or selfconsciousness. second, the subject is also the ensemble of social relations and activities, including both collaborative and conflictual relations, both production relations and the entire range of activities, whether in the private domain, the economy, the arts, or whatever. third, the subject signifies the universal, material products of culture, inclusive of language, the means of production, technology and science, the land, buildings, and so on. as blunden clarified, this conception of the subject, which is abstracted from various formulations to be found in hegel’s work, provides the unit of analysis adequate to the study of the married professional womanmarriage-work life trichotomy. as blunden argued, what is important about hegel’s individualparticular-universal trichotomy is that it is a universal relation. in some instances the ‘individual’ might be an individual psyche, in another instance, the ‘individual’ might be the individual human organism or an artifact or social formation. the form that is ascribed to the ‘individual’ depends on the object of study, and the problem to be solved. it represents the basic structure of a unit of analysis or notion (blunden, 2007). thus, the individual is to be seen as a concrete abstraction, meaning that the individual human psyche is absolutely confined to one organism separate from all others. and yet the entirety of human history is present in it (blunden, 2007). in this regard, blunden observed that once the process of internalization is complete, the distinction between the artifact (marriage, in this study), which may begin its life as an objective material thing outside consciousness (the consciousness of the married professional women, in this study), albeit a thing endowed with social significance (by the ghanaian society, in this study), has become integrated into the psyche itself and cannot be said to be something other than the psyche. as blunden explained, the same can be said of the activity of consciousness in relation to other people and an artifact. methodological considerations the value of any theory, as leontiev (1974) noted, is not whether it provides an objective representation of reality, but rather how well it can shape an object of study, highlighting relevant issues. as argued by jarzabkowski (2003), activity theory may be operationalized through the identification of a series of analytic lenses, one of which is the activity system itself and its corresponding interpretative context that provides the motives and meaning within which strategy as practice occurs. thus, the theoretical approaches in chat that places culture and activity at the center of attempts to understand the challenges faced by professional married women relative to the dialectics between their professional development and the societal perspective of marriage as a cultural artifact is explored. the mediational function of such a cultural artifact and its control as stimuli will be interpreted to mean that the mental processes of such women can also be changed. this is based on the conception that new mental structures, which allow learners to move beyond instinct and take control over their worlds, are produced (vygotsky, 1978). in order to achieve such realization, this study followed the qualitative advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 research process which is defined by three interconnected, generic activities that go by a variety of different labels, including theory, methods, analysis, ontology, epistemology, and methodology. as it is explained by denzin and lincoln (2000), behind these terms stands the personal biography of the researcher, who speaks from a particular class, gender, rationale, cultural and ethnic community perspective. the gendered, multiculturally situated researcher approaches the world with a set of ideas, a framework (theory ontology) that specifies a set of questions (epistemology) that he or she then examines in specific ways (methodology and analysis), that is the researcher collect empirical materials bearing on the question and analyses and write about them. the cross-sectional design approach is used for this study. thus, the approaches used for both data collection and analysis in this regard are highlighted in the subsections that follow. data collection the empirical approach for this study involved the collection of data on how the sociocultural and organizational variables influence the interrelationship between married ghanaian women professional and the two institutional settings (i.e., the sociocultural and the organization’s cultural settings). additional data on dimensions such as, autonomy, cohesion, trust, pressure, support, recognition, fairness, discourse, appropriation and social relations were also collected. the target population for the study was managerial women. participants for this study were a sample of women in managerial positions in a southern, metropolitan city of ghana. the managerial women sampled were highly educated with either university degrees or with professional qualifications and had managerial responsibilities in their organizations and were mainly lower to upper level managers in their organizations. the metropolitan city was chosen as the primary setting for this study due to its high concentration of major and key organizations and institutions which engage highly skilled women in ghana, and also due to its cosmopolitan atmosphere. a total of 150 questionnaires were distributed and 141 were returned. out of the respondents, 77 (54.6 %) were from private organizations and 64 (45.4 %) were from public organizations. all the 141 questionnaires returned were usable. this constituted a response rate of 94% of respondents. distributions of the organization category, educational levels, number of years worked in organization, and number of years in managerial position of the 141 respondents whose questionnaires were used are shown below in figure 1, figure 2, figure 3, and figure 4 respectively. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 figure 1. distributions of respondents’ organization category. figure 2. distributions of respondents’ educational levels. private, 77, 55% public, 64, 45% masters and above , 26, 18% postgraduate diploma, 29, 21% first degree, 60, 42% ‘a’ level , 5, 4% ‘o’ level , 10, 7% other, 11, 8% advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 figure 3. distributions of years respondents worked in organization. figure 4. distributions of years respondents functioned in managerial position. less than 1 year, 15, 11% 1 year, 9, 6% 2 years, 18, 13% 3 years, 20, 14% 4+ years, 79, 56% 1 year, 7, 5% 2 years, 15, 11% 3 years, 16, 12% 4+ years, 30, 23% no answer, 65, 49% advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 results and discussion in carrying out expansive developmental research, a rigorous analysis of the activity system is very important (engeström, 2000). activity analysis highlights how the oftenunrecognized inconsistencies that develop within activity systems provide major opportunities for review and re-conceptualization and how new challenges may trigger new learning (blackler, 1993). in this regard, the interrelationship between the activities of the married professional women in their different institutional settings (both societal and organizational) and its consequences on their career development will be the main unit of analysis. the activity contradictions that emerge in their attempts to relate to their sociocultural settings and organizational culture, the influential role of spousal support, and the influential impact of organizational design will be the sub-units of analyses. engeström (1987) has clarified that in activity theory, the term contradiction as a source of tension in the activity system indicates a misfit between elements within an activity, and/or between different activities. these contradictions manifest themselves as problems, ruptures, breakdowns, and clashes. as it is pointed out by collins et al. (2002), the tension that arises between elements of the activity system identify areas where systems no longer match the activities they model. according to wertsch (1998), to recognize the irreducible tension between agent and mediational means is not to conceptualize mediated action as an undifferentiated whole. instead, it is to conceptualize it as a system characterized by dynamic tension among various elements. he noted that it is important to keep sight of the elements within this system for at least two reasons. first, wertsch pointed out that many of the analytic strategies for examining mediated action are made possible by the fact that one can isolate its elements. wertsch explained that such isolation, among other things, allows various specialized perspectives to bring their insights to bear, and that it also is often the key to understanding how change occurs in mediated action. second, he observed that it encourages the researcher to examine the various mixes of these elements since an analysis that focuses solely on the irreducibility of mediated action as a bounded system all too naturally suggests a static system in which dialectic tension is involved. thus, the core of the analytic data for such rigorous analyses in this study is the information gathered from the questionnaire administered. in this respect, the data analysis is carried out within the perspective of the analytical segments outlined by engeström (1987). these are the historical analysis, and the actual empirical analysis. but as engeström has outlined, the historical analysis of the activity system has to be carried from both its objective and theoretical perspective. this view is reinforced by sanda (2006) with the observations that the activities in organizations, the problems in realizing these activities, the possible means of solving the problems, as well as the obstacles of learning, are historically specific (i.e. they are determined by the local and historical form of the activity and the available cultural means of solving the problems). influence of maternal role on professional development the extent to which both maternal role and spousal support influence the professional career development of the women respondents is assessed relative to the indices outlined in figures 5, 6, 7 and 8. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 as it is shown in figure 5, 140 (99%) of the respondents indicated that they have the ambition to follow the modern trend of having both a career and a family (i.e., having a husband and children). also, 110 (89%) of the respondents indicated that they already have a family, and of these, 104 (85%) indicated that they will not forgo or postpone having children in preference for developing their professional careers. figure 5. respondents perceptions on maternal role relative to professional development. the trend of responses in figure 5 above show that ghanaian managerial women desire to have the multiple roles of family and career. they want to have it all and hence, will not choose career over family. in other words, they will not shortchange their family for career development. an indication of this observation is shown in figure 6, which shows that 80 % of the respondents have at least one child. as it is shown in this figure, majority of the women have children, implying that they will not forego or postpone having children in preference to developing their careers. this is because ghanaian women have a value system that reinforces a family orientation rather than an individualistic orientation (oppong & abu, 1987; sackey & sanda, 2008). since it is indicative that the married ghanaian women professional may not want to shortchange her family orientation for career development, but rather wants to have it all, the issue of how she perceives the realization of this then becomes of importance. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 1 women's perception on maternal & professional issues p e rc e n ta g e o f w o m e n h o ld in g p e rc e ti o n ambition to fhave both a career & a family having a family orientation will not forego or postpone having children in preference to profesional career delopment advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 figure 6. distributions of respondents’ number of children. in the women’s attempt not to upset the delicate balance between home and career issues, 73 (61%) of the respondents indicated that their professional development is highly constrained. 79 (66%) of the women indicated that they have no alternative, but to endure the impact of marriage on their professional career development. however, 36 (30%) respondents said they do not have to endure the impact of marriage, but have alternatives. the implication here is that, for most married professional women who cherish family and career lives, professional development is perceived as quite a daunting task to achieve. this is because playing such dual role effectively is difficult for them. as such, the women indicated that they have to endure the impact of marriage on their career development. however, it is not all the women who hold these views. a reflection of these observations is shown in figure 7. none, 28, 20% 1 child, 34, 24% 2 children, 32, 23% 3 children, 35, 24% 4+ children, 12, 9% advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 figure 7. respondents perceptions on the constraints of marriage to professional development. there are others among the respondents who think that they do not have to endure the impact of marriage and that there is an alternative way to manage the dual role they play. indication of this viewpoint is reflected in figure 8 in which 98 (84%) of the respondents place great value on the meaning of marriage with 88 (74%) of the respondents believing that the societal roles that most ghanaian women are expected to play as wives are clearly defined. in the same vein, 77 (61%) of the women indicated that spousal support had greater impact on their attempt to draw a balance between expectations from their socio-cultural settings and their organizational culture. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 1 women's perception on constraining factors p e rc e n ta g e o f w o m e n h o ld in g p e rc e ti o n s enduring impact of marriage on professional career developmnt constraints to drawing a balance between home and career issues advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 figure 8. respondents perceptions on marriage and spousal support. the implication from the above observation is that married professional women perceive marriage as very meaningful in relation to their professional development. they also contend that their roles as wives are culturally bounded and which boundary is clearly defined by society. the women also value marriage as a way of life, and thus expected it to contribute positively towards their professional development. in this sense, the contemporary ghanaian managerial woman appears to represent a mixture of traditional values and social patterns carefully preserved by its culture. this observation is indicative of the difference in the sociocultural characteristic of ghanaian women in relation to their counterparts in other countries, in that, as much as they aspire to grow economically, they also want to have a prolific reproductive life. this means that ghanaian women want to have large families immediately they marry and they do not intend to stop working and earning income. in fact in many cases, they are the main sources of material support for their children (oppong & abu, 1987). this clearly shows that ghanaian women have for a long time combined productive and reproductive roles. although they may bear children and do house chores most of the time, they still work to earn money to supplement what the husband or the man brings no matter how little (oppong & abu, 1987). the learning that emerges from the analysis of maternal role and professional development is the pointer that “marriage” is a cultural product (i.e. cultural artifact) in the ghanaian sociocultural system which is embedded with strongly held societal codes and ethics (i.e. both formal and informal rules) to which the woman is strongly bonded. it is this strong bond that the woman want to maintain, and at the same time want to be able to negotiate in order to enhance their career growth and personal professional development. in this context, it is indicative that the married professional woman (as an individual) in the ghanaian society strongly relates to the institution of marriage (as a cultural artifact) and its defining codes and ethics (i.e. both formal 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 1 women's perception on societal issues p e rc e n ta g e o f w o m e n h o ld in g p e rc e p ti o n strong impact of spousal support in drawing abalance between sociocultural settings & organizatioanl culture placement of great value on marriage clear definition of societal roles as wives advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 and informal rules) as set by the society in a trichotomy. in chat terminology, using blunden’s (2007) explanation of trichotomy, the married professional woman (as an individual), as it is indicative in the analyses, is a reflection of a single mortal human psyche. the institution of marriage (the culture) to which she is strongly bonded is a reflection of the mass of societal objects or artifacts that are inherited from the past and which only spring into life when they are adhered to by individuals. the society is the particular environment entailing continuing corporate activities in which the married professional woman allows the signification of marriage to impact on her collaborative activities. this observation then appears to provide a leeway for understanding the persistent dichotomy between the individual, on one side, and society (subsuming both culture and activity) on the other. it also provides avenues for extending the foundations of chat that can lead to better theorization of culture and social formations, not solely as context and resource, but also as manifestations of the human psyche, as argued by blunden (2007). impact of sociocultural environment on freedom and professional development the impact of the sociocultural environment on married women’s career development and growth is assessed relative to the indices outlined in figure 9 below. figure 9. respondents perceptions on environmental and sociocultural impact on their practical freedom and organizational growth. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 1 women's perception on sociocultural variables p e rc e n ta g e o f w o m e n h o ld in g p e rc e p ti o n high freedom capability low freedom capability negative sociocultural impact on freedom no sociocultural impact on freedom seldom relating strong to sociocultuarl norms againts organzitaon norms mostly relating strongly to sociocultural norms againts organzition norms strong environmental, individual & organizational barrier to career advancement no environmental, individual & organizational barrier to career advancement advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 a cursory look at figure 9 shows that 89 (72%) of the respondents perceive themselves as having the capability to exercise genuine practical freedom in their efforts towards developing their professional career. twenty-eight (42%) of the women indicated that they have very low capacity to exercise practical freedom in their professional development. the pattern of response indicates that most of these professional married women have practical freedom in developing themselves. additionally, 30 (28%) of the respondents indicated that their socio-cultural environment impact negatively on their practical freedom in their efforts to develop their professional careers. on the contrary, 71 (66%) of them indicated that their sociocultural environment does not impact negatively on their practical freedom towards developing their professional careers. the implication here is that, majority of the women do not perceive their sociocultural environment a impacting negatively on their practical freedom and professional development. sixty-four (54%) of the women indicated that they seldom find themselves relating strongly to their socio-cultural norms as against the existing norms in their organization. also, 38 (32%) respondents indicated that they relate strongly to their sociocultural norms compared to the norms in their organization most of the time, whereas 6 (5%) respondents said that they relate strongly to their sociocultural norms all the time. only 10 (8%) of the respondents indicated that they did not relate strongly to their sociocultural norms all the time, at all. in this respect therefore, majority of the women perceived themselves as seldom relating strongly to their sociocultural norms as against the existing norms in their organizations. as it is also highlighted in figure 9 above, 80 (68%) of the respondents also believe that in the ghanaian organizational situation, there are strong individual and environmental (sociocultural) barriers to the career advancement of the professional woman while 35(29%) disagree with this view. despite all these freedom that the women report to have in developing themselves, they still believe that there are organizational, situational, individual and sociocultural (i.e. environmental) barriers to the career advancement of professional women. the pattern of responses shows that majority of the women do not share the view that some positions are the preserve of men. however, some women held the contrary view. the women believe that they have equal abilities as men and can also fight for top management positions. because of these culturally bound beliefs, the woman who occupies such a top management position must prove beyond reasonable doubt that they are indeed capable of holding such a position, hence their pattern of responses. the responses here also indicate that majority believe that holding a management a position in organizations also requires working hard to justify the position. this goes on to buttress the points made that men have to take decisions and women are to support, and that they do not have a view of themselves. the implication therefore, is that for women the onus is for them to prove their worth and justify their capability to hold management positions. the above observations corroborate the findings of sackey and sanda, (2008) that there are a number of constraints emanating from the sociocultural environment, policies, laws and institutions that inhibit the developmental progress of professional women over the years in ghana. as it is indicative in the analyses, women are regarded as supporters of their male counterparts. as it is explained by sackey and sanda (2009) this is a result of the women being psyched over the years by the society to believe that men were those to take decisions, be it at home, the workplace, or at the national level. this tended to lend support to sociocultural belief advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 15 that women who occupy management positions in organizations have to work very hard to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that they are capable of occupying such positions (sackey & sanda, 2009), pointing to the prevalence of strong individual and environmental (sociocultural) barriers to career advancement. this is also against the background of the managerial women mostly being unsure of what their specific job tasks are due to positions in the organizational hierarchy being male-gendered-defined. this finding provides an explanation to the functional limitations in organization design that confront women, and which impact negatively on their career developments, and as such, provides learning on the impact of the inflow of socio-cultural dynamics into a gender-oriented organizational life and the complexities that it generates in understanding the constraints to the professional career development of married women. the learning that emerges from the above analyses is the conflict that prevails between the transforming psyches of the married professional women and the non-transforming characteristics of their society. from the perspectives of chat theorization, the constraining impact of such conflict on the professional development of the women is quite obvious, since it is upheld in chat that the human development is based on active transformations of existing environments and creation of new ones achieved through collaborative processes of producing and deploying tools (stetsenko, 2005). these processes, in other words, involve the development of collective experiences of people which are passed on from generation to generation. thus such collaborative processes can be seen as ultimately representing a form of exchange between the professional women with their world, and which exchange is unique to the social practice of human labor, or the professional women’s organizational and sociocultural activities. in these social and historically specific processes, people not only constantly transform and create their environment; they also create and constantly transform their very lives, consequently changing themselves in fundamental ways and, in the process, gaining self-knowledge. therefore, the professional women’s activity consists of both practical and social collaborative processes which are aimed at transforming their societal world as well as their personal selves with the help of collectively created tools. this practical, social, purposeful activity (or human labor) as the principal and primary form of human life, and the contradictions brought about in its development, lie at the very foundation and are formative of everything that is human in humans (stetsenko, 2005). based on the above observations, the ghanaian woman professional as an “individual” appears to be an individual psyche. the individual is thus seen as a concrete abstraction, meaning that the individual human psyche is absolutely confined to one organism separate from all others, and yet the entirety of human history is present in it (blunden, 2007). in this regard therefore, the distinction between the artifact (i.e. marriage), which begin its life as an objective material thing outside consciousness (i.e. the consciousness of the married professional women), albeit a thing endowed with social significance (i.e. by the ghanaian society), has become integrated into the psyche itself and cannot be said to be something other than the professional woman’s psyche. thus the married professional woman (as subject) entailed three components (i.e. the unity of the individual, the particular, and the universal). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 16 conclusion working ghanaian women who are also married continue to face variety of challenges that tends to constrain their professional development in organizations in which they function. what appears evident in the analysis is that ghanaian managerial women desire to balance their multiple roles of keeping both family and career. the women in this study also perceive themselves as possessing the capability of exercising genuine practical freedom in their efforts towards developing their professional career. their sociocultural environment also impact negatively on their practical freedom and professional development. in this regard therefore they reported that they do not relate strongly to their sociocultural norms as against their organizational norms. the women believe that there are strong individual and environmental barriers to the career advancement of the professional married woman in the ghanaian organizational situation. yet still, for most married professional women who cherish family and career lives, professional development is perceived as quite a daunting task to achieve. the sense here is that married professional women perceive marriage as very meaningful in relation to their professional development, because, they value marriage as a way of life, and thus expected it to contribute positively towards their professional development. though most of these professional married women have practical freedom in developing themselves, they still believe that there are organizational, situational, individual and sociocultural (i.e. environmental) barriers to their career advancement. this therefore portrays the contemporary ghanaian managerial woman as representing a mixture of both traditional values and social patterns carefully preserved by its culture. the consequence of their attempt to manage such a characteristic is the emergence of conflict between their transformation-oriented psyches as married professional women and their conservative-oriented sociocultural values. it is as a result of this that their talents are underutilized due to the sociocultural notion that they exist to support males (i.e. husbands or workmates), despite they also having equal abilities as men, with the capability to rise to top management positions in organizations. the impact of such a socioculturally-held view about women’s capability is the introduction of functional limitations in organization design which impact negatively on their quest for career developments. implications from the study the acceptance by the ghanaian traditional society of the married woman as a capable person who can equally perform as her male colleague in organizations and thus need to be trusted, supported and recognized is of relevance to her career development. this observation provides learning on the impact of the inflow of socio-cultural dynamics into a gender-oriented organizational life and the complexities that it generates in understanding the constraints to the professional career development of married women. going by the explanation of blunden (2007) the professional ghanaian woman is a reflection of the individual, simply understood as a mortal individual psyche, with a capacity for moral responsibility, knowledge, beliefs, and ideology, holding a certain identity or self-consciousness. the professional ghanaian woman therefore appears as an ensemble of social relations and activities, including both collaborative and conflictual relations (both organizational relations and the entire range of social activities). the advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 17 woman thus signifies the universal material product of culture, whose quest for career professional development is constrained by sociocultural norms and ethics. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 18 references blackler, f. 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(2008). using chat to explore marriage as a societal artifact and its impact on the professional career development of ghanaian women. in symposium book of abstracts, second conference of the international society for cultural and activity research (iscar), 2008 (pp. 33). san diego, california: university of southern california. 8th-13th september, 2008. sanda, m. a. (2006). four case studies on the commercialization of government r&d agencies: an organizational activity theoretical approach. doctoral thesis 2006:33/issn:1402-1544. luleå: luleå university of technology press. [epublished version]. retrieved from http://epubl.luth.se/1402-1617/2003/049/ltu-ex-03049-se.pdf sanda, m. a., & fältholm, y. 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(1998). mind as action. oxford: oxford university press. biography dr. mohammed-aminu sanda is a postdoctoral research fellow at the division of industrial work environment, department of human work sciences, luleå university of technology in sweden. he is also a faculty at the university of ghana business school, and a lecturer at the department of organization and human resource management, where he teaches courses in organizational behavior and management, advance strategic management as well as organizational change and management. dr. sanda received his phd degree in human work sciences, specializing in marcroergonomics (organizational design and management) in 2006 from the department of human work sciences, luleå university of technology in sweden. correspondence address: division of industrial work environment, department of human work sciences, luleå university of technology, se – 971 87, luleå, sweden. telephone: +46 920 49 3024, fax: +46 920 49 1030, email: mohami@ltu.se jocelyn sackey is a phd candidate at the division of industrial work environment, department of human work sciences, luleå university of technology in sweden. she is also a faculty at the university of ghana business school, and a lecturer at the department of organization and human resource management, where she teaches courses in human resource management and human behavior in organizations at the department of organization and human resource management. ms. sackey received her mphil degree in industrial psychology in 2006 from the university of ghana. telephone: +46 920 49 3024, fax: +46 920 49 1030, email: jocelyn.sackey@ltu.se volume 43, 2024 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop & kristina hall 2 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 advancing women in leadership vol. 43, 1-14, 2024 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper empowering second+ career female academics: strengthening relationships through mentoring for personal and professional growth cindy ann smith, felicity mclure, sonja kuzich, sonia ferns, sally murphy cindy smith: lecturer, curtin university, cindy.smith1@curtin.edu.au felicity mclure: senior lecturer, charles darwin university, felicity.mclure@cdu.edu.au sonja kuzich: director of learning and teacher/senior lecturer, curtin university, s.kuzich@curtin.edu.au sonia ferns: adjunct associate professor, casual academic, curtin university, s.ferns@curtin.edu.au sally murphy: senior lecturer, curtin university sally.murphy@curtin.edu.au accepted november 8, 2023 mentoring of early career researchers (ecrs) in universities usually involves older, more experienced researchers providing guidance to younger researchers starting out in their careers. however, for women who enter academia as a second or more career (second +), this type of mentoring may not recognise the experiences these women bring with them or the unique barriers that they encounter. this study is an autoethnographic case study through a relational cultural theory lens of five women who entered academia later in their careers but were classified as ecrs. in order to address the unique challenges confronting them they formed a peer mentoring group. analysis of group discussions and individual reflections resulted in the identification of common themes of disempowerment, lack of belonging and lack of collegiate relations as they confronted the often-invisible barriers presented by university processes and culture. sharing of mutual experiences within the peer mentoring group resulted in greater self-awareness of negative self-talk and beliefs, developed understanding of university systems, empowered participants through relational problem solving and supported agency in planning career progression. the increased sense of belonging and self-efficacy that participants felt suggests that peer mentoring, rather than traditional mentoring schemes, may be of greater benefit for other second+ career female academics. keywords: mature female academics, mentoring, university relationships, empowerment, early career researcher(s) historically, university education was available only to elite segments of society, primarily white men, with admission to university by women being achieved more recently. australian universities began admitting women in the 1890s and oxford university in england accepted their first unrestricted female cohort in 1920. prior to this date, women were allowed to study at oxford, however, they were not allowed to take a degree (university of oxford, 2023). harvard university in the u.s. excluded women as late as 1942, with all harvard colleges admitting women only as recently as 1965 (wenninger & conroy, 2001). gender gaps although, more recently, the participation gap for females studying and working in academia has reversed, a gender gap remains in relation to female academics in positions of leadership. by the 1990s female university students outnumbered their male classmates (wenninger & conroy, 2001). yet, despite entering academia, graduating in greater numbers, and moving to teaching and research academic roles, women remain underrepresented in university leadership positions. as is the case worldwide, australian universities are showing a general improvement, precipitated by such factors as the measures introduced by the first and second action plans for women implemented by the australian vice chancellor’s committee (avcc), and the subsequent universities australia strategy for women (winchester & browning, 2015). these strategies influenced a shift in australian universities where women comprised 40% of academic staff overall in 2005. however, women were not well represented in senior leadership positions; for example, only 17% of professors and 23% of vice chancellors in 2005 were women (browning, 2008). progress is being made, albeit slowly; by 2014 the overall number had slightly increased to women representing 44% of academic staff with 31% being in senior positions (winchester & browning, 2015). however, there is still much work to be done. in 2020, while close to 60% of employees at australian universities were women, more than 50% of academic positions at senior lecturer level or above were held by men (universities australia, 2020). in their examination of university policies and practices, winchester and colleagues (2006) posit that the gender disparity in promotion and leadership is due to cultural and generational mailto:cindy.smith1@curtin.edu.au mailto:felicity.mclure@cdu.edu.au mailto:s.kuzich@curtin.edu.au mailto:s.ferns@curtin.edu.au mailto:sally.murphy@curtin.edu.au 3 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 attitudes rather than poorly designed or implemented policy. the most recent figures from universities australia (jarboe, 2017) show that wide gender disparities still exist in leadership positions; currently only 25% of vice chancellors, and 15% of chancellors are women, and at the faculty level women make up about one third of head of faculties or schools. this slow progress is reflective of the difficulty in changing societal attitudes and unconscious biases (vongalis-macrow, 2016). gender bias in the workplace more broadly is well documented, with women being less likely to achieve promotions, and more subtle differences where women are subjected to stereotypical gendered assumptions by their colleagues (davidson, 2018). academic mentoring mentoring for academics is a support often provided by universities. however, there is a wide variance in the effectiveness of mentoring programs including difficulty with matching mentor and mentee, and a lack of training and support for mentors (stokes & merrick, 2012). women in academia have unique needs that are difficult to address through standard workplace mentoring programs, which may not consider the needs of women or the unique strengths they bring. this was the case for a group of five mature female academics at an australian university, four of whom had attained doctoral qualifications in the previous five-year period. despite their varied career experiences and wealth of expertise, they were categorized as early career researchers based on the completion timeframes of their doctoral studies. the term early career researcher (ecr) or early career academic (eca) is used broadly in the university sector to describe those who are in their first five years post-completion of a phd, and is a common measure used for both research funding and workplace training, awards, and promotion (bosanquet et al., 2017). however, traditional views of academic support for those identified as ecr/eca ignore the rich experiences that women who complete phd studies later in their professional careers bring to academia. because of this oversight, institutional mentoring support provided by universities is often inadequate for the unique needs of this cohort of women academics, partly because their distinctive strengths and skills are not considered. having found this to be the case, we created a peer mentoring group for the purpose of providing mutual support and managing the challenges to career advancement specific to women entering academia later in their professional careers. we began meeting together for informal, mutually supportive discussions around our unique experiences. as females who had extensive career experiences but were labelled as early career researchers, we came to consensus that the term second+ career female academics more accurately described our situation. we recognized the benefits of using our background experience to support each other as colleagues through relational mentoring experiences, utilizing supportive relational behaviors such as reciprocity, flexibility, and mutual learning. this paper shares the story of our journey for the purpose of adding to the research base of effective mentoring supports for women in academia. first, we review previous research around relational mentoring, particularly considering structured workplace mentoring programs in tertiary institutions. we then challenge stereotypical views of both gender and age often found in academia, through our argument that the unique strengths and challenges of women in academia can be more effectively viewed through the theoretical lens of relational cultural theory (miller, 1976) rather than the traditional linear view of human development with individuals progressing through specific developmental points across the lifespan (erikson, 1968). our research is structured as a qualitative, auto ethnographic inquiry, with ourselves positioned as insiders (participant researchers) exploring our own ideas and understandings and culminating in both individual and collective narratives (chang, 2008). we report on our peer mentoring group experiences for the purpose of adding to information regarding effective supports specifically for the cohort of women who complete phd studies and pursue academic careers as a second or more career, especially considering their unique strengths. literature review the widely used terms of ecr and eca fail to accurately describe the growing cohort of academics who complete phds well into their working career. in addition, the increasing casualisation of the academic workforce means that many academics may teach and complete research for extended periods of time before gaining a permanent academic position. because of these changing dynamics, such terms as ecr or eca are becoming inaccurate and outdated. studies such as those of bosanquet et al., (2017) show that as few as 20% of ecas follow the traditional pathway into academia through gaining permanent or full-time employment at a university almost immediately after completion of doctoral studies. many individuals begin their academic careers through casual teaching or research positions. ageism & perceptions there is a move to discard descriptors like “young” and “new” academic (price et al., 2015) because of growing realization that “age is not an indicator of early career” (bosanquet et al., 2017, p. 891). a new zealand study identified that over a third of early career academics were female, 40 years of age or over (sutherland et al., 2013). yet, the most common definition of an early to mid-career researcher is one that is under 35 years of age (suarez-martinez & ravenscroft, 2019). women over 35, with extensive previous non-academic career experience, plus, in many cases, a substantial academic career prior to completing a phd, disrupt the stereotypical conceptions of who is considered an ecr/eca. current research literature in this area is more likely to focus on those under 35. more information is needed to understand the particular types of support which are needed by those that either change careers or enter academia through 4 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 pathways other than directly after completion of an undergraduate degree to a phd qualification. typical university supports are aimed at career trajectories envisaged as slow and steady progressions across a lifetime of work. in contrast, women who have gained years of valuable career and life experience before completing phds, bring this practical knowledge and experience with them when they join academic fields. not only do they need different types of support for career progression, but much of their previous experience can also be drawn upon to perpetuate a more rapid climb for successful career progression and recognition. utilising the strengths this group of women academics contribute can transform their academic career progression from a “marathon” to a “sprint race” (mckay & monk, 2017, p. 1252). those that identify as ecrs are faced with challenges in relation to low job security, with precarious short-term contracts the norm (hollywood et al., 2020; bosanquet et al., 2017); pressure to research and publish (raynor, 2019); increasing workloads (acker & webber, 2017) leading to stress, burnout and mental health issues; and poor work-life balance (bartlett et al., 2021). however, for women, particularly those that enter academia or complete a phd later in their career, these issues compound. despite being successful and competent in previous workplaces, mckay and monk (2017) argue, upon entering higher education this group is reduced to neophytes, as there are new sets of “explicit and implied rules, ideologies and hidden curriculum” (p. 1258) to master. they contend that for this group there is limited time to learn the rules, build a record of accomplishment and establish an academic profile. in addition, they face a persistently hierarchical, patriarchal, aged, and gendered environment (hearn & husu, 2019), where there is greater expectation that women will do more of the teaching, pastoral care, and the invisible procedural and “academic housekeeping” (p.199), work which is less valued in terms of university career progression metrics. this group of academics can ‘slip through the cracks’ of institutional provisions, such as research funding schemes, and career enhancing support networks that have been identified as privileging male academics to the exclusion of women (burkinshaw & white, 2019; boyle et al., 2015). these cracks in provision result in, what bosetti et al., (2008) characterise as positioning women ‘betwixt’ and ‘between’ what is on offer from academia, and what women need in terms of effective career support. what became clear to us was the dominant model of career support offered at our institution, such as mentoring, lacked nuance and relevance for our needs as a group of second+ career female academics. mentoring the university sector professes to offer support for ecrs, including formal mentoring programs, peer mentoring programs and other types of institutional support. however, mentoring programs tend to encourage collaboration and the development of interpersonal relationships, which can be difficult in competitive academic environments that value individual achievement (lewis & olshansky, 2016). therefore, intended support may be ineffective or non-existent, especially for those transitioning between roles within the university sector (adams et al., 2016). respondents to a survey of ecrs in australian education faculties conducted by orlando and gard (2014) reported a broad range of support from little to rich and meaningful mentoring relationships, and formal professional development programs. those who expressed dissatisfaction found that the programs were ad hoc or produced few tangible benefits and that workload allocations made it difficult for ecrs to develop research profiles while also meeting other demands of their roles. involvement in leadership and mentoring programs within universities includes a range of identifiable outcomes, such as increased understanding of organizational structure, clarification and confidence around career development, and opportunities for networking and role models (browning, 2008). academics who have successfully attained leadership roles in research groups attribute mentoring as one of the factors alongside institutional support, research culture and institutional assistance, as contributing to their success (browning et al., 2017). universities often send mixed messages encouraging collaboration among academics, but at the same time rewarding individual efforts which fosters a culture of competitiveness rather than collaboration. mentoring relationships must be built upon open and trusting relationships to be successful, and this is certainly true in a competitive professional context such as academia. formal mentoring programs are widely used as a support for early career teaching and research academics and are often seen as a method of support for underrepresented minority groups, including women in the profession (lewis & olshansky, 2016; brown & severin, 2014). these mentoring programs do not always provide satisfactory or measurable benefits to participants. formal mentoring in academia usually involves a more experienced or successful faculty member providing support to a newer peer through advice, introductions and assistance navigating processes. however, currently established mentoring programs often were designed according to the needs of white, male academics and may not benefit those from the diverse groups represented in academia today (johannesen & bristol, 2016; hackmann & malin, 2020). this lack of success may be due to a mismatch of interests, backgrounds or expectations or a lack of understanding of how the relationship can benefit both parties. traditional mentoring approaches, caution lewis and olshanky (2016), may attempt to fit the mentee into existing models rather than working to create new models of success. they also suggest that unless there is a method of relationship development, formal programs are unlikely to be successful. mentoring programs in various forms including peer mentoring, group mentoring, and co-mentoring, are increasingly being utilized at university and even national and global levels, in attempts to find more satisfactory arrangements (mullen et al., 2020; johannesen & bristol, 2016; wu et al., 2016). peer 5 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 mentoring provides a safe space where participants feel free to admit to challenges and perceived weaknesses without being judged, and to share ways of working through those challenges, including mutual support (adams et al., 2016). groups such as those developed by adams and colleagues (2016) have found that being at a similar career stage and having similar research areas helped to develop bonds which provided both professional and personal support. if early career researchers are to become the research leaders of the future, browning et al. (2017) conclude universities need to provide strong support for activities which develop networks, encourage collaboration, and provide mentoring opportunities, as well as other systematic support such as resources for conference attendance, development of grant applications and supervision of post graduate students. we argue that this type of institutional support is scarce, as in our case, where a group of female academics found it necessary to create an informal, collegial mentoring space. theoretical foundation this paper draws on relational cultural theory (rct) as an explanatory mechanism to illustrate our experiences. first proposed by miller (1976), rct focuses on the importance of personal development through the process of relationship building with personal interactions, friendships, and network development. although originally applied as a feminist theory, the concepts of rct have been used to understand the interactions within specific groups defined by culture or sexual orientation. a central tenet of rct is the development of mutually supportive relationships geared toward reciprocal growth and empowerment (alvarez & lazzari, 2015). this is in stark contrast to the traditional individualistic view of personal development where a person works through personal challenges developing greater degrees of self-confidence and independence across the lifespan (erikson, 1968). however, proponents of rct believe that these traditional views are aligned with the experiences of white, middle-class males, without considering the experiences of minority or marginalized societal groups such as those defined by gender, culture, or socio-economic status, who may tend to recognize the importance of community and relationships for personal development (comstock et al., 2008). while personal autonomy is important, healthy human development, both personal and professional, is supported by interactions with colleagues, particularly those which consider the uniqueness of a person’s specific characteristics such as gender, culture, or experiences of individuals who may have had marginalizing experiences (lewis & olshansky, 2016). further, the group relationship development which may support positive self-concepts and lead to healthy, connected relationships were likely to be negatively identified as feminine traits and opposite to the concepts of autonomy and self-reliance more likely to be seen as male attributes. study purpose & rationale based on prior research into women in academia and ecr, it is evident that women who are entering academia from other careers are not represented in the literature. this study addresses this gap by investigating the differences between our experiences as second+ career female academics in comparison to younger women who entered academia as a first career. the purpose of this study is to examine the way this group of women academics used the development of relationships via a mentoring group as a supportive system to navigate the academic environment. each of the participants has their individual academic journey to share, however, we propose that the interactions of the group provide interesting and valuable insights to better understand the ways the group supported and strengthened each other. further, we present insights into the larger picture of academia, including how women navigate systemic supports and barriers. we seek to understand how the experiences of the women individually interacted with the collective experiences of the group. this understanding may provide more information as to the support needs of second+ career female academics. the two research questions examined in this study are: 1. what are the perceived challenges and opportunities for second career female academics? 2. what is the impact of participation in a peer mentoring group specifically designed to support second career female academics in addressing the challenges identified? methods this qualitative study utilizes corbin and strauss’ (2008) procedures of the development of a grounded theory through examination of the context and process to understand how theoretical integration is useful to a phenomenon. this method is useful since we want to demonstrate how individual experiences interact with and act upon the understanding and actions of the group. we employed a collaborative auto ethnographic methodology to understand our lived experience from an emic (insider) perspective as five female academics at a single university within western australia using a narrative analysis of the data. these procedures are useful to recognize the artificial aspect of micro and macro conditions because of the complexity and interrelatedness of human interactions allowing us to make sense of both our individual and group experiences. participants each of the participants (n=5) had a career in classroom teaching and educational roles outside of schools before coming to academia and were over 50 years of age at the time of this study. four had completed their phd within the last two to eight years and met the definition of an eca used at many australian universities. in this paper, we describe these women as second+ career female academics to acknowledge their relative late entry to academia, and the fact that they are by necessity much older 6 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 than many of their university colleagues due to their previous, often extensive, work and life experiences. the participants became part of this research in two ways. the first was as a result of a conversation between three of the academics, jane, alexandra and ruth, precipitated by an incident in the workplace that impacted all three and became the impetus for this study. this incident related to a call for female ecr’s to join a formal university wide mentoring program. the selection process resulted in a young female academic being selected, which caused our group to surmise that mature female academics were not readily considered by management as needing this kind of support. it was only after lobbying that one of the second + career academics was eventually included in the formal program. this shared experience, where each participant has experienced a phenomenon that is the central focus of a study, and therefore, an information rich source, is an example of purposeful sampling (cresswell & plano clark, 2011). the other two participants, michelle and grace, were recruited via snowball sampling, a form of convenience sampling (bryman, 2012) as they were known to the first three participants. michelle was included as she was the only other example of a second+ career female academic within their department and grace was selected as she had over 20 years’ experience in academia but had only recently completed her phd. this organic development is an important aspect of effective peer mentoring and allowed us to develop specific mutual support within our group. procedures the group met monthly for 1-to-1.5-hour meetings for a period of one year. we also communicated through emails and informal conversations, reaching out to each other for support and information around university processes and procedures. group members did not know each other well in the beginning, however, we discovered that we all had specific areas of experience and expertise that were mutually beneficial to the group members. this engagement resulted in a natural progression of supportive professional relationships among the group members which we found in stark contrast to our experiences in mentor programs developed through bureaucratic processes which, although well intentioned, did not provide the intended support. because we felt that our experiences were particularly unique, we believed that it was important to document the group activities and the progression and outcomes of the relationship development through research. the research procedures, including development of the research questions, and research design decisions were determined through collaborative discussions in which all group members had an equal voice. the responsibilities and tasks were shared among the group according to the strengths and interests of the members, including organization and facilitation of the focus group meetings, recording and transcription of the focus groups, data analysis and writing for dissemination. data were generated through two sources: two semi structured focus group interviews and ongoing, reflective journaling by each participant. focus groups the focus groups were held across two distinct points during the mentoring process, at 6 months and again after 1 year. due to covid-19 movement restrictions at the time, one of the focus groups was conducted online via zoom (https://zoom.us). each focus group utilized semi structured interview questions enabling participants to provide a response to a common prompt, but also to elaborate and contextualize their response to personal experiences and circumstances. open-ended questions generate rich qualitative data as they enable a more natural conversational relationship between interviewer and interviewees. they also encourage “depth and vitality”, supporting both spontaneous questions and responses that may lead to new paths not considered in the original study design (doody & noonan, 2013, p. 30). interview protocol the focus group interview questions were: 1. how confident do you feel regarding your ability to navigate university processes? 2. what barriers have you experienced/perceived regarding career advancement in the academic environment? 3. what supports have you found useful regarding career advancement in the academic environment? 4. what strengths do you feel you bring to the academic environment specifically because of your life position? 5. who have you identified as a career mentor in the academic environment? a. what qualities make that person an effective mentor? the interviewer, michelle, adhered to the set of pre-planned core questions in a flexible way building upon the responses of each participant, and utilizing secondary probing and clarifying questions. in this way, her role as a researcher changed during the focus group interview to a moderator or facilitator (punch, 2009). the core questions guided the interview to gain a common set of data from each participant related to the foci of this study. the goal was to facilitate the generation of rich descriptive detailed accounts of the participants' experiences perceptions and perspectives (dicicco-bloom & crabtree, 2006; adams & cox, 2008) and what meaning they made of these (rubin & rubin, 2012). in addition, facilitation of group interaction produced data and insights that enriched and expanded on individual participant contributions (punch, 2009). reflective journals each participant engaged in reflective journaling across the year. to support journal writing, open ended prompts were developed by consensus of the group at the monthly meetings. examples of these prompts include: 7 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 1. current barriers to my success are: 2. current supports i am experiencing: 3. i feel my colleagues value/don’t value my work because…. 4. a colleague i trust is: 5. my goals are: participants were also encouraged to regularly record other thoughts, observations, feelings, and ideas beyond the specified prompts. journaling is a form of self-reflexive auto ethnographic inquiry that enables participants to explore their ideas and understandings resulting in individual narratives (chang, 2008). using an auto ethnographic approach, each participant interrogated themselves and generated data in the form of a personal account. these journal entries allowed the individual to explore the broader social and cultural context through selfobservation (sealy, 2012; wilkinson, 2020). through engaging in auto ethnographic inquiry we, as a group of female academics, sought to weave together our lived experiences in academia in narrative form to help make sense of, and contextualize our experiences of perceptual and actual barriers to career progression. these journal entries were collated at the conclusion of the year and were entered into nvivo (https://lumivero.com/products/nvivo/). data analysis the data generated represent a collective or composite reflective narrative. the auto ethnographic accounts of our experiences centered on a common phenomenon within an australian university over a year. data were analyzed in two stages. first, the transcribed recordings of responses to open-ended focus group questions were analyzed. each researcher independently engaged in a process of open coding each line of the transcripts to generate high level categories. the researchers then met to ensure intercoder agreement and to develop a collective consistent nomenclature for each category and clarify the meaning of each and the data relevant to each category. then a single researcher input the transcripts into nvivo (qsr, 2012) and associated direct quotes from the participants with each category. the same process was applied to the reflective journals from each participant. from here, coding of both the focus group interview transcripts and the journals using constant comparative analysis generated inductive themes; that is, they emerged from the data and not from the existing literature. these themes linked a number of the initially coded categories to represent broader and more inclusive concerns that resonated with the research questions posed in the study. the following themes emerged as salient: belongingness, collegiate relations, university processes and protocols, and mentoring. these four themes had a reciprocal relationship with each other, and constituted aspects that contributed to the overarching theme of (dis)empowerment, as illustrated in figure 1. the use of the term (dis)empowerment captures the dichotomous influences on these female academics. for example, within the theme of belongingness, aspects such as the development of supportive, positive relationships can support a sense of empowerment in the workplace, whilst perceived inequities because of age or gender could lead to disempowerment. therefore, each of the four themes had a positive and negative valence. results themes interviews were initially coded for themes using nvivo (qsr, 2012) software using open-ended coding as categories arose (corbin & strauss, 2008). as coding progressed, five major categories were identified (bryman, 2012): belongingness; collegiate relations; mentoring; university culture and processes; and empowerment/disempowerment. coding within these themes to find sub-themes within each category continued until no more categories arose and it was assumed that theoretical saturation had been reached (bryman, 2012). themes and sub-themes and the frequency of each sub-theme which describe the participants’ perceptions of barriers and supportive factors for career progression are presented in table 1. note: within table 1, identified barriers are represented in italics, to differentiate from identified supports. table 1 supportive factors and barriers to career progression arising from nvivotm analysis. belongingness the theme of belonging or lack of belonging within the academic environment was raised as a prominent theme by all participants (table 1). sub-themes within this theme represent either supporting factors or barriers to ‘belongingness’. for 8 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 instance, a sense of inclusion supported a belief in belonging, while beliefs in inequitable practices undermined a sense of belonging in participants. during the initial group meetings, discussion tended to focus on the sub-themes that described barriers towards belonging. four of the five participants noted that they had felt left out or rejected within the academic community. for instance, ruth noted that she “was not introduced to anyone” and that told the story that “you’re not really part of the school”. a second major barrier to belonging that was identified was the participants’ beliefs about others’ perceptions related to age. there was the perception that, although they were categorised as early career researchers due to recent completion of phds, that they were frequently considered to be “too old” (alexandra) and hence overlooked for awards or promotion as they did not fit the stereotype of a young (early) career researcher. concerns were expressed that despite selection criteria for academic positions purportedly being age-blind, that age was an unwritten factor working against career development for these women. issues of inequitable distribution of opportunities for older women were also raised, for instance, perceptions that younger women were “offered [more] opportunities and support” and older women were given disproportionately “the heaviest workloads” (alexandra). two of the sub-themes were related to the participants’ own self-perceptions. three group members noted that they had feelings that they did not really belong within the academic community – that they were imposters within that environment. for instance, jane noted that “most of us probably do have those moments where we go ‘how did i end up [here]?’” secondly, group members noted that we tend to undersell our abilities and skills that we have developed over many years and through many life-experiences. it was recognised that these two sub-themes and elements of the other sub-themes are examples of negative self-talk, for instance, not “believing that we can do things as well as others” (ruth), which act to prevent integration within the academic community. in meetings later in the year, there were fewer instances of each of these sub-themes and a perceptible increase in expressions of agency and empowerment were noted. participants of the mentoring group noted the benefits of the group because they felt like “there are people who are like me” (jane) and recognised that they should not be “ashamed of [their] prior experience but, in fact, celebrate [those] experiences” (jane). participants also became aware of negative self-talk and checked themselves from engaging in such talk. jane noted that she was “genuinely grateful for the group” as participation supported agency through breaking down barriers to belonging and building inclusion. belongingness for our group was enabled through feeling included and the perception that we were given opportunities on an equitable basis due to ability rather than age. barriers to belongingness were related to our feelings of rejection or exclusion, underselling ourselves by not promoting our skills and abilities, and a self-perception of ourselves as imposters within an academic environment. mentoring most of the participants had taken part in formal one-to-one mentoring organised by the university. although there were some benefits to these externally arranged mentoring relationships, all participants noted that there was incongruence between the mentor’s experience and the mentees’, since most mentors had worked in academia for their entire careers or in “research only positions” (alexandra) and did not understand the unique experiences that we had as women entering academia after pursuing prior careers or trying to juggle teaching with research. on the other hand, this purposively selected group of academics, possessing a range of perspectives and experiences, but who shared characteristics such as age, gender (experiences congruent with age/role), was considered to have a much more profound influence in encouraging members, helping them to understand the university context and supporting them in career development. for instance, alexandra noted that being in this group had “laid bare some issues that are peculiar to us” as “the ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ group”. ruth noted that “hearing stories of others has given me specific steps that i can take in order to develop my career.” alexandra identified the need for second+ career female academics to engage in “a fast-track program – accelerated learning of the essential things that are known to make a difference to career progression and academic success.” she noted that “having this group has made these hidden questions more tangible” and “given me courage to shape new strategies”. in summary, the mentoring provided by a purposively selected group of academics who would provide a range of perspectives and experiences was considered effective. in addition, this mentoring was significantly more effective than formally arranged university mentoring, as there was a congruence between the mentor’s and the mentee’s experience, age, gender, and role. university processes & culture the processes and culture of universities emerged as a dominant theme during focus group conversations (see table 1). participants perceived the university culture as “hierarchical” (grace) and prohibitive in enacting autonomy and feeling accepted in the workplace with “a number of barriers [impacting] on success as an academic” (alexandra). the university environment was described as “lacking in community building and unwelcoming for newcomers” (ruth). alexandra described this as a “kind of ‘uni cultural cringe’” and felt people perceived her as not possessing “the right credentials to be noticed”. alexandra believed what was “valued outside academia and at the entry point into academia was a devalued currency within the university environment. the metrics for career success and progression narrowed to a small set of criteria 9 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 that often focussed on individualistic, rather than collaborative goals”. there was an emphasis on learning to navigate the system to improve a sense of inclusion in the university community with a prevailing perception that barriers were constantly reinforced if those involved “don’t know how the system works” (alexandra) and you “really have to push the boundaries” (ruth) to achieve success and build an academic profile. inconsistency in messages and information across the university was expressed as a barrier to progressing careers, creating uncertainty about navigating the system. grace commented on the competitive nature of the university culture which negatively impacted the establishment of relationships premised on collegial support and encouragement because people have to “look the best or better” than colleagues. incompetent leaders were thought to be “intimidated” and “threatened by competent people with extensive experience”. there were perceived risks associated with being outspoken and challenging decisions and leadership. participants had been “omitted from conversations and excluded from opportunities” (alexandra) and there was general agreement that “they actually pick out people who are going to be compliant” (grace) rather than someone who challenges the system. more in-depth discussion about the university culture centred on “the type of people we’re employing [at the university] and the appointment of incompetent executive leadership and “dysfunctional leadership” (grace) as barriers to establishing a positive community ethos and an inclusive workplace. leadership often provided explanations that were “very inadequate in justifying some decisions” (alexandra). despite the perception of deficits in the interpersonal skills and expertise of staff, participants ascertained that a “good relationship with your head of school” (alexandra) was an effective strategy for traversing obstacles in the system. alexandra described a leadership group as “a little purple circle” where information flow and decision-making was constrained within the “bubble” with “minimal discussion” and not disseminated to staff more broadly to ensure equitable access to information. michelle appreciated the support of the mentoring group as it helped “to keep a more balanced perspective and allows me to see that the unhelpful attitudes and actions of the university aren’t personal to me, but it speaks of many differing agendas of the people who are in power and make decisions”. participants alluded to two key problems with university culture: “sometimes you are genuinely blocked” and on other occasions it is because “you don’t know what you don’t know” (jane) there was a belief that employees “learn the ropes” (alexandra) and identify the “gatekeepers” (michelle) over an extended period. “find[ing] the right person” is key to navigating the barriers to progression. with no “formal induction into university processes”, and “no idea about what my role was” (ruth) striving for success was “a process of osmosis relying on your own initiative” (alexandra). personal responsibility was accepted in some instances with (jane) commenting that a part of the reason is because as “women… we don’t necessarily want to admit that we need help”. grace surmised that she was “tired of the instability, constant restructuring and reshaping, poor leadership, lack of long term strategic and operational planning designed to achieve strategic imperatives, incongruence across the institution, and repeat conversations for the last 10 to 15 years.” the group identified that an inclusive culture where they were welcomed as newcomers and valued for previous experience, would support their progress in academia. less emphasis on credentials, and greater focus on collaborative rather than individualistic pursuits were identified as ways to build a supportive culture. in terms of university processes, several factors emerged as helpful such as a more formalised induction process that clarified the role of an academic and ways to navigate the various, and ever changing, systems with the help of knowledgeable colleagues who could identify gatekeepers. transparent and effective leadership committed to equitable dissemination of information was also identified as supportive measures. collegiate relationships participants acknowledged the “deep importance of interdependence and really valuing each other and encouraging each other” (ruth). appreciation of nurturing collegial relationships where one can speak “honestly and frankly, and voice ideas/concern that are accepted and validated” (alexandra) was considered essential for navigating a difficult work environment. there was consensus that supportive groups of this ilk were “very powerful and helped to clarify perceptions based on self-doubts and those that are systemic problems” (ruth), thereby building self-awareness and identifying strategies for breaking down barriers. developing global networks outside the university were considered valuable for “self-esteem” (ruth) and professional “credibility” (grace). “the deep importance of interdependence and ...valuing … and encouraging each other” (ruth) was highlighted as benefit of the mentoring group. grace discussed the benefits that evolve from “networking and building those networks and relationships”, perceiving this strategy as instrumental in breaking down barriers. ruth described the mentoring group as “instrumental in changing my perspective about how to develop my career.” participants referred to “informal connections” that evolved into collaborative professional relationships. jane described an example where her confidence was boosted when a colleague sought her input and subsequently “found that [the colleague] learned just as much from [jane] as she did from me about different things”. actively “keeping up relationships and keeping online and … doing zoom calls with people “(ruth) was deemed essential to maintain relationships during covid-19 restrictions. despite examples of positive relationship building and acknowledgement of the importance of collegial relationships, the underlying perception was that academics “don’t play well together” and lack “social skills” (michelle). 10 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 the group identified the powerful interdependent collegiate relationship developed had privileged honesty, trust, frankness, and valuing of each other, and was instrumental in breaking down personal barriers to career progression. [dis] empowerment perceptions of empowerment and disempowerment echoed across all themes. personal agency, confidence, and resilience were afforded through an enhanced sense of belonging, strengthened collegiate relations and mentoring. conversely, negative self-worth and lack of confidence, and a prevailing sense of powerlessness emerged from feelings of rejection, being undervalued, and a university culture characterised by obstacles. participants agreed that it was important to take ownership and initiative in managing your career and not rely on others who are self-interested. feeling empowered to “push the boundaries” (alexandra) was critical to success and wellbeing. “a lack of value for work and efforts by the university” (ruth) and feeling “largely invisible and unrecognised in my workplace” (alexandra) led to a lack of confidence and a feeling of inadequacy. jane expressed doubt in her capabilities referring to an “imposter syndrome”, questioning that she deserved accolades and success and “needed to accept ownership of her career trajectory". personal agency and positive thinking were resonating themes throughout discussions. participants agreed that it was essential to “keep a more balanced perspective” (michelle) and recognise that “the unhelpful attitudes and actions of the university aren’t personal but speak of many differing agendas of the people who are in power and make decisions” (ruth). alexandra conceded that “much of what we need to succeed is left to a process of osmosis or relies on your own initiative”. as participants “shared individual strengths and reaffirmed each other’s valuable contributions” (jane), confidence grew and ownership of one’s destiny emerged. ruth was inspired by the group as a sense of pride emanated and a willingness to “celebrate prior experience and … say i actually have something to contribute here”. the “lack of job security” (jane), “funding and the freeze on contracts [are] major barriers” (ruth) to progressing academic careers. “short term contracts” (ruth) were perceived as barriers to career advancement. covid-19 was regarded as an “insidious” (alexandra) factor in limiting career progression and propagating a sense of disempowerment. jane articulated a deepening sense of empowerment the group enabled through “making it a safe, supportive space to share highs and lows” and the collective discussion on “ways to counteract [the negatives and injustices]”. “it’s also been great to see how the group seems to be more as a whole than the sum total of our parts. i think we are stronger as a group than we would be if we were just individuals” (michelle). empowerment for the individuals in the group was strongly supported by being part of the collegiate mentoring group. through the group the factors identified as relating to a sense of disempowerment were able to be dealt with in a collective, affirming, and supportive way. as michelle expressed: “the conversations and relationships that i’ve developed with the group members have helped…me [to recognise] that as colleagues the other group members do value and appreciate my work/ideas”. empowerment for the members was enabled through a collective dismantling of perceived barriers. discussion women are well represented in university teaching and research roles; however, they are less likely to hold leadership positions as compared to their male counterparts. although universities attempt to address this inequity, support offered such as mentoring, is not always effective because the strengths and needs of women are not taken into consideration (stokes & merrick, 2012). the purpose of this study was to better understand the challenges and opportunities of women who complete doctoral degrees and enter the field after completing other careers. second, we wanted to know if participation in an organically developed peer mentoring group was useful in addressing identified challenges according to their perceptions. second + career female academics have unique strengths created by the rich experiences they bring with them as well as specific support needs, which are not always addressed by mentoring programs developed through traditional bureaucratic policies. overall, the data indicates that despite a wide variance of career experiences and aspirations of the participants, there are common recurrent themes in the identified participant experiences and perceptions suggesting that traditional support systems and bureaucratic processes are often inadequate or ineffective and, in some instances, create further challenges for the second + career female academic participants. further, there is compelling evidence that participation in a peer mentoring program which is organically developed may mitigate these challenges. this section will discuss the overall themes gathered from the data, including how the thematic concepts are interrelated as well as their relationship to rct (miller, 1978), and finally, how this data can inform the development of more effective supports for other second+ career female academics. five broad themes were identified: belongingness, collegiate relations, mentoring, university culture and processes and empowerment/disempowerment. each theme has distinct characteristics yet are interrelated concepts relevant to the concept of relationship building, the foundation which underpins both mentoring and rct (alvarez & lazzari, 2015) as both hold that quality peer interaction is essential to healthy human development. not only were the five themes evident, but the data in each category also helped to tell the story of our individual growth through the development of supportive professional relationships. see figure 1 for a graphic representation of the interconnectedness of these thematic concepts as they relate to the positive relational development over time. 11 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 figure 1 thematic interactions illustrating growth of relationships across the peer mentoring activities. relational conditions (lack of belonging) and relational behaviors and processes (disempowerment and lack of collegiate relations) were in evidence within our group during the period when the only mentoring we experienced was formal and institutional. a sense of belonging or fitting in to our environment is important to promote confidence and safety. the sense of not belonging is strongly linked to the concept of ‘imposter syndrome’, a sense of not really belonging because of a feeling of being fraudulently allowed ‘in’ – that any achievements or successes are inauthentic or fraudulent and that, when this fraudulence is uncovered, the person will be unmasked and shamed (breeze, 2018). the development of supportive relationships which occurred over time through the peer mentoring activities allowed the participants to move from a sense of not belonging, being unsupported, and without a sense of empowerment, to the development of belongingness within an effective support system and gaining a strong, positive sense of empowerment. the data provides evidence that strategic and positive peer interaction is not merely an effective coping strategy, rather it sets in motion processes that promote further personal and professional development. these findings are consistent with the work of lewis and olshansky (2016), in which academic mentoring is underpinned with the framework of rct and emphasizes the importance of organic relationship development as a counterbalance to mentoring programs developed through arbitrary bureaucratic processes. although formal mentoring programs can be effective, they are more likely to assign mentor/mentee dyads arbitrarily and are less likely to support the rich interactions needed for effective relationship building. this group developed by the participants, provided a more supportive foundation for effective relationship development. the group activities included periodic formal meetings as well as informal conversations consisting of rich, supportive interactions between the group members, providing information, peer support, and an emotionally safe space to exchange useful feedback. through these exchanges we developed a greater sense of confidence in our abilities. this venue to openly ask questions and engage in non-judgmental discussion helped to promote a sense of emotional safety, while dispelling imposter feelings. further, we found that being able to ask questions was useful to the entire group, as together we could better navigate our way through bureaucratic processes by pooling our knowledge, contacts, and experiences. we collectively made use of our strengths, such as problem solving and persistence, supporting the development of the group in a manner more consistent with rct rather than traditional individualistic views (miller, 1976). this is particularly relevant, considering that not knowing the ‘rules of the game’ has been identified as a factor resulting in the absence of women from senior positions in academia (fagan & teasdale, 2021, p. 779). for instance, understanding when it may be appropriate to speak out and draw attention to a particular accomplishment, or to be able to frame an activity in the most favourable manner may be difficult to ascertain. therefore, collective support can be especially valuable to navigate the invisible, intangible aspects of the academic 12 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 environment that are not necessarily codified in any ‘manual’, and if not discerned by the individual remain an imperceptible barrier to career progress. thus, through the process of our peer mentoring we established the relational conditions of belonging, which in turn precipitated the relational processes and behaviours of collegiate relations and empowerment as academics. our experience indicates that universities would be wise to encourage fertile environments for organic, collaborative relationships to develop, rather than creating arbitrary and artificial supports which may not meet the needs of the academics they are meant to support. recommendations for practice the field of academia can be incredibly challenging with well documented issues of gender inequities and feelings of professional isolation. women who enter the academic field as career changers may also experience difficulties due to age discrimination. many traditional supports do not consider the changing demographics of teaching and research academics. if universities are to benefit from the experiences which second+ career female academics bring to the field, appropriate supports must be developed which promote agency, self-confidence, and an inclusive culture of belongingness. mentoring as a support can be valuable, however, mentors and mentees should not be arbitrarily matched, rather collaborative networking opportunities which promote organic relationship development should be supported. provision of university support for mentoring programs in elements such as workload and meeting space, while allowing the participants to retain agency as to goals and objectives of the program would be more likely to provide effective support for participants. further, rewards for individual achievement should be balanced with the recognition of collaborative accomplishments and recognition of the contributions of all participants. limitations and recommendations for further research this study draws upon the richness of the lived experiences of a specific cohort of women in academia. however, the participants are a small group from one geographic location and may not be representative of all women in academia. further, the participants in this group were all white women from relatively privileged backgrounds. although we began this study to counter our feelings of marginalization due to our gender, age and experiences, other academic groups may experience marginalization due to other factors and have different experiences and perceptions from us. further research is needed to understand if other academics from underrepresented groups such as minority cultural groups, low socio-economic backgrounds or diversity in gender identification would also benefit from more targeted supports. although our cultural backgrounds are important to our present perceptions and understandings, this was not specifically noted through our conversations or data analysis. further research with a focus on the influence of culture within the academic community would be valuable. in addition, replications of this research in fields of study outside of humanities, such as engineering, health sciences or other areas would add valuable information to the overall knowledge base. while lived experience is valuable, it is also important to remember that the opinions, views, and experiences of the participants are very personal, and it may be difficult to disclose highly personal information. quantitative, anonymous data building on the rich qualitative data would provide vital objective information to better understand the inequities often experienced in academic environments. conclusion although women have a strong presence as academic lecturers and researchers, and potentially contribute unique attributes that enrich academia, there remains an equity gap in leadership and promotion opportunities. this study examined an under researched cohort of academics, women who enter the field as a second + career, and with relatively recent phd completions, to identify supports and barriers to their career progression. drawing on the theoretical foundations of rct (miller, 1976), this study highlighted the influence of self-selected mentoring groups on second+ career female academics. mentoring programs are often offered as a key mechanism of support by universities; however, they lack the organic elements needed to allow relationships to develop. the collegiate relationships that evolved through a collaborative mentoring dynamic enhanced participants’ sense of belonging and empowered group members to navigate university culture and processes to progress personal career trajectories. our findings indicate that the unique needs of second+ career female academics are supported through peer mentoring, however, to be effective, the group must be developed by the mentor/mentee participants to allow for the development of a safe space which enables honesty, mutual trust and respect, and an appreciation of each group members’ diverse strengths and skills. references acker, s., & webber, m. 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(2009). women at the top: what women university and college presidents say about effective leadership. stylus. advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 11 2010 issn 1093-7099 academic reality “show”: presented by women faculty of color dr. gaye luna, dr. catherine medina, ms. sharon gorman abstract although the resolution of world war ii brought dramatic growth to higher education, it was not until the 1950s and 1960s with social movements of equal and civil rights that women faculty of color had foray into faculty positions. unfortunately, data on sex and minority status were limited in large studies during these decades, and any numbers of minority women faculty were estimated proportions of total faculty (see, e.g., menges & exum, 1983). in his analysis, graham (1978) noted that women faculty positions actually declined from 1930 to 1970. higher education after 1970 continued to expand due to the civil rights movement, and this movement propelled women and women of color to enter the academy. in academe today, women faculty of color know their own reality—they live in a world where an academic reality “show” would point out the truth, that is, all progress made in higher education does not represent them or their story. to begin, numerous quantitative studies do show that women have made significant progress in education over the decades. for example, the condition of education 2008 noted females account for nearly two-thirds of undergraduate and graduate (i.e., master's level) degrees through 2007 (national center for education statistics [nces], n.d.). for graduate and professional degrees, women have almost equalized the total number of degrees awarded to men (u.s. department of education, as cited in the nation, 2007; see, also, nces, “participation,” n.d.). even though increases in male and female graduate students are expected through 2018, female enrollment is expected to increase at a rate faster than male enrollment (nces, “participation,” n.d.). along a similar line, women of color (i.e., american indian, asian, black non-hispanic, and hispanic) earned more doctorate degrees than male ethnic minorities in 2004-05 (u.s. department of education, as cited in the nation, 2007). women faculty of color hold only 3% of full professorships, representing an important difference from their classification of 10% as assistant professors (snyder, in association of american colleges and universities, 2009). this supports research that has found that women, and especially women of color, face significant barriers as they move toward tenure. then, too, advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 there has been only a sluggish increase in hiring racially and ethnically diverse faculty members, and this increase includes hiring these individuals into certain types of higher education institutions -two-year colleges and community colleges (american association of university professors, 2009; gappa, austin, & trice, 2007). as jackson (2004) emphasized in her article, there are numerous other factors behind the numbers that tell the story of progress of women in academe. personal experiences in the academic workplace are not found in percentages or other representative numbers. to understand the academic reality “show” for women faculty of color, we need to listen to their stories. these stories articulate messages that are often suppressed or ignored in academe. perhaps the time has come to rethink again current practices in the academy—practices that confine, restrain, and dehumanize lives. keywords: women, education, reality show, faculty, barriers citation: luna, g., medina, c., & gorman, s. (2010). academic reality “show”: presented by women faculty of color. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(11). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 introduction to set the stage for this article’s academic reality “show,” the academic environment needs some description. it was 1999 when glazer-raymo announced that “[u]ltimately, the institutional culture of most universities is not compatible with the needs and concerns of women in academia” (p. 207). more recently, valimaa and ylijoke (2008) discussed the environment of higher education from varied cultural perspectives, challenging former concepts and theories and finding numerous disadvantages for female faculty. discouragingly, some of the same historical issues still remain in place. as bracken, allen, and dean (2006,) clarified, "when familyfriendly policies, programs, and resources are fully in place, the academy will be better positioned to encourage women to stay in the pipeline to tenure and enjoy satisfying work and family lives as university professors” (p. 26). in higher education, the added distinction of being a woman of color contributes an additional disadvantage in the academic environment. institutional change there is a need for institutional change to include the rich experiences and perspectives of women faculty of color; relatedly, bracken, allen, and dean (2006) argued for new definitions of “support” and “expectations” that include diversity. early on, some universities developed initiatives to foster diversity for institutional change, as one example pointed out: [u]nderstanding and valuing diversity is only a first step in the process of institutional transformation. these understandings must translate into activities undertaken by all members of the university community that create an inclusive and welcoming climate for students, faculty, and staff . . . a welcoming and inclusive climate is grounded in respect for others, nurtured by dialogue between those of different perspectives. (pennsylvania state university, n.d., ¶ 1) collecting stories it is easy to ignore research about women of color. many deem it as irrelevant or “soft” research. there are those in academe who step back and ask themselves, “so what if women of color have problems adjusting to the workplace environment. don’t we all have problems?” examining research on women of color from a comparative lens often causes us to rationalize, justify, and even ignore the research about ethnic minority women, targeting them as “complainers” or minimizing their struggles. it is only by hearing personal stories from women of color that we begin to realize the challenges and barriers that were likely absent in others’ entry and socialization into the academy. storytelling is one way to humanize the experiences in academic life and tie them back to theory, practice, and research (solorzano & bernal, 2001). then, too, stories provided by multiple women of color give rise to a collective consciousness that validates their realities in the academy. as aguirre (2000) articulated, “i tell my story to bring to light an alternative interpretation of institutional practices in academia that support the majority stock story” (p. 319). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 by women of color expressing life experiences through storytelling and our documenting these stories, we offer readers multiple perspectives of the academic reality often faced by these individuals. we also offer faculty women of color a voice of inclusion—a voice often absent in their day-to-day lives in higher education. in introducing the university experiences of seven female faculty of color, a platform is provided in which to challenge existing practices and make available recommendations for change—change that will benefit all members of the academy. purpose and procedures of the study the purpose of this study was to assess the experiences and challenges facing faculty of color at a southwestern university and provide recommendations to enhance the recruitment and retention of faculty of color at this higher education institution. this study was conducted by ethnic minority individuals representing two university committees. the institution's office of affirmative action sent 56 letters to self-identified ethnic minority faculty requesting voluntary participation in the study. in response, 26 tenure-track faculty members consented to structured interviews. interviews were conducted by six different interviewers utilizing a standard protocol consisting of 21closedand open-ended questions (e.g., please identify your faculty rank and when you first joined the faculty at the institution; were there any efforts made by your department to assist you in your professional and social integration? if yes, what support was provided? if no, what might have been helpful?). the faculty participants were separated into four main categories: african/african american, asian/asian american, latina/o, and native american. all individuals interviewed fell into one of these four groups. data were transcribed by a paid staff member at the institution. each transcript was sanitized by the transcriber. transcriptions of the interviews were analyzed qualitatively by a team of eight tenure-track faculty and staff representing the two sponsored university committees. participants consistently addressed three areas as identified in this article: (a) campus climate, (b) marginalization and exclusion, and (c) faculty roles and responsibilities. through the analysis process, the team discussed each protocol and came to consensus on major themes based on the data provided. for the purposes of this article, the authors will discuss the findings based on 7 of the 26 interviews, as the authors were particularly interested in the perceptions and attitudes of u.s. ethnic minority women and therefore ethnic/racial minority men and non-american women were excluded. data obtained from these individuals were reserved for future articles. in addition, minor changes in the narratives were made to eliminate words/statements that might identify the participants. the voices of seven individuals will be presented as it is the authors’ belief that their experiences are representative of many other faculty women of color working in university settings. their academic reality may teach us lessons about “humanizing” an often competitive, uncivil, and alienating workplace—the academy. the struggles and triumphs of these women challenge us to consider reforming the academic environment to include a culture of inclusion, advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 choice, and flexibility. as many know, the academy is not “just” a workplace, but also a community where lives are played out. academic reality through stories from women faculty of color in academic reality, what one individual sees is not necessarily how another individual feels, experiences, or remembers. from the literature, history, current conditions, and future predictions can be learned; however, only when stories of women faculty of color are connected (or disconnected) from the literature, do these women’s lives become illuminated. this section reviews research on academic climate, the workplace environment, and roadblocks existent in teaching, service, and research as related to three themes that emerged from the women’s stories. the cold campus climate according to the american council on education (in green, 1989), campus climate “embraces the culture, habits, decisions, practices, and policies that make up campus life. it is the sum total of the daily environment and central to the ‘comfort factor’ that minority students, faculty, staff, and administrators experience on campus” (p. 113). campus climate becomes “chilly” or cold when faculty of color and students of color feel marginalized, underrepresented, overused, discouraged and/or discriminated against (jackson, 2004; park, 1996; patitu & hinton, 2003; turner, 2002; turner, myers, & cresswell, 1999). jackson (2004) found that minority faculty feel more discouraged and discriminated in comparison to their white male counterparts and asserted that “[a]t every point, white women and black/hispanic faculty were nearly twice as likely as white men to be discouraged from pursuing their education/career goals. women of color experienced their greatest discouragement at the faculty level” (p. 179). in addition to feelings of discrimination and discouragement, minority faculty often felt overused because they were expected to handle minority and gender affairs at the expense or in addition to their teaching and research (turner, 2002). minority faculty faced obstacles related to campus climate that their white male counterpart rarely encountered. for example, alicia, a latina associate professor in this study, recalled her own entry into the academy. within a month of being hired, one of the search committee members told me that i was not the first choice in the candidate pool. they really wanted this person [said name removed] from another state . . . but they felt they needed a person of color. i was their second choice on the list . . . i responded to her by saying, “you know you would have been very fortunate to get her here.” i tried to diffuse it, but i thought that was very hurtful . . . i was second on the list and was made to know that. so, that kind of set the stage for my first year . . . i was recruited, and i was recruited in at $1,000 more than the other people who were recruited that same year, and boy you would have thought that i made $20,000 more--the resentment that came from that. apparently, a group of faculty members went to the dean and said, “why did so and so get hired at $1,000 more than i did?” sonia, a latina assistant professor, also recalled her entry into academia. in her negotiation process, she advocated for a competitive salary and other accommodations. one advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 administrator discussed the specifics of her negotiations with faculty members outside of the search committee, setting the stage for a cold environment: [i said to another junior faculty member] that i really felt isolated . . ., so i wanted to get to know you [and other junior faculty]. there was a group of faculty women [who met regularly], and she said . . . “things are pretty unfair around here and a lot of people are disgruntled . . . for example, you make more than me.” she was a junior faculty member who was hired ahead of me. i said, “really, well i think that is terribly unfair. i think you would use me as a way to get more for your salary.” the stories of alicia and sonia are riddled with concerns regarding academic policy in hiring, confidentiality in the hiring process, and messages of exclusion for being hired. as highlighted in their narratives, alicia came to realize that another faculty member of the dominant culture would try to “put her in her place,” while both sonia and alicia felt that by being competitive in hiring negotiations they were alienated. interestingly, both women were placed in positions where they felt they needed to “play nice.” in academia it is not unusual to offer a competitive package to a desirable candidate, but if you are a woman of color it is often assumed that only the “color” and not the “competence” factored into the job hire. ignored were the credentials of these two top candidates by other faculty, with hiring policies breached. the “cold” climate was set into place almost immediately upon their employment. chilly or cold climates across higher education have existed for some time (hall & sandler, 1982). according to patitu and hinton (2003), institutions that do not commit to diversity initiatives had few faculty of color and had conservative attitudes and beliefs (or in other words, a non-supportive environment), which ultimately effected faculty members’ satisfaction. in this context, diversity efforts and strong institutional advocacy are essential in creating safe and supportive campus climates for women faculty of color. not-so-subtle marginalization and exclusion much debate has ensued whether diversity initiatives have had a positive impact on the quality of life of faculty of color in academic institutions (aguirre, 2000; baez, 2003; flores & rodriguez, 2006; jackson, 2004; niemann & dovidio, 1998; sterrett, 2005). sterrett (2005) argued that while institutions may continue their quest to achieve diversity and access, other initiatives besides traditional affirmative action programs are needed. baez (2003) asserted that “white women are the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action, and their success kept whites overrepresented in faculty and administrative positions” (p. 99). in addition, there has been a perception that qualified faculty of color are unjustly framed as affirmative action hires (flores & rodriguez, 2006; niemann, 1999). jackson (2004) contended that the problem is further compounded when academic institutions confuse diversity and affirmative action as conceptual synonyms. while faculty members across the board have welcomed diversity on their campuses, they may still reject the idea of affirmative action even if it resulted in their own employment or hiring of colleagues that they respect and admire (baez, 2003; flores & rodriguez, 2006). regardless, diversity efforts have contributed to more faculty of color being hired at academic institutions (flores & rodriguez, 2006; niemann & dovidio, 1998; smith, turner, osei-kofi, & richards, 2004). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 whether or not one agrees with diversity initiatives in part or as a whole, faculty of color and women faculty of color are still largely underrepresented at academic institutions across the board (allen, epps, guillory, suh, & bonous-hammarth, 2001; park, 1996; perry, moore, edwards, acosta, & frey, 2009; turner, myers, & cresswell, 1999). results of this underrepresentation are impetus for feelings of marginalization and tokenism (niemann, 1999; segura, 2003; turner, myers, & cresswell, 1999) or the syndrome of one minority per pot, as coined by reyes and halcon (1997). in her own personal reflection in the making of a token (1999), niemann stated that she felt lonely and stigmatized when overhearing, "she's the one the dean forced the social science department to hire," and “[n]ow that we have you, we don’t need to worry about hiring another minority” (p. 118). the marginalization experience has been further explained by hooks (1990) as being “part of the whole but outside the main body” (p. 149), provoking distrust, suspicion, anxiety, nervousness, and even fearfulness (madrid, 1988). overall, chun and evans (2008) stressed that higher education must address workplace climate, institutional policies, and collective behaviors to eliminate marginalization and exclusion. as troubling as the “only one” or “the other” syndrome is, the fact remains that marginalization and tokenism lend themselves to stereotyping. lara, an associate professor of mexican descent in the study, explained how she is expected to be the voice for all individuals of mexican descent. in addition, the pressure to “fit” the mexican stereotype was also placed upon her, implying that “all” individuals of mexican descent have the same philosophy towards life, speak the same language, and even act the same--with the landscape of human behavior and differences narrowed for individuals of color when singled out as being the “one.” lara shared the following: to be an ethnic minority faculty means, first and foremost, to be different because there are so few of us [in the academy]. it means to me that i carry an unreasonable burden. i have to represent 50 million united states citizens of mexican descent. part of the burden means the whole range of good and bad that that population represents. it means to me being marginalized . . . being an ethnic minority means being treated differently. clearly i am different by the scripted characteristics, but i am different by treatment towards me. sandra, a native american assistant professor who doesn’t fit the stereotypical “look” of a native american, was questioned about her ethnicity and the validity of her cultural ties. she explained, “i was very discouraged to be called a ‘water-down indian’ by a few people. that got back to me and that was a hurtful thing . . . .” another study participant, denise, a mexican american assistant professor lacking ethnic/racial credibility because she did not “look” the role (i.e., the narrow television and media portrayal of what a mexican should look like and act like), stated her frustration in being overlooked as an ethnic minority: in some ways, i guess i’m in a unique situation in that i am frequently not considered ethnically diverse. i mean you can tell by looking at me that people frequently don’t think of me as being ethnically diverse, so that can be frustrating for me, very frustrating. for example, when i’m doing research on diversity, there are times that i get the impression from people that you don’t know what this experience is like, you don’t know what it’s advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 like to be ethnically diverse . . . i do know what it’s like to be ethnically diverse. i may not look like i am, but i am . . . so, it’s an interesting experience for me and maybe i see the other side of it because people don't recognize my diversity. i see prejudices that just drive me wild. rarely does stereotyping happen to members of the dominant culture—no one challenges their “whiteness.” marginalization and tokenism brings with it expectancies to window dress, to posture, to placate the dominant culture, and to be the caricature that represents a whole population of people. when ethnic minority women of color do not fit the stereotype they become suspect—distrusted and even shunned. it is through supportive institutional systems in tandem with diversity initiatives that help eliminate stereotyping and diminish the unreasonable burdens often placed upon women of color—thus creating supportive campus climates. mckinley and brayboy (2003) stressed, “unless we are committed as a unified faculty and administration to changing the institutional structure, implementation will merely maintain and strengthen the status quo that marginalizes diversity” (pp. 85-86). cultural tax on traditional triad of roles and responsibilities the traditional triad of faculty responsibilities (teaching, service, and research and scholarship) is ever-present in policies and expectations of higher education faculty. research studies have shown that faculty of color and women of color spend more time doing service and teaching than majority-male faculty spend doing research (antonio, 2002; bellas & toutkoushian, 1999; jackson, 2004; owen, 2009). this creates a dichotomy that often leads to a fast burn-out rate and little reward. as antonio (2002) stated, “faculty, many of whom are drawn to the academy because of their commitment to teaching and service, are finding themselves torn away from those activities to concentrate on the research productivity required for promotion” (p. 585). in explaining the term “cultural tax,” owen (2009) concluded that “[i]t is far too often the case that women and men of color and white women are called upon to serve on diversity committees, mentor students of color or female students, and fulfill other functions that serve the institution’s diversity goals” (p. 194). minority faculty, and in particular women faculty of color, are overwhelmed with service activities (national education association, 1991) and often feel overburdened and stressed with more responsibilities compared to their white male counterparts (baez, 2003; niemann & dovidio, 1998; o’meara, 2002). in the study rose, a native american assistant professor, pointed out how her exhausting service load pulls her away from research. because of her commitment to indigenous students and the need for an ethnic minority voice on committees, she is often asked to serve on multiple university committees. without the appropriate mentoring from senior faculty, it is often difficult for a new faculty member to know when or how to refuse a committee invitation, thus taking on the additional burden of excessive service work without realizing the risks it may carry. as rose expressed in her story: advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 the teaching load is high, 3-3. i hardly have time to do my research. i’ve managed to grind out three articles. i’m looking to finish my book. it is my own commitment to making connections between nearby reservation communities and the university community . . . i think it’s true of faculty of color, particularly women, that we spend so much time doing the service commitment that we think is important. so we’re always overloaded . . . this is my third year in a tenure track position, and i get called on to be on so many committees because they need a token brown person, and i get way overextended. alicia, unlike rose, had a female senior faculty member to help her negotiate how to limit her service and how to choose committees that would make a positive difference in the promotion and tenure process. in essence, unless mentoring is present in entry to the academy, it is difficult to navigate the bumpy terrain of university responsibilities and make wise choices toward tenure. as alicia confirmed: when you’re new, you don’t know how to say no. at least i didn’t. because i was the minority rep, i was on every search committee imaginable. it wasn’t until my third year that one of the full professors, a woman, said, “you’re crazy. you don’t owe anything to these search committees” . . . we have so few ethnic minorities on campus that those who are willing to serve on search committees can be eaten alive by it. so my first two years, i was on a lot of committees, just by virtue that they needed me to be on them. but now, i’m very selective in what committees i choose to be on. as jackson (2004) confirmed, “[i]t is widely known that new/junior faculty are confused by the tenure process in higher education, the nuances of institutional politics, and how to ensure balance in their work agenda” (p. 181). women faculties of color often get sidetracked and lose sight of scholarly research essential to their tenure eligibility (antonio, 2002; niemann, 1999). as niemann (1999, p. 118) told in her own story, “the faculty distanced me and made no attempts to mentor me or facilitate my road toward tenure.” in their faculty work-life study, thomas and hollenshead (2001) reported that women faculty of color felt colleagues did not solicit their opinions about research ideas yet pressured them to alter their intellectual interests to fit in with those of departments. while service and teaching undoubtedly augment the overall climate of an institution, they nevertheless are not valued compared to scholarly research, which has been considered a more valuable indicator for eligibility for tenure (butin, 2006). to counter, bellas and toutkoushian (1999) asserted that teaching and service loads should be recognized and “equitably distributed among departments” (p. 384). they continued their argument: equity encompasses not only number of courses, but number of course preparations, frequency of new courses, number of students, and support from graduate assistants. in addition, the level of preparation required of courses can vary (graduate versus undergraduate; course content that changes very little versus that which changes almost daily because it deals with current issues). (p. 384) advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 until institutions begin to recognize (and reward) service and teaching equal to research as well as mitigate burdensome multiple roles for women faculty of color, the cultural tax of the traditional triad of responsibilities will remain. moreover, women faculty of color will continue to experience mixed messages in the workplace; confusion over departmental, college, and university requirements and responsibilities; and difficulties in the tenure and promotion process. steps institutions can make now i would have liked having some of the faculty that had been here for awhile helping me go through the ropes of what was expected of me. in that realm i didn’t get a lot of direction outside of the letter of expectation. i mean that was minimal--so perhaps more direction on just how you go about becoming a faculty member. celia (native american assistant professor) the stories of women faculty of color help in understanding the cold academic climate. additionally, dealing with and confronting marginalization and exclusion, tied to unending, inequitable teaching and service burdens, were clearly stated as critical concerns. while the literature has pronounced numerous solutions to these concerns, developmental steps in the growth process for women faculty of color can provide assistance in a multitude of academic areas and arenas. one step requires the utilization of other voices with experience and knowledge –mentors in the academy. within the academy: development of mentoring programs institutions of higher education have a distance to travel in order to recruit and retain women of color. for many in academia, the “only one syndrome” takes its toll in terms of “cold” academic climate, tokenism, and differentiated roles and responsibilities. there is no single strategy or answer to improve the lives for women of color in the academy, but current research continues to verify earlier research findings--that early mentoring and faculty social support may help relieve many of the stressors associated with induction into the academy and change the cold work climate and the culture of the organization (bilimoria, joy, & liang, 2008; driscoll, parkes, tilley-lubbs, brill, bannister, & pitts, 2009; thompson, 2008; wang, 2009). mentoring also enables senior faculty members to advise junior faculty members in learning how to balance different aspects of their jobs and lives (major, fletcher, davis, & germano, 2008). institutions can actively support women and faculty of color by expanding mentoring programs, providing guidance on tenure, and offering advice on how to contend with the varied responsibilities carried by women (e.g., child care, elder care). in this study, alicia commented on the difficulty in managing various faculty and life roles and relayed the necessity of having senior faculty mentor junior colleagues: i’m doing all this committee work and i’m working 20 hours out of 24 trying to keep up with research, teaching and everything else. i was burnt out before i ever started my career . . . it wasn’t until female senior faculty members pulled me aside and said, “you’re nuts. let’s look at what you’re doing and get rid of this, this, and this.” advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 celia, a single mother in the study, emphasized that she did not have the good fortune of having senior female faculty members help her prioritize her committee work, research, and teaching load as well as offer advice on other aspects of her life (e.g., schools in the area, recreation activities for her children, child care) during her first year on campus. in similar respect, jackson (2004) had argued, “institutions should not leave it to chance for [new or junior] faculty . . . [to] offer candid and systematic feedback on how things are going in their departments” (p. 181). numerous studies over decades have shown positive and important impacts of mentoring in higher education. in thomas and hollenshead’s (2001) study of faculty members’ work-life balance, women faculty of color felt their careers could be enhanced by a supportive mentor (see, also, aparicio, 1999). institutions need to promote both informal and formal mentoring efforts and programs to assist women faculty of color as they traverse the cold campus climate, approach issues of marginalization and exclusion, and challenge their faculty roles and responsibilities. unfortunately, many ethnic minority individuals do not have role models (outside of their doctoral program) that mentor them on how to be a faculty member--or even what it means to be a faculty member. so, left alone, faculty members of color swim upstream in torrential and unknown waters. crawford and smith (2005) explained that mentoring is important on many levels: 1) for enhancing an individual's skills and intellectual development; 2) for using influence to facilitate an individual's entry and advancement; 3) for welcoming the individual into a new occupational and social world; 4) for acquainting the individual with its values, customs, resources, and role players; and 5) for providing role modeling behavior. (p. 54) crawford and smith (2005), moreover, found that individuals preferred several mentors opposed to one mentor, mainly because mentors have strengths in different areas. by expanding mentoring relationships, junior faculty members may be more apt to navigate inside the institution and within their own departments without circumstantial roadblocks. a mentor gauges and encourages faculty members to stay on track without being waylaid by potentially draining activities that will not support their promotion. in mentoring a native american female faculty member, green (2003) stated, “i learned the difficult balance of encouraging this individual to refuse to take on tasks that were not critical to her survival yet encouraging tasks that would benefit her ultimate promotion and would assist native students where possible” (p. 231). segura (2003) revealed that it is challenging to women faculty of color to “just say no” to student advising and office hours, for fear of weakening “their connection to the strong sense of political mission that fuels their academic integrity” (p. 38). a mentor may be more persuasive guiding conflicted faculty when their academic and personal goals seem out of synch. without a successful mentor, a faculty member can feel lost without support. patitu and hinton (2003) discovered how a female african american faculty member “perceived that she had received no direction, although she had sought advice and suggestions from faculty members at other institutions” (p.87). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 in practical terms, jackson (2004) noted that when “academic administrators and faculty mentors structure or plan discussions . . . [this planning] would identify issues of faculty concern around socialization, [and] may result in more collaboration and advancement of a teaching and/or research mission” (p. 182). and more pointedly, chittister (2000) in her final analysis stated: the function of an older generation of women is the empowerment of the next. we have not done our duty until we teach them every lesson, give them every question, prepare them to the hilt, empower them to begin, and allow them the privilege of risk. anything else is to leave them powerless in the face of systems made only for the powerful. (p. 70) beyond the academy: honoring work-life balance woven within the stories of women faculty of color in this academic reality “show” were those subtle, yet powerful, comments regarding the women’s personal lives—comments institutions should not ignore. as one native american study participant said, “there was a time when i had personal things that came up. my child was very sick . . . she is fine now, but that took a big chunk away from my being able to complete my work in the time that i wanted to.” one single mother noted that “with trying to do this job it is really, really difficult so i don’t have a lot of time to really go out and socialize with other people across campus.” yet another study participant discouragingly expressed, “it’s just not possible to live in this town on the pay we make at [institutional name deleted]. that is another reason why i am leaving. i will never be able to afford to live in this town and that’s sad.” some higher education institutions have not paid close attention to work-life balance issues, recognizing the extensive family obligations of many female faculty members (see, e.g., erickson & rodriguez, 1999). and even when institutional policies promote the work-life balance, there is fear of bias when individuals utilize the policies in their quest to resolve issues and problems. as christensen (in cook, 2009) stated, “there’s a structural mismatch of how the workplace is organized and the needs of the current workforce. now the workforce expects the career path to mimic a life lived” (p. 1). women faculties of color need flexibility in the work environment to meet their personal needs and responsibilities. these issues necessitate institutions embrace changing the academic reality where women faculty of color reside. the chronicle of higher education’s survey (“great colleges to work for,” 2009; philipsen, bostic, & sorcinelli, 2009) noted numerous factors and indicators important to faculty working at higher education institutions: newly constructed child care centers, flexible-work options (e.g., work from home office) or compressed work weeks, monies toward a purchase of a home with a specified area near the college, low-rent housing for faculty, and university events to help employees learn about caring for aging relatives. then, too, evidence exists that familyfriendly policies make a difference, that is, faculty members are more committed to their institutions and are less stressed in their work environments (halpern, 2005, 2006). what cannot continue is every junior faculty member’s nightmare: advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 there is no end to faculty work—academic institutions are greedy in their demands for faculty time. in fact, some faculty find it hard to know when to go home at the end of the day because there is always more that needs to be done, and there are no obvious end-ofthe-day indicators, especially for new faculty to help them decide when they have prepared enough for the classes they teach, advised students well enough, fulfilled faculty committee assignments, or completed enough quality research for the day. (halpern, 2008, p. 59) the bureau of labor statistics (2007) has projected that 662,000 faculty jobs will become available during the timeframe 2006-2016, with 382,000 as new positions, and 280,000 as replacement positions. institutions should take note as they re-imagine the academic environment. will women faulty of color reach the point where they ask (as poignantly expressed by reyes and halcon in 1988): is it necessary for women faculty of color to give in or give up? non-supportive, non-collegial, and unfriendly institutional environments may hear more women faculty of color voice their perspectives, as one voice in a video project about women faculty of color clearly revealed: “i’ve come to understand that i value family more than i do career, and that is maybe one of the best kept secrets in academia” (aparicio, 1999, p. 127). higher education needs to learn that the work-life balance is critical; if institutions do not provide mechanisms and policies to support integration, faculty may forgo professional opportunities and challenges. strategies inside academe for internal oppressions although developing mentoring programs and incorporating policies, structures, and initiatives to address personal and family responsibilities are of primary importance in assisting women faculty of color as they maneuver academic reality in their institutions, there may be situations wherein faculty members will need to access other avenues of progression. higher education provides human resources as well as affirmative action services. human resources ensure university policies are in place and provide guidance and assistance in the promotion of communications within the workplace, while affirmative action offices more specifically foster diversity in the campus community and ensure that legal procedures and policies enforce the institutional commitment to the concept of affirmative action, equal opportunity in all aspects of employment for those historically excluded or prejudiced. additional resources of health and well-being are found on most higher education campuses. these programs focus on all aspects of the total person with emphasis on the spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional, social, and occupational wellness of employees. services may include learning how to handle work-related stress in an individual’s life or how to prioritize and balance work-home activities. other wellness resources often include body-mind integration activities (i.e., meditation, thai chi). then, too, faculty ombuds programs are available at some institutions. the goals of these programs are to provide voluntary, informal, neutral, and confidential third-party assistance in resolving individual questions, issues, and conflicts that arise in the work environment. working advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 outside of the formal problem-resolution and grievance procedures, ombudspersons assist informally in working with individuals before problems escalate on a personal or professional level. this type of intervention often involves informal mediation. for faculty women of color this may mean bridging cultural understanding. although institutions of higher education may offer a number of services under a multitude of office, program, and initiative nomenclature, protection and assistance for women faculty of color must be made transparent to them and all new faculty members. in providing a comprehensive listing of campus and community resources, universities may be able to retain faculty and ease the transition into university life and work expectations. changing the academic reality show of women faculty of color understanding and addressing the interactions of work, family, and personal issues will become increasingly important in these times of a crushing economic environment. higher education institutions must take steps to address the work-life balance, allowing for flexibility and choice. women faculty of color should not feel trapped when making decisions outside of their academic lives. creating mentoring programs with a confluence of stakeholders’ interests, passions, and energies is another step that should be considered. overall, scholars need to reframe discussions surrounding the concerns of women faculty of color and make sure that institutional policies and procedures support such investigations. as the second decade of the new millennium awaits, the academic reality “show” of women faculty of color more so than ever needs to change stations. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 15 references aguirre, a. 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(2002). women of color in academe: living with multiple marginality. the journal of higher education, 73(1), 74-93. turner, c. s. v., myers, s. l., & creswell, j. w. (1999). exploring underrepresentation: the case of faculty of color in the midwest. the journal of higher education, 70(1), 27-59. valimaa, j., & ylijoke, o. (eds.). (2008). cultural perspectives in higher education. finland: springer science-business media, b.v. wang, j. (2009). networking in the workplace: implications for women's career development. in c. r. nanton & m. v. alfred (eds.), social capital and women's support systems: networking, learning, and surviving [special issue]. new directions for adult and continuing education, 2009(122), 33-42. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 18 biography dr. gaye luna is a professor at northern arizona university in the department of educational leadership. she has focused her research on women faculty, mentoring, and pay equity in higher education. dr. catherine medina is a professor of special education at northern arizona university. her areas of research include women in leadership, adolescent suicide, and bilingual and multicultural special education. ms. sharon gorman is an instructional technologist, who studies cross-cultural communication within organizations. women faculty of color hold only 3% of full professorships, representing an important difference from their classification of 10% as assistant professors (snyder, in association of american colleges and universities, 2009). this supports research that... as jackson (2004) emphasized in her article, there are numerous other factors behind the numbers that tell the story of progress of women in academe. personal experiences in the academic workplace are not found in percentages or other representative n... to set the stage for this article’s academic reality “show,” the academic environment needs some description. it was 1999 when glazer-raymo announced that “[u]ltimately, the institutional culture of most universities is not compatible with the needs ... advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 20, winter 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] the impact of feminist pastoral counseling on the self -esteem of female christians by yu-fen lin presented to dr. beverly j. irby dr. genevieve brown sam houston state university 2.20.2005 feminist therapy has risen correspondingly to feminism since 1960 (israeli & santor, 2000). duttondouglas and walker (1988) stated that over a decade feminist theory has greatly impacted the major therapy systems. feminist therapy also has developed considerably and brought its unique contribution to the area of psychotherapy. this therapy addresses four important issues, which are: (a) the special problems that women bring into the therapeutic setting, such as motherhood, employment discrimination, marriages, rape, wife abuse, sexual harassment, etc.; (b) sex-role socialization in the development of women, for example, women are expected to maintain the body image of a certain thin figure and try their best to stay young because this society adores youth, especially for women, and other social sex-roles which keep women subordinate to the other gender and, therefore, causes women' s unhealthy problems.; (c) the inadequacies of contemporary theory, research, and practice in addressing the lives of women; and (d) the development of alternative approaches to conceptualization and intervention with women (worell & remer,1992). feminist mainline theology claimed that women's experiences are the important base to reconstruct traditional theology (greene-mccreight, 2000). feminist theologians read the bible as an authority in a different perspective from christian traditional theology. according to the historical criticism, priests and prophets wrote the biblical texts; then, of course, it represents the religion norms of priest and prophets (greene-mccreight, 2000). fiorenza, (as cited in green-mccreight, 2000) who took the suspicious attitude while reading the bible, questioned that all traditional religious names, texts, rituals, laws, and interpretive metaphors all bear "our father's names" (p. 37). she insisted that women's self-affirmation, survival, power, and self-determination are the central spiritual and religious feminist quests. fiorenza defined the patriarchy in green-mccreight’s book as follows: just as feminism is not just a worldview or perspective but a women's movement for change, so patriarchy is in my understanding not just ideological dualism or androcentric world file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/fall2005/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter2006/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/winter2006/index.html construction in language but a social, economic, and political system of graded subjugations and oppressions. therefore i do not speak simply about male oppressors and female oppressed, or see all men over and against all women. patriarchy as a male pyramid specifies women' s oppression in terms of the class, race, country, or religion of the men to whom they “belong.” (green-mccreight, 2000, p. 34) in this sense, christian women also live in a church context, which is patriarchal and hierarchal. feminist theology shares the common belief of feminist therapy by challenging different areas of the patriarchy system. in my research, two taiwanese women were interviewed to tell their experiences of living in the taiwanese christian church context. through their experiences, i found the vast literature supported the reality of the taiwanese christian women still living in a system with patriarchal values. my research, which binds feminist therapy and feminist theology, seeks to investigate the level in selfesteem of christian women in taiwan and to provide christian women in taiwan an alternative way to increase their self-esteem levels. statement of the problem people in mental health professions and people who seek help from counseling believe that counseling is one of the alternative ways to enhance peoples' mental health and well-being. applied psychology went through several developmental stages in its history. the psychoanalytical psychology came first in the mental health world, then behaviorism, which once dominated the therapy world, and later, the third force therapy known as humanistic therapy. now, there are different counseling theories and different counseling models trying to find their contributions in promoting human beings' mental health. in this research, feminist counseling was introduced to be a very powerful alternative therapy to achieve the goal of helping and healing. what has made feminist therapy a special therapy is that it has recognized the unique experiences that women have been living in a context which is androcentric, distributes unbalanced power among men and women, and expected women and men to fulfill their given stereotypical roles. feminist therapy considers this is the important source for a lot of women who suffer from depression and low self-esteem. thus, to challenge the patriarchal system and its values is an important task during the therapy sessions. compared to the other therapies, this is what makes feminist therapy more special than others. this research also attempts to explore how christianity made an important contribution to the patriarchy system and belief, and how the traditional patriarchal theology brought the negative influence on christian women's low self-esteem. the purpose of the research the purpose of this research was to support the idea that androcentric patriarchal system does contribute to women's low self-esteem, depression, and their unhappiness. church also plays a significant role in this big patriarchal system, especially to christian women. by being aware of it and taking efforts to change it through feminist pastoral therapy, a christian female client can benefit from it, increase her self-esteem, and find the happiness and mental health she deserves. the research questions since the patriarchal belief systems have brought negative impacts on women's self-esteem and their wellbeings, to seek an approach to help women become aware of their situation and help them to fight against the patriarchal system is critical. how much the feminist theology and feminist therapy can be integrated together to help increase self-esteem in christian women is the research question. this research question focuses on investigating the impact of using feminist therapy and feminist theology on female christians and to see if this will enhance their self-esteem. the theoretical framework this study attempted to use feminist therapy and feminist theology as the major tools to help christian women establish high self-esteem and find happiness in their daily lives. feminist therapy defined feminist therapy has provided guidance for clients in analyzing the external and internal factors causing emotional distress, and to facilitate female clients growth toward mental health (dutton-douglas & walker, 1988). feminist therapists believe that women's problems are caused in a larger context by the society in which they live, which devalues them, limits their access to resources, and discriminates against them economically, legally, and socially (worell & remer, 1992). feminist therapy also finds that sexism exists in all areas of human beings' life: families, religion, education, recreation, the work place, and laws. therefore, sexism is institutionalized and perpetuated by the enterprise of society. rawling and carter (1977) pointed out that the inferior status of women is due to their having less political and economic power than men. in light of all these findings and beliefs, feminist therapy searches for the models which can truly foster women's well being. thus, some strategies may often be considered subversive. traditional therapies defined worell and remer (1992) defined traditional therapies as therapies that emphasize on therapist's objectivity: analytical thinking, therapist expertise and control of procedures, emotional distance from clients, and intrapsychic dynamics. they suggested that therapists could be sexist in many ways, such as involving gender-biased stereotyping and diagnostic labeling, androcentric interpretations, and intrapsychic assumptions. for example, feminist therapists criticize the freudian concepts of women having "penis envy," which is rooted in the androcentric psychoanalyst perspectives that having a penis is superior to having a vagina and uterus (worell & remer, 1992). as indicated in figure 1, worell and remer (1992) compared the feminist therapy and traditional therapy. core components and values of feminist therapy feminist therapy contains rich diversity, both theoretically and therapeutically (israeli & santor, 2000). cammaert and larsen (1988) clearly summarized the feminist therapy's values in the book titled feminist psychotherapies: integration of therapeutic and feminist systems. it briefly acclaimed that the personal is political and it asserted women’s choice, equalization of power, therapist as a role model, and androgyny. in addition, it introduced the ideas of consciousness-raising, social and gender role analysis, resocialization, and social activism. consciousness raising group. the consciousness-raising group began with choosing a group work approach. the group gathers women together to discuss women's devalued status in society. it helps women realize that they are not the sole cause of their distress and that others share their problems (israeli & santor, 2000). several quantitative studies have been made to prove that women who joined in the consciousness raising group gained higher self-esteem and their depression level decreased (eastman, 1973; weitz, 1982). consciousness raising groups encourage women to believe that their needs are just as valid as their husbands or boyfriends' needs. feminist consciousness-raising groups encourage women to transform the traditional roles they receive from society by promoting assertion, emotional independence, financial independence, and a sense of control or competence. by doing this, these changes will also result in increased self-esteem and decreased depression (weitz, 1982). social and gender role analysis clients learn how their gender roles are shaped by society and how the cultural different norms affect women and men differently (laidlaw & malmo, 1991). whalen (1996) indicated that false beliefs and selfdoubts are the sources of women's problems. false beliefs are formed through women's early learning and social experiences, and they can be resocialized by new information and learning. self-doubts come from the experiences of being abused or living a life controlled by someone else. it includes women's many faces, like a lack of belief in self-efficacy, and pervasive self-deprecation (whalen, 1996). in brief, psychologists have learned since gilligan (1982), that the characteristics and behavior of the development of women are different but not less than that of males. feminists give their critiques to show women and men are limited by their sex roles. the emphasis of society on the differences in characteristics and skills between men and women, which are developed artificially and are perpetuated by the socialization process, is a false stereotype (dutton-douglas & walker, 1988). unfortunately, sex-roles stereotype women on their whole lifespan development. sex-role conceptions affect how people evaluate and consider themselves (worell & remer, 1992). for example, in the survey of sauer and robles-piña (2003), the major topic in the magazines that young girls often read is dieting. society creates a "thin ideal" phenomenon and norms. it contributes to women suffering from eating disorders because society, media, and even family and peers reinforce these messages and values constantly. resocialization in essence, resocialization has a goal to restructure a client's belief system and provides an experience in which women can build a positive self-image that is broader in scope than the prescribed image by patriarchal society (israeli & santor, 2000). naumburg and hepworth (2004) found a shift from the traditional view of divorce related to shame and pity to a normative occurrence that may provide an opportunity for growth. in the framework of feminist therapy, language forms are used in a more gendersensitive and inclusive attitude. feminist therapists reframe the language forms that devalue women from weakness to strength. for example, terms such as "enmeshed and fused" may be reframed as "caring, concerned, and nurturing” (worell & remer, 1992, p. 22). regarding the relation between sex-role orientation and psychological well-being, the traditional congruence model stresses that psychological well-being is maximized when one's sex-role orientation is congruent with one's gender. now feminist therapy has proposed the androgyny model as more beneficial to the individual well-being. in other words, when one's sex-role orientation incorporates a high degree of both masculinity and femininity, regardless of one's gender, his or her well-being is enhanced (whitley jr., 1983). social activism social activism is embedded in the feminist movement motto "the personal is political" (dutton-douglas & walker, 1988; enns, 1993; laidlaw & malmo, 1991; parvin & biaggio, 1991; sturdivant, 1980). some feminist counselors believe that since women's problems are created by the patriarchy, therefore, the patriarchy must be overturned (whalen, 1996). for instance, battered women were often considered to have low self-esteem and needed to have treatment of building self-esteem. feminist counselors would respond to their clients in different ways. counselors would respond and probe more on the area in terms of social changes. they reflected feminist political analyses of the problems in society (whalen, 1996). therefore, an expected outcome of therapy has been that the clients would take some actions to change the public or private system, which contribute to their problems (dutton-douglas & walker, 1988). however, not every feminist therapist is in favor of encouraging their clients to make a real change of society either for the client's own good or for other women's welfare. feminist therapists would debate about whether social activism is beneficial or necessary since it combines therapy with political advocacy (dambrot & reep, 1993). therapist as a role model cammaert and larsen (1988) claimed that a feminist therapist presents herself as a woman and as a therapist at the same time in the therapy. william (1976), long before cammaert and larsen, indicated that a feminist therapist is a “living proof that a woman can be supportive and helpful, involved with the growth and development of others and yet at the same time involved with her own intellectual and professional growth, with political issues, and with her economic self-interest” (p.21). research also indicates that clients benefit more from therapy when the relationship of therapist and client is built on the equalitarian rather than authoritarian base (lorr, 1965). feminist therapy adopts this belief to carry out their application. for many female clients, therapists who make appropriate self-disclosure develop the potential bond that arises out of the communality of women's experiences in our society. these efforts would facilitate the positive aspects of modeling by the therapist. sexism in christian tradition if one studies christianity well, he or she would know the essence of christianity is to bring liberation to the world. in history, however, people frequently use god and religion to justify their killing and violence, and use the texts of the bible to allow different forms of oppression to exist (nelson-pallmeyer, 2003). since the ancient hebrew world, one country would invade another country because of the monotheism belief; god here was a warrior god. also, the hebrew bible often portrays god as a male deity who only plots with male priests. with such ideology, the predictable result is violence against women. also, the israelites took women as property like cattle, flocks, and all other goods (nelson-pallmeyer, 2003). all of these are now comprehended that an alliance between religion hierarchy and patriarchy is seen clearly. the arise of feminist theology in the greene-mccreight (2000) study, she found ludwig feuerbach (1804-1872) to be one of the closest intellectual and theological forebears of feminist theology. green-mccreight (2000) quoted from feuerbach as evidence of his tenet of modern theology, " since we moderns are committed to the full equality of the sexes, our theology must express that commitment; therefore, we should not speak of god in masculine terms (at least unless they are balanced by feminine terms)” (p.30). feminist theologians read the bible as an authority in a different perspective from christian traditional theology. according to the historical criticism, priests and prophets wrote the biblical texts, then, of course, it represents the religion norms of priest and prophets. any religious activities outside this circle are viewed heterodox and rejected as deviant (greene-mccreight, 2000). feminist theology denoted that biblical texts were shaped by historical, social, and political factors (greene-mccreight, 2000). feminist theologians take varied approaches toward bible authority and its interpretation. some feminist theologians, like fiorenza who took the suspicious attitude while reading the bible, questioned that all traditional religious names, texts, rituals, laws, and interpretive metaphors all bear "our father's names" (p. 37). she insisted that women's self-affirmation, survival, power, and self-determination are the central spiritual and religious feminist quests (greene-mccreight, 2000). like fiorenza, lerner (1986) also claimed the attitude of being skeptical toward every known system of thought, and being critical of all assumptions or ordering values and definitions. she insisted that women should trust their own experience and use such experience to test one's statement. she said, since women's experience has usually been trivialized or ignored, it means overcoming the deep-seated resistance within ourselves toward accepting ourselves and our knowledge as valid. it means getting rid of the great men in our heads and substituting for them ourselves, our sisters, our anonymous foremothers. (lerner, 1986, p.228) feminist theology emphasizes women's experience feminist mainline theology claimed that women's experiences are the important base to reconstruct traditional theology (greene-mccreight, 2000). berliner wrote from her background as a sister of st. joseph of brentwood and as a psychologist in private practice. she emphasizes the significance of women's experiences. she shared her experience of conducting a psychospiritual workshop: because we are all living examples of women in today's world and church, i decided to draw on our own life experiences. rather than lecturing, i created a reflective environment, structuring sessions around three themes: life thread (who am i when i am most true to myself?), demons (what keeps me from being that self?) and an angel (what helps me to be that self?). i located each theme within a psychological and spiritual context, introduced questions reflection and time for discussion. (berliner, 1992, p.3) in her practice, she empirically collected data from all of the participants and found representing growth to be a continuum of change from self-hatred to self-esteem. she identified four marker points of women's transition: the self-less woman, who has no sense of self and sacrifices herself, the self-ish woman, whose validity counts on her adherence to rules and roles, the self-centered woman, who has moved toward finding her own personal identity, and the centered self, who has the acceptance of herself as an unique and valuable individual, in both her inner and outer world. (berliner, 1992, p.3) feminist spirituality berliner (1992) stated that a feminist psychospiritual model of therapy can be used and be effective to people who value the spiritual dimension in their daily life. riddle (1975) gave a brief description of feminist spirituality: "our revolution is about how we relate to our love and power, and about finally realizing that they are the same" (p.16). slee (2002) made distinctions with four descriptions of feminist spirituality. first, feminist spirituality strongly emphasize desire, eros, and passion. second, it emphasizes relationality, connectedness, and community. third, it is passionately committed to the liberation of the earth. feminist spirituality considers the earth as the "body of the god," therefore it stresses the immanence of the divine presence within the world rather than beyond it (p. 182). fourth, it highlights the holism, integration, and intrusivity, which reject the dualism of the dominant belief system that separate supernature and nature, spirit and matter, humanity and nature, mind and body, spirituality and sexuality. the impact of feminist theology on christian world and christian women it is important to consider feminist theology because theology shapes the identity of men and women. the significance of feminist theology is evident. if one person's god is a male god and is a god who is against women, of course this person would also live his or her life with the same attitude. on the other hand, if such an ideology and system can be challenged and overturned, it would also change people's daily lives. christian women would be able to accept themselves more and to refuse sacrificing all the time. they can ultimately feel that they are living a fulfilled life. all the struggles, all of the searching for meaning in life, and all of the pain and joys are in relation to the divine. the significance of the research the significance of this research was to integrate feminist therapy with feminist theology in order to bring practical help and a real change to christian women’s lives. due to the dissatisfaction with the traditional theories of female and male development and behavior that adopted male-typed traits as the norm and females often as deficient by comparison, thus, it causes frustration with the continuing omission of women from the knowledge base of psychology (grady, 1981). within this context, feminist therapy challenges sexrole stereotypes that define the feminity for women and masculinity for men as the best desirable mental health adjustments ( bern , 1975). the contributions of feminist therapy are to enhance clients' sensitivity and awareness of gender roles as factors that affect personal mental health. they criticize that the traditional psychotherapies are often non-supportive of women and even damaging to them. friedan (2001) criticized freudian theory as a bad influence to the modern world. she thought women today, though resourceful enough and independent, are still told to live a life under victorian prejudice and not to question authority and feminine mystique. feminist theology has been addressed in the christian world, yet, how to apply and practice it is another question. to bridge feminist theology with feminist therapy is a step towards finding a way to apply its theory to the real people in the real world, the christian women, and maybe even christian men. method and data collection two research participants were recruited from tainan theological college & seminary (ttcs) in taiwan . permissions were both obtained from the individual students and the seminary. the procedures to conduct this research were as following: a. two seminary female students, who used feminist pastoral counseling in the seminary, were selected to participate in this research. b. interviews were given to two participants via the internet software, skype. the interviews were recorded from mp3 recorder. the language used in interviews was taiwanese since the participants were taiwanese. c. the interviews were transcribed to english. d. the researcher e-mailed the transcripts to each of the participants to confirm the accuracy of the transcriptions. e. the participants gave their feedback to the researcher. f. the researcher analyzed and inducted the rich data. g. the researcher drew certain conclusions and gave critiques. the interview protocol was designed based on the knowledge and experiences of feminist therapy and feminist theology: the draft of the protocol was discussed and edited with the professor of the course of qualitative research and the other researcher in the counseling ph.d. program of sam houston state university . the interview questions basically searched the meanings and lived experiences of the participants as christian women, how and what the christian traditions have impacted to their lives in terms of their self-esteems, and how the feminist pastoral counseling ever assisted them on their self-esteems. the interview protocol was as follows: 1. how much does the feminist pastoral counseling help your self-esteem as a christian woman? how does it happen? 2. as a christian woman, what kind of difficulty related to gender have you ever experienced? 3. what kind of self-image you possess /possessed is/was related to christian's traditional teaching? 4. compare your experiences between traditional counseling and feminist counseling. 5. as a female pastor/female church leader to be, what would be the barriers existing in your inner and outer world to overcome? 6. how would god's image affect your self-image related to gender? 7. what kind of support would you wish to get in the future? 8. what kind of change would you wish to see in the church system, including rules related to genders and institutional belief? ethical issues the two selected female seminary students were given a consent form to read and sign. the consent form clearly claimed participants’ right to discontinue participation at any time without penalty or loss of benefits. the consent form also documented clearly the time duration, which the interviews would take. the consent form also mentioned each of the interviews would be recorded and transcribed. knowledge derived from this research provided useful information regarding the true effect of the feminist perspective on female christians with high need for cognition. the participants were provided an opportunity to recall their memory of their feminist pastoral counseling. they then shared and told their experiences as storytellers. the narrating experience was to conceptualize their past experience and benefit from it. in terms of the ethics of feminist therapy, the american psychological association task force report on sex bias and sex role stereotyping in psychotherapeutic practice (1975) presented four categories of therapist behaviors, which are considered sexist: 1.) fostering traditional sex roles; 2.) bias in expectations and devaluation of women; 3.) sexist use of psychoanalytic concepts; and 4.) responding to women as sex objects, including seduction of female clients. this guideline is used and expended due to women's special needs, especially when it becomes evident that sex bias and stereotyping in therapy with women mounted (dutton-douglas & walker, 1988). limitation and delimitation in this research, only to taiwanese christian women were interviewed. of course it is hard to generalize its result, however, generalizing the result is not the purpose of this research. seeking a deeper understanding of taiwanese christian women's voice was the main task of this research. the similar expressions and themes found in the research gave the readers a chance to understand the taiwanese women’s phenomenological world. credibility in this research, the experiences of taiwanese christian women were addressed and valued. they were able to tell their stories and contribute from telling their life stories. also, i also drew on my own counseling experience with women and my own experience as a woman to imply the credibility of this research. in the past eight years, i taught in a presbyterian bible college and tainan theological seminary and college. at the same time, i also provided counseling to the students. many of them were females. harding and hintikka (1983) addressed the credibility issue; "what counts as knowledge must be grounded on experience. human experience differs according to the kinds of activities and social relations in which human engage. women's experiences systematically differ from the experiences upon which knowledge claims have been grounded." (p. x) results after making the efforts to give interviews to two christian women in taiwan who has used feminist therapy, which combines feminist theology perspective, i analyzed the data qualitatively. several findings are listed as follows: (a) feminist pastoral counseling as the powerful tool to increase christian women's low self-esteem participant a and participant b both stated that they experienced the gradual changes through the whole feminist pastoral counseling. also, through content analysis, it showed their self-esteem was increased through the feminist pastoral counseling. participant b said, "after receiving counseling, i found that i was better than what i gave myself credit for and i found the ability to do different things nicely. i am happy now. the whole counseling process brought me gradual changes in the way i used to think and the attitudes with which i did things." participant a's experience was similar. she said, the feminist pastoral counseling provided a different perspective, which allowed me to change the way i looked at myself. i saw myself in a better way because i often did not see my strengths like the other people saw in me. those people saw my strengths, better than i did. another example from participant a to evidence her self-esteem increase through the help of feminist pastoral counseling is "it (feminist pastoral counseling) has helped me to feel that i am good and capable to control more things. this happened because the counselor strengthened my confidence and gave me a space to express myself.” through all of her self-description, the proof of her self-esteem increase appeared in a form of seeing the strengths in herself, which she did not acknowledge before. both women mentioned the same experiences that happened to them in their feminist pastoral counseling. i conclude they are the contributors of a successful feminist pastoral counseling. participant a said, in my experience of feminist counseling, i felt the atmosphere was warmer and i could tell more about my feelings deep down. i know that the counselor approached this counseling with feminist ideas, and the counselor understood more my situation. participant b stated, "gender sensitive counseling let me feel more comfortable to talk about certain things that happened in my life." to create the comfortable and safe environment in counseling is considered to be the first significant factor for the counseling to be effective. feminist pastoral therapy creates a comfort space for its clients to articulate their unique feelings and experiences as women. (b) the factors that contribute to the christian woman's low self-esteem both women i interviewed used to suffer from low self-esteem in their lives without being aware of it. participant b said in the interview, "i hoped to be liked by people and i was frightened that people might dislike me." it represented low self-esteem of women in a form of seeking validation from others. (c) the difficulties that christian women experienced the major difficulties that christian women experienced were grounded down to the theme of stereotypes for women. participant b said, "i was taught that being a woman i should act very feminine: being lovely, gentle and dress myself the best i could. i thought i would only be accepted if i fulfilled these requirements." participant a also described her experience very similarly: the image of women in church is like housekeepers, who have to clean up the mess, arrange the flowers, cook for all, take care of naughty children, teach the sunday school, and move chairs...etc. when it comes to decisions, women' statements are less powerful than men's. a statement from participant a vividly described the fixed roles that taiwanese christian women shared in their church: i also see that when the congregation gathers for a church annual meeting to decide and vote for certain important issues in the church or when the elders and deacons meetings are held, it is usually men's opinions are more powerful than women's. if there are some female elders who voice out their opinions and if their attitudes are assertive and powerful, they usually get criticized and resisted by the congregation. people just do not appreciate that women have their own opinions. they prefer seeing quiet women. (d) the difference between feminist pastoral counseling and traditional counseling gender sensitive counseling, compared to the traditional counseling, is able to explore deeper feelings more as women. this was supported by the research of participant b: "the traditional counseling tends to resolve the superficial level of problems. gender sensitive counseling, compared to the traditional counseling, meant being able to explore the depth more. the traditional counseling tends to only resolve the superficial levels of problems." participant a also compared the two similarly and added one more factor about counselor's gender: gender sensitive therapy makes me feel more understood than traditional counseling does. it might have to do with the counselors' gender, too. when i had counseling with you, i felt warmer, securer, more empathized and understood. i did not worry that you would not understand. the two participants also described the difference with traditional counseling and feminist counseling. participant b felt her feelings and her experiences as a woman were more valued in the feminist counseling. she compared the traditional counseling with feminist pastoral counseling: "the traditional counseling may ask me to accommodate myself and endure the unfairness. also, the traditional counseling might consider me overreactive in certain matters" (participant b). (e) use the product of feminist theology as a tool to do feminist pastoral counseling from the interviews, the result was found that to perceive god's image is beyond gender helps women confront the contested idea of women being inferior. participant a said i believe that human beings share god's image; it gives me a strong motive that i can pursue a better life. we also have great potentials and gifts given by god, we of course can do greater things. i would also be proud of being a woman because gender is a gift from god. the perception that god is not a male god helps christian women to challenge the controversial idea that man is the first sex and woman is the second sex. since the feminist theology has addressed the issue of god's gender, it is powerful to use it as a tool to do feminist pastoral counseling. to de-emphasize god's masculine image in traditional theology and emphasize god's feminine image or emphasize god is actually beyond the gender helps christian women to value themselves. the old belief of god as a male god is reframed into the new one in which women share god's image in creation like men. this would be a powerful force to lift up christian women's self-esteem. the other finding is to use jesus' image as another approach to increase christian women's self-esteem. participant b stated in the interview the image of jesus affects me a lot. he was with the poor, women, and the oppressed. he lived to uphold the justice, loved and helped people. jesus was not welcomed when he lived in his time because of what he did. we need to learn from him to be strong, to fight against the injustice between men and women. jesus' image brings the opposite message from the traditional patriarchal message. jesus' image is a role model to christian women to confront the sexism of the church. (f) the needs of christian women through the data analysis, the researcher found that christian women need their support system, such as feminist pastoral counseling, which provides a safe space to talk and get some advice on a continual base. participant a said, "i wish to get counseling help and advice of pastoral work. i wish i can always find a safe place to talk and to get some advice so that i will know what to do better in the daily life." participant b implied the need of forming a network to fight for women' s rights and equality. she said, "i wish that more women could stand up and fight for their own freedom and equality. for example, if there is a person talking down to women, we could all question that person." (g) the suggestions from christian women participants a and b both suggested that gender equality education needs to be designed and practiced. participant a commented, i hope that we can develop curriculums and series of educational materials. then we can apply them to people who are still wondering and confused about gender issues, people who still wonder that if women are inferior to men. we can start to educate children when they attend sunday school. i think the earlier and we start, the better and the more successful outcome it can make. both participants shared the same voice: women should take more leadership in the church system. participant a said: "men in the church do not comprise over half of population, yet, men in the church system hold most of the power in their hands. women's population is over fifty percent." she also said: "i wish that one day women would have rules that regulate half or more than half of the members participating in general assembly and synod should be female. right now it is only one-forth." participant b also had a similar description: "i hope to see more female ordained pastors, 50 percent of female elders and deaconesses.” participant b made another insightful suggestion for the church system that the translation, edition, and the interpretation of the bible should be taken into account. i shared this insight because the different ways to interpret bible would bring different enlightening. discussions beulter, crago, & avizmendi (1986) suggested that therapists having more flexible attitudes toward gender roles and are more important than the gender of the therapist in determining influence on psychotherapy. one study found that self-labeled feminist counselors actually perform more feminist behaviors than did nonfeminists (moradi, fisher, hill, jome, & blum, 2000). the significance of this finding was that feminist therapy is one of the few systems of therapy, compared to other therapies like person-centered therapy which also stresses on empowerment like feminist therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy which also emphasizes on the assertiveness and autonomy like feminist therapy, that emphasizes analysis of relations between the personal and the political in light of the tenet that the personal is political (moradi, et al., 2000). whalen (1996) said that less than half of the counselors she interviewed used feminist sociopolitical analysis that spoke to the pathology of society to state women's problems. instead, women's problems were often stated as individual pathology. it is interesting to explore the meaning and the cause of this percentage since feminist therapy is a powerful therapy, yet less than half of the counselors used it. suggestions for future research weitz (1982) designed a research using a consciousness-raising group to explore how this approach helps participants increase their self-esteems and decrease their depressions. she conducted this research by issuing questionnaires, interviews, and the janis-field self-esteem scale to 73 women who had registered for feminist consciousness-raising groups in the state of connecticut . these women were from two places in opposite extreme corners of the state so to decrease the sampling error. the goal of her study was to use consciousness-raising groups as an alternative therapy to support that the participants' self-esteems are increased and the depression decreased. the finding of this study was, after the consciousness-raising group finished, the increase in feminism was significantly related to the increase in self-esteem (t(71) = 2.25, p<.05). also, 43% of the women who did not initially label themselves feminists were willing to do so by the time of the follow-up interviews, and two-thirds of these participants believed that having a role model increased their self-esteem. for example, one participant said "i feel more positive towards myself, more capable of achieving my goals, because she can achieve hers" (weitz, 1982). follingstad, robinson, and pugh (1977) previously had an experiment to study the relationship between feminism and self-esteem. they designed this research by adopting a feminist therapy approach on raising women's self-esteem. they randomly assigned 22 female undergraduates to either a 16-hour marathon group or a 2-hour, 8-week time-spaced group. twelve additional females who took objective measures at the same time as one of the two groups acted as no-treatment control subjects. the result showed that all the experimental participants had obvious and significant increases in their profeminist behavioral changes and attitudes. when compared with control participants, time-spaced participants reported significantly more profeminist behavioral changes and an increase in self-esteem. the significance of this study is the fact that they designed two groups with different time formats and compared them with no-treatment control groups. this is a strong point in its favor, and the basic function of control groups did support the changes in subjects' attitudes and behaviors toward a more profeminist direction (follingstad, et al., 1977). according to these prior researches, the researcher suggests for further research to use the feminist therapy's approach, to form focus groups for christian women, to access the collective experience of participants. individually, continuing to interview more christian women to look for their diverse experiences and voices is another suggestion for the further study. conclusions the environment shapes the individual's inner value system. when a system holds the patriarchal values that are against women, women living within in this system easily internalize those values. that is a main factor for many women. despite not wanting to, they view themselves as inferior to men. participant a’s experience corresponded to this perspective: even in my generation, which is quite a young generation, you can still find people who are hostile to women. if they dare to speak it out in a descending way, i would argue and respond to them as best as i can. however, i sometimes still feel women are inferior because the whole environment emphasizes it. i feel pulled into two directions. one direction is that you know some people out there who expect you to pursue and to promote the gender equality; yet, some other people may expect you to remain in the traditional gender roles. these two forces would make me wonder and feel confused sometimes. from her voice, an understanding came across that women feel torn from the changing and informing society. they feel torn by two sets of values. therefore, to provide a support system and resources for them to go through their struggles is critically important. feminist pastoral counseling can function as an effective approach while christian women in taiwan still struggle with their identities and self-values. traditional therapy feminist therapy androcentic gender centric ethnocentric heterosexist intrapsychic deterministic gender-free genderfree flexible flexible interactionist lifespan figure 1. characteristics of theories (worell & remer, 1992) references american psychological association report on the task force on sex bias and sex role stereotyping in psychotherapeutic practice. 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(2003). magazines: what adolescent girls are reading and the way they shape body image. advancing women in leadership journal , retrieved july 10, 2004 , from http:/ /www .advancingwomen.com/awl/winter2003/sa uerr -l.html slee, n. (2002). the holy spirit and spirituality. in s. f. parsons (ed.) the cambridgecompanion to feminist theology (pp. 171-189). new york : cambridge university press. sturdivant, s. (1980). therapy with women. new york : springer. weitz, r. (1982). feminist consciousness raising, self-concept, and depression. sex roles, 8, 231-241. whalen, m. (1996). counseling to end violence against women: a subversive model. thousands oaks, ca.: sage. whitley, b. e., jr. (1983). sex role orientation and self-esteem: a critical meta-analytic review. journal of personality and social psychology, 44, 765-778. williams, e. f. (1976). notes of a feminist therapist. new york : dell. worell, j., & remer, p. (1992). feminist perspective in therapy: an empowerment model for women. new york : wiley. authors yu-fen lin copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 12 2010 issn 1093-7099 learning about the human aspect of the scientific enterprise: gender differences in conceptions of scientific knowledge dr. erin e. peters burton abstract calls for new ways to teach science include an emphasis on the human endeavor of science and for making science more relevant to a feminine perspective. this quasi-experimental intervention study of 166 middle school students approaches the teaching of the nature of science in an explicit and reflective way that also enhances the humanistic perspective of scientific knowledge construction. girls in the experimental group significantly outperformed both boys in the experimental group and boys and girls in the comparison group on nature of science knowledge and on content knowledge. differences were also found in the qualitative results. girls saw the process of cognition as a group endeavor, whereas boys reported the process as being generated by themselves, with guidance from books or from the teacher. additionally, girls in the experimental group tended to rely more on evidence in making conclusions and boys relied more on authority when they developed the “big ideas” in their inquiry. keywords: nature of science, scientific inquiry, gender issues in science, science cognition. citation: peters, e. e. (2010). learning about the human aspect of the scientific enterprise: gender differences in conceptions of scientific knowledge. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(12). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction since the launching of sputnik, reports from the u.s. government have indicated that there is a critical shortage of elementary and secondary students who are interested in science (see national research council, 2007; national commission on mathematics and science teaching for the 21st century, 2000; national research council, 1998). especially notable is the lack of girls and women who pursue science as a career (nces, 2001). although government is aware of the shortage of students interested in science, efforts have not improved the poor scores from students in the united states when compared to other countries (timss, 1999, 2003, 2007). younger u.s. students tend to score equally with other industrialized countries, but as students progress through the grade levels, older students rank much lower than other countries. it can be interpreted from these test scores that as students reach the secondary level of education, they become less interested in learning about science. one possible connection to students’ lack of interest in science in the united states is the way in which science is taught in secondary school and in college. college students who do not consider themselves “science-minded” have chosen to leave the field of science because of the competitive and isolating way in which science is taught (seymour, 1995; tobias, 1990). the perception that science is isolating and unfriendly is also evident in the finding that girls in secondary school feel that science is irrelevant to them because of the isolating and competitive methods of science instruction (baker & leary, 1995), and tend to have low self-efficacy in their performance in science class, especially in the physical sciences (britner, 2008). the purpose of this study was to test a unique teaching method that emphasizes the human endeavor of pursuing scientific knowledge as a possible relief to the isolating and inhospitable methods of teaching science, to compare the academic performance of girls and boys and an exploration into the cognition boys and girls use to make sense of scientific activities. the shortage of women in science the absence of women in science is a persistent problem that reduces the amount of progress that can be made in the field of science. lack of women in the field means limited perspectives in generating scientific knowledge (blickenstaff, 2005). synthesis of the research on why girls and women do not pursue science points to nine possible reasons: (a) biological differences between men and women, (b) girls’ lack of academic preparation for a science career, (c) girls’ poor attitude toward science and lack of positive experiences with science in childhood, (d) the absence of female scientists as role models, (e) science curricula are irrelevant to many girls, (f) the pedagogy of science classes favors male students, (g) a ‘chilly climate’ exists for girls in science classes, (h) cultural pressure on girls to conform to traditional gender roles, and (i) an inherent masculine worldview in scientific epistemology (blickenstaff, 2005). much of the research done to explore the reasons for the lack of girls and women in science cannot explain fully the phenomena. although some cognitive difference between men and women were found in two meta-analyses by janet shibley hyde in 1996, the differences in spatial perception (d=.43) and mathematical ability (d=.45) cannot alone explain the 20 to 1 ratio of men to women found in scientific careers. girls’ and womens’ lack of preparation for studying advanced science has not convincingly been shown to be a barrier to a science career. girls are advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 well-prepared to pursue science courses, but still choose to avoid them (cole, 1997; erwin & marutto, 1998). neither biological differences nor lack of academic preparation can account for the low number of girls and women who are involved in scientific pursuits. examining other factors, such as attitudes toward science, role models, pedagogy, and scientific epistemology leads us to more substantial contributions to the reasons behind girls’ and women’s dislike of science. weinburgh (1995) conducted a meta-analysis of girls’ and boys’ attitudes toward science and found that boys had a more positive attitude toward science (d=0.20), especially in general science and earth science (d=0.34). baker and leary (1995) interviewed 40 girls about their experiences in science and found that girls noticed a lack of role models and could not imagine themselves as scientists. additionally, they found that girls were more interested in biological sciences rather than physical science because they had a need to care for humans and animals. in an investigation of 1500 physics students in 16 universities across the united states, it was found that women were more successful if they took a high school course that emphasized depth rather than breadth of the subject (hazari, tai & sadler, 2007). the quality of teaching at the university level also has an impact on the perseverance of girls and women in science. seymour (1995) found that students who have switched from a science major to a non-science major, 90% of the students had a concern about the pedagogy. the students reported that the instructors were not easily approachable, and they over used competition in the grading system to the detriment of collaboration among students. these findings were corroborated by tobias (1990) who found that undergraduate students who switched majors felt isolated in their studies. lastly, it has been extensively argued by authors such as evelyn fox-keller, jane gilbert, sandra harding, and donna haroway that science inherently has ways of knowing that exclude a feminine perspective. henwood (1996) on scientific epistemology revealed the deeply gendered nature of scientific knowledge. because science is based upon positivist objective rationality, the subject of science in school tends to be unattractive to girls and women (harding, 1991; kerr, 2001). there is a large body of evidence that points to the need for a different type of teaching science if we intend to improve girls’ attitudes toward science and increase the number of women who pursue science as a career. inclusive ways to teach science calls for new ways to teach science include an emphasis on the human endeavor of science and for making science more relevant to a feminine perspective. among other conclusions, blickenstaff (2005) suggested that given the factors that influence the number of women pursuing science careers, curriculum developers should create assignments that emphasize quality of life issues in science and illustrate that the scientific enterprise can provide careers that focus on caring. gilbert (2001) put forward the idea that to challenge the assumptions that go along with science and its masculine roots, we seek new meanings for “women” and “science” to create spaces that women can truly intellectually engage with the scientific enterprise. jones, howe, and rua (1999) found that the girls rarely engaged in science experiences outside of a classroom setting and propose that curriculum take that into account. taasoobshirazi and carr (2008), in their work on gender and expertise in physics, advised that a more authentic view of expertise in subjects like physics be taken so that females do not continue to be derailed advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 in their success early in their school careers. in creating new ways to teach science that focus on the human element, we can develop programs that will allow young women to maintain their feminine perspective, rather than having to adopt an artificial masculine identity. emphasizing the scientific enterprise in curriculum curriculum emphasizing hands-on activities that illustrate how humans endeavor to gain scientific knowledge may show students that science is a social and creative undertaking, and help girls to envision science as a career choice. scientific inquiry is a curricular choice that can make the subject of science more collaborative, engaging, and authentic (national research council, 1996, american association for the advancement of science, 1993), but has been historically difficult to put into practice (bybee, 2000; costenson & lawson, 1986; deboer, 2004). although it is intuitive to think that just by conducting scientific inquiry that students will understand how scientists operate, there is a body of research demonstrating that explicit, reflective instruction in the nature of science has been found to be more effective in expressing the scientific enterprise to students (gess-newsome, 2002; khishfe & abd-el-khalick, 2002). the nature of science can be defined as the inherent guidelines which scientists use to obtain and verify knowledge in their field (lederman, 1992). curriculum that teaches the nature of science demonstrates that the endeavor of constructing scientific knowledge requires particular habits of mind that are simultaneously organized, creative, and rigorous. it shows that scientists do not act alone, but have social networks to help with thinking through problems. lastly, this type of curriculum would make clear that all scientific claims are backed up with empirical evidence, and that historical factors have played a role in the progress of scientific knowledge discovery. making nature of science knowledge explicit and reflective diminishes the mysterious process of obtaining scientific knowledge to students, especially girls, and emphasizes the human side of doing science. in this study, i explored the effectiveness of teaching the explicit, reflective nature of science through a self-regulatory model where students can compare their results of inquiry to the ways scientists work. the self-regulatory model frames the discipline of science in a human context rather than a factual context. additionally, the self-regulatory model of teaching the nature of science requires students to be self-reflective about their work and can enhance selfefficacy in science learning because of the supportive methods in the model. several measures of academic success have shown improvement using self-regulated learning strategies (zimmerman, 1989) including strategy use (pressley, goodchild, fleet, sajchowski, & evans, 1987; weinstein & underwood, 1985), intrinsic motivation (ryan, connell & deci, 1984), academic studying (thomas & rohwer, 1986), classroom interaction (rohrkember, 1989; wang & peverly, 1986), use of instructional media (henderson, 1986), metacognitive engagement (corno & mandinach, 1983), and self-monitoring learning (ghatala, 1986; paris, cross & lipson, 1984). the intervention in this study approaches the teaching of the nature of science in an explicit and reflective way that enhances the humanistic perspective of scientific knowledge construction. the following research questions were central to the study: rq1: do comparison and experimental groups differ as a function of gender on science students’ content knowledge, nature of science knowledge, and self-regulatory efficacy of learning? rq 2: how do male and advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 female students report the process of cognition when participating in metacognitive prompting intervention-science? methods an embedded mixed-methodology was chosen for this study because the research questions involved both the processes of the students (investigated through qualitative techniques) and the outcomes of the students (investigated through quantitative techniques). i employed a quasi-experimental design over two years. this research was not originally intended to discern responses by gender, but later became a natural progression of the work. students in the experimental group (n = 37 girls, n=42 boys) and comparison group (n=41 girls, n=46 boys) were pre-tested on content knowledge, nature of science knowledge, and self-regulatory efficacy of learning. all classes were taught by the same teacher who was instructed in educational research so that contamination between the different strategies employed by the different groups would not occur. each class had approximately equal numbers of girls and boys, a deliberate decision by the teachers on the middle school team. during the class, students worked in groups comprised of both girls and boys assigned by the teacher. i visited the classroom daily over the six weeks of the unit each year for two years of the study to maintain fidelity of the teacher to the intended interventions. study setting and participants over two years, 166 students from an urban middle school in the mid-atlantic region of the united states participated in the study. the middle school serves 928 students, grades six through eight. seventeen percent of students from this school receive free or reduced price for lunches. the sample population consisted of 7.9% black students, 10.7% hispanic students, and 69.2% white students, and 12.2% mixed racial identification. study design the four modules of instructional material in which the intervention was placed were based on guided scientific inquiry (national research council, 1996). both the experimental group (n=79) and the comparison group (n=87) were given four sequential guided inquiry lessons on electricity and magnetism. the lessons were taught for 45 minutes each day over a 6week period and had three main pedagogical elements: (a) student prior knowledge, (b) hands-on activities prompting the construction of knowledge about scientific content and processes of the specific content, and (c) student-generated summary of three overarching principles guiding the physical phenomena (national research council, 1996). student prior knowledge was generated in each of the four lessons. a think-pair-share paradigm was used at the beginning of the lesson, and students were asked to write their thoughts individually for three minutes about the topic to be studied for the “think” portion, share ideas with a partner for five minutes for the “pair” portion, and participated in a whole class discussion for the “share” portion. the second section of the lesson consisted of the hands-on activities that were designed to have students observe the phenomena, write descriptions of the physical interactions in the inquiry, and organize an explanation for the core physical interactions in the activity. lastly, students were expected to use higher-order thinking by describing three or four big ideas that characterize the behavior of advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 the phenomena, backing up their descriptions with empirical evidence. students worked in the same assigned co-ed groups of three or four for the entire inquiry lab. although both groups were given identical content knowledge and science process tasks, each group was given a different way to develop nature of science knowledge. the experimental group was given checklists and questions that facilitated the scrutiny of their science process work with the guidelines of scientific inquiry (metacognitive prompting intervention – science or mpi-s). the comparison group learned about the nature of science implicitly through the collaborative hands-on science, and was given additional content questions to account for equal time-on-task. the checklists and questions given to the experimental group, based on the selfregulation work of zimmerman (2000), attempted to model scientific thinking for a specific aspect of the nature of science, and to teach students to align their decisions during the inquiry with the guidelines inherently used in the scientific community. mpi-s focused only on the nature of science, and was free of content instruction. to show how the checklists and questions were content free, an example of the checklists and questions for the empirical aspect of the nature of science is provided here. the first prompt is an example of an empirical observation made by a scientist that includes detailed descriptions and standard units. the second prompt is a checklist for students to compare their decisions in the inquiry to the empirical nature of science. the third prompt is a short checklist for students to align their work with the nature of science and a short list of questions asking about student reasoning for the validity of their empirical evidence. lastly, the fourth prompt is a longer list of questions probing students’ rationales in their decisions about inquiry processes and construction of knowledge based on empirical evidence. mpi-s was given to the students iteratively to encourage repeated practice in the training. overall, students were to use the first prompt as a model to do their work, the checklists to reflect on the alignment to the scientific enterprise to their work, and the questions to demonstrate rationale for their decisions regarding valid, empirical data. quantitative data sources mixed methodology was chosen for this study to explain the student outcomes of the intervention through quantitative results, as well as explaining the processes the students used to achieve the outcomes with qualitative results. quantitative data were gathered from pre-and posttests of nature of science knowledge, content knowledge, and self-efficacy of learning. qualitative data were gathered from student work products, think aloud protocols, and focus group interviews. test of electricity-magnetism knowledge (temk). this test assesses individual attainment of content in the topics of magnetism, static electricity, current electricity, and electromagnetism using 19 short response items. each question on the temk was open-ended and used visual, logical, and analytical forms of communication to assess the content goals. the assessment was designed by the researcher and was evaluated for content and construct validity by a team of national award winning teachers who taught physical science with the same age group of students as the participants. the cronbach alpha reliability on the temk scoring was measured at .82, indicating high reliability within the test. in order to determine content validity, two questions were chosen from the same grade level test that was designed for the national assessment of educational progress or naep (national center for educational statistics, 2007). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 the naep, otherwise known as “the nation’s report card” in the united states, is given to a random sample of students nationally and represents the level of content knowledge for students across that country (national center for educational statistics, 2007). a sample item from the temk is “why are some materials magnetic while others are not?” the rating criteria for the naep were identical to the rating criteria for the temk content test for this study. an omitted answer received a 0, a partially correct answer received a 1, an answer that was essentially correct but had a minor flaw received a 2, and a completely correct answer received a 3. raters of this assessment were given a code book that indicated the level of answers for each score. forty percent of the questions on the temk were randomly given to three other raters to determine inter-rater reliability with a cohen’s kappa statistic which was found to be .92, indicating substantial agreement. the views of the nature of scienceform b (vnos –b). the vnos-b (lederman, abd-el-khalick, bell, and schwartz, 2002) assessed student understanding of inherent guidelines used to conduct science and consists of seven open-ended questions corresponding to the seven identified aspects of the nature of science: a) scientific knowledge is durable, yet tentative, b) empirical evidence is used to support ideas in science, c) social and historical factors play a role in the construction of scientific knowledge, d) laws and theories play a central role in developing scientific knowledge, yet they have different functions, e) accurate record keeping, peer review and replication of experiments help to validate scientific ideas, f) science is a creative endeavor, and g) science and technology are not the same, but they impact each other (mccomas, almazroa, & clough, 2005; lederman, 1992). lederman, abd-el-khalick, bell, and schwartz (2002) argue that nature of science knowledge is best gathered using qualitative methods, and because free-response best represents student knowledge. each answer on the vnos-b was ranked using a 0-3 scale: 0 representing no answer, 1 representing novice knowledge, 2 representing emerging knowledge, and 3 representing proficient knowledge using a rubric designed from the research literature recommendations. because the nature of science tends to be more tenuous than content knowledge, 100% of the responses were used to calculate inter-rater reliability. cohen’s kappa analysis of the reliability resulted in .94 which indicates a substantial agreement. in addition to the scoring rubric, questions from the vnos-b were included in the focus group interviews, as suggested in the literature (lederman, abd-elkhalick, bell, & schwartz 2002). self-efficacy for learning form (self). the self scale (zimmerman & kitsantas, 2005) is a 19-item survey designed to test student self-efficacy for learning. the items ask students to determine their ability to complete self-regulated learning strategies on a percentage scale divided into increments of ten percent, ranging from “definitely cannot do it” to “definitely can do it”. it is designed to have students self-report on a variety of situations that require academic self-regulatory efficacy such as reading, note taking, test taking, writing, and studying. high scores on this scale represent a high ability to be self-regulatory in academic strategies. this scale has a reliability coefficient of .97 and was highly correlated to teacher reports on students. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 qualitative data collection methods in order to triangulate data and to capture the process students used to produce the learning outcomes, qualitative data was collected and analyzed. sources of qualitative data were student written products, think-aloud protocols, and focus group interviews. student products from inquiry units. student learning outcomes for the inquiry units, given to both the experimental and the comparison groups, focused on observable phenomena in electricity and magnetism. for example, the first module guided students to investigate interactions between permanent magnets that were oddly shaped. students were challenged to use empirical evidence to determine the location of the poles of the magnets, and then to determine the role of domains in magnetic orientation. the completed student products resulted in written responses to student prior knowledge, open-ended content questions, explanation of processes to obtain results, summarization of findings into enduring understandings and how the evidence from the activities support their ideas, and a reflection on student cognition during the inquiry. two other trained science educators who were not directly involved with the project coded 80% of the student products (randomly selected) using the code-book developed by the researcher which resulted in a cohen’s kappa of .92 agreement in coding. think aloud protocol. think aloud protocols are used to draw out student thinking that may not be apparent on the surface of a field observation (ericsson and simon, 1993). students were instructed to talk aloud about what they were thinking throughout the course of one of the lessons, instead of focusing on the answer to the problem. during the think aloud protocol, the researcher would probe student thinking when students mentioned that they changed their minds based on evidence or on communicating with other students in their group. randomly selected students from each group, six students per group for each year of the study, were videotaped while they performed an investigation from the intervention. the total number of students involved in the think aloud protocols over two years was twenty-four, 14 girls and 10 boys. focus group interview. a focus group was chosen as a method of data collection because based on the researchers experience with eighth grade students, they often feel more comfortable communicating as a group rather than as an individual. after each of the two years of the intervention, six members were randomly chosen from the explicit group and six members were randomly chosen from the implicit group to participate in focus group interviews, totaling 12 members of the experimental group (7 girls and 5 boys) and 12 members of the comparison group (6 girls and 6 boys). the members of the focus groups were not the same students as the members of the think aloud groups. a semi-structured protocol was needed due to the flexibility to explore phenomena that emerged. sample questions from the semi-structured protocol were (a) how did you act like a scientist in that lesson? (b) how do you think science class is different from english, history or math class? (c) how can you think about your thinking? (d) what does it mean to you to think like a scientist? (e) are there other ways of thinking? (f) do scientists behave differently than other people? two additional researchers independently open-coded transcripts of the think alouds and the focus group interviews for categories, which were grouped into themes. the interrater reliability among three researchers was a cohen’s kappa of .73 advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 agreement among the themes. the researchers met to discuss the coding and adjust the themes until there was a cohen’s kappa of .90 for consensus agreement. narrative data from the think aloud and the focus group interviews were transcribed using the software, transana. data was open coded verbatim (strauss & corbin, 1998) to maintain fidelity of the message of the participants then axially coded to consolidate themes (gibbs, 2002). an educational researcher, a teacher educator, and a science teacher independently coded the student work products and the interviews. there was initially an 88% agreement among the codes that emerged for the three coders, and after discussion and collapsing of the codes into larger categories, the agreement among the three coders reached 94%. results because both girls and boys participated in the experimental and comparison groups, initial analysis focused on groups differences, which is a factor in reducing expectancy effects in studying gender as a variable. after this preliminary analysis demonstrated significant differences between the entire experimental group and the entire comparison group, girls in the experimental group were compared to the boys in the experimental group on all measures. figure 1 illustrates the process of analysis for this project. girls in the experimental group (m = 2.73, sd= 0.41) significantly outperformed boys (m = 1.63, sd = 0.40) in the experimental group on content knowledge f(1,79) = 5.14, p < .01 and on nature of science knowledge f(1,79) = 13.18, p < .01. however, there were no significant differences between girls and boys in the experimental group on self-regulatory efficacy f(1,79) = .19, p = .91. overall, the experimental group (boys and girls) outperformed the control group (boys and girls) in content knowledge f(1, 166) = 12.77, p < .01, and nature of science knowledge f(1, 166) = 38.95, p< .01, but no significant differences occurred for self-regulatory efficacy f (1, 166) = .322, p = .57. considering that the both genders in the experimental group outperformed both genders in the comparison group and girls in the experimental group outperformed boys in the experimental group significantly, girls in the experimental group demonstrated the greatest positive change of all subgroups. the qualitative data explains of the processes that girls and boys in the experimental group used in learning the nature of scientific knowledge. the work given to the students during the inquiry, otherwise known as student work products, included questions about how students utilized cognition in the activities and the nature of their knowledge. themes clearly emerged when the answers given by girls and boys in the student product were analyzed separately and placed on a matrix. six queries that addressed the nature of scientific knowledge were asked at the end of each activity: (a) explain how your observations would be clear to other people, (b) are you behaving more like a scientist (an expert)? explain. (c) did you initially ignore any observations or data? (d) are your data organized clearly to illustrate your point? (e) is there a similarity among the facts that lead to a “big idea” or conclusion? and (f) how did you use creativity to arrive at your conclusions? although boys and girls worked together to achieve consensus on advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 results and explanations during the activity, the questions about cognition were assigned as homework and each student answered them individually. each question with representative results of the emergent themes will be discussed below. explain how your observations would be clear to other people girls who responded to this question defined clarity as either being generated by group consensus, indicated by the word “we” in their writing, or as being accepted to an outside audience, indicated by the word “they” in their response. boys who responded depended on the decisiveness of the phenomena, such as the change in strength of a magnet, or on the competency of their abilities, indicated by the word “i” in the majority of responses. for example, the girls rationalized the clarity of their responses by indicated the ability of a group of people to understand them, “…because we organized it well enough to understand,” “…because we applied what we know and we tried to cover the purpose,” and “…because we discussed with our group.” the girls also indicated that clarity could be achieved by imagining what an outside audience would think of their display of data, “they would think it was clear” and “another class could read it and see what we did.” in only one case out of 37 did a girl use the pronoun “i” in her response to this question rather than the pronoun “we”. the responses of the boys for this question were markedly different, as they focused on either the clarity of observation arising from the distinctiveness of the phenomena or from their own ability. some of the boys described the phenomena again to emphasize the clarity (or lack of clarity) of their observations, “…because the magnet rubbed against the scissors more and it became more magnetic,” and “…one of the numbers was an outlier, so someone might get confused.” a large majority of the responses from boys for this question rationalized the clarity because of their high competence in describing phenomena, “because i said how things were done and used descriptive words,” “…because i proved it with the experiment,” “…because my observations can be explained with my data”, and “…because i stated them clearly.” language indicating the consideration of a group of people occurred only once in 42 responses from boys, “…because our data did not make sense…” themes that emerged showed that girls tended to depend on group interaction, and boys tended to rely on physical phenomena or their own ability to determine clarity of observations. are you behaving more like a scientist (an expert)? explain. another very clear difference emerged between responses of girls and of boys when asked if they felt they had more expert knowledge as a result of participating in the activities. thirty-five out of 37 girls responded positively. for example, “yes because now i think about past labs i may have done, i also think from other people’s perspectives and i don’t ever leave out information.” the remaining two responses from the girls were “maybe” and “just a little.” whereas the majority of boys (38 out of 42) responded negatively and did not feel as though they were more expert. sample responses from boys state, “i’m not sure, i always thought like this but i never wrote it down” and “no, you need to know a lot more to be an expert.” only one boy answered in a positive way, “yes because we done more experiments and answer more questions about the investigation.” these results indicate that there is a very strong difference between girls and boys regarding the perception of the level of expertise of a scientist. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 did you initially ignore any observations or data? when asked about their ability to be more inclusive of detail in their observations as the activities went on, the majority of girls responded that they could have improved their initial observations, while the majority of boys responded that they wouldn’t have changed their initial observations because it was factual. of the responses from the girls, 33 indicated that they could have improved their data collection, one indicated that it wouldn’t have changed, and three left the question blank. representative examples of responses from girls are as follows, “probably but not on purpose,” “yes, i could have been more detailed,” and “yes, i could have labeled them better.” more boys left the question blank (n=12) but from the boys who answered, the majority answered in very definite terms that what they initially observed was accurate and would not be changed. sample responses from the boys state, “it was only what i saw,” “i stuck to the science part,” and “no, i didn’t.” girls in this study tend to be in some way aware of bias due to prior experiences in observation, but boys were much more concrete in their perception of the validity of observation. are your data organized clearly to illustrate your point? all boys and all girls responded affirmatively to this question, but the reasons for their answers were different and mirrored the girls’ tendency toward tentativeness and the boys’ tendency toward convergent answers. most of the girls described a specific concept that the data were illustrating. for example, “yes, because it showed the concept of connecting and how it happened.” however, six of the girls who responded made concessions about how they could have accomplished more, such as “yes, but it could have been more complete,” and “yes, but i didn’t do as much of the work as i could have.” the boys answered positively, but never mentioned that the data could have been displayed in other ways. their responses indicated a perception of knowledge as static, such as, “yes, because they’re drawn like the display was,” “yes, because it showed the observations in a descriptive way,” “yes because i proved the facts and things in the lab,” and “yes, the data was strong to the point.” all of the responses of the boys reasoned that an accepted procedure was followed which therefore led to an organized data display. the way the boys responded (a positivist orientation) and the way the girls responded (a more tentative, conceptual orientation) corroborates the results of the gender differences in the responses of the other cognitive question asked about data collection and display. the responses of the girls and boys resulted in similar answers to the other question about data, “did you initially ignore any observations or data?” where the boys answered in a more self-directed right/wrong way and the girls showed more tendencies for knowledge to be dependent on perspectives. is there a similarity among the facts that lead to a “big idea” or conclusion? this question yielded the most distinct results of all of the questions regarding cognition. all girls answered yes and explained a concept found in the activities. only one boy out of 42 answered yes and all other boys answered no without any explanation. this is a surprising difference because boys and girls worked together during the activity, but the girls distinctly saw a trend in the data and the boys did not. representative answers from the girls include, “the facts advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 could explain that the farther away the coils the less amount of magnetism” and “the stronger the magnet the more paperclips picked up as in coils.” boys had less complete answers than the girls. one boy did answer, “yes the numbers were similar,” but all other boys answered “no” without any elaboration. based on the answers to this question, girls clearly saw a link between the activity and the theory driving the activity, where the boys did not see similarities among the facts found during the activity to lead to a conclusion. how did you use creativity to arrive at your conclusions? again, girls and boys approached this question differently. girls reported being creative by choosing which variables to change, such as “by coming up with different variables,” “for the variables we used # of coils and space between,” and “we tested the effect of the current with three different amounts of batteries and coils.” boys answered in a more conceptual way and demonstrated that they regarded creativity in science as thinking more about why the phenomena happened. sample answers from the boys include, “i used creativity by keeping an open mind,” “just see what is going on,” and “i imagined the domains and what they were organized in the power of the magnet/nail.” in this case, girls answered in a more procedural way and the boys answered in a more conceptual way. focus group and think aloud results qualitative data from the focus groups and the think aloud protocol parallels the differences found between girls and boys in the cognitive questioning from the student work products. the focus groups and think alouds were conducted with boys and girls together, but the responses of boys and girls were analyzed separately. for the purposes of this study, the experimental boy and experimental girls were the only responses taken into consideration. the purpose of the focus groups was to probe student understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, and the processes students used to access and construct knowledge. the girls in the experimental group tended to answer questions about the characteristics of scientists with answers that were more aligned with the nature of science, but boys did not show same inclination. when girls were asked to indicate characteristics of scientists, they answered, “scientists have great imaginations . . . when they don’t know how to do it, they try things until they can show it” (creative nos), “science is more than just facts, you can elaborate on them” (empirical nos), and “when you have more technology you can use it to change theories” (tentative nos). boys overwhelmingly responded to questions asking about the characteristics of scientists by elaborating on their appearance, “scientists wear white lab coats and have crazy hair… they work in their labs a lot.” as seen in the cognitive questioning, girls in the experimental group tended to rely more on evidence in making conclusions and boys relied more on authority when they developed the “big ideas” in their inquiry. in the co-ed groups, the students often came to different conclusions based on the same evidence. part of the task of the inquiry was for each lab group of three or four students to come to consensus about the conclusions based on the data they collected. students in the think aloud protocols and focus groups discussed the ways they worked out the conflicts in the groups. as with the qualitative analysis of the questions, only the experimental group was considered because of their exposure to the explicit means of learning the nature of advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 science. all seven girls described that their way to resolve discrepancies with the conclusions was to return to the physical data and perform the investigation again, “when we had a disagreement, we kind of figured out what made sense and what didn’t make sense. eventually we all came to an agreement that we didn’t do something right. then we went back and changed it.” four of the five boys in the focus group, reported that they were convinced that the conclusion was appropriate only when the teacher indicated the “right” answer, “we waited until the class discussions at the end. then ms. white (the pseudonym for the teacher) told us what the answer was.” this trend is analogous to the gender differences found in the cognition questions where boys answered in a more authoritative way and the girls indicated that perception played a role in their conceptualization of the data. discussion results of the exploration of differences between 8th grade girls and boys in learning nature of science knowledge given explicit, reflective learning prompts show clear differences in both outcomes and processes. girls significantly outperformed boys on the content and nature of science knowledge measures, discussed different learning processes in the interviews, and answered questions about their cognition differently even though mixed gender groups performed the science inquiry together. however, the boys and girls did not show significant differences in the self-regulatory efficacy measure. a discussion of the qualitative and quantitative results, organized by research question, follows. rq1: do comparison and experimental groups differ as a function of gender on science students’ content knowledge, nature of science knowledge, and self-regulatory efficacy of learning? given the same intervention prompting nature of science knowledge in an explicit, reflective manner, girls outscored boys on the content test which focused on the major concepts of electricity and magnetism. content knowledge in the intervention was developed through connecting new hands-on experiences to prior knowledge and making conclusions about the major ideas that governed the hands-on experiences. to a large extent, students had to work collaboratively to develop a consensus about what data to collect, how to organize the data, and how to develop conclusions about the trends found in the data. groups, all of which were populated by both girls and boys, designed a peer review system to make sure their ideas were valid. all members of the group had to agree that the actions taken in the activity as well as the reasons for the actions taken during the activity were sound. as reported in the cognition questions, girls oriented their expertise of electricity and magnetism knowledge toward the group, evidenced by their frequent use of the word “we”. girls seemed to easily accept the construction of knowledge through the group, and reported depending on the group to discuss and confirm information. boys, conversely, reported their orientation of knowledge acquisition as being generated by the interaction of themselves with the content. this is evidenced in their answers to the cognition questions being dominated by the use of the word “i” as the source of information. additionally, the qualitative data showed girls ability to form “big ideas” from hands-on experiences, and the boys did not think they could develop overriding ideas from several different hands-on activities. finally, the evidence in the interviews points to the girls’ ability to construct knowledge in a group. girls reported that they relied on evidence to solve any advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 discrepancies their group had while taking data. boys reported that they relied mainly on authority, in the form of a book or of a teacher, to solve difficulties they encountered in the activities. boys tended to orient themselves to finding the one right answer that was provided by an expert. girls may have increased content knowledge because the intervention was designed to draw heavily on group interactions to develop knowledge. girls reported being more comfortable with this type of learning, and they were able to accept knowledge that was developed by a group. the performance of girls over boys on learning nature of science knowledge may be attributed to the metacognitive prompts, because they described the processes of developing scientific knowledge as a human endeavor. the metacognitive prompts explicitly described the scientific enterprise as being influenced by human bias, being collaborative, and being creative. the prompts were designed to override the thinking the science is conducted entirely by the scientific method and to show that the process of acquiring scientific knowledge is more iterative than linear. the girls reported the prompts as being helpful to revise their work in the hands-on activities. a representative comment from the focus group from a girl reported, “i thought about the checklists and realize that i didn’t do something as well as i could have. i thought about how i might explain it to other people and i wrote it in more detail.” also, girls realized that the data generated in the hands-on activities could be improved upon, where as the boys were satisfied with their display of data if it led to a convergent answer. this evidence points to girls’ ability to recognize the tentative nature of science which states that the scientific knowledge we have now is largely stable, but can be changed given compelling data. when asked about the role of creativity in science, girls answered in a more procedural way, and boys answered more conceptually, but not oriented specifically toward science. although the girls saw some creativity in science generated by their design of the hands-on activities, the boys tended to connect their responses about creativity with school work, rather than with science. for example, the boys reported that you can be creative in science by keeping an open mind. finally, evidence that illustrates how girls comprehended nature of science knowledge is seen in the interview responses. girls tended to talk about what scientist did in an everyday capacity. boys described the appearance of scientists as being “mad scientists”, a phenomena also seen in the draw-ascientist test (chambers, 1983). all of the indications of comprehension of nature of science knowledge from girls tended to show scientists and scientific endeavors as more human. self-regulatory efficacy measures did not show any differences between girls and boys. this may be because 8th graders not exposed to the ways scientists do their work (hogan, 2000) and the students were learning nature of science knowledge for the first time. students, especially young students, do not immediately display self-efficacy when learning something new (bandura, 1997). research using prompting to enhance writing skills (nuckles, hubner & renkl, 2009) also showed no increase in self-efficacy with undergraduate psychology students, which corroborates the findings of this study. boys and girls at the eighth grade level were not very confident in learning independently whether they were given a prompting intervention or not. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 15 rq 2: how do male and female students report the process of cognition when participating in metacognitive prompting intervention-science? overall, girls and boys reported different processes of cognition when given prompts to align their hands-on work with the methods of scientists. girls saw the process of cognition as a group endeavor, whereas boys reported the process as being generated by themselves, with guidance from books or from the teacher. even though the girls and boys worked in mixed groups, the girls proceeded through the activities utilizing physical evidence to develop general ideas about the behaviors of electricity and magnets. boys conducted the activities using physical means, but did not rely on their results to generate their knowledge about magnets and electricity. rather they referenced authoritative sources and confirmed the big ideas they found in the data with what was published in books or by confirming the idea with the teacher. the ways they generated knowledge were linked to the ways in which boys and girls communicated the knowledge. girls tended to provide rational about the correctness of their answers by group consensus and boys provided the rational about the correctness of their answers by showing that the ideas they generated matched what was known by the scientific community. the intervention (mpi-s) seemed to be successful in illustrating science as a human endeavor and as a result engaged girls so that they gained more content knowledge and knowledge about the nature of science. implications it is well documented that the united states is suffering a shortage of scientists, especially women scientists (nces, 2001). even students who begin their undergraduate studies in the sciences often become unhappy with the culture of learning in science. students, especially female students, become disillusioned with the competitive, isolating way that science classes are conducted at universities (tobias, 1990). showing students early in their schooling that science need not be linear and the scientific enterprise is a human endeavor may encourage more students to pursue science as a career. mpi-s can be one way to scaffold student understanding to show that science is creative and social, which is different than the traditional model. the development of scientific knowledge is often taught at the k-12 level as a spontaneous, brilliant thought of a singular genius. for example, there are many textbooks that teach the idea that an apple dropping on newton’s head as the source of the idea for the law of gravity. most students cannot relate to this because they think they are not smart enough. teaching the nature of science with prompts shows the enterprise of science in more human terms, and can illustrate to students that being “scientific-minded” does not mean you need to be a genius. this realization can open up new career paths in science for students who had not previously considered it. prompting students to check their thinking against the way the discipline’s expectations can have implications for engaging students who do not consider themselves “science – minded”. students do not often have an understanding of the scientific community or the process of construction and verification of knowledge in science (desautels & larochelle, 2006; hogan & maglienti, 2001). students who use mpi-s gain experience in checking their thinking against scientific thinking which helps them to understand what knowledge is scientific and what knowledge is not scientific. this method explicitly connects the knowledge that students are learning with ways knowledge is generated and validated, opening the opportunity for students to advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 16 become independent learners. for girls especially, prompting nature of science knowledge may have a positive impact on the ways the value the discipline of science. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 17 references abd-el-khalick, f., bell, r. l., & lederman, n. g. 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(1985). learning strategies: the how of learning. in j. w. segal, s. f. chipman & r. glaser (eds.), new directions in piagetian theory and practice (pp. 39-49). hillsdale, nj: erlbaum. zimmerman, b. j. (1989). developing self-fulfilling cycles of academic regulation: an analysis of exemplary instructional models. in d. h. schunk & b. j. zimmerman (eds.), selfregulated learning: from teaching to self-reflective practice (pp. 1-19). new york: the guildford press. zimmerman, b. j. (2000). attaining self-regulation: a social cognitive perspective. handbook of self-regulation. new york: academic press. zimmerman, b. j., & kitsantas, a. (2007). examining the validity of the self-efficacy for learning form (self). journal of psychology 215(3), 157-163. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 20 biography dr. erin e. peters burton is an assistant professor of educational psychology and science education at george mason university in fairfax, virginia, usa, and her research interests include cognition of science, self-regulation of scientific epistemologies, social justice in science education, and assessment of nature of science knowledge. her research agenda is derived from 15 years of experience as an electrical engineer, a secondary science teacher, and an albert einstein distinguished educator fellow at the national aeronautics and space administration. references advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 29, number 10 july 30, 2009 issn 1093-7099 principal gender as related to campus size, level, and academic rating dr. valerie roser dr.michelle s. brown dr. cheryl l. kelsey abstract a comparative, quantitative research design was utilized with a pearson χ2 test statistic. procedures for the study included gathering the gender of all public school principals in the state of texas by utilizing a tea data bank. the 2006 aeis report generated information regarding campus size, campus level, and campus rating for every school in the state of texas. results indicated that a significant relationship exists between each of the variables tested. the prevalence of gender at particular school campuses has continued, as gender was found to be significantly related to campus size, campus rating, and campus level. discussion presented is related to hiring practices and future research. key words: principal, school, gender issues, hiring practices citation: roser, v., brown, m., & kelsey, c. (2009). principal gender as related to campus size, level, and academic rating. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(10). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/� advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 2 introduction the school principal is the highest-ranking administrator at the elementary, junior high, and high schools level. the role of the public school principal has become an increasingly complex, albeit multi-tasked, position that has required a plethora of responsibilities. despite legislation that has promoted equal opportunity, affirmative action, and support of women’s professional aspirations, women have continued to be the minority in public school administrative positions (boyle, 2004; gladstone, 2001). as eagly (2007) stated, “there continued to be widespread recognition that women often come in second to men in competitions to attain leadership positions” (p. 1). traditionally, past research has focused on the white, male educational leader (blackmore, 1989; capper, 1993; glazer, 1991). the characteristics and attributes of leadership styles among public school principals varied on many different levels across both genders. historically, women have been the majority in the teaching profession. with the division of labor among administrators and teachers in the early 1900s, women were assigned the role of nurturing teacher, and men became scientific decision-makers, bureaucrats and disciplinarians (shakeshaft, 1987). in 1928, female principals became the majority, with 55% holding the position of elementary principal. interestingly, there was then a sharp decline in the number of women holding a principal’s position. “in the years between 1928 and 1984, the number of women principals continually dropped from 55% to 18%” (lynch & o’riordan, 1990, p. 471). recent research revealed that female principals comprise less than half of the percentage of male principals at the secondary level (national center for educational statistics, 2007). generally, women principals, as profiled by their male counterparts, were seen as having sacrificed family for success. women were considered to be powerhungry, aggressive, and stepping on others in order to gain prestige. few examinations of female administrators existed, and, “they lacked the substance necessary for a thorough examination of the style and manner of effective women administrators” (smith-thibodeaux, 1991, p. 132). even though the level of opportunities for women increased, there is still a great deal of “social scrutiny” faced, making “hard choices—such as when and whether to start a family or advance in the workplace—even harder” (fels, 2004, p. 59). regardless of administrator gender, the bottom line has been student achievement, which can be measured by the overall academic success or failure of a campus. past mandates and ratings by the no child left behind act (2001) have further spotlighted schools that were not receiving an academically acceptable passing score. the state of texas has used the texas assessment of knowledge and skills as an assessment criterion that has rated both individual students and subgroup populations within the student body. schools are then rated as having been academically successful or not. when a school receives an unacceptability rating, change often occurs in administrative leadership. today's principal has been the facilitator of staff and student learning—the leader of a learning community. the principal has been the instructional cheerleader that taught, coached, and promoted professional development. providing availability to the staff would enhance motivation, self-esteem, security, and morale (blase & blase, 1998). principals have had a positive impact on professional development when they offered a vision of learning, supported advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 3 collaborative change, and discussed professional research with their teachers. teachers who worked in a stimulating and supportive environment could reach a higher stage of professional development (phillips & glickman, 1991). a review of related literature indicated that perceptions of female principals vary due to both gender and myth. one of the most common reasons presented in the literature for the underrepresentation of women in school administration was negative perceptions of women's leadership (tyree, 1995). studies of female and male approaches to leadership have documented a distinct set of beliefs with regard to the stylistic way that women and men manage (morgan, 2004). management attributes traditionally associated with men, such as authoritative, decisive, controlling, and unemotional were often more respected by potential employers in education than a more decentralized approach to leadership which involved the principal as a facilitator of a shared vision and shared decision-making. tyree (1995) stated that the underrepresentation of women in educational administration was fostered through a series of myths: "(a) women don't have what it takes, and (b) women lack support of teachers and the community” (p. 22). according to helgesen (1990), women must continue to deal with the negative views of female administrators held by peers, parents, and employees of both sexes. gupton and slick (1995) quoted a female elementary principal as having said that "even after women have obtained administrative positions, they are not afforded the status or the respect given their male colleagues" (p. 10). educational leadership “has been subjected to and contributed to workplace gender power relations within and across hierarchical levels, in recruitment, selection, appraisal, promotion and so on” (broadbridge & hearn, 2008, p. 44). within the school environment, the attitudes which teachers have had toward women administrators may also have had a direct effect on how well the administrator’s job performance would be evaluated by her supervisor. attitudes may also be a deterrent to women who have sought administrative positions. the gender gap in school principal leadership has continued, despite past records of successful leadership by women principals (mertz, 2006). to date, the gender of texas school principals has not been correlated to state mandated testing for student success rates, and has received very little attention. while many studies have supported the evidence that differences in perception exist among men and women with regard to leadership qualities that equate success (eagly, karau, & johnson 1992), relatively little has been examined comparing gender to the texas essential knowledge and skills (taks) as a success indicator. the current study examined the relationship between gender and taks success. campuses receive report cards from the academic excellence indicator system (aeis) that determine the overall academic rating through a summative assessment. the report cards also present data on campus size and campus levels. past researchers (morgan, 2004; pompiel, 2004; tyree, 1995) have indicated a distinct stereotype of the differences in the way women and men manage leadership positions (eagly, 2007). differences in leadership style have also existed among the same gender. placing leadership differences aside, the question has arisen regarding placement of women principals in specific campus levels and campus sizes. in the past, women were seen as being selflessly nurturing, domestic, and more motherly in manner (popiel, 2004). this may impact the placement of female principals at particular campus levels or particular campus sizes. the advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 4 current study examined these issues as well. research has uncovered very little regarding male principals, even less about female principals. there have been volumes of books published on various historical educational topics but the principal has been missing from most of the chapters. rousmaniere (2006) stated that “it’s as if the principal did not exist at all” (p. 12). the purpose of the study was to examine gender demographics and report on the relationships between principal gender and taks campus rating, campus level (e.g., elementary, junior high, and high school), and campus size (student population totals). the comparative study gathered texas state data for the 2006-2007 school year. the following research questions were posed for the study: 1. what is the relationship between administrator gender and campus level (elementary, junior high, and high school)? 2. what is the relationship between administrator gender and campus academic success as measured by the texas taks test? 3. what is the relationship between administrator gender and campus size? method a comparative study using descriptive statistics was utilized to compare the nominal variable gender with the ordinal variables campus rating, campus level, and size. descriptive statistics utilize variables whose values are measured on different types of scales (norusis, 2004). for this study, the variables were measured for relationships that existed. researchers who have used this design do not give any treatments; they have only described observations. hence, the study was descriptive and comparative. to test all of the hypotheses, the study utilized two-way contingency table analyses with the pearson chi-square statistic to test the phenomenon that: (a) a specific gender exists in particular campus level principals (b) a specific gender exists in successful campus rating and (c) a specific gender exists in certain campus sizes. a crosstabulation table with a contingency coefficient was generated. the statistical significance (p value) of a result is the probability that the observed relationship or a difference in a sample occurred by chance, and that in the population from which the sample was drawn, no such relationship or difference exists (gall, gall, & borg, 2003). the required level of significance for all analyses was p < .05. the magnitude of the relationships were also examined and reported using cramer's v. population and sample rarely in educational research can one study every member of a specified population (gall, gall, & borg, 2003). instead, data are collected from a sample of individuals, which are then used to make inferences about the specified population. a population is “all of the individuals who possess a certain characteristic (or set of characteristics)” (fraenkel & wallen, 1996, p. 104). the target population, or population of interest for the study, included all of the public schools in the state of texas. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 5 schools in the state of texas are divided into 20 separate regional areas that encompassed a total of 8,105 public schools during 2006 (tea, 2007). of the public schools listed, approximately 112 schools were not listed in the tea ask ted (tea, 2008) website. these schools were either closed, or they were omitted from the website. the total population of schools that was used in the study numbered 7,893. schools that did not receive a rating by the state of texas' taks test were not grouped by grade level, but were instead counted as missing in the system, and numbered 881. the final count of the number of schools included by campus size, campus level, and campus rating numbered at 7,012. this sample included all possible schools meeting the criteria for the study, and therefore is representative of the state of texas. using the largest sample possible is a general rule in quantitative research (gall, gall, & borg, 2003). instrumentation the instrument that was used to collect the data was the campus academic excellence indicator system (aeis) report rating of the texas assessment of knowledge and skills (taks). taks is one of a series of criterion-referenced tests published by the texas education agency intended to measure student achievement in reading, math, and science. the taks objectives remained the same in all taks grade levels and were defined at each grade level by instructional targets (tea, 2004). the taks campus ratings were collected for the one test administration period: spring 2006. the aeis report also contained the campus type, campus level, and the location of the campus. the texas education agency provides a public access, online webpage, as well as documents that contains a directory for all principals in the state of texas (askted, 2008), and constitutes the final instrument for the study. principals were listed by name and campus type as well as contact information and location. gender data for school principals were ascertained from the list and verified. procedures data regarding gender and campus rating were gathered from the texas education agency data bank. further, campus level and campus size data were also collected from aeis reports. a database of campus information was developed with a list of texas principals’ gender for all public campuses, accountability ratings, campus level, and campus size, using the statistical package for the social sciences (spss 15.0). results data preparation in order to utilize the spss program for statistical data, and for ease of data analysis, the original data were converted into specific coded items prior to analysis. each variable was coded numerically, for ease of data entry into spss, and for data analysis. there were four variables in the data file collected for all texas public school campuses: gender of principal, level of school, size of school, and accountability rating. the gender of campus principal was coded with either 0 advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 6 = male principal or 1 = female principal. level of school was originally coded using several codes, including pk/k campuses. however, due to group sizes, and the fact that many schools did not receive the accountability variable (level), these schools were recoded as missing. campus levels were as follows: k-5 as elementary, 6-8 as junior high, and 9-12 as high school. campus level was then recoded with a 0 = elementary school, 1 = junior high school, or 2 = high school level. initially, the number of students at each campus was coded by using five groups ranging from 500 students up to 3,000. ultimately, the number of students was recoded to make three appropriate groupings for the comparative analysis. therefore, the number of students was recoded as 0 = 0 to 500, 1 = 501-1,000, and 2 = 1,001+. campus accountability rating was coded as follows: 0 = exemplary, 1 = recognized, 2 = acceptable and 3 = unacceptable. once all data were entered, recoded, and verified for accuracy, the comparative data analysis was conducted. the data were compared using the crosstabulation and chi-square test, which is a nonparametric test of statistical significance used for categorical data where observed and expected frequencies of events are compared (green & salkind, 2005). the contingency coefficient cramer's v, which assesses the strength of the relationship between row and column, was also used. according to green & salkind (2005), cramer's v tells the magnitude of the difference in variables that have more than two levels by rescaling phi (another strength measure) to a scale between 0 and 1. descriptive statistics four separate frequency tables were obtained for each of the study variables. a frequency table is constructed by arranging collected data values in ascending order of magnitude with their corresponding frequencies (green & salkind, 2003). as gender was relative to the study, a count of all of the principals in the state of texas was necessary, and was thus included as the first table. the data for table 1 were taken from the tea (2008) website indicating the name of every school campus in texas. once the information was gathered, the tea askted (tea,2008)website, was reviewed for every campus, with the name of the principal listed. table 1 displays the frequency distribution of the prevalence of male and female principals for the public schools in the state of texas. table 1. frequency distribution of principal gender, 2006 (n = 7,893) score n % male 3,503 44.4 female 4,390 55.6 total 7,893 100.0 the sample size represents all public school principals in the state of texas during the year 2006 (tea, 2008). the data revealed that women occupied 55.6 % of the principal advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 7 positions in the state of texas, while the percentage of men that occupied the principal position was noted at 44.4%. although women occupied over half of the principal positions, further analyses were necessary in order to validate whether or not the findings were significant. table 2 narrows down the school campus level into three separate categories (elementary, junior high, and high school). the campus names and levels were obtained from the tea (2008) website, and were listed alphabetically by district. each school campus was listed, along with the level of the campus. table 2 represents the frequency table for the campus level-recode. table 2. frequency distribution of campus level-recode (n = 7,893) score n % elementary 4,058 51.4 junior high 1,505 19.1 high school 1,449 018.4 total 7,012 88.888.8888 missing 881 011.2 total 7,893 100.0 elementary campuses were the most numerous in the state of texas with 4,058 or 51.4%. junior high campuses ranked second in number with 1,505 or 19.1%. high school campuses were the fewest with 1,449 or 18.4%. there were 881 campuses that were excluded from the study due to their ineligibility of taking the taks test. generally, these campuses were listed as pk/k campuses. results for the campus rating recode are presented in table 3, with a row in the frequency table representing each of the categories rating the school campuses for the state of texas. six hundred eighty schools were excluded, as they received no rating or were excluded by tea (tea, 2008). advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 8 table 3. frequency table for campus rating-recode (n=7,893) campus rating n % unacceptable 268 3.7 academically acceptable 3,572 45.3 recognized 2,802 35.5 exemplary 571 7.2 total 7,213 91.4 missing 680 8.6 total 7,893 100.0 the total number of schools that received a rating by the tea (2006) was 7,213. of the schools receiving a rating, 268 campuses received an unacceptable rating by the state of texas. this was equivalent to 3.7% of the total population. the majority of schools tested as academically acceptable (3,572) with 45.3%. schools that were rated as recognized accounted for 35.5% with 2,802 campuses statewide. only 7.2% of schools received an exemplary rating with 571 schools total. schools that were missing from the campus rating accounted for 8.6% of the total number of schools. table 4 reports the frequency distribution table for the total number of students at each campus. campus size was relevant to determine if the prevalence of gender was significantly related to the size of a campus. table 4 reveals the frequency distribution for the variable of campus size. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 9 table 4. frequency distribution of new number of students (n = 7,893) number of students n % 0 – 500 3,919 49.7 501 – 1000 3,150 39.9 1001 + 823 10.4 total 7,892 100.0 missing 1 0.00 total 7,893 100.0 research question 1 the first research question was: what gender of campus administrator is most prevalent at the elementary, junior high, and high school levels? the 2006 data indicated that there are more elementary campuses in the state of texas, while junior high and high school campuses are nearly equivalent percentagewise. historically, research has indicated that the majority of elementary campus positions in the united states were held by women, with 69% in 2000 by the u.s. department of education. results indicated that at the elementary level, women were the most prevalent with 73.5% of all elementary principals being women. at the junior high level, men outnumbered women with 58.7% male principals. high school results indicated that men also outnumbered women, with 70.2% male. gender and campus level were found to be significantly related, pearson χ2 (2, n = 7,012) = 1,038.81, p = .000, cramer's v = .38, a moderate to large effect size. the prevalence of men at the elementary, junior high, and high school level were .27, .59, and .70, respectfully. the prevalence of women at the elementary, junior high, and high school level were .74, .41, and .30, deferentially. research question 2 the second research question was: what is the relationship between gender and campus success as measured by the texas taks test? accountability ratings are categorized by the state of texas and the ratings were kept the same for this study: exemplary, recognized, acceptable, and unacceptable. the prevalence of gender, as it relates to campus accountability rating, is important as federal funding can be withheld from campuses receiving an unacceptable rating, and may influence hiring practices in the future. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 10 a two-way contingency table analysis was utilized to evaluate whether administrator gender was related to campus rating. the two variables consisted of administrator gender, crosstabulated with four levels of campus rating (exemplary, recognized, acceptable, and unacceptable). gender and campus rating were found to be significantly related, pearson χ2 (3, n = 7893) = 202.95, p = .000, cramer's v = .16, a small to moderate effect size. the prevalence of men at the exemplary, recognized, acceptable, and unacceptable rating were .27, .37, .49, and .64, correspondingly. women in the same order of academic rating were realized at .73, .63, .51, and .36. therefore, it seems that the prevalence of women at the exemplary, recognized, and academically acceptable campus rating were higher than that of their male counterparts; while the most prevalent campus rating for male principals was that of unacceptable. research question 3 the final research question was: what is the relationship between gender and campus size? in order to report the campus size, the tea website ask ted (2008) was utilized for each school campus in the state of texas. the website reported results for the year 2005/2006 by indicating the number of students on each campus. the numbers were recoded in order to procure a manageable list with which to categorize school campus numbers. results were then crosstabulated for observed and expected frequencies. campuses were divided into three numerical groups: 0 – 500 students, 501 – 1,000 students, and 1,001 + students. data indicated that men hold the majority of positions at campuses that have from 0 – 500 students, while women hold the majority of positions at campuses that have from 501 – 1,000 students. men also hold the majority of positions at campuses with populations of 1,001 + students. the largest group of male principals was 2,052 at small campuses. the largest group of female principals was 2,175 at middle-sized campuses. a two-way contingency table analysis was utilized to evaluate whether administrator gender was related to campus size. the two variables consisted of administrator gender crosstabulated with three levels of campus size (0 500, 501 – 1,000, and 1,001 + students). gender and campus size were found to be significantly related, pearson χ2 (2, n = 7892) = 390.50, p = .000, cramer's v = .22, a moderate effect size. the prevalence of men at the 0 – 500 students, 501 – 1,000 students, and 1,001 + students size of campus were .52, .31, and .58, respectively. the prevalence of women at the same size campuses was .48, .69, and .42, coordinately. discussion hiring practices should focus on experience, professional development, collegiality, and training of school principals, rather than giving credence to gender. the identification of gender bias that women principals face as school administrators has been an important component in the process of increasing opportunities for women who sought advancement. eagly (2007) pointed out that “the good performance of business organizations that have more women among their executives provides an argument for nondiscrimination that complements the more fundamental advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 11 arguments that discrimination flouts laws and violates the american value of equal opportunity” (p. 6). the observations and studies presented in my study may contribute to insights that would help central office administrators and school boards when making decisions on principal candidates in the state of texas. hiring the most qualified person should remain the focus, not gender. using action skills to address contemporary problems faced by female school administrators should enable current candidates to achieve success (smith & hale, 2002). the results of the study indicated that the prevalence of female principals is greater in the state of texas than the prevalence of male principals. past research for the united states had indicated that men were more prevalent in principal positions. as reported by mertz (2006), the hegemony of men during the 1970s in principalship positions had maintained a foothold for over 30 years. women principals have been the prevalent gender in the state of texas since 1998, according to the tea (2002). although women have been the prevalent gender for the state of texas, the placement of women at specific campus levels is noteworthy. historically, research had indicated that there has been a distinctive pattern of male dominance in public administration, particularly at the secondary school level (mertz, 2006), and the results of this study make the same implication. gotwalt and towns (1986) reported that women occupied 55% of elementary schools, 12% of junior high schools, and 6% of high schools during the 1930s. results from my study indicated that women held 73.5% of elementary positions, 41.3% of junior high positions, and 29.8% of high school positions. the greatest increase for women occurred in the junior high school positions as women have gained 29.3% since the 1930s. the second increase in position occurred at the high school level as women have gained an increase of 23.8 %. it would appear that the results of this study support historical data in reporting that women are more prevalent in elementary principal positions. to date, there were no studies available with regard to gender and campus rating for the position of the principal in the state of texas for the taks test. the no child left behind act of 2001 made school campuses accountable for the academic success of each student. student scores were compiled, averaged, and grouped in order to give the campus an aeis rating indicating academic success or failure (tea, 2002). the study revealed that the gender most frequently associated with an unacceptable rating was that of male. the final conclusion was found with regard to campus size. once again, no data were found in the literature with regard to principal gender and campus size. i believed that a variable related to size of campus might reveal a prevalence of gender. results indicated that the prevalence of gender at the campus size of 0-500 and 1,001 + students was male. results for campus size of 501-1,000 students were most prevalent with the gender of female. the relationship is significant and the strength of the relationship was moderately strong. the implications of the study are relative to the hiring practices of school administrators as they continue to realize the mandates that are required for texas state accountability in order to receive federal funding. the findings show that schools that employ a female principal have an overall better campus accountability rating than that of their male counterparts. although women have made a tremendous leap in the number of positions attained, they have still been relegated into the role of the nurturer, by being placed historically and prevalently into advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 12 elementary campuses. interestingly, women have attained more positions at the junior high school level than ever before. administrators in charge of hiring decisions at school districts may want to consider research data that might reveal trends, implications, and significant findings with regard to gender and campus rating. implications may further necessitate further examination of differences in gender when schools are involved in making hiring decisions with regard to state accountability. although current results indicate a higher accountability rating for campuses lead by women, historical trends of hiring men continue to flourish in a world where education and research is supposed to be esteemed over all things. the research has set out to discover the overall significant principal gender of school campuses that have been rated as acceptable or above in the state of texas. further, implications of the study may creating a discrimination towards men in hiring practices if districts consider only the data concerned with unacceptable campus ratings that was reported. research is designed to further explore and understand the many variables that are associated with investigatory enlightenment. research is necessary to understand historical trends, associations, and influences that shape outcomes in our world. this study attempted to discover the changes that have occurred in an ever-developing society which has struggled for equality in the workplace, competition to succeed, and accountability for actions. further research on this topic is still needed. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 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(1995). women in education: are we perpetuating societal attitudes by moving toward an androgynous leadership style? in b. irby & g. brown (eds.), women executives: voices and visions. austin, texas: the texas council of women school executives. u.s. department of education, (2000). retrieved november 20, 2007 from www.ed.gov biographies dr. michelle brown is associate professor, educational leadership, college of education, texas a&m university-kingsville, 700 university blvd., kingsville, tx 78363. send e-mail to kfmns00@tamuk.edu dr. valerie roser was a doctoral student in educational leadership when the initial study was conducted at texas a&m university-kingsville. send email to rjroser@yahoo.com dr. cheryl l.kelsey is assistant professor, educational administration, college of education, texas a&m universitysan antonio. send email to kfclk00@tamuk.edu http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev9.htm� http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev9.htm� http://www.ed.gov/� mailto:kfmns00@tamuk.edu� mailto:rjroser@yahoo.com� mailto:kfclk00@tamuk.edu� advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 19 2010 issn 1093-7099 nigerian women leaders: journeying toward organizational rebirth through midwifery dr. catherine e. hackney abstract twenty nigerian women were purposely selected to participate in leadership development sessions because of their reputations as visionaries, cultural pioneers, and socially responsible leaders. they expressed that they sought to make differences in their organizations through greater leadership effectiveness; to change traditional thinking about women's leadership; and to challenge constructively the male organizational and traditional hegemony under which they worked on a daily basis. together, for three days, these gifted women, my colleague, and i would be leader/learners enriched and instructed by the customs, traditions, and practices of each other. keywords: women's leadership, international, leadership development citation: hackney, c. e. (2010). nigerian women leaders: journeying toward organizational rebirth through midwifery. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(19). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction the rooster in the compound sang his song ushering in daybreak as the imam’s arabic call to prayer reached our ears from the loudspeaker just across the street on the roof of the mosque. so began our first morning in northern nigeria. even exhausted after longing for sleep for what seemed like hours in the sweltering equatorial heat, these early morning sounds couldn’t help but delight us. what an undertaking! we were in the city of gusau to immerse ourselves in the lived experiences of 20 nigerian religious women leaders. they were all members of a women’s religious order, all native nigerians between the ages of 30 and 60, and all eager to expand their leadership understanding. these women had travelled up to 10 hours on crowded, dusty, hot public transport to attend this leadership event. all of the 20 women held mid to executive level leadership positions in social service agencies in nigeriaclinics, hospitals, schools, rural development and non-governmental organizations. they were purposely selected to participate in our sessions by their community leader because of their reputations as visionaries, cultural pioneers, and socially responsible leaders. they expressed to us that they sought to make differences in their organizations through greater leadership effectiveness; to change traditional thinking about women’s leadership; and to challenge constructively the male organizational and traditional hegemony under which they worked on a daily basis. together, for three days, these gifted women, my colleague, and i would be leader/learners enriched and instructed by the customs, traditions, and practices of each other. before sharing with the reader the remarkable insights gleaned from of our three days with the nigerian women, it might be helpful to explore briefly the historical highlights of the research and theory concerning women and leadership in the western world as a backdrop. rehashing the history and addressing the void the research on women and leadership in the western world has evolved from the early demographic, descriptive studies (schmuck, 1975; adkinson, 1981) to studies through which researchers sought to generate from the experiences of women new theories about how women lead (berry, 1979; biklen & brannigan, 1980; gilligan, 1982; belenky, clinchy, goldberger, & tarule, 1986). later in that decade, research attempted to explain the dearth of women in higher levels of leadership and focused on societal barriers women faced as they attempted to climb the ladder of leadership. one widely respected piece was shakeshaft’s (1989) examination of women school administrators. shakeshaft suggested reasons why so few women were in positions of school leadership, how more women might attain positions of leadership, and what a female culture of administration might look like. at the time, shakeshaft questioned whether women should try to fit in the male world of educational leadership or whether that world should change. since that time, though theorists have legitimized alternative ways of leading (astin & leland, 1991; helgeson, 1995; reagan & brooks, 1995), little has been written about women leaders themselves taking responsibility for the transformation, or cultural rebirthing, of their organizations. moreover, whether we make our homes and spend our workdays in the united states or in africa, we cannot help but note the worrisome conditions prevalent in our world today. from decaying economic conditions, unethical business practices, the degradation of the importance of education, premature declarations of war, terrorism, and greed, to the erosion of social services advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 and health care, we are troubled by the lack of concern for the well being of others that is demonstrated globally. furthermore, despite an individual’s religious or spiritual orientation, there exists in our world that which lerner (2009) has expressed as “meaning needs.” lerner has written that: people hunger for loving connection with others and recognition by the other of [their] uniqueness. [they] see the opportunity to manifest [themselves] in creative work and joyous play and a way to connect with a higher meaning for [their] lives than that which is offered by a society that tries to convince us that ‘he who has the most toys wins. (¶ 4) now, in the year 2010, as women, we recognize that we have “come a long way.” we have begun to see a greater number of women execute legitimate power in both public and private organizations. though still in the minority, women leaders are making their presence known among their male counterparts. despite these more hopeful current conditions, begging to be addressed is the question, “so what?” has the presence of women leaders made a noticeable difference in the organizational culture? are women motivated by personal glory, money, or power; but, rather, as were the early scientists and artists (csikszentmihalyi, 2001), are t hey driven by an affinity for humanity, deep concerns for social issues, the world’s wellbeing, and a quest to transform their institutions to places more socially just and responsible. are women willing and able to rebirth organizational cultures into domains more representative of marginalized others and ringing with voices historically muted? or, have women, satisfied to have risen to positions of power, simply replaced the men who preceded them and perpetuated a culture not always responsive to its constituencies? these questions are difficult to address since the research on women and leadership is devoid of work that calls attention to the social responsibilities of women once they attain positions of power. but, typically and historically, organizations have not been places of joy, peace, and generosity. most organizations in the public sphere have been founded on models of learning and bureaucracy compatible with qualities of self-preservation, self-centeredness, cynicism, competition, rational thought, instrumentalism, and hegemony. the qualities of justiceequity, hope, collation, altruism, caring, and goodnesshave been de-emphasized to make room for the materialistic values of selfishness, ambition, and greed. thus, to address the “meaning needs” of which lerner (2005) wrote, it would seem that organizational cultures would require transformational rebirth induced by values derived from an “other-centered” perspective (wilson, 2004, p. 5). these values would be characterized by a tendency toward greater inclusivity, empathy, connectedness up and down hierarchies, and a focus on broader issues of concern and welfare. as helgeson (1995) so aptly wrote, these values would produce an organization concerned with a larger vision of society, aware of the effect that organizational decisions have on families, education, the environment, social welfare, and even world peace. however, as we all have experienced, life in organizations generally has not been so. in many situations organizational leadership has succeeded in contributing to inhuman tax structures, environmental disregard, the devaluation of workers, and the breakdown of social welfare systems. wilson (2004) wrote: advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 when it comes to women’s leadership, [we must acknowledge that] we live in a land of deep resistance, with structural and emotional impediments burned into the cultures of our organizations, into our society, and into the psyches and expectations of both sexes. the problem is layered, as is the solution (p. xiii). thus, the number of women in positions of leadership should matter; if that means that more women in positions of power ensure that their experientially-contextualized voices can be heard. however, unfortunately for many others, many women who have achieved levels of power and authority have done so because of their ability to conform to the traditional cultural expectations, norms, and values. as the number of women who assume leadership in our organizations begins to increase, the individual, token woman may be a thing of the past along with her necessity to prove that she is “man enough for the job,” complying with traditional notions of leadership. rather, she will be able to join with other women and like-minded men to moderate the influence of masculinity and shape policy in line with [women’s] values” (wilson, 2004, p. xiii; rhodes, 2003)values of justice. inspiration to transformation thus, and historically appropriately, much valuable research has highlighted the struggles, barriers, obstacles, and pressures women have historically experienced as they have striven to assume leadership in organizations. more contemporary work has suggested new theories of women’s leadership; yet, we have not addressed the responsibility women need to take on if their presence is to mean a transformation of organizations to more socially just and responsible places. because women bring a difference perspective to the organization in terms of their social relationships, economic activities, relationships to power, interests, and contingencies, they can assume a valuable position to redirect values in the organizations through “critical reflection of what is” and “creative thinking of what might be, … to “test old assumptions and new ideas” (meyerson & ely, 2004, p. 139-140). i take the position that women have a responsibility to take on the reshaping of the organization with qualities of justiceequity, hope, collaboration, altruism, caring, and goodness. to do so will require leadership and courage to challenge the status quo, promote new ideas, trust in “difference” and in the vision of a different future. however, women must still be concerned with the risks that come with such noncompliance: labeling as a feminist, troublemaker, or even to this day, a “women’s libber;” loss of collegial support and career development opportunities that would provide a power base within organizations and make advocacy for the values and issues important to women effective; and, diminished job security within the organization (rhodes, 2003). as i found in my work with nigerian women leaders, the risks that they face are even more formidable. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 2010: nigerian notions of women and leadership aside from the somewhat humorous directives that all “good” nigerian women must follow, such as women must never wear knickers!, the women leaders we worked with described explicitly the culturally-imposed notions of womanhood and leadership that they carried from young womanhood to their lives as organizational leaders. just a few of those included: • women should only speak when spoken to. • women are temptresses. • women do not possess good reasoning. • women can’t make decisions. • women are baby machines. • women are meant to be just mothers. • women must always submit to men. • women must get married. • women are weak. • women must not compete with men. • women should not be involved with politics. • a woman’s education is a waste. • women are meant only for certain professions. • women must never challenge men or authority. • women are the property of men and need their protection. as our days with the nigerian women leaders ensued and we were more and more deeply how deep and strong the cultural and traditional weights they struggled with and against actually were. the sexism in the society was tangible, malevolent. in their own words they told stories of personal discouragement,” of dealing with pretense and insincerity, and of their feelings of powerlessness. they were wearied by the injustices to the marginalized, the unreachable, and with their superiors’ lack of appreciation for their work. they spoke of bureaucratic run-around, broken promises, and exclusion from professions and government. they dealt daily with big men, men in authority and of privilege who imposed, subordinated, excluded, intimidated, and dominated. they were censored, restricted, penalized, and often fired for expressing their thoughts and opinions. yet, they were able to identify their strengths and articulate how they used them to circumvent male-made cultural and hierarchical attitudes, rules, and regulations to the advantage of their organizational purposes. in summation: • these women leaders were driven by an affinity for humanity, deep concerns for social issues, and a quest to transform their institutions to places of higher moral and ethical being. • these women recognized that significant changes needed to be made in their organizational cultures. • these women recognized that these changes required rebirth their organizational cultures into what had not been experienced traditionally and historically. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 we found them to be prophetic leaders, vehemently courageous, and willing to take on the status quo. they were determined to destroy the myths that had burdened them through their maturation to adulthood and create a newer wave of cultural awareness for their younger sisters. during our leadership sessions when we transitioned into discussion of effective leadership as a result of transformational change and cultural rebirthing for the betterment of all, the women participants realized that the messages that they send to their younger sisters, their successors, must be ones of liberation, social justice, meeting resistance with courage, and personal power. they authored a very powerful women’s bill of rights, which included, but was not limited to the following components of the bill. young woman you have the right to: • believe in your own strengths. • speak or preach and not shy away. • speak in public to build a better society. • participate in politics to build a better government. • have your thoughts, feelings, and work respected. • choose your future. • work in any professional you are qualified for. • attain the highest level of education you choose. • to make decisions and be part of decision-making. the story of midwifery fortuitously, (and exciting to me as one who in recent years has been exploring leadership through the metaphor of midwifery) among our nigerian women leader-participants were four nurse-midwives, who also managed clinics and women’s hospitals. to bring the sessions toward closure we asked these four women to describe for the rest of the group the duties and role of a midwife. but, before introducing that rich discussion, i will provide some background on midwifery purposely to elevate the common, more marginalized notion of midwife and to justify my use of midwifery as a metaphor for leadership illuminated by the feminist ethic. the metaphor of midwifery is one that lends itself to suggest a leader’s role in organizational transformation and cultural rebirth. midwifery is as old as time. references to midwifery appear in ancient documents such as the old testament (genesis 35:17) in the story of rachel’s birthing of benjamin. other cultures have referred to the midwife as the wise woman, the sage-femme, and the weise frau. midwives have possessed technical, manual, and often magical, mystical abilities. throughout history they have been revered as leaders of society; yet, at other times, feared, tortured, and killed as witches. during the influx of immigration during the first half of the twentieth century in the united states, by 1915, 40% of all births were attended by midwives. of course, as societal indices would suggest, most of those births were to non-white and foreign born mothers. by 1935, however, the rate of births attended by midwives had decreased to 10.7%, again not advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 surprising that 54% of those were to non-white mothers. explanations include several societal factors: higher socio-economic status was linked to the use of “modern” medicine, most physicians were male and exercised power of women’s bodies, and public campaigns swayed public sentiment with loaded misinformation about midwifery. certainly, all of these factors contributed to the marginalization of the work of midwives in the united states (brucher, 2003). yet, during this same period of time, mary breckenridge, of kentucky, who had suffered the loss of two of her own children, studied the british model of midwifery as a desirable alternative to physician-attended hospital births. convinced that this model would “make an impact on the outcome of pregnancy” (brucher, 2003), in 1925, she established the frontier nursing service to serve the women of appalachia. the success of her service, marked by a decrease in childbirth mortality rates, led to the creation of the american association of nursemidwives in 1928. by the 1930s, the state university of new york downstate nursemidwifery program was created to train nurse-midwives in the care of disadvantaged women in new york city. by 1968 the american college of nurse-midwifery was established. later in the century, in the 1970s, a resurgence of interest in midwifery in the united states was predicated by illustrative articles in time and life. in these publications midwifery was touted as more desirable than the caesarean-section, drug induced, sterilized hospital births, which were protecting women from the male perceived “pathology” of pregnancy and the “evils of childbirth” (forthsyth, 2009). midwife-operated birthing centers, which encouraged more natural, alternative practices, were acknowledged as safe, nurturing places to birth babies. such centers limited the use of artificial technologies and emphasized the promotion and maintenance of good health, pre and post partum. the articles reported that nurse-midwives were increasingly treating women of varied socio-economic levels and were raising the national standards of practice with their advanced exam-supported certification as certified nurse-midwife. leadership graced by midwifery the panel of nigerian nurse-midwives participants we invited to co-lead the final session as we approached more practical applications of leadership provided us with a comprehensive view of their work as they partnered with their patients and their families, other medical personnel, and social service agencies to create a collective, healthy vision for their futures. they discussed how as midwives they educated their patients about pregnancy, how the changes and discomforts they were experiencing were natural. they instructed the mothers about the need for proper nourishment for themselves and their developing fetuses. they encouraged patience and shared the joys of fetal kicking with the mothers as they anticipated a healthy birth. as the birth of the baby drew near and labor began, the midwives continued to provide both physical and psychological support for the mother. they concentrated on caring for the mother, easing her pain and anxiety, maintaining the partnership that grew in trust from the early stages of pregnancy. at delivery, the midwives cared for the newborn, acted to prevent infection within mother and baby, and provided any other medical or psychological interventions that were deemed necessary. post-partum, the work of the midwife continued close with observation of the mother and baby. she nourished the mother physically and psychologically, encouraged patience during the natural healing process, and taught her how to care for her new baby. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 through the partnerships they developed with the mothers they cared for, the midwives were able to lead mothers and their families through a complex process that would change their lives, their family dynamics and their personal responsibilities forever. the midwives’ assured their patients that they were not alone, that they were being supported through their journeys by caretakers who genuinely included them in decision-making, affirmed their progress, and validated their worth, and who would be a resource as long as they were needed. as the non midwife participants reflected on the work of their midwife colleagues, they drew interesting connections from midwifery to leadership. kate remarked that a leader goes on a journey with her people, and must practice patience as she walks with them hand in hand. a leader helps others accept change and tells the truth for good. as organizational leaders, these women appreciated that it takes time to educate, influence, listen, and respect the members of the organization. they recognized that the pregnancy was a time of waitingwaiting for cultural conditions to support the changes that they, in collaboration with their communities, collectively conceived for the good of the individual and the organization. as leaders they knew that great levels of commitment, investment, and perseverance were required of them. they felt an unseverable connection with the pregnancy, the product of collective conception of a vision. bene spoke of a leader birthing the gifts in others, being available, observing, and recognizing possible needs for intervention. ann reflected that as a midwife, one works to make sure that all come out of labor alive. so too must a leader confront the confusion and move the organization from cloudy to clear. as another woman declared, from the pain comes deep and lasting joy. though dealing daily with resistance to cultural and organizational change, impatience with ambiguity, and misunderstandings of the complexities in the organization, these women expressed the necessity of guiding, supporting, and providing safety nets for the members of the organization as they all dealt with the figurative pangs of labor. they held the integrity of the organization, and of themselves, in utmost regard. though they realized that as leader-midwives they would have to endure the pains of pushing, pulling, and struggling, they maintained their eagerness to see the transformational future of their organizations unfold. as at delivery, hearing the cry of the new baby makes everyone happy; the positive effects of good leadership, achieving the common good, is too a time to rejoice (bene and ann). some transformational efforts result in deliveries where the organizational products just pop out. other deliveries are much more difficult. however, as the labor and delivery of organizational transformations was pursued, these women leaders were willing to keep their eyes on the purpose of their work. they wanted to be involved in birthing new organizational cultures centered on the values of justice. they spoke of relying on the hope that there is goodness in the world, and never abdicating their responsibilities as transformational leaders. they affirmed each other by proclaiming that they must never lose the tradition of care for their organizational communities, outside others, and for themselves. these are women who became intent on building generous communities: encouraging organizational members to pull together, support each other, build healthy relationships, and insulate each other from harm and toxicity. one stated, we’re ‘on the knee’ [a reference to the novel the red tent]. we provide support for each advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 other. we don’t enable, we support. we’ll show the way and massage each other through the hard times. very importantly, these women transformational leaders were not afraid to challenge prevailing thought and status quo. they were the self-proclaimed consciences of their organizations, and, as they remarked, regularly held up mirrors to themselves and the organization. before us, these women were developing an organizational curiosity intent on questioning, challenging, stretching, and growing themselves and their organization through collective inquiry and problem solving. just as a woman is transformed through the act of giving birth, these women leaders were finding themselves changed by the notions of cultural rebirthing. in some cases they found that they needed to redefine themselves, their relationships with others, and their dispositions toward leadership. as one of the women noted, we cannot continue to act the same old way. we must now ‘stand up’ and educate others to do the same. we must push a little further, but always be ready to catch! looking toward the future we concluded our three-day session of leadership with these gifted nigerian women leaders by leaving them with questions for future thought and consideration: • how will you “midwife” cultural changes in your organization? • how will you unleash the power everyone has within? • how will you evoke leadership in others? support your partners in transformation? • using your gifts, strengths, inner resources, how will you meet resistance inside and outside of your organization? more thoughts on organizational change for re-enculturation organizational change, especially transformational change for the good of people and the organization, must naturally undergo a gestation period, labor pains, delivery, and a post-partum period. to explain this phenomenon, theories of change have evolved from the early 1950’s linear models introduced by lewin (1951). lewin understood change as a process of three parts: unfreezing the equilibrium, or status quo, undergoing movement, and then re-freezing a new equilibrium. though this theory shed light on the process of change, it did not integrate the notion of continuous change in response to an unpredictable, ever evolving life inside and outside of an organization. later, in 1958, lippitt, watson, and westley acknowledged the role of the leader as integral to change in the organization. they recommended leaders be cheerleaders, facilitators, and experts who could guide change among their employees. but, it wasn’t until 1978, that burns introduced the transformational leader whose role it would be to elevate the organization for the common good. then, in 1992, schein attributed the cultures of organizations as determiners of the capacity for change and development. his three-layered analysis of culture, composed of artifactsthat which can be experienced by the senses; espoused valuesoften advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 expressed in mission statements; and underlying assumptionsshared world views and basic attitudesled to greater understanding of the complexity of organizations and their resistance to change. most currently relevant in support of the leader as midwifeaside from the work of burns (1978) is the work of educational theorist, michael fullan (2008). fullan’s notion of the transformational leader is characterized as one who recognizes the need for relationships, capacity building, and shared values. the leader, who is able to develop deep and meaningful relationships with members of the organization, is able to build the organizational capacity to ask critical questions, to challenge existing assumptions, and to deal with ambiguity, unpredictability, inconsistencies, and complexity more successfully guides an organization through transformational change and brings about a re-enculturation of the organization for the good of those invested and involved in its success and well as for the organization. fullan describes such leaders as those who strive to increase their patience yet decrease their deliberateness. they listen attentively to understand the intricacies of their situations; they genuinely honor those in their organizations and nourish connection with them; and, they encourage synergy to maximize the contributions of all concerned. leaders as midwives. using difference to make a difference culturally situated differently than their male counterparts, the nigerian women with whom we worked, as well as many western women, view themselves as resources to the organizationresources that illuminate different interests and contingencies, hold different dispositions toward social relations, practice different approaches to power hierarchies, and emphasize different kinds of economic activity. they are compelled to use these illuminations to nudge tradition in order to challenge prevailing practice, and, most importantly, to question an established belief system. in doing so, they consciously critically examine what was and is and creatively explore what might be. as midwives of the organization, if women are expecting to make a difference based on their differences, they must realize that the future, transformed organizational life after birth, must be conceived collectively and nurtured with acceptance, perseverance, patience, and commitment. just as each new parent knows, the newly birthed son or daughter is not always what had been imagined or expected but often a surprise: “wow, madeline has my grandmother’s eyes!” “his tiny nose looks just like my brother’s!” or, “hmmm, it seems like uncle john’s ears are showing up again! oh dear!” guided by a vigilance of critical reflection, the different leader-midwife must establish an organizational culture of inquiry critical inquiry, institutionalizing “mechanisms by which people come to challenge old ideas and ways of doing things and generate newness” (meyerson & ely, 2004, p. 140). such a culture would demonstrate openness to constructive change influenced by the richness of collective purposing and visioning. paralleling her organizational leadership efforts, the leader-midwife must also accept a personal invitation for becoming, as bartky (1990) referred to the journey of developing feminist consciousness. the leader-midwife must undergo a transformation herself. she must change her “behavior: …make new friends; respond differently to people and events; change her habits of advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 consumption; and, sometimes alter. . . her whole style of life.” often “facts” turn into “contradictions” or become “out of phase with one another from the vantage point of a radical project of transformation” (p. 11-12). thus, transformed and transformational leader-midwives begin to see what is illuminated by what is not yet. leader-midwives, committed to transformation of organizations to just communities of caring and generosity, offer themselves as natural resources of the organization who promote ongoing inquiry, learning, change, and renewal. in doing so, they are able to organizationally redefine leadershipregardless of who is assuming the roleand reconstruct the organization without oppressive structures. they will bring to the forefront the concerns of those historically and traditionally dismissed and discounted: peace, policy in line with just values, inclusion, equity, connectedness, empathy, and a de-emphasis of the influence of masculinity. as leadermidwives they will need to practice what coles (2001) referred to as a “stubborn apartness” (p. 165). as the midwife is committed to the promotion of health, well being, and safety of mother and child, so is the leader-midwife committed to the individuals and collective purposes of the organization she leads. as the midwife nurtures those in her care with education, continuity of care, and emotional support, so also must the woman leader nurture those in her organization. and, as csikszentmihalyi (2001) noted, just as was the work of early scientists and artists, the work of the leader-midwife must be compelled by her values: a deep concern for issues of social justice, a quest for the world’s well-being, an affinity for humanity, and a desire to bring about goodness through transformation. only then will the presence of women in leadership experientially make a difference for those in organizations and mean more than the mere replacement of men. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 references adkinson, j. (1981). women in school administration: a review of the research. review of educational research, 51(3), 311-343. astin, h., & leland, c. (1991). women of influence, women of vision. san francisco: josseybass. bartky, s. l. (1990). femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression. new york: routledge. belenky, m. f., clinchy, b. m., goldberger, n. r., & tarule, j. m. (1986). women’s ways of knowing: the development of self, voice, and mind. new york: basic books. berry, m. (ed.), (1979). women in educational administration. washington: the national association of women deans, administrators and counselors. biklen, s. k., & brannnigan, m. (eds.), (1993). gender matters in educational administration and policy. london: the falmer press. burns, j. m. (1978). leadership. new york: harper & row brucher, m. (2003). university of texas southwestern medical center at dallas. www.utsouthwestern.edu. csikszentmihalyi, m. (2001). the domain of the future. in goodland, j.s. (ed.), the last best hope, san francisco: jossey-bass. coles, r. (2001). lives of moral leadership: men and women who have made a difference. new york: random house. forsyth, j. (2009). modern midwife. coast, april. fullan, m. (2008). six secrets of change. san francisco: jossey-bass. gilligan, c. (1982). in a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. helgeson, s. (1995). the web of inclusion. new york: doubleday. lerner, m. (2009). after the fall: why america needs a spiritual lift. retrieved from http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/lerner-after-the-fall/print. lewin, k. (1951). field theory in social science: selected theoretical papers. new york: harper and brothers. lippit, r., watson, j., & westley, b. (1958). the dynamics of planned change: a comparative study of principles and techniques. new york: harcourt, brace, & world. meyerson, d. e., & ely, r. j. (2004). using difference to make a difference. in d.l. rhodes, ed, the difference “difference” makes, p. 129-143. stanford, ca: stanford university press. metz, p. k., & tobin, j. l. (1995). the tao of women. atlanta, ga: humanics trade. regan, h. b., & brooks, g. h. (1995). out of women’s experience: creating relational leadership. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. rhodes, d. l. (2003). the difference “difference” makes. in d.l. rhodes, ed, the difference “difference” makes, p. 3-50. stanford, ca: stanford university press. schein, e.h. (1992). organizational culture and leadership. san francisco: john wiley and sons. schmuck, p. (1975). sex differentiation in public school administration. virginia: national council of administrative women in education. shakeshaft, c. (1989). women in educational administration. newbury park: sage publications. wilson, m. c. (2004). closing the leadership gap: why women can and must help run the world. ny: viking press. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 biography catherine e. hackney is an associate professor of educational leadership at kent state university in kent, ohio. advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 20 2010 issn 1093-7099 mentor and mother hen: just what i needed as a first year professor dr. linda searby and dr. loucrecia collins abstract support is needed for new faculty members to achieve success in the early stages of the higher education career. women, in particular, are often left to fend for themselves when entering the academy. this sonata-form case study glimpse into a mentoring relationship will focus on the experience of a new female faculty member as she was mentored and “mother-henned” by a senior member in her department. the mentor provided the framework for open sharing about tenure and promotion expectations, the inside politics of the department, research protocols at the university, and many other supports that led to her early success in academia. a point of interest is the fact that this was a cross-race mentoring relationship. keywords: women, education, gender, mentor, professor, tenure citation: searby, l., & collins, l. (2010). mentor and mother hen: just what i needed as a first year professor. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(20). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction as a newly hired professor of educational leadership at a research i university, i needed a mentor. i had just made the transition from being a veteran elementary principal, with only a few semesters of adjunct college teaching on my resume. i had little concern about being able to fulfill the teaching role of the professoriate, but the reality of the research and publishing demands filled me with fear and trepidation. fortunately for me, loucrecia, the only other female professor in the educational leadership program, knew that i would need a mentor, and she took me under her wing. although we were from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, we shared the experience of coming into higher education from elementary principal positions. this article will provide a glimpse into the mentoring relationship initiated by my senior colleague as she became my “mother hen,” determined that i would have support in making the transition from practitioner to professor. my mentor provided the framework for open sharing of information about tenure and promotion expectations, the inside politics of the department and school, research protocols at the university, and many other details that led to my early success in higher education. i, in turn, consulted with her regularly to ask questions, clarify expectations, and get advice for moving forward with my research and publishing. the mentoring relationship we established provided strong scaffolding for my emerging confidence and competence. in addition, we enjoyed mutual respect as mentor and protégé, and developed a friendship in the process. conceptual framework for mentoring in higher education upon my arrival in higher education, i was unaware of the literature that supported my need for a mentor, yet it did exist. since then, i have discovered a number of scholarly works that verify the need for new professors to receive mentoring. first of all, newcomers to higher education are often frustrated by the differences in their own expectations and the university’s expectations for them (aguirre, 2000; johnson & despain, 2004). it was daunting to learn that there was an expectation for new faculty to produce at least two published articles per year in peer reviewed journals, contribute service in the field and to the university, and present at national conferences. secondly, studies showed that the presence or absence of collegiality in the higher education setting is a factor in retention of new faculty (ambrose, huston, & norman, 2005; ericson & rodriquez, 1999; zhou & volkwein, 2004). thirdly, boice (2000) stated that “the first few years in the careers of professors, beginning at the time they interview for their initial positions in academe, are an enormously critical period” (p. 2). however, usual advice for new faculty is sporadic, anecdotal, and unproven (boice, 2000). finally, it is noted that women, in particular, are often left to fend for themselves when entering the academy. wylie (1995) stated that the “tendency to explain away women’s successes, treating them as an exception or attributing them to circumstances, luck, or the support of a male associate, while failure is accepted as the norm” (p. 39) devalues female faculty members. although changes in hiring policies and attitudes towards women in higher education have improved over time, biases against women still exist in higher education today (gerdes, 2006). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 mentoring for new faculty in higher education is not a new concept. mentoring is usually cited in faculty development literature as a vital component in helping newcomers in the induction process (sorcinelli & jung, 2007). mentoring in the traditional sense involves a process in which one person, usually of superior rank, guides the development of an entry-level individual (savage, karp, & logue, 2004). this traditional mentoring has been called groomingmentoring, whereby special assistance is provided by an older, more experienced professional who grooms his/her protégé during a transitional period (e.g. entry into a profession), in order to enhance a quicker movement up the career ladder (levinson, darrow, klein, levinson, & mckee, 1978). mentoring for both males and females in higher education has received more attention from researchers in recent years, due to the discovery of the psychological, social, and careerrelated benefits that mentoring provides for protégés (bouquillon, sosik & lee, 2005). mentoring, however, may not be happening for every new higher education faculty member. in a study on faculty mentoring, 86% of new faculty members wanted a mentor, but only one-third of them actually had one. two possible reasons for this were cited. first, only a small number of faculty members find a mentor on their own. second, few campuses provide mentoring in a systematic and effective way (boice, 1992). bode (1999) proposed a possible reason why mentoring might not be taking place, “perhaps newcomers wish to hide their ignorance and uncertainties from members of their own department” (p. 124). this may indicate that new faculty feel vulnerable and have fears that their incompetence might be revealed. intellectual companionship is also something that new faculty desire but may find lacking. fink (1984) found that only one-third of new faculty in his study had someone with whom to discuss ideas and professional concerns. those who did not said that it had a negative effect on their professional satisfaction. two-thirds of them said that this situation had affected their performance as professors. participants who had found intellectual companionship received high course evaluations from students and higher assessments from chairpersons and colleagues. clearly, becoming connected to a mentor when one enters the academy could result in a more positive transition to the culture of higher education. method this glimpse of the mentoring relationship between my mentor and me is written as a sonata-form case study (sconiers & rosiek, 2000). a case study is written “to illuminate a decision or set of decisions: why they were undertaken, how they were implemented, and with what result” (schramm, as cited in yin, 1994, p. 12). case studies are useful when researchers must “cover both a particular phenomenon and its context because….the boundaries between [these] are not clearly evident” (yin, 1994, p. 31). the sonata-form is a particular style of case study, drawing its name from the field of music, as depicted in the following definition: sonata form: a type of musical structure distinctive of the first movement of the sonata, usually based on two themes or subjects presented in different keys often with transitional episodes and consisting of an exposition giving the principal subject in the tonic key, and the secondary subject in the dominant advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 key…[including] a development giving full thematic working out of one or both subjects, and a recapitulation repeating both subjects in the original key and ending with a coda. (gove, 1963, p. 2172) in the sonata-form case study, my mentor and i are in dialogue, as in the tonic and dominant keys of a sonata. thus, we write in first person, present tense voice to convey the emotions that we were feeling during this first year of our mentoring relationship. you will hear my voice as the protégé in excerpts from the journal i kept during my first year as an assistant professor in educational leadership as i endeavored to make meaning of my experiences. arranged chronologically and assigned themes, each of my journal excerpts is followed by thoughts from my mentor. the dialogue with my mentor was crafted at the end of my first year, as we conducted the collaborative writing phase of the case study. here she reveals her “reflection on action” perspective, giving the reader insights into the rationale for her intentional mentoring behaviors (schon, 1991). we acknowledge that this case study, like others, does not contain generalizable principles or specific revelations. in addition, we recognize that this case study is not illustrating a phenomenon that would always be observed in other contexts (sconiers & rosiek, 2000). however, we chose to highlight dialogue that illustrates issues most cited in professional literature as important to the mentoring of newcomers to higher education. after each themed ‘split-screen dialogue’ section of this article, relevant literature is reviewed which offers support and validation of the experience we shared. the first year professor receives socialization, information, and guidance linda, new professor, protégé: i have a job offer for a tenure track position in educational leadership at the university of (alabama at birmingham)! i just received a phone call from dr. loucrecia, the program coordinator for educational leadership. she greeted me with “good morning, colleague!” and that made me feel so good! she conveyed excitement about me joining their faculty, and told me that they had been looking for someone like me for two years. talk about feeling wanted and empowered! it was a huge ego builder for me, and eased my mind about the upcoming transition into teaching at a research i university. loucrecia: mentor, mother hen, newly-tenured professor: finally! a new colleague and a woman, too. our department has been looking for almost two years. we have placed ads in national journals, contacted colleagues, used word of mouth, and the internet. linda seems nice. i want to be sure i support her as i was supported. it is important to support new people. when you start over, you become the low person on the rung. it is almost like being a rookie. all previous accomplishments go out the window. linda: i have decided to keep a diary of my first year as a college professor. i know there are a few books out there about the experiences of first year professors. perhaps i can get a journal article out of this if i keep some good notes! after all, someone has advised me to “write what you know about.” advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 loucrecia: the world of higher education can be a daunting place for women and minorities. a social gathering in a non-threatening environment will set the stage for all the work that awaits my new colleague. i will invite our full time professors and adjunct faculty to join us. the henley room in the library will provide an intimate setting for sharing and bringing down barriers. life can be challenging at a research i university. linda: my new colleagues made me feel welcome from the beginning. loucrecia, the only other full time female faculty member in the educational leadership program, arranged for a welcome luncheon to introduce me to the full time and adjunct faculty in the program. it was held in a beautiful walnut-paneled conference room of the library, where we pulled the comfortable upholstered arm chairs in a circle, and everyone introduced themselves and shared their professional journeys. afterwards, we enjoyed a catered light lunch. everyone was so friendly! it seemed like the epitome of southern hospitality to me. linda: it is still the summer before my first semester of teaching. loucrecia called me to arrange a lunch date. she made me feel welcome all over again by saying, “i want you to know how happy i am that you are here. for five years, i have been the only woman in the program with all these men. i am so thrilled that the other university told us about you. i finally will have another woman to talk to!” we made a lunch date for later that week and she told me to bring my list of questions i might have about my work here. when we met, i had my list of questions, ranging from the “nuts and bolts” of how we conduct business in our program area to what this tenure thing was all about. i know i am a novice and my questions will reflect that, but here are some things i want to know: • who decides what courses we teach? • do you get to see the student evaluations at the end of each semester? does anyone talk to you about them? • how do you go about starting to do research? • how do you decide when to ask someone to co-author with you? • is there someone who checks your writing for correct apa style? • how do you get copies made for class handouts? • if i want to use technology in my teaching, how do i go about accessing it? • what have you found that works for you to get your writing done? • how much do you work in your office and how much do you work at home? loucrecia is ready to mentor me! she brought me a folder of information on the tenure and promotion requirements. she explained them to me, and told me she stood ready to help me get started on my portfolio. she told me she would help me get oriented to professional involvement in national organizations, tell me where to send proposals for making presentations, how to start the work of publishing, and she answered every question i had. i am so humbled by her kindness. i have heard from other professors in other places how competitive their departments are and how they have to fight for their own survival without any guidance. i feel strongly that this will not be my experience here. i have a “mother hen” who is going to take me under her wing. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 loucrecia: food is a natural way to socialize. i invited linda to the local subway restaurant to have a conversation about tenure and promotion issues. nurturing is how i live my life – hence, i compiled a ‘how to’ file folder for my new colleague. it is exciting to have a female colleague. there are just certain conversations that women want to have. . . a natural flow to how we communicate. after just moving through tenure, i believe i can provide relevant information. i want linda to be successful. my goal as her mentor is to help her move from fear to flight. a common need expressed by most new faculty in higher education is the need to feel connected to others. common first year concerns of new faculty include feelings of loneliness, isolation, and lack of social and intellectual connection to others (sorcinelli, 1994). gabelnick, macgregor, matthews, and smith (1990) observed that “there is a deep hunger among faculty members for more meaningful, collegial relationships and more conversational structures in our institutions” (p. 86). yet, there has been relatively little attention paid in the literature to faculty development strategies that assist new faculty members in building skills in collegial networking (akerlind & quinlan, 2001). my mentor, loucrecia, took the initiative to ensure that i became connected to others immediately. she created the climate and setting for networking for me the very first week i was on campus. unfortunately, the research on new faculty in higher education does not show my experience to be very common (boice, 2000; fink, 1984). if no one steps up to guide and mentor a new faculty member, that person is left to navigate the academy alone. there are often barriers that inhibit new faculty from successfully networking with one another. akerlind and quinlan (2001) found two common barriers to be (a) new faculty simply are not aware how important collegiality is to faculty life, and (b) new faculty do not know that they must be proactive in building collegial ties and establishing themselves in scholarly communities. it is suggested that new faculty may not feel confident of their abilities to network and actually need to learn how to develop collegiality. according to the authors, “it takes courage to introduce oneself to senior (or indeed, junior) colleagues or to share one’s work with them” (akerlind & quinlan, 2001, p. 307). i was fortunate to have a mentor who paved the way for me to begin building important collegial relationships. searching for competence and confidence in a new culture loucrecia: the expectations are high at a research i university. our department chair has been so generous with his financial and emotional support. in some departments, you get only one trip per year to attend a conference. this has not been a challenge here. i want to be sure i help linda connect with people at the national level. she will need strong letters of support from external reviewers at tenure time. every behavior must now be purposeful towards the concept of earning tenure. findings from the research reveal that women and minorities have the most difficult time earning tenure. some females move as many as six times in their academic careers. linda: from the beginning, this university has seemed to be a good fit for me. i have received encouraging comments from my colleagues in the program, such as “we will give you lots of help and support” and “we are just thrilled to have you.” my department chair informed me that i could order new office furniture and that i would be furnished with a computer for the office and a laptop for working at home. i was told i could order books for my professional library and advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 that travel to conferences to make presentations would be highly supported. “we want you to have the tools to be successful,” was the message that was conveyed in multiple ways. when i shared with loucrecia how pleased i was with the support for travel and the generosity of the department chair in providing me with a pleasant office environment and professional resources, she said….“you’re in the big leagues now, girl!” loucrecia started mentoring me immediately. she wanted me to get connected to the wider field of educational leadership and began citing opportunities i should pursue. loucrecia told me about the university council of educational administration conference we should attend together, and a colleague from illinois encouraged me to attend the national council of professors of educational administration conference. i submitted requests to attend the two conferences right away which were both approved. the department secretary offered to make my plane reservations, and told me how to get reimbursed for other expenses incurred at the conferences. coming from k-12 education, where i was lucky to go to one in-state conference a year, i sensed that my world was going to suddenly expand exponentially! linda: all this new excitement fills me with hope and anticipation for what my new life as a college professor might be like. however, i have to admit that i have some fears. i have entered an unfamiliar culture in more ways than one. not only am i new to higher education, i am also a caucasian “yankee” new to the south. at (alabama at birmingham), a large percentage of the graduate students in our program are african american. will they accept me? as a school administrator, i was never expected to do any professional writing or research. my dissertation experience was a few years ago. will i be able to write and publish anything of importance? where do i begin? what will the work-rhythm of my life be like? how will i know if i am being successful? these are questions swirling in my head. loucrecia: any time one makes a major life change, fear creeps in. it can paralyze and hamper one from self-realization. life in the academy is filled with the unknown. i hope to assist my new colleague in wading the murky muddy waters of higher education. we are fortunate to have a specific set of guidelines to provide structure to an amorphous process of earning tenure. it is always a challenge to enter a new organization, but when one relocates to another region the challenge increases. cultural norms vary from region to region. the south is very formal . . . this city is even more formal. should i warn linda about the use of titles? many african americans want to be addressed by their official title. after years of being called “auntie,” “tom,” “girl,” and “boy,” titles are important to this group. remnants of the struggles of the civil rights movement remain entrenched in the society. i wonder, will my new colleague understand these dynamics? bailey and cervero (2004) noted that cross-cultural mentoring relationships may be a struggle due to issues of race and class. one of the unique constructs of this mentoring relationship is that my mentor is an african-american female and i am a caucasian female. power and privilege are often thought to reside only within the dominant culture (mcintosh, 1988). however, race and class yielded to nurturing and support, with me as the benefactor. kram (1985) found that women mentoring other women often resulted in the senior’s maternal behavior and attitudes providing a supportive climate for professional growth .while there exists a plethora of literature on cross-racial mentoring when the mentor is white (bailey & cerevo, 2004; gregory, 1995; moody, 2004; & peterson,1990), there is a paucity of research to offer advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 insight into the kind of relationships that exist. coker et al. (2007) and patterson et al. (2002) identify the determination and collaborative efforts of white and african american women who seek mentoring as a means of surviving and thriving in the academy. our experience confirms that same determination to thrive together. teaching, research, and service – paying attention to what counts linda: the first week of teaching is over. i’ve taught each of my classes once now and both went well. i am re-affirmed that teaching is one of my passions because after each class, i felt totally buzzed and energized. i have a one-course reduction in teaching load this first semester, to help me get started on research and publishing. i am teaching politics of education (which i felt totally unqualified to teach) and the introductory course of leadership and administration. in the latter, i have 35 students in a really small room! despite the cramped conditions and poor air conditioning, the students were good sports. loucrecia: fall semester – our classes are huge this year 35 in one class. linda is cramped in a small classroom. i went by to check on her and her spirits were high. she is always positive and open to new ideas. linda: i am taking the advice of so many who say “set aside a writing time and protect it.” this semester, i am going to make friday my writing day at home. i got started on my first article this week. i actually found it fun to write again. it’s not a chore for me, but comes fairly easily. i do worry a little about the next step, though – sending it out for review. i guess it is the fear of rejection and knowing you have to wait a long time to hear back from a journal. anyway, it felt good to get started! loucrecia: “publish or perish” is the law of the land for non-tenured professors, and always a challenge. i have given linda my materials on getting published. i shared with her my first manuscript submission experience. i shared the importance of finding the “right person” to serve as your editor. you want constructive comments to spur you on versus a crushing comment to stifle you. finding a good balance is the chore. finding the right place to submit an article is crucial. i must warn my new colleague to protect her time. avoid over-committing. it may appear you have a lot of time, but days will quickly dissipate. semesters turn into years and oh, the time goes quickly. new faculty members need to feel capable and competent early on in their careers in higher education. however, in fink’s (1984) seminal research on the needs of new higher education faculty, it was found that an incongruence of expectations for new faculty members often exists which hinders the development of competence. one is hired as a faculty member because members of a search committee, a department chair, a dean, and ultimately, a provost, judge that the individual possesses the ability to teach and conduct research commensurate with the expectations of the institution. expectations and job descriptions are usually covered in the job interview. however, the reality is that there is often a radical ambiguity in the professoriate, where one is hired for one purpose (chiefly, teaching), expected to carry out another (research), and prized for achieving a third (scholarly publishing) (fink, 1984). when this incongruence is realized, the new faculty member may begin to feel less than competent and capable. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 new faculty members often do not receive enough feedback to judge their own competency. sorcinelli (1994) conducted a longitudinal study of new faculty and found that unrealistic expectations and inadequate feedback, recognition, and rewards were factors that contributed to stress for new faculty members. new faculty members want to know if they are viewed as competent. menges (1999) noted that faculty members want three types of feedback. they want affirming feedback, telling them what they are doing right, corrective feedback to help them improve, and clarifying feedback to clarify expectations. learning to write for scholarly journals can also be daunting for new professors, especially those coming from roles as k-12 school leadership (sanacore, 2006). in 20 years of studying new faculty, boice (2000) found that almost all failures of new hires had little to do with lack of expertise in a faculty member’s field of study. instead, failures came from not knowing how to manage enough writing for publication in modest of amounts of time, as well as not learning how to elicit effective collegial support. in a study by sorcinelli (1994), many new faculty found that their senior colleagues were generally encouraging, but newcomers did not receive any concrete help with scholarship, such as offers to collaborate on a research program or to review a manuscript or grant proposal, or with teaching (sharing syllabi, visiting a classroom). there may be an assumption in higher education that new faculty will arrive knowing how to produce scholarly articles, therefore, help in this area is not provided. boice (2000) argued, “tradition assumes that professors already know how to work as writers; new faculty, after all, have almost always written a thesis or dissertation. so, custom limits most advice for new faculty to teaching because teaching seems less sufficiently mastered” (p. 103). in boice’s (2000) study of hundreds of novice professors at a variety of campuses, he found this assumption to be disastrous. the majority of new faculty struggled as beginning scholarly writers. during years 1 and 2, over two-thirds of them produced nothing that “counted,” despite their plans for substantial output in scholarly writing. for many newcomers, this lack of productivity continued into years 3 and 4, and often well beyond. loucrecia recognized the importance of encouraging me to get started on scholarly writing projects the very first semester i was employed. even though i felt inadequate in this area, “just doing it” helped me overcome my initial fears. following the advice i had received to “write about what you already know” enabled me to build on prior research from my dissertation and public presentations i had delivered. extrinsic and intrinsic rewards accompanied my first 2 publications. no one could have adequately described to me the powerful emotion i would feel the first time i saw my name in print as the author of a peer-reviewed publication! receiving support in the feminist tradition linda: things are winding down before christmas. loucrecia suggested that four of us in our educational leadership program go out to lunch together as a holiday treat. it was a fun and relaxed time together. my sweet mentor gave me a gift certificate for getting my nails done for christmas at the salon where she goes! she said she remembers how tight money was for her when she first came to teach here, and there was not money for extras like manicures. what a special, thoughtful gift! advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 loucrecia: it is important to nurture all aspects of my new colleague’s life. we were lamenting the reduction of salary from our principal’s jobs and discussing getting our nails done. i sure could not discuss that with the males! a nail certificate for the holidays is what i knew would be the perfect gift. in her study of feminist leadership in higher education, barton (2006) pointed out that the feminist leadership philosophy places value on collaboration and creating a supportive and pleasant work environment. the feminist leader possesses a more holistic perspective, often looking at situations differently than males. according to barton (2006): you rely on your intuition; you value those things that go with being a woman but that have been marginalized traditionally. the ideology of feminism certainly has an effect on your disposition and then your leadership action or behavior. you’re doing it because it’s the right thing and the good thing to do. (p. 4) further, barton pointed out that fostering academic communities in which members can be happy, healthy, and productive was a consistent theme that emerged from the data on feminist leadership. my mentor, loucrecia, certainly led from the feminist perspective, understanding the importance of the small gestures that could make a big difference in both the collective culture of our program and with me, personally. making it through the first year without a ‘formal’ mentoring program linda: it’s midway through the spring semester of my first year. i continue to be energized by my teaching. it’s been a challenge to have three preps this semester, two of them being new, and i have to spend a lot of time getting ready for classes. but i really love the students here and i feel that i have bonded with them. they are very diverse in their backgrounds, in race, interests, teaching specialties and levels. when i am teaching, i feel my passion coming forth, and i hope that the students catch that. i feel a heavy responsibility for preparing them to be great leaders in our schools. i always hope that something i say or prepare for them or facilitate in one of the classes will stick with them and make a difference. loucrecia: as former classroom teachers, i believe we place extra emphasis on how we teach. we prepare with great expectations as we want to pass on the knowledge. i have shared articles, books, videos and strategies to assist linda. i hope i am not being too pushy. new preps for classes are a part of this world. but once you get it completed, you are on your way. building relationships is the essence of this work. we want to plant seeds so that harvests of candidates are bountiful. loucrecia: linda is in good shape as she ends her first year. oh, the time goes so quickly and one must be quite strategic as far as tracking progress. while we are told there are three legs on the tenure-earning stool, one does carry more weight: scholarship. you must have at least six articles to be safe. linda enjoys writing, which is a big plus for her. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 linda: it’s april and i have to turn in my first faculty information form which documents my productivity for the year. loucrecia said i was in good shape for my first year. i had a book chapter contribution, an ncpea yearbook article, two other articles under review, several national conference presentations, and some consulting. linda: i met with my department chair to de-brief my first year of employment. he said i did fine but would need to step up my production year by year. he said that i should develop an area of expertise and broaden my focus for publishing. i should also work my way onto committees of national organizations and eventually become an officer of one. my service is acceptable, and he praised my work on dissertation committees. my teaching evaluations were good. something he told me was a revelation to me. he said i have to “toot my own horn” to him about my work. he said i could give him copies of things that i get published, let him know what i am working on, and in my faculty information form, “brag” about what i have done in the classroom, such as revising syllabi, trying new teaching strategies, etc. i didn’t know that kind of information played into our merit system of raises, but i will know for the future! i am nearing that milestone of completing my first year and it feels great. loucrecia: linda is ending her first year and we have not run her off. the guidelines for tenure provide clear structure on how to be successful. our chair is very good to work with. he encourages us and is generous with financial support. linda will be nurtured and nudged forward simultaneously. it is true that the first year sets the stage for your career at a university. when i was hired at the university, there was no formal mentoring program in place for new faculty. this is the case in many institutions. however, research indicates that support for new faculty can be provided even if a mentoring program is not in place. in his seminal study of new faculty, fink (1984) presented a list of eight types of support that new faculty could receive: (a) being invited to a colleague’s classes; (b) colleagues offering to visit their classes; (c) colleagues discussing general teaching problems; (d) colleagues explaining local resources; (e) colleagues carefully explaining criteria for performance evaluations; (f) colleagues discussing particular courses and teaching; (g) colleagues inviting one to professional events, and (h) colleagues inviting one to social events. new faculty participants in fink’s (1984) study were asked how often these supportive activities took place and they reported low support in all areas. however, in the same study, when senior faculty were asked for their perceptions on how often these supports were offered to new faculty, they perceived that they were provided quite often. one possible explanation for the difference might be that faculty who had been in the organization for some time may have believed that such supports were not very important, or that, if they were, newcomers could get them on their own. this indicates the incongruence that could exist between the perceptions of senior faculty and new faculty seeking encouragement. according to fink, “new teachers may feel a much stronger need for assistance, and they may not be at all sure how to get it” (p. 51). loucrecia, my mentor and “mother hen,” did not wait for me to struggle and ask for help. she was proactive in offering the exact kinds of needed support delineated in the research literature. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 reflections on surviving and thriving linda: my first full twelve months of being a new professor of educational leadership is history! one of my colleagues asked me yesterday if i was glad i made the switch from being a school administrator to being a college professor, and i emphatically said, “yes!” it has been a satisfying year. i like the pace of the work. i feel i am contributing to something worthwhile and investing my life in students who will make a difference in schools and for kids. loucrecia: it has been rewarding having a female colleague. we have bonded as women and as professionals. we discuss our differences and similarities. we seek common ground as professors of educational leadership trying to make a difference in the lives of our students. linda: i know i could not have arrived at the end of this first year feeling successful if it had not been for the intentional mentoring and attention given to me by my colleague, loucrecia. she provided a road map, traveling directions, and encouragement to move forward every month. she facilitated my entry into the profession through her “mother hen” behaviors – gently prodding me and pushing me along in my process of finding my voice and place in the department. while she was mentoring me, a fringe benefit unfolded – we became friends. that fact, as well, has sustained me through this first year. she helped me to feel competent and capable. she showed compassion when i shared frustrations. she made sure i got connected. i finished my first year feeling very fulfilled. conclusion mentoring provides guidance for new professors on the road to tenure and promotion. for female faculty, it provides a crucial support system needed to navigate the demands of entering the world of higher education. brennan (2000) posited that mentoring is an intervention which can enhance socialization, orientation, and influence the career progress of faculty. according to aisenberg and harrington (1988), the level of support provided either enhances or deters female faculty progression. their study highlighted the importance of positive mentoring relationships for a woman’s professional development. findings by gardiner, tiggemann, kearns, and marshall (2007) further supported the benefits of mentoring for female university faculty. for those who were mentored, retention rates and grant productivity increased. it is also interesting to note that female faculty who had been mentored rated their self perceptions as academics higher than those in the control group who had not been mentored. it has been purported that because women’s learning and development is more conducive to relationships, mentoring may be more beneficial as a capacity building tool for women than men (gilligan, 1982). five essential themes of the mentoring experience of female faculty were identified by gibson (2004). the themes noted were: (a) having someone who truly cares and acts in one’s best interest; (b) a feeling of connection; (c) being affirmed of one’s worth; (d) not being alone, and (e) politics. the mentoring experience i have described in this article confirms and reinforces the research on mentoring of new faculty in higher education. the support of my mentor enhanced my orientation and socialization into the higher education culture. loucrecia “mother-henned” advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 me in a gentle, yet firm way. she demonstrated to me that she truly cared about my success at the university. she affirmed my worth and initiated meetings that insured that i got connected immediately to others, thus reducing that often-experienced isolation that is found in the higher education culture. as was noted in the dialogue, loucrecia even helped me, a caucasian yankee, navigate the politics of the southern culture. my mother hen, loucrecia, took her self-appointed role as mentor seriously, offering me ongoing, consistent support throughout that critical first year. the result of our mentoring relationship was growth in my confidence and competence, and the development of my engagement in the culture of higher education. my mentor and mother hen was just what i needed as a first year professor. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 references aguirre, a. 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(2004). examining the influences of faculty departure intentions: a comparison of tenured versus nontenured faculty at research universities using nsopf-99. research in higher education, 45(2), 139–176. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 16 biography linda searby joined the faculty in educational leadership at the university of alabama at birmingham in august, 2005, where she teaches graduate courses in leadership and administration, curriculum and supervision, and mentoring. dr. searby received her ph.d. from illinois state university. she has presented nationally on preparing protégés for mentoring, characteristics of stuck and moving schools, engaging women in mentoring relationships, and effective leadership. dr. searby’s research interests include mentoring from the protégé’s perspective and mentoring new school leaders. dr. loucrecia collins is an associate professor in the department of educational leadership at the university of alabama at birmingham. a veteran educator, she has been recognized as an outstanding teacher, principal, and professor. during her tenure at uab, she has conducted research in the areas of bullying and conflict resolution to reduce school violence. dr. collins also researches current trends in urban education. she is a member of the center for urban education and provides seminar to support teachers and principals in urban settings. in an effort to expand student learning experiences, dr. collins is leading the travel abroad program for the school of education. she has lead a delegation of students to rome, florence, and arezzo italy to compare and contrast the educational experiences of students. dr. collins has also presented research internationally in pescara italy, cambridge england, and johannesburg south africa .her philosophy is “there are no barriers to learning, only opportunities for growth”. microsoft word 379_rebbca_gutierrez keeton.doc volume 40, 2021 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership 75 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 advancing women in leadership vol. 40, pp. 75-86, 2021 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women of color in community colleges: leadership development rebecca gutierrez keeton, ding-jo currie, & netasha k. pizano rebecca gutierrez keeton, associate professor, california state university, fullerton, rgkeeton@fullerton.edu ding-jo currie, former chancellor for the coast community college district, distinguished faculty, california state university, fullerton, dcurrie@fullerton.edu netasha k. pizano, lecturer, california state university, fullerton, nkpizano@fullerton.edu accepted december 18, 2020 this quantitative study assessed the impact of the kaleidoscope leadership institute (kli) model of professional development on kli on 140 participants’ personal and professional lives. the model was designed for community college women of color and led by female presidents/chancellors. participants report gains in career and educational advancements, new networks, and mentorships across races/ethnicities and higher education positions. researchers conclude that cross-cultural networking, mentoring, and identity development are beneficial and recommend that professional associations and institutions expand the kli model to increase institutional leadership diversity. keywords: community college, leadership development, women of color, identity-based leadership development, female college presidents, female leaders, mentoring, networking, identity development, institutional racism in u.s. community colleges, there is a lack of racial diversity in top leadership positions, and advancement for women of color has been slow. the american council on education (ace, 2019) reported that 83.2% of college presidents surveyed in 2016 were white. in comparison, 7.9% were black, 3.9% were latina/o/x, 2.3% were asian american, individuals of more than one race comprised 1.4%, 0.7% were american indian or alaska native, and .6% were middle eastern or arab american. gender and racial and ethnic inequalities are conventional in academia's male-dominated fields (jones et al., 2015). the ace (2019) study showed gradual increases over time, yet inequities remain. women held 30.1% of presidencies in 2and 4year institutions in 2016; of that number, 5.1% were women of color (ace, 2019). women held a larger share of community college presidencies relative to their share at 4-year institutions (ace, 2019). the percentage of college and university presidents of color was 16.8%, less than one-third of whom were women (ace, 2019). most female presidents of color come from within the community colleges (ace, 2019). at 7.9%, black college presidents represented the highest percentage of presidents of color overall, yet the pipeline is thin. in fall 2015, the california community college chancellor’s office staffing reports showed white administrators in the california community college system outnumbered black administrators by 80% on the academic side and 89% on the support services side (kirkwood, 2018). kirkwood (2018) asserted that underrepresentation conflicts with stated goals of diversifying leadership. underrepresentation perpetuates institutional racism and inhibits creating equitable and inclusive environments. to increase the pipeline of future women of color leaders in higher education, we must examine their experiences. in higher education, women of color experience high levels of racial, gender, and class discrimination and oppression (howardvital, 1989; jones et al., 2015; lee, 2015; mena, 2016; vaccaro, 2010). to mitigate inequities, women and people of color report fighting pressures to reinforce stereotypical gender characteristics and expectations to navigate institutional leadership (brue & brue, 2018; lee, 2015). some women have described feeling pushed to behave in ways that validate cultural and gender stereotypes and roles (liang & hawkins, 2017). organizational impediments may hinder opportunities for women of color to develop authentic leadership identities. there is value in networking, mentoring, and approaching leadership development in ways that authentically support and develop the multiple identities of women of color. to diversify postsecondary education, women of color leaders have developed programs to inspire and mentor women leaders of education for advancement. this study evaluates the effectiveness and impact of a leadership development program designed for women of color to determine if identity-based leadership development programs have the potential to increase the pipeline of women of color leaders in u.s. community colleges. 76 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 literature review literature on the growth of women-only leadership development programs in the united states is presented in this section, including benefits of networking for and between women of color, mentoring experiences of women of color in higher education, and connecting women’s identity development and leadership development. women-only leadership development programs started in the late 1970s and were designed primarily for women in u.s. corporations and business schools (ely et al., 2011). to support increases for women in enrollment, advanced degree attainment, and employment rates in higher education, women created resources to foster authentic identities and leadership growth. higher education resource services (hers), an early leadership program for women in higher education, was initiated in 1972 (white, 2012). in 1977, the ace launched the ace national identification program, now the ace women’s network, which focuses on the advancement of women in higher education. in the 1980s, community college leadership development programs for women, such as the national institute of leadership development (nild), began to support women’s networking in senior leadership positions (petterson, 2003). networking for women of color networking refers to maintaining relationships with others to advance one’s career, work, or academic development (forret & dougherty, 2001). networking with individuals with power may lead to job opportunities (burke & carter, 2015). people who engage in networking behaviors, such as joining professional organizations and engaging in social activities with other professionals, are more likely to experience positive career outcomes, such as promotions and financial gains (forret & dougherty, 2001). scholars have indicated that women of color experience barriers related to race (howard-vital, 1989; mena, 2016) and gender (jones et al., 2015; lee, 2015). for women of color, discrimination and other barriers may hinder access to professional positions and networking resources (crenshaw, 1991; davis & maldonado, 2015; somer, 2007). women of color benefit from professional development programs that connect women of color, mitigating the impact of inequity (moorosi, 2014). in programs that promote connections between women of color, aspiring leaders could access unique knowledge shared by women of color leaders and executives. women of color need mentoring opportunities to connect with other women who have similar interests and experiences, informing their career decisions. mentoring programs foster networking and mentoring relationships between women of color (moorosi, 2014). mentoring experiences of women of color mathews (2003) identified two common characteristics of mentoring definitions: (a) influential status and (b) willingness to share time and information. mentors often have ample experience, occupy influential positions, and desire opportunities to share experiences to support novices. mentorship can support growth for women of color who experience unequal access to higher education employment opportunities (holmes et al., 2007; somer, 2007; vaughan, 1989). mentees can learn effective leadership skills and how to develop strong networks and support systems (davis, 2009; vongalis-macrow, 2016). women of color faculty have reported feeling excluded by other faculty because of gender and race discrimination (a. t. davis, 2009; gibson, 2006; holmes et al., 2007; sanchez-hucles & davis, 2010; tran, 2014). such experiences have contributed to working environments that do not adequately support women of color. work climate and culture may negatively impact access to mentors in higher education (gibson, 2006). the feelings of exclusion and inadequate support, coupled with negative work environments, make it difficult for women of color to find and benefit from mentors. women of color who receive support through mentorship report more positive experiences than women of color who do not have mentors, even when mentors are peers (agosto et al., 2016; a. t. davis, 2009; muñoz, 2009). women mentees of color report that mentors have positively influenced them to seek opportunities for professional development (davis, 2009; muñoz, 2009; searby et al., 2015). mentors provide a space for mentees to join in professional circles (crawford & smith, 2005). beyond development in work environments, mentors help mentees develop personally (muñoz, 2009; searby et al., 2015). women’s leadership development as identity work researchers have argued that personal identity precedes leader identity (moorosi, 2014). women’s awareness of their cultural traits and personal values plays a role in leadership development. the development of leadership skills is closely related to women’s identity development (guillen et al., 2017; ibarra et al., 2010; moorosi, 2014; turner, 2007). therefore, women leaders benefit from opportunities to develop through initiatives such as professional development programs. beneficial programs allow women to address their multiple identities while focusing on issues related to working environments (debebe, 2011; mena, 2016). as leaders acquire self-awareness of their identities and leadership skills, individuals around the leader also benefit from the leader’s increased understanding of the importance of intersectionality, confidence in the face of oppression, and commitment to mentoring (crenshaw, 1991; ely et al., 2011; jones, 2016; moorosi, 2014; muñoz, 2009). programs that address the experiences of women of color can empower participants and encourage them to pursue higher levels of leadership. one program model, in particular, the kaleidoscope leadership institute (kli), was developed for and led by women of color executives in postsecondary education. in 1991, carolyn desjardins and jacquelyn m. belcher created the kli, a leadership development program designed to meet the unique needs of women of color in community colleges and address the uniqueness intersections of gender and race/ethnicity. the 77 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 inaugural kli began in minnesota, and its goals were to inspire and support women of color to be strong and influential leaders in organizations. the core faculty of the kli (n.d.) have included presidents, chancellors, and superintendents from educational institutions across the united states. what differentiated the kli model from other programs was executive women of color creating a space in participants’ lives for the development of (a) new networks and enhanced leadership skills, (b) cross-cultural relationships that may lead to lifelong mentorships, and (c) personal identity development. through gatherings, mentoring relationships, and support structures, the kli brought women of color who are presidents, ceos, and in similar positions to share personal and professional experiences related to leadership with other women educators who aspire to higher-level positions in the community colleges. the kli provided an environment to prepare participants for higher-level positions by analyzing societal and institutional barriers and offering guidance on setting and achieving personal and professional goals. the need for identity-based leadership development programs like the kli model is evident, considering the growth of womenonly leadership development programs in the united states and the need for more women of color leaders in community colleges (ely et al., 2011; kli, n.d.; petterson, 2003; white, 2012). networking benefits women in general and women of color specifically (burke & carter, 2015; crawford & smith, 2005; a. t. davis, 2009; d. davis & maldonado, 2015; forret & dougherty, 2001; muñoz, 2009). literature on experiences of women of color in higher education often lacks descriptions of programs where senior leaders serve in mentoring roles (brue & brue, 2018; howard-vital, 1989; vaccaro, 2010) and where connections are made between women’s identity development and leadership development, both of which are critically important (debebe, 2011; ely et al., 2011; ibarra et al., 2010; mena, 2016; moorosi, 2014; turner, 2007). research questions the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the kli and determine the impact of networking, mentoring, and identity development on women of color in higher education through participation in an identity-based leadership development program for women of color in the community colleges. the following questions drove the study: 1) what was the overall impact of the kli on participants? 2) what was the overall effectiveness of the kli and its faculty through measures of participants’ personal and professional attitudinal and behavioral changes? 3) what personal and professional impact, if any, did the kli have on participants? 4) what impact, if any, did the kli have on participants’ networking, mentoring, and identity development? 5) are there differences in impact or perceptions of effectiveness and impact among participants based on the women’s race/ethnicity, position in higher education, or years of participation in the kli? methods this study included a quantitative, nonexperimental design methodology (creswell & creswell, 2018). a sample of 140 past attendees of the kli completed surveys with openand closedended items. sample we sent invitation emails to 300 individuals who had attended the kli between 1992 and 2012, and 140 women (46.67%) agreed to participate. participants provided race/ethnicity, age, current position in higher education, and years they attended the kli (see table 1). we grouped participants into four age categories: 25-34 years, 35-44 years, 45-54 years, and 55-65 years. most participants were 45 to 54 years of age (36%, n = 50), while few were 25 to 34 years of age (5%, n = 7). more than half of the participants (65.5%, n = 91) identified as african american, and 18.7% identified as latinas. administrators made up 54.7% (n = 75) of the study sample, and 45.3% (n = 62) of participants were in faculty or staff positions. over half of participants (53.6%, n = 75) had participated in kli events in the 5 years prior to data collection: 27.9% (n = 39) attended between 6 and 10 years prior, 11.4% (n = 16) attended between 11 and 15 years before the study, and 7.1% (n = 10) attended between 16 and 20 years prior to data collection. table 1 demographic information of participants (n = 152) participant characteristic frequency percent age 25-34 years 7 5% 35-44 years 34 24.5% 45-54 years 48 34.5% 55-65 years 50 36% ethnicity african american 91 65.5% asian 9 6.5% pacific islander 1 .7% latina 26 18.7% native american 4 2.9% multiracial 8 5.8% current position administration 75 54.7% faculty 34 24.8% staff 28 20.4% data collection and analysis we developed a novel survey, which included openand closedended items, to explore impressions of the effectiveness of the kli and its faculty mentors, kli’s impact on networking, 78 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 mentoring, and identity development, and changes to participants’ personal and professional lives. closed-ended survey items, which assessed the program's effectiveness, included items with a 6-point likert-type rating scale from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (6). each item also had a not applicable response. the survey was validated using cronbach’s alpha and face validity. the newly constructed questions were developed based on literature to address this study’s research questions. through face evaluation of the novel survey, items appeared to assess the four research questions, suggesting the survey was valid. we used cronbach’s alpha to determine the internal consistency of the survey, suggesting the measure is consistent. the survey demonstrated high internal consistency and levels of reliability, with a cronbach’s alpha of .90. the survey began with 47 closed-ended items to capture quantitative data on three constructs: impression of effectiveness, impact on professional and personal lives, and behavior (creswell & creswell, 2018). the survey included six items about impressions of the effectiveness of the kli, 22 items related to the impact of the kli on participants’ personal and professional lives, and 12 questions about the effectiveness of kli faculty and their specific contributions. seven items focused on participant actions taken after participation in the kli. impressions of the effectiveness of kli and its faculty were assessed with items such as, “through kli, i gained new understanding of the leadership challenges facing women of color,” “through kli, i gained new understanding of other women of color in leadership roles,” and “kli faculty provided opportunities for personal insights.” impact of the kli experience on participants’ personal and professional lives were assessed by items including, “kli increased my capacity to confront challenges i faced as a woman of color,” and “the kli experience helped me have a stronger connection with other women of color.” examples of items intended to assess the behavioral actions taken after kli included, “i am or have been a mentor for other women of color since i attended kaleidoscope institute,” “i had a promotion since i attended kaleidoscope institute,” and “i advanced my educational level since i attended kaleidoscope institute.” next, four open-ended items were used to enrich the understanding of their quantitative scores related to perceptions around participants’ experiences with the kli. creswell and creswell (2018) explained that one limitation of attitudinal measures is that there is often no evidence of behavior; yet openended items were appropriate because they enhanced insights from data collected from closed-ended items. participants were asked to provide opinions on the impact of the kli through four open-ended, qualitative items: impressions of the program, program's impact on participants’ personal and professional lives, faculty and their contributions, and the impact of the kli on participants’ actions. statistical analyses consisted of t-tests, analysis of variance (anova), and descriptive statistics through spss (version 24) were conducted to determine if differences existed between participants. independent variables in the study included race/ethnicity, age, professional position, and years of attendance at kli. dependent variables included an impression of effectiveness, impact on professional and personal lives, and impact on behavior. an anova was used to determine if the perceived efficacy of the kli differed by participants’ races/ethnicities, professional positions in higher education, or numbers of years of attendance. visual inspection of histograms, normality plots, and box-and-whisker plots indicated data were normally distributed. the data met the homogeneity of variance assumption. for the open-ended questions, data were coded and grouped into themes and subcategories using a lean coding method, which involves assigning a few codes the first time a transcript is reviewed (creswell & creswell, 2018). exemplar quotes were identified for each theme. lastly, participant quotes were reviewed and recoded to reveal alignment with quantitative findings. results participants had positive impressions of the kli model and gave the women of color faculty high ratings. participants cited numerous examples of how the kli contributed to their personal and professional development, noting their influence on networking, mentoring, and identity development. participants of all ages, job positions, and ethnicities had positive experiences in the program. based on years of participation, results suggest the positive outcomes may be stable over time. impact and actions taken after the kli responses revealed kli participants pursued professional changes following the institute. one hundred twenty-seven participants (91.4%) had been mentors to women of color, and 111 (80.0%) indicated they had been mentors to women of other races/ethnicities since participating in the kli. seventy-one participants (51.1%) had changed jobs, and 66 (47.5%) had earned promotions since attending the kli. fifty-nine participants (42.4%) increased their education levels, and 22 (15.8%) received doctorates since attending the kli. fifty-eight participants (41.7%) indicated others had attended the kli because of their encouragement. program and faculty effectiveness of the kli model participants across all subgroups rated the kli as effective based on measures of participants’ personal and professional attitudinal and behavioral changes. the average score on the six items in the program effectiveness scale was 5.1 out of 6 (sd = 0.9). survey items that helped explain the overall program ratings included participant responses to questions about the degree to which they gained a new understanding of the leadership challenges women of color face, understanding more about other women of color in leadership roles, and understanding the leaders from their institution in new ways. participants also rated the degree to which they gained a new understanding of 79 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 women of other races/ethnicities and new cross-cultural communication skills working with women from other cultural backgrounds. high ratings were standard for participants who had mentored women of other races/ethnicities since attending (t = 2.61*) and changed jobs since attending (t = 2.07*). participants who rated the program as most effective were more likely to have mentored women of other races/ethnicities. there were no differences across ages, positions, and races/ethnicities in rating the kli as effective. significantly, no matter when participants attended, they rated the program as useful. participants rated faculty as highly effective across all subgroups, with a mean rating of 5.0 out of 6. examples of elements from the survey that measured faculty effectiveness included participants’ responses to questions about the degree to which the kli faculty taught them things they never knew were relevant to women of color, helped them understand the leadership journey and challenges for women of color, and made it possible for them to see themselves as leaders in a new role. high ratings were standard for participants who had mentored women of color since attending (t = 2.65**), who had mentored women of other races/ethnicities since attending (t = 2.88**), and who indicated others had attended the kli because of their encouragement (t = 1.78*). participants who felt faculty were effective may have been more likely to serve as mentors and encourage others to attend. we found no differences across participant subgroups (p > .05); thus, the p-value was insignificant between the subgroups. participants of all ages, job positions, races/ethnicities, and years of participation rated kli faculty as effective. personal and professional impact of kli model across all subgroups, participants rated the kli as having positive personal and professional impacts. on average, participants rated the program's impact on their personal lives as 4.7 out of 6 (sd = 1.1), indicating participants perceived the kli positively impacted their personal lives. several survey items measured the program’s impact on participants’ personal lives, including the degree to which kli helped participants increase their capacity to confront challenges they faced as a woman of color, grow in personal confidence, anchor their spiritual focus, and gain internal strength to deal with challenges. high ratings were standard for participants who had mentored women of color since attending (t = 2.19*) and mentored women of other races/ethnicities since attending (t = 3.34**). participants who felt the program had personal impacts may have been more likely to become mentors after attending. there were no differences across participant subgroups—ages, job levels, races/ethnicities, and year of participation—in rating the kli as having personal impacts. on average, participants rated the program's impact on their professional lives as a 5.0 out of 6 (sd =0.8), showing that participants viewed the kli as having positive impacts on their professional lives. elements from the survey that measured the program’s impact on participants’ professional lives included questions about the degree to which kli helped prepare them to contribute more effectively towards their institution and president’s vision and goals, whether kli helped increase their understanding of job search processes, and improved their ability to perform well in job interviews. high ratings were standard for participants who had mentored women of other races/ethnicities since attending (t = 2.02*), who had changed jobs since attending (t = 2.10*), who had increased their education level since attending (t = 2.14*), and who indicated others had attended the kli because of their encouragement (t = 2.08*). participants who felt the kli had professional impacts may have been more likely to mentor women of other races/ethnicities and encourage others to attend. individuals of all ages, job levels, races/ethnicities, and years of participation rated the kli as having a personal impact. kli impact on networking, mentoring, and identity development the kli model provides networking, mentoring, and identity development experiences to inspire and support women of color to rise in higher education as strong and effective leaders. each woman provided perceptions of the impact of the kli on networking, mentoring, and identity development. impact on networking irrespective of race/ethnicity, position in higher education, and year of participation in a program, when asked if the kli “provided valuable networking experiences with other women of color,” participants agreed, f(4,133) = .935, p > .05. a one-way anova revealed no significant differences between women of different races/ethnicities in networking at the conference. the results help demonstrate the impact kli had with efforts to counter isolation at community colleges, where there are few women of color available for networking. participants networked across racial/ethnic groups, and this may increase opportunities for cross-racial and cross-ethnic mentorships. on average, women who identified as african american (m = 5.18, sd = .93), asian (m = 5.40, sd = .69), latina (m = 4.73, sd = 1.45), native american (m = 5.50, sd = 1.00), and multiracial (m = 4.75, sd = 1.03) reported the kli helped them create stronger connections with women of color. when asked if the kli “helped me have a stronger connection with other women of color,” women in staff, faculty, and administrator positions equally agreed the program was helpful, f(5,133) = 1.41, p > .05. on average, women administrators (m = 5.05, sd = 1.03), faculty (m = 4.97, sd = 1.19), and staff (m = 5.39, sd = .92) agreed the conference helped them foster relationships with women of color. we found no differences between women who attended the kli at different points in time, f(3,136) = .251, p > .05. women who attended within the previous 5 years (m = 5.20, sd = .95), 6-10 years ago (m = 4.92, sd = 1.14), 11-15 years ago (m = 5.00, sd = .89), and 16-20 years ago (m = 5.00, sd = 1.56) perceived the conference promoted networking opportunities. therefore, quantitative results confirmed that kli helped participants foster 80 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 networking relationships with women of color from different racial/ethnic groups and higher education positions. cross-group networking is critical for women of color who have difficulty finding mentors who share their specific identities. we asked several open-ended questions about how networking at kli helped participants advance their higher education careers to explore the specific networking benefits gained across the different years of participation. responses from the open-ended questions revealed that participants used networking relationships to enhance career development skills, improve resumes and interview skills, and consult with other women of color on difficult personal and professional situations. we analyzed the data from open-ended questions and found that networking assisted participants with career development skills. one woman said, “the workshops on goal setting and personal mission statement development were impactful for me. the mission statement i created is central to what i have done in my various roles in higher education.” another participant wrote that she received help to “restructure my resume and prepare for interviews differently.” a third participant appreciated practicing her interview skills: “the mock interviews with a room of presidents was a very valuable experience.” a fourth participant received help to identify and apply transferable skills. she commented, “i didn’t know how to take my current leadership skills and apply them for advanced positions.” participants also learned to use networking skills to consult on difficult situations. a participant revealed they learned to trust other women of color: this incredible leadership experience opened to me a network of professionals that have over the years been willing to help with hr situations, professional development, personal development, and the like. these women have become lifelong friends and confidantes. [it was an] invaluable experience. another participant stated, “i was more confident professionally when i returned to work, and i knew i could call or email any of my new sisters for guidance and support. we connect with each other by facebook.” impact on mentoring when asked if the kli faculty mentors “taught me leadership skills that are uniquely necessary for women of color,” results from closedand open-ended questions demonstrated that participants strongly agreed that the kli fostered skill development. we detected no differences in african american, asian, latina, native american, and multiracial women’s perspectives on the unique mentoring skills kli faculty provided, f(4,136) = .626, p > .05. the results mean that despite ethnic/racial differences between faculty and participants, the kli faculty could articulate meaningful similarities across identity groups for all participants. participants from different identity groups appreciated the mentoring offered in one-to-one conversations, executive-leader panels, and topic-specific sessions on goal-setting, interviewing skills, and job searching. similar findings were evident when comparing women in staff, faculty, and administrator positions in higher education, f(2,136) = 2.14, p > .05. participants’ agreement on the program’s impact on skills development through kli mentorships did not differ across time, f(3,135) = 2.19, p > .05. when asked if kli faculty “empowered me to feel and think more in-depth about important issues,” all participants strongly agreed. women who identified as african american, asian, latina, and multiracial had similar perspectives on the program’s impact on provoking reflection on important issues related to women of color, f(4,137) = .262, p > .05. similarly, women in various positions in higher education agreed that the kli empowered them to think deeply about issues related to women of color, f(2,134) = 1.26, p > .05. time of participation and time since participation did not impact participants’ perspectives on the empowerment cultivated, f(3,137) = 1.93, p > .05. findings from open-ended items supported quantitative results, showing that women of color benefitted from mentorship through the kli. two themes emerged from data on mentorship: (a) participants learned skills and knowledge unique to women of color, and (b) participants thought in greater depth about important issues related to women of color. mentoring assisted participants with developing leadership skills unique to women of color, including promoting themselves and other women of color and dealing with discrimination in the workplace. when asked to share qualitative feedback about the skills and knowledge they learned at the kli, one participant shared: importantly, the workshop focused on “real-life” business, government, or school decision-making challenges that face today’s working women of color. one particular concern for many women of color in management positions is the issue of competitiveness and jealousy, not only for the majority of white leadership but from other minority women. another woman wrote: as women of color, we sometimes personalize our own issues and do not realize or acknowledge that other women of color are having the same issues. we tend to put on the face and show up looking and acting like we’ve got it together, all the time hiding our own insecurities. [it was valuable] to have other women of color open up about their own struggles as well as teach us ways to overcome them. we asked participants if they “gained new understanding of the leadership challenges facing women of color.” faculty had a strong impact on participants: “i felt as if there were secrets to become a professional woman of color that were now revealed. i appreciate the honesty and ability to hear the truth.” the truth to which participants referred included mentoring discussions about discrimination. for example, one participant wrote: the conference opened my eyes to barriers women of color face and why . . . and what we need to do to promote ourselves and each other. there is a chain of command in 81 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 any job. there are politics that we must deal with, and this conference provided us with tools, skills, and rules of engagement to succeed. participants revealed that mentoring helped them think deeply about important issues related to women of color, specifically the lack of representation of women of color at higher levels of leadership and the need to seek opportunities through obtaining advanced degrees. one participant highlighted the power of mentorship at the kli: “i grasped a huge concept of keeping the spirit to hold on to my morale as a woman of color that is facing opposition. i found i am not alone.” one participant wrote about the lack of women of color in highlevel positions. she stated, “i was made to feel i was not alone in my struggles as a woman of color. i really appreciate the training put forth by the leadership.” several participants echoed this sentiment: “it was wonderful having faculty who have faced bureaucracy of higher education as women of color, but [who also have] been supremely successful.” another participant stated, “the faculty were amazing. it was wonderful to see women of color in professional leadership positions. i was finally able to see myself in someone else.” participants thought in new ways about issues related to their advancement. one woman shared, “it was very inspirational to be in a room with so many women of color who are in professional careers and are seeking to continue advancing or improving themselves.” kli faculty encouraged participants to continue their education. one participant stated, “the biggest turning point was when we were all encouraged to pursue our doctorate degree because as women of color, we have to be credentialed to be promoted.” discussion about educational attainment and encouragement from mentors led participants to act. one woman disclosed, “i gained confidence and self-esteem to pursue my educational goal…i just completed my mba…now it’s accomplished.” at least two participants enrolled in college after returning home from the kli. one wrote she would be graduating in weeks, and another said, “immediately upon my return home, i applied to the university of maryland for the doctor [of] management in community college policy and administration [and] i will be finishing this year.” impact on identity development we asked participants to consider their identities as women of color; when asked if the kli “increased my capacity to confront challenges i faced as a woman of color,” across all ethnicities, women agreed, f(4, 137) = .566, p > .05. participants at all levels of positions also agreed that the kli increased their capacity to confront challenges, f(2, 135) = 1.41, p > .05. results were consistent regardless of when women participated, f(3,138) = .613, p > .05. participants in various positions and years of participation in the program agreed that the kli assisted their development as women of color. women in staff, faculty, and administrator positions strongly agreed the kli “helped me understand the leadership journey and challenges for women of color,” f(2,136) = .937, p > .05. differences were not detected between women who participated in various years, f(3, 139) = .732, p > .05. we detected a difference among women of various races/ethnicities related to kli’s assistance with their leadership journeys and challenges, f(4,138) = 2.897, p < .05. the pairwise post hoc analysis using bonferroni post hoc criterion for significance indicated agreement was significantly lower for latinas (m = 4.56, sd = 1.36) than for women who identified as african american (m = 5.31, sd = 1.36). latinas’ reports also differed from asian american, native american, and multiracial women’s reports. it appears latinas have unique challenges with which they would like more assistance, which may include experiences of isolation, marginalization, and the perpetuation of racial/ethnic stereotypes experienced by latina community college presidents (muñoz, 2009). it may be beneficial to qualitatively explore this difference further and include more content specific to latinas. findings from open-ended responses supported the quantitative results that the kli enhanced women’s identity development by emphasizing race/ethnicity and leadership roles. one theme emerged from the open-ended questions around awareness of women of color in leadership positions. one participant wrote, “women of color had similarities, and so i am able to use that lens when interacting with women of color.” another participant stated, “[the kli] program opened my eyes that women of color all face the same prejudice. it was an eye-opening experience for me.” participants enhanced their identity development when they gained knowledge about themselves as women of color and leaders. a participant explained, “my personal life was enhanced . . . [and] i grew in my knowledge as an african american female leader.” another participant described sharing the experience with women of color in leadership roles: “this was a very empowering experience for me to share experiences, first of all with other professional women, and more specifically with women of color.” overall, the kli positively impacted participants’ personal and professional lives. participants identified many ways in which the kli influenced their networking, mentoring, and identity development. discussion in this study, we measured perceptions and behaviors of women of color through analysis of responses to closedand open-ended survey items. the results suggest women had positive experiences while participating in the kli model over its 20 years. the results illuminate similar programs’ effect for women of color’s personal and professional lives throughout the higher education pipeline. notably, participants of all ages, job levels, races/ethnicities, and years of participation identified the personal benefits of kli. this across-the-board benefit occurred because the kli model has cultivated practices, such as 82 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 relationship building across racial/ethnic groups through honest dialogue and connecting participants with other women of color in higher education through truth-telling and discussing shared pressures and stereotypes (brue & brue, 2018; lee, 2015). women indicated their appreciation for the professional development exercises that helped them refine their leadership skills. the opportunity for personal benefits is built directly into kli and came from opportunities to create deep connections with other participants of color and the distinguished faculty from various ethnic backgrounds who developed and facilitated the program using a consistent curriculum that honored their intersecting identities. leadership development programs for women of color that encourage networking are highly beneficial (moorosi, 2014). this study demonstrated that participating in programs tailored to women of color networking can help women build meaningful networks. women of different races and ethnicities, holding different positions of authority, and varying years of participation built networks while participating in kli. this benefit may be explained by how kli structured connections among and between groups based on participant comments. participants said they valued how kli offered them the muchneeded opportunity to connect with others in identity-specific settings so that they could dialogue with people like themselves. participants also benefited from cross-identity group exercises, where faculty, administrators, and staff members shared how they might support each other across organizational lines. participants mentioned the limited opportunities they had to connect with other women of color executives at their home campus because of limited numbers (ace, 2019). the kli exercises also helped women find common needs despite differences. participants said connecting across ethnic and racial groups helped them develop skills for countering barriers related to racism in career advancement (mena, 2016). through networking, women said they could operationalize and organize career goals, connect with other women of color, and foster career advancement actions. mentors provide career guidance and skill development, and the kli model offered women opportunities to be mentored by executives of color with extensive expertise who have been committed to growth and development. the results correspond with previous research findings showing that mentoring is crucial for developing and advancing women of color (a. t. davis, 2009; muñoz, 2009; searby et al., 2015). the results of this study suggest that the kli model helped women across ethnic groups and higher education positions build mentormentee relationships with faculty and their peers. these results illustrate the power of building cross-ethnic/racial coalitions with mentors to fight tokenism and build a collaborative spirit across diverse groups to uplift all women of color. women of color do not have to advocate for change alone. when women of color build cross-ethnic/racial mentorships, they push back against those who may want to keep groups divided by design to maintain the status quo. they can be peer-mentors to each other and support each other. agosto et al. (2016) found peer-mentors to be impactful for women. the peer-mentor-mentee relationships extended beyond the institute. kli participants and faculty influenced participants in meaningful ways; some noted they were more motivated to be proactive in pursuing leadership positions in higher education, despite inequities in higher education. notably, several women re-enrolled in academic programs after participating in kli, increasing their opportunities for professional advancement. kli faculty mentors encouraged women to reflect on issues related to women of color in higher education. the faculty participated in panel discussions where they openly shared examples of the challenges they faced as executive leaders of color and commented on the commonalities they experienced as women. following the panel discussions, the faculty mentors would lead small group discussions with groups from various racial/ethnic groups to discuss how women of color could serve as allies to one another. given the limited number of women executives of color available to serve as mentors at community colleges, this learning proved invaluable to the participants and may have contributed to the finding that, when assessing the unique mentoring skills provided by the kli faculty, there were no differences detected in african american, asian, latina, native american, and multiracial women’s perspectives. the results suggest that organizations such as the kli promote insights for women of color because the faculty were willing to discuss the leadership challenges they face as women of color, regardless of their role on campus. women learned leadership skills that were uniquely necessary for women of color, including understanding the importance of intersectionality and multiple identities and building confidence in the face of oppression to mitigate the impact of inequities (crenshaw, 1991; jones, 2016; moorosi, 2014). by building an environment advantageous for women of color, participants can share experiences and express their challenges in higher education. there were no differences across ages, positions, and ethnicities in rating the effectiveness of the kli program and faculty. significantly, no matter when participants attended kli, they rated the program as effective. in addition to the kli model’s focus on leadership and career development, the curriculum emphasizes aspects unique to women’s identities. in response to research recommendations (debebe, 2011; mena, 2016), the kli model has addressed the complex interaction between roles women hold and contexts women navigate. the kli model promotes leadership development and gives attention to unique issues related to the leader’s gender and race/ethnicity. data from open-ended items demonstrated that as one identity grows, other identities also develop. the quantitative results highlight the importance of identity development in leadership programming for women of color. the results suggest the importance of creating leadership development programs that address multiple identities. 83 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 recommendations this study confirms that programs such as the kli can provide meaningful networking, mentoring, and identity development opportunities for women of color in higher education. participant experiences are positively impacted by the 4-day residential program's intensity, where college and university presidents and ceos serve as faculty in residence. drawing from participant experiences and research documenting the inequities perpetuated by the “gap in the pipeline” for female leaders of color (ace, 2019; muñoz, 2009, p. 168), we developed the following recommendations for organizations. each recommendation is designed to increase the leadership pipeline for women of color at various points in the higher education pipeline and emphasizes institutionalized organizations and campus resources as partners. enacting these recommendations offers opportunities to further research into the efficacy of leadership development programs for women of color that honor multiple and intersecting identities. we believe organizations with three key characteristics will be most successful in implementing identity-based leadership development programs, like kli, that offer women of color the opportunity to learn from women executives and peers of color. first, the organization recognizes that systematic obstacles impact the underrepresentation of women of color in leadership positions (kirkwood, 2018). second, the organization acknowledges that women with more than one marginalized identity have compounding challenges (crenshaw, 1991). third, the organization commits to closing leadership gaps across gender, race, and other marginalized identities to create more equitable and inclusive environments in higher education. recommendation 1: replicate identity-based leadership development institutes for women of color many higher education professional associations offer professional development opportunities as part of their mission. women of color and their allies might encourage professional associations to consult with past and current kli faculty and participants to create a nationally implemented curriculum design. a consistent curriculum design is necessary to maintain the positive benefits identified by kli’s 20 years of experience. individual campuses may not have enough executive women of color to sustain a 4-day residential program over time. in order to avoid cultural taxation, it would be beneficial to identify a professional association to provide the infrastructure to support the 4-day residential program. the professional association would recruit high-level administrators to serve as faculty, assist with program logistics, and conduct ongoing assessments to measure program effectiveness. recommendation 2: offer identity-based regional preconference workshops for women of color higher educational professional associations often sponsor regionally based initiatives, such as conferences. leaders in national organizations might sponsor regional 1to 2-day preconference workshops for women of color. such programs would be led by college and university women executives of color and could occur before the regional event, requiring less professional development travel funds and traveling time. one benefit of offering a 1to 2-day regional experience is that it might create a pipeline of senior women leaders of color willing to serve as faculty for national 4-day programs. one successful example is the a2mend women’s leadership institute, which is offered as part of the african american male education network development (a2mend) annual meeting. the a2mend organization “consists of community college faculty and administrators dedicated to the promotion and advancement of institutional change within the community college system” (african american male education network development, 2020, para. 1). the a2mend women’s leadership institute focuses on essential leadership development for women participants’ internal strengths and external contextual intelligence in higher education that are necessary for leadership success. women of color with significant leadership experience facilitate the workshop, drawing 40-50 participants each year. recommendation 3: develop institutional-level women of color professional development activities professional development and travel funds are often cut during difficult fiscal times. nevertheless, there is still a need to examine and address equity gaps for women of color staff and faculty at all leadership levels. districts and campuses have human resource departments and faculty development initiatives where professional development work is often a stated priority. finding ways to provide a unique leadership development curriculum for women of color on local campuses is needed. institutionalization of such professional development activities may be the most efficient and cost-effective way for women of color leaders to contribute to future leaders' development at their institution, both at the college and district levels. developing institutional-level activities may grow the existing pipeline of emerging leaders serving in entryto mid-level leadership capacities. recommendation 4: offer identity-based leadership development for female students of color student leadership development programs are offered through student government, identity-based resource centers, or student affairs on many campuses. leadership development programs for students of color should be institutionalized at colleges and universities to increase access to the pipeline for future executive leaders of color. offering identity-based leadership development programs would normalize that women of color have unique needs and experiences that deserve focused attention and support. entry-, mid-, and senior-level women administrators could participate in on-campus workshops as student mentors. institution-driven leadership development programs would yield opportunities to study the impact of identity-based leadership development programs on undergraduate and graduate students. limitations of the study and future research 84 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 this study included perspectives of women who participated in the kli over its 20 years. we did not specifically evaluate the structure and contents of the kli program, focusing instead on participants’ assessment of the program and its impacts. although we focused this study on networking, mentorship, and identity development, future researchers should consider other factors, such as resilience, that benefit the leadership development of women of color. we found that latina participants rated the kli’s assistance with their leadership journey and challenges lower than women from other racial/ethnic groups. further research could determine the reasons for this difference and compare results of race/ethnicityspecific professional development opportunities for women of color. researchers may determine which program components offered the most significant benefits for women of color from various identity groups. further research could establish curricular guidelines for leadership development programs that honor participants’ individual and intersecting identities. a. t. davis (2009) highlighted the advantages of women of color mentees, similar to kli participants, and noted that mentors also benefit from mentoring relationships. many kli participants went on to become mentors and it would be enlightening to explore further how they have benefitted from mentoring women of color. investigating the perspectives of executive-level mentors could highlight features of productive mentorship within and across racial/ethnic groups. we need more research on additional identity development variables of leaders who are women of color. this study focused on the intersection of visible identities (e.g., gender and race/ethnicity). women of color also have invisible social identities to assess, such as religion, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status, that inform their perspectives. future studies may also consider using this study’s novel instrument to assist in the measure’s validation. conclusion there is value in offering identity-based leadership development programs designed for, and facilitated by, women of color. benefits exist when women of color can experience mentoring, spaces to connect, and tools for networking, mentoring, and identity development. the findings indicate that participants have had positive experiences based on responses to survey items on the kli’s personal and professional impact, effectiveness, and faculty. participants have benefited from workshops, engaging in conversations with women of color in higher education, and building relationships. kli has encouraged women to seek opportunities and establish career objectives. participants described life-changing impacts. mentorship, leadership skills, and networks developed through kli programming have empowered women of color to advance their careers. this valuable learning helps women of color navigate various contexts while honoring their multiple identities and their colleagues’ identities. programs such as kli can uplift women of color in higher education and increase the pipeline of women of color advancing to executive-level positions in community colleges. references african american male education network development. 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(2013). no crystal stair: narratives of female community college presidents of color (publication no. 3568307) [doctoral dissertation, drexel university]. proquest dissertations and theses global database. advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 4 2010 issn 1093-7099 female faculty members at texas community colleges: any changes since 2000? dr. john slate and dr. anthony harris abstract in this study, the authors examined the extent to which the number and percentage of female faculty members employed full-time and part-time at texas community colleges had changed from 2000 to 2006. both the absolute number and percentage of female faculty members employed full-time and employed part-time had significantly increased over this 7 year time period. females comprise more than half of the community college faculty members in the state of texas. implications of these findings for faculty diversity are discussed. key words: women, education, community college, texas citation: slate, j & harris, a. (2010). female faculty members at texas community colleges: any changes since 2000? advancing women in leadership journal, 30(4). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/� advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 the historical and contemporary mission of community colleges is to serve the local and area citizenry through relevant academic, workforce, and enrichment programs that result in both individual and community development (kenney-wallace, cox, lu, & slate, 2006; wang, gibson, solis, selinas, & slate, 2007). an important element of that historical and contemporary mission has also been to respond to the needs of the staff by providing appropriate programs and services that engender institutional loyalty, promote professional development, and encourage personal fulfillment. though the presence of women in the workforce is not new, the presence of women, particularly women with children, in community college faculties is a relatively new and growing phenomenon (wolf-wendel, ward, & twombly, 2007). the percentage of women in the u.s. labor market with children under the age of 6 has increased from nearly 40% in 1975 to nearly 60% in 2004, thus suggesting a growing general acceptance in society of working mothers (united states department of labor, 2005). the united states department of education (2002) reported that, of all full-time faculty members in the country, women represented 37% of full-time faculty members. this percentage was an increase of 14% from the early 1970s (chamberlain, 1998). noted in the 2002 u.s. department of education’s report was that 28% of all college faculty were employed in public two-year institutions, or community colleges. this educational institutional level has the greatest percentage of faculty members (e.g., public research universities employ 18% of the total faculty in the united states). regarding female faculty members employed at two-year colleges, women comprised 44% of the full-time faculty members in 1997 (babco, 2000). the highly visible presence of women in the community college faculty (trower, & chait, 2002), in part, can be traced to the prominence of the community college mission, particularly its commitment to personal fulfillment. the nature of that mission and its timehonored recognition of the centrality of teaching have enabled women to find community college teaching a profession that allows them to balance family and career. wolf-wendel et al. (2007) pointed out that nearly one-half of community college faculty members are women. due to the centrality of teaching in community colleges, women who seek a balance between work and family, find the community college to be a place that supports their desire to have a family and a career. generally, in four-year comprehensive and doctoral degree universities, a “publish or perish” tradition (gad-el-hak, 2004, p. 61) is present that tends to force some women to postpone or to abandon the notion of having a family in lieu of the career. often, the tenure clock and the biological clock are in conflict (bhattacharjee, 2004). at the community college level, such a conflict does not exist, at least not to the extent that it does at the university level. in addition, gender politics at the community college are not as strident and stressful as they are at the university level (hagedorn & laden, 2002). as a result, political tension between men and women at the community college may not be as inhibiting a factor for women when it comes to avoiding gender discrimination. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 purpose of the study the purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which female faculty members employed full-time and employed part-time at community colleges in the state of texas had changed since 2000. given the emphasis placed on faculty diversity, the number and percentage of female faculty members, both full-time and part-time, should have significantly increased since 2000. this increase is even more important, given the increase in student diversity present at community colleges. research questions 1. what are the numbers and percentages of female faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges in 2000 and in 2006? 2. what are the numbers and percentages of female faculty members employed parttime at texas community colleges in 2000 and in 2006? 3. is there a statistically significant difference in the percentages of female faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges from 2000 to 2006? 4. is there a statistically significant difference in the percentages of female faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges from 2000 to 2006? method participants participants for this study were the 75 community colleges on whom data were available at the texas higher education coordinating board accountability system website (http://www.txhighereddata.org/interactive/accountability/). using the interactive institutional list function on the texas higher education coordinating board accountability system website, the number of female faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges in 2000 and in 2006, as well as the total number of faculty members employed full-time at these institutions for 2000 and for 2006 were downloaded into an excel file (http://www.txhighereddata.org/interactive/accountability/matrix_all.cfm?type=cc). then these data, after transposing the columns and rows, were converted into a database suitable for analysis by the statistical package for the social sciences-pc version 15.0 (spss, http://www.spss.com/spss/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=ad_box). this process was repeated to obtain the number of female faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges in 2000 and in 2006 and the total number of faculty members employed part-time at these institutions for 2000 and for 2006. once converted into an spss datafile, the number of female faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges in 2000 was divided by the total number of faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges in 2000. this calculation yielded the percentage of faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges in 2000 who were female. this same computation was conducted for 2006 and yielded the percentage of faculty members who were employed full-time at texas community colleges in 2006 who were female. given that the total numbers of faculty members employed full-time at community colleges had substantially http://www.txhighereddata.org/interactive/accountability/� http://www.txhighereddata.org/interactive/accountability/matrix_all.cfm?type=cc� http://www.spss.com/spss/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=ad_box� advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 increased from 2000 to 2006, this percentage figure was the appropriate measure to subject to statistical analysis. this same process was repeated for the part-time faculty member spss database. accordingly, the percentage of faculty members employed part-time who were female was generated for 2000 and for 2006. results full-time employment the number of female faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges ranged from a low of 0 (at 1 community college) to a high of 331 (at 1 community college) in 2000. this number of female faculty members employed at texas community colleges ranged from a low of 6 (at 1 community college) to a high of 378 (at 1 community college) in 2006. in addition to an increase in the highest number of female faculty members employed from 2000 to 2006, the mean number of female faculty members differed from 2000 to 2006. the average number of female faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges in 2000 was 75.07 (sd = 69.88) whereas the average number of female faculty members employed fulltime at texas community colleges in 2006 was 88.11 (sd = 78.89). a paired samples t-test, conducted to ascertain whether the number of female faculty members employed full-time had increased over this time period, yielded a statistically significant result, t(73) = -3.78, p = .0001, d = .18. using cohen’s criteria (1988), this finding reflects a small effect size. thus, the actual number of female faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges had significantly increased from 2000 to 2006. these numbers can be misleading because the total number of faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges increased from 2000 to 2006. the average number of faculty members employed full-time in 2000 was 155.04 (sd = 149.88) whereas the average number of faculty members employed full-time in 2006 was 174.84 (sd = 161.10). thus, it would be possible for the number of female faculty members employed full-time to increase over this 7 year time period without an increase in the percentage of female faculty members employed full-time. a paired samples t-test was conducted to determine whether a statistically significant increase had occurred in the total number of faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges from 2000 to 2006. this analysis resulted in a statistically significant difference, t(73) = -3.12, p = .003, d = .13. this effect size was again small (cohen, 1988). as expected, the total number of faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges had significantly increased over this 7 year time period. because of this finding, the percentage of female faculty members employed full-time was calculated for 2000 and for 2006. in 2000, the average percentage of faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges who were female was 48.79% (sd = 7.78%). in 2006, the average percentage of faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges who were female was 50.65% (sd = 7.10%). to determine whether a statistically significant increase was present in the percentage of female faculty members employed full-time at texas community colleges, a paired samples t-test was conducted. the result was statistically significant, t(72) = -2.72, p = .008, d = .24. using cohen’s criteria (1988), this finding was reflective of a small effect size. the percentage of female faculty members employed full-time across this 7 year time period had increased 1.76%. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 part-time employment the number of female faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges ranged from a low of 0 (at 2 community colleges) to a high of 927 (at 1 community college) in 2000. this number of female faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges ranged from a low of 2 (at 1 community college) to a high of 1337 (at 1 community college) in 2006. in addition to an increase in the highest number of female faculty members employed parttime from 2000 to 2006, the mean number of female faculty members differed from 2000 to 2006. the average number of female faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges in 2000 was 129.77 (sd = 149.03) whereas the average number of female faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges in 2006 was 172.93 (sd = 215.27). a paired samples t-test, conducted to ascertain whether the number of female faculty members employed part-time had increased over this time period, yielded a statistically significant result, t(73) = -4.52, p = .0001, d = .24. this effect size was similar to the magnitude of the effect sizes for full-time female faculty employment, small (cohen, 1988). thus, the actual number of female faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges had significantly increased from 2000 to 2006. again, these numbers can be misleading because the number of faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges increased from 2000 to 2006. the average number of faculty members employed part-time in 2000 was 268.11 (sd = 311.06) whereas the average number of faculty members employed part-time in 2006 was 331.88 (sd = 416.72). thus, it would be possible for the number of female faculty members employed part-time to increase over this 7 year time period without an increase in the percentage of female faculty members employed part-time increasing. a paired samples t-test was conducted to determine whether a statistically significant increase had occurred in the total number of faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges from 2000 to 2006. this analysis resulted in a statistically significant difference, t(73) = -3.82, p = .0001, d = .18, small effect (cohen, 1988). as expected, the total number of faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges had significantly increased over this 7 year time period. because of this finding, the percentage of female faculty members employed part-time was calculated for 2000 and for 2006. in 2000, the average percentage of faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges who were female was 48.60% (sd = 8.53%). in 2006, the average percentage of faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges who were female was 53.98% (sd = 8.37%). to determine whether a statistically significant increase was present in the percentage of female faculty members employed part-time at texas community colleges, a paired samples t-test was conducted. the result was statistically significant, t(72) = -3.71, p = .0001, d = .64. unlike the previous findings, this result indicated a large effect size (cohen, 1988). the percentage of female faculty members employed part-time across this 7 year time period had increased 5.41%. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 discussion our purpose in conducting this study was to determine whether the number and percent of full-time and of part-time women faculty members in community colleges had changed over a 7 year time period. in both cases, the numbers and percentages of female faculty members showed statistically significant increases. for full-time employment, the average number of female faculty members at texas community colleges had increased from an average of 75.07 in 2000 to an average of 88.11 in 2006. because the total number of faculty members employed at texas community colleges had increased over this time period, the percentage increase of female faculty members was computed and showed an increase from 48.79% of full-time faculty members in 2000 to 50.65% of full-time faculty members in 2006. thus, female faculty members showed a gain of 1.76% over this time period. the increases, both in numbers and percentages, were much greater for female part-time employment. an average of 129.77 female faculty members was employed part-time in 2000, compared with an average of 172.93 female faculty members in 2006 at texas community colleges. given the increase in the total employment of part-time faculty members, percentages of part-time faculty members who were female were calculated. in 2000, 48.60% of the part-time faculty members at texas community colleges were female. this figure was 53.98% in 2006, which shows an increase of 5.41%. female faculty members now constitute more than half of the faculty members at texas community colleges who are employed either full-time or part-time. this increase in female faculty members at texas community colleges is reflective of the increased presence of female students enrolled at colleges (mather & adams, 2007). that is, women are enrolled in colleges, both community colleges and universities, at much higher percentages than are men. mather and adams (2007) reported that women now make up 54% of the 10.8 million young adults who are enrolled in american 2-year and 4-year institutions of higher education. in a report by northwestern university (2004), a series of suggestions were made by a campus diversity committee to help ensure the continued significant presence of women in the faculty. though that report addresses the recruitment and retention of women faculty at northwestern university, we believe that their suggestions are generalizable to other educational settings. concerning recruitment, search committees need to be proactive in seeking prospective applicants. rather than restricting faculty position advertisements to sources such as the chronicle for higher education, search committees should cast a broad net. by doing so, search committees avoid being too parochial and can increase the likelihood that a greater number of prospective applicants will be reached. active and intentional efforts have to be made to identify women who might be interested in applying for faculty vacancies. creative early identification programs such as grow your own can be very beneficial in identifying, cultivating, and hiring prospective women faculty members. also, consulting directories that specialize in maintaining cv databases can be extremely helpful. many databases are discipline specific and can be accessed relatively inexpensively. regarding retention, suggestions made by the northwestern university faculty diversity committee were quite specific in nature. for example, the simple but profound act of welcoming advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 a new faculty member, who is probably filled with anxiety and apprehension, can help ease the transition into the department. such an effort could make the difference in helping the new faculty member feel welcome and part of the team or an outsider who may not be welcome. mentoring of new women faculty members, especially if there are few other women present in the department, can be a substantial source of help and guidance. senior faculty members can assist the new faculty member in identifying and responding to a myriad written and unwritten departmental rules, traditions, and practices. mentoring can also aid the new faculty member in understanding unique challenges that affect women faculty, such as requests for their service on committees, which rarely carry sufficient weight in the tenure and promotion process. networking is essential to the retention effort. by introducing the new faculty member to colleagues in other departments and at other institutions, inviting her to collaborate on research projects and professional presentations, and including her in other professional and social functions, she is more likely to achieve success as a new faculty member than if these efforts are not made. in sum, women faculty members have increased their presence in texas community colleges over a 7-year time period, both in terms of part-time employment and in full-time employment. given that the majority of students enrolled in 2-year and in 4-year colleges are female, we believe that having faculty members who are reflective of the students they teach is positive. in this study, we addressed the issue of female faculty members for only one state. the extent to which our findings generalize to other states is unknown. other researchers are encouraged to examine this issue, not only as it relates to faculty member’s gender but to their ethnic membership as well. until these findings are replicated, readers should avoid over generalizing these findings. references babco, e. l. (2000). professional women & minorities: a total human resources compendium. washington, dc: commission on professionals in science & technology. bhattacharjee, y. (2004, december 17). family matters: stopping tenure clock may not be enough. science, 306(5704), 2031-2033. chamberlain, m. k. (1988). women in academe: progress and prospects. new york: russell sage foundation. cohen, j. (1988). statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum. gad-el-hak, m. (2004, march 24). publish or perish-an ailing enterprise? physics today, 57, 61. retrieved january 24, 2008 from http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-3/p61.html hagedorn, l.s., & laden, b.v. (2002). dimensions of the community college faculty labor market. new directions for community college, 118, 69-78. http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-3/p61.html� advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 kenney-wallace, p., cox, j., lu, s.c., & slate, j.r. (2006). analysis of texas’ and new mexico’s urban, suburban, and rural 2-year community colleges’ mission statement themes. essays in education at http://www.usca.edu/essays/vol182006/slate.pdf mather, m., & adams, d. (2007, february). the crossover in female-male college enrollment rates. prb: population reference bureau. retrieved january 26, 2008 from http://www.prb.org/articles/2007/crossoverinfemalemalecollegeenrollmentrates.aspx statistical package for the social sciences-pc version 15.0. (2007). http://www.spss.com/spss/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=ad_box). texas higher education coordinating board accountability system. (2007). (http://www.txhighereddata.org/interactive/accountability/). trower, c. a., & chait, r. p. (2002). faculty diversity: too little for too long. harvard magazine, 104(4), 33-37. u.s. department of education. (2002). digest of education statistics, 2001. (national center for education statistics publication no. nces 2002-130). washington, dc: t. d. snyder. united states department of labor. (2005). facts on working women. washington, d.c.: department of labor. retrieved january 23, 2008, from www.bls.gov/cps/wifdatabook2005.htm wang, y., gibson, a., solis, f., selinas, l., & slate, j.r. (2007). thematic differences in mission statements between four-year institutions and two-year colleges in texas. international electronic journal of leadership in learning at http://www.ucalgary.ca/~iejll/volume11/slate.htm wolf-wendel, l., ward, k., & twombly, s.b. (2007). faculty life at community colleges, community college review, 34(4), 255-281. http://www.usca.edu/essays/vol182006/slate.pdf� http://www.prb.org/articles/2007/crossoverinfemalemalecollegeenrollmentrates.aspx� http://www.spss.com/spss/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=ad_box� http://www.txhighereddata.org/interactive/accountability/� http://www.bls.gov/cps/wif-databook2005.htm� http://www.bls.gov/cps/wif-databook2005.htm� http://www.ucalgary.ca/~iejll/volume11/slate.htm� advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 29, number 1 may 03, 2009 issn 1093-7099 theorizing african american women’s leadership experiences: socio-cultural theoretical alternatives dr. marilyn byrd abstract leadership is generally associated with an individual being in a position of authority, and holding a certain measure of power and influence within an organization. however, for african american women (aaw) in predominantly white organizations, race, gender, and social class may restrict the process of leadership. rather than being mechanisms of leadership, power and influence may be means of restricting aaw’s leadership authority over others. whites often use their privilege to circumvent, diminish, overrule, and control the actions of blacks in the workplace (deitch et al., 2003). even blacks in positions of leadership are subject to having their authority undermined. king and ferguson (1996) suggest the presence of aaw as leaders in predominantly white organizations is in itself ambiguous in that these roles are beyond the customary expectations for black women. although the number of aaw leaders in predominantly white organizations is increasing (catalyst, 2004), the dilemma remains that socially constructed hierarchies of race, gender, and social class together may serve to disempower the process of leadership (collins, 1999). furthermore, aaw’s marginalized status may limit access to social connections in predominantly white organizations. access to power as well as the freedom to exercise one’s own power and authority often lies in informal social networking systems (gostnell, 1996). lack of access to these systems may disadvantage the aaw leader’s ability to influence organizational processes and actions. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 2 many of the experiences that aaw face in predominantly white organizations are not located within separate spheres of race, gender, or social class (crenshaw, 1989). rather these independent spheres converge and form an interlocking system that shapes structural and political aspects of individual experience not captured within mainstream leadership discourse. furthermore, this interlocking system can intersect with the presumed right of the african american woman leader to exercise power and influence over persons of the dominant culture. collins (1998) refers to aaw as being outsiders-within – a status of disempowerment within interactive systems of power, race, gender, and social class. the purpose of this article is to stimulate new conversations on leadership theory and the socio-cultural perspectives that aaw leaders lend to the conversation. the goal is to suggest alternative theories and encourage theory building research that are useful for informing the challenges to leadership in respect to the race, gender and social class of the leader. key words: women, leadership, african american women citation: byrd, m. (2009). theorizing african american women’s leadership experiences: socio-cultural theoretical alternatives. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(1). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/� advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 3 beginning the conversation-dorothy’s story dorothy, an african american female, is a senior manager in a predominantly white organization and the only african american manager in the organization, recalls a difficult period during her professional career. over a period of time, dorothy observed how (white) employees under her authority went around her, rather than approach her to challenge, question, resist, or attempt to override decisions she made. dorothy gives the example of her administrative assistant, a white woman, who was on a social level with the head of the department, a white male. according to her job description the assistant reported directly to dorothy, although she was hired without dorothy’s input. from the beginning the assistant demonstrated no real loyalty to dorothy; often thwarting any efforts dorothy made to implement new ideas if she saw a “better” way to do things. the assistant routinely went over dorothy’s head and was often successful in having dorothy’s instructions to staff changed or overturned. each time she addressed the assistant’s actions with the department head, dorothy was made to appear as overreacting or made to appear a troublemaker who could not get along with other people. by nature of her status within the organizational hierarchy, dorothy’s position symbolized authority. but in many instances, dorothy felt her authority was in name only and as such afforded her limited voice even in areas within her leadership domain. the social relationship dorothy’s assistant had with the department head extended to settings outside the workplace. in light of this, dorothy felt she was socially disadvantaged for entering this circle-an outsider within. these types of situations were frequent sources of frustration and confusion for dorothy. although her primary source of confusion came from experiencing the contradiction of having the power and influence in the process of leadership in her organization and having no one to offer an explanation for why the contradiction existed. statement of the problem leadership has been studied primarily from the perspective of traditional, mainstream leadership discourse based on the experiences of white men (parker, 2005). as a result, there is a lack of understanding of how social power, dominance and control interacts with aaws’ leadership (allen, 1995). black feminists and scholars (hooks, 1990; collins, 1990; sternweis & wells, 1992) have studied aaw from a sociological perspective, but many questions are raised when aaw are studied as leaders in predominantly white organizations. for this reason, research and theory is needed to explain how the historically marginalized status of aaw leaders in terms of race, gender, and social class interacts with power and influence in these settings. to gain an understanding, theories that inform the process of leadership, as well as theory building research, needs to address the social and cultural challenges that may confront aaw leaders. towards this end, the following inquiry is made: how do traditional, mainstream theories of power and influence inform (or not inform) the experiences of aaw in positions of leadership in predominantly white organizations? advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 4 defining key terms the key terms used in this article are: african american women, leadership, intersectionality (race, gender, social class), power, influence, and authority. these terms are defined as follows. african american women refers to women who, by self-definition, view themselves as being a black woman (delany & rogers, 2004) born in the u. s. with traces or direct lineage to african ancestry. the term african american women may be used interchangeably with black women. for the purposes of this discussion african american women will be the preferred reference. leadership is a process whereby an “individual influences a group of people to achieve a common goal” (northouse, 2004, p. 2). leadership is not only a trait or characteristic that resides in the leader; it can also be conceived as an event, process, or relationship between leader and follower. intersectionality denotes the various ways in which race, gender, and class interact to shape the multiple dimensions of aaw’s experiences (crenshaw, 1989). race is generally understood as a socially constructed category to denote differences among people and is politically sustained to assign people to categories (banton, 2000). gender is not only a biological categorization; it is a “set of assumptions and beliefs on both individual and societal levels that affect the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, resources, and treatment of women and men” (bell & nkomo, 2001, p.16). social class determines one’s access to networks and resources that influence success and social privilege. power refers to the leader’s authority or control to direct or influence others and the ability to influence a change in behavior (noe, 2002). power is “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his (or her) own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests” (weber, 1947, p. 152). in organizations, power can be associated with the leader’s influence to facilitate change. influence is the power to shape policy or ensure favorable treatment from someone based on status (oxford dictionary of english, 2005). similarly authority is the power or right to give orders or make decisions. a person having authority has administrative power, control, and the power to influence others (oxford dictionary of english, 2005). authority is generally accepted based on a person’s position without being publicly questioned or challenged by others within the organization. the significance of theory theory is used to understand and offer solutions to complex problems. according to lynham (2002), the application of a theory to a problem, issue, or phenomenon links the theory to the world of practice. the application of theory guides further inquiry and understanding of the theory in action. furthermore, the application of theory to real world context becomes a fundamental source of knowledge or ongoing development of theory (ruona & lynham, 1999). in organizations, leaders use different perspectives, or frames, to help understand situations, problems, and daily activities in the workplace. a drawback to solving problems may be when problems relate to people and the theories we have to draw upon are not necessarily universal nor can be generalized to all people, situations, and circumstances. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 5 the ability (or inability) to apply traditional leadership theory to aaw leaders in predominantly white organizations may present a need to re-evaluate traditional theory in respect to practical application in these settings. lynham (2002) refers to the ongoing refinement and development of a theory to ensure it continues to be relevant and useful in the workplace. when the theory is no longer valid or useful in action, it should be adapted or discontinued. in light of this, we might ponder whether existing theories of leadership are applicable to all or only a portion of those engaging in the process of leadership. gioia and pitre (1990) described theory as “a coherent description, explanation and representation of observed or experienced phenomena” (p. 587). theories have a practical role in our organizations, just as they do in our everyday lives. in the organizational context theories inform the phenomenon of leadership. according to lynham (2000), the study of theory is undertaken for producing new knowledge about the world. theories help leaders “to understand, explain, anticipate, know, and act in the world in better and more informed ways and to better ends and outcomes” (p. 222). torraco (1997) identified several ways that theory is useful in developing an organization’s human resources. among these are: a) responding to new problems which have no previously identified solution, b) reinterpreting old data and giving it new meaning, c) identifying new issues and research questions that need to be answered, and d) guiding and informing research and improving professional practice. bell and nkomo (1992) argued that merely questioning the applicability of leadership theory to the race, gender, and social class of the leader undermines the assumption that universal organization and management theories exist. by bringing to the conversation new and previously silenced voices, we can move beyond questioning and begin to challenge orthodox theories of this social phenomena, shifting leadership knowledge from a deterministic-individualistic paradigm to a more reflexive, non-deterministic and collective one, pushing the notion of leadership to new heights of understanding and bringing us closer to an alternative worldview of leadership (allen, 1995). theories of power and influence. a basic assumption of power and influence theories is that “the power possessed by the leader is important not only for influencing subordinates, but also for influencing peers, superiors, and people outside the organization” (yukl & van fleet, 1992, p. 160). therefore, effective leadership is based on the successful use of power and influencing processes to achieve certain goals. however, we might argue how the leader’s exercise of power might be constrained or limited based on followers’ perceptions of the leader’s race, sex, and social class. two theoretical perspectives of power and influence will be examined: french and raven’s (1959) bases of power, and graen’s (1976) leader-member exchange (lmx) theory. theory signifying the legitimate power of a leader. french and raven (1959) proposed five bases of a leader’s power: legitimate, referent, expert, reward, and coercive. this discussion will center on legitimate power as a form of power frequently exerted within formal organizations. this type of power is traditionally assumed and generally accepted from the leadership of white men in dominant culture organizations (gostnell, 1996). according to french and raven, legitimate power is contingent upon the willingness of subordinates to accept the authority of the power holder. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 6 legitimate power is derived from an individual’s position with the organizational structure (french & raven, 1959). this position of power extends beyond a leader’s capacity to hire, fire, or promote. it encompasses stakeholders and all relationships inside and outside of the organization. by an individual’s mere position or status within the organization, stakeholders and other interested parties generally accept a leader’s status within the organizational hierarchy. in an organizational context, subordinates are expected to accept the legitimate power of a leader based on the leader’s position within the structure of the organization. the leader has the legitimate right to expect that subordinates will comply with his or her exercise of authority. non-compliance to a leader’s legitimate power based on perceptions of the leader’s self identity (race, gender, and/or class), may be problematic to objectives and outcomes of the leadership task. accepting (rejecting) aaw’s legitimate power may be a function of interpersonal similarities (or differences) that provide a basis for subordinates’ perceptions of leader-follower fit. theory signifying the relationship between leader and follower. leadership assumes the existence of a relationship between leader and followers (northouse, 2004). an example is graen’s (1976) lmx theory, which is based on a reciprocal relationship between leaders and subordinates. according to graen (1976), trust building is an important step in the process of establishing a successful leader-member relationship. successfully negotiating this process often depends on similarities between the leader and member. while the implications may be that subordinates are the most likely affected by unsuccessful relationship building based on differences, the same might be said of leaders who do not fit the leadership norm. in light of this, it may be problematic for aaw leaders in predominantly white organizations to develop a leader-member relationship with (white) subordinates that have had few dealings with blacks on a professional level. because people prefer to interact with others like themselves, they are less likely to have meaningful interactions with those different from themselves (ohlott, chrobotmason, & dalton, 2004). in lmx, a pattern of ongoing social exchange is established between the leader and member. the initial reaction to a minority leader tends to involve a period of scrutiny where (white) subordinates assess a leader-follower fit (waters, 1992). perceptions based on the other’s race and/or gender as well as other differences is critical to the development of this process. therefore, negotiating a leader-member relationship between a leader of a different race, gender, and social class may be more difficult to establish and maintain. other related theories of power. consideration might be given to other theories that relate to power and relationships between leader and followers. for example, hofstede’s (1980) cultural dimension theory contains a relational concept termed power-distance. power distance being the degree of difference one feels between their level in the organization and their superior’s level in the organization; or how one views another as having power greater than themselves. hofstede’s (1980) framework suggests that we do not easily separate the interactions that take place in organizations and workplaces from what is happening in society. similarly, maslow’s (1970) theory of motivation holds a power-related concept. according to the theory of motivation, the leader is responsible for motivating and empowering employees to reach their full potential. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 7 however, if the leader is from a marginalized group (e.g. aaw) the leader might encounter resistance to the exercise of leadership, thereby creating an unfavorable relationship for motivation to be an expected outcome. likewise, an upward relationship may exist whereby if the leader is from a marginalized group (e.g. aaw), race, gender, and/or social class may produce an unfavorable relationship for empowerment to be an expected outcome. judging the soundness of theory patterson (1983) advanced the following criteria for judging good theory: importance, preciseness and clarity, parsimony and simplicity, comprehensiveness, operationality, empirical validity or verification, fruitfulness, and practicality. according to lincoln and lynham (2006) elements for judging theory are generally represented from an empirical-analytical perspective and are not representative of applied fields. for this reason, these scholars offer the following criteria for judging theory from an interpretive perspective: compellingness (creates a response), saturation (explanations have reached a point of exhaustion), prompt to action (drives the next steps), and fittingness (suitable to the context). brookfield (1992) proposed three categories of criteria for analyzing the central proposition of formal theory: epistemological, communicative, and critically analytic. epistemological criteria refer to the discreteness (not susceptible to explanation by other theories); empirical grounding (extent to which grounded in observation or experience); researchability (can be validated by those other than the original theorist); and comprehensiveness (extent to which all aspects of the phenomenon are considered) of the theory. communicative criteria (clarity, tone, connectedness, and prescriptive policing) are ways that theories are clearly understood by those for whom they are intended. critically analytic criteria refer to the ways that theories are subjected to “constant critical analysis by its own proponents” (p. 87). another consideration is the transportability of theory (y. s. lincoln & s. a. lynham, personal communication, october 31, 2007). this concept is based upon the ability of a theory to not simply hold true, but to explain a phenomenon across multiple contexts and be relevant to multiple groups and stakeholders. according to brookfield (1992) theory building should consider gender, social class, ethnicity, and age. furthermore, consideration should be given to the ways that theory changes over time in response to the emergent nature of research and the changing dynamics in society. leadership perspectives of aaw emerging from historical and cultural foundations the landscape of an african american woman’s life is shaped and designed by history and culture; opening new arenas for growth and opportunity while erecting barriers to socially constructed forces of oppression (bell & nkomo, 2001). although the biases of the broader society may restrict, delay, or minimize aaw’s leadership in predominantly white organizations, to resist these biases, aaw have gained support from historical and cultural foundations (gostnell, 1996). figure 1 represents the historical and cultural aspects which may shape aaw’s identity within the larger society and thus her identity as a leader in predominantly white organizations (bell & nkomo, 2001; allen, 1995). the inner circles represent oppressive, advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 8 socially constructed forces that challenge aaw leaders. history and culture are external forces that aaw draw support upon from internal forces that oppress. the ties that binds aaw history culture race gender social class aaw experience race, gender, and social class oppression simultaneously figure 1. external forces that bind, internal forces that oppress considering how history and culture has shaped an aaw life is useful for understanding the leadership experiences of this group. therefore, to be inclusive of aaw, the examination of leadership requires a socio-cultural lens as well as an organizational one. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 9 historical and cultural foundations of aaw leaders a sense of community emerges from the historical and cultural aspects of an aaw’s life. the circumstances emerging from a legacy of struggle experienced by the african american community in general created a form of resistance to which aaw responded by organizing efforts to survive. the oppression of aaw emerging from this legacy of struggle (allen, 1996; robnett, 1996) has centered around five themes: survival, resistance, social activism, community uplift, and transformation (parker, 2005). based on this insight, it might be beneficial to consider aaw as leaders from a historical perspective. as dilthey (1976) points out, a historical perspective is necessary to discover the interrelatedness of the part to the whole. from a holistic perspective, historical foundation adds richness to the overall human experience of aaw. aaw’s involvement in the community speaks to social activism and social change (rogers, 2005; delany & rogers, 2004). involvement in the church and community has been found to be influential sources that have nurtured, shaped, and empowered aaw (meux, 2002). this foundation has supported a cultural and social epistemology based on the determination for liberation and social change. furthermore, family, church, and community are sources aaw draw upon to overcome and transcend racism and other barriers to their professional lives (island, 2006). therefore, it is useful to recognize aaw’s leadership as a product of group survival and community uplift. perspectives of african american women in educational leadership educational leadership is a resourceful area to study the experiences of aaw leaders and the interactive effects of race, gender, and social class. as the number of aaw principals, superintendents and other administrative positions increases in predominantly white schools, aaw are confronted by the power play of multiple stakeholder groups (community, parents, faculty, and students) that are unaccustomed and resistant to the changing face of school leadership. compounding the experiences of aaw educational leaders is feeling compelled to work harder than their white counterparts in order to prove self-worth and maintain high standards for their schools (bloom and erlandson, 2003). in academia, racism and sexism have been referred to as the double blind syndrome, subjecting aaw to an invisible and hidden form of marginalization (stanley, 2006). aaw faculty report that students demonstrate greater tendencies to challenge or question their authority as opposed to white faculty and in some instances ignore or fail to acknowledge their educational status altogether (stanley, porter, & ouellett, 2003). in addition, aaw report lack of recognition for their research, questioning of credentials, being excluded from information, and perceiving an atmosphere of being unwelcome--particularly among white male faculty. consequently, leadership theory that helps explain racism and sexism in the experiences of aaw in these types of circumstances is necessary. because aaw are uniquely positioned within an interlocking system of race, gender, and social class, the experiences of this group cannot be understood by studying the experiences of women faculty in general or, for that matter, by studying the experiences of aa male faculty in advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 10 academia (stanley, 2006; turner, 2002). race-based, gender-based, and institutional-based issues create the lens through which aaw in academia process the actions and culture of their institutions (grimes, 2003). to survive this culture, aaw often seek community with others that similarly situated. drawing from a shared, collective culture of power with others that are similarly situated can be used to empower and possibly counter the effects of power used to dominate and control (hebert, 1996). perspectives of aaw in organizational leadership similar to experiences of aaw leaders in educational leadership, aaw leaders in organizational leadership positions regularly confront discrimination and bias in exercising their leadership authority (parker, 2005). organizational leadership refers to the practice of leadership within a context where individuals are held to norms, values, and beliefs of the organization’s culture (parker, 2001). an organization’s culture is justified through norms and values, and perceived through underlying assumptions of people within the organization (schein, 1992). one underlying assumption of members within an organization is that leaders look, act, and think in ways that reflect the culture of the organization (parker, 2001). however, this expectation may be in conflict with the stereotypical assumptions about aaw when “white, middle-class cultural values and beliefs are the norm to which organizational members are expected to adapt” (p. 45). while white men dominate the organizational culture in u. s. organizations, this group has been slow to acknowledge the possibility that racist and sexist structures are intentionally maintained for the purpose of power and privilege (ross-gordon & brooks, 2004). although the double-edged sword of race and gender cuts deeply, aaw in middle and upper management report “racism rather than sexism, as the greater barrier to opportunity in dominant culture organizations” (parker and ogilvie, 1996, p. 197). because these acts of bias are often subtle and overt, encounters can be a source of confusion and frustration. the resulting issue then is how aaw negotiate the process of leadership within a predominantly white organization’s culture--by adapting to the norm or by offering new meanings and greater options for leading based on the multiple perspectives they bring to the leadership experience. consistent with reports from aaw in educational leadership, aaw leaders in organizational settings report disempowering encounters where their authority is constantly questioned or scrutinized, where lack of access to social networks limits access to information, or situations in which they must undergo a trial period of having their qualifications validated before being accepted in their roles (byrd, 2008; stokes, 1996). the most salient and challenging of these encounters and situations are perceived as being associated with race and gender. in western culture, the notion of leadership has been traditionally fixed on images of middle class white men, and more recently white women, as the leader. the image of aaw in positions of power and authority distorts this fixed image (parker, 2005). as a result, the dominant perception of who is best fit to lead tends to grant power and privilege to certain groups (white men), while restricting others (aaw). the dominant perspective that frames our understanding of the power and authority of a leader in organizations is competitive and distant, a perspective advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 11 generally associated with the leadership of white men (parker, 2005). however this perspective is inconsistent with aaw’s tendency to use a more interactive and collaborative process of leadership, emphasizing empowerment through community building. returning to the case of dorothy in organizations and workplaces, leaders are perceived as having a position of power and authority to fulfill their roles. however, minority leaders in u. s. organizations frequently encounter opposition to their leadership authority reflected in (white) subordinates’ initial perceptions and reluctance to accept a minority’s capacity as leader (waters, 1992). these perceptions may have an adverse effect on leadership effectiveness, as minority leaders are painfully aware of the differential treatment to which they are subjected. consequently one’s perception of the leader’s power is significant to the establishment of the leader’s authority. in the opening story, dorothy experienced disempowering encounters that challenged her leadership. disempowerment occurs in the form of challenging authority, resisting, resenting, undermining, or even ignoring an aaw’s position of power and influence within the organization. in today’s organizations, encounters with discriminatory acts are more subtle and overt in nature (deitch et al, 2003). moreover, the experiences of groups such as aaw, who have struggled against societal barriers constructed by race, gender, and social class are less understood by individuals who have experienced privilege and power in their lives. therefore marginalized experiences are often dismissed as being unimportant, insignificant, or overexaggerated. complicating dorothy’s experience was her outsider-within position (collins, 1998). the essence of this experience is that the individual is the only person of color in a setting. whites are often insensitive to the feeling of being alienated, unaccepted undervalued, and alone. in dorothy’s situation her outsider-within position placed her on the margins and outside the social network system. in organizations, a social network system creates social stratification that is usually positioned across racial lines. dorothy’s outsider-within status and lack of access to the social network system in her organization also placed restriction on her power and influence. at the same time dorothy’s marginalized status empowered her subordinate, a white woman, who had direct access and participation in the social network system. because perceptions are often derived from personal biases, the manner in which a leader’s authority is perceived will vary from organization to organization and from one context to another. for example, white men who have traditionally been the accepted leaders may not easily accept an aaw’s position of power and influence. white women may resist the leadership of aaw because, historically speaking, aaw have been held to sub-status or sub-class positions in relation to white women, which may be difficult to dispel in a leader-follower relationship. for that matter, african american men may feel threatened by aaw’s rise to positions of leadership. furthermore, aaw within the same organization may not necessarily bond to advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 12 another aaw’s leadership. however in the latter two, race does not necessarily restrict the followers’ perceptions of the leader in the same manner as the first two relationships. traditional leadership theories such as french and raven’s (1959) legitimate power theory and graen’s (1976) leader-member relationship emerged during eras when the typical image of who leads in organizations was developed with the image of white men at the helm. as such these theories fixed the notion of leadership as race neutral (parker, 2005). race neutral refers to the failure to recognize that organizations are not neutral settings where all leaders are the same and are subjected to the same type of historical and cultural experience. historically, society has a fixed image of aaw as being subservient and holding positions of servitude. as such, the acceptance of aaw as leaders may be distorted by this socially constructed image. as a result, when aaw enter organizations as managers and leaders, they are often challenged to deconstruct the stereotypical image and re-define themselves within a socially fixed image of who leads an organization--white men, and more recently white women (parker, 2005). the face of leadership in organizations is changing and although the numbers are still small, aaw are now holding executive positions in major, predominantly white organizations in the u. s. (catalyst, 2004). the absence of socio-cultural theories that explain and more importantly, expose the existence of race, gender, and social class on the everyday realities and experiences of aaw serves to minimize the existence of aaw as leaders (gostnell, 1996). furthermore, without persistent inquiry of a problem, developing applicable theory will remain lacking (lynham, 2002). socio-cultural theory--an alternative socio-cultural refers to theoretical perspectives that consider race, gender, and social class in analyzing power dynamics within bureaucratic and other systems where power can be used to oppress (merriam & caffarella, 1999). traditional theories of leadership are based on an idealized notion of white middle class men as leaders, which sends the message of who is best suited to lead (parker, 2005). in order to understand the organizational context as well as the sociological aspect of aaw’s leadership in predominantly white organizations, socio-cultural theoretical frameworks are needed to bridge this understanding. according to bloom and erlandson (2003), a useful framework for studying the complexities surrounding the experiences of aaw leaders in predominantly white organizations is critical race theory (crt). critical race theory critical race theory (crt) (bell, 1993; delgado, 1995; ladson-billings & tate, 1995) evolved during the 1960s, a period of social unrest in the united states (crenshaw, 2002). crt is a socio-cultural theory rooted in legal scholarship and based on the notion of the social construction and reality of race. this theory expands critical legal studies in critiquing social power and illegitimate social hierarchy. as a theoretical framework, crt can be used to uncover the inequities existing in organizations and promoting social change within organizational contexts. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 13 crt speaks from a critical raced-gendered epistemology that allows researchers to embrace the use of counter stories, narratives, and autobiographies to unveil the unique experiences of aaw and other women of color (bernal, 2002). storytelling challenges dominant ideologies and creates new and culturally relevant ways to view and re-interpret traditional ways of knowing. for instance, in the opening story, dorothy described encounters emerging from issues of race, gender, and social class in her leadership experiences. encountering issues that are oppressive in relation to one’s social location is consistent with how crt gives centrality to racism and other forms of intersectionality. “race-gendered epistemologies emerge from ways of knowing that are in direct contrast with the dominant eurocentric epistemology partially as a result of histories that are based on the intersection of racism, sexism, classism and other forms of subordination” (bernal, 2002, p. 110). according to taylor (2004), crt posits, “issues of race, class, and gender are inextricably bound by economic, social, and political hegemonic power structures” (p. 35). crt provides a means for people of color to communicate experiences and realities through narratives and storytelling and consequently, critically examine racial issues within the context of the workplace. stories like dorothy’s exemplify how storytelling can be used to give voice to marginalized people in the workplace. using crt places aaw’s encounters with race, gender, and social class at the center of analysis and represents a shift from traditional leadership perspectives that have focused on “race-neutral, dichotomized notions of masculine and feminine leadership” (parker, 2005, p. xii). crt uses counter stories based on real, lived experiences that challenge the discourse and beliefs of dominant viewpoints. moreover, crt renders visible and deconstructs attitudes and structural barriers that pervade the workplace (bernier & rocco, 2003). in addition, crt recognizes the societal struggles that aaw bring to predominantly white organizations when they enter to lead. power, white privilege, racial and sexual oppression can be disempowering to aaw’s leadership (bernier & rocco, 2003). crt can be used as a paradigm to deconstruct the perceptions, assumptions, and biases that support the unequal use of power in organizations. recommendations and conclusion in this discussion, an argument was made for theories to explain the challenges aaw leaders experience in predominantly white organizations--specifically, the challenges that the interactive effects of power and influence with race, gender, and social class. french and raven’s (1959) bases of power, and graen’s (1976) leader-member exchange (lmx) theory were used in this discussion as examples of traditional theories of power and influence. however these theories do not address dynamics that emerge from encounters with the race, gender, and social class of the leader. furthermore, these theories do not satisfy the criteria for judging the effectiveness of theory. first, these theories do not offer a response (lincoln & lynham, 2006) to the dilemmas created by the race, gender, and/or social class. second, the theories are not comprehensive (patterson, 1983) in that they do not consider all aspects and actors involved in the phenomenon of leadership. finally they are not reflective of contemporary society and do not consider dynamics such as gender, social class, and ethnicity (brookfield, 1992). advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 14 traditional theories of leadership, such as french and raven’s (1959) power and influence and graen’s (1976) lmx theories, are race neutral and are based on the experiences of white men and white women. therefore, these theories are inadequate for explaining leadership in respect to power and influence with an interlocking system of race, gender, and social class. bringing this interlocking system to the discourse on leadership adds a new perspective to the phenomenon that is not addressed in traditional discourse. furthermore, theory-building research that explains the challenges aaw leaders in predominantly white organizations face in respect to the combined effects of race, gender, and social class is severely lacking. the significance of theories for explaining and thereby understanding the leadership experiences of aaw is necessary for providing and improving leadership development opportunities for aaw as emerging leaders in organizations. socio-cultural theories such as crt, that are nontraditional to the research of leadership in organizations, provides a framework to broaden the traditional theories and inform our understanding of aaw’s leadership in predominantly white organizations. in addition, crt offers insight on how the intersection of race, gender, and social class limit and restrict the power and influence of aaw leaders in these organizational contexts. therefore, crt provides a framework for bringing social issues into discourse, thus countering the traditionally held theories of leadership. research on the impact of race, gender, and social class on aaw’s leadership in predominantly white organizations may be understudied because the study itself is interdisciplinary and requires insight from a number of perspectives. in addition, organizational researchers are likely to study a phenomenon through a different lens from sociological and cultural studies researchers, although the study of aaws’ leadership in predominantly white organizations calls for a blend of the two perspectives. recommendations theory-building research in the area of leadership in organizations needs more qualitative studies that capture the essence of people’s experiences. through qualitative studies researchers can begin to collect rich and descriptive data of lived experiences in the workplace that will lend to greater theory building opportunities. parker and oglivie (1996) recommended research that illuminates how aaw leaders encounter racism and sexism and the ways these interactive effects are perceived by subordinates, peers, and superiors. this might be addressed through leadership models that will support a more inclusive perspective of leadership, thereby informing the experiences of a larger audience of leaders (parker, 2005). lynham (2000) suggested a general theory of leadership is needed because the traditional theories do not adequately address the challenges of modern day leaders. towards this end, lynham developed a theory of responsible leadership for performance (rlp) to help integrate and demystify the leadership body of knowledge. the rlp proposes, “leadership is a purposeful, focused system not an individual or a process managed by an individual” (p. 179). by reframing the purpose which leadership has to fulfill, the rlp could be used to bridge the gap between existing, traditional perspectives of leadership and the growing need for more socio-cultural perspectives of leadership. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 15 conclusion the study of aaw and leadership is an investigation of a phenomenon (leadership) from the perspective of a group that has been subjected to socially constructed phenomena (race, gender, and social class). therefore, the intersection of race, gender, and social class on the professional lives of aaw should be included in explaining the leadership experiences of this marginalized group. however, intersectionality is an aspect of aaw lives’ that has primarily been the focus of scholars from sociology and and/or women’s studies. one explanation for this may be attributed to the larger numbers of african american scholars affiliated with these fields. the growing number of aaw in positions of leadership in predominantly white organizations increases the need for explaining the challenges that the combined effects of race, gender, and social class with power and influence places on the leadership experience-challenges which are not experienced by white men or white women in these positions. therefore either theory-building research is needed in this area or alternative theoretical paradigms should be considered for a more inclusive theoretical perspective of leadership. although researchers have studied leadership of a diverse workforce (waters, 1992), research of marginalized leaders who may be challenged in their exercise of leadership in predominantly white organizations is lacking. in addition, scholars from fields such as management and organizational studies generally study leadership as a universal phenomenon; although this generalized approach excludes socio-cultural realities that may be associated with the process of leading. this is problematic for aaw leaders, because the socio-cultural realities exist regardless of the context. the social realities that exist for an aaw in society will also exist and restrict her role as a leader. to ensure that the leadership theories we draw upon are adequate and inclusive of all those in positions of leadership, the interactive effects of power and influence with race, gender, and social class should be brought into the conversation. embracing the race, gender, and social class of the leader brings aaw from the margins to the center of analysis, thus adding a new dimension to the concept of leadership and taking the analysis of leadership and construction of leadership theory to new arenas (parker, 2005; allen, 1995). advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 16 references allen, b. l. 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(1992). theory and research on leadership in organizations. in m.d. dunnette and l. m. hough (eds.), handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (pp. 147-197). palo alto, ca: consulting psychologists. theories of power and influence. a basic assumption of power and influence theories is that “the power possessed by the leader is important not only for influencing subordinates, but also for influencing peers, superiors, and people outside the organi... in lmx, a pattern of ongoing social exchange is established between the leader and member. the initial reaction to a minority leader tends to involve a period of scrutiny where (white) subordinates assess a leader-follower fit (waters, 1992). percepti... other related theories of power. consideration might be given to other theories that relate to power and relationships between leader and followers. for example, hofstede’s (1980) cultural dimension theory contains a relational concept termed power-di... leadership perspectives of aaw emerging from historical and cultural foundations the landscape of an african american woman’s life is shaped and designed by history and culture; opening new arenas for growth and opportunity while erecting barriers to socially constructed forces of oppression (bell & nkomo, 2001). although the bias... figure 1. external forces that bind, internal forces that oppress historical and cultural foundations of aaw leaders a sense of community emerges from the historical and cultural aspects of an aaw’s life. the circumstances emerging from a legacy of struggle experienced by the african american community in general created a form of resistance to which aaw responded b... aaw’s involvement in the community speaks to social activism and social change (rogers, 2005; delany & rogers, 2004). involvement in the church and community has been found to be influential sources that have nurtured, shaped, and empowered aaw (meux... perspectives of aaw in organizational leadership critical race theory recommendations and conclusion recommendations microsoft word 4.ryan_daz_grow_women in computer science and engineering[1].docx volume 40, 2021 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 39 advancing women in leadership vol. 40, pp. 3947, 2021 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women in computer science and engineering: a transformational leadership approach to gender equity lindy ryan, eduardo r. díaz, arron p. grow lindy ryan, professor and researcher, rutgers discovery informatics institute, rutgers university, lindy.ryan@rutgers.edu eduardo r. díaz, associate professor, school of business and administration, cetys universidad, eduardo.diaz@cetys.mx arron p. grow, faculty, clover park school district, arrongrow@hotmail.com accepted november 19, 2020 the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) is a phenomenon that needs to be addressed from an educational perspective. within the domains of computer science and engineering (cs&e) the gender imbalance is even more acute as the underrepresentation of women not only persists but has increased over the past few decades (corbett & hill, 2015; master et al., 2016). in this paper a discussion of the current situation of women’s underrepresentation across broad cs&e domains is presented. this will be demonstrated through a review of research into the historical factors and institutional practices that have been ongoing barriers to the inclusion of women in cs&e. then, a discussion of how transformational leadership theory can serve as a tool for change to help scholars better understand the present situation, and then guide practitioners in overcoming it, is presented. to this end, the paper concludes with a discussion of how diversity and inclusion ideas, based on a transformational leadership approach, can improve gender equity in cs&e. keywords: underrepresented, women, gender, transformational, leadership introduction the disproportionately low share of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) domains is well documented in the scholarly literature (aguinis et al., 2018; fatourou et al., 2019; hill et al., 2010; sekaquaptewa, 2011; szelenyi et al., 2013; zafar, 2013). according to corbett and hill (2015) as well as master et al. (2016), the underrepresentation of women in engineering fields—especially in leadership roles— has not only persisted in recent decades, but has increased. this deepening gender imbalance lends unique urgency to exploring and overcoming institutional barriers that affect and depress women’s long-term inclusion in broad computer science and engineering (cs&e) domains. pawley et al. (2016) reviewed published articles in the journal of engineering education from 1998 to 2012. they argued that while individual articles were noteworthy, most of them focused on a narrow range of theoretical approaches, tended to use undergraduate students as participants almost exclusively, described gender simply in binary as male or female, and focused on educational inputs rather than performance. as the problem of women’s underrepresentation in cs&e and stem remains insufficiently examined, mckinney et al. (2008) as well as kim et al. (2008), reported that the percentage of computing jobs held by women has fallen significantly over the past 23 years. more recent research found that women are outnumbered by men six to one in leadership positions in computing fields (corbitt & hill, 2015). this marginalized faction of women has become known as what margolis and fisher (2002) referred to as “survivors of the ‘boys club’ of high-school computing” (p. 49). the lower number of women studying in cs&e programs represents a pipeline problem. many studies on women’s participation as authors in research publications have been conducted over the past decade to understand gender inequality in academia and the impact of policies and practices that may perpetuate continued underrepresentation of women researchers across a wide variety of computing disciplines (agarwal et al., 2016; aguinis et al, 2018; cavero et al., 2015; cohoon et al., 2011; vela et al., 2012). several studies have already addressed the gender imbalance in engineering fields, including the work published by dimitriadi (2013), agarwal et al. (2016), and lewis (2018). their research found gender gaps in all areas of cs&e academics, including number of students, faculty (tenured and non-tenured), and research personnel. this deficit is not only impactful in women’s roles as leaders in academia; it also affects advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 40 the rate at which young women enroll in cs&e courses per bottia et al. (2015), who found that the availability of female faculty was a contributing factor to women’s retention and terminal efficiency in academic programs in this field. finally, a widening gender gap in cs&e not only perpetuates an imbalance of women in stem at large, but has specific, wider consequences in the larger cs&e economy, which is expected to continue to grow (bureau of labor statistics, 2015; dockterman, 2014). thus, this issue of underrepresentation in cs&e represents a larger and urgent organizational problem: women comprising only a quarter of the computer science workforce and the number is declining. not only is closing the gender gap in cs&e at risk, but so is meeting the incredible workforce demand of the big data era. we believe the continued underrepresentation of women in cs&e across industry and academic domains are not mutually exclusive phenomenon, but are interrelated issues that form a larger diversity imperative of increasing inclusion of a historically underrepresented population. we argue that creating transformational organizational cultures can help address the gender in cs&e domains. though recent scholarship traversing the historic underrepresentation of women in cs&e has provided much impetus for new programs and interventions intended to increase the inclusion of women, many are in nascent stages. kim et al. (2008), as well as szelényi et al. (2013), and most recently gailliard and batmanian (2016), provide research and discussions that address underrepresentation of women in cs&e. considered together, these researchers have found that strategies such as early socialization and role model mentorship, research experiences for undergraduates, and living-learning programs exist in practice. thus far, however, the consensus appears to be that such efforts, while having potential for improving underrepresentation of women in cs&e, need to be embraced across educational institutions to create significant change. this requires educational institutions, specifically academic programs in stem, to transform their culture in a way that diversity and inclusion are valued as essential parts of the overall strategy for the future of cs&e field. factors affecting underrepresentation inquiry into women’s underrepresentation in cs&e has been ongoing for some time. valian (1999) presented evidence that women are disadvantaged both by gender schemas that favor men in technology and by the compounding accumulation of male advantage over time. later, in a controversial speech by a former harvard university president, three hypotheses were provided as possible explanations for the historic underrepresentation of women in cs&e. these included (a) different innate aptitudes in mathematics and high-end technology skills; (b) different career-related preferences among men and women; and (c) simple, overt discrimination (summers, 2005, as cited in reuben et al., 2014). while mounting evidence against the aptitude-based hypothesis and career-based dichotomy have been since revealed in the literature (guiso et al., 2008; hyde et al., 2008), other notable recent findings have indeed illuminated the ongoing pervasiveness of historical biases. these include, but are not limited to, perceptions of women’s competency in computer science, the larger share of employment opportunities for men, and a lack of dynamic mentorship programs and stem advocacy for women. according to corbett and hill (2015), all these issues remain ubiquitous barriers for women in computing. in addition to these, szelenyi et al. (2013) pointed out that several personal and environmental factors affect women’s career-related outcomes in cs&e. moreover, ehrlinger et al. (2018) noted that career choices for women continued to be influenced by engineering prototypes based on stereotypical gender beliefs that discourage women from entering cs&e fields. therefore, there continued to be a need to address issues such as early socialization of and education in cs&e identity, attitudes of self-efficacy, and issues related to status and stereotypes. the research cited here suggest that the problem of women underrepresentation in cs&e goes beyond the existence of male-dominated workplaces but stretches all the way back to early educational experiences. systemic barriers to women in cs&e given even this relatively brief review of the research literature, it should be clear that there are many obstacles to women in cs&e, and that raising this issue in the scholarly record is not a new attempt. for this reason, we would like to take a different approach to facilitating a constructive conversation on overcoming barriers to increase inclusion of women in cs&e going forward. thus, rather than itemizing difficulties, we propose two general categories of systemic barriers be considered as areas that perpetuate divergence of women from pursuing advanced education and careers in cs&e, expanding on mckinney et al.’s (2008) idea of an input and throughput theorem which describes the disparity between women and men existing in engineering professions. described in general terms, these are an entry problem, wherein women do not enter (or are not prepared to enter) computer science domains and a continuity problem, wherein entry does not persist meaningfully into leadership. the following literature review encompasses research on both the entry and continuity problems to distill salient, recurrent themes that offer insight on fundamental issues affecting ongoing underrepresentation of women in cs&e, and describes what researchers have concluded to be useful approaches to meaningful interventions. going forward, these will form a framework for further discussions on how to overcome long held institutional barriers to gender equity in cs&e by transforming educational cultures. the entry problem we identify entry problems as issues concerned with women not developing early stem identity or sustainably connecting with broader cs&e domains through educational programs or socialization. reuben et al. (2014) found that standardized test advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 41 results indicate that high-school-aged girls are as prepared as boys to pursue science majors in college. however, this readiness does not correspond to enrollment of women in computer science majors. their work affirms what hughes et al. (2013) had already been pointing towards: that entry problems begin foremost with the rate at which women enter early cs&e educational programs, and that marginalization begins to occur at adolescence. more specifically, research conducted by the american association of university women (2010) suggested that the ages between 10 and 15 are the period during which students, particularly girls, begin to lose interest in science and mathematics, as well as when the gender gap in terms of standardized stem test scores begins to evidence. thus, we can further delineate entry problems into the following two areas where barriers have been suggested to occur: during pre-college education and socialization (k12), and early college experiences. pre-college education and socialization (k12). looking into the efficacy of middle school participants’ stem identity formation, researchers hughes et al. (2013) studied the influence of activities within informal science and engineering learning environments. while the study did not show a significant difference in the two informal programs evaluated (an all-girls’ stem camp and a co-educational stem camp), it did provide findings that raised the issue of access, particularly with pedagogy, and advocated for stem curricula approaches that consider the unique learning styles of young women. additionally, explicit exposure of female role models resulted in an increased interest in stem fields, among them cs&e. further research conducted with middle-school students suggested that gender segregation in stem is affected by teachers who take part in shaping the worldview of students at an early age. one example of research that points to this is shapiro et al. (2015). their research followed that of riley (2014) who stated that teachers who unknowingly make genderbased distinctions have profound influence on their students and unintentionally lead them to conform to biased educational expectations. both investigations added support for what dimitriadi (2013) and tajlili (2014) also concluded: that one angle of the entry problem is how the influence of parents, teachers, and guidance counselors and other role models early in a student’s educational journey affect long-term student choices in education and career trajectories. hughes et al. (2013) also found that exposure to female role models improved self-concept, a broadened view of stem careers possibilities, and generated a sense of belonging, suggesting that early and informal stem education programs can positively influence learned stem identify. again, the need for role models and mentorship was highlighted in this study. early-college experiences. appropriately, several efforts have been undertaken to move beyond k12 grade level and precollege barriers to study the early college experiences that act as further entry barriers to women advancing in computer science programs (cheryan & meltzoff, 2016). several previous studies have found that programs early in the collegiate journey that include programmatic elements designed to promote gender equity are effective in promoting long-term interest in computer science, particularly among underrepresented groups such as women, and especially so when supported by ongoing mentorship with faculty members (barker, 2009; jesse, 2006). two recent notable studies in this category focused on building on previous research that sought to address issues of women’s underrepresentation in cs&e. one study was conducted through an nsf-funded project at the center for embedded network sensing (cens) at ucla to explore whether research experiences for undergraduates (reu) promote women’s long-term interest in cs&e domains. in their study of reus, researchers kim et al. (2011) reviewed specific mentoring, programming, and professional development mechanisms that benefited female students. results from the study found several gender equity building strategies, including having a critical mass of women in the program, providing role models and mentors to support participation, and indirectly (as opposed to directly) introducing sensitive gender equity topics like work/family balance. findings from kim et al. (2011) also support retention in cs&e programs through faculty mentorship, fostering community building through structured groups, and sharing of individual progress. overall, the need for a strong faculty mentorship component was deemed particularly influential in women’s decisions to move beyond undergraduate programs and pursue advanced degrees. on this matter of entry, other programs that merit attention are those referred to as living-learning programs (l/l). looking into living-learning programs, szelenyi et al. (2013) found that variables of socioeconomic status, high school grades, and precollege self-efficacy were statistically significant predictors of involvement in stem-related studies. this further reinforces earlier findings that suggest stem identity and self-efficacy begin in adolescence, and the middle school years are perhaps those most sensitive to stem formation (aauw, 2010; hughes et al., 2013; spielhagen 2008). it is also worth noting that similar to studies already reviewed, szeleynyi et al. (2013) found that women who engaged with female peer and faculty mentors enjoyed a “safe space” (p. 866) that facilitated persistence in science and engineering graduate education as well as confidence in career success across broad science domains. for their part, cerf and johnson (2016) found that teachers who spend time listening to students and inspiring them to stay the course are likely to contribute positively to student retention, especially with minority and female students in cs&e undergraduate programs and influence their academic and professional success. these researchers, along with fatourou et al. (2019), voiced what we too assert, that schools have a responsibility to help fulfill industry needs for talent despite the challenges they may face in doing so. in their research, they found that while enrollment numbers in cs&e programs have consistently risen, the issue of lack of diversity represents a problem in terms of social justice, size of the talent pool, and available perspectives to inform in product design processes. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 42 the continuity problem the second set of systemic barriers to women’s underrepresentation in cs&e are those we classify as continuity problems: situations wherein women enter cs&e academic programs or professional careers, but either leave or are marginalized to the point of essential exclusion and thus do not achieve a significant share of leadership positions. though several suppositions have been offered as reasons for women’s underrepresentation in cs&e and how this impacts their leadership roles throughout academia and industry, mckinney et al. (2008) launched a large-scale study to distinguish fact from supposition by examining attitudes and experiences of 815 male and female it professionals in the us. their work suggests potential causes of underrepresentation and support the assumption that fewer women entering cs&e professions exacerbate the underrepresentation problem. first, results suggested that men and women share some but not all motivations for entering cs&e professions. for example, men were far more likely to cite love of technology as a key motivator, while women more often indicated job security and flexible work hours, thus suggesting that factors in the work itself were more important than actual career decision (mckinney et al., 2008). regarding socialization and the effect of appropriate role models, two areas that have historically been causal to lower levels of learning providing a plausible explanation for women’s underrepresentation. results suggested that while there was no significant difference in the influence of professional role models—a finding that is contrary to assumed and documented disadvantages for women, especially at the undergraduate or entry-level (ahuja, 2002; kim et al., 2011)— women did have a vastly different socialization experience where learning was focused primarily on the social aspects of cs&e whereas men reported stronger socialization in regard to the technical aspects. these resulted in statistical significance (p<.001) in both comfort with technical language and technical skills (mckinney et al., 2008). of note in mckinney et al.’s (2008) study were the reported gender differences across work-related experiences, specifically in regard to perceptions of supervisor support for career success. they concluded that there are gender differences in the treatment and experiences of men and women in cs&e, which were consistent with historical findings in greater attention is needed on the supply side of the underrepresentation issue, early identification and socialization with technology, and attention to female learning styles in computer science. interestingly, stereotypes that impair women’s careers in cs&e are not limited to male-female biases, but women enact these same biases upon themselves. one finding in this area of research came from reuben et al. (2014) who found that while there was no gender-based disparity in performance, a strong bias existed among both males and females to hire male candidates. the researchers found that when employers received subjective information about candidates’ performance, the gap increased: females were chosen only 32% of the time, and male candidates were selected 85.7% of the time. this suggests that not only are negative stereotypes against women’s aptitudes pervasive, but that both men and women may discriminate against women without realizing it, leaving room for further research into why. a transformational approach to overcoming barriers to equity in cs&e this section argues the point that educational organizations need to create transformational organizational cultures where female students can find role models and mentors that can help them overcome the entry and continuity problems noted before. according to northouse (2016) “transformational leadership is the process whereby a person engages with others and creates a connection that raises the level of motivation and morality in both the leader and the follower" (p. 163). northouse's definition is consistent with earlier works developed by burns (2010), bass (1985), and kouzes and posner (2019). these authors believed that effective leaders understand the importance of ensuring follower buy-in to achieve superior results in a variety of contexts. they noted that the leader-follower relationship creates a transformation that is manifested at the individual, group, and organizational level. kouzes and posner paid special attention to making sure educators understand how their work is essential shaping the perspectives and perceptions of self of students. to this end, we espouse an adaptation of four leadership factors connected with transformational leadership. as discussed by northouse (2016) these are the abilities to act as strong role models for others, inspire and motivate, foster intellectual stimulation, and provide individualized consideration while influencing toward a desired goal. adapting these factors for the purposes of the present discussion, the connected skills and actions would be the following. first, becoming ready and willing to influence women toward cs&e-related careers; second, motivating women to not only become involved in cs&e-related careers, but inspiring them toward longer-term involvement and leadership in these fields. third, providing intellectual challenges connected to cs&e thinking and endeavors, which encourage innovation and creativity as a standard practice. finally, being skilled at addressing individual concerns about moving toward cs&e-related domains and becoming adept at meeting individual needs of women who pursue cs&e-related careers. in the context of the present discussion, we look for influencers to be mindful of these four factors while they engage in actions typically connected with transformational leadership, e.g. coaching, mentoring, and other activities that inspire and support female students and workers and align with demonstrated effective practices in numerous studies (díaz et al., 2019; kouzes & posner, 2019). to better explain how transformational leaders can help reduce educational, social, and organizational barriers for women in cs&e, we will address each of these barriers separately. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 43 overcoming barriers in education. some schools have created programs designed to motivate female students to enroll in engineering courses designed and taught by teachers engaged in promoting gender diversity in cs&e (fortenberry & cady, 2009). once female students enroll in science and engineering programs, the issue of retention takes on a gender approach, as these students tend to be more aware of the gendered effects of their discipline than their male colleagues (morganson et al., 2015). thus, the need to reconsider pedagogical and curriculum design practices on the part of educators becomes a subject for discussion (brotman & moore, 2008, as cited in hughes et al., 2013). transformational leaders in the education industry are likely to engage in behaviors that are gender neutral. these leaders promote educational environments where educators can highlight the value of diversity, developing relationships, and building trust among peers (selzer et al., 2017). these leaders may act by developing and implementing assessment programs based on the opportunities to learn standards (otl) to promote equity in their institutions (chism & pang, 2014). although otl tends to be associated with government involvement, transformational cultures in education focus in the shared values of the groups involved to create conditions that cater to the development interests of everyone in the organization. overcoming social barriers. in a study conducted to compare male and female nobel prize in science winners, researchers found that female winners, who were significantly fewer in number than male winners, tended to make more sacrifices in their personal and family lives than their male colleagues (charyton et al., 2011). unfortunately, the need to sacrifice more may be part of the reason why women continue to be underrepresented in cs&e. for example, cardador (2017) noted that women who are promoted to management positions in engineering tend to suffer increased work-life tension and may inadvertently reinforce gender stereotypes associated with taskrelated efficacy. these stereotypes include beliefs that women are communal, and men tend to be agentic (diaz & lituchy, 2020). knowing that they are embedded in a male-centered environment seems to give women in stem a sense of pride, which can be leveraged with the help of a good role model (morganson et al., 2015). several researchers (athalye, 2009; kim et al., 2011; mackie, 2014; mcinnes, 2009; watts & corrie, 2013) have noted the use of role models is consistent with transformational leadership. thus, we believe that women involved in cs&e fields can benefit from personalized attention provided by transformational leaders around them and reduce the effects of the social barriers that affect their career choices and progress. overcoming gender-biased corporate cultures. while women continue to be underrepresented in cs&e due to stagnant or decreasing enrollment in undergraduate and graduate programs in these domains, there is still much educational organizations can do to help reduce the gender gap and promote innovation. psychogios (2007) noted that organizations are going through an exciting point in time when women claim a greater share of management jobs and are finding ways to meet performance expectations consistent with the needs of companies that compete in the more diverse and global markets. the author argued that this type of environment has led traditionally male occupations to become more feminine, which, in turn, changes the way business gets done. this situation represents an opportunity for management teams that are slowly starting to develop more gender-inclusive policies across a variety of traditionally male-dominated industries. it has already been argued that innovation and creative problem solving are not necessarily gender-based, and that a more diverse work environment promotes creative thinking. therefore, beyond simply meeting the workforce demand in cs&e, closing the gender gap in organizations that exemplify the realities of the new economy is so important. this task begins with educators sharing research on the matter with their students, which could help address outdated beliefs about cs&e fields being inherently masculine. there is evidence that an integrative leadership approach has worked in the cs&e industry, as documented by abdulai et al. (2012) who studied software firms in south africa and learned that the goal of securing the appropriate human capital is better served by having managers adopt a transformational leadership approach to manage personnel. therefore, transformational leadership beliefs and behaviors have been sufficiently documented in the literature as having a positive effect on helping individuals from diverse backgrounds work together as cohesive units to achieve superior results due to the added layers of talent available. thus, it is appropriate to increase transformational leadership among organizational managers through the different methods that have been developed in the literature. educators can influence this development by teaching future managers and minority students to seek out role models and engage in leader-follower relationships to help them address long-standing barriers for inclusion and development. summary of transformational leadership and the gender gap in cs&e our intention in this paper is to integrate some of the ways transformational leaders can help plug the leak in the pipeline of women in broad cs&e domains. the previous pages have illustrated that there is a social and economic problem resulting from the pervasive underrepresentation of women in cs&e, which derives from the scarce representation of young women in stem-related academic programs and a lack of concentrated effort on early intervention for stem identity formation. we have addressed several key points that are relevant to this problem and have identified some solutions that are beginning to take place through the work of transformational leaders. table 1 serves as a snapshot of that argument. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 44 table 1 factors that negatively influence female participation in cs&e and proposed solutions. barriers for women in cs&e proposed solutions segregation of male and female students in academic environments, which favor the role of male students in stem or cs&e fields (gonzález & pau, 2011; hughes et al., 2013). promote the enrollment of female students in introductory cs&e courses (master et al., 2016). develop teaching methods and curricula to better serve female students in cs&e academic programs (fortenberry & cady, 2009; brotman & moore, 2008, as cited in hughes et al., 2013). communicate with female students interested in pursuing careers in stem or cs&e fields to find ways to guide and support them toward academic success (cerf & johnson, 2016). career choice is influenced by gender-based perceptions that lead to misconceptions regarding the role of women in stem or cs&e fields (cerf & johnson, 2016). promote the fact that some traditionally male dominated industries and occupations are becoming more feminine (psychogios, 2007). develop mentoring programs for female students interested in pursuing careers in cs&e (charyton et al., 2011; fann & misa-escalante, 2011; lewis, 2018; morganson, 2015). there continues to be unsubstantiated preferences for men in stem and cs&e fields (reuben et al., 2014). challenge the established perceptions regarding gender and performance by having female workers conduct themselves in a manner consistent with their values and capacity (ahuja & thatcher, 2005; debebe, 2010; ng & sears, 2012). note: developed by the authors. we consider the solutions in table 1 to be a realistic approach to address the gender gaps in cs&e, and the broader leadership problem. a required condition is to ensure that individuals exercise their critical thinking skills, and question forgone conclusions and assumptions that have been sustained through time (zamudio et al., 2008). while we believe that the transformational leadership approach in academia, corporations, and social groups can be effective in addressing the problems of representation described throughout this paper, we do not believe that the discussion should end there. in the following section, we briefly share some general ideas for future research that in time may lead to sustained equity, eliminating gender as a variable from questions of representation and power. future research educational, organizational, and social leaders are ultimately responsible for addressing the gender gap in stemrelated fields. however, more work on the part of scholars is required to better inform the decisions and practices of individuals trying to make change. we believe we adequately represented the current conversation on the issue, but there is much more we would like to know and discuss as we move forward in trying to help eliminate gender as a variable from any question of efficacy. we suggest the following areas for future research: 1. document the results from initiatives taking place in engineering programs aimed at promoting educational transformations (reidsema et al., 2013). intentional efforts like these are examples of transformational leadership in action, which should yield positive results in terms of gender equity. 2. examine the effects of action-learning, personalized, student-centered educational approaches on student learning and development in engineering programs (stappenbelt, 2010). this approach, given its individual nature, holds the promise of minimizing gendered effects because it is based on the needs and characteristics of individual students. 3. review the results from curricular and co-curricular changes designed to include leadership theory in engineering undergraduate programs (kotnour et al., 2013). we believe that exposing engineering students to leadership models can help them understand their role as change agents and help close the gender gap in stem-related fields. 4. making process of educators, organizational leaders, and policymakers (wang & degol, 2017). we believe it takes knowledgeable individuals to arrange data in a way that people from different fields can absorb and use to develop plans and execute them. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 45 conclusion educators in science and engineering disciplines have taken notice of the gender imbalance described throughout this paper, which is encouraging, but awareness without action is not enough (blair et al., 2017). marginalized groups of young students can overcome barriers to growth by recognizing inequalities and becoming involved in activities to address them (rapa et al., 2018). educators can help start the process by having their students inquire, become self-aware, and take action (boyle-baise et al., 2007). we believe that this is taking place in schools at different levels; however, it is important for educational and organizational leaders to create environments where this kind of thinking is encouraged (buxton, 2010; kouzes & posner, 2019; zamudio et al., 2008). we assert that leaks in the leadership pipeline for women in cs&e begin with the marginalizing experiences of young women and follow through to ongoing stereotypes that affect women’s success in cs&e domains across industry and academia. today, this historic marginalization has resulted in women being positioned as stigmatized groups with many stem-related domains (hughes et al., 2013), and is the core problem in a widening gender inequity in women’s roles in cs&e. ultimately this problem extends beyond a lack of inclusion of women and is an urgent diversity problem and a leadership imperative. we explained that this marginalization may not occur consciously, but that it may be part of the way in which we approach early stem education and identity formation, how we make gender-based assumptions and set expectations, and how we create environments that affect the success of professional women, regardless of occupation. we believe that it is through a transformational leadership approach that we may address and overcome these barriers, given the research that is available today. the basic assumption is that young women can be supported as they look through the stereotypes regarding male and female occupations, and focus on adding value to their organizations, regardless of their role. finally, we proposed areas for future study that focus on results of initiatives that are gender neutral, like examining the effects of immersion of leadership theory in engineering programs. hopefully, these studies will shape the conversation to focus on outputs rather than inputs on engineering education and leadership. these studies may also serve to remove gender from the list of variables that associate with task-related or managerial efficacy in science and engineering fields. references abdulai, m., youngsun, k., & junghoon, m. 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(2008). thinking critically about difference: analytical tools for the 21st century. equity & excellence in education, 41(2), 215229. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665680801957378 advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, fall 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] standing on the frontline: having the courage to teach rochelle garner wright state university abstract issues of race, class, and gender along with many other characteristics that define human differences are inextricably woven into the fabric of the social institutions in the united states of america; the university classroom is not excluded. this article discusses the teaching experiences of an african-american woman teaching associate/doctoral student while teaching at a predominantly white institution and the resistance often encountered from students in the form of challenging authority, questioning credibility and/or grades, and other forms of disrespectful behavior that could be subtle and covert. despite such challenges, the teaching associate discusses ways in which she used various strategies to successfully manage barriers in the classroom. dealing with issues of social justice in the classroom inevitably creates a level of discomfort for individuals who have never had to deal with these issues; yet, it is critically important to continue to raise the level of awareness for faculty and administrators of the type of issues women and people of color are faced with in the classroom when dealing with these topics. "when and where i enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing, or special patronage, then and there the whole negro race enters with me."-anna julia cooper "as subjects, people have the right to define their own reality, establish their own identities, [and] name their history."-bell hooks purpose this study examines my teaching experiences for the purpose of explicating how i was able to overcome challenges in the classroom, and how i navigated my way through the academy's terrain without coming "undone." this narrative provides reflections of days gone by while i was serving as a teaching associate/doctoral student at a mid-size university, located in the midwest region of the united states. not all of these experiences were a series of unfortunate events; however, some of them have brought me to the conclusion that it is important to tell my story and share some of these experiences. this research is grounded in scholarly personal narrative or personal experience narrative as described by ellis & bocher file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/templates/index.html (2003). personal experience narrative is a method of inquiry that uses an individual's life experience to generalize to a larger group or culture. this type of research provokes, challenges, and illuminates rather than confirms and settles (bullough & pinnegar, 2001). in essence, this narrative will be examined through the analysis of reflexivity, which allows me to reflect upon, examine critically, and explore analytically the nature of this research process (fonow & cook, 1991). the importance of recording everyday life experiences is immeasurable because it helps those with similar experiences to make better sense of the phenomena when it occurs. it also provides a different way of viewing the world for "outsiders" who do not have these encounters. additionally, it provides the support or tools for dismantling various hegemonic practices. women and men of different ethnic backgrounds, who are located in these spaces at majority institutions and have encounters of resistance in the classroom, may feel that their situations are occurring in isolation and not know how to deal with them. despite such challenges and the encounters i experienced, i offer strategies that were used to navigate my way through the contested terrain of dealing with issues of resistance in the classroom. entering the academy as a professional is a landmark achievement for most african-american women who have chosen to be a part of this space, despite the fact that african-american women have served in various roles in higher education for more than a century. some of the african-american women trailblazers from our past include mary mcleod bethune, the founder of bethune-cookman college; anna julia cooper, president of freylinghuysen university; and lucy diggs slowe, the first dean of women at howard university. today, notable african-american women include johnetta cole, former president of spelman college and current president of bennett college ; ruth simmons, the first african-american president of brown university ; and alexis herman, president of fisk university. while african-american women have shown notable gains as history makers in higher education, it has not been without sacrifice and many challenges along the way. despite such challenges, african-american women have been able to sustain themselves through various support systems, and they have succeeded against the odds. as african-american women succeeding against the odds and accomplishing such landmark achievement, rassool (1995) notes, they have triumphed against different kinds of oppressions and have made numerous sacrifices in their quest to live their lives as women, according to their own personal, social, and professional definitions. munro's (1998) research on women teachers discusses the importance of them telling their stories and acknowledging their conversations as more than just "idle talk." it is in the manner of the telling, the authoring of oneself through story, which provides a space for understanding what baktin calls the dialogic of self, the relationship between self and culture (munro, 1998). telling the story is important because it helps others with similar experiences to overcome the isolation and ineptitude that can ensue as a result. modes of inquiry as noted by many scholars, narratives, stories, and storytelling play a vital role in the meaning making process in qualitative inquiry (berger & quinney, 2005; geertz, 1995; munro, 1998). both narrative inquiry and feminist/womanist literature inform this research. women's ways of knowing, of being, of teaching, and of leading in the academy have been recorded in narrative form to give women "voice" in the ways in which they make meaning of their lives in constructing their own knowledge (belenky, clinchy, goldberger, & tarule, 1996). collins (2000) notes the importance of doing research about black women by having them assert their own standpoint and speak for themselves as an oppressed group. this embraces the position that women view all knowledge as contextual, experience themselves as creators of knowledge, and value both subjective and objective strategies for knowing, while dismantling the positivist notions of inquiry that traditionally have been male-centered. in retaining each other: narratives of two african-american women in the academy , fries-britt and kelly (2005) note the marginalization of african-american graduate students and faculty of color at predominantly white institutions, the subject of research over the past 40 years. they also documented the obstacles and negative experiences these individuals have encountered in navigating their way through the ranks of the academy. hence, understanding the challenges faced by african-americans in higher education is important because it points to ways in which the academy can create a more just and equitable environment for its members. a frontline narrative: here the journey began i remember when i was first asked to teach sociocultural studies in education , a seminar course addressing issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other types of differences in education. this course focused on examining and deconstructing media images with particular focus on how different ethnic groups were portrayed in the media. i was informed that i would be teaching this class less than an hour before it began, which meant i did not have any preparation time. a syllabus was out of the question. prior to this assignment, i had wondered what it would be like teaching this course. i had heard many stories about the resistance that took place in the classroom between the students and the teaching associates. these reflections were from both men and women of color who were either united states nationals or students from abroad. admittedly, i was forewarned about this phenomenon of resistance that took place when teaching this particular class. my own concerns centered on several questions: (a) what made this such a difficult course for some of the teaching associates? and (b) what would this experience mean for me standing before a class comprised of a majority of european-american students? by all accounts, i had every reason to ponder these questions. as i learned during my first semester teaching, there were a number of variables that were part of the equation. while i was teaching, this phenomenon of "strange happenings" became apparent to me, and i began to understand why other doctoral students had complaints. what became apparent is (a) students questioned my authority as an african-american woman; (b) students assumed a sense of entitlement because of their race; and (c) students assumed a sense of power and entitlement because of their parents' wealth. for example, many students felt that since their parents were paying for their education, it was their prerogative, rather than that of the instructor, to determine how the course should be structured. "determining what the course should be" had to do with the students' resistance in talking about issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other types of difference. the most difficult topic for students, however, had to do with discussing the subject of race and race ideology. dealing with and discussing issues of race for many white students becomes a highly charged emotional experience resulting in resistance, misunderstanding, rage, and feelings of inefficacy (tatum, 1994). at certain points during classroom discussion, as i raised questions regarding related text on the subject of race, i would find myself examining blank stares on the students' faces and long moments of silence. clearly, it was uncomfortable for many students who never had to really think about issues of race and their white privilege. as noted by peggy mcintosh (1998), white privilege is an invisible package of unearned assets where privilege is assumed and taken for granted by the dominant culture in american society. mcintosh parallels white privilege with men's reluctance to acknowledge male privilege. consequently, we must consciously address practices of entitlement when we see them perpetuated upon women of color and traditionally marginalized groups. in part, students' discomfort in discussing their ideas on race and race ideology was related to their lack of knowledge about different groups of people, stereotypes portrayed in the media, and lack of interaction with ethnically diverse groups of people in their schools and communities. students felt vulnerable as a result of exposing themselves, their discomfort, and their uncertainty before me, an african-american woman. initially, i found their lack of knowledge about racial issues surprising. the more i engaged in discussions with students and reflected on the teaching-learning experience, i began to understand that most of the students had lived in very sheltered, isolated worlds with limited, if any, experiences with diverse groups of people. this had a critical impact on the way they viewed the world around them. in many ways, their sheltered experiences affirmed to them that the only thing that was important in life was who they were, to the point of placing and seeing different groups of people as being invisible. the shroud of others' "invisibility" was shattered when i walked into the classroom and stood before students clothed in my brown skin; clearly, i did not blend into the manila walls that stood behind me. nor was i silenced in the presence of their dominance. by the end of the semester, many students admitted that i was their first african-american teacher. as i reflected upon my day-to-day experiences in the classroom, i realized that these students needed to have this educational and cultural experience with me, which strengthened my will, desire, and courage to teach, despite some of the challenges i faced. on the frontline: a few unfortunate events scenario one during one of my class discussions, we discussed mcintosh's (1998) article on "white privilege and male privilege." this discussion was quite unsettling for many students. students' lack of knowledge and inept awareness of their "white privilege" became clear to me when a white female stated to the class after reading the article, "i can do all of this! what's the point?" the student's shrill in her voice, as if it was a waste of time reading the article, and the disgusted look on her face indicated to me that she did not understand the author's point. after hearing this statement, i knew it was going to be a long day. when talking about race, education, and culture, many of the students acknowledged that they had never had a person of color as a teacher in their k-12 educational experience, and i was the first person of color as their college instructor. many of them acknowledged that there were only "white" students who lived in their communities and attended their schools while growing up. although there was some discomfort, students began to think more critically about the ways in which they had been enculturated, and their belief that certain media images and stereotypes were the "truth." as i continued to engage with this student population, the "real" critical thinking began as we began to dispel the myths and stereotypes they had learned about different cultural groups, and the importance of understanding how this thinking marginalized individuals and groups of people. since the majority of the students in this class were education majors, i was determined to keep "pushing the envelope" to get students to think more critically about the different types of children they might encounter in their future classrooms, and how their biases and stereotypes could have a negative impact upon these children's lives if they were not aware of them. one of the main ideas i conveyed in this class regarding differences is that children do not determine their race, class, learning ability, or economic status when they are born, and all children deserve to have a fair chance in the educational process. initially, there were days when students' limited worldviews became frightening, as i thought deeply about who would be teaching our children and future generations. yet, there were other days when i was very hopeful as some students were willing to push themselves beyond their comfort zone and think about certain ideas more critically without becoming defensive or resistant. i am glad i maintained the sense of hope and the courage to teach; especially since our vastly changing global marketplace is creating a sense of urgency for our students (and americans) to learn, know, understand, and embrace cultural differences in the classroom and in the workplace, if we are to remain a country known as a global leader. scenario two on another occasion, i was challenged by a white female when i asked her to see me after class with her teammate. these two students had received a failing grade on their paper. i wanted to talk with them to provide an opportunity to revise the paper and resubmit. as i spoke with the two female students after class, i noticed several other students waiting to see me. i asked the two females to schedule an appointment to meet privately in my office to discuss what went wrong. before i could finish my sentence, one student indignantly exclaimed, "i want to talk about it now!" after hearing her indignant tone of voice, i had to step back and ask myself, "what is really going on here?" when i told her we needed to meet privately, she insisted that the only time she could talk about the assignment was right then. therefore, i asked her teammate if she could meet with me, and we set up an appointment. it was quite obvious to me that the female student who indignantly told me that she did not have any other time available forgot who was the student and who was the instructor. that day, i walked away thinking, "if an instructor was going to allow me an opportunity to resubmit an assignment, i would make myself available to find out what i needed to do to achieve a better grade." scenario three another incident occurred with a white male student who insisted that he deserved a higher grade than he had received in my class. this student missed several classes, he was always late, there was very little class participation, and he did not actively participate with his group members on their final project. according to his reasoning, he was supposed to receive an "a" in my class. this student came to me a week before the end of the semester to inform me that he was an engineering student and he needed an "a" in my class. i think he thought his meeting with me would be enough to tell me what grade to give him regardless of his performance. his performance in class showed differently; therefore, he did not receive an "a." he insisted to "press the issue" by having his parents call the chair of the department. after rounds of discussions and, finally, a three-way conversation with his mother on the phone (initially, i did not know she was on the phone), he admitted that he had not done his part to achieve the "a." based on the syllabus criteria, this student should have failed the class due to his lack of attendance and participation, which were a part of the grading process. as a doctoral student, still holding onto my sense of hope and courage to teach, i felt it was difficult for me to fail any student. in reflecting on this experience, i realize that my sensitivity in wanting all students to succeed made it difficult for me to fail a student. afterward, i had conversations with other faculty of color and learned that we held similar beliefs on how difficult it is to fail a student. i wonder why this is the case when the student has actually failed himor herself by not doing the work. consciously reflecting upon the situation made me ask myself, "what other things could i have done to help the student become more successful?" experiences like these expose our own vulnerabilities and require us to closely examine how we model the changes we wish to see in our students. beyond the frontline: having the courage to teach and negotiating spaces in asking myself, "how have i been able to negotiate these spaces of difference and maintain my sense of being, along with my sense of sanity in teaching a course like this ?" i would like to suggest that it has been through my spirituality, which has served as a form of empowering resistance. this type of resistance recognizes the obstacles, challenges, and contestations of everyday life; thus, focusing on liberating the situation by moving through or over the obstacle, and ultimately focusing on succeeding-the victory (garner, 2004). i came to realize that despite topics that were most uncomfortable for the students, i had to find a way to broach the subject without making them feel intimidated or defensive, and this was not an easy task. it was critical for me to find a way to help students understand the importance of why we needed to talk about these ideas in a meaningful way, and how ultimately the way we view the world around us and within our communities has a direct impact on who we are or would become. bringing to bear a critical pedagogy, i entered the classroom with a need to build community in order to create a climate of openness and intellectual rigor. i informed my students that we were all responsible in the teaching/learning process, and i served as the classroom facilitator (not the bearer of all knowledge) because we all could teach and learn from each other in our community. taking this stance was risky, but i felt it was important to help students understand their level of responsibility in our community and in the teaching-learning process. this level of engagement was necessary because it allowed me to be a co-teacher and a co-learner, to talk the talk and to walk the walk. like bell hooks (1994) in teaching to transgress , i believe that a sense of community creates a sense that there is a shared commitment and a common good that binds us. hooks notes that we all have a desire to learn and to receive knowledge that enhances our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world. one way to bring together community in the classroom is to recognize the value of each student's voice, and to develop a sense of respect for our various opinions when discussing very difficult issues. after teaching this course several times, i developed a process for asking all students, "what does community mean to you?" then, i asked each student to give me a word to describe community. each word had to be different. by the time we finished the list, there were 30-40 words describing community, and within this list of words respect appeared consistently. after examining the list, students were asked to commit to the standards of our community. today, i still use this exercise, and i create the "community" list the first day of class. as i have encountered resistance and tension in the classroom, it has required me to lean on my spiritual discernment and ask myself, "what is really going on, and what is causing the resistance at the time?" spiritual discernment means saying two words in the midst of the discussion when things go awry, and those two words i say silently are "lord help!" spiritual discernment for me can be described as palmer (1999) offers in leading from within: the great insight of our spiritual traditions is that we co-create the world that we live in and through complex interaction of spirit and matter, a complex interaction of what is inside of us and what is "out there." the insight of our spiritual traditions is not to deny the reality of the outer world, in part, by projecting our spirit on it-for better or worse. (p. 3) my spiritual discernment helps me to focus on how i project my spirit onto others. in projecting my spirit on the situation, especially challenging situations in the classroom, i think of myself as remaining positive and projecting a spirit of enthusiasm and encouragement in teaching and working with students. prior to pursuing my doctorate, i was a counselor at a small university in the northeast, which prepared me for dealing with some of the difficult situations i encountered. there were times when i had to revert to the counseling mode to determine the issue at hand. doing so helped me to reflect and read the situation better. in another sense, i am disposed to understanding the tensions in the classroom as a way to push students to thinking and responding on a deeper level. though students may become uncomfortable, i think it is a part of the challenge to intellectually engage them in a way that would be different from their traditional way of learning and thinking about the world. what then occurs becomes a paradoxical way of teaching and learning. palmer (1998) discusses paradox in the courage to teach, by stating, good teachers.find their way through such minefields every day by allowing the tension itself to pull them open to a larger and larger love.a love that resolves.these dilemmas by looking past the tension within ourselves toward the best interest of the student.. (p. 84) the paradox of the love with the tension taking place, as palmer (1998) suggests, is in the suffering, we will not be able to teach in the power of the paradox until we are willing to suffer the tension of opposites, until we understand that such suffering is neither to be avoided nor merely to be survived but must be actively embraced for the way it expands our own hearts..we cannot teach our students at the deepest levels when we are unable to bear the suffering that opens into those levels. by holding the tension of opposites, we hold the gateway to inquiry open, inviting students into a territory in which we all can learn. (p.85) ultimately, having the courage to teach increases our vulnerability as teachers, as we expect students to increase their vulnerability by pushing them to deeper levels of thinking and critically engaging in the teaching-learning process. understanding the cultural codes of students has served as another critical factor in the teaching-learning process. two important questions i often reflected upon in getting to know my students include (a) what do i need to know about my students that i do not already know? and (b) what do they need to know about me? something as simple as the way i greeted students when entering the classroom had a significant impact on the way we connected. for example, i used to walk into the classroom and say, "good afternoon," and the students would barely open their mouths until i said "good afternoon" a second time. at the beginning of each semester, i found myself explaining to students that it was important for me culturally, socially, personally, and professionally to greet my students and to have a reciprocal response. after having conversations with some of the students, i learned that they were not used to their instructors greeting them at the beginning of the class. instead, these students were used to their instructors walking into the classroom and beginning the lecture without a greeting. while walking to class one day, i decided to try something different. i walked in the classroom and said, "how ya'll doing?" and just about everyone in the class responded like a chorus. with a smile on my face and eyebrows raised, i said, "wow!" i explained to the students that "how ya'll doing?" was not my usual way of speaking; however, i noticed that a lot of people in the midwest used this terminology and i decided to try it to see what type of response i would receive. since the response was positive, as the students agreed they liked "how, ya'll doing?" versus my "good afternoon" greeting, i decided to keep the "how ya'll doing?" on the one hand, i should have known that the preferred greeting would be more to the liking of these students because many of them were from rural communities surrounded by cornfields and farmland, and "how ya'll doing" was common to their vernacular. i learned that this language was more familiar than what i knew or understood. on the other hand, my "good afternoon" symbolized characteristics i valued about myself. yet, i learned that the less formal greeting helped to change the classroom culture and set the tone for students to feel more comfortable in talking about their own life experiences as it related to educational issues. if this change meant it would deepen the level of thinking and communications among students, the new greeting was worth it. as an african-american woman, standing on the frontline has not been an easy task; however, i decided that the mere fact that i was given the responsibility of being in the classroom meant that i was supposed to be there, and i was determined to have an impact on changing students' attitudes and behaviors toward those who were different from themselves. as a woman and a person of color, one must have a strong sense of self when teaching at majority institutions. collins (2000) notes that black women's self-definition speaks to their power by rejecting externally defined and controlling images of black womanhood. "the emphasis that black feminist thinkers have placed on respect illustrates the significance of self-valuation" (p. 115). in a culture where people do not feel obligated to respect african-american women, we have admonished each other to have self-respect and to demand the respect of others (collins, 2000). this same respect is necessary when dealing with resistance in the classroom. one must maintain a high level of respect in having the courage to teach, the courage to challenge the status quo, and the courage to push students to a new level of thinking beyond the familiar "banking system of education" as described by paulo freire (1993). like palmer (1998, 1999) and hooks (1994), it is the teaching from the heart and soul that pushes students and the learning process to a much deeper level. the challenges, contradictions, and forms of resistance may always be in the classroom. it is when we become clear about our purpose that we have the courage to teach and to challenge ourselves in the process, to make a difference in the lives of students who sorely need the experience. references belenky, m. f., clinchy, b. m., goldberger, n. r., & tarule, j. m. 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(1993). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. fries-britt, s., & kelly, b. t. (2005). retaining each other: narratives of two african-american women in the academy. the urban review, 37 (3), 221-242 . garner, r. (2004). contesting the terrain of the ivory tower: spiritual leadership of african-american women in the academy . new york: routledge. geertz, c. (1995). after the fact: two countries, four decades, one anthropologist . cambridge, ma: harvard university press. hooks, b. (1994). teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. new york: routledge. mcintosh, p. (1998). white privilege and male privilege: a personal account of coming to see correspondences through work on women's studies. in k. rousmaniere & k. knight-abowitz, readings in sociocultural studies in education (4th ed., 91-99). new york: the mcgraw-hill companies, inc. munro, p. (1998). subject to fiction: women teachers' life history narratives and the cultural politics of resistance. philadelphia: open university press. palmer, p. (1998). the courage to teach: exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life. san francisco: jossey-bass. palmer, p. (1999). leading from within: reflections on spirituality and leadership. washington, dc: servant leadership press. rassool, n. (1995). black women as "other" in the academy. in l. morley & v. walsh (eds.), feminist academics: creative agents for change (p. 22). bristol, pa: taylor & francis. tatum, b. d. (1994). teaching white students about racism: the search for white allies and the restoration of hope. teachers college record , 95. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or 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glass ceiling cracks: features of u.s. organizations where women rise to the top dawn harris & peter norlander dawn harris: professor emerita, loyola university chicago, dharri1@luc.edu peter norlander: associate professor, loyola university chicago, pnorlander@luc.edu accepted february 6, 2023 firm-level efforts to increase diversity are argued to be an important means of advancing women in the executive ranks of corporations. to assess these efforts, longitudinal research is needed on women executives to test the hypothesis that firm-level efforts can succeed over long periods of time. tracking a subset of firms with 20 percent or greater representation of women in top executive roles in the year 2000, we report that these firms continue to have a higher than average percentage of women in top executive roles in 2015. gaps in the pipeline, even at these best practice firms, suggest more needs to be done to ensure a steady flow of future women leaders. executives at these best practice firms report that sponsorship from top leadership has been key to their high levels of women in senior roles. we discuss the implications of these findings for the progress of women in the pipeline and argue that firm-level commitments to diversity by top corporate leaders are essential for further progress. keywords:women executives, best practices, longitudinal analysis only fifty-five, or 5.5% of ceos in fortune 1000 companies were women in the fiscal year ending january 31, 2016, and at current rates of progress, it will take perhaps 100 years for top levels of large u.s. companies to reach gender parity (fortune, 2016; mckinsey, 2016). along with individual and governmental efforts to change the trajectory, firm-level action to address an inadequate pipeline of women at higher levels of corporations is a crucial pathway to gender parity (powell, 1999). research at the firm level has made promising advances in the last decade. first, firm-level characteristics can be associated with the presence of a female ceo, including firm sector, size, stability and size (brady et al., 2011). it is also possible to study below the ceo level and to examine levels of representation in top management teams (helfat, harris & wolfson, 2006, hereafter hhw). levels of gender representation have been linked to different firm-level outcomes. for example, firms with greater representation of women on top management teams have enhanced firm reputations, experience better performance in innovative fields, and better motivate women in middle management (bass, 2019; dezsö & ross, 2012; bear, rahman, & post, 2010; miller & triana, 2009). this may be due to the role of diversity in frequency of strategic change (wu et al., 2019). while these advances in knowledge have been made using different samples of large u.s. firms, there has been relatively little long-run tracking of firms to see whether women routinely rise to the top at some firms. in this paper, we address that question and two other critically related matters: first, are some firms, which we deem “best practice” firms, superior to other firms with regards to gender representation in their top executive pipeline for long periods of time? if so, how are such best practice firms different from other firms? finally, what can be learned from best practices at these firms? we study the gender pipeline at “best practice” firms-20% or more women in top executive rolesand track their change from 2000 to 2015 and demonstrate first that these firms are not a statistical fluke. we present evidence showing that these firms are doing something different than most firms that enables them to maintain an edge in the placement of top women executives over other firms. second, we provide a detailed report on how best practice firms are different. we find that men and women in best practice firms have generally similar age and tenure profiles, which is not the case at comparison firms. we also find that gaps in the pipeline, even at best practice firms, suggest more needs to be done to ensure a steady flow of future leaders. finally, we question the top executives at best practice firms, asking how they achieved the superior gender balance at the executive level. we find that executive sponsorship matters immensely – across the companies we studied, board-level, founder, or ceo backing for gender parity in executive roles was in every case described as the reason for greater diversity. these findings carry theoretical and practical implications for the growing literature on the gender representation gap. just as female representation on boards is associated with greater 24 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 likelihood of appointing a woman ceo (elsaid & ursel, 2011), this research suggests that top-level support for gender parity is essential at ranks below the ceo. this study also follows a thread raised in research that takes an individual focus on how women advance. when asking women directors about how they advanced (e.g., vinnicombe & singh, 2003) or how they managed work-family tensions (ezzedeen & ritchey, 2009), studies report that individual women’s perceived barriers are often related to broader organizational policy or cultural barriers. thus, this study adds to the calls for a greater focus on changes needed at the firm-level to enhance women’s representation. this paper is organized as follows. we first present the motivation for this study – the reasons why firms should encourage diversity, and major reasons why firms are not more diverse. we then consider how the study of specific best practice firms can address the gender representation gap. we discuss our empirical strategy for studying these firms and present an analysis of the 1,000 largest u.s. firms, a detailed comparison between best practice and matched firms, and the results of our survey with executives. we conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for theory, for future research, and for proposals to address the gender representation gap. the advantages of diversity calls for companies to accelerate efforts to diversify their top management teams often cite, and many firms often cite, the likely benefit firms will receive from diversity. as an executive of a fortune 1000 firm with one of the highest percentages of women in executive leadership told us: “there’s just a ton of benefits. you’re going to run better than competing companies.” benefits of diversity cited by the executive include a company largely free from lawsuits related to gender harassment, as well as a workforce freer from bullying and harassment, a more motivated workforce, and an easier job recruiting top talent. diversity is also cited as an attractor, and companies that are not diverse may lose key talent. as another fortune 1000 executive shared, “[women] are increasingly more selective when choosing the companies they work for — a company with a culture that supports women will attract more women.” research supports the view that diversity can bring a competitive advantage. greater diversity among top management teams can increase the number of perspectives available to solve problems, and enable better adaptation to changing environments (certo, lester, dalton, & dalton, 2006; hambrick & mason, 1984). women bring unique values and experience, which can improve firm strategy when incorporated into decision-making (nielsen & huse 2010). racial and gender diversity may also enhance governance through the advancement of individuals who are likely to be more independent of management (colaco, myers, & nitkin, 2009). at the ground-floor level, mckay, avery, & morris (2008) found that stores with a climate favorable to diversity experience large increases in sales per hour. increased diversity climate perceptions are also correlated with a decrease in turnover intentions (mckay, avery, tonidandel, morris, hernandez, & hebl, 2007). the academic literature has highlighted the importance of diversity and the reasons for a lack of gender parity (brett & stroh, 1999). if many good reasons exist for diversity, cited by both leading firms and academic research, given these advantages to greater diversity, why haven’t women made more progress toward the apex of firms? reasons for the lack of diversity three major explanations for why diversity continues to be lacking continue to shape the conversation (powell, 1999). person-centered explanations suggest that women select out of competing for top positions. one aspect of the discussion at top executive levels encourages women to “lean in” more, compete, challenge stereotypes, and make more choices to advance their careers (sandberg, 2013). academic research has found gender parity outcomes can be attributed to differences, for example, in negotiation style (small, gelfand, babcock, & gettman, 2007), or work-life balance expectations (schweitzer, ng, lyons, & kuron, 2011). women are less likely to negotiate job offers (greig, 2008), and are also less likely than men to apply for external executive positions if they have been rejected in the past (brands & fernandez-mateo, 2016). fewer women may remain in the pipeline due to factors such as work and family tradeoffs. since women spend more time on work in the home (smith, smith, & verner, 2013), they may opt out of top management positions that require a significant commitment of time. managerial and family sexism, even when “benevolent,” may also limit women’s ambitions (hideg & shen, 2019). women may also put less inherent value on money or position. if women perceive their abilities differently (correll, 2004) or choose to apply for lower status jobs (fernandez & mors, 2008), then there might be limited consideration of these women for senior executive positions. these person or individual centered explanations suggest that many women still find that workplace practices limit their ability to manage family and work responsibilities (mooney & ryan, 2009). by contrast, social-system centered explanations focus on the barriers that women face: discrimination and harassment based upon sex, for example. while one in four women report being harassed at work, six in ten women report experiencing gender harassment such as hostile behavior due to their gender (feldbum and lipnic, 2016: 9). for women to advance, government and business leadership is necessary to end such systemic barriers. not only is sex discrimination illegal; harassment also costs firms in decreased productivity, reputational damage, and increased turnover (ibid: 17). such societal or system-based explanations, however, often fail to identify the party or parties responsible for gender inequities, and by casting a wide net, fail to offer specifically targeted recommendations that individuals or firms can take. situation specific, or firm level, explanations of the gender imbalance focus on the organizational circumstances of women 25 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 at specific firms that affect differential hiring and promotion patterns for women and men. as the label suggests, “situation specific” causes of the gender representation gap include a large number of causes that are difficult to tie together. for example, firms that implement diversity programs often fail to achieve their goals because of a top-down control mindset (kalev, dobbin, & kelly, 2006; dobbin & kalev, 2016). firms with biases in recruitment and promotion (correll, 2001; cuddy, glick & beninger, 2011) may benefit from training on unconscious bias. court mandated oversight can increase organizational accountability through specific recruitment and monitoring programs (hirsh & cha, 2016), and having a high-level executive who signs the eeo-1 report is associated with increases in women’s representation in management (graham, belliveau, & hotchkiss, 2017). despite knowing that circumstances at some firms favor women more than other firms, more can be learned about why some firms outperform others, and whether those firms that do outperform can do so over a long period of time. in the following section, we outline why it is necessary to study firms that do outperform others. why study best practice firms? while interest in the pipeline of women in top management has been strong, the conversation has shifted since the turn of the century. a recent mckinsey/lean in survey (2016: 20-24) suggests top level commitment to gender diversity is increasingly strong, as 62% of senior leaders say that gender diversity is a personal priority and 44% of companies indicate that they set pipeline targets for gender diversity. however, even at companies with a stated commitment to diversity, there are doubts about how committed organizations are to execute a gender pipeline strategy. for example, one reason that women and men are not promoted at the same rates is access to networks: high potential women are mentored more but have less access to ceo and senior executive mentors than men, and are less likely to be promoted (ibarra, carter, & silva, 2010). according to the mckinsey/lean in data (2016: 20-24), while 62% of leaders say gender diversity is a personal priority, only 32% of employees say managers are held accountable, and only 9% say that managers are recognized for progress on gender diversity. mckinsey (2016: 18) reports that while “commitment to gender diversity is at an all-time high, companies don’t consistently put their commitment into practice, and many employees are not on board.” in the context of gender diversity on boards, huber and o’rourke (2017) highlight how “some progressive companies are taking the lead” and suggest that “their experiences are salutary for those that are lagging behind and want to better understand how to make change happen.” we identify and track a subset of companies that had the highest percentage of women in executive leadership at the dawn of the 21st century. using comprehensive data from the 1000 largest firms in the u.s. in 2000, hhw provided the first fine-grained analysis of gender representation at the top executive ranks of the largest publicly traded u.s. firms. hhw’s comprehensive dataset from 2000 was used to estimate that only 6% of women would be ceos in 2016. according to the hhw data from 2000, only 64 firms had women in 20% or more of their top executive roles – given acquisitions and changes in ownership, only 30 of those companies remain intact in the fortune 1000 in 2015. we conduct a fine-grained analysis of these 30 “best practice” companies using 2015 data, and a matched comparison sample. we additionally perform a time-series data analysis with large data, and an open-ended survey of top executives to study whether, and then how, these firms stand apart from their peers. research questions we investigate three related questions: first, are some firms, which we deem “best practice” firms, superior to other firms with regards to gender representation in their top executive pipeline for long periods of time? best practice firms from an earlier time period are important to revisit given the concern surrounding the commitment to gender representation. one hypothesis is that best practice firms might simply be “lucky”; whether they maintain their higher levels of representation of women in their top management teams over long periods is an important empirical question to identify whether or not some firms really manage diversity better. it is possible that companies that once led the way have faltered since then, and these firms are important to study in order to accurately understand the progress and possible limitations to future advancement of women in the pipeline to the ceo role. although small in number, changes in the representation of women in the firms that were leading in 2000 can suggest, as representation continues to slowly increase on average, whether progress at the exceptional firms is assured or is vulnerable to setbacks. second, we ask how, if best practices firms are different, such firms are different from other firms with respect to the advancement of women in top management teams? differences in tenure, background, and seniority level in the corporation could mean that the path for women to advance is different than the path for men. we make detailed comparisons between the men and women in the top management teams of both best practice and non-best practice firms. finally, we seek to assess what can be learned from best practices at these firms? among the firms that have better than average representation of women, we collect qualitative data to learn more about how they explain their success in recruiting and maintaining a high number of women in top management. methods the database samples to identify best practices for those organizations interested in increasing gender diversity, we study top management teams at best practice firms. top management teams refer to the individuals just below the ceo who are responsible for decisions throughout the firm and are responsible and influential for setting firm strategy and performance (finkelstein & hambrick, 1996). these top executives have a reasonable likelihood of advancing to the ceo role. the significance of 26 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 women achieving the ceo position is important and supported by research demonstrating that ceos have a significant real impact upon firm performance, and a symbolic impact for the outside world (hambrick & mason, 1984; hayward, rindova, & pollock, 2004). datasets choosing best practice firms to study requires a definition and a baseline against which to benchmark; the present study draws a sharp cutoff, focusing only on firms from the year 2000 that had 20% or more women in the top management teams, according to hhw (2006). the initial dataset consisted of 64 companies but was reduced to 30 due to acquisitions, private ownership, or firms that ceased to exist. information was hand-coded from 277 short biographies of every individual in the list of executive officers reported in the annual 10-k report to the securities and exchange commission or in proxy statements for 2015. hand-coding ensures accuracy and completeness. focusing on a small number of top executives at best practice firms has advantages and limitations. first, we can ensure data integrity and conclusion accuracy by hand-coding data from these firms. second, while a single point in time analysis can find whether firms with higher levels of women in executive roles adopt specific programs, prior research has not examined longer run historical data to test whether best practice firms can sustain their high levels of representation. thus, our “best practices” subset of 2000 data is a good sample to use as a benchmark to test whether or not organizational practices matter. the limitation of examining best practice firms in isolation, however, is that this dataset is unable to speak to what is happening at other firms. for this reason, we construct two datasets. first, we construct a “big” dataset of executives of the one thousand largest publicly traded u.s. firms using ward’s business directory, which provides limited biographical data on 99,799 top executives of large firms, including name and job title, for years 2010-2017. we classify each executive’s gender by comparing the first names of these executives with the identified gender on the first names of all persons born in and issued social security cards in the u.s. from 1932-2012. we can thus demonstrate what has occurred in the past at the population level for large firms in terms of gender representation at executive levels. ward’s data on the largest firms also enables comparison over multiple years. ward’s data also has limitations. there are unwanted additions and omissions in the dataset. ward’s compiles executive names from filings with the securities and exchange commission (sec), corporate annual reports, media reports, and from company reported data. the best practice and matched comparison firms (more below) that we analyze in detail for 2015, and that hhw (2006) analyzed for 2000, by contrast, are hand-coded from sec filings to ensure accuracy. ward’s data does not include executive age or tenure. to complement our best-practices sample and address certain limitations in the ward’s data, we construct a second dataset, a hand-coded matched dataset of 307 top executives at 30 matched comparison firms to enable us to make detailed projections for non-best practice firms. projections of gender representation for the future rely on detailed information about tenure and role. the 2015 matched comparison dataset was created by matching each of the 30 best practice firms to a similar size firm from 2000. we used a systematic process to identify the nearest non-best practice firm in terms of 2000 revenue: for every best practice firm, its closest neighbor in terms of revenue was considered for inclusion in the matched comparison dataset. both the best practice and the matched comparison firm must have existed in both 2000 and 2015. as with the best practice sample, we removed from consideration firms that no longer existed, whether due to private ownership or acquisitions. the parent industry classification of the best practice firms and the matched comparison firms are similar in terms of industry composition. coding data in both the best practice and matched comparison practice group, several variables were hand coded to compare the jobs and career patterns of women versus men. to determine the relative authority and status of top executive women in each best practice firm, the relative rank within each top executive hierarchy was hand-coded for each female and male executive (see hhw, 2006). to gauge whether firms used early promotion and outside hiring more often for women than for men, the number of years in his or her current position and the number of years worked at the company was also coded. other data was also collected on the age of the executive, industry, and number of corporate officers reported by each company. hand-coded data ensures that only executives that companies listed in their official reports are recorded which prevents over or under-reporting of the number of women executives by firms. results are best practice firms different from other firms? we first compare best practice firms with matched comparison firms and the 1,000 largest publicly-traded u.s. firms using the ward’s data. in figure 1, we demonstrate that the best practice firms have over 25% women in each year from 2010-2017, while the top executive ranks of matched comparison firms and all firms remain below 20% women. we can see that best practice firms are significantly different from the other firms in every year: they do outperform other firms on gender representation. we note that the universe of large firms is not significantly different from the matched comparison firms in terms of gender representation levels, but that the best practice firms consistently have a greater percentage of women in top executive roles. while progress for women has occurred gradually at the 1,000 largest firms, best practice firms hold a lead. 27 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 we now switch to the more precise hand-coded best practice data, and find again that best practice firms outperform matched comparison firms: contrasting the 57% of firms with at least one woman in the best practice sample to the 13% in the matched sample, we reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference in the proportion of women in executive roles in these two types of firms χ^2(1,n=60)=12.55, p<.01). sixty-seven percent of matched firms have one woman or zero women, compared to 23% of best practice firms χ^2(1,n=60)=11.54, p<.01). all of the matched firms have at least four executives who are men. we also find that the progress of women at best practice firms is overall stagnant in 2015 compared to their levels in 2000. among best practice firms in 2000, 77% of executives were men. for these same firms in 2015, 71% were men. the change from 2000-2015 was not statistically significant χ^2(1,n=60)=.28, p=.60). we find that while female representation in best practice firms has been overall stable, a significant number of firms have dropped out of “best practice” status, while others have increased their representation of women. according to the selection criteria, one hundred percent of best practice firms had more than 20% women in 2000. by 2015, significantly fewer, 76 percent, of these firms had more than 20% of women χ^2(1,n=60)=8.05, p<.01). thus, there is some evidence of reversion toward the mean – a little less than a quarter of companies in the best practice sample (23 percent) had one woman or no women executives, as indicated in table 1. even at best practice firms, there is a distance to be traveled for real gender parity. how are best practice firms different? women at best practice firms had greater than “token” status. women may choose not to accept higher roles when they would be the lone woman on a corporate board, for example (rowley, lee & lan, 2015). when we compare the proportion of women in firms to the proportion of men in best practice firms in 2015, we find that the proportion of firms with at least three women (57%) is significantly less than the proportion of firms with at least three men (100%) in the top executive levels χ^2(1,n=60)=16.16, p<.01). hhw found that in 2000, the higher the total number of executives at a firm, the lower the percent of women who are executives, indicating an l-shaped relationship. this suggested that many women were “tokens” – the lone woman executive among an otherwise entirely male executive team. we present data in figure 2 indicating a positive relationship at best practice firms between the number of executives and the percent of women in executive roles. this suggests that best practice firms continue to increase their women executive ranks as their executive teams grow larger, and don’t pigeonhole or restrict women to token positions. above, we described how some best practice firms have increased their representation of women. in 2015, seventeen percent of best practice firms had three women of executive rank, and another twenty-seven percent of the sample had more than three executive women. this can be contrasted with 7.22% of firms in 2000 with three or more women, representing a significant increase in the number of best practice firms with three or more women executives χ^2(1,n=60)=10.49, p<.01). in 2000, 29% of best practice firms had only one woman executive, compared to 20% in 2015, a non-significant difference 28 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 χ^2(1,n=60)=.65, p=.42). however, in 2000, 52% of best practice firms had more than one woman, compared to 77% in 2015, a significant improvement χ^2(1,n=60)=4.03, p=.04). in summary, these data show that about one quarter of the best practice firms had one woman or no women executives. the matched comparison group fared worse: 67% of firms had one woman or no women executives. however, as seen in table 1, at 43% of best practice firms, women were well beyond token status, with more than 2 women executives. in these best practice firms, women executives on average had similar ages and tenure with men. job positions we found that women at best practice firms are not relegated to token status and this is supported by a closer examination of the job positions that women held. the job positions data provided information on whether women or men held more influential positions. we investigated where women rank relative to men in the top executive hierarchy. the total number of executives and the number of women and men at each level of the executive hierarchy are reported in table 2. a rank of 1 was the highest possible within-company level in the hierarchy and a 6 was the lowest rank. for example, a chief executive officer would be coded level 1, while a chief operating officer would be coded level 2, and so on (more description of this coding scheme is included in hhw (2006)). at the top of the hierarchy in best practice firms, level 1, only 15 percent (5 out of 33) of executives were women. at level 2, 13 percent (3 out of 23) were women second-in-command executives. at level 3, 11 percent are women. below level 3, the number of women represented rose dramatically, 24 percent at level 4, 35.5 percent at level 5, and 52% at level 6. in matched comparison companies, only 6% of the highest-level top executives are women, and there are zero women at the second-highest level. the highest percentage of women is at level 6, where 19% of executives are women. the majority of women held positions below levels 1 and 2 in 2015. levels 1 and 2 combined have 20 percent of the total number of women and 37 percent of men. sixty-three percent of women had attained either level 3 or 4 in the hierarchy. in comparison, for all firms in 2000, women in levels 1 and 2 were only 1.7% of the total number of women, compared to 16.75% of men. in levels 3 and 4 combined, the women were well represented with 64 percent and the men with 54 percent. thus, women were better represented in levels 1 and 2 at the best practice firms and not relegated to token status. what are the best practices at best practice firms? we received substantive engagement from at least one representative at 7 of the 30 companies. when asked why their firm had more than 20% women in 2000, a very consistent pattern emerged from senior executives at fortune 1000 best practices firms. executive sponsorship was responsible for the advancement of women: “our ceo was committed to improving gender representation in our senior ranks,” said one executive. “ceo had a laser focus on ensuring opportunities for women in leadership roles.” “[founder] valued diversity before anyone else was talking about it it is his legacy.” “strong executive leadership from female ceos and many female executives that have been part of [company] culture.” “the company made a concerted effort to recruit women in 2000 to ensure that our workforce and leadership represent the diversity of our communities.” commitment from what we deem level 1 -the ceo and the founder -mattered a great deal to the executives at best practice firms. this is consistent with the view of scholars who emphasize the symbolic, strategic, and key decision-making role of the ceo (finkelstein & hambrick, 1996; hambrick & mason, 1984; hayward, rindova, & pollock, 2004). when asked to what they attribute current levels of gender representation, executives again reiterated the importance of top level commitment: “top leadership commitment to make progress.” “our ceo's (and general executive) focus is augmented by a strong talent development/succession planning process.” “emphasis on gender diversity from board & top executives.” “strong diversity from the board level down and this is replicated throughout the company and sets the tone for a very strong culture.” “our strategic execution begins with ongoing support from our board of directors and our executive leadership team.” “we started at the top and leveraged executive sponsors as advocates …” 29 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 discussion and conclusion we present several findings about the progress of women at best practice firms based upon our analysis. first, we ask if best practice firms are different? we find that best practice firms identified in 2000 had long-run differences in gender representation some fifteen years later. compared to both the largest 1,000 firms in the u.s., and a matched comparison sample, these best practice firms had significantly more women fifteen years later. we do find some firms in the subset of best practice firms fall backward. in addition, the number of women in each level varies substantially in the pipeline at best practices firms. although the pipeline even at best practice firms does not appear to have a steady flow of women, one level after another, these firms are still outperforming their peers fifteen years later. second, we ask how are best practice firms different? while progress is uneven, we forecast how far firms have to travel to move away from “token” representation, when firms have only one woman, or women isolated in certain roles. hhw report a sharp decline in the percent of women executives as the total number of executives in a firm increases suggesting that many firms with women executives only had “token” representation. in contrast, best practice firms in 2015 demonstrate a positive relationship between the number of executives and the percent of women of executive rank. forty-three percent of best practice firms had three or more women in their top management teams in 2015. in contrast, only 7.22% of fortune 1000 firms had three or more women in 2000 (hhw, 2006), and only 13% of a matched comparison group from 2015 have three or more women. this indicates that many best practice firms have retained and advanced women well beyond “token” status. another novel finding relates to the detailed reporting and forecasting this analysis allows us to make about best practice firms relative to other firms. we find women and men at best practice firms are very similar to one another in terms of age and tenure. in contrast, for all fortune 1000 firms in 2000, women were significantly younger, had less tenure with the same firm, and were in their current position for shorter time periods (hhw, 2006). thus, a sizable share of best practice firms are recruiting and promoting women and men to the top executive ranks in a similar manner, in contrast to other firms. implications for theory ultimately, the business case for diversity, while strengthened by research in the past decade, is not the only reason to encourage greater representation. the increasing interest in diversity rests not only upon the interests of individuals and firms but may also be in part due to changing “labor-market imperative(s) and societal expectation(s) and value(s)” (kochan et al., 2003). still, many are skeptical about claims that firm’s gender representation policies reflect underlying reality about policy implementation or efficacy. indeed, it is possible that the proliferation of gender initiatives at companies are little more than “myth and ceremony” or normatively or institutionally desired procedures implemented at large firms to better fit the institutional environment (meyer & rowan, 1979). the finding that some firms really are different has significant implications for theories of the gender representation gap. as others have noted, individual behaviors framed as choices are often difficult to change due to constraints at the organizational level (broadbridge, 2010), and are in any event inadequate to address the scale of the unequal representation problem. theorists and analysts of gender diversity must turn attention toward firm-level characteristics that lead to the advancement, or the stalling, of women’s careers. absent the evidence we present here, academics are often skeptical of claims that some corporations do better than other companies over long periods of time, or that anything can be learned from “best practice” firms or cases. there is a presumption of futility to corporate action, and a sense that any corporate action will have a perverse impact, as is observed in dobbin & kalev (2016). as that paper (ibid) illustrates, how specific programs are implemented matters greatly. coercive top-down initiatives may fail, while committed top executives will find a way to succeed. drawing from our qualitative and quantitative conclusions, specific types of gender equity programs, and how they are implemented at the firm level, may matter less than what is not being measured in most studies: top executive-level buy-in at the firm. in the below section, some examples are offered regarding how this difficult to observe variable can be measured. as we demonstrate, while even some best practice companies falter, a large number have demonstrated an ability to advance their pipeline well beyond the overall status quo. while this study has contributed an appreciation to the role of firms in achieving greater progress, there is much more to be learned in the future from further study of best practice firms. implications for research our descriptive examination of the data shows that best practice firms really are different when it comes to advancing women into the executive ranks. future researchers can also seek to calculate the data we have analyzed longitudinally, combined with other firm-level data, to present additional predictors of firms that advance women. in addition, as new firms rise and old firms fall, the factors at the firm level that predict whether a company remains a best practice firm or falters will be important to study. our qualitative research shows that top level endorsement matters. while our survey of top executives has limitations, this finding calls for further research. past research suggests that organizational culture remains a formidable challenge that can hold back the implementation of family-friendly policies (lewis, 2010). culture also acts as a mediator of gendered assessments of leadership (roebuck, thomas, & biermeier-hanson, 2018). perhaps top level sponsorship can help cut through the barriers posed by culture, as culture is often transmitted through the actions of the top leadership. while few good measures of level of executive sponsorship exist, one that has been studied (level 30 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 of executive who signs off on eeo report) finds that higher level sponsorship does predict better diversity on the ground (graham, belliveau, & hotchkiss, 2017). other studies have found that the gender of top executives’ first child matter for the gender pay gap (dahl, dezső, & ross, 2012). future qualitative and quantitative researchers should seek better measures and indicators for executive sponsorship. implications for improving gender representativeness ultimately, while our results show promise that some firms can sustain a better than average level of representativeness, there are limits to the firm approach. not enough firms are “best practice” firms. further, the definition of best practice used here – 20% or more women in top executive roles – is too low a bar given a desire for parity. although many companies and individuals do find the business case for diversity compelling, it has not clearly convinced the market for top executives that representation of women and minorities brings a competitive advantage. perhaps one reason is that research has found that increasing gender representation is not always associated with positive results. firms are more likely to have greater representation of women executives in the years following a scandal (brady, isaacs, reeves, burroway, & reynolds, 2011). furthermore, when women are appointed to boards, firms may experience a penalty from investors, even controlling for performance (dobbin & jung, 2010). thus, a key question is how executive sponsorship might help to incorporate women into the firm so that they are not an unusual appearance only at times of scandal, or that they face penalties when appointed. when we surveyed top-level executives about what happened since 2000 at best practice firms, they told us about a variety of organizational practices related to diversity. while most responses detailed achievements, one executive told us that gender representation was stuck: “it is about the same — in some years somewhat higher and some years somewhat lower depending on promotions and attrition.” while two of the executives at these firms described a lack of comparable progress in terms of racial diversity, several of the responses detailed impressive initiatives to enhance gender, ethnic, and racial diversity. for example, one firm response stated that diversity and inclusion “wasn’t top of mind or overtly discussed” in the “mid-90’s.” after investing in two full time employees focused on traditional diversity initiatives and equal employment opportunity compliance and one to focus on diverse recruitment, conversations moved towards talent acquisition and development. “we made a decision that diversity was a strategic advantage and a clear priority which we communicated and reinforced consistently. we continued to focus on leveraging data and learning to elevate the conversations around d&i [diversity and inclusion] with an emphasis on gender representation and gender partnership.” this type of situation-specific response has shown practical ways that committed firms and executives can enhance gender representativeness. research has shown that diversity task forces, voluntary diversity training, targeted recruitment and other programs that engage managers in diversity management can increase the representation of women and minorities by upwards of 10% (dobbin & kalev, 2016). continued evaluation research on other initiatives will be worthwhile. in conclusion, the common factor we heard from executives at best practice firms is that executive sponsorship at best practice firms – the personal commitment of the top corporate leadership – had a far-reaching impact. given that societal efforts have focused on legislating gender diversity at the top, and person-centered efforts focus on coaching women to reach the top, while firm level efforts work on convincing the top management to pay attention to gender diversity, the different approaches and the empirical evidence we gather point in a common direction. while many factors are unique to individual organizations, and each chief 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(2019). top management team surface-level diversity, strategic change, and long-term firm performance: a mediated model investigation. journal of leadership & organizational studies, 26(3), 304–318. https://doi.org/10.1177/1548051819848997 33 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2007.00064.x https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functions/organization/our%20insights/women%20in%20the%20workplace%202016/women-in-the-workplace-2016.pdf https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functions/organization/our%20insights/women%20in%20the%20workplace%202016/women-in-the-workplace-2016.pdf https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functions/organization/our%20insights/women%20in%20the%20workplace%202016/women-in-the-workplace-2016.pdf https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functions/organization/our%20insights/women%20in%20the%20workplace%202016/women-in-the-workplace-2016.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2009.00839.x https://doi.org/10.1108/17542410910950877 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8683.2010.00784.x https://doi.org/10.1177/1548051818781815 https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492614546263 https://doi.org/10.7202/1006346ar https://doi.org/0.1037/0022-3514.93.4.600 https://doi.org/10.1177/001979391306600204 https://doi.org/10.1108/17542411111130963 https://doi.org/10.1177/1548051819848997 459 esguerra-escarez final pub ready.docx volume 43, 2024 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop & kristina hall advancing women in leadership vol. 43, 117-134, 2024 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper leading in a room full of boys: a retrospective interpretative phenomenological analysis of the leadership experiences of adolescent women as a minority in a coed senior high school in the philippines socorro perpetual f. esguerra-escarez socorro escarez: lecturer, ateneo de manila university, sescarez@ateneo.edu accepted november 14th, 2024 this study explored the lived experiences of seven student leaders who belonged to the first three cohorts (2018, 2019, and 2020) of female transfer students in a private catholic senior high school in metro manila after years of exclusive basic education. using retrospective ipa, participants were individually interviewed to analyze the meanings they ascribed to their leadership experiences three to six years ago. participants recalled their challenges, coping strategies, as well positive experiences as student leaders. following willig’s steps in ipa, data analysis yielded the following key themes: leadership as (a) unsafe space (for women), (b) a response to systematized injustice, (c) adaptive resilience-building, (d) building social support systems, (e) character-forming, and (f) purpose-driven. these themes were framed by the participants’ experience of gender conflict and discrimination as a minority in their new school environment. implications for research and practice are discussed. keywords: gender, women minority, adolescent women leaders, leadership, leader emergence, leadership development, coeducation, retrospective ipa, philippines the debate whether leaders are born or made has been a topic of discussion for a long time. however, one cannot overemphasize the importance of supportive social structures that enable the development of leaders especially from a young age. past research has suggested that leadership is 30% innate and 70% learned through significant life experiences (picklesimer, 2014). in their “ready, willing and able” conceptual framing of leadership development, keating et al. (2014) identified three key components from among multiple factors that are involved in forming effective leaders: leadership self-efficacy, motivation to lead, and leadership skills. besides these factors, an individual’s unique context is also a crucial component of leadership learning and development. apart from families, schools undoubtedly provide students opportunities for secondary socialization processes that are crucial in navigating later experiences in life as leaders in organizations. the growing emphasis on the impact of student leadership on workplace leadership later in life demands a deeper understanding of youth leadership and the design of evidence-based leadership development programs in schools. i have contributed to the literature on young women’s leader emergence, the role of gender in their leadership experiences and the optimal conditions that provide support for the development of leadership among adolescents. coeducation and gender integration coeducation in schools has been considered beneficial to the cause of gender integration and equality not only in terms of basic access to education but also in terms of leadership opportunities both for young men and women in schools. in the philippines, an early ethnographic study by clark (2001) of two high schools with an even distribution of sexes in an urban and a rural setting revealed that filipino boys and girls enjoy equal opportunity in ascending to leadership roles in schools. however, in examining their narratives of student leadership, both boys and girls were found to consider girls to be more of the political leaders in their schools. apart from excelling in academics and having lower dropout rates compared to boys, girls were thought to be more dependable, responsible and diligent in carrying out individual as well as group tasks. they are almost always voted as class leaders because of these traits. talon et al. (2020) in their phenomenological study on gender integration in a filipino public high school describes teachers’ efforts at gender mainstreaming in their highly contextualized curriculum by using and promoting localized and inclusive language and practices, thereby strengthening the school’s gender responsiveness in addressing discrimination in the classroom. this has helped minimize the gender gap in their school with such practices that promote gender equity and equal opportunity. the case is not always the same in foreign and local schools that have transitioned from single sex to coeducational classrooms. in 1993, russell wrote about her experiences as a female administrator brought into the transition management team of an all-male academic institution in boston, united states when the school opened its doors to female students in high school after 75 years. she conceded that it cannot be 118 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 business as usual in navigating this kind of transition no matter how prestigious an institution may be. for true coeducation to exist, both genders must be together, heard equally and valued equally. russell identified a healthy school culture as the optimal context for successful gender integration in the classroom and provides several specific elements that characterize a healthy school culture such as core values, mandated shared leadership and a very clear discipline system. fabes et al. (2018) noted that decades of gender segregation in schools has only enabled young men and women to learn more about same-gender interactions, skills and expectations than about the other, thereby allowing them to grow up in quite distinct social environments which ultimately inform their affect, behavior, and attitudes toward each other. they argued that attitudes toward an unfamiliar group can improve through increased social contact provided that groups enjoy equal status, share common goals, and cooperate in the attainment of shared goals within supportive social institutions. as peers, they become agents of social influence to each other in many ways. within the local setting, in his 2016 study, villarin explored the opportunities and challenges presented by coeducation in his religious order’s school within the context of providing quality catholic education. he noted that the transition to coeducation places greater demands on teaching faculty to navigate gender dynamics and combat gender stereotypes and biases that may arise. racelis (2013), in her qualitative study on the impact of coeducation on female students’ experiences in the same catholic school revealed that the school created a challenging environment for female students because of its perceived traditional gender role expectations. female students reported experiencing objectification from their male peers and expectations to be subservient and nurturing. the harassment they experienced from male students also made them feel fearful and powerless. her study further underscores the need for schools to provide psychological safety and supportive environments for women and to combat gender biases and stereotypes. despite russell’s american context, her experiences may help provide insight into understanding the present study’s unique setting where young filipino women are a minority in a former exclusive basic education institution for boys. both the boston school and the study’s setting share similar characteristics – that of having a long history in exclusive education, and a strong tradition as an elite school. alumni (and college alumnae) of the local school setting supply a strong leadership bench for private organizations as well as in philippine politics. there is value in examining leadership emergence at a young age in this school setting, especially now that the institution has begun the shift to coeducation in senior high school. gender and leadership issues in coeducation leadership education is a relatively new discipline, particularly in understanding the various conditions in which leadership learning happens (guthrie & jenkins, 2018). castillo et al. (2019) asserted that schools are mandated to develop authentic and responsible student leaders not only in view of gainful employment in their futures but also with the objective of deepening the bench for future leaders of society. their research with junior high school students in the philippines, thailand, indonesia and pakistan suggests that school climate is the strongest predictor of leadership development. however, madsen and andrade (2018) addressed the issue of implicit gender bias which has been generally excluded in many leadership development programs for women. implicit bias or unconscious or second-generation bias has implications on the formation of women in leadership. in particular, there is a need to have leadership development program designers who are experts and appropriately educated in gender studies. they asserted that designers of such programs must be highly knowledgeable of the conditions that provide contextualized coaching anchored on the latest research in order to create a safe space for leadership learning, especially for women. in the philippines where this study is situated, both the philippine commission on human rights and the department of education emphasize the strict implementation of deped’s gender responsive basic education policy (de guia, 2022) by clarifying that gender equity goes beyond equal access to education but involves addressing gender-related issues in school that impede learners’ personal growth due to a lack of psychological safe space. while the philippine commission on women (2022) reported that the philippines remains the best performing asian country at 19th place with an overall score of 0.783 among 146 countries on the world economic forum’s global gender equality index, this trend does not seem to parallel the growth intended in the local research relevant to young women’s leadership development; and more alarmingly, this trend does not always translate to the experiences of young women who find themselves a minority in unique social contexts. the case for context and climate as critical to female students’ leadership development has led to several qualitative inquiries into their experiences mostly from a phenomenological lens or other inductive methodologies. however, as mentioned earlier in this paper, there seems to be a dearth in knowledge about how adolescent female students who are a minority in a male-dominated environment experience leadership in such a highly contextualized setting. hoyt and kennedy (2008) used grounded theory approach to explore changes experienced by ten adolescent girls in a comprehensive feminist-based leadership program. consistent with studies on leader identity among young women, the participants were initially found to be traditional in their views of leadership, i.e. anchored on the cis-male prototype’s qualities, and were therefore hesitant to consider themselves leaders. their views became more inclusive after the program and they were observed to be more confident and inspired to be leaders. they noted that being in a program environment of mutual trust and respect helped foster their confidence in themselves, along with experiencing female leaders as role models and a better understanding of multiple forms of leadership other than the traditional. most other studies, however, on female students’ leadership experiences were conducted with older females as participants. haber-curran (2013) via a phenomenological case study in the united kingdom explored the challenges and successes of four undergraduate female college students in top 119 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 leadership positions. gathering data from one-on-one interviews, focus group discussions and participant journals, haber-curran suggested that success as a leader was perceived by the women as externally focused, with greater importance placed on the organizations they lead and on efforts at nurturing members’ development and that striking a balance between being a leader and being a friend was considered as a primary challenge. in a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews of eight female chinese student leaders in a male-dominated university over an 11-month period of fieldwork, zheng (2017) revealed challenges experienced by the women on account of gender role expectations in their asian culture. while these women’s personal achievements place them in an elite category of students in the university, traditional role expectations related to subservience and their sexuality hinder them from embracing their self-identity as empowered leaders. as chinese society undergoes a gendered process of interaction, these high-achieving women leaders in university experience stress from their elite status and have sometimes been called feminazis for seeking equity with men in a highly traditional society. swai and moses (2021) utilized a phenomenological interpretative approach to explore the lived experiences of six undergraduate female student leaders using the hexagonal and motivation to lead theories as framework. the hexagon theory in student leadership development underscores factors that relate to the six elements of the (a) self, (b) family, (c) school, (d) friends, (e) university, and (f) society as crucial to the development of leadership in a young person through a change in attitude, knowledge, skills and behavior. results indicate that female students take on leadership roles if they receive approval and support from significant others. leadership is oriented by the family by allowing daughters the freedom and power to make decisions. teachers who demonstrate trust in them and help build responsibility are also instrumental in their leadership experiences. religion was also found to help in the development of their leader identity. female student leaders also manifested important leader attributes such as the ability to lead, resolve conflict and make decisions. in a comprehensive literature review on adolescent girls’ leadership formation, eva et al.(2021) found five overarching themes: (a) leader emergence, motivation, and identity, (b) relationships with peers and adults, (c) varieties of leadership development opportunities, (d) exercising agency in leadership development programs, and (e) integration of leader development into the school curriculum. of these five themes, it is worth noting that leader identity among young females is strongly aligned with more collaborative and relational forms of leadership, which ultimately becomes problematic, because most adolescent leadership research tends to be focused on the cis-male leadership prototype, highlighting more masculine perceptions of leadership which become a barrier for girls in perceiving themselves as leader material (archard, 2012 as cited in eva et al., 2021). hurtes (2002 as cited in eva et al., 2021) likewise observed that the social requirement to fit in possibly contributes to the lack of leader identity development among girls, given the standards set by the cis-male leader prototype. interpretative phenomenological analysis as theoretical lens smith and osborn (2007) described interpretative phenomenological analysis (ipa) as a detailed examination of personal experience and as an attempt to explain how a person makes sense of one’s experiences in her personal and social world. ipa is a dynamic process in research that allows the researcher to walk in the participant’s shoes in order to understand what life is like from the latter’s perspective. through a process of double hermeneutic, two stages of interpretation take place, first from the participant’s making sense of the experience and then from the researcher’s analysis of the participant’s sense-making. ipa is a qualitative research approach that is idiographic in nature – it seeks to understand the unique subjective experiences of individuals within a specific context, instead of developing generalizable knowledge or theories. this approach examines the lived experiences of individuals in a nuanced and in-depth way, by focusing on the individual experience and interpreting such data as opposed to starting from a pre-existing theory or framework (allan, 2008). as a research tool, the idiographic nature of ipa is a powerful means in understanding subjective experiences of individuals and exploring the complexities and diversity of human experience. attention is likewise drawn to the social, cultural and historical contexts that shape these experiences. shinebourne (2011) argued that “with its theoretical underpinnings in phenomenology and hermeneutics and its idiographic perspective, ipa offers a method that is congruent with the existential-phenomenological paradigm and at the same time can link existential-phenomenological research with the wider research literature in psychology” (p. 16). although phenomenology is regarded as a philosophical system of thought, its focus on the content of conscious thought and the individual’s experience of the world lend itself well to qualitative research methods in psychology and in the social sciences in general (willig, 2008). ipa is a phenomenological method that recognizes the impossibility of direct access into what husserl (1931) regarded as individuals’ life worlds. as ipa explores individuals’ experiences from their perspective and describes the meaning they ascribe to their experiences, to a certain extent, it also represents the researcher’s interpretation of such meaning-making owing to his own world view. this is why reflexivity is paramount in the researcher’s conduct of ipa. the use of ipa in the study sought to gain an understanding of how the pioneering batches of female student leaders in a predominantly male senior high school view and experience their leadership experiences. the aim was to gain insight into their thoughts and beliefs as female student leaders in a unique context so that their experiences may inform school policy in the future. while the study is retrospective in approach, the methodology used (ipa) differs from a narrative analysis in that the study focused on how they made sense of their leadership experiences by remembering. in a retrospective ipa, the focus is not on how the story is told but how participants 120 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 retrospectively (and reflectively) make meaning of past experiences (van parys, et al., 2014). ipa research works best with a fairly homogenous sample, in this case, a group of participants who were all elected student leaders from among the female minority in a newly coeducational catholic senior high school. research questions through participants’ retrospective meaning-making, i sought to answer the following questions: 1. what are the lived experiences of the first three cohorts of female student leaders of a newly coeducational senior high school? a. what were their experiences like running for elective positions? b. what were their experiences like after being elected student leaders? 2. how do the female student leaders make sense of their experiences? methods design in this study, i employed a qualitative research approach through retrospective interpretative phenomenological analysis (ipa). semi-structured interviews were conducted individually with the seven participants following an introductory script and interview schedule. research setting participants in this study were alumnae of a newly coeducational senior high school in a catholic university in metro manila with a long history and tradition of exclusive basic education for boys. its founding religious organization also runs several basic education and tertiary institutions in different parts of the country, most of which are coeducational. in the senior high school of their university in metro manila, a formal student government exists as noted in figure 1. figure 1 representation of the sanggunian organizational chart based on their official facebook page (2020) 121 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 my primary interest was in leadership experiences of young women in a former exclusive private school for boys in the first three years of transitioning to coeducation in senior high school. given enrollment constraints, the school was only able to offer slots to female transfer students comprising one-third of its new population, making the new female students a sexual minority in their own environment. republic act no. 10533 which created the k-12 reform was seen by the catholic academic institution as an opportunity to make their brand of quality education more accessible. scholarship grants were offered to the best female students transferring from public schools. it is crucial to know that the school has had nearly 160 years of history and tradition as an exclusive basic education institution for boys from middleto upper-class families (with the exception of a few scholars) as this background contextualizes the female students’ leadership experiences. participants seven alumnae, aged 21 to 23 years old, volunteered to participate in this study by responding to the researcher’s recruitment advertisement on facebook and messenger. they fit the two criteria set for participants: (a) they belonged to the first three cohorts (2018, 2019 and 2020) of female transfer students, and (b) they were in elective positions in the official student government during their stay in senior high school. all seven participants had both minor and major (elective) leadership positions in the school in grades 11 and 12 as depicted in table 1. table 1 participants’ batch, strand and leadership positions participant code batch strand minor elective position major elective position kay 2020 humss1 ✔ ✔ kim 2020 stem2 ✔ ✔ faye 2018 stem ✔ ✔ dawn 2019 humss ✔ ✔ ginny 2019 humss ✔ ✔ kelly 2018 humss ✔ ✔ greta 2018 humss ✔ ✔ 1 humanities and social sciences strand 2 science, technology, engineering and mathematics strand most of them started as elected class officers, usually as class vice president or class president, or as elected officers of important student councils or committees and recognized organizations that had an impact on student life. their elective positions in grade 11 became the pipeline for higher offices in the student government once they reached grade 12. however, in terms of student organizations, a number of them who expressed a feeling of a lack of control or voice in pre-existing organizations (i.e., those that carried over from the university’s exclusive junior high school) would create new organizations and committees that better served their interests and advocacies such as a student committee on gender equality. because of the length of time it took to process a proposal for a new organization, these participants became more active as founding leaders of new organizations in their 12th grade. nonetheless, all of them served under the sanggunian or sanggu, the official student government of the school, as elected student leaders in different capacities. data collection i took measures to ensure that ethical considerations in the conduct of the present study were addressed, such as issues of confidentiality, transparency, and minimizing risk to the volunteer participants. while results of this study may become available in the public domain, confidentiality of participants’ personal identities and circumstances were guaranteed, along with the identities of persons and institutions that were consequently mentioned by the participants in their interviews. after research ethics clearance was secured for this study, participants were recruited using purposive snowball sampling via facebook and messenger invitations. since i, as the principal investigator, was a former guidance counselor in the same institution when the prospective participants were still in senior high school, the invitations were either sent directly or through common acquaintances on the social media applications. a copy of the recruitment invitation was likewise uploaded on the private facebook group page “sanggu females” (created in 2017) of which the target participants and the researcher are members. alumnae who reached out were screened on two criteria: (a) members of batches 2018, 2019 or 2020, and (b) elected student leaders in either grade 11 or 12 (or both) in the school’s student government (sanggunian) or in any of the sanggu councils. informed consent forms were sent to the interested volunteers who returned (electronically) signed copies to the researcher after ensuring that they understood the terms of their participation in the study. the process of securing informed consent ensured that participants understood what they were agreeing to do and that they could withdraw at any time during the period of the study should they decide not to participate anymore, without fear of consequence. the informed consent form detailed the instructions for the data gathering process so that participants knew what to expect in the ensuing interview sessions. the form also provided the link to the privacy policy of zoom for those who would choose an online interview. semi-structured interviews were individually conducted with the seven participants on their leadership experiences in senior high school following an introductory script and interview schedule. the interview schedule was constructed with the purpose of letting participants freely share and elaborate on their own leadership stories as elected student leaders of their batches. questions enclosed in parentheses were intended as follow-up questions in case the participant did not include the 122 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 information needed in her initial reply. participants’ consent to record the interview sessions was obtained before the audio recording began. examples of these questions are the following: what was it like running for your leadership position? what were your challenges? (how did you handle these challenges?) what were the positive aspects of it? after you won the election, what were your leadership experiences like? what were your challenges? (how did you handle these challenges?) what were the positive aspects of it? none of the participants reported experiencing emotional distress during the interviews. in terms of benefit to participants, the study provided them an opportunity to let their stories be heard, an experience that some of them considered cathartic, agentic and liberating. audio-recorded interviews lasted from 30 minutes to an hour. data analysis identifying themes participants’ recorded interviews were transcribed by two volunteer university scholars after signing a non-disclosure agreement. the transcripts were sent back to the researcher who reviewed the transcriptions alongside the audio recordings for approval. i asked both scholars if they would be willing to work on the initial codes and emailed them a list of steps orienting the transcribers on the coding process according to willig’s (2008) basic methodological procedures of conducting (retrospective) interpretative phenomenological analysis. initially, both transcribers agreed to do initial coding dividing the seven transcripts between the two of them while the researcher began the initial coding for all seven. working separately, the researcher and the two scholars identified initial themes and subthemes after iterative reading of each transcript. however, after further clarifications were made via email exchange, only one decided to complete this next step. the remaining transcriber took upon the coding task of the other transcriber. the transcriber and i completed around three to four re-readings of each transcript, adding initial themes or subthemes previously left out and removing those that did not directly answer the research questions. the whole process involved taking initial notes and creating tentative themes (and subthemes) for each transcript – the idiographic nature of ipa requires that this initial process be descriptive and empathic. i then compared my coding with those of the transcriber and made decisions on the terms to use. before finalizing the themes and subthemes, transcripts, notes and initial themes were then shown to an internal auditor – a fellow phd leadership studies student who has completed his own ipa study and who was familiar with the context of the participants’ leadership experiences for review and feedback. i, having been a former counselor in the school setting, sought the internal auditor’s expertise in order to ensure my reflexivity in the identification of initial themes and subthemes. each of the seven participants also received a copy of their own transcript with the notes and initial themes for their feedback and additional clarifications where needed (disclaimer: not all participants responded in a timely manner, thereby losing the opportunity to amend or add to their transcript’s themes). involving the participants in the review of distilled themes and subthemes was meant to ensure transparency as well. clustering themes and integrating cases in the next stage, i structured the tentative themes into clusters the clustered themes were shown to the internal auditor who then approved the clustering. the auditor also reminded me to ensure that the organized themes reflect only what was actually said by the participants; hence, a summary table of the clustered themes was produced with a few quotations that illustrate or elaborate on certain themes that needed context. the homogeneity of the sample allowed for the integration of cases for specific interview questions while ensuring that the idiographic nature of the inquiry into the lived leadership experiences of each participant was respected and kept intact. following the double hermeneutic process of ipa, themes were assigned to how participants interpreted their experiences then the researcher provided interpretations of the meanings participants ascribed to such experiences. themes were further explored and their relationships examined within each transcript and then across transcripts. in constructing the resulting narratives of the participants, presented quotes were translated into english (actual interview data may be provided upon request). results i sought to examine the subjective experiences of seven student leaders from the first three cohorts of female students in a newly coeducational senior high school and the meanings they ascribed to their unique and collective experiences as a minority in their new school environment. figure 2 summarizes the key themes and subthemes in the participants’ lived experiences of leadership grounded by their unique context and motivations. from participants’ description of their challenges, coping strategies, and positive experiences, their lived leadership experiences may be summarized through six main themes: leadership as (a) unsafe space (for women), (b) a response to systematized injustice, (c) building social support systems, (d) adaptive resilience-building, (e) character-forming, and (f) purpose-driven. subthemes are further discussed under each of these key themes. 123 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 figure 2 participants’ lived leadership experiences leadership as an unsafe space (for women) this theme included 10 subthemes. participants’ leadership experiences from the period prior to elections until after they won their leadership positions were marked by a lot of difficulties and challenges. while some of these challenges abated after they won in the elections, there were continuing difficulties that the women have had to deal with and overcome – making them feel that being a leader in their new school environment was an unsafe space for women. culture shock from microaggressions participants expressed that they experienced culture shock even before they made their intent to run public in grade 11. one participant described the experience as “jarring” – coming from high expectations of their new school environment and then encountering problems with male students within just a few months of being together. incidents of microaggressions such as being deliberately ignored during meetings and being excluded from group activities on account of gender were reported by participants. microaggressions are subtle everyday forms of discriminatory behavior or language directed towards the women leaders such as a lack of sensitivity to their experiences. although these can be unconscious on the part of the person exhibiting microaggressions, such as implicit assumptions based on gender stereotypes, these are harmful to the women – creating a sense of inferiority and feelings of exclusion. they were confused and disappointed. one participant narrated that she did not believe gender discrimination to happen in real life until she experienced it first hand in senior high school. in her coeducational junior high school in cebu which was run by the same religious order, her gender had never been an issue. as kay narrated, oh my god this happens in real life like all this discrimination happens in real life (and not only in) movies or things that we read. so (there) i was culture shocked by how much the men felt threatened and how much not just threatened but how much they would act out to women running (because) coming (from) how our school went co-ed we were (previously) all girls and then they started accepting admissions for boys starting kinder/grade 1 so the first batch of boys was grade 1 so we grew up together. while this was a sentiment shared by all participants, the stem students thought that the situation was not so bad in their strand, because they had the highest number of female transfer students – nearly half of the students in the stem strand were female. kay belonged to the humss strand and the other humss students among the sample indicated sharing a collective feeling of frustration over how they were perceived and treated by their male classmates, in particular, 124 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 those who referred to themselves as “homegrowns”, i.e. those who have been in the same school from preparatory level up to junior high school. gender conflict the culture shock and its attendant negative emotions generally resulted from the gender conflict that permeated the school atmosphere after the opening of the newly coeducational senior high school. participants experienced prejudice on account of their sex and their decision to aspire for leadership positions in the new school appears to have negatively impacted initial male-female friendships formed within classes and strands. a participant (greta) from humss narrated that her running mate for class president when she ran for vice president in grade 11 would later lead the campaign against her when she decided to run for strand representative in grade 12. her running mate lost to another male classmate while she won for class vice president. when she decided to run as strand representative unopposed in humss, her former running mate and his male friends actively campaigned for students to abstain from voting instead. the curious thing about this experience for the said participant was that she could not imagine what the male students had in mind for their strand governance should a failure of elections be declared. fortunately, she won by a relatively good margin over all the abstain votes. participants also shared experiencing being stereotyped on account of their gender, with certain gender roles expected of them in carrying out classroom tasks especially during group work. this has led to women in class work stepping up for their male groupmates because they were expected to do the work. even within the official student government, female officers and leaders had to take on more tasks. dawn narrated, so i was there to pick up the work… the strand chairperson left behind and sometimes ignored on so many levels, (stepping up on their behalf to do the work), and sometimes other elected officers would reach out to me when they had concerns because sometimes the strand chairperson was (nowhere) so they would go to me for other decision-making choices, and then (what else…). one participant (kim) from the stem strand noted a tendency towards tokenism among her male stem schoolmates despite their show of support for her candidacy in the sanggu. while they were respectful and helpful, during the campaign, some of them would reportedly tell schoolmates that they were voting for the main male candidate for chair “and the girls”. tokenism in this context is a form of gender discrimination that involves the practice of including women in activities but merely for the sake of appearances, instead of sincere and meaningful efforts towards gender equality. as kim shared, so majority of the positions had a female candidate so for cso it was me and then for aco it was [redacted] and for athc it was [redacted]. and there was a thing going on that people would say they were going to vote for the leading male candidate ‘and the girls’. that was like how they would phrase and there was a freedom wall post saying that ‘oh i keep hearing people saying they’ll vote for this (male) candidate and the girls’ and it was basically saying that just because they’re girls doesn’t mean that they can do the job or like they’re better which i think is weird because i feel like the common sentiment or like stereotypically people would think that guys are better than girls but during this time there was this campaign to be like ‘hey don’t just vote for the girls because they’re girls’. bullying participants described the campaign period as “intense”, engaging majority, if not all, of the student body in a historic election of their new leaders. as the intensity progressed, varying levels and forms of bullying were reportedly experienced by the participants. these ranged from acts of microaggressions such as being ignored during meetings or being patronized in discussions, to becoming the topic of messenger chat groups created for the purpose of smear campaign, to getting booed onstage during miting de avance, to more overt acts of physical aggression or harassment. dawn recalled, and then i would see (that) they would angry-react my posts and then there was an incident (where) one of the guys, (using a) paperball, ma’am, (sprayed with) alcohol (then he would light it up and throw it up in the air and i was always afraid he would throw it in my direction so i reported it to my formator, ‘sir, i think [redacted] might burn me.’ i wasn’t sure if he wanted to burn my hair) or what. according to her, only then did her class moderator act on her complaints. absence of safe spaces when the participants were considering moving to the newly coeducational senior high school, one of the drivers of their decision was to experience inclusion. however, their initial experience would be the opposite. the presence of a pre-existing in-group comprised of males from the majority of the student body became more pronounced when incidents of gender conflict occurred in the first few months of school. participants felt excluded and alienated from this in-group and they feared that as aspiring women leaders, they would not be listened to. along with these feelings of alienation, and owing to their minority status as well, they did not feel they had safe spaces. the microaggressions and bullying affected their self-esteem, aggravated by a perceived lack of support from some school authorities. dawn illustrated this with her experience: and then when the guy went back to his friends, they were all laughing, and then i knew it (like) a mocking sort of laugh and then i was crying about it to my friends. and then my formator was like ‘if you’re uncomfortable with it, then why didn’t you just tell them to stop?’ and then i was like ‘sir, i did tell them to stop but then that’s the way they reacted.’ so those were just kind of the experiences (that were like)… that sort of misogyny was normalized, i didn’t know 125 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 if my safe space is being protected. i just knew that i wasn’t being respected as a leader. i don’t know if i was respected as a person (but) at the end of the day, (i was able to ‘graduate’) from them. hyper-awareness of one’s gender even after they had won in the elections, participants continued to experience exclusion and alienation from the pre-existing in-groups of male “homegrown” students of the senior high school. as elected student leaders, while more severe forms of bullying and harassment abated, the microaggressions and bullying in the digital space continued. these continuing incidents of gender conflict led participants to feel hyper-aware of their being female, a fact that had previously not been an issue for them in their previous schools. kay shared, it’s so weird (that) for the first time in my life (it was like) being a woman – i was so conscious of being a woman and being a woman leader (also) – so (like) from that election, (where) i think i was the only one who won the position. leadership as a response to systematized injustice systematized injustice is a pattern of injustices that are deeply rooted in societal structures and are reinforced over time, particularly in highly traditional institutions. greta’s interpersonal conflict with her former running mate which spiraled into the “abstain movement” is one such example of how years of tradition can solidify cultural norms among a well-bonded group such as the “homegrown” male students. while her conflict with her running mate quietly persisted albeit as undercurrents in day-to-day school interactions, greta lamented the rise of groupthink among the male and female students who were close to her running mate, and who judged her on the basis of what was told to them about her. she was disturbed that none of these students actually confronted her about the issues being raised against her. in this experience, she realized that some people would find gender discrimination more acceptable publicly than admitting to a personal grudge. normalized gender discrimination it also did not help that a few school authorities were perceived as complicit because of the seeming lack of transparency in how complaints were handled in general. participants’ personal experiences of bringing their complaints to school authorities were further marred by incidents of trivializing, victim-blaming, and in cases where the culprits were given disciplinary sanctions, they believed them to be mere slaps-on-the-wrist. greta was also disappointed by the way her class moderator handled the situation with her former running mate – instead of correcting his behavior and that of his friends who were behind the “abstain movement”, it was greta whom he pulled aside to talk with. maybe the admin or the faculty could have done something about it because they were aware of it eh and i knew my class adviser was aware of it and (there it was) he pulled me aside and talked to me about it (sort of) telling me to not mind the naysayers (because) he believes also in my capabilities. although i really felt like… especially since it also… the opposers also came from our own class eh. i felt like maybe it would have been better if directly (it was addressed), rather than addressing me. rather than addressing me, i felt like he needed to address them and call it out. these personal experiences with school authorities seem to have normalized gender discrimination in the eyes of participants along with the perceived systematic marginalization of their group as a minority. anger and cognitive dissonance as student leaders of the school, the participants experienced a build-up of feelings of anger from the continuing lack of safe spaces for women, the cognitive dissonance they noted between the senior high school’s progressive teachings and the prevailing culture, and the feeling that they were unsupported despite trying to do the right thing as leaders and as women. kay shared, a lot of that anger from that time and from the sentiments of… the first three batches was really a lot… how we… a lot of the feelings that we shared – we were the collateral damage of that system and (there)... (was like) a lot of the pain, and even for many it was trauma at that point, very traumatic. and (there)... with that experience – and i think that's why a lot of the women still hold that part of anger for the senior high even with the good experiences and the good (stuff) in a way it really failed them (especially) the first few batches. systematic marginalization they also believed that their marginalization as female leaders were mirroring the systematic marginalization of the female transfer students in the school in general because of the transferee quota set for women and their perceived hasty preparations for the school’s transition to coeducation, given its long history and tradition in exclusive education for men. one participant shared how, to help “foster better relationships” between the male and female students in class, her class moderator paired them up in the classroom seat plan. this forced socialization had the opposite effect instead, as some females in the class (who comprised only one-third of the section) felt uncomfortable with this arrangement. uneasy compromise participants generally coped with their challenges by, at first, arriving at a fragile compromise with the male students (through their class moderators) of basic respect for boundaries; but even this understanding felt like a sort of forced accommodation of the undesirable situation at hand. as dawn said, by studying communication patterns with the male students, she tried to pander to their interests. for the guys, it was more of catering (or) appeal(ing) to their interests because, (i’m the one who needed to adjust)i, actually, (i don’t know anymore) if i’m running ahead of myself but there were times when a 126 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 lot of the guys won’t hesitate to point out to me (that i’m an outsider), (that) i’m alienated from them, (that i was just a hanger-on), here in [redacted], because i do not belong. because of that, and (because they were the majority) and i needed their votes, i had to pander to their interests, meet them at their level, (like) use their humor with them, for them, against them. leadership as building social support systems the second theme includes four subthemes. participants who experienced the same negative treatment forged a strong bond with each other within and across strands. trauma bonding dawn called the phenomenon “trauma bonding”. dawn’s understanding of trauma bonding refers to the solidarity she forged with other fellow women leaders who underwent negative experiences in their leadership journey. in the context of marginalized women, trauma bonding occurs when they are forced to endure oppression, creating a sense of helplessness in their situation. however, it should be noted that trauma bonding is characterized by attachment to the oppressor which is clearly not what dawn was describing in her experience. the women leaders’ collective experience of discrimination was what brought them closer together, providing a much needed support system in the midst of their challenges. expanded social circles running for leadership positions also helped expand their social circles not only during the campaign period. their collective frustrations somehow also allied them with student groups who also felt marginalized in a previously all-male exclusive school. there was an uptick in community awareness of lgbt issues and teachers began looking inward to check for subconscious biases they may have been harboring. widening their social circles also enhanced participants’ interpersonal and social skills not only with the opposite sex but also with people in general who were “outside their comfort zone”. as faye explained, (what i loved most) out of the experiences is i got to really connect with different people – (there were) instances (when we would meet) with our junior high counterparts so we have activities together and well (it was just so cool) to experience (because) it’s really nice to think that you’re a part of a bigger thing. kim shared, i think the life-giving parts were being able to – i guess – getting to know the people outside my classroom and outside the strand since a lot of the homegrowns in my section – they were super willing to help me and they were super kind enough to introduce me to their friends who were from the junior high school and who were from different strands… when they announced that we had won during the time, we all ran outside to the lobby and looked for each other and we just hugged each other and ‘oh my gosh we finally did it!’. yeah we really ran and especially because me and the athc candidate, we were together, so we ran and we were looking for the aco candidate and then we found her, it was like ‘wow, finally!’ like all the… everything was… that was like one of the most memorable experiences. mentorship notable among the participants’ coping handles in their leadership journey was the presence of facultymentors who were highly sympathetic, empathic and supportive of them. they made time to listen to their concerns and dispensed valuable advice in navigating their problems. they were not formal mentors in the sense that they were mandated to do this task for the women but they were subject teachers, class moderators, counselors and even office staff who cared enough to listen. they also lauded their school mentors for speaking up on their behalf. one of the core values of the school is cura personalis alumnorum, roughly translated as “care for the entire person”. high empathy faculty mentors, both formal and informal, who placed high levels of trust in their capabilities as female student leaders were deemed to have shown them cura personalis in action. they also mentioned long hours spent hanging out at the sanggu office or office of student activities where they experienced hands-on mentorship from the faculty formators and learned the ropes vicariously from grade 12 student leaders. however, one participant expressed that this kind of mentorship did not happen to everyone – one had to have been working closely with the faculty formators to benefit from their mentoring. as ginny explained, the thing with the mentoring (was that) it didn’t happen to everyone. (sometimes you get mentored, other times you have no one) – (so you’re just there and) you just learn by looking. but there are others that are more hands-on towards other people and there were others who actually approached people (to ask), hi, how do you do this? heightened social support participants also expressed experiencing heightened levels of social support not only from fellow females but also from male schoolmates as well. they take pride in belonging to what is considered the most inclusive school in the basic education unit, where females are pioneering student leaders. in the case of greta, she felt heartened by the collective pushback she witnessed from among fellow female (and some male) students not only from humss but from other strands as well. she claims that the movement was a grassroots initiative, something she noticed when her attention was called when a hashtag with her name #istandwith[redacted] began trending in their social media circles. greta shared, i was really touched when one of my close friends in that class, she really went in front of the class like – (remember the) homeroom period? – she stood up in front of the class and told the class her plan (like) ‘oh this is what’s happening to [redacted] and this is my idea, let’s support her through this and that’ and (people stepped up to support me too) and then it was 127 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 so nice... that also warmed my heart (because) it was the first time someone stood up for me. someone else stood up for me. leadership as adaptive resilience-building the following two subthemes were found under the theme of leadership as adaptive resilience-building: (a) adapting by shifting focus and (b) assertivess as a leader. adapting by shifting focus greta’s experience of social support in the wake of the abstain movement against her bolstered her spirit and motivated her to shift her focus and energies on the schoolmates who appeared neutral and quiet by reaching out to them and presenting her leadership platform to them. she explained, so what i really (just) did, i really just focused on the people who were supporting me or neutral against me. (i no longer…) – i didn’t exert effort anymore in trying to please those people who… (my) mindset (was) i’m just going to do the work, i’m going to do my best for people who need, who need the leadership… for the people who need their issues to be addressed for. assertiveness as a leader some participants coped by cultivating and projecting a strong (leader) image. ginny shared, i guess it was when – sorry for the trigger warning – it was when there were already news of sexual harassments and we just know how those rumors, also not even the rumors, (when i already knew of cases being filed, i said, shucks, it’s not enough to be tough) – (i needed to be tougher, show them you can’t be messed with). because that was one of the things that i think was the reason why i’d like to think i got out of [redacted] unscathed was because i had to build up more walls (so i could be more assertive and not easily intimidated). and i think that was also one of the lesser reasons why i joined sanggu was because when they know that you’re like established as a leader here like in the [redacted], (they know they can’t touch you). in coping with their continuing challenges as elected leaders of the school, the participants maintained the peace through a fragile compromise with the male students who opposed them. they also continued to focus on reaching out to the student body to rally support for their programs. the small collective pushback they started during the campaign and election season snowballed into a more intentional and concerted effort to create new mechanisms in school to create safe spaces, educate the community on gender issues, and officially call out undesirable behavior whenever situations warranted it. one of the new student committees formed by batch 2018 advocated for safe spaces and gender equity. succeeding batches of female leaders began organizing talks on women empowerment and gender issues, inviting speakers like senator risa hontiveros, networking with the gender hubs of the college within the university and in a neighboring academic institution known for their feminist orientation. in the two school years that followed, student-led committees would also embark on their own #metoo movement, lgbt pride activities, and put up physical freedom walls for expression for women and men alike. participants’ leadership journey in their senior high school was also marked by positive experiences that they considered helpful to their experiences of leadership later on in college and, for batch 2018, in navigating the world of work after graduation. foremost of these experiences is the value of assertiveness and standing up for oneself. participants look at their senior high school leadership experiences as their socio-political awakening, first, as they struggled with acceptance, inclusion and recognition in a new school environment, and later on as their leadership opportunities exposed them to social realities outside of school and beyond their immediate communities. from recognizing the need to act on complaints within the school in order to correct undesirable behavior, they realized the need as well to speak out on social injustices they witnessed in the larger context of society. as kay shared, i have such a deep love for the senior high (because) of the opportunities to lead especially how it shaped me as a leader – i mean it gave me a lot of opportunity to serve not just the community but like the community outside of [redacted] so (it was like) in senior high it was my sociopolitical awakening (as well) being able to be part of campaigns bigger than the senior high school. as student leaders they also saw the value of sustaining grassroots movements that push back against unjust attitudes and practices by highlighting empowering practices and mechanisms. they were also successful in setting clear boundaries in school to engender mutual respect and improved communication. leadership as character-forming gaining deeper insight on gender bias as they attempted to make light of the disappointing experiences they were having as new students aspiring to be leaders, they took a hard look at gender differences that accounted for problems in communication and interaction with the male “homegrown” students. along with this came the realization and acceptance that it was impossible to be liked and accepted by everyone, no matter how widely they tried to reach out. these moments of introspection allowed them to gain a deeper insight not only into gender differences but also helped them make meaning out of their personal and collective experiences. as kay shared, (i needed to)… the language that i am communicating with had to be different when i’m talking to guys. talking to girls – because with girls, it’s just easy to just flow in the conversation because we come from same context. participants expressed gaining a deeper understanding of gender bias as primarily a function of ego formation influenced by family upbringing, and other environmental 128 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 factors such as the impact of peers’ attitudes, sociopolitical actors in the larger milieu, social media, and global trends of intolerance and hate. with this understanding comes the realization that antagonizing males in their senior high school was not a solution. from batch 2018 to 2020, it is worth noting that the younger cohorts have significantly noted an improvement in gender relations in the senior high school, with institutionalized mechanisms that address gender conflict and discrimination such as gender sensitivity workshops in school. kelly explained, ah okay, (so this should be the) consideration, (your) understanding and of course, (and) self-expression – your communication with others just to achieve (a) certain level of inclusivity where no one would ideally be left behind . and also you wanted to – i wanted to consider (too) the personal experiences (because) i couldn’t really fault the homegrown boys for being like that 100%; (because) their environment has been tolerating them to be like that (and so it became quite) internalized. (another thing), i think another factor (was) a language barrier in a way. enhanced personality traits and leadership skills participants likewise shared that their personality traits and skills were greatly enhanced by their leadership experiences in senior high school. working with highly diverse and talented individuals including those they met outside of their comfort zones greatly benefitted their leadership skills. ginny explained, it was like something you could try to establish – it was a very blank slate. so the leadership that was being defined here something you could explore and something that you could also trailblaze with. and so that was something that i was really interested to look into like how does the [redacted] actually form leaders and how do we actually inculcate that and how do we encourage our students. and i was like very encouraged, and i think it was also the environment, especially when i was in grade 12 wherein i really wanted to continue on with the sanggunian and why i wanted to take up on leadership roles. they enjoyed making connections with different people and the experience taught them to be more open and flexible. they also found that as leaders, they gravitated towards the more collaborative, relational style given the initial experiences of challenges they had and the need to reach out to more people beyond one’s comfort zone. nonetheless, it remained clear to them that their proper performance of their leadership roles and responsibilities to all their constituents took precedence over mere popularity. leadership as purpose-driven shared values their leadership experiences in senior high school also brought them closer to what the school stood for – a stronger service orientation. the varied opportunities they had to exercise leadership to serve their school and community gave them greater creative freedom to conceptualize and execute programs that supported the school’s advocacies. the school’s vision and mission have always been clear in their minds and despite the challenges they encountered being a minority in the new senior high school, they believed that the school’s character formation thrust aligned with their personal values. participants described it as a deep love for their school, flaws and all, or a strong school spirit that was defining of their experiences and identities as women leaders. as ginny explained, i love how [redacted] teaches its students like how to become student leaders? like i always tell this to my former moderators here whenever i come back here, it was here that i learned the hard skills, the soft skills, how to really be better at project management, how to deal with people, but more so how to empower also. but also i think at the very core, was how to embody empathy like towards your constituents, towards the people that you’re working with. it was here when i actually learned how it means to become a better leader. like i’ve always had a concept of what a leader was but it became more tangible, it became more realistic, it became more structured here in [redacted] and i’d like to think that even if i entered in a blank slate of [redacted], it was– despite it, i learned so many things that up to this day, i still carry (them) over to where i am already right now. discussion gender and leadership development the arrival of the first batches of female students in senior high school was instrumental in the school community’s unraveling of deeply held, albeit subconscious, biases about gender and people who do not belong to in-groups or dominant groups. both students and teaching staff have had to take a pause and ask where all this prejudice was coming from, in a 21st century coeducational senior high school in a university known for its liberal education and progressive teachings in its curricula. as participants recalled their leadership challenges and retrospectively ascribed meanings to their experiences, they came to the conclusion that the prejudice was not entirely the male students’ fault (although it is extremely important that the male students still acknowledge and be made answerable for their own undesirable behaviors, i.e. bullying and harassment, gender discrimination, and similar gender-based acts of aggression). it is now important to ask how does this form of gender bias develop? in an early study by liwag et al. (1998) on child-rearing practices and gender socialization in the philippines, their review of 131 related studies confirm the role of family as the primary venue for gender socialization of filipino children from early childhood to young adulthood. parental attitudes are influenced first by an expressed preference for either a son or a daughter for different reasons. fathers preferred sons for their firstborn children and daughters were preferred for their perceived value in household chores. daughters are raised to be responsible 129 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 because they shared in their mothers’ role of nurturance and household management. parental expectations of their children’s traits have also been found to be gendered in that daughters are expected to be modest and obedient while sons are expected to be intelligent and sociable. parents’ career aspirations for their children are also differentiated by the latter’s gender. while filipino parents in general aspire for all their children to finish higher education, when confronted with limited finances and opportunities, the tendency was to prioritize their male children over the females because of the expected role of men to become breadwinners in the future. in a comparative study done by kreitz-sandberg (2007) on gender and schooling between japanese and filipino schools, she cited a local study conducted by miriam college’s wagi (women and gender institute) in 2004 where a sample of sixth-graders from filipino households were asked to identify if certain activities were for “boys only”, for “girls only”, or for “both girls and boys”. while eighty (80) percent of the filipino sixth-graders assigned parenting, decision making and leadership roles to both sexes, half of them assigned household management tasks to females, such as cooking, washing and marketing. in the classroom, the wagi study noted that teachers also tended to give gender-specific instructions to students. teaching materials also tended to depict male students in more active roles while female students are associated with domestic tasks. nonetheless, kreitz-sandberg notes that subjective choices for gender expression and identity were less conservative among filipino children compared to their japanese counterparts. language is seen as facilitative of this because compared to japanese, the filipino language, such as its pronouns, is not gender-specific. while the participants in the wagi study belong to a different demographic than the male and female students of the senior high school research setting, their study provides an insight into how filipino children assimilate gender stereotypes at home and in school, and come to perform gendered roles in both environments. in contrast, a study on british households by borrell-porta et al. (2018) examined what they termed as the “mighty girl effect” which basically argues that parents who have daughters tend to become more accepting of less traditional gender roles even if they held gender stereotypes prior to the birth of a daughter. nonetheless, parenting styles across cultures have still yielded evidence on gendered expectations of male and female children. in ulferts’ (2020) working paper for the oecd entitledwhy parenting matters for children in the 21st century: an evidence-based framework for understanding parenting and its impact on child development, maternal and paternal roles remain gendered despite the shift in recent years on how gender is construed. parents’ gender roles thereby impact the way they raise boys and girls across different cultures. children’s gender also affected the way they are parented, with parents tending to be more authoritarian with boys, and more authoritative with girls. zheng’s (2017) qualitative study on young chinese women’s leadership experiences in an elite university also revealed cultural factors that caused the women stress and impeded their identity as empowered leaders on account of being female. these studies underscore the crucial influence of perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of an individual’s significant adults (such as parents and teachers) within a particular societal context on engendering implicit or second-generation biases which ultimately inform individuals’ behavior towards the opposite sex. data from participants’ interviews also highlight the important role their families played in their decision to seek leadership roles in school. most of them credit their family upbringing and their role models for having the character and personality to lead. as ginny explained, her parents raised her to be strong in the sense that her leadership personality was structured that way. one other participant shared that her parents were student activists during martial law and are still involved in social development work. she believes she was raised by her parents to be socially aware, involved and to aspire for social justice. kay’s leadership experiences are framed by her experience of a strongly matriarchal family, where women are naturally considered leaders and decision makers. she quoted a cousin who described them as “firecracker women”. for kelly, being the eldest somehow preordained her to take the lead in many things, owing to parental expectations as well as to her own expectations of the self as a responsible eldest child. kelly also shared that her family is a family of extroverts, and she owes her facility in making friends and connecting with people to the social skills she was exposed to in her family. themes that emerged from the individual interview data and case integration support keating et al.’s (2014) conceptual framing of how leaders (and leadership) are formed as well as swai and moses’ (2021) hexagonal model of leadership emergence. however, for this particular study, “school” and “university” have been combined as representing one and the same academic institution characterized by deeply held traditions and a pre-existing culture. the researcher has added crucial elements under each factor based on the study’s resulting data. figure 3 combines the theoretical conceptions of keating and her colleagues with that of swai and moses on the factors involved in young women’s leader emergence. 130 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 figure 3 young women’s leader emergence (adapted from keating, et al., 2014 and swai & moses, 2021 participants in the study all began their leadership journeys in the senior high school with high levels of self-efficacy and a strong perception of the self as a leader. as pioneering batches of female students in senior high school, they saw themselves as trailblazers, and assuming a leadership role in this new school environment was almost predestined for them. it also helped that they possessed a very positive self-image and were fairly confident in their abilities and leadership skills. participants also sought validation and empowerment in their pursuit of leadership. as a minority comprising only one-third of the school population, they needed to be seen, and heard, and their value and contribution acknowledged by the community. it is worth recalling that keating and her colleagues explored student leaders’ perception of their abilities while undergoing an elective leadership course in college and noted that a pathway to leadership effectiveness starts with building confidence and seeing oneself as a leader. leadership readiness is further bolstered by a genuine desire to serve as a primary motivator. while other drivers of the pursuit of leadership may have contributed to the participants’ decision to seek leadership roles such as the support of their friends and families, the perception that they possess the personality and character of a leader and that they are willing to fulfill their leadership roles seem to be the main drivers in their pursuit of leadership. their leadership skills which were fruits of prior leadership experiences in junior high school prepared them for the more challenging demands of leadership in senior high school. eva et al.’s (2021) comprehensive review of literature on young women’s leadership development likewise points to adolescent girls’ leader emergence, motivation and identity as a prevailing theme in related studies. the participants’ desire to solve problems in the new school environment and to represent women as a minority were likewise drivers of their decision to lead. the challenges encountered by the participants in their leadership journey likewise provide a context that can potentially provide conditions in which transformational leadership could emerge. the female students’ collective leadership experiences rocked the senior high school boat, thrived on conflict and engaged fellow students who snapped out of their groupthink and apathy to help effect small but significant changes in people’s attitudes and institutions’ ways of proceeding. burns (1978) described 131 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 transformational leadership as a challenge to the status quo, and a process whereby leaders and followers help each other create valuable, positive changes in individuals and systems. while these changes do not happen overnight, the participants’ leadership experiences and the lessons learned from these experiences may serve as a catalyst towards lasting transformational changes for the school community. unique context, challenging climate the participants’ leadership experiences, while generally echoing women’s struggles in many parts of the world, happened within a very unique context of suddenly becoming part of a minority in a private catholic school with many years of history and tradition as a boys’ school. because of the limited admission slots for women in grade 11, they comprised roughly 30 to 35 percent of the grade level population. batch 2018 likewise had the sole distinction of sharing the new campus building with the last all-male batch of the senior high school in grade 12. the admission quota was perceived by the participants as systematic marginalization which did not help their adjustment to their new environment. ay kay explained, “so systematically, unless that quota is removed, women will always be the minority.” given the rigorous screening process of transfer students for admission to the school, coupled with a preferential cutoff score for the male applicants from the university’s feeder (junior high) school, the female students who joined the newly coeducational senior high school were the best of their class, considered elite, academics-wise and in terms of co-curricular achievements. about a third of the female students were also top students from public schools who were granted scholarships. this contextualizes why kay described the men in her batch as feeling “threatened”. as in the case of russell’s (1993) experience of transitioning to coeducation in her boston school, the women “brought with them a forthright seriousness of academic purpose that had been missing from some of the all-male classrooms” (p. 12). learning is said to be influenced by the quality and character of one’s school life. school climate has also been found to be a strong predictor of leadership development (loukas, 2007; castillo et al., 2019). while participants did not categorically state that the climate in their new school environment was unwelcoming, most of them shared that their experiences with some of their male schoolmates made them feel like they still needed to prove that they belonged there. as a minority, and as conflicts with the male students escalated, their need for psychological safety and support became highlighted. according to the nscc (national school climate center at ramapo for children, 2022), in assessing school climate, five key areas need to be looked into: (a) safety, (b) interpersonal relations, (c) social media, (d) teaching / learning, and (e) institutional environment. however, amidst participants’ challenges in the matter of school climate, they still expressed a strong sense of connectedness to the school despite their negative leadership experiences, and through their own initiatives and the support of sympathetic members of the school community they took it upon themselves to ensure safe spaces by creating formal mechanisms that provided protective aid to students who felt marginalized and unsafe. limitations and implications for research a major limitation in this study pertains to the uniqueness of its context in that it does not represent the experience of other schools in the philippines, particularly of public senior high schools where male and female populations are nearly equal. a possible implication for further research would be to look into young women’s leader emergence and leadership experiences in other contexts – such as in private and public, urban and rural schools, where male and female students are equal in number, or where female students outnumber males. it would be interesting to explore how various contexts and school cultures impact young women’s leadership experiences. local studies conducted in various contexts on the topic would provide a deeper appreciation of the wealth of this phenomenon about gender and leadership. this study also did not include the impact of the shift to online schooling due to the covid-19 pandemic on student leadership particularly for batch 2020 and succeeding cohorts. in a future study, it might be interesting to explore how practices and processes related to choosing student leaders may have influenced female students’ experiences of doing primarily online campaigns, participating in online elections, and remote leadership. implications for practice earlier in this paper, it has been noted that the issue of subconscious gender bias is generally excluded as a consideration for designing and developing leadership programs for women (and men) (madsen and andrade, 2018). considering the unique participant sample in this study, a co-constructed leader formation and leadership development program between the intended beneficiaries and education experts highly familiar with gender studies is recommended. as shown in this study, internalized or implicit gender bias among students and other members of the school community has had implications on the formation and experiences of female student leaders. a gender-fair leadership development program would need to be evidence-based while remaining faithful to the core values of the senior high school. summary this retrospective ipa was concerned with the lived leadership experiences of seven women who belonged to the first three batches (2018, 2019, and 2020) of a newly coeducational senior high school in a filipino, catholic basic education institution. due to a transferee admission quota, the women belonged to a minority, comprising about one-third of the student population. their lived experiences of leadership as pioneering female leaders in the former exclusive school for boys are summarized into the following key themes: leadership as (a) unsafe space (for women), (b) a response to systematized injustice, (c) adaptive resilience-building, (d) building social support systems, (e) character-forming, and (f) purpose-driven. reflexivity the researcher is a former head counselor in the research setting and had over two decades of teaching and counseling experience in the all-male high school of the university before 132 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 its shift to coeducation in compliance with the country’s k-12 reform. on the last school year of the research period, the researcher was appointed as the school’s first female assistant principal for student affairs and formation. the researcher made an 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(2004). gender socialization in philippine child-friendly schools. in: human rights education in asian schools, vol. 7; pp. 113–127, published on the homepage of asia-pacific human rights information center [hurights]. willig, c. (2008). introducing qualitative research in psychology. 2nd ed. mcgraw hill open university press. zheng, j. (2017). developing a feminist identity among elite female students in a chinese university: a qualitative study. gender and education, doi:10.1080/09540253.2017.1399201. 134 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 advancingwomen website international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle advancing women in leadership feminist epistemology: a reconstruction and integration of women's know ledge and experiences joanne ardovini-brooker, ph.d. ardovini-brooker, summer, 2000 "well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet," said alice; "but when you have to turn into a chrysalis--you will someday, you know-and then after that into a butterfly, i should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?" "not a bit," said the caterpillar. "well, perhaps your feelings may be different," said alice; "all i know is, it would feel very queer to me." "you!" said the caterpillar, contemptuously. "who are you?" (griffin 1992: 56 citing carroll 1901:95) epistemology is the study of knowing. it is the basis for knowing and how it is that people come to know what they know (johnson, 1995, p. 97). originating from philosophy, epistemology seems to come to us from a number of disciplines, i. e.: sociology, psychology, and political science, among others (duran, 1991, p. xi). these fields have all contributed to what is known as feminist epistemology.. this occurred with the emergence of materials that professed to spelling out what feminist accounts of knowledge entail and what is implied by ways of knowing pertaining to women (p. xi). the term feminist epistemology does not have a single referent. feminist theorists have used the term variously to refer to women's "ways of knowing," "women's experiences," or simple "women's knowledge" (alcoff potter, 1993, p. 1). therefore, the term feminist epistemology is a means of summarizing, to some extent, and integrating women's knowledge and experiences. inherent in feminist epistemology is the "multiplicity of women's voices" (duran, 1991, p. xiii). the recent literature on feminist epistemology revealed that the word "epistemology" has been "reconstructed" by feminists to include the broadest possible sense of the term. this has been done by drawing attention to areas previously left untouched by traditional epistemologies and research (duran, 1991, p. 73). additionally, by creating "gynocentric epistemics," knowledge centered around women's realities, a new knowledge is brought forth. the reason for these actions is the feminist desire to have women's experiences finally recognized and legitimated. code (1991) does not agree that feminist epistemology is a means of summarizing or integrating women's http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html knowledge. she has concluded that the question of "whether a feminist epistemology is possible or desirable must be left unanswered" (code, 1991, p. 314). however, she believes that feminist can be epistemologists and that the epistemologies that develop from feminism seem to require a basis in assumptions about the essence of women and of knowledge (p. 315). this would risk "replicating the exclusionary, hegemonic structures of the masculinist epistemology, in its various manifestations, that has claimed absolute sovereignty over the epistemic terrain" (p. 315). hence, code argued that feminist epistemology, despite its subversive potential, cannot alone provide the theoretical position that is required to develop a true integration of knowledge (p. 317). the history of feminist epistemology is the history of the clash between feminist commitments to "the struggles of women to have their understandings of the world legitimated" and "the commitment of traditional philosophy to various accounts of knowledge" (alcoff potter 1993, p. 2). the history of epistemology has also been one of inquiry into "whether knowledge was possible" (cartesianism) and "seldom into the conditions producing knowledge" (feminist epistemology) (duran 1991, p. 3). cartesianism assumes the unproblematic generalizability of knowledge from its context of discovery to a variety of contexts of use (stanley wise 1993, p. 191). these approaches also see knowledge as existing independently of the person(s) who produced it. feminist epistemology developed as a critique of traditional epistemology and its dominant narrative. feminist epistemology assume "that those we deem to be knowers actually do posses knowledge" (duran, 1991, p. 4). today and in the future, feminist epistemology is comprised of research programs that are moving beyond critique to reframe the problematic of knowledge and unearth the politics of epistemology (alcoff potter, 1993, pp. 2-3). alcoff and potter (1993) suggest that: feminist epistemologies should not be taken as involving a commitment to gender as the primary axis of oppression or positing that gender is a theoretical variable separable from other axes of oppression and susceptible to a unique analysis. (pp. 3-4) if feminism is to liberate women, it must address virtually all forms of domination because women fill the ranks of every category of oppressed people. feminist epistemology "seeks to unmake the web of oppressions and reweave the web of life" (p. 4). this is similar to what code (1991) describes as standpoint epistemologies. in her discussion, "taking subjectivity into account", code argues that conventional, mainstream epistemologies create the illusion of a universal "truth" through the removal of "unacceptable" points of view. these "unacceptable" points of view are the experiences of the oppressed. therefore, according to code (1991), the goal of feminist epistemology is to overturn "perspectival hierarchies" (alcoff potter, 1993, p. 5). research concerning feminist epistemogy, i. e.: fox-keller (1985), bordo (1987), and harding (1986) uncovered themes in traditional epistemology. fox-keller's (1985) analysis of plato's philosophy of sexual love and its link to metaphysics found a relationship between androcentric epistemology and plato's philosophy. similar to fox-keller's work, bordo's 1987 study of descartes meditations also found androcentric epistemology in traditional science. harding's 1986 analysis offered the feminist responses to the androcentrism inherent in science. all three theorists concluded that there is a "masculinist, androcentric tradition that yields a hypernormative, idealized, and stylistically aggressive mode of thought" (duran, 1991, p. 8). harding (1987), in her analysis of the androcentric epistemological assumptions of science, argued that feminist epistemology, particularly feminist standpoint epistemologies, must "seek to epistemically valorize some of the most discredited perspectives of knowledge" that have been ignored (harding, 1986, pp. 25-26). harding identifies herself as a feminist standpoint epistemologist. yet, harding does not go as far as embracing relativism. she suggests that feminist standpoint epistemologies will increase and strengthen women's ability to achieve objectivity. objectivity can be done through the use of a methodology that involves (harding, 1986): starting thought, from the lives of marginalized people...this will reveal more of the unexamined assumptions influencing science and will generate more critical questions, thus producing less partial and distorted accounts...this research needs to be undertaken by everyone, not just by the marginalized themselves. (pp. 25-26) stanley and wise (1993) disagreed with harding's suggestion. they advocated women as the knowers and the doers. stanley and wise also viewed feminist epistemology a bit differently, defining feminist epistemology as a "framework or theory for specifying the constitution and generation of knowledge about the social world; that is, it concerns how to understand the nature of reality" (stanley wise, 1993, p. 188). therefore, based on the definition, women's realities differ from men's realities and feminist epistemology is women's epistemology. feminist epistemology specifies what women's knowledge is and how it may be distinguished from the knowledge which dominates men's knowledge. this is done by specifying who are the "knowers," female or male. specifying who are the "knowers," female or male, specifies the type of knowledge utilized by the researcher/theorist. feminist epistemologies also examine by what means someone becomes the knower and "the means by which competing knowledge-claims are adjudicated and some rejected in favour of another/others" (stanley wise, 1993, p. 188). stanley and wise (1993) alleged that feminist epistemology is fundamental to feminism, "for it is around the constitution of a feminist epistemology that feminism can most directly and far-reachingly challenge non-feminist frameworks and ways of working" (stanley wise, 1993, pp. 188-189). they use, for an example, key areas of the feminist research process that draw from feminist epistemology. these key areas reflect such feminist epistemological assumption as (stanley wise, 1993): 1. the researcher/research relationship is a hierarchical relationship; this should not occur; 2. emotions are aspects of the research process which, like any other aspect, can be analytically interrogated; 3. critically unpacking conceptualizations of "objectivity" and subjectivity' as binaries or dichotomies, integration must occur; 4. the researcher's "intellectual autobiography" affects their "understanding" and their "conclusions", use the "intellectual autobiography" of researchers, that is, know where the researchers is "coming from" to be able to describe the process by which "understanding" and "concluding" are reached; 5. there are different "realities", consider the existence and management of the different "realities" or versions held by researchers and researched; 6. there is those who hold authority and power in research, be aware of issues surrounding authority and power in research; 7. there is authority and power in the written representation of research, perhaps more crucially be aware of these issues that affect research. (p. 189) the above noted feminist epistemological assumptions are implemented in theory and research in a variety of ways. according to harding (1986), there are three main categories that feminist epistemologies fall into: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint, and feminist postmodernism (harding, 1991, p. 106). harding's categorization of basic epistemological assumptions is based upon her view of feminist epistemology as "feminist ways of knowing" or "feminist critiques of traditional accounts of ways of knowing" (duran, 1991, p. 81 citing harding, 1986, pp. 25-26). harding's (1986) first category of feminist epistemologies is feminist empiricism, described by duran (1991) as offering: an account of the functioning of the empiricist (and even quasi-positivist) portrayals of knowledge acquisition as beyond criticism has tended to focus on rather more straightforward issues of women's role within sciences, such as the number of women functioning in scientific endeavors, and the effect that the training of greater number of women would have on the sciences. (p. 81) feminist empiricism is an attempt "to bring the feminist criticisms of scientific claims into the existing theories of scientific knowledge by arguing that sexist and androcentric results of research are simply the consequences of 'bad science'" (harding, 1991, p. 48). the emphasis of this category has been at the cost of examining what other feminists, i. e.: fox-keller, have regarded as the underlying issues in the structures of the sciences (duran, 1991, p. 81). harding's second category of feminist epistemology is feminist standpoint. this category has been described (duran, 1991) as: those lines of feminist critique that have in general taken a post-marxist view of the division of labor on our planet, and that have argued that women are privileged to have an epistemically different perspective from males by virtue of the state of their oppression and the tasks that, as members of an oppressed group, they are asked to perform. (p. 81) feminist standpoint epistemologists argue that the problem of science, research, and knowledge is more extensive. the dominant conceptual scheme of the natural and social sciences have been cultivated from "the experience that western men of the elite classes and races have of themselves and the world around them" (harding, 1991, p. 48). feminist standpoint epistemologists also support the starting of research from women's lives, which will result in a more inclusive, less distorted explanation of social phenomenon. here the term epistemology is divorced from its use in the analytic tradition of what makes knowledge. in this category, knowledge is viewed as a social construction and contextually bound. the third and final category is feminist postmodernism, or "those strands of feminist analysis, influenced by such thinkers as lacan, foucault, cixous, heidegger, and derrida" (duran, 1991, p. 81). the feminist works that fall within this category have been described as (harding, 1986; duran, 1991) "fixed firmly within the continental tradition and that see the pretended unity of science, society, and indeed western culture itself as a shattered or fragmented pattern that never had the authority it purported to have" (duran, 1991 p. 81-82). feminist postmodernism rejects foundationalism in all its forms. feminist postmoderns also reject all "grand narratives", including feminist grand theory explaining women's conditions and oppression (stanely wise, 1993, p. 189). feminist postmoderism also dismisses (stanley wise, 1993): any notion of a representational, effectively one-to-one, relationship between reality and textually based (written, verbal, visual) accounts of it. postmodernism claims to be the originator of these epistemological claims. (p. 190) stanley and wise (1993) do not concur with the rejections of feminist postmoderist epistemology. stanley and wise argued that feminist postmoderism partakes in colonizing activities, intellectual imperialism, and "lay claim to these ideas as instead the common property of a number of divergent intellectual traditions (stanley wise, 1993, p. 190). collins (1990) also explored feminist epistemology. she described a feminist epistemology that is encompassed in harding's feminist standpoint epistemology category. collins (1990) examined black feminist epistemology and describes this particular epistemology as encompassing four defining attributes: 1. concrete experiences are the criterion of meaning and are predicated upon an assumption of the ontological basis of knowledge; 2. dialogic means must be used to assess knowledge-claims; 3. the basis of relationships between people is the ethic of caring; 4. there is an ethic of accountability that is central to black feminist epistemology. (pp. 201220) i would argue, along with stanley and wise, that these attributes are the basis of all feminist epistemologies and are not exclusive to black feminist epistemology. stanley and wise disagreed with collins and did not accept the existence of difference as a means for a hierarchical relationship between the degrees of different voices. stanley and wise also granted a view that contradicted the privileging of feminist epistemology seen in hartsock (1987), jaggar (1989), and harding's (1991). these attributes also demonstrate that there are no relationships between ontology, epistemology and ethics. as stanley and wise (1993) stressed, "these have epistemological consequentiality, such that the one is mutually subsumed within the other: a perfect union" (stanley wise, 1993, p. 226). i argue that the union of ontology, epistemology, and ethics is also true for feminist theory, methodology, and pedagogy as well as for practitioners. as we have seen, feminist epistemology not only integrates ontology, epistemology, and ethics, it integrates women's knowledge with their experiences. as feminist have reconstructed epistemology in order to incorporate women's voices, they have illustrated the inherent connection between women's knowledge of the world and their construction of realities within that world. feminist epistemologists argued and still argue that our "womanness" or "maleness" affects how we view the world. the female view of the world is traditionally ignored in the social construction of knowledge. therefore, feminist epistemologies are the "golden keys" that unlock the door to women's ways of knowing, being, and experiencing. feminist epistemology illustrates the multiplicity of women's voices while integrating their knowledge and experiences. once this door is unlocked, a better understanding of women's lives can occur and the end of oppression may be plausible. references alcoff, l. and potter, e. (1993). feminist epistemologies. new york: routledge. code, l. (1991). what can she know? feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. ithaca, new york: cornell university press. collins, p. h. (1991). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. new york: routledge, chapman and hall, inc. durna, j. (1991). toward a feminist epistemology. savage, maryland: rowman littlefield publishers, inc. griffin, g. b. (1992). calling: essays on teaching in the mother tongue . pasadena, california: trilogy books. harding, s. (1986). the science question in feminism. ithaca, new york: cornell university press. harding, s. (1991). whose science? whose knowledge? thinking for women's lives. ithaca, new york: cornell university press johnson, a. (1995). the blackwell dictionary of sociology: a user's guide to sociological language. cambridge, massachusetts: basil blackwell inc. stanley, l. and wise, s. (1993). breaking out again: feminist ontology and epistemology. new york: routledge. dr. joanne ardovini-brooker is an assistant professor at sam houston state university. soc_jab@shus.edu subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | 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http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the invisible labor for emerging women leaders: a critical analysis of literature in higher education kathryn r. blaha, kristine reed, lisa a. newland, karen card, & larianne polk kathryn r. blaha: doctoral student, university of south dakota, kathryn.r.blaha@gmail.com kristine reed: professor emerita, university of south dakota, kristine.reed@usd.edu lisa a. newland: professor of human development and educational psychology, university of south dakota, lisa.newland@usd.edu karen card: associate professor of adult and higher education, university of south dakota, karen.card@usd.edu larianne polk: educational service unit 7 chief administrator, university of south dakota, polk.larianne@gmail.com accepted march 6, 2023 while studies focused on gender and negotiations have explored the procedures or outcomes of the negotiation, little is known about how women experience the process of negotiation for salary and compensation. this hermeneutic phenomenological study gave voice to female school superintendents’ experiences with negotiation through 11 semi-structured interviews in the midwestern us. each 60-minute interview was recorded, transcribed, and verified. keywords and phrases were identified, and clusters of meaning were developed to articulate themes and provide detailed descriptions of what women experienced throughout the negotiation process. trustworthiness techniques were utilized in this study, including journaling, bridling, and member checking. six themes emerged from the 11 semi-structured interviews: i am a woman in a man’s world (still), negotiating for myself is uncomfortable, the school board holds the cards, experience and salary data are key, fairness is important, and female leaders need support. recommendations are provided to bolster support and preparation for women’s participation in negotiation, including creation of network support groups, mentorship programs, and personal development opportunities, as well as further education for school boards regarding gender bias and disparity in negotiation. recommendations are also provided for future research regarding female superintendents’ experiences of negotiations. keywords: leadership, female superintendents, negotiation, gender, salary, compensation while a variety of factors, including experience and qualifications, can influence employment compensation, negotiation remains key. kugler et al.’s (2018) recent meta-analysis revealed consistent gender differences in negotiations. their work highlights the continued inequality of resource distribution amongst males and females, which reinforces the glass ceiling and the gender wage gap. yet little is known about female personal experiences with negotiation for compensation (in part because of their tendency not to negotiate). there is even less research on women in specified fields (e.g., k-12 administration). in this qualitative study, the negotiation experiences of 11 female superintendents are explored. while previous studies have focused on negotiation processes or outcomes, relatively little work has focused on the lived experiences of females – particularly from rural midwest public school systems. a phenomenological approach was therefore taken to study female superintendents’ lived experiences of advancement and salary/compensation negotiation. this allows the female voice to be heard and recognized in a male-dominated world. methodology for this study included purposeful sampling of female superintendents, whose responses to the semi-structured interviews were analyzed. six themes emerged: i am a woman in a man’s world (still), negotiating for myself is uncomfortable, the school board holds the cards, experience and salary data are key, fairness is important, and female leaders need support. limitations, recommendations for practice, and suggestions for future research are identified. the female experience in school leadership women entering the superintendency tend to do so later in their careers than males (robinson et al., 2017). alarmingly, the number of women in the superintendency does not reflect the number of women qualified to hold the position (rodriguez, 2019; tarbutton, 2019). this discrepancy is based on biases that influence candidate recruitment and stereotypes regarding women’s capacity to be successful leaders that are still prevalent (superville, 2017). the united states’ educational system has a gendered career system that favors males over females in leadership roles at all levels (kolb. 2012; maranto et 35 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 al., 2019). this gender bias has implications regarding what topics can be negotiated and by whom (kolb, 2012; kolb & mcginn, 2009). kolb’s work called to light the “role of institutionalized social practices that sustain gender differences and inequalities” (2009, p. 515). social reinforcement of gender distinctions has allowed “second generation gender issues [to] become embedded in institutional cultures and practices” (kolb & mcginn, 2009, p. 5). this inequality continues even when women advance into leadership positions (gresham & sampson, 2019). women, negotiations, salary, and the gender pay gap northouse (2019) drew attention to a major behavioral difference between women and men; men readily self-promote and negotiate, while women typically do not. in fact, women negotiate at a much lower rate than men (fischer & bajaj, 2017; kugler et al., 2018). to complicate things further, males may be viewed as “more deserving of benefits and rewards over equivalent women” which in turn makes it more acceptable and appropriate for men to ask (kolb 2012, p. 131). it is also suggested women hold lower pay expectations than their male counterparts, negotiate less intensely, and as a result, accept lower outcomes (mazei et al., 2015). the likelihood of negotiating and the outcomes achieved when negotiating wage-setting arrangements can be very impactful on access to opportunities and other resources (blau & kahn, 2017; northouse, 2019). through negotiations, one may profit in ways that include improving salaries, benefits, and careers (kugler et al., 2018). toosi et al. (2019) found that gender disparities in pay over a lifetime are closely connected to starting salaries. failing to negotiate the initial salary is so significant and challenging to overcome that it has been argued the wage gap between the sexes is primarily due to discrepancies in entering salaries (babcock & laschever, 2007). therefore, women need to negotiate early and consistently to improve their economic standing (toosi et al., 2019). the gender wage gap is ascribed to females’ behavior to negotiate less regularly and less effectively than their male counterparts (kugler et al., 2018). the differences associated with gender are influential in connection to negotiation behaviors and are also associated with the wage gap between the sexes (catalyst, 2021). yet, focusing on gender differences may place blame on women and in turn ignores the culture and institution that may be contributing to the wage gap (meyerson & fletcher, 1999). when acknowledging females’ careers over their lifetimes, the ripple effect associated with the outcomes of negotiations cannot be overlooked (pardal et al., 2020). recognizing the impact gender differences have on negotiations helps highlight the inequitable allocation of funds between males and females while reinforcing concepts including the glass ceiling and the gender wage gap (kugler et al., 2018). purpose and rationale for the study while studies focused on gender and negotiations have explored the process or outcomes of the negotiation, little is known about how women experience the process of negotiation for salary and compensation. this phenomenological study gave voice to female school superintendents’ experiences with negotiation. creswell and poth (2018) explained that this exploration through qualitative research provides researchers an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of a complex issue and further insight into “the process that people experience, why they responded as they did, the context in which they responded, and their deeper thoughts and behaviors that governed their responses” (creswell & poth, 2018, p. 46). heidegger, the father of hermeneutic phenomenology, held “the assumption that humans live in the world as interpretive beings in a continuously interpreted world” (vagel, 2018, p. 81). researchers use hermeneutic phenomenology to study the lived experience to get at the essence of the experience and thoughtfully describe its meaning to others, balancing interpretation with bias/assumption checking in a cyclical process (vagel, 2018). in that way, the meaning of a lived experience is gathered and reduced to its essence to facilitate understanding of the phenomenon (creswell & poth, 2018). the purpose of this qualitative hermeneutic phenomenology was to develop an understanding of how female superintendents experience negotiation through description and the meaning they ascribe to that process. by exploring how female school superintendents experience salary negotiations, this study fills a gap in the literature while allowing for the participants’ voices and insights to be heard. in hermeneutic phenomenology’s interpretive style, attention is paid to a conceptual framework for the problem (peoples, 2021; vagel, 2018). in this study, kolb’s (and others’) work on female negotiations provides the framework for understanding this phenomenon. method participants purposeful sampling was used to ensure that participants could provide insight into the phenomenon being studied (creswell & poth, 2018). each of the eleven female participants was leading a public k-12 school district as a superintendent. two rural midwestern states were chosen for sampling because of the limited research on the topic in that demographic area. in addition, accessibility of the data to the researcher was considered. the sample was chosen to highlight the similarities and differences in salaries and negotiation processes based on salary data, in what are otherwise very similar midwest states. most of the participants were white, which is reflective of the general demographics of female superintendents in this area. district size ranged from approximately 176 to 25,000 students. participant superintendent experience ranged from 4 to 18 years, total years of experience in education ranged from 16 to 39 years, and years of experience with negotiation ranged from zero to 13 years. 36 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 procedures several inclusion criteria were identified, specifically: job title, gender, place of employment, and experience with negotiations. such criteria were in place to ensure the participants selected held the position of the superintendent as their job title, were female, held employment in a public school district within the geographical region of the midwest, and had either participated in or elected to forgo the negotiation process. the eleven participants who met the criteria were interviewed using audio and video recordings. interview protocol in phenomenological research, data are often collected through interviews with a group of people who have experienced the studied phenomenon. this interview is a conversation-based interaction where knowledge is developed as the researcher tries to understand the interviewee’s point of view in her world to find meaning (brinkmann & kvale, 2015). the researcher used a semi-structured interview which lasted approximately 60 minutes. semi-structured interviews allowed for interview questions to be developed to ensure research relevancy and that the main characteristics of the study were addressed while providing the participants the opportunity to discuss other material that could be relevant to the study (peoples, 2021). the semi-structured interviews included five sets of questions. the questions were grouped and included questions addressing the participants’ years in education, years as a superintendent, and years in the current school district; questions associated with gender and leadership addressing the participants’ role as a female superintendent and obstacles they may have faced; questions related to gender and social roles/norms addressing how gender roles and social norms may have impacted their experience as a superintendent; questions related to negotiation experience(s) addressing how many times the participants had experienced negotiations and various aspects of their experience; and questions providing the opportunity to share information not previously addressed. data analysis the goal of data analysis in a phenomenological study aims to provide a comprehensive narrative drawing from essential themes identifiable to those who have experienced the phenomenon (peoples, 2021). each interview was recorded and analyzed using qualitative data analysis techniques. all data were treated equally during this process, as merriam and tisdel (2016) recommend. after identifying keywords and phrases, the researcher developed clusters of meaning to articulate themes and provide detailed descriptions of what was experienced and how it was experienced (creswell & poth, 2018). journaling and bridling were used to offset potential bias. journaling allows the researcher to track adjustments and changes in thinking as data is analyzed and reflect on her thinking to view the phenomenon more clearly and impartially (peoples, 2021). bridling assists with recognizing one’s beliefs to prevent them from compromising one’s openness to the phenomenon and is more suitable for hermeneutic phenomenology than bracketing (vagel, 2018). participants were offered opportunities to review their transcripts to help ensure the study’s trustworthiness, as supported by shenton (2004). two participants also completed member checks. member checks ensure internal validity by asking for feedback from the participants and checking for accuracy (merriam & tisdell, 2016). such checks help prevent misinterpretation and ensure the participants’ perspectives are given while also serving as a way to identify researcher biases and misunderstandings (maxwell, 2013). confidentiality and anonymity were upheld through pseudonyms to protect participants. findings upon analysis of the data, six themes emerged in connection to the female superintendents’ negotiation experiences. while the themes are representative of the participants’ lived experiences in both states, there are noted differences between the states as well – most noticeable was the availability of data through transparency or the lack of such. nebraska’s superintendent pay transparency act places stipulations and expectations regarding publishing superintendent contracts (gessford, 2014). access to such contracts could allow for data analysis and the potential use of such data to become talking points during negotiations. this data is gathered into a spreadsheet that provides salaries, benefits, and days of the contract, among other things, to allow for comparability studies. superintendents draw upon this readily available information to help them prepare for negotiations. while south dakota requires educators’ pay to be published, south dakota does not have as robust of a policy as nebraska. one resource commonly accessed is a salary survey created by a professional organization, which gathers self-reported pay and is shared with its members. it is important to note that context matters in negotiations within the public educational system. there are inherent limits within the educational system. namely, the elected members of the school board have power when working within the confines of the school board meetings and exert such influence through voting. furthermore, as public schools are funded mainly through federal, state, and local funds, decisions are often financially driven. as the school board governs the school, the use of resources is an important responsibility to oversee (phillips & dorata, 2013). with only limited funds available, fiscal responsibility is taken seriously as sound management is expected (phillips & dorata, 2013). i am a woman in a man’s world (still) beyond the duties associated with being a leader, the participants juggled other challenges unique to being female – challenges often related to social norms and stereotypes. across interview participants, there was a general concern about how 37 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 they were being viewed as a leader. considering perceptions of the superintendent’s leadership abilities and success in the position are directly evaluated and often tied to negotiations, this is a valid concern. areas addressed included acknowledging the role of gender (despite wanting to remove it from influence), facing criticism, giving extra attention to appearances, and navigating relationships. many of the superintendents in this study did not view their roles differently due to gender. anne explained, “it’s an awesome responsibility not to talk about being female, but just to show that you can dig in and get the work done.” jasmine and penny expressed the desire for expectations to be the same regardless of gender and approached their positions as a job to be done. yet, gina voiced concern regarding the number of women holding superintendent positions in the state. she explained, “there are fewer candidates that are women… [f]ewer interviews that are women [and] … fewer selections that are women.” gina’s concern alludes to potential biases in recruitment, as suggested by superville (2017), and called attention to the gendered educational system, as noted by maranto et al. (2019). female superintendents are in the minority, and that fosters challenges. laurie explained, “you do have to kind of figure out and read people a little bit better – how they’re going to react to a woman that is … in charge of a district.” mira recognized some people do not believe women should “be making that much” money. she faced a board with members “that did not feel like they needed to pay a female superintendent what men were getting paid.” jasmine also acknowledged the challenge of having to prove herself as a leader. laurie felt things have improved for her “because i believe i’ve got a solid reputation established.” northouse (2019) called out empirical evidence exemplifying how gender stereotypes can influence the perception of females in positions of leadership, while kugler et al. (2018) drew attention to how gender roles influence people’s expectations of what others can and should do. while gender schema are the embedded beliefs associated with sex differences, such schema can create bias when evaluating “professional women’s behavior, competence, and performance” (kolb, 2013, p. 246). such conditions benefit men reinforcing both status and advantages associated with superior rights due to their connection to identity with their group (kolb & mcginn, 2009). despite working to demonstrate ability and professionalism, the study participants still faced criticism associated with their gender. anne pointed out, “stereotypes of what leadership looks like can really affect you and affect others.” cora explained she has been told several times, “you’re very direct,” and reflected, “i don’t think they’d tell a man that.” dee shared she was told she needed “to be meaner.” heather reported being told she “wouldn’t get a superintendent position because it is a male-dominated role.” then, when she did earn such a position, “the person who was there was mortified that [the board] had … hired … a woman.” she added she was referred to as g.i. jane, a reference to the term used to describe females who step out of their traditional roles and enter positions traditionally held by males as well as an allusion to the movie by the same title released in 1997 starring demi moore. mira admitted having encountered being “called derogatory names” also. stepping outside of the gender stereotypes traditionally assigned has prompted social backlash where these women in leadership have faced criticism not directly in connection to their ability in fulfilling their duties but in connection to their gender (bernal et al., 2017; cheryan & markus, 2020; chiefs, 2019; eagly & wood, 2013; ibarra et al., 2013; kennedy & kray, 2015; meltzer, 2018; maranto et al., 2019; reyes et al., 2021). associating a job with a specific gender connects specific qualities and characteristics to fit and thus perpetuates the stereotype (kolb & mcginn, 2009). this leads to the challenge of “redefining norms and expectations around what it takes to be seen as an appropriate fit and then to succeed” in a specific job or at a specific level (kolb & mcginn, 2009, p. 7). appearances are also influential as the participants have stepped outside of the traditional stereotypes and social norms ascribed to women. anne admitted, “being a female in leadership… i guess it never occurred to me that it was a big deal. to some people, it is. i am very cognizant of how i come off to people.” anne continued, “i think it’s very important that i dress … for my day and for what i expect.” she added, “i just have to adjust my presence, and image is important.” on the other hand, dee also shared her board’s discussion of a dress code and how they reminisce about the heels and skirts teachers wore years ago. while none of these participants have specifically been told how to dress, some shared that they knew of other women who have been in that very situation. bernal et al. (2017) highlighted professional dress as well. stereotypes and social norms also impact how women navigate their professional relationships as they are frequently “judged on a double standard” associated with authority (kolb & mcginn, 2009, p. 7). dee explained, “as a woman, you’re going to have to explain everything that you do,” while men seem to be trusted more and not questioned. dee further shared that there are areas her board does not trust her with, which has prompted her to delegate responsibilities to compensate. dee added the need to coach delegates “as even though i let [them] be my voice, i have to coach [them] so we are on the same page.” coaching takes extra time and effort, recognizing social roles and the need to navigate them strategically. mira recognized that while she has had a blessed career, “i have not been fully included” in her male counterparts’ conversations. four participants recognized the good ole boys club, with dee explaining, “i don’t go fishing or drinking, so i’m out of the loop.” laurie expressed frustration, “we are still invisible – and it’s frustrating!” such recognition illustrates the challenges stereotypes and social norms have created for women in leadership. indeed, perceptions of women’s knowledge and abilities have influenced others’ beliefs regarding their competence, creating obstacles for women to navigate (bernal et al., 2017; ibarra et al., 2013; northouse, 2019). furthermore, 38 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 when women are excluded from such social activities, they are also excluded from opportunities such as relationship-building (kolb & mcginn, 2009). there are also relationships beyond the professional ones to consider – specifically in connection to motherhood, the social roles most commonly associated with it, and its impact on their leadership. while participants did not address regret at entering the superintendency, a sense of sadness could be heard in the interview for some. anne recognized it is important for others to see her as a mother and acknowledged, “there’s a reason there aren’t very many female superintendents with kids – it’s not easy. it’s hard on the family. it’s hard on me. [there are] sometimes when i’m not the mom i wish i was.” kelli recalled walking into a local store under new management and hearing, “oh, these boys do have a mom!” she also shared how one of her children said, “i liked you better when you were just a principal because you were home more,” and acknowledged the challenge of finding that life-work balance as well as the benefit of a supportive husband. gina echoed this, explaining there is a price when “you’re giving and giving and giving.” time is sacrificed. gina continued, “it’s sacrificed to your family. it’s sacrificed to your kids….” while barrosa and brown (2021), fernandez et al. (2021), parmer (2021), and tarr (2018) have identified motherhood and related responsibilities as elements that pull women away from work, these superintendents are recognizing the challenge and making sacrifices involving their families to meet the demands of the position. negotiating for myself is uncomfortable considering negotiations allow access to improved resources, tasks, and compensation (reif & brodbeck, 2014; sӓve-sӧderbergh, 2019), it is critical to participate in the process. yet, seven of the eleven participants addressed difficulty with the process of negotiations. participants addressed topics associated with negotiation ranging from discomfort, the impact of stereotypes and gender, and acknowledgment that it can lead to resignations. discomfort with negotiations is not uncommon, and participants were very candid in their responses to this topic. dee does not consider herself “the best expert on negotiation.” cora admitted she is “not a very good negotiator for myself.” betty, kelli, mira, and gina all agreed negotiations are not their favorite things. gina shared, “i just hate going through it, and i’m glad when it’s done!” these findings support reyes et al. (2021) that negotiations can be unpleasant. kolb and williams (2000) pointed out a negative focus highlights perceived weaknesses in turn preventing the use of women’s assets, so it is essential to take stock of one’s assets and recognize their associated value while also acknowledging weaknesses. yet, while these superintendents are uncomfortable negotiating for themselves, three participants expressed different feelings when negotiating for or with their staff. heather shared, “i like to negotiate for the teachers or with the teachers better than i do for myself.” penny voiced enjoyment in that experience as well. finally, cora admitted, “i’m much better at negotiating for my staff and my principals.” again, these findings are supported by prior research as bear and babcock (2017), kugler et al. (2018), mazei et al. (2015), and schneider (2018) all addressed the communal or other-focused viewpoint which assists women when negotiating, as it fits more closely with their social roles. there is more to this discrepancy. the participants shed light on this as well. betty explained, “i don’t want to appear or … give people a perception that i’m needy or feel that i’m worth more.” she continued, “i don’t want to draw attention to myself.” mira expanded on this thought: “i think one of the hardest things you can do is talk about yourself… it’s uncomfortable when you have to talk about yourself and promote yourself.” dee added there is a “need to justify yourself and sell yourself even though we’re not raised to believe it. we are raised to have … humility.” anne also echoed the need to “try to be incredibly humble.” betty acknowledged the feeling of awkwardness when “asking for that raise.” gina shared, “it makes me feel like i’m begging for more when i’m happy with what i’m getting.” negotiation will be considered unnatural and distasteful when it is thought of as a selfish or otherwise negative activity, but women must use their voice if they want others to know their thoughts and expectations (kolb & williams, 2000). reif et al. (2019) suggested women need to look at negotiations as an opportunity for open discussion. there is also the need for confidence when negotiating (chiefs, 2019). women must recognize their worth so as not to undervalue it (fischer & bajaj, 2017; harvard, 2019; kay & shipman, 2014; schneider, 2018). knight (2017) drew attention to making sure the salary reflects the skills and knowledge possessed as well as fair market value – even if the salary offered would support a comfortable lifestyle. again, extensive research ties to these experiences of the impact of norms and stereotypes, social backlash, and the sense of not belonging (bernal et al., 2017; bien et al., 2018; cheryan & marcus, 2020; kugler et al., 2018; northouse, 2019; wynn & correll, 2017). beyond the discomfort that negotiations can create, this process brings about more questions for the female superintendents. while more than one participant addressed the need to remove gender from the table and focus on the job, gender still surfaced. dee asked, “would my gender make a difference in my salary? can i negotiate for more?” betty shared, “i feel like i have to … advocate a little bit more and have to push harder. i have to fight a little bit more.” gina recalled, “there were times earlier in my career as a superintendent that i felt too much like i had to defend when i was asking for the money i was asking for.” dee also remembered someone once told her that her gender would make a difference in her salary. gina shared an example, “i do think that some thought i was going to be cheaper, and not necessarily because i was younger and … newer to the profession – but because i was a woman.” laurie echoed experiences where others were “not giving me the same 39 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 type of attention as ...a male counterpart” received. she expounded on the impact she felt gender had made in her experience, saying, “maybe my credibility or even skillset was overlooked.” gina acknowledged others “may need a little more time to accept you.” mira added she felt her gender also impacted the negotiation process early in her career. she continued, “i think your performance and the skills that you bring to the district, your knowledge of the district, and all of that outweigh that – eventually.” gina wondered, “just because there are fewer of us… maybe it takes a little more effort to be seen in that more serious role or to be taken a little bit more seriously.” these comments associated with gender, as shared by the participants, are reminiscent of current research literature on gender and leadership. previously, researchers have found that expectations associated with gender influence people’s thoughts, behaviors, and leadership success beliefs (blau & kahn, 2017; eagly, 2020; seitchick, 2020). eagly and wood (2012) identified ways in which society supports or dismisses behavior associated with gender roles. those women who participate in the act of negotiation make decisions to behave outside of the stereotypical female gender role, thereby pushing against their gender-based identity and running the risk of receiving social backlash (kugler et al., 2018; schneider, 2018; williams & tiedens, 2016). challenges associated with negotiations also led to some superintendents’ resignations. jasmine candidly explained, “there is only one way to get a raise sometimes – pack your bags.” for one participant, her resignation followed the school board’s reluctance to raise her pay, as the data suggested. this superintendent recalled how a board member asked her, “do you know how much it’s gonna cost to replace you?” she replied, “yes, i do. those are the numbers i give you every single time [we] negotiate. that’s why i’ve been fighting with you to give me the appropriate raise!” another participant who left a district following a contract negotiation experience explained, “it got down to negotiating for my contract and the level of … disrespect for my job and what i was doing, and i even said to a board member, is it because i am female?” these women seemed to recognize the impact low pay can have over time on one’s career, as highlighted by depaul (2020), and acted to make changes to benefit their circumstances. additionally, card et al. (2016) drew attention to negotiation differences associated with gender and income. the school board holds the cards the process of negotiation involves two parties. for the participants in this study, the other party was the school board and its members. the negotiation experience is as varied as the school boards with whom superintendents negotiate. a superintendent’s contract is developed and finalized through negotiation, but the relationship with the board is very impactful on both the process and the outcome. the participants shared experiences associated with poor and positive relationships and further stressed the value of that relationship in how they approach negotiations with their school board. heather explained, “you have your own contract. it’s between you and the board what that contract looks like.” cora added, “if they want to keep somebody and they offer … extra money, it makes it tough to leave.” kelli pointed out that the process of negotiating “is such an opportune time to really show people how much they appreciate you.” laurie shared, “i’m pretty excited when that time comes around. i hope that whatever i’ve done up to that point in that school year, that the board recognizes it as i’m working hard and am continuing to move the district forward.” she continued, expressing hope “that they’re willing to give me compensation that rewards and recognizes what i’m doing.” these statements support the assertions by northouse (2018) that women are less likely to self-promote. for some, the relationship with the board has led to positive negotiation experiences. for example, laurie shared, “i really have never negotiated for my contract. [the school boards] have paid me well – to the point where i want to keep a very great relationship with my board.” laurie continued to explain, “i’m being paid better than most, but again, i have a doctorate. i’ve got some experience. i think they pay me well because they don’t want me to leave.” kelli shared how her board is adamant about transparency and will provide the best offer first but has also become more generous each time. anne shared the unique experience when her board “wanted to move me higher … and i told them we can’t do that with our budget.” she expressed satisfaction with her proposed salary, saying, “that’s enough.” she then moved attention to gaining benefits for her administrative team. mira felt fortunate “to have people that i trust and that i believe will represent me well” on her board. other women have not had such positive experiences with their boards. one participant addressed how rural areas may have more old-fashioned views and how those board members will be the ones that provide pushback. mira stressed the importance of listening and “trying to get a feel for how they were.” she shared, “i think that’s when i started noticing … the gender differences, how it wasn’t outright spoken.” heather acknowledged she has “had a couple of board members who may have thought that a woman’s role wasn’t in the superintendency.” mira shared that in her experience, there were board members “that did not feel like they needed to pay a female superintendent what males were getting paid.” dee supported this view, explaining, “if i were a man, they’d have no problem – we’ll give you the money. you’re worth it.” she went on to express frustration, saying, “i’m working hard, and that’s what i’ve had to tell them. i really had to sell myself.” others have recalled other challenges associated with their gender. one participant admitted she was uncomfortable asking for a raise from one board. these experiences associated with pushback, gendered views, and the challenges of selling oneself to demonstrate their worthiness of the pay are reflected in the 40 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 literature as well – most notably connected with norms and stereotypes (mazei et al., 2015; seligman et al., 2018). relationships with the board are essential. mira talked about her process of strategizing with the board president “to ensure that i’m getting an equal shake. and then to be able to allow him to speak on my behalf to the board prior to any agreements being made.” dee stressed the need to be willing to explain to the board what they are getting and remind them of all the things that are getting done because she is in that position. mira approached things differently, saying, “i like to go in and say, you know i really appreciate the support and everything… this is what i feel would be appropriate next year.” she continued, stressing to make “sure that they’re clear about what they are paying for.” while the dynamic of a board can change with an election, that change can also influence the negotiation experience. mira shared that when an educated woman in a leadership position came on the board, “it made my negotiation much more fluent and engaged.” experience and salary data are key in education, data is quite frequently sought after and analyzed for a variety of purposes. this study shows a discrepancy between the two states regarding how they report superintendents’ pay and the availability of such data, which relates directly to transparency. the participants shared their experience of accepting that first contract and were able to address how their lack of experience and lack of data access could have been impactful. a closer look at the two states in connection to salary transparency and the impact on participants’ experiences with negotiations was also explored. experience and availability of resources such as salary data make a difference in how one approaches negotiations. several superintendents addressed how the first year differed from later years in connection to their approach. betty explained, with the first job, i was “so thankful to get the opportunity… just whatever you [the school board] want, that's good enough. now i better understand the whole system.” gina shared, “i was just so happy to get my first job and excited about that raise.” she pointed out a significant change in pay from a principal to a superintendent, but one may not recognize the workload that goes with the pay until one experiences it. she continued, saying, “that first experience [of negotiating], you don’t quite know what you’re doing, whether it’s a fair contract or not, versus what you were doing before. moving from principal to superintendent is a big increase no matter what, so you’re looking at the bottom line.” in contrast, betty highlighted the role experience plays, explaining, “i knew exactly where i was willing to be within [regarding the salary range]… felt less desperate… [and] had a little more power to make that decision as opposed to just take whatever they offered.” inexperience is not helping women who are entering their first superintendent position. research again sheds light to support the findings of this study. while fischer and bajaj (2017) addressed the impact of women’s beliefs connected with financial need to determine if they will negotiate, miller and miller (2002) called attention to women’s beliefs associated with luck in landing a position and fearing risk, which may jeopardize the offer. it is certainly not luck, but success that has come from “constant improvisation, negotiating opportunity, evading roadblocks, creating value” (kolb & williams, 2000, p. 240). nebraska superintendents’ experiences nebraska’s superintendent pay transparency act places stipulations and expectations regarding publishing superintendent contracts (gessford, 2014). access to such contracts could allow for data analysis and the potential use of such data to become talking points during negotiations. this data is gathered into a spreadsheet that provides salaries, benefits, and days of the contract, among other things, to allow for comparability studies. furthermore, the provided data increases attention to pay by “breaking apart total pay packages” (klein et al., 2021, p. 748). superintendents draw upon this readily available information to help them prepare for negotiations. in addition, some participants reported there are districts that use law firms or private companies to draw up comparison studies for use during negotiations. the nebraska superintendents referenced access to data heavily. one superintendent shared how negotiations can be tense times, and she felt concerned about “what to say, what not to say. what’s appropriate to say and what’s not appropriate to say.” yet, when using this data, the superintendent suggested, “just look at the numbers. don’t get into all the fluff. that can really alleviate a lot of problems with negotiations.” by relying on the data, a superintendent felt “it just makes the process go a lot easier because [the board knows] you’re trying to do what’s best for everybody.” another superintendent agreed, saying, “i usually collect all these data points… and i share that with the board prior to negotiations.” another superintendent suggested being data-driven allows the board to see the “fair market value for the work that you’re getting.” another explained that the numbers allowed her to justify whatever request she would take to the board. many participants stressed the value of the data by staying away from the emotional side. one superintendent expounded on this, explaining, “i prefer everything to be based on data and less on … intangible statements that are really difficult to prove.” there is value in having resources that provide useful data. as one superintendent summarized, “now i have the resources to get the numbers that i need to use … to help me negotiate – knowledge… experience in the job… i have more tools to bring to the table.” another participant recognized that her inexperience as a first-year superintendent allowed the district to “have me for really cheap labor.” she continued, explaining that moving forward, we “brought the actual numbers and wanted to be at the … middle range. it was two months of back and forth at board meetings” as they worked to find an agreeable price point. she admitted that even with the data for support, this experience was “quite painful.” yet, it is 41 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 the availability of solid data that provides protection from being taken advantage of (kolb & williams, 2000). south dakota superintendents’ experiences while south dakota requires educators’ pay to be published, the state does not have nebraska’s robust policy. a resource often mentioned is a salary survey created by a professional organization from self-reported compensation and shared with its members. three of the superintendents addressed the use of data in driving their negotiation process. two superintendents stressed market value, as well as gathering and analyzing data reflective of their district’s size. there was also mention of transparency. for example, one superintendent gathered district-specific data and used the daily rate as the basis for her negotiation. she shared, “the only reason i went into negotiation was because i had [the data].” some superintendents expressed concern or questioned whether they were fairly compensated. one asked, “where do i fit as far as negotiating for myself?” another explained a significant barrier to salary negotiation “is knowing what to ask for.” while others could be asked, she added that many of the men keep things “pretty close to the vest on some of their strategies.” to find some answers, one superintendent logged onto the salary survey “to see where i’m at with pay, but i don’t always know what that is because every district pays so differently.” another participant shared she cannot enter the negotiation process emotionally. she needs to have the mindset that she “might have to look for another job.” fairness is important it is often said that fairness is a state of mind. yet, for the participants in this study, fairness is sought after. when it comes to negotiation for salary and compensation, these female superintendents measured fairness by the numbers, their experience, and their credentials but also recognized a variety of other factors that are impactful. while different elements may be placed on the scale to help tip or balance it regarding fairness, finding a balance that is interpreted as fair is the goal – and that concern for fairness was for both parties involved. among the participants, there have been both positive experiences and negative experiences. yet, even when exploring the issue of fairness in connection with negotiations, participants also brought up their comfort level in negotiating and the differences within their male counterparts’ contracts. fairness, while an element that is highly sought after, is elusive. all but four participants specifically mentioned fairness as a concern connected with negotiation. heather explained some of the influential elements on one’s contract are the “predecessor, your credentials, experience, and market value.” jasmine added that through “experience, you start understanding your worth.” gina pulled no punches when talking about contracts and negotiation as she stated, “it just needs to be fair. it just needs to be comparable.” gina further explained, “my goal is to be fairly compensated for what i’ve accomplished, for how satisfied they are with how i’m doing my job, and for someone with my credentials to be making.” one aspect of fairness addressed is the balance struck for the benefit of the school and the superintendent. anne has asked her board, “what they believe is fair based on what i’m producing for them and what the market is asking for.” jasmine explained that she looks, “for that fairness in what you do for the school and what the school pays you.” jasmine added the data needs to be accurate as it makes the whole process “go a lot easier” as everyone is “trying to do what’s best for everybody.” anne shared that she’s had to say, “i don’t think you should… go that high. i’m good where i’m at, and it’s fair.” she added, “my personal motivation is to be fairly compensated while the community and the board do not think i’m an overpaid, underworking slouch.” she further recognized there is a fine line to maintain such balance. cora highlighted the value of compromising as she successfully used that strategy when a board was concerned about the financial bottom line. she was able to adjust her contract in other ways as compensation. several participants discussed experiences where they felt they were treated fairly by their boards during the negotiation process, with some mentioning the value of relationships. for example, cora stated that most of her boards have been generous and treated her fairly. she added, “i’ve taken what they’ve offered – except [for the one time] where i started looking at daily rates.” jasmine shared she is “perfectly happy just because of the school i was coming to” and added she felt they treated her fairly after reviewing the data. another superintendent shared that there have been many times when the board has “given me more than i’ve asked for.” laurie mirrored that statement when she shared, “i have never asked for more pay, and whatever the salary is, my salary is more than the [the others’ salaries in the] conference.” this behavior supports the assertion by northouse (2018) that women are less likely to self-promote. fischer and bajaj (2017), odell (2020), and reyes et al. (2021) all called attention to the value of relationships for women and the fear of harming such relationships through negotiations. others believed they had received unfair treatment. this belief prompted some to negotiate when they actively had not done so before. for example, cora candidly shared she has only asked for one raise, and this request had been “based on what others are making” as she was requesting to, at minimum, match the daily rate of other male administrators within her district. another superintendent shared it “took a lot of convincing,” and she “had to pull a lot of data” for the board to recognize that they were behind in her pay. these examples demonstrate how access to data for comparison provides information that sparked active negotiation, as supported by coglan (2018). for others, concern regarding unfair treatment caused them to leave the district. a superintendent shared, “the [male] superintendent before me worked half-time. i got paid the same 42 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 amount he did [for working full-time]. the superintendent that followed me is paid considerably more, and he’s male. i question that.” another participant did her research and “had asked for the average. [while the male] principal who was demoted got the average, [the board] would not give me the average – and they were going to make me do even more work!” it is important to do some research and discover one’s alternatives as they can strengthen one’s position while also focusing on one’s goals (kolb & williams, 2000). additionally, the authors highlighted alternatives that can “provide a litmus test for the ability of either party to walk away” from the negotiation table (p. 64). these experiences also support the literature addressing discrepancies in earnings by gender (aasa, 2021; barroso & brown, 2021; catalyst, 2021; kugler et al., 2018) as well as in gender inequality (parmer, 2021). for some of these women, the only way to rectify their situation was to move on. yet, even when moving to another district, some questions are raised. for example, one participant was hired on an interim basis, but the two male predecessors before her “were given two to three-year contracts.” dee shared, “every job that i left, they’ve paid my predecessor more than they paid me,” and it was “a lot more, so that’s tough.” but, she continued, “that’s motivated me to make sure that i’m … where i should be on the pay scale in comparison to my male counterparts.” again, these experiences support the literature addressing discrepancies in earnings by gender (barroso & brown, 2021; aasa, 2021). another challenge was also addressed – comfort level. gina explained, “if you’re middle of the road or there’s lots of room for improvement, i would feel less comfortable asking for what i felt was fair.” she continued, saying, “if they’re happy with what i’m doing, it makes me a little bit more comfortable saying … we’re behind the curve here.” betty shared, “i never want to ask for more than what everyone else already has – and so that’s probably where i struggle the most.” kelli admitted, “i don’t want some exorbitant amount more than what the teachers get, and i’m completely happy with that.” she continued, “i’ve never thought that i deserve more than what [the board] gave me, but i would probably take less because they are so supportive.” betty shared, “i don’t want to … be perceived that i’m not thankful.” cora’s discomfort with one of her boards ultimately prevented her from actively entering negotiations to ask for a salary increase. fischer and bajaj (2017), odell (2020), and reyes et al. (2021) all called attention to the value of relationships for women and the impact fear of harming these relationships has on negotiations. women also discussed what they might know about their male counterparts’ contracts and negotiations. for example, in connection to the contracts of her male counterparts, one superintendent expressed amazement at what they received and asked, “how do they talk somebody into that?” this ties into northouse’s (2019) acknowledgment that men readily self-promote and negotiate as well as the finding of fischer and bajaj (2017) that women may not recognize some of the elements up for negotiation. female leaders need support it is recognized that female superintendents are in the minority – holding 24% of the positions nationwide, according to the aasa survey in 2010 (enfield & gilmore, 2020, para. 5). gina simply asked, “women, where are you?” indeed, part of the challenge is not negotiating for compensation, but negotiating for the right to be considered for the job (kolb & mcginn, 2009). when questioned about support, many participants addressed the value of relationships, mentoring, and professional development. positions of leadership require skill in navigating people and professional relationships. again, there are undertones of stereotypes and social roles at play within the participants’ interviews. while some participants acknowledged needing just a few close friends, who often come from their professional network, others did talk about the role professional relationships play in their leadership role. dee addressed the need to have a core team “looking out for you,” while kelli valued a “handful of other female superintendents that really are my trusted peers.” gina admitted it can get lonely at the meetings and stressed the need to “find people to support you in the areas you’re less strong in.” while these insights support areas that fernandez et al. (2021) and ibarra et al. (2013) recognized in connection to mentors or sponsors, they also call on the relational and communal nature of women (eagly, 2020; seitchik, 2020). mentors are not new within the field of education, and for some of the participants, they have directly benefited from a mentor. some of these mentors came from a network of women, while others were well-respected males in the educational field. kelli shared that her male mentor “was able to provide what to expect and how he has done it.” several women recognized the benefits of a strong mentor or role model. gina, heather, and mira all expressed a desire to help aspiring leaders as they have been supported. gina also wondered what support could be provided at the state level to bolster a mentoring program through more structure and attention to the negotiation process. research recognizes that mentors serve as role models and support others early in their careers (chiefs, 2020; fernandez et al., 2021). beyond mentoring, discussion regarding professional development was also addressed. while these women are all well-educated and hold the highest leadership position within a school district, they recognize the need for general or specific professional development. kelli shared her knowledge of an annual negotiation training hosted by one of the organizations she belongs to. yet, there is a need for further professional development. cora suggested professional development on how the genders look at things differently, while mira would welcome training on navigating stereotypes. dee would appreciate information on “what to ask for.” betty suggested 43 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 professional development on data usage for negotiations and general negotiation skills. all recognized that general or specific professional development is both vital and helpful. however, as anne cautioned, one must critically examine it to remove the pieces that can be used while still being yourself. there is a need to have access to leadership experiences (meltzer, 2018) as well as opportunities through professional development and informal activities (chiefs, 2019). gina admitted such professional development associated with negotiations “would have been very helpful” early in her career. laurie recognized the value of knowledge as “the more you know, the more you know.” these various requests and insights tie back to the advice to acknowledge their worth in comparison to others and learn what is and is not negotiable (fischer & bajaj, 2017) while also supporting education (ibarra et al., 2013) and programming to bolster leadership skills (seligman et al., 2018; ibarra et al., 2013). both women who provided member checks addressed appreciation for having an opportunity to gain the information provided and read other women’s perspectives of their role as superintendents. one of the participants who completed the member check shared, “i didn’t realize that there were so many of us feeling the same way and having the same issues.” she added, “this makes me wonder if there are other areas of concern that we all have in common within the position.” she acknowledged that the topic of negotiations “will continue to need extra support and resources.” her comments highlight the need for women to have the opportunity to visit with each other and share their experiences, perspectives, challenges, and lessons learned. recommendations for practice in light of this study’s findings, the following recommendations are put forward for women leaders, employers, supervisors, organizations, and educational institutions: 1. engage women in discussions with their female peers regarding life experiences associated with leadership, including but not limited to negotiation. such network groups can provide needed support and information and “often occur naturally for white, heterosexual men” (kolb & mcginn, 2009, p. 9). talking to female colleagues allows women to share experiences and gain feedback (kolb & williams, 2000). 2. create intentional support for women in connection to the experience and process of negotiation through a mentorship or sponsorship program addressing negotiation strategies to better prepare females in education for this aspect of leadership. literature suggests inadequate opportunities to participate in networks of mentorships can have negative effects on negotiated items such as compensation and other benefits (dreher & cox, 1996; seidel et. al, 2000). 3. encourage women to seek personal development through exposure to such things as literature, conferences, and workshops addressing negotiation-related topics. it is important to note that female superintendents, a marginalized group, may need to learn how to recognize and learn how to “negotiate for authority, personal respect, access, and resources” elements that are typically granted to the members in the dominant group (kolb & mcginn, 2009, p. 8). furthermore, it is essential to recognize that what is bargained for actively, as well as that which is permitted to be decided by others, will impact opportunities associated with future negotiations (kolb & williams, 2000). 4. encourage school board members to seek resources to increase awareness of gender-related challenges associated with negotiation to help combat gender bias and disparity. by heightening the awareness of “factors that shape how gender gets mobilized in negotiation settings” negotiators may be able to recognize the “choices they have in the roles and positions they take up” (kolb, 2000, p. 350). 5. encourage school board members as well as other school leaders to examine the unspoken rules within the organization’s order to uncover second-generation gender issues. such work will allow progress to be made as a focused attempt to create gender equity can be made which will also allow opportunities to create change associated with “structures, practices, policies, and procedures” leading to greater organizational effectiveness (deutsch, 2007, as cited in kolb, 2013, p. 262). limitations of the study this study served to develop an understanding of how female superintendents in education experience negotiation through description and meaning drawn out of their lived experiences connected to the negotiation process. while the qualitative methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology was effective and provided valuable and insightful data in connection to the topic, the following study limitations need to be noted: 1. the research results may have limited transferability due to the small sample size. 2. the study participants represented only female superintendents in public school settings within two geographic midwestern states, limiting access to female superintendents’ perspectives and experiences in private schools and other states. 3. the study participants’ experiences may be biased because the data is self-reported by participating female superintendents and based on feelings and insights into their negotiation actions and life experiences. 4. researcher bias could have been a factor in the study as the researcher was in a life situation similar to some participants. while unintended and unintentional, participants’ stories may have been analyzed through a biased lens due to the researcher’s experiences. as supported by creswell and poth (2018) and peoples (2021), the researcher used journaling and bridling to avoid this potential bias. 44 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 recommendations for further research the following recommendations for further research are offered to further explore female superintendents’ experiences of negotiation: 1. this research could be replicated with a larger sample size of female superintendents in a broader geographical area and representing greater racial and ethnic diversity to determine if the results are consistent. kolb and mcginn (2009) aptly pointed out that “different groups of women … are likely to be affected differentially” (p. 3). 2. future research could examine whether rural female superintendents are impacted by lack of mobility due to other factors such as their spouse’s current employment. 3. future research could not only expand the diversity of populations examined but also different organizational settings to explore the impact of gender in connection to negotiation as kolb suggests such avenues can assist in moving past the stereotypes and limitations of past research regarding gender and negotiations (2012, p. 127). conclusion recognizing there are fewer women than men in the role of the school superintendent, those females who reach this point have overcome odds and faced challenges to get there. the female superintendents’ experiences of negotiations in this study both identify and articulate the challenges they have faced. while they shared their experiences which included both celebrations and challenges, many had the nagging question associated with the role of gender in their experience. support to assist women in navigating negotiations is needed as it is through negotiations the opportunity to improve resources, tasks, and financial compensation is made (reif & brodbeck, 2014; sӓve-sӧderbergh, 2019). in addition, clear information needs to be provided to eliminate the vagueness that disadvantages women – as, under those conditions, females often end up with lower income than their male counterparts (ammerman & groysberg, 2021). ultimately, attention needs to be drawn to the social norms and systems that slow women’s progress because as long as women face bias and discrimination based on their gender, disparities will continue (fernandez et al., 2020). therefore, as a society, we must recognize our biases and work to amend the stereotypes that unfairly impact women in the negotiation process. suggestions provided could be a start to supporting women as necessary for their success in navigating negotiations. references american association of school administrators. 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(2017). gendered perceptions of cultural and skill alignment in technology companies. social sciences, 6, 1-28. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci6020045 47 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 microsoft word 391_kimberly desimone_advancing women in leadership journal_author edits_december 2021.doc volume 40, 2021 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership 99 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 advancing women in leadership vol. 40, pp. 99-107, 2021 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women perceive barriers to corporate advancement as self-imposed kimberly desimone associate professor, st. bonaventure university, kdesimon@sbu.edu accepted april 15, 2021 the purpose of this study is to address a disconnect between women’s perceptions of their advancement potential / barriers to success in upper echelon corporate roles and their actual level of representation within such roles in companies in the s&p 500. this study involves the use of semi-structured phone interviews with 13 women in an organization in the s&p 500, who have been identified by organizational leadership as having high advancement potential. the results are evaluated using interpretive phenomenological analysis (ipa) to ensure an understanding of respondents’ experiences and perceptions in connection with their own process of meaning-making. in the findings, the participants’ responses indicate a disconnect between primarily positive perceptions on advancement opportunities for women, low levels of gender bias, and diversity initiatives and the actual outcomes regarding numbers of women in top leadership roles. further, participants consistently espouse a strong sense of personal responsibility and a perception that barriers they encounter are self-imposed. this is consistent with an overall institutional narrative that organizational initiatives have mitigated the problem of women’s barriers to advancement in the corporate pipeline, which serves to reinforce the illusion of an equitable and effective meritocracy. by drawing on a phenomenological research design and prioritizing the experiences and perceptions of women on the edge of advancement into upper echelon corporate roles, it becomes evident that corporate narratives and diversity initiatives may be serving to reinforce, rather than ameliorate, the status quo of gender disparity in corporate america. both scholars and institutional stakeholders can build on the results of this study to move toward improving the corporate pipeline for women’s advancement to executivelevel roles. keywords: gender, women’s advancement, corporate pipeline, stereotypic attribution bias despite improvements to women’s overall representation in corporate america, they remain underrepresented in the highest echelons of organizations. similarly, women’s career advancement progress often stalls at a middle-management level, and they are more likely than men to exit high-level leadership roles (carter & silva, 2010; catalyst, 2011, soares, lebow, wojnas, & regis, 2011; bureau of labor statistics 2019). indeed, although women represent 57% of the overall workforce and approximately 46% of management, they are underrepresented in the upper echelons of organizations with women representing approximately 15% of fortune 500 executive officers, 11% of corporate top earners, 21% in board seats, and only 5.2% in the role of ceo (catalyst, 2017). in addition to this issue—which clearly constitutes a broken pipeline in terms of women’s advancement to the executive level, top earner positions—many women report feeling that, given the prevalence of an extreme work culture and institutional advancement initiatives, any barriers they face are self-imposed (desimone, 2020; harris, 2017; hewlett & luce, 2007; thornton, 2016). harris (2017) and sandler (2014) studies confirmed that negative self-limiting ideologies prevent women from appreciating their full professional advancement potential. desimone’s (2020) study of fortune 500 female leaders found that when asked about barriers to advancement, a predominant self-responsibility, sense of career ownership narrative was prevalent. the attitude that women themselves are responsible for their stalled career progress dovetails with similar issues, including stereotypic attribution bias perpetuating an unhealthy professional pipeline for women in corporate careers in the united states. as of june 2019, only 25 women (5%) were serving as ceos of fortune 500 companies (bureau of labor statistics, 2019; catalyst, 2019a). women also represent 11.0% of top earners, 21.2% of board seat holders, and 26.5% of executive/seniorlevel officials and managers (catalyst, 2019b). conversely, women made up 46.9% of the overall u.s. labor force in 2018, up from around 16% in the 1970s and 26% in the 1980s (bureau of labor statistics, 2019). this is despite research that shows 100 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 companies benefit in tangible ways from having more women on the top-management teams (lyngsie & foss, 2017), lyngsie and foss’s (2017) study found that companies benefit from having more women on the top-management team whereby more women are associated with more entrepreneurial outcomes including more products and services are profitably launched. more notable than women’s lack of upper echelon representation, however, is the fact that narratives in corporate america, alongside the prevalence of diversity initiatives, propagate an assumption that organizations are functioning as effective meritocracies (burke & major, 2014; pape, 2020). burke and major (2014) challenged the legitimacy of meritocracy in maletyped domains where gender stereotypes create limitations for woman in roles that are “…the most prestigious, high-paying and sought after (p. 217). this illusion of effective and equitable advancement opportunities for women often leaves them feeling as if their failure to advance can only be attributed to internal, rather than external, factors (desimone, 2020). many researchers note a host of structural and institutional obstacles that serve to stifle women’s professional advancement. (burke & major, 2014; heilman, 2012; d hentschel, heilman, & peus, 2019; matsa & miller, 2013). scholars contend that male-dominated work culture and the extreme work model at the executive level plays a major role in creating a lack of fit feeling for women who then see their lack of advancement as selfimposed (burke & major, 2014; desimone, 2020, ezzedeen, budworth & baker, 2015; heilman, 2012; hewlett & luce, 2007). numerous external push and internal pull variables have been identified in the literature as correlating with women’s workforce exit and lack of advancement. push variables are those external, social, and organizational variables that most commonly emerge in the research correlated with pushing women out of the workforce or clogging the advancement pipeline for highly qualified women. pull variables are those internal, personal variables emerging in the research and literature that pull women away from attaining their professional potentials such as delaying promotion or slow tracking for motherhood, work-life balance, and lack of desire for power. the most frequent external variables identified in the literature as being associated with pushing women out of the workforce or derailing women’s advancement include lack of mentoring and sponsorship (hom, roberson, & ellis, 2008; meyers, 2015; mcdonald & westphal, 2013); exclusion from informal networks (cook & glass, 2014; fain, 2011; kulich, lorenzicioldi, iacoviello, faniko, & ryan, 2015), lack of flexibility (klettner, clarke, & boersma, 2016; waumsley, & houston, 2009; williams, blair-loy, & berdahl, 2013), motherhood penalties (england, bearak, budig,& hodges, 2016; kmec, huffman, & penner, 2013; kricheli-katz, 2012; stone, & hernandez, 2013), gender stereotyping (burke & major, 2013; branson, chen, & redenbaugh 2013; heilman, 2012), the malecentered work ethos (cabrera, 2009; cahusac & kanji, 2014; gregory, 2016; kelly, ammons, chermack, & moen, 2010; widera, chang & chen, 2010) and the glass ceiling (cook & glass, 2014; fain, 2011; kulich et al., 2015; ryan & haslam, 2005; sabharwal, 2013) which represents the unseen and unreachable barriers that inhibit women and minorities from rising to the highest corporate levels regardless of their qualifications or achievements. the most frequent internal pull variables in the literature correlated with women’s exit from the workforce or advancement derailment include opting-out or slow-tracking related to motherhood (belkin, 2003; grether, & wiese, 2016; & sealy, 2017) work-life balance or conflict (deery, & jago, 2015; catalyst, 2015; williams, & dolkas, 2012;) and lack of desire for promotion or low desire for power (paxton & hughes, 2016; schuh, bark, van quaquebeke, hossiep, frieg, & van dick, 2014). whereas there is extensive research identifying variables associated with women’s barriers in the workplace, what has been examined less closely is an in-depth understanding of the lived experience of highly educated and qualified women on the verge of achieving the highest levels of corporate leadership. more specifically, further research is required in terms of women’s perceptions and attributions of the barriers they encounter while working in traditionally male-dominated corporate roles. to address this lacuna, the purpose of this phenomenological study is to ascertain women’s perceptions and lived experiences concerning their potential for advancement in the corporate pipeline, their organizations’ diversity initiatives, and the existence or nonexistence of a functioning meritocracy. after providing a literature review including extant research on variables that influence women ‘s workforce decision making and stereotypic attribution bias, this article includes the methodology of the present study, presents results concerning women’s perspectives on self-imposed barriers, and offers recommendations for institutional implications and avenues for future research. literature review extensive extant research has addressed negative consequences resulting from the fact that highly qualified women, identified as high potential earners, continue to lag their male counterparts in advancement, compensation, and career satisfaction at every stage of their careers (carter & silva, 2010; fortin, 2015). as noted, the research indicates a host of external push and internal pull variables have been identified in the literature as correlating with women’s workforce exit and the broken pipeline from mid to top-level advancement. however, both institutional and scholarly narratives surrounding this broken pipeline contribute to women’s tendency to perceive their inability to advance as self-imposed (kim et al., 2018). the most frequent internal pull variables in the literature correlated with women’s exit from the workforce or advancement derailment include opting-out or slow-tracking related to motherhood (belkin, 2003; grether, & wiese, 2016; harman, & sealy, 2017) work-life balance or conflict (deery, & 101 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 jago, 2015; catalyst, 2015; williams, & dolkas, 2012;) and lack of desire for promotion or low desire for power (o’ neil & bilimoria, 2005; paxton & hughes, 2016; schuh, bark, van quaquebeke, hossiep, frieg, & van dick, 2014). historically, these pull variables have garnered a great deal of social traction (williams & dolkas, 2017) and are often the focus of the corporate, societal, and media narratives associated with women’s lack of representation at the highest, top-earner levels. harman and sealy (2017) explained that these seemingly internal variables are the result of external, contextual factors, such as identity-fit barriers, lack of support, and work-life conflict. the pull or opt-out narrative fails to address the full complexity of the issue by placing the blame for women’s lack of representation on the women themselves, while failing to address the many entrenched social and organizational barriers women encounter in male-typed domains (burke & major, 2014; heilman, 2012; matsa & miller, 2013; williams & dempsey, 2014; williams & dolkas, 2017). while explanations that attribute women’s lack of advancement to internal factors like motherhood and work-life balance are prevalent in the media and in institutional narratives, many researchers have also focused on external variables that derail women’s advancement, including lack of mentoring and sponsorship (meyers, 2015); exclusion from informal networks (cook & glass, 2014); lack of flexibility (waumsley & houston, 2009); motherhood penalties (kmec et al., 2013); gender stereotyping (branson et al., 2013; heilman, 2012); malecentered work ethos (cahusac & kanji, 2014); and the glass ceiling (kulich et al., 2015; sabharwal, 2013). while such perspectives are useful, it is also important to avoid the creation of a false dichotomy and to consider the broken pipeline of women’s advancement in corporate america in a holistic manner that accounts for the complexity of the situation in relation to the presence of a well-entrenched extreme commitment “24/7” (hewlett & luce, 2007, p. 54) work culture (desimone, 2020; hewlett & luce, 2007; thornton, 2016). for example, the understanding of motherhood as a pull variable runs contrary to the notion that the extreme work model forces this choice thereby rendering it a push variable. indeed, failure to fully embrace this extreme work culture has often been interpreted as a pull variable, and women are consequently assumed to have a low desire for power or promotion (o’neil & bilimoria, 2005; paxton & hughes, 2016; schuh et al., 2014). more in-depth, qualitative interpretations are necessary to challenge this potentially oversimplified interpretation. the presence of androcentric bias, whereby men and masculine traits are viewed as the default, in corporate culture is also necessary to consider. burke and major (2014) contended that descriptive stereotyping results in negative expectations and evaluations of women’s performance in male-typed domains. foster (2017) noted that institutionalized androcentrism causes women to suffer gender-specific forms of status subordination. heilman (2012) has found that “lack of fit” (p. 115) narratives propagate an organizational expectation that women are not equipped for, or likely to attain, success in top leadership roles. the proportion of men in an organization influences the extent to which stereotypically male qualities and behaviors are valued, and that women represent such a low proportion top-earner, executive positions serve to normalize the attributes seen as necessary for success at the highest echelons as those which are stereotypically masculine (burke & major, 2014). in a meta-analysis of gender stereotypes and bias, koch, d’mello, and sackett. (2015) found that men were overwhelmingly preferred for male-dominated jobs—that is: those jobs historically held by men—and that male raters exhibited greater gender-role congruity bias than did female raters when evaluating women in male-typed job domains. koch et al. (2015) and burke and major (2014) contended that the incongruence between stereotypical gender traits and the gender stereotype of a job results in increased gender bias, particularly in masculine-typed jobs. similarly, williams and dempsey (2014) addressed a pattern of language differences among men and women which create barriers to success; for example, women are described as lucky when positive outcomes result from their leadership (p. 29-30), whereas men with similar outcomes are described as skilled and highly competent (p. 29-30). this perpetuates the problem of an illusion of meritocracy that is flawed resulting in placing the blame for women’s lack of representation at the highest echelons on the women themselves, failing to address culture, structures, and policies which result in male privilege in the workforce (burke & major, 2014). therefore, understanding power and privilege is critical in examining the role of corporate culture as a barrier to women’s perceptions of, and experience in, navigating the corporate pipeline to upper-level leadership roles. these gendered stereotypes for achievement in upper-echelon leadership positions also influence the likelihood of potential top-earners to engage in positive or negative attribution patterns. sekaquaptewa and espinoza (2004) defined stereotypic explanatory bias as the tendency to spontaneously provide explanations for stereotype-inconsistent, but not stereotypeconsistent, behaviors perpetuating bias. thus, given the prevalence of women in middle-management as compared to upper echelon roles, it is more likely that individuals feel compelled to provide a spontaneous explanation for a woman’s advancement to a ceo role than they would for her failure to advance through the corporate pipeline. similarly, lacosse, sekaquaptewa, and bennet (2016) studied stereotypic attribution bias (sab) within the context of the stem field, defining the phenomenon as the tendency to spontaneously generate external reasons for men’s setbacks as opposed to internal attributions for women’s setbacks. lacosse et al. (2016) conducted a longitudinal study to assess sab over time with regard to the specific outcomes of perceived belonging in stem and postgraduate intentions to stay in stem and found that, when first tested, all participants, regardless of gender, showed a tendency to engage in sab and that, among women, a 102 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 perceived negative environment increased women’s tendency toward internal attribution. arguing the importance of stereotype threat in studies of organizational psychology, casad and bryant (2016) identified a gap in research within a workplace context and recommended further assessment of stereotyping and attendant issues in diversity and inclusion initiatives in workplace settings. while extant work has addressed issues concerning push and pull variables, the drives of an extreme work culture, and the potential explanatory and attributive effects of gendered stereotyping, notably absent in the literature is an in-depth, detailed understanding of the lived experience of highly qualified women on the verge of achieving success at the highest levels in corporate organizations and their relative experience navigating a gendered corporate workforce. methods to address the gap in extant literature concerning women’s lived experience and perceptions of external and internal barriers to their career advancement, this phenomenological study draws on the results of individual, semi-structured phone interviews with 13 participants from a company in the s&p 500. it employed two primary research questions: (a) what factors do women feel impact their career advancement? and (b) how do women feel about their leadership potential in the organization? a range of open-ended exploratory questions with additional prompting sub-questions was utilized as needed, enabling study participants to open up about their experiences, beliefs, and perceptions related to their corporate advancement opportunities. this methodology was appropriate for better understanding the lived experience of mid-level, corporate women navigating the fortune 500 landscape. creswell (2013) has illustrated that we conduct qualitative research “when we want to empower individuals to share their stories…” (p. 48). furthermore, creswell (2013) described hermeneutical phenomenology as research oriented towards the lived experience of participants and the researcher’s interpretation of these expressed experiences. oakley (1981) remained one of the most cited articles when discussing phenomenology and the feminist epistemology challenging the masculine assumptions of “proper interviews”. oakley challenged the “objective, standardized, and detached approach” (p. 41) asserting that better-understanding people through interviewing was “best achieved when the relationship of interviewer and interviewee is non-hierarchical and when the interviewer is prepared to invest his or her own personal identity in the relationship” (p. 41). the researcher in this study utilized interpretive phenomenological analysis (ipa) in order to better understand not only the content but also the complexity of meaning in respondents’ experiences (chan, fung, & chien, 2013) which was appropriate given existing oversimplified explanations for women’s workforce decisions. the interview questions prompted reflection from the participants resulting in explanations of their experience in their words. as chan, fund and chien (2013) explained, ipa enables the rich descriptions of human experiences with an emphasis on the importance of individual account. the interpretive approach was important though, to not only give voice to participants, but also, to make sense of their responses. larkin and thompson (2012) noted the importance of making sense of or offering an interpretation that is grounded in the accounts while using “psychological concepts to extend beyond them” (p. 101). interpretive phenomenological analysis, therefore, allows for “clarifying and elucidating a phenomenon” (eatough & smith, 2017, p 193). as such, with ipa, our interpretations are, amongst other things, attempts to understand “how we have come to be situated in the world in the particular ways we find ourselves” (eatough & smith, 2017, p. 198). sampling the targeted participants in this study included women occupying midto high-level management positions in a fortune 500 company in the midwest. purposive sampling was conducted to recruit participants via the researchers’ professional connections the purposive sampling process resulted in a population of women occupying midto high-level management positions (in the organization studied, these were defined as senior manager and director level roles) in a fortune 500 company in the midwest. the purposive sampling technique was a deliberate choice of participants based upon the similar qualities the participant possesses, in this case, women identified as high potential in the same fortune 500 company. etikan, musa, and alkassim (2016) examined the validity and efficacy of purposive sampling emphasizing it is appropriate for qualitative research in the identification and selection of “information-rich cases” (p. 2) where the researcher decides what needs to be known and sets out to find people who can provide meaningful information by virtue of their knowledge and experience. etikan et.al. (2016) emphasized that this form of sampling focuses on candidates who share similar traits or specific characteristics like similar educational backgrounds, jobs, or life experiences (p. 3). the women in the study were relatively homogenous demographically in terms of the level of education; most holding a master’s in business administration (mba), similar years of experience (more than 15 in most cases), and all working in similar jobs in the same fortune 500 company, and all had been identified by organizational leadership as having high advancement potential. in the organization under investigation, their executive leadership team of 11 included three women (27%) and eight men. of their 12-member board of directors, there were three women (25%). the women in the study were relatively homogenous demographically in terms of the level of education (mostly mbas; 11 of 13), years of experience (more than 15 in most cases), race (mostly white with two of 13 self-identifying as hispanic), age (mid-30s to mid-40s) marital status (9 married, two divorced, two single), and parental status (11 of 13 have 103 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 children). the phone interviews included 10-12 discussion questions and ranged in duration from 55 to 75 minutes. all interviews were recorded and transcribed using nonotes call recording and transcription platform, and results were interpreted using interpretive phenomenological analysis (ipa) and categorized with affective, values, and narrative-based coding methodologies. to ensure confidentiality, participants chose their own pseudonyms after providing their consent to participate, and coded data is stored securely. the use of ipa was significant in that it facilitated a connection between individuals’ experiences and their meaning-making relative to their experiences in navigating corporate advancement. interview questions were designed in order to prompt reflection and to encourage participants to provide explanations of their experience in their own words, which was particularly fitting in connection with this study’s aim of understanding women’s tendency toward internal and external attribution of their career progress and barriers experienced. gender socialization theory served as the primary theoretical framework in data analysis to evaluate the behavior and attitudes considered appropriate for a given gender, and how those expectations create both descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes and biases, which (as addressed in the literature review section), has not been examined in depth within the context of women in fortune 500 management roles. results after transcribing and coding the interviews saturation was reached with narratives, examples, and general answers to questions recurring and common themes emerging. the intent was to remain open to any themes or similar response clusters that emerging (miles, huberman & saldana, 2014) while using formal coding protocols as part of the data analysis process (saldana, 2013). upon completion of the interviews, the recordings were transcribed and the data from the audio interviews were captured in microsoft word and microsoft excel. where it was coded for key phrases and relevant emerging themes. two methods of coding (saldana, 2013) proved appropriate based on the transcribed data; affective methods: emotional coding and values coding. affective coding methods “investigate subjective qualities of the human experience” (saldana, 2013, p. 105) making it appropriate for analyzing and categorizing the data. saldana (2013) noted that emotional coding which taps into participants` feelings provides “deep insights into the participants` perspectives, worldview, and life conditions” (p. 106). creswell (2013) has noted that we conduct qualitative research “when we want to empower individuals to share their stories…” (p. 48). affective coding methods “investigate subjective qualities of the human experience” (saldana, 2013, p. 105) making it appropriate for analyzing and categorizing the data. saldana (2013) noted that emotional coding which taps into participants` feelings provides “deep insights into the participants` perspectives, worldview, and life conditions” (p. 106). values coding reflects participant’s values, attitudes, and beliefs which were suitable for this study as value represents the importance attributed to oneself, others, things, and our surroundings (saldana, 2013). corporate culture and social-cultural norms are highly relevant concepts in relation to the lived experience of participants navigating the workplace. the data analysis revealed that the women interviewed tend to compartmentalize professional barriers to advancement as personal or self-imposed rather than organizational or societal in nature. their responses also indicate the presence of a strong personal responsibility narrative related to career advancement. additionally, participant responses suggested that such narratives are reinforced consistently in organizational messaging and training programs. study participants consistently referenced these messages and programs as evidence of their internal sense of control over their careers. women in the study also addressed the extreme work model of constant availability, ability to relocate on-demand, and prioritizing work and the company as inevitable at corporate executive levels; many women identified this phenomenon as a major barrier to advancement and a central antecedent to career slow-tracking. internal attribution and personal responsibility narratives regarding the second interview question—which addressed what barriers, if any, participants had experienced or had to overcome and asked why participants feel those barriers remain present in their workplace—respondents reflected a predominant sense of self-responsibility and career ownership narrative. for example, the respondents used language connoting and explicitly clarifying personal ownership; carli noted that “you own your career” and jess asserted “i am in charge of my own domain.” although women expressed barriers of work-family balance and the need for flexibility, they did so within the context of what they perceived to be self-imposed barriers. joan reported that: i would say if i wouldn’t have personally taken steps back because of it being the right thing for me personally at the time, i would be much higher in the organization then i am now but i’m okay with that. i had a two-year-old and a sixmonth-old when i joined the company. i’ve personally chosen to take a step back so that i could manage everything. the participants employed language regarding personal choice, which serves to propagate the narrative of self-imposed barriers. similarly, julie noted that: i think the barriers i’ve talked with you about that i’m kind of self-imposing, right? i don’t feel like i’m being or going to be held back or that i’m going to stall out or tap out unless it’s potentially maybe temporarily of my own accord due to family needs and requirements. again, balancing work and family is articulated within the construct of a self-imposed barrier. even in instances when participants acknowledged gender stereotyping, the barrier seemed to have been internalized. for example, in referencing her first experience with the company in a role working with mostly men, jana noted: 104 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 so i had to overcome in my own mind that it was okay to be female, that even in leadership i was not expected to always have male traits, that i could actually be a whole person, a whole human being that i am and not have to pretend to not be one thing or the other. so, i think it was an internal barrier that i put on myself for a while. and it probably took me the first ten years of my career to get over that. now i’m over that but i do remember having to go through that. while some participants did address the presence of extreme work culture and stereotyped expectations for men and women, their responses were most frequently connected with similar notions of personal choices and ownership over career decisions, rather than based on a focus on entrenched stereotypes surrounding a male work ethos. institutional initiatives, stereotypic gender bias, and extreme work culture the first interview question asked: does everyone in the organization at your level need to prove themselves the same? do you feel some people are judged more unfavorably for their mistakes? is the playing field equal? in response, participants expressed the perception that organizational gender bias is improving overall as a result of diversity initiatives and clear performance expectations. importantly, participants’ responses to this question and the tendency to focus on training consistently related to reinforcements of the self-responsibility narrative. for example, several women specifically mentioned participating in landmark personal & professional growth training and noted this program’s message of empowering women to achieve success. nicole explained: one of my colleagues had recommended it to me. it was a very strong leadership concept really. kind of, focused on what excuses are you making or what barriers are you putting in your own way to attain success? i think that was probably one of the most eye-opening courses that i took. overall, participants expressed that gender bias was “getting better” in corporate america, and only about one quarter of participants directly addressed their experiences with gender bias. however, several participants noted feeling judged for being emotional and seen as wearing their heart on their sleeve, at times when they felt their behavior was exhibiting passion and commitment rather than being overly emotional. kristina noted: but the one place that i think there is a bit of judgment is around being emotional. i know many women at my level who have potentially the same…i want to call it an issue, the same trait that i do. i wear my heart on my sleeve and it is a passion more than anything else. but i think it is seen as emotional because i’m a woman. i think that people judge that in a way that i wish they didn’t do; they probably shouldn’t. likewise, jana described an experience early in her tenure with the company, which she described as a “very stereotypical male, very tough environment.” she noted that, in that environment, “i didn’t feel that i could be feminine in terms of like basic—you know, the traditional types of feminine traits like being too emotional or showing a lot of emotion at work.” even though few participants explicitly addressed experiences with gender bias, they did address a prevalent preference for agentic over communal traits in leadership. interview questions concerning the attributes or competencies associated with being a strong leader in the organization—prompted a detailed discussion from participants on the very specific, well-defined, and organizationally universal traits associated with top leadership in organizations. in response to this question, every participant noted a blend of traits including traditional hard business skills, such as meeting financial outcomes, and soft business skills, such as communicating well and working well with others, were necessary for advancement. although participants noted the non-gendered nature of such ideal behaviors for all employees, approximately half of the study participants brought up color wheel personality training, which correlates certain personality traits with certain colors. those with red personalities, for example, are seen as having strong leadership qualities defined using agentic words like assertive, determined, risk-taking, take-charge, and self-assured. in contrast, those with blue personalities are seen as more detailoriented, data-driven, and precise. yellow personalities are defined using communal words like kind and inclusive. all participants who mentioned this color wheel noted that red was emphasized as the most desirable personality type for leadership. kate noted: “i feel like they’re highly dominantly red as far as personality-wise.” some participants reported that, if they were not “red” enough by nature, they would exaggerate that part of their personality at work, kate noted: friday night i’m exhausted because i pushed so hard to be redder at work, but it’s because the preferred color is red and i’m not red, so i’m okay with who i am, but i know from a work standpoint i should be viewed as more red. so, i pump it up. although participants in the study expressed, they did not see gender as a factor in terms of organizational perceptions of their leadership abilities, the color wheel discussion suggests that, even in a corporate culture that values diversity in leadership, there remain stereotypical beliefs and values related to the ideal leader, and the most valued traits have been typically associated with men. the participants expressed the prevalence of extreme work culture as the most common barrier to their advancement and a catalyst for their experiences with career slow tracking. the respondents often addressed the extreme work model associated with executive-level leadership as resulting in a lack of workfamily balance. participants saw this extreme work culture as inevitable at senior levels and as such, noted this as a major advancement barrier. when asked about promotional aspirations, jess noted: “so, that next level up, i’m not aspiring to be there for a long time.” she explained further that “i want to maintain 105 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 my work-life balance, and i don’t believe i would be happy with…if i was working at that the next level of what it would do to my family.” when asked whether there was anything that could change that would make that next level of leadership an option, jess responded: “honestly the expectations of that role would have to decrease, right? at least where we work…those people are working, you know, 24/7, you’re on call all the time, and that’s not a tradeoff i’m willing to make.” while this type of personal choice narrative has gained a great deal of traction in the media, with headlines asserting that women are making the choice to slow track or exit their careers to have more time at home with their children, many professional women don’t view this as a choice. carli asserted: “it’s funny. it’s…you don’t really make choices. i think that the most interesting thing when you, you know, have children in general, there’s things you just have to do.” likewise, the extreme hours and expectations of constant availability are perceived to create health and wellness concerns among women. regarding being promoted to the next level, nicole responded: nope. i’ve made it very clear i have no desire. when i went to higher levels of leadership, it was just too much of an emotional toll on me. it would consume me. it would...take over everything. i took a big step back a couple of years for my own personal health, kind of, like said, this is not what i want to do. overall, despite references to an extreme work model, stereotypic associations between gender and desired leadership qualities, bias against emotional behaviors, and experiences with barriers to advancement, these results indicate a disconnect between women’s perception of—and predominantly selfimposed justifications for—barriers to advancement and their actual level of representation in top-echelon roles. discussion describing their barriers to advancement, women in this study primarily used organizational jargon relative to leadership advancement that has been well integrated into the corporate culture. for example, when asked about barriers to advancement, women compartmentalized professional barriers as personal, frequently using words like “self-imposed” rather than articulating any organizational or societal influences. this persistent personal responsibility narrative related to career advancement is reinforced consistently in organizational messaging as well as in advancement and training programs. a distinct disassociation emerged in participants’ responses among the corporate environment, outcomes, and perceived barriers. participants interpreted the many corporate diversity initiatives, training programs, and women’s leadership development initiatives implemented over the past decade as a commitment to addressing inequity and advancing women through the corporate pipeline, even when the same participants noted concerns with advancing to the next level because of extreme work expectations and work-life balance considerations. overall, participants did not perceive the culture as a constraint but rather perceived their personal inability or desire to meet the extreme time demands at the executive level as the barrier. when viewed in conjunction with the quantifiable reality of the executive landscape, including executive leadership statistics in this organization which, despite many noted diversity and inclusion initiatives, remains vertically segregated with women well represented in mid-level management while top-level leadership roles remain largely male—a disconnect emerges. the findings in this study results draw attention to a significant and troubling divide between women’s perceptions of their ability to advance and the existence of an effective meritocracy, and the actual vertical segregation in the s&p 500. indeed, despite many initiatives implemented by executive-level leadership, the organization included in this study is not statistically dissimilar from the overall figures of s&p 500 companies. interestingly, the findings of this study suggest that, rather than materially addressing the issue of disproportionate representation, these initiatives create an illusion of meritocracy and perpetuate an incorrect belief that women are as likely as their male counterparts to advance to executive-level leadership. to address this issue, further research is necessary focused on women’s perceptions of self-imposed barriers in relation to their trust in organizational initiatives alongside the actual impact of such programs by conducting similar phenomenological research with a broader array of women and with larger sample sizes. further, the results of this study indicate that problems associated with extreme work culture are not yet being sufficiently addressed, are perpetuating diverging expectations of men and women, and must be addressed at the organizational level and within the context of the corporate culture. likewise, as current diversity initiatives, according to the results of this study, maybe reinforcing rather than mitigating the effects of the broken pipeline of women’s advancement to upper echelon positions, it is necessary to continue research on the ways in which women’s perceptions of corporate america, their advancement potential, and an 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(2012). the opt-out revolution revisited. women who opt out: the debate over working mothers and work-family balance. new york university press, 151-175. microsoft word 364-ellen frank.doc volume 40, 2021 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership 65 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 advancing women in leadership vol. 40, pp. 65-74, 2021 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper study of students’ perceptions of women in management: 1988-2018 ellen frank southern connecticut state university, franke1@southernct.edu accepted august 17, 2020 (posthumous acknowledgement: dr. frank died prior to publishing this paper. this is one of the last works of her) replicates a study completed 30-years before regarding college students' perceptions of women in management. questions include descriptions on semantic differential scales of male/female managers, personal preferences for a boss, and estimates on when management equality would be achieved by women. factor analysis in 2018 defined the same three factors as in 1988. male managers' factor scores are higher on "managerial behavior," female managers higher on "consideration," and no significant difference for "initiation of structure" in both studies. when asked the preferred boss of a mixed-gender group, women are more likely to select a man, although this preference has decreased. there was a significant increase for females to choose a woman manager as their personal boss preference. results indicate little change in the stereotypical description of a woman manager, and that current female students have the "think manager think male" attitude. there is also the perception that in the population at-large, it is not yet acceptable for women to pursue a managerial career when married with children. however, men have significantly increased their personal acceptance of career women. keywords: woman in management, college student, perception of managers in 2018 women made up 46.9% of the labor force. and yet, looking at the s&p 500 companies 36.9% are first/mid-level managers, 26.5% senior level, 21.2% hold board seats, and only 5% were ceo (catalyst, 2019). apparently, there is an operating bias serving as a glass ceiling that is blocking a greater proportion of women to move up the managerial ranks. although there may be several reasons for this disparate impact (e.g., stepping out of their careers for a period of time, assignments that are dead ends) women are not perceived as having the “right stuff” to be effective managers. what seems to be operating is a stereotype of women that is not congruent with the characteristics believed to make a successful manager. this article reports the comparison of the results of survey data in 1988 with the replication using the same survey instrument in 2018. the principal objective is to examine changes in the description of male and female managers in the 30-year period made by undergraduate business majors. there is an abundance of research examining descriptions of male and female managers starting with v.e. schein in 1973 when she developed the schein descriptive index (sdi) her findings showed that descriptions of men and managers were more similar than the descriptions of women and managers. in her replication in 1975, she used middle-level managers as her focus. once again, the description of males and middle-level managers were more alike than descriptions of women and middle managers. research suggests that these stereotypes are not changing over time (bajdo, 2005; massengill & dimarco, 1979; noris & wylie, 1995; schein et al., 1989; tomkiewicz & adeyemi bello, 1995). dubno (1985) found no significant changes over an eight-year period. powell et al. (2002, 1989) studied managerial stereotypes among students for almost three decades. respondents were asked to describe good managers by rating the importance of a number of personality traits. the results found in 2002 were not much different from the results found in 1979 and 1989. students defined good leadership with masculine characteristics and believed that female traits were irrelevant or even harmful for good leadership. huckle (1983) also provided evidence that traditional sex-role expectations still existed. this current research represents a 30-year longitudinal investigation (1988 to 2018) to examine the extent gender stereotypes and perceptions of managers have changed. the methodology and results from the earlier study were published in sex roles (frank, 1988) and were used as the basis for this replication. the original research questions were: 1) to what extent do college students perceive that women are accepted as managers? 2) what are the significant differences, if any, in descriptions of male and female managers? 66 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 3) what are the gender preferences for bosses, if any, when given the choice to choose for homogeneous and mixed gendered groups? the objective of the current study is to compare the results of the two investigations conducted three decades apart regarding college students’ perceptions and attitudes towards women in management. three new research questions have been formulated: 1) to what extent have college students’ perceptions changed regarding the level of acceptance of women as managers? 2) how have descriptions of male and female managers been modified over this 30-year period? 3) how have gender preferences for bosses changed for respondents? methods subjects 1988. respondents were all upper-level business undergraduates enrolled in management courses at southern connecticut state university and at baruch college – the city university of new york during the 1986 -1987 academic year. 2018. students in upper-level undergraduate business courses at southern connecticut state university were requested to complete the attitude survey on a voluntary basis. students were told the survey link would be found online in the weekly course folder in blackboard learn 9. to encourage participation, the announcement noted the drawing of 15 target $10 gift cards. the demographic sections of both instruments were the same with questions regarding gender, age, marital status, ethnic group, and if they had ever worked for a female boss. survey instrument 1988. the hard copy survey was six pages long and required about 25 minutes to complete. the majority of the questions were answered on a 10-point likert scale, where the lower numbers represented positive responses, i.e., 1 = definitely yes vs 10 = definitely no. the survey was distributed with a very short verbal explanation encouraging students to answer all the questions. the written instruction read: we would like to know more about your attitudes and perceptions of women in management. please answer the questions indicating the first response that comes to mind. the instructions emphasized first impressions in an attempt to discourage students from making studied responses that they felt were socially acceptable rather than their own feelings. students physically wrote in or circled their answers. the completed surveys were manually entered into a database. 2018. the online survey was constructed within the software program “surveygizmo.” the majority of the questions were again answered on a 10-point likert scale. respondents just had to click on the numbered scale points to indicate their responses. the instructions read: “we would like to know more about your attitudes and perceptions of women in management. please answer the questions indicating the first response that comes to mind. at the end of the survey, there will be an opportunity to send in your email address to enter a raffle for fifteen $10 target gift cards. the survey should not take more than 10 minutes to complete. thank you for your participation!” attitudes towards career women the first question on both surveys, “how acceptable do you feel it is for a woman to pursue her own career, even if she is married and has a family?” was anchored with 1=definitely yes, and 10 = definitely no. a follow-up question repeated the same wording with subjects projecting how acceptable it was to “others.” a third question investigated, “are female executives presently accepted as the equals of male executives?” the follow-up question, “in how many years do you predict it will take before management equality for women is achieved?” had different formats for recording answers. in 1988, respondents were asked to enter a number in a blank space. in 2018, to avoid any hand data entry, the responses were fixed alternatives: already, never and in 10, 20, or 50 years. gender preferences for bosses both surveys asked students, “if you were forced to choose, whom would you prefer as your boss?” there were only the twogender choices as alternatives in order to force a choice, rather than the socially acceptable option, “doesn’t matter.”. the follow-up question was, “how significant is the boss’s gender to your job satisfaction?” to further investigate students’ gender choices for a boss, subjects were given three situations where they were asked to select who the preferred boss would be. the three groups were an all-male group, an all-female group, and a mixed-gender group. the question indicated that the credentials of the male and female candidates were equal, and the only difference was their gender. descriptions of male and female managers in both investigations, subjects were presented with two sets of 20 semantic differential scales upon which to describe a male, and then a female manager. responses were made on a 10-point scale. the instructions were simple: “describe a male (female) manager.” results sample 1988. the survey was distributed to 210 students during class. the administration resulted in 202 usable surveys (females n =103; males n = 99). the average age was 23.7 years for males and 24.6 years for females. the racial breakdown was as follows: white, 77%; black, 14%; hispanic, 4%; asian, 4%; other, 1%. 67 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 marital status was single 82%; married, 15%; divorced 3%. not having had a female boss was reported by 25% of the females, and 35% of the males. 2018. a total of 280 upperclassmen participated in the online survey with 270 being considered usable (females n= 158; males n=112). the racial breakdown was as follows: white, 65%; black, 15%, hispanic, 12%; asian, 5%; other 3%. unlike the earlier study where subjects wrote in their age, this group was asked to click-on which interval their age fell in. this sample was younger, with an average age of approximately 22 years old. only 6% indicated they were married, with 4% indicating divorced. in this group, only 8% of the men and women reported not having experience with a woman as a boss. attitudes towards career women 1988/2018 personal acceptance. the response to, “how acceptable do you feel it is for a woman to pursue her own career, even if she is married and has children?” has moved in a positive approval direction. male students in 1988 were significantly less accepting of the dual role than the female students (women = 2.38, men = 2.97; t = 2.16, p < .05). although there was no significant difference between genders in the 2018 sample (women = 1.57, men = 1.60), the results demonstrated a significantly greater degree (t =3.51, p < .001) of personal acceptance over the 30-year period for both genders 1988/2018 “others” acceptance. women in 1988 reported a significantly more negative perception regarding the acceptance of “others” to a career woman than male students (men = 6.02, women = 6.91, t = 2.71, p < .01). in 2018, women also reported less acceptance by “others” of career women than the men reported (males = 3.51, women = 4.64, p < .001). for the total sample in 2018, the contrast between personal acceptance and the perception of society’s acceptance was extreme (t =14.8, p <.0001). boss preference 1988. to the question, “if you were forced to choose, whom would you prefer for your boss?” 60% of the men checked a preference for a male boss (z = 2.00, p <.05); 67% of the women also checked a male boss preference (z = 3.40, p < .001). tests of significance were based on a p = .5 hypothesized preference for each gender. men with no working experience with a woman boss reported that the boss’s gender would be a significant factor in determining their job satisfaction compared to males who had experience with a female boss. (experience = 8.11 n = 64; no experience = 6.69, n = 33; t = 2.48, p < .01). 2018. women preferred a female boss 79% of the time, while 66% of males showed a preference for a male boss. against the null hypothesis of p =.5, both groups showed a significant tendency to choose a boss of the congruent gender (z < .0001). bosses’ gender was less of an issue for male subjects than for the females, although both minimized gender importance to their job satisfaction. (females =7.51, males = 8.18, t =2.20, p < .05) for males who reported never having a woman boss (n=18), there was no significant difference in their response from males who had worked for a woman. 1988. table 1 presents the choices the sample chose as the boss for the three configured groups. in 1988 male managers were chosen by both male and female students as the overwhelming (p < .001) choice of an all-male group and of a mixed workgroup. male respondents were inclined to predict a greater preference for a female manager in an all-female workgroup than female respondents, although this difference reached only p < .10 level of significance. table 1 management gender preference (%) respondents' all male group preference males 1* males 2** females 1* females 2** male boss 93 95 93 90 female boss 7 5 7 10 all female group males 1 males 2 females 1 females 2 male boss 39 29 54 29 female boss 61 71 46 71 mixed group males 1 males 2 females 1 females 2 male boss 82 62 81 75 female boss 18 38 19 25 *1988 ** 2018 2018. both genders thought for the homogeneous groups, a similar sex boss would be the preferred choice. in the mixed group, 75% of female subjects chose a man, while male subjects chose a man 62% of the time which is significant (chi sq. = 4.614, p <.05). table 1 indicates respondents’ preferences for the three different groups. equality in the workplace 1988. the question, “in how many years do you predict it will take before management equality for women is achieved?” was an open question. men felt it was going to take on the average 19.4 years, while women predicted an average of 14.0 years. these responses were treated purely as descriptive of students’ present perceptions, with no further statistical test made. 2018. respondents that selected “never” as their answer to the question, showed a significant difference between the genders. only 7% of males indicated it would not happen; 15% of women 68 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 perceived the future as no prospect of equality (p < .05). examining respondents who indicated equality has already been reached, 19% of males responded that way, while only 7% of females reported so positively (p < .05). the most frequent choice, 44% of the total sample, was that equality would be reached in 10 years. 1988. the question, “are female executives presently accepted as the equals of male executives?” demonstrated a significant difference between the genders in the way reality was perceived in the workplace in both years. where “1” was “definitely yes,” women in 1988 reported significantly more negative perceptions regarding a lack of acceptance than men did (men = 6.02; women = 6.91; t = 2.71, p < .01). 2018. the mean for females was 6.91, while men were more optimistic with a mean of 4.92 (t = 5.882, p < .0001). descriptions of male and female managers factor analysis of the 20 descriptive scales using varimax rotation generated three factors (eigenvalues > 1.0). table 2 presents the mean factor scores from both samples. table 2 factor scores male respondents managerial behavior considerations initiation of structure 1988 male managers 10.20 9.25 10.50 (1.67) (1.29) (1.06) female managers 9.26 10.01 10.27 (1.27) (1.29) (1.53) 2018 male managers 29.61 20.79 23.40 (10.22) (8.67) (8.7) female managers 29.81 27.17 24.90 (11.73) (8.18) (11.1) female respondents 1988 male managers 9.90 8.90 10.51 (1.30) (1.30) (1.32) female managers 9.79 10.15 10.09 (1.27) (1.37) (1.63) 2018 male managers 34.19 25.17 26.18 (9.45) (6.93) (8.18) female managers 29.22 29.47 27.9 (10.99) (7.16) (7.19) 1988/2018. the first factor, “management behaviors” was weighted heavily with the scales anchored with the terms: leader, effective, competent, fast, strong, decisive, knowledgeable, and active. the second factor, “consideration,” contained the scales anchored with such terms as open, rewarding, friendly, understanding, communicative, and soft. the third factor, “initiation of structure,” contained the descriptors lenient, democratic, people-oriented, happy, familyoriented, and easy. this factor seems to describe the type of team characteristics or the type of atmosphere in the group the manager leads and is a by-product of their leadership style. 1988. male students rate male managers significantly higher than female managers on managerial behaviors (t = 5.25, p < .001) and significantly lower than women managers on consideration (t = 4.00, p < .001) there was no statistically significant difference in the factor score for initiation of structure. female respondents scored female managers significantly higher on consideration (t =6.67, p < .001) than male managers, and lower on initiation of structure (t =1.98, p < .05) there was no significant difference in the managerial behavior factor. comparing factor scores across genders, male students scored male managers higher but not significantly higher on managerial behaviors (t = 1.65, p < .10) than the ratings by female students. they also scored male managers significantly higher on consideration (t = 1.97, p < .05) there was no significant difference across genders in the mean score for initiation of structure 69 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 2018. male respondents described female managers higher in consideration (p < .0001) the other factors were not significant. women scored male managers higher on managerial behavior (p <.001), and female managers higher in consideration (p < .001). there was no significant difference regarding initiation of structure. comparing the responses of male and female students, women rated male managers higher in managerial behavior (p < .001), lower in consideration (p < .0001), and lower in initiation of structure (p < .05). comparing the responses of male and female students, women described female managers higher in consideration than male respondents (p < .05) and also higher on initiation of structure (p < 05). there was no significant difference in the mean factor score for managerial behavior. 1988. comparing male students’ description of the typical male and female manager, the male manager is described as significantly stronger (p < .001), business-oriented (p < .001), decisive (p < .001), demanding (p < .001), leader (p < .001), effective (p < .01), task-oriented (p < .01), distant (p < .01), closed (p < .01), active (p < .05), knowledgeable (p < .05), punishing (p < .05), and unreasonable (p < .05). looking at the women’s description of both, female students described the woman manager to be more family-oriented (p < .001), communicative (p < .001) people-oriented (p < .001), soft (p < .001) friendly (p < .001), understanding (p < .001), open (p < .001), democratic (p < .001), competent (p < .01) rewarding (p < .01) lenient (p < .05), weak (p < .05) and knowledgeable (p <.05) than male managers. comparing students’ descriptions of female managers, males portrayed female managers as more unsure (p < .001), knowsnothing (p < .005), incompetent (p < .05), weak (p < .05), ineffective (p < .05), closed (p < .05), and more of a follower (p <.10). 2018. male subjects described female managers as weaker (p < .001), follower (p < .001), familyoriented (p < .0001), soft, (p < .001), rewarding (p < .001), democratic (p < .05), unsure (p < .01), friendly (p <.001), open (p < .0001), communicative (p < .01), people-oriented (p < .01), and more understanding (p < .01). comparing women’s descriptions of male and female managers, women managers are scaled as more competent (p < .01), fast(p < .05), happy (p < .0001), family-oriented (p < .0001), soft (p < .0001), rewarding (p <.0001), democratic (p < .0001), lenient (p < .01), friendly (p < .0001), open (p < .0001), communicative (p < .0001), knowledgeable (p <.001), people-oriented (p <.01), and understanding (p < .0001) than male managers. using responses from the total sample (n=270) comparing male vs female managers on the individual scales, female managers are weak (p < .001), happy (p < .0001) follower (p < .05), family-oriented (p < .0001), soft (p < .0001), rewarding (p < .0001), democratic (p < .0001), unsure (p < .01), and more lenient (p < .01). tables 4 and 5 present the descriptors that were significant across at least three sets of data. table 3 descriptive means *women=158 *men=112 **women=103 **men=99 male female male female male female male female competent -incompetent 3.78 3.20 3.16 3.40 2.72 2.23 2.50 2.60 s.d. 1.83 2.01 1.77 2.00 1.19 1.08 1.16 1.25 slow-fast 6.70 7.18 7.09 6.67 5.03 4.99 5.09 4.89 2.17 2.02 2.22 2.20 1.2 1.39 1.03 1.22 strong-weak 3.39 3.72 3.10 3.91 2.70 3.14 2.84 3.55 1.87 2.15 1.88 1.93 1.36 1.34 1.41 1.33 difficult-easy 4.80 4.77 4.99 5.15 3.59 3.72 3.68 3.78 2.06 2.02 2.07 2.25 1.3 1.4 1.11 1.47 serious-happy 4.46 5.58 4.17 5.05 3.43 3.49 3.35 3.27 2.18 2.26 1.91 2.35 1.38 1.59 1.30 1.48 leader-follower 3.51 3.52 2.91 3.85 2.48 2.62 2.29 2.93 2.07 2.04 1.84 2.12 1.45 1.17 1.31 1.42 active-passive 4.01 3.62 3.57 3.88 2.85 2.69 2.26 2.70 2.18 2.01 1.85 2.21 1.50 1.37 1.18 1.38 business-family 3.63 5.28 3.51 4.94 2.50 3.27 2.47 3.51 70 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 1.88 2.34 1.81 2.38 1.39 1.55 1.33 1.62 effective-ineffective 3.74 3.47 3.35 3.71 2.72 2.51 2.38 2.89 1.83 1.98 1.94 2.07 1.26 1.20 1.16 1.22 soft-hard 6.67 5.18 6.79 5.21 4.98 4.08 4.95 3.94 2.19 2.04 1.85 2.29 1.26 1.37 1.20 1.35 rewarding-punishing 5.31 4.08 5.20 4.16 3.74 3.21 3.64 3.18 2.03 1.98 1.94 2.25 1.37 1.37 1.35 1.31 autocratic-democratic 4.95 5.90 5.08 5.68 3.51 4.33 3.84 4.01 2.03 2.14 2.01 2.24 1.34 1.47 1.23 1.44 decisive-unsure 3.76 3.97 3.42 4.16 2.58 2.71 2.50 3.37 1.99 2.07 1.91 2.26 1.26 1.36 1.18 1.53 demanding-lenient 4.04 4.71 4.16 4.50 2.85 3.22 2.72 3.42 2.17 2.10 2.18 2.24 1.22 1.41 1.05 1.37 friendly-distant 5.04 3.88 4.63 3.69 3.53 2.73 3.52 2.97 2.05 2.09 2.03 1.96 1.30 1.33 1.31 1.26 open-closed 5.48 3.97 5.17 3.66 4.03 2.70 3.64 3.10 2.29 1.90 2.15 2.03 1.54 1.42 1.36 1.40 communicative-secretive 4.84 3.52 4.53 3.74 3.58 2.53 2.88 2.84 1.89 1.94 2.11 2.14 1.81 1.45 1.43 1.42 knowledgeable-knows nothing 3.69 3.00 3.42 3.56 2.48 2.10 2.26 2.62 1.89 1.77 1.95 2.16 1.27 1.07 1.15 1.37 task-oriented-people-oriented 4.31 4.31 3.78 4.66 3.12 3.97 3.25 3.83 2.16 2.16 2.05 2.66 1.63 1.37 1.51 1.59 understanding-unreasonable 5.03 5.03 4.20 3.50 3.73 2.71 3.31 2.93 2.14 2.14 2.11 2.08 1.47 1.33 1.31 1.27 *2018 **1988 table 4 significant descriptors of male bosses men women 1988 2018 1988 2018 male boss male boss male boss male boss strong businessoriented strong business-oriented business-oriented businessoriented hard hard hard decisive decisive demanding demanding demanding leader leader effective task-oriented task-oriented task-oriented task-oriented distant distant closed closed closed closed active knowledgeable knowledgeable knows nothing punishing punishing punishing punishing 71 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 unreasonable unreasonable unreasonable unreasonable autocratic autocratic autocratic serious serious secretive secretive secretive distant distant incompetent incompetent strong slower table 5 significant descriptors of female bosses men women 1988 2018 1988 2018 female boss female boss female boss female boss weak weak follower follower family-oriented family-oriented family-oriented soft soft soft rewarding rewarding rewarding democratic democratic democratic unsure unsure friendly friendly friendly closed open open communicative communicative communicative people-oriented people-oriented people-oriented understanding understanding incompetent competent competent faster happy lenient lenient knows nothing knowledgeable knowledgeable ineffective weak discussion discussion of the sample the major difference in the sample profile was an increase from 4% hispanic to 12%. this reflects that the fastest-growing ethnic group in connecticut is hispanic. attitudes towards career women the comparison of the first two questions on both surveys is a key indicator that there has been a significant change in male attitudes. some change would be expected since more women have entered the management ranks over the three decades. in terms of personal acceptance, we see a very significant positive move towards acceptance of a wife/mother pursuing a career over the 30-year period. with the often-necessary financial reliance on two-paycheck families, this result could have been expected. what was not expected was the strong perception that “others” were not as accepting of career women as the respondents. looking at the total sample, the discrepancy between selfaccepting and “others” reached p < .0001 significance. if the perception is that society does not support working women, 72 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 there may be a tendency not to select a woman even if it runs contrary to their own feelings on the matter. this could be a factor in the low participation rate of women in the higher level of management positions. notably, women are even more negative in their perceptions of women’s acceptance in the later study. certainly, this point of view may demoralize young women from aggressively pursuing advancement. this supports the results in the next question. equality in the workplace 1988. title vii of the civil rights act of 1964 forbids discrimination in the workplace. that was the law of the land for 24 years when the first study was conducted. the students at that time felt it would take about another 20 years to make women whole. certainly, the quest for gender equality is going far more slowly than the estimates given in 1988. 2018. with this second study, 30 years later, only 19% of the males and 7% of the females feel the struggle has been won. an estimate of another 10 years was the majority response. if that turns out to be correct, it will mean it has taken society 54 years to deal with an issue that affects 51% of the population. having said that, 15% of the university female students sampled here still don’t think equality will ever happen. this is especially true if the operating condition is that “others” in general don’t accept professional married women. gender preferences for boss 1988/2018. in 1988, male bosses were checked 60% of the time as the personal preference of male respondents. in 2018, this preference rose to 66%. however, the big difference was in the women’s response. in 1988, 33% of the women preferred a woman, while in 2018 women indicated a 79% preference for a woman. as the percentage of women in the workforce has increased in 30 years, more of these students have experienced working or observing women in management and this familiarity makes it more likely a woman would be a reasonable choice. all respondents in both studies indicated a definite preference (< 90%) for gender congruence with a male boss in an all-male group. this is true as well in both studies where the majority of males (61%, 71%) noted that the preferred boss of an all-female group was another woman. this support was only 54% from female respondents in 1988 i.e., a greater percentage of men backed a female boss for an all-female group than women did. but not so in 2018 where 71% of the females preferred a woman boss in an all-women’s group. although this was a meaningful shift in support, it only tied the percentage chosen by men. one must wonder why women wouldn’t support a woman in almost any management situation especially when it is noted her qualifications were the same as the men to the same degree, over 90% as they did a male boss with a male group. the lack of support for women in management positions by other women is reflected in the preference stated for the mixedconfigured group. the male boss was the overwhelming preference for the mixed group in all four sets of findings. one positive result is that in 2018 a greater percentage chose a woman, but it was weak support. in fact, in 2018, 38% of male respondents selected a preference for a woman while it was only 25% from the women. women don’t seem to go out of their way to support women in management positions, even when the position is imaginary on paper. description of male and female managers 1988. the factor component, managerial behavior contains descriptors that most would agree are a major factor in success as a manager i.e., leader, effective, task-oriented. male respondents rated male managers significantly higher on this factor (p < .0001) than female managers. on consideration (lenient, friendly, soft) female managers were significantly higher (p < .0001). there was no significant difference in the initiation of structure factor (happy, family-oriented, easy) there was no significant difference in the managerial behavior factor for female respondents. they did rate female managers higher in consideration (p < .0001). there was no difference in initiation of structure. 2018. male respondents rated female managers significantly higher in consideration (p <.0001). there were no significant differences with the other two factors. a key finding here is that the significant difference in 1988 on the managerial behavior factor no longer exists. female respondents describe male managers higher in managerial behavior (p < .001). women are significantly higher in consideration (p < .0001). there was no significant difference in initiation of structure. female students appear to have even a more positive view of men as managers than male students. (men rated men and women the same on managerial behavior). this is probably why a greater percentage of female students selected a male manager for the mixed-gender group – they really believe men are better managers than women. 1988/2018. looking at the traits that reached significance on at least three of the four description sets, there is a strong level of agreement, especially for male managers. the words used to describe men are business-oriented, hard, task-oriented, closed, unreasonable, demanding, punishing, autocratic and secretive. respondents appear to be describing the stereotypical “is allbusiness” individual who wants the job done, and cares little if s/he is liked by subordinates the scales that were found in common for a female manager coincides with the stereotypical description often used for women. the frequent descriptors are family-oriented, friendly, people-oriented, soft, rewarding democratic, and communicative. certainly, relevant terms for a social work type job, but not traits often used to describe an executive at any level. conclusion the essential conclusion from this research is that the stereotypical perceptions that existed 30 years ago seem to be 73 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 undergoing change, but not necessarily in the same direction. one important change is male respondents in 2018 did not see a significant difference in their managerial behavior factor scores between the genders as they did in 1988. women managers are described as having a similar set of managerial characteristics as the descriptions of male managers. results from duehr and bono (2006) also revealed a considerable change in male managers' views of women over the past 30 years, as evidenced by “greater congruence between their perceptions of women and successful managers and stronger endorsement of agentic and task-oriented leadership characteristics for women.” this change bodes well for women to be selected by men to move up the management ladder. there was also a change in the managerial behavior score for men as rated by female students. female subjects in 2018, evaluated men with significantly higher managerial behavior factor scores when there was no significant difference in 1988. these young female college students perceive men demonstrating more of the characteristics generally attached to successful managers. in other words, “think manager-think men.” this change foretells that women may not select a woman for a management vacancy if there is a male with similar credentials. this is especially true if women believe men having ingrained in their behavioral domain more of what a successful manager must possess. this point of view is probably the basis of why 75% of these same women chose a male boss for the mixed-gender group. male respondents chose a woman significantly more often. on the positive side, 12% more women indicated a personal preference for a female boss in 2018 than in 1988, although bosses’ gender seems not to be a factor in job satisfaction. female students in 2018 don’t perceive a level playing field in obtaining managerial positions. this in spite of 50 years of affirmative action, and the current acknowledgment that diversity is a component of organizational success. even more disheartening is the fact that there is a portion of young females who don’t believe women will ever have equality. in a way, this may be a product of their perception that the outside world does not approve of a female pursuing a career when they are married and have children. this does correspond to the findings of carlson et al (2006) that women express notably less faith that complete acceptance is in the offing. and that men’s perceptions are overly rosy. a question arises with the significant results that these 2018 men are more accepting of a career woman than in 1988. if they are so accepting, why are they so negative about their friends and acquaintances, in other words, “others” attitudes? one has to wonder would they really support their wife’s career if they were feeling peer pressure that the place for a woman is home taking care of the kids. this might be the case of responding with the socially acceptable or politically expedient response when they are answering for themselves. the evidence points to the fact that the 2018 female students believe males possess more of the traits seen in successful managers than they do. the important question is why the deterioration of managerial self-image in these 30 years. in 1988, women did not describe male managers significantly higher on the managerial behavior factor. this is a significant finding of this study. maybe the unconscious rationale is “we are not equal now, nor may we ever be and the reason for that is we are not as good as men.” what they do have is high scores in consideration. consideration probably has more of a role in developing a transformational leadership style than the transactional managerial behavior traits. women apparently don’t see this natural advantage. the terms used to describe male managers, the higher managerial behavior score, and the fact female respondents more often selected a male boss for a mixed-gender group indicates that females supporting other females for higher-level corporate positions will be infrequent. most of the job growth probably will happen in female-dominated jobs, where the adjectives used in the consideration factor to describe women managers are more appropriate for positions in fields related to teaching and caring. the results of this study are disheartening. stereotypes are difficult to break when they are part of the dominant culture. nevertheless, the amount of social change that has occurred in 30 years has been astounding. looking at cultural changes in issues such as gay marriages, and stay-at-home dads, etc. show there have been modifications in gender roles that are now “acceptable.” not so for women participants in this study. what is also discouraging is the critical implication of this investigation. it does not appear that this generation of collegeage women will be championing a new, more “executive” profile for female managers. perhaps, someone else will do a similar study to this one in another 30 years and find that women finally use the same words and traits they apply to men – effective, leader, and business-oriented – as they apply to themselves. references bajdo, l. (2005) the effect of individual differences on stereotypes of male and female managers. proquest. carlson,d. kacmar, m & whitten d.(2006). what men think they know about executive women. harvard business review. https://hbr.org/2006/09/what-menthink-they-know-about-executive-women catalyst. (june 5, 2019). women in the united states workforce. https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-theworkforce-united-states/ dubno, p. (1985). attitudes toward women executives: a longitudinal approach. academy of management journal, 28(1), 235-239. https://doi.org/10.2307/256072 74 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 duehr, e. e., & bono, j. e. (2006). men, women, and managers: are stereotypes finally changing?. personnel psychology, 59(4), 815-846. frank, e. j. (1988). business students’ perceptions of women in management. sex roles, 19(1),107-118. huckle, p. (1983). a decade’s difference: mid-level managers and affirmative action. public personnel management, 12(3), 249257. https://doi.org/10.1177/009102608301200304 massengill, d., & dimarco, n. (1979). sex-role stereotypes and requisite management characteristics: a current replication. sex roles, 5(5), 561-570. noris, j.m. & wylie a.m. (1995). gender stereotypes of the managerial role among students in canada and the united states. group and organizational management, 20, 167-182. powell, g. n., butterfield, d. a., & parent, j. d. (2002). gender and managerial stereotypes: have the times changed? journal of management, 28(2), 177-193. powell, g.n. & butterfield d.a. (1979) the “good manager”: masculine or androgynous?" academy of management journal, 22(2), 395-403. powell, g. n., & butterfield, d. a. (1989). the “good manager”: did androgyny fare better in the 1980s? group & organization studies, 14(2), 216– 233. https://doi.org/10.1177/105960118901400209 schein, v. e. (1973). the relationship between sex role stereotypes and requisite management characteristics. journal of applied psychology, 57(2), 95–100. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0037128 schein, v. e. (1975). relationships between sex role stereotypes and requisite management characteristics among female managers. journal of applied psychology, 60(3), 340. schein, v. e., mueller, r., & jacobson, c. (1989). the relationship between sex role stereotypes and requisite management characteristics among college students. sex roles, 20(1), 103-110. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00288030 stoker, j. i., van der velde, m., & lammers, j. (2012). factors relating to managerial stereotypes: the role of gender of the employee and the manager and management gender ratio. journal of business and psychology, 27(1), 31-42. tomkiewicz, j., & adeyemi-bello, t. (1995). a cross-sectional analysis of the attitudes of nigerians and americans toward women as managers. journal of social behavior and personality, 10(4), 189. advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, fall 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] pedagogical implications of "becoming wide-awake": commemorating the tenth anniversary of the publication of releasing the imagination by maxine green melinda moore davis university of tennessee in my own quest for knowledge and beyond knowledge, wisdom, i read maxine greene's book, releasing the imagination . i sought guidance from greene to re-form my own pedagogy related to teacher education. the tenth anniversary of its publication seemed an apropos time to consider its continuing value to educators. after reading and studying this work, i agreed with elizabeth vallance (1996) who said, this book is a hymn to the liberating potential of art, music, dance, and literature as portraits of other imagined worlds. and, it is a forceful argument that those portraits are essential to students' repertoires of images of what it means to be human in a community (p. 102) however, to further assess the worth of such a work of literature (for a highly poetic sort of prosaic form enlivened this nonfiction writing), it seemed only fair to critique the passion, the presentation, and the awakening of newness within the constructs that the author set for herself. greene asked readers to examine their present conceptions of reality and consider social and political alternatives that promoted equity for all people. greene wanted us all to engage our individual and collective imaginations toward the crucial pursuit of reforming education. in particular, she addressed the community of learners constituted by teacher educators, teachers, and students. she wanted to create space for commonly held understandings of teaching and learning processes that included myriad diversities. after acknowledging the unique positionalities of students and teachers from varied backgrounds and experiences, she asked professors to guide all students as they created meaning for their own lives. as professor emeritae of philosophy of education at teachers college, columbia university , greene spent (and is spending) her professional career devoted to the reformation of teacher education. her purpose was to transform future teachers' collegiate environments and experiences and, thereby, to radically change the education of future generations of their subsequent students. she also sought to influence the thinking and related professional behaviors of teacher educators in colleges and universities. she wrote that her "life project has been to achieve an understanding of teaching, learning, and the many models of education; [she has] been creating and continue[s] to create a self by means of that project, that mode of gearing into the file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/templates/index.html world" (1995, p. 1). in situating herself within her own locality, within her realm of experience, and within her unique personal characteristics, greene saw this journey through her perceptions "as a woman, as a teacher, as a mother, as a citizen, as a new yorker, as an art-lover, as an activist, as a philosopher, and as a white, middle-class american" (1995, p. 1). adopting a readily apparent activist stance, this author applied values of decency and justice in discussing pedagogy that would be humane and emancipating. she refuted educational experiences that promoted oppressive conformity and denial of personhood. in this book, the author expressed ideas about learning, about students, and about curricula that included literature and the arts. greene conceived of enriched public school environments designed to stir teachers to renewed action -action on behalf of curricula that centered upon the concrete knowledge and experiences of those within their care. teachers would engage their imaginations to seek alternatives to past and current methodologies that stratify, divide, and demean students. teachers would act to reform education in ways that centered upon the creation of democratic community. and, teachers would consciously address inequities in public education and resist systems of accountability based on measurements of quality dependent solely on standardized tests. recognizing inequalities in educational experiences and outcomes that adversely affected diverse individuals and groups of people, greene rejected the model of public education that intended to form compliant citizens for reasons of economic productivity. she wanted teachers and students to work toward mutual acceptance and cooperation that would facilitate incorporating and applying new learning. this new learning would encourage moral decision-making for the benefit of all members of the human community. so, did greene succeed in her mission to arouse this reader's imagination? did she convincingly present a proposal for restructuring public education that promoted a radical restructuring of my thoughts? did i concur with her vision of joint learning for teachers and students within a democratic community? did i discover "sense-making" to apply to my own teaching and learning? to answer these questions, i will divide this article into three main sections: first, i must more extensively expound upon her theories, ideas, and solutions for teacher-student interactions. and, her opinions must be analyzed in relationship to the educational environment that she resisted and the one she proposed instead. subsequently, i will embed relevant comments and critique from scholarly reviews of releasing the imagination. third, i will discuss changes in my conceptions of my own pedagogy in higher education based on greene's ideals. reforming teacher-student interactions and creating democratic communities of learning first, maxine greene wrote releasing the imagination at least partially as a reaction to goals 2000, a set of national standards proposed by the federal government during the early-to-mid 1990s. greene (1995) responded with clarity in her opposition to these tenets for public education. she objected to the stricture that students and teachers should comply unquestioningly with educational goals determined by federal officials. in opposing those who decided the relative merit of various kinds of knowledge for others, she resisted the factory-like production of students as workers. greene did not believe that students should be used simply as resources for the maintenance of american technical and economic superiority. in her words, the author stated that "world-class achievement and benchmarks seem superficial, if not absurd, in a world filled with inequity, fear, and uncertainty" (p. 122). while goals 2000 promoted educational management through measurement, the author wanted educators and others to consider education oriented towards holistic well-being and growth for people. she emphasized the realities of diversity and the inevitability of change. she touted the creation of relevant, important educational tasks that would improve access to opportunities for many disenfranchised students. in refuting the correlation between testing and academic quality, the author highlighted the discrepancy between hierarchically imposed, performance-based objectives for schooling and parents' and students' hopes, dreams, and expectations. greene (1995) stated that standards and tests do not relate to the diversity of students living in a multicultural world. "the particularities [of people] cannot be reduced to statistics or even to the measurable" (p. 10). the educational environment in the united states would not be improved or concerns erased with the application of simplistic, mechanical measures applied to diverse human beings. greene wanted a transformation of public education (and teaching and learning settings for people) that focused upon creating openings and possibilities for all people. greene wrote often of the need to "look at things as if they could be otherwise" ( p. 19). greene (1995) centered her book, releasing the imagination , upon her heart-felt belief that it was imagination and not simple reason that allowed people to connect one with one another. imagination was linked to empathy and empathy allowed us all to consider someone outside ourselves. these others and their life stories could then be incorporated as having validity, even without complete agreement between diverse persons. she spoke of imagination as "opening windows, as disclosing new perspectives, [as] shed[ding] a kind of light" (p. 36). in addition, she referred to imagination as "the means through which we can assemble a coherent world" (p. 3). using a process of discovery, she conceived of teachers and students as joint seekers of knowledge. greene merged our burgeoning knowledge of others as separate entities, as we grow and learn, with new constructions for envisioning life in different ways. as teachers and always still as students, to look at life with new eyes, new ears, and a new heart required an assessment of the past and present to create new insights into a better world for the future. the author also wrote about breaking barriers in the educational environment and process to cultivate the emergence of imagination. to break these barriers would be to foster understanding of differences that then could lead to an acknowledgement of our joint humanity. a true recognition of our unified bonds as human beings would then lead to sharing humanness in all its aspects. we would feel more deeply and act more readily to improve the circumstances of the poor, the disabled, the victimized, and the disenfranchised. use of the imagination in learning and applying our learning would foster "glimpse[s of what] might be, to form notions of what should be, and to focus on what is not yet" (p. 19). she conceived an altered future for teacher-student relationships within classroom settings that employed imagination as a central theme within her philosophy of education. greene espoused a philosophy of teaching and learning that included an active approach to the process of questioning. she emphasized a break with tradition, with conventions, with restrictive norms, to assist students in seeing alternatives for themselves and for their worlds. these alternatives would promote a different order of social and political interchanges that would appreciate the concerns and contributions of diverse voices. to create new beginnings for educators and for students, she stated that teachers (including herself) must break with routines and accepted norms to re-create learning. greene believed that beginnings have to do with freedom and increasing people's awareness of options for their lives and the lives of others. in constructing a new vision for classroom interactions that incorporated ideas of freedom, the author focused upon creating an atmosphere of mutual respect where teachers and students both operated as seekers of knowledge. they communicated through meaningful dialogue that produced engaged people who wanted to know about their worlds. she admitted to "utopian thinking" to construct a more equitable social order (p. 5). working together to promote learning, the members of the classroom community would create new ways of learning and understanding that built consensus, but also acknowledged and respected areas of difference. she wanted academic rigor and the development of students' minds that remained open to different points of view and different ways of knowing. greene's goals for classroom interactions included both the acknowledgement of diversity and the building of common elements within human relationships. again, in greene's (1995) words, "we want our classrooms to be just and caring, full of various conceptions of the good. we want [students] to be articulate, with the dialogue involving as many persons as possible, opening to one another, opening to the world" (p. 167). in helping students to care, the teacher would ask questions about the here and now, and about aspects that could and should be changed to promulgate intellectual curiosity and shared learning. and, she wanted students to continually ask "why?" within the safety of the classroom as a democratic community. using the concepts of situated lives as "narratives-in-the-making," the author wished to emphasize dialogue between teachers and students who behave as active learners within the same shared space (greene, 1995, p. 6). she wanted students to encounter local and immediate relevancies within their lessons. she concentrated on the concrete and the particular to teach concepts leading to generalizations and abstractions. and, she pinpointed the importance of context, of knowing who we are and how we came to be who we are. in trying to resist the messages of our society (if and when they are unfair, exclusive, and hurtful), we must recognize these messages first and place ourselves within the continuum of expectations and beliefs held by the majority. then, teachers and students can move beyond themselves to consider the connectedness of humanity and our responsibilities to others. thus, the purpose of education was viewed as teaching students to teach themselves, so that they could go forward with reformation of their local communities and the global community. to create educational reform that would enable students to develop competence, self-awareness, sensitivity to others, and needed values, the teacher educators and the teachers were to adopt several elements of educational philosophy commensurate with greene's ideals. the program of reform was defined as grasping a total picture. . young people will require a great range of habits of mind and a great number of complex skills . that are oriented towards job opportunities, dealing with catastrophes, literacy in more than one medium, and adequate planning for the future. (greene, 1995, p. 13) she developed several strategies for teachers to consider in helping students become adept in using their imaginations to apply to learning. in wanting students and teachers to be open to questioning and discovery, she wanted all to focus upon the role of inquiry. instead of using standardized assessment measurements, she urged teachers to develop authentic assessment measures linked to meaningful experiences to help students grow beyond their present understandings. thus, she continued to reject the formulaic proposals of national educational initiatives that focused upon regimented programs of factual drill, testing, and students as assembly-line products of the system. her democratic learning community included active participation rather than passive receptivity and cooperation rather than competition. greene discussed multiple roles for teachers to adopt in keeping spaces open to possibilities. emphasizing authentic dialogue and collaboration with educators, parents, community members, and teachers' colleges, greene saw teachers as observers of students' lives. teachers were to consider the distinct experiences and circumstances of individuals in order to attend to their unique needs. in applying the "caring, connectedness, and moral commitment" inspired by noddings (1992) and martin (1992), greene saw teachers as analyzing their students' present realities to foster movement towards alternate modes of living. teachers were to act as "mediators between the students and the world, between students and the content" (greene, 1995, p. 52). she insisted that education was an on-going journey throughout all of life and that incompleteness was an essential part of the vision. teachers were not to control students, but they were to prepare them for independent entrance into the world. in an interview with an editor from the phi beta kappan in january of 1997, greene explained that "this [relational, though independent] mode of teaching and curriculum-making does not lead to final answers" (p. 387). focusing upon process and practice, teachers were to enlarge their roles as mediators and become guides for students' thinking and educational work. as guides, they would lead students to examine inconsistencies and tragedies, as well as connections and possibilities for renewal. as interpreters, teachers would show students that provisional knowledge leads to an on-going search that lasts a lifetime. quantifying and qualifying definitive answers was not the purpose of seeking knowledge. rather knowledge could be used to build wisdom to apply to present and future problems. thayer-bacon (1996) and i agreed with greene in the unfinished nature of knowledge-seeking and with viewing education as a life-long process. the infinity of possibilities from provisional understanding would lead to increased awareness and acceptance of personal responsibility to foster social and political activism. so, teachers acting as activists with visions of social justice would inculcate values within their students. these values would be individually defined and acted upon, in accordance with the ability to understand and include diverse voices, needs, and perspectives. next, teachers would act as healers as well. they would create wholeness from a number of disparate parts. they would help students to relate experiences to new knowledge to formulate useful constructs which would be applied to practice. using toni morrison's quote from beloved (1987), greene (1995) conceived of a teacher as "becoming a friend to someone else's mind, with a wonderful power to return . a sense of wholeness" (p. 38). within this incredibly humane vision of teachers and their work, did greene specifically give directions for strategies to apply to praxis? yes, she did. viewing the multiple tasks and roles of teachers as challenging, greene suggested that teachers use literature and the arts to enhance curricula that intended to produce meaningful learning experiences. teachers should be "willing to risk encounters with the unknown" (greene, 1995, p. 128) and should use "stories, listening and speaking from a variety of personal perspectives, seeking consensus, and refining process and product" (p. 68). teachers would ask significant questions and enter into dialogue with students to apply analytic skills to all the arts. she still believed that disciplinary structures and explanations of varied disciplines were necessary for students' development of vocabulary and constructs for useful discussion. but, she implored teachers to add understanding gained from the arts to mathematics and science education. she rejected the "essentialist notions" of science as objective truth and urged educators to apply process learning even within the teaching of these subjects (gender equity, n.d., p. 1). learning empathy through literary and arts' experiences, students would utilize their newfound skills in all disciplines to critically examine assumptions that have led to present-day inequities. to reduce differential access and inequalities within a learning community that adopted beliefs and practices of a true democracy required the willing embrace and inclusion of all who wished to join. it centered on the recognition of individuality and the need to construct common goals that would include those who had formerly been left out, silenced, or marginalized by a dominant majority. a democratic community operated within a shared context and adopted guiding principles, such as equality, justice, and freedom. greene's vision of democratic community centered on varied teachers' roles and responsibilities and on corresponding student roles and responsibilities. one of the most important teachers' roles and her dedicated responsibility was to create space for students to share a space of affirmation and comfort that recognized and valued conflict and its resolution. teachers modeled classroom rights and responsibilities and led discussions concerning the principles inherent in the learning community. students learned equity in privilege and responsibility in applying these principles, which included personal growth in relation to the growth and wellness of others. greene proposed a need to get to know diverse people, to listen to them, and to try to understand them. in confronting pluralism and multiculturalism, she explicated society's need to listen to many voices and to include them in educational excellence, in opportunities, and in collective decision-making. students and teachers should work together in incompleteness to continue the process of searching for varied solutions to problems. they should recognize that reality has been built from combined perceptions and that no one individual holds the key to the door of truth (my emphasis). so, if many diverse ideas are required to achieve workable solutions to human problems, how can any standardized curricula conforming to normative measures include the varied perspectives needed for solving complex human problems? greene (1995) rejected the concept of standardized curricula within a democratic learning community. she wanted teachers to help students question aspects of their respective realities and develop new potential to make meaning and to act upon it. she wanted people to respect the cultural heritages of others and to "reject the metanarrative of what it means to be an american" (p. 83). to explore a wide range of subjects with diverse people meant to form coherent notions of varied experiences. a democratic community resisted the conventions of societal habits and norms and created shared norms appropriate and relevant to group members. within a small and confined membership, perhaps shared public spaces could really be reclaimed and restored. the purpose of democratic community would ultimately be to "look at the realities of our world, the harshness and the horror . to find ways of creating situations in which persons will choose to engage in cooperative or collective action in order to bring about societal repairs" (p. 61). formation of a democratic community that centered upon a specific group of people engaged in collective learning implied a definite philosophy of education, a philosophy that greene expressed throughout the book. critiques of releasing the imagination in reviewing greene's book, audrey thompson (1995) agreed that "public education is where we pay off the democratic promissory note. among the reasons we value it so highly -and debate its failures so ferociously-is our perception of schooling as a place to begin anew" (p. 392). thompson viewed public schools as places that people could come to find opportunities to escape the limitations of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. in this manner, she reinforced greene's basic concepts of education for freedom and of education constituted of starting over and over. concurring with greene and thompson, allsup (2003) used the concept of learning as beginnings with his music education students. he created a classroom environment that promoted experimentation and aroused students' passions for different kinds of music by allowing exploration of varied forms. thus, he applied greene's conception of learning as starting anew in a collegiate environment that prepared public school teachers. caine (2004), another one of greene's reviewers, critiqued the current national methodology of educational accountability through standardized testing. he applied greene's idea of creating personally relevant meaning by examining and interpreting experiences of self and others. caine concurred with greene's philosophical foundation of reform when he wrote of the need to "examine [the potential of] creative insight and powerful learning to create gestalt moments in students' lives" (p. 1). caine also believed in greene's insistence on the importance of meaning-making to promote wholeness within people and communities. and, i agreed with greene and caine when they emphasized meaning, synthesis, and personal growth to understanding not only others' present realities, but the possibilities for alternative lives lived with greater equity and harmony. accountability should be linked directly to students' abilities to create cohesive and coherent meaning from newly observed phenomena through demonstrations of their own learning. i do not believe that professional educators object to accountability to the public for their work with children and youth. after discussing the "no child left behind" program with many teachers and student teachers during the past two years, i do believe that the methodology for accountability today is deeply flawed. in its creation, it has ignored the decades of research on how people learn and how people integrate new learning into their lives. to simplify the educational process by insisting upon tests that relate to only small, narrowly defined pieces of factual recall contradicts the work of educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, and others who have documented research findings. so, what vision did greene substitute to replace the pre-digested, disconnected feedback that students are required to produce for standardized tests? in reaction to goals 2000 and other national programs imposed upon public education, greene proposed applying educational ideas informed by her intelligence, her work, her interactions with others, and her knowledge of students and how they learn. greene utilized mann's concepts of "seeing the world small and seeing the world big" to describe educators' ways of acknowledging perceptions that informed teaching (mann, 1955, quoted in greene, 1995, pp. 10-13). to see the world "small" was to view it from the limited perspective of one system, one hierarchy, one manner of execution. to see the world "big" focused upon the "world and its people as something great" (greene, 1995, p. 13). as did vallance (1996), i found this use of "small and big" as ways to distinguish world views confusing. at first, it was difficult to discern her meaning. but, with further reflection, i realized that greene's point was to categorize those persons who hold narrow definitions of teaching according to majority norms as "seeing small." conversely, educators who reach beyond themselves to gather in others who are different and whose voices need to be heard were designated as "seeing the world big." she promoted inclusion and thus, wanted others to expand their experiential horizons to enlarge their perspectives and their ways of being in the world with others. so, in viewing the world "big," what differences would occur in teachers' guidance of their students? greene (1995) wanted teacher educators to assist future teachers with creating models for classroom interactions that would lead to functioning communities based upon democratic interchanges. these beginning teachers would learn to speak and act and interact with students in imaginative ways that would promulgate shared learning using active strategies to elicit engagement. as practitioners of greene's "wideawake[ness]," teachers would exhibit behaviors to encourage wide-awakeness in their students as well (p. 43). as thayer-bacon (1996) expressed it, greene challenged us all to "experience the world in new ways and to learn to be wide-awake, open, and attending to the world around us" (p. 154). my responses to releasing the imagination as allsup (2003) expressed in his application of greene's work in this volume, the notion of education defined as beginning again and again was a radical one for me. coming from an indoctrinated educational philosophy of "teacher as expert" who gave pre-packaged knowledge to others, greene's definition prompted a 180 degree shift in the way i think of myself as a teacher and about how i will design learning experiences for students. to consider newness as a principal construct means to delve into learning as an opportunity for excitement, to prepare for amazement, to wander into the unknown without pre-conceived outcomes in mind. could this approach to learning truly blend my situatedness and my life story with those of others to foster open adventuring with blended understandings as the goal? i believe so. for example, instead of non-stop lecturing which i would have gladly done in the past, i have recently designed small group instructional exercises for pre-service teachers that allowed them to examine and react to multicultural children's literature. their exploration placed changes in educational publishing in historicallybased social and political contexts and our time together reinforced and expanded their learning, as opposed to merely transferring my own. next, as with several of her reviewers (braman, 2004; rodriguez, murphy, huber, & clandinin, 1998; thompson, 1995; vallance, 1996), one of greene's most significant ideas for me came to life as she discussed the need to recover our personal connections to important works of literature from childhood and young adulthood. as we view these works through reflective lenses of memory connected to broadened experiential bases, we recapture what was meaningful to us as children and recognize how these connections with others have informed our present selves. in better understanding ourselves, we can reach out to others through examining experiences that have been similar, as well as those that represent significant differences in our molding and positions in life. i have recently indulged in this exercise to determine key points of impact from literature for myself. space and time will not allow specific references to books and poems and essays, as within greene's book, but i will share some ideas about this subject in general. i learned that using my imagination in reading was a necessary escape from daily life, with its moments of conflict and verbal abuse. i learned that my conception of god was different from that of others. i learned that people are often kind and giving, and, conversely, can sometimes act in evil ways. in reading extensively, i explored people and events and worlds past and yet to come. i came to view most of life as a form of internal, interpretive fiction that stemmed directly from my perceptions of varied experiences. so, i do not believe that scientists have more insight into "real life" than do artists or novelists or philosophers. from reading and listening and examining others' words and ideas, i have formulated values and beliefs to guide my interactions with other people whom i love and those who remain mere acquaintances. as in greene's life, this quest is unfinished. however, the relationship between greene's reading and my own and the shared connectedness to literature has become a link for me to her world. in a doctoral class that i attended at the university of tennessee, dr. thayer-bacon pointed out that many scholars and readers have criticized greene's work as being esoteric and beyond the reach of many people's general understanding. her references to literature were viewed as somewhat elitist and exclusionary. but, as with thayer-bacon, i did not find this analysis to be true for myself. greene's poetic explanations of influences from other authors and specific titles seemed true and applicable to her overall vision of using one's imagination to inform the teaching and learning process for both teachers and students. however, it was helpful to seek information about her references and allusions at times in order to deepen the meaning that i was able to make from reading her work. and, in our current era of mass devotion to popular culture and blatant materialism, should we not honor and celebrate a person whose breadth and depth of reading and knowledge so informed us? greene also informed me about a different world view that more conscientiously and intelligently reflected my perceptions of my life at this point in time. i am learning to substitute shared responsibility for learning for strict control. i now view myself as a seeker of approximate truth in concert with my students, instead of insisting upon correct answers. i accept incomplete understandings for definitive knowledge, as i continue to grow and learn throughout my life. perhaps, most importantly, i am learning to consider more diverging viewpoints of existence as valid through the expressions of many more diverse acquaintances than the anglo-saxon, protestant descendants of my youth and early adulthood. in reaching out to know diverse people whom i might not have met in the past, i am reconstructing myself as an educator and as a human being. i believe that greene would approve. and, i have met a philosopher of education whose writings will continue to guide my own academic endeavors. in referring to greene as "the most important american philosopher on education since john dewey" (p. 1), baum (2003) expressed my sentiments exactly. baum celebrated all of greene's initiatives and achievements in philosophical understanding of educational reform and practice. in creating a vision for teachers in using the imagination to create democratic learning communities, baum commented about greene's worry that today's classrooms implemented many fewer opportunities for creative thinking and radical reconstruction of teaching children and youth. i, too, am very concerned that public school classrooms today focus upon isolated skill development in reading and math and do not integrate these lessons into the larger conceptions of life that students will need to function in a complex world. in paraphrasing greene's vision for students' educations, shaw and rozycki (2000) reiterated that " students need to come to understand that the reason for learning is to nurture their intellectual talents for the construction of our society into a more democratic, just, and caring place to live. citizens must be wellinformed and have the educational abilities and sensitivities needed to critically examine the world in which we live. (p. 1) in looking at education, we must not confine ourselves to divisive notions of political and social purposes of education. we must truly engage in authentic dialogue with others to determine the multi-faceted, essential purposes for educating the young, the middle, and the old to produce changes that will lead to improved lives for all. so, in a final analysis for this paper (for the evolution of my ideas will not end), how did reading greene's book, releasing the imagination , impact my life as a person and as an educator? i did engage with her in imagining my teaching in very different ways. i do believe in the necessity of applying imagination to creative restructuring of the educational process. my consciousness and, hopefully, my ability to be "wideawake" have been enhanced. i propose to radically restructure my interactions with future students in first considering their situated lives. to accomplish this task will require knowledge of each person and her or his dreams and goals. it will also require recognition of areas of abilities and areas of limitations for each individual and for the group as a whole. in building a more democratic vision of classroom community, i will design learning goals, readings, and assignments with serious consideration of student input. i will creatively modify curriculum planning and execution to make needed adjustments along the way. alternative modes of expression by individual students will be not only allowed, but encouraged. assessments will be designed with input from the person, from their classmates, and from myself as the mediating professor. i will carefully consider the diversity of backgrounds and experiences within those backgrounds that have shaped the personalities and opinions of my students. i will try to enlarge their perspectives by providing significant engagement with literature and the arts, and with examples of innovation from other sources and disciplines as well (something greene does not address in a thorough way). in promoting an atmosphere of caring and cooperation, i will focus upon the success of all, as we jointly design experiences for the success of individuals. and, as a radical shift in thinking, i will align myself as a fellow seeker of increased knowledge, rather than the holder of some expert knowledge that is to be imposed upon persons who cannot escape the particular learning setting. in applying a quote to virginia woolf that she found in the work of sartre, greene (1995) said, "she read; she reflected; she refused. sartre would have said that she became educated" (p. 49). greene used this quote to explain virginia woolf's influence on her own life. i would like to now extend the admiration and the indebtedness to maxine greene in my own life by stating: she read; she reflected; she refused. in so doing, she became educated and in turn, she has educated me and many, many others. amen! references allsup, r. e. (2003). praxis and the possible: thoughts on the writings of maxine greene and paulo freire. philosophy of music education review, 11 (2), 157-169. baum, j. (2003). maxine greene, philosopher & aesthete. education update online , 1-2. retrieved march 8, 2005, from http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com.proxy.lib.utk.edu:90/hww/results braman, j. (2004). releasing the imagination. independent school , 63 (2), 86-88. caine, g. (2004). getting it! creativity, imagination, and learning. independent school , 63 (2), 1-7. gender equity for mathematics and science (an interview with maxine greene) . (n.d.). retrieved march 8, 2005, from http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/math/gender/03f-greene.html greene, m. (1995). releasing the imagination: essays on education, the arts, and social change . san francisco : jossey-bass. greene, m. (1997). metaphors and multiples: representation, the arts, and history. phi delta kappan, 78 , 387-394. rodriguez, k., murphy, s., huber, m., & clandinin, d. j. (1998). releasing the imagination [review]. teachers college record , 99 (4), 793-795. shaw, r. p., & rozycki, e. g. (2000). the educational theory of maxine greene. retrieved march 8, 2005, from http://www.newfoundations.com/gallery/greene.html thayer-bacon, b. (1996). peripheral visions. educational studies , 27 , 292-301. http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com.proxy.lib.utk.edu:90/hww/results javascript:ol('http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/math/gender/03f-greene.html'); javascript:ol('http://www.newfoundations.com/gallery/greene.html'); thompson, a. (1995). releasing the imagination: essays on education, the arts, and social change [review]. educational studies , 392-397. vallance, e. (1996). releasing the imagination: essays on education, the arts, and social change [review]. american journal of education , 105 (1), 102-107. melinda davis is a doctoral student at the university of tennessee, knoxville , tn. she has a b.s. in special education and elementary education, george peabody college for teachers, vanderbilt university , nashville , tn ; and a m.s. in library and information science, the university of tennessee, knoxville copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style 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microsoft word lanier_is_it_really_helping.docx volume 38, 2018 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 14 advancing women in leadership vol. 38, pp. 14-20, 2018 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper is it really helping? a review of women’s “self-help” literature cayla c. lanier & zoe dupree fine cayla lanier, department of communication, university of south florida, cclanier@usf.edu zoe dupree fine, department of communication, university of south florida, zfine@usf.edu accepted july 25, 2017 in this article, we review recent popular literature about women in leadership at work. we focus on popular literature because of its extensive and diverse audience, and approach it as an indication of the status of women in the workplace: what is faced and how it is handled. in our review of the most frequently purchased books about women and leadership, we argue that these works’ general message is as follows: women face difficulty getting ahead in their careers, women require advice about how to be successful leaders in their workplaces, and that advice instructs women that if they aspire to get ahead or even just stay afloat in systems that, for the most part, are still dominated by men and built on hegemonic values, then women employees must change aspects of themselves. we argue that this focus on individual women changing their behavior and appearance in the workplace fails to challenge systems issues that contribute to women’s experiences as leaders in work. we conclude by inviting scholars to shift these conversations from how women should change to how everyone, including women, should work together to change workplace norms. keywords: women in leadership, work, self-help literature introduction in this article, we review recent popular literature about women in leadership at work. we focus on popular literature because of its extensive and diverse audience, and approach it as an indication of the status of women in the workplace: what is faced and how it is handled. in our review of the most frequently purchased books about women and leadership, we argue that these works’ general message is as follows: women face difficulty getting ahead in their careers, women require advice about how to be successful leaders in their workplaces, and that advice instructs women that if they aspire to get ahead or even just stay afloat in systems that, for the most part, are still dominated by men and built on hegemonic values, then women employees must change aspects of themselves. we argue that this focus on individual women changing their behavior and appearance in the workplace fails to challenge systems issues that contribute to women’s experiences as leaders in work. we conclude by inviting scholars to shift these conversations from how women should change to how everyone, including women, should work together to change workplace norms. we commence our literature review by discussing lois p. frankel’s (2004) nice girls don’t get the corner office: 101 unconscious mistakes women make that sabotage their careers. subsequently, we address sheryl sandberg and nell scovell’s (2013) lean in: women, work, and the will to lead. we conclude by reviewing katty kay and claire shipman’s (2014) the confidence code: the science and art of selfassurance what women should know. we focus on these works because they are currently among the most popular nonacademic works on the subject of women in leadership. also, these works are frequently purchased together on websites like amazon.com, as of our 2016 search. as among the most popular books on the topic, these works inform expectations of and about women in the workplace, and thus warrant close examination. this literature review attempts to determine the recent and currently held notions about women in leadership roles at work that such self-help authors address. frankel’s nice girls in her 25 years as a coach, trainer, human resource professional, and psychotherapist, lois frankel has worked with thousands of women to help them achieve their goals in the workplace. in nice girls don’t get the corner office: 101 unconscious mistakes women make that sabotage their careers, frankel offered anecdotes to explain what she calls the “mistakes” advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 15 women make, along with coaching tips to help women improve their performance in particular areas. as indicated by her chapter titles – “how you play the game,” “how you act,” “how you think,” “how you brand and market yourself,” “how you sound,” “how you look,” and “how you respond” – frankel blamed women employees for the challenges they faced in their workplaces. then, she offered advice on how women should go about changing their behavior in their work environments to achieve success. this, frankel explained, can happen when women take her advice to “quit bein’ a girl” and instead begin acting like “grown women” in the ways she stipulated (p. xvi). according to frankel, during childhood girls are “taught that their well-being and ultimate success is contingent on acting in certain stereotypical ways,” which include being polite, remaining soft-spoken, being compliant, and being relationshiporiented (p. xvi). she argued that some women do not grow out of these habits as they age. because of this, women workers continue to “act like girls” in their jobs, and, as a result, they are unsuccessful, especially as leaders. frankel advised women to remedy this by starting to act like grown women, in an effort to get ahead in their jobs. she argued that women are at fault for not seeing success in their careers because of how they act and appear in work environments. however, she argued, women employees are capable of improving their situation by changing their behaviors at work; this she equated to women’s empowerment. we believe this view parallels the notion of blaming victims of sexual assault, when issues of rape culture are what warrant attention and intervention (wavaw, 2016). though different contexts, the focus in both circumstances is on what individuals are assumed to do or not do, and how those presumed behaviors or actions contribute to the problem. instead, the focus should be on systemic issues at play that constitute problematic environments. a cybernetic approach to such circumstances, for instance, would facilitate a stepping-out of the limits of the given circumstances: seeing the issues at play from outside of the boundaries of the issue, while recognizing what roles are played on the inside. such an approach has the potential to lead to more nuanced systems understandings of the problems at hand and offer solutions that engage all workers in identifying a solution (keeney, 2002). frankel (2004) offered a frame based on socialization rooted in traits learned through social interaction. for instance, she conveyed the notion that women do certain things well because women are expected to do such things well. frankel provided an example of this in the beginning of “how you play the game,” her second chapter: let’s start with the most important lesson: business is a game and you can win it. [...] i talk to [men] about the importance of things like listening, collaborating, motivating, and seeing the human side of their staff. these are typically things women do well because they’ve been taught the behaviors and have had a lot of practice at them. (p. 19) with this as her premise, frankel advised women on how to “play the game” more effectively, and warned against behaviors such as “working hard,” “doing the work of others,” and “waiting to be given what you want.” to address these errors, frankel offered women coaching tips including learning to play chess because “it will help you to develop a more strategic mind,” and “unless you’re directed otherwise, never ask permission to spend money. instead, expect you’ll be told if there’s a problem” (pp. 21, 33). frankel also outlined behaviors women enact that, when combined, create an overall impression of unprofessionalism. these, she explained, include being naive, seeking approval, and having low self-confidence. according to frankel, behaviors like “needing to be liked” and “polling before making a decision” can reduce any leader’s credibility, yet others are behaviors that are stereotypically attributed to women. for instance, she linked “sharing too much personal information,” “helping,” “feeding others,” and “offering a limp handshake” with actions that play up a woman’s femininity. frankel framed these behaviors as mistakes because they reduce a leader’s ability to earn respect, share her vision, and be taken seriously. frankel posited that the first step to changing one’s behavior is to change one’s attitudes. she explained that women tend to work harder, not necessarily smarter. by “making miracles,” doing more with less, and meeting impossible deadlines, individual women workers continuously raise the bar for what is expected of all women employees. by doing things like “taking full responsibility” and “obediently following instructions,” women workers focus on details and outcomes, losing sight of the bigger picture and ultimately missing the chance to highlight their abilities to think and act strategically. she argued that by doing all of this, women sabotage women. frankel warned against thinking too narrowly about work to the detriment of workplace and personal relationships, and warned women against “minimizing your work or position” and “giving away your ideas.” frankel advised that women need to define their strengths and how they match to what the company needs. by doing this, she argues, women will be able to build credibility as valuable employees and leaders. frankel spent two of eight chapters addressing women’s appearance at work, because, as she stated, “combined with how you look, how you sound comprises more than 90 percent of the perception of your credibility” (p. 147). the mistakes that women made in this realm included asking permission, apologizing, using “touchy-feely language,” and speaking at a “higher-than-natural pitch.” frankel outlined common mistakes women make in their physical appearance, as well, including smiling inappropriately, sitting on their feet, and even wearing inappropriate makeup and the wrong hairstyle. to correct these mistakes, frankel coached women to “inform others of your intentions” instead of asking questions, schedule frequent visits with hair and makeup stylists at top department stores, and have advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 16 regular hair color and cut appointments (pp. 155, 201). by citing these as mistakes that women make, frankel argued that playing up femininity in particular ways reduces a woman’s credibility. concurrently, frankel offered ways that women should more effectively attend to how they present themselves at work. we find her focus to be superficial: she discussed appearance, looks, and physical presentation of self, but ignored the content of women’s speech, the actions women take, and the strategies women use at work. these aspects are eclipsed by how women come off to others when speaking and acting in their workplaces. finally, frankel argued that women make the mistake of being more likely to tolerate inappropriate behavior, including sexual harassment, because women: […] have been socialized to respond to inappropriate treatment in a polite, docile, or acquiescent way. we’re not taught to defend ourselves or get angry when someone is disrespectful to us. whereas boys are typically taught the art of self-defense, girls are taught to turn the other cheek. (p. 215) to address this, frankel offered as coaching tips ways women must stand up for themselves in a professional manner, learn to negotiate, and practice speaking up when they feel they are being taken advantage of or disrespected. overall, frankel argued that the ways in which girls are socialized are why women are often not as successful as they could be in their workplaces. yet, by highlighting mistakes and providing coaching tips, we argue that frankel failed to most effectively address the challenges that women leaders continue to face in their jobs. frankel’s approach instructing women to change their behavior in order to fit a corporate world built on how young boys and men are socialized fails to take into account a key part of the equation: women are not the only individuals involved in these work systems that continue to be filled with barriers. workplaces include a variety of types of leaders and styles of leadership. thus, only asking women workers to change their behavior cannot feasibly be the solution to the problems women face at work. other approaches are needed, and those approaches must prioritize changes that transform corporate culture, practices, and mechanisms so they become more equitable for all workers, regardless of identity markers (race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, etc.). the problem should be framed as a macro-level one instead of a micro-level one. a wider, more intersectional and systems-based scope is needed. with frankel’s 101 mistakes and coaching tips laying the foundation for our literature review, we now shift to the most frequently discussed book in the genre. lean in (sandberg & scovell, 2013) continues to be the go-to book for women on the topic of workplace success, and it is therefore an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about women and leadership at work. sandberg and scovell’s lean in in 2013, chief operating officer of facebook sheryl sandberg made waves by encouraging women everywhere to “lean in,” “sit at the table,” and “make your partner a real partner.” she claimed that engaging in these practices is necessary for women to find success in their careers. for over sixteen weeks, sandberg and scovell’s (2013) lean in: women, work, and the will to lead topped the new york times bestselling list, was selected as amazon’s best book of the month in march 2013, and received oprah’s gold seal of approval. years later, the book remains among the most commonly referenced books on leadership and women (brooks, 2014; alkon, 2015). lean in featured sandberg’s research and personal stories designed to raise awareness about “gender differences,” offered “practical advice to help women achieve their goals,” and challenged women “to change the conversation from what women can’t do to what we can do [...] to work together to create a more equal world” (leanin.org, 2016). like frankel (2004), sandberg and scovell (2013) outlined the ways women hold themselves back in their careers, and the authors offered advice about how women workers can, instead, “lean in” to their careers, find personal and professional growth, and keep pushing against the institutional barriers that hold them back. sandberg and scovell envisioned a truly equal world as one in which “women [run] half our countries and companies and men [run] half our homes” (p. 7). the authors shared research that highlighted the external barriers preventing women from getting to the top of organizations. they pointed out that internal obstacles are often overlooked in studies of women in leadership, argued that the challenges women in business continue to face are due to macro-level institutional barriers as well as micro-level barriers (p. 8), and stated that both must be addressed. yet, sandberg and scovell’s primary aim in this book was to offer ways for women leaders to gain power in work environments by combating internal barriers. in each chapter, sandberg and scovell outlined such barriers and offered women workers suggestions about how to overcome the obstacles that prevent them from achieving success. like frankel (2004), sandberg and scovell focused on what individual women employees can do to change how they work and lead. sandberg and scovell (2013) began by identifying the gender stereotypes introduced in childhood that lead to what they refer to as women’s “leadership ambition gap.” they explained that these gender stereotypes are reinforced throughout their lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies because of stereotype threat: “when members of a group [like women] are made aware of a negative stereotype, they are more likely to perform according to that stereotype [and] the stereotype of a working woman is rarely attractive” (p. 22). they argued that this plays a major role in the leadership gap because: while men are assumed to succeed at work and at home, women continue to carry a greater burden of household chores and childrearing. because, for women, the goal of having success at work and home feels particularly advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 17 burdensome, many women remain in dead-end or lowpaying jobs instead of pushing ourselves to achieve more in our careers. (p. 22) offering a possible solution to this issue, sandberg and scovell articulated the first step women leaders must take is to “sit at the table.” this means that women should no longer be spectators in their own careers. they encouraged women to play an active role by believing in themselves, leaning in, speaking up, and getting noticed. the assumption here is that women are not doing these things already, or that they are doing them but not effectively enough. however, just as frankel (2004) writes, sandberg and scovell argued that women must only get noticed in the “right ways,” which they described as finding a delicate balance between likeability and competence. the following excerpt illustrates their approach, which involves advocating for women to change behaviors in order to achieve such a “balance.” the authors argued this is necessary for women to become successful as leaders in their work environments: if a woman is competent, she does not seem nice enough. if a woman seems really nice, she is considered more nice than competent. since people want to hire and promote those who are both competent and nice, this creates a huge stumbling block for women. (p. 41) because women have a particularly difficult time balancing competence and likeability, sandberg and scovell explained, women leaders have to work twice as hard to manage their likeability among peers, while maintaining credibility and respect in their roles. we believe such an approach fails to attend to what contributes to this need for balance. as was the case in frankel’s piece, what remains under-acknowledged is a systems, macro-level approach to identifying characteristics of a valued employee, regardless of gender. instead, sandberg and scovell addressed how women should continue to carry the burden of working within the system by changing their mindsets, actions, and approaches to work. one solution that sandberg and scovell offered involves women taking up a new metaphor to make sense of work: to conceptualize and treat careers as jungle gyms instead of as ladders. a jungle gym metaphor, they explained, permits more flexibility. in addition to allowing more people to climb at the same time, it offers more than up and down moves, sandberg and scovell elaborated. they encouraged women to stretch across the jungle gym, to gain new skills, to capitalize on opportunities, and to see more than merely up-down possibilities. this sensemaking about women in leadership is limited, however, in that it continues to require women to see their work and careers differently, while allowing men to continue working within the current system. circumstances might begin to shift if corporate culture, practices, and policies are examined and questioned. by changing our focus to analyzing issues that systematically prevent women from “making it,” we will more effectively, efficiently facilitate women’s abilities to “lean in” without encouraging women to rely on self-help advice about how they must change individual behaviors to help themselves “make it” in their jobs. after wrapping up their discussion of internal obstacles, sandberg and scovell addressed the external barriers that remain in place. they discussed the importance of speaking up and working together towards equality. sandberg and scovell explained that talking about these issues with other people is necessary to allow others to understand the issues, as “equal opportunity is not equal unless everyone receives the encouragement that makes seizing those opportunities possible” (p. 160). they argued that men and women need to support women workers, because it will take everybody working together to meet the goal of creating a world in which those social norms no longer exist. they explained that if more children see fathers at school pickups and mothers who are busy at jobs, both girls and boys will envision more options for themselves. in such a world, gender will not set expectations; instead, personal passions, talents, and interests will set expectations (p. 169). sandberg and scovell concluded that both internal obstacles and external barriers must be addressed for equality to manifest. sandberg and scovell’s tips are no doubt helpful to certain women in certain work situations. some of their advice is likely quite useful to particular women who are in a high socioeconomic status tier, women who have family members who also work and lend support, and/or women who have financial means to hire others to help them “strike a balance” so that they may attend to their responsibilities at work, at home, and elsewhere. sandberg and scovell’s guidance seems designed to benefit women who occupy levels of leadership akin to theirs, women who work in companies that operate in ways similar to those of their own companies, and women who have family and personal partnership structures that mirror, or come close to mirroring their own. this limits the usefulness of lean in. the work falls short of attending to issues that other groups of women in leadership face. for example, sandberg and scovell used personal anecdotes to explain how sandberg and her then husband (founder of survey monkey) divided parenting duties in order to balance work and home responsibilities. yet, the examples in the book presented sandberg’s family budget and resources as representative of middle class america when, in fact, this is far from the case. in 2014, sandberg became one of the youngest female billionaires in the world (mac, 2014). though sandberg and scovell’s 2013 piece pointed to structural issues that need attention, we find that this book served as an extension of what frankel addressed in 2004. the mention of systemic issues present in the book’s introduction and conclusion merely bookend the central idea: women, as individuals, must change their behavior, routines, and practices at work because doing so is necessary if they want to “make it” in their jobs. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 18 the final piece in our review takes a slightly different approach in that it investigates confidence as a key component of success. kay and shipman’s confidence code leading journalists katty kay and claire shipman have interviewed dozens of women throughout their careers, including some of the most influential leaders of our nation. through their interviews with women, they found a common thread: a great deal of self-doubt. in the confidence code: the science and art of self-assurance what women should know, kay and shipman (2014) drew on research from biology, genetics, neuroscience, athletics, and leadership to discover the source of that self-doubt. they concluded that, in the world of work, confidence is more important than competence, and that women simply have too little confidence. the authors argued that while women have made many gains in their efforts to seek top positions in companies, women leaders are still not successful, because self-doubt holds them back (p. xv). this work parallels the others that we have addressed in this literature review. kay and shipman attended to issues women in work experience. to do this, they honed in on the uniqueness of women as females who (presumably) have innately psychological, neurological, and biological factors that are different from those of males, and argued that those factors contribute to the challenges women face in workplaces. like the other authors, kay and shipman oriented to the challenges women face at work as an issue for women instead of as an indication of issues within workplace cultures. kay and shipman began with what they refer to as the “science of confidence,” and they argued that the “confidence gene” – a serotonin transporter that has four polymorphisms, which result in different combinations of resilience levels – is the key component of confidence (p. 57). kay and shipman explained that people with female bodies do not tend to have all of one type and people with male bodies all of another: the genetic material involved is split and random. they concluded that genes do not show that females are more confident than males, or males are more confident than females. as frankel (2004) and sandberg and scovell (2013) argued, kay and shipman (2014) posited that the different experiences of leaders with differently sexed bodies must be examined as social phenomena: as circumstances, experiences, nurture, and socialization. in this vein, kay and shipman addressed how “nurturing” happens differently for people born in certain bodies. citing the work of maldonado, huang, chen, kasen, cohen, and chen (2013), kay and shipman explained that, in childhood girls are taught to sit and play quietly, while boys are permitted to run wild: with all their roughhousing and teasing, boys also toughen each other in ways that are actually useful for building resilience. where many women seek out praise and run from criticism, men usually seem unfazed, able to discount other people's views much earlier in life. (p. 91) according to kay and shipman, since boys are taught how to fail and therefore how to learn from failure, boys are uniquely socialized to have confidence and be well equipped to find success. they explained that women, on the other hand, struggle with failure because they were taught as girls to doubt themselves and to pursue perfection. kay and shipman cited the work of psychiatrist daniel amen who finds that women are “more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, insomnia, pain, and being unable to turn off their thoughts” (p. 111) than men. kay and shipman argued that these brain differences, in addition to hormonal differences, provide biological differences in the factors controlling confidence in men and women. in this way, they categorized the issues women experience in the workplace as biological issues that must be addressed as such. the assumption here is that once behavioral changes appropriately compensate for these biological issues, women will experience fewer challenges in workplaces. presumably having found the source of women’s lack of confidence, kay and shipman offered women advice about how to “make up for” their biology by reducing self-defeating behaviors in order to be successful. this echoed the models of frankel (2004) and sandberg and scovell (2013). one suggestion kay and shipman offered involves teaching parents how to raise confident children. kay and shipman encouraged parents to teach girls to be more assertive and reduce the amount of praise given to children, and to teach their children to “accept and even embrace struggle, rather than shy away from it” because it helps children focus on progress rather than perfection in achieving goals (p. 169). other practical advice they offered is to “push out pink” by encouraging math and science activities, and to tout the benefits of sports because they teach girls how to “play the game” more effectively. in their book, kay and shipman also instructed women about how to rewire their brains in order to have more “productive” kinds of thoughts and stop the cycle of self-critical thoughts and actions. they encouraged women to fail, fail fast, and fail often since doing so will help them develop patterns of thought based on risk and resilience, i.e. patterns that will in turn build confidence. these interventions focus on changes to women’s thoughts, actions, and behavior, which is designed to boost women’s confidence to increase their chances of succeeding in their work environments. kay and shipman concluded by acknowledging that getting ahead in one’s career is not always as simple as implementing a few tips and tricks to gain the confidence needed to complement competence. they admitted that many corporate managers have traditional ideas about what confidence looks like and state that women may need to adjust their behavior to fit others’ visions of what a woman in leadership should look like. kay and shipman’s overall message to women was this: take the advice they offer, blend it with your own personal style, and merge the science with the art of confidence to cultivate an authentic, confident self, because “when confidence emanates from our core, we are at our most powerful” (p. 200). the onus, they articulated, is on women; if women want to improve their advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 19 experiences at work, women must do the work of making changes to themselves. yet, we believe that confidence is merely one small part of entire systems that create and sediment roadblocks that women in work and in leadership at work face. simply asking women to adjust their behaviors in and outside of their workplaces is insufficient. it fails to problematize the factors of the systems at play that contribute to the issues that women in leadership continue to face. instead of creating a workforce of women striving to “cultivate an authentic, confident self” (kay & shipman, 2014, p. 200) who are fighting against rigid workplaces, organizations should cultivate cultures and work systems that are more reflexive, malleable, and sustainable for all workers. in a recent the wall street journal article, sandberg pointed to the need for changes to the workplace in order to make a real difference for women workers (sandberg, 2016). she cited an example of a woman beginning a negotiation conversation by addressing the bias against women who negotiate. she also acknowledged that many more companies are willing to join the conversation about how to advance women workers, but they struggle to put their concern into practice. sandberg suggested corporate goal setting and tracking as a solution for making equality in the workplace part of the corporate culture. perhaps this marks a shift from individual behaviors to workplace norms. such a positive change has the potential to inspire future, necessary academic research that takes a systems approach to addressing the topic of women in leadership in work. conclusion in our review of these three popular books, we note suggestions that authors make for women to change their workplace practices to better align with their workplace cultures so that they will be more successful in their careers. by describing the “ideal” worker, these three authors identified ways women should adjust their behaviors to be “good” leaders and to get ahead in their jobs. we argue that this approach fails to treat women as individuals who have unique talents and leadership capabilities, upholds one type of value system to describe the ideal workers, and teaches women to follow the rules and meet expectations rather than challenge them when doing so is necessary. we encourage scholars and popular literature authors to continue writing about women and leadership to extend ongoing conversations about women in leadership at work, to bring more attention to the issues they face, and to do this by carefully attending to workplace culture and macro-level issues. furthermore, popular literature and academic writers committed to studying the issues that women in leadership at work face must include a focus on resistance as part of a potential solution. among the works that began this inquiry are pal and buzzanell’s (2013) piece about employee resistance within call centers and murphy’s (1998) work on resistance among flight attendants. both address resistance as a method of organizational and cultural change. pal and buzzanell’s ideas of rupturing the cultural stereotype and disrupting the master narrative suggest a starting point for change, and murphy offers humor as an opportunity to address inequalities in a public and nonthreatening way. such scholarship contributes to a framework of resistance that might lead future scholars to offer fresh, new approaches to addressing the issues that women in leadership at work continue to face. if authors are going to advise women to change their behavior in the workplace, we should advise them to act in ways that challenge outdated and hegemonic norms, not acquiesce to them. we also recommend that future research about women in leadership at work include qualitative analyses of lived experiences of women at work. such studies might offer a more nuanced understanding of current workplace cultures. for example, in our ongoing research, we analyze data from interviews we conducted with women leaders at a large university in the southeastern region of the u.s., offering empirical evidence to argue how micro-level changes by individual women employees open the door for macro-level work to be done. that the books we reviewed are so widely read means that scores of people are interested in and talking about the issues women in leadership at work face. this implies that many individuals care about the barriers women in leadership roles continue to encounter in work environments. sound academic scholarship has the potential to serve as the foundation for helpful popular literature, reaching audiences most likely to utilize it. future scholarship should address resistance and highlight the day-to-day experiences of women in diverse work situations. such scholarship has the potential to enhance understandings and solutions to the systemic issues of inequality that women at work still to face. references alkon, a. 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cooper, 2002; curtis, 2005; glazer-raymo, 1999), questions arise about whether women faculty can find a home or welcome ground, both in the united states and around the world (caplan, 1993; cooper, benham, collay, martinez-aleman, & scherr, 1999).  the literature identifies a number of differing ways of viewing the academy as home. for example, jane roland martin (2000) refers to the academy as "the home of thought" (p. 41). in discussing this concept, many women academics talk about finding or forging, if not a home, then welcome ground or a neighborhood. whatever the term, the connotation is one of a place that is friendly, rather than hostile; one that counters the chilly climate image that sandler and hall (1986) have written about. this article explores the question of finding a home or welcome ground by asking if these concepts are relevant both in the new millennium and in the international arena.  we examine the experiences of women academics in three countries: the united states (us), aotearoa/new zealand (nz), and romania (ro). we build on the recent exploration of us women's efforts to find or forge a home (cooper, ortiz, benham, & scherr, 2002; cooper, et al., 1999), and explore this concept in three countries that are geographically distant from one another. they are vastly different in size, from the giant united states to the tiny new zealand, as well as culturally, politically, and economically different. we share the stories of twelve women, four each from the us, nz, and romania. because experiences are embedded in the particular socio-cultural, political conditions of the individual country, the next section will describe existing research about women's experiences in each country. women's experiences in the us the chilly climate for women in the academy in the us has been well documented, from the initial work of sandler (sandler & hall, 1986), to the work of aisenberg and harrington (1988), to the recent work of glazer-raymo (1999). although sandler began writing about the chilly climate for women in us institutions of higher education in the 1970s, new evidence suggests that the environment is still hostile to female faculty, staff, and administrators. for example, the stories of women of color (rains, 1999) and lesbian women (estes & lant, 1998; mcnaron, 1997) suggest that the climate is still very chilly. despite the growing numbers of female students and faculty, many of the equity issues cited in earlier reports have not been resolved. in some cases, new reports indicate that the situation for women has deteriorated. across the us, for instance, the number of female professors has increased since the early 1970s, but their proportion of the total faculty has remained the same, since the total number of faculty has also increased (blum, 1991). in addition, women are more likely to be either non-tenure track or part-time. in 1996, 22% of full-time women faculty was nontenure track, bringing the total of either non-tenure track or part-time female faculty to 62.4%. when they do obtain https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html tenure track positions, women are still rarely able to reach the highest rank of full professor. in 1993, only 17.2% of full professors in higher education across the country were women (glazer-raymo, 1999). this continuing chilly climate for women means that more women also leave the profession. for instance, in the wisconsin system of higher education between 1981 and 1990 its 27 campuses hired 1,281 women as faculty members.  in that same period, however, 955 female professors left the system, about three-fourths of the number hired (blum, 1991). this research underscores the need for a greater understanding of the ways in which women who stay have been able to find welcome ground or make a home for themselves in the academy. beyond the ways in which women might survive in this environment are larger questions about being at home in an often hostile world. an examination of these questions was begun by cooper, et al. (1999). their research indicates that finding a home in the academy rests on change in both individual and institutional practices. while their work does not deny the responsibility of institutions of higher education to make efforts to welcome and support both women and men, it focuses on the importance of individual reflection and action. they report that the process of finding a home involves constant reflection in an effort to understand both identity and belonging. it then requires that women take action on their own behalf. the experiences and efforts of women in the academy are not made in a vacuum. they are embedded in the social and political environment of america at the dawn of the 21st century.  women received the vote in 1919 and have been free to be more active in us political and professional arenas since that time. the center of women's struggles for equality after 1919 was the national women's party, which turned its attention to passage of the equal rights amendment (era). this struggle spanned the next four decades "in the face of generally hostile public opinion that caused significant structural strain within the party's ranks" (glazer-raymo, 1999, p. 12). while other laws, such as the equal pay act of 1963, have advanced the cause of women, the equal rights amendment was derailed in the 1960s and has never been passed. the civil rights, women's liberation, and student protest movements of the late 1960s did, however, serve to advance women's rights indirectly. one of the strongest deterrents to the passage of the equal rights amendment in the 1970s was the new right movement, organized by phyllis schlafly, and centered on family values (glazer-raymo, 1999). these anti-era forces were able to successfully persuade a skeptical electorate that era threatened traditional american values.  while the efforts of feminists to advance the rights of women have certainly made great strides in the last century, the american political scene at the beginning of the 21st century is a complex web of interacting forces.  for example, in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, candidates courted "the women's vote." yet, both candidates also claimed to be good christian men who adhere strongly to american family values, the same argument phyllis schlafly used in derailing the era. thus, the strong influence of the moral majority is still felt in american politics and will continue to be felt with the re-election of george w. bush as president.  because of the on-going debate over abortion rights, the us is one of the few nations that still has not ratified the united nations convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (cedaw). women's experiences in aotearoa/new zealand aotearoa/new zealand is a small island nation in the south pacific with a long and proud history of social reform. between the late 1800s and the 1970s, nz was considered a world leader in social reform. in 1893, it was the first country in the world to give women the vote, and in 2000 women held the top five positions in the country (prime minister, leader of the opposition, attorney general, chief justice, and ceo of telecom, the largest company in new zealand). with the introduction of a new system of voting in 1996, there are more women and maaori members of parliament, although still well below their representation in the general population. despite the progress that has been made, women are still underrepresented in positions of leadership in almost all sectors. they earn 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, and are overrepresented in the statistics on poverty and domestic violence.  maaori and pacific island women fair particularly poorly. in the 1980s and 1990s, aotearoa experienced extensive economic and social reform. these neo-liberal reforms were pervasive throughout all sectors (for example, education, health, and social welfare) and dramatically changed the way services were delivered. previously, the government had a “hands on” approach providing almost all services using the tax payer's dollar. during the 1980s and 1990s, the government stepped back, reduced taxes, reduced spending on social services, and increased situations in which the user pays for such services. ironically, the world once again looked to new zealand as a shining example of neo-liberal economic and social reform. education was not exempt from these reforms and in 1989, partly in response to the inequities experienced by women, girls, and maaori in education and partly (although some would say mainly) to save money, a process of restructuring education was started, which continues today. tomorrow's schools (lange, 1988), as the reforms were commonly referred to, had as one of its aims to increase the representation of women in school leadership positions. in 1993, if you were a man you had a 1 in 3 chance of becoming a school principal, and if you were a woman you had a 1 in 27 chance (slyfiled, 1993). these inequities were paralleled in higher education. the documentation of women's experiences as faculty in nz (brooks, 1997; middleton, 1999; wilson, 1995) is very similar to the experiences of us women. institutions of higher education in nz are described as “masculinist” institutions with limited career patterns for academic women" (brooks, 1997, p.1). brooks claims that "lip service is paid to equality in the academy, which is then undermined in numerous and effective ways" (p. 2). in terms of women's representation, particularly in senior academic positions, women and maaori are seriously underrepresented (mckinley, 1995; wilson, 1995). despite equal employment opportunity policies, the situation only marginally improved over the 10 year period of 1985-1994. during this time, however, the proportion of women in part-time faculty positions increased by 10% (wilson, 1995). in comparison to their male colleagues, women are overrepresented in untenured positions and junior faculty positions; are more likely to be teaching in the “soft” disciplines such education, social work, arts and humanities, and social sciences; and have a lower publication rate (brooks, 1997). in 1991, statistics on the most senior university positions revealed that only 3.8% of full professors and 7.5% of associate professors were women, and only one of the 15 vice-chancellors was a woman (brooks, 1997).  these statistics, however, tell us little of the women's experiences in the academy. the studies carried out by brooks (1997) and wilson (1986) on new zealand women faculty found evidence of high workloads, feelings of isolation, some experience of discrimination and harassment, and a lack of role models and mentors. personal narratives highlight attitudinal and institutional barriers experienced by feminist faculty working for change (ball, 1999), and describe the very high workload of women faculty who also hold administrative positions (middleton, 1999). like the us, in the uk (eggins, 1997), australia (blackmore, 1998; morley, 2005), and canada (rees, 1995) it has been the feminist lens and theorizing brought to bear by feminist academics and researchers that has exposed the impact of institutional hegemonic practices on women’s experiences as faculty in aotearoa/new zealand. in these countries (the us, uk, nz, australia, and canada) research has been relatively extensive. the same cannot be said of eastern european countries such as romania. women's experiences in romania like the new zealand government, the romanian government, since the introduction of democracy in 1989, has been developing an increasingly “hands off” approach to the delivery of services. however, in comparison to the us and new zealand, the romanian government still remains very involved in the lives of its citizens. even though there is a much greater involvement of the free market in romanian society, the government still provides essential services such as education. for example, although it is very competitive for students to be accepted in universities, once they do, apart from a very small fee, tuition and accommodation are free. to better understand romania today, it is important to at least briefly explain what life was like in romania during the communist regime. when considering the position of women in romanian society today, which includes women faculty, the influence of the socio-cultural and political contexts cannot be overestimated. harsanyi (1993) commented that "the enduring and entrenched peasant culture provided the traditions, values and moral standards for the whole country" (p. 39). in romania, both peasant culture and communism supported clearly defined gender roles, despite the rhetoric of communism that preached equality of the sexes. romanian society has always been, and continues today, to be very patriarchal. due to a quota system during the communist regime, women were well represented in leadership positions, particularly politics. however, gender anomalies still existed. for example, women who were single, divorced, or childless found it very difficult to gain promotion. the communist ideology supported both women in the home, preferably with many children, and women working for the state. giving birth was a patriotic duty so the state would not be short of workers during the time of intense industrialization. in 1966, an anti-abortion law was passed that restricted abortions to women over 45 with five children or more under 18 years of age.  contraception, other than condoms, was banned, and women were subjected to compulsory gynecological examinations so that early pregnancies could be detected. deaths from illegal abortions and giving birth were high. infant mortality was very high. there was also a gender division in what was taught in schools with girls taking cooking and embroidery and boys taking woodcarving and metalwork. these measures continued to reinforce the domination of men. women were almost always responsible for all household chores and for child rearing. labor saving devices such as washing machines and refrigerators were either not available, too expensive, or could not be operated because of the unpredictable supply of power. so women had to do all chores by hand and queue for hours for basic food.  housing was also in short supply and as many as three generations lived in a small apartment. children did not leave home until they got married so living conditions were cramped, and violence and alcohol abuse was common. life for women was very hard (harsanyi, 1993; hausleitner, 1993). censorship was common. images of feminine beauty and women as desirable sexual beings disappeared from tv, magazines, and newspapers. harsanyi (1993) commented "romanian society was even more boring and colorless than that of its socialist neighbors" (p. 45). former communist dictator nicolae ceausescu's politics were moralistic, puritanical, and misogynistic. university sociology and psychology departments were either closed down or highly propagandized so the experiences of women during this time were not researched and documented. only recently have romanian universities begun to re-establish these departments.  romanian feminism, by western standards, is very new and very embryonic. the importance of this becomes apparent later in this paper when the romanian faculty in this study reflects on their lives.  it was not until 1994 that the first ph.d. on a feminist topic was completed in romania, and in 1997 the first ma in gender studies was introduced at bucharest university (miriou, 2001). however, what is similar between romania, the us, and nz is that women in romania are underrepresented in faculty positions. women are 31.9% of the total faculty, professors (5%), readers (25%), lecturers (32%), assistants (45%), and tutors (42%). the more senior the position, the fewer the women (ministry of education (1997-1998) cited in miriou (2001) ) research design qualitative feminist research most suited our need to examine the experiences of participants. the work is feminist in that it draws on reinharz's (1992) definition of feminist research. it was carried out by two feminist researchers, women's experiences were given centrality, and feminist theory was used in interpreting the data. each case was bounded by its examination of the experiences of woman academics in the united states, aotearoa/new zealand, and romania. twelve stories follow, all addressing questions about how these women found or forged a home/welcome ground in their professional lives. this work draws on the theory of intersubjectivity. as feminist researchers working in the academy, we agree with weiler (1988) that common shared experiences give importance to "lived experience and the significance of everyday life" (p. 60). likewise, the use of narrative strategies is congruent with feminist research. narrative, which is rooted in experience, conveys what individuals think and feel as they move through academic life. narrative or story has the power to teach, to validate, and to embody a collective wisdom which can provide faculty women with both roots and purpose as they struggle to make meaning of their academic lives (lieblich & josselson, 1994; personal narratives group, 1989). the women in this study vary in age, ethnic background, sexual orientation, discipline, and have served as both faculty and administrators. all were interviewed in their own countries.  they come from a variety of disciplines, including management, recreation, education, languages, mathematics, food chemistry, and kinesiology. they hold positions from dean to assistant professor. the us women included moana (40s) who is indigenous and is recently tenured and teaches in education; cornelia (60s) teaches languages and is about to retire from her position as dean; lucille (50s) is lesbian and an assistant professor of kinesiology; and elizabeth (50s) who is a department chair and a full professor in teacher education. the nz women included kate (50s) and gemma (40s) who are both indigenous and lesbian. kate is a senior lecturer in information technology and gemma is a lecturer in leisure management. theresa (40s) is a senior lecturer in management and kathleen (40s) was a lecturer in management but has since left the academy. the romanian women included andrea (60s) and nina (30s) who are mother and daughter. andrea is an associate professor in food chemistry and nina is a lecturer in mathematics. angela (40s) lectures in languages and daniella in mathematics. all the romanian women know one another and teach in the same university. the interviews drew on questions that emerged from the work of cooper, et al. (1999). each woman was interviewed in the setting of her choice and at times was involved in repeated conversations as women were given the time needed to reflect upon their own experiences and strategies. three of the romanian women were interviewed in english and one in romanian using an interpreter. jane traveled to romania to carry out the interviews and on her return home continued the conversations via email. findings all the women were asked if, for them, the academy was welcome ground. they were also asked to reflect on the notion of the academy as a home and whether in their experience this was a relevant description. there were some commonalities in the stories across the three countries and these were most marked in the stories of the us and nz women. three broad categories of findings emerged which included how some of the women did find welcome ground, how some experienced a hostile and toxic environment, and how the women struggled to belong to the academy by at times challenging it and at times withdrawing from it. welcome ground the concept of the academy as home did not sit comfortably with the women in this study, however, some did find welcome ground in the academy and some made attempts to create a home for themselves. four women, cornelia and elizabeth in the us and gemma and kate in nz, found welcome ground in the academy. however, feeling welcome was not necessarily something they experienced right away and sometimes it had to be worked at. for example, cornelia, who immigrated to the us in the early 1970s, was looking for welcome ground in two contexts, a new country and a new job. cornelia commented, “...on the whole this place [the academy] has treated me kindly.” yet, she was aware that there had been some tough times on her journey to becoming dean, and like the other us women in this study, much of that struggle focused around the process of gaining tenure. elizabeth also found welcome ground or what she called “a comfort zone” after much struggle. elizabeth started out in a department in which she felt welcomed. however, her department changed over the years. the atmosphere became “charged, negative, with cliques, hidden agendas, and political agendas.” it became a very hostile place. she described it as very wearing. at this point elizabeth developed cancer and needed surgery. in order to again find welcome ground, she negotiated a transfer to a new department. now that she has changed departments and is free of the toxic environment she found herself in, she can really notice the difference. “it sneaks up on you. it’s hard to notice when you are in it,” she stated. elizabeth describes her new department as “wonderful.” “being smaller, non-field based and delivering only graduate courses, it is a much more doable environment,” says elizabeth. it allows for collaboration while also giving her the individual space she needs to maintain comfort: “in that sense, this is a home-like, or comfort zone, but i can have it and have a personal life outside the academy and this is extremely important.” for kate and gemma (nz), who are both maaori, even though the academy was welcome ground it was not home. kate's home was "up north" where she was born, and for gemma home was where her partner lived. maaori traditionally view home as where they were born and this brings into question the appropriateness of calling the academy home for indigenous peoples. another, and somewhat surprising, finding was that unlike many lesbian academics, kate and gemma did not find their working environment hostile (estes & lant, 1998; mcnaron, 1997). in fact, of all the women in this study they were the two that expressed the most satisfaction with their academic lives. kate even suggested that at times being a lesbian was an advantage: "...sometimes being gay is quite useful because people let you get away with doing things that are a little bit different because they think oh well, you know, she is one of those." kate and gemma's comfort may in part be due to the fact that they have a feminist dean with a strong social justice leadership agenda. the previous dean was also feminist and openly lesbian so a culture of inclusion and respect for diversity had already been established. facilities and resources enjoyed by the us academics and, to a lesser extent, the nz academics, were not enjoyed by the romanian women. in some cases, they did not have what many would consider to be basic requirements such as a desk or a computer. angela (ro) commented, "i don't have an office. i don't even have a table of my own or a chair...conditions for us they are not so good." yet, attempts were made to create a more pleasant place at work by putting flowers and family pictures in their offices. what some women in the us and nz may find unacceptable, like sharing an office, was seen by daniella (ro) as a plus: "i like sharing [an office] not to stay there alone [especially] late in the evening. i don't like to be lonely." she enjoyed the security and friendship of her colleagues as they worked and socialized together in their shared office space. it was also somewhere they could go that was smoke-free as none of the faculty who shared the office smoked. this made their office especially welcome ground.  the university where all the romanian women in this study worked was not smoke free. finally, all the women from all three countries found welcome ground in their teaching.  they were passionate about their teaching and gained enormous personal satisfaction from their work with students. even for those women who described the academic environment as toxic, like moana (us), it was their teaching, research, and their contact with students that nourished and sustained them. if we examine the women’s teaching experiences in the academy in the light of jane roland martin's (2000) suggestion that the academy is the "home of thought" (p. 41) then the concept of the academy as home is a better fit. for example, theresa (nz), whose experiences of sexual harassment made calling the academy a home abhorrent, enjoyed the intellectual stimulation and challenge she found in her teaching and research. also, andrea (ro), despite being frustrated by the lack of resources and equipment, loved her research work and her teaching: "what gives me most satisfaction is when the students attend [my] classes, when they pay attention to what i am saying, when they are really interested and they are doing their homework." linking teaching and scholarship goes beyond the academy as "the home of thought divorced from action and theory uninformed by practice" (martin, 2000, p.41) and firmly locates teaching as a scholarly pursuit. it also grounds scholarship in action and practice. enduring a chilly climate some of the women in this study endured the chilly climate sandler and hall (1986) describe; an environment which was shaped by their experiences of harassment, stress, and, in romania, by poor resources. harassment             harassment was a major reason why some of the women definitely did not experience the academy as welcoming, but rather as toxic and hostile. moana, lucille, and cornelia (us) and kathleen and theresa (nz) all experienced prolonged periods of harassment from senior colleagues (both men and women), which prevented most of them from feeling positive about their academic environment, although the three us women were able to get to a place of comfort and fit through a variety of circumstances. for moana, lucille, and cornelia, much of the harassment they experienced was associated with the tenure process, which left them feeling angry and powerless, even though they all eventually received tenure. they consciously and carefully implemented strategies to counteract the problems they were experiencing. for example, moana took up a “terrific opportunity.” she had to work with an established researcher from her department who provided her with support and encouraged her to channel her energies into productive endeavors. when speaking of her tenure process, cornelia states, “i was not an uncontroversial figure in the department. there were people who could not stand me.” another woman in the department thought “only people who were german should teach german. i was not a native german [therefore] i should not be teaching german. i was not the only victim. i was the victim who did not go away. i stayed.” however, she did not stay without a struggle. her first application for tenure was denied. cornelia’s department chair was furious. “i think what made him most furious was that i had done all the dirty work in the department...(so) he asked the president could i please go up again in my last year.” the president agreed. her department chair “made sure that the next time...my application was presentable. he would say, ‘shouldn’t you mention this?  didn’t you do this’?” cornelia remembers him as “a real mentor.”  theresa and kathleen (nz) also experienced harassment which impacted on their relationship with colleagues and their feelings of safety and professional enjoyment. the prolonged periods of harassment they both endured made it “impossible” for them to view the academy as home. theresa and kathleen considered that the gendered culture of their faculty (in the department of management) made it very difficult for them to enjoy their work environment.  they had both lost faith in the academy’s ability to provide them with a comfortable and collegial place of work. a senior colleague harassed theresa, and when she would not support his bid for promotion, the harassment increased and continued via email: "i got the most disgraceful, harassing emails ... about how i was a traitor and a back stabber and my career was dead." although theresa did not report the harassment at the time, she did keep copies of the emails he sent, “if there is ever a time that i need that information, i will use it." theresa’s harassing senior colleague, shaun, was promoted, and it was at this stage thattheresa lost faith in the university: "...no i don't feel like i have a home...i have no faith or trust or commitment...there is no pleasure in being at work."  the harassment kathleen endured was both sexual and psychological and, apart from her friendship with theresa, she found little support in the academy. after the death of her baby, at a time when she was extremely vulnerable, she experienced gross insensitivity from some of her colleagues and had to fight to return to work. she explains, i knew that under the parental leave act that if your baby died i was entitled to go back, as long as i gave a certain amount of notice. so i did all of that. again, this time it was tom from staffing, tried to say, well emma died in the beginning of october and i wanted to come back at the beginning of december. he tried to say well you can't come back in december and he wrote a letter to the dean because it was non-teaching time and [he] said basically i was trying to do the university in by coming back at the start of the vacation time. after some negotiation she was able to return to work but found she was unable to go back into her old office and had been given another one in the basement away from her departmental friends and colleagues. eventually, things were sorted out, the dean apologized, and she was able to have an office in her department. however, these and other experiences left her so bruised and battered that after eight years she resigned. even though the period of harassment for moana, lucille, theresa, and kathleen was over, the memories were still painful, the experiences raw, and their emotions visible. moana, theresa, and kathleen expressed their anger at what had happened, and much of kathleen’s story was told through her tears. each developed strategies to help them cope and survive in their toxic working environment. while elizabeth did not experience harassment, she did describe the environment she found herself in as “toxic” and developed coping strategies, chiefly to transfer to a more welcome ground in another department. we discuss these strategies later in this article. poor resources the reasons why the romanian women found the academy to be unpleasant at times were quite different from the reasons why some of the us and nz women experienced a toxic environment. the lack of resources, poor pay, and a smoky environment concerned the women.  they were also struggling to cope with the changes in a relatively new democratic environment in which there was less money available for equipment and research. andrea (speaking through an interpreter) commented, so on top of the equipment, even the library is poor. it lacks the latest information and general books. i have a hard time trying to get updated with the latest research information in my field. i waste a great amount of time doing manually things that could be done by machines. i do not have the right machines, the right equipment. the other romanian women who also commented on how difficult it was to teach at the standard they would like to when the resources were so poor echoed andrea’s frustration. for example, angela did not have a computer or an office. except for when she was teaching, she mainly worked at home as there was no work space for her at the university. this left her feeling isolated from her students and colleagues. romanian academics are poorly paid in comparison to other professions, so the low level of pay was a problem. it would not have been possible for any of the women to live on her salary alone. families needed to have two or more income earners, which meant that often several generations lived together in one small apartment. so, the women were not only coping with their careers but also managing quite large households with little or no help from the men in their families. this at times caused strife in the families. nina’s husband believed that because she was earning so little, it was her responsibility to run the household, an attitude nina felt was very unfair.   nina commented on how difficult it was for her to work where the environment was literally toxic because so many faculty members smoked at work: "yes, very boring [department meetings] and everyone smoking, which is quite a pest ...out of 28 [department faculty] only three or four don't smoke...all of them smoke, women and men…they smoke all the time and everywhere. this is a big problem.” because it is quite legal in romania for people to smoke in their work environment, the women did not believe they had any power to change this situation.  the only other woman to mention poor resources was kate who was very frustrated by the inadequate car parking which resulted in her spending long hours at work: i come to work early partly because i'm a morning person but also because of the hassle with car parks. i am not tolerant of driving around trying to find a car park. in fact i become very irrational if i can't find one. it just irritates the hell out of me so i would much rather come to work early and i say to myself i'll go home early and i hardly ever do but that is a real irritant to me. the women’s responses to their working environment reflected their struggle to belong to an environment that was not always welcoming. struggle to belong in their struggle to belong to the academy, what strategies did the women use and what was their emotional response? each woman developed her own unique way of coping within two broad strategies of challenge and withdrawal. these were not the only strategies they used and they were not always discrete but sometimes overlapped; sometimes one was used and then the other and sometimes neither were used. challenge challenging institutional practices and senior colleagues, particularly when you are untenured, takes courage. those women that did risked, at best, not being promoted, and at worst, not getting tenure and losing their jobs. however, these women were survivors and refused to be victims. the emotions and feelings that drove them to challenge were anger, disgust, fear, outrage, and a strong sense of injustice and unfairness. the new zealand womens’ stories in particular, and to a lesser extent the us women also, were saturated with feminist explanations of the conditions under which they worked. they spoke a language of resistance and challenge.  theresa challenged in two ways. first, she publicly spoke against the appointment of her harasser as department chair. she was very uncomfortable with shaun having such power when she knew him to be a harasser. although she was not successful in challenging his appointment, it took courage as the dean was supporting his appointment. second, she worked to change the curriculum she was teaching to include socially responsible management practices as she considered that this was not happening in the classroom: “in reality we do a lot of training and not too much education in my view. so my passion is about finding ways to turn that around.” her work in challenging and changing the curriculum was a strategy used to find intellectual welcome ground.             even though kathleen eventually resigned from the academy, while she was there she did challenge what was happening. her extensive knowledge of human resource practices and employment legislation meant she had an informed platform from which to launch her challenge.  she knew her rights. the cost was high both in terms of her emotional health and how she was able to work with and relate to colleagues. she commented that her numerous efforts to fight for her rights meant that some, including the dean, viewed her as a “bloody difficult worker.” all the nz women academics identified themselves as feminists. their feminism was an integral part of their professional lives and provided them with theoretical tools that helped them to analyze and explain their experiences. a striking feature of all the interviews was how when telling their stories they theorized their own experiences. they liberally used words such as power, gendered, masculinity, marxism, control, sexism, racism, resist, patriarchy, hegemony, and challenge. and, in contrast to their romanian colleagues, they spoke a language of resistance and challenge.             while the us women used less explicit feminist language in describing their responses to challenge, they were nevertheless determined to resist what was happening to them. cornelia, for example, fought both her failure to receive tenure on the first try and the university’s original offer to pay her less than the male dean (her predecessor) had been earning. “it took the regents a long time” to appoint her the dean, cornelia reported, “because i was asking for the same salary as” the former dean, saying, “you can’t pay a woman less than a man.”  lucille refused to sign the evaluation her dean had written which labeled her as someone with “limited probability of success.” she told him the evaluation was written based on hearsay and had no basis in actual fact. she then challenged the system by establishing a scholarly record that was beyond reproach. lucille focused on doing what she loved and on what her students were learning.  this willingness to work hard to create an outstanding academic reputation can be seen as a form of challenge to those who would discredit women in the academy. like theresa, this effort was one of finding welcome intellectual ground. lucille now describes her scholarly work as being a piece of a larger whole. she described her teaching, research, and service as "infinite loops that come back on themselves." she feels she is working to make the world a better place and focuses everything she does on social justice and gender issues. moana’s challenges to the system were much more direct. when she discovered that her department chair was trying to sabotage her tenure application, she confronted the woman directly. when this did not work, she called her faculty union and filed an informal grievance. her advice to other junior faculty is to “be gutsy enough to stand up for yourself, to think when you’re attacked, ‘stuff you!  i’ve worked hard!’” withdrawal withdrawal both within the academy and also into their homes was a common response amongst the women, particularly the romanian women. the language of resistance was not so evident in the romanian womens’ stories. although they had strategies to help cope with the poor facilities and resources, their coping strategies were more likely to involve withdrawal rather than challenge, and they appeared resigned to the way things were. daniella’s metaphor illustrates the philosophic attitude the romanian women faculty had: sometimes [working in the academy] may be like the weather, sometimes bad or a day with rain. after that sunny days with sun. other times ok.  or, maybe a wave that takes you up and down and after that the sun and the good weather. but you know it’s like all our life. because of their poor working conditions, both nina and angela organized their work so they spent as little time as possible at the university. nina suggested that their apparent acceptance of how things were was because they were in survival mode with little energy left to try and change things. also, after years of communist rule, challenging and questioning were not only discouraged but could be dangerous. being aware of what is possible to do in a changed political climate takes time. it was not only the romanian women who used withdrawal as a coping strategy. theresa withdrew to her home to work and also into her curriculum where she felt she could work to “make a difference.” although kate enjoyed her working environment, she withdrew from the “busy-ness” of her life to the comforts of her home, even if it was to carry on with her work: i will just go home and carry on what i'm doing a lot of the time. i've got this laptop of course. it’s a real trap because i bought it myself, one of my treats or rewards i think you'd call them, and it was a nice new leather recliner chair from danske mobler. now with the new laptop, i can recline right back with my laptop and this lovely screen. and its amazing how thoughtful i can be. lying there, breathing the leather. likewise gemma made a deliberate choice, for lifestyle reasons, to move away from her previous work (she ran her own business) where she worked weekends “year in and year out.”  she now refuses to work weekends and withdraws into her life with her partner. although this helps to feed her spirit, gemma commented that there were costs because she had to make sure she got all her work done during the week. like gemma, elizabeth in the us has found withdrawal to be a helpful tactic. she has withdrawn in two ways. one is a withdrawal from a work life that had taken over and left her exhausted and with a life-threatening illness. the second form of withdrawal was her move to a different department when she found the atmosphere in her first one had turned toxic. elizabeth claims that making the academy her “home” was her major problem. by not distinguishing between work and her personal life, she created a life with no balance in it. while she admits her life was enjoyable, having her work and her personal life be one proved to be very unhealthy for her. “there were no boundaries to my work life,” she says. “i worked all the time. it kept me in a fairly narrow world.” her work segued into her private life. her friends, her travel, and her time away from the office were all work related. she now believes it is healthier to separate professional life. in a sense, she has withdrawn into a personal life that does not involve working all the time. here withdrawal served as a survival mechanism that allowed her to get well. moana describes the use of both challenge and withdrawal tactics. while challenging the negative evaluations she was given by her department chair, she also admitted that it was often hard to come into work, given the toxic environment she was working in. she stated that it was hard to stay in your office and “get beat up,” but too much time away from the office may result in your colleagues complaining that you are not a “team player.” this tension is one many new faculty may face as they attempt to balance the enormous demands on their time with the need for rest and relaxation. conclusions earlier in this article we asked if the concepts of home and welcome ground in the academy are relevant both in the 21st century and in the international arena. this study has highlighted that they are only partially relevant. the stories of these 12 women indicate that the chilly climate as described by sandler & hall (1986) still exists. all experienced difficulties in obtaining their goals and finding welcome ground in academe. they used the strategies of challenge and withdrawal to survive (and sometimes thrive) in what was at times a very hostile environment. they needed to be alert and sophisticated readers of their political environment so they knew when to challenge, when to withdraw, and when to seek the help of others. the support of colleagues and friends was vital as their experiences often left them feeling powerless, lonely, and isolated. elizabeth, for example, found great comfort and intellectual support from her colleagues in her study group. she recommended that new faculty “find really good mentors” who can provide intellectual and emotional support “so you don’t have to go through this by yourself.” likewise, moana found a senior colleague who was a powerful mentor to her as she began to develop as a scholar. as a group these women have much to teach us about unraveling the often tacit knowledge necessary to succeed and about believing in yourself and your ability to contribute to higher education's goals and values. their individual and collective journeys provide reflective, yet, insightful perspectives and valuable lessons. despite their struggles, they have been able to persevere and succeed, largely through their own resilience, tenacity, and strength. as nyquist, manning, wulff, austin, sprague, fraser, et al. (1999) have asserted, higher education must be concerned about the academy's current values and structural organization and about whether the academy is adequately preparing the kind of innovative, committed, and thoughtful faculty members needed in the 21st century. all the women in all three countries exhibited a determination to succeed that must have had a powerful impact on their ability to overcome obstacles and grow professionally. their experiences and the responses to them serve as powerful models for the ways in which women in academe can not only survive but thrive. they do not deny the existence of a sometimes chilly climate. yet, while they acknowledge that reality, they reassure women new to the academy that these obstacles are not impossible to overcome. although the chilly climate literature has often assumed that male colleagues are the most troublesome for women faculty, moana, lucille, cornelia, elizabeth, theresa, nina, and kathleen all encountered other female colleagues who were obstructive. the chilly climate for women, it seems, can be perpetuated by men or by other women colleagues.  heinrich (1995) describes this complex phenomenon in her study of female advisor?]advisee relationships. she characterizes doctoral advisement relationships between women as filled with both a sense of friendship and one of betrayal. she asserts that the research on the benefits of female mentors to women's professional development has produced mixed results. while the women in this study were not doctoral students, in most cases they were in subordinate positions (junior to senior faculty) to the women colleagues who constructed barriers to their success. not all their female colleagues, however, were unsupportive. many went out of their way to help in times of trouble, just as many of their male colleagues did. perhaps most of all, these experiences underscore the complex nature of relationships in the academy and the ways in which they are not easily categorized. cornelia, for example, describes the intricate web of support and non?]support that faculty women encounter as they enter the academy. having been mentored by male and female colleagues, she found support not only from her superiors, such as the dean, but even from some part time faculty who actively defended her when she was refused tenure. one woman in particular “got all the troops organized and wrote a letter to the president that this was a shame that i had not gotten tenure because i was such an asset to the department.”  “this was a woman (whose)...own employment status was kind of wobbly,” states cornelia.  this woman “wanted more than anything at that time” to have a tenure track position in german.  she was part time and cornelia says, “i think now if i would have left my job, there would have been the position in german” that this woman wanted. “she could just as well have thought, well too bad for corey, but when she’s gone i’ll apply for the position in german...but no,” states cornelia, “she was fearless.” heinrich recommended that further research be conducted with "double minorities," women who fit this category by virtue of their gender, as well as their racial or ethnic origins. moana, kate, and gemma’s experiences begin to meet this call, describing the ways in which the overlay of color and sexuality plays itself out in female academic relationships. heinrich (1995) further indicates a need for studies which "explore the unconscious forces rooted in mother?]daughter relationships that enhance or obstruct women's advisement relationships" (p. 467). the experience of these women hint at the unconscious forces at work in all relationships, male or female, as well as the powerful role a sense of self plays in women's ability to weather the "rough sailing" they may encounter. lucille's description of her new found confidence and the conviction that her earlier difficulties were "the best thing" that could have happened to her underscores the powerful role identity plays in both the success of women academics and their sense of place in the academy. lucille’s belief in the instructional value of her professional struggles could not have come without a period of reflection on her circumstances and what she learned from them.  these women’s experiences affirm the conclusions of cooper, et al. (1999) about the importance of reflection and subsequent action in the face of difficulty. like lucille, elizabeth reflected on her current circumstances in her department and her subsequent illness. facing her own mortality she states, “i had to take action.  i had to try.” this underscores cooper’s, et al (1999) assertion that finding welcome ground in the academy involves constant reflection in an effort to understand identity and belonging, as well as the willingness to take action on one’s own behalf.  the women in this study did that in both large and small ways. challenging the evaluation of a dean, as lucille did, is a large act of courage. bringing flowers into the office, as the romanian women did, is a small act, but still a form of taking action on one’s own behalf. it is the cycle of withdrawal and reflection coupled with subsequent action which may be the most important element of these women’s survival, not a consideration of these coping mechanisms in isolation from one another. the stories of these women equip others in the academy with both concrete strategies and overall encouragement as they make their own academic journeys. their experiences provide invaluable advice for others. finally, their long view brings an in-depth understanding of the adjustments and struggles that continue throughout women's academic careers. their effort to make a congenial space for themselves also forges new paths for the women who come after them. amidst a world often filled with invisible and unspoken rules, a world caplan (1993) describes as "the good, the bad and the perplexing." 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(1986). report on the status of academic women in new zealand. auckland: the association of university teachers of new zealand inc. wilson, m. (1995, july). academic women in the 1990s. proceedings of the education and the equality of the sexes conference. hamilton, new zealand. footnotes             1aotearoa is the maori word for new zealand and means the land of the long white cloud.             2vice-chancellors are the equivalent of university presidents in the us.             3nina and her husband have since divorced and nina has since returned to live with her parents.             aotearoa is the maori word for new zealand and means the land of the long white cloud. vice-chancellors are the equivalent of university presidents in the us. nina and her husband have since divorced and nina has since returned to live with her parents.   copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the 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https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com abstract advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editors dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 29, number 3 may 08, 2009 issn 1093-7099 effective mentoring relationships with women in sport: results of a meta-ethnography dr. glenna g. bower abstract women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions within sport. one of the most critical aspects of advancing women in leadership positions within sport is the mentoring relationship. as the number of women entering sport increases, a growing number of professionals recognize the inherent benefits and challenges between the mentor and the protégé. this study was designed to identify themes based on key elements of an effective mentoring relationship helping women to advance within leadership positions in sport. a qualitative methodology, meta-ethnography, allowed the researcher to synthesize 15 qualitative studies about mentoring women within sport. these 15 studies were selected by using both content and methodological screening. each study was read, coded, and analyzed for themes based on the key elements of an effective mentoring relationship. the findings of the study revealed 10 themes and seven implications for female protégés, potential mentors, and organizations to consider when mentoring women within sport. key words: women, sport, mentor, relationship, leadership citation: bower, g (2009). effective mentoring relationships with women in sport: results of a meta-ethnography. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(3). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 introduction of the united states work population, 70 million women were employed in 2006. in terms of leadership positions, females comprised of 38% of the management positions (u.s. department of labor, women’s bureau, 2008). women have come a long way but are still underrepresented in leadership positions within male-dominated occupations. the maledominated occupation of particular interest to the researcher is the sport industry. the sport industry consists of many segments which include intercollegiate athletics, interscholastic athletics, academics (scholastic physical education and academia), recreational sport (campus recreation, health and fitness industry, facility and event management, leisure service management), business (sport related business, professional sport, sport communications), and diverse populations (international sport, sport for people with disabilities, african american women) (hums, bower, & grappendorf, 2007). the degree of underrepresentation of women within leadership positions within the sport industry has been well-documented in intercollegiate athletics (acosta & carpenter, 2008), interscholastic athletics (whisenant 2003; 2004), academics (grappendorf, smucker, & pent, 2006), recreational sports (bower & hums, 2003), business (lough, 2007), and diverse populations (lapchick, 2008). often the road to leadership positions in the sport industry is difficult because of barriers. some of these barriers include the need for women to prove themselves, lack of support, balancing work and family, old boys network, lack of training and career development (lough, 2001; weaver & chelladuri, 2002). one of the most critical aspects of advancing women in leadership positions within sport is the mentoring relationship. as the number of women entering sport increases, a growing number of professionals recognize the inherent benefits and challenges between the mentor and the protégé. while the mentoring relationship is important in career development for both genders, it is particularly critical for women, especially those in male dominated professions such as the sport industry. mentors may buffer the female manager from overt and covert discrimination, and help their female protégé circumvent structural, social, and cultural barriers to advancement in the organization (bower, hums, & keedy, 2006; grappendorf, burton, & lilienthal, 2007; sagas & cunningham, 2004). thus, a review of the mentoring literature is warranted. there are an overwhelming amount of mentoring definitions that can be problematic in itself because of ungrounded theory and inconsistent definitions. weaver and chelladurai (1999) defined mentoring from multiple studies of the mentoring relationship, “a process in which a more experienced person serves as a role model, provides guidance and support to a developing novice, and sponsors that novice in his/her career progress” (p. 25). in addition, weaver and chelladurai (1999) developed a mentoring model identifying key elements of an effective mentoring relationship including: (a) mentor and protégé characteristics, (b) career functions, (c) psychosocial functions, and (d) outcomes of the mentoring relationship. for instance, the first key element of the model states “the mentor and protégé characteristics lead to mentor-protégé compatibility, which subsequently leads to a mentoring relationship (weaver & chelladurai, 1999, p. 26). for example, bower (2004) identified characteristics which positively influenced a mentor’s and protégé’s decision to develop a mentoring relationship with women in campus advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 recreation. the study reported the mentor and protégé were attracted to individuals they perceived as being more like themselves. the second and third key elements of the model supports aspects of the mentoring functions developed by kram (1983) to enhance an individual’s growth and advancement. kram’s (1985) mentor-role theory established the ability of mentors to provide two broad categories of mentor functions. first, the career-related functions included sponsorship, exposure and visibility, coaching, protection, and challenging assignments (kram, 1985) and are often key elements of a successful mentoring relationship (weaver & chelladurai, 1999, 2002). the sponsorship function allows the mentor to help build the reputation of the woman by highlighting her potential. exposure and visibility allows the mentor to help the woman build relationships for greater advancement opportunities. the mentor also provides knowledge, as well as productive feedback on appropriate skills needed to advance within segments of the sport industry. the mentor also protects the woman from taking on too many responsibilities. finally, the mentor assigned challenging assignments to the woman in preparing her for greater responsibilities. for example, bower (2008) examined advancement techniques used in preparing a female protégé for leadership position within the health and fitness industry. results supported the need for career functions in providing the female protégé with “knowledge and skills, as well as productive feedback on an appropriate education, demonstrating research applications, a willingness to share information, developing leadership, organization, training, and business skills” (p. 44). the psychosocial functions included role modeling, acceptance and confirmation, counseling, and friendship (kram, 1985), and are also key elements of a successful mentoring relationship (weaver & chelladurai, 1999, 2002). the mentor may help the woman to build an identity by observing the behaviors, attitudes, and values of the mentor. during acceptance and confirmation, the mentor helps the woman in building confidence by creating a mutual trust, confirming individual abilities, and lending encouragement and support. the mentor counsels the woman to investigate and solve personal conflicts that may detract them from an effective performance. finally, a social interaction (friendship) between the mentor and protégé may allow the woman to share personal experiences and escape the pressures of work. for example, young (1990) identified and analyzed mentoring and networking among selected male and female administrators employed by national collegiate athletic association (ncaa) institutions. the results of study illustrated “the mentor was viewed by the administrators as a role model. the mentor was generally regarded with respect, appreciation, loyalty, admiration, and friendship (p. 74). the fourth key element is to identify mentoring outcomes of the mentoring relationship. the majority of research concerning mentoring outcomes focused on the benefits and barriers of the mentoring relationship (bower, 2004; weaver & chelladurai, 2002). the research has clearly established a direct link between mentoring and the career benefits of increased salary, promotions, and job satisfaction with women within the sport industry (bower, hums, & keedy, 2006; grappendorf, burton, & lilienthal, 2007). it has also been well documented that women face different barriers than men when it comes to initiating a mentoring relationship. women seeking employment in predominately male-dominated professions face many barriers which advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 decrease the chances of obtaining leadership positions (bower, hums, & keedy, 2006; weaver & chelladurai, 2002). weaver and chelladurai (2002) identified several barriers to mentoring including a shortage of mentors, apprehension in the initiation of the mentoring relationship, factors influencing the willingness to mentor, support of the mentoring relationship, and misperception of the mentoring relationship. bower, hums, and keedy (2006) identified barriers to mentoring including the “old boys network,” lack of trained females, and discrimination. although research has examined the mentoring relationship among the mentor and female protégé within sport, (bower, 2007a; bower, hums, & keedy, 2006; grappendorf, burton, & lilienthal, 2007), no study has attempted to develop a relationship between these studies or seek patterns between them. thus, this study identified themes based on the key elements of an effective mentoring relationship with women in sport. the identification of these themes may provide insight on advancing women within leadership positions within sport. methodology demographics the meta-ethnography identified 15 qualitative studies about mentoring women within the sport industry. of the 15 studies demographics were analyzed as frequency data and included the following about mentors that were interviewed: (a) total number, (b) number of females to males, (c) average age and range, (d) average years and range of working in the sport industry, and (e) formal or informal mentoring relationships. the total number of mentors interviewed from within 13 of the studies was 133. the remaining two studies gathered mentors responses from open-ended questions from within a survey (n=480). therefore, there was a total of n=613 participants interviewed from within 15 of the studies. these mentors came from several segments of the sport industry including intercollegiate athletics, interscholastic athletics, academia, recreational sport, and sport-related business. the majority of the mentors interviewed were female (n=593) in comparison to the males (n=20). on average the mentors were 48 years of age with a range of 36-65, worked within a particular sport segment for an average of 32 years with a range of 25-46. of the mentors interviewed there were a total of 598 who participated in informal mentoring relationships as opposed to 15 who participated in formal mentoring programs. research design for this study, a meta-ethnography, counterpart to a meta-analysis, was the genre used to identify themes, patterns and connections representing and defining similarities and differences in the translation of interpretive research studies (either ethnographic, interactive, qualitative, naturalistic, hermeneutic, or phenomenological) into one another (noblit & hare, 1988). data analysis advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 the data were analyzed using a seven phase approach to translate studies into one another which constituted the meta-ethnographic synthesis (noblit & hare, 1988). first, identified the area of interest. for this meta-ethnography the area of interest was identifying themes based on the key elements of a successful mentoring relationship which help women advance within leadership positions in sport. second, determined the topic based on relevance. i identified key elements of a successful mentoring relationship with women in sport as the topic of relevance. third, collected and read literature on mentoring women in sport (intercollegiate athletics, interscholastic athletics, academic, recreational sport, and sport-related business). studies of the mentoring relationship of women in sport between the years 1990 and 2008 were collected and analyzed. after identifying the title, abstract, or reference, the refereed published articles were retrieved and reviewed for relevance. through this process a total of 47 refereed articles (qualitative and quantitative) were collected that focused on mentoring women within sport. fourth, determined how the studies were related. selected studies based on a content and methodological screening process determined relevancy that supported the key elements of an effective mentoring relationship which help women advance within leadership positions in sport. the content screen (merriam, 1998) was used as a guide to select studies that (a) were focused on mentoring women in sport (intercollegiate athletics, interscholastic athletics, campus recreation, leisure service management, health and fitness, sport and physical activity academia), (b) provided enough information describing the key elements of an effective mentoring relationship with women in sport, and (c) were capable of identifying specific themes associated with understanding the key elements of an effective mentoring relationship with women in sport. a total of 37 articles were remaining following the content screening. the remaining 37 studies were evaluated using a methodological screening based on qualitative principles. the methodological criteria consisted of evaluating the studies by answering the following questions: (a) are there explicit research questions focused on the key elements of mentoring? (b) are the data collection procedures clearly outlined? (c) is there adequate presentation of findings to help determine themes for the key elements within the study? and (d) are the studies qualitative? fifteen studies were selected for the final sample. finally, a peer debriefer was asked to examine the select sample of studies to determine if all the studies met the content and methodological screening criteria. the peer debriefer was a researcher engrained in the literature specific to mentoring women within sport. the “peer debriefer” endorsed all 15 studies for the final analysis. fifth, the studies were translated into each other seeking similarities, differences, and unusual information. i read, coded, and analyzed each study using ethnograph 5.0 software. the ethnograph 5.0 software was used as a means of managing the text data (store, code, memo, link, search, link, retrieve, display, graphics). the constant comparative analysis (glaser & strauss, 1967) was used in coding the results of each interpretation of the mentoring analysis. the constant comparative analysis consisted of placing each research study interpretation into separate ethnographic files. these ethnographic files were compared to one another to find similarities and differences in the information presented. sixth, analyzed and synthesized the advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 commonalities of the themes via ethnograph 5.0 software. finally, expressed the synthesis by writing the results of the analysis. trustworthiness of the data trustworthiness is the quality of research that convinces others to pay attention to the researcher’s findings (lincoln & guba, 1985). trustworthiness of the study was established by using several methods focused on the credibility (internal validity), transferability (external validity), dependability (reliability), and confirmability (objectivity). credibility lincoln and guba (1985) indicated credibility involves whether or not research is believable and is worth the attention of other researchers. the primary technique used to ensure the credibility of the data was triangulation because of the multi-study approach including “multiple sources of data, multiple points in time” (rossman & rallis, 2003, p. 69), and through the use of a peer debriefer. the peer debriefer provided an additional level of confidence in the results. the second technique used to establish credibility was the use of the constant comparative analysis. this technique allowed me to know when the subject areas had been thoroughly analyzed. transferability lincoln and guba (1985) indicated transferability is the ability of other researchers to understand and transfer the findings to another group of individuals. transferability was established through triangulation of the data which helped to establish the thick description. the thick description is the foundation of analysis which makes interpretation possible. thick description enables readers to transfer information to other settings and determine whether the findings can be transferred because of shared characteristics (erlandson, harris, skipper, & allen, 1993). the thick description provided meaning to the participant quotes within each study in developing themes for each key element. the themes allowed the researcher to consider whether or not the findings could be generalized to a similar population. dependability dependability was established through peer debriefing and specially designed software. the peer debriefing of the transcripts was completed by an expert in the field of mentoring. ethnograph 5.0, specially designed software, eased the management of the large volume of textbased data associated with a meta-ethnographic study. confirmability confirmability depends on the ability of the researcher to consider subjectivity within the context of the trustworthiness of the findings. i made every attempt to limit the bias and advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 premature conclusions through the use of the constant comparative analysis, peer debriefing, and rereading the data. results and discussion this study was designed to identify themes based on the key element of an effective mentoring relationship which help women to advance within leadership positions in the sport industry. i identified 10 themes based on the key elements of the mentoring model framework (weaver & chelladurai, 1999) including mentoring and protégé characteristics, career functions, psychosocial functions, and outcomes of the mentoring relationship. element # 1 mentoring and protégé characteristics an important aspect to understanding the key elements of an effective mentoring relationship is to have an understanding of what attracts mentors and protégés to each other. the mentor and protégé characteristics identified as most important for this meta-ethnography are discussed below. theme 1: mentor characteristics the meta-ethnography identified role modeling, nurturing, displaying a personality, and being competent as mentoring characteristics important to develop an effective mentoring relationship. the mentors described throughout the analysis portrayed the mentor as a role model because they led by example, provided leadership to the organization, and served in any way possible within their particular sport segment. a mentor referring to coaches within intercollegiate athletics (coach) explained: it is important [representation of women] so that there will be available role models and mentors thereby increasing visibility of women in the positions and making the dream of those individuals aspiring to become coaches and administrators a reality (abney, 1991a, p. 14). the mentors also displayed nurturing characteristics by providing care, support, and a positive outlook, taking both a personal and professional interest, and being sensitive to the needs of the protégé. a mentor working within intercollegiate athletics (athletic director) explained, “he was very supportive of developing women’s programs and creating change within the university” (inglis, danylchuk, & pastore, 2000, p. 9). the mentors’ display of personality characteristics included being sociable, having integrity, listening skills, and friendly. for example a mentor within sport and physical activity academia explained, “the mentor has to listen to the needs, questions, uncertainties, and fears the protégé has and the protégé needs to listen to the mentor” (bower, 2007b, p. 18). another example of a mentor within sport and physical activity academia included, “be firm, fair, and friendly in addition to being consistent. be honest with them [protégés] and direct with them [protégé], let them [protégé] also know the expectations (miller & noland, 2003, p. 87). a advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 mentor working within a sport organization described competency indicators as the following, “the mentor has to be out-going, to have excellent people skills, to possess inner confidence and intelligence” (strawbridge, 2000, p. 47). finally, competency indicators included having experience, skills, and knowledge to mentor a protégé within sport. a mentor within the health and fitness industry explained, “[the mentor needs to be] knowledgeable about the every aspect of the field business, health, people, skills, teamwork, education etc. (bower, 2008, p. 46). a mentor within a sport organization commented on the importance of competency, “a good academic background or the solid education they had received, regardless of the discipline, which was crucial to their credibility and perceived competence” (strawbridge, 2000, p. 50). theme 2: protégé characteristics mentors identified competency indicators and personality attributes as protégé characteristics of an effective mentoring relationship. the competency indicators included women who are high performers and who have the knowledge to excel in the field. for example, a mentor within sport and physical activity academia explained, “the young faculty should have knowledge of the field. . . she should also be critical of her work and strive to be a high performer” (bower, 2008, p. 42). another example within sport and physical activity academia, “be committed to teaching, “know your stuff,” “be organized. . . being a good teacher requires a high degree of skill”(miller & noland, 2003, p. 88). the personality attributes most often mentioned throughout the studies included the willingness to be mentored, the ability to be people oriented, and integrity. a mentor described her experience of wanting to be mentored when she was a protégé aspiring to be a coach within interscholastic athletics, “i just wanted the experience working with an experienced head coach. . . i wanted to listen to what she had to say, to understand [sport] better (dodds, 2005, p. 361). mentors also explained how being “people oriented” was an important attribute to a successful mentoring relationship. a mentor within campus recreation explained: i think that being people oriented is an important attribute to be successful, period. . . you can have such a technical proficiency, but if that’s what you bring to the table apart from an interest in people and some people skills – success is extremely difficult. (bower, 2004, p. 166). finally, the mentors described how important it was for the protégé to have integrity along with other personal attributes within a sport organization, “[the mentor] should possess strong motivation, to be thick skinned, to have personal integrity, to be enthusiastic and persevering, to be independent, self assured and to be a risk taker (strawbridge, 2000, p. 51). element #2 career functions advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 researchers suggest advancement to powerful positions in organizations may be partially based upon the application of career functions in developing effective mentoring relationships (kram, 1985). i identified career functions of exposure and visibility, coaching, and challenging assignments as important in the development of an effective mentoring relationship. theme 3: exposure and visibility the female protégés were introduced to the organization within several of the studies analyzed. exposure and visibility provided the protégé with an opportunity to make connections and learn about the organization and its cultures within leadership positions as illustrated in the work by dreher and dougherty (1997). mentors stressed the importance of providing the female protégés with opportunities to meet other people and highlight their skills in many different environments. a mentor within interscholastic athletics described exposure and visibility as a way to introduce the protégé to several individuals with different expertise within interscholastic athletics: it is more of a network of people that have . . . contributed different things some people have been more the educators, the teachers, some have been more the friends, supporters; some have been more the political people in my life who knew what to do and how to do it (dodds, 2005, p.. 359). another top-level administrator within a division i intercollegiate athletic setting supported exposure and visibility, “the mentor introduced me to influential people with the idea that in doing so she had a stamp of approval and was no longer necessary for the woman to feel like she had “to continually prove herself” over and over again” (strawbridge, 2000, p. 52). theme 4: coaching coaching was extremely important to the success of women wanting to advance within leadership positions in sport. the results supported the research that coaching can lead to the enhancement of task-related aspects of the job women need to be aware of to facilitate the objective career success. when “coaching” provided the woman with success, the protégé enhanced her performance abilities, thus leading to career related outcomes (allen, poteet, eby, & lentz, 2004). for example, one study illustrated how the mentor provided coaching by helping the female protégé to learn valuable skills about research within sport and physical activity academia. the mentor stressed the importance of a new faculty member being a part of a research team, “don’t try to start your career by yourself. . . get actively involved and learn by doing…i don’t believe that an individual can do substantive research alone anymore” (miller & noland, 2003, p. 86). another good example is of a mentor within a sport organization: a mentor is like a sounding board, they can give advice but the protégé is free to pick and choose what they do. the context does not have specific performance objectives. a coach is trying to direct a person to some end result, the person may choose how to get there, advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 but the coach is strategically assessing and monitoring the progress and giving advice for effectiveness and efficiency (starcevich, 1999, p. 1). theme 5: challenging assignments the challenging tasks mentioned throughout the meta-ethnography were specifically targeted as useful for women wanting to advance within the sport industry. challenging tasks revolve around making sure the female protégé had the opportunity to experience difficult tasks within specific segments of the sport industry. these results support kram’s (1983) work on assigning challenging assignments which have a direct impact on career advancement, and are critical in preparing young protégés to perform well on difficult tasks as they move forward. for example, a mentor within a sport organization explained the “hands on experience” she received from her mentor when she was a protégé: i was given a variety work experiences in the coaching positions and administrative positions. . i was given responsibility for a specific area which required me to manage, solve, negotiate, or be as creative as possible dealing with a particular situation which had no apparent precedent to which i could refer (strawbridge, 2000, p. 50). element #3 psychosocial functions the psychosocial functions are an important element to identify in developing an effective mentoring relationship. the psychosocial functions help address interpersonal aspects of the mentoring relationship and enhance the protégés sense of competence, self-efficacy, and professional and personal development. in addition, the psychosocial functions are dependent upon the quality of the interpersonal relationship and the emotional bond that underlie the relationship (kram, 1983). i identified psychosocial functions of role modeling, acceptance and confirmation, and friendship in the development of an effective mentoring relationship. theme 6: role modeling the mentors within these studies were considered to be role models. research on mentoring states that, “women mentors are more likely to effectively conduct the psychosocial functions of mentoring in which relational connection and role modeling are essential” (gilbert and rossman, 1992, p. 237). the psychosocial function of role modeling was evident as a mentor from within leisure service management mentioned: there is one woman i know who has really accomplished a lot in the field and is very well respected. when i see the kinds of things that she can do, it makes me realize that i can overcome the barriers if i really set my mind to it (frisby & brown, 1991, p. 303). another mentor explained the great impact mentoring had on their performance within intercollegiate athletics, “i saw how hard the coaches worked, how they were constantly upgrading their education. it really gave me a good role model (bloom, durand-bush, schinke, & salmela, 1998, p. 273). advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 theme 7: acceptance and confirmation acceptance and confirmation were highly related to the protégés satisfaction with the mentor. there was a deeper, more intense relationship which enhanced the quality of the mentoring relationship (kram, 1985). this deeper more intense relationship was an important aspect to the female protégé wanting the “nurturing” aspect of the relationship as well as the career benefits. for example, a mentor within sport and physical activity academia explained: i met several critical people over the years who were quite influential. . .i think mentors are absolutely critical in people’s lives. . . but its probably in large part due to the several individuals who at critical points in my development, made a difference in giving me confidence to pursue this or even suggesting that i could pursue [teaching] (grosshans, poczwardowski, trunnell, & ransdell, 2003, p. 149). another woman within the health and fitness industry explained, “she [mentor] supported the need for friendships as well, “i am also empathetic and caring allowing her [the protégé] to talk about issues outside the workplace” (bower, 2008, p. 18). theme 8: friendship the mentors valued friendship as a resource for the former protégé. these results supports kram’s (1983) redefinition phase (mentoring relationship turns to a friendship) where the roles and responsibilities for the mentor and protégé change dramatically. for example, friendships developed between the mentors and protégés throughout many of the mentoring relationships. for example, “working with this well-known coach was tremendous. he was like my mentor and i had tremendous respect for him. we developed a real strong personal relationship and became close friends. he was probably the most influential person in my career” (bloom et al., 2000, p. 274). another mentor provided support on women within intercollegiate athletics who valued the importance of friendship and support as effective characteristics of a mentoring relationship, “for the female administrator, having a mentor as a friend as well as to assist in pursuing a successful career can be extremely important” (marshall, adams, & camerson, 1998, p. 1). element #4 outcomes of the mentoring relationship mentoring relationships are a critical career resource for women wanting to advance within organizations in the sport industry. the advancement of the protégé is dependent upon both positive and negative outcomes which take place during the mentoring relationship. the outcomes can be a direct result of the career and psychosocial functions. the mentors’ described two major themes for the mentoring outcomes which included professional development opportunities and barriers to mentoring. theme 9: professional development opportunities advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 one outcome mentioned throughout the studies was providing women with professional development opportunities. scanlon (1997) reported that professional development is the key in how young professionals become prepared or socialized to accept powerful leadership positions and the mentoring relationship is used frequently in organizations as an informal means of providing employees with guidance on how to develop within their profession. for example, many of the mentors enjoyed seeing the protégé put what she learned from the mentor into action really made the mentors feel good. the mentors wanted to make a difference in the lives of these young women and to see them learn and grow. a good illustration of the professional benefit outcome for the protégé is illustrated in sport and physical activity academia: my mentor inspired me and gave me moral support and counsel. she helped me to achieve my dream. not only did she teach me the technical skills of teaching, but she helped me learn the values and standards of the profession while developing my own professional identity (schweitzer, 1993, p. 51). theme 10: barriers to mentoring the three main barriers identified by the mentors that may hinder the mentoring relationship included (a) lack of female leaders, (b) time commitment, and (c) vulnerability. first, there was a lack of female mentors within the different segments of the sport industry. the demand for female mentors creates a problem due to the shortage of women in the upper levels of the organization. when there is a shortage of women at upper levels of management, women in these positions are overburdened with women needing mentors (weaver & chelladurai, 2002). a mentor in coaching within intercollegiate athletics explained, “the best way of developing young coaches is working with a mentor. the problem is that there are not a lot [of women] to go around” (bloom, et. al., 1998, p. 276). the second barrier to mentoring is the time commitment involved with mentoring the female protégé. this barrier illustrated how mentoring takes a substantial amount of time from a mentor’s day. far from viewing this as a major problem, mentors accepted it as part of “territory” as well as an investment of the job as being a mentor. a mentor within the campus recreation profession explained how difficult it was to be available to the protégés at all times and that it was important to choose protégés that have the potential: the time investment [is] that you only have so much time and energy and you have to be selective in investing [is a disadvantage to mentoring] . . . we [professional staff] need to pick a core of kids that we really think has potential and we need to really invest in them and see who is going to surface to become our next leaders (bower, 2004, p. 201). the third barrier to mentoring described as a negative outcome was vulnerability. the mentors described how the young protégés were more likely to make mistakes. this could lead to negative exposure for the mentor. a mentor within sport and physical activity academia stressed the importance of allowing the protégé to realize it is okay to make mistakes, “i want you [protégé] to make mistakes. . . you’re [protégé] trying too hard not to make a mistake and advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 you’re holding back. i want you to make a mistake (grosshans, poczwardowski, trunnell, & ransdell, 2003, p. 148). discussion many mentor and protégé characteristics were mentioned throughout the studies. however, there were two distinct similarities between the mentor and protégé characteristics. both the mentor and protégé characteristics emphasized the need for competency indicators. the competency indicators are especially important to the mentor who seeks protégés that have higher advancement aspirations. mentors are often faced with challenges within organizations regarding their own career advancement and may view choosing a weak protégé as an indicator of poor judgment (allen, poteet, & russell, 2000; bower, 2006). the female mentor simply tries to offset the risk associated with a low performing protégé by selecting one that is high performing. in addition the mentor may select a high ability protégé because of the potential in helping overcome the barriers associated with breaking the glass ceiling (allen, et al., 2000). the protégé characteristics most often spoke about was the willingness to be mentored. this finding may support the social exchange theory that suggests a protégé’s motivation and willingness to learn are necessary to generate further development in the relationship. if a protégé lacks drive and/or is not open to learning, the relationship will not progress and thus will not be successful (fuller, hester, barnett, frey, relyea, & beu, 2006). this theory may also relate to the mentor who needs to be motivated and willing to mentor in developing the female for advancement within leadership positions in sport. career and psychosocial functions were clearly linked to a female proteges’ career success within several segments of the sport industry. these career and psychosocial functions provided opportunities for the protégé to develop skills and the support needed to advance within leadership positions. the key is providing the woman with the opportunity to be mentored by someone that has the necessary skills and nurturing behavior to help the protégé along. blumberg and pringle (1982) best described the role of opportunity for work outcome and career success in relation to career and psychosocial functions. blumberg and pringle state, “with an experienced mentor, the protégé is provided valuable advice, introduction to influential people, and the opportunity to develop managerial skills and philosophy of management. . . a set of interrelated factors that provide organizational newcomers with the conditions needed to acquire provide organizational newcomers with the conditions needed to acquire and display attributes related to role competence and effectiveness” (blumberg & pringle, 1982, p. 568). professional development and barriers were two outcomes of the mentoring relationship. the mentors stressed the importance of providing professional development opportunities for males and females to gain skills needed to excel and advance with the organization. the key to providing the professional development opportunities was to realize the needs of each individual person within the organization. the barriers to mentoring mentioned have clearly been supported in the sport literature (bower, hums, & keedy, 2006; weaver & chelladurai, 1999, 2002). an underrepresentation of women within leadership positions leads to a dearth of potential female mentors. the shortage of female mentors provides an additional barrier of time constraints. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 women in the leadership positions need to spend their time advancing their own careers rather than helping others. in addition female mentors in leadership position are concerned about their reputation if a protégé makes a mistake. essentially, the female mentor believes this has a negative impact on her ability as a leader. implications the results of the meta-ethnography provided several implications focused on establishing a better understanding of the key elements of an effective mentoring relationship within leadership positions in sport. the seven implications suggest actions for female and male mentors and protégés, practitioners, and professional organizations in improving the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in sport. these mentoring elements may also be important for women in other industries such as business, academia, and health professions. implication #1 – consider informal mentoring first, the majority of the mentors participated in informal mentoring programs. the results of the study suggest that female protégés with informal mentors benefited more in terms of career development and psychosocial functions than female protégés of formal mentors. specifically, coaching, role modeling, counseling, and friendship function were not as apparent for the female protégé with formal mentors (ragins, 1999). all of the psychosocial functions besides counseling were considered an essential theme in helping women advance within leadership positions in sport. in addition, informal mentors have been found to sponsor their protégés into upwardly mobile positions, give them challenging assignments, and buffer them from adverse forces within the organization (kram, 1983), all of which are important variables for women wanting to advance within leadership positions in sport. therefore, professional organizations within each sport segment may want to consider using their resources to train professionals to have the necessary skills to become an effective mentor as opposed to focusing on introducing formal mentoring programs. for example, professional organizations such as north american society for sport managers (nassm), the national association for girls and women in sport (nagws), the national collegiate athletic association (ncaa), etc. may offer a workshop for professionals in their respected field. mentors may highly recommend the workshop to young female protégés. in developing the workshops, organizational leaders, may want to address the skills and/or experiences needed to mentor women to advance within leadership positions in sport. for the entry-level protégé this could be detrimental if the mentor does not possess or is aware of the necessary career and psychosocial skills needed and the potential barriers to overcome in helping women to advance within their sport segment. implication #2 – choose a mentor wisely second, the identification of mentor characteristics may be an important element to consider when helping women advance within leadership positions within sport. the social identity theory, the similarity-attraction paradigm, and the relational demography perspective theories all predict protégés choose mentors that are similar to them; they can identify with, advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 and/or are considered role-models. these theories may suggest female protégés should be encouraged to seek out same-sex or cross-gender mentoring relationships based on the identification of key functions important to them as a protégé. the identification of the key functions correlates well with the acceptance and confirmation theme which are highly related to the protégés satisfaction. if the female protégé identifies with the mentor because of similarities she may be more satisfied with the mentoring relationship. organizations may want to consider developing an assessment tool to test personal characteristics of potential mentors. the assessment tool may not only help mentors and protégés to determine if the characteristics are appealing to them, but it may also discover deficient characteristics that need to be addressed. implication #3 – consider low performer protégés as well as high performer protégés third, the protégé characteristic most important to the mentor was women who were high performers. this finding supports the research which states that female mentors choose protégés most often based on ability, potential, and performance as opposed to the willingness to be mentored (allen, poteet, & lentz, 2004). female mentors may need to consider other female protégé prospects that may not be a high performer but one that is willing to ask for help. the lower performing protégé are usually the ones that need mentoring the most to help develop the skills needed to advance within leadership positions. where the low performer lacks in skill may be made up with the desire to succeed. this market of people may be something that has been overlooked and could help with the representation of women in leadership positions. implication #4 – introduce the protégé to key players fourth, the career functions of exposure and visibility can be extremely important for the female wanting to advance within leadership positions in sport. women and men in leadership positions need to consider allowing protégés to participate in important meetings, workshops, and conferences that will expose her to key players in a particular sport segment. for example, an associate professor cannot necessarily assume she will be hired as a chair of a sport and physical activity department. the assistant professor needs to be exposed to upper administration. for example, the chair may allow the woman to attend meetings with chairs of other departments, athletic directors and/or the vice president for the college. allowing the associate professor to attend meetings may provide her with the opportunity to learn about the culture at higher levels of administration and allows the woman to have the opportunity to develop connections with key players involved with the hiring process in the future. implication #5 – use performance evaluations as a mentoring tool fifth, the career function of coaching provided additional ideas for helping women advance within leadership positions in sport. mentors need to consider using their structured performance evaluation and feedback process as a means for mentoring. a structured performance evaluation and feedback process may be used as not only a merit system but as a way to provide mentoring “coaching” to the earlier stages of the protégés career. the performance evaluation should be extensive and may include performance counseling, career advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 goal setting, and a professional development agenda. this type of planning allows the protégé to work towards leadership positions within sport geared specifically towards women. implication #6 – consider multiple mentors sixth, another career function identified was challenging assignments. each leader of a segment of the sport industry has the knowledge and skills to identify challenging assignments for the protégé. the key is to find challenging assignments that benefit the female to advance within leadership positions. a suggestion is to allow multiple mentors within the organization to offer their expertise by offering challenging assignments. the exposure to different individuals allows for informal mentoring from specialists of areas needed to advance in a leadership position. for example, a campus recreation director may allow a fitness coordinator to gain experience in a variety of recreational sports segments including facility management, intramurals, special event, and others. this allows the protégés to have mentoring from a variety of supervisors offering different challenging assignments. this process allows the protégé to learn acquisition of skills for career movement. implication #7 – consider female and male mentors seventh, a barrier that has long been an issue is the paucity of female role models in leadership positions within sport. female protégés and organizations need to be aware that they can benefit from both female and male mentors. helping women overcome fears is one step that may be helpful in recruiting female mentors. all of these fears were identified as outcomes during this meta-ethnography. more specifically, women must not be afraid to mentor others due to (a) fear of the negative of failure of the protégé, (b) time and energy required, and (c) fear of the protégés surpassing them. thus, more women should be encouraged to mentor, distributing the number of protégés more equitable. not only do women in leadership positions within sport need to put their fears aside and step-up, female protégés may also need to consider cross-gender mentoring. cross-gendered mentoring may be more beneficial to the female because male mentors hold a more crucial position within the organization. the male mentors’ power in the organization offers advantages of career functions such as sponsoring their protégés in obtaining leadership positions, protecting them from barriers, and giving them needed exposure (weaver & chelladurai, 1999; 2000). consequently, the career function of sponsorship was not identified as important to mentoring women within leadership positions within sport. this may be due to the amount of female to male mentors that were identified throughout the studies. thus, male mentors may help female protégés advance within sport organizations by introducing them to the “right” people, helping them to gain the support of fellow peers, and buffering them from biased decisions. conclusion advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 i identified themes based on the key elements of an effective mentoring relationship which help women to advance within leadership positions in the sport industry. valuable information on the mentor and protégé characteristics, career and psychosocial functions, and outcomes provided recommendations on ways to mentor women to advance within leadership positions within sport. i hope the meta-ethnography inspires others to gain a deeper understanding of how successful mentoring relationships are essential to the advancement of women within leadership positions within sport. reference advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 abney, r. 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(2008). u.s. department of labor, women’s bureau: fiscal year 2007 outlook. retrieved march 14, 2008, from http://www.dol.gov/wb/ weaver, m. a., & chelladurai, p. (1999). a mentoring model for management in sport and physical education. quest, 51, 24-28. weaver, m.a., & chelladurai, p. (2002). mentoring in intercollegiate athletic administration. journal of sport management, 16, 96-116. whisenant, w. a. (2003). how women have fared as interscholastic athletic administrators since the passage of title ix. sex roles, 49(3/4), 179-184. whisenant, w., & pedersen, p.m. (2004). traditional managerial activities and interscholastic athletic directors: examining the difference, similarities, and connections between engagement, gender, and success of high school sport administrators. public organizational review: a global journal, 4(1), 75-84. young, d. (1990). mentoring and networking perceptions by athletic administrators. journal of sport management, 4, 71-79. 387 brawner copyediting.docx volume 42, 2023 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 42, 48-61, 2023 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women in sport leadership, fifty years since title ix candace brawner: candacelbrawner@aol.com accepted march 6, 2023 women in athletic administration in secondary public schools in texas remain a significant minority to their male counterparts despite nearly fifty years since the passage of title ix. this qualitative research study used narrative inquiry with eight research participants to investigate the factors leading to success among female athletic administrators in secondary education according to creswell’s (2013) method for coding information and identifying themes. the study results are organized by the four research questions. the findings include the importance and value of professional organizations for the personal development and networking opportunities for women. work-life balance was noted among all the participants and the executive directors of the professional organizations as the largest factor for women leaving the industry as extreme hours are a constant expectation in sports administration. desirable feminine traits, experience and connections, and influential male mentors and advocates were cited by the research participants as key factors to their personal advancement. recommendations for practical application include partnerships between professional organizations and school districts to review key concerns as they relate to the recruitment and advancement of women in athletic administration. this study provides suggestions for advancing women in athletic administration in texas school districts including: removal of barriers, opportunity for training, district environment of readiness, professional organization support, and prioritization of work-life balance and family needs. keywords: gender, leadership, leadership development, institutional change males continue to greatly outnumber females in athletic administration as well as coaching positions throughout the state of texas, which has perpetuated a cycle of recruitment, hiring, and burnout among women in the industry who have failed to gain the appropriate support in their position (acosta & carpenter, 2014). furthermore, limited opportunities for advancement in athletic administration are available to women (bradford & keshock, 2009). although there has been a pronounced increase in girls’ participation in high school and collegiate athletics, the substantial disparity between the number of male and female coaches as well as the even greater gender difference in the positions of athletic administration remains (acosta & carpenter, 2014; hancock & hums, 2016; staurowsky, 2009; whisenant, 2008; whisenant, vincent, et al., 2005). since 1972 and the passage of title ix of the education amendments, girls and their coaches have, quite literally, made huge strides on high school campuses across the united states in regard to gender equity and fairness (acosta & carpenter, 2002). according to the national federation of state high school associations (nfshsa) report, girls made up less than 300,000 of the participants in high school athletics in 1971, the year prior to title ix, but there were over 3.4 million female athletics participants in the 2016-2017 school year. girls throughout the country have changed stereotypes, created a landscape of physical activity, and fostered a new love of sport among american youth; however, girls continue to battle for equality and basic rights to which boys have been privileged (kennedy, 2010; whisenant, 2006). even more staggering is the significant gender discrepancy among high school coaches and athletic directors (whisenant, 2006). despite nearly 50 years since the education amendments of 1972 including title ix, female coaches and athletic administrators remain widely undervalued and underrepresented throughout every level of sports (acosta & carpenter, 2014; cunningham, 2007; international working group on women and sport, 2012; lapchick, 2012; smith & wrynn, 2013) as the field remains dominated by male coaches and administrators. although female athletes have enjoyed significant positive impact in the half century since the passage of title ix of the education amendments of 1972, the large discrepancy between the number of male and female coaches and athletic administrators has continued to increase (acosta & carpenter, 2014; cunningham, 2007; lapchick, 2012; smith & wrynn, 2013; taylor et al., 2018) as the coaching of female athletes has become more prestigious (bradford & keshock, 2009). as the fiftieth year since the passage of title ix approaches, it is an important time in women’s sport to observe the impact of this legislation (acosta & carpenter, 2014). given the scope, scale, and longevity of gender inequities in higher education leadership, it is no surprise that scholars have 49 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 developed abundant literature on the topic over the past 20 years. motivated by the need for new, creative solutions to a persistent problem and in light of our own subjectivity as emerging women leaders who seek guidance from such writing, we critically analyze three predominant themes in the literature: (a) professional development; (b) identity work; and (c) institutional change. within the theme of identity work, we pay particular attention to woc and marginalization. we assert that much literature reinforces the idea that women must take on additional labor in order to be successful (an idea that places responsibility for success on individual women), is targeted primarily at an insular, gender exclusive audience, and promotes working within existing structures even while acknowledging the need for structural change. our goal, ultimately, is to develop new ideas and questions for future research and not to discount the rich body of existing research and advice. as such, we frame this review around the guiding question, “what are the available discourses surrounding women and higher education leadership in the u.s.?” review of related literature history of title ix the passage of title ix of the education amendments of 1972 served as a significant step forward for female athletes (overview of the title ix of the education amendments of 1972, 2005); however, the amendment did not provide the same advancement for females in athletic administration (bradford & keshock, 2009; whisenant, 2008). the early focus of the title ix education amendments included equal pay and tenure track opportunities among women in higher education (edwards, 2010). echoing back to the original intention of title ix, women in leadership and coaching positions in sports continue to be overwhelmingly outnumbered by males; in fact, today, there are proportionately fewer female coaches than there were in the years prior to the passage of title ix (acosta & carpenter, 2014). this lack of representation of women in athletic administration and in coaching positions limits female athletes’ perception of the potential careers in sports which further perpetuates an already dire inequality (bandura, 1997; whisenant, 2008). according to edwards (2010), in billie jean king’s testimony to the senate subcommittee on education of the committee on labor and public welfare in 1973, king addressed the need for change in school culture, athletic administration, and the media. not only due to her incredible star quality and the recent defeat of riggs but also her ability to garner top payment of $100,000 for an athletic performance, king (1973) helped the american public and the senate committee understand that money was a measuring stick for success (1973), and she struck at the heart of cultural change during her address: so many women [have] the potential to be athletically inclined, and they are just afraid, but if through these educational programs, if you do fund athletic programs and girls find out it is fun, they find out that they are accepted in fact they are looked up to, this will change everything. (king, 1973, p. 7) king (1973) illuminated a vital part of the struggle for equity – girls will love athletics as much as the boys. when king was able to create a conversation about kids, not marathoners, not elite athletes, but just kids needing equal accessibility, the hearts and minds of americans began to change toward the issue. as society began to see the need for girls to participate on the same level as the boys, change began to occur (edwards, 2010). edwards (2010) noted that in addition to the changing role of women as athletes in the public’s perception, special interest groups also quickly arose in discussion around the passage of title ix including restriction of athletics from the regulation. thus, edwards suggested groups such as the national collegiate athletic association (ncaa) and the american football coaches association lobbied for the specific exclusion of athletics from title ix. universities largely feared the impact title ix may have on their athletics budgets (michener, 1976; see also simon, 1993). in michener’s 1976 book sports in america, michener described the status of athletics budgets in the early years after the passage of the legislation: one day, i saw the budget of a state institution supported by tax funds, with a student body divided fifty-fifty between men and women. the athletic department had $3,900,000 to spend, and of this, women received exactly $31,000, a little less than eight-tenths of one percent. on the face of it, this was outrageous. (p. 120) unfortunately, title ix and the amendments that followed have never been adequately enforced (nader, 2003; pastore & meacci, 1992). “the office of civil rights has never initiated a single proceeding to remove federal funds from... any college that fails to comply" according to nader (2003, p.1). instead, kennedy (2010) noted gender discrimination in both high school and college sports has largely been contested in litigation. kennedy also found that while the court frequently sides with the plaintiff in title ix cases, the financial punishments to the universities are not significant enough or widespread enough to demand major change. current status of women in sports leadership while the significant increase in girls’ participation in high school athletics continues, the large gap between the number of male and female coaches and the even greater gender difference in the positions of athletic administration remain (staurowsky, 2009; whisenant, 2003; whisenant et al., 2005). in fact, as suggested by bradford and keshock (2009), the gap is actually rising. while there are perhaps numerous reasons for this significant disparity in coaches and athletic administrators, whisenant (2008) suggested that “the three structural barriers that have limited access for women in sport were opportunity, power, and 50 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 proportion” (p. 770). whisenant also suggested the difficulty for women to gain head coaching appointments is one way in which opportunity is a factor. whisenant found that when women are in the role of leadership at a particular institution, other women are much more likely to become head coaches as opposed to when the athletic director is male. power is an essential factor in the continued disparity. in their 2005 research, whisenant et al., also pointed out that the dominant male leadership will be challenging to overcome due to homologous reproduction ubiquitous in the field of athletics. whisenant et al. noted, “when the dominant group is men, the shared backgrounds and experiences often produce a network closed to women. this exclusion even from consideration is the result of social characteristics, not the lack of competencies for the position” (p. 912). for example, the texas high school coaches association (thsca, 2018) has never, in its history since 1930, had a female president of the organization. thsca has over 21,500 members representing 1,100 school districts and is the largest organization of its kind in the world; however, in 2018, the organizations had thirty board members, none of which were women, nor has the organization ever had a female member of the board. additionally, according to the texas high school athletic directors association (thsada, 2018) has had only two female presidents out of 46 since 1972. however, in 2018, half of the board of directors was comprised of women. the executive director rusty dowling also stated that there is a concerted effort on the part of the organization to increase leadership and participation of women in their organization. unfortunately, university interscholastic league (uil), the governing body for public school sports in texas (2018), thsca (2018), and thsada (2018), all do not keep records of their members, whether coaches or athletic directors, by gender. according to bradford and keshock in 2009, since the passage of title ix, the incredible gains by girls in sports participation has simply not been replicated for their coaches. they argued, “common sense would indicate that this increase in female athletic participation would also have shown a concomitant increase in the number of female coaches. however, the research reveals that this is not the case” (p. 196). for example, true (1986) reported that in wisconsin, the number of female coaches decreased by 59% in the first ten years after the passage of title ix. yet, from 1971-1972, women coached 85% of the girls’ teams in washington, but over the next ten years it severely declined to 32%. this decrease is also seen at the university level with nine of 10 female sports coached by women in 1972, but in 2014, only four out of 10 female sports were coached by women (acosta & carpenter, 2014). at the high school level, smucker and whisenant (2005) found men held a majority of the coaching positions over girls’ sports and virtually all positions over boys’ sports. in texas in 2005, males even held the dominant number of coaching positions of female sports according to smucker and whisenant. according to whisenant et al., (2005), the disparity in the representation of female athletic directors grows at both the high school and college levels in comparison to female coaches. they found “the lack of representation of women in the first level of sports leadership in interscholastic athletics is magnified at the athletic director level” (p. 911). men control athletic administrative positions of importance with a sweeping majority of the roles in high schools according to whisenant et al., (2005). in fact, whisenant et al. found in texas public schools, men hold 98% of the athletic director positions. throughout the country, the odds are slightly better as males hold approximately 87% of the athletic director positions (whisenant, 2008). according to whisenant (2008), it is a common practice for job listings for athletic director positions to require that the position double as the head football coach. whisenant found that 77% of job announcements had this link in the job description. in 2008, whisenant also found “by coupling the athletic director position with the head football coach position, schools appeared to be engaging in both disparate impact and disparate treatment discrimination, since few if any women are head football coaches” (p. 769). hancock and hum (2016) also pointed to a leaky pipeline when it comes to the career development of women in sport management. impact on recruitment succinctly summarized, whisenenat et al. (2005) suggested “the jobs in coaching and athletic administration in interscholastic athletics that have been created by the growth of girls’ sports have typically gone to men” (p. 911). this lack of proportionality likely negatively impacts the perceptions of female athletes and their career options as a coach (whisenant, 2008, p. 769; see also true, 1986) leading to a continued disparity. if young female athletes do not have female role models in leadership at their respective educational institutions, then they are unlikely to seek careers in the field which only continues to perpetuate the disproportion (suggs, 2000). suggs’ (2000) quoted shillingford who pointed out that “the lack of women perpetuates itself through a vicious cycle: because women are so rarely able to crack the ‘old-boys network’ to land top coaching and administrative jobs few female athletes aspire to careers in athletics” (p. 54). in a national, longitudinal study, acosta and carpenter (2014) found the availability of better alternative career choices also reiterates the lack of female athletes considering positions in coaching or athletic administration. beers (1997) noted “although athletic directors believed that female athletes were being given opportunities commensurate with their interests and abilities, the majority expressed a belief that there were ‘serious problems’ with gender equity” (p. 44). beers argued this incongruence only further reiterates the intense separation between athletic directors’ understanding of the needs of female athletes and the actual application of title ix policies. sports, both participation in and leadership of, remains a gendered space (burton, 2014). according to cunningham (2007), when a woman is hired in a position of influence, she 51 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 will “oftentimes face difficult and antagonistic workplaces” (p.136) in addition to the significant under-representation. women are also significantly more likely to be placed in marginalized positions (whisenant et al., 2002). the social institution of sport positions women as “other” in the hierarchical structure throughout participation, support roles, management, and leadership which leaves women under constant scrutiny (kane, 1995). behaviors of men are seen as superior to stereotypical behaviors of women (ely & meyerson, 2000). shaw (2006) found that sport organizations are inundated with the notion that men and their participation and leadership are privileged. thus, sartore and cunningham (2007) suggested that jobs are linked with traditional gender and sex-role stereotypes in organizational settings where male privilege dominates the landscape. burton (2014) suggested, “any discussion of women’s leadership experiences in sport must include positioning gender as a fundamental aspect of organizational and social processes” (p. 156). shaw and frisby (2006) found that gender not only shaped identity but also serves as a power center influencing numerous aspects of an institution including but not limited to networking, structures, and policy and procedure. young women need to see more women in decision making roles and positions of power within sports organizations in order to redefine the male dominance barrier as a strong perception among potential applicants in the workforce (coakley, 2001). hancock and hums (2016) found that a leaky pipeline of women in sports leadership exists from limitations such as a lack of mentorship and access to personal development. furthermore, krane et al. (2004) posited female athletes are likely to exhibit more feminine gender stereotypes when they are outside their respective sports arena. while gender and sexuality, particularly in the arena of sports, may be fluid, assumptions and normalization of gender remain stable in society (butler, 2006). once women do reach those positions in sports, whether as coaches or administrators, they often face difficult workplace environments, enjoy fewer opportunities to improve their options, which leads to burnout (felder & wishnietsky, 1990). this pattern is a problematic cycle especially considering the decrease in the number of women in sports organizations (acosta & carpenter, 2014). the informal networks, often called “good ole boys,” can hold significant power within an organization or even an entire industry (davidson & cooper, 1992; liff & cameron, 1997). according to davidson and cooper (1992), for women to truly achieve success in the workplace, they may have to lean in to these networks to gain access to information and power at the right level. there are many limitations to such a prospect. some women may perceive these networks to be impenetrable (liff & cameron, 1997), or they may be directly discouraged from participation in these informal networks or social activities (knights & richards, 2003). additionally, it may simply not be in the nature or personality of an individual to insert themselves into a male dominated informal network (knights & richards, 2003; liff & cameron, 1997). while more and more organizations value diversity in the workplace especially among management, this is not commonly the case in sports organizations (cunningham & fink, 2006). cunningham (2007) argued, “cultures of similarity that marginalize women are institutionalized within sport organizations – that is, there are informal processes and taken-for-granted norms, values, and assumptions that are perpetuated over time” (p. 157). this state of sidelining women’s advancement and participation in addition to the gendered nature of sport organizations becomes perpetual, cyclical, and continually reinforced (ely & meyerson 2000; shaw & frisby, 2006) which only further devalues the position of women in the field and weakens the industry as a whole. cunningham and sagas (2008) argued many traditionally feminine characteristics, such as listening, collaborating, and peacemaking, inherently add value to the workplace. instead of valuing these qualities, women are expected to conform to the standard operating practices of the milieu and take on traits prized in traditional male leaders (cunningham & sagas, 2008; shaw & frisby, 2006). dual income households and single-parent households have continued to increase over the last several decades. as a result, organizations have begun to utilize more flexible practices that address the needs of these types of households (greenhaus & powell, 2003). ely and meyerson (2000) examined the often inherent tendency in the world of sports administration to accept the extreme expectations of work hours beginning early in the morning and continuing into the late hours of the evening, and its impact on gender equity. darvin (2020) further examined the role that these expectations have on the retention inequity among coaches and sport leaders. each of the three largest professional organizations for coaching and athletic administration in texas, tgca (2018), thsada (2018), and thsca (2018), shared deep concerns over the loss of women in the industry due to long work hours and work-family balance. executive director of tgca, tipton (2018) stated “work-life balance is the number one reason women don’t become head coaches and then athletic directors.” in 1972, shortly after the passage of title ix, women actually administered over 90% of women’s athletic programs (acosta & carpenter, 2014). while title ix was instrumental in the accessibility and promotion of female participants in organized sport, the unintended consequence of legitimize female athletes became the increased desirability of coaching girls’ sports; therefore, more men began coaching girls (zimbalist, 1999). within 30 years of the passage of title ix, only 18% of women administered female sports programs and held only 17% of athletic director positions (acosta & carpenter, 2014). methods 52 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 the purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the lived experiences of female athletic directors regarding the recruitment and advancement of females in secondary school sports administration in public school districts across texas. this research sought to address the central question of how female athletic directors, in the public school setting, perceive recruitment efforts to staff athletic administration opportunities within the school district. a qualitative approach allowed the researcher to seek out those few women who are in leadership positions in athletic administration and accumulate data to create meaning regarding their shared experiences. the complexity of the topic of women in athletic administration (sartore & cunningham, 2007) also suggested a qualitative methodological approach would be useful for analysis allowing the various shared perspectives. common meaning was created by identifying the phenomenon of women in athletic administration, collecting data from females in these leadership roles, and conducting a horizontalization of the data to construct themes. the women’s varied and diverse experiences are also shared by each other experiencing the phenomenon as a group of individuals, making their experiences both subjective and objective (creswell & poth, 2018). setting and participants the setting was public school districts in texas. participant selection required identifying and contacting individuals who represent the focus of this research: current, female athletic administrators. due to the small number of women in athletic administration in texas, approximately 25, two types of sampling were used, criterion and snowball sampling, which resulted in eight study participants. participants were all employed in large school districts between 5a-6a. five of the eight were the first to hold the position of district athletic director for their respective districts. all participants played collegiate level sports. five of the eight were married. five identified as white, one as black, one as latino, and one as black and white data collection took place via face-to-face and virtual interviews. furthermore, interviews were conducted using open-ended questions in order to gain the deepest understanding of the experiences of the participants. upon completion of the study, the results of the study were emailed to all participants in order to ensure accuracy of the process, findings, and reporting. according to patton’s (2015) descriptions of ethics in confidentiality, the confidentiality of participants was protected through the use of pseudonyms, and the confidentiality of districts was protected through the use of pseudonyms for the locations. research questions after conducting a pilot test with an initial interview protocol, the final guided protocol was agreed upon by a panel of experts. eight participants were interviewed using face-to-face questions in their natural setting. open-ended questions were used to interact with participants through an inductive process to construct meaning. what are the female coaches’ perceptions regarding the recruitment efforts of the school district related to staffing athletic programs? what are the female coaches’ perceptions regarding the advancement efforts of the school districts related to staffing athletic programs? what are the challenges regarding the advancement opportunities to administrate athletic programs available within the school district? what are suggestions practicing female athletic directors offer to increase the opportunity for other female coaches regarding athletic administration? triangulation of the data involving the use of more than one data source, the researcher used data triangulation for the study. the unique experiences of each study participant were recorded and transcribed verbatim, adding to the consideration of data through their diverse thoughts and experiences regarding the same phenomenon (patton, 2015). this data triangulation added a provision of trustworthiness to the findings. furthermore, participants had the opportunity to review their transcription and the study results in order to supply corrections, understandings, or information regarding the accuracy of the information and data analysis, which provided increased validity (patton, 2015). a panel of experts was used to review the interview questions. although the researcher included an epoche in which the personal experiences related to the phenomenon are bracketed, the researcher remained a key instrument in the process (creswell & poth, 2018). analysis in order to analyze the phenomenological data, the following procedures, in accordance with moustakas (1994) and creswell (2013), were used. from each interview, field notes and recordings were transcribed exactly (patton, 2015). the researcher identified statements from participants of particular significance and their experience of the topic which were relevant to the purpose of the study and research questions. independent, non-repetitive statements were also listed, clustered, and coded into patterns and response, which, according to creswell (2013) provided horizontalization of the data, treating each statement with equal worth. according to creswell (2013), the raw, horizontalized data were grouped into larger units of themed information. verbatim examples from the themes accompanied a textural description of the experiences of the participants in the study. the researcher created a structural description focusing on the setting and context in which the phenomenon is experienced. including both 53 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 the textural and structural descriptions, a composite description of the phenomenon was developed. involving the use of more than one data source, the researcher used data triangulation for the study. the unique experiences of each study participant were recorded and transcribed verbatim, adding to the consideration of data through their diverse thoughts and experiences regarding the same phenomenon (patton, 2015). this data triangulation added a provision of trustworthiness to the findings. results perceptions regarding recruitment all of the research participants stated that their leadership experience was a necessary and foundational aspect of their success in coaching and then in athletic administration. kimberly and denise cited specifically that their colleagues would let them know of job openings for which they were qualified. all relied on a network of professional connections to promote their personal development and career progression. all women also stated that personal connections they developed through their professional organizations to be a key factor in their leadership development and job placement. this was often stated as both a way to develop skills and knowledge of sports administration, but it is also a way to connect to other industry experts. every participant was a member of the texas high school athletic directors association (thsada) and discussed the value of this organization. daniela, selena, and heather also stressed the importance of the national interscholastic athletic administrators association (niaaa). when asked about common factors in their districts regarding the advancement of athletic administrators, the participants all included either personal connections or experience or both in their answers. for example, kimberly, denise, and heather specifically noted the connection to football as an important and valuable piece of experience, whether it was through supporting football in an administrative role or learning the game in order to support coaches’ development. this was noted as a particular area of importance in texas because it is the largest sport and consumes significant budgeting. denise was a football operations coordinator for a previous school district, which she felt gave her a distinct advantage over other applicants. kimberly planned to “intern” with her district in a football support capacity as she feels that this is a particular need for athletic director positions in texas. heather worked closely with the athletic director on football related support in her district when she was the assistant in order to prepare for a future role at the district level. conversely, kendra noted that her lack of football experience was a point of concern before she was hired as the athletic director despite being in the assistant position for 11 years. she stated: “i was very concerned about how the football coaches would perceive me. which is respect, it's football and you better have a clue about football. you won't garner any respect if you don't know football. i was very apprehensive about how-i mean i knew most of the football coaches, mind you. we've been in the district for so long, i knew who they were and i've been the assistant for 11 years. i just wasn't sure how they would perceive me, if they would accept me. i think one of the things that someone criticized me about before i was hired is that they didn't want to hire me because they were afraid that i wouldn't be able to make the hard decisions.” while there is no precedence for female football coaches in texas, these women knew that the expectation for rising in their careers was direct football experience not only to understand the innerworkings of football operations but also to gain the respect of male colleagues and subordinates. need for desirable feminine traits the overall tone of every interview was very positive, and the women all focused on their positive leadership experience. although the participants did not immediately note the discrimination inherent in their application process, one particular question sparked emotive language and deep personal reflection and even frustration. when asked, “in what ways did you observe that male colleagues experienced their path to leadership roles differently than you?” each participant gave specific feedback about the differences in the career path that were common in their advancement. lilian first described the vast number of men in roles that “do not deserve to be in those positions” and the unprofessional behaviors that were evident among some other male athletic directors including but not limited to playing online during important conferences, making inappropriate jokes during job interviews, and being threatened easily by the presence of a strong woman. she stated, “if people expect me to be emotional and to flip out over stuff, then i try to just stay real, real calm about it. just break their stereotype of what they think.” lilian described the necessity of calm but strong feminine qualities in her role as an athletic director for a large school district especially when dealing with men who might be sexist or who received their roles without merit. lilian further commented: “it is difficult. now, it’s part of life, and it’s something we have to deal with. i don’t think we can be angry about it. we can’t be bra burners. we can’t be everything that men expect us to be. they expect us to get pissed about it and throw a fit. i don’t think we can do that… look, i don’t need you to be threatened by me. i just want to be here and do a good job.” heather also noted that there were many males in athletic director roles simply because they were “old guard football.” however, she felt that this created an environment where 54 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 younger, sharper women were a desirable, value-added for organizations. selena also noted that she gained favor among the male coaches because they felt that her attributes as a woman may have actually helped her to develop good relationships, and she noted that she is able to have strong, positive communication with other women in leadership in academic roles in the district. she commented that male colleagues have stated that her feminine qualities are a bonus in her role. all interviewees noted personality traits like abrasiveness as a particularly damning quality among female leaders. all described traits using desirable feminine traits in their approach with coaches. words, such as, caring, mother-figure, supportive, and listening were used consistently among every participant. lilian suggested that even when mentoring other district executive athletic directors, she was not able to take a firm or direct tone. she felt that using kindness and support was the only acceptable approach with her weaker male colleagues, but at the same time she felt that she must be confident and strong but not emotional. lilian indicated that male colleagues would get emotive or enthusiastic about something, but it would be called passionate; however, women would be labeled as emotional for the same behavior. she said, “he is just passionate about it…they will say the exact same emotion and call it two completely different things.” similarly, daniela noted that there were instances when a woman might say or do the exact same thing as a male, but she would be disliked for it and a man might even be celebrated for the same behavior. value of support and mentorship from influential male throughout the process, heather, denise, lilian, kendra, gloria and selena stated that it was important for their career to have a successful and respected male support their advancement. these six participants were directly recruited and supported by a male colleague to apply and to train for a leadership role early in their careers. furthermore, four of the six of these influential males also mentored the women in the recruitment, negotiation, and advancement of their careers. all eight indicated mentorship in general as an important part of their career. denise also stated that it was a key influential male in the district who supported and promoted her value as part of the organization. he encouraged her to continue her education and get the appropriate certifications. furthermore, he put her in a position as a football operations director to do logistics and planning during games. denise felt that this experience has been key to gaining the respect of her male colleagues, especially other football coaches. she said: “he had me in the football coaches’ picture that was in the football program… it was great, great experience. i was able to sit in the chair. all the other football coaches would be around, and they’d go through the script for the week and stuff and i knew every part of it. yes, that was invaluable for sure.” when asked about her experience being recruited from coaching to athletic administration, gloria stated that she was “100% recruited” by her athletic director and superintendent. after being a head volleyball coach for 26 years, she was approached to help address the needs of her growing district by these influential males in her system of schools. similarly, lilian felt that an influential male athletic administrator was actually the one to push her into the role of head coach and then into athletic leadership. he began mentoring her early in her career and then maintained strong communication and mentorship. lilian believed strongly that it was his advocacy of her leadership that led to the position she holds currently. she commented: “that is truly where that reputation starts. you have some man who believes in you, and convinces the other ones, “look, she’s not some crazy female. she’s got it.” because, unfortunately, that’s what they think about us. they think that when we handle any situation we’re going to flip out, we’re not going to be able to handle it, we’re going to get too emotional. for him to be able to kind of – i can tell people that i’m not that way, but for it to come from a respected athletic director, those guys really bought into it. “ when lilian was first offered a position of athletic director of a school district, it was also a male mentor who helped her navigate an appropriate pay. her first offer was $12,500 below her current salary which was a lower level administration position, but he was able to impart enough confidence for her to turn down the offer. eventually, the district came back with a salary offer more appropriate to her years of experience and value. lilian recounted her story of support: “if it wasn't for him, pushing me through the whole thing, the interview process, my salary negotiation, everything. because we, as women, we will just go, "hey, okay, i accept that." he made me decide a number. what are you not going to accept less than? and even at one point, i was like, "no, i'll take this $12,500 pay cut." he's like, "no, you won't."” additionally, heather’s mentor supported her in learning how to lead football at the district level. he saw this as vital to her growth in the lead district role. she stated: “i was really fortunate that from the very beginning. when i got started, my boss said, "look, the only way that you're going to become the head ad here, if you ever even have a chance is that you've got to know football and be in charge of it." i was in charge of it and so i would be down on the sideline, and they would think that i was the athletic trainer. they didn't know 55 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 who i was. they were not accustomed to having a woman be in charge of the stadium.” while these participants emphasizing mentorship all personally had a male mentor, it was noted that a male was not necessarily an important factor in their advocacy. given that there are only 24 female athletic directors in the state of texas, it is likely that many aspiring women will require male mentors in their career development. perceptions regarding advancement the need for a culture of acceptance and the right timing to hire a female were inherent among the participants with seven of the eight participants specifically stating that timing was a factor in their hiring. the participants consistently stated that it was important for women to be represented because approximately half of their athlete demographic were women. every participant also cited work-family balance as an important factor in the advancement of women in athletic administration. need for a culture of acceptance and right timing throughout the interviews, 75% of the athletic directors reiterated multiple times that their advancement came at a time when the school district was ready for a female athletic director. denise, selena, and heather all described a domino or snowball effect that led to the hiring of women in athletic administration at its current rate. denise, a respected leader in sports administration throughout the state of texas, gave detailed information on the culture and timing historically that has led to a new era of women in athletic administration. she pointed out that in the 90s, there were only two or three women in athletic administration in the entire state. however, this began to change in the last fifteen years. the trend became that male athletic directors hired female assistant athletic directors, and then many of those women eventually moved up. she stated: “what was the trend was for the males that were these athletic directors to hire female assistant athletic director. there were one or two districts that did it before [names district] did it. when everything was going down the way it was and with the title ix deal. all of a sudden, you saw [another district] do it, you saw [another district] do it, you saw [another district], you saw [another district]. and it took off like wildfire. it was like, "hey, everybody, get a female assistant." denise further stated that once these assistants obtained significant years of experience in the larger school districts, it created an environment where women were very qualified for the lead district athletic director role: “the bigger school districts, or the more well-known ones, you had, finally, that glass ceiling is broken. you had those females in those assistant athletic director roles. so many school districts did that when the old guys start retiring, i'd say within the last 10 years, as those guys start retiring like the lp jones of spring branch, the rusty dowling of katy, some of those things. guess what? the females were the only qualified applicants besides somebody that basically just walked off the field.” similarly, selena felt that women have a better chance at obtaining roles in district level athletic administration from the snowball effect. once a few districts began hiring women, more followed suit. “that worked out well for [names district] or that worked out well for [names additional district]. why wouldn’t we look at a female?” work-family balance every interviewee stated that the prolonged work hours are a significant factor limiting women from entering into sports administration in schools. however, it is noted that this is an issue facing males in coaching as well. the job requirements have increased significantly in the last ten years, and there are more jobs available than ever before; however, the hours and the expectations have also increased. participants and the executive directors of thsada, tgca, and thsca all noted a particular concern over this phenomenon as being a major point of discussion in the industry. it is a regular topic at professional organization board meetings and conferences where various strategies are being discussed as possible avenues for facing this growing concern. kendra almost left coaching early in her career when she became pregnant as her husband did not want her to work the long hours without someone else to support their growing family. she recalled: “when i was just an assistant basketball coach, my husband mentioned we might want to see about getting a live-in person to help with the baby, and i said no. because i grew up with my mother working all the time, we always had some cousin or aunt or somebody coming in living with us so that they could help take care of us. i didn't want another adult in my house. my husband says, "well, if we don't do that then you probably can't coach." well, i guess we'll find somebody[laughter] and we did.” daniela stated that the number one reason women leave the industry is the time commitment: “the amount of time involved. that would be number one. that would be it.” she stated that when women are “wanting to start families” they often leave coaching. in addition to wanting time off to spend with children, daniela found that many of her female coaches were leaving the industry when they wanted to start a family as well. daniela was adamant that the workload is exceptional, and her personal life has suffered dramatically. similarly, heather reflected that it may be easier for males to rely on a spouse to support the family needs in general. she stated: 56 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 “if you have males that are ads and if you listen, you go to coaching school and you go to the hall of honor, whether it's for coaches or for ads, they constantly talk about how great their wives were and about how their wives raised the kids. they always, always talked about how, "i thank my wife because she was the one who was there. meanwhile, i was out coaching and my wife was one who was there because i was coaching football and i was doing it seven days a week.” societal expectations and work family balance are a key issue in the retention of female coaches, which was ubiquitous among study participants challenges regarding advancement every participant cited work-life balance or the need for a family environment as a key challenge in the advancement of more women in the industry. additionally, six of the eight participants specifically stated that their advancement was due in part to having the right timing in their school district and the district being ready and accepting of a female applicant. however, many districts do not have such a structure in place and do not consider female applicants, which is cited by the participants as a significant challenge for the advancement of women. need for family time or environment throughout all the interviews, participants consistently stated that having a family environment is a key element of success for women in athletic administration. the very long working hours are an industry norm, so flexibility and family inclusion are a key facet of success. daniela reflected that women are typically still very focused on raising their family, and there are still societal expectations that women make it home to cook, clean, and take care of the family. she stated that it is very hard to raise a family while being in a leadership role in athletic administration. daniela noted that she has lost strong female coaches because they wanted more family time, and it was something they could not do and keep the long working hours. district trust throughout the interviews, participants noted the need for districts to trust that women can handle the role of district athletic director. district size was listed as a significant factor in the hiring of women for athletic administration. it was also noted that districts must follow the example of the pioneers of women in leadership and trust that women are able to do the job. denise felt it was specifically smaller school districts lacking in the numbers of women in athletic administration. every participant was from large school districts with high schools in the 5a-6a range. denise stated that in 1a-3a, and even possibly 4a, school districts it is highly likely that the position is going to be filled by the head football coach, even though requiring it is a violation of title ix. selena also found that 4a and below rarely have women in athletic administration due to the financial implications of football. she stated that to her knowledge, there are no women in athletic administration at school districts from 1a-4a in the state of texas, which includes over one thousand school districts. heather stated that even after more than thirty years in her district and extensive experience as her district executive athletic director. her ability to hire a head football coach was still questioned: “then they're always going to be situations where they see you, that they see you as a woman and that they're not sure how your over the—“you're at the school? you're over the school? you're what? -you're over the school district? [capitalized for verbal emphasis], "say what? you're over what?" "yes." "football?" it's fine. it's something that comes with the territory just like they're probably people that-recently when we hired a new football coach, and they were like, "well, can you do that?" i was like, "yes, i can do it." you just have to have a little bit of thick skin and just say," well, i didn't play it, and i didn't coach it, but yes i can hire a head football coach." they just have to know that you can.” the lack of exposure to football remains a constant barrier for women in sport leadership in texas. suggestions to increase opportunities two questions were used in the protocol to elicit suggestions on increasing the opportunity for other females. responses centered on accessibility for women including the creation of additional opportunities for women and removing barriers currently in place. it was consistently suggested that provisions be made for making work-life balance a priority for the future. additionally, district readiness for the inclusion of women in athletic leadership was a key suggestion. all participants cited the importance of their professional organizations for training, support, exposure, and networking. accessibility: creating opportunity and removing barriers beginning very early in the athletic careers of both daniela and heather, they observed significant disproportionate gender representation. both personally lead campaigns in their hometowns to add sports for girls when they were children. although title ix had been passed, both girls saw an opportunity for girls’ sports in their cities. with strong mother figures, both began campaigns to add girls’ sports whether in the city sport teams or in their school. the biggest roadblock that is inherent in the structure of school districts is the connection of the title head football/athletic director for smaller districts and the connection of head football/campus athletic coordinator in the larger districts. every interviewee had the latter arrangement within the district, except kendra’s district which had three campuses with a female 57 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 athletic coordinator. the opportunity and accessibility of these roles are not available to women when the link for a majority of positions is tied to football. heather noted that women are less likely to have a voice in decision making due to this policy. when she needs to hear the voice from campuses, she is more likely to hear from the campus athletic coordinator, who is always the head football coach in her district. she can request to speak with the female coaches, but it is much more difficult because they are teaching classes. denise stated that “there’s no doubt” in a 1a-4a school that the athletic director is going to be male. there is no accessibility for females in the vast majority of school districts in texas. she stated: “because it’s probably going to be the head football coach at that particular school unless it’s a multiple high school district and then all of a sudden those opportunities come along easier.” when nearly every district in texas connects the role of head football and athletic leadership, it becomes very nearly impossible for women to advance. prioritizing work-life balance and family environment because child care and family time were consistently among the participants with every participant listing it is a major reason more women are not advancing in athletic administration, some of these female athletic directors, specifically kendra, lilian, and selena, stated that they have tried to emphasize some flexibility of work hours and family support to make the jobs more accessible for young families. lilian’s district has emphasized that children are welcome during the summer to meetings or strength and conditioning camps. even as the district athletic director, she will watch a child if a coach needs more time. she stated, “i was actually watching his one year old because he needed 30 more minutes of practice. he was just hanging around in my office.” district environment of readiness repeated numerous times throughout the interviews was the idea that a district must be ready to consider female applicants with seven of the eight participants specifically using the word “timing” to describe their appointments in athletic leadership. districts must create an environment where women can thrive in athletic administration. this includes work-life balance and family environment, but it must start with a willingness to consider the strengths of a female leader in the athletic administration role according to the participants. kimberly, who was a campus assistant athletic director, stated that she found barriers to job interviews related to district readiness. recently, a friend recommended her for a district level athletic administration position. she felt immediately upon meeting the interviewer that she would not be considered for the position as his first question was, “are you sure you want to get out of coaching?” kimberly also frequently stated that not being a football coach was a major barrier for women in pursuing athletic administration. in fact, kimberly planned to assume significant football responsibilities “as an intern” even though it is well outside her job duties, and she has nearly 20 years of athletic coaching experience. professional organization support participants listed their professional organizations as a major factor in their success. whether it was from general knowledge or networking to accepting leadership roles for the region or state, the professional organizations have been a significant factor among the participants. the texas girls coaches association (tgca), the texas high school athletic directors association (thsada), national interscholastic athletic administration association (niaaa), and the texas high school coaches association (thsca) were consistently mentioned among the interviewees. networking and personal connections were considered very important to the career advancement of the participants. selena was pleased to be nominated by her colleagues for a regional leadership role in thsada and felt that it was a good indicator that women have gained significant ground in leadership roles in texas. she also pointed out that the organization is currently chaired by a female president, only the second in the history of the organization. she stated that this opportunity and others like it have helped to ensure that women have a voice. selena also stated that thsada is actively investigating ways to promote the industry of coaching and athletic administration for women and in general because fewer people are entering the career field. implications for practice this study suggests several strategies for future practice which may be impactful for women including: be involved in professional organizations, organize and involve women in mentoring programs, provide opportunities for female coaches to work directly with student athletes aspiring to join the athletic administration industry, review hiring practices limiting the advancement of women, and provide training on work-life balance at the state, district, and campus level. picariello et al. (2020) also emphasized the importance of mentoring as a key factor in the success of women in sport leadership and whose study “confirms that women perceive mentoring as a pivotal factor in their careers.” be involved in professional organizations all women interviewed were deeply involved in their professional organizations. all consistently referenced the 58 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 importance of these organizations in their personal development and their success in post. prior studies also support the need for networking and social capital development (clarke, 2011; cunningham & sagas, 2008). as all participants heavily emphasized the importance of these organizations, there are many recommendations based on the research that will continue to support women interested in careers in athletic administration. while the thsada has many women in leadership roles, the thsca currently has no women in any leadership positions and has also never had any women in leadership in the past. because thsca is essentially feeding into thsada, as athletic directors are all former coaches, it is very prohibitive that the organization has not promoted women in leadership. while these organizations work closely together on many issues, there has not been a partnership on women in leadership. thsca is the largest professional coaching association in the world. its massive database of coaches from all sports backgrounds makes it a powerful organization in texas sports. thsca has never had a female board member in its history. organize and involve women in mentoring programs almost all the participants also emphasized the importance of an advocate and a mentor within their professional growth. the women felt fortunate to have experienced that level of support but also recognized that it is not necessarily available to everyone. they emphasized that they were in the right place and the right time. in order to ensure that all promising female athletic administrators have access to mentors, the professional organizations can provide a concrete structure to support this professional growth. smucker and whisenant (2005) found that without opportunities to develop a mentorship, women reduced their opportunities to lead. in fact, six of the eight participants had a strong, influential male mentor early in their career. with only 24 female athletic administrators in the state of texas, it would not be sustainable to have only female-to-female support structures in place even though each participant cited deep willingness and commitment to the development of others. bower’s (2009) meta-ethnographic work comparing 15 qualitative studies found that having both male and female mentors are important to the growth of women. provide opportunities for female coaches to work directly with aspiring student athlete leaders furthermore, working directly with student athletes on their career aspirations would eventually help to recruit more female and minorities into the career path. nearly all the participants cited the importance of representing the student demographics among their coaching staff. according to whisenant (2008) and suggs (2000), having female role models in sports administration at a young age is a key factor to the perception of job opportunities in the future. review hiring practices limiting the advancement of women participants also cited the difficulty for women to obtain leadership roles in athletic administration in smaller districts across texas, which make up the vast majority of districts. participants stated that this is due to the role being almost exclusively advertised as head football/athletic director. one participant, also an industry expert and highly knowledgeable on title ix, agreed that this is likely a title ix violation which eliminates the possibility of female candidates in the majority of districts in the state of texas. smaller districts may not be aware that this hiring practice is a title ix violation. the university interscholastic league (uil), which oversees all athletics in the state of texas, can educate districts on the legality of hiring practices. provide training on work-life balance work-life balance was very heavily emphasized among the participants as a key factor in their successful careers. all participants cited that a sense of work-life balance is essential for staff. flex hours was recommended as an acceptable method of allowing more family time. family environment was also listed through making sure children and spouses are always supported to attend games and participate in various summer activities. three participants specifically mentioned that children are welcome to attend summer meetings or training. one interviewee stated that she had high school athletes use volunteer hours to watch the children of her coaching during off-season or summer training to alleviate the child care concerns and also create a family atmosphere. this was consistently cited as an issue that affects all athletic administrators and not only females, though the impact on women might be greater as few males are stay-at-home parents to support a coaching spouse. this is supported by research from dixon and bruenig (2005), greenhaus and powell (2003), and ely and meyerson (2000). concluding remarks research indicated highly common experiences and concerns for the future among the participants. several factors were repeated as salient experiences leading to their successful career advancement. based on research findings, practical recommendations include a focus among professional organizations such as thada, thsca, and tgca on improving opportunities for aspiring women in coaching who are interested in becoming athletic administrators. mentorship programs, professional development, and the invitation to participate are all important components of the successful matriculations in advancing from coaching to athletic administration. similarly, individual school districts can adopt these strategies. the most common theme among the participants was the need for a stronger work-life balance in the industry with 100% of participants citing it as a concern. several suggestions to improve this balance include flex hours, creating a family environment, and supporting coaching with child care concerns. these emphasis points are key for school districts to recruit and 59 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 advance all quality coaches and not only women and minorities, though these groups might be more highly impacted. school districts throughout the state of texas, particularly smaller districts which make up the majority, are continuing to engage in hiring practices that violate title ix. school districts should discontinue offering and advertising the position in athletic administration as head football/athletic director which remains a common practice. references 2016-17 high school athletics participation survey. 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(1999). unpaid professionals: commercialism and conflict in big-time college sports. princeton, nj: princeton university press. 61 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 http://www.commondreams.org/views/2003/01/30/join-fight-title-ix http://www.commondreams.org/views/2003/01/30/join-fight-title-ix http://www.commondreams.org/views/2003/01/30/join-fight-title-ix https://doi.org/10.1080/24704067.2021.1871859 the process of tenure: the effect on women and faculty members of color rosita l. marcano, ed.d. marcano, summer, 2001 academic freedom is something that we must maintain as members of academe, but an alternative to the incurious process of tenure that exists today must be found. issues of trust, respect, equity, growth and diversity must continue to be addresses. tenure is perceived by many academics as the pinnacle of professional success. gaining membership into this much-sought-after exclusive group so prized by faculty members on campuses around the world may be more of a hazing ritual than anything else. the abuse and torture sustained by many seeking tenure, including white males, is legendary. for some women and faculty members of color, the barriers to achieving tenure may be insurmountable. the subject of tenure has been hotly debated in journals and the media for years. most of the issues surrounding this debate focus on due process and academic freedom of academics, who are often judged by administrators who may have institutional perspectives that limit diversity and dissension. what has been ignored is the prevailing, agonizing, and unfair process that tenure has become for women and faculty of color. it is a closed system where a few individuals can easily open gates, while making it unnecessarily harder for others, as the deciding committee sees fit. too many of these committees are made up of tenured and promoted white males who are feeling the pressures of change around them. they are privileged within institutions of higher education and the tenure process has served them well. although it may be difficult at times, the system works better for them than for other groups. they are often unaware of their privilege and deny that it exists when brought to their attention (mcintosh, 1988). peggy mcintosh points out that: obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the united states so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already. (mcintosh, 1998, p. 94) value for minority scholarship in seeking to understand the negative effects of this so-called power to admit some and keep out others who do not look or behave in the same manner, university faculty must look at the negative effects of limiting the membership of the professoriate. the numbers of females and faculty of color on campuses are few enough, but there are even fewer who are in decision making positions and who comprise the committees who make major decisions on tenure and promotion. majority white mainstream faculty will continue to reject the work of colleagues that does not look like their own. in an article written by paul ruffins in the journal of black issues in higher education, he cites an interview with dr. phyllis bronstein. she is a tenured professor at the university of vermont who is conducting qualitative research study analyzing the lives and careers of thirty scholars who have focused their research on feminist and multicultural issues. she points out that tenure committees often treat ethnic and women's studies as ghetto disciplines, and that ethnically oriented journals are often viewed as inferior publications outlets. "it appears that differences may add up against you," she says. "it looks like the more people differ from the mainstream model, the more difficulties they have in their institutions-particularly on a personal level" (ruffins, 1997). trust an important issue that appears to be key to a successful process of tenure is the issue of trust. max depree, leading without power: finding hope in serving community, talks about trust as a something that begins with a personal commitment to respect others and to take everyone seriously. unfortunately women are not always taken seriously by faculty that is predominantly male nor are faculty of color always respected by all white faculties. drpree clearly feels that trust begins with respect and respect demands that we first recognize each other's gifts, strengths and interests; he feels that we must integrate them into the work of the organization. only then can we reach our common and individual potential. max depree describes seven essential beliefs and initiatives for trust to occur: 1. a personal commitment to respect others and to take them seriously 2. trust grows when people see leaders translate their personal integrity into organizational fidelity 3. the moral purpose of our organizations and our personal commitments is the soil in which trust can take root and grow 4. trust is built on kept promises 5. trust in organizations depends on the reasonable assumption by followers that leaders can be depended on to do the right thing 6. the building of trust in organizations requires leaders to hold the group accountable 7. for trust to be maintained over time, leaders must demonstrate competence in their jobs-just like everyone else building trust in organizations has become a chief responsibility of leaders and true leaders take time to develop the persistence, the patience, and the discipline that will ultimately result in trust. the lack of trust in a reward system that injures will continue to erode the goal of universities to retain faculty of color and women. a new reward system one way to address the inequities with which many reward systems are laden is to examine the current system. we need to ask ourselves, "who is this system consistently admitting and who is being kept out?" but this process requires serious listening to the faculty, especially those that have been most injured by the process. their responses cannot be ignored, including those assistant professors that have left. it may help to take a good look at those that are pleased with the current system. are they part of the "good old boys" network and do they represent the mainstream group that has continued to have success within the organization? in january of 1998 the dean of the college of education at northern illinois university initiated the development of a reward restructuring committee (rrc) to investigate needed changes in the current rewards system. three purposes guided the committee's efforts. the first purpose was to provide maximum rewards to faculty members doing the academic work that they do best including research in ethnic and women's studies. too often, these contribution's have gone unnoticed in the tenure process. the second purpose was to reward faculty for responding to the needs of the community and society. their community-based works must /can be designated service. the third purpose was to create a reward structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition. the aim was to create a more positive working environment by valuing research and enhancing the retention of excellent faculty of all ranks, but particularly of assistant professors. the third purpose may be the most difficult to achieve. good leadership is essential for this to occur. we are lucky to have a good leader and it is still difficult, especially when there is lack of support in the higher ranks. sabotage and turf wars persist in most organizations that require change and reform. interestingly, when the rrc disseminated a survey asking the faculty if change was needed, what strengths and weaknesses they saw in the current system and what an ideal systems looks like, the faculty responded with seven characteristics. the seven characteristics distilled from responses were: • climate of respect and trust • flexibility • culture of support/learning • structure of fairness and equity • criterion-referenced • communication • sensitivity to the community you may notice that trust was ranked most important and remained an essential part of an ideal system. the survey's findings called for changes in the current reward system. the incorrect assumption had been that the current system was fair to all, but the practice of rating and ranking faculty against each other created practices that resulted in decidedly unequal access to rewards, especially for women and faculty of color. research, teaching and service, and their associated rewards have been the conventional arrangement of faculty work. in the new reward system, faculty work falls into two distinct arrangements, each with multiple components: expanded scholarship expanded citizenship discovery integration teaching application program institutional instructional professional selfdevelopment expanded scholarship expanded scholarship, the first area of faculty work, includes the four areas of faculty work that boyer (1990) believed to be true scholarship. boyer believes that scholarship is equally apparent in applied work or service that is "...tied directly to one's special field of knowledge..." (boyer, 1990, p. 22) as it is in discovery work or basic research. scholarship is equally apparent in intellectually engaged teaching and the work of integrating ideas as it is in basic research. the rrc's direction for this area of faculty work was guided by discovery, integration, teaching, and application as key components of expanded scholarship. (see table 1). expanded citizenship this second area of faculty work also influenced by boyer's ideas (1990) may require different forms of evaluation. he pointed out the problematic characteristics-vagueness, low status, and a "catch-all"-of the service category of faculty work, a problem created by the conflict between the goals of the academic and those of the larger world. this endless and often invisible and usually non-rewared cluster of activities poses a particular hazard for women and minority faculty. it is important to note that faculty committees made up of males will seek a female member to demonstrate a commitment to equity. a committee made up of white file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/advancing%20women2/awl/summer%202001/rositamarcano.html#t1 file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/advancing%20women2/awl/summer%202001/rositamarcano.html#t1 members may seek a minority member. unfortunately and too often minority members may be invited to be seen, but not necessarily heard. "expanded citizenship" provides the avenue for two areas of growth. this category had two components; program, institutional and processional responsibilities (committee work and bureaucratic activity that often accompanies the institutionalization of work), and professional self-development, a formal avenue to develop each faculty member's growth. (see table 2). another area that was added to the new reward system included a team to help assistant professors with the process of tenure and promotion. too often, new professors arrive on the job with little guidance about how to make the transition from expert learner to novice teacher. without mentorship, they will not learn what is expected of them as professionals. unfortunately not enough is done to help women and faculty members of color go through the process of attaining tenure. many leave positions or higher education feeling frustrated and abused by the process of tenure and promotion. at most universities, women and minorities express lack of trust in the reward system. this must change. i feel our university has made a serious attempt to address these issues. but we must also take a close look at whether faculty members of the mainstream still have reservations about female and minority faculty achieving tenure. they will make up part of the teams and councils that will ultimately make the decision for tenure and promotion yet may view culturally different faculty and their research as inferior. issues of trust, respect, equity, growth, and diversity must continue to be addressed. the injurious effects of this process called tenure will continue to limit diversity of faculty. individuals will eventually move on rather than endure the abuse. their departure will continue to be a source of missed opportunities for universities to expand their missions through the addition of multiple perceptive. the bleak numbers of females and faculty of color on campuses who are tenured and in decision making positions ensures that little will change. pressures like rrc are one way to rectify this continuous saga of exclusion. academic freedom is something that we must mainstream as members of academe, but an alternative to the injurious process of tenure that exists today must be found. dr. rosita lopez marcano is an associate professor at northern illinois university. dr. marcano can be reached at: mailto:rmarcano@niu.edu references boyer, e. l. (1990). scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professoriate. the carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching. jossey-bass inc., san francisco, california. chamberlain, m. k., & jossey-matta, l. (1994). women of color and the multicultural curriculum. the feminist press, the city university of new york, new york. depree, m. (1997). leading without power: finding hope in serving community. josseybass inc., san francisco, california. file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/advancing%20women2/awl/summer%202001/rositamarcano.html#t2 file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/advancing%20women2/awl/summer%202001/rositamarcano.html#t2 mailto:rmarcano@niu.edu mailto:rmarcano@niu.edu mcintoch, p. (1998). white privilege, male privilege: a personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies. a paper presented tat the virginia women's studies association conference in richmond in april, 1986. pace and racism, p. 94-105. reward restructuring committee, college of education, northern illinois university, (1998-2001). dekalb, illinois. ruffins, p. (1997). the shelter of tenure is eroding and for faculty of color gaining membership may be tougher than ever. black issues of higher education. vol. 14, no. 17. table 1. category of expanded scholarship with four components and examples related work tasks discovery scholarship/artistryintegration scholarship/artistry teaching scholarship/artistry basic research presentations publications grants professional organizations other interpretive work theory development course development program development collaboration teamwork publications presentations workshops grants professional organizations other creation of learning materials strategies and environments research on teaching presentations workshops grants professional organizations currency of syllabi other table 2. category of expanded citizenship with two components and examples of related work tasks institutional, instructional, and professional responsibilities self-development responsibilities *assigned courses *dissertation direction *student advisement *mentoring of colleagues and students group work/team skills development teaching skill development technology/software skill development *committee work program reviews, ibhe, ncate committee meetings professional organization responsibilities other * = instructional responsibilities writing/research/presentation skills being mentored improving licenses/credentials in-sevice/workshop to maintain licenses/credentials clinical practice experiences self improvement plan other +  development in this context is limited to those activities that enhance one's professional role at the university. note: it is expected that growth and productivity in both the scholarship and citizenship categories (not necessarily all components) be maintained. faculty members are encouraged to choose which components within scholarship and citizenship are conducive to the development of their talents. effectiveness in instructional responsibilities are required for tenure. microsoft word frkal_integrating _care_and_critical_reflection.docx volume 38, 2018 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 38 advancing women in leadership vol. 38, pp. 35-49, 2018 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper integrating care and critical reflection in women’s leadership development programs robin ayers frkal robin ayers frkal, assumption college, email: ra.frkal@assumption.edu accepted august 27, 2018 women’s leadership development programs (wldps) have been suggested as programmatic additions for achieving genderequity in organizational contexts. these programs are conceptualized as transformative learning spaces affording women the opportunity to explore uncritically examined assumptions and create new perspectives of themselves as leaders. the author explains how these types of transformative learning environments are predicated on dialogue that encourages critical reflection in the context of caring relationships. recognizing that women may arrive in leadership programs with varied capacities for both relational learning and critical reflection, the author sought to explore the communication practices needed to create the dialogic conditions of care and critical reflection. the paper outlines the results of a qualitative study that examined critical incidents of dialogue in a women’s leadership development program to demonstrate the ways in which facilitators communicate to create these conditions. the results suggest how taking a communication perspective on dialogue may increase a facilitator’s capacity to integrate care and critical reflection. keywords: women’s leadership development programs (wldps); transformative learning; dialogue; coordinated management of meaning introduction considerable progress occurred toward advancing women in leadership in the later part of the twentieth century. the gender wage gap narrowed, segregation within professions declined, and the number of women in leadership positions steadily increased (warner & corely, 2017). throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, notable progress continued in women’s representation in top leadership positions. the share of companies with women in executive leadership increased more than six fold from 1997 to 2009 (warner & corely, 2017). while the number of women in management and leadership positions suggest that the glass ceiling may no longer be an apt metaphor for the experience of women in leadership, women still face significant challenges (eagly & carli, 2007; rhode, 2017; rhode & kellerman, 2007). these include continued overt discrimination (hill, miller, benson, & handley, 2016). however, even more prevalent is the subtle bias and organizational structures built on masculine ideals of leadership (cikara & fiske, 2009; eagly & carli, 2007; eagly & sczesny, 2009; rhode, 2017). leaders who are outspoken, authoritative, forceful, and competitive are viewed positively and promoted to higher level positions. this places women who have been socialized to communicate and behave more collaboratively in a double-bind (eagly, 2005; eagly & karau, 2002). women that communicate and operate in a more feminine way are often viewed as weak leaders and overlooked for advancement into higher level leadership. however, women who adopt a competitive work-style, handle conflict directly, or in anyway present too masculine risk being judged harshly and also not advanced. this puts women in a no-win situation. they can either present authentically and not be viewed as a strong leader, or they can project a more masculine presence and be penalized for not meeting the social expectations of women’s behavior (eagly & sczesny, 2009). combined with organizational structures that reinforce masculine values, women often internalize these biases, which can interfere with their ability to see and develop themselves as leaders (ely, ibarra, & kolb, 2001; ely & meyerson, 2000). in addition, while gender expectations in regards to childrearing and housekeeping are slowly shifting, women continue to be accountable for a large share of family advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 39 responsibilities (rhode, 2017; rhode & kellerman, 2007). this fact, combined with organizational contexts that have not necessarily kept up with changing gender norms and undervalue caregiving make it difficult for women to attend to family obligations while climbing the leadership ladder (galinsky, aumann, & bond, 2011; slaughter, 2015). the result is that women often find themselves struggling to balance work and family obligations (eagly & carli, 2007; sabattini & crosby, 2009). the challenges that women face in developing an authentic and recognized leadership identity combined with difficulties in balancing work and life can lead to an ambivalence toward leadership advancement. women often become conflicted about advancing in their careers at the expense of family life and/or are challenged to make changes within their organizations that better match their unique values and needs (clarke, 2010; vinnicombe, moore, & anderson, 2013). to succeed in leadership, these women must find ways to navigate a landscape that holds women leaders to outdated expectations and personal perceptions, and this requires profound reflection, not just development of skills and techniques (debebe, 2011; vinnicombe & singh, 2002). in other words, women leaders need opportunities to examine the ways in which they view themselves in relation to the world around them to develop their full leadership potential. with this in mind, women’s leadership development programs (wldps) are suggested as important programmatic additions for promoting increased gender-equity (debebe, anderson, bilimoria, & vinnicombe, 2016; vinnicombe & singh, 2002). these programs are conceived as transformative learning spaces that provide women opportunities to critically examine the internalized social perspectives that often stunt their ability to fully embrace themselves as leaders (debebe, 2011; vinnicombe & singh, 2002). the purpose of wldps is to provide women an opportunity to question previously unexamined assumptions to build an authentic leader identity (debebe et al., 2016). in contrast with general leadership programs that focus on enhancing leaders’ performance with emphasis on skill acquisition to distinguish oneself from others, wldps are noted to approach leadership development from a relational frame that encourages participants to discover their leadership identity in connection with others (sugiyama, cavanagh, van esch, bilimoria, & brown, 2016). while caring and relational ways of knowing have been demonstrated across genders, there are studies that suggest a greater proportion of women who show caring and relational orientations (eagly, 2005; gilligan, 1982). with this in mind, wldps have also been noted to remove gender pressures that may prevent women from openly examining their unique leadership experiences and to allow for the use of gender-sensitive teaching and learning practices more compatible with women’s more caring, connected, and relational ways of knowing (debebe, 2011). there are some who feel that women’s only programs provide artificial environments that remove women from the real-life challenges they must contend with in organizations and deprive them of the ability to add networks of male peers (ely et al., 2001). others suggest that these environments shift the focus away from the more systemic and structural issues that continue to challenge advancement. still others believe that such programs stigmatize women by suggesting that women need to be fixed in order to lead (vinnicombe et al., 2013). however, wldps have been demonstrated as effective additions to traditional leadership development programs (debebe et al., 2016; vinnicombe et al., 2013). wldps provide opportunities for women to develop selfawareness and improve self-confidence, as well as develop skills, strategies, and support networks to address challenges that are unique to their leadership journeys (clarke, 2010). effective wldp programs are described as safe spaces where women can reflect on and explore their leadership identities. however, these spaces must go beyond the supportive to be effective. topics and discussion must be situated in a larger critical analysis of second generation gender bias and the systematic structural contexts that perpetuate the same. in the spirit of transformative learning, these environments require conditions that go beyond caring (brookfield, 2005). dialogue that pushes individuals to critically examine perspectives within a supportive network is essential (mezirow, 2003). to achieve the dialogic conditions for transformative learning conditions of both care and critical reflection are needed. this nuance raises an important question for educators and facilitators of wldps—how do we create conditions of care while also encouraging critical reflection? this is not to suggest that these conditions are inherently at odds, but rather that to encourage critical reflection within a context care is hard work. caring for the other does not suggest a removal of critical reflection on what is good (noddings, 1984). regardless of educators’ focus on care for their students they must be strong and focused on using the good created by this relationship to impact that which is not good in society (noblit, 1993; noddings, 1984). in the context of wldps, this means that facilitators need to ensure that the new meanings that are created together foster a greater appreciation of the subtle and internalized gender biases that permeate women’s experiences at work. in this paper, i outline the results of my inquiry into the ways in which facilitators communicated with adult women in a leadership development program to create the dialogic conditions for transformative learning. after a review of the literature to better understand the need for care and critical reflection in wldps, i describe the ways in which facilitators in a women’s leadership program created a context of care and how critical reflection occurred within this context. i suggest viewing dialogue from a communication perspective—paying attention to the process advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 40 of communication and not just content—can help facilitators maintain the delicate balance between care and critical reflection. literature review researchers have presented the idea of wldps as transformative learning environments. transformative learning is that which alters existing perspectives to be more inclusive, open, and reflective (mezirow, 2003; mezirow & associates, 2000). experiencing transformative learning involves making new meaning through questioning one’s own and others’ experiences (cranton, 2006). it is through critical dialogue that interlocutors are able assess the ways in which each justifies her interpretations or beliefs and eventually find common meaning (freire, 2000; mezirow & associates, 2000). mezirow (2003) asserted that this dialogue process involves examining beliefs, feelings, and values in a critical, rational manner. this requires listening, empathy, holding off judgment, and seeking common ground by all participants. the dialogue process for transformative learning requires both critical reflection and care and connection (carter, 2002; mcgregor, 2004; o'hara, 2003). relationship has been shown to be especially important when working with women learners (english & irving, 2012; english & peters, 2012). due to traditional gender socialization, woman tend to think of themselves and others in more relational ways (gilligan, 1982). attending to these relational ways of knowing is highlighted in much of the literature focused on women’s learning and development (english & peters, 2012). wldps are suggested as important additions to leadership development initiatives with this in mind. wldps are emphasized as safe spaces where women can discuss, reflect, and test out their experiences with those of others (debebe, 2011; vinnicombe & singh, 2002). in mixed gender groups, gender pressures persist which limit women's abilities to fully and openly examine their unique leadership experiences. wldps provide a safe environment that removes gender pressures both because of the single-sex nature of the programs, but also because of the use of gendersensitive teaching and learning practices more attuned to women’s caring, connected, and relational ways of knowing (debebe, 2011). however, the transformative learning literature cautions against viewing transformative learning as a primarily intuitive, creative, and emotional process (brookfield, 1986, 2000, 2005; gunnlaugson, 2007). a shift toward more relational ways of knowing, at the expense of critical reflection, is problematic because it can marginalize reason, and thus avoid the essential element of social critique (brookfield, 1986, 2000, 2005; gunnlaugson, 2007). english and peters (2012) found this to be true in their research with women. while they found transformation and development occurred in the context of relationship, they also concluded these relationships were “not necessarily the friendly, affirming, and uncritically supportive bonds often presented as foundational for women’s learning” (english & peters, 2012, p. 114). these authors suggested critical reflection occurs within constructive conflicts arising between role models, mentors, and friends (english & peters, 2012, p. 114). sugiyama, et. al. (2016) also suggested there is value in merging the epistemological and pedagogical approaches of wldps with more traditional leadership development approaches to develop leaders regardless of gender (sugiyama et al., 2016). in their review of both general leadership programs and wldps, they found critical reflection–a standing back, or differentiation from others--is as essential to leader’s development as is connecting to others (sugiyama et al., 2016). building on belenky, clinchy, goldberger, and tarule’s (1997) concept of women’s ways of knowing, sugiyama et al. (2016) offered a model for more inclusive leadership development incorporating both separate and connected knowing. they suggested, for inclusive leadership development, the presence of both separate and connected knowing increases the potential for individuals to both differentiate but also gain the relational connections that support and enable necessary leadership shifts. (sugiyama et al., 2016, p. 284) separate knowing stands back and doubts (belenky et al., 1997). this is the knowing stance mezirow believed is needed in the transformative learning process (belenky & stanton, 2000). conversely, connected knowing involves acquiring and validating information by trying to understand another’s perspective using empathy and imagination (belenky et al., 1997). this type of knowing encourages listening and creates a more open and level forum where people with different viewpoints can communicate to achieve common understanding (belenky & stanton, 2000). developing and facilitating wldps that meet both of these requirements is a challenging endeavor. programs need to be designed and facilitated in ways that maintain a delicate balance between care, connection, and critical reflection. facilitators are called upon to help program participants build and maintain relationships with each other while at the same time encouraging critical assessment of perspectives (brookfield & preskill, 2005; cranton, 2006; vella, 2008; walton, 2010). to create dialogue that both sustains connection and holds critical tension, educators are called to become facilitative co-learners with a primary objective of building and maintaining relationships with and between students (brookfield & preskill, 2005; cranton, 2006; vella, 2008). at the same time, they need to be conscious of the power 41 inherent in their position and to use this power responsibly (brookfield & preskill, 2005; cranton, 2006). all along one needs to be aware of individual differences in ideas, feelings, and actions of students and to develop ways of ensuring that all voices are heard (cranton, 2006; vella, 2008; walton, 2010). such open-ended goals have served to increase demands on facilitators. an abundance of suggestions are proposed for the things that they are supposed to be and do (cranton, 2006). practitioners working for transformative learning are called on to be knowledgeable, student-centered, organized, prepared, and structured in their learning activities, while establishing supportive learning environments (apte, 2009; brookfield & preskill, 2005; vella, 2008). it is important that they are authentic and immediate with students to foster respectful relationships that safely support challenging dialogue and praxis (brookfield & preskill, 2005; cranton, 2006; cranton & wright, 2008; groen & hyland-russell, 2010; vella, 2008; walton, 2010). adult educators are being called to be mindful, appreciative, and conversationally competent. their role is to facilitate and provide space for students to speak and learn from others (brookfield & preskill, 2005). monitoring the conversation, questioning, listening, and responding are acknowledged by many in the field as central to this process (apte, 2009; brookfield & preskill, 2005; chetro-szivos & gray, 2004; cranton, 2006; ziegler, paulus, & woodside, 2006). however, these researchers fall short of explaining the ways to manage the moment-to-moment facilitation, and none specifically address the specific challenge of working with adult women. to fill this gap in the literature, i asked the question-how do educators create the dialogic conditions for transformative learning with adult female students? methods to answer this question, i conducted a qualitative interview study. the setting for the study was a wldp offered within a degree completion program for adult women. part of this program is a three-course women as empowered learners and leaders (well) series specifically developed for reflection on personal goals, strengths, professional life planning, and issues related to women in the workplace. each of these courses is designed to engage students in dialogue around these topics to empower them to take ownership of their lives and change how they view the world. each of the three courses is 6-weeks long during which there are 3 5-hour saturday seminar sessions combined with online interaction. the content, as well as the process, followed in this all women’s leadership program provided a context that supported the type of reflective, transformative dialogue. facilitators of these sessions are expected to lead class discussion, provide instruction for assignments and support students’ development as leaders. i interviewed eight facilitators with a minimum of one year of experience advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 teaching in this program using a variation of the critical incident technique (butterfield, borgen, amundson, & maglio, 2005; flanagan, 1954). each facilitator completed a written dialogue description form describing a critical incident of classroom dialogue they felt demonstrated the components of care, connection, and critical reflection. care was defined as paying attention to the feelings, needs, and interests of others. connection was defined as developing and maintaining relationships and/or active engagement with others. critical reflection was defined as the ability to question, analyze, and judge one’s own as well as others’ ideas, opinions, and assumptions. this step was followed by a semi-structured interview with each of the facilitators to elaborate on the dialogue episodes and the communication behaviors used to create them. the number of students in the recalled incidents of dialogue varied from 8 to 18, and ranged in age from 20s to 50s. most of the students were described as middle to lower-middle socioeconomic class, and many had some previous academic experience. the professional experience of the students varied, with some being stay-at-home moms and others working in lower-level supervisory positions. to analyze the data, i used coordinated management of meaning (cmm). pearce and cronen (1982) developed cmm is a practical communication theory their theory is based on social-constructionist view of communication, which affirms communication as the primary social process. cmm provides several heuristics researchers can use to deconstruct communication and appreciate the ways in which participants in particular episodes of communication are dancing together to create meaning, and the resources they are using in the process. phase one of the analysis process was to describe and interpret each of the critical incidents. first, i read and reread the written dialogue description forms, interview transcripts and my field notes to create serpentine diagrams of each incident as described. serpentine diagrams are a cmm tool used to storyboard the turns of a particular conversational episodes. i used these serpentine outlines to develop a thick description of each of the recalled critical incidents of dialogue. i then utilized the cmm hierarchy model, which gives a way of thinking about the contextual resources or stories that are being used to make sense of a situation, to identify the multiple layers of stories the facilitators and their participants used to make sense of the sequences of turns. once i had a thick description of each of the individual incidents, i moved to phase two of the analysis, which involved reading and rereading each of the incident descriptions and serpentine diagrams. in addition, i entered and coded the text of dialogue turns into dedoose© to help me identify patterns and in the contexts, behaviors, and participants ways of knowing across the incidents. 42 findings these analytic steps allowed me to describe the ways in which facilitators created a context of care and observe how critical reflection occurred within this context of care. creating a context of care the facilitators in this study created a context of care for the participants in the class. care is demonstrated in the ways in which they structured and facilitated class activities. facilitators in the study were noted to present material and modify their class plans in ways that addressed their participants’ needs and concerns. moreover, they regularly provided their participants with verbal and non-verbal demonstrations of approval and support. they also created this context of care through active listening, observing, and monitoring the dialogue occurring between participants in the classroom. t6 “sasha said something about she felt that people who stayed home were just sitting around all day.” t7 molly asked kathy “to explain, to actually tell us about a normal day for her…if it meant she was actually home all day or that she volunteered during the day while her kids were at school.” t8 kathy shares her experience “of being a stay at home mom for all those years and the things she was able to do because she was a stay at home mom. she was able to be on the pto, pta and she was able to make lunches for her kids and be there when they got home from school….but she was still at the school every day being a teacher helper or bringing meals for different things going on at the school. she was still busy throughout the day, kind of like someone who worked, but she gave us more information about that.” t9 molly observed “sasha’s body language, she began to turn a little bit away from kathy,” and says, “okay, let’s make sure that we are all talking to each other and facing each other when we’re having conversation.” within these turns we see that molly, while not asserting herself as a main contributor or actor in the conversation, was carefully monitoring the conversation between the students. in t6, she picked up on the possible stereotyping of stay-at-home mothers by sasha. rather than directly alerting sasha to the danger of her generalization, molly interjected with a clarifying question about kathy’s experience to address the validity of the stereotype. in t9, she picked up non-verbal behavior, suggesting possible disrespect. she used communal language at that moment to remind the class of their ground rules around maintaining eye contact and open minds while engaging in the class. overall, in these turns, molly allowed the students to critical examine and challenge each other’s’ ideas and assumptions about women’s roles. however, she was sure to establish appropriate boundaries advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 and probed as needed to ensure students respected the experiences of others. facilitators in the study also demonstrated care in the way they addressed participants’ needs. for example, ann shifted her expectations around how participant presentations should be made when she realized that a participant was exceptionally nervous. t1 after about nine students had presented their plans, the student that had been particularly hesitant to speak during class gathered enough courage to make her presentation. this student stood up and said “i’ll go next, i’m ready.” t2 ann recognized once the student stood up that she was so nervous that “i asked her if she wanted to sit down because that was how nervous she was, i thought she might faint.” t3 the student said, “no, everybody else has done it, i can do this.” she does not go to the front of the room (as the other students had) but stands at her place in the back of the room, braces against her chair and begins to speak. t4 ann and the other students shifted in their positions to face the student speaking at her seat. the first sequence of turns in the dialogue modeled care. the student’s nervousness created an implicative force causing ann to re-frame the episode. her highest level of context shifted from the episode of student presentations to her relationship with the students. in her reflection she noted, i think, actually everybody did, they went up to the front of the room and did their presentation; but once this woman stood up, i don’t think she could have walked. i think she was so nervous, that she was afraid to walk to the front of the room. we all saw her through the six weeks just really trying to find strength and courage to talk, that no one minded, we were all okay with her standing where she was. moreover, facilitators regularly gave their participants verbal and non-verbal approval and support. for example, writing a participant’s idea on the white board, or using facial expressions and body language demonstrating a participant’s comments were worthy of further discussion. marcelle described how she smiled and moved toward a participant to demonstrate that while the participant’s ideas were off-topic and perhaps controversial, they were worthy of further discussion. this incident began with a student’s off-topic, direct, and negative statement about two women with some prominence in popular entertainment media. t1 a student stated kim kardashian and beyonce were “role models.” she proceeds to call both of them advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 43 “bitches” and “hoes” based on how they present themselves (dress) to society. t2 marcelle gave the student an “are you serious right now?” look acknowledging she was off-topic, but she did not stop the conversation. she moved to stand closer to the student making the comment. this student’s out of the blue statement created a critical moment in which marcelle had options about how to act. she could be direct in her feedback to the student – suggesting that perhaps we need to be mindful about the words used in describing women. she could ignore the statement and continue with class as planned. her choice of action was influenced by her contextual framing of the episode, which was one of caring for students and her role as a facilitator of learning. in describing this series of turns marcelle stated, “i knew it was off topic and she typically was; that particular [lady]. i always have one. i loved her.” in addition to this overarching context of care, marcelle presented an understanding of her role as one of facilitator. she noted that her lesson for the day included the topic of media and images and that she decided in the moment to use this student’s off-topic comment as the jumping-off point to verbal actions. these sent a message to the other students in the class that while she might not have approved of the student’s comment, it is worthy of further reflection. this created enough practical force for another student to engage the first student in a conversation. t3 another student asked the first, “why would you say that?” t4 the first student responded to the second explaining how she feels like this because she works with young girls and that she doesn’t feel these were images that she should have to see and feel a certain way about. marcelle recalled the tone of the student in t3 was noncondescending. she noted the student did not feel negative about the first “because we had already had experience with her in the classroom in terms of voicing her opinion so openly, and the way the class is set up; in the very first class…we talk about ground rules…so, i don’t think she was asking in a judgmental way. it was in a way to generate conversation.” these prior experiences with the student and ground rules can be viewed as pre-turns in the dialogue that create contextual forces which informed the student’s turn within this dialogue exchange. “bring it where i needed it to go in terms of women in the media.” this context of caring facilitation informs her nonthe table below summarizes the ways in which the facilitators in this study communicated to create a context of care in the classroom. table 1 findings – context of care summary of finding dialogue behaviors observed examples facilitators consistently demonstrated concern and regard for participants’ needs and feelings • modeling care in organizing classroom activities and managing classroom interaction • approving of participants contributions to class in verbal and non-verbal ways • changing expectations for delivering participant presentations • writing participant ideas on white board, providing positive feedback, moving toward participants facilitators maintained environments where participants were able respectfully challenge each other • actively listening, observing and monitoring the dialogue • setting specific ground rules that enable participants to challenge each other • stepping in to redirect conversation that was becoming less constructive critical reflection in the context of care facilitators promoted critical reflection within this context of care. care for participants informed the ways and types of discriminating behaviors used in the dialogue incidents. rather than challenging or defending perspectives, the facilitators used questioning or probing. these behaviors are advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 44 more about engaging with and understanding vs. separating from or challenging others’ ideas. the facilitators sought to have students gain an understanding of the other’s perspective to appreciate the similarities and differences of the underlying logics. each of the facilitators used questioning or probing at least once in their recalled incidents. probing behaviors were often in combination with caring turns. for example, one facilitator utilized a combination of non-verbal communication and questions to encourage participants to expand on their feelings and underlying perspectives of their contributions to the dialogue. t5 marcelle invited other students to share their experience using eye contact and standing right in the middle of the class to demonstrate she was listening and was open to what they are saying. using first names, she asked those students that do not open up initially, “what do you think about this?” or, “what do you think of what so-and-so is saying?” what is your experience with that? t6 marcelle walked over to students contributing to the discussion and asks follow-up questions such as “why do you feel like that? what makes you feel so strongly about that? why does it impact you so greatly?” this series of turns reflects the ways in which an educator engaged and invited critical reflection within the context of care. large elements of marcelle’s actions were nonverbal. she described using eye contact and positioning in the classroom to invite and engage students in the dialogue. in probing students’ experiences, she used emotional appeals with words such as “feel” in her questions. it was not a hard challenging or defending of one’s beliefs but rather a probing with language of emotion. “what makes you feel like that?” in the end, marcelle noted she and the other students were able to demonstrate connection through “caring when asking her opinion on certain things. it wasn’t to have an argument or debate, it was questioning her to let her talk. to say, ‘why do you feel like that?’” in another incident, a facilitator engaged in an exchange with a student that had a contrary opinion about women leaders after viewing a video. t6 a student made a comment about not viewing women as leaders as historically accurate because they needed to be physically stronger then; and now that society has changed, physical strength is no longer needed. t7 betty was not sure if she understood a student’s comments so she dug deeper. not with “will you clarify?” but more of “what do you know?” t8 betty responded to the student’s view with a contrary position. stating, “that yes, she agreed but there were other historical cultures that viewed women as strong as and equal to men. she offered the example of women and men in viking culture.” t9 the student thanked betty for offering her thoughts. betty noted that while contrary, her turn (t7) “wasn’t like ‘i disagree with you’ contrary.” it was more about what the class had viewed in the video and how she disagreed with that. she made sure she was not putting criticism on the student but rather on the material. in clarifying students’ views, betty’s highest level of context included her desire to facilitate learning and reflection but were joined and subordinated to one of care for her students. her comments suggested she was both attentive of students’ feelings while enacting her goals as a facilitator of learning. critical reflection was also established through extending, relating, and synthesizing of ideas. the facilitators in this study consistently sought to make connections between participants and their ideas. for example, one facilitator made a conscious decision to invite other participants into the dialogue to help another see that she demonstrated leadership. while debriefing a leadership autobiography exercise t3 one student replied, “"nope. i'm not a leader. i don't feel i have any leadership qualities at all." t4 krystena responded with a probing question of "are there any particular examples of why you think that?" t5 the student noted that she does not have leadership role at work or anything like that. she goes on to share her story, which includes being the mother of a disabled child. in her interview, krystena remarked that in her many times teaching this course and debriefing this assignment it was the only time a student had said she was not a leader. as such, t3 served as an implicative force that shifted krystena’s framing of the episode. krystena began defining the episode as debriefing an assignment. the students were given an assignment and as an effective educator it was her job to make sure they fulfilled the assignment. she infused an element of care in the way in which she invited the students to share with the class, but this is not her highest level context. in t4, episode is replaced as the highest level context by her appreciation of the student’s ability to learn from other students rather than being “taught” from the front of the room. she also maintained knowledge of the students’ various backgrounds in the class allowing her to encourage connections that may naturally create critical reflection. within these frames she chose not to respond directly to the student’s statement from the viewpoint of an educator. rather than lecture the student on how leadership can manifest in ways other than positional power, she asked the student to share other parts of her personal experiences with the class. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 45 t7 other students in the room enter into the dialogue, asking her questions such as “is your child on an iep? are you involved in that?” they also provide positive feedback such as “you’re a strong parent, advocating for your child. absolutely you’re a leader.” and, “if your child is on an iep and you’ve been a part of that, you’ve been advocating for your child, so you’ve been a leader for your child.” in turn t7, students in the class brought their own set of contextual frames to the conversation, which included knowing about what it takes to advocate for a disabled child as well as wanting to support this woman (whom they had only just met). within these frames, they probed the student’s experience. these contextual resources also led the students to demonstrate their respect of her actions, and extend their understanding of leadership. t8 krystena looks for visual cues from the students to guide when to reenter the dialogue with her reposing of the leadership question. “i was definitely looking for visual cues from the student, as she was shaking or nodding her head yes, and answering questions… t9 “once the conversation seemed to die down and the student was shaking her head yes less often, and giving different visual cues…” krystena “went back to the student…i asked her, again, the question. i said, “now, hearing this, and talking about it, would you still say that you’re not a leader?” t10 the student responds, “no. i think my mind has been changed. yes, i do have leadership qualities, and there are areas of my life in which i am a leader.” in the final turn (t10), we see how the prior turns of the conversation have led to a restructuring of the student’s contextual frames. while she entered into the discussion thinking leadership equates to title and thus saying, “i am not a leader,” she exited with a different view of leadership, which frames her view of herself. krystena noted that feedback from other students was the catalyst for having the student start to think about areas in which she may be a leader. in her mind, she was just a parent doing what needed to be done for her child. her classmates’ feedback encouraged her to look at that a different way--instead of just being a parent looking out for her child, being a leader looking out for someone who needed some assistance. krystena played a secondary role in this contextual shift. she indicated that while this sequence of turns occurred among the students she “was in the front of the classroom kind of directing the conversation.” she further described, “i definitely stepped back during that and let the other students…obviously, it would have been one thing for me to say that i consider you a leader, but to have her peers within the class--that i think was more beneficial for her.” another facilitator made these connections by setting up activities in a way that ensured participants are able to come to their own opinions and perspectives of material presented. while moderating participant discussion stemming from the video she showed in class, instead of responding to each individual comment offered, she looked for select opportunities in the dialogue to summarize, relate several participant ideas, and connect them to her lessons for the day. table 2 findings – critical reflection in the context of care summary of findings dialogue behaviors observed example(s) facilitators quietly challenged participant’s perspectives • probing and questioning participants ideas • following up participant ideas with questions, such as “why do you feel like that?” participants more actively challenged each other’s perspectives • challenging and evaluating ideas, defending positions • questioning personal beliefs, choices. • providing justification for beliefs and actions. facilitators made concentrated effort to connect participant’s ideas • extending dialogue between participants • relating and summarizing participant comments • inviting participants into dialogue vs. responding herself • summarizing several comments vs. responding to individual contributions 46 discussion women continue to experience unique challenges to their leadership. wldps have been suggested as important programmatic additions to help women reflect on and develop new perspectives on these challenges. to be effective with this task, wldps need to be more than safe environments where women share their experiences. to encourage the type of transformative learning that changes the ways women leaders view themselves as leaders both care and critical reflection are needed. facilitators working with women leaders need to be able to hold the tension between care and critical reflection among groups of women who come with a variety of capacities for connected and separate knowing. i have provided, via this research, some insight into how this phenomenon occurs in practice. first, i found some of the ways in which facilitators can establish caring contexts. the findings show that facilitators model care through their consideration of the participants’ needs when establishing activities and setting class expectations. care begins with establishing appropriate ground rules for engagement between and among participants. however, facilitators go beyond this baseline requirement. they demonstrate and model care in the ways in which they interact with participants. they often express their support of participants’ contributions to the dialogue and make connections between the participants’ points of view. this is especially true with those participants who due to their historically marginalized place may not be as confident in their voice. second, the facilitators in this study consistently worked to foster critical reflection through more subtle behaviors of probing, relating, and summarizing of ideas. while consistent with women’s more connected ways of knowing, these dialogue behaviors also encourage critical reflection within a caring context. helping others to appreciate our perspectives and recognizing the connections between our own and others ideas serves to remind us of the mutable constantly changing nature of the truth. the opportunity to intimately reflect on one’s own and others’ experience encourages the development of empathic capacity, which greatly changes one’s perspectives on the world. together, these processes help to develop new more open and inclusive frames of reference. i further noted how facilitators were able to hold the tension between care and critical reflection through carefully monitoring the dialogue process. the facilitators were noted to continually monitor not just what was being said in a discussion, but what was being made by it. the facilitators disrupted those turns in the dialogue counter to the development of care, while encouraging those that supported critical reflection. their attention was not only on what was being said, but included non-verbal cues and the ways in which the students participated in the class. these findings suggest a communication perspective on dialogue might be useful to facilitators of wldps who must establish caring yet advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 critically reflective dialogic spaces with women who have variety of ways of knowing. taking a communication perspective means recognizing dialogue as a highly relational, emergent process rather than an ideal to be achieved through specialized conditions and specific action. (gergen, mcnamee, & barrett, 2001; pearce & pearce, 2000, 2004; stewart & zediker, 2000). viewing dialogue as emergent, relational, and contingent places a different emphasis on how it can be created in practice (pearce & pearce, 2000). rather than following set logical and rational procedures, it requires an ability to monitor what is going on in the communication process (gunnlaugson, 2007; pearce & pearce, 2004). in this spirit, dialogue is does not just happen, but neither can it be planned. the participants in dialogic moments have been likened to jazz musicians who interpret others’ conversational moves and simultaneously shape their responses in ways in which the other person can relate (gergen et al., 2001). central to the idea of taking a communication perspective is recognizing that meaning is co-created. taking a communication perspective means establishing caring yet critical environments is not solely the responsibility of program facilitators. participants have a place in creating conditions that foster transformative learning. this was evident in the findings of this study. the facilitators in this study embraced the diversity of experiences in the class to help move participants views of themselves and their place in the world. they gently probed women’s ideas and found ways to relate and summarize to demonstrate difference while empathetically creating a new scaffolding upon which they might think and act. the incidents of dialogue examined in this study involved engagement between women participants within a large age range and fairly mixed backgrounds. the question thus remains as to whether facilitators presented with more homogeneous groups of women would be able to create the same dialogic conditions. would, for example, participants with a less diverse age range or experience level have enough variety of experiences to create the tensions that occurred in the dialogues between the women that varied in age from early 20s to 50s with a variety of different leadership experiences? undertaking this study with women of more similar age, experience, and organizational contexts would be helpful in answering this additional question. it should also be acknowledged that a few of the critical incidents suggested the participants involved may have experienced a change in their leadership identities. however, based on the limited information available this cannot be viewed as evidence that the dialogues observed resulted in substantial leadership development. further studies combining evaluation of the dialogue conditions with some more formal evaluation or screening for leadership development among the participants involved would be needed to make this claim. it would also be inappropriate advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 47 based on the data to suggest the existence of these dialogue conditions leads to transformative leadership development in all cases. dialogue conditions are only one of the elements suggested by literature as necessary for transformative learning to occur. conclusion wldps are suggested as transformative learning spaces where women have the opportunity to examine and rethink existing perspectives (debebe et al., 2016). more specifically, wldps are proposed as safe spaces that follow gender sensitive teaching and learning practices which facilitate leadership growth and development (debebe, 2011). however, transformative learning spaces need to be more than caring environments where women are able to come together and share their lived experience. transformative learning requires dialogue between caring interlocutors that challenge existing ways of thinking and build new meaning. program developers and facilitators are responsible for holding the delicate balance between care, connection, and critical reflection to ensure this can occur. the goal of this paper was to provide guidance on the ways facilitators might create these conditions through analysis of critical incidents of communication occurring in a women’s leadership development program. the findings suggest researchers and practitioners interested in developing transformative learning spaces for women’s leadership development need a generative view of communication to guide their work. i have determined in this research as to how facilitators working with adult women in an academic based leadership program create caring environments by consistently demonstrating concern for participant’s needs and feelings in both verbal and non-verbal ways, setting up specific ground rules, and actively monitoring conversation. it also shows how critical reflection occurred in this context of care. the active attention to establishing caring environments allowed students to challenge each other’s perspectives safely. moreover, facilitators questioned participant’s ideas with subtle inquiries into their feelings and beliefs about issues. they also made conscious efforts to extend and relate participants’ ideas to encourage deeper understanding. however, academic programs are not the only context in which women’s leadership development programs occur. additional research in organizational contexts and across different populations using a communication perspective of dialogue is recommended. references apte, j. 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"this course is helping us all arrive at new viewpoints, isn't it?": making meaning through dialogue in a blended environment. journal of transformative education, 4(4), 302-319. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 18, spring 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        parent advocacy in a gendered organization: participatory research, action, and analysis margaret andrews (pseudonym) sharon shockley lee lincoln university of missouri hegemonic gender relationships pervade the organization of schooling in america (marshall, 1992, 2000; yeakey, johnston, & adkinson, 1986; young, 2000; young & laible, 2000). men generally occupy privileged roles as administrators. women ordinarily serve in subordinate positions as teachers and parents (read: mothers). the exercise of authority in schools, then, has come to be associated with the male voice: hierarchical, rule-oriented, dispassionate, and even harsh (jones, 1988; shakeshaft, 1989, 1998). hegemony silences women’s voices so that their calls for compassion and connectivity become “non-authoritarian, marginal pleadings for mercy—gestures of the subordinate” (jones, 1988, p. 121). hegemony of gender served as the fundamental premise of this study of four women as they struggled to achieve social justice for their children with disabilities.  the mothers created a grassroots organization called face-to-face and, for two years, battled the male-dominated school administration and board of education.  the study examines the gendered organization of schooling in one, small, rural school district in the american midwest, and serves as a lens for viewing the hegemony of gender in american society. methodology, data sources, and research ethics two academic researchers (andrews and lee) and the four women of face-to-face selected participatory action research as the methodology for this study. like community organizers, andrews and lee collaborated with the mothers to challenge the structures and mechanisms of their oppression (sohng, 1995). participatory action researchers engage disenfranchised people as researchers in pursuit of answers to their own questions and solutions to the problems of their everyday lives (brown, 1985; fals-borda, 1979; freire, 1970, 1974; hall, 1981; tandon, 1981). the inquiry process encourages participants to create the changes they want to see in their world (gaventa, 1988). participatory research is a means of putting research capabilities in the hands of deprived and disenfranchised people so that they can identify themselves as knowing actors; defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their history, and transforming their lives for themselves…. it is a means of preventing an elite group from exclusively determining the interests of others... (sohng, 1995, p. 4) andrews and lee, activists for the rights of the less powerful--women and children, made no attempt to create an illusion of objectivity and neutrality while collaborating with face-to-face to conduct this study. we openly asserted our bias. in fact, as women and mothers, we saw ourselves as insiders who had privileged access to the worldviews and experiences of the four women (foley, levinson, & hurtig, 2001). our study is epistemologically valid based on our identification with the four women, our sensitivity to the gendered nature of schooling, and our shared commitment to the aims of improving the learning and life chances of their children (foley, levinson, & hurtig, 2001; noddings, 1984, 1992). both andrews and lee are university professors. andrews was participant-observer, an insider who lived in the rural community where the study took place. the parents regularly sought her advice about how to deal with the schools.  https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html with andrews and lee serving as advisors, the women formed face-to-face, a grassroots organization of parents learning to advocate for the education of their children with disabilities. throughout the two-year struggle, andrews maintained ongoing communication with parents, school board members, the newspaper editor, and district administrators.  lee, an outsider, assumed the role of observer-participant; conducting interviews, analyzing documents and artifacts, and participating in community activities related to the ongoing struggle.  the women of face-to-face collaborated recorded field notes, collected documents, took photographs, participated in tape-recorded interviews and conversations, analyzed data, and reviewed and approved written accounts. we chose to conduct this study from a feminist perspective for four reasons (foley, levinson, & hurtig, 2001).  first, we wanted to document and analyze the specific experiences of the four women. second, gender emerged as an essential dimension of analysis in the study (hearn, sheppard, tancred-sheriff, & burrell, 1989).  third, the feminist perspective unmasked patriarchy as a system of social reproduction like racism and capitalism. and fourth, we selected a feminist framework for this study because of the intimate interrelationship of participatory research and women’s “ways of knowing” (belenky, clinchy, goldberger, & tarule, 1986; yeakey, johnston, & adkinson, 1986). we made three ethical commitments.  we would support the parents, offering advice regarding educational law, policy, and change strategies. we would regard the parents as equal colleagues, rather than subjects or informants (lee, 2000). parents would collaborate in making decisions about the research, collecting and analyzing data, and reporting findings. we would provide anonymity for the women and their children by replacing each proper name with a pseudonym in published accounts. only the outside researcher's name is real. utilization of participant-observer as well as observer-participant and insider-outsider (smith & geoffrey, 1968) techniques enhanced the reliability of data collection.   interviews included open-ended and specifically focused questions as well as narrative conversations among the researchers and interviewees. both individual and collective interviews were taped (video or audio) and transcribed for subsequent analysis.  data were triangulated, enhancing reliability and validity.  for example, interview data was compared to letters, newspaper reports, field notes from observations, and audio and video recordings (denzin, 1978; guba & lincoln, 1985; lecompte & schensul, 1999). parents, administrators, school board members, teachers, and community members participated in interviews.  other sources of data included:  minutes from board of education meetings; newspaper accounts of board meetings; school district policy statements; state department of education records; school district financial records; community attitudes, as reflected in letters to the editor in the newspaper; letters; legal documents, including reports from the office of civil rights; and video-tapes of board of education meetings. the following narrative, “four bitches and a prick at the newspaper,” presents vignettes drawn from the data.  the analysis, “confronting hegemonic masculinity,” follows. the narrative and analysis offer a provocative view of the hegemony of gender in a small, rural school district in the american midwest. "four bitches and a prick at the newspaper" the narrative begins with a vignette of a public board of education meeting that reveals asymmetrical gender relationships between the four women and school administrators and board members. the notorious november 15th board meeting fifty angry face-to-face supporters attended the meeting.  to accommodate the crowd, the board had moved the meeting to the junior high library.  four conspicuous folding chairs and a microphone were strategically placed in the no man's land between the audience and the board. six board members, the board secretary, the superintendent and assistant superintendent sat at three long, narrow tables, pushed together end-to-end.                                                                 “you girls are here.  you want to take your seats?” the board president gestured to the chairs. the women moved to the four chairs, and so began the “notorious november 15th board meeting,” as it came to be known in the community. the women tried to speak, but mrs. blake, the president interrupted them:  “girls, excuse me!  if you will let me go on, i think we can address this issue.” mrs. blake encouraged the "girls" to develop a “spirit of working together” and asked for their suggestions.  but she continued without waiting for a response: “this is the way we are going to do it.”              mr. ford, vice president, began to speak.  the women again tried to respond, but the president interrupted: “mr. ford is talking.  do you think it would be a little more polite not to interrupt him until he finishes his sentence?"  mr. ford went on and on. “you’ve never admitted there was a problem!”  one of the women snapped, visibly angry. vice president ford admitted,  “there is a problem here.” the problem had begun almost a year earlier as each woman transferred her child from parochial to public schools in order to access special education services.  each mother met with resistance from administrators when she asked to participate in educational decisions about her child. katie hahs battled administrators for three years until they consented to evaluate her son and place him in a class for students with learning disabilities.  joan manson requested an occupational therapist and a master’s degree prepared speech pathologist for her son with severe language impairment.  an administrator asked her if her son was “walking into walls” and offered the services of a speech pathologist whose master’s degree was in school administration.  administrators viewed sarah farmer as a real threat to the district because “she had more internet connections than the world wide web.”  in contrast, natasha read’s daughter received excellent services.  the superintendent had been the best man at the read's wedding, although he no longer came around much. board members and administrators feared these assertive, well-connected women who asked troubling questions and demanded answers. natasha recalled the parent teacher organization meeting that brought them together:  “nobody talked. nobody stood up.  nobody said a damn thing.  it was a talent show.  i resented that...  it was cut and dry.  the president came up, banged the gavel.”   that pto meeting made them aware that there was no legitimate forum for parents to express concerns. during the next six months, the four women, with the researchers' help, established face-to-face, a grassroots organization of parents.  their meetings responded to parent concerns and student needs. face-to-face invited parents' questions, provided answers, and offered advocacy and support.  as they gained strength, administrators' communication and relationships with the parents deteriorated. administrators stoned-walled parents and publicly criticized face-toface, especially the four leaders. so the women decided to bypass administrators and take concerns directly to the school board. in october, they asked to be placed on the agenda.  according to district policy, citizens who wanted to speak to the board must “write up” the presentation and submit it to the superintendent for approval.  the superintendent denied their request, explaining that their written application "was too brief.” refusing to be silenced, the women presented their ten concerns anyway, waiting until the “patrons” section of the agenda.  the women knew that policy prevented the board from responding to their questions at that meeting.  they would have to wait until next month. at the "notorious november 15 board meeting" the board responded to the “ten areas of concern”:  1. the need for public reporting of the number of students receiving special services; 2. the use of external consultants to evaluate students to determine eligibility for special services; 3. the disrespectful treatment of parents by district staff; 4. the district’s failure to comply with federal and state laws; 5. testing and evaluation of students with disabilities; 6. retaining students with special needs in the same grade; 7. requiring students with disabilities to meet district mastery objectives; 8. the lack of programs available to assist “at risk” students; 9. the need for improved cooperation among special and regular education teachers; 10. the need to add programs to serve preschool youngsters with disabilities.  the president read a scripted response to each item. vice president ford criticized the women for insufficient documentation. audience members volunteered to tell their stories, offer documentation, and answer questions.  donna baker, agitated and loud, complained about years of difficulty trying to obtain services for her daughter.  the president immediately silenced her, citing policy.  nan blake ended her response to the women’s concerns as abruptly as she started.  she moved quickly to the next agenda item.  the women retreated awkwardly when they finally realized they had been dismissed. public reaction to the notorious meeting public concern about the “notorious november 15th board meeting” quickly mounted.  a highly charged community grapevine fueled anticipation of the board meeting broadcast the next evening. the newspaper publisher wrote an editorial citing the difficulties of face-to-face and criticizing the board’s inaccessibility. the editor, tiffany lane, attended all board meetings and provided extensive coverage of board activities.                                                             the board of education could no longer silence the four women once the news media legitimated their voices. administrators' control began to unravel:  the district lost it’s first and only due process hearing; the parent of a student with disabilities initiated a complaint with the office of civil rights; ocr found the district guilty of civil rights violations and harassment; administrators lost credibility; and the board underwent major changes. a new board member took the place of one who moved from the district.  two others were elected after campaigning on the issue of special services.  a fourth, natasha read’s husband, was appointed to fill an unexpired term.  the board deposed president nan blake and replaced her with a male board member.  the new board asked the director of special services to leave.  superintendent jones resigned under pressure.   the board directed him to stay home until his contract expired.  until the “notorious november 15th board meeting,” administrators had insisted that the district had no problems.  the superintendent claimed the real problem was “four bitches and the prick at the newspaper." confronting hegemonic masculinity john codd (1982) contends that "...the field of special education has been especially prone to forms of technical domination and political manipulation in which the underlying ethical dilemmas have remained largely unexamined" (p. 9).  we suggest that one of the reasons for this is that the hegemony of gender dramatically affects education generally and special education specifically.  gender emerged as the key factor in this research, exposing the hegemonic relationship between school district and parents.  the analysis centers on gendered organizational hegemony as the essential variable in explaining the formal, legitimate, and masculine work of professionals inside the organization and the informal, illegitimate, and feminine work of laypeople outside the organization. in this study, we examined the hegemony of gender as it was revealed in the words and actions of board members, administrators, and parents.  the powerful sought to preserve their privileged status as decision-makers in the organization.  the women contested that privilege.  the competition between the dominant and subordinate ideologies was clear.  it was also clear that during the struggle the women developed contradictory (gramsci, 1971) or critical (giroux, 1988) consciousness about what was really happening.  board president nan blake presented the ideological image that the dominant culture required of an organizational leader. her image was congruent with traditional organizational values of assertiveness, control, dominance, and power, but her image was inconsistent with gender roles in the organization. we contend that the usually successful dominant ideology failed in this situation, in part, because a woman took on a leadership role traditionally performed by males. in contrast, the roles of parents seeking to participate in decision-making were peripheral to the school precisely because women performed them. hegemony maintains the marginalization of parents in the gendered organization of schooling. school leaders view parents as mothers: uninformed, illegitimate, and ineffective outsiders. marginalized persons often attempt symbolic transvestitism to reflect the dominant ideology and gain access to power. symbolic transvestitism occurs when members of one gender group assume or put on the actions, language, and values of the other. we contend that institutional transvestitism cannot successfully present the ideology.  gender and gendered organizations "gendered position" (acker, 1990; connell, 1987; west & zimmerman, 1987), an important theoretical construct, indicates that "consciousness" and "the possibilities for experiences" (mclaren, 1989) are fundamentally different for women than men. gendered position also suggests that differences will endure as long as consciousness and "possibilities for experiences" are part of the substructure upon which those status positions are built.  if gender transcends the ideological process, we would expect to see it emerge in both the dominant and subordinate ideologies.  it did.  acker's (1990) notion of "gendered organizations" provided the analytic tool necessary to understand gendered positionality in this study. acker (1990) explains that a systematic theory of gender and organizations is necessary for two reasons.  first, organizational processes segregate by gender as well as income and status.  second, organizations invent and reproduce cultural images of gender and gender identity, particularly masculinity.  we add a third.  organizations are ubiquitous and retain the legal status of individual.  acker (1990), following connell (1987) and west and zimmerman (1987), defines gendered organizations: to say that an organization, or any other analytic unit, is gendered means that advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, and meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine.  gender is not in addition to ongoing processes, conceived as gender neutral.  rather, it is an integral part of those processes, which cannot be properly understood without an analysis of gender.  (p. 146) acker (1990) describes five interacting processes through which gendering occurs.  these processes serve as lenses for the analysis and interpretation of data in this study.  we examine each in the context of this case. the construction of divisions along lines of gender acker (1990) suggests that divisions along lines of gender include:  labor, allowed behaviors, locations in physical space, and power.  in this case, divisions along gender lines were obvious.  the entire administrative team was male.  one of the administrators is a self-described "mean son-of-a-bitch."  over the course of the previous five years, four female administrators left the district.  males, one of whom was not certified, replaced them.  the majority of teachers were female, and in the area of special services there were no male teachers. the four parents who confronted the board were female, as was the individual who filed the office of civil rights (ocr) complaint.  each of the organizers had supportive husbands but none of them participated in face-to-face activities.  the board president was a stay-at-home mom and substitute teacher who also filled in, on occasion, at her husband’s veterinary practice.  one businesswoman, a female hair stylist, and four local businessmen joined her on the board. the ocr sent three women to conduct interviews, review files, and write the final report for the initial ocr on-site investigation.  when a second complaint was filed, the ocr sent a male investigator.  other than criticizing the women, no administrator mentioned the situation throughout the two years of the study.  the male newspaper publisher wrote critical editorials about the board's response to the parents but these were gleaned from his female editor's extensive coverage. construction of allowable behaviors allowable behaviors for women do not include aggression.  it is unattractive.  the women’s tenacity and assertiveness and the board president’s aggression put their behavior outside traditional organizational expectations.  it was not aggression, per se, that elicited negative reactions; it was female aggression.  the women had a distinct advantage, however, over the board president.  they represented their families; nan blake represented the organization. family is a singular, fixed, and unchanging unit based upon consensual decision-making.  family enjoys the status of “agent” which, in effect, denies women individuality (glenn, 1985).  this shifts attention away from gender while still constructing allowable behaviors.  the closest one can come to understanding the idea of parent, someone who does the work of the family, is to think of a woman.  but families, not women, are the focus of theoretical speculation.  the idea of parent denies the explicit gender division that supports the family structure itself.  within the theoretical framework it is easy to understand parents’ contentiousness.  however, when those bolstered by the dominant ideology want to confront those who represent the subordinate ideology, it does not make sense to attack parents.  it makes more sense, as the board members and administrators discovered, to go after the atypical organizational behavior of these women.  administrators and board members criticized the women as impolite, assertive bitches.  on the other hand, the women were able to capitalize on nan blake’s behavior in her role as board president.  she too was cast as an unfeeling “bitch” who denied parents the right to voice concerns about their children.  on both sides, the contentious issue of parental participation in educational decision-making played out not on defensible, ethical grounds but on the ability of each side to capitalize on gendered expectations of traditional behavior within and around organizations. construction of organizational logic parents [read: women] can advocate for their families but cannot act within the organization of schooling because there is no role assigned for that function.  this organizational logic explains how parents' roles are excluded from educational organizations even though their very existence depends, in great measure, on parental satisfaction and support. in organizational logic, both jobs and hierarchies are abstract categories that have no occupants, no human bodies, no gender . . . .  the closest the disembodied worker doing the abstract job comes to a real worker is the male worker whose life centers on his full-time, life-long job, while his wife or another female takes care of his personal needs and his children.  the woman worker, assumed to have legitimate obligations other than those required by the job, did not fit with the abstract job. (acker, 1990, p. 149) since job is an implicitly gendered concept, organizational logic would not recognize any role for parents/women in the organization.  parents/women have no job description, no job, cannot be evaluated, and cannot be part of the hierarchy.  parents/women make no sense in an organizational context since their role is not rationally constructed as part of the organization. the board had denied a written request to establish a task force to investigate problems with special services.  the board president’s justification is a good example of organizational logic.  she wrote: one request of the parents, that of a task force, was denied by the board on three different occasions.  there were valid reasons for this denial.  special services is a sensitive, emotional area for many parents and children.  it would be difficult to create a task force of qualified persons who could make intelligent recommendations without a large amount of time and training in the area of special services.  the most recent committee of this type was that of establishing concepts of character education traits to be incorporated into the curriculum.  several years ago, an ad hoc (sic) committee was appointed to evaluate the facilities of the school district.  these types of committees have been used and will continue to be used in the future.  (personal communication, nan blake) the reasons for denying the request for a task force were based on obvious, gendered assumptions about parents/women and children -emotionality, sensitivity, and lack of sufficient intellect.  the president’s organizational logic presupposes gender neutrality when there is none.  that is, tasks or jobs can only be performed under direct control of the organization and meet the needs of the organization.  it was logical to form task forces that the board initiated but to deny one that would undermine its purposes. parental/women’s involvement "is not usually taken to mean participation in daily school activities, but in pta work or in home-based support for children's schoolwork" (david, 1989, p. 57).  it is women's work -volunteer work that supports the organization.  they serve the organization by supporting schools so that those inside the organization can perform their jobs.  when the women acted, they violated the implicit professional/lay boundary and defied the organizational logic that legitimated the gendered organizational structure.  the board and administrators had to stop the parents/women; they used organizational symbolism and imagery to do it. construction of symbols and images symbols and images “explain, express, and reinforce, or sometimes oppose" the division of labor along gender lines (acker, 1990, p. 146).  this study revealed linguistic symbolism that distinguished the school organization from the parents.  distinct techniques promoted vivid images of the organization and parents. parental images the board and administrators viewed parents' concerns as trivial, troublesome, and suspicious.  they met the women’s formal and informal requests with disdain and outright anger.  calling the four women "girls" at the november 15th board meeting stands out as a blatant example.  referring to the four women as "bitches" also exposes the administrators' gendered perception of the parents.  there were other, more subtle, efforts to construct a negative image of face-to-face generally, and the four women specifically. at one point in the november meeting, the only other female on the board left her chair, walked behind the women, and stood with her back to the audience.  she referred to them as "women" and put her hand on the shoulder of one of them.  she said to them, "you support each other, and that's what you need -like weight watchers and alcoholics anonymous -you're happy to reach success."  later on, the board president insinuated that the women were unable to accept the fact that their children function on a "low cognitive level" and are not "ld" (learning disabled). she looked directly at them and said, "i know this is hard to understand."  the superintendent quickly added, "administrators and teachers have to deliver bad news to parents.  they [parents] want to shoot the messenger."  the women were repeatedly told they were "wrong" or "not right."  one of the businessmen asserted that the community did not need the women to represent them. he said angrily, “there were people in the community who do have guts enough to stand up and speak their piece.”  these instances were systematic attempts to establish dominance.  board members and administrators demeaned them as women.  the women were not bright.  they needed support.  the board also disparaged them as parents.  the parents had handicapped children.  their children cost the district money. they did not accept their children's disabilities.  they questioned the school's practices, thereby handicapping their children further.  when all else failed, they metaphorically shot the educators who were trying to help.  this approach presented the district as blameless, thus avoiding accountability.  the board blamed the parents/women, characterizing face-to-face as a support group like aa rather than a grassroots advocacy group.  the women had the problem, not the organization. organizational images connell (1987) uses the term "hegemonic masculinity" to advance the idea that heterosexual, male sexuality legitimates organizational power formed around a dominance over women and in opposition to other masculinities.  “hegemonic masculinity is typified by the image of the strong, technically competent, authoritative leader who is sexually potent and attractive, has a family, and has his emotions under control" (acker, 1990, p. 153).  this image suited the superintendent. superintendent jones was an avid hunter.  the community viewed him as "a numbers man"; he referred to himself as “the boss.”  the superintendent's arrogance angered some community members.  during frequent conflicts with the board or community, mrs. jones and their four children were visibly at his side.  two female administrators resigned and jones replaced them with men, leaving no women on his administrative team. the superintendent visibly demonstrated his disdain for the four women of face-to-face and the local newspaper publisher.  natasha read’s husband overheard jones' conversation with a board member at the dew drop inn. the superintendent remarked that his problems were instigated by "four bitches and the prick at the newspaper.”  casting the parents as "bitches" and the publisher as a "prick" demonstrated the role of male heterosexuality in legitimating organizational power through domination of women and opposition of other masculinities (connell, 1987). superintendent jones appeared to be building a board that reflected the image of hegemonic masculinity, a pervasive theme in this study.  the board presented itself as strong, knowledgeable.  members experienced intense pressure for unanimity, avoidance of public dissent, and suppression of divergent views.  the board also used language and physical space to dominate. while the table arrangements were different at the november board meeting, the "hot seat" retained its symbolic power.  the four women sat in armless chairs with no table for their notes.  the control of language was evident from the beginning of the meeting when the president called the women “girls.”  the board worked from a typed script.  the president’s use of the first person plural was condescending:  "now we know our first step is to not call the state department," or "had we taken the proper channels."  the board members also ignored the women in order to suppress their challenge. the board vice-president used linguistic negotiation (bates, 1981) to mask issues.  for example, he changed the language contained in the written list of concerns in an effort to control perceptions.  "corrected" became "addressed"; "problems" became "allegations"; "tested" became "evaluated."  ironically, the newspaper had quoted the vice-president months earlier: “we need to convey to the community a sense and perception of openness.  the community views this board as very closed.” administrators and the board of education used linguistic negotiation to recast the problem in the eyes of the public.  instead of confronting the issue as a breakdown in communication, the administration and board painted the parents/women as problematic.  the paternalistic district leaders would help the parents/women deal with their problems.  when the parents rebuffed their help, the women became gendered "bitches."  when the newspaper publisher wrote editorials sympathetic to the parents, he became a gendered “prick at the newspaper.” interactions interactions make patterns of dominance and submission manifest, maintaining hegemonic organizations.  this study revealed a number of important gendered interactions, particularly the relationship between the superintendent and the board president.  community members dubbed board meetings, “the harry and nan show."  nan blake took her cues from superintendent jones, who was always obviously in charge.  at the november 15th meeting, dr. jones made only three brief statements; two invited by the president.  this was a substantial deviation from typical interactions at board meetings. a few years earlier, dr. jones, then assistant superintendent, sat silently as another female board president prevented the former superintendent’s attempt to terminate jones.  minutes later the superintendent and two board members quit in protest, and she moved to appoint dr. jones superintendent.  like nan blake, that board president was deposed.  given their status as supporters rather than actors, these women fulfilled their ideological role.  the superintendent efficiently tapped this hegemonic resource when it served his purpose.  he was not only a victimizer but, in the long run, also a victim of the "false generosity of paternalism" (freire, 1970, 1974, 1985).  silence takes on a new interpretation.  hegemony is always operating and it privileges hegemonic masculinities when it simply runs its course. the interaction between the board president and the four women was more complex.  the president assumed control, using interruption, insult, reprimand, and lecture to maintain control.  joan manson characterized it as “demeaning and repressive.”  nan blake was boss in every sense of the word.  she even acted without her usual deference to the superintendent.  the four women sat, listened, and left defeated, one in tears. the newspaper ran a large, front-page picture of the board president. jaw set, finger pointing like an angry teacher reprimanding students, she was gesturing to the four women sitting six feet from her. the community hotly debated the issue throughout the week.  after viewing a recording of the notorious november board meeting, two prominent men decided to run for the board  the fact that the board meeting worked against the organization seems to defy organizational logic.  all the elements necessary for the organization to retain its power were in place and operational.  they had control, but a woman exercised that control. organizational logic does not recognize females as legitimate sources of power.  women as victims is reasonable, a woman as victimizer is not.  symbolic transvestitism failed.  no matter how close nan blake came to looking and acting like the leader of the school district, she would never be ideologically legitimate (acker, 1990; connell, 1987; kanter, 1975; reskin & roos, 1987). individual identity individual identity is "consciousness of the other three aspects of gender, such as, in organizations, the choice of appropriate work, language use, clothing, and presentation of self as a gendered member of an organization” (reskin and roos, 1987, p. 147).  this study demonstrated "consciousness" in a number of individuals.  the board president made a conscious, carefully planned effort to lead the district through the difficult situation posed by the parents.  her use of symbolic transvestitism, something that the popular literature promotes as necessary for the success of female leaders, failed.  months later, when she reflected upon what had happened, she wrote about trying to establish her individual identity as it related to the organization: after much deliberation, i have decided to record some of my thoughts regarding the special services issue and my service on the board of education.  for several months, i have given a lot of consideration to these issues.  i have thought about them when i am cleaning house, when i am doing laundry, when i am preparing meals, when i am driving my car, when i go to bed at night, when i am in church -i say this only to indicate that my views have not come about lightly.  i have spent countless hours reviewing the entire situation. (personal communication, nan blake) nan blake's role in the organization was intimately tied to her role as a woman.  her role was to support hegemonic masculinity by deferring to the superintendent’s directives.  the editor of the newspaper characterized her as "dr. jones' puppet."  when jones recognized it was not in his interest to conduct meetings as usual, he silenced himself, creating the illusion that the president acted alone.  this required her to change her image.  she had to put on the symbolic accouterments that legitimated organizational leadership -hegemonic masculinity.  her own words revealed a "consciousness" of her identity that was not evident at the time she prepared for the meeting:  after the october meeting, the board decided that we would answer the questions and "stand up" for the district against the very strong and unfounded allegations stated by face-to-face.  a change that i would make in conducting the november meeting is that i would be more gentle with my comments.  the board had decided to present a "strong" front in support of the district -and perhaps i came on too "strong" and should have been less adamant about the insults to the entire district.  i guess i am human. i guess i was tired of listening to our administrators being insulted with unfounded allegations.  i guess i was tired of the negative press that the entire school was receiving.  i did not intend to come across so rude and uncaring, but apparently i was perceived as that way, and i feel badly about that perception...  (personal communication, nan blake) being "strong", "adamant" and "standing up" for the district made this woman feel "badly" because she was perceived as "rude and uncaring."  brownmiller (1984) provides insight into the ideology that guides assessments of feminine anger. [a]nger becomes the most unfeminine emotion a woman can show.  anger in a woman is "unattractive."  an angry woman is hard, mean, and nasty; she is unreliably, unprettily out of control...  the endless forbearance demanded of women, described as the feminine virtue of patience, prohibits an angry response. (p. 210) nan blake was angry that night in november.  the four women in the hot seat were patient and "ladylike." more compelling was blake's assumption that she failed because she was "human."  this suggests two things.  first, there may be, as acker (1990) suggests, a sense in which the organization employs abstract individuals to fill roles and is therefore beyond "humanness."  second, nan blake's humanness required that she not "stand up" or be "strong" and that she listen to the insults and the negative press.  nan blake came to the realization that her individual identity was constructed as a victim not as an agent. the four women provided another view of “consciousness.”  each recognized and worked within traditional ideological parameters.  the women appeared before the board as a group.  their spouses were present.  their demeanor at the meeting was not contentious.  their attempts to speak were abruptly rebuffed or ignored altogether.  the women were patient.  one of them cried.  another stated softly,  "we'll be back."  they seemed to understand, like the superintendent, that they would benefit when hegemony ran its course. the women were victims.  the community rallied not to support justice but to defend the women against the board, particularly the board president.  the women were able to use the sexist reaction to convince two prominent businessmen to run for the board of education.  the men won and the new board's first action was to depose nan blake.  this was a symbolic victory against those who defied the hegemony of gender.  none of the four women ever considered running for the board of education.  the spouse of one of them was appointed as a board member.  when asked why she did not consider running for the board herself she stated:  i don't work well with committees.  because i get up and cuss and i don't, i don't function well with five other assholes sittin' around a table.  i would rather be behind the scene and do what i do best and that's agitate.  every organization needs to have that loose cannon.  (personal communication, natasha read) in terms of individual identity and working within the ideological context, she was probably correct in assuming that she would not succeed in the forefront.  creation and conceptualization of social structures gender is a constitutive element in organizational logic that frames relations.  gendering underlies both theory and practice.  while organizations appear gender-neutral and use gender-neutral language, they are not.  "four parents and the publisher at the newspaper" is a description emerging from organizational logic veiled by theoretical inconsistency, and practical propriety.  "four bitches and a prick at the newspaper" is a description emerging from gendered organizational logic, theoretical integrity, and practical impropriety. the language to accommodate the strategies and activities of the four women is limited.  within the organization, individuals who did what the parents/women did would be seen as change agents, decision makers, or educational leaders.  but the women were not part of the organization.  they were parents/women with no job, no role, no rationale for participation in the organization.  they were not part of the social structures that constitute education.  gendering is seldom identified because there are few theoretical tools to explain how it operates in organizations generally.  this research examined how it operated in one organization specifically. summary the women from face-to-face and the board president used the only tools available -the tools of the organization.  one of the women said,  “what you need to do is to take their stick and beat them over the head with it.”  the term “bitch” became a rallying cry for those who defied the school system.  the “prick” was the “masculinity” that threatened the male administration.  gendering the women and the editor was the only way for superintendent jones to describe the relationship of the women and the publisher to the organizational culture.  the language that describes and explains organizational dynamics is theoretical.  the language that describes dynamics outside the organization's logic is sexual and offensive.  this makes it easy to ignore and explains the theoretical underdevelopment of the hegemony of gendered organizations. it is not surprising that hegemony of gender enabled the women to succeed in changing district leadership.  the confrontation would not have taken place had hegemony not been a key element in these events.  from the "consciousness" that emerged, the women recognized organizational hegemony and used it for their advantage.  for faceto-face, the goal was to gain a voice in the decision-making process.  for the superintendent and the board, it was to put the parents/women in their place by relying on hegemony of gender to sway public opinion away from four “bitches.”  the fundamental mistake was that the board and superintendent did not anticipate the full power of the hegemony of gender they confronted.  the superintendent and board president did not foresee that what was worse than four “bitches” was a symbolic transvestite.  nan blake simply did not possess the central quality that those who are victims of the hegemony of gender expect in leaders -maleness.   references acker, j.  (1990, june).  hierarchies, jobs, bodies: a theory of gendered organizations.  gender & society, 4(2), 139-158. belenky, m. f., clinchy, b. m., goldberger, n. r., and tarule, j. m. (1986).  women’s ways of knowing: the development of self, voice, and mind.  new york: basic books. brown, l. (1985). people-centered development and participatory research. harvard educational review, 55 (1), 69-75. brownmiller, s.  (1984).  femininity.  new york:  ballantine books. codd, j.  (1982).  some ethical problems in special education.  australian journal of special education, 6, 8-14. connell, r. w.  (1987).  gender and power.  stanford, ca; stanford university press. david, m. e.  (1989).  schooling and the family.  in h. h. giroux & p. mclaren (eds.), critical pedagogy, the state and cultural struggle.  (pp. 50-65).  new york:  suny press. denzin, n.  (1978).  the research act: a theoretical introduction to sociological methods, (2nd ed.), new york:  mcgrawhill. fals-borda, 0. (1979). investigating reality in order to transform it: the colombia experience. dialectical anthropology, 4, 33-35. foley, d., levinson, b.a. & hurtig, j. (2001). anthropology goes inside: the new educational ethnography of ethnicity and gender. review of research in education 25, 37-98. freire, p. (1974). education for critical consciousness. new york: seabury. freire, p. (1970). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: the seabury press. gaventa, j. (1988). participatory research in north america.  convergence, 24 (2-3):19-28. gramsci, a.  (1971).  selections from prison notebooks.  q. hoare & g. smith (eds. and trans.), new york: international publishers.  giroux, h. a.  (1988).  teachers as intellectuals:  toward a critical pedagogy of learning.  massachusetts:  bergin & garvey publishers, inc.   guba e. & lincoln, y.  (1985).  naturalistic inquiry.  newbury park:  sage publications. hall, b. (1981). participatory research, popular knowledge and power: a personal reflection. convergence, 16 (3), 6-17. hearn, j., sheppard, d. l., tancred-sheriff, p., and burrell, g. (1989). the sexuality of the organization.  newbury park, ca: sage. jones, k. b. (1988).  on authority:  or, why women are not entitled to speak.  in i. diamond & l. quinby (eds.), feminism and foucault:  reflections on resistance.  boston, ma:  northeastern university press. kanter, r. moss.  (1975).  women and the structure of organization:  explorations in theory and behavior.  in r. kanter & m. millman (eds.), another voice.  new york:  doubleday. lecompte, m.d and schensul, j.j. (1999). analyzing and interpreting ethnographic data. walnut creek, ca: altamira.  lee, s. (2000). root out of a dry ground: resolving the researcher/researched dilemma. in j. zeni (ed.) ethical issues in practitioner research (pp.61-71). new york: teachers college press. mclaren, p. l.  (1989).  on ideology and education:  critical pedagogy and the cultural politics of resistance.  in h. a. giroux & p. mclaren (eds.), critical pedagogy, the state and cultural struggle.  (pp. 174-202).  new york:  suny press. marshall, c. (1992).  the assistant principal; leadership choices and challenges.  newbury park, ca: corwin. marshall, c. (2000). the emperor and research on women in school leadership: a response to julie laible's loving epistemology. qualitative studies in education, 13(6), 699-704. noddings, n. (1984). caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. berkeley, ca: university of california press. noddings, n. (1992). the challenge to care in schools: an alternative approach to education. new york, ny: teachers college press. reskin, b. & roos, p.  (1987).  status hierarchies and sex segregation.  in c. bose & g. spitze (eds.), ingredients for women's employment policy.  albany: suny press. shakeshaft, c. (1989).  women in educational administration, updated ed.  newbury park, ca: sage shakeshaft, c. (1998).  wild patience and bad fit: assessing the impact of affirmative action on women in school administration.  educational researcher, 27(9), 10-12. smith, l. & geoffrey, w. (1968).  the complexities of an urban classroom: an analysis toward a general theory of teaching.  new york, ny: holt, rinehart, and winston. sohng, s. (1995).  participatory research and community organizing. paper presented at the new social movement and community organizing conference, university of washington, seattle, wa.   tandon, r. (1981). participatory research in the empowerment of people. convergence, 24 (3), 20-29. west c. & zimmerman, d.  (1987).  doing gender.  gender & society.  1, 125-151. yeakey, c., johnston, g., & adkinson, j. (1986).  in pursuit of equity: a review of research on minorities and women in educational administration.  educational administration quarterly, 22(3), 110-149. young, m. (2000). considering (irreconcilable?) contradictions in cross-group feminist research. qualitative studies in education, 13(6), 629-660. young, m. & laible, j. 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higher education since 1970: the more things change, the more they stay the same eugenia proctor gerdes, ph. d. bucknell university senior women looking back over their careers noted the increased presence of women, changes in policies or behavior, and/or improvements in beliefs or attitudes. however, almost half also noted family problems that remain for women, and about two-thirds described biases against women that remain a part of higher education today. women who began academic careers in the united states in the early 1970s have witnessed and experienced dramatic changes. these changes since the early 1970s were stimulated by application of affirmative action to higher education (astin & snyder, 1982), commissions on women (glazer-raymo, 1999), and, perhaps more subtly, by the development of women's studies (beck, 1990) and the gradual incursion of feminist perspectives across disciplines. any woman whose career spans the period from the early 1970sto the present can recognize the increased numbers of women in faculty and academic administrative positions. from 1976 to 1997, the combined number of women faculty members and women in higher education executive-administrative-managerial positions more than doubled. in the same time span, women as a percentage of full-time employees increased from 25% to 36% of full-time faculty members, and from 26% to 45% of full-time executive-administrative-managerial positions (national center for education statistics, 1998, 2001). attitudinal changes both allow such changes in numbers and follow from them, and of course the whole academic culture changes as the percentages of men and women change. the changes in numbers have been very gradual, however, and it is unclear how salient the differences in file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer2006/index.html higher education are to women who themselves are immersed in the academic environment. at a time when younger academic women could take improvements for granted, it is particularly important to determine whether senior women, who are able to compare the past and present, perceive women's current situation as equitable or as still necessitating redress. the concepts "glass ceiling" (see morrison, white, van velsor, & center for creative leadership, 1987) and "chilly climate" (see sandler, 1986) still are well-understood and frequent depictions of structural and attitudinal constraints impeding women's progress in academe. but, are they still applicable? recent books and articles about women in higher education administration bear titles including alarming phrases, such as "stranger in a strange land" (north, 1991), "against the tide" (walton, 1996), and "cracking the wall" (mitchell, 1993). books and articles about women in the faculty similarly describe "outsiders in the sacred grove" (aisenberg & harrington, 1988), "ivy halls and glass walls" (bronstein, rothblum, & solomon, 1993), and "women and minorities in peril" (tack & patitu, 1992); encourage "storming the tower" (lie & o'leary, 1990), "arming athena" (collins, chrisler, & quina, 1998), and "lifting a ton of feathers" (caplan, 1994); and admonish women to "shatter the ceilings, polish the floors" (deangelis, 1995). these sources and others (e.g., christman, 2003; glazer-raymo, 1999; glazer, bensimon, & townsend, 1993; glazer-raymo, townsend, & ropers-huilman, 2000; johnsrud & heck, 1994; ransom & megdal, 1993; simeone, 1987) use anecdotal accounts, national statistics, or surveys of background and job characteristics to describe women's obstacles as well as headway against them. yet, there are few compilations of systematically collected self-reports describing how women experience the current higher education environment. the most relevant of those are discussed below. aisenberg and harrington (1988) interviewed 25 tenured women and 37 women who had been deflected from the normal tenure-track career path in both groups, the authors found the same themes of "professional marginality and exclusion from the centers of professional authority," which they attributed to the persistence of "social norms that are constructed to cast women in subordinate, supportive roles in both their private and their public lives" (p. xi). it is significant that these women still felt unfairly marginalized in spite of higher education's apparent acceptance of newer norms of equal opportunity, but it is also important to note that the interviews for this study occurred in 1983-84, so the situation could have improved in later years. in the early 1990s, walton (1996) asked 20 women leaders of british and american institutions to write accounts of their career paths, addressing common questions including hindrances they had experienced. many of these women began their careers well before 1970. although most acknowledge a sense of going against traditional expectations of women ("against the tide") in their rise to the top positions, their accounts emphasize individual circumstances and their success and personal style rather than perceptions of higher education or changes in academia over their careers. astin and leland (1991) collected case studies of three generations of women educational leaders (77 altogether). their study arose from a 1983 conference of the middle cohort, instigators, whose leadership from the 1960s to mid-1970s resulted in legal and institutional changes benefiting women in higher education and society at large. their younger inheritors began to assume leadership in the mid-1970s and reported greater support, role models, and mentoring (often from instigators). like the earlier cohorts, inheritors reported discriminatory experiences, at least early in their careers. the authors' treatment of the inheritors is primarily in terms of comparison to the earlier cohorts, so the date of the most recent situations they have described is not clear, although it must be somewhat before the 1991 publication date, at which point most inheritors were in their early to mid-forties. at that time, all three cohorts of educational leaders expressed their concerns about several continuing problems they perceived for women: subtle discrimination; isolation and non-acceptance within the traditional male hierarchy; balancing family, work, and personal agendas; economic issues, including pay inequities and child care; and confusion related to feminist identity. as part of a larger project on the socialization of junior faculty, tierney and bensimon (1996) interviewed 99 junior tenure-track women on 12campuses during 1992-93 and 1993-94. they explored the hiring process and the reception of the new faculty member once hired and concluded that these women generally face a climate that does not support or affirm them, due primarily to unconscious sexism that persists in the traditionally male academic environment. many women reported difficulty being included by male colleagues and felt that acceptance required their acting unduly good-natured and helpful. those with family concerns often felt they had to hide this aspect of their lives. junior women who were in situations with a critical mass of female colleagues tended to report a more favorable situation. tierney and bensimon (1996) argue that the typically non-supportive climate for women and their reactions to the institutional culture are related to previously demonstrated gender differences such as higher attrition, lower tenure and promotion rates, and lower productivity for women. the experiences of these junior women are important, but it is unclear to what extent their experiences are dependent on their insecure junior status, and new entrants to higher education cannot by themselves demonstrate whether women's situation has improved or remained constant. washburn (2004) compared the concerns expressed in 1988 and 1997 by women professors at a midwestern research institution. following the 1988 survey, the institution made visible efforts to address women’s concerns. the women responding in 1997 expressed fewer concerns than in 1988 in every category. only 5% expressed concerns about number and distribution of women faculty and only 8% about institutional support in 1997. although concerns in all other categories also had dropped dramatically since 1988, sizable percentages of respondents still expressed concerns in 1997 about promotion and tenure processes (22%), salary (23%), women’s influence and power (29%), institutional response to worklife issues (34%), and general climate (46%). furthermore, washburn’s analyses of statistics available in these areas indicated that the respondents’ 1997 perceptions overestimated the improvement in their situation relative to 1988 and relative to national data. washburn argues that the university’s visible actions to address grievances affected many women’s experience and, consequently, their career satisfaction, in spite of little demonstrated improvement. although limited to a single institution and a short time period, washburn’s study illustrates the importance of considering experience as well as statistics in assessing the change in women’s situation in higher education. although each of these studies makes its own contribution to understanding whether higher education is approaching parity for women, it seems important to add reports from a broad sample of senior women who observe the current environment from a variety of academic positions, and to gather these reports before the women who began careers in the 1970s begin to retire. consequently, the purpose of the current study is to document senior women's own experiences of the most important changes during their careers and of the most important areas in which parity has not been achieved. qualitative methodology seems most appropriate to investigate experience (see kimmel, 1989). rather than providing a structured questionnaire with forced choices that would have directed women to answers which the author thought might be important, this study employed open-ended questions asking respondents to describe their own careers. however, in contrast to the previous qualitative work using interviews or questionnaires, cited above, this study demonstrates the connection of the conclusions to the data by presenting the results of the content analyses rather than presenting the conclusions alone. the respondents included both faculty members and those administrators whose careers typically begin with doctoral degrees and faculty positions. method survey using a snowball sampling technique (patton, 1990), i distributed a letter of explanation and an open-ended questionnaire by electronic mail to women identified through listsers of academic deans and higher education administrators, through multi-disciplinary lists of faculty members, and through acquaintances at my own and other institutions. faculty women and academic administrators or other administrators who began with faculty positions were invited to answer the questions and/or to forward the explanation and questions to others who might do so. those who assumed their first positions in higher education in the 1970s or a few years earlier were particularly encouraged to participate. a series of open-ended questions asked respondents to describe positive and negative experiences early in their careers and in their current work. the two questions relevant to the current report appeared at the end of the questionnaire and asked respondents to address directly the most important changes and unchanged factors they had observed: 1) more generally, in what ways do you believe that the situation for women has changed over the time of your career in your current institution and other institutions in which you have worked in higher education in general? 2) are there important issues for women in your institutions or in higher education in general that have not changed over the course of your career? what are the most important of these? respondents most respondents replied by electronic mail, several sent answers by regular mail, and three asked for telephone interviews, in which case they simply gave their answers to the same questions orally to the author. useable responses were obtained from 98 women. of these respondents, 11 were current or recent presidents or chancellors; 40 were academic deans, vpaa/provosts, or their associates working in academic or faculty affairs; 9 were other administrators; and 38 were faculty members. respondents’ disciplinary backgrounds spanned the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences including medicine. they were located across the country (plus several in canada) and at institutions that represented every carnegie classification and that included some women’s colleges. respondents were invited to identify characteristics besides gender (such as ethnic background) that might have affected their treatment, but few did so. it must be assumed that most are white. although 96% had received doctoral or terminal m.f.a. degrees, a good number of the participating women began academic positions before obtaining the doctorate. other women received their final degrees well before they sought or were able to obtain a full-time position, so either date of degree or date of first academic job could mark the start of the academic career. only five had not received their highest degree or begun an academic job before 1980. moreover, the distribution of starting dates was skewed toward the late 1960s and early1970s; 84% of the women in this study either received their highest degree or began an academic job by 1976. qualitative analysis each question was analyzed separately. both questions invited respondents to indicate multiple elements that had changed or not changed for women, so each respondent’s answer was broken into separate elements where the respondent appeared to shift to a new point. as is often suggested for qualitative analysis (e.g., marshall & rossman, 1995; patton, 1990), an inductive process was used to determine categories that were distinct and internally consistent. that is, the categories were determined by first skimming the answers to determine preliminary categories. the separated elements were then placed into the larger categories with new categories added when points did not fit the existing categories, and with categories combined when points appeared to fit in either of two categories. the wording used by respondents was maintained in the categorization process to facilitate such changes in categories, as well as to describe the separable types of issues (subcategories) identified in each category. each point made by a respondent was placed into only one major category, so the percentage of respondents who reported a change in that category could be calculated by dividing the number of respondents represented in that category by the total number of respondents answering the question. each separable point also was placed into only one subcategory within a category, but a single respondent could have several different points classified into different subcategories in the same category. in fact, a distinction made by respondents frequently was the rationale for maintaining separate subcategories for closely related points, even though this resulted in many small subcategories. results and discussion changes all 98 respondents answered the question requesting that they describe changes over the course of their careers, and all but two respondents identified some changes. they typically mentioned one to four changes, a few mentioned more. for example, in one of the fullest answers, an academic associate dean with responsibility for several university-wide programs answered, the changes for women have been significant. affirmative action in the academy has had an effect. a more open and democratic process of evaluation and review also has changed things significantly having more women in professional positions has halted the “token woman” issues at least in the arts and sciences. there seems to be more support and understanding for family issues. not surprisingly, certain changes appeared in many answers, often with similar wording. it was possible to categorize the separate changes cited into five broad categories: general, increased numbers or access, changes in policies or behavior, changes in beliefs or attitudes, and professional, disciplinary, or scholarly influences as stated previously, each separate change cited by a respondent was placed in only one of these major categories. for example, from the associate dean’s answer above, significant changes was placed in the general category, too many professional women to be "tokens” was placed under increased numbers or access, affirmative action was categorized under changes in policies or behavior as was open and democratic evaluation, and support and understanding for family issues was placed under changes in beliefs or attitudes. in these women's opinions, higher education definitely has changed during the course of their careers (see table 1). the majority mentioned increased numbers of women or increased access to positions. a sizable percentage thought of the changes in terms of either improvement in explicit policies or behavior or improvement in beliefs or attitudes, or both. a description of the answers in each category follows. (numbers in parentheses represent number of respondents, except where explicitly identified as percentages.) general. general answers were those that stated change had occurred without specifying the area changed; general changes were mentioned by 38% of respondents (37 women). using the women’s own terminology to form subcategories of equivalent or similar answers, the most frequently assigned subcategories were those that contained comments mentioning increased opportunities (10 women); stated that there were significant, dramatic, or massive changes (12); or gave more qualified responses that conditions were somewhat, generally, marginally better, or only more flexible (9). in less frequently assigned subcategories, two women each described the change as a less bad situation in terms of lower barriers/easier times, or qualified the change as being greater earlier than recently. one woman commented that the situation had already been good in women’s colleges, and one that the situation had improved dramatically in previously all male institutions. professional, disciplinary, or scholarly influences. only eight women (8%) thought to answer this question in terms of professional, disciplinary, or scholarly influences. two women mentioned the impact of women’s studies, and one each mentioned the related and overlapping areas of student interest in women’s studies, interest in women’s history, interdisciplinary scholarship on gender/race/class, women’s interests impacting teaching and scholarship, institutions wanting courses and scholarship on women, disciplines being more open to women scholars, growth of women’s areas in disciplines, support from professional women’s associations, and scholarship on academic women’s experience. (more than eight specific changes are listed because some women mentioned more than one subcategory of change that fit this category, as is true in the other categories as well.) increased numbers or access. the majority of the respondents (53%; 52 women) mentioned one or more changes that were categorized as increased numbers or access to positions. the most frequent subcategories were those containing answers that referred to more women in general or without specifying in what areas (14); more women, hiring access, or critical mass in the faculty (14); more senior women or leaders (10); more women administrators (9); more tenured women or full professors or senior critical mass (6); and more or more varied mentors or role models (5). answers from two or three women each were placed in subcategories that referred to more women as graduate students and doctorates, students in traditionally male fields or schools, and faculty in traditionally male fields. most other answers were more specific versions of the frequent answers. one to three women each referred to more opportunities to advance or for senior positions, more senior administrators, more faculty leaders, more senior positions in professional organizations, too many professional women to be tokens, and more networks or informal support groups. quite a few women mentioned more than one subcategory of changes in this category. changes in policies or behavior. the category changes in policies or behavior was used for the respondents’ perceptions of overt, observable changes in institutions’ policies or individuals’ behavior toward women; 41 women (42%) mentioned such changes. the most frequently assigned subcategories were the overall response of less blatant discrimination or sexist behavior (12) and references to affirmative action or changes in search practices (8). three similar responses noted simply that women are sought for jobs. all other answers fell into small subcategories of one to four answers, which could be loosely grouped. more general policy advances were cited by one to three women each: less discriminatory policies; equal opportunity or legal protection; gender equity initiatives; institutional protection/remediation/back-up for women; and the fact that the infrastructure has been developed, trails blazed, or roads paved. in addition to the large subcategory of less blatant discrimination and sexist behavior above, more equitable treatment was mentioned by one to three women each in terms of women being treated better, equitably in some cases, or equally; compensation being more equitable or equal; equal opportunities for advancement; more open, democratic evaluation; more recognition for women’s achievements; and more equitable assignments. improved policies related to family or timing in women’s careers that were mentioned by two to four women each included family-friendly policies in general, childbearing/rearing or family leave, and tenure-clock policies. somewhat different overt changes mentioned by one or two women each were governance being changed by women’s interests, mentoring programs and programs for women, men contributing more to family duties, less sexual harassment and greater willingness of women to complain, and women’s making public complaints about inequity. changes in beliefs or attitudes. reported changes in sensitivity, perceptions, or acceptance regarding women in higher education, including women’s own beliefs and attitudes, were classified as changes in beliefs or attitudes. one or more changes fitting this category were offered by 42 women (43%). none of the specific types of changes were reported by more than four women. although these perceived changes could be grouped loosely, differences in respondents’ terminology made it difficult to combine these responses into subcategories without losing information. quite a few women’s answers contained two closely related statements that they clearly intended as different points. the distinctions these women were making would have been lost if only larger subcategories were presented. because the whole point of this study was to hear these women's own voices, it was not appropriate to combine these small subcategories into larger subcategories. therefore, larger groupings of subcategories are presented in table 2, but with the smaller subcategories maintained. a single woman could be counted in more than one subcategory in each grouping but only once in each specific subcategory. these women’s perceptions of changes in beliefs and attitudes could be loosely grouped as changes in sensitivity, lessened prejudice against women, improved attitudes specifically toward women’s advancement, changes in women’s selfperceptions, and changes in attitudes toward family issues. the 42 women represented in table 2 made 54 separate statements about their perceptions of changes in beliefs and attitudes toward women. interrelationships. although the separate factors salient to the respondents in formulating their own statements of changes are interesting, it is important to note that some answers referred to important interrelationships among categories. for example, the listing of increased numbers of women, even of mentors, probably underemphasizes the degree to which the respondents saw the whole environment as consequently changed. a woman who had held positions in several administrative divisions at her institution commented, "…as more women have assumed leadership positions and been successful, the overall situation for women was bound to be affected." one president wrote, there are many more opportunities now for women. at [my university], 50% or more of our faculty hires are women. men and women are tenured at equal rates and more and more women are being tapped for significant administrative roles. i am very pleased to see these changes and believe they will only enhance opportunity for women at all levels. the effect of numbers on treatment were addressed by the chair of a science department at a master's institution who pointed out, there are more women colleagues. for whatever reason (it might just be that you end up talking in the bathroom), women tend to interact in groups just as men have traditionally done. also in meetings men are more apt to use sexist language and behavior if you are the only woman in the room than if there are more women present. thus by having more women colleagues, men are at least superficially more respectful. another woman scientist at a baccalaureate college stated, "the sheer numbers have changed things for the better. it is not acceptable in most circles to discriminate openly, and it is even difficult for hard-line women haters to find excuses to keep women out." a woman in the humanities at a baccalaureate college noted the relationship between having "more voices and more voice." another humanities professor at a canadian institution commented, "there are more of us, we are more 'at home' in the professions and the institutions, and our interests (the whole range from private to public) have impacted considerably on scholarship, teaching, and university governance." similarly, those who mentioned legal changes probably viewed them as important determinants of other changes, whether or not they made the connection explicit. and those who mentioned less blatant discrimination probably recognize its illegality as a factor. a dean at a master's institution stated, "...laws and their implementation have changed, so searches, affirmative action initiatives, sexual harassment, discrimination, salary differentials, etc. have been impacted in turn." perceptions of causal relationships cannot be established by a study of this sort, but several respondents implicitly acknowledged their complexity. one president included numbers of women, knowledge of women's situation, and laws as determinative: most obviously, there are many more mentors for women these days and much more has been studied and written about the experience of women in academe. it's hard to emerge from graduate school, in particular, without a keen understanding of the challenges ahead and also the resources available. more women occupy senior roles and provide models for others as well as the ability to change institutional cultures. the importance of women's studies is well established. affirmative action has much to do with this positive evolution. consistent with this answer, the belief that women have helped themselves is implicit in many of the answers about numbers (especially answers involving critical mass, women leaders in faculty and administration, and mentoring or role models) and in the few answers about disciplinary changes. qualifications. it is important to note that quite a few respondents added qualifications to the positive changes they described, such as "still not where should be" or "still a ways to go," in some cases even adding factors that were more appropriate for the next question on the questionnaire dealing with unchanged factors (these statements were included in the results for that question, which was analyzed separately). one president's comment, "obviously, women are more frequently (but not that much more frequently) in positions of leadership" was typical of these qualifications. many such comments were made about senior positions in the faculty or administration, and the persistence of an “old boys’ network.” an associate provost at a research university gave this less-than-enthusiastic description of changes: “many more institutions now consider women as appropriate candidates for senior positions; in some cases, women are treated equitably. my current institution is on the low end of the equitable continuum.” also typical was the distinction between a decrease in blatant discrimination and the persistence of subtle discrimination, and several respondents commented that progress has lagged for women who are in traditionally male fields or who are not white, middle class, and heterosexual. concern about whether improvements for women are secure was explicit in several answers. a scientist at a women's institution commented, "gender bias became more subtle, though it did not disappear. i think it is becoming more overt again." a dean at a women's college put her concerns in terms of affirmative action: generally there are more women around and in roles of leadership. how they/we got here was at least partly affirmative action. i am troubled at how fast and to what extent society's support for affirmative action has shifted—and what this may mean in terms of few opportunities for women and minorities. another dean referred to the financial situation of higher education, "but it could go bad, with retrenchment —no hiring and the over-reliance on lecturers." one humanities professor's description of changes illustrates the "yes, but" nature of many of the responses: “more of us, but not enough more. individual situations may be better, different, whatever...but collectively we still fight the same battles, struggle with the same struggles." the areas about which these women are most pessimistic are illustrated by their answers to the second question with which this article deals. constancies three respondents omitted the question on issues for women that had not changed; 95 gave answers, typically citing one to four factors that they considered unchanged. as for the first questions, using the same process and with the same qualifications, these answers were classified into six broad categories: general, constraints, areas with underrepresentation of women, behaviors or self-perceptions that disadvantage women, family issues, and bias. as evident in table 3, four of these categories had low numbers of responses. general and constraints. of the women answering this question, a few (10%; 9 women) included general comments, on the one hand that there are many unchanged factors (3) or the same battles and struggles (1), or on the other hand that all important factors had changed (4), that changes were massive and continuing (1), or that improvements were more obvious than deficiencies (1). a few (5%; 5 women) cited one or more constraints to change that did not fit into other categories and some of which were unrelated to gender. of these, two cited tight budgets or retrenchment and one each cited competitive organizational politics, misanthropic public officials, lack of philanthropists supporting women, women and men speaking different dialects, and violence and the need for peace in the world. areas with underrepresentation of women. areas with underrepresentation of women were salient to about one-quarter of the respondents (23 women; 24%), in spite of the overall impression of increased numbers of women in higher education. the most frequently assigned subcategories contained statements that cited these underrepresented areas: leadership positions or administrators (6), high level administrators (6), and faculty members in nontraditional areas (5). other underrepresented areas were identified by only one or two respondents each: tenured or full professors/senior faculty, minority women, chaired professorships or positions of honor, senior faculty in nontraditional areas, chairs or administrators in nontraditional areas, women (and men) of color in administration, lower class women in administration, senior administrators in finance, board of trustee members, and mentors. many of these less frequently cited areas are more specific versions of the most frequent responses in this category. in summary, those who gave responses in this category expressed an awareness that progress for women has been uneven or at least slower to reach more competitive positions and women who are not white, middle class, or in traditionally female areas. behaviors or self-perceptions that disadvantage women. a smaller number of women cited self-perceptions that limit women's success or skills they find lacking in women. behaviors or self-perceptions that disadvantage women were identified by 16 respondents (17%). three respondents mentioned women thinking their spouses’ careers were more important. self-esteem issues were mentioned by two women. other areas were noted by one woman each: being committed to teaching and service, not being selfish enough to protect one’s own creative work, lacking negotiation skills, being less assertive than men, being more careful that one can support one’s position than men, difficulty exercising non-feminine leadership, graduate school not preparing women for faculty positions, more women dropping out of graduate school, feeling stress over family and work demands, competitiveness and mistrust among women, and young women being unaware of gender’s role in society. not surprisingly, most of the traits cited are related to traditional gender role socialization. some are not negative in the abstract but only in the context of skills needed in a traditionally masculine profession. family issues. family issues were cited by almost half of the women answering this question (43 women; 46%), with a high degree of overlap in the answers. the most frequently assigned subcategory was balancing career and family demands or personal and professional demands, which were mentioned explicitly by 20 women. other closely related subcategories were childcare problems (12), childbearing/childcare leave and family policies (5), conflict of the childbearing/rearing and tenure clocks (6), more being expected of women relative to childcare and the home (6), institutions’ expectations assuming no family work (4), the need for different career paths or policies such as flex time (5), and two-career couples and partner hiring policies (4). one respondent mentioned each of the following difficulties for women: having to make choices not required of men, lacking wives, being slowed down in their careers unless they have unusual husbands or hired help, lacking mobility, being noticed for family time rather than hard work in their career, bearing primary responsibility for eldercare, and lacking access to contraception and abortion. as one of two frequently cited areas that remain unchanged (the other being bias below), these family issues require further description. in these answers, many women cited responsibilities for childcare or the difficulty of balancing family and career as constraints that affect women more than they affect men. most of the family issues cited would apply to women in other careers as well; however, the fact that women are evaluated for tenure and are expected to demonstrate singular devotion to a career during their prime childbearing years is a problem specific to these higher education careers that begin with a faculty appointment. although many suggested that conflict between work and family roles was unsolvable given the reality of time constraints, others suggested that traditional expectations exacerbate the problems for women. the provost of a liberal arts college pointed out, if a male colleague (or even my husband) spends a little time doing childcare, he is praised, celebrated, loved; if a woman does childcare, it is just her job, nothing special. women still have to deal with the way that pregnancy and its aftermath interfere with a “normal” career trajectory. some respondents reported traditional gender expectations regarding the family as a problem for both men and women. as a scientist at a women's institution acknowledged, it is still not acceptable for fathers to be the primary care-givers or even to be active sharing care-givers— this is not an issue for women per se but for families. institutions have not changed their expectations of faculty, which may have been appropriate when women were unmarried or men had full-time wives at home, but are now unrealistic. and a few women made explicit their desires for more flexible policies. a scientist at a southern master's institution stated concerning maternity/paternity leave, my institution is not enlightened in this respect. there is no paternity leave and maternity leave, in the science area, is pretty much limited to six weeks with pay. if you are efficient enough to have your child during the summer, there is no leave. that meant that i taught full time after my son was born in the middle of august. the administration has seemed less willing to consider creative solutions to the maternity leave problem, such as a reduced load, followed or preceded by a heavy load. i think that the most likely solution to the problem will occur when a number of men start demanding paternity leave. such answers suggested that family-friendly policies could ameliorate some remaining family-work conflicts. bias. two-thirds of the respondents still perceive bias in higher education (65 women; 69%). a number of subcategories could be formed from repeated answers, but, as in other categories, some subcategories were quite specific and distinctive. although more women specifically identified salary inequity than any other factor (14), and several mentioned sexual harassment (4) or simply unfair treatment (3), most of their answers did not deal with overt discrimination. a large number of women reported some version of subtle bias intrinsic to higher education as a traditionally masculine enterprise. several women chose similar words to describe the remaining discrimination: subtle or underground discrimination (6); male rules, male standards, male hierarchy (6); glass ceiling (5); having to work harder or be better to succeed (5); and tenure, promotion, or advancement in rank being harder (4). the terminology selected by one to three women to describe a more specific area of bias also is illustrative and is shown in table 4. an attempt was made to arrange similar answers in close proximity to each other in this table. the 65 women represented in this table made 111 separate statements specifying areas of remaining bias. most of these respondents do not perceive remaining biases as blatant discrimination occurring across all situations, but as more subtle biases implicit in stereotypical expectations of women and in masculine institutional traditions that remain from a time when women were explicitly excluded, a time that most of these respondents can remember from the beginning of their careers. the difficulty of changing what is seen as the fundamental nature of the academy was expressed in a variety of ways. some expressed their disappointment at the failure of higher education to reach equity as might have been predicted from the rapid gains of the early 1970s. some suggested backsliding, as discussed in the section on reported changes. as a scientist in a northeastern baccalaureate institution indicated, …the appearance of equality is somewhat illusory. the same students (white males) who say that affirmative action is not needed because women can compete say that employers should be able to hire the person with whom they are most comfortable—and, although they do not say so openly, that is going to be another white male. it would be very easy to return to overt discrimination. conclusions although open-ended responses do not contain all the features that a respondent would agree are significant if she were asked specifically, they do indicate which aspects are most salient. this study demonstrates that women looking back over their own careers are aware of the dramatic changes for women in higher education since the early 1970s. the changes in numbers are dramatic enough to have been mentioned explicitly by over half of the respondents. like the educational leaders in the inheritor generation (astin & leland, 1991), these women, in a wide variety of academic positions, are aware that they benefit from the presence of other women in the academic workplace. beyond changes in numbers, these senior women believe that life is now easier for women in higher education than it was when their careers began. almost as many women mentioned improvements in overt behavior or explicit policies and improvements in attitudes toward women or women’s issues as mentioned increased numbers. if only the first question were considered, it might seem curious that women in this study were cognizant of dramatic changes but that so many gave qualified answers, describing areas of difficulty remaining for women. even most of the answers that did not list specific qualifications used terms such as “improvement,” “more,” or “better” to describe the changes, rather than claiming women now are treated or regarded equitably. this finding is, however, perfectly consistent with the fact that all but 4 of the 95 women (96%) answering the second question mentioned continuing disadvantages for women, including 69% who perceived remaining areas of bias against women. in fact, looking at the two questions together, one of the most striking findings is the consistent distinction made by many women between the reduction in overt, explicit discrimination and continuation of subtle, underground bias. in addition, almost half (46%) of the respondents mentioned difficult family issues for women, and areas with continuing underrepresentation of women were salient to almost a quarter (24%). these results are consistent with other questions answered by the same senior women. as described elsewhere, they reported a high level of stress in their own lives, often related to family issues and conflicts between other roles and career expectations (gerdes, spring 2003), and they offered younger women mixed advice, encompassing optimism due to improvements but also cautions or strategies for dealing with the problems still likely to affect women in academic careers (gerdes, 2003). the "outsider" status described by aisenberg and harrington (1988) and the problems identified by all three generations studied by astin and leland (1991) continue to be powerfully present as observed more recently by these 98 senior women. although the women professors surveyed by washburn (2004) in 1997 did not express concerns about underrepresentation of women, the current results are consistent with washburn’s respondents in other areas, particularly climate, worklife issues, and influence and power. unfortunately, younger women seem to be starting their careers with many of the same concerns (tierney & bensimon, 1996) without personally experiencing the improvements that are salient to senior women. although these studies that focus solely on women’s perceptions cannot demonstrate that women in higher education experience more problems than men in comparable positions, that conclusion is consistent with other findings from national surveys. for example, women's reactions to the academic climate were more favorable than in the past in the 1998-99 heri faculty survey national norms (sax, astin, korn, & gilmartin, 1999), but women still were less likely than men to believe female faculty were treated fairly, were more likely to report being sexually harassed, and reported more stress from subtle discrimination and the review and promotion process. in addition, women reported spending more time than men reported on household and childcare responsibilities, and reported more stress from managing household responsibilities and lack of personal time than men reported. these differences remained in the 2001-02 heri faculty survey results (lindholm, astin, sax, & korn, 2002). unfortunately, perceptions that significant obstacles remain for women in higher education are accurate. in terms of numbers, women continue to be underrepresented in traditionally male fields, the upper ranks of faculty and administrators, and more prestigious institutions (billard, 1994; glazer-raymo, 1999; nces, 1998, 2001, 2002; valian, 1998). further, the representation in these areas of women of color is extraordinarily low (nces, 2001, 2003). a fact that, ironically, might have been noted more frequently in the current study if the respondents had been a more racially diverse group. women also are disproportionately overrepresented in non-tenurable and part-time positions, and women continue to earn less than men in comparable situations (billard, 1994; glazer-raymo, 1999; nces, 1998, 2001, 2002; ransom & megdal, 1993; valian, 1998). the growth in numbers of women has arisen primarily from growth in the overall numbers of professional higher education employees (more than a 70% increase between 1976 and 1997) with a higher rate of increase for women than for men. changes since the early 1970s might seem dramatic because of the growth in numbers, but, given the time span, the increase in the percentage of positions held by women actually has been so gradual that the term "slow" is quite appropriate. according to nces (1998) statistics, the percentage of faculty (partand full-time combined) who were women grew only 6% from 1969 to 1979 and only 1% from 1979 to 1989. similarly, milheim and astin (1993) estimate only a 7% increase between 1972 and 1989. looking back over a longer time span, it is discouraging to realize that that the percentage of faculty (partand full-time combined) who were women did not regain the level of 1939 until 1979 and grew only 12% further (from 29% to 41%) by 1997 (nces, 1998, 2001). although the growth of women as a percentage of full-time faculty cannot be examined as far back, the full-time comparison is most relevant for the current study and indicates the same slow growth. although the increase in women as a percentage of full-time faculty from 25% in 1976 to 36% in 1997 was momentous, the fact that this change of 11% took 21 years makes it less impressive. the slow growth has continued since the senior women in the current study expressed their opinions in 1997, with the percentage of all faculty who are women increasing only an additional 1% and the percentage of full-time faculty who are women increasing a little more than 2% by 2001 (nces, 2003). women as a percentage of full-time executive-administrative-managerial employees also increased only a little over 2% between 1997 and 2001 (nces, 2003). moreover, it can be argued (collins, 1998) that women are losing ground in higher education in terms of the increasing gap between the number of women who hold doctorates and the number employed by institutions of higher education. consistent with the impression of many of the respondents, valian (1998) highlights the importance of increasing representation to lowering other barriers, arguing that “being in a minority increases a woman’s likelihood of being judged in terms of her difference from the male majority, rather than in terms of her actual performance” (p. 140). integrating experimental research and statistics on women in traditionally male occupations, including academia, valian concludes that women still lag behind men not because of their preparation, performance, or values but because of traditional gender schema and the accumulation of many small disadvantages, in other words because of subtle discrimination. benokraitis (1998) distinguishes individual subtle sex discrimination from organizational, institutional, and cultural subtle discrimination that can be addressed only by fundamental changes in colleges and universities and in higher education in general. along the same lines, tierney & bensimon (1996) argue that gender-neutral policies are not sufficient to eliminate discrimination, which would require "critical and gender-based appraisals of academic structures, practices, and policies as well as the elimination of language and interactions that create hostile, patronizing, or indifferent workplaces for women" (p. 76). nor is increasing numbers sufficient. glazer-raymo's (1999) careful analysis in shattering the myths: women in academe not only demonstrates that women's progress in numbers has been overestimated but also debunks the myth that women are gradually achieving equality in higher education as their numbers increase. as factors that actually could worsen the situation of women, glazer-raymo cites some of the same factors that concern the respondents: a political climate that is increasingly antifeminist, the backlash against affirmative action, and the corporatization of the university, including the increase in part-time and non-tenure track faculty who are disproportionately women. the women in the current study, most of them senior professors and administrators, know that they have come a long way—but certainly not all the way to equal opportunity in higher education. coming from many different backgrounds and doing their different jobs in their different institutions, these women personally have observed and experienced many of the very problems identified by feminist scholars who study higher education. they do not believe the struggle is over. and the nature of the struggle does appear to remain the same, in spite of the progress. these senior academic women would agree with alphonse karr, who stated over 100 years ago, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” references aisenberg, n., & harrington, m. 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(2004, spring). appeasing women faculty: a case study in gender politics. advancing women in leadership journal, 16. retrieved july 23, 2004, from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/spring2004/washburn.html author dr. eugenia p. gerdes is professor of psychology and dean of the college of arts and sciences, bucknell university. note the author wishes to thank those busy women who gave generously of their time to participate in the study. portions of this paper were presented as “progress since 1970? academic women’s perceptions of changes” at the 12th annual international conference on women in higher education, charleston, sc, january 2-5, 1999 and as “women in higher education administration: how much progress?” at the american association of university women’s college/university symposium, washington, dc, june 1719, 1999. table 1 changes in the situation for women over the course of respondents' careers changes percentage of respondents reporting this change general 38% increased numbers of women or increased access 53% changes in policies or behavior 42% changes in beliefs or attitudes 43% professional, disciplinary, scholarly influences 8% table 2 changes in beliefs or attitudes (reported by 43% of respondents) grouping number of women reporting this change general statements of changes in sensitivity awareness, understanding of gender issues 2 efforts to be sensitive, proactive regender issues 2 change in institutional culture, climate 3 women less special now 1 lessened prejudice against women disapproval of discrimination 1 appreciation of value of diversity 2 women more accepted, respected 2 less stereotyping of women 2 less male standard, need to fit male model 2 female students and aspirations more respected 1 women more valued/listened to, more voice 2 women viewed as equal partners in educating 1 integrated, viewed as colleagues before women 3 not considered as tokens 1 women seen as chosen for their quality 1 feminist scholarship more respected 1 willing for students to value female perspective 1 (table continues) students not "put off" by women professors 1 greater awareness of sexual harassment 1 improved attitudes toward women’s advancement receptive to women in authority, leadership 4 accept women candidates for senior positions 1 successful women admired, not aberration 1 expect women to want to excel 1 changes in women’s self-perceptions women don't feel different from norm 1 reality check with other women possible 1 less feeling of isolation, vulnerability 3 don’t have to be "first woman to," exemplar 2 women more at home in professions, institutions 1 women expect acceptance in nontraditional field 1 graduate students feel more powerful 1 women understand challenges in higher education 1 changes in attitudes toward family issues women seen as able to handle job & parenting 1 women expected to use daycare 1 support, understanding for family issues 2 husbands more understanding 1 recognition of need for diverse career paths 1 table 3 factors in the situation for women that have remained constant over the course of the respondents’ careers unchanged factors percentage of respondents reporting this factor general 10% areas with underrepresentation of women 24% family issues 46% bias 69% behaviors or self-perceptions that disadvantage women 17% constraints 5% table 4 remaining areas of bias (reported by 69% of respondents) area of bias number of respondents reporting this bias unfair treatment 3 diligence necessary to preserve gains 2 remaining salary inequities 14 hiring, higher ability required for woman 2 hiring in chauvinistic departments 1 hiring into temporary vs. tenure-track 1 lack of diversity in administration & staff 1 old boy network 2 tradition inhibits diversity, equity 2 subtle discrimination, underground 6 overall climate for women 2 women still isolated, not seen as true colleagues 1 male rules, male standards, male hierarchy 6 linear, analytic way of knowing seen as superior 1 faculty discourse masculine, combative 1 exceptional women separated out for acceptance 1 excellence less expected of women nationally 1 less respect 1 women professors less respected by students 1 (table continues) not respected if attentive to women’s issues 1 women's issues trivialized as "special" 1 women expected to conform to feminine stereotypes 1 women never thought of first to do something 1 ideas of women discounted, not taken seriously 2 not seen as competent, able to lead as men 3 lack credibility as administrators 1 men confused about how to treat women leaders 1 women not trusted for tough questions 1 men think female colleagues poor at quantitative 1 women not trusted fiscally 1 singled out as woman (token) in some areas 2 women less welcome in pockets of university 1 exceptions to sensitivity, comfort with women 3 some faculty leaders "don't get it" 1 bias against lesbian women for high positions 1 harder for minority women 3 sexism, racism, homophobia, & heterosexism 1 harder if not white, heterosexual, & middle class 1 glass ceiling 5 have to work harder, be better to succeed 5 tenure, promotion, advance in rank harder 4 (table continues) benign neglect recareer enhancing opportunities 1 women given service jobs 1 male bosses discourage women moving up 1 male bosses overwork women 1 achieve status when older, postmenopausal 1 easily labeled aggressive, pushy 3 negative labels compared to men with same traits 1 delicate balance between being seen as wimp or bitch 1 gender-related problems of women presidents 1 curriculum in coeducation biased toward men’s values 1 classroom climate for students 1 student culture treats women as objects 1 women students seen as poor at quantitative 1 no commitment to solutions when women lag 1 sexual harassment 4 no public outcry about sexual assaults 1 copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that 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file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com volume 42, 2023 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop 99 advancing women in leadership vol. 42, 98-109, 2023 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper thriving and striving: the paradox of leading and following for women mid-level administrators in the community college jodie beckley jodie beckley: schoolcraft college, personal & professional learning, jbeckley@schoolcraft.edu accepted january 23, 2023 this qualitative study explored the meaning that ten mid-level women administrators ascribed to the experience of being both a leader and a follower within the community college sector. previous research indicates that mid-level women administrators are under-valued as leaders and followers despite their capacity and influential connectivity up, down, and across the organizational chart. participants discussed their experiences through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and described the perceived effects of those experiences on their leadership and followership practices. three overarching themes emerged from the transcript analysis of the narratives: leader identity construction; impact of following on leader identity construction; and navigating the community college environment. implications from the findings suggest that community colleges can advance the mission of their organizations by leveraging mid-level administrator talent to build greater leadership capacity across the entire organization. additionally, an intentional focus on identifying and eliminating implicit gender and racial bias will contribute to improved outcomes for faculty, staff, and students. by understanding the leading and following experiences of women in midlevel administrative positions in the community college, this study contributes to a broader inclusion of leadership beyond the privilege of senior-level positions. keywords: administrator, community college, leader, follower, women, mid-level mid-level leadership has been acknowledged as crucial to the effectiveness of higher education organizations in achieving academic success and implementing change initiatives in the united states, canada, and new zealand (marshall, 2012). women hold the majority of mid-level administrative positions in community colleges (phillippe, 2016) and, as both leaders and followers, are uniquely situated to exert influence up, down, and across the institution as they effectively juggle a myriad of competing priorities (rosser, 2004; wild et al., 2003). as comprehensive, open-access institutions, community colleges are often tagged as “people’s colleges'' (meier, 2018), emphasizing universal access for all, innovation, and growth. yet the expected cultural and racial acceptance, opportunities, and networks that are assumed characteristic of such institutions are not always experienced by white women and women of color in mid-level administrative positions (amey & eddy, 2018). masculine norms of leadership are still ingrained in the organizational structures of community colleges and women leaders are judged against these norms (eddy & khwaja, 2019). rather than regarding their leadership based on its own merits and contributions to the college, women mid-level administrators are characterized as professionally limited by the bureaucratic nature of the community college where they become “stuck in the middle'' by spending too much time in management positions (eddy & ward, 2015, p. 9). this marginalized viewpoint reflects a failure to recognize and maximize female leadership and is further complicated by scholars who lament the loss of talent when those who aspire to lead from the middle do not seek higher-level positions (ward & wendel, 2017). the influential connectivity of mid-level women administrators, within the community college, ensures they are uniquely positioned to positively effect change and significantly contribute to the leadership capacity of the organization, despite an institutional environment that places needless pressure on the construction of their leader and follower identities. by understanding the leading and following experiences of women in mid-level administrative positions in the community college, this study contributes to a broader inclusion of leadership research beyond the privileged of senior-level positions. valuing the roles of mid-level women administrators will help community colleges better support these leaders and increase the leadership capacity across the entire organization in order to move their institutions forward and meet the complex challenges they face today and tomorrow. background much of the literature on community college leadership presents leaders from the primary lens of a white male hero leader with formal autocratic and bureaucratic authority (eddy & vanderlinden, 2006). studies on women in community college leadership have primarily focused on the presidency (cejda, 2008; garza mitchell & eddy, 2008) leadership styles (eddy, mailto:jbeckley@schoolcraft.edu 100 2010; gill & jones, 2013) and barriers that obstruct their progression up the career ladder (diehl, 2014; leatherwood & williams, 2008; yearout et al., 2017). research on women in mid-level administrative positions in the community college is underdeveloped compared to that of senior-level roles (branson et al., 2016) and often centers on management (boggs & mcphail, 2020; jones, 2011; yamasaki, 1999), as well as job related activities and associated stress (bailey, 2008; gonzales & rincones, 2013; rosser, 2004; tunguz, 2014; wild et al., 2003). empirical research on women of color in community college administrative positions is scant and focuses on mentoring (patton, 2009), leadership development (davis & maldonado, 2015) and career pathways (delgado & allen, 2019). gender stereotypes research regarding gender stereotypes and leadership has shown an incompatibility between the role of the leader and the gender role. gender stereotypes are oversimplifications of traits attributed to men and women, which endorse negative beliefs about a woman’s job performance by constructing a perceived “lack of fit” (heilman, 2012, p. 114) between the traits attributed to women and the traits believed essential for success in traditionally male roles such as leadership (fletcher, 2004; madden, 2011). for example, when enacting communal behaviors such as being kind, expressing concern for others or using consensus-based decision-making, women may be liked but not respected (carli & eagly, 2016; fletcher, 2004; madden, 2011). conversely, women who enact agentic attributes and behaviors associated with men may be viewed as competent but are not liked and are often perceived as abrasive, arrogant, and self-promoting (diehl & dzubinski, 2016; heilman, 2012). because success is stereotyped as male and masculine, women are expected to strike a precarious balance between masculinity and femininity. williams and dempsey (2014) refer to this type of double bind as a tightrope, in which women must work twice as hard as men to overcome gender stereotypes while constantly managing perceptions of their leadership behaviors as either “too masculine” or “too feminine” (p. 61). thus, in order to be seen as equally skilled leaders, women, more than men, are compelled to prove their competence over and over again. women of color are subjected to double jeopardy in which they experience the outcomes of both gender and racial bias (beal, 2008; williams et al., 2016). building upon this work, crenshaw (2017) conceptualized intersectionality to examine how social categories such as race and gender simultaneously interconnect, resulting in the systemic oppression of women of color. others have asserted that people with intersectional subordinate identities experience distinct modes of oppression known as “intersectional invisibility” (purdie-vaughns & eibach, 2008). according to this view, black women, for example, are often marginalized because they are not seen as prototypical members of their racial group or their gender group. community colleges as traditional bureaucratic organizations, community colleges are reliant on hierarchical leadership, enabling gender and class disparities (costello, 2012; eddy & cox, 2008). while the student body in two-year institutions is comprised of 59% women and 41% men (national center for education statistics, 2023), the percent of female ceos at community colleges has remained flat over the last decade, barely moving from 36.5% in 2010 to the current rate of 36.6% (phillippe, 2023). white males constitute the majority of presidents with high salaries (edwards, 2017) while white women and women of color make up the majority of low-paying support staff positions (ash, 2017). what it means to be a leader in the community college sector is further complicated by a lack of equity on the board of trustees, where 82% of board members are white, and only one in three are women (eddy, 2017). leadership expectations are still structured around ideal worker norms of being on call around the clock while having a partner manage the worker’s personal & family responsibilities (eddy, 2010; eddy & khwaja, 2019). although some women mid level administrators in two-year institutions enjoy high levels of job satisfaction (eddy & vanderlinden, 2006), others elect not to move into administrative positions due to the culture and context of leadership (ward & wendel, 2017). instead of the racial and gender-neutral democratic institutions they purport to be, community colleges operate through a gendered substructure, often invisible, that maintains processes and practices which continually create gender and class inequalities (acker, 2012). leadership and followership the process of internalizing leader and follower identities is laden with obstacles for women who must establish credibility in a world that is deeply troubled with female power and authority (ely et al., 2011). when organizational performance is attributed solely to leaders, the contribution of followers is devalued. instead of defining leadership as a one-directional social interaction in which leaders influence the behavior of their followers, studies suggest that followers themselves can positively or negatively influence leadership outcomes (tee et al., 2013). how a mid-level administrator perceives her identity as a leader and a follower impacts her behaviors related to power dynamics and contextual elements, in addition to intersecting aspects of identity such as gender, race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status (kezar & lester, 2010). at its core, identity refers to an individual’s self-definition, how they answer the question, “who am i?” (ashforth & schinoff, 2016, p. 113). in this study, the process of identity construction enables the individual to define the extent to which they internalize a leader as well as a follower identity. the internalization of a leader identity empowers individuals to more effectively participate in leadership processes that enable the accomplishment of organizational objectives (ashforth & schinoff, 2016). 101 theoretical framework this study used a feminist, multi-frame approach to examine the intersections of gender, race, institutional structure, leadership, and followership as an overall orienting lens in understanding how mid-level women administrators make meaning of their identities in the community college sector. feminist approaches often begin from a woman’s standpoint and empower researchers to reflect on the invisibility of women within the academy while providing a unique view of their everyday lives (blackmore, 2014). standpoint theorists advance the belief that knowledge is socially situated for women and others who are marginalized by intersecting systems of oppression (harding, 1987; hartsock, 1987; smith, 1990). feminist scholars of color have been instrumental in evolving standpoint theory to hold that women have multiple standpoints along lines of race, social class, sexuality, nationality, and other socially determined categories of difference (hooks, 1984; collins, 1986; sandoval, 2000). in line with feminist scholarship that gender is fundamentally complicated by class and race/ethnicity (collins, 1990; hooks, 1984), acker (2006) extended the concept to include organizing activities that constitute inequality regimes, defined as “loosely interrelated practices, processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and racial inequalities within particular organizations'' (p. 443). higher education institutions have historically been organized along gender lines with women in predominantly subordinate positions to men (ash, 2017; edwards, 2017). the theory of gendered organizations (acker, 1990, acker, 2012) is used in this study to understand the means in which gender norms, as experienced by mid-level women administrators, are upheld or suspended by existing institutional practices in the community college. traditional approaches to studying leadership involve role-based views reliant upon leader traits and behavioral styles as foundational to organizational outcomes. however, the study of mid-level administrators, who both lead and follow, requires a constructionist approach that views followership as a necessary element in the co-construction of leadership. derue and ashford’s (2010) theory of leadership identity construction views leadership and followership as socially constructed processes in which leader and follower identities shift back and forth as individuals engage in mutual influence processes. in this approach, followership is not tied to a role but to following behaviors that can include leader and follower claiming and granting as well as resisting or negotiating with another’s influence attempts (uhl-bien, et al., 2014). in summary, the conceptual framework used for this study consisted of feminist standpoint theory (hooks, 1984; collins, 1990; hawkesworth, 1999), gendered organizational theory (acker, 2006; acker, 2012), and leadership identity construction (derue & ashford, 2010). the research question was: how do mid-level women administrators in the community college make meaning of their identities as both leaders and followers? this multi-pronged framework offered a more comprehensive approach than has been used in previous studies and answered the call by eddy and khwaja (2019) for community college leadership scholars to interrogate norms and practices that restrain women from thriving as leaders. research design and methods informed by this multidimensional framework, the study utilized a qualitative design drawing upon a phenomenological approach to obtain rich data about the lived experiences of mid-level women administrators. the primary method was in-depth interviewing, which is an effective method frequently used by feminist researchers to uncover the subjective understanding that participants bring to a given situation (hesse-biber, 2014). the study employed criterion sampling to recruit participants in the midwestern united states who held mid-level administrative positions of director, assistant/associate dean, or dean in community colleges for at least three years. from 42 potential participants, ten administrators agreed to participate in their response to an email invitation. they self-identified as two black, one african american and seven white women, and ranged in age from 40 to 67. five held a master’s degree, three held a doctorate degree, and two were enrolled in a doctoral program. all participants selected a pseudonym. identifiable information about their positions as well as particular institutions was omitted. two in-depth semi-structured 90-minute interviews were conducted over three weeks with each participant. the first interview centered on establishing the participant’s early experiences with leading and following and included open-ended questions related to her career in higher education, current role, and areas of responsibility. the second interview included openended questions about the details of the participant’s experiences as a leader and follower and the meaning those experiences held for her. to stay close to the experience as lived, follow-up questions were asked such as “when did this happen? what were you doing? who said what? what did you say to them? what happened next? how did it feel? what else do you remember about the event?” (van manen, 2014, p. 316). responding to semi-structured questions with additional prompting sub-questions enabled participants to share a rich and detailed experiential account of their experiences. data analysis data analysis was informed by the tenets from feminist standpoint theory (collins, 1990; hawkesworth, 1999, hooks, 1984), gendered organizational theory (acker, 2006; acker, 2012), and leadership identity construction (derue & ashford, 2010). the data analysis process recommended for qualitative studies of a phenomenon (creswell & poth, 2018) also guided this study. the process included transcription of the interviews, note-taking, forming codes, creating patterns, and developing themes (saldaña, 2013). themes were integrated, and participant analysis and third-party analysis were compared to further illuminate the emerging themes (anfara et al., 2002). the themes were used to write a description of what the participants 102 experienced as well as the context that influenced how the participants experienced the phenomenon of leading and following from the middle. thematic memoing was used throughout the data analysis process to bolster analytic thinking and stimulate insights into the data (creswell & poth, 2018; rossman & rallis, 2017; saldaña, 2013). to safeguard consistency between the findings and the experiences described by the participants, four specific strategies were employed to promote internal validity: member checking, thick description, peer debriefing, and reflexivity (rossman & rallis, 2017). through member checking, all participants responded with additional feedback to the interview transcripts sent to them for review and eight provided feedback to a summary of the preliminary findings. to ensure rich, thick description (geertz, 1973), strong action verbs and quotes were used and interconnected details from general ideas to more specific themes were provided (creswell & poth, 2018). peer debriefing was utilized to explore potential biases and assumptions as well as to check for weaknesses in the researcher’s reasoning. by writing memos during data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation processes, the researcher engaged in her own reflexivity in order to remain open about her assumptions and ideas as they emerged throughout the study. limitations there were four limitations of the research design to consider for this study. first, while the recommended sample size for phenomenological interviews is three to ten participants who have all experienced the phenomenon (creswell, 2014), the sample size is a small subset of the entire population of midlevel community college administrators. therefore, the perspectives and experiences collected for this study may not reflect the full range of mid-level women administrators’ experiences. second, the researcher sought to fill a gap regarding the dearth of research on women of color in community college leadership. however, the study participants represented only black and white women, therefore limiting access to the experiences and perspectives of other women of color mid-level administrators. third, participants were selected from those who responded to an e-mailed invitation and thus open to discussing their narratives. other community college mid-level administrators who identified along the continuum of gender identity and did not respond to the invitation may have different experiences or perspectives that are not represented in the study. fourth, participants were selected from the upper midwest region of the united states. it is possible that regional differences in community college contexts could impact the leadership experiences of mid-level women administrators in other parts of the united states. further, no participants lived or worked outside of the united states. it is also likely that national differences in higher education cultures could affect how women experience leading and following in mid-level administrative positions. findings the multiple frameworks utilized in this study revealed how participants made meaning of their identities as leaders and followers in the middle and how their leadership and followership practices were impacted by their institutional context. three main themes emerged from the transcript analysis of the narratives: (1) leader identity construction; (2) impact of following on leader identity construction; and (3) navigating the community college environment. the themes represent the principal areas of commonalities in the experiences of all ten participants. leader identity construction contributing factors the participants in this study worked in mid-level administrative roles in student life, academics, and instructional and academic support. before employment in their current institutions, they held a variety of jobs in other industries as well as other sectors of higher education. past work experiences along with participation in professional learning communities, leadership roles in national and state organizations, and terminal degree attainment in higher education all influenced how they came to conceptualize their own views of leadership. when discussing their reasons for working in a community college, participants expressed strong convictions about the importance of its opendoor mission, the focus on students, and serving the community. all of the administrators echoed louisa’s view about why they selected two-year institutions over other sectors, “we serve a lot of non-traditional at-promise students, and this is where i felt that i could probably make the most difference.” for the majority of participants, developing talent and supporting the success of faculty and staff were key components of their leadership practice. they described the gratification they felt in coaching direct reports to improve their skill sets in order to be more successful in their positions. giving back through mentoring others was also important for many participants because they themselves had benefited from mentors along their own leadership journeys. as summarized by rachel, “i believe that the mark of a good leader is creating more good leaders.” thus, prior work experiences, learning opportunities, the community college mission, and influential mentors served to inform impressions about leaders and how each administrator constructed her leadership identity. leading faculty, direct reports, and staff in describing their leadership work, participants emphasized the importance of effecting change to ensure student success. effecting change was achieved through influencing strategies such as asking faculty and direct reports to consider the student perspective when implementing policies and procedures. for example, lucy pointed out that faculty preferred to build schedules for their own purposes, rather than for students, and always wanted threeand four-hour classes. to implement a schedule more responsive to student needs, she asked them to 103 reflect on what it was like for them as students. she engaged them in discussion about how much learning really occurs when students have to be in class for long periods of time, a few days a week, rather than for shorter periods on multiple days. by placing students at the heart of the discussion, lucy helped faculty understand why schedules built to meet students’ needs would result in better outcomes. another influencing strategy often discussed by administrators in this study was the use of data for decision making. in order to be seen as credible leaders, participants were unwavering in their application of data to convince faculty, direct reports, and staff that their decisions were based on solid facts, whether that was the budget, enrollment numbers, or survey data that indicated an initiative was or was not working for students. participants emphasized that influencing strategies were more successful when coupled with relationship building. in order to accomplish change initiatives, the administrators indicated they had to have buy-in and make people feel they were all going in the same direction. rachel pointed out, “it's about building and nurturing relationships and then leveraging those relationships to achieve goals. that's how you get stuff done.” building relationships and hence, leading faculty and staff, also involved listening, being patient, and referring to policies. for instance, rhonda indicated that faculty resistance to change was diminished after she reviewed neglected policies with them and explained how she would hold everyone accountable to those policies to ensure student success. participants also shared examples of when their leadership actions did not result in corresponding followership actions by peers or staff. in these instances, they might go to their direct supervisor or someone else’s boss, but only when they could not get compliance with a crucial request. some participants indicated that union-negotiated regulations negatively impacted their ability to obtain support for leading actions with faculty. others felt their leading actions were sometimes not supported because the same faculty had been in place for years. lucy stated, “they've had it their way for so long. they don't think they need any assistance in anything.” participants sometimes utilized other administrators or faculty members as conduits to move the faculty in a particular direction. an example of this strategy was highlighted by louisa in describing implementation of a new student coaching program: the only way this was going to work was to get the faculty on board. so, we aligned ourselves with those that supported it, and folks that didn't, we didn't waste a whole lot of energy trying to convince them otherwise. you have the ones in the front of the boat that are really, really all enthusiastic and they're on board. then you've got the ones that are in the middle that maybe, maybe not, and then the ones in the back. i don't waste my time with people in the back. it's the ones in the middle, those are the ones you really want to work with and then you use the ones in the front to help align. even with resistant followers, louisa demonstrated the importance of influence and relationship-building to effecting change and moving the institution forward. while the administrators in the study described some experiences in which followers resisted their efforts to exert influence and lead, the majority of participants’ experiences related to examples in which faculty, direct reports, and staff positively affirmed their efforts to lead. this affirmation then fostered subsequent leading actions, which informed the administrators’ sense of self as a leader and conveyed that those with whom they closely worked viewed their fitness for the role as positive (ely, ibarra, & kolb, 2011). impact of following on leader identity construction relationships with supervisors almost all participants reported positive relationships with their current supervisors and provided examples of beneficial support they received. these examples included coaching and mentoring, recommendations for leadership development opportunities, and demonstrated trust in their decisions, all of which they regarded as votes of confidence in their leadership capabilities. when reflecting upon earlier positions in their careers, several participants talked about negative experiences with previous supervisors that adversely impacted their ability to do their jobs and compelled them to leave their positions. leading while following located in the middle of the organizational chart, mid level administrators enact the follower role with their own supervisors and other senior leaders while simultaneously leading faculty, direct reports, and staff. some participants, such as marie, viewed their follower role as that of a team player, “i'm perfectly happy to take a pretty clear plan of action and help make it happen”. others described experiences in which their supervisor took credit for ideas they brought forward. a few administrators, such as bella, did not see themselves in the follower role at all, “i see it as working together for a common goal.” at times participants endeavored to lead up regarding initiatives with which they did not agree. for example, lucy worked to persuade senior leaders not to move a department to another division within the college. to make her case, she pointed to the faculty’s success with implementation of their curriculum and how they were on the path to continued success, which she believed would be negatively impacted if the change was implemented. as a result of lucy’s input, senior leaders decided not to move forward with the proposed move after all. in a few instances, participants described interactions in which their input was not well received by senior leaders, and no action was taken. navigating the community college environment working conditions participants described several aspects of their institutional work environments which caused them to question the value placed upon their leadership contributions. these included taking on more responsibilities with no additional pay, performance 104 evaluations that were not reflective of their work, and a substandard work-life balance. rhonda explained that she would stay late at work on some days because her supervisor expected to see her working on campus after hours. rachel disclosed that she received emails from her supervisors throughout the night and on weekends, “there was an expectation that i was working 24/7 and it got to be a lot”. amanda talked about being torn between the work she had to do in the institution and making sure her children had access to high-quality education and experiences. in addition, participants discussed challenges related to implementation of remote work and heightened stress levels for themselves and their faculty and staff due to ongoing covid-19 issues. implicit gender bias subtle and veiled forms of implicit gender bias negatively contributed to participants’ ability to integrate leadership into their core identities. rachel described a previous institution as a place where women were not for other women, “i never felt she was an ally. i felt that she was always waiting for me to screw up so she could say gotcha”. others described how they were talked over at meetings and their ideas and contributions were ignored or unacknowledged. several participants explained that they altered their facial expressions, so faculty and staff did not perceive them to be emotional or angry. others disclosed that they modified their straightforward communication style because it was better received by men than women and others described using softening techniques such as putting requests in the form of a question. josie explained further, “you damn well better be kind or people will turn on you. they'll eat you alive if they have the chance.” some administrators shared that more men than women were promoted to leadership positions in their institutions. others described senior leaders who were either threatened by their work as mid-level administrators or viewed them as lacking ambition if they weren’t trying to advance to senior level positions. racial bias construction of leader and follower identities was further complicated by race for amanda, rhonda, and nichole. they shared stories of how women are often underestimated, especially black women. they described encounters in which white faculty and staff members perceived them to be an angry or scary black woman. they narrated accounts in which they were placed in a position to explain, defend, and validate current events and environmental factors related to racial injustice. they stated that being situated by white colleagues as the sole subject matter expert for a racially marginalized group led to exhaustion. nichole explained: some days we are just tired of being tired and being that voice. but at the end of the day, if you don't, who will? someone did it before me and i'm here to do it for the next group to follow after me because we're not equally represented in every space, on our boards or on our executive level management. to cope with ongoing physical, mental, and emotional fatigue, amanda, rhonda, and nichole sometimes engaged in self-care activities related to exercise and healthy eating. at other times, however, they just tried to suppress their feelings, which resulted in additional stress from the trauma of dealing with both racial and gender bias. discussion the concept of leadership as primarily focused on traditional, individualistic models that celebrate predominantly white, masculine positional leaders at the top of the organization remains in place in community colleges today despite their perceived status as institutions of social equity. the multipronged approach used to analyze the research in this study provided evidence that mid-level women administrators lead, follow, and navigate the organizational culture in order to effect positive change in support of the overall success of their institutions. these findings also contribute to deconstructing broad concepts of leadership and gender to bring attention to specific policies, practices, and actions for reconceptualizing leadership roles across all levels of the community college. construction of a leader identity a key component to the construction of a leader identity is developing a sense of purpose through the pursuit of goals aligned with personal values that advance the greater good (ely et al., 2011). all participants in this study developed a compelling sense of purpose centered on making a positive difference in the lives of community college students through their work with direct reports, faculty, staff, and supervisors. consistent with other research findings that the community college was the institution of choice for women leaders because they were committed to the mission it serves (cejda, 2008), participants in this study articulated that service to students is what they valued most. thus, their identities as leaders were integrated with a principle larger than themselves and crystalized what they stood for as leaders in their institutions. participants also indicated that developing the talents and championing the success of their direct reports, faculty, and staff were important components of their leadership practice as well. therefore, by connecting to purposes larger than themselves, on which they placed a high value, the mid-level administrators in this study gave meaning to the experience of being a leader by making a difference in the lives of direct reports, faculty, and staff, thus developing, and fostering a leader identity. some participants utilized their work with international or state level organizations to develop and hone their leadership skills; others pursued advanced or doctorate degrees which they believed gave them more credibility as a leader in their institutions. many of the participants discussed strong mentoring relationships with past supervisors or other senior leaders, who provided opportunities and encouraged them to pursue senior-level positions because they recognized their leadership potential. through participating in leadership development and receiving positive reinforcement from leaders whom they admired and trusted, the administrators in this study began to make sense of what it means to be a leader 105 early in their careers and applied that learning to their own practice of leadership as they progressed to mid-level administrative roles. in addition to developing a compelling sense of purpose, becoming a leader is a process of mutual influence in which one internalizes a leadership identity through claiming and granting leader and follower roles (derue & ashford, 2010). the findings provided insights into how mid-level administrators associated their work most closely with leading followers – faculty and direct reports. the participants described many experiences in which they asserted leadership by taking purposeful action such as convening meetings, facilitating reflective conversations, and using data to drive decisionmaking. they discussed how they used interpersonal skills of influencing and relationship building with faculty and staff to claim leadership for change initiatives related to student success. these findings are supported by other researchers who found that mid-level administrators reported a higher ability to successfully achieve initiatives through influence than senior leaders who reported limitations in their amount of power and control (eddy & vanderlinden, 2006). when the participants in this study took actions to claim leadership, findings indicate that leadership was often granted and thus, a leader identity was relationally recognized by faculty and direct reports, who accepted the reciprocal role identity of follower. conversely, there were times when some participants claimed a leader identity, but leadership was not granted by faculty and staff. in these instances, participants’ self-confidence was diminished, and they were discouraged from subsequent assertions of leading. based on their experiences over time, however, the majority of administrators realized that the pattern of claiming and granting behaviors with faculty, direct reports, and staff was reciprocal and mutually reinforcing and would continue to result in consistent leader-follower relationships (derue & ashford, 2010). this realization contributed to their resilience and internalization of a leader's identity. impact of following on leader identity construction almost all participants made more meaning of their identities as leaders than as followers, which may be the result of their own implicit leadership theories as well as the amount of time spent with faculty, direct reports, and staff versus with senior leaders. a critical component of how mid-level administrators made sense of their follower identity was directly related to the relationship with their direct supervisors. several participants attributed a positive relationship with their current supervisor as the reason they were able to extend influence upward in order to implement change initiatives that were important to them. others were not able to broaden such influence even though they reported positive relationships as well. bella remarked, “sometimes they listen and sometimes they don't”. when talking about previous supervisors, several participants spoke about negative situations in which they had to navigate turbulent organizational waters on a daily basis. they tried to make sense of those experiences by intentionally choosing not to replicate the behaviors of their supervisors. however, as participants came to recognize those situations as serious threats to their leader and follower identities, they made the decision to leave in a bid of self-preservation. this finding speaks to the significance of the mid-level administrator’s follower identity and the corresponding relationship with her supervisor in construction of a positive leader identity. it is worth noting that when supervisors do not grant leadership claims, it may be due to implicit followership bias which keeps women in followership positions because others believe they are well suited to the follower role (braun et al., 2017). future research on leader and follower identity construction could include the perspectives of senior leaders to better understand their roles in relational recognition of mid-level administrators. participants’ follower identities were sometimes complicated by their leader identities and the simultaneous roles they played in both following and leading. several participants discussed challenges in which they had to weigh the risks and benefits of asking for permission from their supervisor versus forgiveness when making difficult decisions. they noted the delicate balance between coaching younger colleagues who required feedback and senior leaders who also needed direction. they described experiences in which their input was requested by senior leaders, and in response, they had to be courageous and provide feedback that may have been viewed as critical or noncompliant. these findings point to a proactive construction of follower identity in which the administrators viewed themselves as active participants in the leadership process. as such, they exhibited competencies related to negotiation, conflict management, development of political alliances, and leading change, all skill sets that are often considered to be exemplary of highly effective leaders (white, 2014). these findings suggest that for community colleges focused on meeting ongoing challenges, a sustainable and insightful approach would be to intentionally look to mid-level administrators for the kind of strategic leadership that is needed rather than rely primarily on senior leaders. impact of the community college environment on leading and following amey (2022) reported that studies over the last 30 years have consistently shown how community colleges have remained gendered organizations – unsupportive of leaders who are women or people of color, especially in relation to inequitable human resource policies, impractical work-life expectations, and unchallenged hegemonic cultures and structures. the findings reported here support this claim. when discussing their leadership and followership practices, participants noted they put in more time, took on other positions, or supervised additional employees without further compensation. they often felt obligated to go the extra mile, whether it was responding to emails before and after the workday or spearheading additional initiatives. for the administrators in this study, making sense of what it means to be a leader was often compounded by pressure to prove their capabilities time and again in order to be viewed 106 as competent, if not more competent, than others. this finding was even more significant for black participants who described experiences of racial bias related to professional barriers they faced as well as the double jeopardy of being both a woman and a person of color. it is well documented in the extant literature that black women experience both sexism and racism throughout their careers. the findings from this study are consistent with those of similar studies. for example, hall et al. (2012) found that black women experienced stress from racial and gender stereotypes held by their co-workers and supervisors and were often placed in the position of being the voice for the black race. this study supports previous research suggesting that gender and racial inequalities are often indirect and unspoken and can obstruct the leadership identity development of women leaders (ely et al., 2011; williams & dempsey, 2014). an unexpected finding of this study found that many participants tried to navigate the subtle workplace biases and negative stereotypes they encountered by combining their competencies with specific social behaviors in order to manage the options of being respected or being liked. for example, many took on additional projects to raise the profile of their departments or to provide additional assistance to other units related to technical skills and accreditation. they often tried to demonstrate that they were personable, “as i met people, i made sure to leave them better off than i found them. if there was anything i could do to be helpful or just put an emphasis on pleasantness” explained fern. in some situations, participants provided additional, unsolicited reports to supervisors in an effort to instill more confidence in their leadership capabilities. other times, they became the de facto leader of a cross-divisional mid-level administrator workgroup where they took responsibility for facilitating meetings and recording minutes with upbeat energy and a cheery attitude. most of the participants in this study were reluctant to speak about the existence of gender bias in the policies and practices of their institutions. yet in making meaning of their identities as leaders and followers, they described experiences in which they were held to higher standards of performance than males, disparaged for being too assertive or too passive, asked to make trade-offs between their careers and their families, and criticized by other women on the appropriate way to be a woman – all examples which contradict the idea that gender bias is absent from their organizations. future research should focus on investigating how mid-level administrator identities as leaders and followers shape the context of the organizational culture over time. alternatively, an important question is whether leader and follower identities evolve to match the organizational culture of the institution. implications and conclusion this study has contributed to identification and understanding of the significant contributions women mid-level administrators make when leading and following in their institutions in spite of professional and organizational challenges. grounded in the findings from this research, community colleges can reconceive the role of mid-level administrators and fundamentally change the way positional power and agency are distributed throughout their organizations. increasing leadership capacity across the entire institution through dynamic, interactive relationships among all leaders will enable these institutions to better navigate the critical issues of the present as well as the future. to become less predisposed to the effects of implicit gender bias, community colleges can educate faculty, staff, and administrators to first, recognize it and second, understand how it manifests in the organization. additionally, community colleges must work to recognize the existence of racism in the workplace and address its effects on the psychological wellbeing, self-concept, and interpersonal relationships of people of color. community colleges can begin by educating all personnel on the meaning, identification, and impact of microaggressions and then support faculty, staff, and administrators with strategies and individual skills to reduce and remove microaggressions from the organization. in conclusion, a multi-frame approach to this research enabled a complex and discerning examination of leadership and gender in the community college sector. by critically examining the experiences of mid-level women administrators, this study confirmed that identity construction is a complicated and multidimensional concept for women, related to the way an individual perceives herself with respect to the environment and influenced by social interactions with those with whom she works. this study revealed that issues related to gender and race continue to fester just beneath the surface of the institutional environment. most significantly, the women leaders in this study, drawing upon a higher purpose when faced with adversity, provided a positive example of how to effectively lead and follow to move their organizations forward. references acker, j. 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(2017). impediments to the advancement of women at community colleges. journal of women in educational leadership, 214, 1– 16. 353+lopatofsky pub ready.docx volume 42, 2023 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 42, 132-146, 2023 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the perceived impact of a post-secondary education program on kenyan catholic sisters’ understanding of their lives as women religious tara m. lopatofsky senior program manager for monitoring & evaluation at the african sisters education collaborative at marywood university in scranton, tara.lopatofsky@asec-sldi.org accepted july 11, 2023 kenyan women religious, also referred to as catholic sisters, serve in ministries that provide essential aid in their communities. these ministries include vital positions in the fields of education, healthcare, social work, finance, and agriculture, among others. however, approximately 80% of women religious in sub-saharan africa lack the post-secondary education necessary to adequately meet the evolving demands of their ministries (wakahiu & shaver, 2015). for this reason, women religious in kenya have been provided an opportunity to participate in a uniquely delivered, fully funded, post-secondary education program. this qualitative study endeavored to answer the questions: has participation in the program transformed kenyan sisters’ understanding of their lives as women religious? and, has participation in the program influenced how kenyan women religious view themselves in their ministries? in-person interviews with program participants and staff (n = 17), as well as document reviews, were conducted to effectively answer these questions. upon analysis, three themes were revealed, including enhancement of ministry abilities, empowerment, and relational engagement. from these themes, the concept of servant leadership emerged as the ultimate perceived impact of the post-secondary education program on kenyan catholic sisters’ understanding of their lives as women religious and view of themselves in ministry. keywords: women religious, ministry, leadership, post-secondary education many catholic women religious in africa begin their journey of consecrated life with minimal formal post-secondary education or professional preparation. in fact, 80% of women religious in african congregations possess no post-secondary education credentials (wakahiu & shaver, 2015). due to a deficiency in her education, a sister may lack the advanced levels of leadership and specific professional knowledge necessary to carry out her ministry (wakahiu, 2015). unfortunately, in many cases, this level of insufficient training remains incomplete due to a shortage of congregational resources in sub-saharan african countries (nakitende, 2015). according to the center for religion and civic culture (crcc), women religious in africa have a positive impact on the welfare and wellbeing of those to whom they minister, as well as those in their congregational communities (mcnally, 2016). through their various ministries in fields including education, social services, and health care, they work to ease suffering, alleviate poverty and provide assistance to marginalized groups (wakahiu & keller, 2011). much of this work is done without any formal post-secondary education credentials or training (wakahiu, 2015). little research has been completed on the impact of increased formal education for sisters, yet there is evidence that leadership training increases sisters’ competency within their ministries. in a phenomenological study by wakahiu and keller (2011), it was discovered that completion of a leadership training program increased african women religious’ capacity to deliver effective services in their communities. the leadership training program achieved this outcome by increasing the sisters’ technical skills, as well as their ability to plan and incorporate theory into practice (wakahiu & keller, 2011). this research identifies the immense potential of african women religious, should they receive the proper training and education necessary to carry out their ministries. the post-secondary education program to address the problem of insufficient professional preparation, kenyan women religious have been provided an opportunity to participate in a uniquely delivered, fully funded, post-secondary education program, subsequently referred to as the post-secondary education program or the program. facilitated by a collaborative of united states congregations of women religious and their respective colleges/universities, the post-secondary education program aims to increase the capacity of african women religious by providing them the opportunity to achieve diploma, bachelor’s, and master’s level education (wakahiu & shaver, 2015). the program is donor funded 132 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 mailto:tara.lopatofsky@asec-sldi.org through a grant and provides educational opportunities for sisters in ten countries in sub-saharan africa: kenya, uganda, ghana, lesotho, south sudan, malawi, zambia, tanzania, cameroon and nigeria. as of october 2017, the program had served 541 african sisters since its inception in 2012. although there are a few other programs that provide african sisters the opportunity to further their education, none of these match the large scale interventions of the one being studied (sivasubramaniam, 2021). in order to provide education that is context-specific and culturally relevant, the program partners with 22 colleges/universities in both the united states and sub-saharan africa. through these partner institutions, program participants are able to complete their studies online or in person at the diploma, bachelor’s, or master’s degree levels. sisters are permitted to enroll in any program of study offered at the partner institution, depending on their individual needs. sisters selected to participate in the program have obtained permission from their congregation to further their studies and either maintain or leave their current ministry while enrolled. balancing religious life, academic work, and sometimes ministry can be quite challenging for sister participants. yet overall, through the program’s annual evaluations, participants generally report having a positive experience. once accepted to both the program and the college/university, the sister is provided a full tuition scholarship, a laptop, and reimbursement of all textbook expenses. aiming to be a transformational learning experience, the program provides additional support to its participants through workshops such as orientation, reflective learning, and alumnae. these workshops offer program participants the opportunity to engage with other program participants and progress in their studies with purpose. since the majority of sisters in the program have been out of school for quite some time, these additional supports are necessary to integrate the sisters into the college/university environment. forty-nine percent of program participants are between the ages of 33-42, making them non-traditional students within the college/university setting. the program’s workshops offer sisters the skills necessary to be successful in their studies, with topics covered including time management, study skills, and technology training. this study focused primarily on program participants completing their education in kenya. the program has been operating within kenya for seven years, which is the longest duration of all the program’s countries of operation. members of the post-secondary education program’s pilot cohort of students, which began in 2012, were kenyan residents. as such, the program is fully developed in kenya, which has contributed the greatest number of participants: 119 sisters as of 2017. kenya also has the highest number of program graduates, with 81 kenyan sisters having completed the program in its entirety by 2017. program partner institutions in kenya include the catholic university of eastern africa (cuea), tangaza university college (tuc) and, chemchemi ya uzima institute. due to the high number of program participants in kenya, participants from this country have also developed a complex support network amongst themselves, consisting of an elected student leadership board, fundraising endeavors, common religious activities, and a “buddy system.” purpose of the study the purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the perceived impact of the post-secondary education program on kenyan catholic sisters’ understanding of their lives as women religious. this study also examined what impact, if any, the post-secondary education program has had on kenyan sisters’ view of themselves in their ministries. literature review the impact of catholic sisters in africa has habitually been overlooked by mainstream society, as these women often go about their important work quietly, with little fame or notoriety (ngure, 2015). yet women religious are important figures in their communities, and provide valuable services that are desperately needed (ngure, 2015). during the course of this literature review, it was discovered that limited literature exists in the area of catholic sisters in africa and further study is needed. the construct of religious life according to the catholic church’s code of canon law, women who wish to devote themselves solely to god are referred to as women religious or “sisters” (can. 573-606). these women aspire to be an example of jesus christ and view their commitment as “a gift of god the father to his church through the holy spirit” (paul, 1996). sisters profess vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience in order to join with the church in this special way (can. 573). the code of canon law speaks of “special gifts” that women religious possess; these gifts promote good works for people through charity, and are based on the will of the father (can. 574-577). sisters endeavor to live out the love they believe christ showed humanity, or evangelize (i.e., share belief and understanding of that love), through gifts of sacrifice and service. in pope john paul ii’s vita consecrata, the mission of sisters is further interpreted by the statement that sisters have “a call to pursue competence in personal work and to develop a dynamic fidelity to their mission, adapting forms, if need be, to new situations and different needs” (1996, p. 63). in addition, vita consecrata dictates that “providing room for women to participate in different fields and at all levels, including decision-making processes, above all in matters which concern women themselves” is necessary in consecrated life (paul, 1996, p.98). melia (1999) conducted a qualitative, grounded theory study in which she found the themes of central meaning in the lives of women religious to include, in order of frequency: faith, family, education, friends, community of sisters, service to others, and prayer. these findings suggest that receiving and providing education are both integral aspects of religious life. 133 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 in order to provide bishops with a synthesis of the major components of religious life, the sacred congregation for religious and for secular institutes (crsi; 1983), with the approval of pope john paul ii, published essential elements in the church’s teaching on religious life as applied to institutes dedicated to works of the apostolate. this document serves as an overview of canon law as it specifically pertains to women religious and offers a construct for religious life (sheehan, 1989). in this document, religious life is characterized by nine components: consecration by public vows, communion in community, evangelical mission, prayer, asceticism, public witness, relation to the church, formation, and government. from these components, women religious are informed that consecration is the basis of religious life, that god is first in all things, and that their commitment belongs to the life and holiness of the church (crsi, 1983). congregations of women religious are governed under a hierarchical system (martin, 2009). regional, provincial, and general superiors lead congregations of women religious and make the majority of significant decisions (wakahiu, 2015). these leaders form the countrywide national associations of women religious, such as the association of sisterhoods of kenya (aosk), which promote solidarity across congregations (ngure, 2015). in addition, congregations in kenya can be under pontifical right, meaning they follow direct leadership of the apostolic holy see in rome, or diocesan right, meaning they follow the authority of the bishop in their particular diocese (ngundo, 2015). a congregation of diocesan right has often been founded by the diocesan bishop, which traditionally allows him authority in these types of institutes (cafardi & hite, 2017). however, in both types of religious congregations, local bishops and superiors often share power and responsibilities, each having their own authority as well as overlapping duties (cafardi & hite, 2017). educational disparity in kenya kenyan women, in general, have been found to have less access to quality education at all levels than their male counterparts (heath & jayachandran, 2018; kisaka, 2015; machio, et al., 2017; milligan, 2014; odhiambo, 2016). twenty-five percent of women in kenya have been found to have a child and/or marry before their 18th birthday (machio et al., 2017). in addition, kenyan girls have been found to engage in sexual behavior due to a lack of resources (oruko et al., 2015). in a qualitative study of two kenyan public secondary schools, it was reported that young female students were having sex for money and other necessary items, such as sanitary towels (milligan, 2014; oruko et al., 2015). kenyan girls themselves also cite sexual relationships with boyfriends and menstrual care problems as reasons that lead them to drop out of school (oruko et al., 2015). for some young kenyan women, dropping out of school is culturally acceptable (mwaiko, 2017). for example, the kenyan samburu and maasai communities enforce female genital mutilation and early forced marriage, which limits a girl’s ability to achieve higher education (mwaiko, 2017). kisaka (2015) found that kenyan women are commonly socialized to be passive members of society. they are thought to focus more on their motherly duties than their academic performance in school (kisaka, 2015). a culture of poverty and bias against females has also contributed to their lower rate of access to education in kenya (mwaiko, 2017). kenyan teachers have been found to use derogatory language in reference to females, lowering their self-confidence in the classroom (milligan, 2014). in addition, schools often lack female washrooms, which promote an undesirable connotation to girls’ attendance (heath & jayachandran, 2018). this is compounded by a negative parental attitude towards female education completion (kisaka, 2015). an inequitable school environment greatly influences girls’ ability to complete their education (oruko et al., 2015). educational development of african women religious african women religious have expressed some difficulty with understanding the policies regarding educational development within their own congregations (nakitende, 2015). often, congregations will require a certain level of education prior to entering their religious order (phiri et al., 2015). in sub-saharan africa, women are generally required to hold a high school certificate prior to entry (phiri et al., 2015). this policy assists in ensuring that sisters are able to fully understand their religious education or formation and will perform appropriately in their assigned ministry (phiri et al., 2015). however, research shows that many sisters require additional capacity building and higher education in order to reach their full potential (nakitende, 2015; ngundo & wiggins, 2017; wakahiu, 2013). the problem with this requirement is that many congregations do not have the necessary financial and human resources to provide such education and lack clear policies on which sisters are to receive educational advancement (nakitende, 2015; ngundo & wiggins, 2017). for instance, in a study of the little sisters of saint francis, a congregation with sisters located in uganda, kenya, and tanzania, it was discovered that the educational advancement of sisters depended to a great extent on chance and the availability of scholarships (nakitende, 2015). this particular congregation had a formal policy on record regarding educational advancement, but the sisters reported inconsistencies in the ways they were selected for educational opportunities (nakitende, 2015). although the majority of sisters enter religious life in sub-saharan africa having only completed secondary education, some enter at higher levels, creating great variation within and among communities (phiri et al., 2015). without a formal procedure for congregational leadership to select sisters for educational advancement, many are left in the dark regarding when they will receive an opportunity to return to school (phiri et al., 2015). in 2006, the first special assembly for africa was held by the synod of bishops titled “the church in africa in service to reconciliation, justice and peace.” at that time, pope benedict 134 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 xvi (2006, sec. 60) advised that appropriate preparation was of the utmost importance for consecrated persons in africa. it was also stated that education regarding peace and justice was necessary to prepare african consecrated persons for the socio-political realities of their ministries (benedict, 2006). this document encourages consecrated persons to acquire an interest in and knowledge of the social and political state of africa to better serve their communities (benedict, 2006). in addition, vatican ii clearly states that during the scholasticate portion of a woman religious’ formation, or training to become a sister, there is to be a focus on ensuring the sisters’ educational needs are met (paul, 1965). yet in africa there has been minimal attention paid to this mandate (phiri et al., 2015). phiri et al. (2015) outlined several reasons for education’s importance in an african woman religious’ life, including having relevancy in post-modernity, creating sustainable congregations through social and political reform, being able to confront ecclesial problems, improving economic conditions, and being of better service to their people. phiri et al. (2015) even proposed that every african catholic sister should be afforded the opportunity to study theology at the diploma or degree level. servant leadership and religious life obi and bollen (2017) argued that in nigerian congregations, respect, fairness, and equality are top priorities amongst congregational leadership. these researchers outlined that superiors of women religious recognize that they have been elected to their position by their fellow sisters, and consider this with every decision they make (obi & bollen, 2017). this consideration extends to superiors’ allocation of education and training resources within a congregation (obi & bollen, 2017). according to obi and bollen (2017), these nigerian sisters’ actions exemplify the concept of servant leadership. servant leadership, a philosophy coined by greenleaf in the 1970s, proposes that servant leaders are those who value social responsibility and support the growth and well-being of others above all else (dierendonck, 2010; greenleaf, 1970). greenleaf asserted that servant leaders are servants first, but have made the conscious decision to lead as a means to better serve individuals and communities (greenleaf, 1970). coetzer et al. (2017, p. 1) define servant leadership as a “desire to serve, followed by an intent to lead and develop others…to ultimately achieve a higher purpose objective” to the benefit of others. the concept of servant leadership stems from the bible and has been applied to the actions of women religious in several studies (coetzer et al., 2017). the leader-follower relationship is built on trust, as the servant leader offers her followers a visionary concept or goal to help them reach their full potential (greenleaf, 1970). further, greenleaf (1970) believed that servant leadership: requires that the concerned individual accept the problems he or she sees in the world as his or her own personal task, as a means of achieving his or her own integrity. he or she sees the external manifestation of this internal achievement as beginning with caring for individual persons, in ways that require dedication and skill (p. 37). of particular relevance to the lives of women religious is the fact that many researchers refer to jesus christ and his teachings to his disciples as a true model of servant leadership (parris & peachey, 2013). greenleaf (1970) felt that formal education can contribute to the expertise of a servant leader but an individual cannot be taught how to be a servant leader, as servant leadership develops through a natural, personal, process of experience. in a qualitative narrative research study (n = 4), cooper et al. (2018) found five childhood characteristics that greatly influence the exhibition of servant leadership behaviors later in life; these included family life (i.e., a secure attachment to parental figures), church involvement (i.e., christian teachings, belief in god), a mentor/role model relationship (i.e., coaches, teachers, others in the community), accountability (i.e., being given responsibilities), and group activities (i.e., belonging to a club or team). in particular, cooper et al. (2018) recognized the importance of positive early childhood role models in the exposure to servant leadership behaviors, which was found to have lasting impact in the long-term development of a servant leader. the literature reveals there is some variation regarding characteristics demonstrated by a servant leader; this may be due to greenleaf’s assertion that servant leaders are not defined by what they do but rather who they are and their commitment to the service of others (dierendonck, 2010; parris & peachey, 2013). nevertheless, dierendonck (2010) proposes there are six characteristics a servant leader typically possesses, including an ability to empower others, be humble, be authentic, demonstrate interpersonal acceptance, provide direction, and display stewardship. in addition, achievement of educational proficiency has been linked to four servant leadership competencies, including empowerment, stewardship, building relationships, and compelling vision (coetzer et al., 2017). in african cross-cultural contexts, including studies conducted in rwanda, kenya, and ghana, the servant leadership philosophy has been found to be positively correlated with leader effectiveness (brubaker, 2013). brubaker (2013) hypothesizes this may be due to parallelisms between servant leadership and african cultural beliefs. for instance, winston and ryan (2008) suggest that the concept of servant leadership stems from global value systems, such as the african concepts of ubuntu and harambee, rather than western constructs alone. winston and ryan (2008, p. 217) draw a link between servant leadership and ubuntu, or the traditional african collectivist belief that “to be human is to affirm one’s humanity by recognizing the humanity of others in its infinite variety of content and form.” more specific to kenya, winston and ryan (2008, p. 217) also refer to the swahili notion of harambee, which similarly embodies servant leadership ideals as it encourages “mutual assistance, joint effort, mutual responsibility, and community self-reliance.” 135 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 education’s impact on understanding religious life according to the secularization thesis, as a person or society progresses in education, their level of religiosity declines (norris & inglehart, 2004). research shows that for christians, and in particular catholics, this thesis does not hold true (pew research center, 2017). the pew research center (2017) has found that catholics, regardless of their level of education, remain at the same level of religious identification. catholics at all levels of education are almost equally likely to pray daily, attend worship services weekly, and say they believe in god with absolute certainty (pew research center, 2017). in reality, the catholics with the highest levels of education are the most likely to say they attend mass weekly (pew research center, 2017). for women religious in africa, there is some belief that educational advancement results in sisters leaving consecrated life (nakitende, 2015; ngundo, 2015). sisters report that in kenya it is difficult to differentiate between the true vocation of women religious and those who falsely join religious life for the sole purpose of obtaining education (ngundo, 2015). ngundo (2015) posits that these sisters lack an understanding of religious life and an unwillingness to commit to the demands of the lifestyle. when interviewing kenyan sisters, nakitende (2015) found that religious superiors were quite disappointed in the departure of sisters from religious life after completion of educational programs. the superiors also reported that the withdrawal of sisters, in whom the congregation has invested resources, greatly damages the congregation financially (nakitende, 2015). although there is some controversy regarding sisters who leave the congregation after graduation, the need for educational advancement within congregations is identified throughout the literature (ngundo & wiggins, 2017; wakahiu & kangethe, 2014; wakahiu & shaver, 2015). in a survey of african congregations of women religious (n = 18), 12% of congregations had more than 300 members with no higher education credentials, and 24% had more than 200 members with no higher education credentials (wakahiu & kangethe, 2014). in the few studies that have been conducted on women religious obtaining post-secondary education, results have shown that the experience is challenging but greatly beneficial (dimba, 2015; wakahiu, 2013; wakahiu & kangethe, 2014; wakahiu & shaver, 2015; wakahiu & keller, 2011). one quantitative study, including women religious enrolled at the catholic university of eastern africa (n = 40), found that 72.5% of sisters reported that the large workload limited their time for spiritual matters (dimba, 2015). in addition, 82.5% of these sisters reported that time spent reading books took away from their pastoral work, and 62.5% stated that absence from their religious community was a challenge (dimba, 2015). however, this study did not ask sisters how or if post-secondary education has impacted their consecrated lives or understanding of their lives as women religious (dimba, 2015). wakahiu and shaver (2015) studied the post-secondary education program, analyzing specifically those participants (n = 17) who completed their coursework online, in order to identify benefits and challenges of this aspect of the program. this research identified interconnectivity, scarcity of university seats, and gender disparity as challenges but identified online learning as a viable and needed form of study in africa (wakahiu & shaver, 2015). in addition, a qualitative study conducted by wakahiu and kangethe (2014) of 18 participants of the same program in kenya and uganda revealed that the program introduced sisters to technology and assisted them in defying african gender norms for leadership. no studies were found to assess the program’s impact on the participants’ perceived understanding of their lives as women religious or their view of themselves in their ministries. methods this study employed a qualitative study methodological approach to explore the perceived impact of a post-secondary education program on kenyan catholic sisters’ understanding of their lives as women religious. this methodology was used to answer the study’s central research questions: has participation in a post-secondary education program transformed kenyan sisters’ understanding of their lives as women religious? and has participation in a post-secondary education program influenced how kenyan women religious view themselves in their ministries? participant recruitment and selection study participants were recruited and selected purposively based on their agreement to be interviewed. in total, 13 women religious were recruited during this process. in addition to the post-secondary education program participants, the researcher also conducted interviews with the facilitating organization’s staff. these staff members included the two in-country staff currently stationed in kenya, and two united states headquarters staff, the assistant and executive directors of the post-secondary education program. procedure once recruited, the program’s in-country staff notified the program participants of their scheduled interview time, date, and location via email. during the scheduling process, in accordance with qualitative methodology, a review of existing public documents regarding the program was conducted. these documents included written evaluation reports, the program’s web content, news articles (e.g., success stories), and program enrollment data, all of which were available on the program’s public website. document reviews were delimited to the facilitating organization’s public documents that pertained to the post-secondary education program. necessary background and contextual information regarding the education program were collected during document reviews via hand written memos containing the researcher’s relevant thoughts and ideas, which were referred to throughout analysis. 136 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 to prepare the participants for the interview they were provided a copy of the interview protocol in advance. although all study participants identified english as their primary language, they were provided with the interview questions prior to in-person meetings in order to minimize any possible language differences and put the participants more at ease. providing the interview questions in advance allowed participants time to collect their thoughts and engage more easily in conversation with the researcher. the researcher then conducted audio-recorded in-person interviews with the participants. program participants provided their age, years of completed post-secondary education, concentration of study, number of years in religious life, and years since final profession, if applicable. the researcher then asked the participant each question on the program participant interview protocol, lasting approximately 30-60 minutes. in-person interviews with the program’s in-country and administrative staff were then conducted, following the staff interview protocol. the purpose of program staff interviews was to provide the context of the program and to garner a full description of program functioning. all audio-recordings were then transcribed and uploaded into nvivo software for analysis. data analysis data were analyzed using an inductive constant comparative method, typical of qualitative studies (merriam & tisdell, 2016). following merriam and tisdell’s (2016, p. 204) analysis protocol, first “open coding” was conducted which was expansive and purely descriptive. then these “open codes” were interpreted and grouped according to similarity (i.e., analytical coding), effectively placing them into categories or themes (merriam & tisdell, 2016). as directed by merriam and tisdell (2016), the lists of codes and categories from each transcript were then merged to create one master list. this process continued throughout the rest of the interviews and the documents under review. codes and category names were reflected upon by the researcher constantly throughout this process in ongoing memos. once it was apparent that saturation had been reached, final categories were determined appropriate if they met the category criteria set by merriam and tisdell (2016, p. 213), meaning they were exhaustive, mutually exclusive, sensitive to the data, and conceptually congruent. finally, the researcher reviewed the categories and considered their relationships and possible connections in terms of the study’s research questions. this last step in data analysis contributed to the study’s final result model. results description of participants post-secondary education program participants the sample of program participants interviewed for this study included 13 kenyan post-secondary education program participants. nine sisters attended the catholic university of eastern africa (cuea), two attended chemchemi ya uzima institute, and two attended tangaza university college (tuc). this sample was a fair representation of the population, as indicated in document reviews the largest number of sisters in the post-secondary education program attend cuea in comparison to the other two schools. the average age of all 13 program participants was 40 years. however, program study participants ranged in age from their late twenties to early fifties. these sisters also reported an average of 16 years in religious life, with a range from 1 to 27 years. in addition, the sisters reported an average of seven years since they made their final profession, with two sisters not yet making their final profession and one sister reporting 22 years since final profession. all program participants used english as their primary spoken language. when asked about their current educational status, three sisters stated they were currently working towards earning their master’s degrees. of these three master’s degree students, two of the sisters also earned their bachelor’s degree through the post-secondary education program. the master’s level sisters reported working towards degrees in theology, project planning, and business administration. the remaining ten sisters reported being enrolled in the program at the bachelor’s level. of these ten sisters, two had already graduated from the program with their bachelor’s degree and eight remained enrolled, with five of these currently enrolled sisters being in their first year of the program. the sisters studying at the bachelor’s level advised they were working towards degrees in education, social ministry, and development studies, amongst others. staff member participants the four facilitating organization staff member participants consisted of two in-country staff members (i.e., the kenyan country director and coordinator), and two united states headquarters staff (i.e., the program’s assistant and executive directors). these staff members were all employed by the facilitating organization. the staff members reported working for the facilitating organization an average of three years, with a range from ten months to eight years. findings through data analysis, it was determined that the post-secondary education program did indeed have an impact on sisters’ understanding of their lives as women religious and their view of themselves in ministry. the program was found to meet the participants’ needs and assist them in living out the religious life they had originally hoped to live. three themes emerged from the data regarding the program’s impact on sisters’ understanding of their lives as women religious and view of themselves in ministry; these included enhancing the sisters’ ministry abilities, an increased sense of empowerment, and an improved ability to engage relationally. from these themes, it was apparent that the post-secondary education program developed sisters’ ability to be servant 137 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 leaders and ultimately live the religious life they anticipated. themes related to the program’s impact on the participants’ understanding of their lives as women religious and view of themselves in ministry are detailed in figure 1. figure 1 the post-secondary education program’s impact on sisters; understanding of life as women religious and view themselves in ministry enhanced ministry abilities study participants’ responses that referred to explicit skills learned during enrollment in the post-secondary education program, supported by document reviews of program materials, were identified under the enhanced ministry abilities theme. data coded in the following categories were included in this theme: professional, academic, congregation strengthening, and spiritual skills. under this theme, study participants stated that the program allowed them to view themselves as more effective in their ministry, as they obtained the skills necessary to conduct their work in a more professional manner. as such, they recognized that with the proper post-secondary education, women religious are capable of being highly qualified in their fields, allowing them to better exemplify their ideal of life as women religious. empowerment a theme of empowerment, including codes associated with increased self-confidence, was also identified as an outcome of participation in the post-secondary education program. study participants commonly stated that as a result of participation in the post-secondary education program, they felt empowered in their ministries and lives as women religious. further, with increased empowerment reported higher authority and autonomy in their ministries. for instance, participant a said: i can say that this has been the most important empowerment for me because to say the truth, before i was not a courageous woman. i had a lot of fears but now i am able to face any difficulties and any circumstance that i meet on my way. sister participants described that the post-secondary education program has prepared them for any circumstance, and as a result they feel more confident in their abilities. as participant j stated, “my disposition right now, i am quite prepared for whatever field of service.” they also explained that in order to empower and serve others, they themselves needed the empowerment they received through the post-secondary education program. participant l said, “working in community programs i found i needed some empowerment, some capacity to meet the needs of the people i was working with.” relational engagement another common theme amongst study participants was that of relational engagement. study participants often expressed that the post-secondary education program provided opportunities to engage with many different people from various backgrounds and cultures. participants indicated that, prior to the program, they had never had these types of experiences. the participants said that it was through these interactions that they developed an awareness of the significance of relational engagement in life as a woman religious. the following codes were identified within this theme: social interaction, self-awareness, and leadership. servant leadership as a result of participating in the post-secondary education program, sisters were able to develop their ministerial abilities, become empowered, and more successfully engage in relationships, making them more effective in their lives as women religious and thus servant leaders. with these skills, the sisters indicated that they felt an increased sense of stewardship towards those served through their ministry and a sense of responsibility to better serve their communities. many sister participants expressed that their objective for completing the post-secondary education program was to ultimately provide a higher level of service to those to whom they minister, which is a fundamental characteristic of a servant leader. for instance, participant h said, “the knowledge that i get is not something that i own. what i receive is something to be shared in my community.” the concept of service and stewardship was a common theme for sisters throughout the interviews. the sisters stated that the program offered them an opportunity to develop their professional skills in their various ministries, which would allow them to better serve others. sisters then related the concept of serving others, through ministry, to their understanding of life as women religious. through their participation in the program, sisters began to identify with the characteristics of a servant leader, which is related to their original model for life as a religious. conclusion and recommendations the study participants stated that enrollment in the post-secondary education program allowed them to live up to their original ideal of religious life by increasing their capacity as servant leaders. through the application of the study’s theoretical framework, including transformative learning theory, womanism, and complex adaptive systems theory, the sisters’ realization of themselves as servant leaders emerged as the outcome of the program. in conclusion, the program was found 138 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 to nurture a sister’s understanding that her role as a woman religious in ministry is that of a servant leader. emergence of findings from the theoretical framework the theoretical framework of this study significantly contributed to the interpretations of the findings. in utilizing complex adaptive systems theory, womanism, and transformative learning theory to understand the three themes discovered as the program’s impact, the concluding concept of development as a servant leader emerged. servant leadership was not originally reflected upon as a possible outcome of participation in the program and was not referenced in any completed document reviews; rather, the concept arose during the process of interpreting the findings in relationship to the theoretical framework. figure 2 depicts these relationships, which are described further in this section. figure 2 emergence of findings from the theoretical framework application of complex adaptive systems theory complex adaptive systems theory allowed for the interpretation that the findings of this study are interconnected with the context, culture, and systems to which each participant belonged (puzycki et al., 2014). this theory also helps to explain how all three theories of the theoretical framework are able to operate both independently and in concurrence. each theory provides its own insight and contribution, but complete understanding cannot be achieved without consideration of all three perceptions. complex adaptive systems self-organize into patterns and demonstrate chaotic, fat-tailed, adaptive, and emergent behaviors (holland, 2014). non-linear self-organization describes the interaction of the theoretical framework because there is continuous and autonomous collaboration between each theory, and from this interaction servant leadership has emerged. the co-evolutionary relationship of the three theories did not operate in isolation from the context in which the participants found themselves, but had permeable boundaries allowing for dramatic transformation (eidelson, 1997; kauffman, 1995). there are additional connections between life as a woman religious and servant leadership which can be more fully understood by complex adaptive systems theory. for example, study participants outlined the dynamic relationship between religious life and service. at the center of religious life remains god, and the sisters explained that, as part of serving him, they must also demonstrate their love to other people and successfully engage in relationships with them. this is similar to the description of a complex adaptive system with many interconnected diverse parts, arranged in a hierarchical manner (eidelson, 1997). therefore, complex adaptive systems theory assists in understanding the role of a woman religious within her dynamic context and how the complex system to which she belongs contributes to her realization as a servant leader. application of african womanism the african feminist theory of womanism indicates that empowerment in an african context is related to an increased sense of conciliation, collaboration, complementarity, and consensus within cross-gender relationships (coulibaly, 2015). this postulates that in african culture, a sense of empowerment does not come from the individual but rather from an ability to effectively connect and engage with others. the association between empowerment and relational engagement is echoed in the findings of this study. study participants explained how the program increased their ability to communicate and understand others, and through this increase in capacity, they felt a sense of empowerment. the achievement of the characteristics of womanism leads to the emergence of a servant leader because for a womanist, empowerment is not about “power” but mutual respect. womanism is distinctive in that it incorporates african concepts of ubuntu or harambee, emphasizing the respect of “humanity in its infinite variety of content and form” (ogunyemi, 1985; winston & ryan, 2008, p. 217). these concepts accurately describe servant leadership, thus identifying the link between empowerment, womanism, and the emergence of a servant leader. application of transformative learning theory transformative learning theory provided insight into how the sisters’ understandings and views were transformed during participation in the program, linking the sisters’ enhanced ministerial abilities to their development as servant leaders. transformative learning occurs through the interaction of both instrumental learning (task-oriented problem solving, increasing proficiency in performance) and communicative learning (assessing beliefs through justification; mezirow, 1996; moyer & sinclair, 2016). the post-secondary education program facilitated instrumental learning by providing academic and workshop content relevant to the sisters’ ministries. communicative learning was enabled through the sisters’ frequent interactions with diverse groups, which the sisters identified as an increase in their ability to relationally engage. 139 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 taken together, these domains indicate that the post-secondary education program was a transformative learning experience. with a transformative lens, one sees that the sister participants have experienced a perspective transformation regarding their understanding of their lives as women religious, leading them to become more effective servant leaders. sisters explained that the experience of assimilating information and engaging in critical reflection and rational discourse was transformative (mezirow, 1997). in terms of transformative learning theory, they developed their frame of reference or worldview to be more “inclusive, differentiating, permeable, critically reflective, and integrative of experience” (mezirow, 1996, p. 163). each of these transformative characteristics aligns with indicators of a servant leader, once more signifying the emergence of this outcome. convergence of the theoretical framework in the emergence of the findings complex adaptive systems theory, womanism, and transformative learning theory must each be integrated to hold a complete understanding of the emergence of servant leadership as the final outcome of this study. the complex relationship between theories and themes assists in explaining by what means the sisters have emerged as servant leaders. in addition, each theory individually contributes to the understanding that the study’s outcomes are tied to servant leadership concepts. this model provides a foundation upon which to interpret the study’s findings and elucidate the perceptions of the study participants. interpretation of the findings impact parallels with servant leader development the post-secondary education program offered sisters the opportunity to further their knowledge and skills, but this was only a gateway to their emergence as servant leaders. education is essential in building the trust of those whom the sisters serve, because a follower’s trust stems from their confidence that a leader is competent and knowledgeable in their field (coetzer et al., 2017; greenleaf, 1970). generating and managing a follower’s trust is imperative to servant leadership, with all other servant leadership characteristics building upon this cornerstone (greenleaf, 1970). study participants undoubtedly quantified enhanced ministerial abilities (i.e., academic and professional knowledge) as an impact of the program and this will allow them to more successfully gain the trust of those they serve. however, as greenleaf (1970) advised, although enhanced ministerial abilities are important to provide expertise, these competences alone do not create a servant leader. the sisters also stated that the program empowered them to effectively serve in their ministries by making them more courageous and confident in their professional abilities. self-empowerment is necessary to possess a compelling vision or goal and to eventually empower others, both of which are characteristics of a servant leader (dierendonck, 2010). in describing how they were empowered, the sisters articulated their compelling visions and goals for their futures as women religious, signifying possession of these servant leader characteristics. furthermore, a truly empowered person is able to demonstrate the servant leadership characteristics of humility and authenticity (dierendonck, 2010). the interviewed sisters continually displayed humility and authenticity in their descriptions of their experiences in the post-secondary education program and their service in ministry. this was particularly evident in the way the sisters attributed their successes to the grace of god, the facilitating organization, and their congregations. participating in the program also alleviated the sisters’ fears that they would lose their ministerial positions to others with higher educational qualifications. a servant leader is able to exhibit certainty and purpose of mission to those whom they serve, which, prior to the program, sisters often felt unable to do (greenleaf, 1970). the sisters expressed that they experienced anxiety over holding lesser educational qualifications than their lay coworkers. this imbalance created great uncertainty for the sisters and in some instances prohibited them from expressing their professional opinions assertively. impact on understanding of life as a woman religious the post-secondary education program allows its participants to effectively and confidently live their lives as women religious. study participants recognized that the skills, knowledge, and confidence they received from the program should be utilized for the more professional, comprehensive, and competent service of others. by adeptly performing as servant leaders, the sisters were more closely able to exemplify the life they originally intended to live as women religious. accordingly, the post-secondary education program assists in maturing the sisters’ servant leadership qualities, which allows them to cultivate an enhanced understanding of their roles as women religious. the role of women religious. by developing sisters as servant leaders, the post-secondary education program has concurrently allowed them to possess a fuller appreciation of their roles within the catholic church, their congregations, and society as a whole. women religious are a part of a complex adaptive system, characterized by nonlinear local relationships and influenced by god, the church, and their cultural context (bircher & hahn, 2016; eidelson, 1997; fidan & balci, 2017). the complexity associated with the dynamic interactions of these agents can create some ambiguity for sisters in regard to their roles within the system (eze et al., 2016). however, a servant leader values service above all else and achieves his or her own integrity through the service of others (greenleaf, 1970). therefore, a sister who is also a servant leader feels complete and that she is representing herself adequately in her religious life when she is proficiently serving others in need. by developing as a servant leader, a sister is more skillful in determining her role, regardless of the context or situation in which she finds herself. being one component in a larger, complex adaptive system, this quality is of great significance and increases sisters’ poise for recurrent transformation of roles. 140 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 women’s rights and the servant leader. eze et al. (2013b) have proposed that african women religious do not have a place in the formally educated, male-dominated hierarchy of the catholic church. the results of this study, in concurrence with the complex adaptive nature of the structure and functions of the catholic church, contest this claim. the post-secondary education program has increased sisters’ sense of self-worth and empowered them as servant leaders, who have a personal sense of responsibility to improve the conditions around them. without necessarily intending to, servant leaders “acquire extraordinary and compelling powers that attract followers” (greenleaf, 1970, p. 35). the same is true of sisters’ ministries; their goal is to serve the marginalized, but they have proven to be remarkably influential in their communities (ngure, 2015). this emergence provides evidence that the sisters will make long-term significant contributions to human development through their ministries, signifying they do indeed have a vital place within the structure and function of the church. in general, african women have faced inequalities and are largely absent from positions of power (chea, 2008; maloiy et al., 2016; rombo et al.,, 2017). in particular, eze et al. (2013b) propose that sisters experience de facto gender-based discrimination in the catholic church. through development as servant leaders, sisters are more capable of engaging in activities that characterize the african theory of womanism, which opposes gender-based discrimination. a servant leader is fair and respects others, even those who are different than herself, such as a member of the opposite sex (greenleaf, 1970). therefore, the sisters as servant leaders also display characteristics of womanists, who value conciliation, cooperation, consensus, and complementarity (greenleaf, 1970; ogunyemi, 1996). this development gives sisters the insight, when necessary, to advocate appropriately for their self-worth and recognize when they may be improperly treated in the church and their community. the theme of empowerment, described by the study participants as an impact of the post-secondary education program, can also be understood as a result of a transformative learning experience. lavrysh (2015, p. 65) states that a main indicator of transformative learning experiences is a shift from an external locus of control to an internal one in which adults are aware of their personal capabilities. bulut (2018) classifies this actualization of a person’s potential or ability as self-actualization. this idea is similar to the finding that the sisters experienced an increased sense of capacity, which advanced into a sense of empowerment relationships within congregations. prior literature revealed there is abundant ambiguity associated with educational advancement within african congregations of women religious (nakitende, 2015; phiri et al., 2015). differences in educational attainment had previously been found to create harmful conflicts regarding obedience and submission within a congregation (eze et al., 2016). in contrast, the participants of this study expressed humility, gratefulness, and understanding related to the educational opportunity allotted to them. with participation in the post-secondary education program came obedience to self-responsibility and the communal nature of the congregation. instead of instilling a desire for increased power and control, participation in the program made sisters aspire to support the growth of others, especially other sisters within their congregations. as discovered by obi and bollen (2017), in the african context, when congregational leadership exemplifies servant leadership, qualities of respect, fairness, and equality amongst relationships become top priorities. this is aligned with the african ideal of the communal nature of congregations and the swahili notion of harambee encouraging mutual, community growth (winston & ryan, 2008). given the importance of relationships amongst sisters, especially since feelings of loneliness and desire for intimacy have been found to be the most common reason for leaving a congregation, development of servant leaders may be the key to congregational vitality in the african setting (smith & knowles, 1991). this provides evidence that the post-secondary education program and the development of the sisters as servant leaders may be fundamental to the positive enhancement of african congregational health. impact on view of self in ministry. all of the study participants spoke of feeling inadequate in their ministry, due to a deficiency in their post-secondary education, prior to joining the program. they desired to carry out their ministry, and thus their lives as women religious, in the manner they originally envisioned, but felt unable to accomplish this because of a lack of skill and knowledge. the post-secondary education program allowed sisters to see themselves as more capable of appropriately responding to the needs of those they serve, which increased the sisters’ efficacy in ministry. this outcome was also found, via document reviews, to be a designated long-term goal of the program. improved proficiency for the sisters meant they were better able to engage with marginalized groups, identify their needs, and then attend to them appropriately, whatever the context. key program component. the key component of the post-secondary education program, in regard to its impact on the sisters’ understanding of life as women religious and their view of themselves in ministry, is that it provides the opportunity to experience and develop diverse relationships. although this program component was not explicitly addressed in program documents, it emerged clearly from participant interviews. this unique feature of the program brings sisters and lay people together throughout the course of the program, greatly influencing the participants’ stated outcomes. this, too, is aligned with greenleaf’s (1970) belief that formal education alone does not create a servant leader; rather, servant leaders develop through natural processes of experience. the importance of the relational component of the program is aligned with the literature regarding the significance of relationships in transformative learning, especially for women (english & irving, 2012). being able to engage in dialogue with 141 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 diverse groups and the development of authentic relationships are core components of transformative learning (mezirow & taylor, 2009). sharing life narratives with others is crucial to transformative learning; this relationship is also consistent with the findings of this study. specifically, transformative learning was facilitated as cohort members reflected together on their experiences in the program at annual reflective learning workshops. lavrysh (2015, p.65) said of transformative learning theory, “through conscious reflection, learning can become transformative and be translated into personal empowerment and self-awareness.” moreover, ntseane (2011) suggested that the value of collective empowerment should be integrated into educational opportunities in order for transformative learning to occur in african contexts. findings of this study support this claim, as study participants outlined their own personal sense of empowerment in terms of their relationships and ability to serve others. the study participants also discussed how participation in the post-secondary education program has had positive, unforeseen, long-term effects, such as strengthening their congregations and leading the sisters to build sustainable organizations in the service of others. this is characteristic of the complex adaptive systems concept of the butterfly effect, as a small change to an initial condition has greatly impacted the larger system (holland, 2014). given this insight, it is conceivable that the full extent of the program’s long-term impacts have yet to be seen, and additional developments continue to be possible. limitations of study this study focused specifically on determining the impact of a post-secondary education program on kenyan sisters’ understanding of their lives as women religious and views of themselves in ministry. as such, only women religious and program staff who had contact with the post-secondary education program in kenya were interviewed. findings from this study are therefore not generalizable to populations outside of these parameters, decreasing the external validity of this study. interviewing of sister participants from other countries in which the post-secondary education program is operational may generate variation in the findings. this study also utilized in-person interviews of program staff and participants, a data collection technique which relies heavily on self-report. the self-report of study participants can be subjective and may change over time. although measures were taken to increase the validity and reliability of this study, findings may also be limited to this particular case. recommendations for future studies first, it is recommended that a future study be conducted on a wider range of sisters who have participated in the post-secondary education program. this study focused exclusively on program participants currently residing in kenya; future studies should expand this participant pool and consider participants from the other nine countries which the program serves. this would allow for cultural comparison and would determine if the results discovered in this study are able to be replicated in the program’s other countries of operation. secondly, other post-secondary education programs for women religious should be investigated to more precisely explore and compare the unique characteristics of the program under study in this research. thirdly, the findings of this study could be further investigated by conducting a large scale quantitative study with the same or similar participant pool. lastly, it is recommended that future studies focus more exclusively on the relationship between post-secondary education and servant leadership in the lives of women religious. this relationship should be explored in greater depth with additional interview questions pertinent to this topic. further exploration of servant leadership in various cultural contexts would enhance understanding of the cross-cultural differences in this area. implications for study the findings of this study indicate that for women religious, participation in a post-secondary education program can contribute to the development of a servant leader. study participants stated that the program allowed them to fulfill the role of a woman religious with integrity, serving those in need with precise skill and care. the program allowed them to live up to the model set by the sisters who had inspired them to join religious life in their youth. through enhanced ministerial abilities, empowerment, and relational engagement, the post-secondary education program has enabled its participants to act as servant leaders, allowing them to make positive change in their communities. these findings suggest that an investment in a woman religious’ post-secondary education is beneficial not only to the sister but also to those she serves. the post-secondary education program was found to deepen a sister’s understanding of her life as a woman religious and build great confidence in how she carries out her ministry. in doing so, the sister is more adept in understanding herself, others, and her environment, allowing her to make a greater impact. through this process, women religious develop into influential servant leaders, better capable of carrying out their mission to spread god’s love through service. potentially, the findings of this study could be extended to african women in general, promoting women’s empowerment throughout the continent and encouraging the achievement of worldwide gender equality. conclusions evidence of this study suggests that the post-secondary education program had a positive impact on the lives of kenyan women religious. specifically, the post-secondary education program enhanced the sisters’ ability to minister, empowered them, and improved their capacity to effectively engage in relationships with others. through these accomplishments, the post-secondary education program participants developed as servant leaders, which has enabled them to better serve in their communities. by exemplifying characteristics of servant leaders, 142 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 program participants are more adept to fulfil their potential and create lasting positive change. references barasa, e. w., molyneux, s., english, m., & cleary, s. 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(1989). institutional relationships: religious life in the church. the way. http://www.theway.org.uk/back/s065sheehan.pdf sivasubramaniam, m. (2021). philanthropic and faith-based non-state actors in the low-free private school sector in the global south: blurring the lines of philanthropy and enterprise. unesco global education monitoring report. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380066 smith, m., & knowles, a. d. (1991). contributions of personality, social network, and cognitive processes to the experience of loneliness in women religious and other mature australian women. the journal of social psychology, 131(3), 355-365, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1991.9713862 wakahiu, j. (2013). making a difference: role of women religious in bridging democratic leadership in africa. journal of leadership, accountability and ethics, 10(5), 78-95. http://asec-sldi.org/docs/publishedwork/making_differ ence_wakahiu.pdf wakahiu, j. (2013). mentoring: a model of cultivating leadership competencies in kenyan women leaders. advancing women leadership journal, 33, 132-141. http://www.asec-sldi.org/docs/published-work/mentorin g_model_wakahiu.pdf wakahiu, j. (2015). foundation of religious institutes and impact of technology innovation on sisters in africa: a sociocultural approach. in j. wakahiu, p. i. gichure, & a. r. njageh (eds.), voices of courage: historical, socio-cultural and educational journeys of women religious in east and central africa (pp. 34-65). nairobi, kenya: paulines publications africa. wakahiu, j., & kangethe, s. (2014). efficacy of online distance learning: lessons from the higher education for sisters in africa program. european journal of research and reflection in educational sciences, 2(1). http://www.asec-sldi.org/docs/publishedwork/efficacy_ online_distance_learning_wakahiu_kangethe.pdf wakahiu, j., & keller, d. (2011). capacity building: a phenomenological study of the african women perceptions and experiences in the leadership training program. advancing women in leadership, 31, 125-135. https://awlojstamu.tdl.org/awl/index.php/awl/article/vie w/85 145 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1360080x.2016.1150551 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1360080x.2016.1150551 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174287 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0144321 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s1055101213226 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s1055101213226 http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_decree_19651028_perfectae-caritatis_en.html http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_decree_19651028_perfectae-caritatis_en.html http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_decree_19651028_perfectae-caritatis_en.html http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_decree_19651028_perfectae-caritatis_en.html http://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/26/in-america-does-more-education-equal-less-religion/ http://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/26/in-america-does-more-education-equal-less-religion/ http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol10no5/10.5-11-rombo.pdf http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol10no5/10.5-11-rombo.pdf http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol10no5/10.5-11-rombo.pdf http://www.vatican.va/ http://www.vatican.va/ http://www.theway.org.uk/back/s065sheehan.pdf https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380066 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380066 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1991.9713862 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1991.9713862 http://asec-sldi.org/docs/publishedwork/making_difference_wakahiu.pdf http://asec-sldi.org/docs/publishedwork/making_difference_wakahiu.pdf http://asec-sldi.org/docs/publishedwork/making_difference_wakahiu.pdf http://www.asec-sldi.org/docs/published-work/mentoring_model_wakahiu.pdf http://www.asec-sldi.org/docs/published-work/mentoring_model_wakahiu.pdf http://www.asec-sldi.org/docs/published-work/mentoring_model_wakahiu.pdf http://www.asec-sldi.org/docs/publishedwork/efficacy_online_distance_learning_wakahiu_kangethe.pdf http://www.asec-sldi.org/docs/publishedwork/efficacy_online_distance_learning_wakahiu_kangethe.pdf http://www.asec-sldi.org/docs/publishedwork/efficacy_online_distance_learning_wakahiu_kangethe.pdf https://awlojstamu.tdl.org/awl/index.php/awl/article/view/85 https://awlojstamu.tdl.org/awl/index.php/awl/article/view/85 https://awlojstamu.tdl.org/awl/index.php/awl/article/view/85 wakahiu, j., & shaver, r. (2015). perception and experience of distance learning for women: case of the higher education for sisters in africa (hesa) program in west africa. journal of education and social policy, 2(3), 93-110. http://asec-sldi.org/docs/published-work/distance_lear ning_women_wakahiu_shaver.pdf winston, b. e., & ryan, b. (2008). servant leadership as a humane orientation: using the globe study construct of humane orientation to show that servant leadership is more global than western. international journal of research studies, 3(2), 212-222. https://www.regent.edu/acad/global/publications/ijls/ne w/vol3iss2/ijls_v3is2_winston_ryan.pdf 146 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 http://asec-sldi.org/docs/published-work/distance_learning_women_wakahiu_shaver.pdf http://asec-sldi.org/docs/published-work/distance_learning_women_wakahiu_shaver.pdf http://asec-sldi.org/docs/published-work/distance_learning_women_wakahiu_shaver.pdf https://www.regent.edu/acad/global/publications/ijls/new/vol3iss2/ijls_v3is2_winston_ryan.pdf https://www.regent.edu/acad/global/publications/ijls/new/vol3iss2/ijls_v3is2_winston_ryan.pdf https://www.regent.edu/acad/global/publications/ijls/new/vol3iss2/ijls_v3is2_winston_ryan.pdf home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 18, spring 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        fundithe enduring leadership legacy of civil rights activist ella baker stephen preskill university of new mexico many black activists have pronounced ella baker the fundi of the american civil rights movement. moses and cobb (2001), veterans of the mississippi voter registration project from the early 1960s, named her “our fundi in the tradition of community organizing” (p. 4). joanne grant (1981), who later wrote an important biography of ella baker’s life, called her film about baker’s legacy – fundi: the story of ella baker. fundi is a swahili word for the person who possesses practical wisdom and is skilled at passing on to new generations the knowledge that the community’s elders regard as most important. the fundi is a teacher and a learner. the fundi supports other people in learning the lessons of the elders. the fundi does not seek credit or fame. she is quietly satisfied to provide a bridge from one generation to the next and to help young people root their ideas and actions in their culture’s most enduring traditions. throughout her life ella baker stepped in again and again to model learning, relationship-building, teaching, and leadership. although she devoted her life to upholding the cause of racial justice and gained a reputation among civil rights activists for being a great leader, the name of ella jo baker remains largely unknown to the general public. born in 1903 in norfolk, virginia, baker was the granddaughter of proud and defiant ex-slaves.  with the support of her parents who made many sacrifices to further their daughter’s education, baker graduated from north carolina’s shaw university as the valedictorian of her 1927 class. almost immediately after graduation, she left the south for new york city and immersed herself in the excitement of the harlem renaissance. it wasn’t long before she was participating actively in a variety of organizations to help people secure their rights and enhance their economic opportunities. all of this led eventually to her assuming a leadership position in the national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp) – the preeminent black advocacy group in the united states since its founding in 1909. as director of branches for the naacp, baker was especially effective in maintaining contact with the association’s grassroots membership and pushed hard for education and training programs to prepare rank and file people from throughout the south for leadership roles. in the 1950s, baker was the first executive director of the southern christian leadership conference (sclc) – the organization that grew out of the montgomery bus boycott and supported dr. martin luther king’s efforts to combat racism. in 1960, she left the sclc to launch the student nonviolent coordinating committee (sncc) – the group set up to sustain the student protest movement that began so dramatically on february 1, 1960, when four black students from the agricultural and technical college of north carolina staged a sit-in at a segregated woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown greensboro to protest racial discrimination. throughout all of this work, baker stressed the value of learning, growth, and the development of grassroots leadership. she saw herself primarily as an adult educator and a cultivator of untapped leadership.  every cause, in her view, simmered with opportunities for education. taking the time to think through the issues, to cast off worn out assumptions, and to plan reflectively for the long term mattered most to her. she maintained that social action yielded valuable learning when sufficient time was set aside for reflection and dialogue.  she held steadfastly to her belief that leaders are at their best when supporting ordinary people to lead themselves. she believed in leadership, but she particularly believed that the most effective leaders are self-effacing people, more interested in developing leadership in others than in getting recognition for their individual achievements. when asked by an interviewer to explain how you organize people, she said matter of factly that you don’t start with what you think. you start with what they think. she continued, “you start where the people are. identification with people…if you talk https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html down to people, they can sense it. they can feel it. and they know whether you are talking with them, or talking at them, or talking about them” (cantarow &o’malley, p. 70, 72). she affirmed repeatedly that leaders are teachers and must create opportunities for people to learn from each other and to reflect on the best ways to take action collectively. she maintained that leading and learning are part of the same process and that no successful movement can be continued without leaders who are intent on learning from those around them. leaders were critical to ella baker, not as solitary individuals who bask in the reflected glory of group action, but as solid and selfless collaborators in the enduring struggle for social justice. when she was first organizing the group that became sncc, baker hesitated to be overly directive. she observed, “those who had worked closely with me knew that i believed very firmly in the right of the people who were under the heel to be the ones to decide what action they were going to take to get from under their oppression” (cantarow & o’malley, p. 84). she did not seek credit or even much compensation for what she did, but she received enormous gratification from witnessing people, who enjoyed little notice from others, grow into leaders owing to her support. as barbara ransby (2003) shows in her magisterial new biography, ella baker’s approach to leadership was “democratic and reciprocal.” she saw leaders as teachers and as learners in which learning is “based on a fluid and interactive relationship between student and teacher,” (p. 359) and leading is seen as an ever-shifting bond that holds leaders and followers together. the kind of leader baker strived to be can be inferred from her comments on working with the naacp branches. she observed: if you feel you are part of them and they are part of you, you don’t say “i’m-a-part-of-you.” what you really do is you point out something. especially the lower-class people, the people who’d felt the heel of oppression, see they knew what you were talking about when you spoke about police brutality. they knew what you were speaking about when you talked about working at a job, doing the same work, and getting a differential in pay. and if your sense of being a part of them got over to them, they appreciated that. somebody would get the point. somebody would come out and say,“i’m gon’ join that darn organization.” (cantarow & o’malley, p. 72) baker as servant and transformer baker’s goal of identifying with the people, of learning about their goals and desires and building from there, recalls greenleaf’s (1977) notion of servant leadership, burns’s (1978) theory of transforming leadership, and freire’s (1973) dialogic approach to education and transformation. while working for the naacp, baker strived to be a servant-first. if her leadership did not help those served to grow as persons, then it lacked any real value.  in line with greenleaf’s claim that servant leaders are superb listeners, baker practiced the discipline of listening assiduously and seemed to concur with greenleaf that listening could powerfully build “strength in other people” (p. 17). but she also followed burns in that she put the utmost effort into practicing leadership as a reciprocal process, into realizing goals that were “mutually held by both leaders and followers” (p. 425). she also invested great effort in the teaching function of leadership and the role she might play in transforming a seemingly ordinary action into something momentous that brought “end-values, such as liberty, justice, and equality” (p. 426) to the forefront. in these ways, she also followed freire closely as ransby (2003) has so brilliantly demonstrated. according to ransby (2003), the sncc-inspired freedom schools, that led to huge increases in the registration of black voters in the early 1960s, carried the imprint of baker’s philosophy and practice of leadership. first, like freire, baker contended that to lead is to teach, not to “transfer knowledge but to create the possibility for the production or construction of knowledge” among learners and followers (p.328). second, for baker, teaching and learning were mutual, part of the same continuum, in which willingness “to listen across boundaries of difference” counts most of all (p. 328). third, teaching, like leading, is not a top-down, didactic process. it is above all, an occasion to help learners [and followers] “begin to question” (p. 329). ella baker respected people in the classic sense. she strove to acknowledge and appreciate them in all their complexity and fullness. she did not make assumptions about the people she endeavored to lead, but actively sought to find out all she could about them.  she then used what she learned to facilitate opportunities for learning and taking action that reflected their beliefs. baker grew famous among the rank and file membership of the naacp as the leader who seemed to know and understand each branch’s special situation and the unique challenges that each branch leader faced. transformational leaders do not so much orate and lecture, as they create opportunities for people to learn together, to become, as burns (1978) points out, “joint seekers of truth and of mutual actualization” (p. 449). baker noted that her work as activist and leader did not stress imparting new theories or drawing complex pictures of social relations. she focused her efforts instead on helping people to more clearly “see their own ideas” (ransby, p. 363). she did this, as bob moses (2001) has pointed out by quietly working “in out-of-the-way places” and then by really “digging into [life in] local communities” (p. 4). she did this as well the many times she delivered speeches that helped people to see the universality of the civil rights struggle. baker was unusually wide-awake to the people and the events swirling around her. listening closely, observing keenly, speaking concisely, seeing discerningly, she picked up on things other people missed.  she was famous among the sncc membership for holding individual side conversations with quieter participants (often women) while group deliberations were going on, and then interrupting the discussion to announce to those assembled that someone she had just spoken to held a powerful idea that needed to be heard. dallard (1990) reports that baker would sit down next to a particularly reticent participant, quietly draw that person out, and then grab the attention of the rest of the group by shouting: “look, here’s somebody with something to say about that” (p. 84). she was also the one inclined to locate areas of agreement or consensus in the midst of what appeared to be sharp conflict. during a meeting of sncc when a bitter argument broke out between the partisans of direct action and civil disobedience and those committed to advancing the goal of increasing voter registration, baker stepped in with unusual directness to show how both goals could be pursued simultaneously. reflecting on this occasion, baker noted: “i never intervened…if i could avoid it. most of the youngsters had been trained…to follow adults….i felt they ought to have a chance to learn to think things through and to make the decisions. but this was a point at which i did have something to say” (dallard, p. 86). baker as bridge-builder in 1958, baker reluctantly accepted the title of “temporary executive director” of the southern christian leadership conference the civil rights organization that martin luther king created to capitalize on the success of the montgomery bus boycott. when she stepped down from this position almost 3 years later, her title still included the word “temporary.” when her male successor took over, he was immediately granted the full title of “executive director.” as a strong-willed, intellectual female in an organization largely staffed by males, baker rarely got the recognition that her male colleagues enjoyed. yet few of her male counterparts knew grassroots leaders as well as she.few were as comfortable as baker relating to the sclc’s broad range of constituents. she was equally effective with highly educated organizers or poor, illiterate farmers. baker can be viewed as a classic “bridge leader” a term coined by belinda robnett (1997) in her study of african american female activists. she often did the important behind the scenes work that helped to build a movement or organization, while others, usually male, got the credit.  baker’s supporters and close associates, though, understood how transforming her leadership was. they recognized how dedicated she was and how authentically she believed in people’s potential.  like few other leaders in the civil rights movement she built trust and commitment from the ground up, making possible many of the dramatic accomplishments we associate with more famous activists. empowering sncc and group-centered leadership in april of 1960, with her tenure at sclc coming to an end, baker welcomed over 200 student protesters from 19 states to raleigh, north carolina to propose an organization to coordinate and support the emerging student protest movement.  inspired by the four black students from greensboro who stunned the nation by “sitting-in” at a segregated lunch counter, hundreds of young protesters from throughout the south followed the lead of the greensboro students. many of these students were hauled off to jail for disturbing the public peace and for defying laws promoting segregation.  their patience and forbearance in the face of white resistance and hate was inspiring. baker admired the students’ initiative and identified closely with their courageous struggle. she quietly created an atmosphere at the conference that would allow the students to share their experiences freely, to learn from each other, and to build a foundation for a new student movement.  baker knew that the students’ actions were momentous, but feared that anxious adult leaders, like king, might slow their progress by urging caution. in organizing the raleigh meeting, baker hoped to provide a forum for discussion and learning that would remain student-centered and would allow the students to explore the creation of their own, independent organization. in fact it is instructive, at this point, to take note of the contrasting leadership styles of baker and martin luther king. there is no question, of course, about king’s greatness as a leader, but there is reason to believe that his strong, charismatic, almost mythic style of leadership sometimes did as much harm to the progress of the civil rights movement as it did good (payne, pp. 400-402; ransby, p. 188). for one thing, the hero worship that king inspired sometimes had the effect of disempowering people. it made them think that they could not achieve great goals on their own, that without his talent for striking oratory and his capacity for trenchant analysis, no real gains would be made. the founder of the highlander folk school, myles horton (1990), has noted that king’s leadership was so strong and charismatic that it often inhibited others. he once told king: “you are so much the powerful leader that it’s hard for people who work with you to have a role they can grow in” (p. 127). horton urged king to cultivate new leaders, but he never seemed able to do this, as the sclc depended so heavily on burnishing king’s powerful image. furthermore, the tendency of the media to focus all of their attention on king – a practice encouraged by sclc administrators – meant that many deserving activists got little or no credit for their efforts. bob moses recalled conversing with ella baker’s successor at sclc, wyatt t walker, about the need for many leaders in the movement. moses believed it was a huge mistake not to encourage multiple leaders. walker, who was representative of the all-male leadership allied with king, ended the exchange abruptly by declaring, “we all need to get behind one leader” (p. 28). e.d. nixon, who effectively and courageously provided the impetus for the montgomery bus boycott, was one grassroots leader who was completely overshadowed by king. nixon’s resentment over this slight persisted for many years (branch, p. 190).  baker, on the other hand, wanted ordinary people to be supported for achieving their own goals and to receive appropriate credit for their accomplishments. they didn’t need a savior to put an end to oppression. all they needed, baker averred, “was themselves, one another, and the will to persevere” (ransby, p. 188). a whole different view of leadership was needed according to ella baker, one that didn’t depend on a charismatic guru. baker’s view was that the group, if sufficiently cohesive and collaborative, could more efficiently and effectively assume the leadership role. baker observed: “instead of the leader as a person who was supposed to be a magic man, you could develop individuals who were bound together by a concept that benefited the larger number of individuals and provided an opportunity for them to grow into being responsible for carrying out a program” (ransby, p. 188). when baker spoke at the conclusion of the student gathering in raleigh, she touched on a number of these themes.  first, she made it clear that the sit-ins symbolized something much more than the right of black people to be served at a segregated lunch counter.  the daring actions of these courageous black college students were not just part of a struggle for their own emancipation or that of their race.  they were part of a movement to uphold human freedom that held “moral implications…for the whole world” (forman, p. 218). what they accomplished and how they responded under pressure could inspire freedom lovers across the globe to rise up against their oppressors. second, because the struggle was so universal and so urgent, she noted, a democratic, group-centered focus must be maintained. by de-emphasizing the leadership of charismatic individuals, the goal of expanding the sphere of human liberty could be guided by many voices and not detoured by power grabs.  for baker, true leadership occurs when the individual is stretched to his or her highest potential “for the benefit of the group” (forman, p. 218).  she linked this point to a third observation that the students would remain adamantly independent of adult control and of traditional top-down ways of running organizations.  spurred on by baker, they wanted the group as a whole to provide the necessary leadership to advance their cause. finally, baker concluded that although the conference in raleigh had been a great triumph, the future success of the student movement depended on the willingness of its leaders to embrace adult education.  she called for training in non-violence, group dynamics, and ways to creatively redirect the rage engendered by racism toward meaningful and lasting social change.  at the october, 1960 gathering of sncc, a follow-up to their april meeting, the student leaders exhibited a new found confidence in their ability to shape the organization’s future course.  with the recognition and support of numerous other activist groups, sncc now emerged as a less vulnerable and more permanent human rights group.  what must have greatly pleased ella baker was sncc’s ongoing commitment to group-centered leadership. resisting the temptation to create a hierarchical structure and eager to support rather than to control local organizations, the members of sncc continued to believe that they could do their best work by nurturing local leadership and by keeping lines of communication open for the benefit of all.  over time tensions would emerge over the true mission of sncc, but there was never any doubt throughout most of its history that one of its most important functions was to help local community groups “determine their own direction” (carson, p. 30). as payne (1995) has noted, the key to sncc’s influence and legacy was “the respect it had for people regardless of their status and the ways in which that respect empowered those people to make the contributions they had in them” (p. 185). few dissented from the belief that without ella baker’s leadership and vision it would have been impossible to sustain this enduring purpose. although baker was self-effacing and often quiet, the vision she projected was radical. she reminded the students frequently that they needed to “learn to think in radical terms.”  baker used “the term radical in its original meaning – getting down to and understanding the root cause. “it means,” she asserted, “facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system” (moses & robb, p. 3). baker was respected as a leader who believed in the civil rights movement, but who, in a larger sense, used the movement as an opportunity to radically alter an unjust system. leader as teacher/leader as learner even as sncc began to exert a major influence on the civil rights movement, the need for searching and extensive discussions about its mission and structure remained strong.  for at least the first two years of its existence, years in which ella baker continued to play an active role, sncc gathered periodically to revisit and to explore their collective purposes.  the “marathon meetings” that inevitably ensued always included baker’s quiet and unobtrusive presence.  she rarely contributed a view of her own, but participated most often as a listener and occasionally as a questioner.  comparing her to nelson mandela, grant (1998) explained that baker listened closely and actively to every person and would occasionally refer to a previous speaker’s words to lend them added credibility and weight.  she regularly paraphrased and synthesized what others had said, and taught the young people in sncc “that everyone had something to give, thus helping them learn to respect each other” (p. 137). baker also participated by questioning students with a masterful socratic persistence. she would not tell them what to do, but she would interrogate participants repeatedly about purpose and mission. as mary king (1987), an early sncc volunteer, noted, “again and again, she would force us to articulate our assumptions” (p. 60).  mary king sometimes felt intimidated by baker’s methods, but she came to see that her questioning was a strategy to combat dogmatism. only through persistent and sharply worded questioning, mary king learned, could the temptation to adopt a single, doctrinaire approach be avoided. she attributed to baker one of the most important lessons of her life. “there are many legitimate and effective avenues for social change and there is no single right way” (payne, p. 97). baker’s approach to leading, which was inseparable from her approach to teaching and learning, stemmed from her belief that the students must have control over their own decision making.  this was especially true of the sncc students, who believed that overbearing adults would only hamper efforts to keep the movement energized. but they would listen to those rare adults who treated them as equals and who regarded the students as responsible thinkers and doers.  this was exactly ella baker’s view, which is why the students prized her leadership. as bob moses said recalling ella baker’s legacy for sncc: it was ella more than anyone else who gave us the space to operate in.  as long as she was sitting there in the meetings, no one else could dare come in and say i think you should do this or that, because no one could pull rank on her.  her stature was such that there wasn’t anyone from the naacp to dr. king who could get by her.  i think that the actual course of the sncc movement is a testimony to the fact that the students were left free to develop on their own.  that was her real contribution. (dallard, pp. 84-5) joanne grant (1998) pointed out that, although baker spurned the profession of teaching as a vocational aspiration, her chief role with sncc turned out to be as teacher.  she wanted to develop new leaders and there was no way to do this except through some form of instruction.  of course, baker employed a variety of forms to support and guide the students – listening, affirming, questioning, and, only rarely, asserting.  but these were all aspects of her teaching role.  baker was a fount of wisdom and experience for the students of sncc.  as time went on, her ability to teach, facilitate, and redirect the students toward more productive, generous, and humane goals grew into legend. it was out of such encounters that her reputation as fundi developed. baker’s developmental leadership throughout her life, but especially as “founding mother” of sncc, baker espoused and practiced a philosophy of what payne (1995) and belenky, bond, and weinstock (1997) have called developmental leadership. it left little room for charismatic, top-down influence. despite the many opportunities she had to further her fame, she stayed behind the scenes, supporting and nurturing her fellow activists and organizers, never seeking recognition for herself. baker embraced a highly collaborative approach to leadership in which individuals did not take credit or accept responsibility for their actions alone, but instead alternated between leader and follower for the sake of the general welfare. she discouraged leaders who thirsted for acclaim, who were animated by glory and power, urging them instead to revel in the accomplishment of collective goals. yet, baker was also the first to defend anyone possessing the courage to take a principled stand against the group when doing so for the group’s sake. defiance can be admirable when selfless, she seemed to say, but destructive when carried out merely for self-aggrandizement. baker’s (1972) notion of group-centered, developmental leadership stressed learning, interdependence, and selfsufficiency. traditional leadership makes followers dependent on leaders, stripping followers of the resources to learn from their experiences and to make decisions for themselves. developmental leadership assumes each person is indispensable, all group members are potential leaders and learners, and, as baker herself has affirmed, such leaders “cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves” (p. 347). self-sufficiency was her goal for everyone, which also meant that people must be free to make mistakes, to choose a misguided course of action and to learn from its consequences. such circumstances were necessary to allow civil rights workers to grow as learners and leaders. at a time when large, consolidated organizations were the norm, baker believed that people must take control over their own lives by acting within relatively small organizational environments. organizations must be small enough, baker assumed, for people to get to know one another by name, to get to know one another as persons. payne (1995) has noted that baker “envisioned small groups of people working together but also retaining contact in some form with other such groups, so that coordinated action would be possible wherever large groups really were necessary” (p. 369). only then, she believed, could the nurturing of both individual and collective growth occur. baker (1972) insisted that “what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people” (352). witnessing young people emerge as leaders—in part as a result of her specific efforts—gave her life meaning and purpose. seeing them furthermore develop the values and principles upon which real democracy is based fueled her hope. these were truly the things she lived for. in an interview with historian gerda lerner she said: every time i see a young person who has come through the system to a stage where he could profit from the system and identify with it, but who identifies more with the struggle of black people who have not had his chance, every time i find such a person i take new hope. i feel a new life as a result of it. (baker, 1972, p. 352) conclusion – leading as teaching, learning, transforming and developing there is no question that ella baker met the multiple tests of transformational leadership that burns (1978) delineates in his groundbreaking book leadership. this is particularly remarkable, as she successfully exercised leadership in multiple settings decades before burns put forward his theory. yet, leaders like baker, females who did much of the behind-the-scenes work that made possible the accomplishments of more high-profile leaders, usually male, receive virtually no attention in burns’s book. ella baker was a leader who formed long-term relationships with her co-workers and who worked constantly to redistribute power by helping people to emerge as leaders themselves. as a self-actualized person, baker was not threatened by others seeking to come forward as leaders. like other transformational leaders, baker exhorted her followers to express their commitments to justice and equality openly and passionately, and to allow these commitments to carry them forward toward assertive action. she reminded civil rights workers that their struggle was a struggle for freedom loving people everywhere. furthermore, baker was a towering example of dignity and decency herself. she embodied the principles she espoused and inspired others to do the same. it is in fact striking how closely baker paralleled the expectations burns held for transformational leaders. she lived the idea that leadership is collective. she was one of the leading advocates of group-centered leadership, of the idea that the strongest, most effective leadership is something held in common by the group and is best carried out by the group itself. she heartily endorsed the notion that leadership is dissensual and went out of her way to foster discussions among leaders and followers that included heavy doses of constructive disagreement and creative conflict. she affirmed that the clash of differences, when carefully controlled and constructively expressed, enhances learning and stimulates group growth. she also believed that leadership is causative. it can make a difference, change people’s minds, and get them to think and act more generously for the good of the whole. similarly, she practiced morally purposeful leadership by supporting people to pursue those goals that would help them flourish as human beings. these things included most notably – opportunities to learn, opportunities to lead, and opportunities to change a system that undermined human dignity. finally, baker’s leadership was elevating. it gave people new hope that they had the ability and the power collectively to renew the world. while burns’s theory of transformational leadership explains a great deal about  the influence baker exercised, payne’s (1995) and belenky, bond, and weinstock’s (1997) theory of developmental leadership also casts light on the some of the contributions made by this american fundi. transformational leadership, despite its many insights, may put too much emphasis on the individual leader. ella baker’s genius was in using leadership to decenter leaders, to redistribute power from one person to many persons and, in so doing, to help people gain the resources, acquire the learning, and develop the confidence to go out and support the development of others in their own communities. baker was a strong presence wherever she went. she was respected and even revered by many. but the source of her leadership had nothing to do with the sort of mystical aloofness or charismatic distance we associate with more traditional leaders. her leadership focused on relationships, on getting to know people on a first name basis, and on finding out directly from them what they cared about most. but, like any great teacher, her desire to know people through conversation and active listening and close observation of their actions was not a good in itself. it was the means by which she attempted to develop their latent abilities and help them to see that their individual and collective empowerment were within their own control. as barbara ransby has so eloquently pointed out, baker was also a practitioner of dialogic teaching and learning as espoused by paulo freire. both “viewed education as a collective and creative enterprise requiring collaboration and exchange at every stage (2003, p. 362).” both believed in the power of simple humility and close listening, embracing the wise notion that “silence in the context of communication is fundamental” (2003, p. 362). ransby also quotes organizer prathia hall, a protégé of baker’s, who recalls sitting on the porches of the poor people whom she sought to register to vote in rural georgia. “we’d sit and we’d listen, and we’d listen to the person talk about survival and talk about families…i think some of the most important lessons i learned were on the porches of people who couldn’t read or write their names” (2003, p. 362). one can’t help thinking that ella baker and paulo freire, too, would have been very proud of how prathia hall nurtured relationships with the black people of rural georgia and learned from their experiences. in an influential essay about building a foundation for a strong, democratic society, benjamin barber (1998) concurs with baker that it is not strong leaders, but strong organizational members that are most needed. leaders are at their best as facilitators, moderators, and head-listeners. leaders who are scrupulous listeners work to ensure that everyone has a chance to contribute something valuable to the group. for the leader, to lead through listening means “not to scan an adversary’s position for weaknesses or potential trade-offs, (p. 108)” but to support each participant in empathizing with all others, “to discover in the babble of voices a consensus that is audible only to the scrupulous auditor (p. 108).” the effective facilitator as leader “wishes to transform all the he’s and she’s who come into the meeting with their own interests into a single we with a common interest (p. 108).” such a leader “will insist that every [participant] be heard, but by that [the leader] will mean not only that all can speak but that all must listen” (p. 108). according to howard gardner (1995), leaders tell a recurring story that reveals the identity of the leader, underscores group goals, and highlights the values that the group both espouses and enacts. such stories help the group to understand “who they are, where they come from, and where they are headed” (p. 43). furthermore, the values embedded in the story that the leader conveys are embodied or lived by that leader on a daily basis. the story ella baker related was one of ordinary people working together for social change to further racial justice and enhance human dignity. as a leader, she remained offstage doing all she could to support others in assuming leadership roles. rarely making decisions herself, she worked quietly to create environments for people to take charge of their own lives and to make choices that shaped how they would live together.  she prized freedom and fairness and respect and strived to model these ideals in all of her interactions with others. perhaps most of all she esteemed continuous learning and deepened understanding as the twin bases for authentic transformation. in a statement to her followers that parallels almost exactly gardner’s claims about the leader’s story, ella baker succinctly put forward her own leadership narrative. it also brings us full circle, because it reminds us in no uncertain terms how ella baker fulfilled her role as the fundi of the civil rights movement.  she encouraged her followers to foment radical change, but only after cultivating a thorough understanding of the tragedies and triumphs and trials of the past: in order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed.  that is easier said than done. but one of the things that has to be faced is…to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going…i am saying as you must say, too, that in order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been. (quoted in moses and cobb, p. 3) references baker, e. (1972). developing community leadership. in g. lerner, (ed.), black women in white america: a documentary history. new york: vintage. barber, b. (1998). a passion for democracy. princeton, nj: princeton university press. belenky, m., bond, l., & weinstock, j. (1997). a tradition that has no name. new york: basic books. branch, t. (1988). parting the waters: america in the king years, 1954-1963. new york: simon and schuster. burns, j.m. (1978). leadership. new york: harper and row. cantarow, e. & o’malley, s.g. (1980). ella baker: organizing for civil rights. in e. cantorow (ed.), moving the mountain: women working for social change (p. 52-93). old westbury, ny: the feminist press. carson, c. (1981). in struggle: sncc and the black awakening of the 1960s. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. dallard, s. (1990). ella baker: a leader behind the scenes. new york: silver burdett press. forman, j. (1972). the making of black revolutionaries. new york: macmillan. freire, p. (1973). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: seabury press. gardner, h. (1995). leading minds. new york: basic books. grant, j. (producer/writer/director). (1981). fundi: the story of ella baker. (motion picture). (available from first run icarus films, 32 court st., 21st floor, brooklyn, ny 11201) grant, j. (1998). ella baker: freedom bound. new york: john wiley. greenleaf, r. (1977). servant leadership. mahwah, nj: paulist press. king, m. (1987). freedom song. new york: william morrow. moses, r.p. & cobb, c.e. (2001). radical equations: math literacy and civil rights. boston: beacon press. payne, c. (1995). i’ve got the light of freedom: the organizing tradition and the mississippi freedom struggle. berkeley: university of california press. ransby, b. (2003). ella baker and the black freedom movement: a radical democratic vision. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. robnett, b. (1997). how long? how long?: african american women in the struggle for civil rights. new york: oxford university press. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 29, number 11 august 27, 2009 issn 1093-7099 ‘so pleasant to be a school maam’: the civil war as an educational force for women dr. lucy e. bailey abstract scrutinizing the documentary traces of women’s lives reveals the significant variability in what constitutes women’s leadership and advancement historically. during war time, even the act of writing a letter offered women opportunities to advance their learning. this paper draws from a collection of over 150 letters northern women wrote during the american civil war to consider aspects of women’s educational experiences during this devastating national conflict that spanned four bloody years and involved millions of americans (bailey, 2008; rhoades & bailey, 2009). women’s historians have explored how the war shaped women’s social roles, gendered consciousness, and political organizing, yet its educational implications remain an under-theorized aspect of the war’s complicated legacy worth exploring further. the letters under study highlight four aspects of women’s education during the american civil war: (a) women’s varied attitudes toward new opportunities to teach and attend school, (b) wartime correspondence as an educational tool, (c) home front demands as obstacles to women’s pursuit of formal education; and, conversely, (d) war events as educational forces in women’s lives. each has implications for reconsidering women’s leadership and advancement historically. keywords: women, education, school, civil war citation: bailey, l. (2009). so pleasant to be a school maam: the civil war as an educational force for women. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(11). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 2 introduction this paper draws from a collection of over 150 letters northern women wrote during the american civil war (1861-1865) to consider aspects of women’s educational experiences during this devastating national conflict that spanned four bloody years and involved millions of americans, which i have discussed at length elsewhere (bailey, 2008; rhoades & bailey, 2009).i women’s historians (attie, 1998; clinton & silber, 1992; faust, 1996; richard, 2003; silber, 2005) have detailed varied ways the civil war shaped women’s social roles, gendered consciousness, and political organizing, yet its educational implications for women’s lives and leadership remain an under-theorized aspect of the war’s complicated legacy. given the significant role education has played in advancing women’s status historically, and women’s activism throughout the 19th century to increase educational access, these aspects of women’s experience merit further consideration. in a century in which many deemed women’s intellectual capacities inferior to men’s and their education of lesser importance than their other roles and responsibilities, the collection of letters under study offers insight into young northern women’s attitudes toward education and teaching and their methods for pursuing educational opportunities in the midst of war. although national upheaval, gendered demands of war work, and women’s concern for the men they loved often consumed their emotional and physical energies, print culture also flourished during the civil war and citizens exchanged letters with a degree of fervor and fanfare previously unknown in american history (wiley, 1952). some white, middle-class women slipped into classrooms that soldiers left vacant, utilized such informal educational tools as letters, newspapers, and literary societies, or taught school with varying degrees of reluctance and enthusiasm. others found that home front demands forced them to defer their educational dreams (bailey, 2008). as historians have detailed, the civil war was a profoundly gendered phenomenon. gendered beliefs saturated cultural discourse about patriotism and war, gendered prescriptions shaped men and women’s war experiences and roles, and sex/gender status influenced who lived and died: over 620,000 men lost their lives in the war’s hospitals, camps, and battlefields (attie, 1998; clinton & silber, 1992; faust, 1996; richard, 2003; silber, 2005). gender also shaped patterns of documentation during the war and scholarship produced in its aftermath (faust, 1996; nelson, 1997). nearly 150 years after confederate forces surrendered, social historians continue to explore the varied social, economic, and political effects of the war for women’s lives. the scholarship of jeannie attie, catherine clinton, drew gilpin faust, patricia richard, nina silber, and the society for women and the civil war has contributed to this notable effort. yet, much is left to mine in the civil war era diaries, letters, and other documents women left behind. in this paper, i draw from letters some northern women wrote between the years 1862 and 1867 to discuss four aspects of education legible in the texts (rhoades & bailey, 2009): (a) women’s varying attitudes toward formal educational opportunities, (b) the function of wartime correspondence as an informal educational tool, (c) home front demands as obstacles to women’s education, and conversely, (d) war events as educational forces in women’s lives. the four educational themes i highlight in these historical documents not only suggest ways that rural and middle-class women participated in formal schooling as their opportunities expanded throughout the 19th century but also underscore the significance of women’s informal advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 3 educational pursuits. women’s limited access to formal education historically has prompted educational historians to explore the informal tools women have used to advance their learning to create a more comprehensive portrait of women’s educational experiences. letter-writing, print culture, study groups, and bible readings are among the key vehicles women seized to nourish their intellectual development (davidson, 1986; martin, 1989). exploring such complexities can enrich our understanding of women’s educational history.ii in what follows, i first describe the letters on which this study is based. i then utilize marjorie theobald’s (1999) critique of the “grand narrative of emancipation” (p. 20) in which historians have sometimes cast women’s teaching progress historically to highlight letter writers’ varied attitudes toward teaching and learning. i suggest such variability offers insight into the historically-specific nature of women’s advancement and leadership. next, i describe the educational function of letter writing during the war and letters’ value as informal educational tools. in the remaining sections of the paper, i describe how war events both interrupted and facilitated women’s educational and teaching opportunities. i conclude with possible lessons these historical documents have for contemporary women. women’s letters this study is based on a collection of 158 letters women wrote to one union soldier during the civil war years.iii these primary sources, discovered at the bottom of a lieutenant’s dispatch box, bear features that are unusual in war correspondence. most notably, few collections of women’s letters survived soldier’s marches and battles across the war years. war collections typically contain soldiers’ letters from the frontlines that wives and mothers worked to preserve or the writing of political figures whose heroic acts or leadership has inspired scrutiny and acclaim. in contrast, this collection is primarily comprised of letters from young, white, rural and single women—including chums, love interests, one admiring cousin, and strangers who responded to the soldier’s newspaper advertisement for correspondents.iv the letters thus provide glimpses of the activities and preoccupations of dozens of unknown middle-class school-aged girls and women who lived during the war. also unusual is that the soldier, in a sense, edited the collection himself. he carried select letters throughout his service, preserved them throughout his life, and by happenstance or intent, left them for his granddaughter to discover more than a century after the civil war ended.v the soldier left few other material possessions behind. in addition, the letters reveal literate, optimistic, energetic writers who wielded their pens as patriotic, romantic, and educational tools, working to “cheer” soldiers rather than lament hardships at home.vi although often anxious for the war to end, and sometimes bored with their daily lives, the young women discussed a variety of entertaining topics: local gossip, family health, picnics and singing schools, and the exploits of local war dissenters. significantly, they also championed the bravery of union men. these cheerful epistles expand our understanding of women’s communicative patterns during the war; as historian james mcpherson notes, such encouraging missives from the home front are too often “lost to history” because married women’s letters more often detail their struggles in men’s absence (1997, p. 133). epistolary art and labor are important aspects of studying women’s educational development, for as literary scholar sally l. kitch argued, the letter historically has been a form “all but synonymous with woman, not because men wrote no letters, but because literate women were permitted to write advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 4 little else” (1993, p. 21). epistles thus constitute a key genre women have utilized as political, relational, creative, and educational tools. investigating the educational aspects of women’s letters can heighten awareness of the varied forms women’s leadership and advancement take at different historical moments. such analysis is significant because the historical record, particularly in matters of war, has too often rendered women’s contributions invisible, indeed inconsequential, in comparison to soldiers’ sacrifices or leaders’ military maneuvers. yet, women sought and seized varied opportunities within historical circumstances that limited their development. weaving literary lines into a letter, learning new geography, or stealing moments from household duties to read a newspaper are contextually-specific acts of women’s educational agency. these glimpses of agency remain enduring lessons for historians working to trace and reconceptualize leadership in the historical record and for contemporary women seeking creative spaces for their own advancement. emancipatory narratives of educational “opportunity” in 1863, sophronia rogers, a nineteen-year-old teacher in ohio, wrote to the union lieutenant, “i intend commencing my school next monday. o! horror, how i hate it. i would just as soon go to my grave the first week” (november 27). the “horror” phrone expressed at the idea of entering a school room underscores american women’s complex relationship with the teaching enterprise since the profession first cracked, then threw open, its doors to admit them. indeed, theobald (1999) argues that feminists have embraced far too eagerly as an emancipatory narrative of women’s educational progress the remarkable demographic shift from male to female teachers that occurred during the 19th century. although historians have rightly heralded these far-reaching increases in women’s educational opportunities as markers of women’s social advancement, phrone’s comments suggested, and theobald echoed a century later, that individual women felt far more ambivalent about their educational opportunities than feminist historians’ glowing reports sometimes indicate. phrone and other letter writers were among thousands of women whose presence in american classrooms reflects women’s changing educational fortunes during the 19th century. as scholars such as jackie blount (1998), nancy hoffman (1993), and katharine kish sklar (1973) have explored, the steady increase in the number of female teachers across the 19th century is perhaps the most striking demographic change in american educational history. in the early 1800s, men constituted the majority of the nation’s teachers, but by 1870, women became the majority (fraser, 2007). by century’s end, women held 70% of teaching positions and as much as 90% in cities. the development of the common schools, increased literacy, the need for teachers—as well as women’s percolating discontent with gendered social restrictions—spurred women to pursue educational participation and equity with, in blount’s words, “a thirst and drive characteristic of persons long deprived” (1998, p. 7). as hoffman (1993) phrased it, during the 19th century, teachers became women. as blount (1998) notes, given women’s almost total exclusion from schools before 1800, the breadth of this demographic shift is a remarkable aspect of american women’s advancement historically. indeed, in the letters, teaching is the only public occupation that women mention performing. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 5 yet, theobald (1999) argued that however significant “feminist demands for the right to education” were to advancing women’s status, “what happened to [individual] women as teachers—as subjectivities shaped by institutionalization, the ‘everydayness’ of waged labour, and the lifetime of self-censure demanded of them—may well be the antithesis” of women’s broader emancipatory gains (p. 20-21). for example, in the quote above, phrone seemed to begrudge the days she spent in ohio’s rural classrooms, perhaps because her young charges were restless, her labor kept her away from her beloved sister, or she preferred to spend time among friends sledding in the fresh ohio snow. indeed, her father’s death may have rendered her teaching labor a financial imperative, and thus a burdensome, rather than pleasurable, undertaking. in addition, phrone was 18 years old when the war began and her favored beau rushed to join the union ranks. her concern for his fate and the sheer effort required to contain wiggling bodies in school desks may have tempered the zeal this young woman felt for the opportunity to teach. significantly, she never links teaching with women’s social advancement. in addition to the broader context of war that shaped writers’ experiences, the specific circumstances women navigated in their daily lives inevitably shaped their attitudes toward teaching. for example, feisty lou riggen, who was 22 years old when answered the lieutenant’s advertisement for correspondence, lived and taught in a rural area of montgomery county, kentucky. her father, reuben, died when she was four years of age, and her mother, mary, died when she was 21. she was the eldest of three, and her brother served in the union army throughout the war. a single woman who needed to work, lou likely had few occupational choices in her small community and thus did not necessarily experience teaching as a liberating phenomenon. indeed, she maintained steadfast silence on the details of her schooldays in all 26 letters she wrote to the soldier. teaching, she mentioned once in passing, kept her “closely confined” (march 3, 1864). lou’s letters reflect a witty, intelligent writer who enjoyed poetry and music, wielded logic with ease, and reveled in her ability to entertain the soldier. responding to his advertisement might have provided welcome relief from her daily labor.vii for other young women, the mere idea of attending school during the war evokes a lackluster response. in 1862, fourteen-year-old fannie meredith wrote, “mae lydick is going to danville to school….i intended to go but geve it up [sic]. there was so much excitement about war that i could not think of going” (september 14). although schools expanded women’s social and economic opportunities, and fannie, like phrone, later claimed a school ‘room of her own,’ the appeal of lessons, quills, and schoolbooks seems to pale in comparison to the excitement surrounding the war. such contextual forces are key to analyzing the diversity and complexity of women’s educational experiences, for considering their varied attitudes toward educational opportunities, and for complicating the “grand narrative of emancipation.” in contrast to phrone’s dread and fannie’s disinterest, the lieutenant’s young cousin, rosa crum, enjoyed schooling and longed to become a teacher. yet, in the wake of the war and her mother’s death, she must grapple with domestic burdens that keep her dreams out of reach. rosa, who lives in a small community in southern ohio, writes to the soldier from ages 14 to 18. during these years, she fed her young brothers, maintained her father’s household, contributed to farming and harvesting, and abode by her father’s wishes to defer her teaching goals until she was older. yet ironically, after the war, her father asked her to teach her active young brothers at home. in response to his request, she wrote, “will try to learn them all i can and will be delighted advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 6 in doing so, but it is quite an undertaking i assure you; they would rather play than be kept in the house at their books” (april 15, 1866). with poignant reserve, rosa described her circumstances as “confining” (april 15, 1866) but gendered social prescriptions dictate that she must await her father’s blessing before pursuing a teaching position—and she waited in vain for his approval throughout the war and beyond. after the lieutenant returned safely from war and acquired his own teaching position, rosa expressed, i almost envy you to think you are teaching school. i wish i was there to help you. i would then be in the occupation i have so long desired. it seems to me nothing would be so pleasant as to be a school maam (december 11, 1865). although domestic duties and patriarchal forces thwarted rosa’s goals, she continued to work toward a teaching future. aware that education could expand her opportunities, she wrote, i think the winter will close my schooling at bainbridge and i must improve my time to every advantage…i think of teaching when i go out west…i will study hard and learn all i can that i may be the better prepared (september 11, 1865). in rosa’s experience, schooling is a fleeting gift for women and a key vehicle to expand her choices—indeed, for her, a “grand narrative of emancipation” (theobald, 1999, p. 20). whether rosa was able to advance her learning to achieve her professional goals is unknown. theobald’s critique of the emancipation narrative is useful in considering the gendered pay discrepancies that were commonplace, and in fact, championed as a method for school boards to conserve money. rosa, phrone, or lou might have earned $16.25 a month teaching in the common schools while a man might earn $27.81.viii such disparate sums do not negate the pleasure some women felt in teaching or the cumulative power teaching as a profession wielded in advancing women’s interests—in fact, catharine beecher advocated for women to become teachers on this very basis (sklar, 1978). however, in considering factors that enabled women’s advancement as a group, it is important to clarify that individual women felt ambivalent about these opportunities. some women felt empowered in leading classrooms while others found the prospect little cause for celebration. as theobald (1999) reminded us and contemporary teachers are sure to echo as they reflect on their own professional experiences, the “institutionalization” and “‘everydayness’ of waged labour” (p. 20-21) that shape women’s teaching lives do not always equate to, or feel like, advancement. war correspondence as an informal educational tool a common technique women used to advance their learning during the civil war that is invisible in our contemporary era of electronic communication is letter-writing. during the war years, letter-writing was serious business. president lincoln perceived the mail system of such importance to war morale that he appointed a special agent in 1862 to oversee aspects of the army’s mail service. the increasing efficiency of the postal service coupled with high levels of literacy in the north allowed writers to produce a steady stream of letters to sustain bonds across advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 7 the miles. this correspondence comforted many soldiers during the war. as the lieutenant expressed in 1864, “received a mail…oh lord how glad we are!” (december 18). in his classic studies of union and confederate soldiers, historian bell irvin wiley estimated that 1,000 men, early in their service, could send out an average of 600 letters a day. one soldier’s tally of his 1863 mail revealed that he received 85 letters and wrote 164 others, some on behalf of other men (wiley, 1952, p. 183). writing became distraction and duty, relief and ritual, comfort and craft. some young women turned to pen and ink to perform a patriotic service to the war effort (hamilton, 1863). in the process, their writing also advanced their literacy and allowed them to practice what one letter writer called “interchange of thought” (august 23, 1863). northern writers called women to the patriotic labor of letter writing throughout the war. in an article the atlantic monthly published in 1863, gail hamilton (abigail dodge) wrote, “follow the soldier to the battlefield with your spirit. the great army of letters that marches southward with every morning sun is a powerful engine of war…” (p. 347). responding to public criticism of northern women’s lackluster support of the war effort (silber, 2005), hamilton argued that women’s writing was imperative for a successful outcome: “this issue of war depends quite as much upon american women as upon american men—and depends, too, not upon the few who write but upon the many who do not” (1863, p. 348). some women thus penned “soldier letters” (june 26, 1865) as their patriotic duty, crafted them according to gendered epistolary conventions, and refined their communication skills in the process.ix the function of letters as educational tools is a less recognized but compelling aspect of their role for women during the war. instructors in the common schools often incorporated letterwriting into writing instruction as a vehicle to teach composition skills (halloran, 1990). some young writers asked their elders to model penmanship and epistolary etiquette and elders, in turn, offered constructive criticism and guidance. in this collection, one young writer claimed “self improvement” was her goal in corresponding with soldiers. for example, in responding to the soldier’s advertisement for correspondents in 1863, she asserted, i am a school girl, and the greatest desire of my heart is a good education. i come to the conclusion that by interchange of thought i should be enabled to obtain usfull [sic] knowledge, and also, sometimes to drop a word or two to cheer the dull monotony of camp life (august 23). letter writing seemed a promising avenue for this young woman to both “cheer” the soldiers in hamilton’s patriotic vision and to practice “interchange of thought” to advance her own learning. a notable aspect of civil war correspondence is that writer’s improvement efforts met with some success. in the case of soldiers, both wiley (1952) and brenner (bard, 1996) note that the soldier’s letters they studied showed marked improvements in skill and style during the war. soldiers who “maintained a considerable flow of correspondence, despite their handicaps,” wiley observed, “showed decided improvements in style during the course of their service” (1952, p.186). women’s letters in the collection evidence similar improvement. for example, a letter rosa crum wrote at the beginning of their three year correspondence reads, “papa received a letter from you daybeforeyesterday [sic] stating that you was well and getting along well. as pappa [sic] has not time to write i will have to write in behalf of him” (may 24, 1863). in advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 8 contrast, after four years of writing to the soldier, relatives, and presumably, other union men from her hometown, rosa’s writing reflects mastery of the epistolary form and the flowery prose of period literature. she wrote, i have just come from the concert and while all the rest of the family are wraped [sic] in sweet repose and perchance having pleasant dreams, i am here this cold still night all alone writing to my cousin with naught to disturb me save the ticking of the old clock (december 23, 1866). although rosa’s maturation, schooling, and intellectual development likely facilitated this shift from awkward grammar to smooth prose, the letters she wrote to soldiers did not simply reflect her learning but undoubtedly advanced her learning and her skills as well. in addition to the value of epistolary practice for advancing literacy, women’s approach to letter writing as a synthesizing educational activity highlights the additional creative benefits women’s informal educational practices offered during wartime. writers often craft their letters using excerpts from literature and poetry in the 19th century literary landscape. such integration of print culture, letter-writing and reflection speaks to the creative value of letter writing and the prominent literary norms shaping women’s reading choices. for example, lou riggen wrote, i have been reading some of tennyson’s poems. as i thought it my duty to like so celebrated a poet, read and read, and do like some of them. what common people would call smoke he calls “the warm-blue breathings of a hidden hearth.” isn’t that pretty? (december 4, 1866). lou dutifully reads, cites, and evaluates canonical literature, and shares her reading preferences with the soldier. other letters refer to sleep as “nature’s sweet restorer” (july 12, 1864), described a photograph as a “thing of beauty that is a joy forever” (april 26, 1864), and suggested soldiers’ deaths make “countless thousands mourn” (september 30, 1863). such smooth mobilization of lines from classic american literature and patriotic anthems with few explicit references to their original sources reflects the increasing value of the written word in 19th century culture and women’s assumption they were participating in a community of literate readers with a common knowledge base and common frames of reference that needed little to no explanation. it also reflected women’s approach to letter writing as a creative educational act through which they cited appropriate texts, practiced interchange of thought, and used literature to articulate their ideas, emotions, and experiences. in this manner, war time correspondence functioned as a gendered educational tool that supplemented women’s private reading and formal schooling. variable access to formal education domestic, community, and patriotic leadership on the home front during war sometimes claimed women’s attention at the expense of their formal education. civil war scholars have detailed the extensive labor northern and southern women performed to support the war effort (attie, 1998; clinton & silber, 1992; faust, 1996; richard, 2003; silber, 2005). women procured goods for soldiers, raised money, participated in local civic events, wrote letters, advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 9 provided essential “kinship work” (di leonardo, 1987) to sustain families, farms and businesses, and performed duties that disrupted traditional gender roles and, significantly, led to leadership opportunities after the war. northern women forged their understanding of the war through newspapers, letters from the front lines, changing demands in their daily lives as the war continued, and young men’s dwindling numbers as they joined the union ranks. as one writer surveying empty church pews reflected, men are “pretty scarce here these war times” (november 11, 1862). fewer men meant more for women to do. some differences in women’s prose and mechanics in the letters suggest that wartime responsibilities, family illness, and war anxieties disrupted their formal schooling. indeed, nelson (1997) suggested that war-time literacy practices were governed by gender-specific tropes; in women’s case, the “interruptibility” topos that suggested women “never have time to write” contributed to normalizing gender and literacy roles and dictating the type of writing with which women could engage (p. 48). although these letter-writers were literate, ohioans did not seem to enroll their girls to the same extent as their boys in any year from 1837 to 1875 and girls and women’s educational opportunities remained circumscribed throughout the century. whereas 346,147 girls enrolled in ohio schools in 1862, the daily attendance figure for that year was 189,972 (ohio state teacher’s association, 1862, p.447). war events shifted priorities, as fannie meredith’s earlier comments indicate: “there was so much excitement about war that i could not think of going [to school].” other letters shed additional light on these erratic attendance figures. in 1862, ohioan mollie ward writes, “[mother] has been sick over three weeks and the principal part of the care of the household rested upon my shoulders…i have been so busy i have scarcely found time for reading the news” (november 28, 1863). war events preoccupy some women, while laundry, cooking, and caring for ill family members preoccupy others. for ell hawn, a member of a farming family with ten children, polishing her epistolary prose seems the least of her concerns. her brother john’s service and her enlisted brother marion’s death in 1862 left her family with fewer hands for the agricultural labor on their farm in knox county, ohio, a region in which agriculture was the dominant industry. it is thus understandable that ell’s writing is circuitous in style and peppered with misspellings. for example, on september 27, 1862, after president lincoln had circulated the emancipation proclamation, ell wrote, and allas the president has ishued a proclaimation that all the negroes shall be set free by the first of january if the southerns do not go back as they once were & obey the laws of thire country. although ell’s skill base was established long before the war, she might have lacked the luxury of time or family support during her adolescent years to refine her skills. lou riggen’s colorful description of domestic responsibilities illustrates the enormous labor women performed to maintain their 19th century households that undoubtedly consumed schooling hours for many. it also provides a clear example of the gendered “interruptibility” topos governing war time literature that suggests women “never have time to write” (nelson, 1997, p. 48). responding to the soldier’s query concerning the range and quality of her domestic advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 10 skills, lou asserted that she once managed her household for six months to the “edification of all but lou riggen.” “my! what an endless task of intricate labor,” she wrote with a flourish: brooms, carpets, beds, cobwebs, dinners, suppers, breakfasts, with all their attendant auxiliaries of good butter, sweet milk, done bread & not burnt either…. ‘to be or not to be’ good was always the question until dinner stood in all its dread array on the table. sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. don’t i know how to boil & bake & fry & stew & roast beef & biscuit & pork & light bread & “season to taste [!]” (september 29, 1864) although lou volleyed this “dread array” of activities with a lively tone and a creative nod to shakespeare, she likely performed this very labor throughout her childhood in the wake of her father’s death. later, after her mother died in 1860, she likely performed this labor in addition to teaching school. lou’s remarks remind us that women’s domestic responsibilities continued during war, as they do today, regardless of the number of men seated at the table. from a historical perspective, women’s leadership thus might often look much like domesticity. the civil war as an educational force although domestic demands challenged lou and interfered with rosa’s dreams to teach, war events created spaces for some women to become students and teachers, avenues for women’s advancement that were unavailable to many in previous centuries. as the battlefields drained schoolrooms of its men, administrators turned to women to fill vacant desks (blount, 1998). statistics from ohio, the home state of many women whose letters appear in this collection, capture this phenomenon. for example, ohio men outnumbered women in teaching positions by more than 2,000 in the 1850s and by 740 in 1861. in contrast, during the war years, ohio women surpassed the number of men in teaching for the first time in history. by 1863, women outnumbered men by 3,890 (ohio state teacher’s association, 1876, p. 448) and they constituted the majority of ohio teachers thereafter. the letters also indicated the opportunities that print culture, men’s travel reports, and letters provided rural, northern women for learning about distant locales and events that were, until this point, perhaps unimaginable and irrelevant to the contours of their daily lives. railroads, newspapers, and the telegraph increased efficiency in transferring information and facilitated families’ access to war news. writers sometimes mentioned southern geography, battle particulars and political events. others inquired about the details of marches and engagements. the war personalized distant events to women who felt anxious for their loved ones states away. a comment edith welker offers in 1862 hints to this subtle aspect of correspondence for women distanced from the frontlines. she wrote, “the rebels have possession of frederickburg [sic]. i suppose you knew where that is. it is in virginia” (december 19). although edith’s treatment of this key battle is limited to this cursory line, and she assumed the soldier is aware of fredericksburg’s location, her passing reference reveals how war reports opened a geographic world in print for northern young women as soldiers encountered that world firsthand. edith advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 11 learns the location of this place called “frederickburg” in “virginia” because a battle took place there, newspapers reported it, and community members discussed it. writers sometimes seemed painfully aware that gendered restrictions will limit their geographical education to the realm of print and undermine their authority to “write the war” (nelson, 1997). at times women seemed envious of soldiers’ mobility and agency, if not for the circumstances that necessitate their travel. in one letter, a writer’s comments about the soldier’s travels are tinged with gendered yearning. she wrote, “i should like much to visit the hallowed spot [of president washington’s grave], but as i cant be a soldier suppose i will never have that pleasure…[and] all soldiers that might, do not avail themselves of the privilege” (june 6, 1865). she underlined the word “can’t” as if to emphasize how gendered conventions constrain her choices and opportunities and subtly criticize soldiers who choose not to advance their learning and enrich their life experiences through the “privilege” of travel. women’s access to information, like their travel, could also be constrained as a result of gender. newspapers’ separation of “ladies sections” from “war news” reinforced the gendered understanding of war and politics as men’s business. a passing remark of emma peterman’s indicates that despite the proliferation of news sources and the significance of the war for men and women alike, women’s exclusion from political arenas could limit their access to information. emma wrote, “pa did not stay [at the political meeting] so i cannot tell you how it went off” (july 6, 1863). other women described float decorations, fund raisers, and political tensions with a local flavor that seems disconnected from the fundamental tensions driving the war. thus, even as edith collected tidbits of geographic information, women’s political knowledge and leadership opportunities remained inextricably linked to gendered conventions. gendered legacies from the civil war women’s writing from more than a century ago remains compelling for the insights it offers into white, rural, middle-class women’s experiences during a war that remains the deadliest, and the most analyzed, in american history (mcpherson, 1988). exploring primary source documents expands our knowledge of women’s lives historically. yet, perhaps of greater import for women’s educational history, these writings underscore the linkages between formal and informal education and women’s use of informal educational tools to advance their learning. literate women used letters, newspapers, literary societies, and bible study groups to develop their skills, supplement their schooling, and seek interchange of thought. even as common schools expanded, and women trickled into classrooms at all educational levels, women’s access to formal education varied significantly on the basis of race, socio-economic class, citizenship, and region. rosa’s confinement to her father’s household and ell’s struggle with writing are sobering reminders that women’s education remained secondary to their other responsibilities. these letters also remind us that we must remain vigilant to the intricacies of what women’s advancement and leadership look like at different historical moments. indeed, how contemporary scholars define these profoundly gendered concepts differs from how women in the past conceptualized and experienced them. as phrone and lou trudged to their classrooms, they may not have experienced their labor as liberating or recognized they were part of a momentous shift in women’s social roles. as rosa dreamed of teaching and dashed off letters to advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 12 soldiers, she may not have perceived her quill and ink to be educational tools that synthesized her learning and advanced her skills. as eliza avoided school in the flurry of war events and phrone approached her classroom with “horror,” they could not have realized how their lived experiences would complicate the “grand narrative of emancipation” (theobald, 1999, p. 20) in which feminist historians have sometimes cast women’s teaching opportunities. exploring such complexities enriches our understanding of women’s educational history. contemporary educators can gain insight into women’s educational advancement through close scrutiny of how historical events both unlock and reinforce gendered norms and how contextual forces both interrupt and facilitate women’s educational pursuits. indeed, at first glance one woman’s letter to the front lines may seem inconsequential to spurring or theorizing women’s advancement. however, reconsidering this small act in light of women’s social constraints and responsibilities suggests its educational value for that individual, as well as its cumulative value for advancing women’s literacy during war time. these rural school girls and teachers, who could not serve in traditional leadership roles, who were primarily confined to their local environments, and who had few educational choices in their small communities, nevertheless seized minute opportunities to advance their learning. they grappled with the dictates of their historical and contextual circumstances, dreaded or dreamed of schoolrooms, and learned of far away places while they worked, worried, and wrote from the home front. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 13 endnotes i author note: the author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on this essay as well as audience members at annual meetings of the research on women and education (rwe) where earlier versions of this paper were presented (see, for example, bailey, 2008). this paper reflects ongoing analytic work on this collection of letters. it draws from letters and text that appear in rhoades & bailey (2009) and are used with the permission of ohio university press. see this source for full text of the letters, information on the growth of scholarship on women’s civil war history, and the significant role print culture played in citizens’ investments in war letters and photographs. ii exploring informal educational practices historically is critical in part because of their potential insights into diverse women’s lives, who, because of kinship demands, geography, racism, sexism, or socio-economic class restrictions, had limited access to formal education. iii the collection contains 168 letters; of these, 158 are written by women. iv for more on the phenomenon of soldier advertisements, see richard (2003) and rhoades & bailey (2009). v nancy l. rhoades discovery of her grandfather’s letters is discussed in rhoades & bailey, (2009). this work would not be possible without her efforts. vi many writers mentioned their goal to “cheer the soldier” in his duties (hamilton, 1863). vii teaching might have become lou’s lifelong occupation. the 1870 census of vermillion county, illinois, lists lou, age 28, living with her brother, john, and sister, sarah, and working as a school teacher. viii for more on ohio teaching, see ohio state teachers association (1876). a history of education in the state of ohio: a centennial volume. columbus, oh: gazette printing house. ix the genre of “soldier letters” was a new epistolary genre that emerged during the civil war. women wrote to pass the time, to forge romantic connections, to maintain links with loved ones, and/or to comply with idealized gendered prescriptions of patriotic womanhood. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 14 references attie, j. (1998). patriotic toil: northern women and the american civil war. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. bailey, l. (2008). collateral effects: the civil war as an educational force for women. proceedings of the 2007 research on women and education conference. retrieved june, 2008, from http://www.rwesig.net/ bard, d. b. (1996). friend alice: the civil war letters of captain david d. bard, 7th and 104th regiments, ohio volunteer infantry, 1862-1864. (j.t. brenner, ed.). kent, oh: scholar of fortune publications. blount, j. (1998). destined to rule the schools: women and the superintendency, 1873-1995. new york: state university of new york press. clinton, c. & silber, n. (1996). divided houses: gender and the civil war. new york: oxford university press. davidson, c. n. (1986). revolution and the word: the rise of the novel in america. new york: oxford university press. dileonardo, m. (1987). the female world of cards and holidays: women, families and the work of kinship,” signs, 12 (3), 440-453. faust, d.g. (1996). mothers of invention: women of the slaveholding south in the american civil war. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. fraser, j.w. (2007). preparing america’s teachers: a history. new york: teachers college press. halloran, s.m. (1990). from rhetoric to composition: the teaching of writing in america to 1900. in murphy, j.j (ed.), a short history of writing instruction: from ancient greece to twentieth-century america (pp. 151-182). davis, ca: hermagoras press. hamilton, g. [mary abigail dodge]. (1863). a call to my country women. atlantic monthly 11, pp. 345-49. hoffman, n. (1993). woman’s ‘true’ profession: voices from the history of teaching. new york: the feminist press. kitch, s. (1993). this strange society of women: reading the letters and lives of the woman’s commonwealth. columbus: ohio university press. martin, t.p. (1989). the sound of our own voices: women’s study clubs 1860-1910. new york: beacon press. mcpherson, j. (1988). battle cry of freedom: the civil war era. new york: oxford university press. mcpherson, j. for cause and comrades: why men fought in the civil war. new york: oxford university press. nelson, m.c. (1997). writing during wartime: gender and literacy in the american civil war, journal of american studies, 31, 43-68. ohio state teachers association. (1876). a history of education in the state of ohio: a centennial volume. columbus, oh: gazette printing house. rhoades, n. & bailey, l. (2009). wanted—correspondence: women’s letters to a union soldier. athens, oh: ohio university press. richard, p. (2003). busy hands: images of the family in the northern civil war effort. new york: fordham university press. advancing women in leadership journal volume 27, 2009 15 silber, n. (2005). daughters of the union: northern women fight the civil war. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. sklar, k. k. (1973). catharine beecher: a study in american domesticity. new haven: yale university press. theobald, m. (1999). teachers, memory and oral history. in k. weiler & s. middleton (eds.), telling women’s lives: narrative inquiries in the history of education (pp. 9-24). buckingham: open university press. wiley, b. i. (1979/1952). life of billy yank: common soldier of the union. indianapolis: bobbsmerrill press. biography lucy e. bailey is assistant professor in social foundations and qualitative inquiry at oklahoma state university, and a member of the gender and women’s studies faculty. her research interests include qualitative methodologies, critical race studies, and the history of american women’s education. she is currently working on an interpretive biography of a 19th century educator and ancestor. advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership ‘so pleasant to be a school maam’: dr. lucy e. bailey abstract keywords: women, education, school, civil war introduction women’s letters emancipatory narratives of educational “opportunity” war correspondence as an informal educational tool variable access to formal education the civil war as an educational force gendered legacies from the civil war endnotes home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 19, fall 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]          women, organizational development, and the new science of happiness virginia h. milhouse university of oklahoma   women, organizational development, and the new science of happiness do people need a lot of money or wealth to be happy?  some social scientists say no.   once people get beyond having their basic needs met, making more money does little to raise the sense of satisfaction (diener & seligman, 2002).  what, then, makes people happy?  according to a new science of happiness, authentic happiness centers on conditions that enable people to flourish in their lives (seligman, 2003).  when asked what conditions brought them the greatest source of happiness, more than 900 women said their greatest sense of happiness came from their children, religious or spiritual life, family connections and friendships, contributing to the lives of others, and leisure and holiday time (diener & seligman, 2002).   further, research reported in the miller, caldwell, and lawson (2000), the sloane business review (1991), and by the business women's network (2002) reveals that many professional working women, if given the option, would choose flextime, spending time with family, and helping others over making more money.  other studies show women want friendly and supportive work environments and are, therefore, working with organizational leaders to achieve them.  in fact, a recent article, the opt-out revolution, reports that because the corporate world has not enabled conditions that help women flourish, many are unhappy and many others are leaving the traditional corporate world altogether (belkin, 2003).  thus, while some studies suggest that women are leaving the workplace only for reasons such as maternity leaves or day care problems, this paper suggests that although “motherhood” is very important to women, it is not just about this.  social scientists such as gallos (1989), ehrenreich (1995), and hall (1986) say this trend is more about conditions that impede women’s satisfaction with the workplace.  therefore, this study seeks to know more about the conditions which can impede or enhance women’s happiness in the workplace. theoretical perspectives work is just one of many key areas that make up the lives of women.  issues such as family, friendship, community, and religion/spirituality are also vitally important.  in fact, recent research shows that women are most happy when they are able to balance their energy and effort – emotional, intellectual, imaginative, spiritual, and physical – between these areas (halpin, 2005).  at the same time, if any one of these areas are neglected, this can reduce the amount of happiness women experience in both their work and personal life.  thus, striking a balance between their work and personal life is of utmost importance to women at the turn of this new century. to examine the theoretical debate surrounding the questions about women’s happiness in the workplace, this paper reviewed the literature related to women’s issues in the workplace (i.e., corporate organizations, educational institutions, and law firms).   the framework for this review is guided by questions about conditions that can impede women’s happiness or help it flourish in the workplace.  the review also looks at the perceptions of women of color, caucasian women, and international women as they relate to the three conditions. what “conditions” impede or enhance women’s happiness in the workplace? a review of the literature revealed three salient conditions which can hinder or enhance the success and well-being of women in the workplace:  work-life balance (or quality of work-life), job satisfaction, and spirituality-at-work.  an understanding of why these three conditions are important to women’s happiness or unhappiness in the workplace can be gleaned from studies associated with the rapidly growing field of academics called the new science of happiness (diener, 2004; seligman, 1998) and traditional studies in https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html organizational development and women’s developmental theories in the workplace. though some scholars may think that the term happiness is too “slippery” to be studied scientifically, seligman (2005) argues it is not only scientifically measurable but useful in building one’s personal and professional life.  he breaks happiness (i. e., reflective happiness) down into three discrete components:  (1) the pleasant life, (2) the engaged life, and (3) the meaningful life.   each of the three components is useful to an understanding of the work related conditions.  however, the most consequential of these are “engagement” and “meaningfulness.”  research shows that women are the happiest when they can be deeply, but equally, engaged in both their work life and their personal life.  the deeper the involvement they have in these areas, the more meaningful life is to them.  also, inherent in the principles of engagement and meaningfulness is a consciousness of spirituality.  although spirituality is a dimension of both men and women’s personality, gallos (1989) argues that women are more willing to risk bringing their spirits to work with them.  for gallos, this means bringing “a creative perspective to work and an ethic of caring which is essential to the development and productivity” of all workers (p. 128). therefore, in the paragraphs below, the author examines the importance of a balanced life for women’s happiness and state of wellbeing by looking specifically at each of the three work related conditions (also referred to as categories or themes) in depth.   first, the concept of quality of work life is reviewed.  the review seeks to define this condition and explain how it impacts the happiness of women in the workplace. quality of work-life/work-life balance work-life balance is defined as the balance between an employee’s work demands and outside interests or pressures.  this aspect of work has been a long-standing, yet ever-evolving area of corporate social responsibility.  however, in its infancy, work-life balance/quality of work-life focused primarily on the needs of working mothers.  today, this initiative has expanded, in response to the demands of all employees for quality work-life programs, to include flexible scheduling, dependent care, time-off policies, and family supportive programs such as financial assistance and health and wellness programs (business for social responsibility, 2005).  parasuraman and greenhaus (1997) define work-life balance (i.e., quality of work-life) as having a connection with all of our priorities; that is, a connection with all of the relationships that are important to us, development and reliance upon solid values and beliefs, and a sense of success in each of these areas. (p. 35) how might this impact women’s happiness in the workplace?  excessive interference of work with family, personal time, friendship, or religious/spiritual development not only reduces the amount of happiness women enjoy in their lives but can cause psychological strain. this is particularly true for women in highly professional fields such as university professors, lawyers, women ceos, or women in executive and administrative positions.  research shows that when women in highly professional positions experience extreme unhappiness in the workplace and are not able to change the conditions that generate the unhappiness, or to engage in forms of either physical or psychological job withdrawal, many experience problems with anxiety, fatigue, and irritability.  ultimately, these problems can lead to women having difficulty concentrating on the job, missing work more often, and in extreme cases, voluntarily exiting the workplace altogether (galinsky, friedman, & hernandez, 1991).  for example, in a recent article, “opting out of the workplace,” belkin (2003) found that the primary reason the 15 professional women she interviewed left their jobs was because of the conflict between their jobs and their personal lives. job satisfaction another condition that can impede or enhance the success or well-being of women in the work place is job satisfaction.  job satisfaction has been described as the degree of pleasure an employee derives from his or her job (spector, 1997); or as having a feeling of positive effect toward one’s job (friedman & greenhaus, 2000).  when looking at how job satisfaction relates to other workplace variables, most researchers associate it with the work-related dimensions of pay, promotion, supervision, benefits, contingent rewards, operating procedures, coworkers, nature of work, communication, and feeling accepted (ash, dandridge, kovel, & chris, 1999).  job satisfaction has also been described as encompassing the broader dimensionsof organization commitment, organization justice, and organization citizenship.  for example, meyer and allen (1991) reported that employees who are satisfied with their jobs are also committed to staying with their organizations.  organization commitment has three primary sub-dimensions: “(1) affective commitment emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the organization; (2) continuance commitment awareness of the costs associated with leaving the organization; and (3) normative commitment a feeling of obligation to continue employment; thus, people with a high level of normative commitment feel that they ought to remain with the organization” (p. 28).  as for organizational justice, spector (1997) and meyer and allen (1991) report it is concerned with fair treatment of individuals in the organization including how justice is distributed (e.g., equity and equality) and the perceived fairness of the policies and procedures which are used to make decisions about equity and equality.  finally, the employee who exhibits organizational citizenship behavior (e.g., altruism, conscientiousness, courtesy, and sportsmanship) is also perceived as happier in his or her job and more proorganization than one who does not exhibit such citizenry (spector, 1997). this perspective of job satisfaction can obviously be viewed as a sign of employee commitment, loyalty, and productivity.  however, researchers such as bailyn (2003) and gonyea and googins (1991) explain that this type of job satisfaction implies that the employee’s time belongs to the company.  when women are expected to be like whyte’s (1959) organizational man or to have an unwavering, singular devotion to work alone, and their family and personal time are viewed as unnecessary diversions (gallos, 1989), the job often becomes a source of dissatisfaction because it creates work-family and personal life conflicts. such was the case with women faculty at the university of kansas.  in its faculty work satisfaction survey (ash, et al., 1999), the university of kansas found that women were significantly more dissatisfied than men with 97 % of 15 job related issues, among which “time constraints” were a central source.  this study, therefore, provides organizations with some empirical insight into the consequences of job dissatisfaction; noting, for example, that many negative consequences can result from high levels of employee work dissatisfaction.  these consequences can involve “high levels of turnover, absenteeism, tardiness, reduced work effort, unionization activity, whistle-blowing (taking grievances against organization and management public by going to the media), theft, and violence in the workplace” (p. 46).  for example, a 40-year old female college professor is reported to have left her job because of negative office politics and an unsupportive work environment (pennington, 1999). in their study on “occupational stress, burnout, and job status in female academics,” doyle and hind (1998) found that job stress/burnout, when submitted to factor analysis, loaded on the factor of job dissatisfaction.  using the faculty stress index (fsi), these researchers asked 312 men and 251 women faculty to indicate which aspect of their jobs created the greatest amount of pressure.  the fsi measure consisted of the following 10 items:  too heavy a workload, time to keep up to date, time for teaching and preparation, inadequate salary, conflict between personal and departmental goals, securing financial support for research, meetings taking too much time, job interference with personal life, and preparing manuscripts for publication.  fifty percent of the women in this study reported significantly and consistently higher levels of stress on the 10 fsi items compared to 41% of men. while it is not totally clear from this study why women reported more pressure than men when performing these work related responsibilities, the difference might be due to the nature of the work environment.  osborne (1991) noted that men perform better in highly individualized and competitive work environments, while women tend to value work environments that encourage connectedness and emotional sensitivity. brewer and mcmahan (2003) conducted a study of job stress and burnout among industrial and technical teacher educators.    the researchers asked a total of 109 men and 24 women to indicate how often they experience feelings related to emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment.  women differed significantly from men only on the emotional exhaustion scale.  other researchers have reported similar results.  for example, blix, cruise, mitchell, and blix (1994) reported on the effects of stress on the well-being of postsecondary faculty including women.  more than 80% of the postsecondary teachers responding to a faculty stress index measure reported a decrease in productivity due to stress.  in addition, these authors reported that postsecondary faculty who report high levels of stress are more likely to leave the workplace versus those who experience lower levels of stress.  in summary, as noted above, stress is a factor of job dissatisfaction.  when women experience high levels of job dissatisfaction, this can impede or hamper their success or happiness in the workplace. spirituality in the workplace what is spirituality in the workplace and how might it impact the morale, motivation, and productivity of women in the workplace?   when 158 women at the 2002 women-business-spirituality:  a new formula for leadership conference were asked “how do you define spirituality?,” 39.9% said it means being balanced in mind, body, and spirit; 37.3% said having faith in superior power or being; 36.7% said connecting to others and the universe; 28.5% said it was an approach to life; 18.4% said it was an attitude of mind; 15.4% said respect for the individual; 6.3% said religious beliefs; 5.1% said ethics; 6.3% checked other; and 12.0% gave no answer.  to the question “how important a role do you, personally, believe spiritual values have in the workplace?,” 82.9% said extremely important and 15.2% said somewhat important.  when asked to indicate the two most important manifestations of spiritual values in the workplace out of a total of six (corporate policies, practical support programs, community outreach, world outreach, and religious accommodation), the women said the two most important manifestations were corporate policies (e.g., diversity, hiring practices, zero harassment, top management) and practical support programs (e.g., counseling programs, job sharing, telecommuting, parental leave, flextime, support networks, childcare, and health programs), 60% and 50% respectively (litrell, 2002).  these results seem to support other studies (i.e., coombs, 2003; gallos, 1989; lewis, 2001) which indicate a movement of spirituality in the workplace and that women might well be the ones who will take the risk or be the grassroots of this new movement to infuse trust and integrity into business. there are other proponents of spirituality whose perspective on the meaning of spirituality in the work place is simply about addressing the demands of time and energy in a 24 hour-seven day workplace (ime annual report, 1995).  also, others say it is being able to express one’s spiritual values in the workplace and working for economic and social justice in local, national, and global systems (smith, 2005).   hendricks and ludemon (1996) argue that spirituality is very important to the corporate world and “leaders who think [it] has no place they are selling themselves and those around them short” (p. 12).  others report that successful leaders of the 21st century will be spiritual leaders who are comfortable with their own spirituality and who will know how to nurture spiritual development in others (cacioppe, 2000; smith, 2005). moreover, female and male employees are increasingly asking themselves questions that are essentially spiritual in nature: "what do i want to do with my life?", "why do i go to work?", and “what is important to me?".  bruzzese (1996) explained, it is not that [women] are unhappy just because they may not be well paid or don't have good [extrinsic] benefits it's something else.  it is a sense of struggling in a job that adds no value to their lives spiritually or otherwise. ( p. 12) in a recent article, “workplace spirituality and organizational performance,” garcia-zamor (2003) reports it is not enough for women to merely feel productive and effective, they also need to feel connected.  people connect with their work and each other not just intellectually, but spiritually as well:  “spirituality is, [therefore], about recognizing that people come to work with more than their bodies and minds.  it is also about the individual talents and unique spirits employees bring to work with them everyday” (labbs, 1995, p. 360).  in her research, pennington (1999) found that women described time for motherhood, community service, and or serving others as a type of ministry or pastoral care that permeates the domains of work and life. in another study on spirituality in the workplace, mitroff and denton (1999) asked 231 hr executives and managers what gives them meaning in their work, in particular, and their lives in general?  in response, the managers and executives noted things such as full potential, meaningful work, and serving humankind. in the qualitative part of the interview, participants were asked which part of themselves they were able to express at work.  in almost all instances, they used phases like their “total intelligence” and “complete creativity.” how might an examination of these studies on spirituality at work inform organizational leadership about the conditions that encourage women’s development in the workplace?  to begin, research shows that for those women for whom spirituality means many things (i.e., having “mind/body/spirit balance,” a “faith in a superior power or being,” and a “connection to the universe”), spiritual values have an extremely important role in the workplace (glaser & smalley, 1999, 2003).   these studies also speak about the conditions that make women most productive in the workplace.  as stated earlier, women are most productive when they are able to balance their energy and efforts emotional, intellectual, imaginative, spiritual, and physical between work and life issues. do women of color, caucasian, and international women need similar conditions to flourish in the organization? caucasian women what are the needs of caucasian women in the workplace?  do they differ from women of color and international women?  research suggests that there are some workplace differentials between these groups.  if we look, for example, at the three workplace conditions (job satisfaction, work-life balance, and spirituality at work) in terms of categories of met and unmet needs, where job satisfaction (i.e., workplace acceptance, mentoring/coaching, formal training, advancement and promotion, and income) is the first category of needs, work-life balance (i.e., family and work, flextime, and family friendly employers) is category two, and the third category is spirituality in the workplace (i.e., creativity, serving others, connection, and faith in a superior power), caucasian women may have fewer unmet needs in the first category (job satisfaction).   in a recent study where caucasian women and women of color were asked to rate their level of satisfaction on the workplace issues of job authority, income, access to training and development, promotions, access to developmental relationships with higher level managers, informal interactions, treatment differences according to race, acceptance, and diversity, all category one issues, caucasian women reported significantly higher levels of satisfaction than women of color (cianni & romberger, 1997). however, research also shows that high levels of workplace success are seldom achieved without sacrifice.  thus, to achieve high levels of workplace success, caucasian women have often had to sacrifice family and personal needs.  for example, one 45-year old caucasian woman executive vice president for a fortune 101 company in the u. s. disclosed, my entire life is work … [and] in my quest for success, i have neglected family and friends, and when i look at what i have become, i don’t particularly like what i see.  all of my hard work and the tangible rewards it brought me have not given me the joy and peace of mind i thought it would.  sure on the outside, i appear successful.  but i keep wondering “is this all there is.” (glaser & smalley, 1999, p. 3) a survey of 234 caucasian women by freidman & greenhaus (2000) revealed that 76% said they were no longer happy with having to sacrifice time for family, friends, and themselves for the precious job title, the impressive salary, the corner office with a view, and the power and perks that come with what was traditionally thought of as success.  a growing number of caucasian women at the turn of the millennium seem to be at “emotional—and even spiritual—crossroads” (glasser & smalley, 1999, p. 3).  thus, while they may be satisfied with the extrinsic rewards of their jobs, they have an equal need for those rewards (i.e., time for family and personal needs) which bring intrinsic happiness. women of color in comparison to caucasian women, women of color have more unmet needs in the area of job satisfaction.  however, this is not due to a lack of qualifications or job commitment. after interviewing 963 african-american women from across the country, catalyst (2002, 2004), a nonprofit research and advisory organization working for the advancement of women in business, reported that despite their qualifications, african-american women represent a miniscule 1.1% of corporate officers at fortune 500 companies.  in other words, out of a total of 10,092 corporate officers in fortune 500 companies, only 106 are african-american women. in addition, this study revealed that african-american women were faced with more barriers in the workplace than caucasian women.  for instance, african-american women received fewer job advancements, promotions, and salary increases; they enjoy a less supportive work environment; feel less influential in their positions; and receive less adequate on the job training, development, or coaching in the workplace.  moreover, some of the women talked about experiencing what catalyst describe as a “double outsider” status.  whereas caucasian women share gender or race in common with most colleagues or managers, african-american women report exclusion from informal networks and even conflicted relationships with their caucasian counterparts (catalyst, 2004).  for example, one 40-year old divorced mother with three children left her position in management in a large fortune 500 production and distributor company because of a growing dissatisfaction with workplace dynamics.  that is, she experienced many of the problems other women of color reported such as conflicted relationships, exposure to negative race-based stereotypes, more frequent questioning of her credibility and authority, a lack of company support, and exclusion from formal and informal networks (catalyst, 2004; pennington, 1999).  thus, while african-american women may not be as successful as caucasian women in the job satisfaction category, they expend just as much energy and effort in this area.  pennington (1999) writes that some african-americans have left the workplace because it interfered with their family and spiritual life. in their report, “advancing latinas in the workplace:  what managers need to know,” catalyst (2002), based on quantitative findings from 342 latina survey respondents and qualitative data collected from focus groups and in-depth interviews, found that latina women face work/family issues that are not adequately addressed by corporate policy or practices.  latina women, like africanamerican women, also place a great deal of emphasis on their relationships with extended family members who often serve as sources of support (catalyst, 2003).  however, these extended relationships are not recognized in the same way by corporations.  for example, when a grandparent or a great aunt is ill, most employer-family-friendly policies or practices do not extend to these members.  as a result, latina women are faced with the issue of “work interference with family” or in the reverse “family interference with work.”  another challenge latina women face is building effective professional relationships in their companies because there are no role models, sponsors, mentors, or informal networks available to them in corporate environment.   like african-americans, “many feel they have to overcome negative stereotypes in order to form successful relations” (p. 2).  in terms of their experience with “double outsider” status, some latina women feel they have to lose their identity in order to fit in.  in addition, they report similar perceptions about corporations’ diversity policies as other women of color.  that is, they are inadequate in creating inclusive work environments. in 1998, catalyst gathered quantitative findings from 413 asian women, qualitative findings from 12 focus groups of entry and midlevel asians, as well as in depth interviews with senior asian women.   the findings revealed many work-related challenges.  for example, some reported feeling unaccepted and unsupported in the workplace because of their cultural upbringing.  as a result, they felt pressured to change in order to fit in.  very similar to the first two groups of women, about 60 % of these women reported a lack of mentors and networks as a barrier to advancement and are more likely to report having lower quality relationships with their managers.  these challenges also were reported as reasons why asian women were not advancing in their careers, did not receive the same promotions, and/or intellectually satisfying work task. thus, the primary category of unmet needs for women of color appears to be job satisfaction.  however, research (garcia-zamor, 2003; pennington, 1999) shows that both women of color and caucasian women have had to neglect family, friends, community involvement, and their spiritual development because of an unwavering devotion to their jobs.  but this is changing.  some u. s. women of color and caucasian women are leaving the workplace, others are working with organizational management to improve their workplace conditions, and still others are striking out on their own to start businesses for themselves. international women thus far, this paper has focused mainly on the work related conditions women face in the united states.  however, to fully address the second research question (do women of color, caucasian, and international women need similar conditions to be successful in the workplace?), this section looks at women in other countries:  canada, britain, mauritius, south africa, and malaysia. canadian women seem to have some of the same workplace issues women have in the united states.   many women report that they started their own businesses or became self-employed because they were unhappy with the quality of their work-life (leisure time and time for family and friends) and job satisfaction issues (i.e., job advancement, job authority, income, etc.).  in a survey of more than a 1,000 canadian women, hughes (2003) and catalyst (1998) report that many felt pushed into “self-employment out of a need for independence, flexibility, and the opportunity to escape barriers in paid employment and job advancement” (p. 1). the issue of working-time preferences has also emerged as an important one for women working in britain.  according to fagan (2001), it has become both an academic and a policy debate.  although fagan’s study found that work schedules were important to both men and women, they were more inconvenient for women than men.  women cited child care problems and the need to fit household chores into their day much more often than men.  both men and women said some schedules interfered with family and leisure time and their health. to determine the degree of awareness and level of supportiveness of top managers of women’s issues in mauritius, ramgutty-wong (2002) surveyed 147 chief executives of private and public sector organizations.  this author reported that although none of the chief executives opposed the idea of women in management, they said they believed that most mauritian men would feel uncomfortable working for a female manager.  this study also showed that women specific workplace issues such as family supportive employers, flexible work schedules, and work-life balance also did not find favor with these male executives. the south african business women association (bwa) in association with catalyst (2004) revealed that quite a bit of work needed to be done in addressing the needs of women in the south african workplace.  more specifically, these groups reported that while 52% of the adult population were women, only 41% were gainfully employed, and only 14.7% of all executive managers and 7.1% of all directors in the country were women.  this disproportionate representation becomes even more dismal as one examines the upper ranks of the management population.  only 19.8% of executive managers and 10.7% of directors are women.  what makes this picture so unacceptable for women in south african is “one of [its] major thrusts of economic development in the country is the empowerment of all sectors of the community.”  the president of bwa notes that “these figures are cause for concern that organizations may be short changed themselves.”  in order words, “women are a potential source of competitive advantage, and their presence on boards is an indicator of a company’s intentions and environmental climate” (p. 2). in another study about black and white working mothers of durban, south africa, magwaza (2003) reports that there is a contradiction between what societies expect of child rearing and parenting and what the mothers themselves can meet.  the main concern of the respondents in this study was that the criticisms leveled against working mothers appeared to come from people in society who lack first-hand experience with parenting.  for example, in some south african families ideas about mothering are shaped by patriarchal ideologies.  according to the author, such ideologies include the notion that good mothering means being with the children every waking moment.  magwaza notes that although parenting is shouldered extensively by mothers, fathers can help by being more receptive to the opinions of mothers about the challenges of motherhood.  it would also be helpful if south african fathers were more open to the notion that mothers are also individuals and have needs of their own which may not be related to the role of mothering.    this study suggests that some south african women experience some of the same conflicts with work and family issues as women in the u. s. and other countries. many of the physical and psychological stressors malaysian women experience are reported to be associated with the conflict between their work and family roles.  in a recent study, noraini (2002) surveyed 310 malay women who were struggling to balance their work and family roles.  this author found that because the malaysian culture places a great deal of importance on women’s family roles, women often experience conflict between their family responsibilities and their commitments to their work.  however, this study does show women who had more independence or control over their personal and work lives reported higher levels of job satisfaction and higher retention rates than women with less control in these areas. international women are dealing with some of the same issues in the workplace as women in the united states.  while most seem to have the greatest unmet need in the category of job satisfaction, many still express a need for more balance between work and life issues. to summarize, the preceding literature review suggests three conditions that may impede or enhance women’s happiness and wellbeing in the workplace. thus, to investigate the validity of these conditions, the researcher formulated four research hypotheses for qualitative and quantitative analysis.  hypothesis one states:  quality of work life, job satisfaction, and spirituality at work enable the happiness of work place well-being of women.   hypothesis two states: the proportion of job satisfaction needs would be greater for women of color, while caucasian and international women would indicate a greater need for quality of work life issues.  hypothesis three states: all groups will indicate a need for the importance of spirituality in the workplace.  hypothesis four states:  women have the same work related concerns across occupations (e.g., business, education, and law). methods to examine the validity of the first hypothesis, a random sample (i.e. texts) was drawn from social science literature related to three occupational clusters:   businesses, postsecondary educational institutions (e.g., colleges and universities), and the legal profession (e.g., major law firms).  the sampling method involved (1) electronically importing texts from several on-line sources (the library online resource access (lora) database, scholarly books, and e-journals and e-books on the internet) into the provalis research qualitative data management (qda) computer software program, (2) assigning the texts a random case number, and (3) sorting the cases in ascending order for each cluster creating three random database samples:  business corporations, universities/colleges, and law firms.  this procedure yielded 75 useable texts.  twenty-five addressed women’s concerns in the corporate world.  another 25 addressed women’s concerns in the university.  and 25 addressed women’s concerns in law firms. to obtain sampling data for the second, third, and fourth hypotheses, the researcher estimated need variations among women of color, caucasian women, and international women, as far as the conditions that enable them to flourish in the workplace are concerned, by merging demographic data from the u. s. department of labor women’s bureau (dol/wb), the american university college of law corporate counsel work life statistics report, the national association for legal professionals (nalp), the america bar association (aba) market research division, the national center for education statistics (neces), catalyst, and the professional association for people involved with spirituality in the workplace.  these agencies provided a cross-section of probability sample surveys (conducted annually for the period 2001 thru 2005) on professional women in the united states, canada, and europe.  all agencies have been a valuable source of individual and organizational level data analysis of opinion polls (ewald, 2004; less & hay, 2002; winters, 2005) and have been used extensively to examine effects of the demands of work and family on women in the workplace (freeman, 2004; friedman & greenhaus, 2000; hurst & hudson, 2005; parasuraman & greenhaus, 1997). data analysis to gain insight into the meaning of the data collected from the two samples, two separate analyses were conducted.   the first analysis was based on the textual data related to h1:  quality of work life, job satisfaction, and spirituality at work enable the happiness and work place well-being of women. to analyze this data, a contextual content analysis was performed.  a key element in contextual content analysis is the systematic and reliable coding of textual data (mctavis & pirro, 1990). in fact, the codial process is the foundation upon which the analysis rests (macqueen, mclellan, kay, & milstein, 2001).   it was important, therefore, to identify a profile of idea or theme categories associated with the first research question.  to do so, the researcher developed a coding scheme using emergent coding (fierros, gulek, & wheelock, 1997).  emergent coding involved the preliminary analysis of a subset of nine texts (three per occupational cluster) and the independent extraction of the dominant themes that emerged from this subset.  this process yielded three dominant themes and 30 subcategories (10 per dominant theme) which were then used to code the remaining 66 texts. it is important to point out that before the coding of these 66 texts, each of the three themes was assigned a numerical category score for subsequent statistical analysis.  theme one was assigned the category score of c-1, theme two was assigned a category score of c-2, and theme three was assigned a category score of c-3. the remaining 66 texts were coded using the qda miner computer program.  this was done with the help of a codebook, developed from the three major themes and 30 corresponding subcategories, and a two step codial process:  (1) analyzing, selecting, and highlighting segments of imported texts (i.e., one text at a time) and (2) coding the segments by double-clicking on a subcategory in the codebook that matched the highlighted words/phrases in the text.  the code markings were displayed in color brackets at the right margin of the highlighted text segment.  each marking identified the physical limits of the coded text segment, the major theme (or category), the code (or subcategory), date, and coder’s name.   the markings also identified the numerical category score assigned the major themes.              table 1 presents the results of the contextual content analysis by clusters.  employing the framework developed through emergent coding, the researchers, with the help of qda miner and spss text analysis computer programs, systematically coded 75 texts.  as shown, each cluster is separately analyzed. this made it possible for the researcher to compare the percentage of categories/subcategories among each occupational cluster.   frequency counts were computed for each of the three major categories.  this number is shown as the “total percent” for each category and represents the unique occurrence of a major category in a specific text. in addition to computing the unique occurrence of the major categories, the researcher also computed the number of cooccurrence of the sub-categories within each of the major categories.  because an occupational cluster may have a single text which contains multiple sub-categories, the “percent total” for each major category represent the number of texts that listed one or more subcategories.  for example, the “percent total” for the major category of quality of work life means that 30% of the texts for this cluster contained one or more of the sub-categories listed (i.e., flexible work schedule, work, and family, etc.).  therefore, the “percent total” refers to the overall occurrence of a particular category, not the sum of the sub-categories.   inter-intra rater reliability tests the goal of content analysis is to identify and record relatively inter-subjective characteristics of contextual concepts (neuendorf, 2002).  therefore, there was a need to determine the reliability of agreements made by the researchers.  in this study, reliability was defined as the extent to which the raters’ agreed in their ratings and not just the extent to which their ratings were correlated.  therefore, two types of reliability ratings were completed:  (1) the agreement made between the researcher and a trained research assistant (interrater reliability) and (2) two agreements between ratings made by the researcher (intrarater reliability) on two separate occasions (sim & wright, 2005) on the same 66 texts.  to avoid contamination of intra-rater agreement, the two rating sessions were done three to four weeks apart. there are a number of ways to report inter-rater and intra-rater agreement.  the simplest way is the overall “percent agreement.”  although “percent agreement” offers a measure of agreement, it was too limited for this study due to the fact that it does not take into account the agreement that would be obtained purely by chance.   and since chance agreements often yield inflated coefficients, a more conservative technique, one that controls for chance agreement between raters, was needed.  cohen kappa is recommended (crocker & algina, 1986; kvalseth, 1991; sim &wright, 2005) as such a technique because it indicates the proportion of agreement beyond which is expected by chance.  a kappa standard of .61 to .80, according to landis and koch (1977), suggests a substantial amount of interand or intra rater agreement. after coding all 66 texts, several qualitative analysis functions were performed (i.e., code retrieval, co-occurrence, clustering, and codeword collapsing).  these functions provided a preliminary structure for the subsequent quantitative statistical analysis.  this included the variable list of all 66 major themes and subcategories coded as c1, c2, and c3 which was saved and imported into the spss data editor where the researcher re-structured it according to coders (coder 1 and coder 2), cases (1 thru 66), occupational cluster id (corporate, university, and law firms), and the data (thematic codes c1, c2, and c3).   after this restructuring, data were submitted to crosstabs procedures, which produced a crosstabulation table and kappa statistics for the “rating” of coder 1 by the “rating” of coder 2 on all variables.  as shown in table 2, the overall kappa coefficient obtained for the inter-rater agreement for the major themes (quality of work life, job satisfaction, and spirituality at work) was .80 (n = 75).   specifically, the reported kappa coefficients for the individual clusters:  corporate, university, and law firms were .80, .82, and .78 respectively. the intra-rater agreement, which was completed during two coding sessions (approximately 4 weeks apart) for 5 thematic categories for each cluster (corporate, university, and law firms), obtained an overall kappa score of .80 (n = 15).  the second analysis was based on the second, third, and fourth hypotheses, which are concerned with the relationship among the major themes by demographic group by occupational clusters.  this relationship was examined via hierarchical log-linear analyses in which the unit of analysis was the three major work related themes. a test of the independence model revealed a substantial amount of association among these three factors as indicated by the likelihood-ratio chisquare (l) of 97.87 (df = 4, p < .001).  hilog analyses also offer a selection procedure that first determines the necessary order of interaction termsrequired for a model to fit the data; then through backwards elimination, it determines the best sufficient model to satisfactorily fit the data (spss, 2003).  the saturated model was such a model.  saturated models include all possible terms, including all interaction effects.  they also provide an exact fit for the observed cell count.  the optimal model, thus, had the generating class demographic groups by category and category by occupational cluster (l = 112.41, df = 20, p < .001). table 3 reports cell frequencies for the demographic groups (woc, ca, and int’l women) by category (major categories) contingency table.  the chi-square for this interaction was 36.10 (df = 1, p < .001).  the strongest of the three work categories was most likely job satisfaction and quality of work life for each demographic group.  while spirituality at work received the lowest frequency count, its importance was almost identical across groups. chi-square tests were computed to test the hypothesis that the proportion of job satisfaction needs was greater for women of color, while caucasian women would indicate a greater need for quality of work life issues.  to guard against type i error, the criterion value of p was set at .001.  issues like job advancement, diversity, gender and racial equality, development, pay raises, full-potential, acceptance, and resourceful were significantly (p. < .001) more likely to be identified by women of color (50%), compared to caucasian women (32%), and international women (33%) as the most critical work-related concerns for them.  issues such as work-life balance, flexible work schedules, family and work, family-friendly employer, broad family leave benefits, and work interference with family and personal time were significantly(p < .001) more likely to be identified by caucasian women (56%) than women of color (41%), although international women (50%) were just as likely to identify these issues as significantly (p < .001) important to them. cell frequencies for the category by cluster breakdown are also reported in table 3 (x= 38.09, df =1, p. < .001).  follow-up chi-square tests revealed that each work related category (quality of work life, job satisfaction, and spirituality at work) had a significant amount of association (p. < .001) with each occupational cluster (e.g., corporate, university, and law firm).                                           discussion this study found what women, universally, have predicted.  that is, workplace well-being is directly related to their concept of happiness.  by using computer contextual content analysis to examine patterns of work related themes in relevant texts, the researcher identified three conditions, quality of work life, job satisfaction, and workplace spirituality, which can impact women’s well-being in the workplace.   these results strongly support the first hypothesis and extend the findings of parasuraman and greenhaus (1997), diener and seligman (2002), and giacalone, jurkiewicz, and fry (2005).  the second hypothesis was also accepted.  a significantly higher proportion of job satisfaction concerns were reported by women of color than either caucasian women or international women.  on the other hand, caucasian women and international women reported significantly higher concerns for quality of work life issues than women of color.  although spirituality at work received the lowest frequency count among the three categories, it was yet accepted because it was hypothesized that the importance was almost identical across the three groups.  in addition to revealing how these work-related conditions correspond with the needs of each group, this study also provides insight into the robustness of maslow and lowery (1998) organizational needs theory.  first, it determined that one level of workplace needs does not have to be completely satisfied before another one emerges. this was indicative of the large number of caucasian and international women who reported a greater need for “quality of work life” issues, but still had unmet needs in the area of “job satisfaction.”  that is more than 1/3 was also concerned about issues such as job design, the work environment, and social relations. however, when compared with women of color, caucasian women report fewer unmet job satisfaction needs.  this means they receive more job advancements, promotions, and salary increases.  they enjoy more supportive work environments, feel more influential in their positions, and receive more on the job training, development, and/or coaching than women of color.  this part of the findings extends the research of catalyst (2002) and pennington (1999), which reveal that caucasian women face fewer barriers in the workplace than women of color.  women of color reported fewer concerns for quality of work life issues than caucasian and international women.   on the face of it, this finding seems to defy conventional policies because it implies that women of color were receiving more flexible schedules, childcare assistance, family friendly benefits, leave time, and so forth than the other groups.  while it is possible that these women did indeed have fewer unmet needs in this area, it is unlikely that their needs were being met by their employers.  historically, women of color have relied on an informal network of family caregivers, which is an outgrowth of the relationship between their nuclear families and their extended families.  this network is one possible explanation why the women of color had fewer needs on this issue than the other groups.  research shows that family networks can be:  (1) helpful to the psychological well being of working women; (2) helpful with the amount of time devoted to home, childcare, and development (emotional, health, and educational); (3) helpful with overall family and personal life choices; and (4) helpful to shoring up women’s sense of self-worth, coping, and adapting strategies through feedback and validation (boyd-franklin, 1989; chao, 1999; connard & novik, 1996). the third issue was spirituality in the workplace.  in this area, all three groups reported a lower score than they did in the other two areas.  this finding may be interpreted in relationship to a host of studies on workplace spirituality (cavanaugh, 1999; fry, vitucci, & cedillo, 2005; giacalone & jurkiewicz, 2003; gilligan, 1992; harman & hormann, 1990; koenig, 2002; malone & fry, 2003; mccormick, 1994; palmer, 1998; sass, 2000; seligman & diener, 2002; siegel, 1991) which reveal that there are many possible theories of spirituality.  one theory which emerges from the literature is the theory of “segmented spirituality.”  the segmented spirituality theory argues that employees may fail to bring their spirituality to work out of a fear of reprisal, or because they do not know how to integrate it into their work.  the opposite of this theory is the “integrative spirituality” theory.  integrative spirituality is when employees bring their spiritual values to work and integrate them into their work to enhance their performance (giacalone & jurkiewicz, 2003).  if one conceptualizes the first theoretical perspective as the individual level of spirituality and the second perspective as the organizational level of spirituality, then it is possible that the three groups in this study may have responded in terms of their individual spiritual values and not the organizational values. thus, the lower scores found on this issue may mean that the women’s spiritual needs were being met, at least, at the individual spiritual level.   however, since the goal of this study was to determine the need for spirituality at the organizational level, future studies should differentiate between individual level and organizational level spirituality, then assess whether or not employees needs are being met at the organizational level. one way to do this is in the context of maslow’s hierarchy of needs model.  many of the characteristics of the individual workplace spirituality are interchangeable with maslow’s “self-actualization” characteristics (i.e., full-potential, creativity, inclusiveness of all humanity, wholeness, authenticity, value-based judgment, interconnectedness, ethics, and meaningfulness).  yet maslow believes managers can motivate employers to integrate these individual needs within an organizational culture whose values reflect altruistic love, profitability, competitive positions, and reputation (giacalone & jurkiewicz, 2003). others (giacalone, et al., 2005) argue that even if one accepts that spirituality is associated with these characteristics, creating spiritual workplaces will require demonstrating that workplace spirituality is aligned to organizational goals.  thus, the likelihood of these associations being put into effective operation will depend on several developments:  (1) employees having an understanding of the vision of the organization and being empowered with the autonomy to act as they see fit, (2) employees feeling that through their work they are making a positive difference in other peoples’ lives which in turn enriches their own, and (3) leaders committing to the legitimacy of this association (fry, 2003).  according to giacalone et al. (2005), it is such outcomes, ultimately based in the satisfactions that result from work performed as if it were a calling that will result in higher levels of organizational commitment, productivity, and reduced stress, the same organizational goals most often reported as affective outcomes of organizational research. (p. 14) this is consistent with the science of happiness research which shows that authentic happiness centers on conditions that enable people to flourish in their lives (seligman, 2003).  three such conditions are workplace spirituality, quality of work life, and job satisfaction.   when there is equilibrium between these conditions, organizational outcomes are limitless.  and research has shown that these need not be directly tied to a financial outcome (such as increased individual productivity or decreased theft), but could be tied indirectly to financially-related outcomes such as associations with positive employee attitudes (yielding lower turnover), lowered rates of illness (reducinghealthcare costs and absenteeism), or improved public image (yielding more interest in the company) (giacalone et al., 2005, p.14). in conclusion, while some may scoff at this new organizational science as being too “soft,” there is a growing body of literature which shows that the nature of modern business requires what is ultimately typical of creative management.  according to amabile (1998), as well as others (fry, 2003; maghroori & rolland, 1997; pallavi, 2000) creative leadership is one of the most powerful tools in the realm of the business world today.  but out of an unwavering pursuit of productivity, efficiency, and control, all legitimate business strategies, many workplace managers unknowingly use managerial practices that kill the creative spirits of their workers.  a single unwavering focus on productivity, efficiency, and control can crush employees’ intrinsic motivation, that strong internal desire to do something based on interests and passions.  this happens because managers do not understand that those desirable business imperatives, they pursue primarily through productivity, efficiency, and control, can coexist, harmoniously, with creativity.  inherent in the nature of creativity is the ability to think flexibly and imaginatively and to use one’s expertise to motivate others to achieve goals.  however, if this model of thinking is to be profitable, managers must find a way to merge the individual level values of ethics and spiritual wellbeing (e.g., happiness, caring, connection), commitment and productivity with organizational level values (e.g., a culture with values of altruistic love, social responsibility, profitability, competitive positions, and reputation) (giacalone et. al., 2004).  it is only through this type of merger will organizations get the kind of productivity, efficiency, profit, and authentic employee happiness that is so vitally needed in the 21st century economy. references amabile, t. m.  (1998, september/october).  how to kill creativity.  harvard business review, 76(5), 71-77. ash, r. a., dandridge, d. l., kovel, j. p., & chris, p. 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(2005). the ever flexible workplace. the salt lake tribune. retrieved december 10, 2005 from http://www.sltrib.com/   table 1 percent of major categories and sub-categories by occupational clusters                   occupational clusters categories corporate cluster (n=25) percent university cluster (n=25) percent law firms cluster (n=25) percent quality of work life (1) work life balance 15 6 14 (1) flexible work schedule 35 7 20 (1) broad family benefits 6 9 3 (1) overworked/work load 12 20 25 (1) work interference w/family 9 5 10 (1) leisure-time/personal time 4 4 5 (1) family-friendly employer 6 10 1 (1) family work/market work 2 0 0 (1) work and family 5 1 9 (1) time-off/leave time 6 10 4 total percent 75% 50% 40% http://www.mitsmr.com/ http://www.mitsmr.com/ http://www.workplacespirituality/ http://www.workplacespirituality/ http://www.bwasa.co.za/ http://www.bwasa.co.za/ job satisfaction (2) development/training 10 9 9 (2) diversity/diversity workforce 12 20 10 (2) acceptance/support 7 10 6 (2) promotion/job advancement 21 22 12 (2)resourceful/utilization 5 9 0 (2) retention 10 20 8 (2) consultation/communication 8 8 0 (2) discrimination/racial /gender 20 25 15 (2) pay raises/levels 15 28 12 (2) recognition by management 9 6 10 total percent 80% 70% 69% . spirituality (3) community 5 5 3 (3) connection 3 8 3 (3) meaningfulness 5 12 10 (3) creativity 7 6 3 (3) valued-based thinking 3 8 0 (3) mind-bodyspirit 2 7 0 (3) serving others 10 10 9 (3) faith in higher power 4 3 0 (3) full-potential 6 7 4 (3) ethics 8 8 3 total percent 30% 29% 28% table 2 cohen kappa reliability agreement major themes across clusters clusters and major themes themes      raters corporate major       themes university major        themes law firms major        themes (n=25)   interraters     .80 (n=25)     .79 (n=25)            .81 (n=25)   intraraters     .76 (n=25)     .80 (n=25)            .79 table 3 frequency of demographic groups, broken down by category and occupational cluster category by occupational cluster women of color n=5,225 caucasian women n=8,401 international women n=2,839 quality of work life corporate cluster 1060 2654 503 university cluster 763 1230 240 law firm cluster 318 1506 494 job satisfaction corporate cluster 1372 1200 735 university cluster 934 803 118 law firm cluster 351 330 375 spirituality at work corporate cluster 160 160 89 university cluster 162 366 139 law firm cluster 105 152 146   copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other 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mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com volume 41, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, and brad bizzell assistant editor: jordan donop 104 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 advancing women in leadership vol. 41, 103-111, 2022 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper gender pay equity by state and industry ronald sowadski ronald sowadski: business consultant, grand canyon university, ronniec312@gmail.com accepted november 28, 2022 the purpose of this study was to examine whether there are differences in gender pay equity in the public sector, among states, and among industries in the united states. the study was conducted with archival data from the american community survey. results of two one-way anovas showed a significant difference in the gender pay equity among the 51 states (including d.c.), f(50, 1740) = 1.69, p = 0.019, and among the five major industries, f(4, 1735) = 17.00, p < 0.01. these empirical findings provide a basis for developing policies to address pay inequity. keywords: pay inequity, pay equity, inequality, wage equity, gender-related pay equity, gender pay gap since 1964, pay equity has been a social issue that the government, the entity responsible for the regulation of pay, has not been able to solve. this is due—in part—to the lack of a complete dataset (wade & fiorentino, 2017). this study and the pay equity problem are based on equity theory, fair distribution of contributions, and benefits for each person (adams, 1965). previous scholars have utilized equity theory to research pay equity (dennis, 2016; rosado, 2018; smit & montag-smit, 2019). various laws and acts have been implemented; however, little progress has been made with this social issue. regardless of the multiple federal laws implemented, women still earn less than men (white, 2019). over the last century, the gender pay equity issue has narrowed, but it remains sizable (phillips, 2018). the federal government has stated that the pay equality gap is 20% and will take another 130 years to solve (geoghegan, 2018; phillips, 2018; rosado, 2018). this study may expose what states and industries contribute to the social problem of inequity and provide evidence that can provoke change. the adverse effects of the gender pay equity issue are felt throughout the economy and society. pay equity is a topic that affects 74.6 million women workers in the civilian labor force (dewolf, 2017). equal pay between men and women would reduce poverty for working women from 8.2 to 4%. each of the 50 individual states would benefit from increased funds into their economies (status of women, 2020). the most significant adverse effect of gender wage inequality is that pay equity issues contribute to increased anxiety and depression rates among women (platt et al., 2016). in a partnership with the center for workplace mental health, the american psychiatric association expressed significant concern about gender pay equity. the president of the american psychiatric association stated that gender pay equity issues are more impactful than economic issues and contribute to mental disorders (american psychiatric association, 2020). furthermore, more recent researchers have shown that income inequality increases the risk of obesity and heart attack (pabayo et al., 2018). it is fair to say that the adverse effects of gender pay equity are significant to american society. the u.s. census bureau and american community survey data is the most appropriate dataset for assessing state and industrylevel data. statistics are given from a national perspective to cover individual states and industries. this study may provide gender pay equity data by state and industry, with added analyses of potential social and economic factors contributing to pay equity issues. literature review the body of research on pay equity has common themes, including laws, acts of legislation, government changes, societal awareness, and human resource departments' responsibilities (burn, 2018; dennis, 2016; smit & montag-smit, 2019; swain, 2019). future research requires an assessment of why the gender pay equity issue has not been researched more thoroughly. this is so despite the pay equity pay act being passed in 1963. at the current rate, the gender pay equality issue will not be closed until the year 2152 (lobel, 2020; phillips, 2018; rosado, 2018). this study's findings may result in changed legislation at all levels of government and society, thereby improving the risk of obesity, heart attacks, depression, and social/financial inequity of 74.6 million women. additional scientific knowledge of pay equity is required. this study's benefits may provide societal results that can change the u.s. economy while enhancing the discipline of industrialorganizational psychology. an additional 512.6 billion dollars would enter the united states economy if women were paid equally to men (schulze, 2018). the united states gross national mailto:ronniec312@gmail.com 105 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 profit is 19.61 trillion dollars and provides almost a 3% increase in the united states economy (sowadski, 2021). a 512.6 billion dollar per year influx into the economy would positively change american society as a whole. previous researchers studying this topic have used limited and small sample sizes, which required additional research. obloj and zenger (2020) researched pay equity with a sample size of only eight of the 50 states. additionally, these authors focused on 139 institutions, representing a limited sample size within the eight states. cortés and pan (2019) researched pay equity, finding the study's most significant limitation to be the sample size and the need to assess industry data. the sample size only included 25 united states cities, not representing all 50 states or entire states, and did not consider industry data. goldin (2017) identified a limitation of his pay equity studies, which included 23 out of the 50 states of the united states and only included metropolitan areas, not the entire state. blau and kahn (2017) researched the gender pay equity issue utilizing a sample size that only consisted of less than 25,000 participants, not representing all 50 states, and requested an entirely nationally representative dataset. rosado (2018) researched gender pay equity issues trends but identified limitations in her qualitative study. rosado requested future research to provide a larger sample size, industry assessment, and the use of a quantitative research methodology. the previous literature gap of limited sample size has led to the need for a qualitative nationwide data set that includes all 51 states (including d.c.) and industry assessment. additional gaps were found in the previous literature. previous literature utilized outdated sample data, which required further research. many previous studies that had limitations of sample size also utilized outdated datasets. cortés and pan's (2019) researched pay equity and used a dataset that was eight years old at completion. the dataset that was used was the 2011 american community survey data. blau and kahn's (2017) gender earning equity study utilized a 2010 dataset that was seven years old at completion and requested future research to assess occupations and industries. goldin (2017) researched gender earning equity utilizing a 17-year-old dataset from the year 2000. in the current study, the researcher used the most up-to-date dataset to ensure the validity of the results. methods the purpose of this quantitative, nonexperimental, comparative study was to examine differences in gender pay equity across states and industries in the u.s. economy's public sector. the study was conducted using archival data from the 2017 american community survey. out of 3,526,808 responses to that survey, only 2,145,639 were retained in the final dataset because the united states census bureau only accepts fully completed surveys. the researcher downloaded survey data aggregated at the subindustry level by state. the dataset analyzed in this study included 1,834 data points representing 36 subindustries x 51 states (including d.c.). district of columbia lacked data from two subindustries within the major industry of natural resources, construction, and maintenance (i.e., farming, fishing, forestry, and construction and extraction occupations). this explains why the total number of cases in the data file was 1,834 instead of 1,836. there were 36 subindustries within each state, with the exception of the district of columbia, which had only 34 subindustries. subindustry data points best represented the total population. the independent variables were state and industry and compared 1,834 data points for 36 subindustries within each of the 51 states (including d.c.) the dependent variable was gender pay equity, operationalized as the proportion of women's pay relative to men's pay at the subindustry level in each state (measured on a ratio scale as a percentage). to be more clear, "pay" was measured as the average pay by gender and total pay by gender (measured as the percent difference between the median values for males and for females). previous scholars have called for an investigation on this topic using a quantitative research method approach (rosado, 2018; swain, 2019). a more robust conclusion of statistical assessment to compare data between the studies and variables may increase analytical and generalized effectiveness utilizing a quantitative research method. the data analysis provided information about gender pay equity in all 50 states plus the district of columbia and the industries within each state. analyses of gender pay data were conducted with ibm spss statistics software to assess gender pay equity specifics. the u.s. census bureau administered the 2017 american community survey, and this dataset provided a significant amount of gender pay data for men and women at an individual state level. gender pay data retrieved from the united states census bureau (american community survey) were analyzed to assess the gender pay equity percentage between men and women. the american community survey raw data provided the percentage of gender pay equity for each subindustry within each state. in this study, the percentage of gender pay represents the compensation ratio between men and women. higher percentages indicated better pay equity for women relative to men. values below 100% indicated that women were paid less than men, and percentages above 100% indicated that women were paid more than men. states were broken into the five major industries to assess industry bias. the 2017 american community survey raw dataset provided all data points (percentages). the variables were gender pay equity, state, and industry. it is important to note that the dependent variable of gender pay equity was utilized for both research questions. the analysis involved two anova tests comparing states and industries in terms of the dependent variable. a bonferroni (1936) correction was applied to the statistical significance level to prevent type i error inflation. the corrected alpha became .025 (.05 / 2 = .025). the following research questions and corresponding hypotheses guided this quantitative comparative study: 106 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 rq1: are there any statistically significant differences in gender pay equity among the 51 states (including d.c.) in the united states public sector? h10: there is no statistically significant difference in gender pay equity among the 51 states (including d.c.) in the united states public sector. h1a: there is at least one statistically significant difference in gender pay equity among the 51 states (including d.c.) in the united states public sector. rq2: are there any statistically significant differences in gender pay equity among the five major industries in the united states public sector? h20: there is no statistically significant difference in gender pay equity among the five major industries in the united states public sector. h2a: there is at least one statistically significant difference in gender pay equity among the five major industries in the united states public sector. population and sample selection this study's general population was 2.1 million respondents to the american community survey of men and women from the united states public sector. all 50 states, as well as the district of columbia, were included. additionally, the five major industries in each state were included. the original 2.1 million data points were archival data from the united states census bureau. data authorization was obtained from the united states census bureau, center for economic studies (ces), which provides public-use data. email confirmation of approval and authorization to utilize the united states census bureau data was completed. if authorization from the united states census bureau had not been obtained, other public archival databases would have been considered. addressing the problem statement and answering both gender pay equity research questions required two one-way anovas of aggregated archival data collected from the united states census bureau data (american community survey). the aggregated archival was retrieved from the 2017 acs dataset. raw data were aggregated to provide a single data point for each of the 36 subindustries from each of the 51 states (including d.c.), representing the 1,834 data points (the district of columbia lacked data from two subindustries). the unit of observation in the survey was the individual respondent, and the unit of analysis, subindustry identified by state, was utilized for analysis. the unit of analysis had dual identification: subindustry x state (36 subindustries x 51 states = 1836 cases). since the unit of analysis had dual identification, pay data (unit of analysis) from the 36 subindustries represent the dataset for both questions. the acs data are archival and publicly accessible, indicating that no participant approvals were needed. sample and target sizes were the same because the archive includes a total of 2.1 million data points. the original 2017 acs dataset included 3,526,808 responses. the final data set consisted of 2,145,639 data points because the united states census bureau only accepts fully completed surveys. the original 2.1 million data points were compared to 1,834 data points for analyses (i.e., 51 states (including d.c.) and the 36 subindustries within each state). district of columbia lacked data from two subindustries, resulting in a total dataset of 1,834 compared to 1,836. the two subindustries not represented in the district of columbia are within the major industry of natural resources, construction, and maintenance. the two subindustries are farming, fishing, forestry, and construction and extraction occupations. the united states census bureau has a minimal standard confidence level of 90%, with the margin of error (moe) = 1.645 x s.e. s.e. stands for standard error (s.e.), the foundational measure of the variability of an estimate due to sampling. the census bureau states alternate confidence levels in data 95% and 99%, moe = 1.96 x s.e., and 2.58 x s.e. achieving the highest level of confidence in information is critical; utilizing a larger geographical size and combining estimates across characteristics and geographies lowers the risk of estimate sampling variability (fuller, 2018). this researcher utilized a large geographic size consisting of all characteristics to achieve 99% confidence in data integrity. table 1 united states census bureau confidence chart instrumentation the source of all data used in this study was the u.s. census bureau, which collected the data through the american community survey (acs). the 2017 acs collected data from 2.1 million public sector employees. the united states census bureau collects data through two survey methods: online and paper. the united states census bureau seeks to obtain a significant majority of data collected through the website, online survey, and a mail-in option. the u.s. census bureau results are required under law 13, u.s. code, sections 141, 193, 221, and inform how 675 billion dollars of federal dollars are dispersed across the country. the distribution of 675 billion dollars is 29 percent of all united states federal assistance. data analysis two one-way anova analyses were used to compare gender pay equity across states and industries. ibm spss statistics software was used for the entire analysis. previous researchers have analyzed incomplete data that did not consist of national data broken down by state, requiring a larger, more diverse 107 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 sample size (blau & kahn, 2017; cortés & pan, 2019; goldin, 2017; obloj & zenger, 2020). the minimum sample size for this quantitative, nonexperimental, comparative research was estimated in g*power 3.1.9.7. for two one-way anovas (fixed effects, omnibus, one-way) with the same dependent variable and distinct, independent variables. the input included an expected medium effect size (f = .25), corrected alpha (.025), minimum power .95 (meaning 5% risk of type ii error), and the maximum number of compared groups (51). the estimated minimum sample was 816 cases (gender pay ratio between men and women), with complete data for each research question (see appendix f). the researcher added that 15% (123 cases) discard outliers or use nonparametric tests for the preferred parametric analysis in case of unresolved assumption violations. this raised the minimum sample size to 939 cases. the final sample included 1,834 cases (gender pay ratio between men and women) and exceeded the minimum sample size for both research questions. ibm spss 25 premium statistics were performed with a multistep process. 1. state data were downloaded from the united states census and american community survey databases in a csv format that is importable to ibm spss premium statistics software. 2. each state, the district of columbia, and industry was assigned a number representing analysis for spss. 3. a state and the district of columbia data point included 36 individual industries within each state and the district of columbia. 4. state and the district of columbia data were calculated to represent a total dataset of 1,834 data points for analyses (51 states, including d.c.) and the 36 subindustries within each state). 5. a csv file was organized to represent the gender pay equity for 1,834 data points for analyses (51 states, including d.c.) and the 36 subindustries within each state). 6. the five major industries are defined from the original 36 subindustries. archival data provide significant industry data points. 7. the csv file was imported into ibm spss 25 premium statistics software. 8. the analysis process compared the means through the gender pay equity rate test variable of the 1,834 data points. 9. with the collection of state data into ibm spss format, a csv file was imported into ibm spss 25 premium statistics software. 10. the six assumptions for one-way anova were tested using the shapiro-wilk test, levene's test, and kolmogorovsmirnov test. 11. if the sample failed assumptions, then a nonparametric test had to be performed for both sets of independent groups. 12. ibm spss univariate options were set to descriptive statistics and homogeneity of variance test. 13. the level of statistical significance was corrected to .025 to mitigate inflation of type i error (bonferroni, 1936). 14. the one-way anova analysis process sought to assess data interaction utilizing a general linear model and univariate analysis. 15. the univariate analysis variables defined a dependent variable of rate (gender pay equity), state, and industry factors. 16. ibm spss was used to analyze the data results in this nonexperimental comparative study, the researcher compared data collected from the united states census and american community survey, 2017. the dataset enabled the researcher to examine a nationwide sample. the nonexperimental comparative method provided the research framework to compare gender pay equity between men and women of all 50 states, the district of columbia, and five significate industries (36 subindustries). the dependent variable was gender pay equity. this variable was operationalized as the proportion of women's pay relative to men's pay at the subindustry level by state. in addition, the sample of data is per individual state data in the united states. the descriptive statistics summaries of gender pay equity are shown in tables 2 and 3. the mean gender pay equity is 74.73% (sd = 14.24%) for the general population. the highest gender pay equity in the dataset is 118.16%, while the lowest gender pay equity of the general population is 32.71%, shown in tables 2 and 3. it should be noted that male samples have higher pay data than female samples because the percentage is below 100%. this means that men are in favor of women (women are paid less than men). thus, a gender pay equity issue was observed; however, the significance of the difference in gender pay equity was determined using a one-way anova to determine significant differences in gender pay equity by states and industry of the united states public sector. table refers to the composite abuse scale revised (casr-sf). the composite abuse scale revised refers to the relationship we mean a current partner. a main interpretation of casr-sf is to validate the reliable brief of self-reporting measurement developed while utilizing a mixed-method approach. the majority focus of casr-sf is to focus on the severity and intensity of the data point captured. 108 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 table 2 descriptive statistics summaries of gender pay equity data table 3 descriptive statistics for gender pay equity variables of measured as 𝐶𝐴𝑆𝑅-sf (n=1,79) rq1: are there any statistically significant differences in gender pay equity among the 51 states (including d.c.) in the united states public sector? the results presented in table 4 indicate a statistically significant difference across the 51 states (including d.c.) in terms of gender pay equity, f(50, 1740) = 1.69, p = 0.019. the difference is significant because the p-value is below the corrected level of significance value (α = .025). no posthoc tests were performed because of the very large number of compared groups (51). based on these findings, which showed statistically significant differences in gender pay equity across the 51 states (including d.c.) for u.s. public sector employees, the null hypothesis for research question 1 was rejected. table 4 results of one-way anova for gender pay equity by state states with the lowest gender pay equity, women were paid lowest to men (measured as the percent difference between the median values for males and for females) were idaho (m = 66.91%; sd = 16.55%), utah (m = 67.53%; sd = 15.35%), louisiana (m = 69.53%; sd = 12.66%), wyoming (m = 70.80%; sd = 18.93%), and connecticut (m = 71.58%; sd = 13.31%). the states with the highest (i.e., best) gender pay equity were the district of columbia (m = 81.69%; sd = 13.31%), nevada (m = 81.18%; sd = 73.86%), arizona (m = 80.67%; sd = 11.75%), vermont (m = 79.55%; sd = 17.82%), and maryland (m = 79.15%; sd = 14.17%). rq2: are there any statistically significant differences in gender pay equity among the five major industries in the united states public sector? the categorical independent variable defined five groups that were compared: (a) management, business, science, and art occupations, (b) service occupations, (c) sales and office occupations, (d) natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations, and (e) production occupations. a level of significance of .025 was also used in the one-way anova. the one-way anova results determined the significance of the difference in gender pay equity by industry; the results are shown in table 5. the one-way anova revealed a significant difference in gender pay equity among the five major industries, f(4, 1735) = 17.00, p < .001 (table 4). there is a significant difference because the p-value corresponding to the f statistic is lower than the corrected level of significance (α = .025). it is important to note that the analysis of the major industries had 51 fewer data points since "civilian employed population 16 years and over with earnings" does not have a specific industry since it represents all data points that were not specifically classified under one of the 5 major industries. the posthoc test results of the games-howell tests (table 6) identified the statistically significant differences for multiple pairings of groups. specifically, there were significant differences in the gender pay equity between management, business, science, and art occupations; and natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupation (p < 0.001) by a mean difference of 4.34%. there were significant differences in the gender pay equity between management, business, science, and art occupations; and production occupations (p < 0.001) by a mean difference of 8.35%. there were significant differences in the gender pay equity between service occupations; and natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupation (p = 0.01) by a mean difference of 4.14%. there were significant differences in the gender pay equity between service occupations and production occupations (p = 0.001) by a mean difference of 4.75%. also, there was a significant difference in the gender pay equity between sales and office occupations and production occupations (p < 0.001) by a mean difference of 5.43%. there was a significant difference in the gender pay equity between natural resources, construction and maintenance occupations, and production occupations (p = 0.04) by a mean difference of 4.01%. table 5 results of one-way anova for gender pay equity by major industry 109 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 table 6 results of games-howell test for gender pay equity by major industry* the comparison of means in table 7 shows that the industries with the highest gender pay equity (i.e., the lowest percentage of female earnings relative to male earnings) were production occupations (m = 68.18%; sd = 11.84%); and natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations (m = 72.18%; sd = 16.53%). the industries with the lowest gender pay equity (i.e., the highest percentage of female earnings relative to male earnings) were management, business, science, and art occupations (m = 76.53%; sd = 12.29%) followed by service occupations (m = 76,33%; sd = 14.95%). these results provided evidence of statistically significant differences in gender pay equity across the five main industries for the united states public sector. based on these findings of the one-way anova, the null hypothesis for research question 2 was rejected. table 7 descriptive statistics for gender pay equity across the five major industries discussion the study results have profound practical implications and applications regarding gender pay equity. the study results suggest that gender pay equity is significantly influenced by the individual state in which a woman lives and industry type. as stated before, the adverse effects of gender pay equity are felt throughout our economy and society. pay equity is a topic that affects 74.6 million women workers in the civilian labor force (dewolf, 2017). equal pay between men and women would reduce poverty for working women from 8.2% to 4%. each of the 50 individual states would benefit from an increase in funds in their economies (status of women, 2020). another negative effect of gender wage inequality is that gender pay equity contributes to increased rates of anxiety and depression among women (platt et al., 2016). in a partnership with the center for workplace mental health, the american psychiatric association expressed significant concern on the topic of gender pay equity. the president of the american psychiatric association, renee binder, md, stated that gender pay equity is more impactful than economic issues and contributes to mental disorders (american psychiatric association, 2020). researchers have shown that income inequality increases the risk of obesity and heart attack (pabayo et al., 2018). scholars have suggested that gender pay equity is significantly based on the state of the united states; therefore, more resources can be implemented in areas of need. such resources can include money, economic pressure, social pressure, and education. because gender pay equity has significant adverse health effects, there is a need to increase the country's mental and physical health resources. federal funding can be withheld from states for not following federal laws. 110 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 future implications the implications of finding out that states have not adhered to previous legislation will create challenging questions. negative findings could cause a halt in billions of dollars of federal funds. federal funding is meant to assist the state in infrastructure, education, relief, and economic benefits. this completed dataset will provide practical applications as the blueprint of gender pay equity, providing americans information to apply legislation and political pressure for change and benefit 74.6 million american women workers. states of the united states are not protecting the women that live within them. these women's mental, physical, social, and economic health is negatively affected by gender pay equity. it has been discovered that individual states are not protecting women workers. the failings of state governments, businesses, and organizations can no longer go unnoticed. future researchers have provided the framework for assessing why their state influences gender pay equity. more state and industry-specific research can be conducted to evaluate gender pay equity at the state and industry levels. declaration of conflict of interest the author declares no conflict of interest. references adams, j. s. (1965). inequity in social exchange. advances in experimental social psychology, 2, 267-299. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0065-2601(08)60108-2 american psychiatric association. (2020). gender pay gap contributes to increased rates of depression and anxiety among women. workplace mental health. https://www.workplacementalhealth.org/mental-healthtopics/depression/gender-pay-gap-contributes-toincreased-rates-of-d blau, f. d., & kahn, l. m. (2017). the gender wage gap: extent, trends, and explanations. journal of economic literature, 55(3), 789-865. burn, i. (2018). not all laws are created equal: legal differences in state non-discrimination laws and the impact of lgbt employment protections. journal of labor research, 39(4), 462-497. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-018-92720. cortés, p., & pan, j. (2019). when time binds: substitutes for household production, returns to working long hours, and the skilled gender wage gap. journal of labor economics, 37(2), 351-398. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/7001 85. dennis, g. (2016). gender pay disparity among women. exceptional children, 85(2), 124. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014402918811447. dewolf, m. (2017). 12 stats about working women. u.s. department of labor blog. https://blog.dol.gov/2017/03/01/12-stats-about-workingwomen. fuller, s. (2018). using american community survey estimates and margins of error u.s. census bureau, decennial statistical studies division. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/census/programssurveys/acs/guidance/trainingpresentations/20180418_moe_webinar_transcript.pdf. geoghegan, f. j. (2018). the gender wage gap: how paid family leave affects women of childbearing age [master's thesis, georgetown university]. proquest dissertations & theses global. goldin, c. (2017). the expanding gender earnings gap. american economic review, 107(5), 110-114. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.p20171065 lobel, o. (2020). knowledge pays: reversing information flows and the future of pay equity. columbia law review, 120(3), 547-611. obloj, t., & zenger, t. (2022. the influence of pay transparency on inequity, inequality, and the performance-basis of pay in organizations. national human behavior, . 6(5):646-655. doi: 10.1038/s41562022-01288-9. pabayo, r., fuller, d., lee, e., horino, m., & kawachi, i. (2018). state-level income inequality and meeting physical activity guidelines: differential associations among u.s. men and women. journal of public health, 40(2), 229-236. https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdx082. phillips, a. n. (2018). promulgating parity: an argument for a states-based approach to valuing women's work and ensuring pay equity in the united states. tulane law review, 92(3), 719-743. https://www.tulanelawreview.org/. platt, j., prins, s., bates, l., & keyes, k. (2016). unequal depression for equal work? how the wage gap explains gendered disparities in mood disorders. social science & medicine, 149, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.11.056. rosado, o. m. (2018). trends in gender wage gaps: a qualitative study [doctoral dissertation, northcentral university]. proquest dissertations & theses global. schulze, e. (2018). closing the gender pay gap could have big economic benefits. cnbc. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/08/closing-the-genderpay-gap-could-have-big-economic-benefits.html. smit, b. w., & montag-smit, t. (2019). the pay transparency dilemma: development and validation of the pay information exchange preferences scale. journal of applied psychology, 104(4), 537-558. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000355. sowadski, r. (2021). gender-related pay equity by state and industry [doctoral dissertation, grand canyon university]. https://www.proquest.com/openview/c4750440883351fc7 e7dc26026917f75/1?pqorigsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y status of women. (2020). the economic impact of equal pay by state. https://statusofwomendata.org/featured/theeconomic-impact-of-equal-pay-by-state/. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0065-2601(08)60108-2 https://www.census.gov/content/dam/census/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/training-presentations/20180418_moe_webinar_transcript.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/census/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/training-presentations/20180418_moe_webinar_transcript.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/census/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/training-presentations/20180418_moe_webinar_transcript.pdf 111 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 swain, p. (2019). the lived experiences of u.s. female employees who encountered gender-based wage disparity [doctoral dissertation, capella university]. proquest dissertations & theses. wade, m., & fiorentino, s. (2017). gender pay inequality: an examination of the lilly ledbetter fair pay act six years later. advancing women in leadership journal, 37. https://doi.org/10.18738/awl.v37i0.11. white, k. (2019). the effect of union affiliation on salary for female community college faculty [doctoral dissertation, university of missouri – st. louis]. https://irl.umsl.edu/dissertation/913/. advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, summer 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] pay and rank of female engineers in government service: a crack in the glass ceiling michael z. sincoff, bud baker, and t. scott graham wright state university abstract in 1991, the united states government began efforts to address the “glass ceiling” and its effects on the federal workforce. this article explores the nature of the glass ceiling, particularly progress made since 1991 on the pay status and hierarchical placement of the almost 200,000 engineers in united states federal civilian employment. when a glass ceiling exists, men occupy a disproportionately high percentage of the higher ranks in a career field, while women tend to be overrepresented in its lower ranks. similarly, on average men earn higher pay than women in the same organizational rank. these were exactly the conditions of the federal engineering field in 1991, the year of the passage of the civil rights act of 1991 that addressed the glass ceiling, among other topics. in 1991, as a result of the existence of the glass ceiling, women engineers earned only about 81% of the salaries and wages of their male counterparts. through an exploration of federal employment databases, this article suggests that the condition of women engineers in government service has improved in the years since 1991—more female engineers are on the government rolls, they make up a much larger proportion of senior engineering management, and their compensation is much closer to parity with men—but they are not yet equal with males on any of these dimensions. pay and rank of female engineers in government service: file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer2006/index.html a crack in the glass ceiling a reflection welcome to your new career! you are fresh out of a top engineering program and today is your first day at work. you have separated yourself from your fellow applicants, survived the hiring process, and now you are on your way to your new office on the third floor. while waiting for the elevator, you observe that the architect did a terrific job of designing an impressive building. all the floors surround a central atrium; it stretches to the roof some 20 stories above the lush gardens on the ground floor. on each level, you can see people walking, talking, or just leaning on the balcony railings and you begin to notice some patterns. on the lower floors, you see men and women of all races and of all ages. by the middle floors, that composition has changed; you see fewer women and fewer minorities. by the time you focus on the highest floors, almost all the people you see, as well as those streaking toward them in the glass elevators, seem to look alike: they are male, and nearly all of them are white. your elevator arrives and you enter it with your new co-workers to begin your ascent. your reaction to this little vignette depends a lot on you and on your experience. for some, such observations are not surprising, rather, they are an approximation of the way the working world is, and the way it always has been. others, though, see this scene differently. they acknowledge the reality of a more homogeneous workforce at the top of the organizational hierarchy, but deny its inevitability. yes, it may have always been this way, but no, it need not be this way in the future. the office building is, of course, a metaphor for organizational life, one aspect of which is the glass ceiling: the invisible barrier and mechanism that results in the top levels of organizations and career fields being dominated by white males (hymowitz & schellhardt, 1986). this article explores the nature of the glass ceiling and gender equality in general, and particularly the hierarchical and pay status of thousands of federally employed women in engineering. we examine the condition of the united states federal civilian engineering workforce at the time of the establishment of the federal glass ceiling commission (fgcc) in 1991. we compare hierarchical ranks and salaries of those engineers, by gender, to understand the status of men and women as of the fgcc’s creation. then, we analyze the corresponding data for the workforce as of 2003 to determine the extent of the progress made toward a more gender-equitable workforce. two brief history lessons lesson one: historically, in the private sector, women have received less pay than men. as cited by milkovich and newman (2005), the pay policy handbook for a major us corporation in 1939 offered a rationale for this discrepancy, explaining that women should be paid less than men . . . because of the more transient character of the former [women], the relative shortness of their activity in industry, the differences in environment required, the extra services that must be provided, overtime limitations, extra help needed for the occasional heavy work, and . . . general sociological factors . . . . basically then we have another wage curve . . . for women below and not parallel with the men’s curve. (electrical workers (iue) v. westinghouse electric corp., 1980, cited in milkovich & newman, 2005). lesson two: the equal pay act of 1963 amended the fair labor standards act of 1938 and prohibited wage discrimination under two principal conditions: where employees perform equal work in the same establishment, or where employees perform work requiring equal skill, effort, and responsibility under similar working conditions (equal pay act of 1963). pay differences between men and women performing equal work were allowed under the act when pay was pursuant to seniority, merit, quantity or quality of production, or any factor other than sex. when passed originally, federal civilian employees were exempt from coverage. today, they are covered. a barrier invisible and impenetrable occasionally, a new term resonates with the public in such a way that it quickly becomes part of everyday language. two wall street journal reporters, carol hymowitz and timothy d. schellhardt, created just such an effect in a 1986 article: “even those few women who rose steadily through the ranks eventually crashed into an invisible barrier. the executive suite seemed within their grasp, but they just couldn’t break through the glass ceiling” (hymowitz & schellhardt, 1986). it was through their usage that the term “glass ceiling” entered the american lexicon, and, within five years, the law as well. the civil rights act of 1991 established the federal glass ceiling commission (fgcc) whose mission was “. . . to focus attention on, and complete a study relating to, the existence of artificial barriers to the advancement of women and minorities in the workplace, and to make recommendations for overcoming such barriers” (the civil rights act of 1991). for four years, the fgcc studied employment conditions in the private and public sectors, and determined that gender inequity existed in both spheres. the federal workforce itself was certainly not immune. for example, in 1990, the year prior to the establishment of the commission, only 6.2% of federally employed women were at or above the level of middle management (gs-13 and above). yet males were four times more likely to reach those upper levels: nearly 28% of federally-employed men were in the gs-13 and above category (federal glass ceiling commission, 1995, p.35). the general pay schedule for civilian federal employees at this point some words of explanation are called for. most of the 1.7 million civilian federal white collar employees are paid based on what is known as the “general schedule” (gs). the gs structure is made up of 15 grade levels, from the lowest (gs-1) to the highest (gs-15). within each grade are ten “steps” upon which incremental pay increases are based largely, though not completely, on longevity (united states code title 5, §5332, july 3, 2001). above gs-15, special pay plans exist for the highest levels of management (e.g., the senior executive service or the senior diplomatic service). as a rough comparison, a gs-12 is similar in organizational level to an army or air force captain, and a gs-15 is approximately equivalent to a colonel. the highest levels of civilian leadership (those senior leaders above the general schedule) are considered parallel to generals and admirals in the military. in 1991, the mean gs grade for all federally-employed women was gs-7.50; their median grade was gs-7. for men, the mean was gs-10.38; their median grade was gs-11. not surprisingly, this disparity was reflected in average salary. in 1991, the average federally-employed woman earned $28,184 annually, approximately two-thirds of the average $40,926 earned by a federally-employed man (united states department of commerce [usdc], 1991, p. 9). the fgcc existed from its creation in 1991 until it released its final report in 1995. that report, “a solid investment: making full use of the nation's human capital,” called on both the private sector and the government to reduce and ultimately eliminate the pernicious effects of the glass ceiling. the report urged the federal government to focus on two areas. first, the government should gather and disseminate national statistics to identify problem areas and to track improvement. second, and equally important, the fgcc urged government at all levels to “lead by example,” tearing down its own barriers to the professional success of minorities and women (federal glass ceiling commission, 1995, p. 4). specifically, the report recommended that government units should “. . . increase their efforts to eliminate internal glass ceilings by examining their practices for promoting qualified minorities and women to senior management and decisionmaking [sic] positions” (federal glass ceiling commission, 1995, p. 35). engineering career fields in the federal government there are 446 white collar career fields within the federal government. of those, 32 are within the category known as gs-0800, covering engineering, architecture, and related fields. in 1991, at the beginning of our study, these 32 engineering-related specialties contained 187,623 people, about 11% of the total federal civilian workforce. (usdc, 1991, p. 118-119). a societal context there can be little disagreement that women are underrepresented and underpaid in scientific and engineering fields. but the reasons promulgated for this status generate a great deal of contention. a recent report from the society for human resources management (shrm) has identified four reasons why disparities may exist generally in pay and advancement opportunity for women versus men. first, hitting the issues head-on, “a major sign of the effect of the glass ceiling is gender-based compensation” (shrm, 2004, p. 3). second, corporate cultures hamper women’s advancement. third, challenges in balancing work/life concerns inhibit women’s advancement. finally, an organization’s culturally engrained mentoring and networks favor men (shrm, 2004). some see the seeds of disparity as being sown early. while young males are guided toward science and mathematics, young females are steered toward softer studies. some even espouse the view that women are neither intellectually nor temperamentally suited for quantitative work: if women were still being discriminated against in engineering school, or in high schools, i could understand it. however, there is no evidence of such discrimination. if relatively few women are going into engineering, it is probably because fewer women have aptitude for or interest in the work. (borger, 2003, p. 8) this point of view set off a firestorm of controversy when offered in remarks by lawrence h. summers, president of harvard university, to members of the national bureau of economic research (nber) (winters & kelly, 2005). although summers subsequently professed his “. . . strong commitment to the advancement of women in science . . .” (summers, 2005a), a transcript of his remarks made five days earlier offered three hypotheses as to why women are underrepresented in scientific and engineering fields: (1) they are unwilling to work long hours (e.g., 80-hour weeks) because they value family more than men do; (2) women are inherently (genetically) worse at science than are men; and, (3) women are more susceptible to different socialization patterns and patterns of discrimination than are men (summers, 2005b). with respect to the contemporary dialog about genetic differences between men and women, silva has noted, . . . discourses of genetics as the fundamental basis for individuality, identity, or uniqueness are . . . widespread . . . . the appeal of genetic individuality certainly lies, at least partially, in the idea that there is something stable, something assured, something that (with the right tools at least) we can “see” and “know” that makes us who we are. . . . science has succeeded in . . . fixing for all time our ability to know and guarantee who and what we are. (silva, 2005, p.107) the above assertions and hypotheses notwithstanding, there is ample evidence that higher education’s approach to engineering is less than ideal. while the percentage of undergraduate female engineering students has climbed modestly over the past two decades, statistics make clear that they are substantially more likely than males to drop out of the engineering profession (peters, lane, reese, & samuels, 2002). indeed, even summers (2005b), in his remarks to the nber, acknowledged anecdotally that although there were “. . . very substantial increases . . .” in female graduate students in science and engineering 20-25 years ago, there is no evidence that a high ratio of females to males has been maintained when one looks today at the highest levels of an organization (para. 3). far fewer women today are in their organization’s highest ranking science and engineering positions than one would have predicted from graduate student enrollments in those fields 20-25 years ago (summers, 2005b). one reason for this disparity may be that female engineering students lack role models among their teachers. the united states department of education figures from 1995 reveal that only 3% of engineering professors at that time were female. that small band of women often felt marginalized, reporting disrespectful behavior from other students and unsupportive attitudes from peers and administrators (murray, meinholdt, & bergman, 1999). furthermore, curriculum design and pedagogical style may also hamper women’s chances for success in engineering. for example, engineering programs are often oriented toward a “weeding out” process, carried out through a heavy emphasis on competition among students. this may have a disproportionately negative effect on female students, who tend to gravitate more toward learning styles emphasizing cooperation and collaboration, and less toward learning styles emphasizing competition (murray, et al., 1999). still, the number of women graduating with baccalaureate degrees in engineering climbed from a miniscule 1.6% in 1974 to 14.8% in 1994. however, researchers suggest that those encouraging numbers only mask a deeper set of problems. researchers of engineering and other male-dominated professions make clear the existence of a revolving door through which large numbers of women may be admitted to the career field, only to be shown to the exits in short order (chang, 2003). these concerns are shared by organizations at the pinnacle of the scientific and engineering world. the national science foundation awarded a $19 million grant to study recruitment and retention of women in technical careers (rosser, 2003). and nine of america’s most prestigious research universities have acknowledged, in a first-of-its-kind statement, the existence of institutional barriers for women in scientific and engineering careers (rosser, 2003). while these studies have targeted non-federally employed engineers, there is reason to believe that similar conditions and prejudices exist in the federal workforce. while the glass ceiling itself may be invisible, its effects are not. if such a barrier exists within the federal government, one would expect to find women disproportionately clustered on lower rungs of the career ladder, with incomes correspondingly lower than those of their male counterparts. however, if the progress urged by the civil rights act of 1991 and the recommendations of the federal glass ceiling commission in 1995 have in fact become a reality, one would expect to see statistical progress in the years since 1991, in terms of both pay and upward career mobility and success. a retrospective: federal engineering career fields in 1991 to best evaluate the extent of progress made in eliminating the glass ceiling, we will begin by examining the state of federal civilian engineering career fields in the early 1990s. of the government’s 1.7 million whitecollar employees in 1991, about 841,000 (or 49.1%) were women. yet in 1991, women made up only 8.1% of the federal civilian engineering workforce. one significant measure of gender equity is salary. in 1991, male federal employees in engineering earned substantially more pay, in the aggregate, than did their female counterparts. the average salary for federally-employed male engineers was $45,900 in 1991, and for women, $37,400. thus, the average woman engineer earned only about 81.4% of the salary earned by the average male in the field (usdc, 1991, p. 38). since gs pay scales in government do not vary based on gender, one must look elsewhere for the causes of this substantial disparity. some likely causes are rank and seniority. with such a significant gender-based difference in earnings, one would expect to find that engineering fields were, in 1991, characterized by disproportionately high numbers of men at the upper levels, with women overrepresented in the lower ranks. table1 shows that compared to their overall representation of 8.1% in the federal engineering workforce, women were overrepresented in lower ranks (at or below the level of gs-13), and severely underrepresented above that level: less than 3% of all federally employed engineers above the level of gs-13 were female. the underrepresentation of women was even more evident at the highest pay levels. in the most senior pay grades, comprised of those senior executives compensated above the gs-15 level, female engineers held a mere 22 of 1,328 positions, only about 1.7% (usdc, 1991, pp. 70 – 71). all of the numbers discussed above suggest that female engineers within the federal government faced a pronounced glass ceiling effect in 1991. salaries in all engineering subspecialties showed substantial inequity and the highest-ranking levels of the field were very much a male preserve, with women filling less than two percent of those positions. that same year, however, marked the passage of the civil rights act of 1991 and the establishment of the fgcc. has the status of women engineers improved in the years since? has pay equity been achieved, or at least improved? are women better represented today at the upper levels of engineering fields? for these answers, one must turn to the most recent federal employment statistics. women in federal engineering careers—2003 if the above data show engineering fields with a strong glass ceiling at the start of the 1990s, how had the picture changed by mid-2003? to answer this question, it is necessary to evaluate the most recent data available, covering the federal workforce as of june 2003. an exploration of federal employment databases developed by the united states office of personnel management reveals substantial improvement in the status of women engineers between 1991 and 2003. from 1991 to 2003, the size of the government’s engineering workforce dropped significantly due to the impacts of retirements, outsourcing of government work to engineers in private industry, and other economic factors. at the same time, women as a proportion of the federal civilian engineering workforce climbed by half, from 8.1% in 1991 to 12.2% in 2003. comparatively, in the same year, women engineers represented 9.8% of the private sector workforce in the so-called “nontraditional occupations for women” in the fields of aeronautical engineer, computer hardware engineer, civil engineer, electrical and electronic engineer, industrial engineer, mechanical engineer, and engineers (all other) (united states department of labor, [usdl], 2004). meanwhile, shortages of engineers drove private sector salaries higher, while government pay lagged significantly. the average nationwide salary of all government engineering employees in june 2003 was $74,528 (united states office of personnel management, 2003). but the financial picture was brighter in the private sector, where compensation for engineers was substantially higher (national society of professional engineers, 2003). although the size of the total federal engineering corps declined between 1991 and 2003, today the prospects for women engineers have never been better. we saw that in 1991, women engineers’ average salary was just 81.4% of their male counterparts. by mid-2003 that proportion climbed to 90.7%. in federal service, the average woman engineer’s salary was $68,347, the average man’s $75,385. similar success can be seen in promotion of women into senior management positions. table 2 shows how male domination of senior general schedule ranks has faded. in 1991, only 2.8% of engineers at the senior ranks of gs-14 and gs-15 were women. by 2003, that percentage had increased nearly four-fold to 10.2% (united states office of personnel management, 2003). at even higher levels, above the general schedule, the progress is even more dramatic. as shown in table 3, the number of males eligible for special pay plans such as those found in the senior executive service (equivalent to military generals and admirals) dropped sharply from 1991 to 2003, paralleling the decline in the overall engineering workforce. but note also that the number of women eligible for these special pay plans more than tripled, from 22 to 71, during the same period. looked at on a percentage basis, the progress is even more dramatic. in 1991, women made up only 1.7% of the most senior executives. by 2003, that percentage had grown by almost six times, to 9.7% (united states office of personnel management, 2003). summary, discussion, and conclusions this research describes the pay status and advancement progress of women in the federal government’s engineering career fields. while it is apparent that the 12 years between 1991 and 2003 brought significant percentage advancement for women engineers, one must look behind the numbers to see if true progress has been made. statistically, when starting with a set of relatively small numbers, almost any improvement can appear as dramatically significant. such is the case here—despite some progress, women in engineering fields in federal government service are still outnumbered by men 9:1, and they still receive less pay than men for comparable work. one optimistic view of our analysis would suggest that the present snapshot documents a stage in the inexorable journey of women toward gender equity at work. but those with less rosy perspectives can find ample room for concern. is it possible, for example, that the influx of women into the career field, which increased the proportion of women from 8% to 12% in just over a decade was merely a result of the strong 1990s economy drawing more men to the higher pay of the private sector? is it even possible that engineering within federal employment will be increasingly seen as “woman’s work,” subject to the social, economic, and cultural biases that have historically been implicit in such a designation? until the societal dialogue becomes less acrimonious and more thoughtful and accepting, the causes of the progress, or lack thereof, made by women since 1991 will remain unclear. even so, for women aspiring to careers as federally employed civilian engineers, the news herein is promising. we would not be so naïve as to say that the glass ceiling has been shattered. however, one might contend reasonably that it is cracking, but not fast enough. women have made progress at moving into federal engineering careers, especially into positions of upper management and senior leadership beyond the gs-15 level. their increasing numbers and increasingly more equitable pay are reflective of that movement. from such positions in the hierarchy, it is realistic to expect that these women can, and in many instances will, extend a helping hand to those following behind them, and allow the entire engineering workforce to move in the direction of gender equity with respect to pay and organizational level. further, it is altogether reasonable to believe that gender equity in pay and opportunity for women will evolve through a combination of education, high organizational level sustenance, alteration of the federal government’s culture and norms, and overt organizational acknowledgement that women represent an indispensable pool of leadership talent. references borger, h. 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(2005a, january 19). letter from president summers on women and science. retrieved february 22, 2005, from harvard university, the office of the president web site: www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/womensci.html summers, l. h. (2005b, january 14). remarks at nber conference on diversifying the science & engineering workforce. retrieved february 22, 2005, from harvard university, the office of the president web site: www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber/html the civil rights act of 1991. (1991, november 21). public law 102-166, 42 usc 722. http://www.azspe.org/azdesigns/ http://www.dti.gov.uk/ http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&an=10444860 http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/womensci.html http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber/html u.s. code, 5 usc 5332. (2001, july 3). retrieved february 22, 2005, from http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/5/5332.html u.s. department of commerce. (1991). occupations of federal white-collar and blue-collar workers. federal civilian workforce statistics as of september 1991. washington, dc: office of personnel management. u.s. department of labor. (2004). nontraditional occupations for women in 2003. retrieved february 22, 2005, from www.dol.gov/wb u.s. office of personnel management. (2003, september). fedscope: federal human resource database. retrieved december 15, 2003, from http://www.fedscope.opm.gov/employment.htm winters, r., & kelly, m. (2005). harvard’s crimson face. time, 165(5), 36-38. table 1 federal general schedule-and-related engineers, by level and by gender, fy 1991 gender £ gs-13 number £ gs-13 percentage ³ gs-14 number ³ gs-14 percentage male 146,786 91.0 25,561 97.2 female 14,543 9.0 733 2.8 total 161,329 100.0 26,294 100.0 table 2 federal general schedule-and-related engineering employees, by gender, showing percentage change from 1991 to 2003 £ gs-13 ³ gs-14 gender 1991 2003 1991 2003 male 91.0 91.4 97.2 89.8 female 9.0 8.6 2.8 10.2 total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 table 3 senior engineer executives (above gs-15) by gender, numbers, and percentages gender 1991 2003 male 1306 98.3% 664 90.3% http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/5/5332.html http://www.dol.gov/wb http://www.fedscope.opm.gov/employment.htm female 22 1.7% 71 9.7% total 1328 100.0% 735 100.0% dr. michael sincoff department of management raj soin college of business wright state university 3640 colonel glenn highway dayton, ohio 45435-0001 dr. bud baker raj soin college of business wright state university dr. t. scott graham college of education and human services wright state university copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, summer 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] women college presidents: interviews about journeys and adaptations jo young switzer manchester college while the progress of women into higher education presidencies is dramatic, it is also, in the words of one experienced woman president, “not exactly a lot!” in the 15 years from 1986 to 2001, the american council on education (ace) reports that the percentage of women presidents increased from 9.5 to 21.1 (the american college president, 2002). of these women, 26.8% led two-year institutions; 18.7% led baccalaureate schools; 20.3% led comprehensive universities; and only 13.3% headed doctorate-granting schools; with the remaining 14.8% guiding specialized schools. higher education agencies such as ace, american association of colleges and universities (aac&u), american association of state colleges and universities (aasc&u), council of independent colleges (cic), as well as scholarly journals and presses have monitored these quantitative and qualitative changes. these publications have provided periodic snapshots about demographics and attitudes, but because the role of women in senior leadership positions in higher education is in a time of transition, it makes sense to listen at more frequent intervals to these women. in addition to giving some benchmarks about the changes, their experiences and suggestions can be particularly helpful for women who are considering presidencies. one woman president said that “the university is just one subset of society, and the same factors that prevent women from making more progress to the top of corporations or government are also at work in education” (glazer-raymo, 1999, p. 157). this project looked at the ways that socialized gender roles are intertwined with perceptions about effective leaders. leadership stereotypical views of men’s leadership is that it is results-oriented, assertive (if not aggressive), decisive, bold, and hierarchical, much like the masculine stereotype (eagly & johannesen-schmidt, 2001). women leaders are seen as more relational, emotional, people-oriented, indecisive, and participative, all file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/awl%20aug3/summer2006/index.html stereotypically feminine characteristics (helgesen, 1990; todd-manchillas & rossi, 1985). effective leadership has long been traditionally associated with the masculine approach because of the perception that this kind of leadership got results. these stereotypes created the double bind for women because women who act in stereotypical feminine ways (emotional, relational) are perceived as weak leaders. if they act in accordance with the stereotypical men’s approach to leadership, they are perceived as pushy, rude, and aggressive. this double bind has been documented in many occupational contexts (cantor & bernay, 1992, p. 74-75; haslett & lipman, 1997, pp. 38-42). at the same time, critical changes have reshaped contemporary organizations (flatter structures, selfmanaged teams, workforce diversity, and strategic alliances). as a result, organizations require leaders with strong relational abilities and team-oriented management, skills that have traditionally been associated with women. these “people skills” are as valuable in the new corporate environment as the more traditional “masculine” approaches were to more hierarchical organizations, yet a new irony emerges (acebo, 1994). the new paradox is that women are still not being selected for top leadership positions to the degree that the current organizational needs would appear to require (merrill-sands & kolb, 2001). some women are not selected because of the “glass ceiling,” about which much has been written (annenberg public policy center, 2003; morrison, white, van velsor, & the center for creative leadership, 1987). in addition, women may not apply for these positions because they perceive that the glass ceiling will inhibit their success. the research questions and design in order to take a current snapshot of women presidencies and to assemble their reflections on ways women can move successfully into presidencies, this report focused on several key questions, including some practical issues not typically included in the current literature but which may be of practical interest to women who are considering presidencies. 1. how do current women presidents describe their journeys into the presidency? 2. what role, if any, did mentors play in their journeys? 3. knowing what they know now, would they do it again? 4. how did the presidency affect their family dynamics? 5. how do they get the housework done? what additional services would be most helpful? 6. what was best advice they received as they considered a presidency? what advice would they give to women considering a presidency? the responses of current women presidents to these questions amplify and extend what we already know about how people become and remain presidents. fifteen women presidents, representing two-year community colleges (n=5), baccalaureate colleges (n=5), comprehensive institutions (n=4), and doctoral institutions (n=1), participated in interviews about these questions. invitations to participate went to women in the four primary sectors of higher education and to women in different geographical areas of the u.s. this modified random sampling selection process generated a sample size that was sufficient to give voice to differences, but small enough to be able to schedule and complete the interviews. telephone interviews ranged from 25 to 75 minutes. of the 27 individuals invited to participate, 2 declined, 10 did not respond, and 15 participated. each invitation included a brief description of the project and a biography of the investigator. once the presidents had agreed to partake, participants received copies of the questions and a brief demographic questionnaire in advance of the interview. interviews were completed in a three-month period in late 2003 with follow-up notes sent to each participant. all were told that their responses would be kept anonymous and that results would be reported in aggregated form or without specific attribution. they included women in their first presidencies, and several in their second. they included 4 african-americans, 1 hispanicamerican, and 11 caucasians. all of these presidents responded to the open-ended questions which were included in the standard protocol. if they chose to take their responses a different direction than the question protocol, they could. in addition to the interview, each president completed a short demographic questionnaire, with questions about age, family background, socioeconomic class, marriage, children, tenure in the current job, and academic discipline. their responses indicated that gender is not a factor that they think about overtly when they think of their leadership. instead, they described being female as a more fundamental part of who they are and how they work. one said, “i try to be self-reflective about this, but i have no distance. i don’t know how not to be a woman leader.” another argued that “leadership differs more among men and women than between them.” their stories, however, did not always support this observation. they shared varied experiences in which being female gave them skills that enhanced fund raising, administrative effectiveness, and work with their boards. they also described times when they got resistance because they were female. all of them, however, provided insights about ways women can diffuse resistance and strengthen their institutions by acting in accord with their own values and leadership styles. the voices of these women highlighted the special challenges that gender has posed for their presidencies. even more important, they shared a plethora of insights about ways that women can, and should, seek out presidencies, and suggested ways women can succeed in those positions. the journey why do women become college and university presidents? how do they describe their “journeys” into the presidency? only 1of the 15 women interviewed said that she had set a presidency as a goal and gone about “methodically to achieve it.” she took advantage of professional development opportunities, and she also “spent time watching and looking at what the president did” and observing what boards wanted the president to do. within 11 years of setting the goal, after moving quickly from a faculty position through a series of administrative posts, she became a president. the majority of the women described their journeys quite differently, one saying poetically, “it was a very crooked road.” the majority began as successful faculty members who, fairly early in their careers, were chosen for key committees or administrative assignments (e.g., honors program and women’s center directorships, personnel committees, planning committees). in those appointments, they discovered they enjoyed learning about the “bigger picture” and networking with people whom they would not have met otherwise. looking back, they realized that their professional visibility increased significantly because of these ancillary assignments. one said, “. . . in retrospect, it looks perfectly organized, but it wasn’t.” they described themselves early in their careers in non-presidential terms, such as, “a very hard worker who likes to think that nobody works harder than me;” “someone who likes to act outside the box;” “happy as a faculty member;” “a happy second person;” “organized;” and “able to articulate aspirations for the larger group.” several said outright, “i didn’t see myself as a president.” one president began her very first administrative assignment when she was pregnant with her first child: “i had a notion of what a president looks like and it is typically a man who doesn’t have a couple of kids running around...being a president wasn’t a life goal at all.” none of the women moved into senior administrative positions because they were unhappy with what they were doing. all enjoyed the successes and visibility of their early work as professors, school superintendents, continuing education administrators, and counselors. they did, however, become interested in the bigger picture somewhere along their journeys in these earlier positions. they especially enjoyed working in multidimensional assignments. ten of them described their initial surprise at the intellectual challenges they found in these non-teaching assignments. those who had been faculty members critical of administrators were particularly surprised at the intellectual vitality required by administrative work. they were also surprised at what they learned about their institutions, and some were amazed at their successes in these roles. only two of the presidents became ace fellows, one of them describing that program as “the single greatest leadership preparation one can have.” both ace fellows alumnae were extremely positive about what they learned through that experience. the majority of these women had at least one person who saw in them more than they saw in themselves. several said that senior leaders encouraged them to participate in the harvard institute for educational management (iem), bryn mawr’s summer program for women leaders, the kellogg foundation leadership program, and the ace fellows program. only one month after being invited to serve as an executive assistant to the president as an untenured faculty member, one woman heard this from her president: “i really want you to consider becoming a college president.” another served as an interim president and deeply enjoyed the interaction with the public, particularly “telling the institutional story.” since a full year participation in the ace fellows program was not possible for one particular woman, her creative president and mentor tailored weeklong opportunities for her to shadow the chief financial officers at a much wealthier campus and at a major corporation. both of these experiences exposed her to an entirely different component of organizations than she was used to seeing and expanded her professional networks dramatically. those who had not completed their graduate work were encouraged to do so. one third of the women, mostly from the community colleges, had not completed their doctorates when the lower-level administrative doors began to open, so they completed their graduate studies, often at the same time they had children at home. these women took very seriously the effectiveness with which they handled their non-faculty assignments and the messages from supervisors saying, “you ought to consider a presidency.” one woman said that her mentors “opened themselves to show me the joys and the things that are not so joyful about a presidency, and what the trade-offs are.” this enabled her to seek a presidency with her “eyes wide open.” another’s mentor “just modeled good people skills, and i learned a lot from how she works with people.” another woman had a mentor whose promotion of her benefited him too: “he plucked me out of the role of being a radical faculty union advocate into administration.” as a result, he redirected her leadership effectiveness which had been strongly anti-administration into a role that broadened her perspective and lessened her constant lobbying for unionization. another woman’s dean and president, both men, said, “you would make a great president…why don’t you try it?” like other mentors, they followed up that encouragement with professional development opportunities for her. the mentor of a different woman pressed her to think about what she would do if she did not get the presidential job she was seeking, or what she would do if she got it and did not like it. these questions nudged her to gather information and think carefully about her own aspirations. as a result, she went into a candidacy fully informed about the nature of the job. another mentor consistently encouraged the woman regularly to consider her “reasonable next steps.” one woman who participated in the bryn mawr summer institute for women found her “aha!” moment in the assignment to design a career map. when the group gave her feedback on her very ambitious map, they said, “it sounds perfectly reasonable. go for it.” and she did. one interviewee found that her mentor was only helpful to the point that the interviewee surpassed her mentor. she cautioned women mentors to make sure they are comfortable with the success of those they mentor since, in her situation, “my success broke our relationship.” friendships and mentoring relationships were not always positive for these women. one president reflected on those people who took credit for some of her early work: “i had to kiss some frogs along the way.” the interaction between the women and their mentors is multi-dimensional. the mentors were able to “name” the possibility of the women’s potential as presidents and to provide an array of experiences to enhance development toward that end. the women were able to hear those confirming messages, embrace the professional opportunities even when they were new and uncomfortable. they were also able to celebrate their own part in their successes. women also adapted the pace and locations of their careers to their spouses’ jobs. none reported that this adaptation was debilitating, but they nearly all reported that it took hard work to negotiate the needs in twocareer households. one woman and her spouse had a commuter marriage for 16 of their 33 years of marriage. this intense negotiation and problem-solving is in direct contrast to the example which was shared about two unnamed men who accepted presidencies and then went home and told their wives about it. the expectations all of these women said they received warm and supportive messages as they began their presidencies. the women reported that the search committees and boards of trustees announced publicly and privately that they believed they had chosen the right persons for the presidencies. these experiences reflect a constructive change in opportunities for women at top levels of higher education. the change is comparable to what is apparent in the dramatic increase in women who are elected to office in the u.s. house of representatives as well as the senate. in his 1984 landmark analysis of women in congress, gertzog talked about the treatment of women by the men who, by number, greatly dominated congress. in the 2nd edition of the book, gertzog (1995) renamed the notion of treatment and talked about women’s entries into congress as their integration. in 11 short years, they were less inclined to be passive recipients of treatment by male colleagues and became more active participants in their integration into that “man’s world,” and they helped shape that integration. women college presidents have experienced this same shift. the early days of presidencies for the women in this report reflected a natural kind of integration into the campus. they did not report a sense of being the outsider in the institution, being treated in any particular way by the members of the campus faculty, administration, or by the board. the gender-related expectations for women presidents were somewhat predictable, discouraging, and amusing. four of the women described repeated instances at public events (receptions, student orientation) where their husbands or male faculty members were assumed to be the president rather than them. nearly half of the women said people underestimated their knowledge of finance, facilities, and construction. four reported that they received messages that were downright patronizing, “almost testing to see if i was intelligent enough to do the job.” a common expectation about women leaders is that they may not be able to make tough decisions. none of the presidents in this report described their work in ways that sounded remotely indecisive, nor were they reluctant to make hard decisions. the women were clear that any responsible leader will find some decisions difficult, regardless of gender. several reported having to make unpopular decisions shortly after arriving at their institutions (e.g., removing faculty, cutting positions, reducing budgets). one remarked, “i’ve followed a male in every position i’ve had, and it’s amazing some of the tough stuff that doesn’t get done. people who are conflict-adverse don’t seem to realize that you can do tough things humanely.” these women were confident in their abilities to make hard decisions, knowing that those decisions were for the benefit of the institution. one woman spoke clearly: “i’m a good read of character.” the presidents believed that they had keen awareness of the broader impact of hard decisions (including the impact on people), so “it is a challenge not to internalize ramifications of the decisions.” one woman said that having children gave her a “good yardstick with which to measure priorities in hard decisions.” another said that as she makes hard decisions, she tries to “look at what happens to people between the present time and the end result.” many presidents believed their constituents expected them to be warm, nurturing, and sensitive; and at the same time, they wanted them to be able to handle severe pressure and make hard decisions (brown, van ummersen, & sturnick, 2001). most described themselves as being good listeners, good “people-persons,” and “humanistic,” but a few do not. one president reported that she is a “strong t (task), not f (feelings) on myers briggs, so my style isn’t necessarily the female style.” another boasted, “i follow men’s examples of bluffing myself through stuff. i watch them, and it works.” she also described herself as “impersonal” about making decisions. one participant who has written about women and leadership noted that many women are highly sensitive to unspoken cues. they have been socialized “to scan the environment constantly to see how people are reacting and feeling.” one president believed that women do have a deeper “connection to people.” she described the “motivational side” of her leadership which includes being able “to read people, empathize, communicate, be comfortable with praise and warmth.” the connection between these abilities and potential success in fund-raising was obvious. another significant issue is the perception that women presidents are more accessible than their male counterparts. these created serious problems for the presidents whose offices may not convey the typical “boundaries” one would expect for a ceo. “people think they can just walk into a woman’s office,” noted one president. several described the faculty and staff popping into their offices without appointments. another reported how “shocked” faculty members were that she sat with them at public events, but she also noted that doing this might confuse faculty about her immediate accessibility to them in other contexts. these presidents worked hard to let people know how much they are valued. several reserved time in their daily schedules to prepare hand written notes. another said, “even at the point of exhaustion, i make sure people know i value them. i haven’t experienced this from men.” several participants believed that women have high expectations for themselves, sometimes higher than may be healthy. one said, “we’re always asking ourselves ‘am i smart enough?’ ‘am i good enough’?” one reflected, “i think what women are saying is whether they are doing enough to help their institution.” another participant said that not only do women presidents have high goals for themselves, but they also have very high expectations for others. in her mind, this meant “when we see something that’s not right, we challenge it and change it.” other expectations from faculty, staff, and the public apply to both men and women, particularly the expectation that the president should be knowledgeable, fair, able to interpret the campus vision, set goals and garner support for those goals, and be present at all events. actually, the president does not need to attend all events, just the events that critics think are important! leadership women presidents differ greatly in their approaches to leadership. in this report, two of the women described behaviors that suggested a somewhat impersonal and ambitious approach to the presidency. most, however, talked about their leadership in terms of their being trusted “to articulate the aspirations of my institution.” one reflected, “i’m almost entirely motivated by the desire to do meaningful and worthwhile work.” one said that she feels less pressure to be right than to “arrive at mutually satisfactory conclusions and decisions.” numerous women presidents described their strong listening abilities. if the ability to listen enhanced the president’s ability to make informed judgments, she increased her ability to serve the institution well, particularly at the beginning. other writers argue that presidents who work hard in the beginning to know their campuses – their histories, cultures, power centers, and so on – seem able to make a more positive impact more quickly than those presidents who feel they know exactly how to turn the institution around (sturnick, milley, & tisinger, 1991, p. 79) these same authors posit that learning the institution by listening and observing allowed the president to determine which “symbolic actions” can best unify the institution. one essential skill in creating these mutually satisfactory conclusions is the ability to understand people. one woman described her own leadership this way: “i have an ability to hear what people are not saying at same the time as i hear what they are saying.” another said she was “sensitive to unspoken cues.” this ability helped both consider more fully the “human implications of decisions.” people appear to want “emotional intelligence” from their presidents, as well as “academic acumen,” said one woman. this relational ability was undoubtedly a helpful element in fundraising because donors developed a relationship to the institution through the president who was attentive and responsive to them. most described themselves as collaborative leaders, including one woman who believes that leadership differs more among men and women than between them. in her experience, she reported, she does notice a difference in men’s and women’s comfort with collaboration and inclusion. other writers have confirmed a high level of comfort with participation and collaboration among women leaders (astin & leland, 1991; kabacoff, 2000). most women in this report did not rigidly differentiate between male and female leadership. nonetheless, they made many self-observations that indicated they do believe there are a few socialized gender characteristics that give women some advantage in building good morale, enlisting support for initiatives, collaborating effectively with colleagues and board members, and fund-raising. “if you’re good, you’re good, and if you’re not good, it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female,” said one. family the statistics about marriage and children differ fairly dramatically between men and women presidents. the 2002 summary from ace shows that 89.6% of men presidents are currently married compared to 58.9% of the women. the same report finds that 90% of the men reported having children while only 67% of the women did. despite this fact, 25.8% of women presidents said they had altered their job circumstances for child-rearing compared to 1.9% of the men (glazer & raymo, 1999, p. 162-64). more than a quarter of the women reported that they had left the job market or worked part-time during the time when child-rearing was most demanding. there is no question that family issues present complications more for women presidents than for their male colleagues (brown, van ummersen, & sturnick, 2001, p. 5). whether women can function as presidents with children at home is a troubling issue. only 1 of the 15 women in this report had children at home during her presidency, although about two thirds of those interviewed have grown children or stepchildren. all but two of those with children moved into presidencies after their children were grown. one specifically delayed her senior leadership roles when her children were young: “my children were first before my career, and i’m not sorry about that. but for me, it just happens that this delay eventually ended up in a presidency.” a third of the women interviewed said that they “could not imagine” combining the job of the presidency with at-home children. despite their heavy professional responsibilities, these women carry significant responsibilities for family and home. only one of these presidents had children still at home, and her spouse went back to school to prepare for a completely new, time-flexible career when he was 45 in order to provide family support around her schedule. she reported, “i haven’t done food shopping for 15 years, and it’s embarrassing to say that!” others had husbands who took primary responsibility for elderly parents, emptying the dishwasher, and similar daily tasks. those presidents were are single and living alone remarked that their lives were simpler because they had no one to be responsible for except themselves. in their book, second shift (hochschild & machung, 2003), the authors assert that many working women complete their first shift at their paid employment and then begin a second shift at home after work. the authors noted that this phenomenon happens even in families where both partners believe they have an egalitarian approach to sharing of household responsibilities. do women presidents work a second shift? it was not uncommon for them to do laundry on weekends, handle family gifts, pick up dry cleaning after work, and cook. one said, “it’s hard to do this job well and still handle the ordinary details of life.” the more typical response was gratitude for the ways that their husbands were willing to negotiate “redivisions of labor.” some presidents let their husbands know which public events are important for the husbands to attend, but they do not expect them to attend all events. several husbands served as unpaid drivers for their president wives. one president said about her husband, “he actually likes the entertaining more than i do.” other husbands did not. of the 11 married presidents in this group, five husbands retired when their spouses took these jobs, a characteristic that does not match the ace statistics. housekeeping and other demands many women considering a presidency wonder how to balance the daily work of home with the demands of the job. most of the women interviewed in this study lived in a campus-owned residence, and basic housekeeping was provided by the institution. the community college presidents were less likely to have housing, housekeeping, and grounds work provided. the degree to which the institution paid for these services varied greatly. one president had a full-time house manager who not only handled housecleaning (with additional part-time help), but also managed all entertainment. this president could literally arrive at home 10 minutes before a major reception, and everything was in place and ready to go. another president needed to go home to mop the floor, put table clothes on the tables, and arrange the flowers before a reception. the majority of the women had resources between these two extremes. most had part-time housekeepers who handled the cleaning of the home, and most campuses took care of the grounds. some campus used their own food service to cater these events, and other times women presidents worked with outside caterers to plan menus. much less often, the women presidents actually prepared the meals for campus events in their homes, not by choice but by necessity. the women said that two additional services would make their jobs significantly easier. most of the women would like to have a full-time house manager, who not only cleaned, but who was responsible for seeing what needed to be done. a house manager would plan menus, tend to decorating issues, notice when it is time to put in the screens, and work proactively to manage the property and the entertaining. the women presidents who had housekeepers say that too often they (the presidents) still carried the responsibility for making sure that all the house tasks got done, including those related to institutional entertaining, even though they may not perform those tasks themselves. “i’d just love to have a wife, if you know what i mean” said one president. second, 13 wished they had a driver to take them to some, but not all, of their off-campus meetings. numerous women described the fact that by driving themselves, they lose valuable time that could be spent on the telephone, on email, reading, and even resting. they also said that there were times they preferred to drive themselves, sometimes for the chance to be alone, handle private telephone conversations, and sometimes for the chance to turn up the radio and sing. why did they not seek these two extra services? to a person, they reported that the public fall out would not be worth it. to have a driver and a house manager would be perceived by some in the public as “uppity” one woman said. another said it would “ignite a furor.” presidents in state institutions face especially close scrutiny about services they receive. with national media publicizing the most egregious abuses of funds by corporate executives and several university presidents, presidents face unusually high public scrutiny. one woman reported that because her public university was in a very cold northern state, she would love to have heated seats in her car, but if faculty on her unionized campus found out that a university vehicle had this luxury, “it would be all over the front page.” for most, including those from state institutions, the actual cost was not as significant a reason for foregoing services like a house manager and driver as was public perception. several had decreased staffing levels in their homes when they began their jobs because they thought it seemed excessive, but all reported that they would handle the situations differently once they had been in office for some time and realized their need for that support. several presidents have used creative ways to lessen the load of home responsibilities. one’s adult daughter handled the house manager-type duties for several years. another moved from her own off-campus house (which she maintained herself) to a home on campus. one experienced woman president said that she handled only the “more meaningful family responsibilities” (e.g., birthday cards and gifts, special family gatherings, sunday private dinners with her husband), and her half-time housekeeper handled the cleaning, dry cleaning, and other less personally meaningful duties. advice these women presidents received important advice when they first entered their presidencies. the advice came primarily from mentors or other presidents, most of whom were men. the women made it clear that this advice regularly guided them. it fell into several themes, none overtly related to gender. first, in a presidency, you need to be yourself. one woman said she was told “you have to live with yourself at the end of the day and feel okay with what you did; so you must be true to yourself.” for the two self-described introverts in the group, being themselves was a challenge when a social evening with the rotary club felt like work rather than relaxed conversation. both of the “well-adjusted introverts” gave examples of ways they nurtured their need for privacy and quiet time through walks, reading, and solitude. several mentors warned how important it was that all actions be able to pass the "headline test.” if this behavior or statement appeared on the front page of the paper tomorrow, how would it reflect on the president and the institution? this was why one of the presidents, when she was seeking the senior position, used a maid service rather than a private individual so that she could never be accused of not paying someone’s social security taxes. the women were advised to keep their own sense of priorities. one mentor said, “you can’t do it all at once.” another said, “you can do everything, but you can’t do everything first.” it is why another president and her husband have a “date night” each week where the restaurateurs knew to put them into a cozy corner for privacy. the delicious importance of that marital relationship led them to find space to nurture it. other suggestions that individual women received were to a) hire people you trust; b) do not be a caretaker to someone else’s institution; c) never agree to anything on first hearing; d) remember that every sweet student and loving faculty member is a potential lawsuit; e) never lie about or misrepresent a situation; and f) stay close to your board. advice to women considering a presidency many women academics are eager to learn more about the demands of a presidency, but they are reluctant to ask anyone directly about their questions. the active women presidents in this study were also invited to share their advice with prospective presidents. the most widely repeated advice was a) to know yourself and b) to be willing to be yourself in a presidency. one summarized, “you’re a woman and don’t try to be anything different.” one woman encapsulated it concisely: “every day, you make big and little decisions that can chip away at your moral and spiritual being if you’re not clear where your values are.” anyone with a high need for constant approval will have difficulty in a presidency because, as one president said, “it’s not a popularity contest.” decisions must be made that disappoint some people, and if a president needs everyone’s approval, her stress will be high. along with awareness of one’s own values, the participants advised new presidents not to be negative about their predecessor or to act as though nothing happened before they arrived. effective presidents are those who, from the interview forward, acknowledge the legacy. second, they encouraged prospective presidents to learn as much as they can about finance, strategic budgeting, laws governing institutional accounting practices, and investments. “it’s all about money,” said one president. several women described their own “crash courses” in finance before applying for presidencies, but most believed that they already had sufficient background in finance and budget before they began. their challenge was demonstrating that competence to the board of trustees and senior staff. a third important piece of advice was to work closely and respectfully with the board, keeping lines of communication open. just as it is important to have mentors with whom one can be open about challenges, it is important to keep key board members in the loop about important issues. sometimes a board member can be the sounding board, supporter, and translator. fourth, the experienced presidents said that it was essential for women to make specific plans tailored to their own values and lifestyles, to protect their time. one president described the presidency as being a job consisting of five thirds. one third involved strategic and long-range planning because “if the president doesn’t do it, it won’t get done.” the second third was “administrivia,” the daily tasks of running the institution. presidents who were not intentional about their time use frequently ended up with operational tasks dominating their calendars. the next third was personnel work, including hiring, developing, supervising, evaluating, and mentoring. the fourth third was the “being there” third, the time it took to be present at campus events (athletic competitions, lectures, concerts, art exhibits, receptions). this third was particularly demanding at smaller colleges where many constituents wanted the president’s attendance at their own events. the fifth third was advancement and fund raising, a third that expanded in size during capital campaigns. a president with a job that has five thirds must bring clear priorities and intentionality about schedule in order to survive and thrive. they used some fairly common techniques for managing their time, as well as some creative approaches. several of the presidents limited the number of evenings they were available for meetings, social events, dinners with donors, and student events to three per week. one woman said, “my scheduler can put three events on my calendar each week without asking me, but she has to ask me if she wants to schedule any more than that. and sometimes i say ‘no’.” half of the women said that they restricted the number of appointments they schedule because they cannot get all of their work done if they are in a steady stream of meetings. several scheduled their vacations many months, sometimes a year, in advance so that they were firmly committed to spending that time away, relaxing and rejuvenating. if they did not plan them ahead, the time away too often got bumped aside for other obligations. the women also stressed the importance of reserving time for whatever activity relieved stress most for them. one president said that women must be able to “shed stress” if they are serious about a presidency. the most common activities that the women in this report used to relax were described as “just simple things” like walking outdoors, biking, swimming, reading, eating out with spouses or friends, and going out of town regularly. the women also reminded prospective presidents to think about the public attention that will be directed to their work and their personal lives, applying the “headline test” to their actions. as one president said, “we have to be aware that our personal lives move into the public eye with a presidency.” for husbands who are private and introverted, this can be a stressor. one president described her husband as “private and wonderful” and said that the public demands created some challenges for him when he needed to attend a reception but would have preferred sitting in his library, reading. one woman confessed that she needed to keep her own sense of humor under control because it was too easy for people to interpret her irreverent statements more literally than she intended. “hiring is the most important work,” asserted one president. characteristics of good hires were described fairly consistently: highly competent, loyal, funny. numerous others talked about the importance of having an office staff whose talents complement the president. to the person, they stressed the value of having a strong, trusted, likeable executive assistant in the office. one said, “i’m not right all the time, so i surround myself with people who are smart and energetic. i don’t find this threatening at all.” one president, who described herself as “weak on details,” hired not one, but two assistants. presidents also need to assemble a strong senior staff and nurture them to work together to achieve the institution’s mission. one president organized annual retreats for her top staff, and together they developed a written covenant about ways they will advance the mission together. she said “it’s hard to live up to these covenants!” finally, they advised women who are applying for presidencies to do their homework before preparing the application and even more intensely if they are invited for interviews. one woman who was a distant third candidate for a position prepared intensely for the interview by reading newspaper archives, old state records, etc. members of the search committee said, “we learned a lot of things about our campus we didn’t know before.” she got the job. search firms estimate that it takes an average of 11 to 13 active applications before their clients secure presidencies. the presidents encouraged women to spend their time at incremental levels of responsibility and to be resilient in the application process. feelings about their jobs would these presidents, knowing what they know after they spent time in the office, do it again? “absolutely!” said more than half of them, and all of them responded that they definitely would do it again. some said they would even do it sooner. although several described the presidency as a job where “the highs are higher and the lows lower” than any other jobs they have experienced, they appreciated the opportunity to “build a common vision and tell the story of the institution.” one observed, realistically, that “everything that makes a university a plus is what makes it a negative.” interpreting processes that seem like negatives to board members (like the slow pace of faculty governance) was a responsibility of the president. these presidents were happy to embrace those challenges. only two of the presidents talked about their satisfaction in terms of the financial and prestige-oriented benefits of the position. more typically, the women presidents reflected on satisfaction they received from the knowledge that they are leaving a legacy that helps students. one reflected, “i’m leaving a legacy, something that will endure; and i love being so fully engaged in ways that challenge and expand me. i just love it.” another said, “it’s been an amazing opportunity to build an institution and make it better for our students. it’s compelling to be part of that.” another said she was grateful to leave a legacy that “opens doors for people.” their enthusiasm for their work was not unrealistic, however. several presidents shared the experience of the one who said, “i wish i had more time. sometimes i feel overwhelmed because i think i need to do so much, and i don’t take time to focus, read, or exercise.” another said that the hardest challenge is to find renewal so that she can stay vital. a president added that she believes presidents must take their work seriously, “…but not themselves. we have to take care of ourselves because if we don’t, there’s nothing left to attend to others or do the work you have to do...we must be very deliberate about how we spend our time.” one president spoke of her frustration when her position “silences” her on issues she believes extremely important. if she expressed strong opinions on a controversial political issue, her voice sounded like it was the voice of the university. for her, the most troubling part of the job was her loss of freedom as a citizen to speak out on issues that were important to her and, in some cases, to higher education policy. her imperfect solution has been to share her concerns with branches of campuses where others can pick up the issue and speak out. her frustration, though, is intense. in addition to the sense of leaving a positive legacy, the presidents described the gratification they received from doing challenging and meaningful work. one president, who had served for nearly a decade at her institution, said, “it’s an absolutely wonderful job...intellectually interesting...my public touch becomes connected to a deep sense of academic values so i can convey the integrity of the institution to others.” another said that she found great satisfaction in “raising money to do important work.” the sense of responsibility that accompanied this work warrants careful reflection because, as one president said, “the realization that an institution cannot rise any higher than my intellect and character is scary.” the meaningful nature of the work made the weight of the responsibility worth the effort: “you can really make a contribution in a presidency. you get to work with smart, creative people in an organization that’s vibrant and pulsating with students.” summary the u.s. college and university presidency is a complex position that requires an exceptional combination of expertise, life balance, and leadership. women face a distinctive set of challenges as they blend the responsibilities of leadership with responsibilities, both real and perceived, for themselves and their families. these interviews with women presidents give an engaging and candid snapshot of what the presidency is like for women. they were, to the person, encouraging of other women to consider the presidency; and they provided extensive and varied advice – some inspirational and some practical – for why and how women can become presidents. one president observed that “there are more opportunities to lead than there are people capable of doing a good job at it.” for women considering a presidency but unsure about their abilities or the demands of the job, the big step is finding the “courage of action to apply ...the rest you can learn.” references acebo, s. (1994). a paradigm shift to team leadership in the community college. in g. baker (ed.), handbook on the community college in america: its history, mission, and management. westport, ct: greenwood press. annenberg public policy center. (2003). the glass ceiling persists: third annual report on women leaders in communication companies. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania. astin, h., & leland, c. (1991). women of influence, women of vision. san francisco: jossey-bass. brown, g., van ummersen, c., & sturnick, j. (2001). from where we sit: women’s perspectives on the presidency. washington, dc: american council on education, office of women in higher education. cantor, d. w., & bernay, t. (1992). women in power: the secrets of leadership. boston: houghton mifflin. eagley, a. h., & johannesen-schmidt, m. (2001). the leadership styles of women and men. journal of social issues,57, 781-797. gertzog, i. n. (1995). women: their recruitment, integration, and behavior (2nd ed.). westport, ct: praeger. glazer-raymo, j. (1999). shattering the myths: women in academe. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. haslett, b. b., & lipman, s. (1997). micro inequities: up close and personal. in n. v. benokraitis (ed.), subtle sexism: current practice and prospects for change (pp. 38-42). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. helgesen, s. (1990). thefemale advantage: women’s ways of leadership. new york: doubleday currency. hochschild, a., & machung, a. (2003). second shift (2nd ed.). new york: penguin. kabacoff, r. (2000). gender and leadership in the corporate boardroom. portland, me: management resource group. merrill-sands, e. m., & kolb, d. m. (2001). women as leaders: the paradox of success. center for gender in organizations insights, boston, ma, 1-4. morrison, a., white, r., van velsor, e., & the center for creative leadership. (1987). breaking the glass ceiling: can women reach the top of america’s largest corporations? reading, ma: addison-wesley. sturnick, j. a., milley, j. e., & tisingere, c. a. (eds.). (1991). women at the helm: pathfinding presidents at state colleges & universities. washington, dc: american association of state colleges and universities. the american college president. (2002). washington, dc: american council on education. todd-manchillas, w. r., & rossi, a. m. (1985). gender differences in the management of personnel disputes. women’s studies in communication, 25-33. jo young switzer, (ph.d., university of kansas, 1980), currently serves president at manchester college in indiana where she is also a professor of communication. she taught at indiana university purdue university fort wayne for nine years before becoming vice president and dean for academic affairs at manchester in 1993. she has chaired the council of independent chief academic officers task force and serves as consultant-evaluator for the higher learning commission of the north central association. she was a member of the academic advisory council for brethren colleges abroad (bca), a study abroad consortium headquartered in elizabethtown, pennsylvania. she co-authored a textbook, interviewing art and skill, and is the author of numerous publications and academic presentations. she completed this research project during a sabbatical leave in the 2003-04 academic year. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com 429+gray+copyedited[75] (1).docx volume 42, 2023 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 42, 110-122, 2023 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper preparing sport leaders of the future to lead equitable, diverse, and inclusive sport organizations: the insights and strategies of their professors erika gray & jim weese erika gray: university of ottawa egray057@uottawa.ca jim weese: western university jweese1@uwo.ca accepted august 17, 2023 researchers have documented the tangible and significant benefits to organizations having more diverse senior leadership teams. however, not all industries have embraced this practice. while gains have been made for women securing senior positions in professional sport, the rate of change has been slow, despite the fact that men and women equally aspire to these roles, and women outnumber men in many sport management educational programs. systemic and structural barriers exist for women seeking senior leadership levels in the industry, a fact that women students seem to recognize more than men students (gray & weese, 2021). this descriptive study extends this research by engaging nine sport management professors in a focus group to determine if they understand the issue and, if so, what they were doing to ensure that their students were equipped to advance women in the sport industry. the six-phase framework by braun & clarke (2006) was used to identify three overall themes (i.e., awareness, barriers to advancement, and purposeful) from the focus group. the professors appreciated the issue and recognized the gender differences that exist between their men and women students. importantly, professors shared activities and strategies they use to help ensure that the next generation of sport leaders value and advocate for equity, diversity, and inclusion (edi) leadership practices. the professors agreed that they needed to continue to heighten the awareness and sensitivities of their students on the topics of edi, and they all believed that they could do more to incorporate edi perspectives in their classes and mentorship sessions. ten recommendations are provided to assist current and future sport management professors in addressing this critical issue. keywords: sport leadership, higher education, focus group, gender, equity, diversity, inclusion despite the compelling equity and fairness arguments, coupled with the compelling evidence that diversity is linked to heightened organizational performance, women remain vastly underrepresented at senior leadership levels in sport (burton, 2015; burton & leberman, 2017; hancock et al., 2018; kane & lavoi, 2018; walker & bopp, 2010). researchers (e.g., acosta & carpenter, 2014; burton et al., 2011; forsyth et al., 2019; kane & lavoi, 2018; lavoi & dutove, 2012) have concluded that women face structural and institutional barriers that impede women’s career progress. some examples of these barriers are: glass ceiling, glass cliff, glass wall, leaky pipeline, homologous reproduction, discrimination, sexual harassment, stereotypes, and lack of confidence. other scholars (betzer-tayar et al., 2017; burton et al., 2012; norman & rankin-wright, 2018; sartore & cunningham, 2007) suggest that women frequently impose limits on their advancement. for example, not applying for senior leadership roles because they believe that they lack the qualifications. this also helps to explain low representation of women in executive suites (zenger, 2018). burton (2015) noted that women often do not seek, and consequently do not secure, mid-level leadership roles in sport organizations that would build their experience profile and qualify them for the candidate pools of senior-level leadership in the sport’s industry. women frequently underestimate their abilities, minimize their contributions, and believe that they are deficient in the requisite skills and ability to secure these roles, in direct contrast to the practices of their men counterparts (kay & shipman, 2014). in addition, women are often disadvantaged due to restrictive human resource policies and top management that don’t support gender equity (spoor & hoye, 2014) and family responsibilities (eason et al., 2014; hideg & shen, 2019; mondal, 2020). consequently, women leave middle management roles, despite these roles being fundamental skill and experience building prerequisites for senior leadership roles. as a result, this further limits women’s chances of getting to these senior leadership roles. the “pipeline” transporting individuals into the candidate pools for senior-level positions is often devoid of women (helfat et al., 2006; johnson, 2016; lyness & grotto, 2018). a deeper analysis, especially in the sports industry, would conclude that the pipeline leaks (hancock & hums, 2016). 111 as a result of these facts, women often report that they lack the women role models, mentors, and sponsors that are critical to leader development and career accession (burton & leberman, 2017; hancock et al., 2018; hoyt, 2010; jones & palmer, 2011; lough & grappendorf, 2007; pfister & radtke, 2006). this reality is especially problematic when considered in the context that women are outnumbering men in our institutions of higher education, specifically in the undergraduate and graduate sport management programs housed in many universities (darnell et al., 2012; demers et al., 2019). gray and weese (2021) uncovered the perceptions that undergraduate students studying sport management within canadian universities had regarding the barriers that women might face in advancing to senior leadership roles in the industry. gray and weese (2021) adapted the methods from a similar study conducted by hancock et al. (2018) set in the united states. gray and weese (2021) found that both men and women students equally aspired to senior leadership roles in their careers. however, contrary to the hancock et al. (2018) study, gray and weese (2021) found significant differences between the men and women students relative to their perceptions of the glass ceiling barriers that women might face in reaching these career heights. the students who identified as men did not fully understand the fact that women often face barriers to senior leadership roles, despite feeling that their women colleagues could overcome any obstacles they encountered on their way to the executive suites (gray & weese, 2021). the women students understood this reality and were cognizant of the fact that the barriers could limit their opportunities (gray & weese, 2021). perhaps the next generation of sport leaders holds the key to making a positive and lasting change towards key concepts like equity, diversity, and inclusion (edi). therefore, the purpose of the current study was to better understand what students’ professors may or may not be doing to enhance their students' understanding of the barriers women face to advance to senior leadership roles. a conversation about advancement of all was had, specifically about the benefits and richness of edi and the need to be advocates for the concept. implementing an authentic edi program has proven benefits to organizations in several areas, including performance (theard et al., 2020), enhanced decision making, and a better understanding of the market (cunningham & melton, 2011). having women sit on corporate boards leads to more diverse perspectives being mined when discussing issues, more prudent decision making, a decrease in negative conflict, and heightened financial returns (desvaux et al., 2007; seierstad et al., 2017, seo & huang, 2017). hoobler et al. (2018) and torchia et al. (2018) conducted research that also confirmed these findings. why would an organization or industry overlook 50% of the population, especially in light of these demonstrated benefits of edi, and according to zenger and folman (2012) women generally outperform men in leadership roles. unfortunately, this continues to be the case in most of the sports industry (burton, 2019). change is needed. perhaps the best place to lead significant and sustainable change rests with preparing the next generation of sport leaders. holvino et al. (2004) believed that there is significant merit in embedding an understanding and appreciation for the concepts of edi at this impressionable stage. defining equity, diversity, and inclusion (edi) edi are challenging topics to teach, given the sensitivities to a perception of perceived reverse discrimination that critics of edi uphold. equity ensures that there is parity and fairness in the processes and policies of a group or organization; equity programs are implemented to help ensure that no historically underrepresented group is disadvantaged (fuentes et al., 2020; theard et al., 2020). equity is often used interchangeably with equality, which is different, therefore, it is important to note the difference. equality is providing equal opportunities to all (women and gender equality canada, 2021). sport management professors could introduce and discuss these concepts in their classes and demonstrate its utility and application through case study analyses where systemic policies exist and under-represented groups are subsequently disadvantaged. this could be of specific benefit given the impact using case studies has in sport management classrooms (dixon, 2008). diversity refers to the composition of a group or organization (fuentes et al., 2020; theard et al., 2020). leaders must ensure that their human resource policies align with legislation and that they attract and support distinctly different groups of individuals (e.g., gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation) who will bring richness and diverse perspectives to the group and its decision-making processes (cunningham, 2011). sport management professors could draw attention to the typical composition of leadership teams in sport and highlight the success stories of organizations and industries that have benefitted from greater diversity and formalized diversity programs. inclusion refers to the culture of a group and the degree to which members of a group or organization feel included, engaged, and recognized (fuentes et al., 2020; theard et al., 2020). professors could discuss the role that leaders play through their words and actions in shaping and embedding an inclusive culture for their group or organization (schein, 1990). inclusive case studies and confirmatory research studies could be discussed in class to help students understand the value and importance of inclusion in sport management. a review of staff directories revealed that women in president and vice-president senior leadership roles in professional sport organizations/major league sport in canada, were vastly under-represented (gray and weese, 2021). the field needs to reflect on human resources policies and make substantial changes that will take time and hard work to implement, given the historical resistance to change in this area (bernstein et al., 2020). the past diversity training programs have not been effective in significantly changing the edi channel (bernstein et al., 2020). fuentes et al. (2002) believed that the long-term, systemic change rested with the next generation of leaders, namely today’s students. the researchers of this study concurred but felt that it would be necessary to initially understand the 112 activities and strategies that professors are using to heighten awareness in the classroom and help get students to understand the need for leading sustainable change. the research question that guided this study was: what are professors doing or could be doing to prepare their students to advance to a career in senior leadership within the sport industry? the focus of the conversation was on women students but turned into a conversation about heightening the awareness of edi within all that professors do in their classrooms and within all courses that they teach for all students to advance. the results of this research could have implications on the approaches sport management professors employ to prepare their students to advance their careers in the industry. the results could also help professors implement strategies to educate their students to be inclusive, appreciative of gender equity, and eventually lead more diverse and equitable workplaces. method research design and study population the qualitative data for this descriptive study was generated through conducting an online focus group with sport management professors (n = 9) from the nine universities offering undergraduate sport management programs in canada. the researchers sought to understand what these professors were doing to prepare their students to advance their careers and lead sport organizations. data collection procedures qualitative data were collected following the procedures outlined by patton (2014). focus groups typically consist of open-ended questions with approximately five to eight participants (patton, 2014). focus groups are a cost-effective method of gathering deep insights into a research question and aiding researchers to bring in large groups of participants to focus on a specific issue (patton, 2014). data quality and richness are enhanced when participants can interact and elaborate on their opinions, confirm, or challenge the views of others, and elaborate on a discussion issue (patton, 2014). the nine professors all agreed to participate in the focus group research, and each received a letter of information and consent form in their recruitment package. the session was recorded with the professors’ permission, and the researcher took field notes to ensure that data were accurately captured (patton, 2014). three introductory questions were asked at the start of the session to get the participants freely interacting (patton, 2014). these questions were followed by a series of open-ended questions designed to uncover their perspectives on the topic. participants were asked about the barriers their students perceive that women may face in advancing to senior leadership roles in sport. they then discussed their strategies for creating awareness of their students' issues and helping their students understand the barriers that women face. from this discussion, equality, equity, diversity, and inclusion were discussed with respect to teaching the benefits of edi in the workplace. they also discussed their pedagogical strategies and what they could do to help bring awareness to and improve the situation. the professors determined which areas warranted more in-depth discussion and deeper reflection. the researchers followed the guidance of patton (2014) to ensure that respondents were not influenced by each other or succumbed to “groupthink,” which can be an issue in focus group research. this was done by creating a safe place where all opinions were welcomed and encouraged and by utilizing the chat function of zoom to express different opinions that one may not have felt comfortable sharing out loud. data analysis procedures the focus group meeting lasted 75 minutes and 14 seconds in duration, was recorded, and then transcribed verbatim. the final transcription data were analyzed using braun and clarke's (2006) six-phase framework to identify themes. the six-phase framework has been widely used throughout the psychology discipline to analyze qualitative data (forsyth et al., 2019). in phase one of the data analysis procedure, the researchers transcribed the audio file to a text file. the researchers listened to the recording of the focus group three times to ensure that the transcription was accurate. the researchers then re-read the data and highlighted the initial themes or ideas (braun & clarke, 2006). the researchers reviewed the focus group data three times to identify keywords, preliminary themes, sub-themes and confirmatory quotes. phase two of the data analysis process involved taking the highlighted words and generating initial ideas of potential themes (braun & clarke, 2006). phase three involved searching for the themes in the transcribed data by matching the quotes from phase one to the mind map from phase two of the data analysis process (braun & clarke, 2006). the researchers utilized nvivo coding software 12 to break the themes down into a smaller mind map and place relevant quotes underneath the listed themes. similar themes were grouped under one central theme (braun & clarke, 2006). phase four of the qualitative data analysis procedure reviewed and refined the identified themes (braun & clarke, 2006). after the pockets of data were examined in nvivo to fulfill phase four, phase five of the data analysis procedure was completed, by developing a mind map. the mind map helped the researchers summarize and categorize the data to identify the emerging themes (braun & clarke, 2006). consistent with the advice of forsyth et al. (2019), two secondary reviewers were secured to review the data following a training and testing program independently. this helped ensure inter-rater reliability between the reviewers (creswell & creswell, 2017). results strategies were identified to help increase students’ understanding and awareness of the barriers women often face in advancing to senior leadership positions in the sport industry. by engaging in these conversations with students, professors felt that it would assist the advancement of all students, specifically women in their pursuit of senior leadership roles. the professors confirmed that this is an area of importance to them, and they 113 believe that students need to know the importance and benefits of fostering equality, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace and the leadership practices of future leaders in the industry. the three main themes identified in the data were: (a) awareness; (b) barriers to advancement, and; (c) purposeful. twelve sub-themes were identified from these analyses, and all were captured in the model illustrated in figure 1 below. figure 1 professor themes and sub-themes in this context, awareness is defined as a heightened understanding of the sport management profession, particularly the barriers women face when advancing in the profession. the professors identified a need for greater awareness of women's barriers to advancing in the sport industry. it was mentioned that this has been seen through the canadian association for the advancement of women and sport and physical activity (caaws, now known as canadian women & sport) and the sport information resource centre (sirc). these are advocacy groups that strive to increase awareness of gender equity and overall sport resources. professor two highlighted this by saying, “[…] there is a lot going on […] right now with caaws leading the way and some of those other groups really pushing for equality and as a result there is a greater awareness […]”. the professors highlighted this fact in the focus group session. specifically, they discussed the advocacy programs available through these organizations and how they implemented this concept in their classes. they felt that these organizations and their coverage of the content were making a difference with their students. however, while the professors confirmed that progress has been made, a discrepancy still remains. more work is needed, and the professors felt that the academy needs to double-down their efforts to heighten awareness and the need for change. they unanimously agreed that there is considerable work to be done in this area. this was specifically highlighted by professor one in the following quote: “…i think there is starting to be more awareness in general social inequities from students coming up generally about race and sexuality and gender this is still happening this is still a common situation of both men and women, and i would say not thinking that there are any gender inequities […]. when i push them to ask them for more significant examples give me more than one they can’t and maybe that is when they kind of start to see that it is a bigger problem […].” a deeper analysis of the data categorized under the awareness theme was redefined as our sub-themes entitled: (a) career opportunities; (b) alumni; (c) modeling, and; (d) privilege. the “career opportunities” sub-theme captured a need for students to have a clearer understanding that there are jobs available in each sector and at multiple levels in the sport industry. students need to be taught that there are opportunities at the non-profit level and in smaller communities, as opposed to solely working in professional sport, which is now dwindling due to fewer opportunities in this sector. professor one stated: “[…] this industry is massive, and so maybe it is a rethinking of what actually is within the sport industry and helping students to understand the sort of number of opportunities that might come in front of them […] just the scope that possible careers are out there is maybe starting to become a greater understanding of what that might look like […] from students […].” the professors spoke of widening the perspectives of students and exciting them to non-traditional and emerging career opportunity areas in sport management. they suggested that career opportunities for women and men could be increased through more work-integrated learning opportunities like internships and cooperative education programs. experiential learning programs allow students to gain valuable experience in the field, better understand the rules of engagement in the workplace, increase the students’ networks, and provide students with role models, mentors, and sponsors to advance their development. these can be especially beneficial to women, who tend to outnumber men in undergraduate and graduate sport management programs. 114 the next parts of the awareness theme were the sub-themes: alumni, modelling, and privilege. professors need to integrate case studies and examples of non-traditional and emerging sport management career options in sport management. students need to learn about the success of women in sport management leadership roles. as billy jean king prophetically noted, “if i can see it, i can be it.” on numerous occasions, the professors reaffirmed the need to profile women in senior leadership roles (e.g., as guest speakers, visuals, video presentations, case studies) in sport so both the men and women students can see women in these roles and better understand their career progression histories. the professors felt that having alumni fill these roles may be especially effective as current students might identify more closely with these individuals. the professors felt that these strategies would be impactful for students and establish a foundation for effectively engaging students in discussions on the importance and benefits of equitable, inclusive, and diverse workplaces. however, one example is not enough. one professor suggested that the same strategies must be employed for other equity-deserving groups (e.g., people of color, people with disability, and indigenous populations). the professors discussed the need to challenge their students about the concept of privilege and help them recognize their privilege through critical thinking and reflection. this can be a challenging and oftentimes uncomfortable discussion, but one that is critical if we are going to make change and ensure more equitable, diverse, and inclusive sport leaders in the future. the second overall theme from the focus group was labelled barriers to advancement. four sub-themes were discovered from the barriers to advancement theme, and they were identified as: (a) leadership efficacy, (b) understanding, (c) sport management career, and, (d) gender norms. “leadership efficacy” and how it relates to the concept of self-efficacy was discussed at length in the focus group meeting. colleagues felt that it was critical for the women and men sport management students to be confident in their abilities and their preparation for roles in the industry. specifically professor six noted: “[ …] how female young adults typically compared to their male counterparts feel as though with respect to self-efficacy and leadership efficacy that is lower than males so if they have a lower belief in themselves then compared to their male counterparts then how does that actually relate to how they feel as though they have advantages in actually attaining leadership roles regardless of actually advancing within those roles and then that leads me to the systemic barriers that females are up against […] i believe coming from a leadership self-efficacy standpoint that i am not sure that they feel that they have advantages and the literature also supports that once you get into the most senior it is less females for sure.” the professors suggested that this was especially true for their women students who, consistent with the research literature (sartore & cunningham, 2007), placed self-imposed limits on themselves that impeded their career progression. one of the professors noted that their women students have lower levels of confidence than their male students, in spite of the fact that they have a higher ceiling for performance. they don’t apply for roles that they don’t feel 100% qualified for, a reality that they don’t see in their male students. the professors spoke of the need to break this cycle. bringing this to the attention of women students is important, as is the need to employ strategies to bolster the confidence levels of the women students. having women role models, seeing more examples of women in these roles, and matching women students with mentors and sponsors might help address this problem. another sub-theme identified under the barriers to advancement theme was “understanding,” students need to understand gender norms and perceptual realities of men and women leadership. professors drew on research (e.g., shaw & hoeber, 2003) that highlighted how men and women in leadership are perceived (e.g., men who are strong-willed are admired; women exhibiting the same qualities are labelled domineering). the professors felt that it was critically important to bring this research to the attention of students so these misperceptions can be addressed, deconstructed, and halted. in fact, women typically exhibit heightened levels of emotional intelligence and advanced communication skills which contemporary leadership researchers (zenger & folkman, 2012) believe are critical to effectiveness in the role. the “sport management careers” sub-theme refers to the barriers that sport management students may face to gain and advance within careers in the sport management field. for example, long hours, low pay, and extensive travel become increasingly challenging for those with competing responsibilities. there are generally fewer work-to-life balance challenges in the early career years. professor three speaks to this in the following quote: “[…] i think with entry level jobs they are typically getting those out of school when they are much younger with much less other work family conflict at that stage in life and so i think you know at that level hopefully we are seeing less disadvantage but i think then that shifts as women move on and have their other chapters of life whether it is child raising whether it is caregiving for parents or neighbor or others that is where we start to see some and i have heard from some of our alumni certainly as they get into their late twenties early thirties and they are asked to move up into higher positions that is when they start to feel the intense pressure because a lot of those positions in the sport industry are not the typical nine to five jobs they […] involve a lot of travel they involve […] international calls at interesting hours and other constraints so i think that could be one of the reasons why we are not seeing entry level but then we are seeing some more challenge for women as they move through different management ranks.” 115 however, researchers (eason et al., 2014) suggest that things change for women as they enter the typical mid-career stage. while more couples engage in co-parenting, women still assume greater home responsibilities for child-rearing, and in some cases, parental support. they often feel greater pressure balancing career and family obligations (eason et al., 2014; hideg & shen, 2019; modal, 2020). human resource policies are not often supportive of women. sport management roles often require evening and weekend work. women often feel intense pressure to balance their personal and professional lives. the professors felt that women often decide not to advance to mid-career or senior roles as a result. the professors felt that women and men students need to better understand this reality, and, when afforded the opportunity, influence human resource policies that are more equitable for both women and men. in addition to being more equitable, the host organizations can accrue the rich benefits that come with being a more equitable, diverse and inclusive unit (cunningham & melon, 2011; theard et al., 2020). overall, this observation is consistent with the literature that there are barriers in the sport management industry that usually transpire into mid and senior career levels (burton, 2015; burton & leberman, 2017; grappendorf & lough, 2006; hancock et al., 2018; kane & lavoi, 2018; pfister & radtke, 2009; walker & bopp, 2010). the last sub-theme related to the barriers to advancement theme was identified as the sustained “gender norms” that continue to be prevalent in society. professor four brought to the attention of the focus group that “[…] we live in a world with embedded gender norms in sport and within society as a whole and so i would hesitate to say that it is a fully equal landscape for graduates […]”. this was also highlighted by several of the professors who participated in the focus group. the professors agreed that the barriers to entering the sport industry are not an issue for women. men and women tend to enter the industry equally, which makes conceptual sense given the enrolments in college and university sport management programs. the issue emerges at the mid-career and senior leadership ranks in the industry. the professors agreed that as women progress to higher levels, there is more inequity due to embedded gender norms. the final theme from the focus group session with the professors was identified as purposeful. in the context of this study's analysis, the purposeful theme refers to having mindfulness and meaning when educating students about the values of equity, equality, inclusion, and diversity. it is important that graduates understand these concepts and have the opportunity to learn and become aware of them as they navigate their careers in the field. they also need to understand the legal issues as well as the benefits to decision-making, organizational culture, and organizational effectiveness, when these values are upheld and practiced. four sub-themes were identified under the purposeful theme, and these sub-themes were: (a) teaching; (b) inclusiveness; (c) social support, and; (d) explicit about experiences. the professors stated that increasing awareness through “teaching” the barriers that women face in career advancement is their responsibility. this was illustrated by professor seven who stated that “obviously i think it is our responsibility to make them aware of those barriers and show them those inequalities […]”. students must be made aware of the barriers and their impact. professor eight elaborated on this point by saying: “[…] has to be a part of everything we teach we can’t have a section in our class on this because it then seems as though it is something that we have to address or deal with. it is similar to talking about indigeneity or any other kind of it just has to become part of what we do. if you are lecturing on organizational culture you have to talk about culture, the research that is done and shown that you have to have a diverse workforce that leads to increased performance, you know all of those kinds of things, but i think if you treat it as a section of a class it is not going to be successful.” they need to learn about barriers, stereotypes, gender inequities, inequalities, and issues regarding “inclusivity” and diversity in the classroom. they need to engage in reflection activities undertaken about experiences outside the classroom using real-world examples within and outside of the sports industry. students can learn these concepts through a variety of pedagogical modalities, including, but not limited to, lectures, case study analyses, guest speakers, and guided reflection activities. the professors extended this point by stating that the concept of barriers needed to be integrated into everything that professors do in the classroom. the sub-theme “social support” was evident when talking about how the barriers can continue to be minimized. allyship between all colleagues and departments was discussed and deemed to be critical. men and women must align to make significant and sustainable change. colleagues across the academy must also be united in a quest to make this necessary change and aid women in overcoming barriers that impede their career progression. students need to know how to build guiding coalitions to generate the momentum needed to make this necessary change (kotter, 1996). allyship needs to be taught to students to increase their understanding of the barriers to career advancement and allow both men and women students to recognize and appreciate how they can support others who encounter these barriers along their career paths. the professors also noted that their male students needed to understand the concept of allyship, and the professors agreed to do all they could to heighten student awareness and encourage them to also help lead change to reverse the historical patterns of stunted women advancement in sport leadership. both men and women must be part of the solution and lead necessary change in this area (kotter, 1996). the final sub-theme in the purposeful theme was identified as being “explicit about experiences.” this theme represents continuing the discussion about barriers and stating that they still happen, and it is important to be honest about these experiences. 116 honesty in accepting that women are still facing these barriers. the professors were aware of the barriers that women face to advance in the sport industry. additionally, they discussed a strong commitment to lead change in the ways that they prepare their students. they pledged to heighten efforts to teach the concepts of edi so their students and future leaders better understand the concept and the rich benefits of edi programs. they reinforced the need to highlight the inequities that exist for their women students and offered hope that their students will help lead change in this area. however, it will take many who share this commitment to change. it was also clear to the professors that not only women face these barriers. they reinforced the point that awareness needs to be raised and strategies employed to level the playing field for other minority groups (e.g., people of color, indigenous groups, and people who experience a disability) as well as initiate discussion to stop other forms of discrimination (e.g., ageism, sexism, racism). as well, an allyship needs to be developed between individuals with gender-based privilege and those who do not, to continue the conversation and make greater necessary changes. discussion the research question that guided this study aided the researchers in determining what professors are or could be doing to prepare their students to advance to a career in senior leadership within the sport industry. multiple themes and sub-themes were identified, but four clear conclusions can be made from this data. professors reported that they are: (a) educating their students about barriers faced to advancement in their classrooms by modelling them through imagery and examples, ultimately leading to a potential increase in students’ understanding of the barriers; (b) helping students to gain different perspectives regarding careers to which they could potentially advance in the sport industry by bringing in alumni to explore barriers they have faced; (c) being purposeful in their teaching of the barriers where they emphasize meaningful discussions and keep students out of their comfort zone to increase learning, and; (d) learning more about the barriers women face and being honest and explicit about the experiences of women when advancing in the sport industry and academia which will help them better educate their students. the results of this research offer significant implications for the preparation of students, and action today could help rectify systemic inequity for future generations of sport leaders. researchers confirm that women are vastly underrepresented at senior leadership levels in sport management (burton, 2015; forsyth et al, 2019; lough & grappendorf, 2007; sartore & cunningham, 2007; walker and bopp). advocacy literature that supports the fact that women do face barriers to advancement is prevalent in canadian organizations such as canadian women and sport (formerly caaws) and the sport information resource centre (sirc). the programs and services that these organizations offer are bringing more awareness to gender equity in sport and it is possible that students are becoming even more aware as a result of these organizations’ initiatives. when it comes to career progression, professors stated that they are being honest about what a career in sport management entails. they are making students aware of the long hours, evening and weekend commitments, and employment realities (harris et al., 2015). the professors in the current study recognized and stated many of the barriers that female students and alumni face to advancement (forsythe et al., 2019), that appear to be causing the gender inequity that is present in senior leadership positions in the sport industry. even when women reach senior leadership positions, they are often unfairly scrutinized and face unfair criticism for their decisions and actions (ryan & haslam; 2005; shaw and hoeber, 2003). one of the main themes in the focus group was increasing the understanding of the barriers for students through examples, imagery, and alumni. to make any change, professors have to provide social support for each other and be explicit about their experiences towards the barriers to reduce them; a significantly important point that was mentioned in the focus group. through continuing the conversation, barriers will be made evident to students, inside and outside of the classroom. students’ understanding of barriers increases when they are pushed outside of their comfort zones, and thus, they become better prepared for their future. the professors who participated in this study encouraged discussions that promote gender equity in the university classrooms. majority of the professors stated that they teach students about barriers and inequities. they also attempt to heighten awareness of diversity and inclusiveness through the examples of women in power in sport that they showcase in their class content and visual representations. a point that was discussed in the current study was that women alumni are being brought into classes to serve as role models. this has also proven to be an effective intervention within the field of sport management research (hoobler et al., 2018). perhaps more could be done to engage these professionals as mentors. the importance of mentorship is emphasized in the literature, especially for young women (block & tietjen-smith, 2016; bower & hums, 2009; clarke, 2011). an analysis of the literature base in this area highlights the difficulties women often experience in networking within the sports industry (aman et al., 2018; burton, 2015; shaw & frisby, 2006; shaw & hoeber, 2003). this is especially problematic if there are few women in the industry. women do not have access to the same number of women peers, mentors, advocates, and sponsors (darvin et al., 2019; deane et al., 2015; weiner & burton, 2016). the field is imbalanced and offers fewer sustainable career options for women who seek greater balance in their lives (harris et al., 2015; savickas, 2005). forsyth et al. (2019) noted that the success of women achieving both sport and general business employment should be promoted and having an alumni day where women in sport come into a professor’s classroom to inspire other young women would prove beneficial. vianden and greg (2017) specifically highlighted the impact on student’s knowledge that incorporating diversity and inclusion materials into course content, fieldwork, 117 and internships had on students. kay and shipman (2014) commented on the lack of confidence that women hold for themselves compared to men. as darvin et al. (2019) noted, securing a sponsor is an especially valuable strategy for women seeking to advance in senior leadership. hopefully, the increased mentorship from alumni, peers, and professors, can potentially increase the confidence of women to continue to achieve their goal of senior leadership. it is evident from the results of gray and weese (2021), that women are striving to achieve senior leadership positions in the sport industry, as 57% of women participants stated they have career aspirations for a senior leadership role in sport. if more professors outside of those who participated in the focus group of this study continue this important discussion piece and create a safe space for allyship, mentorship, and networking to happen in their classroom, women may have more of the tools (i.e., confidence, networking, understanding of the barriers, allies, strategies for securing mentors, and sponsors) to achieve their goals of senior leadership and break through the glass ceiling to advancement (zenger, 2018). as per recent findings from burton (2019), the metaphor glass ceiling implies to readers that women will not reach the top when they are aiming for a senior leadership position, that the barriers they face will be from a distance, and that the barriers are just something that can’t be overcome. this is not true, given there are a number of women in top leadership positions currently and in sport specifically, who have spoken about the barriers they have faced and overcome (burton, 2019). there are numerous barriers that women who are in senior leadership positions in sport have faced, which are extremely real, noticeable, and not at all indirect (burton, 2019). women are clearly getting to the top levels of the leadership hierarchy in sport (burton, 2019), but not in proportions commensurate with the proportionate numbers seen in sport management educational programs (simmons, 2011). implications for sport management reflecting on the results of this study, it is evident that equity, equality, diversity, and inclusion need to be a part of the discussion in all sport management classrooms. this was highlighted in the discussions of the current study. the underrepresentation of women will not change without the incorporation of edi into classroom pedagogy and activity. however, teaching the concepts of equity, equality, diversity, and inclusion goes beyond a discussion and should become a part of pedagogy (e.g., diverse readings, guest speakers, and images), as found in deluca et al. (2021) and vianden and gregg (2017). these are simple practices that can be incorporated into the sport management classroom and, ultimately, make a difference at leadership levels when students graduate from higher education and take on organizational roles. deluca and colleagues (2021) conducted a study about students' perceptions of diversity and inclusion and state the same call to action regarding incorporating diversity and inclusion within course content to promote idea sharing, inclusive spaces, and display multiple perspectives. they will know the importance of edi from their classroom experiences, and they will employ the same tactics when hiring, leading, mentoring, sponsoring, and networking in their future endeavors. the results of this investigation highlight the complexity of the situation, and men need to be included in the conversation and educated about the barriers to overcome their possible denial, and views on acceptance of the prevalence of barriers in organizational life (gray & weese, 2021). a number of undergraduate and graduate students studying sport management will advance into decision-making positions. therefore, they need to clearly understand the need for equality, equity, inclusion, and diversity in the workplace. they need to be sure that they serve as mentors and sponsors of men and women colleagues. women must also be strategic and employ strategies (i.e., preparation, securing a sponsor) that have been proven successful in advancing in the industry to avoid resignation (darvin, et al., 2019). women students need to remain resilient beyond their academic years. although, resilience alone will not be the only answer to breaking down systemic issues and establishing change. the strategies and insights from the professors who participated in this study should be used to facilitate change at the undergraduate and graduate levels of higher education. based on the results of this study, the researchers recommend that sport management professors: 1. introduce the concept of edi and allyship into the early stages of the sport management students’ program of study and integrate and apply the concept in senior-level courses. 2. integrate the concepts of emotional intelligence and emotional literacy into the curriculum so men and women students better understand, appreciate, and commit to delivering more inclusive leadership practices after entering the workforce. 3. expand work-integrated learning experiences (e.g., internships, co-operative education, practice) into the curriculum to provide students with the opportunity to hone and temper their skills, gain useful experiences that they can build upon, develop stronger networks, and evaluate the relative absence of women in the senior leadership ranks and the need for systemic change. 4. work with students and campus placement offices to expand the career options for students in the sport management area (i.e., beyond traditional high-performance sport settings). 5. ensure that visual representations, case studies, and guest speakers used in classes are purposely diverse on multiple axes (e.g., gender, race, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, experience, tenure). 6. bring successful people of diverse genders who have a demonstrated record for promoting greater diversity in 118 their leadership teams to the classrooms to serve as role models and advocates. 7. create a pool of diverse professional mentors and match them with sport management students from equity-deserving groups (on the condition that the students agree to “pay it forward” and serve in a similar capacity once they graduate). 8. implement targeted strategies to help bolster the confidence of women students so they actively pursue opportunities that men counterparts actively pursue (sometimes with fewer qualifications and experience). 9. include course content on leading change (e.g., kotter, 1996) to help future sport leaders change the channel on the employment realities for women seeking senior leadership roles in the industry. 10. unite as sport management academicians to better ensure that current and future sport management leaders eradicate discriminatory and limiting practices of the past and help ensure more inclusive and welcoming employment realities in the future. although professors in this study have indicated they are educating their students on the barriers women face, it may not be enough. the teaching of barriers that women face has highlighted the importance of promoting knowledge of edi (seirstad et al., 2017). continuing the conversation regarding the benefits of a diverse leadership team in higher education will be vital to promote change for the next generation of sport leaders. sport management professors have indicated in the focus group that this is something that they try to do in all of their courses, not just one. increasing awareness, education on the barriers, and being purposeful in teaching will help move the needle forward and create change. an intersectional approach to teaching diversity will be evident as found by both deluca et al. (2021) and viandaen and gregg (2017). for example, guiding discussions that go beyond topics of gender equity and equality and speaking to various forms of diversity such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age, are both warranted and necessary (stowe & lange, 2018). the results can be helpful in informing both preparation and practice. research often generates more questions than answers, and in that spirit, a number of areas for future research are highlighted. in the focus group session a statement that was brought up was that not only women experience these barriers. thus, further research should be conducted on how other groups of people such as indigenous people, people who experience disabilities, people of color, and other visible minorities perceive and experience barriers to advancing in the sports industry. a case study analysis could be an interesting methodological approach to see how equity, equality, diversity, and inclusion are being used in the classrooms to provide helpful resources for other professors who may not know where to start, or who may not be comfortable doing so. some professors may feel they do not have the resources or knowledge to speak to topics that surround equity, equality, diversity, and inclusion and therefore, they avoid it. it would be interesting to conduct an additional focus group with professors to determine the resources from which they would benefit to better include equality, equity, diversity, and inclusion in their teaching pedagogy. providing professors with the tools and professional development courses to teach these topics would improve their success in classroom discussions (brooks et al., 2013; deluca et al., 2021; stowe & lange, 2018). in addition to exploring the barriers that other historically marginalized groups face, it is important to conduct research with groups of people who have been historically marginalized to determine how change can be made, and how they can be better supported both in higher education and leadership to have equitable tools and resources to achieve success. when researchers find the solutions, they need to then engage those who are in privileged positions to create and develop change. overall, change will be a collective effort and assistance and commitment from all stakeholders will be required to make a significant and sustainable difference. references acosta, r. v., & carpenter, l. j. 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(2012, march 15). are women better leaders than men? harvard business review, 15(2), 80-85. retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/03/a-study-in leadership-women-do 122 https://doi.org/10.1080/13583883.2004.9967129 international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle volume 2, number 1, winter 1999 preview this issue focuses on the culture transition and pursuit of knowledge and self. four articles discuss ethnic women in leadership; two articles target the barriers women face in their fields, and the final article addresses self-awareness. the articles included are: "black women in academe: progress but no parity" (sheila t. gregory); "mexican women confront mainstream policy: voices from the colonias address family selfsufficiency" (georgiana vaccaro and ann lessem); "hispanic women 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jankens, and julia ballenger assistant editors: jordan donop, kristina hall, & rebecca philips advancing women in leadership vol. 43, 77-90, 2024 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper examining and overcoming barriers to leadership for black women in hbcu spaces tameka v. williams, tyler s. clark, larrisha mcgill-youngblood, lauren henderson dr. tameka v. williams: director of staff investment and curiosity, justice system partners, tameka@justicesystempartners.org dr. tyler s. clark: adjunct professor, north carolina agricultural and technical state university, tsclark2@ncat.edu dr. larrisha mcgill-youngblood: director, office of e-learning, north carolina central university, lmcgilly@nccu.edu ms. lauren henderson, msw: associate, justice system partners, lauren@justicesystempartners.org accepted november 6, 2024 the researchers in this study aimed to explore the barriers black women face when ascending to leadership roles at historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) and the coping strategies they employ to overcome them. guided by two research questions, we gathered data from 93 black women who currently work or have worked at hbcus and aspire to leadership roles. our findings, integrated with existing literature, reveal several significant barriers: microaggressions and gender oppression, limited access to professional networks and mentors, and work-life imbalances. gender oppression and workplace microaggressions emerged as prominent barriers, aligning with previous research on gender discrimination in academic settings. most respondents reported not having access to formal mentorship programs, significantly impacting career progression. additionally, balancing work and personal responsibilities, coupled with discrimination, adversely affects well-being and career advancement. the stereotypes and perceptions of black women also emerged as a significant issue, placing undue emotional and psychological burdens on black women. respondents highlighted the importance of personal support networks, professional networks, and mentorship in coping strategies. support from family and friends, professional networks, and seeking additional education were commonly cited strategies, with mentorship being particularly valued. keywords: black, women, historically black college and university, hbcu, ascension, leadership, barriers despite advancements in gender equality, black women remain notably underrepresented in mid and executive-level leadership roles across corporate, government, and higher education sectors. according to naspa (2014), black women are four times less likely to hold executive positions compared to their white counterparts. similarly, miles (2012) noted that black women frequently encounter stagnation in mid-level positions, regardless of their educational attainment or professional experience. furthermore, west (2020) highlighted that advanced degrees among black women do not necessarily translate to advancements in leadership roles, particularly in chief student affairs positions. although black women are the most educated demographic in the united states, even in their own spaces, black women experience pervasive barriers to leadership (kaba, 2023). according to uncf (2019), 62% of students at hbcus are women, yet only about one-quarter of hbcu presidents are women. this highlights the need to investigate the challenges black women encounter in reaching leadership positions within hbcus to understand further why so few black women ascend to the highest leadership roles in these spaces. leadership roles in this study can be defined as various positions crucial for the effective governance, strategic direction, and operational management of these institutions, including presidents or chancellors, provost or vice presidents, deans, chairs, or directors. historically, black women have contended with pervasive discrimination, sexism, racism, workplace bullying, and limited access to mentorship and professional development opportunities across various fields (davis & maldonado, 2015; hollis, 2018). this experience often arises from the intersection of race and gender, creating systemically biased environments where black women feel undervalued and encounter invisible barriers that hinder their career advancement (turner et al., 2011). to highlight this notion, the tragic case of antoinette “bonnie” candia-bailey, vice president of student affairs at lincoln university of missouri, underscores the systemic obstacles black women face in leadership positions, with instances of racism and workplace bullying leading to devastating consequences, such as suicide (wong, 2024). hollis (2018) also emphasized the significant impact of academic bullying on hindering the career advancement of black women within hbcus. herder (2021) 78 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 mailto:tameka@justicesystempartners.org mailto:tsclark2@ncat.edu mailto:lmcgilly@nccu.edu mailto:lauren@justicesystempartners.org interviewed several black female presidents of hbcus in a leadership blog to find that they, too, have experienced gender oppression and objectification despite their high level of education and competence. additionally, domingo et al. (2022) identified institutional and service-related obstacles, such as the unfair distribution of service responsibilities and undervaluation of contributions, which exacerbate the challenges faced by black women in advancing their careers. the purpose of this study was to examine the barriers black women face when ascending to leadership roles at historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) and the coping strategies they employ to overcome these barriers. to do so, we employed an exploratory quantitative research design. our study findings contribute to the existing literature by providing empirical insights into the challenges faced by black women in ascending to leadership roles. further, we addressed the gap in research by focusing specifically on black women's leadership experiences within the hbcu context. ultimately, we sought to raise awareness of black women's unique challenges and propose policy changes to facilitate their progression into leadership positions within hbcus. literature review gender oppression, lack of mentoring, and limited professional development are major obstacles to black women's ascension into leadership roles at hbcus. black women often encounter both gender and racial discrimination, which contributes to their underrepresentation in leadership positions. they also face microaggressions and hostile work environments that impede their professional development and access to opportunities. the lack of solid mentoring worsens these challenges, as black women do not have the support, guidance, and networks needed for career advancement. together, these barriers create a multifaceted and arduous environment that consistently blocks black women's path to leadership at hbcus. gender oppression black feminist theory illuminates how the intersection of gender and racial oppression uniquely impacts black women in higher education. according to collins (2019), black women experience double jeopardy, a term that encapsulates the compounded effects of both gender and racial discrimination. this dual burden means that black women must navigate professional spaces with inherent disadvantages that cannot be altered. chance (2021) conducted a qualitative phenomenological exploration into how black women in higher education leadership navigate cultural adversity. respondents in the study highlighted that the intersection of race and gender poses significant challenges for black women who strive to present their true and authentic selves (chance, 2022). additionally, despite individual differences, black women leaders in higher education often share common experiences of discrimination, intersectionality, identity issues, cultural diversity, and a struggle for belonging. this indicates that gender oppression is a significant barrier that hinders the advancement of black women in leadership positions at hbcus. these detrimental perceptions cast doubt among decision-makers about the suitability of black women in leadership positions. this scepticism makes it significantly harder for black women to penetrate the concrete ceiling. additionally, in academic environments, black women often face microaggressions, which are subtle yet insidious forms of discrimination (smith, 2019). these microaggressions foster hostile and unsupportive work environments, hindering black women's professional growth and access to leadership opportunities. according to vazquez and williams (2021), the marginalization and stereotyping of black women also contribute to feelings of imposter syndrome, which can erode their confidence and deter them from aspiring to leadership positions. gender oppression also results in unequal access to essential resources such as mentorship and sponsorship opportunities, which are crucial for career advancement (wright & brown, 2019). the lack of access to these resources further widens the gap for black women seeking leadership roles in higher education. thus, gender oppression, intertwined with racial discrimination, creates a complex and challenging landscape filled with negative stereotypes, microaggressions, and resource inequalities that obstruct black women's ascension to leadership at hbcus. lack of mentorship a lack of mentoring, negative mentoring experiences, and other mentoring challenges can hinder the long-term success of black women in academia (davis et al., 2022). the lack of formal mentoring programs can inadvertently create disparities in accessing support (bova, 2000). typically, available mentors are white men who select other white men, seeing them as younger versions of themselves (nair & vohra, 2017). horton (2023) conducted a study on mentorship in academia, focusing on barriers and strategies for african american female faculty. the research highlights that the lack of mentorship significantly impacts the career progression of black women in higher education. horton emphasized that mentorship is crucial for navigating the complex academic landscape, particularly for underrepresented groups facing unique challenges. similarly, davis et al. (2022) conducted a qualitative research study examining the barriers to mentoring faculty women of color in higher education. in the study, four themes were identified: negative mentoring, difficulty finding mentors, insufficient institutional support, and lack of post-tenure mentoring. mentors neglecting their role slowed productivity and required assertive steps from the respondents. additionally, faculty of color face unique career barriers, including cultural clashes, devaluation of scholarship, exclusion from professional networks, and discrimination. davis et al. (2022) emphasized the importance of formal mentoring processes in offsetting these experiences. 79 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 lack of professional development black women at hbcus often lack access to structured professional development programs (colclough, 2023). the absence of targeted training and support can impede their ability to acquire the necessary skills for leadership positions (lim et al., 2015). limited access to programs tailored to the unique challenges faced by black women further restricts their professional growth. targeted professional development initiatives can help address these gaps (colclough, 2023). professional development programs can offer valuable opportunities for black women to enhance their leadership skills, such as communication, decision-making, problem-solving, strategic planning, and management (fuller & williams, 2020). strengthening these skills is essential for preparing them for leadership roles. additionally, these programs allow women of color to connect with potential sponsors, peers, and mentors, especially when they face challenges in organically expanding their networks (james & carter, 2019). emphasizing and investing in professional development is crucial for promoting greater inclusivity and diversity in academic leadership. work-life imbalance dr. tashni-ann dubroy, executive vice president and chief operating officer at howard university, recently highlighted in a forum that being a black woman in an organization often allows for very few mistakes (herder, 2021). this means that black women must continually work harder to prove their ability to lead an institution, often resulting in longer workdays, the sacrifice of relationships, and an unhealthy work-life balance (laube & hunt, 2023). to further explain, a study by jean-marie (2017) emphasized that black women in higher education often struggle with the dual burden of professional responsibilities and societal expectations, leading to significant work-life conflicts. these conflicts can impede their career advancement and overall well-being. lockett and gasman (2018) also noted that the demanding nature of leadership roles at hbcus, combined with the personal responsibilities that black women often bear, exacerbates work-life imbalances. this situation is further complicated by the lack of supportive networks and formal mentoring programs within these institutions, making it harder for black women to navigate their career paths effectively. therefore, addressing work-life balance issues is crucial for supporting black women in pursuing leadership positions at hbcus. strategies for overcoming barriers despite black women's challenges in higher education, several strategies can help them navigate and succeed. robertson (2022) identified coping mechanisms such as religion and spirituality, armouring, shifting, support networks, sponsorship and mentorship, and self-care. building relationships, forming alliances, and identifying champions are crucial for increasing self-efficacy and establishing a sustainable support system. connecting with others who share similar experiences through professional organizations, online forums, or therapy groups can help black women create support networks. creating safe and supportive spaces allows black women to share achievements, experiences, and challenges, fostering a sense of belonging and mutual support (smith & johnson, 2019). professional counter spaces, culturally sensitive environments established by and for black women, promote professional growth and community support (west, 2019). such environments foster a sense of belonging and provide vital support for black women seeking to rise into leadership positions. additionally, prioritizing self-care, such as exercise, meditation, or journaling, can help manage stress and improve mental well-being for black women. applying the black feminist theory provides context for why these barriers most often permeate black women’s experiences in leadership roles. theoretical framework black feminist theory: intersectionality and power black feminist theory, which kimberlé crenshaw first introduced in print in 1989, outlines the multidimensionality of black women’s experiences in various spaces (crenshaw, 1989; taylor, 1998). however, analyzing race and gender through a single-axis approach ignores the experiences of black women and limits the inquiry to privileged group members (crenshaw, 1989). moreover, cases involving class-privileged individuals add another layer to the challenges black women face. their experiences uniquely combine race, gender, and class discrimination (rosette et al., 2018). while all women experience gender oppression, black women face compounded barriers due to racism and classism, impacting their professional lives significantly. this intersectionality worsens work-life imbalance, as they are often expected to juggle roles such as caregiver, breadwinner, and community leader without sufficient support (ali, 2023). this imbalance hampers their career advancement and affects their overall well-being (perry et al., 2013). black feminist theory further explains this phenomenon as it explicates that black women cannot be completely empowered until the intersecting oppressions, including racism, sexism, and classism, are obliterated (collins, 1990). a significant component of intersectionality is its relationship with power and stratification (alinia, 2015). rooted in black feminist epistemology, it explores the interplay of power and knowledge, asserting that black women's experiences of intersectionality—through race, class, and gender—are shaped by intersecting systems of dominance and oppression. black feminist theory “exposes the way that domination is organized and operates in various domains of power” and “also shows the path of struggle and to empowerment while at the same time highlighting the challenges and difficulties in combating intersecting oppression, since the multipositionality of social agents, on the one hand, and the simultaneity of multiple and intersecting sites of oppression, on the other, make the relationship between domination and resistance highly complex” (alinia, 2015, pp. 2334-2335). based on positionality in social 80 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 structures and hierarchies, black women often become part of oppressive systems and reproduce majority race and gender domination when ascending to leadership roles in higher education. purpose of the study the purpose of this study was to examine the barriers black women face when ascending to leadership roles at historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) and the coping strategies they employ to overcome these barriers. while there has been some attention to this issue in recent literature, it has largely focused on women employed at predominantly white institutions (pwi) and has primarily utilized qualitative research approaches. we designed this study to fill a significant gap in the literature by specifically examining the barriers that hinder black women from ascending into leadership roles within the context of hbcus. by focusing on the unique challenges black women face in leadership within hbcus, this research provides insights into the factors contributing to their underrepresentation and explores potential strategies to overcome these barriers. ultimately, the goal is to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the experiences of black women in leadership roles and to inform efforts to promote their representation and advancement within hbcus and beyond. research questions the following research questions will guide this exploratory quantitative study: 1. what barriers do black women encounter in their ascension to leadership positions at hbcus? 2. if barriers exist, what coping strategies do black women who work or previously worked at hbcus use to overcome such barriers? research design and methods much of the research on the barriers black women face as they ascend to leadership positions at hbcus has utilized qualitative methods such as phenomenology and case studies to capture their experiences. while impactful, these methods often limit the ability to generalize results to larger populations. to investigate the pervasive barriers black women face at hbcus further, the researchers in this study aimed to expand the body of research by broadening the sample size and conducting an exploratory quantitative study. quantitative research can be defined as a systematic and scientific approach that investigates causation between variables through statistical analysis (adams & lawrence, 2018). this method allows researchers to interpret data and test relationships, making it suitable for addressing the research questions posed by this study (creswell, 2014). by employing numerical measures, quantitative methods facilitate the explanation of relationships (adams & lawrence, 2018). traditionally, quantitative studies follow a positivist worldview, emphasizing the measurement of factors influencing outcomes, which asserts that a scientific approach is the only way to uncover the truth about a phenomenon (creswell, 2014). we used a descriptive survey design to uncover black women's perceptions and the barriers to attaining leadership at hbcus. adams and lawrence (2018) defined descriptive research as a method to examine "who, what, when, where, and how" (p. 18). this exploratory survey technique allows for an in-depth review of a phenomenon. stebbins (2001) described exploratory research as a broad-ranging, purposive, systematic, and prearranged effort designed to maximize the discovery of generalizations leading to the description and understanding of a social or psychological area. in other words, a descriptive survey design collects data on specific variables without investigating causation. when empirical data on a subject is lacking, an exploratory approach can examine respondent opinions to understand behaviors and attitudinal trends (adams & lawrence, 2018). this design was chosen for the current study due to the limited knowledge about the perceptions of black women in the context of hbcus. the goal was to reach a wider range of respondents to build a more accurate picture of the barriers women experience as they seek leadership positions at hbcus and to examine the strategies they use to overcome those barriers. overview of respondents in the study criteria for inclusion in the study required respondents to identify as black women who were employed or previously worked at an hbcu in any discipline. respondents were recruited through multiple methods, including snowball and convenience sampling, without any incentives for participation. the purpose of the study and an invitation to participate were shared through six social media groups frequently visited by black women in higher education. additionally, the same survey information was emailed to professional contacts of the authors and distributed via two professional listservs, which included 500 higher education administrators affiliated with hbcus. the invitation included a link to a detailed study summary, allowing respondents to determine if they met the study criteria. those who chose to continue were presented with a consent form outlining the study's risks and benefits and were required to consent to participate. a total of 204 black women who currently work or have worked at hbcus responded to the survey. the study involved 93 respondents after missing data was removed. all respondents identified as black women and ranged in age from 28 to 70 years, with an average age of 49. among the respondents, 62 held a master's degree or higher. the roles within the university varied, with 28 serving as faculty members, 42 as university or department administrators, and 13 as center or program directors. regarding tenure status, 15 respondents were tenured, 6 were on a tenure track, and 44 were not on a tenure track, all of whom aspired to a leadership role. marital status among the respondents showed that 23 were single, 32 were married, and 81 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 11 were divorced. refer to table 1 for the participant demographic characteristics. survey instrument the survey instrument was developed using a carefully chosen set of previously validated research tools. these included (a) the gendered racial microaggressions scale for black women (grms) (lewis & neville, 2015); (b) the work-family conflict scale (kelloway et al., 1999); and (c) an index measuring coping mechanisms (manley, 2015). to better fit our research objectives, we extracted 14 items from the grms to create two modified microaggressions scales and 5 items to form a gender oppression scale based on stronger interrelations among these variables compared to their original groupings. we also incorporated 5 items from the work-family conflict scale and included the original coping mechanisms index. the mentorship survey questions were adapted from feldman (2010) and comprised six questions focused on current mentoring relationships and mentoring needs. the professional development scale was modeled after feldman’s work but tailored to include specific activities relevant to higher education settings. these instruments were selected for their relevance to our study’s focus areas and were modified to align with our research objectives and target population. the gendered racial microaggressions scale (grms) was initially developed to evaluate both the frequency and stress appraisal of microaggressions through feedback from a focus group of black women and an expert panel (lewis & neville, 2015). in study 1, exploratory factor analysis with a sample of 259 black women identified a multidimensional structure with four distinct factors: (a) assumptions of beauty and sexual objectification, (b) silenced and marginalized, (c) strong black woman stereotype, and (d) angry black woman stereotype. study 2 confirmed the adequacy of this 4-factor model for both frequency and stress appraisal scales through confirmatory factor analysis with an independent sample of 210 black women. the grms demonstrated strong reliability, with cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from 0.78 to 0.91 across subscales, and validity was supported by significant correlations with psychological distress and established measures of racial and sexist microaggressions. similarly, the work and family conflict scale, developed by kelloway et al. (1999), was designed to assess four dimensions of work-family conflict: (a) strain-based work to family, (b) time-based work to family, (c) strain-based family to work, and (d) time-based family to work. reliability was robust, with cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from 0.75 to 0.85 across various subscales over different waves of data collection. confirmatory factor analysis with data from 236 employees supported the scale's factor structure. we carefully designed our survey to reflect the strengths of the scales mentioned. we combined these scales into one survey because together, they best captured the barriers that previous literature has identified as being experienced by black women when they advance into leadership roles. prior to the full-scale deployment of the instrument, the survey underwent a pilot phase with a sample of 10 respondents. institutional review board (irb) approval was obtained from an accredited academic institution before the study. this piloting process facilitated iterative feedback, allowing for the refinement of survey items to enhance clarity, comprehension, and relevance. minor edits were made based on the pilot respondents’ feedback to improve the efficacy and validity of the survey instrument. once finalized, the survey was administered online using the qualtrics platform, providing a convenient and secure environment for data collection. it took respondents 15 to 20 minutes to complete the survey. the survey began with a consent form outlining the purpose, duration, administration procedures, potential risks and benefits, and the intended use and assurances of privacy and confidentiality. it included six sections, each addressing distinct aspects related to respondent demographics, experiences of gender oppression, mentorship access and importance, lack of professional development, work-life imbalance, and strategies for overcoming barriers. the question formats included likert scales and open-ended questions, providing comprehensive insights into respondents’ perspectives and experiences. data collection occurred over one month during the summer of 2022. at the end of the survey, respondents received the researcher’s contact information so they could share additional thoughts or ask questions. they could also provide their own contact information if interested in future research on this topic. all responses and communications were kept confidential. validity and reliability we employed various techniques to ensure the validity and reliability of our survey instrument. we utilized construct 82 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 validity as we adapted and selected items from previously existing scales that were theoretically relevant to our research objectives. we also demonstrated reliability in previous research through measures such as internal consistency reliability, which assesses the extent to which items within a scale consistently measure the same underlying construct. in addition, piloting the survey with a small group of respondents and iteratively refining the survey items based on their feedback ensured that the selected items accurately measured the intended constructs and were comprehensible to our target population of black women employed at hbcus. this pilot study also allowed us to assess internal consistency and test-retest reliability. incorporating skip logic and clear instructions in the survey design minimized respondent error. finally, rigorous data cleaning and validation checks were conducted to identify and address any potential inconsistencies or outliers in the dataset, thereby bolstering the overall reliability of the quantitative survey data. data analysis the data analysis for this exploratory quantitative study involved several steps to ensure a comprehensive examination of the collected data. the analysis was conducted using the statistical package for the social sciences (spss). first, descriptive statistics were calculated to summarize the demographic characteristics and scale responses. measures of central tendency were used to describe continuous variables (e.g., age). frequencies and percentages represented categorical variables (e.g., educational level, university roles, tenure status, and marital status). an exploratory factor analysis (efa) was conducted to identify the underlying factor structure of the survey items (refer to table 2 for validity and reliability factors). the specific steps included running a principal component analysis (pca) with varimax rotation to extract factors (adams & lawrence, 2019). in addition, the kaiser-meyer-olkin (kmo) measure of sampling adequacy and bartlett's test of sphericity were used to assess the suitability of the data for factor analysis. factors with eigenvalues greater than 1 were retained, and items with factor loadings of 0.40 or higher were considered significant (adams & lawrence, 2019). to elaborate, the kaiser-meyer-olkin (kmo) measure for the entire dataset was 0.398. a low kmo value indicates weak correlations between the variables, suggesting that the variable measurements are quite diverse. this was expected in our study, as we designed our survey using previously validated scales to measure the relevant theoretical variables we believe are best suited to assess the barriers black women face in attaining leadership roles at hbcus. for example, when we focused on specific barrier experiences such as gender oppression, work-life balance, and microaggressions scales, the kmo was 0.885. for professional development and mentorship experiences, the kmo was 0.622, indicating that the measures we wanted to examine are interconnected. additionally, we obtained strong reliability statistics and are confident that we accurately measured the intended variables. we conducted a reliability analysis using cronbach's alpha to evaluate the internal consistency of each scale. this analysis was performed in spss by selecting the relevant items and using the default cronbach's alpha option under the reliability analysis function. the resulting cronbach's alpha coefficients are presented in table 4. a cronbach's alpha of 0.70 or higher was considered acceptable, signifying that the items within each scale reliably measured the same construct. the results of the factor analysis reveal a robust underlying structure encompassing various workplace-related constructs. microaggressions: workplace marginalization and black women stereotypes each account for approximately 67% of the variance, indicating that these factors effectively capture a significant amount of variability related to marginalization and stereotyping experiences in the workplace. gender oppression stands out with the highest explained variance at 77.32%, emphasizing the prominence of gender-based differential treatment as a distinct and impactful experience. the lack of professional development factors, which encompass training opportunities and scholarship/grant writing, explain approximately 60% and 69% of the variance, respectively, underscoring these as crucial areas of professional development barriers. the value of mentorship for career advancement factor, slightly lower at 53.42% of the explained variance, remains acceptable and reflects the impact of mentorship on a variety of career-related skills. lastly, the work-life imbalance factor explains 70.51% of the variance, capturing the considerable influence of work commitments on personal life balance. the high kmo values and significant results from bartlett’s test indicate the data's suitability for factor analysis, while the high eigenvalues and explained variance across factors reinforce their reliability and distinctiveness. altogether, these findings affirm that each factor represents meaningful constructs, validating them as reliable measures for assessing workplace challenges, professional development barriers, and the value of mentorship, making them well-suited for further research analysis. 83 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 results our study examined barriers black women experience when ascending into a leadership role at an hbcu. a total of 204 responses were received. however, after removing missing data, 93 responses were completed and included in the final analysis. research question # 1: what barriers do black women encounter in their ascension to leadership positions at hbcus? descriptive statistics at the beginning of the survey, respondents were asked, in general, to select yes or no if they encountered some barriers ascending to leadership and to what degree they experienced them. one hundred percent (n = 93) of respondents reported having experienced at least one of the following barriers at an hbcu: sexism/gender bias, lack of network and mentors, caregiving/family responsibilities, physical/mental health and wellness, and imposter syndrome. refer to table 3 for response descriptives. after addressing the initial broad questions about general experiences with barriers, the survey included additional barrier scales to further examine specific instances of microaggressions, gender oppression, lack of professional development, and work-life imbalances that black women experienced at hbcu while attempting to ascend to a leadership position. we also inquired about the importance of mentorship in overcoming the identified barriers and asked respondents to share coping mechanisms and strategies. table 4 presents a detailed summary of the psychometric and descriptive statistics of the barrier scales used in the study. microaggressions microaggressions: workplace marginalization and black women stereotypes had mean scores of 23.37 and 19.79, respectively, with relatively higher standard deviations (6.4 and 8.4), suggesting variability in participants’ experiences of marginalization and stereotyping in the workplace. this indicates that these events happen sometimes or frequently to the respondents. when examining individual instances over their careers, 91% of respondents felt unheard at some point in their academic career, and 92% had their comments ignored. another 89% reported being disrespected in the workplace, and 91% felt their authority was challenged. the item with the highest score was the question, “i am assumed to be a strong black woman,” with a mean of 60.79. for this question, 91% of the respondents stated that they have been assumed to be strong black women. when examining occurrences over their careers, 70% of the respondents reported that someone had told them to calm down, 61% were perceived as an angry black woman, and 68% reported that someone accused them of being angry when speaking calmly. gender oppression gender oppression had a mean of 19.26 and the highest standard deviation (9.12), indicating that experiences of gender-based discrimination may vary widely among respondents. forty-one percent of the respondents felt that they had experienced unfriendliness or unwelcoming behavior at work due to their gender. forty-two percent also felt that their opinions were overlooked and ignored, and their work was assumed to be inferior to men. additionally, 56% of respondents felt their employer or co-workers treated them differently than their male co-workers. lack of professional development respondents provided information on the availability of various professional development opportunities at their institutions. the lack of professional development scales had moderate means, with training opportunities at 13.64 (sd = 4.52) and 84 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 scholarship/grant writing at 9.70 (sd = 2.95), showing that perceptions of limited access to professional development opportunities are less intense but still consistent across participants. a substantial 64% of respondents affirmed the presence of professional development opportunities at their respective hbcus. at first glance, this statistic reflects a commendable commitment to nurturing the growth and potential of the hbcu faculty. however, delving deeper into the responses reveals a more nuanced narrative. among those surveyed, 63% reported that professional development opportunities extended beyond the confines of the campus. to better understand the specifics of these professional development offerings, respondents were asked to assess how frequently various programs were made available to them. a significant majority, 61% of respondents, “rarely” or “never” experienced publication training and writing groups. advising training was found to be seldom offered, with 30% experiencing it “rarely” and 20% indicating that it was entirely absent in their professional journey. funding for faculty engagement through conference attendance was seldom offered, with 42% of the respondents stating that it was “rarely” or “never offered.” a significant portion of respondents, 56%, noted that leadership training was “rarely” or “never offered” at their institutions, indicating a gap in leadership development opportunities. grant-related training, including grant writing, grant writing assistance, and grant identification assistance, was reported as “rarely” or “never offered” by a substantial percentage of respondents, ranging from 41% to 51%. more than half of the respondents, 54%, reported that diversity, equity, and inclusion (dei) training was “rarely” or “never offered,” indicating a need for increased focus on diversity and inclusion initiatives. concerningly, title ix training was “never offered” for 10% of respondents and “rarely offered” for 34%, highlighting a compliance and ethics training gap. finally, assessment training received limited attention, with 14% “never” being offered this training, 27% “rarely,” and 35% “occasionally,” suggesting the need for more comprehensive training in educational efficacy evaluation. value of mentorship in career advancement respondents were asked to rate how important they felt mentoring was in various professional development areas in higher education. categories for consideration ranged from networking to skill development to publishing. additionally, questions asked whether respondents had a mentor and the nature of the mentoring relationship. the value of mentorship for career advancement had a mean of 25.61 and a lower standard deviation (4.11), suggesting generally high regard for mentorship with relatively consistent views across the sample. however, recognizing this importance, 71% of the respondents reported that they did not have a mentor at their hbcu. of those who did have a mentor (29%), the majority (93%) of those mentoring relationships developed organically instead of being assigned by their institution or as a part of a formal mentoring program. work-life imbalance work-life imbalance had a mean of 16.01 and a standard deviation of 6.04, which indicates moderate concern among participants about balancing work and personal life, with some variability in their experiences. the majority of the respondents indicated they had not experienced significant barriers that impeded their work-life balance. to further evaluate the work-life imbalance, 63% of respondents “somewhat agreed” and “strongly agreed” that it is difficult to tell where their work life ends, and their family/non-work life begins. the consistent reliability and varied mean scores observed across these scales emphasize the significant impact of these experiences in the workplace. the high mean scores in microaggressions, gender oppression, and work-life imbalance highlight the notable challenges faced by participants. in contrast, the high mean value of mentorship underscores the perceived importance of mentorship for career growth. these findings affirm the reliability of the scales as valuable tools for further exploring the influence of workplace dynamics, developmental opportunities, and mentorship in professional settings. we ran several anovas to examine the relationship between variables. tables 5 and 6 highlight the impact of gender oppression and various forms of microaggressions on perceived barriers to leadership and access to professional resources within hbcus. separate one-way anovas were conducted with each identified barrier and the following questions, “do you feel like you have experienced barriers to attaining a leadership role at your hbcu?” and “to what degree do you experience barriers, such as sexism, limited access to professional networks and mentors, caregiving, mental/physical wellness, imposter syndrome?” the results in table 5 indicate that gender oppression significantly influences respondents' perception of barriers to attaining a leadership role at their hbcu, with a high f-value of 17.691 and p < .001. additionally, microaggressions: workplace marginalization also has a significant effect (f = 8.437, p = .005), suggesting that experiences of workplace marginalization are linked to perceived leadership barriers. these findings highlight the substantial impact of gender oppression and workplace marginalization on respondents' perceptions of their leadership opportunities. 85 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 in table 6, we analyzed the relationship between microaggressions and a broader range of perceived barriers, including sexism, limited professional networks, caregiving, wellness, and imposter syndrome. the results show that microaggressions, workplace marginalization (f = 2.019, p = .028), and microaggressions, black women stereotypes (f = 2.156, p = .019) significantly impact these perceived barriers. this suggests that stereotyped expectations and assumptions about black women contribute to a heightened perception of workplace and professional challenges. overall, these findings emphasize the substantial role that gender oppression and microaggressions play in shaping the professional experiences of respondents and highlight the need for targeted interventions to mitigate these barriers and promote equitable leadership opportunities and professional support within hbcus. next, we will describe the coping strategies that the respondents used to overcome the barriers experienced. research question # 2: if barriers exist, what coping strategies do black women use to overcome such barriers? the survey included an index measuring coping mechanisms (manley, 2015). the question asked which coping strategies women have used when faced with obstacles while pursuing leadership positions. respondents were able to check all items that applied. therefore, the percentage will not equal 100% as respondents could select more than one item. some items on the list included consulting with a mentor, turning to family and friends for encouragement, or applying for other jobs. mechanisms utilized by 50% or more of the sample were family and friends (76%), professional networks (62%), national conferences (62%), consulting with colleagues (58%), seeking additional education (54%), and talking with a mentor (50%). women were asked about the strategies they felt were most effective in addressing barriers to leadership advancement. ninety-five percent of respondents selected mentorship, and 81% selected effective leadership as a key strategy. although we were able to answer the research questions that guided our study, it was not without limitations. limitations when interpreting the results of a study, it is important to consider various aspects, even when statistical analysis has been conducted to determine the significance between variables. one such aspect is the issue of researcher bias, which can arise when the researcher's personal beliefs or opinions influence the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data. to minimize this potential bias, we used objective measures to ensure that the survey instrument used to collect the data was reliable and valid (creswell, 2014). another crucial factor to consider is the sample size. while statistical analysis can provide valuable insights into the relationship between variables, the findings may not apply to the entire population based on the sample size (creswell, 2014). in addition, conducting more sophisticated statistical analysis was challenging due to the sample size. we encourage future researchers to expand the sample size to assess differences among experiences between roles or departments. moreover, time constraints could have influenced the findings of this study. the duration allocated for data collection and analysis may not have been sufficient to capture all relevant factors or fully comprehend the relationship between variables. another limitation is the possibility of measurement error, which can occur if the data collection instrument is not adequately designed or if the respondents misunderstand the questions (creswell, 2014). the scope of the study is also a limitation to consider. our research question focused on a specific population. therefore, the findings may not apply to other contexts or groups. additionally, extraneous variables that were not taken into account during the study may have affected the results. these variables could include environmental factors, cultural differences, or individual characteristics of respondents that were not measured. finally, it is important to acknowledge that research is an ongoing process. while this study may have contributed valuable insights, there is always more to learn and discover. future studies can build on these findings and explore new questions, leading to greater understanding and knowledge. discussion we explored the barriers black women face when ascending to leadership roles at historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) and the coping strategies they employ to overcome these barriers. guided by our two research questions, we gathered data from 93 black women who aspire to or have aspired to leadership roles in hbcus. the following discussion integrates our findings with the existing literature to provide insights into these barriers and strategies. research question 1: what barriers do black women encounter in their ascension to leadership positions at hbcus? we identified several significant barriers black women encounter when aspiring to leadership positions at hbcus. the primary barriers identified included microaggressions, gender oppression, limited access to professional networks and mentors, and work-life imbalances. 86 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 gender oppression emerged as a prominent barrier, with an overwhelming majority of respondents indicating these issues as significant obstacles. this finding aligns with previous research highlighting the pervasive nature of gender discrimination in academic settings (hollis, 2018). such biases often result in black women being perceived as less competent and authoritative compared to their male counterparts, further hindering their professional advancement. seventy-one percent of the respondents reported not having a mentor at their hbcu, and if they did have a mentor, the relationship grew organically, indicating that hbcus do not have formal mentor programs established. this limitation can significantly impact career progression, as networking and mentorship are crucial for professional development and advancement (davis & maldonado, 2015). the lack of formal mentoring programs at many institutions exacerbates this issue, as informal networks are often less accessible to black women. respondents also indicated that the stress associated with balancing work and personal responsibilities, coupled with the pressures of facing discrimination, can adversely affect overall well-being and career progression (manke, 2019). we also found that gender oppression, workplace microaggressions, and stereotypes about black women were highlighted by respondents as having a profound effect on black women's professional experiences at hbcus. more importantly, these findings are consistent with the experiences explained by the black feminist theory and provide a robust framework for understanding the complex and intersectional nature of the barriers faced by black women in their pursuit of leadership roles at hbcus. this theoretical perspective emphasizes the unique experiences of black women at the intersection of race, gender, and other social categories, and it critiques systems of oppression that perpetuate inequality. our findings can be elucidated through the lenses of several key concepts within black feminist theory. the concept of intersectionality, coined by kimberlé crenshaw (1989), is central to black feminist theory. it posits that black women's experiences cannot be understood solely through the lenses of race or gender alone but must be examined at their intersection. our study found that gender oppression, limited access to professional networks, and work-life imbalance are significant obstacles for black women. intersectionality explains that these barriers are not just additive but multiplicative, creating unique and compounded challenges that differ from those faced by white women or black men. in some cases, people experience both racism and sexism, which is known as double jeopardy. this can result in them being seen as less competent or authoritative. in our research, we found that over 50% of respondents reported experiencing gender oppression (collins, 2019). in addition to this, one of the findings highlighted the impact of the "strong black woman" (sbw) stereotype, where 91% of respondents reported being assumed to be strong and resilient. this stereotype, while seemingly positive, places undue emotional and psychological burdens on black women, expecting them to endure stress and adversity without complaint. collins (1990) describes how controlling images justify and perpetuate social inequalities. the sbw stereotype can lead to the neglect of black women's mental health needs, as indicated by 45% of our respondents identifying mental and physical health as significant barriers. research question 2: what coping strategies do black women use to overcome such barriers? in the study, we also explored the coping strategies employed by black women to navigate and overcome the identified barriers. respondents indicated a variety of strategies, with several common themes emerging. black feminist theory emphasizes the agency and resilience of black women in resisting and navigating oppressive structures (rosette et al., 2018). our findings on coping strategies such as relying on family and friends, professional networks, and seeking additional education underscore this resilience. these strategies reflect black women's collective wisdom and resourcefulness to overcome barriers. the high value placed on mentorship, cited by 95% of respondents, aligns with the communal ethos emphasized in black feminist thought, which values relationships and collective support as essential for survival and success (collins, 1990). support from family and friends was the most frequently cited coping mechanism utilized by 76% of respondents. these findings are consistent with research by smith & johnson (2019) and underscore the importance of personal support networks in providing emotional and practical assistance in navigating professional challenges. over 60% of respondents cited professional networks and mentorship as significant strategies. these networks provide essential support, guidance, and opportunities for professional growth. respondents also sought additional education and attended national conferences (54% and 62%, respectively). these activities enhance skills and knowledge and provide opportunities to build networks and gain visibility within the academic community. in conclusion, this study highlights the significant barriers black women face in ascending to leadership roles at hbcus, with gender oppression and lack of professional support being the most prominent. the coping strategies identified, particularly the importance of mentorship and established professional networks, offer valuable insights into addressing these challenges. hbcu institutions can play a crucial role by fostering inclusive environments and providing formal support systems to facilitate the professional advancement of black women in academia. research and policy recommendations it is crucial to conduct more research to fully understand the experiences of black women in higher education. such research should involve comparing experiences at predominantly white institutions (pwis) and historically black colleges and universities (hbcus), exploring cultural differences, and using mixed-methods studies. leaders at hbcus should establish safe 87 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 spaces and provide leadership development opportunities specifically for black women. hbcu leadership should recognize and respond to the diverse experiences of black 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(2018). gendered microaggressions in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. leadership and research in education, 4, 28–45. 90 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 microsoft word 356[79] rev.docx volume 40, 2021 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership 56 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 advancing women in leadership vol. 40, pp. 56-64, 2021 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper would you send your daughter to howard? historically black colleges and universities advancing black women in leadership amy oppong yeboah assistant professor, department of afro-american studies, howard university, amy.yeboah@howard.edu accepted august 17, 2020 in this article, we address the influence of historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) on black women’s participation in american politics. focusing on the rise and record number of black women running and winning political office in 2018, a remarkable list of over 400 black women candidates were collected. focusing on lives of three black women whose dedication, determination, leadership, and activism are shifting the american political; kamala harris, stacey abrams, lucy mcbath, its evident that hbcus have empowered black women to continue to lead, make a change and break barriers in american politics. these results highlight some of the long-term impacts supporting hbcu environments has created for black women in politics and america. keywords: black women, politics, underpresented, gender, leadership, historically black colleges and universitites my dear president johnson: last night, february 24, at the meeting of the university council in the course of your remarks, you said that a certain man had asked you if he should send his daughter to howard university. you did not say what your answer to him was, but you did turn to several men near you and ask, “would you send your daughter to howard”? i believe that there are fine women students at howard university as there are at any university in the country; indeed i happen to know that the women are much finer in manners and standards of conduct than they are in many negro and white schools. dean lucy diggs slowe (1932) on november 9, 2016, while many media headlines focused on the defeat of democratic presidential nominee hillary clinton, others read “kamala harris is second black woman elected to the u.s. senate howard university alum beat out fellow democrat rep. loretta sanchez” (evans, 2016). just shy of the 50th anniversary of the election of u.s. representative shirley chisholm as the first black woman elected to the u.s. congress, senator kamala harris’ victory symbolized an attempt at balancing a male-dominated american political order (godwin, 2018; hochschild 2011; stephanie 2017). remarkably, less than eight months in office, the conversation would evolve to “kamala harris: young, black, female – and the democrats’ best bet for 2020?” in 1922 when president durkee called slowe to shoulder the responsibility of being a dean of women at howard university, for years, slowe set out to chart a course and develop a model where “negro women [would] be prepared [and protected] for making their contribution to the problems of the world.” howard university and many other historically black colleges and universities encompass a long legacy of training women and men for a level of citizenship that thrives on community building, empowerment, and development for a better future. kamala harris and many other black women are a benefactor of this legacy. from bbc, the new york times, npr, and even bizarre fashion magazine the conversation on the rise and record number of black women running and winning seats in political office in 2018 have been everywhere. candidates such as stacy abrams, lucy mcbath, stephany rose spaulding, and letitia james represent a long legacy of black women standing before a glass ceiling looking to do more than just give it a crack. while the focus around gender and race politics concentrates on the alarming barriers black women face in attaining positions in political office (fox, 2013; lawless and pearson 2008), this project attempts to switch the lens to focus on what has assisted black women in the struggle for political representation and recognition. one common experience abrams, mcbath, spaulding, and james share is a historically black college and university (hbcu) experience. for decades, hbcu scholars have and continue to influence almost all areas of society nationally and, in some cases, internationally. contributions, by spelman college graduate marian wright edelman in policy, west virginia state graduate 57 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 katherine johnson in stem, tennessee state university graduate oprah winfrey in media, and howard university graduate toni morrison in the arts, are just a few examples. from barbara jordan, ella baker, now kamala harris and hopefully stacey abrams, in the never-ending struggle for justice in america, hbcus in many cases have been at the forefront of social change. to increase such momentum, we must look to support hbcus even more. black women and american politics political participation for centuries black women have been politically involved in staging demonstrations and protests, signing petitions, boycotting, volunteering for political campaigns, contributing campaign funds, organizing and boldly speaking out, before having the right to vote. even though men have dominated american politics throughout time, in 1965, after being disfranchised, the impact of the voting rights act uncovered opportunities black women would utilize to extend their political participation and grip a seat at the table. between 1970 and 1990 alone, the rapid growth in the number of black women in political office was an estimated 1463% increase (william 1991). as shirley chisholm in 1968 became the first black women in congress, patricia roberts harris in 1977 the first black women appointed to a white house cabinet, and carol moseley braun in 1993 the first black women elected to the u.s. senate, year after year, large disparities on the federal, state and local level continued to be chipped away (center for american women and politics, 2018; higher heights 2017; 2015). by the 21st century, it was no secret a black women’s vote mattered. during the election of former president barack obama, black women led the defeat over clinton in the 2008 primaries, and in the presidential elections over john mccain in 2008 and mitt romney in 2012 (hanna, harris-perry, 2018; harris-perry, 2011; price, 2008; smooth 2018; sinclairchapman, pew report, 2009). yet, as black women continue to make substantial strides, in 2018, men still hold 80.0% of the 535 seats in the 114th u.s. congress, 77% of the statewide elective executive offices across the country, and 80% of the 285 mayoral seats of u.s. cities with populations 100,000 and over (center for american women and politics, 2018). patricia hill collins (1998) in the more things change, the more they stay the same: african-american women and the new politics of containment states, in, one sense, the organization of power confronting african american women as a result of the civil rights and feminist gains of the 1960s and 1970s appears to be entirely different from that characterizing earlier patterns of slavery and de jure segregation in the south… relying on the visibility of african-american women to generate the invisibility of exclusionary practices of racial discrimination, this new politics produces a remarkably consistent black female disadvantage while claiming to do the opposite. (p. 13-14) while black women make up 7.3 % of the u.s. population and represent 30% of the elected officials in the 115th congress, the visibility of representation in one area becomes a deceptive gain, for they do not represent all black women. within congress, the legislative branch of government that makes laws that influence our daily lives, among states with large populations of people of color, black politicians are underrepresented and, in some areas, nonexistent (jones, 2015). over 64 percent of people of color in the united states live in just ten states, and in seven of the ten states, black women do not hold a congressional seat at all (center for american women and politics, 2018). of the 73 women serving in statewide elective executive offices, only 3 black women hold seats; serving states with black populations at less than 15%. thus far, a black woman has not been elected as a state governor, director of the fbi, cia, member of the joint chiefs of staff, confirmed a supreme court judge, or u.s. vice president or president. the chisholm effect signified extensive political gains for black women in american politics (harris, 2018). yet, why do so few black women hold positions of power in the united states? most recently, researchers have discovered and publicized compelling evidence to suggest that regardless of the political position when men and women run for office, they both have an equal opportunity at winning (cook 1998; fox 2018; lawless and fox, 2013) lawless and pearson 2008;). fox (2018), states “there are almost no gender differences in terms of the major indicators of electoral success: vote totals and fundraising” (p.218). yet, the “almost” must be in reference to black women. in a letter addressed to the democratic party, black women expressed strong sentiments of political dissatisfaction, dear chairman tom perez: black women have consistently shown up for democrats as a loyal voting bloc, demonstrating time and again that we are crucial to the protection of progressive policies such as economic security, affordable, and criminal justice reform. we have voted and organized our communities with little support or investment from the democratic party for voter mobilization efforts. we have shown how black women lead, yet the party’s leadership from washington to the state parties have few or no black women in leadership… (estell, et.al, 2018) scholars suggest “the fundamental reason for women’s underrepresentation is that they do not run for office. there is a substantial gender gap in political ambition; men tend to have it, and women don’t” (lawless and fox, 2006). yet, from the oldest hbcu, cheney state university, to the smallest hbcu talladega college, hbcus continue to be at the forefront of empowering black people, especially, black women with the ambition to lead, make a change and break barriers. historically black colleges and universities and american politics historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) were established to educate the freed descendants of enslaved 58 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 africans in the united states. since the establishment of cheney state university in 1837, for over 180 years, hbcus play a significant role in american society. in cultivating civil rights leaders such as thurgood marshall, barbara jordan, ella baker, diane young, martin luther king jr., and jesse jackson sr., hbcus have been influential in leading the nation towards equality for all. including, 1939 lincoln university graduate, kwame nkrumah became the first prime minister and president of ghana, hbcus have developed an extensive and undeniable history of advancing young black women and men to even enter into the international political arena. academically and socially, today of the 101 hbcus in the united states, institutions such as howard university, morehouse college, spelman college, fisk university and xavier rank among the top degree institutions in the u.s. (allen and jowell, 2002). howard university alone is the top producer of black undergraduates earning phds in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, especially among black women, representing the highest gains. (news release, 2014). yet, as productive hbcus are, it is bittersweet as many struggles with funding, enrollment, accreditation, and retention (allen and jowell, 2002; gasman, 2013; mutakabbir, 2011). in 2018, although sometimes overlooked and overworked, when hbcu alumni front-running political candidates such as andrew gilliam and stacy abrams dominated conversations for progress and change in america, this is evident that hbcus are still successfully educating and graduating a powerful generation of leaders. building on hbcus legacy of instilling confidence and ambition in black women to lead, make a change and break barriers, the underrepresentation of black women in elected offices, could historically be changed in the 2018 midterm elections. the numbers the research presented is based on data collected from three independent sources (1) the black women in politics database (bwp), (2) the center for american women and politics (cawp) and (3) votesmart.org. the data represents a major cross-sectional effort designed to provide information on black women in and running for political office in 2018. the center for american women and politics (cawp) is nationally known as the leading source of academic research and data about american women’s political participation. established in 1971, at rutgers university’s eagleton institute of politics, cawp (2018) “has been committed to advancing scholarship about women in politics and making women's leadership more visible.” luvvie ajayi developed blackwomeninpolitics.com in 2017 after doug jones was elected to the alabama senate by the surprising massive support of black women. as a searchable database of over 400 black women running for local, state, and federal in 2018, blackwomeninpolitics.com is a strong public effort to ensure black women and heard and seen. vote smart is a free and unbiased database of candidates and elected officials in america. from their website, if disclosed, each political candidate’s biographical description includes their previous professions, education, family life, and organizational memberships to their social media accounts and latest email addresses. the data represented in the study is not exhaustive but attempts to capture a representative scoop. it also should be noted that attending an hbcu does not mean a candidate graduated from an hbcu. after cross-referencing all three data sources the names of 409 black women running for federal and state political offices were confirmed in 2018. black women lead as an africana studies instructor, in my black women in america ii course one of the first books we read are black women in antiquity, by ivan van sertima. the volume provides an impressive histography of black queens, leaders, rulers, and goddesses who have dominated since ancient times. against a backdrop of stereotype threats that plague black women in society, for my students this text debunks them all. although, for many, the central question in advancing black women in leadership is the relationship between race and gender, yet for many black women coming from hbcus they are taught there are no questions. black women just lead. in 2017, howard alumna, kamala harris in her speech to the graduating class of 2017, understood that, since this school was founded, in 1867, howard has awarded more than 120,000 degrees. it has prepared and produced thousands of black lawyers and doctors; and artists and writers… it prepared me for a career in public service, starting with my first-ever political race — for freshman class representative on what was then called the liberal arts student council… history has proven that each generation of howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world…. i chaired the economics society and was on the howard debate team. and i pledged my dear sorority, alpha kappa alpha. so the notion of rejecting false choices that howard taught us had carried me throughout my career — as the district attorney of san francisco, as the attorney general of california, and now as a united states senator. today, senator kamala harris’ presence is felt as she sits on the senate committee on budget, homeland security and government affairs, judiciary, intelligence; subcommittee on federal spending, regulatory affairs, oversight, agency action, privacy, technology, and the constitution. born in california, raised in montreal, québec, canada, then schooled in washington, dc, it was at howard university that senator harris was able to manifest the political ambition to lead. 59 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 figure 1 black women serving in political office in 2018, by hbcu attendance currently, on the federal, state, and local level the influence of hbcus in the lives of black women in political office are also evident. from figure 1 of the 8 black women serving in the 115th congress, howard university alumna, kamala harris is the only black women elected to the united states senate. within the u.s. house, rep. alma adams (d-nc) is an alumna of north carolina central, rep. joyce beatty (d-oh) is an alumna of central state university, and rep. frederica wilson (d-fl) is an alumna of fisk university. as a member of the fisk university class of 1963, congresswoman wilson was educated in the heart of the civil rights movement and has become known as a “voice for the voiceless.” of the 74 women serving in statewide elective executive offices, 3 are black, 2 of whom are alumnae of hbcus. when virginia state university alumna denise lynn nappier (d-ct) took office as state treasurer in january 1999, she became the first black woman elected to serve as a state treasurer in the u.s. and the first black woman elected to a statewide office in connecticut. lincoln university alumna lieutenant governor sheila y. oliver was first elected to the general assembly in 2003, as the first black woman in state history and the second in the country. graduating from the first degree granting hbcu in 1974, lieutenant governor oliver ran and won the third most powerful elected position in new jersey. from the most current list of women mayors of the top 100 cities, 3 of the 7 black women in leadership have attended an hbcu. from morgan state university alumna baltimore mayor catherine pugh, she “was really engaged at morgan. it was really a great place to be around, so many african americans striving to achieve and be a part of the leadership of the city…. one thing morgan state university taught us was how to be leaders'' (sybil, 2018). following the footsteps of the first woman to be the mayor of atlanta and the first black woman to be elected mayor of a major southern city, howard university alumnae shirley franklin, florida a&m university graduate mayor bottoms is now the second woman to be elected to atlanta’s highest office. lastly, in an interview, the mayor latoya cantrell states “i wanted to go to an hbcu because that was instilled in us…i told my family i was applying to all these schools, and i only applied to xavier.” these were the words of mayor cantrell, who made history in 2017 as she was elected the first woman mayor of new orleans. figure 2 graphically depicts the 275 black women serving as state legislators nationwide in 2018, by hbcu attendance. in delaware (100%), north carolina (92%), massachusetts (77%), virginia (75%), nevada (67%), indiana (67%), alabama (62%), tennessee (57%), texas (56%), georgia (52%), wisconsin (50%), oregon (50%) and louisiana (50%) over 50% of the black women in office have attended an hbcu. in red states, such as alabama, alabama state university, alabama a&m university, miles college and tuskegee university alumnus; in tennessee, tennessee state university and lemoyne-owen college alumnus, and in texas, texas a&m university, texas southern university, and prairie view a&m alumnus are leading against the majority. for example, in the state of massachusetts where 13 black women are in office, and 77% hold an hbcu experience, in studies ranking women’s economic, social well-being, and health, massachusetts comes in second as a women-friendly policy state (caiazza, 2008). figure 2 black women serving as state legislators nationwide in 2018, by hbcu attendance 60 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 a change is coming at howard university with a substantial population of women, after the presidential election of trump, even with the threat of death lingering, leading into 2018 midterm elections, black women had no intentions of slowing down (yeboah, 2018). following in the footsteps of senator kamala harris and other game changers in 2017, the rise and record number of black women running for political office in 2018 has been remarkable. first-time candidates such as lucy mcbath (d-ga) ran for change in gun-control, veronica johnson (d-al) change in education, sheila cherfilusmccormick (d-fl) change in healthcare, and raychel proudie (d-mo) change in prison reform. with 36 governorships, 35 senate seats and 435 house races open, black women were not hesitant to run for a seat at the table. as hbcus continually demonstrate that their students and alumni both serve and lead, mcbath, johnson, cherfilus mccormick, and proudie are just a few representing a wave of hbcu scholars moving towards a political change in america. by november 1, 2018, the black women in politics database, reported a list of over 400 black women candidates running for office in 2018. of which, “58 were for federal seats, 180 for state seats, 213 for local seats… 178 in blue states, 290 in red states, 181 incumbents and 287 challengers” (bwp, 2018). one of the first-time candidates, lucy mcbath, joined the political trail after the murder of her son jordan davis in 2012. when michael bloomberg’s everytown for gun safety, donated more than $500,000 in ads for mcbath during election primaries, she became a political front-runner (mom’s demand action, 2018). the hbcu, virginia state university, alumnae and mother of the movement representative felt it was time for a change. heading to the statehouse might seem a heavy lift for a political novice, but mcbath isn't precisely that. she attended civil rights marches as a child with her father, then the president of the illinois branch of the naacp…mcbath graduated from virginia state university in 1982 with a degree in political science and interned for douglas wilder, who would become the state's first black governor. activism, mcbath says, "is in my dna." – (king, 2018) with her success on november 7th, the democratic nominee for georgia's 6th district, lucy mcbath successfully changed a red district that voted overwhelmingly in support of trump in 2016 to a democratic blue district. in table 1 and 2, looking at the 409 black women running for a federal or state office in 2018 the ambition for change by the state is clear. in states like georgia, north carolina, tennessee and indiana where republicans won the electoral vote, over 30% of the black women running for office have attended hbcus. in texas especially, of the 25 black women running for federal or state office, 60% have attended an hbcu. in alabama of the 29 black women running for federal or state office, 48% have attended hbcus. in missouri where democratic sen. claire mccaskill struggled to remain in control, minority voters in ferguson, mo worried about race relations and criminal justice reform, but raychel proudie, grambling state university alumna, lead the race for state representative of missouri's 73rd district. in colorado, clark atlanta university alumnae, stephany r spaulding, ph.d., pushed to make history by changing colorado’s 5th congressional district democratic for the first time. lastly, in tennessee and texas hbcu alums from tennessee state university, xavier university, howard university, jackson state university, langston university, texas a&m university, and texas southern university pushed for a political shift. in georgia, the success of spelman college alumnae stacey abrams would symbolize not only change but also the historical legacy of hbcu scholars breaking barriers. table 1 black women running for political black women running for political office in 2018 percentage of black women running for political office in 2018 attended an hbcu 2016 u.s. electoral vote winner number of u.s. electoral votes maryland 46 36.96% democrat 10 new york 30 6.67% democrat 29 alabama 29 48.28% republican 9 georgia 29 31.03% republican 16 texas 25 60.00% republican 38 pennsylvania 24 16.67% republican 20 illinois 23 8.70% democrat 20 florida 18 22.22% republican 29 california 17 17.65% democrat 55 north carolina 16 56.25% republican 15 ohio 16 18.75% republican 18 michigan 11 9.09% republican 16 oklahoma 9 44.44% republican 7 missouri 9 22.22% republican 10 arkansas 8 37.50% republican 6 61 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 tennessee 8 37.50% republican 11 minnesota 8 12.50% democrat 10 south carolina 7 28.57% republican 9 wisconsin 6 50.00% republican 10 nevada 6 16.67% democrat 6 west virginia 5 20.00% republican 5 arizona 5 0.00% republican 11 washington 4 25.00% democrat 12 delaware 4 0.00% democrat 3 massachusetts 4 0.00% democrat 11 colorado 3 33.33% democrat 9 indiana 3 33.33% republican 11 oregon 3 33.33% democrat 7 alaska 3 0.00% republican 3 iowa 3 0.00% republican 6 kentucky 3 0.00% republican 8 new jersey 3 0.00% democrat 14 utah 3 0.00% republican 6 virginia 3 0.00% democrat 13 connecticut 2 0.00% democrat 7 nebraska 2 0.00% republican 5 new hampshire 2 0.00% democrat 4 vermont 2 0.00% democrat 3 idaho 1 0.00% republican 4 kansas 1 0.00% republican 6 louisiana 1 0.00% republican 8 maine 1 0.00% democrat 4 mississippi 1 0.00% republican 6 new mexico 1 0.00% democrat 5 rhode island 1 0.00% democrat 4 montana 0 0.00% republican 3 north dakota 0 0.00% republican 3 south dakota 0 0.00% republican 3 wyoming 0 0.00% republican 3 table 2 black women running for political office in 2018 by percent black population black women in the state legislature in 2018 black women running for political office in 2018 percentage of black women running for political office in 2018 attended an hbcu % black of population mississippi 13 1 0.00% 38 louisiana 8 1 0.00% 32 georgia 31 29 31.03% 31 maryland 21 46 36.96% 30 south carolina 9 7 28.57% 28 alabama 13 29 48.28% 27 north carolina 12 16 56.25% 22 delaware 2 4 0.00% 22 virginia 12 3 0.00% 20 new york 18 30 6.67% 18 florida 9 18 22.22% 17 tennessee 7 8 37.50% 17 arkansas 4 8 37.50% 16 illinois 15 23 8.70% 15 new jersey 12 3 0.00% 15 62 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 breaking barriers america has never elected a black woman governor to lead a state, yet hbcu spelman college alum stacey yvonne abrams is running to break that barrier. twenty-eight years after, howard university alum, lawrence douglas wilder became the first elected black governor in america for virginia, abrams is attempting to make her mark. in following the argument, lawless and fox suggest, the fundamental reason for women’s under-representation being political ambition, in stacey abrams autobiography minority leader: how to lead from the outside and make the real change she traces her ambition to spelman college. suddenly, i found myself seeing how much blacks could achieve… our college expected us to dream beyond our narrow understanding of what we could be. i threw myself into college life, hungry to become this new superwoman: the breaker of stereotypes, destroyer of black women myths. i was now in a context that included people of color, women no less, who had confidence that they could succeed…once we accept that we deserve to want more and we understand how giving birth to ambition requires knowing ourselves better, we’re ready to actually start figuring out what lights us up and then plotting out our pathways to get it. (abrams, 2018, 10) similar to kamala harris’ hbcu experience, stacey abrams was able to develop ambition by knowing herself as a black woman. it was not only about knowing herself but knowing that a black woman meant anything she wanted that to be, instead of what others told her she could be. with the historical legacy of oppression, black women face in america before political ambition can manifest, personal ambition must be at the foundation. rarely, are black girls and women socialized to understand that they have leadership potential or the capacity to develop leadership skills that transcends race and gender barriers. unlike, national organizations and training programs like emily’s list, vote run lead, and the women’s campaign school, organizations like higher heights, founded by black women for black women’s to develop political growth and equity, and black girls lead, offering black girls tools and resources to become dynamic leaders, innovators, and public servants, produces a more profound sense of both personal and political ambition black women need to run and win. with personal ambition for herself, she then moved to political ambition. it was at spelman college again, located in the heart of atlanta georgia, during the wake of the rodney king verdict that stacey abrams, without a political background or academic interest, took a step towards running for political office. i can easily trace my goal of becoming mayor to my freshman year of college…the [atlantic university center] possesses a proud tradition of civic engagement, as the college home of luminaries such as martin luther king jr., marian wright edelman, and walter francis white. i wanted to do their legacy justice and felt called to continue their work... still, as the police moved into our area of the city to quell the unrest, a strange thing happened. tear gas canisters rained down onto our college quads, vile smoke flooding the open spaces. across the street, similar bombs exploded in the eyes of section 8 housing dwellers. from the traumatizing experience, a young stacey abrams would question the role of law enforcement and government, in relationship to her personal ambitions. she continued to ask that question as she interned for the mayor’s office, studied law at yale, was elected deputy city attorney for atlanta, minority leader for the georgia general assembly and now as she attempts to break barriers and become the first black woman governor to lead a state. table 3 black women running for state governor and attorney general in 2018 name state office college/university attended midterm results stacey abrams ga governor spelman college*, university of texas and yale law school l yvonne girard ca governor websters university, california state university, university of maryland l constance n. johnson ok governor langston university* and university of pennsylvania l leticia sanders ar governor arkansas baptist college* l vanessa g. ward ne governor unknown l leecia eve ny attorney general smith college, harvard university, and harvard law school l sharon fairley il attorney general princeton university, university of pennsylvania, and university of chicago law school l erika n. l. harold il attorney general the university of illinois and harvard law school l letitia james ny attorney general lehman college, columbia university and howard university school of law* w lakresha s. roberts de attorney general pace university and delaware law school l historical black college and university* 63 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 hbcu alumnae have been breaking barriers for years. in the 2018 midterm elections, black women with an hbcu experience were doing the same. in table 3, howard university alumna, letitia james ran and won to break barriers as the first black woman elected in new york state as attorney general. spelman college alumnae, stacey abrams, and arkansas baptist college alumnae, leticia sanders in 2018 were 2 of 5 attempting to break barriers to become the first black women governor in the u.s. stacey abrams, in the extended gubernatorial election, hbcus in many cases have been at the forefront of social change. to increase such momentum, we must look to support hbcus even more. moving forward black women in leadership even though the heart-breaking struggles of 2016 and 2017 women faced socially and politically in america, black women have not gotten weary in running. the rise and record number of black women running and winning seats in political office in 2018 were historic. after staging marches, signing petitions, campaigning, raising funds, lobbying and speaking out, the results were mixed. for black women the results of the 2018 mid-term elections included historical wins, loses, draws and possible recounts/runoffs. yet, how do black women continue to harness political ambition? what are the steps necessary for advancing black women in leadership? our results show the support and recognition of historically black colleges and universities for black women must be involved in the plan. hbcus for decades have developed an extensive history of cultivating young black women and men to be leaders. focusing on leverage hbcu space and recruiting black women to run, history proves not only benefits women but all americans. as the most devoted democratic political participants, the democratic party must reciprocate the support. focusing on the early stages of political involvement, as senator harris and abrams experienced in college, having stronger impacts. these results highlight some of the long-term impacts support hbcu environments can create from women. references african-american female college presidents: self conceptions of leadership. 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(2017, nov 19,). https://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/11/who_is_l atoya_cantrell_new_orl.html williams, l. f. (2001). the civil rights-black power legacy: black women elected officials at the local, state, and national levels. in b. collier-thomas, & franklin, v. p. (vincent p.) (eds.), sisters in the struggle african american women in the civil rights-black power movement (pp. 306-331). new york university press. yeboah, a. o. (2018). reflections on the second wave of “make america great again”: a glimpse from a historically black college and university. women, gender, and families of color, 6(1), 136-143. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/womgenfamcol.6.1.0136 volume 43, 2024 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editors: jordan donop & kristina hall advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 43 advancing women in leadership vol. 43, 42-53, 2024 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper black women college administrators perspectives on informal mentoring: a phenomenological case study kimberly havens-mcvea kimberly havens-mcvea: director, academic support, molloy university, khavens@molloy.edu accepted july 10, 2024 within this qualitative phenomenological case study, i explored the perspectives of informal mentoring as a coping strategy to navigate workplace and career stagnation for black women college administrators in the united states. findings from their experiences indicate that while formal mentoring and sponsorship existed for their counterparts, it was not accessible for them. the participants described informal mentoring was needed and helpful for their workplace challenges and for the cultivation of their leadership growth strategies, particularly as employees at predominately white institutions. seven themes emerged: (a) defining supportive relationships; (b) relevancy of race and gender in mentoring; (c) cultivating kinships and networks; (d) identifying salient challenges; (e) navigating campus culture; (f) penetrating boundaries to leadership; and (7) leveraging for leadership. keywords: mentoring; black women college administrators, counterspaces; black feminist theory black1 women’s ascensions to senior-level leadership positions in u.s. higher education have been limited as they continue to struggle in attaining high ranking positions (searby et al., 2015). while the advancement of black women professionals in u.s. higher education has slightly progressed, senior leadership representation remains disproportionately low compared to white men who historically represent the majority of leadership posts (chance, 2022). white men are historically at the top and white women hold more leadership roles compared to black women (chance, 2022; jones, 2014). noting college presidencies, 32.8% are held by women (american council on education, 2023). in 2022, 5.4% of college presidents were african american women (american council on education, 2022). more broadly, the u.s. department of education (2020) reported white males held 78% of leadership posts compared to 7% of black women in leadership at higher education institutions. given these trends, black women administrators are not amply represented in higher education leadership within two-and four-year public and private institutions in the united states (bartman, 2015; paige, 2018; west 2018). researchers have illustrated that black women have struggled to secure high ranking leadership positions (e.g., see artay, 2018; coker et al., 2018; wilder et al., 2013). black women college administrators experience challenges that represent barriers to their career advancement (davis & maldonado, 2015). for example, stigmas of gender inequality, isolation, lack of preparation, racial stereotypes, lack of opportunities and underrepresentation all remain relevant as part of the problem (west, 2015). underrepresentation is a main challenge that is best described as the disproportionate representation of a group of individuals when compared to another defined group (zambrana et al., 2015). the slow moving and disconcerting leadership strides that black women have been able to make in u.s. higher education impedes the positive expectations of these women in the field (howardbaptiste, 2014). mentoring can be employed by professionals on college campuses (darwin & palmer, 2009; davis, 2009). a mentor signifies a role model with advanced experience and ability to guide and counsel (kram, 1985). mentoring has been explored as a support by black women administrators to assist with aspirations of increased leadership and overcoming career barriers that impede their consideration for advancement (e.g., see chang et al., 2014; howard et al., 2016; west, 2018). it is suggested by searby and colleagues (2015) that women not wait on mentor opportunities to appear, but to proactively seek them out. however, in many instances, mentors are not available and there is an absence of mentors, especially for women (e.g., see ballenger, 2010; chang et al., 2014; horenstein et al., 2012). in particular, the lack of formalized mentoring and institutional support networks are an issue for black women college administrators (gardner et al., 2014). this is also a reality for other professionals of color in academia (irby et al., 2016). latina faculty face similar absences of formal mentoring that if available may improve 44 their workplace experiences (irby et al., 2016). few studies have elucidated formal mentoring specifically for black women college administrators, yet informal mentoring has often been employed by black women to better understand their professional support and personal coping strategies (irby, et al., 2016; searby et al., 2015). purpose of the study the purpose of this qualitative phenomenological case study, a form of research that focuses on the exploration of significant issues within a particular population or field, was to explore how black women college administrators in the united states turned to informal mentoring to help their career paths and the influences of these informal relationships on their professional lives. informal mentoring relationships are those typically established outside of the workplace that do not follow a set format and are synonymous with non-traditional mentoring in this study. i explored the challenges and experiences of black women through illuminating their use of informal mentoring as a desired coping mechanism for dealing with perceived career, psychosocial, and psychological impacts. the following research questions guided the study: 1. what are the ways black women college administrators experienced informal mentoring relationships? 2. in what ways does informal mentoring contribute to black women college administrators’ leadership growth in the workplace? black women, mentoring, and professional counterspaces black women administrators through actualizing the oppressions they encounter alongside their feelings on the lack of general support, seek external outlets to deal with workplace experiences (.g., see davis, 2016; hall, 2012; jones, 2014; west, 2015). research addressed that mentoring provides professional support advantages when such relationships are available (ballenger, 2010; kram, 1985). henderson et al. (2010), through their exploration of black women’s experiences at predominately white institutions, recognized mentoring relationships as relationships where mentors “give advice and support in a warm and caring way to someone striving to become successful” (p. 35). mentoring is a distinct relationship used to cultivate and motivate individuals (arora & rangnekar, 2015). arora and rangnekar (2015) postulated mentoring as “a vital tool to enhance career resilience” (p. 19). mentoring has transformed and taken on different meanings and applications, and contextual applications as evidenced in the literature (e.g., see agosto et al., 2016; dunbar & kinnersley, 2011; henderson et al., 2010, searby et al., 2015). kram (1983) prognosticated a mentormentee relationship as having positive influences on one’s professional and psychosocial development. kram (1983) leaned toward a formal mentoring scenario where the relationship has set expectations, boundaries and accountability, where informal mentoring is less predefined. in the absence of formalized mentoring structures, black women college administrators embrace informal means of establishing mentoring relationships (see e.g. searby et al., 2015; west, 2015). for example, searby et al. (2015) sought mentoring perspectives of black women administrators and found that participants were taking advantage of informal mentoring opportunities via informal structures. nontraditional mentoring provides career and emotional benefits that are not tangible within the walls of academia (carmel & paul, 2015; chang et al., 2014). because opportunities for black women to establish networks at work is difficult due to their lack of representation, informal methods are often implemented and beneficial. they may proactively seek out mentors on their own to align themselves with persons to whom they feel a connection and whom they can learn from (agosto et al., 2016). informal mentors provide certain psychosocial and emotional benefits that are not often tangible within the walls of academia (carmel & paul, 2015; chang et al., 2014). informal mentoring can include sister-circle meetups (black women support groups), self-mentoring, religious counsel, friends, online professional or social groups that are multi-geographic, silent observed behaviors, occasional impromptu check-ins for advice or support, or positive interactions in professional campus settings (agosto et al., 2016; searby et al., 2015). informal mentoring experiences, also cultivated through professional organization memberships, provide additional benefits for black women in higher education (baltodano et al., 2012; west, 2017, 2018). the association of black women in higher education and the american association of blacks in higher education are two organizations specifically created and operated for the purposes of providing professional and social networks for black people and the former explicitly for black women. the association of black women in higher education (abwhe) is a professional association that creates spaces for black women in higher academia to congregate and network on a regional and national level (“the association of black women in higher education”, (n.d.). the american association of blacks in higher education (n.d.) website provided the following vision statement: the american association of blacks in higher education (aabhe) pursues the educational and professional needs of blacks in higher education with a focus on leadership, access and vital issues impacting students, faculty, staff, and administrators (para. 2). for black women college administrators, membership in these types of organizations may have benefits that allow these women to engage, decompress, and have supportive discourse for handling the issues and challenges they may face on their campuses (west, 2015). the women of color summit offered by the american council of education’s office of women in higher education division provided platforms for women 45 leaders of color to form cross cultural networking groups and find mentoring (baltodano et al., 2012). in contrast to the research on mentoring strategies largely for black faculty, west (2018) introduced the necessity for professionally homogenous counterspaces for administrators, which are more accessible through external organizational affiliations and conferences. a counterspace is a culturally homogenous site of resistance for marginalized groups of individuals, infused with responsive resources to promote professional success and personal wellbeing (west, 2018). whereas the women of color summit (baltodano et al., 2012) was established for multi-ethnic women of color in higher education and chang et al. (2014) introduced perspectives of both academic and administrative leaders of color working in faith-based higher education, the african american women’s summit in west’s (2018) study was specifically for black women professionals in higher education. black women often seek camaraderie and sisterhood with other black women (e.g., see arday, 2018; henderson, et al., 2010; johnson-bailey, et al., 2015; searby, et al., 2015). the african american women’s summit (aaws), according to west (2018), is “a culturally responsive professional development opportunity known as a professional counterspace” (p. 6). aaws was a non-traditional form of mentoring that promoted culturally affirming positive interactions through affinity groups or sister circles (west, 2018). these safe spaces contribute to black professional women’s sense of belongingness and security to be who they are without fear or stigmatism of being black women (horenstein et al., 2012; irby, 2014; west, 2018). counterspaces, as newer interventions, support the standpoint of patricia hill collins’ (2000) black feminist thought where models are created for black women by black women due to their shared understanding of oppressions, challenges, and coping. extensive data does not exist that introduces prominence of black women holding leadership roles in higher education administration (davis, 2016; davis & maldonado, 2015; hague & okpala, 2010; searby et al. 2015). although, according to ballenger (2010), women leaders in higher education that engaged in mentorship found the relationships integral to their career advancement; it is also regarded as a popular mechanism for career support and rapport building (chang et al., 2014). additional research on the mentoring relationships of black women college administrators would prove beneficial to include the informal methods they use for their own professional successes, career ladders and wellbeing, and the present study contributes to this exploration. theoretical framework black feminist thought (bft; collins, 1986, 1990, 2000, 2002), penned by black feminist scholar patricia hill collins, is a formative theory that introduces a conceptual frame rooted in sisterhood for black women to cultivate a better understanding of their oppressions and relationships with one another (collins, 1986). according to collins (2000), black feminist theory encompasses a place of marginalization in which black women are different from white and other minority women. black feminist thought (bft) is a framework that allows for further exploration of the experiences black women face in academic workplaces racism, sexism, and underrepresentation. these types of oppressions add to the dearth of mentoring opportunities for black women higher education professionals. collins (2000) asserted bft consists of the following tenets: (a) black women’s group location in intersecting oppressions produces commonalities among individual black women, (b) bft emerges from a tension linking experiences and ideas, (c) bft is concerned with the connections between black women’s experiences and sharing of knowledge or standpoint, (d) bft is concerned with the essential contributions of black women intellectuals, (e) bft is concerned with the significance of change, (f) bft is concerned with its relationship to social justice, and (g) bft decrees that black women have specialized knowledge of their own realities that includes the intersection of race and gender. bft provided a deeper foundation for conceptualizing the underrepresentation, isolation, negative cultural stereotyping, and marginalization that black women administrators experience as employees at institutions of higher learning (henry & glenn, 2009). the focus is on black women’s experiences and “consists of ideas produced by black women that clarify a stand-point of and for black women” (collins, 1986, p. 16). black feminist thought postures the catalyst for black women to challenge the ill-norms by seeking relationships with other professionals and asserting their desire for mentoring. methods i employed a qualitative phenomenological case study research design. a phenomenological case study is a research method that is focused on the participants’ experiences with a phenomenon and understanding them through analyzing participants’ perceptions and descriptions of their experiences (creswell & poth, 2018). further, it is a research design that focuses on a bounded case rather than a population sample. it “enthralls us with insights into the enigma of life as we experience it” (manen, 2017, p. 779). a phenomenological case study takes what is experienced in the real world and elucidates it through simulation in research studies. moustakas (1994) proffered that phenomenological inquiry may be applied to a chosen topic or population. interpretively, phenomenology is used to unearth concerns and create opportunities for voices with shared experiences (moustakas,1994). my rationale for electing to employ this type of design was to use phenomenology as a method of inquiry to illuminate awareness of the mentoring challenges of black women. 46 the phenomenological case study design is useful to unearth and interpret how the specific phenomenon of informal mentoring impacted black women in higher education administration as a case, and if it contributed to their personal well-being, leadership growth, and career success. i explored what is experienced in context, such as how black women feel when they are not supported in the workplace (west, 2015), or how the absence of formal mentoring exacted using alternative measures for support are embraced by women of color (agosto et al., 2016). the intent was to fully engage and find meanings from an individual’s respective experiences and for greater understanding of those personal experiences (lune and berg, 2017). participant criteria and recruitment i recruited study participants based on the following criteria: (a) full-time black woman college administrators representing a variety of administrative areas and years in the field; (b) fulltime professionals at a two or four-year public and private higher education institutions in new york state; and (c) black women that identified as having experiences with mentoring. i contacted prospective participants via email, using lists from two black-women-centered higher education organizations and one national leadership organization for black college professionals. i parsed out the lists to further identify possible participants in the northeast, primarily new york state. i formally introduced myself via an invitation email that included an overview of the study in efforts to solicit black women professionals to participate. their responses to the written correspondence confirmed their willingness to participate in the interviews, focus groups or both, understanding the time commitments. responses from eleven black women college administrators, representing nine institutions, were received. i sent follow-ups to the respondents along with the interview protocol. two withdrew prior to the beginning of the process; there remained nine study participants from eight schools. sample the sample for this study included nine participants ranging in administrative level from counselor to assistant vice president representing student affairs, academic affairs, and admissions areas, aligning with creswell’s (2009) recommendation of including 5-25 participants in phenomenological studies. the participants were selected due to the similarities of being black women administrators in the field of u.s. higher education. black women in u.s. higher education have been viewed as a marginalized group, and the participants captured the complexities of their experiences providing various points of view (greyerbiehl & mitchell, (2014). three of the nine women earned bachelor’s degrees, five obtained master’s degrees, and one held a doctoral degree. participants represented a range of years in the field, from one to thirtyfive, and from one to fifteen years in their current positions at new york state colleges. brief demographic information on these women is shared in table 1. as purposeful sampling was used, all the women professionals were black. this format was used to ensure the voices of black women, as the foci of the study, were exclusive in efforts to collect informationrich related data. creswell (2014) defined purposeful sampling in qualitative research as an approach used to identify and access a particular sample group to gain better knowledge on the studied phenomenon. greyerbiehl and mitchell (2014) asserted that black women in higher education possess educational and workplace experiences that are understudied yet valuable to research and unpack. a sampling frame of black women college administrators was sought in efforts to solicit participants that would yield relevant data mostly attributed to their scarcity in higher education leadership. their small-in-number representation reflects a mosaic of the larger embodiment of black women in the field. full-time employment status was desired due to the day-to-day consistency of their time on campus and presumed interactions that may enable them to more completely know the respective campus climates. stratification to secure participants representing early (1-5 years), mid (5-20 years) and late (20+ years) career field categories involved a deliberate search of three from each. table 1 summary of demographic characteristics of participants data collection institutional review board (irb) approval was obtained prior to conducting interviews and focus groups for data collection. semi-structured interviews were the primary method used, with focus groups as secondary. the inclusion of documents, for corroboration, was as an additional data source, when presented. meaningful documents, in the form of personal journals, inspirational quotes, travel bibles and desk tchotchkes were shared by the participants and were introduced in the interviews and focus group discussions. they were read aloud, displayed or shown for sentimental reflection. what the participants felt were personally impactful items were considered in the context of this study. as major sources of data collection, triangulated use of interviews, 47 observations, or documents are considered most comprehensive (creswell, 2014). these methods, per maxwell (2013), were used to effectively answer the research questions. to gain further knowledge on this study’s phenomenon, mentoring, semi structured interviews and focus groups data collection methods were conducted. the inclusion of documents, for corroboration as an additional data source, were made available. to ensure consistency, follow-up interviews via telephone or video conferencing with participants after second interviews, as necessary, were conducted. interviews informed consent was appropriately obtained prior to the start of scheduling interviews. permission to audio-record the interviews was an important detail and part of established protocol. an assurance of confidentiality of question responses and real names was safeguarded by using pseudonyms. open-ended questions were used to provide options for participants to respond in their own voices and to further expound on their respective situations. due to the exploratory nature of this research, two semi-structured interviews with each participant, ranging from sixty to ninety minutes were conducted. the interviews process holds importance for establishing context in qualitative research (maxwell, 2013). the intent, to yield robust data through exploring perspectives, perceptions and experiences of the interviewees, black women college administrators. convenience and availability are factors to consider in attempting to schedule interviews (creswell, 2014). the onset of a pandemic, covid-19, compelled a pivot away from inperson interviews and focus groups. the national network of public health institutes (2020) opined that modifications be made where online video conference and teleconference tools be used for data collection. resultantly, it created flexibility in conducting the interviews, focus groups, and discussions. focus groups there were two two-hour focus groups with four to five participants in each group. they were conducted virtually on various dates, based on the availability of the participants. inquiries included perceptions of benefits that resulted from their informal mentoring experiences; their perspectives on black women mentoring other black women; the role of technology-mediated mentoring; and mentoring’s impact on their leadership growth. the participants were reminded of their voluntary participation; that said, they could decline to answer any question or if uncomfortable may end their participation. at the conclusion of data collection processes, i used transcription programs (i.e., rev and transcribeme) as tools for data analysis. field notes matrices and researcher notes were also helpful in supporting which codes coincided with the research questions. field notes are used for researcher reflective practices to ensure the collected data can be thoroughly reviewed and interpreted for expanded meaning (deggs & fernandez, 2018). the notes also served to capture and later recall observed expressions and body language. participants in both the interviews and focus group had access to the commentaries for inclusion and clarifications as part of a debriefing and member check process (creswell & poth, 2018). understanding the crucial importance of member checking, i provided tangible data transcripts for correction, verification and/or further clarification to the study participants. they were used to help recount details such as body language, colloquialisms, and emotional responses. data analysis open coding was used to find common statements that could be used as codes as shown in table 2. this open coding process of reviewing each transcription also involved highlighting significant and relevant statements to identify emerging meaningful categories from the dataset. following saldana’s (2015) outline for data analysis, the codes were developed through repetitive review of the transcripts to find pertinent data that can be further analyzed based on commonalities. following the initial data analysis, umbrella categories were created. the categories were then expanded to themes that were germane to the data. reliability creswell (2014) emphasized providing measures used to support reliability in research studies. several strategies may be employed to enrich the quality of collected findings in qualitative research (maxwell, 2013). audit trails and triangulation were employed to ensure comprehensive data collection and analysis as recounted and coded data from the interviews. maxwell (2013) asserted that coding is a categorizing strategy important for data analysis in qualitative studies. per-line review of the interviews and focus group transcripts were initially done by hand to familiarize with the analytical process of coding and to capture frequencies. findings seven themes emerged. four themes are related to the first research question discussing informal mentoring experiences of the participants. related to the second research question, there are three themes about leadership growth through the lens of black women college administrators in this study. the seven themes are: (a) defining supportive relationships; (b) relevancy of race and gender in mentoring; (c) cultivating kinships and networks; (d) identifying salient challenges; (e) navigating campus culture; (f) penetrating boundaries to leadership, and (g) leveraging for leadership. table 2 provides details on the phrases used in conceptualizing the themes. 48 table 2 categories and subcategories based on research questions defining supportive relationships the nine participants shared their thoughts on how they viewed their respective informal mentoring relationships to provide insight and on how those relationships were conceptualized, formed, and sustained. they reported that they had to seek support externally due to lack of women who looked like them on campus and even less in senior leadership of whom they could emulate. anna resounded a common sentiment of most participants: her support came from external people, and she is “okay with that.” marie relayed: being a black woman in higher education administration can be difficult when you don’t know anyone else of color on campus. role modeling is important to survival and being new i feel that i need that. someone to be in my corner and show me what to do and not to do, but in a caring way and not condescending. we get enough of that. marjorie stated: on my campus white males are dominant in leadership and it’s not a great visual. i often feel devalued and deflated seeing that. if i were to see women that looked like me, i would feel like someone on campus has an open-door for me. ethel responded to conversations on support through informal mentoring as: there are things that are not necessarily in a [employee] handbook, whereas a mentor is kind of walking you through the not so official things on campus. my mentor was actually a retiree of the college. she says that she didn’t want me to have the same experiences, and since i was new to the field, there were certain things i needed to know that were different from the corporate world. she told me my degrees don’t really matter when sitting in meetings. they would only see me one way—as a black woman. the participants illustrated examples of how supportive kinships with other black women provided them with needed emotional releases and the values placed on them. in dealing with workplace issues, having informal external mentors and sisterly relationships provided security of thought, emotion, and camaraderie. they leaned on one another, outside of work, because they knew an understanding of the challenges was familiar. relevancy of race and gender in mentoring the importance of race and gender mattered in choice of mentors, and the participants largely felt that it was relevant to have black women as mentors. ethel commented, “so because there’s so few of us we don't have any mentors. i sought my mentor out because she was a woman of color.” beulah expressed a viewpoint on the need for a black woman mentoring her: absolutely, 100 percent. to me, you need to have someone that has experienced the same things you've experienced. i'm not saying that you can’t have a good mentoring relationship with someone who doesn’t look like you; i just think you have a better mentoring relationship when it includes someone that looks like you and has experienced the same things you have experienced. lillie expressed why it matters to her, saying, “i absolutely do because there's a different conversation that i can have with you about things i should improve upon if you are my same race and gender versus if you are a [white] woman or another gender.” while most participants believed having a black woman mentor was critical, there were other opinions regarding whether the mentor had to be a black woman in establishing relationships. there were those who had varied experiences with non-black women mentors that were significant. anna stated, in the focus group, “race shouldn’t be a factor. because we are two different people, even if we are the same race. nobody’s alike.” she further expounded: i don't think sex really should be a factor either… i don't think sex or race should be a ‘something.’ because when you put sex involved, it becomes very limited. and then you could learn from a male. you could learn from a female. so therefore, i never think sex or race should be something that we should put as factors in mentoring. beulah expressed how she viewed men as having different positionalities than women and their abilities to establish social capital. she circled back to the overall preference of a black woman mentor. the participants all agreed that men have an easier career ascent than women. 49 the participants described their perceptions on race and gender-based implications on the mentoring relationships and experiences as black women. while the expressions leaned more towards mentors being black women, due to feelings of familiarity and alliance, there was openness to it not being an absolute necessity. cultivating kinships and networks the participants spoke about the various methods of establishing and nurturing their informal mentoring relationships. it was important to most that they would have comfortability in discussing their truths. they found relief in various outlets, such as sororities, churches, social outings, affiliate organizations, and sister circle meetups. marjorie described these kinships, saying: personal relationships that are mutually caring and trustworthy are very important. you can only trust certain people, you can’t share all your information with everybody. the “crabs in a barrel” mentality is very real out here! so, you have to have a few trusted like-minded people in your circle who won’t turn around and gossip. for real, i do have a short key group of ladies, my “day ones” (long-time friends). climates of trust were important to the participants where they expressed how they trusted one another and that safe spaces allowed them to say what they wanted. having confidants was a common thread, the women embraced wanting to trust the company they kept. collins (2000) addressed trust and why it is considered essential in the scheme of black women’s relationships: “this process of trusting one another can seem dangerous because only black women know what it means to be black women. but if we will not listen to one another, then who will” (p. 104). rapport building within defined safe spaces were viewed as valuable experiences. for lucy, she relayed, “i would just call it maybe a sister circle, where you all get together and discuss issues that are going on on-campus without worrying about outside ears or eyes inquiring.” marie had an outlook that was holistic in nature. she said, “you will be less likely to give up, knowing you have someone who is monitoring your life and cares about you as a whole person.” identifying salient challenges the dynamics of competitiveness, black racial stigmas, institutional obliviousness, and lack of support contributed to how career blocks were perceived by the women in this study. marie espoused, “our obstacles are more difficult than white, even asian women, they have implicit bias and there’s no training on how to work with other cultures.” lucy felt, “there’s a large cluster of secret allies [air quotes] who do not believe that black women belong in academic spaces.” while black women college administrators face having to resist race and gender prejudices, and barriers to advancement, they also endure various challenges in securing mentoring, mentoring relationships, and development thereof (e.g., see commodore et al., 2016; hague & okpala, 2017; irby, 2014). lucy recollected: i always felt subpar and invisible. like going into these meetings where it’s mostly non-people of color where i'm the only black person in the room. then going back to my office and being the only black person there, feeling alone. i think it would have been helpful to have a black woman mentor to help me navigate those emotions. it’s not healthy to keep things so bottled up waiting to get off work and go tell somebody. the participants discussed how their feelings of isolation, being alone and unsupported contributed to their unhappiness and insecurity in workplace settings. their workplaces struggles and concerns were not recognized. these issues also spurred their desire and need for mentors yet had to acknowledge a hurtful and disappointing reality–the lack of internal support from their own. lavinia frankly stated about working with black women: “but a lot of times when you're in power, you're so comfortable right there. you don't want anyone to know the real secret of how you got there or how you sustain your position there.” ethel also addressed this issue, saying: and a lot of times when someone is in a position where they feel comfortable, and i put that in air quotes, sometimes they don’t want another person or another woman to come in and mess up that dynamic. so, i think that’s a hindrance in the mentoring relationship. if you establish this relationship with your predominantly white coworkers, then someone else comes into the mix and just might throw that off and you don’t want to do that. so, you kind of maybe keep to yourself and not engage with that other black woman. you get your mentoring from outside. less competition there. margaret added, “and so we always feel like there has to be few of us instead of thinking that there can be a multitude of us.” the aspect of internal competition among black women was a distinguishable barrier for them forming workplace networks. feelings centered around only very small few that can occupy spaces on campus, so needing to be guarded impeded developing kinships. it is clear from the participants that in trying to establish camaraderie or workplace mentoring relationships, specifically with other black career women, competition was an area for which they had many thoughts and conflictions. navigating campus culture navigating was a common word used in describing the participants’ voiced goals. the situations and occurrences at work led them to believe that in their respective workplaces 50 they needed to be strategic. as they recounted how their workplaces were difficult to digest and the accompanying hurdles they faced, they were eager to be strategic. ethel gave an example of her experience and how her support outlet played a role in her maneuvering. she said: oppression olympics is what i call it...why do i have to work harder, code-shift or be scrutinized because i'm a black woman. but i do and i am. my support groups helped me survive higher education while i wait to thrive in higher education. marjorie said this about her mentor: well, she showed me how you should conduct yourself in a meeting, depending on the type of meeting and how to navigate others looking at you like you don’t belong. like how you should negotiate, how you should cut in to make sure you’re heard. this is how you should handle this or do that. so i have in my head, okay i’m going in as a black female so i walk in, you know, different. lavinia stated, “i think in higher education, that we tend to look at the cream of the crop to work with, as opposed to approaching others and developing one and blooming one up to greatness.” she iterated how within certain campus cultures, black women can be overlooked or discounted in leadership and said she worked hard to make sure she was valued for what she has accomplished. beulah expressed an understanding of the sacrifices that leaders make and how her mentors were integral in challenging her to self-advocate on her campus. her mentor said: be persistent. do not let a situation stop or hinder you to the point where you feel like you can’t move forward. find a way or make one. they will expect you to fail or need them. you must be on your toes all the time. so that’s what i try to do, without risking sounding like an angry black woman, of course. you can’t be assertive, without acknowledging the risk. penetrating boundaries to leadership black feminist thought through its tenets of social justice and change are what collins (1990) asserted black women should use as catalysts to counter, and not be influenced by, institutional barriers. lucy remembered how guidance she received was beneficial for her growth. she said: it has certainly urged me to seek much more professional development. it has served me in terms of being elevated in my position and understanding my positionality within predominantly white institutions and being able to maneuver within certain spheres of the university. lucy shared a perspective of how professional development coupled with educational achievements give black women better positioning. she relayed: being a part of a community of professional women, like abwhe [association of black women in higher education], has strengthened me with interpersonal and networking skills. we need more of that, as i do think the culture of higher education will change, slightly. if we as women of color get into more leadership positions, to basically, for lack of a better term, have a seat at that table in making decisions at a board of trustees table or being at a director’s table, those are the things that need to happen for change. but we all know that those things do not happen if you do not have at least a master’s and in addition to that, a doctorate. you’re not sitting at that table if you don’t at least have those two things. so, i feel like once more of us get those things, then that’s how we’ll be able to have a seat at the table and we can move more into positions of power in higher education. although lucy felt strongly about her position, others were differently expressive. for instance, beulah said: keeping it real, the ivory halls of academia will always look out for who they want to look out for, and it’s usually not the ebony in their ivory. if you don’t have an influx of black women in higher education we’re just going to be where we are now in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years. i don’t see it changing. the importance of mentoring to penetrate certain boundaries in higher education spaces was evident though the affectual responses from some of the women. they clearly took advantage of available mentoring with their own expectations and experiences. these women voiced how their mentors’ guidance set them on a path of preparation in dealing with settings, people and experiences at work. ethel, recounted a scenario where her mentor told her to use her workplace dismay to her advantage. she illustrated: my office was just recently moving to another part of campus, and it was going to be smaller and staff broken up. it turned out my office ended up in a basement, along with the student workers’ space. now, call me sensitive, but i’m the only person of color out of a staff of six. i had to decide if i wanted to make a case out of this or not. i spoke to my mentor, and she told me, “no, don’t!” ethel further explained the advice she was given that helped her make a progressive decision. she recalled the mentor added, “what you’re going to do is use this privacy to work on you. to strengthen your skills, get a certificate, or look at graduate 51 programs. you can use this to your advantage.” she said, having the privacy would be good for me. i didn’t know how i felt about that because i was still the black person in the office occupying a basement office space. but i took her advice and now i’m beginning a master’s program. so, what i’m saying is, with her help, i turned that into a positive that i can be proud of. leveraging for leadership it was unveiled that the black professional women from the study placed extreme importance on the roles their relationships with other black women had on their leadership development. the advice, counsel, and real talk from their informal mentors was well regarded in helping them establish their leadership goals and be prepared for increased leadership. their mentors helped them improve their career and interpersonal skills for more weighty responsibilities. lucy said of her mentor: “my coach, or mentor, would tell me not to take things personal, you know, you have to have thick skin and stand in your blackness. you have letters behind your name, too. she said, don’t let that get taken away from you!” margaret, in her reflections, said: if i didn't have networks that poured encouragement into me, i’d have a different story to tell. i have grown emotionally and professionally because of the supports i get outside the workplace. i'm able to hold my own in meetings and respectfully make my stance on issues that involve my area. marjorie’s sentiment from a focus group discussion was prophetic; she said, “mentoring never stops for me. it shouldn’t for you.” that sentiment spoke to the impressions of mentoring as ongoing, encouraging, and possibly reciprocal. discussion the focus of this study was on how black women college administrators in the northeastern united states employed external resources to meet their needs for mentoring. they intentionally sought support that could potentially aid them in dealing with workplace challenges, career stagnation, and possible sponsorship for advancement opportunities. the lack of formalized mentoring and scarcity of black women in leadership at the participants’ campuses added to the feelings of marginalizing, imposter syndrome and pigeonholing their leadership growth. the answer to that was to find support through organizations, professional conferences, affinity groups outside of campus and technology mediated groups— all considered counterspaces for the support of black women in higher education. while there are studies that indicate the benefits of mentoring (e.g., see agosto, et al., 2016; baltodano et al., 2012; irby, 2014), few were directly related to how black women college administrators can access mentoring at their workplaces. finding mentorship at work had an additional caveat, the underrepresentation of black women in leadership available to mentor as they are stretched thin (wandix-white & boyd, 2022). while literature exists that addresses workplace mentoring, there are noted challenges for those relationships: lack of clarity in mentoring needs and expectations, diverging from mentorship to friendship, lack of time or lack of desire to mentor and disconnects (wandix-white & boyd, 2022). the participants also found commonality with competition being another issue and reason why workplace mentoring among black women was not optimal. remarkable were the stories shared, during the interviews and focus groups, on how the women were open to mentoring from any subgroup, so long as it was genuine and for the betterment of their leadership growth. they were candid about how they had more than one mentor that met a particular focus they had. it was evident that the women took charge of exploring how to identify and connect with mentors. collins’(1986) black feminist thought addresses how black women need to be proactive to break cyclical norms and selfadvocate for their personal and professional lives. she described the marginalized and isolated status of black women in various professional and academic settings as the “outsider within.” this phrase, coined by collins (2000), noted that african american women in higher education have been invited into places where their minority status renders them outsiders because they are still invisible and have no voice. implications the implications of this study demonstrate how informal mentoring is a modality by which black women in higher education navigate workplace silos where they are also often underrepresented. the successes of their efforts to solidify increased leadership growth through mentoring does not appear to outweigh the psychosocial benefits that are embraced by the participants. further, increasing representation of black women in senior leadership positions on college campuses may result in greater inter-campus connections and mentoring possibilities that would benefit the mentors, protégés and commitments to diversity of the respective institutions. while research exists on how mentoring helps in the workplace (arora & rangnekar, 2015 ; hall et al., 2012), it is noticeably not present on a marginal scale to address the lack of it for black women college administrators and the impact of its scarcity. future research that focuses on a correlation between lack of sponsorship for positions and the underrepresentation of black women in higher education leadership may highlight existing obstacles they face in the workplace. another area of research could be one that explores the retention or exodus of black women in higher education spaces that do not feel valued or can no longer envision upward mobility at their institutions. 52 note 1. since the study focuses on college administrators in the united states, i use black and african american interchangeably throughout the article. in addition, i use both terms to align with authors’ use of the terms within their original works. references agosto, v., karanxha, z., unterreiner, a., cobb-roberts, d., esnard, t., wu, k., & beck, m. 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(2015). climbing the ladder, holding the ladder: the mentoring experiences of higher education female leaders. advancing women in leadership, 35, 98-107. straus, s. e., johnson, m. o., marquez, c., & feldman, m. d. (2013). characteristics of successful and failed mentoring relationships. academic medicine, 88(1), 82–89. doi:10.1097/acm.0b013e31827647a0 u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics. (2017). status and trends in the education of racial and ethnic groups 2017 (nces 2017-051). https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator _ree.asp wandix-white, d., & boyd, s. (2022). black women empowering one another through mentorship. journal of african american women and girls in education, 2(3), 1-7. west, n. m. (2018). in the company of my sister-colleagues: professional counterspaces for african american women student affairs administrators, gender and education, doi: 10.1080/09540253.2018.1533926 volume 41, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, and brad bizzell assistant editor: jordan donop 77 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 advancing women in leadership vol. 41, 76-88, 2022 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper female's journey to the state superintendency authors: sarah l. tanner-anderson, ed.d. sarah tanneranderson: assistant professor, program director of educational leadership, longwood university, tannerandersonsl@longwood.edu accepted october 24, 2022 several studies have emerged over the past several decades attempting to pinpoint potential factors for occupational inequity and inequality for prospective and current female educational leaders. although women are increasingly obtaining leadership positions in the field, one position has remained elusive to the aspiring female educational leader: the superintendency (bilken & brannigan, 1980; brunner & björk, 2001; brunner & grogan, 2007; dana & bourisaw, 2006; mertz, 2006; shakeshaft, 1987). overcoming societal perceptions, handling hardships associated with attaining and maintaining one’s position, and building powerful, meaningful relationships are some of the foci of previous research; however, there seems to be a piece missing from the current available literature. while one may evaluate the struggles females have faced in attaining district-level superintendent positions, research detailing the female’s journey to the state superintendency remains incredibly limited to nonexistent. through a postmodern-feminist lens, this qualitative study employs harter and monsour’s (1992) self-inrelationship (sir) interview protocol, in addition to open-ended interview questions, to explore a conceptual framework blending perceptions, reality, and relationships that potentially impact females on the journey to and in service within the state superintendency. from a constructivist, grounded theory approach, the study investigates a glaring gap in the current available literature in an effort to answer the overarching question: do female superintendents perceive gender as playing a role in fulfilling one’s duties at the state level? keywords: female state superintendent, gender and educational leadership throughout american history, females have struggled for equality in all facets of society, ranging from voting and reproductive rights to educational and occupational rights (dana & bourisaw, 2006; rowe-finkebeiner, 2004; tong, 2009). women’s greatest struggle over the course of history, unfortunately, continues: the struggle for occupational equality in leadership positions (tallerico & blount, 2004). working alongside their male counterparts, women have secured careers in the american job market that were, at once, believed impossible for females to obtain; however, major leadership positions in many occupational fields remain predominantly held by males (brunner & grogan, 2007; dana & bourisaw, 2006). in 1975, estler asserted that “women are virtually excluded from the higher levels of educational leadership at local, state, and federal levels. . .[and] are only poorly represented at lower levels” (p. 363). in the field of education, wherein a tremendous number of the instructional population is indeed female, the lack of female representation in leadership positions remains astounding even decades later (young & mcleod, 2001). a number of studies have emerged over the past several decades attempting to pinpoint potential factors for occupational inequity and inequality for prospective and current female educational leaders. although women are increasingly obtaining leadership positions in the field, one position remains elusive to the aspiring female educational leader: the superintendency (bilken & brannigan, 1980; brunner & björk, 2001; brunner & grogan, 2007; dana & bourisaw, 2006; mertz, 2006; shakeshaft, 1987). witmer (2006) posited that “mothers have been venerated, daughters have been loved, wives have been respected, women have been admired, and a few female national leaders have been revered, but females—half the population in any human culture—have not been valued” (p. 124). she continued: various services that females have provided have been valued to a lesser or greater degree, but these services have had their value placed on them by males. women and women’s work have been viewed as a convenience for men. and, until the present generation, women were enculturated to feel privileged that they could serve. (p. 124) witmer’s suggestion highlights a continued, overarching problem—throughout history, women have been made to feel lesser than men, and, even in the twenty-first century, women have struggled to feel valued as equals. this is where our journey begins. 78 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 in 1972, roby purported that, “because the inequitable educational and occupational treatment of women buttresses the economy’s unequal distribution of resources. . . inequitable treatment is unlikely to be rectified before general economic inequalities are eliminated or greatly reduced” (p. 120). roby surmised that “within the foreseeable future, the system may not be changed, but if it is not, we all—men and women alike—will be the losers” (p. 139). even decades after the passing of governmental acts in the 1970’s, including title ix—which schmuck (1993) indicated was the “‘single innocuous sentence’ declaring that public schools could no longer discriminate because of sex” (p. 3)—and the women’s educational equity act, also designed to promote gender equity, gender inequalities in the field of education have yet to be fully rectified (brunner & grogan, 2007; grogan, 1999). even as educational leaders, females often remain underrepresented, undervalued, and underestimated in the field (arriaga, stanley, &lindsey, 2020; gilmour & kinsella, 2009), and, as such, many have suggested the reason hinges on differences between men and women (arriaga, stanley, &lindsey, 2020; brunner & grogan, 2007; skrla, reyes, & scheurich, 2000; gilligan, 1993; kelly, saintgermain, & horn, 1991; shakeshaft, 1981). perhaps this may be attributed to the complexity of women’s career development; namely, as valenziano (2008) noted, women and other minority individuals “must deal with a combination of stereotypes, attitudes, roles, expectations, behaviors, and discrimination when choosing a career path” (p. 2). offering another potential explanation for continued gender inequality in educational leadership positions, kim and brunner (2009) suggested that there may also be differences between “women’s and men’s career mobility toward the superintendency in terms of career pathways and movement patterns, with specific attention to women’s career pathways as they correspond with their aspiration to the superintendency” (p. 75). statement of problem overcoming societal perceptions, handling hardships associated with attaining and maintaining the superintendency, and building powerful, meaningful relationships have been some of the foci of previous research; however, there seems to be a piece missing from the available literature. although one may evaluate the struggles females have faced in striving to attain superintendent positions, primarily at the district/division levels, available research detailing the female’s journey to the state superintendency, or commissionership, as the position is called in some states, remains limited to nonexistent. this research, thus, explored the experiences of female state superintendents to identify any divergent, convergent, or emergent themes regarding gender and the superintendency. research purpose and questions the purpose of the study was to unearth shared experiences, challenges, and triumphs, if any, that females face on their respective paths to and in their respective services within the state superintendency. focusing on the blending and balancing of perceptions, reality, and relationships, this study thus sought to amplify the voices of these unique female educational leaders while closing a gap in the current available literature. although research regarding women in educational administration has increased over the past several decades, particularly with regard to the district-superintendent level, the following were unresolved questions that the researcher wished to further explore regarding leadership challenges and/or triumphs females may have faced on the path to and in the service within their respective state superintendencies: 1. what does it mean to be a state superintendent? what does it mean to be a female state superintendent? 2. what unique challenges, if any, do female superintendents face at the state level? 3. how, if at all, do relationships impact a female superintendent’s ability to lead at the state level? 4. how do female state superintendents arrive in their positions? although the study did not specifically focus on age, race, or ethnicity, the researcher recognized additional themes that may emerge that stem from, or perhaps are separated from, gender. for the purposes of this study, however, the research focused specifically on the female experience. statement of significance conducting this study was significant for educational policy and practice, the participants in the study, and the educational profession as a whole. first, one must understand the nature of policy. in fowler’s (2009) policy studies for educational leaders, the author defined policy as “the dynamic and valueladen process through which a political system handles a public problem. it includes the government's expressed intentions and official enactments, as well as its consistent patterns of activity and inactivity” (pp. 3-4). fowler continued to define government as “elected and appointed public officials at the federal, state, and local levels as well as the bodies or agencies within which these officials work” (p. 4). as political leaders of state government, state superintendents must therefore adhere to established policy to ensure the educational welfare of all students under his or her care; however, established policy may enable or impede state superintendents’ ability to do so. as such, the very nature of this research is directly tied to educational policy. thus, conducting this study was significant: not only did the research provide a multi-faceted exploration of current legislative policy that impacts one’s entrance to and operation within the state superintendency, but it also evaluated the role potential occupational gender inequities may play in female state superintendents’ journeys to and performance within the position. as policy is the process and practice is the action (elmore, 2008), conducting this study was significant for practice as well. delving deep into the expectations, duties, and responsibilities of the state superintendent shed light on the way in which 79 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 educational and political policy is enacted in day-to-day practice within both the state superintendency and the entire state educational system. yet, rather than a surface-level, impersonal evaluation of the state superintendency, this study detailed female state superintendents’ shared and unique experiences as they implemented federal and state policies and mandates in practice for their respective state educational systems. thus, considering the personal, reflective nature of this study, the research was also significant for the participants. in utilizing the self-in-relationship (sir) interview protocol, participants actively constructed an illustrative, meaningful image of their relationships and subsequent classifications of themselves and others that they may or may not have previously identified. as such, the research was eye-opening to individual participants. in juxtaposing individual responses, a deeper understanding of collective conceptualizations emerged, and thus the significance of the study more greatly expanded to the group as a whole. lastly, conducting this study was significant for the entire educational profession. not only did the research highlight legislative policy, practice, and expectation of the educational field at the state level, the study also contributed to the limited available literature regarding the female state superintendency. in addition, aspiring female superintendents of all levels may benefit from the examination of historical, political, theoretical, and conceptual facets of the state superintendency to aid in their pursuits of educational leadership positions. theoretical foundation and conceptual framework recognizing a gender divide in the field of educational leadership, one could utilize a number of feminist theories as a foundation for research. if one hopes to pinpoint a single cause for the inequalities that continue to exist, however, one will find that a prescribed, one-size-fits-all gender inequality does not exist. as such, this study emphasized postmodern feminism as a foundation from which to build. postmodernism is, as lather (1991) defined, “[response] across the disciplines to the contemporary crisis of representation, the profound uncertainty about what constitutes an adequate depiction of social ‘reality’” (p. 21). when coupled with feminism, which “asks that women not be forced to ‘choose’ between public justice and private happiness. . .that women be free to define themselves—instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men” (faludi, 1991, p. xxiii), this theoretical lens provided a foundation from which to explore female state superintendents’ experiences. with regard to the conceptual framework, the study showcased the blending and balancing of three facets—societal perceptions of gender and place, the realities of operating within the state position, and the importance of establishing and maintaining a variety of relationships— which collectively defined state superintendents’ experiences. methods this qualitative study examined the female experience and the state superintendency in an effort to illuminate “diverse local worlds, multiple realities, and the complexities of particular worlds, views, and actions,” through a constructivist grounded theory approach (creswell, 2007, p. 64). along with traditional interviewing, the study employed the two-part self-inrelationship (sir) protocol to lend voice to the experiences of female state superintendents through their unique participation in the data collection and analysis process (harter & monsour, 1992). the protocol, which first required participants to answer 12 open-ended questions, then moved into a participant-led portion wherein participants supplied, classified, and analyzed a series of descriptive words used to identify one’s relationship with colleagues, family, state board of education, confidant and/or significant other, and self. collectively, sir interviews lasted from an hour to an hour and a half in length and were analyzed to identify convergent, divergent, and emergent themes. delimitations and limitations to amplify the voices of a limited research population, this study was intentionally confined to interviewing current and former female state superintendents. the study did not expressly focus on age, race, or ethnicity; rather, the researcher specifically sought to identify potential shared and unique experiences pertaining to the female’s experience and the state superintendency. any emergent themes of additional classification will be discussed within their respective contexts. in addition to recognizing the delimitations, it is important to consider potential limitations of the study as well. gender, in evaluating the female’s journey to the state superintendency, served as the first limitation. another centered on the population, in that gaining access to and subsequent availability of securing state superintendents as participants was difficult, given the high-stress, political nature of the position. likewise, delving deep into the realities of females’ respective journeys to the state superintendency reflected some self-restraint due, in large part, to various political implications of divulging specific information. also, appointed or elected female state superintendents serve at the mercy of governors, boards of education, and the voting public whose wants, needs, and expectations are ever-changing. consequently, the researcher sought to make contact and interview both former and current female state superintendents in an effort to gain a more in-depth, encompassed understanding of their experiences. research procedures to answer the guiding research questions, the task was two-fold. in addition to securing participants whose experiences lend voice to a limited research population in the literature, the researcher addressed a number of methodological considerations prior to conducting the study. first, the researcher identified epistemological foundations and carefully chose a research design; then, she considered dual data collection and analysis methods. epistemology 80 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 before conducting any study, a researcher must recognize inherent epistemological assumptions. epistemology “addresses the relationship between the researcher and that being studied as interrelated, not independent” (creswell, 2007, 247). with regard to her epistemological assumptions, the researcher recognized that she is both a woman and an educational leader who has experienced the sting of gender inequalities; as such, her epistemological assumptions are shaped by prior experiences. likewise, as one who believes that individuals create meaning in their lives and work, and that through their unique and varied experiences, they grow to understand their surrounding world, the researcher is a constructivist (crotty, 1998; creswell, 2009). the researcher thus believes that female state superintendents cultivate an understanding of their respective worlds through their lived experiences, and, subsequently, the perceptions, realities, and relationships they experience collectively shape their worldviews. in juxtaposition with a grounded theory approach, which requires the researcher to “derive a general, abstract theory of a process, action, or interaction grounded in the views of the participants,” (creswell, 2009, p. 13) the researcher relied on participants’ views to inform an understanding of the female’s journey to the state superintendency. creswell (2009) explained: constructivist grounded theory is a form of grounded theory squarely in the interpretive tradition of qualitative research. as such, it is less structured than traditional approaches to grounded theory. the constructivist approach incorporates the researcher’s views; uncovers experiences with embedded, hidden networks, situations, and relationships; and makes visible hierarchies of power, communication, and opportunity. (p. 238) considering a conceptual framework of perceptions, realities, and relationships, as well as an interactive research design and use of the self-in-relationship (sir) interview protocol, a constructivist grounded theory epistemology was appropriately suited for this research. because “any view is a view from some perspective, and therefore is shaped by the location (social and theoretical) and ‘lens’ of the observer,” (maxwell, 2005, p. 39) one can not necessarily “control” for bias; however, it is vital to recognize the researcher’s place and thoughts within the research. as such, the researcher employed a number of qualitative methods to address researcher subjectivity, including crafting an identity memo and writing several subjectivity memos, wherein she detailed her thoughts, feelings, and emotions with regard to the ongoing research. research design maxwell (2005) asserted that designing a study requires more than simply borrowing a previously-strategized design and crossing one’s fingers in hopes that it is faithfully implemented. as such, qualitative research “does not begin from a predetermined starting point or proceed through a fixed sequence of steps, but involves interconnection and interaction among the different design components” (p. 3). in addition to employing a grounded theory research strategy, utilizing an interconnected guide such as maxwell’s provided an encompassed understanding of the female’s journey to the state superintendency. likewise, maxwell’s interactive design allowed for a deeper exploration of the conceptual framework, wherein the female superintendent must blend and balance perceptions, realities, and relationships in order to effectively lead at the state level. participant selection to promote a greater understanding of the female state superintendent and her respective challenges, triumphs, and experiences, participants were purposively selected according to the following criteria: 1. no more than 10 female state superintendents 2. balance of current and former state superintendents, with former superintendents having served within the past ten years 3. for research travel purposes, participants were selected from states east of the mississippi. the researcher discovered it was much easier to contact current state superintendents, as their contact information is of public record and easily accessible via standard internet searches; conversely, locating contact information for former state superintendents presented a problem, as most choose to go “off the radar” upon exiting the superintendency. however, the researcher secured four current female state superintendents and three former female state superintendents for the study, all of whom served east of the mississippi and within the past 10 years, meeting the established research criteria. methods of data collection in order to paint a metaphorical portrait of the “lived experiences” (creswell, 2007) of females in the state superintendency, the researcher collected data through a twotiered qualitative interviewing process. first, through traditional, open-ended questions—which stemmed from the overarching research questions—the researcher secured a general understanding of each participant. the second, more in-depth data collection process employed the self-in-relationship interview (sir) protocol, which required participants to actively engage in crafting a unified portrait of one’s self through relational descriptors. instrumentation through two-tiered qualitative interviewing, the researcher gained insight into the female’s journey to the state superintendency. participants were initially contacted via telephone and/or email, depending on available information, with a subsequent email and/or letter to serve as a follow-up contact. upon agreement to the study, participants were provided with an information sheet that both detailed the nature of the study and affirmed participant confidentiality. in addition, 81 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 participants were asked to complete a data sheet to gather demographic information about each participant. this information was used to identify any demographic connections between superintendents, should any arise. both portions of interviews—opened-ended questions and the sir—were audio-recorded and transcribed. interviews were then coded according to three overarching, researcher-established priori codes that tied in directly with the conceptual framework: 1. perceptions (self and societal) 2. realties (duties/responsibilities of the superintendency) 3. relationships (building/maintaining; importance) all other coding was inductive or in vivo codes developed in data analysis from participants’ unique responses. for the sir specifically, the collected data offered a tangible representation of each participant’s classifications from which the researcher coded in juxtaposition with the other participants’ representations. from this, the researcher was able to identify convergent, divergent, and emergent themes from the participants’ two-part interviews. interview protocol in order to delve deep into the experiences of female state superintendents, the researcher expanded upon open-ended, qualitative interviewing through the two-part self-inrelationship interview (sir) protocol to collect data. the sir interview was originally designed by harter and monsour (1999) to better understand relationships among adolescents; however, the protocol has been used for a variety of research interests, including examining depression and developmental effects of childhood sexual trauma on depressed adolescent girls (calverley, 1995; calverley, fischer, & ayoub, 1994) and evaluating the role of relationships with regard to female educational and business leaders (lemasters & roach, 2010, jones, 2013). recognizing the diverse value of participant input and selfexamination, the sir interview provided female state superintendents with an opportunity to actively assert one’s feelings and perceptions through a two-part protocol. the first part, which consisted of 12 questions, required participants to thoughtfully reflect on their experiences in the attainment of and service within the state superintendency. the second portion required participants to engage in a five-part activity wherein they articulated, categorized, and analyzed five words to describe how they identify themselves in relation to one’s colleagues, family, state board of education, confidant and/or significant other, and self. this articulation served as the first part; for the second, participants then categorized their generated words by positive, negative, or mixed connotations on a tangible representation of their relational experiences. participants then placed their 25 generated words on a bulls-eye, on which words were further categorized by importance to the participants. the remaining two parts offered participants an opportunity to answer open-ended questions in reflection of the bulls-eye creation; namely, participants were asked to reflect on what this categorization fundamentally means with regard to being a female in relationship to one’s self and others. collectively, the sir interviews lasted from an hour to an hour and a half in length. data analysis procedures using maxwell’s (2005) interactive design for qualitative research, this two-part study provided in-depth explorations of the female’s journey to and service within the state superintendency. data collected through open-ended questions and the self-in-relationship (sir) protocol helped to shed light on the guiding research questions. information attained in data collection provided rich answers to these guiding questions and allowed for a multi-faceted exploration of each female’s respective journey. blending maxwell’s (2005) and creswell’s (2007) data analysis procedures, data interpretation hinged on the evaluation of researcher-transcribed interview transcripts and participantcreated sir bulls-eye diagrams. to do so, the researcher first analyzed responses provided during the open-ended question portion of the interview process, noting any convergent, divergent, or emergent themes. then, the researcher analyzed participant-crafted responses supplied through the sir interview, likewise noting any convergent, divergent, or emergent themes. upon completion, the researcher returned each interview transcript to the participant for member checking prior to coding. other than clarifying acronyms, participants did not identify any changes. data revealed convergent themes of self and societal perceptions, the realities of the position, and the importance of building relationships. on the other hand, the data highlighted an important divergent theme of gender’s role in participants’ journeys to the state superintendency. in addition, an emergent theme arose, wherein participants shared their experiences with navigating the political arena of the state superintendency. data analysis of the open-ended interview portion allowed the researcher to gain an overall understanding of each female’s journey through three specific priori codes: self and societal perceptions, the realities of the position, and the importance of relationships. an emergent in vivo code also impacted every participant: the nature of navigating politics, as did the divergent theme of gender and the journey. then, prior to identifying common and differing threads between and among the participant-created sir representations, the researcher explored participants’ own words regarding their unique classifications. lastly, the researcher revisited preliminary field and research notes and journal entries to review initial epistemologies and reflect on the findings. results in examining the female’s journey to the state superintendency, similar and varying stories surfaced. data attained in the openinterview portion revealed three themes complementary of the 82 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 conceptual framework developed from a thorough review of the literature: self and societal perceptions, the realities of the position, and the importance of relationships. in addition, themes not initially identified, such as navigating politics and gender and the journey, also emerged to provide an encompassed view of the female’s path to and service within the state superintendency. then, in the self-in-relationship (sir) portion, participants generated, classified, and evaluated their unique self-conceptualizations and designated connotations in relationship to their work colleagues, state boards of education, families, significant others/confidants, and selves. this data revealed a number of interesting components; namely, connotative designations were overwhelmingly positive, adjective placement per category varied depending on current or former service, and personal versus professional relationships indicated an overall “backburner” placement of family and significant other/confidant relationships as compared to workspecific relationships. interpretations of results and conclusions broadly, the findings of this study reflect how female state superintendents make meaning of their journeys to and service within the state superintendency. specifically, participants’ shared words and experiences illumined a gap in the current available literature by exploring the nature of self and societal perceptions, the realities of the position, the importance of relationships, the navigation of politics, and the role of gender and the journey. participants’ own experiences: the open-interview portion the open-ended interview portion allowed participants an opportunity to share their respective journeys, noting any challenges and/or triumphs they encountered on their paths to and their service within the state superintendency. as previously mentioned, data analysis unearthed three convergent themes: self and societal perceptions, the realities of the position, and the importance of building and maintaining relationships. self and societal perceptions first, with regard to self and societal perceptions, each participant anecdotally detailed conflicting expectations that stemmed from gender; in fact, the responses expressed negative experiences tied to perceptions of gender. even if these experiences were gained on their journeys to the position, rather than in the position itself, a visible mark was made on each participant in a way that influenced her leadership in the superintendency. many of these negative experiences stemmed from public perception of image. as with division superintendents (dana & bourisaw, 2006; brunner & grogran, 2007; shakeshaft, 1987) and public officials (clark, 1991; kunovich & paxton, 2005), both politically appointed and elected female state superintendents must constantly be aware of their projected appearances in the public spotlight. this includes outward physical appearance, on which several participants commented as an important facet of the superintendency. for instance, one participant indicated that she was at constant odds with her perceived self and the perceived “caricature. . .that other people paint” of her. another discussed the need to always “look the part,” whether cutting the grass, going to the grocery store, or speaking on the floor of the state government. collectively, female state superintendents indicated the need to consider their outward appearance as important as their words and actions. yet appearances are not all that female state superintendents must “keep up”; in addition, several participants noted that being a female state superintendent essentially equated to operating under conflicting expectations. for instance, three participants mentioned unfair classifications between male and female leadership, in that men who take their time making decisions may be considered cautious whereas women may be considered wavering. this is akin to what brunner and grogan (2007) asserted: because educational administrative roles have been most often filled by men, a male model of leadership has evolved. . . . these experiences, as well as their career paths, formal and informal training, age, and other issues related to gender can create the impression that women lack what is seen as the proper leadership style—that is, they do not exhibit the familiar and accepted masculine persona. (p. 43) further inequities with regards to perception surfaced as well, including one participant’s unfair treatment and missed leadership opportunity early in her career due to pregnancy. unfortunately, sex-role stereotypes, such as the perceived disconnect between being a mother and being a leader, often serve as career inhibitors (brunner & grogan, 2007). for this participant, securing the district superintendency was delayed because of unspoken yet biased hiring practices regarding pregnant women and educational leadership roles. eventually, she did overcome those initial gender barriers, yet she felt strongly enough about the early impact to share her disgust. therefore, juggling conflicting expectations remains a constant obstacle for female state superintendents. lastly, two participants commented on negative stigmas of bureaucracy and academia that clouded public perception of their positions in the superintendency. one, as a career-long employee of the state education agency, noted that she has had to overcome the public perception of being “stereotyped as a bureaucrat”. the other, in dealing with the public humiliation of a dissatisfied governor, was publicly labeled as an “academic, a psychometrician, and a statistician”. these classifier terms carry negative connotations and hinged on biased perceptions. like all public servants, female superintendents thus operate under high levels of public scrutiny (kelly, st. germain, & horn, 1991). from participants’ stories, one may deduce, then, that perception and gender go hand-in-hand; appearances, conflicting expectations, and negativity surrounding the position itself were collective obstacles identified by participants. with regard to self 83 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 and societal perceptions, the data indicated that female state superintendents may be dually judged by society as anomalies serving in what many consider a male-dominated position (gilmour & kinsella, 2009). realities of the position in addition to self and societal perceptions, each participant discussed responsibilities, interactions, and expectations that comprise the realities of the position. of these, participants indicated that addressing state and federal educational curricular mandates, considering a host of policy concerns, collaborating with various stakeholders to overcome push-back from change, and dealing with budgetary constraints stemming from a declining economy served as major foci of their respective superintendencies. these realities echo brunner’s (1998) assertion that superintendents must be prepared “to be collaborative decision makers, to practice a caring way, to focus on curriculum and instruction, and to provide guidance and support for women in the superintendency” (p. 160). reflective of the literature, participants shared that state and federal standards have become an integral part of the superintendency (brunner & björk, 2001). they indicated that marketing public education has likewise become an important facet of their positions; namely, they felt that they were charged with corralling the entire educational community around a common goal. in most cases, that goal rested on achieving success as prescribed by state and federal mandates. further, participants indicated that much of their day-to-day responsibilities involved addressing state and federal standards and engaging in the policy work that went hand-in-hand with those concentrated efforts. participants also commented on the importance of policy work, noting that policy knowledge and innovative approaches to addressing state and federal mandates enabled them to make progress toward achieving higher standards and national recognition. dealing with budgetary restraints as a result of the declining economy also presented a difficult obstacle. one participant noted that the economy forced salary reductions, staff cuts, and the merging of many positions which in turn added to her responsibilities as state superintendent and pseudo-deputy superintendent. when asked to expound upon the challenges she has faced being a female in the state superintendency, she quickly replied, “the assumption that i can do two jobs, to be quite blunt. no male would be in this position doing what i am doing.” participants also suggested that collaboration among and between various stakeholder groups was a vital component of their positions. one, in particular, spoke to the nature of pushback and change; namely, she asserted that although she currently operates in a “progressive state,” it’s “insular” and that impacting change, even if it is positive, presents a set of challenges. this is reflective of grogan’s (2000) assertion that superintendents must “affect change that promises better outcomes for all students in the future” and “be comfortable with contradiction, work through others, appreciate dissent, develop a critical awareness of how children are being served, and adopt an ethic of care” (pp. 131-132). considering these stories, one may infer that female state superintendents face common day-to-day challenges in their respective superintendencies. to overcome these challenges, many tap into their innate leadership characteristics such as collaborating, prioritizing, nurturing, and carefully considering how each decision impacts the children for whom they serve. interestingly, these characteristics are generally ascribed to females (dopp & sloan, 1986; haar, 2002; isernhagen, 2002; pankake, schroth, & funk, 2002; witmer, 2006; brunner & grogan, 2007), suggesting that perhaps females are best equipped to address and balance the many personal, professional, and political demands of the state superintendency. “sometimes stereotypical women’s ways of nurturing, collaborating, and caring for others are not female, but are, in fact, critical components of successful leadership” (pankake, schroth, & funk, 2002, p. 77). importance of relationships as with overcoming self and societal perceptions and dealing with the realities of the position, participants also noted the importance of building and maintaining relationships in the state superintendency. in concert with representations created through the self-in-relationship (sir) interview, participants indicated varying degrees of relationships and their corresponding importance in their lives and leadership. the only elected state superintendent in the study advised that one must “make friends before you need them.” likewise, another participant suggested that one should focus on “maintaining relationships and just generally being kind to people and not burning bridges” because of the cyclical nature of the work. similarly, one participant mentioned the need to build and maintain relationships because the state superintendent is charged with being the “caretakers of this country’s most precious natural resource, our children” and they must develop relationships with various stakeholders to build coalitions and impact positive change. two participants did not directly comment on the importance of building and maintaining relationships; however, their anecdotes shed light on why doing so is vitally important. for instance, one mentioned the complex relationship between her state board of education and she, wherein members know that she is very guarded in what she says publicly. the other shared her struggles in conflicting relationships between the governor, the state board of education, and herself. in reviewing these shared experiences, one may infer that relationships are fundamental building blocks from which all operation, change, and success is built. without strong coalitions, change cannot occur; without trust and support, success cannot be attained. this was most apparent in one participant’s shared experience, when the sting of broken 84 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 relationships ultimately cost her the superintendency. other stories detailed the positive impacts of relationships, yet one thing is clear: whether positive or negative, the importance of building and maintaining relationships cannot be overstated (shakeshaft, 1987). navigating politics closely tied to the aforementioned priori themes, participants discussed an emergent theme of navigating politics. farmer (2009) suggested that a superintendent should recognize the “importance of political skills and diligently [work] to hone them” so that “a gradual transformation occurs,” moving the superintendent “away from seeing political forces as obstructions to progress and toward visualizing political forces as integral stakeholders in the educational process whose contributions are essential in the quest to achieve organizational objectives” (p. 32). participants in this study concurred: navigating politics is a vital component of the state superintendency. as an elected superintendent, one participant, in particular, mentioned the brutal nature of political jockeying, alignment, and elections; however, other participants noted the struggles they too faced in dealing with the political nature of the position. for instance, one commented on the importance of depersonalizing the work, choosing words carefully, doing one’s homework, and aligning support for initiatives rather than ever going into situations “cold.” another suggested that partisan politics hinder progress; as such, she guards her personal political affiliation and strives to work in a “bipartisan manner.” similarly, one participant stressed the importance of adhering to one’s core values rather than becoming “politically involved” and potentially losing sight of the work. politics eventually got the best of one participant, whose career ultimately succumbed to negative political attacks from her former governor. one may deduce, then, that politics plays a major role in one’s ability to lead in the state superintendency. in fact, one participant signified that, regardless of the situation or initiative, “there’s still politics with a little ‘p’ somewhere in it”; thus it behooves state superintendents to be cognizant of and address political influence and nuances. gender and the journey varying experiences of gender and the journey served as the only divergent theme of the research. each participant commented on whether or not they felt as though their gender played a role in their ability to lead in the state superintendency. for example, one participant suggested that, “as a female [her] tenacity and perseverance have been underestimated”; likewise, another participant mentioned that she “believe[s] while people certainly respect [her], [she is] a girl.” yet interestingly, when asked to expound upon their personal experiences with gender and the journey, many of the participants indicated that they did not feel as though gender presented an issue in their role as state superintendent. their shared stories, however, seemingly contradicted their assertions. for instance, one participant indicated that she broke a number of “glass ceilings” early in her career and that subsequently gender did not play a role in her journey to the state superintendency. one may argue, however, that gender did play a role; namely, her overcoming obstacles early in her career enabled her to move forward on leadership paths that ultimately lead to the state superintendency. likewise, one participant noted that gender may have hampered her earlier career pursuits but not her attainment of the state superintendency. although she eventually secured position, these hindrances delayed her ascension many years because of antiquated gender inequities regarding motherhood and leadership. similarly, another participant said that gender did not present an issue on her journey to the state superintendency; however, she mentioned an instance in which men tried to keep her in her “woman’s place.” lastly, two participants indicated that gender did not play a role in their attainment of their respective superintendencies. yet, both of these women followed strong female predecessors who essentially paved the way for their successes. this leaves one to wonder: had they not followed such driving female forces, what would their journeys have looked like? participants’ own words: the self-in-relationship (sir) protocol for this section interview portion, participants were asked to consider the ways in which they conceptualize themselves in relationship to their work colleagues, state boards of education, families, significant others/confidants, and selves. to demonstrate this, participants utilized the self-in-relationship (sir) protocol, a three-part interview wherein participants generated, classified, and evaluated their unique representations in reflection of their relationship with the aforementioned categories. data collected via the sir protocol provided a deeper glimpse into the nature of relationships as previously discussed. to illustrate how participants conceptualized the aforementioned relationships, each participant was asked to provide five adjectives to signify how she would describe herself in relationship to each of these categories. then, after generating adjectives to identify how one describes herself in relationship to the five categories, each participant in the study was asked to evaluate whether she would label her provided adjectives as positive, negative, or mixed in connotation. to do so, participants were asked to place a plus sign (+) for positive, a minus sign (-) for negative, or a plus and a minus sign (+/-) for mixed (both positive and negative) connotation for each of adjective. for the second sir portion of each interview, participants were asked to review their adjectives and connotative designations and were then instructed to place each post-it note on the bullseye as such: the words that best describe and are most important to who the participant is were placed in the center ring; the words that least describe and are least important to who the participant is were placed in the outer ring; those of moderate influence or importance were placed in the middle ring. 85 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 the final component of the sir protocol required participants to evaluate self-classifications by answering the following questions: 1. do you think this represents your life? what does this picture mean to you? 2. what role do you think being a female plays in this picture? each participant thus reflected on her unique creation and offered explanations for her chosen adjectives, connotations, and classifications on the sir bulls-eye; from this, each articulated her thoughts and feelings of the representation. what the sir revealed in reviewing participants’ adjectives, connotations, and classifications, several common threads arose that both directly and indirectly aided in further data analysis of the open-ended interview section. most participants classified their adjectives as positive (+) or mixed (+/-); these words were mostly placed in the “most important” or “somewhat important” rings. words designated as negative (-) were all placed in the outer “least important” ring, yet there were few adjectives labeled as negative (emphatic, subdued, gossipy, guarded, and complainer). in reviewing their adjectives, connotations, and classifications, several participants indicated that they were probably “too positive” in their initial responses. with regard to the sir bulls-eye representations, it seemed as though adjective placement depended on service; for example, participants who currently serve as state superintendents classified adjectives differently from participants who served as former state superintendents. for instance, current female state superintendents positioned more adjectives describing their relationships with their state boards of education and work colleagues as “most important” (reflective, idea-generator, listener, optimistic, negotiator, driven, centered, fun, respectful, engaged, thankful, honest, focused, teaching, learning, and professional), whereas former female state superintendents primarily placed adjectives describing self and family in the center ring (supportive, caring, nurturer, planning, communicating, loving, understanding, futurist, worrier, and thinker). contrastingly, most former state superintendents placed adjectives describing relationships with their state boards of education and work colleagues in the “somewhat important” or “least important” rings (collegial, careful, impatient, focused, busy, affable, advisor, collaborator, probing, listener, prepared, respectful, and guarded). with regard to participants’ relationships with significant others/confidants, one participant indicated that she is divorced and another that she is single. many of the other participants shared that their significant others/confidants have played a supporting role in their careers. as such, in describing relationships with significant others/confidants, most participants, regardless of current or former service, positioned those descriptors in the “somewhat important” or “least important” rings (supportive, empathizer, indirect, structured, opinionated, relaxed, comfortable, enjoyable, pleased, caring, open, sharing, and humorous). from this, one may deduce that the state superintendency is an all-consuming position. while in service, personal relationships with family and significant others/confidants and internal considerations of self are placed on the back-burner; then, when no longer in service, those relationships return to the forefront. conversely, while in the state superintendency, participants noted that professional relationships with their boards of education and work colleagues are of greater importance while relationships with family, significant others/confidants, and self take on a lesser role in their lives. one participant best described this dynamic: my family talks about the toll the job took on me. and i never saw it. and i almost think, whether it’s [that i’m] a woman or it was my leadership style or just the way i was, i always gave 150%. i worked 18 hour days, never said ‘no,’ always was in there. but, my grandson, two weeks after i stepped down from the job, he goes ‘nana, it shows.’ and i said, ‘what shows, [grandson]?’ he goes, ‘nan, you would be wired when you came in here. just wired.’ and—and i think it was that level of tension. whether because i was a woman it affected me differently or not, but the comparison my daughter and this other woman had this week: think about hilary clinton, how she looks. the tension, as she suggested, causes a disconnect between self and relationships with one’s family and significant others/confidants on one hand and one’s work colleagues and state boards of education on the other. an interesting juxtaposition: female district superintendents versus female state superintendents. perhaps the most interesting differences emerged in reflection of sir classifications. first, participants in this study conceptualized relationships differently based upon their proximity to the position: major differences in sir classifications for this research stemmed from participants’ current or former service in the superintendency. as marcussimpson’s (2012) and jones’s (2013) participants were all current district superintendents, each participant’s experiences were evaluated in real-time; contrastingly, participants in this study evaluated experiences both in real-time and in hindsight, providing a more diverse, encompassed view of the journey to and service within the position. the sir also provided unique insight into how female state superintendents may differ from female district superintendents. for instance, unlike current district superintendents who classified relationships with their confidants or significant others and families as of high importance, current female state superintendents considered relationships with their confidants and/or significant others as “somewhat” or “least important” and relationships with their state boards of education and colleagues as “most important” instead. conversely, former female state 86 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 superintendents answered in the opposite. to better understand why, the researcher revisited the open-ended interview transcriptions and discovered an interesting clue: for those who served in the district superintendency prior to the state superintendency, participants noted that the state superintendency demanded more time and stamina and thus often put relationships with anyone outside of their day-to-day professional levels on the back-burner for the duration of their term. what they didn’t say: the female state superintendent data sheet some of the most poignant conclusions may be drawn from the data collected on the female state superintendent data sheet; namely, two important facets emerged based on what participants wrote rather than what they said: participants’ number of children and age. children in reviewing answers on the data sheets, one of the most striking responses was for total number of children. mahitivanichcha and rorrer (2006) suggested that “as many women strive to satisfy family demands, the constraints imposed by this dominant time structure may explain some of the occupational decisions that women make, including whether to pursue and/or remain in the superintendency” (p. 492). participants in this study made the decision to pursue the superintendency, but at what cost to building and supporting a family? at first glance, the number of children may not stand out as a component worthy of additional consideration. of the three former female state superintendents, one indicated “1” child and the other two “2+” children. all three former state superintendents either mentioned their children as participants in various moments in their lives or as reasons for how they operated in the position. for instance, one participant commented on her children’s unwillingness to move to another state for her career opportunities: “my son thought, oh my god, my mother’s going to deny him his right to go to high school outside of [undisclosed geographical location in their hometown]. and, so i commuted back and forth for 18 months.” as mentioned, one participant’s grandchild highlighted the mental and emotional toll the superintendency took on the family while she was in office. another suggested that becoming a mother changed the way she looked at all of the students in her care: i saw the children, who i was chosen to work on behalf of, as really my children. i mean, [undisclosed number] of them, as my responsibility. and i think that being a mother shaped part of that. i mean, frankly, a lot of what i thought about many things changed after i was a mother, for the first time. this, however, only speaks to children of former state superintendents. all four current female state superintendents indicated “0” children. during the sir interview portion, one participant posed a question to herself regarding her choice to not have children: i often think to myself, ‘what would i do if i had my own family i had to take care of?’ and quite possible, i wouldn’t be able to juggle. i don’t know that i would be able to juggle. so, i have chosen a profession to be my life. i am my work. two participants did not directly mention their familial choices in the open-ended or sir interviews; however, one did comment that she often “look[ed] through the lens of a sister, an aunt, you know, from a female’s point of view” rather than a mother when considering her role as “caretaker” of the children in her state. like mahitivanichcha and rorrer (2006) suggested, then, perhaps these females found it difficult to balance having children and pursuing or attaining the state superintendency. age another interesting finding hinged on age classifications secured from the data sheet. in reviewing participants’ responses, it is clear that most state superintendents take on the position later in their careers. with the exception of one participant, who indicated her age as “45-49,” four participants indicated their age as “over 60” with the other two indicating age as “55-59.” one may wonder why the majority of participants are close to or beyond retirement age, yet as wolverton and macdonald (2001) suggested, “women generally traveled to the superintendency through staff roles and their career mobility patterns were more often horizontal” (p. 75). in comparing these responses with stories shared in the open-ended and sir interview portions, it seems as though their ages reflect the diverse experiences they have gained over years of moving up their respective leadership ladders. regardless of their pathways, a common thread rested on the many years these women worked through various positions, whether in school systems or in state educational agencies, to ultimately attain the state superintendency. their ages, in turn, are reflective of their long, arduous journeys. race arriaga, stanley, and lindsey (2020) suggest that “women, especially women of color, in high-level, educational leadership position are often viewed as exceptions rather than the rule” (p. 5). although no researcher-prescribed delimitation influenced the population’s race or ethnicity, participants included six caucasian females and one african-american female. in discussion of race, the african-american participant noted that, although she could be considered “twice-exceptional” as an african-american and a female; however, she commented that “being a female is far more profound than race” with regard to questions of competency. recommendations for future research the purpose of this qualitative study was to evaluate the female’s journey to and service within the state superintendency to identify any convergent, divergent, or emergent themes in an effort to address a gap in the current available literature. this 87 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 goal was attained through thoughtful analysis of open-ended interview questions and participant created self-in-relationship (sir) representations for four current and three former female state superintendents. based upon the findings of this study, the researcher recommends the following for future research: 1. to further examine any similarities or differences, this study should be replicated and expanded to include current and former state superintendents of diverse genders. 2. this study should be conducted as a comparative study of female state superintendents and other female state political leaders to determine what role gender may play in the attainment of and service within other state positions. 3. to expound upon the data, this qualitative study should be conducted as a mixed-methods study wherein the self-in-relationship (sir) protocol is quantitatively analyzed. 4. to explore the connections between race and gender in educational leadership development and pathways. conclusion in conducting this study, a narrow, unexplored gap in the literature was examined. through the shared experiences of the participants, female state superintendents have been given a voice in the crowd of educational research; in listening to their “different voices,” a greater understanding of the convergent, divergent, and emergent experiences of these female educational leaders on their respective journeys to and services within the state superintendency was attained. this study spoke to gilligan’s (1993) assertion that: in the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression at the failure of connection. the failure to see the different reality of women’s lives and to hear the differences in their voices stems in part from the assumption that there is a single mode of social experience and interpretation. (p. 173) each participant shared a story; in each story, the richness and diversity of life and experience emerged. through their candor, convergent themes of overcoming self and societal perceptions, dealing with the realities of the position, and building and maintaining relationships were shared; in addition, an emergent theme of navigating politics and a divergent theme of gender and the journey surfaced. as previously examined, these themes complemented the limited available literature regarding the female superintendency, yet more importantly, participants’ shared experiences paved the way for future research regarding the female state superintendency, an underrepresented “voice” in the literature. references arriaga, t. t., stanley, s. l., &; lindsey, d. b. (2020). leading while female: a culturally proficient response for gender equity. corwin. bilken, s. k., & brannigan, m. b. (1980). women and educational leadership. heath and company. brunner, c. c., & björk, l. g. (eds.) 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(2001, october). flukes, opportunities, and planned interventions: factors affecting women’s decisions to become school administrators. educational administration quarterly, 37(4), 462-502. volume 41, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, and brad bizzell assistant editor: jordan donop 65 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 advancing women in leadership vol. 41, 64-75, 2022 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper are we teaching college women to aspire for elite leadership roles?:teaching college women to aspire for leadership authors: karyn boatwright, shayla dailey, kristie mcalpine, caitlin finan, meredith hallisey, kate mccracken, & andrea dendrinos karyn boatwright: associate professor of psychology, kalamazoo college, karyn.boatwright@kzoo.edu shayla dailey: senior research assistant in psychology, kalamazoo college, shayla.dailey@kzoo.edu caitlin finan: research scientist at evolent health, illinois, ccfinan@gmail.com andrea potthoff dendrinos: licensed psychologist, minnesota, andrea@dendrinospsychology.com rhonda k. egidio: professor emeritus in the higher education & counseling and rehabilitation department, michigan state university, rhonda_egidio@yahoo.com stephanie vibbert, was one of the student founders of this project. she passed away during the first phase of data collection. in her honor, her parents established the stephanie vibbert women's leadership research endowment which continues to fund this research. a special thanks to the remaining members of the team who worked with stephanie to gather and analyze data: kristie mcalpine, d’angelo bailey, leigh ann ulrey, rachel carson, claire deikman, meredith lacina hallisey, sara nestor, katherine curley, dana allswede, grace mcgookey, kate mccracken, and becca riser. accepted october 24, 2022 in this longitudinal study we conducted annual interviews with 19 randomly selected college women for four years to ask them to describe the skills of an effective leader, their current leadership skills, post-college leadership aspirations, and college experiences that adversely and positively affected their aspirations for future leadership roles. as anticipated, growth and changes were not uniform among all participants; in fact, the varieties revealed a complex picture of women’s leadership aspirations and the leadership skill development they favoured to enliven their aspirations, as well as the college experiences that shaped their evolving notion of their own desire for top leadership roles.an analysis of their interview responses indicated that over the span of four years: although most women increased their beliefs that effective leaders should possess both relational and task-oriented skills, the majority reported that they developed stronger traditional authoritative leadership skills; women reported stronger leadership aspirations, particularly those who had developed stronger traditional leadership skills. those who developed stronger relational skills reported lower leadership aspirations. suggestions for leadership mentors, professors, administrators, college student personnel and faculty are presented. keywords: leadership aspirations, college women’s leadership, elite leadership roles the pipeline that supplies the educated workforce is chock-full of women at the entry level, but by the time that same pipeline is filling leadership positions, it is overwhelmingly stocked with men. there are so many reasons for this winnowing out, but one important contributor is a leadership ambition gap. —sheryl sandberg, lean in for graduates the enduring underrepresentation of women in upper-level leadership roles continues to perplex leadership scholars, college faculty, and student development personnel. clearly, many middle and top-management women leaders earn praise from their employees and supervisors yet continue to occupy a disproportionately low percentage of elite positions (pfaff, et al., 2013; wilson, 2020). why is this still the case? for decades, it has been widely assumed that women hit invisible barriers labeled by loden in 1978 as the “glass ceiling” (guvenen et al., 2021; salvaj & kuschel, 2020) that thwart the progress of aspiring women leaders but another factor is that too few women aspire to hierarchical advancement (sandberg & scovell, 2014). are women on a continuous path of low aspirations for leadership roles or does something happen along the way of women’s college trajectory to shift their aspirations? in phase one of our 24-year longitudinal study, we interviewed 19 college women annually throughout their college careers. compared to mailto:karyn.boatwright@kzoo.edu mailto:shayla.dailey@kzoo.edu mailto:ccfinan@gmail.com mailto:andrea@dendrinospsychology.com mailto:rhonda_egidio@yahoo.com 66 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 their first year, most senior participants reported stronger leadership aspirations. several of these seniors reported a corresponding interest in employing traditional task-oriented leadership behaviors such as delegating tasks, setting job objectives, making decisions, setting firm expectations, acting decisively, etc. these particular women also failed to see the need for balancing this task-oriented style with relational strategies such as demonstrating consideration to employees’ needs, developing personal relationships with supervisees, showing care and concern for others, attending to the unique preferences and work styles of employees, empathizing, and facilitating cooperation among work teams. those who more strongly valued the relational leadership model experienced lower leadership aspirations. these trends appear relevant because progressive organizations are currently seeking leaders with both task-oriented and relational leadership skills. does something occur during college to undermine their early aspirations? does something occur during their early professional careers to undermine their aspirations for elite roles? how did a midwestern private liberal arts college that purposefully admits students with previous leadership experience create an environment that strengthened women’s traditional task-oriented skills while weakening their relationally-oriented skills? what occurred to reduce their balanced set of task and relational-oriented behaviors? what transpired to decrease or extinguish some women’s leadership aspirations? this is a compelling curiosity in the quest for gender equity. over the past few decades, education researchers found that girls’ interest in math and science falls off at 5th grade education. scholars provided teachers with a plethora of successful educational strategies to address this problematic trend. in a similar vein, we must better understand what may be a fallout period for some potential women leaders during the college years as young women envision and prepare for their careers and in many cases either desert their relational leadership style or give up on their interest in aspiring to leadership positions altogether. with knowledge of why this shift occurs in these critical career development years, more targeted strategies to maintain and even build stronger leadership aspirations and more progressive relational and organizational (i.e., balanced) leadership styles for women in the college years can be designed and implemented. thus, a critical presenting question in the advancement of women in society is why some women’s leadership aspirations decline during the college years and why those who maintain or strengthen their commitment shift toward more stereotypical task-oriented approaches even though a blend of task-oriented and relational styles is more desired in many contemporary business and educational organizations. now more than ever, the contemporary leadership skills needed in today’s workforce that combine relational with task-oriented managerial skills favor women. yet, a gender disparity persists that is further exacerbated for higher level women leaders of color. although women workers constitute approximately 46.8% of the workforce and hold over half of the middle management positions (u.s. bureau of labor statistics, 2020), they still only hold 8.2% of fortune 500 executive positions and between 8% and 18% of organizational and political leadership positions. unsurprisingly, the percentages for women of color are significantly lower: black and latina women hold only 1.3% and 1.2% respectively of the highest-level executive positions in the united states (catalyst, 2017; hinchliffe, 2021). a woman’s crafted set of leadership skills as a leader and a receptive environment to recognize women’s leadership capabilities are both critically important (fritz & knippenberg, 2017). the third leg of that stool is a woman’s aspirational level for leadership roles. without the internal birthing of the woman’s own sense of desire to be a leader, there is no starting block (sandberg & scovell, 2014). given the potential importance of leadership aspirations, it surprises us that few researchers have examined factors that adversely or positively influence women’s desire to lead. mounting evidence suggests that a persistent gender-gap exists in leadership aspirations (keller & molina, 2020). although women may be well situated to pursue these roles, women are less likely than men to aspire to higher level leadership positions. over two decades ago, only 15% of women aspired to a “powerful” position in their professional future (konrad et al., 2000). current data suggest that men continue to express stronger interest in high-level corporate positions (keller & molina, 2020). historically, desirable leadership skills were almost exclusively authoritative, task-oriented managerial skills associated with men and “masculinity” such as strategizing, dictating work policies, decisively solving problems, monitoring and evaluating employees’ behaviors, and teaching them how to lead other employees. for over a decade, leadership scholars have drawn attention to an emerging paradigm shift in organizational leadership models that include traditional task-oriented skills as well as those associated with “femininity” such as the ability to empower, build consensus, express concern for others, listen, validate workers’ opinions, build solid professional relationships, empower employees, encourage collaboration, demonstrate mutual respect among diverse populations, and develop cohesive teams and communities (fletcher, 2012; patel et al., 2020; salvaj & kuschel, 2020). within the organizational world, employers are increasingly seeking leaders who possess both sets of skills included in this new task and relationallyoriented model. this is because many organizations want their leaders to tailor their leadership behaviors to meet their employees’ needs. not only do workers frequently prefer leaders with these skills (e.g., boatwright & forrest, 2000; boatwright et al., 2010), but this leadership style can potentially enhance employees’ work satisfaction, organizational loyalty, and productivity. even though men significantly outnumber women in elite leadership roles today, this should not be equated with the notion that men are better suited to lead within this new leadership 67 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 paradigm. in comparison to women, many men are socialized at a young age to develop more authoritative leadership behaviors such as taking a clear stand, organizing, delegating tasks, but not explicitly encouraged to solidify relational skills. in some cases, some boys are socialized to “deny in themselves the relational skills needed to survive psychologically [and instead], they tend to rely on women to provide these attributes” (korabik & ayman, 2007, p. 9). conversely, many women may be particularly well-suited for leadership roles because as young girls they were not only encouraged by parents, teachers, and peers to acquire taskoriented skills assumed necessary for success in the “man’s world” but encouraged to build and hone relational skills (patel et al., 2020) in short, when combined with task-oriented skills, many stereotypical “feminine” traits fostered by gender socialization that have traditionally derailed women’s leadership trajectories now make women potential frontrunners for senior positions. fortunately, women’s socially constructed and diverse repertoire of leadership behaviors has influenced their progress in obtaining more lower and middle level management positions but unfortunately has not substantially affected the alarmingly wide gender gap in higher-level roles or increased women’s aspirations. both external and internal factors are forces in understanding why women’s aspirations for higher-level leadership roles are lower than men’s. we have known for some time that both social (external) and psychological (internal) factors adversely influence women’s underrepresentation in leadership roles (eagly et al., 2020). however, the social factors, such as stereotyping, social marginalization, gender-biased hiring practices, slower promotions, gender-biased feedback process, and lower levels of organizational development due to managers’ biased perceptions of women’s desire to pursue positions, have received significantly more empirical attention in recent years (sandberg & scovell, 2014). comparatively, psychological factors have largely been ignored leading some to speculate that women simply naturally "opt out” or are “naturally” disinterested in upper-level positions. while recognizing that psychological variables do not develop within a social vacuum, a handful of researchers have begun to illuminate five variables that adversely influence leadership aspirations: women’s negative cognitions about themselves as elite leaders; negative beliefs about abilities perpetuated by television; insufficient role models; effect of personal responsibilities such as household chores and tasks; and perception of oppressive environments for women. women’s negative cognitions about themselves as senior leaders before aspiring for higher-level leadership positions, young women must first believe that they possess leadership potential: these beliefs begin to form in childhood. many may foreclose on leadership roles early after internalizing messages that they should not directly express their thoughts and that their relational traits are not valued leadership skills. in one study, 65% of women participants reported that in childhood, they were reluctant to demonstrate their leadership abilities (veihmeyer & doughtie, 2017). additionally, some college women, poised to enter corporate america, are socialized to feel less worthy of the rewards associated with higher-level roles (veihmeyer & doughtie, 2017), express lower self-efficacy beliefs regarding their leadership abilities (sanchez & lehnert, 2019), and voice stronger fears of negative evaluation (boatwright & egidio, 2003). even in the professional world, many women describe themselves as less confident, competitive, qualified than their male counterparts and thus less likely to seek access to senior leadership roles (veihmeyer & doughtie, 2017). negative beliefs about abilities perpetuated by television even though women’s leadership abilities have been consistently documented, television’s outdated negative portrayal of overly aggressive or weak women leaders adversely influences young women’s thoughts regarding their interest in leading groups. a study conducted with university of waterloo undergraduate men and women was designed to examine the effect of television on college women’s interest in leadership roles. participants watched either gender neutral or stereotypically negative television segments of women leaders. immediately following this exposure, researchers asked participants to serve as either a leader or a subordinate in a group exercise. compared to participants who watched the gender-neutral segments, women who watched the gender-biased television segments expressed lower interest in serving as a leader (davies et al., 2005). insufficient role models in their seminal study, bandura et al. (1961) posited that observing the rewarded behaviors of others influences one’s desire to engage in similar behaviors. following this assertion, when girls or young women observe elite women leaders, they will be more apt to aspire for top leadership roles. although they did not explicitly study leadership aspirations, beaman et al. (2012) assessed career aspirations by analyzing data from over 3600 adolescents from 495 villages in india who had been exposed to indian women leaders. following this exposure, the young girls’ career aspirations increased. gender disparity in personal responsibilities although women work a comparable number of hours to men within the workplace, a gender disparity exists among professional men and women educators, lawyers, and business personnel with elite leadership potential. women report six to ten times more hours completing household tasks and providing childcare than men (masterson, et. al., 2020). these heavier domestic workloads in turn often decrease women’s desire to pursue top management positions (salvaj & kuschel, 2020). women’s expectation of gender-biased environments we know that gender-biased institutional factors often impede women’s advancement, yet we do not yet fully understand the set of psychological factors that directly or indirectly influence women’s desire to seek higher level leadership roles. even when 68 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 organizations establish gender parity in advancement policies, women’s beliefs regarding leadership roles must positively fuel their aspirations before they choose to seek these roles. to better understand the foundations of college women’s aspirations to seek leadership positions, we studied a randomly selected group of college women attending an elite private liberal arts college who were considered to be potential leaders in their future professional fields. over the course of their fouryear college experience, we conducted annual interviews to assess fluctuations in their conceptualization of effective leadership, perceptions of their own leadership skills, leadership aspirations, and experiences that influenced their aspirations in future professional leadership roles. method participants we invited 30 women undergraduate students from the entire pool of 150 female students enrolled in their first year at a private midwestern liberal arts college to participate in our 25year longitudinal study. to ensure a random sample, we invited every 5th woman student and each accepted. the only selection criterion used was that they were categorized by our admissions office as first-year women students. over the course of the four years, ten withdrew from the college and one opted not to participate after her third year. nineteen women participated in the first phase and each graduated within one month of the final interview. additionally, all agreed to be interviewed in phase ii of the longitudinal study 20 to 25 years after graduation. participation involved an initial baseline interview in their first trimester of college followed by interviews near the end of their first, sophomore, junior, and senior years. the mean age of the participants at the beginning of the study was 19 with the youngest and the oldest being 18 and 19, respectively. seventy percent of the participants identified as white which reflected the composition of the student body; 24% of the participants identified as asian american; 6% as african american. all participants were from middle or upper-middle class backgrounds, single, and represented a cross section of academic interests and majors. our four research questions: 1. do women change their conceptualization of effective leadership skills during college? 2. which effective task-oriented and relational-oriented leadership skills do participants develop during college? 3. do women’s leadership aspirations for future leadership roles shift during their college years? 4. which college experiences increase college women’s leadership aspirations for future roles? 5. which college experiences decrease college women’s leadership aspirations for future roles? measures demographic questionnaire a 13-item questionnaire was used to acquire information regarding the participants’ age, gender, race and ethnicity, academic interests, and socioeconomic status. interview questions in semi-structured interviews during their first trimester of college as well as the end of each of their four years of study, participants answered the following five open-ended questions. 1. which skills do you believe an effective leader should possess? 2. which skills do you currently possess that might help you manage, supervise, or train others effectively? 3. comparing yourself with where you were a year ago in terms of your interest in leading, supervising, training, or managing others, has your interest in becoming a leader (aspirations) in your professional field, whatever that might be, decreased or increased? 4. would you please describe any college experiences in the last year that have increased your interest in leading, supervising, training, or managing others in your future professional field? (note: this question was not asked in the first baseline interview since it took place during their first college trimester.) 5. would you please describe college experiences in the last year that have undermined the way you perceive yourself as a future leader? (this question was also omitted from the baseline interview.) leader behavior description questionnaire (lbdq): ideal preference version to categorize participants’ ideal and actual leadership skills, we were guided by the lbdq (halpin, 1957), the most extensively used instrument in leadership research (landy, 1989). the lbdq has been employed in many organizational research studies because of its behavioral specificity with regard to leadership behaviors and concretely delineates relationallyoriented (consideration) and task-oriented (initiating structure) dimensions of leadership style. leadership behaviors labeled relational include demonstrating mutual trust, respect, concern for workers' needs and showing warmth and rapport between themself and workers. task-oriented behaviors include leadership skills such as maintaining work standards, delegating tasks, providing direction to organizational members, planning, coordinating, trying out ideas on employees instead of asking for their ideas, maintaining standards of performance, and encouraging the use of uniform procedures. relational traits include leadership behaviors such as demonstrating consideration to employees’ needs, developing personal relationships with supervisees, showing care and concern for others, attending to the unique preferences and work styles of employees, empathizing, and facilitating cooperation among members of a work-team. 69 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 procedure after obtaining approval from the college’s institutional review board, the primary researcher invited 30 randomly selected firstyear women who were enrolled in a midwestern private liberal arts college to participate in our longitudinal study. all agreed to participate without a promise of compensation, although to enhance their persistence we annually sent small tokens of our appreciation to them in their campus mailboxes (e.g., a college mug, candy bar). over a four-year span, four male and female members of an undergraduate research team, all of whom were selected due to their interest in women’s leadership aspirations and interest in acquiring research experience, conducted a series of private, open-ended, face-to-face interviews with participants in the research lab near the beginning of their freshman year and during the last month of their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years. before the initial interview, participants received a verbal and written description of the research procedures and agreed to the conditions by signing an informed consent form. the first author’s research team was composed of six college women who were selected due to their interest in examining college women’s leadership aspirations. research team members conducted and transcribed all audio-taped interviews. when necessary, interviewers used specific prompts or probes such as “could you expand on that answer” to ensure that each question was answered. on average, each interview lasted 30 minutes. to ensure the anonymity of the respondents, participants’ names were excluded from the transcription and replaced with a selfselected codename. data analysis to refrain from skewing the results or guiding the interviews toward a particular direction, our research team did not discuss anticipated findings before interviewing our participants. in our interviews we asked open-ended interview questions, relied on participants’ words, acknowledged the role of context in the construction of our participants’ experiences, and employed a team consensus approach to code and analyze the data. following the interviews, each skill cited by our participants in the first and fifth questions was coded and consensually determined by the team to be task-oriented or relational behavior based on the skills and categories used in the leader behavior description questionnaire (halpin, 1957). next, the number of relational and task-oriented responses were counted and the ratio of relational and task-oriented skills to their total set of responses reported during their first and fourthyear interviews was calculated. responses that were neither relational nor task-oriented were omitted from the calculations. depending on their percentage of responses, each participant’s leadership style was categorized as either relational (r) or taskoriented (t). if a participant’s response set in either category was equal to or greater than 66% of her entire response set, she was categorized as relational or task-oriented. if the difference between a participant’s percentage of identified relational and task-oriented behaviors was less than 33%, she was categorized as possessing a “balanced” conceptualization of leadership. after much discussion the percentages of 66% and 33% were selected by the research team since two-thirds of similar responses seemed sufficient to label the set of responses as relational or task-oriented. for the remaining questions, we coded and categorized each response to identify the primary themes, comparing each year’s responses with their responses from a previous year as well as comparing their first and fourthyear responses for more significant shifts. because we were unable to find previous studies that had used this type of categorizing, we relied on our intuitions to develop the ratio model and asked three different organizational researchers to comment on our method of analysis. all three agreed that the majority ratio model seemed to be a creative and rational way to categorize the traits. results results of our study are offered in the order of the research questions identified above and occasionally illustrated by participants’ words. question 1: which skills do you believe an effective leader should possess? in their first college trimester interview, 40% of our participants described effective leadership skills as primarily relational. this suggests that before college, some students were exposed to the benefits of relational leadership traits. for example, romeo described an effective leader as “someone who is not only concerned with what they are trying to achieve, but as far as the feelings of others and furthering, helping others with their goals as well as them.” similarly, cobi believed leaders should listen to “everyone’s opinions in the group…and [be] able to listen well and… listen to everyone’s personal ideas.” in contrast, 37% of the women described leadership as consisting of mostly taskoriented behaviors. for example, eddie believed that listening was important but that leaders needed to “decide which one’s the best.” only 23% of the women cited a relatively equal amount of relational and task-oriented skills. one participant, sunshine, highlighted this balance stating that effective leaders should be “responsible, respectful, assertive, open minded and organized.” by the end of their senior year, most of the women (71%) used fewer task-oriented leadership skills to describe an effective leader and developed, maintained, or solidified their belief in the effectiveness of primarily a relational or a balanced set of relational and task-oriented skills. overall, our data suggest that most participants increasingly learned to value either a predominantly relational or a balanced relational and taskoriented skillset and devalue a primarily task-oriented skillset. question 2: which skills do you currently possess that might help you to manage, supervise, or train others effectively? two major themes emerged from participants’ responses to this question. when asked at the beginning of their first year to describe their current leadership skills, 76% of the women self70 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 reported possessing either a set of primarily relational leadership skills (44%) or a balanced set of skills (32%). ashley, whose list of effective leadership skills was categorized as relational, for example, described her “fairly decent communication skills…and [ability] to communicate with others without coming off as incredibly airy or, um, like really distant.” cobi reported both relational and task-oriented skills when she stated that she was “pretty unbiased and able to listen to other people’s ideas, and i tend to be able to control groups easily.” only three of the women (25%) felt they possessed a higher percentage of taskoriented skills. by the end of their senior year, 44% of the women reported possessing a higher percentage of task-oriented skills than relational-oriented skills, 31% reported possessing a higher percentage of relational-oriented skills, and 25% of women reported employing a balanced set of skills in their leadership behaviors. mia fell into this latter category, stating that she felt “quite organized” and tended to be a “good listener and, um, i like to simplify things so that others can understand them better.” another senior who reported possessing task-oriented and relational skills, albrunner, acknowledged that she occasionally needed to be “very top-down in my leadership but so over the years i have learned to be more perceptive to what other people’s needs are and to kind of…not really announce my presence with authority.” as these data reveal, the percentage of participants who in their first trimester of college reported possessing a higher number of relational skills dropped from 44% to 31% by the end of their senior year (27% decrease). similarly, women who initially reported a relatively equal number of relational and task-oriented skills dropped from 31% to 25% (20% decrease). however, the percentage of women who reported possessing a larger percentage of task-oriented skills than relational grew from 25% to 44% (76% increase). overtime, the women who had learned to value relational skills as more important to an effectively balanced leadership style felt they had developed more taskoriented skills during college, suggesting an inverse correlation between belief and behavior development over time. question 3: comparing yourself with where you were a year ago in terms of your interest in leading, supervising, training, or managing others, has your interest in becoming a leader in your professional field, whatever that might be, decreased or increased? when we compared our participants’ reports over the course of four years, we noticed three intriguing patterns: most women reported an increase in leadership aspirations senior josie, for example, stated: i think it’s probably increased, which i didn’t really think was possible because i thought i already had these really high aspirations, but, i guess the more time i spend in math classrooms and with math students, the more things i realize are wrong with the current system and the way textbooks are written, the way teachers teach the courses…so those are the kinds of things that i hope to be able to address as a professor and in hoping to reform those things i think that that’s like a whole new, you know, level of, of leadership that i wasn’t really even thinking about before… most participants who formed, maintained, or solidified their belief in the superiority of task-oriented leadership reported an increase in their aspirations superfan, for example, specifically noted that her aspirations increased in response to the internal satisfaction experienced when exerting “power over” other students, unabashedly proclaiming that she enjoyed her off-campus position as “a manager… so now i am the boss of all my friends.” most participants who formed, maintained, or solidified their belief in the superiority of relational leadership reported a decrease in their overall leadership aspirations sunshine, for example, who reported a stronger belief in relational skills in an earlier question indicated that: “[leadership aspirations have] definitely decreased as far as what i want to do. maybe later on, once i realize that i can actually modify policy, then i will be more focused on getting…um…attaining a higher administrative-type position, but not right now.” question 4: would you please describe college experiences in the last year that have increased your interest in managing, supervising, or training others in your future field (whatever that might be)? asking participants to identify experiences that affected their leadership aspirations over the course of four years provided us with additional insights. when asked to report experiences that positively influenced their aspirations, participants listed a myriad of classroom and out-of-classroom experiences. two major themes emerged from participants’ responses to this question: classroom group projects were cited as the most important experience as early as their first year and each year thereafter, approximately one third of the women stated that classroom group-project participation had been critically important in fueling their leadership aspirations by bolstering their confidence in their leadership abilities. the most reported confidenceboosting component of group projects was positive feedback from peers. romeo, for example, felt this confidence boost when peers told her that her “opinion really mattered,” asked her how they could “make this section of the paper better?” or commended her on the “really great piece of research” that she found for a project. according to josie, before she started a particular group project during her sophomore year, she wasn’t certain how peers would 71 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 react to her attempts to lead but “because they reacted positively and [have] accepted that i’ve taken on this role, it’s encouraged me to do so in the future.” leadership roles in class and in off-campus jobs increased leadership aspirations many women in our interviews reported that assuming teaching assistant positions and leadership roles in student organizations and off-campus jobs strengthened their leadership aspirations. in these roles, a couple participants reported that the peer reinforcement increased their leadership aspirations. when displaying relational behaviors, for example, josie, who worked as a teaching assistant, explained that she gets: “to work with students one on one, small groups, whatever and uh… working with them has really been a great experience because they'll say things to me later like "oh you're really helpful" or "oh you're going to make such a great professor" and like that is such a huge like confidence booster just to have people tell you that you are actually succeeding at what you're attempting to do and you're managing to teach people.” at the end of her senior year, another participant, cobi, felt that the empowering feedback from her science professors increased her leadership aspirations: “a lot of the professors… umm… in my department have, you know, acknowledged me. you know, i always felt like there were always four other people above me, you know, not necessarily four, but you know, that group of people above me who were, they were looking to… really…as going to be the future leaders in chemistry, you know. that they really had confidence, and i think i've kind of finally, been accepted into that group, i think, i don't know, and you know, acknowledged, as someone that they are confident will succeed well in the field.” ashley felt that her experiences with peers increased her belief and confidence in employing relational skills and decreased her enjoyment of occupying a hierarchical position stating: “i think there was definitely a part in my life where i would relish in that feeling of hierarchy or that… but… i feel like at this point it feels so rewarding to help others. not help others but to work with others through that process and like teach each other and empower each other that um… that is just a really awesome feeling and i think that’s, that’s very encouraging to want to be in positions of leadership or even to be in positions where leadership interactions are valued or personal interactions are highly valued where you are gonna work with each other and teach each other. and i think that’s huge.” cobi reported that employing task-oriented behaviors in her role as a science lab teaching assistant increased her desire to pursue leadership roles because “it was kind of fun to be able to explain to people how to do things and be like, ‘i know how to work this, and this is how you should do it.’ that’s kind of fun.” sunshine similarly reported that group members completed “our own little parts” and that “we all pull[ed] our weight” but when the group needed direction, she did not mind “giving some direction one way or the other to what the goal should be.” question 5: would you please describe college experiences in the last year that have undermined your interest in managing, supervising, or training others in your future field? when thematically organizing responses to this question, we noticed two common obstacles that thwarted student aspirations: negative comparisons to peers/feeling less intelligent eight of the women admitted that negative academic comparisons with their peers during their first year seriously undermined their leadership aspirations. toriamos40, for example, who planned to enter the medical field, felt that her science major was “competitive…and… kind of discouraging at times and overwhelming.” even in their senior year, feeling less intelligent than their peers remained the most common experience that undermined their leadership aspirations. one of the women noticed that her “own lack of ability to assist people in the way that, you know, i should or would want ideally has really shown me that um… maybe almost dissuaded me from wanting to be in a position of leadership just because. if that makes sense?” negative experiences with professors for three of our interviewees, negative relationships or experiences with their professors emerged during their sophomore, junior, and senior year interviews. 3.14159 described her irritation with a professor that she felt undermined her leadership aspirations: “i had a teacher this year write a fairly condescending e-mail when she thought i was under-qualified to be in one of her classes… it would be situations like that where people don’t just give you benefit of the doubt as to what your potential is or what you’re able to do.” similarly, jane doe revealed that her relationship with her professor provided “a sense of doubt in my leadership aspirations” but chose not to expand. as a teaching assistant her senior year, superfan mentioned feeling as though the professor she was working for undermined her authority as a leader by changing grades she gave to students without consulting her first: “i felt like he has tended to undermine me a little in the way we handle the students… it just, you know, kind of draws from the desire to be in a leadership position when other leaders are, um, working against you.” for these participants, messages from professors were not easily discarded and seemed to solidify their underlying self-doubt regarding their leadership skills. 72 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 discussion despite their advances in attaining entry level and middle management leadership positions, women continue to be poorly represented in upper-level leadership roles across many occupational domains. the most cited sociocultural factors responsible for this include institutional gender-biased policies, lack of role models, stereotypical assumptions regarding women’s leadership styles, gender-biased performance evaluations, personal and familial sacrifices, and women’s selfefficacy (eagle et al., 2020). additionally, researchers have found that many potential women leaders perceive themselves to be less skilled than men in competition for elite roles and less worthy of leadership rewards in the workplace. even women in lower or middle-management positions often describe themselves as less confident, competitive, and qualified than their male counterparts for leadership roles and report lower leadership ambition. as a result, these women candidates may possess minimal interest in leadership, particularly the higherlevel positions. surprisingly, leadership aspirations have received insufficient research attention. unless women aspire to lead, they will continue to be underrepresented in higher-level leadership roles. the college experience is a critical time for women to learn about progressive models of leadership, to build leadership skills, and to solidify their leadership aspirations. in order to examine this more closely, we followed a select group of 19 college women for four years to study fluctuations in their selfperceptions as leaders and conceptualizations of effective leadership. we paid close attention to patterns in their development of relational and task-oriented leadership skills, shifts in their leadership aspirations, and experiences that strengthened or undermined their leadership aspirations for future leadership roles. our team hoped the findings would jumpstart the process of designing college-based interventions to increase women’s interest in and confidence in pursing professional positions of higher-level leadership. in our initial interview, we expected most of our first-year participants to describe effective leadership skills as traditional (e.g., delegating tasks, setting job objectives, making decisions, setting firm expectations, acting decisively, etc.). to our surprise, most (63%) described effective leadership as including more relational skills while the remaining participants (37%) described skilled leaders as primarily task-oriented. moreover, by the end of their senior year all but two had developed, maintained, or solidified their belief that a leadership style that included relational behaviors would be most useful. although our sample group of college women attending an elite college was intentionally very specific and thus generalizations for other women cannot be made, our results suggest that before starting college, some women already understand the advantages of infusing relational traits into their leadership style and during college, many increasingly learn to appreciate the importance of relational skills. these findings caused us to expect an increase in the development of their own relational leadership skills over the four-year span: however, the opposite occurred. in the initial interview, most reported that they possessed almost twice as many relational as task-oriented leadership skills, but by graduation most reported a stronger set of task-oriented skills. in other words, most participants developed stronger beliefs in the value of relational leadership behaviors throughout college but developed more task-oriented skills and incorporated them into their behaviors. let us be clear, developing non-authoritative task-oriented skills is important in a well-rounded leader. however, since newer leadership models require both relational and task-oriented behaviors, developing a strong set of relational leadership skills is also of value in a premier leader role. we found that many of our participants put enhancement and refinement of their relational leadership skills on hold which might very well be the set of skills that will distinguish them in the higher-level leadership roles needed for modern organizations. this surprising finding invites our thoughtful reflection on two questions. one, why did most of our participants learn to value relational skills but mostly strengthen their task-oriented skills? and two, how might academicians help students develop both sets of skills? in regard to the first question, the most important factor cited was group participation. for example, three women who did report an increase in their relational skills between their first and senior college years cited meaningful group project interaction with peers who shared a common goal, co-constructed a plan, collaborated with each other, and made consensual decisions as critically important. from their descriptions, it seems the group members co-constructed experiences that strengthened their relationally-oriented skills—a possibility that requires additional empirical attention. interestingly, half of the women who reported an increase in their task-oriented skills also reported that empowering experiences within a group context helped increase those skills. however, those particular groups were described as being authoritatively structured with an emphasis on hierarchy. additionally, some felt most empowered when they emerged as the leader who “took charge.” for example, two interviewees acknowledged internal positive reinforcement when assuming authoritative “power over” other students, particularly when receiving compliments from their peers for their ability to plan, strategize, delegate tasks, organize meeting times, and assume responsibility for a disproportionate number of group tasks. when discussing this finding as a research team, we wondered if this could have occurred because groups often evolve into hierarchical structures with one person assuming the leadership position without pre-project collaboration training. another possibility requiring additional empirical attention is that students solidify their task-oriented skills simply by observing their professors. within the classroom, some faculty model and 73 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 thus unintentionally promote the social learning of traditional and more authoritative behaviors more so than relationallyoriented leadership skills. this style is deeply rooted in the historically traditional college classroom that has been hierarchically constructed. the professor typically employs taskoriented skills including traditional lectures, socratic questioning, and teacher-led discussions. this leads to our second reflection question, “how might academicians help students develop both (relational and task) sets of skills?” professors are frequently taught how to select course content and design effective pedagogical strategies, but they are rarely shown how to infuse leadership principles directly into the classroom. perhaps we can convince faculty that the academic classroom may be an underutilized and ideal learning laboratory for developing leadership skills, though, historically, leadership has been perceived as extracurricular and the exclusive responsibility of student development staff. with training on how to combine leadership skill development into their pedagogy, professors could learn to model a more balanced set of leadership competencies. perhaps this could be achieved by decreasing traditional hierarchical strategies and increasing relational skills through collaborative discussions, student-centered group projects, teaching assistant involvement, student facilitated discussions, team-building assignments, student-designed course content reading lists, and syllabus construction. these strategies can foster the development of both relational and task-oriented skills but only if students are adequately prepared. for example, our participant responses implicitly suggest that too often faculty assign group projects without providing instructions on the process of a group, resulting in a missed educational opportunity. to remedy this problem when assigning group projects, professors should explain the purpose of a collaborative group project and the importance of cultivating a balanced set of leadership skills required for future higher-level leadership positions. additionally, they should teach students how to reflect on their own leadership development while working on the group project, maybe by assigning an article related to progressive leadership models and distributing instructions to explain collaborative principles such as constructing an equally distributed list. professors—or better yet teaching assistants— could facilitate small group discussions to reflect on leadership challenges currently encountered by group members (e.g., the urge to assume responsibility for the tasks assigned to other group members, the urge to wait for the emergence of a strong leader, etc.). following the completion of the group project, the professor and/or teaching assistant could meet with each group to discuss not only the quality of the project but also to process strengths and weaknesses of their individual and team leadership skills. that being said, do professors and teaching assistants even know how to support the group processes and thus inspire students to develop balanced leadership skills? some may, but many may benefit from working with student development staff or trained faculty to prepare for these group discussions. imagine if these two groups collaborated to develop student leadership skills within the academic experience instead of exclusively within extracurricular workshops. leadership aspirations not only should women develop competencies in both relational and task-oriented skills to meet the progressive trend of hiring worker-centered leaders, but in their professional careers, they must aspire for executive leadership positions before striving for these roles. what can faculty do to encourage women to develop these skills and seek elite positions? extrapolating from our participants’ experiences, we identified three key suggestions: leadership aspiration education, leadership aspiration workshops, and leadership aspiration support groups. leadership aspiration education many women who reported stronger task-oriented skills and an increase in their leadership aspirations noted that in their campus or off-campus leadership roles, they received consistent positive feedback when employing more traditional, authoritative behaviors. to encourage these women to revise their assumptions regarding leadership styles and to develop stronger leadership aspirations, faculty could model more relational skills in their classroom as well as integrate research, documentaries, and speakers to demonstrate the value of a balanced leadership style that relies on their empathic skills and interpersonal perceptiveness and teaches students not to exert power over employees but to empower employees to participate actively in the organizational process. additionally, professors could help women reconceptualize their relational traits, such as commitment to collaboration, teamwork, community involvement, mutuality, interactive discussion, and connection with others as signs of their leadership capabilities. even more importantly, college women could learn to appreciate how their relational attributes are not simply skills to lead employees toward organizational goals; they also carry the potential to empower employees toward personal growth and organizational transformation, thus empowering them to aspire for higher positions. leadership aspirations workshops across the country, college personnel frequently offer leadership skill-building workshops but rarely develop leadership aspiration training. in leadership aspiration building workshops, committed faculty and staff leaders within departments like gender studies and psychology could describe their leadership aspirations and how they blend relational and task-oriented skills into their leadership style. hearing strong women role models talk about women’s strengths and how well-suited task and relationallyoriented women are for modern leadership could strengthen women students’ aspirations. participants could also examine factors empirically shown to influence aspirations such as selfesteem, leadership self-efficacy, work climate, labor division, 74 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 relational issues, and reflection on the personal and professional pros and cons involved in seeking leadership roles. additionally, students could learn how to develop critical skills predictive of future career success as elite leaders. college leadership workshops often attract women who fit the stereotypical authoritative leadership model and who have received praise for their assertive managerial skills. they fail to attract women who not only possess task-oriented organizational skills but also relational-oriented leadership skills. due to outdated and patriarchal assumptions about “natural born” authoritative leaders, some relationally skilled women with minimal leadership experience doubt their leadership acumen and prematurely foreclose on these workshop opportunities. the finding that many participants who reported a decline in their leadership aspirations by their senior year were more inclined to conceptualize effective leadership as relational further illuminates the need to recruit these women for leadership aspiration workshops. how do we attract all potential women leaders to these workshops? faculty and advisors should encourage these often overlooked and relationally skilled women to participate in leadership aspiration workshops designed to help them realize their potential for the balanced leadership positions that require both sets of skills. additionally, because solid students with effective relational or team-building traits may be less likely to “stand out” in a classroom and thus less likely to receive a professor’s recommendation for a leadership program, workshop developers could work closely with faculty to familiarize them with leadership model changes and help them identify these overlooked but capable women. leadership aspirations support groups student development personnel could also offer leadership aspirational training in the context of a women’s support group. as we learned from our participants, students are highly influenced by the perceptions that their peers hold of their leadership capabilities. additionally, several of our participants reported that they often evaluated themselves negatively when comparing their leadership skills with those of their peers. a non-competitive and supportive environment would enable groups of women to recognize each other’s relational and taskoriented strengths as well as help them consolidate a multifaceted leadership skill set. clearly, more women are needed in elite leadership positions. we see evidence of effective leadership in corporate america and women heads of state. very recently, new zealand and taiwanese women leaders were lauded for having the most effective responses to the global covid-19 pandemic (maclean, 2020). they were successful because they were relational and task-oriented leaders who combined a sense of humanity and inclusion with effective task management. they motivated broad cooperation along with effective management and received praise for their leadership. certainly, women have developed their task-oriented skills, but they need to see their relational skills as a strength not to be deserted in emerging leadership. faculty and student personnel have a responsibility to support the next generation of leaders by recognizing not only how to build skills but to start at the very foundation. we begin by understanding, tapping, and supporting further growth of leadership aspirations for women during the college years so that aspirations are strengthened based on women’s relational skills rather than the falling away that we observed in our study. our hope is that this research will stimulate even more investigation leading to a deeper understanding and resultant actions to support the growth of leadership aspirations for women during the college years. references beaman, l., duflo, e., pande, r., & topalova, p. 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(2020, january). employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and hispanic or latino ethnicity.https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm veihmeyer, j., & doughtie, l. (2017). kpmg women’s leadership study: moving women forward into leadership roles. kpmg llp. retrieved from https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/ph/pdf/thoughtle adershippublications/kpmgwomensleadershipstudy.pd f wilson, j. m. (2020). the role of discrimination in women's advancement to senior leadership in environmental industries (publication no. 28023718) [doctoral dissertation, capella university]. proquest dissertations publishing. https://www.proquest.com/openview/c7809a544128bd89 4ce8b67786401709/1?pqorigsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 18, spring 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        rethinking leadership: leadership as friendship gerri perreault university of northern iowa …our brother who has been educated at schools and universities.  do we wish to join that procession, or don't we?  on what terms shall we join that procession?  above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men?    --virginia woolf, three guineas, 1938 virginia woolf (1938) in three guineas asked where the procession of educated men was leading us.  she raised fundamental concerns about the procession of men who had been educated in colleges and universities.  answering her own question, she pointed out that the procession was leading to war.  the political and social system, she believed, generated competitiveness, tyranny, possessiveness, and violence (carroll 1978).  in three guineas, when a man from a peace society asks for help in preventing war, her response is:  "we can best help you to prevent war by not repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods" (p. 143).  if woolf were writing today, she would raise similar questions about leadership and would be critical not only of where leadership has taken us but also how people in general tend to view leadership.  the early popularity of the so-called afghanistan "war" and iraq "war" would confirm for woolf her earlier views.  she would, however, be pleased to note the number of people and groups that have been leading from a different model for leadership.  their leadership could be characterized as leadership as friendship. this paper proposes a rethinking of leadership that challenges the dominance of the military battle metaphor and proposes an alternative metaphor--friendship.  the paper first discusses the nature of metaphors and critiques the military battle approach to leadership.  it then focuses on friendship as a metaphor for a relational conception and practice of leadership.  the paper concludes with examples of people who lead within such a framework. the nature of metaphor "where imagery leads, policy follows."                          --elle goodman, 1989 metaphors are powerful illuminative tools and provide insights into taken-for-granted assumptions.  mcfague (1987) likens metaphors to imaginative pictures that present partial but illuminative "imaginative leaps" across a distance (pp. 34, 63).  metaphors help people make "imaginative leaps" in order to be able to see facets they may not otherwise notice and envision possibilities that may have otherwise remained unseen and unthought.  imagination is particularly called for in the discussion of leadership in terms of a "friendship" metaphor that presents a more ideal model of leadership.  constructing new possibilities requires imagination.  as emily dickinson pointed out, "the possible’s slow fuse is lit by the imagination" (dickinson, 1914, p. 30).  examining metaphors is important also because metaphors have consequences for behavior.  metaphors are pervasive not only in how we think but also in how we feel and how we perceive reality.  lakoff and johnson (1981) point out that "metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but in thought and action. . . .  our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people" (p. 287).  functioning as "invisible https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html powers" (clancy, 1989), metaphors not only structure our perceptions but influence the actions that flow from those perceptions (p. 295).  the discussion of the metaphors of military battle and friendship is intended to provide a "partial but illuminative" (p. 295) picture of the complex phenomenon of leadership and illustrate how metaphors can structure perceptions and behaviors vis-a-vis the leader-follower relationship in radically different ways.  the military battle metaphor the military battle metaphor is a dominant metaphor in the u. s.  the key to understanding the world view of this metaphor is to examine its most fundamental root, its ontology.  ontology has to do with the nature of reality, and a key distinction is whether or not one perceives a world composed of building blocks or a world that is fundamentally interconnected (see e.g., capra, 1982, 1975; deloria, 1979; heisenberg, 1962; perreault, 1983, 1980).  this distinction is the difference between perceiving oneself separate from the world vs. perceiving oneself connected to/with the world. in the military battle metaphor, the ontology and basic assumption is one of separation from the world.  in battle, to be able to kill other people, one has to make them into enemies.  this is done by distancing oneself from others, and conceiving of others as an object, as "the other," someone radically different and separate from oneself.  it is such a stance--separation--which allows someone to define others as enemies.  one can only make an enemy of someone who one has already made into an object (perreault, l983; griffin, 1982; keen, 1986). the military battle metaphor is pervasive in most areas of society.  the language is that of targets, task forces, doing battle, attack, adversaries and enemies, and covering your flanks.  this use can be seen in lakoff and johnson's (1981) analysis of how military language is reflected in arguments.  the person one disagrees with is viewed as an opponent, and arguments are won or lost.  lakoff and johnson provide the following expressions as examples of the military battle influence (pronouns have been changed to gender-free language): your claims are indefensible. they  attacked every weak point in my argument. their criticisms were right on target. i demolished their argument. i've never won an argument with them. they shot down all my arguments (pp. 288-289). deborah tannem (1999) has similar views.  describing u.s. society as an "argument culture," she says that "war metaphors pervade our talk and our thinking.  nearly everything is framed as a battle or game in which winning and losing is the main concern" (p. 4).                                      one example where this orientation can be observed is in how election processes and presidential debates are framed.  someone once quipped, "politics is war by other means."  bunch (1988) pointed out in the late 80s that the presidential debates were focused on the question, "who won the debates?" and she asked "why such a focus?"  such a focus is still evident today.  in the election process, the talk is framed in a context of the "military battle" metaphor.  the presidential debates are viewed as part of a campaign to win a series of battles rather than as an opportunity to inform the electorate about what their choices are.  the focus is on winning the battles, hence the question, "who won the debate?"   pollsters, the media, and strategists tell us who is ahead but scarcely a notion about who has a better conception of where society should be headed.  the military battle metaphor limits the ability of leaders to lead in many situations, especially in today's complex organizations, society, and world.  if one begins with an assumption of an enemy, this mindset keeps the person from seeing a broader range of options.  for example, columnist ellen goodman (1989) notes the importance of war imagery and language on the drug war.  she points out that the use of the "war on drugs" metaphor was intended to mobilize action against drugs.   but she warns that "where imagery leads, policy follows," and she explains that "the way we label things, talk and think about them, inevitably has an effect on how we behave" (goodman, 1989, p. 14a).  goodman concludes, "what is needed is less of an assault mentality and more of a healing one."  for a complex social problem like drug abuse, she would substitute a marshall plan in place of a war plan.  joseph mcnamara (1995), a former police chief (san jose, california and kansas city, missouri), expresses views similar to goodman's.  in interviews regarding the bigotry and behavior of l. a. police detective mark fuhrman, mcnamara pointed out how a focus on a "drug war" sets the context of dealing with an enemy, and that such a mindset can lead to disregard for the law (mcnamara, 1995; sack, 1995).  as mcnamara explained, "once you get that war mentality, anything goes" (1995, p. 4a). the metaphor and language of military battle assume an enemy at the start.  although that may be how people feel at times, and it might be that at times people may have to protect themselves as if the other person was an enemy (i.e., someone who is out to destroy them), it is important to begin at a different place.  framing one's world within an "enemy" perspective impedes the cooperation needed to get things done.  equally important is the impact on ethics.  destructive means are justified, by the (presumably) noble ends sought.  in a society that appears to have lost its moral compass, the "ends justifies the means" orientation keeps the moral compass buried in a magnetic vault, unable to point a direction. in contrast, using friendship as a metaphor for leadership provides a way to convey a view and practice of leadership in which connection and relationship are basic.   the nature of friendship in proposing leadership in terms of a friendship metaphor, the concept of friendship is necessarily that of a highly developed and mature friendship (perreault, 1996a, 1996b).  it is not a "fair-weather" friendship dependent on the whims of another or an instrumental friendship based on the rewards one hopes to receive from the relationship, for example, a business owner being friends with a legislator.  it is what can be called genuine friendship, a friendship in which one seeks the welfare not only of oneself but also of the other.  friends feel a connection with each other, listen and seek to understand, respect each other, and support each other but are not afraid to voice criticism of potential errors and misjudgments.  indeed, as friedman (1993) argues, friends may promote the moral growth of each other. a variety of views on friendship exist (e.g., aristotle, 1925; friedman, 1993; hunt, 1992; martin, 1935; mcfague, 1987; meilaender, 1985; raymond 1986; welty & sharp 1991).  hunt's and mcfague's views are particularly useful for my work.  in her book, a feminist theology of friendship, hunt conceives of friendship as "an underlying stance that one takes toward the world, beginning at home and with those closest to home.  loving one's neighbor is the most logical extension of loving oneself and one's family" (p. 37).  friendship is the "true human relational norm" (p. 9) and "serves as a useful paradigm of right relation for the whole of creation" (p. 2).  she sees generativity as "the hallmark of friendship" (p. 99).  it is her perspective on friendship as a stance toward the world that will be highlighted later for the conception of leadership as friendship. mcfague (1987) has a similarly broad view of friendship.  in models of god she uses friend as a metaphor for god.  although conceptions of friendship typically view the friendship relationship as an exclusive one, mcfague conceives of friendship as an inclusive relationship.  she cites a biblical quote in which jesus is called the "friend of tax collectors and sinners" to illustrate that friendship can include outsiders (p. 158). another difference from the usual concept of friendship is mcfague's inclusion of a common vision or interest as an important feature of friendship.  this element, she says, "opens it [friendship] onto the world" (p. 162).  she cites the society of friends (quakers) as an example of such friendship (p. 162).  similarly, one of the communities in the buddhist religion is called "friends of the western buddhist order" (friends of the. . ., 2005).  members of both communities of "friends" are bound together not by personal friendship relationships but by commitment to shared spiritual vision. both hunt and mcfague extend friendship beyond a personal relationship.  their perspective on friendship as a broad and inclusive relationship is central to the conception of leadership as friendship in this paper. leadership as friendship since metaphors structure both perception and action, conceptualizing leadership as friendship provides a stance toward/with the world that can contribute to shaping new actions and ways of thinking.  that friendship stance is a relational view of leadership, grounded in perceptions of connection and inter-dependence from which emerge a sense of respect and responsibility for the welfare of self and others.   such leaders seek to understand the views and needs of others, refuse to define others as enemies, and are open to the potential mutuality of the parties involved in any situation.  they are inclusive in their definition of "the other."  this conceptualization of leadership extends the responsibilities of leadership beyond one's own group.  the friendship metaphor asks leaders to assume and affirm the best in human beings, whether as followers, potential followers, and even those who are viewed as "enemies."  these qualities are described in more detail in this section. an ontology of interdependence and connection as with the military battle metaphor, the heart of a friendship metaphor lies in its ontology, its view of the nature of reality.  within the friendship view of reality, the mode of relationship to the world is fundamentally one of connection and interdependence.  the shift from an ontology based on separation to a friendship ontology based on connection is as radical as the paradigm shift in physics from a newtonian model of a universe composed of building blocks to a quantum physics model of a universe that is fundamentally interconnected (see, e.g., capra, 1975, 1982; deloria, 1979; heisenberg, 1958; perreault, 1980).   a respect for others  grounded in a perception of interdependence and connection, the characteristic most fundamental to a friendship metaphor is that of basic respect for others.  friedman (1993) discusses two kinds of respect that friendships seem to exhibit.  one is a respect based on admiration of a person because of specific worthwhile qualities.  the second is a respect for persons as moral equals.  according to friedman, this second type of respect is a "principle about the inherent moral worth of persons" (p. 193).  such respect is ". . . owed to all persons, regardless whether or not we like them or think well of them.  it has nothing to do with individual merit or moral qualities" (p. 193).  it is friedman's second notion of respect that forms the basis for the type of friendship discussed in this article.1  this respect places a value on others that is based on a common humanity, and is not dependent on status, position, sameness of views and nationality, or potential rewards.  this conception calls on leaders to recognize the humanity of everyone and treat everyone with respect, not only one's followers but even those whom a leader might traditionally define as enemies.  more on this below. a relational and participatory approach  with the grounding in a perception of interdependence and a respect for others, the friendship metaphor changes the notion of leadership and of the leader-follower relationship.  leadership is viewed in relational terms; leadership is not a trait of an individual but a relationship among all involved.  as such, it is inherently participatory.  leadership is not simply leaders doing leadership as in the heroic model or the john wayne type of leadership.  leaders and followers do leadership together.2  the relationship of leaders and followers is not one of general-troop, parent-child, or managersubordinate, but of friend to friend engaged in genuine dialogue.  leaders and followers together comprise the leadership relationship.  significantly, the leader-follower role can change, depending upon the needs of the situation, with leaders becoming followers and followers becoming leaders.3 a commitment to listen to understand perspectives and needs  part of respecting others, especially for leaders, is being motivated to listen in order to understand the perspectives and needs of others.  noddings (1984) in her book, caring, points out that "caring involves stepping out of one's own personal frame of reference into the other's" (p. 24).4  being able to comprehend the perspectives of others is necessary if leaders are to care about and for others.  decisions need to take into account the actual, not assumed, views and needs of all involved.5  only by understanding reality from the frameworks, views, and needs of the people involved can leaders fully comprehend the consequences of their actions or inactions on all stakeholders in any particular situation.    in addition, listening has powerful effects on the person to whom a leader is listening. brenda ueland (1992) in a remarkable essay describes what happens when people feel heard:   "when we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.  ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life" (p. 104).  she believes a creative fountain "is in us all" and that "it is this little creative fountain inside us that begins to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected laughter and wisdom" (p. 105).  the effects of listening are powerful dynamics for leaders who seek to empower others. listening is related to the ability to take the perspective of others, and this ability contributes to more effective leadership even as measured by traditional measures of success such as climbing the corporate ladder.  in a study of factors that lead to success and derailment of leaders in a corporation, mccall and lombardo (1983) found that two of the primary factors were insensitivity to others and the inability to take the perspective of others. a process view of vision a related consideration is the source of the vision for the group.  even in fairly progressive books on leadership, the leader is often presented as the person who has the vision for a group.  sometimes this is true and appropriate in a particular context.   although a vision for a group may derive from a leader, it may as likely emerge from the work of leaders and followers in a joint effort.   this is another reason why listening is so important for leaders. one could think of these two differences in terms of a "product leader" and a "process leader."  presumably you may have both kinds in one person but the traditional conception of leadership is that of a leader as a product leader--the leader furnishes a vision (product) and then either influences or coerces6 people to become followers of that vision.   in the process view, the leader helps the group develop a collective vision.  the friendship approach leans towards the process view but also recognizes that the type of decision-making depends upon the goal and the group.  this approach rejects the idea that it is always the leader's role to provide the vision.7  indeed, for some problems, it is dangerous to assume one leader has the answer for the rest of the group.  in other cases, such a view may squelch better visions unexpressed by people in the group.   a broad realm of responsibility  more radically, the friendship approach changes the leader's relationship with, for want of a better word, "non-followers," that is, people who are not in the leadership group.  this point is a major one and deserves more extensive discussion.  decisions need to take into account the effects on others ("stakeholders," to use a business term).  the friendship stance calls leaders to move beyond the leader-follower relationship as commonly conceived and to recognize the humanity of everyone and, as noted earlier, to treat everyone with respect.  respect and responsibility are extended beyond one's group to include not only potential followers in that world but even those who are and may remain, in traditional terms, "enemies."  the capacity to apprehend the view of others is needed in all leader-follower relationships, but is needed even more, and is more difficult to do, with those who are not currently in one's leadership relationship. harkening back to hunt's (1992) and mcfague's (1987) views of friendship, "enemies" are to be included in the leader's realm of respect and responsibility.  the word "enemy" is in quotes to show that this is a word that a friendship orientation strives to avoid.  thinking of anyone (individual or nation) as enemies closes out options for relating.  as noddings (1989) points out, "when we think of people as enemies it is easy to put them outside the moral community, to devalue their moral worth" (p. 198).  here the assumption of connection and interdependence is key, for such an assumption precludes, or at least makes more difficult, the defining of other people as enemies or other nations as evil empires.  as riddle (1982) points out, "violence is possible only when we objectify others, i.e., distance ourselves from them.  as long as we are aware of our unity with others, we are aware that in harming another, we also harm ourselves" (p. 38).  if one conceives of the world as connected and not separate from self, then one is less likely to objectify others (perreault, 1983), and one's first response to others may be more welcoming rather than hostile. a unilateral (non-reciprocal) ethics   in terms of ethics, this approach has a unilateral ethics perspective.  as is probably apparent by now, the leader's respectful and responsible actions under friendship are not predicated on positive or respectful responses from others.  noddings' (1984) view of the caring fits here also.  although her view of the caring relationship as a non-reciprocal one has been criticized as a unilateral one (hoagland, 1991), noddings' perspective on this point is a critical one for the ethical behavior of leaders.  in her view, care is not necessarily a mutual relationship, except in its mature form.  it does not demand an equal response from the other:  "what the cared-for does to the caring relation is not a promise to behave as the one-caring does, nor is it a form of 'consideration'. . . .  the focus of our attention will be upon how to meet the other morally" (p. 4).  similarly, the integrity and ethical behavior of leaders cannot depend upon an expectation of reciprocity of ethical behavior from followers or nonfollowers. an optimistic view of human nature  also apparent, the conception of leadership as friendship requires an optimistic view of human nature.  it calls on the leader to approach others with initial trust and to assume the best about people.   discussion of noddings' carer is useful here also.  nodding proposes that the carer "always approaches the other as though the other has a respectable motive.  indeed, the motive of the other has an a priori respectability that may be denied only with justification--if it is to be discredited at all" (p. 123).  griffin (1982) expresses a similar view when, discussing the feminist movement, she argues for the importance of replacing hatred for an enemy with a "vision of possibility" (p. 660).  to begin with an assumption of an enemy relationship leads to the assumption becoming self-fulfilling.  friendship asks the leader to have a vision of possibility, to begin with optimism and trust, and to withdraw that trust only with a compelling justification.                       in summary, a friendship orientation to leadership is a stance toward the world that is grounded in a perception of connection and interdependence.  the friendship stance leads leaders to approach the world with a profound respect for others and a sense of responsibility for the welfare of others, a responsibility that is broad and inclusive in its reach.  leaders assume the best about others, and have an optimistic view of people and possibilities.  they recognize the importance of genuinely listening to others and understanding their perspectives and needs.  they refuse to define anyone as an enemy, and are open to the potential mutuality of the parties involved in any situation.  their actions as leaders are not contingent on the probability that the response from others will be equally respectful.  they are aware of and accept that fact that a respectful stance does not necessarily bring forth a respectful response.  leaders can only maintain such a respectful stance by sustaining themselves with a vision of possibilities. friendship and leadership cases:  acting on a vision of  "the possible’s" "the possible’s slow fuse is lit by the imagination."  --emily dickinson leaders need a vision of possibility.8  conceptualizing friendship as leadership is intended, as discussed earlier, to help leaders and followers make "imaginative leaps" in order to see new possibilities.  imagination is called for because the "friendship" metaphor highlights a somewhat ideal model of leadership.  as such, it is not a common model that can be observed everyday.  what cannot be imagined cannot take place.  as emily dickinson (1914) pointed out, "the possible’s slow fuse is lit by the imagination" (p. 30).  leaders practicing from within a friendship metaphor call on their imagination to see "the possible’s," the possibilities they may not otherwise see. although the friendship model is an ideal one, examples can be found of leaders and followers who approximate this ideal, leaders and followers who can see beyond the norm to imagine dickinson's  "possible’s."  two examples will be discussed--an organization called common ground for life and choice and a higher education administrator, sue follon.    common ground for life and choice one striking example of leadership as friendship is the common ground network for life and choice, an organization founded by the leaders of the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" movements.  common ground grew out of the abortion battles (literally; this is not a metaphor here) in this country.  in let's talk (koop & johnson, 1992), a book by former surgeon general c. everett koop and dr. tim johnson, koop describes to johnson the effect of what can be called a military battle approach to the abortion issue: i do agree with you, tim, about the futility of the shrill cries from both sides, from those who are "prochoice" and those who are "pro-life."  the rhetoric has reached unprecedented heights, and the headliners in the newspapers remind one of world war ii with "battle cry," "combat," "war," "battle strategy," and so on.  crushing the enemy has become the goal, to be achieved no matter what ethical and moral  principles get trampled in the process.  success amounts to who can rent the largest number of school buses to transport marchers to washington, d.c., for a demonstration.   (p. 19) it is rejection of that approach and the projection of the vision of what might be possible that has animated the founders of common ground.  common ground emerged in spite of the deeply held ideological beliefs and intense emotional feelings on both sides of the abortion debate.  some of the leaders were able to move beyond the enemy-based, battleground approach to an approach more consistent with a friendship model.  common ground leaders are able to see the best in people.  wolf (wolf & mathewes-green, 1999), speaking at a common ground meeting, explained how martin luther king, jr., was an inspiration for her.  she said that he "addressed his opponents as if he were addressing the highest, most noble, most potential place in them" (p. 34).  like king, common ground members reach out beyond their own followers to the "other side" to seek shared solutions and work together on concerns and areas in which they have common ground (cage, 1992; goodman, 1992; isaacson-jones, 1992).   respect for each other and genuine listening have been clear components of their work together. interestingly, not all the followers of the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" leaders are in agreement with their leaders' involvement in common ground; they question how their leaders can talk to "those people" (isaacson-jones, 1992, p. 12).  but the leaders are motivated by a larger vision.  isaacson-jones (1992) belongs to common ground.  refusing to make others into an enemy, she eloquently explains that she has "never lost sight of the idea that the other side is not the enemy.  we are political adversaries, not enemies.  the enemy is unwanted pregnancies.  the enemy is poverty.  the enemy is ignorance.  the enemy is racism.  these enemies are common to us all" (p. 12).   similarly, wymen's premise is that  "to end abortion in america we must eliminate the root cause of abortion" (cited in goodman, 1992).   he and others assume a more humane society will result in a greater reduction of abortions.   members of common ground direct their energies toward areas where problems can be solved, and they have faith that talking and listening will lead to understanding and to solutions that current divisive strategies block.  ultimately, their efforts will reduce abortion as well as improve the lives of children and mothers.  their leadership affirms the constructive potential of a friendship approach to leadership. sue follon, a university vice president "the role of a leader is to bring forth the genius and spirit of her people."                                                   --sue follon a second example of leadership within a friendship framework is dr. sue follon who was the vice president for educational and student services at the university of northern iowa (uni) from 1985 until her untimely death due to lung cancer in 1998.  she was the first woman to be named a vice president at uni, and headed ten divisions in the student services area.  prior to that, she was involved in equal rights for women for the state of iowa.   she served for nine years as executive director of the iowa commission on the state of women.  she had a long-time commitment to justice for all, particularly women.  her awards include the cristine wilson medal for equality and justice and the salute award for outstanding contributions to the progress of women. although follon left no written records of her views, they can be gleaned from observations and interviews of people who worked with her (and she would say "with," not "for").  when i was first hired at uni, i would hear comments that her staff would die for her.  i realized why this was so when dr. follon spoke to one of my leadership classes and stated that the role of a leader was to "bring out the genius and spirit of her people."  everyone interviewed agreed that that quote represented sue follon's leadership.  for example, pat geadelmann (personal communication, march 24, 2000), assistant to the president, responded, "that quote is reflective of sue’s views because she brought out the best in people and made people want to give their best."  sue follon's leadership reflects many of the qualities of leadership as friendship (geadelmann, personal communication, march 24, 2000). she had a relational approach to leadership.  for follon, leaders and followers participated in leadership together.  the current vice president, renee romano (personal communication, march 3, 2000), and pat geadelmann (personal communication, march 24, 2000) said follon constantly built relationships.   she was a very unassuming leader with a remarkable quiet strength.  her style was collaborative and personalized.  she had the ability to relate to individuals and to have them feel valued and important and recognize that they had a contribution to make. she never did anything to put herself in the spotlight.  at the same time, she had tremendous skill at building a team and bringing all those individuals together (geadelmann, personal communication, march 24, 2000). follon demonstrated respect for others.  she "valued the worth and dignity of every human being and tried to treat everyone with respect".  she treated people with respect (romano, personal communication, march 3, 2000; geadelmann, personal communication, march 24, 2000), even if you disagreed with her.  people felt "unconditionally accepted by her".  interestingly, one result of the respect that she accorded everyone was that people who worked in groups with her respected each other as well (geadelmann, personal communication, march 24, 2000). an example from her years with the iowa commission on the status of women shows follon's ability to work with everyone and treat everyone with respect, an ability to work even across so-called "enemy" lines.  a new governor appointed a number of anti-era and anti-choice people to the commission.  follon, however, found ways to bring the group together.  people were able to listen to each other and everyone was able to make contributions to the cause of women (geadelmann, personal communication, march 24, 2000).  as in her leadership of her student services division later at uni, she respected everyone and as a result everyone learned to respect each other, and could work well together. follon was always interested in others, and believed it was important for all voices to be heard.  in order to have all voices heard, leaders have to welcome dissent also.  when asked whether or not follon encouraged dissent, geadelmann's response was insightful.  she said that follon encouraged dissent not by saying 'i want to hear your disagreements' but by having everyone feel comfortable and feel free to speak.  people felt accepted because people felt so unconditionally accepted by her and did not have to worry about whether or not a disagreement would reflect poorly on them.  she never set about trying to generate conflict or controversy but people were free to express differing views.  she thought that letting people be heard was all that mattered.  so she was not afraid that having someone say something negative was going to sidetrack the general goals.  she felt by having all the views on the table that the result would come out better. follon was strong in her own beliefs and principles, but she did not see herself as the only one with ideas or a vision.  her statement reflects that perspective:  "the role of a leader is to bring forth the genius and spirit of her people."  as romano (2000) said, follon hired people who were in line with her values and then let them direct their own programs.   at meetings of all the division heads for educational and student services, with follon leading as a process leader, meetings were spent having everyone's voices heard.  her approach called forth from people their "creative fountains," a phrase used by ueland (1992) to describe what happens when someone really listens to another person.  follon's profound respect for everyone and her willingness to listen to everyone reflect her optimistic view of human nature.   her leadership was clearly that of a friend who cares for the welfare of others. limitations of a friendship metaphor any view of leadership has its strengths and its limitations.  the most common objection about a friendship approach is, "but how can one be friendly with one's subordinates?"  a related objection is that a friendship orientation will get in the way of accountability, that it would be difficult to hold one's friends accountable.   in thinking about leadership in terms of friendship, readers and listeners have remember that friendship is being discussed as a metaphor, and metaphors do not have a one-to-one correspondence with reality.  thinking about leadership as friendship does not require one to be friends or "friendly" with followers or subordinates.  what it does require is respect for everyone, even for those outside the leadership relationship and even those whom one might traditionally define as "enemies." indeed, one could argue that a grounding in respect would make it easier to provide negative feedback, that a relationship of respect diminishes the likelihood that criticism would be taken as a personal attack.  if two people respect each other, criticism by one or the other is less likely to be perceived as a message about her/his inherent unworthiness; the connection of respect is there to sustain the relationship.  as noted earlier, friedman (1993) believes friends may promote the moral growth of each other. another objection to a friendship approach is that it is too ideal, that people will not necessarily respond positively.  no guarantee exists that one's friendship approach will result in a like response.  clearly, responding with trust and openness is a risk.  as noddings (1984) says about care, we may not know "until too late that we are dealing with evil" but this risk "is an unavoidable danger of acting under the guidance of an ethic of caring" (p. 116).  however, one can also question the effectiveness of approaches that are adversarial or violent.  in noddings' (1989) view, "the adversarial/competitive model is deeply entrenched in our customs, beliefs, and institutions, and we cannot transform it easily. . . .  the warrior model threatens to destroy us all" (p. 190).  certainly, the approach most opposite to a friendship/caring approach--assuming evil on the part of others and acting on that assumption--is at least as risky, as the experiences of the u. s. in vietnam and iraq have demonstrated.  although more of a reality to anticipate than a limitation, one fact to note is that leaders who live from within a friendship orientation can expect to be misunderstood in a culture that (1) exalts the individual pursuit of one's own selfinterest and (2) expects leaders to be the individual, heroic decision-makers and miracle workers who act decisively with strength (narrowly defined as coercive) to fix things.  former president carter's actions in korea generated a number of negative reactions.  for example, a national review article was titled "gullible's travels" ("gullible's travels," 1994).  senator paul wellstone faced a similar situation regarding use of the boundary waters wilderness area in minnesota.  when he tried to organize federal mediation over the dispute, he was accused of waffling (bassett, 1996). leaders need to take into account the limitations of any approach including this one.  but the limitations are not insurmountable.  the most difficult one is the last one because the friendship orientation is so different from the dominant mindset.  awareness of the potential benefits can sustain the efforts toward new views and practices of leadership. concluding comments woolf (1938) in three guineas asked where the procession of educated men was leading.  her list of concerns exists yet today, with others added. the leadership challenges are enormous--an unconscionable rich-poor gap, in this country and world-wide, ghastly wars and internecine strife, violence of all types and degrees, and environmental destruction that threatens the sustainability of all, to name only a few. underlying these tragedies are conceptions of the self as separate from others and the world.  the challenges call for new ways to think about and practice leadership, or as woolf (1938) said, "by finding new words and creating new methods" (p. 143).  metaphors are compelling "invisible powers."  since metaphors structure both perception and action, conceptualizing leadership as friendship provides a stance toward/with the world that can contribute to shaping new actions and ways of thinking. that friendship stance is grounded in perceptions of connection and interdependence from which emerge a sense of responsibility and care. this conceptualization of leadership as friendship extends the responsibilities of leadership beyond one's own group. leaders within a friendship orientation can only maintain such a stance by having a vision of dickinson’s “possible’s" that are ”lit by the imagination.”  such a view allows leaders to leave behind, at least temporarily,9 an adversarial approach for one that is more respectful and open to the potential, if not yet actualized, mutuality of the parties involved, as illustrated by the cases above.  leaders practicing within a friendship metaphor call on their imagination to see "the possible’s," the possibilities they might otherwise not see.  the friendship metaphor asks leaders to affirm the best in human beings, whether as followers, potential followers, or those who are viewed as "enemies" of the leader.  it promotes the making of "imaginative leaps" (mcfague's phrase) across a distance.  in doing so, it expands our capacities to imagine what ought to be, to act on that vision, and to respect and care for each other in an interdependent world, ultimately shaping a more humane world. references aristotle.  (1925).  friendship (books viii and ix).  the nicomachean ethics.  oxford, england:  oxford university press. bunch, c. (1988, fall).  presentation to feminist education conference, duluth, mn. brabeck, m. m. (ed.).  (1989).  who cares?  theory, research and educational implications of the ethic of care.  new york:  praeger. burns, j. m.  (2003, fall)  we're operating on a frontier.  compass, 1(1), 5-8. burns, j. m.  (1978a)  leadership. new york: harper and row. burns, j. m. (1978b, october).  true leadership.  psychology today, 12(5), 46-48, 50, 53-54, 57-58, 110. cage, m. (1992, autumn).  humanizing the debate.  conscience, 13(3), 10-11.  capra, f. (1982).  the turning point:  science, society and the rising culture.  new york:  simon and schuster. capra, f.  (1975).  the tao of physics.  berkeley, ca:  shambhala. carroll, b. (1978, february).  `to crush him in our own country': the political thought of virginia woolf.  feminist studies, 4(1), 99-131. clancy, j. j.  (1989).  the invisible powers:  the language of business. lexington, ma:  lexington books (d. c. heath and co.). cole, e. b., & coultrap-mcquin, s.  (eds.).  (1992).  explorations in feminist ethics:  theory and practice.  bloomington:  indiana university press. deloria, v.  (1979).  the metaphysics of modern existence.  san francisco: harper and row. dickinson, e.  (1914).  poem #27.  in the single hound: poems of a lifetime, p. 30. boston: little, brown. dillon, r. s.  (1992).  care and respect.  in e. b. cole & s. coultrap-mcquin (eds.), explorations in feminist ethics:  theory and practice, (pp. 69-81).  bloomington:  indiana university press. farley, m. a.  (1993, spring/fall).  a feminist version of respect for persons.  journal of feminist studies in religion, 9(1-2), 183-198. friedman, m. (1993).   what are friends for?  feminist perspectives on personal relationships and moral theory.  ithaca, ny:  cornell university press. friends of the western buddhist order.  retrieved january 25, 2005 from http://www.fwbo.org/ gilligan, c., ward, j. v., taylor, j. m., & bardige, b.  (1988).  mapping the moral domain.  cambridge, ma:  center for the study of gender education and human development, harvard university graduate school of education. goodman, e.  (1992, september 23).  a prolifer for better choices.  star tribune.   goodman, e.  (1989, november 20).  stamp out cold war thinking.  star tribune, 14a. griffin, s.  (1982).  the way of all ideology.  signs:  journal of women in culture and society, 7, 641-660. gullible's travels (j. carter's trip to north korea). (1994, july 11).  national review, 46, 16. heifetz, r. a.  (1994) . leadership without easy answers.  cambridge, ma:  belknap press of harvard university press. heisenberg, w.  (1958/1962)  physics and philosophy:  the revolution in modern science.  new york: harper and row. hoagland, s. l.  (1991).  some thoughts about 'caring.'  in claudia card (ed.), feminist ethics (pp. 246-263).  lawrence:  university press of kansas. hunt, mary e.  (1992).  fierce tenderness:  a feminist theology of friendship.  new york:  crossroads. ingwer, c. (1993, march).  recognizing the divine spark.  fellowship, p. 7. isaacson-jones, b. j.   (1992, autumn).  adversaries, not enemies.  conscience, 13(3), 11-12. keen, s.  (1986).  faces of the enemy:  reflections of the hostile imagination.  new york:  harper and row. http://www.fwbo.org/ http://www.fwbo.org/ kittay, e. f., &  meyers, d. t.  (eds.).  (1987).  women and moral theory. totowa, nj: rowman and littlefield. koop, c. e., & johnson, t.  (1992).  let's talk. grand rapids, mi:  zondervan publishing house. lakoff, g., & johnson, m.  (1981).  conceptual metaphor in everyday language.  in m. johnson (ed.).,  philosophical perspectives on metaphor (pp. 286-325).  minneapolis:  university of minnesota press. larrabee, m. j.  (ed.).  (1993).   an ethic or care:  feminist and interdisciplinary perspectives.  new york:  routledge. martin, h.  (1935).  a philosophy of friendship:  a brief introduction to a social philosophy of education.  new york:  dial press. mccall, m. w., jr., & lombardo, m. m.  (1983, february). what makes a top executive?  psychology today, 17(2), 26-31. mcfague, s.  (1987).  models of god: theology for an ecological, nuclear age.  philadelphia:  fortress press. mcnamara, j. (1995, september 4).  interview with reporters for abc news. meilaender, g.  (1985).  friendship:  a study in theological ethics.  notre dame, france:  university of notre dame press. noddings, n.  (1995).  conversation as moral education.  journal of moral education, 23(2), 107-118. noddings, n.  (1990, spring).  a response.  hypatia, 5(1), 120-126. noddings, n.  (1989).  chapter 7:  war.  women and evil (pp. 178-205).  berkeley:  university of california press. noddings, n.  (1984).  caring.  berkeley: university of california press. offen, k.  (1988, autumn).  defining feminism:  a comparative historical approach.  signs: journal of women in culture and society, 14(1), 119-157. payne, c.  (1989).  ella baker and models of social change."  signs: journal of women in culture and society, 14(41), 885-899. pearson, c. s.  (1986).  the hero within:  six archetypes we live by.  san francisco:  harper and row. perreault, g. (1996a, july). sharing the vision:  leadership as friendship and the ethic of care.  a leadership journal: women and leadership--sharing the vision,1(1), 33-49. perreault, g.  (1996b, winter).  metaphors for leadership:  military battle and friendship.  journal of leadership studies, 3(1), 49-63. perreault, g. (1993).  toward a theory of ethical followership.  in c. langone & e. van de genachte (eds.), leadership and service:  proceedings of ale conference.  athens, ga:  georgia fanning leadership center, university of georgia, with the association of leadership educators. perreault, g.  (1983, fall).  vision and the emerging world view: from separation to connection.  mwhe newsletter.  based on paper presented to conference of minnesota women in higher education, march 2, 1983.             perreault, g.  (1980).  futuristic world views:  modern physics and feminism--implications for teaching and learning in colleges and universities.  in k. redd & a. harkins (eds.), education:  a time for decisions (pp. 168-190).  washington, d c.:  world future society.  also presented at annual conferences of the national women's studies association (1980) and the world future society--education section (1979). raymond, j. g.  (1986).  a passion for friends: toward a philosophy of female affection. boston:  beacon press.   see also review symposium on j. raymond's a passion for friends:  claudia card on "female friendship: separations and continua," marilyn friedman on "individuality without individualism:  review of janice raymond's a passion for friends," and janice g. raymond on "response," hypatia, vol. 3, no. 2 (summer 1988), pp. 123-143. riddle, d. i.  (1982).  politics, spirituality, and models of change.  in c. spretnak (ed.), the politics of women's spirituality:  essays on the rise of spiritual power within the feminist movement (pp. 373-381). new york:  anchor books. sack, kevin.   (1995, september 5).  fuhrman casts a pall of bigotry over all police.  star tribune, 4a. tannen, d.  (1999).  the argument culture:  stopping american's war of words.  n.y.:  ballantine books. ueland, b. (1992, november/december). tell me more:  on the fine art of listening.  utne reader, 104-109. welty, e, & sharp, r. a. (eds.)  (1991).  the norton book of friendship, new york:  w. w. norton. wolf, n., & mathewes-green, f.  (1999, january-february).  finding common ground.  sojourners magazine, 28(1), 32-35. woolf, v.  (1938).  three guineas.  london:  the hogarth press. author note gerri perreault, ph.d., is an associate professor at the university of northern iowa where she is director of the leadership studies program that includes a minor in leadership studies.  the program has an emphasis on educating students for responsible and ethical citizenship in their professional and community lives.  perreault is also involved with a leadership institute in a disinvested area of waterloo, iowa; the institute seeks to develop the skills of neighborhood association members in influencing city, state, and national policy.   she can be reached at gerri perreault, 3102 hiawatha road, cedar falls, iowa 50613.  phones: 319-273-6898 (work)  319-268-0936 (home)  e-mail:  yla@uni.edu or geraldine.perreault@uni.edu footnotes 1. the debate about the nature of respect is a complicated one.  although some criticize the kantian (kant,1964) view of respect, its imperative to treat persons as ends in themselves is valuable.  see discussions by farley (1993) and dillon (1992). 2. i have a positive conception of followers, and i distinguish followers from subordinates (perreault,1993).  followers are those who, in general, accept the goals and practices of a leader or manager.  i say, "in general," because my definition of follower conceptualizes followers as active participants in the leadership process, and they are obligated to dissent when necessary.  (obligation can arise out of principles of fairness and/or an ethic of care.)  subordinates, on the other hand, are defined by position in a hierarchical organization, and may or may not be followers.  3. this conception of the fluidity of the leader-follower relationship owes much to james macgregor burns (2003, 1978a, 1978b). 4. the friendship view is consistent with many of the characteristics emerging out of the theories and concepts of care ethics.  for example, it is consistent with noddings' "care ethic" in its emphases on relation and interdependence, responsibility, and understanding the views of others, and in its optimistic and trusting view of human nature.  but it differs in extending the realm of care beyond those in one's immediate proximity to include outsiders and strangers.  it differs also in its treatment of the principles of respect and justice.   for a more complete view of noddings, see caring (noddings, 1984), the section on "war" in women and evil (noddings, 1989), a response to critics (noddings, 1990), and "conversation as moral education" (noddings, 1995).  see also in-depth discussion of feminist care ethics in mapping the moral domain (gilligan, ward, taylor, & bardige, 1988), women and moral theory (kittay & meyers, 1987), explorations in feminist ethics (cole & coultrap-mcquin, 1992), an ethic of care (larrabee, 1993), and who cares? (brabeck, 1989). 5. taking people's needs into account does not require one to meet those needs if they are inappropriate or illegal or unethical.  noddings (1984) recognizes this issue:  "a carer cannot always comply with the wishes of cared-fors (sometimes the wish is deemed morally wrong or badly mistaken), but the expressed needs, goals, and desires are always considered" (p. 9). 6. leadership scholars differ on whether or not someone who coerces someone to do something ought to be considered a leader.  burns (1978), for examples, does not consider hitler a leader because in burns' view of leadership anyone who crushes dissent and blocks opposing views is a tyrant, not a leader. 7. for a similar and extended discussion, see heifetz (1994), leadership without easy answers. 8. although this article discusses vision as if it was always ethical, in fact, this is not so.  to assess the ethics of any particular vision, a number of questions need to be asked.  for example: whose vision is it?  who is included?  who is excluded?  will the fulfillment of the vision result in harm to people, the nonhuman world, or the environment?  heifetz' (1994) comments on vision are relevant for ethics as well: "conceptions of leadership that do not value reality testing encourage people to realize their vision, however faulty their sight" (p. 24). 9. the word "temporarily" is inserted to recognize that a leader will not always receive a respectful response in return and at some point may need to reassess whether or not a different approach may be required.  see, for example, noddings (1984) discussion, pp. 114-115. mailto:yla@uni.edu mailto:yla@uni.edu mailto:geraldine.perreault@uni.edu mailto:geraldine.perreault@uni.edu copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: 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https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 17 2010 issn 1093-7099 female bodies: gender inequalities, vulnerability, hiv and aids in kenya dr. waithera sesay abstract this paper emerged from a lack of literature on women’s vulnerability to hiv/aids in aids discourses. women have been vulnerable to hiv/aids since the epidemic emerged but not much research has been done specifically on kenyan women. the ways in which women are vulnerable to hiv infection were explored by examining social, economic, and cultural identities that affect women’s sexual relations using a feminist lens. in this research, it is postulated that hiv vulnerability has to be studied in the context of patriarchy and cultural constraints. to address women’s vulnerability to hiv/aids, secondary analysis of data from the 2003 kenya demographic and health survey was utilized. hence, demographic variables of age, education, religion, ethnicity, region of residence, marital status, and employment were the independent variables that were used to discern the factors associated with hiv vulnerability among women. a dependent variable, hiv vulnerability which i constructed from the 2003 health and demographic survey was conceived of as a larger concept comprised of powerlessness in basic decision-making processes within the household, aids-related knowledge on transmission and prevention, cultural practices which encompassed polygamy, wife inheritance, and sexual behavior, and perceived risk of contracting the hiv/aids disease. in this study, the data strongly suggested that women in kenya are more vulnerable to hiv/aids when they are younger, have low levels of education, are from different ethnicities and from certain regions, are unmarried, and not employed. the findings supported the literature that women’s vulnerability is strongly influenced and tied by broader forces present in the society. women’s vulnerability to hiv/aids is real and needs to be tackled for any progress to occur in the fight against aids. hiv/aids is a very expensive disease that totally drains economies of households, communities, and countries. until hiv vulnerability is acknowledged and fought, women will continue to succumb to the disease overwhelmingly and kenya will eventually disintegrate as it will be full of sick people intensifying underdevelopment. women’s vulnerability to hiv/aids is an urgent issue that needs dire attention for kenya to prosper. a healthy population fosters development and stability. however hiv/aids produces instability, suffering, extreme poverty, and underdevelopment. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 keywords: hiv/aids, vulnerability discourses and kenyan women, female diseased bodies, gender inequalities, feminist theories, patriarchy, cultural constraints, powerlessness and women of kenya. citation: sesay, w. (2010). female bodies: gender inequalities, vulnerability, hiv and aids in kenya. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(17). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 introduction aids has steadily become a worldwide disease as people continue to move and interact in an increasingly global economy. the world has become a global village with much less restrictions on the movement of people, goods, and information than ever before. opportunistic viruses such as hiv can easily travel throughout the world at a much faster rate than in the past. currently, there is still no cure: the medications in place prolong life but do not cure aids. because hiv is transmitted through the exchange of bodily fluids, this indicates that the best form of protection is to avoid contact with them. therefore, one can suggest that until a cure is found, regardless of the economic might of a nation, hiv will continue to pose a serious health problem in the future. in the east african region, kenya is one of the countries where aids has taken a toll. the first aids case in kenya was reported in 1984 (republic of kenya, 1999-2004). the spread of hiv in kenya has been attributed mostly to heterosexual unprotected sex. the extent of risky sexual behaviors such as anal intercourse and homosexual activity are not yet known in kenya, and are largely omitted from aids literature in most of africa (wilton, 1997). the rapid spread of aids worldwide and the patterns that have been generated by this spread have transformed aids into a woman’s disease (lindsey, 1997). hiv/aids has affected women from sub-saharan africa in disproportionate numbers more than anywhere else in the world. the number of women being infected with hiv through heterosexual transmission is rapidly rising. women represent 59% of those infected in sub-saharan africa (unaids, 2006) and are getting infected at a faster rate than men because of social, economic, and cultural vulnerabilities. hiv is not only a health problem, but also a social, cultural, and political phenomenon (caldwell, 1993; sargent & johnson, 1996; treichler, 1999). since the beginning of the aids epidemic, women were suffering and dying from aids, yet the topic of women and hiv/aids was virtually non-existent. the experience of men dominated aids discourses and defined the symptoms of aids and course of the illness (lindsey, 1997). the invisibility of women in aids literature led to a delay in understanding how hiv affected women (baylies & bujra, 2000). women were virtually ignored in the literature as aids was presented as a homosexual disease and a male disease. the notion that women could not contract aids led to tragic consequences, because women were not getting tested, studied, or included in clinical trials (squire, 1993). statistics depict a grim picture of aids in africa, and unfortunately, the numbers represent only an estimate of actual prevalence. the actual number of people infected is believed to be higher than has been reported. statistics are often based on testing that has been done mostly on pregnant women. although voluntary counseling and testing centers are accessible in kenya, most women are reluctant to take the hiv antibody test because of the stigma that comes with being hiv positive (clark, 2004). many women are afraid of the stigma, social isolation, loneliness, abandonment, and fear of violence for those who are suspected of being hiv positive (caldwell, 2000; smyke, 1991). as a result many women resort to self-imposed silences and do not disclose their sero-positive status. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 aids brings to the individual the imminent threat of total annihilation, and women are the most vulnerable to disease and death (bain, 2001; murphy, 1995). aids has exploited, interrupted, and destroyed women’s lives in kenya. the cultural, social, and environmental conditions that women are subjected to lead to vulnerabilities that attract hiv. women continue to be powerless in these societies due to the patriarchy that continues to permeate throughout women’s lives (nnaemeka, 1998). although women are largely responsible for expressive roles such as childcare and cooking, women in kenya are hardly given the opportunity to make simple decisions about what they cook, let alone issues that pertain to sexual matters. in sub-saharan africa, the vast majority of hiv infections among women occur through penetrative heterosexual sex (das gupta, chen, & krishnan, 1995). the cultural and economic context of heterosexual sex has had a significant effect on women’s vulnerability to hiv infection (farmer, connors, & simmons, 1996). the exponential increase in aids cases among women in kenya (republic of kenya, 1999-2004) has created pain, suffering, and death. women in kenya are faced with insurmountable health problems such as malaria, and aids is another added problem they are blamed for and have to take responsibility for (farmer, 1999). since men are in power, it is men’s issues that get addressed as state concerns. this creates more problems for women whose concerns are seen as secondary, and thus not important to the state (national aids control council [nacc], 2002). aids is a serious, wasting, deteriorating, disease affecting kenyan women in disproportionate numbers. hiv/aids is a women’s issue because the risks and consequences are different for women (campbell, 1999) and therefore should be studied using a different, feminized perspective. conceptualization of vulnerability the concept of hiv vulnerability refers to kenyan women’s multiple layered realities, characterized by social and cultural inequalities that perpetuate hiv vulnerability. in this context, attention has been given to the ways in which women may be vulnerable. figure 1 depicts the five constructs that represent hiv vulnerabilitypowerlessness, cultural practices, lack of aids-related knowledge, sexual behavior, and perception of hiv risk. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 figure 1. hiv vulnerability model. women and powerlessness aids brings to the surface neglected inequalities such as the power differences between women and men (schneider & stoller, 1995). andersen (2003) defined power as a system of patriarchy, an organized structure whereby men hold more power than women. power also determines whose pleasure is given priority and when and how sex takes place (gupta, 2000). furthermore, gender inequality often gives men more power to decide on the timing and conditions of sex and the means of preventing infection, and therefore limits women’s ability to negotiate protection with their partners (das gupta et al., 1995). allen (1999) also stated that power can be defined as a relation of male domination over women. in this context, power is used to demonstrate how women lack power when it comes to decisions that pertain to sex and health care, as well as simple decisions such as purchasing household items. a review of the literature shows that aids occurs in a cultural context whereby roles are culturally scripted and defined according to gender (o’leary & jemmott, 1996). women tend to have little power within patriarchy in kenya and few alternatives are available to them (gok, 1997). according to thiam (1986): the african woman has no real power, only a pseudo-power. she can act, as long as she causes no embarrassment to her husband. any power she may think she possesses is an illusion. the big decisions are the monopoly of the man, and she is not in any way involved in them. in black africa, the black man controls not only his own life but also that of his wife which makes her vulnerable to hiv. (p. 15) hiv vulnerability powerlessness lack of aids-related knowledge cultural practices sexual behavior perception of risk advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 in the african culture, male dominance permeates every sphere of the society (nacc, 2002). men decide and make most of the decisions in the home and in the community because of male privilege, which transcends to issues of health care (turshen, 2000). ogundipe-leslie (1994) noted: the entrenchment of patriarchy makes women react with fear, dependency complexes, and attitudes to please where more self-assertive actions are needed. the african man is still steeped in his centuries-old attitudes of patriarchy which he does not wish to abandon because male domination is advantageous to him. african women are shackled by their own negative self image, by interiorization of ideologies of patriarchy, and gender hierarchy. (p. 36) the fear of upsetting the patriarchal system and dependency on men for resources contributes to hiv vulnerability among women in kenya (institute of economic affairs, 2001). patriarchy is so deeply entrenched in the kenyan society that women have little control over resources that would allow them to live independently of men. for example, customary law dictates that women should not own or inherit property unless through their sons or male relatives (campbell, 1999; nacc, 2002). women are disempowered from the time they are young. the socialization of girls and women often curtails their autonomy and undermines their ability to negotiate with men. the ideology that men are naturally superior to women in essence, and in all areas, affects societal structures as women’s input or voices are submerged (das gupta et al., 1995; gok, 1997). this ideology prolongs the attitudes of negative discrimination against women (ogundipe-leslie, 1994). african women are socialized to be silent, and fear is instilled in them such that they learn not to question men. in kenya, the social environment can be hostile to women, leading to violence (mikell, 1997). the subordinate position of women articulated in much of the literature demonstrates a high level of vulnerability to diseases, particularly hiv (smyke, 1991). the silence of women in africa means that they cannot discuss or make decisions about sex (gok, 1997). the extreme dependency of women on men creates a powerless situation in which women are ultimately vulnerable to hiv. powerlessness contributes to women’s vulnerability curtailing their freedom to decide on their own on health issues without consulting their partners as they are not economically strong. a woman with a sexually transmitted disease cannot go to the doctor discreetly because of structural constraints that inhibit women from autonomy of movement including health care. fear of the consequences of disclosure and lack of confidentiality are major impediments in women being unable to protect themselves without interference from the patriarchal gaze. because of shame and stigma, women who contract sexually transmitted diseases usually may not seek treatment. the fear is that if they seek treatment for sexually transmitted infections there is no guarantee of confidentiality and women are often accused of being promiscuous. women are often in a bind because of cultural constraints and would rather not seek help in case they discover that they are hiv-positive and get abandoned. researchers must be aware of what advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 it means to be a female in the patriarchal culture (patton, 1994). research consistently shows that women are more vulnerable because of the inequality that exists between the sexes (fleischman, 2003). hiv vulnerability is prevalent in cultures where women have little power in the family (gupta, 2000). women and aids-related knowledge women are more at risk for hiv due to the society that denies them knowledge and access to upward mobility. most women in kenya lack basic information about sexual and reproductive health because of the culture of silence that exists in african culture. african women’s vulnerability is exacerbated by social perceptions of female roles (mann & tarantola, 1996). a good woman is one who is ignorant about sex. ignorance about sexuality is encouraged, and women are made to believe that men should be more experienced in sexual matters, while women should remain ignorant (bethel, 1995; gok, 1997). women are discouraged from learning about their own bodies and sexual health. this may put them in a position of being dependent on men for information, information that may be factually wrong (mann & tarantola, 1996; nacc, 2002; 1996; nnaemeka, 1998). ignorance about sex is rewarded and viewed as a sign of purity; too much knowledge is considered a sign of immorality (gupta, 2000). mann and tarantola (1996) indicated that many cultures all over the world view female ignorance of sexual matters as a sign of purity and knowledge of sexual matters as a sign of diminished virtue. in addition the cultural norm that insists that women should remain virgins until marriage inhibits women from seeking aidsrelated knowledge lest they are accused of being sexually knowledgeable and experienced (nacc, 2002). however, the lack of knowledge about hiv transmission displayed by women puts them in a disadvantaged position because they do not have the tools to protect themselves. kenyan women are unable to exercise their sexual rights because the culture disempowers them as they lack power in the economic, social, and political arena. because women in kenya are often economically, culturally, and socially disadvantaged, they lack equal access to treatment, financial support, and education (gok, 1997; nacc, 2002). women, cultural practices, and aids culture can be defined as a way of life of a group of people. according to macionis (2006), culture refers to values, beliefs, and behavior that together form a people’s way of life. culture is a powerful force that shapes not only what people do but also what they think and feel. however, cultural practices are rituals that are carried out in a specific ethnic group or groups. culture is not synonymous with cultural practices because not all ethnic groups in kenya engage in female circumcision, widow inheritance, or polygamy. cultural practices that contribute to hiv vulnerability among women are significant topics affecting women but have generally been understudied. according to bloor (1995), cultural differences can be useful in explaining different hiv vulnerabilities. the following cultural practices that contribute to hiv infection are discussed: female circumcision, polygamy, and widow inheritance. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 female circumcision. female circumcision is a collective name given to several different traditional practices that involves surgeries of the female anatomy intended to curtail women’s sexuality. female circumcision has existed in africa since time immemorial and continues to this day (rahman & toubia, 2000; turshen, 2000). female circumcision is a secret society whereby women get together in a ritualized female bonding environment and is viewed as a form of female empowerment by african women only. female circumcision is a complex ritual that brings in a lot of income and is intertwined in the political, social, and economic sphere, especially in the rural areas where resources are scarce (lightfoot-klein, 1989). female circumcision is a deeply ingrained custom that is still widely practiced in kenya. research has shown that some kenyan women continue to practice female circumcision even after it was outlawed and banned in 1982 (toubia, 1999). for some societies that practice female circumcision, a family or clan’s honor depends on a girl’s virginity or sexual restraint. face and honor are two virtues that are highly prized in kenya; however, a double standard exists because men do not have to live their lives under the same microscope (lightfoot-klein, 1989). in some societies, the rituals is a time of joyous celebration and elaborate festivities, while in others it is shrouded in concealment and secrecy (abusharaf, 1995). female circumcision, once considered concealed and hidden, was brought into the forefront in the western world through writings by hosken (1993). hosken started the dialogue on female circumcision by using maps to catalogue all the countries that practiced this ritual. western feminists were outraged by female circumcision and vowed to eradicate the practice as they viewed it to be barbaric with no value for women. female circumcision became a highly charged debate and in the early 1990’s, western feminists embarked on this issue, renaming the ritual to female genital mutilation (fgm). in spite of rising opposition from western feminists and scholars to end the practice, there was a backlash from some african women at the 1995 fourth world conference on women in beijing, china. african women vehemently denounced western feminists for condemning female circumcision on the basis that it was an attack on their culture (paterson, 1996). african women refused to listen to the voices of western feminists, and the topic on female circumcision was simply submerged. however, female circumcision is an important topic in aids discourses because circumcision performed on women, not men, makes women more vulnerable to hiv infection because the possibility of hiv entry is high due to the sharing of instruments that are tainted with blood (nacc, 2002; turshen, 2000). few studies have attempted to connect female circumcision as “woman on woman” violence and the relationship to hiv/aids vulnerability (nnaemeka, 1998; toubia, 1999). women have been continuously portrayed as victims, but the power of women cannot be underestimated. african women are often portrayed as passive victims who have their genitalia removed in the name of tradition. however women can be victimizers, as evidenced in female circumcision. it is women who have gone undergone this practice who put pressure on other women to undergo female circumcision (lightfoot-klein, 1989). through this practice, women are directly involved in spreading hiv in the name of upholding tradition. little research has been done on the effects of female circumcision on sexuality and the likelihood of hiv transmission (doyal, 1995). further studies need to investigate the underlying structure of men’s power over women’s lives that advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 enforce such practices (sen & grown, 1987). women as agents of patriarchal violence in female circumcision need urgent attention and intervention (nnaemeka, 1998). polygamy. polygamyy is a cultural practice found in most parts of africa that allows a man to marry more than one wife. polygamy is still widely practiced in kenya particularly among muslim communities (nacc, 2002). polygamy, another cultural practice, predisposes women to hiv infection. few studies have been done with regards to hiv and polygamy. however, polygamy may influence sexual behavior in ways that are relevant for hiv infection (cleland & ferry, 1995). locating research that pertained to the association of polygamy and hiv was very difficult because of the silence that is prevalent in kenya. africans are very conservative and will not discuss topics that deal with sex. sex is still considered a private affair. in kenya, polygamy is still culturally valued even though many men have only one wife. some men in kenya do not even admit that they are in polygamous relationships, despite the fact that they have two wives who would be living in different residences (nacc, 2002; turshen, 2000). however marriage arrangements are risky for women because men are not accountable for their behavior and can easily blame their wives if they are hiv infected. polygamy benefits men at the expense of women. however, marriage is so much valued in this society that some women with very low self-esteem do not care about sharing a man, and in the process they may contract hiv, and in turn become responsible for spreading it (gok, 1997; nacc, 2002; turshen, 2000). promiscuity from both men and women is one of the factors that have influenced hiv vulnerability (sabatier, 1988; schoepf, 1988). promiscuity is a concept that is hidden in order to save face but it needs to be exposed because of the high prevalence of hiv cases among women in sub-saharan africa (unaids, 2004a). african scholars are reluctant to talk about promiscuity in the african culture, but promiscuity exists and people have still not changed their behavior in spite of being aware that a serious disease looms (bethel, 1995; sabatier, 1988). the multiplicity of partners leads to women’s vulnerability because the likelihood of coming in contact with an infected person is very high (mann & tarantola, 1996). thus, with hiv/aids in the country, the practice of polygamy puts women at risk for hiv infection for the mere fact that an infected husband can introduce the virus to all of his wives. likewise, if one wife is infected, she can also infect the husband and put other wives in danger. another factor that has not been explored in polygamous households is adultery. the younger wives are known to keep lovers while still married (ogundipe-leslie, 1994). since the relationships are secret, and occur through a code of silence, younger wives can also bring hiv to the bedroom introducing hiv to the husband and the rest of the wives. secrecy is a breeding ground for hiv vulnerability because it impedes a person’s ability to communicate honestly about sexual matters and relationships that can drastically alter an individual’s life forever (eng & butler, 1997). this becomes a vicious cycle of hiv vulnerability, infection, and spread. widow inheritance. widow inheritance found among some ethnic groups in kenya is another practice that exposes women to hiv infection. this is a cultural practice that involves the inheritance of a widow by the brother or male cousin of the deceased husband. according to kenyan customary law, when a husband dies, the widow is absorbed into the husband’s family as a way to ensure that the widow and her children are provided for and the family name is kept. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 widow inheritance has become dangerous with the advent of hiv/aids. this practice increases the risk of contracting the aids virus particularly when the new bride is infected or if the inheritor is infected, putting both at risk. in summary, in terms of cultural practices, the vulnerable position of women has to be recognized (lindsey, 1997) particularly because there are some cultural rituals that pose a danger to women because of the vulnerability of the female anatomy. sexual behavior, women, and aids little is known or understood about influences on sexual behavior among women from different classes and ethnic groups (cleland & ferry, 1995; treichler, 1999). sexuality remains an extremely private and complex subject of human behavior surrounded with socio-cultural taboos that make talking about sexuality virtually impossible (eng & butler, 1997). the meaning of specific behavior patterns that place women at risk must be thoroughly understood in order to educate vulnerable women about their own hiv vulnerability (smyke, 1991; worth, 1989). in the context of kenya, not much has been written on women’s sexual behavior because of the dichotomy between a good and a bad girl (belenky, clinchy & goldberger, 1986; sacks, 1996). the image of a good girl is prevalent, and most women try to emulate that good girl image even when their behavior contradicts that model (mann & tarantola, 1996). women are reluctant and refuse to engage in open discussions about sex for fear of being branded knowledgeable about sex, which makes them experienced. women who seek information about sex are frowned upon (gok, 1997, nacc, 2002). cultural inequality contributes to women’s silence, which leads to secrecy about their sexual behavior because of fear and shame. face and honor are two virtues that are highly valued in african societies (toubia, 1999). patriarchy reinforced through culture needs to be examined in relation to women’s vulnerability to hiv/aids. women and girls are often powerless to abstain from sex or to insist on condom use. lack of consistent condom usage by women can be attributed to low sexual power (fonck et al., 2005). women may be coerced into unprotected sex or run the risk of being infected by husbands in societies where it is acceptable for men to have more than one partner (baylies & bujra, 2000). conversely, the more fragile women’s economic situation is, the less likely women are to insist on their partner using protection, even when they know they are at risk for hiv infection (bethel, 1995). condom use, a tool that can prevent hiv infection, has been received with a lot of negativity by africans (sargent & johnson, 1996). women’s objections to condom use is related to ideas about men’s sexual pleasure and fear of its disruption (wilkinson & kitzinger, 1994). women who engage in sex for money, gifts, or other favors are also highly vulnerable to hiv infection because of the frequency of partners from different ethnicities that have different practices, which leads to sexual mixing (sargeant & johnson, 1996). kenya is reported as having one of the highest rates of prostitution in africa (institute of economic affairs, 2001). women sex workers typically represent the groups that are at high risk for hiv infection. for example, 90% of women sex workers in the city of nairobi are hiv infected (institute of economic affairs, 2001). however, there are limited studies as to what happens to women whose partners patronize sex workers, leading to sexual mixing (mann & tarantola, 1996). the vulnerability of women in kenya is greater than that of men because a man has the sole control of whether he wants to wear a condom or not (sargent & johnson, 1996). in addition women are prohibited from suggesting condom use because it is seen as evidence of a advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 woman’s infidelity (smyke, 1991). women risk physical violence if they ask their partners to use condoms (sargeant & johnson, 1996). with the advent of aids, it is becoming increasingly apparent that heterosexual sexual interaction is a dangerous practice if one of the partners is infected with hiv (lester, 1989). thus condom use and engaging in sex for money are sexual practices that should be examined in a study of hiv vulnerability. women and perception of risk risk has been recognized as an important variable in theory and intervention in hiv prevention, but little attention has been made in examining what factors cause people to see themselves at risk (prohaska, albrecht, levy, sugrue, & kim, 1990). few empirical studies have assessed the relationship between perception of risk to hiv/aids and sexual behavior in kenya. the context and meaning of sexuality is complex, diverse, and varies across ethnic lines in kenya (nacc, 2002). perception of risk is a difficult concept in health education because a person’s own idea of his or her own risk of hiv infection often bears little relation to an individual’s actual risk (panos institute, 1990). in kenya, on an individual level, people do not perceive themselves to be at risk because of the denial that pervades the kenyan culture. there has been widespread denial of the extent and risk of sexual transmission of hiv through heterosexual sexual contact (berer & ray, 1993). furthermore, stereotyped representations of who is at risk give women a false sense of security, which prevents women from realizing that they might be at risk for hiv infection (cleland & ferry, 1995). in summary, women who on an individual level, do not perceive themselves to be at risk for hiv infection are less likely to take safety measures because of the marriage myth that women are safe if they are married (fleischman, 2003). yet in the context of kenya this is not always the case because of polygny and the rampancy of extramarital affairs (nacc, 2002). conceptual model of feminist theories and hiv vulnerability a conceptual model shown in figure 2 represents feminist theories utilized in this study as a guide in illuminating gender inequalities in the society which prevent women from enacting control over their social and sexual lives increasing their vulnerability to hiv infection. feminist theories in this study provided an alternative lens in examining women’s vulnerability to hiv/aids by looking at social and cultural conditions and disparities that affect women in the kenyan society. according to the principles of liberal feminist theory, women are vulnerable to hiv infection due to lack of equal opportunity and education exacerbated by traditional practices which keep women misinformed, disempowered, and dependent on men. liberal feminist theory suggests that women can reduce their vulnerability to hiv infection if they have access to education and equal opportunity; however liberal feminism is deficient because it does not believe in upsetting the status quo. liberal feminist theory suggests that traditional practices that impede women’s progress should be deconstructed to benefit women. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 socialist/marxist feminist theory attributes women’s vulnerability to hiv to the capitalist system and patriarchy endemic in the society. socialist/marxist feminist theory argues that capitalism and patriarchy inhibit women from acquiring complete independence over their lives which enhance hiv vulnerability. the remedy is to overthrow the capitalist system and patriarchy which would give women spaces in which they can have some say and control over their lives. the radical feminist theory is more beneficial in fighting hiv/aids because it states that women are extremely vulnerable to hiv infection due to patriarchal processes in the culture and environment that affect their health, and therefore women should strive to overthrow patriarchy. radical feminist theory suggests that the only way to fight women’s vulnerability is to expose what is considered private and make it public. according to research on african women, many women are getting infected by their husbands or partners (fleischman, 2003). with the aid of liberal, socialist/marxist and radical feminist theories, an hiv vulnerability model was constructed for this study that consists of powerlessness, lack of aids-related knowledge, cultural practices, sexual behavior, and perception of hiv risk. feminist theories guided this study by demonstrating that women are most vulnerable to hiv infection when they have the least control over their sexual lives because of lack of economic power, cultural constraints, and disparities created by patriarchy (lindsey, 1997). patriarchy is a strong force in kenya (mikell, 1997; turshen, 2003) and feminist theories are needed to expose what is in the society that creates conditions of vulnerability to hiv infection among women. factors related to hiv/aids vulnerability age, women, and aids hiv risk among young girls is steadily rising in africa for several reasons. for economic and social reasons, women are forced to engage in relationships with older men in order to gain access to their money and material goods. cross generational sex (fleischman, 2003), agemixing (sargent & johnson, 1996), and the concept of sugar daddies all refer to older men who entice younger women and have sexual relationships with them, believing that they will be cured if they sleep with a virgin (gok, 2002; leclerc-madlala, 1996; shell & zeitlin, 2000). studies have shown that young girls are infected with hiv infection at younger ages because of their association with older men who may be infected (okeyo, baltazar, stover, & johnson, 1998). in countries such as botswana, malawi, south africa, zimbabwe, and kenya, it is well documented that older men seek younger girls in the hope that the girls are not sexually active and are therefore free of hiv (common secretariat, 2001; kalipeni, 2000; smyke, 1991). from the democratic republic of congo, to uganda, to malawi, research has shown that young girls are vulnerable to the enticement of older men who promise money and material benefit in exchange for sex (mann & tarantola, 1996; sargent & johnson, 1996). in addition, younger women are biologically more prone to hiv infection than older women because of the vulnerability of the female anatomy (doyal, 1995; patton, 1994). women are more vulnerable to hiv given that they are the receptors while the men are the depositers of semen, which when contaminated with hiv is a danger to women. thus, younger women may be more vulnerable to hiv than older women. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 disparities create gender inequality 1. powerlessness 2. lack of aids-related knowledge 3. cultural practices 4. sexual behavior 5. perception of hiv risk hiv vulnerability figure 2. conceptual model: intersection of feminist theories and hiv vulnerability. feminist theories liberal social/ marxist radical personal is political. disparity due to patriarchy patriachy needs to be overthrown disparity due to lack of access to equal opportunity and education and traditional practices work within system disparity due to capitalist system and impact of patriarchy capitalism and patriarchy need to be overthrown social and cultural inequalities make women vulnerable. the five constructs below ↓ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 women, education, and aids illiteracy has been said to play a major role in hiv vulnerability. in sub-saharan africa, women are at the bottom in terms of education. illiteracy and ignorance are two major obstacles in curbing hiv/aids. kenya has made enormous strides in educating girls. however women are still largely under-represented in education. statistics indicate that many girls are enrolled to go to school in the primary level, but few women seem to enroll at the secondary level. in addition males seem to enroll more than females (king, 1993). browne and barrett (1991) proposed that girls go to school in lesser numbers than boys, although considerable variations exist, making it difficult to generalize rates of participation and educational attainment. there are various explanations for this inequality in school enrollment between boys and girls in kenya, for one, traditional attitudes place more emphasis on the education of boys, and parents continue to encourage boys to enroll in secondary schools (eshiwani, 1988). secondly, when a family member becomes sick, girls are the first to leave school so that they can take care of the family obligations. in this respect, girls tend to grow up to be illiterate and dependent on men for information (nnaemeka, 1998). other factors that account for low enrollments of girls in kenya are early marriages, secret societies, that is, the seclusion of girls at puberty, and the opportunity costs of schooling relative to more traditional forms of training for adulthood at home (fafunwa, 1982). the cultural aspect of son preference also lowers female chances of going to school. research on son preference reveals the dynamic by which the status of women can have a negative effect on their health (smyke, 1991). because of poverty, families prefer to educate boys; as a result, many women are denied the opportunity to go to school. women are given low priority and the society views them as dispensable. in addition, educating a woman is seen as a waste of resources, as the belief is that women get married and leave the family. conversely, investing in a man is viewed as a badge of honor and is highly encouraged by the society. men are viewed as the providers while women are relegated to the passive role of being the caretakers and homemakers (nacc, 2002). however, one finding does appear firm: girls who stay in school tend to be from families of higher socio-economic status than boys, and these differences are compounded at higher levels of education (abigail, 1976; world bank, 2002). these sex differences in education can be traced in broad cultural patterns on women’s access to education (gok, 1997; nacc, 2002). turshen (2000) has argued that women’s access to schools depends on the extent to which cultural and religious beliefs accord women a role in life outside the family. lack of education for women results in low exposure to hiv/aids education messages (nacc, 2002). women with education are more likely to understand how hiv is transmitted and thus how to protect themselves. conversely, illiterate women are less likely to have the education and knowledge of the disease, how hiv is transmitted, and how to prevent it. limited information has been a significant contributing factor in the spread of hiv (berer & ray, 1993). when women are less educated, they have less knowledge, and do not possess ways of protecting themselves against aids (wilkinson & kitzinger, 1994). growing up in ignorance, fear, and shame regarding their bodies, women’s subordination starts early through a clear advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 15 definition of what a female should be (das gupta et al., 1995; mann & tarantola, 1996). education inequality affects women’s ability to take informed decisions on risk reduction (turmen, 2003). thus, low levels of education may be related to higher levels of vulnerability (fleischman, 2003; mann & tarantola, 1996). religion, women, and aids the complexity of kenyan women’s lives is negatively influenced by some religious sanctions. religious beliefs contribute to women’s vulnerability especially when some religious leaders reinforce the idea that aids is caused by taboos and curses (douglas, 1999). some religious denominations in kenya have not fully engaged in open discussions about sexual health and hiv discourse (nacc, 2002). many religions have branded aids as a punishment from god brought about by deviance. therefore, religious leaders are reluctant to talk about hiv because it involves sex. talking about sex is still considered a taboo (mann & tarantola, 1996). the situation of women with aids cannot be improved without openly addressing issues of sexual health and formulating policies that would uplift women (murphy, 1995). mann and tarantola (1996) conducted research on religion and hiv vulnerability and contended that “aids reveals the unspeakable which seems to shake religions in their moral substance and their social influence” (p. 156). religion can facilitate hiv vulnerability because of a denomination’s views on sexuality. denominations like the roman catholic church are very influential in people’s lives but the church has been silent and reluctant to discuss sexual health issues (nacc, 2002). in kenya, the roman catholic church is very conservative and discourages the use of sex education in schools and the distribution of condoms (gok, 1997), on the premise that distribution of condoms would encourage promiscuity. also recently in 2009, the pope denounced the use of condoms on the assertion that condoms promote sex leading to aids. this is unfortunate because in the absence of a cure, condoms are considered one of the safer preventative methods against hiv infection. the church in this instance inhibits people from being open about sexuality, hiv/aids, and ways of prevention. in churches, talks about sexuality are discouraged and people are afraid to speak or ask questions regarding sexuality. their voices are muted because they are taught that it is wrong to think, talk about, or engage in sex. however, people are getting infected everyday because of their own sexual behaviors and these issues need to be brought out in the open. religion, where people seek solace, is a hindrance to many women because they are not protected from a deadly disease. consequently, religious affiliation may put women in a more vulnerable position in relation to hiv/aids. studies on religiosity versus those with no religion should be further explored in identifying hiv vulnerability among women. ethnicity, women, and aids kenya consists of 40 ethnic groups (cia-factbook, 2005). each ethnic community has its traditional customs, beliefs, and laws (gok, 1997). however, some ethnic groups share common cultural beliefs and practices, for instance female circumcision, polygamy, and widow inheritance, and these are practices that have major repercussions for women (nacc, 2002). not much aids research has been done on pastoralists groups like the masai and turkana. women in these communities may be more vulnerable to hiv infection because their communities are advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 16 mobile and unstable. in such complex, difficult environments most women do not go to school, which explains the low levels of education and lack of aids-related knowledge found among these two groups (gok, 1997; nacc, 2002). while not all practices found in different ethnic groups are harmful, the practices that affect hiv vulnerability cannot be overlooked under the guise of keeping tradition. thus, women may exhibit different levels of vulnerability based on their ethnic group affiliation. region of residence, women, and aids kenya is divided into eight provinces, which are further subdivided into 72 districts (kdhs, 2003). hiv prevalence varies in each region as each ethnic group tends to congregate in a particular province. some provinces have been affected by aids more than others depending on the culture and environment. stark imbalances are vivid between urban and rural areas because of the uneven regional investment in the rural areas enhancing impoverishment (susser & stein, 2000). the urban areas are more endowed with resources than the rural areas, which may contribute to vulnerability among women. because of scarcity of jobs there is increased involuntary migration of men in all rural areas into the city in search of jobs. this raises new issues because the men and women who are left behind engage in extra-marital and casual sex contributing to hiv vulnerability (turmen, 2003). the most impoverished areas are found in the rural areas where there is little development. the western provinces of kenya are said to have the highest adult hiv prevalence rates in the country, with recent estimates for nyanza province at 28-35% (unaids, 2004). in addition to chronic underdevelopment, cultural practices play a role in hiv vulnerability and cannot be overlooked. the practice of widow inheritance is more common in certain regions of the country. in the mombasa region, women may be more vulnerable due to the practice of polygamy. although women are expected to remain virgins until marriage (ogundipe-leslie, 1994), polygamous marriages do not prevent vulnerability to hiv infection particularly when infidelity occurs. in the rift valley region, wife sharing found among the masai enhances higher vulnerability for women because of the frequent change of partners increasing the chances of encountering infected men (lesathage, 1989; nacc, 2002). although some women try to resist the custom, many women relent because of societal pressures. some women from the central region still practice female circumcision in the traditional way using a common knife on all their clients given that it is a ritual that is based on sisterhood, sharing, and transfer of blood, thereby increasing vulnerability to hiv infection (toubia, 1999). other factors such as geographic location may make issues such as transportation and communication more or less available potentially increasing vulnerability among women because of scarcity of resources. the nature of the environment contributes to the scarcity of resources in some areas (rural vs. urban). education levels may vary and economic opportunities maybe limited based on the area. discrepancies in resources between the urban and rural regions have led to underdevelopment, poverty, and diseases. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 17 marital status, women, and aids marriage is a very important concept in african culture (ogundipe-leslie, 1994). some women strive to get married because it is a symbol of social status, prestige, and access to resources. in addition, many women view marriage as a way out of poverty when there are few options available. according to studies on aids (schoepf, 1988), marriage can offer protection to women if both parties are faithful. however, marriage can be oppressive, intensified by cultural and economic circumstances that favor men and leave women powerless in most decisions. studies done in india, brazil, and africa suggest that marriage can be a risk factor for women who believe they are in a monogamous relationship because of the behavior of their partners (fleischman, 2003). women are especially more vulnerable to hiv if they are part of polygamous relationships, on the basis that infidelity is inevitable especially among the younger wives. many women are being exposed to hiv in their own homes from their husbands or partners (bandyopadhyay & macpherson, 1998; fleischman, 2003; gok, 1997). however, men’s behaviors are often overlooked and the blame is shifted onto women, who are often portrayed as the agents of hiv transmission (booth, 2004). marriage, which was considered a safe haven, can be toxic and lead to fatality, particularly in kenya where polygamous relationships and concubinage co-exist side by side. marriage is not a panacea for aids; consequently, marriage does not protect women from contracting aids. in addition, being married does not mean immunity from aids in a society like kenya where extramarital affairs are a common occurrence. many women live with the fear of becoming infected by their partners or husband because of the patriarchal system that condone men having multiple partners (fleischman, 2003; mwale & burnard, 1992). the threat of aids for women begins with a lack of control over the sexual lives of their husbands outside of marriage, and in decisions about what takes place sexually, women are voiceless and do not discuss sexual matters with men (wilkinson & kitzinger, 1994). widowed women are vulnerable to hiv infection when they belong to cultures that promote and practice widow inheritance. if the husband died of aids, chances are that the widow is infected and can introduce the virus to the new husband and his family. conversely, the widow could be hiv negative and get infected by the new husband. in summary, relative to marital status, different situations enhancing vulnerability are present for unmarried, married, and widowed women. from the available literature, it is unclear which group maybe more vulnerable based on their marital status. employment, women, and aids research has shown consistently that women who earn an income independent of men are less depressed and derive satisfaction from work (donovan, 1985; frankenhaeuser, lundberg, & chesney, 1991; sen & grown, 1987). however, women who stay at home with little income are dependent on men and are more likely to be depressed and feel less worthy (andersen, 2003; lindsey, 1997; patton, 1994). often, women are not able to adequately compete in the job market because they lack the education and skills needed for the job. in advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 18 addition, women are relegated to lower paying jobs and stereotyped positions that carry low status in the private and public sector (adepoju & oppong, 1996; mikell, 1997). poverty affects the health of everyone as well but has further repercussions for women (mascie-taylor, 1995). poorer women spend more time on subsistence farming because they cannot afford to buy enough food to feed the family (world bank, 1994). being uneducated and unskilled means that women work longer hours and make less pay, and the kind of work women engage in is often back-breaking and dangerous (sen & grown, 1987). a woman who is illiterate and poor has few options as she does not have skills; therefore, her female anatomy becomes a sexual commodity which makes her vulnerable to hiv (sacks, 1996). women’s economic dependency often means that they offer and exchange their unpaid labor for male support, favors, and resources (sacks, 1996). research shows that women who have independent incomes are able to control their sexual health and are in a position to insist on condom use (worth, 1989). but the reality is that most women in kenya do not have independent incomes and are dependent on men for material goods (smyke, 1991). thus, women who are unemployed tend to be dependent on men for survival material goods and hence are more vulnerable to hiv/aids. in summary, aids vulnerability discourses reveal that feminist theories are crucial in exposing gender inequalities in a society that prevents women from enacting control over their lives, and thereby increases their vulnerability to hiv infection. the kenyan woman is like a trapped bird in a cage, as she is surrounded by economic, social, and cultural inequalities that engulf her entire life. with nowhere to go, african women suffer in isolation and silence. liberal feminist theories inform us that women can begin to reduce their vulnerability to hiv infection if they are accorded equal opportunity and education. socialist/marxist feminist theory argues that capitalism and patriarchy are major impediments to women acquiring complete independence, which enhances hiv vulnerability. radical feminist theory suggests that the only way to fight vulnerability is by exposing what is considered private and make it public. these three theories reveal that women who are most vulnerable to hiv infection are those who have least control over their sexual lives compounded by broader social issues such as lack of economic power, sexual power, cultural constraints, and disparity due to patriarchy (fleischman, 2003; smyke, 1991). these socio-cultural factors conversely affect women depending on their age, education, religion, ethnicity, region, marital status, and employment. methodology this research investigated the factors that influence women’s vulnerability to hiv/aids in kenya. to address the research questions, secondary data analysis of the 2003 kenya demographic and health survey was undertaken. herein, the methodology used to examine the relationship between hiv vulnerability and various demographic variables is explained. first, the method of data collection, the sampling design, and the questionnaire are described. kenya demographic and health survey the data used in this research were derived from the 2003 kenya demographic and health survey (kdhs). the survey is an ongoing process conducted to monitor population and advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 19 health in kenya. data were collected in 1989, 1993, 1998, and 2003 however the present study used only the 2003 data set. data collection and sampling design the 2003 kdhs was administered by the central bureau of statistics in collaboration with the ministry of health, the national aids and sexually transmitted infections control programme, the kenya medical research institute, and the national council of population and development. the data were collected from april to september of 2003. the sample included 10,000 households randomly selected throughout kenya. the sample incorporates the eight provinces in kenya as well as rural and urban areas. a two-stage sample method was utilized in the kdhs survey. in the first phase, “clusters” were collected from a main sample frame under the central bureau of statistics department (the fourth national sample survey and evaluation programme). from this main sample frame, 400 clusters, 129 urban and 271 rural, were selected. in the second stage, selection involved a sampling of all households that had been collected in 2002 by the national sample survey and evaluation programme. an update was reconfigured in may and june of 2003 in 50 selected samples because of the rapid change of residential places in the urban areas. sample there were 8,195 women aged 15 to 49 and 3,578 men aged 15 to 54 who responded to the survey throughout kenya. the present study utilized only the female data because of the research focus on vulnerability. the final sample size was reduced to 3,697 because of the use of listwise deletion, which is the exclusion of all respondents with a missing value on any given independent variable in the analysis. the average age of respondents was 28 years and the minimum and maximum ages were 15 and 49 respectively. in sexual relationships, aids exposes women’s vulnerability. women are particularly affected by aids, given how gender relations intersect with sexual behavior and economic security (baylies & bujra, 2000). the present study shows that women who were younger, had low levels of education, were from certain ethnicities and from certain regions, were unmarried, and not employed were more vulnerable to hiv infection. survey instrument the kdhs (2003) study utilized three separate questionnaires for the study: the women’s questionnaire, the household questionnaire, and the men’s questionnaire. however, in this study the primary focus was on the women’s questionnaire. the women’s questionnaire collected information from all women aged 15-49 on various topics ranging from reproductive history to experience with domestic violence. the survey examined issues of hiv/aids with emphasis on “awareness, sexual behavior and sexually transmitted diseases” (p. xix). the kdhs (2003) also added new features such as domestic violence and hiv testing which had not been included in prior research. in this study, however, the area of interest was about women and hiv advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 20 vulnerability in relation to kenyan women. selected items from the survey were operationalized to create the dependent and independent variables for this study. operationalizing the dependent variable: vulnerability the dependent variable created was hiv vulnerability. this variable was constructed through a review of the literature that identified five concepts that were shown to be related to the topic of interest which were powerlessness of women, lack of aids –related knowledge, cultural practices, sexual behavior, and perception of hiv risk. the vulnerability variable consisted of 21 items. the vulnerability score was calculated only if the respondent answered at least 10 of the 21 questions. the average of the items answered was calculated as the vulnerability score. in cases where the responses to more than 11 questions were missing, those responses were not taken into account and were eliminated because the low response rate did not represent the full scope of vulnerability, table 1 shows the number of women who responded to each number of questions. according to table 1, it is evident that only three people were excluded for the analysis because they answered fewer than 10 questions. over half (57%) answered at least 18 of 21 questions. for purposes of this study, the vulnerability score was measured on a scale from 0 to 1 such that a low score represented low vulnerability and a high score represented high vulnerability to hiv. the composite score was arrived at by calculating the mean of the non-missing responses. the sum of the responses could not be used because of missing values that would not have given an accurate representation of the vulnerability score, hence mean scores were used. in the following section, each of these five constructs will be examined to show the frequency distribution of respondents on each of the dependent items. table: 1 number of respondents for vulnerability items no. of questions no of respondents cumulative number 6.00 1 8.00 1 2 9.00 1 3 10.00 29 32 11.00 85 117 12.00 68 185 13.00 124 309 14.00 161 470 15.00 147 617 16.00 476 1093 17.00 490 1583 18.00 725 2308 19.00 1110 3418 20.00 269 3687 21.00 10 3697 total 3697 advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 21 powerlessness to measure women’s powerlessness, a scale was created that consisted of six items representing aspects of daily living (table 2). respondents were asked to determine whether they or someone else had a “final say” on issues such as health care, daily needs, food, purchases, money, and family visits. the initial response categories included (a) the respondent, (b) the husband/partner, (c) the respondent and husband/partner jointly, (d) someone else, and (e) respondent and someone else jointly. low vulnerability was indicated by whether the woman herself, or if the woman and someone else jointly shared the responsibility for these decisions, and was therefore coded 0. if someone else had the final say, the woman was considered more vulnerable, and these responses were therefore coded as 1. table 2 coding of powerlessness items coding 1. who decides how the money you earn will be used? 0=respondent, respondent & husband/partners jointly, respondent & someone else jointly 1=husband/partner/someone else 2. who has a final say on your own health care? 3. who has a final say on making large household purchases? 4. who has a final say about household purchases for daily needs? 5. who has a final say about visits to friends and family? 6. who has a final say about what food should be cooked daily? aids-related knowledge to measure knowledge about hiv/aids, a number of questions were utilized from the original survey. the knowledge scale consists of eight items that ask respondents about their knowledge of factual information related to the transmission of hiv. the response categories were either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. the coding of these responses depended on whether the correct answer was yes or no; with correct answers (i.e., more knowledge) indicating low vulnerability. answers indicating that the respondents had more knowledge, and hence were less vulnerable, were coded as 0. those who answered in a way that indicated less knowledge and were therefore more vulnerable, were coded as 1. table 3 provides the specific coding for each of the knowledge items. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 22 table 3 coding of aids-related knowledge items coding 1. can one reduce their chances of getting the aids virus by having one sex partner who has no other partners? 0=yes 1=no 2. can one get the aids virus from mosquito or insect bites? 0=no 1=yes 3. can one reduce their chances of getting the aids virus by using a condom every time they have sex? 0=yes 1=no 4. can one get the aids virus by sharing utensils with a person who has aids? 0=no 1=yes 5. can one reduce their chances of getting the aids by not having sex at all? 0=yes 1=no 6. is it possible for a healthy-looking person to have the aids virus? 0=yes 1=no 7. have you ever been tested for the aids virus? 0=yes 1=no 8. do you know where you could go to get an aids test? 0=yes 1=no cultural practices two items were utilized to represent cultural practices. the respondents were asked to indicate whether or not they were circumcised and if their husband had more than one wife. those who responded yes were coded as 1, indicating higher vulnerability. conversely, those who responded no were coded 0, which demonstrated lower vulnerability (see table 4). table 4 coding of cultural practices items coding 1. does your husband have other wives? 0= no 1=yes 2. are you circumcised? 0=no 1=yes sexual behavior four items were used to measure respondents’ risky sexual behavior. the items asked about condom usage and whether the respondent had received money or gifts in exchange for advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 23 sex. the response categories were ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ with yes responses indicating low vulnerability (table 5). table 5 coding of sexual behavior items coding 1. the first time you had sexual intercourse, was a condom used? 0=yes 1=no 2. the last time you had sexual intercourse, was a condom used? 0=yes 1=no 3. intercourse with another man, was a condom used? 0=yes 1=no 4. ever given/received gifts, money, or favors in return for sex? 0=no 1=yes perception of hiv risk to measure perception of hiv risk, respondents were asked to determine perceived risk of hiv vulnerability. there was one question with four possible responses. the response category ranged from no risk to small, moderate, or great risk. those who stated that their chances of getting aids were “no risk” were coded 0, small risk was coded .50, moderate risk was coded .75, and great risk coded 1 (see table 6). table 6 coding of perception of hiv risk item coding 1. do you think your chances of getting aids are no risk, small, moderate, or great? no risk =.00 small =.50 moderate =.75 great =1.00 operationalizing the independent variables according to the literature, a number of demographic differences exist among women with regards to vulnerability. people who are less educated are shown to be more vulnerable to hiv than those with more education (nacc, 2002; world bank, 2002). younger adults are more vulnerable to hiv than older adults. there are also certain ethnic practices or religious practices that may increase hiv vulnerability (mann & tarantola, 1996). therefore, it is paramount that studies take into account basic demographic differences in studying the level of vulnerability among women. in this study it was expected that age, education, religion, ethnicity, region, marital status, and employment were the independent variables that would be related to hiv vulnerability among women. the independent variables are summarized in table 2. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 24 age age is one of the variables identified in the literature as a factor in hiv vulnerability among females. the literature has widely suggested that younger adults are more vulnerable to hiv infection because of social, cultural, and economic reasons (kalipeni, 2000; nacc, 2002). age was measured in the following increments: 1. 15-19 2. 20-29 3. 30-39 4. 40-49 education the literature suggests that those with higher levels of education tend to be more knowledgeable about hiv transmission and prevention and hence less vulnerable to hiv infection than those with lower levels of education (cleland & ferry, 1995; world bank, 2002). education was classified into four categories: 1. no education 2. primary 3. secondary 4. higher education religion hiv vulnerability is expected based on religious affiliation. for example, douglas (1999) and mann and tarantola (1996) suggested that certain religions promote practices such as polygamy, which can create an easier channel for the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases including hiv/aids. in this study it is expected that there will be differences in vulnerability to hiv/aids based on religious affiliation. five religious categories were identified for the purpose of this study. 1. roman catholic 2. protestant/other christian 3. muslim 4. no religion 5. other ethnicity as suggested by the literature, it is expected that there will be differences among the various ethnic groups with regards to hiv vulnerability. certain cultural practices such as female circumcision have been criticized for contributing to the spread of disease among women, advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 25 making some ethnic groups more vulnerable than others. the ethnic groups included in this study are as follows: 1. embu 8. kalenjin 2. kamba 9. kikuyu 3. kisii 10. luhya 4. luo 11. masai 5. meru 12. mijikenda/swahili 6. taita/taveta 13. turkana 7. kuria 14. other region of residence different lifestyles influenced by access to resources in different regions may exhibit different levels of vulnerability. the region of residence variable was divided into eight categories: 1. nairobi 2. central 3. coast 4. eastern 5. nyanza 6. rift valley 7. western 8. north eastern marital status the literature has suggested that all categories of women are vulnerable to hiv infection due to different reasons (fleischman, 2003; nacc, 2002). in this study it is expected that there will be differences in hiv vulnerability based on a woman’s marital status. the marital status variable comprised of six categories: 1. never married 2. married 3. living together 4. widowed 5. divorced 6. married, not living together employment in this study it is expected that there will be differences in hiv vulnerability based on whether someone currently works or not with those who are unemployed being more vulnerable (farmer et al., 1996; mann & tarantola, 1996). the original categories were as follows: advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 26 1. household and domestic 2. professional, technical, managerial 3. sales 4. agriculture-self employed 5. not working 6. clerical 7. unskilled manual 8. services 9. skilled manual the original responses were disproportionately skewed towards ‘not working’ (37%), therefore the original occupation variable was collapsed into two new categories: (a) employed and (b) unemployed. analysis plan the statistical package for the social science (spss) was used for this analysis. descriptive statistics were computed for independent variables. the statistical test used to analyze the data in this study was anova, analysis of variance. a one-way anova was performed to test if a significant relation existed between the independent variables and dependent variable. anova was used because the data consisted of categorical factors which included age, education, religion, ethnicity, region of residence, marital status, and employment. tests of between subject effects were conducted to ascertain significant factor effects (table 7). for significant factors, multiple comparisons with bonferroni adjustments were used to make all pair-wise comparisons of the individual levels of the factor. analysis of variance to gain an understanding of factors affecting hiv vulnerability among kenyan women, analysis of variance (anova) was used to study the effect of age, education, religion, ethnicity, region of residence, marital status, and employment. the tests of between-subject effects show that age (f =78.848, p =.000), region of residence (f = 21.452, p = .000), education (f = 130.088, p = .000), ethnicity (f = 13.276, p = .000), marital status (f = 39.002, p = .000), and employment (f = 216.592, p = .000) were all statistically significant. however, religion (f = .730, p = .572) was not statistically significant (table 8). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 27 table 7. definitions, measurement, and coding of independent variables variable definition measurement coding gender male or female only females included in study n/a age chronological age age of respondent in years years of age 1= 15-19 2= 20-29 3= 30-39 4= 40-49 education highest level of education of respondent as reported by respondent 1 = no education 2 = primary 3 = secondary 4 = higher religion religious affiliation of respondent as reported by respondent 1 = roman catholic 2 = protestant 3 = muslim 4 = no religion 5 = other ethnicity ethnic origin of respondent as reported by respondent 1= embu 2= kamba 3= kisii 4= luo 5= meru 6= taita/taveta 7= kuria 8= kalenjin 9= kikuyu 10=luyha 11=masai 12=mijikenda/swahili 13=turkana 14=other region region of residence of respondent as reported by respondent 1=nairobi 2=central 3=coast 4=eastern 5=nyanza 6=rift valley 7=western 8=north eastern marital status the marital status of respondents whether respondent is married or not 1 = never married 2 = married 3=living together 4=widowed 5=divorced 6= not living together employment employment status of respondents whether respondent is employed or unemployed 1 = not employed 2 = employed advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 28 it had been hypothesized that religion would play a significant role in hiv vulnerability. however this was not the case, and was in contrast with the hypothesis. thus no further analysis was performed using religion. in the next phase of analysis, between-subject effects were identified and multiple comparison tests (bonferroni) were conducted for these variables. bonferroni was the preferred statistical test used in this analysis because more than one test was performed and if type 1 error were to occur, the significance would not be more than 0.05. table 8 results of the test of between-subject effects source type iii sum of squares df mean square f sig. age 3879 3 1.293 78.848 .000 q102 – region 2.492 7 .352 21.452 .000 q108 – education 6.399 3 2.133 130.088 .000 q117 – religion .048 4 .012 .730 .572 q118 – ethnicity 2.830 13 .218 13.276 .000 q501 – marital status 3.198 5 .640 39.002 .000 q710 employment 3.551 1 3.551 216.592 .000 error 59.964 3657 .016 corrected total 110.191 3693 discussion of findings this research explored the socio-cultural factors contributing to hiv vulnerability among women in kenya. the present study indicates that there are differences in hiv vulnerability among young and older women, women with lower levels of education were more vulnerable than those who had higher levels of education, women from some ethnic groups exhibited higher vulnerabilities, women from the rural regions were more vulnerable than the urban areas, unmarried women were more vulnerable than married, widowed, and the divorced, and those who were unemployed tended to be more vulnerable than those who were employed. age the current study found that females, as earlier identified, were more likely to be vulnerable to hiv infection at an earlier age. this is consistent with previous literature that age is a major factor in hiv vulnerability among younger women (kalipeni, 2000).young girls in relationships are more likely to be socially and sexually vulnerable because of their dependence on men economically and submissiveness of women in a society where women are often expected to be socially and culturally subservient to men (fleischman, 2003; zulu, nii-amoo dodoo, & chika-ezeh, 2002). in addition, young women get married to older men in kenya increasing hiv vulnerability because of the power imbalance that exists in terms of experience, authority, and control over sexual activity and resources (turmen, 2003). studies done in the caribbean, south africa, namibia, and uganda have shown similar results that age plays a vital role in hiv vulnerability with younger women being more vulnerable (bain, 2000; kalipeni, 2000; nacc, advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 29 2002). the power advantage in patriarchy comes through in various ways and is wielded through older age, education, and social status (bain, 2001). in kenya, women are getting infected at a very young age with aids cases on the rise in the 20-45 age bracket and peaking at ages 25-29 (akwara et al., 2003). kalipeni (2000) further stated that age plays a significant role in increasing hiv vulnerability among younger women as middle aged men are known to seek younger girls 10-15 years of age in the belief that they are sexually inexperienced and free of hiv infection. this suggests that women usually succumb to older men for resources at an earlier age because of limited access to economic and educational opportunities (nacc, 2002). poverty creates conditions whereby girls do not often have money to pay for basic amenities or even schooling and have to rely on men to pay for access to those resources. however in the process hiv can be introduced to women (mann & tarantola, 1996; nacc, 2002; shell & zeitlin, 2000). while all age groups have some degree of vulnerability, hiv/aids education efforts targeting girls and young women aged 15 to 19 should have priority. the few studies that have been done on sexually transmitted diseases indicate that the infrastructure is in disarray, health education is often neglected, and nothing is known about the quality of std health education in kenya (o’hara et al., 2001). education the findings that women with lower levels of education demonstrated higher vulnerability were consistent with other findings published in the literature. the unequal access of education of girls is widespread and has both economic and cultural roots (das gupta et. al, 1995). previous studies have shown that individuals with less education are likely to have little access to resources as well as less specific aids-related knowledge (abel & chambers, 2004; cleland & ferry, 1995). those women with low levels of education may experience hiv vulnerability as they may have inaccurate aids-related knowledge about transmission, spread, and care. research suggests that those with higher levels of education have greater access to basic health care, better nutrition, and access to antiretroviral therapies (baylies & bujra, 2000). according to the 2003 kenya demographic and health survey, intercourse starts as young as the age of eight among girls; hence provision of education should not have age boundaries. recent studies emphasize the need for hiv education as it has been known to reverse and reduce the spread of hiv, and education in general contributes to women’s economic independence (belenky, clinchy, & goldberger, 1986; browne & barnett, 1991; nacc, 2002; world bank, 2002). education is vital and significant in a person’s growth. the notion that education is a very important factor in reducing hiv vulnerability is in agreement with the liberal feminist perspective that advocates education for women. education on sexual health is a process that should begin early in life as hiv affects women at an earlier age. awareness must be raised as women lack the information to initiate change. hiv education must be extended to grandmothers who are the main beneficiaries as the numbers of orphans are increasing in kenya (gok, 1997; world bank, 2002). the essence of education should be more than just informative. it must seek to address three major key issues. first, education given to women must be relevant to their health needs and their priorities identified. secondly, education must also be directed towards changing social attitudes that inhibit women from protecting themselves. thirdly, it is important to maintain effective advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 30 communication and promote awareness through education. education about sex and the female body is an important determinant of hiv vulnerability (turmen, 2003). the literature shows that health education can influence cultural attitudes and beliefs about the explanations of disease and encourage women to interact and seek health services rather than rely on self-treatment (caldwell, 1993). furthermore, research shows that adequate knowledge may influence and change attitudes and make condom usage and change of behavior more attractive (abel & chambers, 2004). women should be offered appropriate information and education so that they can make informed choices. their particular social, cultural, and economic barriers should be considered (visvanathan, duggan, nisonoff, & wiegersma, 1997). however, education is helpful only if people can apply the knowledge. educating women on aids and not providing women with protective devices is a losing battle. hiv health education should be a priority since it is very inexpensive and requires little resources compared with diagnosis and treatment (o’hara, et al., 2001). hiv/aids is a multifaceted disease that carries connotations of fear, shame, and stigma. because the disease is so heavily stigmatized, women resort to avoidance and refuse to engage in any issue that pertains to hiv/aids because they are afraid of being associated with the disease (mikell, 1997). however one major obstacle for women in kenya is that women do not feel safe to go for hiv testing because of the stigma attached to the disease, and many avoid clinics even when they know where a voluntary and testing center (vct) is available (nacc, 2002). stigma of hiv/aids is so strong that women with hiv perceive little reason to seek medical services for fear of disclosure (unaids 2006). thus a significant number of women resort to selfmedication, which is dangerous because it can result in the “breeding of resistant organisms” (mascie-taylor, 1996, p.20). women in kenya do not voluntarily go to clinics for hiv testing, they only go to clinics when they are pregnant and need prenatal care and an hiv test is mandatory (nacc, 2002). most women find out their hiv status through ante-natal clinics (clark, 2004). sites where women can feel safe to go without being castigated have been slow to emerge in kenya. religion the findings in this study showed that religion was not significantly related to hiv vulnerability. however, other researchers propose that religion and faith-based organizations can have a positive influence on health behaviors, but little research has been done to examine religion’s role in educating people about hiv/aids issues (douglas, 1999; elifson, klein, & sterk, 2003). in a study done by elifson et al. (2003), religiosity was found to be a strong predictor in womens’ involvement in sexual risky behaviors with the less religious reporting greater risky sexual behavior hence greater vulnerability. however in the present study, religion was not significantly related to hiv vulnerability among women. this is likely because the majority of the respondents were christians and therefore there was not much variation in this variable; only a small number indicated no religion. further studies need to be done to understand the role religion plays in influencing vulnerability to hiv/aids. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 31 ethnicity the results of the current study were consistent with the literature that women from different ethnicities experienced different levels of vulnerabilities based on their lives and environment (sargeant & johnson, 1996). in this study, the kisii, masai, swahili, and kuria women had higher vulnerabilities to hiv infection. in the present study, the luo and luyha ethnic groups had lower vulnerabilities; however, these results are in contrast with the aids literature on kenya which shows that the western provinces of kenya have the highest adult hiv prevalence rates in the country, with recent estimates for nyanza province at 28-35% (unaids, 2004). women’s vulnerability can be attributed to the social and cultural forces within each particular ethnic group that negatively impacts on their upward mobility (gok, 1997; nacc, 2002; schoepf, 1988; turshen, 2000). women from the luo and luhya ethnic groups have to rely on the social networks available such as widow inheritance because they are economically vulnerable and risk starvation if they go against tradition. as customary law takes precedence and dictates that women cannot own property independently of men only through husbands, sons or a male cousin in the absence of a male (mikell, 1997; ocholla-ayayo, 1976) exacerbating women’s vulnerability. consequently, women who belong to ethnic groups that are disadvantaged economically and socially tend to resort to harmful cultural practices such as widow inheritance and female circumcision as a way to generate revenue. these very practices increase vulnerability among women. authors such as mwale and burnard (1992) and lightfootklein (1989) stated that african women live with the constant fear of being vulnerable to hiv as a result of remaining faithful to traditions, some of which may be harmful but continue in order to appease patriarchy. cultural practices such as widow inheritance offer women support and protection in case the husband dies. since women cannot own property they lose everything to the paternal family when the man dies. women’s vulnerability to hiv infection increases when widowers remarry without having an hiv test (nacc, 2002). female circumcision is another natural occurring system which provides a network for women to belong to a group, to satisfy a need even when it puts women at risk. however these practices need to be revisited and reexamined. they should not be totally abolished as there are no alternatives to female circumcision, polygamy, and widow inheritance (nacc, 2002). without an income and no access to resources the systems in place although harmful provide some security, thus totally eradicating them would create other vulnerabilities. i propose that women should use these avenues to raise awareness and consciousness about hiv/aids and disseminate information that pertains to hiv and women. practices that predispose women to hiv/aids should be done away with (ogundipe-leslie, 1994; toubia, 1999), because they are not functional in today’s kenya. the masai are pastoralists and are less likely to have knowledge of how hiv is transmitted because of low levels of education. most of them do not go to school because of their nomadic lifestyle. they move from one place to another in search of water, food, and greener pastures for their cattle. thus in some instances women are more vulnerable because they are geographically isolated and may have less access to information because they do not have access to modern amenities (gok, 1997; lesthaeghe, 1989). the concept of ethnicity is a complex issue because of the norms that each group has which is distinct from the other. conversely, ethnicity has to delved into in order to examine what each ethnic group is doing enhancing situations of hiv vulnerability among women. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 32 region of residence the results of this study supported the hypothesis that women have varying vulnerabilities depending on where they reside. the urban areas of nairobi and the coastal regions showed lower vulnerabilities than the rest of the regions, which are classified as rural. specific ethnic groups with almost similar cultural practices tend to congregate amongst each other within regions (akwara et al., 2003). the characteristics of rurality differ by region and type of economy (thomas, lansky, weiner, earp, & schoenback, 1999). the unequal distribution of resources found in the rural areas as opposed to the urban areas contributes greatly to hiv vulnerability among women. women from the nyanza, rift valley, western, and north eastern regions showed high levels of vulnerability. another factor that may be responsible for hiv vulnerability among women is migration. women who migrate to the city without a safety net run the risk of being jobless, living in deplorable conditions with limited basic amenities amplifying their vulnerability (zulu et al., 2002), even though the city is more developed than the rural areas. poverty forces inhabitants to migrate to the city in search of employment; this creates disruption of social and family networks increasing the likelihood of hiv infection (turmen, 2003). rural areas are fairly isolated and relatively stable but they are not isolated from urban areas and infections spread very easily because of the number of sexual relationships outside of main partnerships occurring between the two regions (thomas et al., 1999). marital status there were differences in vulnerability based on marital status with those who were unmarried exhibiting higher vulnerability. from a vulnerability perspective, aids literature has provided conflicting perspectives about who is vulnerable depending on marital status. previous research on kenya has shown that the level of sexual relations among unmarried women is high and the average number of different partners greater for unmarried, than married, widowed, and divorced women (caldwell, 2000). hence unmarried women would be considered more vulnerable to hiv infection. research shows that sex within marriage is considered safer than sex outside of marriage (clark, 2004). however some studies on african women have shown that married women are just as vulnerable and at risk for hiv infection because of the behavior of their partners (abel & chambers, 2004; fleischman, 2003). with the advent of aids, marriage does not automatically offer protection from risk for women who believe they are in a monogamous relationship yet their husbands may have multiple partners enhancing vulnerability (baylies & bujra, 2000; mann & tarantola, 1996). nevertheless in some instances the behavior of a male partner may be more important in determining hiv vulnerability among married women (mann & tarantola, 1996). research has demonstrated that women in africa, asia, and the pacific are being infected in increasing numbers by their husbands who have commercial sex as well as concubine sex (fleischman, 2003). in addition, polygamous sexual cultures also place women in marriages at risk for hiv infection because of both male and female infidelity (fleischman, 2003; mann & tarantola; 1996; sabatier, 1988; turshen, 2000). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 33 however, the present study supports the contention that unmarried women are more vulnerable. according to aids literature, sticking to one partner, also known as zero-grazing, is the best way to avoid hiv vulnerability, regardless of whether one is married or unmarried (mann & tarantola, 1996; sabatier, 1988). employment the findings are consistent with the literature that lack of employment plays a significant role in hiv vulnerability. only 20% of women are employed in the formal sector, and many of the women’s economic roles are undervalued and highly marginalized, which leaves women highly vulnerable (mikell, 1997). of those who are employed in kenya, women tend to occupy the lowest-paying and stereotyped positions that carry low status in the private and public sector (mikell, 1997). women in kenya are faced with many obstacles that deflect their concentration in school forcing them to drop out of school and ultimately become unemployed and dependent. according to kalipeni (2000), jobs and resources such as government training or extension services are directed toward men and income generating opportunities are generally unavailable for women. the financial vulnerability of women is intensified by lack of access to credit, land ownership, training, and education (fleischman, 2003). harsh economic realities and no possibility of acquiring jobs because of lack of skills leave women with few options and some have to resort to survival sex (sacks, 1996) as a way of generating income, which increases their chances of vulnerability. inferior economic and social status limits the ability of many women to refuse coerced and unprotected sex (mann & tarantola, 1996). the results from this study concur with socialist/marxist theory that women’s economic inequality and their dependence on men is a major factor in influencing greater vulnerability to hiv infection. socialist/marxist feminist theory states that without economic power, women are more likely to depend on men for economic resources (blumberg, 1981, farmer et al., 1996). low wages paid to women and unpaid household labor creates situations in which women become dependent economically and emotionally on men (donovan, 1985; lindsey, 1997; lorber, 2001). employment is significant in empowering women because it creates economic freedom and independence, and women can have the option to leave a relationship that is toxic. without an income, women are desperate and are forced to stay in disastrous relationships that create avenues for hiv vulnerability (farmer et al., 1999; fleischman, 2003). in summary, the findings in this study indicate that women were vulnerable to hiv infection because many women lack power and economic independence over their sexual lives. however, as this study suggests, vulnerability cannot be blamed on the individual alone; cultural norms and a combination of social vulnerabilities places women and girls at high risk for hiv/aids. in addition, vulnerability to hiv infection is linked to people’s sexual behaviors. it is what people do that puts them at risk (mann & tarantola, 1996). women are also vulnerable because sexual relationships between men and women in kenya take place in a context where the roles are determined by patriarchal cultures where women have little say in sexual matters (delor & hubert, 2000; mann & tarantola, 1996). hiv affects women who are least able to protect themselves; the vulnerable, insecure, and weak (bury, morrison & mclachlan, 1992). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 34 this study brings together social and cultural factors that influence hiv vulnerability among women. women in kenya are oppressed in numerous ways, increasing their vulnerability to hiv infection. male dominance camouflaged through customs has prevented women from exerting control over their lives and bodies. women are unable to protect themselves from hiv infection as they lack the power to negotiate in matters that affect their health and bodies because they are dependent on men for daily living, enhancing their vulnerability to hiv infection. in this context, women’s vulnerability to hiv infection is reinforced by processes and factors existing in the society and the environment that interact at different levels, affecting women depending on their age, education, ethnicity, region of residence, marital status, and employment. limitations the results of this study should be viewed in light of several limitations that can be attributed to the use of secondary data analysis. because variables had to be constructed from pre-defined survey items, it was difficult to create variables that could provide a comprehensive picture of vulnerability. for instance, the cultural practices question included only 2 items, not enough items when examining vulnerability. important factors related to hiv vulnerability such as substance abuse and use of alcohol were not incorporated in the kdhs questionnaire. however, despite these limitations, i was able to conceptualize concepts that made this study possible. another limitation was missing data. in this study the vulnerability concept consisted of 21 items. this resulted in a sample that was half the size of the original survey. in cases where the responses to more than 11 questions were missing, those responses were not taken into account and cases were eliminated because of the low response rate. in cases where the responses to more than 11 questions were missing, those responses were not taken into account and cases were eliminated because of the low response rate. because of missing data, the vulnerability score was calculated only when the respondent answered at least 10 of the 21 questions. consequently, the average of the items answered was calculated as the vulnerability score. for purposes of this study, the vulnerability score was measured on a scale from 0 to 1 such that a low score represented low vulnerability and a high score represented high vulnerability to hiv. the composite score was arrived at by calculating the mean of the nonmissing responses. because of missing values, mean scores were used. another limitation was underreporting by the respondents; only one woman admitted to having aids. this is in sharp contrast to reports that show cases of women with aids in kenya rapidly rising (unaids, 2000a). the underreporting might be attributed to the way the question “do you have aids” was phrased in the survey. rather than asking “do you have “aids” as a separate question, this was a response on the perception of risk question (refer to appendix a, q816b1, p. 144). another possible reason for the underreporting is the stigma associated with hiv, it is not safe to disclose one’s positive status particularly if you are a woman. women are also afraid to be associated with aids because aids is linked with acts of deviance (mann & tarantola, 1996). women with hiv are stigmatized because they are viewed as dangerous. the possibility of contagion is the basis for some of the fear (feldman, 1990). women face the risk of physical and mental violence once they disclose their hiv positive status. stigma and discrimination prevalent in kenya also makes women hide their status. another limitation is that advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 35 the kdhs sample may not be representative for the general population of women in kenya given the nature of the data. however, for the purposes of this study, i was able to discern concepts that were relevant given the variables available. the kdhs was a large sample and it incorporated 14 ethnic groups. collecting such data would not otherwise have been feasible. recommendations the current situation on women and hiv vulnerability cannot be rectified before the root causes are targeted. social, cultural, and economic factors produce conditions that facilitate vulnerability. among the most important tools to alleviate vulnerability is sex education, which empowers women and gives them the self-confidence and self-esteem to express their needs and negotiate condom usage (visvanathan et al., 1997). health education enables people to understand the problems they are facing and participate in choosing an appropriate solution to their health problems (steady & toure, 1995). education on sexuality and aids-related knowledge should begin early in life. young girls before they are of child bearing age must begin to understand how their bodies function and how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted infections. women of child bearing age, typically the target group, must also have health education reinforced. having established the target groups and the importance of health education, the next step is to determine how the strategy is to be implemented. who will provide the education? how will it be provided? in many african countries, health education is provided by community health workers as they constitute a large proportion of the health care sector. large scale health providers such as the world bank have recognized this and have begun to maximize their effectiveness (world bank, 2002). the marginalized groups particularly the poor, uneducated, and pastoral communities in kenya that have less access to information and health care should have their needs met by providing resources related to hiv/aids. the resources must be distributed to women through some form of affirmative action with preference given to women who are more disadvantaged and hence more vulnerable by offering them opportunities so that they can advance to the level of the more privileged women. women in kenya should have access to knowledge about hiv and be equipped with tools on how to be assertive and good negotiators in sexual matters without fear of violence. this study demonstrated that women are more vulnerable in their younger years; consequently interventions must be directed towards women at an early age. the fact that only one woman reported to having been hiv positive is disheartening because it still shows that women do not feel safe to disclose they are hiv positive because of the hostile environment prevalent in kenya. i suggest that some kind of intervention needs to be directed to those women who know they are hiv positive but will not admit it for fear of retaliation by violence. understanding of the culture is crucial to effectiveness in this area. empowerment by providing equal opportunity. factors contributing to women’s vulnerability can only be changed with sufficient commitment and resources. in kenya, girls are the first to be pulled out of school to help in taking care of the household and the sick (fleischman, 2003). girls need to stay in school so that they can better themselves in the future. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 36 women need to be empowered with tools on how to facilitate access to and control over their income (zulu, dodoo, & chika-ezeh, 2002). to achieve this goal, women must be given the opportunity to work and generate a substantial income and gain greater control over their destiny, health, and nutrition (browne et al., 1991; nacc, 2002). research has shown that the greater the degree of financial dependence, the greater the constraint exercised in sexual matters including condom negotiation (doyal, 1995). laws that discriminate against women on issues such as property ownership, employment, inheritance, divorce, and marriage need to be reexamined and repealed (mikell, 1997; turmen, 2003). women need to be empowered so that they can escape from the cultural entrapments that require women to be submissive (baylies & bujra, 2000). empowerment means the attainment and diffusion of information which enables women to participate fully in decisions about their bodies (wilkinson & kitzinger, 1994). protective sex devices. women need to be equipped with tools that would enable them to have greater control over their bodies and health by introducing the female condom and making it readily available to women. a similar approach has been supported in the latest global report on aids (2006) which advocates for women’s empowerment through tools women can negotiate and use. according to aids literature, african women are highly enthusiastic about the female condom as it would give them power and control that they lack (sacks, 1996). the silence about condom use should be broken as it would improve the prevention of hiv transmission in kenya significantly (o’hara et al., 2001). inclusion of men. one aspect that cannot be overlooked is that women cannot reduce vulnerability by themselves, therefore men must be included in aids discourses. patriarchy has been identified from aids literature and radical feminist theory as one of the factors contributing to hiv vulnerability (baylies & bujra, 2000; donovan, 1985; lindsey, 1997). it follows that if women are vulnerable and at risk for hiv due to social norms and culture, then men, too, are entrapped by ideologies of masculinity (baylies & bujra, 2000). since the society is so male dominated, male members of the household must also be included in the discourse because ultimately they are the final decision makers in regard to family matters. this was consistent with the current findings which showed that only 52% of the women had a final say on issues regarding their health care. adopting the radical feminist dictum, “the personal is political”, legislation on the national level needs to be introduced and passed that imposes on men who prey on younger women for sex. in addition those who knowingly infect others need to be imprisoned and the crime classified as a felony. unleash women’s voices. recent feminist writers (belenky et al.,1986; gilligan, 1982; lorber, 2001) have convincingly argued that there is a masculine bias at the very heart of most societies. the omission of women from aids discourses is now being recognized. this responsibility has been taken by feminists who are now beginning to articulate the values of the female world and to reshape the disciplines to include the woman’s voice. in the process, they continue to press for the right of women to participate as equals in the male world. it may be reasonably argued that when the woman’s voice is included in the study of the factors that contribute to hiv/aids, women’s lives and qualities will be revealed and the unfolding qualities will be observed in men as well. kenyan women need to reinvent themselves and bring their stories into existence to fight this deadly disease. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 37 recommendations for future research hiv vulnerability in women encompasses many aspects of their lives and sexual health. the concept of vulnerability itself should be considered in future studies. reducing hiv vulnerability among women will require further studies to explore the conditions that create vulnerability to hiv infection among kenyan women, especially in sub-groups such as women in the rural areas and pastoral women who have less access to resources. furthermore, studies need to focus on strategies of how these women can be reached with appropriate education and interventions. research has shown that the threat of violence affects women’s power and ability to determine the conditions of sexual intercourse, to use services such as testing for hiv, and to seek social support if they test positive (gupta, 2000; turmen, 2003). studies on women in kenya and tanzania have reported incidences of physical violence after a positive hiv diagnosis (turmen, 2003). evidence from recent studies suggests that an association between partner violence and hiv infection exists in women (fonch, els, kidula, ndinya-achola, & temmerman, 2005). this research lends support to the idea that more research needs to be done on the impact of domestic violence and vulnerability to hiv infection. further research is recommended to fully explore the concept of stigma as it relates to hiv vulnerability. aids-related stigma weighs heavily on women because in many parts of the world, hiv/aids is incorrectly perceived as “a woman’s disease” (turmen, 2003, p. 416). fear of stigma causes women to avoid seeking hiv prevention, testing, and accessing treatment and care, and has been cited as the most important reason why people do not get tested for hiv, as well as being inversely related to aids knowledge and years of education (kalichman et al., 2005). measures need to be adapted to be culturally relevant, for example, as has been done in south africa (kalichman et al., 2005). a similar process outlined by kalichman and his colleagues (2005) could be followed in kenya to develop a measure that investigates what constructs influence stigma, such an instrument could be used to investigate the demographic characteristics and attitudes towards hiv testing and disclosure (kalichman et al., 2005). stigma of aids is a complex issue for women who are hiv positive because they are often rejected, abandoned, and shamed by family and the community at large(nacc, 2002). parker and aggleton (2003) stated that it is significant to examine how “stigma is used by individuals, communities, and the state to produce and reproduce social inequality and social exlusion (p, 16). research has shown that stigma of aids causes women to hide their status leading to secrecy. secrecy breeds death because women who are afflicted with this disease do not seek help and avoid the subject of hiv leading to early death (meursing, 1997). the functionalities of stigma and stigmatization of others have to be examined not as an isolated ideology that is emotionally charged but as central to the constitution of the social order (parker & aggleton, 2003). in order to reduce stigma, vigorous and extensive hiv/aids education is needed (kalichman et al., 2005) and education has to start in the family and society (unaids, 2000b). since kenya is a communal society, the government and its citizens have to all work together to reduce stigma so that people’s lives can be saved. stigmatization is a part of a complex social struggle that intersects with structures of inequality (parker & aggleton, 2003). in addition, further research should be conducted on denial, since denial seems to be prevalent in kenya and has created conditions whereby some people are infecting their unsuspecting partners leading to a cycle of hiv transmission. both stigma and denial have been advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 38 described as being “as central to the global aids challenge as the disease itself” (mann as cited in parker & aggleton, 2003, p. 13). further research is recommended to fully explore kenyan women’s substance abuse and drinking habits, as they may increase their vulnerability and risk of hiv infection. the role of alcohol in exposing women’s vulnerability to hiv infection has not been well researched in kenya. alcohol is known to impair one’s judgment resulting in irrational decisions such as engaging in risky behavior (baylies & bujra, 2000; mann & tarantola, 1996). further studies need to be done on drinking habits and substance abuse by kenyan women and how they contribute to risky behaviors enhancing their vulnerability. supplementary research is proposed to fully explore hiv vulnerability among women in plural marriages. polygamous sexual cultures and hiv vulnerability have not been adequately studied. research has shown that when infidelity occurs in polygamous marriages, women are extremely vulnerable to hiv infection (sabatier, 1988). additional research needs to focus on women’s migration and hiv vulnerability. research has shown that men often migrate in search of employment and leave their wives behind for long periods of time, increasing the chances of risk infection given that men are known to visit sex workers while away (turmen, 2003). future studies need to focus on hiv vulnerabilities among pastoral and nomadic women. pastoral and nomadic women are often invisible and marginalized in the kenyan society. there is a needed focus on the special needs and vulnerabilities of these women in terms of this deadly disease. religion as previously mentioned in relation to hiv vulnerability needs to be explored further to better understand how religion influences vulnerability, although religion was not statistically significant in this study. in order to get a deeper understanding of women’s vulnerability to hiv, future research can utilize a multivariate analysis to get to the complexity of an issue such as hiv vulnerability. integrating qualitative research methods is highly recommended in order to get the full scope of vulnerability (takyi, 2003). it is imperative that research on hiv/aids vulnerability ask women better questions such as what does vulnerability mean to them? how and when do kenyan women feel most vulnerable to hiv infection, at what points in their lives, place, or location? these questions have important implications because such real situation vulnerabilities cannot be fully explored in a quantitative survey, hence qualitative methodology is suggested. statistics are important in research but they do not tell the entire narrative. other variables such as culture cannot be easily quantified; therefore narratives need to be incorporated to get a holistic picture of what is in the culture and environment that is attracting hiv vulnerability among women. conclusion this research grew from a recognition that women in kenya do not constitute a homogenous category. it is evident that there are stark differences among women in kenya in relation to hiv vulnerability. these differences range from age, education, ethnicity, region of residence, marital status, and employment status. the root of hiv vulnerability among women in kenya is exacerbated by the strong patriarchal nature of kenyan society where men are the advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 39 critical decision makers in family, household, and the wider social order (das gupta et al., 1995; 1995; nacc, 2002). women are rendered vulnerable to aids through social and cultural processes that shape hiv transmission. the power imbalance between men and women in sexual relationships makes it difficult for women to implement and insist on protective behaviors (eng & butler, 1997). this study recognized that in spite of efforts to spread information about the dangers of hiv/aids, social, economic, and cultural factors play a significant role in women’s vulnerability. in line with liberal feminism, women can begin to alleviate hiv vulnerability if they are accorded the same opportunities in terms of equal opportunity and education so that they can fully participate in all aspects of social life, reflecting personal choices (lindsey, 1997). education is the most powerful tool for reducing women’s vulnerability. education has been shown to provide women with knowledge in order to make healthy decisions concerning their own lives and bring about long-term health behaviors (world bank, 2002). education can contribute to female economic independence, delayed marriage, and work outside the home (world bank, 2002). hiv/aids must be addressed through education and prevention efforts that are culturally feasible (treichler, 1999). hiv vulnerability discourse is a complex issue because women’s vulnerability to hiv and sexuality is related to life within the realm of a patriarchal society. the forces present in patriarchal societies negatively impact a woman’s ability to stand up against all odds in order to protect herself. however, feminist theory can assist and guide in dissecting the oppressions present in the society that create conditions conducive for hiv infection and provide solutions. the results of this study suggest that younger women, women with lower levels of education, women from specific ethnic groups, unmarried women, and unemployed women are extremely vulnerable to hiv infection. i postulate that hiv vulnerability will continue to persist as long as women are socially, economically, and culturally helpless. there needs to be awareness and increased emphasis on improving the conditions of women, particularly those who are most vulnerable. good health is basic to human life and fundamental to social and economic development. unfortunately, most countries in africa have lagged far behind in providing this basic need (world bank, 1994).women are vulnerable to hiv infection because of economic, social, and cultural factors and processes within the society. therefore, hiv vulnerability can only be reduced if contributing factors are identified and positive action redirected in the right direction. women need to be shielded from this disease as they contribute immensely to the economic and social fabric of kenya as women, daughters, wives, and mothers (mwale & burnard, 1992; 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(1999). behaviors that facilitate sexual transmission of hiv and stds in a rural community. aids and behavior, 3, 4. thiam, a. (1986). speak out, black sisters: feminism and oppression in black africa. london: pluto. toubia, n. (1999). caring for women with circumcision: a technical manual for health care providers. new york: research, action and information network for the bodily integrity of women. townsend, j. (1995). women’s voices from the rainforest. new york: routledge. treichler, p. a. (1999). how to have theory in an epidemic: cultural chronicles of aids. raleigh, nc: duke university press. turmen, t. (2003). gender and hiv/aids. international journal of gynecology and obstetrics, 82, 411-418. turshen, m. (2000). african women’s health. trenton, nj: africa world press. unaids. (2004a). a global overview of the aids epidemic: report on the global aids epidemic, 4th global report. bangkok, thailand: author. unaids. (2006). report on the global aids epidemic. geneva, switzerland: author. visvanathan, n., duggan, l., nisonoff, l., & wiegersma, n. (1997). the women, gender, and development reader. atlantic highlands, nj: zed books. wilkinson, s. ,& kitzinger, c. (1994). women and health: feminist perspectives. london: taylor & francis. wilton, t. (1997). engendering aids: deconstructing sex, text and epidemic. thousand oaks, ca: sage. world bank. (1994). better health in africa: experience and lessons learned. washington, dc: author. world bank. (2002). education and hiv/aids: a window of hope. washington, dc: author. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 44 worth, d. (1989). sexual decision-making and aids: why condom promotion among vulnerable women is likely to fail. studies in family planning, 20, 297-307. zulu, e., dodoo, n., & chika-ezeh, a. (2002). sexual risk-taking in the slums of nairobi, kenya. population studies, 56, 311-323. biography dr. waithera sesay is an hiv/aids activist, counselor, and educator who earned her master’s degree in international affairs, specializing in african women and global health and earned a ph.d from the ohio state university. her writings span diverse fields-the intersection of feminist theories and hiv/aids vulnerabilities, african patriarchy, kenyan women and hiv/aids. advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 5 2010 issn 1093-7099 graduate student perceptions of college of education culture and climate dr. cynthia pemberton, dr. beverly ray, dr. hamdan said, dr. deb easterly, dr. chris belcher abstract this study queried graduate student perceptions of, and experiences with harassment and discrimination in a college of education (coe). the study employed inclusive sampling, targeting all graduate students enrolled in coe classes from fall 2000 to summer 2006. one hundred and ninety-three surveys were completed and returned (12% response rate). while findings revealed relatively low incidences of harassment (26 incidents or 13.5%) and discrimination (27 incidents or 14%) within the coe; with oral remarks, in terms of insensitive or disparaging comments, perpetrated by faculty and students, within coe classrooms, the most frequent form of harassment/discrimination observed and/or experienced; this study contributes yet another example of data-driven evidence regarding the ongoing need in higher education settings for organizations and individuals to act with intentionality and purpose to ameliorate persistent harassment and discrimination. key words: culture, climate, discrimination, diversity, harassment citation: pemberton, c., ray, b., said, h., easterly, d., & belcher, c. (2010). graduate student perceptions of college of education culture and climate. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(5). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/� advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction in 1970, 42% of college undergraduates were female. by 2001 that percentage had risen to 56% (hudson, aquilino, & kienzi, 2005). by 2005, 57.4% of all students enrolled in higher education were female (schmidt, 2007). in 1980, females received 55% of associate’s degrees and 50% of bachelor’s degrees. by 2001 these figures had increased to 60% and 57% respectively. as of 2004-2005, almost 60% of bachelor’s and master’s degrees were awarded to women (the nation, 2007). similarly, “…[c]ollege enrollment among hispanics and asian americans more than tripled from 1980-81 to 2000-01. african-american college enrollment grew by 56 percent and among american indians, college enrollment grew by 80 percent” (ace, 2003, para. 11). in terms of degrees earned, according to the 2003 ace report “[m]inorities went from receiving 11 percent of all bachelor's degrees in 1980-81 to earning 22 percent in 2000-01, and from 11 percent to 19 percent of master's degrees” (para. 16). at the graduate student level, although overall men earned 54.7% to women’s 45.1% of doctorates in 2005, women earned more doctorates in education, humanities, life sciences, social sciences, and professional fields. further, a report from the united states (u.s.) department of education (2006) predicted, “…from 2006 to 2015 women’s enrollment is expected to continue growing at a faster rate than men’s” (p. v). similarly, the 2008 report, graduate enrollment and degrees: 1998-2008 (council of graduate schools, 2008) noted: much of the increase in total graduate enrollment has been the result of increases in the numbers of temporary residents, women and u.s. racial/ethnic minorities….graduate enrollment has increased at an average annual rate of 3.8% for women versus 2.3% for men over the past decade. and, total enrollment has increased at a faster rate for u.s. racial/ethnic minorities than for whites in nearly every broad field over the past ten years. (p. viii) as these numbers indicate, women [and minorities] comprise and are expected to do so increasingly, the numerical majority of college students. despite this, and despite passage of antidiscrimination laws, academia can be and often is, a “chilly and alienating [place] for women [and minorities]” (aquirr, 2000, p. 1). even as women’s (and minorities’—albeit to a lesser degree) enrollment numbers have increased, granger (1993) reported, “decision-makers in many institutions of higher education may pay lip service to affirmative action by developing systems [that], on the surface, [seem] to seek and welcome women [and minorities], but really attempt to comply with federal regulations on paper only” (p. 121, 123). too often the result is a potentially hostile and/or unsafe academic environment for female and minority faculty and students. based on a 1996 report, the chilly climate: subtle ways in which women are often treated differently at work and in classrooms, sandler, silverberg, and hall (1996) noted over 60 ways in which women were treated differently from men. according to sandler (1999) subtle ways the classroom climate differed for women included “behaviors that communicate lower expectations for women,” (¶ 4) and “ignoring women while recognizing men, even when women clearly volunteer to participate by raising their hand” (¶ 7). the literature on sexual harassment (i.e., discrimination based on sex) in academia suggests not only that harassment advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 and discrimination persist, but, that too often students remain silent about their experiences. a report prepared for the american association of university women (aauw) by hill and silva (2005), stated that many students did not know who to tell, and/or were scared and embarrassed. according to this report, two-thirds of respondents experienced some form of sexual harassment, but less than 10% reported it to authorities. there are a variety of reasons that may be associated with non-reporting. these are: (a) uncertainty about whether they will be believed (fitzgerald et al., 1988), (b) worry that the harasser will retaliate against them (fitzgerald, swan, & fischer, 1995), (c) doubt that persons in positions of authority will take action to remedy the problem (dziech & weiner, 1990), and (d) feelings of shame or embarrassment (u.s. department of defense, 1994). students also worry about potential damage to their collegiate or professional reputations. these anxieties and fears, coupled with a lack of knowledge about reporting processes and/or university resources available for redress, result in a low number of reported incidents (reilly, lott, & gallogly, 1986). discrimination and harassment also persist against minority students (ancis, sedlacek, & mohr, 2000; holley, larsen, adelman, & trevino, 2008; parker, 2006). research by ancis, sedlacek, and mohr (2000) revealed that african american students reported experiencing more racist behavior from faculty than did white students. in terms of student-student relationships, parker (2006) stated, “race relations among students continue to be unhealthy, despite widespread and public institutional support for diversity” (p. 18.) likewise, holley et al. (2008), “found that when comparable scales were used to measure attitudes toward lgb people and toward members of five ethnic/racial groups, attitudes toward the six specified groups were correlated” (p. 95). holley et al. found higher levels of negative attitudes about lesbian, gay, bisexual (lgb) students than any other demographic group, and more negative attitudes about latino students than african american students. discrimination and harassment, in all forms, create a hostile learning environment (ancis, sedlacek, & mohr, 2000; hurtado, carter, kardia, 1998); and, as per parker (2006), “[a] negative…climate severely impedes the fulfillment of an institution’s goal to promote diversity….and…can affect students’ experiences and academic performance” (p. 19). over the years, a number of laws have been enacted in an effort to ameliorate the negative impact of discrimination and harassment, some of which have been particularly relevant to the higher education setting. these include: executive order 11246 (1965) and as amended executive order 11375 (1968) (i.e., affirmative action), title ix of the education amendments (1972), and executive order 13160 (2000). affirmative action attempts to alleviate past discriminatory practices by taking into account race, sex, etc. there have been a series of cases in the supreme court that have attempted to set forth affirmative action guidelines. the court has come to a variety of decisions as to how, and to what extent, affirmative action is allowed. in 2003 the supreme court struck down the university of michigan’s undergraduate race-conscious admissions point system, but upheld the law school’s admission policy noting that race could be a factor used in making admissions decisions (grutter v. bollinger, 2003). this decision effectively reaffirmed the 1978 landmark decision, regents of the university of california v. bakke, wherein the court suggested that while set-asides (i.e., racial quotas) were forbidden, racial diversity as a plus factor could be used for admission decisions. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 in 1972, a federal civil rights statute, title ix, was enacted as part of the united states education amendments. title ix was designed to broadly address issues of education equity (i.e., admission and recruitment policies and practice, educational programs and activities, etc). title ix states that, “no person in the united states shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance” (title ix 1972, 1975). the link to federal financial assistance (i.e., federal dollars funneled directly or indirectly to schools) ties title ix to virtually all public and most private educational institutions. executive order 13160 (2000) was signed by president clinton, to address discrimination based on sexual orientation. it states, in part, that “...discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, disability, religion, age, sexual orientation, and status as a parent will be prohibited in federally conducted education and training programs and activities” (exec. order no. 13160, 2000, para. 2). for the purpose of clarification, programs and activities are defined to include programs or activities “...conducted, operated, or undertaken by an executive department or agency” and include, “...but are not limited to, formal schools, extracurricular activities, academic programs, occupational training, scholarships or fellowships, student internships, training for industry members, summer enrichment caps, and teacher training programs” (exec. order no. 13160, 2000). the law generally, and these laws in particular, attempt to provide guidelines that regulate the boundaries of behavior, and thereby balance varied interests among individuals with differing priorities, values, and beliefs. despite attempts to legislate behavioral boundaries, discrimination and harassment remain problems too often evidenced on campuses and in classrooms (lindsay & justiz, 2001). van roosmalen and mcdaniels (1998) suggested that many in positions of authority have either hoped these issues were no longer problems or have waited silently for them to disappear. purpose of the study the purpose of this descriptive study was to query graduate student perceptions of, and experiences with harassment and discrimination in a college of education (coe). this study was motivated by a need to: (a) provide a safe avenue through which students could express issues and concerns, both positive and negative, regarding their perceptions of, and experiences with harassment and discrimination within their college; (b) add to the growing body of literature confirming the existence and persistence of harassment and discrimination in higher education; and (c) provide an institution specific research-based foundation for action. this study was guided by two research questions. these were: (a) what are coe graduate student perceptions of and experiences with harassment?; and (b) what are coe graduate student perceptions of, and experiences with discrimination? methodology survey research was used to query coe graduate students’ perceptions. the coe exists within a doctoral granting research university in the inter-mountain west of the united states. the coe was selected as the university unit for this study, because it was the researchers’ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 home college, and the source of study funding and support. resources were not available for a broader university-wide inquiry. the study employed inclusive sampling to provide all potential respondents an opportunity to share their perspectives (patten, 2001; patton, 2002). respondents and sampling sampling was delimited to all graduate students enrolled in classes in the coe from fall 2000 to summer 2006. this time span was selected because: (a) it was deemed recent enough to increase the likelihood of obtaining accurate contact information from the university data-base, and (b) it spanned enough time to increase the likelihood of surveying at least some graduate students who could reasonably be expected to have completed their masters, education specialist, or doctorate degree programs of study. a sample of 1644 graduate students was identified using institutional 10th day enrollment reports and annual graduate student graduation rates for the proscribed years. a university data-base, available through the office of institutional research, was used to generate a mailing roster of the 1644 graduate students identified. because of the nature of the information collected, students were assigned a number code. this code was used throughout all steps in the research process to maintain confidentiality. to further assure confidentiality, a third party employee of the university’s office of research opened returned envelopes, physically removed the code numbers from the surveys, and separated surveys and signed informed consent forms before data entry began. two hundred sixty-eight surveys were returned as undeliverable resulting in an estimated actual research sample of 1376 (n = 1376). it is possible that some surveys neither reached their address target nor were returned as undeliverable – therefore, the actual sample number was considered an estimate. one hundred and ninety-three surveys (n = 193) were completed and returned, resulting in a 12% response rate. sixty-nine respondents (35.7%) contributed written comments related to the study’s goals. respondents included numerous demographic groups: (a) student status demographics (i.e., domestic and international students, master’s and doctoral degree-seeking, fulland part-time students, etc.); and (b) student personal demographics, including age, gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, citizenship, disability, marriage, and family status. (see table 1) advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 table 1 student demographics ____________________________________________________________________________ variable total number of responses ______________________________________________________________________________ citizenship u.s. citizen 174 (90.2%) non-u.s. citizen 8 ( 4.1%) no response 11 ( 5.7%) program degree area masters 77 (39.9%) ed. specialist 18 ( 9.4%) doctorate 44 (22.8%) no response (27.8%)a status full-time student 48 (24.9%) part-time student 118 (61.1%) no response 27 (14.0%) age 20-25 1 ( 0.5%) 26-30 20 (10.4%) 31-35 23 (11.9%) 36-40 19 ( 9.8%) 41-45 31 (16.1%) 46-50 39 (20.2%) 50+ 48 (24.9%) no response 12 ( 6.2%) gender male 63 (32.6%) female 117 (60.6%) transgender 1 ( 0.5%) no response 12 ( 6.2%) sexual orientation bisexual 3 ( 1.6%) heterosexual 160 (82.9%) declined to respond 14 (17.3%) no response 16 ( 8.3%) race/ethnicity caucasian 157 (81.4%) non-caucasian 20 ( 2.6%) no response 17 ( 8.8%) disability yes 10 ( 5.2%) no 156 (80.8%) no response 27 (14.0%) spousal status single 26 (13.5%) married 144 (74.6%) partnership 5 ( 2.6%) no response 18 ( 9.3%) do you have children? yes 151 (78.2%) no 28 (14.5%) no response 14 ( 7.3%) (continued) advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 table 1 continued variable total number of responses ______________________________________________________________________________ number of children? 1 17 ( 8.8%) 2 54 (28.0%) 3 29 (15.0%) 4 22 (11.4%) 5 28 (14.5%) 5+ 15 ( 7.8%) no response 45 ( 7.3%) number of children currently residing with you 1 37 (19.2 %) 2 36 (18.7%) 3 20 (10.4%) 4 7 ( 3.6%) 5 2 ( 1.0%) 5+ 2 ( 1.0%) no response 89 (46.1%) ______________________________________________________________________________ a one or more of the respondents answered the questions with two or more responses. instrumentation this study employed a survey questionnaire developed based upon: (a) the researchers’ knowledge and expertise; (b) related literature (alger et al., 2000; hill & silva, 2005; maruyama & moreno, 2000; sandler, silverberg, & hall, 1994; sandler, 1996); and (c) a review of existing university-based surveys addressing harassment and discrimination (e.g., the claremont graduate university: exit survey, the cleveland state university: adult graduate students: perceptions of gender & race survey, the indiana state university: survey of the national origin climate, the pennsylvania state university: assessment of campus), including the university wherein the research was conducted. once drafted, the researchers’ confirmed the legitimacy of the instrument and the link between survey items and the research questions by creating a content alignment matrix between the research questions and survey items. in an effort to further enhance instrument validity and reliability, the draft instrument was then reviewed by university colleagues external to the researchers, and piloted with domestic and international graduate students from another college. the review and piloting generated feedback used to clarify survey items and revise/finalize the instrument. the finalized questionnaire included item sections addressing harassment, discrimination, diversity, and respondent demographics. along with a likert scale, a modified semantic differential scale was used for data collection. instrument inter-item reliability was assessed using cronbach’s alpha (patten, 2005). according to leedy (1997), a score over .70 is acceptable for cronbach’s alpha. the alpha coefficient for harassment related items was  =.973 (33 items). the alpha coefficient for discrimination related items was  =.966 (26 items). the instrument and full institutional report is available at http://ed.isu.edu/depts/diversity/ccreport08/index.htm. http://ed.isu.edu/depts/diversity/ccreport08/index.htm� advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 procedures as stated, all coe graduate students enrolled (fullor part-time in credit bearing coe graduate courses) during the proscribed time period were mailed a letter explaining the purpose of the study and requesting their participation. included with this letter was a statement of informed consent, the survey questionnaire, and a return addressed, postage paid envelope. due to the nature of the issues addressed, the researchers declined to solicit responses from those who did not reply to the initial mailing. the decision not to contact non-respondents, as well as the sensitive nature of the issues addressed, and the questionnaire length, may have contributed to the relatively low response rate (ary, jacobs, razavieh, & sorensen, 2006; dillman, 2000). response rate as a limitation of the study is discussed below. the surveys were mailed to potential participants in october and november of 2006. although initially the researchers anticipated allowing 1 month between survey mailing and data analysis, data analysis occurred in march 2007. data were primarily quantitative (nominal and ordinal), with some qualitative data derived from open-ended questions. survey data were entered into a database created by a member of the research team using statistical package for the social sciences ® (spss ®). a research team member with extensive experience using spss® ran descriptive analyses on the quantitative data (i.e., response frequencies and corresponding percentages as well as measures of central tendency). qualitative data were analyzed using a general inductive method (thomas, 2006). narrative data were read and reread by two members of the research team. emergent themes and patterns were noted independently, then compared for cross-validation, and used to further explicate the study’s quantitative findings. results this descriptive study queried graduate student perceptions of, and experiences with harassment and discrimination in a college of education (coe). limitations are examined, followed by a report of the findings beginning with a review of respondent demographics, followed by findings related to perceptions and experiences regarding harassment, and then discrimination. limitations the response rate was relatively low (12 %) and is an important limitation to keep in mind as the findings are reviewed and discussed. beyond the procedural decision not to engage follow-up contacts, a number of potential response-related factors may have impacted this study: (a) despite the fact that anonymity and confidentiality were assured, participants may have feared retribution, which may have impacted the response rate, and inhibited fully truthful responses (fitzgerald, swan, & fischer, 1995); (b) some of the participants know one or more of the researchers (in some cases as colleagues in the coe) and may have responded in what they perceived to be socially desirable ways (ary, jacobs, razavieh, & sorensen, 2006), or felt threatened (for themselves or others) and sought to discredit and/or skew the study findings; (c) advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 for some participants, considerable time had lapsed since they had taken coe classes, which could contribute to forgetting incidents and/or muting incident memories; and (d) response rates are “…often higher among the more intelligent, better educated, more conscientious, and those more interested or generally more favorable to the issue involved in the questionnaire” (ary, jacob, razavieh, & sorensen, 2006, p. 414) as a result, those who responded may not be fully representative of the target population and may reflect a disproportionate number of “…those more interested…” (p. 414). demographics as displayed in table 1, just over 60% of the respondents were female, with 32.6% male (some respondents declined to indicate sex, and one noted transgendered). age ranges spanned from 20-25 years to over 50 years, with the majority (just over 41%) indicating they were over 40 years of age. ninety percent of respondents were u.s. citizens, who identified themselves as white/caucasian (81.4%), english speaking (86%), heterosexual (83%), and married (74.6%) with one or more children (78.2%). these demographics were fairly consistent with both the coe and broader university demographics (i.e., majority female, 35-40 years of age), and indicated that the survey respondents, while somewhat more female dominated, were demographically representative of the coe and university graduate student populations (isu, 2007). relative to program-specific alignment, most respondents were not currently coe graduate students (64%), were graduates of the coe graduate program within which they took classes (57%) (46 doctoral students, 18 education specialist students, 77 master’s students, 6 dual degree program students [i.e., masters, education specialist, doctorate combinations], and 46 no responses), and were not members of a coe cohort program. also, similar to broader university graduate student demographics, the majority (61%) indicated they were, or had been, part-time graduate students. harassment harassment was defined as uninvited and unwelcome verbal or physical conduct, comment, or display, that demeans, belittles, intimidates, or humiliates a person or group (alexander & alexander, 2001; carpenter, 2000; dziech & weiner, 1990; fitzgerald et al., 1988; hill & silva, 2005; reilly, lott, & gallogly, 1986; sadker & sadker, 1994; sandler, 1999; sandler et al., 1996; u.s. department of defense, 1994; van roosmalen & mcdaniels, 1998). perceptions of harassment were queried relative to whether coe students who had taken graduate classes (hereafter referred to as students) believed they had experienced and/or witnessed harassment, the type and form of harassment, location of occurrence, and whether the harassment was reported, and to whom. of the 193 respondents, 26 (13.5%) indicated “yes” they had experienced harassment in the coe, 162 (83.9%) said “no,” and 5 (2.6%) did not respond. similarly, 24 respondents (12.4%) indicated the harassment interfered with their ability to learn, 23 (11.9%) stated witnessing harassment interfered with their ability to learn, and 31 (16.1%) believed that the harassment they witnessed interfered with another student’s ability to learn. in absolute terms these numbers may be relatively small, and given the low response rate, this study does not advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 suggest the findings are generalizable. however, a theoretical extrapolation of these numbers, that is, “implied incidents” (hill & silva, 2005, p. 14),viewed in terms of a broader student population of 2000 graduate students could translate to nearly 300 students experiencing harassment, and among a general student body of 14,000 students, these numbers could translate to nearly 2000 students experiencing harassment. in terms of type of harassment, among those who reported experiencing harassment, findings revealed that: (a) student harassment by faculty occurred most frequently in terms of race/ethnicity/color/national origin, sex, and language/culture; (b) student harassment by staff/administration, while reported as less frequent than harassment by faculty, was similarly concentrated in these three categories; and (c) student on student harassment was most frequently reported in terms of race/ethnicity/color/national origin, religion, and language/culture. (see table 2) incidents of harassment were elaborated on by some respondents through written responses to open-ended questions. five students reported firsthand accounts of harassment on the part of faculty. three others reported observing faculty harassment of other students. a female participant stated: while i did not personally experience harassment from coe admin/staff, 2 different women confided in me about sexual harassment & bullying from a male coe admin/staff that they each experienced. it should be noted that these 2 women did not know each other & were not enrolled in the same courses. another commented: “students with children @ home often were "reminded" what their priorities should be.” similarly a female respondent noted: “i was in the graduate program several years ago and that is when the discriminatory comments were made against women in administration. this attitude convinced me not to finish the masters program at that time.” beyond identifying frequency of incident occurrence, survey responses revealed faculty harassment based on sex out-numbered harassment reported as perpetrated by staff/ administration and students combined; while reports of harassment of students by students on the basis of race were nearly as high as those for faculty. only veteran status resulted in zero reports across all three groups. reports of harassment on the basis of religion occurred with limited frequency (3 = faculty; 1 = staff/administrative; 4 = students). these findings indicate that harassment experiences were evidenced, and were consistent with hill and silva’s 2005 aauw report, drawing the line: sexual harassment on campus. in hill and silva’s study, 7% of the students reported being harassed by faculty. also consistent, were findings that harassment by staff/administration occurred less frequently than by faculty and/or other students. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 table 2 type of harassment ______________________________________________________________________________ once more no than once response ______________________________________________________________________________ faculty race/ethnicity/color/national origin 7 (3.6%) 0 186 (96.4%) exceptionality in ed/disability 3 (1.6%) 0 190 (98.4%) age 3 (1.6%) 0 190 (98.4%) sex 7 (3.6%) 0 186 (96.4%) sexual orientation 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) religion 3 (1.6%) 0 190 (98.4%) socio-economic status 3 (1.6%) 0 190 (98.4%) veteran status 0 0 193 (100% ) language/culture 6 (3.1%) 0 187 (96.9%) staff/administrative race/ethnicity/color/national origin 4 (2.1%) 0 189 (97.9%) exceptionality in ed/disability 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) age 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) sex 2 (1.0%) 0 191 (99.0%) sexual orientation 0 0 193 (100% ) religion 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) socio-economic status 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) veteran status 0 0 193 (100% ) language/culture 2 (1.0%) 0 191 (99.0%) students race/ethnicity/color/national origin 6 (3.1%) 0 187 (96.9%) exceptionality in ed/disability 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) age 0 0 193 (100% ) sex 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) sexual orientation 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) religion 4 (2.1%) 0 189 (97.9%) socio-economic status 0 0 193 (100% ) veteran status 0 0 193 (100% ) language/culture 4 (2.1%) 0 189 (97.9%) ______________________________________________________________________________ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 hill and silva’s 2005 study went on to note that sexual harassment experiences were not only “widespread among college students across the country” (p. 2), but that “[m]ore than onethird of college students do not tell anyone about their experiences with sexual harassment” (p. 4). in this study, just over a third of those indicating they had experienced harassment said they reported it. among those who reported harassment–told someone, most told a family member, friend, or fellow student. five respondents indicated they reported harassment to a coe faculty member, four said they told a coe administrator, none reported anything to the human resources department, and only one said she/he reported harassment to the affirmative action office. (see table 3) these data were consistent with the low incidence of harassment reporting noted more broadly in the literature (hill & silva, 2005; fitzgerald et al., 1988; fitzgerald, swan, & fisher, 1995), and suggest the need for awareness information and/or training regarding available harassment reporting avenues and offices. table 3 harassment reporting ______________________________________________________________________________ yes no not no applicable response ______________________________________________________________________________ did you report the harassment? 9 ( 4.7%) 17 ( 8.8%) 58 (30.1%) 109a (56.5%) to whom did you report the harassment? a family member 16 ( 8.3%) 177 (91.7%) a friend 13 ( 6.7%) 180 (93.3%) a fellow student 15 ( 7.8%) 178 (92.2%) a coe faculty 5 ( 2.6%) 188 (97.4%) a coe admin 4 ( 2.1%) 189 (97.9%) a non-coe faculty 1 ( 0.5%) 192 (99.5%) a non-coe admin 0 193 (100% ) human resource 0 193 (100% ) affirmative action 1 ( 0.5%) 192 (99.5%) other 1 ( 0.5%) 192 (99.5%) not applicable 54 (28.0%) 139 (72.0%) ______________________________________________________________________________ a one or more of the respondents answered the questions with two or more responses. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 13 data detailing the form and frequency of harassment indicated that oral remarks, occurring within coe classrooms, followed by oral remarks occurring in coe offices, were the most frequent form and location of harassment reported. further, insensitive or disparaging remarks from faculty were reported as occurring more than twice as often about women as about men, or any other group (i.e., race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and language/culture). (see table 4) table 4 form and site of harassment ______________________________________________________________________________ yes no response ______________________________________________________________________________ in what form was the harassment? oral remarks 22 (11.4%) 171 (88.6%) written comments 1 ( 0.5%) 192 (99.5%) anonymous phone calls 0 193 (100% ) e-mails 3 ( 1.6%) 190 (98.4%) graffiti 0 193 (100% ) bullying 3 ( 1.6%) 190 (98.4%) denial of services/support 6 ( 3.1%) 187 (96.9%) threats of physical violence 0 193 (100% ) actual physical assault or injury 1 ( 0.5%) 192 (99.5%) other 4 ( 2.1%) 189 (97.9%) not applicable 52 (26.9%) 141 (73.1%) where did the harassment occur? in a coe classroom 20 (10.4%) 173 (89.6%) in a coe lab 2 ( 1.0%) 191 (99.0%) in a campus office in the coe 12 ( 6.2%) 181 (93.8%) in a public space in the coe 3 ( 1.6%) 190 (98.4%) while working at my coll/univ job 2 ( 1.0%) 191 (99.0%) at a coe/campus event 0 193 (100% ) other 2 ( 1.0%) 191 (99.0%) not applicable 52 (26.9%) 141 (73.1%) ______________________________________________________________________________ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 although these data imply a relatively low incidence of harassment within the coe, harassment incidents were evidenced. specifically, harassment, in the form of oral remarks, noted in terms of insensitive or disparaging comments, perpetrated by faculty and students, within coe classrooms, appear to be an area in need of redress. discrimination for the purpose of this study, discrimination was defined as unfair or unequal treatment or consideration of a person or group (i.e., prejudicial bias) on the basis of race, ethnicity, color, national origin, exceptionalities in education, disability, age, sex/gender, sexual orientation, religion, socio-economic status (ses), veteran status, language or culture (alexander & alexander, 2001; carpenter, 2000; cheney & pemberton, 2002; freire, 1998). perceptions of discrimination were queried relative to whether students believed they had experienced discrimination, the type and form of discrimination, location of occurrence, and whether the discrimination was reported, and to whom. when asked if they had experienced discrimination, as defined in this study, by faculty, staff/administration, or students, 27 (14.0%) responded “yes,” 153 (79.3%) responded “no,” and 13 (6.7%) did not respond. the incidence of occurrence reported was similar to that noted for harassment (harassment data: yes: 26 (13.5%), no: 162 (83.9%) and no response: 5 (2.6%) respectively). in terms of type of discrimination, like harassment, most respondents did not report the occurrence of discrimination. however, among those who did, faculty were reported as the most frequent sources of discrimination, with sex, religion, and race/ethnicity/color/national origin noted as the discrimination demographics with the highest frequencies of occurrence. staff/ administration and student sources of discrimination were reported with less frequency across all categories than discrimination by faculty. (see table 5) the qualitative data supported these findings. respondents wrote about their discrimination experiences based on religion (5 comments), gender (3 comments), and ableness/ability (2 comments). a participant wrote: “i believe that the religion that is predominate in this area creates prejudices in the community and this university against non-members. i also see this religion creating a climate of sex discrimination and white superiority in this region.” another stated: i would like to know how many students who use wheelchairs for mobility have actually finished the program… both graduate students and under graduates with disabilities very quickly found out that if you used a wheelchair for mobility you could not graduate in special education. interestingly, when queried through example-based follow-up survey items as to whether they believed they had “…been judged on the basis of [their] gender,” 36 (18.7%) said “yes,” 17 (8.8%) believed they had been “…singled out in class to speak on behalf of [their] gender,” 10 believed they had experienced “…discrimination based on [their] gender,” and 6 believed they had “…experienced sexual harassment.” these numbers, while similar to those reported earlier, were somewhat higher. likewise, a higher number of respondents indicated they believed they had “…been judged on the basis of [their] race/ethnicity” 24 (12.4%), “…been singled out in class to speak on behalf of [their] race/ethnicity” 15 (7.8%), and “…experienced discrimination advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 15 based on [their] race/ethnicity” 11 (5.7%), and “…experienced sexual discrimination” 15 (7.8%). these additional queries further support and validate the study findings in terms of student perceptions regarding occurrences and experiences of harassment and discrimination. table 5 type of discrimination ______________________________________________________________________________ once more no than once response ______________________________________________________________________________ faculty race/ethnicity/color/national origin 8 (4.1%) 1 (0.5%) 184 (95.3%) exceptionality in ed/disability 3 (1.6%) 0 190 (98.4%) age 4 (2.1%) 0 189 (97.9%) sex 10 (5.2%) 0 183 (94.8%) sexual orientation 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) religion 9 (4.7%) 0 184 (95.3%) socio-economic status 5 (2.6%) 0 188 (97.4%) veteran status 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) language/culture 3 (1.6%) 1 (0.5%) 189 (97.9%) staff/administrative race/ethnicity/color/national origin 5 (2.6%) 0 188 (97.4%) exceptionality in ed/disability 2 (1.0%) 0 191 (99.0%) age 3 (1.6%) 0 190 (98.4%) sex 3 (1.6%) 0 190 (98.4%) sexual orientation 0 0 193 (100% ) religion 4 (2.1%) 0 189 (97.9%) socio-economic status 0 0 193 (100% ) veteran status 0 0 193 (100% ) language/culture 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) students race/ethnicity/color/national origin 4 (2.1%) 0 189 (97.9%) exceptionality in ed/disability 2 (1.0%) 0 191 (99.0%) age 4 (2.1%) 0 189 (97.9%) sex 3 (1.6%) 0 190 (98.4%) sexual orientation 1 (0.5%) 0 192 (99.5%) religion 6 (3.1%) 0 187 (96.9%) socio-economic status 2 (1.0%) 0 191 (99.0%) veteran status 0 0 193 (100% ) language/culture 3 (1.6%) 0 190 (98.4%) ______________________________________________________________________________ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 16 like the findings reported for harassment, few respondents indicated they reported discrimination. among those who did, most reported it to a family member, a friend, and/or a fellow student. only one instance of reporting to the affirmative action office was noted, and zero reports to the human resources department occurred. (see table 6) table 6 discrimination reporting ______________________________________________________________________________ yes no not no applicable response ______________________________________________________________________________ did you report the discrimination? 9 ( 4.7%) 24 (12.4%) 60 (31.1%) 100a (51.8%) to whom did you report the discrimination? a family member 16 ( 8.3%) 177 (91.7%) a friend 13 ( 6.7%) 180 (93.3%) a fellow student 11 ( 5.7%) 182 (94.3%) a coe faculty 6 ( 3.1%) 187 (96.9%) a coe admin 6 ( 3.1%) 187 (96.9%) a non-coe faculty 1 ( 0.5%) 192 (99.5%) a non-coe admin 0 193 (100% ) human resource 0 193 (100% ) affirmative action 1 ( 0.5%) 192 (99.5%) other 2 ( 1.0%) 191 (99.0%) not applicable 58 (30.1%) 135 (69.9%) ______________________________________________________________________________ a one or more of the respondents answered the questions with two or more responses. also similar to the findings reported regarding harassment, respondents indicated oral remarks, followed by grading and denial of services/support were the most frequent forms of discrimination experienced. consistent with the most frequently cited source and form of discrimination, respondents indicated discrimination occurred most often within coe classrooms and offices. (see table 7) advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 17 table 7 form and site of discrimination ______________________________________________________________________________ yes no response ______________________________________________________________________________ in what form was the discrimination? oral remarks 24 (12.4%) 169 (87.6%) written comments 0 193 (100% ) grading 12 ( 6.2%) 181 (93.8%) anonymous phone calls 0 193 (100% ) e-mails 0 193 (100% ) graffiti 0 193 (100% ) bullying 3 ( 1.6%) 190 (98.4%) denial of services/support 10 ( 5.2%) 183 (94.8%) threats of physical violence 0 193 (100% ) actual physical assault or injury 0 193 (100% ) other 4 ( 2.1%) 189 (97.9%) not applicable 59 (30.6%) 134 (69.4%) where did the discrimination occur? in a coe classroom 18 ( 9.3%) 175 (90.7%) in a coe lab 3 ( 1.6%) 190 (98.4%) in a campus office in the coe 12 ( 6.2%) 181 (93.8%) in a public space in the coe 2 ( 1.0%) 191 (99.0%) while working at my coll/univ job 2 ( 1.0%) 191 (99.0%) at a coe/campus event 1 ( 0.5%) 192 (99.5%) other 4 ( 2.1%) 189 (97.9%) not applicable 59 (30.6%) 134 (69.4%) _______________________________________________________________________________ discussion as stated, this study queried graduate student perceptions of, and experiences with harassment and discrimination in a college of education (coe). the discussion reflects on respondent perceptions of harassment and discrimination, and suggests conclusions and recommendations derived from the findings. summary perceptions of harassment and discrimination while the majority of respondents did not perceive they had experienced harassment or discrimination while taking graduate classes in the coe, the findings revealed that incidents of harassment and discrimination have occurred within the coe, and were perpetrated most often by faculty and students within coe classrooms. consistent with the broader literature on sexual harassment reporting, just a third of the respondents who indicated they had experienced harassment/discrimination reported it, with virtually none telling a coe or university person/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 18 office of authority (i.e., the affirmative action office or human resources). disparaging remarks in terms of race/ethnicity/color/national origin, sex, and language/culture were the most frequently cited manifestation of harassment/discrimination perceived by students. conclusions and recommendations hill and silva’s 2005 aauw report on sexual harassment offered concluding thoughts that are not only relevant, but instructive to this coe and university. paraphrased and inclusive of discrimination, these thoughts read as follows: sexual harassment and discrimination defy a simple solution, demand action and are unlikely to go away on their own. talking candidly, while seeking commonalities and acknowledging conflicts, are necessary steps toward creating harassmentand discrimination-free environments within which all students can achieve and succeed (p. 39). this inquiry explored graduate student perceptions of, and experiences with harassment and discrimination, and revealed that incidents of harassment and discrimination have occurred within this coe. according to palmer (1998), a safe learning environment is essential if learning is to occur. kess (2003) supported this assertion, stating “…a safe learning environment provides clear and realistic opportunities for success for all students” (p. 56). harassment and discrimination foster the antithesis of learning environment safety, and impede and impair student achievement and success (ormerod, collinsworth, & perry, 2008). this study and these findings are important, because: (a) they add to the growing body of literature confirming the existence and persistence of harassment and discrimination in higher education; (b) they have the potential to become a model for broader university-wide inquiry regarding obstacles (i.e., harassment and discrimination) that impede an educational culture and climate that values and supports all students and their learning; and (c) they provide a college specific data-based foundation for awareness and action, from which necessary steps toward creating a harassmentand discrimination-free coe culture and climate can be operationalized and pursued. to that end, the following recommendations are offered. recommendations issues of harassment and discrimination are important for individuals and organizations—colleges/universities---to consider. evidence provided by studies such as this, encourage academic units to assess not just culture and climate, but perceived culture and climate. evidence also serves as measure of current conditions that can then be used longitudinally to access positive changes as they occur within and across units; as well as across different student academic levels (e.g., undergraduate students and graduate students). additionally, using the currency of academia, that is, research findings, this study provides the needed documentation to justify and motivate the provision of harassment/discrimination sensitivity training for faculty, staff/administration, and students. in particular, education stakeholders (faculty, staff, and administrators) interested in the retention of students must be informed about study findings such as these and educated about the nature and meaning of harassment and discrimination; as well as how their actions impact students’ perceptions of them as professionals and of the college as a community of learners. particular attention should be paid to the damage disparaging remarks, as a manifestation of harassment and discrimination, can inflict on students’ educational experiences. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 19 “sexual harassment [and zero-tolerance anti-discrimination] policies should be complemented by educational efforts. a policy alone does not change behavior” (howardhamilton, phelps, & torres, 1998, p. 57). howard-hamilton, phelps, and torres reported on studies showing that providing education on sexual harassment policies does change the climate at universities. similarly, research conducted by peterson and quarstein (2001) revealed that holding sensitivity training for disability specialists was successful in helping them overcome insensitivities they exhibited when working with disabled clients. according to peterson and quarstein (2001), “professionals tend to become inured to the hardships of others and lose sight of the need for both verbal and non-verbal sensitivity in the workplace” (p. 43). sensitivity training for those already in the workplace can yield positive results. these findings provide data-driven rationale to support conducting harassment and discrimination sensitivity training. likewise, students need to be made aware of their obligations and options in regard to these issues, and informed about existing institutional mechanisms and reporting avenues to protect them and others from harassment and discrimination. students, too, play a role in establishing and maintaining the culture and climate within an academic unit (parker, 2006). inperson and electronic communications, as well as on-line workshops and training programs could be used to achieve these ends. in particular, information on how and where to get support, along with incident reporting avenues and protection assurance mechanisms need to be in-place, broadly communicated, and advertised. even one incident of harassment and/or discrimination is one too many. evidence, such as the findings presented here, serve to shine light on persistent harassment/discrimination problems, and provide an evidence-based foundation upon which education leaders can act with intentionality and purpose to ameliorate persistent harassment and discrimination. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 20 references alexander, k., & alexander, d. m. 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(2007). violence, corruption, and a slowing economy left many colleges on shaky ground. chronicle of higher education, 2007-08 almanac, 54(1), 3. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, summer 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        race, gender, and leadership by parker, patricia s. (2005). a review by janie kelly, marymount manhattan college. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates, 2005. isbn: 1-4106-1125-6, 212 pp. $24.95 (hbk).             the preface to race, gender, and leadership boldly declares that “this book takes up the charge put forth by cutting edge leadership scholars to envision new forms of leadership for the 21st century” (p. ix).  a key point of the book is that in criticizing traditional “masculine” forms of leadership and arguing instead for an alleged “female advantage” or “feminine leadership” style, feminist scholars have done little more than perpetuate notions of dualism.  furthermore, the model of feminine leadership portrayed in the popular media is based on the experiences of a “select few” predominately white middle-class women.  as a result, “the female advantage perspective excludes the experiences of african-american women as well as other women of color and of different class statuses” (p. xv).  most important, it ignores the multicultural perspective that is essential to understanding and advancing leadership development in an age of globalization.             a major strength of the book is that parker deftly avoids falling into the same dichotomous trap as the flag-bearers of the “female advantage.”  parker’s contention that the “race-neutral” attitude that pervades leadership studies allows researchers to generalize the experiences of an elite group of individuals (that is white, middle-class, privileged) is analogous to the argument against “gender-neutral” studies that led feminist researchers to pose an alternative model.  however, parker is not out to present yet another alternative model rooted in race and gender.  rather, she astutely recognizes that any either/or approach to leadership fails to capture the “the diversity among women’s (or men’s) experiences that shape leadership knowledge” (p. 8).  while noting that the “female advantage argument provides an important critique of the patriarchal discourses that exclude women’s experiences,” parker zeroes in on a significant flaw.  namely, “it fails to acknowledge that notions of feminine and masculine are social, cultural, and historical products, constructed according to racial and sexual ideologies that conscript women’s and men’s embodied identities” (p. 10).  the identities and experiences of african-american women are conspicuously absent from leadership theory and research.             the book is divided into three parts.  part i is entitled, “the need for raceand gender-inclusive visions of leadership in the postindustrial era,” and parker presents the case admirably.  part ii focuses on “african-american women: an untapped source of leadership knowledge.”  from a socio-historical perspective, parker explores the cultural stereotypes that surround the exclusion of african-american women from leadership dialogues, and at the same time, the ways that resistance to oppression generated a distinctive, and valuable, tradition of leadership.  part iii, “african-american women executives and 21st century organizational leadership” brings together the dominant themes of the book, illustrated by the narratives of 15 black female executives.  the collective voices included the executives, subordinates, superiors, and the author’s detailed observations.             although part i effectively establishes a rationale for parker’s study, it is the least compelling to read.  parker’s writing becomes much more vivid when she departs from the theoretical realm and describes “real world” influences and experiences, whether the focus is the degradation of black women during slavery or the emergence of black women in the corner office in postmodern business organizations.  one of the most interesting sections is parker’s account of ella baker as the embodiment of the leadership tradition of african-american women.  parker emphasizes that her focus is organizational leadership.  how many times has the example of a grassroots leader appeared in organizational literature?  the inclusion of women like baker, whose story is told in admiring detail, highlights the point that there are valuable lessons in leadership historically excluded from traditional research. https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html             parker credits baker with being “one of the major influences on the development of collective leadership in the early days of the civil rights movement” (p. 55).  collective leadership is “grounded in a theme of community building”: just as enslaved african-american women combined an african heritage with american exigencies to forge networks of kin relations, and as 19th century clubwomen sought to unite african-american women in the rural and urban communities, baker enacted a tradition that enabled people across class statuses, races, ages, religions, an ethnicities to identify with each other. (p. 57) as described by parker, baker’s work illustrates strategies for advancing collective leadership derived from “africanamerican women’s traditions of resistance and transformation” (p. 56).  the first strategy is developing and using voice.  cultivating and using one’s own voice and that of others is a technique for simultaneously calling for others to become involved in a collective effort and working against the “intrusion of hierarchy” (p. 56).  one of baker’s most famous statements was that “everyone has a contribution to make.  just as one has to be able to look at a sharecropper and see a potential teacher, one must be able to look at a conservative lawyer and see a potential for justice” (p. 56).             in addition to unorthodox organizing techniques, indefatigable energy, and an optimistic and astute view of her fellow human beings, baker’s strategies “emphasized self-definition and self-determination as a basis for long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women” (p. 57).  ironically, that may be what is lacking in contemporary models of leadership.  most scholars would call baker a “transformational leader,” but parker makes it clear that her unique approach to leadership goes beyond that.  parker also makes it clear that baker is not the only african-american woman who displayed the qualities of collective leadership (rosa parks, ranks with many others).  nor did the vision of black women’s leadership end with the civil rights movement.  the legacy of baker, parks, and countless unheralded community leaders is evident in the narratives of the executives presented in the next section.             to continue the historical perspective, parker begins part iii by noting that the personal histories of the executives are replete with the influences of mothers, fathers, and “othermothers,” as well as “contemporary and ancestral others in their extended families and communities that strengthened their identities as black women and influenced their approaches to leadership” (p. 60).  regardless of their social class background, the predominant theme was “don’t forget where you came from,” a powerful reference to “the history of struggle, survival, and triumph in african-american experience” (p.60).  in addition to setting the stage for the narrative portrayals of the 15 executives, the introduction distinctly sets their experience apart from the white middle-class women on whom the notion of “feminine leadership” is built.             parker discerned five major themes in the leadership approaches of the 15 women: 1) interactive communication; 2) empowerment through the challenge to produce results; 3) openness in communication; 4) participative decisionmaking through collaborative debate, autonomy, and information gathering; and 5) leadership through boundary spanning.  ironically, these five qualities reflect identified “best practices” in organizational leadership.  however, as the narratives demonstrate, they are not simply rhetoric.  they are exemplified in the philosophies and day-to-day behavior of the executives.             the use of multiple sources, a common strategy in business management resources, reinforces the point that the women are not simply portraying themselves according to the tenets of popular leadership styles.  for example, a key characteristic of transformational leadership is the ability to formulate a vision and enlist others to share it.  a staff member of one executive commented precisely on that quality, stating that she is “very good at molding her vision and goals into most all of her communications” so that they never lose sight of her long-range goals (p. 75).             a critical point is that the african-american women executives embody both traditionally masculine and feminine notions of leadership.  theoretically, that applies to all good leaders and leadership.  the case studies presented by parker demonstrate that it is not only a viable but a highly effective leadership approach.  for example, one staff member said, i think she’s very people oriented, but understanding that, she also wants action.  she wants things moving in a positive direction.  she’s not happy with the status quo… (p. 77) while describing the executive as “very caring,” the staff member also commented, “she holds people accountable…if you’re not doing your job, you may not be here” (p. 77). in a parallel fashion, one executive’s supervisor related, i think she’s very direct.  i think if you talk to the people who work in the organization, it is all business.  that doesn’t translate to any lack of humanism…i think she is very compassionate.  she really goes to bat for people, particularly if she believes that they’re trying to improve and that they’re working hard at it…but you better be improving.  and she’s not sympathetic for someone who’s less than committed. (p. 77) in many ways, the statements of the executives and their staff could easily come from accounts presented by leadership theorists like warren bennis, peter senge, or jay conger.  however, by going beyond the race-neutral perspective, parker challenges both racial as well as stereotypical notions of leadership.  even more important, the case studies make it evident that the exclusion of black women from leadership studies (or positions) impedes the advancement of 21st century leadership by eliminating valuable and constructive insights into what makes a good leader.             in-depth studies of excellent leaders almost invariably illuminate the myriad of ways that personal, cultural, and historical factors interact to form their character and behavior.  parker accomplishes this in her book using race and gender as a framework for understanding the experiences of her subjects.  from a broad perspective, she makes a persuasive argument for the case that “we should continue to seek diverse sources of knowledge” (p. 88).  africanamerican women do indeed represent an untapped, valuable source of leadership.  a further implication is that in a multicultural, global society it is counterproductive as well as unethical to ignore the perspectives of diverse groups.  as parker concludes, “in the twenty-first century, leadership theorizing should reflect the interplay and struggle of the multiple discourses that characterizes postindustrial society” (p. 92). copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, 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mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com editorial review-irby.docx volume 43, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodreguez assistant editor: kristina hall & jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 43, 2024 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 editorial overview editorial overview: exploring leadership, mentorship, and gender in academia: insights from recent research beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodriguez, kristina hall, jordan donop, and melissa de witt the 2024 volume of advancing women in leadership journal (awlj) includes researchers from around the world. they are from canada (ontario and british columbia), the philippines, australia, and the united states, including california, maryland, new york, north carolina, and ohio, and the work that is published here also highlights women from these locations and trinidad and ghana. these researchers dealt with structural impediments to women’s opportunities, highlighting the transformative power of mentorship, resilience, and targeted strategies against professional obstacles. this is a valuable collection because it underlines how gendered expectations, cultural biases, and organizational structures continue to be essential factors in the construction of women's leadership experiences. yet it also points out some novel approaches, such as informal and peer mentoring, narrative inquiry, and digital advocacy, reflecting the potent role of collective action and relational support in promoting better levels of empowerment and equity. sectors like health and education are still wracked by unconscious bias and structural hurdles in achieving equity. these studies prove that such challenges can be avoided with innovative strategies. for example, mentorship programs have enhanced women's skills, knowledge, and confidence. emphasis on informal and peer mentoring and narrative inquiry testifies to how storytelling and relational support can empower and bring about equity among women. these approaches offer the necessary guidance and create networks, which are very important for professional development. the awlj 2024 volume delves into specific case studies to highlight an intertwined relationship between individual agency and systemic constraints. research on health leadership brings out a clear need to deal with structural biases and exploit workplace facilitators to create more equal opportunities. the resilience of adolescent women and working mothers while they play a dual role is echoed by the researchers, often out of environments riddled with gender discrimination. the tailored strategies include mentoring programs for latina nonprofit leaders and salary negotiation training for female sports management students. this reflects how shared expertise is important to surmount professional challenges for which few successful examples exist. digital platforms create significant avenues through which advocacy can be conducted, giving a voice to marginalized communities and building systemic change. while constituting a call for much-needed systemic change, it builds on the remarkable potential for progress possible when supportive structures are in place. the research presented in the awlj 2024 volume presents how informal mentoring relationships and the force of shared stories alone stand to comprehensively share how women have negotiated and overcome so much while on their way up into leadership and equitable positions. in the healthcare sector, billie jane hermosura and ivy lynn bourgeault’s study,“ it takes a village to raise a leader”: overcoming gender-specific barriers through individual, workplace, and organizational level facilitators,” examined the systemic barriers women encounter in canada’s healthcare leadership. through thematic analysis, the authors identified motivations, enablers, and challenges, underscoring the urgent need to address unconscious biases and structural hurdles that hinder gender equity in leadership. shifting the focus to education, socorro perpetual f. esguerra-escarez investigated the leadership journeys of adolescent women in the philippines in “leading in a room full of boys: a retrospective interpretative phenomenological analysis of the leadership experiences of adolescent women as a minority in a coed senior high school in the philippines.” these researchers explored the experiences of young women transitioning from single-sex to coeducational environments, emphasizing resilience, social support, and strategies to confront gender discrimination. similarly, julie hasson, kimberly money, and olivia sikes explored the dual roles of motherhood and leadership in their study, “the benefits and challenges of inhabiting the dual role of mother/ leader.” their findings reveal how these roles uniquely shape leadership styles while posing significant challenges in achieving work-life balance. 1 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 mentorship emerges as a powerful tool for leadership development across various studies. belinda hernández, in her article, “what’s my type? characteristics of quality mentoring relationships for nonprofit latina ceos as mentees in california,” highlights the role of informal mentoring in empowering latina nonprofit leaders in california. similarly, heidi grappendorf, cindy veraldo, a. j. grube, and annemarie farrell, in their study,“ mentoring in salary negotiations for female sport management students,” underscore the importance of mentoring in addressing gendered salary negotiations in sport management academia. digital platforms and advocacy also play critical roles in fostering equity. felicity sena dogbatse’s work, “let the silenced speak: digital platform usage by feminist and gender equity nongovernmental organizations in ghana,” examined how feminist ngos in ghana leverage digital platforms for advocacy and empowerment. despite challenges like misinformation, these platforms amplify the voices of marginalized communities and drive gender equity efforts. in higher education, kimberly havens-mcvea explored the significance of informal mentoring in “black women college administrators’ perspectives on informal mentoring: a phenomenological case study.” her findings revealed how these relationships support black women in predominantly white institutions, addressing systemic challenges such as microaggressions and career stagnation. further examining higher education, molly bradshaw and colleagues, in their work entitled “the effects of burnout in female higher education administrators,” investigated the interplay of gendered challenges, burnout, and compassion fatigue among women in male-dominated academic fields. narrative inquiry and storytelling also emerge as tools for exploring leadership dynamics. crystal washington and tatiana gounko’s “understanding through stories: leadership experiences of trinidadian women of color” examined the leadership experiences of trinidadian women principals. they highlighted ethics of care and collaborative leadership while addressing the biases these women face within their cultural context. finally, cindy ann smith, felicity mclure, sonja kuzich, sonia ferns, and sally murphy focused on second-career female academics in “empowering second+ career female academics: strengthening relationships through mentoring for personal and professional growth.” these researchers underscored the unique challenges faced by women entering academia later in life and the transformative role of peer mentoring groups. these groups address disempowerment and enable career progression by fostering belonging, self-efficacy, and relational problem-solving. these studies collectively illuminate the complexities of leadership and mentorship in diverse contexts. they underscore the importance of systemic change, inclusive practices, and innovative mentoring models in fostering equity and empowerment across professional landscapes. 2 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 22, winter 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] on becoming and being faculty-leaders in urban education and also being africanamerican...seems promising tondra l. loder, michele jean sims , loucrecia collins, michael brooks , deborah voltz, charles calhoun, and angela d. coker* abstract seven african-american women and men faculty members at a southeastern urban research university reflect on their collective experiences of creating an intellectual community and spearheading an urban teacher education initiative within their school of education . employing a qualitative self-study and project reflection approach, the authors situate themselves within the historical trajectory of the african-american struggle for education, emphasizing the problems and promises confronting contemporary urban educators. highlighting their role in launching the training and retaining urban student teachers (t.r.u.s.t.) initiative in the birmingham city schools, the authors conclude that the future of urban education is predicated on the capacity of contemporary african-american educators to forge effective alliances first with one another, and then with other partners in higher education, urban school districts, the local community, and national educational organizations. on becoming and being faculty-leaders in urban education and also being africanamerican...seems promising in the fall 2004 special issue of advancing women in leadership , five of our colleagues in the school of education (soe) wrote about the challenges and problems that our institution and soe have confronted with regard to mentoring women and people of color in higher education (patterson, dahle, nix, collins, & abbott, 2004). these five women (one of which is a co-author of the present article) described the context for african-american faculty in bleak terms, noting their sparse numbers and experiences of isolation within the soe. since the time of this publication, the soe has made some strides to increase the number of african-american faculty. in fact, in the 2003-04 academic year, for the first time in the soe's history, a small yet critical mass of nine african-american faculty members (seven women and two men) were employed across the soe's three departments. in a previous writing collaborative, the african-american women authors represented in the present article codified our experiences of creating an intellectual community within the context of a predominantly white file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/winter2007/index.htm file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/winter2007/index.htm urban commuter university and soe, both of which have had a poor track record for hiring and grooming african-american faculty for tenure and promotion (coker, loder, sims, collins, voltz, & coker, in press). we learned from our experiences that the potential for the creation of viable intellectual communities among african-american women (aaw) in higher education relies, in part, on the presence of a unique set of characteristics that must be inherent or cultivated within aaw faculty. in our case these characteristics encompassed (a) possessing a womanist worldview/identity, (b) having a desire for a culturally affirming and validating professional experience, and (c) striving to achieve professional excellence and serve as a comentor to her colleagues (coker, et al., in press). we also learned from our previous writing collaborative that very little research exists documenting the underlying processes of establishing collaborations among higher education faculty in general, and aaw (and men) in particular. too often the uglier "divide and conquer" side of the higher education world dominates and adversely impacts the small and fragmented community of african-american scholars ( marshall , 2002). thus far, by identifying shared characteristics and beliefs, we have been successful in taking the first step to create a supportive and thriving intellectual community among the aaw faculty. our circle of scholars now includes two men, due to the recent hire of a young african-american male faculty member (michael), and our effort to reach out to another male colleague (charles), who was for so long the lone african-american faculty member in general, and tenured faculty in particular. furthermore, our collective interest in urban education, along with recent local, national, and institutional forces that have propelled the development of one of the largest urban teacher education initiatives in the history of our soe, has also contributed to our coalescing. in the present article, we build upon what we have learned about being aaw faculty in higher education and take this lesson a step forward by reflecting on our experiences of becoming and being africanamerican faculty-leaders in the field of urban education. the title of our article is adapted from a statement made by h. councill trenhholm, the longtime president of alabama state teachers college during the early 20th century. the language captures his frustration concerning the dire state of african-american education in the south during that period: "being in the field of education and also being a negro, it seems to me to be tragic" (in fairclough, 2000, p. 91). considering the context of the jim crow south--with its segregated schools, gross under-funding of black schools, inadequate teacher training, and open and violent oppression and repression of black educators who protested these conditions--trenholm's statement, while sobering, is quite understandable. and given the current national and local dialogue concerning the woes of urban education, the tenor of trenholm's statement seems prophetic. recent commentary on the implications of the 1954 brown v. board of education of topeka, kansas supreme court decision indicates that there is much unfinished business with respect to providing an equal educational opportunity to african-american children as well as children from all walks of life (patterson, 2002; shealey, lue, brooks, & mccray, 2005). african-american children continue to attend racially and economically segregated schools and are far less likely to receive a quality education than white middle and upper class children. although this special issue focuses on african-american women scholars, we have intentionally chosen to include our african-american men colleagues in this dialogue because history bears out the reality that efforts to mobilize social change in african-american education cannot succeed without collaborations between women and men educators grounded in a mutual respect and appreciation for our common and unique histories, experiences, perspectives, and contributions. in the spirit of sankofa--a ghanaian symbol in the akan language symbolizing an african value system and tradition of understanding and respecting one's past so that one can move forward to the future--we first look back at the experiences of africanamerican educators in the 19th and early 20th centuries so that we can continue to advance this tradition of educational leadership for social change into the 21st century. in the first section we address historical and contemporary perspectives on african-american educational leadership as a context for situating and understanding our present reality and work as african-american educators. in the second section we provide background and context on the authors, method, and local and institutional settings in which we live and work. in the third section we examine the problems and promises we encounter as african-american faculty-leaders in urban education. in the fourth and final section we offer concluding thoughts about our perceived roles and expectations as african-american educators in the 21st century. historical and contemporary perspectives on african-american educational leadership the lives and work of african-american educators have been historically intertwined with the africanamerican community. particularly in the south during the 19th and early 20th centuries, african-american teachers and principals were looked upon to provide leadership in african-american communities; in many respects the practice of teaching and leading was enacted as a form of social activism and religious and spiritual mission (anderson, 1988; fairclough, 2001; franklin, 1990; fultz, 1995a, 1995b; perkins, 1989; siddle walker, 1996, 2000, 2003; taylor, 1996). during this time, african-american women teachers in particular developed self-help programs and women's clubs with missions aimed at providing food and clothing to the indigent, child care for poor working mothers, and housing for orphans (harley, 1982; neverdon-morton, 1982; perkins, 1989; shaw, 1996). these women also worked to promote positive images of african-american women to counter the prevailing negative stereotypes. yet, in spite of this widely documented tradition of leadership among african-american educators there is a scholarly tension concerning whether african-american teachers and principals in the south were actually "activist" in the enactment of their daily work. there is a sentiment among some scholarly ranks that african-american educators are categorically socially and politically conservative. fairclough (2001) addressed this tension in his in-depth analysis of african-american teachers' involvement in the civil rights movement. he noted that the civil rights movement sometimes prompted harsh criticisms about african-american teachers, principals, and educators in higher education. historically black schools and colleges seemed irrelevant or harmful to integration efforts. leaders of civil rights organizations accused african-american teachers and principals of failing to support the struggle against segregation. many african-american college presidents were charged with being "uncle toms" for bowing to segregationist politicians' demands to expel activist student leaders. even on our home ground in birmingham , alabama , african-american principals and teachers were criticized during the sixties for not allowing students to participate in protest marches and demonstrations (eskew, 1997). in his documentation of the tradition of african-american educational leadership beginning in the late 18th century and extending through to the 1954 brown decision, historian vincent p. franklin surmised that contemporary african-american educators have failed to work as a collective to carry the torch of activist leadership into the latter half of the 20th century, citing their shortcomings in confronting the mounting urban public school crisis. he wrote, despite increased information and research on urban schools and programs that achieved educational success for african-american students, black educators and administrators made no collective commitment to educational revitalization within african-american communities. this is unfortunate, for the historical record is clear. throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, african-american educators and administrators not only held themselves accountable for what took place within their educational institutions, but they also moved out into the community to provide leadership for organizations and movements aimed at the social, economic, and political advancement of the entire african-american population. these educators knew that their progress and advancement as educators and administrators was tied to the overall progress of african americans as a group. given the recent failure of the political establishment to improve significantly the situation for african-american children in urban public schools, it is time that african-american educators and other professionals assume the leadership role in the revitalization campaigns needed to carry afro-america into the 21st century. (franklin, 1990, p. 59-60) a corollary critique to franklin 's argument is the longstanding scholarly contention that desegregation and integration policies ushered in by the historic brown decision have done more harm than good for africanamerican education. by shrinking the pool of african-american teachers and principals, this decree effectively divorced these educators from their strong support and power bases in african-american communities (coffin, 1972; foster, 1990, 1993, 1997; hudson & holmes, 1994; siddle walker, 2000; weinberg, 1977). a more apologetic view is offered by michael fultz (1995a, 1995b), a historian who has examined african-american teachers during this same period, who contends that african-american principals and teachers have historically borne unrealistic expectations for changing social conditions that impact the broader african-american community. recent scholarship on african-american educators' perspectives about their commitment to africanamerican education appears to contradict the contention that contemporary african-american educators are less "activist" than their predecessors (beauboeuf-lafontant, 2002; dixson, 2003; loder, 2005a; lomotey, 1989; morris, 1999; sims, 2003). this scholarship portrays african-american principals and teachers who are deeply committed to the education of african-american children, and who espouse the belief that it is critical to their success as educators to stay attuned to the concerns, interests, and needs of the africanamerican community by drawing on its rich heritage of unique pedagogical and leadership styles. in light of these historical and contemporary perspectives, it seems to us that the potential for today's african-american educators to continue the tradition of activist leadership is predicated on their capacity to forge alliances first and foremost with one another. for our african-american predecessors, the scourges of racism and white oppression posed a clear-cut, immediate, and ominous threat to african-americans' hopes and dreams for a brighter future in the field of education. yet, in the absence of an identifiable and common threat within the 21st century context of african-american education, african-american educators may fail to recognize the need to coalesce in order to champion a particular cause. in fact, recent social commentary points to a phenomenon of "diverging generations" in which post-civil rights born african-americans are attributing their success and failure in attaining the american dream to individual efforts versus collective struggle and social and historical influence (bositis, 2001; loder, 2005b). it is ironic to note that although the post-civil rights generation is the first generation to reap the rewards of the hard-fought civil rights campaign, it still confronts persistent institutional and covert racism and sexism, poverty, and inequality (cose, 1993; tarpley, 1995; west, 1993). the mainstream academy, in particular, frequently is a site for covert and institutionalized racism and sexism that diminishes and undermines the collective presence and influence of african-american faculty on education policy and politics. despite efforts to level the playing field in the academy, african-american men and women continue to be woefully underrepresented in the ranks of the academy. african-american men and african-american women each constitute 2.6% of all higher education faculty across rank (i.e. professor, associate, assistant, instructor, lecturer) making up a total of 5.2% of all faculty (the chronicle of higher education 2004-05 almanac, 2004). these sparse numbers contribute to african-american faculty members' feelings of intellectual and personal isolation, marginalization, and their concerns about being viewed and treated like tokens (coker, et al., in press). it is within this aforementioned context that we reflect on our experiences of becoming faculty-leaders in the field of urban education. as a contribution to the larger discussion on urban education, we present our own voices in dialogue, focusing on our efforts to enhance the quality of urban teacher education in the city of birmingham . our capacity to collaborate on this initiative cannot be fully appreciated without some background and context for understanding the reflexivity and flexibility of our method, the diversity of the authors' backgrounds, and the constraints and challenges posed by the local and institutional contexts in which we live and work. background and context method in this article we employ a qualitative self-study and project reflection approach in an effort to advance our practice while contributing to the thin literature on contemporary african-american leadership in urban and higher education. in an effort to crystallize our reflections, each author contributed to the first author's query about our previous and current experiences in urban education. the questions she posed required us to reflect on our cumulative experience in and contributions to urban education, our views on the state of urban education at our own institution and within the city of birmingham , and our assessment of the facilitators and barriers to launching a new urban teacher education initiative in our school of education . this query was designed to capture how we strategically mobilized our cumulative experiences, knowledge, and skills working in k-12 urban school and higher education settings to co-create a national urban teacher education initiative designed to increase student academic achievement in the birmingham city schools (bcs). in addition to this query, our personal interactions and discussions in regular project planning meetings allowed us to interrogate the ways in which we understood and made sense of our professional trajectories and current work on the urban teacher education initiative (bogdan & biklen, 1992). authors we believe our own biographies offer a critical context through which to examine this undertaking. we represent a geographically diverse group with colleagues hailing from the southeast and northeast. we are also diverse with respect to age and generation, with ages ranging from 30 to 52 years and birth years cutting across opposite divides of the civil rights and women's movements. all of the authors have earned doctorates, with diverse training in the fields of psychology and counseling, public policy and educational foundations, educational leadership, special education, and curriculum and instruction. two of the authors are tenured professors and seven are junior tenure-track faculty. with the exception of one author who has been at the university for 16 years, the authors are relatively new to this university with time of service ranging from one to five years. all of us have previous experiences working in urban schools in various cities ( new york , philadelphia , anchorage , orlando , and birmingham ) as an intern, teacher, principal, career and college counselor, and professional development consultant. we have transformed these rich experiences into a form of professional capital that empowers us to lead the way in advancing a major urban education initiative in our local and institutional settings. local and institutional settings our university is located in birmingham , alabama . the city has a population of 74% african-americans, and has earned historical notoriety as the epicenter of racial turbulence during the civil rights movement. far removed from the racial make up of city and school district governance 40 years ago, today the mayor, the overwhelming majority of city councilors, and the bcs superintendent are african-american. although our university has been designated as a minority-serving institution, few faculty members in the soe are from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. both the university and the soe have demonstrated a weak track record in hiring and grooming african-american faculty for tenure and promotion. currently, slightly less than 5% of the full-time faculty is africanamerican ( university of alabama at birmingham office of equity & diversity, 2006). this university, like many urban research universities across the nation, has been criticized by some local community members for mining local community resources to advance its wide-ranging research agendas without reciprocally contributing back to these communities. there is a perception among some members of the local african-american community that the university serves its own interests sometimes at the expense of the needs, interests, and well-being of its neighboring business and residential community. the soe has had a tenuous and sometimes contentious relationship with the local school district for this same reason. local school leadership and teaching staff have felt like university faculty and administration have viewed their schools as revolving doors for research, entering in and moving out as grant funding streams expand or dry up. however, recent and sustained leadership by the current soe dean, a senior faculty administrator, and a core of diverse and primarily african-american faculty to establish trust and a positive rapport with local district leadership have so far proved fruitful and promising. these efforts are critical given that the achievement gap between students in birmingham and students in many surrounding communities conflicts with the level of achievement of other business, social, and artistic sectors of this city. this situation mirrors many u.s. cities and is not specific to birmingham alone; this gap in achievement levels is a national problem. in birmingham , it is fueled by several critical pieces of information: • virtually all students in the system are children of color; • nearly 75% receive free or reduced meal assistance; • achievement of students and schools is depressed with very few schools scoring above the national mean (average sat performance is 36th percentile). additionally, very poor participation in challenging high school curricula (less than 50% take the act and the average score of 18.2 is far below the state average of 20.3); • 11.5% of high school students failed the alabama high school graduation exam in 2003; • there is a growing out-migration of families from the city resulting in lower enrollment (4.6% decline in 3 years). as noted by our colleague, michele, "many residents in the birmingham metropolitan area are not convinced that urban education is 'working' for students and making them competitive in the job market." her perception is shared by our colleague, tondra, who grew up in birmingham and attended the bcs from grades 2 through 12: many black birmingham residents appear to feel skeptical about the promise of urban education. even though many of them received a quality education in the bcs, they are disheartened by the negative press about the bcs. many black middle class residents have migrated to the suburbs along with their white counterparts in search of better schools and housing. recent statistics on student and resident out-migration patterns and plunging tax revenues bear out concerns that many residents lack confidence in the bcs. we recognize that the political climate of high stakes testing and accountability ushered in by the no child left behind act has spotlighted the minority achievement gap. consequently, schools of education across the country are being held accountable for their graduates' success in improving the quality of education. all of these factors must be taken into consideration when examining the context for our emerging leadership in urban education at this juncture. since 2003, we have been working diligently to launch an integrated and comprehensive urban education agenda within our soe. a recent outgrowth of our efforts is the training and retaining urban student teachers (t.r.u.s.t.) initiative, a multi-million dollar federally funded urban teacher education training and enhancement program. all of the authors have made a strong commitment to this initiative and serve such diverse roles as principal investigator and project director, faculty liaisons, and an advisory board member. the vision of t.r.u.s.t. is to implement a comprehensive, seamless environment for preparing teachers for urban settings. this vision is based on the core belief that the entire community must come together to create the process by which outstanding teachers are prepared and nurtured. adapted from the popular african proverb, the project motto is "it takes a village to prepare a teacher." the goal of the project is to train teachers who are well-prepared with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to promote high levels of student academic achievement in urban schools, and who are committed to remaining in those schools. the engagement of the pk-12 educational community in the development of the t.r.u.s.t. initiative is noteworthy, as a cross-section of high-level bcs administrators, including the superintendent, along with teachers, principals, and school board members have been actively involved in the discussions leading up to the submission of the federal grant proposal for t.r.u.s.t. as well as throughout the implementation process. in a component of the program focused on the preparation and training of in-service teachers for future jobs in high needs areas in the birmingham city schools (urban teacher enhancement program), bcs administrators and teachers have partnered with soe faculty liaisons to select prospective teacher candidates and to deliver the curriculum. the genuine spirit of cooperation and engagement among the bcs, soe, and national partners in this initiative is arguably unprecedented in the history of the soe. on becoming and being faculty-leaders in urban education: problems and promises as we embark on this groundbreaking urban education initiative, we reflect on the problems and promises that lie ahead for us. one critical concern for us as scholars is the marginalization of urban education--along with the intertwined concepts of race and class--as a serious and legitimate field of study, teaching, and service. the majority of us are junior untenured faculty who are interested in being productive and successful in the academy, which for us encompasses the dual yet often competing objectives of being both scholars and advocates for social justice in the field of urban education. as our colleague, michael, observed, "although urban education is perceived by the soe community as being noble work, it is also a last resort for prospective junior faculty seeking employment." michele echoed this concern, observing that the context for urban education is perceived by many in the mainstream academy as being "too foreign and perhaps too unpredictable." consequently, because mainstream faculty often lack "insider knowledge" about urban schools, they preclude that urban education is not a "viable research area." noting that the urban education research agenda is viewed as being "soft research and not the real thing," our colleague, angela, shared, "i often feel marginalized if i don't crunch numbers and deal with data instead of real people. i often feel isolated intellectually." and tondra has observed that not only is urban education marginalized as a research enterprise but also as a teaching focus and a site for teacher training. acknowledging that many white students and some african-american students with limited exposure to urban schools are reluctant to enroll in courses focused on urban education or to seek field placements in urban schools and communities, she noted: these students have heard a lot of horror stories about urban schools from the local media, family members, friends, and peers within the teacher education program. so unfortunately they allow their biases and negative perceptions to hinder them from exploring the full and rich range of schooling experiences available to them in the city. i have also found that a few of my colleagues limit their students' field experiences to suburban settings for the same reasons. we cannot take these concerns lightly given that the institutional incentive structure validates, supports, and promotes research and service agendas that are viewed favorably by and accorded high status within the mainstream academy. we are well aware that most of us are junior and untenured faculty who are trying to succeed in a setting where only a dearth of african-americans has realized tenure and promotion. consequently, we must constantly negotiate our commitment to the marginalized field of urban education with our tenuous professional standing. as faculty-leaders we must also guard against burn-out. as michael noted, "the problems of urban schools can be overwhelming and encompassing. while we are out trying to 'save the world' we still have obligations to be fulfilled at the university." we are cognizant of the historic mandate that in addition to executing professional duties, african-american educators are expected to solve societal ills that extend beyond the four walls of their schools and academies. given the sparse numbers of african-americans in the academy, it is not lost on us that we must stay focused on our professional obligations to the university. to this end, we have been working together strategically to successfully fulfill our obligations to teach, research, write, and serve the university and community. while we work diligently to implement the mandate of t.r.u.s.t., we also constantly seek and take advantage of opportunities to collaborate with each other on research, publications, and national conference presentations. in light of these concerns, we are optimistic about our unique generational position as african-american faculty-leaders in the context of contemporary birmingham . we recognize that we are poised, along with our project partners, to effect positive and significant changes in the bcs, and thereby contribute to the national dialogue on the achievement gap in urban schools. we recognize that establishing a solid professional community among africanamerican colleagues is the first critical step to becoming facultyleaders in this arena. our colleague, loucrecia, observed that prior to the presence of a critical mass of african-american faculty members committed to spearheading an urban education agenda, "some faculty seemed to dismiss the concept of urban education as someone else's problem." deborah concurred, pointing out that [having a critical mass of african-american faculty] is the first thing you need to build community. it's hard to have a "community" when you are only talking about two or three people, so i think numbers really do help. the collaborative spirit that i sensed among my african-american colleagues is also important. our small circle of scholars has actively participated in most of the conversations and formal meetings that gave birth to the t.r.u.s.t. initiative. we were involved with the groundbreaking work of developing a mission statement and nominating a director for this project. our colleague, deborah, is the principal investigator and project director for this initiative. she has been described by her colleagues as a "highly capable, dynamic, intelligent and vibrant leader." she has distinguished herself among her soe colleagues with her unique background as a former student and teacher in the bcs. as tondra acknowledged, "she has a foot in both the worlds of the bcs and higher education which makes her especially well-suited to assume the helm of an initiative that crosses these two worlds." although we are encouraged by our successful efforts to build an intellectual community of africanamerican faculty-leaders, we recognize that the long-term and sustained viability of t.r.u.s.t. relies in large part on our success in establishing a broad and diverse institutional commitment to the aims of this initiative. it is heartening to note that the original core of t.r.u.s.t. faculty liaisons, which once included only one white colleague, now includes two with the anticipation of one more. in addition, one of our latina faculty colleagues is an active member of the t.r.u.s.t. national advisory board, which is significant given the increasing population of hispanic students in the bcs. concluding thoughts we are cognizant of our position within a longstanding tradition of african-american leadership and activism in the field of urban education. yet we are deeply concerned by the scholarly contention that contemporary african-american educators have failed to assume the torch and carry on this tradition. this indictment is especially troubling for faculty-leaders whose lives and work are embedded within a city that was the epicenter of the civil rights movement and that also harbors less-than-favorable memories about the role of african-american educators in the civil rights struggle. as contemporary african-american educators we confront a professional context fraught with complexities, one that makes us feel like we are caught between a rock and a hard place with regard to fulfilling competing professional goals and social obligations to the local african-american community (loder, in press). rather than to perpetuate the patterns of intellectual and social isolation that too often hinder the success of african-american faculty, we opt to use our position of marginalization to our advantage (alfred, 2001), carving out a space for ourselves and within a tradition of african-american educational leadership to effect positive change in both urban and higher education. admittedly, we are in the initial phase of implementing t.r.u.s.t. although "so far, so good," we recognize that we have a long road ahead of us to build "trust" among all the stakeholders. a major challenge for us will be to successfully negotiate our roles and positions within the academy with our perceived roles and positions within the local african-american community. in response, we are working alongside our local school district and national partners to turn around the decidedly negative image of the birmingham city schools. but while doing so, we sometimes find ourselves fighting against the tide of distrust and friction that continues to exist between our institution and some rank and file members of the local school district and african-american community. we are cognizant of the wariness that some local african-american citizens and school district officials and staff have about the usefulness and benefit of university research to the local african-american community and schools. this reality challenges us to explore strategies for making our intent and purposes as african-american scholars more transparent and salient to schools and communities, and to work more closely with these entities to co-create mutually rewarding research endeavors. the tragic context that h. councill trenhholm described for african-american educators in the early to mid-20th century does not have to be our legacy in the 21st century. we envision a more promising future for urban education as contemporary african-american educators build internal and external alliances and take advantage of the vastly expanded educational opportunities passed down to us by our predecessors. through initiatives like t.r.u.s.t. we intend to carry forth the tradition of african-american activist leadership, and hopefully leave behind a legacy of positive social change for urban and higher education in the city of birmingham and beyond. references alfred, m. v. 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(in press). lifting as we climb: six african american women explore the creation of an intellectual community. in r. martin (ed.), transforming the academy: struggles and strategies for the advancement of women in higher education (2nd ed.). tehachapi , ca : graymill. cose, e. (1993). the rage of a privileged class. new york : harper collins. dixson, a. d. (2003). "let's do this!" black women teachers' politics and pedagogy. urban education , 38 (2), 217-235. eskew, g. t. (1997). but for birmingham : the local and national movements in the civil rights struggle . chapel hill: university of north carolina . fairclough, a. (2000). "being in the field of education and also being a negro...seems...tragic": black teachers in the jim crow south. the journal of american history , 87 (1), 65-91. fairclough, a. (2001). teaching equality: black schools in the age of jim crow . athens : university of georgia . foster, m. 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(in press). dilemmas confronting urban principals in the post-civil rights era . in j. l. kincheloe, k. hayes, k. rose, & p. m anderson (eds.), urban education: an encyclopedia. westport , ct : greenwood . lomotey, k. (1989). african-american principals: school leadership and success . westport , ct: greenwood . marshall, b. (2002). avoiding the "divide and conquer" environment on campus. black issues in higher education , 18 (24). morris, j. e. (1999). a pillar of strength: an african american school's communal bonds with families and community since "brown." urban education, 33 (5), 584-605. neverdon-morton, c. (1982). self-help programs as educative activities of black women in the south, 1895-1925: focus on four key areas. journal of negro education, 51 , 207-221. patterson, j., dahle, k., nix, m., collins, l., & abbott, g. (2002). mentoring females and minorities into higher education. advancing women in leadership journal , 12 , 1. retrieved march 5, 2004 , from http:// www.advancingwomen.com /awl/ fall2002/abbott.html patterson, j. t. (2002) . brown v. board of education: a civil rights milestone and its troubled legacy . new york : oxford university press. perkins, l. m. (1989). the history of blacks in teaching. in d. warren (ed.), american teachers: histories of a profession at work (pp. 344-369). new york : macmillan. shaw, s. (1996). what a woman ought to be and to do: black professional women workers during the jim crow era . chicago , il : the university of chicago . shealey, m., lue, m., brooks, m., & mccray, e. (2005). examining the legacy of brown: the impact on special education and teacher practice. remedial & special education , 26 (2), 113-121. siddle walker, v. (1996). their highest potential: an african american school community in the segregated south . chapel hill: university of north carolina . siddle walker, v. (2000). valued segregated schools for african american children in the south, 19351969: a review of common themes and characteristics. review of educational research, 70 , 253-285. siddle walker, v. (2003). the architects of black schooling in the segregated south: the case of one principal leader. journal of curriculum and supervision, 19 (1), 54-72. sims, m. j. (2003). african-american teacher beliefs about learning and teaching: portraits and perspectives of six urban school educators . dissertation abstracts international , 64 (11a), 3948 . tarpley, n. (1995). testimony: young african americans on self-discovery and black identity. boston : beacon. taylor, e. (1996). race, gender, and calling: perspectives on african american women educators, 18611870. in j. a. banks (ed.), multicultural education, transformative knowledge, and action: historical and contemporary perspectives . new york : teachers college. the chronicle of higher education almanac , 2004-05 (2004). 51 (1), 29. retrieved on may 23, 2005, from http://chronicle.com.fetch.mhls.uab.edu/prm/weekly/almanac/2004/nation/0102902.htm. university of alabama at birmingham office of equity and diversity. (2006, winter). equity and diversity at uab . weinberg, m. (1977). a chance to learn: the history of race and education in the united states . cambridge , ma : cambridge university . west, c. (1993). race matters. boston : beacon. http://www.advancingwomen.com%20/awl/%20fall2002%20/abbot.html http://www.advancingwomen.com%20/awl/%20fall2002%20/abbot.html about the authors: all of the authors are or were faculty members in various departments within the school of education at the university of alabama at birmingham . angela d. coker is now an assistant professor at the university of missouri-st. louis .* copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com advancing women home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international advancing women in leadership online journal volume 22, winter 2007 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ] life notes about the dual careers of a black female: race and gender politics in public school administration and higher education professorship juanita cleaver simmons abstract this article is written from the experiential and theoretical perspectives that i encountered as a black female public school educator who, after twenty-plus years of public school teaching and administrative experiences, became an assistant professor at a predominately white research university. being a student of critical race theory, i write this experience narrative from the perspective of life notes in order to help "demystify[ing] african american feminist ways of knowing, in moments of reflection, relation, and resistance" (dillard, 2003, p. 135). moreover, this article represents an " endarkened feminist epistemology" (dillard, 2003) in order to shed light on how incidents and events with race, class, and gender translate into meaning for both of my professional careers and my life in general. a chronologic comparison of my experiences in both careers reveals the debilitating affects of race and gender. by sharing this experience, i hope that all who are involved in the recruitment, retention, and promotion of women and minorities in these professions (public school administration and the academy) will better understand how acts of racism and sexism create distractions that hinder their success in these careers. race and gender politics in public school administration and higher education professorship there are several studies on female public school administrators that highlight race, class, and gender differences in the promotion and ascension into administrative or supervisory positions (blount, 1998; grogan, 1996; shakeshaft, 1987). but there is a limited body of research on the comparative experiences of former public school administrators who later turn to the academy as their second careers. some former public school administrators believed that by going upstream (university educator preparation programs) they might help to better prepare aspiring public school teachers and administrators for the realities of public school administration (simmons, 2005). they, as did i, soon discovered that the academy's promotion and tenure system offered little or no advantages for practice. instead, the system appeared to favor scholarship and "cookie-cutter" socialization skills. in spite of the challenges in the careers of most female educators, few studies explore the political nature of file:///index.html file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awl/index.html file:///awl/summer2006/index.html file:///awl/awl_journal_archive.html file:///awl/guidelines.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/www/awl/winter2007/index.htm the education profession from the comparative perspective of a black female administrator-turned-professor who seeks to access the career ladder while striving to overcome the barriers of race, class, gender, and traditional politics inherent in both the pubic school administration and higher education paths. although experiences from the two careers--public school administration and academia--have surprising differences, the common denominators of race, gender, and politics in education remain the same. in that vein, this article is written from the experiential and theoretical perspectives that i have encountered as a black female educator who, after 18 years of public school teaching and administrative experiences, became an assistant professor in higher education. in these life notes, i share recent acts of discrimination and racism and align them with similar experiences that i encountered while growing up in the "jim crow" south. the purpose of aligning the present experiences with the past is to help emphasize the fact that racism is still prevalent in the daily lives of people of color, and is especially prevalent in u.s. educational systems. in revealing the past/present comparisons of my experiences that span a period of nearly 50 years, i hope to help contradict the belief that america is a "post-racist" society. as stated by reddy (2002), according to majority white opinion, we live in a post-racist society. racism is widely -whitely perceived as an historical artifact, not as the powerful shaper of all of our lives it actually continues to be. this view of racism as nasty but finished, except for aberrational outbreaks by unrepentant white supremacists, is constructed as the truth by successful, conservative politicians and repeatedly reinforced by all kinds of cultural institutions, including ostensibly "liberal" media. (p. 52) unfortunately for people of color, many mainstream americans do not believe that racism still exists. this fallacy enables acts of discrimination to continue, especially when little or no voice is given to the topic. so, i will use this platform to voice my encounters with race, gender, and class discrimination encountered in public school administration and in the academy. methodology i write this experience narrative from the perspective of life notes in order to help "demystify[ing] african american feminist ways of knowing, in moments of reflection, relation, and resistance" (dillard, 2003, p. 135). an experience narrative, similar to life notes, is "an account of an event--or of several related events-as described by a person who was involved in the described episodes, either as an active participant or an observer" (thomas, 2003, p. 38). sutter (2006) argued that a similar work by mcnulty (2003) was a nonexperimental research design referred to as the "life story research design," which "articulates the experiences and qualities within a type of life in a manner that is accurate, relevant, and compelling as determined by those who are familiar with it" (p. 320). however, the life notes approach differs slightly from the experience narrative and the life story research design because it enables the use of a more reflective approach of one's experiences. i employ it in this study to reveal an in-depth analysis of the common and contrasting elements of my two careers. by using the life notes approach, i am afforded the opportunity to expose the debilitating affects of sociocultural factors in an open and honest manner that includes a dialogue in the language that best expresses the pathos of these experiences. the philosophical framework, "endarkened feminist epistemology" (dillard, 2003), is used to elucidate how incidents and events with race, class, and gender translate into meaning for both of my professional careers and my life in general. an endarkened feminist epistemology is a term coined by the african-american feminist scholar, cynthia dillard (2003). she explains, "i have deliberately sought language that attempts to unmask traditionally held political and cultural constructions/constrictions, language that more accurately organizes, resists, and transforms oppressive descriptions of sociocultural phenomena and relationships" (p. 132). in agreement with dilliard (2003), as an african-american female i find it difficult to transform my experiences of injured passion, conflict, and unresolved emotions into a formalized canon. given the status quo of these malignant conditions that continue to be perpetuated against women and minorities in america (expressly in the predominantly white academy, and in male-dominated public school administration), my use of endarkened feminist epistemology better articulates my own lived experiences. dilliard (2003) so eloquently states, therefore, in contrast to the common use of the term enlightened as a way of expressing new and important feminist insights (arising historically from the well-established canon of white feminist thought), i use the term endarkened feminist epistemology to articulate how reality is known when based in the historical roots of black feminist thought, embodying a distinguishable difference in cultural standpoint, located in the intersection/overlap of the culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities and the historical and contemporary contexts of oppressions and resistance for african american women. (p. 132) in essence, only i can adequately pay homage to the unheard voices of my mother, grandmother, and self, as only i have inherited their struggles. by using this structural framework, an interpretive analysis of these shared experiences can be generalized to other women of color who struggle to negotiate successful promotion (academy) and/or ascension (public school administration). an additional purpose of the study is to support the use of endarkened feminist epistemology as a viable method to express the importance of the intersection of personal connections and lived experiences as a theory of knowing. importantly, sharing my experience from the perspective of life notes may help the reader to better understand how the common denominators of race, gender, and class that i experienced in both careers (public school administration and college professor) form a trimorphic nexus that determine my survival and success. early offerings i am an endangered species, but i sing no victim's song, i am woman, i am an artist; i know where my voice belongs; i know where my soul belongs. there is an early knowing of one's place, voice, hopes, limitations, and aspirations. as reflected in the above quote, many women (especially those of color) grow up with a sense of personal responsibility for the improvement and uplifting of their oppressed races. unlike their white female counterparts who argue that they "have no race just american," african-american women of my time (preand early-post brown era) carry the weight of racial responsibility in every pursuit that they encounter. some of my most memorable life lessons were offered by elders who urged me to "insist on being heard." their lessons were prefaced with statements about their experiences of forced silence and hushed regrets. although it takes courage to resist silence, the fear of being silenced is greater than the fear for the repercussions which result in "speaking out." there is an inherited legacy for the fear of being silenced and left voiceless. as early as 1892 anna julia cooper, a human rights activist, stated, one muffled strain in the silent south, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the negro. and of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant black woman.the "other side" has not been represented by one who "lives there." and not many can sensibly realize and more accurately tell the weight and the fret of the "long dull pain" than the openeyed but hitherto voiceless black woman of america . (lemert & bahn, 1998, p. 51) armed with the list of expectations and hopes of my elders, i attended undergraduate school at a predominantly white college--one that i swore i would never attend. it was my mother's heartbreaking alma mater, where she became one of the first-known african-americans to graduate. as a small child i remember the debasing articles in the local newspaper headlining, "negress is intent on spoiling the halls of this great institution." but those words were not as harsh as the threats from the president of that university, or his confidential phone calls that begged her to "just take the diploma without the embarrassment of marching." in spite of the barrage of racial epitaphs and the debacle of endless slurs hurled at her, she remained steadfast in her response: "i'm not marching for you or your kind, but for my four black children, the many others to come, and for my father who was never allowed to attend school." although she spoke those words in 1955 with the hopeful empowerment of the brown versus board of education of topeka, kansas case, her words still echoed in my mind as i received my diploma from this same institution 17 years later. unfortunately, her early demise excluded her presence at this celebration. she would have rejoiced for the many minority graduates who may never know her name or the sacrifices that she made to integrate this institution. her early death is another lesson that deserves to be heard at another time, as the sociocultural issues that african-american women face tend to manifest into physical and emotional ailments that often result in their premature deaths (hudson & stern, 2000). nonetheless, my memories of the experiences we encountered at her attempts to participate in her college graduation formed lasting impressions on me about the power of education. even as a fouror five-year-old, i wondered what could be so important that powerful whites, living on the other side of town, would even know our names. besides, since we had our own public schools, stores, and community businesses, we had so little contact with them. still, i wondered in my own child's mind, "why should they be concerned about one black woman who wanted to get a degree and graduate?" after all, we were not crossing into their private neighborhoods where we knew that we [literally] needed to hold our breaths until we made our safe return to the "colored part of town." these same feelings that i had while reading about my mother's instigating attitude at demanding to attend her own graduation resurfaced 30 years later when i received my first face-to-face mid-term evaluations from my university students. "why," i asked, "didn't my credentials and life experiences merit the respect of these students?" armed with 18 years of experience in urban public school classrooms and administration, a masters degree, and doctorate of philosophy in public school administration earned at another predominantly white institution, my mid-term evaluations were derogatory. why i was surprised at my students' shocking critiques of my instruction, i do not know. smith (1999) shares a similar experience from her students at a predominantly white university: given all of the other indicia of student hostility, students laid in waiting to tell me, and the institution, that i had done nothing to eliminate the presumption of incompetence in their minds. their anger at my not being mammy and being perceived as sapphire controlled, as did their solidified authority, credential, and evaluative hostilities. (p. 183) many of my students had openly admitted that they had never been taught by an african-american. the majority of the students had also confessed that they had never attended high school classes with minority students. yes, a few of my students admitted that they had noticed minorities in their high schools, but as they put it: "those students were not in our high-academic classes or any of our organizations." consequently, their experiences with minorities were limited to their perceptions formed by the traditional stereotypes that their families and communities held about people of color (e.g. poor, uneducated, troublesome, non-authoritarian figures). my introduction to this class on teaching public school cultures included an overview of american public schooling. in my naiveté, i had no idea that their prior teacher education courses had not informed them about the influential dynamics that the white anglo-saxon protestant (wasp) culture held on american public schooling. this was the first unforgivable, uncorrectable mistake that i made during my first week with the class. students actually turned their backs on me and talked during my instruction. one student literally grabbed handouts from me as i motioned them to return their papers by passing them down the rows. another brave soul thought he would be the class hero by challenging me on the wasp statement. he, with his lips curled tightly, spewed out--"i'm offended!" i had no earthly idea what he meant. i was still under the assumption that the university, which is located between two major urban centers, was honest in its attempts to adequately prepare future teachers for diverse and urban student populations. additionally, i assumed that this lesson, which was about educational commonplaces, would be a review from their previous teacher education classes and that the concept of the wasp's influence on public education was their charge for helping to de-racialize their future schools and classrooms. this student's comments provided an opening for several additional comments from the others. some students peered at me with stone faces but made no comments. the follow-up that resulted from that group of hush-mouthed students was a confidential meeting they arranged with my department chair. later, when my chair conferred with me, she honored the students' requests and did not divulge the students' names. i was more concerned about the mob mentality of this class and the exaggerations that the students shared with my chair than i was with knowing their names. as my chair gingerly debriefed the entire episode with me, rather than hear her assessment of their comments, my mind reflected back to another childhood memory. for some reason, the event with the students in my class reminded me of an experience i had driving through boomstown (real name not given) enroute to another city in texas . there was absolutely no way to escape that racist city without driving through the main street of that town. most african-americans in texas knew that the state troopers helped the city elders enforce their billboard which proudly announced: "run n-----, don't let sundown catch you here." attached to this sign was a dummy replica a black man clad in a pair of overalls and roped by its neck to the sign; the dummy's legs dangled in the wind. unsurprisingly, since more than 5,000 african-americans had been lynched across the nation prior to this period (ginzburg, 1988), we knew that sign was not just a friendly warning. thankfully, my chair had met the whole incident (with the resistant students) in a calm and supportive manner. she offered to attend the next class session, but i rejected that offer on the basis of feeling that i needed to gain the students' confidence and respect. i had hoped that i could help them rise above their limited attitudes and beliefs. but the whole incident quickly snapped me into the reality of time, space, history, and the effects that the students' evaluations would have on my promotion and tenure opportunities. but part of my reality included the shocking reminder that i was no different from any other minority, particularly black female faculty, in a predominantly white university. nor were there any differences in time, space, or location of racist behavior. simply put, i'm an endangered species; i sing no victim's song. but i know where my voice and soul belong . all dressed up and nowhere to go--except where my voice belongs as any other human being would do, i sought to overcome feelings of rejection with a sense of belongingness. i needed the comfort and strength of something familiar. i knew that after this incident i would always fear being patronized by my co-worker and superiors. it did not matter that by the end of the semester i felt that most of my students had understood and learned to appreciate my methods in delivering the course objectives. the only thing that mattered at that time was the shocking reality of my life: with 18 years of successful public school experience, a doctorate in educational administration, awards from international and national contributions, i still needed to prove my competence. as brunner, simms, and peyton-clair (2000) concur, "you get tired as a person of color qualified and competent especially as a woman of color, having to engage daily in the mental and emotional battle of legitimizing yourself to others" (p. 541). i wondered how successful i might have been if i did not have the constant challenge of "legitimizing" myself. my earning a ph.d. degree in educational administration with an emphasis on urban school superintendency from one of the nation's top superintendent preparation universities had only resulted in three occasions where i was a finalist for a superientendency. the old clichés "not a fit," "over-qualified for our little district." and "you really wouldn't be comfortable here" became familiar reminders that neither my past success as an administrator nor my degrees could break through the barriers of race and gender. nonetheless, this incident with those students taught me to constantly provide my students with lots of nurturing articles, books, studies, and interactive activities. i actually learned to lovingly correct their stereotypical comments about race and socioeconomic status of others. my decision to do this was later confirmed when i read liston & salim (2002) who argue that when examining race in the university classroom we need two types of pedagogy: we need a pedagogy of discomfort and a pedagogy of attentive love. a pedagogy of discomfort engages students and teachers in an examination of their assumptions, beliefs, locations in a racist society. when we practice a pedagogy of discomfort, pain and anguish surface. a pedagogy of attentive love recognizes this pain and attempts to connect students with the classroom material. attentive love focuses on seeing students and ourselves (as teachers) more clearly. both approaches are needed. it is not an easy story to tell but we think the telling is important. (p. 239-240). certainly, telling the story is as much a healing process for teachers who either choose to entertain class discussions on topics that delve on oppressive content or teachers whose course curricula include oppressive research. simply put, teaching from the perspective of critical theory is a challenge for any teacher, but it is a double challenge for minorities. one reason for this is because when such courses are taught by any nontraditional professor (meaning female and/or minority), the threat of student resistance increases to greater levels (tusmith, 2002). so, only their final evaluations will judge the success of my efforts. still, i had the human need to feel accepted and appreciated. so, when i received an out-of-state call from the school district that i had previously declined, i verbally accepted their offer to design a special school for their students. it took several weeks for me to finally accept their offer because i resented the thought of running from the hurt. thankfully, my dean had agreed to make this public school project a special research leave so that i could return to the university at the end of one semester. besides, i loved the opportunity the university provided for me to write and research. i had come to the university convinced that i would make a better contribution by helping to influence future teachers and administrators. i really thought that my many years of urban classroom teaching and supervision would make a difference. but as i drove through this beautiful, quaint college town, attempting to make a decision, i was distracted by the confederate flag flying from a passing truck. i drove past a company that employs many of the city's residents. there, on the meticulously manicured lawn, stood the company's logo-a design that included the confederate flag. the psychic, symbolic nature of that flag reminded me that very little had changed in my or my mother's time. just as she was all dressed up (for graduation) with no place to go, so was i. i sped home to call the superintendent's office. when i heard the familiar voice i said, "i'll accept your offer." i knew within my heart that this district had more challenges than i wanted to face at this point in my life. but, i thought, "at least i'll have a voice (a platform to address the possibilities for change), and i know where my voice belongs." a glimpse into the familiar past i sing no victim's song two days after my verbal acceptance, the district had arranged for my travel and site visitation. i was picked up by an associate superintendent who informed me that the district was hosting a community forum on the brown versus board 50 th anniversary commemoration. we went directly to the forum from the airport. while enroute, she reviewed my schedule of events which included an 8:00 a.m. assembly with my future student body. all 650 students would be bused to the high school where they would be temporarily housed the next year. next on my schedule would be a tour of the high school and a meeting with the principal, an associate superintendent, and later the superintendent. the following day included an early morning meeting with teachers who would become my staff for the special project. but the assembly with the prospective students would be first. the assembly with the students went considerably well. of the 650 students, approximately 70% were black and hispanic. the first group of students entered the auditorium in an unruly manner. one student attempted to climb over his seat to the next row. i stopped him in his tracks. although their teachers (about 90% white) escorted them, many of the teachers seemed hesitant to correct the students. this setting reminded me of the many white females in my teacher training class. some of whom were participants in criticizing me for my discussions about the cultural mismatches between their white, middle-class, protestant values and the lived realities of urban minority youths. although the aspiring teachers in that class resented my truthful instructions, i stood before their black and white counterparts who had little control over their urban students. the more the teachers ignored their behavior, the rowdier the students appeared. finally, after stopping a boy from climbing over the seat, the principal and assistant superintendent decided that this was "unacceptable behavior" and dismissed the students to return in an orderly fashion. needless to say, both assemblies went well after that incident. these students, no different than any adolescents, only wanted the adults to act as though they were in charge, and to require them to do what they were taught to do--cooperate. i noticed that the principal watched every move i made during the first assembly. he also listened intently to every word that i spoke as i shared the expectations and plans for the program with the students. so it was no surprise that he repeated a part of my speech while speaking with the second group. then, he introduced me to speak, forcing me to quickly rethink another speech to give. he literally gave mine already. i recovered from that shock quickly enough to rehash his statements with comments such as, "yes, as mr. x said, etc." this act of my invisibility (on his part) was a familiar experience for me. as i reflected over the incident, i decided that it did not matter that he (the principal) was black. his power-over attitude, which had been accorded to him by the traditional role of male-administrator, served as his cushion of comfort. here, the term power-over has been adopted from the work of brunner and shumaker (1998) who state, in the "power over" conception, power is a property of individuals or groups, and such people have power if they have positions atop hierarchically structured communities and organizations if they achieve control over their policies and programs. to attain such control, people draw upon various power resources at their disposal, issue unilateral commands, and often employ coercion to attain obedience from subordinates. (p. 32) recognizing his use of this tactic, i rethought my speech and presented a different angle, adding newer thoughts and ideas. i knew that i could not allow myself to become victimized by his attempts to silence me. i also knew that without my backup plan, his traditional (mannish) competitive nature threatened my visibility. gender and race invisibility if you can't see me, maybe you can hear my voice what a refresher! i had barely set my foot in the door and was already reminded of the gender and race invisibility struggles in public school administration. franklin (1999) uses ralph ellison's (1952) classic novel, invisible man , to elaborate on the physical and psychological affects that african-american men and women experience when encountering invisibility. franklin defines invisibility as "an inner struggle with the feeling that one's talents, abilities, personality, and worth are not valued or even recognized because of prejudice and racism" (p. 761). women, as do other minorities, often experience a measure of invisibility as a result of gender bias. the issue of invisibility is exacerbated by race and gender for african-american women, and has been particularly noted in public school administration (blount, 1998; grogan, 1996; shakeshaft, 1987). although it had only been a year since my last position as a school administrator, the experiences were quickly coming back. i reflected over an incident that i had experienced a couple of years prior to my coming to the university. i was sitting at a conference table with my former superintendent, two male principals, and two female associate superintendents. i was the only african-american in the room. i had just successfully designed that district's newest magnet school and had a waiting list of over 150 students seeking to enroll. in addition to the many newspaper articles detailing the program's success, my program had been featured on a public television network. but, as i sat at the conference table, the superintendent asked the man sitting next to me questions that should have been directed to me. after two or three of his misdirected questions i finally said to him, "sir, are you speaking to him or to me? you appear to be asking him questions about my program, and he doesn't know the answers." i half smiled and interjected, "i don't suppose that i'm invisible, now." the superintendent resented my speaking up, but since i had already observed how the two other females sat and literally hung their heads at this insult, i knew that i could not depend on them to validate my presence or my comment. why would they? either they felt themselves exempt by race, or they chose to appear androgynous for the sake of job security. but, because i had ignored him the first time that he had overlooked my presence at the table, i was determined that if he repeated this act of ignoring me again, i would bring it to his attention immediately. as an african-american female administrator, i felt that if they pretended not to see me, i would make them hear me. and i had the success of the program as my personal empowerment. i learned then that one must know where her voice belongs, especially in such power-over environments as the educational community. reflections of my past public school administrative experiences made me realize that the challenges and oppositions found in higher education may be a bit more hopeful. strong enough for a man; made for a woman power to. i snapped from that reflection to return to the setting of the school visit. i looked forward to meeting and speaking with the teachers, and i had spent several hours the previous evening refining my presentation. my investigation of the existing school included student scheduling reports, recommended course offerings, aligning staff qualifications with student needs, and compiling this information with the prospective students' general accountability data. i arrived at the school ahead of the first student bus. i was immediately called to attend a meeting with one of the associate superintendents. as it turned out, she did not approve of my presenting to the staff. she was angry that she had been left out of the process by another associate. i knew nothing about this. i had spoken several times to the other associate and the superintendent of that district, but had no idea that there was opposition energy among the staff. it did not matter that 650 minority students were looking forward to this project. nor did it matter that a group of teachers were motivated and excited by my original proposal and ready to work. the bottom line was the usual job-protecting gimmicks and political conflicts that often stand in the way of student achievement. unfortunately, many high-poverty, minority schools in urban centers are often linked to unique political conflicts that present systemic impediments. although political conflicts among minority public school administrators is seldom talked about, henig, hula, and pedescleaux (1999) concur that african-american educators in black-led cities share perceptual, ideological, and communal bonds with elected officials, parents, and other important community actors, including the black churches that play a pivotal role in shaping the political life in many inner-city areas. these bonds help to account for the fact that community mobilization around school issues often takes the shape of protecting jobs and their incumbents instead of demanding higher levels of performance and structural change. (p. 27) indeed, this district missed what i believed to have been an opportunity for a higher level of performance, and an opportunity for potential structural change. nonetheless, with the defensive, derogatory response that i received from this administrator, i immediately knew that this was not the place for me. i returned to the university with a strong sense of determination, and was grateful that my dean had arranged for my work with that district to serve as research and field experience. after that brief encounter with the public school offer, i realized that it would be difficult for me to ever return to a career as an education administrator. at least i would try to remain in higher education until i could make a significant impact on future educators from the university's teacher and administrator training programs. one of the biggest challenges to this decision was learning to accustom myself to the incongruence between research, daily realities, and conflicting cultural communications. conclusion in spite of oppositions and challenges that i have met in higher education, i am determined to be as successful in this profession as i was in public school administration. and since there is very little difference in the way in which both careers enact racism, classism, and gender, i accept this challenge to forge new territories. i refuse to become weakened by student resistance and the self-defacing experience brought on by rejected publications, especially articles that expose social justice and emancipatory issues. these experiences are familiar characteristics of gate-keeping, preserving the honor of the so-called canon, and sophisticated jim crow policy enforcement. yet, my experiences are no more unique than those of other educators of color, especially those who struggle to maintain their existence at predominately white institutions. i have shared the affects that race, gender, and class have had on my dual careers. by no means does this imply that racism is equivalent to gender or class issues; there is simply no comparison. in her poem, for my people , walker (1992) referred to racism as "the unseen creature that towers over us omnisciently" (p. 20). racism is an ever-present shadow that effects generations of families, while leaving its victims constantly functioning in a reactionary mode. worse, racism creates internal hostility, nervousness, and defensive behavior. but racism is not personal, it is america 's problem. racism has been institutionalized in the educational system; of this, i am sure. my lived experiences in k-12 education and higher education career affirm this. each racist experience heightens my respect for my elders' efforts to remain hopeful. their determination to forgive the wrongs of racism is a lesson in love that should be modeled by us all. my experiences also give me a deeper sense of empathy for our children. if my experiences with k-12 schools and higher education have been difficult for me to bear, how stressful this must be for the youth. no wonder many of them underachieve and drop-out of schools. this thought forever reminds me that my main responsibility is to "speak out" (resist silencing), "be seen" (resist invisibility), and "teach the truth" (regardless of political tactics: e.g. derogatory evaluations, tenure/promotion politics, and other gimmicks that control scholarship). from the "sistah anthem of solidarity" specifically inspired by alice walker's book, possessing the secret of joy, sung by dianne reeves, lyrics by jeanne pisano references blount, j. (1998). destined to rule the schools: women and the superintendency 1873-1995 . albany : state university of new york press. brunner, c. c., & schumaker, p. (1998). power and gender in the "new view" public schools. policy studies journal , 26 (1), 30-45. brunner, c. c., simms, m., & peyton-clair, l. (2000). seeking representative supporting black female graduate students who aspire to the superintendency. urban education, 35 (5), 532-548. dillard, c. (2003). the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen: examining an endarkened feminist epistemology in educational research and leadership. in m. d. young & l. skrla (eds.), reconsidering: feminist research in educational leadership (pp. 131-159). albany : state university of new york press. franklin, a. j. (1999). invisibility syndrome and racial identity development in psychotherapy and counseling african american men. the counseling psychologist, 27 (6), 761-793. ginzburg, r. (1962, 1988). 100 years of lynchings . baltimore : black classic press. grogan, m. (1996). voices of women aspiring to the superintendency. albany : state university of new york press. henig, j. r., hula, r. c., orr, m., & pedescleaux, d. s. (1999). the color of school reform: race, politics, and the challenge of urban education . princeton , nj : princeton university . hudson, h. m. ii, & stern, h. (2000). the heart of the matter: the african american's guide to heart disease, heart treatment, and heart wellness . roscoe , il : hilton publishing company. lemert, c., & bhan, e. (eds.). (1998). the voice of anna julia cooper . lanham , md : rowman & ligglefield. liston, d. p., & al salim, s. (2002). race, discomfort, and love in a university classroom. in b. tusmith & m. t. reddy (eds.), race in the college classroom (pp. 239-252). new brunswick , nj : rutgers university press. reddy, m. t. (2002). smashing the rules of racial standing. in b. tusmith & m. t. reddy (eds.), race in the college classroom (pp. 51-61). new brunswick , nj : rutgers university press. shakeshaft, c. (1987). women in educational administration . newbury parks , ca : sage. simmons, j. (2005). superintendents of color: perspectives on racial and ethnic diversity and implications for professional preparation and practice. in l. björk & t. kowalski (eds.), the contemporary superintendent: preparation, practice, and development (pp.251-282). thousand oaks , ca : corwin press. smith, p. j. (1999). teaching the retrenchment generation: when sapphire meets socrates at the intersection of race, gender, and authority. william & mary journal of women in law, 6 (53), 53-214. sutter, w. n. (2006). introduction to educational research: a critical thinking approach. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. thomas, r. m. (2003). blending qualitative & quantitative research methods in theses and dissertations. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press, inc. tusmith, b. (2002). out on a limb: race and the evaluation of frontline teaching. in b. tusmith & m. t. reddy (eds.), race in the college classroom (pp. 112-125). new brunswick, nj : rutgers university press. walker , m. (1989). this is my century: new and collected poems. athens : university of georgia press. about the author: juanita cleaver simmons is an assistant professor in the college of education-educational leadership and policy analysis division of the university of missouri-columbia. she is a former public school teacher and administrator where she worked in high-poverty urban schools. her research agenda includes the national achievement gap, school renewal, and equity issues in public school leadership. both her master's and ph.d. degrees were earned at the university of texas at austin. copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited file:///index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ file:///business.html file:///wk_entrepr.html file:///web.html file:///finance.html file:///education/index.html file:///networks/index.html file:///international.html file:///awpublisher.html file:///advertising.html file:///content.html file:///privacy.html file:///sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com volume 43, 2024 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop & kristina hall 16 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 advancing women in leadership vol. 43, 15-28, 2024 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the effects of burnout in female higher education administrators molly bradshaw, jacklyn bruce, katherine mckee, amy orders, rhonda sutton, and carolyn dunn molly bradshaw: process efficiency and training, north carolina state university, mqbradsh@ncsu.edu jacklyn bruce: associate professor, north carolina state university, jackie_bruce@ncsu.edu katherine mckee: assistant professor, north carolina state university, kemckee@ncsu.edu amy orders: environmental health and safety senior director, north carolina state university, aborders@ncsu.edu rhonda sutton: assistant dean of the graduate school, north carolina state university, rssutton@ncsu.edu carolyn dunn: professor, north carolina state university, carolyn_dunn@ncsu.edu accepted november 8, 2023 this research explored the phenomenon of femaleness and how it impacts the experiences of women in higher education administration, specifically in colleges of agriculture, and how these experiences contributed to burnout, compassion fatigue, and job satisfaction. despite representing more than half of the college-educated workforce, women are not represented equally within leadership positions in higher education. in academia, women faculty numbers have improved over the past several decades, representing 52.9% of assistant professor positions (women in academia: quick take, 2020). higher education was initially intended only for men (bystydzienski & bird, 2006) and therefore valued men in higher-level positions (bird, 2011; trower, 2012). this has led to the creation of a culture where women and minorities are underrepresented and face multiple barriers (bird, 2011). having an inequitable distribution of power not only in organizations but within society suggests that women will need to traverse a different, more challenging path than their male counterparts to arrive at the same tier of status. keywords: burnout, compassion fatigue, higher education, women administrators, women leaders in agriculture, stress, gender roles, coping with stress at their inception, higher education institutions were intended to only serve, educate, and employ men (bystydzienski & bird, 2006) and value only men in higher-level positions (bird, 2011; trower, 2012). this led to a culture where women and minorities are underrepresented and face multiple inequities (bird, 2011). acker (2006) defined inequality as: “loosely interrelated practices, processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and racial inequalities within particular organizations” (p. 443). for those who are underrepresented, the process of navigating an organization within a culture of inequality can be challenging (acker, 2006), and the result can often mean disparities in pay and treatment. the perpetuation of inequalities in the united states (u.s.), via societal norms and expectations, causes additional issues, specifically for women. inequality within an organization can dictate who holds and has access to power (carli & eagly, 2001). disparities have been found in salary, expectations, treatment, promotion, and level of responsibility for women within male-dominated fields. throughout time, norms related to the respective roles of the different sexes have varied, initially lacking any scientific basis, based instead on social myths (de beauvoir, 1949). the different sexes within nature do not have distinguishable functions, as humans do, but rather their functions are dimorphic. when the two sexes are viewed as a whole, they represent two diverse aspects of the species’ life vital to its survival. de beauvoir (1949) explained why sexual opposition increases when the individuality of an organism asserts itself. the male finds more ways to use the forces of which he is the master; the female feels her subjugation more and more (de beauvoir, 1949, p. 38). there is a conflict between the women’s interests and the expectations femaleness puts upon her. (de beauvoir, 1949). as merleau ponty stated, “man is not a natural species; he is a historical idea” (de bouvoir, 1949, p. 45), which in turn leads to the historical notions of what being a female is and what femaleness entails. “only within a human perspective can the female and male be compared in the human species. but the definition of man is that he is a being who is not given, who makes himself what he is” (de beauvoir,1949, p.45). this research explored the impact being female/femaleness has had on the experiences of high-level women administrators in male-dominated land-grant institutions of higher education. these women face unique and challenging realities in their lives due solely to defying the confines femaleness has dictated for them. as women fight for more equity in their worlds, it exposes them to a multitude of other challenges, barriers, and obstacles. theoretical framework this research was framed by the multidimensional theory of burnout (maslach, 1998) and ashby's law of requisite advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 variety (de raadt, 1987). together, the framework demonstrated how biological systems attempt to cope with exposure to stress. when an individual is equipped to handle disruption or stressful situations, they will produce a requisite response to combat the stress. if the individual is ill-equipped and unable to produce a response, the result will be chaos for the system in the form of burnout. maslach (1998) described burnout as an individual stress experience embedded in the context of social relationships, including a person's conception of both themselves and others. influencing individual responses to stress is an individual's social relationships, how they view themselves, and their view of others. maslach’s multidimensional theory of burnout (mdb) examines three main components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. ashby's law of requisite variety is a law of organizations (lewis & stewart, 2003) positing that for a system to sustain viability, it needs to achieve and maintain many different states (palumbo & manna, 2018). each organism possesses controls that aid in controlling variety and sustaining the system's internal equilibrium and homeostasis. there is a correlation between the aspects of mdb and specific techniques used for coping with stressors. these coping techniques, both problem-focused and emotion-focused, are related to the theoretical framework through ashby's law of requisite variety, illustrating the direct link between workplace stressors and the requisite coping response. in burnout situations, when the individual has reached the dimension of a reduced sense of personal accomplishment, they are unable to cope. without a response to act as a buffer between the disruption (or stressor), the individual's homeostasis will be disrupted, resulting in chaos (cohen, 2013). literature review gender, leadership, burnout, compassion fatigue, and job satisfaction all intersect for women in high-level administrative positions at land-grant institutions. this review of the literature provides a brief overview into that intersection. gender ridgeway & correll (2004) indicated gender is not primarily an identity taught in childhood but instead an institutionalized system of social practices for constituting people as two very different categories: men and women; and organizing social relations of inequality based on that difference (p. 510). it is “a social construct that outlines the roles, behaviors, activities, and features that a particular society believes are appropriate for men and women” (hasanovic, 2015, para. 1). the gendered expectations and norms of any society may vary from group to group, may change over time and may differ based on the setting. like other systems of inequality and difference, gender involves distributions of resources and cultural beliefs, patterns of behavior, and organizational practices, selves, and identities (ridgeway & correll, 2004, pp. 510-511). gender has been linked directly to one’s self-perception and identity. for this research, the gender binary definition of a classification system consisting of two genders, man and woman, will be used (dictionary, 2020). participants in this research all self-identified as women. vinney (2019) described gender role socialization as the process in which we learn our culture’s gender-related rules, norms, and expectations. this process begins very early in life, with children understanding gender categories (vinney, 2019). family can influence many different essential aspects of a child’s life. during childhood and adolescence, one’s gender roles are conveyed through the socialization process. significant others shape these roles, mainly parents, teachers, and peers (gabay-egozi, shavit, & yaish, 2014, p. 2). as socialization for children occurs, boys are predominantly encouraged to be independent and friendly, while girls are encouraged to be dependent and modest. experiences in school, with peers, and media will expose and reinforce gender norms. adolescents will look to their same-sex friends for clues about “appropriate” behavior. due to this influence, girls are more likely to favor humanities and social sciences, and boys are more likely to prefer stem fields (gabay-egozi et al., 2014, p. 3). while making choices related to education, girls and boys follow a common perception of the “appropriate” choice and behavior for their gender. gender socialization is a lifelong process, and our childhood beliefs can affect us throughout our lives (vinney, 2019). the impact of this socialization can vary but may still affect behaviors in school, the workplace, or relationships (vinney, 2019). the term, “gendered organization,” emphasizes that gender is part of the very structure and culture of organizations and acknowledges that individuals experience organization through gendered advantages and disadvantages (pullen, et al., 2017, p.107). joan acker first theorized in 1990 that organizations are not just gender-neutral sites but that the organizations themselves are gendered, reflecting and reproducing a male advantage (stainback, et al., 2016, p.110). further, these researchers purported all aspects of an organization, including the rules, procedures, and hierarchies, while seemingly free of gender, actually reflect longstanding distinctions between men and women, masculinity and femininity, and power and domination in ways that aid in the reproduction and maintenance of gender inequality (p. 110). gender norms and gender socialization have led most of our environments to being highly gendered with an emphasis on traditionally male or female stereotypes becoming a part of our daily lives (sobles-canales, et al., 2020). the enactment of these stereotypes has implications for a woman's career path and the promotion and perpetuation of workplace gender bias. this suggests gender influences higher-level positions and leadership positions within an organization. academia seems to be no different, with a scant number of women in higher roles within the institution. gender stereotypes/bias the act of being successful is not what is problematic for women, but instead being successful in an area that advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 demonstrates a violation of a gender stereotype. gender stereotyping may be descriptive or prescriptive in nature (heilman, 2012). the descriptive gender stereotype designates what women are like, while prescriptive establishes what women should be like. societal norms, again, influence these specific biases. stereotyping women based on gender creates negative expectations about performance in the workplace (heilman, 2012). “male gender-typed positions, which include top management and executive positions, are believed to necessitate characteristics that coincide with stereotypic conceptions of men, but not with stereotypic conceptions of women” (heilman, 2012, p. 116). behaviors associated with the opposite gender, when exhibited by a woman, may be viewed as unfavorable and may prohibit ascent in an organization (heilman, 2012). there is a societal assumption that women are not equipped to handle typically male tasks and positions. these assumptions can influence women’s upward career trajectory. women who aspire to be successful in upper-level leadership positions “have to be able to compete aggressively for positions, to act independently and decisively, and to take charge when the situation requires it” (heilman, 2012, p. 123). these behaviors often lead to disapproval or negative consequences. within their individual organizations, women can be penalized for demonstrating competence in traditionally male positions (heilman, 2012). women in leadership women comprise 50.8% of the united states population, including 47% of the u.s. labor force and 52.5% of the workforce who are college-educated (warner, et al., 2018). despite representing more than half of the college-educated workforce, women are still not represented well within leadership positions. for example, within higher education in the united states women are woefully underrepresented in senior administration (mosley & hargrove, 2015); only “31% of full professors and 27% of college presidents” (warner et al., 2018, p. 1) are women. individuals need only view the many references and newspaper articles that announce “she is the first woman” or “the only woman” to hold a specific position (mosley & hargrove, 2015) to have these statistics reinforced. when considering the statistics, it is clear an obstacle (or obstacles) is in the way of women gaining access to these higher education positions. while women continue to work to break down barriers and obtain positions they have not occupied previously, they can experience a form of gender-based discrimination. this bias, whether conscious or unconscious, may manifest in ways both subtle and overt (“what is gender bias?” n.d.) such as discrepancies in pay, job opportunities, and treatment. essentialist thinking about gender has taught women to fit into workplace gender norms and rely on the stereotypes constructed to define leadership that perpetuate the lack of women leaders (chamorro-premuzic, 2019). consequently, women leaders end up being demoralized and subjected to constant pressure to lead in ways others think appropriate. chamorro-premuzic (2019) said if we continue the association of leadership with masculine features, we can continue to expect women will be more harshly and negatively judged despite their performance. as leaders, women’s styles are typically characterized by cooperation, interdependence, emotional tone, personalistic perception, intuition, and acceptance (billing & alvesson, 2000). a better understanding of, and responsiveness to, how women leaders negotiate the personal, professional, and organizational landscapes both informally and formally for career advancement is necessary to improve the number of women in higher education leadership roles. women in higher education while women do hold some positions of leadership in the field of education, inequity persists. there is a “dismaying lack of success of women in making significant progress toward equality in the economic domain of american higher education. the gap between the salaries of women and men professors has not narrowed—it has widened” (frances, 2018, p. 696). mcmahon and associates (2018) found, in their review of the literature, that on average, women are not progressing as far as their male counterparts within the academic pipeline. literature suggests when women do advance; they encounter vast differences in grant acquisitions, salary, and recognition (frances, 2018). over the past 20 years, there has been little to no growth in this area of women serving on college and university boards of trustees (frances, 2018). “at the highest level in 2016, among doctorate-granting institutions in the public sector, 23 percent of the presidents were women, and in the private sector, 20 percent were women” (frances, 2018, p. 703). the american council of education (ace) has conducted periodic reviews of studies from the american college president and found the path to high-level positions in academia, such as the presidency, may be very different for men and women (frances, 2018, p. 703). women traditionally work their way through the ranks within an institution, tending to take a traditional path of serving as a department chair, dean, and finally chief academic officer, positions from which some men have been promoted directly into the presidency (frances, 2018). there are fewer women in leadership in postsecondary institutions who are positioned to take on critical roles, such as president, provost, dean, director, and department chair (madsen, 2012). this contributes to a lack of prepared leaders. the underrepresentation of women within higher education environments has been referred to as the “absent women” discourse (aiston & yang, 2017). this issue not only has an impact on the institutions themselves but also has an impact on the research being conducted within the institutions. contributing factors that hinder the advancement of women in leadership roles include work relationships, university environment, invisible rules, proactivity, and personal circumstances (madsen, 2012). these factors lead to gender imbalance within institutions. due to this gender imbalance, the presence of women leaders and mentors available for other women is lacking. academia is a challenging environment in which to work. faculty members, within colleges and universities, encounter multiple stressors. as their responsibilities continue to grow and expectations rise, this may result in the advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 faculty member experiencing feelings of stress or being overwhelmed (eagan & garvey, 2015). the amount and different types of responsibility (teaching, grant writing, research pursuits, mentoring graduate students, etc.) is one explanation for these feelings. “rank and gender of the resident instructional faculty proved to be significantly associated with task-based stress” (smith, et al., 1995, p. 276). in addition to having more experiences of stress in the role of faculty, women report having more task-based stresses. in contrast, male faculty were significantly less likely to have this experience. “controlling the effects of the other variables, the likelihood of task-based stress for men was about half (0.4758 times) that of women” (smith et al., 1995, p. 277). without proper provisions in place, it is possible that mismanaged workplace stressors could potentially cause other serious consequences for the employee, including, but not limited to, job dissatisfaction, burnout, or compassion fatigue, and ultimately affect the employee’s health and career. burnout while there is no generally accepted definition of burnout, most do agree burnout syndrome is comprised of three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishments (kulkarni, 2006). common symptoms include but are not limited to, constant negative state of mind related to work, strain, exhaustion, distress, tension, chronic fatigue, depression, professional melancholia, feelings of not being effective, decreased motivation, persona crisis, and poor mental health (kulkarni, 2006). kulkarni (2006) stated, “approximately 30-50% of the workforce is exposed to psychological overload at work resulting in occupational stress or burnout while 75% of us workers admit that their jobs are stressful and pressure of work is steadily increasing” (p. 3). workplace pressure and stress is realized and felt by individuals. demands for new skills, new responsibilities, and pressure for a higher quality of work, time constraints, and hectic schedules all act as stressors in the workplace (kulkarni, 2006). these workplace stressors are in addition to any individual’s life concerns. “the increasing difficulty in integrating working life with family life globally has caused imbalance in financial capital, social capital, and health capital” (kulkarni, 2006, p. 3). not only do stress and burnout affect an individual’s well-being and mental health, but they have a direct impact on organizations. in the u.s., occupational stress has been estimated to cost employers over $200 billion annually (kulkarni, 2006). individuals who may be experiencing burnout may exhibit a decrease in their workplace productivity, quality of work, and exhibit low morale. organizationally, employee burnout may be manifested in an increase in staff turnover and absenteeism rates, increased worker compensation claims, and frequency of on-the-job injury rates resulting in increased demand for occupational health. there is a need for organizations to be aware of the results of occupational stressors leading to burnout. this awareness will allow the organization to act as a resource for their staff in the prevention and treatment of this condition. burnout may appear differently for individuals who work in academia. “the downside of having a brain that is constantly on call is that our energy is sapped continuously. the resulting burnout can happen at any stage of a career” (gannon, 2008, p. 1157). as one’s career advances, the responsibility and workload given to the individual can potentially increase. this leads to what has been referred to by gannon (2008) as the “stale phase.” once an individual moves from tired, to stale, to burnt-out, it is difficult to recover. the time needed to complete tasks generally increases while the constant underperformance drains enthusiasm. it may become increasingly more difficult for academics to continue their work after reaching a period of burnout. in another psychological approach, burnout has been viewed as an existential crisis (dzau, et al., 2018). this crisis manifests when the value of the individual’s work and sense of selfworth is being questioned. teachers experiencing this level of burnout come to ask why they are working in a thankless and underpaid job. they may challenge what difference their efforts are making. these feelings of depleted selfworth and a lack of appreciation in their career may cause teachers to leave their positions (dworkin, 2014). burnout for women is attributed to many different stressors and challenges unique to their experiences related to their gender. as women climb the organizational ladder and take on more leadership responsibilities, they encounter more barriers in their path including “the sporadic focus on career advancement, time-consuming childcare, responsibility for family life, and a woman's tendency toward understatement” (schueller-weidekamm & kautzky-willer, 2012, p. 244). further, these researchers share that outside factors, including family and personal life, affect the careers of women leaders. harassment at work and lack of a women’s network were additional factors that hindered prolonged career development. a lack of women mentors and role models paired with low self-confidence may pose challenges for women within leadership (schuellerweidekamm & kautzky-willer, 2012). care giving responsibilities are mentioned frequently within research as an obstacle encountered in a woman’s career ascent. for women, the time expenditure for family life, including responsibility for children’s education, childcare (watts, 2009), and organizing family life and structure, has been identified. “women report significant challenges when balancing their work and family lives, due to the lack of sufficient time, their husbands' non-involvement in house chores, cultural norms, and gender biases that still exist in the workplace until this day” (karkoulian & srour, 2016, p. 4919). there is more stress due to the burden of family and career imposed on women leaders with families, and “these stress factors might lead to a burnout syndrome that occurs in > 30% of people who work in the healthcare system” (schueller-weidekamm & kautzky-willer, 2012, p. 248). purpose of the study the purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the phenomenon of being female/femaleness and its impact on the experiences of high-level administrators in colleges of agriculture at land-grant universities. this phenomenon has implications for half of the population. the term “female” is understood as a pejorative term that confines women to her advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 sex (de beauvoir, 1949). historically, the roles of the different sexes have varied. men have more opportunities, while women feel subjugation in the conflicted between their own interests and external expectations (de beauvoir, 1949). the phenomenon of being female/femaleness was crucial to consider when examining participant experiences to tease out the resulting impact the phenomenon may have had. the participants' cumulative experiences resulted in feelings indicative of burnout and compassion fatigue, with implications for overall job satisfaction. the following questions were used to frame the study: 1. how does the phenomenon of being female/femaleness impact the lived experiences of high-level female administrators at land grant colleges of agriculture? 2. what are the experiences that result from bring female/femaleness, as they relate to career burnout, compassion fatigue, and job satisfaction? 3. what are the consequences of stress, stress coping mechanisms, and implications of long-term stress exposure for those who are female? methods to understand the phenomenon of being female/femaleness, a qualitative approach was selected because the main objective of was to understand the experiences of a particular individual or group and the meaning those individuals attach to those experiences (denzin & lincoln, 1994). particularly when investigating an individual’s leadership journey, it is important to “understand the meaning people have constructed” concerning their environment and experiences that they have encountered in the world as it relates to their position (merriam & tisdell, 2016, p. 15). research design the descriptive method of phenomenology giorgi used is a version of husserlian’s approach, however, it places the focus on the “importance of going to the description of others; assuming the attitude of the phenomenological reduction (bracketing); and the search for an invariant psychological meaning …” (vagle, 2014, pp. 52-53). this approach was useful in this context as it was “corrective both to the ‘natural attitude’ of everyday life and to other scholarly approaches that gloss over the meanings of such experiential data, or even the data itself.” (salter & mcguire, 2014). the responses provided were a description of the participants’ own personal experience rather than a reflection of the experience. sampling & participants purposeful sampling was used to determine the sample for the study. this type of sampling is “based on the assumption that the investigator wants to discover, understand, and gain insight and therefore must select a sample from which the most can be learned” (merriam & tisdell, 2016, p. 96). the population for this study was higher-level female administrators, specifically in colleges of agriculture, at 1862 and 1890 land-grant institutions. twenty-two participants responded to the invitation to participate and completed the interview session. the participants were from a variety of regions across the u.s. and ranged in age from 40-70 years old. further details of the participants has been left out to ensure that identities stay confidential. data collection & instrumentation descriptive, semi-structured phenomenological interviews were conducted with each participant. this type of interview was selected to collect data to obtain information that has a complete description of the participant’s experience (merriam, 2009; giorgi, 2009). the phenomenological interview required the participants to describe their experiences; additional details were obtained through the flow of interview discussions, body language and other tacit information. data analysis when analyzing the data, the focus was placed on the participants’ descriptions of their lived experiences and the tacit information conveyed during the interview. it was imperative the words of the participant be represented without edit. the processes of horizontalization, reduction, and the whole-part-whole method were used to retain the focus on understanding the participants’ experiences via their descriptions of those experiences (hoffding & martiny, 2016). in horizontalizations data are examined, and each statement is given an equal value at the initial data analysis stage (padilla-diaz, 2015). each statement represents a segment of meaning. the segments are then categorized into themes (chun, 2013; merriam, 2009; moustakas, 1994). with horizontalization, an individual has a combination of conscious experiences and phenomena. qualities are recognized and described during the process of explicating the phenomenon, with every perception having equal value, nonrepetitive experiences are linked thematically, and full description is derived. (merriam, 2009, p. 27, moustakas, 1994, p. 96) smith et al. (2009) described phenomenological reduction as a process intended to lead the inquirer away from the distraction and misdirection of their own assumptions and preconceptions, and back towards the essence of their experience of a given phenomenon. i used reduction to guide me back to the lived experience of the phenomenon to get back to its essence (merriam & tisdell, 2016). reduction was achieved through the epoche, acknowledging, and putting aside my own experiences, opinions, and biases regarding women in leadership (kee, 2019). giorgi stressed the importance of detaching from personal experience, understanding, and knowledge to analyze the data from a new perspective (vagle, 2014). as the final analysis process, a whole-part-whole analysis was undertaken, revisiting the data three separate times, each time with a different view (giorgi, 2009); an initial reading to become (re)familiar with the data, taking notes, a secondary reading where large sections or excerpts of data that contain meaning were marked, defining meanings and identifying themes and categories based on the readings/rereadings. it was important to continually ensure that the advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 meanings that originated from the data and participants rather than the interpretation of the researcher, and subsequent readings to re-articulate personal thoughts about each section, label themes, and identify new trends (vagle, 2014, pp. 110-111). credibility qualitative research occurs in a natural setting for the participants, making the phenomenon observable and can be interpreted “in terms of meaning people bring to them” (denzin & lincoln, 1994, p. 2). researchers need to ensure they are proving the trustworthiness of their study (ingerson, 2013). credibility was established through member checking and peer debriefs. transferability was established through thick, rich descriptions. dependability was achieved by conducting a coderecode procedure, taking field notes, journaling, and audit trail. these tools mapped out every step of the process, including how decisions were made and how conclusions were reached. confirmability was established with the use of an audit trail, the use of spreadsheets and folders organizing the research documentation. results it is important to note that in this results section, participant numbers were used to denote attribution to the participant(s) who shared the experiences contained herein. where direct quotes were used, the pseudonyms provided to the participants at the outset of the research were used to attribute the words to their source, while still ensuring confidentiality of the participants. research question 1: how does the phenomenon of femaleness impact the lived experiences of high-level female administrators at land grant colleges of agriculture? this question focused on understanding the impact of femaleness participants have experienced as high-level female administrators. three major themes emerged that demonstrated the lived experiences of these administrators: career path, mentors, and motivations. we first examined where participants started and what inspired them to pursue a career in academia. a few participants had a linear path to academia, always intending to pursue faculty positions as their ultimate career (p2, p9, p11). still others started their journey not with a desire to work within academia, but outside it, instead starting careers in industry and k-12 education (p1, p6, p7, p18, p21, p22). some of these women found inspiration to pursue roles in higher education based on backgrounds in cooperative extension and 4-h (p15, p17, p19). they described being raised in families with mothers who were educators—many witnessed women in these roles over generations. by seeing women hold these roles in these organizations, it reinforced that these were positions women could have, and therefore, inspired the participants to follow similar paths. mary shared: well, as far as preparation, i grew up in a rural area. growing up in a rural area, you get involved with a lot of different types of you know, organizations such as 4h and things like that that teach leadership and agriculture. and so going through each program, and my mom was an educator, watched her, modeled her, and always wanted to be like my mom. parents, teachers, and peers shape gender roles. growing up, these individuals witnessed others working in particular positions deemed acceptable for their gender; that there were appropriate roles for girls to pursue. this finding is compatible with marcus et al.’s (2015) research that, in practice, gender norms “limit girls’ development opportunities and undermine their well-being” (p. 5). as such, some of the participants elected to stay within the defined confines and pursue a similar path. additionally, these participants considered their expectations as a female when exploring their career options. susan shared: i thought it was a good mom's job because i wanted to be able to have time with my children, follow the school schedule if i was a teacher. so i started out in education to become a teacher … hansanovic (2015) stated society deems what is appropriate within roles, behaviors, activities, and features based on gender. the responsibilities outlined by the phenomenon here included the expectations that these women fulfill traditional female roles. by selecting careers that allowed for some to be available for childcare and household priorities, they were able to pursue employment while still navigating within the confines that femaleness had outlined. this study revealed mentors and role models played critical roles for these participants, providing guidance, and assisting these women along their career journeys. due to the male-dominated stem environments, mostly male mentors were available (p1, p5, p11, p12, p20, p21, and p22); however, some participants did have experience with a female mentor or role model (p3, p6, p11, p14, p16, p21). while mentors and role models were beneficial to their career trajectories, participants felt that female mentors had more of an impact than males. these female mentors were found to be able to provide guidance, act as a sounding board, and model what navigating femaleness in a maledominated environment may look like. caroline shared, “my role model was a faculty member in the [discipline] at the [university]. and seeing her as a woman working in, as a [position], encouraged me that it was possible.” this finding is congruent with rupert et al.’s (2015) research which suggested institutions should partner newer staff with a more experienced colleague as a mentor, providing examples of someone of the same gender navigating successfully around the phenomenon of femaleness, inspiring other women to do the same. the third theme that emerged related to the phenomenon impacting participants’ experiences was motivation; what inspires, drives, and motivates these individuals within their careers. participants were inspired to be able to work with students (p6, p8, p9, p10, p12, p13, p16, p19). michelle explained she remains, where i'm at because of the students. i love the students, and i love the research i'm doing. if i advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 didn't have the love of the students and the research, i probably wouldn’t stay in academia. being able to remove potential barriers and guide these students on the way to success was exciting and motivational for participants. this type of nurturing service is congruent with bartel’s (2018) research that found that women comply with gender-role stereotypes by taking on more service-oriented work than their male colleagues. by acting in the role of problemsolver or caretaker, and putting others’ needs before their own, these women were complying with the gender-role stereotypes. a man would not have to consider being available after school and during the summer to be with children. for women, this is still viewed as their primary role. women are taught to seek fulfillment by assisting others in more of a service-oriented or caretaker role. this is a prime example of the constraints the phenomenon imposes on women via taking care of others, their homes, and families; thus influencing the levels of fullfilment and satisfaction women may find based on the parameters of the phenomenon. while women have advanced in many fields in an attempt to gain equal footing, findings here indicate women consciously and unconsciously are still confined by their femaleness within society. research question 2: what are the experiences that result from femaleness, as they relate to career burnout, compassion fatigue, and job satisfaction? research question two focused on the experiences related to career burnout, compassion fatigue, and job satisfaction as a result of femaleness. five significant themes emerged during this portion of the study, including stereotyping, challenging environments, women as a marginalized group, gender expectations, and misogyny. heilman (2012) posited stereotyping women creates negative expectations about performance within the workplace, and the findings of this study were congruent. gender stereotypes create assumptions that women are not equipped to handle typically male tasks or positions, leading women to have to “compete aggressively for positions” (heilman, 2012, p.123). stereotyping was a pervasive experience shared by participants that had a direct impact of femaleness. from uncomfortable situations to blatant inappropriate statements, participants shared their experiences of stereotyping that they have experienced only because of their gender (p1, p2, p3, p4, p5, p6, p12, p14, p15, p16, p17, 18, p19, p21). caroline explained, “i have multiple experiences. we would not have enough time today to talk about these experiences.” she explained “at the end of an interview, i was told, ‘you know, we think you're a really promising young [role]. i'm really impressed with your communication and your [specific type of] skills, but honestly, we have no idea what we’d do if you got pregnant.’ ” still others were advised not to pursue a promotion due to the fact it was viewed as a “male” role. mary’s peers affirmed this thinking by stating, “oh, no way, you know they’re not gonna let you have that. they don’t want women.” similarly, this study found while there were many experiences of blatant stereotyping, many participants encountered microaggressions throughout their careers that caused feelings of discomfort, stress, and dissatisfaction in their work (p3, p5, p10, p11, p19, p21). these passive-aggressive behaviors may be small but frequently occurred, having a cumulative effect on the participants. women found themselves as the gender minority in exceptionally challenging work environments (p3, p4, p5, p11, p12, p13, p14, p15, p18, p19, p21). stainback et al.’s (2016) study purported all aspects of an organization, while seemingly free of gender, actually reflect longstanding distinctions between men and women, masculinity and femininity, and power and domination in ways that aid in the reproduction and maintenance of gender inequality (p. 110). the current study supports those findings, as the phenomenon of femaleness impacted the treatment of participants in the workplace, including an unwelcoming climate, and lack of inclusivity and satisfaction, adding additional obstacles for the participants already attempting to navigate male-dominated workplaces, directly resulting in increased exposure to stress. participants felt an inequity within their work environments that resulted in being excluded, underappreciated, uncomfortable, and mistreated (p3, p6, p7, p11, p12, p14, p15, p19, p21, p22). most participants were singled out for being a woman and made to feel as if they did not belong in the male-dominated environment. as an example, ava shared during her career, “research was sort of relegated as a male role, so unfortunately teaching and service was a female role.” goldeberg and crowe’s (2010) study reported male dominance in agriculture being well recognized, and our findings are congruent. caroline identified this saying at her institution: women here are pigeonholed to a certain extent into traditional roles, they can work in hr, they work with teaching, work with youth and children, but it's much harder to have a voice in the harder science things … we have [barriers] in having a voice and being heard in agriculture. the findings of this study also paralleled some results of jacobs’ (1995) research, including the lack of women faculty in higher education is evidence that they have to endure a chilly climate. entry into these male-dominated fields is more challenging due to traditional expectations placed on women as a result of the phenomenon. even after gaining access to these fields, these participants were still met with inappropriate behavior and treatment. these experiences have a cumulative effect and increased stress levels, feelings of dissatisfaction, and symptoms related to compassion fatigue and burnout. hiring more women would ultimately diversify not only the faculty/department/college but the discipline which has far larger implications in terms of opportunities, role modeling, and mentoring. holmes’ (2011) research referred to the “gendered division of labor” describing roles deemed “male” and “female,” with only those genders traditionally filling those roles. in this study, participants were prohibited from entering certain positions or opportunities because the role was viewed as a “male role” (p3, p6, p7, p11, p12, p14, p15, p19, p21, advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 p22). susan explained, “[at my institution] the females did family consumer sciences and males did the agriculture area.” chloe added, it's [the discipline] mostly male-dominated at the upper echelon. and the women that make it up, again they tend to be the women who didn't marry for whatever reason, don't have kids. and they are tough women in a different sort of way. so, they kind of fit that male expectation or the male role? the current research study’s findings supported aron’s (2019) findings stating the idea of misogyny was understood to be structural and recognized organizations of society are deeply rooted in the oppression of women. in this study, adverse treatment within organizations not only contributed to a challenging and unwelcome environment but also increased the overall level of stress to which the participants were exposed. participants discussed either having first-hand experience, observing the behavior, knowing someone, or hearing about women around them experiencing misogyny (p2, p5, p16, p20). evelyn shared she is often treated negatively, saying, “there is no inclusion, and i was not part of the buddy talk.” in this study, men were not found to be the only perpetrators of misogynistic behavior. this is congruent with clark and lindfield’s (2018) study which found misogynistic influence was so deeply ingrained into society women did not realize they were imposing those views on themselves or other women. as these women deviated outside of their prescribed femaleness, they were met with disdain and negativity by other members of their gender (p5, p7, p8, p10, p12, p16). maria shared: i have personally speculated that i think in general the women make it worse than the men. i've wondered if it's because the women are so aggressive because they've always been really high performing. they kind of fought their way to the top and continued that. [you get the women together, and they're just ready to cut each other's throats rather than help each other out… the women are always trying to prove that you're better than the other person, trying to constantly say, oh, those other women are not as good as i am. this behavior creates undue stress and barriers between members of the same marginalized group, preventing opportunities for comradery and support. this increased exposure to stress, frustration, and dissatisfaction are all symptoms of burnout kulkarni’s (2006). research question 3: what are the consequences of stress, stress coping mechanisms, and implications of long-term stress exposure for those who are female? when exploring the impacts and consequences stress had on these women, it was essential to be conscious of the phenomenon of femaleness and the daily implications it has for this group. four major themes emerged related to the consequences of stress, coping mechanisms, and long-term stress exposure. these themes include stressors, impacts of stress, coping, and level of satisfaction. the types of stressors participants were exposed to range from work-related issues, personal issues, or a combination of the whole. this research found one cause of stress for participants was not feeling valued (p3, p6, p11, p14). chloe shared, “if i were to come up with a common thread, it was just lack of respect for what i did or could do, my potential, just total lack of understanding or respect of my potential.” this finding is congruent with bystydzienski & bird, 2006) that higher education was initially intended for only men and therefore valued men in high-level positions (bird, 2011; trower, 2012). another source of stress that impacted symptoms related to burnout, compassion fatigue, or dissatisfaction was the participants' abilities being doubted. the superior’s perception of one’s abilities was a significant factor related to stress. for example, ava discussed such an experience with her supervisor, sharing: [he] called me into his office one day and said, “well, you know, we don't have any confidence in your abilities to manage your budget, and that's the perception we get among all the [specific role]. this is a crisis i don't think you're going to survive.” participants also noted discrepancies in pay between themselves and male counterparts, which resulted in feelings of being undervalued and their abilities being doubted which is in line with baker et al. (2015). these situations, and others like them, resulted in health issues (p1, p5, p6, p8, p10, p11, p12, p15, p19), difficulty sleeping (p2, p3, p5, p8, p11, p14, p15), a lack of work-life balance (p11, p18, p20, p22), a loss of morale, feelings of hopelessness, and self-doubt all of which are symptoms of compassion fatigue. it is further congruent with elliot, et al.’s (2015) work that identified that females have an increase in stress from working in a male-dominated field results in sleep disorders. poor institutional cultures and resulting stressors impact women in these high-level positions including exposure to and level of stress which has long-lasting health-related consequences. kulkarni’s (2006) study identified many workplace stressors including demands for new skills, new responsibilities, and pressure for a higher quality of work, time constraints, and hectic schedules. similarly, schaufeli’s (1996) research identified job demands as the root cause of burnout. the current research study’s findings supported both kulkarni’s (2006) and schaufeli’s (1996) findings. it can be concluded that these stressors paired with the impact that femaleness has had on this group’s daily experiences result in them being at risk for higher levels of stress and the development of feelings of dissatisfaction and burnout. when employees are under intense stress, it not only has an effect on them but the organization as a whole. employee burnout increases staff turnover, absenteeism rates, increased worker compensation claims, and an increase in on-the-job injuries (kulkarni, 2006). the participants in this study had symptoms of burnout, resulting in feelings of disengagement that impacted the participant’s work and the organization. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 as people move into the stage of depersonalization, interpersonal relationships will suffer (borgogni, et al., 2012), and this research is congruent with those findings. more than half of the participants admitted feelings of disengagement at some point in their careers (p1, p2, p3, p4, p5, p7, p8, p9, p10, p11, p12, p14, p15, p17, p18, p19, p21, p22). participants shared stories about difficult situations involving superiors, colleagues, and decisions that resulted in feelings of disengagement, helplessness, anger, depression, and frustration, all symptoms of burnout. as their symptoms of burnout manifested, their relationships at work and sometimes at home were negatively impacted. coping mechanisms were vital to ensure balance. each individual developed coping mechanisms to combat the different types and amounts of stress they experienced. not all coping mechanisms participants shared were healthy or effective longterm, such as the use of food, drugs, or alcohol, are directly related to burnout. these are not recommended mechanisms. four participants admitted to drinking to reduce stress (p1, p11, p14, p16). while others did not drink to relieve stress, they did say that their drinking has increased, and occasionally they drank in excess. most participants discussed using exercise and physical activity as a method to combat stress and promote their well-being (p8, p9, p10, p11, p14, p16, p20, p21, p22). staying active has helped participants feel balanced, healthy, and get through their day. an additional coping mechanism participants referenced was religion or prayer (p5, p7, p9, p10, p14, p17). the incorporation of their faith into their daily routine provided feelings of calm and peace. many participants discussed professional support networks (p4, p7, p8, p9, p13, p14, p15, p16, p19, p20, p21). these women shared utilizing professional associations for support, and networking opportunities resulted in them gaining valuable colleagues. many participants referenced their families as their primary support structures (p3, p4, p5, p6, p7, p8, p9, p10, p12, p13, p17, p18, p22). these women referenced their families as fundamental support structures that provided many different types of support for them. other participants turned to friends for support and guidance, emotional support, and socialization (p5, p6, p8, p11, p13, p18). ginoux and isoard-gautheur (2019) and meier and beredord (2006) both had similar findings which indicated the institutional and individual implementation of physical activity as a coping mechanism had an overall positive impact which is in line with the results found here. krasner et al.’s (2009) study found that intuitional intervention aided staff with positive coping mechanisms. while the current research found participants implementing a host of coping mechanisms, both those recommended and those not recommended, findings did not include an institutional invention. the findings related to stress, coping mechanisms, and implications of long-term stress exposure indicate that as the level of stress increases, the risk for symptoms related to burnout and compassion fatigue will also increase. long-term exposure to stress without proper tools to prevent and manage it will result in a likelihood in the development of conditions such as burnout, compassion fatigue, and overall dissatisfaction. as appropriate coping mechanisms are implemented into one’s daily routines, the results of stress should begin to be better managed and eventually decrease. if inappropriate or not recommended coping mechanisms are used to combat stress, we can conclude it will have can have an overall negative impact on the individual. the result would be an increase in the level of stress but also the risk for conditions such as burnout and compassion fatigue. recommendations this study provided insight into the impact the phenomenon of femaleness has on the lived experiences of female administrators within land-grant institutions. based on the research findings, the following are suggestions for future practices and further research. suggestions for practice it is imperative when managing and combating stress, the burden not be shouldered individually, but shared institutionally. rupert et al., (2015) found that while individuals have personal stressors, many of the stressors faced are actually related to organizational or contextual factors. the individual can work to manage their personal stress but the “unavoidable occupational hazards” of workplace stressors need to be addressed and managed by the institution (rupert et al, 2015, p.168). the proposed model demonstrates the importance of an individual and an institution together, responding appropriately to stressors to prevent burnout (see figure 1). figure 1. proposed model for individual and institutional responses for burnout prevention as the model demonstrates, the responsibility cannot rest only on one party to reach homeostasis, but rather the individual and institution share a part in the successful management of stress. while job demands play a central role in most burnout models, these models have increasingly emphasized the importance of resources for preventing or reducing levels of burnout (rupert, et al., 2015). the job demand–resources model (demerouti, et al., 2001) advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 recognizes multiple other resources, such as opportunities for professional development, supervision, and feedback, play a role in reducing burnout, either by directly influencing motivation or engagement in work or by buffering the impact of job demands (rupert et al., 2015, p.169). as part of the institutional intervention, the well-being of female employees needs to become a top priority. by providing educational and health resources to these employees, it assists in managing, combating, and treating stress and related conditions that are unique to this group. institutions should begin by performing an assessment of their current state to identify existing resources, programs, and sources of expertise within the organization (krusie, 2018). programs and educational resources and promoting high-quality behavioral health resources for staff is essential. this allows staff not only education on topics such as stress, burnout, and compassion fatigue but will provide resources for diagnosis and treatment. it is necessary to make the behavioral health resources anonymous to encourage female staff and faculty to feel comfortable seeking help. educational leaders need to be educated to recognize stress and burnout, enhance communication skills, and become advocates for their staff and faculty (krusie 2018). within the system, the organization needs to specifically outline the traits and competencies expected of its leaders. this will ensure leadership's principles are aligned with the system (krusie, 2018). there should be expectations for leaders to be available for coaching and mentoring to support not only the staff but also aid in continuous improvement of the organization. an essential part of supporting the staff will be leaders listening and encouraging feedback. autonomy and control are cited as critical factors in understanding the prevention of burnout. by providing faculty and staff with a sense of self-direction and independence in their work can increase engagement as well as personal ownership. structured formal networks and support systems need to be available and encouraged for new female faculty members entering stem disciplines. formal, scheduled support mechanisms, such as a support group dedicated to discussing personal feelings about work and problem-solving, provide staff a supportive outlet to discuss their feelings and triggers of stress (meimer & bresford, 2006). additionally, this offers an opportunity for interdisciplinary support as staff to come together to discuss common issues (rupert, et al., 2015). this support structure will assist in the navigation of the high-stress work environment and provide education on balancing work-life responsibilities and stress related to burnout. rupert, et al. (2015) suggested that workplace support is a significant resource. the support an individual receives in the workplace plays an important role as it assists with building a sense of personal accomplishment (rupert et al., 2015). as women gain entry into the male-dominated stem disciplines, a mentor will be imperative. institutional implementation of a mentor program is recommended as it assigns an experienced colleague in the workplace to assist the new employee. by pairing a colleague who is experienced in similar experiences related to femaleness, it will assist in the navigation of challenging and stressful situations (meimer & beresford, 2006), the phenomenon of femaleness, and burnout. schueller-weidekamm and kautzky-willer (2012) indicated fellowship activities positively influence colleague relationships. meimer and beresford (2006) recommended the utilization of peers who understand the work and can be sounding boards. rupert, et al. (2015) noted support at work is important, specifically for building a sense of personal accomplishment. female mentors should also be made available to female students. these mentors should be visible within the organization to demonstrate to aspiring females the possibility of holding a higher-level administrative position. the creation of a formal program that pairs women in stem fields with a female mentor will provide opportunities for comradery, guidance, and support from another female within the area. additionally, mentoring programs, coaching, networking, and the support of other persons help to strengthen female soft skills and achieve a work–life balance (schueller-weidekamm & kautzkywiller, 2012, p. 249). references acker, j. (2006). inequality regimes: gender, class, and race in organizations. gender & society, 20(4), 441–469. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243206289499 aiston, s. j., & yang, z. 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(2009). “allowed into a man’s world” meanings of work-life balance: perspectives of women civil engineers as “minority” workers in construction. gender, work, and organization, 16(1), 37–57.   home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international preface several years ago while chairing a committee for the national association for multicultural education (name), the committee charge was to research and determine what constitutes a multicultural leader. we examined research on the issue, we queried members throughout the organization, and we debated data continuously in meetings. as one might imagine then, this exchange of information among committee members who represent various diversity, our interactions with others who represent their own uniqueness, enjoined and brought to the surface many other important questions. soon committee members (nine female and two male) became embroiled and intertwined within discussions that intensified around such issues as "what makes a sensitive multicultural female leader who might adjust policies established by white males and make them appealing to others?" and, "what about institutional policies established by white males and their direct implications for all women and women leaders of color?" moreover, we explored ways that women may differ from men while carrying out policies, practices, and procedures within a fragile u.s. military industrial complex such as ours? questions such as "in what ways might women leaders make professional decisions that are different from their male counterparts?" or, might a sensitive female multicultural leader reveal one who is sensitive to race, ethnicity; gender (especially women and girls) economics, various disability, and language groups. various committee members extended and intensified their research on women leaders and began to ask broader questions surrounding women leaders. they wanted to know "what experiences and insights might have occurred along the way that prepared women for sensitivity to diversity in their leadership?" it is with these questions in mind that we move toward a better understanding of what leadership means to women and how might their management styles differ from many of their http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html 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reveal sensitivity to employee's personal struggles with family and friends and might even allow time off from work to resolve issues. however, a typical male response might insist that employees work through their issues by focusing on their work. but, could there exist other differences in leadership among women and men? what makes a multicultural leader? and, what are the differences? in order to respond to this critically important issue surrounding female leaders i posed several questions to a diverse group of women. i approached various race, ethnic, gender, economic, language, and disability groups of women. these women represent various agencies, organizations, and institutions. they range from women who volunteer in homeless shelters, physicians in hospitals and private settings, leaders in schools and academies, and social service representatives such as state and federal police/military and/or welfare to work programs. a resounding response to my query is "the major difference between women in leadership is that we must prove ourselves worthy to men," or "the politics of the workplace oftentimes overwhelm me and i am unable to lead as i choose," or "i worry that my leadership does not differ from men" to "i like the current system and see no reason for change." these responses from women tend to connect to national data collected on women in u.s. society. the following data was collected from the perspective of women, by women, and asked of both women and men. that is, several women collected data from both females and males; men and women who represent various racial groups; persons who represent various ethnicities internationally; groups who represent different sexual orientations; and other groups who represent diversity. this group offered a resounding chorus of voices that revealed an intense belief in transforming the system to meet their various needs. there was also a less significant set of data within this category expressing a keen concern for maintenance of the system. so, it is within the above framework that this special issue of advancing women in leadership (awl) is positioned. and, most importantly, i invite you to observe the writings of a diverse group of women directly affected by 9/11. the writers join in to examine the roles and behaviors of women in leadership. the manuscripts shared here would have been presented at the research on women and education (rwe) conference, october, 2001 in baltimore, md. however, due to the tragedy of september 11, 2001, a month prior to the conference date and many cancellations from participants, the meeting was canceled. in closing, to the women, men, families, children, and friends who directly faced tragedy on 9/11, we wish you confidence and peace, we love you and we carry forth our work in your honor! pausing to the tragedy that changed our lives forever, awl and rwe staffs and membership continue our work in honor of those most intimately affected by the tragedy. together, we provide conference participants an avenue to share their work with you. thus, awl and rwe honor those most closely touched by the tragedy of 9/11 by dedicating this issue in your honor. evelyn reid clark atlanta university   copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web 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journals: a place for women to publish? susan m. tescione tescione, summer, 2000 "economics and technology now dictate a shift from print to cyberspace and make electronic publication inevitable." academic publishing in north america has existed in its current form for more than two centuries. for most disciplines, the journal article remains academe's stock-in-trade. tradition as well as institutional policy play pivotal roles in "publish or perish," and decisions about hiring, promotion, and tenure often rest on the candidate's publication record. the format of the published work, the quality of the journal, the publication peer review process, copyediting, typesetting, and the finished look of an article in print all contribute to the authority of published research (tomlins, 1998). the process of "getting into print" is arduous and can consume a year or more. proponents of electronic journals say that this slow process creates a body of literature that is outdated at publication. in contrast, electronic peer review proceeds quickly, and anyone can self-publish on the world wide web. many scholars object to the time the peer review process absorbs and predict the demise of print journals in libraries due to expense, shelf space, availability, turn-around time, and the costs of preservation. although technology can place information at a researcher's fingertips almost instantly, scholars are concerned about other academic issues that involve the quality of the research and publication. the evolution of scholarly electronic publication stevan harnad referred to electronic publication as "scholarly skywriting" (harnad, 1991). harnad outlined the first three evolutionary stages in the development of human communication-speech, writing, and printing (the gutenberg era). he called the current stage "the post-gutenberg galaxy" or "the fourth revolution." both ann okerson and stevan harnad noted that scholars chafe at the time lag in writing, peer review, publication, and citation in the print journal process (harnad, 1991; okerson, 1991). in 1991, okerson counted 30 electronic journals and 80 electronic newsletters. most were in listserv format. four years later, mceldowney located 300 electronic journals and 400 electronic newsletters and predicted that by 1998 more than 3,500 journals and newsletters would publish electronically (mceldowney, 1995). harter and kim wrote in 1996 that many of the known listserv journals had moved to the world wide web (harter kim, 1996). in the same article, harter and kim reported the results of the most comprehensive research on the quality http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html file:///content.html file:///business.html file:///awcareer.html file:///workplace.html file:///networks.html file:///web.html file:///hispanic.html file:///international.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///users/nrahman/desktop/flash2/womsoc/index.html file:///awl/awl.html file:///finance.html file:///lifestyles/lifestyles.html of web journals to that date. they combined the listings of two indexes for electronic journals on the web and discovered that only 131 publications actually qualified as refereed academic journals. they then determined that 72 percent of those publications posted with sufficient regularity during the period of the study to qualify as electronic journals. only 45 percent of the remaining 95 journals in the study could be accessed on the first attempt. the researchers uncovered numerous technical problems once in the directories of the journals that included missing or misspelled url's and changes of address with no forwarding url's. the articles also contained errors such as inoperative links, missing references, and unverifiable data. of the 131 electronic journals in the original sample, only 56 percent met the following criteria: (a) scholarly and peer-reviewed, (b) accessible, and (c) published with references (harter kim, 1996). copyright and intellectual property based on an example from burbules and bruce, the following example demonstrates complex ethical and publication issues (burbules bruce, 1995). suppose that a scholar posts an article to the web. other scholars e-mail her and she revises the article extensively, sometimes using cut and paste. she publishes an article in an electronic journal and based on commentary from the readers, writes a second article that is published in print. when was the first article actually published, when it was posted to the web or when it appeared in the electronic journal? who is the author? did plagiarism occur? who were the reviewers? was the article refereed? to what extent should the authors of commentary receive credit for both articles? what are the copyright and intellectual property issues that involve these articles? while the scope of this paper does not provide answers, it is important to debate these questions when considering the professional ramifications of electronic publishing. along with the quality of publication and access issues, some of these questions form the basis for the academy's hesitation to accept electronic publication as evidence of scholarly productivity for promotion and tenure review. the triangle research libraries network (trln), a joint committee of faculty, librarians, and university press editors from duke university, north carolina state university, and the university of north carolina at chapel hill, authored proposed policy changes in 1993 (trln copyright task force, 1993). the committee advocated policies that allow authors to retain their copyrights while encouraging the institutions to electronically publish the results. their policy stated, "returning ownership and control of the research results to the institutions and individuals who generate them in the first place is a critical first step in moving toward a future where research results are peer reviewed and then disseminated electronically to the worldwide scholarly community at reasonable costs" (1993, p.15). harnad (1997) argued that authors are paid for their scholarly work in terms of tenure, promotion, travel benefits, and research grants, therefore objection to assignment of copyrights to publishers is without merit. harnad also noted that the scholar's relationship with publishers is vastly different than the relationship that authors of other genres have with publishers, and believes that copyright will have little or no meaning if open access applies. he emphasized e-print, a method by which scholars post articles to a site, and other scholars contribute their comments. the original author can then revise the article and post it to an electronic publisher or a print publisher. thus far, most print journals reject this procedure on the basis of questionable authorship and argue that the article was previously published on the web (guernsey kiernan, 1997). tenure and promotion committees also do not respond well to the electronic form of collaborative authorship. however, many scholars view e-print as a legitimate method of distributing papers to colleagues for comment prior to submitting the paper for publication. economics institutions of higher education inevitably pay for research twice--first, in the form of faculty salaries, and then for library journal subscriptions (guernsey, 1998). to provide research facilities, academic libraries must maintain adequate numbers of journals in each discipline, even if the publisher inflates the price. libraries can now spend thousands of dollars for a year's subscription to a single journal. three years ago that same journal might have cost only a few hundred dollars (association of research libraries, 2000; wilson, 1998). this situation is particularly true of journals in the hard sciences and medicine; in fact, an annual subscription to a medical journal can exceed $15,000 (wilson, 1998). in the classic sense, print journal publishers might be biting the hand that feeds them. richard w. meyer argued that as publishers increase the price of print journals to libraries they lose some sales, but more than offset those losses with gains due to inflated pricing (meyer, 1997). libraries now turn to electronic journals to reduce the overall cost of journal subscriptions. many academic libraries compile their own electronic journals, creating "virtual" or "digital" libraries. johns hopkins university received funding from the national endowment for the humanities and the mellon foundation to initiate project muse. nearly 400 libraries currently subscribe to project muse, which provides access to 42 databases that feature electronic journals. of those subscribers, approximately 80 percent enroll through library consortia. project staff log 3 million users each quarter and process nearly 30,000 requests daily, as of january 1997 (neal, 1997; varian, 1997). the pressure to "publish or perish" places scholarly authors in a poor bargaining position. whether the costs are charged to the library, to an academic department, or are incurred through faculty salaries, institutions almost always bear the expense of research and publication, unless the researcher has grant funding.. in fact, the economics of publishing could change rapidly as electronic publishers charge authors, not subscribers, for publication fees. two models two models for electronic journals have rapidly evolved. the first model mimics the print process with paid subscriptions, a lengthy peer review, and archival processing on paper rather than electronic format (disk, cd). the second view predicts a more fluid process: electronic writing will dominate publishing and publications will be freely available to everyone. peer review, while still essential, could take a variety of formats, and utilize methods such as e-mail, listserv, and e-print, a form of posting on the world wide web that invites commentary. although harnad (1991) advocated the second model, okerson (1991) believed that both models would coexist for some time. these models are at the heart of a controversy among researchers who support electronic publication. the two models and senior faculty although university policies concerning tenure and electronic publication remain open, senior faculty continue to resist the medium (collins berge, 1994; kubly, 1996; langston, 1996). their reluctance to accept articles published in electronic journals directly affects faculty voting in personnel decisions. genuine concern about the quality of electronic journals, even without analysis of research methodology and writing style, lead to skepticism about consideration of electronic publications for hiring, promotion, and tenure review. to attain the status of print journals, kristin hede kubly argued that "online journals must maintain the rigorous standards that print journals have employed" (kubly, 1997, p. 275). however, scholars such as bernard j. hibbitts (1996) and terrence a. brooks (1999) advocate electronic journals that can and should exploit the web's full capabilities. this technology includes interactive forms, animation, sound, and video programmed in languages like java, javascript, and perl. but most faculty are still testing the electronic waters and the ambivalent atmosphere inhibits progress. meanwhile, junior faculty hesitate to publish electronically because they do not know if their committees will consider their work for tenure review. as david a. rier noted, "now it would be a fine thing indeed if articles were written for their own sake. but web technology does not alter the fact that professors, especially those not yet tenured, can ill afford to 'opt out' of a game that determines their professional fate" (rier, 1996, p. 205). women particularly find themselves caught at cross-purposes. according to the chronicle of higher education (august 27, 1999, p.38) in 1995, women made up 35 percent of all full-time faculty. the vast majority of women in academe are untenured and fill the lowest academic ranks. sixty-four percent of all the women in the academy are lecturers, adjuncts, instructors, and not-yet-tenured assistant professors. women make up more than half of the faculty in the instructor and lecturer ranks. without the full support of their institutions, these professionals have difficulty in obtaining grants, conducting research, and having papers accepted for publication (enos, 1991). the presence of women in the ranks of senior faculty is disproportionately low; only 18 percent of the full professors and 32 percent of the associate professors are women. these figures were released in 1995; the numbers are believed to have declined since that time. a number of studies demonstrate that women publish fewer articles than men (creamer, 1998), receive fewer citations (sonnert holton, 1996) and have more difficulty in breaking into print than do their male counterparts (enos, 1991). according to enos, a scholar in the field of advanced composition, women also tend to publish in less prestigious journals than men and tend to publish programmatic articles rather than theoretical articles (1991). because electronic journals are a relatively democratic form of publication, it could be tempting for women to publish in this media. many women authors with technical backgrounds would like to publish electronically, but are concerned that the time spent writing an electronic article would be better spent in pursuing print publication, which also has the payoff of acceptance in tenure review portfolios (langston, 1996). changing policies: hiring, promotion, and tenure economics and technology now dictate a shift from print to cyberspace and make electronic publication inevitable. given faculty preference for print publications, the demise of print journals will not occur as rapidly as some proponents of electronic journals predict. however, the climate of uncertainty creates a dilemma, especially for women faculty. is it better to publish more research articles electronically to increase the total number of publications and hope that the tenure committee will consider electronic articles? or should tenure-track women faculty submit their research to a print journal and allow the article to wind its way through the review and publication process? many junior faculty, women among them, are considering electronic publication. electronic journals, particularly those hosted by academic digital libraries, attempt to obtain articles through the institution's faculty. but there is no guarantee that the candidate's tenure committee will accept the electronic article as evidence of scholarly excellence. if accepted as part of the portfolio, will the article be judged on the same merit as print articles? consider the cases discussed below. in 1998, the pew charitable trusts, the association of american universities, and the association of research libraries co-sponsored a series of national meetings attended by university provosts, librarians, and scholars. the meetings culminated in a proposed plan that involves peer review for certification of articles (wilson, 1998). each university would appoint peer review panels within every academic discipline to examine articles for certification. if certified, the articles could then be considered in promotion and tenure proceedings, even if the author does not pursue publication. authors could electronically publish in their university's digital library. this controversial arrangement has met with mixed reaction among the universities represented at the meetings, although caltech has taken action on a radical new policy of its own. in september 1998, caltech asked its faculty to retain their publication rights rather than assigning the rights to publishers. if publishers decline to print the articles without the rights, caltech's administrators hope that faculty will publish in the library's electronic system (guernsey, 1998). unlike other institutions of higher education, caltech's position is unique because its niche is applied science. traditionally these disciplines weave networks with industry, government, and private institutions. these relationships allow the applied sciences a measure of independence that other disciplines do not have. further, the electronic journal garners far more acceptance in the private sector than in public higher education. at companies like boeing aircraft and battelle laboratories, electronic journals form the standard and are often condensed in the corporation's digital library before being posted as electronic digests to subscribing engineers (fidel crandall, 1998). obviously, the culture of applied science supports the electronic media and encourages academic faculty to publish electronically. men traditionally dominate the applied sciences, and so a great deal of networking supports acceptance of electronic publication in engineering. but what about the liberal arts and education, academic areas where more women can be found? academic fields in these disciplines lag far behind engineering and physics in acceptance of the electronic journal. arts and education also constitute some of the academic areas that are most likely to resist acceptance of electronic publications for tenure review. if institutions of higher education strongly support the development of electronic publishing, policy changes could convince senior faculty to alter their opinions about electronically published articles. when surveyed in1995, less than 3 percent of all faculty respondents stated that they had submitted articles to electronic publications. of those surveyed, 62.4 percent indicated that they did not favor the use of electronic journals for promotion and tenure review (budd connaway, 1996). much has changed over the last few years. tenured faculty exercise influence; they can call for tighter standards in electronic publication-standards that lead to the consideration of articles published electronically for hiring, promotion, and tenure proceedings (kubly, 1996). while untenured women find themselves in a precarious position, tenured women enjoy more freedom in their choice of media. senior faculty often evaluate the records of tenured candidates for promotion to full professor on benchmarks other than their publication records. in interviews conducted in 1998, three department heads stated that national reputations, research grants, and professional service were as important as the publication record to a tenured candidate seeking promotion to full professor (tescione, 1998). senior women faculty could play a strong role in electronic publication. they can publish electronically and encourage their colleagues on tenure committees to accept electronic publication in tenure review portfolios. members of tenure committees should consider electronic journal articles to be on the same par as the print counterparts. just as faculty evaluate each print article on the merit of its research content, electronic articles should be assessed by the same standards of quality. outside peer review of previously published research forms a cornerstone for promotion and tenure review (bednash, 1991). the current system trusts senior scholars in other institutions to empirically analyze the work of junior faculty and to comment on its quality beyond the scope of writing style and format. strong research that is well-written remains good research, whether it is published electronically or in print. the tenure and promotion system relies on the opinions and thoughts of senior scholars, regardless of the media used in publication. although the media should be irrelevant, the quality and accessibility of the publication is crucial (collins berge, 1994). economics and technology now dictate a shift from print to cyberspace and make electronic publication inevitable. many top scholarly journals now appear in both electronic and print format (kubly, 1996; langston, 1996).. institutions of higher education and their senior faculty should respond with open minds to urge viable standards of excellence for both media and to accept electronic articles on an equal footing with print articles in hiring, promotion, and tenure proceedings. references association of research libraries. (2000). scholarly communication is your system, [online]. available: http://www.arl.org/scomm/change.html bednash, g. (1991). tenure review: process and outcomes. the review of higher education, 15, 47-63. brooks, t. a. (1999). post-modern information science and its 'journal', [online]. available: http://weber.u.washington.edu~tabrooks/documents/postmodern.html budd, j. m., connaway. l. s. (1996). university faculty and networked information: results of a survey. journal of the american society for information science, 48, 843-854. burbules, n. c., bruce, b. c. (1995). this is not a paper. educational researcher, 24, 12-18. collins, m. p., berge, z. l. (1994). ipct journal: a case study of an electronic journal on the internet. journal of the american society of information science, 45, 771-776. creamer, e. g. (1998). assessing faculty publication productivity. ashe-eric higher education report 26, 1-117. enos, t. (1990). gender and publishing. pre-text, 11, 311-316. fidel, r., crandall, m. (1998). the role of subject access in information filtering. clinic on library applications of data processing, 24, 16-27. guernsey, l. (1998, september 18). a provost challenges his faculty to retain copyright on articles. chronicle of higher education, p. a29. guernsey, l. (1998, july 27). journals differ on whether to publish articles that have appeared on the web. chronicle of higher education, p. a27. harnad, s. (1991). post-gutenberg galaxy: the fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge, [online]. available: http://info.lib.uh..edu/pr/v2/n1/harnard.2nl harnad, s. (1991). learned inquiry and the net: the role of peer review, peer commentary, and copyright, [online]. available: http://www.proquest.umi.com harter,s. p., kim, h. j. (1996). accessing electronic journals and other e-publications: an empirical study. college and research libraries, 57, 449-456. hibbits, b. j. (1996). last writes? reassessing the law review in the age of cyberspace. new york university law review, 71, 615-668. kubly, k. h. (1996). the electronic journal on the internet. eric document reproduction service no. ed 400810. langston, l. (1996). scholarly communication and electronic publication: implications for research, advancement, and promotion. eric document reproduction service no. ed 403892. mceldowney, p. (1995). scholarly electronic journals: trends and academic attitudes, [online]. university of virginia electronic journal system. available: http://poe.acc.virginia.edu/~pm9k/libsci/ejs.html http://www.arl.org/scomm/change.html http://weber.u.washington.edu~tabrooks/documents/postmodern.html%20 http://info.lib.uh..edu/pr/v2/n1/harnard.2nl http://www.proquest.umi.com/ http://poe.acc.virginia.edu/%7epm9k/libsci/ejs.html meyer, r. w. (1997). consortial access versus ownership, [online]. andrew w. mellon foundation. available: http://www.arl.org/scomm/scat/meyer.html neal, j. g. (1997). the use of electronic journals, andrew w. mellon foundation. available: http://www.arl.org/scomm/scat/neal.html number of full-time faculty members by sex, rank, and racial and ethnic group. (1999, august 27). chronicle of higher education almanac, p.. 38. okerson, a. (1991). the electronic journal: what, whence, and when?, [online]. public access computer systems review. available: http://info.lib.uh.edu/pacsrev.html rier, d. a. (1996). the future of legal scholarship and scholarly communication: publication in the age of cyberspace. akron law review, 30, 183-213. sonnert, g., holton, g. (1996). career patterns of women and men in the sciences. american scientist, 84, 63-71. tescione, s. m. (1998). final report: assessing the quality of publication and research in tenure review. unpublished manuscript. tomlins, c. l. (1998). the wave of the present: the printed scholarly journal on the edge of the internet. the journal of scholarly publishing, 9, 133-150. trln copyright policy task force. (1993). model university policy regarding faculty publication in scientific and technical scholarly journals: a background paper and review of the issues, [online]. the public access computer systems review. available: http://infor.lib.uh.edu/pacsrev.html varian, h. r. (1997). the future of electronic journals. andrew w. mellon foundation. available: http://www.arl.org/scomm/scat/varian.html wilson, r. (1998, june 26). provosts push a radical plan to assess the way faculty research is evaluated. chronicle of higher education, pp. a12-a13. susan m. tescione is a doctoral student at the university of washington. tescione@u.washington.edu subscribe to advancingwomen network a free ezine from advancingwomen.com copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking 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mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com 446+chan+copyedited final.docx volume 42, 2023 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 42, 73-79 , 2023 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper shaping the future for a sustainableworld: perspectives of women leaders from commonwealth open learning institutions josephine ie lyn chan & dewi amat sapuan josephine ie lyn chan: research fellow, wawasan open university, josephinechan@wou.edu.my dewi amat sapuan: associate professor, wawasan open university, dewisapuan@wou.edu.my accepted may 1, 2023 this study aimed to examine the perspectives of female leaders from commonwealth open learning institutions on women's leadership and a sustainable future. nineteen women leaders from fourteen commonwealth countries responded to an open-ended survey. using a thematic qualitative analysis, four critical constructs for advancing women in leadership emerged: having a mentor, building a powerful network, empowering women in ict, and championing climate change. the findings suggest that female leaders are conscious of their critical role and must motivate other women to take up leadership or decision-making roles. nevertheless, there seemed to be a disconnect between envisioning a sustainable future and actualizing that vision. the study highlights the importance of women in shaping the future for a sustainable world, as they offer valuable insights, experiences, and narratives on leadership and change. keywords: women leaders, open learning, commonwealth countries, sustainable world, future the covid-19 pandemic has brought to light the significant dependence of society on working women, particularly those on the frontline and at home. at the same time, it has spotlighted the long-standing structural inequalities experienced across all realms. this served as a wake-up call to societies and economies worldwide, demonstrating the importance of placing women at the center of efforts to recover from the pandemic. in response, united nations women, the sole united nations entity that focuses on gender equality and women empowerment, has initiated policy and intervention measures and a global gender response tracker to assess if countries' efforts are gender sensitive. the agency found that 20% of the 206 countries tracked had no gender-sensitive measures implemented. women's leadership and contributions must be central to resilience and recovery to prevent a reverse of the limited progress made on gender equality and women's rights (united nations, 2020). envisioning a sustainable world according to meadows (1994), everyone needs to envision a sustainable world where people and nature live in harmony and human needs are taken care of without exploiting the natural environment. for this to happen, a revolutionary change involves a collective call toward values people hold, how they view the world, and how society defines progress and organizes itself (senge et al., 2010). however, more importantly, people need to think differently, taking inspiration from the environment. though the industrial revolution brought development and economic success, it also resulted in the exploitation of renewable and non-renewable resources, the creation of industrial waste, and consumer and commercial toxicity (senge et al., 2010). to achieve a sustainable world, people must learn from past mistakes and have exceptional leadership from individuals to organizations. the question then is, what can be done to make this happen? women leaders in higher education a sustainable world can be achieved through education (blewitt, 2010). education offers the potential to foster a green knowledge-based society, providing the necessary skills and knowledge to leverage the potential of new technologies and social media to adapt and transform the complex and unpredictable world into a more sustainable one. moreover, the current sustainability challenges can be prevented if higher education teaches and practices a more robust form of sustainability rather than simply offering a few token courses (clugston & calder, 2014). to bring about this shift in mindset, new cultural narratives, values, and ethics must be developed to enable everyone to live in a way that all can survive. it requires a significant shift in individuals’ lifestyles, the functionality of communities, and the formation of social and economic policies. to achieve this, the 73 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 university leadership must strongly embrace the concept of sustainability and empower their faculties to produce graduates who can support, practice, and lead in social movements to create a sustainable world. in the past, the commonwealth of learning (col) has reported that women are making their presence felt in higher education, introducing new teaching, learning, and administrative approaches in the 21st century (latchem et al., 2013). however, women leaders in higher education remain underrepresented in developing countries (morley, 2013). men are preferred for leadership roles due to the perceived notion of them having the “toughness” to perform well in these positions (ahad & gunter, 2017). past studies have also highlighted the struggles of women in attaining leadership positions in higher education where family members' resources, support, and attitudes are crucial factors in this regard (morley & crossouard, 2015). to encourage more women in leadership roles, there must be adequate support in the form of social networking, family, and mentor support, changing the mindset of employers towards women's potential as leaders, and at a higher level, diversity and inclusivity policies must be implemented (maheshwari & nayak, 2020). vietnam, an economy developing rapidly, has laws to reduce gender inequality, yet women leaders in higher education remain scarce (maheshwari & nayak, 2020). based on the above references to past studies, women in higher education face various challenges in leadership roles (ahad & gunter, 2017; maheshwari & nayak, 2020; morley, 2013; morley & crossouard, 2015). while discrimination, stereotyping and subtle biases persist, it is important to share the narratives of women leaders in higher education to bring about meaningful and sustainable change in the future. the context of study in open learning institutions, women are often catalysts of change, using new methods and technologies to serve and reach out to individuals and communities. nonetheless, in most cases, these women are employed in lowto mid-level, part-time, or untenured positions. thus, interventions are necessary to recognize and represent these women at the senior decision-making levels of their institutions or organizations. since 2018, the commonwealth of learning (col) and wawasan open university have conducted various training programs advocating for women to lead transformation in open learning institutions. this year's program, entitled 'women leaders: shaping the future for a sustainable future', aligned with col's goal of advocating gender equality and giving women the right to assume leadership positions in their respective institutions or careers. twenty-six participants from sixteen commonwealth countries took part in this program. the program was designed with the understanding that the participants had prior experience as leaders in various positions and aspired to assume more impactful leadership roles in their respective institutions or careers. through panel discussions and presentations revolving around the main open education and sustainable themes of women and leadership, educational technology, and women and climate change, participants reflected on their experiences, strengths, and weaknesses, and distilled lessons learned. purpose and rationale for study this study aims to investigate the key constructs and challenges that shape a sustainable future for women leaders who participated in the training program. the findings of this study are crucial for accelerating progress towards the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, which includes a specific goal of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. methods in this study, we utilized thematic analysis to analyze the written responses to the open-ended survey questions. thematic analysis is a widely used method in qualitative research that involves identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns within data. it is a flexible and iterative approach that allows for the identification of both explicit and implicit themes. the program organizer lead, selected to assume the role as an independent rater in this process, conducted a separate exercise of assigning codes and documenting coding decisions. we followed the steps outlined by braun and clarke (2006) for conducting thematic analysis. first, we familiarized ourselves with the data by reading through the responses multiple times. we then independently generated initial codes that identified meaningful units of text related to our research question. these codes were collated into potential themes and reviewed for accuracy and coherence. the percentage agreement on the inter-rater reliability assessment is 80%. minor changes were made to the coding scheme to improve its clarity. we then refined the themes, checked their relevance to the purpose of the study, and selected representative quotes from the data to illustrate each theme. this process allowed us to identify key themes and patterns in the data related to the experiences of women in leadership positions. also, according to singer and couper (2017), open-ended survey questions allowed respondents to freely express their opinions on specific topics instead of being confined to responding to a range of statements using a likert scale. as a result, we obtained more detailed and meaningful data on the topics under examination. women leaders from commonwealth open learning institutions who participated in the 'women leaders: shaping the future for a sustainable future' event held from august 1 to 3, 2022, were conveniently sampled for this study. the women leaders, as respondents, were informed that their participation was voluntary and that their responses would remain anonymous throughout the data analysis process. a survey containing open-ended questions was physically distributed to the twenty-six participants from sixteen commonwealth countries and collected that same day. there was a 73% response rate. table 1 shows that the nineteen respondents were represented by fourteen commonwealth countries, with malaysia having the most representatives at 32%. all respondents held mid to senior leadership positions in their respective higher learning 74 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 institutions, while most of them were from the universities (84%), with the majority between the ages of 40 – 59 (79%). findings and discussion based on the thematic data analysis grounded in the purpose of the study, several key themes emerged which shed light on the influencing constructs and challenges faced by women leaders in shaping a sustainable world. in this section, we present and discuss these themes in detail, providing insights into the experiences and perspectives of women leaders who have participated in a leadership development program. having a mentor in the past, mentors have typically taken on various roles for their mentees, such as serving as role models, offering sponsorship, providing guidance and protection, and helping to ensure acceptance by others (forret & dougherty, 2004). they also provide support and strategies to help women reposition themselves intellectually, socially, and professionally (blackmore et al., 2015; o’meara & stromquist, 2015). however, based on the responses of the women leaders surveyed for this study, the role of mentors has extended to include leadership in ict. given the recent covid-19 pandemic, mentoring need no longer be in-person or face-to-face. with the emergence of new technologies, remote mentoring has become possible. the profile of a mentor on leadership in ict has been further refined, with respondents noting the need for mentors to be passionate, people-centric, motivating, inspiring, experts in their field, professional, and knowledgeable of the latest technological trends. the respondents also highlighted the importance of having mentors to provide a strong foundation of their leadership skills in ict and beyond. van der weijden et al. (2015) have noted that formal mentoring can support women in furthering their careers. they found that young professors with mentors became more positive towards their work and research activities. this finding reinforces the respondents’ opinions on the value of having mentors. they have mentioned that mentors can help identify potential leadership roles, guide career decisions, and reach leadership goals. mentoring can thus provide the foundation for women leaders to build strong peer networks where they do not need to face their struggles alone. by sharing experiences and taking collective action, women leaders can become more assertive and occupy more leadership positions (brabazon & schulz, 2020). the respondents also highlighted the importance of a psychologically safe environment to foster a successful mentor-mentee relationship. this includes the need for trust and openness to learning and change. furthermore, women leaders in ict often face challenges regarding mentoring and leadership due to a lack of time, opportunities to mentor or be mentored, trust, and confidence. respondent 6 noted, "the challenge is that people are often scared of asking for help. therefore, we do not take full advantage of the possibilities or positive career growth likely from effective mentoring and leadership." according to tran (2014), mentoring plays a critical role in shaping positive experiences and success pathways for women of color in higher education institutions in the us. this is because the personality, personal experiences, and professional backgrounds of individuals can influence the experiences of mentoring or being mentored. the respondents in the study were aware of the importance of mentorship but highlighted the difficulty of finding a mentor. as one respondent stated, "women need role models for inspiration...but the question is how to get them? how to get and be connected with a mentor?" (respondent 7). however, powerful networks could be the answer since mentoring is no longer unidimensional but multidimensional, with various mentoring relationships occurring among individuals (de janasz & sullivan, 2004). these relationships form powerful support networks (brabazon & schultz, 2020). building a powerful network the respondents are aware of the power of networks, and they shared that building a powerful network should be a priority for leaders, as its benefits are innumerable. one of the common advantages of having a solid network is tapping into the knowledge, skills, and experiences of people in the network or communities of practice, which increases one's and others' capacity. respondent 10 stated, "networking helps open up minds to appreciate diversity, to recognize opportunities, and to contribute to a wealth of knowledge through the interpersonal exchange, publishing, and conferencing." powerful networks can be a powerful tool for advancing careers, enabling smoother problem-solving, decision-making, accessing the latest updates and finding the right industry or research partners. as respondent 15 stated, "building a powerful network is connecting with the right people at the right time and sustaining the network." this importance is also reflected in past studies, which have highlighted the advantages of networking in terms of career achievements (forret & dougherty, 2004), such as access to information and resources, career sponsorship, and professional and personal support (casciaro et al., 2014). 75 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 although building external networks is possible, doable, and can be validated, some respondents highlight similar challenges. for instance, maintaining a robust network for work or research can be challenging without institutional or top-management support. communities of practice and professional learning communities, which can often foster healthy professional competition, are not always promoted in higher learning institutions. contrastingly, other respondents revealed that their institutions actively encourage networking, resulting in numerous collaborations for institutional and staff development with other universities and new global and local partnerships that are necessary for the institution's progress. another respondent noted that building, sustaining, and maintaining networks are now an almost automatic agenda item in her institution's daily processes. the respondents brought up the challenge of linking effort, ideas, or intentions with a person's affiliation being discouraging. this is consistent with gibson et al. (2014), who argued that networking should be based on having a common purpose which drives both internal and external networking behaviors, focusing on the quality and usefulness of the relationships. a respondent also shared that networks in the higher education industry are not as open in sharing information as manufacturing networks, potentially due to the lack of common purpose or usefulness in sharing information. respondents also opined that international connections are more challenging than regional networking, which is deemed feasible. however, it is still challenging for a pioneering open university to build powerful networks due to the lack of local benchmarks to navigate regional and international networks. additionally, the respondents raised the concern that powerful networks may be affected by the lack of women in senior positions since most institutions are under male leadership. through powerful networks, women leaders are seen as "creating safe spaces for other women and girls and supporting one another" (respondent 15). despite networking differences between men and women, female leaders with strong relationships in their networks have an intensive inner circle of two or three other women connected to diverse but non-overlapping contacts (yang et al., 2019). this tight, female-dominated inner circle provides the women leaders with gender-specific information and support, while the more extensive network provides relevant job market information. moreover, mcnae and vali (2015) discovered that networks are essential for women leaders in higher education in papua new guinea, especially when making decisions. although some women in the higher education environment are subject to nepotism, restricting access to leadership positions, other women use this system to secure leadership roles. this action highlights that individual women may view their leadership position as an opportunity to facilitate the advancement of other women. lastly, amid the covid-19 pandemic, respondents have discovered that technology has made communication and networking within and outside of institutions more accessible. through online platforms such as zoom, microsoft teams, and whatsapp groups, women leaders can empower other women in ict and take advantage of new technologies. empowering women in ict all respondents in this study view knowledge of ict as essential for leadership. they recognize they are change agents to empower women in ict, particularly in the post-pandemic period. to reach this goal, they emphasize what is required: lifelong learning, connection to society, recognition of changing trends, mentorship, and support for ict at the grassroots level, opportunities for ict experiences and participation, and allocation of ict resources. institutions empower both men and women in ict, offering them similar opportunities. during the pandemic, many stories were shared about the increased use of ict, particularly among digital immigrants who found adapting more difficult than digital natives. staff and students had to be educated on the technology to ensure successful online assessments. the pandemic highlighted the importance of being tech-savvy, and women began to share knowledge and offer peer guidance in ict. despite this positivity and the increased availability of ict training, women leaders still faced challenges in providing equal opportunities, affordability, and confidence for ict education, with funding being a significant barrier. this lack of access to ict knowledge, skills and gadgets particularly impacts women. furthermore, using and acquiring it is time-consuming and requires people to learn in their free time (muthama et al., 2013). this situation means that women are disadvantaged, as they often must prioritize family chores in their free time. as a result, there is an apparent disparity in technological advancement between men and women. despite women's challenges and limitations when embracing ict, the survey respondents recognized the importance of leveraging new technologies while holding leadership positions in higher learning institutions. they have come to "gradually understand the power of social media and how it can help in decision-making rather than just being more efficient" (respondent 1). leading a higher learning institution in the post-covid-19 era requires using crucial new technological tools and social media to engage with generation z students, who are digital natives. as a result, the teaching and learning processes have changed to this new normal. one respondent shared that her institution plans to establish a development and training academy to arm faculty members with the necessary technical skills and strategies. new technologies and social media are powerful communication tools. senior et al. (2014) opined that emails are particularly effective for women faculty leaders in establishing closer ties with their student community. these interactions could create inspirational role models for students, helping them to shape their future aspirations. ultimately, technology can facilitate interactions between women faculty leaders and the student body, thus improving the overall learning environment of the higher learning institution. 76 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 new technologies and social media are increasingly influential in daily decision-making, so women leaders must have the necessary skill set to leverage these tools appropriately. some respondents believe it is essential for women leaders to stay up-to-date on new technologies to ensure their use has no adverse consequences. adapting to new technologies is becoming increasingly important for university leaders, although not all have fully embraced social media and its potential to reach a large audience (sharma et al., 2022). as role models in their communities, women leaders should strategically use social media to promote their university's branding and messaging. with new technologies revolutionizing the higher education sector, data privacy, distinguishing between trustworthy and false news, and the digital divide among marginalized populations are among the worries expressed by respondents concerning adopting new technologies and social media. respondents call for training initiatives to address these anxieties, especially for older faculty members who may lack familiarity with the latest technologies. championing climate change there is an increased awareness of the necessity to protect the environment from further harm. as part of the 17 sustainable development goals, sdg 13 encourages climate action to combat climate change and its implications. sieghart (2021) revealed that women are more concerned about climate change and its potential effects on future generations than men. consequently, female leaders are more likely to enact climate-focused changes that may help reduce global warming. this present study reinforces that the reality of climate change has been accepted by the respondents, who have experienced its effects first-hand. women have specially adjusted to this new reality, though unpredictable weather patterns have made planning and incurring costs more difficult for institutions. while typically seen as small contributors to the problem, countries in the tropics still feel the financial strain of climate change in specific industries and disaster recovery efforts (respondent 16). it is widely accepted that climate change could have severe and detrimental impacts on the environment and human lives. all the respondents seemed to agree that this is an issue not to be taken lightly and that everyone should take responsibility for it: "it is everybody's business" (respondent 8). despite acknowledging the issue, there appears to be a lack of proactive measures or active initiatives to address it. one person remarked that there is "no internalization of how much we contribute toward the destructions that we witness". the responses showed that there is an underplaying of the systemic effects of inaction or delayed action. more plans are being proposed for leaders to address the problem than personal or institutional initiatives are being implemented. additionally, the expressed concerns about the effects of the problem seemed to be localized. for example, one respondent said the impact had not been felt much in their country apart from the increasing temperature. another person mentioned that countries in the tropics were not significant contributors. the overall sentiment is that many tasks must be completed to address the issue of climate change effectively; convincing supporters of conspiracy theorists, changing habits and behaviors, providing a supportive environment, training mindsets, and raising awareness of practical approaches for daily practice. the respondents were convinced that acting is achievable for anyone and that women leaders are particularly well-suited to lead the charge (birindelli et al., 2019; kovaleva et al., 2022; pierli et al., 2022). for instance, pierli et al. (2022) discovered that women leaders of five companies in italy actively promoted and implemented environmental and social practices due to their natural tendencies to listen, share, and collaborate. women leaders who advocate for sustainability often have a systematic or holistic way of thinking, the ability to manage complexity, and a commitment to inclusivity in their leadership approach. the respondents believe that one can start from the family unit and be a role model for others. on the educational institution level, various initiatives have been suggested, such as developing programs on sustainability as mandated by the prime minister, integrating topics on climate change into classrooms, conferences, course designs, and business operations, and recognizing the importance of becoming a green university. on the macro level, the government and ngos have numerous roles; however, the problems encountered in the country are the lack of monitoring, waste bins, and proper waste disposal systems. the lack of tangible initiatives to address the problem of climate change is evident when one respondent states that there is a sense of comfort in simply seeing someone else championing the cause. respondent 3's remark of "someone needs to take steps to lead others to do more…" implies that while people are aware of the damaging effects of climate change, they lack the knowledge and ownership needed to act. the respondents raised several challenges climate change poses, such as resistance to change, difficulty in changing people's habits and behaviors, and inadequate implementation and monitoring of climate change policies. this finding is in line with the findings of kovaleva et al. (2022), who found that, despite the increasing participation of women in climate change issues and decisions in africa, they face numerous challenges due to limited knowledge, mentors, and political will. women leaders must be equipped with specific skills to face the challenges ahead successfully. according to rimita et al. (2020), foresight, agility, and conscientiousness are critical 21st-century skills that these leaders need to effectively navigate the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business landscape. foresight is essential for predicting what could happen and making necessary adjustments. agility is also critical, enabling them to respond to changes and adjust their strategies when needed quickly and effectively. moreover, conscientiousness 77 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 ensures they have the necessary information to strategize, make wise and timely decisions, and guide others in taking the right actions. the ultimate question remains: how can women leaders enhance their leadership capacities and drive transformations? conclusion and implications the current study aimed to investigate the perspectives of women leaders from open learning institutions in commonwealth countries regarding their role as educational leaders in shaping a sustainable future. their shared thoughts and experiences showed that the women leaders knew their role in this pursuit and their challenges. however, what was sometimes shared indicated the need for more comprehensive or specific strategies, which could affect implementation when cascading to lower levels within the institutions. there appears to be a disconnect between envisioning a sustainable world and translating that vision into reality through feasible and concerted actions. this idea could be explored in future research. the experiences and insights of women leaders have highlighted several implications for the consideration of other women leaders in higher education: 1. women leaders must be provided with mentorship to succeed. mentoring offers a secure space to grow and learn while providing access to valuable networks and connections. 2. women leaders need to create strong networks to enact change. networking is essential for new ideas and innovations and provides the opportunity for multiple perspectives to make better decisions. 3. women must be empowered in information and communications technology (ict). despite men dominating the ict career field, girls and women must be given equal opportunities. social media and new technologies can be used to cultivate global citizens. 4. women leaders must champion climate change issues. universities have started integrating sustainability and climate change into their curricula and projects, hopefully inspiring the next generation to become informed and caring global citizens. further insights into nuances from respondents’ narratives could not be captured due to the limitation in using written surveys to collect data. data collected was not rich enough to explain how distinct country cultures influence representatives’ narratives. nevertheless, findings from this study are sufficient to guide institutions on how to begin or reflect on their sustainability initiatives. references ahad, l. r., & gunter, h. 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(2019). a network’s gender composition and communication pattern predict women’s leadership success. pnas, 116(6), 2033–2038. https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1721438116 79 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 dogbatse let the silence speak digital platform usage.docx volume 43, 2024 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, benjamin jankens, and sonia rodriguez assistant editors: jordan donop & kristina hall advancing women in leadership vol. 43, 66-76, 2024 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper let the silenced speak: digital platform usage by feminist and gender equity nongovernmental organizations in ghana felicity sena dogbatse felicity sena dogbatse: doctoral student, university of maryland, fdogbats@umd.edu accepted august 28, 2024 the freedom and acceptance of feminists’ activities in ghana hit several rocks after the first african feminist congress in ghana in 2004. in ghana, research on gender advocacy and feminist organizations has increased, but little emphasis has been paid to the contribution of self-identified feminists to women’s empowerment. i explored how self-identified feminists and gender equity-focused ngos in ghana leverage social media to educate and advocate for women’s and children’s welfare. i also examined how these feminists and ngos engage women in rural areas in seminars, discussion sessions, and training workshops to create spaces for women to voice their concerns and gain empowerment. given this, 17 in-depth interviews were conducted with self-identified ghanaian feminists and ngo leaders. i employed muted group theory and african feminist theory to guide the data analysis. i argued that ghanaian self-identified feminists and ngos have put in a lot of work to empower ghanaian women to enable them to express themselves and share their experiences. the findings contribute to the discussion on ghanaian feminism and how they enact empowerment and advance how the growing acceptance of feminism in ghana allows ghanaian women to speak for themselves and have their voices heard in national and global digital spaces. keywords: freedom, feminism, digital platforms, muted groups, ngos in the past decade, a significant increase has been observed among feminists and organizations in ghana. however, misinformation is still spreading regarding the character, extent, and use of feminist activity in ghana. the media in ghana is highly influential in forming opinions and upholding beliefs on intricate political, social, and cultural narratives (avle, 2011). following the adoption of ghana’s 1992 constitution, which guaranteed freedom of speech, social groups aimed at combating harmful cultural practices such as female genital mutilation, the trokosi system, child marriage, and witches camp practices for women began to emerge and grow (ameh 2004; authority & council, 2000; kreitzer, 2012). before the 1992 constitution, state measures such as the provisional national defense council (pndc) law 111 provided some liberation to women who lost the assets they may have gained during their marriage before the 1992 constitution (korang-okrah & haight, 2015). according to korang-okrah and haight (2015), the pndc law 111 and the 1992 constitution laid a crucial foundation for women to break free from silence and actively contribute to dismantling systemic barriers to their rights. these legal frameworks paved the way for women to assert their rights to property ownership, pursue higher education, combat economic injustices, advocate for maternity leave policies, and demand unrestricted access to quality healthcare and social amenities. however, ghanaian gender advocacy groups and practices have seen a diffusion with greater educational attainment, the introduction of technologies and social media, and women’s rights advocacy. this has advanced women’s accessibility to social utility and bumped media engagement by women (badri & tripp, 2017). although there has been a growth of women in ghanaian media throughout time, this growth has been gradual. according to gadzekpo (2011), only 11% of ghanaian women participate in discussions on the radio. gadzekpo argues that ghanaian media do not adequately address women’s issues, including rape and other gender-based crimes. ghanaian women’s lives are changing dramatically, with social media and technology creating a culture of connectedness (van dijck, 2013). according to fotopoulou (2021), the existence of modern technology has ushered in a period of “empowerment versus vulnerability” (p. 1). chiluwa (2022), in her study on “women’s online advocacy campaigns for political participation in nigeria and ghana,” argued that online media allows advocacy groups to extend their voices and reach national and global audiences. however, the most vulnerable women, particularly those in rural areas of west africa and other underprivileged audiences, are often muted by privileged individuals. she noted, “only a small percentage of women in rural areas have access to the internet, thereby limiting participation in online activism in cities and urban centers” (chiluwa, 2022, p. 465). review of literature women cannot be left out when telling the history of ghana. in many ways, african women have made significant contributions to the liberation across the continent. although the precise start date of african feminism is uncertain, it is believed to have started long before colonialism, although 67 within that period, it was not identified as feminism (mcclaurin, 2001). ghanaian women are one of the nation’s precious yet undiscovered growth resources. although there have been consecutive hegemonic political administrations, ghanaian women have been included in the developmental discourse since the country’s struggle for independence (nartey, 2021). however, whenever these women were brought up throughout our country’s progress history, they were viewed as silent activists or helpers (mohammed, 2022; mohammed, 2023). this sense of silence on the path of women displays the history of gender and development as a tale of the trajectory of female agency in the development of ghana. defining ghanian feminism ghanaians are not enthused about feminism and all the ideas that are associated with it. according to mohammed (2023), “feminist politics, feminist activism, and feminism was frowned upon in ghana (mohammed, 2023, p. 1). bawa (2018) claimed that ghanaian culture thought that because feminism disregarded the societal duties assigned to women, it was a threat hidden in plain sight. ghanaian feminism was acknowledged for challenging and upending dominant bourgeois cultural practices and beliefs (bawa, 2018). consequently, women prefer the identification of “gender advocates, women’s rights activists, women’s empowerment advocates,” and gender-sensitive persons rather than being tagged as feminists. (mohammed, 2020, p. 5). in the history of ghana, women were also freedom fighters during the fight for independence. women such as yaa asantewaa, sophia doku, leticia quaye, and hannah kudjoe made sure to support the course for ghana’s independence with their skills, courage, and finances. (mohammed, 2022). even after independence, ghana can boast of women like rose mensah-kutin, takyiwaa manuh, and nana konadu agyeman rawlings, who still advocate for women’s rights and inclusion. however, women are not recognized for this role and contribution, leading to their erasure from the history of ghana (akuffo, 2023). sometimes, when these women get the privilege to be acknowledged, they are considered less central to the independence movement (allman, 2009). to deal with this erasure, most african feminist organizations have come together to acknowledge the efforts of these women and their contribution to the continents’ development (davies, 2014). the ghana women’s manifesto was formulated in 2004 by a coalition of women who sought to address issues from women’s rights to reproductive health care, economic and political equality, and other rights (fallon & boutilier, 2022). other issues, including patriarchy, economic disparities, societal standards, and assigned duties for women, are encompassed by the concept of gender inequality (mohammed, 2023; sultana, 2010). although ghanaian feminists haven't made much headway, they are working to address several concerns listed in this manifesto. chomsky et al. (2021) argued that “contemporary activism from an embodied perspective is organic and complex” (229). as part of these steps for change, ghanaian feminist activists seek new avenues to advocate for social change. mcinroy and beer (2022) acknowledged that social media is one of the new channels for nonprofits seeking to cause radical social change. feminist usage of social media in ghana according to nwaolikpe (2021), digital media provides victims of domestic abuse with a platform to express their feelings, inform the world, and find answers to their issues. according to his research, activists noticed that the information they shared on facebook created awareness of domestic violence and offered networking opportunities and education. furthermore, nartey (2021) contended that social media was utilized in ghana to confront misogyny and denounce sexists like kennedy agyapong and george lutterodt. as a result, women in ghana who battled to defend other women were commended for their efforts. nartey (2021) argued that ghanaian feminists have been utilizing social media to challenge laws and policies that deprive women of their rights and create injustice. it is interesting to witness how women are speaking up for themselves in ghana and around africa. according to loiseau and nowacka (2015), social media is an effective tool for promoting women’s rights, holding people accountable for their actions, and dispelling discrimination and stereotypes that negatively impact women. women’s groups like the network for women’s rights in ghana (netright), the gender centre for empowering development (genced), and national empowerment for democracy, which is based in nigeria, have expanded their support to women in politics through social media activity. african women organized themselves before colonization. however, the ideology of feminism has not been entirely accepted by all the women in the movement (horn, 2013; mama, 2011). studies on ghanaian feminism frequently have been focused on the country’s opposition to feminism. these studies do not include instances of silencing or how ngos and self-identified ghanaian feminists educate and train women to voice out and be heard. it is critical to study how, what, and why these self-described feminists and ngos carry out activities to help empower women, as it will enable people to recognize their contribution toward achieving gender equality. to address this gap, the following questions guided this study: 1. how has feminist activism in ghana evolved from 1992 to 2022? 2. in what ways have self-identified ghanaian feminists managed to avoid being silenced? 3. what phenomena do feminist and gender equity ngos in ghana address through social media to advocate for ghanaian women's and children’s welfare? muted group theory (mgt) muted group theory (mgt) was created in 1975 by feminist researcher shirley ardener and cultural anthropologist edwin ardener (meares, 2017) and revealed the sociolinguistic power disparities that can potentially silence the voices of social groups. inequitable restrictions that prevent a social group from expressing itself are referred to as mutedness. according to the mgt, there are two ways a dominating 68 group and subordinate group(s) are related: the dominant group creates the lexicon and social norms that permeate the language system. to communicate, subordinate group(s) learn to speak in the language of the majority (meares, 2017). in this study, i employed mgt from “a call to attention to the muting of women’s voices and, thus, experiences; and to reform language so that women’s experiences from women’s perspectives are fully represented” (wood, 2005, p. 63). the mgt is valuable and applicable to the ghanaian context because the idea of muted groups clarifies how dominant systems suppress women, which helps to explain the difficulties ghanaian self-identified feminists and ngos encounter when promoting women’s rights. african feminist theory african feminist theory challenges eurocentric mainstream feminist theories by highlighting african women's unique perspectives and experiences. african feminism moves beyond essentialist definitions; thiam (1986) argued that african women face multiple forms of oppression based on sex, class, and race. however, it is stereotypical that african women should be viewed as liabilities; instead, they should be recognized as individuals with special capabilities, self-worth, and priorities. consequently, through this theory, women within africa are recognized as powerful, with their respective agency to make decisions based on their unique experiences. wane (2011) argued that based on the lived experiences of african women, they embrace various indigenous and creative ways of knowledge. it extends beyond issues of gender to address the intersecting socio-economic, political, and cultural factors that position women as subordinate to their male counterparts (davies & graves, 1986). african feminism makes society conscious of the impact of societal issues on women in africa. african feminism therefore aims to pinpoint and demolish the current power structures that exist between men and women. it allows women to recognize their talents, gendered place in society, and numerous identities in the face of adversity (steady, 1987; nnaemeka, 1998). african feminism, as part of a worldwide movement, seeks to destroy patriarchy in all its manifestations (steady, 1987). research can benefit from the paradigms offered by african feminist theory and mgt, which emphasizes power relations and underrepresented voices. by highlighting the intersections of gender, race, and class, african feminist theory places these issues within the african sociocultural framework. together, they add to the more extensive conversations on feminist praxis and empowerment by providing insights into the tactics used by ngos and feminists to elevate underrepresented voices and promote gender equity in ghana, locally and globally. methods in this study, i employed a qualitative research design. tashakkori and teddlie (2008) claimed that qualitative research entails gathering and examining statements and non-numerical data (such as text, video, or audio) to comprehend ideas, attitudes, or experiences. for this study, i employed the snowball sampling technique. snowball sampling, as described by luther and meadows (2015), is choosing survey participants through introductions and recommendations. i had to choose prospective ghanaian participants and declare myself a feminist to apply this sample approach. following their introduction, these potential participants introduced me to further possible participants who share their attributes. the participants then recruit new individuals by introducing them to me. therefore, with this research, i interviewed 17 self-identified feminists in ghana. out of these 17 women,14 of them identified as feminists, two identified as gender activists, and one person identified as a humanitarian. also, because the research focused on gender equity in nongovernmental organizations, i sought to determine if these women belonged to such organizations. of 17 women, 10 were affiliated with nongovernmental organizations focused on gender-related issues. to protect the identity of the participants, i used pseudonyms to refer to these research participants. this sampling method was chosen because it is characterized by networking and flexibility, and it helps me to be able to reach my participants, as i could not contact them directly due to geographical boundaries. using purposive and snowball sampling (luther & meadows, 2015), 17 feminists were selected to be interviewed to gain in-depth information concerning the concept of feminism in ghana, how this notion has evolved over the years, feminists’ activities and their publication of their issues affecting women on social media. in addition, data were gathered from the participants through in-depth interviews using a semi-structured interview guide. according to mears (2012), an in-depth interview is an open-ended, discovery-oriented method for obtaining comprehensive information on a topic from a research participant. these involved a flexible format that allowed the interview to follow the interests of the person being interviewed but was guided by the research questions, enabling the interview to be carried out based on the availability of the interviewees. with this study, all the collected early data were carefully studied, separated, sorted, and synthesized through qualitative coding (charmaz, 2000). thus, the data were sorted and grouped into segments. i stopped interviewing when i reached the point of data saturation; signifying the point at which no new information emerges from participants, which validates the depth of data collected (fusch & ness, 2015). complemented by transcription applications, manual coding enabled meticulous examination of responses, ensuring completeness and accuracy. ethical principles were employed in the data collection process. these include informed consent, anonymity, and confidentiality principles (ryan & beasley, 2017). all irb protocols (irb #735880-17) were duly observed. trust and mutual respect were cultivated through transparent communication regarding the study’s purpose, funding, and potential benefits. thematic analysis braun and clarke (2006) defined thematic analysis as a method used for identifying, analyzing, organizing, describing, and reporting themes found within the data collected by the researcher. thematic analysis is also described by boyatzis 69 (1998) as a translator that enables researchers to interact even using different research methods. braun and clarke (2006) opined that frequent thematic analysis produces trustworthy and insightful findings from the research data. according to braun and clarke (2006), although thematic analysis does not entail detailed theoretical and technological knowledge of other qualitative approaches, it provides a highly flexible research process that leads to the modification of the needs of many studies, hence, providing a rich and detailed, yet complex account of data. also, the thematic analysis is easily accessible during analysis, especially for new researchers (braun & clarke, 2006). this is because the process of thematic analysis is easy to learn, adapt, and apply to one’s research. through this process, i had over 500 initial codes grouped into categories and themes for my research using different color schemes. during interview sessions, i wrote memos to keep track of my participant’s processes, suppositions, and mannerisms (thornberg & charmaz, 2014). writing and maintaining memos enabled me to consider other factors, such as tone, body language, and confidence, and move beyond individual discussions and literature to search for more categories. results i sought to discover how feminism was perceived and how it helped provide women in ghana with their voice and language. i considered the activities carried out by individual and organizational feminists in ghana that have changed the perception of feminism in ghana. through the analysis of the interview data, three thematic categories were identified in response to the first research question. these themes include the diverse notion of feminism in ghana, misinformation as a cause of ghana feminists being muted, and ghana’s acceptance of feminism. the diverse notion of feminism in ghana the theme of the diverse notion of feminism refers to the different interpretations, conceptions, and impressions that people have of something known or unknown. in this study, feminism is a known and unknown concept within ghanaian society. thus, most of the participants i engaged were well acquainted with the term “feminism,” while a few had a shallow understanding of it. feminism as a term has been highly misunderstood within ghanaian society. bawa (2018) argued that ghanaian culture perceives feminism as a threat in disguise because it has led women to reject the social roles assigned to them. this argument is due to a misunderstanding of what feminism embodies within ghanaian society. bawa (2018) highlighted the issues of a diverse notion of what feminism seeks to symbolize, how the understanding of ghanaian society concerning the connotation of feminism and the representation of a feminist. this issue of diverse notions of feminism is evident in the participants’ responses. in line with this, one of my participants, sitso, stated, “i believe that feminism is about fighting for equality for women. feminism is about advocating for women’s rights. on the other hand, people believe that feminism is about fighting so much against men.” (sitso, zoom interview, 2022) sitso’s response highlights her understanding of feminism and society’s other interpretations concerning feminism. although she thinks of feminism as a cause for “gender equality,” she does not deny that ghanaian society perceives “feminism” as a battle-causing ideology between men and women in the community. another participant, delali, stated that: ghanaians do not understand feminism. i know feminism means a group of women advocating for women’s rights and equality. in ghana, feminism was seen in the past as a group of women who did not want to get married or be controlled by men. given this, they assume the identity of feminism to scare away men. (delali, zoom interview, 2022) from delali's response, it can be perceived that there is some lack of understanding of feminism. although she uses the word “ghanaians,” it cannot be concluded that all ghanaians are guilty of this lack of misunderstanding about feminism. her response complements ama's response on how feminism is interpreted differently among people. she avers one’s mind to how it was understood two decades ago and how it is currently understood. although the negative connotation that was associated with feminism still lingers, there has been some level of clarity in meaning. given this, another participant, nuna, stated, “a feminist is a person that believes in the power of women. that women must stand for something and think they can do what they set out to do.” (nuna, zoom meeting, 2022) nuna’s response shows her interpretation of feminism. she believes feminism stands for women’s power and ability to do what they set out for. though her performance is not far from what is understood as feminism, one can perceive the difference in interpretation from that of the earlier respondent. this shows that even though all these participants are within ghana, their understanding of feminism differs from one person to the other. misinformation as a cause of the silencing of ghana feminists ghanaian women have been muted in so many ways by patriarchal norms through the dissemination of wrong information. this has contributed to some women picking up the language of the majority to communicate. however, i discovered that ghanaian feminists are working hard to avoid being muted and giving women the chance to own their voices and narratives. in this study, i found that one of the ways that ghanaian feminists were being muted was through the spread of misinformation. misinformation intentionally spreads false or inaccurate information, primarily deliberately intended to deceive (allein et al., 2023). thus, it involves creating and spreading wrong information about feminism or feminists in a given society to mislead, confuse, or deceive people, especially those with little to no knowledge about what feminism entails, which leads to subordinate group(s) 70 integrating or picking up the language and wrong ideas about feminism of the majority when discussing the subject. misinformation about feminism significantly challenges people’s understanding of the ‘truth’ about what feminism represents and the essence of feminism within ghanaian society (banet-weiser, 2021). these stories and misleading information about feminism are misinformation about women and feminists within a given society. this information is circulated through actual individuals, bloggers, and websites. banet-weiser (2021) argued that deliberately spreading untrue information about feminism reveals the entwined relationship between misogyny and misinformation. the response of yawa, a participant, advocates that misinformation about feminism has contributed to fear of women speaking up or joining the feminist movement. this is evident in her statement, “people are being silenced and discouraged from embracing feminism due to exposure to wrong information about what feminism is, which is due to the corruption of messages about feminism.” (yawa, zoom interview, 2022) yama’s response presents the case of the meaning of feminism being distorted due to the corruption of the true sense of what feminism stands for or represents. from the response of yama, due to this wrong “corrupted” message about feminism, people do not get the true definition of feminism. as a result, women are afraid to speak about their interest in feminism or add to the discourse. based on this, whenever women talk about feminism in ghana, they rely on the words or phrases used by men, “feminism is evil,” to describe it. another participant, dosia, stated, because of information overload on social media, people tend to get false information about issues, which include feminism. they also fail to go back and cross-check their book to verify if the information they get is true. due to lack of verification, they post and share this misleading information about feminism. (dosia, zoom interview, 2022) from these responses, misinformation is one of the factors that contributes to the muteness of feminism as well as the misunderstanding about feminism. this presents ghanaian women with restrictions that prevent them from expressing themselves and learning about the uniqueness of ghanaian feminism. these assertions by the respondents align with the argument made by aune and redfern (2013), who stated that many misinformation and common misconceptions fight against achieving true freedom of rights and opportunities, regardless of sex or gender. thus, due to misinformation, people within ghanaian society cannot recognize the role of feminists and their voices in the fight for the rights of the weak in each community. ghana’s acceptance of feminism digital platforms continue to rally people to communicate and share their experiences, ideas, and arguments and advocate for social causes (brock, 2012; knight-steele, 2021). digital media have constraints, affordances and features that can enable users to perform certain actions with it (jean-christophe & aswin, 2019). however, digital platforms such as social media engender community building and enable resistance patterns. lu and knight-steele (2019) demonstrated that public advocates deploy the affordances to assert greater authority in digital spaces and to provide public visibility for groups that use it. focusing on how feminists and gender equity nongovernmental organizations (ngos) in ghana use digital platforms to advocate for ghanaian women and children, my participants mentioned that some issues that are addressed are issues of women’s involvement in developmental discourse, women’s rights, gender equality, and initiatives to achieve gender equality through using their voice and language. mohammed (2022) noted the minds of scholars about how digital platforms are being used to create an avenue for people to contribute their views and thoughts on feminist activism in ghana. the themes discovered were that these digital platforms were used as digital classrooms to educate women on their rights and as an avenue for training women on hard and soft skills and using female celebrities. education: digital classrooms the research participants indicated that providing education was one of the means through which feminists and gender equity nongovernmental organizations (ngos) in ghana use digital platforms to advocate for ghanaian women and children. mohammed (2020) and tetteh (2018) argued that to advocate for women and children in ghana, feminists and gender equity ngos use digital platforms to educate women on their rights. this means that digital media serve as digital classrooms through which ghanaian self-identified feminists provide information to ghanaian women on advocating for their welfare, rejecting the linguistic system infused with social norms. regarding this, a participant, rose, explained, now, we can have educational groups to educate women through these digital platforms, especially twitter. these provide new help to working mothers and women in business and much information on their rights as women. (rose, zoom interview, 2022) similarly, lili also emphasized the immense role of digital classrooms in feminist advocacy. lili says, “social media contributes to ensuring that education and awareness are out there for everyone.” she explains this by saying that these digital platforms used by ghanaian feminists enlighten them on some of the misleading information they have been exposed to while being socialized into ghanaian society. she emphasizes this by saying, “we all grew up with these toxic learning and training until we get to know that all these things are wrong…social media specifically is like a place where we go to learn.” (lili, zoom interview, 2022). from rose’s and lili’s responses, i infer that digital platforms create a classroom atmosphere where women and girls get educated. feminists use these platforms to inform women of using their linguistic system to reject social norms that increase patriarchal notions. it also helps women to unlearn all the lexicon and principles that the dominant group has created to limit marginalized groups. this allows them to be more equipped with information that can be used to protect themselves and their children and voice their concerns. 71 sunflower also stated that “social media plays a vital role in educating women: there is a lot of educated stuff that is provided for women by feminists on social media.” (sunflower, zoom interview, 2022) probing further, sunflower continues that twitter (now x) especially helps ensure that education and awareness are provided to women. social media groups are being created, and issues such as marital rape and domestic violence that most women go through in their marriages but cannot talk about are being discussed, and duly educated on measures to handle these kinds of issues. kavi stated, “these platforms provide everyday opportunities for us to learn about this happening to women and about sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and issues of consent.” (kavi, peer facilitator of cegrad, zoom interview, 2022). to kavi, this education goes a long way in protecting “ourselves” and others. it helps them as feminists to understand the context of these issues, allows them to avoid victimization of those who go through these circumstances, and enables them to encourage victims of sexual and gender-based abuse. thus, it is evident that this approach aids young women and feminists in grasping the contextual nuances of these issues, enabling them to express their experiences and empowering them to support other survivors in sharing and pulling through their experiences equally. avenue for training women regarding feminist and gender equity, nongovernmental organizations (ngos) in ghana use digital platforms to advocate for ghanaian women and children. the participants, some of whom belong to gender equity nongovernmental organizations, attested that providing training is one of the ways through which they use these digital platforms to advocate for women's and children’s welfare. tetteh (2017) argued that feminist and ngo voices are active on digital media, and the training of other women feels their presence. these training activities serve as an empowerment mechanism for these women to use economically to care for themselves and their children. some self-identified feminists and gender equity ngo affiliates stated that the training equips women to protect themselves and their children from abuse. edem acknowledged this by saying, “we bring people on board on our digital platform to train people (women) on what they can do when they face any harassment. many women are housewives. we encourage them to take advantage of what they see other women doing.” she continues to say that “there are some people (gender-based organizations) who offer free training to women on social media.” (edem, zoom interview, 2022). from edem’s responses, it is evident that providing training for women through these digital platforms helps to build the women's ability to face and overcome the challenges they may face. furthermore, these pieces of training create avenues for them to connect with others in localized creative spaces. listening to these feminists, one can understand what they encounter during their training. these women can amplify their voices in defense of other women who are weak and help in seeking the welfare of children, too. this supports taylor et al.’s (1995) assertion that women have become active in amplifying women’s voices. based on this, it is evident that women have moved from being passive (silenced). thus, women have become central in raising women and children’s welfare while extending some defense against women’s silencing, rejection, and discrimination. ghanaian women have gained their voices, which prevents them from being marginalized by dominant narratives (meares, 2017). dzifa shared her experience on how an ngo using social media, provided the skills she has now. she maintained that gender equity and feminist ngos are using various digital spaces to provide complex and soft skills to help empower women to become advocates for their welfare. dzifa stated that, before i became a part of my ngo, i so that the head of the ngo posted a training program she was running for women on facebook. i took advantage and registered for the training program. i then got to meet others, especially the manager of the ngo, and i became empowered. (dzifa, project officer for nsreku academy, zoom meeting, 2022) takyi, the head of a gender equity nongovernmental organization, shared how she uses digital spaces (instagram and facebook) to train women and girls. she affirms: i use these social media to train and to address the issue of period poverty in society. i teach kids, young ladies, and women. we spend quality time with our kids, so if i am empowered, the kids coming up will be empowered and in outstanding positions to protect themselves. (takyi, zoom interview, 2022). this statement of takyi shows how her organization uses social media to seek financial support and call for change in policies that affect women. her foundation has used its social media platforms to discuss issues of period poverty. it has even sought sponsorship to provide sanitary pads for teenage girls who cannot afford them in kumasi in the ashanti region of ghana. the use of celebrity advocacy the publicity of campaigns or advertisements in ghana is usually accomplished with the assistance of celebrities in ghana (agyepong, 2017). the success and ratings of these campaigns are generally high due to the presence of these celebrities. these celebrities also play diverse roles in ensuring that feminism is understood and there is attainment of gender equality in ghana. the use of stars shows that celebrity force has become the fueling factor of feminist discourse and political activity, which is more pertinent now than ever (ocran, 2014). these celebrities, who identify as feminists and gender equality advocates, usually journalists and movie stars, use their popularity and programs to broadcast and educate people about gender equality. they also use their digital platforms as avenues for discussion about gender equality. ama, one of the participants, responded that ghanaian female celebrities and top women have been doing a lot to champion the cause for gender equality. this is evident 72 in her statement: “we’ve got some top ghana women; maybe somebody like nana aba anamoah is huge on twitter and doing all kinds of engagements on twitter, and she’s got a good following. they have conversations on issues that contribute to the empowerment and development of women.” (ama, zoom interview, 2022) joy, another respondent, responded similarly concerning feminists and ngo contribution to sdg 5 through celebrity advocacy. she stated that, nana yere gifty anti is an author and a show host. she’s always mentoring young women to be their best version of themselves and helping them understand their dreams are valid. you know she’s at an epitome. (joy, zoom interview, 2022) for joy, the acts of gifty anti contribute to empowering young ladies to look beyond the societal and patriarchal norms that restrict them, hence causing them to aspire for great success in whatever they do. furthermore, her response suggests that the encouraging words and programs these public figures hold contribute to building great women for leadership, governance, and decision-making in every capacity they find themselves in, especially among their male counterparts. eventually, this contributes to achieving gender equality in ghana. yaa, another participant adds: i know anita erskine and others, like nana anamoah, have some groups like that that help empower young women. i don’t know their names, but they have groups that empower women. anita even has a program she shows on dstv about women’s empowerment. (yaa, zoom interview, 2022) yaa continues to say that” it is good that these female celebrities do what they do.” through their digital platforms and programs, they inform young ladies and women about what they went through before getting to where they are now. they share some entrepreneurial ideas, their vision for women, how they started, and where they are now. all these play a significant role in educating and advocating for girl child empowerment and, eventually, gender equality. the participants’ responses prove that using feminist celebrities and gender advocates goes a long way in contributing to gender equality in ghana. thus, these celebrities use their fame, digital platforms, and experience to challenge, educate, and empower women to achieve greatness and take up positions that put them in the proper standing to become advocates for other women and children. all these responses agree with the notion that the use and role of these celebrities contribute to the journey of attaining gender equality in ghana. the assertion complements the argument made by some earlier scholars (odoom et al., 2022; ussher et al., 2022) that through female celebrity, expected gendered behaviors and attitudes are promoted, which usually aligns with achieving success as women. because of this, adamson and kelan (2019) agreed that celebrities are highly influential in promoting specific managerial trends and leadership styles. all these activities by ghanaian feminists correlate with the meaning frazer (2013) made of habermas’ concept of decolonization. frazer (2013) opinions that feminists usually struggle to ensure a redistribution and democratization to access and control the distribution of resources equally with men in socio-political discourses and decision-making. thus, the efforts of these ghanaian women to educate, train, and empower other women add to their efforts in their fight for an egalitarian society in ghana. discussion in this study, i examined the evolution of ghanaian feminism and how ghanaian feminists use digital platforms to provide women the space to express themselves and share their experiences without influence from dominant groups. the data analysis and response to the first research question support that ghanaian feminism has moved from a demonized stage to a gradually open-minded society. similarly, ghanaian women are becoming more knowledgeable about the importance of feminism and the need to share their experiences with others. my findings reinforce the argument that ghanaian women are no longer muted but are more active in speaking through their lexicon and understanding of feminism, gender empowerment, and the benefits of digital platforms in these movements, as also noted by mohammed (2022). according to hudson-weems (2019), the narrative on feminism has changed over the years. using the mgt, there are lessons that i have learned from the narrative of these ghanaian women. first, ghanaian women are trying to call people’s attention to how dominant cultural narratives have muted women’s voices over the years. thus, they use their digital platforms to project the experiences of ghanaian women while calling for acceptance of the uniqueness that feminism brings to women’s empowerment and national development. this ensures that women’s perspectives are fully represented and that every woman in ghana can express their own experiences and contribute to the feminist movement without influence from the dominant group. my interaction with these women has provided information that they have decided to embrace the concept of feminism on their terms and voice and through their understanding of their strength as women. although women’s empowerment programs have received a lot of attention in the last decade (nartey, 2022), it is apparent that issues of intersectionality are not just about subordination among the various genders in society but also the evident gap that exists among women based on privileges that are exhibited through digital organization and discourse. this compounds the discrimination against marginalized women, and their voices become muted within feminists’ discourse (collins, 2002). crenshaw (1989) argued that “the inability to allow disadvantaged people to speak out and be represented may be a defeat to restructuring the distribution of opportunity and eliminating the issues of hierarchy” (p. 145). thus, society must allow these self-identified ghanaian feminists and the women they work to use their own words and voice in describing experiences and their contribution towards gender empowerment and social justice. 73 despite this shortcoming, another thing to consider is how these ghanaian women focus on the forward movement of their fight for women’s rights (research question 3). through ngos’ help, these women start movements geared towards dismantling the predominant structures of patriarchy (issue one). ngos and feminists work together to educate women, empower them to initiate divorce proceedings that save them from toxic marriages and educate them on their right to make individual decisions regarding pregnancy, contraceptives, and abortion (issue two). what i see here are strong women who carve their paths and use their tools to contribute to feminism and work towards achieving gender equality (issue three). finally, in response to research question 2, it is evident that through the activities of self-identified ghanaian feminists and ngos, feminist voices, especially feminists who operate in rural areas, are nurturing and empowering women through accessible digital platform training, online tutorials, in-person training, and introducing these women to free tools that can be explored to bridge the social, political and organizational gap in their society. these women are being supported to become essential public speakers who can contribute to development. through this, equal opportunities and new freedoms are created for these women. conclusion the findings of this study demonstrate continuous evidence of feminism’s acceptance rate in ghana over the years. earlier research portrays negativity hovering around feminist discourses in ghanaian society (dery & apusigah, 2021; mohammed, 2020; mohammed, 2022, nartey, 2021). based on these, there is a need to reorient people to what feminism means or the reality of feminism within ghanaian culture and how power dynamics have influenced notions about feminism within the ghanaian setting. this brings me to the critical point of how self-identified ghanaian feminists have thought of honing on the fact that ghana has always been open to feminism based on our analogy of tagging ghana with the femininity of mother ghana. this goes back to the reality of the fact that feminism is being gradually accepted in ghana. based on the hard work of our feminist ancestors, the space for discussion on the importance of women being outspoken and empowered is being normalized both on broadcast and digital platforms (mohammed, 2023). although ghanaian traditional media initiated the amplification of muted voices of women within the african digital spaces, digital spaces, mainly social media platforms, have become additional outlets for creating, educating, training, and organizing empowerment programs for women, which enables older and younger women to share their experiences. this justifies the argument of atenas et al. (2022) and loney-howes et al. (2020) that gender and feminist activists acknowledge that utilizing new media and digital platforms are inclusive aids in facilitating global consciousness-raising, creating connections and empowering women through visibility and voice. thus, a wheel of change has been put in motion to change the notion that ghanaian women are not capable, that they can speak, and they can break the barriers set by dominant groups in society. moreover, they are as capable as their male counterparts and fight for their liberation by resisting dominant masculine norms, ideas, and language limiting women. thus, education and training provide women with a fair middle playing ground to shun elements of patriarchy, capitalism, dominance, subordination, and control in any respect and to restructure through their activities of socially gendered categories or roles, which is long overdue. notwithstanding, the difference in dynamics and characteristics of what will come to be known as “ghanaian feminism” will play a key role in understanding how feminism is conceptualized differently within african geographies. from all the responses, it can be concluded that ghanaian feminist and gender equity nongovernmental organizations’ usage of social media in ghana has enabled the amplification of the authentic voices of ghanaian women. thus, despite the pushback due to the social construct, ghanaian women have become active participants in the national discourse, expressing their womanhood in various ways and creating spaces to exhibit their potential to the best of their capability. although some may perceive ghanaian feminism as directly linked to african feminism, i argue that if we want to strengthen the elements of african feminism, society must allow the features and potentials of ghanaian feminists to speak for themselves and have theories that portray the elements of their style of feminism. thus, an exhibition of ghanaian feminism has allowed ghanaian women to participate in developmental discussions, leadership, and politics, express their joy, and respond to women’s call for social justice. references adamson, m., & kelan, e. k. 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(2005). feminist standpoint theory and muted group theory: commonalities and divergences. women and language, 28(2), 61–65. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/feminist-st andpoint-theory-muted-group/docview/198819291/se-2 76 555 mikura copyediting 11.12.docx volume 44, 2025 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodriguez, and benjamin jankens assistant editor: jordan donop& rebecca phillips advancing women in leadership vol. 44, 72-83 , 2025 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper exploring the source of leadership self-efficacy among japanese female high school student-athletes through sport experiences akane mikura, mika takezawa, & etsuko ogasawara akane mikura: assistant professor, juntendo university, a-mikura@juntendo.ac.jp mika takezawa: specially appointed assistant professor, tokai university, mika.takezawa@tokai.ac.jp etsuko ogasawara: specially appointed professor, juntendo university, eogasawa@juntendo.ac.jp accepted november 5, 2025 purpose: to apply self-efficacy theory to identify the sport-related themes and the processes through which they influence leadership self-efficacy (lse) among japanese female high school student-athletes. method: focus group and one -on-one interviews were conducted with 30 female high school student-athletes aged 16-17. a grounded theory approach (gta), which allows the generation of theory from participants’ narratives, was employed to extend self-efficacy theory within the sport context. result: we identified four categories that impact lse: (a) leadership experience, (b) feedback on leadership behavior, (c) observation of leaders, and (d) sport performance level. implication: these findings of this study contribute to the development of leadership education programs for girls through sport, helping to address the underrepresentation of female leaders in japan. keywords: leadership development; female student-athletes; leadership self-efficacy; sport leadership in recent years, the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions has emerged as a significant global challenge, prompting efforts toward resolution. japan, in particular, consistently ranks low in gender equality, as indicated by the world economic forum's annual gender gap index (ggi), where it was ranked 118th out of 146 countries in the 2024 report (wef, 2024). japan’s gender gap is especially pronounced in politics and economics. the gender ratio of parliamentary representatives stands at 0.115, while that of managerial positions is 0.171, significantly contributing to japan’s lower ranking. one key reason for this substantial gender gap in political and economic domains is japan’s historical adherence to a patriarchal system, in which women were historically denied the right to make key life decisions—such as education and marriage—on their own. instead, women were confined to domestic roles such as childcare and housework, reinforcing a rigid gender-based division of labor: women belong at home, men belong in the workforce. as a result, women’s entry into the workforce has been a relatively recent phenomenon, and structural barriers remain, such as systems that reward long working hours and continuous employment—practices that continue to hinder women’s access to leadership positions (villa, 2019). however, in recent years, global movements toward gender equality, alongside domestic challenges such as a declining birthrate and economic stagnation, have spurred various gender equality initiatives within japan. notable examples include the implementation of the basic law for a gender-equal society in 1999 and the 2015 enactment of the act on the promotion of women’s active engagement in professional life. despite these efforts, progress remains slow compared to other nations, and japan’s ggi ranking has continued to decline. therefore, alongside establishing environments where women can actively participate, it is essential to prioritize the development of women capable of demonstrating leadership across various fields, particularly in politics and economics. expanding leadership education targeted at girls and women has become an urgent priority. as previously noted, the shortage of female leaders is deeply rooted in historical, societal, and organizational factors (nakamura & horimoto, 2017; villa, 2019). therefore, updating societal values and eliminating structural discrimination against women in political and organizational settings is essential. while only one of many possible approaches, efforts have been made to shift societal perceptions by providing leadership training opportunities for prospective female leaders and by promoting their visibility across various sectors. among these initiatives, the use of sport as a medium for leadership development has gained attention. sport is widely utilized in youth development initiatives due to its capacity to contribute to physical, psychological, and social growth, which, in turn, benefits community development (mcgarry et al., 2020). this 72 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 connection is grounded in the broader recognition that sport not only fosters personal growth but also serves as a platform to address wider societal challenges. in particular, in the context of "sport for development," which refers to the idea of using sport as a means to achieve positive outcomes in areas such as public health, peace, youth development, and the economy (schulenkorf, et al., 2016), sport has been recognized as a tool for addressing various social issues, including promoting peace and gender equality, leading to the establishment of numerous sport-based programs targeting girls (unesco, 2024). in japan, the significance of sport for leadership development is particularly evident in the school sport club system, which serves as a primary setting where adolescent girls engage in sport and encounter opportunities to assume leadership roles. approximately 64.5% of japanese high school girls (ages 15–18) participate in exercise or sport at least once a week (sasakawa sports foundation, 2023). school-based sport clubs serve as one setting where students can engage in physical activities, with 34.4% of female high school students participating in these extracurricular sport clubs (sasakawa sports foundation, 2023). in these school-based sport clubs, it is customary for senior students to hold leadership roles, such as team captain or game captain. this structure naturally creates a dynamic where underclassmen take on follower roles while upperclassmen assume leadership positions, allowing the functions of leadership and followership to develop within this environment (ono & shoji, 2015). consequently, participating in school-based sport clubs provides students with opportunities to experience leadership firsthand. in fact, a survey of junior and senior high school girls examining their perceptions of leaders and their leadership experiences revealed that 36.8% of the respondents reported learning about leadership through school clubs including sport clubs or committees. this was the highest proportion compared to other contexts such as classroom activities, extracurricular lessons, or out-of-school activities. at the same time, the proportion of such responses was lower among girls attending coeducational schools compared to those in girls’ schools, indicating that girls may have fewer opportunities to take on leadership roles in environments where boys are present (plan international japan, 2022). literature review in the literature review, we first examined studies that have explored the current status of women in leadership in japan and the underlying factors contributing to their underrepresentation. we then reviewed research that highlights the potential of sport to contribute to leadership development. current status of women in leadership in japan japan continues to face significant gender inequality, with women remaining underrepresented in leadership positions across sectors. for example, women held only 20.5% of board positions in publicly listed companies compared to the oecd average of 32.5%, and they accounted for just 10.0% of members of the national diet versus the oecd average of 33.8% (oecd, n.d.). women make up only 8.3% of cabinet members, further underscoring japan’s lag in gender parity. unlike many oecd countries that have shown steady increases in women’s representation since 2012, japan’s figures have remained largely stagnant. scholars have identified multiple factors underlying this persistent underrepresentation. nakamura and horimoto (2017) highlighted three key factors that hinder women’s leadership development in japan: government policy, organizational factors, and women's own motivation. the first factor, government policy, includes initiatives promoting gender equality in employment and efforts to shift away from work-centered lifestyles. however, despite these policies, the unequal division of household and childcare responsibilities persists, and systemic policy changes that could significantly transform traditional gender roles remain underdeveloped. the second factor, organizational, concerns structural employment practices in japan. women are often hired into positions with limited opportunities for promotion, and traditional seniority-based systems favor men, who tend to accumulate longer continuous service, making it easier for them to obtain leadership positions. the third factor, women's motivation, is shaped by socially prescribed gender roles, limited professional networks, and a lack of female role models in leadership positions. these conditions make it difficult for women to develop aspirations toward leadership roles. nakamura and horimoto also emphasized the importance of educational and training opportunities in leadership development, noting that various organizations have begun offering programs to enhance women’s leadership capacity. however, previous studies have indicated that women generally have fewer opportunities for skill development compared to men (betz, 2007; van vianen & keizer, 1996), and this tendency may be particularly pronounced in japan, given the structural and cultural barriers discussed above. therefore, it is essential to intentionally provide leadership training opportunities in order to promote the development of women leaders. leader development and sport adolescence, particularly the ages of 12 to 18, is considered a period of “experiential exploration” in leader development, where individuals develop a range of leadership skills through various extracurricular activities (liu et al., 2021). participation in sport has been shown to enhance individuals’ self-perception of their leadership skills. in fact, individuals with regular sport experience have been shown to possess significantly higher leadership abilities compared to those without such experience (mareque et al., 2022). sport also provides opportunities to acquire broader life skills, such as communication and teamwork, which are foundational to leadership (gould & carson, 2008; holt et al., 2017; opstoel et al., 2020). while these benefits apply across gender, evidence suggests that sport may be particularly beneficial for adolescent girls. hancock et al. (2012) found that the positive relationship between sport 73 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 participation and leadership self-perception was especially pronounced among girls. at the same time, as previously noted, sport is male-dominated culture, so girls participate at lower rates than boys (mareque, et al., 2022), and women in sport-related fields face numerous challenges and conflicts (e.g., brawner, 2023; dixon & bruening, 2005; itoh et al., 2017). in particular, women are underrepresented in leadership positions (burton, 2015), with lower proportions of female coaches (acosta & carpenter, 2012; goorevich et al., 2024) and sport administrators (acosta & carpenter, 2012; brawner, 2023) compared to men. burton et al. (2020) pointed out that leadership stereotypes are often associated with more masculine traits, and this tendency is particularly pronounced in the context of sport, where masculinity is heavily emphasized. therefore, when considering leader development for adolescent girls through sport, it is essential to create environments that provide girls with equitable opportunities to experience leadership. leberman (2017) also highlighted the value of offering leadership development in settings tailored specifically to young women, suggesting that programs separated from those designed for boys can be more effective. in line with this, chelladurai (2011) specifically highlighted self-efficacy as a critical skill developed through sport and emphasized its significance in the cultivation of effective leadership—a key concept that will be discussed in the following section. theoretical framework self-efficacy theory self-efficacy is defined as the belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce predicted outcomes (bandura, 1997). in other words, it refers to the capacity to direct one’s efforts toward desired goals and to sustain the motivation necessary to achieve those goals within a given context. based on this definition, self-efficacy functions as a central cognitive mechanism that mediates between self-evaluative information and individuals' subsequent thought patterns, emotional responses, motivation, and behavior (feltz et al., 2008). when self-efficacy is high, individuals are more likely to persist in their efforts, overcome obstacles, and effectively manage stress and anxiety (bandura, 1997). taken together, these findings highlight why, in today’s unpredictable and high-stress society, self-efficacy is regarded as an essential competency, prompting numerous studies to identify the factors that contribute to its enhancement. furthermore, the low representation of women in specific academic fields, such as mathematics and physics, and related career paths has been linked to lower self-efficacy among girls and women, reducing their likelihood of pursuing these disciplines and careers (e.g., betz & hackett, 1986; hackett & betz, 1981). as noted earlier, sport is likewise a field in which girls and women are underrepresented. in particular, women are especially scarce in leadership positions (e.g., coach, athletic administrator), and numerous studies have identified low self-efficacy as one of the contributing factors (e.g., machida-kosuga et al., 2016; swim et al., 2021). therefore, in order to increase the number of women who aspire to and remain in leadership roles over time, applying self-efficacy theory to identify the key aspects that enhance self-efficacy is considered useful. sources of efficacy information efficacy beliefs are shaped through a complex process that integrates diverse sources of information. bandura (1997) identified four primary sources of self-efficacy: mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and physiological and emotional states. the first source, mastery experiences, refers to individuals’ experiences of success or failure and is considered the most influential source of efficacy information. mastery experiences affect self-efficacy beliefs through self-evaluation of one’s performance. when an experience is perceived as successful, self-efficacy increases; conversely, when perceived as a failure, self-efficacy beliefs decrease. monitoring successful experiences reinforces the evaluation of mastery experiences and can enhance self-efficacy more effectively than monitoring failures (feltz et al., 2008). the second source, vicarious experiences, involves obtaining efficacy information by observing others. repeated observation of others' actions and outcomes provides information on how to perform tasks correctly and reassures individuals that the task is learnable. when others succeed, individuals’ self-efficacy in similar tasks tends to increase, while observing others’ failures can diminish self-efficacy (feltz et al., 2008). observing others with similar abilities and personal characteristics has been shown to be especially effective in bolstering self-efficacy, suggesting that the most beneficial comparisons come from individuals who are either similar in ability or slightly more skilled (bandura, 1997). the third source, social persuasion, has a limited impact on its own but can motivate individuals to persist in their efforts when assessments are within a realistic range (bandura, 1997). the strength of its influence also depends on the persuader's prestige, credibility, expertise, and trustworthiness (feltz et al., 2008). additionally, people can self-persuade by affirming their ability to accomplish or cope with specific tasks through positive self-talk or affirmations, while negative self-talk or irrational beliefs can lower self-efficacy and affect subsequent activities. the fourth source, physiological and emotional states, refers to individuals' cognitive assessment of their physiological condition when evaluating their capacity to meet the demands of specific tasks (feltz et al., 2008). factors like physical strength, fitness, fatigue, and pain play a role; favorable conditions enhance efficacy, while unfavorable ones reduce it. for example, positive emotions such as happiness, excitement, and calmness can elevate efficacy judgments (maddux & meier, 1995; treasure, et al., 1996), whereas negative emotions like anxiety, fear, and worry tend to decrease self-efficacy (feltz, 1982). 74 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 interventions based on these sources of efficacy information can modify self-efficacy beliefs. however, how efficacy information is weighted, processed, and integrated to form judgments across different tasks, situations, and personal skill levels remains unclear (feltz et al., 2008). leadership self-efficacy leadership self-efficacy (lse) refers to an individual's confidence in their ability to lead others (dwyer, 2019). lse is a critical factor contributing to effective leadership, making the enhancement of lse essential for improving leadership quality within organizations (chemers et al., 2000; mccormick et al., 2002). however, previous study has indicated that women tend to have lower lse compared to men of similar age and educational background (mccormick et al., 2002). the gender difference in lse is not attributed to the number of leadership experiences but rather to differing interpretations of work outcomes. specifically, men are more likely to interpret their performance in ways that boost efficacy, while women are more likely to interpret their successful performance in ways that constrain their efficacy, thus leading to gender differences in lse (mccormick et al., 2002). consequently, women who lack confidence in their leadership abilities are less likely to pursue leadership positions and may display a lack of confidence regardless of their actual capabilities. furthermore, research has demonstrated a positive correlation between lse and career advancement (machida-kosuga et al., 2016), suggesting that enhancing lse could encourage individuals to aspire to higher levels of leadership. in line with this, leberman (2017) emphasized the importance of implementing leader development programs specifically for young women as a way to address the unique challenges faced by female leaders. therefore, to increase the number of women proactively pursuing leadership positions, it is essential to focus on girls' self-efficacy and examine how sport experiences impact their leadership self-efficacy. such an investigation may contribute to the development of effective leadership education programs for girls. purpose and research question the purpose of this study was to explore how aspects of sport activities influence leadership self-efficacy among japanese female high school student-athletes. the research question for this study is: what sport-related experiences contribute to the development of leadership self-efficacy among japanese female high school student-athletes? methods research design this study employed a qualitative descriptive design informed by the grounded theory approach (gta; charmaz, 2014), which was chosen to allow participants’ voices and perspectives to emerge in a naturalistic manner, enabling the identification of patterns grounded in their experiences. gta was particularly appropriate for this study, as the aim was to generate conceptual insights into the processes by which sport-related experience—such as participation in school-based or community sport clubs, the leadership roles they assumed, and the interactions encountered—shape leadership self-efficacy among japanese female high school student-athletes. in doing so, the study also sought to extend the application of self-efficacy theory to the context of sport and adolescent leadership development. participants to recruit participants, purposeful sampling was first employed for the initial group interview to ensure that participants met the study criteria: high school girls currently participating in sport, either through school-based clubs or local community sport clubs. consent was sought through their school teachers, and students who provided consent (and obtained parental consent) were randomly assigned to groups according to their availability, after which group interviews were conducted. as the study progressed, theoretical sampling, a method specific to gta (charmaz, 2014) was then applied. theoretical sampling does not involve predefining participants; instead, subsequent participants are selected based on emerging analytical results. interviews continued until theoretical saturation was achieved—when no new themes arose—through repeated interviewing and analysis. to collect rich and diverse qualitative data, both focus group and individual interviews were employed in a complementary manner. focus groups (2–5 participants) facilitated dynamic discussions and allowed observation of group interactions, while individual one-on-one interviews were primarily conducted to elicit deeper personal experiences and to clarify in greater detail how these experiences influenced leadership self-efficacy. although the same semi-structured interview guide was used across both formats, the combination of group and individual settings enriched the data and contributed effectively to the theoretical sampling process. all participants were high school female student-athletes aged 16 to 17 from tokyo, japan, an urban metropolitan area, who were involved in either school-based sport clubs or community sport clubs. eligibility criteria required that participants were currently enrolled in high school and actively engaged in organized sport. the sports they were currently engaged in included soccer, rhythmic gymnastics, basketball, and badminton. according to self-efficacy theory, the presence of males in traditionally male-dominated fields can impact females' self-efficacy (hackett, 1995). as sport is a male-dominated field, it has been suggested that women, as a minority, may face challenges in accessing leadership experiences due to various factors (sartore & cunningham, 2007). additionally, it has been argued that leadership programs should consider gender and provide learning environments tailored to girls (hoyt & johnson, 2011). therefore, we focused on female high school students 75 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 attending an all-girls school, where they could engage in sport activities without the influence of male counterparts. data collection proceeded in three rounds. in round 1, focus groups were conducted to capture initial perspectives, and participants were grouped with familiar peers, such as classmates or teammates from the same sport club, in order to facilitate more active and open discussions. in round 2, one focus group was conducted to further examine the shared themes identified in the first round. in addition, individual interviews were primarily used to clarify in greater detail how specific experiences influenced leadership self-efficacy. round 3 then combined additional focus groups with one individual interview to refine the emerging categories and approach theoretical saturation. in round 2 and 3, focus groups were organized based on participants’ pre-survey responses, grouping together those who shared similar experiences. this arrangement was intended to facilitate in-depth discussions and allow common themes to emerge more clearly. an overview of the rounds, including methods, number of participants, and purposes, is summarized in table 1. it should be noted that different participants were involved across the three rounds of data collection. this was consistent with the principles of theoretical sampling in which new participants are deliberately recruited in later stages to refine emerging categories and ensure the comprehensiveness of the analysis. rather than weakening the analysis, the inclusion of different groups strengthened the findings by allowing for the comparison of perspectives across participants and contributing to theoretical saturation. table 1 overview of data collection rounds: methods, participants, and purposes. round particip ant number selection criteria & purpose round 1 4 focus groups total 15 15 purposeful sampling to capture initial perspectives from girls active in school/community sport. round 2 1 focus group 4 individual interviews total 6 2 4 theoretical sampling, with individual interviews as the primary method to elicit more personal experiences and clarify in detail how specific experiences influenced leadership self-efficacy; one additional focus group was conducted to further examine shared themes emerging from round 1. round 3 3 focus groups 1 individual interview total 9 8 1 theoretical sampling to refine categories, deepen understanding of the processes underlying self-efficacy development, and move toward theoretical saturation. semi-structured interview protocol data were collected through semi-structured interviews. this method was chosen to balance the flow and adaptability of questions during the interviews, ensuring harmony between participants’ spontaneity and questions aligned with the study framework (bloomberg, 2022). the interview guide was developed based on the four sources of efficacy information that influence self-efficacy—mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and physiological and emotional states (bandura, 1997). while questions were structured around this guide, flexibility was maintained to adjust questions based on participants’ responses. the interviews were conducted by two researchers, either as focus groups (2–5 participants) or in-depth, one-on-one interviews, each lasting approximately 30 minutes to an hour. this data collection was approved by the university's institutional review board (irb). informed consent, participant protection, confidentiality, and anonymity were explained to participants, who then provided consent. additionally, since participants were high school students under the age of 18, written explanations of the study’s purpose were provided to parents or guardians, and parental consent was obtained. we developed a self-designed, semi-structured interview guide grounded in bandura’s self-efficacy theory (1997) and informed by prior qualitative studies on leader development in sport (damon et al., 2024; machida-kosuga & kohno, 2023). the guide comprised four core questions, each mapped to one of the four sources of efficacy (mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and physiological/emotional states). given the semi-structured format, the interviewer used tailored probes following participants’ initial response to elicit richer detail (e.g., specific episodes and contexts, actors involved, frequency and valence of feedback, and perceived impact on leadership self-efficacy). to ensure alignment with the study’s research question—what sport-related experiences contribute to the development of leadership self-efficacy among japanese female high school student-athletes? —the interview guide was organized around the four sources of efficacy so that each item elicited concrete sport experiences relevant to leadership self-efficacy. data analysis as previously mentioned in the participants section, this study employed charmaz’s (2014) gta for analysis. this method involves three stages of analysis: (a) initial coding, (b) focused coding, and (c) theoretical coding. in the initial coding phase, a process called line-by-line coding was conducted, in which each line of the transcribed data was assigned a label (code). this step allowed for the identification and extraction of significant actions or behaviors from participants’ statements. by comparing assigned codes, specific terms used by participants, known as in vivo codes, were 76 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 identified. these in vivo codes are essential as they capture key concepts that symbolize participants’ statements and actions. in the subsequent focused coding stage, codes relevant to the research question were extracted from the initial codes, and similar codes were grouped together to form provisional categories. finally, in the theoretical coding stage, relationships between the selected codes from the focused coding were conceptualized to develop a theory. specifically, this stage illustrated the processes through which participants’ lse was enhanced or diminished through sport activities, as well as the factors influencing these processes, which were represented in a conceptual diagram. throughout each phase, constant comparison—one of gta's core features (glaser & strauss, 1967)—was utilized. during analysis, if necessary, previous stages were revisited, and comparisons were made between statements and assigned codes, as well as between different codes. this approach helped clarify similarities and differences, uncover hidden meanings, and identify underlying actions. to ensure the quality and rigor of this qualitative research, the analysis was conducted by two researchers, who collaboratively assessed the emergent categories, themes, and findings. throughout the process, memos—an essential component of gta—were used to explicitly document the analytic development. the analysis and writing were guided by charmaz’s (2014) four criteria for evaluating grounded theory studies: originality, credibility, resonance, and usefulness. trustworthiness and rigor of this study various approaches have been utilized to ensure the quality of qualitative research. one of these is the criteriological approach, which assesses research quality by determining whether the methodology meets predefined external criteria. among the widely used criteria are the four standards proposed by lincoln and guba (1986)—credibility, dependability, transferability, and confirmability. it is suggested that meeting these four criteria enhances the “trustworthiness” of the research. credibility was supported through constant comparison throughout the analytic process, including data collection, and the use of rich, illustrative quotations. dependability was enhanced via the development of an iterative codebook and the maintenance of an audit trail. initial coding was conducted independently by two researchers (the first and second authors), and the level of agreement in their results was examined. subsequent coding was primarily carried out by the first author; however, analytic findings were regularly reported and discussed with the co-researchers, which helped resolve ambiguities and strengthen the stability of the categories. transferability was addressed by providing thick descriptions of the research context (tokyo—a metropolitan setting—female high school student-athletes aged 16-17 and their sport context), enabling readers to judge applicability to other settings. finally, confirmability was fostered through the use of memos, which are emphasized as a central component of the grounded theory process. throughout the study, memos were written to document analytic decisions, reflections, and emerging theoretical insights, creating an audit trail that linked interpretive claims explicitly to the data. results the data analysis revealed four categories: (a) leadership experience, (b) feedback on leadership behavior, (c) observation of leaders, and (d) sport performance level. leadership experience leadership experience emerged as a form of mastery experience. in japan’s school-based sport clubs, it is customary for senior students to take on leadership roles, meaning that many participants had previously experienced being leaders in sport. leaders were selected either through direct appointment by a coach or through discussions among teammates. even those who had not held official leadership positions had opportunities to demonstrate leadership in various capacities, such as guiding younger team members during meetings or taking the lead during games. when expected to fulfill a leadership role, participants engaged in trial and error, adjusting their communication styles with team members. for some, these experiences became successful mastery experiences, such as effectively facilitating discussions, achieving team goals, or gaining followers among teammates. however, some participants experienced these moments as failures. specific instances included communication conflicts with team members or feelings of pressure from leadership responsibilities, which led to behaviors that deviated from their ideal image of a leader. those who experienced such failures sometimes developed an aversion to leadership roles. for example, one participant noted, “when i was on the club team, i tried to express my opinions, but felt they were rejected, which made me afraid to speak up. from then on, i just let others take the lead.” another reflected, “i was in a position where i had to lead the team, but i became overwhelmed… i ended up exposing all my weaknesses to the team, which made me feel like i had become a leader far removed from the one i envisioned.” feedback for leadership behavior feedback from others, such as coaches and teammates, was identified as a factor that reinforces mastery experiences. this corresponds to social persuasion, one of the four sources of efficacy information. participants shared experiences in which constructive feedback helped them reflect on their actions and improve their leadership skills. for example, one participant described a conflict with a teammate: “my teammates didn’t express their opinions much, so i spoke strongly. as a result, one of them cried, saying later that she thought i was scary. i didn’t understand why at the time—i thought i was just speaking normally. about a week later, the 77 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 teacher pointed it out to me, and i talked with the girl who had cried and apologized. after that, we were able to share opinions again and work together.” others shared how positive recognition from a trusted coach encouraged further leadership behavior. one participant recalled: “during a practice match, some of my teammates were feeling down after being scolded by the coach or frustrated by losses. since we were third-year students, we encouraged them, saying things like ‘it’s okay,’ and ‘let’s try again next time.’ our female coach saw that and told us, ‘it’s great how you support one another—your team is the best at doing that.’ hearing that made me really happy and gave me the motivation to keep trying.” observation of leaders vicarious experience, the second most influential source of self-efficacy, significantly impacted the leadership self-efficacy of participants in this study through observing various leaders encountered in sport. participants met and observed diverse role models, including older leaders within their teams, leaders from other teams, and prominent figures in the sport world through the media, which helped them form an ideal image of a leader. examples of participant statements include, “my ideal leader was a captain who would guide us well and wasn’t afraid to say what needed to be said. everyone respected them, and i don’t think anyone disliked that senior member,” and “during games, when i felt anxious, [my role model] would offer words of encouragement. conversely, if i made a mistake out of nervousness, there was a senior who would carefully remind me what needed to be done, and i admired that.” however, not all leaders encountered served as positive role models. some participants noted negative examples, such as, “watching the current leader, i find myself thinking, ‘i don’t want to become like that.’” negative role model attributes included dissatisfaction with communication skills, such as "tone and choice of words," and frustrations with certain behaviors, like, “there’s a leader who acts like ‘i’m the absolute authority’… as if they are always right and can do whatever they want.” however, observing such unfavorable examples of leadership did not necessarily diminish self-efficacy. rather, witnessing poor role models led some participants to clarify their own ideal image of a leader and strengthen their motivation to become a better one. for example, one participant stated, “when i look at the current leader, i just think, ‘i don’t want to become like that.’ there’s a lot going on, and i just know i don’t want to be like that.” another said, “i don’t like people like that, and it helped me form a clear idea of the kind of leader i don’t want to be. i don’t want to become someone who thinks it’s okay to look down on others just because they have less ability or hold a lower position. i want to be a leader who treats everyone equally.” sport performance level self-perceived sport performance level emerged as a factor affecting emotional status. previous studies have shown that, for female athletes, higher competitive skills promote coaching self-efficacy in the context of second careers as coaches (mikura & ogasawara, 2021). similarly, in the context of leadership, lower self-perceived competitive ability was associated with a sense of being unsuited for leadership and a decline in lse. in japan, it is customary for athletes with high skill levels to assume leadership roles in sport teams, and many consider highly competitive ability a key leadership quality. supporting this notion, one participant shared, “when it comes to sport, i feel like i’m in complete darkness… i’m currently the one in the club who’s growing the least, not changing at all. i don’t know how to improve. even when i ask others, they say it’s something i have to work out myself, but i can’t figure it out. i’m fed up with myself, and i’ve started to hate badminton itself… if i’m not going to grow, maybe i should quit? my confidence really seems to be influenced by my perceived performance and improvement in the sport.” in japanese sport teams, where seniority is deeply embedded, senior members are often expected to take on leadership roles. this can lead to inner conflict for senior members who feel responsible for leading younger teammates yet perceive their own abilities as inferior. for example, one participant said, “as a second year, i feel i have to lead the first years, including through my play. but since i’m less skilled than they are, i worry that if i try to give advice, it might affect their play style, so i end up not saying anything.” influence of four categories on leadership self-efficacy figure 1 illustrates the influence of these four categories on lse. solid lines indicate positive influences, while dotted lines indicate negative influences. as indicated in the results, successful leadership experiences enhance lse, whereas unsuccessful experiences diminish it. however, receiving constructive feedback on leadership behavior from others can transform such experiences into positive ones. moreover, observing role models—even poor role models—can lead to a positive recognition that one can become a better leader. finally, while higher perceived sport performance levels were associated with increased lse, lower perceived performance or struggles in sport was found to decrease lse. 78 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 figure 1 four sources of leadership self-efficacy gained through sport experiences discussion to further interpret the findings, we discuss how each of the four identified categories—leadership experience, feedback on leadership behavior, observation of leaders, and sport performance level—contributed to participants’ leadership self-efficacy. these factors are examined in light of self-efficacy theory (bandura, 1997) and relevant empirical research. leadership experience the findings suggest that leadership experience functions as a form of mastery experience, a key source of self-efficacy (bandura, 1997). consistent with mccormick et al. (2002), participants who experienced success in leadership roles demonstrated stronger leadership self-efficacy. however, the present study also highlights that not all leadership experiences were interpreted as successful. when participants faced interpersonal difficulties or role strain, some internalized these moments as failures, leading to diminished confidence in their leadership abilities. bandura (1997) emphasizes that unsuccessful experiences prior to the development of efficacy can negatively impact self-efficacy beliefs. the current findings extend this idea by illustrating how adolescent girls may disengage from leadership opportunities following perceived failures. these insights underscore the importance of supportive environments and mechanism—such as feedback and encouragement—to mitigate the negative impact of early leadership struggles. this will be further explored in the next section on feedback on leadership behavior. feedback on leadership behavior as illustrated in the result section under ‘feedback on leadership behavior’, feedback from others, particularly when it comes from respected figures such as teachers or coaches, played an important role in transforming participants’ perceptions of their own leadership. participants who had initially viewed their experiences as failures reported that such support helped them reframe those experiences as learning opportunities, allowing them to improve their communication and leadership behaviors. this finding aligns with bandura’s (1997) view that social persuasion can contribute to a stronger sense of self-efficacy, especially when the communicator is a knowledgeable and trusted individual (won et al., 2017). although verbal persuasion alone is unlikely to dramatically alter self-efficacy beliefs, targeted and credible evaluations can strengthen capabilities. mccauley et al. (2013) similarly noted in studies on women’s lse that feedback can highlight areas of strength and needed growth, facilitating further development as a leader. observation of leaders based on the findings presented the result section, this study discusses how observing leaders influenced participants’ leadership self-efficacy. sport is known to offer opportunities to observe various leaders and provide everyone, regardless of position, the chance to step into leadership roles (burton, 2015). furthermore, research indicates that the more similar the observer is to the model, the greater impact it has on the observer’s self-efficacy (bandura, 1995). observing the success of similar others can strengthen self-efficacy by reinforcing a sense of “i can succeed too,” whereas observing their failures can lower self-efficacy. in school sport clubs, the increased opportunity to observe leaders of similar age and gender offered rich vicarious learning experiences. for girls and women, the presence of same-gender role models is particularly impactful in fields or careers where they are underrepresented, as shown in various studies (e.g., gray & weese, 2023; moran-miller & flores, 2011). sport activities can thus provide valuable opportunities to observe same-gender leaders in action. lirgg (1992) also noted that confidence tends to be lower for girls and women in “masculine” domains such as sport, and that positive portrayals of women in sport through the media can promote effective modeling. in mixed-gender sport environments, however, there is a risk that leadership positions may be dominated by boys. this suggests a need for strategies, such as quota systems, to intentionally place girls in leadership roles. additionally, offering leadership training that includes effective communication methods can help cultivate positive role models among these leaders. sport performance level as noted in the result section, the notion that “those with higher competitive skills should assume leadership” and “older members should be leaders”—cultural stereotypes specific to japan—were found to reduce lse among those who did not meet these expectations. additionally, a lack of confidence in their sport abilities contributed to negative emotional states, such as anxiety and discouragement, which in turn led to decreased 79 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 self-efficacy. as previously mentioned, negative emotional states are known to lower self-efficacy (bandura, 1997). furthermore, sport carry various stereotypes and gender biases, with leadership qualities often associated with traditionally masculine characteristics, leading to the perception that “girls and women are not suited for leadership in sport” (grappendorf & burton, 2017; schull, 2017). while traditional trait-based leadership theories have been increasingly replaced by behavior-based approaches in leadership research (chelladurai, 2014), society still holds onto trait-based ideas. these stereotypes can have harmful effects, such as diminishing leadership self-efficacy among girls. therefore, eliminating rigid stereotypes and gender biases related to leadership in both sport and society, and promoting practices informed by contemporary leadership theories, are also essential steps forward. implication the findings of this study revealed the key aspects of sport environments that either enhance or diminish lse among female high school student-athletes, offering valuable insights for both practitioners and researchers. for practitioners, this study confirmed the potential usefulness of incorporating sport into leadership education and highlighted considerations for developing leadership programs that utilize sport. in the context of sport for development, sport has already been employed in programs aimed at empowering girls and women (e.g., sport for tomorrow, n.d.; women win, n.d.). however, in japan, sport has not yet fully realized its potential as a tool for achieving gender equality, and further efforts to leverage this potential are warranted. for researchers, we provide insights into previously unexplored factors that influence lse among girls in sport, offering implications for future research. unlike prior studies on sport and leadership, which have largely focused on western contexts, this study revealed phenomena unique to the japanese context. in japan, there remains a tendency to emphasize leaders' traits rather than behaviors, which may be one reason for the scarcity of female leaders in fields beyond sport. it is essential to further investigate the effects of gender bias and leadership stereotypes—potentially through comparisons with male counterparts—to understand these influences more comprehensively. conclusion the purpose of this study was to apply self-efficacy theory to explore the key aspects within sport activities that influence leadership self-efficacy (lse) among japanese female high school student-athletes. the interview analysis identified four key aspects that contributed to the development of lse: leadership experience, observation of leaders, feedback on leadership behavior, and sport performance level. these findings suggest that participation in sport can serve as an effective form of early leadership education by offering opportunities to gain leadership experience and observe diverse role models. at the same time, the male-dominated nature of sport presents structural challenges. therefore, it is essential to create sport environments that actively support girls in taking on leadership roles and that offer encouragement and guidance, especially when they face difficulties. these findings underscore the importance of developing sport settings that are intentionally designed to foster girls’ leadership development. acknowledgement this work was supported by the joint research program of juntendo university, faculty of health and sport science. references acosta, r.v., & carpenter, l. j. 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(n.d.). every girl and woman exercise their rights. https://www.womenwin.org/about-us/ won, s., lee, s., & bong, m. (2017). social persuasions by teachers as a source of student self-efficacy: the moderating role of perceived teacher credibility. psychology in the schools, 54(5), 532–546. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.22009 world economic forum. (2024). global gender gap report 2023. wef. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/wef_gggr_2023.pdf villa, l. f. (2019). classic patriarchal values and their effects on working japanese women. revista digital mundo asia pacifico, 8(14), 60–75. https://doi.org/10.17230/map.v8.i14.04 82 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 https://doi.org/10.17230/map.v8.i14.04 appendix interview question guide: 1. in your sport experience, have you ever achieved or failed to achieve something as a leader? 2. what kinds of leaders have you encountered through your sport activities, and how did their presence influence you? 3. through your sport activities, what kind of feedback have you received regarding your leadership actions? 4. how did you feel during your leadership experiences in sport activities? 83 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 439 russell pub ready.docx volume 42, 2023 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 42, 88-97, 2023 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper advancing gender equity and women’s leadership capacity: mentoring, networking, training mia russell, barbara stewart, & lisa brooks mia russell: senior lecturer, center for leadership education, johns hopkins university, mrusse29@jh.edu barbara stewart: professor and chair, human development & consumer sciences, university of houston, bstewart@uh.edu lisa brooks: professor, hospitality and tourism management, eastern illinois university, tlbrooks@eiu.edu accepted may 1, 2023 to overcome barriers to leadership opportunities that exist for women and promote gender equity in the workforce, it is essential for organizations to provide leadership development programs specifically targeted towards women. the purpose of this study was to understand professional and personal outcomes associated with participation in a leadership development program. all participants in this study were female. key findings from this study indicated that as a result of participating in the leadership academy leadership training program, most participants expressed high levels of self-confidence regarding leadership positions as well as knowing their individual strengths. results of the qualitative findings suggested four emerging and descriptive themes associated with program outcomes: confidence builder, network facilitator, opportunity booster, and paying it forward. this study adds to existing literature suggesting that formal women-focused leadership training programs can facilitate gender equity in the workforce. keywords: women, leadership training, development, benefits, confidence, networking gender equity in leadership is required for organizational success in the increasingly complex and global world, yet barriers to leadership opportunities exist for women. representation disparity among the female workforce is prevalent: women represent approximately 54.3% of the workforce (un women, 2022) yet only 35% of senior leadership positions (ariella, 2022). the recent covid-19 global pandemic has amplified this organizational leadership challenge for women. in fact, during the pandemic, women experienced unprecedented job losses and were 24% more likely to permanently lose their jobs compared to men (catalyst, 2021). an effective solution for addressing inequity in the workforce is for researchers, practitioners, human resource and leadership professionals to promote leadership development programs for women (hitt & tucker, 2016). literature review leadership development leadership has drawn increased attention as many believe it is a way to improve one’s personal, social, and professional life; an idea reinforced by corporations and organizations seeking those with leadership ability to help achieve organizational objectives (northouse, 2016). while there is no common definition of leadership, common understandings have emerged from scholarship positioning leadership as a multidimensional and reciprocal construct that can mobilize, influence, and persuade others to a common goal or course of action (barnard, 1938; burns, 1978; northouse, 2016). bush and glover (2003) extend the definition of leadership by explaining it in three ways: (a) a process of influence to structure and organize processes, (b) related to organizational values and committing people to these values, and (c) vision-oriented. primary indicators of leadership interest are the resources and programs devoted to leadership development evidenced by countless discussions in schools, corporations, churches, and communities as well as the over two billion google search results using “leadership development”. leadership development is defined as the investment in developing and mentoring leaders and expanding the collective capacity of organizational members to engage effectively in leadership roles and processes (hitt & tucker, 2016; mccauley & brutus, 1998). in this way, leadership development is seen as a practice and discipline that builds capacity and helps leaders navigate complexity, uncertainty, and emergent dynamics. day (2001) asserts that leadership development should emphasize capacity building and use interpersonal competence. interpersonal competence includes social awareness (e.g., 89 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 empathy and emotional intelligence) and social skills (e.g., collaboration and relationship building). taking these perspectives, leadership development can be an integration strategy that helps individuals enhance their self-understanding, relate to others, and build the competence to determine and execute strategic initiatives. leadership programs for women buck (2003) identified the need to build capacity for individuals, groups, and projects as a way to increase internal and external leadership skills. she proposed formal leadership development programs to build capacity to provide leadership for communities and for the roles in which individuals live, work, and serve. underrepresentation of women in leadership roles (levine, et al., 2015) and the need for leadership skills in women have prompted developmental programs specifically targeted to women. in general, reported outcomes have been positive. khalid et al. (2021) examined post-training scores that revealed an increase in knowledge and leadership skills. vinnicombe and singh (2002) stated that women-only training enables women to clarify leadership ambitions and recognize their strengths. expounding on previous research, chuang (2019) provided evidence that women-only leadership programs are a suitable approach to address gender inequality in the workplace (clarke, 2011; limerick et al., 1995; willis & daisley, 1997). in that vein, lewis and fagenson (1995) examined women-only training programs and noted that they provided a forum for women to express themselves without being discriminated against. additionally, lewis and fagenson (1995) found the programs provided support among women who felt the same disadvantages in the workplace. harris and leberman (2012), in a longitudinal study, found increases in participant self-confidence, application of new skills, including networking and promotions. similarly, levine et al. (2015) discovered that after the program, participants were more likely to ask for promotions and negotiate salaries. this supports the findings of longman and lafeniere (2012), maher and atack (2011), and o’bannon et al. (2010) who assert that participation in women-only leadership development programs builds self-efficacy and creates opportunity for networking and career advancement (clarke, 2011). brush and crosina (2016) also found that such programs significantly develop female entrepreneurial talent. levine et al. (2015) and longman and lafreniere (2012) indicated that the ability to network with other women was valued and enhanced via leadership programs. networking was also the focus of the work of tsen et al. (2012) who found that a mentoring leadership program provided confidence in mentoring skills, enthusiasm for mentoring, and diversification of mentoring relationships. more generally, in a statement focused on the benefits of leadership training for women, gautam (2005) asserted that skill-building sessions can help women realize their abilities and provide inspiration to act. she also expressed that it is not necessary to hold an administrative title or position to be a leader. geary (2016) asserted that training can assist women to balance work and family, support career development, build self-awareness and self-confidence, and adopt a leadership identity as well as deal with socio-cultural and structural barriers. when summarizing the advantages of leadership training programs focused on women chuang (2019) included (a) addressing feminine strengths, weaknesses, and characteristics, (b) developing confidence and self-awareness, (c) providing a supportive and non-threatening learning environment, (d) increasing chances of participation in discussion and learning activities, (e) discussing sensitive topics more openly, (f) developing relationships, (g) building supportive networks; (h) creating opportunities for continuous professional development, (i) engaging in an environment free from male-domination, and (j) promoting gender equity. leadership development through capacity building: mentoring and networking mentoring mentoring is described as an advising and development relationship, usually with an experienced or senior individual. scott (2010) says that mentoring is a fruitful way to develop leaders. positive mentoring experiences significantly improve productivity, retention, commitment, satisfaction, leadership growth, and succession planning (welchin, 2020). key aspects of mentoring programs include identifying high-potential future leaders within the association, executing mentor programs, and creating individual development programs (al suwaidi et al., 2020). mentors can help to build and refine critical soft skills such as listening, collaboration, and professionalism. additionally, mentors can help mentees (or partners) assess their strengths and weaknesses and clarify leadership roles and opportunities. whether mentoring is formal or informal and planned or not, the relationship must be maintained and monitored. heavily skewed toward support, mentoring is seen as an especially effective component of development. skill-building training is an important aspect of successful mentoring within leadership programs. this training brings many skills and talents to bear including effective listening and communication skills, patience, industry and organizational knowledge, the ability to read and understand others, as well as honesty and trustworthiness (scott, 2010). in these ways, mentoring helps develop a more sophisticated and strategic perspective on the organization. networking opportunities networking is described as connecting to others in divergent functions and areas (welchin, 2020). networking is about expanding understanding through exposure, which can challenge basic assumptions about what we think we know. it is also a means of encouraging organizational members to form commitments with others outside of their immediate sphere of influence, work group, or social network. in this way, networking is about investing in and developing social capital 90 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 with a primary development emphasis on building support. networking benefits are optimized when individuals have the requisite self-awareness, motivation, and self-regulation (i.e., intrapersonal competence) (welchin, 2020). networking is a prime means of enhancing social capital and fostering peer relationships in an organization. the best leadership development programs provide opportunities for participants to network with key leaders within the organization (mercer, 2005). leadership training strategically relevant leadership training programs can be enormously valuable (welchin, 2020). training can play a significant part of learning when (a) it is used as an opportunity to reflect on and make better sense of actual experience; (b) it substitutes for experiences that are either unavailable to enough people or are too risky or expensive to use for development; and (c) it provides experiences that are not available online such as scenarios for future states of the organization (mccall, 2004). aas (2016) suggested that experiential learning and hands-on training helps to effectively implement changes in daily practice. zhang and brundrett (2010) also suggested mentoring and coaching as invaluable aspects of leadership development training. wright and da costa (2016) emphasized effective professional development that helps to extend and redefine experiences such as challenging assignments and exposure to other leaders over time. research purpose & questions to support leadership opportunities for women, within and external to the organization, the american association of family and consumer sciences (aafcs) developed the aafcs leadership academy (leadership academy). developed to create a pool of competent future leaders to drive and support the organization, the leadership academy includes leadership training, mentoring programs, and networking opportunities. grounded in both transformational leadership (bass, 1985; burns, 1978) and servant leadership (greenleaf, 1977), the leadership academy model also follows the work of kouzes and posner (2017), integrates emotional intelligence (bradberry & greaves, 2009), and encourages the discovery and use of participants’ strengths (rath, 2007). while the organization wanted to ensure a future pipeline of qualified leaders, participant benefits extended beyond the organization (conger & fulmer, 2003). drawing from a previous study (brooks et al., 2022) assessing the impacts of the leadership academy on participant leadership preparation and experiences to assume leadership roles in aafcs, the purpose of this study was to understand professional and personal outcomes associated with participation in a leadership development program. the study was guided by the following research questions: 1. in what ways can participants apply knowledge and skills after participating in the aafcs leadership academy program? 2. what are the non-organizational experiences and benefits participants realize after participating in the aafcs leadership academy program? methods this mixed methods research design combined both quantitative and qualitative data to adequately answer both research questions (creswell & plano clark, 2011). conducted between october 2021 and january 2022, this study was open to all participants of the bi-annual aafcs leadership academy since inception: (2013; n = 15), (2015; n = 14), (2017; n = 12), (2019; n = 13), (2021; n = 12). before data collection, institutional review board approval was obtained from the university of houston. we employed an explanatory sequential design using survey methodology (qualtrics, provo, ut) and focus groups. emails were sent to all leadership academy participants with an invitation to respond to a web-based questionnaire. to increase participation, cohort-specific email invitations were sent to participants. non-responders were prompted to reply with follow-up invitations. upon completion of the survey, all respondents were invited to join an online focus group to further discuss the ways in which the leadership academy. building on a prior study of leadership academy participants (stewart et al., 2023), this questionnaire was designed, by the researchers, to assess individual-level effects associated with leadership development program outcomes. the researchers developed the questionnaire based on the program objectives and a thorough review of professional leadership scholarship. grounding this research in leadership development program outcomes, specifically the theoretical model of leadership (black & earnest, 2009) and the evalulead framework (grove, kibel, & haas, 2005) helped to address concerns of validity. the 24-item survey (including 6 demographic questions), shown in table 1, took less than 5 minutes to complete, and remained open for four weeks. table 1 survey instrument 1. i accepted a non-aafcs leadership role (e.g., managerial, non-managerial, executive level). 2. i received a promotion within my organization. 3. i accepted a new professional role/position – external to the organization. 4. i can develop and pursue a personal leadership development plan. 5. my total compensation has increased. 6. i consider myself a leader. 7. i know my strengths as defined by the strengths finder tool. 8. i use my strengths. 9. i am confident in my networking skills. 10. i continue to seek development opportunities. 91 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 11. i am satisfied with my career. 12. i have a high-level of self-efficacy regarding leadership positions. 13. i have a high-level of self-confidence in my skills as a leader. 14. my quality of life has been improved. 15. in one word, how would you describe the impact of the aafcs leadership academy on your personal life?a 16. in one word, how would you describe the impact of the aafcs leadership academy on your professional life?a 17. what non-aafcs benefit(s) and/or opportunities have you received as a result of your participation in the aafcs leadership academy?a 18. please use the space below to share any other comments about the impact of the aafcs leadership academy. a a survey question listed verbatim. all other items begin with the stem: “as a result of participating in the aafcs leadership academy”. of the total population (n = 49), the response rate was 51 percent (n = 25). of the 25 participants that completed the survey, a majority were white, female, and under the age of forty. other collected demographics are listed in table 2. table 2 demographic data focus group methodology was used to help clarify the survey and provided an opportunity for open interaction and sharing between participants (tveito et al., 2010). the focus group protocol is listed in table 3. of those that expressed interest (n = 9), six participated in a 65-minute focus group. the focus group was facilitated online via zoom, using semi-structured, open-ended questions. to ensure accuracy, focus group interview transcript review was employed by which each participant received an opportunity to review and correct the cleaned, de-identified transcript. to ensure reliability, dependability, and validity of the results, two researchers separately reviewed the data. using the cleaned transcript and researcher journal notes, key words and phrases were organized and analyzed using hand coding ultimately yielding 36 codes and four themes that helped to explain leadership academy experiences: confidence builder, network facilitator, opportunity booster, and paying it forward. table 3 focus group protocol 1. how do you define or describe leadership? 2. how would you describe the aafcs leadership academy (referred to as leadership academy for our remaining time together)? 3. in what ways has your leadership improved as a result of participating in the leadership academy? 4. how did your participation in the leadership academy influence your non-aafcs aspirations and (personal/professional) trajectory? 5. please share a significant accomplishment that you can attribute to what you learned during the leadership academy? 6. there were many concepts covered during the leadership academy, including emotional intelligence, strengths finders, and time management. thinking of a specific concept that was meaningful, what comes to mind? how have you embraced and implemented what you've learned? 7. thinking back to the emotional intelligence session and content, specifically, what did you learn about yourself? might there be things you've started, continued, or stopped based on what you learned? 8. can you describe specific aspects of your mentor/mentee relationship that helped you? 9. what is your most memorable leadership academy experience? why? 10. if you could wave a magic wand and improve one aspect of the leadership academy, what would you select and why? 11. is there anything else that you wished i would have asked? results survey results: quantitative findings analysis of forced-choice survey items used descriptive statistics to identify respondents’ experiences and perceptions as a result of leadership academy participation. open-ended survey items were analyzed by thematic recognition of words. all responses were anonymous. descriptives, including frequency distributions, are shown in table 4. most notable are the findings that as a result of leadership academy participation, 92% of participants expressed (a) a high level of self-confidence regarding leadership positions, and (b) knowing their individual strengths as defined by the strengths finder tool. additionally, as a result of their leadership academy participation, 88% of participants (a) considered themselves a leader, (b) were able to develop and pursue a personal leadership development plan, and (c) used their strengths (also defined by the strength finder tool). to further understand the influence of demographic variables on experiences and perceptions as a result of leadership academy participation, cross-tabulation analyses were conducted for age and race. while neither indicated significance, it was noted that age did provide some variation on (a) self-confidence in skills as 92 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 a leader, (b) seeking development opportunities, and (c) confidence in networking skills (see tables 5-7). table 4 experience and perception as a result of leadership academy participation item n percent high-level of self-confidence regarding leadership positionsa 23 92% know individual strengths as defined by the strengths finder toola 23 92% consider myself a leadera 22 88% able to develop and pursue a personal leadership development planb 22 88% use strengthsa 22 88% seek development opportunitiesa 21 82% confident in networking skillsa 20 80% high-level of self-efficacy regarding leadership positionsa 20 80% satisfied with careera 16 64% quality of life has improveda 14 56% accepted a new professional role/position external to current organization b 9 36% accepted a non-aafcs leadership role b 8 32% total compensation increased b 4 16% received a promotion b 2 8% note. n=25 a reflects the number and percentages of respondents’ level of agreement (agree or strongly agree) to this question. b reflects the number and percentage of participants answering “yes” to this question. table 5 variation in self-confidence in skills as a leader by agea age n perce nt 20-29 2 8% 30-39 8 32% 40-49 7 28% 50-59 3 12% 60+ 3 12% note: n=25 a reflects the number and percentages of respondents’ level of agreement (agree or strongly agree) to the question, “as a result of participating in the aafcs leadership academy, i have a high level of self-confidence in my skills as a leader.” table 6 variation in seeking development opportunities by agea age n percent 20-29 2 8% 30-39 7 28% 40-49 7 28% 50-59 3 12% 60+ 2 8% note: n=25 a reflects the number and percentages of respondents’ level of agreement (agree or strongly agree) to the question, “as a result of participating in the aafcs leadership academy, i continue to seek development opportunities.” survey: open-ended responses in the open-ended portion of the survey, respondents were asked to describe, in one word, the impact of the leadership academy on their personal and professional lives. the word cloud in figure 1 offers a visual representation of the frequency of the open-ended responses whereby the larger the word, the greater the frequency. there were 32 words provided. of these, the following were reported most frequently: networking (n = 5), good (n = 3), time (n = 2), impactful (n = 2), and enhanced (n = 2). other words closely related to networking, such as network and connections, were consolidated into the count for networking. all other words were reported once. figure 1 impacts of leadership academy on personal and professional life 93 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 respondents also shared non-association benefits and opportunities they received from leadership academy participation. networking and mentorship were often mentioned. additionally, six respondents indicated that their participation had led to increased leadership roles and opportunities, and two shared that they gained skills and tools helpful in new or expanded job roles. focus group: qualitative findings data were organized inductively. initial and axial coding was used to identify themes and trends in the data. the researcher remained as objective as possible and refrained from making interpretations until all data was coded. the coding process allowed the researcher to attach keywords to text segments and reduce data through the categorization of similar data chunks (miles et al., 2018). the analysis process included a comparison of codes to develop themes related to leadership experiences and influencers. in total, 36 codes were identified through the data analysis. from these codes, four themes emerged: confidence builder, network facilitator, opportunity booster, and paying it forward. after the investigator classified the responses, a second independent researcher confirmed the codes, subcodes, and major themes (miles et al., 2018). all identifying information was removed to protect the confidentiality of participants. focus group participants agreed that the leadership academy offered a comprehensive and robust program that improved self-awareness and helped participants learn more about themselves, develop higher-quality relationships and gain new skills and experiences. participants talked about the community, affiliation, and sense of belonging that was built through the experience. illustrations of the four emerging themes confidence builder, network facilitator, opportunity booster, and paying it forward – follow. confidence builder all participants discussed how their confidence increased. one participant shared that “… some leaders reached out and asked me if i would be interested in [serving as a mentor]. i thought that was neat and kind of a vote of confidence that they knew me and thought i might be a good match so… that was good and so i’m serving as a mentor to [a current participant] which has been good.” another participant offered that the program “… gave me the confidence to do those things and serve in different leadership roles outside of [our field].” another participant expressed that the program “… gave [her] the confidence to go before [her] legislators… and before that [she] wouldn’t have considered.” network facilitator all participants expressed the benefits of meeting new people and making valuable connections. as expected, one participant shared that “… it was a really good way to network, meet people, and learn more about the organization” while another expressed how she was able to “engage with… professional leaders, you know people [that she] looked up to in that capacity. [being in the academy] really made me feel welcomed and included in the organization”. tied to the role of mentoring, one participant shared “meeting people that… encourage you to lead was helpful.” while growing your network within the organization was expected, one participant mentioned the opportunity to “expand [their] horizon with the people that [they] work with.” a final example was “it helped [me] develop a better network of like-[minded] people… definitely opened doors.” opportunity booster one participant explained that “[leadership academy] just exposed me to opportunities to lead and made me feel more confident.” another participant expounded on this idea and shared that being a part of the leadership academy “better equipped me with the skills necessary to i don’t want to say just lead but be involved with various opportunities that allowed me to lead, maybe not alone, but as a group or team and it definitely made me see that, i am a good leader and that i can do these things.” another participant explained that she “became the president of a [state] affiliate” while another discussed “serving on church boards and within the youth ministry.” paying it forward most of the participants have found ways to contribute to colleagues and society, more broadly. they valued the care, concern, and consideration shown towards them and because that care made such a personal impact, they desire to help others in similar ways. the idea of paying it forward was expressed as realizing “how you can play a role in [contributing to others].” two participants shared specific projects that they have worked on: “i’ve started a mentorship group just to help others that were stuck in their dissertation phases and so far, at least one is almost done… i’m glad that the leadership skills i got have enabled me to say, yes, i can help others to achieve an objective…” and … “i’ve been able to make [a local community] group more of a leadership type academy on a very small scale. and not only that program but other programs 94 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 that i work with, [such as] volunteer groups. [using the leadership academy principles and activities help to] take the program to the next level. i’m actually working with a state leadership group [using some of the tools] that can take the program up a notch [in terms of] leadership.” discussion the purpose of this research was to understand professional and personal outcomes associated with participation in a leadership development program. blending the quantitative and qualitative data helps to validate the data and illuminate findings. our findings were consistent with existing literature on leadership training programs for women; however, our research offers an interesting perspective on the broader implications associated with leadership development. specifically, leading quantitative findings for this study indicated that as a result of participating in the leadership academy program, 92% (n = 23) of participants expressed high levels of self-confidence regarding leadership positions, as well as knowing their individual strengths as defined by the strengths finder tool. additionally, 88% (n = 22) of participants (a) considered themselves a leader, (b) were able to develop and pursue a personal leadership development plan, and (c) used their strengths. in addition, the majority of participants were able to seek development opportunities (82%; n = 21), were confident in their networking skills (80%; n = 20) and had a high-level of self-efficacy regarding leadership positions (80%; n = 20). not only are these findings consistent with previous literature, but they were also expected since the leadership academy training program included a mentor program and provided a variety of effective resources for developing self-efficacy. moreover, the leadership academy provided multiple opportunities for networking with leaders in the field, such as board members and mentors. quantitative items that were inconsistent with previous literature included those that were related to receiving increased compensation. only 16% (n = 4) of participants reported increased compensation and only 8% (n = 2) reported receiving a promotion. qualitative findings indicate four emerging themes confidence builder, network facilitator, opportunity booster, and paying it forward. participants discussed how their confidence increased and expressed the benefits of meeting new people and making meaningful connections. participants expressed increased positive attitudes and an openness to explore leadership opportunities. finally, most of the participants discussed both the impact and modeling of the leadership academy planning team and other organizational leaders. the experiences with these leaders and the care, concern, and consideration shown during the leadership academy made such a profound impact on participants that they desired to help others in similar ways. the four emerging themes from this study are consistent with previous literature regarding leadership development training programs for women. future research should examine professional outcomes such as increased compensation and promotions. researchers should also consider assessing leadership styles and traits and including assessments for emotional intelligence and personal strengths. finally, more research is needed to understand other factors that build leadership capacity and help reduce gender disparity and inequity within organizational leadership ranks. limitations there are important limitations to note for this study. first, the program participants volunteered to participate in the leadership academy. this self-selection bias threatens external validity. this study was also focused on outcomes as derived from program objectives not leadership theories. a focus on leadership theories would create an opportunity to use validated, reliable leadership scales. finally, this study explored mentoring, networking, and training although there are many worthy factors that contribute to leadership capacity. implications women leaders remain largely underrepresented in organizational leadership. this study supports prior research showing that formal leadership development programs for women help improve self-confidence and self-efficacy; a solution to facilitate gender equity (maher & atack, 2011; clarke, 2011; o’bannon et al., 2010). additionally, findings from this study suggests that these same programs can contribute to personal development as well. in fact, our study shows that leadership development programs can help women grow in personal, social, civic, and organizational leadership roles. taken together, leadership development programs may have the power to support women in a holistic way –personally and professionally. this study also suggests that mentoring relationships are integral to the success of leadership development. specifically, we find that women engaged in a mentoring relationship – as mentee or partner have a desire to help others. organizational leaders might consider leadership development programs as a tool to improve work commitment and job satisfaction. both organizational leaders and leadership development practitioners can use findings from this study to inform interventions and programs with the goal of (1) providing support mechanisms and exposure that can help women leaders build and sustain their networks and (2) helping to build confidence and to encourage women to push past perceived boundaries. both of these goals may help advance gender equity and women’s leadership capacity. references aas, m. 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(2010). school leaders’ perspectives on leadership learning: the case for informal and experiential learning. management in education, 24(4),154-158. doi:10.1177/0892020610376792 97 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 42 http://dx.doi.org/10.14307/jfcs115.2.7 advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 13 2010 issn 1093-7099 gender issues in k-12 educational leadership dr. jafeth e. sanchez and dr. bill thornton abstract this paper serves as a review of the research literature on gender issues in k-12 educational leadership, with a primary focus on the principal and superintendency positions in the united states. the prominent common themes or topics found in the literature are discussed. more specifically, barriers to gender equity in educational leadership are identified, and qualities or strategies used by successful female administrators where such barriers have been broken are noted. keywords: gender issues, educational leadership, women, principals, superintendency citation: sanchez, j. e., & thornton, b. (2010). gender issues in k-12 educational leadership. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(13). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction educational leaders are under pressure to reform public schools; such efforts are driven in part by the accountability and achievement demands from the no child left behind (nclb) act of 2001. educational leaders are significant, as was found in the pioneering work by edmonds (1979). he identified the principal’s skills and capabilities as contributions of school performance. more recent work similarly noted that effective educational leaders can positively impact student and school success (cistone & stevenson, 2000; darling-hammond & post, 2000; marzano, waters, & mcnulty, 2005). however, despite the critical nature of principals’ or superintendents’ roles, a disproportionately low number of women occupy these positions (loder, 2005; young & mcleod, 2001). compared to males, females are less likely to become administrators (holloway, 2000). at the same time, “no federal or national organization, including the national center for education statistics, collects or reports annual administrative data by gender;” as a result, available statistics are minimal, and it is difficult establish trends over time (shakeshaft, brown, irby, grogan, & ballenger, 2007, p. 103). although statistics are minimal, some reports have illuminated the low percentages of women in educational leadership. for example, the u.s. department of education national center for education statistics (nces, 2002) noted a disproportionate representation of women in the superintendency. grogan (2005) stated that “although the numbers of women in the superintendency have more than doubled over the past ten years, they are still woefully small” (p. 24). more recently, de santa ana (2008) affirmed that there are more women becoming superintendents, with 15 percent in the nation. this value is significant given the considerable presence of female teachers in our public schools. for the principalship, nces (2007) indicated that between 1993-1994 and 2003-2004 the percentages of female public school principals increased from 41 to 56 percent in elementary schools and from 14 to 26 percent in secondary schools. additionally, it is particularly important to note the small percentage of female principals at the secondary schools because promotions to the upper levels of administration, such as the superintendency, often occur from this level (young & mcleod, 2001). thus, in a field that is populated by women, the glass ceiling effect is still present (addi-raccah & ayalon, 2001; mahitivanichcha & rorrer, 2006; moreau, osgood & halsall, 2007). according to nces (2006), 75 percent of public school teachers were females, so it is clear that females’ percentages in leadership are not proportionate with their percentages in the teaching workforce. keeping such statistics in mind, marshall (2004) cautioned that the field of school leadership will be repopulated by 2010, and vacancies will need to be filled. perhaps the people who will fill these vacancies will be representative of our culturally diverse society, with equitable gender representation in the field of educational leadership. however, for such transformational changes to occur, an understanding and awareness of gender issues in educational leadership must also occur. to this end, this paper provides a review of the research literature on gender issues in relationship to k-12 educational leadership, with a primary focus on principal and superintendency positions. barriers to gender equity in educational leadership are identified, and qualities or strategies used by successful female administrators where such barriers have been broken are noted. this study lends additional information to the current body of knowledge because it continues the dialogue about why women in the 21st century in a advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 developed country are still lagging behind in positions of educational leadership. gender inequities currently exist in educational leadership, and the issue cannot be ignored. women are over-represented in the education system; yet, they are consigned to lower positions. the current body of knowledge must continue to disseminate effective practices that can encourage female leadership, promote leadership among women with families, and reflect a feminine way of knowing. barriers to gender equity unseen gender inequities the process toward equitable changes should be improved by reducing and eliminating current barriers to educational leadership positions. however, there seems to be “an implicit assumption that problems of equity for women have been solved and there are no issues left to address” (coleman, 2005, p. 5). moreau, osgood, and halsall (2007) found that many female teachers and other educational stakeholders did not recognize or identify a gender imbalance. within educational leadership, krüger, van eck, and vermeulen (2005) also mentioned that “there has hardly been any reference to gender, although women are still under-represented and thus under-utilized” (p. 241). furthermore, young (2005) indicated that “in recent years, ambivalence, resistance and antipathy have redeveloped around gender issues, making it more difficult for feminist scholars to continue to work for gender equity in the leadership field” (p. 35). earlier, young (2001) emphasized the lack of equal opportunity: discrimination still exists in terms of salary, benefits, recruitment, hiring, and promotion. furthermore, women principals tend to be hired more frequently at the elementary level, while women superintendents are relegated to less desirable districts that are either small and rural or urban and troubled. these difficulties merely scratch the surface of the inequities that impact women in educational leadership, yet the perception persists that women have achieved equity. (p. 36) perhaps part of a reason for persistent inequities in educational leadership exists because male leaders tend to dominate the field and tend to make employment decisions. male dominance while females dominate the ranks of teachers, the field of educational leadership has historically been comprised of males (tallerico & blount, 2004). similarly, lárusdóttir (2007) affirmed that “the hegemony of masculine values over feminine in educational administration is not new. educational administration as an academic field is a little over a hundred years old and for most of this time women have been largely absent from the field” (p. 263). addi-raccah and ayalon (2000) also identified male dominance and hegemony within the field. as a result, “workers that best fit the ideal-worker norm—white, male, married, and heterosexual—are perceived as the more attractive worker” (mahitivanichcha & rorrer, 2006, p. 500). coleman (2001) recognized the masculine nature of the leadership culture and pointed out that it can serve to marginalize and isolate females. thus, women may not seek leadership positions because the status quo does not appear to favor them (coleman, 2005). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 stereotypes if the status quo does not appear to favor women in educational leadership, it should not be surprising that stereotypes serve as a major barrier for aspiring female leaders. indeed, unique stereotypical styles, characteristics, and behaviors are commonly attributed to each gender. for example, krüger (2008) noted that: women are said to be dependent, conformist, cooperative, passive, emotional, uncertain of themselves, kind, helpful, understanding, sensitive and weak, to name just a few of these preconceptions. men are said to be independent, competitive, active, rational, sure of themselves, aggressive, dominant and strong. (p. 164) an existing and pervasive stereotype in the field is that successful leaders must portray masculine characteristics and corresponding styles, which are often a mismatch for females (brooking, 2008; coleman, 2003b; grogan, 2000; krüger, 2008; krüger, van eck, & vermeulen, 2005; oplatka, 2002). in general, a number of researchers have emphasized that leadership roles are considered to be masculine-oriented with behaviors of authority and discipline, whereas females are considered to be more emotional and collaborative (e.g., adams & hambright, 2004; addiraccah & ayalon, 2000; brooking, 2008; coleman 2003a, 2005; krüger, van eck, & vermeulen, 2005; shields, 2005; wrushen & sherman, 2008). in essence, because women might be stereotyped as being nurturing and emotional, others might believe that this will negatively impact leadership positions (coleman, 2001; krüger, 2008; young, 2005). with the existence of these stereotypes, males are considered more favorable than females for leadership roles (krüger, van eck, & vermeulen, 2005), even by female teachers (krüger, 2008; young, 2005). further, male leaders are often given more freedom and latitude to apply a variety of leadership styles (krüger, 2008). in the workplace, and specifically in public schools, the stereotypical frames of effective leaders have worked against aspiring female leaders. although stereotypes can work against females, more recently, collaborative approaches have been judged more desirable within educational leadership. such collaborative approaches point to feminine ways of knowing “that are less linear, separate, and hierarchical than are men’s” (luttrell, 1989, p. 35). specifically, a paradigm shift from a hierarchal approach to a community approach in educational leadership has emerged (doyle, 2004). the widely used professional learning communities (plcs) create significant demands for collaboration, involvement, and collective decision making (buffum & hinman, 2006; dufour, 2004; hord, 1997). considering such a shift, bear in mind that “women are thought to be caring, tolerant, emotional, intuitive, gentle, and predisposed towards collaboration, empowerment, and teamwork” (coleman, 2003a, p. 30). in other words, these characteristics are identified as transformational, shared leadership styles, whereas men are noted as having managerial, hierarchical styles (coleman, 2003a; dana & bourisaw, 2006; fennell, 2005; grogan, 2005). in view of the shifts in effective leadership styles and the existing leadership perceptions, it would seem that women’s perceived styles could benefit their opportunities for leadership positions. that is why shields (2005) emphasized that advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 “women leaders do not need to be bullies or boxers, nor do they need to lead in the soft and fluffy ways suggested by images of little girls playing hotscotch [sic], or in the frenetic, reactive, and unproductive ways reminiscent of jumping rope” (p. 84). considering the paradigm shift in leadership styles, it is important to note that leaders’ self-perception reports actually tend to be similar among men and women and often favor a more feminine style (coleman, 2003a). even more, studies revealed that educational leaders were perceived as equally effective despite gender, thus countering many stereotypical beliefs that masculine characteristics are needed for effective leadership (adams & hambright, 2004; thompson, 2001). of course, it seems logical that quality leaders are not simply defined by gender (brooking, 2008). nevertheless, “it appears that while the leadership characteristics commonly associated with the female gender are becoming more accepted and valued, the actual gender is not” (young, 2005, p. 38). hence, certain perceptions still keep women out of leadership positions or limit their abilities through stereotyping (young & mccleod, 2001). sexism, bias, and discrimination stereotypes are also intertwined with barriers of sexism, bias, and discrimination against potential and current females in educational leadership. women often face sexist practices, particularly in hiring, selection, and recruitment procedures (alston, 2000; brooking, 2008; coleman, 2005; young, 2005). also, women lack social networks and have less training or fewer opportunities for development, and a general bias against them can occur (addi-raccah & ayalon, 2000; coleman, 2001). because of bias, females often have to work harder to prove themselves as leaders (adams & hambright, 2004; coleman, 2001, 2003a, 2005), which can also lead to burnout (adams & hambright, 2004; oplatka, 2002). rusch and marshall (2006) argued that there is a gender bias in expectations for administrative roles. they posited that gender filters exist, and they (a) reproduce and reify privilege and tradition, (b) are subtle and contradictory, and (c) modify conduct; in addition, such filters generally favor males in educational leadership. along with bias, women encounter discrimination (moreau, osgood, & halsall, 2007; silverman, 2004; young, 2005), and women and men are equally likely to discriminate against female leaders (young, 2001). therefore, “although women are interested and qualified, they encounter constraints that limit their choices and decisions,” such as sexism, bias, and discrimination, along the leadership pathways (mahitivanichcha & rorrer, 2006, p. 485). role conflicts, low salaries, and high job demands other factors that have been found to serve as barriers along the leadership pathways have been role conflicts, high job demands, and low salaries. for example, grogan (2000) clearly identified role conflicts when she noted that, for the position of superintendent, “the kinds of men and women often described as successful in the position have to act in ways that are sometimes at odds with their earlier roles as relational, nurturing teachers” (p. 125). in relationship to the principalship position, loder and spillane (2005) found that female administrators commonly faced role conflicts when shifting from teaching positions to administrative positions. for example, for one female administrator, they noted that “one of the advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 biggest adjustments she had to make as an administrator was to broaden her purview of the work domain.” as another example, the authors identified the change in relationships with students, from being intimately personal to more compartmentalized and distanced. however, these authors mentioned that they were not sure whether the females’ role conflicts were genderrelated. regardless, they suggested that educational leadership programs and professional development efforts should address such challenges in order to better prepare administrators for the shift in roles. as females face role conflicts when they shift roles, they also face high job demands and insufficient salaries within educational leadership positions. loder (2005) documented the physical and emotional toll on female leaders when they accepted administrative positions. similarly, mahitivanichcha and rorrer (2006) acknowledged that the superintendency has high job demands, and they made particular note of low salaries and “a systemic structure, which includes a dominant time structure around which all workers are expected to organize their lives” (p. 487). adams and hambright (2004) polled participants in their teacher leadership program and found that teachers’ love of teaching overpowered their desire for leadership positions, and teachers mentioned the desire to avoid dealing with difficult parents and lack of appropriate salaries. in other words, some teachers believe that leadership responsibilities are not worth the additional time and stress. grogan and andrews (2002) referenced insufficient salaries in light of “the additional stress of meeting state benchmarks to remain accredited in this era of highstakes testing and accountability” (p. 237). additionally, “expansions of scale, decentralization, and increasing autonomy of schools are making the business of running schools more complex and principals are being asked to do the impossible” (krüger, 2008, p. 156). it seems reasonable for females to take into account the role conflicts, insufficient salaries, and high job demands of educational leadership positions, especially when considering that today’s females must often balance work and family obligations. family obligations in many families, women are expected to maintain traditional family roles independent of existing or new job responsibilities. when females obtain or seek positions as educational leaders, it is not easy to balance their work and family obligations (coleman, 2001, 2005; mahitivanichcha & rorrer, 2008; moreau, osgood, & halsall, 2007; wrushen & sherman, 2008). for example, grogan (2000) reviewed the literature on the superintendency over the past 50 years and acknowledged that “a superintendent is not encouraged to put his or her own family needs first” (p. 125). at the same time, the system tends to support “married male workers who have the full-time domestic support such that they can be free of home and family responsibilities” (mahitivanichcha & rorrer, 2008, p. 493). it makes sense, then, that women who obtain positions of leadership are often not mothers (coleman, 2001). although coleman’s (2001) study was conducted in the united kingdom, her findings were similar to those above. she explored reasons for the lack of women in educational leadership and found that women might have to choose their career over family. she noted that part of this might be attributed to the gendered roles of females as domestic caretakers and posited that women might take time off work to care for children or elderly relatives. for the most part, research findings have made it “woefully apparent that the overwhelming advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 responsibility for managing work-family conflicts falls largely on women administrators” (loder, 2005, p. 768). females’ career goals or aspirations related to educational leadership are impacted by family obligations. similarly, silverman (2004) highlighted concerns about family obligation and added that women might have to move to obtain such positions, which they are not always willing to do. as a result, women might be less committed to jobs that require more time investments because of their combined work and family roles (addi-raccah & ayalon, 2000). therefore, these obligations often lead others to question whether women are capable of being effective educational leaders. confidence, aspirations, and risk-taking it is also believed that women sometimes question their own capabilities of being educational leaders because of a lack of confidence or aspirations (coleman, 2001, 2005; krüger, 2008; wrushen & sherman, 2008). for example, wrushen and sherman (2008) revealed that some women felt uncomfortable describing themselves as powerful. coleman (2001) noted that, for women, careers may be seen as only one part of life, so they are reluctant to progress to other positions. further, she argued that women may not apply for a job unless they truly believe they have all of the qualifications, whereas men might apply even if they do not believe they have all of the qualifications. therefore, risk-taking characteristics play a critical role in advancement and employments decisions. lack of confidence and aspiration might occur because women may have experienced more failure and rejection than their male counterparts (coleman, 2001). as a result, it is often believed that “a combination of a woman’s aspirations, experiences, and responses to those experiences is what ultimately determines her decision to enter or not to enter educational administration” (young & mcleod, 2001, p. 469). hence, leadership preparation programs should consider proactive steps to address these concerns. breaking barriers to gender equity effective practices women face many real dynamic barriers to movement from teaching into leadership roles; however, these barriers can be broken. fennell’s (2005) study identified common themes in the live experiences of six women principals. although the study did not investigate gender differences, it highlighted women’s practices used to overcome barriers. fennell established that these female leaders (a) worked to develop a collaborative environment under a common vision, (b) valued people and their contributions, (c) used power and made it expandable to others, and (d) resisted practices that interfered with the overall goals, thus confronting issues as needed in their positions as educational leaders. these leaders employed the stereotypical female styles to proactively promote change. although the characteristics may be considered stereotypical, such characteristics pertain to the feminine way of knowing, which is embedded in social relationships (luttrell, 1989). advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 also, with experience, peer mentors, and training, women have become more comfortable in leadership roles; as women persist in leadership roles, they might “take on more risks, becoming more daring and less afraid of personal consequences” (bloom & erlandson, 2003, p. 361). the willingness to risks might also be related to power attainment and skill development. from interviews of women in elite educational leadership positions, shields (2005) concluded that women who understand power, can effectively and wisely use it to overcome gender issues, and are able to promote positive changes in leadership. further, a common style for female leaders involves a focus on collaborative activities—instruction, skill development, and relationship building with their educational stakeholders (grogan, 2005), which are consistent with the current paradigm of effective education leadership. with such paradigm shifts in process, and as they become more widely accepted, females relate better to educational positions. mentors for educators who aspire to leadership positions or currently obtain positions as educational leaders, mentors are a critical for job effectiveness (coleman, 2001; de santa ana, 2008; grogan, 2005; méndez-morse, 2004; sherman, 2005). for example, de santa ana (2008) advised aspiring superintendents to stay focused, gain experience, take risks, and develop networks, and enlist effective mentors. sherman (2005) affirmed that leadership development programs can help aspiring leaders identify potential mentors, coordinate mentorship, and promote mentoring opportunities. also, méndez-morse (2004) observed that many mentor relationships do not have to match gender. still, effective mentor relationships that incorporate a gender match are functional and can provide support for personal experiences with gender barriers (magdaleno, 2006, p. 13). however, sherman (2005) cautioned that mentorships or stand-alone leadership preparation programs cannot influence change—they must be an integral part of k-12 systems. such programs must implement strategies to recruit women, have formalized processes for recruitment, have an induction program for new administrators, and training after placement (sherman, 2005). mentor relationships and other support structures can help women obtain, succeed, and retain educational leadership positions. balance of work and family even though some women in positions of educational leadership may struggle with balancing work and family obligations, women have creatively balanced both responsibilities. however, the extent of this balance will clearly be case by case. a single approach is not appropriate or sufficient—important issues include marital status, characteristics of spouse, and family structure. for example, “compressing time—juggling different thoughts, decisions, and tasks simultaneously, or multitasking—permits women to accomplish more than one task at a time, including balancing job and family responsibilities” (mahitivanichcha & rorrer, 2008, p. 492). earlier, mahitivanichcha and rorrer (2006) recommended that collaborative efforts among educational leaders take place to help leaders alleviate the cascade of job demands. also, grogan (2005) pointed out that “the united states is founded on stories of white women and women of color whose work to manage a home and family affairs has never been described as leadership, though it was crucial to the survival and success of all” (p. 21). women can contribute to effective leadership, and those who strive to become effective leaders can advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 implement various life course strategies to help balance work and family efforts. loder (2005) illustrated that women often plan when to get married, when to have kids, and how to carefully integrate life-changing events. women must carefully consider such events to facilitate an appropriate balance between work forces and family obligations. higher education advanced degrees are entry requirements for leadership positions; however, a decision to earn an advanced degree requires significant planning and related transitions. these decisions require a balance parallel to those discussed above. higher education has been experiencing a transition in the enrollment numbers within educational leadership programs. shakeshaft, brown, irby, grogan, and ballenger (2007) noted that “anecdotal information from preparation programs indicates that the majority of the students are women” (p. 104). therefore, this could expand the number of qualified female candidates for positions of educational leadership. this, hopefully, will promote more female leaders in schools and lead to more gender equitable leadership. the synergistic leadership theory the effective practices highlighted above further demonstrate that women should be themselves and should not feel the pressure to conform to patriarchal practices in order to move forward. women’s practices of inclusion, collaboration, valuing others and their contributions, and the ability to balance work and family are helpful in breaking barriers to gender equity in educational leadership. in any case, irby, brown, duffy, and tautman (2002) affirmed, that even though such practices are widely advocated, they are not incorporated in common leadership theories. irby et al.’s (2002) synergistic leadership theory (slt), however, “openly acknowledges the feminine organization as a major component,” which lacks in other leadership theories (p. 315). the leadership model by irby et al. (2002) has the following four factors that serve as dynamic interactions: (a) attitudes, beliefs, and values; (b) leadership behavior; (c) external forces; and (d) organizational structure. these four factors have six interaction pairs, and there is no structural hierarchy or linear nuance (irby et al., 2002; leonard & jones, 2009). further, the model contains “both male and female leadership behaviors, a range between closed and open organizational structures, and infinite possibilities of external forces and attitudes, believes, and values” (irby et al., 2002, p. 312). leonard and jones (2009) noted that effective 21st century leadership can be fostered through the gender inclusive framework of slt. closing comments and recommendations gender issues in the field of k-12 educational leaders exist, and various barriers faced by women are dynamic; the field is slowly changing. more than ever before, opportunities for women to overcome traditional barriers are available. however, grogan (2005) warned that “until there is a more equitable distribution of women in the highest levels of educational leadership, we are sending a message that says women’s leadership is still not much valued” (p. 26). “the absence of women … means that women’s influence on policy changes, decisions, advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 and practice in the field is limited” (mahitivanichcha & rorrer, 2008, p. 486). the development of appropriate structures and support systems to promote gender equity in educational leadership are critical for effective education change—we need our most effective leaders independent of gender. as part of the process for achieving gender equity, a reconceptualization of effective leadership must occur; this is above and beyond the need to recruit, develop, and retain highly effective women. at the same time, while it is important to look at overall issues of women in educational leadership, “it cannot be unilaterally assumed that experiences of women based on their social and ethnic location are the same or similar” (fitzgerald, 2003, p. 433). it is necessary to take note of gender issues in educational leadership, but within-group consideration must also take place, such as ensuring proportionate racial and ethnic representation. additionally, loder (2005) cautioned that: it makes very little sense to continue drawing conclusions about women’s progress in achieving gender equity in educational administration based on comparisons between ‘today’s’ women administrators and ‘yesterday’s’ men administrators, which may be invalid or erroneous comparisons. (p. 770) past patterns must also be challenged. it is important for “others to think about contemporary leadership in ways they have not before—both by understanding the superintendency’s past patterns within their social contexts and by generating new questions about this and other sex-segregated leadership positions in education” (tallerico & blount, 2004, p. 656). all school leaders need professional development and awareness training in gender related issues, which will support new and aspiring leaders as they address existing barriers. effective female leaders should make efforts to support new and aspiring leaders—they should share successful experiences. such supportive activities have many benefits; negative perceptions and stereotypes can be challenged, a wide pool of successful women leaders can be developed, and would-be leaders can be encouraged to move forward. educational institutions and professional organizations must support and encourage research on gender issues in educational leadership. federal and national organizations must improve data collection procedures and examine additional variables, such as sex, in their studies about educational leadership. of course, “it is the responsibility of k-12 leaders, men and women, worldwide along with universities and bodies preparing school leaders to maximize opportunities for all practicing and prospective leaders so that the capabilities of a larger and more diverse population of school leaders can fully be realized” (wrushen & sherman, 2008, 466). collaboration among all educational stakeholders is vital because gender inequities exist in educational leadership. stakeholders must recognize the existence of gender roles and gender influences in women’s efforts to obtain leadership positions (wrushen & sherman, 2008). this recognition is critical because “turning the differences to our advantage is becoming increasingly necessary” (krüger, 2008, p. 156). schools can benefit from both perspectives, and advantages of any differences should help to enhance educational outcomes (krüger, 2008). knowledge of and use of the slt model can promote gender inclusive leadership and integrate holistic advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 11 leadership efforts toward educational change. as leonard and jones (2009) acknowledged, “using slt as a lens to view modernist leadership theory enables one to understand that women can lead effectively without having to behave aggressively or in a masculine manner to be successful” (p. 4). thus, an equitable representation of a talented, qualified pool of females and males is crucial in educational leadership. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 12 references adams, k. l., & hambright, w. g. 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(2005). hopscotch, jump-rope, or boxing: understanding power in educational leadership. international studies in educational administration, 33(2), 76-85. silverman, f. (2004). superintendent slot still lacks females. district administration, 40(3), 16-16. tallerico, m., blount, j. m. (2004). women and the superintendency: insights from theory and history. educational administration quarterly, 40(5), 633-662. doi: 10.1177/0013161x04268837 thompson, m. d. (2000). gender, leadership orientation, and effectiveness: testing the theoretical models of bolman & deal and quinn. sex roles, 42(11/12), 969-992. doi: 10.1023/a:1007032500072 wrushen, b. r., sherman, w. h. (2008). women secondary school principals: multicultural voices from the field. international journal of qualitative studies in education (qse), 21(5), 457-469. doi: 10.1080/09518390802297771 advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 15 young, m. d. (2005). shifting away from women’s issues in educational leadership in the us: evidence of a backlash? international studies in educational administration, 33(2), 31-42. young, m. d., mcleod, s. (2001). flukes, opportunities, and planned interventions: factors affecting women's decisions to become school administrators. educational administration quarterly, 37(4), 462-502. biography dr. jafeth e. sanchez recently completed her ph.d. in educational leadership, with a focus on higher education administration at the university of nevada, reno. she is currently a mathematics teacher in nevada’s washoe county school district. dr. bill thornton is associate professor and chair in the department of educational leadership at the university of nevada, reno. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, summer 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        factors influencing career choice for women in science, mathematics, and technology: the importance of a transforming experience leslie m. besecke and anne h. reilly loyola university chicago an earlier version of this paper was presented at the retaining women in early academic science, mathematics, engineering, and technology careers conference, iowa state university, october 2002 abstract             organizations in the business sector, as well as government and academia, continue to demand intelligent professionals trained in science, mathematics, and technology.  this paper explores factors that may influence women’s initial choices to pursue careers in these fields.  in addition to the many well-established factors that guide an individual’s career choice, we propose that women who choose careers in science and technology have a subset of common early experiences that encourage them to pursue a career path still regarded as contrary to traditional gender roles for women.  for many women, this common background is a transforming experience that supports their career choice in science, mathematics, and technology.  this transforming experience is composed of personal contact with a role model and often an intimate involvement with the process that serves as an invitation into the world of scientific inquiry.  the researchers outline a model for women’s career selection in these nontraditional fields, and our results suggest some recommendations for increasing the numbers of women in these careers. factors influencing career choice for women in science, mathematics, and technology: the importance of a transforming experience “we live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”                                                                                                         --  carl sagan, american scientist, 1934-1996             scientific and technological progress is one of the key engines upon which our economy and culture depend for the continually improving standard of living enjoyed by much of western society.  whether leading to unprecedented space exploration, access to the human genome, or simply faster and better consumer products, scientific discoveries  and the scientific method that drives them occupy a place of respect and importance in our society and in the marketplace.  similarly, those pursuing science as a career, including researchers, physicians, and engineers, have access to information that can make valuable differences in human lives.  in addition, they often enjoy commensurate access to higher pay and higher standards of living associated with such careers (u.s. department of labor, 2004a).  unfortunately, equal participation in and contribution to careers in science by all those with the greatest ability and interest, regardless of gender or race, has not yet been achieved. for decades, women have been greatly underrepresented in science, mathematics, and technology careers (national science foundation, 2003).  tables 1 and 2 present some selected summary statistics for degrees granted and annual earnings among the u.s. workforce for 2002, categorized by gender, field of study, and occupation.  as these tables show, although women earn the majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees granted in these fields overall (u.s. department of education, 2003), the number of women currently employed as natural scientists, engineers, and math and computer scientists remain a significant minority (national science foundation, 2003; u.s. department of labor, 2004b).  in fact, the u.s. department of labor has defined these careers to be among those that are nontraditional choices for women.  furthermore, as table 2 shows, women in these occupations, plus science technicians, earn less than men in every category.  table 1 also illustrates that the percentage of doctorates awarded to women is below 30% for computer and information scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and physical scientists and technicians, although these are among the fastest growing industries in the u.s. economy (u.s. department of labor, 2004b). proficiency and interest in the sciences are similar for boys and girls in the u.s. at age 9, but a significant gender gap begins to appear by age 13, as measured by mean scores on the naep mathematics assessment (u.s. department of education, 2000).  by 12th grade, males consistently have more positive attitudes than females about mathematics and science (u.s. department of education, 2000).  turner and bowen’s 1999 study of college-age men and women concluded that a widening divide exists between the life sciences and math/physical science in terms of relative career attractiveness to men and women, in that women are actually slightly overrepresented in a survey of intended majors for incoming college freshman in the field of biology but are at least two to https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html threefold less interested in choosing engineering, computer sciences, or technical majors than were men.  however, even in science fields where the number of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees awarded has reached parity, such as biology (u.s. department of education, 2003), it is clear that increases in numbers of women beginning or completing scientific training are not translating into equality of long-term participation in scientific careers.  salaries for women graduates with science degrees are significantly lower than men with similar credentials (see tables 1 and 2). individual female scientists, their employers, and the u.s. economy as a whole are all greatly affected by the under representation of women in science and technology related careers.  on an individual basis, table 2 illustrates that fewer women than men enter these high paying fields, and those women who do earn less than their male counterparts.  a “leaking pipeline” metaphor (hanson, 1996) is useful in describing the obstacles that work against women’s persistence in science related careers, such as fewer job opportunities and the constraints of balancing career and family.  from a more macro perspective, the underrepresentation of women in scientific and technological careers, coupled with the "leaking pipeline" out of those careers, means that organizations and the u.s. economy as a whole are unable to access the potential talent and skills of the female half of the general population.  simply put, companies are not maximizing their use of the available skilled labor pool.  in an economic era characterized by ever-increasing competition, this gender inequity is a critical waste of financial and intellectual resources.  furthermore, the paucity of women's voices in these careers has allowed science to develop without the full input from all of human experience, and, as an institution, it suffers because of this. the purpose of this study is to explore some key factors that influence women’s initial career choices into scientific fields in the business, government, and academic sectors of employment.  in particular, the role of early enriching experiences and mentoring relationships will be examined as a positive influence on women’s selection and success in science, math, and technology (american association of university women, 2004; norby, 1997).  in addition to the many well-established factors that help to guide an individual’s career choice, women who choose careers in scientific fields have a subset of common early experiences that encourage them to pursue a career path still regarded as contrary to traditional gender roles for women.  for many women, these early events represent a transforming experience that introduces the girl or woman to science as an opportunity for her.  this transforming experience is composed of personal contact with a mentor or role model and often an intimate involvement with the scientific process that serves as an invitation into the world of scientific inquiry.  the researchers propose a model for women’s career selection in these nontraditional fields and discuss the implications for increasing the numbers of women in science, mathematics, and technology careers. career choices for women in science, mathematics, and technology efforts to understand the driving forces behind the underrepresentation of women in the sciences have considered a variety of factors that may impact career choice.  for example, studies have examined gender differences relating to academic performance and preparation at the high school, college, and graduate levels (american association of university women, 1998; u.s. department of labor, 2004b) access to educational and career resources both in and outside the classroom (american association of university women, 2004), and retention of women interested in science careers while in the “leaking pipeline” (brush, 1991; hanson, 1996) during the training period and in their early jobs. significant social, personality, and social psychological differences have been identified for women pursuing traditional versus nontraditional careers for females.  for example, lemkau’s (1983) comprehensive review of the personality and background of women in male-dominated occupations reports that these women have high levels of maternal employment and unusual opportunities to witness a wide range of male and female work models.  lemkau’s respondents frequently report having been encouraged and supported in pursuing higher education and masculine as well as feminine endeavors.  in a longitudinal study spanning ten years, mills (1997) found that personality traits, when added to high mathematics ability, increased the probability that young women would pursue a career in science or mathematics. individual intelligence and academic proficiency are clearly associated with success in science, math, and technology fields (mau, 2003; mills, 1997; nauta, epperson, & kahn, 1998).   women in science tend to be independent and emotionally stable with a high need for achievement and a high academic and social self-esteem (lobel, agami-rozenblat, & bempechat, 1993).  chatterjee and mccarrey’s 1991 study presented data in which sex-role attitudes were examined in women in both sex-typical and non-sex-typical fields.  their data indicated a higher autonomy score and a less sex-typed self-concept in women in nontraditional fields. according to mortimer, dennehy, and lee (1992), parental education level had the most effect on the educational plans and occupational aspirations of adolescents.  lemkau’s (1983) research suggests that women in nontraditional occupations have more frequently experienced family environments enriched by varied models in which they were stimulated to explore an unusually broad range of behaviors and career options.  these women were more likely to report the positive influence of men, including fathers and male teachers, while women pursuing sex-typical careers reported more female influences, but this effect may be a reflection of the status of women in these careers at the time of lemkau’s work.  research by norby (1997) suggests that having a family member employed in a science or technology-related career was an important factor in influencing women’s career choices in these areas. scholarly publications and the popular press alike have argued for the importance of mentoring and hands-on experience as strategies for retaining women science, mathematics, and engineering majors (e.g., "women in science say mentors are crucial,” chicago tribune, fitzgerald, 2002; "balancing the equation," national council for research on women, 2001).  research by ragins and cotton (1999) found that protégés, especially females who are informally mentored, are more satisfied with their mentors, receive more career help, and enjoy more psychosocial benefits in terms of friendship, social support, role modeling, and acceptance. the transforming experience             in this paper, we propose the importance of a transforming experience in encouraging girls and women to pursue careers in science and technology.  we define this transforming experience broadly: important and path-setting interactions with role models and mentors, which can include individual intervention, counseling, laboratory projects, the opportunity to interact with scientists, and personal relationships.  these transforming experiences have a dynamic role in fostering the confidence and perseverance necessary for girls to make and then act on their initial choice towards science or technology.  for example, with the encouragement of a mentor a girl might be able to challenge family or personal gender stereotypes or surmount external obstacles, such as classroom harassment, to reach her goal of a career in science.  method the first author contacted 33 individuals employed across the united states and invited them to participate in this field study.  the response rate was 91%, yielding a sample of 30 respondents aged 26 to 46 who are currently working in scientific fields.  twenty were women and 10 were men.  although a convenience sample, the respondents were chosen to maximize diversity.  thus, they included ph.d.'s, master’s, and bachelor's degreed scientists in different career stages employed in academic, industrial, and governmental sectors across various scientific disciplines.  ethnic backgrounds included the united states, india, south africa, and china. table 3 summarizes the structured interview questions, which focused on having respondents recall how they were introduced to science and what influences they felt helped them choose science as a career.   over a three-month period, the first author conducted these individual interviews using an e-mail dialogue format.  on average, the e-mail dialogues lasted 30 minutes.  the e-mail interview format allowed the researchers both to contact scientists across the united states and to allow the study participants to respond in a convenient format. printed e-mail texts provided transcriptions of these qualitative data.  the first author analyzed the contents of the 30 transcripts, searching for shared key themes.  the second author then compared a sample of the transcripts with the content analysis to check consistency in coding.  the key themes identified in the interview transcripts are summarized in table 4. while the ability to generalize from 30 respondents is of course limited, table 4 illustrates some intriguing factors that appear to influence career choice in science and technology. results and discussion             as table 4 illustrates, the data identified three broad categories of career influences.  first, the specific role that families play in encouraging women to pursue science education and science careers may be composed both of support for girls' interest in the sciences, but also the absence of discouragement for disciplines and careers that are nontraditional for girls and women.  second, innate personality variables and their expression, such as high need for achievement, play a part in influencing the choice of a scientific or technical career.  third, the importance of transforming experiences in affecting a science career choice, including interactions with role models, mentors, and individualized encouragement and counseling, was underscored throughout the e-mail dialogues.             parental and family influence. in general, women with careers in science reported very little direct parental influence in their choice of science as a career.  in fact, most women suggested that their parents were supportive of them and their education in general, but that they did not do anything in particular to encourage or discourage science and math careers over any other.  as one female professor of zoology reported, "they didn’t play much of a role...neither went to college...they were just ecstatic i attended college.  they don’t understand what i do, but are extremely proud and supportive of my educational goals.”  although many researchers have linked early family influence to career choice, it is possible that what is actually important for girls pursuing science careers is the more generalized support from parents and the absence of gender-stereotyped discouragement that may be at the core of how families help foster interest in science and science careers (norby, 1997).  in contrast, all ten of the male scientists surveyed reported having a parent who was employed as a scientist and also being steered into science careers and away from others perceived as less financially rewarding.             personality variables. our e-mail dialogues tended to support the personality variables reported in the literature as associated with women's career choice into scientific jobs (e.g., mau, 2003; mills, 1997).  for example, a common theme that emerged was the high math/science proficiency coupled with the high need for achievement required for success as a scientist.  one academic biologist noted, “i think this notion of science as a difficult field may keep girls from pursuing it.  after all, there truly are easier (and more lucrative) ways to make a living.”  an endocrinologist reported, “i could work 20 hours a day seven days a week and there would still be things i don’t understand or know.  this can be frustrating and difficult given the many other demands on women’s time and energy.”  several women respondents also noted the importance of strengthening academic and social self-esteem, especially given the perception of science as a nontraditional career choice for women (lobel et al., 1993).  according to one woman doctor in our sample, “i think girls need to receive more positive encouragement in very specific ways.  lack of confidence is a major obstacle.  the notion that boys are better with laboratory equipment is also damaging to girls.”  an academic researcher commented, in retrospect, i was not confident about my intellect or abilities, but i was always an excellent student.  now i know this is a common experience for a girl, especially in adolescence.  at the time, however, it didn’t occur to me that i was bright and capable of pursuing any of a number of career options.             role model influence and enriching experiences. the data supported the importance of a role model/mentor and an enriching experience sometime in high school or college (nauta et al., 1998).  in general, men recalled being talented and interested in nature and science courses; a career in that field, according to a male engineer, “naturally followed.”  in contrast, 17 of the 20 women respondents were able to name key teachers and professors as well as detail the specifics of their interactions, which included independent study opportunities, individualized encouragement, and counseling.  the women all attributed their science preparation, interest in science, and career aspirations to these interactions.  a female biomedical researcher noted, “it was my undergraduate advisor, dr. s-...she was so supportive and demanding and the first person to suggest to me i might have a special aptitude.”  these results support earlier research emphasizing the importance of individual mentoring experiences between teacher and student in the sciences (american association of university women, 2004). the case for the importance of a transforming experience these reported differences between women’s and men’s career choice influences may, in part, be due to recall and reporting differences, since it is likely that men had similar opportunities for mentoring and independent study.  what seems clear is that for women, these interactions were important enough to serve as a transforming experience for them as they were choosing careers.  the detail and language used in describing these interactions are vivid and concrete, even decades later.  one woman physician recalled, i had a science teacher in grade school (italics added) who made science fun...he staged a rubber band fight in the class, explaining that when a rubber band was drawn and ready to shoot it had potential energy...when it was released, that potential energy was converted to kinetic energy. the fact that in many cases the mentoring relationships continue to the present also underscores the relative importance these happenings have for these women.  according to a female medical researcher,  i worked in beth d’s lab as a college senior...and unconsciously i clung to her because the mere presence of a successful woman in science was a novel image in my experience and obviously filled a void...she’s still one of my biggest supporters, even ten years after college. many examples of such transforming events were evident throughout the e-mail dialogues in this study among these women who have pursued science careers and seem satisfied thus far in their career choices.  another woman scientist stated,  my high school biology teacher was instrumental in sparking my interest in biology.  i decided as a junior after taking anatomy that this is what i wanted to study in college.  choosing research as a career came in college because of another great professor who became my advisor and whose lab i did my honors project. this study’s results support the findings of evetts’ (1998) work: the influence of mentors, teachers, and other transforming events during graduate training and even earlier in high school may be gender differentiated.  women tend to report receiving support, encouragement, or special attention or interest that helped them in the pursuit of a scientific career, whereas, as evetts reports, the men interviewed did not refer to such sources of influence. obstacles for women in science, mathematics, and technology             the researchers’ interview results also provide some thought-provoking data concerning the obstacles encountered by women choosing to pursue these nontraditional career paths.  both men and women respondents agreed that there are many obstacles that hinder girls from entering and staying in science careers.  the interview data ranged from simple comments saying "science is male dominated” to more reflective responses.  women in science, math, and technology face many of the same hurdles confronted by women in other nontraditional fields, including lack of support from male colleagues, competition and power struggles, and rigid, traditional corporate cultures (mau, 2003; evetts, 1998; norby, 1997).  one of the male scientists in our sample explained, science is very similar to corporate america in that it's very much a boys' club.  for the most part, it seems to be a relatively small group of fat cats helping each other out and taking turns scratching each other's backs.  they have their traditions and rules, with the purpose of keeping power exclusively to themselves.  as a man, the benefit is that the doors open easier, it's easier to be taken seriously, and you enter with some measure of respect already granted to you.  i'm not saying that this is right.  there is nothing more unfair than women having to fight for what is normally just given to men….hard work does not pay off in this world, it's all in who you know and even more importantly, if they like you….i'm sure that as bad as it is for a man, it's a million times harder for a woman.             in addition to the "old boys' network,” our study respondents also noted the perception of science as an isolated, demanding, and inflexible career as an impediment to this career choice.   a female neuroscientist commented, i believe that one of the greatest obstacles to girls entering the sciences lies in the presentation of science.  if more teachers presented science in a fun way, i think more girls would go into the field.  perhaps more exposure to women scientists would help.  also, i would say that companies need to make it easier for women to be both mothers and scientists by being more flexible and not staying with the 50-plus hour a week mentality. this respondent is touching on another likely obstacle to girls:  careers in science are demanding, and it can be difficult to envision the balancing of multiple roles (i.e. mother, spouse) within the context of a science career. another academic researcher also touched upon the issue of science's "image": girls need to see that science involves a great deal of interaction and is not simply about collecting data.  analyzing that data, discussing it with colleagues, and presenting it is an exciting part of science as well.  i think much of the population is under the misunderstanding that science is separate from the rest of the culture, which is, of course, absurd. the impression that science is devoid of relevance or cooperative interpersonal interaction can be another large obstacle for recruitment of girls into science (brush, 1991). suggesting a career choice model          a model outlining key factors involved in science and technology career choice emerges from this discussion and may be generalizable to other career choices in nontraditional fields for women.  figure 1 outlines this proposed model.  girls and women pursuing scientific careers (and, perhaps, other nontraditional careers for women) need to include key gender-related variables, at least while women are still a visible minority in the field.  family characteristics include a low degree of gender stereotyping, in addition to parental support and active encouragement for nontraditional careers, while personality variables that are important are high self-esteem and high need for achievement.             the figure 1 model illustrates that while many factors are important in career choice, the transforming experience plays a central role in influencing girls and women to select a career in science, mathematics, and technology.  in our model, this transforming experience is defined as important and pathsetting interactions with role models and mentors, which include individual interventions, counseling, laboratory projects, and personal relationships.  even when most other factors (such as scientific aptitude and family encouragement) are present, a transforming experience (perhaps at several stages including high school, college, and/or graduate school) may yield the confidence and perseverance necessary for the initial choice towards science to be made and acted upon.  a transforming experience also affects the other inputs and the double-headed arrows in the model indicate this. for example, with the encouragement of a mentor, a girl might be able to challenge family or personal gender stereotypes, surmount external obstacles, or confront classroom harassment to reach her goal of a career in science. implications and recommendations this study investigated some key factors that influence women's initial career choices into scientific fields.  in particular, the role of early enriching experiences and/or mentoring relationships emerged as a positive influence on women's selection and success in scientific and technical fields.  while our research is limited by its reliance on past experiences and hindsight as well as sample size, some interesting issues emerged, which have some important implications for organizations seeking to encourage the development and retention of women scientists and technologists. first, girls should be given early opportunities to develop exposure to and confidence in their abilities in science-related activities. lower confidence in one's ability to understand and partake in science courses is the beginning of girls and women underestimating their abilities and opting out of science as a career.  along with eliminating the well-documented sex biases that exist in classrooms and guidance counselor offices, some girls may benefit from single sex classrooms when studying math and science (american association of university women, 1998).  turner and bowen (1999) found a higher proportion of women in mathematics and physical sciences at women’s colleges as compared to coeducational institutions. second, there may be a misunderstanding among the general population as to the activities involved in science and science careers.  brush (1991) noted that scientists may be stereotyped as extremely bright but socially awkward (“nerds”); he argued further that when women scientists are featured in the popular press, they are often portrayed as atypical scientists and atypical women.  a public relations campaign for science and technology may be necessary, both to illustrate the full breadth of possibility, opportunity, and power of a science career, as well as to demonstrate its real-world applications and relevance to human health and life. finally, our study results suggest that it is imperative for all students, but particularly girls, to have the opportunity for enriching and transforming experiences related to science.  the intervention of key figures appears to be a major influence for girls pursuing nontraditional fields in general, and science fields in particular, at least until equity has been achieved in what are now nontraditional fields for women (see american association for university women, 2004).  in addition to equity in the classroom and awareness of stereotypes, girls need hands-on experiments, role models and mentors, special encouragement, and opportunities to meet scientists and to see the interactive process of scientific explorations and discovery. teachers and professors can help through encouraging girls' participation in clubs, field trips, and science correspondents (i.e., pen pals).  parents can facilitate science-related opportunities by such activities as networking with family and friend scientists, vacation activities, and camp opportunities. one example of a program that is attempting to correct the deficit of role models in daily life for girls and young women is the role model project for girls, which provides examples of women professionals in a wide range of nontraditional careers and is available on cd-rom and at their web site (womenswork.org).  many universities participate in the women in science and engineering research (wiser) program, a research program aimed at women undergraduates.  wiser was created in 1993, specifically as a means to stop the “leaking pipeline” and retain women college students in science and engineering.  another example of a business role model group is women in apprenticeships and non-traditional occupations (wanto), which serves as a resource for internships, field trips, and mentors for individual women and as a consultant to businesses interested in recruiting and retaining highly-skilled women in such nontraditional occupations.   references american association of university women. (1998). separated by sex: a critical look at             single sex education for girls.  washington, dc: author. american association of university women educational foundation. (2004). under the microscope: a decade of gender equity projects in the sciences.  washington, dc: author. brush, s. g. (1991).  women in science and engineering.  american scientist, 79, 404-419. chatterjee, j., & mccarrey, m. (1991). sex-role attitudes, values and instrumentalexpressive traits of women trainees in traditional vs. nontraditional programmes.              applied psychology: an international review, 40(3), 281-297. evetts, j. (1998).  gender and career in science and engineering. london: taylor &             francis. fitzgerald, j. (2002).  women in science say mentors are crucial. (2002, may 29). chicago tribune. 2002. hanson, s. l. (1996).  lost talent: women in the sciences.  philadelphia: temple  university press. lemkau, j. p. (1983).  women in male-dominated professions: distinguishing personality             and background characteristics.  psychology of women quarterly,8, 144-165. lobel, t. e., agami-rozenblat, o., & bempechat, j. (1993).  personality correlates of  career choice in the kibbutz:  a comparison between career and noncareer women. sex roles, 29(5-6), 359-370. mau, w. c. (2003, march).  factors that influence persistence in science and engineering career aspirations.  career development quarterly, 51, 234-243. mills, c. j. (1997).  gender differences in mathematics and science achievement: the role of personality variables.  research report 1999, johns hopkins university: center for talented youth. mortimer, j. t., dennehy, k., & lee, c. (1992).  influences on adolescents' vocational development.  berkeley, ca: national center for research in vocational education. (ed 352 555). nauta, m. m., epperson, d. l., & kahn, j. h. (1998).  a multiple groups analysis of predictors of higher level career aspirations among women in mathematics, science, and engineering majors.  journal of counseling psychology, 45, 483-496. national council for research on women. (2001). balancing the equation: where are  women and girls in science, engineering, and technology? new york: author. national science foundation, division of science resources statistics (2003).  science  and engineering doctorate awards: 2002. (nsf 04-303). arlington, va: project  officer, susan t. hill. norby, r. f.  (1997).  evaluating progress in gender equity in careers for women in science and technology: the impact of role models on women’s career choices.  electronic journal of science education, 1(3).  retrieved march 2005, from http://www.unr.edu/homepage/jcannon/ejse/norby ragins, b. r., & cotton, j. (1999). mentor functions and outcomes: a comparison of men and women in formal and informal mentoring relationships. journal of appliedpsychology, 84(4), 529-550. turner, s. e., & bowen, w. g. (1999). choice of major: the changing (unchanging)  gender gap.  industrial and labor relations review, 59(2), 289-313. u.s. department of education, national center for educational statistics (2000).  trends in educational equity of girls and women (nces 2000-030). washington, dc: u.s. government printing office. u.s. department of education, national center for educational statistics (2003).  digest of education statistics, 2003.  retrieved march 2005, from http://www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d03/tables u.s. department of labor, bureau of labor statistics. (2004a, september). highlights of women’s earnings in  2002 (report 972).  retrieved march 2005, from http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom2002 u.s. department of labor, women’s bureau. (2004b, april 14).  nontraditional occupations for women in 2003. retrieved march 2005, from http://www.dol.gov/wb/2003       table 1 number of degrees conferred by u.s. institutions, 2001-02                                                     bachelors                         masters                          doctoral       degrees total % to women total % to women total % to women total, all fields 1,291,900 57.4 482,118 58.7 44,160 46.3 biological/life sciences 60,256 60.1 6,205 57.8 4,489 44.3 computer/ information sciences 47,299 27.6 16,113 33.3 750 22.8 engineering 73,964 18.9 26,920 21.4 5,210 17.2 mathematics 12,395 46.7 3,487 42.4 958 29.0 physical sciences/science technologies 17,851 42.2 5,034 37.6 3,803 28.0 data adapted from u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics, 2003 table 2 full-time workers in u.s. and weekly earnings, 2002 annual averages full-time workers number of workers (in 000s) percent women median weekly earnings women’s earnings as % of men’s total, 16 years & older 100,204 43.7 $609 78.1 engineers 1,889 10.9 $1,161 85.6 math & computer scientists 1,808 30.4 $1,096 81.1 natural scientists 475 34.9 $958 85.7 technicians & related support 3,660 50.1 $694 70.3 data adapted from u.s. department of labor, bureau of labor statistics, report 972, september 2004 table 3 structured interview questions 1. why did you decide to pursue a career in science? 2. how would you rate the role of your family/parents in your decision? 3. were there other influences on your choice to pursue a career in science? 4. how early was your first interest in or exposure to science? 5. do you remember any special experiences that helped to influence your career decision? 6. do you see any obstacles to recruiting more girls/women entering and staying in science careers? 7. what other careers had you considered other than science? 8. what are the greatest benefits and drawbacks to a career in science for you as a woman/man? table 4 content analysis results: key factors influencing women’s career choice of science, math, technology                key factors              description parental and family variables general support for choices absence of discouragement for nontraditional career personality variables strong math/science aptitude high need for achievement high academic and social self-esteem less sex-typed self-concept experiential variables (the transforming experience) mentors and role models enriching opportunities: laboratory work, independent studies exposure to broad range of career choices figure 1.  a model of career choice for women in science, mathematics, and technology.   leslie m. besecke and anne h. reilly loyola university chicago 820 n. michigan avenue chicago, il 60611 312-915-6537 (office) 312-915-6988 (fax) areilly@luc.edu an earlier version of this paper was presented at the retaining women in early academic science, mathematics, engineering, and technology careers conference, iowa state university, october 2002   copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com volume 41, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell assistant editor: jordan donop 38 advancing women in leadership vol. 41, pp. 37-49, 2022 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the essential leadership skills for women leaders in the age of industry 4.0 szufang chuang & barbara a. w. eversole szufang chuang, indiana state university, associate professor, szufang.chuang@indstate.edu barbara a. w. eversole, indiana state university, professor, barbara.eversole@indstate.edu accepted: november 22, 2022 abstract: the researchers summarized and synthesized research evidence on different women’s leadership characteristics and behaviors from men and identified essential women’s leadership competencies that are necessary to address the new challenges of today’s workplace and the paradigm shifts for women leaders to remain competitive in industry 4.0. recent neuroscience and social science research findings regarding women’s leadership characteristics and behaviors were reviewed and discussed. critical leadership traits, abilities, and skills for (international) business success were discussed. six essential women’s leadership skill sets for industry 4.0 were proposed to provide human resource development practitioners a framework for women leadership development and promoting gender equality in workplace. some unique women’s traits such as sensing, listening, accepting, approaching, collaborating, supporting, and encouraging, can be women leaders’ strengths in the tech-driven workplace. finally, implications for human resource development and recommendations for future research were provided. keywords: essential leadership skills, women’s traits, women as leaders, women’s leadership development, industry 4. as our workforce demographic changes, there are challenges that come with organizational diversity and inclusion initiatives and technology innovation in the workplace. the large number of retiring mature workers, known as the silver tsunami, creates issues of talent shortages in the workplace; yet the other group of mature workers who prefer to work longer for self-actualization or financial reasons also creates challenges of a multigenerational workforce for managers and leaders (tamburo, 2020). according to the u.s. bureau of labor statistics (2021), the labor force of people ages 75 and older is projected to grow 96.5 percent by 2030. in addition, technological advancement increases opportunities and needs for highand low-skilled jobs with none-routine and unpredictable pattern of tasks but replaces middle-skilled jobs using routine manual tasks – known as job polarization (cirillo, 2018; gallie, 2017). the current progression of industry 4.0, also the 4th industrial revolution, drives companies to upgrade and fully automate their manufacturing systems and to upskill their employees and leaders (kasapoğlu, 2018). these modern phenomena have reformed business models and produced an aging, diverse, machine-paced, and skill polarized workplace that may redefine and create different demands for essential leadership skills for managers and leaders. leaders are facing challenges of preparing workers for new skills and job changes to align initiatives with new business models and organization’s strategic direction. also, to retain talent workers and ensure their productivity, developing and sustaining engagement of remote workers require advanced consulting and leadership skills from managers. after examining the effect of industry 4.0 on employment, job outlook, work structure, and human resource development (hrd), chuang and graham (2018) noted combined challenges of a skill-polarized workplace, a tendency of technological unemployment for those positioned in middleskill jobs, and an increased demand for employees with a higher level of human skills. given the challenges of the skill-polarized workplace, job changes, technology unemployment, and new meaning of work to lead in industry 4.0, additional constrains make it harder for women to succeed in leadership positions. in 2019, about 41 percent of managers were women, a number that has remained relatively flat since 1990, who still remain underrepresented in management positions (u.s. bureau of labor statistics, 2022). the number is even worse in the executive suite: only 5% of the global 500 is run by a woman (hinchliffe, 2022). although a sufficient number of women is highly educated and qualified to participate in global organizations, there are still barriers and challenges confronting women in leadership and management positions in business, government, and university sectors (haile et al., 2016). there have been many efforts to promote gender equality in the workplace. yet, research evidence has shown a long-term effect of underrepresentation of women (students) in stem industries (adams & kirchmaier, 2016), and considerations of senior leader selection and development still vary by gender across the globe (gipson et al., 2017; cuadrado et al., 2015). for example, in china, horak and cui (2017) revealed significant evidence of better organizational mailto:szufang.chuang@indstate.edu mailto:barbara.eversole@indstate.edu 39 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 performance and competitiveness with women on corporate boards; however, gender inequity remained on the boards in the automotive industry. in 2020, only a third of worldwide corporate boards had at least three women members (milhomem, 2020). via a systematic literature review over 345 publications between 2000 and 2015, kalaitzi et al. (2017) discovered that “leadership skills” is on the top 10 list of 26 identified women’s leadership barriers. research has provided evidence of lacking development of leadership skills for college students and women faculty in leadership positions (acker, 2010; kodama & dugan, 2013). from an organizational development perspective, women’s continued development and participation in leadership positions can enhance diversity in the workplace and promote organizational success. as women’s leadership roles and responsibilities expand, their quality performance and efficiency will be more visible in highly competitive and rapidly changing workplaces (coleman, 2010). it is critical to find out their needs, barriers, and unique qualities that differentiate them from men and make the differences beneficial to their organization and job performance. while industry 4.0 reforms the business model, operation, system, and strategy globally, securing effective leadership skills for woman managers should be considered as a strategic hrd approach for organizational competitive advantages. after all, having diverse gender mangers at the top level promotes organizational growth (seo et al., 2017). because of the ongoing gender gap in top leadership positions, a new perspective of essential leadership skills from women’s perspective to cope with workplace changes by advanced technology is needed. this conceptual paper aims to provide new insights and perspectives on the woman leadership competence puzzle and identify essential women’s leadership skills for organizational success in industry 4.0. the paper is expected to (a) provide evidence and practical information that will facilitate organizations helping women in developing essential leadership competencies for industry 4.0 transformation, (b) contribute to the literature in gender, leadership, and organization development/culture change, and (c) explore whether and how women may well be uniquely positioned to lead in industry 4.0. therefore, the construction of this paper will first focus on the current understanding of women’s qualities and behaviors in leadership roles. next, we will discuss the critical perspectives on leadership skills for success in industry 4.0 transformation in general. finally, based on the two phases, we will propose essential woman leadership competencies in industry 4.0. sex differences: women’s qualities and behaviors in leadership roles in this paper, leadership is “the behaviors and qualities of persons in formally designated leadership positions” (powell, 2014, p. 249). this section focuses on the gendered nature of leadership and leadership qualities and behaviors of women based on significant findings from neuroscience and social science research. gendered nature of leadership clow and ricciardelli (2011) noted the three theoretical lenses that pertain to gender inequality in leadership: social role theory (eagly et al., 2000), stereotype content model (fiske, et al., 2002), and ambivalent sexism (glick & fiske, 2001). eagly and koenig (2008) noted that role theory and stereotypes that women are interested in community and are empathetic conflicts with the role stereotypes prevalent in the world of management. women are also more interpersonal, while men are more taskoriented (eagly & karau, 1991). since more men than women are leaders, role incongruity theory explains why women are perceived as being less effective than men as leaders (eagly & koenig, 2008; patterson et al., 2012). in fact, even when women leaders adopt the same behaviors as men, they are still viewed as ineffective, as they threaten gender stereotypes (rudman & fairchild, 2004; mavin, et al., 2017). all this leads to discrimination against women leaders (clow & ricciardelli, 2011). it is important to note that women’s barriers to reach their leadership potential are global. in south africa, woman managers tend to deploy transformational, democratic, and people-oriented leadership styles and experience barriers related to gender stereotype, a lack of confidence to achieve success, family responsibilities, and a lack of networking skills (maseko & proches, 2013). in spain, gender stereotypes was also found in a perceived expectation of exhibiting woman traits in women leadership (cuadrado et al., 2015). in south korea, cho et al. (2016) discovered robust findings on women leaders’ work-life imbalance and barrier in leadership development because of a gendered workplace. similar findings on women leadership barriers were supported by kalaitzi et al.’s (2017) study in healthcare, academia, and business. these research findings indicate that women leaders tend to exhibit different leadership styles from men and generally experience barriers caused by gender stereotypes and roles. women lead differently from but effectively as men using measures of leadership effectiveness, such as the multifactor leadership questionnaire (mlq), studies have found no difference between genders (yan et al., 2018; stempel & rigotti, 2018; qiu & dooley, 2018). there are more similarities in leadership behaviors than differences between men and women executives versus non-executives, such as decisiveness, assertiveness, and strategic thinking (wille et al., 2018). however, javidan et al. (2016) discovered different global leadership strengths between men (who demonstrated superior interpersonal impact, global business savvy and cosmopolitan outlook) and women (who excelled in diversity, diplomacy, and intercultural empathy). shaked et al. (2019) concluded that women principals utilized an instructional leadership approach characterized by instructional expertise and attention to relationships more often than men. in another study, women leaders were found to favor clement leadership behaviors on an instrument – the paternalistic leadership questionnaire (paleq) – while men favored authoritarian 40 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 behaviors (zbihlejovia et al., 2018). clement leadership behaviors included care for subordinates and their well-being, while authoritarian behaviors utilized power and control and required obedience. these results mirror those found by a metaanalysis done by eagly et al. (2003) of 45 studies, which found that women were more effective than men on transformational measures of management. these scientific research findings confirm that, in general, genders lead differently. women’s barriers in leadership role and development a consistent finding on women’s barriers in leadership is lack of confidence. paustian-underdahl et al. (2014) reported that women were rated as significantly more effective than men in leadership by others, but less effective than men in self-ratings. sheppard (2018) and koohang and hatch (2017) also discovered that women scored significantly higher on leadership effectiveness but considered themselves to have less leadership ability than men and viewed themselves as less likely to become leaders. these findings reveal that women tend to suffer from a lack of confidence in their leadership effectiveness. this low self-assurance can affect women’s performance evaluations and opportunities for promotion to higher level management positions (harvey, 2015). similar finding on the confidence gap between genders could also be found in other research in united kingdom (howe-walsh & turnbull, 2016), south africa (maseko & proches, 2013), and united states (sin, 2016) that often restricts women’s opportunities for career advancement. the issue of low confidence among women is universal and should be addressed for their leadership career development. a notable exception to this is a specific gendered role model coined the “female hero” by adamson and kelan (2019). this role model has the “confidence to jump over gendered barriers” (adamson & kelan, 2019, p. 983). another common phenomenon impacting the leadership gap is the glass cliff – a result of hostile sexism (acar & sumer, 2018; ryan et al., 2016). the glass cliff is the phenomenon where women are placed in risky top leadership positions more often than men. harassment and social role conflict limits the number of women in top leadership positions (hubbard, 2018). in a study using indirect questioning techniques, hoffman and musch (2019) found that both women and men were more prejudiced against women leaders than self-reports would indicate. another experimental study on effective leadership between genders, women were rated less positively and rewarded less than leader of men (grossman et al., 2019). sexism has been and will continually affect women in their leadership role and advancement. women’s brains action patterns why women see and do things differently from men may be explained through a neuroscience lens. neuroscientific studies demonstrated that one’s emotion, thought processes, learning, memory, and moral decisions are affected by the biology of sex differences in cognitive function (li, 2014; ryan, 2017). recent studies in cognitive neuroscience have examined gender differences in brain activation patterns and concluded gender differences in justice evaluation (dulebohn et al., 2016), attitudes about online advertising (goodrich, 2014), responses to novel and valenced material (andreano et al., 2014), ethical decision-making (ryan, 2017), information processing (bhaduri & ha-brookshire, 2015), and multitasking (tschernegg et al., 2017). even though recent empirical research discovered that genders are found to be less different in sequential (i.e., task switching) and concurrent (i.e., dual tasking) multitasking, the research finding was generated by controlling all possible gender differences in working memory, processing speed, spatial abilities, and fluid intelligence (hirsch et al., 2019). specifically, women have more persistent amygdala responses to familiar, negative material which leads to a potential vulnerability contributing to affective disorder and predicts self-reported anxiety and depression (andreano et al., 2014). generally, women perform better on object location or recognition and verbal memory tasks (li, 2014). for example, women are generally better at remembering faces (herlitz & loven, 2013) and outperformed men on word attention and social cognition tests (ingalhalikar et al., 2014). in more recent research, tschernegg et al. (2017) assessed sex-related differences in brain function with multitasking and confirmed that women demonstrated increased activation in functional networks (the inferior frontal gyrus) for verbal dual-tasking. these findings are supported by amen et al.’s (2017) discovery on how women’s brains are significantly more active in the limbic (emotional areas) and the hippocampus (memory area), which may explain why women tend to exhibit more empathy, intuition, and collaboration. new research on facial recognition and processing facial expressions has shed light on why women’s abilities surpass those of men; women are actually processing information on a subconscious, unattended level (zhang et al., 2018). women’s information processing the literature shows that genders are different in information processing and evaluation, and the differences are influenced by both biological and socialization factors (aragon-mendoza et al., 2016; bhaduri & ha-brookshire, 2015; costa et al., 2001; goodrich, 2014; meyers-levy, 1989). women are comprehensive processors who are more likely to process information elaborately, seek association between their selfgenerated and outside information, and evaluate all available information before reaching a judgment (bhaduri & habrookshire, 2015; goodrich, 2014). women’s problem solving problem solving is a method, a procedure, and an attempt to recognize, explain, assess, and resolve a gap between a preexisting condition and a goal (khan et al., 2016). empirical research systematically reports gender differences in problemsolving process, style, and skill (burnett et al, 2016; ekici, 2016; görücü & cantav, 2017; hardy & gibson, 2015). specifically, women were found exhibiting greater levels of creative problemsolving (hardy & gibson, 2015) and positive perceptions of the 41 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 general problem-solving process (ekici, 2016). both hoogerheide et al.’s (2016) video modelling example and sin’s (2016) social media example indicated that women tend to have low self-efficacy, and their problem-solving methods are more likely to be affected by excessive information, conflicting information, and noncredible information. hedjazi et al.’s (2012) conclusion on how intuitive individuals often view the environment as a whole aligns with burkey and miller’s (2005) report on women being intuitive global thinkers and using an intuitive problem solving style in work settings. the finding was also confirmed in khan et al.’s (2016) recent research on university students’ problem solving style. notice that, because many empirical research in problem-solving was conducted on students at high school (ekici, 2016; hoogerheide et al., 2016) and university levels (görücü & cantav, 2017; keener & strough, 2017; khan et al., 2016), the application of these scientific findings on professional women workers in leadership positions may require further investigation. women workers may have different leadership traits and behaviors from women students. because problem solving has a significant effect on life satisfaction of individuals (cenkseven-önder, 2012), it is important to understand and further investigate on issues relating to women’s problem solving. critical perspectives on leadership skills in general for decades, scholars have been trying to define essential leadership skills for managers. katz (1955) distinguished three developable leadership skill sets: technical skills (i.e., knowledge and proficiency in particular activities involving methods, processes, procedures, or techniques), human skills (i.e., self-awareness, sensitive to human relations, encouraging and motivating employees, communication, and active listening, which shows the ability to work with people and help people working cooperatively toward a common goal), and conceptual skills (i.e., vision, strategy, and putting goals into words which shows the ability to see the enterprise as a whole and work with ideas and concepts). katz (1955) suggested that technical skills are more important at lower levels of administration; however, human skills are essential to managers at all levels. differently, conceptual skills are the most important ability of administrators at the top/executive level. katz’s central idea of leadership skill has been well adopted and further developed in many studies (kearns et al., 2015; mumford et al., 2007; zaccaro, 2001). in 1980s, research on leadership skill began to involve more variables into investigation such as environmental dynamic. for example, heimovics and herman (1989) examined management skills and suggested that skills such as creative boundary spanning, strategic planning, human resource development, and service provision are needed for managers of non-profit organizations. kearns et al. (2015) also examined lead skills of the chief executive officer (ceo) of non-profit organizations and identified a mix of technical, interpersonal, and conceptual skills in the executives’ leadership tasks that are critical for organizational success. communication and trust building are identified as the most important interpersonal skills for ceos (kearns et al., 2015). to better understand how leadership functions and the applicability of the identified leadership skills in an international context, hurt and homan (2008) used the u.s. department of labor’s occupational information network (o*net) to examine the components of effective leadership and identified four dimensions of universal leadership behaviors: visionary, consideration, task-orientation, and problem-solving. jones et al. (2014) has also contributed to the literature on international leadership by attempting to develop a universal leadership model and proposing four as – ability, adaptability, ambassadorship, and awareness – as the construct of universal leadership. selfawareness is emphasized as a critical attribute in achieving and maintaining a successful leadership role (jones et al., 2014). however, given the contemporary changed leadership landscape, marques (2015) suggested seven critical leadership behaviors: flexibility, care, a sense of community, creativity, inspiration, facilitation, and honesty. similar result was found in smalley et al.’s (2016) study on individual leadership perceptions, skills, and traits of agribusiness and industry professionals. smalley et al. (2016) discovered that being accountable, taking responsibility, communicating, learning, and adapting to change are five most important leadership skills, and honesty, positive attitude, trustworthiness, self-confidence, and dependability are identified as the five most effective leadership traits. also, twenty-one behaviors of effective leaders from the point of view of subordinates that hamlin et al. (2016) enumerated in a derived etic comparative study are: good planning, involves employees in decision-making, actively listens and seeks opinions of staff, actively supports training and/or career development of employees, constructive in providing feedback on performance, monitors and addresses poor performance and appraises employees, gives recognition or thanks, rewards employees, gives direction and guidance, informs staff by sharing information, shows interest in employee well-being, effective delegation and empowerment, sets goals and shares them with employees, supportive management/ leadership approach, lends employees a hand when necessary, stands by employees when under threat, encourages and/or motivates employee, helps employees learn from their mistakes, exhibits an open and approachable style of management and leadership, develops honest and trusting relationships with employees, and leads by example (p. 251). in a more recent research, tench et al. (2017) surveyed 2777 communication and public relations practitioners (62% were woman; 38% were men) in europe to identify important characteristics or behaviors to be demonstrated by effective leaders. the identified top ten characteristics of an effective leadership are: 42 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 communicating in an open and transparent way, providing a clear overall, long-term vision, handling controversial issues or crises calmly and confidently, leading by example, aligning what is said and done, bringing out the best in others, admitting mistakes, telling a compelling, easily understandable story, making tough decisions, and showing respect for different cultures (tench et al., 2017, p. 204). because of technological advancement, recent research began to consider technological dynamic in leadership behavior. the industry 4.0 and age of automation has made leadership tougher. an enlightened and flexible leadership is required to keep pace with the rapidly changing industrial landscape and to lead businesses into the future (herold, 2016). some critical qualities of an effective leader include the ability to ensure the organization’s sustainability and demonstrate their moral responsibilities to the communities such as treating technological displaced workers with respect (binney, 2019). according to herold (2016), top leaders in the digital age should hold the four skillsets: traditional leadership (leading, managing, and inspiring others effectively), diversity (welcoming and embracing different opinions and perspectives), agile leadership (innovating, performing, reflecting, risking, defending), and ethical responsibility (leveraging new technologies to protect humans). harrison et al. (2018) examined and identified the critical entrepreneurial leadership skills for organizational success in a developing economy environment through qualitative research. technical/business skills (i.e., technical expertise, business function skills, accounting and financial management, administration, marketing) were one of the four identified entrepreneurial leadership skill sets in the study. table 1 summarized the critical leadership traits, abilities, and skills found in the literature discussed above. the identified leadership skills may be adopted to facilitate women to achieve and maintain a successful leadership role during the industry 4.0 transformation. essential women’s leadership skills in the age of industry 4.0 “leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humanness, courage, and sternness.” – sun tzu (cleary, 1988, p.6). industry 4.0 integrates advanced technology into every aspect of life and increases human dependency on technology. the need for human labor is declined from production to decision-making and business strategic plan and leadership are reformed (herold, 2016). the profound impact of industry 4.0 on social and human capital development should not be underestimated. as discussed in the previous sections, the literature has provided sufficient evidence on gender differences in various ways. a gender impact on woman leadership identities, styles, and practices was confirmed (wheat & hill, 2016). gender differences do matter in leadership and management performance. perkov et al. (2016) indicated an ongoing tendency of women achieving top management positions through their shared experience as women, rather than adopting a successful leadership style for men. more studies have examined women’s traits and revealed the influence of women’s social roles and personality (women’s) traits on their behavior and performance in decision–making, conflict management, and problem-solving (cenkseven-önder, 2012; keener & strough, 2017). for example, wheat and hill (2016) identified a powerful influence of motherhood on the women’s leadership styles and practices and how the skills learned from the motherhood could be transferred to the leadership roles. this may partially explain the phenomenon of gender differences in leadership. similarly, keener and strough (2017) also identified a significant influence of women’s personality traits on women’s conflict management strategies. specifically, women tend to use a communal strategy to manage conflicts with female friends but adopt an agentic strategy to address conflicts with a male friend or romantic partner (keener & strough, 2017). common woman traits that were identified in leadership and management literature may include: sensitive to other people’s needs and feelings, emotional, devoting self wholly to help others, building warm relationships with others, and using idealized attributes and inspirational motivation (cuadrado et al., 2015; martin, 2015; tench et al., 2017). to help women reach higher-level of leadership positions in this competitive work environment, cimirotić et al. (2017) discovered several individual enabling factors such as social/interpersonal skills, specialized knowledge, professionalism, ambition, hardworking, ability to assert oneself, and like their job. thus, efforts to reshape women leaders into a male form are not needed, nor encouraged. women may have different needs and concerns with leadership development, as well as strengths to lead employees and organizations through industry 4.0 transformation. successful leaders should not be gender-blind but treat gender differences as opportunities for better performance outcomes. the unique women’s traits and strengths may be adopted in leadership practices to unleash women leaders’ potential. because of the gender differences and rapidly changing work environment, we propose that women could apply some of the woman traits and strengths to cultivate their leadership qualities and skills that are needed for (international) business success in industry 4.0 and to possibly complement and address issues caused by gender inequality in the workplace. for the purposes of this conceptual paper, we proposed the following six essential women’s leadership skill sets for industry 4.0 transformation. advanced human/interpersonal skills – for humanness humanness is something cannot be replaced by machines or robots. interpersonal skills and traditional women’s behaviors are favored in new business management (gaytán, 2014). studies suggest that women tend to exhibit more empathy, intuition, and collaboration than men (araújo et al., 2017). 43 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 table i. a summary of critical leadership traits, abilities, and skills identified in literature skill sets critical leadership traits, abilities, and skills human/ interpersonal skills (all-levels of administration) · awareness of self and others · team-building · ambassadorship · adapting to change · motivating self and others · inspiring others · welcoming and embracing different opinions and perspectives · showing respect for different cultures · managing & developing people · empowering employees · giving feedback & recognition · advanced communication · sensitive to human relations · showing care & concern · trustworthy · collaborative · supportive · honest · flexible · empathic · principled conceptual skills (top level of administration) · creating and selling vision · analytical · strategic planning · idea generating · problem-solving · decision-making · taking ethical responsibility (having a sense of community) · leveraging new technologies to protect humans · holistic thinking technical skills (lower-level of administration) · knowledge and abilities in particular activities involving methods, processes, procedures, or techniques · service provision · task-orientation · technical expertise · business function skills, accounting and financial management, administration, marketing · planning · giving direction & guidance entrepreneurial skills · opportunity identification skill · opportunity exploitation skill · risk management skill · negotiation skill · envisioning skill · creativity & innovation skill · handling controversial issues or crises calmly and confidently 44 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 the use of empathy may help a woman leader to understand the needs and struggles of employees during the industry 4.0 transformation. generally, women are sensitive to people’s needs and feelings and favour network and relationship building. networking skills, particularly in certain membership, may increase opportunities for relationships, promotions, and professional recognition and credibility (gipson et al., 2017). the woman’s strength in relationship/team building may help collecting diverse opinions, promote innovation, and increase productivity. thus, women may be more likely to arise as leaders and perform successfully when the positions involve advanced interpersonal and human skills. strengthening women’s human and interpersonal skills could also make them robot-proof and stay competitive in the job market. while many women may already have interpersonal skills, weaknesses such as indirect communication style or oversensitivity may constrain their optimal performance on advanced human/interpersonal skills. women tend to use indirect communication to avoid tension or uncomfortable situation that sometimes may create confusion and misunderstanding on the message. expressing a compelling story in clear and concise language are critical verbal communication skills a leader should have. open and frank communications with inclusive language and network of support may advance women’s human skills. heightened awareness skills – for trustworthiness the abilities to recognize one’s own bias, emotions, behaviors, beliefs, motivations, strengths and weaknesses are important to all leaders, particularly in virtual workplace. in order to create long-standing, trusting relationships with employees, women leaders should be truthful to their own bias, strengths, and weakness. as discussed earlier, women’s brains are significantly more active in the limbic – emotional areas (amen et al, 2017), so women leaders need to be aware of their anger and frustrations and heighten their emotional regulation skills. such emotional self-regulation may help women advancing their emotional intelligence and trustworthiness. this suggests that a commitment to develop heightened awareness of self and others is a crucial step for women to be a trustworthy leader sharpened technical skills – for intelligence during the industry 4.0 transformation, successful women leaders should be equipped with practical knowledge and abilities that are needed to perform mechanical techniques, information technology tasks, and/or scientific methods professionally. because women’s brains tend to be more active in the hippocampus – memory area (amen et al, 2017), they generally perform well on object location tasks and verbal memory tasks. such intellectual functioning indicates how women’s leadership effectiveness may be boosted via languagebased interactions (involving encoded, stored, and retrieved information) with others. women leaders’ ability to think, reason, and use knowledge may predict their leadership performance, particularly in problem solving and conflict management. thus, dedicating time to enhance their abilities to acquire and apply knowledge and skills through media and technology could prepare them to respond to challenges of industry 4.0 and be ready for higher managerial and leadership positions. a commitment to seek life-long learning on numerous fronts for continuous performance improvement and leadership development is vital for women to move up to higher-level leadership positions. robust conceptual skills – for sternness because women are multitasked comprehensive processors and intuitive global thinkers, women leaders tend to process information elaborately, seek association between information, and evaluate all information before making a decision. these characteristics may help women leaders developing a global vision and an ability to see the enterprise as a whole when working with ideas and concepts. even though they may use an intuitive problem solving style in work settings, their problemsolving methods can be influenced by excessive information, conflicting information, and non-credible information. detailed and completed information would enhance women leaders’ conceptual skills and abilities to make effective decisions that align with organizational goals. greater self-confidence skills – for courage as discussed previously, a tendency of low self-assurance among women may significantly affect their performance and chance of moving to top leadership positions. knowledge decreases fears and builds self-confidence. it is important to not worry about failures but focus on how to succeed one step at a time. in addition, challenging oneself to lean into discomfort and acknowledging personal value system may also help increasing one’s self-assurance. together, knowledge and self-awareness can promote women leaders’ confidence level. positive thinking, confronting difficult questions, being courageous, taking a stand, learning, and practicing are other possible ways to promote greater self-confidence. to be effective over time, it is essential for women leaders to boost their self-confidence, an essential life skill, for themselves and for their team members (followers). strong innovative skills – for creativity innovation is an important leadership skill to explore new ideas/opportunities and solve problems. innovation and creativity set human apart from animals and robots. because women are intuitive global thinkers and tend to use intuitive problem solving style in work settings (burkey & miller, 2005), it would be helpful for women leaders to advance their innovative skills and develop creative intuitive skill and a growth mindset. creative intuition is an ability to identify creative ideas freely and independently, without much thinking based on reason or logic (spacey, 2017). such ability may be enhanced by developing a growth mindset which seeks growth for themselves, the employees, and the company as a whole (dweck, 2006). people with a growth mindset are interested in and thrive with challenge. they seek success in learning and improving with a focus on self-development, self-motivation, and responsibility (dweck, 2006). a creative intuition skill may facilitate women leaders to quickly respond to the changes and 45 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 challenges caused by industry 4.0 transformation, and a growth mindset would help them to transform the challenges to opportunities. holding a strong innovative skill also helps women leading employees to coexist with machines and robots in the machine-paced and skill polarized workplace, as well as enhance their leadership behavior and take them to the top. conclusion the industry is changing and so is the workforce and leadership. sex differences cause women to naturally lead in ways that we may need for industry 4.0: more collaborative, more empathetic; more human-centered. nevertheless, women still face significant barriers to entering top leadership positions, despite study after study showing that their ability is at least equal to that of leaders of men, if not better. a two-pronged approach is needed to make progress on this issue: we must prepare women leaders by building on their strengths, such as interpersonal skills and empathy, and developing some characteristics that hold them back, such as lack of self-confidence and assertiveness. we must use organization development to change workplace culture to remove the structural barriers and inequities that exist which keep women underrepresented in higher leadership ranks. changing workplace culture is perhaps the most important strategy, as women are already ready for leadership roles. if we are to make any real progress in terms of the number of women in leadership roles, we need to make real changes in workplace structures and norms. in this paper, we summarized and synthesized research evidence on different women’s leadership characteristics and behaviors from men and identified essential women’s leadership competencies that are necessary to addresses the new challenges of today’s workplace and the paradigm shifts for women leaders to remain competitive in industry 4.0. this paper provides hrd practitioners a strategic framework that will be necessary for women’s leadership development and promote gender equality in the workplace. some women’s traits can be women’s leadership superpowers such as more sensing, listening, accepting, approaching, collaborating, supporting, and encouraging skills. with this mindfulness women can increase their self-awareness and confidence level and embrace their strengths into leadership to work toward management effectiveness and organization success. this paper has implications for practices in training and career development and organization development. with changing demographics and workforce requirements, hrd professionals can strategically help women to increase their competitiveness in the workplace and achieve parity in higher leadership ranks by building on their women’s strengths that make them effective leaders, rather than fixing the women. examples may include providing self-awareness training, growth mindset workshop, and creativity workshop that are needed for business success in industry 4.0. moreover, the professionals may also focus on organizational cultural change efforts, such as gender equity workshops and tying performance expectations to outcomes (diehl & dzubinski, 2016), to change male gendered norms in workplace and prepare woman leaders to facilitate humanmachine partnerships at work. hrd interventions to embed diversity inclusivity into the organization culture are also critical. as cook and glass (2014) asserted, diversity among decision makers could significantly increase women's ascension to top leadership positions and contribute to gender equality in work organizations. furthermore, because of the fixed gendered social status of organizations, it is important to re-examine the existing hrd interventions for effective women’s career development toward top management level with necessary skills to promptly respond to challenges and opportunities of industry 4.0. empirically testing the aforementioned recommendations with women’s leadership development in organizations is recommended. references acar, f. p., & sumer, h. c. 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(2001). the nature of executive leadership: a conceptual and empirical analysis of success. washington, dc: american psychological association. advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 29, number 9 july 30, 2009 issn 1093-7099 challenges and breakthroughs of female department chairs across disciplines in higher education dr. carol a. mullen abstract the purpose of this study is to explore the department chair role relative to challenges and breakthroughs women leaders experience both inside and outside the discipline of education. the research reported is an exploration of relatively uncharted territory, adding to the data-based studies that exist of female leadership in this post-secondary context. incorporated into this survey-based study are constructs established in the literature around relational and organizational aspects of leadership behavior. while attention is given to gender and leadership issues reported by 121 female department chairs, the discussion is broader than gender considerations. focus is on the major challenges that practicing leaders have encountered, particularly within the domains of administration and scholarship. included is discussion of these leaders’ initiatives, reflections, and advice, complete with verbatim quotes, thematic analyses, and relevant tables. one recommendation is that more research be conducted of the issues and work of female department chairs, with consideration of the gender dynamics involving workrole identity. other recommendations include the advocacy of women faculty members as college-level leaders who are effectively mentored. key words: department chair, higher education, women citation: mullen, c. (2009). challenges and breakthroughs of female department chairs across disciplines in higher education. advancing women in leadership journal, 29(9). retrieved [date] from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/� advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 2 introduction in this discussion, i explore the somewhat neglected topic of women’s leadership in academic leadership roles and offer study of the reported experiences of female department chairs in their leadership positions. specifically, i inquired into the influences that led academic leaders across disciplines to assume this position, in addition to some of the challenges and rewards of their chairship, administrative and scholarly dimensions of their work, as well as lessons learned and advice that could benefit other leaders. a snapshot of the complexity entailed in this job for female leaders for whom gender is an influencing factor for many emerged from the study. a prevailing tension for the female chairs is of increased accountability and pressure to report departmental outcomes on the one hand, and the commitment to model a democratic leadership style and make a difference on the other hand. by accounting for the perspective of female department chairs, there is potential to advance conversation about the meaning of administrative leadership relative to women. challenges and breakthroughs that to some extent center on democratic agendas for various disciplines emerged from the data analysis. as a department chair who was hired in may 2007 through an external search at a research university located in the united states, i am motivated to learn from other chairs. the insights shared by the participants have already informed my practice, and the hope is that readers will also find these stimulating and useful. background issues the department chairs who participated in this study were prompted to specify their qualifications for the position, as well as the major influences leading to their chairship. qualifications for the position many of the chairs viewed their experience and expertise as a major qualification contributing to their selection as chair and possibly to their effectiveness. they had held varied leadership positions over time and in such roles as director of graduate and undergraduate studies, as these typical comments confirm: “i have a 12-year track record of exceptional teaching, leadership, and service at this institution” and “years of service as the coordinator of the unit, an unpaid position, has made me effective as its chair.” the chairs had built their credentials within their departments and had applicable knowledge about its inner workings. selections also largely, but not exclusively, coincided with one’s status (tenured professor): “seniority at the time was the qualification.” the chairs also highlighted their strong interpersonal skills (with colleagues and administrators) and their outstanding leadership, mentoring, and problem solving skills. gendered language was evident with the self-referential uses of cheerleader, role model, maternal, mother, good listener, and nurturer. for the chairs who, in the majority of cases, were selected internally, they had responded to the need for departmental leadership by “stepping up to the plate.” as many revealed, “i was the only willing candidate. the chair position is not viewed as desirable but rather as being a good citizen”; “i was willing to do the job,” and “i teach about leadership and administration so this was a chance to practice what i teach.” willingness to serve, then, was a prevalent motivator among the advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 3 internally selected chairs: “no one else was capable of doing it, either because of other commitments or because of personality conflicts.” others accepted the role as a strategy for protecting their more junior colleagues from being sidetracked in their academic journey. known for their outstanding organizational skills, the chairs reported that they had built their reputation by spearheading projects involving accreditation, grants, and more. they saw themselves as goal oriented, time managers, with an eye for detail and invaluable knowledge about curriculum issues. a few referred to themselves as academic entrepreneurs. moreover, the chairs had established themselves as leaders who believed that their departments should stay (or become) cohesive through such strategies as good communication and open dialogue. they believed that they had stood out because of their “non-confrontational, mediating style” and because they knew how to be diplomatic and seek win-win solutions. some were seen as the only person “available and qualified who wouldn’t polarize the department,” which amplified the political aspects of their selection and of their professional lives. some of these leaders reported also being known for their commitment to fairness, consensus-building, equitable practice, and departmental governance and advocacy. others expressed being supportive of diversity that included their support of wide ranging approaches to research. someone had initiated “a civility agreement that all faculty signed” before she became the chair—“[they] still use that as a centerpiece to guide [their] interactions.” major influences leading to chairship most of the chair–respondents were internal candidates for which departmental colleagues, college deans, and inept faculty competition had the greatest influence, in addition to the departmental culture. frequently the culture they inherited was portrayed as having been problem-ridden and ineffectual. those hired from the outside had been nominated by an internal candidate, become disillusioned with the inept leadership they had witnessed, or were moving (back) into academe. to a lesser extent, the influence both groups (insiders and outsiders) cited was the lure of a salary increase, in addition to the motivation to make a difference and the belief they were “destined for larger leadership roles.” a few were attracted to the administrative and managerial aspects of the leadership role. only several noted the influence of mentors on their career goals, a rarity for women leaders that is not uncommon, especially among early generation female administrative leaders in education (see short, 2009). theoretical lenses there is a consensus in the literature that department chairs are important in the overall academic leadership team in higher education institutions (e.g., stanley & algert, 2007). they can be elected or appointed (wescott, 2000), and they may be identified from within the faculty ranks or through a national search. such individuals have decision-making authority, and they are directly responsible to the dean, which distinguishes their role from other departmental leaders, such as program directors. three major domains—academic, administrative, and leadership—are the purview of the department chair’s position; this framework that mclaughlin, montgomery, and malpass (1975) described decades ago is still relevant. the departmental advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 4 chairship is considered one of the most or even the most challenging leadership position in the academy (stanley & algert, 2007). moreover, because women may be less inclined than males to think about their career trajectory, they may not advance as quickly or as far as their male counterparts. this is particularly the case within traditionally male-dominated fields, such as educational administration (mertz, 2009). empirical studies have found that women in general, including young gifted women across ethnic groups (brizendine, brown, irby, & reed, 2008), experience others’ expectations and judgments as barriers to their development and success. hence, in response to the broad socialization patterns of female faculty members, deans and provosts in higher education institutions can help build organizational and human capacity by actively fostering the readiness and interests of women to assume college-level leadership positions. institutional decision makers who are proactive about addressing gender equity in the academy support leadership opportunities and outcomes for female faculty members so that “parity between males and females in the quality of life, academic, and work outcomes” can be achieved (koch & irby, 2002, p. 3). university reports provide guidance with respect to solutions and directions, and task forces, while few, have been formed to investigate the work of department chairs and recommend courses of action (chu et al., 2003a; chu & veregge, 2003b). gender, along with race and social class, is a social construct that can promote or marginalize individuals and groups, thus granting or barring privilege (byrd, 2008; koch & irby, 2002). while “stereotyped beliefs about the attributes of men and women” promote a double standard in work settings (heilman, 2001, p. 658; koch, 2004), these beliefs are encoded from within and are manifest in not just how gender is viewed but also enacted (koch, 2004). nonetheless, as van engen, der leeden, and willemsen (2001) cautioned, while many studies tend to reinforce gender-based leadership styles (e.g., women have a tendency to lead democratically, and men, autocratically), the literature on this topic is inconsistent and inconclusive. van engen et al. speculated that the methods and organizational contexts used for study purposes may be exerting an influence over what is found. an example that seems to fit this assertion is gmelch, carroll, seedorf, and wentz’s (1990) powerful finding that over 40% of 800 department chairs, females and males alike, suffered emotionally from having to make decisions affecting others, settling collegial differences, and assessing faculty performance. perhaps leadership behaviors (e.g., sensitivity to interpersonal conflicts) are less a matter of gender and more a matter of leadership or perhaps “feminist leadership” (barton, 2006). while there is not a large body of literature available, some scholarship at both the higher education and prek–12 levels has contributed to discussion of feminist leadership principles and their usefulness for dealing with challenges of the future (barton, 2006; garcia-retamero & lopez-zafra, 2006; klein et al., 2007). through gender equity research and action, organizational value is being placed on humanity, social justice, equity, and student centeredness, and on transforming academic institutions into inclusive, holistic, responsive environments. however, indicators used to assess equality in administrative leadership positions suggest that ethnicity/race is considerably more challenging than gender in post-secondary and prek–12 contexts (jean-marie, 2005; klein et al., 2007). another powerful caveat to the changes in organizational values is that gender stereotypes are activated so easily (eagly & karau, 2002). advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 5 research on female leadership has the potential to not only confront but also alter social expectations and their educational effects. while this is more an inquiry into female leadership than gender stereotypes and genderbased leadership styles, these lenses have relevancy here. the issues participants identified, prompted by survey questions asked, generated connections to these topics. feminine leadership styles are described as interpersonal-oriented, charismatic, and democratic, and related to gender because of stereotypes of women as being sensitive, warm, tactful, and expressive (trinidad & normore, 2005). individuals with a feminine gender-role orientation may emphasize collaboration and cooperation, whereas the masculine gender-role orientation emphasizes control and institutional power, competition, and authority (garcia-retamero & lopez-zafra, 2006). in education and even in leadership positions (heilman, 2001), female leadership styles have been characterized as “more democratic, participative, inclusive and collaborative” (trinidad & normore, p. 583), as well as less agentic or achievement oriented. statement of the problem and orientation more study is needed of the department chair role and specifically “of how chairs see themselves, their challenges, and their sacrifices” (gmelch, 1991, p. 45). compounding this issue, few empirical studies of women faculty and leaders exist, which is an outgrowth of how power and authority are not only distributed but also legitimated within the academy (byrd, 2008), in addition to the preponderance of male department chairs in studies of middle management. while women have advanced in leadership positions, progress has been slow; their representation in such masculine-typed elite jobs as department chair is modest at best and, in prestigious research universities, rare (eagly, johannesen-schmidt, & van engen, 2003; short, 2009). their rarity in such positions helps explain why the female department chairship is an under-studied area of leadership studies (wallace, 2006). leadership studies mostly focus on other leadership positions such as the superintendency (e.g., brunner, 2007) (as well as other business/corporate executives), in addition to gender-based leadership styles (e.g., eagly et al., 2003). my analysis of the literature that addresses the department chair role surfaced five categories: (a) anecdotal perspectives of department chairs (e.g., wescott, 2000); (b) reports produced by organizations (e.g., national council for research on women), institutes, and university task forces (e.g., chu et al., 2003a; chu, & veregge, 2003b); (c) how-to books (lees, 2006); (d) case studies of settings that combine study of department chairs with other academic leaders (e.g., wallace, 2006); and (e) survey-based study of male and female department chairs (e.g., gmelch, 1991). the current study falls into the fifth category but with exclusive focus on women. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 6 methodology and target population instrument development and validation research-informed. the questionnaire that i developed for this pilot study focuses on women academic leadership. benefitting from the literature that informs this topic, it was constructed in such a way as to elicit the relational (e.g., interaction, communication, support) and organizational (e.g., goal setting, direction, task) aspects of leadership behavior in the target population’s work. these general domains have been supported in trinidad and normore’s (2005) review of the leadership literature. however, this conceptualization of leadership behavior is static and limiting, which is why wheatley’s writings (e.g., 1999/2001) about organizational dynamics and change proved influential to my thinking. thus, the survey questions i framed invited reflection on organizational life in whatever organic and evolving forms were being experienced, with some attention on challenges and breakthroughs. because this study focuses on women in chair positions, it does not include a male comparison sample. questionnaire design. the questionnaire (see appendix 1) focuses on the relational and task aspects of leadership style of behavior. question-items were organized into a demographic section (16 questions) and open-ended responses (19 questions). currently practicing female department chairs’ feedback was sought along these dimensions: qualifications, personal or professional factors, administrative duties, scholarly leadership efforts, mentoring support (received and provided to others), collaborative experiences, challenges to one’s work, insight into associations between gender and leadership, and lessons learned. questionnaire procedures. the survey was administered on the internet via an official body at my university; all identifying information (e.g., names, emails) was safeguarded and has since been erased. participants were asked to click directly on the internet survey link and not to confirm their participation via email so that their anonymity could be assured. the survey data were automatically captured at the survey site in excel format. no incentives (e.g., financial compensation) were offered, and no costs were incurred. displays. the examples listed in tables 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 present data saturation relative to the survey question asked (e.g., major administrative duties performed), and they cover the main examples in the data. peer assessors and critique. following institutional review board approval for this study in 2007, six female academic leaders whose profile resembled that of the study’s target group acted as peer assessors. this strategy of seeking validation for undertaking research has been established as sound methodological practice. guba and lincoln (1989) espoused that peer assessor critique has value in the context of research development partly because it potentially empowers one’s stakeholder group. this peer group individually affirmed the relational/ organizational focus of the instrument and made suggestions about the items. this peer group also informed me of current female department chairs not listed in the u.s. news and world report. in all, 15 individuals were identified, and 10 completed the survey. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 7 the initial response rate of 67% combined with the quality responses they produced encouraged me to both identify and access the target population, nation-wide. participants and recruitment to identify female department chairs, i utilized the u.s. news & world report’s (2008) top-50 list of national universities. these are based on the carnegie classifications, the established standard in higher education and research. my sampling was purposeful (creswell, 1998), and it consisted of women in leadership roles at highly-ranked, doctoral-granting institutions. using the top 50 list, i identified 385 female department chairs, located across colleges and disciplines. relative to both institutional lists, i searched each institution’s website, college by college and department by department, to identify members of my target population. of the 385 surveys submitted, 121 responses were received, yielding a response rate of 31%. also, using the university council of educational administration’s (ucea) membership list, i accessed female department chairs in educational leadership (ucea convention 2007 program guide, 2007). an additional 45 institutions were contacted via the ucea website; in 2007, this association had 77 member institutions, 27 of which were in the top 50. surveys were also posted to listserves totaling a membership of 731.1 demographic portrait of the 121 individuals who completed the survey, 111 were serving as department chair or head, in addition to nine interim chairs and one co-chair. (incomplete surveys were excluded from the analysis.) the majority of the chairs were serving on a permanent line, with contracts ranging from 2 to 4 years; some were serving second terms. many were seasoned chairs, with anywhere from 16 to 35 years but 34 had 15 or fewer years. regarding time spent in this leadership role, 22 had had only 1 year or less; the majority (55) had spent 2 to 4 years, with substantial time spent in this role for 25 respondents (5 to 8 years); even more so, 11 respondents had had 9 to 12 years in this role, and 4 of them, 13 or over. from the data reported, most (45%) had spent anywhere from 2 to 8 years in the role but some (18%) were new to it. fifteen different departmental disciplines were represented by the chairs who were leading departments from inside and outside education. education had the greatest concentration of respondents; outside education they were mostly from the humanities/social science and engineering, with a fairly even distribution among a range of other disciplines (see table 1). the number of full-time faculty in their units averaged just under 18 (17.9), which represents fairly large units. they earned their terminal degree anywhere from 1968 to 2002. all but five were located in doctoral-granting institutions. their institutions are located in 29 different us states, with the highest representation (38%) from california, new york, florida, and illinois. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 8 table 1. disciplinary areas reflecting department chairs’ work (n=121) discipline departments education (33/121) educational administration/leadership, special education, educational psychology, counseling humanities/social science (14/121) black studies, classics, english, linguistics, medieval studies foreign languages (12/121) romance languages and literatures engineering (12/121) computer science, chemical, civil and environmental, industrial design, mechanical, agricultural and extension education communications (8/121) information science, rhetoric, technical sociology (8/121) human ecology, social work arts (7/121) theater, finer arts, musicology, arts history, archaeology anthropology (5/121) business (5/121) collective bargaining and labor law, organizational behavior and management information systems, journalism, marketing, fiber science/fashion design and merchandising, management kinesiology (4/121) sport management and physical education, occupational therapy medicine (4/121) public health, nursing, obstetrics. gynecology science (4/121) physics, zoology, epidemiology and biostatistics architecture (2/121) urban planning liberal arts (2/121) international relations behavioral science (1/121) psychology the average age of this group is 53 and its ethnic configuration was white majority (115), with 3 african americans, 2 hispanics, and one asian american. time spent in their current rank averaged 8.6 years. in response to prompts indicating their knowledge and interest with respect to gender issues in leadership positions, most (53%) indicated that they have knowledge of gender issues in leadership positions and 56% that they have interest in this area. regarding their achievements, the chairs had received recognition through teaching and research awards, and grants and funding (table 2). major publications and presentations relative to specialty areas of research and writing emphasis for all 15 departmental disciplines are listed in table 3. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 9 table 2. major awards, recognitions, and grants (part of q. 16) (n = 121) awards/recognitions emphasis researcher remarks teaching award very high for excellence in teaching within one’s university, state, or field scholar/research award very high outstanding or distinguished, awarded from one’s field, university, or college grants and funding very high department of education, national institutes of health (nih), national science foundation (nsf), professional development schools, corporate, university-level presidencies and distinguished offices held within associations high of a national or international association or society excellence in faculty mentoring high for outstanding mentoring of students or faculty (field or university-level) outstanding book award high awarded by a national or international association (or center) fulbright medium for research and teaching in countries outside the united states fellowship medium for research and teaching in countries outside the united states; awarded by centers and institutes outstanding graduate student mediumlow academic overall and dissertation keynote speaker mediumlow major conferences and universities, worldwide top paper award mediumlow national or international association or academic journal editorship of prominent journal low guest-edited issue of a journal very low service very low exemplary programming very low visiting scholarship very low patents very low leadership award very low advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 10 table 3. noteworthy publications and presentations (part of q. 16) (n = 121) publications (e.g., articles) via discipline specialty areas of research and writing emphasis education (29/121) change, student achievement, leadership education educational and female leadership, leadership education, special education, language learning, teacher induction, special education programming, cognitive competence, teacher education and development, mentoring relationships, motivational and learning strategies, equity and social justice, learning communities and partnerships, action research, literacy and childhood education, accountability and reform, service learning, race and class, media, film, culture humanities/ social science (13/121) black studies, applied linguistics, medievalism foreign languages (11/121) romance languages and literatures, french, german, italian, east asian engineering (11/121) civil engineering, engineering science, environmental quality communications (8/121) professional communication sociology (8/121) domestic violence, sexual abuse, welfare systems, substance abuse, race and class, marriage and family arts (6/121) visual arts, cultural identity anthropology (5/121) cultural study, ethnic identity construction business (5/121) human rights, corporate crime, women in government, politics, labor, and democracy in different countries, law and ethics, strategic management, entrepreneurship, marketing, organizational behavior kinesiology (4/121) sports culture, physical education for girls and women medicine (4/121) nursing education, immunology, rehabilitation, nursing facilities science (4/121) biological systems architecture (2/121) urban planning liberal arts (2/121) political science, international relations, religious studies behavioral science (1/121) environmental psychology, maladaptive behavior advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 11 analysis of the data the systematic analytical process i used aligned with a basic qualitative study design (miles & huberman, 1994). after computing numerical outcomes for the demographic information, i then analyzed the written responses by identifying key words and phrases. this analysis was performed independently and then jointly: four peer assessors who were blind to the starting conjectures/hypotheses regarding gender issues performed a separate analysis of the data (sample sets). a doctoral student “trained” in qualitative methods also analyzed the data. a total of six individuals independently verified the conclusions described herein. to formulate this analysis, we each coded the data using as a guide the question, what do female department chairs who are academic leaders across disciplines have to share about their experience of the role? systematic analysis procedures included identification and initial coding of text, development of categories by methods of constant comparison, and generation of themes that emerged from these categories (gall, gall, & borg, 2005). i searched the coded data for units of meaning, collapsed and refined categories, and explored relationships and patterns until consensus and saturation were reached. the coded responses were placed in separate tables (one per survey question), the most illuminative of which are included. trustworthiness of the data, and its interpretation, was established by combining data procedures with inter-rater reliability. thematic results from survey experience, politics, willingness, organizational ability, a strong work ethic, and an ability to get along with faculty and leaders were cited as factors leading to these women leaders’ departmental positions. in fact, they listed both qualifications (e.g., relevant leadership experience) and qualities (namely, good listener, effective mediator, fair, competent, detailed, flexible, collegial, collaborative, and innovative) that together communicate some sense of what was involved in supporting these academics as candidates for the chairship. some attributed their advancement as leaders more to their qualities than their qualifications. as faculty members, many had launched new approaches to instructional, curricular, and delivery systems. although not technically qualifications, the female chairs specified that they were elected or selected for this role, or it was their turn, or no one else who would take it on. many referred to particular circumstances or politics within their departments that meshed with their qualifications, giving rise to their current role. while their commitment to the department and profession in general was apparent, many shared that their chairship was a politically expedient decision, as in “we have a rotating chair and nobody really wants the position. it was my turn and i’m relatively sane,” and “it’s a hard job that no one else wanted.” rewards and drawbacks for department chairs concerning rewards or benefits for their service as department chair they illustrated not only advantages but also disadvantages, which underscore the complexity and hardship of this leadership position. they responded that tangible rewards are not compelling in most cases and that the pay-off is more intrinsic. for most, the salary benefits were modest; however, for some, the external rewards were lucrative and while these focused on salary supplements the benefits advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 12 went beyond them. they received, as a paired resource, some relief from teaching. the picture that emerged is one of an enormous workload and a low-to-moderate pay-off. intrinsic rewards the most pervasive reward cited was the role that influence played, enabling the chairs to shape the direction of their units and programs, and to consequently experience the rewards of advocacy. most emphasized that being in a position to exercise or express leadership is its own reward. their position enables them to “drive forward new initiatives,” “influence the well being and achievement of the staff team,” “have control over our programs,” and “affect students in all programs instead of just the one in which i teach.” they attached the feeling of fulfillment to having influence from within their departments and beyond. the chairs found it rewarding not only to change the direction of the department and to strengthen it internally but also to change the departmental culture itself. influence was succinctly described as “the ability to empower others to make change.” they saw the results of their personal influence in a number of ways including in the marked improvement in student graduation and faculty productivity. they had also implemented new programmatic initiatives and unit activities that included promotion-and-tenure guidelines and colloquium series. contact with administrative leaders was cited as another reward. they found it satisfying to have “access to meaningful decision making” and “a voice in decisions that can affect the profile of the college far into the future.” working with powerful others enabled their momentum toward such goals as raising their departments’ profile on campus and in the profession. most saw their efforts as pivotal to faculty direction and growth, as in “i think the rewards are helping junior faculty see their way through the tenure process and helping more senior faculty achieve their goals.” related to this, they viewed recruiting new faculty and mentoring as a benefit of their role. they especially found rewarding the opportunity to “create a community and environment in which faculty, students, and staff can be as productive as possible.” many also cited the positive affect derived from connecting with department chairs. several expressed that they enjoyed the collegial contact made across their state and the nation. positive spinoffs were associated with feelings of accomplishment, satisfaction, and appreciation. dynamics influencing these feelings were reinforced through relationships with faculty members and students, as well as chairs and deans. feelings of accomplishment, for example, ensued from goal attainment (“achieving the goals i set myself and the department”); increased respect (“pleasure in gaining respect and acknowledgement from my colleagues”), and departmental progress (“satisfaction in seeing my unit grow and advance”). the opportunity to engage in problem-solving with success was highlighted with respect to recruiting and promoting highly qualified faculty in their units, satisfying goals set by their units, and resolving problems involving faculty and students. some units were defined by the values of collaboration and hard work. several individuals reported having an outstanding staff with whom they work closely. citizenship was especially highlighted as a reward. notably, advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 13 “because my department has a strong ethic of citizenship,” the senior faculty members “take our turn at this task for a 2-year term.” the chairs mostly agreed that their position enabled them to benefit from being recognized in the role of leader and as someone doing important work towards improving their departments. one might assume that a reward of the chair’s position is the career advancement it offers. however, as might be fitting of a feminine orientation toward leadership, with less emphasis on the traditional value of careerism, only four of the chairs mentioned the possibility of becoming a dean in the future and one, a provost. instead, the major benefit they were experiencing was personal stature and growth: “the reward is for the institution to take me seriously and to hear my voice” and to act as a “visionary for my group and motivator.” caring more about reputation, growth, and voice than career blazing may be a feminine stance. flexibility and autonomy were also attractors, as in being able to transport their children places. extrinsic rewards the chairs mentioned departmental recognition more frequently than personal recognition. they liked having the opportunity to strengthen their unit and increase its visibility through such means as “adding new dynamic faculty” and “making things happen.” in a few cases, salary was cited as the single most important criterion: “honestly, i would not have accepted the position without the increase as my salary had become compressed over the years.” great variability was evident with respect to the salary increases secured with the promotion, ranging from modest (a $1,000 supplementary per year) to sizable (over $50,000). accompanying the salary increase, and, for some, additional perks, is release from their teaching load, although most commonly they had a reduction of one or more courses per year. the workloads they carry were described as too heavy, ranging from matters of accountability and data control, curriculum updates, and budget constraints to student complaints, compounded by long hours. for some, while “there is no question that the workload is huge and the extra compensation inadequate, the rewards are significant.” however, others shared a rather bleak picture with respect to personal and professional rewards, as in “there is some financial remuneration, but not enough. the workload is enormous.” even where they are relatively well compensated, the increase fails to compensate for their workload; hence, the reward for this position was, for many, internal satisfaction. modest salaries and stipends, and inadequate course releases were viewed as insufficient. additionally, the releases from teaching did not compensate for “the hit to [their] research agenda and how salaries are driven by publications, not service.” while some asserted that they had “moved the department forward significantly,” others felt that the chairship was not forwarding their personal academic career or benefitting them in any way apart from the financial: “the stipend for summer does not compensate for the lack of enough time for research or the workload itself.” in addition to inadequate salary increases and supplements for some chairs and a loss of research time reported by most, teaching was identified, albeit to a lesser degree, as problematic. while some did not feel sufficiently compensated for having to teach too much, a few others said that they missed teaching. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 14 recognition and appreciation were not pay-offs for some. they think that “faculty have little idea of the amount of work involved for a chair in obtaining even simple things like permission for externally-funded faculty research leaves.” much more time was being spent in the office, with an ensuing loss of flexibility in their schedules. the restriction on their daily freedom was compounded with the responsibility for undesirable jobs: “most faculty do not want the burden of scheduling courses, deciding curriculum issues, or evaluating fellow faculty.” for those experiencing high stress and demands, they found that while “financial rewards and release time” compensates to some extent, this does not make the difference it should. timeconsuming personnel issues contributed to the stress: “this is a really hard job, and no amount of compensation can make up for the grief it entails, largely because of very difficult personnel issues that consume my time.” one person simply wrote “ulcers!” gender issues were apparent where individuals felt pressured to serve or to continue for another term. while some individuals hinted at a feeling of powerlessness, several were explicit: “i experience very few benefits, unfortunately. i am given a course release and a small stipend, and i can essentially set teaching assignments, but beyond that i’m basically powerless.” some attributed the lack of control they felt to the way decision making occurs in their colleges, with most of the impactful decisions occurring in the dean’s office. an overall loss was voiced by 15 chairs who reported “virtually no rewards—it’s a net loss in time and work relationships.” administrative duties: time spent and major functions sixty to 80% of the chairs’ time was spent on administrative duties (with outliers specifying, at the lowest 20%, and the highest, over 90%). the average time spent is consistent with data cited in other reports (e.g., chu & veregge, 2003). obviously this is the key aspect of the chair’s job. administrative duties consuming their time are outlined in table 4, with personnel matters (e.g., providing support, resolving conflicts) a salient task. although hiring and recruiting, tenure and promotion, and mentoring and advising are all personnel issues, the chairs treated each as a duty of some significance; thus, these tasks were highlighted separately. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 15 table 4. major administrative duties performed by department chairs (n=121) duties examples in data personnel (51/121) personnel support and development; dealing with student and faculty problems; overseeing student-instructor conflicts; problem-solving; faculty evaluation; conferring with faculty on personnel issues reviews (48/121) personnel/faculty reviews and evaluation (e.g., annual review, tenure and promotion, post-tenure, merit, personnel); departmental reviews; preparing tenure and promotion cases); related legal issues; contract renewals; accountability reviews; accreditation and other program review requirements; reviewing markers of productivity recruitment (36/121) procuring qualified adjuncts and overseeing and assigning adjuncts to teach; hiring teaching assistants and lecturers to staff courses; faculty searches and recruitment; student recruitment; hiring office staff meetings (30/121) numerous meetings with faculty, students, and administrators dealing with issues and problems raised. focused on faculty-and-student concerns; committee, program, department, college, and university meetings attended. presence expected at numerous meetings. preparation required for meetings and follow up (action taken), attending executive committee meetings, organize meetings (and other events) for department and college reports (26/121) administrative and accountability reporting, preparing statistical and other reports for the university; writing different kinds of institutional reports, e.g., instructional budgets; conducting data collection and analyses; reviews of faculty performance; securing data, reporting on it, and reacting; tenure case summaries; annual reports; overseeing the preparation of reports; faculty assignments; grants preparation and reporting; writing for program reviews scheduling (25/121) dealing with course scheduling, coverage, and student enrolment; managing class schedules of individual faculty budget (24/121) managing departmental and grant budgets; developing and defending budgets that fit with departmental and university mission; holding budget meetings with staff and dean; overseeing compliance with budgetary regulations; determining staffing based on budgetary allocations staff (23/121) staff and faculty supervision; staffing courses; appointing staff; faculty and staff personnel actions, solving problems with and involving staff; determining staffing needs and patterns programs (21/121) program administration and development, accreditation and other program review requirements; oversight of programs, including study abroad and language programs; promotion of various departmental programs; fund-raising for programs; working with faculty to develop new and review current programs committees (16/121) serving on and leading departmental, college, and university committees; creating committee assignments and convening committees; writing committee reports; organizing/charging committees; emailing and updates planning (10/121) planning curriculum offerings every semester; assessment systems planning; planning in the context of departmental goals; strategic planning mentoring (10/121) mentoring new and untenured faculty advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 16 scholar leadership efforts: time spent and major functions a little over 23% (23.4) of the women chairs’ work, on average, involves scholarly leadership (e.g., promoting faculty’s research initiatives). despite the challenge of being able to dedicate time to this area of work, they were able to generate an impressive list of scholarship that they have initiated, facilitated, or collaborated on. overall, scholarly leadership was identified as the other key aspect of their job and a function they value. because of the weight of their administrative duties, their scholarly leadership efforts are pressed into a secondary but crucial role. the two domains of work can also be viewed as compatible or even interchangeable to some extent—as tables 4 and 5 reveal, certain functions are common to both domains (i.e., mentoring, recruitment, programs, and reviews). the scholarly leadership functions that consume their time (see table 5) are mainly resource-related (e.g., providing funds for faculty professional development). advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 17 table 5. salient scholarly leadership efforts performed by department chairs (n=121) efforts examples in data resources (44/121) funds for faculty travel (conferences, research trips), professional development (e.g., grants workshops), and research (e.g., site-based research); research funding for graduate students; salary increases for faculty and staff; supported research materials and programs; space and money for faculty; encouraged external funding for research; teaching assistantship workload and assignments; hired qualified individuals in support of grants; raised money to be able to afford more internal forms of support; release time for faculty—reduce course loads (e.g., grants preparation or implementation, tenure-earning dossier preparation, writing); release time to the most productive faculty; hired graduate research assistants for all regular faculty; hired grants support administrator in department; shared information about grant opportunities; information distributed about conferences, grants, fellowship, and other opportunities programs (32/121) curriculum reform and assessment; overhaul of departmental programs integrated with vision statements; new courses developed for majors; developed new degree programs (masters, doctoral); followed strategic plan (e.g., developing goals around research production and grants); found strategies for urging faculty to propose new degree programs and to update existing ones; developed processes for program coordinators to assess their programs for accreditation and alignment with national and state standards; led department through strategic planning; instituted core classes in areas of specialization; developed data-based assessments leading to program changes; professional development of students (e.g., facilitated student exchange programs) collaboration (28/121) increased participation in research and enquiry by wide range of staff; initiated group proposals and workshops; research teams and writing clubs (facultyfaculty and faculty-student research groups); publication review teams, collaborated on research projects, writing articles, presenting at national meetings; helped with stats, read each other’s articles, grants, etc.; encouraged junior faculty to apply for grants; arranged for meetings with potential scholarly collaborators; kept faculty and students abreast of scholarship opportunities; shaped new directions of research; fostered collaboration among existing groups both within unit and with outside unit; formed consortiums of departments, institutes, and academies to become hubs for faculty research and international collaboration; organized group scholarly efforts among faculty mentoring (27/121) developed mentoring systems and relationships—target was mostly tenureearning faculty but embraced seasoned faculty, students, and constituent groups (e.g., school principals); mentored new researchers and staff; encouraged associate professors to become full professors; focused on assistant professors and their research and tenure journey with respect to expectations for tenure; read drafts of junior-earning faculty’s articles; provided guidance about acceptable publication and conference outlets; mentored graduate students (e.g., established a scholarly journal featuring graduate student publications); regulated the mentoring of junior faculty; improved training of teaching assistants; talked with faculty about goals, progress, and projects; supported faculty in working on dissertations; created informal and/or formal mentoring programs for junior faculty and students; acted as sounding board for colleagues to explore decision making and the protection of research time advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 18 table 5. continued efforts examples in data events (17/121) junior faculty-only seminars (with a mentoring focus); research lunches with faculty; established events around the mentoring of junior faculty; discussed research issues at departmental meetings; race and rank issues in teaching/ learning and research; series focused on publication of faculty books; sponsored minority faculty as colloquium speakers reviews (13/121) wrote or revised promotion-and-tenure guidelines; oversaw cyclic review of all faculty designed to strengthen research profiles; oversaw mentoring of all faculty in unit; performance evaluations with standards for success established; developed mentoring and evaluation systems for junior faculty; oversaw tenureand-promotion cases; instituted differential merit raises based on scholarly performance; implemented peer reviews across curriculum; addressed research/teaching emphases of faculty; promoted behavior aligned with unit’s mission; monitored faculty scholarship production visibility (12/121) highlight publications; redesigned webpage to market department and faculty research; garnered publicity for faculty accomplishments by submitting to college communications directors etc.; shared successes during faculty meetings and via email; promoted the impact of faculty and doctoral student research projects (10/121) invited coauthorships with the new faculty on chair’s projects; extended invitations to write for chair’s academic journal and to join in on her articles and guest editorships; created edited book projects and invited all departmental and college faculty to participate; understanding solo projects on translation studies and teaching issues; writing with colleague nominations (6/121) nominated faculty for competitive awards (e.g., fellow in professional society), nominations (e.g., selective service roles, and applications (e.g., grants); pursued research resources for faculty; endorsed faculty requests advocacy (6/121) more voting on issues in department rather than chair making decisions for everyone; broadened faculty voice from the senior male faculty; rotated departmental committee leadership (a stipulated term versus “lifetime”); created executive committee that advises on budget policy and priorities mentoring, coaching, and network support any support personally available to these chairs is mostly informal and self-generated. a high percentage (47%) reported having no mentoring at all or nothing noteworthy, which they believe has limited their effectiveness. they “really regret not having” mentoring and referred to the position as “lonely”: they had to figure out most aspects of the job on their own because the former chair was not a good resource, or because departmental collegial relationships changed when they became the superior, or because supports had not been mobilized for them, or because ineffectual or busy mentors were assigned to them. given that many had to create their own support systems or extend what minimal support may have been available, it is not surprising that the status they attributed to colleagues/advisors/friends as support networks was given such emphasis, followed by fellow department chairs and leadership workshops (see table 6). advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 19 table 6. mentoring, coaching, and network support provided to department chairs (n=121) network supports examples in data colleagues (22/121) informal network of current and former colleagues; friends; spouses; networks on and off-campus; colleagues who are specialists in administration and scholarship; research teams; women colleagues chairs (current, group) (20/121) department chairs in college provide mentoring; mentoring support from other women chairs, sometimes with ongoing network formed; meetings, retreats, and luncheons with college chairs to share information and problem solve workshops (17/121) leadership coaching (time management, personnel management, budgetary concerns, mentoring faculty and students, clarifying university procedures, fundraising); some attended with other department chairs; women chair seminars; one-day workshops and ongoing workshops chairs (previous) (12/121) assistance and/or mentoring from previous chair(s) from inside or outside department; mentoring received initially or on an ongoing basis; references to former chairs as male deans (11/121) mentoring and coaching provided, which aids effectiveness of chair; deans meet with the chair once a month, especially in the early phase; deans range from being very helpful, to somewhat helpful, to less so. administrators (9/121) upper administrators are supportive, as well as associate deans, human relations directors, etc. who provide support in difficult supervisory and leadership areas; provide counsel in confidential discussions faculty (4/121) assistance from leadership-minded and skilled faculty within unit perceived as trustworthy mentors (4/121) mentors from the past (e.g., former dissertation chair) exert influence for years and provide counsel (e.g., regarding sticky personnel matters) salient challenges for department chairs the greatest challenges in (or obstacles to) the work of department chair were reported to be personnel issues (40%) and resource constraints (39%). significant overlap occurred between these two areas, in particular where resource allocation for personnel was deemed inadequate. the issue of authority that emerged helps to explain this overlap as some felt hampered, unable to use resources to affect or alter faculty behavior. their own scholarship was overshadowed by the managerial aspects of their work. lack of resources was amplified by a focus on bureaucracy where excessive demands for accountability were seen as a negative driver. deans were sometimes viewed as supportive and effectual and, at other times, traditional or even unethical. a competing area of attention that overlaps with their perception of and relationship to their deans is the authority of the chair. the limited authority they experienced made these leaders feel powerless to affect change and interact in ways commensurate with their role. solutions attempted for overcoming challenges the most frequent responses concerning solutions attempted for overcoming challenges varied from “no solutions found” to various leadership competencies employed. challenges had not been overcome where there was lack of ample support from departmental colleagues or college leaders or where there had been a personal or professional toll taken on the chair. of advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 20 equal weight, though, was the attention some respondents gave to a complex set of leadership skills developed (e.g., exercising authority, delegation, negotiation, and persuasion; setting high standards and expectations; organizing systems; collaborating with colleagues). maintaining perspective in the role of department chair was also underscored, with “solutions” to challenges varying from believing that problems have a way of getting resolved, to rising above inequities, petty behavior, and resistance, to intentionally seeking personal equilibrium and inner peace. gender and other variables as factors gender and other variables contributed to challenges in the workplace. while some respondents (33%) indicated that gender was not a factor in the challenges they faced—whether because they were new in their role, too busy to notice, or resistant to allowing gender become an issue for them—the majority (67%) expressed lukewarm affirmations and outright declarations to this effect. some explained that it is difficult to discern what actual gender-related issues are, partly because it is “not possible to separate a person from his or her gender.” for example, one chair attempted non-confrontational strategies for accomplishing tasks, which she added can be a matter of gender, personality, or leadership style. most notably, testimonies were provided of discriminatory, sexist, and power-laden experiences. these ranged widely but centered on the sexist behavior of male faculty, students, and administrators (17%). in the former case, the female chairs “deal[t] with some men who challenge [their] authority and, outside the department, “a certain culture of sexism” was alluded to. hostility was described toward “women in charge” (“women with children have no place in the academy, and certainly no place in administration”). notably, a gender division was apparent in the data with respect to “women generally doing the majority of the service work” and even “the grunt work,” “freeing up the males to do more research” and to “make important decisions on graduate admissions, etc.” several equated the administrative and service work that women do with “domestic duties.” someone viewed the gender inequities she faces as “a vicious cycle” that eludes her ability to seek balance and enact change. in some instances, male faculty members, chairs, and administrators were depicted as bullies and resisters of female leadership. power plays by males who think they can rule through intimidation was described as the core issue, and some claimed that they or their staff was the target. comments to this effect include “a male chair in my college who is a bully has attempted some inappropriate things, such as telling my faculty what they should and shouldn’t be doing to get tenure—scaring the crap out of them; i told him to back off—i will not be bullied!”; “some of the male faculty i deal with think they can intimidate me and, to some extent, they are right”; and “i spend time fending off men who want to take credit for my work.” sex-stereotyped roles and attributions were also identified. some think that the males in their colleges are given more respect, as in “they are largely treated like the ‘brains’ of the outfit, getting favorable treatment when it comes to course releases, more publicity for their research, and more serious reactions to their scholarship.” other females believed that they are “perceived as soft,” which might in fact be a plus depending on the configuration of their other perceived attributes: “women have to develop a style that is acceptable. if one appears too aggressive, one’s effectiveness is impaired. men behaving in similar ways are perceived as advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 21 strong. but women in leadership roles have to appear warm, supportive of others, but strong.” they believed that female chairs were perceived as “glorified administrative assistant,” caretaker, mother, and housekeeper: “i’m asked to take on extra work because of the need for females on committees, which translates into being expected to do the ‘mothering’ and ‘housework’” and “staff and faculty colleagues expect you to be more nurturing than men, which simply takes time.” interestingly, some of the terminology they used here aligned with a traditionally masculine terminology: combat, firing line, enemies/allies, and fight. these women believe that they are harder workers than their male counterparts: “the men who exist in leadership are either lazy or disorganized.” further, “the aggressive/negative attitude that some male colleagues have toward their subordinates” was identified as a compounding problem. feeling pressured by administration to serve, untenured female chairs felt that their gender had been a factor: “i wonder if a man would have had the same pressure to take the role of chair as an untenured professor or if males would have just refused the role.” invisibility was felt by those who reported being overlooked and feeling devalued: “women have difficulty being ‘seen’, heard, and acknowledged by universities.” an example given several times in the data centered on gender dynamics within such public forums as meetings wherein women are ignored at the expense of male colleagues who voice the same idea with acceptance. male leaders including deans and female leaders as well apparently allowed for this gender inequity to occur. in some cases, the female chairs’ salary was lower than that of the senior male faculty, even in their own units. the majority also identified variables coalescing around age in particular and, with limited attention, race and status/rank. age was seen as working in the favor of female department chairs who are older and more experienced, except where they were experiencing low energy or a longing to retire (19%). there was agreement among the experienced chairs that “increasing age has made my work life easier. experience counts” and that “age adds authority and credibility,” although “one has to be careful in wielding that authority in a department that considers itself egalitarian.” some of the women specified the middle years as ideal, as in “i’m pushing 60 and think my age commands respect.” however, others pointed out that aging “becomes a disadvantage” without the stamina to carry the department forward. consequently, they become “one of the old farts” who wants to “hand over the reins.” at the other end of the “age” spectrum, those who are relatively young explained that their age is a factor (12%), in some cases giving rise to discomfort and even discrimination. they stated that “even though i have a great deal of experience it is assumed that i don’t have adequate experience due to my age.” consequently, they felt pressured to perpetually prove themselves. race apparently played a role in the challenges of only 13 chairs. several commented that their department is among the most diverse on campus and that the connections forged by them have been “pleasurable” as well as “growth directed.” other chairs felt challenged by the diversity surrounding them, indicating that their departments were not ethnically diverse or that they did not feel “well-equipped” to reach out to persons of color. race was identified as a more prevailing issue for the chairs from traditionally disenfranchised groups (see jean-marie, 2005), both on a personal level (“i’m not just a faculty member—i’m very aware that i’m a black advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 22 woman”) and on an observational level (“black faculty here face significant challenges” and “race is an issue for ethnic minority staff”). a few of the chairs thought that while age and race matter in academic life, rank or status is what really counts. they find that they must remind people of their rank in subtle ways. discussion planned-readiness-duty-forced continuum while some of the respondents had sought after their current position or responded positively when approached, others had either fallen into the role or even felt pressured to assume it. at the extreme end of what i am coining the planned-readiness-duty-forced continuum, 11% of the respondents explained that the shift to department chair fit with their career trajectory. this move was actualized through hard work, planning, and sacrifices, as well as timing and opportunity: there was “no defining moment—it was a logical path.” pursuing this leadership role combined with taking advantage of professional opportunities, they succeeded in their career goal. those expressing readiness for this move referred to the “desire for a new challenge,” one citing an anticipated “growth spurt.” they wanted “to be placed in a mainstream leadership position” where they could “work hard on behalf of others and assume new administrative duties.” for others, the position represented a good fit based on their previous leadership roles and vision for what was needed. for faculty who had become chairs within their own units, they had already accumulated social capital (e.g., networks) through having worked with their colleagues and campus leaders. regarding “duty,” the middle part of the planned-readiness-duty-forced continuum, a sense of duty combined with a view of the chair’s role as one of service to the department and university also surfaced in their responses. some desired to be a good citizen by providing leadership within the department, while others felt resigned to having made this move. reflective of good citizenry was the honored practice of turn-taking. a sense of obligation was also evident, as in: “i don’t crave this position but am willing to do it.” the notion of the individual being a good fit for a particular unit because of her values was also communicated, usually described as caring about and being loyal to their colleagues and work environment. gender versus feminist leadership the results from this study overlap with those for which gender is a factor; in general, female chairs view issues somewhat differently than their male counterparts. for example, in a survey-based study of 539 department chairs in 100 different research institutions female chairs gave greater importance than did male chairs to encouraging faculty members’ professional development, research, and publication (carroll & gmelch, 1992). although not compared with males in my study, the women emphasized relationship building and democratic agendas to such an extent that their own career aspirations and scholarly work played “second fiddle.” also they implied that their leadership behavior is selfless, for they attend to the scholarly and other developmental needs of faculty to a much greater extent than their own needs. while chairs in my sample did articulate personal career goals and interpersonal boundaries, these were the advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 23 exception, broadly befitting a “masculine gender-role orientation” (trinidad & normore, p. 583). hence, my study findings are generally consistent with eagly and johnson’s (1990) review of 162 studies that found people’s leadership styles to be somewhat gender-stereotypic, with women exhibiting more interpersonally oriented and democratic styles, and men manifesting more task-oriented and autocratic styles (cited in eagly & carli, 2003). “negative attitudes toward female authority” (rudman & kilianski, 2000, p. 1316) was how some of the female chairs in my sample explained the treatment of them as housewives, mothers, and servant leaders, and the testing of their authority. this is an illustration of gender inequity—women’s social roles have been devalued through their association with the domestic sphere (e.g., family values) (rudman & kilianski). they also experienced high stress from interpersonal conflict with their colleagues, and more intensely than with deans or students. in the literature, such personnel issues are second only to administrative paperwork, although in the current study personnel stresses equaled bureaucratic stresses. context and temporality it was not necessarily a straightforward task for the chairs to identify the major administrative duties they perform. the focus and emphasis of their administrative work is largely dependent on “the time of the year” and other circumstances, which means that the duties vary somewhat: “in the fall it was annual report and preparing promotion cases. now it is budgeting for next year, doing faculty annual reviews, and determining the teaching schedule for next year” and “periodically it is larger scale things like the strategic plan.” in addition to the temporal rhythms of their annual work, the data analysis that emerged from this study does not provide a simple view of administration/administrative leadership as “bad” and scholarship/scholarly leadership as “good.” for, high-level activity and low-level activity was used to differentiate the types of administrative duties they perform: “unfortunately, most of my administrative time is spent on lower-impact activities, such as resolving student complaints. higher-impact activities include writing proposals to get department resources, etc.” rather than automatically applying this tiered model as a basis for judging worthy and less worthy tasks, a contextual treatment of the categories “administration” and “scholarship” makes more sense. that is, what was cited as a lower-level activity for one chair (e.g., handling faculty issues) was identified as a higher-level administrative activity or even scholarly task for another. further, some practical tasks have higher and lower components; for example, in the case of “handling faculty issues,” the chairs placed greater value on tasks related to personnel review and advancement than managing disputes with colleagues and students. finally, the value attached to any particular task can change over time. one can also imagine that administrative work is not to be automatically subsumed in stature by scholarly work, even though this seems counter-intuitive—administrative work embodies some higher functions and values and it carried some prestige in the data. hence, one cannot assume that this high/low hierarchy of tasks is static or that it applies generally to all academic leaders. writing reports, staffing courses, and other seemingly lowadvancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 24 level tasks can actually have repercussions for personnel matters, curriculum development, resource allocation, and, importantly, the sustainability of a unit and its reputation. the chairs expressed concern that higher-level activities (e.g., scholarly leadership and mentoring) are being compromised in their daily work, along with their potential for impact. several chairs testified that all of the administrative duties performed “are a waste of time but are things that one has to do.” frustration was articulated by many, even disgust, especially concerning ongoing solicitations for detailed information—“responding to endless requests for data from administration and constantly justifying one’s existence defines my work,” and “my job consists of assessments of everything and everyone under the sun.” attitudes towards the department chair role are influenced by assumptions embedded in the academic culture. notably, the respondents used the role descriptor “administrator,” not scholarly leader, mentor, or something else, to refer to themselves and their work. they seemed to have internalized the cultural message that the department chair role is basically one of service to their units and universities. on the other hand, the potential for seeing themselves as scholarly leaders showed promise, as many recognized that the scholarship and mentorship dimensions of their role are essential and that they must be better nurtured. as far as vision is concerned, many understood that the ‘bricks” (significant targets that are met, such as securing major grants or donors) are no more important to a department’s vitality and credibility than its “mortar” (invisible actions taken, such as resolving disputes and mentoring junior faculty members). lessons they have learned the lessons they described were varied and complex concerning what they have learned from their experiences as a female leader that could assist future department chairs. as will be seen, it is as though they were being asked to advise future female department chairs when, in fact, i had not specified gender. (six were too new in the role to comment.) make informed decisions. be aware of the institutional climate you’re stepping into” and “avoid leading in contentious departments” were pressing messages. especially challenging workplaces require a strong leadership style, which does not go over well in general and especially not if it is displayed by a woman. but, where the faculty and college leaders clearly want a strong academic female leader it was thought this might be a good move. others were less cautious, encouraging women faculty to consider taking these leadership jobs and not to worry about the time constraints involved because they can be made “workable.” once in the role, they urged new chairs to take on additional leadership tasks early, in both their schools and professional societies. importantly, they encouraged career planning: “women need to be more proactive than i was in mapping their career trajectory.” a uniform perspective shared was that while new chairs should assert their authority at the outset, they should only speak about issues for which they had knowledge: “rise to the occasion early by making your values clear on day one, through action, and plans.” being informed means staying open to ideas from all colleagues, and cultivating buy-in for strategic efforts: “take the time to do the spadework to be sure you are on firm ground—then act.” advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 25 maintain perspective. the majority (95%) urged that chairs steadfastly maintain perspective and in a myriad of ways. importantly, those in this role should understand that “you will not make everyone happy” and that “a sense of humor” is a matter of survival. a strong work ethic together with “a constructive positive attitude” is essential for fostering responsiveness and change. one must recognize that “the trivia goes with the territory” and that the position is “ultimately a service role.” one must transcend the bleak realities seemingly inherent in such a position. being positive and persistent must be a “constant presence” if leaders are to have impact. doing the work that “one believes in and that makes a difference” gives one fortitude in the face of resistance. “no matter what, be true to yourself,” they urged. the chairs also emphasized the necessity of having strong boundaries: “separate your professional and personal lives” and “when at work, focus on the job.” boundaries must be adhered to in order to ward off attempts at exploitation: “i have stronger boundaries against those that want to take advantage of me” and “set limits. people who expect you to be their mother will be disappointed no matter what, so don’t give them unlimited attention.” monitor gender. many more of the chairs testified that gender is an issue for female leaders than those who felt otherwise. the majority’s previous leadership experiences and present position generated the insight that “gender is a somewhat invisible element in many interactions. race is an area that we don’t violate, but gender is still an area of discrimination that is acceptable.” they agreed that while one must be sympathetic, “since women’s authority is always being challenged, usually without people being aware of it, it’s necessary to keep that in mind and to be careful not to be undermined.” as sex-stereotyped leaders who are expected to not just nurture but also “mother” in the workplace, women need to sidestep being cast as “‘organizational wives’ who do much of the service work without being credited.” they will be forced to rise above “provocations about [their] gender and perceived qualities.” they insisted that female chairs should not let gender interfere in getting the job done, that they should not try to hide their femaleness, and that they should understand that their experience influences their perspective: “speak from that experience but do not generalize it, even to other women.” five individuals alternatively thought that there does not seem to be a “femaleness issue” in their role as department chair. they argued that this logic “would only hold if one thinks that there are characteristics that all women have that all men do not have.” having respect for others, being an effective listener, and being able to discern important ideas and messages are all aspects of the job that are neither “gender specific” nor “rocket science.” they stressed that chairs need to help others to learn how to work together, regardless of differences. they asserted, as well, that not every faculty member can develop the characteristics that will make them good chairs. balancing the building of consensus in ways tolerant of process and of making autocratic decisions focused on outcomes involves a delicate dance. for many, this has proven a difficult challenge: “in implementing changes that are mandated from the top i have worked hard to encourage participation. this challenge has either made me seem like an overly positive administrator-loving chair or an authoritarian chair.” regarding this overriding tension, “being seen as a problem-solver and facilitator really helps—it’s less threatening than being seen as a advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 26 ‘boss.’ someone added, “i have always assumed that some men would resist “‘taking orders’ from a woman, but our male faculty don’t seem to mind being assisted by one.” control emotions. “never lose your temper—it never helps”—basically, self-monitoring was considered as a desirable capacity of leadership. once again, it was as though some had interpreted “future department chair” in the survey question to mean female leader: “stay even keel. use nurturing ‘instincts’ and don’t be shocked or affected by male colleagues when they act like little boys. take it in stride. keep your focus and vision.” avoid coming across as “moody” or “having a chip on your shoulder,” even when “it seems appropriate to play the guilt card.” in fact, they advised only women faculty with “a thick skin” to accept the position. find mentors. new chairs were strongly advised by most (95%) of the respondents to find a mentor/source who can keep them informed about unofficial matters. look for “some kind of support from other women in similar positions” they urged, in part because “one will be challenged and interacted with in ways different than men and one must figure out how to handle that.” others shared that “sisterhood really is powerful” and that “trusted allies and mentors can be found among men and women, but women have an experiential understanding of the challenges we face professionally and personally.” a handful (5%) recommended that executive committees and effective chairs be consulted. because most (85%) viewed “mentors as absolutely critical,” they believe that they must be “intentionally sought out.” practice healthy habits. faculty new to the chairship role need to care for their physical and mental health; recognize that it is not possible to keep everyone happy; maintain clear boundaries; stay positive; elicit support from colleagues and friends; learn to delegate well; and continue their own scholarship. personal counseling was even advised. a different kind of practical tip was to “develop healthy stress releases well before you become chair.” a deeper message was not to lose faith: “hang on fiercely to whatever positive feelings you have about the human race, even as the ‘problem children’ around you try to erase them.” facilitate others’ success. democratic thinking was presented as a shared value, with many examples given of collegial support, consensus building, and transparency. chairs must help their faculty to understand that “we’re partners in each other’s success”; “we make decisions through consensus where possible”; and “if we’ve got something unpleasant to say, we do it at faculty meetings.” as leaders they will need to behave selflessly: “chairs must be at a point in their career that their own personal accomplishments are not of primary concern.” be courageous. female leaders must be optimistic and confident, responsive and objective, and “not take things personally.” be positive and reassuring even when “you have to say no.” women leaders absolutely need to be strong while “somehow avoiding coming across as bitchy. this is a hard act. people forgive men who are indecisive and incompetent but come down hard on women.” women chairs must have inner strength and courage, “as they will likely be tested for their fortitude and ability to make decisions.” advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 27 implications and conclusion while many of the women wanted to lead their departments, at least 10 of the respondents had felt coerced: “the position was thrust upon me” and “i was talked into it by a dean when i was too young to say no.” two of the chairs were not yet tenured: “i was told, ‘you have to do it, no one else can or will.’” if i turned down the offer, i felt it would affect my tenure process.” someone else said she “was begged to take the position and wanted no part of it. when i realized what was happening to newer faculty, i relented and took the role on an interim basis. i’ve been stuck ever since.” another individual, also pressed by the dean, “ended up serving for one year but i liked providing leadership, so i agreed to serve permanently.” obviously “badgering” of female faculty must be closely monitored. only one instance of a positive outcome or reframing was evident in the data. while some of the individuals had felt pressured to accept the job for which they were not ready, the extent to which this is a gender issue is indeterminate. thus, it would be faulty to conclude from my survey results that women faculty are, in general, pressured more often than male faculty to assume the chair’s position and/or that men are more effective than women in resisting pressure from authority figures. what views do campus leaders have about what is feasible in terms of promotion for faculty members who serve as chairs? those without tenure in this position constitute a vulnerable population. a seasoned chair (full professor) declared, “of course this role would be totally unrealistic for tenure-earning faculty.” those seeking promotion to full professor also voiced concern: “after 10 years of serving as chair i can’t be promoted until i do more research,” and “i’m barely tenured—i still need mentoring but instead i mentor others.” faculty members who are guided to learn something about the chairship role can benefit from understanding aspects of the complexities involved and to having leadership fostered within their ranks. as one implication of this study, vulnerable populations should not be placed in this precarious position at all, particularly against their will. associate professors who serve as chairs should be protected by promotional guidelines and proactively assisted, and their assignments should be within highly functioning units staffed with capable individuals. given the preponderance of respondents in my sample who were “home-grown,” deans often pull departmental leadership from within their college ranks. as trinidad and normore (2005) explain, “someone appointed from inside the organization brings past experience and knowledge to the process” (p. 578). leadership from within has merit where the future chair is ready for this move and where s/he is properly transitioned into the role and effectively mentored. more specifically, deans and other leaders can assist new department chairs by reducing “administrivial” requests and encouraging their personal scholarship. additionally, they can explain creative management techniques, including the resource potential of such boundaryspanning activities as grant writing (gmelch, 1991). by valuing their performance, and giving credit to them for their successes and competencies, college leaders can help to overturn the negative “outcomes of gender stereotyping that beleaguer women as they attempt to advance their careers” (heilman, 2001, p. 661) and do the jobs “designated as male” (p. 667). advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 28 the issue of identity for female department chairs is also pertinent to this picture of change. how one envisions and names this academic leadership role matters greatly, as ambiguities about women leaders’ competence and stature can undermine their authority. such gaps in their socialization and mentoring help to explain why my study respondents uncritically used the pejorative “administrator” to refer to their work role. finally, the relatively invisible work of female department chairs needs more study. also needed is further investigation of the complexities involved in this role regarding the interrelated dynamics of gender, leadership, and mentorship. endnotes 1national council of professors of educational administration (353 members) (the survey was also 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(2005). standing on the promises: the experiences of black women administrators in historically black institutions. advancing women in leadership online journal, 19, 1-14. retrieved january 2, 2009 from http://www.advancingwomen.com/ awl/fall2005/19_3.html klein, s., dwyer, c. a., fox, l., grayson, d., kramarae, c., pollard, d., & richardson, b. (eds.). (2007). handbook for achieving gender equity through education (2nd ed.). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. koch, s. c. (2004). constructing gender: a lens-model inspired gender communication approach. sex roles, 51(3/4), 171-186. koch, j., & irby, b. (eds.). (2002). defining and redefining gender equity in education. charlotte, nc: information age publishing. lees, n. d. (2006). chairing academic departments: traditional and emerging expectations. san francisco, ca: anker. mclaughlin, g. w., montgomery, j. r., & malpass, l. f. (1975). selected characteristics, roles, goals, and satisfactions of department chairmen in state and land-grant institutions. research in higher education, 3, 243-259. mertz, n. t. (ed.). (2009). breaking into the all-male club: female professors of educational administration. new york: suny. miles, m., & huberman, a. (1994). qualitative data analysis (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. rudman, l. a., & kilianski, s. e. (2000). implicit and explicit attitudes toward female authority. personality and social psychology bulletin, 26, 1315-1328. short, p. m. (2009). being first: stories of social complexities. in n. t. mertz (ed.), breaking into the all-male club: female professors of educational administration (pp. 167-174). new york: suny. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 30 stanley, c. a., & algert, n. e. (2007). an exploratory study of the conflict management styles of department heads in a research university setting. innovative higher education, 32, 49-65. trinidad, c., & normore, a. h. (2005). leadership and gender: a dangerous liaison? leadership & organization development journal, 26(7), 574-590. university council of educational administration (ucea). (2007). ucea convention 2007 program guide, 113. retrieved november 3, 2007 from http://www.ucea.org/ convention/convention2007/pdf/2007program.pdf u.s. news & world report. (2008, february 2). national universities, top schools. retrieved november 1, 2007 from http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/ college/rankings/brief/t1natudoc_brief.php van engen, m. l., van der leeden, r., & willemsen, t. m. (2001). gender, context and leadership styles: a field study. journal of occupational and organizational psychology, 74, 581-598. wallace, m. (2006). the paradox and the price: a case study of female academic managers in an australian regional university. advancing women in leadership online journal, 21, 120. retrieved december 13, 2007 from http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/ summer2006/wallace.html wescott, j. w. (2000). perspectives from a new department chair. journal of technology studies, 26(2), 1-5. retrieved december 28, 2007 from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ ejournals/jots/summer-fall-2000/wescott.html wheatley, m. j. (1999/2001). leadership and the new science: discovering order in a chaotic world. san francisco, ca: berrett-koehler. advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 31 appendix 1. leadership and the female department chair survey (author, 2007) dear respondent, this internet survey is focuses on leadership experiences of female department chairs in higher education. this study represents relatively uncharted territory, as studies in leadership tend to focus on other leadership positions (e.g., superintendency, business/corporate executives) or the general issue of gender-based leadership styles. instead, this research examines the department chair role and specifically the experiences of women leaders within the academy both inside and outside the discipline of education. very short, typed responses are acceptable; longer responses are preferred. this survey has been designed to solicit responses from female faculty in the current role of department chair or head, co-chair, or interim chair. your responses will be treated confidentially and they will be reported anonymously. because your completed survey responses cannot be traced back to you, your identity will be unknown to the investigator. your participation in this survey is voluntary. if you should feel uncomfortable answering any questions on the survey, you are free to exit the survey at any time. thank you for your time and insights, principal investigator i. demographic information 1. what is your current position? ___department chair/head ___co-chair ___interim chair ___assistant chair 2. check the number of total years you have worked in higher education ___10-15 ___16-25 ___26-35 ___36-45 ___46 or over 3. check the time spent in the role of department chair/head ___1 year or less ___2-4 years __5-8 years ___9-12 years ___13 or over 4. what is your departmental discipline?_________________________ 5. number of full-time departmental faculty?____ 6. year your terminal degree was earned?____ 7. type of degree? ___phd ___edd ___md ___jd ___other (specify:___) 8. type of carnegie-specific institution? ___doctoral-granting ___master’s colleges ___associate’s colleges ___baccalaureate ___other (specify_________________) 9. name of state in which your institution is located?_________________ 10. your age? ___25-34 ___35-45 ___46-56 ___57-65 ___64 or over 11. your race or ethnicity? _________________ 12. what is your current rank? _________________ 13. state time (in months) in current rank _______ 14. check the statement that best applies: ___i have knowledge of gender issues in leadership positions ___i have some knowledge of gender issues in leadership positions ___i lack knowledge of gender issues in leadership positions 15. check the statement that best applies: ___i have interest in gender issues in leadership positions ___i have some interest in gender issues in leadership positions ___i lack interest in gender issues in leadership positions 16. list a few of your major publications, presentations, or awards _______________________ advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 32 ii. open-ended responses 1. what qualifications do you have that you feel contributed toward (a) your selection as chair, and (b) your effectiveness in this role? 2. what personal or professional factors or experiences influenced you to become a department chair? was there a “defining moment” that motivated you to pursue this position? 3. what rewards or benefits do you think exist for your service as department chair (given the workload)? 4. what percentage of your work involves administrative duties? ___20% ___40% ___60% ___80% ___other? 5. what administrative duties consume most of your time? 6. what percentage of your work involves scholarly leadership (e.g., promoting the research and scholarly efforts of faculty members)? ___20% ___40% ___ 60% ___80% ___other? 7. what are some scholarly leadership changes you have initiated or performed? 8. do you personally have mentoring, coaching, or network support and, if so, in what ways has this contributed to your effectiveness as chair? 9. in what ways have you engaged in mentoring the faculty, students, and/or staff in your department? 10. in what ways have you engaged in mentoring the faculty, students, and/or staff outside your unit? 11. in what ways have you collaborated with faculty, students, and/or staff either inside or outside your unit? 12. what are the most important challenges in (or obstacles to) your work as chair? 13. what are some of the ways you have (or have not) surmounted the challenges in your work? 14. has your gender been a factor in the challenges or obstacles you face at work? 15. what about challenges in your work that can be attributed to other variables, such as race and age? 16. are there any perceptions, beliefs, or attitudes in your unit or college regarding the association between gender and leadership? 17. are there any perceptions, beliefs, or attitudes that you have intentionally or unintentionally communicated to your colleagues? 18. what major lessons have you learned from your experiences as a female leader that could assist future department chairs? 19. additional comments: advancing women in leadership journal volume 29, 2009 33 acknowledgment special thanks are extended to the respondents for their written contributions in survey form and permissions. thanks to the peer assessors who critiqued the survey instrument, reviewed the data, and critiqued a draft version of this manuscript. doctoral students jason h. owens and monica davis provided assistance and were funded through a grant. biography carol a. mullen, phd, is chair and professor, department of educational leadership and cultural foundations at the university of north carolina at greensboro. dr. mullen is a scholar in the areas of mentoring, educational leadership, curriculum development, and educational change. she has published 14 academic books, over 65 articles in refereed journals, over 50 book chapters, and 14 edited special issues of refereed journals. her edited book leadership and building professional learning communities (palgrave macmillan, 2009) has been recently published. email: cmullen@coedu.usf.edu mailto:cmullen@coedu.usf.edu� women of color on campus: coalitions and alliances for survival and success stella beatriz kerl, ph.d. pamela renee moore, ph.d. kerl & moore, summer, 2001 "being a token, being denied one's individuality, and being the voice for "the people" can lead to the one of the most difficult challenges for women of color to face on campus: professional loneliness. " the university has the image of being a haven of sorts, a place where ideas can be explored and a person can grow intellectually and personally, regardless of gender or race/ethnicity. although universities have been historically dominated by men, women have made great gains in the last few decades. yoder (1999) states women earned more than half of all bachelors and masters degrees and about 40% of all ph.d.s and professional degrees. more and more women are entering faculty and other professional positions at universities. does this mean that universities are havens for women, places where we can grow personally and professionally without encountering the barriers that face professional women in business or other work environments? unfortunately, this is far from the case. sexism is still alive and well at universities, though it often persists in more subtle ways (benokraitis, 1997; misa, kennelly, & karides, 1999). though it may be easier for women to gain employment at a university, they often face a negative, or even hostile, environment there (hackney & bock, 1999). stalker (1994) wrote that women continue to struggle with questions about how they will fit into patriarchal institutions such as universities and become part of them or alternatively, resist fitting in and risk anonymity and marginality. two women college teachers (anonymous, 1999) wrote about "the devaluation and hostility junior women faculty experience working in that [oppressive] climate (p. 91)." faculty and professional women at universities who are also members of underrepresented racial/ethnic groups face additional challenges, for racism is as everpresent on campus as sexism (hune, 1998; margolis & romero, 1998). women of color on campus experience "double jeopardy:" discrimination and negative attitudes towards them based on their race/ethnicity as well as their gender (lindsay, 1994; pak, dion, & dion, 1991; sorcinelli, 1994). aparicio (1999) stated that "women of color face double forms of marginalization in terms of race and gender," including isolation, racial and gender-based antagonisms (i.e., not being seen as an authority) and the devaluation of their research interests and achievements. challenges for professional women of color on campus the presence of women of color in professional roles at the university is increasing, but is still fairly small. because of their small numbers, professional women of color experience unique challenges in a university setting. bell (1990), in her study of career-oriented black women, found much strength and stamina in her participants. this was evident in their attainment of professional positions, but the need to manage their lives effectively as women of color in a white male culture placed great stress on them. denton (1990) stated that obtaining success in what is often experienced as a hostile environment required special skills in coping and adaptation. our experience as women of color in professional positions on campus is consistent with the literature. as a latina assistant professor teaching in a graduate-level counseling program and as an african american psychologist at a college counseling center, we have had to cope with the overlapping effects of oppression related to gender and race/ethnicity at the university. we have identified several specific challenges that have been especially salient to us and have resonated with other women of color in our work environments. these challenges include the over-extension of race/ethnicity as an identifier, having to be the lone "voice" or representative for all people of our race/ethnicity (and at times, for all people of color!), and professional loneliness. the over-extension of color as an identifier is similar to good old-fashioned stereotyping. alperson (1975) wrote that women of color in academe were especially vulnerable to stereotyping as "radical chic" by white intellectuals with idealized images of minorities. failing to live up to the myth led to rejection, while compliance with the image led to "intolerance for individual differences among minority peoples...the radical chic myth serves to lock minorities into yet another stereotype that is no less vicious than the stereotype it places (alperson, 1975, p. 254)." more recent research has found similar "idealized" stereotyping with negative effects through the token phenomenon. misa, kennelly, and karides (1999) stated that women and people of color within sociology were stereotyped as having privilege in the academic job market due to affirmative action policies and the relative scarcity of "minority" ph.d.s. their study found that, despite this perception, "disadvantages still exist for europeanamerican women, minority men, and most especially [our emphasis], minority women." additionally, they found that european-american men were not disadvantaged in the academic labor market and "continue to enjoy positions of privilege in the academy (misa, kennelly, & karides, 1999, p. 245). women of color are often made to feel wanted because their race/gender makes them double tokens, i.e., able to fill two affirmative action categories. however, being a token is not a path to success. comas-diaz and greene (1994) wrote, "being a token...is a form of racism because it implies that the women of color with professional status is not qualified for her position (p. 353)." tokens often alternate between being showcased by employers to "take care" of minority issues, then having their individual accomplishments ignored. our experience with the over-extension of race/ethnicity as an identifier has been related to both to the "radical chic" myth and tokenism. we have found that in our various positions as professionals, we were identified almost exclusively by our gender and race/ethnicity. one of us recalled that in her first career-related job, she had no training in "recruitment or retention of minority students" but was hired as a counselor at a university department that had been criticized for not graduating enough people of color. she was hired, not for her expertise, but because she was hispanic. when students of color continued to fail and drop out, the department wondered if they should also hire a black counselor. they did not discuss hiring more faculty of color or educating their current faculty about racism/multiculturalism, which seemed to be the real problem with retention in their department. alperson (1975) pointed out this problem when she wrote "it is ironic that the minority individual placed in this position is often the person with the least power to effect administrative changes needed (p. 253)." we have also experienced the over-extension of race/ethnicity as an identifier when we have been grouped together with other women of the same race/ethnicity and expected to be "friends" with them even when we have very little else in common. early in her career, one of us recalls always being coupled with another black intern at a university counseling center. it was assumed that since they were both black women they would have instant camaraderie. when they did not, their colleagues were puzzled. they did not realize that the two women were individuals first and then women of color. some white colleagues have even treated us as if we were interchangeable: one latina faculty member sat through her entire first year evaluation with the departmental chair addressing her by the first name of someone else: the other latina faculty member. another salient challenge we have frequently experienced is being asked to be the voice for all people of our race/ethnicity, also known to us as "the voice of the 12%". throughout undergraduate, graduate school and in other white-dominated environments, we were frequently asked to confirm, deny or state the viewpoints of our particular racial/ethnic group. today, in faculty and staff meetings, eyes predictably turn toward us when the topic is "minority" students, clients, and issues of any kind: "what do you think?" thinking about it makes us weary. being expected to be an expert in all things minority makes us weary. comas-diaz and greene (1994) wrote that "regardless of their professional expertise, women of color may be asked to provide an ethnic minority perspective, or a woman's perspective, or both...they may do so at their own individual expense (p. 355)." embracing this role can have positive effects such as allowing the needs of clients and students of color to be considered. on the other hand, comas-diaz (1994) pointed out that professional women of color make themselves easy scapegoats "if what they say makes those in power uncomfortable or contradicts their view of themselves as liberal minded (p. 355)." aparicio (1999) wrote that "both junior and senior faculty shared painful experiences ranging from being considered the 'ghetto appointment--that being the person of color hired to do the black stuff' (p. 124)" to being harassed by students. she noted their warnings about the costs to being the voice for people of color: costs that ranged from having one's research and teaching marginalized from the central curriculum to being attacked or punished for speaking out about uncomfortable issues. being a token, being denied one's individuality, and being the voice for "the people" can lead to the one of the most difficult challenges for women of color to face on campus: professional loneliness. we experience professional loneliness as a combination of exclusion and isolation: exclusion from what would normally be one's identity within a professional group, and isolation from finding mentoring and other collegial connections. in a comparison of african american women and men faculty and administrators, singh, robinson, and williams-green (1995) found that the women felt less accepted in the academic community and a greater sense of isolation on campus. margolis and romaro (1998) found frequent instances of stigmatization and exclusion in their interviews of women of color in ph.d. programs. lindsay (1994) reported racist and sexist exclusionary practices experienced by deans who were women of color, including vice presidents who refused to support them, tensions with new provosts, and being consistently undervalued. the feeling of not knowing where to turn for help when we need it, overhearing the camaraderie of others while realizing you never quite fit in (as part of the "in group") creates professional loneliness. we often find ourselves having a stronger sense of connection to students, clients of color, and administrative staff than to our peers. one of us recalls being told by a superior to "hang out" more with the other (predominantly white male) faculty: "perhaps you can go to some of the university's football games." another colleague of color had a superior warn her that she should not spend time socializing with the administrative staff because people would not take her professional position seriously. such exclusionary practices have lead us to feeling isolated, feeling isolated because we are isolated. while this loneliness can be survived, it can cause a incalculable toll on the individual and her sense of effectiveness in her profession. much literature about women and women of color (hune, 1998; lindsay, 1994; ponterotto, 1990; thomas & asunka, 1995; witt, edison, pascarella, nora, & terenzini, 1999) discusses the importance of social and professional support for career success and survival. participants in peterson's (1997) research on minority career achievement pointed out the importance of significant relationships for emotional support. mentoring and mentoring-type relationships have also been discussed as an important relationship for women and people of color (harding-hidore, 1986; kerl, 1995; perna, lerner, & yura, 1995), yet many professional women have difficulty in establishing mentoring relationships. women of color often have a preference for collaboration, yet it is difficult to find people in one's department with whom they can collaborate. loneliness and isolation can hinder, even arrest, continued professional growth. coalitions and alliances for professional women of color given that they are often the only woman and/or person of color within their university department, professional women of color need to be proactive in seeking out ways to develop relationships in their work environment. building coalitions and alliances with women of color and white women across the university can give them the support they need to succeed in their careers at the university. albreach and brewer (1990) state that coalitions are groups or individuals that come together around a specific issue to achieve a specific goal. most coalitions are temporary: upon completion of the goal, they often dissolve and the groups or individuals go back to doing their own work. alliances are more lasting: they are built upon more trusting relationships and the level of commitment is deeper than in coalitions. why should professional women of color in universities consider coalitions? essed (1996) wrote that coalitions are helpful for women who find themselves in vulnerable situations. coalitions shield individuals from hostilities and can provide places for people who are isolated. as discussed previously, the university climate for women of color is often described as being "chilly" or hostile, and women of color often become isolated in their departments. women of color are vulnerable in such environments. isolation can also mean being isolated from potential resources within the university. coalitions in university settings can help members to discover potential resources (i.e., grant opportunities, service projects, teaching strategies, etc.). they can assist in forming relationships with people who have access to places you may want to go. in our case, having one of us at the counseling center and the other in the counseling department allows us to have communication and involvement between the two settings, including assistance when we need it. for example, when we organized a coalitions to target depression on campus, we were able to get plenty of student volunteers to do the screenings to promote the services of the counseling center due to our various connections. one of the most valuable reasons to form a coalition is that it "can be empowering because it is a way of breaking the silence of lost hopes and frustrations. together, women can voice wishes and discuss problems and needs that would otherwise remain unsaid (essed, 1996, p. 141)." breaking the silence has the potential to be the best way to "reality-test" our perceptions of events and exchanges we experience in the university. many times we have felt as though we must be paranoid or overly sensitive in the ways that we react to things others consider "normal." however, coalitions of women of color and white women allow us to check our perceptions with others. we often find that white women and women of color have empathy and understanding, and we experience this understanding as a gift and a validation. some people are hesitant to form coalitions for a variety of reasons. bunch (1990) believed that a major factor in preventing effective coalitions is fear of diversity. she wrote that "fear and distrust of differences are most often used to keep us in line. when we challenge the idea that differences must be threatening, we are also challenging the patriarchal assignment of power and privilege as birthrights (bunch, 1990, p. 50). resistance to acknowledging our own dominance and privilege is another factor that can destroy otherwise strong coalitions. it is important that we discuss and understand the overlapping forms of dominance and oppression in its various forms (i.e., race, class, heterosexism, age, disability) rather than oversimplifying oppression using only one dimension (anzaldua, 1990; bunch, 1990). accordingly, one of the key aspects of forming a successful coalition is to see diversity as a strength, and to honestly build an atmosphere of respect for one another. several researchers (bunch, 1990; coffman, 1990; essed, 1996; triandis, kurowski, tecktiel, & chan, 1993) have suggested that having commonalties are also important in building successful coalitions. how is it possible to value and respect diversity while trying to connect using common ground? watkins & rosegrant (1996) wrote that "parties are motivated to join 'natural' coalitions when they have either shared interests or compatible interests that can be advanced through cooperative action (p. 49)" but that the shared interest is not sufficient for the coalition to form. in order for that to happen, the goals of the coalition need to be made explicit. bunch (1990) wrote that "coalition is not abstract. it functions when groups or individuals are working together around something that each cares about...(p. 56). she also wrote that members of coalitions need to be clear about its bottom line, to "know what we need in order to survive in a coalition and how to communicate that to others (bunch, 1990, p. 56)." hackney & bock (1999) wrote that traditional models of mentoring have been characterized more by exclusion than inclusion, but that "women can effect change in the culture by establishing coalitions among themselves and trusted others (p. 4)." they propose a model of "inclusion, egalitarianism, and the exploration and encouragement of new ideas (hackney & bock, 1999, p. 4), and stress the need for acceptance and appreciation of all members. for us the bottom line is that we need each other to survive--and succeed--in our professional roles at the university. for this reason, we begin coalitions along smaller, more concrete issues, and through them form alliances that sustain us through the difficult paths we face along the way to professional growth. anzaldar (1990), in her chapter on alliances with lesbians-of-color, wrote, "en fin quiero tocarlas de cerca, i want to be allied to some of you. i want to touch you, kinswomen, parientas, companeras, paisans, carnalas, comrads, and i want you to touch me so that together, each in our separate ways, we can nourish our struggle and keep alive our visions...(p. 230)." we echo her words. dr. stella beatriz kerl is an assistant professor in the master's in professional counseling program at southwest texas state university. dr. kerl can be reached at: sk08@swt.edu. dr. pamela renee moore is a senior psychologist at the counseling center at southwest texas state university. references albreach, l., & brewer, r. 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(1999). women and gender: transforming psychology. upper saddle river, nj: prentice-hall. microsoft word 382_reviewed and edited.doc volume 40, 2021 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership 108 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 advancing women in leadership vol. 40, pp. 108-119, 2021 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper men’s perceptions of the value of female leaders in higher education stephanie j. jones & patricia ryan pal stephanie j. jones: professor, higher education, texas tech university, stephanie.j.jones@ttu.edu patricia ryan pal: adjunct instructor, texas tech university, tricia.pal@ttu.edu accepted december 18, 2020 this qualitative research study, framed by social role theory, explored the perceptions of 20 men faculty and academic administrators at doctoral-granting highest research-intensive universities located in the southwestern region of the u.s. the focus of the study was their perceptions of the value of women leaders, the differences between how men and women are valued in higher education, and the stereotypes and challenges that contribute to how women are valued as leaders. findings from this study show that men faculty and administrators do not always value women as leaders; differences between academia and industry may exist surrounding how women are valued as leaders; institutional leadership may perpetuate the devaluation of women as leaders; and the value of women in higher education leadership remains a reflection of how women are valued in society. differences between how men and women are valued were also explored, finding that men faculty and administrators may not see the differences in value based on gender; gender differences exist in regards to standards for evaluation and reward in higher education; and women are perceived to devalue themselves. challenges that contribute to how women are valued were identified, including the continuation of homosociality that promotes men supporting other men, and the existence of stereotypes and biases that give men an advantage and undermine women in leadership roles. keywords: social value, women’s leadership, gender women are underrepresented in leadership roles across various industries, making up just 5.8% of chief executive officers at standard & poor (s&p) 500 companies (catalyst, 2020); approximately 23.6% of congress (25% of senators; 23% of house members) (center for american women and politics [cawp], 2020); and 30% of college and university presidents (gagliardi et al., 2017). to explore how women are valued in leadership positions in higher education, it is necessary to understand how women are valued in greater society. a potential reason for the limited number of women in leadership roles across society may be the way that women are socialized (babcock & laschever, 2007; denmark, 1993; klenke, 1996, 2018), as well as the value that society places on gender and its social role. denmark (1993) suggested that women were not socialized for leadership roles, but instead for “domestic roles as wife and mother or lower-level traditional jobs in the workforce” (p. 345). denmark also posited that education is a reflection of larger society, and in turn its values and beliefs, allowing it to reproduce differences based on gender. more recently, parker (2015) noted that a significant shift has occurred, and women have gained momentum professionally, but still are primarily responsible and expected to take care of duties such as childcare and supporting their spouses as they advance in their careers, further demonstrating society’s expected role of them. as demonstrated in women in management: quick take (2020), there has been an increase in the representation of women leaders globally and within the u.s., but women and most specifically women of color, continue to be underrepresented in the highest levels of leadership. society and culture determine how individuals are socialized (bian et al., 2017; denmark, 1993; trumpy & elliott, 2019), and play a role in determining the status value of nominal characteristics such as gender or race (ridgeway, 1991). berger et al. (1980) identified that valuations and beliefs about individuals are organized around specific characteristics, known as “status characteristics” (p. 479); and include individual characteristics such as race, gender, physical attractiveness, and age. status characteristics manifest themselves in the “status organizing process” in which they form the “basis of observable inequalities in face-to-face social interactions” (p. 479). ridgeway (1991) explained that a characteristic has status value “when consensual cultural beliefs indicate that persons who have one state of the characteristics (e.g., whites or males) are more worthy in the society than those with another state of the characteristic (blacks or females)” (p. 368). certain characteristics, such as gender, have long histories of status 109 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 value in society, as depicted by men being seen as more valuable than women (berger et al., 1980; ridgeway, 1991). in their review of literature on gender and leadership, appelbaum et al. (2003) noted that women are socialized through play and behavior to reinforce a second-class nature that they then accept. furthermore, the second-class nature affects the self-confidence of women when it comes to leadership opportunities (kay & shipman, 2018). berger et al. (1980) suggested that when working in groups or organizations, status is not created in a silo but rather influenced by the greater society and is at times inequitable. eagly (1983) referred to “formal status inequality” as being “a product of a hierarchy of roles that is legitimized by social norms and embedded in the formal structure of groups and organizations” (p. 972). as status is being determined by characteristics such as gender due to societal influences, the ability to influence followers for women may be difficult, in turn, limiting how they are viewed as leaders. carli (2001) noted, “to be effective, influence agents should be perceived as competent, and people typically perceive men to have higher levels of competence than women have, unless there is a clear evidence of female superiority” (p. 734). wagner and berger (1997) highlighted the interaction between socialization and status characteristics, saying “socialization determines the meaning of status differences, what these differences represent, and when they are appropriate to employ” (p. 6). performance expectations are determined by social factors through three individual processes: (a) status characteristics that are significant within society including race and gender, (b) social rewards, and (c) “patterns of behavioral interchange” (correll & ridgeway, 2003, p. 32) between individuals. as previously described, status characteristics are the categories by which individuals differ in which the greater society have conferred value, worthiness, or ability to one individual over the other, and can be either specific (i.e., dependent on a situation) or diffuse (i.e., general) (berger et al., 1980; correll et al., 2007; correll & ridgeway, 2003). gender, for instance, is an example of a diffuse characteristic in which men are often valued higher in professional situations and women are valued higher in domestic responsibilities, such as childcare. additionally, status characteristics are independent, meaning that individuals may have more than one lower-level status characteristic that affects their overall status value and how they are viewed by society as potential leaders (ridgeway, 1991). the key to the continuation of status characteristics is that even those who hold lower status accept the lower value position as a “societal fact,” devaluing themselves and their contributions (babcock & laschever, 2007; correll & ridgeway, 2003, p. 32). status characteristics and leadership klenke (1996) identified that historically, the lens that leadership is viewed is “many great men” (p. 2). numerous studies also support the “think-manager, think-male” concept as a possible contributor to gender bias in leadership (e.g., schein, 1973, 1975, 2001, p. 676; sczesny, 2003). this concept, first developed by schein in the 1970s, highlights the relationship between gender and perceptions of characteristics associated with being a successful manager (schein et al., 1996). braun et al. (2017) furthered the concept of think manager, think male in their study that supported that, women encountered an opposite expectation of “think follower – think female” (p. 386). the authors suggested that this concept might perpetuate the challenge, pulling women towards the follower roles that align with society gender roles, and pulling men to leadership roles while pushing them from the follower roles. within higher education in particular, scholars have noted that women and men are valued differently within leadership roles. dean et al. (2009) claimed that “because academic leadership is male normed, simply being male gives men a boost” (p. 235). as identified by klenke (2018), homosociality is practiced by men in higher education leadership positions who look for individuals who are similar to them to hire. in u.s. higher education, men make up the majority of the positions of power, including president (69.9% of the 1,546 participants in the american council on education’s (ace) american college presidents study in 2016; gagliardi et al., 2017), provost (56.4% across institutional types in 2013; johnson, 2016), deanships leading to a presidency (72% in 2012; kim & cook, 2013), and full professors (68% of 182,204 were men in 2015; johnson, 2016). as such, they are the ones often evaluating female faculty and leaders and may act as a barrier to the advancement of women due to how they value them in leadership positions. gender and status are linked based on societal expectations and values, something that is also seen within higher education. a depiction of the value placed on men over women can be seen in the lack of advancement of women into higher faculty ranks as well as into administrative positions (ace, 2016; gagliardi et al., 2017; johnson, 2016). further evidence is the continued gender pay gap in which men out earned women at every faculty rank from lecturer to full professor, and at every institution type except two-year privates in 2015-16 (johnson, 2016). this is also true for higher education administrators. women in administrator positions in 2016 made $.80 per dollar as compared to men, an increase of only $.03 more since 2001 (based on data from approximately 50,000 higher education administrators from more than 1,100 institutions; bichsel & mcchesney, 2017). in their suggestions for future research on women faculty and leaders, dominici et al. (2009) advised that researchers explore the “reasons for the inadequate recognition of women's leadership contributions, which undermines women's career trajectories as well as their stature and job satisfaction” (conclusions section, para. 1). researchers have explored the advancement of women in patriarchal higher education institutional structures (e.g., jones & palmer, 2011; jones & taylor, 2012, 2013; jones et al., 2015a, 2015b ), yet it has often been explored from the women’s perspective. the lack of the dominant gender’s voice in academic leadership -men -from the literature is an oversight that needs to be addressed as higher 110 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 education continues to be male-normed (bornstein, 2009; dean et al., 2009; eddy & cox, 2008). until we understand how men perceive and value women as leaders, it remains challenging to address issues that women face in advancement in higher education, including but not limited to: challenges to tenure and promotion (e.g., hart, 2016; mason et al., 2006; maranto & griffin, 2011); allocation of work responsibilities (e.g., teaching, research, service) and the value put on each (eddy & ward, 2015; link et al., 2008; misra et al., 2012; o’meara et al., 2017); and campus climates and cultures that are not supportive of women and their career progression as leaders (jones et al., 2012, 2015b; maranto & griffin, 2011; pal & jones, 2019). the purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of men, the dominant gender and power holders in higher education leadership and senior faculty ranks, of the value of women leaders within higher education. the following research questions guided this study: 1. how do male faculty and administrators perceive women are valued as leaders within higher education? 2. what differences do male faculty and administrators perceive between how male and female leaders are valued within higher education? social role theory this study is framed by social role theory. social role theory supports that within society there are shared gender stereotypes that develop from a division of labor based on gender (eagly, 1987), as well as “behavioral differences between [men] and [women] are the result of cultural stereotypes about gender (how [men] and [women] are supposed to act) and the resulting social roles that are taught to young people” (eagly & wood, 2012; eagly et al., 2000; ridgeway & correll, 2004; “what is social role theory,” n.d. para. 3). according to eagly (1987) and ridgeway (2001b), since there is a division of labor based on gender, men and women have different skillsets and contribute to a social organization that supports this gender-differentiated behavior (eagly et al., 2000; eagly & wood, 2012). social role theory’s key principle is based on how society distributes men and women into social roles, which results in differences and similarities (eagly, 1987; eagly et al., 2000; eagly & wood, 2012). eagly and wood (2016) stated that gender roles are supported and sustained by the way that men and women behave. there is a socially accepted expectation that women more than men will take on roles that “require predominantly communal behaviors, domestic behaviors, or subordinate behaviors for successful role performance,” and men more than women filling roles that “require predominantly agentic behaviors, resource acquisition behaviors or dominant behaviors for successful role performance” (eagly et al., 2000, p. 127). people’s perceptions about individuals are framed by whether or not they stay within the confines of the expected gender role or deviate from what is considered normal, with them being rewarded or punished respectively (eagly & wood, 2012). within the higher education context, if men are predominantly the leaders and are perceived by society as having the skills and competencies to be leaders, then the division of labor based on these stereotypes will continue without intentional disruption of gendered stereotypes. women who challenge this socially accepted norm may face critical sanctions that are either overt (e.g., being removed from their role) or covert (e.g., being talked about negatively; eagly & wood, 2012). methods this qualitative survey research study was conducted through a naturalistic paradigm. the naturalistic paradigm was used to explore the multiple constructions of reality by the male faculty and administrator participants (lincoln & guba, 1985). salmons (2015) noted that online interviews (e.g., conducted through surveys, video conferencing) “may help some participants to be more forthcoming in response to questions. as a result, participants may be more willing to discuss sensitive or personal matters” (p. 40). the decision to use a qualitative survey was made to increase the openness of the participants by creating a nonthreatening environment to discuss what could be a sensitive topic. the data was collected through a 21-question researcherdeveloped qualitative survey, researcher journals, and institutional documents. the qualitative survey consisted of demographic as well as a series of open-ended questions surrounding men’s perceptions of how departments, colleges, and institutions value women leaders; the role of women within the department/college/ institution leadership; challenges that women face in their career progression, and the role of society in the valuation of women as leaders. the survey instrument was validated through a pilot study with eight higher education professionals including administrators and faculty as well as graduate students and was also face validated by three researchers of higher education leadership and gender studies. feedback from the pilot study and higher education leadership experts resulted in the need to revise several of the open-ended questions for needed clarification. the participants in this study were 20 men faculty and administrators at three large, public, highest research-intensive universities located in the southwestern region of the united states. participants were identified through departmental and college websites based on their role (i.e., faculty member, administrator). the recruitment email was sent to 30 individuals (10 at each university) and included a request to forward the study information to others who they perceived would be interested in participating. due to the use of this recruitment technique, it is not possible to identify the response rate to the survey. although individuals from all academic disciplines were invited to participate in this study, some disciplines were better represented in the final participants than others (e.g., stem, business, arts, humanities, and social sciences). at the time that contact information was collected in summer 2018, men made up the majority of deans, other college administrators excluding department chairs, department chairs, and assistant, tenured associate, and tenured full professor ranks. the only group 111 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 where women dominated in number was the lowest rank of fulltime faculty at the instructor level. potential participants were emailed an invitation to complete the online qualitative survey through qualtrics. a follow-up reminder was sent to the potential participants two weeks later. twenty men completed the qualitative survey. data analysis occurred through the unitizing of data into the smallest meaningful pieces (lincoln & guba, 1985), and coded using open and axial coding to establish themes and subthemes (saldaña, 2016). the data were independently coded and analyzed by the two researchers who came together to discuss and agree upon the final resulting themes. trustworthiness was addressed throughout the study through the use of rich, thick descriptions, peer debriefing, researchers’ reflexive journals, and audit trails of both the unanalyzed and analyzed data. positionality of the researchers having experienced higher education from various roles and perspectives, we have had the opportunity to serve in leadership roles as well as to experience how leadership roles are filled within multiple higher education organizations. our similar backgrounds and current experiences within a doctoral-granting highest research-intensive institution have led us to this study. research intensive doctoral-granting institutions are considered prestigious in the college and university hierarchy and have fewer women at the top administrative levels than other types of institutions. as individuals who identify as women ourselves, we continue to search for why women continue to struggle to reach parity in the top levels of these organizations. our prior work has been from the lens of women and their lived experiences. wishing to further explore why women struggle to achieve parity in leadership, our focus has moved to the perspectives and experiences of the dominant power holders, men. this study was a challenge to both of us as we were unsure if we could remain unbiased in our interpretations and analysis of the data collected but relied on peer debriefings and our reflexive journals to help ensure the trustworthiness of the study’s findings. limitations of the study this study has several limitations. the first is that only men at three highest research-intensive universities located within the southwest region of the united states were invited to participate in the study, limiting the transferability of the findings to other types of institutions or geographic regions. another consideration is that an online qualitative survey was used to collect the data as we perceived the participants would be more honest as the data was anonymous. to get the rich data that was needed to address the research questions, the questions posed were open-ended and required a significant amount of time to complete. we knew that this could potentially affect the response rate to the study. additionally, this study only explored men’s perceptions of the social value of one gender identity, women, and did not consider other gender identities, such as transgender, gender non-binary, or no gender identity. a final limitation is that we were seeking the thoughts of the countergender of their perceptions and experiences of women. it is understood that some individuals may be guarded with their responses in order to be politically correct. it is assumed this is why some of the examples provided in the findings were based on the experiences of the participants with other men and their actions toward female leaders. findings the participants in this study included 10 tenured professors, five tenured associate professors, two tenure-track assistant professors, two non-tenure-track faculty, and one director. all participants were white (the predominant race of the study institutions) and represented a variety of disciplines including stem (8); business (3); art, humanities, and social sciences (5); agriculture (2); education (1); and architecture (1). all but five had held an administrator role at some point during their careers or were currently in an administrator role (e.g., director, chair, dean). the profiles of the participants are presented in table 1. pseudonyms were used to protect the identity of the participants. table 1 participant profiles name age range race/ ethnicity rank discipline administrator role bill 65+ white associate professor business yes john 65+ white professor stem yes ted 55-64 white professor agriculture yes chris 45-54 white associate professor architecture yes mike 55-64 white professor business yes blake 55-65 white professor stem yes ryan 45-54 white associate professor stem no tim 55-65 white professor business yes 112 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 kyle 65+ white professor arts, humanities, or social sciences yes sam 45-54 white associate professor stem yes james 35-44 white associate professor arts, humanities, or social sciences yes alan 55-64 white professor stem yes adam 55-64 white professor stem no kurt 35-44 white assistant professor arts, humanities, or social sciences yes mark 45-54 white assistant professor arts, humanities, or social sciences no colin 55-65 white non-tenure track faculty agriculture no tyler 25-34 white non-tenure track faculty stem no dale 45-54 white professor education yes evan 45-54 white professor arts, humanities, or social sciences yes scott 65+ white director stem yes value of women as leaders the first research question explored men’s perceptions of how women are valued as leaders within higher education. themes that emerged to answer this research question included: (a) male faculty and administrators do not always value women as leaders; (b) industry values female leaders more than academia; (c) institutional leadership may perpetuate the devaluation of women leaders; and (d) the value of women in higher education leadership remains a reflection of how women are valued in society. male faculty and administrators do not always value women as leaders participants highlighted how within institutions of higher education, there is still a bias toward men as leaders, something that manifests through language (how women are talked about) and action (how women are treated). adam perceived that it was becoming harder for women to ascend to leadership, stating, “i used to think that the university made efforts to provide equal opportunities for women in leadership. but recently, the track record seems fairly weak.” others, such as john shared that he had seen men faculty and administrators often question a woman’s right to authority. he recounted a recent conversation he had with some administrators: one example that was clear to me was during interviews for the current dean of [academic college]. in my view, the most highly qualified candidate was a woman, but i heard from some administrators that she was, put bluntly, too “strong” for the position and wanted too much power. however, she was asking for no more than the current dean of [academic college] had obtained. from john’s perspective, the woman administrator was evaluated poorly because she demonstrated traits that are often accepted of men. in another instance, mike shared an example of how colleagues of his referred to a new woman academic dean as “the girl dean,” questioning her ability to lead. as he reflected further on his male colleagues who placed the low value on women leaders, he noted: they [men] hold endowed positions and are generally full professors…the fact is that they use their institutional power to dissuade women from advancing through the academic ranks. for example, in our college, once a woman was ranked first among candidates, this faction, all male and all senior, apparently lobbied the provost to declare our dean search a failure. the men in mike’s example seemed to perceive that a woman was not right to fill the dean role, perpetuating the value challenge that women face. although the woman dean was hired, she entered into a culture where senior men faculty were challenging her ability to fulfill the role before her first day. this was not the first time that action had been taken against a woman in a leadership position in this discipline, which may have contributed to the diminishing value of female leaders. mike shared: two years ago, our administration allowed an incompetent interim dean to fire a competent and effective woman who was serving the college as associate dean. that was a travesty and called into question the sincerity of the president's verbal support for women in leadership roles. he discussed that he perceived the decision to remove the woman associate dean to be more than just removing one person, but a signal as to how the institutional administration valued women in leadership positions. mike’s experiences were supported by tim who shared his perception that “there is still a resistance among some men toward women in leadership roles. it is sometimes subtle and at other times overt.” 113 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 a practice that may contribute to the devaluation of women as leaders in the academy was discussed by blake who claimed that women were sometimes appointed to leadership roles, even when they had not earned it based on their work, noting, “i'm sure there is still the perception that when a woman is appointed to a leadership role, it was done based on something other than merit.” for chris there was a recognition that women were valued when it was support roles, stating that he knew of examples of women in leadership roles but “they seem to follow the standard pattern of valuing effective women in roles that support leaders rather than being the leaders.” industry values female leaders more than academia some of the participants noted that they perceived industryvalued women leaders more than academia. tim, whose discipline was business, noted “that [valuing women as leaders] has changed in business and the professions over the past several decades. i expect that will change in government over the next few elections. we need to make the change in the academy.” tim went on to say that academics “needs to catch up” with industry, which accepts and values women leaders. john had experienced a similar situation in the sciences, sharing “in my field, it took industry to point the way by hiring and advancing women scientists, and by providing them with some of the benefits discussed [childcare, parental leave].” other participants perceived that women were valued in academia. kyle shared an example: education is one area where women nationally are recognized as leaders…k-12 education has been seen for years as a largely female career, so it is not terribly surprising to see that more women are moving into higher education, and that some of them move on to successful careers as administrators at various levels. so i think higher education is probably a pretty good place for talented and ambitious women to move into leadership positions. in his reflection, he did question the number of women presidents in higher education organizations, first speculating 25%, then looking it up to see that it was 30%, higher than he had expected. in his assessment, this was viewed as a positive of the value of women as leaders in the academy based on less than one-third of college presidents being women. institutional leadership may perpetuate the devaluation of women a number of participants discussed the role of institutional leadership in the valuation of female leaders, some giving credit to current institutional leadership for valuing women, while the majority questioned their role in continuing the devaluation of female leaders. sharing his perceptions of institutional administration adam explained, “i have felt that the current upper administration seems less likely to listen to concerns brought by a female leader than by a man. the administration seems to have found ways to politely ignore some requests from female leaders.” mike shared that in some cases, it might be a risk for male administrators to shift perceptions and place a higher value on female leaders: i'm not sure our administrators are willing to take any personal risk to advance the cause. for example, [in the example shared above] regarding the president/provost's unwillingness to tell an interim dean that he does not have the authority to fire a female associate dean. from his perspective, the potential consequences of straying from the norm led the institutional leaders to continue to support the status quo instead of challenging the negative value placed on female leaders. another area discussed was the idea that men administrators do not perceive women’s opportunities for leadership to be a challenge. this was supported by kurt who said, “i also think that part of the problem in representing women in leadership positions here in greater numbers is that too many of the stakeholders with power don't perceive the lack of representation as enough of a problem.” he further elaborated: i think that female leaders at my institution are perceived with great respect, and indeed, i think that the admiration they earn from their male administrative colleagues sometimes blinds those male leaders to problems of representation. that is, i think that some administrative leaders [see] the success of these representative women as indicators of gender equity across campus. many of the participants, however, noted that the lack of women in leadership positions was a challenge that needed to be addressed. dale held the perception that a commitment to value women as leaders by senior administrators was a “clear expression of intent from top leadership (president down).” he noted that the topdown commitment to increasing the number of women in leadership roles has led to changes within his institution, stating “i think the organization has been successful to a significant degree [in] placing women in leadership positions across the university.” still, “genuine diversity” in leadership was something that he perceived was not yet present at the institution. value of women in higher education leadership remains a reflection of how women are valued in society participants perceived that how society values women as leaders continues to be a concern. tim, for instance, stated, “society has not valued women in leadership roles.” this was reiterated by adam who explained, “in the united states, society as a whole seems more eager to disparage women in leadership than to value them.” kurt acknowledged that progress had been made but women were still devalued, stating that “in society and our communities, while important shifts have been made, not nearly enough value and respect are given to the powerful way that women can guide and lead.” tyler also explained that there had 114 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 been a shift, but women were not valued highly in american society, and “as leaders, even less.” scott noted that some of the challenges that women face regarding being valued in society may prevent them from pursuing certain careers as early as junior high school. he explained, “higher education is part of the larger society, and women with academic bents are not immune from what goes on outside academe. i fear that the pipeline is getting squeezed at early stages for women.” despite perceiving that his institution “values good leadership and also inclusiveness” and, in turn, “women who exhibit good leadership potential (and actuality) are given opportunities to use their abilities,” he still acknowledged that challenges in how women are valued in society may affect them reaching higher education leadership positions by keeping them out of the roles that are access points to higher education leadership. differences between how men and women are valued the second research question explored the differences between how men and women are valued as leaders. themes to answer this research question included: 1) men faculty and administrators may not see differences based on gender; 2) due to norms that support men in society and higher education, men and women are evaluated and rewarded based on different standards; and 3) women devalue themselves, adding to the challenges they face in obtaining leadership positions. male faculty and administrators may not see differences based on gender although participants supported that female leaders are devalued compared to males, they did not necessarily see the differences in how men and women are valued. kurt, for example, perceived that, women were supported in leadership by being treated equally with men, stating “the highest leadership roles in our college are filled by women, and i value their leadership, and i have always felt like there is strong teamwork in our college, and especially in our department, regardless of gender or sex.” sam stressed the importance of valuing the individual and not considering gender, noting: i would not state it [valuation of leadership] as a perception of women's leadership abilities but rather that of an individual's abilities. we had a male associate dean who stepped down and was replaced by a female. the female associate dean was greatly appreciated as she was much better at the position. i also know situations where a female in a leadership position was not well-liked because of the way she led. in both these cases, the feeling about the individual was fairly uniform among the [vast] majority of faculty members (and students), with no difference based on the gender of the faculty member or student. tim perceived “those women who are in leadership roles are comparable to my perception of the men who are in leadership roles.” alan also perceived that women were equally competent when recruited through a proper search and not appointed. he continued his assessment of female leaders, cautioning that women may not be equally competent when they are appointed “just to fill some quota.” a similar point was made by sam who perceived that women may in fact benefit from a bias favoring placing them in leadership roles. men and women are evaluated and rewarded based on different standards participants highlighted the different standards that men and women face regarding the valuation of their leadership potential. differences included men being allowed to negotiate for more and rewarded with it, and being allowed to behave differently than women. john shared his thoughts that “some faculty and administrators seem hesitant to accept that women scientists need as much start-up support as men.” if women are not valued the same when starting, affecting things like their start-up support, it has the potential to affect them throughout their careers, creating a disadvantage due to lower valuation of women as researchers from the start. participants perceived that men had the latitude to behave differently than women, being more aggressive or assertive, due to male-normed expectations of leadership held by society. james commented on the challenges that women face: i think that sexism is rampant in our society. assertive women face the burden of this bigotry by being perceived as unfair in their expectations or overly imperious, even when they are conducting themselves in the same manner as their male counterparts. he continued by sharing an example that he sees when men colleagues become frustrated with assertive women leaders, using “sexist comments” to devalue them (e.g., “she thinks she’s the queen bee” or “she’s a bit of a mother hen”). bill reflected on the meaning of the comments, “while the men offering these comments likely see them as innocuous, they speak to negative attitudes that cloud [perceptions of] women in leadership positions.” mark perceived that women may need to change their demeanor at times in order to be successful in leadership roles. for women, certain behaviors, mistakes, and challenges are associated with their gender instead of who they are as a leader. he explained: women are often put in positions that require them to "soften" their public persona by publicly responding to questions that are gender-norm specific or they are often called upon to use a rhetoric that genders their relations in the context of governance. women are subject to greater scrutiny; mistakes in leadership or mere disagreements with positions or policies are often attributed to gender. he furthered this with an example of a difference related to leadership he perceived based on gender where a woman past president was forced to resign when she acted contrary to the conservative expectations of the institution, resulting in “her role [becoming] contentious, publicly.” 115 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 kyle has seen female administrators be devalued or overlooked for promotions when they appeared too aggressive or forward. he shared his perceptions that others assessed these women as “lacking leadership skills (i.e., not [ambitious] or able to tackle difficult personnel problems).” kyle provided an example that he had seen of a woman administrator, someone he assessed as “exceptionally competent” that “may have suffered [from] the perception that she was too willing to tell people what she thinks.” despite reaching successes outside of the institution, the incongruity between a woman leader and male-accepted leadership traits contributed to the stopping of advancement opportunities for her within the institution. women devalue themselves, adding to the challenges they face in obtaining leadership positions a final challenge that the participants perceived was that women tend to devalue themselves as leaders, which contributes to the challenge of obtaining a leadership position and may contribute to the negative valuation of women in leadership roles in general. a number of participants noted that women often do not apply for leadership positions, making the problem less about how men value them and more about how they see themselves in the role of leader. chris explained, “in years of serving on search committees for faculty as well as our current dean, the applicant pools have too few women within them.” he perceived that women may “self-edit” and not apply for roles when they cannot “see themselves succeeding or being supported at our institution.” apart from questioning their ability to successfully fill a role causing them to not apply, bill noted that “women are reluctant to self-promote.” to apply for a position though, he explained that self-promotion was necessary. this point was also shared by scott who perceived that some women have a “confidence deficit,” something that he claimed men had as well, but “push ahead anyway.” discussion and implications for higher education the findings of this study provide interesting insights into men’s perceptions of how women are valued as leaders within higher education organizations. the theory that frames this study, social role theory, continues to be supported by the findings. though participants appeared to value women as leaders, they provided ample examples of subtle and blatant biases and microaggressions toward women leaders at their institutions that provide evidence that women may not be valued as leaders simply due to their gender as well as the stereotypes within society of what their societal roles should be (eagly, 1987). the language and terminology used to describe the perceptions and experiences of the value of women as leaders in this study served to reinforce status characteristics and expectations (berger et al., 1980; correll & ridgeway, 2003; ridgeway, 2001a). references to “the girl dean” and the experience of a woman leader who hit the wall on advancement due to her willingness “to tell people what she thinks,” support the continued misogyny that many women experience in academe. for instance, adding the word “girl” in front of dean is explicitly used to remind others that she is different from the expected male-norm (e.g., schein’s [1973, 1975, 2001] concept of thinkmanager, think-male). the men who added the qualifier as they referred to her were devaluing her capabilities as a leader by stressing the gender difference, perpetuating the stereotypes that women must confront when they stray from the accepted gendernormed social roles. but there is more to this statement than just a reference to her based on her gender. they chose to take it a step further, demeaning her personally as a woman by referring to her as a girl. to further expand on the discussion of the woman leader who was willing to “tell people what she thinks,” this is another example that supports the negative perceptions of women who are assertive, a trait that is perceived to be a sign of effective men leaders, and reinforces that how individuals are socialized to perceive women and men leaders may be determined and perpetuated by society and culture (denmark 1993; eagly et al., 2000; klenke, 1996). the participants acknowledged that when women make it into faculty or administrative positions, they are often valued based on different standards (e.g., not being able to be assertive, being judged if they tried to negotiate for the same amount during the hiring process as a man), aligning with correll et al.’s (2007) assertion that individuals with lower status characteristics (e.g., women, minorities) are held to stricter standards and evaluated harsher than those from the higher status characteristic group. in some cases, researchers have found that a double standard exists where men are awarded for behavior or characteristic that negatively affects women (e.g., parental status, aggressiveness) (correll et al., 2007), something that was evident in this study as well. the challenge that exists is that researchers have found that these gender norms are reinforced in society starting in early childhood (e.g., babcock & laschever, 2007; bian et al., 2017; trumpy & elliott, 2019) – supporting that these double-standards of leadership expectations for higher education leaders are just a continuation of what society has always accepted. the patriarchal organizational structures in higher education organizations continue to support what eagly (1983) defines as “formal status inequality,” caused by the “hierarchy of roles that is legitimized by social norms and embedded in the formal structure of groups and organizations” (p. 972). when the status is determined by a characteristic such as gender due to societal influences, the ability for women leaders to influence their followers may be difficult to advance, further limiting how they are valued as leaders. those who can influence others are perceived as competent, and as supported by carli (2001), society perceives men to be competent until proven otherwise, simply based on their gender. women, on the other hand, must prove their competency to be perceived capable. berger et al. (1980) asserted that status is influenced by the greater society, which is also supported by social role theory. the way that participants in this study perceived and framed women’s value in higher education leadership was also influenced by components of how it is perceived in society (denmark, 1993; eagly et al., 2000; ridgeway, 1991; ridgeway 116 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 & correll, 2004), as well as within the traditional patriarchal organizational structures of higher education organizations (borstein, 2009; eagly, 1983; eddy & cox, 2008; jones et al., 2012, 2015b). though many of the participants reflected on their experiences with other men that they knew in their responses (oftentimes highlighting negative examples that they witnessed instead of providing ones about themselves), the findings reinforced the concept that gender is a status characteristic, which confers value, worthiness, and ability to men in higher education leadership positions, often over women (carli, 2001; correll & ridgway, 2003). in order to be valued as competent and capable leaders, women must overcome the challenges that they face to move beyond the confines and lower valuation that comes with their lesser status characteristic (berger et al., 1980; correll & ridgeway, 2003; ridgeway, 2001a). though we perceive that the intentions of the participants were not to devalue women but to support their progress within the academy as leaders, kyle and mark both made statements that further support that societal expectations are embedded in our perceptions of progress. kyle discussed within education, women had made strides into leadership. this comment reinforces stereotypes that women may only be suitable or accepted as leaders in the education profession and this is where they may need to look for their leadership opportunities. this aligns with the assertion of eagly et al. (2000) who highlighted how women fill “female-dominated occupations” (p. 127) because they align with gender-role expectations. the statement made by mark was within the intention of helping women be leaders but can be interpreted to further support that society expects women to act and behave in specific ways, further perpetuating the stereotypes that society holds of women and reinforcing a continued gender hierarchy, which persists due to the continued assumption that men are more powerful, influential, and have higher status than women (ridgeway & correll, 2004). participants highlighted that there is still a biased preference toward men as leaders, something that manifests through language (how women are talked about) and action (how women are treated). as seen from some of the stereotypes surrounding women leaders, and the argument that the multiple roles of women will prevent them from fulfilling their work responsibilities, women continue to be devalued in the professional setting by some men, the ones often in the positions of authority and power and valued more for their contribution in the domestic sphere (babcock & laschever, 2007; denmark, 1993; klenke, 1996, 2018). klenke (2018) highlighted the concept of homosociality – when individuals look for those who are similar to them in experience, education, and leadership styles when making hiring decisions. due to the societal impressions and values of women as leaders, men may, consciously or not, hire other men for leadership roles. not only does this practice prevent women from being equitably represented in leadership, but also could perpetuate the perceived lack of their value as leaders in the professional sphere in academe, especially at the higher ranks of faculty and administrators. the findings of this study lead to implications for higher education organizations as well as future research recommendations. the perception by some of the participants that industry demonstrates greater value to women in leadership roles may indicate that society overall is moving in a direction where it assigns greater value to women in leadership roles, which may eventually become a priority in higher education organizations. this difference between industry and higher education organizations needs to be further researched to garner evidence as to why colleges and universities are slow to adopt promising practices from industry relative to gender equality and acceptance of women in leadership roles. since higher education institutions often prepare educated individuals who later become industry leaders, it is especially important that women are valued in leadership and faculty roles as it sends a message that may reach well beyond the walls of the institution. as noted by denmark (1993), what happens in education reflects the larger society and can serve to reproduce gender differences. if there is a lack of willingness (or desire) among institutional leadership to challenge the status characteristics and value typically attributed to women leaders, something that participants in this study did not perceive was happening, the gender differences may be perpetuated and continuously reproduced. if status characteristics are self-fulfilling prophecies, and individuals with higher status characteristics continue to fulfill positions of authority and influence while those with lower status characteristics act as followers (correll & ridgeway, 2003), it may be challenging for women to disrupt the status quo and challenge what has traditionally been accepted themselves. further research is needed to explore why women may continue to accept follower roles when they are the most educated population in higher education institutions today, to determine if this perceived acceptance continues because of societal values and stereotypes or simply due to inequitable opportunities for career advancement. women will be unable to disrupt the status quo without the support and advocacy of men. they need men in positions of authority and influence to advocate for and with them to challenge the accepted valuation of female leaders and acknowledge that women leaders have much to contribute. although society is advancing, women and men are still socialized in ways that have aligned with traditional gender-role expectations (babcock & laschever, 2007; bian et al., 2017; denmark, 1993; eagly, 1987; trumpy & elliott, 2019). this socialization may prevent men (and potentially women) from seeing the value of women as leaders and perpetuate the issue that female leaders will continue to be devalued within higher education organizations, demonstrated by inequity in gender parity in status, position, and pay at the highest levels of the organization. to challenge the impact of gender-based social value norms in society on higher education, institutional leaders should examine how women are valued on their campuses through a critical lens, looking beyond numbers and exploring 117 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 the views of those who hold power positions and the followers who also place a value on the leaders. further, faculty and administrators of all genders must understand and acknowledge the role of gender in leadership within their institutions and be willing to challenge existing status values that give advantage to men and disadvantage others when no real difference exists in qualifications or leadership. in order to better understand why women are not valued or recognized for their leadership contributions in higher education (dominici et al., 2009), it is imperative to understand the perspectives of men, the dominant gender in the academy. although the participants in this study noted that they personally valued women as leaders, they also highlighted challenges with how women are valued by men, as well as themselves, in leadership positions. these challenges and solutions to address them need to continue to be researched. the current study is one of the few that focus on men’s perceptions of women as leaders. additional research is needed that continues to explore this topic. until status characteristics can be broken down and challenged though, women may continue to face challenges including being devalued and assessed as less capable for leadership positions. a challenge that exists in confronting this is that men may not see the differences in how men and women are valued but play a critical role in confronting and deconstructing the biases, stereotypes, and structures that exist, which favor the continued advancement of men into leadership roles (bornstein, 2009; 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(2020, august 11). catalyst. https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-inmanagement/ volume 43, 2024 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, benjamin jankens, and julia ballenger assistant editors: jordan donop, kristina hall, & rebecca philips 136 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 advancing women in leadership vol. 43, 135-148, 2024 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper “it takes a village to raise a leader”: overcoming gender-specific barriers through individual, workplace, and organizational level facilitators billie jane hermosura and ivy lynn bourgeault billie jane hermosura: part-time professor, university of ottawa, bhermosu@uottawa.ca ivy lynn bourgeault: professor, university of ottawa, ivy.bourgeault@uottawa.ca accepted november 6, 2024 women constitute most health workers, yet they hold proportionately fewer leadership positions. the literature is replete with normative advice to address gender specific barriers to women’s leadership; less attention is paid to the processes women undertake on their paths to leadership. we describe the leadership journeys of 23 women leaders in the health sector in canada, guided by a multi-layered framework of barriers and enablers. a thematic analysis of 11 semi-structured interviews and 13 public presentations on leadership journeys was conducted, which applied a priori and emerging themes to segments of the transcripts using nvivo 12. three key themes emerged: impetus for leadership journey, enablers to leadership development, and barriers to advancement. women leaders reported a variety of reasons to embark on their leadership journey from their own desire to make a difference to being tapped on the shoulder by mentors and sponsors. many of the barriers faced were specific to their intersectional identities where they often juggled the complex demands of gender role expectations, while maintaining personal and familial mental health and well-being. the multi-layered framework of important factors was validated and improved. better understanding women’s leadership journeys needs to capture processual and structural dimensions. keywords: women leaders, leadership journeys, health care, health sciences women are uniquely positioned in health care given they constitute at least 70% of the health and social care workforce, but much less frequently in leadership positions which is closer to 25% on average (world health organization [who], 2021/2024). this gendered leadership pyramid (women in global health, 2018) with women’s predominance at the bottom and absence at the top has attracted increasing global attention. a key recommendation from the united nations high-level commission on health employment and economic growth stresses the importance of institutionalizing women’s leadership in health to “maximize women’s economic participation … and tackling gender concerns in health reform processes” (world health organization, 2016, p. 11). these calls have remained aspirational (betron et al., 2019; who, 2021). the circumstances surrounding the covid-19 pandemic have not interrupted these gendered trends. according to the who (2024), women provided much of the health care during the covid-19 pandemic but did not have an equal say in decision-making at global or national levels. women face a dual challenge in political participation: securing positions of power and gaining influence within them, necessitating a transformation of existing structures rather than merely adding women to them (fuhrman & rhodes, 2020). when women are present in leadership roles it has been shown to lead to more effective public health responses to the pandemic including more timely measures, contributing to lower death rates (soares & sidun, 2021). increasing the number of women in leadership positions is essential for promoting gender equality and improving societal outcomes. the empowering women leaders in health project drew inspiration from global initiatives to achieve systemic gender transformative change in the health care and health science contexts through increased participation, visibility, and advancement of women. we concurred with arguments that to achieve meaningful change there is a need to move beyond an individual focus on fixing women (mcgowan, 2018, p. 174), focusing instead on a more systemic approach that recognizes and addresses the effect of unconscious gender biases and gendered structural barriers. additionally, drawing upon the foundational work of kimberlé crenshaw (2013), we took an explicit intersectional approach focusing not only on women leaders’ gender, including those who do not necessarily identify in gender binary terms, but also their racialized background, including indigenous identity (decady & bourgeault, 2023; soklaridis et al., 2022). indeed, reflecting advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 137 the colonial canadian context within which this project was situated, we also include a cross-cutting focus on indigenous women and two spirit leaders in health care and health sciences. one strand of this gender transformative project was to better understand the journeys of women into leadership positions in healthcare and the health sciences (bourgeault et al., 2018; casad et al., 2021). the women’s leadership literature is replete with accounts of gender-specific barriers to advancement, with less attention is paid to the enablers women actively harness in support of their paths to leadership (james et al., 2024). moreover, accounts of women’s leadership journeys rarely consider other intersecting influences beyond the gender-specific barriers to advancement that are experienced and how they can be counteracted by effective interventions to effect change. the purpose of this paper was two-fold: (a) to map the intersectional trajectories of women’s leadership journeys in health care and health science contexts in canada, and (b) to frame the intersectional barriers and enablers women leaders face in their leadership journeys according to a multi-layered conceptual framework that moved beyond the individual focus to more systemic considerations women’s leadership in health contemporary literature on women and healthcare leadership has tended to be focused on women’s underrepresentation in key leadership positions (bourgeault et al., 2019; jacobs et al., 2023; james et al., 2024). researchers have indicated that although women comprise most of the health and social care workforce, they remain underrepresented in senior leadership positions (penfold, 2019; wolfert, 2019). despite paradoxically large proportions of women physicians, medicine has made relatively slow progress in achieving gender equity, particularly at the highest levels of executive leadership, academic promotion, and compensation (gabster et al., 2020; shillcutt, 2019; silver, 2017). a persistent knowledge gap is how gender barriers intersect with race, other forms of gender identity, ability status, sexual orientation, and cultural backgrounds is a persistent knowledge gap (ioannidou, 2019). several barriers to women’s ability to obtain leadership roles have been identified in the literature. there is growing evidence that unconscious or implicit bias is a significant barrier to women’s advancement into crucial leadership roles (gangwani, 2019; moyer, 2019). other barriers include gender stereotypes, societal expectations, assumptions, worldviews, and individual frames of reference, that continue to operate within a complex web of interrelated barriers and constraints (andreas, 2021). similarly, desimone (2021) identified external or structural barriers to women’s leadership, such as the lack of mentoring and sponsorship or exclusion from informal networks as well as internalized barriers, when women opt out of leadership opportunities due to caregiving responsibilities and other forms of work-life conflict. evidence-based enablers that are invaluable to women’s success in leadership positions in health care and academic health sciences include formal leadership development programs that can significantly enhance women’s selfconfidence and self-efficacy (russel et al., 2023). such programs offer structured learning, mentorship, and networking opportunities, which help women participants develop essential leadership skills and build supportive peer relationships; experiential learning and positive feedback further reinforce their confidence in their abilities (russell et al., 2023). this growth can lead to greater representation of women in leadership roles, benefiting organizations by promoting diverse leadership teams (mousa et al., 2021). norander and zenk (2023) highlighted how women seeking university leadership roles are consistently advised on tasks, such as strategizing, self-improvement, learning, and relationship-building demand individual time and resources. supporting mentorship and sponsorship from leaders, more inclusive networks and more flexible work arrangements can also facilitate women’s career advancement (desimone, 2021; mousa et al., 2021). although incentivizing mentorship and implementing targeted recruitment to improve diverse leadership has been proposed, moyer (2018) found that other strategies included senior women seeking junior women for mentorship and sponsorship and junior women pro-actively making their desire for leadership known. in the case of academic medicine and dentistry, the lack of appropriate role models and mentorship for the successful socialization of women faculty and the lack of peer support for women’s promotion through the academic ranks and their selection for executive administrative roles at equal rates as their male counterparts were notable challenges (gangwani, 2019). men are necessary supporters of diverse women’s leadership journeys. some argue that men, who are more often in positions of power, are not always aware of how sexism, racism, ableism, and homophobia shape the experiences of their diverse women colleagues or are well-equipped to act as mentors or sponsors for their women colleagues (bourgeault et al., 2022). an understanding of the role that power plays in both advancing and hindering male ally endeavors in supporting women’s leadership advancement (shapiro et al., 2022). when men deliberately engage in gender inclusion programs, 96% of organizations see progress compared to only 30% of organizations where men are not engaged (johnson & smith, 2018). healthcare organizations and those who lead them can change the paradigm of gender inequity in organizations to face the challenges of leadership deficits and cultivate talented women for top administrative roles. livingston (2018) demonstrated that with training, managers could become more aware of unconscious bias and call our behaviors that are not inclusive. a commitment to emphasize gender equality and diversity advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 138 competency, expansion of leadership training for current employees, identifying and developing women with promising leadership potential, and creating a network of coaching and mentorship to increase organizational bench strength (shillingburg et al., 2019) is necessary. in sum, literature includes more barriers than enablers to women’s leadership journeys within studies in which researchers evaluate the effectiveness of interventions that foster women’s leadership (james et al., 2024). the outcomes of interest have focused on women’s numeric representation, an important issue, but fewer researchers have focused on the processes undertaken along women’s leadership pathways, the experiences of barriers along these journeys, and the ways in which women persisted. researchers rarely take an intersectional lens that considers the impact of the power differentials of other identities. gender is often considered as a binary. recognizing these limitations, we developed a conceptual framework that helps inform the data presented in this paper on women’s leadership journeys in the health sector. conceptual framework the framework, based on our scoping review of the literature, informed our research and delineates five conceptual levels that influence women’s leadership development as either barriers or facilitators: societal, organizational, workplace, individual, and home (see figure 1). society can create barriers, like embedded sexism in seemingly gender-neutral policies, but fostering an inclusive culture can make it easier for women to pursue leadership roles. organizational influences, including accountability for reaching gender-based targets or quotas and broader gender transformative policies, can address typical barriers at this level. workplace culture, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that make up the atmosphere in a work environment can enable or prevent women from rising into leadership positions. individual level factors, the focus of much of the literature, delineate knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of women leaders, which can enhance or detract from their leadership development. finally, and almost universally ignored in literature but crucial when fully considering the influence of gender, is the influence of home and caregiving factors, which can enable or create challenges along women’s leadership journeys. drawing upon our multilayered framework of factors influencing women’s leadership development in health, we map the process by which women cultivate essential leadership skills throughout their careers. although our model portrays these structures as separate, in women’s narratives there are interconnections across all five levels. we recognize that the model does not visually capture individual leaders' process or leadership journey dimensions. through our scoping review, we identified that the literature lacks research on how women develop their leadership throughout their careers. in this paper, we addressed this important gap to describe the journeys of women leaders in the health sector. figure 1. gender, care, and health leadership framework (james et al., 2024) advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 139 drawing upon our multi-layered framework of factors influencing women’s leadership development in health, we map the process by which women cultivate essential leadership skills throughout their careers. although our model portrays these structures as separate, in women’s narratives there are interconnections across all five levels. we recognize that the model does not visually capture individual leaders' process or leadership journey dimensions. through our scoping review, we identified that the literature lacks research on how women develop their leadership throughout their careers. in this paper, we addressed this important gap to describe the journeys of women leaders in the health sector. methods our paper is part of a multi-phase project and reports specifically on a thematic analysis of the transcripts of 11 semi-structured interviews and 13 public presentations at events organized by our empowering women leaders in health project: eight learning lab presentations and five open house presentations. a total of 23 participants were included in this study. participants were recruited to reflect a diversity of perspectives and experiences. most participants held formal leadership positions in health care and health sciences, a few identified as emerging leaders, while another was a leader among patient partners. we did not systematically document the time frame of each individual’s leadership journey. the project was also committed to being inclusive of perspectives from black, indigenous, and people of color (bipoc) women leaders: two women identified as black, five women identified as indigenous, five women identified as a person of color, and the remaining 11 women identified as white. data collection semi-structured interviews the research team identified participants through purposive and snowball sampling. prospective participants were invited to participate in an interview lasting up to 60 minutes. a total of 11 participated in the semi-structured interviews. the senior researcher conducted 9 of the 11 interviews, and another team member conducted the remaining two. the interviews were conducted in 2018 and 2019. each interview was conducted on zoom and recorded. audio recordings were transcribed verbatim. to ensure a rich and nuanced understanding of participants’ experiences, the semi-structured format allowed for flexibility in exploring key themes while also permitting respondents to share their experiences with few interruptions. the researchers aimed to create a comfortable environment, encouraging participants to discuss their experiences candidly. this method enabled the interviewers to gather diverse insights and understand the complexities of the experiences and factors being studied. the transcripts were subsequently analyzed using thematic analysis to identify common patterns and themes within the participants’ narratives. learning lab presentations as part of the project, learning labs were organized to build women's leadership capacity in health care and health sciences. two learning labs were held: june 2018 (ottawa, ontario) and october 2018 (london, ontario). each learning lab was twoand-a-half days long. the learning labs were open to senior and emerging leaders as an opportunity to share evidence and tools to make changes in their organizations. several women leaders in health care and health sciences were invited to deliver presentations, of which eight were included in this study. these presentations were recorded. the audio recordings were transcribed verbatim for analysis. open house presentations in march 2020, a public virtual open house forum was organized as a culminating dialogue to the learning labs. the event allowed five learning lab participants to share their experiences and insights over the past year with a broader audience. like the learning lab presentations, the open house presentations were recorded, and the audio recordings were transcribed verbatim for analysis. ethics the protocol for the semi-structured interviews was approved by the university of ottawa research ethics board, application number 08-17-14. data analysis our analytic challenge was to map the personal leadership journeys of participants to a standard or collective process. nvivo 12 computer software was used to facilitate the analysis of interview and learning lab transcripts, which resulted in the creation of a codebook; then, the four virtual open house transcripts were coded manually based on the codes. a priori themes related to the framework (figure 1) were used at the outset but modified to reflect the unique gendered experiences of women leaders in the canadian health context. because our intention in analyzing interview and presentation transcripts was also to add a process dimension reflecting individual leadership journeys to the structural model developed from the literature review, emergent themes were also identified through the coding process. the analysis followed four steps: (a) the lead author analyzed four transcripts in nvivo, two interviews, and two learning lab presentations; these codes were reviewed and discussed with the senior author to develop a codebook; (b) the codebook was used to analyse the remaining interviews, learning lab presentations, and virtual open house presentations; the researchers discussed any new codes that emerged; (c) the codes were organized into categories and themes were developed; and (d) lastly, the finalized code book was applied to four open house presentations, where the researchers remained open to any additional emergent themes. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 140 in addition to the key a priori themes, we added the impetus for career advancement and the management of mental health when managing women leaders’ multiple gender roles as emergent themes added for exploration in this paper. women’s leadership journeys included detailed descriptions of their impetus for career advancement and barriers and facilitators to advancement. across these themes, the participant quotes are presented anonymously. findings the findings are categorized under three main themes: impetus for career advancement, barriers to advancing women’s leadership, and facilitators to advancing women’s leadership. impetus for career advancement our conversations about women’s leadership journeys often began with the impetus for their career advancement. in analyzing their responses, we tease apart more active, passive, or reactive reasons to take on a leadership position and embark on a leadership journey. we recognize that both are prominent across participants and present these reasons as sub-themes below. active approaches to leadership positions we begin with the internal motivation or personal drive of the women leaders we interviewed or had present at our events. in some cases, leadership was pursued for leadership's sake, recognizing one’s potential to make positive contributions while also seeking opportunities for personal growth. in other cases, leadership roles were pursued out of frustration with a situation being experienced. a common thread throughout the conversations around career advancement is the desire to address a particular challenge, whether for quality improvement or to achieve more significant equity in an organization. participants actively positioned themselves into crucial leadership roles to lead change initiatives. recognition of one’s own leadership potential recognizing one’s leadership potential was demonstrated as an impetus for pursuing career advancement, and this came at different points in their careers. participants reported that when they could self-actualize their leadership potential, it was often coupled with an opportunity for growth and self-confidence. one participant described her transformative experience before becoming ceo: it was the first time a woman had been a ceo in that organization in [city]. that was exciting for me, but the morale in the organization was horrible, and people said, “why would you even bother to take that?” i said, “because you can only go up,” and i was going home where my family still was. i learned a ton while i was in [another province]... i learned about really being innovative. it was a different way of being, and i was just a different person when i returned to [city]. (kii #4). some discovered early, and others later in their careers, that being in leadership positions was a way to facilitate a change they wanted to see. for example, one participant described her first managerial position as the role in which she was able to improve the work environment: in my first managerial position as a nurse manager ... i realized that i was much better suited to creating environments for people to work in... and i enjoyed the work much more. … that was the beginning of my journey, and it allowed me to reach where i am today. (kii #1). frustration with current situation several participants shared stories that began with frustration with a current situation at their workplace or with a particular organization. striving to improve these situations, participants actively took steps towards leadership roles to drive change or "doing what i needed to do to change the situation... and hopefully make it better” (ll #4). for example, one participant shared: one of the reasons i wanted to be a leader was that i understood that those leading needed to be smarter. i brought things they did not bring, and i could change things if i were a leader (kii #5). in many cases, the steps taken by some leaders to improve a situation by “pushing the boundaries as women, as marginalized women, as scholars...” (oh #1) led to positive outcomes. the ability to contribute to an organizational change and “make the system feel and be different” (kii #5) was gratifying for several participants. one presenter in the virtual open house said, “i feel that even though there was a lot of learning on the job and not having a formalized structure for learning, i have been able to move the needle in meaningful ways” (oh #3). inequities as the impetus for leaders from a diverse background participants who self-identified as indigenous or racialized described inequitable situations that were the impetus for seeking leadership roles. many said, “if i do not do it, no one is going to do it” (oh #1). kii #10 associated this sentiment with “bravery.” she said: that bravery comes from experiences you have had in other places or challenges you have seen. i think many times i have heard indigenous women leaders— and i think in my experience as well—i feel like if i do not do it, it will not happen. i am terrified most of the time. people tell me i make it look straightforward, but most times, i think i will go for it because if i do not do this, it will not happen. i think, particularly in places … where there are very few indigenous leaders, you sometimes have to take a leap of faith. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 141 another participant described a situation with a student and made a comment related to providing medical treatment for black people or people of color: my earlier motivation in clinical practice was when a patient told me that the student would start an iv on her. they tried a couple of times, but it did not work. the student just kept trying, and when the patient complained, the student said, " oh, you know, it is well known that black people have tough skin. that is why it is so hard” (ll #4). from this experience, ll #4 felt driven to address this misconception among others she had experienced as a nurse educator and researcher. although many bipoc women described situations when they were proactive and willing to contribute to changing organizational culture, at times, it can lead to an imbalance of work or tokenism. as one white participant said, this should be the responsibility of everyone, not just those who are bipoc leaders: make it everybody’s responsibility. that then takes some pressure off women to advocate for women because it gets exhausting and can lead to marginalization. people think you are a token. you will hear this from racialized minorities as well. they do not want to be the spokesperson for their race. (kii #7). in sum, the two most active ways participants were driven to pursue leadership positions were recognizing one’s leadership potential and seeking leadership opportunities of frustration with a current situation and seeking to change it for the better. passive approaches to leadership positions there are also passive ways participants advanced into leadership roles, whereby participants did not intentionally pursue specific opportunities. passive paths to leadership roles refer to unintentional ways women leaders assume or recognize their leadership roles. this would include being around when an opportunity arises and being asked or encouraged to apply for specific positions. in these situations, participants did not actively pursue these opportunities for career advancement, but rather, other people thought they were well-suited to fill these leadership roles. similarly, another passive way of recognizing one’s leadership is through reflection. by talking about past experiences, some participants recognized they had utilized leadership skills in certain situations; they did not consider themselves leaders then. in one of the interviews, one participant talked about an insight they had into influential people: those people who are invested in power and responsibility, that is how i saw it, and people who influence others. so, when i thought about this insight, i thought, “oh, okay, i guess i have been doing some of that.” (ll #4) another participant talked about the impact this specific research project had on their self-awareness of personal leadership: i only just learned that i am a leader, by the way... i participated in the interviews as part of [this project] and met with the interviewer ... and i was like, oh my goodness, yes, i am doing leadership! thank you for acknowledging that and helping me to think about these things! (oh #1) this experience suggests that women leaders may need to learn that they can be in leadership roles or are leaders. this sometimes requires someone or a reflective situation to enable them to recognize this insight. the accidental leadership journey several participants talked about how the opportunity to take on a leadership role presented itself, of which two participants described themselves as an “accidental leader” (kii #8). the sentiment of being open to possibilities and to “see where life takes you” (ll #3) was shared among the participants. another participant talked about being at their workplace during an organization expansion: the school was growing. lots of fascinating things were being done. they desperately needed people who were willing to do it. so, i did... it was because there was a real shortage of people on the ground, and i was there and willing to do everything. (kii #2) in these situations, participants were in the right place at the right time and, without intention, found themselves in leadership roles. they were tapped on the shoulder further to the notion of being an accidental leader in the right place at the right time, participants talked about how others encouraged them to consider specific leadership roles. being tapped on the shoulder, an expression used by several participants, was how some women leaders fell into specific roles. interestingly, being tapped on the shoulder was described in conjunction with a reflection on one’s career to date. one participant described a role for which she was asked to apply: i did get tapped on the shoulder and asked if i would put my name forward... i have not applied for a job since i started as a nurse. it would be a good experience to go through an interview to see what that was like because, at some point, i should move on. (kii #4) another participant described how she saw herself as a clinician, and the suggestion to pursue a leadership role in a national association was coupled with an element of surprise: advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 142 they said, “why don't you run? you should run; i think you would be fantastic.” moreover, my initial gut reaction was, “me? why me? who is going to vote for me?” ... i think of myself as a frontline clinician;... i have been in practice for 20 years now. i am the head of the section at my hospital in [place] and … had [other] leadership positions … i slept on it that night … and by the morning time, i hardly slept. i realized i wanted to do this because it terrified and inspired me, so i ran. (ll #7) when unsure about applying for a leadership opportunity, participants often talked about seeking advice from their colleagues, sponsors, or mentors. one participant sought guidance from a male colleague who offered this advice: “i went to a colleague, a male colleague that i had worked with ... and said, ‘what do you think?’ and he said, ‘just be yourself. lead from where you are, and you will earn the respect of the group’” (ll #6). although many women leaders talked about active and passive ways they pursued leadership roles; they often needed to recognize their leadership potential or abilities themselves. one participant said, “i think the ‘lean in’ concept is interesting... it is very foreign to many women because they are not raised in an environment that was very preferential towards them” (kii #13). this quotation suggests that women often do not recognize their leadership because they are not socialized into that acceptance and speaks to barriers women leaders might experience in their journeys. barriers to advancing women’s leadership reflected in our conceptual framework, different layers of barriers along women’s leadership journeys can be teased apart. we begin with the most prominent and salient to our participants–those related to their personal and familial lives– that reflected a gender-system level of women’s caregiving roles. furthermore, women leaders described situations that challenged and required effective management of their own mental health and well-being. individual influences – personal and familial circumstances when women leaders discussed the barriers they experienced to their career advancement, many spoke to the circumstances in their personal or familial lives. a common refrain was, “it was not a good time but...” which speaks to the tensions between their work and home or personal environment. one participant noted the specific barriers for women physicians: [they] carry out at least two and a half more times unpaid household and care work, and that persists even in medicine... [they] spend 48 hours per week working and the men spend 52 hours a week, and that is just our professional work hours, our clinical duties and our call duties. add to that any duties with aging parents, childcare, and household duties, and you can see how all of this can drive emotional exhaustion and burnout. (ll #7) similarly, another participant recognized the potential conflict and said, “i think if i did have a family and doing the work that i am doing and the amount of it, there would certainly be a conflict” (kii #1). these women recognized that there can be tension between their careers and personal lives, which can lead to burnout and possibly other adverse outcomes. organizations must “consider selecting women for leadership positions and making the place women-friendly and familyfriendly" (kii #5). these layers are complex to tease apart because they are enmeshed but any program to support women’s leadership must address this complexity head-on. workplace influences – limited mentorship opportunities lack of mentors or inappropriate mentorship is an element of work culture that does not set women up for successful leadership. some men may be willing to mentor women colleagues yet can emulate gendered stereotypes related to women having less experience in leadership roles. one participant shared a story describing this very situation: i had started in a key leadership position, and somebody decided to take me out to lunch and… i hadn’t asked this person to mentor me or to give me advice, but he took it upon himself to do so. some of the things were quite infantile. i found myself saying to him, you know, this is not my first job... i just could not see him doing that to one of my male counterparts and he was speaking to me as if i was a college graduate. (kii #1) another participant reported a situation in which she was discouraged from applying for a leadership role because of an informal succession plan: i held other key leadership roles within my units, but when i decided to apply for head of the department, i was actually discouraged by colleagues within the department because i hadn’t been there that long. and what was said was it's so and so’s turn, and, you know, you should hold back. and i think that’s a message that often people do hear, particularly women. (kii #5) certainly, obstacles in interpersonal communication at the workplace can hinder women's progress in attaining leadership roles. these challenges may vary among individuals or be indicative of a larger organizational work culture. organizational influences – unconscious biases, microaggressions, and tokenism although many participants shared personal stories of their journey towards realizing their leadership potential, these journeys were not barrier-free. women leaders in leadership roles said that at times, their efforts get undermined because they are perceived to be a threat to the status quo or a advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 143 disruption of the power balances that exist in their workplace. one participant recounted that “people can create situations that make it very hard for those women to effectively do the role. sometimes it's just, the system itself is not ready, right?” (oh #1). furthermore, kii #12 described the power imbalances experienced by indigenous peoples: indigenous people in [canada] who have an inkling of the systems at play, understand that this idea of leadership isn't about going to [university]. it is literally showing up and being there and sometimes it means though that if you are a leader in [your] community, … it means that this other world, this white world, doesn't recognize you. they don't even see you. that you literally don't exist. the narratives shared by participants underscore the pervasive challenges and systemic barriers faced by individuals striving to fulfil their leadership potential, particularly for women leaders confronting resistance and indigenous peoples navigating a world that often fails to recognize their existence. unconscious biases and microaggressions indirect and sometimes subtle forms of discrimination against bipoc women leaders, unintentional or not, have been experienced in the workplace to varying degrees. unconscious biases and microaggressions can be understood as interpersonal factors within an organization. ll #3 said, “as a woman, yes there are biases for me. i'm also a visible minority, for sure people have biases. i don't always see them, and i often don’t anticipate them, but i've experienced them to a certain extent.” nuanced challenges faced by bipoc women leaders in the workplace highlights the presence of indirect and sometimes subtle forms of discrimination. the discrimination, whether intentional or unintentional, is acknowledge as being experienced to varying degrees. one of the women leaders we interviewed (kii #8) gave an example from her workplace. the president of the [institution] was a woman, and she already had from her perspective: …driven away some other incredible leaders [at the institution] … people would say to me, you know, [kii #8 name], it’s going to be really hard for you because we know that this woman president doesn’t like to have other women who either are going to outshine her or be even in the same potential limelight. women leaders said they have experienced contra power harassment, highlighting a disturbing trend within professional settings. contra power harassment involves situations where subordinates or peers attempt to undermine or challenge the authority of women in leadership roles. these experiences create an additional layer of complexity for women leaders, as they not only navigate the responsibilities of their positions but also contend with resistance or opposition from those who may find their leadership unconventional or challenging. tokenism the “tick box” tokenism was said to occur when women and diverse women leaders were asked to serve on committees, boards, or panels to give the appearance of equality. the impact of tokenism can lead to exhaustion and less representation because although women leaders will take on leadership roles with good intentions, they may not be able to “balance all the demands” (oh #1) between their careers and personal responsibilities. kii #3 spoke about being on different committees where she “was so often the only woman and often the only social scientist.” she mentioned that it felt like, “oh, tick. if we ask [participant], we’ve got a woman. we’ve got a social scientist. tick, tick. the box is ticked with one person.” similarly, kii #2 said, “a bit like that monty python thing—we’ve already got one. if you have a black head of department, you can say, “oh, no, we’re good. we don’t need any more blacks. we’ve got one.” thus, organizations bear the responsibility of actively welcoming a more diverse range of individuals into their midst. this approach ensures that the burden of workload is not disproportionately shouldered by a select few who are already part of the organization. enablers to advancing women’s leadership enablers support the advancement of women’s leadership and, like the barriers, can be categorized at the individual, workplace, and organizational levels. individual influences – networking networking was the main individual factor that enabled women throughout their leadership journeys. women leaders referred to networking as an enabler to advancing their leadership because networking enabled women to meet others, in particular other women, who might be in a similar area of work. the purpose of networking for many women leaders was initially to expand their own professional contacts and become involved in their professional networks. through their active involvement, women leaders become more visible among a wider audience. this network entails special benefits for women who have demonstrated excellence in their positions. their achievements and personal journeys come to the forefront, offering valuable examples and inspiration for fellow members within the organization. these connections might provide greater visibility to women who have been successful in their work, thus serving as possible role models or mentors. one of the women we interviewed described how she encourages medical residents to network: one of the things that i found very informative and successful for me is being involved in groups of other women, especially other surgeons who are women, and i recommend this all the time and take my residents to meetings where there are groups of women surgeons who have actually been successful. and that speaks to you can’t do it if you can’t see it. (kii #13) advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 144 the ability to leverage networks and develop professional relationships was seen to enable women to navigate sociopolitical workplace situations. according to another woman leader we interviewed, women tend to focus more on outcomes and less on the “political groundwork to get them to the next level” (kii #7) such as networking and building relationships. these relationships could lead to women being mentored or sponsored by others within or outside of their organization. workplace influences – mentorship mentors and sponsors are strong forces to enable women to become leaders. based on participants’ responses, unlike networking to expand one’s own professional contacts, mentors may not necessarily work within the same organization whereas sponsors might. both roles might advise women leaders on strategies for their advancement; however, a sponsor might take a more active role since they are in the same organization. what came through in the analysis of the data was exemplified by oh #3’s statement, "for women to enter leadership… support of mentors is required. it takes a village to raise a leader.” this comment might suggest that for women to become leaders, different types of mentors and sponsors are needed throughout their leadership career. in addition to having mentors throughout one’s career, a consistent message shared by many women leaders was that they “leaned in” when they found themselves in new leadership roles, which meant being willing to be mentored by others. although women leaders might be proactive in seeking leadership opportunities, mentorship proved to be a necessary support for women to succeed in those roles. on occasion, women might pursue opportunities without support and oh #2 said it was “like i was kind of being thrown into the swimming pool without knowing how to swim...” she embraced the idea of seeking out leadership training and importantly seeking out female leaders and mentors in leadership at several levels. so, mentors can encourage women to pursue opportunities and enable them to succeed in those roles. there are different reasons why individuals have a variety of mentors. mentors demonstrate how they utilize self-leadership and demonstrate leadership character. mentors role model leadership characteristics, which can shape how mentees conduct themselves in the workplace. one of our interviewees said that she “saw as the kind of leader that i would like to be. and it was a really great balance of being able to direct and make decisions while at the same time being compassionate and a warmth towards other people.” (kii #1) several women leaders shared how they are cognizant that a balance between their professional and personal lives is needed. they talked about how mentors and sponsors can support women leaders in balancing their personal and familial responsibilities. for example, one participant talked about a “good mentor” who had a holistic view of work-life balance. mentors have a key role in demonstrating leadership character and how to find work-life balance (james et al., 2024). women leaders then apply this to their own way of leading. men as mentors some women leaders mentioned the role men had in their leadership journeys. these men mentors demonstrated leadership character, which was perceived by the participants in different ways. for some participants, the men were willing to share their experience and modelled positive leadership characteristics such as confidence. one of the women leaders said, “the majority of the influence in my life and in my career were men... certainly i learned confidence from observing men.” (kii #1) other participants also said that “it would be helpful to have male mentors more if people don’t have them.” (kii #2) men as mentors were seen to have leverage in supporting women in advancing their careers. on the contrary, male mentors were also seen to be a part of an “old boys' network” (kii #4) and other participants said they did not learn interpersonal skills from them but rather how to navigate sociopolitical situations at work. as one said, “i did not learn the empathy, listening, those kinds of softer skills from those men who were my mentors, not at all. they didn't have them. they didn't possess them... what i learned from them [men] was ... the politics of healthcare” (kii #4). kii #6 adds: we've all seen where women try to act like men, and that's when they are least successful as leaders. then, the reality is that women have strengths, and they need strengths. it makes them different from men and actually gives them added advantage when it comes to emotional intelligence and being to read the room, and hopefully some aspects of self-awareness. the varied perspectives on the role of male mentors in women's leadership journeys highlight both the positive impact of learning confidence and career navigation from them, as well as the potential limitations, such as the absence of certain interpersonal skills, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and leveraging the unique strengths that women bring to leadership. mentoring forward women leadership also talked about how they provide mentorship for others. mentoring forward was seen as a responsibility of a leader (kii #3), wherein they contribute to the development of others such as colleagues or students. ll #4 described how she mentors forward: in terms of the ripple effects of this, the mentoring that i've been doing actually, i've also extended that to my colleagues in nigeria that i've worked with over the years, and so i take phd students from there sometime and mentor them here and they go back to work as faculty members, and they've invited me back and we've been able to mobilize and create a nursing research foundation. women leaders shared insights from their experiences with mentees to help them be successful as the progress in their careers. for example, one said she tells those she mentors that advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 145 they need to “stay one step ahead of everybody else,” which has been a “mantra in [her] life” (kii #4). organizational influences – “open door” to diversity women leaders recognized the importance of having inclusive and diverse representation in leadership within an organization. several women leaders acknowledged that an inclusive and diverse workforce is not simply a “tick in the box” (kii #3) but rather understanding how the system works: if you haven’t got some diversity, then people assume that it’s a closed door. … as leaders, we must be broad thinking enough. so, whether you’re a healthcare leader or a health sciences [sic] or any other kind of leader, you’ve got to understand how systems work. (kii #5) similarly, other participants suggested that leaders must actively consider who might not be represented. oh #4 said, “if we’re not actively looking around the table to see who's missing and to remove those barriers, [you’ll] ending up with an echo chamber instead of getting the most robust solutions for what's ailing health care out there.” the findings also suggest that there are unique barriers for bipoc women leaders that cuts across personal, work, and organizational factors. a lack of understanding of “how structurally disempowered indigenous people have been because of colonization” (oh #1) continues. this reveals distinct challenges faced by bipoc women leaders, spanning personal, work, and organizational domains, with an ongoing lack of awareness regarding the structural disempowerment of indigenous people due to historical colonization. discussion the leadership journeys of women leaders in healthcare and health sciences are complex, especially those from racially diverse backgrounds. their deeply personal stories highlighted the impetuses for their career advancement as well as barriers and facilitators. their internal motivation or personal drive was described as active reasons for embarking on their leadership journeys. active reasons included recognizing one’s own leadership potential, frustration with a current situation, and responding to inequitable situations. women leaders also embark on their leadership journeys in unintentional ways. the accidental journey was a shared experience among several women leaders, whereby leadership role happened to arise at an opportune time. another common experience was being tapped on the shoulder or asked by someone to consider a specific leadership role. since these could be considered more passive pathways to leadership, women leaders nevertheless had to be actively open to explore these novel leadership opportunities. whether the pursuit for leadership progression is driven by an active or passive approach, women leaders require support at individual, workplace, and organizational levels to overcome the various entrenched barriers at each stage. networking, mentorship and sponsorship, and continuing to have inclusive and diverse representation at the top were considered essential facilitators for women’s leadership journeys. other researchers have similarly found these facilitators to women’s leadership (alli et al., 2021; perez, 2021). harris and norlander (2023) found that top performing organization have successfully advanced women beyond the token status. interestingly, while women leaders reported mentorship as a key facilitator for their advancement, they also reported a lack of mentors and in some cases, even inappropriate mentorship. while there might be individuals such as mentors and sponsors committed to supporting women advancing into leadership, organizational factors that retract these advancements include unconscious biases, microaggressions, and tokenism. there is a need to provide tools for those who choose or are sought to mentor women leaders (bourgeault et al., 2022). the most common barrier for women to advance into leadership was described at the individual level. although more women are advancing into leadership roles, they continue to be faced with tensions between their work and personal care circumstances. the scoping review that provided the framework for this research included the importance of explicitly considering the experiences of caregiving in the context of healthcare leadership, such as family care needs (james et al., 2024). the categorization of caregiving as an individual level barrier, however, has the impact of reinscribing a gendered system of caregiving wherein women bear the brunt of the burden; reimagining caregiving as a system level barrier to be addressed and integrated at every turn is an approach we encouraged to decouple caregiving from gender. the ability to manage one’s mental health and work-life balance emerged from the narratives not previously captured in the leadership literature, which is an opportunity to embellish the care dimensions of the orienting conceptual leadership framework. the narratives of the women leaders we interviewed and who presented their journeys in our project activities also address another invisibility in the leadership literature, that of their role and responsibilities for carework in the home and how this influenced their decision-making around leadership positions and leadership style. vancour (2023) found that when academic administrators focused on providing opportunities for women at all administrative levels on their campuses, it can improve retention and succession planning, saving valuable financial resources and time. reducing multi-tasking and redistributing household responsibilities can also enhance women’s productivity and well-being; while organizations should adopt policies that support a more equitable division of labour and recognize the negative impacts of traditional gender roles on career advancement and health (guramatunhu-mudiwa & cherry, 2023). prioritizing work-life considerations and support provisions is likely to yield the highest return on investment, but these initiatives should be carefully crafted (vancour, 2023). developing qualified faculty members with aspirations advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 146 to become future administrators is a smart business move, especially during challenging recruitment and retention efforts with constrained budgets. amidst the abundance of normative and proscriptive literature dictating the actions women ought to take avoidance of such carework responsibilities—through contracting out to nannies, cooks, and cleaners—is actively encouraged. the not-so-subtle message is to become a leader one must exhibit qualities and lifestyles that are without any caregiving and responsibilities in the home. another element that can be added to the conceptual framework, which focused primarily on structural factors, are the process elements of women’s leadership journeys, which are also notably absent from much of the literature. our analysis here begins to address a gap in leadership literature that tends to quantify women’s exclusion and underrepresentation rather than explore how this comes to be. barriers related to both gendered roles at work and at home are often obstacles women leaders not only face but actively navigate in their career advancement. accumulating evidence suggests that greater diversity across multiple characteristics, including gender, improves staff experience, organizational performance, and patient outcomes (penfold, 2019). our paper, and the purposive and snowballing selection of a diverse set of women and non-binary participants, enable us to respond to a body of literature that is focused only on gender, and often as a male/female binary. although we did not ask our participants and presenters specifically about their gender identity and whether they would identify as gender non-binary, we were able to reflect on the leadership journeys from an intersectional lens that was inclusive of non-binary gender identity, racialization, and age. these factors need to be accounted for in supporting the advancement of diverse women leaders in health (decady & bourgeault, 2023). to achieve this dismantling of racism, sexism, ableism, and other harmful structures, strong allies who actively work to challenge the status-quo are required (decady & bourgeault, 2023). the leadership journeys of bipoc women may require “exceptional” support systems to overcome extant barrier to emerge in positions of leadership and power (johnson & fournillier, 2023, p. 311). conclusion to effect gender transformative change in support of women leaders, it is critical to capture the ways in which women leaders have been active in shaping their leadership journeys. women leaders in health face unique barriers to their career advancement, which are related to gendered roles at work but also at home. women leaders in health have advanced into key leadership positions through strategic mentorship and sponsorship, and in so doing, have affected change thereby changing the landscape for emerging women health leaders. the leadership journeys of the women leaders we engaged with enabled an enhancement of our understanding of the various layers of barriers and facilitators. applying our enhanced framework of barriers and enablers helps to capture the intersectional experiences of women’s leadership journeys in health. our unique research contribution has been to add a process dimension to literature that is dominated by these structural concerns. references alli, a., lin, t., thorndyke, l. e., parekh, r., & núñez, a. e. 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(2016). high-level commission on health employment and economic growth: report of the expert group. world health organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241511308 women in global health (2018) as cited in world health organization, global health workforce network & women in global health (2019) delivered by women, led by men: a gender and equity analysis of the global health and social workforce. world health organization.https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/defaultsource/health-workforce/delivered-by-women-led-bymen.pdf?sfvrsn=94be9959_2 world health organization, global health workforce network & women in global health (2021). closing the leadership gap: gender equity and leadership in the advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 148 global health and care workforce. policy action paper. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240025905 world health organization, global health workforce network & women in global health (2024). overview: closing the leadership gap: gender equity and leadership in the global health and care workforce. policy action paper. updated 2024 data. retrieved october 18, 2024 from https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240025905 the benefits and challenges of inhabiting the dual role of mother/leader pub ready.docx volume 43, 2024 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, benjamin jankens, and julia ballenger assistant editors: jordan donop, kristina hall, & rebecca philips advancing women in leadership vol. 43, 107-116, 2024 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the benefits and challenges of inhabiting the dual role of mother/leader julie hasson, kimberly money, and olivia sikes julie hasson: assistant professor, appalachian state university, hassonjd@appstate.edu kimberly money: assistant professor, appalachian state university, moneykd@appstate.edu olivia sikes: assistant superintendent, mount airy city schools, osikes@mtairy.k12.nc.us accepted november 14, 2024 what does it mean to be a good mother? what does it mean to be an effective school leader? these questions elicit a myriad of answers, illustrating the complex roles of mother and leader. the complexities are magnified for those who inhabit both roles. the purpose of this study was to understand the intersectionality of motherhood and educational leadership through the experiences of women who are mothers and leaders in a public school district in north carolina. in this qualitative study using a phenomenological approach, a focus group was formed to explore participants’ experiences and perceptions of the benefits and conflicts inherent in maintaining the roles of mother and school leader as well as their perceptions of the non-dichotomous relationship of the two roles. feminist standpoint theory and work/family border theory were utilized as frameworks to inform study design, data collection, and data analysis. ideas around gendered roles as well as work/family balance were central in our efforts to understand the lived experiences of each participant. through analysis of each focus group session, followed by an analysis across group sessions, three themes emerged: 1) emotional challenges 2) mother’s ways of leading, and 3) work-life balance. keywords:mother/leader, women in school leadership, feminist standpoint theory, intersection of motherhood and leadership caring and collaboration are descriptors of both nurturing mothers and influential leaders. although mothers bring beneficial qualities to leadership roles, those who inhabit both roles also experience challenges. gender bias, specifically related to workplace advancement, can be a barrier as women negotiate their identities as both mothers and educational leaders. a pluralistic feminist lens, as proposed by bell hooks (2000b), is of value for understanding the interconnected systems of oppression that working mothers experience. while using feminist standpoint theory and work/family border theory as lenses, the intersectionality and multi-dimensionality of motherhood and educational leadership were explored in this study. we sought to understand the conflicts as well as the benefits that are experienced by those maintaining these dual roles. this study was informed by the work/family border theory, proposed by clark (2000). work/family border theory suggests that mothers manage and negotiate boundaries between work and family domains to maintain balance and reduce conflict between these roles. borders can be physical, temporal, or psychological, and the permeability of borders varies based on personal preferences, job demands, and family dynamics. successful border management requires flexibility and strength in creating borders, as well as support from institutions in respecting borders. when borders are managed effectively, mothers experience greater well-being. however, poorly managed borders can lead to role conflict and stress, diminishing satisfaction in both work and family life. in general, working fathers have experienced less complications and stress than working mothers in establishing work/family borders (torres et al, 2024). in addition to greater stress around work/family borders, women also experience challenges related to gendered norms in the workplace. historically, successful leaders have been characterized by more masculine leadership traits of competitiveness, aggression, and ambition. women are more often associated with leadership traits such as helpfulness, kindness, and empathy. these traits are closely linked with the role of motherhood and the intersectionality of motherhood and leadership (ahmed, 2000; arendell, 1999). the two roles, while challenging to navigate, can complement one another. those who inhabit these dual roles can benefit from self-advocacy and self-care, as well as careful and consistent boundary setting. school districts can support those inhabiting the dual roles of mother and leader by providing mentorship and flexibility. both school districts and individuals gain from understanding that leaders who are also mothers tend to enact their roles differently than those who do not inhabit both roles (torres et al, 2024). 108 as both mothering and leading are rooted in gendered norms, feminist standpoint theory provided a useful lens for exploring these roles. feminist standpoint theory is focused on marginalized groups, particularly women, who have unique perspectives shaped by their experiences of oppression. according to harding (2009) and hartsock (1998), women possess a more critical understanding of social structures, as their lived experiences provide insights often overlooked by dominant groups. feminist standpoint theory emphasizes the importance of amplifying women’s voices against historical norms, asserting that such standpoints are not merely subjective opinions but constitute valuable, situated knowledge that can reveal systemic power dynamics (harding, 2009; harstock, 1998; smith, 1987). identifying as mother and leader becoming a mother often initiates an epistemological change encompassing new ways of knowing and moving through the world, such as listening, nurturing, and mediating (levesque et al, 2020). additionally, becoming a mother is often accompanied by a shift in priorities and work-life balance. becoming a leader is also accompanied by a transition in one’s sense of identity. role identity research indicates that changing from one role to another does not happen in a discrete step; instead, it is a process that requires bridging the disengagement of one role with the engagement of another. it requires shedding one persona and donning a new one (ashforth, 2001). role transitions have been studied widely in other disciplines, such as business and medicine. however, role transitions have not been a focus in education. curry (2000) explained, “considerations of leadership have been lacking in two ways. they have not focused on the phenomenological aspect, including such developmental experiences as the intrapsychic aspects of the individual’s ascendency to a leader position through the construction of a leader persona, and they have not substantively included the experiences of women” (p.18). although context cannot be ignored, there are some challenges common to many women undergoing this transformation. those who become both mothers and leaders experience multiple shifts and likely find themselves leading and mothering differently than those who do not perform both roles (crosslin & bailey, 2021; weber & cissna-heath, 2015). mothering ideology mothering ideology refers to the set of socially constructed beliefs and expectations surrounding the roles, responsibilities, and nature of motherhood, often idealizing mothers as selfless nurturers primarily responsible for the care and emotional development of children (williamson et al, 2022). with roots in traditional gender norms, mothering ideology looks upon caregiving as a moral obligation for women, emphasizing sacrifice, patience, and unconditional love, while positioning motherhood as central to a woman’s identity (zhou, 2017). the prevalence of this ideology often results in conflicting pressures and feelings of inadequacy and guilt for mothers working outside the home (williamson et al, 2022). this ideology has continued to impact societal notions of a what it means to be a good mother. mother considering the deep roots of mothering ideology, motherhood can be viewed through socially constructed norms, grounded in history and culture. historical and modern studies of motherhood have deemed it a study of a private experience, but the definition of a good mother is largely socially constructed. however, the construct does vary in terms of cultural resources and constraints. hattery (2001) writes, "mothering is constructed through men's and women's actions within specific historical circumstances. thus, agency is central to the understanding of motherhood as a social, rather than a biological, construct" (p.25). the construct of motherhood has evolved over time based on the intersectionality of societal norms with factors such as gender, class, and ethnicity. these factors help define motherhood and shape what is defined as the ideal. values regarding a mother’s role in child-rearing, the home, and the workplace are all shaped by the socially constructed ideology of motherhood. while the “ideal” in motherhood has changed throughout history, the value of the mother as the primary caretaker is still present today. intensive mothering, according to hays (1996), is a child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, financially expensive ideology in which mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture and development of the sacred child and in which children's needs take precedence over the individual needs of the others (p. 510). with the gendered imbalance of this great responsibility, mothers (particularly those with demanding professional roles) can feel overwhelmed. leader while women have a long history in the role of mother, their tenure as school leader is relatively short. men outnumbered women in school leadership in 2000, but by 2023, about 55 percent of principals identified as women and about 45 percent identified as men (phillips, 2023). feminist researchers view gender as a lens through which school leaders make meaning of their work and lives (collard & reynolds, 2004; elias 2022). young and skrla (2003) explain, “researchers of gender and educational leadership have centered women in their work and have explored the characteristics of women leaders and the institutional and professional cultures within which they work” (p.1). researchers use a feminist lens to correct both the invisibility and the historical distortion in male researchers’ interpretations of the female experience (elias, 2022; harding, 2009; harstock, 1998; shakeshaft, 1989). the increasing number of women gaining entry into school leadership warrants an examination of the work lives of these women, as female school leaders often face different challenges than their male counterparts (collard & reynolds, 2004). a lack of networking, scarcity of role models, and inadequate mentoring are challenges 109 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 for many female leaders, but not necessarily for male leaders. sacrifices of personal relationships and even health are obstacles female school leaders continue to face (phillips, 2023). dual roles adding the role of mother to school leader brings even more complexity to this gendered identity. in the climate of the late 1960s and 1970s, feminists asserted that motherhood topped the list of social constructions which have hampered women's power and autonomy (elias, 2022; vandenberg-daves, 2002). despite the constraints, school districts benefit from recruiting women leaders and finding ways to support them in leadership roles (bergmann et al, 2022). darling-hammond (2007) suggests that factors associated with behaviors of female school leaders, such as providing support to staff, establishing a supportive culture, and establishing a participatory decision-making structure, are strong predictors of organizational learning which also impact teacher motivation and empowerment. in addition, female leaders often bring several years of teaching experience and knowledge of effective instructional practices to their schools. grogan and shakeshaft (2011) propose that the prominence of instruction and learning at the center of women’s leadership drives instructional change that improves student learning. thus, with the need for strong instructional leaders brought about by efforts to improve academic outcomes for all students, it is essential to recruit and retain female school leaders. purpose and rationale the purpose of this study was to examine the intersectionality of the roles of mother and educational leader. for this study, the term mother/leader is used for women who inhabit these dual roles. intersectionality refers to the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies as well as the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power (davis, 2008). in this study, intersectionality is specific to the intersection of motherhood and school leadership.maintaining the dual roles of mother/leader can create role conflict, but mutual benefits also exist between the two roles. we sought to explore the challenges and benefits from the perspectives of mothers/leaders. bell hooks’ (2000) emphasis on the multi-dimensions of power relations is especially useful to this study as it illuminates a pluralistic feminist lens which informs the understanding of the interconnected systems of oppression that many working mothers experience. using a feminist lens facilitated the examination of the roles of motherhood and leadership from both a historical and current perspective. mothers/leaders must navigate assumptions related to leadership, particularly regarding the expectations of and the value given to the person in the leadership position based on gender. feminine ways of leading have been historically viewed as less valuable than more masculine leader behaviors. blackmore (1989) stated: leaders display attributes and behaviours [sic], possess moral virtues and principles, which are generally associated with ‘masculinity.’ it is a view which has effectively displaced women in educational thought, and therefore rendered women invisible in administrative practice (p. 64). the historic patriarchy that exists in the education system has placed value on masculine leadership attributes, such as assertiveness, competitiveness, and a more hierarchical approach to decision-making. therefore, while the pipeline into educational leadership is predominately female, males have historically occupied a disproportionate number of leadership roles. educational leaders make daily decisions regarding the care, safety, health, and well-being of children. given that educational leaders have this unique position of professionally leading both children and adults, the intersectional relationships between this role and motherhood are unique when compared to women in other leadership arenas, such as politics or business. for school leaders, a mothering ideology may translate into professional roles and manifest itself in ways that can be beneficial in communication, building relationships, and shared decision making (bergmann, 2022). women leaders are associated with leadership traits such as helpfulness, kindness, sympathy, and sensitivity. these traits are also closely linked with the role of motherhood. the roles of mother and leader may complement one another if mothers/leaders can successfully navigate these dual roles. therefore, it is important to understand how these two roles intersect. methods in this study, we endeavored to describe and explore selected women’s perspectives on their roles as mothers/leaders. the notion of describing and exploring rather than identifying cause and effect indicates a qualitative approach to inquiry (janesick, 2004; merriam, 1998). qualitative techniques are utilized when we need a complex, detailed understanding of an issue that is best established by talking directly with people. qualitative research, in general, is also used to empower individuals to share their stories, stories which show individual differences in a way that quantitative measures cannot. in addition to individual differences, qualitative research brings sensitivity to issues of race, gender, and economic status. qualitative research explores behavior within the context of the social structures in which that behavior takes place (austin & sutton, 2014). this qualitative study focused on the experiences of five mothers/leaders in north carolina. the study sought a deep understanding of how these five mothers/leaders understand, experience, and balance the socially constructed ideologies of being both a “good mother” as described by mothering ideology (williamson et al, 2022) and an effective leader. we used a phenomenological approach, which is aimed at understanding the essence of lived experiences related to a particular phenomenon (creswell & poth, 2018). in this study, the common 110 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 phenomenon experienced by participants was navigating the dual roles of mother and leader. our goal was to illuminate the meaning of experiences from the perspective of participants. phenomenological studies typically involve small, purposive samples of people who have experienced the phenomenon (creswell & poth, 2018). participants purposeful selection was used to identify participants who could provide insight into the dual roles of mother and educational leader (creswell and poth, 2018). we also sought participants who were willing and able to share their experiences openly in a group setting. we believed the dynamic of a focus group would promote discussion and reflection. participants could react to each other’s comments, clarify their thoughts, and co-construct meanings around the phenomenon being studied. five women were selected, all mothers/leaders in one rural school district, which enabled us to make specific recommendations to the district. participants for the study were purposefully selected with varying personal and professional experiences related to motherhood and educational leadership. participants were mothers/leaders in all grade spans in k-12 education (elementary, middle, and high school). participants also differed in years of experience in a leadership role as well as ages of the children they mother. varying the personal and professional experiences of the participants helped us explore commonalities and differences and inspired rich conversations in the focus group sessions. data collection each woman participated in four focus group sessions, lasting approximately one hour each. utilizing a focus group allowed us to capture discussion between participants in addition to exchanges between participants and researchers. focus groups are a useful data collection method for underrepresented or historically marginalized groups, as they generate feelings of mutual support among participants (kitzinger, 1995). at times, focus groups have been criticized as antithetical to understanding uncontaminated individual accounts of experiences in a phenomenological approach to qualitative research. however, focus groups can stimulate discussion that opens new perspectives and facilitates meaning making around a common phenomenon (bradbury-jones et al, 2009). in this study, a phenomenological approach and focus group sessions were complimentary and supported our efforts to illuminate the lived experiences of mothers/leaders. using a semi-structured format, the focus group offered open lines of communication and dynamic interaction among the participants. questions for the first focus group session were created from the theoretical framework and literature review. probing and follow-up questions were inserted as needed. questions for the following focus group sessions were created from analysis of responses from previous sessions. open-ended questions allowed the participants to share personal experiences related to being a mother/leader. follow-up questions were asked to gather more details about the challenges and benefits of inhabiting these dual roles. the interviews were audio-recorded and field notes were taken. to protect participants’ anonymity, pseudonyms were used and specific professional titles were not disclosed. data analysis we engaged in data analysis as an ongoing, iterative process, informed by the work of saldana (2015). after each focus group session, we examined transcripts and field notes. initially, we broke the data into manageable pieces and assigned codes to these segments. initial codes were numerous and included varying aspects of motherhood and leadership, including children’s health issues and school emergencies. next, we consolidated these initial codes into broader categories or themes that encapsulated the core meanings of the data, such as emotional labor and nurturing behaviors. during this phase, we also engaged in memo writing to document reflections, insights, and connections related to the codes and themes. we followed this process deductively, starting with our predefined frameworks of feminist standpoint theory and work/family border theory. we highlighted barriers related to gendered norms and boundaries between work and family life. we also analyzed the data inductively, allowing themes to arise organically from the data without predetermined categories. throughout the data analysis process, we used member checking and invited participants to review the emerging findings and interpretations. member checking increased credibility and helped confirm that our findings aligned with participants' realities. summary of major findings through focus group sessions, it was evident that these mothers/leaders were in constant internal conflict over how to simultaneously be both good mothers and effective leaders. this is congruent with work/family border theory, which suggests that working mothers continuously negotiate the borders of work and family spheres in an effort to attain balance (clark, 2000). at the same time, they chose to lead with care and sensitivity, and they saw how their nurturing leadership positively impacted their schools. this is congruent with feminist standpoint theory, as women tend to create alternatives to traditional, hierarchical school cultures (young & skrla, 2003). through our analysis of participants’ conversations, three themes emerged: 1) emotional challenges 2) mother’s ways of leading, and 3) work-life balance. in addition, we explored the challenges of inhabiting these dual roles as well as the benefits. we were particularly interested in data that revealed these were not discrete categories as participants often described benefits hidden in challenges and vice versa. emotional challenges participants expressed a range of emotions from joy to distress. the emotion that most often permeated focus group discussion was guilt, particularly the concept of “mom guilt”. participants 111 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 frequently referenced an internal conflict when striving to balance both roles. they discussed the struggle to separate the two roles and establish boundaries to protect their time at home with their families. self-advocacy was necessary for prioritizing the obligations of motherhood. however, participants shared that mothering ideology is not necessarily aligned with self-advocacy and discussed the perceptions that may arise when mothers/leaders advocate for themselves. guilt and worry manifested in different ways for participants. one participant reported feeling guilty and being afraid to tell people in her professional circle that she was pregnant. this guilt was magnified with her second child. she stated: i remember thinking that when i tell people i am pregnant, they are going to think that i am not going to be able to do my job or be as good of a leader because i am adding to my family or because i have small children at home. i was happy to tell everyone else, but i can remember feeling afraid to tell my employers that i was pregnant. i felt like they would think that i could not be good at both roles. i don’t know where that comes from. it is completely internal. frustration and lack of efficacy accompanied guilt. as the discussion continued, participants began to discuss certain human resource processes that women must navigate when they are pregnant. women must request maternity leave in writing to the board of education and the board must approve the leave. the group discussed how this process seems cumbersome and unclear. each participant agreed and discussed that the process made them feel like they had no flexibility in the dates or the length of their maternity leave and they were expected to come back within a limited time frame rather than take the time they needed with their newborn children. they compared this process in education to other professional fields in which there is paid maternity leave, longer allowed terms for leave, as well as paid paternity leave. according to participants, mom guilt begins before birth and extends far beyond infancy. one participant shared: if my kid is sick, i feel like i have to gauge how sick they are and weigh these factors as to whether i take a day away from work to stay home with them or send them to their grandparents. i feel guilty about missing work for things such as doctor's appointments or other obligations for my children. when there are work pressures, i feel guilty about spending time with my children. the discussion around mom guilt highlighted gendered expectations in parenting and leadership. the group commented that men are generally better at delegation and can get by with doing less. they attributed these feelings to the mothering ideology of trying to take care of everything on your own and not asking for help. the group discussed how they do not think fathers/leaders experience the same guilt as they experience when trying to maintain both roles. one participant stated: i feel like we are judged sometimes as having too much on our plates and feel guilty about having to miss a meeting or other professional obligation and men, in the same situation, are praised for prioritizing their families. setting boundaries that separate the roles of leader and mother may have alleviated some guilt. however, participants found boundaries difficult. the group agreed that it is easier to sacrifice time with their families than to miss something at work as they feel there is no one else to take on their tasks and work demands. one participant shared: i feel like i take my principal mindset home with me. my husband will tell me to stop being a principal. i get two and a half hours a day with my family on average, and i am so in tune with running a school that i come home and run it like my school. i do not know how to sit down and relax. the inability to set boundaries also bleeds into self-care for mother/leaders. educational leaders work long hours, and as mothers, go home to a second shift job, taking care of their families. this schedule forces mothers to either put self-care on the back burner or squeeze it into their schedule at the sacrifice of another need, such as sleep. one participant commented: i work out at 5 am so i am back at home to get my daughters up, get them fed, and get them to school on time. after a long day at work and an evening spent running to my children's events, i am exhausted by the end of the day. the need for mothers/leaders to set boundaries was reported to be important for their own well-being and the well-being of those they lead. the inability to set them sends the message that work should always take priority. the group agreed that a more defined line between the two roles would help alleviate stress, but it seems impossible in their current roles. mothers’ ways of leading in discussions around how the role of mother impacts leadership, participants often described relational leadership. they talked about being able to see similarities in how they relate with their families and how they relate to those they lead at work. one participant shared: i am not the same type of leader that i was when i was leading a classroom. it is very different, and i do believe it has something to do with being a mother now. my leadership is focused on relationships. i focus on getting to know students and staff on a deeper level and ensuring they feel supported. participants agreed that prior to becoming mothers, they may have focused more on managerial tasks, schedules, and efficiency. they were more apt to focus on procedures and rules. however, motherhood influenced them to lean into relationships 112 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 more. this was particularly evident in handling student discipline. one participant said: families and i may disagree on something, but we both have common ground, we are both parents. it has changed the way i deliver consequences and communication. i think about how i would want my child treated. i try to deliver these things the way i would want my child's teacher to deliver them to me as a parent. as mother/leaders, participants reported using shared decision-making practices and seeking input from others. when making decisions or launching new initiatives, they think about the needs and well-being of those they lead. one participant revealed: i cannot help but worry about the staff's well-being when launching big initiatives or changes within the school. sometimes, i have to make the big and heavy decisions that need to be made, but i let the staff have input into the details of the execution. i want to protect my staff's personal time, if possible. that empathy extended to students and families as well. participants revealed feeling greater empathy since becoming mothers, particularly toward other mothers and parents. one participant described this in the context of an individualized education plan (iep) meeting: as a mother, i have gained more empathy for parents as far as wanting to make sure that i am not just checking the box as the leader in their school, but that i am truly helping them understand why things are the way they are in education. these leaders see themselves as advocates and protectors, much like they view their roles as mothers. they exercise patience as they give voice and choice, even when it is more cumbersome for them. work-life balance participants revealed ongoing struggles with inhabiting a professional role historically dominated by men. they felt pressure to constantly demonstrate their competence and prove that motherhood does not interfere with their work. one participant shared: i felt i had to prove myself over and over, and i got locked in this mindset. i often felt like i was in a glass house. i felt like everyone was judging my performance. i was never really great at asking someone to step in and help because it’s my job. participants described the pressure to do it all in both roles. they feared they would be viewed as complainers if they admitted to having too many tasks to accomplish without sufficient time and support. they expressed fears around their supervisors assuming they could not handle the work and the career limitations related to those assumptions. one participant said: at times i have felt that if i advocate for myself now, i will be overlooked for future opportunities. i also think that if we don't apply for positions because we are a mom and we want to keep our lives balanced at the time the position is available, that is frowned upon as well. these mother/leaders acknowledged their attempts to compartmentalize their roles but found it difficult to do so. participants described their efforts to leave work at work and to find ways to transition into family time. for example, they try not to talk about work with their spouses or think about work when trying to be fully present with their children. however, most acknowledged that work issues often invade their thoughts, particularly when they are trying to relax or sleep. challenges all participants described the challenges of separating their professional roles from their roles as mothers. they encountered challenges related to missing time with their families or being unable to attend events. they were not always able to stay home with sick children or go to appointments. even when they were physically present, they were often preoccupied with work concerns. similarly, when they had to ask for time off or assistance to accomplish tasks at work, they felt guilty for not being available or placing additional burdens on those they lead. one mother/leader described the challenges: the importance i placed on my role as a mother often conflicted with my desire to be a highly effective leader. i often felt guilty about having to choose between a work obligation and a family obligation. i dreaded asking permission to miss a meeting or school function to attend my own child's events. i felt constant internal guilt and stress. however, they found unexpected benefits in these challenges. their children had an expanded circle of caregivers, a variety of role models. they also believed themselves to be modeling what it looks like to have a meaningful and fulfilling professional life, which may serve as a powerful example for their children. by prioritizing their families, they gave permission for their faculty and staff to do the same. they had great empathy for those who were also juggling personal and professional obligations. trying to model professional boundaries eliminated the domino effect experienced by those whose leaders encroach on the personal time their employees. benefits the benefits of being a mother/leader included a tendency to use a relational and collaborative leadership style, which had a positive impact on their schools. these mothers/leaders also became better communicators because of their dual roles. one participant said: i am a better communicator with my child and even my child's teacher because i am an educational leader. i feel like my ability to reason and talk things through with 113 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 my child has improved due to the continuous conversations with students each day. i also think i am more reflective of how i communicate with my child's teacher and how i approach any situation that may arise in their education due to my experiences working with teachers and leading a school. however, they also found challenges hidden in these benefits. being more empathetic meant they cared deeply about the struggles of those they lead as well as the students and families they served. they described feeling empathy fatigue, feeling mentally and physically exhausted by holding space and worrying about everyone’s problems. discussion ideologies are patterns of beliefs, ideas, opinions, and values used to create meaning (freeden, 2003). people both produce and consume ideologies and use them to define and promote a construction of reality (johnston & swanson, 2006). ideologies are both "in us" and "to us" and as a result, we are not fully aware of the degree to which we internalize ideologies (althusser, 1984). from the conversations of the focus groups, it was evident that all participants had similarly constructed ideologies regarding what the ideal mother/leader should be. these ideologies created an internal conflict for participants as they navigated the dual role of mother/leader. attempts to integrate career and motherhood are itself a source of stress, according to johnston and swanson (2006). work and family balance is a process of giving and taking and often gets out of balance. navigating borders between work and family requires flexibility and continuous negotiation (clark, 2000). while participants described the pressure and drive as “unexplained,” feminist theory explains the source of this conflict and guilt as the patriarchal foundation of the educational system and the masculine leadership traits of competition, discipline, and assertiveness that are still valued today (zhou, 2017). mothers/leaders feel this internal pressure to prioritize professional obligations as well as the intensive maternal drive, often making them conflicted strivers in both roles. professional decisions shape and reinforce the mothering ideology (weber & cissna-heath, 2015). according to johnston and swanson (2006), "mothers must find cognitive ways to reconcile their employment decisions and their mothering ideology." the need for this reconciliation was described by participants when discussing their inability to establish work-home boundaries and the resulting mom guilt that came with the struggle. participants discussed their feelings of failure as a mother as a result of work demands bleeding into their personal time and lives. participants revealed how compartmentalization was a weakness for them, and they seldom could leave their professional duties at work and come home to focus on their families. in an effort to alleviate guilt, participants discussed making the most of the time they had at home, such as planning activities for their families, even if they could not attend. to modify work constraints, participants discussed self-advocacy and setting professional boundaries. both strategies were self-identified weaknesses of all participants. participants were asked to think deeply about their perceived challenges of being a mother/leader and were asked to think beyond the dichotomies. they were asked about the values found in the perceived challenges of being a mother/leader. conclusions drawn from this discussion aligned with the writings of hooks (2000), outlining the need for self-advocacy in order to destabilize a patriarchal education system. participants concluded that guilt can serve as a catalyst for women to take action to systemically support other women and transform ahistorically male-normed education system. participants discussed support systems such as support groups and mentorships as necessary actions for improvement. "often parenthood initiates an epistemological revolution,'" write belenky et al. (1997, p.35). this epistemological revolution impacts how educational leaders who are also mothers lead professionally. the dual role of mother/leader lends itself to an epistemology that is described by feminist scholars as care-based (noddings, 1984) and love-based (hooks, 2000). mother leaders experience a “crossover” of motherhood traits into leadership style. the same care-based and love-based approach they use with their own children manifests itself in their professional leadership as well. relational leadership was a theme discussed by all participants as a way in which they lead their staff and interact with students and families. this was the primary leadership style that emerged when participants discussed areas of their profession such as decision-making, new initiatives, communication, and discipline. although the participants experienced multiple and significant challenges, they believe those they lead benefit from their dual roles. limitations our study was focused on women who identified as mothers/leaders in one rural school district in north carolina, and all participants identified as white females. although generalization was not a goal of the study, we recognize that a more diverse group would likely yield some differences in findings. we also chose to work with a small focus group over multiple sessions. a larger group may yield some differences, as the small group of participants came to know one another intimately. utilizing member checks and multiple researchers in analysis increased validity. however, it is possible that other researchers may reach different conclusions. recommendations work-life balance and organizational support are key to eliminating gendered role expectations and the impact of those expectations on women in leadership (ahmed, 2000; arendell, 1999; zhou, 2017). the responsibility for finding a balance between work and family obligations falls primarily on mothers/leaders. however, school districts can do more to support and protect them. human resource departments in school 114 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 districts could improve working conditions for expectant, new, and experienced mothers. these departments could adopt the “employ the family” mindset to create more family-friendly working conditions, flexibility, and support for working mothers. areas such as mental health support, self-care resources, and flexible maternity leave could alleviate stress for mothers in leadership. additionally, if superintendents and other school and district leaders had a better understanding of the challenges related to female leaders also embodying the role of mother, they may be able to consider these additional stresses and conflicts when making decisions on how to support mother/leaders. at the conclusion of this study, participants expressed a desire to keep the focus group in tact and morph into a support group with regular meetings. they found the conversations with others who are experiencing the same challenges helpful. prior to the study, many of these mothers/leaders described feeling alone in the struggle and believed others were handling the challenges more effectively. this also demonstrated the need for more mentoring. experienced mothers/leaders who have successfully navigated the challenges can provide insight, strategies, and additional support to newer mothers/leaders. providing training on self-advocacy skills and negotiating working conditions could also be helpful. however, the success of peer groups and mentoring initiatives is dependent upon districts creating the time and space for mothers/leaders to talk about their struggles as well as their successes in the dual roles. students, teachers, and communities benefit from the leadership of mothers/leaders. their relational and collaborative style as well as their instructional expertise engender improved outcomes. however, these benefits can only be realized if mothers/leaders are able to sustain in leadership roles. providing support and opportunities for growth can help mothers/leaders develop the internal resources necessary. systemic changes are also needed, as mothers/leaders could benefit from structures that provide greater flexibility and a clear path forward. ultimately, the success of mothers/leaders is tied to valuing their unique ways of leading and their choice to inhabit these two intersecting roles. references ahmed, s. 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(2022). mothering ideology: a qualitative exploration of mothers’ perceptions of navigating motherhood pressures and partner relationships. sex roles, 88(1–2), 101–117. young, m.d. & skrla, l. (2003). reconsidering feminist research in educational leadership. state university of new york press. zhou, m. (2017). motherhood, employment, and the dynamics of women’s gender attitudes. gender &amp; society, 31(6), 751–776. 116 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 499 copyedited_pub_ready.docx volume 43, 2024 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, benjamin jankens, and julia ballenger assistant editors: jordan donop, kristina hall, & rebecca philips advancing women in leadership vol. 43, 91-106, 2024 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper what’s my type? characteristics of quality mentoring relationships for nonprofit latina ceos as mentees in california belinda hernández, ed.d, m.s.w.: director, stanford university, bhernan@stanford.edu accepted november 14, 2024 mentoring research that explores the experiences of executive leaders as mentees is limited, and almost non-existent, for women of color nonprofit chief executive officers (ceos). not only is existing literature limited, it does not intentionally explore how intersectionality influences the development of quality mentoring relationships for women of color executive leaders. the term latina leadership development (ldd) has been established as a dedicated concept related to the leadership development of latinas in this study. the purpose of the study was to explore how latina nonprofit executive leaders in california leveraged existing social capital and mentoring relationships as mentees that influenced their self-efficacy and leadership development. research was conducted between 2017 and 2020 with 10 latina nonprofit ceos in california utilizing qualitative research methodology. a hermeneutic phenomenological research design was applied utilizing hermeneutic looping techniques during a nine-step data analysis process to ensure participants’ perceptions of their lived experiences remained at the core of this study. this paper presents two themes produced by the study: (a) an evolution of mentorship relationship type and function exists with a preference for informal mentoring relationships that provide psychosocial supportive functioning, and (b) a constellation of mentors from diverse racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds are preferred and integral to lld. this study empirically extends existing scholarship by showing how intersectionality and specific characteristics of mentoring relationships may be most beneficial for latina and women of color nonprofit ceos. keywords: mentoring relationship, nonprofit organization, latina chief executive leader, social capital, community cultural wealth typology, intersectionality, hermeneutic phenomenology the glass ceiling narrative metaphorically describes invisible barriers faced by women during their career advancement. according to glass and cook (2016), the metaphor highlights subtle and covert “forms of bias and discrimination, [in which] women are less likely than men to have access to strong professional networks, social ties to elites, workplace support and insider information” (p. 51). there is a perception that high achieving women have broken the glass ceiling when they have successfully attained executive leadership positions. however, racially and ethnically underrepresented women contend the glass ceiling metaphor ignores specific intersectional social identity characteristics, experiences, and their impact on leadership advancement. instead, subsequent metaphors have been adopted by marginalized women to highlight intersectional identities in leadership such as concrete (holder et al, 2015), adobe (alicea, 2003), stained glass (giglia & smith, 2024); sullins, 2000), bamboo (saksena, 2024), and rainbow ceilings (federo, 2024) described by black, latina, indigenous, religious, asian, and the lgbtq+ communities, respectively. the adobe ceiling metaphor illustrates the dense and muddy barriers latinas must navigate to attain leadership roles (alicea, 2003). as opposed to glass, the muddiness of adobe is opaque and difficult to see through, unable to know exactly what lies ahead, and nor how much further is needed to go to attain and maintain a leadership role. holder et al. (2015) found black women experienced micro aggressions and other discrimination in the corporate workplace. the authors described six coping strategies, two of which were associated with support networks, and seeking sponsorship. in this particular study, research explored how mentors and mentoring networks impacted the leadership advancement for latina nonprofit executives. in this study, i utilized the term latina to describe women who identify as chicana, latina, and/or of hispanic ancestry. study criteria required participants to identify with at least one of these identities. during the screening process, participants were not required to specify which of these identities they preferred. importance was placed on overall identification. all participants identified with at least one of these racial/ethnic/political categories. bernal (2002) defined chicana as a woman of latinx ancestry with a cultural and political social identity that recognizes a resistant and political consciousness. it is important to note that not all latinas embrace a chicana social identity. the term hispanic is not used by many latinx people either who believe the term is an umbrella term issued by the government that does not recognize ethnic or political identity 92 (hayes-bautista, 2004). in addition to racial/ethnic/political identification, participants were required to have or have had a quality mentoring relationship in which they considered themselves a mentee at some point in their lifetime. all participants held a nonprofit ceo role in the state of california at the time of the study. there were no minimum or maximum limits for age, educational attainment, total leadership experience, nor number of years in their current role. all participants were born in the united states. additional participant profile characteristics are found in table 1 below. existing literature has shown that mentors and mentoring networks have been effective pathways for leadership development and executive transitions. however, literature is limited that specifically explores how women of color nonprofit leaders have experienced and engaged in mentoring as they advanced in their careers, nor how they maintain quality mentoring relationships. “breaking the glass ceiling” does not metaphorically represent the intersectionality of women of color executives. the research question for my study: what are the salient characteristics of quality mentoring relationships for latina nonprofit executive leaders in california? theoretical framework the theoretical framework developed for this study leans on a newer version of social capital theory and community cultural wealth that grew from critical race studies. i utilized social capital theory (coleman, 1988; lin, 2001) and community cultural wealth typology (yosso, 2005) to provide a more robust framework for this study. social capital theory foundational capital theory was used to frame the purpose of this study and thematic data analysis. while bourdieu’s (2011) cultural capital theory promotes a meritocratic paradigm that indicates educational attainment benefits all individuals with pathways into the middle class and accumulation of wealth, the paradigm negates the marginalization of people by systems and social structures that do not always benefit marginalized and underrepresented groups, especially for women of color. bourdieu’s (2011) choice of cultural and social capital was discounted as solely an individualistic and meritocratic concept. coleman’s (1988) version of social capital theory and social mobility constructs were adopted to describe the functional nature of social structures, whereby social capital and mentoring relationships mutually may influence each other. lin’s (2001) work on social relationships strengthened this framework emphasizing the criticality of quality mentoring relationships that may provide mentees with additional leadership credentials. community cultural wealth coleman’s work aligns with yosso’s community cultural wealth typology (2005) by emphasizing how the presence of community wealth exists in several forms of capital, regardless of an individual’s social status or marginalization. yosso emphasizes community cultural wealth typology stemming from a critical race perspective, and intersectionality which recognizes gendered and racialized experiences. the typology was well suited for the study’s purpose. intersectionality (crenshaw, 1989; crenshaw, 1991) is further described within this typology in the literature review below. my perspective is that women of color leaders’ intersectional experiences as gendered and racialized beings, and their possession of several forms of existing capital, are foundational to the leadership development of women of color leaders. yet overt and covert forms of social injustices, inequality, and inequity impede social and career attainment for racial and ethnic minority women in leadership that mentoring relationships may help navigate. this study explored latina leaders’ perceptions of their mentoring relationships as mentees, and how these relationships may have influenced their lld. literature review lived experiences of latina nonprofit executive leaders included recognizing social histories that have influenced their lld. history, immigration patterns, and non-monolithic experiences require latinx individuals to respond differently to non-latinx perceptions and social inequity (hayes-bautista, 2004). california born latinx may possess differing experiences than recent latinx immigrants including immigration status, language proficiency, and types and degrees of social capital. although an individual retains their unique experiences and perceptions, majoritarian rhetoric often describes latinx as a monolithic group. similar to hayes-bautista, bernal (2002) described the impact of monolithic rhetoric within the educational system indicating it historically and continually oppresses marginalized communities. bernal described critical race theory (crt) and latinx critical race theory (latcrit) by emphasizing the importance of intersectional identity based on race, ethnicity, and gender. furthermore, chicana feminista praxis (delgado et al., 2017) is anchored in critical race theory and latcrit through the sharing of intersectional latina counter narratives that expose the oppressive nature of the monolithic rhetoric. i highlighted social capital theory and community cultural wealth typology as its theoretical framework, while emphasizing intersectionality is ingrained in this study’s framework. intersectionality’s influence in racial/ethnic/gender studies crenshaw (1991) pointed out the failure of legal studies and feminist theory by asserting they ignore the intersection of race and gender. racial and ethnic minority women suffer from unequal, inequitable, and discriminate ideologies on multiple levels and fronts (crenshaw, 1991). she asserted that, “the problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences” (crenshaw, 1991, p. 1242). to assume people of one culture are monolithic would generalize the diversity of that group. the sociocultural identities latinx form may traverse characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, orientation, disability, generational, immigration, and language experiences, to name a few. intersectionality may be exploratory and analytical (carbado et al., 2013). it has been accepted to account for race, 93 ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, religion and other social differences as connecting or standing alone on individual, cultural, and societal levels (ruiz castro & holvino, 2016). empirical studies that amalgamate intersectionality promote further multidimensional studies especially related to social inequity (rodriguez et al., 2016). carbado et al. (2013) asserted that intersectionality is not solely a static theory rooted in black feminism. the evolution of intersectional perspectives in numerous disciplines has been neglected. researchers must recognize intersectionality during exploration, its influence, and how it mobilizes individuals (carbado et al., 2013). scholars advocate for the integration of intersectionality, especially for racial and ethnic minority women aspiring for executive leadership (sanchez-hucles & davis, 2010). i honored participant intersectionality by acknowledging the way in which participants identified themselves and perceived their experiences. sanchez-hucles and davis (2010) asserted: equally important are efforts to unpack intersectionality in order to reveal the variables and causal relationships among them that underlie it. training in performance management and leadership development that emphasizes the intersectionality of multiple identities may produce acceptance of a wider range of acceptable leadership behavior. (p. 179) respecting multiple identity realities produces finer and more appreciation of leadership diversity (sanchez-hucles & davis, 2010). intersectional identities offer complex mosaics of narrative opportunities. however, carbado et al. (2013) assert demand for group solidarity might become unidimensional restricting an individual within their own cultural groups to the point that individuals may begin to negotiate between their needs for their group’s acceptance. however, latinas share positive feelings regarding the formation of identity, college and professional aspirations, and life transitions within latinx culture (ayala & contreras, 2019; menchaca et al., 2016). latinas leverage related forms of capital to empower themselves through leadership trajectories (ayala & contreras, 2019; yosso, 2005). nonprofit organizational contexts women of color nonprofit executives are overlooked in empirical literature (branson et al., 2013). when assessing only for gender, the nonprofit industry generally continues to employ non-latina white women in organizational leadership intended to serve lower-income black and brown communities, “proving that it is more important to have gainfully employed white progressives with fulfilling careers, than it is to actually rectify systemic inequalities by putting the right people at the forefront” (tomkin, 2020, p. 4). tomkin’s observations critically highlight the systemic barriers that women of color ceos encounter as both gendered and ethnically marginalized leaders in the nonprofit sector. i intentionally explored latina nonprofit leaders’ perceptions about how mentoring influenced their leadership development into the nonprofit sector that is described as systemically oppressive within the leadership ranks. the nonprofit sector may appeal to women seeking top executive positions; however, women may have a firm presence in the nonprofit sector but minimally within key executive roles (pynes, 2000). attainment of these positions and opportunity for further skill development often result in substantially lower salaries than in other sectors (branson et al., 2013). research has shown female leaders add significant economic and social value to an organization (jones & jones, 2017); but limited scholarship exists focusing on women executives in the nonprofit industry (branson et al., 2013) and almost non-existent when intentionally centering intersectionality. inspired by the lack of qualitative research within the nonprofit industry exploring the professional trajectories of women of color, this study highlighted the intersectionality of latina nonprofit ceos, sources of capital, and extends existing mentoring research for leadership development. latinas in nonprofit leadership as mentioned, while opting to work in a nonprofit environment, women, racial and ethnic minorities may opt to accept lower compensation in exchange for greater skill development opportunities (pynes, 2000). female nonprofit ceos tend to lead smaller nonprofit organizations while earning less pay than if in larger organizations (cornelius et al., 2011). in a 2011 national study pertaining to nonprofit executive leadership, 82% of executive directors were white, and just 3% were latinx (cornelius et al., 2011). adesaogun et al. (2015) explored gender, racial, and ethnic disparities among california nonprofit leaders: understanding the overall ethnic composition of nonprofit organizations is integral to understanding the impact of racial and ethnic stratification at the leadership level within the industry. researchers attempting to understand nonprofit organizations in california discovered that while minorities and women made up the majority of nonprofit employees in the state, only 25% of nonprofit organizations were minority-led. (p. 44) adesaogun et al. (2015) found perceptions that there is a lack of organizational interest to mentor ethnic minority employees. although the study was conducted with black women in the midwest, california was referenced as being more of a progressive environment and more diverse in comparison to other regions of the u.s. the authors advise understanding regional ethnic distribution while exploring career success. in fact, racial disparities among nonprofit leadership have led to the establishment of ethnic specific professional networks whereby racial and ethnic minority women seek support from fellow employees of similar cultural backgrounds who assist in acclimating to an organization’s culture (adesaogun et al., 2015). these social networks are aligned with social capital theory and community cultural wealth typology whereby 94 marginalized communities leverage community capital for goal attainment. existing research tends to stratify all women or racial and ethnic minorities, with limited focused research on female racial and ethnic minority leaders within a regional or state boundary (adesaogun et al., 2015). i intentionally explored latina nonprofit leadership in california to fill this gap in empirical scholarship. latina intersectionality and lived experience is critical when exploring how gender, race, and ethnicity impacts the latina ceo's experience. leroux (2009) found that racial matching of an organization’s leaders to its clients enhanced political and advocacy awareness of the community’s needs. leroux suggested additional studies be conducted with latinx leaders due to the population’s growth and often under representation in decision making arenas; “it has important implications for the role nonprofits might play in restructuring the imbalance of influence in larger political and policy-making systems” (leroux, 2009, p. 758). for nonprofit leaders, cooperative relationships are often formed by leveraging their social networks. the leveraging of these networks may nurture mentoring relationships which have been shown to mutually benefit the mentor and mentee. mentoring relationships a mentor describes a person, or an activity, used interchangeably with terms such as advisor, sponsor, coach, counselor, friend, family, peer, protector, role model, teacher, and confidante (crisp & alvarado-young, 2018; kram, 1985; priest et al., 2018). i utilized the term mentor to encompass all of these terms. one of its most paternalistic descriptions indicates how the mentor is committed to developing a less experienced mentee (crisp et al., 2017; kao et al., 2014; kram, 1985). campbell et al. (2012) described shifts in mentoring phenomenon during the 1970s, whereby workplace management held a paternalistic view of the term. the 1980s adopted mentoring as a learning process between mentor and mentee, with kram’s (1985) work bringing mentoring relationships studies within an organizational context. kram’s foundational study began to categorize mentoring into career and psychosocial functions. one of her implications advocated for the exploration of diversity within mentoring relationships. match suitability has begun to include race, ethnicity, and gender as critical characteristics of these relationships (mcarthur et al., 2017; searby et al., 2015). match suitability describes how the mentor is attuned to the needs of an engaged mentee (mcarthur et al., 2017) and the match may be experienced differently in workplace, educational, or cultural spaces. characteristics such as gender became a factor when comparing differences in career interest and aspirations between mentored men and women, emphasizing that, regardless of gender, an individual must be dedicated to the relationship to benefit from mentoring (pârlea-buzatu, 2010). pârlea-buzatu explored how participants defined mentoring and highlighted its salient characteristics and influences. mentoring relationships supporting leadership development vary by type, function, and source (kram, 1985) and contain reciprocity between the mentor and mentee (hastings & kane, 2018). among high achieving individuals, a mentor may help create a safe space that reduces feelings of performance inadequacy or imposter syndrome (clance & imes, 1978; neureiter & traut-matausch, 2016; peteet et al., 2015; vergauwe et al., 2015). while mentoring literature exists, it typically does not center women of color executives outside of the educational sector. block and tietjen-smith (2016) found the benefits of psychosocial mentoring were associated with decreased role conflict and ambiguity, increased career and job satisfaction, and stronger commitment to the organization as a result of satisfaction with the mentoring relationship. i extended mentoring research by demonstrating a more inclusive and detailed set of findings pertaining to how latina nonprofit executive leaders have benefitted from mentoring relationships as mentees. it empirically fills scholarship gaps by showing how mentoring can positively impact an individual’s retention and development in workplace settings while including intersectionality and social identity as influencers of mentoring relationships. methods qualitative research methodology was utilized to collect data that described mentoring experiences from a sample size of 10 latina nonprofit ceos in california. based on review of the literature, semi-structured interviews, descriptive surveys, and researcher field notes an analysis produced themes. the methodological framework examined contextual conditions in which experiences occurred and recognized the unique stories of every participant. i selected a hermeneutic phenomenological research design influenced by heidegger’s (1953/2010) hermeneutic phenomenological philosophy that evolved from husserl’s (1907/1999) idea of phenomenology as both a philosophical perspective and research methodology. it aligned with the intention to recognize the experiences of all participants as well as acknowledge researcher interpretation who shared similar participant demographic characteristics and nonprofit leadership experience. while husserl’s (1907/1999) phenomenology requires the bracketing of a researcher’s own experiences in an effort to disconnect from all preconceived notions about the phenomenon, heidegger (1953/2010) acknowledged that experiences and perceptions could not be objective, requiring inquirers to study individual parts, then go broader to assess all parts in combination. he pushed for the understanding and interpretation of the researcher. through descriptive patterns (polkinghorne, 1983) that cannot be necessarily obtained through basic phenomenology, the core of hermeneutic phenomenology is historicality of understanding (heidegger, 1953/2010; koch, 1995) and hermeneutic loops (koch, 1995; laverty, 20023) which were incorporated into the study. the looping process supported the historicality of understanding which koch (1985) described as the researcher’s background and culture, pre-understanding of the culture and its meaning, co-constitution between oneself and the world, and 95 interpretation. in addition to including the foundation of hermeneutic phenomenology, allen et al (1995) argued that hermeneutic exploration is critical whereby it has a commitment to understanding and highlighting inequities of power and misconceptions. the hermeneutic phenomenological research design was included in all aspects of this study, most importantly in the selection of data collection methods and data analysis process. data collection and analysis included demographic questionnaires; semi-structured, in-person one-on-one interviews; and researcher field notes. demographic questionnaires collected demographic, organizational, and leadership information. participants completed the questionnaire attesting to their criteria such as identification as chicana, latina, and/or of hispanic ancestry, were u.s born, and confirmation they experienced at least one memorable mentoring relationship as a mentee. they also provided basic organizational information such as budget, staff size, and services offered. i travelled throughout the state of california and conducted in person semi-structured interviews at the participants’ place of work or a location of their choice. the duration of the interview did not surpass one and a half hours. through interviews, qualitative data was collected related to perceptions of mentor relationships and influences on leadership development. interviews served as the primary mode of data collection of experiences that were comprehensively described by participants. to the best of their ability, participants recalled these experiences and shared perceptions of their mentoring relationships. participants communicated details they felt comfortable sharing that led to thick, rich, descriptive data collection. the collection of researcher field notes enabled me to notate observations pertaining to their excitement or uneasiness of recollecting their relationships, their workplace environments, and their comfortability sharing their stories during the interviews. the data collection methods led to a multi-prong data analysis leading to thematic analysis. i manually coded all data to ensure the articulation and significance of the interview was accurate as some participants spoke both in english and spanish, and/or used culturally significant jargon. data analysis included a nine-step process to support the philosophy and methodological perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology which allows the researcher to interpret participant experiences through the integration of hermeneutic loops (heidegger, 1953/2010; koch, 1995; laverty, 2003). the nine steps in the looping process include pre-coding; first cycle coding; second cycle coding; codification 1; codification 2; categorization; thematic analysis; circle of friends (peer validation); and participant validation. the looping process became additional opportunities for participant validation during the data analysis process to ensure the voice of the participant was authentic and validated and not misconstrued in coding software. the process supported the study’s rigor with the utilization of triangulation, saturation, member checks, participant validation (member checks), circle of friends feedback, thick rich descriptions, and audit trails. this article presents two themes responding to the purpose of this study. these themes emerged as a result of participants sharing similar experiences, indicating the importance of the experiences themselves related to the themes, and who spent a majority of their interview discussing these experiences. the dialectic between data collection and data analysis produced meanings that were essential to the core hermeneutic strategy of interpretation and mean-making (allen, 1995). participant validation, also known as member checks, and a circle of friends feedback group were conducted during the data analysis process. miles et al. (2020) described how phenomenological studies that share transcripts with their participants become a foundation for shared reflection. in addition, the researcher desired its participants to understand how their voices matter and become empirical research. they also received an executive summary of the resulting themes after data analysis was completed. all participants indicated the themes were aligned with their experiences. all members of the circle of friends’ feedback group represented their organization’s leadership, worked in the nonprofit sector, identified as women, and/or represented diverse racial groups. the feedback group had opportunities to ask questions about the data analysis process that helped identify potential blind spots. laverty (2003) stated that: “for a hermeneutic phenomenological project, the multiple stages of interpretation that allow patterns to emerge, the discussion of how interpretations arise from data, and the interpretive process itself are seen as critical” (p. 31). findings study findings produced themes based on the perceptions and experiences detailed by the 10 latina nonprofit ceos in california. participant profiles participants’ stories and backgrounds provide context to the voices that were heard and conveyed. participant eligibility criteria included the following: ●self-identification as an u.s.-born chicana, latina, or woman of hispanic ancestry. this criterion addressed the gap in scholarship that has not focused specifically on mentoring relationships of latina ceos as mentees. ●at the time, held a ceo position at a california nonprofit organization. this criterion increased geographic sample distribution with broader recruitment opportunities and increased confidentiality. ●self-identification as having had, or having, a mentee experience with at least one quality mentor in their lifetime. other terms such as supervisor, role model, instructor, advisor, coach, sponsor, protector, family member, and friend were accepted. 96 participant demographic profiles were diverse representing different age ranges, educational levels, and leadership experience. participant profiles are displayed in table 1. the study recruited latina nonprofit ceos working within the state of california from 10 different organizations representing 5 regions of the state (northern california; san francisco bay area; central coast and central valley; gold country and high sierra; southern california). the statewide geographic boundary established for this project allowed for expansion, accessibility, and greater likelihood for participant recruitment. a diverse cross section of organizations is reflected among the participant group with the geographic area, organizational histories, budget size, staff size, and type of services offered (see table 2). i identified a set of themes that responded to the guiding research question: what are the salient characteristics of quality mentoring relationships for latina nonprofit executive leaders in california? participants were asked to describe the most meaningful mentor relationship(s) they have had. azalea, camelia, daisy, dahlia, lila, and zinnia described at least two different mentors because they felt they equally were meaningful to them. the mentors’ race, ethnicity, gender, and the role within the participants’ life were thoroughly discussed. figure 1 displays mentors’ characteristics. i explored the types of relationships, functions of those relationships, and how those relationships transitioned over time. formal versus informal mentoring relationships two types of mentoring relationships were examined. formal mentoring took place in the workplace or academic setting where a supervisor or advisor was considered a mentor. it also referred to more structured mentoring approaches or programs internal or external to the workplace or academic setting. informal mentoring took place internally or externally to the workplace or academic setting, including in the community or within the family. informal mentoring was less structured, with more casual mentoring encounters such as unscheduled interactions as chats via text messaging, phone calls, email, or impromptu conversations. over time, it was not uncommon to receive informal advising in the workplace or formal mentorship in the community. all participants, except for violeta, indicated having mentoring relationships that began formally in the workplace or educational environments many years prior to transitioning into a ceo role. however, violeta’s mentor was a community member who helped recruit violeta into her ceo role. it was observed that participants initially thought of only describing the receipt of mentorship that only had occurred in formal environments such as at work or in school settings. although many relationships began in formal contexts, azalea, camelia, and lila did not recall having a formal conversation with their mentors that actually established the mentoring relationship. they were organic. generally, formal mentors began as direct supervisors or academic advisors. it was assumed these persons would provide some level of guidance. over time, formal mentoring relationships became more informal after participants established good rapport and mutual trust with their mentor. attaining this level of comfort allowed participants to feel more comfortable discussing personal matters with their mentors. long-term formal mentoring relationships eventually transitioned to an informal type. azalea, camelia, dahlia, lila, violeta, and zinnia did not necessarily view informal relationships as mentoring in nature. they asked whether it was permitted to share informal mentoring experiences. informal mentoring typically occurred with family and community members, and with supervisors or advisors with whom they had longer term mentoring relationships. family members provided psychosocial support regarding child rearing, demonstrating hard work ethics, helped to establish informal goals, role modeling a strong will and 97 determination, and respect for others. dahlia spoke about her father’s role modeling: my dad was a farm labor contractor, so we saw, through his really strong, hard work ethic, we learned the value of just being respectful and kind to people…i say that i always think of him as a mentor because all throughout my childhood, and even when i went to college, and i was the first to go to college, my dad ... they always encouraged us to do things. family and community mentors usually shared stories about their own experiences in the form of consejos (advice) to the mentee. camelia explained how her mother was discriminated against throughout her career producing feelings of being undervalued and underpaid which she perceived was associated with her mother’s ethnicity and darker skin tone. camelia asserted: my mom had worked at a bank and kind of started as a teller, got to be the head teller, ran up through the ranks and was kind of the second in charge, but not given the title, not given the respect and definitely not given the paycheck, because the president of the bank who really was just a figurehead and his son, who was the guy in charge of it on the day to day basis, you know, old white, italian dudes that they weren't going to give this little mexican lady what she deserved. over time, through these stories and with her mother’s advice, camelia grew in confidence and asked for pay equity which she obtained, even in her current ceo role. career advice and psychosocial support types all participant mentoring experiences were categorized into career advice or psychosocial support types (kram, 1985). table 3 shows exact participant responses that became in vivo codes taken directly from all 10 transcripts and aligned with the two subcategories. in many instances, participants recounted similar stories which strengthened the codes that were developed. participants received career advice in such areas as applying to their ceo jobs, developing informal goals, receiving invitations to meetings, interacting with their mentor’s social networks, coaching on the topic of salary negotiation, and guiding job transitions. career advice was mapped to kram’s (1985) career functions; sponsorship, exposure and visibility socializing forces, coaching, protection, and challenging assignments. challenging assignments were defined as mentors giving participants a project or task which the mentee may not have felt prepared or fully confident in leading. jasmine recounted a story about facing a deadline that she felt was outside of her comfort zone early on in her ceo role. her mentor guided her through the assignment until it was successfully completed. although it was a challenging assignment, her mentor had the confidence in her that jasmine did not have in herself. she shared how her mentor supported her to transition from a clinical nurse to a healthcare administrator which increased jasmine’s confidence level: she shed light on things that i could do, and she was very gentle with me whenever i make mistakes… because i made management mistakes. i made bad calls, but she helped me navigate through those. she got me the training that i would need to be successful in the next level. she would ask about my family. she helped me through my pregnancies. mentors protected participants in situations when mentees felt their authenticity was questioned or infringed upon. in multiple instances, participants discussed being told to modify their appearance to look more “professional.” lila spoke extensively about comments she received from other professionals suggesting that she should wax off her facial hair insinuating she had a moustache and sideburns: your sideburns are a little long, and your moustache you might wanna like, from women. you might wanna wax that… so early on i got messages that i was poor. that i looked poor i guess, and i was hairy…i could tell when i lost a lot of weight, i raised more money…anyways all that to say that sometimes you need a mentor…and that person can validate you and say estan locos [they are crazy]. you keep it moving because part of who you are is everything that you bring to the table. these comments pointed out physical characteristics that made lila feel self-conscious which she had not experienced prior to these interactions. camelia was told her nose ring was unprofessional and was directed to remove it so others would take her seriously. azalea was told to cut her long hair and stop wearing high heel shoes. azalea stated she never wore very high heels. mentors reassured participants to be authentic and comfortable with how they choose to physically present themselves and supported those choices regardless of whether it adhered to traditional and conservative ideologies of how professional women should dress or look. mentors reassured participants in the midst of these environmental pressures and criticism to be themselves. data showed all participants received career advisement along their leadership trajectory. career advisement predominantly occurred while mentors initiated opportunities for exposure and visibility at social events with them and through professional 98 coaching. sponsorship and the giving of challenging assignments were secondary functions. in addition to career advice, psychosocial support was thoroughly described. psychosocial support included confidence building, assisting to see the bigger picture, ceo soft skill development, providing advice regarding professionalism, and support in reinventing or transitioning into their leadership identity. lila recollected a time that she learned her staff desired that she show more assertiveness and a less egalitarian approach. having spent years as a community organizer and ensuring all members have a voice, she was taken aback to learn they expected her to be more assertive. her mentor helped her to establish a stronger leadership identity. lila’s staff told her they wanted her to sit at the head of the boardroom table. for most participants, they described their need to transition from a manager to more of a leadership mindset. they were not accustomed to this type of leadership style but developed one with the support of their mentors. iris recollected many instances that her informal mentors psychosocially inspired her development as she transitioned into her ceo position: when i first knew i was going to take the executive director position here, i got promoted. i knew i was going to have to be the face of the organization and i was such a behind the scenes type person. i don’t like public speaking; i don’t like doing panels and things like that. but they would push me and they would help me prepare speeches and tell me what to look into to get ready to participate in these opportunities. and so it totally helped my confidence and i think i’m a better leader for it. latina executive leaders’ psychosocial supportive experiences were mapped to kram’s (1985) psychosocial functions: role modeling, acceptance and confirmation, and counseling were primary functions, with friendships as a secondary function. role modeling was shown through promotion of self-care and wellness. mentors displayed positive role modeling behavior associated with encouragement of self-care, reminding mentees of their self-worth, and advising mentees to find balance among all of their priorities. mentors discouraged participants from feeling obligated to take on everyone’s issues. as a nonprofit leader, oftentimes in underserved communities, separating this obligation is difficult to do especially if participants were raised and/or live in the communities that their organizations serve. rosa explained how her mentor assisted in balancing priorities: because i think in our day and age there is a little bit of like an achievement aspiration. i think, and maybe this is true of people of color, or leaders of color too, is that like we figured out the school game, but yet we’ve got to figure out the capital investment game, we’ve got to figure out how do you create your own generational wealth game, and especially in nonprofits because we are not taking home pensions. so he was a really great mentor in that way…what was beneficial was he supported us or supported me mentally. participants reflected on managing latinx cultural values and behaviors with expectations of multiple responsibilities that included their role in their families and their paid leadership roles. participants described feeling an insurmountable amount of pressure to lead their organizations, be accountable to their communities, and be present in their families. fear of the adobe ceiling set in for participants when they initially transitioned into the ceo role. for younger age participants who were in their first ceo role, they expressed the stress they felt of experiencing their first pregnancy while proving their leadership worth. daisy was fearful of not living up to the standards established by the founding directors of her organization while simultaneously considering when she would have an opportunity to have her first child after recently being married: because like, even doc, i've talked to him about being a parent and like the balance. i'm not a parent right now, but i want to be one day and i have no idea if it’s going to happen, if it's in the stars for me. so we'll see. him as a man, it's a very different perspective...and then dora, who is the black woman, when she had her baby, almost died in giving birth, but she, it was like the switch, like she was the most type a hardworking, worked with every single person and she became a mom. and she still is the most type a hardworking woman, but priorities shift. i'm like, if she can do it, i can do it. it gives you a sense of like, yeah i could do this too. you figure it out. mentors helped navigate these pressures by offering advice to take mental health and wellness breaks, self-care for themselves, and to understand they are doing the best they can for everyone. the psychosocial support given by mentors became more pronounced as mentoring relationships developed and became longer lasting. the level of comfort and mutual trust increased with longevity of the relationship. overall, shared experiences revealed these women received career and psychosocial support in all functional areas categorized by kram (1985) but one type and function were most preferred overall as current ceos. mentor characteristics for purposes of this study, i asked participants to describe mentoring experiences with one or two of their most meaningful mentors. table 4 categorizes the mentors’ characteristics by race/ethnicity, gender, and title/role. 99 participants may have had one or more mentors from these subcategories. figure 1 maps mentors’ race/ethnicity and title/role in the aggregate as described by all participants. mentors categorized as white or asian were identified as bosses/supervisors or academic advisors. these roles were found in formal settings with mentor relationships beginning as formal mentorship that initially provided career advice. latinx and black mentors were the participants’ family members or peers. these mentoring relationships were found in informal settings with mentor relationships beginning as informal mentorship initially providing psychosocial support. figure 1 further shows participants experienced their most meaningful mentoring relationships from a constellation of mentors of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, genders, and with various titles/roles. the participant is at the core or considered the reference point of the mentor constellation. the most significant mentor(s) was considered the individual(s) the participant identified and described throughout the interview or explicitly indicated were meaningful to them. mentor compositions revealed patterns of relationships. all participants, excluding rosa and violeta, described having more than one quality mentor demonstrating how one mentor could not completely satisfy their needs specifically as they evolved, or relationships dwindled. the majority of participants reported having non-latina white women and/or latina mentors. the racial background of latina mentors was not examined. when counted, the number of non-latina white women and latina mentors was equal. non-latina white women mentors were met within formal settings and provided career advice, while mentoring relationships with latina mentors tended to be informal, familial, peer oriented, and/or developed with highly reputable and experienced community leaders. this data demonstrated alignment with community cultural wealth in which participants received support and guidance from latinas found in their various informal communities and social networks. community cultural wealth encouraged the growth of social capital for participants whereby some participants learned of their ceo position from community members. latina mentors also included mothers and sisters who provided an informal level of mentorship associated with work ethics, both inside and outside of the home. men and non-latina mentors were meaningful mentors for a few of the participants as either fathers or former bosses. azalea spoke of her father’s impact teaching her the softer skills of leadership such as leadership principles and helped form her value system. her father is chicanx and native american. he was her compass. her second male mentor was latinx, an elected community official, and her work supervisor for several years. he provided navigational capital teaching her about the importance of maintaining one’s ethics in local political climates. she reflected on these men and indicated they showed her how to navigate male-dominated spaces: both my dad and joe were also great role models for my relationship with men not just in romantic relationships. like how i view men. but being a latina in leadership, proximity to male leadership has huge impact and your interactions with men early on. i've been involved in the community and in positions of leadership since i was a teenager. i've had some terrible interactions with men, yucky terrible interactions with men since i was 17 years old. big, important, powerful men. but because i had such strong male mentorship from my father and from this very powerful person at the time…being able to navigate that world was so much easier. zinnia spoke of her experiences receiving mentorship from a group of black women in the workplace with whom she formed very close and lasting relationships with as a young leader in the california department of corrections. they all held positions in the state’s correctional system that, according to zinnia, continues to be dominated by white men. she naturally gravitated towards these women: i was a correctional officer and correctional lieutenant and parole agent. who i was in my twenties was like a firecracker, just in there. and you know, very...i was a chicana. it was during the 70s and i owned who that was. so it made it a little caustic to be in corrections when you were a former brown, umas, mecha brown beret you know, and then you are working in an institution like that. it was my first job. i promoted very quickly in an era when we were the first women in corrections. at the time, zinnia was the first latina in her peer group working in corrections. her mentor relationships were organic. to this day, and decades after meeting her mentors, these women reunite on an annual basis rotating among their hometowns, and many times outside of california. these reunions demonstrate the potential for longevity that quality and significant mentor relationships have the opportunity to foster. rosa’s mentor is a former supervisor and an asian man over the age of 60. she was drawn to his career experiences in philanthropy and healthcare leadership ̶ fields that rosa worked within. after meeting several years ago their mentoring relationship continues today. she described his mentoring style which tends to take the form of asking her questions and the sharing of parables. his parables are similar to stories she could 100 relate to that served as food for thought. his style made the difference between solely having a workplace manager and actually engaging with him as a mentor. though they now live in different counties, he continues to serve as her mentor even after she obtained her first ceo role. she indicated his dedication and history to social justice work makes him fully qualified to be her mentor and allowed discussion of pertinent issues affecting her as a leader of color. all participants, except for rosa and violeta, spoke about their diverse mentor constellation pertaining to race and ethnicity. they had non-latina white women and men, latinx, and black women mentors. as a result of their diverse mentor constellation, i noted their experiences were the most varied and expansive of the participant group, as well as were the most outgoing, energetic, and talkative during the data collection phase of this study. few non-latino white men were described as mentors. mentoring relationships that were described with non-latino white men occurred formally as supervisors or academic advisors. this finding was unsurprising as many formal mentoring relationships began in the workplace or academic setting where those in leadership positions tend to be non-latinx white individuals. however, it was through informal relationships with male mentors who were former supervisors or family members (father, brother, husband), that were most valued by participants these data illustrate the majority of participants had diverse mentor constellations. mentor constellations were integral to their lld and exposed them to varying leadership perspectives to view the world. iris explained the need for mentor diversity: “it’s also a balancing. when you’re applying for jobs, you don’t want to have five latinas as your references [giggles]. you want to have a man and have different backgrounds, different colors, and careers.” although most described having women mentors, analyzing the constellations in aggregate illustrated a diversity of race and ethnicities, genders, and mentor titles/roles. the cohort’s non-monolithic and intersectional social identities have been influenced by a diversity of people and events. these experiences promote and reflect the diversity of their intersectional identities and experience, community cultural wealth and their connection to quality mentoring relationships. discussion themes produced by this study describe characteristics of quality mentoring relationships for latina ceos leading nonprofit organizations in california. two themes emerged responding to the salient characteristics of mentoring relationships: (a) an evolution of mentorship relationship type and function exists with a preference for an informal type of mentoring relationship that provides psychosocial support, and (b) a preference for a constellation of mentors from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds were integral to lld. understanding these characteristics are vital when considering building foundational mentorships as well as exploring how they occur and transition. transitions included relationships becoming more informal and psychosocial supportive. latina executive mentoring preferences included the development of mentor constellations with more than one mentor from various backgrounds and skill sets. quality relationships were vividly recollected, indicating lasting impressions that these relationships created. the vastness of the existence of community cultural wealth (yosso, 2005), both known and unknown, and the preference for informal relationships are in alignment with recognizing and leveraging existing relationships for meaningful mentoring opportunities. although participants described non-monolithic and intersectional experiences, salient characteristics were identified among the group. theme 1: evolution of mentoring relationship type and function the transition of mentoring type and support to an informal, psychosocial supportive mentoring relationship was almost a criterion to be considered significant and beneficial. this type of relationship was preferred due to time constraints with work and family demands prohibiting participants to get involved in formal leadership programs or executive coaching services. being that participants preferred informal, psychosocial supportive mentoring relationships those were typically found in the community, with peers, and among family members. this finding demonstrates how the existence of community cultural wealth (yosso, 2005) and various types of capital, along with intersectional experiences (crenshaw, 1989; crenshaw, 1991), was the most critical factor in mentoring that influenced lld. as personal and career experiences transitioned, so did mentoring needs and preferences. the majority of participants began sharing their experiences by describing meeting their mentors in formal workplaces such as on the job, volunteering in the community, and in structured leadership programs or in academic settings while initially received career guidance. mentoring relationships for lld predominately began with supervisors or academic advisors. however, participants indicated they had limited time for formal mentoring programs and relationships that often expect attendance, and completion of training and other assignments. this is a burden with their time as they are expected to successfully lead their organizations, while balancing their personal and community’s needs, this finding aligns with existing literature indicating that female leaders of color tend to have informal mentoring relationships (campbell et al., 2012 ), unsurprising as the presence of female executive leaders of color in formal workplace settings is extremely limited. additionally, the pressure and micro aggressive attitudes and behaviors that participants experienced were best supported by mentors providing psychosocial support, who also had a degree of match suitability (mcarthur et al., 2017; searby et al., 2015), in which the mentor is attuned to a mentee’s needs that can help them navigate various pressures. as time progressed, quality mentors became long-term, significant individuals in their lives while relationships transitioned into 101 informal relationships with more psychosocial supportive functioning. in their current ceo roles, participants preferred informal mentoring relationships that provided psychosocial functional support as they continue to cultivate their leadership identity. informal, psychosocial mentoring felt organic and meaningful. for some, mentoring relationships that could not transition to an informal type were considered transactional, short-term, and not vividly recalled. in dahlia’s and iris’s experience, they recalled losing contact with formal, short-term mentors that eventually returned into their lives as informal mentoring relationships. iris shared: i lost track of her like i moved on to another job after the television station, but then i came back to her a few years ago and she still remembered my eagerness back then. so we started to connect again and now she has been really instrumental with this job here. she helped me create an advisory council for non-latinos that should believe in our mission, to help us do fundraising and things like that. informal and psychosocial functional mentoring relationships provide insight into work-life balance, opportunities to observe role modeling behaviors for self-care and wellness, and increases leader confidence and self-efficacy through mutual trust with mentors (block & tietjen-smith, 2016). informal and psychosocial supportive mentoring appeared to have more long-term influence on lld than formal mentoring, while encouraging affirmation of one’s own authenticity. latina ceos felt their authenticity has to be valued while experiencing multiple challenges as a ceo. informal and psychosocial mentoring affirms the intersectional identities and experiences of women of color as they emotionally transition into their ceo roles or continue to grow in their leadership as demonstrated by participants’ wide range of leadership and ceo tenure. as reported by study participants, while challenged as women of color executives in male-dominated positions, it was critical that mentors seek to explore their mentee’s needs and thought processes for greater relational mentoring (mcarthur et al., 2017). as latina ceos, the preference for informal relationships that provide psychosocial mentoring support was more significant than formal relationships, however, the desire and need for a diverse mentor constellation created the potential of having larger networks that may include formal and informal mentoring relationships. theme 2: preference for a constellation of mentors is integral to leadership growth among participants, having one mentor type, function, and/or individual is insufficient for lld. mentor constellations were preferred and needed (searby et al., 2015). constellations exposed them to diverse cultural backgrounds, intersectional experiences, career expertise, and an array of leader perspectives. participants believed exposure to diversity developed them into a better leader by increasing their capacity to work with various personalities, work styles, and ability to advocate for people from many walks of life with different needs. although participants welcomed latina leader mentors for guidance on navigating racial, ethnic, and gender micro aggressions in the workplace (holder et al, 2015), the notion that latina leaders only need latina mentors was debunked. cross-gender mentoring dyads predominantly occurred with career mentoring. former non-familial male bosses provided career mentoring, while familial mentors such as fathers, husbands, and brothers offered psychosocial mentoring. non-familial cross-gender dyads began in the workplace or school setting with very few of these relationships transitioning outside of these settings. azalea and rosa continued to receive mentorship from their non-familial male mentors after their formal work relationship ceased. the intensity of those relationships did decrease over time. the data also suggested if non-familial, cross-gender career mentoring relationships have the capability of shifting to a psychosocial supportive relationship the relationship is likely to remain intact. non-familial men provided career mentoring in the early stages of participants’ careers, but with deeply personal challenges not being shared with formal male mentors. data supported the assertion that same gender mentoring dyads thrive more when psychosocial supportive mentoring is present (kao et al., 2014). female mentors provided both career and psychosocial support regardless of race and ethnicity. azalea, dahlia, lila, and rosa had male mentors but azalea, dahlia, and lila also equally spoke about having female mentors. participants sought out female mentors to satisfy their need for additional psychosocial support that they did not necessarily receive from male mentors. however, female mentors were not necessarily latina, or women of color. the scant number of mid-career mentors that participants lacked may have been a barrier to participants receiving mentor guidance earlier than mid-career from latina executives. lila articulated the challenges of not having early career mentors while dealing with workplace sexual harassment: when i think about like my early years of leadership and the sexual harassment that i experienced you know. i lacked, at the time, the experience to even articulate what was happening. you know where i was like, oh, i experienced sexual harassment for three years consistently from a male funder. and i did not know what to do. i actually didn’t, i didn’t think about doing anything. i just thought i had to take his verbal sexual harassment all the time. latina ceos have had to stitch together sources of mentorship (searby et al., 2015). access to mentors of similar intersectional identity, especially when enduring gender and/or race/ethnic-specific micro aggressions (block & tietjen-smith, 2016) is attributed to the shortage of female ceos of color in the nonprofit industry. initially, study participants experienced formal, career-functional mentorship from immediate 102 supervisors due to the lack of female ceos of color in their industry that were available for informal psychosocial supportive mentoring. azalea, iris, dahlia, and zinnia indicated that female executives of color are interested in mentoring others but they are under immense pressure to prove themselves as leaders, often resulting in working countless hours beyond the standard work week. this makes it almost impossible to engage as mentors although participants understood the value of mentorship. they indicated they may not have the time necessary to engage in quality mentorship relationships as mentors. participants did not begin to develop their preferred mentoring relationships for lld until their careers were well underway. as leadership is developed over time, latina leaders may miss critical mentorship earlier in their careers that may potentially impact leadership self-efficacy for the future. existing literature promotes the importance for racially and ethnically underrepresented individuals having mentors with similar racial and ethnic backgrounds that may relate to issues of racial stereotyping, micro aggressive attitudes and behaviors, but also mentors with different experiences and identities (block & tietjen-smith, 2016; crisp et al., 2017). i found that participants did not only have mentors of similar backgrounds, races, and ethnicities as their own. although participants felt it was beneficial to have an executive latina mentor, all participants asserted it is unnecessary to only have latina mentors. they valued the exposure to different perspectives that ultimately provides a wider leadership lens needed to lead their organizations. this finding resonated throughout the study, supporting block and tietjen-smith’s (2016) assertion that women need exposure to diverse perspectives from those who have experienced similar leadership challenges. participants felt mentors of black and asian backgrounds were highly valued citing that their politically progressive viewpoints were similar to that of their own as a significant source of ally ship. latina executive leaders welcomed having latina mentors; however, the mentor would be part of a larger gender, racially, and ethnically diverse mentor constellation. it was not always necessary to pair latinas with one another; demonstrating the potential for greater mentor possibilities that could begin earlier in their careers. participants overwhelmingly valued maintaining a diverse mentor constellation in which the mentee was at the central core of the constellation (higgins & kram, 2001; higgins & thomas, 2001; kram, 1985). it was unnecessary for the mentors in a constellation to know one another. the constellation varied by race, ethnicity, gender, background, age, and career expertise. an executive woman of color’s social capital significantly expanded with a more diverse constellation. they may choose to leverage their social capital influencers depending on their needs or situations at any given time or as situations warranted. data showed an increase in relational mentoring (mcarthur et al. (2017) occurred whereby relational mentors offered the most sustainable and longer-term mentoring experiences that are aligned with informal and psychosocial mentoring. mentor constellations were of most interest that provided longer-term exposure to cultural diversity that may expand a leader's perspective. limitations of the study first, small, connected communities may be beneficial for individuals and their social networks, nonetheless they may pose a challenge to participants who desire complete anonymity since that can not be guaranteed. based on the low number of latina nonprofit ceos in california, participants may know each other and the idea of revealing many details about themselves may have impacted the extent to what they shared during this study. in anticipation of this limitation, i intentionally built rapport with participants prior to conducting interviews to establish a safe space and comfort level. i became familiar with participants’ organizations and geographic communities in which they worked prior to conducting an interview. the demographic questionnaire with contextual background assisted with engagement in small talk prior to beginning the interview. second, the study depended on the recollection and perception of lived experiences. authenticity of experiences could not be validated. participants may have provided responses they believed would be important to the study, or what they believed i wanted to hear, especially since i am latina and noticeably shared similar physical characteristics. it is impossible to ascertain whether participants were disingenuous, dishonest, or inaccurately recalled their experiences. miles et al. (2020) described this as a research bias in which participants describe what they think a researcher wants to hear. i integrated additional probing, clarifying, and follow up questions that reinforced responses and stories that they shared. saturation of key themes was attained among the 10 participant experiences. i maintained a researcher self-reflexivity journal to check for assumptions and reflections to ensure interpretations were based solely on the data collected. participant validation, or member checking, minimized these limitations. recommendations informal, psychosocial supportive mentoring was the preference for latina nonprofit ceos in this study. informal mentoring relationships were more accessible and grew organically in the community via the existence of community cultural wealth. industries and society-at-large should place a greater emphasis on informal mentoring and acknowledge that formal workplace training or mentoring programs is not necessarily the only form of executive mentoring, nor preferred, for executive leadership development. the following recommendations are focused on formal leadership programs to encourage strengthening the ways in which intersectional experiences are incorporated into structured mentoring approaches for greater impact and investment in structured programs. 103 recommendation 1: explore intersectionality in leadership programs. formal executive mentoring programs may be found within an organization, or externally away of the workplace or academic setting. most often formal programs are exorbitantly costly and require participant commitment. occasionally, programs offer opportunities to access a mentor or executive coach. however, access to these benefits does not equate to quality mentoring relationships. and while the mentor-mentee matching may not be the right fit, it potentially may be the only opportunity to receive executive exposure by mid-level or during executive leadership. these programs are structured with organized, predictable timelines and approaches that contradict informal types of relationships. i advocate for leadership programs to deliberately recognize and address intersectional realities and how they influence the selection or assignment of mentoring relationships. mentee experiences and context of how mentor relationships are formed determine the type of mentor that will benefit mentees at a particular time in their career. the goal of match reciprocity should also be sought after. recommendation 2: assessment of mentoring programs. deeper assessments of formal mentoring programs must examine whether the mentee and mentor are receiving the intended benefits of their mentoring relationship. formal mentoring programs tend to match a dyad (mentee and mentor) based on position, years of experience, and many times by racial, ethnic, cultural, and/or gender match. however, this study demonstrates these factors are not necessarily what makes a mentoring relationship thrive. formative evaluations should include identifying the needs and interests of the potential mentor and mentee to assess whether the relationship has an increased possibility of being mutually beneficial. reflective checkpoints in the form of brief surveys, journaling, or informal interviews may provide opportunities to shift the relationship or seek another mentor/mentee. evaluative measures may lead to a realization that the mentee-mentor dyad is not characteristically a good fit and a new match or wider constellation is needed. for example, rather than an assigned dyad mentor-mentee experience, constellation mentorship may be developed whereby a mentee is assigned more than one mentor of differing backgrounds. conclusion participants represented an array of organizations located in urban, rural, and coastal areas within california. at the time of this study, organizations held 10 to 127-year organizational histories; annual budgets between $356k and $12m; staff counts ranging from three to 130 employees; and services related to education, healthcare, social and community services, advocacy, and training. organizational profiles illustrate the scope and diverse responsibilities participants had as ceos. participants’ organizational leadership was directly related to intersectional experiences, leader perspectives, and how their mentoring relationships have influenced their latina leadership development (lld). the diverse experiences provided contextual background into their intersectionality and perceptions of the world and themselves. intersectionality was a source of these leaders’ strength, and mentoring experiences have expanded the lens in which they perceived themselves and their leadership. their stories demonstrated unique experiences and how engagement and interactions with their mentors were pursued and maintained characteristics of mentor constellations, or networks, and of the mentors themselves varied. participants described formal and informal types of mentoring relationships, and mentoring associated with career advice and psychosocial supportive functioning. however, as current nonprofit ceos, the majority of participants desired mentoring that is informal with psychosocial supportive functions. this is attributed to the limited time they had for participation in formal mentoring programs that would impact time spent with work, family, and friends. it also demonstrated the preference they had for informal relationships found within the context of community cultural wealth. mentors represented diverse constellations based on race, ethnicity, gender, and role. mentors included black, latinx, asian, and non-latinx white individuals. black and latinx mentors usually represented peers or family members that provided more informal and psychosocial supportive mentoring, while asian and non-latinx white mentors usually represented former bosses or advisors that provided formal mentoring and career advice. participants indicated that developing a diverse mentor constellation early on in their careers, consisting of formal and informal mentors, with career advice and psychosocial support is most beneficial for lld. the diversity expanded their executive leadership perspective as they lead teams of diverse individuals and created an extended perspective to serve themselves and their communities. references adesaogun, r., flottemesch, k., & ibrahim-devries, b. 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(2005). whose culture has capital? a critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. race, ethnicity and education, 8(1), 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006 106 volume 41, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, and brad bizzell assistant editor: jordan donop 129 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 advancing women in leadership vol. 41,128-140, 2022 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper assessment of the organizational culture of the cooperative extension system authors: ginger cunningham, jacklyn bruce, katherine mckee, k.s.u. jayaratne, & maria correa ginger cunningham: county extension director and extension agent, 4-h youth development & forestry, north carolina cooperative extension, ginger_cunningham@ncsu.edu jacklyn bruce: associate professor, nc state university, jackie_bruce@ncsu.edu katherine mckee: assistant professor, nc state university, kemckee@ncsu.edu k.s.u. jayaratne: professor, nc state university, jay_jayaratne@ncsu.edu maria correa: professor, nc state university, correa@ncsu.edu accepted december 21, 2022 women face unique barriers that their male counterparts do not experience in male-dominated disciplines and careers, such as agriculture. the purpose of a recent study was to provide insight into the organizational culture (and viability) of the cooperative extension system by examining the leadership dynamics, power relationships, and cultural impacts experienced by women county extension directors/coordinators (ceds/cecs) across the united states. using a critical feminist collaborative autoethnographical approach and utilizing methodologies of interviews, dialogue, and prolonged engagement, the findings of this study have given voice to those individuals in these unique positions, allowing all individuals to better understand the challenges and barriers to equality in this context. resulting conclusions (valuing sexism, resisting change, etc.) were posed to address misogyny in all forms (i.e., exclusion, promotion practices, etc.) that currently exist. by enacting these strategies, cooperative extension can create meaningful change that is so direly needed. keywords: women, organizational culture, patriarchy, inequality, misogyny, autoethnography the thing that differentiates scientists is purely an artistic ability to discern what is a good idea, what is a beautiful idea, what is worth spending time on, and most importantly, what is a problem that is sufficiently interesting, yet sufficiently difficult, that it hasn't yet been solved, but the time for solving it has come now. -professor savas dimopoulos (stanford university), particle fever as we sit down to begin this journey or perhaps more aptly said, end this journey with you we find ourselves in unfamiliar waters. we did not expect to find ourselves immersed in such research in such a discipline, and yet, this feels like home. because we have claimed this as my “home,” we feel a very intimate connection to how this story will play out because regardless of the characters, the setting, the plot, or the conflict the resolution of the story will forever be a part of us on our lifes’ journey, and we can never distance ourselves from that realization… nor would we wish to. our greater awareness of life and self has caused usto become better individuals, better leaders, better neighbours better disciples. some years back, we came across some sagacious words that drew us near when trying to determine if this was the pathway we would venture down regarding this research: find your passion or your pain, and there’s your research. we realized that most days our pain and our passion had become so entangled that we could not separate the two, and on days where we thought our discernment allowed me to put them in their respective corners, we found them to be almost too familiar, too connected, too similar, and undistinguishable. in a very transparent and perhaps selfish declaration on our part, we embark on this journey with you in an effort to once again lay claim to the distinguishing characteristics of what passion and pain have melded into one so that we can make sense of this for ourselves(and you) in hopes that we are all the better because of it. can beautiful ideas hurt? the kind of hurt that may bring physical pain, tax you emotionally, or bring about an angst that forces you to act on a vision, plan, course of action, or perhaps, even a beautiful idea, to bring about some alleviation? in our curiosity to gain deeper meaning and pursue such beautiful ideas, there is always an innate driver deep within our souls that causes us to expend our blood, sweat, and tears in pursuit of something much greater than ourselves. as fals-bord (1996) alludes, “maybe it is more than curiosity. perhaps what you need is anxiety or you experience anguish and you look for an answer…” (p. 17). perhaps such a time has come. mailto:ginger_cunningham@ncsu.edu mailto:jackie_bruce@ncsu.edu mailto:kemckee@ncsu.edu mailto:jay_jayratne@ncsu.edu mailto:correa@ncsu.edu 130 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 while initiating this journey, richardson (1994) reminds us that a qualitative researcher must seek to reflexively understand one’s self as a person writing at a specific time from a particular position. i know this position and time quite well. being positioned in a role of leadership for a county-based cooperative extension office in a rural north carolina county as a young professional, i have faced a number of unique challenges in my role in my short tenure; such challenges, i often ponder, that may be vastly different had this been a different time, different place, different organization, or perhaps, had i been different myself in some capacity. i found myself situated at the crux of an intersection point where two, historically, male-dominated realms collided: that of agriculture and leadership. to make better sense of these experiences, it was necessary to employ a method of inquiry that would bring sufficient light to the voices of those whose stories had previously been shrouded in silence. denzin and lincoln (1998) compared the qualitative researcher to a bricoleur, who would masterfully piece together experiences from research that would ultimately give light to the holistic representation of the much larger issue at hand. data retrieved from resulting research would form the bricolage of that researcher. denzin and lincoln (1998) described the process as: the bricoleur understands that research is an interactive process shaped by his or her personal history, biography, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity, and those of the people in the setting. the bricoleur knows that science is power, for all research findings have political implications. there is no value-free science. the bricoleur also knows that researchers tell stories about the worlds they have studied (p. 4). tasked with wearing the bricoleur badge, this study seeks to bring attention to a population that has positioned itself in providing guidance to all locally-based extension offices across the nation: women county extension directors/coordinators. these women lead staff who, in conjunction with land-grant universities, provide integral non-formal education to their communities, allowing individuals to improve their lives and livelihoods. here in north carolina, of 91 total county extension director positions, only 35 are held by women county extension directors (ncsu extension personnel, 2019). these women, within the agriculture discipline, are also not well represented in the scholarly literature. while limited literature exists which addresses the needs and barriers of such women who have positioned themselves in areas of leadership within this particular field, one may question whether this could be attributed to a particular disciplinary or organizational culture. this study will examine the lived experiences of women county extension directors/coordinators across the united states in a concerted effort to bring light to these experiences related to leadership dynamics, power relationships, and organizational culture in hopes of furthering a cultural shift for the betterment of us all. a painfully beautiful idea for which the time to solve has come now. literature review feminist theory and social cognitive theory constructs provided the frameworks used to ground this study. first, with regards to feminist theory, in an effort to bring a focus to empowerment and facilitate societal consciousness raising, feminist theory provides insight into both the constitution of gender and the resulting inequality present in gender relations. as such, feminist theory provides the groundwork for questioning the “cultural/historical context and biological premises of gender” through challenging the multiple gender-based social oppressions held by numerous populations (nagoshi & nagoshi, 2017). aligned with the ideas of philosopher michel foucault, feminist theory’s critique of historical gender concepts is based upon the framework that gender is a social construction, defined and enforced by societal processes, cultural norms, and by the exhibition of behaviors defined as being gendered (rogers, 2016). carlson and ray (2011) explain that feminist theories can thus be used to explain how institutions operate with normative gendered assumptions and selectively reward or punish gendered practices (paragraph 1). providing such insight into the feminine experience, via this framework, is a critical component of making meaning of leadership dynamics and power relationships within the cooperative extension organizational setting in which we have positioned ourselves. second, social cognitive theory has been coupled with feminist theory to provide a comprehensive guiding framework to provide depth, richness, and a holistic understanding of the constructs being examined. bussey and bandura (1999) note that social cognitive theory is based upon the human capability for observational learning and symbolization, a tool utilized to create, comprehend, and regulate environmental conditions. learning experiences can come from three main sources: personal factors (namely gender-linked conceptions), behavioral patterns related to gender, and environmental factors that include social influences. as societal views regarding gender roles continue to change and evolve, stereotypes continue to be influenced primarily by culture, not by inherent biological differences between males and females (khajehpour, ghazvini, memari, & rhamani, 2011; rogers, 2016). with the prominent role that culture plays, khajehpour et al. (2011) posit that modeling, abstract learning through observation, is the most powerful means of transmitting attitudes and behaviors, cultural values, and thought patterns across generations. social cognitive theory provides guidance for how observed behavior (i.e., modeling) can “influence values, attitudes, and thoughts, thereby affecting stereotypes and regulation of gender roles that are typically associated with the feminist label” (rogers, 2016, p. 8). as a result, by fusing feminist theory with social cognitive theory, we are afforded both a political/social lens and a learned behavior (i.e., modeling) lens (rogers, 2016) through which to view the impact of gender and culture on female county extension directors. 131 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 traditionally, males have dominated the agriculture field, and while females were present within agriculture, the main role they served was as a farmwife (sachs, barbercheck, braiser, kiernan, & terman, 2016). today, females continue to have an increasingly greater presence within the field of agriculture, but such advancements have been met with adversity. researchers noted that the success of females depends on creating opportunities for access to resources, knowledge, and social support through nontraditional means. while these women can accomplish much on their own, “their efforts are thwarted without the support of agricultural institutions to create equal opportunities for them […]” (sachs, barbercheck, braiser, kiernan, & terman, 2016, p. 4). furthermore, females are lacking representation in all levels of agricultural leadership in education and business. in 2015, female faculty held 37% of positions in the biological, agricultural, and environmental life sciences and related fields at four-year universities (national science foundation, science & engineering indicators, 2018). with regards to representation amongst senior faculty, deans, and university presidency, the american council on education’s american college president study in 2017, only 30 percent of the nation’s college and university presidents are female (bartel, 2018). however, at agricultural and land-grant institutions nationwide, females accounted for less than 10% of deans and vice presidents (griffeth, 2013). to better understand this discrepancy in the representative numbers of females, a discussion of culture is necessary. while cultures are predisposed to change, they are concurrently predisposed to resist change. eagleton (2016) explains that culture is what an individual has done before, and perhaps his/her ancestors before that, countless times, where one’s conduct can be validated if/when it aligns with that of his/her predecessors. resistance to change is built on habit and the solid integration of cultural traits. in that regard, culture becomes not only a way of life, but it is also a matter of custom and something that is not acquired all at once or at a finite point in one’s life. hofstede (2011) explained that societal cultures often reside in such unconscious values, namely in the sense of individuals’ broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others; in contrast, organizational cultures reside in visible and conscious practices based on how individuals perceive what takes place in their organizational environment. the purpose of the study the purpose of this study was to understand the barriers faced by female county extension directors/coordinators across the united states through an examination of the leadership dynamics, power relationships, and organizational culture of cooperative extension. established by legislation passed in 1862, land-grant universities were established to focus on educating common people in agriculture and engineering (buys & rennekamp, 2020). later legislation in 1890, 1994, and 1998 expanded land-grant institutions to include historically black-, native american–, and hispanic-serving universities (aplu, 2020). cooperative extension, established by the smith-lever act in 1914, serves as the outreach mechanism of the united states’ land-grant university system by translating the research and teaching happening at the university for everyday individuals (buys & rennekamp, 2020). it is known that females have both a presence and impact in both agriculture and leadership, but the body of literature reflecting their presence and impact is lacking. the intent of this study was to show how females contribute to areas of agriculture and leadership, and what hurdles they may encounter. furthermore, we have examined unique challenges and/or barriers with which their male counterparts do not contend. to guide data collection and seek to better understand the research problem that was posed, the following research questions provided direction to gain insight into the understanding that fails us: 1. what are the cultural values and beliefs exhibited by cooperative extension? 2. how does cooperative extension respond to change? methods using a constructivist philosophy as the lens, this study employed a critical feminist collaborative autoethnographical approach. the population for this study was female county extension directors/coordinators based across the united states. the working definition of female county extension director/coordinator for the purpose of this study was the individual who identified as female and was tasked with providing oversight to an entire county’s extension program, ensuring that it is all-encompassing, functioning properly, and addressing community needs in alignment with the mission work of the respective land-grant university. purposive sampling was used within this study to maximize the discovery of knowledge related to this particular population and to lend the most intimate insight regarding our guiding research questions (patton, 2002). the 10 participants served in the ced/cec role from 4-22 years, represented the northeast, northwest, southeast, and midwest regions of the us, and were affiliated with 1862, 1890, and 1994 land-grant institutions. through online asynchronous interviews, those 10 participants were presented with written question prompts within a google doc. participants were provided with generic google accounts through north carolina state university information technologies to provide them with anonymity during this process. with the protection of anonymity, participants shared stories freely and honestly. participants were able to provide commentary to the responses of their peers through resulting member checks. four subsequent rounds of prompts were posed to the participants, resulting in five separate rounds of responses and attributable commentary. positioned as autoethnographic research, the lead author concurrently responded to question prompts in a combined methods and reflexive journal along with the participants. data retrieved from the commentary was analyzed in conjunction with the data gathered from the participants. by answering 132 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 prompts, journaling for reflection, and merging these data sets of writing into “one corpus of authoethnographic data,” we were able to build a richer and more expansive authoethnographic record (holman jones, adams, and ellis, 2013, p. 72). as chang (2008, p. 109) has noted, we engage in collaborative autoethnography to create rich context in an effort to not risk only privileging one perspective. by including others as coinformants in this study, this approach broadened the database by elucidating others’ stories while the research focus was still anchored in my own personal experience, an approach similar to that employed by foster, mcallister, and o’brien (2005) and smith (1987). in order to analyze and interpret the resulting data produced during the interviews and member checks, the following six best practices for autoethnographic analysis and interpretation (chang, 2008; holman jones, adams, & ellis, 2013; maxwell, 2005) were employed: 1) to initiate “meaning-making,” an important preparatory step was taken to review data holistically (chang, 2008; maxwell, 2005); this entailed reading textual data of resulting interviews. 2) segmental reading was then employed, which included reviewing each data set line by line. 3) this was followed by another holistic reading that reviewed the entire data set through with little interruption. that review afforded me a broader understanding of what was being said within the data (chang, 2008). 4) to help fracture each data set into smaller bits on the basis of topical commonality and to regroup the data bits into topical categories,we then coded and sorted data (chang, 2008, p.119). 5) we then identified recurring topics/themes/patterns. with this data organization, we wereable to see where deficiencies were (and where more data needed to be collected), where redundancy had occurred (where more than sufficient data had already been accumulated), and where collected data needed to be trimmed and discarded in the data set as well. 6) with moving from analysis to interpretation, while the process of creating initial salient themes refrained from including nuanced interpretations, we worked to build culturally meaningful thematic interpretations to coincide with our posed research questions. trustworthiness of this study was established utilizing tenants of credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. due to the fact that an autoethnography “can also be judged in terms of whether it helps readers communicate with others different from themselves or offer a way to improve the lives of participants and readers or the author’s own” (ellis, 2004, p. 124), when coupled with the need to demonstrate trustworthiness, considerable care was taken to present sound research to the reader. to enhance credibility, peer debriefs, and member checking was utilized. the peer debrief process was enacted to hold the researcher accountable by utilizing external sources to ensure the research process is held in check (creswell, 1998; lincoln & guba, 1985). the exchange of information and feedback was conducted in full with the peer debrief team before the subsequent round of data collection occurred. “thick description” was utilized to establish transferability (denzin, 1989). dependability was established from a two-pronged approach: journaling and documentation trail. journaling was implemented to maintain objectivity as researcher personal bias must be taken into account (vagle, 2014). in addition to journaling, a documentation trail was produced to track and monitor collection methods, decisions made, and conclusions drawn to assist with tracking methodological decisions and reflections (dooley, 2007, p. 39). key findings and conclusions due to the nature of this study, key findings are presented with conclusions and implications regarding each research question posed. research question: what are the cultural values/beliefs exhibited by cooperative extension? with this question, our aim was to determine what values and beliefs are held in high regard and thus exhibited by cooperative extension. social cognitive theory provides needed guidance for how observed behaviors can influence values and attitudes (rogers, 2016), allowing us to conclude that all resulting behaviors stem from such values. with this research question, we looked to the culturally meaningful themes centered around “difficulties of the job are valued by the organization”, “battling hostility and being alone are valued by the organization”, “cautious: on alert for making waves,” and “the positive power of others helps women navigate hostilities.” difficulties of the job are valued by the organization we began with stories that spoke to the difficulties of the job, first regarding the sheer volume of hours that it requires from managing staff, to coordinating county programming, to conducting educational programs, to building collaborative partnerships, to seeking funding, to maintaining budgets, and a plethora of tasks in between in acknowledging this is no 40hour-week-type job. it is important to explicitly make known to the reader that by stating difficulties of the job are “valued,” we are stating that the organization espouses such job traits, does not act to change these difficulties, and acknowledges that such difficulties are ingrained as part of the organizational culture. these difficulties are not “valued” in the traditional sense because if this was the case, the organization would seek out alternatives to address these difficulties, increase compensation for ceds/cecs, etc. with the time demands that are placed on ced/cecs, we saw that it took an incredible toll on these women as individuals. most all participants spoke to how damaging this was to them. these data were similar to findings obtained by cline, rosson, and weeks (2020), foster (2001), and seevers and foster (2003, 2004) whose respondents noted the incredible stress on their marriages/partnerships as a result of their careers. additionally, some of the respondents even noted that they should seek out medical assistance for their own health problems, but they simply couldn’t do this because they had no spare time to devote to those needs (foster 2001; seevers & foster, 2003). with 133 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 these physical, emotional, and mental challenges that are brought onto female ced/cecs, many participants explained the need to have mental fortitude and ‘tough skin’ as well; these findings were congruent with findings established by cline, rosson, and weeks (2019), foster (2001), and seevers and foster (2003). the women also explained how being critiqued and overly critiqued was so draining for them. they noted they felt overly scrutinized for no reason other than their gender. this finding aligned with work conducted previously by cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020), foster (2001), and seevers and foster (2003). battling hostility and being alone are valued by the organization all of the women shared a multitude of experiences that caused them to battle hostility from supervisors/administration, peers, direct reports, and clientele, just to name a few encounters. hostilities in numerous forms aligned with findings reported by cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020), foster (2001), and seevers and foster (2003, 2004). many of the women voiced how detrimental a toxic office culture has been to them and their peers where individuals were demeaning or caustic or even when male camaraderie was not extended to female colleagues. these findings align with cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020) that specifically mentioned toxic work environments where competition and inappropriate/sexist comments were commonplace. furthermore, findings related to male camaraderie not being extended to female colleagues aligned with data resulting from the work of cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020) and seevers and foster (2003, 2004). most of the difficulties and hostilities that these women faced stemmed directly from misogyny where prejudice, malice, and/or contempt towards women finds a safe haven within various patriarchal cultures. many women, working to overcome the hostilities associated with misogyny, “work long hours, often working ‘twice as hard as men,’ to be viewed as equally competent, perhaps sacrificing spouse and children in deference to career, these women have been inculcated into a patriarchal corporate environment” (tosone, 2009, p. 1). this is compounded by doubt, criticism, and the continual and incessant need to prove one’s worth. these findings were congruent with data previously obtained by foster (2001) and seevers and foster (2003, 2004). participants explained at great length environments that were very much “a man’s world” where the “good ol’ boys club” was both prominent and prevalent; participants explained how they felt they did not belong or benefit from such a club/identity. numerous participants had their competency regularly questioned by others. such findings aligned with the work of cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020) and seevers and foster (2003, 2004). current research shows that working in misogynistic settings has dire negative effects on the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of both women and men (tosone, 2009). tosone (2009) notes that being a bystander to gender-based work incivility lends to decreased job satisfaction, productivity, and morale. participants noted the distress they felt related to sexism. these data align with the work of szymanski, gupta, carr, and stewart (2009) which explained the role misogyny plays in connecting sexist events with psychological distress. as the work of szymanski, gupta, carr, and stewart (2009) has identified, the “personal is political posits that sexism is likely to contribute to women’s mental health problems directly through experiences of sexist events and through the internalization of negative and limiting messages about being a woman” (p. 101). as a result of continual devaluing of women through oppression and omission through various acts of misogyny, participants in our study expressed being frustrated, discouraged, and tired. while these data align with work conducted by seevers and foster (2003,2004), foster (2001) specifically noted that many participants stated they were simply “tired” (p. 7). it is not hard to understand that due to the field we find ourselves in (where seevers and foster (2003) reported that less than 15% of aee faculty are women), a number of participants noted that they were often found in situations where they were the only woman present (in the room, in the meeting, at the table, etc.). however, what is hard to accept is how some of these women were “kindly” excluded from events that show various social exclusion in their extension careers. these findings were congruent with data produced by cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020) and seevers and foster (2004). several participants noted that they felt they were the recipients of attacks that were gender-driven but directed (and disguised) towards their age, newness/inexperienced status, etc. which were deemed “safer” or “easier” targets than gender. cautious: on alert for making waves numerous participants mentioned that they were very mindful of what they said, how they shared those messages, and with whom they shared that information. some noted that when they expressed concerns, those concerns were portrayed in a negative light, and at other times, some feared being reprimanded for “making waves” as a woman in leadership. women noted that pushing the boundaries of a female in agriculture in leadership in a somewhat powerful role that had not been done before made others extremely uncomfortable. such findings were congruent with data produced by cline, rosson, and weeks (2019) and foster (2001). the positive power of others helps women navigate hostilities in the ced/cec role, many participants noted that it has been critical to have support and mentoring opportunities to enable them to succeed. for many individuals, they have had supervisors/mentors who took considerable risks to help them advance/succeed. mentors and supervisors were there for the women when they faced hardships. this aligns with previous work of cline, rosson, and weeks (2019) that noted leadership development within an agricultural context for women should 134 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 involve a formal connection to a mentor to strengthen their knowledge base, work personas, and professional networks. female colleagues serving as informal mentors were invaluable to others; for some many of these women, having others in their lives to mentor, act as sounding boards, and hold them accountable empowered them. this further supports work completed by cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020) showing the necessity of women supporting other women leaders within the agriculture industry. this also aligns with the “social capital” notion that falk and kilpatrick (2000) spoke of where females were invested in working to create learning opportunities for other females and would be willing to share what they knew with one another. this is congruent with the findings of cline, rosson, and weeks (2019) where participants believed in the notion of ‘it takes a village’ to achieve success and to give back, furthering the concept of participants’ vested interest in the need to mentor others. conclusions and implications based on the findings presented here, cultural values/beliefs exhibited by cooperative extension show that the job requirements and expectations of a ced/cec force this position to be much more than a 40-hour per week job; this is more commonly at least a 60-hour per week lifestyle. it appears that there is a belief that ceds/cecs should give freely of their time in order to accomplish such tasks during the evenings, weekends, etc. and they are chastised if they choose family/personal obligations over work. the implications of this include creating a work/life balance that is abysmal for many women, and it is likely that such expectations/beliefs will lead to higher attrition rates. it is likely that fewer and fewer women will view this as a viable pathway for them to follow as their chosen career pathway due to personal sacrifices they are forced to make and the numerous barriers they face regarding advancement and tenure (cline, rosson, & weeks, 2019, 2020). with regards to academia, whether this is an artifact of academia (as one participant put it) or otherwise, there is a great value on outputs in the form of scholarly work, prestige, national honors, numbers, etc., and this is evidenced across the country. implications from this include work environments that become increasingly more competitive and hostile. as was evidenced in our study and congruent with work performed by cline, rosson, and weeks (2019) higher education environments can produce greater prevalence of conflict when high levels of competition among colleagues can create unhealthy, toxic work environments. participants noted several issues with undercutting and marginalization of women by both male and female faculty members that was both “painful and counterproductive" (p.8). if not addressed, this implies that land-grant institutions and cooperative extension would value such hostile, counterproductive academic environments. from all appearances, this population of ceds/cecs seemed to be inclusive, understanding, and community service-oriented women. if we value those administrators within cooperative extension who saw the value in hiring them for these attributes and many others, we know there is the capability for the organization to be aware that many of these women find themselves in locations where they face social, political, and religious exclusion. when we acknowledge that these individuals appear to be lacking the appropriate support afforded by an organization to enact change, then we face the implication that such hires were performed only to give the semblance of empty lip service. as tondl (1991) explained, extension sends a message when it resists or accepts change, either actively or passively. many women spoke highly of mentors formal and informal and others who have supported them and their professional (and personal) efforts over the years. it appears that cooperative extension values this support system across the country, so we view this as yet another investment towards building that “social capital” which is direly needed. participants explained frequently that encouragement towards and from other female cooperative extension/aee faculty/staff was critically important, in addition to being honest and transparent regarding needs and expectations of the profession. as has been evidenced by other studies (cline, rosson, and weeks, 2019), it is important for us to be mindful that even though honesty and transparency – in regards to encouragement (and discouragement) of the profession – could intentionally turn other women faculty away from certain personal and professional pursuits, research participants have felt a responsibility to portray the profession authentically. the practices/policies regarding hostility in all of its forms and how that is handled can be seen as incomplete at best; if/when such hostile exchanges do occur, it is unclear as to whether individuals are reprimanded in any way when matters are handled internally. across the country, some offenders appeared to be held accountable by supervisors while others received no such reprimands. furthermore, many continued and perpetuated these acts for several years, and many continued until they departed the organization via retirement. several women spoke of extension events many of them social-based where they were “kindly excluded” from participation due to their gender, so without the organization directly condemning this, we can only conclude that it condones such behavior. likewise, many women acknowledged that there was a great fear of “making waves,” and to persist in the organization, it was best to “not rock the boat.” we know that extension is capable of creating a culture of openness, safety, and respect for its clientele, so we demand the same professional courtesy for the staff that serve it. without a standardized system to air grievances, formally file complaints, and issue corrections, it appears that addressing and correcting hostility-related complaints is not something held as a priority by cooperative extension and their respective land-grant institutions. implications of this conclusion would imply that cooperative extension becomes (or rather, maintains) its status as a patriarchal culture-oriented safe-haven for those difficulties/hostilities and acts of prejudice, malice, and 135 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 contempt that women face directly from misogyny. we should expect fewer women to enter this profession because of the transparency of those within the organization to relay these concerns to emerging faculty, graduate students, interns, etc. these sentiments were echoed in numerous studies, including the work of seevers and foster (2003) who succinctly stated: “there are many, many other professional opportunities for young women today with fewer barriers and more advantages” (p. 35). finally, in acknowledgment of the findings presented here, we conclude that the organization values sexism at its core. regardless of cultural values/beliefs that are “enacted” within the organization, similar to criteria that are marked off a rudimentary checklist (which are superficial at best), the innate patriarchal culture that is truly representative of its operational/cultural values drive this organization. right. into. the. ground. research question: how does cooperative extension respond to change? our aim here is to discern how cooperative extension responds to change: willingly/unwillingly, proactively/reactionarily, knowingly/unknowingly. with this research question, we looked to the culturally meaningful themes centered around “hesitance to change: navigating traditional gender roles/expectations” and “hesitance to change: r-e-s-p-e-c-t”. hesitance to change: navigating traditional gender roles/expectations as we progressed into stories that delved into gender roles and expectations, all of these women were confronted with “traditional” roles/expectations for both men and women. when addressing “traditional” duties that women have held in the past, we also encounter “traditional” familial obligations or lack thereof that women feel critiqued for still to this day. many participants shared that they are mothers and grandmothers themselves. but for those women without children, it was seen to be somewhat “abnormal” and “unnatural.” likewise, some participants encountered a great deal of exclusion when accounting for who they were married to when expectations and assumptions were made that they were in a heterosexual relationship. county extension directors/coordinators attend a variety of functions in their capacity and many of them county and state-level based are centered around the inclusion of “family,” but we are all mindful that “family” is not viewed the same for all individuals. within this field, the concept of a labyrinth is both very real and present. this is congruent with seevers and foster (2003, 2004) noting that barriers inhibiting women in nontraditional fields are complex and interrelated. as we think about these sources of consternation, angst, and doubt, many of these women have been shamed by other women. because women often find themselves living in patriarchal cultures, numerous women have been exposed to various forms of sexism resulting from the media, religious institutions, political and legal systems, familial and interpersonal relationships, and places of work. this is perpetuated by not only men, but also by women, who reinforce the central male culture of devaluing women through acts of horizontal oppression and omission, which result from internalized misogyny; findings here are congruent with work conducted by szymanski, gupta, carr, and stewart (2009). aligning with the previous work of tosone (2009), this notion of internalized misogyny is real and present and not something unique to the field of agriculture. shaming can take different forms, and one of the most prevalent encounters was when women found themselves in roles where they took stands to fight for causes they believed in which were not held in high regard by others. still others have faced shaming and hostility by their direct reports who did not respect their role. many of those women noted that such staff had never before been supervised by a woman. others spoke of times where women peers and administration tried to manipulate their efforts through personal attacks. these findings were congruent with the work of cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020). as we explored discrepancies regarding pay, benefits, and expectations that women have seen or experienced in their ced/cec roles, many participants voiced frustration first over the increased amounts of scrutiny that they face that male colleagues do not seem to receive. others noted that if they did not meet expectations of supervisors, they should expect to be reprimanded while many colleagues did not. several women across the country also voiced frustration at the discrepancies in pay, benefits, retention packages, etc. between men and women that they could not attribute to differing qualities, skills, academic accomplishments, etc. because the salaries of state employees are public information, the differences in wages are quite apparent. these findings aligned with work conducted by cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020) and seevers and foster (2003, 2004) that noted several barriers surrounding status, benefits, salary, and promotion inequities. as noted in the work of seevers and foster (2004), “until we are paid our worth and are treated with respect, there's no need to encourage anyone to go into this discipline." hesitance to change: r-e-s-p-e-c-t stories based upon respect showed that the women felt they were often ignored, not taken seriously by others, or overlooked altogether. some perceived that others viewed them as weak or “pushovers.” as many women alluded to, whether facing missed job opportunities, staff/committee assignments, etc., similar sentiments were echoed that it was due to their gender. many women spoke specifically to facing male privilege at work and how they have navigated such situations. this was congruent with findings of previous work conducted by cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020) and seevers and foster (2003). for many women, they felt others (colleagues and other administration) did not consider them worthy of training or instruction like many of their male peers. this traces back to work conducted by seevers and foster (2004) that females and minorities within the cooperative extension system encounter additional barriers related to lack of commitment from senior managers and 136 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 university administration and the resistance of some clientele groups to work with staff from diverse backgrounds. many participants noted that men preferred to work with other men, and often, men simply seemed to tolerate the women. these findings were congruent with the work of cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020), foster (2001), and seevers and foster (2003, 2004), where female exclusionary practices were well documented. conclusions and implications when we acknowledge that actions and behaviors are reflective of values and beliefs held by an organization (bandura, 2002), when we view the external and internal forces (from an organizational and societal standpoint) that are warranting change(s) within that organization, we can then assess if there are visible changes stemming from new/different behaviors enacted by the organization. based on those understandings, the findings presented here allow us to assess the ability/inability of cooperative extension to respond to change. findings show that changes to diversify the workforce have been slow, inadequate, and superficial as best. this conclusion is made based on the continued under-representation of women in aee and cooperative extension as a whole. while individuals may be hired into the organization, protocols and support systems to help grow and empower these women do not exist, bringing to light a distributive justice concern. likewise, changes to address discrepancies in pay, benefits, retention packages, etc. have not been made. data obtained from this study are congruent with previous work conducted by cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020) and seevers and foster (2003, 2004), showing that progress has not been made. universities have not been transparent in their hiring practices and how promotions, advancements, salaries, etc. are handled and assigned. based on these conclusions, implications include high attrition rates for impactful women employees, furthering the organization’s lack of diversification and progress. this also has implications for the clientele that cooperative extension serves as many clientele may receive sub-par assistance from county offices as positions remain vacant or are filled by lessthan-ideal candidates. likewise, from a title ix perspective, this may impact federal funding received by universities because this violates some discriminatory practices on the basis of sex related to educational programs and services that those universities deliver. even with more women entering the field of aee/cooperative extension, extension has not done a sufficient job of addressing misogyny in all its forms. data obtained for this study showed that there was no formal system or procedures across universities to file complaints, nor was there formal follow-up regarding how complaints were addressed. likewise, extension allowed organization-sponsored events to continue, even though many women had been excluded. as noted previously, implications include women becoming highly dissatisfied within the profession which could ultimately lead to high attrition rates for impactful women employees, furthering the organization’s lack of diversification and progress. as noted previously, from a title ix perspective, this may impact federal funding received by universities because of violations of discriminatory practices on the basis of sex related to educational programs and services provided. finally, in acknowledgment of the data presented here, we conclude that the organization is reluctant to committing to change (that of diversified staff, clientele, demands for programming, etc.) due to the inherent disruption in the power system which currently undergirds the foundation of cooperative extension. because cooperative extension was built upon support structures which have benefited from a patriarchal culture, the willingness to reorganize such power structures to create meaningful change not just that enacted on a superficial level has not yet been forced, and as a result, has not willingly been enacted or espoused as part of the organizational culture (bandura, 2002). as such, implications based on this conclusion would imply that this organizational pathway may not be a viable outlet for women approximately half of the available workforce to develop, grow, advance, and realize professional success and fulfillment. likewise, we should expect to see an internal organizational stalemate on the part of cooperative extension while similar organizations and universities advance and firmly situate themselves as progressive 21st century institutions. this could likely impact federal funding/backing, legislative support, and community viability, causing the organization to enter a state of obsolescence that renders it a vestigial entity altogether recommendations this study provided insight into the implicit organizational culture (and viability) of cooperative extension by examining the leadership dynamics, power relationships, and cultural impacts experienced by women county extension directors/coordinators across the united states. based on these findings, the researcher proposes the following suggestions for actionable practices. as we begin to outline recommendations for practice, we would be remiss if we did not explicitly explain that such issues identified in this study cannot be appropriately addressed and remedied by any one singular approach. as this issue itself is both multifaceted and complex at face value, the solution we seek can be described in much the same way. as we have made frequent mention of the notion of the labyrinth that women navigate as they try to advance themselves, this multifaceted solution set is indeed a labyrinth parallel of its own. advancement in one area is dependent on successful navigation in yet another; some obstacles/barriers and are much more apparent while others are quite hidden and deeply ingrained within cultural constructs. by accepting this mindset that true change will require multiple approaches working in unison due to the complexity of the issue at hand, we can position ourselves to enact meaningful change that has not yet been undertaken. 137 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 the practices/policies regarding hostility in all of its forms and how that is handled can be seen as inadequate at best; if/when such hostile exchanges do occur, it is unclear as to whether individuals are reprimanded in any way when matters are handled internally. across the country, some offenders appeared to be held accountable by supervisors while others received no such reprimands. furthermore, many continued and perpetuated these acts for several years, and many continued until they departed the organization via retirement. without a standardized system to air grievances, formally file complaints, and issue corrections across the country, it appears that addressing and correcting hostility-related complaints are not something held as a priority by cooperative extension and their respective land-grant institutions. the need to establish such a standardized system is far overdue and should be addressed immediately. while some women spoke of extension events many of them social-based where they were “kindly excluded” from participation, we implore that extension step up as an organization to root out some of these exclusionary based activities/functions that are seeded in traditions of the past. as an organization, we draw a lot of strength from tradition, but in many regards, it will render us obsolete in many circles in the future if we do not correct our actions. finally, many women acknowledged that there was a great fear of “making waves,” and to persist in the organization, it was best to “not rock the boat.” we know that extension is capable of creating a culture of openness, safety, and respect for its clientele, so we ask for the same for the staff that serve it. practices and policies need to be established. the organization must address misogyny in all forms; it cannot shy away from this. there should be real consequences for failing not to abide by basic organizational culture values of integrity, respect, and human decency. we require focused effort to dismantle systems and traditions that inhibit women’s advancement. we implore cooperative extension through a joint effort of all land-grant universities to employ equitable and supportive processes for reporting and resolving such allegations that are free from retaliation. although each institution will vary somewhat in these procedures, some standardization needs to be implemented and advocated to cooperative extension staff members so they are fully aware of such procedures. in conjunction with each university’s title ix coordinator, affirmative action officer, or comparable entity, there should be explicit policies which define prohibited conduct and outline general provisions the university will follow in regards to handling allegations of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. title ix regulations require institutions of higher education to implement a title ix policy to address sexual harassment as specifically defined by the u.s. department of education. cooperative extension staff should be able to formally report misconduct that does not constitute sexual harassment as specifically defined by title ix sexual harassment policies; those actions may still be prohibited and should not preclude that respective university from evaluating the reported misconduct. when filing a report/complaint, the cooperative extension employee should be afforded a fair procedure with due process protections. likewise, we require that each university take appropriate corrective measures for any violations of this policy, acting to prevent future violations within the organization as well; we recommend that the extension director in each state be involved with appropriate disciplinary procedures in conjunction with the title ix coordinator/affirmative action officer. with regards to academia, whether this is an artifact of academia (as one participant put it) or otherwise, there is a great value on outputs in the form of scholarly work, prestige, national honors, numbers, etc., and this is evidenced across the country. participants noted several issues with under-cutting and marginalization of women by both male and female faculty members that was both “painful and counterproductive" (cline, rosson, and weeks, 2019, p.8). if not addressed, this implies that land-grant institutions and cooperative extension would value such hostile, counterproductive academic environments. as an organization as a whole, we need to value quality rather than quantity of work (programs, publications, etc.). with this value system, having objective metrics based on sound outcomes and impacts that show marked growth in target audiences will better help provide equitable evaluations to deem what is “quality.” as cooperative extension adopts these principles as they relate to title promotion and advancement, we hope that aee and academia in general will also see the value in quality versus quantity. with the focus moving to quality, it is hoped that individuals will be able to better address some of the issues related to work/life balance, which has plagued the women in our studies and many others (cline, rosson, and weeks, 2019, 2020; seevers and foster, 2003, 2004). many women spoke highly of mentors formal and informal and others who have supported them and their professional (and personal) efforts over the years. it appears that cooperative extension values this mentoring support system across the country, so we view this as yet another investment towards building that “social capital.” we suggest that mentoring programs be expanded and given the needed resources to grow and serve staff. as cooperative extension dedicates time and resources to mentoring efforts through its extension organizational development (or equivalent) office via each respective land-grant university, we recommend that specific resources be set aside for building mentor skill sets within women faculty/field faculty for new women faculty/field faculty. ensuring that new women professionals are paired with a fellow woman professional within the first six months of their appointment could provide invaluable support structure to empower women in those positions in addition to helping to retain them in those jobs. as we are mindful not to overtax those resources that are so tremendously valuable and limited, we recommend that mentoring clusters be created rather than oneon-one pairings. with this approach, we will not be taxing the limited time of existing women mentors, and it is hoped that this will create an environment where learning and support is afforded to both mentor and mentee in a supportive group 138 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 setting. these efforts would support the call to add to the “social capital” notion that falk and kilpatrick (2000) spoke of where females invest in working to create learning opportunities for other females and would be willing to share what they knew with one another. this further supports work completed by cline, rosson, and weeks (2019, 2020) showing the necessity of women supporting other women leaders within the agriculture industry. cooperative extension actively recruits personnel who hold strong technical skills/credentials, furthering the image of the organization acting as a trusted community resource and extension of the land-grant institution. employing staff who act in the capacity of community servants, understanding that they are tasked with uplifting and empowering community members for the betterment of society as a whole, is yet another asset to the organization. staff who hold these characteristics of service and have a sincere interest in global matters, diversity, inclusion, etc. can and will allow the organization to respond more effectively throughout all communities. we recommend that cooperative extension actively seek out individuals with such characteristics for future hires. in coordination with university hr and the county operations team, each cooperative extension should build specific selection checklists into interview questions in order to better discern the propensity in applicants to exhibit such characteristics/skills as future employees. the following should be at the forefront of each administrator’s mind: it is imperative for a leader to recognize that conflicting values within a mixed culture are potential resources for change, and as such, instead of imposing external values on the existing culture, a leader may enlist values from within to facilitate change. it is recommended that the leaders of organizations “can and should employ those values, persons, and parties that promote the needed change” (dwairy, 2019, p. 517). thus, leaders of a particular group or organization should give due consideration to the personal culture of the people in addition to their generalized cultural identity. just as inclusive, understanding, and community servantoriented women have been hired, men with admirable attributes have been hired into the organization as well. men who can act as allies to women are invaluable to combating misogyny; current research shows that working in misogynistic settings has dire negative effects on the well-being of both women and men (tosone, 2009). tosone (2009) notes that being a bystander to gender-based work incivility lends to decreased job satisfaction, productivity, and morale in all genders. it would be prudent of cooperative extension to provide educational resources and training to do more to teach and empower additional male allies within our field. teach employees that it’s not just about “getting out of women’s way” to help them advance; it’s about walking the journey with them. as women receive invaluable training during their own onboarding sessions, it would be prudent for men to receive ally training during their onboarding sessions in conjunction with required diversity, equity, and inclusion training in a “wraparound” approach. these trainings should be coordinated through each university’s extension organizational development office and/or office for institutional equity and diversity for oversight. inequalities related to pay, benefits, retention packages, promotion, etc. persist to this day. we acknowledge that over half a century after pay discrimination became illegal here in the united states, there is a distinct and persistent pay gap between women and men that continues to plague society; women in the united states are paid 82 cents to every dollar earned by men (aauw, 2020). these gender pay gap consequences continue to afflict women throughout their lives in numerous ways: as women outpace men in higher education today, they also hold almost two-thirds of the outstanding student debt as well. furthermore, because of the gender pay gap, these women also have a harder time repaying said loans. this affliction follows them well into retirement because due to a lifetime of lower wage earnings, these women also receive less funds from social security and retirement pensions; overall, retirement income for women is approximately only 70% of what men claim (aauw, 2020). distributive justice must be recognized by cooperative extension. the organization must address discrepancies in pay, benefits, retention packages, etc. universities cannot afford to not be transparent in their hiring practices and how promotions, advancements, etc. are handled and assigned. the organization must act to support these employees in their careers. cooperative extension must adopt practices and policies to support these women as both individuals and professionals. today, non-tenure track positions (akin to field faculty ced/cec positions) account for greater than 70% of appointments for professionals in higher ed; women are much less likely to achieve a tenure-track position than their male counterparts (aauw, 2020). federal law provides protection against discrimination by title vii (unlawful to discriminate against an employee or applicant for employment based on sex) and title ix (unlawful to discriminate on the basis of sex in educational programs that receive federal funding) and applies to land-grant universities. both title vii and title ix protect faculty/field faculty members from sex discrimination during the hiring process, promotion considerations, job training, termination proceedings, or any other condition or privilege of employment (aauw, 2020). cooperative extension should work with each university’s office for institutional equity and diversity to correct current policies/procedures to build transparency and equity in the process. as a conclusion of doing so, extension should then act to set a standard across the nation for finally addressing this societal plight in their organizational culture practices. based on the aforementioned recommendations for practice to assist this work in carrying out its aim to identify and remedy social harms and injustices as the political, socially-just, and socially-conscious research act it is we leave you with these concluding thoughts. due to the mission of cooperative extension to advance agriculture, the environment, human health 139 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 and well-being, and communities, extension programming impacts each community and all of those within it in a multitude of ways. from a cultural standpoint, a challenge of this caliber taps into an organizational pipeline that feeds from our local communities to the federal government. how many other organizations can truly do that? this unique position sets cooperative extension apart from numerous other entities. cooperative extension can set a standard for government entities and employ best practices that can be passed along to other sectors. when we acknowledge that culture and leadership are inextricably connected, we are able to make an assessment of the organizational viability and effectiveness of cooperative extension. unspoken behaviors, social patterns, and culture can perpetuate values, beliefs, and assumptions that persist for decades within our organization. it is necessary and prudent and timely of us to ensure that what is being valued, and thereby espoused and enacted by our organization, is what will advance us for the better in the coming years, not only in terms of organizational health, but for overall societal wellness and empowerment as aware global partners. these words continue to weigh heavy on our hearts: tondl (1991) explained that “extension sends a message when it resists or accepts change, either actively or passively. the organization reveals itself: its internal norms, values, and its attitude toward change [...]” we implore this organization to act now to rectify these social injustices and shake itself from the protective cloak of patriarchal culture that it has so shamelessly upheld for generations. references aauw. 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(2016). the rise of women farmers and sustainable agriculture. university of iowa press. seevers, b.s., and foster, b.b. (2003). women in agricultural and extension education...a minority report. north american association of colleges and teachers of agriculture (nacta) journal, 47(1), 32-37. seevers, b. s., & foster, b. b. (2004). a profile of female county agricultural agents in today's ces. the journal of extension, 42(6), 6. smith, d. (1987). the everyday world as problematic: a feminist sociology. northeastern university press. szymanski, d., gupta, a., carr, e., & stewart, d. (2009). internalized misogyny as a moderator of the link between sexist events and women’s psychological distress. sex roles, 61, 101–109. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-009-9611-y tondl, r. m. (1991). climate for change in extension. journal of extension, 29(3), 14-16. tosone, c. (2009). sotto voce: internalized misogyny and the politics of gender in corporate america. psychoanalytic social work, 16(1), 1-11. vagle, m.d. (2014). crafting phenomenological research. left coast press, inc. https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.ces.ncsu.edu/directory/__;!!kwnvnqrv!dvxo6ixthtigimja80mdrtfxta3zgr9g8dvxjpwbgqhiknxujzo9s29mcc7hmbtuzsyvkac5lks3_ljxurggmg$ microsoft word davidson_beyond_colleagues.docx volume 38, 2018 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 1 advancing women in leadership vol. 38, pp. 1-13, 2018 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper beyond colleagues: women leaders and work relationships sherwin davidson sherwin davidson, department of psychology, portland state university, davidss@pdx.edu accepted july 25, 2017 framed by the stone center’s relational-cultural theory (fletcher, 2007), which proposes that mutual growth occurs through connection, this qualitative exploratory study examines relationships with women colleagues that contribute to the quality of women’s leadership experiences in higher education. women leaders are affected by gendered organizational culture and by stereotypes of leadership that are predominantly male. they also face contradictions concerning their relationships with each other. women are perceived to be relationally-oriented and socially responsive, but also back-biting and competitive; expected to show relational skills, but with no acknowledgement of what their skills contribute to organizations; expected to practice solidarity but also perceived as “queen bees.” in the face of these contradictions, interviews with 15 women in leadership at five u.s. universities illuminate the character and contributions of select relationships that women leaders themselves identify as contributing factors to the quality of their leadership experiences. ten benefits, which accrue both to the women and their institutions, emerged. two of these benefits are: (1) strategizing and problem-solving; and (2) clarity of ideas, knowledge, and perspective. the benefits loosely align with the five positive outcomes associated with the stone center’s relational-cultural model. results offer alternative ways to think about women leaders’ work-related relationships, recasting the usually invisible skills women bring to them as skills critical to enhancing their leadership, beneficial to the organization, and a means of challenging the status quo of gendered institutional culture. keywords: women, leadership, colleagues, relational-cultural theory, support, friendship, work relationships introduction despite the continuing challenges, more women are moving into leadership positions in higher education. recent evidence indicates that even when women achieve leadership roles, significant challenges to their full participation and success remain (eagly, gartzia, & carli, 2014; longman & madsen, 2014; turner, norwood, & noe, 2013; valian, 1999). the importance of support for women in leadership roles is evident in multiple ways, such as the slow progress of gaining leadership positions (woollen, 2016) and the many leadership development programs offered for women and the nature of the programs’ content (ibarra, adams, & kolb, 2013; madsen, 2011). the present study builds on the idea that support for women leaders is important in successfully navigating the marginalization and double binds of their leadership roles. women more than men display behaviors that are emotionally sensitive and supportive of others. these are behaviors broadly characterized as evidence of a communal orientation (eagly, 2009). they are relevant to the support and closeness associated with women’s friendships with one another (roseneil, 2006). women’s work-related relationships with one another could be unique and crucial in contributing to the quality of their leadership experiences. therefore, this study investigates what women leaders identify as factors that contribute to the quality of their leadership experiences, and in particular, it probes the nature of their work relationships with other women. to enable women to speak for themselves, the study is based on qualitative interviews with 15 women leaders at five universities. based on data that speak to women’s slow progress and marginalization as leaders (gangone & lennon, 2014), the study is timely and, to my knowledge, unique. this study’s purpose and focus emerge from perspectives on organizational culture and the ways culture is gendered. also relevant to the study is bias against women leaders that extends from organizational culture and that involves prevalent stereotypes of leaders. these two strands of literature convey that it is important for women leaders to have resources that counter pervasive stereotypes and negative experiences. the advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 2 third strand of literature focuses on relationships between women, both at work and, more broadly, on women’s same-sex friendships, including those at work. relational-cultural theory, the fourth and final area, provides a platform for considering the possible contributions of such relationships to the experience of women in leadership. it offers the potential for linking women’s relationships with one another to empowering, positive, and reciprocal beneficial effects (jordan, 2010; liang et al., 2002). literature review gendered organizational culture organizations are gendered in that people in organizations both tacitly and explicitly reinforce differential expectations and inequality between men and women (acker, 2006; ely & meyerson, 2000; mills & mills, 2000). these expectations and inequality align with and reflect the ways in which gender is constructed in society and the ways power is distributed and plays out differently for men and women (heilman, 2012). several researchers have examined the impact of a gendered higher education environment (gallant, 2014; hannum, muhly, shockley-zalabak, & white, 2015; poole, bornholt, & summers, 1997; van den brink & benschop, 2012). another aspect of organizational culture is the separation of the personal from the professional (mao, 2006). the personal belongs in the private world; the professional encompasses the public work world. relationships in the workplace are expected to be professional, aimed at getting the work done. this expectation leads to both implicit and explicit devaluation of the personal when it shows up in the organization (o’connor, 1992). andrew and montague (1998) provide an example of how this expectation operates in their academic setting. they describe their own woman-to-woman friendship and how it blurred the boundaries between the public and the private, the professional and the personal, in ways that seemed to make their male colleagues uncomfortable. their experience echoed observations by kanter (1977) that a focus on work tasks should be primary and emotional dimensions should not enter in. the consequences of gendered organizations for women are apparent in the pervasiveness of gender stereotypes and their negative effects on performance evaluations and career progress (heilman, 2012), as well as in the professional adversity women describe (diehl, 2014). as mills and mills (2000) observe, organizational culture is governed by both formal and informal rules, with informal rules evidenced in the formation of relationships outside the organizational structure. the old boys’ network is an example of a gendered practice governed by informal rules. looking through the lens of gender, significant organizational power is often sequestered within the informal connections among men at upper levels of leadership. these connections lead to closed networks characterized by social activities and exchange of information, often in settings that exclude women (brass, 1985; durbin, 2010; mcdonald, 2011). the old boys’ network as a privileged set of connections is not always obvious, but it operates as a shadow image that is important to keep in mind to understand women leaders’ experience. the title of a recent web article from forbes, “women leading women: supporters or saboteurs?” (turner, 2012) illustrates an image that also shadows women leaders in organizations, that of the “queen bee” (mavin, 2008) scholarship exploring the queen bee image (mavin, 2008; mavin, williams, & grandy, 2014) identifies that between and among some women, there are behaviors illustrative of competition with and undermining of one another. that female-to-female conflict, in particular, is viewed as problematic was affirmed in sheppard and aquino’s (2013) study. their study compared perceptions of conflict between women to conflicts between men and between men and women. although the conflict scenarios were the same, conflicts between women were perceived as more problematic and with more negative organizational consequences. in general, women themselves are blamed for not supporting the progress of other women when, in fact, there is evidence that the structure and culture of organizations contribute to queen bee behaviors (derks, ellemers, van laar, & de groot, 2011). leader stereotypes and women a great deal of research has been devoted to the distinct challenges for women both in becoming leaders and in carrying out their leadership responsibilities. eagly and karau’s (2002) role congruity theory provides a useful theoretical framework for understanding biases against women leaders. the powerful norms associated differentially with gender and with leadership result in role incongruity for women leaders. women are perceived to be more communal and men more agentic. since leadership roles are associated with agentic behavior, there is a perceived lack of fit between women and leader roles. given the leadership behavior stereotypes, a bias exists against women leaders. research summarized by eagly and carli (2007) supports role congruity theory. the bias it helps explain continues. a meta-analysis (koenig, eagly, mitchell, & ristikari, 2011) and other discussions in the literature summarize multiple aspects of the ongoing challenges (binns & kerfoot, 2011; ely, ibarra, & kolb, 2011), including those for women leaders in higher education (kolodny, 1998; madsen, 2012). the stereotyped expectations regarding women leaders and the larger context of gendered organizational cultures are a powerful combination, and their power highlights the importance of exploring ways women leaders address them. women and relationships women’s workplace relationships serve both individual and organizational functions. they take a variety of forms such as networking (higgins, 2007; macoun & miller, 2014; poldony & baron, 1997), mentoring (allen & eby, 2007; kelch-oliver et al, 2013; ragins & kram, 2007), and friendships (eagly, 2009; lincoln & miller, 1979; milner, russell, & siemers, advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 3 2010; sias, smith, & avdeyeva, 2003). networking and mentoring have been explored extensively, particularly in relationship to women’s organizational progress, including access to leadership opportunities. much of the literature describes women as having strong relational values and interpersonal connections that significantly influence their experiences at work (boatwright & forrest, 2000). research also points to women drawing on many work relationship forms more for social support than for strictly instrumental purposes related to organizational advancement (markiewicz, devine, & kausilas, 1999; tolar, 2012; wright & scanlon, 1991). however, as wright (2006) discusses, the importance of social support does not mean that women are not also drawing on relationships for instrumental purposes. the particular importance of social and emotional support for women in work settings may be partially attributed to the nature of women’s experience in gendered contexts. there is logic then to the idea that if emotional support is particularly important, women may turn to other women because of their shared experiences as women. in their investigation of peer relationships at work, kram and isabella (1985)distinguished between mentoring and peer relationships and identified the roles of peer relationships among both women and men at work. the continuum of peer relationships they identified included information peer, collegial peer, and special peer, with friendship included in the special peer category. the special peer category is the most intimate and therarest. along with the functions that a special peer is defined as serving—confirmation, emotional support, and personal feedback—the descriptors that the subjects generated align with many of the descriptive characteristics of women’s friendships. sias, gallager, kopaneva, and pederson (2012) distinguished workplace relationships from friendships by the fact that friendships are voluntary and personal. they are not strictly a means to achieving organizational ends. they can involve considerable emotional investment (ibarra, 1997). given that women leaders may be somewhat outside both formal organizational structures and informal power structures, such as the old boys’ network (gamba & kleiner, 2001; mcdonald, 2011; searby & tripses, 2006), they “pave alternative routes,” (ibarra, 1997, p. 91) turning to strong close ties with other women (fritz, 1997; wood, 2000; wright & scanlon, 1991). when women turn to other women, the expressive dimensions of their workplace relationships may seem akin to friendship. this would be consistent with research that concludes that, in general, women’s friendships are stronger and closer than men’s (sias, 2008; wright, 2006). andrew and montague (1998) offer an autobiography of their friendship, drawing on research to put into context what they have experienced. they are faculty who work in the same academic department, and they became friends. as part of their narrative exploration, they introduce the risks and complexities their relationship seems to generate both for themselves and for their male colleagues, who seem perplexed by the blurring of professional and personal roles. the experiences they have in common within the context of work provide an important but not an exclusive basis for their friendship, which is oriented both to work tasks and to their personal connection with one another. common experiences as a basis for forming and deepening a friendship are significant factors in cahill and sias’ (1997) study. in their study, the closeness of work friendships increased when work problems and frustrations increased. since women in leadership may have particular needs for support due both to ways they are stereotyped and to common leadership challenges, colleagues who become friends could be a factor contributing to the quality of their leadership experiences. relational-cultural theory relational-cultural theory (fletcher, 2007; jordan, 2010) provides an important framework for thinking about the significance and dimensions of work relationships for women. it is focused on women’s positive development through relationships (jordan, kaplan, miller, stiver, & surrey, 1991). it is an alternative to western culture’s restrictive emphasis on separation and individuation or autonomy as idealized outcomes for human development and talks in particular about women’s greater disposition toward connectedness (boatwright & forrest, 2000). it “privileges connection as the primary site of human growth” (fletcher, 2007, p. 352). the connection and the positive effect of it are labeled growth-in-connection. the theory focuses on the positive outcomes associated with connections that are characterized by mutuality. mutuality refers to the belief that both parties believe that it is important to contribute to the other’s growth. mutual connection results in meaningful outcomes (fletcher, 2007). these outcomes include: • zest. connection with the other that gives both members a sense of increased energy and vitality. • empowered action. motivation and ability to put into practice some of what was learned or experienced in the relational interaction. • increased sense of worth. increased feelings of value that come from the experience of having used one’s relational skills to achieve mutual growth-in-connection. • new knowledge. learning that comes from the experience of having co-created a new knowledge in the interaction through a fluid process in which members fully contribute their own thoughts and perspective while being influenced by the thoughts, experiences, and perspectives of the other. • desire for more connection. a desire to continue this particular connection or establish other growth-fostering connections, leading to a spiral of growth that extends outward, beyond the initial participants. (fletcher, 2007, p. 353) advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 4 many behaviors associated with the relationships that the theory describes are the same as those described in women’s friendships: (a) registering and attending to emotional data in oneself and others, (b) demonstrating sensitivity to others, and (c) gaining something from the friendship (fletcher, 1999; frey, beesley, hurst, saldana, & licuanan, 2016; roseneil, 2006). the model for growth-in-connection is potentially significant for women in leadership and is a useful framework for this study. evidence of the importance to women of relationships at work opens the door to the possibility of such relationships being one of the factors that contributes to the quality of women’s leadership experiences. further, as women navigate stereotypes of their leadership and the organizational marginalization associated with those stereotypes, relationships with other women are a prospective site for exploring common experiences and gaining support for their leadership and the other benefits the theory describes. in addition, the model asserts that the connections that are central to the positive outcomes are skill-based. because women are expected to conform to agentic behaviors in order to be successful as leaders (eagly & karau, 2002) and because as a norm, women are expected to be good at relationships, the contribution women make to organizations using those relational skills disappear (fletcher, 1999). the present study has the potential to surface and make explicit the benefits of those skills, using the voices of the women themselves. in the strands of literature presented in this review, discussion of gendered organizational culture framed a broad context that shed light on women’s challenge in dealing with informal gendered rules. a second strand focused on women and leadership and identified how perceived role incongruity for women leaders intensifies the challenges of women’s leadership. the third strand presented research that examined the importance and role of relationships between women, particularly in the workplace, including peerand colleague relationships that evolve into friendships. relational-cultural theory, used as a framework for this study, suggests that there is growth that comes from women’s connections to one another, underpinned by mutuality and skill. positive outcomes are associated with relational interactions built on skills generally taken for granted in women because of assumptions made about a relational orientation that is just what women are good at. methods i conducted this study to formally explore the factors that contribute to the quality of women’s leadership experience and, in particular, to probe the nature of relationships with other women at work. qualitative research methods enabled me to explore with participants the existence and nature of their particular experiences (creswell, 2003). qualitative methods are intended to describe, not explain (henwood & pidgeon, 1995); therefore, because this topic has not been previously investigated, qualitative methods are a good fit. once an area of study is defined, the nature of the phenomena within the area is characterized based on what emerges from the participants with as little judgment as possible about what is expected (hill, thompson, & williams, 1997; kvale, 1996). in keeping with kvale’s (1996) mining metaphor, which describes the intention to uncover what may not be easily tapped at the surface, the qualitative approach provided the opportunity to prompt a depth of consideration by the participants using their own voices. participants and procedures i recruited participants through my colleagues at five doctoral institutions in the u.s. a colleague at each institution assisted me in gaining access through e-mail to women in leadership positions at the level of department chair or above. i informed potential participants that the study’s purpose was to identify and explore significant factors contributing to the quality of their own leadership experiences. of the 21 women initially contacted, 18 agreed to be interviewed. to assure confidentiality and maximize participants’ confidence in the study, i offered each participant the opportunity to review the transcription with identifying data removed and to remove any additional material that might compromise her identity. ten of the women were deans, two were part of their universities’ executive teams, one was an associate dean, one was a department chair, and one was a program director. their positions were in the following areas of their universities: education, public affairs, nursing, arts and sciences, student affairs, continuing education, social sciences, communication, engineering, and health and human services. all but one had a ph.d., and all but one had been in a faculty role at some point in their careers. their tenure in their current position ranged from six months to 18 years, with a median of three years. most had been in other leadership roles prior to their current one. two self-identified as african american and the rest were caucasian. i conducted all 1.5 hour interviews in the participants’ offices and then had the taped interview transcribed. of the 18 taped interviews, two of the tapes were faulty, and one woman withdrew out of concern that she might be identified. fifteen interviews were used in the analysis. i conducted the in-depth interviews in keeping with a constructivist research model (kvale, 1996). my intention was to discover through a ground-mapping question what participants would volunteer initially and then to explore openendedly what was offered. in keeping with kvale’s (1996) approach, after the ground-mapping question, i focused the interview “on particular themes… neither strictly structured with standardized questions, nor entirely non-directive” (p. 31). i aimed for discovery without the imposition of received knowledge, using neutral probes at first, and then probes more directly related to relationships with other women. as the interview developed, the nature of the exchange between the participant and myself became more collaborative. advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 5 the ground-mapping question posed to participants was: what are the factors that have contributed to the quality of your leadership experiences? thirteen of the 15 introduced relationships with women as contributors to the quality of their experience; nine did so without prompting and four did so with prompts, such as my introducing the idea of the old boys’ network and then exploring what they thought of when i mentioned the idea of an old girls’ network. of the two women who did not introduce relationships with other women as a specific resource, one had entered academe during a period when she was one of the first women in her academic arena. she talked of her husband who was also in an academicallyrelated area as her most available personal support. the other of the two women who did not introduce a specific relationship talked about the importance of relationships with others in her profession, which consisted largely of women, but she did not talk about particular women from whom she drew support. as each interview developed, i sought both to follow their lead and deepen their consideration of the topics they introduced related to the quality of their experiences, becoming increasingly specific about my interest in relationships with other women as factors in the quality of their experiences. i reflected what they said back to them as a way to both signal my understanding and encourage their depth of response. these are examples of the ways i fostered the interactive, collaborative nature of the interview. my active role in the interview was in keeping with feminist perspectives on interviewing that kvale (1996) discussed. analysis i organized the data for analysis through the use of qualitative software. i examined interview content using a modified analytic inductive approach (bogdan & biklen, 1992; creswell, 2003) with subjects’ own words and expressions forming trial codes. an iterative coding process that moved among data from the interviews and reflective memos to myself led to clusters of related responses. by continually comparing the clusters to one another and forming new clusters, it became possible to identify and label themes. i did the coding and theme identification independent of the outcomes identified in relational cultural theory. in this way, the participants’ language was my guide as i mined the data. results the initial question posed to participants was about the factors that contributed to the quality of their leadership experience; it is important to note that the participants interpreted quality to mean positive aspects of their experience. in reporting results of the interviews, i use quotes from the interviews to illustrate each of the components of the results. first, i present categories into which the range of factors that participants volunteered cluster. next, i discuss the salience of the organizational context for participants’ leadership and how that context framed their relationships. i then focus on how the participants talk about their relationships with women in particular, and how the fact that both were women contributed to the nature of their experiences. i next describe the characteristics of those woman-to-woman relationships that help explain how they contribute to participants’ leadership, using participant language to capture the character of the relationships and their significance. i then discuss the benefits that emerged as the women talked about their relationships.. categories of factors contributing to leaders’ experiences the factors participants viewed as contributing to the quality of their leadership experience were identified and then grouped into the following categories: (a) personal characteristics such as energy, intellectual capacity, love of problem-solving, sense of humor; (b) activities that contributed to growth and balance, such as professional development, spiritual life, having a life outside the university; (c) relationships. at some point in their interviews, all of the women volunteered some kind of relationship as a resource. most identified several particular persons across a variety of roles, including mentors, spouses, family, colleagues, and friends. the relevance of organizational context to leaders’ experience given what the literature says about challenges for women inherent in organizational culture, perhaps it is not surprising that the organizational context and its effects emerged as an important backdrop against which to understand participants’ experiences. in a variety of ways, the participants collectively displayed awareness of distinct experiences that they attributed specifically to being women in significant university leadership roles. for example, although i did not specifically ask about the number of women who had played their role or similar roles, eight of the women talked about being first, and about being the only woman or one of a few women in those roles. all participants introduced gender as somehow relevant, citing many different ways they took note of it: “i’m very hesitant about calling any of the male administrators at home.” another said: “i’ll be at a dean’s meeting and i’ll make a suggestion and i’ll be ignored, and i don’t even think the guys know they do it.” the women of color had experienced being both a first woman and a first woman of color in several of their institutional roles. each made observations about the intersection of race and gender, wondering which aspect of their identity might be contributing to others’ views of them. in speculating about perceptions of her, one woman imagined that the views ranged from what she described as the “mammyeffect” to the image of being so strong that “you don’t need any help.” her musings illustrated patricia hill collins’ (1990) discussion of another dimension of experience with which african american women contend, the existence of symbolic images which are part of their marginalization. thus, the two minority women faced additional aspects of role incongruity. what makes participants’ characterization of the organizational context important is that their descriptions reveal their awareness that being a woman leader was a distinct experience that sometimes set them apart from the culture and narrowed their sphere of influence. some experienced the stress of being advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 6 the first or the only, and of being outside what seemed to be understood among the men. they perceived the influence of gender as a given with which they had to contend. the women with whom they interacted seemed to easily understand the tensions of being a woman and a leader when most other leaders in the same organization were men, and to gain perspective, they turned to other women in particular. emergence of relationships specifically with women as a contributing factor participants described what was distinct about the woman-towoman relationships that contributed to the quality of their leadership experiences. one participant stated, “women’s friendships are different. the discourse around the friendship is a good deal less laconic than it is with the men i talk to about these matters.” participants described greater freedom, less boundary restriction, and more trust in relationships with women. one described being excluded from a group of male deans from across the nation and then, in contrast, characterized the relief she felt in the absence of boundaries between her and a group of three women also in comparable positions, women she described as friends. she made the point that they were distinct in what they offered her because they were women. others described the relief of sharing with one another the experiences they felt were common to women. they valued the safety they felt with another woman as they explored the commonality of their experiences in a largely male context. they reported gaining perspective that brought factors beyond themselves into focus. one participant said, “i don’t think i could have been as close in my friendship if she had not been a women. i mean, i think we shared a sense of solidarity, a recognition of... the old boys’ network that existed at that institution.” the identification of the importance of relationships with women in particular emerged from another participant as she reflected on what she described as male culture, the bluffing behavior that she observed as part of that culture and, in contrast, the trust she had in two workplace relationships with women from whom she drew perspective. another described the importance of having women to draw on in this way: “i think i feel more comfortable saying, ‘let’s go get a drink.’ or i can call them at night and i can be more social with them, there’s a little bit more connection.” characteristics of leaders’ relationships to women to characterize the nature of their relationships, participants used a variety of labels including colleague, friend, or good friend or close friend. they moved freely between the use of “colleague” and “friend,” often conflating the two in a matterof-fact way. sometimes they did not use a label but just described particular women and how they knew them, such as someone from the faculty, or another dean, or someone from a professional association, or a group of women. others just used different labels at different points to describe the same person. rather than try to pin down an exact label and its meaning, i explored the characteristics of the relationships participants introduced. across participants, characterizations of the nature of the relationships are revealed in descriptions such as being understood, feeling relieved, having fun, being heard, enjoyment, trusting, and sharing. most of the women identified by the participants as their relational partners emerged from similar professional contexts, either in their own or at a comparable institution, or due to membership in a professional organization. some women were in similar roles, such as deans, but role similarity was not always a requirement for what was shared. while participants highly valued their relationships, they were also alert to the complications of navigating conflicting situations because of their professional roles. one participant stated, “female peers who are other deans within the institution—there’s a certain point at which business becomes business.” the relationships were not always with peers in similar roles; however, the participants perceived their relationship as one of equals and one based on relevant shared experiences. one participant stated, “i think my reaction to [relationships with other women], and other women’s reaction to it, is really, in large part, the shared experience reaction. it’s just nice to be in an environment where people understand some of the ways, some things that you’ve experienced, and some things that might interest you.” another participant stated, “here i’ve been able to develop a very strong network of colleagues, colleagues that were really among my closest friends… i have, in the world.” within their relationships, the personal, including social or family activities, could be very comfortably shared. the personal was often combined with the professional. based on beliefs about the range of professional experiences they held in common, there was no need to explain the context: “we get together for dinner and we talk about personal lives and kids, whether we’re up or down, stressed or not, but [there is] also much talk about politics, the world, the campus, the community.” their relationships were based on an interest in and concern for the other person combined with obligations to the institution, the mutually relevant matters-at-hand, or a good intellectual exploration of a topic. participant descriptions encompassed a “sort of analytical figuring out, observing the world, making sense of it, noticing-what’s-happening quality,” as one woman put it. as noted earlier, gender was significant in the organizational contexts that interviewees described. the significance of gender was also apparent in the contrasting characteristics the participants noted about their relationships with women in comparison to their perceptions of the old boys’ network. they described their selected workplace relationships between and among women as much more collegial and free of expectation for reciprocal favors, having little focus on the politics of connection, being less prone to positioning around power, not just one-dimensional, and as non-competitive. one woman captured in the following way her experience with other women in contrast to how she perceived the old boys’ network: “that’s advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 7 not been my old boys’ network experience. it’s been much, i don’t know the words, it’s just been much more external, much more, i’d say pragmatic and dogmatic, much more competitive one-upmanship.” another said: “you know, you just sort of know they do things in networking. i have observed from time to time the flapping and the indiscretions that occur. i don’t feel that vulnerability with (woman’s name redacted).” the women in these interviews did not introduce the queen bee image. this may be confirmation of the peer status each assigned to the women she spoke of as a resource. queen bee is more often a behavior that women aspiring to rise in an organization would assign to women in leadership roles. however, competition was referenced by a couple of women as a part of specific past experiences. one woman, a dean, described a group of women deans who sometimes got together. it was a group she did not enjoy because of the competition she felt. another dean referenced the inevitability of competition with other women deans as a hazard of the role: “i do meet with other women deans on this campus, and that’s very useful… but on any campus, units, no matter how alike or similar in mission, there’s a certain dimension of competition.” the degree of significance that participants assigned to their connections is revealed by the nature of the language used in describing them. one participants stated, “there was a sense of this being a kind of privileged area… a shared experience at the institution that comes about because we’re women, because we’re female, and because we’re all in leadership positions, and we’re a minority, and we sense a kind of compatibility amongst us, and therefore we’re going to build on that and use that.” participants described the importance of a “sense of solidarity,” the chance of “making something more happen together rather than alone.” they talked about “reducing isolation,” “mutual recognition of female experience,” and “the importance of seeing someone else survive.” against the gendered context that the women themselves identified and described, their language shed light on how much colleagues and friends mattered. their importance as a source of ideas was highlighted by one woman’s description of her group of friends on campus as “intellectual soul mates” and another’s as a “sensational salon.” one described the ability to learn from one another without the power differential inherent in a traditional mentoring relationship: “there has been embedded in the comentoring, the learning, and the reciprocity a deep sense of concern and affection for me, the person.” one woman described her close work-based relationship as something “that goes beyond a friendship,” as qualitatively different from a friendship in that “it isn’t diminished, softened, feminized as friendship between women can sometimes be—it’s like a balm, in an environment that truly does not understand who i am, and isn’t interested in understanding who i am and whose work and purpose it is, you know, isn’t to understand who i am.” there was reference to a tension for men in the organization, a tension associated with some men’s appearing threatened by women in leadership roles. the awareness of that tension made some women conscious of the impact of their relationships with other women. an example came from acknowledgment by a male colleague of one of the women’s group of friends. he stated, “‘oh, what are you all doing? is this some kind of a cabal?’” another referenced the need to be careful not to appear exclusive with her friendship so as not to “threaten the men.” benefits that emerged from relationships and their consistency with relational-cultural theory benefits to their own leadership and to the organization as well were features of the relationships with women the leaders described. the 10 benefits identified in table 1 emerged as themes derived from participant interviews. while some themes overlap, listing them separately reflects my assessment of their distinctiveness. their importance is based on the dramatic and emotional nature of the language the women used in their expression of them. descriptions of each benefit follow, with a quote for each. additional illustrative quotes are shown in table 1. table 1 benefits of women’s work-related relationships processes exemplifying quotes mutuality reciprocity “and so you say, ‘well, i’ve been around that bend. look at that!’ and i say, ‘i’ve been around this bend!’ and she says, ‘okay.’ and so both of us advance in terms of our own development.” fun “there’s the shared experience thing that makes things more fun.” continuity “well, i think friendships have developed out of that group as well… and yet there’s a kind of continuity there…. so it functions beyond those meeting points, but those meeting points, having a continuity, having a form, were really important to me.” validation “they’ve created a space where i can take that stuff that’s inside of me that isn’t serving me well and look at it and have somebody else say, ‘you’re all right.’” advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 8 support and comfort “and so she came up here the weekend before [my speech] and we sat at my kitchen table… and she was like a coach for the whole weekend… and so i was able to go into that situation with an extreme amount of confidence and be more successful than i would have been with that… that was tremendous mutual support that made… a huge difference for me.” clarity of ideas, knowledge, perspective “i can throw something out to them….and i can have them tell me, ‘that’s interesting, that’s not going to work,’ or whatever. and they’ll come at it from very different ways because all three of them are very different…. one of them will say, ‘politics won’t support that,’ or someone else will say, ‘you’re never going to get them to buy into that, or ‘there nothing at the end of the road with this.’” safety to ask for help “so it’s the degree to which you’re just totally exempted for whatever it is, that’s important too…. you’re not going to get hurt in the process.” strategizing, problem solving “getting people together and thinking about strategizing as to how to get things done. strategizing. that was important because… they hadn’t had [a person of color] on the board at that time.” opportunity “they were key in leadership opportunities that i have had in the organization.” benefits to organization “it helps each of us to move in different ways within the university and to be more empowered…. i think you have the ability to have a wider impact. and to kind of have a more comprehensive understanding of the campus, which, in turn, allows you to be more political and to have, you know, just a kind of wiser judgment about things in this bigger context.” mutuality and reciprocity include instrumental actions and the confidence of mutual support. although the participants did not specifically express an expectation for exchange, evidence of exchange emerged in the descriptions, and reciprocity at a more personal level was apparent: “the reciprocity is in that we develop different experiences so you just share that piece of you that isn’t stuck in the same place i am.” mutuality is an understanding held in common, an assumption inherent in friendship, and in some ways an extension of reciprocity. while friendship was the most common descriptor women used in talking about their relationships with women colleagues in their organization or in their professional realm, there was not an assumption that all women colleagues are friends. as one participant described it: “well, i think that [friendship] enriches that relationship and it enables you to do additional things because friends share at a different level than colleagues.” another said that resources she called on included “a network of colleagues—colleagues that were among my closest friends i have in the world.” participants moved around in their language, sometimes conflating colleagues and friends, and in this way evidencing relationships that bridged the personal and the professional and were important for that very reason: “there was a level of the work and what the work did to me as a person, did to them as a person. they connected sort of emotionally and intellectually, affectively and cognitively to the work. that’s what created the bond of lifelong friends.” fun describes shared laughter and shared activities that derived from both strictly work activities and activities outside of work, captured by one woman who said, “and so i just enjoy them, and i’ll just say ‘let’s go get wine. let’s go do something.’ so that’s fun. they’re friends… and that group is very important to me.” the activities were connected to lightening up, providing relief and a feeling of getting away. examples include various forms of being together, such as a book group comprised primarily of women leaders where discussion often took a personal turn, leading the speaker to refer to group members becoming friends. other examples arevacationing, going to dinner or to the theater, and shopping together. continuity refers to a reliable sense that important shared moments would continue. again, the frequent reference to colleagues as friends, along with the assumption inherent in friendship as a relationship built on and evidencing continuity are relevant. in talking about the difference her relationship with a colleague made, one woman said. “i think it made a tremendous difference. having a friendship in which you could deposit your perceptions, your criticism, your thinking—you know—about issues, where you trust the person because you have a friendship. and i think you’re able to maybe go further in exploring the limits of your ideas because of that friendship.” validation describes situations which often involved self-doubt or uncertainty about one’s reading of a situation. one participant stated, “the rest of it is all the sharing, the exchange that is intangible… not something physical.... it is a reaffirmation of who i have always been.” another participant said, “i’ll just pick up the phone and say, ‘am i crazy or did this—do you have a minute?’ and she says [back to me], ‘it’s not crazy, you’re not crazy, you’re not crazy to not like this, this, this and this.’ they [friends] in some ways affirm the reality of the experience we’re having.” advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 9 support and comfort capture getting both practical and concrete direction as well as caring emotional reassurance, both offered without personally evaluative judgment. they included getting help for an upcoming speech—on a weekend, over a kitchen table—or presenting a developing idea to others, as in the following: “‘here’s something i’ve been thinking about,’ i’ll say, and i can have them tell me ‘that’s interesting,’ or ‘that’s not going to work.’” comfort includes the caring experiences that participants have with one other, apparent in participants’ use of language like “balm,” “emotional sustenance,” and “touchstone.” clarity describes the product of an interaction that starts around a muddle, or an issue, or a difficult experience. through the interaction, ideas are generated, knowledge is acquired, and perspective develops. as one respondent said, “[at the beginning] it might have been one issue… but the catharsis and feedback helps you crystallize on three to four fronts at a time sometimes.” another described gaining clarity as “the opportunity to learn from people whose experiences are different, but similar enough to contextualize your situation.” and from another: “i get perspective because sometime it’s difficult to have perspective about what i do if i’m not getting a lot of feedback.” safety to reflect and to ask for help is both a basis for and a byproduct of interaction. especially inside the same organization, it can feel unsafe to ask, as one woman did to a colleague: “do you think that was really out of line? was that sort of over the edge? do i sound like i’m really getting on my last leg?” when support and comfort were offered, and perspective was gained through the interaction, a sense of confidence in the safety of the next interaction grew because, as one participant observed in the context of talking about feeling safe, “it’s not episodic, it’s continuous.” strategizing and problem-solving often involve organizational matters. one participant shared, “when i first came, the senior administration was something to be strategized over.” another woman referenced a colleague’s counsel on specific relationships she needed to develop that would benefit the division she headed. another said, “this is not a support group, this is not just so i can have somebody i can talk to and that they listen. the two people are people who have ideas about what to do.” opportunity has to do with things that emerge from the relationship that provided the chance to increase one’s experience or to make progress toward an ambition. one respondent referenced an opportunity that stemmed from a friendship: “and yet, i would say that she was a catalyst. she said, ‘here’s a course you could teach, here’s how you could teach it, let’s get you doing it,’…and it was out of friendship.” benefits to the organization include comments about how the advantages gained from one’s own interactions redound to a broader circle: “the most obvious thing is that everybody learns, not just me, but everybody i’m talking with and working with. because they see the way i’m dealing with a problem and there’s one less thing they have to learn from scratch, right?” participants’ language also revealed their leadership challenges as they described the importance of the close connections with colleagues in gaining perspective on significant and difficult experiences of their work. however, “challenges” was by no means simply a code word for impossibility, unhappiness, or stress. collectively, participants revealed ways they thrived in their role, and ways that they felt they made a difference in their organizations. the relationships also added to their work satisfaction, which can be viewed as an additional organizational benefit, “i think that that kind of communication [with a colleague who is a friend] is so critical, not only in one’s happiness as a person, but in one’s happiness and satisfaction in the role.” the benefits the women identified can be construed as a series of interactions consistently producing mutual growth, a key dimension of the relational-cultural model. indeed, alignment with all of the principal outcomes of relational practice identified in the relational-cultural growth-in-connection model can be seen in table 2. in this table, each of the benefits emerging from this study’s interviews are further combined and clustered alongside the positive outcomes that relational-cultural theory associates with growth-in-connection. the association between benefits emerging from this study and outcomes characteristic of relational-cultural theory shows the ways that, in this study, relationships between women at work go beyond only social support. for example, strategizing and problem-solving, and benefits to the organization emerged from these women leaders. these benefits align with relational-cultural theory’s empowered action outcome, indicating that the relationships women describe are not only sites for growth as a leader, they also have consequences that spiral beyond the relationship themselves. table 2 relational-cultural outcomes and leaders’ benefits relational-cultural outcomes women leaders’ identified benefits mutuality mutuality reciprocity zest (increased energy and vitality) fun clarity of ideas, knowledge, perspective opportunity empowered action (motivation & ability to apply what is gained) support and comfort safety to ask for help strategizing and problem solving benefits to organization advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 10 relational-cultural outcomes women leaders’ identified benefits increased sense of worth (a sense of growth because of interaction) validation new knowledge (fluidly creating new possibilities together) clarity of ideas, knowledge, perspective strategizing and problemsolving desire for more connection (sense of growth that leads to wanting more and expands to others) continuity organizational benefits discussion relational-cultural theory is a suitable frame for exploring the relationships between women that contribute to the quality of their leadership experiences. the common ground that these women leaders shared seemed to be part of what oriented them to each other, and within their connections, they identified many supportive and growth-producing advantages, epitomizing the growth-in-connection at the heart of relational-cultural theory. they also found ways to address some of the limitations and challenges of their organizational cultures, believing that benefits accrued to the organization as well. the organizational benefits echo those described by fletcher (1999, 2007), who also uses a relational-cultural frame. the benefits accruing to both individual leaders and organizations heighten the value of relational skills beyond just something women are expected to do, a value the women themselves articulate. for nearly all of these women, there existed as a significant factor in the quality of their leadership experience a form of relationship that extended beyond simply a collegial or just another work relationship. as identified by the women themselves, the relationships they described had many of the qualities of friendship in the personal realm, and were all the more valuable to these women precisely because the relationship bridged their personal and professional experience. this bridging occurred in the face of the common organizational injunction to separate the personal from the professional. the results identify not only the merits of significant work-related relationships between women, but also the powerful difference they made to the participants in their experience of organizational culture, enabling them to talk with one another about its dimensions, sort it out, and thoughtfully strategize behavior in response to it. in this way, the study results call attention to ways women can both navigate, challenge, and alter the culture through such relationships, as o’connor (2010), raymond (1986) and andrew and montague (1998) have suggested. the results offer an important alternative way to think about work relationships between women. they confirm multiple aspects of its power to positively affect how women experience leadership, and also its power to improve their own and their organization’s effectiveness. the results raise questions about the distinction typically made between support relationships, more often viewed as expressive relationships, and instrumental relationships. within gendered culture, a challenge in and of itself, there is also the perception of women falling short in their leadership performance. the differences their selected work relationships, with all their expressive characteristics, made to the women in this study can be reframed as also instrumental. in fact, participants’ relationships did lead to instrumental outcomes, enabling them to more fully understand and navigate their leadership experience. they reported being able to think more clearly, learn, gain and seize opportunities, and act strategically. the instrumental nature of their relationships also is apparent as they talked about the importance of their relationships for getting things done in the organization. however, they distinguished them from the old boys’ network. there was not an expectation for quid pro quo, but there was nonetheless a reliable return. they described their woman-to-woman exchanges as more nuanced and more collective and inclusive than those with men in their leadership circle. their important relationships with other women were still aimed not just at getting support, but also at enhancing leadership and benefiting the organization—as one said, “doing what’s important for the college.” it can be argued that in order for women leaders to operate more effectively in their gendered environments, gaining emotional support and clarity is an instrumental outcome. the results of this study indicate that the women leaders who were interviewed derive benefits from other women who understand, offer perspective, and even share common experiences of being a woman and a leader in higher education. yet mentoring (johnson, 2011; searby & tripses, 2006) and leadership development (ely et al., 2011; madsen, longman, & daniels, 2012) are resources for women leaders that have a much higher profile. reasons for scant positive attention to the relationships focused on in this study are worth considering. the first reason concerns the prevailing workplace standard for separating the personal and the professional. the benefits seen in table 1 can easily be construed as primarily personal. as leaders, women may tacitly understand that to call attention to their relationships with other women could violate the perception of what it is to behave objectively as a professional, adding to stereotypes they already face as leaders. the second reason is that women experience what it is to be excluded from the power relationships of men. they may not want to risk being interpreted as replicating a system in which exclusion has been part of their experience. reframing and surfacing what women bring to organizations through these relationships has important implications. one implication is that relationships between women leaders and their colleagues may be an alternative for challenging existing patriarchal power inherent in organizational cultures (andrew & montague, 1998; jordan, 2010). o’connor (1998) refers to the advancing women in leadership journal-volume 38 11 potential for women’s friendships to be sites of resistance. making the growth-in-connection benefits of women leaders’ work relationships more apparent and more transparent could enable more exploration of their importance. in addition, deliberately connecting them to organizational benefits could be a way of broadening the cultural, social, and organizational space for women’s work friendships, awakening others to the specifics of their significance. it could also strengthen the instrumental bridge between the professional and the personal. increasing the visibility of the skills that underpin these relationships is important and also has implications. it puts the focus on the skill instead of the stereotype of relationships as “just what women do” because they are naturally relational and more expressive. consistently and publicly drawing parallels between the skills such relationships require and the skills that facilitate workplace accomplishments could reframe their value (fletcher, 1999, 2007). limitations of this study include its focus only on higher education. however, the higher education context locates the participants’ experience within broadly similar cultures. in addition, hearing from the other woman in the relationships to which interviewees were referring would have added to the strength of the results. also, the number of participants is small, although reasonable for a qualitative study. additionally, triangulating the data would have provided additional perspectives and strengthened interpretation. given their character and significance for the women in leadership interviewed for this study, women-to-women relationships in organizations are a resource worth surfacing and exploring further. additional studies could include mixed methods using validated instruments to quantify the importance of social support while also investigating in interviews 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(1991). gender role orientations and friendship: some attenuation but gender issues abound. sex roles, 24, 537–566. 586 listermann et al. final copyediting edits.docx volume 44, 2025 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodriguez, and benjamin jankens assistant editor: jordan donop advancing women in leadership vol. 44, 84-93, 2025 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper "the challenge is to come to work with a smile”: the mentorship, salary, and relationships of administrative assistants in higher education kelli listermann, cristobal salinas, tamara penna kelli listermann: graduate teaching assistant, florida atlantic university, klistermann@fau.edu cristobal salinas: professor, florida atlantic university, salinasc@fau.edu tamara penna: student, florida atlantic university, tpenna2021@fau.edu accepted november 5, 2025 administrative assistants play a vital role in higher education institutions in the united states by supporting faculty, staff, and students in a variety of ways. despite providing critical day-to-day duties, administrative assistants employed in higher education lack mentorship and are underpaid and overworked, contributing to job dissatisfaction. counter to these demotivators, administrative assistants build and sustain rewarding relationships with students and peers. to better increase job satisfaction and retention of administrative assistants, higher education leaders should consider the following findings of this qualitative study using herzberg’s two-factory theory: lack of training and mentorship, being overworked and underpaid, and building relationships, all contribute to job satisfaction for administrative assistants in higher education in the united states. keywords: administrative staff experiences, higher education administrative assistants, job satisfaction published research about higher education has been centered on the experiences of students, faculty, and administrators, often leaving out the experiences of those in other roles such as administrative assistants. in this study, the researchers aimed to bring attention to the voices and experiences of administrative assistants, who are often overlooked in higher education literature. studies on job satisfaction in higher education outside the united states have primarily focused on faculty members and some upper-level administrators. despite their crucial role in institutional support, administrative assistants in american higher education have not been the subject of much published research regarding their job satisfaction (plattner & mberengwa, 2010; teles & ragsdale, 1989). additionally, over 90% of secretaries and administrative assistants identify as women in the united states (u.s. census bureau, 2019), and due to their perceived low rank, they are frequently overlooked in research. therefore, a research gap exists regarding the work experiences of administrative assistants in american higher education. job satisfaction can be complex, influenced by both personal and situational factors (hagedorn, 2000; herzberg, 1966; kalleberg, 1977; volkwein & zhou, 2003; volkwein et al., 1998). job satisfaction is crucial for administrative assistants due to their role in supporting higher education leaders, students, and faculty members. since colleges and universities use different titles for administrative support staff, the researchers use “administrative assistant” in this study to include “secretaries,” “administrative staff,” “clerical support,” “program assistant,” or “staff professional.” “administrative assistant” is the most common or widely understood term for organizational staff support (international association of administrative professionals, 2022). the following questions will be addressed: 1. what impacts job satisfaction for administrative assistants at higher education institutions? 2. how does the lack of mentorship opportunities, workplace training, and livable salary influence the roles and relationships of administrative assistants in higher education? literature review the experiences of administrative assistants in higher education have not been thoroughly examined in the current literature. to address this gap, this literature review examines themes including lack of appreciation, workplace stressors, complexities, and bullying. additionally, author and author (2024) have emphasized that “future research should explore how administrative assistants in higher education experience, perceive, and engage in mentorship” (p. 23). therefore, this study is significant as it contributes to the literature by examining how administrative assistants experience job satisfaction, mentorship, and training, and how those factors influence their rank within their institution and professional relationships. 84 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 higher education institutions employ more qualified administrative assistants compared to other industries (newman, 2008), yet these administrative assistants often lack appreciation (plattner & mberengwa, 2010) and receive low pay despite increased tasks and responsibilities (listermann & salinas, 2024). administrative assistants play a crucial role in supporting upper-level administrators and faculty members, thereby helping to fulfill institutional missions involving education, research, and service. thus, their essential responsibilities must be cultivated and supported (kuo, 2009). research indicates that administrative assistants continue to be underpaid and undervalued when they assume new roles and responsibilities (listermann & salinas, 2024). moreover, when they take on more significant tasks and responsibilities, they seldom receive mentorship or training (sorcinelli et al., 2006; ponjuan et al., 2011). these negative experiences impact job satisfaction, salary, appreciation, academic relationships, rank, and both professional and personal growth (othman et al., 2017; osakwe, 2014). professional rank is one characteristic that can influence job satisfaction (volkwein & parmley, 2000; volkwein & zhou, 2003). in higher education, professionals with a higher rank report more satisfaction with both intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of their position (volkein & parmley, 2000). administrative assistants do not share the same rank as faculty members or upper-level administrators, which contributes to a lack of job satisfaction (listermann & salinas, 2024; newman, 2018). rank significantly influences the institutional mission of fostering relationships between faculty members and staff (provost, 2005). according to herzberg’s two-factor theory, job satisfaction is impacted by factors such as salary, mentorship, and positive work relationships. therefore, mentorship and relationships are essential for administrative assistants to experience positive job satisfaction. for administrative assistants, a lack of job satisfaction may influence their productivity and effectiveness (issah, 2021). additionally, researchers have shown that administrative assistants without a terminal degree may receive less respect than their academic peers (newman, 2018). lower-rank positions, including administrative assistant roles, experience stress due to increased demands, which can negatively impact mental health (ablanedo-rosas et al., 2011). psychosomatic stressors, such as feeling disrespected and disposable by colleagues, increase stress and further influence feelings of dissatisfaction (plattner & mberengwa, 2010). academic bullying administrative assistants may face bullying from co-workers who have a higher position, such as professors and senior administrators, often due to a power imbalance (prevost & hunt, 2018). according to lampman (2012), the likelihood of being targeted for bullying is higher for women, members of a minoritized racial group, or those without a terminal degree. some reasons for non-physical bullying in academic settings include personal deficiencies or personal benefits (raineri et al., 2011). prevost and hunt (2018) found that psychological and emotional attacks were the more common forms of bullying in academic environments. other forms of academic bullying include escalating administrative responsibilities (faria et al., 2012; frazier, 2011; prevost & hunt, 2018), undermining professional competency (ahmad et al., 2017; fogg, 2008; prevost & hunt, 2018), and isolating the target from social interactions or activities (fogg, 2008), which administrative assistants experience from faculty members. furthermore, academic bullying targeting administrative assistants can lead to "physical, emotional, and psychological impairments, as well as different work-related and institutional implications" (prevost & hunt, 2018, p. 1). additionally, staff members such as administrative assistants who experience workplace bullying may suffer in silence, believing it is better to manage the issues privately rather than confront it (fogg, 2008; lewis, 2004). researchers have shown a "significant increase in the prevalence of bullying tendencies with rank" (raineri et al., 2011, p. 28). compared to administrative assistants and junior professors, upper-level administration and senior academics are reported to engage in bullying more frequently (raineri et al., 2011). thus, it is necessary to critically analyze and reflect on the impact of bullying on the careers, development, and academic freedom of administrative assistants in university settings (dentith et al., 2015). promoting a culture of respect can help foster healthier working relationships between administrative assistants, administrators, and faculty members (prevost & hunt, 2018). theoretical framework the experiences of administrative assistants at higher education institutions are closely linked to job satisfaction and growth, with pay and status being influential factors (othman et al., 2017). several elements affect job satisfaction for administrative assistants, including training, mentorship, appreciation, academic relationships, salary, and other workplace stressors. examining these factors provides insight into how administrative assistants experience job satisfaction. both academic and non-academic staff members who are satisfied with their role contribute positively to institutional goals in higher education (othman et al., 2017; osakwe, 2014). herzberg’s two-factor theory has been applied to assess employee satisfaction both outside and inside higher education institutions. this theory distinguishes between hygiene factors, such as salary, mentorship, and positive relationships with colleagues, and motivators, such as appreciation, recognition, and opportunity for advancement (herzberg, 1966; ghazi et al., 2013). hygiene factors relate to basic job necessities and their absence can lead to dissatisfaction, while motivator factors are associated with job satisfaction and enhance overall fulfillment. herzberg (1966) suggested that job satisfaction is influenced by the interaction of these two sets of factors. understanding and addressing these needs can improve work conditions and enhance job satisfaction. herzberg’s two-factory theory is appropriate for this study because it highlights how elements such as recognition and personal growth can impact job satisfaction. the theory makes 85 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 clear distinctions between preventing dissatisfaction and promoting satisfaction. in the case of administrative assistants in higher education, the complexity of job satisfaction can be understood through this framework by integrating the intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors. thus, the researchers used herzberg’s motivator-hygiene theory to explore how administrative assistants in higher education experience job satisfaction and how these experiences affect their roles and relationships. methods research approach qualitative research focuses on (a) how people interpret their experiences, (b) how they construct their world, and (c) what meaning they attribute to their experiences” to understand how they interpret a phenomenon (merriam & tisdel, 2016, p. 24). furthermore, the objective of qualitative research “is to know more about a phenomenon” that “may eventually inform practice” (merriam & tisdel, 2016, p. 3). consequently, a basic qualitative research study is used to investigate the job satisfaction of administrative assistants in american higher education. basic qualitative methods facilitate an in-depth exploration of these experiences through interviews, allowing the researchers to make meaning of individuals’ perspectives within the specific context of job satisfaction and work environment (merriam & tisdel, 2016). a goal of basic qualitative research is to inform policy and practice (merriam & tisdel, 2016); thus, the findings from this study aim to assist college and university administrators in developing and implementing policies that enhance job satisfaction of administrative assistants this qualitative research study is part of a large study (listermann & salinas, 2024); therefore, similar research methods were employed. context of the study the researchers recruited participants for this study from across the united states. during the course of the study, the researchers learned that potential participants were interested in participating in the study. even though some participants from outside of the southeast and midwest scheduled to interview, there were some reasons they were unable to participate. for example, some had work responsibilities that limited their availability and others felt they would be unable to share their experiences because their position involves knowing a lot of sensitive information about their institutions. while participants were notified the interviews and data would be anonymous and confidential, they declined to interview. additionally, four participants agreed to join the interviews on their lunch breaks and two agreed to interview after 5:00 p.m. outside of their office. therefore, the six participants who ended up participating in the study were located in the southeast and midwest. participants snowball sampling was employed to recruit participants for this study. researchers reached out via e-mails to college and university faculty, staff, and administrators, asking them to recommend potential participants. over a six-month period (january to june of 2022), efforts were made to recruit administrative assistants, resulting in only six participants agreeing to participate. the participants were informed that they could withdraw from the study at any time without penalty. all six participants completed an online consent form through qualtrics, which was password-protected, and had the opportunity to ask questions. most participants inquired about who would have access to the interview data, expressing concern about confidentiality with faculty members, administrators, or colleagues. all participants were assured that only researchers would have access to the data, and any self-identification would be replaced with a pseudonym. to help with trustworthiness and validity, the researchers conducted a member check (creswell & poth, 2024) in which the researchers shared the findings with all participants and requested feedback to ensure their thoughts were appropriately captured. only one participant provided a minor change from secretaries to administrative assistants. the small sample size and demographic similarity of participants may limit the transferability of the findings to a larger population, including those employed at private universities and community colleges. to participate in this study, participants must be 18 years or older and employed as administrative assistants in higher education at the time of the interview. the population of this study consists of six women administrative assistants in higher education institutions across the united states. although the research aimed to recruit a diverse group in terms of job titles, genders, ages, types of institutions, and geographic locations, all participants self-identify as women. of these, five identify as white and one as latina, with ages ranging from 53 to 67 years. the participants hold various job titles and work at different colleges and universities in the midwest and southeast portions of the united states. as stated earlier, the term “administrative assistants” used in this paper encompasses but is not limited to “secretaries,” “administrative staff,” “clerical support,” “program assistant,” or “staff professional.” table 1 provides an overview of the demographics of the six participants. table 1 administrative assistant participants’ demographics pseyudonym age race/ ethnicity gender job title years in position salary (united states currency) judy 60 latina woman program assistant 12 $38,000.00 sonia 67 white woman senior secretary 22 $30,000.00 debbie 55 white woman program assistant 22 $38,000.00 linda 67 white woman office supervisor 8 $36,521.00 sandra 53 white woman admin assistant 13 $51,000.00 rachelle 60 white woman secretary ii 38 $52,000.00 86 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 data collection data collection involves “a series of interrelated activities to gather good information to answer emerging research questions” (creswell, 2007, p.118). for this study, data were collected through 60-minute structured interviews with each participant. participants had the option to be interviewed in person, by phone, or via zoom; two participants chose in-person interviews, one opted for a phone interview, and three interviews were conducted via zoom. thus, six participants in total were interviewed for the study. during these interviews, participants were asked 17 open-ended questions (see appendix) covering various aspects of their career and life experiences, including age, gender, salary, expectations, and relationships with students, faculty, and family. the development of the interview questions was influenced by herzberg’s (1966) concepts of hygiene and motivators. questions aimed at identifying hygiene factors included: “if you feel comfortable, what is your salary?” “do you get salary increases or bonuses?” “what are the challenges you face in your current position?” “what changes would you make to your job description to improve your job and quality of life?” conversely, questions aimed at understanding motivators included: “what do you enjoy the most about your current position? how do you define mentorship for secretaries?” “who supports you? describe that support.” additionally, some questions could address either factor depending on the participants' response, such as “describe the culture of administrative assistants within your department, college, or university,” and “describe the support you receive in your role and who supports you.” to address challenges, the 17-question open-ended interview protocol was developed, and the researchers discussed their perspectives privately to reduce bias and improve the consistency of data collection and analysis. prior to conducting the interviews, the research questions were reviewed by two administrative assistants to ensure relevance and validity. although no pilot interviews were conducted, the feedback from the two administrative assistants provided the researchers with context twhiteo pursue the study. the interview questions (see appendix) were developed after the establishment of the purpose and review of the research questions, drawing on insights from the literature review, theoretical framework, and the researchers’ experiences collaborating with administrative assistants. during the interviews, participants described their current position, which included tasks such as managing communication and marketing plans, serving as a liaison between students, faculty and administrators, handling calendar management, event planning, organizing course schedules, processing budget and travel requests, managing admission applications, and learning new software used at the university. four participants chose to be interviewed during office hours and their lunch breaks, continuing to answer the phone and respond to emergencies during the interviews. when participants needed to address work-related issues, the audio recording was paused until they were available to continue. two participants agreed to participate in the study, but only on the condition that it was after office hours because they were not allowed to take personal calls during their office hours. interviews provide valuable, detailed insights into participants' experiences, but they also present challenges, such as potential interviewer bias and logistical issues, necessitating careful planning and execution to ensure reliability and validity (merriam & tisdel, 2016). data analysis data collected from interviews were transcribed, cleaned (all personal self-identifiers and names of institutions and departments replaced by pseudonyms), and then analyzed. first, the data was organized into codes by all researchers. according to saldaña (2009), codes are “often a word or short phrase that symbolically assigns a summative, salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data” (p. 3). each researcher created their own list of codes, which were combined into a master code list using excel. the code list contained 25 codes, which were subsequently categorized according to herzberg’s two factor theory (1966): 15 codes were classified as hygiene, 6 as motivators, and 4 as neutral. after coding the data into hygiene and motivators, the codes were merged into seven themes. themes represent meaningful patterns and reflect the research’s focus, highlighting what is significant (merriam & tisdel, 2016; saldaña, 2009). the seven themes emerged based on the similarities among the codes; for example, codes related to training and mentorship (motivators) were merged into one theme. another theme included the codes of salary and validation (hygiene). then, using in vivo coding, researchers analyzed the data by identifying direct quotes from what participants shared during the interview to provide in-depth and descriptive insights in the interviewee’s own words (saldaña, 2009). although the codes reflect both hygiene and motivators, the direct quotes reflect that administrative assistants’ experience was “dissatisfiers” (hygiene). the researchers reviewed all direct quotes, met to discuss their understanding of the data, discussed their interpretation, and derived meaning from the data. through this data analysis, the researchers aimed to understand job satisfaction among administrative assistants in american higher education, resulting in three findings. to further ensure trustworthiness and accuracy, the researchers also engaged in member checking and provided the transcripts of their interview to each participant and the findings for their review. participants provided feedback to the researchers, which enhanced the validity of the findings. findings study participants were interviewed about their experiences as administrative assistants working in higher education in the united states. the data reveal three findings that provide context to how administrative assistant women in higher education experience job satisfaction and how their experiences influence 87 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 their roles and relationships. first, participants expressed a need for more training, mentorship, and support from upper-level administration and faculty. second, participants experienced less satisfaction with their positions due to feeling overworked and being underpaid. third, because they lack support and do not feel validated by their institutions and colleagues, they seek to build relationships with other administrative assistants as well as students. see table 2 for the summary of the findings and how they connect to the research questions. table 2 summary of findings findings summary lack of training and mentorship connecting to both research questions, this finding reveals how a lack of training and mentorship contributes to job satisfaction for administrative assistants. the participants expressed the necessity of training and mentoring themselves since they do not receive either from their institutions or departments. overworked and underpaid this finding answers both research questions and elucidates the absence of validation expressed by the participants. this highlights how the lack of a livable salary and the increased duties and demands placed upon them influence their satisfaction with their job, decreasing their feelings of worth and importance in their roles. job satisfaction through building relationships lastly, this finding, which primarily answers the first research question, reveals the most positive aspect contributing to job satisfaction for administrative assistants: building meaningful relationships. the relationships the participants build with students and other administrative assistants were described as providing long-term support and community. all participants stated that they did not receive training or mentoring in any of the programs necessary for their day-to-day jobs. for example, judy said, "i didn't get any training, i pretty much had to train myself on everything and learn about all of the programs." debbie declared how learning the required programs to do her job was challenging, “there was a huge learning curve with programs and software.” like judy and debbie, all study participants shared that they did not receive formal training or mentorship at their universities. due to the lack of formal training and mentorship, participants explained how they had to learn on their own and had to solicit the help of other administrative assistants. while this is not formal mentorship, they anticipated receiving some form of instruction from their employer on how to do their job successfully; yet their employer did not do so. for example, sonia did not receive formal training or mentorship to use workday software; thus, she learned to use the system by herself and is constantly challenged when there is an update on the workday system. sonia said: workday is challenging, yet they don't offer support or additional training. the [university] doesn’t tell you that it's done until it comes back. and then i say, ‘i've done something wrong.’ there's no follow-through regarding updates when they're changing in the system. they don't really tell us; we're the last ones to know. my only mentor was a book. sonia disclosed that one of her biggest challenges was figuring out a system herself. another example of a lack of training was shared by sandra when she explained how she had to reach out to different departments and ask, “could i have training in a certain software system, or if they could explain something to me?” because of the lack of training, judy suggested, “if only we had some cross-training from the university, which would be nice because we could leave [work] and not have to worry about anything going wrong." on top of the lack of training, there was no mentorship to help these women achieve any sort of personal or career goals. rachelle stated, “the mentorship, there’s nothing.” given that the participants of this study shared that there was no mentorship, all participants were asked in the interview to define what mentorship means to them. linda stated: mentorship is when someone is dedicated to work with someone else to receive direction on specific issues that need to be resolved in a collaborative way. i really don't receive any mentorship in my position. sonia also defined mentorship as something where someone “supports [you] on a regular basis, which i have not seen in many years.” due to the lack of mentorship, the participants had no one to reflect on as an example of what should be done in their position. all participants shared how they lack training and mentorship at their institutions. overworked and underpaid: absence of validation alongside the lack of training and mentorship, the participants of the study shared feeling underappreciated due to their heavy workload and low salaries, leading to increased stress. all participants stated how their annual salary had stayed the same after years of working at the same university in the same position, with no raise or bonus. for example, debbie stated, “my salary is $38,300, and that’s after almost 11 years of working here.” alongside sharing her salary, debbie expressed: i haven't had any sort of substantial raise in over five years. my coworker and i had a very, very slight raise maybe three years ago that increased our pay by 20 cents per hour. even though debbie received a 20-cent raise, it is not enough to show appreciation for the 11 years of service that she has invested in her position, department, and the university. although almost all the participants shared their salaries, which ranged from $30,000 to $38,000 annually, linda felt uncomfortable when asked to share. despite not sharing her salary, she said, “the salary is not enough compensation for the 88 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 job responsibilities that i do.” when asked what linda’s responsibilities were, she explained: i manage all of the front desk operations. registering transfers, refunds, mailing supplies, customer service, and special projects, as needed. i did supervise three officestaff members before the closure of covid-19. and before covid, we received a 2%increase every year, and then we also had a year-end bonus. like all other participants, linda has many responsibilities and recognizes that they are not being paid sufficiently for their work. judy shared how her stressful job responsibilities are never-ending without any type of praise, including salary increases. judy shared: there are so many systems here to learn; for every little thing, there's a new system or software that you have to learn; it can be a lot. when you look at the salary of administrative assistants, i mean $14 an hour, you could make $15 at panera. judy compared her salary to a fast-food restaurant. in addition, she recognized that she could be paid more by doing less than she currently does as an administrative assistant. in addition to the low salary with no raise or bonus, the participants expressed the pressure they feel under all the work they have, with no free time for family or personal reasons. for example, linda said: the only change that i would like in my job is to have another person who supports the front desk so i would have the time to go to appointments and breaks and feel more comfortable because i have to ask them [my supervisors] to relieve me. judy also expressed similar feelings to linda, stating that the amount of work she must do is challenging because “you can't take a day off and just chill. you must check in because there are things that you are responsible for, and you can't just disconnect.” like judy and linda, sonia also feels that her ongoing job responsibilities are to support administrators and faculty, reasons for which she cannot disconnect from her job, and her salary does not reflect the effort she puts into her work. sonia shared: i come in because i'm supporting other people who are here or people with time off; the position requires that i'm here. i don't get paid extra, i don't know what's going on, and i take every day as it comes, and when there's a problem, i do my best to correct it. like sonia, participants shared a feeling of being overworked and underpaid. moreover, debbie expressed, “the challenge is to come to work with a smile on your face, knowing that you haven't been really acknowledged for the more work that's been put on you.” overall, the participants expressed a lack of appreciation in terms of salary, alongside stress related to increased duties. job satisfaction through building relationships participants acknowledged that they are overworked and underpaid; however, when describing why they continue to be satisfied with their jobs, they all explained how they enjoy building relationships with students. debbie, for example, explained how she builds relationships with students: i talk to prospective students and advise them about all our different programs and degrees. i build relationships with them, and even after they graduate, they stay in touch with me. in brief, debbie described how she helps students. judy also stated, “the students rely on me. and there are many times i have to talk to them and help them through the program or whatever their needs are.” all participants played a crucial role in the lives, decisions, and education of the students seeking help. the relationships the participants made with these students were not temporary; in fact, some participants shared how they stayed in contact with students after they graduated. like debbie and judy, sonia worked with students “recruiting bilingual and bicultural students from the [school district] to help them enroll and earn a degree in counseling.” sonia then further explained how: a lot of them still send me emails and communicate how they're doing with their new positions or with their family. they still come back. they remind me of the love that i've always had for students. it's wonderful to hear from them. similar to sonia, rachelle said: i've been in touch with all the students that i know from the first time i met some of them in 2011. i know them, and i keep in touch with a lot of them. they get so excited that i reach out. i give words of advice, and they can trust me. rachelle further explains how “helping students is a gift, and i love to see them get their education because i didn't have it,” bringing her joy, knowing that she is making a difference in the lives of these students. building relationships with students was a positive experience for the administrative assistants of this study. the relationships built by the study participants also stretch to the administrative assistants’ colleagues they work with. when asked about the people they work with, all participants said nothing but positive remarks towards their fellow secretary coworkers. debbie, for example, expressed: the dean's secretary is very supportive. i love her as a person in her role because she stays away from conflict. she would go out of her way to help me. another participant who shares the same feelings is stephanie, who said: 89 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 i have great support from other secretaries from different departments and the staff that covers the desk, since we have not had any backup support personnel. in addition to this, debbie explained: i think that we have created a special place as far as the people. i prayed to work around just the best, and i got what i prayed for. i enjoy my secretary coworkers. we have [conversations that are] deep, personal, [and] friendly. they are my friends. the connections the participants make with their administrative assistant coworkers contribute to building a positive work environment from their perspective. all participants of this study shared how they created meaningful relationships with other administrator assistants. while participants of this study shared that they build relationships with students and their administrative assistant colleagues, they shared that they are challenged to build relationships with their supervisors. sandra indicated: i do have very little interaction with a few students. i always feel sort of an affinity to [students] just because i'm a mom. building relationships with students is important… the challenge in my current role is i feel a little isolated. there are people in and out all day. it's not like i can just chat and ask for help. plus, i'm too busy to do that anyway. furthermore, like all other participants, sandra shared that she has developed relationships with other administrator assistants where they use each other as “a sounding board.” participants indicated that they use each other as a support network to navigate their workplaces. having a network of individuals who share similar experiences and job titles fosters community and support. these relationships also inspire the participants to nurture their long-standing relationships with students. discussion herzberg’s two factor theory emphasizes the importance of identifying and addressing the factors that improve job satisfaction (herzbrg, 1966). all participants of this study expressed a need for more training, mentorship, and validation, including better pay, in their current roles within higher education institutions. despite the lack of formal training and mentorship, the administrative assistants of this study found a sense of validation through their relationships with other administrative assistants and some students. while all participants of this study self-identified as women, it is important to acknowledge that not all secretaries are women, and the role of a secretary has traditionally been viewed as a female-dominant profession. the participants felt that the title of “administrative assistant” was more appropriate than “secretary,” suggesting a need for further research on the implications of these titles. future research should also explore the experiences of men and gender-nonbinary administrative assistants, as well as examine the role and impact of gender in this field. most published research underscores the significant contributions of secretaries to “the missions of education, research advancement and public service” (kuo, 2009, p. 43). job satisfaction is a complex, multidimensional concept influenced by situational, relational, organizational, and personal factors (volkwein & zhou, 2003). it is linked to organizational outcomes such as higher performance, commitment, and retention (lund, 2003) and is also shaped by gender, degree, academic rank, and financial stress (volkwein & zhou, 2003). administrative assistants in higher education possess a vital role in supporting students, faculty, and university leadership in higher education. in the first finding, administrative assistants reported a need for both formal training and mentorship to perform their job requirements effectively. while formal training and mentorship serve different purposes, participants in this study expressed a lack of both. training provides educational opportunities to develop specific skills, while mentorship involves a dynamic relationship in which a mentor guides a mentee through professional and personal growth experiences (torrens et al., 2017). investing in mentorship can provide positive returns for higher education institutions, including increased staff retention rates and enhanced career satisfaction (gardiner et al., 2007). research by allen et al. (2004) indicates that academic staff with mentoring relationships experienced greater career satisfaction and are more committed to their work. additionally, mentoring has been shown to decrease work-related stressors (allen et al., 1995; gardiner et al., 2007; wilson & elman, 1990). the participants revealed that they do not feel validated by their pay, with salaries remaining stagnant and starting rates already too low. all participants expressed dissatisfaction with their compensation and lack of opportunities for raises. many rely on financial support from a partner to manage their modest salary. the lack of recognition and limited prospects for advancement contribute to decreased job satisfaction (herzberg, 1966). offering competitive compensation could enhance job satisfaction and improve retention. despite the absence of formal mentorship, participants were able to build relationships with students and peers, becoming mentors themselves. the relationships they built, particularly with students, often lasted long after students graduated. these peer relationships also contribute to job satisfaction. however, one participant reported feeling isolated due to the minimal interaction with others, which hindered their ability to build meaningful relationships and reduce both emotional and professional support. recommendations future research should elaborate on how campus climate affects the job satisfaction of administrative assistants and investigate existing policies aimed at retaining and rewarding them. given the crucial role administrative assistants play, it is imperative for university leaders to understand their job satisfaction experiences. published research has explored job satisfaction in higher education; yet, the role of administrative assistants has been ignored. therefore, this paper contributes to higher 90 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 education management and job satisfaction by sharing the experiences of administrative assistants. to enhance job satisfaction, university management should focus on improving work conditions and recognition for administrative staff. additionally, universities could implement regular feedback mechanisms to address concerns promptly and establish clear career development paths to support long-term career growth and satisfaction among administrative assistants. for example, instituting a formal mentorship program to build support and foster connections. while the participants eventually found relationships with their peers and the students, several noted feeling isolated and that they had no one to support them. in addition to mentoring programs, recognizing the important role of administrative assistants by increasing salary and hiring more support staff could bolster their sense of validation. several participants had expressed feeling undervalued due to their low pay and lack of support in their duties. these recommendations should be considered by higher education institutions as options to increase the satisfaction and well-being of administrative assistants. conclusion this study contributes to the lack of published research about administrative assistants in higher education in the united states. administrative assistants in higher education are in a unique position due to their involvement with students, faculty, and administrators. therefore, the role of a university administrative assistant is multifaceted and involves juggling multiple responsibilities, expectations, and relationships. herzberg’s two-factory theory (1966) draws attention to the intrinsic and extrinsic aspects contributing to job satisfaction. in the case of this study’s participants, satisfaction was impacted by both these factors, notably the absence of validation, lack of training and mentorship, and building meaningful relationships with other administrative assistants. the participants expressed an absence of validation due to a lack of pay, showing the impact of extrinsic characteristics on dissatisfaction. with raises being rare and starting salaries being low, the participants expressed a need for more support, training, and mentorship in their roles. to succeed in their duties, they had to seek out training on their own without support or mentorship. participants also expressed how they built relationships with students and peers. although they did not receive mentorship, they became mentors by helping students and peers navigate the higher education landscape. this highlights how the participants developed an intrinsic sense of value in their work, motivating them to stay in their position despite the dissatisfaction with pay, mentorship, and training opportunities. due to the vital role of administrative assistants in higher education and the variety of skills they must possess and duties they undertake daily, more insight and understanding into their contributions is needed. thus, the researchers encourage leaders, administrators, and faculty not to ignore the value and support that administrative assistants provide to higher education institutions. references ablanedo-rosas, j. h., blevins, r. c., gao, h., teng, w.-y., & white, j. 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(2015). academic incivility and bullying as a gendered and racialized phenomena. adult learning, 26(1), 42-47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1045159514558414 kalleberg, a. l. (1977). work values and job rewards: a theory of job satisfaction. american sociological review, 42(1), 124–143. https://doi.org/10.2307/2117735 kuo, h. (2009). understanding relationships between academic staff and administrators: an organisational culture perspective. journal of higher education policy and management, 31(1), 43-54. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600800802559278 lampman, c. (2012). women faculty at risk: us professors report on their experiences with student incivility, bullying, aggression, and sexual attention. naspa journal about women in higher education, 5(2), 184-208. https://doi.org/10.1515/njawhe-2012-1108 lewis, d. 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(2014). factors affecting motivation and job satisfaction of academic staff of universities in south-south geopolitical zone of nigeria. international education studies, 7(7), 43-51. othman, n., mokhtar, s. s. m., & asaad, m. n. m. (2017). quality management system, employee satisfaction and employee performance in private higher education institutions: a proposed framework. international journal of management research and reviews, 7(6), 681. plattner, i. e. & mberengwa, d. s. (2010). 'we are the forgotten ones’: occupational stress among university secretaries in botswana: original research. sa journal of human resource management, 8(1). https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/ejc95915 ponjuan, l., martin conley, v., & trower, c. (2011). career stage differences in pre-tenure track faculty perceptions of professional and personal relationships with colleagues. the journal of higher education, 8(2), 319-346. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2011.11777204 prevost, c. & hunt, e. (2018). bullying and mobbing in academe: a literature review. european scientific journal, 14(8). https://doi.org/10.19044/esj.2018.v14n8p1 provost, m. w. (2005). a study of four public higher education institutions in florida: the relationships between faculty and administrator goal congruence, faculty productivity and job satisfaction. boca raton, fl: florida atlantic university. https://fau.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fau%3a9037 raineri, e. m., frear, d. f., & edmonds, j. j. (2011). an examination of the academic reach of faculty and administrator bullying. international journal of business and social science, 2(12), 22-35. https://www.ijbssnet.com/journals/vol._2_no._12%3b_july _2011/4.pdf saldaña, j. (2009). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. sage publications ltd. sorcinelli, m. d., austin, a. e., eddy, p. l., & beach, a. l. (2006). creating the future of faculty development: learning from the past, understanding the present. jossey-bass. teles, l. & ragsdale, r. (1989). the impact of word processing on writing behaviour: the interaction of faculty and their secretaries. higher education research & development, 8(2), 217-235. https://doi.org/10.1080/0729436890080207 torrens, o. d., salinas, c., & floyd, d. l. (2017). examining the value of mentoring and men of color staff members of a community college. mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 25(5), 509-527. https://doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2017.1415830 u.s. census bureau. (2019). american community survey 2019. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs volkwein, j. f., & parmley, k. (2000). comparing administrative satisfaction in public and private universities. research in higher education, 41. 95–116. 92 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 https://doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2017.1415830 volkwein, j. f., & zhou, y. (2003). testing a model of administrative job satisfaction. research in higher education, 44(2), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1022099612036 volkwein, j. f., malik, s. m., & napierski-prancl, m. (1998). administrative satisfaction and the regulatory climate at public universities. research in higher education, 39(1), 43–63. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1018752311951 wilson, j. a. & elman, n. s. (1990). organizational benefits of mentoring. academy of management executive, 4. 88–93. https://doi.org/10.5465/ame.1990.4277215 93 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle volume 1, number 1 spring, 1997 preview the mission of advancing women in leadership is to bring together a variety of topics of interest to international women leaders representing diverse professions. written from multiple perspectives, the articles in this inaugural issue of the journal focus on important issues related to women and girls, with five of the entries targeting the experiences of women or girls in educational settings. four of the articles offer status reports, while the other three discuss specific challenges encountered by women. in the first article, rowe shares eight themes resulting from her investigation of women's reflections concerning their childhood gifted label. next, tonso explores some of the ways that violences and silences in graduate engineering classrooms structure women and their lives. liu, in the third article, reports on educated chinese women who, because of language and cultural barriers are unable to pursue their careers after moving to the united states. the experiences, challenges and victories of hispanic female principals are described by marcano in the fourth article. pemberton presents a thorough analysis of the components of title ix compliance, emphasizes the gender specific value of sport, and reports on the gender bias which persists in intercollegiate athletics. the american association of university women's reports on the status on girls in public schools is the theme of little's article. the highlights of the findings of five years of extensive research offer dramatic insights into the major concerns that affect girls' education. johnson presents details of a project aimed at improving the education of girls in guatemala's primary public schools. in the final journal entry, garner reviews a book specifically focusing on women leaders in http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/hispanic.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/hispanic.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/womsoc/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html education but with insights and advice applicable to women in leadership positions in a variety of professions. we hope you enjoy the first issue of advancing women in leadership in its entirety and that you look forward to the subsequent issues to be published in august and november. we want this journal to serve women and girls around the world and to be viewed as a professional publication site for the scholarly inquiry that advances women in leadership. the editors appreciate all of the scholars who have agreed, thus far, to serve on the editorial advisory board and the editorial review board. we are also grateful to our publisher, gretchen glasscock, for her hard work and her willingness to assist women internationally. we welcome suggestions of topics for upcoming issues and encourage the submission of manuscripts. 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https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com microsoft word women-only leadershippositionsinthe middleeast by majd megheirkouni.docx advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 64 advancing women in leadership vol. 34, pp. 64-78, 2014 available online at http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper women-only leadership positions in the middle east: exploring cultural attitudes towards syrian women for sport career development majd megheirkouni accepted october 21, 2014 based on the gender ratios in the leadership positions of general sport organisation in syria, this article aims to explore the reasons behind the low level of women in sport leadership positions. leadership training used in the general sport organisation in syria for high-skilled leaders serves to understand the how individual leaders develop in sport bodies, but it fails to explain the reasons for the low level of women in senior sport administrative positions. in this study, i attempt to analyze the cultural aspects to find out: the nature of challenges surrounding women’s’ career development; and how syrian women learn and develop within the institutional-cultural context of syria. data were collected by semi-structured interviews with ten syrian women leaders: eight from sports governing bodies, one from the national olympic committee, and one from the high executive committee. implications for addressing the challenges for the low level of women in top management in syrian sport are outlined. keywords: national culture, leadership, development, syrian women, and sport. introduction the term ‘dominance’ is an important issue in social interactions (gifford, 1991; wiggins, 1979) and the emergence of dominance hierarchies in small groups is well documented (bales, 1950; berger, fisek, norman, & zelditch, 1977). although some studies have mainly focused on how dominance hierarchies are formed (mazur, 1985; ridgeway & berger, 1986), there is little research on the implications for arabic culture on genders in order to address the reasons of the low level of women in senior sport administrative positions. the topic of gender in leadership is a renewed subject, at the very least, in the arab world and in the middle east region. this might be because gender is a sensitive issue in leadership and in these regions from different perspectives: religious, social, economic, and political views that constitute the motor nerve of daily life. consequently, considering women in leadership and its development requires taking into account privacy in the local context in general and religious and strict societies in particular. however, it is argued that women’s labour is considered as a significant factor in economic growth in these regions (world bank, 2006) because the arab world has witnessed a resurgence of arab women’s activism in leadership in different fields (o’connor, 2010). this has increased the need for women’s career development, which has become a real priority for policy makers and firms in the arab world. according to the united nations development programme (2005), the arab region witnessed a greater increase in the role of women in economic activities than other parts of world between 1990 and 2003. in syria, as well as in other arab countries, the increasing participation of women in the labour market and their career development has been fully attributed to politically led nationalisation strategies. however, it should be further noted that although modernisation has assisted changes and development in economic and social contexts across all arab countries, the institutional-cultural context continues to be a great challenge for arab women (alajmi, 2001). for instance, wilkinson (1996) found that emirati, omani, and bahraini women in top leadership positions face discrimination at work, cultural barriers, and lack of trust in their leadership. similarly, al-suwaihal (2010) found that kuwaiti women leaders have reached various leadership positions, but cultural difficulties are still the main challenges in most leadership positions. this is because males still dominate most leadership advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 65 positions in all professions and have the ability to influence their surrounding social network more than women do. when discussing the level of women in leadership positions in international sport organisations, it is noted that sport leadership positions are still dominated by men and this seems to be a global phenomenon. according to the international olympic committee, the proportion of women in leadership positions was supposed to be 10 per cent, but this proportion was not achieved in practice because there were only eleven women among 126 members to represent their national countries on the international olympic committee. this weakness seems to be a global phenomenon in the sport discipline. context of the study it is noted that organisations, regardless of their type, state, or for-profit and non-profit sector, rapidly pay attention to human resource development including leadership by increasing the development budgets for training and development and for designing leadership development programmes in order to develop leaders, but these efforts are still not enough for applying effective and successful leadership development and the efforts placed for developing leaders across all leadership positions are seen as one of the most critical barriers in this regard (madsen, 2008). callahan, whitener, and sandlin (2007) claim that because leadership development has implications for three interconnected categories of the field of human resource development – career development, training and development, and organisation development – the strong application of leadership development separates between organisations that take into account the challenges of their internal and external environments and other organisations that do not take such issues into consideration. in this vein, it is argued that to ensure the outcome required by leadership development, a successful, comprehensive and global approach to organisational leadership development intended to foster an understanding of the uniqueness of experience and environment, maintain a focus on cultural heritage and organizational future, and adapt the leadership model and approach is required (weir, 2010). however, in some countries, such as an arab context in general and syria in particular, these efforts are only in their infancy. syria is one of the key countries in the world because of its historical legacy, religious legacy, geographical location, tourism features before the political and religious conflicts began in 2011. although syria has witnessed new changes in all aspects of life since the 2000s, scholarly research on syria and its people is difficult to find. more specifically, research focused on sport and leadership development and gender in that country seems to be almost non-existent, and there is no evidence of existing research on the development of women sport leaders. at the same time, a number of scholars have observed that there are few empirical studies that address the key themes and problems around women’s leadership in developing countries, and the middle east region in particular (al-lamky, 2007; madsen, 2010; omair, 2010; tlaiss & kauser, 2010; yaseen, 2010). it is noted that perceptual changes in syria toward women for many decades have served to help women to compete with men strongly in all aspects of life: education and employment, not only in state and nonprofit organisations supported or managed by governments, but also in for-profit sector organisations that have surfaced from all directions which has increased the opportunities to design, adopt, and implement leadership development for syrian women leaders. without doubt an understanding of the context in any country might help to design leadership development programmes that deliver the desired outcome, but without research that explores the influence of national culture on these women in career development, the application of leadership development will be questionable because one of the main implications of leadership development in the field of human resource development is career development. this study begins by shedding light on the challenges for women leaders in syrian sports of how to learn, and develop in terms of on-job training and off-job training for career development. hence, the primary research question for this study is: what are the challenges to leadership development of syrian women that influence the issue of women’s representation within the highest ranks of syrian sports? to address this problem, i conducted indepth, qualitative interviews with syrian leaders in syrian sports bodies and the national olympic committee to investigate the reasons behind the low level of women in senior administrative positions in sport. i also wanted to understand the influence of national culture on attending training and development sessions. identifying the leadership’s needs requires an understanding of the context. because developing leadership occurs as a result of the internal and external challenges that reflect the organisation environment, hofstede’s theory has provided a valuable theoretical lens to guide this research. hofstede (1980a) defined culture as ‘the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another’ (p. 51). advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 66 hofstede’s framework, including data collected from forty countries, focuses on the range of norms, beliefs and value that together constitute a culture. he identified four dimensions: (a) power distance, (b) uncertainty avoidance, (c) individualism versus collectivism, and (d) masculinity versus femininity to which he subsequently added a fifth, (e) confucian dynamism (hofstede & bond, 1988). the descriptions of these dimensions adopted by most scholars and researchers are as follows. table 1 description of findings based on hofstede’s dimensions dimension description and examples masculinity 1. family system determines the degree of parental support to their daughters. 2. family system is influenced by geographical location of family home. 3. the location of the family home had implications for the equity between boys and girls. 4. the low level of women in academic field influenced their performance in teamwork. power distance 1. patriarchal system of family makes male the second leader in the family beyond paterfamilias. 2. mother in a masculine job did not have influence at home. 3. ignoring women opinions in most sport meetings even for issues related to women’s sports. 4. male leaders refused all forms of criticism by women. 5. male leaders did not accept working under female leadership. 6. ignoring the privacy of women. 7. promoting the belief that women must do what they are asked to do. uncertainty avoidance 1. lack of stability. 2. political conflicts altered to religious conflicts had impact on women career development. 3. merging between religious bigotry and jobs by men. 4. keeping women from any leadership role due to security reasons. 5. difficulties for women’s daily attendance at work. 6. difficulties of attending weekly and monthly meetings across all syrian cities. 7. the common tendency for most women was to overcome the crises, rather than the desire for career development. individualismcollectivism 1. the lack of collective culture of learning from academic early stages. 2. the use of autocratic thinking rather than distributed leadership. 3. demonstrating women as a passive element in collective meetings because of resisting culture of sharing ideas and opinions. 4. self-development was as a result of the lack of collective culture for learning and completing the tasks required. 5. self-learning is still seen as uncompleted efforts of women. power distance. this refers to the extent to which the less powerful members of organisations accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. in low power distance organisations, a flat organisational structure seems to be more common. countries that value low power distance are denmark and austria. in high power distance, there is a clear line between leaders and followers because of the hierarchical structure adopted. countries that value high power distance are arab countries, malaysia, and panama (hofstede, 1980b). it may be stated that discussing this dimension in developing countries, such as arab world, suggests that power distance is related to the norms of acceptable work-related behaviours because the arab world considers women as less than compared to their counterparts males. for example, luthar & luthar (2002) found that women in low managerial positions in high power culture are accustomed to their leaders’ sexual behaviours; and they illustrated this behaviour, acting as a legitimate exercise of power by those leaders. in a similar vein, previous research examined how men’s perceptions of power distance and levels of social dominance orientation interact to influence perceptions of women as managers in egalitarian and nonegalitarian countries. the findings revealed that high levels of social dominance orientation in college men was negatively related to a favourable attitude toward women as managers in the usa and kuwait. it was also found that perceptions of power distance moderated the relationship between social dominance orientation and attitudes toward women as managers in kuwait, but not in the usa (aneika, duffy, & hamad, 2012). this may shed light on the nature of challenges that face women’s career development. advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 67 uncertainty avoidance. this deals with rule orientation, stress, and employment stability. in low uncertainty avoidance, there are few rules and high tolerance for deviant and innovative suggestions. additionally, organisations tend to have a transformational leadership role. for instance, singapore and jamaica were examples of low uncertainty avoidance. high uncertainty avoidance refers to many rules, resistance to change and low tolerance for deviant suggestions to reduce uncertainty, lack of confidence and belief in members’ leadership abilities, and rationality by using a vertical style of leadership. in this regard, greece and portugal were examples of high uncertainty avoidance (hofstede, 1980b). individualism-collectivism. this refers to the degree to which people characterise themselves and their group/organisation. in high individualism, a culture has ties between individuals that are loose because the individual tends to care about self-actualisation; in low individualism, a culture has individuals who are integrated into strong in-groups and extend their families, which continue protecting them in exchange for loyalty (hofstede, 1980b). this may suggest that societies in which women’s right are neglected, and women seek for career development attempt to show individualised behaviours. this may be supported by previous research by shafiro, himelein, and best, 2003). the findings of this research revealed that although correlations between individualism/collectivism and gender attitudes were not statistically significant, there was a tendency for individualism to be associated with liberal genders attitudes in the usa. masculinity. this is the extent to which the leading values in a society are distributed between masculine and feminine. in a high masculinity culture, few women can reach top management level; but in a low masculinity society, women have more opportunity, similar to men (hofstede, 1980b). king (1995) argues that there is a relationship between leadership and masculinity. he suggested that women must prove their masculinity to be accepted as leaders, as halberstam (1998) put it that ‘female masculinity has been situated as the place where patriarchy goes to women on the female psyche and reproduces misogyny within femaleness’. however, although women managers were called the managers of the twenty-first century (schwartz, 1992), it is noted that only 42 women have been presidents or even prime ministers and 50 per cent of those women came to office in the 1990s (adler, 1999). confucian dynamism. this refers to long-term versus short-term orientation. short-term orientation refers to past and present-oriented values such as respect for tradition and habits, personal steadiness and stability; and long-term orientation refers to future-oriented value such as perseverance, thrift, and ordering relationships by status (hofstede & bond, 1988). hofstede (2001) suggests that individuals in long-term orientation emphasize the development of social relationships, draw a high level of satisfaction from daily human relations, and link between family and business issues; while individuals with shortterm orientation often emphasise the short-term results, draw less satisfaction from daily human relations, and separate between family and business issues. this dimension was illustrated through studying gender differences in the long-term and short-term goals and life plan that might be influenced by national culture characteristics. for example, evidence from a variety of research suggests that women pursue a diversity of goals compared to men. this result may reflect the nature of changes in women’s role in western culture. however, this tends be to be questionable in societies which lack t any form of changes in action regarding women’s role. this is not because women fail to pursue a greater diversity of goals compared to men, but such factors as security, religious bigotry, and family system may be the reason of the lack of women career development sivakumar and nakata, (2001) have criticized hofstede’s (1980a) work because of a set of weaknesses summarised as follows: it reduces culture to an overly simplistic fouror five-dimension conceptualization; it limits the sample to a single multinational corporation; it fails to capture the malleability of culture over time; and it ignores within-country cultural heterogeneity. although researchers have criticized hofstede, they still favour this five-dimension framework because of its clarity and resonance with managers. accordingly, there is a practical need in the literature at this time for a comprehensive discussion of ways to improve the use of hofstede’s framework. hofstede’s culture theory has been used in a multitude of studies with different types of participant. kirkman, lowe, and gibson (2006) reviewed 180 studies published in 40 business and psychology journals and two international annual volumes between 1980 and 2002 in order to consolidate what is empirically verifiable about hofstede’s cultural values framework. a variety of samples were utilized and classified by three levels of analysis, whether individual, group/organisational, or country, some of which included: change management (eby, adams, russell, & gaby, 2000); conflict management (oeztzel, 1998; smith, dugan, advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 68 peterson, & leung, 1998); decision-making (steensma, marino, & weaver, 2000); human resource management hrm (earley, gibson, & chen, 1999; ryan, mcfarland, baron, & page, 1999); leadership (chan & drasgow, 2001; pillai & meindl, 1998; house et al., 1999); work-related attitudes (thomas & au, 2002; spector et al., 2002); entrepreneurship (morris, davis, & allen, 1994; thomas & mueller, 2000); and social networks (manev & stevenson, 2001). although hofstede’s culture theory has been used as a theoretical framework for a variety of studies in a multitude of countries, to date no research has been published on hofstede’s culture theory being utilized as a basis for research in sport leadership development within the middle east. in these countries, there is a need for understanding national culture for explaining the challenge toward women in their opportunity structures with sport organisations. however, although general sport organisation in syria supports women leaders, anecdotal evidence has suggested that national culture threatens many women’s career development in leadership in syrian sport. it is worth mentioning that previous sport management literature has discussed women’s career development, growth, and their opportunity structures with sport organisations. for example, researchers such knoppers (1992), burton, barr, fink and bruening (2009), deal and stevenson (1998), inglis, danylchuk, and pastore (2000), cunningham, doherty, and gregg (2007), pastore, inglis, and danylchuk (1996), sagas and ashley (2001), sagas and cunningham (2004), sartore and cunningham (2007), schein (2001; 2007), august and quintero (2001), and yiamouyiannis and osborne (2012) have all examined the experiences of women in leadership positions, but none of them has mentioned women’s career development and their opportunity structures within sport organisations in unstable environments. consequently, to date no research has been published on hofstede’s culture theory in order to explore opportunity structures of women with sport organisations in unstable environments. many studies in the literature do propose that there is a dynamic interaction between culture and leadership development in the country of this study. for instance, weir (2010, p. 220) argues that before putting energy into seeking the answer of how to develop leaders, successful leadership development needs to identify the cultural nuances that exist in the middle east; and to understand the leadership needs in the context of factors that contribute to shaping arab organisations into what it is today (weir, 2010). mabey and finch-lee (2007) stated that a culturalist perspective, best associated with the work of hofstede (1980), is a promising source of explaining leadership development. although the main purpose of this study was to use hofstede’s culture theory in order to explore the challenges to women’s career development, and to understand how syrian women lean and develop with the institutional-cultural context of syria, it is worth mentioning that there is relationship between understanding leadership needs and national culture for designing or implementing effective leadership development, which is one of the main issues required for career development. research methods and design the notion of gender and leadership has attracted attention in most academic disciplines including sport, but this attention is still lacking in some countries and clusters because of institutional-cultural contexts. in this regard, qualitative research was adopted for this study to explore in-depth the nature of this problem in a particular country. the purpose of this research has required understanding participants’ views regarding the challenges facing their career development. in this vein, klenke (2008) states ‘qualitative methods produce a wealth of detailed data about a small number of people and cases; they provide depth and detail through direct quotation and careful description of situations, events, interactions, and observed behaviours. consequently, qualitative analysis involves the nonnumerical organisation of data in order to discover patterns, themes, forms...’ (p. 33). as the goal of this qualitative research design was to gather descriptive data, which reflect the experiences of women leaders in syrian sport, a phenomenological approach, in particular, guides the design of this study (wolcott, 2009), because qualitative research can capture cultural values in interviews using qualitative content analysis to characterize culture at the individual or group/organisational level. sample size in a phenomenological study may vary from 2 to 25 (klenke, 2008), so the sample of 10 participants is accepted in this study. phenomenology attempts to understand the world from the point of view of the women leaders in syrian sport directly involved in the social process, which leads to a ‘deeper understanding of the nature or meaning of our everyday experiences’ (van manen, 2001, p. 9). it is worth mentioning that as phenomenology is essentially the study of lived experience, it refers to the world as lived by an individual, not the world or a reality as something separate from the individual (valle, king, & halling, 1989). using culture as a source for explaining the challenge of career development suggests that a phenomenological approach serves to provide deeper understanding of the challenge of women in their advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 69 career development. indeed, a descriptive phenomenological approach is used in this study because little is known about an issue, and the aim of the study is to make clear and understand the most essential meaning of a phenomenon of interest from the perspective of those directly involved in it (giorgi, 1997). selection criteria for participants selecting appropriate individuals to this study has been based on specific criteria. i visited general sport organisation while i was collecting my doctoral data in syria. this helped me to get access to further leaders by using my relationships. in this regard, my visiting general sport organisation purposed interviewing all women who had managerial roles. as a result, only ten women leaders were identified for my research because they were the only women who had managerial roles in syrian sports organisations. although the final result from phenomenological approach research is characterised by the limited number of interviewees, it is characterised by its exploratory nature and the new knowledge that surfaces. research interview protocol data collection was conducted between 26 july and 24 december 2012 by in-depth one-hour interviews with women leaders in syrian sports on general sport organisation in syria. the interview guide helped to organise the interviews through dividing each interviews into two parts. the first part included introductory questions to reinforce the relationship between the researcher and the participants (musselwhite, cuff, mcgregor, & king, 2006). the second part included the key research questions that were designed based on culture theory. the first interview was utilised as a pilot test to ensure that the questions required would be the same; there was no modification (biddle, markland, gilbourne, chatzisarantis, & sparkes, 2001). all interviews were audio-taped for later transcription. all women leaders in syrian sport had similar leadership roles and responsibilities. data analysis. the transcribed raw data has been read many times in order to ensure full understanding of the nature of the collected data. more specifically, the nature of challenges accompanying women in sport career development and leadership in particular in the middle east context is scarce. this required utilising a thematic interpretational content analysis for this study because this approach is appropriate to understand the nature of the challenges surrounding women to reach top management levels in sport (gibbs, 2010). this was followed by data analysis steps summarised by gratton and jones (2010). the first step was data reduction that included extracting raw data themes relating to sport career development and the influence of national culture surrounding women in general sport organisation from each interview. after that, i identified quotes that belong to the common themes and categories, which were classified as low-order themes. then all low-order themes were combined and compared to identify high-order themes. this was followed by also comparing all high-order themes to identify general dimensions (gratton & jones, 2010; jackson & baker, 2001). as a result, this served to build a collective picture from the experience of each woman leader about the topic. at the same time, the leadership and culture literature has clearly dominated the data analysis, and this was evident when the naming of the low-order themes, high-order themes and general dimensions was correlated with perceptions from national culture literature to serve sport literature (corbin & strauss, 2008; young & atkinson, 2012). trustworthiness and validity in relation to credibility, first, this study utilised data about the same topic through recording the interviews, and using interview forms with written details about each question. second, the researcher consulted with colleagues about some legal and ethical matters, especially as data was collected in a culture sensitive to women’s issues; third, i asked some academic staff to check the information collected and the conclusions drawn because this allowed the researcher to analyse their comments and suggestions to build stronger conclusion based on many views of different academic staff on the same data. this would help to provide strong conclusions and suggestions about the topic. however, it should be further noted that because the author came from the same country and is aware of the local culture of the country chosen for this study. the analysis results were sent to one of the participants who had a long history in leadership positions, and also two academic staff in the uk. this study achieved dependability as all interviews were conducted in the same setting by using the same research questions with all participants; the same rules and steps concerning categories and coding were consistently applied; asking one woman leader who was selected for her feedback because of her long experience in syrian sport. this study achieved confirmability through interview notes with all participants and transcriptions of all interviews that would allow other investigators to pursue the chain of evidence. in relation to transferability, although the purpose of this study is not to generalise the findings, advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 70 transferability is possible because this study contributes to existing theory on the phenomenon of women in sport leadership positions via the description of this research process, especially when readers determine whether the findings of my study could be applied to different settings. findings the inductive approach of the study helped to understand the nature of career development taking place in general sport organisation in order to explore the challenges for opportunity structures of women with sport organisations, and how they learn and develop in unstable environments because of culture sensitivity. especially, this approach was based on the conceptual framework and the research questions of this study. what are the challenges surrounding women’s career development? education the low number of women in the academic environment. given that the number of universities operating in both state and private sectors is rapidly increasing across all syrian cities, the number of students is still increasing, but the number of female students is still low and varies between schools and between universities. this was reflected in the capability of female students to learn in an environment characterised by its masculinity; or at least the leading character of the schools or collective projects in universities is masculinity. in this regard, all participants, except three, agreed that the academic environment at undergraduate level was not seen as a stimulating learning environment. one participant indicated: when i was an undergraduate, we used to do projects in teamwork or groups, but the problem, for me like any other woman, was that each team contains at least five males with only one female. in fact, i was uncomfortable. indeed, the education system did not support us as women to learn effectively and comfortably (m1). one participant shared this story: i failed once submitting a collective assignment with other three students in my team because i could not communicate with them at any time and my family did not allow me to go out anytime i wanted.... although i submitted my own assignment, it was rejected because of being a collective task. indeed, the tutor did not understand that i cannot meet with my colleagues based on their time because of being a woman, so he supported my three colleagues’ attitude, and then i was the loser (m9). it is found that leadership training and development is still a new trend in syria in general, so theoretical background regarding the concept of leadership development in the academic study was the essence of career development. in this regard, it should be noted most women who seek career development based on their theoretical background in leadership are much better than their male counterparts, but the problem is that not all women are able to cover all their roles in any managerial positions because of their commitments to either family or husband. one participant stated: i have a masters degree in sport management that supports my opportunity for managerial positions. but i cannot commit for a long time, such as attending regular meetings in the 14 syrian cities. so men tend to have more managerial positions than we have (m2). patriarchal system the structure of family for preparing women. although syrian family, school, and society tend to look at both genders in the same way, the traditional rules, which relate to habits, traditions, and social norms, make male members the second leader in the family after the paterfamilias. in this regard, strict rules are applied with regard to sisters’ behaviours. in other words, a brother can practise his leadership more than his sisters. one participant stated i have no right to argue with my dad or brother regarding going out and spending my whole day outside the home; however, i registered on different management courses, but i failed to attend because most of these courses took place at night and my brother and dad do not allow me to go out after 7 pm (m9). one participant observed: my family is big because it includes 9 members as well as my dad and mom, so equity among all brothers and sisters is difficult because the priority is for brothers. what i want to say, my salary from my own career is not enough to cover my personal needs, ... and my family cannot help me support my leadership training (m9). in a similar vein, one participant stated: ...my mother’s job requires a strong personality because she is an officer in the military, but when she comes back home, she advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 71 turns to her traditional role as mother because my father is the lord of this home and he makes the final decision-making. indeed, this is the same when i come back home because i had other responsibilities towards my husband. so i make a balanced relationship between job and home because i want to avoid all forms of argument with my husband regarding my home responsibilities (m4). another participant stated: i left my job once because i had a serious argument with the head of our governing body. the reason is that he designs and identifies the training needs of our female team without taking into account that our female team has its own requirements that must be understood and discussed seriously with women, at least to run correctly (m6). refusing criticism monopoly on managing internal and external affairs. the ten participants demonstrated a kind of disappointment because of the low level of women in leadership positions despite their high qualifications and performance compared to their male counterparts. women were ignored and avoided for most managerial roles. indeed, their disappointment manifested clearly in the examples presented by the participants. one participant said, it is not fair that men are our guidance regarding developing our development strategies and legislating the laws and the rules...etc. let me explain it to you. the federation of women’s gymnastics is controlled by a male leader, and our participants in all championships are controlled by a male leader. there is not even any opportunity for negotiation (m7). another participant told this story: once one of our female champions was invited to participate in the world rhythmic gymnastics championship, but this player had a personal problem, which makes it difficult for her to participate. the head of our governing body attempted to find out all the details and the reason behind her apologies for participation, but it was embarrassing to this player. in this regard, we lack a female leader in the gymnastics governing body for females who understands such situations. but this leadership level has been controlled by men for the last 30 years and we must accept all that we are asked to do in this federation (m8). one woman had a sad story: i worked in olympic cities for 10 years, so i was selected to manage the olympic cities across our country, but this raised a serious concern for different male managers of sport facilities in most of our olympic cities because they do not accept working under female leadership and claimed that women do not have leadership capability; yes, i lost this leadership level, and when they selected a man for this position, all who opposed my leadership for this position acted to demonstrate their commitment to the new manager; even, the new male manager refused my criticism for any reason during our meetings because he had gained the others’ trust and this is enough for him (m10). political and religious conflicts lack of stability and career development. the syrian crisis altered from political to religious conflicts, which was reflected in all life aspects in syrian society. these conflicts moved inside general sport organisation because these organisations contain people from all components of syrian society. in this regard, leadership training workshops running in general sport organisation seemed to be useless. one participant said, the political and religious conflicts affected the outcome of our training because of the merging of training inside the organisation with religious conflicts, which led to conflicts among participants, especially women because these conflicts had a religious character, which minimizes the effectiveness of leadership training and makes learning in an unstable environment more difficult (m1). one participant stated a leadership role at general sport organisation requires attending most of the events that occur here at any time. well, however, this is not possible for me as a woman because i am living in one of the hot areas that witnesses the fight between the syrian arab army and terrorist groups, so for security reasons i cannot come to the federation on time or even attend daily, so i do not feel i can be effective in this task if it has been elected me… for security reasons (m2). another participant noted advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 72 some of our managerial meetings take place across all syrian cities, even within the syrian crisis. this requires travelling weekly to different cities, but moving from one city to another is not safe because of terrorist groups, so you might think that we would delay these meetings. indeed, general sport organisation relies on regulation, rules and law to ensure its effectiveness. otherwise the leaders will lose their positions with defaults on attendance. for me, as a woman, i cannot travel to different cities now because of the lack of security, so i avoid putting myself in this situation and do not want any leadership role in this federation because of the instability (m8). one participant stated in fact, i do not have the desire to seek a leadership role in this federation because we are struggling to survive and because of the violence and fighting among all components of syrian society. all that we want now is to overcome this crisis in syria and protect our families (m7). weak outcome of teamwork lack of collective learning culture. although religious rules, family structure, and the nature of social relationships are all based on strong relationships among people, there is still controversy about this issue and an exceptional situation that affects leadership development and career development, as this quote illustrates: when i was in the university, i did not like teamwork. even sometimes we were asked to complete either practical or theoretical assignments, but i did not like it because in teamwork, i saw competition among students, the sensitivity to other behaviours and acts, feeling jealous and other issues among the team members, which did not support us to work or learn in teamwork (m1). another participant highlighted the relationship between team members in the meetings determining the annual plans discussing the annual budget. she stated yes, we meet in general sport organisation because we are members in the high executive committee to discuss our sport requirements as teamwork with regard to participating in internal and external championships, funding, training and development, managerial programmes, and many other relevant issues. what i want to say is although we meet to discuss the above issues, we do not have the right to make decisions or to be active, especially, and the main active members are men and they think that the degree of mistakes for women must be zero, otherwise, we will lose our role (m5). one participant stated we achieve the results required through teamwork, but the reality is that we lack distributed leadership when working in teams because autocratic thinking is more common in our teams by certain men. also, unwritten rules can be seen here. for instance, i should listen and accept other men’s ideas, but i should not insist on my suggestions and ideas (m7). unequal stimulation although general sport organisation of syria is a non-profit organisation, its members are mostly volunteers because they are elected to their managerial positions in order to serve sport as volunteers. in this regard, it is found that most external sport missions are supervised by a few men in each governing body and the national olympic committee, which makes the desire for career development of women rare because of lack of stimulation. one participant stated most of our male colleagues in managerial positions select the individuals who will represents our sports missions. you know this organisation is a non-profit organisation, and thus there are no salaries for us, so we rely on the external missions of our national teams because it would provide us somehow some financial stimulus. but even this, it is controlled by men, which makes working for this organisation useless to me as a woman (m1). one participant stated ...for me this is the last year in this federation because the result required of my voluntary period is finished, but i was met with nothing for this contribution regarding my future opportunity structures with sport organisations. indeed, i am thinking to leave and continue my masters and phd degree in the sport world. then i will show my qualifications to all colleagues, particularly men (m3). one participant indicated advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 73 although we are all working in a non-profit organisation, there are differences between individuals regarding the stimulations and rewards, especially between men and women because the best external missions go to men and missions that lack financial benefits, such as local or regional missions, often go to us (m4). how do syrian women learn and develop within the institutional-cultural context of syria? parental support role of women within family frame. although the family system mainly follows the social system used in syria that follows habits, norms, rules, religion, and other sensitive issues that restrict behaviours, each family adopts its own system that differs from other families’ system. in this regard, all participants confirmed that the family structure and the system used to guide the family is directly connected with the educational level of family members, the nature of their career, the geographical location of the family home, the number of family members, and the level of the cost of living. one participant stated for me, my mom was the head of a primary school and my dad was academic staff in the university, so i learnt from their experience and try to compare this with my task in this organisation (m3). another participant noted we used to live in different locations, some of them in poor areas, while others were in rich areas. actually, this had positive and negative impacts on our family because living within rich areas that contain educated people, rich, friendly, easy going, and displaying good breeding of their children, influenced our family; yes, we cannot ignore their behaviours or rules because it is difficult to be a neutral element in this community; even if my dad was unsatisfied because of the exaggerated openness (m7). self-development challenges for on-job training. given that the general sport organisation is a large organisation of 26 governing bodies, the national olympic committee, and the local executive committee in 14 cities, it fails to cover all individual requirements. in this regard, it should be indicated that the application of the questionnaire serves to highlight the weaknesses in the entire organisation because it is found that it does not cover all internal stakeholders. this is likely to be because preparing and supporting women for managerial positions tend to be ignored. one participant stated i found that the federation is implementing training sessions for specific subjects required for some individuals, especially men. this is the truth, because we do not hear how and why they adopt such training sessions. yes, their questionnaire covers only some persons. i think some colleagues refuse giving managerial positions to women in this federation (m8). moreover, most women attempt to learn and acquire their knowledge to ensure they can take opportunities successfully. this manifested clearly through their efforts to develop their leadership capabilities by offjob training that enable them to learn and develop according to their own requirements; but selfdevelopment still requires further support to ensure its effectiveness. an example of this influential issue is if we want to show that we are interested in managerial positions through off-job training, they will announce war on our attitude because women in managerial positions are simply not desired. but self-learning is not enough; we need additional support (m5). this was supported by another participant who stated ...it is ridiculous to be like a thief, when i tell my husband about such a thing, because i feel that i stole something from others. however, all what i’ve been doing is just self-learning and development to have a high level of leadership someday. if i have the same support as my male colleague, i will be the best (m6). long-term purposes building experience for future opportunities. given that women lack career development in the short term, it was found that women in general sport organisation seek to seize the opportunities when participating in external missions and conferences. one woman stated ...going abroad to participate in international conferences and giving sport presentations encourages me to nominate myself in future for membership of international sport organisation because there is no opportunity for career development and growth within general sport organisation in syria. so i realized that going to international conferences advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 74 is not as easy as you think because they are mostly controlled by men in this organisation for social and power considerations. thus, i do my best to exploit opportunities for the future (m2). another participant told an interesting story: i participated in a conference on the asian level four years ago and it was my first participation, after confusion about the person who would represent our sport federation. according to the conference agenda, i was given 20 minutes for my presentation. what i did was i merged between my presentation and discussing other issues and providing suggestions, acting as a golden opportunity in this conference, but it will not be repeated (m10). similarly, another participant noted because the only way to present myself to most heads of sport missions from all sport organisations around the world is to participate in international sport conferences, yes, this way helps me to be well-known; today, i have friendship with heads of many sport missions in asia and other countries who support my membership of the asian olympic committee. who holds syria’s seat in this committee: a man, despite the wishes this seat is held by a syrian woman. as you can see, my opportunity tends to be in the long-term (m7). discussion the purpose of this study was to discover and understand the reason behind the low level of female participation in top management in general sport organisation by analysing the cultural aspects to explore the following objectives: the nature of challenges surrounding women’s learning and development; and finding out how syrian women learn and develop within the institutional-cultural context of syria, the findings of this study suggest some initial evidence that national cultural aspects have affected women’s presence in the top management in general sport organisation in syria despite the fact that women have made a large effort to build their experience and knowledge in leadership for career development, and any other managerial positions in international sport organisations. according to collinson and hearn (1994), the reason for differences between men and women is their diversity in relation to age, class, religion, ethnicity, bodily facility, sexuality, world view, region, nationality, appearance, paternal/maternal kinship status, leisure, occupation and career, size, and propensity to violence. in this regard, the findings of this study support what hargreaves (2003) noted in that the patriarchal style of family and society has helped men to dominate women socially, legally, and politically because this was reflected in the way in which women grow, learn, and acquire their personality. in addition, the norms, rules, and habits have encouraged men to control and restrict women. this is manifested clearly by the highly hierarchal management structure and network structure that determined the nature of relationships and the style of communication between women and men within the frame of the syrian family, syrian society, or in general sport organisation. this is similar, to a degree, to harry (1995), knoppers bedker-meyer, ewing, and forrest (1990), and whisenant, pedersen, and obenour’s (2002) findings that shed light on historical precedent in the context of sport and sport organisations which identify a masculine domain rich in traditions of power, monopoly, and aggressiveness. similarly, it is found that although the government has made large efforts to reduce the gap between the sexes in its schools and universities. demographic characteristics of both sexes are influenced by the education system that restricts female behaviour and act against teamwork due to the low number of women. moreover, it should be noted that the findings of this study suggest that a masculine domain, characterised by its autocratic behaviour, was the reason beyond the monopoly of decision-making by men, as well as refusing any form of criticism by women because women’s leadership in general sport organisation is still perceived as a shame on men in the syrian context. it is found that women in syrian society are still restricted through the social construction that affects the nature of family policy, which was characterised by its patriarchal system of power, and this patriarchal system was seen as the key determinant of women’s talent towards leadership. this was supported by the two opposite results with regard to the implication for patriarchal system of power on women by bierema (2005), and cooke (2009). it is also found that uncertainty in the syrian context, especially since the start of the political and religious conflicts, have acted to make the opportunity for women’s career development in sport in general and in general sport organisation more difficult and rare. furthermore, it is found that although syrian society is characterised by collectivism, the desire to work, learn, and lead individually is still the common tendency of syrians. in this vein, it is noted that women do not feel comfortable to learn in a frame featuring high masculinity, which demonstrates advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 75 women as a passive element despite their talent. given that the lack of women’s opportunities to learn and advance in general sport organisation through onjob training because of the dominance of men, women rely on self-development as a means to build their experience via off-job training. this manifested clearly in the strong efforts of women to build their experience for future opportunities in membership not only of local sport organisations, but regional, continental and international organisations. additionally, it is found this was as a reaction to unequal stimulation between men and women at general sport organisation with regard to rewards, travel in sport missions, external conferences, and training courses. thus, research on hofstede’s cultural theory on syrian women in workplace settings is suggested to extend this line of inquiry in other settings. as is noted, there is a relationship between national cultural dimensions and leadership development (mabey & finch-lee, 2007; gooderham & nordhaug, 2002), and career development (sparrow, 1996; beauregard, 2007; thanacoody, bartram, barker, & jacobs, 2006); and thus the findings from this study support this statement. implications and conclusion despite the fact that the findings of this study cannot be generalised across all women in sport organisations in syria or any other organisations, it can be stated that the findings can provide some insight into hofstede’s cultural theory and the preferences of syrian women. there is also an opportunity for future research to follow the findings in order to address other challenges facing young women who are looking for sport leadership positions in general sport organisation. furthermore, the findings of this study serve to guide instructors and designers of leadership development programmes for women and men in general and in sport in particular to take into account the privacy rules of national culture for equal opportunity of men and women in leadership training and development in order to achieve the final objective and in turn career development. the findings of this study have theoretical and practical implications. for instance, these findings add new insights into how women learn and develop for leadership positions, an area where there is a lack of research (e.g., self-development and role of family support). in addition, this study contributes to the literature in the area of national cultural characteristics. in this regard, this study also contributes to the theories of convergence and divergence (geppert, et al., 2002). this study contributes to our understanding of the nature of institutional-cultural challenges surrounding women’s career development in general and sport in particular in syria, as well as the other countries in the middle east. the findings of this study supported what has been termed as crossvergence (ralston, 2008) because of the similarities between syria and the other countries in the middle east along with: a) the masculinity of arab societies that forbid ‘weak’ women to find their opportunity in sport leadership; b) despite the fact that the arab world is characterised by the desire to live in groups, selfishness tends to be a common characteristics in jobs, learning, and development; and c) lack of stability has negative implications for sport career development of women, whether young or those who have middle management positions. in addition to the above, this study also makes a significant contribution to practice by uncovering that although women take part in leadership meetings, and training and development activities, their equal opportunities with their male counterparts are still questionable. it appears that when women in general sport organisation take any opportunity to participate in external activities, they try to find their own identity and build their leadership knowledge as a means for building their good reputation in a masculine world. also, the findings revealed that young girls who struggling for sport leadership positions have few opportunities to develop leadership skills during their career in general sport organisation. this study had an additional contribution through exploring that men mostly dominate women in most sectors and in general sport organisation specifically, in terms of decision-making and the lack of acknowledgement of criticism made by women. also, the family system and policy are affected by the family size, home location, and educational level of the parents. this, in turn, had negative impact on the women’s learning, thought, and growth. this study makes an additional contribution to practice by shedding light on the ways utilised for learning and development by women in general sport organisation. the findings revealed that even selflearning tends to be influenced by men. this was evidenced when women are prohibited from developing their leadership skills, and exceeding the boundaries made them feel shame and confusion. future research the findings of this study suggested that addressing the low level of syrian women in the top management in general sport organisation can generally begin only if women are given the same advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 76 opportunities given to their male counterparts. also, if syrians avoid combining the socio-cultural aspects and their jobs in most filed aspect in general and general sport organisation in particular, this may be the first step in the right direction to address the problem of the low level of syrian women for sport leadership positions. this appears to be the key challenge to syrian women both young women who are struggling for leadership positions in sports and those who have a specific managerial role for their career development in the top leadership position at national and international levels. the next step will be guiding academic research to investigate the problems of and solutions for women leadership needs in sports and shedding light on the future trends for women sport leaders in the middle east. furthermore, there is an essential need for activating hosting international sport events because this would help women to communicate, learn, and build their experience regarding international relationships. this might have positive implications for their performance locally. in addition, articles written about the experiences of women in leadership and managerial positions in the syrian context in the middle east that represent a combination of all directions, such as moderate secularism and religious societies, can be very useful for future efforts on various topics. the data of this study was conducted within the syrian crisis; future research is recommended to collect data in a stable environment to compare the results with the findings of this study to investigate the differences. conclusion as a result of all the above, the key cultural challenges of women for sport leadership positions were present when syria was perceived as a stable country before its current political and religious conflicts. these cultural challenges were also seen as written and unwritten rules such issues as habits, traditions, norms, values, religious rules, and the family system. however, after the syrian crisis started in 2011, the application of cultural unwritten rules was found to be evident after the political conflicts altered to religious conflicts, which gave all aspects of life a religious feature. in this regard, the cultural barriers for women in sport leadership positions were not born of the moment. it may be stated that the instability in the syrian environment due to geopolitical changes were not seen as the reason for the low level of women in sport leadership positions; rather cultural issues related to syrian society were seen as the key reason for the low number of women in the top management. the lack of opportunities of most women in sport led to the lack of sport career development; but this is not the only reason because even self-development was seen as a prohibited right. therefore, women, who had the opportunity to be in leadership positions in general sport organisation, have been improving their skills and qualifications by off-job training depending on their own efforts. it can be stated that women in syria, like any other country in the middle east, have many challenges to reach the top leadership positions in sport due to national culture barriers that may be seen as an iceberg, especially for those who may not have a full understanding of this part of the world. limitations it is worth mentioning that one of the main limitations of this qualitative research is that it did not adopt a quantitative design. the reason is simply because of the low number of women in general sport organisation. in this regard, the small sample size of this study limits the generalizability of the results to all of syria, let alone other arab cultures. hofstede’s research targeted a large number of countries among different clusters, but few arab countries were involved in hofstede’s research in general, and no research was made into syrian culture in particular. in turn, there is a need for further research in syria, as well as research on arab culture, that aims at identifying similarities and differences between women for leadership positions and their challenges and opportunities in the context of hofstede’s cultural dimensions within and between arab countries. future research into all aspects of leadership 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3.2. how do you describe the relationship between your development and your family attitude? why? 3.3. from you experience, could you describe the extent to which the society in which you lived influence family behaviours? could you give an example? 3.4. how do you evaluate the differences between sport male leader and their counterparts’ females? why? 3.5. do you think that the inequity between male and female in education has implication on their talents? could you give me details? 4. power distance 4.1. how do you describe the influence of male leaders on your early career up to know? could you give details please? 4.2. what kind of influence do your family adapt to deal with your family members? and why? 4.3. how do you describe the relationship between male leaders and you in the affairs of your sport? could you give me examples and details please? 4.4. from your daily experience, have you ever had different opinions, feedback, comments to your leaders? if yes, what happened? if no, why did not? 5. uncertainty avoidance 5.1. because of syria crisis since 2011, how did this crisis affect you in your sport career? 5.2. how did syrian political crisis affect your participant in national and international events? could you give me examples? 5.3. what is the relationship between political and religion conflicts in syria and internal relationship in your sport federation? 5.4. personally, have the internal and external challenges affected your future inspiration in sport leadership role? if yes why? if no why? 6. individualism-collectivism 6.1. do you prefer to work individually or collectively on any sport case, champions, decisions etc? why? can you provide more details? 6.2. what are the advantages and disadvantages of learning and training individually and collectively? and which one helped to improve your leadership skills? 6.3. how do you learn and develop for your sport career development?* this question was related to the individual or collectivism cultures that they prefer each participant.* 7. confucian dynamism 7.1. how do build your strategy for sport career development? why 7.2. how do you promote your talents to others? 7.3. how do you convenience others by your sport leadership? appendix b table 2 research participants general sport organisation division participants codes national olympic committee 1. assistant manager of national olympic committee m9 badminton federation 1. manager of badminton federation m2 gymnastics federation 1. gymnastics assistant manager 2. aerobics manager 3. rhythm and dance manager m7 m6 m8 executive office 1. international relations manager m3 interview number: date: time: advancing women in leadership 2014 volume 34 81 basketball federation 1. secretary of basketball federation manager m2 olympic cities 1. executive manager of dams olympic city m10 sport for all federation 1. secretary of sport for all federation manager m1 swimming federation 1. secretary of swimming federation manager m5 volume 43, 2024 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, brad bizzell, and julia ballenger assistant editor: jordan donop & kristina hall 30 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 advancing women in leadership vol. 43, 29-41, 2024 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper mentoring in salary negotiations for female sport management students heidi grappendorf, cindy veraldo, a.j. grube, and annemarie farrell heidi grappendorf, professor sport management, western carolina university, hgrappendorf@wcu.edu cindy veraldo, professor sport management, mount st. joseph university, cynthia.veraldo@msj.edu a.j. grube, dean, college of business, western carolina university, agrube@wcu.edu annmarie farrell, professor sport management, ithaca college, afarrell@ithaca.edu accepted january 24, 2024 female professors continue to make less than their male counterparts. in traditionally male dominated fields, such as sport management, the pay gap can be even greater. to gain further insight into the salary negotiation process, the specific role of mentoring was examined utilizing qualitative research, and specifically semi-structured interviews conducted with female sport management professors. open-ended coding was employed to analyze the data. female participants reported they had limited mentoring for the salary negotiation process and felt there were barriers that influenced if mentoring took place. participants did indicate informal mentoring occurred, and some reported the development of meaningful relationships specifically with major advisors who intentionally provided advice and mentoring related to the salary negotiation process. being cognizant of gender roles and utilizing mentoring strategies is critical to addressing salary and the continued gap in salary amongst female and male professors in sport management. keywords: salary negotiation, mentoring, gender role theory full-time faculty salaries for women were 81.9 percent of those for men in 2021-22 (american association for university professors, 2022). at the instructor and assistant levels, where new doctoral students are most likely to be hired, the starting salaries for women are $61,452 and $81,181. for men, the starting salaries at the instructor and assistant levels are $64,852 and $89,533, respectively. by the time faculty members reach the highest rank at full-professor, the salary difference is even greater, with women making on average $131,028 while men make $150,596 (american association for university professors, 2022). it is clear that starting salaries can have long lasting effects on one’s earnings over time as the financial gap is only compounded (marks & harold, 2011). in fact, when considering salary increases and retirement contributions, babcock and laschever (2003) reiterated the importance of initial salaries, as it could cost women more than $500,000 over the course of their careers. salary negotiation involves processes where individuals try to attain the greatest compensation they can (stuhlmacher & walters, 1999). the process is a foundational element of the job offer and acceptance process (wade, 2001). wade (2001) found that women experienced more constraints in the salary negotiation process because of stereotypes and gender roles. further, rudman (1998) and rudman and glick (1999) found that women who did make a case for themselves during salary negotiation ran a greater risk of backlash, because selfpromotion is stereotypically male/agentic behavior that violates the stereotypical female communal role. thus, gender roles and expectations are a critical component to understand the discrepancy salaries of men and women. as negotiation is vital piece of this process, it is important to understand any gender dynamics impacting the process. when looking at sport management faculty, the number of female professors lags behind the number of males in the same position (jones et al., 2008). in fact, jones et al. (2008) reported that 29% of sport management programs did not have any female faculty, and in 66% of programs, female professors were less than 40% of faculty members. particularly for women in traditionally male dominated fields such as sport, mentoring may provide a means for women to deal with many of the inequities, including lower salary offers they may receive. mentors are vitally important to the growth and advancement of women in their careers (bower, 2009). “while the mentoring relationship is important in career development for both genders, it is particularly critical for women, especially those in male dominated professions such as the sport industry” (bower, 2009, p. 3). although there has been a call for more research related to mentoring women in sport management (bower, 2009; grappendorf, et al., 2022, shaw, 2006) there has been limited research related to mentoring experiences of female sport management professors’ salary negotiation processes. therefore, the purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the role and importance of mentoring in the experiences of female sport management faculty in the salary negotiation process. mentoring mentoring has been defined as the relationship between a mentor with more experience and a mentee with less 31 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 experience that consists of support, guidance, and counseling that can contribute to a person’s individual and professional development (kram, 1985; weaver & chelladurai, 1999). mentoring provides career support and can enhance career development (kram, 1983). mentors assist mentees in navigating such things as uncertain environments and role conflict (carmel & paul, 2015). thus, mentors can provide both career and psychosocial support (kram, 1985). psychosocial support aspects include providing encouragement, helping mentees develop identities, or cultivating self-esteem and confidence (weaver & chelladurai, 1999). the mentee also receives reassurance and encouragement from an empathetic mentor, helping the mentee create a positive self-image (grima et al., 2014). this type of support is associated with growth outcomes (weaver & chelladurai, 1999) as well as increased self-awareness, self-respect, competence, confidence, and assertiveness (bruce, 1995). career support consists of career advice, assistance in developing networks and human capital, and advice related to career advancement. these advancement outcomes are associated with promotion, salary, and status (ragins, 1997; weaver & chelladurai, 1999). mentoring is an essential function, particularly for young career academics, (st. clair et al., 2017)), women (levesque et al., 2005), african americans and other people of color (dreher & chargois, 1998). as mentoring can provide the necessary information, as well as skill development and greater career outcomes, it is important that mentoring is utilized for those traditionally minoritized groups (carmel & paul, 2015). although kram (1985) noted that mentoring has traditionally been viewed as an informal process where the mentor and mentee form a relationship with the purpose of assisting the mentee in becoming knowledgeable and developing skills specific to one’s career, women and traditionally minoritized groups may be more likely to be excluded from informal mentoring relationships (burke & mckeen, 1990). further, they may experience more barriers to obtaining a mentor and be less likely to have one or obtain quality mentoring (ragins, 1999). women may be reluctant to initiating a mentoring relationship, they may fear misinterpretation of seeking out a mentor or the unwillingness of mentors, or simply, they do not have access to mentors (weaver & chelladurai, 2002). women may find it more difficult in attaining and developing mentoring relationships in male dominated occupations where most mentors would be men, making it more complex in developing male-female mentorships (johnson & scandura, 1994). as sport management academia is still predominantly men, these issues certainly may impact the mentoring relationship. mentoring, women, and salary negotiation an effective mentoring practice is to help mentees understand the benefits of career development mentoring, as the outcome has been positively associated with higher salaries and promotions. mentoring can introduce mentees to social networks as well as help them gather information to assist them in negotiating salary (kolb & mcginn, 2008). individuals that have been mentored receive higher salaries (allen et al., 2004; laband & lentz, 1993) and having knowledge and preparation for how to negotiate can have a tremendous impact, whether the candidate is successful or not (allen, et al., 2004). according to williams-nickelson (2009), learning to be comfortable and talk openly about money and how to ask and negotiate for salaries is particularly critical for women. however, for women, the influence of gender roles related to negotiation is multi-layered, extensive, and complicated (olekalns & kennedy, 2020). in addition, “women have to negotiate over issues that men can take as givens – opportunities for promotion and training, mentoring, client assignments, partnership arrangements, resources, and office space, among others” (kolb & mcginn, 2008, p. 1). the variables that have received attention from researchers are wide-ranging and still evolving as we learn more about the influence of gender roles in salary negotiations. numerous investigations into women and negotiation focused on what women did not do or did not do well. for example, babcock et al., (2006) found even before negotiation begins, women were less likely to see negotiation as a possibility, and if they did, they had lower salary expectations. the lack of self-confidence of women (ragins & sundstrom, 1989), the fear of contentious relationships, (babcock et al., 2006) and elevated levels of anxiety (babcock & laschever, 2004) have all affected their negotiation efforts. categorizing the aforementioned as “fix-the-women” issues is problematic. “women do not appear to be broken and encouraging them to negotiate more and differently often backfires” (recalde & vesterlund, 2022, p. 455). recalde and vesterlund (2022) go on to suggest that we should be looking at fixing the institution narratives and examining the overall context in which negotiation happens; it would be more meaningful and useful in reducing the gender differences in outcomes. kolb and mcginn (2008) advocated that research stop focusing on the individual variables and change the narrative to consider societal factors that impact organizational practices. there have been other concerted efforts to not merely just blame women for their inequities in the salary negotiation process, or to view them as less effective negotiators (kennedy & kray, 2015; schneider, 2017). instead, they suggested focusing on gender role expectations utilizing social role theory and role congruity theory as a foundation. social role and role congruity theory wade (2001), and amanatullah and morris (2010) noted that women are just as capable and have the skills to negotiate, but they are often penalized when they do. social role theory (eagly, 1987; eagly et al., 2020) posits that women are viewed as being more communal (e.g., being more cooperative, caring, nurturing) while men are believed to be more agentic (e.g., more competitive, assertive). thus, women and men are prescribed ways in which they should behave. there can be a negative reaction or backlash to women and men who deviate from their gender roles (rudman, 1998; wade, 2001). as such, people typically behave in ways consistent with their gender roles to avoid backlash (amanatullah & morris 2010; rudman, 1998). specific to salary negotiation, women would experience more backlash because agentic behaviors are viewed as 32 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 necessary (stuhlmacher & linnabery, 2013). therefore, as women are viewed as having communal characteristics and expectations are different for their behavior, there is an incongruency between their social role and what is viewed as necessary for salary negotiation (eagly & karau, 2002; stuhlmacher & linnabery, 2013). women may end up facing discrimination based on the gender role stereotyping that takes place when gender roles are prescribed and then violated by acting outside of them (eagly & karau, 2002; wade, 2001). the backlash and discrimination that women may face is amplified when working in a male-dominated profession (heilman et al., 2004). women in the salary negotiation process are caught in a tricky situation because if they behave communally, they may be disadvantaged at negotiation, but if they do negotiate, they may receive backlash as they have violated their gender role (wade, 2001). it is a damned if you do; damned if you don’t situation. methods this study was part of a larger scale qualitative study that was conducted utilizing semi-structured interviews to explore the salary negotiation experiences of women in sport management academia. in the larger scale study, results indicated that female sport management professors identified the main barrier in salary negotiation was the societal expectation that they adhere to traditional gender roles. however, during the semi-structed interviews, and in the open-ended coding utilized to organize the data and look for patterns, a major strategy and theme related to the importance of or lack of mentoring in their salary negotiation experiences was revealed. the specific use of semi-structured interviews allowed the researchers to probe further and gain understanding from participants’ lived experiences of the information they viewed as important (i.e., mentoring) (kvale, 1996) and more deeply explore the words and stories of the participants (patton, 2015). the semi-structured interviewing format provided for flexibility, and allowed the researchers to find out what was most important to participants, and to explore topics that may not have even been in the guide (patton, 2015). participants nineteen current female sport management professors in the united states were included in this study. all the female sport management professors held doctoral degrees, but their academic rank varied. seven participants were at the assistant professor’s level, eight were associate professors, and four were full professors. as part of purposive sampling, diversity in participants was a focus. although fifteen of the participants were caucasian, there were two african americans, and two who reported being mixed race. six participants were currently residing in the midwestern united states, while six reported being in the northeast. three participants resided in the south, while two resided in the mideast (atlantic) region, one in the west, and another reported living in another part of the united states. ages ranged from 30 years old to over 60 with four reporting they were ages 30-35, seven who were 36-41, three who were 42-47 years of age, three who were 48-53 years of age, one who was 54-59, and one participant was over 60 years of age. regarding relationship status, two participants reported being single, four reported being married to someone of a different sex and eight were married to a person of the same sex. one participant indicated they were in a relationship with someone of a different sex, but not married, while four indicated they were in a same sex relationship. see table 1. table 1. demographics demographic category n % 30 35 4 21.05 36 41 7 36.84 age 42 47 3 15.79 48 53 3 15.79 54 59 1 5.26 > 60 1 5.26 black or african american 2 10.53 race white 15 78.95 other / mixed race 2 10.53 assistant professor 7 36.84 rank associate professor 8 42.11 professor 4 21.05 northeast 6 31.58 mid-east (atlantic) 2 10.53 region of south 3 15.79 residence midwest 6 31.58 west 1 5.26 other 1 5.26 single 2 10.53 married, opposite sex 4 21.05 relationship married, single sex 8 42.11 status in relationship (not married), opposite sex 1 5.26 in relationship (not married), a same sex 4 21.05 information regarding participants’ starting salaries as well as their current salary was requested. five participants reported under $45,000 for a starting salary while fourteen reported over $45,000 for a starting salary. five participants reported current salaries over $115,000, while two reported earning between $105,001-$115,000. three were earning in the $95,001-$105,000 range, two made $85,001-$95,000, one between $75,001-$85,000, three reported earning $65,001-$75,000 and three earned $55,001$65,000. six of the nineteen respondents reported having additional titles and tasks for which they are compensated. as these amounts varied from year to year or were not permanent, they were not included in current salary information. see table 2. 33 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 table 2 starting and current annual salaries salary range starting salary current salary n % n % < $25,000 2 10.53 0 0 $25,001 35,000 2 10.53 0 0 $35,001 45,000 1 5.26 0 0 $45,001 55,000 4 21.05 0 0 $55,001 65,000 4 21.05 3 15.79 $65,001 75,000 1 5.26 3 15.79 $75,001 85,000 2 10.53 1 5.26 $85,001 95,000 3 15.79 2 10.53 $95,001 -105,000 0 0 3 15.79 $105,001-115,000 0 0 2 10.53 > $115,000 0 0 5 26.32 total 19 100 19 100 procedure subjective criteria like knowledge and experience of the topic are more of a priority than randomization when it comes to whom to include in the sample (etikan, et al., 2016). “the logic and power of purposeful sampling lie in selecting informationrich cases for study in depth. information-rich cases are those from which one can learn a great deal about issues of vital importance to the purpose of the inquiry, thus the term purposeful sampling. studying information-rich cases yields insights and in-depth understanding rather than empirical generalizations” (patton, 2002, p. 230). purposive sampling was utilized as it requires that participants meet certain criteria (etikan et. al, 2006). inclusion criteria, which are specific conditions the person or population must possess to be included in the study were utilized (lopez & whitehead, 2013). the researchers intentionally sought out women who met specific criteria such as being female, working in sport management academia, and those who had experience negotiating salary as a professor. even though the specific inclusion criteria were being female sport management professors who had negotiated at least one job, researchers were also cognizant of getting a range of participants that represented various demographics. in addition to purposefully seeking out those that met the inclusion criteria, convenience sampling was employed. convenience sampling occurs when individuals not only meet the criteria but are available and willing to participate at a given time or are geographically close (etikan et. al, 2006; patton, 2002). further, convenience sampling was utilized as the researchers were aware of women within their field and networks whom they could easily contact and whom the researchers were confident would participate (lopez & whitehead, 2013). to create a list of participants, the researchers sought out (e.g., purposeful sampling) those that met the criteria, as well as used connections and collegial relationships to other female professors in sport management whom the researchers were confident would participate (e.g., convenience sampling). after the list was compiled, emails were sent explaining the study and inquiring if the professors would be interested in doing an interview in person, on the phone or via video conference. overall, twenty-five female professors were contacted, and nineteen female professors were interviewed. seventeen interviews were conducted with phone, with two taking place in person. reminder emails were sent two weeks after the initial email. those willing to participate in the study were sent a link to a demographic survey that included questions related to age, race, rank, region of residence, relationship status, and their initial starting salary and their current salary. the researchers were not certain what would be the total number of interviews needed, as the suggested number of interviews recommended varies greatly. the richness of the data and getting to data saturation is the goal, the actual number of participants is not the central focus (patton, 2002). all interviews lasted between 35 and 75 minutes with an average of 57 minutes. four researchers divided and conducted the interviews, while two researchers coded each interview. three researchers conducted 5 interviews, while the other conducted 4. all interviews were recorded with multiple devices (e.g., computer, phone, ipad) to ensure recording took place. the semi-structured interview guide that was used, reflected questions specific to gender and negotiation experiences. the semi-structured interview guide was created by the researchers to cover the main topic of the study (taylor, 2005), provide some structure but not to be followed exactly (patton, 2015), and based upon previous literature (babcock, et al., 2006; kolb & mcginn, 2008.). utilizing a semi-structured interview method, questions were primarily open-ended to ensure participants could genuinely reflect and share their thoughts in their own words (warren & karner, 2005). the interview guide contained four sections. the first section inquired about participants jobs and the subsequential negotiating experiences. the second section included questions related to inquiring if they negotiated or not, how they felt during the process, and if they felt prepared. the third section had questions related to what they learned when negotiating and what they would incorporate in future negotiations. the last section of questions sought participants perspectives on potential gender differences and strategies that women could employ and to assist them with negotiating, as well as for those doing the negotiating. probing questions (patton, 2015) were also utilized to gain further insight into participants perspectives. for example, questions such as “could you tell me a little bit more about that,” or “how did that make 34 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 you feel” were also asked. further, utilizing semi-structured interviews allowed the researchers to include, diverge, and explore an issue or response that came up during the interview (patton, 2015). other benefits to semi-structured guides are that the interviewer can adjust, and re-order questions based on how the interview progresses, and that the interviewer could ask questions not listed in the interview guide if the participants noted something of interest (patton, 2015). semi-structured interviews provided flexibility with the opportunity to pursue and probe certain responses, seek clarification, or ask follow-up questions (creswell & poth, 2018; lopez & whitehead, 2013). based on this qualitative methodology, the researchers were afforded the opportunity to inquire further when participants noted their levels of comfort with salary negotiation, as they had mentioned they would have been more comfortable if they had a mentor who had talked to or helped them with salary negotiation. before the interviews began, to safeguard participants’ identities and address the issues of privacy and anonymity, pseudonyms for first names were designated for each participant. not only can pseudonyms help protect identities, but they can also make participants more relatable and human (miles, et al., 2014). to begin the interviews, jacob and ferguson (2012) suggested to build rapport with participants in order to garner the depth needed in qualitative research. thus, before the interview officially started, the researchers engaged in small talk and then began by asking participants about their stories and experiences in becoming sport management professors. next, the researchers inquired about the details related to being offered their first jobs and their initial salary offers. the second part of the interview consisted of questions specifically related to their initial salary offer in academia, the process, and their reflections on that experience. the third part of the interview assessed participants’ comfort levels and feelings during the process and any potential insights, knowledge, observations, or skills learned. last, the interview included questions related to challenges and/or barriers for participants as women in the salary negotiation process, and participants were given the opportunity to add any open-ended statements they felt were important to the topic. researchers took notes during the interviews, noting any observations or thoughts regarding the interview. as notes can be a useful tool for accuracy of interpretation, recall and memory. further, notes can be helpful if there was an issue with transcription (muswazi & nhamo, 2013). interviews with participants were conducted until the criteria for data saturation were met. data saturation happens when no added information is being attained and sufficient information has been acquired (patton, 2015). data saturation occurs at the point in the coding process when no added information is found by simply conducting more, or where redundancy in the themes and patterns are discovered within the interviews (guest et al., 2006). interviews with participants were conducted until the researchers came to consensus that they were seeing similarities in responses and the same themes in the data within the interviews (i.e., redundancy). thus, the researchers decided they had meaningful and rich data and had met the criteria of data saturation. data analysis the researchersall female sport management professors knew they needed to discuss their own potential bias and thus, had a discussion as a group to discuss their own negotiation experiences with each other. discussing their biases and their experiences as they focused on remaining objective in coding the data, contributed to the trustworthiness of the data (creswell & poth, 2018; patton, 2002). creswell and poth (2018) and jootun et al., (2009) indicated this as a crucial step in data analysis to ensure trustworthiness, credibility, and rigor. jootun et al., (2009) noted “reflecting on the process of one's research and trying to understand how one's own values and views may influence findings adds credibility to the research and should be part of any method of qualitative enquiry” (p. 43). additionally, the researchers made a conscious effort to be objective and not give opinions while conducting the interviews (jootun et al., 2009). debriefing occurred after each of the interviews took place to discuss and gain initial insight to the data as well as to increase the trustworthiness of the data (patton, 2002). after the interviews were completed and transcribed, they were uploaded to google drive where all four of the researchers had access to them. for organizational purposes, an excel sheet was created, assigning the person doing the interview as one coder for that transcript along with another researcher. every transcript had two researchers assigned for coding. open coding was utilized where the researchers read, re-read and thoroughly examined the transcripts (williams & mosher, 2019). next axial coding, where the researchers looked for emerging patterns and themes took place (williams & mosher, 2019). in coding, patterns and similar statements are given a label (i.e., theme) to organize and make sense of it (creswell, 2015). once all the researchers had coded the data and organized themes, they met as a group via zoom to discuss the themes and do a qualitative comparison (elliott, 2018). conducting a qualitative comparison (elliott, 2018) affords the opportunity for researchers to discuss which codes and themes were agreed upon or not. if there were discrepancies between two researchers during the coding phase, the researchers were instructed to discuss. there were no disagreements, so this step was not needed. not only were the researchers able to discuss the data, clarify any interpretations, and edit any theme categorization names, they were able to discuss their own personal assumptions and biases again to ensure trustworthiness (creswell & poth, 2018; jootun, et al., 2009). results this study was conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the role and importance of mentoring in the experiences of female sport management faculty in the salary negotiation process. the main themes that emerged from participant data were the lack of mentoring, barriers to mentoring, informal mentoring, and meaningful mentoring relationships. this section concludes with suggestions on the negotiation process from the participants. 35 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 lack of mentoring the interview data revealed many of the participants received little to no formal preparation or mentoring relating to the salary negotiation process. olivia indicated “i had none… so negotiating for my job at (university) was my first ever experience with job negotiation or salary negotiation.” zoey also noted “nothing structurednothing formal came in any kind of conversations with my advisor when i was on the job market.” kristin noted her lack of mentoring in not negotiating indicating, “i think i just took what they offered me. because i didn't know any better, i didn't know there was anything you could negotiate.” sophia also did not receive any mentoring for salary negotiation stating, “i didn't have any formal training, no formal help.” hannah also noted she was not prepared to negotiate. hannah, an associate professor at a large master’s university in the northeast, stated “i don't think i was prepared to negotiate at all. i don't think my doctoral program actually provided any way of, you know, what to ask or how to negotiate. i was not prepared for that at all.” hazel, a professor in the midwest at a large master’s university, who also has administrative responsibilities, expressed frustration, and similarly remarked: i was embarrassed to tell people that i didn't know how to do it. i went in thinking people had their best foot forward, of course years later i realize they don’t always. i worked with a woman who was offering me, i figured she gets it and so no, i didn't have a mentor, i didn't have any education, i didn't have any advice. payton, an assistant professor at a research institution (r1) in the midwest discussed a potential benefit of encouragement and confidence building if she would have had a mentor when she noted, “i would have liked some positive reinforcement. i guess maybe someone around telling me that ‘you clearly are good at this and have potential and you have to see that in yourself.’” paula and vivian also mentioned the need for a confidence boost when going into the negotiation process, noting it would help them feel less overwhelmed and more empowered. paula stated: "... we're in a male dominated field and i think sometimes we're trying to, you know, prove to ourselves and to our colleagues we do belong here and i think that creates self-doubt." vivian, experienced a lack of confidence when negotiating because she “was never taught how to do it.” these participants did not receive the guidance, support, encouragement, or confidence cultivation that mentoring can provide. they went into the negotiation process naïve and unaware of how to respond to a job offer and interact with the future employer. mentors could have certainly alleviated some of this unpreparedness, which ultimately may have significant consequences on the future earnings of these women. barriers to mentoring gender role congruence (eagly & karau, 2002) has been defined as behaving in ways that are traditionally prescribed for women (e.g., cooperative and nurturing), was clearly a barrier experienced by participants. paula, an associate professor that has experience at both a teaching university as well as a research institution (r1) stated, i think i got scared that me asking for 95 would make them say, ‘no we can't do that and we're moving on.’ i was three years into my career at that point. i had never sat on a search, didn't have administrative experience, i didn't know how these things worked in terms of people asking for money all the time. i didn’t know that this is what we can offer and you can take it or leave it, but we're not going to be so offended by that, that we then don't want you. i was thinking i really want this job. i really wanted the job and i wanted to negotiate for a little bit more money, but i also didn't want to make them think less of me or think i was not serious about the position. paula did not have a lot of experience. she was concerned about what the employer would think and she was scared to ask for what she wanted. zoey “didn’t want to push to hard,” hannah wanted to “avoid conflict,” mia described negotiating as “aggressive type behavior” and melanie, kristin, and avery thought the salary was fair and didn’t try to negotiate. melanie stated “i was so excited i got a job that i wanted, in the town i lived in, at a school that i wanted to work at, that i was just like, yeah sounds great. it wasn’t until my peers started negotiating that it occurred to me that i should have.” participants stuck to being more cooperative and less agentic. participants appeared happy to get an offer even though they really may have wanted to be more assertive, but wanting to make sure the employer liked them, and they did not want to rock the boat. payton also felt less agentic and discussed feeling intimidated by those involved in the negotiation when she said, “i mean, for me coming out of a ph.d. program, deans and people who are in administration are intimidating, and to go from never speaking to them, now to having to negotiate my future, it’s intimidating.” a mentoring relationship likely would have given payton more confidence in negotiating with administration at her future institution. another barrier experienced by some of the participants was inconsistency in advising. hazel and vivian confirmed this inconsistency in advisor mentoring of doctoral students while mentioning they wish they had received more in their doctoral programs. vivian indicated: i think for every doctoral student, there should be a one-day seminar or at least one credit hour or something that teaches you, once you get the offer. i mean we teach people how to do research, how to do their presentation, but nothing that i came across was like, ‘great, you been given the offer, now what?’ how do you know how to pick your benefit package or how do you know how to negotiate the higher salary or what’s appropriate? they’re going to offer you x, you should ask for 5% more than that because its generally going to work for you, or don’t ask for more than this, that’s never going to work. i think that would help, just something that we share with people, or even just a conference presentation. i think every doctoral 36 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 student would have attended that presentation in terms of like, what the heck do you do once you’re done, because your advisor can’t help you, they can give you advice, but it’s not like you’re going to call them up and be like, ‘hi, i am going to have my advisor actually negotiate. i’ll get back to you later.’” addison, an associate professor at a research institution (r2) in the south stated, it (doctoral program) was fantastic as far as helping me with my research, but there was no nuts and bolts and nothing related to negotiation. i could have gotten a lot more, which is one of the hard parts about realizing that i didn't get that experience and then it really was up to my advisor deciding if she wanted to give me advice. advisors can play a key role in mentoring their students. often there is so much focus on research or teaching or the job talk, that advisors either forget to help students with salary negotiation or it may not be on their radar, or they may talk about it with some students and not others. it was clear from the participants that some doctoral students get some mentoring about salary negotiation and others do not. this inconsistency is a barrier to some and can cause significant salary disparity in the field overall. informal mentoring participants discussed the role of informal mentors as they spoke about the negotiation process. these individuals were family members, other faculty members not in their area, and people outside of academia. kristin, an associate professor at a teaching college in the northeast who is in her second academic appointment stated, “i talked to my advisor and my mother-inlaw. that's all i did. i just got some tips from them on what i should ask for. if they say no on salary, what are some other things i should ask for?” lily, an assistant professor in her second academic appointment in the midwest at a research institution (r1) said, “i would go to family members most the time if i think about it. i would go to my brother's best friend who works in hr, and he does this for a living and so he would give me little hints.” amy mentioned getting advice from her dad and hannah mentioned getting advice from her friends. avery suggested “…seeing how people outside of academia do it, i think is very helpful.” samantha, an associate professor at a research institution (r1) in the south chose an informal mentor in the field who could help her with specifics. she stated “at first, at the start of this process i didn’t even know about the startup fund. so, it was my informal mentor at (university), another female faculty member, who helped me with some of those things.” addison, ellie, and sophia also mentioned getting informal advice from advisors and other colleagues at their universities. ellie specifically noted that “it was mostly informal…” and sophia stated “i think it was more through informal conversation with colleagues…” family and friends and informal advisors can be good mentors in some facets of life, and they can help build confidence and offer support, but they likely do not know the sport management field. they likely do not have the advice needed for women negotiating salary in a male dominated field. it is also unlikely that family members and friends know salary ranges or start-up packages at distinct types of institutions. informal mentorships with faculty are a good place for doctoral students to begin learning about salary negotiation, but something more structured or intentional can go much further in developing the skills needed to be successful in the process. meaningful mentoring relationships a few of the participants had good experiences with mentors that resulted in meaningful guidance for the salary negotiation process. melanie, an associate professor in her first appointment at a teaching college in the midwest noted, “my advisor was a really great mentor, especially in the job search, like, where should i apply? how should i demonstrate my focus?... ‘you need to do your homework on salaries, so that when they offer you…’” melanie felt prepared when she was offered a job and she understood what she needed to do in the negotiation process. olivia, an assistant professor in her first appointment at a mid-atlantic research institution (r1), received meaningful support through a class devoted to the job search, interview, and negotiation process in her doctoral seminar, as well as a close mentoring relationship with her advisor. when she got offered her first job she said, i went in to see my advisor and said ‘i don't even know what to ask for because everything looks so good.’ my advisor said, ‘they expect you to negotiate, so you have to ask for more.’ he said ‘even if you think the salary is competitive, you have to ask for more because they would expect a man to do that, so you have to do it.’ the advice her mentor/advisor gave her was strong encouragement to break down one of the barriers related to gender. he encouraged her to be agentic and assertive. he continued to work with her throughout the negotiation of her first job. olivia said, my advisor and i sat down, and he helped me decide how much more i am going to ask for in terms of salary and for travel funds. i asked for additional funds to travel to conferences. to help teaching, they gave me the opportunity to ask for electronics, so my advisor and i sat down and made a list of everything that he had ever used as a teacher or a researcher and i asked for all of that. so, his approach was really broad in terms of ask for anything and everything and the worst that they can say is ‘no.’ that was kind of the approach i took when negotiating for my job here at (university). olivia’s advisor took the time to lead her through the negotiation. she did go to him and ask for advice, but because she had a doctoral seminar class that highlighted negotiation, she knew to ask for help when the job offer was presented to her. only melanie, olivia, and samantha mentioned having good advisors who discussed negotiation with them. 37 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 suggestions for negotiations most of the participants provided tactics and strategies for negotiation, but related to the mentoring process, vivian suggested faculty take time in a doctoral seminar to discuss and even practice the negotiation process. hazel indicated “i really think a professional development class should be standard operating procedure for any doctoral program.” in addition to a doctoral seminar class, hazel recommended the following, i think that there should be a rule that every dissertation chair takes a couple hours and at least sits down and says, here's a list of things that you should consider when you're either weighing new positions or within an institution. this is how you can help prepare yourself, not only for today but say, 10-20 years from now…there are things you just don't know, but mentoring could be good, just taking someone aside and saying, consider this. similarly, payton and olivia suggested practicing interview questions with an advisor. payton suggested “practice. practice out loud. practice with someone who intimidates you. and get some feedback on the things that you’re asking for,” while olivia noted “practice the “ask.” role play.” furthermore, addison and lily suggested that advisors and mentors could facilitate negotiation workshops and panels at conferences which would also be helpful. professors and advisors are the key mentors for doctoral students, and they can play a key role in supporting, encouraging, and informing young scholars about the negotiation process. in providing some advice for other women in the field, melanie stated, “know your worth, be confident, and i think as women we need to do a better job with actually talking about our salaries, and our money, and what we make, and what we negotiated for. i think there is both a cultural taboo about talking about money, but also among women.” another suggestion by ellie, i think for anything, have your facts straight. i think as women we need to recognize our worth and not sell ourselves short. it's good to be a team player, it’s good to give those other folks credit, but know what you're bringing to the table. don’t back down. i hate to say it because i feel like that fits such a stereotype, but you cannot back down. avery also noted the importance of strategies and implementing them stating, “the worst thing you can do is walk out of the room and say i wish i would have asked for more.” overall, the female participants in this study had little to no preparation or mentoring for the salary negotiation process. some women sought informal mentors like family and friends, but the advice given in those relationships may not help when it comes to barriers women face in the male dominated field of sport management. some of the participants did have meaningful relationships, particularly with advisors who were intentional in giving advice about how to navigate the negotiation process. ultimately, participants recommended important strategies like conversations in doctoral seminars and more consistent, and even required, conversations between students and their dissertation chairs to ensure all job candidates receive mentoring on salary negotiation as they search for their first academic position. discussion as part of a larger study, we found the mention of mentoring (or not) for female sport management professors a central and critical part to salary negotiation. therefore, we specifically explored mentoring in salary negotiation for female sport management professors utilizing the theoretical contexts of social role and role congruity theory. thus, the purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the role and importance of mentoring in the experiences of female sport management faculty in the salary negotiation process. overall, the substantial and meaningful role that mentoring in salary negotiations, mentors’ roles, strategies utilized, and the impact it had for women in sport management academia was revealed. the barriers faced by women in sport management academia are distinctive. for example, working in a male dominated area such as sport (coakley, 2017; lapchick, 2019) and sport management academia (hancock & hums, 2011; north american society for sport management, 2017) are unique circumstances. further, the constraints of prescribed gender roles (heilman, 2001; heilman et al., 2004) further complicate the situation for women in sport management academia. the academic field of sport management must consider mentoring and associated strategies that help students, particularly female students. the implications of not mentoring inevitably factor into the continued discrepancies in the salary differences between men and women in academia. further, by mentoring and providing women the necessary information and tools to be effective, women could feel prepared, informed, and confident in their endeavors. our research parallels the benefits of mentoring in one’s academic career which has been widely researched (allen et al., 2004; kram, 1983;1985; weaver & chelladurai, 1999; williams-nickelson, 2009), and includes; providing support and encouragement, cultivating self-esteem and confidence (bruce, 1995; grima et al. 2014; weaver & chelladurai, 1999), and providing career advice and assistance in developing networks (ragins, 1997; weaver & chelladurai, 1999). this support can lead to positive outcomes such as higher salaries. specifically for women and young academicians, mentoring is crucial (levesque et. al, 2005). certainly, women in sport management academia should be receiving the same benefits of mentoring as those in other fields. the participants in this study indicated a lack of awareness of negotiating tools, and a lack of mentoring. participants noted at times feeling intimidated, unprepared, and lacking confidence regarding salary negotiation. with such detrimental data indicating substantial loss of lifelong earnings (babcock & laschever, 2003; marks & harold, 2011), it is evident that mentoring and information related to salary should be provided. having knowledge and information, as well as feeling confident in salary 38 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 negotiations, can be immensely beneficial (allen et al., 2004). other fields that are traditionally male dominated, such as business and law, require some training in salary negotiation (elshenawy, 2010). sport management programs not only should provide mentoring specifically related to salary components but make it an essential requirement of their programs. a barrier that was evident from the results of this study was the effect and impact of gender roles. wade (2001) and eagly and karau (2002) reported that women have learned from a variety of situations that not conforming to one’s prescribed gender role can lead to potential backlash. further, wade (2001) noted women, in comparison to men, experienced more constraints in the salary negotiation process because of stereotypes and gender roles. the participants in this study were aware of the impact of gender roles but did not seem aware or confident as to how to address the situation. although the process may not be comfortable for women due to their prescribed gender roles, (eagly & karau, 2002), they must be informed and made aware of how to navigate the salary negotiation process. gendered processes that are institutionalized in salary negotiation need to be discussed with a focus on gendered practices that organizations and sport employ without examination (coakley, 2017; recalde & vesterlund, 2022). mentoring and discussions about gender roles can help normalize the practice of women having conversations about money and, in turn, make women feel more comfortable in the negotiation process (williamsnickelson (2009). mentoring is a piece of the puzzle in addressing salary discrepancies, but information related to societal and prescribed gender roles is also needed as part of that mentoring. the participants in this study indicated that although they may not have received mentoring from faculty in sport management, they did seek it out in informal ways with others outside of the field. this may impact the advice provided specific to the field as the knowledge and the quality of the informal mentoring may be less (ragins, 1999). if a more formal mentoring process were in place in sport management programs, women would not have to seek out or only rely on those outside of the field. formal mentoring and training related to salary negotiation can have a significant impact on outcomes (movius, 2008). this begs the question as to why sport management programs are not implementing more formalized mentoring programs. faculty members and advisors in sport academia have the potential to form significant and meaningful relationships with their students. participants in this study noted examples of when they did receive mentoring and how much it helped them. having information, being prepared, discussing strategies, and gaining insights from their mentors were impactful and assisted the participants in feeling more confident. meaningful mentoring relationships, where participants felt increased confidence and comfort and trusted their mentors, appeared to provide benefits for the participants (bruce, 1995). blake-beard et al., (2011) found that meaningful relationships were those in which there was evidence of increased confidence and genuine feelings related to wanting what was best for mentees. the barriers faced by women in sport management academia are distinctive. for example, working in a male dominated area such as sport (coakley, 2017; lapchick, 2019) as well as sport management academia (hancock & hums, 2011; north american society for sport management, 2017) are unique circumstances. further, the constraints of prescribed gender roles (hentschel et al., 2019; heilman, 2001; heilman et al., 2004; heilman et al., 2024; toneva et al., 2020) further complicate the situation for women in sport management academia. however, the academic field of sport management appears to not be acknowledging the situation for female academicians, nor do they appear to be offering mentorship, programming, or assistance related to salary negotiation. the implications of not mentoring are wide reaching. continued pay discrepancies between men and women in academia (american association of university professors, 2022), fewer female sport management professors (jones et.al, 2008) and less career and professional opportunities (bower, 2009) could occur. further, by mentoring and providing women the necessary information and tools to be effective, women could feel prepared, informed, and confident in their endeavors (bower, 2009; kram, 1985) despite the documented benefits of mentoring (bruce, 1995; kram, 1983, 1985; weaver & chelladurai, 1999) and for salary negotiation (elshenawy, 2010; kolb & mcginn, 2008; movius, 2008; sambuco et al., 2013; simone et al., 2020), sport management programs have not made the topic a required component of their programs. if women are not being mentored, they can be excluded from the potential advantages mentoring affords, including higher salaries (allen et al., 2004; laband & lentz, 1993). sport management programs have an obligation to assist with career success and positive salary outcomes for their female students. the discussions and dialogue specifically related to mentoring and salary negotiations for women are long overdue. faculty and sport management programs must make a commitment to the topic of negotiation. further, the ingrained and institutionalized way salary negotiation occurs within a gendered context needs to be addressed. though there are many complexities to the pay gap for men and women, committing to adding a salary negotiation class, workshop, symposium, role playing, or mentoring programs specifically for salary negotiation would certainly be a step in the right direction. although some participants in the study suggested tangible strategies that professors and advisors could provide, they also noted that women themselves could do better. one should be leery to accept that advice to completely solve the problem and view it as one part of the gendered salary negotiation process. kolb and mcginn (2008) proposed that research related to salary and negotiation stop focusing solely on characteristics of individuals or what they could do better; instead, working to change the narrative to consider societal factors that impact organizational practices (olekalns & kennedy, 2020). it may be important to also educate all (e.g., professors, mentors, those negotiating, advisors, administrators) about the negotiation processes and complexities. the narrative of if women would only do 39 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 43 this or that is a simplified, stereotypical response that is institutionalized (recalde & vesterlund, 2022) and should also be addressed. limitations and future research this study represents an initial inquiry into the role of mentoring, specifically for women in sport management academia regarding salary negotiation. a limitation of the study was that it only included female sport management professors in the united states. thus, the results are not generalizable and should be utilized explicitly to understand american female sport management professors mentoring experiences with salary negotiation. as cultural norms, values, and beliefs can impact the salary negotiation experience (shan, et al., 2019) the experiences of more international female sport management professors should be explored. sport and sport management have traditionally been dominated by white men (coakley, 2017; jones 2008). it cannot be assumed that all women experience the same circumstances or situations (henderson et al, 2010). although efforts were made to include traditionally minoritized individuals in the study, researchers should focus solely on their experiences with mentoring for salary negotiation. it cannot be assumed that women in the field have the same experiences as a black woman, latina, those with a disability, etc. thus, types of diversity and the intersection of one’s identity should also be examined. in future studies, researchers could also address the perspectives of faculty and mentors in sport management programs. it would be compelling to get an overall perspective of which programs include salary negotiation as a topic, or if 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(2019). the art of coding and thematic exploration in qualitative research. international management review, 15(1), 45–55. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.77.5.1004 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.77.5.1004 https://doi.org/10.1123/jsm.20.4.510 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1999.tb00175.x dichotomy of perception: an analysis of faculty perspectives on affirmative action in the university of missouri system shawn woodhouse, ph.d. woodhouse, summer, 2001 women, therefore, are at a disadvantage and may understand that they must promote strategies which will improve their situation such as affirmative action. introduction discrimination in admissions and faculty employment has been a problem in academia throughout this nation’s history. the civil rights movement led to political and legal remedies for this problem, among them anti-discrimination provisions in admissions (title vi) and employment (title vii), and affirmative action (executive order 11246), which all provided substantial gains for underrepresented groups in higher education (travers & rebore, 1995). long known as the “marketplace of ideas,” universities have in recent years had the reputation of providing equity for all students and faculty. yet, affirmative action, a primary tool by which to promote equity in higher education, is being challenged in the courts and legislatures of states such as california, texas, florida, and washington. in addition, this study was conducted at a time when the missouri general assembly was considering legislation, similar to initiatives in other states, which would “…abolish minority preferences in the state’s system of public employment, education, and contracting…” (garnier, 1998). this study examines faculty employment data to determine what it reveals about trends in faculty hiring based upon gender. this study also examines faculty perceptions of the impact of affirmative action on employment practices in the university of missouri system. background research has shown that there is a correlation between race, gender, and professional rank in higher education institutions. males, particularly white males, hold higher paying jobs at research universities, while women are relegated to the less prestigious ranks and less prestigious colleges (wilson, 1995). according to wilson, 66.5% of white males held the majority of high-paying faculty positions as compared to 21% of women in 1995. conversely, at low-paying two-year colleges, 47.9% of the teachers were women (wilson, 1995). longitudinal studies of women faculty representation indicated that they obtained rank and tenure at a slower rate than their male counterparts. in 1992, women comprised 32.5% of full-time faculty (wilson, 1992). review of literature summers (1995) conducted a study which indicated that women were quite more favorable in their attitudes toward affirmative action. in addition, men felt that they were less apt to encounter affirmative action, and more importantly, that their careers would be negatively affected should they encounter it, which relates to the idea of self-interest as a variable which affects responses to affirmative action. self interest recurred as a variable which affects opposition to race targeted interventions in research conducted by stack (1997). veilleux and tougas (1989) redefined self-interest as affecting one’s group rather than one’s personal situation in assessing men’s attitudes toward affirmative action programs. consequently, those men who believed that men as a group would be deprived of opportunities for hiring, promotion, and salary as a result of affirmative action were opposed to these programs. in addition, when men perceived that women as a group were being unfairly treated and that their career opportunities were limited based upon sex differences, they were favorable to programs designed to help this group. tougas, beaton, and veilleux (1991) also employed a comprehensive model of self-interest to predicting women’s reactions to affirmative action. results showed that even if women recognize that their group’s situation has not improved by past efforts, they will not approve of affirmative action unless they feel that present organizational practices are discriminatory to women. research questions 1. are there differences between gender groups regarding faculty perceptions of the impact of affirmative action policies on employment practices in the university of missouri system? 2. what do faculty data for the university of missouri system reveal about trends in faculty hiring based upon gender for the years 1993-97? method the survey used for this study was produced as part of a larger public research institute (pri) study for the office of human relations at san francisco state university (sfsu) (deleon, browning, & newton, 1996). some questions were modified to reflect the university of missouri's setting and population. population and sample the university of missouri system manages four campuses in different regions of missouri: university of missouri-columbia (umc), university of missouri-kansas city (umkc), university of missouri-rolla (umr), and university of missouri-st. louis (umsl). a random sample of 616 tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the university of missouri system received a questionnaire. stratified random sampling was successively employed to determine the number of faculty members on each of the four campuses to be surveyed, yielding a total of 329 (53%) on the umc campus; 113 (18%) on the umkc campus; 83 (13%) on the umr campus; and 91 (15%) on the umsl campus. two mailings were sent to faculty campus addresses. there were a total of 291 respondent, 34 (14.3%) of whom were located on the umsl campus; 125 (52.5%) on the umc (the flagship) campus; 45 (18.9%) on the umkc campus; and 34 (14.3%) on the umr campus. there were 137 (48.2%) white respondents and 147 (51.8%) ethnic minority respondents. there were 205 (74.3%) males and 71 (25.7%) females. there were 101 (34.9%) full professors; 128 (44.3%) associate professors; and 60 (20.8%) assistant professors. of this total, 224 (77.2%) were tenured; 64 (22.1%) were tenure-track; and 2 (0.7%) were not tenure track. results of statistical analysis the chi-square (x2) test of independence was employed to test the research questions. the statistical package sas was used to analyze the data. table 1 indicates that nearly 100 percent of the male and female respondents agreed with the affirmative action policy on their campuses, but the responses of women faculty were slightly higher. approximately 63 percent of the male respondents also believed that there is a scarcity of women faculty in their fields while 65% of women faculty did not believe that women faculty are scarce in their fields. additionally, 62% of the male respondents did not believe that women faculty in their fields lack the specialties needed, but the percentage was greater (83%) for female faculty. the majority (69%) of male respondents did not believe that minority faculty is less qualified than white male faculty, but the percentage was even higher for female respondents (84.51). moreover, 68% of male faculty did not believe that there is low motivation to hire minority faculty in their department while women faculty was divided in their opinion on the issue. approximately 68% of women faculty did not believe that finding qualified women faculty takes more time and effort than finding qualified white male faculty, but male file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/woodhouse.html#t1 file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/woodhouse.html#t1 faculty were divided in their opinion on the issue. in addition, approximately 77 percent of male faculty believed that their departments had been thorough in their efforts to recruit minority faculty, but the percentage was lower (60%) for female respondents. lastly, 63% of the male respondents indicated that they would not support legislation to abolish minority preferences, but an overwhelming majority of the women (87%) indicated that they would not support legislation to abolish minority preferences. table 2 indicates that there were more newly hired white male faculty in a given year than any minority faculty group. the data for minority faculty new hires were very scant, with some fluctuation of 1-4 hires for individual years. similarly, table 3 indicates that more white female faculty were employed than any other racial group. african american, asian american, hispanic, and american indian female faculty followed, respectively. as with male faculty, the hiring data for all female minority faculty were extremely scant, with some fluctuation of 1-2 hires for individual years. discussion this study provides strong evidence that gender group membership is important in understanding employees’ perceptions of affirmative action programs (parker, baltes, & christiansen, 1997). faculty perceptions in this study may have been a function of their political ideologies or their belief that affirmative action serves as a vehicle by which to create a more equitable workplace for women (parker, et al., 1997). ambivalence and concordance rather than opposition more accurately characterized the difference in perceptions between gender groups in this study. the only item on which the groups had a difference of opinion was the scarcity of women. both groups agreed with the system affirmative action policy and supported minority preferences for the state’s system of public employment and education, except the percentage was higher for women on both items. female faculty responses may be reflective of their belief that affirmative action policies work more in their favor in selection decisions (graves & powell, 1994). stack (1997) indicated that women are more supportive of help-oriented programs to nurture the opportunities of the disadvantaged than men. these differences in perceptions among gender groups may have also been attributed to the historically conditioned perceptions that are embedded in american society (bax, 1996). the american workplace is structured upon the white male system, or the “old boy” network, which thrives on power relations (schaef, 1992). white males compete to acquire and hold on to key positions in order to secure their place in a system which perpetuates the employment of those who have similar values and beliefs. women, therefore, are at a disadvantage and may understand that they must promote strategies which will improve their situation such as affirmative action. file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/woodhouse.html#t2 file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/woodhouse.html#t2 file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/woodhouse.html#t2 file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/woodhouse.html#t2 file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/woodhouse.html#t3 file:///c:/documents%20and%20settings/michelle/desktop/woodhouse.html#t3 conclusion researchers who have studied faculty representation in academe have consistently indicated that the number of women faculty has increased, but not enough to impact the disparity that currently exists in the academic workplace. the gender groups only differed in opinion substantially regarding the scarcity of women. both groups agreed with the system affirmative action policy and supported minority preferences, except the percentages were higher for women. female faculty responses may be reflective of their belief that affirmative action policies work more in their favor in selection decisions (graves & powell, 1994). the conceptualization of faculty perceptions in this study may be twofold. faculty perceptions may imply that there has been a convergence of ideological values underlying the political framework of the american workplace. that is to say, faculty who agreed to participate in the study were either more liberal or felt an obligation to conform to social standards by providing socially desirable responses in order to dispel the implication of racial bias. faculty reactions to various items on the questionnaire and their divergence from the theoretical framework of contemporary research suggests the latter explanation. because affirmative action targets historically disadvantaged groups, white males tend to be the only group that does not benefit from affirmative action. male responses in this study consistently contradicted the theoretical and empirical frameworks which suggest that they generally resist affirmative action policies. although a substantial percentage indicated that they would support legislation to abolish minority preferences in missouri, the majority indicated that they would not. an overwhelming percentage of women faculty strongly agreed with their campus affirmative action policies and indicated that they would not support legislation to abolish minority preferences. this group has been historically excluded from participation in academia as professional personnel and may not have recognized any improvements in their social condition until affirmative action was implemented. this could explain their overwhelming acceptance of affirmative action. the implications of this study challenge us to consider whether the hegemonic ideals that once permeated the knowledge hierarchy of academia have diverged to include the intellectual perspectives of academic professionals from every cultural, social, and economic origin. the ideological infrastructure that guides educational policy and constitutes the ethos of academic institutions must incorporate diversity. consequently, higher education can live up to the reputation of being a “marketplace of ideas.” dr. shawn woodhouse is an assistant professor at the univesity of missouri-st. louis. dr woodhouse can be reached by e-mail at: shawn_woodhouse@umsl.edu references bax, p. f. (1996). women in academia: is affirmative action helping? thresholds in education, 22(1), 19-24. deleon, r., browning, r., & newton, j. (1996). human relations at san francisco state university: the faculty perspective. (public research institute). garnier, d. (1998). sb 0681 repeals quotas and preferences by state and local governments. [on-line] available: http://www.senate.state.mo.us/bills/sb681.html graves, l. m., & powell, g. n. (1994). effects of sex-based preferential selection and discrimination on job attitudes. human relations, 47(2), 133-155. parker, c. p., baltes, b. b., & christiansen, n. d. (1997). support for affirmative action, justice perceptions, and work attitudes: a study of gender and racial-ethnic group differences. journal of applied psychology, 82(3), 376-389. schaef, a. (1992). women’s reality: an emerging female system in a white male society. san francisco: harper collins publishers. stack, s. (1997). women’s opposition to race-targeted interventions. sex roles, 36(9-10), 543-550. summers, r. j. (1995). attitudes toward different methods of affirmative action. journal of applied social psychology, 25(12), 1090-1104. tougas, f., beaton, a. m., & veilleux, f. (1991). why women approve of affirmative action: the study of a predictive model. international journal of psychology, 26(6), 761-776. travers, p. d., & rebore, r. w. (1995). foundations of education: becoming a teacher. (4th ed.) massachusetts: allyn and bacon. university office of human relations. (1996, fall). human relations at san francisco state university: the faculty perspective. san francisco: san francisco state university public research institute. veilleux, f., & tougas, f. (1989). male acceptance of affirmative action programs for women: the results of altruistic or egotistical motives. international journal of psychology, 24, 485-496. wilson, j. k. (1995-96). the myth of reverse discrimination in higher education. the journal of blacks in higher education, 10, 88-93. mailto:shawn_woodhouse@umsl.edu mailto:shawn_woodhouse@umsl.edu wilson, r. (1992, may 13). education department study of faculty members finds most have full-time appointments. the chronicle of higher education, p. a19. table 1. perceptions by gender _______________________________________________________________________________________ gender                                                      vairable male f(%) female f(%) x2 agree strongly agree 93(45.81) 97(47.78) 22(31.88) 46(66.67)   affirmative action policy uninformed not very informed moderatley informed very informed 7(3.41) 32(15.61) 110(53.66) 56(27.32) 3(4.23) 19(26.76) 35(49.30) 14(19.72) 5.036 affirmative action goals strongly negative moderatly negative moderatley positve very positive 4(2.00) 24(12.00) 102(51.00) 70(35.00) 1(1.52) 6(9.09) 30(45.45) 29(43.94) 1.807 affirmative action implementation strongly negative moderately negative moderately positive very positive 11(5.47) 45(22.39) 117(58.21) 28(13.93) 2(2.99) 13(19.40) 48(71.64) 4(5.97) 4.987 affirmative action results strongly negative moderately negative moderately positive very positive 15(7.65) 58(29.59) 112(57.14) 11(5.61) 6(9.23) 15(23.08) 40(61.54) 4(6.15) 1.079 scarcity-minorities not at all moderately greatly 24(11.71) 64(31.22) 117(57.07) 12(16.90) 19(26.76) 40(56.34) 1.444 scarcity-women not at all moderately greatly 73(36.14) 84(41.58) 45(22.28) 45(65.22) 18(26.09) 6(8.70) 18.311*** lack specialties-minorites not at all 90(45.23) 54(27.14) 36(52.17) 22(31.88) 3.779 moderatley greatly 55(27.64) 11(15.94) lack specialities-women not at all moderately greatly 124(62.31) 56(28.14) 19(9.55) 57(83.82) 11(16.18) 0(0.00) 12.843*** less qualified-minorities not at all moderately greatly 138(69.35) 46(23.12) 15(7.54) 60(84.51) 10(14.08) 1(1.41) 7.015* less qualified women not at all moderatley greatly 171(86.80) 24(12.18) 2(1.02) 64(91.43) 6(8.57) 0(0.00) 1.436 low motivation to hire-minorites not at all moderatley greatly 137(68.16) 33(16.42) 31(15.42) 35(49.30) 19(26.76) 17(23.94) 8.047** low motivation to hire-women not at all moderatley greatly 153(76.88) 34(17.09) 12(6.03) 49(70.00) 15(21.43) 6(8.57) 1.363 takes more effort to recruit-minorities not at all moderatley greatly 58(28.71) 72(35.64) 72(35.64) 22(31.43) 25(35.71) 23(32.86) 0.246 takes more effort to recruit-women not at all moderatley greatly 98(49.25) 71(35.68) 30(15.08) 46(67.65) 19(27.94) 3(4.41) 8.745** lack resources to recruit-minorities not at all moderatley greatly 132(65.35) 47(23.27) 23(11.39) 42(60.87) 15(21.74) 12(17.39) 1.649 lack resources to recruit-women not at all moderatley greatly 140(70.71) 44(22.22) 14(7.07) 50(75.76) 11(16.67) 5(7.58) 0.926 recruiting efforts-minorities not at all thorough not very thorough moderately thorough very thorough 18(8.96) 28(13.93) 61(30.35) 94(46.77 11(16.18) 16(23.53) 22(32.35) 19(27.94) 9.673** recruiting efforts-women not at all thorough not very thorough moderately thorough 8(4.02) 20(10.05) 69(34.67) 102(51.26) 4(5.80) 9(13.04) 21(30.43) 35(50.72) 1.062 very thorough vote-missouri senate bill 681 yes no 70(37.23) 118(62.77) 9(13.24) 59(86.76) 13.480*** note: *p<.05; **p<.01; ***p<.001 table 2. total tenured/tenure-track newly hired males by campus and race, 1993-1997 umsl umkc umrumc white 23 29 25 103 african american 7 1 0 6 hispanic 0 1 1 3 asian american 2 7 6 12 american indian 0 0 0 0 total 32 38 32 124 note: umsl = university of missouri-st. louis; umkc = university of missouri-kansas city; umr = university of missouri-rolla; umc = university of missouri-columbia table 3. total tenured/tenure-track newly hired females by campus and race, 1993-1997 umsl umkc umrumc white 21 28 11 63 african american 3 1 0 5 hispanic 0 0 0 2 asian american 0 2 1 1 american indian 0 1 0 2 total 24 32 12 73 note: umsl = university of missouri-st. louis; umkc = university of missouri-kansas city; umr = university of missouri-rolla; umc = university of missouri-columbia volume 44, 2025 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodriguez, and benjamin jankens assistant editor: jordan donop & kristina hall 2 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 advancing women in leadership vol. 44, 1-14, 2025 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper the challenges of female executives in the sport industry: an interpretive phenomenological study lindsay hofferberth & andrew babyak lindsay hofferberth: assistant professor of sport management, belmont abbey university, lindsayhofferberth@bac.edu andrew babyak: assistant dean of business, messiah university, ababyak@messiah.edu accepted february 28th, 2025 the purpose of this qualitative, interpretative phenomenological study was to explore how executive women working in the sport industry described their lived experiences navigating challenges to attaining executive positions. the theoretical framework for this study was the leadership labyrinth, which is used to identify the unique and specific challenges women may face throughout their professional careers and personal lives. the study was guided by two research questions which asked how do executive women describe their lived experiences pertaining to gender bias while working in the sport industry and how do executive women in the sport industry described their lived experiences of overcoming challenges of gender bias in attaining executive positions? the sample consisted of 12 female executives in the sport industry in the united states. the primary method of data collection was a 60–90-minute open-ended interview, and the analysis method for this research study was heidegger’s method of interpretive phenomenological analysis. the results of this study identify the role gender bias plays in women’s careers. other career inhibiting factors like work-life balance, double standards, societal gender roles, stereotypes, the need for male sponsors, men as decision makers, and the queen bee syndrome were identified as unique challenges. the findings of this study also outline factors and techniques used to navigate and overcome the challenges associated with gender bias including personality type, a need for confidence, building relationships, and using gender as an advantage. this study provides a unique perspective and contributes to the overall body of work pertaining to the female experience in the sport industry. keywords: gender, bias, sport, leadership labyrinth, queen bee syndrome, female, executive, phenomenology sport is often described as a microcosm of society, through its images, ideologies, and structures, which emphasizes the differences between men and women, and reinforces a social hierarchy based on gender (cibibin & leo, 2022). the sport industry in the united states has always been dominated by men, who are still involved at higher percentage than women (cibibin & leo, 2022). the white male patriarchy generally dominates the sports sector and sport business (pielichaty et al., 2024). gender inequality in the sport industry has become a normalized practice, with women being underrepresented and marginalized (hindman & walker, 2020). the purpose of this qualitative, interpretative phenomenological study was to explore how women working in the sport industry described their lived experiences navigating challenges to attaining executive positions in the united states. although there has been an increase in the number of women in working environments, the same trend is not true in management positions, especially in sport (kowaleska, 2020). for example, in the ncaa, men hold more than 70% of the positions in leadership (paulson et al., 2023. gomez (2023) stated that intercollegiate athletics is dominated by males, especially in leadership roles, with only about 24% of the population of college athletic directors being female (as of the 2021–22 academic year). despite the more recent need for fairness, equality, and diversity, women are still vastly underrepresented in senior leadership in the sport industry (gray & weese, 2023). while the sport industry continues to be male dominated, there are women who have entered the industry and successfully earned positions at the executive level. the scarcity of women in leadership roles is indicative of a gender equity issue, and it also indicates there is a rare set of circumstances that exist for the female leaders who have managed to ascend to the upper echelons of an organization (imm & wahid, 2020). while previous studies have been conducted to learn about the experiences of women working in the sport industry, there is a more specific need to explore the experiences of women working in the industry who hold leadership, management, or executive positions (hindman & walker, 2020). women are at a disadvantage not only within the sport industry, but especially within the executive levels of an organization (cibbin & leo, 2022). research into collegiate athletics has found that sport is often privileged to men, especially white men (hardin et al., 2022). women 3 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 continue to be underrepresented in senior leadership and in higher administration within the sport industry. (gray & weese, 2023). even though there are opportunities for participation in sport, women have been underrepresented throughout men’s sport history (samad, 2021). there was a need to explore how women who hold executive roles in the sport industry have navigated challenges of gender bias throughout their careers. gender bias is the inclination or prejudice towards a specific gender (smith & mccarthy, 2022). in this study, gender bias referred to the unfair treatment of women simply because their gender is identified as female. for the purpose of this study, the classification of “female” was identified from one’s gender at birth or one’s identity as a transgender female. prior researchers have conducted studies involving women working in the sport industry, but not at the executive level (hindman & walker, 2020). hindman and walker (2020) conducted a qualitative phenomenological study with 11 participants to explore the experiences of sexism that women encountered while working in various roles for teams of the american hockey league. hindman and walker found that all participants faced gender bias at some point in their careers. hardin et al. (2022) indicated that gender bias is a significant factor which limits opportunities for female leaders across various industries including sport. they investigated how women who hold senior level positions in collegiate athletics experience gender bias. the results indicated that gender bias is still a factor in collegiate athletics, and they provided an in-depth look at several factors that use gender bias as a construct. while studies have been conducted pertaining to gender bias in the sport industry, research had not been conducted from the perspective of the female executive (hindman & walker, 2020). hindman and walker (2020) recommended that further research be conducted to explore how a woman’s experiences of bias range in the industry. examples included evaluating both women’s professional sport and college athletics. gallardo-perez (2021) suggested that future research explore gender bias as it relates to minorities. women are considered minorities both in the united states and also within the sport industry (gill, 2021; gallardo-perez, 2021). diehl (2020) suggested that future studies should be focused on exploring the experiences of women in fields like technology, oil, gas and mining, and other male dominated areas. the sport industry is male dominated, and women face many barriers (both structural and institutional that hinder a woman’s career progress (gray & weese, 2023). the barriers to advancement are usually seen when women transition to the upper echelons of an organization by earning more financial income and taking on more responsibilities (apaydin et al., 2021). samad (2021) discussed how the nba should address gender discrimination in sport by implementing a “hammon” rule for hiring head coaches. this study was inspired by san antonio spurs former assistant coach becky hammon. despite having a more than qualified resume, hammon has yet to hold a head coaching position in the nba. this study introduced the idea of forcing nba teams to interview female applicants for head coaching positions (much like the “rooney” rule in the nfl requires teams to interview minority candidates). per nfl operations, “through hiring best practices, the rooney rule aims to increase the number of minorities hired in head coach, general manager, and executive positions... following the 2022 spring league meeting, the rooney rule was expanded to include women as a part of the minority candidate definition and also include the qb coach position” (2022). samad suggested a multi-faceted approach to promote gender equity to improve the organizational culture by: (a) implementing mentorship programs pairing women with male and female sponsors to provide career advancement opportunities, (b) conducting regular audits of hiring and promotion practices to ensure women are considered for decision-making roles, and (c) fostering a workplace culture that encourages collaboration rather than competition among women to combat the queen bee syndrome. phenomenon and research questions it was not known how women working in the sport industry described their lived experiences navigating challenges to attaining executive positions. the purpose of this qualitative, interpretative phenomenological study was to explore how women working in the sport industry described their lived experiences navigating these challenges in the united states. the following research questions were used to guide the study: rq1: how do executive women describe their lived experiences pertaining to gender bias while working in the sport industry? rq2: how do executive women in the sport industry describe their lived experiences of overcoming challenges of gender bias in attaining executive positions? theoretical foundations for research while the glass ceiling is used to provide an explanation for the career trajectory of a woman’s career is still appropriate because there are still gaps in the pipeline for women at some of the best in practice organizations (harris & norlander, 2023), it is not always an accurate analogy. the use of the glass ceiling implies that women ascend to executive positions in the same vertical alignment with similar experiences along the way (mcdonagh & paris, 2012). the barrier was not easy for women to see from a distance (hancock et al., 2018). the use of the glass ceiling implies that each woman faces the same struggles and challenges on a singular linear ascension to management; however, that assumption is inaccurate and unrealistic. the continued scarcity of women at executive levels of leadership increases gender assumptions which promotes perceptions that women are similar, thus the performance and success of one woman can be generalized to many/all women (manzi & heilman, 2021). leadership labyrinth the leadership labyrinth was used as a theoretical framework for this study to describe a woman’s journey during her professional career and personal life. while the glass ceiling is represented by a ladder that eventually leads to an invisible impenetrable barrier, the leadership labyrinth is depicted as a maze. within the maze, there are 4 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 a variety of factors that a woman may encounter along her career that may affect her ability to earn management positions (mcdonagh & paris, 2012). examples of barriers in the maze are career demands, inhospitable workplace culture, lack of leadership development, discrimination, work-life balance, aggressive competition, lack of role models, lack of confidence, stereotypes, and thwarted ambition (mcdonagh & paris, 2012). the representation of the leadership labyrinth as a maze is a more accurate depiction of a woman’s career path (hancock et al., 2018). this maze is specifically referred to as a labyrinth that women must strategically navigate to advance into leadership and management positions (mcdonagh & paris, 2012). the framework was used to imply that there are boundaries everywhere and the journey for women is complex (lucia & padgett, 2021). the leadership labyrinth provided a more accurate depiction (as compared to the glass ceiling) of a woman’s experiences, and the challenges she has faced both personally and professionally throughout her career. within each turn and corner of the leadership labyrinth, there are a variety of factors that represent a barrier or an inhibiting component that a woman may experience during her career. examples of these barriers and inhibiting factors include work-life balance, stereotypes, aggressive competition, inhospitable culture and double standards. the maze is a unique representation of the specific and individual nature of each woman’s experiences (mcdonagh & paris, 2012). the use of a maze suggests that each woman, on her career journey, will experience a different path in her goal toward earning a position of power. each woman will encounter barriers on her journey, some that are subtle and some that are much more overt (hancock et al., 2018). any combination of the factors listed in the leadership labyrinth may affect a woman’s journey to management. women face a variety of obstacles en route to promotion in the workplace, which include inhospitable corporate cultures, lack of leadership development opportunities, lack of confidence, work-life balance, and double standards due to bias or discrimination (mcdonagh & paris, 2012). queen bee syndrome women are connected by the commonality of gender; thus, women would be more likely to support each other’s goals and ambitions (n.a., 2021). because women may encounter similar experiences, it would be logical to assume that women would come together to fight for a common cause. however, this assumed behavior is not always the case. a phenomenon has developed as a result of research among those women who have been able to reach the top levels of an organization. several studies have shown that women in top positions tend to mistreat other women (apaydin et al., 2021; cibbin & leo, 2022). this phenomenon is known as the “queen bee syndrome”. queen bee syndrome occurs among women who are successful in a male-dominated industry and have earned high-level positions. sometimes these women create obstacles for other women based on societal roles in an attempt to discriminate against or suppress other women (apaydin et al., 2021). it is also the notion that female executives knowingly or unknowingly view other women as a potential threat; therefore, they ostracize themselves from these other women in an attempt to protect themselves and their successes (apaydin et al., 2021). female executives are likely to have a difficult journey to reaching management and executive positions. according to apaydin et al. (2021), they understand the struggle for success, and it can be taken away just as quickly as it was earned. female executives have fears of being outshined or outperformed by younger women who are working to ascend the ranks. as a result, the female executive may tend to hold onto information or opportunities in an attempt for self-preservation to keep other women from becoming more successful and empowered (apaydin et al., 2021). methods participants the target population for this study was identified as women who held leadership, management, or executive positions in the sport industry. these positions can be defined as department heads (like vice president of marketing or vice president of ticket sales) or positions within the c-suite (like chief executive officer, chief financial officer, or team owner). this distinction was used to illustrate a specific focus within the sport industry, and it identified the target population as women who held roles in the upper echelons of sport organizations. purposive sampling by using the participant’s job titles, organization and league was used along with snowball and convenience sampling to produce a sample of 12 women who held positions as department heads or as members of the c-suite in the sport industry in the united states. this sampling strategy matches the sample based on meeting the goals and objectives of the research (campbell et al., 2020). it improves the validity of the study and trustworthiness of the data and results (campbell et al., 2020). convenience and snowball sampling were used as additional recruiting methods. convenience sampling is a type of sampling in which participants are chosen because they are convenient sources of data for researcher (andrade, 2021). the process of snowball sampling is based on referrals (streeton et al., 2004). this process allowed the researcher to find additional participants by being associated with a particular person (streeton et al., 2004). participants who were recruited and committed to the study through purposive sampling knew other female executives that were willing to participate. all communication with the 12 participants was conducted using personal email addresses to ensure identities could be protected and to avoid having to obtain site authorization. a demographic questionnaire was utilized to collect data on the participants’ race, experience within the sport industry, age, level of education, and title within their respective organizations. the demographic questionnaire was obtained as part of a google form once the participants signed and submitted the informed consent document. table 1 displays the demographic data as percentages of the overall population. 5 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 research design interpretive phenomenology was the philosophy that was used to guide this study. smith & osborn (2008) indicated that interpretive phenomenology was developed from psychology as a method to recognize that people view the world differently. these views are often based on personalities, life experiences and motivating factors. interpretive phenomenology can be used to explore personal and subjective experiences of individual participants (smith & osborn, 2008). this method is different than other facets of psychology because interpretive phenomenology does not attempt to test a hypothesis; it does not seek to generalize results for a group of participants; and it does not try to quantify an objective experience (smith & osborn, 2008). interpretive phenomenology is specifically used to explore the human experience. it considers each participant as a unique entity and allows the researcher to make deeper connections with the data (matua & van der wal, 2015). the data were analyzed using heidegger’s method of interpretive phenomenological analysis. this method was chosen over giorgi’s method of analysis because it is used to examine the context of the participant’s experiences in relation to factors like culture, gender, or employment (matua & van der wal, 2015). in giorgi’s method, “the results reflect a careful description of precisely the features of the experienced phenomenon as they present themselves to the consciousness of the researcher” (giorgi, 2009, pp. 130-131). using giorgi’s method of analysis, results are described simply based on the accounts of participants (giorgi, 2009). heidegger’s method of interpretive phenomenological analysis goes further than just the description of the participants’ experiences and seeks meanings that are embedded in the everyday accounts (pham, 2021). additionally, interpretive phenomenological analysis has an idiographic approach because it first considers the experiences of each individual participant before attempting to make conclusions about a group or study population (smith & osborn, 2008). once the interpretive phenomenological analysis was completed, a summary of the results was composed. data collection the primary data source for this research study was an openended interview. the interview questions were developed to answer the research questions and to address the phenomenon and the problem statement. the interview questions and protocol were reviewed by an expert panel and three field tests were conducted to evaluate the interview questions and protocol. as a result of the expert panel review and field tests, adjustments were made to the questions and protocol to improve the interview process. the participants were asked to describe their lived experiences pertaining to gender bias in the sport industry. they were asked about the factors included in the leadership labyrinth. they were also asked about the obstacles and challenges they have faced throughout their careers, and how they have been able to navigate and overcome those challenges. each interview lasted approximately 60-90 minutes and consisted of 16 scripted interview questions. time was allotted for follow up questions and discussion to allow the researchers to fully comprehend the experiences and feelings of each participant. during the interviews, the researchers worked to gain the trust and develop a rapport with each participant. there was not a set number of follow questions. any additional questions or conversations were unique to each interview to dig deeper about a particular experience or to clarify details, thoughts or feelings of each participant. interviews were either conducted in-person away from the participant’s place of business or via zoom. all interviews were recorded using a personal recording device. table 2 displays the specific details of each interview including duration, setting and length of each transcript. prior to each interview, informed consent was obtained for each participant. informed consent is required for research studies using human subjects (yip et al., 2016). informed consent also addresses the participants’ right to leave the interview or the study at any point as they wish (yip et al., 2016). the data that was collected during the interview process did not uses any participant names, organization names or league names. it was important to protect the identities and careers of the participants. women who chose to participate in this study were hesitant because they had concerns about jeopardizing their careers. distinguishing factors were protected because those factors could be used to identify participants. there were also legal implications to consider. many states in the united states employ right-to-work statutes. north carolina, where the researcher was based, is a right-to-work state. this means that, excluding a contract stating the contrary, employees can quit or can be fired at any time for any reason or for no reason at all with no notice required to be given by the employer (varner & schmidt, 2022). bracketing was completed for this qualitative phenomenological study. bracketing is used in qualitative research to mitigate researcher bias that may taint the research process (dorfler & stierand, 2021). to minimize bias, the researcher used a reflexive journal. using a reflexive journal was an important tool in phenomenological research. it is valuable because the researcher must reflect on experiences throughout the data collection process (vicary, young & hicks, 2016). using a reflexive journal helped the researcher stay vigilant of any potential bias, so objectivity could be maintained throughout the study (vicary, young & hicks, 2016). table 2 contains information regarding the specific attributes of each interview as well as averages for interview time and the number of transcript pages. 6 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 data analysis once the data were collected, they were transcribed, and member checking was conducted. this is the process of asking for feedback from the study participants about the data. this validity check is a requirement for rigorous qualitative research (motulsky, 2021). the data were analyzed using heidegger’s method of interpretive phenomenological analysis. this method was chosen over giorgi’s method of analysis because it is used to examine the context of the participant’s experiences in relation to factors like culture, gender, or employment (matua & van der wal, 2015). in giorgi’s method “the results reflect a careful description of precisely the features of the experienced phenomenon as they present themselves to the consciousness of the researcher” (giorgi, 2009, pp. 130-131). using giorgi’s method of analysis, results are described simply based on the accounts of participants (giorgi, 2009). heidegger’s method of interpretive phenomenological analysis goes further than just the description of the participants’ experiences and is used to seek meanings that are embedded in the everyday accounts (pham, 2021). there are eleven steps to complete a proper interpretive phenomenological analysis. the study followed the necessary steps during data analysis. according to creswell (2007), the steps of the analysis process are as follows: 1: for data preparation, a transcript must be created for each interview, which is derived from the recordings. in this step, the researcher must also assign any appropriate or necessary pseudonyms. 2: for data cleaning, once the data are transcribed the researcher must conduct any error detection and error repair before the interpretive analysis process. data cleaning involves removing errors or inconsistencies to improve the overall quality of the data (rahm & do, 2000). 3: the researcher must read and re-read each participant transcript for accuracy and become immersed in the subject matter. the researcher listens to the original data and reread the transcribed data for better comprehension. this allows the researcher to become fully immersed in the content. 4: for initial noting, the researcher explores content of each individual transcript and record initial notes within the research data. this also involves exploring semantics within the content. it is important to evaluate verbiage used by the participants to describe their experiences. notes are then grouped and identified by the researcher. notes must be identified based on the purpose of the study. 5: in order to develop initial themes, the researcher focuses on portions of each transcript individually and develops the assigned notes into themes. there can be many initial notes in the data. those notes must then be combined and narrowed into initial themes based on the data and the purpose of the study. 6: in order to develop emergent themes, the researcher looks for connections across emergent themes within each individual transcript. these themes are then be compared with one another to look for similarities and differences. 7: to move to the next case, steps 3-6 are completed again until all transcripts are themed. each transcript must be considered individually before moving to the following steps in the process. 8: in order to report individual themes, the researcher reports the themes of each individual participant and transcript. it is important to highlight each participant’s experiences and emergent themes before moving forward and comparing cases within the study. 9: in order to look for patterns across cases, the researcher looks for patterns among the emergent themes across each participant’s transcripts. the researcher tries to bracket previous themes only after treating each case as an individual entity. bracketing is used in qualitative research to mitigate researcher bias that may taint the research process (dorfler & stierand, 2021). after each case has been considered individually, the researcher can look for patterns across participants. 10: in order to take interpretations to deeper levels, the researcher takes initial interpretations to deeper levels to gain a deeper understanding of the content. this is one of the steps that differentiates interpretive phenomenological analysis from other qualitative analysis methods (matua & van der wal, 2015). 11: for the summary of findings, a researcher creates a summary of the findings based on the data and themes that have emerged from the participants during their individual interviews. the findings are detailed in a report, and the researcher highlights the common themes that were discovered as well as any other unique findings that address the phenomenon and the research questions. trustworthiness maintaining trustworthiness was a crucial component of this study. trustworthiness is an important component to assessing qualitative research, and it is the most important aspect for ensuring transparency (adler, 2022). in addition to bracketing, the interview protocols were reviewed by an expert panel and three field tests were conducted to help the researcher understand and fine tune the interview process. as a result of the expert panel, adjustments were made to improve the interview protocols. the field tests were 7 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 valuable in providing insight while also teaching the researcher about the interview process. the researcher practiced maintaining impartiality as the participants responded to the open-ended questions. the researcher also made adjustments to cadence and timing when conducting the interviews to improve the way the interview flowed. additionally, member checking was conducted after the researcher created each interview transcript. member checking is the process of asking for feedback from the study participants about the validity of the data or interpretations. this validity check is a requirement for rigorous qualitative research (motulsky, 2021). ensuring trustworthiness was important to this phenomenological research because this study relied on the depth of participant experiences in order to explore the phenomenon. results before presenting the results of themes across participants, it is important to examine the results of each individual participant. each participant had unique experiences throughout their respective careers. the naming convention for the pseudonyms was “participant” followed by ascending letters of the alphabet (i.e. participant a, participant b, participant c, etc.). research question 1 the first research question asked how do executive women describe their lived experiences pertaining to gender bias while working in the sport industry? there were three emergent themes that contributed to answering the first research question. those three emergent themes were identified as “gender bias”, “the queen bee syndrome” and “non-gendered challenges”. within those three emergent themes, several individual themes were identified, and they were important to include because nearly all or all participants discussed them in their respective interviews. gender bias the first emergent theme was “gender bias”. this theme was significant because every participant in this study identified that gender bias did exist in the sport industry. every participant acknowledged they had not only experienced unfair treatment because of their gender, they had also witnessed other female colleagues or supervisors being treated unfairly on the basis of gender. within the emergent theme of gender bias, there were six subthemes that provided context, and at least 10 of the participants acknowledged the significance of each subtheme as a contributing factor in their respective interviews. work-life balance. the first subtheme contributing to gender bias was “work-life balance”. every participant in this study identified that women have had to balance both home and family life while the same expectation does not exist for men. participant a and participant b both identified a need to adjust their work schedules or the need to find roles that accommodated for the ability to balance home and work. participant a indicated, “once i started a family, i was like, oh, i need something more nine to five.” participant b acknowledged that after a significant change in her personal life, she transferred divisions so that she would be available to meet the needs of her family. she stated, “that was a real eye opener there, and then, life had changed for me. i needed to find something that was work from home at that time, and i was able to transfer divisions within the same company.” other participants discussed the struggles they faced while trying to balance the demands and the unpredictable hours of the sport industry along with the demands of having a family. participant k even discussed the struggles she has seen regarding work-life balance among her single childless colleagues. it is also very interesting, because a lot of times the single women are asked to do more work because they’re perceived to have more time. married colleagues, with children would often ask single colleagues to cover things for them, but what they don’t understand is that single people have worklife demands as well; they just aren’t the same. work-life balance was an issue among all participants regardless of their position in life. double standards. the second subtheme that contributed to the emergent theme of gender bias was “double standards”. in analyzing the results, 11 of the 12 participants identified behaviors directly linked to work-life balance that suggested double standards existed between men and women in the workplace. behaviors associated with domestic life like being a wife, mother, and managing a home had an impact in the workplace. participant e noted that in her experiences, females had not been entitled to the same perks and benefits as their male counterparts. she also indicated that if a woman did not have to manage the demands of work-life balance, she would be able to compete with the men in her organization. she told the story of a female colleague who was able to compete with men in her organization because she did not have children. “there was this executive and she was able to compete with her male colleagues because she was not married and did not have children.” she had the ability to do everything that a man could because she did not have to worry about taking care of children. the double standard existed in the fact that men could have children and families, yet a woman had to be single and childless to earn the same level of success. she indicated that the demands for men were far less cumbersome than for women. she stated, “the male executives are all married, so they have a wife at home to help with children.” participant f discussed double standards in the way she was treated as opposed to her male counterparts. her every move was measured and monitored, yet the men were not judged as harshly. “it was just the way he treated the women in the office. if i went to the restroom, i was asked about where i was going. it was very much a gendered thing.” participant c even recounted how her appearance often led to being misjudged in a way that men would not. she stated, when i walk into a sports venue more often than not, people come up to me and ask me whose wife or girlfriend i am. they don’t ask or assume that i am an executive. it’s just an assumption that’s made. 8 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 many of the participants discussed that these behaviors would not and did not happen to their male colleagues. the need for male sponsorship. the third subtheme that contributed to the emergent theme of gender bias was “the need for male sponsorship”. this subtheme first presented itself with participant a. it was a theme that did not seem overtly significant, and the researcher addressed potential skepticism in the reflexivity protocol. however, this individual theme was present among 11 of the 12 participants. participant a suggested that throughout her career, once she was able to break through barriers with men, they proved to be a better ally than women. “i find males, once you're able to break down the barrier, they can be a better ally. to me, that's my experience than female at times. because i find that we're our own worst enemies.” she also stated that of all the times she had been promoted or offered an opportunity for advancement, it was given to her by a man who acknowledged her work ethic and value to the organization. “and through working various positions in the business at [company name], there was a man [name] was like, ‘man, you're such a good worker. we want to promote you here’, and i just kept getting promoted.” the researcher added a line of questioning regarding this topic as a result of the interview with participant a. participant c discussed that her career path was a direct result of a group of men that saw her skill set as an asset. the men who launched her career were always very supportive and constantly asking her how they could help her. she stated, the people i work with are great. they are family to me and huge mentors. about one year into my career, they said ‘how can we help you? obviously, you have done some great work, but how can we help you. participant k discussed the premise that women’s ideas are often dismissed and then accepted when they are presented by a male. she told a story about a male colleague actually giving her credit when it happened to her. there was an instance where i brought up an idea in a room with a lot of people and they completely dismissed it. then a couple months later, a man in a position of power brought it up, and they were like, ‘oh, my god, that's so great.’ then he flipped it back and said, ‘you know, she mentioned that a few months ago. ten of the 11 remaining participants identified a significant need for male sponsorship throughout their careers within the sport industry. men as decision makers. the fourth subtheme that contributed to the emergent theme of gender bias was “men as decision makers”. much like “the need for male sponsorship”, this subtheme also presented itself in the interview with participant a. she stated that post the “me too” movement, women had been promoted to executive levels more than ever before. however, she was curious to know how many of the women being promoted were actually considered to be true decision makers. it was her understanding that while it was wonderful to have women in positions of power, there were still men ultimately making the final decisions. she stated, “i mean, when i was in [industry], most of the decision makers were men. they're the ones making the decision for you to be sharing the table with other women.” the suggestion was that many women may be promoted to executive roles for optics rather than input. participant d discussed the fact that her male colleagues would often seek opinions from other men to validate their thoughts instead of asking her opinion. “i knew that they were not going to take me seriously because i'm a woman. you get that feeling when you're talking to them. they'll go to a couple other people, the male counterparts for similar asks or answers”. participant k also included a similar sentiment from her career. she stated, a lot of times, it's when you're sitting in the room, and a woman will say they have an idea, and people kind of brush it off and move along. then that same exact idea is replicated, you know, maybe an hour later, or in a different meeting by a white man, and everyone is like “oh, my god, this is amazing. that's such a great idea.” they're, the one getting the credit for it. then to not acknowledge where it came from in the first place. societal gender roles. the fifth subtheme that contributed to the emergent theme of gender bias was “societal gender roles”. this subtheme was present among 11 of the 12 participants. the participants identified that there were certain behaviors and responsibilities that were inherently connected to being a woman. the belief was that these roles and norms were perpetuated by society. participant a identified several examples of behaviors that american society placed on women and girls. for example, there was an understanding in this country that women fulfilled more domestic responsibilities like childcare and cooking. men tended to fulfill roles outside the home, and they tended to be more adept in stem fields. participant a indicated, but it's the perception that, you know, it's the idea, right? that guys, they are good at math, smart at math, and sciences, and you know, we are good at decorating and baking cookies. so um, i don't even think it's intentional, but it's just natural. participant d discussed that societal gender roles stem from a historical context, and they all build upon one another. she stated, i think that just goes to other things that are out of our control as far as historical opportunities for minorities. it still exists because of the inequities of education. it still exists, even though they're getting slightly better, but it still exists pretty badly. so, those cultural things…they all build on each other. so, the cultural things lead to inadequacies or fewer opportunities for school, and it builds as you go. so, then that sets you up further behind the further you go. stereotypes. the sixth subtheme that contributed to the emergent theme of gender bias was “stereotypes”. of the participants in this study, 10 of 12 participants presented information about the existence of stereotypes in the workplace. participant c included several examples of how 9 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 stereotypes had affected her throughout her career. she felt that as she met women in the sport industry, they were often labelled as a bitch. to her, that term was not meant in a derogatory way, but as a way of identifying that a woman was very tough, assertive, and hard-nosed. but it's the perception that, you know, it's the idea, right? that guys, they are good at math, smart at math, and sciences, and you know, we are good at decorating and baking cookies. so um, i don't even think it's intentional, but it's just natural. there was a unique connection and assumption that if a woman was successful in the industry, she had to be a bitch to be successful. participant h discussed stereotypes she faced while she was pregnant. her subordinates assumed she could not handle certain tasks because it would be too daunting with “pregnancy brain”. she indicated, i was told by a couple lower-level managers who reported to me. ‘hey, let us. don't worry about doing that. we can take care of it. we know you probably have that pregnancy brain and it's a lot for you to think about.’ i remember thinking at the time, ‘well, no, i've earned this position, and i should be able to go do it.’ the funny part is i know these individuals, and they're great people. they're still my friends. their thought process was, ‘we're going to help her.’ even when the intent was not malicious, she still faced stereotypes and judgement about her fitness to do her daily tasks. queen bee syndrome the second emergent theme that contributed to answering the first research question was “the queen bee syndrome”. queen bee syndrome occurs among women who are successful in a male-dominated industry and have earned high-level positions. sometimes these women create obstacles for other women based on societal roles in an attempt to discriminate against or suppress other women (apaydin et al., 2021). it is also the notion that female executives knowingly or unknowingly view other women as a potential threat; therefore, they ostracize themselves from these other women in an attempt to protect themselves and their successes (apaydin et al., 2021). of the 12 participants in this study, there were 11 that had either experienced or witnessed the queen bee syndrome during their careers. this theme was significant because there was an assumption prior to this study that only men were contributing to the gender disparity in the sport industry. however, it became apparent in the interview process that not only were women facing challenges from men, but they were also facing challenges from other women. participant a suggested that this phenomenon had developed early in female youth as part of society and culture. she stated that from a young age, girls were taught to be catty, mean spirited and competitive with each other as a result of feeling threatened. one of the things that i found out is, girls are really taught to be catty from a small age coming up, right? it's always, you know, even the moms competing about who makes the better cookies, right? it was the moms talking about how much playing time each girl is going to get, and what this girl is doing, versus what this girl is doing.” some girls were taught this “mean girl” behavior, and it eventually manifested itself in the workplace. within the sport industry, many of the participants stated that some of their biggest challenges came from other women. participant a had experienced and witnessed this behavior. she included stories of female supervisors who intentionally hindered her growth and were constantly difficult as she tried to better herself and create opportunities for advancement. participant a noted, “i can tell you stories of being burned, but it's always by a female. like, you're asking me this, and then it's crazy, but it's always the times when i've gotten burned. it's been a female.” she also witnessed this behavior among female colleagues. she saw other women being hindered or unsupported by female executives. she could not understand why women would choose to be unsupportive of each other given the already tenuous level of competition with men in the workplace. she alluded to the idea that many women believed there was only one seat at the proverbial table, and the only time there was not competition was when women worked for different departments or companies. she included, “and i think what it is if you're in different organizations, different companies, it will work because there is no threat, no direct threat for your job.” nearly all of the participants cited examples of experiencing or witnessing the queen bee syndrome within the industry, and they all acknowledged it was a significant factor that could hinder a woman’s career. non-gendered challenges the third emergent theme that contributed to answering the first research question was “non-gendered challenges”. this theme includes factors that were hindering to a female executive’s career; however, it may not specifically have been related to gender. there were individual themes included in this emergent theme that inhibited a woman’s career. the argument could be made that they may have contributed to the overall experience that a female executive had; however, they could not exclusively be tied to gender. eleven of the 12 participants identified several challenges that had also contributed to their experiences working in the sport industry. for example, ageism, aggressive competition, career demands, hypocrisy and racial bias were all significant individual themes that emerged from the interviews. aggressive competition was an individual theme that resonated with many of the participants. participant d suggested that this factor may have been specific to the culture within the sport industry. she indicated that many former athletes had chosen a career in the sport industry, and as a result, they are treated better. participant d stated, “he is a former [professional athlete] that now is [working] for us. so, the owners of my team already have him in a much higher regard than probably everybody else.” by nature, sports are aggressively competitive, and she suggested that competition had translated from the playing 10 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 surface into the workplace for many of her colleagues, and there was a mentality to think like a man. she indicated, i think the joke nowadays is like you have to think like be like a man, right? like, not doubt yourself and abilities. you might only have 70-80% of the skills on that job description, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't apply for it. i think there's a lot of that. i think there's more of a need to take an action right away, as opposed to trying to get all the details out. research question 2 the second research question was how do executive women in the sport industry describe their lived experiences of overcoming challenges of gender bias in attaining executive positions? the phenomenon associated with this question focused on how female executives in the sport industry navigated challenges associated with gender bias while also earning executive positions. there were five emergent themes that were developed to answer the second research question. those five emergent themes were identified as “how to overcome/succeed”, “moving forward”, “positive career experiences”, “building relationships”, and “career path”. within those five emergent themes, several individual themes emerged, and they were important to include because nearly all or all participants identified them in their respective interviews. how to overcome/succeed the first emergent theme was “how to overcome/succeed”, and this theme was significant because every participant in this study identified factors and methods for how to overcome challenges associated with gender bias and how to succeed within the sport industry. there were two subthemes that provided context, and nearly all of the participants acknowledged their significance as contributing factors to this emergent theme. confronting situations. the first subtheme that contributed to the emergent theme of how to overcome/succeed was “confronting situations”. the manner in which the participants chose to confront situations was important to understand in answering this research question. these methods were essentially attributed to the participant’s personality type. these two personality types were identified as confrontational and nonconfrontational. approximately half of the participants identified as having a confrontational personality. this means that participants were not afraid and showed no hesitation in confronting situations and people that treated them unfairly based on their gender throughout their careers. participants d and g included several instances in which they addressed situations that they deemed biased or inappropriate. participant d suggested that because of the nature of the industry and the male dominated nature, she felt a need to always be proactive and vocal about the way she was treated. participant d indicated, but i had a specific incident when i was with the [team name] that i had to confront. if i didn't, you know, i probably still would have been fine. but also, it was that i was going to confront this. it could either lead this way, or this way. it could lead to a good reaction and a positive reaction for these people to be better and help me. or they were going to blacklist me, and i was going to be out of here and never be in this again. participant g also discussed the importance of having a confrontational personality with regard to fighting for promotions. she described a situation by stating, so, i decided, what would a guy do? i went back in the office, sat down with my boss and said, ‘is this number firm? or is this negotiable?’ i always use the term fight with facts. i said, ‘so i've done a, b, c and d’ just like the guy in the office. i showed him the numbers, showed him a, b, c and d. i've done this and i feel like this doesn't represent the work i've performed. sure enough, i got a bump up. conversely, approximately half of the participants identified as having a non-confrontational personality. this means that participants would rather not address situations of gender bias. some of these participants chose which battles to fight with a scale of importance. others chose not to confront situations at all because causing too many problems may result in being fired or other repercussions. either way, the participants felt this method was significant in the manner in which they had been able to earn new opportunities for advancement while being a female in the sport industry. need for confidence. the second subtheme that contributed to the emergent theme of how to overcome/succeed was a “need for confidence”. ten of the 12 study participants identified that confidence was crucial in succeeding and navigating gender bias in the sport industry. participant a discussed that learning how to be confident was done through job experience because it isn’t learned in school. she stated, but there is a way to tactfully do it with confidence. yes, because there is not a course in school that teaches you confidence. so how do you get confidence? so, when you get knocked down, how do you get up? right? yeah, you have to have the confidence to get up, but they don't teach it. she found that there were ways to be tactful and confident in addressing specific situations. participants d, e and g also indicated that confidence had been important in their careers. all three women discussed the importance of having confidence especially when competing and working with men on a daily basis. participant e even alluded to the fact that women would often bring different skill sets to an organization as opposed to their male counterparts, and it was important to see those skills as assets and not liabilities. she indicated, i mean, i think it's hard, but women have different skills than men. i mean women are great problem solvers. we figure it out. we can figure it out in the same way (if not better) than men figure stuff out, you know?” 11 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 making that distinction often took confidence, and while it could be scary or overwhelming, developing confident behavior was important for navigating gender bias and earning executive roles in the sport industry. moving forward the second emergent theme that contributed to answering the second research question was “moving forward”. this particular theme addressed how gender bias was still a prevalent issue within industry. this theme included factors or perceptions that women believed were important for reducing the existence of gender bias in the workplace. for example, participant e stated, women can choose not to want a family or kids and men can do the same. this is a big reason why men should and could take paternity leave and be encouraged to leave the office. they should want to talk about their families at the office and want to say, ‘i'm going to leave early for my kids soccer game.’ no one should judge a man or a woman for doing that. i think if a man says, ‘i'm going to go home and cook dinner for my family tonight,’ let's applaud that and change the narrative. so, to me, i think as we grow, it just has to be continuing to equalize that. many participants acknowledged a need to change behaviors and attitudes moving forward and to change societal gender roles placed upon women; however, they did not know where to begin the behaviors for change. they suggested that while progress may have been coming, there was still a very long way to go before there was true gender equality in the industry. gender bias improving. one subtheme that contributed the theme of moving forward was “gender bias improving”. ten of the 12 participants acknowledged that as bad as their experiences of gender bias had been, they believed that it was improving. the participants believed that the incidents of gender bias were becoming less severe as opposed to the earlier stages in their careers. several of the participants also acknowledged that the existence of gender bias was not nearly as significant for them as opposed to prior generations. participant a identified, so, i will say there's a lot more awareness of gender bias. i also will say i feel like females have gotten in a position of power now. so, i can speak my mind and be heard. versus, you know, when i was much younger, there weren't a lot of females in power. participant h included thoughts that gender bias is improving and changing gender roles and stereotypes should be praised. she stated, this is a big reason why men should take paternity leave and be encouraged to leave the office. they should want to talk about their families at the office and want to say, ‘i'm going to leave early for my kids soccer game.’ no one should judge a man or a woman for doing that. i think if a man says, ‘i'm going to go home and cook dinner for my family tonight,’ let's applaud that and change the narrative. so, to me, i think as we grow, it just has to be continuing to equalize those roles for both men and women. positive career experiences the third emergent theme that contributed to answering the second research question was “positive career experiences”. while the topic of this research study could certainly have assumed negative connotations or a negative perspective, there were several positive career experiences that emerged within the data. eleven of the 12 participants identified one or more positive career experiences within their careers. there were two significant individual themes that emerged as positive career experiences for the participants. positive overall experience. the first subtheme that contributed to the emergent theme of career experiences was a “positive overall experience”. given the nature of this research topic, it could have been easy to assume that the bulk of the data could be perceived negatively. however, when asked, 10 of the 12 participants noted that even with gender bias as a contributing factor, they would still say their overall career experience was positive. participants a, b & d indicated that while there were certainly things that were negative, overall, their experience was mostly positive. participant b stated, “i don't want to say like that it’s…it’s not negative. there are negative aspects, but those negatives, i think a majority of the time they have turned into positives.” finally, even though participant f had a terribly discriminatory beginning to her career, she expressed that her career had been positive since then. she stated that, “i'd say it’s much more positive now. i mean, i don't know if i could draw on anything super negative probably in the last 10 years.” gender bias as a positive. the second subtheme that contributed to the emergent theme of positive career experiences was “gender bias as a positive”. this individual theme drew upon the experiences in which the participants were able to use their gender in their favor or to gain an advantage in the workplace. nine of the 12 of the participants used the stereotypes or societal gender roles placed upon them to their own benefit. participant f noted that because she worked with a predominantly male staff, she was able to draw upon stereotypes. the men on her team often used a softer approach, and they did not speak to her as harshly as they spoke to each other. she did not feel like she faced as much aggressive competition or confrontational behavior as her male counterparts. she was certainly confident in handling those situations, but she was also content that her male counterparts were not as aggressive or combative because she was a woman. participant f stated, i would say that is probably has existed. you know probably when i was in a [specific] role like using charm and using all the things that you have at your disposal, right? you know, that probably could have worked in my favor for sure. that would probably be the most i can draw upon that. even now like working with males and they are using a kind of that softer, kind of slightly different approach. they may not argue or come at me as much as they wouldn't necessarily like a male counterpart. it can be good and bad. you know, it 12 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 works to my advantage because i can just kind of soft pedal it or they will soft pedal me versus coming at me harder. participant g discussed the importance of using gender to her advantage. as a woman, she felt like she was able to relate better to her colleagues and subordinates in ways that her male counterparts could not. so, i would say emotional intelligence is important, because you have to understand the balance between head and heart, and situational analysis, or situational awareness. if you have those, you're able to read a room. you're able to read a person that you're sitting in front of. you can drive how you want that conversation to go. for example, i can see i'm not getting anywhere with this person, because right now they're just not there. they are distracted, or they are connected to something else. i can tell they're not engaging in what i'm saying. so, i need to either say it another way or i need to change gears and give them something else. while gender bias was mostly seen as a disadvantage throughout this study, this emergent theme illustrates that there were positive career experiences within the sport industry that shaped the careers of these female executives. building relationships the fourth emergent theme that contributes to the second research question is “building relationships”. ten of the 12 participants identified the importance of building strong relationships throughout their careers. these relationships helped the participants navigate the challenges of gender bias and also the challenges throughout their careers to achieve their respective levels of success. within this emergent theme, 10 of the 12 participants acknowledged they had positive relationships with their coworkers. participant b indicated, “i am extremely fortunate in my career. everyone's been very helpful to help me develop the skills, and i tried to pass that along actually myself as well.” because of those positive relationships she tried to instill that same behavior to other colleagues and subordinates. career path the final emergent theme that contributed to the second research question was “career path”. this emergent theme was present among all 12 participants. the career path of each participant was integral in shaping their careers. because of the skills and education developed upon entering the sport industry, the participants were equipped to handle and navigate challenges associated with gender bias. within this emergent theme, there were two subthemes which were identified as “traditional” and non-traditional”. pertaining to their career paths, half of the participants identified having a traditional path, and half of the participants identified having a non-traditional career path. for half of the participants, formal education followed by internships and industry experience was the appropriate path for their respective careers. however, the other half of the participants had a non-traditional path to the sport industry. these women had attended a university, but their experience and careers initially led them to different industries upon graduation. those experiences often led them to building relationships with a person or a company that had an affiliation with sport organizations. because of the relationships and experiences, participants were then offered careers in the sport industry serving as a department head, member of the c-suite or executive board. the five emergent themes of how to overcome/succeed, moving forward, positive career experiences, building relationships, and career path were significant for answering the second research question. they directly related to how the participants navigated the challenges associated with gender bias throughout their careers. these emergent themes were also significant for the process of interpretive phenomenological analysis because they specifically focused on exploring the lived experiences of the participants in relation to understanding the phenomenon. theoretical implications the results of this study examined the research questions of how executive women describe their lived experiences pertaining to gender bias while working in the sport industry and how executive women in the sport industry describe their lived experiences of overcoming challenges of gender bias in attaining executive positions. the results of this study contribute to both the leadership labyrinth, which was the theoretical foundation for the study, as well as the queen bee syndrome. the leadership labyrinth asserts the glass ceiling is no longer relevant for how women achieve success. unlike the glass ceiling, the leadership labyrinth suggests that each woman’s experience and struggle for success is different and convoluted; thus, each account must be examined uniquely (hancock et al., 2018). each woman in this study had unique stories and experiences that were specific to their own journeys; thus, this study contributes to the validity of the leadership labyrinth and its value as a theoretical foundation. participant e even found the leadership labyrinth to be more representative of women in executive roles. upon being shown a diagram of the leadership labyrinth, she stated, “oh, that's funny. this is this is much more of an accurate depiction as to what is experienced at this level.” this study also contributes to the queen bee syndrome. the queen bee syndrome occurs among women who are successful in a male-dominated industry and have earned high-level positions. sometimes these women create obstacles for other women based on societal roles in an attempt to discriminate against or suppress other women (apaydin et al., 2021). nearly every participant in this study had either witnessed or experienced the queen bee syndrome. this study adds depth to the theory, and it provides a basis for research to be conducted in the future. practical implications the results of this study could be applied in a practical setting. the participants of this study were serving as executives in the sport industry at the time of this study. their interviews revealed some very real issues related to gender bias that could be addressed for current and future generations of women who pursue a career in sports. human resource departments could use the results of this study to 13 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 evaluate the hiring practices within their respective organizations. additionally, practices could be put in place to evaluate the way women are treated in sport organizations. the participants of this study did not always feel safe reporting inappropriate behavior, and that stemmed from human resource departments lacking the outlets for employees to feel safe and protected. organizational cultures should also be evaluated. a woman does not feel inadequate or inferior because of her gender if the organizational culture promotes equality and diversity. if an organization truly saw women as equals, it would have a safe space for women to voice their concerns. additionally, there would be procedures in place to reprimand or discipline those people who discriminate against women. if an organization’s culture truly promoted equality, the issue of gender bias would not have been found in this study. finally, women within the industry should be held accountable regarding “queen bee” behavior. it is hard enough for women to succeed in the sport industry by having to compete with men on an uneven scale. they should not have to compete with women as well. women are connected by the commonality of gender; thus, women would be more likely to support each other’s goals and ambitions (n.a., 2021). by supporting each other, it would eliminate the cutthroat mentality, and women could combine to exist as a dominant force. there would be more space at the proverbial table (not less) if women fought together instead of with each other. future research implications there are a few implications for future research. several participants expressed the interest in understanding the male perspective regarding gender bias. this study did not consider male executives in the sport industry, but they could be studied to determine if male executives share similar views as their female counterparts. additionally, race presented itself many times in the interviews with participants. the african american participants seemed to have more challenging experiences in the industry because they were discriminated against by both race and gender. references adler, r. 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(2016). legal and ethical issues in research. indian journal of anesthesia, 60, 76-80. doi:10.4103/00195049.190627 540 copyediting final (2).docx volume 44, 2025 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodriguez, cynthia gallardo, and benjamin jankens assistant editors: jordan donop & kristina hall advancing women in leadership vol. 44, 57-71, 2025 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper exploring the work of women faculty through the lens of care: an institutional ethnography of caregiving and carereceiving in higher education emily c. s. johnson, caitlin m. shovkoplyas, laura j. parson, fredricka r saunders, lisa r. arnold, rajani ganesh pillai emily johnson: phd candidate, north dakota state university, emily.johnson108@ndsu.edu caitlin shovkoplyas: phd, north dakota state university, cailin.shovkoplyas@ndsu.edu laura parson: phd, north dakota state university, laura.parson@ndsu.edu fredricka saunders: phd candidate, north dakota state university, fredricka.saunders@ndsu.edu lisa arnold: phd, north dakota state university, lisa.arnold@ndsu.edu rajani ganesh pillai: phd, north dakota state university, rajani.pillai@ndsu.edu accepted august 20, 2025 in this institutional ethnography, we explored how women faculty members at a midwest research university (mwu) experienced the promotion and tenure evaluation (pte) process through the lens of feminist standpoint theory. beginning from the standpoint of women faculty navigating the pte process, we employed institutional ethnographic methods first to identify the work of giving and receiving care among women academic workers. we then explored the institutional and organizational ruling relations that coordinated that work. our findings consist of the disjunctures or conflicts between the day-to-day experiences and how women faculty interact with the institutional structures that coordinate their work. women focus group participants described feeling like they were at a disadvantage because they were experiencing additional pressure to take on caregiving work, and that their carereceiving work was undervalued; participants reported conflicts between the work and what they perceived as required by organizational pte policy. we conclude by calling for systemic support for faculty mentoring activities. we also recommend that for these changes to be lasting, recognition for mentoring activities be included in the promotion and tenure evaluation (pte) process with formalized measurement methods. keywords: institutional ethnography, women faculty, caregiving, care receiving, receiving care, uncompensated work, ideal academic worker, promotion, tenure, career advancement, feminist standpoint theory, gender equity according to the 2020 american association of university professors (aaup), women comprised 43 percent of tenured or tenure-track faculty and 54 percent of full-time and non-tenure track faculty (aaup, 2020). some scholars (aiston & fo, 2021; barrett & barrett, 2011) suggest these statistics are evidence that higher education is a gendered organization, where women faculty are disadvantaged because they are not the “ideal worker,” which, in higher education, is based on a masculine ideal academic work. specifically, acker’s (1990) gendered organization theory describes, in part, how an institution replicates gendered practices, policies, and procedures based on an unencumbered man as the normative worker. in higher education, the discourse of the ideal academic worker poses challenges for women who are expected to meet masculinized expectations while also fulfilling gendered expectations, such as performing emotional labor (lund & tienari, 2018) and conforming to the abject woman's body to masculine expectations (blalock et al., 2023; fotaki, 2013). in higher education, this “double bind” often results in women faculty providing care above and beyond that of their man-identifying peers (acker, 1990, 2006; blalock et al., 2023; fotaki, 2013; howell et al., 2017). as the underrepresentation of women has persisted despite improvements, additional research is needed to understand how institutional and systemic barriers coordinate the work of women faculty. to contribute to this body of research, we explored the work associated with caregiving and carereceiving behaviors among women faculty (e.g., serving on committees, mentoring colleagues, and needing a mentor; blood et al., 2012; kosoko-lasaki et al., 2006; voytko et al., 2018). we aim to contribute to an exploration of the non-compensated work of caregiving and carereceiving among women faculty. while a substantial amount of research has been conducted on the topic of mentorship and the positive role it plays for women faculty 58 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 (blood et al., 2012; davis & maldonado, 2015; gibson, 2004; kosoko-lasaki et al., 2006; voytko et al., 2018), we aim to explore how expectations that a woman faculty member will have a mentor coordinates their work. we focused on caregiving work that women faculty feel expected to take on, such as caring for students or guiding new faculty (misra et al., 2011), and the barriers to sustainable carereceiving, like mentorship, contributing to the discourse of the ideal woman academic worker. in the present study, we sought to expand our understanding of the systemic barriers that face women faculty by identifying the translocal practices that organize the ways in which women faculty provide and receive care. to achieve this, we analyzed focus group data collected from womenand men-identifying faculty at midwest research university (mwu; pseudonym) using an institutional ethnographic approach to data analysis. using feminist standpoint theory, we identified the work of women faculty. then we examined the policies, practices, procedures, and discourses that coordinated caregiving and care-receiving work for these women faculty members. our analysis suggested that institutional policies from the state board of higher education, organizational promotion, tenure, and evaluation (pte) policies, and the discourse of an ideal academic worker created challenges for women faculty, as they felt pressure to accept additional caregiving work, which created barriers to sustainable carereceiving. first, we discuss the literature on caregiving, carereceiving, and the discourse of the ideal academic worker. we then discuss our methods and data analysis, using entry-level focus group data, which informed the document analysis of mwu policies. we then describe the findings as they relate to the literature and conclude with our discussion and recommendations. caregiving, carereceiving, and women faculty women faculty face gendered expectations to align with the masculine definitions of academia while embodying feminine characteristics of caregivers without receiving reward (acker, 1990; blalock et al., 2023; howell et al., 2017; lund & tienari, 2018). additionally, gendered expectations are perpetuated in the structures of academic organizations, rewarding individualistic behaviour with unmeasured expectations for caregiving work. indeed, with academia valuing individuality (howell et al., 2017) and the expectation that the ideal worker is entirely focused on work (acker, 1990), marginalized faculty, particularly women, are often unable to receive care for their professional and personal development. first, we describe feminist standpoint theory as our theoretical framework for this institutional ethnography. then, we discuss caregiving work performed by women faculty. next, we discuss carereceiving as additional work for women faculty. finally, we discuss the ideal academic worker and describe how caregiving and carereceiving work are considered within that discourse. we conclude with how literature informed our study and how we plan to extend this work. feminist standpoint theory we used feminist standpoint theory to focus our research questions and identify the caregiving and carereceiving work undertaken by women faculty. feminist standpoint theory states that knowledge is socially created and participants are experts in their own experiences and are the most credible resource for their perspective (harding, 2004; hesse-biber, 2017; smith, 1987). additionally, feminist standpoint theory focuses on “shared histories” of groups and identifying the power within them as it is socially coordinated (collins, 1997, p. 376). therefore, feminist standpoint theory is often part of institutional ethnographic research (campbell & gregor, 2002) because institutional ethnographies begin from the day-to-day work and locate the power structures or ruling relations that socially organize the work of a group of people, often marginalized such as women (collins, 1997; hartsock, 1981; smith. 1987). feminist standpoint theory posits that in order to understand marginalized peoples we must first understand the systems that create and perpetuate marginalizing behaviours (collins, 1987). furthermore, feminist standpoint theory connects the everyday work of the participants back to the institution (i.e. academia and the promotion and tenure process) which coordinates their work (hartsock, 1981). we used the basis of feminist standpoint theory; understanding how knowledge is socially constructed (harding 2004), focused on marginalized groups (collins, 1997; hartsock, 1981; smith, 1987), and rooted in the everyday work of our participants to formulate our research questions. in our research, we used feminist standpoint theory as a lens to focus specifically on how women faculty’s work was coordinated and rendered invisible by institutional ruling relations. we began by identifying the work then explored the power structures or ruling relations that coordinated women academic’s work, we concluded by discussing the disjunctures between the lived experiences and the ruling relations. we began from a women’s standpoint, examining the day-to-day challenges of academic workers who have experienced difficulties navigating higher education and career advancement. we used feminist standpoint theory to identify our starting point based on the authors' lived experiences (campbell & gregor, 2002). however, our standpoint was not just the perspectives of the women academic workers; it also included the perception of their experiences. to examine how women’s caregiving work is understood and organized within the academy, we opened participation to all faculty members, regardless of gender. this approach allowed us to identify how caregiving is recognized, taken up, or dismissed within the broader institutional environment. it also made visible the discourses and expectations that shape caregiving work across faculty roles, while centering the experiences of women. we used the broader sample to gather data on how individuals understand the experiences of women academics, rather than limiting our data collection to women academics. by beginning with the experiences of women academics, we sought to understand how they experienced and interacted with the institution of higher education. we used everyday experiences as an entry point into the institution of academia to identify the 59 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 work of women academics, and then how the institution organizes that work through texts, processes, procedures, and discourses (smith & griffith, 2022). we aimed to use this lens to understand the day-to-day experiences of women academic workers and how the work they do to provide and receive care in the workplace is socially organized by structures that are not immediately visible (smith, 2005). in the following section, we begin by discussing caregiving work for women faculty to provide a background for our research. caregiving work for women faculty research suggests that women in higher education, including faculty members, often feel pressure to bear the burden of caregiving responsibilities (docka & stone, 2021). for this research, we define care as support or providing for the needs of mwu, departments, students, or colleagues. caregiving can take various forms, both outside the workplace and within (heijstra, 2017). we use caregiving as a term to encompass work that is considered providing care and goes unrecognized or uncompensated. in higher education, caregiving work encompasses categories such as teaching and service. we extend and operationalize caregiving as care work that is often unmeasured, mainly in traditional documentation such as the promotion and tenure (pte) dossier (heijstra, 2017). even for caregiving work that is ostensibly measured or tracked in a pte dossier, women faculty are often asked to assume a higher proportion of teaching and advising as well as chairing committees, serving as undergraduate directors, and providing student mentorship without compensation or recognition (blalock et al., 2023; misra et al., 2011). for example, advising is often a part of the “service” component of a pte dossier. in the dossier, a faculty member lists the number of undergraduate and graduate students they advise. however, the work of advising, and perhaps one measure of its quality, also involves the frequency and duration of time spent guiding and advising students. in this example, the number of advisees is measured for pte purposes, but the time a faculty member spends on advising is not. the latter, for our purposes, is considered caregiving work. altogether, research suggests that women faculty members tend to take on a larger proportion of caregiving work, which means, in practice, they spend additional time teaching and mentoring students, and less time on research (misra et al., 2011), with little reward (blalock et al., 2023; heijstra, 2017). women faculty often report that they take on caregiving work because they feel it is vital to the success of their students and the institution (blalock et al., 2023; misra et al., 2011), to be a team player, or to align with expectations of their peers. however, faculty report that caregiving work is seen as expected, so it is not work that positively impacts pte (barrett & barrett, 2011; fitzgerald, 2012). through this study, we aimed to identify the coordination and definitions of caregiving work to expand on the gendered organization (acker, 1990; docka & stone, 2021; toffoletti & starr, 2016). specifically, we were interested in understanding the work related to both providing care and the work women faculty do to receive care. care-receiving work for women faculty research suggests that women faculty members are burdened with additional work within the gendered academic workforce (docka & stone, 2021). additional work is demonstrated in our definition of carereceiving work, when faculty seek out support systems as methods to receive care that do not naturally form with colleagues (block & tietjen-smith, 2016) and are often unrecognized. carereceiving would include finding and vetting mentors, creating a support system of peers, and making friends within the campus and local community. although not traditionally conceptualized as carereceiving, mentorship has been described as a key component of success and belonging for women faculty (gibson, 2006). however, women faculty members are often advised to find their mentors while simultaneously being told that mentorship is key to their success (blood et al., 2012; gibson, 2006). through mentorship, women faculty can receive guidance, support, and advocacy, which helps them overcome challenges and foster professional growth (gibson, 2004, 2006; gill, 2009). early career mentor relationships in academia can positively impact “promotion, grant applications and awards, article presentations, and professional society involvements” (voytko et al., 2012, p. 1048). however, the perception that a mentor should share identities with the mentee can expand the barriers that women faculty face in receiving mentorship when programs are formed naturally rather than systemically supported. these barriers are only exacerbated for women of color, non-binary, and lgbtq (blood et al., 2012; zambrana, 2019). additionally, women faculty members have less access to resources for personal growth (lund & tienari, 2018). the personal groups that develop often occur outside working hours, making them inaccessible to already marginalized groups (blalock et al., 2023; toffoletti & starr, 2016; zambrana, 2019). women faculty face pressure to defer their own needs to meet workplace gendered expectations (acker, 1990; howell et al., 2017). smith et al. (2000) and voytko et al. (2018) have demonstrated that faculty who receive care in social groups or mentorship typically experience greater job success, higher salaries, and more career opportunities. although research has made these advantages clear, women faculty often do not reap the rewards unless they seek out care external to the workplace. thus, women faculty are burdened by systemic barriers to their support and ultimately their success, further perpetuating a gendered workplace. ideal woman academic worker the expectations of women faculty to provide care and find it for themselves embody the traits of a discourse of an ideal woman academic worker, which stems from acker’s (1990) theory on gendered work and organizations. her theory of the ideal worker is based on a masculine, unencumbered body that 60 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 has no outside commitments (acker, 1990; 2006). evidence of the gendered worker is in job descriptions, where the ideal candidate is presented as neutral but based on gendered norms that restrict who meets the position requirements (acker, 1990; 2006). we associate those traits within academia, and the research of lund and tienari (2018) attributes caregiving behaviors to the woman academic worker. indeed, the ideal academic worker is passionate and values individualized pursuits (lund & tienari, 2018). prioritizing individuality devalues the work of caring for colleagues and fostering community (fotaki, 2013; gill, 2009). additionally, the ideal academic worker is someone who stands alone (acker, 1990; lund & tienari, 2018), dismissing carereceiving work of women faculty as they seek communities of support such as mentorship or social validation (rowlands, 2017). the discourse of the ideal academic worker valuing individuality (lund & tienari, 2018) conflicts with the research on the value of mentorship and creating support networks (blood et al., 2012), which are critical components of the ideal academic worker. the discourse of the ideal academic worker establishes the expectation that to be accepted in academia, one must comply with the gendered norms established by the institution (blalock et al.; rowlands, 2017). we aim to identify the disjuncture between the discourses of the ideal academic worker and the ideal woman academic worker by exploring the work of women faculty. our analysis of focus group data led to the identification and analysis of policies, practices, and procedures at mwu, as well as the discourse of the ideal woman academic worker that coordinated women faculty’s work. the focus group data analyzed were part of a larger study exploring the experiences of women faculty at mwu. methods this project was not conceptualized as an institutional ethnography from the outset. however, after the data collection we (emily johnson, cailin shovkoplyas, laura parson, and fredricka saunders) approached our data analysis by making our research an institutional ethnographic inquiry to understand and make recommendations that were focused on academia as an institution from the standpoint of women academic workers. we used feminist standpoint theory as a lens to approach this institutional ethnographic research. we began from the experiences of the individual, then proceeded to identify the disjunctures between their lived experience and the methods that coordinated women faculty’s caregiving and carereceiving work. feminist standpoint theory guided our research and analysis as we sought to uncover the unseen or unrecognized work (smith, 1987, 2005). feminist standpoint theory is often part of institutional ethnographic research, as the data is not limited to the participants' experience, but also to how their experiences or work are socially organized (campbell & gregor, 2006). institutional ethnography (ie) begins with a problematic experience or challenge, often one that is felt or noticed by the researcher (campbell & gregor, 2006; smith, 1987). the research stems from personal experience. for the present study, laura parson, lisa arnold, and rajani ganesh pillai are women-identifying faculty members who have undergone the tenure process and experienced the pressures associated with caregiving. laura, lisa, and rajani balanced accepting work outside of the pte dossier that would help and support their colleagues or students with the work that was associated with the pte process and would act as evidence for their tenure. while not a faculty member, emily johnson has felt pressure to complete additional caregiving tasks, such as accepting roles as a mentor without compensation or a managerial title, assisting in onboarding, and being the person coworkers would turn to for questions and help. although emily was not part of the pte process, they related their caregiving work to her annual review process. she felt that they were unable to receive recognition for completing work that exceeded their job requirements and the items outlined in their annual review. the documentation and review process limited the work for which emily was compensated, as her supervisor noted that the care work of supporting colleagues and onboarding new hires was something she chose to complete and naturally excelled at. institutional ethnography begins with a problem, and then the research questions are designed to identify what the work entails on a day-to-day basis and how it is socially organized (campbell & gregor, 2004; smith, 2005). ie research goes to a second level to identify the challenges or disjunctures between the lived experience (work) and the institutional structures that coordinate the work, such as national policy, organizational procedures, or discourses (campbell & gregor, 2004; smith, 1987). informed by research on caregiving, carereceiving, and the ideal academic worker, we explored the experiences of women faculty at mwu, framed within feminist standpoint theory. the research questions that guided our data analysis sought to describe the work of women faculty to identify institutional policies, practices, procedures, and discourses that coordinated that work: 1. what are the processes, policies, practices, and procedures that coordinate caregiving work for women faculty? 2. what are the processes, policies, practices, and procedures that coordinate carereceiving work for women faculty? to understand how women faculty’s work was coordinated, we leveraged focus group data to identify discourses, policies, procedures, and practices at mwu through an analytic approach typical of an ie. context this research evolved from an internal report completed by the institution’s women faculty advancement commission (wfac – pseudonym) to understand the experiences of women faculty members and the impact of the institution’s cultivate (pseudonym) initiative. to address systemic and institutional barriers to women’s advancement in higher education, the national science foundation’s (nsf) (2020 cultivate pushes universities to address elements of organizational structure and culture that adversely affect women (nsf, 2020). cultivate is an 61 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 initiative focused on women faculty charged with creating and refining efforts to address obstacles, particularly for women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem). andreasen et al. (2017) attribute the increase in women hired in higher education to programs like cultivate at various universities. the wfac collected data from the focus groups and completed a report, which we (emily, cailin, and fredricka) received after our analysis. our findings offer valuable insights into the institutional context that contributes to a broader understanding of caregiving and receiving work. this research is a component of broader research related to caregiving and work-life balance from the standpoint of women faculty. we found that women faculty felt pressure to accept work that was unrecognized by the formalized promotion and tenure evaluation policies. this pressure perpetuated work environments where women faculty had to choose between their careers, their lives outside of work, or their students (saunders et al., 2025). participants mwu faculty received an email via the faculty listserv with information about the focus groups and a link to a survey, administered via qualtrics, where they could indicate interest. participants were given the option to participate in mixed-gender or single-gender focus groups; however, all four groups were single-gender. a total of 23 faculty members participated in the event. although we sought to understand the standpoint of women faculty members, we spoke to those who identified as women and men to understand how women faculty members’ work and challenges were organized at mwu. we collected entry-level data through focus groups (three women-identifying faculty members and one men-identifying faculty member) with faculty members at mwu to understand the challenges facing women faculty. this informed the document analysis we conducted on mwu policies at the broadest university level. we sought to understand how the challenges described were created and continued. data collection we had two phases of data collection, as is typical of an ie. we began with hour-long semi-structured focus groups of mwu faculty to allow for space for follow-up questions (rubin & rubin, 2011). we leveraged focus groups to collect data on how faculty understood the coordination of academic workers' work (campbell & gregor, 2002). our focus group protocol was developed to understand our standpoint, which focused on women academics’ experiences. a small subgroup of focus group facilitators drafted the initial focus group protocol, which was then reviewed by the wfac committee, revised, and approved. the focus group questions were developed specifically for this data collection to identify issues that face women faculty and document changes or improvements in the campus climate for different groups. after the protocol was approved by the wfac and the mwu’s irb board, we began conducting focus groups. first, participants were invited to meet their selected focus group in a central location on campus, with two facilitators present for each meeting. upon arrival, participants selected a nametag with a number, which they affixed to their clothes for the duration of the meeting. the room contained approximately 10 chairs arranged in a circle, facing each other, and participants could choose their preferred seating position within the circle. as participants arrived, they were provided with a consent document. the facilitators verbally instructed them that by remaining in the room, they were providing consent to participate in the study, but they could leave or withdraw at any time. as participants waited for everyone to arrive, they were asked to complete a demographic questionnaire by hand which included optional questions related to gender, orientation, ethnicity, and dis/ability. once all participants had arrived and completed the questionnaire, one of the facilitators turned on the recording device, which was placed on a chair within the circle. for the duration of the focus group, participants were instructed to refer to each other by the number on their nametags, rather than by name, to protect their anonymity. when the facilitators were ready to begin, they provided a brief explanation of wfac, its purpose, and the objectives of the focus group. after inviting questions, the facilitators proceeded to ask a series of questions to prompt discussion among focus group members listed in table 1. table 1 focus group questions and facilitation protocol at the beginning of each focus group, facilitators will explain to the group who the wfac (pseudonym) is and its purpose. participants will be given numbers by which to refer to themselves and others in the group. informed consent will be obtained. main question follow-up what has been your previous experience with or knowledge of wfac (pseudonym) and/or policies it has forwarded? what would be an ideal situation that would facilitate your career? what does your situation look like currently? what might help you in achieving the ideal situation/career goals? what barriers or challenges have you faced? do you think these experiences are similar to other people that you know of? could it be different for anyone else? what about someone with a different gender identification? what is/has been/was your experience like going through the onboarding and/or promotion process? senior faculty: what has been your experience in preparing for/having access to leadership positions on campus? do you think these experiences are similar to other people that you know of? could it be different for anyone else? what about someone with a different gender identification? tell us about formal or informal structures on do you think these experiences are similar to other people that you know of? could it be different for anyone else? what about someone 62 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 campus that have supported you in your career. with a different gender identification? what has been your experience with specific mwu (pseudonym) policies related to gender equity? what suggestions do you have for policies that the wfac (pseudonym) might address? next, our second phase of data collection was informed by the analysis of the focus group transcriptions. after identifying the caregiving and care-receiving work for women academic workers, we sought to understand how this work was coordinated through texts such as the pte policy in the university employee manual, as well as department-specific requirements that exceeded university standards. we also explored the focus group data to identify what it meant to be a women faculty member, contributing to the discourse of an ideal woman academic worker. both phases of data collection were critical to the ie method and answering our research questions around the caregiving and receiving work that women faculty accepted, then identified how that work is organized and where women faculty feel that work is their responsibility. data analysis in alignment with the process of institutional ethnography, our analysis focused on responding to our research questions and tracing how work was coordinated. we began by identifying caregiving and receiving work for women faculty. next, we read the focus group data and identified the work being done by women faculty related to caregiving and carereceiving. for example, “asking us what we could use for mentoring,” would include the work of: “reflecting on what is needed,” describing needs, “collaborating with colleagues,” and “identifying the potential ideal outcomes.” instead of identifying themes or categorical codes often seen in qualitative research, we sought to identify the ruling relations or texts that organized the experiences or work of women academics (campbell & gregor, 2002; smith, 2005). by identifying the ruling relations, we were able to provide insights into how institutional and organizational structures, such as the state board of higher education, the mwu website, policy manuals, and the discourse of the ideal woman academic worker, shape the work. throughout this process, we identified the work, how it was coordinated, and noted disjunctures or conflicts between the lived experiences of women academics and the ruling relations. trustworthiness and validity to ensure confidentiality, participants were referred to by an assigned number for data collection (e.g., 201, 302), we used pseudonyms in the findings, and the university was renamed mwu. each of the quotes in the findings was limited to ensure anonymity. recognizing the internal validity of the study, it is essential to note that the sample was not randomly selected. lisa and rajani recruited faculty members through convenience sampling, based on self-selection and time commitment, to participate. 63 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 figure 1 researcher positionality 64 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 limitations as an institutional ethnography, the research is intended and expected to be generalized across the broader population of women faculty. we were limited by not having access to participants after the focus groups had concluded. this research, although limited to a specific university, highlights the challenges associated with being a woman faculty member. through this study, we focused on how work is accomplished and assigned, both in formal policies and in the perception of cultural norms within the organization. we, the researchers (figure 1), are critical elements of the research itself, as we tried to understand the group experiencing marginalization. the findings of this study aim to contribute to the understanding of caregiving and carereceiving work for women faculty and the discourse on the ideal woman academic worker. findings our analysis of the focus group data and institutional policies that coordinate the work of women suggests a disjuncture between the care work that women faculty provide for students and colleagues and the mwu policies regarding campus community contributions (figure 2). first, we describe the caregiving work of women faculty members, including academic advising, serving on committees, and assisting colleagues. second, we describe the carereceiving work of women faculty, which was primarily related to creating communities of support and finding mentors. we conclude by relating mentorship to the discourse of the ideal woman academic worker. caregiving for this study, we defined caregiving as work that falls within the service or teaching category in the pte dossier but has elements that are often unmeasured, such as academic advising, serving on committees, and providing support to colleagues. we discuss each element of caregiving work by beginning with the policy, practice, procedure, or discourse that coordinates that work, and then describe how that work is implemented in practice. finally, we conclude each section by discussing how or why this creates challenges (disjunctures) for women faculty. academic advising advising is required by the mwu pte policy within the category of service; however, it is unclear how much advising fulfills the policy requirement. we note the disjuncture between the work women faculty saw from their colleagues and their perception of the pte policy service section coordinating advising. for some, this was based on their contract, for others, student advising occurred less formally, where faculty would either be assigned or volunteered to advise students. the ambiguity in the service policy regarding how much advising was enough conflicted with the desire of women faculty to help students and provide care, as they accepted or declined work. for example, sibyl described her experience as a faculty member with the most student advisees in her department because she was good at it. however, others in her department did not accept advising meetings because they do not offer advising. i have one of the highest advising rates, as we don't have professional advisors in our department. i'm one of the few, and i have the highest number of advising appointments, because i do it well. and our other faculty have actually told our department chair “i, i don’t advise.” and they're okay with that. sibyl felt that she needed to prioritize providing care above her perception of the mwu pte service policy advising requirements. the conflict in priorities led to her having the most advising appointments in her department. this disjuncture created an imbalance between her role functions of service, research, and teaching. she needed to choose between doing what she felt was expected and building pte evidence. likewise, helen also noted the work of advising but related to graduate students. she felt she had to turn away students asking for help when their advisor was not meeting their needs. helen’s choice to maintain boundaries by not accepting the additional work left her feeling disheartened because she knew the students needed care but was unable to provide it. it's really frustrating when, when you are a faculty member, and there is a graduate student coming to you because your colleague isn't doing what they're supposed to be doing. … and it's, it's really just kind of, yeah, just disheartening to be like, like, i wish i could be stronger advocate. but it's either that taking on that service work, or that teaching. helen’s choice to decline the additional work of advising graduate students conflicted with her perception of what was expected in the mwu pte service policy and her desire to help students. the mwu pte policy described service work as, “contributing to the welfare of the department, college, or university.” however, the lack of clarity on how much advising is evidence for pte created the disjuncture between the expected work of faculty and participants’ experience. like advising, serving on graduate student committees is work outlined in the pte service policy that does not have clear metrics. in the next section, we discuss committee responsibilities as caregiving work. serving on committees pte policy ambiguity created a disjuncture for women faculty, because it was unclear what level of service was required to meet contractual requirements. the way work was defined by participants aligned with pte policies but conflicted with the goals on the mwu website to “create an equitable environment” that is supportive of the advancement of women faculty. this created more work for women faculty, because they felt pressured to accept committee work to contribute to department community, yet this work was not counted as evidence toward promotion and tenure. 65 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 for example, sam noted that women faculty in his department were overburdened with committee work. his perception was that his department diversifies the committees to align with the university’s diversity efforts. however, this procedure created an unequal division of work for women faculty. i have noticed that there's a tendency when my female colleagues kind of reach a certain level, that they're super kind of weighed down with committee work that, you know. especially kind of, like, committees that require senior faculty, you know, there's, there’s not as many, kind of, women in the pipeline. and so, the women who do reach full professor end up getting kind of, you know, three, four, or five committee assignments. sam described a workspace where women faculty were overburdened with caregiving work serving on committees and accepting that work in place of their colleagues. stella’s experience was similar, she described the supporting students as tasks that women faculty felt would not be completed if they did not do it themselves. likewise, stella shared that in her department where individuals, she estimated mostly tenured, had the autonomy to refer to their contract. some faculty completed only the compensated work, leaving a gap, noted by stella, in student guidance and support. it’s usually women, um, or senior lectures or other faculty who, sort of, make up a lot of that other, like, nebulous labor that clearly makes the department go. it makes, it makes our graduate programs like produce graduates. like, we do that work… while we have a couple of people who are just like, “not my job. where does it say in the bylaws that i have to do this?” so, then they just don’t have to do it. but then there’s no punishment for that person in any way. and then there is no real reward on the other side, right? there was no deterrent for faculty to refuse work viewed as outside their contract, according to stella, nor was there recognition or reward for completing the additional caregiving work. the policies at mwu did not define the allowance to refuse additional responsibilities nor provide guidance on rewarding those who accept the caregiving work above and beyond what was required by departmental policy. the disjuncture between the faculty pte policy related to service, contributing to the campus community, and building evidence for a pte dossier, and faculty practices created alternate realities for women faculty if they chose to prioritize perceived expectations or mwu policies. additionally, helen described her desire to be a team player as a new faculty member, feeling pressure to support students and step in. she noted that it was clear which faculty members did the work. i’m a new colleague, you know, i’m trying to, i want to be a team player. i want to help our students and, like, this is the attitude this person has. and, and, you know, and you can tell we have a list that’s not always updated, but like, of who’s working, you know, with which students. and it’s glaringly obvious the people who step in, you know, and want to support the students. and those who don’t. helen felt that this pressure left many women faculty members feeling undervalued, because they do the work above and beyond departmental practices. mwu pte policies were written to enable individuals to build a case for how they meet pte expectations. the vague nature provides little guidance on what meets requirements and how a faculty’s work should be measured. the lack of clarity creates a disjuncture for women faculty members trying to be team players without recognition for the unequal workloads they face in caring for students. in the next section, we discuss care work for women faculty as they feel pressure to care for their coworkers above and beyond their students’ needs. caring for colleagues students were not the only group that faculty described as needing care; colleagues were also recipients of the caregiving work of women faculty. mwu policy manual stated expectations for faculty to create a better campus community, conceptually valuing collaborative work. this conflicted with practices that valued individuality. caring for colleagues and contributing to the campus community created a disjuncture between an ideal academic and mwu policy. with this conflict between perceived expectations and policy, women faculty were torn between what they observed and what they felt they should be doing. for example, according to meryl, contributing to the campus community was not outlined or reflected in her annual evaluations, which were focused on teaching, research, and service, creating a disjuncture between pte practices and her contract. seems like there should be some component of this annual evaluation that really gets to the part of fostering, because the contract, when you get hired, at least the contracts that i have, uh, the letters that i have actually saved, you are expected to contribute to a positive work environment. meryl’s experience highlights a conflict between the practice of annual evaluations and her formal contract. she felt that there could be more support from mwu to push for behavior that created collegiality. providing care for colleagues was also described as knowing and sharing resources for faculty and their students. for faculty to create a community of collaboration and care, women faculty needed resources and methods to share information. several women faculty described the work of locating and validating links and resources for incoming faculty and staff. this practice was one they chose to undertake in addition to their formally 66 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 coordinated work, which conflicted with the outlined expectations in the pte policy, devoting time to research, service, and teaching. the work related to caregiving, such as advising, serving on committees, and helping colleagues, was in addition to contractual responsibilities by women faculty, leading to an overload of work. women faculty then faced the challenge of either caring for students and colleagues or being labeled as someone who did not contribute to a positive work environment, focusing only on evidence for their pte dossier. the time women faculty members spent completing additional uncompensated work to care for others ultimately took time away from efforts to advance their careers or care for themselves. in the following section, we discuss the expectations for women faculty to build and create a community while navigating the barriers to finding support and receiving care. carereceiving in response to our second research question, we identified the career-receiving work of women faculty. we define carereceiving as work related to finding and feeling support. the conflict between experiences and the perception of mwu’s employee policy manual and pte guidelines emerged as participants described their experience and what they felt they needed. women faculty described the challenges to receiving care by building personal communities of support, finding, and maintaining mentors. we discuss these components of carereceiving work, beginning with the policy, practice, procedure, or discourse that coordinates this work. we then provide examples of the work in practice. we conclude by describing how or why this creates a disjuncture (challenge) for women faculty. communities of support there were departmental practices of creating support networks, such as running a club or naturally forming groups of individuals with similar backgrounds. however, not being a formal component of mwu policy resulted in the programming lacking sustainability. work to create and maintain communities of support created additional challenges for women faculty as they sought care. the work of locating colleagues willing to participate and dedicating time to building communities of support was viewed as social. however, it was not seen as contributing to the campus community, rendering it invisible. this created the disjuncture between what the faculty felt was needed and the support from mwu. for example, anita described informal practices to create communities of support. when she first arrived at mwu, there was a running club for women, and she found a support system she could lean on and connect with, both in the office and outside of it. i'll speak from my own department, where we have a lot of informal things. where we, at least when i first arrived, we would gather, all the women would gather, and some of us would go running, for example, you know every wednesday, you know, the women would run. …it was just a way to build community. and just, people that you could talk to and lean on, right? because that's often the thing you need. anita described the work and effort that went into creating a community that brought people together, where she and her colleagues had people they could turn to for help and support. however, the practices of mwu that created a community of support were not sustainable through institutional changes. additionally, zoe described finding friendships and creating connections as work she had to do as a new member of the community. she felt lucky to be part of a large wave of incoming hires, but noted the additional work required to create a community of support. so, like i said, i think i lucked out incoming when i did. because there was this big wave of hiring, at least in our college, and a lot of folks coming from outside. and so, we've been able to form that community. without that, i probably wouldn't still be here, right. but it's, it hasn't been necessarily about research. it's been about the social, and then, like, i have a number of people that i could call. zoe found community in her cohort; however, this was work in addition to her role. the work of finding relationships and sustaining them to form that community aligned with the service aspect of the mwu policy. however, that work was considered social rather than part of contributing to the campus climate, creating a disjuncture between work seen as evidence for the pte dossier and the policy itself. gwen, a woman faculty member of mwu, described the formation of mentor networks as a challenge for her as a woman. the networks naturally formed for the majority groups, white men, but for minorities such as women, particularly women of color, they needed to reallocate time from other aspects of their roles to prioritize carereceiving work. gwen described the choice between the work of building her pte dossier and finding and forming those networks. in a lot of departments there are, already exists, a network for white men. so, they don’t have to spend the energy creating one. but for women and people of color, they have to take energy and time away from other things to find that support network. it doesn't exist in my unit either. and i think you're right by that everybody's really busy, and then, like, you're not rewarded for forming those networks. um, in the pt & e process, it's just, like, you need it. and so, you do it, or you try to do it, but at the sacrifice of your other things that are important to your promotion and tenure process, gwen felt she needed to look elsewhere for support networks since mwu did not have a mentorship program in place, and it 67 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 would not develop without structure. the mwu pte policy recognized contributing to the campus community as service work; however, this conflicted with the experiences of women faculty, as the work they were doing to create communities of support was not reflected in their pte dossier. next, we discuss the work women faculty did to find mentorship as a specific method for receiving care and the barriers to building mentor relationships. seeking mentorship participants described mentorship as a need; however, mwu did not have procedures on how to mentor or incentives to become mentors for women faculty. this conflict perpetuated the challenge faced by women faculty members in finding, vetting, and securing quality mentors to guide them. indeed, there was a challenge for women faculty to find mentors who shared their identities. for example, elaine described the work of finding mentors as searching for individuals who held similar roles to her own. mwu practices did not support the work of finding a mentor. as a result, it became invisible work. elaine described the process of seeking mentorship outside the department as a challenge. there was no like plan, mentorship part of me starting. and i was the first professor of practice in the department, and the only professor of practice. and, so i had to, like, seek out and meet people across campus to like, meet other professors of practice … and now, very recently, in the last few months, they've started to go, “oh, maybe we should mentor these newer faculty members,” because there's four of us now. like, half the department is new. and, uh, so, now they're starting some mentoring things and asking what we could, you know, use to help, help us proceed in all this kind of stuff. the department has since added a mentorship program, and leadership came to her and her colleagues, asking them what they needed and how the department could help them. this created more work for elaine and her colleagues as they sought to provide recommendations. in contrast, sam, a faculty member, described an informal practice where the associate dean in his department organized workshops for newer faculty to connect and learn the ways of working at mwu. sam noted his experience may not have been the same for women faculty in his department. sam also described the value of being mentored through a practice third-year review by the department chair and colleagues. this prepared him for his next step in the pte process. sam’s work was visible and recognized within the department's practices, particularly through his pte discussions. the program and his colleagues valued the work he did to receive care. sam’s experience was positive, but as he noted, this conflicts with his observations of women faculty. additionally, helen shared that she received mentorship but wanted to expand outside her department. she learned on her own how to identify mentors. the chair of helen’s department gave her a gift card and told her to connect with someone outside of the department for coffee. for helen, there was additional work to obtain mentorship, forcing her to choose where to focus. she could keep her current pace or take time to identify someone in another area with whom she could connect. this challenge led her to desire a formal mentorship practice within mwu, where faculty could receive care that aligns with the policy manual for pte, related to contributing to the campus community and recognizing the work faculty do to create mentorship networks. mentorship as a trait of the ideal woman academic worker. through our data analysis, we identified descriptions of work related to what women faculty felt they needed to be successful in their roles. the ambiguity in the mwu pte policy determining service created space for mentorship to be recognized. though some participants felt that this was an opportunity, this conflicted with mwu pte review practices. participants consistently expressed a desire to have a mentor, with some correlating mentorship with career progression. women faculty consistently shared that having mentors share their identities was needed and should be part of the evaluation for pte. our analysis suggests that having a mentor is a characteristic of an ideal academic woman. for example, bernadette described mentorship as something that is needed throughout a faculty member’s career. she noted that it was beneficial early on, as new members learn the ropes and access helpful resources. her commentary suggested that mentorship needed to be developed, presenting a challenge to create a comprehensive system within mwu that would meet the needs of all. additionally, meryl noted that mwu did not have a culture of mentorship. she described pte policy and noted the lack of verbiage related to mentorship. her experience was that the traditional method of providing evidence to support the service section of her pte dossier was through classroom evaluations provided by students or colleagues. and creating that culture because the evaluations on an annual basis are teaching, research, and service. there is nothing in there for like collegiality, mentorship, a mentorship could, i mean, like, you could start putting that into service, but i think the traditional way of evaluating those is, you know, classroom…, because the contract, when you get hired, at least the contracts that i have… you are expected to contribute to a positive work environment. meryl drew attention to her belief that mentorship could directly contribute to meeting the expectation of fostering a positive work environment, as noted in the mwu faculty policy manual. her experience was that mentorship was not evidence of service, presenting a disjuncture between recognizing mentorship and the ideal woman academic worker’s need for a mentor. 68 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 lastly, maggie described mentoring as a critical component of what was missing when asked about her expectations for the ideal work environment. she noted that mentoring was critical to career progression, stating, “mentoring what was, has been missing…there was no, no one mentoring to, to kind of, mentoring is so important to, um, for moving, moving higher.” maggie’s need for a mentor reinforced the concept that having a mentor was a critical trait in the discourse of the ideal academic woman. meryl and bernadette also called out this trait as critical. being an ideal academic woman, someone who has a mentor, conflicts with the policies related to pte, as women faculty provide evidence for their dossiers while meeting their expectations. table 2 findings matrix our findings, highlighted in table 2, outline the challenges that women faculty face and how their work is coordinated, which creates the disjunctures or differences between the ruling relations and the work that happens day-to-day. women faculty consistently felt pressure to accept work that provided care for students and supported their colleagues, while navigating the challenge of finding the same support for themselves. participants felt that communities of support and mentorship were critical for advancement, but were not naturally forming for women faculty. we attribute the expectation of having a mentor as part of the discourse on the ideal academic woman worker. we found that women faculty members were expected to take on invisible work beyond their contracted hours to meet the expectations of their colleagues, pte committees, and the ideal woman academic worker. in the following section, we discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations to improve the experiences of women faculty members. discussion in our study, participants experienced additional invisible workloads caring for those around them, students and colleagues. the actions of providing care through the mandated elements of the mwu pte policies included academic advising, chairing and serving on committees, and creating a positive work environment. women faculty members did not have a support system in place for care and development, which hindered their ability to navigate the pressure of taking on caregiving roles and working within higher education. the ambiguity in the service section of the promotion, tenure, and evaluation process did not provide clearly defined incentives or guidelines for serving as a mentor or seeking mentorship at a professional level. though mentorship may be able to fit beneath the evidence portion of the service section describing, “contributions to fostering a campus climate that supports and respects faculty, staff, and students who have diverse cultures, backgrounds, and points of view,” it was not described as something participants cited as part of their pte dossier. the absence of mentor networks or support systems left women faculty feeling isolated and alone. the discourse of being an ideal woman academic worker conflicted with policy and practices within the day-to-day work of women faculty. using ie as a method, we identified a disjuncture between unmeasured policy requirements and the ideal academic worker. then, we describe the expectations for women faculty seeking care without institutional incentives. we conclude by discussing the ideal academic woman worker as someone with a mentor. unmeasured requirements the work of women faculty, as they advise and care for students, is devalued by the disjuncture between the discourse of the ideal academic worker (blalock et al., 2023; howell et al., 2017; lund & tienari, 2018) and the pte policy related to service and teaching. without the formal measurement and value attributed to both the quality and quantity of advising or graduate committee service, the workload fell on women faculty. this research reinforces the work of lund & tienari (2019), who suggest that the ideal academic worker should be passionate but distanced from students, able to stand alone and take on necessary work. in sybil and helen’s cases, the care they provided was seen as academic housework (docka & stone, 2021) and thus invisible work that is not valued for recognition as a part of the pte process. additionally, marginalized students often seek out faculty who share their identities, placing even higher caregiving workloads on women faculty of color and their allies (docka & stone, 2021), due to the ambiguity of the advising section in the mwu pte policies. the mwu pte policy defined service as “public service, service to the university, college, and department, and service to the profession.” this could be used to the advantage of women faculty, creating the space to recognize their caregiving work underneath the service requirement. however, women faculty members felt pressure to accept caregiving work that exceeded their workload, thus not receiving recognition for this work within the broad definition of the mwu policy. expectations without incentives the policies of both the state and mwu conflicted with participant descriptions of the work environment. while some women faculty members experienced some mentorship, albeit short-term, others described the need to build networks of community outside of work to create connections. the sbhe and mwu pte policies state that employees should create positive environments by providing service to students and 69 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 colleagues. however, that workload ultimately became the invisible work of coordinating meetings and organizing programs, without clear incentives or guidelines on how to be an effective mentor. the trickle-down effect ended with the work being assigned to an individual rather than a role (nichols, 2014), forcing faculty to reinvent programming through staffing adjustments. when pte policy is the motivator for determining priorities, faculty will defer to what is listed in policy and the behavior of colleagues (kosoko-lasaki et al., 2006). without precise alignment on what it means to create positive work cultures, the priority of the work being done will continue to be seen as additional work. for example, the running group that anita appreciated or the network of women of color that gwen noted. this conflict between highlighting women faculty’s caregiving work and the policies dictating the day-to-day work ensures the continuation of the status quo, forcing women faculty to complete additional work without recognition within their pte discussions. characteristics of the ideal woman academic worker our analysis of the data suggested that women faculty faced a challenge in navigating the intersection of their identities as faculty and community members, in addition to their need for support. the standards of what is expected of faculty at mwu are not well-defined, contributing to the conflict between the work being done and what faculty felt were traits of an ideal woman academic worker. our analysis found that women faculty members described a mentor as someone who shared their identities in terms of gender, race, or orientation, rather than someone in academia. the perceived need for mentorship and the expectation that academics should have a mentor (ng et al., 2021) contributed to our interpretation of the ideal woman academic worker. this aligns with the work of lund and tienari (2018), who noted that the ideal academic is passionate and knows how to pursue their work effectively. building on their research, we infer that the individuals who cited mentorship as critical (blood et al., 2012; gibson, 2006) identified it as a trait of the ideal academic woman. however, the climate at mwu did not present opportunities for women faculty to obtain mentorship, nor did it recognize its value as a component of the pte dossier, instead treating it as an act of receiving care. academia continues to be a workplace built for the ideal worker. acker's (1990, 2008) work perpetuates the barriers to marginalized groups, creating mentor networks with those who share their identities. therefore, women faculty of color face a double challenge: feeling that they need a mentor who looks like them to be successful, while finding few people who meet their qualifications. figure 2 recommendations our recommendations that follow are summarized in figure 2. we focused on our key findings regarding the challenges that affect the work of indexed women academics. first, to address the additional invisible work that women academics accept above and beyond their job definition, which creates imbalances in workloads across the faculty, we recommend adding to job descriptions. we recommend that 'mentor' and 'caring' work be defined and added to the faculty job description to highlight the importance of care work to the organization and quantify the care work involved. second, we found that women faculty members were expected to have a mentor but were not provided with the support to locate or vet potential mentors. we recommend that the institution establish a systematic mentorship program with clearly defined expectations for what constitutes a successful mentor and mentee. the expectations should be collaboratively built with a pilot group. the pilot mentor group is a potential for future action research to assess and revise the program. third, we found that women faculty members described feeling pressure to accept caring work to support the overall campus climate and to support their students. to address this, we recommend revising the service expectations within the pte dossier to include recognition for time spent on advising and descriptions of the qualitative experience of advising work, rather than limiting the work to the number of advisees a faculty member has each term. lastly, we found that women academics shared that, in addition to caring for their students, they were also under pressure to care for their colleagues and create systems of support where they were not organically formed. we recommend that the university add to the terms in the section “fostering a campus climate that supports and respects faculty, staff, and students” to describe actions that contribute to a favorable campus climate. for example, the organization could add language that describes supporting colleagues through collaborative projects, mentor groups, and activities outside the office space that create connection and collaboration. to conclude, this study identified the methods that coordinated caregiving and carereceiving work for women faculty. the disjunctures between mwu policy, practices, and discourses of the ideal woman academic worker devalued the caregiving work of women faculty and perpetuated barriers to carereceiving work such as long-lasting mentorship and communities of support. based on our findings, we recommend that to improve how women faculty navigate the pte process and progress through 70 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 their career in academia, recognition for caregiving and care-receiving work be included in the pte dossier. future research is crucial for continuing to explore the discourse of the ideal academic woman worker. first, the experiences and discourse of women faculty members and the ideal academic worker may vary based on their field. we recommend that research be continued on a larger scale, involving women faculty from various institutions, to identify the perceptions and impact of the ideal woman academic worker discourse. the long-term impact of the gendered organization is still perpetuated in the experiences of women academics today. therefore, we recommend research seeking to identify the impacts of sustainable mentorship and carereceiving for women faculty. our call to action is that academic institutions should recognize the value of mentor relationships and define what it means to have a mentor and be mentored. the self-reflection process could be a component of the pte dossier, thereby highlighting the unseen work of 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(2019). toxic ivory towers: the consequences of work stress on underrepresented minority faculty. rutgers university press. https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813593012 72 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 microsoft word 1.rao_tootell_dickson_rethinking_the_impact_of_organizational_sponsorship_commentsaddressed.docx volume 40, 2021 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, barbara polnick, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 1 advancing women in leadership vol. 40, pp. 1-12, 2021 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper rethinking the impact of organizational sponsorship with lacanian theory vasudha rao, beth tootell, andrew dickson vasudha rao, lecturer, school of management, massey university, v.rao@massey.ac.nz beth tootell, associate head of school, school of management, massey university, b.l.tootell@massey.ac.nz andrew dickson, senior lecturer, school of people, environment and planning, massey university, a.g.dickson@massey.ac.nz accepted september 11, 2020 sponsoring has been positioned as a powerful intervention for the career advancement of women, with career resilience as a key benefit of sponsorship. in this paper we utilize a psychoanalytic framework namely lacanian discourse theory, to argue that this may not be the case, and that sponsoring may actually create a diagonally opposite result by creating (ir)resilience in individuals being sponsored. our theoretical critique is supported by empirical data from qualitative interviews with participants across europe, as well as an examination of extracts from accounts of sponsoring in published research. our analysis supports an alternate way of thinking about sponsoring and has implications for human resource practice. we suggest reversing the hierarchical positioning of sponsors and sponsees to counter the (ir)resilience created in a hierarchical sponsoring relationship. the resulting artificially introduced hystericisation will set the scene for radical change and build career resilience in women, both as sponsors and sponsees. keywords: sponsoring, women, career resilience, lacan, psychoanalysis, career advancement introduction women continue to be under-represented in leadership positions, board and executive levels across the globe (catalyst 2017; grant thornton, 2017). despite greater number of women graduates and women in the workforce, women report not being able to progress in their careers at the same rate as men (lin, 2016). research has indicated that gender diversity contributes to better organizational and financial performance, and organizations with a higher number of females in board positions display stronger financial and organizational performance as well as better corporate governance (e.g. badal & harter, 2014; carter & wagner, 2011; dawson et al., 2013; dezsö & ross, 2012; joecks et al., 2013; lee et al., 2015; pellegrino et al., 2011). however, our concern is with women’s career progress and women continuing to face barriers to career progress in organizations at all levels (e.g. fraser et al., 2015; sin et al., 2017), and a greater number of women in senior leadership has been reported to positively influence a concern for women’s issues more broadly in organizations. therefore, there is support for increasing women’s representation in senior leadership both from an organizational perspective as well as from the perspective of women’s progress. while several interventions for enabling the advancement of women into senior leadership have been implemented at an organizational level such as mentoring, sponsoring, leadership development and board internships, flexible workplace policies and networking events, mentoring gained the attention of researchers and practitioners in particular. research has shown that women who are mentored do better in their careers than women who are not (e.g. headlam-wells, 2004; mckeen & bujaki, 2008; vinnicombe & singh, 2003). given that mentoring hasn’t resolved the issue of underrepresentation of women in senior management, sponsoring has been proposed to be the answer (catalyst, 2017; grant thornton 2015). according to some, sponsoring could indeed be a key factor in enabling more women into leadership roles (e.g. foustcummings et al., 2011; hewlett et al., 2010; travis et al., 2013). sponsors are said to influence promotion decisions, give access to those in power, and provide other support for women’s career progress (e.g. ehrich, 2008; foust-cummings et al., 2011; advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 2 hewlett et al., 2011; ibarra et al., 2010; kambil, 2010; paddison, 2013). however, the terms mentoring and sponsoring, have often been utilised interchangeably in literature (bhide & tootell, 2017), and sponsoring is often a role attributed to mentors in kram’s (1985) widely used model of mentoring in organizations. mentoring and sponsoring have also been proposed to belong to a range of developmental relationships (higgins & kram, 2001) or support relationships (shapiro et al., 1998) even though there is no consensus on which relationships are more beneficial or meaningful for women’s career progress. focusing on people’s experiences would enable an insight into the meaning derived from relationships such mentoring or sponsoring, yet such a focus is evident only to a limited extent in the mentoring literature, and to the best of our knowledge lacking in sponsoring literature to date. however, the task of accounting for the experiences of subjects is not a straightforward activity and presents the issue of accurately representing lived experiences (driver, 2016). scholars have also argued that there is in fact an absence of the ‘real subject’ in research thus making the production of knowledge based on participants’ experiences a complex endeavor (hardy et al., 2001; rhodes, 2009). one alternative for addressing the struggle to account for the real subject or the subject of the unconscious in research that produces ‘knowledge about them and for them’, is to utilize psychoanalytical theorizing (driver, 2016: 731). psychoanalytical theories have been utilised by researchers to analyse human relations within organizations (arnaud, 2002; arnaud & venhuele, 2003; driver, 2015; driver, 2016; ekman, 2013; san-vergel et al., 2011; stein, 2007). lacanian theory in particular has been looked at from this perspective to analyse several organizational phenomena and constructs (arnaud, 2012; bénédicte, 2007; driver, 2005, 2015; 2017; 2018; ekman, 2001; vanheule et al., 2003; vanheule & verhaeghe, 2004). in this paper, we respond to driver’s (2016) call to utilise lacanian discourse theory as a psychoanalytical framework for representing the research subject. specifically, we think through the sponsoring relationship with lacanian discourse theory and elaborate on the kind of discourse occupied by research subjects. moving between the four positions of lacan’s discourse theory enables us to represent the research subject reflexively and ethically, and to move towards more empowering positions and relational practices, making it especially relevant for empirical research as well as for human resource practices aiming for women’s career progress and gender equity (brewis and wraybliss, 2008; guillemin and gillam, 2004). our method for thinking through sponsoring in this manner is two-fold. first, we analyze data from our own empirical research (interviews conducted with 11 participants across europe). second, we re-read examples drawn from the published literature on sponsorship. through this, we demonstrate evidence of twin discourses operating in the accounts of subjects who were asked to describe their perceptions or experiences of sponsoring. we have labelled these discourses, following lacan’s discourse theory, the master and the hysteric (lacan, 2007). we question the benefits of sponsoring in its present form for women given that an examination of data demonstrates that it results in considerable anxiety. we then extend this argument by suggesting that other developmental relationships may reveal previously undiscovered findings when examined through a lacanian lens. it is through the contradictions inherent within the relationship between these positions that we hope to make a radical contribution – one where developmental relationship could live up to the aspirations many scholars hold for it. the paper is structured into four sections; we begin by briefly introducing our analytical framework – the relationship between lacan’s discourse of the master and discourse of the hysteric. we then attempt to expose what we have called ‘the myth of sponsorship’ by critically examining the literature and demonstrate how the present literature is the master’s discourse. this provides a position from which to present an ‘other side’ of sponsorship that has emerged through the analysis of our data, the final section concludes by considering a practical alternative way to practice sponsorship in organizations that avoids many of the pitfalls our analysis has revealed, and suggesting a similar approach towards other developmental initiatives for women’s career advancement. section 1: a brief foray into lacanian discourse theory in this section our intention is to provide a brief discussion of one particular relationship, between two social bonds, central to lacan’s model of discourse (driver, 2016; lacan, 1996). this relationship is useful to explain both how sponsorship has been positioned in theory and practice so far and why we contend that this positioning erodes resilience for all women at work (not just those seeking career advancement). that relationship is the tension that exists between what lacan terms ‘the master’s discourse’ and the discourse of the hysteric. a lacanian understanding of discourse centres around the notion that irrespective of the specific words that people speak, the structure of the discourse in play determines which ‘social bond’ is established between subjects (fink, 1995; lacan, 2007; malone, 2008; verhaeghe, 1995; žižek, 2002, 2006). in seminar xvii, the other side of psychoanalysis, (lacan, 1996), lacan presented four discourses: that of the master, the university, the hysteric and the analyst. these four discourses emphasise particularly the structural relationships that form as a result of engaging in the act of speaking (bracher et al., 1994; skold, 2010; verhaeghe, 1995). each discourse has four fixed positions: agent (speaker), other (receiver), product (result of the discourse, what is produced) and the truth, which is the unconscious driver behind the discourse, something that can never be expressed fully in words (verhaeghe, 1995). each discourse also has four mutable positions: s1 (the master signifier), s2 (knowledge), $ (the lacanian split subject – split by the gap between the unconscious and conscious speech), and ‘a’ (a representative of desire). each discourse speaks from one of these mutable positions; it is this position (the agent) that ‘kicks off’ the advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 3 discourse so to speak, that sets the structure in motion. when the master signifier is in the position of agent the discourse of the master is enacted, when knowledge is in that position we see the university, when ‘a’ is in the driver’s seat we experience the discourse of the analyst and when the split subject takes over we have the hysteric. the ‘flow’ of each discourse remains the same – the agent is driven by an unconscious truth and speaks to the other (the recipient) who also produces something in the unconscious. the product of the discourse and its founding truth are incapable from interacting – feedback is impossible. this is why each position can be conceptualised as representing both a particular desire and the failure to attain that desire (verhaeghe, 1995). the agent (the subject speaking) is stuck between these; on the one hand attempting to exercise their desire, and on the other hand failing to do so which is why the cycle of a social bond keeps repeating. perhaps most important, none of these discourses act alone, so to speak. they are all in action in all of our speech, all of the time. the tendency to cherry pick a discourse for analytical purposes for instance as nobus and quinn (2005) warn, carries with it a significant rendering of lacan’s theoretical development towards a ‘too neat’ conclusion. more problematic, it fails to recognise that discourse, in a psychoanalytic frame, is slippery. put simply conversations slip between discursive positions, each acting out and being frustrated by a particular desire. it is here, in the movement between discourse (lacan, 1998: 16), in our case specifically between the master and the hysteric, that we can find something analytically useful for understanding the specific characteristics and ramifications of the frustrated desire of sponsorship. however prior to embarking on this we need to spend a little time looking at the relationship between the master and the hysteric. the master’s discourse can be conceptualised by imagining a doctor-patient interaction in a medical setting. the patient (other) approaches the doctor (master) with high blood pressure and back pain and is given the diagnosis of a muscle tear (dickson, 2016). speaking from the master’s discourse here, the doctor provides a definitive diagnosis to the patient. the patient, however, already knows something about their own condition (how the patient makes sense of this knowledge). in other words, the patient is also a split subject, or the other side, who is not sure of the doctor’s diagnosis. similarly, while the doctor may well be not sure about the diagnosis they can display their ‘knowledge-ability’ or their ‘ability-to-master-knowledge’ (mastery) with reference to the medical body of knowledge. even though the patient is provided a diagnosis they walk away wondering if it may actually be something else other than a muscle tear. in lacanian terms, it is the unconscious (dickson, 2016) of the master (doctor) and other (patient) that creates a split in the master (the doctor who appears to make the diagnosis consciously but is actually not quite sure although this anxiety is partly taken care of by the body of medical knowledge that the doctor depends on), and the emergence of the object of desire for the patient (the patient walks away with a treatment plan but wonders whether something else is wrong with them). therefore, this discourse appears commanding (the doctor’s diagnosis) but it actually reiterates the subject’s search for desire (might it be something else?). one way for the subject to react to a ‘prescription’ from the master is to question the master. lacan’s discourse of the hysteric questions the power that is exerted by the master and the status quo, whether that is political, social or cultural (verhaeghe, 1995). the hysteric questions the master on whether he really has an answer or challenges the master by pointing out that the answer is not really reasonable (verhaeghe, 1995; wajcman, 2003). since the hysteric is also a split subject, they continue the contradiction between the conscious and the unconscious and their position is not to offer the solution – in fact, they do not believe there is necessarily one solution. in this position, their role is to question what is not right or reasonable in the master’s discourse, while simultaneously contradicting themselves and aligning with the master. the hystericised subject is unsure of what she wants but she finds the master lacking in knowledge (fotaki & harding, 2013; parker, 2010; žižek, 2002). with the split subject as the agent ‘the hysteric (unconsciously) refuses to align with the master signifier, while paradoxically attempting to do exactly that’ (dickson, 2016, p. 137). ultimately, the hysteric knows that the master can relieve her symptoms, she also knows that the solutions offered are not reasonable or do not fit somehow, yet she is unable to get rid of the master’s influence on her life (desmond, 2009; dickson, 2015; lacan, 2007). from a lacanian perspective, to achieve change, the master’s discourse must be questioned from the hysteric’s position in order to pave the way for the mediation of (a) new master signifier(s) to emerge through the analyst’s discourse, as the hysteric’s discourse enables the interpretation of words and actions in order to reveal hidden desires (verhaeghe, 1995). section 2: the myth of sponsorship ever since catalyst published their 2011 survey sponsoring women to success, sponsorship has been part of the holy grail of women’s leadership advancement. in theory, sponsorship is career advocacy provided to a subordinate by a senior-level executive. it is touted as a relationship built on trust, respect, and mutual benefit, but it remains exceedingly rare, especially outside of the us business environment, and is mythical to many. hewlett et al. (2010) claimed that sponsorship provides a statistical benefit of up to 30 percent for high profile assignments, promotions, and pay raises, yet very few women have sponsors. in fact, men are 46 percent more likely than women to have one. other researchers have argued that women tend to be over-mentored and under-sponsored and, as a result, they miss out on the positive impact of having a sponsor (ibarra et al., 2010). further, that there is direct relationship between a lack of sponsorship opportunities and the absence of women in leadership positions (hewlett et al., 2010). advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 4 the necessary role of intentional workplace relationships is further developed by fernando and cohen (2013). they argued that despite the broad consensus amongst scholars that social capital was vital for career advancement, women are often marginalised and excluded from key social groups. ibarra (1993) contended that women were more likely than their male colleagues to have small social networks, while durbin and tomlinson (2014) further noted that women managers are more likely to be part-time than their male counterparts, and therefore their working relationships and experiences are different due to their different working patterns. into this void, sponsorship enters as a potential solution to the challenges of women’s restricted social networks. women who want access to senior leadership are suggested to engage in self-promotion and ingratiation behaviours to ensure visibility, and organizational sponsorship (king, 2004: 121). however, somewhat in contradiction to this idea, there is some evidence from the literature that sponsorship roles may in fact reinforce the traditional subjugation of women’s rights, needs and autonomy at work (burt, 1998). in kumra and vinnicombe’s (2010) research, early and mid-career respondents highlighted that importance of pleasing the higher-ups to gain goodwill in order to the climb the organizational hierarchy. burt, as far back as 1998 spoke of the need for ingratiation with superiors as a means of securing sponsorship for women. sponsoring has predominantly appeared in research as a subfunction of mentoring and there is sparse literature, especially prior to hewlett’s (2010) study that examined sponsoring independently. while geographical differences in how sponsoring is perceived have been reported, which may in part be due to varying power distance orientations (clutterbuck, 2009), there are also reports of sponsorship being hidden and covert (megginson, 2006; merrick, 2009). this might be a result of the powerful position of a sponsor which allows sponsors to support the career advancement of their sponsees by acting as a door opener; influencing promotion decisions; and providing exposure and networking opportunities; and providing access to otherwise inaccessible resources (e.g. ehrich, 2008; foustcummings et al., 2011; kambil, 2010; paddison, 2013). however, this view presupposes that any individual who is not in an influential position is not considered to be able to sponsor, and any individual in an influential position is expected to be able to sponsor. research indicates that males in senior leadership positions are less likely to sponsor females as they consider them a flight risk (ibarra et al., 2010). with the majority of senior leadership being male, perhaps there is a need to think differently about sponsoring women. while research suggests there is an inability for sponsoring to happen in any other manner other than on the initiation of senior leadership, it is contradictory, then, that recent popular literature has focussed on women ‘leaning in’ (sandberg, 2013) and getting themselves sponsors when it is in fact the actions of sponsors that will determine whether women are sponsored or not. this is, in effect, a continued pattern of patriarchy. positioning current sponsoring literature as the master’s discourse. a lacanian psychoanalytical framework accounts for the interpersonal dimension between subjects rather than individuals as subjects, and since the subject is represented through language (stavrakakis, 2008), lacanian psychoanalysis is an appropriate framework to account for the real subject, and this framework offers a way to understand research through language and discourse (driver, 2016), which is our preferred approach. we are guided by the linguistic approach to research wherein knowledge is contained within signifiers through language. with this understanding, we propose that the current understanding of sponsoring perpetuates the master’s discourse (verhaeghe, 1995). in this discourse, the master signifier (s1) in the position of the agent (or the one who is talking) is the sponsor. this agent speaks to s2 (the denominator of knowledge) in the position of the other, in this case the sponsee. the desire in this discourse is for the master signifier to be the undivided subject, and therefore at the position of truth is the divided subject or the human being divided between the conscious and the unconscious (verhaeghe, 1995). the sponsor is a construct, then, of the sponsee, with s2 (knowledge) in the position of the other, with the sponsee (s2) sustaining the position of the sponsor (s1). the sponsor is also a divided subject with the hidden truth, the fact that they too are a divided subject or a being of language. the result is the lost object ‘a’ in the position of the product. further, the master signifier (sponsor) is in a commanding position to the knowledge signifier (sponsee), and the use of language is such that knowledge is available for use by the master (verhaeghe, 1995). in this case, it is the body of knowledge on sponsoring. however, beneath the master signifier is the signifier for the divided subject ($), indicating that the master actually suppresses the truth – the knowledge of their own inadequacies. nevertheless, this truth needs to remain hidden and they cannot let it be known, for the fear of losing the power as the master (verhaeghe, 1995). finally, beneath the knowledge signifier is the object a or the surplus pleasure or jouissance, or the product of this discourse. this emerges from the discourse (unconsciously) for the sponsee and discloses the master’s true desire which is to be in a commanding position with respect to society, have knowledge at their disposal and acquire pleasure from being in this position (olivier, 2009). thus, the master’s discourse is the discourse of power which does not need validation (driver, 2016). in the us-based understanding of sponsoring as the master’s discourse, we see the sponsor, with his/her hidden truth, sustained in a position of power by a sponsee with the resultant product of the discourse having nothing to do with the hidden truth of the sponsor. the sponsor thinks of the sponsee as an object of his/her knowledge, for example their ability to influence the sponsee’s promotion from senior manager to board member or ceo, or to get a raise. what is produced in this discourse is the lost object a, surplus pleasure, gained by the master due to the position of being the master signifier. when the sponsor engages in the act of sponsoring as a means of advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 5 moving women up the career ladder, we suggest that it is their own surplus pleasure that they are seeking. the sponsee learns something (symbolising knowledge), however, the master is not really concerned with what that is, focussing only on maintaining or growing their own power (fink, 1995), and enjoying the surplus pleasure (jouissance) that is created in the position of the object. lacan’s four discourses are centred around the impossibility of attaining desire. since the result of the discourse of the master is the lost object, the desire of the sponsor is never assumed, resulting in repeating the same cycle again. sponsoring has been positioned as the means to women’s upward mobility and equal status to men, a historical focus of feminism. however, one could argue that this is a feminist phantasy of unconstrained enjoyment, which from a lacanian perspective, is impossible to attain due to the idiosyncratic nature of jouissance. this would lead to an uncomfortable and polarising position, one that does understand sponsoring as a feminist phantasy – specifically an exercise in masculine jouissance that does not result in what it suggests it does. the other side of sponsorship in the previous section, we presented a critical review of sponsoring literature and utilised lacan’s theory of discourses as a template to argue that the current understanding of sponsoring perpetuates the master’s discourse. in the discussion that follows, we will demonstrate how the examples provided from our data as well as data from the two published studies considered (fernando and cohen, 2013; kumra and vinnicombe, 2010), point towards the emergence of the hysteric by illustrating the unconscious desire to resist the master signifier in these accounts (dickson, 2015, 2016; lacan, 2007; verhaeghe, 1995). even though the hysteric demands knowledge from the master, there is actually the repeated revelation of its lack because the desire of the hysteric is impossible to realise (parker, 2005; verhaeghe, 2001). the master’s command. we begin with kumra and vinnicombe’s (2010) study, in which they examined the role of impression management and social capital in career advancement by conducting interviews with 19 female consultants in a management consulting company in the uk. the participants determined that sponsorship is critical for career advancement, and speculated on what determines whether an individual has sponsorship. through selected quotes from this study, we illustrate below the emergence of the hysteric who is unsure about whether the master has the answers to their questions, but is still captivated by the master’s command. one respondent states: ‘[t]he question i have is less around the promotion process but is around the exposure to opportunities, and this is really where the informal thing kicks in because, although we have formal allocation of these assignments, you need the network and sponsorship to get a track record. you can see other people doing it you suddenly think, how has that person got there? and you just think, ah! well, that is because they have attached themselves to these two or three people, they always work on their jobs, you can see they are always doing the extra stuff in their own spare time, and you just think, this is how it goes….’ ‘gcf [the formal competence-based promotion system] was supposed to get rid of all of that. if it wasn’t written down on paper it wasn’t supposed to be acceptable in the progression discussions, but ultimately they sit huddled in a room and they discuss your performance and then they have people’s opinions.’ we suggest that you can see the hysteric’s plea in the way this respondent questions what leads to promotions, concluding that sponsorship is needed. however, she then goes on to elaborate on how sponsorship is secured, specifically by attaching oneself to other people. she finds this unreasonable but concludes that it is the way things are. her dual position as agent of the hysteric’s discourse and as recipient of the master’s discourse can be seen as she both identifies sponsorship as critical to career advancement and finds things that lead to people being sponsored. at the end of the first section she articulates the position of the ‘other’ of the master’s discourse, by saying clearly ‘this is how it goes’. what she does know is that the way to progress in the organization is by obtaining the right to be sponsored, through allocating personal time to sponsors’ tasks. the divided subject is here both longing for it (as the subject of the master) while also abhorring the idea (as hysteric), yet showing an acceptance of it as the normal. we see the hysteric responding more forcefully in the second section, the phrase ‘but ultimately they sit huddled in a room and they discuss your performance’ draws a line through the sponsor master’s potency, calling it out, exposing the impotence as despite what your sponsor says, ultimately they huddle with their conspirators and talk about you – you can almost hear her say ‘what are they saying about me’? ‘what am i to them, really?’ does the master’s have the answers? we now examine some statements from the accounts of the participants of our qualitative research in 2014, who expressed varied perceptions about different aspects of sponsoring and the functions of a sponsor. we suggest that the quote below from jason’s account illustrates jason’s position as a hysteric: ‘i think it tends to be people get handpicked and yes there may well be an element of validating that because that person has been delivering regularly his tasks, but i think on the broader level though the process of making that available needs to be accessible to everyone. i think that would be the point that people particularly in the uk, that’s where they might have reservations about sponsoring. the basis for them being chosen and that’s the one thing that i suppose people can’t answer that question. even though their manager would not call it sponsoring that’s what i would call it but then question would be what’s the process of being sponsored’? advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 6 in the first statement, jason identifies that although sponsoring may lead to career progress, it may not be available to everyone. he clarifies that it is not just him, and that other people in the uk would also have doubts about it because the notion itself has deficiencies. however, in the second statement he expresses his frustration in not knowing what it is that actually happens when a person gets sponsored. what he is really saying is: ‘i don’t know whether i will get sponsored because the process is not transparent and i don’t know what that process is’. jason is an individual who is not willing to let go of the notion that hierarchical sponsoring leads to career advancement. he would like to have access to a sponsor and get sponsorship sometime in his career. however, he displays his resistance to the master’s position through his notion of sponsoring not being available to everyone. we argue that this is the dual subject who on one hand can see the folly of the master’s discourse that perpetuates the notion of sponsorship being responsible for career progression, but is unable to not be subject to it. jason’s statements also indicate a sense of helplessness in not being able to influence the process of sponsoring, since it was not considered transparent. jason is hysterical from a lacanian perspective when he begins to question the reasoning behind the solution that the master offers, yet is unable to unlatch himself from the notion of the master as the one with the solution. he is not quite sure of the master’s position and is beginning to unconsciously display resistance to the master’s discourse, by refusing to align with the master’s command. however, the refusal is verbalized through a desire to occupy the subject position that is being refused, hence this refusal is actually hysterical (dickson, 2015; fotaki & harding, 2013). another participant, katy (switzerland), felt that sponsoring happened in the background and that it might not be possible for individuals to actively look for sponsors. she talked about this lack of transparency and said: ‘i don’t know how they decide if they do this for some women while some others they think are stupid, so they would not help them’. she also felt that one could not go and get a sponsor because: ‘i don’t know whether you can actively look for sponsors if they don’t do that by themselves, the sponsor can be a sponsor and actually not say a word, right? katy’s frustration is evident in her first statement where she cannot quite understand why some individuals would be privy to sponsoring while others would not because of what the sponsor thinks of them. she also indicates that being valued by the sponsor is a key determinant of whether sponsorship is provided, irrespective of other factors. in her second statement, she emerges as the hysteric when she asks whether it would be possible to get a sponsor at all because it happens in the background and nobody knows ‘by who exactly and why’. what katy appears to want to say is that there is no reasoning behind the manner in which sponsorship occurs, but it just does, and sponsors just go ahead and provide sponsorship to some people, however that she may not be that person. these statements thus indicate resistance to the master’s discourse in questioning the role of sponsoring, expressing ambiguity about the process of sponsoring as well as an individual’s inability to influence it (or not), and questioning the motivations behind sponsoring and whether those who do not get sponsored are undervalued. these instances indicate the emergence of the hysteric subject challenging the assumption that sponsoring can be available to all women if they want it, and thus unconsciously challenging the master and questioning their ability to provide a solution to their problems (symptoms they exhibit). in this hystericisation, we also illustrated through a quote in kumra and vinnicombe’s study (2010) where the participant discusses her perception about what determined whether an individual obtained sponsorship. the participant identifies the influence of the sponsorship group as being critical for career advancement, while also identifying likeability as a factor that would make some individuals appeal to that group more than others, and ensure sponsorship: ‘i’ve always thought that a lot of it is definitely likeability. i’m from a bit of the organization where i think a lot of the partners like what i call a “good bloke”. someone who will go out drinking, play snooker, and i can spot a mile off the type of person who’s going to appeal to that sponsorship group and 10 to 1 you’ll see them in the room and think, that’s inevitable’. there is a sense that this participant finds it unreasonable that an individual may already be in a favourable situation for sponsorship by virtue of appealing to hierarchical sponsoring groups but she also normalises it as something that is inevitable. in other words, she is aware that there are things beyond an individual’s control, such as likeability, that may determine who moves up the career ladder but she still finds ways to understand how someone may appeal to those responsible for career progression through sponsoring. here again we see the dual position of the hysterical subject. why must i do as you say? our participants also reported that not all aspects of sponsoring were as they seemed. the primary function of a sponsor according to brooklyn (portugal) was providing new opportunities and talking about her work. however, brooklyn also explained how in a sponsoring relationship a protégé could be put under pressure: ‘of course if you have someone that supports you and sponsors you this person also wants something from you or make you feel obliged to give something in return’. brooklyn’s response aligns with the master’s discourse in the way she normalises that a sponsor may naturally want something in return, but she also states that the person may make an individual feel obliged to give something back suggesting a hysteric’s resistance to the idea of reciprocity. similarly, a sponsor was perceived as someone ‘actively promoting the mentee at the right places in the organization and so actively helping a mentee in getting the job’ by katherine (denmark). however, katherine also stated that sponsors wanted their sponsees to mirror their own careers without consideration for the sponsees own career goals: ‘you risk becoming clones of sponsors because the sponsors may not really understand what you can contribute but they just want you to get the kind of career that they can have.’ here again, katherine is torn between advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 7 the need and benefits of sponsorship as she perceives them and cannot rid herself from the hold of this discourse, while questioning her own position as a sponsee. her contradictory position indicates a questioning of ‘who am i and what do i want? and ‘who am i (to the sponsor)?’; a hysteric’s response. we now turn to quotes from two participants in fernando and cohen’s (2013) study to continue with our discussion around hysteric subjects. fernando and cohen interviewed 24 female sri lankan participants, who explained their perceptions of how career advancement and promotions occurred in organizations. one participant states: ‘the editors are like god; one thing i learned is that you don’t contradict whatever they say. you just take their word for it and revise your work accordingly. and you don’t refuse anything that is handed over to you however busy you are. you just take it up. you have to keep all the big people happy if you want better assignments, your own column, etc. everything is after all at the discretion of the editor.’ (natasha, 25). on the surface, natasha’s statement displays a sense of action that could be taken (keeping superiors happy) in order to progress in the workplace. however, underneath, there is a sense of helplessness and at the same time a sense of wanting to disagree and resist the notion of securing a promotion in this manner. by comparing the editors with god, what she wants to say is that sponsors are infallible and the only thing that can be done is obeying their wishes. she justifies this stance by stating that this kind of obedience will determine whether and how junior employees progress in the workplace. she seems to dislike the notion of the editors being god-like and having the power to make decisions about career progress, yet, she reinstates that very notion in what she thinks needs to be done. another participant states: ‘your progression is guaranteed if you stick up to the key people; that’s the sri lankan work model for you!’ (shamila, 32). her statement does away with all the interventions that are supposed to advance women in workplaces, and how career advancement boils down to ingratiation techniques by individuals. here again, similar to natasha, shamila consciously seems to express that she would need to embrace the model for career progression, and that this would in fact guarantee career advancement. however, it seems unreasonable to her that sticking up to the key people should lead to guaranteed career progress and there is underlying contempt and ridicule in her statement about this being the sri lankan work model. we suggest that what she means is that (hopefully) this is ‘only’ the sri lankan work model, displaying hysteric symptoms (wajcman, 2003). what natasha and shamila’s accounts indicate overall is the dissent with the manner in which career advancement occurs currently, yet both respondents cannot shake off the notion that this is the way in which it must be done (the master’s command): someone must provide hierarchical sponsorship for career advancement to happen. i will anyway. the existing understanding of sponsoring as the master’s discourse points out to a hierarchical model of sponsoring where an individual in a senior and influential position provides sponsorship for another individual in a junior position by advocating for their promotion or similar. however, the accounts of participants from two studies as well as from our own research reveal how participants identify sponsorship as critical to career advancement, yet also discuss how they think career advancement and sponsorship actually happen, making it likely that a person may or may not receive any sponsorship this way. ultimately, these statements reveal the emergence of hystericisation among these participants, and the quotes that we have presented illustrate evidence of repulsive reaction to the way that sponsorship is currently conceptualised. subjects speculate about the various opaque ways in which sponsorship may be available to some people but definitely not to others, and about the impotence generally of a sponsor to achieve career change, yet they also normalise the various underhand ways of gaining sponsorship, as if it does ‘help’. we can clearly see the emergence of the hysteric's discourse in this model – where people subject to it simultaneously see the phantasy behind the master’s discourse but still subject themselves to it (of course they may have no option). in lacanian terms, the hystericised subject is one who is aware that the master is also split, but who has not acted upon that awareness and hence continues to be subjected to the discourse of the master (verhaeghe, 1995). in the discourse of the hysteric, the divided subject is filled with doubt and questions her position in relation to the master (žižek, 1993, 2002). she is split and torn between what she thinks she is meant to do and her resistance to the master’s command. (žižek, 1993, 2002). therefore, there is on one hand a display of resistance and protest to the master’s command while on the other, there is a sense of meaninglessness because of failing to live up to the master’s command. in perceiving sponsoring as hidden, happening in the background, or a sign of incompetency, the participants of our research emerge as hysterics where they start to question their subjective position, yet remain the divided subject, conflicted between what they are supposed to do and the failure to live up to what the master commands. despite the resistance however, the hysteric is still captivated by the demands of the master’s discourse (bracher et al., 1994). the accounts of the participants that we have discussed in this section display subjects who demonstrate resistance to the master’s discourse and question why it must be obeyed, yet they display helplessness and a sense of meaninglessness in identifying how there are certain things actually that determine who secures sponsorship or influences decision makers. the question they seem to raise is: ‘why must i act the way you say?’ (lacan, 1993), the status quo. they question the master’s claim to have the answer and yet they remain subjected to the discourse of the master. the ramification of our analysis are substantial, although sponsorship has been touted as building career resilience in women (e.g. carson & bedeian, 1994; heslin & turban, 2016; london, 1997; waterman et al., 1994) we argue that it is advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 8 actually the opposite. paradoxically, it creates irresilience (e.g. insecurity, fear, frustration, longing) and develops a lack of trust among individuals. this is evidenced by frequent slippage from the subject of the master to the agent of the hysteric. this is an unintended consequence of the manner in which sponsoring is understood and promoted in organizations, and has direct implications for how effective sponsoring can be for women’s careers, given its current understanding. we discuss this further in our conclusion. conclusion in this concluding section our purpose is two-fold, to summarise the theoretical contribution our paper makes in relation to the development of lacanian discourse theory in considering gender and organization studies and to discuss some potential practical interventions that have emerged from our critical consideration of the sponsorship literature and our empirical data. the sponsorship literature only understands sponsorship as something that occurs in a unidirectional way in an organization’s hierarchy. that is, someone who is higher in the hierarchy acts as a sponsor and someone lower in the same or related hierarchy is sponsored. the assumption that underpins this approach is reasonable in our current logic of patriarchy – those higher have both experience and power, supposedly – and thus can influence in various ways the rise of the person sponsored in the relevant hierarchy. this is perhaps the defining feature of sponsorship over related concepts such as mentoring and coaching, which do not have the same expectation (overt or covert) that comes with sponsorship. we have theorised this unidirectional relationship, at least as it is represented in the mainly u.s. literature, as best characterised by lacan’s discourse of the master (dickson, 2016; driver, 2016; fotaki & harding, 2013; skold, 2010). here, the sponsor speaks from the position of authority (s1) and attempts to structure the ‘career’ (s2) of the sponsee, which results unsurprisingly in the production of an unknown desire (le petit objet a in lacanian terms), which manifests in the speech of the sponsee as an uncomfortable and perplexed irresiliance – what am i to my sponsor?, they ask. the dangers of lacan’s master’s discourse are well explained in the organization studies, sociological and psychoanalytic literature, what underpins the master’s attempts to manipulate the future of the sponsee is an unacknowledged lack, a rupture, – they can’t guarantee anything. although they provide assurance and even though they need to appear knowledgeable consciously, the master’s assurance is ‘underwritten’ by an unconscious lack (dickson, 2016: 136). our claim is that sponsored women can sense this impotence and are structurally uncomfortable hitching their carriages to (often) impotent men above them in the hierarchy. so what is an alternative? here we see potential, as others have (e.g. fotaki & harding, 2013, alakavuklar et al, 2017) in hystericisation, in putting to work the other’s jouissance (dickson, 2015). we agree with driver as she suggests that ‘more attention can be paid to discursive movement that unsettles either/or thinking allowing for both/and’ (2017: 733). in particularly the discursive movement between master and hysteric could be structurally reversed to allow those often positioned as hysterical to be positioned as masterful. one way that this might work in practice in terms of furthering women’s career progression is by purposefully reversing the sponsorship relationship. here the sponsors would be the junior female members of staff, people who often operate closer to the operational work of the organization. they would have as their sponsees more senior female colleagues who have aspirations to move ‘up’ the organizational hierarchy. although this might sound impractical, politically impossible and potentially creating significant power imbalances we see it as a solid step towards recognising hystericisation, specifically ‘the structural introduction, under artificial conditions, of the hysteric’s discourse’ (lacan, 2007: 33). it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a detailed account of how this might occur in practice, but we think we already have the building blocks in place with methods such as the various 360-degree feedback schemes. although these would need to be radically rethought with due care to make sense of the complexities of organizational life. perhaps here we are asking for too much, but consider the argument. one of the findings from our empirical material was this notion that we have termed ‘irresiliance’ in those sponsored. this, we have argued, comes from the impotence of the discourse of the master creating an unsettling, perhaps uncanny feeling of disconnection and alienation in the sponsored subject. the discourse of the hysteric as a response to the master speaks from the position of the barred subject, driven by desire, and asks of the master: what am i to you? by asking junior female members of staff to take up the role of sponsor, to fight the corner of the sponsored senior staff without the trappings of the impotent master, who appears potent only to be unmasked through the progression of the discourse, we think we would begin to see produced s2, knowledge. knowledge of the true function of the organization, of the real power-brokers, the saints and the sinners so to speak. organizational 360 degree feedback mechanisms have predominantly been proposed as aids for leadership development and 360 degree feedback has been researched as a tool for the selection and effectiveness of leaders (e.g. bracken et al., 2016; harris and kuhnert, 2007; markham et al., 2015). recent empirical studies have also noted the value of 360 surveys about future performance potential in addressing gender bias in promotion processes (bain & company, 2017). at the same time however, while some scholars argue that 360 degree assessments are effective for leadership competency assessment (craig and hannum, 2006; toegel and conger, 2003), we would contend that the 360 feedback fantasizes objectivity within what is inherently a subjective process, for instance women often receive feedback that is different from men due to gender bias and the notion that leadership is associated with men (e.g. heilman et al., 1995; metcalfe and altman, 2001; people matters, 2018). thus in fact, the 360 feedback often just stands in for the impotent master, the double bind and double standards that women encounter in organizations (ibarra et al., 2013). advancing women in leadership journal-volume 40 9 our data shows that promotion decisions are thought to happen in the background through closed room discussions between senior leaders. thus, 360 degree mechanisms in the current format in which they are utilised would not address the anxiety that promotion processes create among female employees. we propose modifications in 360 processes such that women are empowered to select a panel of ‘sponsors’ hierarchically lower who would then ‘sponsor up’ the female sponsee with senior leadership ambitions. the influence of subordinates in evaluating leadership effectiveness through 360 feedback has been recognised through various scholarly studies (e.g. lance et al., 2006; tett & burnett, 2003). our proposed 360 degree feedback structure further emphasizes the role of followers in the co-construction of leadership (e.g. derue & ashford, 2010; fairhurst & uhl-bien, 2012; shamir, 2012). the feedback received on past performance and future potential through the 360 process involving this select panel (including human resource personnel, sponsee chosen sponsors, and senior leadership) would influence career advancement for the sponsee. such a process is envisaged to enhance transparency and aid in making career advancement processes less anxiety-ridden for women. slavoj žižek has described the hysteric as authentic, but inconsistent (žižek, 1993). we would likely see this in operation in this reverse sponsorship system, as those junior sponsors would be able to exercise authenticity without the pressure of actually elevating their sponsees, the results would most definitely be inconsistent because the existing power structures would be completely unable to handle the incision into their normal operating procedures. and just imagine the resilience that would emerge in both the sponsor and sponsee as they forge an unlikely bond, the senior sponsee both reliant on and responsible for the junior sponsor. and the junior sponsor seeing and fighting the true organization effects of the insidious nature of patriarchy through the eyes of her senior charge. we see this as having potential for real change through change in the real, that is the creation of new master signifiers through the emergence of the analyst’s discourse (driver, 2016; lacan, 2007) as the traditional hierarchical relationship between the sponsor and sponsee is unstitched. references alakavuklar, o. n., dickson, a. g., & stablein, r. 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(2006) how to read lacan. w. w. norton & company. 534 mckinney et al final pub ready.docx volume 44, 2025 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodriguez, and benjamin jankens assistant editor: jordan donop & kristina hall advancing women in leadership vol. 44, 30-43, 2025 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper emotional labor and the helper identity: mothers of children with disabilities who work in student affairs kellie m. mckinney & karen l gischlar kellie m. mckinney: assistant professor, rider university, kmckinney@rider.edu karen l. gischlar: professor, rider university, kgischlar@rider.edu accepted april 30, 2025 the field of student affairs is considered a helping profession as it requires the provision of assistance and support to others. likewise, having a child with a disability and/or illness places a burden of help and support on caregivers in the home setting. through a narrative portraiture lens, this qualitative study examines how women who work in student affairs and who have at least one child with an identified disability, describe emotional labor and strategies they utilize to navigate the aforementioned across work and home environments. findings suggest that the women interviewed assume a helper identity at both work and in the home, which requires them to use emotional labor frequently in both arenas. for many women, the organizational culture of the workplace coupled with demands associated with parenting a child with a disability drives their need to mask, which ultimately influences overall satisfaction with work performance and home life. we provide higher educational leaders with practical and sustainable recommendations to transform organizational culture, policies, and practices that have the potential to reduce emotional labor for this population of employees. keywords: emotional labor, helper identity, higher education, student affairs, mothers of children with disabilities women who work in student affairs, a helping profession, and who parent a child with a disability often experience competing work and family responsibilities. at times, this intersection of demands across settings incites emotional and mental labor and can lead to burnout, work-home life conflicts, and women either failing to advance in their careers or leaving their positions (dean et al., 2022). this review of the literature provides a brief overview of this intersection, including definitions of terminology and the application of concepts to mothers of children with disabilities who are employed by university/college departments of student affairs, a population for whom a dearth of literature exists. student affairs as a helping profession the caring and service aspects of the student affairs profession designate the field as a helping profession. helping professions are those that are grounded in the provision of professionally qualified assistance and services to others (starek, 2022). in the field of student affairs, employees provide students from varied backgrounds academic, social, and emotional support (tapia-fuselier, 2023). being part of a helping profession, such as student affairs, often makes it difficult for employees to set personal limits and boundaries (burke et al., 2016; guthrie et al., 2005; von bergen & bressler, 2019); with technologies that enable constant contact (e.g., mobile phones and computers), the demarcations between personal and professional realms continue to blur (kossek, 2016). in particular, student affairs employees may find it challenging to attain professional/personal balance due to the round-the-clock nature of their work, their participation in the informal life of the college, and the demands associated with being a part of a helping profession across individual student and large group levels (burke et al., 2016; guthrie et al., 2005; mullen et al., 2018). moreover, recently, there has been an increase in the presence and severity of mental health issues on college campuses (allen et al., 2024; deshpande et al., 2024; mccarthy & horwitz, 2025; mullen et al., 2018). as a result, student affairs professionals are spending an exorbitant amount of time addressing the needs of distressed students (lynch, 2022; mullen et al., 2018; reynolds, 2013). literature suggests that students facing high levels of depression, anxiety, suicidal tendencies, self-injurious behavior, posttraumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and other serious mental health issues, as well as frequent engagement with highly involved parents, place increased demands on student affairs professionals (elam et al., 2007; kadison & digeronimo, 2004; mullen et al., 2018; precht & olivier, 2023; soet & sevig, 2006). 31 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 furthermore, there exists a body of research that suggests that student affairs professionals typically adopt a mindset and work ethic that involves little delegation of tasks, mentoring for all colleagues and students, infrequent use of the word no, and the belief that the concept of accomplishment is synonymous with exhaustion and fatigue (burke et al., 2016; howard-hamilton et al., 1998; marshall et al., 2016; raimondi, 2019). in fact, higher education administration consistently has placed among the most stressful occupations, which might impact the level of job satisfaction of student affairs professionals (naspa, 2022). managers within student affairs have reported higher levels of job stress and pressure compared to professionals within other higher education divisions (marshall et al., 2016; volkwein & zhou, 2003; walker et al., 2023). women in student affairs roles a primary purpose of the student affairs profession is to connect people who are in need with people who care (tapia-fuselier, 2023). although the field of student affairs has become highly specialized with many functional areas, student affairs practitioners are first and foremost caretakers, educators, and helpers, and are expected to actively assist students with the emotional and academic demands of college life and to encourage their personal development (creamer et al., 2001; mullen et al., 2018; tapia-fuselier, 2023). assuming a helper/caring role can at times be challenging for practitioners. dealing with student’s strong emotions, hearing their painful stories, and setting appropriate boundaries can make professionals who take on this helper role feel drained and emotionally overwhelmed (reynolds, 2011). in addition, individuals can experience self-doubt, perfectionism, emotional exhaustion, and frequently take on too much responsibility for those they are helping (corey & corey, 1998; martinez hoy & nguyen, 2020; perez & bettencourt, 2023); this can ultimately lead to poor job satisfaction, burnout, or departure from the field (stoves, 2014). gender-role spillover theory suggests that gender-based expectations and behaviors in one area of life often carry over to other areas, creating workplace differences between women and men (lin & burgard, 2018). oftentimes, women are perceived as caregivers in the home environment and this gender-role expectation can carry into the workplace, although it might be irrelevant or, even inappropriate, to specific job-related tasks (lin & burgard, 2018; marshall & taniguchi, 2012; song & wang, 2023). despite the fact that the percentage of women in the workforce has increased over time (usa facts, 2024), the ideas around caregiving and optimal worker norms have not changed substantially (lin & burgard, 2018; mckinney, 2024). practices around hiring, pay, and promotion are often biased and lead to gender differences and increased work-life conflict, particularly for working mothers (addison et al., 2014; foley & williamson, 2018; heilman et al., 2023). the ideal worker norm is often characterized by constant devotion to work and can lead to an environment in which “think leader, think male” is reinforced, as working mothers often have competing responsibilities between home and work (braun et al., 2017; miller & riley, 2022). moreover, the societal expectation that women should be caring, giving, and communal can influence volunteerism (babcock et al., 2017; marshall & taniguchi, 2012), or work without remuneration, both within and outside the workplace. these competing demands are often cited as barriers to women’s career progression and representation, including within institutions of higher education, particularly in the highest leadership positions (cobb et al., 2024; kossek et al., 2020; miller & riley, 2022). in a study conducted by marshall et al. (2016) that focused specifically on women in student affairs roles, participants reported feeling that they do not experience balance between their personal and professional lives and, specifically, noted not having enough time to spend with family and friends due to the high demands of the profession. additionally, 12% of the individuals sampled left the profession to stay at home to take care of their children. this specific finding from the study is especially important to note, given the long hours that some student affairs professionals work and the expectation that student affairs professionals must sacrifice personal time and put students’ needs first (marshall et al., 2016). this workplace environment can result in burnout, work-life conflicts, and, as denoted throughout the literature, female professionals leaving the field (howard-hamilton et al., 1998; marshall et al., 2016), contributing to underrepresentation of women in senior positions (miller & riley, 2022). calls to changes in this culture have long been voiced, yet have gone largely unheeded (miller & riley, 2022). the ideal worker and emotional labor the cultural norms of student affairs often align with the ideal worker notion (nobbe & manning, 1997; marshall, 2021; wilk, 2016). the idealized worker has minimal personal distractions such as family, health issues, or nonwork interests that could potentially detract from their organizational work (acker, 1990; williams et al., 2012). it is in the context of the ideal worker that emotional labor emerges. as a construct, emotional labor pertains to the process of managing feelings and emotional expressions within the workplace to conform to organizational expectations (nguyen & stinglhamber, 2020; vial & cowgill, 2022). studies have found gender differences in emotional labor in the workplace (taylor et al., 2022). in many occupations that require care and nurturing, such as health care and social services, women outnumber men, except in positions of leadership (boniol et al., 2019; us bureau of labor statistics, 2022). these helping professions, which include student affairs divisions, often place higher emotional labor demands, intraand interpersonal, on employees than other occupations due to secondary trauma; secondary trauma results from supporting others, physically, psychologically, and emotionally, and may manifest as decreased job performance and satisfaction, disconnection and social withdrawal, emotional exhaustion, and lowered self-esteem in helpers (lynch & glass, 2018; stoves, 32 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 2014). women, in particular, report more negative impacts of emotional labor on job performance and overall well-being than men. these differences might be attributable to occupational requirements, yet likely also reflect the greater complexity of women’s emotional display rules (brescoll, 2016; vial & cowgill, 2022). for example, women who display emotions that are inconsistent with feminine stereotypes (e.g., pride and anger) are often judged more harshly than their male counterparts who display the same emotions (brescoll, 2016). this mismatch between experienced and expected emotions can lead to early burnout, detrimental effects on health outcomes, and work/family conflict (taylor et al., 2022). however, it should be noted that emotional labor also is impacted by other individual factors, including affective traits, emotional expressivity, and emotional intelligence (grandey & melloy, 2017). increased challenges associated with having a child with a disability in the home having a child with a disability in the home can compound these effects, as additional strain is placed on families (cheng & lai, 2023). often, mothers–less frequently fathers–curtail work hours outside the home, take less demanding positions, request leaves, or abandon careers altogether to care for their children (national alliance for caregiving, 2009; stabile & allin, 2012). research has suggested that as the severity of the childhood disability increases, the negative effects on maternal employment also increase, given time demands in attending to the child’s medical needs, including monitoring the child’s condition, scheduling therapies/appointments, providing in-home therapies, and scheduling medical treatments (brown & clark, 2017; cheng & lai, 2023; fairfax et al., 2019). in addition, these parents often are responsible for advocating for their children across medical, social services, therapy, and school settings (beighton & wills, 2017; cheng & lai, 2023; derigne & porterfield, 2010). a reduction in rank and/or working hours to care for a child with disabilities can impact a family’s financial picture, affect the mother’s own health and sense of well-being, and place a strain upon the marriage (javalkar, 2017; lee et al., 2015; stabile & allin, 2012). for the mother of a child with a disability who works in student affairs, these impacts may be magnified, as the care-taker role spans both environments. purpose of the study despite myriad research on emotional labor, including differences in experiences by gender, there exists a dearth of research examining how emotional labor impacts the work/family balance of women who have children with disabilities (mckinney, 2024). because mothers, more often than fathers, assume care-taker roles for offspring (national alliance for caregiving, 2009; stabile & allin, 2012), it is important to examine how having a child with a disability impacts a woman’s emotional labor, particularly in helping professions that also require care-taking. the impacts of the ideal work construct and emotional labor are likely magnified for women who have a child with a disability in the home, as they attempt to curtail or hide the related emotions and fatigue of caregiving. this qualitative study was designed to address the following research question: how do women who work in student affairs and have children with disabilities describe emotional labor within their family and work domains? theoretical framework hochschild’s emotional labor framework for this study, arlie hochschild’s (1983) emotional labor framework was applied to understand how women who work in student affairs and have children with disabilities describe emotional work. hochschild first coined the term emotional labor and defined it as managing one’s emotions to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display (hochschild, 1983). current scholarship on emotional labor exemplifies how emotional labor is performed through surface acting, deep acting, and natural expression (brotheridge & lee, 2002; cheung & lun, 2015; diefendorff et al., 2005; grandey, 2000; hülsheger & schewe, 2011). surface acting, deep acting, and natural expression emotional regulation occurs through surface acting, deep acting, or natural expression. surface acting involves modifying outward expressions—suppressing, faking, or amplifying emotions—to align with organizational expectations (cheung & lun, 2015; hülsheger & schewe, 2011; yanchus et al., 2010). for instance, a student affairs employee may feign a smile when interacting with students, parents, and faculty despite personal feelings (nguyen & stinglhamber, 2020). deep acting, by contrast, entails adjusting one's thoughts to elicit genuine emotions (brotheridge & lee, 2002; grandey, 2000; nguyen & stinglhamber, 2020). instead of merely displaying happiness, an employee practicing deep acting might recall a positive memory to produce an authentic smile (yanchus et al., 2010). these strategies are not mutually exclusive, as individuals often employ both to meet organizational emotional display rules (nguyen & stinglhamber, 2020). lastly, natural expression occurs when outward emotions genuinely reflect internal feelings (diefendorff et al., 2005), signifying authenticity. emotional work in educational and family domains emotional work refers to efforts aimed at improving others' well-being through empathy and support (england & farkas, 1986). in educational settings, this includes listening to students' concerns, offering guidance, and demonstrating warmth (isenbarger & zembylas, 2006). emotional work fosters caring relationships but is often invisible or undervalued (isenbarger & zembylas, 2006). although emotional labor research focuses on workplaces, it extends to family life (zedeck, 1992). just as professionals perform emotional labor, family members engage in tasks with emotional display expectations (yanchus et al., 2010). responsibilities such as childcare, household chores, and emotional support require constant regulation of emotions (beehr et al., 1995). while family life can be rewarding, it can also be psychologically and physically draining, yet parents are 33 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 expected to exhibit care and support despite exhaustion (yanchus et al., 2010). hochschild’s (1983) framework can help to understand emotional expression's significance in both work and family domains (fisher & ashkanasy, 2000; salovey et al., 2000), highlighting the pervasive nature of emotional labor across professional and personal spheres. methods the qualitative methodology used in this study was narrative portraiture which depicts social phenomena through individual’s stories of everyday life experiences (riessman, 2008). it focuses on consciousness and the structure of those conscious experiences from a first-person point of view, allowing for a unique and in-depth experience into the subject’s thoughts and emotions (lawrence-lightfoot & davis, 1997). through this lens, researchers are able to bridge the gap between individuals and society (rodríguez-dorans & jacobs, 2020). portraitures ultimately seek to blend art and science, bridging empiricism and aestheticism (lawrence-lightfoot & davis, 1997). the five key components of portraiture are context, voice, relationship, emergent themes, and aesthetic whole (lawrence-lightfoot & davis, 1997). this methodological approach was appropriate for this study because it minimized the common qualitative practice of privileging the researcher’s interpretation and the potential for over-analysis of participants’ narratives (rodríguez-dorans & jacobs, 2020). narrative portraiture reflects the position of the researcher; however, it aims to produce a product in which the participants are visible and undeniable (rodríguez-dorans & jacobs, 2020). another benefit to using this methodology was that it draws from a wide variety of phenomenological and narrative traditions and captures rich data that is often missed through other forms of data analysis. narrative portraiture minimizes the conventional practice of privileging the researcher’s interpretation and over analysis of participant’s narratives (rodríguez-dorans & jacobs, 2020). while it still considers the standpoint of the researcher, this process works to ensure transparency in the process and present data in a clear and visible way (rodríguez-dorans & jacobs, 2020). sampling and participants the purposeful sampling strategy that was utilized was criterion sampling (patton, 2015). participants met three criteria: (a) be a full-time employee in student affairs, (b) identify as a mother, and (c) be the mother of at least one school aged child (6-17 years) who is diagnosed with at least one disability. disability was defined utilizing a list provided by idea partnership (2018) and the child’s disability had to be diagnosed through either a doctor or in the child’s educational setting. participants came from 20 different higher education institutions across the united states, and worked in various functional areas within student affairs, in roles that ranged from entry level to mid-management. the majority of the participants worked in student affairs for 10 or more years and reported having one or two children with disabilities, whose ages ranged from 7to 17-years of age. data collection data collection began with a demographic survey designed to identify participants that met the specific criteria noted above. the 21 individuals who met the sampling criteria participated in in-depth semi-structured interviews (rossman & rallis, 2017). these interviews served as the primary method of data collection, lasted between 60-90 minutes, and were recorded via zoom. the questions we asked our participants focused on how they define emotional labor and what it looks like within their work and family domains. observation was also used as a method of data collection for this study, as it serves as a fundamental component of all qualitative inquiry, especially portraiture (lawrence-lightfoot & davis, 1997; rossman & rallis, 2017). capturing the context is vital to this methodology as context is the best resource for interpreting the verbal communications and actions of individuals (lawrence-lightfoot & davis, 1997). throughout the interviews, we observed the participant’s office and/or home as well as the participant’s body language. since the data was collected during the covid-19 pandemic, we were also able to observe emotional work as it related to the work domain intersecting with the family domain. data analysis in order to analyze the collected data we adopted an analytic tool developed by rodríguez-dorans and jacobs (2020) to aid us in developing narrative portraits. this can be found in table 1 below. we began by detailing a descriptive account of what happened for each woman, where it happened, and with whom. we found that it was helpful to write out a holistic description before interpreting and explaining the data. this descriptive insight subsequently informed a deeper exploration of the data, which 34 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 ultimately allowed us to explore questions of why (yin, 2014). it is through this strategy that we were able to provide a detailed description of emotional labor in both the work and family domains (the how) for mothers of children with disabilities who work in student affairs as well as the underlying reasons and influences (the why). trustworthiness in order to ensure trustworthiness in this study, we examined the extent to which the study was credible, transferable, dependable, and confirmable (lincoln & guba, 1985). credibility was addressed through member checks, peer debriefing, and triangulation. transferability was established by utilizing thick and rich descriptions with sufficient detail so that the reader is able to obtain a clear picture of the procedures and findings of the research. dependability was achieved through an inquiry audit as well as the establishment of an interview and documentation protocol. lastly, audit trails, triangulation, and reflexivity were used to authenticate the confirmability of the study. within the narrative approach, triangulation is not understood as a means to test for one single event or outcome, but rather the utilization of different data sources resembles the process of piecing together a puzzle (maxwell, 2012; rodríguez-dorans & jacobs, 2020). findings to ensure confidentiality, each participant was provided a pseudonym which was used to reference quotations reported in this section. pseudonyms were also generated for the participant’s child(ren) when needed. from the data, two major themes, each with subthemes emerged. the first major theme is “assuming the helper identity” with a subtheme focused on the emotional impact of the helper identity. the second major theme is “masking one’s feelings” which has three subthemes: a) masking in the work domain, b) masking in the family domain, and c) the ability to be authentic. each of these findings are described below. the helper identity the majority of participants in this study view being a helper in their personal and professional roles as an identity (the same way they would utilize other unique sets of characteristics such as race, gender etc.) to describe their sense of self. eight participants reported that being a helper comes naturally and it just is “who they are”. for example, fran stated, “i've always been a helper, i've always been one to do things for other people. so, it kind of works for me.” elizabeth who is a director of housing stated, “i love what we do. it feels, you know, it feels natural. it feels like the right thing to do.” julia also discussed how being a helper comes naturally noting, “i think that i chose this profession because i am a helper by nature. i'm an empath, and i mean i got my master's degree in counseling. and so, you know, i feel like my natural inclination is to be a helper. and to kind of be in tune to what's going on with people.” participants frequently described their work in student affairs as part of their identity and expressed how their professional work was much more than a job and that they could not see themselves in another professional role. for example, lauren who works as a sophomore success coach and early alert coordinator noted, “i can't imagine anything else. my kids have asked me before, if you're not doing this, what would you be doing? and i'm a social worker. i can't imagine myself not in a helping profession.” although many women agreed that the student affairs profession is a helping profession that attracts those who are helpers by nature, some denoted how being a helper can be “all consuming” if one is not careful. vicky noted, “it's a helping profession, it attracts helpers. and i think in some ways, that's both validating, to sort of be around the same people who are coming at work with the same framework or or [sic] mission, if you will, and also can become, if we're not careful, all consuming.” ashley agreed, stating that she believes that tasks at work are frequently added to her plate because “she’ll just do it because she’s a helper” and “gets things done”. it's a slippery slope, because then it becomes more than sort of what i'm being compensated to do. and it's funny to me, and i don't hear this as much anymore, as earlier in my career. but you know, there's so much like, expectation, even amongst peers to give, give, give, because that's who we are as people. and then without a recognition or as much energy put into, i should be paid for that as we paid for my give give [sic] giving, like i gotta pay my bills. (ashley) for mary, she enjoys being a helper, although she feels as though the “definition of being a helper keeps changing, and it's getting harder and harder.” she believes that as each year passes it becomes more challenging to feel like she is “helping enough” particularly because she senses that student problems and concerns have shifted and changed drastically. mary thinks that this leads to burnout and a feeling of being a failure. sharon had similar thoughts as she shared that the “challenge is giving of yourself in a way that feeds your soul and doesn’t empty you and leave you hollow.” for 18 women in this study, the helper identity also carried over into their motherhood role as many of them assumed the primary caretaking responsibilities for their children with disabilities. helping in the family domain typically presented in the form of doing tasks for their children and family. women described how they help by cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, helping children with their homework, or taking their children to after-school activities. in addition, these mothers were required to spend additional time beyond these obligations to help and care for their children with disabilities. they needed to regularly monitor their child’s condition(s), schedule and/or provide therapies, as well as attend their child’s multiple doctor appointments or treatments. for example, marie described that one of the ways she is a “helper” is by reminding her daughter to take her medicine. in addition, she must “do a lot of coaching on executive functioning” with her daughter, something that she does not have to do with her younger child. 35 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 as for ellie, she spends a great deal of time helping to create structure for her son who has tourette syndrome, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (adhd), and obsessive compulsive disorder (ocd). now that her son is 14, he strives to be more independent, and believes that he can handle all that he faces with no structure at all, but ellie understands that he will not be successful without these supports in place. she spends an inordinate amount of time helping him to reflect on the importance of structure and how to maintain it within his daily schedule. one of the most significant ways in which julianna helps her daughter is by assisting her with managing her anxiety. she spends much of her time helping her daughter remember her coping mechanisms, which are imperative to her daughter’s success. lastly, judy’s son is in second grade and not fully potty trained. as a result, she must help her son with his frequent accidents. she also noted that it takes a considerable amount of effort and time to ensure that her son is not exposed to anything that will make him sick both at home and at school. emotional impact of the helper identity in this study, 20 women noted that there were rewards and/or consequences that resulted from assuming the helper identity. both are discussed below. rewards and benefits. rewards and benefits are found within both their work and family domains. for example, students, staff, colleagues, spouses, children, family, friends, and community members all benefit in some way from the helping nature of these women. this study also suggests that these women personally benefit as well. lora described how when her children first attended elementary school, no child with special needs was permitted in the school’s before-care, aftercare, or summer programs. by the time her children left elementary school, there were numerous children with special needs in these programs. she successfully advocated for the inclusion of all students in these three programs, which resulted in lora feeling a sense of pride. as an assistant dean of students, julianna also felt “a lot of pride and accomplishment” whether it was through helping students, their family members, or other constituents on campus. she stated, “it feels good to be able to, you know, help people navigate something that they didn't know how to do.” consequences. it was not uncommon for participants to also mention words like “emotional exhaustion” and “draining” when describing their experiences as a helper. participants discussed frequently feeling emotionally taxed and drained within both their professional and motherhood roles. jean stated: i also think that, you know, as a person who is a natural helper, you find yourself doing that in your personal life too. and, you know, there are times where you can feel completely drained of [it] all. like, as a mom, you say sometimes, i've been touched out. i cared for everybody all day long. nobody touched me, [because] i have to care for myself now. and i feel like it can be the same way with work. today i cared for a lot of people, and then after work, i cared for my little people, cared for my friends, and i cared for my spouse, and sometimes, that can feel like a lot. elizabeth shared a similar sentiment stating, “i think there's an emotional exhaustion with having to be the advocator, the educator, the person who has to stay on top of it, all right?” for sharon, she struggles trying to give all she can at work and still ensure she has enough to “give” at home at the end of the day. sharon shared: the challenge, though, is giving of yourself in a way that feeds your soul and doesn't empty you and leave you hollow. and that has taken a couple of decades of figuring out how to do [that], so that when i am finished with my workday, i have a little something left to offer my family. masking one’s feelings women in this study described times in which they altered their feelings and expressions within their work and home environments. women described feeling one emotion but had compelling reasons to express a different emotion, or to “mask” their true emotions. there are three findings related to masking that are discussed below: toxic positivity in the work domain leading to masking, masking in the family domain, and the minimization of masking when one can be their authentic self. masking in the work domain women discussed the need to alter or change their emotions more at work than at home, and for some women, masking at work was imperative. masking at work was required when participants did not want their colleagues to adjust their expectations of what they believed the participant could accomplish. masking also occurred when participants felt the need to cover up an insecurity or needed to create boundaries between work and family. it also occurred because participants were not permitted to be authentic within their place of employment due to toxic positivity in the work culture. for example, brittany was unable to share her authentic emotions at work. brittany described: when ayden was diagnosed, i cried every morning on the way to work. every morning i cried. a song would come on, a thought would be in my head, i would cry. [i would] pull into the parking lot. i never put makeup on until i got to the parking lot, because i had to fix myself. i would fix myself to go into work, and i put that mask on. i'd be positive, i'd be a go getter, and get shit done…so as soon as i put the makeup on, i stopped crying. brittany articulated that toxic positivity was part of their campus culture. it is expected that staff, particularly female staff, are positive, nurturing, and never provide negative feedback or complain. she stated that if she was not positive and did not fall 36 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 in line with the cultural expectations “you can really suffer professionally here.” as a result, she masks frequently, always trying her hardest to smile and be positive. she said, “i fake it to make it.” she continued and described a time when she was authentic with her emotions and wished she would have masked them instead. i'm the only woman on the leadership team right now and i feel like a token. when i get angry, i cry…i'm not crying because i'm sad, i'm crying because i'm angry. and i did that in front of my supervisor. i can never go back in time and take that away, and i wish i wouldn't have done that. brittany was not the only participant who described needing to “fake it”. juliana said that stating “i’m fine” is part of the mindset in the area she lives. “you say, i'm fine, even when you're incredibly not fine.” she said that regardless of what is going on in her life, she has to “stuff it deep” and put on her “fine mask.” not being allowed to be authentic in the workplace was “super tiring,” “overwhelming,” and made women feel “angry that they were not allowed to have feelings.” similarly, lauren also noted that while she was employed at her prior institution, she was not permitted to demonstrate she was having an “off day”. she stated: i feel like i've literally had to wear a mask…i feel like prior to this working environment, i did have to pretend that everything was fine. i'm good, it's good, everything's fine, i got this. that i wasn't allowed to show that i was having an off day. that expectation to perform trumped my personal feelings, and even my mental health. i don't think mental health was really valued at other institutions, the way it seems to be valued here. kenzie felt similarly stating: and i just remember crying in my office, like i just got the diagnosis for frank. and i was really upset…when i worked in the division of student affairs, it, [showing your emotions], was showing weakness. [some] perceived it as weakness and emotion was not welcomed. you just had to have your stuff together all the time… for elizabeth, she learned early to “have a game face” and how to “morph that game face when people don't’ care what’s going on”. she went on and described how she masks most of the time when she is “interfacing with folks who either are so far removed from child rearing or have never been in that experience themselves”. sharon described a time when one of her child’s doctors relocated, and the stress associated with trying to find a new nephrologist. she described how she needed to mask at work during this time period. i can't walk into every meeting and be like, you know, well, our pediatric nephrologist decided to take a job in chicago, so we're looking for a new one. which is like the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, you know, but that can't be the only thing i talk about, right? you know, you need to be a professional person in this professional place. masking in the family domain masking at home was deemed necessary when the participants needed to prioritize their children over their authentic emotions; they attempted not to exacerbate the child’s disability, or utilized masking as a mechanism to detach from work and draw a boundary between their two roles. lora described that when she has a difficult day at work, she tries to ensure her children are not aware of her feelings and she works to “overcome whatever it is.” she stated that by the time she gets home from work and picks up her children, they want her to focus on their lives, so that is what she prioritizes over her authentic emotions. she masks the feelings from her difficult day to tend to their needs, listen to their concerns, and respond accordingly. jean agreed with lora stating that she masks “100% at home” for her kids’ sake. she noted “it’s not always great for them to see a mom who's fallen apart”. similarly, elizabeth acknowledges that she masks at home as well. she emotionally masks her stress and anxiety because her daughter lives with enough worry, particularly as it relates to her disabilities. she believes that if she did not mask in front of her daughter, she could inadvertently make things more difficult for her daughter. participants noted that there was an emotional impact that occurred as a result of masking in the family domain. for example, juliana described how it can be overwhelming to have something at work that is frustrating her and have to “pull the i’m fine mask on at home.” she stated, “it's a heavy load for people to stuff feelings in and not be authentic about where they're truly at.” she acknowledged that she may not “need” to mask at home as much as she does, but she chooses to mask there so that there are no negative impacts on her children or on her plans for the evening. nettie discussed a time in which there was a student death on campus. the student who passed away was someone who worked for her for a period of time and as a result she knew the student personally. the experience was incredibly taxing on her. she explained, “you know, in the sense of like, could you have done something more? you know, how can you help.” she described how working in student conduct, she tries really hard to detach from her work, but that sometimes to do so is incredibly difficult when she knows the student personally. she concluded by talking about how she would put on a mask, pretending to be “fine”, when she went home. “and so, when you have to go home and be like, oh, everything's fine, you know?” 37 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 ability to be authentic when women were able to be their authentic self, masking was not required. women seemed to be more authentic at work when vulnerability was encouraged and cultivated throughout the institutional culture. this was particularly true when their direct supervisors encouraged employees to be authentic in the workplace. lauren described moments in which she was supported and not judged when she cried in front of her supervisor. she explained how there is a “genuine invitation to come to the table, come as you are” and that there is nothing that her supervisor has not seen or heard from her or one of her colleagues. lauren shared: and that's really special, because he doesn't expect me to take work home with me. but he expects me to bring my whole self to the job. and it's unique and beautiful…he invites us to be who we are. he wants us to be authentic, and i feel like that has created a culture where we can be real with each other, and we can allow our students to be real with us. it's this authenticity in the workplace i've never experienced elsewhere. juliana described how her current leadership encourages and applauds employee’s ability to be authentic and vulnerable with their colleagues, being transparent with “where you’re at and what you’re feeling.” juliana acknowledged that under different leadership she was not permitted to be her authentic self and “what a difference” being authentic makes for her and her experience. her current leadership is “very grace based” and “applauds one’s ability to be vulnerable with their colleagues.” fran discussed how she is very close with one of her colleagues and she frequently goes to this person to vent or talk. she went on to discuss how being vulnerable at work is helpful for her and noted that she can see how being vulnerable could be a challenge for individuals who are trying to be promoted. you know, having somebody there that does get it really helps. and they kind of know the chaos that i have going on at home, and they're very supportive. but i feel like it's a little bit different for me, because i'm not currently trying to move up or trying to do it, you know, i mean, but i can see where it becomes extremely important. if you're trying to, you know, work your way up, you don't want to seem like a liability, or you don't want to seem like you don't have it together. vicky finds being authentic about being a mother of a child with disabilities helpful, particularly as she navigates spaces with her students and coworkers. she noted, “it humanizes me. but it also gives them a context in which, you know, if i have an opinion on something, you know, this is where it's coming from.” being authentic also occurred in the family domain for women in this study. brianna stated that she can be her authentic self at home and does not mask while at home. “i'm pretty authentic at home. like, they get what they get…i think my kiddos, my husband would agree with that.” when the pandemic hit and she was transitioning to work from home, she struggled significantly with anxiety. this was a difficult time for her but throughout, she was transparent with her family about what she was feeling and what she was experiencing. jean feels as though being authentic at home is a necessity for her children. she noted: it's good for my kids to see authenticity. sometimes i feel sad. sometimes i feel anxious. sometimes i feel angry. i want my kids to recognize and understand that those emotions are real and human, and they can have them too. limitation and delimitation limitations were found in the following areas: the participant’s marital status, race, the child’s disability, and the student affairs functional area within which the women worked. in this study, only three of the 21 participants identified as non-white. two women identified as separated, two as divorced, and one widowed, while all of the others noted they were married or in a domestic partnership. in addition, the type of disability the child has, or the severity of the disability was not accounted for in this study. women also had different titles, differing levels of work responsibility, and came from different functional areas within student affairs. while the findings of this study may not be generalizable to all mothers of children with disabilities who work in student affairs, it can still be beneficial to researchers as they identify new areas of inquiry regarding this underrepresented population and can also be valuable to student affairs leaders as they work to better support and retain these women. discussion and implications for practice the findings of our study help to answer the question: how do women who work in student affairs and have children with disabilities describe emotional labor within their family and work domains? this question is answered through the following discussion on how the “helper identity” can lead to increased emotional labor, and how organizations can reduce emotional labor through developing employer-employee relationships and encouraging authenticity in the workplace. the mothers in this study describe emotional labor within their dual domains as a "helper identity," considering it as integral as other salient identities such as race, gender, or religion. this identity has both internal and external aspects. not only is it how the participant sees themselves, but it is also how they are seen by those in both their work and family domains. as we consider the intersectionality of the helper identity in both domains, we find that these women may be more vulnerable to increased amounts of emotional labor compared to other employees, which in turn, can result in an increased chance that they do not advance in the profession or leave the field altogether. current literature reveals that the ideal worker construct is pervasive in higher education and student affairs work requires intense emotional labor (sallee, 2021). 38 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 furthermore, care for children with disabilities is still primarily a mother's responsibility, resulting in increased stress and health problems for these mothers (murphy et al., 2007; siman-tov & kaniel, 2011). it is suggested that supervisors support mothers of children with disabilities in declining service beyond contractual obligations during times of intense emotional labor across home and work settings. in addition, we found that toxic positivity within an organizational culture often creates the need for mothers of children with disabilities who work in student affairs to alter their authentic emotions. our findings expand current literature by calling attention to the interconnectedness of emotional labor and toxic positivity in higher education work environments. a study by roemer and harris (2018) suggested that toxic positivity can impede workplace performance and contribute to lowered levels of employee well-being. a work environment that fails to acknowledge the well-being of employees often results in reduced job satisfaction, which, in turn, can impact commitment and performance negatively (roemer & harris, 2018). when we consider the participants in our study, masking, or engaging in surface and deep acting, was reported in response to the expectation of positivity within their organizations. this need to hide one’s authentic self can diminish the sense of well-being and potentially inhibit productivity and advancement in the workplace. conversely, roemer and harris (2018) suggested that organizations that promote healthy levels of well-being through job and personal resources foster self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience among employees (roemer & harris, 2018). consistent with prior research (reis et al., 2017), our findings underscore the need for workplace authenticity, achievable through individualized understanding of employees. we propose that colleges prioritize authenticity and relationship-building in employee recruitment and retention, particularly for mothers of children with disabilities. supervisors play a critical role in fostering authenticity by practicing active and empathetic listening (kelly et al., 2023). active listening requires attentiveness to verbal and nonverbal cues while suspending personal biases for accurate interpretation. empathetic listening, which involves paraphrasing and nonverbal affirmations, enhances understanding and trust. managerial training in these skills can cultivate a workplace culture that supports authenticity (kelly et al., 2023). recommendations for future research mothers of children with disabilities who work in student affairs remain an under-researched population, and we urge scholars to address this gap. while existing literature explores how various identity groups—including lgbtq professionals (kortegast, 2021), professionals of color (boss & bravo, 2021), class dynamics (ardoin, 2021), women (marshall et al., 2016), and fathers (sallee et al., 2021)—navigate student affairs, mothers of children with disabilities are largely overlooked. this study skims the surface of understanding the impact of emotional labor on these women. future studies should examine how women navigate the emotional labor they experience in both domains, emotional labor based on severity of child’s disability, as well as the specific functional area of student affairs. we also recognize that women in this study were confined to the dualistic roles of mother and professional. we recommend future studies take into consideration other potentially challenging roles, such as the role of advocate, or any activities outside of work for which the participant assumes responsibility. bringing awareness to the advocate role and additional nonwork roles and responsibilities may provide a more holistic understanding of emotional labor on this population. lastly, although this study focused solely on mothers, we do not intend to suggest that other groups, such as fathers or faculty with children with disabilities, are unaffected by ideal worker norms or emotional labor. studies should examine the experiences of these populations and any shared or individual support that may be needed for these employees to successfully manage emotional labor. conclusion we call higher educational leaders to assume responsibility for engaging in practical and sustainable changes to organizational culture, policies, and practice in an effort to reduce emotional labor for mothers of children with disabilities who work in student affairs. while it is challenging enough for a woman to advance in the gendered organization of higher education, when we add the layer of motherhood and the additional layer of being a mother of a child with disabilities, it becomes clearer than ever that appropriate supports of this population are needed if we intend to see these women retained or advance into senior administrative positions. support might consist of trainings on effective listening, relationship development, development of knowledge pertaining to parenting children with disabilities and the associated grief, instituting physical and virtual spaces for individuals to be authentic, and assisting women in reducing responsibilities outside of contractual obligations when necessary. empathy and authenticity in 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(1992). introduction: exploring the domain of work and family concerns. in s. zedeck (ed.), work, families and organizations (pp. 1–32). jossey-bass. 43 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44   home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international gender equity models in science teaching and learning mirrored structures, and designs for change doris ash, ph.d. ash, summer, 2001 a video is presented by an educational researcher from uc berkeley, and a large group of predominantly female teachers watches a series of vignettes featuring a variety of configurations of girls and boys doing small group math problem solving. they watch as one quiet young asian girl in a mixed-gender group attempts to voice her opinion. she is continually swamped by opinions of louder and larger boys. they watch as, later, other girls voice their uncertainties by saying things like: ã¬i feel stupidã®. throughout the showing of the vignettes there are frequent sighs by the teachers indicating their empathetic feelings. when the researcher states that one of her findings is that 'all female' groups spend more time collaborating and that females in general tend to express their uncertainty more, the teachers give a knowing laugh, as though they already know this and that, indeed, they have lived this particular experience. introduction over the past ten years research on gender equity in mathematics and science (linn 1992, klein, & ortman, 1994, kahle & meece, 1994) indicates that although the gender gap is closing there is still much work to be done at many different levels. according to the september 2000 congressional commission on the advancement of women and minorities in science, engineering and technology development's land of plenty report: diversity as americaãs competitive edge in science, engineering and technology: despite the growing proportion of women in the workforce, the relative proportion of http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html women in such fields as engineering, computer science, and physics lags far behind that of men. currently only 19% of the set workforce is female despite significant improvement among girls in mathematics and science achievement and course taking over the last 20 years. there are now only small differences between girlsã and boysã science and mathematics scores on the national assessment of educational progress (naep) tests, and girls are now taking the upper level mathematics and science courses required to enter set college majors at the same rate as boys. although the ability and basic academic background needed to continue in set careers exist for many girls, their interest in these careers is not maintained. among sat-takers, over three-fourths of students wishing to major in engineering and computer science are boys. the only science field attracting more girls than boys is the biological sciences. by eighth grade, twice as many boys as girls (independent of race/ethnicity) show an interest in set careers. (p. 26) in this paper i develop a 'mirrored structures' model that applies to three nsf-funded gender and science projects aimed at improving girls understanding, attitudes, and abilities in science, mathematics, and technology. all are concerned with the underrepresentation of women in science, math, and technology. all three facilitate girls' success at critical educational junctures particularly the middle/ junior high transition where girls are lost to science. the three projects have developed rich and varied programs aimed at increasing understanding, confidence, and ability in the science, math, and technology for girls, and for their teache rs, their parents, and administrators. the projects are different but share some common underlying elements and in many ways are typical of the multi-tiered gender equity programs across the country. together the three programs offer powerful evidence for understanding systemic change within diverse geographies. all three programs share similar philosophiesã³there are many different ways to achieve equity goals but it is essential that participants at all levels capitalize on existing strengths, their particular "ways of knowing". i argue that the 'mirrored structures' model cuts across all levels of participation within all three projects. the projects, are: first (female involvement in real science and technology) in oakland, california; the voices project: rural and urban images: voices of girls in science mathematics and technology in rural appalachia, west virginia; and girls inc. of lynn, massachusetts's operation smart (science math and relevant technology). while the model offered in this paper was based originally on the first project, it is applied to the voices and operation smart programs. together they provide exemplars for examining systemic change because the programs emphasize not only the changes within the target audience, elementary and middle school girls, but also an expanded group of teachers, parents, and administrators within school districts that serve diverse student populations. by systemic change, i mean change at multiple levels of participation which can interact in both positive and negative ways. change can be better understood by analysis of these relationships and by maximizing the positive interactions as leverage points. background on the three programs first the model was originally developed within the first project, a cost-effective design experiment for museum-led, school-based, inter-community agency collaboration1. it provided a forum and a local urban laboratory in the form of a design experiment (brown, 1992) that simultaneously introduced a series of innovations and studies their effects. the project provided a model for systemic change, working with elementary and middle school girls, their teachers, and administrators within the oakland unified school district (ousd) a large urban district that serves a diverse student population. the project included these major design features: 1) a program specifically aimed at reaching girls at the juncture between elementary and middle schools; 2) a discipline that has long attracted the largest proportion of women scientistsã³biologyã³using an environmental studies emphasis; 3) a project-based/inquiry format for all grade levels; 4) a community building component that emphasizes discourse and communication skills; and 5) multiple entry points for advancement of understanding for teachers, administrators, business and research mentors. programmatic structural elements include classroom activities2 for both boys and girls, after-school science clubs for girls, and specific leadership skills training for girls. first also collaborated with local industry and business in order to link female scientist/mentors with science club and leadership girls. voices the voices project3 focuses on the middle school juncture as a critical time to intervene so that girls do not become sorted out of mathematical and science tracks. the program focuses on the rural/urban split, particularly issues faced by rural girls living in poverty. the voices progra was designed to look at "the ways rural and urban places can support and hinder girls' sm t education without taking the networks and experiences of advantaged girls as the norm" (carter, keys, & kusimo, 1999, p. 4). voices tested a series of interventions to help girls do well and feel confident in science, mathematics, and technology. designed to promote middle school girls' interest and achievement in science, mathematics, and technology, they had two project's two sitesã³ one rural and one urban. programs included activities in science, math, and technology, mentoring, academic assistance, and an advocate network for families. they did not assume that girls raised in appalachian cultures, whether rural or urban, are deficient either developmentally or with respect to smt learning. instead, they look to what these girls, their families, and communities can teach about girls' development and possibilities. girls inc. the girls incorporated of lynn4 , massachusetts's operation smart program encouraged girls to persist in math and science and addressed issues of power, equity with students, parents, and their teachers. operation smart's programming provided girls with hands-on experiences and introduced them to careers in science, math, and technology. it also provided training and support, curriculum guides and materials for teachers, and advanced professional development both in and out of the classroom. girls. inc. mission is to build girls' capacity for responsible and confident adulthood, economic independence, and personal fulfillment. major program goals include: working with girls on hands-on science with activities that are open-ended and risk free; allowing girls and their teachers to understand and change their stereotypes about science; helping girls, parents, and teachers understand that they can enjoy science; and that science is everywhere, in the lab, in the kitchen, and outdoors; and it is accessible to all, equally. these elements are combined in a variety of programs for a wide audience including schools, clubs, and other social organizations. one unique feature of smart programming is its inter-mixing of core program elements that, while focussing on inquiry in science, examine other aspects of gender identification, for example, using activities such as role playing and stereotype reflections. these subtle aspects of professionalism, when brought to the surface, help make conscious personal views about science. these activities helped sensitize teachers and promote an attitude shift that decreased fear of science for female teachers and helped male teachers to understand gender differences. the proposed model all three projects share common features, for example: they make efficient use of already available and tested materials, a variety of geographic locations, participant structures and personnel; they encourage all participants to test, to adapt, and to share ideas that fit within their philosophical and practical guidelines; they work with many different levels of expertise simultaneously; and they combine real life with science seamlessly. when examined from the perspective of levels of participation and the way in which participants were guided to increase their professionalism some underlying systemic patterns emerged. the model outlined in figure 1 captures these levels of participation and layers of professionalism. the model, designed first for the first project, identifies three levels of participationã³students, teachers/parent, and researchers and three layers of expertiseã³foundational, scaffolded, and leadership. the three l yers of expertise reflect increasing ability to take on more sophisticated content and respo nsability. they include: foundationalã³provides the basic elements for examining science as part of the individual's life, as well as one's relationship to doing science, and thinking about it. this can include hands-on science activities, direct modeling of teaching techniques, and other direct communication techniques. examples include modeling hands-on activities for students and teachers, talks by women scientists and architects, and trips to laboratories, colleges, or nature sites. scaffoldedã³refers to the increasing abilities of learners as they are guided to improve their mastery with experience. the scaffolding process begins with the 'learning leader' at first doing most of the cognitive work. this phase is followed by one in which the teacher and learner share responsibility. "finally, the learner is able to perform independently." (campione, brown, ferrara, & bryant, 1984, p. 8). the 'scaffolding' is gradual, as the teacher maintains the interaction within the learner's zone of understanding. examples across the programs include ongoing work with women mentors, including professionals such as architects, scientists, or the teachers themselves. as the mentor/student relationship continued over time, the students become more confident and independent in pursuing long-term goals, such as independent investigations, preparing for standardized tests, or simply increasing competence in activities not considered typical for girls. leadership ã³characterized by increasing ability of individuals at all levels advance toward novel situations with success and, having learned the principles of project, to mentor others and to reach wider audiences. examples include classroom teachers becoming lead teachers in other schools and other districts, girls preparing to take pre-algebra in a hostile environment, and girls science club expanding to include school wide activities such as recycling. theoretical underpinnings vygotsky (1978) and the notion of the zone of proximal development (zpd), as well as the work of newman, griffin, and cole (1989) provides the theory that informs this work. "a zone of proximal development is the region of activity that learners can navigate with aid from a supporting context, including but not limited to people. it defines the distance between current levels of comprehension and levels that can be accomplished in collaboration with people or powerful artifacts. the zone of proximal development embodies a concept of readiness to learn that emphasizes upper levels of competence" (vygotsky, 1978; brown et al., 1993). i argue that a reciprocal interaction occurs between the ã«teacher and learnerã as they work together in the zpd so that so each is changed at all three levels of interaction. in short, both the ã«teacherã and the ã«learnerã inform each other in substantive ways, so that the role teacher and the role learner become interchangeable. working within the zpd, each acts as both teacher and learner in a mutual dance of appropriation of ideas and actions (brown, ash, nakagawa, gordon, rutherford, & campione, 1993). levels: girls, teachers, and researchers level 1: the girls "math, math, math is cool. it makes us want to stay in school" chant the voices of a group of bright-eyed, smiling sixth graders. --voices girls it is well documented that, at about the junior high level (orenstein, 1994), girls lose confidence in their abilities, even if they have heretofore displayed competence. research on classroom experiences for girls has been extensiveã³in short summary, girls say less, do less, get less attention and are encouraged less frequentl y to speak up, to analyze or to think deeplyã³when they get older they are less confident about their work, they spend more time checking it for accuracy, and they are more modest in speaking about their expertise (linn, 1992; sadker & sadker, 1994). thus, the target audience is elementary/middle high girls who typically become lost to science and math before high school. the intent is to: encourage and model an early and successful interest in science, its tools and ways of thinking; to keep this interest alive and lively within the transition from elementary to middle school; and to help mentor girls in the transition to high school. first worked with girls grade 3 through 8 across elementary and middle schools within the same large urban district. although originally intended for grade 5 and up, teachers in younger graders also insisted on being part of the program, suggesting that starting at younger grades might give a longer time to develop confidence and abilities. the voices project began with sixth grade girls of all interests and levels who came from two diverse environments, urban and rural. the comparison study did not take the urban experience as the 'standard', instead sought to identify the essential elements for success for rural girls. the girls were faced with distinct disadvantages that arose from a variety of sources including teachers, school policy (especially in relation to prepation for algebra), and general social conditions that afford success. smart worked with girls across a variety of ages in elementary through middle school and with a variety of formats. the emphasis was on working with students and their teachers simultaneously so that professionals can learn new teaching pedagogies by seeing them modeled by others, practice them and then reflect on that practice. the reflective environment with ongoing coaching fostered a collaborative community of teachers, students and parents. level 2: their teachers and parents "i feel like i should have been an engineer" "i wasn't encouraged to explore a variety of career areas, at home boys cut the grass, girls washed the dishes" "i was always interested in math and science and i wanted to be a scientist...i was encouraged to take liberal arts...i was told that's what females do..." -first teachers historically women have been perceived to play a minor role in the history of science. first's elementary school teachers, more than 90% women, had interest in science but typically have little formal training. many had been left out of the science and math track in their own educations and wished to: become part of the process of doing science; to learn along side the girls; and to foster and share their sense of excitement in making discoveries. in doing so these teachers illustrate (self-selected) professional development in science. significantly, they also act as role models in the process of acquiring the skills and concepts and especially the confidence that comes with doing science successfully. girls in the us are behind boys on a variety of measures in science and this is partially related to the differential teacher-student discourse in the classroom. teachers have been described as more likely to encourage boys than girls to ask questions, make integrative comments, and to explain (crowley, callanan, tenenbaum, & allen, in press). because research indicates that even teachers sensitized to gender issues typically favor white boys in the classroom (sadker & sadker, 1994) gender equity concerning discourse is a parallel professional development goal. teachers often lack time and practice for reflection on their own practice, a necessar component for their pivotal role in counteracting the effects of gender bias with their studen ts. classroom practice is slow to change even in cases where this is an explicit goalã³even teachers who wish to make changes sometimes need help. because gender and its relationship to science and math careers is not a major part of elementary school teacher training, first's and smart's professional development includedã³in-depth examination of gender equity issues including summaries of current research studies, model classroom and club materials, activities and curricula, as well as work with science content and pedagogy. the same can be said for the voices project. all three programs simultaneously work with attitudes and long held feelings about what science is (only for white males, who have test tubes and are absent-minded) and who can be allowed to do it. this sensitivity training comes side by side with the day to day logistics of doing hands-on science. as one smart director says: "the first hurdle you need to achieve is attitude shifts about who can do science, then participants can be concerned about the logistics of doing the actual activities" (j. martin, personal communication, april, 2001). the voices program had a larger challenge in trying to engineer attitude shifts at school-wide and district levels, by working to change existing views of what girls can do, for example, take complex math. they needed to pave the way for advanced courses to be offered, as well as to encourage the girls to want to take them. the teachers were pivotal in this change, as they themselves were changed by the program. the parents were an integral part of all three projects but were especially so in voices, where a vital component was advocating for family networks. in the rural mountain location, as a result of their work, the voices program led to reinstatement of pre-algebra and algebra courses and increased enrollment in pre-algebra. primarily women in the first and smart projects, the administrators came from the ranks of teachers and share the desire for more science but view the problem of equity more globally. their charge is to create a systemic view of equity science (and other subjects) and to disseminate this view throughout their school and their district. they look for efficient means for doing this while maximizing the structures that are already in place. they have also been the recipients of inequities in their own careers and seek to mentor teachers and students in their science efforts. level 3: the researchers i felt that i was ã¬too stupid to do mathã³girls donãt do thatã® ruth cossey, mathematics educator, mills college --conversation with first teachers because gender equity has not become a reality in spite of years of research and implementation efforts; because new and systemic programmatic efforts are necessary; because those planning for future equity require models that address these needs, in this paper the mirrored structures model help identify research agendas matched to these needs. towards this end, first's, voices, and smart's design efforts are directed at deep understanding of inequity patterns, then feeding that research directly back to the practice of equity education. all women, the researchers for these projects, view their programs as models for creating and sustaining change. for example, research suggests that females (at many ages levels) express more uncertainty with their ability to do science even when their ability tests high. this is a dynamic that cuts across all educational levelsã³students, their teachers, administrators, and researchers. such systemic undercurrents must be dealt with at many levels simultaneously. thus while students gain confidence in their ability to learn science, teachers gain c nfidence in their ability to learn and teach science, administrators gain confidence in their a bility to understand, and foster good science teaching for girls and researchers attempt to capture these cumulative and singular changes as they occur. similarly, it is important to understand more deeply the interconnected nature of changing attitudes about science and resultant change in practice. if stereotyping is unmasked and if past views are adjusted, does actual teaching practice change, or does it go deeper than that? these are the kinds of questions these researchers in the three programs grapple with daily. the layers : foundational, scaffolded, and leadership the vertical dimension in figure 1 is the degree of advancement available for each level, the layers are foundational, scaffolded, and leadership. the foundational level includes the basic experiences, understandings, and ways of knowing that each level brings to the setting. for girls, their teachers and researchers the foundational level occured durning the classroom and field activities. girls are an integral part of a complex classroom social learning environment replete with activities and structures. teachers manage these complex environments, assess their students understandings and design complex classroom activities, and grow as professionals. researchers watch the complex interaction between them. the classroom experience is the stepping stone for increased opportunities for advancement and leadership. scaffolded experiences allow participants entry into expanded opportunities to work with peers, teachers, parents, mentors, administrators, and researchers, all of whom act as scaffolding for increased expertise and engagement. this includes girls science clubs, field trips, camping, coaching, tutoring, summer camps, and many other forms https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/ash.html#%20figure%201 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/ash.html#%20figure%201 of participation that are self selected, guided, female only, and open-ended. these activities give opportunity to practice scientific processes in a safe, comfortable environment. in clubs and science camps, girls encounter a variety of scientific concepts, processes, and ways of reasoning (along with their leaders), and importantly they witness modeling by successful women in science, with science mentors, and their own teachers leading the way. they have a chance to practice using the thinking tools of scienceã³ the processes, such as predicting and hypothesizing as well as the physical tools, such as hammers and screwdrivers. girls science club/camp/field activities help level the playing field for the girls using teachers, mentors, and administrators as well as materials, activities, camaraderie, and time as leverage agents. for teachers, scaffolding occurd chiefly in peer settings, primarily in professional development sessions where science mentors and experts, new materials, and curricula, and most importantly, opportunities for self-reflection, provide multiple opportunities for growth. it is also important to tie professional development opportunities directly to classroom practice. smart and first programming for example typically asked teachers to reflect immediately after trying activities with children. in these sessions teachers were able to examine what just happened with a smart/first mentor to guide their examination. over time these reflections led to changed practice. the leadership level allows seasoned participants to move to newer areas, to touch new audiences, and to disseminate their work. for the girls, the leadership experience occurs in mixed-age groups in summer training at local colleges, science jobs, field sites, oe working with women professionals such as architecture. in the summer mixed-school, mixed-aged, and leadership training sessions, girls gain advanced skills in presentation, in athletics, and in ways of d ing science, as well as career information. for teachers this entails working with larger au diences, other schools, national audiencesã³in short, opportunities to grow and to disseminate without the support of the peer group as offered in scaffolded settings. the model in action i argue that the three layers and the three levelsã³a 3 by 3 matrix that includes nine cells, each of which has distinctive characteristicsã³are inter-connected, much like a biological ecosystem. to some extent each feeds and retrieves information from the others in reciprocal fashion. for example, assessing girlsã attitudes or learning at one level, the classroom or club for example, allows their teachers (administrators and researchers) to make parallel, related but personalized changes in their own work at their level of understanding. teachers become more sensitive to gender issues and more able to reflect on their own practice, and with administrator support, practice changes slowly. researchers find ever more interesting areas to explore within the design experiment as these changes occur. for these reasons the model is described as mirrored because movement, both vertically and horizontally, is mirrored by the levels and layers. below are three examples of interactions that begin to demonstrate these interconnections. one describes the interconnections between classroom activities and professional development, the second and third involve activities that cut across all levels of participation. examples of the model in action: example 1: firstã³the classroom and professional development. why women can't be president! at one urban elementary school site, 6th grade boys and girls spent a great deal of time creating a women's history dinner plate project, one that highlighted the role of women in history, especially women scientists, medical doctors, and mathematicians. in preparation for the dinner plate project the class had already had extensive discussions of what their life would be like if they happened to be born the opposite sex. narrowly defined gender roles dominated these discussions and students' opinions were highly charged. the teachers who led the plate project were surprised and informed by these comments. these activities acted as a formative assessment of students' attitudes and in turn directly affected teacher practice. teachers designed the plate project, in part, to change views of women's abilities over time. as a result of these discussions, the dinner plate project was designed so that each student became an expert on one woman's career and subsequently explained that particular women's role in history, artistically, in written form and orally to an assembled audience of parents, other students, and friends at a specially planned evening event. later, the teacher who organized this event used this as the focus for one of firstãs professional development sessions. the idea spread to another school, this time using the ã«if i were born a--opposite sexã® for third and fourth grades. third graders confirmed the same views of gender stereotyping observed in the first school and both teachers in the second school, in turn, were informed and surprised. in the third grade, students were convinced that a woman could not become president because there never had been one before. they argued: "if women could be president why hadnãt there been one already?"ã³there was no existence proof. needless to say these discussion at younger grade levels also eventuated with their teachers designing a series of follow-up activities, similar to those of the sixth grade students, designed to highlight the role of women in the sciences. these activities are now following into a second year for younger and older students in both schools. example 2: first & smartã³clubs, leadership, and professional development leveling the playing field in first and smart, both the science clubs and the summer leadership training involve a mixed age group of girls. throughout the clubs5 and camps the girls, their teachers, and aides, sometimes their parents, their mentors and science buddies, together, explored a wide variety of science areas, some working towards a long-term, school-based, environmental project. during summer leadership training mixed age groups from many schools along with their school site liaison person (a parent, teacher, or aide), enjoyed in-depth training in the life sciences, athletics, career explorations, and presentation skills. in both clubs, camps, and leadership settings, girls learned new skills and gained confidence in their ability to do science, but so too do their mentors, aides, teachers, administrators, and parents. for example, in first's summer leadership cadre, while girls dissected and identified the reproductive parts of a flower, their supporting adults (parents, aunts, or teachers aides, etc.) did the same thing and in the process, they too felt the thrill of science as a "way of knowing ". adults and children gained in expertise simultaneously so that accomplishment passes between and across ages reciprocally. all the attending females, to some extent, gained ground while undertaking the same activity and while using the same materials, for example, a microscope. adults recaptured what had been left out in their science training and gained confidence in the role of life-long learner while, simultaneously acting as support for the girls. the women of many ages, all of whom entered the summer training with different backgrounds and expectations, advanced according to their particular need. among operation smart's goals are to guide participants to be more reflective about themselves as learners, to be learners of science in a different way; and for teachers to apply this information to their work with kids. parallel (for teachers and for students simultaneously) changes along these lines were evident as part of smart summer camp training. after modeling lessons with the students, teachers and smart trainers spent time reflecting on the experience. these reflections revealed profound changes by the teachers and students. for example a fifth grade student had been heard to say: "i'm going to do that experiment next week for the whole class", while a teacher discussed ways to pass on the information to other teachers by swapping classrooms temporarily. one teachers said: "i really liked the role modeling component of the operation smart training. i'm a visual learner, so i learn and retain things much better by watching them than by reading. also, i probably wouldn't have believed that these activities would work with kids if i hadn't seen them in action." similarly the director of the school program said: "at the head teachers meeting j. was full of ideas and enthusiasm about the things that she's been doing during the week that you've been here. we were discussing various methods for passing on the information to the other teachers. we will probably have some of the teachers, that you've t ained swap classes for a day, every so often, so the other kids can benefit from operation smar t. we may also try different combinations of team teaching. we'd also like to have an operation smart day some time during the summer so that other staff and kids can become as excited as the three who have been trained this week." it seems that activities of this nature 'level or flatten the playing field' for female science learners. each level of participant grew in learning, but on a different trajectoryã³the students as first-time to science participant, the teacher and parent as long left out of science participant. i consider this professional development6 according to adapted needs. these insights lead researchers to explore further how leadership can be developed and encouraged for all levels of participants in a variety of ways because: ã³science ability and materials are scarce for all women ã³certain activities act as gatekeepers to further science for females ã³across-age experiences can be powerful motivators for advancement example 3: changing voicesã³changing expectations: equal access to mathematics the voices program had far reaching impact across the rural community over its three years, especially regarding changing societal norms about expectations for their girls. voice had more success in the rural mountain setting than in the urban river setting. within the mountain community there had been a general malaise of mind regarding what the girls might be able to do. the assumption was: 'we can't expect too much of our students, given their background and lives at home", as a result children 'get by' because "low expectations permeate the systemã–they structure educational opportunity without being overt enough to challenge" carter et al., 1999, p. 11). voices did make substantive changes in the way math is seen as a gatekeeper to high school. because of their ongoing support at many different levels, the voices girls were able to take pre-algebra, to take the test that had limited their entry, and most importantly change the structure of the school that heretofore had not seen this as a necessity. to do so they needed to gather support at many levels. the girls needed to "want to take algebra" i.e. to see themselves as successful. the teachers had to see the importance and to help change the status quo. as part of this process of change, it seems that teacher mentors learned as much as the girls. voices " may have had more powerful impacts on the mentors than on the girls they mentored. because so many of them (mentors) were teachers and not science and math specialists, they had to seek ways to increase the girls' awareness of science and technology in nearby workplaces. in the process the mentors themselves learned a lot about the use of science and mathematics in jobs not usually scientificã³lessons that many took back to their classrooms to share with their students" (carter et al., 1999, p. 20). most importantly, the families had to learn how to be better advocates for their daughters "voices families got access to information about college, financial aid programs, scholarships and other opportunities...they also learned ways that they can make their voices heard in schools and (to) question sexist and economically elitist policies and procedures. one mother got her ged so that she could better support her daughter. ã– a number of families invested in computers for their girls and themselves" (carter et al., 1999, p. 17) discussion i have proposed a design model for studying systemic change in relation to gender equity in science for elementary and middle schools girls. this model posits important interconnections across levels of participation (girls, teachers, administr ators, and researchers) as well as between the layers of expertiseã³ foundational, scaffolded, and leadership. although only a beginning analysis, the model has allowed re-definition of several important components of systemic change in three nsf funded programs across the united states. specifically, first, it encourages focussing on the interactions between student attitude and expertise in science with similar components of teacher professional development; and second, it identifies the equalizing effect across age and science knowledge for females while taking part in gender/science activities. by assessing their own and their childrenãs existing ideas about gender roles, teachers, parents, mentors, and researchers became more sensitive, more informed, more concerned and more able to design future activities for their students and for research that might begin to ameliorate gender biases. partially as a result of these projects, girls, teachers, parents and administrators began to take charge of their own inquiry into gender matters, to grow and to learn, to teach each other and to "step up" into gender/equity issues as models for their own schools and communities. and as teachers indicate, gender work spills over and becomes part of the rest of the curriculum and the entire school day. instead of being a part of one day, equity becomes part of every dayã³ "a way of life", in one teacher's words. thus there appears to be linked and interconnected change between student attitude and learning and teacher professional development in relation to science content, pedagogy, and equity sensitivity. last, there is need for re-definition of the meaning for the phrase professional development, since the experience of these three projects has shown us that this may occur at many levels simultaneously from students to researchers. working professional women, students administrators, university researchers, mother volunteers, as well as teaching professionals grow in awareness and ability to act upon equity issues and science within their own contexts. this is not a 'one size fits all' model, instead it a 'design your own' professional development model. the implication is that we need to look across groups, not just at teachersã³but to look at teachers and students in relation to each other and in relation to administrators and researchers, in a more systematic way. dr. doris ash is an assistant professor at the university of california-santa cruz in science education. dr. ash can be reached by e-mail at: dash5@cats.ucsc.edu funded in part by the national science foundation experimental program for women and girls footnotes 1first is a museum-district collaboration overseen by the chabot observatory and science center in oakland, with mills college, the university of claifornia, berkely, the east bay association of women in science, and the oakland museum. 2classroom design features are meant to enhance all learners opportunitiesspecifically by emphaizing fcl (fostering a community of learners; brown & campione, 1994; 1995) principles. 3the voices project is conducted by the appalchia educational laboratroy in west virginia. 4a local affiliate of teh national organization, girls incorporated, fromerly girls club of america, has ben operation programs for girls since 1942. 5activities range from electronic appliance or owl pellet dessection to visits to local science centers such as the exploratorium for behind the scenes tours, to visits by local female scientists and engineers 6professional development is defined more broadly for the multiple levels of participants including students, teachers, administrator, parents, and researchers. references american association for the advancement of science. (1993, april 15). gender and the culture of science. science 260, pp. 383-430 brown, a. (1992). design experiments: theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. journal of learning sciences, 2(2), 141178. brown, a. l., ash, d., rutherford, m., nakagawa, k., gordon a., & campione, j. c. (1993). distributed expertise in the classroom. in g. salomon (ed.), distributed cognitions, new york: cambridge university press. brown, a., & campione, j. (1994). guided discovery in a community of learners. in k. mcgilly (ed.), classroom lessons: integrating cognitive theory and classroom practice, (pp. 229-270). cambridge, ma: mit press/bradford press. carter, c. s., keyes, m. c., & kusimo, p. s. (1999). lessons from the holler and the streets: what appalachian girls, families and communities have taught us about implementing informal science and mathematics programs. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association, montreal, canada. congressional commission on the advancement of women and minorities in science, engineering and technology development. (2000). land of plenty report: diversity as americaãs competitive edge in science, engineering and technology. [online]. avalilable: http://www.nsf.gov/od/cawmset/report.htm. (september, 2000) crowley, k. callanan, m., tenenbaum, h. r., & allen, e. (in press). parents explain more often to boys than to girls during shared scientific thinking. psychological science. klein, s. s., & ortman. p. (1994). continuing the journey towards gender equity. educational researcher, pp. 13-21. kahle, j. b., & meece, j. (1994). research on gender in the classroom, in d. gabel (ed.) handbook on research on science teaching and learning, (pp. 542-557), new york: macmillan. linn, m. (1992). gender differences in educational achievement. in j. pfleiderer (ed.), sex equity in educational opportunity achievement and testing. proceedings of the 1991 invitational conference of the educational testing service, princeton, nj. newman, d., griffin, p., & cole, m. (1989). the construction zone. cambridge: cambridge university press. orenstein, p. (1994). school girls. doubleday: ny. sadker. m., & sadker, d. (1994). failing at fairness: how our schools cheat girls. touchstone: new york. vygotsky, l. s. (1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. figure 1. mirrored structures levels     layers girls teachers/parents reasearchers foundational classroom field activities classroom teaching ongoing reflection classroom design ongoing reflection scaffolded science clubs field activities professor development clubs, classrooms professor development design leadership summer camps mixed-ages mixedschool across schools dissemination dissimination across states (ash 2001)   copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any 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mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com + volume 41, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman assistant editor: jordan donop advancing women in leadership 26 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 advancing women in leadership vol. 41, pp. 25-36, 2022 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper “it’s not enough to hold that power”: the gendering of advice in corporate discourse amaly santiago & mariaelena bartesaghi amaly santiago, adjunct faculty member, university of south florida, amalysantiago@gmail.com mariaelena bartesaghi, associate professor, university of south florida, mbartesaghi@usf.edu accepted november 11th, 2022 abstract: in this qualitative study, we analyzed advice literature written by corporate women for women readers who want to rise in the corporate ranks. advice is pervasive social practice, and rests on an asymmetry of knowledge between authors and readers. we use discourse analysis to examine how authors of advice books deploy strategies to instruct, encourage, and exhort women to do better. we identified four strategies that expand on the current literature on advice-giving: pronoun choice and alignment, credibility, the assertion of necessity, and the use of metaphors. we found that advice literature re-creates narrow gender categories and dichotomous performances of gender for women to carry out. rather than offer alternatives, advice to corporate women works toward ratification of gender norms, ratifying a notion of women’s shortcomings. keywords: corporate women, advice, leadership, gender, metadiscourse introduction diverse organizations (e.g., pew foundation and linkedin), and prestigious programs like yale and harvard have created courses, certificates, seminars, and conferences dedicated to women. these initiatives, which fall under the rubric of leadership training and “strategies for women” (linkedin), focus on women as subjects of mostly unmet aspirations. what may be counterintuitive about these initiatives is how they contribute to a social discourse of gendered inability. as ahl (2006) noted (see also fairclough, 1992), discourse practices, or how we communicate about people, is both indexical and constitutive of institutionalized practices. because leadership models present the language of leaders as inherently, even innately, masculine, and women’s language as inherently feminine (see eckert & mcconnell-ginet, 2003, for a discussion of gendered assumptions about language), we considered how leadership discourse emphasizes a putative gender binary, with women as the opposing pole. thus, advice to women readers is disingenuous: it does more for the professional standing of expert authors than for emancipation from the constraints of gendered leadership. fig 1 below, extracted from the yale school of management’s women’s leadership program online (women’s leadership program online, n.d.), offers insight into our argument. figure 1 introduction page of the women’s leadership program though asymmetry is part of all communication (marková & foppa, 1991), that of advice is an asymmetry of knowledge: the mailto:amalysantiago@gmail.com mailto:mbartesaghi@usf.edu 27 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 advice giver assumes competence in matters of gender, leadership and power the same cannot be said of the recipient. in this way, yale’s initiative rests on an unequal distribution of power. as social action, it proposes to re-direct the communication and actions of women. from the outset, we are told that “women face a unique challenge in the workplace.” this is presented as a social “fact,” not requiring support. though this statement embeds an evaluation about gender, challenges and organizational culture (hunston & thompson, 2000), its declarative formulation (re) constitutes women as beings with “unique” challenges (takano, 2005) and thus reifies the very gendered norms and power asymmetries that constrain women's career advancement (allen et al., 2016). as well, it feeds into a social metadiscourse (c.f. craig, 1999) of gendered innateness; according to the connotations of uniqueness, the challenges of women are theirs alone. it follows that non-male bodies (which incarnate and enact challenges) need additional help in matters of leadership. the program assumes that leadership, though gendered, does not correspond to women. leadership discourse constructs both gender and leadership as innate by situating it in males (baxter, 2010) engaging in “masculine” behaviors. nonetheless, it presents this as surmountable by way of advice, which is a clear relational practice. the outcome of this double logic is to take male leadership as the standard, and to guide women who aspire to grow professionally to adapt to the standard (baxter, 2010). in effect the implicit promise is that of transmuting women into male-like beings. and those outside this putative binary are not accounted for. this logic is manifest in advice books written by women for women. our argument proceeds as follows. we first, contextualize the study within the literature on advice, identity, leadership and gender in professional settings. we use a synthetic approach to discourse analysis to examine four strategies that corporate women utilize to advise other professional women. these strategies are: pronoun choice and alignment, credibility, the assertion of necessity, and the use of metaphors. they are based on the inherent asymmetry of advice, which is weighted in favor of the advice giver’s putative authority. our conclusion considers how advice may very well be counterintuitive to women’s emancipation from gender roles and personal empowerment as leaders. literature review the technology of advice jones (2016) explained that technologies are tied to the relationship between discourse and action. technologies do more than transmit a message, for they construct its meaning via metacommunication: they state rules of action and position bodies accordingly (jones, 2016). they are “part of larger social practices, which can be considered highly developed “technologies” for getting things done” (p.11). applying the understanding if technology advanced by jones (2016), we argue that advice is a technology of gendered inability, for we will show that it is given in expectation that readers will shift their language and beliefs according to the authors’ recommendations. the authors’ technological proficiency is grounded in their “professional vision” (goodwin, 1994), a term which captures how experts circumscribe the area of knowledge which they then proceed to occupy. like benoit-barné (2020), we consider authority as a relational dynamic: “a property of relationships communicatively generated and negotiated in the process of organizing” (p. 149) (see also vasilyeva, robles, saludadez, schwagerl, & castor, 2020). as cooren (2010) pointed out, authorship and authority are closely connected, first, etymologically and second, discursively, for authors claim expert ownership of their words in the text-reader conversation (smith, 2005). because advice seekers “turn to those who they feel might have insights into their problems, whether or not those individuals have credentials” (de capua & durham, 1993, p. 529), authors ground their insights in terms of credentials both professional and personal. because it is common knowledge that workplace advising may improve job performance (macgeorge & van swol, 2018), the authors in our data emphasize their authority in matters of professional identity and leadership. the technology of advice rests on the claiming and granting of this authority. in order to refute it, readers would have to question the authors and the weight of the evidence and experience. gendered identity tracy and robles (2013) argued that people construct who they are, as well as account for who they have been and will be, through their social interaction. along these lines, sociolinguistic janet holmes (2015) noted that “individuals are constantly engaged in constructing aspects of their interpersonal and intergroup identity, including their professional identity and their gender identity” (p. 887). they do so by way of discursive strategies, vocabulary, or grammatical structures (holmes, 2015). therefore, women's leadership discourse constitutes and molds women’s professional identity. in her analysis of leadership texts, ahl’s (2006) review of research articles about women’s leadership takes this very view as a premise. we have observed identity as a contingent identification in which subjects position themselves in a competitive discursive context of gendered leadership. according to fairhurst (2007), the term “contingent” indicates that identity is always otherwise positioned. the more contingent the field, the more “space of action” the individual has for determining freedom, autonomy, and personal interest. this renders identity multiplicity and “discursively constructed over and over again in particular interactions” (van de mieroop, 2011, p. 566). analyses of leadership discourse have found that leadership is associated with hegemonic behavior, which is in turn grounded in masculinity (schnurr, 2009; jones, 2021). the ideal leader corresponds to a masculine stereotype, an obstacle to women and their career growth (holmes, 2017). with effective leaders’ qualities defined as innately male, gender is a ubiquitous aspect of leadership discourse (schnurr, 2009). workplace culture has a particular way of understanding gender, and leadership is not a 28 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 gender-neutral concept; thus, “masculine ways of doing leadership are typically viewed as normative” (schnurr, 2009, p. 7). the nature of advice in the self-help literature we analyzed, advice is by nature implicitly solicited. by this we mean that readers do not directly ask the authors for it; however, the readers (advice-seekers) are professional women who buy these books to reach their career advancement goals. consequently, these books are produced in expectation of readers’ consumption and solicitation. the following is an example: excerpt 1: own the power (krawcheck, 2017, p. 2) i’m here to tell you that you already have the qualities and skills it takes to get ahead in the modern workplace, and, that in owning those qualities, you have more power and potential than you realize. so rather than looking to be “empowered,” this book is going to be about how to leverage our existing power to thrive and advance in our careers in ways that play to our strengths (data omitted; discusses the need for a woman-friendly workplace). who am i to tell this story? well, i’ve been around. in excerpt 1, krawcheck spoke in the first person and presumed the readers’ wants. she also relied on her own experiences, research, and observations at the workplace to advise women. in this excerpt, krawcheck considered power relations and reflects on organizational power relations, specifically when women seek leadership. as krawcheck mentioned in her book, she is against the notion of women being empowered and believes that women can actively work on diversity issues (women’s inclusion). women do not need to be given any power because women already have the power and qualities that leaders own. this is at odds with her own power as agent of advice. in line 7, krawcheck offered the relational terms of the advice asymmetry by noting how long she has been an experienced professional, using the idiom “i’ve been around” to create familiarity with readers. notice that this phrase is vague; therefore, she relies on readers to believe her account of experiences that led to her expertise and authority. linguists have examined advice-giving in multiple contexts, such as everyday conversations, phone calls, and online forums. they have identified the following language strategies: the use of should, imperative sentences, elaboration, assertion of individual choice, expressions of empathy, and introspective questions (decapua & dunham, 2007). as communication scholars and discourse analysts, concerned with the relationship between language and embodied/ material, social action, we expand on their observations by suggesting four novel discourse strategies. methods we examined four best-selling self-help books by corporate authors and leadership coaches. we focused on amazon bestseller books directed to professional women regarding how they can pursue their career advancement. c-suite is “a widely-used term used to refer collectively to a corporation’s most important senior executives” (fitzsimmons, callan, & paulsen, 2014). these corporate women advise other women in their career progression based on their experiences and anecdotes. our data were drawn from the following volumes: lean in (2013) by sheryl sandberg, cco of facebook, own it: the power of women at work (2017) by sallie krawcheck, ceo and co-founder of ellevest, how women rise: break the 12 habits holding you back from your next raise, promotion, or job, (2018) by sally helgesen and marshall goldsmith, an international author, speaker, and leadership development consultant and a top-ranked executive coach, respectively, and lean out: the truth about women, power, and the workplace (2019) by marissa orr who spent 15 years working at today’s top tech giants, google, and facebook. we chose these texts for two reasons. the first is that they are the highest rated books by readers on amazon.com. the second is that their publication occurred over a relatively short period of time (from’2013 to 2019) which corresponds to an increased awareness in organizations to address diversity in hiring, and the prevalence of a “second generation” gender bias (ibarra, ely, & kolb, 2013) notice that all, save from sandberg’s book, are published following the #metoo movement (2017) – a significant consideration when evaluating advice on gender. as discourse analysts, we coded by hand; this is a common way to identify features of talk or text for analysis in language and social interaction studies (fairclough, 1992; tracy & mirivel, 2009). in reading, we attended to pragmatic features of the text: lexical features (e.g., metaphors), repetitive phrases (e.g., you need), key narratives that stand out (e.g., rejecting promotions, maternity leaves, being fired). in a discursive approach, these features are understood as strategies (a term that highlights that language is a doing) (e.g., bartesaghi, 2014; 2021; halliday, 1985). advice is defined as a formulation (hak & deboer, 1996) where one party suggests/recommends to another what to do to achieve or change something. two important aspects are worth mentioning. the first is that giving advice (as we mentioned above) legitimates a functional asymmetry of knowledge between the person who offers and the person who is presumed to seek the advice and for whose benefit the advice is formulated. second, it follows that the particular change is something desirable that the advice-seeker wants and, therefore, that advice is warranted and sought after. this, though the actual request for advice is never explicated; it is simply assumed, as is the underlying premise of advice as social support (goldsmith & fitch, 1997). in sum, advice is circular and selfvalidating, for it creates and legitimates its own professional vision. 29 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 discussion our discussion of strategies is worth additional context. the term “advice” appears infrequently in our data (8 being the lowest, and 25 being the highest). this, in texts ranging from 206 to 242 pages. it follows that advice is a doing, and rarely explicitly recognized as such. below, we examine how advice is done. strategies of authorship we identified four strategies of authorship: pronoun choice and alignment, credibility, the assertion of necessity (you need), and the use of metaphors. as follows, we analyzed different excerpts to distinguish each strategy and how each accomplishes advicegiving and speaks to the authority of the giver to offer it. pronoun choice and alignment because it involves a relationship between giver (speaker/author) and recipient (addressee), pronouns are the currency of advice. pronoun alignment consists in the authors’ positioning with respect to the issues they discuss. for instance, when authors choose the pronoun “i,” they focus on their embodied authority, expertise, and power. by switching to the second person “you,” the authors center on the familiarity and closeness they develop towards the readers throughout the book and its content. as well, “you” is sometimes utilized as a directive for how the addressee should act or feel. some authors use “you” in this way, to disassociate themselves from certain women’s actions that do not let them progress professionally. according to decapua and dunham (2012), and we agree, shifting pronouns are often a discursive strategy that produces identification and lessens the distance between the advice-giver and the advice-seeker, shares the sense of identity, and promotes bonding. below we analyzed authors’ pronominal strategies: we, i, and you. pronoun “we”. the pronoun “we” is multifunctional: both inclusive and exclusive (pantelides and bartesaghi, 2012), signaling “co authorship, implying shared identity” (p. 24) or, conversely, including the author among a category of experts from which the reader is excluded. “we” extends the sense of inclusiveness and empathy in two ways: it positions the author as a part of “womanhood” and thus someone who understands the issues women are going through, and second as co-creators of leadership. most of the time, the authors use “we” as including themselves as part of the issue they discuss, for example advocating equality, as, for example, “we women,” “we as women,'' and “we need” in order to seek identification or show being part of the same membership category, women. extracts 2 and 3 illustrate how we can be used to at once affiliate and disaffiliate from readers. excerpt 2: (krawcheck, 2017, p. 65) the point is that if we as women want to capitalize on and accelerate the positive changes in the business world and make that world better for our children, we need to get our oxygen masks on first. we need to position ourselves well for the coming changes in the workplace. while in 2 the author is part of women helping themselves, in 3 it becomes clear that the author can be both part of and separate from. after all, authors are in a position of giving advice to those for whom they write. notice the switch from “we” to “you.” excerpt 3: (krawcheck, 2017, p. 93) we women have actually gotten pretty good at the mentor thing. but that’s not enough. you need “sponsors” as well: those individuals who not only answer your questions but also advocate for you. pronoun “i”. the first-person pronoun is the principal strategy used by authors in our corpus, showing that the authority to advise is based on personal experiences and achievements in organizations. as bamberg (2012) pointed out, narrators give narrative forms to experiences, confer their experiences, order experiences, and make sense of their experiences. although narrators’ expertise is a component that may underscore an asymmetrical relationship between the advice-giver and advice-seeker, it may promote bonding as well (decapua & dunham, 2012). as we studied the authors’ selfhelp literature, we note that texts produce and function as agents in organizational life (cooren, 2004). thus, the authors’ texts participate in the production of the advice-giving to women who seek advice to progress and manage leadership positions. the first person positions the author as someone who knows how organizations operate and how a professional woman should deal with leadership aspects. this positioning also brings cooren’s (2012) ideas of ventriloquism into play. he explained ventriloqual acts as follows: the activity that consists of making someone or something say or do something — which is what i mean by ventriloquism—can thus be considered coextensive with any conversation, any discourse, whether we end up ventriloquizing not only policies and organizations but also languages, accents, ideologies, speech communities, rules, norms, values, identities, statuses, etc. (p.5) as we see it, krawcheck and sandberg spoke in the name of expertise or authority in leadership. the author’s animation of ventriloqual relations can lead the audience to say or do something provided from the advice-giving or recommendation obtained from the authors (cooren, 2012). the following excerpt illustrates the use of pronoun choice and alignment, “i.” excerpt 4: (sandberg, 2013, p. 48) no wonder women don’t negotiate as much as men. it’s like trying to cross a minefield backward in high heels. so what should we do? should we play by the rules that others are created? should we figure out a way to put on a friendly expression while not being too nice, displaying the right levels of loyalty, and using “we” language? i understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to biased rules and 30 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 expectations. i know it is not a perfect answer but a means to a desirable end. it is also true, as any good negotiator knows, that having a better understanding of the other side leads to a superior outcome. in excerpt 4, sandberg aligned “i” as an animation (goffman, 1974) for the author to speak and positions her as the expert who understands what women experience and the paradoxes at the workplace. in line 1, sandberg let the audience know that she understands that specific matter (“negotiate as much as men”) and spoke to general knowledge (“no wonder”). by shifting to “i” in line 5, the author represents herself and represents all women in terms of understanding and awareness of the paradox of the advice she is giving. it is her authority that resolves this paradox, as sandberg advises women to reflect on their behaviors and develop an understanding of how to manage themselves. reflection is a metaphor. it amounts to holding a mirror to oneself, to be shown what was previously unnoticed or missed. in this case, the metaphor is apt: the readers need the authors to hold a mirror to their actions, showing them a new way. notice how, in a series of retrospective questions, sandberg included herself as part of the issue (“so what should we do?”). sandberg constantly used the pronoun “we” in lines 2 and 3 to include herself as a fellow agent (van de mieroop et al., miglbauer, & chatterjee., 2017), who has this dilemma as well. it is also noticeable how sandberg shifts pronouns, from “we” in lines 2 and 3 to “i” in lines 5 and 6, to mark and disassociate herself from the rest of the women. authors take a stance, and as du bois (2007) stated, “stance has the power to assign value to objects of interest, to position social actors with respect to those objects, to calibrate alignment between stancetakers, and to invoke presupposed systems of sociocultural value” (p. 139). the epistemic stances “i understand” and “i know” in lines 5 and 6 acknowledge the speaker’s intellectual position in the discourse. also, the phrase “i know” imparts a sense that the reader must know because, at times, this phrase implicates agreement with the other party. moreover, sandberg framed herself as expert knower when she used the interpersonal markers “i know” and “i understand.” the pronoun “i” provides the first-hand experience of her understanding of workplace and leadership matters and claims her role as a charismatic leader (fairhurst, 2007): knowledge is located inside her, and because of this, she can externalize it. in studying authority, bartesaghi (2009) examined how it works by substituting first-hand experience by expertise. thus, professional women may have the same experiences as corporate women; however, the corporate women’s expertise (their firsthand experience) allows them to advise other women. thus, in excerpt 4, sandberg reinforced her expertise and authority of being capable of advising others by indicating that she knows what women are experiencing about bias. this authority also allows sandberg to tell the audience that she knows how to deal with this type of situation, in effect representing herself and all women's understanding and awareness. pronoun “you”. among the books we examined, the authors concurred with addressing the reader with familiarity by shifting to the pronoun “you,” which permits the authors (corporate women) to position themselves as the character or voice who understands what the reader (professional woman) is going through professionally. similarly, that “you” approach creates a closeness between the writer and the reader. in other words, the change to the pronoun “you” produces a direct conversation between both the writer and the reader. as linde notes, a narrative presumes the personal experience of the teller, based on an actual occurrence (linde, 1993). familiarity allows the writer to express that she has been in the same position that the reader is. developing familiarity also included the type of stories that the authors select. therefore, by establishing familiarity and stories, the audience, as members of a culture, do not struggle with the story because they recognize the stories and are receptive (gergen & gergen, 2006). as harvey sacks (1992) pointed out, “you” in its singular case is “regularly a way of referring to that member of “they” who happens to be present” (p. 166). in this case, the author referred to a member of the women category (professional women) who is presently reading the book. in addition, we observed that “you” is multifunctional, and some authors claim entitlement (sacks, 1992). the teller authors the reader’s experiences and “owns” them, even though they are not her own (shuman, 2006). the following excerpt illustrates how the sense of familiarity can be involved by using the strategy of pronoun choice and alignment, specifically with “you.” excerpt 5: (helgesen & goldsmith, 2018, p. 16) as you will see, the trick to maximizing your talents and opportunities is not becoming a less thoughtful and giving person, but rather purposeful and intentional about your choices while also addressing the behaviors that keep you stuck. by the formulation “as you will see” in line 1, the authors anticipate their ability to predict yet unforeseen but expected experiences. as well, the authors assume that readers are thoughtful and giving (line 2); thus, readers are not using the right strategy because these characteristics are at odds with leadership. in addition, excerpt 5 exemplifies how the authors exercise their expert knowledge by the phrases “[what] you have to offer and why “you are stuck.” the solution’s vagueness and the use of a familiar register claims informality with readers once more supports the authors’ expertise. the shift to the pronoun “you” confers entitlement to the authors, who unlike their readers, have ownership and dominion over their own experience. on another note, the future tense in line 1 is intended to provide a sense of guidance and indicates that it will be a forthcoming explanation. the future tense also suggests that what will be explained is something that the reader does not see (the reader needs the explanation), and the authors will show her how to manage it. specifically, the authors authorize that version of the story of life by giving a piece of advice. the following 31 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 excerpt is another example in which the use of the pronoun choice and alignment with the pronoun “you” appear. excerpt 6: (helgesen & goldsmith, 2018, p. 116) when you enlist allies on a project, be sure to talk about them in a positive way. praise what they are doing and connect them with others. you don’t need to be the world’s biggest extrovert to do this. you don’t need to try to make friends or form close ties. you just need to engage as many people as possible in your efforts to have an impact. and you want to do it in a public way so that you, and they can benefit from the association. in excerpt 6, this shifting to “you” is at almost every beginning of each sentence by employing anaphora. this rhetorical device allows the authors to emphasize the specific advice and intensify to whom they speak (their audience) by employing repetition. in addition, looking into the author-reader approach, helgesen & goldsmith use “you” as a command and claim to demand what women fail to do and, conversely, what they need to do to obtain more allies. in excerpt 6, the authors seem to have some stories that support the advice of achieving ally engagement. by claiming narrative entitlement, the authors claim ownership (shuman, 2006) of both their clients’ experiences and the reader’s experiences; from this position, the authors put forth the idea that women pursue incorrect ways of acquiring allies and establishing advantageous relationships. credibility one of the strategies used by the authors is claiming credibility. the authors positioned themselves as experts who are knowledgeable about leadership and workplace matters. macgeorge and van swol (2018) state that the advisor’s characteristics are: expertise, intentions, and confidence, and these corporate authors establish these characteristics in their narrative distinctly. at the beginning of each book, all the authors specify their credentials, motives, and purposes that inspire them to approach other professional women to help and encourage them with their career advancement. the authors established credibility through strategies of legitimization (macgeorge & van swol, 2018), in which they cited respected sources to increase their credibility when they offered solutions, simultaneously reinforcing their own knowledge. on another note, limberg and locher (2012) argued that adviceseekers place the advice-givers in a position of having something to say about the issue raised; despite this, advice-givers use two strategies to show credibility, warranting strategies and mitigation strategies. warranting strategies are used to “give credibility to their recommendations and to show expertise (e.g., citing a source, quoting facts and numbers, invoking personal experience to make a point)” and mitigation strategies are used “to downtone the impression that they might be imposing their view on the advice-seeker” (limberg & and locher, 2012, p. 6). as we observe, these author’s behaviors establish certain standing among the readers, such as reliability and humility. in other words, the authors’ personal experiences validate the sources, and vice versa, the sources validate the author’s personal experiences. furthermore, all authors voice the claim “research shows” when invoking statistics or specific data, and most of them include the sources, which often include academic articles. “research shows” makes this putative and evaluative “seeing” self-evident (to the author’s expert eyes, at least), because the author has already read and assessed what is “shown” on behalf of the reader, while acting as a mere conduit for the research. in other words, the reader is asked to trust, and be relieved from the burden of her own judgment on what is in fact shown. the following is an excerpt in which marissa orr claims credibility. excerpt 7: (orr, 2019, p. 95) many research studies and lab experiments confirm that women are liked less when they become successful. one of the most well-known studies that’s referred to throughout lean in comes from columbia business school professor frank flynn and new york university professor cameron anderson. in line 1, orr highlighted her statement as credible and based on research. she placed accountability/authority on other texts that the reader should take for granted. therefore, orr is not accountable for the research; she is simply “reporting” on it. in excerpt 7, we observed that texts and humans are co-agents. in the same way, orr mentioned two universities and their respective professors in lines 3 and 4 who have studied how women tend to be less liked when they are successful. however, orr did not specify how the study measures this unlikability. by stating these academic institutions and the professors, orr made the argument stronger in terms of credibility since she provides a source. also, the fact that the statement emphasized that the finding is based on research makes it believable and indicates that research in these matters is available and substantial. thus, orr positioned herself as someone informed about women’s careers and leadership matters and able to read and interpret scholarly research for the reader (who, by contrast, is less informed). in this case, orr framed this academic study before exposing her opinion and discrediting it based on her experience with successful women. orr uses her expertise as task-related knowledge (macgeorge & van swol, 2018) to uncover the false discourse that other corporate women and organizations deliver to professional women in terms of not being likable. notice how orr switched to locating credibility outside of herself, instead placing it on the authority of texts as a nonhuman agent. in this way, research is a textual agent, recruited by the author in her credibility strategy, and acting to boost it (cooren, 2004; barge, 2021; cooren, 2004). excerpt 8: (krawcheck, 2017, p. 9) i’ll take you through some of the troves of research on the positive business results that derive from gender diversity for companies. 32 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 in line 1 of this extract, krawcheck begins to establish her credibility by assuming that the reader is unfamiliar with this type of research and therefore needs her guidance, which is forthcoming. also, krawcheck presentified research (which she has pre-read and assessed) as part of the equation (benoit-barné & cooren, 2009). that is, research is brought in to authorize the credibility of her arguments, including the voices of respected sources that allow her to explain or discuss gender diversity in line 2. agency and accountability for the knowledge she presents is now distributed and disbursed (castor & bartesaghi, 2021) between krawcheck, research sources, and business results. krawcheck claimed, explained, and rationalized the information. krawcheck once more spoke in the name of research and business results (cooren, 2012). the assertion of necessity (you need) this strategy was a revision of what decapua and dunham name the assertion of individual choice (2007). in their work on the pragmatics of advice-giving, decapua and dunham described this strategy as “statements that emphasize the importance of or need for, the advice-seeker to do what was best for himself/ herself” (p. 332). this strategy meets with the paradox of needing or choosing something. if you need something, then the choice does not exist. the authors in our corpus utilize the expression “you need” as part of their advice in an attempt to encourage an action. the semi-modal “need to” expresses strong obligation and necessity, specifically when something is required (biber et al., johansson, leech, & finegan, 2006). thus, this semi-modal works implicitly like “must.” we reexamined this strategy, and we call it “the assertion of necessity,” which we define as a statement about something that is needed or requires an action to step forward and advance in an issue. in the excerpt below, sandberg’s narrative picks up as she recounts that after a couple of talks about gender, someone asked her, “so is this your thing now?” excerpt 9: (sandberg, 2013, p. 146) at the time, i didn’t know how to respond. now i would say yes. i made this my thing because we need to disrupt the status quo (data omitted). instead, we need to speak out, identify the barriers that are holding women back, and find solutions. in her answer, sandberg presented an account coherent with #metoo, recommending speaking up. she included herself as part of the issue by using the pronoun “we” in lines 2 and 5 and as a member of the women category who both is subject to this and has, by definition, overcome it (unlike the readers). this is a perfect example of the multifunctional potential of “we.” excerpt 9 carries two synergistic strategies of advice. the first is the assertion of necessity and this is bolstered by the second strategy is the imperative sentence that commands women to act (“identify and find”) towards equality issues. should they ignore her imperative, they will fail to act on behalf of diversity. excerpt 10: (helgesen & goldsmith, 2018, p. 196) as your sort through your decision, it’s helpful to keep in mind the old saying: perfect is the enemy of good. in other words, don’t agonize, don’t imagine you need to start in the perfect place or get every step exactly right; just get going. in excerpt 10, we identified two strategies, the assertion of necessity and imperative sentences. both strategies work together since the imperative sentence as command indicates what is necessary to do (lines 2-3). in excerpt 10, the authors advise women to move forward and not wait for the ideal time or place; otherwise, they will remain paralyzed. notice that by using “you need” in line 3, the authors give an explicit command of action. metaphors according to lakoff and johnson (1980), metaphors are at the basis of all understanding of the world (lakoff & johnson, 1980). consequently, they direct our sensemaking. because we understand the world in metaphorical terms, we explain concepts and give meaning to those concepts through the use of metaphors. in the same way, metaphors are related to our culture, experiences, and everyday life. we use metaphors purposefully or unwittingly in our speech, conversations, life, and thoughts (lakoff & johnson, 1980). they are part of our tacit cultural knowledge (polanyi, 1970). in a broad sense, all language is metaphorical because it creates meaning. metaphors work by imposing entailments, which are the farreaching ways in which they create and organize our sensemaking. for example, to say there was no chemistry has little to do with chemistry in itself, and instead creates entailments about relationships, such as that we cannot be accountable for them, they happen (or not) naturally, and they are part of the natural universe. organizational scholars have studied how metaphors organize. for example, gareth morgan (1986) employed metaphorical understandings to analyze the significance of organizational life through various metaphors such as organizations as machines or organizations as political systems, to mention a few. therefore, through narrative and metaphors, we understand complex stories that answer our questions. in this study, we noticed how authors use metaphors as a technology of advice: to illustrate aspects of the workplace and how they address those aspects. the organizing metaphor in our corpus is the container metaphor (things being inside a container, in various states, and removable from it); it speaks of power, options, opportunities, and decisions as material things that one can own, move, push, and manage with the authors’ direction. inside the container is women’s professional fulfillment, and advice is the way to open it correctly. power and authority. the following extract exemplifies how power and authority is conveyed. 33 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 excerpt 11: (krawcheck, 2017, p. 24) but it’s not enough to hold that power. we need to own that power and put it to work. we chose this metaphor in our title, because it is a well-worn conceptual metaphor; power is a tool with a specific metaphorical expression in line 1, which entails that power is usable, power is carried, and power can be manipulated. krawcheck describes power as an object that someone can touch, hold, and do something with it. by “it is not enough to hold that power,” she urges women to act and take action with power as a tool. but the real key to empowerment is by way of her guidance: it is by taking her advice that women can possess and appropriately wield the substance of power. careers and options. in the following excerpt, sandberg advises women on how to act to keep themselves moving forward in their careers. excerpt 12: (sandberg, 2013, p. 103) anyone lucky enough to have options should keep them open. don’t enter the workplace already looking for the exit. don’t put on the brakes. accelerate. keep a foot on the gas pedal until a decision must be made. that’s the only way to ensure that when that day comes, there will be a real decision to make. according to sandberg, women hold back their careers because they think about future decisions such as getting married or having children. notice the assumption of a binary: that women need to choose between career or family. that sandberg assumed it in effect reifies it. she is, after all, authorized by the reader to know. the conceptual metaphor is career is a race with the metaphorical expressions in lines 2 and 3, which entail that careers can be driven. sandberg mentions “options” as an object that simulates a door in which a person can enter freely, and the person decides how to work with it (the option). she encouraged women to leave those doors open and not close them before the precise time. in line 2, sandberg directs an action which she compared with a race car. this race car represented how women should keep going and taking those opportunities or options that the workplace offers them. the brakes offer an embodied metaphor, for it calls into being the experience of an abrupt stop, as we would experience to avoid an accident when driving. in line 3, sandberg used another metaphorical expression to impart that women need to keep going and moving forward. the lack of action to “keep the foot on the pedal” causes women to lose professional opportunities. once again, it is sandberg who is driving the proverbial car, for it is fueled by her advice. equality and leadership gap. sandberg is especially vocal in her encouragement that women do more for their careers. in her chapter working together toward equality, she employs the following metaphorical expression: excerpt 13: (sandberg, 2013, p. 172) the hard work of generations before us means that equality is within our reach. we can close the leadership gap now. each individual’s success can make success a little easier for the next. we can do this — for ourselves, for one another, for our daughters, and for our sons. if we push hard now, this next wave can be the last wave. in the future, there will be no female leaders. there will be 6 just leaders. in excerpt 13, we found multiple metaphors: actions are movements, equality is an object, and change is a wave. as we notice with these metaphors, our conceptual system plays a central role when explaining our everyday realities, and concepts can be understood through several different metaphors (lakoff & johnson, 1980). let’s analyze the principal conceptual metaphor. actions are movements with the metaphorical expression “if we push hard now, this next wave can be the last wave,” which entails that actions can bring changes or actions can do changes. this metaphor positions men as ideal leaders and role models for women; it intends to explain the fight against women's leadership gap in the workplace and what direction equality should take (there will be just leaders without a gender distinction). equality is presented as an object that is touchable and reachable. as such, women are positioned as not having done enough in their capacity to reach this tangible goal (equality). sandberg offers her advice with a supportive act in which she inquiries about a problem and provides information, knowledge, and guidance to resolve a problem (feng, 2014). since advice might function to reassure someone, here, sandberg utilizes advice to reassure women of the existence of equality issues by making a problem seem manageable (goldsmith & fitch, 1997). however, by explaining how women can contribute to equality, sandberg tells women to “push hard now.” when someone pushes harder, the person is close to accomplishing the goal that is “pushed” (a directive very much connected to birthing, an experience that the readers can understand) because the person is asked for extra effort to bring action to completion. this metaphorical phrase presents the leadership gap as a container/object that is pushed to the other side, but it still needs to be pushed harder, and now it is the moment to do it. push represents the actions taken towards closing the gap. therefore, women need to push more because this issue is not over and because if they stop, all the efforts of previous generations would be in vain. as she specified, sandberg invited women to push because this could be the last push since “this wave can be the last wave.” here, she connects birthing to gendered and political advancement. this expression conveys that sandberg does not know if this is the last wave to struggle with the leadership gap, but she recognizes that pushing now can signify an essential achievement in the leadership gap issue. if she indicates that “this wave can be the last wave,” sandberg believes that the leadership gap issue (much like the suffering of birth) is close to its end. to boot, sandberg recommended women be empathetic and try to understand others (morrow, 2012) whose experiences are similar to theirs - 34 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 once more highlighting the woman’s body as the source of experience, and the need for understanding. opportunities and decisions. metaphors create concepts like gender and what is understood as gendered styles (koller, 2011). as a result, we see how metaphors are used to talk about men and women and how metaphors construct discourses and social domains that are identified as masculine or feminine. the following example illustrates how gender is created by metaphor. excerpt 14: (sandberg, 2013, p. 115) women face enough barriers to professional success. through this metaphorical expression, sandberg described what women encounter in the workplace. in this sentence, the metaphor concept employed is women are climbers with the metaphorical expression women face enough barriers, and the entailment is women confront obstacles. the metaphorical expression “women face enough barriers...” depicts how women struggle against organizational barriers and how their gender works two times more than men to achieve success. this metaphor also describes women as the gender who struggles the most to reach professional success. thus, this metaphor represents that it is more complicated for women to grow and accomplish professional success in organizations because they face more obstacles in their career paths. value and women. turning to another author, orr provided another metaphor that drives to gender’s description. it is important to note that she does not believe in sandberg’s motto, “lean in” and instead believes that women have many values and qualities to offer to organizations, and women do not need to behave as a man to achieve success. the following excerpt shows how she constitutes a woman. excerpt 15: (orr, 2019, p. xxvii) perhaps the most difficult part for me to accept was the incessant stream of advice on how to behave. instead of encouraging us to lean in to our individual strengths and celebrate the value women bring to the table, we were essentially being told to behave more like a man. in line 3, orr used the metaphor value is an object which entails value as something you give or hand out. value is described as an object that you bring and offer to others. orr also depicted women as a gender that can make things happen. thus, women offer their individual strengths and a range of values and ideas. the expression “bring to the table” signifies what women add and contribute to organizations with their particular uniqueness without behaving like men. additionally, we observed that the expression “instead of encouraging us” describes women as the gender that needs to be advised and encouraged to be successful. these components lead to organizations preparing leadership training exclusively for women. conclusion in this paper, we have examined how self-help advice books work within the knowledge asymmetry that is advice. in considering advice as a technology, we have identified how it rests on the authority of the expert, and their access and deployment of particular strategies. though the strategies are purportedly for the advancement of women, what is interesting about them is how they reinstate the very problems they promise to solve, and how this is done by fitting into a metadiscourse of the gendered bodies of women as inherently lacking what it takes to act in professional contexts like men. the fact that gender is presented as a binary is, of course, problematic, reductive and dangerous, given the awareness that gender is a social construct, and that it allows for a variety of legitimate performances (see, for e.g., eckert & mcconnel-ginet, 2003). the dichotomy and duality between women and men presented by sandberg, orr, krawcheck, helgesen &goldsmith actually reinstates it and materializes it as a basis for authorizing the authors’ accounts (unlike the readers). the case can of course be made that authors are authorities by nature of their status qua leaders, which is granted by the consumption of their books.. in fact, authors organize credibility by emphasizing warranting strategies that claim entitlement by various means: personal stories, testimonies, and the correct evaluation of data/ statistics, and sources. nonetheless, authors’ pronominal work suggests that they are both part of a common experience of womanhood and transcending it. as such, we are presented by a paradox that is the paradox of help discourse: though authority is based on affiliation with the readers, advice works by separating from them. on the one hand, are women who are “stuck,” and on the other are the exhortations to act against this. but would not taking the advice be proof that women readers are too stuck to figure it out by themselves? this contradiction means that women always need to see their career choices as faulty and alter “their mindsets, actions, and approaches to work” (lanier & dupree fine, 2018, p.17). further research might want to consider how the technology of advice in various interactional settings might deviate from its promise. references ahl h. 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(2017). mobilizing master narratives through categorical narratives and categorical statements when default identities are at stake. discourse & communication, 11(2), 179-198. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481317691867 vasilyeva, a. l., robles, j., saludadez, j., schwagerl, c. & castor, t. (2020). the variety of (more or less) authority. in n. bencherki, f. matte, & f. cooren (eds.), authority and power in social interaction: methods and analysis (pp. 57-76). routledge. women’s leadership program online (n.d). yale school of management. retrieved april 16, 2022, from https://som.yale.edu/executive-education/forindividuals/leadership/womens-leadership-program volume 41, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, and brad bizzell assistant editor: jordan donop 90 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 advancing women in leadership vol. 41, 89-102, 2022 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper promoting diverse leadership: an examination of professional experiences and career advancement perceptions of black women in higher education delisa johnson and peggy delmas delisa johnson: director of prospective student programs and new student orientation, university of south alabama, dpjohnson@southalabama.edu peggy delmas: assistant professor, leadership & teacher education, university of south alabama, pdelmas@southalabama.edu accepted september 12, 2022 the professional experiences and career advancement perceptions of black, female, higher education professionals were examined in an effort to obtain qualitative and quantitative data that could positively impact practice and policy in higher education leadership. data were collected using a mixed questionnaire that included survey items, open-ended questions, and demographic inquiries. one-way analysis of variance (anovas) was conducted to assess the difference in mean perception career advancement scores based on participants’ professional classification, highest level of education, and years of professional experience. no statistically significant differences (p > .05) were found. the lack of differences across demographics indicates that black, female, higher education professionals have similar perceptions of career advancement, regardless of professional classification, education achieved, or years of experience. keywords: african american women, authentic leadership, senior administrator according to the american college president study, the demographic trend of the average college president has not changed much in decades and position holders continue to be white men in their early sixties (stripling, 2017). furthermore, out of the 1,546 college leaders nationwide who participated in the study, 1,283 were white and 1,082 were men (stripling, 2017). while some progress has been made, black, female, higher education professionals are still underrepresented in postsecondary senior-level leadership, particularly at predominantly white institutions (pwis). white men and women made up over 80% of university and college presidency seats, while women of color collectively accounted for 5% of college presidents, and black men and women combined made up 8% (gagliardi, espinosa, turk, & taylor, 2017). in 2014, black students made up 14% of undergraduate enrollment and 14% of post-baccalaureate enrollment at degree-granting institutions in the united states (u.s.). of the black undergraduates and post-baccalaureate students, 62% and 70% were women, respectively (musu-gillette et al., 2017). this data reveals a disparity in diverse leadership in higher education. the presence of black women in top-tier leadership is not readily visible in american higher education and, in many cases, the racial makeup of the university is not reflected in highranking positions. on a college campus, human diversity can enhance student learning outcomes and institutional efficacy (smith & schonfeld, 2000). furthermore, sherbin and rashid (2017) asserted that diversity and inclusion are a basis for competitive advantage, innovation, and organizational progression. identifying the perceptions of black women, in regard to barriers, aspirations, professional growth, and representation, could guide efforts towards the understanding and eventual elimination of underrepresentation, which could lead to other benefits surrounding diversity. black women are the largest dually minority group in the united states. examining this group, minority by gender and race, could result in major impact for women of color and benefit smaller, female, minority groups. the purpose of this study was to examine the professional experiences of black women in higher education, including their perceived professional growth opportunities and perceived barriers to career advancement. participants’ responses revealed specific, perceived causes or reasons for the poor reflection of black women in upper administrative roles in higher education. additionally, we examined the ways in which black women in postsecondary education view gender and race representation and their perceptions of career advancement. responses provided details negative perceptions in this area as well. therefore, the goal of this study was to examine black, female, higher education professionals’ experiences and perceptions of career advancement opportunities and views of leadership representation in senior-level, university administration by collecting date related to the following research questions: mailto:dpjohnson@southalabama.edu mailto:pdelmas@southalabama.edu 91 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 1. what are the perceptions of career advancement among black, female professionals who are employed at colleges and universities? a. how do the perceptions differ between respondent groups? 2. what are the career advancement related experiences among black, female, higher education professionals? a. what barriers are black women currently experiencing as employees at colleges and universities? b. what aspirations or professional growth plans do black women have as employees at institutions of higher education? 3. what perceptions do black women have regarding the representation of black women in senior-level administrative roles at colleges and universities? the data collection method to be used for this study was a survey, which included closed-ended items that require scaled responses and open-ended questions that aim to provide rich data to inform the scaled survey responses. results may assist leaders and organizations in identifying needs related to diversifying senior-level administration, inclusive of black women. findings may guide methods to diversify leadership in higher education, which might allow black women to be appropriately represented in top-tier leadership, especially at pwis, in ways that are more reflective of the university’s population. furthermore, significant findings could have greater societal outcomes for black women and leadership at universities where underrepresentation is an issue. literature review according to wolfe and dilworth (2015), there is a shortage in literature regarding the representation of african american administrators in higher education and their experiences as employees within pwis. furthermore, researchers who have produced research studies and national reports have confirmed that a majority of senior-level administrators, specifically college presidents, are middle-aged, white men (stripling, 2017). according to the american college president study 2017, 58% of college presidents were over the age of 60, 83% were white, and 70% were male in 2016 (gagliardi et al., 2017). this racial and gender disparity has been in place since the establishment of higher education in the united states. in the 17th century (stripling, 2017). additionally, there is a paucity of literature on african american, female college leaders and their professional development or career advancement in higher education, as the literature often focuses on white men, women, or people of color in a generalized manner rather than focusing on black women specifically (davis & maldonado, 2015; wolfe & dilworth, 2015). in her foundational work, demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics, crenshaw (1989) offered a black feminist critique of doctrine, theory, and politics; she presented issues that marginalized black women by not acknowledging their experiences as both black and female, which does not value intersectionality. crenshaw discussed how feminist theory and politics originated from the context of white women and does not speak for or to black women, and how antiracist politics do not acknowledge the compounded nature of being black and female. crenshaw demonstrated through court cases a discord between justice for black, female plaintiffs and the understanding of the black and female experience. crenshaw identified a single-axis analysis as problematic in understanding the experiences of black women and suggested that society embrace the intersection between race and sex to facilitate inclusion, improve antidiscrimination efforts, and understand the multidimensional experiences of black women. davis and maldonado (2015) claimed that research on the impact of intersectionality, where race and gender cross, on african american women’s professional development as university leaders has not been adequately examined. they proposed that a framework is needed to understand the black, female experience and a reference point is needed to identify and eradicate cultural obstacles that may hinder their career advancement. furthermore, the researchers reported that the results from the 2012 american college president study highlighted the need for more minority women in collegiate leadership positions and revealed barriers faced by black women. (davis & maldonado, 2015). the 2017 american college president study reported that new leadership trends are occurring slowly, as percentages for women and minorities have increased by four points since 2011 (sesay, 2017). recent works, such as research conducted by gagliardi et al. (2017), davis and maldonado (2015), and wolfe and dilworth (2015), suggested that there are opportunities for more diversity in higher education leadership. they also suggested that there are gaps in literature concerning black women in academia, opportunities for exploration of new research and data, and discussions that can be expanded to include black, female, higher education professionals. data show some improvement in the area of diversified leadership, but progress is slow, as college presidencies are still overwhelmingly white (sesay, 2017; stripling, 2017). the number of female and minority candidates who are qualified for these positions has grown as the number of women and people of color who have earned advanced degrees has grown (wallace, budden, juban, & budden, 2014). growing diversity in employee and student populations continues to be a major topic in higher education as evidenced by current articles in popular higher education publications, such as the chronicle of higher education, insider higher ed, and academic journals that focus on equity and diversity. in order to more fully understand the leadership culture in u. s. higher education, as well as the black woman’s place therein, it would be reasonable to examine the history of higher education in the united states, the culture of patriarchy in american higher 92 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 education, and the history of black women in education and the workforce. it is also important to note the peculiar connection and disparity between white men, who are currently in the majority as leaders in higher education, and their african american female counterparts, who are not well-represented in senior-level administration. from the inception of u. s. higher education in the 1600s to present-day, the position of president at pwis has been held primarily by white men. additionally, these men have held positions as the majority population, which some would claim includes authority, perceived superiority, power, and favorable bias in the role of academic leadership (blain, 2017; marcus, 2017; stripling, 2017). these benefits, as they may apply to white men, suggest that women and people of color are at a disadvantage in pursuit of senior-level leadership at institutions of higher education. barriers such as patriarchy and the glass ceiling are concepts that often position men as the leaders or portend to hinder women’s progress and increasingly impede progress for women of color (beckwith, carter, & peters, 2016; hooks, 2004). while women have had obstacles to overcome because of their gender, and black men have faced similar barriers related to race, black women have experienced the difficulties encountered by both groups. for this reason, black women in the u.s. have a unique narrative with added layers of complexity. this narrative includes the use of african american women as slaves and domestic servants, women’s suffrage and the women’s rights movement, the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 60s, and present-day lobbying and protesting in social justice movements such as black lives matter and #metoo. in u. s. academia, black women have been subject to additional challenges, from the prohibition of education during slavery to the current underrepresentation of african american women in higher education tenured faculty and leadership positions (johnson, 2017). theoretical framework lederman and lederman (2015) stated that although research was conducted prior to the development of now well-known and widely used theories, all scholarly works of today, regardless of the methodology used, need cogent theoretical frameworks to explain the significance of the studies. additionally, grant and osanloo (2016) claimed that as researchers prepare their dissertations, the theoretical framework serves as a blueprint for the work, which guides and supports the study. it also provides structure and defines the researcher’s logical, procedural, and analytical approach. therefore, to support research regarding the underrepresentation of african american women in seniorlevel administrative roles in postsecondary pwis in the united states, the researcher chose critical race theory (crt), social dominance theory (sdt), and black feminist theory with black feminist thought. these theories, collectively, were used to justify the study’s importance and act as a guide to better address and understand the subject matter. critical race theory critical race theory was founded in the 1980s by derrick bell, who revealed the law’s failure to deliver racial justice following brown v. board of education and provided a lens for studying inequality in legal studies (dixson & rousseau, 2005). in 1995, ladson-billings and tate applied crt to education as a framing tool designed to challenge racial inequalities, but it was first used in american law schools to address critical legal studies’ failures to account for the experiences of the racially-oppressed (gasman, abiola, & travers, 2015; patton, 2016; wolfe & dilworth, 2015; yosso, parker, solorzano, & lynn, 2004). crt is a theoretical framework guided by principles that can be used to study and argue the influence that race and racial discrimination have on educational constructions, systems, and dialogues (yosso et al., 2004). mccoy and rodricks (2015) defined crt as: a form of oppositional scholarship that centers race and racism while challenging the eurocentric values established as the accepted norm in the united states; is used to examine the unequal and unjust distribution of power and resources politically, economically, racially, and socially; a movement of scholars committed to challenging and disrupting racism and other forms of oppression; composed of the following key tenets: the permanence of racism, experiential knowledge, interest convergence theory, intersectionality, whiteness as property, the critique of liberalism, and commitment to social justice. (p. 91) furthermore, mccoy and rodricks (2015) asserted that postsecondary institutions are white structures that favor white norms. patton, mcewen, rendon, and howard-hamilton (2007) claimed that the underrepresentation of racial minorities in university leadership is an instance of crt and reveals that racial minorities have less status and power than the dominant race. yosso et al. (2004) identified genealogy and influences of crt in education and presented a gap between praxis, practice that is informed by theory, and theory; but also, the connections that all of the subjects have in relation to one another, particularly studies of ethnicity, women, and multiculturalism, relative to this research problem. it is also important to note that while crt points to race and racism as the core ideas to be examined, it also acknowledges how other scholarly practices and studies contribute to the framework. crt concurrently acknowledges that additional oppressive beliefs, particularly sexism in this case, are joined to explain the systemic conditions of a person’s existence. rationalizing the idea of multiple oppressions as a condition is complex and should not be generalized (mccoy & rodricks, 2015; yosso et al., 2004). crt encourages people of color to share their stories to combat the oppressive narrative of the dominant culture (ladsonbillings & tate, 1995; martinez, 2014). to the contrary, a perpetuation of negativity projected onto the minority by the 93 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 majority may be a factor that leads to underrepresentation in senior-level administrative roles in u. s. higher education (gasman et al., 2015). crt calls for a “rejection of liberalism, meritocracy, colorblindness, neutrality, and objectivity—these notions reinforce the self-interest of whites in the position of power” and failure to reject such ideas indicates a disregard for the minority’s narrative (gasman et al., 2015, p. 4); ultimately, the acceptance of such ideas will not benefit the majority or address the issues related to racial discrimination (mccoy & rodricks, 2015). social dominance theory social dominance theory was introduced in the 1990s by sidanius and pratto as a way to study societal structure. more recently, sidanius and pratto (2011) offered this statement as part of an overview of sdt: stated most simply, social dominance theory (sdt) argues that intergroup oppression, discrimination, and prejudice are the means by which human societies organize themselves as group-based hierarchies, in which members of dominant groups secure a disproportionate share of the good things in life (e.g., powerful roles, good housing, good health), and members of subordinate groups receive a disproportionate share of the bad things in life (e.g., relatively poor housing and poor health). (p. 1) furthermore, the classifications for sdt are age, gender, or patriarchal and arbitrary-set systems. the age system indicates that adults have power over children, while the patriarchal system indicates that men have more power than women. this power can be social, political, military, or economic (sidanius, cotterill, sheehy-skeffington, kteily, & carvacho, 2016; sidanius & pratto, 2011). race might be arbitrarily assigned as a system that implies that a dominant group has power over another, and myths that legitimize the oppression work to normalize the inequality (sidanius & pratto, 2011). for example, using this system in conjunction with the understanding of america’s historical context as it relates to racism, the inference could be made that whites retain a disproportionate and greater amount of power and possessions than blacks. this explanation of systems offers a lens for studying the underrepresentation of african american women in senior-level leadership roles in u. s. pwis. considering these systems as part of society-imposed, group-based hierarchies, it would appear that young, african american, female candidates would be considered last for these positions, be paid less than white professionals and black, male professionals as well. furthermore, this societal organization uses group-based ideologies that promote hierarchy to rationalize the disparities, which places marginalized groups at a greater disadvantage (sidanius & pratto, 2011). sidanius and pratto (2011) identified system-wide, intergroup, and person levels of sdt and the relationships between concepts within the theory. it is important to note that on the personal level, social dominance orientation (sdo) concerns a person’s desire for their group to dominate another. however, if a person who is in an outgroup has a high level of sdo, they would prefer that the hierarchy and structure remain the same, which promotes oppression (sidanius et al., 2016). this statement suggests that a person who prefers hierarchy is willing to support hierarchical rule—even if they are not in the dominant group— and face inequalities, rather than challenge the status quo. in contrast, a subordinate group member with a low level of sdo will advocate for change and resist discriminatory or hierarchical policies. sdt has been applied to many domains and has been used at length to study organizational behavior in the workplace, as well as prejudice and discrimination (sidanius et al., 2016). because of its previous application, this theory is fitting to use to identify inequities as the underrepresentation of black women in seniorlevel leadership at pwis is being examined. the inequities could be products of sdo, hierarchy, legitimizing myths, social institutions, social context, group behavior, or discrimination that sidanius et al. (2016) have studied. black feminist theory and black feminist thought black feminist theory is a by-product of feminism, which encompasses white women, and black women’s studies, which is inclusive of black women (hooks, 1989). black feminist theory acknowledges the challenges of being both black and a woman, asserting that race and gender cannot be isolated entities and that the oppressions are compounded (hooks, 1989; 2000). davis and maldonado (2015) claimed that “african american women may have different experiences of power, growth, and development compared to other women,” and “black feminist theory provides african american women the opportunity to speak from an experience unbeknownst to other women” (p. 53). it is this ideology that recognizes the differences among black women and between black women and other groups. it also supports the significance of studies specific to black women and their experiences and perceptions. black feminist theory is rooted in black feminist thought, as it is the responsibility of black, female scholars to construct theories about the experience of being a black woman that will explain black women’s perspectives (collins, 1986). furthermore, as a critical social theory, the objective of black feminist thought is to support efforts against the oppressions of being black and being female that overlap (collins, 2000). collins (1986), the architect of black feminist thought, identified three key themes. first, black women’s self-definition and self-valuation involves self-empowerment. the interlocking nature of oppression is the second theme, which deals with the black woman’s opposition to persecution due to race, class, and gender. lastly, the importance of african american women’s culture is recognized and used to combat discrimination. in 2000, collins (2000) broadened the concept by introducing additional core themes that are often issues of concern for women in the workplace and 94 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 society, such as sexual politics, love relationships, motherhood, and activism, which are important pieces of the theory. relevant theories there are a number of theories used to better understand the unique experiences of minorities in the workplace and various leadership theories that relate to diversity. for example, some scholars recommend using miller and stiver’s relational-cultural theory model—which focuses on mutual engagement, empathy, and empowerment—to understand the experiences of black, female faculty members at pwis (edwards, bryant, & clark, 2008). edwards et al. (2008) offered a different theory, kanter’s (1993) theory of proportional representation, to understand the minority experience in groups. this theory suggests that the minority experience differs based on the group’s structure and composition. with regard to diversity in academic leadership, page (2003) asserted that leaders will accept their responsibility to serve the well-represented in addition to the underrepresented populations of the institution, if a university maintains the ideal that leadership must mirror its population’s make-up and make role models available for others in leadership positions. these are just a few theories that can be used to better understand the links between the experiences of minorities, diversity, and leadership. gardner, barrett, and pearson (2014) used a conceptual framework that focuses on adjustment issues, institutional factors, career dynamics, and career outcomes to examine the barriers and enablers of career success for african american administrators at pwis. the four minority women who shared their experiences in this qualitative study were quoted on topics of mentoring relationships, commitment to diversity, discrimination, perceptions of prejudice, social networks and family support, and healthy self-image and motivation. claiming to be the first to employ the tenets and procedures of consensual qualitative research (cqr), the authors reported that the use of cqr’s constructivist approach resulted in the selection of “successful” participants to interview for the purpose of their study. gardner et al. (2014) suggested that placing more emphasis on supportive structures and eradicating barriers of career success at pwis might improve chances for african american student affairs administrators to achieve success in their professions. rosette, leonardelli, and phillips (2008) examined whether race is recognized as a characteristic of the leader archetype. the researchers utilized leadership categorization theory and collected evidence supporting their projection that race, particularly being white, is an attribute of the leadership prototype. additionally, they investigated whether this finding could describe the variances in assessments of white and minority leaders. evidence from this part of the study found that white leaders were more favored in evaluations than african american leaders, which contributes positively to their opportunities for advancement over the non-prototypical leaders. this study included four experiments and concluded that "transparent barriers likely persist that prevent racial minorities from rising to the most esteemed positions of leadership in corporate environments” (rosette et al., 2008, p. 773). these studies support the concept that white men are the prototype for leadership, which contributes to the underrepresentation and advancement issues of other minority groups, specifically african american women. methods to obtain findings that could address the problem of practice, wherein black women are underrepresented as senior-level professionals at pwis, the first author conducted an embedded mixed methods study to pursue answers to the research questions. research study participants—black, female professionals who worked at american postsecondary institutions—completed coleman’s african american student affairs administrators survey about their perceptions of career advancement in higher education, resulting in quantitative data, and provided demographic and background information related to the study. open-ended questions were presented to participants as well to further address participants’ perceptions regarding career advancement, thoughts surrounding black, female representation in senior-level leadership, and career goals in higher education. this qualitative analysis gave the researcher and participants an opportunity to partner in a research process aimed to respond to a social problem that impacts a underrepresented group in an effort to identify contributing factors and possible resolutions. research design this study was conducted using a mixed methods design, specifically an embedded design. an embedded design is used when there is a need for one set of data to be supported by another, such as this study, which was largely quantitative with the qualitative data taking a supporting role in the larger design (creswell & creswell, 2018). this instrument design was a mixed questionnaire, “a questionnaire that includes a mixture of open-ended and closed-ended items,” with scaled items and open-ended discussion questions (johnson & christensen, 2014, p.199). trends found in the survey responses (the quantitative component) were explained, opposed, or further explored through the open-ended questions (the qualitative component) to better understand the findings from the survey, or vice versa. qualitative and quantitative data were collected, maintained, and analyzed electronically. the interpretations of the responses from both methods were used to answer the research questions and address gaps in the literature. additionally, the first author engaged in reflective journaling was employed in the research process which strengthened the methodology by making the author’s experiences and thoughts visible (ortlipp, 2008). quantitative reliability and validity coleman (2002) used this survey to examine 27 factors of career advancement related to black, female administrators in 95 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 alabama. belk (2006) used a revised version of the same survey to study the “impact of gender, institutional characteristics, years of professional experience in higher education, and highest earned degree on perceptions of career advancement factors held by mid-level black female and male student affairs administrators” (p. ix). coleman reported that the final version of the african american student affairs administrators survey was reliable with an item-to-total correlation range of 0.317 to 0.808, cronbach alpha of 0.93, and standard error of measurement of 3.85. coleman also reported satisfactory content validity for this instrument. qualitative reliability and validity after qualitative data were collected, the extent to which results were plausible, credible, consistent, and trustworthy was determined though verification strategies. these strategies included ensuring coherence between the research question and components of the method, utilizing an appropriate sample, collecting and analyzing data concurrently, thinking theoretically, and moving between a micro-perspective of the data and a macro-conceptual/theoretical understanding (morse, barrett, mayan, olson, & spiers, 2002). in addition, open-ended questions were reviewed by the researcher’s committee chair and peers to ensure that appropriate standards were met. by doing so, the researcher employed two of creswell’s (2013) recommended validation strategies, enabling external audits and involving peer reviewers, to ensure validity and that the survey remained consistent throughout the study to ensure reliability. validation is necessary, as the qualitative data from the openended questions were used to support the quantitative data revealed by the survey responses for a more nuanced view of the findings. participants individuals who were identified as potential participants by their association with groups of higher education professionals or black women were contacted for participation. upon closing the data collection portion of the study, 110 submissions were received from self-reported black, female, higher education professionals who are or were employed in higher education roles in the united states participated in this study by completing the electronically distributed survey in the setting of their choosing. fully or partially submitted responses to the survey were included. some participants worked in senior administrative roles at their institutions, while others did not. with regard to age, 80.9% of participants were 19-50 years of age and 11.8% were over 50 years old. approximately seven percent did not indicate age or respond to any of the items on the survey. most participants reported employment, current or previous, at a pwi versus a minority serving institution, public versus private institution, and four-year versus two-year institution. while job titles varied significantly from support staff to deans, 11.8% of participants self-identified as seniorlevel, 47.3% identified as mid-level, 16.4% as entry-level, and 1.8% as other (see table 1). of those who responded to the professional classification questionnaire item, eight identified as senior-level administrators at pwis. table 1 professional classification of research participants over 20% of respondents reported a terminal degree as their highest level of education and less than 2% reported holding an associate’s or high school diploma as their highest level of education (see table 2). thirty-three percent of participants had less than five years of professional experience in higher education, 23.6% had five to 10 years of experience, and 20% had more than 10 years of experience (see table 3). table 2 highest level of education of research participants selection was based on participants’ availability and willingness to provide feedback, as well as viability of the contacts provided by organizations and through various networks. therefore, participants were from different institutions, regions, academic backgrounds, etc. the rationale that drove the invitation of participants was to identify those who were most likely to provide rich data. therefore, the sample consisted of those who self-reported as the target group of the research study (i.e., black, female, higher education professionals). rich data could introduce themes associated with leadership in higher education and the participants’ perceptions of career advancement opportunities for black, female employees. with this goal in mind, the first author sent approximately 80 direct emails inviting people to complete and/or share the survey link for this study. additionally, the first author asked seven groups to share the invitation with their members. participants, who were invited and subsequently participated, were members of national, state, and local professional organizations that focused on higher education, diversity, and women in the academy. the first author also invited members of informal groups and other organizations, whose membership primarily consisted of female professionals and higher education professionals, to participate as well. the invitation encouraged recipients to share the survey link with other potential participants. 96 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 role of the researcher the first author conducted this study for her dissertation with support from the second author, a member of the dissertation committee. the researcher (first author) attempted to minimize personal influence on the study by communicating with participants through electronic means, rather than in person. coleman’s african american student affairs administrators survey was delivered electronically with minimal interaction between the researcher and the participants. the researcher remained unbiased in data collection by using all responses submitted and reported unmanipulated findings relative to the established research questions. the researcher acknowledged the influence that her own social, political, and religious views, as well as her personal and professional experiences as a black female, could have on her perception of the participants and data interpretation. therefore, the researcher employed reflexivity to maintain self-awareness and positionality to maintain objectivity in her thinking and interpretation process. additionally, reflective journaling was employed in the research process which strengthened the methodology by making the researcher’s experiences and thoughts visible (ortlipp, 2008). researcher context at the time of the study, the first author was a doctoral student and the second author was faculty and a member of the first author’s dissertation committee with extensive experience in mixed methods research. this manuscript is a result of collaboration between the first author, who is now a director for incoming and prospective student programs in higher education, and the second author who is a current faculty member in higher education. the first author has an interest in diversity in leadership, professional development and retention, and university advancement. the second author’s research interests involve gender and leadership in higher education and issues of social justice. this collaboration was the result of a shared desire to make known the issues faced by those who are underrepresented. bourke (2014) asserted that “our own biases shape the research process, serving as checkpoints along the way” (p. 1). with positionality in mind, the female authors made intentional efforts to identify their biases and approach the research in a way that would unbiasedly address the needs of the group being examined. procedures and data collection the researcher obtained permission from the university’s institutional board (irb) to execute the procedures as outlined below. with the proper permission, the african american student affairs administrators survey (coleman, 2002) was used to assess the perceptions of career advancement for african american women in higher education. next, the survey instrument was administered using qualtrics survey software, an online survey tool, which provided an anonymous link via an emailed invitation to participate. the researcher took the following steps to obtain participants: 1. participant contacts were acquired from various professional and social organizations and collegial networks, in an effort to obtain data related to the research questions. 2. potential participants received an electronic invitation letter to participate from the researcher directly or indirectly. 3. an informed consent form was provided prior to the survey to all participants. 4. the survey was linked to the consent form and distributed electronically to black, female, higher education professionals and affiliated groups nationwide. numerical values were assigned to the participants’ responses that reflected negative or positive perceptions for the scaled items. the scaled responses were evaluated for trends, using a one-way analysis of variance (anova), and analyzed to determine statistical significance. the open-ended questions were presented to participants in an effort to collect qualitative data regarding the professional experiences and perceptions of career advancement among african american women in higher education who are or have been employed at colleges and universities in the united states. six weeks following the initial distribution of the survey, responses were coded and analyzed to identify themes. to ensure accuracy, electronic data collection was not altered, and the researcher-maintained access. to ensure confidentiality, data were saved electronically on the researcher’s computer and secured with password protection. any data that specifically revealed the identity of a respondent or institution were destroyed upon conclusion of the study. data analysis data were analyzed using the statistical package for the social sciences (spss; version 26.0; ibm corporation, armonk, ny). descriptive statistics were used to provide an analysis of response frequencies and to discover trends in reported experiences and perceptions. one-way analysis of variance (anova) was utilized to evaluate differences among participant mean career advancement perception scores based upon professional classification (senior level, mid-level, entry level, and other); highest level of education (high school, bachelor degree, master’s degree, educational specialist, doctorate, and other); and years of professional experience (less than 1 year, 1 to 3 years, 3 to 5 years, 5 to 7 years, 7 to 10 years, 10 to 15 years, and more than 15 years). if the overall f test was significant, follow-up tests using fisher’s least significant difference (lsd) were conducted to evaluate pairwise differences among the means. the alpha was set as a = .05. values coding was utilized to conduct an analysis of the qualitative data, responses to the open-ended questions, that reflected participants’ values, attitudes, and belief. according to saldaña (2013), “a belief is part of a system that includes our values and attitudes, plus our personal knowledge, experiences, opinions, prejudices, morals, and other interpretive perceptions 97 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 of the social world (p. 111). therefore, this application was fitting for examining the perceptions and experiences of black, female, higher education professionals. data was categorized under the value coding premise and themes were identified. quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed in tandem to determine commonalities and provide a richer picture of lived experiences. limitations potential limitations included a lack of external incentives from the researcher to encourage individuals to participate, and the absence of repercussions for partial or no participation. also, the study’s findings were dependent on the participants’ choices to answer the survey items honestly and in compliance with the instructions. some participants may have chosen to respond to all of the items, while others may have responded to some or none of the items. those who responded to none were not counted in the submission count and very few skipped items, possibly by choice or in error. it is possible that a number of participants acted under participant bias, providing answers that they believe the researcher desires or will find favorable, while others may have hidden their true answers for fear of being judged or providing unfavorable responses. some participants may have also intentionally or unintentionally not followed the given instructions for the questionnaire. all of these scenarios presented potential limitations. findings this analysis confirmed findings that have already been reported in academic literature and introduces new ideas for further research. data findings were as follows: rq 1: what are the perceptions of career advancement among black, female professionals who are employed at colleges and universities? lower scores (scores close to one in numerical value) in response to the survey’s scaled items reflected more agreement with the statement. with regard to degree attainment and experience, participants agreed (m = 1.33) most strongly with the following statement: experience, in addition to a master’s degree, is necessary for african american, female, college/university employees to advance their careers. they were less agreeable to the statements that referred to a master’s without experience or a doctorate with experience as a necessity for career advancement. participants also strongly agreed (m = 1.33), signified by low scorings, that networking opportunities for black, female, higher education professionals are lacking in higher education settings. participants agreed (m = 1.67) that they must work twice as hard as others to be considered competent. with regard to the standards that black, college professionals are held to, participants strongly agreed (m = 1.67) that they are held to a higher standard than white, male employees, but even more so than white, female employees (m = 1.33). participants disagreed (m = 3.33), denoted by fairly high scorings, that they are often held to a higher performance standard than african american, male employees. the only other item with a mean of 3.33, the highest level disagreement reported on this scale, involved organizational culture. for this item, participants strongly disagreed (m = 3.33) with the following statement: as an african american, female, college/university employee, i think that on the whole, i have an unclear understanding of the organizational culture in which i work. these data suggest the perception of racial discrimination is greater than that of gender-based discrimination, which is part of an understood organizational culture. in such a culture, black women must work harder to be considered competent and are held to a higher standard than white men and an even higher standard in comparison to white women, but not in comparison to black men. one participant reported the following: i do not believe african american women are well represented in senior level administration. i believe based on experiences i have had that we are often ignored in respect to our professional work ethic due to either being [b]lack or female or both. we are often however the ‘go to’ for all things work. this participant’s beliefs encompass a perceived unfair standard, bias, and lack of representation that she attributes to her race and gender. 1a: how do the perceptions differ between respondent groups? the researcher found no statistically significant differences among participant mean career advancement perception scores based on professional classification, f(3, 81) = .234, p = .872, see table 1; highest level of education, f(8, 101) = .290 , p =.968, see table 2; or years of professional experience, f(6, 78) = 1.311 , p = .262, see table 3. the lack of differences across demographics suggested that black, female, higher education professionals have similar perceptions of career advancement, regardless of professional classification, education achieved, or years of professional experience. rq 2: what are the career-advancement-related experiences among black, female, higher education professionals? participants revealed career-advancement-related experiences that supported the presence of inequality/inequity and a lack of opportunities to grow and advance in the field of higher education (see table 4). ultimately, the themes that appeared in all of the inquiries under the second research question suggested discrimination. table 4 research questions and emerging themes in the research data 98 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 2a: what barriers are black women currently experiencing as employees at colleges and universities? barriers to career advancement reported by respondents included, but were not limited to, the following: passed over or overlooked for promotion and lack of advancement opportunities, identity taxation, unfair or unequal pay, lack of professional development, and exclusion or dismissal (see table 4). participants reported cases wherein black women were suitable candidates for jobs that were awarded to white women or men who were less suitable, and cases wherein the participants’ environments were not inclusive. one participant stated, “several times my white male supervisors have told me that there wasn’t an opportunity for me to advance and then opportunities were given to underqualified white men.” this scenario shared by the participant suggests that black women have been denied opportunities for promotion and advancement opportunities, which have instead been offered to white men who are less qualified. other participants referenced identity taxation as they recalled being the “go-to” person and receiving “all of the students of color assignments.” 2b: what aspirations or professional growth plans do black women have as employees at institutions of higher education? themes that surfaced during this study regarding the aspirations of advancement in higher education were self-improvement, self-promotion, and influence/impact for the next generation (see table 4). one participant stated, “yes, i’d like to be a role model for others and break barriers for other black females that come after me.” other participants reported the need to better themselves, prove themselves, and be role models for others. those who reported no interest in advancing in higher education, which accounted for approximately one fourth of the total respondents, identified politics and family as reasons to maintain or change current positions. another participant stated, “i do not feel there is space for me at my current pwi to fully be seen, valued, included, and heard.” these negative experiences can adversely affect the future of diversity and the representation of black women in higher education. rq3: what perceptions do black women have regarding the representation of black women in senior-level administrative roles at colleges and universities? qualitative data revealed that over 90% of the respondents disagreed with the belief that african american women are wellrepresented in senior-level administration at pwis in the united states. reasons included, but were not limited to, lack of mentorship or sponsorship, biased networks and discrimination, and lack of value with regard to african american women and/or diversity (see table 4). several participants mentioned that care-taking roles, family, values, inability to relocate, and other reasons might keep women, and specifically black women, from applying or being hired for senior-level leadership roles. however, the overwhelming majority pointed to bias as the reason for their perceived underrepresentation in senior-level leadership. participants’ responses included words and phrases such as discrimination, subject to the bias of those above us, stereotypes, inequalities, unfair, and systematic prejudices. additionally, some participants explained that there are token or symbolic roles for which african american, female, higher education professionals are often hired in senior-level positions; these include being leaders of diversity, inclusion, or multicultural offices, or they have leadership titles but no real power or influence (see table 4). discussion research findings revealed that the data presented is in alignment with the literature relevant to this research study and lends itself to follow-up research to obtain a deeper understanding of the black, female experience and perception as a higher education professional and aspiring leader. research question 1 rq1 addressed the career-advancement perceptions of participants per their scaled responses to various items within the survey. responses were primarily negative, as evident by the low means indicating strong agreement for statements that suggest a presence of inequity and discrimination, which aligns with reports in current literature. there was no statistical significance between groups as related to rq1. respondents strongly agreed that experience and education, specifically a master’s degree, is vital to career ascension and that opportunities for black, female, college professionals to network are lacking. another noteworthy finding presented in the data is that participants agreed (m = 1.67) that they must work twice as hard as others to be considered competent. heilman et al. (2015) discussed lack of fit and gender bias in their article about career recruitment and selection, wherein they stated that female job applicants and candidates who benefit from affirmative-action initiatives—black women are members of these populations—are presumed to be incompetent. this belief alludes to bias and discrimination and is supported by data. with regard to the standards that black college professionals are held to, participants strongly agreed (m = 1.67) that they are held to a higher standard than white, male 99 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 employees and agreed more strongly with the idea when compared to white, female employees (m = 1.33). the researcher found that white employees are considered prototypical leaders and, therefore, are evaluated more favourably in comparison to african american employees (rosette et al., 2008). these findings support the participants’ belief that a higher, and possibly exclusionary, standard exists. finally, participants disagreed (m = 3.33) that they are often held to a higher performance standard than the african american male employee. these findings suggest that the perception of racial discrimination is greater than that of gender-based discrimination and reveal evidence of intersectionality’s effect— the impact of an individual’s lived experience as a minority by gender and race concurrently—on black, female, higher education professionals. this effect postulates that black individuals are held to a higher standard or must outperform than their white peers, and that black women may also feel subject to superfluous standards because they are women and, therefore, must perform better than white women if they want to advance their careers. research question 2 rq2 addressed barriers to career advancement and aspirations or growth plans. data collected for rq2a supported the data collected for rq1. respondents reported concerns that included being passed over or overlooked for promotion, lack of advancement opportunities, experiencing identity taxation, unfair or unequal pay, a lack of professional development opportunities, and exclusion or dismissal within their organizations. the aforementioned concerns, glass ceiling and occupational barriers due to gender or racial bias issues, were addressed in various works by scholars such as davis and maldonado (2015), hill et al. (2016), johnson (2017), hirshfield and joseph (2012), and yoshino and smith (2013). the barriers’ presence in the data supports current literature’s claims, which sets black, female, higher education professionals at a disadvantage due to stereotypes, bias, and discrimination. the frequency at which these barriers appear in the data also suggests that this group shares commonalities within and between their differences and that their work environments are not perceived as places where equality, growth, advancement, and inclusion are present for them. influence or impact for the next generation was a theme that emerged from the responses of the open-ended questions related to the aspirations of advancement in higher education. these findings support authors who have made similar claims, such as hannum et al. (2015), whose minority participants placed value on the presence of role models. research participants have stated that it is important that the next generation of learners, particularly black students or students of color, have the support they need or a role model that looks like them. this idea is the driving force for some black higher education professionals to remain in the field and advance therein. research question 3 rq3 addressed the representation of black, female, senior-level administrators in pwis as perceived by black, female, higher education professionals. like beckwith et al. (2016), participants overwhelmingly agreed that black, female professionals are not well-represented in top-tier leadership at pwis for various reasons. primary explanations included the lack of mentorship/sponsorship as discussed by hill et al. (2016); biased networks and discrimination within organizations as discussed by gardner et al. (2014), davis and maldonado (2015), perrault (2015), and mcdonald (2011); and a lack of value placed on diversity in general and the black, female professional specifically. recommendations for policy and practice the findings of this study are critical in supporting recommendations for policy and practice that eliminate higher education’s discriminatory systems and develop procedures that will facilitate equity and career advancement for black women. networks such as the “good ol’ boys” should be replaced with mentorship and sponsorship programs that are inclusive of black, female professionals as suggested by grant and ghee (2015). hill et al. (2016) asserted sponsorship, not just mentoring, is most beneficial, while davis and maldonado (2015) stated that black women in their study who had sponsors reported professional advancement and development which they attribute to their sponsors. also, attention should be placed on practices involving the recruitment and retention of black, female, higher education professionals as recommended by edwards et al. (2008); additionally, pipelines to leadership and diversity training could aid in such endeavors as suggested by johnson (2017) and gasman et al. (2015). conclusion this study aimed to examine the career advancement perceptions and professional experiences of black, female higher education professionals. a mixed methods embedded design was utilized in an effort to obtain rich data that would inform leadership and address issues related to the underrepresentation of black women in post-secondary, seniorlevel roles. the study’s initial research question sought to identify the perceptions of black, female professionals in higher education by soliciting responses to items on a survey. responses were primarily negative, as evident by the low means indicating strong agreement for statements that suggest a presence of inequity and discrimination, which aligns with reports that can be found in current literature. the research study’s second question aimed to more deeply explore the survey responses from rq1 with open-ended questions that focused on career advancement experiences and perceptions, primarily barriers, aspirations, and development. there was no statistical significance between groups as related to rq1. data collected for rq2a supported the data collected for rq1 with reasoning such as lack of opportunities and exclusion, as 100 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 reported by participants. rq2b sought to identify participants’ career goals and steps for growth in higher education, if any. those who reported aspirations of growth in higher education referenced various reasons why they wanted to ascend as higher education professionals, and named steps to achieving their goals. one primary reason was influence for students. primary steps included networking and relationship building, professional development, and additional experience. the final research question aimed to explore the perceptions of representation by black women regarding black, female, higher education professionals in senior-level administration in pwis. participants overwhelmingly agreed that the representation of black women in top-tier leadership is inadequate and stated reasons such as lack of mentorship and sponsorship as discussed by hill et al. (2016), biased networks and organizational discrimination, and lack of value for diversity and/or black women. to address the negative perceptions and experiences revealed by participants in this study, policy and practice must be reconsidered in most cases. institutions would benefit from efforts by leadership and professionals in higher education to identify and assess programs that intend to facilitate networking, match aspiring leaders with mentors/sponsors, and develop leadership pipelines in higher education for black, female professionals. numerous participant responses referenced such needs, which suggests that there are still opportunities for improvement in the area of diversifying leadership. references beckwith, a. l., carter, d. r., & peters, t. 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(2004). chapter 1: from jim crow to affirmative action and back again: a critical race discussion of racialized rationales and access to higher education. review of research in education, 28(1), 1-25. doi:10.3102/0091732x028001001 advancing women in leadership journal the first online professional, refereed journal for women in leadership editor: dr. genevieve brown editor: dr. beverly j. irby college of education college of education sam houston state university sam houston state university volume 30, number 9 2010 issn 1093-7099 gender equality for learning leadership in undergraduate business schools dr. sabra e. brock abstract some scholars suggest that business schools are failing the challenge of providing 21st century skills and in particular, they are failing women. as a conceptual model of how people can better adapt to change, the lens of transformational learning was used to shed light on whether women are at a disadvantage to men in transformational learning when exposed to the same experiences at undergraduate business school. transformational learning occurs when a student’s worldview is challenged and when the learner moves beyond old assumptions to see things in a new way. in this quantitative study of 256 undergraduate business students, women experienced comparable rates of transformational learning to their male counterparts and reported experiencing the same learning stimuli in personal relations, class room activities, and life events. it would appear that when exposed to the same stimuli, female undergraduate students are not at a disadvantage to male undergraduate students in learning how to be business leaders through transformational learning. key words: undergraduates, business schools, transformational learning, women’s learning citation: brock, s. (2010). gender equality for learning leadership in undergraduate business schools. advancing women in leadership journal, 30(9). retrieved from http://advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_wordpress/ advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 2 introduction the face of the business school is changing, reflecting changes in both education and the workforce, notably in technology, global reach and the proportion of women (jarvis, 2006). business school graduates are future professionals and organization managers; in these roles they will have to “adapt to changing work environments and demands” (o'connor, bronner, & delaney, 2002, p. 5) in a workplace where both men and women are nearly equally represented (wellington, 2001). business school, the traditional means of preparation for a leadership role in a business career, reflects an increased proportion of women (merritt, 2004). women now account for nearly a majority of undergraduate business major graduates, up from 48.6% in 1998 to 49.2% in 2007 (planty, et al., 2009). some writers have suggested that the nearly equal balance of men and women in undergraduate business schools may be a more positive environment for teaching 21st century business leadership skills than a predominance of either because it better emulates the workplace (tanton, 1992; lewis & fagenson, 1995). transformational learning has been shown to be an effective component of leadership among teachers (harris, lowery-moore, & farrow, 2008), in the operating room (mcnaron, 2009), and in executive education (ciporen, 2009). undergraduate college students have been found to demonstrate gender differences in learning styles with women more likely to display listening behaviors and value peers as collaborators, while men show an active approach to learning and to use peers for testing achievement, but these differences may diminish with maturity (baxter magolda, 1992). however, women in mid-career have shown more receptivity to learning elements such as talk and reflection (carter, 2002) and females, in general, may benefit from more social support than males (taylor, klein, lewis, gruenwald, gurung, & updegraff, 2000). undergraduate female students have also indicated less receptivity to learning through competitive activities (gneezy, niederle, & rustichini, 2003), making competition a negative factor insofar as workplace promotion is based on competition (schrage, 2008), and women tend to benefit from a more cooperative atmosphere (mason, 2009). students expect that investment in a business school education will change the way they look at the world, as well as provide the specific capabilities demanded for leadership in an increasingly complex and changing workplace (gammie, 1994). at the same time, the workplace calls on business education to provide capabilities once thought to be more characteristic of women such as teamwork and collaboration (buttner, 2001; gardner & korth, 1998; tschannen-moran, uline, woolfolk hoy, & mackley, 2000), relationship building (gersick, bartunek, & dutton, 2000; rojewski, 2002), as well as communication skills (whetton & cameron, 2006). some scholars have indicated that business schools are failing the challenge of providing 21st century skills (pfeffer & fong, 2001; vinten, 2000), especially in improving interpersonal ability and communication skills (pfeffer & fong, 2001), and in particular failing women (bilimoria, 1999; bilimoria, joy, & liang, 2008; mavin & bryans, 1999). specifically, females are disadvantaged at organizational, faculty, and curricular levels of business schools: (a) an organizational structure that may inculcate habits and practices of inequality like the unconscious advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 3 expectation that males are student council presidents, the assumption of the gendered vocabulary of business, and the belief that equality has been achieved (cavanaugh, 2000); (b) systemic discrimination, artificial performance criteria, and stereotyping for female faculty (orser, 1992); and (c) curricular gaps like the low number of women represented in case studies and few readings by female authors (bilimoria, 1999). to study whether women are still disadvantaged in undergraduate business schools, a particularly promising thread to follow is transformational learning, defined as a theoretical description of the steps learners undergo in changing their world views (mezirow, 1985). from the educator’s perspective, transformational learning occurs when a learner is struck by a new concept or way of thinking and then follows through by making a life change; it can supplement more common types of learning such as acquiring facts or learning new skills (cranton, 2006). numerous learning activities that foster transformational learning have been researched, including personal support activities, classroom assignments, and life events (choy, 2009; king, 2000; merriam & ntseane, 2008; meyers, 2008; taylor e. , 2008). differences in transformational learning between men and women have been reported among traditional-aged college students in qualitative research ( harris, 2002; taylor e., 1997). however, mezirow, the father of transformational learning, never studied gender differences in transformational learning and expressed interest in research pursuing a quantitative measurement of possible gender differences in transformational learning (personal communication february 7, 2006). curricula designed to maximize transformational learning may help undergraduate business students adjust more readily to a fast-changing workplace (wills, 2001). transformational learning theory may shed light on how business schools can adapt to serve these needs in the context of a nearly proportional percentage of male and female students (planty, et al., 2009). therefore, quantitative research was undertaken surveying students, using an instrument validated to measure transformational learning (king, 1998). research questions 1. what is the relationship of gender and the report of transformational learning in undergraduate business school? 2. do male and female undergraduate business school students indicate having the same types of learning experiences? 3. among those reporting transformational learning, what is the relationship between exposure to different types of learning experiences and gender? method this study was conducted during fall, 2005. the population was undergraduates in a large northeastern united states business school. the school has an urban campus located in a large metropolitan area. the school itself is ranked in the top 10 undergraduate business schools in the united states (lavalle, gerdes, jespersen, gloeckler, & symonds, 2006). the study included a survey delivered via a web site. it had 16 questions, covering closed-end questions about 28 different learning activities found in business school, and included advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 4 two open-ended questions asking those who reported transformational learning to describe the experience. the dean of the undergraduate business school recruited students to participate in four editions of the school’s e-newsletter over the fall semester. women, asians, and freshman responded at higher rates than their representation in the population. these factors place limitations on the use of the study findings because these segments may not represent the population’s behaviors and attitudes. however, weighting was performed to balance the sample to their real proportions in the population, and no significant changes in study results were found. the incidence of transformational learning was measured by a “yes” answer to the survey question: “since you have been taking courses at this institution, do you believe you have experienced a situation when you realized that your values, beliefs, opinions or expectations had changed?” positive answers were edited out if the open-ended descriptions of the experience did not confirm to the definition of transformational learning found in the literature. findings a key focus was to examine whether and how students experienced transformational learning in undergraduate business school. the primary research question was, “what is the relationship of the respondent’s gender and the report of transformational learning in undergraduate business school?” a one-tailed chi-square test was used to examine possible differences in reported incidences of transformational learning between the two genders in this undergraduate business school. since previous research indicated that women may be disadvantaged in business school (bilimoria, 1999; cavanaugh, 2000; mavin & bryans, 1999), a one-tailed test was used, predicting lower incidence of transformational learning among women. the outcome of the significance testing was a chi-square value of <.001 and an associated non-significant p of .493. this result suggests that for research question 1 there were no meaningful differences between male and female undergraduate business students in reported incidence of transformational learning in this study. the observed difference was only one percentage point with men reporting transformational learning at the 49.5% rate and women at the 48.5% rate. prior research had raised questions as to whether female students may be at a disadvantage in the business school structure (bilimoria, 1999; cavanaugh, 2000; mavin & bryans, 1999; orser, 1992). another study (king, 2000) had shown no significant difference in the incidence of reported transformational learning between the two genders in evening college classes in her more holistic study. the second research question asked, “do male and female undergraduate business school students indicate experiencing the same types of learning experiences?” two-tailed chisquare tests were applied to each of the 28 different types of learning experiences drawn from the literature as fostering transformational learning or being characteristics of undergraduate business school curricula. examples of these learning experiences are shown in table 1. the results of the testing showed no significant differences in the exposure to these experiences between men and women. t-tests were used to measure whether the variety of experiences were significantly different for male and female students. it was not, with a mean for males of 10.6 different types of learning activities and for females 10.2. in this school, male and female advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 5 students appeared to experience similar learning environments with regard to class assignments, personal support activities, and life events. a third research question posed was, “among those reporting transformational learning, what is the relationship between exposure to different types of learning experiences and gender?” to answer this question, two-tailed chi-square testing between gender and the learning activities reported influencing transformational learning was conducted among respondents indicating transformational learning. three categories of learning activity types, class assignments, personal support, and life events, were examined. more complete descriptions of types of learning activities are shown in tables 1 and 2. to investigate a different relationship in learning activities to the report of transformational learning between genders, a two-tailed chi-square testing was conducted, first among the types of learning activities classified as class assignments. the statistical testing showed no significant relationships between the report of transformational learning and gender for the type of class assignments except for “writing about concerns.” table 1 shows that men were significantly (α = <.05) more likely to say that writing about their concerns fostered transformational learning more than were women. one-tailed significance testing produced the same results. table 1 relationship of influential classroom assignments to transformational learning by gender total = reported transformational learning men n = 46 % women n = 78 % chi-square (with yates correction) p class activity/exercise 31.1 40.0 .719 .338 writing about concerns 20.0↑ 8.8 7.942 .019* personal reflection 15.6 25.0 .650 .361 verbally discussing concerns 13.3 16.3 .001 .999 internship 13.3 10.0 .499 .324 assigned readings 11.8 13.8 .001 .999 term paper/essay 11.1 18.8 2.914 .233 class activity/exercise 11.1 15.0 .001 .999 deep, concentrated thought 8.9 21.8 1.676 .129 prior learning assessment 8.9 7.5 .031 .709 self-evaluation 4.4 8.8 .119 .698 case study 2.2 1.3 .001 .999 lab 2.2 1.3 .001 .999 other class assignments 8.9 2.5 2.050 .080 *difference significant at .05 in two-tailed chi-square test; phi = .413 no significant differences existed between genders in the personal support activities or life events reported influencing transformational learning shown in table 2. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 6 table 2 relationship of influential personal support activities to transformational learning by gender total = reported transformational learning men n = 45 % women n = 80 % chi-square (with yates correction) p support activities: any personal influencer 46.7 37.5 .658 .347 support of classmate 17.8 17.5 .211 .573 support of other student 26.7 25.0 .117 .555 teacher’s challenge 17.8 12.5 .001 .999 teacher’s support 13.3 10.0 .001 .999 support of advisor 4.4 2.5 .001 .999 any life event 33.3 33.7 .001 .999 moving 22.2 25.0 .023 .726 death of loved one 2.2 3.8 .001 .999 parent job change marriage 2.2 2.2 2.5 0.0 .001 .080 .999 .366 birth 2.2 0.0 .091 .357 parent job loss 2.2 0.0 .080 .366 parent retirement 2.2 0.0 .091 .357 other life event 11.1 10.0 .001 .999 additional statistical analysis to answer research question 3 was done via two t-tests to determine the relationship of the incidence of transformational learning and the varieties of different types learning activities reported by both men and women. table 3 displays the results of this analysis. table 3 differences in variety of learning activities reported by gender base = 125 who reported transformational learning advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 7 x # learning activities (range = 0-27) standard deviation x difference levene’s test sig. t p men women 12.22 10.90 7.11 4.44 1.32 .069 1.279 .20 there was no significant difference between men and women in the overall variety of learning activities with men having x of 12.22 (sd=7.11) and women x of 10.90 (sd=4.45). the type 1 error α was .20, outside the .05 set as necessary for statistical significance. conclusions male and female undergraduates who participated in this study reported remarkably similar experiences of transformational learning. this level of reported transformational learning in this study, 48.8%, is midway between the only two other reported incidences of transformational learning found in the literature, 32.5% (king, 1997) and the other indicated as “high,” 66.8% (king, 2000). king had observed a higher incidence of reported transformational learning among students who had recently moved to a new place and hypothesized they were more open to new experiences (king, 2000). thus, the reported transformational learning was fairly high for both genders, so it is possible that the women in this respondent base had similar motivations and learning experiences to those of men, for example, in having moved to this large city to attend school. therefore, it appears that this school provided personal and curricular support that both men and women found useful for transformational learning. it may also be argued that college is an extraordinary time of openness in one’s life for both men and women, and the female students in the current study seemed to be open to experience transformational learning at the same rate as their male counterparts, especially given similar exposures to the learning activities that foster transformational learning. among the personal support activities and life events thought to provide a positive learning environment, both genders reported no significant difference in exposure in this study. it may be that a low acceptance rate allows this school to select both males and females who are similar in transformational life experiences and once at the college, open to the personal support activities important to transformational learning. where transformational learning was reported, the only exception to having positive significant differences between genders was males mentioned writing about their concerns in connection with reporting transformational learning more often. however, since this is the only advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 8 one of 15 classroom assignments (and 28 learning activities) found to be more important for one gender than the other, it is attributed to chance, rather than a real relationship. there was a possibility that the finding may be related to the greater need for late teen-aged boys to assert their identities (younger & warrington, 2005), but their study was not designed to measure that connection. also, there was no other support found in the literature to indicate that writing about concerns should impact transformational learning more in men than women. if anything, studies have shown women more receptive to use of writing as a learning technique (howard, 2000). the responses to open-ended questions in this study gave some possible explanation of the difference in response to competition between men and women found by other researchers (gneezy, niederle, & rustichini, 2003). these answers seemed to indicate men may be more used to thriving on competition, whereas women need to contextualize competition to see it as a positive. for example, one male student said that this school “is fierce in competition and constantly moves me to forward. in this atmosphere, one is more future-driven than before.” or as another young man said, “i realized that if it were not for the competitive nature of the school and the city, i would not have been as motivated in my studies... i have adopted a more serious tone in all aspects of my life.” another young male student said that with competition, “i began to see that i needed to raise my expectations and work much harder than i ever have before.” another combined friendship and competitiveness, “my friends in [this school] are all hardworking and smart; so, i feel like i am competing with them. this has improved my skills and perspective.” while many of the female students reported a positive reaction to competition, they appeared to have expanded definitions of what competition is. for example, one woman said, “this is a mature, thought-provoking setting in which we are all hammered by different presences. diversity in thoughts provided me with the motivation to change and be openminded.” another female student said more simply, “i was put in a place with high achievers and this influenced me to raise my own expectations.” another young woman was perhaps more typical of other female students in her openness, “i knew coming to college means exposing myself to a myriad of ideas. i'm fine with that and i'm willing to change if i find the new ideas more applicable and convincing.” some female students just observed competitiveness as part of the environment, saying this school is “very fast paced (as is [this city]) as well as competitive and there are the students [who] have very strong character, including the women.” another said, “each person is for himself in school. no one will look after you. i must take responsibility to organize my academic time, social time, and relaxing time.” and another, “i realized that starting now, i need to be more responsible and dedicate more time to what should be my higher priorities to help me prepare for the future.” women may process competition differently than men, adding a frame of reference, whereas men appear to “main line” it. when planning classroom activities that include competition, instructors may want to allow sufficient processing time and perhaps discussion for those who need it. recommendations and implications for future research embed a variety of types of classroom assignments advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 9 differences in female and male conceptions of competitiveness would seem to underscore the need for a variety of learning approaches be available to undergraduate business school students, realizing men and women may react differently to various learning approaches (as certainly do students with different learning styles). this study showed that there is a special value in the writing about concerns, the challenge of a teacher, and the support of peers and teachers to the emergence of transformational learning. treat men and women the same both consciously and unconsciously. in assuring women get equal exposure to learning experiences, teachers may also check their own expectations about equal performance despite the student’s gender. teachers are encouraged to be aware of modifications in their own teaching style to male and female students. the conclusion is to treat both genders equally in the classroom. connect class assignments and exercises to the broader student experience. moving is especially characteristics of this and many undergraduate populations. realizing that students are especially open to redecorating their environments can also be extended to their exploration of new mental frameworks, diverse peer groups and expanded ways to view their worlds. implications for future research what was it about these young women that they were open to transformational learning in apparently the same way as men in this undergraduate business school? it may be possible, as some observers have suggested, that these women were more diligent in their approach to college than counterpart men (lewin, 2006) and made up for any disadvantage in the business school structure. further, to be asked, what was it about the educational experience at this particular undergraduate business school that encouraged a fairly high rate of transformational learning among both the men and women who were students there? it may have been the particular nature of the student body. these students may have been more similar to each other than even other males and females in a typical undergraduate population. these students selfselected to apply to a business school and to this highly-ranked business school in a very urban and stressful environment, acknowledged to have a highly competitive student body (lavalle, gerdes et al. 2006). they may also be particular in that many are seeking to mold themselves to careers that reward fast reaction to change, e.g., wall st. and investment banking (school website, 2005). therefore, both the men and women who attend this school might be similar on characteristics affecting their openness to transformational learning, which has been cited as a conceptual model descriptive of openness to change (cranton, 1994). many other questions remain unanswered. for example, do the number of exposures to any particular learning activity relate to the likelihood of transformational learning among either women or men? does the particularly competitive nature of this research site, with its low acceptance rate, mean that a particular subset of students, especially women, attend this undergraduate business school? would results replicate in lower tier undergraduate business schools? for that matter, is the business major more or less likely to be open to transformational advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 10 learning as other majors? would equality of transformational learning between genders continue to mbas and to the workplace? as women in the workplace occupy fewer top management positions, why does a gender difference in transformational learning show itself once college is left behind? teachers may have found a way to create equivalent expectations and learning experiences such that male and female students equally report experiencing transformational learning. it may be that there are lessons to be applied to the organizations where these students find employment. future research could address some of these questions and determine whether most women and men are emerging from undergraduate business school education with equivalent leadership skills to succeed in business careers. references baxter magolda, m. 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(1994). 2001: a research odyssey – teaching different types of learning. the journal of management development, 13(1), 60-74. younger, m., & warrington, m. (2005). raising boys achievement in secondary schools. new york: open university press. biography sabra brock, ph.d., is a professor, researcher, writer, and management trainer. she teaches marketing and management to undergraduates at touro college in new york city and is dean of their german campus. she can be reached at sabra.brock@touro.edu. advancing women in leadership journal volume 30, 2010 14 references   home | business|career | workplace | community | money | international the career path and profile of women chief academic officers in public community colleges cynthia b. mckenney, ph.d. brent d. cejda, ph.d. mckenney & cejda, summer, 2001 "...it would appear that for women a variety of credentials and experiences have become the medium of exchange." the position of chief academic officer (cao) is complex and demanding. the holders of this office are generally recognized as the highest-ranking academic administrator of their institution and are charged with directing its academic mission. they are looked to for leadership, vision, and wisdom. this position is also the one most commonly held prior to assuming a presidency of an institution of higher education (plotts, 1998; ross & green, 1998; twombly, 1986). vaughan (1989) reported that 50% of the presidents in community colleges held the cao position immediately prior to the presidency. twombly (1988) also confirms the importance of the cao position in the career path leading to the community college presidency. given their impact on the academic programs of their institutions and the likelihood that they will advance to the presidency, investigations into the career paths of these academic professionals are warranted. twombly (1999) asserts that examinations of the status of women in faculty and administrative positions have recently shifted focus. historically, studies identified women, described their experiences, and then compared their experiences to those of men (bayer & astin, 1975; moore & sagaria, 1981; townsend, 1993; twombly, 1993). feminist critical policy studies (marshall, 1997) provide a new focus and suggests a http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/support/support.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awcareer.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/workplace.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/ub/ultraboard.cgi https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/lifestyles/lifestyles.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html complexity much greater than that of earlier research on women's role in higher education. moreover, this new scholarship has demonstrated that well-meaning equal opportunity policies have not worked to bring the relative number of women holding higher education positions to the level of representation of female students or to end discrimination or unequal work experiences (brooks, 1997; eggins, 1997). as a method, feminist critical policy studies pose gender as a fundamental category of analysis, focus on local context, are concerned with the experiences of women, have transformation as a goal, and are change oriented. this study will address the three feminist critical policy study parameters of gender as an independent category, local context and concern for the experiences of women. the scope of this study will not attempt to address the issues of transformation and change. a key aspect leading to the shift in the scholarship on academic women is the fact that they make up an increasing proportion of faculty and administrators, especially in the community college sector. the community college cao position clearly indicates this increased representation. moore, twombly and martorana (1985) sampled 2049 administrators from 1219 public and private institutions. the caos that responded to the survey accounted for 271 of the total responses, constituting a 22.2% response rate for the total number of institutions surveyed. in addition, this study reported that women made up 15.9% of the cao population in community and junior colleges. several years later vaughan (1990) surveyed the same population and found that 21% were female. additionally, hawthorne (1994) surveyed caos in 1,243 two-year colleges and obtained a 57% response rate with no evidence of bias. this study determined women held 27% of the cao positions in community colleges. finally, in a recent study with a 59% response rate found women comprised 39% of the public community college caos (mckenney & cejda, 2000). this study, in conjunction with the previous investigations, suggests that the number of women caos in public community colleges has continued to increase. the 39% from this most recent study mirrors the representation of women among the total faculty at community colleges (38%), a higher percentage than in any type of four-year institution (clark, 1998). in examining representation, kanter (1977) identified 35% as a minimal level necessary to reach 'critical mass,' the point at which a category of individuals moves from 'token' representation to a collective 'group.' this concept of critical mass has continued to be incorporated in research focusing on academic women (riger, stokes, raja, & sullivan, 1997; twombly, 1999). recognizing the demographic evidence, clark (1998) called for research on women faculty and administrators in the community college that moves beyond male-versus-female comparisons to in-depth investigations of their experiences and professional advancement. given these parameters, this study addresses women caos as a group unto themselves in the community college setting. of the criteria marshall (1997) outlines, the investigation also demonstrates a concern for the actual experiences of women and consideration for the specific context of the public comprehensive community college. the theoretical framework for this study is grounded in the concept of an organizational career and the theory of labor markets. we define an organizational career as a sequence of positions within an organization. from labor market theory, we conceptualize the organization as all public comprehensive community colleges holding membership in the american association of community colleges (aacc). finally, the definition of comprehensive community college follows that of the north carolina state department of community colleges (1969): those that provide college transfer, general education, occupational education, occupational extension, continuing education, and community service. purpose the purpose of this study was twofold. first, we wanted to gather personal and professional data concerning the career experiences of women caos in public comprehensive community colleges. second, we hoped to use this data to identify significant career path predictors to facilitate the advancement of women who aspire to the community college cao position. methodology data used in this study came from a national survey of caos in public comprehensive community colleges (mckenney & cejda, 2000). the survey consisted of a series of questions designed to illicit institutional type, mode of movement, number of years in the position, type of contract, and title of the position for the four jobs held prior to the office of cao. in addition, demographic information including age, gender, race, marital status, and degrees attained was garnered to create a profile of the current cao. the questionnaire was pilot tested and minimal changes were made. the sample was drawn from the population of 1487 aacc member institutions. limiting the population to 1) accredited institutions that are state or locally controlled, and 2) institutions matching the definition of a comprehensive community college resulted in a sample of 628 administrators functioning in the capacity of cao. these individuals were surveyed by mail during the 1998-1999 academic year. a total of 369 usable questionnaires were returned, yielding an overall response rate of 59%. of these 369 responses, 142 (39%) were received from women caos. descriptive statistics along with chaid analysis (chi-square automatic interaction detector) (statistical innovations, inc., 1994) was used to identify and analyze the data. the chaid analysis created a visual "tree structure" or dendrogram identifying what factors made a significant impact on the career paths (perreault & barksdate, 1980). to determine career paths for the caos in this study, position titles were grouped according to higher education general information survey (hegis) classifications. these classifications were determined after reviewing position titles; thus, not all of the hegis classifications were utilized. the nine classifications and their definitions are : 1. vice president-responsible for all or most functions and operations of an institution under the direction of the chief executive officer [president]. 2. chief academic officer-directs the academic program of the institution. includes those individuals who were listed as both academic and student affairs officer. 3. chief student affairs officer-responsible for the direction of student life programs. 4. primary academic officer-responsible for a specific component of the organization [college, division] or a specific function or operation [associate provost for technology] under the direction of the chief academic officer. 5. chair or head-responsible for a specific course of study [department, program] under the direction of either the primary academic officer or the chief academic officer. 6. other higher education-administrative position within an institution of higher education that does not fit any of the classifications listed. 7. faculty-responsible for delivering the academic program. 8. k-12-positions in educational institutions serving students from kindergarten through the 12th grade. 9. other-positions held outside of educational organizations. to quantify the sizes of the communities serviced by these public comprehensive community colleges, the categories utilized by the aacc on their community college locator website were utilized. these categories were developed by the bureau of the census from information provided on the integrated postsecondary education data set (ipeds) and are as follows: 1. rural-population of less than 2,500 or a non-incorporated community. 2. small town-an incorporated community with a population between 2,500 and 25,000. 3. large town-an incorporated community not within a metropolitan statistical area (msa), as defined by the bureau of census, with a population greater than 25,000. 4. suburban-an incorporated community within a msa, as defined by the bureau of census, that is not a central city within the msa with a population greater than 25,000. 5. medium to large city-a central city within a msa with a population greater than 250,000. in order to classify the institutional configurations of these public comprehensive community colleges, we also used aacc designations for type of school. three designations are used by the aacc: single campus college, multi-campus college, and multi-campus district. placement in the respective designations is based on information provided on ipeds. we were not able to obtain specific definitions of these designations from the aacc. results the demographic characteristics collected in this study allowed for the development of a profile of the women cao. the mean age of the 142 female respondents was 51.36 (range 36-64, s.d. 5.36). the racial distribution of the women caos is shown in table 1. the caucasian component of the sample was predominant (84.4%) followed by african-american (8.2%), hispanic (3.3%), american indian (3.3%) and asian (0.8%). a frequency distribution of the highest degree attained query was also completed. the ph.d. represented the highest credential obtained by the greatest number of caos (41.4%) followed by the ed.d. (34.9%). the remaining portion of the caos completed a master's (22.6%) or a professional or other type of degree (less than 1%). no caos reported the baccalaureate degree as their highest credential. the final demographic aspect was current marital status. slightly more than twothirds (67%) of the caos are currently married. it is interesting to note that only 4.2% of the women caos had never been married, all of these remaining single as members of a religious order. career paths we decided to establish 5% of the sample as a minimal level to establish career paths. there were no fiveor four-step career paths that met this minimal level. the threestep grouping provided 26 career paths with eight meeting the minimal 5% level. as shown in figure 1, three of the most common career paths of women caos represented more than 10% of the sample, faculty-chair-cao (12%), faculty-paocao (11.3%), and chair-pao-cao (10.6%). to identify significant predictors for the career paths of women caos, a chaid analysis and the associated dendrogram were generated (figure 2). the analysis provided evidence that the most important factor that significantly predicts the career path of caos in community colleges was the immediate previous position. the second most important factor affecting the career paths was the career entry port. third and finally, the remaining significant predictor was the number of higher education positions in the career sequence. as the most significant predictor of career path, a distribution frequency for the first prior position was created. table 2 reveals that the most common prior position was that of a primary academic officer (32.6%), followed by serving as the chief academic officer at another institution (25.5%). the chaid analysis identified the number of higher education positions as the third and final significant predictor for career path. in order to examine the differences in the number of positions held by these women, three means were computed: 1) the total number of all positions held, 2) the number of faculty positions held, and 3) the number of administrative positions held. these means are summarized in table 3. women caos in comprehensive community colleges generally hold two https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#figure1 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#figure1 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table2 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table2 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table3 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table3 administrative positions in their career and one faculty position. to determine the number of years women serve in faculty and administrative positions, descriptive statistics were used to compute seven means: 1) the total number of years held in all positions, 2) the total number of years held in all faculty positions, 3) the total number of years held in all administrative positions, 4) the number of years in the cao position 5) the number of years held in the first prior position, 6) the number of years held in the second prior position, 7) the number of years held in the third prior position, and 8) the number of years held in the fourth prior position. the results from this analysis are summarized in table 4 and indicate that women caos served more years as administrators than as faculty members. in addition, the number of years served in prior positions gradually increases with each sequential position. institutional profiles in order to identify the types of institutions served by female caos and the relative size of the towns in which these institutions are located, demographic information on the colleges and their communities was collected from the aacc. a number of multicampus institutions and districts report only the total student headcount. in such instances, and when the cao was not responsible for all campuses or the district, we excluded the data from our analysis. as a result, we were able to gather institutional and community demographics for 110 (77%) of the women caos.table 5 presents the frequency distribution of student headcount for institutions with women caos. the results indicate 63.6% of the women caos serve institutions with student headcounts ranging from 3,000 to 11,999. thus women caos generally serve in moderate sized institutions. the distribution of the institutional configurations for community colleges served by women caos using the aacc designations of single campus, multi-campus college, and multi-campus district is presented in table 6. almost two-thirds (65.1%) of the women caos serve at single campus facilities. the aacc uses five designations that may be used to describe the size of communities serviced by community colleges. in order from smallest to largest these designations are rural, small town, large town, suburban, and mid to large city. table 7 presents descriptive information concerning community size, revealing that 44% of the women caos are employed in communities with populations of 40,000 or less (rural, small town, large town). we characterized mobility as four types: 1) internal to the institution, 2) movement within the state, 3) movement outside of the state, and 4) movement outside of higher education. to determine whether there is a difference in the mode of movement during the careers of caos, a frequency distribution of the women caos experiences was created and is presented in table 8. the results support internal mobility as the strongest type of movement for the three previous positions, with within state movement as the most common type for the fourth prior position. movement outside https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table4 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table4 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table5 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table5 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table6 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table6 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table7 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table7 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table8 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2001/cejda_mckenney.html#table8 of state is the greatest at the point of assuming the cao position. we do not know, however, whether out-of-state movement occurred due to factors such as choice, or due to limited in-state cao vacancies. discussion and conclusions the profile of a woman cao in a public community college portrays a 51-year-old caucasian female who is married and has earned a ph.d. she has served in her current position for a little over five years. the entry port she used to gain employment in the community college was a faculty position. she has held approximately three positions in higher education of which two were administrative and one was faculty. her immediate prior position was as a pao or a cao at another institution. as a point of comparison, it is interesting to note the similarity between the percentage of women in the community college faculty (38%) and the percentage of women among the caos in this study (39%). in contrast, clark (1998) described that minority women comprise 3.6% of the total faculty in community colleges. our data reveals that minority women comprise 6% of the caos in public comprehensive community colleges. this result might be explained, in part, by the fact that 14% of the women respondents chose not to reveal their ethnic background. it does, however, provide at least a hint of optimism and most certainly points to the need for additional studies. the analysis of career paths proved to be the most challenging component of this study. vaughan (1990) recognized this diversity when he identified the path to the position of cao as fairly wide with many branches. likewise, twombly (1986) found that top-level administrative careers in community colleges did not always follow structured career lines. even so, we were able to develop eight, three-position career paths that represent almost two-thirds (64%) of the sample. three of the common career paths included 10% or more of the sample. in a similar effort, twombly (1988) utilized 10% as the minimal limit for the first previous position, resulting in 6 categories, and 5% as the minimal limit for the second previous position, resulting in only one category. our findings support previous conclusions that an individual's career history influences his or her success in obtaining a cao appointment. specifically, the chaid analysis indicated that the immediate previous position and the entry port were the two most important factors that affected the cao position. having the first prior position as a significant predictor supports the previous work on career paths that frequently focuses on this variable (moore, 1982; ross & green, 1998). a faculty position emerged as the primary entry port, reported in 53% of the women caos' career paths. pao (17.6%) and chair or head (13.4%) emerged as the next two most frequent entry ports. thus, these three positions served as the entry ports for more than four-fifths (83.8%) of the caos. this finding supports previous research on initial positions that provide access to community college careers (arman, 1986; boggs, 1988, twombly, 1988). the study also supports the notion of flexibility in the community colleges as it allows academic administrative careers to begin without requiring an initial faculty position. only two of the eight common career paths began with a faculty appointment, illustrating the concept that an individual does not need to have a faculty position in a community college prior to moving into administration. the career paths of these administrators are not as straight as the three predictors might seem to indicate. prior to their current position, 55% of the respondents served either as the cao for another institution or as a primary academic officer. this indicates many of these administrators have made lateral moves during their careers and supports twombly's (1988) assertion that administrative experience rather than a particular position is an important determinant in the path to the cao in community colleges. she states, "it is possible that type of experiences or positions held are more important than the order in which they were held" (p. 685). summary this study was an initial investigation of the career paths of women caos as a group unto themselves in the community college setting. in completing the investigation we answered the call for research on women administrators in the community college that moved beyond male-versus-female comparisons. using descriptive statistics, we developed a profile of the woman cao. chaid analysis was employed allowing for the identification of three significant career path predictors for caos along with the most significant predictor for women caos. a frequency distribution also allowed us to identify three common, three-position career paths comprised of 10% or more of the sample. finally, descriptive statistics allowed for the development a profile of the public comprehensive community colleges served by women caos. as 39% of the responding caos are women, the critical mass necessary for group consideration has indeed been reached. we are also guardedly optimistic about the representation of minority female caos. no different than earlier investigations that include both men and women, we found that the paths that women follow to arrive at the position of cao are not clearly defined. absent is a sequential set of positions through which the candidate desiring the position should gradually advance. instead, it would appear that for women a variety of credentials and experiences have become the medium of exchange. classroom experiences, obtaining a ph.d., and holding an administrative appointment as a primary or chief academic officer are part of this value system. we urge additional research on the experiences of women in both faculty and administrative roles. while certainly a beginning, our study was not an exhaustive investigation of administrative careers. nor did we consider the entire gamut of personal, organizational, and external variables. in addition, a longitudinal study of women in this and other administrative positions in comprehensive community colleges is needed to identify the unique factors, to determine changing dynamics, and to lead to institutional transformation and change. dr. brent d. cejda is an assistant professor of higher education in the college of education at texas tech state university. dr. cynthia b. mckenney is as assistant professor of horticulture in research and extension horticulturist at texas tech university. dr. mckenney can be reached by e-mail at: c-mckenney@tamu.edu. references arman, h. d. (1986). career preparation of college presidents and chief academic officers in midwestern colleges. unpublished doctoral dissertation, michigan state university, lansing. bayer, a. e., & astin, h. s. (1975). sex differentials in the academic reward system. science, 188, 796-802 boggs, g. r. (1988). pathways to the presidency. paper presented at the annual convention of the american association of community and junior colleges (69th, washington, dc, march). (eric document reproduction service no. ed306973) brooks, a. (1997). academic women. buckingham, england: open university press clark, s. l. (1998). women faculty in community colleges: investigating the mystery. community college review, 26 (3), 77-88. eggins, h. (ed.). (1997). women as leaders and managers in higher education. buckingham, england: open university hawthorne, e. (1994). leaders in teaching and learning: a profile of chief academic officers in 2-year colleges. community college journal of research and practice, 18, 269-278. kanter, r. m. (1977). some effects of proportions on group life: skewed sex ratios and responses to token women. american journal of sociology, 82, 965-990. marshall, c. (ed). (1997). feminist critical policy analysis ii: a perspective from postsecondary education. washington, d.c.: falmer press. mckenney, c. b., & cejda, b. d. (2000). profiling chief academic officers in public community colleges. community college journal of research and practice, 24, 745-758. moore, k. m. (1982). women and minorities. leaders in transition. center for the study of higher education report no. 83-310, university park, pa: pennsylvania state university and the american council on education. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 225459) moore, k. m., & sagaria, m. d. (1981). women administrators and mobility: the second struggle. journal of the national association for women deans, administrators, and counselors, 44, 21-28. moore, k. m., twombly, s. b., & martorana, s. v. (1985). today's academic leaders: a national study of administrators in community and junior colleges. university park, pa: the pennsylvania state university and the american association of community and junior colleges. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 264 922) north carolina state department of community colleges. (1969). north carolina comprehensive community college system standards and evaluative criteria: community colleges and technical institutes. raleigh, nc: author. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 026038) perreault, w. d., & barksdate, h. c. (1980). a model-free approach for analysis of complex contingency data in survey research. journal of marketing research, 17, 503-515 plotts, j. g. (1998). career paths of presidents of institutions belonging to the coalition for christian colleges and universities. unpublished doctoral dissertation. the university of north texas. (umi microfilm: 9841445 riger, s., stokes, j., raja, s., & sullivan, m. (1997). measuring perceptions of the work environment for female faculty. the review of higher education, 21, 63-78. ross, m., & green, m. f. (1998). the american college president: 1998 edition. washington, d.c.: american council on education. statistical innovations, inc. (1993). chaid for windows vs. 6.0. chicago, il: spss inc. townsend, b. k. (1993). feminist scholarship in core higher education journals. the review of higher education, 17, 21-41. twombly, s. b. (1986). career lines of top-level two-year college administrators: implications for leadership in a new era. ashe 1986 annual meeting paper. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 268884) twombly, s. b. (1988). administrative labor markets: a test of the existence of internal labor markets in two-year colleges. journal of higher education, 59, 668-689. twombly, s. b. (1993). what we know about women in community colleges. journal of higher education, 64, 186-210. twombly, s. b. (1999). new scholarship on academic women: beyond "women's ways". the review of higher education, 22, 441-454. vaughan, g. b. (1989). the community college presidency. new york: macmillan. vaughan, g. b. (1990). pathway to the presidency: community college deans of instruction. washington, d. c.: the community college press. table 1. ethnic representation of women caos ethnicity frequency percent african 10 8.2 american     american indian 4 3.3 asian 1 .8 caucasian 103 84.4 hispanic 4 3.3 total 122 100 table 2. first prior position of women caos title frequency percent chief academic officer 36 25.5 vice president 8 5.7 chief student affairs officer 6 4.3 primary academic officer 46 32.6 chair of head 15 10.6 faculty 7 5.0 other higher education position 19 13.5 k-12 experience 2 1.4 other 2 1.4 total 141 100 *the total number of respondents for this table reflects the number of individuals who chose to respond to this specific survey question. table 3. number of positions held by women caos type of position n mean number held standard deviation higher education 142 3.42 .878 faculty 101 1.73 .823 administrative 112 2.41 1.136 *the total number of respondents for this table reflects the number of individuals who chose to respond to this specific survey question. table 4. years served by women caos position n mean years standard deviation cao 142 5.05 4.04 first previous 141 5.43 4.61 second previous 134 5.02 4.17 third previous 96 4.73 3.12 fourth previous 86 3.64 2.36 total faculty 124 13.39 9.88 total 124 15.23 9.57 administrative total all 141 28.32 13.09 positions table 5. student headcount for institutions with women caos student population census frequency percent 1499 or less 8 7.3 1500-2999 10 9.1 3000-5999 36 32.7 6000-11999 34 30.9 12000-23999 16 14.5 24000 and above 6 5.5 total 110 100 *the total number of respondents for this table reflects the number of individuals who chose to respond to this specific survey question. table 6. campus configuration of institutions with women caos campus configuration frequency percent single campus institution 69 65.1 multi-campus institution 21 19.8 multi-campus 16 15.1 district     total 106 100 *the total number of respondents for this table reflects the number of individuals who chose to respond to this specific survey question. table 7. size of communities with institutions served by women caos community size frequency percent rural 8 7.3 small town 34 30.9 large town 6 5.5 suburban 27 24.5 mid to large city 35 31.5 total 10 100 *the total number of respondents for this table reflects the number of individuals who chose to respond to this specific survey question. table 8. frequency distribution (%) of mobility type for women cao positions mobility current 1st prior 2nd prior 3rd prior 4th prior type position (n=142) position (n=142) position (n=131) position (n=120) position (n=100) internal 54.9 66.9 48.9 43.3 34.0 within state 18.3 14.8 26.7 31.7 37.0 outside state 25.4 16.9 22.9 19.2 21.0 outside higher ed 1.4 1.4 1.5 5.8 8.0 *the total number of respondents for this table reflects the number of individuals who chose to respond to each of these specific survey questions copyright advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; 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however, it is worth exploring their strategic abilities. strategy is a skill historically linked to masculinity (laurie, 2015). a more inclusive understanding of both leadership practices for women is necessary. strategic thinking and empathy are essential in stabilizing and creating future opportunities during an economic crisis (beilstein et al., 2021; khaund, 2023; yorke, 2023). i provided a phenomenological analysis to gain insight into how women leaders engage both skills, develop future leaders, and practice resiliency through change. an exploration linking empathetic leadership and strategic thinking prompts leaders to reimagine the evolving marketplace needs and address ongoing organizational issues. the study was guided by the following research questions: (a) how do empathy and strategic thinking present in women leaders’ abilities to manage crisis, and (b) how do empathy and strategic thinking present in women leaders 'ability to develop emerging leaders? an interpretative phenomenological analysis study was framed in social capital theory (sct), and cognitive and affective empathy was used to interview 10 women leading in different industries. women leaders shared their experiences, highlighting advocacy, accountability, decisiveness, creativity, commitment, and community, resulting in the creation of a leadership development model. keywords: women leaders, empowerment, empathy, strategic thinking, emerging leaders organizations can benefit from leaders who equip their teams with competencies to embrace fortitude under pressure preparing them to lead through crisis (koh, 2023). when considering the array of competencies concerning women leaders, it is necessary to explore how empathy and strategy have been practiced and contextualized. historically, women leaders have been credited with empathy as their main capability (diehl, 2014; mashele & alagidede 2022). specifically, women leaders are often credited with demonstrating empathetic concern, nurture, and compassion during a crisis (vongas & al hajj, 2015). empathy is valuable when dealing with critical situations in the workplace (dolamore et al., 2021). it is a widespread notion that women leaders are too emotional and therefore may be unable to strategically face problems within their careers (hornak et al., 2023). arguably, a woman's emotional intelligence assists with conducting a quick assessment regarding the needs of the organization and the people (vongas & al hajj, 2015). while it is necessary to acknowledge the value of emotion management in leadership positions (choudhary et al., 2017), part of emotion management is learning to effectively utilize empathetic competency when making difficult decisions (huy, 2005; saha et al., 2023; vuori & huy, 2022). leading with empathy has heightened a focus on people-centered leadership (safuan, 2025). to cultivate the next generation of leaders, the experiences of current leaders can inform talent development by fostering trust, empathy, and teaching conflict management skills (yeager & callahan, 2016). women leaders can offer emerging leaders their social capital to progress their careers while championing change. emerging leaders in this study are defined as those with less than five years of career experience. a review of the literature helped to frame the assertion that women engage in both empathy and strategic thinking when leading during a crisis and while developing emerging leaders. literature review although women’s leadership discussions about empathy and equity are plentiful (christov-moore et al., 2014; hanold, 2011; vongas & al hajj, 2015), there is a deficiency in the literature exploring how women demonstrate and conceptualize strategic leadership (chikwe et al., 2024; zhang et al., 2022). furthermore, there is a growing need to study empathetic and mindful leadership skills to better support organizational resilience (purser et al., 2018; wibowo & paramita, 2022). this research distinguished the difference in affirming one’s emotions through understanding versus being mindful of one's internal state, heightened emotional reactions of others, and taking control of complex situations in the workplace. it is necessary to 46 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 reframe the paradigm society holds about women leaders and their leadership capacity (fernandez et al., 2019). thus, insight on women leaders’ strategic decision-making and their approach to cultivating emerging leaders may add value to future societal constructs. while it is oftentimes perceived that leaders are either strategic and competitive (masculine) or empathetic (feminine), together empathy and strategic thinking are competencies that produce competitive advantage for businesses and leaders who are emotionally intelligent (ghezzi, 2022). previous studies about empathy and strategy have focused on either the competitive edge, working with customers, or creating collaborative work environments (goleman et al., 2017; zaki, 2019). discussions on empathy are progressing, highlighting its role and strategic importance within organizations, where empathy can help alleviate workplace disruptions during times of crisis. (dolamore et al., 2021; halevy, 2020). notably, ghezzi (2022) explained that leading through a crisis, whether operational, environmental, or cultural, will require a different leadership approach by reshaping the practice of empathy. leaders and their interpersonal relationships can guide how employees develop and process information (longmire & harrison, 2018; yeager & callahan, 2016). specifically, emerging leaders desire emotionally balanced and agentic leaders (vongalis-macrow, 2016). thus, women leaders can leverage social capital to cultivate agency, empower emerging leaders, and thrive during change. women leaders’ social capital women leaders’ social capital has been contextualized by scholars as supportive networks where empowering behaviors raise consciousness to fight for one’s well-being, economic status, and access to resources (ety, 2024; ganapati, 2012). this means that women are empowered through social and collaborative networks that encourage their overall societal success. furthermore, yeager and callahan (2016) explained that achievement, personal power, and sociability were essential components in developing emerging leaders’ identities in the workplace. the authors highlighted that follower influence helps promote emerging leaders’ personal leadership power. ganapati (2012) explained that social interaction with others provides a community of support where individuals continuously discover their unique talents. experienced leaders may offer emerging leaders their social networks, opportunities, and resources, empowering them through crisis and inspiring commitment to goal achievement (northouse, 2016; yeager & callahan, 2016). this study addresses how women leaders experienced empathy and strategic thinking in their organizations during organizational turbulence and how they developed emerging leaders. strategic thinking and crisis leadership strategic thinking refers to the cognitive ability to process how an individual’s actions, the actions of others, or situational circumstances (crisis) impact outcomes (halevy, 2020; smriti et al., 2021). furthermore, amanah et al. (2022) described strategic thinking as a problem-solving process that helps individuals make decisions and implement strategies for organizational success. strategic thinking is crucial for leaders who will engage in strategic planning in their careers, manage change, and address critical problems. asobee (2021) highlighted a brief overview of strategic thinking, it is based on one’s ability to engage in creativity, mental processing, thinking critically, inquiry, and testing. considering an appropriate definition for this paper, strategic thinking prepares leaders to strategize about the future, to be responsive, and to act quickly with sound empathetic judgment. emerging studies relative to women leaders versus male leaders have focused on the glass cliff; senior leaders who move women into higher roles or critical assignments that ultimately lead them to unfortunate outcomes (vongas & al hajj, 2015; ryan et al., 2011). this emergence moves beyond the glass ceiling experience, where women now occupy leadership but remain at a disempowering disadvantage. vongas and al hajj (2015) explained that women are unfairly positioned on this glass cliff because inevitably the situation is already beyond repair, thus, positioning the woman leader to fail. women are given these opportunities to lead because they are perceived to have the desired nurturing and supportive traits to manage highly emotional situations during a crisis (haslam & ryan 2008; krishnan & szczepura, 2021). however, women leaders offer more than empathetic understanding during a crisis. women are rarely acknowledged at executive levels as being forerunners who manage change and drive innovative business decisions; typically, women are dismissed, unheard, or spoken over by their male counterparts (hornak et al., 2023). if women are considered forerunners during a crisis, it is usually when their empathetic leadership is desired (vongas & al hajj, 2015). it is imperative to explore women’s leadership experiences during a crisis to hear their voices and highlight their strategic agility. women’s shared experiences can create an inclusive space to support leadership development and lead through critical change. thus, showcasing how they demonstrate and conceptualize empathetic and strategic skills. the pandemic (covid-19), most recently experienced—is one crisis where leaders were consistently required to think through problem-solving strategies while demonstrating empathetic and caring behaviors (beilstein et al. 2021). human well-being is a rising concern regarding the impact of trauma on stakeholders in the workplace (mcnamara & elue, 2024). these and ongoing societal issues are a call for leaders to consider how to champion change leading through crisis and developing emerging leaders. theoretical and conceptual framework social capital theory (sct), cognitive and affective empathy were used to frame this study. sct is defined as social networks and resources that may be leveraged by a community of people who can develop and encourage others (hafiz et al., 2023). social capital involves individuals who have trust, shared values, 47 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 and work together for the benefit of achieving a common goal— especially personal development (dudwick et al., 2006). sct involves participatory networks like associations, philanthropic organizations, and other inclusive spaces where others may advance their purpose (ety, 2024). women leaders collaborate and make inclusive decisions by utilizing social capital as a leadership strategy (swanson et al., 2020). sct aligns well with the study to support how women leaders utilize their social capital to develop emerging leaders and navigate crises. a leader’s social capital can involve their leadership skills, professional networks, identity, and experiences (ganapati, 2012; hafiz et al., 2023). sct and empathy can be applied to the decision-making strengths of women leaders. it is imperative to also contextualize both cognitive and affective empathy. revisiting cognitive and affective empathy, cuff et al. (2016) explicated that empathy remains ambiguous when trying to interpret its meaning. similarly, other scholars have attempted to demystify the term empathy (besel & yuille, 2010; m. davis, 1996), but it remains a difficult social construct to understand. in part, because empathy has recently been defined as having multi-functions. cuff et al. (2016) explained that empathy can serve as affective, perceptive, or cognitive. this means that the affective approach is an emotional response or reaction, while the perception approach is directly experienced or imagined. finally, the cognitive approach is someone’s own understanding of the emotion. understanding empathy is pivotal when exploring how women leaders engage empathy and strategic thinking within organizations during critical times. furthermore, researchers have considered empathy and perspective-taking by delineating their differences (gregory et al., 2011; longmire & harrison, 2018). when examining empathy and perspective-taking, organizational leaders consider whether or not it is better to identify with the emotions of others or assess different thought approaches during problem-solving. perspective-taking is closely related to the cognitive approach, the focus is to see someone else’s point of view. however, h. davis (1980) described empathy as feeling the emotions of others. “perspective-taking and empathic concern are often touted as trainable and mutable orientations that might improve joint outcomes at work” (longmire & harrison, 2018, p. 894). for example, perspective-taking has been found to be essential when employees execute tasks by offering differing viewpoints. on the other hand, affective empathy is most useful when dealing with social relationships or individual needs in the workplace (gregory et al., 2011). there are adverse outcomes of both orientations. perspective-taking could orient a person towards manipulation for personal gain, and affective empathy could orient a person towards partiality in the workplace (blader & rothman, 2014; epley et al., 2006), which could exhibit inequity, possibly impacting team synergy. therefore, it is important to understand how empathy is both perceived and applied. this study explores both cognitive and affective concepts. affective and cognitive empathy can inform how women leaders experience empathy. social capital, cognitive, and affective empathy were appropriate paradigms used to frame the study and research questions. to help advance women leaders and aid in the thematic findings of the study, a conceptual framework is proposed. a conceptual framework was developed to consider an empowering leadership model that identifies empathy as an informative component of carrying out strategic thinking. the proposed conceptual framework applies sct, which supports the benefits of community and network building to develop leaders. further, the framework includes 4 components to empower leaders through change. the conceptual framework is called the empowered h.i.g.h. dudwick’s et al.’s (2006) analysis of the social capital framework applied in this study, stated “the social capital dimension of empowerment and political action explores the sense of satisfaction, personal efficacy, and capacity of network and group members to influence both local events and broader political outcomes” (p. 25). additionally, developing cognitive and affective methods to express care and consideration for others at an organizational level is imperative to empower leaders (vongalis-macrow, 2016). women leaders can leverage strategic thinking and empathy to harness social capital in organizations by applying the empowered h.i.g.h concept. the framework has 4 major components: 1. humanistic approach – consideration of others, collaboration with others, effectively communicating with others. being culturally sensitive, responsive, and being committed to serving people. 2. individualistic approach – exercising self-awareness, understanding personal strengths and weaknesses, and understanding passion and purpose to set the vision. 3. goal approach – identifying problems, identifying solutions, identifying organizational goals, effective goal setting to develop and execute strategy. 4. hope approach – empowering and inspiring others, encouraging others’ development, driving change, and stabilizing organizations through turbulent circumstances. empowered h.i.g.h can be used by women leaders to develop emerging leaders and manage change. in figure 1 the first level, the humanistic approach, is to understand and serve the people in the organization. people-centered leadership is necessary to empower others, this means understanding and supporting the humanistic needs of stakeholders (dolamore et al., 2021; gregory et al., 2011; safuan, 2025). the second level, the individualistic approach, is to fully understand oneself, personal strengths, and unique gifts (huy, 2005; yeager & callahan, 2016). self-awareness is intricately important to leaders' ability to define their personal value in an organization and create impactful change (huy, 2005; wibowo, & paramita, 2022). 48 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 the third level, goal approach, helps leaders establish appropriate goals for organizational problems faced and to strategically prepare for internal and external organizational change by leveraging networks and resources (amanah et al., 2022; jia et al., 2020). finally, level 4, the hope approach, encourages leaders to motivate, empower, and inspire themselves and the team. actively pursuing hope can help leaders stabilize the organization during crises (fry & egel, 2021; mashele & alagidede, 2022). by employing hope, leaders strategically and empathetically motivate others, whether in times of crisis or daily duties implementing vision and driving change. organizational leaders may experience different climates across decades. this framework is a cycle of continuously analyzing and evaluating personal and organizational needs to empower leaders and emerging leaders. figure 1 empowered h.i.g.h framework conceptual model. purpose of the study the purpose of this phenomenological interpretative analysis is to explore women leaders' experiences engaging empathy and strategic thinking during a crisis and when developing emerging leaders in the workplace. the following research questions were addressed. 1. rq: how do empathy and strategic thinking present in women leaders 'ability to manage crisis? 2. rq: how do empathy and strategic thinking present in women leaders’ ability to develop emerging leaders? methods an interpretative phenomenological analysis study was designed to describe the lived experiences of women leaders demonstrating and conceptualizing empathy and strategy. martin heidegger (1889 – 1976) viewed phenomenology as an interpretation of experience and the ability to derive meaning of being (horrigan-kelly et al., 2016). similarly, moustakas (1998) viewed hermeneutic (interpretive) phenomenology as a valuable method when seeking to understand the lived experiences and meanings that individuals apply to a phenomenon experienced. “in simple terms, phenomenology is about understanding phenomena, or “things,” as they appear to, or are experienced by, others” (farrell, 2020, p. 2). the phenomenon demonstrating and conceptualizing empathy and strategic thinking through crisis while developing emerging leaders was explored. research design hermeneutic phenomenological design was applied based on principles identified by moustakas (1994), which emphasized the value of using an iterative process contextualizing the lived experience based on the participants’ attributed meaning. people are naturally self-interpretive, they describe their life experiences relating through stories, events, and objects, to examine this process, “ipa draws upon the fundamental principle of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and ideography” (noon, 2018, p. 75). ipa involves double hermeneutics, which means the participants and the researcher co-construct meaning (smith 1996). to this end, interpretive phenomenology was applied using the qualitative interview experience. the research questions allowed room for interpretation, inviting participants to reflect deeply on their individual experiences and derive meaning. this enabled me to engage interpretatively with their experiences relative to the research questions. the first set of questions focused on personal development and organizational behavior experienced through sct. the second set of questions focused on how participants contextualized empathy, and the final set of questions focused on how participants experienced empathy. semi-structured interview questions were designed. i developed 12 social capital questions, seven cognitive empathy questions, and seven affective empathy questions. the questions were adapted from previous studies, which focused on sct, cognitive, and affective empathy. zoll and enz (2010) research was used to build affective and cognitive-related interview questions, while social capital questions stemmed from dudwick et al.’s (2006) qualitative methods guide. utilizing affective empathy questions helped to explore behavioral phenomena such as mood, emotion, and feelings, while cognitive questions helped inform how those behaviors are perceived (fox, 2018). social capital questions were developed to explore how individuals experienced their networks, connections, resources, and cognitive capital (jia et al., 2020). the research questions align with ipa because participants were able to reflect and develop meaning about their lived experiences engaging empathy and strategic thinking. ipa also supports individual interpretive strategies to understand each participant's voice. participants the participants were chosen through criterion sampling (palinkas et al., 2015), seeking women leaders who have directly experienced leading during a crisis and while developing 49 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 employees. ten women leaders with at least three years of work experience and those who have held leadership roles for a minimum of three years were interviewed. women who work across sectors were selected from higher education institutions, nonprofit organizations, and corporate organizations. this criteria was selected to build upon the experiences of women leaders, who may have lived through the recent crisis (e.g., covid-19). these leaders varied in age and were dominantly women of color. there were 8 black females and 2 indian females who held mid-to-senior level roles. there were 2 participants in the corporate sector, 4 in higher education, and 4 in nonprofit management. a flyer was shared on linkedin, facebook, and via email for potential participants working in the state of georgia. participants interested in the study were directed to complete a microsoft form, i reviewed the form to ensure participants met the study’s criteria. the participants were emailed the informed consent to sign and return by email by the deadline. participant selection took place september 18, 2023 through october 1, 2023. interviews were scheduled between the months of october and november of 2023. data collection semi-structured interviews were conducted through microsoft teams password protected recorded meeting room. participants were asked to choose a pseudonym to protect their privacy (zahle, 2017). this pseudonym is based on how they saw themselves as women leaders by identifying their leadership capacity in one word as noted in the results section. participants were interviewed for one to two hours. i explained to participants through the interview protocol the purpose of the study. i began all interviews by first discussing my goal to expand research on women leaders to help provide a sense of comfort for participants. i then explained the selected frameworks that i used to contextualize how the questions were developed. i identified the key terms used to provide clarity. i created a safe environment before asking participants to recall their experiences by encouraging participants to engage in storytelling. establishing comfort can help participants reduce stress when recalling difficult experiences (dempsey et al., 2016). i guided participants to do the microsoft teams interview in a private and comfortable setting, preferably not a professional setting, to obtain the most authentic shared experiences. the study was reviewed and approved through troy university’s irb board. data analysis the data were transcribed through microsoft teams transcription software and later reviewed for accuracy by comparing the transcription to field notes. ipa coding was completed utilizing emergent themes and developing experiential themes to contextualize the participants' experiences (smith et al., 2021). participants also attributed meaning behind those experiences. specifically, i followed the ipa steps to include: (a) reading and re-reading each transcript, (b) initial noting (coding), i listened to audio recordings again, (c) developed emerging themes by circling and highlighting key words from the transcripts line by line and then grouped those codes into larger themes, (d) i mapped the overarching themes by connecting the patterns from the emergent themes to create clusters, (e) i repeated these steps for each individual transcript. this was conducted by focusing on descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual content. descriptive coding is related adjectives, linguistic coding is related to language that the participants used. finally, contextual coding is related to the meaning and examples that participants provided. descriptive, linguistic, and contextual coding are specific methods used to analyze participant transcripts in ipa (smith et al., 2021). after completing coding for all participants, i grouped each under these categories and assigned broad themes. i then reduced the overlapping words or meaning into smaller themes to create the final thematic emphasis for five themes related to the three sections of the interview protocol. this study is trustworthy and credible because i asked participants during the interview to confirm the reinterpretation of statements that i called back out to them to confirm accuracy of thought and meaning. participants were also given the opportunity to review meaningful statements to clarify their intended meaning. the following section includes findings with key statements and words demonstrating a connection to the experiential themes. the themes align with the methodological research design by grouping sct related experiences into themes and grouping affective and cognitive empathy experiences into themes. findings the study was guided by the research questions, (a) how do empathy and strategic thinking present in women leaders’ abilities to manage crisis, and (b) how do empathy and strategic thinking present in women leaders 'ability to develop emerging leaders. the results were organized by experiential thematic findings followed by participant significant statements. participant statements are presented with their selected pseudonyms. the findings revealed 5 major themes (see table 1): 50 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 table 1 experiential themes from interpretive phenomenological analysis experiential themes personal experiential themes keywords theme 1: accountability and advocacy set the expectation consistent for everybody perspectives heard cause it’s gonna affect them i specifically stood up one time to be heard and give grace reflection of the culture accountability standards advocacy acknowledging voice example theme 2: encouraging community relational, building camaraderie what they needed was community mentorship opportunities connections with others open relationship with supervisors it’s less hierarchical communication community mentoring collaborative sharing theme 3: communication, commitment, and control active listening transparency was lacking thoughtful and decisive challenge others for solutions not having hysteria don’t panic, evaluate emergency detail oriented navigating, strategic conversations listening transparency commitment decisive stability steady navigating theme 4: creativity and foreverlearning intentional steps forward confident, don’t hesitate take time to learn open to continuous learning creativity, critical thinking past experiences open to mistakes care about development planning confidence learning creativity versatility innovative caring theme 5: awareness and action a seat at the table motherhood can affect work multi-generational female support women seen in higher roles toxic image of women needs change visibility support equality competing 51 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 the first three themes presented are accountability and advocacy, communication, commitment and control, and encouraging community. these themes aligned with the sct framework, which focused on organizational behavior and professional development. the following research question was addressed: rq 1: how do empathy and strategic thinking present in women leaders' ability to manage crisis? accountability and advocacy advocacy and accountability were found to be a consistent themes among the participants. women leaders shared that advocating for one another as well as emerging leaders during a crisis was pivotal. when discussing organizational behavior, women leaders also shared that it was important to demonstrate accountability as leaders and to ensure that their leadership was exemplary of what they expected within the organization. the empowered leader shared an experience where she felt the need to voice her concerns for an injustice she witnessed. further, she contextualized the injustice based on what behaviors had been acceptable for male counterparts to do versus female counterparts. i've also seen where it's permissible for a man to just start spewing out sometimes umm, you know, cursing and things like that in a work environment. but a woman generally has not done that when they're talking to another employee… and i think that's something that needs to change. the supportive leader described advocating for fairness across the team regardless of team members’ different home lives and responsibilities. specifically, she outlined the need for consistency within a work hybrid work schedule. i think the difference was that one of my team members had children, the others did not. so kind of still making the schedule fair that if we are doing a hybrid schedule, once we were kind of coming back into the office, how does that look for everybody and how consistent is that for everybody? the visionary leader discussed accountable leadership. she explained that it is important for emerging leaders to have a leader who practices the expectations they set for the team. she explained that using buzz words like transparency is not enough when actions fail to demonstrate proclaimed expectations. you know the silent quitting and things like that just being around the young people i think has helped me to have a better understanding of what is going on behind their mind, which comes up a lot. well, if you're telling me to clock in at 8:00 o'clock, but you come in at 8:02 and there's, there's no accountability, which you, even though you're saying, you know, i'm transparent and this and that, you know, if i don't see you coming in at 8:00 o'clock, like you want me to clock in, so why would you? why would i honor that? encouraging community building a sense of community was important to the participants. specifically, women desired more community in predominantly male-dominated leadership roles. women envisioned themselves as conduits to generate a level playing field creating a team-oriented and collaborative work environment. the intentional leader shared that there is a need for community within leadership teams, most importantly at the executive leadership level. so going back to that [women’s leadership development], i saw both the administrative and academic side right and the commonality of what they needed was community. and so, i would like to see, because it's very lonely at the top and it's very quiet at the top, right? so at this level, there's not many colleagues that i can like, we're not confiding, you see what i'm saying because i know where the bones are buried. i know the announcements that haven't hit. there's a lack of community. so i would like to see a level of, you know, if not, maybe within their institutions, but across the country, those type of women having resources to navigate and collaborate together because it is very hard, you know, and even in those spaces, there's still gonna be people buttoned up, there's still not gonna have a lot of, you know, conversation. like, are you continuing to keep your resume up to date? are you continuing to road map your career? the collegial leader shared her experience focusing on relationship building. she felt it was important not to simply make decisions just because she could as a leader but to create a team who felt apart of those decisions. i will also say just being relational, um and trying to build some sort of camaraderie with individuals and groups on your teams. it's really essential as well and it's something i try to bring to the table. so really, that relationship building piece is a big part of how i try to lead. the compassionate leader shared her experience approaching leadership communicatively with understanding and compassion for the intersectional identities everyone carries into the workplace. people are not monolithic and they wear so many different hats and you might come in here and be a raging psychopath one day, but having the understanding to know that there's much more to the spaces and the identities that we all carry and we're juggling them all. 52 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 communication, commitment and control communicating openly, being decisive, detail-oriented, and exercising control during crisis were described as necessary strategies to lead during turbulent situations. women leaders described the need for transparency and honesty. women leaders expressed concern and discomfort in work environments that lacked transparency and hid the reality of what was occurring. women expressed being able to face and make tough decisions that were emotional while also remaining in control. the discerning leader recalled what it was like leading during a crisis (the covid-19 pandemic) and she identified decisiveness as a key strategy that helped her guide the direction of a nonprofit during major uncertainty. active listening, um being thoughtful and being decisive. there was a lot of uncertainty at that time and i think that, umm, you know those in leadership positions more than ever needed to be that steady. be willing to make the decision… the intentional leader spoke about having leaders who can face challenges with commitment. she shared that today we need leaders who stay the course and demonstrate tenacity. i think there has to be a level of stick to it right? there's a level of, you know, it's, you have fair-weather leaders now. you know, you have to come in and then they leave and it's not working. but i have to have a level of tenacity about me that sticks with it. the empowered leader shared her experience with emerging leaders within the changing workforce climate. she has witnessed new career professionals being decisive about what they expected from employers, however, lacking initiative. now what i'm going to say is probably not going to be a popular opinion, but i feel i would really like to see people who have less than five years experience take initiative. i'm having to follow up a lot and and i might have spoken to you about this. but i'll tell you what they are, those with less experience. when i say within the first five years of the workforce, what they're good at, is making the demands of what they want, you know, and when i hear it, i'm like, wow. it's, you know, that entitlement is there. the final two themes presented are creativity and foreverlearning, and awareness and action. these themes aligned with affective and cognitive empathy, which focused on how women leaders applied empathy and understood empathy. the following themes addressed the research question: rq2: how do empathy and strategic thinking present in women leaders’ ability to develop emerging leaders? creativity and forever-learning creativity, confidence, empathy, and forever learning were found as strategies women engaged in their leadership capacity. women reflected on their diverse roles and life experiences, showcasing their strength as leaders through the application of care. women defined their contributions to organizational cultures relative to learned experiences, learning from others, and awareness of other's needs. the innovative leader discussed that her experience has provided confidence and a knowledgeable lens to consider the past, present, and strategize about creating the future. i've been here a long time, so i have the history of where we were and where we are now. and i think that's very valuable to my team as we continue to grow learning from past mistakes to where we are now, but also being innovative you can't keep doing the same old thing and expecting to get a different outcome. when you're dealing with different groups of students and different types of learners, you just really have to be innovative. the visionary leader believed that it is important to provide a flexible work culture where people can focus on their wellness, creatively solving problems, and meet their deadlines. she provided imagery of what flexibility means. you can show emotions and there's nothing wrong with that. i think normalizing a lot of those qualities of women in the workplace, we make a difference as well in changing the narrative of how women in leadership are viewed. you know, in an ideal world in the future, actually, right now we do it. we have remote days and then we have office days. i definitely see, you know, some days virtual or some days in person giving people that flexibility, having a workspace that is full of joy and you know, i envision not a workout space like almost like a studio. i envision something similar to a screaming room, but not a screaming room, for us to scream out, but more of a space where people can go in and just take a moment. i really would appreciate a work environment where you know, your mental health is a priority. awareness and action women leaders described issues with a historical narrative woman have faced in the workplace. participants shared that such narratives must change going forward. it was important for women leaders to dispel ideals that women are not emotionally stable and that demonstrating empathy means being weak or less capable. findings showed a disconnect between verbalizing support and taking appropriate action. the compassionate leader spoke about important changes that she would like to see going forward concerning issues with women. her current institution has been very supportive of motherhood, unlike a prior job she held. she spoke about supporting mothers in the workplace. 53 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 i'm triggered by new motherhood, it's not just that hat of being mom now, of being a mother. it's where is the ripple effect as to how that is manifesting now when i'm in my workspace? so for me, here’s what i've told myself my mantra is where my feet are planted. that's where i am present. that will make sure to compartmentalize that, but to a certain extent, that's just my framework. that's impossible, because i'm exhausted, which means i could be forgetful. one day my kid could be, like last night, she was awake until 4:00 o'clock in the morning and my alarm goes off at 6. so how does that then affect my performance when i come into the office? and so, if i need, i'll just say time or grace, this is a new space and a new season of my life. so, i want to see organizationally where there are initiatives whether run by hr or an office manager to support that. the visionary leader shared a change that she desires to see concerning issues that women face in the workplace. she explained the narrative that women must take on a masculine leadership style should change. let the men work the way they work and let women work the way they work, because then that way we reduce the best part of us and i think that also promotes the narrative that you see. sometimes when you see the boss lady, she's in a suit. you hardly see a picture of a boss lady with a flowy, flowery dress, which is part of why, you know some of the logo with our brand is showcasing the diversity of women who have dreams, that you don't have to be in a suit to show that you are boss lady, right? and i feel that that's one of the critical places to change the narrative is that idea that, you know, women need to be masculine to show leadership. the empowered leader shared her perspective concerning misconceptions professionals hold about empathy. she expressed that empathy is not just about emotion, but it’s apart of decision-making. maybe that empathy means that you're going to focus only on the emotion. because that's where they're like, well, don't base this on emotions. this is purely like we just talked about, don't base [the decision] on emotions. this is purely strategic. well, no emotion is a part of it, and strategy is the major part of it that it's ok for it to be combined. discussion women explained that empathy is not merely an emotion of understanding or acknowledging someone’s experience; empathy is a tool for decision-making. the interpretation of the collected data revealed that women engage empathy in their strategic thinking process by assessing both a critical situation and the emotional state of the organization. women leading during crisis viewed empathy and strategic thinking as strengths in their ability to be supportive, understanding, compassionate, decisive, and steady. women perceived themselves as a pillar of strength to maintain control and to be the voice of hope and reason. the conceptual framework can be applied to the thematic findings. empowered h.i.g.h, the humanistic approach aligns well with the theme accountability and advocacy to support emerging leaders and to practice advocating for people-centered leadership. for example, women recalled behaviors that were socially acceptable for men yet not for women, hence creating unfair working climates. additionally, women discussed consideration for their unique circumstances like motherhood in the workplace. consideration for others’ well-being is a core value in people-centered leadership (safuan, 2025). the next step in the conceptual framework is the individualistic approach, which aligns with the theme awareness and action. women who embrace their unique strengths through awareness and learn the strengths of their teams, can strategically create visionary change. when leaders have an awareness of self, their leadership identity increases their visionary power (yeager & callahan, 2016). the third component of the framework, goal approach, can be applied to the communication, commitment, and control thematic emphasis. women highlighted their ability to be decisive, assess critical situations, and effectively communicate. critical thinking, coordination, and control are necessary skills to effectively set strategic goals (asobee, 2021). additionally, women leaders believed that it was their duty to help mentor emerging leaders, provide direction, and encourage commitment. it is pivotal for emerging leaders to take ownership of their personal and professional development by learning and establishing goals. the final component of the framework, hope approach, which aligns with two themes, the first, creativity and forever learning. women acknowledge that creativity, confidence, and empathy are essential to their leadership. to enact hope leaders should remain optimistic about the future, commit to the path, and deliver unwavering support through their social networks (fry & egel, 2021). finally, women described the best work environment as a community to embrace knowledge-sharing, understanding, collaborative environments that are less hierarchical to achieve goals, which aligns with the theme encouraging community. limitations and recommendations for future research a limitation of the study was due to perspectives of primarily women of color. moving forward it would be interesting to compare women leaders’ experiences to the experiences of emerging leaders to gather a better understanding of what each group desires in terms of leadership support and development within organizations. it would also be interesting to have a more diverse pool of participants. conclusion there has been great progress in positioning women leaders, for some industries there has even been considerable attention given to women’s leadership development. however, to continue to advance women leaders, 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(2010). a questionnaire to assess affective and cognitive empathy in children. https://dnb.info/1058435078/34 567 copyediting final 138 volume 44, 2025 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodriguez, and benjamin jankens assistant editors: jordan donop & rebecca phillips advancing women in leadership vol. 44, 138-150, 2025 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper understanding leadership deficiencies and capital challenges in black women-owned businesses sherry williams sherry williams, dba: residency program coordinator, holy name medical center, shwilliams@holyname.org accepted december 3, 2025 black women entrepreneurs play a vital role in the u.s. economy, launching businesses across diverse industries more expeditiously than their counterparts. despite this growth, the lived experiences of black female entrepreneurs in the beauty industry are permeated by challenges from conception through all stages of business development, including leadership deficiencies, capital constraints, and systemic barriers that threaten sustainability and profitability. the purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study was to explore how black women entrepreneurs apply effective leadership practices to access capital, enhance leadership skills, and navigate operational challenges. the theoretical framework for this inquiry was transformational leadership theory, serving as a lens to examine how leadership practices shape business growth and operations. guided by the research question: what effective leadership practices do black women entrepreneurs in the u.s. beauty industry employ to access capital for investing in leadership development training, thereby enhancing their leadership skills, mitigating operational challenges, and improving profitability? data was collected through semi-structured interviews with ten business owners and analyzed using braun and clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis. five key themes emerged: mentorship, education and training, funding, sustainability, and business operations. findings revealed that limited access to capital, leadership development, and mentorship hindered business growth. leveraging leadership practices fosters profitability and long-term sustainability. this study contributes to the literature on women’s leadership by highlighting how black women entrepreneurs can leverage effective leadership practices to expand their businesses and promote equity in underrepresented sectors. keywords: black women entrepreneurs, beauty industry, leadership development, access to capital, operational challenges, business sustainability black women-owned businesses are the cornerstone of the economy. black women started businesses in various industries at a higher rate than their counterparts (jackson & sanyal, 2019). harvard business review (2021) reported that 17% of black women were in the process of starting and operating a new business, and 42 % net of businesses were black women-owned. however, only 3% had achieved sustainability (kelley et al., 2021). the experiences of black female entrepreneurs making a headway into the beauty sector permeated with challenges from the conception to all stages of development in their business (forbes, 2021). mckinsey & company reported that in 2022, black-founded or black-owned beauty brands made up 2.5 % of revenue in the beauty industry, yet black consumers are responsible for 11.1 % of total spending on beauty products and services (mckinsey & company, 2022). even though black consumers have substantial spending power, persistent disparities and barriers continued to hinder black female beauty brands from achieving the same level of success as non-black beauty brands (forbes, 2021). despite the motivation to start new businesses, leadership deficiencies such as ineffective leadership practices, limited access to capital, and inadequate financial management skills were identified as the root cause of decreased productivity and sustainability, resulting in business failure (bates et al., 2018). wendell (2020) noted that some black women business owners did not invest in leadership development training to enhance leadership skills. therefore, they were unequipped with the necessary skills to meet their business goals and expectations. to understand leadership deficiencies in african american women-owned businesses in the beauty industry, gaining insight from black women business owners through their lived experiences was imperative. the purpose of this study was to explore the perspectives of black women business leaders in the u.s. beauty industry regarding the challenges of accessing capital for leadership development training and how this limitation impacts their ability to strengthen leadership skills, address operational issues, and improve business profitability. 138 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 problem statement poor leadership practices are a major contributor to reduced productivity, profitability, and employee retention across industries (bates et al., 2018), costing organizations approximately 4% of annual sales and contributing to 7% of voluntary turnover losses that could be mitigated through stronger leadership strategies (dutta, 2020). although effective leadership has been shown to improve revenue growth by 2–3% (campbell, 2020), many businesses continue to face financial setbacks due to ineffective leadership (leslie, 2020). the specific problem is particularly critical for black women entrepreneurs in the u.s. beauty industry, who encounter persistent barriers to profitability and sustainability, largely stemming from limited access to capital for leadership development training. without such investment, many struggle to manage operational challenges, enhance leadership capacity, and sustain long-term growth (jackson, 2021; marwah, 2018). despite launching businesses at higher rates than their white counterparts (jackson & sanyal, 2019), only 3% of black women–owned businesses succeed (kelley et al., 2021), with inequities in venture capital access, just 1% of total funding allocated to black-owned businesses, further compounding the challenge (small business administration, 2022). additionally, only 4% of black-owned businesses remain open after 3.5 years, compared to the national average of 55.5% (lesonsky, 2022), underscoring the urgent need for systemic support and targeted leadership development resources. purpose statement the purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the perspectives of black women business leaders in the u.s. beauty industry regarding limited access to capital for leadership development, and how this affects their ability to enhance leadership skills, address operational challenges, and improve profitability. the study participants were 10 black women beauty industry leaders in the northeastern united states. the research question guiding this study was: how do black women entrepreneurs in the u.s. beauty industry access capital to support leadership development, enhance leadership skills, overcome operational challenges, and increase profitability? research indicates that leadership deficiencies, ineffective practices, and insufficient funding are major barriers to profitability and sustainability, with evidence suggesting that overcoming these hurdles could increase revenue by approximately 20% (mckinsey & company, 2022). black women entrepreneurs often face limited business ownership and constrained leadership capabilities due to lack of training, education, and financial resources, and gaps in mentorship and skill development contribute to business failure (mohammad & islam, 2022). by identifying effective strategies for accessing capital and leadership development, this study aims to generate insights that will empower future black women business owners to launch, grow, and sustain successful businesses, addressing both operational and systemic challenges while promoting economic equity (adeoye & olenik, 2021). gap in practice the gap in practice is that some black women business owners do not receive or invest in leadership development training necessary to address operational challenges that affect profitability and long-term sustainability (wendell, 2020). jackson and sanyal (2019) noted that some black women business owners do not invest in leadership training to enhance leadership skills such as communication, strategic planning, and relationship building. gambill (2021) commented that the lack of leadership skills can affect business performance and decrease productivity and revenue. successful leaders seek leadership development to improve deficiencies in their leadership skills and address gaps to become better leaders (campbell, 2020). effective leaders possess the leadership skills needed for the execution of organizational strategies by aligning the team with the goals and vision for organizational success (sales et al., 2020). literature review understanding leadership in black women-owned businesses and the challenges they faced in accessing capital for profitability and sustainability was vital, as these factors contributed directly to business success or failure (jackson & sanyal, 2019). the scholarly literature review examined research and studies that explained the obstacles black women entrepreneurs encountered on their journey to business ownership (leitch & volery, 2017). the literature highlighted leadership deficiencies and identified strategies black women business owners could employ to enhance their leadership and financial skills, including leadership development training and engagement with experienced practitioners (jackson & sanyal, 2019). moreover, the literature demonstrated the critical role of experienced practitioners in supporting effective business operations (turner & endres, 2017). consequently, this study aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the leadership challenges faced by black women entrepreneurs and how these challenges influenced the operation and sustainability of their businesses (wendell, 2020). dutta (2020) stated that in 2022, only 0.39 percent of venture capital funding was allocated to black women business founders. gambill (2021) noted that this underrepresentation was primarily attributed to network barriers, limited human capital, gaps in leadership skills, and strategic decisions regarding growth, product development, and market positioning. williams et al. (2020) and busch (2022) argued that even rapidly growing firms with revenues exceeding $1 million often struggle to sustain expansion without adequate financing. while prior research focused on objective barriers such as credit access (decuypere & schaufeli, 2020), recent studies highlighted the importance of leadership development, business knowledge, and access to networks as critical, yet often overlooked, factors influencing venture growth (howard et al., 2019). in addition to funding challenges, leadership development and mentorship are essential for business success. ali and islam (2020) reported that practitioner insights offer practical 139 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 strategies to navigate operational challenges and implement best practices. ibrahim and daniel (2019) highlighted gaps in collaboration and knowledge transfer between business owners and experienced practitioners, while wendell (2020) emphasized that mentorship is critical for developing leadership capacity. harvard business review (2021) stated that mentorship helps black female entrepreneurs secure manufacturers and investors, make informed decisions, and strengthen leadership skills. mckinsey & company (2022) and bates et al. (2022) added that practitioner insights and mentorship enable entrepreneurs to overcome structural barriers and foster sustainable growth. dutta (2020) noted that beyond funding, guidance from experienced mentors is crucial for navigating operational and strategic challenges. theoretical framework the theoretical framework for this qualitative inquiry study was the transformational leadership framework, because it provides a lens for examining the experiences of black female entrepreneurs and has demonstrated high reliability and validity in prior research (deng et al., 2022). the tenets of transformational leadership idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration guided the development of the research question and study purpose. specifically, the study explored how black women entrepreneurs leverage leadership practices to access capital, enhance leadership skills, and overcome operational challenges, aligning with the core tenets of the transformational leadership framework. by integrating these principles, the framework ensured that data collection, analysis, and interpretation remained clearly connected to understanding effective leadership strategies in this context. the following discussion expands on the transformational leadership framework, the rationale for its selection, and its alignment with the study’s research question and purpose. transformational leadership framework james macgregor burns formulated the concept of transformational leadership in 1978. burns defined transformational leadership as a reciprocal relationship wherein both leader and follower motivate each other to higher levels, aligning their value systems (akdere & egan, 2020). transformational leaders inspire followers to exceed their potential by focusing on values and aligning them with organizational goals (afriyie & musah, 2019). according to bass, this approach fosters trust, loyalty, and respect, motivating followers to surpass expectations (campbell, 2020). its key tenets—idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration—provide a framework for examining african american women entrepreneurs’ leadership deficiencies and challenges in sustaining profitable beauty businesses (ali & islam, 2020). transformational leaders demonstrate commitment to improving leadership practices and fostering growth, supporting business success and long-term sustainability (farahnak et al., 2020). figure 1 transformational leadership framework idealized influence idealized influence serves as a tool for transformational leaders to enhance their leadership skills and practices by cultivating trust, inspiring others, fostering alignment with organizational goals, empowering individuals, and promoting a positive organizational culture (lia et al., 2022). business owners who take on this leadership style exhibited effective communication skills, effectively conveying the vision for the organization and elucidating the significance of each team member's contribution (kalogiannidis, 2021). intellectual stimulation concept transformational leaders who utilized intellectual stimulation created an environment that encouraged continuous learning and skill development among their employees (dinibutun, 2020). this empowered them to remain informed about industry trends, acquire new knowledge and skills, and adapt to changing market conditions, thereby enhancing the organization's sustainability. business owners who utilized the intellectual motivation concept created opportunities to enhance leadership practices for profitability and sustainability by promoting problem-solving skills, fostering continuous learning, enhancing employee engagement and satisfaction, and driving organizational growth (akdere & egan, 2020). inspirational motivation concept transformational leaders who adapted the inspirational motivation concept inspired and motivated followers by communicating a compelling vision, setting ambitious goals, and fostering enthusiasm and commitment toward achieving them (akdere & egan, 2020). the inspirational motivation concept helped business owners improve leadership practices for profitability and sustainability by aligning vision and goals, 140 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 boosting employee morale and engagement, encouraging innovation and creativity, building trust and loyalty, and driving performance and results (thompson, 2022). individualized consideration concept the individualized consideration concept helped transformational leadership focus on each follower's unique needs, strengths, and development opportunities (thompson, 2022). fries et al. (2019) stated that business leaders should establish strong interpersonal relationships, listen actively, and offer feedback and guidance tailored to each follower's strengths and weaknesses. business owners who employed the individualized consideration concept created a supportive and inclusive workplace culture where employees feel valued, motivated, and empowered to succeed. transformational leaders who used the individualized consideration concept created a thriving business that was capable of achieving long-term sustainability (pauceanu et al., 2021). selected framework justification the transformational leadership framework is the foundation for this research directing data collection by centering on its core tenets. it aims to equip black women-owned businesses with the knowledge to empower themselves by fostering effective leadership skills and practices conducive to business success. the construct of the transformational leadership framework formed the basis of the interview guide, providing a structured approach for data collection. these tenets also shape the design of the interview questions. the purpose of using transformational leadership was to assess leadership practices in black women-owned businesses, pinpoint areas for enhancement, and establish measurable goals and actions to navigate adversity and overcome barriers to success. methods a phenomenological research approach (mortari et al., 2023) was employed to explore the lived experiences of black women entrepreneurs in the u.s. beauty industry. this approach focused on understanding participants’ experiences from their own perspectives, allowing for an in-depth exploration of barriers to accessing capital for leadership development and how leadership practices influence operational challenges, sustainability, and profitability (adeoye & olenik, 2021). data were collected through one-on-one semi-structured interviews with 10 african american women entrepreneurs who had sustained profitable businesses. all interviews were conducted via zoom. the interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006), a method that involves systematically coding the data, identifying patterns and categories, and generating themes that capture the essence of participants’ experiences. participants the targeted population for this study consisted of 10 black women business owners in the beauty industry in the northeastern united states. the study focused on women with privately owned businesses to explore the challenges they faced in developing leadership skills and operating their businesses successfully. data were collected through semi-structured interviews, in which participants answered 10 open-ended questions designed to capture their experiences with leadership practices, skill development, and barriers to accessing resources. interviews were conducted via zoom, with audio recording and transcription enabled (adeoye & olenik, 2021). the specific participant inclusion criteria were: a) black woman business owners b) reside in northeastern united states c) started a new business within five years d) can attest to having a basic understanding of leadership practices, but limited leadership development training data collection data were collected through one-on-one semi-structured interviews with 10 african american women entrepreneurs who had sustained profitable businesses in the u.s. beauty industry for at least five years. interviews were conducted via zoom, with audio recording and transcription enabled. participants were provided informed consent forms approved by the capella university institutional review board (irb), outlining the study purpose, procedures, voluntary participation, and the right to withdraw at any time. signed consent forms were required before interviews commenced. each interview lasted approximately 45–60 minutes, broken down as follows: 5 minutes for introductions and rapport-building, 25–55 minutes for interview questions, and 5 minutes for closing remarks. participants first answered demographic and business-related questions, followed by 10 semi-structured interview questions designed to capture participants’ experiences with leadership practices and business challenges. the semi-structured interview questions are as follows: 1. how long have you been in business, and what inspired you to start your business? 2. what obstacles have you encountered in starting and sustaining your business? 3. what types of support (financial, mentorship, or other resources) did you receive when you initially launched your business? 4. what resources or support do you wish you had access to when starting your business? 5. which leadership strategies do you currently implement within your organization to ensure its sustainability and growth? 6. do you have formal business education or training, and how has it impacted your leadership and management practices? 7. when did your business begin generating profits, and what factors contributed to that milestone? 8. how would you describe your leadership style, and how does it influence your team and business operations? 141 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 9. do you have a mentor or advisor in the industry, and how has that relationship influenced your business? 10. what additional skills, resources, or support do you feel would help you grow your business in the next 1–3 years? building rapport with participants and allowing transcript review enhanced data credibility (mcgrath et al., 2019). audio recordings were transcribed verbatim, deidentified, and assigned unique identifiers. participants verified transcript accuracy and provided feedback. once verified, transcripts were coded using deductive codes (frampton, 2020) and prepared for thematic analysis, marking the completion of participant involvement. ethical consideration before data collection, approval was obtained from the capella university institutional review board (irb), ensuring compliance with federal regulations and ethical standards for the protection of human subjects. participants were informed of the study’s purpose, procedures, potential benefits, and their right to withdraw at any time without consequence. informed consent was obtained in accordance with irb guidelines, and participants underwent debriefing to confirm understanding. participation was entirely voluntary, and individuals retained autonomy to halt the interview at any point. these measures ensured participants had sufficient information to weigh potential risks and benefits, aligning with ethical principles that prioritize maximizing benefits while minimizing harm. data analysis data were analyzed using thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) with an inductive coding approach that explored the perspectives of black women entrepreneurs in the u.s. beauty industry regarding effective leadership practices for accessing capital, investing in leadership development, mitigating operational challenges, and improving profitability. audio-recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and supplemented with field notes to enhance contextual understanding (adeoye & olenik, 2021). transcripts were deidentified, assigned unique participant identifiers, and reviewed by participants to verify accuracy, strengthening the credibility and trustworthiness of the data (mcgrath et al., 2019). to streamline the coding process, audio recordings and written transcripts were organized and processed in microsoft excel for analysis. the six-phase process outlined by braun and clarke (2006) was followed: 1. familiarization with the data by repeatedly reviewing each transcript. 2. generating initial open codes by identifying recurring concepts and key phrases. 3. grouping related codes into themes based on shared meanings. 4. refining themes and identifying overarching patterns across participants. 5. defining and naming themes that captured essential aspects of the data. 6. reviewing themes to ensure alignment with the research question and study objectives. credibility and trustworthiness in qualitative research, establishing credibility involves ensuring that findings accurately reflect participants’ experiences (maher et al., 2018). in this qualitative phenomenological study, credibility was strengthened by allowing participants to review their interview transcripts for accuracy and by maintaining a detailed project log of all research activities. through careful review of the data and an inductive approach to identifying emerging themes, the analysis emphasized elements most relevant to the research question (trochim, 2006). these strategies helped ensure that the interpretation of the data remained grounded in participants’ perspectives (maher et al., 2018). transferability was supported by providing clear descriptions of the participants and context, allowing readers to determine whether the findings may apply to other settings (maher et al., 2018). dependability was reinforced by thoroughly documenting the research process to enable replication, and confirmability was addressed by regularly checking and rechecking the data to ensure consistent findings that could be reproduced in another study following the same procedures (stahl & king, 2020). results we sought to address the question: what effective leadership practices do black women entrepreneurs in the u.s. beauty industry employ to access capital for leadership development, enhance leadership skills, mitigate operational challenges, and improve profitability? to answer this, thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) was conducted on interview data. initial coding generated 20 open codes, including lack of funding, absence of leadership training and formal education, and operational challenges. codes related to leadership development and formal education were grouped into the category of education and training, which emerged as the theme: leveraging structured education and training programs for business success. further analysis revealed overarching patterns showing how ineffective leadership practices contributed to operational inefficiencies and cash flow challenges. five key themes: education and training, business operations, sustainability, mentorship and support, and funding, illustrate the leadership strategies that support profitable and sustainable business practices. to provide a detailed understanding of how these themes emerged, the following section describes the coding process, including the generation, refinement, and categorization of codes from the interview transcripts. code generation process interview transcripts were meticulously reviewed, and codes were assigned to capture key concepts relevant to the research question. this open coding approach allowed identification of a broad range of concepts without being constrained by pre-existing categories. each code was labeled descriptively to 142 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 summarize the main idea, and new codes were created as novel concepts emerged. potential relationships and patterns among codes were noted. this iterative process was applied consistently across all transcripts, with regular reviews to ensure clarity and relevance. similar or related codes were consolidated to maintain a meaningful set. analysis revealed 20 open codes across the 10 interview transcripts. the researcher focused on word and phrase frequency to identify initial codes, then grouped and refined them, creating clear definitions and examples. the next phase of thematic analysis, following braun and clarke's (2006) six-step process, involved transitioning from initial codes to final codes. the finalized codes, along with frequency counts, definitions and examples, are provided in table 1. 143 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 table 1 development of codes codes definition examples frequency counts lack of leadership training developing and enhancing skills and knowledge to lead and manage individuals and business. p5: “i never received any formal leadership training, which made managing my employees and business difficult in the beginning” 30 lack of formal education academic programs are designed to teach individuals the foundational knowledge, skills, and theories related to business and management. p3: "one of the most important lessons i learned was the value of understanding my business. i truly wish i had educated myself more about the business before starting on my own." p2: "i haven’t so far received any business training, but that is something i’m looking into because i plan to use those skills for other business avenues in the future." p1: "i would tell new business owners to take an online course to understand things like a profit and loss statement. this should be your priority when starting a business, because as soon as you make purchases, you need to track your expenses, the cost of your products, and the financial breakdown." 24 product research understand consumer needs, preferences, and market trends to develop and improve products. p10: "it's important to know your target audience and know what they want and what sells." 8 sustainability strategies to ensure long-term stability. p6: "after covid, my business kind of went up and down. so, it was still about balancing after covid, and i did lose some clients in between. so, it's been just pretty much the loyal clients. 12 self-funded used personal savings to finance business. p4: being a black woman, i often felt overlooked when applying for funding. i would hear things like, 'you probably won’t get approved,' even though i had good credit. because of these challenges, i had no choice but to self-fund my business. i started small, and over time, i was able to grow it steadily without external financial support." p5: "i worked a regular 9-to-5 job and used a portion of my paycheck to fund my business. by setting aside a percentage of my earnings, i was able to invest in my business and grow it from the ground up, relying solely on my personal savings.” 39 capital challenges obstacles a business faces in acquiring, managing, or utilizing the financial resources (capital) needed to fund their operations, for growth. p1: "securing funding was a big challenge for me. i realized it’s important to understand financial basics, like profit and loss statements, before seeking capital. without this knowledge, managing my expenses and product costs became a struggle." p8: "it takes money to start a business. i had to keep my 9-5 job to finance my business because i could not obtain a loan." 33 support providing encouragement, or resources to help. p2"i wish i had more support from my family, both financially and emotionally. they didn’t take me seriously when i said i wanted to start a business, and that lack of support made things harder for me in the beginning." 35 profitable businesses generating more revenue than the costs providing a positive return on investment allowing it to sustain and grow. p3: "i received support from strangers, but my family didn’t want to get involved, which made the journey more difficult.” p7: “my business became profitable by year 3. i learned to capitalize on busy seasons, so during slower periods, i'm not as financially strained." p4: "my business started generating profit around year three. by year six, i was able to quit my regular job and focus solely on my business." 20 collaboration working together with others. p6: "although my business is sustainable, expanding and adding new products has been challenging. i tried collaborating with vendors, but it did not work out." 2 bias unfair treatment that affects a business owner's ability to secure funding, due to race. p3: "i felt like being a black woman, they didn’t even give you a glance when i tried to get a loan. it was like, 'oh, well, you probably won’t get approved.' and i’m like, 'but i got credit.' challenges like this made me self-fund my business. i started small, and then as the years went by, i started growing." 11 lack of funding financial resources or capital to support a business or education. p1: "getting capital for my startup has been really difficult, especially as a black woman. banks are hesitant to support minority-owned businesses, and this lack of funding has forced me to rely on personal savings to keep my business going." p7: "i often come across various grants, but i’m not usually lucky in actually receiving them, as i can only imagine how many others are applying for the same 46 144 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 funding. it can be quite challenging." customer service overall experience provided to customers before, during, and after they purchase a product or service. it is focused on ensuring customer satisfaction by addressing their needs p6: "as my business grows and adds new products, maintaining the high level of customer service my clients expect has become a challenge. ensuring consistent service quality is crucial to retaining loyal customers." 2 strategies actions or approaches designed to achieve specific goals and plan for growth. p3: "the people around me didn’t have businesses, so they couldn’t inform me about different strategies that work for starting a business and obtaining clients. i had to learn on my own, trying different approaches until i figured out what worked for me." 3 operational challenges challenges that arise in the day-to-day activities of a business. p7: "in the early stages of my business, i focused mainly on making money and didn't realize the importance of foundational steps like opening a business account. 9 employee retention ability to keep its employees and reduce turnover. p5: "i currently have two employees that are family members. it's hard because they take advantage of the situation. when they don't get their own way, they threaten to leave. i could benefit from leadership training to learn how to manage employees." 6 diversification expanding on different types of products or services within a business to enhance growth opportunities. p10: "i keep my ear to the ground to stay informed about trends or upcoming opportunities, and i also strive to stay ahead of trends by being creative with my product offerings." self-directed learning acquiring skills through experience, trial, and error. p5: "when i first started the business, i learned by making mistakes along the way. many of these could have been avoided if i had a mentor or formal training, but they were valuable learning lessons." 14 flexibility ability to adjust and adapt. p7: “as a new business owners i had to be flexible whether it was in my personal life or the way i run my business to be successful.” 16 145 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 code to themes the next phase after initial coding, definition, and word counts was categorizing the codes in themes. transitioning from codes to themes is a critical step in thematic analysis, allowing higher-level abstraction and interpretation of the data (naeem et al., 2022). as braun and clarke (2006) note, themes capture essential aspects of the data and reveal patterns of meaning. the 20 open codes from table 1 were synthesized into five themes using phases three and four of braun and clarke’s process, organizing related codes with shared meanings and aligning each category with the research problem table 2. codes were then refined into themes reflecting core insights relevant to the research question. table 2 codes to themes themes code definition number of participants frequency counts training and education challenges absence of formal business education; leadership training; leadership style; skill gap, self -directed learning structured education in business principles and practices. programs or initiatives aimed at developing leadership skills. 10 86 growth and sustainability diversification; marketing; operational challenges; flexibility; customer service; collaboration expansion into new markets or offerings to promote business growth and long-term success 10 81 support mentorship and family support guidance provided by experienced individuals or mentors, along with emotional or financial support from family members to aid personal or professional growth 10 66 funding and financial resources access to capital; self-funded; loans; grants; barriers securing financial resources; bias financial resources necessary for business operations and growth, including personal savings used to finance business activities. 10 90 business operations maintaining profitability; sustainability collaborations; employee retention; product research; customer service activities and processes involved in running a business efficiently and effectively, including managing resources, employees, and workflows. 10 54 analysis of themes the next step involved analyzing and reviewing the recurring themes in response to the project question. examination of the themes derived from initial codes revealed broader patterns, ensuring alignment with the study’s objectives. the analysis yielded five key themes: (a) education and training, (b) mentorship and support, (c) funding and financial resources, (d) business operations, and (e) sustainability. as summarized in figure 2, these themes reflect participants’ perspectives and provide a framework for understanding the leadership practices of black women entrepreneurs in the u.s. beauty industry. each theme is presented below with participants’ narratives. figure 2 themes emerged from codes theme 1: education and training participants consistently emphasized the importance of training and education as entrepreneurs, whether through formal education, leadership development programs, or self-directed learning. when asked about their perspectives on the absence of leadership training and education, p3 responded, “one of the most important lessons i learned was the value of understanding my business. i wish i had educated myself more about the business before starting, as it would have helped me navigate challenges and grow my business.” invest in your business and ensure your customer service is top-notch; it is what can make or break your business. if you have never worked in a customer service role before, i would strongly recommend 146 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 gaining experience or training in that area. it will help your business to grow. (p6) in addition to acquiring knowledge through formal education and training, participants highlighted the importance of research as a form of self-directed learning to stay informed about trends in the beauty industry. p5 and p10 mentioned, do not get discouraged from pursuing an idea just because it is something you have not seen before. if you have done your research and noticed a gap or opportunity, do not underestimate yourself or back out simply because the market seems oversaturated. yes, there is a lot of competition in industries like skincare, but that does not mean there is no room for your unique idea. (p5) i prioritize research to stay informed and think creatively about my business. i often look at ideas from other industries and adapt them to fit my field. this strategy has kept me innovative and ensured my social media marketing remains fresh and effective. (p10) overall, the data collected indicated that leadership training and formal business education are essential for addressing the unique challenges faced by some black women entrepreneurs in the beauty industry. by leveraging structured education and training, some black female entrepreneurs can enhance their leadership skills and overcome operational challenges. this approach could help close the knowledge gap, equipping black female entrepreneurs with the necessary tools to lead effectively and manage their businesses for long-term success and sustainability. theme 2: mentorship and support mentorship and emotional or financial support from family were critical in shaping participants’ business experiences. participants reported limited access to mentors in the industry, which intensified challenges in decision-making and growth. p8 mentioned, “one of the first steps i recommend is seeking out women’s community outreach programs, as many provide free mentoring opportunities that can offer valuable guidance and support.” there was so much i did not know, and since the people around me did not have businesses, they could not provide me with information. finding a mentor to guide me was incredibly difficult, making it challenging to learn how to navigate various aspects of running a business. as a result, i went through a lot of trial and error. (p1) theme 3: funding and financial resources the data revealed the challenges faced by some black female business owners in securing funding, often attributed to systemic barriers such as racism and other biases, which hindered their access to loans, and grants. p1 stated, “getting capital for my startup has been difficult, especially as a black woman. banks are hesitant to support minority-owned businesses, and this lack of funding has forced me to rely on personal savings to keep my business going.” participants indicated that, despite attempts to secure conventional bank loans, they were often unsuccessful and consequently relied on self-funding to support their businesses. p4 stated, “the hardest part of starting my business was securing the capital i needed. i had to continue working my 9-5 job to self-fund my business.” i worked a regular 9-to-5 job and used a portion of my paycheck to fund my business. by setting aside a percentage of my earnings, i was able to invest in my business and grow it from the ground up, relying solely on my personal savings. (p5) theme 4: business operations participants described operational challenges related to day-to-day management, customer service, employee retention, and strategic planning. for example, p6 noted, “as my business grows and adds new products, maintaining the high level of customer service my clients expect has become a challenge.” theme 5: sustainability sustainability emerged as a theme connecting leadership, funding, and operational practices to long-term business success. participants reported that flexible approaches, diversification, and strategic planning contributed to stability and profitability. p10 responded, “i keep my ear to the ground to stay informed about trends or upcoming opportunities, and i also strive to stay ahead of trends by being creative with my product offerings.” implications the implications of this study are significant and extend beyond the u.s. beauty industry, highlighting broader socio-economic challenges faced by black women entrepreneurs. the data reveal a notable correlation between limited access to capital and the restricted ability of these business owners to participate in essential leadership development training. this lack of investment not only constrains individual profitability but can also jeopardize the long-term sustainability of their businesses. these findings emphasized the urgent need for some black women beauty industry leaders to prioritize investment in leadership training and formal business education. such efforts would equip black women entrepreneurs with the skills and knowledge needed to navigate entrepreneurial complexities, including effective funding strategies, educational gap limits, financial literacy, making it difficult for these entrepreneurs to navigate complex processes such as loan applications, investor pitches, and financial management. this deficiency not only affects immediate access to funding but also hampers long-term business sustainability. addressing these educational gaps can enhance both individual and collective economic outcomes. the findings also highlight the significant role mentorship plays as a complementary strategy for leadership development, particularly for black women entrepreneurs. mentorship offers 147 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 emerging leaders access to invaluable experiential knowledge, allowing them to benefit from the expertise and practical insights from seasoned professionals. through this interaction, mentees can refine their strategic decision-making, develop problem-solving capabilities, and enhance their capacity to manage the complexities of entrepreneurship. additionally, mentorship provides a vital platform for expanding professional networks, which are essential for accessing resources, funding opportunities, and potential partnerships that are otherwise difficult to obtain for underrepresented groups. the study also highlights the necessity of prioritizing leadership development initiatives as a strategic response to the inherent barriers in capital acquisition. the integration of training and mentorship into the entrepreneurial journey not only addresses immediate skill gaps but also fosters a more sustainable model for long-term success. recommendations for policy based on the findings of this study, several recommendations can support the implementation of effective leadership strategies in the beauty sector: to address these challenges, the following policy recommendations are proposed: establish industry standards and best practices for leadership development the beauty industry should adopt comprehensive standards that prioritize leadership development training, formal business education, research, mentorship, and financial resources tailored to black women entrepreneurs. these standards would provide a roadmap for effective business management and foster a more inclusive environment within the beauty sector. facilitate partnerships and collaboration initiatives policies that promote partnerships between black women-owned businesses and established industry networks can facilitate the exchange of knowledge and resources. collaborative learning and mentorship from experienced business owners can offer valuable insights on navigating industry challenges and securing necessary capital, reducing the barriers to entry and operational success for new entrepreneurs. from a policy perspective, integrating mentorship into leadership development frameworks along with formal business education can have transformative effects. mentorship provides direct, context-specific support that complements formal training by offering real-world insights and practical guidance tailored to overcoming obstacles common among underrepresented groups. policymakers and industry leaders should therefore advocate for and support the establishment of formalized mentorship programs within entrepreneurship especially aimed at empowering underrepresented entrepreneurs. recommendations for practice based on the insights gathered from black women business owners in the u.s. beauty industry, several key recommendations can be offered to aspiring black women entrepreneurs in the beauty industry. these recommendations, grounded in their lived experiences, emphasized the importance of mentorship, continuous learning, and strategic networking to foster successful leadership. first, seek out mentors and network with fellow business owners. mentorship is crucial for navigating challenges, especially in securing funding, and for providing the support and guidance necessary for business development. networking also plays a vital role in expanding the client base and connecting with potential mentors. second, enrolling in leadership and professional development programs is recommended. taking advantage of opportunities to attend leadership and business courses, workshops, and classes to continuously enhance knowledge and skills is crucial. investing in education can help elevate the business and adapt to new challenges. recommendations for future work future research should investigate how black women entrepreneurs can effectively utilize resources to bridge skill gaps impacting strategic planning, operational efficiency, and financial stability. emphasizing formal business education, leadership development, and mentorship in future studies would extend the insights gained from this project, enhancing its relevance and impact within the beauty industry. ultimately, this approach could generate strategies that enhance business outcomes and create strong support systems, empowering black women entrepreneurs to achieve sustained success. emphasizing formal business education, leadership development, and mentorship in future research could build on this study’s insights, expanding its relevance and influence within the beauty industry. here’s how: deepening understanding of leadership deficiencies and training needs examining how business owners can leverage formal education and leadership training directly addresses a significant gap identified in this study. by conducting further research, future studies could uncover specific training needs within this group, leading to targeted educational programs tailored to beauty industry entrepreneurs. the focus on education could create a blueprint for developing competencies in areas such as financial management, strategic planning, and operational decision-making, with the aim of sustaining their competitiveness and growth. enhancing practical business strategies through stages of development this study identified operational and financial challenges as pervasive issues that hinder business sustainability and profitability. additional research on implementing leadership practices across various business stages could provide specific, actionable strategies that entrepreneurs in the beauty industry can apply. 148 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 measuring the influence of leadership on profitability and market positioning understanding how specific leadership skills contribute to financial and operational performance is crucial in an industry. by investigating how leadership training and development impact key financial indicators, future research could bridge a vital gap in this study, linking leadership practices to measurable outcomes like revenue growth, customer acquisition, and profit margins. this knowledge could guide beauty industry leaders to refine their leadership approach to emphasize metrics directly tied to profitability and market positioning, thereby helping businesses better compete and thrive in an industry that is both consumer-driven and trend-sensitive. enhancing mentorship models to drive sustainable growth this study pointed to the importance of mentorship within the beauty industry. by examining effective mentor-mentee relationships in more depth, future studies could highlight successful strategies for skill transfer, strategic thinking, and innovative problem-solving. mentorship tailored to this sector could help business owners navigate the complexities of the industry, adapt to evolving standards, and ultimately support long-term growth and sustainability. informing policy and support programs for underrepresented entrepreneurs the insights from this study and subsequent research could inform policies and support initiatives aimed at addressing systemic barriers faced by black women entrepreneurs in the beauty industry. detailed data on financial and leadership training gaps could lead to advocacy for more inclusive funding opportunities, grants, and educational programs tailored to meet the specific needs of beauty industry entrepreneurs. ultimately, these recommendations aimed to deepen our understanding of how education, mentorship, and leadership skills influence the long-term viability of businesses, particularly for black women entrepreneurs who may face unique challenges. by addressing these research areas, future studies can help shape resources and support systems for black women-owned businesses. conclusion the study revealed that although black women started businesses faster than other groups, they faced significant barriers from limited leadership training, business knowledge gaps, and financial constraints. these challenges hindered their ability to launch, fund, and sustain ventures. lack of formal education further limited their capacity to secure capital and develop leadership skills. participants stressed the importance of business education and mentorship from industry leaders to provide guidance and support. strengthening leadership competencies was seen as essential to overcoming operational and financial challenges and improving business outcomes. references adeoye‐olatunde, o. a., & olenik, n. l. 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(2017). entrepreneurial leadership: insights and directions. international small business journal, 35(2), 147–156. https://doi-org.library.capella.edu/10.1177/026624261668 1397 mortari, l., valbusa, f., ubbiali, m., & bombieri, r. (2023). the empirical phenomenological method: theoretical foundation and research applications. social sciences, 12(7), 413. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12070413 pauceanu, a. m., rabie, n., moustafa, a., & daniel, c. j. (2021). entrepreneurial leadership and sustainable development—a systematic literature review. sustainability, 13(21), 11695. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132111695. thambusamy, r. x. & bekiroğulları, z. (2020). virtual leadership in small businesses during the covid-19 pandemic: challenges and possibilities. the european journal of social & behavioural sciences, 29(3), 179-190. turner, s., & endres, a (2017). strategies for enhancing small-business owners' success rates. international journal of applied management and technology, 16(1), 34–49. https://doi.org/10.5590/ijamt.2017.16.1.03 wendell, h (2020, october 15). corporations are rushing to help minority-owned firms. is it enough? crain’s chicago business. https://www.chicagobusiness.com/finance-banking/corpor ations-are-rushing-help-minority-owned-businesses-enou gh 150 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 18, spring 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        two women professors search for tools to teach social justice susan katz diana ryan roosevelt university background of the study we came to the university as new faculty in august of 2001 and were hired to teach in two different colleges. we eventually came together, fueled by a mutual interest in issues of social justice. in a faculty development workshop, we began to uncover what was really important to us as professors, particularly at this small, private university situated in a major, urban, multicultural city. with the hiring of a new president, the institution was going through changes.  the new administrative protocol seemed to be larger classes and stricter admission standards.  we heard that admission criteria would be raised thereby limiting access to higher education for many students who have been educated in the city’s public schools. after our experiences in teaching at the urban campus, we believed that those students, mainly students of color, did not possess the prerequisite skills and/or test-taking abilities that higher standards would demand. we also heard that the university was concerned about enrollment.  class sizes needed to reach a minimum number, necessitating cancellation of some sections and combining others. we were concerned that these new planned changes would reduce access for those students who generally have more difficulty gaining admission to academia. once admitted, larger classes would reduce the personal attention that many of these students want and need. the possibility that the university would be taking this new direction concerned us. our ideas about what social justice has meant for the university and what it should continue to look like in the future began to take shape. we knew that the university was founded on principles of social justice. the university’s history substantiated what we felt was foundational to the institution.  its very creation in 1945 was “considered an experiment in the imagination” of the city (gross, 2003). according to gross, the city was segregated by race and religion. discrimination was pervasive in social organizations, business, housing, and higher education. the college that was the university’s forerunner was no different (gross, 2003).  the key event that shaped the university was in 1945 when the college president resigned rather than support practices of discrimination by the college board of directors. faculty and students voted to break the institution’s ties to the governing board and walked out.  from this crucible of racial and religious defiance and a commitment to social justice, our institution of higher learning was born (gross, 2003). many institutions of higher education claim to support diversity and equal opportunity. we feel this important value must be supported and embedded in institutional practices.  we want to insure that social justice is treated seriously as part of the university’s pedagogical practices. it must not be glossed over to meet standards or simply included in a mission statement for the purposes of satisfying an accrediting body. thus, we decided to investigate which pedagogical tools would contribute to raising student consciousness about social justice issues.  we offered our courses to different populations since we taught at both the university’s urban and suburban campuses, and at a corporate site.we had observed the student differences in our classrooms—gender, race, ethnicity, and class. as we worked to enhance and guide student learning in this multicultural population, we saw that students needed to be challenged to appreciate similarities and differences.  purpose of the study https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html one of the promises of higher education is that instruction cultivates critical thinking and insight into social reality, and, ultimately, contributes to a more just society.  the disappointment is that coursework does little to help students begin the process of critically examining their own thinking, feelings, and desires. the purpose of our study was to discover how university coursework acquaints students with the issues of democratic community and social justice, to help them begin to examine the issues more critically, and provide students with an impetus to work for change in their communities. the study was initially conducted in one course in the college of education’s educational leadership department during the summer semester 2003. it then continued during the fall 2004 semester in four courses: two courses in the department of educational leadership with two sections of social foundations of diverse communities. the other two courses were in the bachelor’s of general studies program: proseminar in critical skills and diversity in the workplace.the study asked the following questions:  1. in one semester of coursework designed to acquaint students with issues of    social justice, do students experience a change in their: • definition of social justice? • recognition of practices relevant to social justice in their organizations? • sense of responsibility for contributing to change in the distribution of justice? 2. what specific type of pedagogy promoted movement toward change?  theoretical framework we have chosen the framework developed by bigelow, christensen, karp, miner, and peterson (1994). their “social justice classroom” (p. 4) guides our choice of pedagogy for the study.  consistent with their elements of the equitable, socially-just classroom, we designed our courses so they were: 1) grounded in the lives of the students, 2) critical, 3) multicultural, antiracist, pro-justice, 4) participatory and experiential, 5) hopeful, joyful, kind, and visionary, 6) activist, 7) academically rigorous, and 8) culturally sensitive (p. 4-5). another framework that guided our focus for cultivating critical thinking in learners is that of paul and elder (2002). they suggest that to be a critical thinker, learners must develop their abilities to monitor their egocentric and sociocentric tendencies. they must examine critically their point of view and conformity to the thinking of their social group, such as nation, culture, profession, religion, family, or peer group.  paul and elder suggest that the mind has three distinctive functions; thinking, feeling, and wanting.  a dynamic interrelationship of these functions is constantly communicated about what is going on in our lives, our feelings about those events, and the things we want to pursue – where to put our energy.paul and elder also contend, “we need to develop critical thinking skills in dialogical settings to achieve genuine fair-mindedness.  if critical thinking is learned simply as atomic skills separate from the empathetic practice of entering into points of view that we are fearful of or hostile toward, we will simply find additional means of rationalizing our prejudices” (p.340). methods to answer the research questions, five major activities defined the study.  in addition to the activities or pedagogical elements, students responded to a preand post-course survey that gathered information on their thinking, feelings, and desires about social justice in their daily lives, particularly in their work lives.  questions in the survey revolved around the issues of defining social justice, recognizing relevant practices in the workplace, and responsible action for change.  the pre-course survey was completed on the first day of class and the post-course survey was completed on the last day of class to identify substantive changes.  the post-course survey also asked for feedback on the course design to determine what specific pedagogical elements contributed to deeper understanding. pedagogical elements the study focused on five major pedagogical elements thatwere: group activities consisting of focus and roundtable groups; a set of guidelines for classroom discussion; the grecso model; reflective journaling; and selected texts and readings. we describe each of the pedagogical elements below. focus and roundtable group activities the focus group activity specifically allowed student teams to explore the group’s thinking, feelings, and desires concerning issues of social justice. trigger questions allowed students to dialogue with one another and negotiate and construct meanings while they critically examine their points of view.  all focus groups used the same set of trigger questions but the professor of the class chose the specific medium of videos to view or short articles to read and then discuss in focus groups. readings were taken from rethinking our classrooms: teaching for equity and social justice (bigelow, christiansen, karp, miner & peterson, 1994).  selected videos represented race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and disability.        the roundtables were whole-class activities to “explore a new way of meeting together to think about shared ideals of equity, appreciation of differences, shared leadership, authenticity, values clarification, and self-reflective listening and speaking” (gabriele, 2003). a facilitator read a script organized as follows: introduction, purpose, format, guidelines for speaking, guidelines for listening and responding.  for example, in the college of education courses we used a roundtable after students viewed the video, educating peter (hbo primetime, 1993). the video focused on the full inclusion of a student with down syndrome in a third grade general education class.  in the university college program at the corporate site, three roundtable sessions were conducted following the viewing of each of three videos. the professor facilitated the process following the video on race, and students conducted the process following videos on gender and sexual orientation. the students recorded their reactions to the session in their journals in class immediately after the roundtable sessions on the videos.  guidelines for classroom discussion a set of classroom guidelines to shape discussion was distributed on the first day of class and referred to throughout the semester. these eight guidelines (the chronicle of higher education, 2002) were developed by lynn weber, director of the women’s studies program at the university of south carolina and first published in women’s studies quarterly 18 (spring/summer 1990). the guidelines were intended to focus the students on key issues of social justice and help students define, recognize and take responsibility for social justice in their own workplaces and communities. grecso model grecso (dalmadge, 2003) highlights six socially-constructed categories of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation plus the category of disability. the grecso model was introduced early in the semester as an interactive process for exploring social construction of diversity categories.  in class, before the model is introduced, we asked students to write their definition of social justice. the acronym grecso is written on the board horizontally with each term written out. a horizontal line is drawn and students are asked to come up with the traditional categories for each of the terms. as the categories of privilege and power are placed on top, the model ends up looking something like this. gender race ethnicity class sexual orientation ability male white american have heterosexual abled female black/people of color alien/foreigner have not homosexual disabled as the model was drawn on the blackboard, students were asked, “where do you place yourself on this grid? what do you notice about the values society assigns to the different categories?”  after the first presentation and discussion of the model, students were asked if their definition of social justice had changed, and if so, to rewrite it. we addressed the grecso model throughout the semester to promote critical thinking about the categories in relation to students’ personal contexts. reflective journals students in all the courses submitted reflective entries in their offline journals or online in the course website group discussion forums. giancarlo and facione (2002) contend that reflective journals provide an opportunity for metacognitive self-correction: rather than mindlessly repeating one’s own errors of reasoning, or being misled by the errors of others, one is able, through meta-cognition, alone or with the help of others, to reflect on one’s own thinking. by applying critical thinking skills to the products of one’s own critical thinking—namely the judgments formed—one is able to analyze, interpret, explain, and evaluate one’s thinking by the standards of good reasoning. (p.18) in some cases we asked students to record their reflections on readings and dialogues in a journal that they brought to each class meeting.  at the end of the semester, students scanned their journals and composed one-page conclusions reflecting on the themes and issues that emerged in relationship to leadership, diversity, and/or social justice.  texts and selected readings we were careful to choose texts for all courses that were particularly relevant for social justice issues.for example, in the summer semester, since the course was concerned with special education topics for educational leaders, the major text addressed how leaders create a caring and effective education for all students. and in the fall semester the course, proseminar on critical skills, had a text that focused on teaching the standards and elements of critical thinking that lead students to personal and social consciousness. additional readings included articles that focused on race as social construction and the concept of white privilege. results the guiding research question for the study was concerned with whether or not students experienced change in their ideas about social justice. we decided to look at change in three ways: no change, some change, or major change. we coded all data together and talked extensively about whether students’ responses constituted change and if so, what degree of change. our data came from survey responses, transcripts of audio taped focus groups and roundtable activities, postings online and offline, and reflective journals. we also were interested in how students answered questions on the post-course survey and whether they liked or disliked the pedagogical elements introduced during the summer and the fall semesters. students also mentioned the pedagogical elements in other forums, like the audiotapes, reflective journals, and online and offline postings. we included these in the analysis. definition of social justice to answer the first research question, we explored change in three areas. first we asked: did students experience a change in their definition of social justice? the data from the preand post-course surveys provide starting and ending statements by the students. however, the richer data was gathered from the opportunities that students had to explore ideas whendialoguing with each other, when recording reflections in their journals and in recordings of focus group activities. we analyzed the pilot study’s pre-and post-course surveys. they indicated that students began to question their belief systems regarding inclusive education and to see possibilities of achieving social justice for minority groups in their school settings.the study also revealed that students entered the course with undeveloped ideas about social justice issues. for example, on the pre-course survey, one question asked students for their personal definition of social justice. of the twenty students in the summer class, eleven responded with the idea of “equality.”  other ideas that emerged were the concepts of “fairness,” “equity,” and “opportunity.”  a few students were unsure of their definition of social justice. one student responded to the definition question with “not sure. people treated fairly in society?”  clearly, students began to construct their own meaning of social justice as evidenced by one student’s journal entry on the course website. since our first class, and the grecso exercise, i have found myself reflecting on some of these issues.  i find myself thinking about [student name] and what it must be like to be the only person of color in the class.  i have wondered what it might be like if the situation were reversed, and i was the "only" white, suburban in a class of urban teachers of color.  how would i feel?  how would i handle that situation?  i think of what it must be like for (student names) to hear us talk about the "problems" in our schools where we have so much in terms of support and resources and compensation. the course was designed to deepen student understanding of social justice.  for example, in the pre-course survey, several students defined social justice simply as equality. for example, “everyone is treated equal and given the same opportunity,” and “equal treatment for various social groups.” to introduce students to a different view of fair and equitable treatment, they read about and discussed the concept of a need-based system of distributing justice, i.e., everyone gets what is needed to succeed (thousand, nevin, & mcneil, 2000). after comparing and contrasting their initial definitions of social justice with this need-based system, students deepened their formulation of ideas leading to a more nuanced definition of social justice. one person’s definition of social justice inthe pre-course survey was: “social justice is when the job goes to the most qualified candidate after he or she earned it.”  in the post-course survey, the same person said, “social justice is when people have equality of opportunity.” we identified this as a clear shift in focus. another substantive change occurred when one person in the pre-survey defined social justice as the equal treatment of “people that exist in the same environment but have different social interests.”  in the post-survey the same student defined social justice as “having equitable learning and access opportunities regardless of race, gender, age.” the student’s definition had sharpened and acknowledged the categories in the grecso model.  a salient example of how students changed their definition of social justice occurred in one of the focus group activities. in one group of four, there was some discussion about what social justice really meant in the context of seeing color: a review of white teacher (delpit, 1994). the point in the reading is that if people say they are color blind, they see people as all needing the same things, and they miss the point of diversity. this is certainly a departure from a needs based system of distributive justice where everyone might need something different to be successful (because of differences relating to grecso). students began their discussion by talking mainly about race and the need for white teachers to have “color blindness” in their classes of students. after a thoughtful discussion, the group decided it was not colorblindness that was desirable, but actually being able to use diversity as an asset rather than a deficit. the discussion forum on the course website was another opportunity for students to reflect on their definitions of social justice. a white male recognized his own ‘privilege’ after reading the american anthropological association’s statement on "race" (1998). i guess being a white male does give me advantages that i never thought about.  every year we sit down as a class and look at the faces of all the presidents on the wall.  i ask what the kids see. at the start some of the kids say things like, “they are old.”  soon it becomes apparent, usually to the girls, that they are all men.  then it is noticed they are all white.  this is what every minority has to overcome. what every woman has to overcome.  in this country it [is] still assumed or at least voted [on] that only white men can be president.  that is over 200 years of precedent.  that’s what we are dealing with…that’s a lot of history (coe student, personal communication, july 28, 2003). recognition of relevant practices continuing to explore the question of change, we asked: did students experience a change in their ability to recognize practices relevant to social justice in their organizations? again we coded preand post-course surveys looking for evidence of minor or major changes, or no change.  in response to the question, “how do your organization’s current practices agree or disagree with your definition?” one student responded in the pre-survey: “i think all students are treated pretty fair.” in the post-survey the same student said, “i think it [the organization] does what is fair for the most people and most economical, not necessarily the best for all.” some students did not respond to questions in the presurvey, but had strong answers to questions in the post-survey. we interpreted this to mean that students experienced a significant change during the course. for example, one student, who identified himself as an educator for 25 years and who now serves as a guidance counselor, did not respond to the pre-survey question regarding relevant practices. in the post-survey he said, “we segregate students of low ability and elevate students of high ability (based on narrow standards).” some students developed their ideas more deeply about issues of inclusive practices in the pilot study within their organizations as evidenced by one student who said in the pre-survey, “i believe we adhere to this [practices relevant to social justice issues] – at least try.” in the post-survey, the student said, “somewhat – it is too easy for a teacher to say this student is holding the rest of my students back. and then the student is dropped from your class. interventions with the teacher should be made.” analyzing the focus group transcripts provided another example of how students view relevant practices of social justice in their schools. for example, a group discussing the article, whose standard? teaching standard english (christensen, 1994), came to the agreement that teachers need to hear their students’ stories first, before they begin to correct nonstandard language. the idea in their discussion was that teachers need to make students feel that they are worthy and have a lot to say before teachers begin to correct writing errors. in response to a trigger question regarding which social justice issues will have the most long-term implications, the team agreed the long-term consequences would be a sense of belonging for students, opening up to others, sharing, and willingness to learn the standard. “the first thing they need to know is what they [students] have to say has value and that it is important.” in another example, after reading why students should study history: an interview with howard zinn (miner, 1994), a team recognized that the one-sided teaching of history was slanted to the european point of view. students thought the social justice issue here was to recognize that “there is another side of history.” the team agreed that changes in the way history was presented in textbooks would benefit everyone. reflective journaling provided another source example of recognizing relevant practices. during an online discussion forum two women talked about racism in their culture as youngsters. one said she was raised in her church to look at herself and her church friends as greeks and everyone else as americans. she said, “it just goes to show how unexpectedly and easily racism pops up in every culture.” the other woman said they were not allowed to talk to the catholics next door even though they were the same race. sense of responsibility the final part of the research asked: did students experience change in their sense of responsibility for contributing to change in the distribution of justice? we did not find much evidence of this type of change. possibly we need to reframe the question on the survey. more importantly, we need to directly address this subject more during class discussions. the data from the surveys and reflective journals produced more information than the focus groups about whether or not students experienced a shift in their sense of responsibility for change. in the survey results, one person, who identified herself as a science teacher, initially thought that she took responsibility through her modifications for one student who was “handicapped,” and who wasalready identified as someone with special needs. in the post-survey she said, “i realize now that it is my job to seek out ways to accommodate students so they can stay in my class and be successful with the proper support and encouragement.” we saw this person making a major shift because, after the course, she viewed inclusive practices as her individual responsibility and not that of the system. in the online reflective journal postings one student wrote about practices regarding the homeless. those of us who look for real answers appear to be radicals because public life is filled with a great concern for appearances . . . there are many making money tearing down ghetto high rises and converting them to condos. also if the problem is out of sight, then it is out of mind. that is why we [police department] clear the homeless from the street and the city when a visiting official’s motorcade is scheduled to pass. it makes it easier to give the appearance that we are solving the problem. in reality we are just moving, hiding the mess. another student wrote in his reflective journal regarding his sense of responsibility for practices in his organization. he questioned how inclusion would work in a system of limited resources. “perhaps we will have to give up some things in order to have a world of full inclusion in our schools. maybe then it would be a conscious choice.” in another section of his journal, this same student felt he went through “a real paradigm shift” during the class. his epiphany came when he read another student’s ideas about inclusion. he said, to me, her idea of focusing on best practices or what is best for each student . . . and not forcing the outcome—or making inclusion the goal—made a lot of sense to me.  . . . the outcomes of such an approach might very well be some form of increased inclusion. another student’s reflections on responsibility began with a quote from maya angelou, “we do the best we can with what we know. when we know better, we do better.” in a direct response to the angelou quote, the student went on to say: that starts with ourselves and is about knowing better our prejudices, our biases, and the subtle hidden baggage we carry. the next step perhaps, is to help those we love, our children, and our students, to know better—not just to know how to spell, to add, and to read, but to know themselves. in the summer semester, where the focus was on inclusion as a social justice issue, the students in the educational leadership program were all public school teachers. we did see a shift in their thinking about how their schools treat students with disabilities. they seemed more aware of the issues at the end of the course regarding inclusive practices, and they seemed better able to evaluate such practices after the course content. pedagogy promoting change we wanted to know how students felt about each of the pedagogical elements and specifically which of the elements promoted movement toward change. the course evaluation asked this question directly and was the main source of data to answer this question. activities (focus groups and roundtable) comments about focus groups were positive as evidenced by the following examples: “i truly enjoyed the idea of the focus group.”  “i would have enjoyed the opportunity to participate in it more.” “i found it quite easy to participate in this forum.” “this was an important exercise for my group because we were struggling as a team. this gave us an opportunity to really work together.” “good tool—it helped me understand my own feelings better along with those of my teammate.” student comments on the course evaluations were equally positive for the roundtable. in fact, two of the educational leadership students who are school counselors are using the roundtable in their high schools with various groups of students with much success.  guidelines for classroom discussion the data were consistently positive. comments such as, “great—group respectful,” “excellent,” “needed,” “appropriate,” were noted on the course evaluations. referring to the guidelines, a student said, “much needed. these guidelines helped us stay focused on the subject as opposed to following our own emotions wherever we were led.” another student felt that “it was nice to have a guideline so discussions were fair to everyone.” one negative comment had to do with the belief that the guidelines constrained intellectual risks and one student felt they were unnecessary. grecso more than half of the comments on grecso in the final course evaluations from the summer semester were positive. for example, students said that grecso “really opened my eyes to such issues on the first day.” other comments included “…opened the way i look at certain situations;” “liked it, thought about using it in group [counseling];” “magnified issues not thought of;” and “informative, eye-opening.” in the online reflective journal, one student wrote, [i] appreciate the thought about grecso. after realizing during the first class that i was ‘above the line’ on that exercise, i began to wonder what things i cannot see precisely because of being raised a white male, etc. there must be a world of ideas and feeling i can’t even comprehend and, as a result, i suspect there are a multitude of “institutionalized” issues which continue to benefit me even though i don’t know it. kinda like being a fish in water. in the same student’s offline reflective journal, he indicated that grecso ideas were a powerful representation of “popular opinion” and had a great influence on him. “perhaps these [my] questions and perspectives are a result of being raised in the u.s. in and around middle to upper-class families. basically, this whole idea, grecso seems to have taken on a life of its own for me.”  in a different offline reflective journal, the same student wrote: i think the key to moving ahead is getting a better sense of where each of us is now. the kind of thinking and self-exploration that comes with exercises like the grecso chart can help with that. this class has made me realize that we carry with us many subtle biases and expectations that we ourselves don’t even see. reflective journal (online and offline) students welcomed the chance to write in their offline reflective journals in the pilot study.  in the course evaluations, students said that the journal activity “connected my personal experience to the content (social justice).” “[i] loved them, keeps me grounded.” “i loved these and wish i had more time to reflect.” “a very good experience—encouraged me to process on a personal level.” the negative comments from students indicated they did not want their journals to be evaluated for a grade. even though they had a rubric for their reflective journals, they stated that they felt their responses were personal and their own and “how could they be graded?” some students would have preferred sharing in person for “authentic assessment/reaction.” one online assignment involved students posting their reflections on the reading and then posting a response to a classmate’s reflection. positive comments about this assignment included, “i loved them. i enjoyed reading the reflections of others. also i enjoyed how others responded to my thoughts.” another student liked reflection and felt it allowed her “to express my feelings and actually see how this is affecting me now.” “i really enjoyed this exercise…gave me an opportunity to think about the way i think.” other comments regarding thought processes were, “really a positive experience, helped me ‘feel’ my thoughts.” “good to be able to look back at how my thoughts and process has changed over the class time.” texts and readings (web and print) in the course evaluations, students indicated that the texts and readings were “very helpful, especially capper.” [the text (capper, frattura, & keys, 2000)] “made me aware of many social justice issues.” “[the] handouts were great.” “web articles were terrific, concise but helpful.” “people first [language article (snow, 1998)]—good read.” students in the proseminar in critical skills class felt that the critical thinking text (paul & elder, 2002) was interesting and informative although slightly repetitive. one student said, “i have actually recommended it in my work group as well as to friends.” online presentation material received positive comments from students. conclusion university professors share the responsibility of preparing citizens for participation in a just society.  given this responsibility, course design must promote critical thinking among students who are regularly confronting diversity and complex social changes in the workplace and in the larger community.  this paper reports on a study conducted at a small midwestern comprehensive university. the study attempted to isolate the value of particular pedagogical tools and strategies in promoting students’ critical thinking about social justice issues, problems, and concerns.  two professors from two different departments of the university collaborated on creating and conducting the study initially in one course and continuing the study in four other courses designed with this goal in mind.  in this paper we have described student reactions and how the five pedagogical elements contributed to the growth of student thinking, feelings, and desires about issues of social justice.  as anticipated we concluded that overall the five pedagogical tools helped students deepen their thinking and insight into social justice issues in connection to their own communities. in all the courses, we found evidence that students began to question their belief systems regarding the key socially constructed categories we focused on: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and disability.  we were hoping to identify an array of instructional tools and strategies that could be combined in different ways for the course and context that would broadly contribute to student consciousness and action for social justice.  we knew from the research that the educational community favored certain constructivist tools and educational pedagogy to engender reflection and growth for individual students. we knew from experience that some of those tools used in other courses led to deep reflection and growth.  our deliberate study of the bridge between theory and practice confirmed that students also find these to be valuable tools for consciousness raising and connection to personal circumstance and practice. there are many unanswered questions and areas to explore in the effort to teach for social justice as a natural part of any class.  as researchers we are interested in exploring the specifics of various pedagogical tools and developing them completely.  some of the ones we have chosen for this study have a solid base of experience.  reflective journals are quite popular now throughout the educational system.  we would like to do more work with them in our classes and refine the process for our students.  the roundtable activity is the pet project of a small group of researchers in social systems design and we would also like to work with these researchers to refine this valuable tool.  focus groups are only just beginning to be used for educational purposes rather than for commercial functions.  all the tools deserve more research and leave many questions about their role in social justice unanswered. however, since our study, we have been using and have found these pedagogical tools useful in other classes. whenever discussion of issues of social justice crop up in our classes, we find grecso and the roundtable useful. one final area that may be more critical than any is the question of context.  in our study, we gathered data in the urban setting, the suburban setting, and the corporate setting. we have ideas about the differences in students’ backgrounds and experiences among those settings and how those communities reflect the grecso model. these differences have a critical bearing on how successful the tools can be.  these factors warrant further study in order to make a contribution to our understanding. we clearly need additional research on tools that help educators walk the talk of social justice. epilogue marlon riggs (1993), in his documentary, “black is . . . black ain’t,” weaves the metaphor of his community cooking up a louisiana gumbo to talk about his experience with diversity.  his culinary metaphor works for our story also.  unlike a lot of recipes that have one right outcome, the gumbo is something that grows out of what you have in the community kitchen; who brings the ingredients, what ingredients are brought, and who will be doing the eating.  some in the community are more experienced with making gumbo, and they facilitate the process, but everyone contributes to the cooking and the ingredients.  the cooks create the basic roux to bind those ingredients together.  the roux must be tended carefully for if it gets too hot, it will burn; a perfectly browned base is desired to make a tasty gumbo.  in the riggs documentary, people add fresh herbs and hot peppers along with the other ingredients. the whole thing is stirred until the flavors combine and are cooked to perfection. the gumbo is rich and varied and totally unique to that community. the community feast is over when everyone goes away satisfied that much was given and was eaten.   if our university classrooms are community kitchens and we are the experienced chefs, we must insure that our students have contributed to that social justice gumbo in a pot they have an investment in. as professors, we may be from different departments and disciplines, but we need the same pots and cooking tools to support that interactive learning experience in our courses. we need a selection of effective pedagogical tools and documents that guide rather than dictate the learner’s experience.  just like keeping a careful watch on the roux, we must be watchful to see that learning occurs in the social testing and sharing of ideas.  new points of view spice up the learning experiences and students make the authentic connection between theory and practice. in our opinion, that is what gives them something substantive to chew on.  if human beings are basically interested in learning from each other while realizing that everyone has a unique contribution to bring to the pot, they will have something worthwhile to take away from the classroom to practice in their communities. in a related discussion forum on one course website, a student suggested, “if people were like gumbo, the roux would be the unique qualities of each individual (diversity) and their experiences. everyone and everything that is contributed (diversity) makes for a good pot of gumbo." references american anthropological association (1998). statement on “race.” retrieved on september 3, 2003 from http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm bigelow, b., christensen, l., karp, s., miner, b., & peterson, b. (eds.). (1994). rethinking our classrooms: teaching for equity and justice. milwaukee, wi: rethinking schools. capper, c.a., frattura, e., & keyes, m. (2000). meeting the needs of students of all abilities. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press, inc. christensen, l. (1994). whose standard? teaching standard english. in b. bigelow, l. chirstensen, s. karp, b. miner, and b. peterson (eds.), rethinking out classrooms: teaching for equity and justice. milwaukee, wi: rethinking schools. dalmadge, h. (2003). presentation delivered at the teacher quality enhancement seminar. roosevelt university. chicago, il. delpit, l. (1994). seeing color: a review of white teacher. in b. bigelow, l. christensen, s. karp, b. miner, and b. peterson (eds.), rethinking our classrooms: teaching for equity and justice. milwaukee, wi: rethinking schools. gabriele, s. best of both roundtable. retrieved on september 4, 2003, from http://www.gemslearning.com/services.html giancarlo, c.f., & facione, p.a. (2002). insight assessment and critical thinking as reasoned judgment, the album. santa clara, ca: the california academic press. p 18. gross, t. (2003). the university that gave them a chance: roosevelt university 1945-2001. retrieved on january 10, 2004 from http://faculty.roosevelt.edu/ruonline/history_start_a.htm. hbo primetime (producer). (1993). educating peter [motion picture]. (available from    state of the art, inc, 4455 connecticut ave., suite b-200,washington, dc 20008) miner, b. (1994). why students should study history: an interview with howard zinn. in b. bigelow, l. christensen, s. karp, b. miner, and b. peterson (eds.), rethinking our classrooms: teaching for equity and justice (pp. 150-155). milwaukee, wi: rethinking schools. paul, r. w. & elder, l. (2002).  critical thinking: tools for taking charge of your professional and personal life. upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall. riggs, m. (producer/director). (1993). black is . . . black ain’t [motion picture]. (available from california newsreel, order department, p.o. box 2284, south burlington, vt 05407 and online at http://www.newsreel.org/) snow, k. (1998). kids together, inc.: people first language. retrieved on september 4, 2003, from http://www.kidstogether.org/pep-1st.htm. the chronicle of higher education (2002). guidelines for discussion or thought control? retrieved on september 1, 2003, from http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i05/05a01001.htm thousand, j.s., nevin, a.i., & mcneil, m.e. (2000). achieving social justice through education for responsibility. in r.a. villa. & j. s. thousand (eds.), restructuring for caring and effective education (pp. 137-165). baltimore: paul h. brookes publishing co.   copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | 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engaged in higher education in common border zones, or "outsider-within locations." while teaching and leading as an outsider, scholars also affirm the conscious effort by women of color to reject the status of victim that is an effect of multiple oppressions. their resilience to continue to change people's understandings about themselves, others and the world, despite simultaneous and multiple oppressions is seen in their teaching practices, in their efforts as leaders, and in their active participation in the construction of enduring life stories. this special issue includes a collection of articles about black women educators who have fought oppressions through their experiences as leaders, pedagogues, and scholars. articles are written in various perspectives and survey personal and professional lived experience, highlighting stories of the past as well as of the present. elizabeth davenport's article, telling stories: examining the views of an african-centered female minority leader , explores the beliefs of an african-centered educator as she uses her own african-centered model to empower students in urban schools. in their article, black women teacher educators: creating enduring afriographies as leaders and change makers, djanna hill-brisbane and jeannine dingus explore the perspectives, experiences, and practices of black women teacher educators as leaders and change makers. karen johnson examines anna julia cooper's role as an educational leader as well as her philosophical views on education, in her article entitled: the educational leadership of anna julia haywood cooper. tondra loder, michelle sims, angela coker, loucrecia collins, michael brooks, deborah voltz, and charles calhoun draw attention to the experiences of african american women and men in the academy in their article, on becoming and being faculty-leaders in urban education and also being african american...seems promising. in her article entitled, finding my voice: an african-american female professor at a predominantly white university, aretha faye marbley draws from her personal experience and shares concrete examples from her promotion and tenure review, including the experience of social integration issues and the ramifications that the higher education environment had on her personal and professional attitudes as an african american female faculty member. juanita cleaver simmons wrote from the experiential and theoretical perspectives that she encountered as a black female public school educator who, after twenty-plus years of public school teaching and administrative experiences, became an assistant professor at a predominately white research university, in her article entitled, life notes about the dual careers of a black female: race and gender politics in public school administration and higher education professorship. as we focus on black women leaders, this special issue also includes those who may not have been university professors, yet made significant 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networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle preview this issue explores several perspectives ranging from feminist epistemology to learning how to turn anger into knowledge. the reflective articles in this edition include subjects which pertain to things that effect women in the workplace such as: stereotypes, ideologies, and anger. these selections also discus how women may overcome such barriers. the articles within are: "scarlett leads the schoolhouse: does being southern matter?" 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https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 18, spring 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        overcoming injustice: a tradition of resilience by joanne chesley university of north carolinagreensboro numerous studies have explored the concept of resilience and its influence in the face of alienation, adversity, or abnormality (benard, 1991; cairns & cairns, 1994; gordon, 1995; krovetz, speck, & luther, 1991; werner, smith,  & sagor, 1996). even more noteworthy, a significant body of this research has considered the role of resilience in the management of social complexities such as gender bias and institutional racism (bressler, 1967; centra, 1970; davis, loeb, & robinson, 1970; heussenstamm, & hoefner, 1971; kiernan & daniels, 1967; marjoriebanks, 1980; middleton, 1963; newman, 1980; reed, mcmillan, & mcbee, 1995; seginer, 1986; solomon, 1989; taylor, 1970; wilson, 1979). gordon’s (1995) work views resilience as the ability to thrive, mature, and increase competence when confronted with adverse circumstances. these circumstances, which can be either biological or environmental, become obstacles as one attempts to increase social competence. sometimes the circumstance may be chronic and consistent and other times severe and infrequent. in any case, it represents a loss of opportunity to thrive, mature, and increase capacity for competence. studies by gordon (1995) and luther (1991) found that resilient people possess an internal locus of control, not found in non-resilient people, and that the resulting social competence held by the former group plays an important role in overcoming stressful situations. dealing with racism at school, in the workplace, in neighborhoods, and in business has long been a stressful situation for african americans. it is one of the primary forms of adversity with which resilience researchers have concerned themselves (bressler, 1967; centra, 1970; chesley-carter, 1998; davis, loeb, & robinson, 1970; kiernan & daniels, 1967; taylor, 1970). from these studies that link resilience to racial prejudice, several things are clear.  people need 1) cultural identity, 2) psychological acceptance, 3) feelings of relevance, and 4) fulfillment of cultural needs and goals. another thing that the research on resilience tells us is that people need people. in study after study (cairns & cairns, 1994; christenson, 1992; garmezy, 1991; gordon, 1995; jorgensen, 1979), it appears that the influence of a dependable role model, constant buddy, or a caring adult figure (in the case of youth) is a highly significant factor in one’s overcoming obstacles. resilience and social justice two essential characteristics mark the behaviors and mindsets of people who are considered resilient (chesley-carter, 1998). these are having a sense of personal power and control over life’s events and the capacity to make meaning through a role model. there seems to be this inextricable connection between resilience and social justice. how can one go about the work of social justice without a sense of personal power and without reference to another role model? kant’s (1959) philosophical work recognized the importance of resiliance.  he wrote about the outcomes of moral action and suggested that actions and decisions have worth when they are done out of duty, which is always connected to a sense of good, or goodwill. even if the action did not succeed, if it was done out of a spirit of goodwill, it is still considered successful. leading for social justice is a consequence of conscious moral action. in the body of work on moral action (an important aspect of social justice) there are leaders who really want to help improve situations for people.  they do three things: 1) ensure that there is capacity to initiate action that supports the mission (illustrates the characteristic of ‘meaning’), 2) https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html 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obstacles (illustrates the concept of resilience), and 3) handle the external issues (illustrates the characteristic of control)(hill, foster, & gendler, 1990). these leaders make the mission clear, the benefits of ‘the struggle’ clear, and establish covenants and commitments designed to see the effort through to the end. these leaders take whatever initiative is necessary to bring about change.  they socialize those around them. they consider themselves accountable to the larger community. this is leading for social justice. motivations for moral action vary, probably to the extent that leaders do. paccione (2000) reports that motivation to act morally comes from job situations, influence of family/childhood experiences, discrimination due to minority status, and interactive/extended cultural immersion experiences. she adds that some derive their ‘calling’ from training, educational courses, or books. her work on motivation to lead suggests that childhood exposure to diversity provides a solid foundation for a strong disposition and commitment to the cause of justice. she finds a correlation between social competence (the primary effect of resilience) and high commitment to lead. models of power and meaning i don’t know if i used the term ‘social justice’ before 1996.  at that time i was studying at the university of north carolina-chapel hill under drs. richard hunter, frank brown, dave clark, and others who frequently used the language of social justice. while i may not have had the language, i have always understood social justice as a part of my personal experiences and witnessed by my family. my grandmother as a very young child, i observed my grandmother’s activism in the local branch of the naacp. there, in the small town of la plata, in the state of maryland, lillie mae butler and others who lived with injustice everyday, literally led the march toward social justice. these women followed in the footsteps of leaders like ida b. wells and mary white ovington, the women who helped to form the naacp in 1909.  my grandmother was about 10 years old then, i suppose. she would adopt as her role models the likes of fannie lou hamer and septima clark. my grandmother was from a family of teachers born in the south. like septima clark, they were told where they could and could not teach, and began working through local branches of the naacp to eradicate prejudice in the job market. grandma, who had a business certificate from peabody high school in petersburg, virginia, needed work upon the death of my grandfather.  he was one of the first minorities in the country, we believe, to have his own shop where he repaired and sold singer sewing machines. when grandma couldn’t find work in her field, because of segregation, she did what was called day work.  in other words, she began working in white folks’ kitchens.  i remember my mother telling me when i was about 8 years old that my grandmother was paid $8.00 a day.  she worked about 3 days a week. my grandmother spent much of the other two workdays in the cause for justice. she believed she had a responsibility to bring about political, economic, and social change. she applied her business knowledge from her education in petersburg, virginia to the work of the naacp. i was looking through some treasured family artifacts recently.  there are things like a book of ration coupons that my mom’s parents never finished using after the war, the deed to her parents’ house in baltimore, maryland in the early 20s, and the minutes that my grandmother took at a 1963 naacp meeting. the minutes reflected their annual program of work which included 12 things:  “1) first class citizenship; 2) establishing bi-racial committees; 3) equal opportunity; 4) better housing; 5) home loan opportunities; 6) integration of public schools; 7) integration of public offices; 8) increasing voter registration; 9) negro responsibility to self, community, and county; 10) increasing naacp membership; 11) community improvement; and 12) assist youth activities” (butler, 1963). i remember going to these meetings, nearly every one of them, freezing in the winter because it took time to heat this big old community hall with a single wood stove.  my grandmother was responsible for lighting the stove before the meeting. while my sisters and i sat, for what seemed an eternity each time the grown folks met, we gained a true appreciation for community service and commitment to justice for all. my mother my mother’s involvement in community and social justice emerged from grandmother’s influence and was phenomenal. one of the most compelling acts of leadership on her part was her response to a situation that, until that time, had only served to anger ‘colored’ people. in charles county, md, as in most cities and towns before the civil rights act of 1964, black children and white children attended separate schools and of course rode separate buses. it was in 1957, two years after rosa parks decided that she would keep her seat on the bus, that my mom decided it was time to correct the busing situation in laplata.  for the few colored children who attended the catholic school there was no transportation. my older sister, phyllis, was one of the first. the ‘colored’ population at this school with grades 1-12, and approximately 500 students, was less than ten.  even 45 years later, i recall their names, which i believe speaks more to the import of their integrating that school than of my memory’s acuity. there were 3 families---the monks (betty jean, mary ellen, and sonny), the greys (sharon, ann, lynette, and monica), and my sister, phyllis chesley. i would join the ranks two years later as would siblings of the other trailblazers mentioned here. while the church did not allow segregation in schooling, it had not taken the next step –ensuring that we could get there in the same way white children did. our parents could not take us by car, as did some of the white kid’s parents.  most colored parents only had one car, if they had one at all. our parents had to work from sun up to sundown to pay the tuition. this church supported school did not own its own buses, and so made bus arrangements with the public schools’ transportation system for the children whose parents could not bring them to school. for the colored children, this meant not being able to get to the school because we were not allowed to ride the public schools’ ‘white only’ buses. the public school bus that went to the heart of la plata, where the catholic school was, was for white children. the colored children’s bus went in a different direction--toward the colored school. after several appeals to the school system, to no avail, my mother, mrs. mable chesley got up one morning about 5 a.m. and typed a letter to the governor of maryland. i suppose this was pretty gutsy for the times the mid-fifties. we’re talking about a colored person, and a woman at that, directly appealing to the governor!  she received a reply from the governor’s office advising her of her rights. my mother ,supported by my father and the grey family, who were also african americans, filed the case and rode two hours to baltimore on their court date.  my mother said, “it is time,” probably in a similar tone to that of dr. king when he said from his jail cell, “if not now, when?”  until this time, getting my older sister to school took some planning. my dad had to drive more than one hour into washington dc everyday to work, something he did for 38 years. so my parents found someone who would take phyllis to school. i often wondered why mrs. v. freeman did it. it surely was not money. i doubt she accepted anything. why would she give of her time like this, getting up early every morning and going back to get my sister every evening, sometimes dealing with her car breaking down?  i remember that car.  a big, old black humped back car, perhaps a ‘48 or ‘49 plymouth or something. i’ll have to ask my dad, he’ll remember, even at 82 years old. i remember the running board on the car was so rusty that it had begun to corrode and crack.  phyllis scraped her leg on this rusty metal so many times, in the same place, that my mom started to worry if the wound would ever heal and if this would cause cancer. many believed this was a cause of cancer-sores that did not heal well.  for now, getting an education was the priority. witnessing victory on the day the judge ruled in favor of my mother, she knew she would have to continue the fight of working for social justice. her assertiveness had paid off.  no longer could the buses in charles county md discriminate (even though the schools still could). monday morning, phyllis would be riding the bus with other little children. i now know that mrs. freeman made the sacrifice every morning because it was what she could do to help advance social justice.  as an active member of the naacp, alongside my grandmother and a man named mr. luther stuckey, this lady knew that the war against racism would only be won, one battle at a time and with each soldier carrying his or her share of the weight.  such intentional behaviors are critical to advancing the cause of justice.  when i think back on these days, these events, i recall everyone being so serious about all of this. righting injustice was serious. it was focused. nothing else got in the way--not women’s issues, not differences in religious denomination, not household responsibilities. mahatma ghandi’s advice to a fellow hindu leader was, “there will be many turnings along the way.  it will be easy to get lost on attractive bypaths that lead nowhere.  resist deflections.”  ghandi’s words were all about staying the course, being steadfast and resilient. this advice may well have been the mantra for my mother and her contemporaries. my role begins i joined the naacp youth council in the mid-sixties. though the civil rights act had been signed in 1964 and the dirty little “whites only” sign had come off the bathroom door at a gas station in la plata, many small towns like this continued to discriminate. the naacp found itself extremely busy in these days, dealing with issues of non-compliance. i recall a drug store in la plata.  as colored children, we could never sit to the counter when we ordered a milkshake or ice cream cone.  we had to order and stand behind the red leather swivel stools as we waited for our food. we would just stand there, spinning the stool with our hands, entranced in its whirlwind, the way a little kid watches a ferris wheel he’s yet not allowed to ride. our trips to the movie theatre are also memorable, for colored people had to sit upstairs. the naacp and its youth group decided that the time was right to stop such discrimination. while we were too young to remember the greensboro, north carolina sit in of 1960, we read about it and let it inform our action. we organized a boycott and a march on laplata to demonstrate our opposition to injustice. i remember the kids in the youth group getting together to make the signs and banners. i remember the saturday when we marched.  i felt that i was doing something really important. i learned, when i went to school on monday, that my peers, mostly white, began to regard and respect me as an activist. these were white children coming of age in a world of “two nations: separate, hostile, and unequal” (hacker, 1992). my senior year most likely list stated that i would most likely lead protests and become a militant. i was not a militant, nor did i have plans to become one, but i had made an impression.  i knew that white people who had never witnessed blacks’ opposition to oppression, even if peaceful, considered any kind of fighting back to be militant. after the march and several boycotts, the right to sit at the lunch counter became ours, and the dream of full citizenship, a bit more fulfilled. i was learning the value of conviction. i was becoming an activist for justice. my civic role began to impact my influence at school.  more often now, i observed my classes holding open discussions about race and equality. we had debates, essay contests, and public speaking events around issues of equality and freedom. my early efforts in the promotion of social justice produced the kinds of awards that looked good on my college application, with one being particularly intriguing.  i wrote an essay on the assigned topic, “citizenship” and won. the sponsors happened to be the daughters of the american revolution, who are remembered by many to have taken a very boldly racist position on marion anderson’s invitation to perform at constitution hall in 1939. i did not know this fact then—we were not taught such history. i just remember my mother being veryamazed by this honor! perhaps the daughters did not know i was a colored girl. realizing resilience in my nearly all white catholic school, a bit removed from the real world, i never felt alienated, but as color barriers were being broken down in the community, many white people hoped that feelings of alienation would cause us to reconsider our desire for integration and ‘go back to where we came from.’ but i had learned to be resilient.  resilience is that force that overcomes or opposes feelings of alienation. resilient people are not governed by powerlessness and meaninglessness, the most common expression of alienation. they do not give in to fears, rather they operate on the expectancy that their own behaviors can determine outcomes.  they seek to understand their environments and to figure out where they fit and how they can care for that environment (seeman, 1959). they believe in their own sense of influence over a given situation versus the belief by the non-resilient (or less resilient) that things get better over time, simply as a matter of chance, good luck, or manipulation. i remembered my grandmother’s power and my mother’s sense of meaning. i felt my own resilience emerging. fighting injustice would be “a culturally valued objective” (middleton, 1963) whose attainment could only be blocked by powerlessness and meaninglessness, neither of which defines me! my first administrative position after ten years of teaching, which i loved, i became assistant principal of a high school. i knew that i had been sent there to be a gatekeeper for black students. my reputation for being socially conscious and outspoken when necessary preceded me, and that was ok. the school was rural, set apart from the growing cosmopolitan ambiance of the city.  this southern city that was beginning to attract industry from all over was in stark contrast to this rural, very traditional town where there were occasional stories about hate group activity. out there, things were slow to change. teachers were used to saying, “oh honey, i’ve been doing this for 19 years!” many administrators were equally accustomed to defending them even in their unwillingness to be fair to students. as a result, many black students were left to succeed the best way they could.  expectations for them were not high. appreciation for their experiences was not a priority. my work in social justice at this juncture would happen through teacher supervision. veteran white teachers resented a young black woman pointing out teaching practices that needed improvement. they were particularly offended by my suggestions that they develop a more culturally relevant approach to teaching. engaging them in race and culture issues was extremely difficult. many were teaching black children for the first time. this school had been a white school until the late 70s, and here in 1984, some were still adjusting!  it was clear that many teachers were determined to not change their attitudes or practices. many believed that black children from certain communities would never produce excellence. achieving equity was not highly valued among the teachers. students whose parents received federal assistance and who already had low grades were not encouraged to prepare for the psat or sat. these students were placed in special courses with ‘special’ names. they were not advised to take algebra ii or a foreign language (neither of which was required for graduation then), which left them deficient when they decided during their senior year that college was in their future.  this was an injustice and apparently not an inadvertent one.  the faculty held only a few good black students in high regard at this school. the teachers thought that they were a credit to their race. of the four administrators in the school during my four years there, two were black. attempts to address the issues of inequity were seldom collaborative and spirited.  i saw what looked like apathy, and sometimes fear in my black colleagues, and felt they preferred keeping the peace to working for justice. i later realized that their methods were just different from mine. they would simply maintain a low profile until they had the chance to run a school of their own one day. often assistant principals have to make such choices.  i began to work closely with students. i met with them frequently on a one to one basis just to talk, to establish relationships, to prevent the kind of conference where disciplinary action is in order.  my friends and business contacts began to come to the school to tutor students who needed extra help. parents, who had felt little connection, began to come to school. inschool and outofschool suspensions went down, because i refused to do as many as had been done before. this of course was not popular with the teachers who wanted unruly students to be punished, regardless of the circumstances. somehow, this did not ring of justice to me. between their dissatisfaction with decreased suspensions and my citing improvements needed in their teaching (which often suggested the need for a more culturally relevant approach), complaints made their way to the area supervisor. i would soon know the repercussion. seeking promotion a family move led me to interview with nearby school systems.  shortly after a very successful interview, i received a call from the personnel director.  he called to offer me the position—a principalship at an elementary school.  in the same breath, however, he told me that they were so impressed with me, and really wanted me to consider a high school principalship, and he named the high school that had a vacancy. we talked a bit and i expressed some trepidation, feeling that elementary would be a bit easier for my first principalship.  he asked me to just think about it.  he would be in touch soon. i did not hear back.  i called. they stalled.  nothing. i learned from a source, that a particular administrator in my school district had blocked the process—even after the offer to accept a position had been made.  the words she passed along were arrogant and injudicious.  this is not unlike the comments made about most strong black female leaders, as i would later come to know. i knew that this was the backlash for carrying out my duties as teacher supervisor and evaluator. i asked teachers to be fair, to take time to know their minority students, to give equal access to positions on sports teams and placements in ‘gifted’ classes.  i had not punished enough black males who lost their cool after a teacher embarrassed them in the classroom. i had not suspended them from school.  for this, i was being punished.  it hurt at first. i had desperately wanted this principalship. i wanted to lead a school where all children would have the opportunity to soar. i knew though what i was dealing with and that it would probably follow me from one district to another. sure there were other minority administrators but some of us had to be dealt with –just as a reminder! i thought about my grandmother and my mother and knew that my energies had to remain positive.  i could go to court to fight this or i could focus my sights on higher achievement and widening my circle of influence.  i chose the latter. i realized that sacrifice is essential to change and progress, and that many times it is a personal sacrifice. yes, it was alright, especially when i recall speaking up to put an end to this school’s homecoming tradition of holding a slave auction. in this event, the girls would buy football players and use them to carry their books, or do whatever tasks they wished throughout the school day.  most of the athletes were black and the girls buying them were white, and the rest of the story has already been written. the real test of resilience my next assistant principalship was at an other high school. i felt was sent to take care of those for whom the system did not work. i would try to represent the system in a more positive light. black parent organizations had called for a more socially just education. real desegregation did not happen until 1995 with the merger of the city and the county systems. the time and climate for change seemed never to be right for some, so by 1995, the county commissioners led by mr. bill bell, made the decision for the two districts.  without their leadership, the two school boards may never have come to consensus! after moving into my office, which was located in the administrative suite of this new school, i was approached one morning by the principal. he walked up to where i was doing hall duty and moving students along to their 1st period classes.  he said, “you know, i’m going to have you move down here, so you’ll be with the freshmen.” i was the ‘freshman class administrator.’ i had taught freshmen for several years and loved that age group. so working primarily with this group was fine. he proceeded to tell me that this had always been in the plan, even before i arrived. (uh, huh). i said, “well dr. b., where will my office be located? i knew there were no available spaces.  this school was filled to the gills. he said that he would probably have the classroom on the corner divided into 2 or 3 offices.  well that seemed alright. i did not voice any dissention. nothing happened for two weeks, nor did i ask any questions about the move, until dr. b. came to my office with the most demeaning and dehumanizing decision that he could have mustered at the time. he said, “i’m going to have the men take the sink out of that custodial closet down the hall and get some carpet in there, and fix that up so you can move down there in the next day or so.” the rage welled up inside of me. i began to feel hatred and rebellion, and the need to ‘go off on him.’ but a little voice down inside of me said, “ stay calm, count to ten, always maintain pride and dignity.” this is the response my mother and grandmother would have approved. i asked him a series of questions to allow myself time to get calm.  i asked, “why a closet, why not the classroom renovation?  i asked how he would feel if this was done to him? i said, “i suppose you know what this looks like!” i finally said, “dr. b., i am not going down there.” as his face turned a lighter shade of red, he walked away with defiance and guilt, and i sat there for a few moments, feeling sorry for myself, asking myself if i had come this far in life, trying to look out for others, only to be treated this way. in considering how to move forward, i knew that racial tension in the durham schools was so high, and ignorance about other cultures so pervasive that telling my story was just going to be one more piece in a fairly ugly puzzle. several friends told me to report him. i feared that if i handled this in my usual assertive manner, i would lose, not because he was right but because he was connected in this racist environment. the other black assistant principal had already been moved out of his front office prior to my coming to the school.  his office was on the ground floor near the cafeteria. he did not protest it because he was just biding his time until retirement.  my move would leave the two white administrators in the office suite at the front of this shiny new building. ah, impressions!        this incident caused me to consider what injustice can do to people emotionally, intellectually, and even physically. i understood for a few moments the kind of rage that is born of oppression and bigotry, the kind that robs one of selfesteem and dignity, and often leads to destructive behavior.   i made a very conscious decision to not fight it in the way most would expect.  no, i had not become weak.  rather, with each battle, we learn better how to choose our strategies. a good offense as my best defense would work, i thought. my decision was to make a plan that not only would respond to the incident in a constructive way, but would have greater impact. i would let this injustice inspire me to new endeavors for myself and those i serve. i would let this inform my behavior as a leader in my next position. the feelings that resulted from exclusion and marginalization would remain with me to guide my actions with others. no school administrator, nor teacher, nor teacher’s assistant or secretary should have been subjected to such treatment anywhere-and this was a new 25 million dollar school building with no room in the inn. dr. b. had the school custodian take the nameplate off of my door in my front office location, and screw it into the custodial closet door where the name “custodian” had been.  the buzz started.  teachers and students alike were asking—no, bombarding me with questions. despite my newly determined strength and plan of action, it did hurt. i felt embarrassment, inferiority, and pain. i felt like an outsider, very alienated, different from the other administrators. i felt i would lose the respect of the very people i had to supervise and mentor.  i was sure that this was in the plan.  i had all of these bad feelings, and i had done nothing wrong. this is how injustice feels. black students were angry and empathetic. white students were sympathetic or indifferent. the word got to parents.  i got calls and had to try and explain this injustice. when the used carpet came in from an old school that had just closed down, and the sink had been ripped from the wall, i was told i needed to move down there.  i still did not. i figured, if he were serious, he would have the men move my things. i certainly was not going to ask them to do it.  that is not the kind of fool i am.  he did. they moved my items, as i discovered one morning, leaving behind all of the furniture (for this new full size office furniture would not fit in a janitorial closet turned assistant principal’s office). i proceeded down the hall with conjured up dignity to retrieve those things i needed to work on and walked back up to the front office to do my work. i did not need to see my name on the door.  i continued to do this for 2 weeks as i thought of my next move. i endured the embarrassment of people seeing me in the closet office at times during the day when it was not feasible to go back and forth between offices. the experience became a prayer; it was a time for reflection, for increasing humility and introspection. i learned to get quiet and just listen to my heart and soul. i learned more about finding purpose. i gained an extra measure of resilience. after two weeks of playing the game, allowing the custodial closet to be my office of record, and working up front where i belonged, i decided the game of charades ends at some point.  one day, very impulsively, i jumped out of my chair, rolled it down the hall, filled it with my things, one trip, another trip, and nine more trips, bringing them back to the office up front. something just said, " it is time!” i didn’t say a word to anyone.  i passed by dr. b. in the hallway as i made the 6th trip. he said nothing. i borrowed a screwdriver from the custodian and took my nameplate off of the closet door and put it back where it belonged. i began to appoint my office the way i liked while deciding that i would stay until i chose to go somewhere else.  i quietly applied for a principalship. my principal was very upset that i had not told him about my application.  the words in my response to him were all about fairness and respect. i became the principal of an elementary school where my work for ensuring justice would continue. a climate of injustice gordon (1995) explains resilience as the ability to thrive, mature, and increase in competence in the face of adverse circumstances and says that the adverse circumstances may be chronic and consistent or severe and infrequent. the incident i endured spoke of the sick racial climate throughout the district during those years, a condition that was certainly chronic and consistent. at this school people of color, custodians, and cafeteria workers were not treated as first class citizens. the suspension rate among black males reached 60%! the dropout rate was high, and the token black male teacher upon my arrival was a coach who taught physical education. monday afternoon administrative meetings seemed dedicated to the topic, “how to get more black students out of school.” i would not participate in the scheming. i was admonished more than once for not suspending more students.  i was told that we were a team and that we needed this consistency or it would cause problems for the teachers and students. i love teams, especially when they play the game fairly. i was there to help kids make better decisions, to teach them a better way to react to anger, and respond to injustice. i was there to keep them coming to school, whatever it took. my job was to provide as much encouragement and assistance as possible to make graduation a reality.  dropout really concerns me.  i do not believe that children want to leave school for the streets, but will do so when they perceive an environment of uncaring adults. i wanted our administrative team to focus on reasons for the resistance and rebellion seen in black youths. several studies (taylor, 1970; kiernan & daniels, 1967; hacker, 1992) on student alienation suggest that we consider the effects of forced school choice and eurocentric focus on black student alienation. i wanted our team to be more concerned with culture and society and pay more attention to issues of identity, community, and economics. in her studies on race, class, and power in schools, lipman (1998) found that the influence of the principal was critical in reculturing a school and trying to move them to a more responsible place on the spectrum of social justice. lipman’s work cites suspension rates for black males that look much like those i mentioned earlier. the restructuring efforts that she helped to implement in the participating schools were designed to reduce these suspensions, which would reduce missed work, school failure, and dropout. lipman reports that when suspensions dropped, teachers sought yet other ways to punish these students, primarily african american males. in one district where black student made up 64% of the population, they constituted 83% of the suspensions. at the school where i was serving as ap, black students made up 30% of the population but nearly 60% of the suspensions. when these students returned to class many would withdraw; they were demoralized, ashamed, and disengaged. they did not see justice working for them. teachers unabashedly shared their predictions that these kids would not go anywhere in life. after repeated undeserved suspensions, i observed some of these young black men becoming angry, and why not? i recall the words of dr. martin luther king before he set out for a particular boycott. he declared that patience at some point must yield to protest. he said, “there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” our students though, did not know how to protest, nor were they allowed to do so. being the role model besides my personal experience here with injustice, i had taken it upon myself to improve the school climate for students of color. i continued to push for hiring more black teachers and reducing the number of black male suspensions. this effort was consistently met with excuses and procrastination and each reminder only served to increase the principal’s obstinacy. once more, i would work for justice within the place and space i had found myself—this time working under a principal who had no intention of creating a climate of equity. (the fact that two black administrators worked there was no indication of his desire to provide equity. we were both sent there by the superintendent.)  i started tuesday afternoon lunch chats with students, giving them a safe place to express their feelings about the school climate, about teacher attitudes toward them, and their perceived opportunities for success. on occasion, the time was given to career preparation talks. as assistant principal, i needed to know how the students felt about their school and their achievement.  spending the lunch period with my students allowed me the opportunity to teach appropriate strategies for dealing with prejudice.  ninety percent of the students who came to the lunch talks were african american.  certain teachers were curious.  the principal was uneasy. african american parents were appreciative and supportive. my work was simply that of social justice---taking moral action. my goal was to increase the competence of these young people.  across the country, african american students fail to score well on the sat. the situation was no different during the early 90s when i served as assistant principal. one observation was that only a few black students could afford to take a test preparation course.  i called on my church member to offer test prep sessions after school. parents helped me to organize the classes. we sold pizza and soft drinks.  the students learned new techniques in test taking and had fun doing it! i smiled when students came to let me know they had scored well, and that they felt more confident in taking the test after having learned the techniques. i won funding from the geraldine dodge foundation to start a mentoring organization for african american high school boys, which i called black men tomorrow’s teachers.  through this project, i was able to reach young black males in a positive, supportive manner, whether they ultimately became teachers or not.  my  protégés visited college campuses, helped younger children with schoolwork or introducing them to new things like tennis and japanese food, and spent weekly time with male mentors who were black and dedicated to the profession of education. the program set a new standard for the dodge foundation’s celebration of education grant program. the foundation’s marketing materials endorsed my initiative as a model for replication. as the city and county labored toward better relations in support of a merged, integrated school system, the county human relations department and area churches and synagogues sponsored a series of town meetings designed to open discussions and heal hurts.  i was asked to help plan these meetings and to serve as moderator. my role in justice was expanding.  i would have to continue on this path of making a difference.  i gleaned an almost inexplicable satisfaction from seeing others grow in their confidence to handle life’s hurdles. i was doing the work of my grandmother and my mother. now and then, i would reassess the principal’s decision to ‘put me in the closet,’ each time more convinced that this was the narrowminded attempt to drive me away.  my role at that school had become anything but what he had envisioned and charted out in his head. something had to be done to keep me in check, so moving me where i would be out of sight, out of mind seemed the only option. a role model in higher education fighting for justice is about commitment.  it never stops. sometimes it’s for us, sometimes for others. regardless, i believe that it is a cumulative process; every battle gets us closer to winning the war.  we can’t ignore injustice and think it will just right itself one day.  it never works that way. we have to take action.  we must be intentional. the students at the high school came to understand a bit more about justice.  they also learned that battles are often fought in ways that are sometimes quiet and unobtrusive, ways that move you to an even more effective position, where your impact is felt in an even greater way. i now teach those who will be principals of our schools. i have the greatest opportunity possible to impact the minds and hearts of these future school leaders. i teach the graduate course titled “the principalship,” and on the first day of class i ask each of them, “why are you here?” i ask, “what do you expect to change in this business of education?”  and again, i ask, “but why you, what makes you suited for this position that requires so much?” while there are no right and wrong answers to these questions, i am looking to see what kind of work i will have to do with them in the realm of justice.  what is their appreciation for social justice? what experiences have they had of being treated unfairly?  what did they do with the experience? most of my students are white females, often disturbed by my candor, my asking them to think about white privilege. i force them to consider the things they take for granted –the same things that are not assumed or automatic for people of color. i ask them to think about leading a school in the poorest section of town, where most of the families are black and or latino and test scores are woefully low.  i see the unrest in their body language and hear it in their words when all of this gets to be too much for them. now and then i hear the same thing i heard from my very privileged white students at a nearby private university a few years ago, “oh, i’m never going to teach in that kind of school.” to that i tell them that if they leave feeling unprepared to teach in “that kind of district” then they should consider themselves less than prepared to lead any school!  an excellent administrator is an excellent administrator anywhere. of course, some settle for just being good. leading for social justice my work in promoting justice goes on, in the lessons i teach, the guardianship i continue to provide to students of color, and my daily collaborations with colleagues. i ask myself from time to time, “what have you learned from these experiences of injustice?” after a few moments of reflection, the answer is clear. i have learned that leadership for social justice is all about resilience, about pressing on in the face of obstacles, about never feeling powerless, and remaining ever aware of the meaning behind the struggle. i know now, only after years of observing such resilient people, that these leaders are not the kind of leaders who constantly, if ever, receive public attention.  they do not get the medals or pages in the history books, but are no less honorable or significant for their endeavors. i’ve learned that leadership for justice is groomed and good leaders in this arena look for someone to carry on the work in a new place and time. my grandmother and my mother provided that necessary stimulation for me as a child, to chart my own path as a leader for justice. they modeled the characteristics and work ethic i would need to adopt in future years.  they modeled tenacity and perseverance, as they sang, “we shall not be moved.” i can recall though, that as a child, i was onsidered too bold, too daring, a bit ‘bull headed’ as my dad would say. often, in the course of growing and trying new things, i would not accept a “no!” i believe now, that amidst the constant admonishments to “slow down,” i was encouraged to be a leader. i have learned that a woman in leadership must possess an intricate package of talents and skills for her own survival and the success of those she leads. she must be ready to address a wider audience than simply working within a specific domain. (in my mother’s case the ‘wider audience’ was appealing to the governor’s office.) she must be willing to confront those in authority and always feel equal to those in positions of more authority. she believes in her own thoughts; she sees her insight and vision as meaningful and powerful and as good or better than what currently exists. she does not surrender easily, cognizant of the fallout that can occur and willing to take that chance. she knows that to assume a lesser position leaves her vulnerable to another who is more assertive. women who lead for justice are moved by an internal system of morality. we know the value of moving beyond our safety zones. we know that in doing so, we may not get that for which we strove, but would ultimately gain something greater—a better opportunity to lead or a better opportunity for the next person. we are competitive people.  we enjoy positions of control but for the right reasons—to attain goals that are humanitarian and socially just. women in leadership for justice don’t always work within the confines of rganizations, workplaces, or other specific domains. often we invent our own environments for change, especially in the latter years of our professional careers.  we learn that it is necessary to take time out to study new venues for effecting change.  we share our stories more readily than when we were, say, twentyfive years old. we now know that telling our stories is powerful and helps others to discern meaning in their own lives. there are things i dreamed of doing when i was a child and numerous things i have accomplished in my adulthood. nothing among these however is as great as the difference that i believe i have made by taking a stand when equality was in question or justice denied. i may not have moved mountains or shattered the earth by anything to which i put my hands, head, or heart.  i have however, attempted to seize a few moments where i could change the path or chart a new one. i pray that my son and daughter, in their own place and time, will do the same. references benard, b. (1991). fostering resiliency in kids: protective factors in the family, school and community.  portland, or: western center for drugfree schools and communities. bressler, m. (1967). white colleges and negro higher education.  journal of negro  education,26, 258-265. butler, l. (1963). minutes from naacp meeting, la  plata, md. cairns, r.b., & cairns, b.d. (1994). lifelines and risks: pathways of youth in our time. london: harvester wheatshaft. centra,  j. a. (1970, summer).  black students at predominantly white colleges: a  research description. sociology of education, 43, 325-339 chesley-carter, j. (1998). the relationship between at-risk students’ resilience and dropout behavior.  a dissertation.  university of north carolina, chapel hill. christianson, s. l. (1992, fall). family factors and student achievement: an avenue to increase students’ success. school psychology quarterly, 7, 178-206. davis, s. c., loeb, l.w., & robinson, l. f. (1970). a comparison of    characteristics of negro and white college freshmen classmates. journal of negro education, 39, 359-366. garmezy, n. (1991). resiliency and vulnerability to adverse developmental outcomes associated with poverty.  american behavioral scientist,34, 416-430. gordon, k.a. (1995). self-concept and motivational patterns of resilient african american high school students.   journal of black psychology, 21, 239-255. hacker,  a. (1992). two nations: black and white, separate, hostile, and unequal. new york: ballantine books. hill, p. t.,  foster, g.e.,  & gendler, t. (1990).  high schools with character. santa monica, ca:  the rand corporation. huessenstamm, f. k., & hoepfner, r. (1971). black, white, and brown: adolescent  alienation. paper presented at the annual meeting of the national council on measurement in education, ny. jorgensen,  c. c.  (1979). internal-external control in the academic achievement of black youth: a reappraisal.  integrated education, 14(6), 20-23. kant,  i.  (1959). foundations of  the metaphysics of morals. (l. w. beck, trans.). new york: bobbs-merrill, (original work published 1785). kiernan, i.r. & daniels, r.p. (1967). signs of social change through an exploratory study of 23 negro students in a community college.  journal of negro education, 36, 129-35. krovetz,  m.,  &  speck, m. (1994, december). student resiliency: toward educational equity.  the high school journal, 78(2), 111-114. lipman, p. (1998).  race, class and power in school restructuring.  albany: state  university of new york press. luther, s. (1991).  vulnerability and resilience: a study of highrisk adolescents.  child development, 62, 600-16. marjoriebanks, k. (1980).  ethnic families and children’s achievement. sydney:    allen and unwin. middleton, r. (1963). alienation, race, and education. american sociological review, 28,  973-977. newmann, f. m. (1980).  organizational factors and student alienation in high school: implications for theory for school improvement. (report no. nieg-79-0150).  washington, d.c.: national institute of education. paccione, a. v. (2000). developing a commitment to multicultural education.  teachers college record, 102(6), 980-1005. seeman, m. (1959). on the meaning of alienation.  american sociological review, 24,  783. taylor, o. 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http://www.publicationsetc.com/newsstand-advancingwomen/%22%20%20 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 http://www.tfc.com/syndication/advancingwomen/mavens-welcome.html?g=marketmavensreport&a=mavens-welcome%22%20%20target=%22_top%22 https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com 562 copyediting.docx volume 44, 2025 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodriguez, and benjamin jankens assistant editor: jordan donop & rebecca phillips advancing women in leadership vol. 44, 109-121, 2025 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper perceived incompetent? the annihilation of women in critical national discourse in the ghanaian media michael ofori, jessica afful tuleassi, felicity sena dogbatse michael ofori: ph.d. student, university of minnesota, twin cities, ofori047@umn.edu jessica afful tuleassi: ph.d. student, university of minnesota, twin cities, lea001@umn.edu felicity sena dogbatse: ph.d. candidate, university of maryland, college park, fdogbats@umd.edu accepted november 5, 2025 media reflects and reinforces gender-based disparities. in ghana, these inequalities exist in the media space. despite the greater media freedom enjoyed by the ghanaian media today, the male-dominated nature of media programming and placements has remained relatively unchanged from its experiences under the restricted media era in post-democratic ghana. this research focuses on gender representations in media programming and placements in the ghanaian media. we conducted a quantitative content analysis of news data collected over six weeks (july 4th august 16th, 2022) from five primary ghanaian tv channels: tv3, joy news, citi tv, ghone, and utv. our findings reveal an epistemic injustice toward women, stemming from the overrepresentation of male expertise in media programs. while women appear slightly more often as program hosts, indicating greater on-screen visibility, their expertise is not utilized to the same extent as that of men. we discussed the impact of culture, media objectification, and commodification as factors influencing women's presence in the ghanaian media. keywords: presumed incompetence, gender, ghanaian media, underrepresentation, content analysis scholarly discussions have long focused on media diversity, equity, and inclusion (connell, 2005; hendrickx et al., 2022). most of these studies have concluded that the media space is gendered, often silencing or trivializing women’s voices (gmmp, 2020; harp et al., 2013). as a result, affirmative action laws in many countries have promoted gender equality across all sectors, including the media, politics, and decision-making contexts. in belgium, for instance, women accounted for 33% to 48% of media professionals compared to men (van bauwel, 2018), signaling some progress in other contexts. however, ghana's progress on gender equality has been slower, with little change since independence in 1957 (gadzekpo, 2013; prah, 2003). democratic reforms led to improvements in women's rights, including property ownership under the provisional national defence council law (pndc law) 111 and constitutional provisions for equal participation (constitution of ghana, 1992), yet patriarchal cultures in ghana often hinder gender equality (malik, 2025; sikweyiya et al., 2020; thayer, 1980), particularly in terms of women’s visibility during important national discussions (o'brien, 2014; ocran, 2014). the global freedom index ranks ghana as a significantly free country (freedom house, 2024), with the media enjoying stable freedom (reporters without borders, 2023). however, this freedom does not translate to gender equality. while significant studies have explored gender, culture, and media portrayals in the ghanaian media (see, acquaye, 2022; macharia, 2016; ofori-birikorang & donkor, 2014) a notable gap exists that focuses on women’s participation in discussions centered on critical national issues, such as politics and governance (beauvais 2020; tagoe & abakah, 2015), finance/economics (kigula, 2024), and health (capecchi, 2023; kitzinger et al., 2008) particularly within the broadcast television context, underscoring the need for further exploration in this area. since these focus areas are understudied in the gender literature, this study aims to explore 1) how women experience injustice in the ghanaian media and 2) in what ways women’s voices are represented or marginalized during discussion of critical national issues on morning breakfast shows. this study signifies (a) an advancement of knowledge in the field of media and gender, as significant scholarships in the field have not examined this phenomena in non-western contexts, and (b) patterns, themes, and insights that are common across cases of media and gender within the context of a critical political, economic, health, and security events where there is a paucity of research. this literal exclusion of women in the media, through their historic silencing and invisibility, generally affects women's participation in key sectors of the nation, demonstrating the importance of this study in enriching knowledge in this novel area of academic inquiry in ghana. 110 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 literature review theoretical perspectives on women’s visibility and voice in the media unequal representation of women in media discourses has been widely documented (banks, 2018; elliott & stead, 2018; lämsä & tiensuu, 2002). in the media and gender literature, this unequal representation has been established as an annihilation of women, one that excludes or mutes their relevance, experiences, and outputs within diverse sociocultural, political, and economic contexts (harding 1991; malik, 2025; orbe, 1998; wood, 2005). tuchman (2000) describes this exclusion as “symbolic annihilation,” encompassing the trivialization, condemnation, and omission of women. gerbner and gross (1976) similarly frame it as the absence of or marginal presence of a group of people in the media, which perpetuates social inequalities. eventually, such exclusion leads to epistemic injustice (fricker, 2007), when women’s expertise are undervalued (testimonial injustice) and their perspectives omitted from the frameworks that shape collective understanding (hermeneutic injustice). according to byskov (2021), “testimonial injustices wrong someone in their capacity as a speaker or knower because the increased or decreased credibility accorded to their testimony is based not on any relevant concerns, but on prejudices that have nothing to do with whether the speaker or knower should be granted credibility” ( p. 2). the consistent scholarly discovery of the lack of women’s prominent coverage in the media constitutes such injustice. building on this, feminist standpoint theory (harding, 1991; hartsock 1983 ) emphasizes how society is structured by power relations. this results in unequal social locations for certain groups, thereby shaping experiences of people within these groups (wood, 2005). while men are found to be in the privileged and dominant group, women are found as non-dominant, leading to their marginalization. because women are found as subordinates, their social locations and experiences are more likely to promote knowledge that is critical and reflective of overlooked realities (wood, 2005). thus, women’s social positions grant them distinctive standpoints from which to understand and interpret social realities. these standpoints differ from men’s opinions and are crucial for a comprehensive and equitable public discourse as they emphasize the lived experiences of women (lwamba et al., 2021). standpoint theory, therefore, offers a critical understanding of how both location and experience shape interpretation of broader social and political contexts (wood, 2005). as wood (2005) .asserted, “by implication, a standpoint is an intellectual achievement that reflects-and necessarily entails-political consciousness” (p. 62) yet in the media context, particularly when it comes to discussions centering around politics, health, economy, and security, women’s opinions are often marginalized. this does not only lead to their silencing but represents a loss of valuable insights that could enrich national dialogue. the persistence of these patterns is reflected in a 2015 report by the european institute for gender equality (eige) that stated, the aggregated data for the 114 participating nations revealed that women still constitute only 24 percent of the people in the news (as sources or subjects) published, broadcast, or posted online – a figure that has been relatively stable since 2005. (p. 193) media portrayal of women often excludes their diverse experiences and perspectives, perpetuating stereotypes and limiting their epistemic agency. while women have been involved in newsrooms for decades, the global media monitoring project shows that the rise of women in the media is associated with their increased objectification for “visual pleasure”, rather than an acknowledgement of their meaningful participation as news sources (gmmp, 2020). harp et al. (2013) argued that although female journalists tend to integrate women into the news more than their male counterparts, females remain invisible when it comes to news discourse. similarly, harp et al. (2011) studied gendered reports of women in times of war. they found evidence concerning the under-utilization of women as news sources and reporters on war. they realized that even when women are cited as sources, they are often recognized as victims in the news, demonstrating a general epistemic injustice of women through trivialization and omission (harp et al., 2011). despite recent advocacies to increase diversity and gender balance in the workplace (ahmed, 2024; fine et al, 2020), women are still underrepresented in authoritative roles and are often depicted in narrow, traditional roles (kulkarni & mishra,2022; malik, 2025; thelma & ngulube, 2024). gurrieri (2021) argued that ideas on politics, economics, and security are communicated in a male-dominated power structure, and this contributes to the “trivialization of the complexities of women’s lives, omission of those outside of the hegemonic feminine ideal and condemnation of women’s corporeality” (p. 364). this marginalization extends to news coverage, where women’s voices are often minimized, particularly in discussions of important issues such as politics, the economy, health, and leadership not only distorts gender representation but also entrenches epistemic injustice by silencing women as legitimate producers of knowledge (malik, 2025). such discussions of the exclusion of women in the media are relevant, as the media plays a crucial role in shaping, informing, and educating society about the roles of women as actors of development (gallagher, 2013; obeidat, 2002). women’s representation in media: examining factors in ghana in discussing the representations of women in the media, it is important to clarify two things: the roles women play as media personnel and as panels when discussing critical national issues. in addressing these two issues, while other studies have focused on the unequal representation of women in media discourses (banks, 2018; elliot & stead, 2018), others also argue that there is a gradual shift in the representation of women in the media as 111 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 hosts, sources, news anchors, and panelists (armstrong, 2006). in a progressive society, it is relevant to bring up discussions about the role of the media in shaping, informing, and educating society about critical issues (gallagher, 2013). however, there exists a huge gap in how women are portrayed and the roles they play during such media representations in the ghanaian media. gendered discourse is not novel in ghana’s media landscape (diabah & agyepong, 2022; malik, 2025). notable among scholars who have studied women’s representation in the ghanaian media is gadzekpo (2013). the author argued that there still exist some gross gender inequalities in the ghanaian media. since ghana transitioned to democracy in 1992, women’s representation in the political landscape has been a struggle (verge & pastor, 2018), and their voices have often been muted in media coverage of critical national issues (gadzekpo, 2009, 2013). media representation of ghanaian female politicians focus on marginalization, sexist, and misogynistic reporting rather than focusing on their contribution to policy issues (asare & agomor, 2023; yeboah-banin et al., 2024). in newsprint media, coverage of women in politics is low, their stories are placed on the inside pages, and rarely do their names hardly make it to the headlines making them “invisible” (thuo, 2012). in the discussion of national issues in the media, the expertise of women as guests for media shows is less visible compared to their male counterparts (baitinger, 2015) as there is a greater proportion of male representation than females in news content (len-rios et al., 2005). women are rarely used as sources in stories of national and international importance and their expertise on critical national issues is less valued, and this signals the social construct that women are not as critical as men when it comes to these issues (carter & steiner, 2003; ross & carter, 2011; zoch & turk, 1998; mensah & wood, 2018). in addition to women being rarely used as sources in stories of national and international discourses, haynes (2022) and o’brien (2014) observed that women’s representation in the media, especially in the context of political discourse, on the flagships of current affairs show, and prime time, are double silenced in the media. this is because, within newsrooms, journalists continue to base their daily decisions on what is considered newsworthy predominantly on traditional masculine news values (ross & carter, 2011). while there is evidence of women being marginalized in media and politics in ghana (gadzekpo, 2009), this does not imply a total absence of women’s expertise in discourse that focuses on politics (madsen, 2019). instead, it highlights the ongoing issue of limited visibility for women’s participation in political discussions and the media’s reinforcement of this trend. despite their advanced knowledge, women continue to encounter obstacles in attaining equal representation as experts, particularly in comparison to men (harp et al., 2011). consequently, their expertise and significant contributions to social and economic issues are frequently sidelined, with journalists often favoring men's viewpoints and expertise as authoritative voices, especially on matters related to business and politics (ross & carter, 2011). it is important to note that sociocultural norms provide ample justifications for media representation of women. the dominant portrayal of male traits in politics hinders the representation of women in this area (van der pas & aaldering, 2020). societal cultures play a role in the media representation of women. patriarchal norms in society are self-reinforcing and influence women's involvement in politics, which consequently influences their stereotypical representation in the media. mensah and wood (2018) examined the types of issues women parliamentarians participated predominantly during parliamentary discussions in ghana. they found that female members of parliament predominantly contributed to the “soft” sociocultural issues in parliament, while men featured dominantly on the “hard” and critical politico-economic and security issues. when “hard issues” are handled by men, and “soft issues” are handled by women, the media become a conveyor belt within such a construct. thus, the media alone is not complicit in its gendered representations, but sociocultural factors play important roles in women’s stereotypical portrayals. the silencing of women' s voices as experts extend beyond politics but bleeds into the area of health. studies on women’s scientific utility during health crises show an undervaluing or trivialization of women’s scientific expertise (capecchi, 2023; kitzinger et al., 2008). for instance, kassova (2020) found that men were quoted five times more than women in health news about the covid-19, highlighting the undervaluing of women’s expert opinions on health. the invisibility of women in the media raises concerns about media diversity and has policy consequences that may intensify gendered inequalities in science (smith, 2020). nonetheless, tokenistic media representation of women in the health sector has focused on their bodies and sexualized features (chimba & kitzinger, 2010; momade, 2023). overall, women’s media invisibility persists, highlighting ongoing gender struggles within the media landscape (akalonu & ha, 2024; ross & carter, 2011; joubert et al., 2022). . in a study carried out by the university of ghana on women’s status in ghana’s media, it was discovered that women face biased promotion to leadership roles in the media (yeboah-banin, 2024). interestingly, women are not recognized as having the required skills to be given leadership roles in media organizations (adongo et al., 2023; elliott & stead, 2024; robertson et al., 2021). for example, adongo et al. (2023) argued that conventional gender roles that are consistent with cultural values, gender stereotyping, family obligations, and cultural views and perceptions of women and attitudes, along with low expectations regarding women’s managerial abilities, deter women from assuming leadership roles in societies, which is reflected in the media. given that media planning and programming are important parts of media work and decisions about news selection and assignment are made by leadership (byerly et al. 2020), the absence of women leadership in the media explains the perpetuation of stereotypes against women globally. in the organizational setting where men are dominant or heavily represented, research has shown that women’s voices 112 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 are often muted, irrespective of their intellectual contributions and expertise (izunwanne et al., 2020). the literature outlined previously clearly demonstrates the traditional marginalization of women in the media worldwide. in the ghanaian media, the experience remains constant. however, studies that examined women's participation in the ghanaian media have often examined their visibility as leaders, news sources, and reporters, mostly analyzing print media. these studies also do not explore gender representation in the broader program genres in the media. examining gender representation across multiple television programs and their composition is a crucial addition to understanding patterns and trends of gender representation. we addressed this gap by answering the question: rq1: what are the patterns in gender representations within the ghanaian media? rq2: what are the trends in gender representations within the ghanaian media? methods research design personality placement in the media (tv/radio) forms part of media programming. such programming does not occur by accident and the choice of programs and personality placements also reveals institutional ideologies which affect media production and content diversity (hendrickx et al., 2022). in this study, the phenomena of media placement and programming were studied during the early morning breakfast shows. this period is chosen as it represents the time when complex national issues are discussed in the ghanaian media different from the terrain in other geographic contexts. given that this study was focused on exploring the patterns and trends in gender portrayal, a quantitative content analysis research design is adopted as the approach to address the key research question in this study. this method is important for this study as the goal of the authors is to discern the frequency by which women’s utility are significantly explored by newsrooms in comparison to men, and within what session of media contents are women’s utility explored. data collection to accurately obtain quantitative data that capture the nature of gender representation in the ghanaian media, a quantitative content analysis was adopted to code the contents of the breakfast shows within five ghanaian media outlets. the tv channels and their respective programs included: tv3 (new day), ghone tv (gh today), united tv (adekye nsroma), citi tv (breakfast show), and joy news tv (am show). these media outlets are selected based on their historical value to national discourses, their popularity, diversity of language use (english and local language), attributed credibility, and performances in national awards over the past decades (avle, 2011; kpienbaareh et al., 2021; yeboah-banin et al., 2019). quantitative coding procedure two final-year undergraduate students (who served as coders) from a public university in ghana monitored and recorded their observations of the programming and placement of the media within six weeks (july 4th – 16th august 2022). coder 1 reported their observations from three television channels and their corresponding programs which included tv3 (new day), ghone tv (gh today), united tv (adekye nsroma) and coder 2 reported their observations from the remaining two tv channels and their respective programs which are citi tv (breakfast show), and joy news tv (am show). to address the issue of reliability in the different coded tv contents, the two coders were initially taken through a week of interrater reliability coding. to limit bias and inconsistency in the reported data, the coding items were mostly questions that required a yes or no answer and others required the counting of observed representations in the tv program. to begin with the actual manual coding, and in line with best practices (lacy et al., 2015), the lead author guided the two student coders to code other similar television programs to ensure a consistent understanding of the coding units. additionally, all the questions asked in the online qualtrics codebook were thoroughly explained in writing (appendix). this aimed at guaranteeing a 100% reliability of the coding metrics across the two coders. after all issues were resolved and coders gained a common understanding of the coding items, they then began the coding of the actual tv programs for the analysis. the timeframe for the data collection was opportune due to the political party conventions/elections and their characteristic debates and media coverage during the time. also, the period was characterized by the economic crisis which challenged ghana to seek a second international monetary fund (imf) intervention. further, labor strikes, protests, and terrorist insurgency in neighboring countries, burkina faso and nigeria, triggered security concerns in the ghanaian media at the time and led to a series of discussions. it was also within the same time when the monkeypox health epidemic had taken root and ghana’s preparedness to tackle it post-covid-19 became a topical issue in the ghanaian media. these events triggered media discussions, and it was an ideal time to examine gender participation on these complex issues of national relevance. there has never been a period where the media landscape in ghana or elsewhere experienced such occurrences within a short time. data analysis procedures from the initial observations, we identified four main segments of the tv program: newspaper reviews, panel discussions, special interview sessions/call-in sessions with experts, and general interviews. the main topics or subjects that are specific to this study’s goal include politics/governance, legislation, security, health, finance/economy, and others. the data for this study were analyzed using qualtrics, primarily through its cross-tabulation function. this function was used to examine patterns and relationships among the categorical 113 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 variables—gender, media outlets, program names, and expert/program participants—by comparing the observed frequencies and ratios of gender representation on tv programs during the six weeks of data collection. the aim was to assess gender diversity and representation in the ghanaian media, particularly in the context of discussions on complex national issues. for this study, and within the current gender context of ghana, gender was examined in terms of male and female categories. findings the data for this study were analyzed to explore the representativeness of the genders in the media, especially during discussions of issues that are critical to policy formulation, adjustments, and/or modifications. we analyzed data collected from observations of morning shows aired by five selected media outlets over a 32-day period. first, providing information about the rate of the responses from the five media outlets within the thirty-two days sets a good foundation to note the frequency with which these morning shows were held on those channels. table 1 presents the results of the responses on the regularity of the morning shows in the five media outlets. table 1 regularity of morning shows broadcasted in the media within six weeks program name % n adekye nsroma -utv 21.48 32 tv3 new day 20.13 30 citi breakfast showciti tv 18.12 27 ghtodayghone tv 20.81 31 am showjoynews tv 19.46 29 total 100 149 over the thirty-two days of data collection, united television (utv) recorded 21.48% responses of the morning shows for this analysis. ghone recorded a 20.81% response rate for the morning shows for this analysis. tv3 recorded a 20.13% frequency for their broadcast of morning shows within the duration of the data entry. joy news recorded a 19.33% response rate for the morning shows for this analysis. citi tv recorded an 18.67% response rate for the morning shows for this analysis. the analysis of the data is based on the percentages from the responses obtained from the respective media and it shows that within the 6-weeks, all the media outlets held morning shows justifying the necessity for examining gender representational issues in these morning shows. further, coders entered their observation for the question concerning the gender of the host of the morning shows. this question contributes to our identification of the equality in gender participation on tv morning shows in the ghanaian media. table 2 presents the results of the gender representations within the five media channels during the thirty-two days of data collection. table 2 gender of morning show, newspaper, and panel hosts gender general morning show hosts newspaper discussion host panel discussion host n % n % n 5 male 71 47.65 68 47.22 64 46.72 female 78 52.35 76 52.78 73 53.28 total 149 100 144 100 137 100 morning shows in the ghanaian media mostly consist of the host of the program for the day, a newspaper review or synthesis, and a panel discussion. the program host for the morning shows could be multiple depending on the occasion and the house style practiced by the media outlet. here, table 2 reflects the results from the gender of only the main hosts of the morning shows, including their major compositions. the results in table 2 demonstrate a higher frequency of women (52.35%) serving as the main hosts for the morning shows than men (47.65%) in the ghanaian media within the period of data collection. earlier studies show a depreciated visibility of women in the media and their obscurity with media leadership, even more so in the ghanaian media (de vuyst & raemaecker, 2019; gadzepko 2013; gadzepko, 2009; gmmp, 2020). despite that, the results of this study show a moderate appreciation of women’s role as hosts over men. while statistical data available in the gmmp 2020 reports show an underrepresentation of women in the ghanaian media, our finding shows a steady increase in women’s visibility during morning shows in the 2022 period when this data was collected. with the gender of the various components of the morning shows established, we went on to examine the nature of topics and their frequency of discussion within the period of the study as presented in table 3. this helps us to assess the critical nature of the discussions held in the media within the period of data collection. also, it sets the foundation for us to assess the equal participation of the genders in these critical discussions. 114 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 table 3 issues and frequency of discussion issues % n politics 23.89 75 finance/economy 28.34 89 health 1.91 6 security 1.59 5 legislative/policy 21.97 69 other 22.29 70 total 100 314 table 3 provides the values of the national issues discussed during the morning shows within the five media outlets. political discourses are essential to media programming and central to morning show discussions in the ghanaian media. in this study, politics is associated with discussions such as the assessment of the strengths and/or weaknesses of the president, ministers, district and municipal heads, issues about corruption and general issues concerning state mismanagement, and elections into political offices. this delimitation of politics is situated in the context of the political climate within the time the data were collected as stated in the methodology. aside from the delimitation of politics, other issues maintain their original meaning. the data show that within the period, economics/finance (28.34%) was the most spoken-about subject within the media. this is justified since the result reflects the period ghana returned to the imf for economic intervention and public sector workers agitated for increased remunerations. politics (23.89%) was the second most discussed topic in the media. on one hand, political discussions and economic/finance discussions intersected on the basis that the economic challenges experienced within the era also led to criticism of the government and state officials associated with the financial management of the state. on the other hand, discussions about politics largely reflect the political climate. legislative/policy issues (21.97%) were significant in media discussion within the era. while coders coded health (1.91%) and security (1.59%). other issues (22.9%) were a combination of topics that were sparsely related to health, security, education, policy issues, politics, and other social issues. table 4a discusses the result of the presence and the number of panel members on the morning shows. this sets the basis for analyzing the gender balance in panel representations. table 4a panel members excluding the host number of panel members % n one 27.74 38 two 32.85 45 three 35.77 49 four 2.92 4 five/ five+ 0.73 1 total 100 137 panel members are key to the discussions of critical societal and national issues (jordan & robinson, 2008). for television morning shows, panel members are preplanned personalities of experts with knowledge about the subject for the day. table 4a provides information about the quantity of panel members staged for the morning shows within the six weeks of data collection. table 4a shows that, excluding the host of the morning shows, the morning shows often hosted three-panel members at 35.77%, two-panel members at 32.85%, and a one-panel member at 27.74%. at 2.92% of the time, the panel consisted of four panel members while at 0.73% of the time, panel members consisted of more than five panel members. this suggests that within the morning shows, there was at least one panel member invited to speak to one or more of the issues in table 3. after noting the presence of panel members on the morning shows, coders then entered their responses for the question “how many female panel members were present?”. table 4b presents the frequencies of the female panel members out of the total frequencies presented in table 4a. table 4b frequency of female panel members present female panel present % n one 12.41 17 two 2.92 4 three 0.73 1 four 0.73 1 five/five+ 0 0 none 83.21 114 total 100 137 115 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 the values presented in table 4b are the results of the actual values of female/women presence as panel members on the morning show out of the total panel members of both men and women presented by table 4a. table 4b shows that when the morning shows had one panel member, 12.41% out of the 27.74% of the time, it was a woman. which means that 15. 33% of the time, it was a male. further, when the morning show consisted of exactly two panel members, 2.92% out of 32.85% of the time, it included women or had a woman as a panel, showing that 29.92% of males dominated the panel. also, when the show had exactly three panel members, 0.73% out of 35.77% of the time, a woman was included on the panel which was dominated by males by 35.04%. similarly, when the morning show had exactly four panel members, 0.73% out of 2.92% of the time, a woman was included, yet dominated by males at 2.19%. while there is some visibility of women on the morning shows in the top five ghanaian media, the data show that 83.21% of the time, panel discussions did not include a woman in the discussion of the various subjects shown in table 3. this finding reinforces the patriarchal traditions of the ghanaian media landscape. more, it suggests the inadequacy, if not incompetencies of the female perspective on these critical national issues. figure 1 shows the percentage of the special interview component in the morning shows and the frequency of the availability of both genders as guests for the special interview sessions. figure 1 shows a pie chart representing the presence of male and female special interview guests on morning shows in the ghanaian media. figure 1 special interviews special interviews are important components of morning shows in the ghanaian media, and they often consist of, at least, one guest. it is the session where special topics are discussed. coders noted that within the six weeks of tv breakfast show monitoring from all five media outlets, these special interviews hosted guests including but not limited to celebrities, ministers of state/cabinet ministers, members of parliament from both incumbent and opposition governments, economists, emergency management officials such as social welfare, human rights experts, and health practitioners. these guests discussed issues concerning their area of knowledge. figure 1 reveals that 71.96% of males were represented or hosted as guests to special interviews, whereas females 28.04% were hosted. thus, there is a greater participation of men as guests for special interviews than women in the ghanaian media during morning shows, especially given the intricacies of the time the data were collected. figure 2 shows a pie chart representing the frequency of calls to male and female experts on morning shows in the ghanaian media. figure 2 external experts similar to special interviews are calls made to external experts during the morning shows. experts have deeper knowledge in their field of specialization and their knowledge has utility for media discussions based on their attributed credibility. the results indicate that calls to external expertise were 21.64% which represents a lower utilization of calls to external experts during panel discussions. however, with the lower utilization of calls to experts during morning shows, there is a higher utilization of male experts (86.67%) in panel discussions during morning shows than women experts (13.33%). the results presented in figure 2 reinforce the notion that both genders are considered experts in the discussion of issues. contrary to the number or rate at which men are called on to share their expert knowledge on national issues, the rate for women is significantly low. the wide difference in the rate of women’s expertise (13.33%) to male expertise (86.67%) in the ghanaian media, especially on critical national issues proves that although women are considered in some discussions, women's expertise is significantly lagging. this result justifies bosch's (2010) argument that although women are not excluded or prevented from participating in deliberations, they are seldom called or 116 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 invited as experts to join political deliberation and discussions, or rather, they are invited to participate in the lighter discussions such as on entertainment issues. discussion the findings of this study demonstrate a consistent pattern of male dominance in the ghanaian media. numerous studies on gender representation, participation, and equality in the media worldwide, and the ghanaian media in particular, show a constant depreciation of women's involvement and participation in newsroom decision-making and their continuous invisibility in media leadership positions (gadzekpo, 2013; gmmp, 2020; ross & carter, 2011). the global media monitoring project report (2020) reveals gender imbalance in the ghanaian media, especially in the discussion of complex socio-political, health, and economic issues. the decline in the use of women’s expertise (31%) especially on critical national issues to the preference for male expertise (69%) as reported in the gmmp report 2020 ascribes to the social phenomenon of women’s perceived incompetence which this research has also attested to by the results in figure 1, figure 2, and table 4b. the primary goal of this study was to demonstrate the extent of gender equality in the ghanaian media. while ghana’s media has transitioned from a state of total invisibility of women two decades ago to a steady increase in the visibility of women in modern times, especially in leadership (adams et al., 2016), it is popularly assumed that the ghanaian media has achieved some gender balance, especially on tv. this is because popular names such as nana aba anamoah, oheneyere gifty anti, portia gabor, serwaa amihere, aisha ibrahim, afia pokuwaa (vhim lady), akosua ago aboagye, deloris frimpong manso, anita erskine, jessica opare soforo, and among others are popular media personalities in the ghanaian tv media in modern times. as table 1 shows, women dominate as morning show hosts (52.35%), newspaper discussion hosts (52.78), and panel discussion hosts (53.28%) across the five most popular media outlets during morning shows. despite this, the role of hosts could mean two things, (a) the acknowledgment of women’s competence to lead discussions but also (b) the objectification of women as effective media marketing tools for morning shows. firstly, the promotion of literacy in ghana, and the particular focus on women's education in ghana has positively increased gender advocacy and the call for women's inclusion in every aspect of ghana’s public life (gadzekpo, 2013; nartey, 2021; prah, 2003). notwithstanding that, the slow adoption of the affirmative action bill into law and its perceived implementation challenges stampedes gender equality in ghana (appiah, 2015; bawa & sanyare, 2013; bukari et al., 2017). despite this, there has been a steady increase in women’s participation in previously perceived male-dominated contexts such as political leadership, parliamentary discourse, and media practice (adams et al., 2016; mensah & wood, 2018; musah & gariba, 2013; ocran, 2014). the second reason for the role of women as hosts feeds into the age-old phenomena of the commodification and objectification of women, however, in a subversive form that benefits both the female hosts and media outlets (gmmp, 2020; resario & darkwah, 2021). in this study, while table 1 indicates the utilization of women as hosts for various segments of the morning shows, we argue that women in media leadership roles have not significantly contributed to addressing gender imbalance, the misrepresentation of women, or their low participation in discussions of critical national issues. the results reveal a steady utilization of women as morning show hosts but women’s expertise on the issues that matter is not sought after. this confirms earlier studies on the non-utilization of women's expertise in complex national issues, globally (craft & wanta, 2004; baitinger, 2015; kitzinger et al., 2008; steans, 2006). conclusion in this study, we questioned the agenda for using women as morning show hosts yet not as experts on complex national topics. we centered back to the commodification hypothesis of the role of women hosts. as in vu (2020), the presence of women as morning show hosts in ghanaian media, as observed in this study, may reflect the use of their bodies and beauty as “roses” with marketable value for media outlets. such representations contrast with genuine gender equity norms, as they primarily aim to (a) leverage women’s physical appearance to attract audiences and generate traffic for media outlets, and (b) use the prominent visibility of women hosts as a branding strategy to present the outlet as an equitable institution. normatively, this aligns more with marketplace feminism than genuine gender equity strategy. the findings show the characteristic masculinity in the ghanaian media. the implication of this is that the monotonic and mono-gendered male perspective on these popular media outlets shapes national policy decisions, hence contributing to the gender imbalance in national policies. this approach also silences the feminine voice and enforces the perceived incompetence of women in the discussion of critical national issues (craft & wanta, 2004; gadzekpo, 2013; gmmp, 2020). in this context, the annihilation of women does not imply the total absence of women's expertise but rather the persistent marginalization of women's participation in discussing critical national issues. in a true democracy, all voices must be given priority, especially when discussing national issues. thus, the absence of women’s expert opinions on critical national issues pokes questions about the democratic credentials of ghana. these findings, like other wide-scale studies, suggest that democracy as practiced within the lens of the ghanaian media is patriarchal. the findings make significant contributions to the literature on media patriarchy, and the results are consistent with earlier findings as presented by the global media monitoring project report (2020). despite its contributions, this study is not without limitations. the duration (six weeks) of the data collection does not allow us to study the phenomenon of gender equality in the ghanaian media over a period. thus, further studies can examine the phenomenon of gender equality in the ghanaian media over time during tv morning/breakfast shows where significant 117 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 national issues are discussed daily. again, in this research, our findings complement the study of gadzekpo (2013) concerning the issue of a gender gap in the ghanaian media and the need for advanced study in the field. we believe that further research into the existing gendered issues and trends in the media will aid in developing new media and gender equality theories that can consider the dynamics within the ghanaian media setting and suggest 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(2012). media framing of women in politics: an analysis of print media coverage of women members of parliament in kenya [doctoral dissertation, university of nairobi, kenya]. https://erepository.uonbi.ac.ke/bitstream/handle/11295/84 20/thuo-media%20framing%20of%20women%20in%2 0politics%20an%20analysis%20of%20print%20media. pdf tuchman, g. (2000). the symbolic annihilation of women by the mass media. in: l., crothers, &c., lockhart. (eds) culture and politics. palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62397-6_9 van bauwel, s. (2018). invisible golden girls? post-feminist discourses and female ageing bodies in contemporary television fiction. feminist media studies, 18(1), 21-33. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1409969 van der pas, d. j., &amp; aaldering, l. (2020). gender differences in political media coverage: a meta-analysis. journal of communication, 70(1), 114-143. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqz046 verge, t., & pastor, r. (2018). women’s political firsts and symbolic representation. journal of women, politics & policy, 39(1), 26-50. https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477x.2016.1268878 vu, h. t. (2020). female leadership in vietnam: traditional gender norms, gender quota policy and the media. in c., c., chao, & l., ha. (eds.). asian women leadership: a cross-national and cross-sector comparison (pp. 109-124). routledge. wood, j. t. (2005). feminist standpoint theory and muted group theory: commonalities and divergences. women and language, 28(2), 61. yeboah-banin, a., fofie, i., & gadzekpo, a. (2024). status of women in the ghanaian media: providing evidence for gender. equality and advocacy. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357204399_st atus_of_women_in_the_ghanaian_media_p roviding_evidence_for_gender_equality _and_advocacy yeboah-banin, a. a., tietaah, g., & akrofi-quarcoo, s. (2019). a chink in the charm? a framing analysis of coverage of chinese aid in the ghanaian media. african journalism studies, 40(1), 53-66. https://doi.org/10.1080/23743670.2019.1610781 zoch, l. m., & turk, j. v. (1998). women making news: gender as a variable in source selection and use. journalism & mass communication quarterly, 75(4), 762-775. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f107769909807500410 121 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 21, fall 2006 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        feminist leadership: building nurturing academic communities tracy r. barton bowling green state university american higher education currently faces "harsh realities" (altbach, 1999). "it has been argued," according to altbach, "that higher education's golden age the period of strong enrollment growth, increasing research budgets, and general public support is over" (p. 272). there is a wave of change on the horizon. "never before have we experienced the kind of change currently rocking our society" (zahorski & cognard, 1999, p. 2). preparing our academic institutions for this change "promises to be perhaps the greatest of the many challenges in the decades ahead" (p. 2). some of the changes that currently challenge higher education include "fiscal austerity, downsizing, heavy faculty workloads, underprepared students, a growing cohort of nomadic adjunct faculty, a tenure system under fire, [and] a demand for greater accountability and productivity from a disenchanted public" (p. 2). perhaps the greatest challenge at present is the changing face of american higher education due to the influx of new populations of students. in parts of the country, p eople of different nationalities, cultural identities, and races are sharing academic spaces creating hybrid identities, new languages, and new academic cultures (association for the study of higher education, 2006). policies, institutional practices, teaching methods, methods of assessment, and leadership will all need to change to better serve constituents in these evolving academic communities. the colleges and universities that will survive the rapid change ahead will be those that are focused on students (zahorski & cognard, 1999). the primary defining trait of successful universities will be "a nurturing institutional culture" (p. 9). therefore, we need "a more strongly proactive leadership model" (p. 9). if we hope to meet the challenges of the future, we need leaders who recognize the importance of student centeredness, social justice, and equity, and who will work to transform our academic institutions into more inclusive, holistic, nurturing organizations. findings from my re cent study of feminist leadership in higher education indicate that feminist leadership could be the key to the development of more nurturing academic communities. feminist leaders are student centered, focused on equity, and work to build holistic environments in which all constituents can thrive (barton, 2006; blackmore, 1993, 1999, 2002; strachan, 1999, 2002). feminist leaders keep issues of gender, race, social class, ability, and sexual orientation at the forefront of what they do (barton, 2006). they are watchful for oppressions and they work to ensure that no one is treated unfairly. it seems, based on findings from this study, that at the very least feminist leadership principles will be effective tools for higher education as we head further into the 21 st century. in this essay, i offer some of the findings from my dissertation study. i briefly discuss the theoretical framework and the methodology, and offer a short description of feminist leadership based on research that was available prior to this study. next, i offer some of the findings from my study that articulate how feminist leaders work to create a nurturing academic culture. therefore, i focus only on a few of the major themes to emerge from the data. this essay offers only a sneak peek into the principles of feminist leadership, as articulated by the study participants, but urges that we begin further discussion about feminist leadership and its potential impact on academic communities. theoretical framework unsatisfactory experiences in graduate school led me to wonder why the climate of higher education is still so unfriendly toward women, and if, therefore, we need more progressive leadership models to transform our institutions into more https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2006/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/www/awl/templates/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/www/awl/templates/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/www/awl/templates/index.html responsive, caring academic communities. i decided to study feminist academic leadership to explore these questions. the writings of bell hooks (1994, 2000) were very important to me as i began this study. teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom (1994) became my inspiration and provided the theoretical framework. hooks illustrated many criticisms of the academy and discussed personal struggles with her undergraduate and graduate experiences. as i had, she found graduate school disappointing and frustrating. at the same time, she proposed that education could be enabling, that students and professors could transgress the boundaries of race, gender, and social class and could strive to become self-actualized. above all, hooks proposed that the classroom remains a "location of possibility" (p. 207). hooks wrote, the academy is not paradise. but learning is a place where paradise can be created. the classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility . in that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. this is education as the practice of freedom. (p. 207) i thought about the classroom as a "location of possibility" and began to wonder if the larger campus community could also be a location of possibility. research suggests that the feminist classroom is an equitable and holistic social environment (hooks, 1994; maher & tetreault, 1994). therefore, if more feminist leaders were found in academic administration and were able to enact change, i wondered if the academy could be transformed into a more nurturing social environment. very little research existed on feminist leadership. previous studies were based on school leadership in australia and new zealand (blackmore, 1993, 1999, 2002; strachan, 1999, 2002). in addition, education, feminism, and leadership have traditionally been examined separately. more work needed to be done. this study builds upon previous studies and enhances our understanding of feminist leadership. ultimately, this study found that feminist leaders work toward equitable and holistic, or more nurturing, campus environments as part of their transformative social justice agenda. methodology the purpose of the study was to understand feminist leadership as constructed by feminist academic administrators and to learn how feminism shapes their identity and leadership practice. the study was designed around a feminist methodological framework, and combined postmodern perspectives that conceive of experience and identity as constructed and situational. feminist standpoint theory provided the inspiration for the study design. standpoint feminism is based on the idea that "the world looks different depending on one's social location" (allen, 2000, p. 178). standpoint theory assumes women's lives provide valuable resources for criticizing prevailing knowledge claims. the feminist academic administrator's standpoint will now allow us to criticize prevailing notions of leadership, and to reconceptualize leadership using these new standpoints. data collection involved semi-structured interviews with seven female academic administrators who self-identified as feminists. each participant was interviewed twice and the interviews were typically two hours long, which provided very rich, descriptive data. content analysis was used in conjunction with the constant comparative method. the participants included african-american, european-american, and international women in their 40s and 50s who represent institutions from small, private colleges to large public universities and community colleges in the midwest . their titles included department chair, dean, vice provost, and academic vice president. they are identified here only by the pseudonyms they chose so as to protect their anonymity. research questions included the following: what is feminist leadership as constructed by self-defined feminist academic administrators? how does a feminist identity shape an academic administrator's leadership practice? what barriers or limitations does the feminist leader experience in trying to practice feminist leadership? the study revealed many interesting things. however, my purpose here is not to answer the original research questions, but rather to focus on a portion of what emerged from the data, the notion that feminist academic leaders focus on building nurturing academic communities. first, i provide a brief description of feminist leadership based on prior studies. feminist leadership strachan (1999) is one of only a handful of feminist scholars studying feminist leadership and education. she found, through case study research, that feminist leaders in new zealand schools worked for improved social justice and equity. they possessed a strongly held core value system, which included a commitment to being student focused, a commitment to providing a safe learning environment, and a belief in shared decision making. strachan found that feminist school leaders embraced a wide political agenda that was not just anti-sexist, but also anti-racist and anti-violent. study participants valued diversity and put the academic and social welfare of their students above all. strachan (1999) wrote, feminist educational leadership rests on emancipatory politics which emerge from women's experiences and beliefs. women's beliefs, values and attitudes are central (glazer, 1991) but feminist educational leaders may not be exclusively concerned with these. rather, they may encompass a wider emancipatory agenda which includes issues of race, class, sexuality and differing abilities. therefore, feminist educational leadership includes but goes beyond being woman centered and embraces a wider political agenda that is anti-racist as well as anti-sexist (joyce, 1987; gosetti & rusch, 1995). that is, feminists are motivated by equity (blackmore, 1993). feminist educational leadership is about the 'doing of feminism' and leading in a way that challenges and changes hegemonic institutional practices (blackmore, 1996). (p. 309) rosser (2003) found, in her study of feminist student affairs professionals, that feminist leaders "valued a commitment to social justice, an ethic of care, collaborative relationships, freedom from gender roles and stereotypes, [and] a commitment to empowering others." (p. 240). my findings were in keeping with these studies; however, this study expands upon previous descriptions of feminist leadership. findings from a study of feminist academic administrators many of the themes that emerged from the data articulate the transformative agenda of the feminist academic administrator. it was found that feminist leaders in higher education focus on the big picture or a broad social justice agenda as much as possible. findings also indicate that feminist leaders work toward change and institutional transformation. they work to establish a diverse environment and one that is inclusive. the two themes discussed here are related to the development of nurturing academic communities introduced at the beginning of this essay; one is fairness, justice, and equity, and the other is community building. fairness, justice, and equity fairness, justice, and equity were consistent themes throughout the interviews with the seven study participants. these terms are not interchangeable, but participants used them in conjunction with one another. feminist leadership, according to participants, is about social justice, about advocating for women and others who are marginalized, and about attending to injustices. it was known prior to this study that feminists share a passion for social justice and for equity (hooks, 1994; maher & tetreault, 1994; rosser, 2003; strachan, 1999). this study confirmed that feminist leadership is all about equity. for example, joni said, "i think basically that looking at all of the situations i'm in, from the standpoint of justice, fairness, equal opportunity, that's definitely a way that i've been influenced by a feminist perspective." jessie also spoke about fairness and equity together, and added that feminist leadership includes caring, and taking the personal seriously: i'd say probably everything i do is driven by a sense of thinking about issues of equity and community building and fairness to people on the margins, whether they are women, people who are clerical staff, people with kids, people of color, foreign students, a white male student who has neither kids nor any other issues but is struggling with something else, family issues or money. i think it is taking the personal seriously. the feminist leaders in this study are committed to equity and work to ensure that everyone is treated fairly. this is a goal that drives their leadership practice. joni further explained that this emphasis is specifically a principle of feminist leadership: i think someone who is a feminist is always thinking about equality, equal opportunity, and resisting oppression. .if you're a feminist, that's never far away from your thinking and if that's how you're administering, then that's what sets you apart. .you're always deconstructing what you do to make sure that there isn't any innate oppression, or there isn't some unintentional oppression that you're either supporting intensively or actually doing, however unintentionally. i think that makes the difference. if you don't have that orientation all the time, then you're administering without being feminist about it. several of the participants further described what differentiates feminist leadership from other constructions of leadership. gerri explained, "i think we look at things more holistically. we look at social and political justice or injustices, and we fight against those and try to empower others as well as ourselves. that is what differentiates from male-dominated leadership." alexa articulated the differences this way: because your value system is different, it is going to affect your disposition toward leadership. you can be more collaborative; you rely on your intuition; you value those things that go with being a woman but that have been marginalized traditionally. the ideology of feminism certainly has an effect on your disposition and then your leadership action or behavior. .you're doing it because it's the right thing and the good thing to do. .you're going to be more inclusive in your decision making, your problem solving, rather than in a hierarchical fashion. you're going to be more deliberative, more critical, and you're going to be more challenging as a feminist than you would otherwise. participants in this study believe that the feminist leader looks at things differently, more holistically. a feminist leader is watchful for systems of oppression and is always deconstructing her surroundings. inclusive and nurturing academic communities must have leaders who think about and work toward equity for all constituents. community development to create a sense of community, according to hooks (1994), everyone's presence and participation must be valued. community development was a very strong theme that permeated the interviews with all of the participants. participants shared numerous examples of how they build community in their academic environments. joni explained, i very much believe in relational leadership. you have to forge the connections with the people who work for and with you; you have to be willing to do a lot of vision creation that's collaborative, and i think the standard is the leader has the vision and rallies everyone around the vision. i prefer to think of vision as something that's created by the group, and also that you get what primal leadership calls a tribal kind of feeling where people feel connected and they're motivated, they're excited, and they're enthusiastic, and your own passion is something that becomes everybody's passion. jessie said her leadership philosophy revolves around "finding ways to help communities or collectives work better." she feels strongly about creating a supportive and pleasant work environment. other participants agreed. several participants said this encourages creativity among organizational members. the feminist leaders in the study see themselves as facilitators, putting structures in place to support the work of their departments, their faculty, and so on. charlene explained, the enterprise is all about mentoring students and mentoring faculty so that they can do great things, mentoring students' intellectual development, which to me is really why we're here. simultaneously it's about mentoring the careers and the development of faculty and staff; trying to put into place supports so that people can be really successful. and it's not about having power and getting to make the decisions. it's about making this place a really great place for students and for staff and faulty and helping people think about the broader issues. when there is a sense of community, according to participants, the outcome or what is generated by the group is always bigger and better than what could be accomplished by any one individual. raja explained how she engages in group processes to begin an initiative: my model i would say is really that of trying to inform people to the greatest extent possible with the most diverse range of ideas about an issue, and then trying to foster some dialogue about it in which everybody really has an equal opportunity, and then really sort of abiding by the decisions that the group makes. but my job as i see is to kind of relate people and try to make their strengths work to the best possible advantage for an outcome that is bigger than any of them individually. alexa shared these thoughts: it's creating this sense of we are only as good as the integration of all of us together. when we integrate all these good minds and the ideas of these fine people, we create something far better than we could ever imagine alone. it's a very generative process. if you make sure that the environment is generous, that your ideas aren't any better than hers, let's listen to all of them and find where those common threads are, it's that generous and generative spirit that is really important. the real blessing is when you're in a place where that can happen, where you can create among each other that very generous spirit that leads to a generative sort of an environment. findings from this study indicate that feminist leaders seek to foster the development of academic communities in which group members can be happy, healthy, and productive. community building was a theme that permeated all of the interviews. thus far, i discussed two of the findings from my study of feminist leadership in higher education that suggested some of the ways that feminist leaders work toward building nurturing academic communities. i turn now to a working definition of feminist leadership that emerged from the data, and then discuss one conclusion that i believe to be the most important finding from this study. definition of feminist leadership a fundamental objective of this study was to arrive at a working definition of feminist leadership. the definition generated by this study has a slightly different focus than previous descriptions, including the notion of building holistic academic communities and the incorporation of the feminist lens as a key component to feminist leadership, which is discussed in the next section. based on the findings from this study of seven feminist academic administrators, i propose the following definition: leadership from a feminist standpoint is informed by the power of the feminist lens, which enables the feminist leader to identify injustices and oppressions and inspires her to facilitate the development of more inclusive, holistic academic communities. feminist leaders are motivated by fairness, justice, and equity and strive to keep issues of gender, race, social class, sexual orientation, and ability at the forefront of what they do each day. the elements particular to a feminist leadership construction include a focus on both individual or micro-level and societal or macro-level social justice concerns, a desire to bring marginalized voices to the center of the conversation, and a willingness to take risks as one strives to enact a transformative agenda. (barton, 2006, p. 238) i conclude this essay with one additional key finding from the study. the power of the feminist lens perhaps the most important finding to come out of this study is what can be called the power of the feminist lens. this seems to be the feature that distinguishes feminist leaders from leaders with a different orientation. melissa explained how the feminist lens gives her a different perspective: it's a political way of thinking. it's also a social way of thinking. and it's very much an academic way of thinking. it's going into any situation, whether it's working on your own research, or whether it's sitting in a meeting and understanding that because you're a woman, because you've had a set of experiences that have come to you and affected you in certain ways because you're a woman, that your reactions, your perceptions and the way you are treated are going to be very different from the male norm. all of the participants gave examples of how they approach their surroundings and their work, and that is through a feminist lens. the feminist lens is like radar or a set of antennae, both metaphors having been offered by participants, that the feminist administrator uses to continuously scope out her surroundings and gather information. feminists use this sensory input to identify issues of oppression and to make sure no one within their purview is treated unfairly. joni said, it's a deconstruction that is automatic; immediately when i'm scoping something out, i will begin to deconstruct it to be sure that there isn't anything going on there that i don't want to either be part of or be doing myself. it's like a selfreflection really, and a thinking about what you're doing in a very intentional way and a very analytic way. .i'm thinking, "ok, now what am i doing, why did i do it, how might it play out, what are some problems that could result in any of these that would adversely affect women?" in using the power of this lens, feminist leaders focus not only on their immediate surroundings, at the personal, group, or institutional level, but are also cognizant of what is happening in society at large. they are attuned to issues of oppression on both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. for instance, gerri shared these observations: it's almost scary. .we have a very conservative government and i see things going backwards. a lot of social and political things are going backwards. the gains that were made in years past, as it relates to women and people of color and other vulnerable groups, we're going to see ourselves on a slippery slope sliding backwards unless action is taken. it seems like the worst i've seen. so, i'm just wondering the impact all this is going to have. you see the workforce deteriorating, so that means that those persons in power, especially the men, are going to make sure they stay in power. what happens to women when they try to climb that ladder? i think all that is a threat to feminist leadership and females in the workplace. feminist leaders are conscious of both individual issues and concerns (micro-level) and societal issues and concerns (macro-level) and try to do a delicate balancing act as they participate in feminist activism on both levels. at a college or university, this means that a feminist leader is concerned for individual students, faculty and staff, whole academic communities, and also how to best serve the community or town in which the institution is located. this awareness that comes from the feminist lens should be recognized as an asset to an academic community. a feminist leader possesses a core set of values, or a feminist ethic. a feminist leader, as illustrated by study participants, is always attuned to issues of fairness and is always deconstructing her surroundings to identify oppressions. she is always focused on a broad social justice agenda. implications i have provided only a snapshot of the findings from a larger study of feminist leadership in american higher education. however, it should be evident even from a brief discussion of the findings that feminist academic administrators work toward equitable and holistic social arrangements and that their work could be instrumental to developing more nurturing higher education organizations. it must be noted, however, that institutional transformation is not a simple task. existing organizational structures prevent academic communities from becoming holistic, nurturing ones overnight. some feminist scholars argue that complete transformation is not even possible within existing institutional structures. the seven participants in this study continue to work toward change, despite the barriers and the risks. hooks (1994) proposed that the feminist classroom is a "location of possibility." i propose that colleges and universities should take feminist pedagogical principles under consideration and work to create and sustain more nurturing organizational cultures. findings from this study suggest that feminist academic leaders work toward that goal. therefore, i hope this study begins to facilitate an open dialogue among university administrators about how to develop more nurturing academic communities. references allen, b. j. (2000). learning the ropes: a black feminist standpoint analysis. in p. m. buzzanell (ed.), rethinking organizational & managerial communication from feminist perspectives (pp. 177-208). thousand oaks , ca : sage. altbach, p. g. (1999). harsh realities: the professoriate faces a new century. in p. g. altbach, r. o. berdahl, & p. j. gumport (eds.), american higher education in the twenty-first century: social, political and economic challenges (pp. 271-297). baltimore : the johns hopkins university press. association for the study of higher education. (2006). retrieved april 14, 2006, from http://www.ashe.ws/conf06 /theme06.htm barton, t. r. (2006). a feminist construction of leadership in american higher education. unpublished doctoral dissertation, the university of toledo. blackmore, j. (1993). "in the shadow of men": the historical construction of educational administration as a "masculinist" enterprise. in j. blackmore & j. kenway (eds.), gender matters in educational administration and policy: a feminist introduction (pp. 27-48). deakin studies in education, series 11. london : falmer. blackmore, j. (1999). troubling women: feminism, leadership and educational change . buckingham , uk : open university. blackmore, j. (2002). troubling women: the upsides and downsides of leadership and the new managerialism. in c. reynolds (ed.), women in school leadership: international perspectives (pp. 49-69). albany : state university of new york . hooks, b. (1994). teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom . new york : routledge. hooks, b. (2000). feminism is for everybody: passionate politics . cambridge , ma : south end press. maher, f. a., & tetreault, m. k. t. (1994). the feminist classroom . new york : basic books. rosser, v. j. (2003). feminists in student affairs: negotiating the process of change . unpublished doctoral dissertation, bowling green state university. strachan, j. (1999). feminist educational leadership: locating the concepts in practice. gender and education, (11) 3, 309-325. strachan, j. (2002). feminist educational leadership: not for the fainthearted. in c. reynolds (ed.), women in school leadership: international perspectives (pp. 111-125). albany: state university of new york. zahorski, k. j., & cognard, r. (1999). reconsidering faculty roles and rewards: promising practices for institutional transformation and enhanced learning. a report on caphe's faculty roles, faculty rewards, and institutional priorities grant program. washington , dc : council of independent colleges. tracy barton has a phd in higher education administration and women's and gender studies. she is currently on the faculty of the department of interpersonal communication at bowling green state university ( ohio ). copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, 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mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com 560 final manuscript.docx volume 44, 2025 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodriguez, and benjamin jankens assistant editor: jordan donop 94 advancing women in leadership vol. 44, 94-108 2025 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper analyzing ideal traits and terms of address for male and female college professors narissra m. punyanunt-carter and sumeyya akdilek narissra m. punyanunt-carter: professor, texas tech university, n.punyanunt@ttu.edu sumeyya akdilek: doctoral student, texas tech university, sakdilek@ttu.edu accepted november 5, 2025 this study replicates and extends rubin’s (1981) research on students’ use of address terms for their college professors to explore how gendered expectations have evolved in contemporary academic settings. using data from 445 undergraduate students, this study examined preferred address terms across public (in class) and private (office) contexts, as well as perceptions of ideal professor traits. descriptive and inferential analyses, including chi-square and independent-samples t-tests, revealed no statistically significant relationship between professor gender and address term choice, χ²(3, n = 445) = 3.42, p = .33, cramer’s v = .09. however, familiarity significantly predicted informality, t(443) = 2.15, p = .03, η² = .02. students overwhelmingly reported that how professors addressed them (84%) influenced their own choices. results suggest remarkable stability in address-term patterns over four decades, with formality remaining the default in classroom contexts and first-name use emerging mainly in informal interactions. these findings reinforce the enduring influence of academic hierarchy and reciprocal adaptation between students and professors in shaping linguistic respect and perceived authority. keywords: address terms, college students, gender, professors, sex differences, titles gender disparities persist in labor market outcomes across sectors (ganguli et al., 2021), and academia reflects these inequalities (holte & snickare, 2022). although women’s representation has increased, occupational sex segregation endures (reskin & hartmann, 1986), sustaining gendered expectations that can shape student–faculty interactions (kamerlin & wittung-stafshede, 2020; riger et al., 1997). to understand how professor gender informs students’ perceptions, it is also necessary to consider how gendered occupational structures inform status attributions in academic settings. rubin (1981) conducted two foundational studies to examine how students perceived professors in terms of both ideal traits and forms of address. in rubin’s study 1, participants selected ideal professorial traits from a list of thirty-four items that were later grouped by an independent sample into five overarching categories: knowledge and intellect, professionalism, communication ability, openness, and nurturing. the findings revealed subtle gender-typed expectations, with students associating male professors more often with intellect and professionalism, and female professors more often with nurturing and openness. rubin's study 2 focused on the terms of address students used when referring to their professors across two contexts, private (office) and public (classroom) using options such as mr., ms., mrs., miss, professor, doctor, and first name. results indicated greater use of first names for younger female faculty and more consistent use of formal titles for male professors. together, rubin’s studies demonstrated how both language and perceived traits contribute to gendered expectations of authority and approachability in academic communication. the present study extends rubin’s (1981) research by using study 1 as theoretical foundation and partially replicating study 2 with a new sample to determine whether rubin’s original patterns remain consistent today. rubin’s first study was a quantitative survey in which students selected ideal professorial traits from a list of thirty-four descriptors. a second group of participants, serving as independent raters, categorized these traits into five dimensions: (a) knowledge and intellect, (b) professionalism, (c) communication ability, (d) openness, and (e) nurturing, creating the framework that guides the present investigation. rubin’s (1981) framework integrated gender role theory and sociolinguistic principles to examine how students’ language and perceptions of professors reveal socially constructed expectations of authority, warmth, and professionalism in academic contexts. building this theoretical structure means that our study draws conceptually from rubin’s dimensions of professorial perception to interpret patterns in modern student evaluations. we retain her categories and contextual distinctions while explicitly defining address terms and comparing our findings with rubin’s distributions to evaluate continuity and change across generations. in addition, we use the term “gender” rather than rubin’s original term 95 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 “sex,” as our constructs, students’ address terms and perceptions of professionalism are social and linguistic practices shaped by social roles, identities, and expectations rather than biology (ellis & mitchell, 2000; marecek et al., 2004). for historical fidelity, meaning the careful preservation of rubin’s original wording and procedures to ensure accuracy in replication (cohen & crabtree, 2008), we retained her phrasing when describing the study design. this quantitative replication uses rubin’s framework with a contemporary sample, reframing her findings through gender to reveal ongoing structural patterns in academia. literature review gender career barriers and workplace inequality throughout history, women's career choices and their struggle to remain in the workforce have been significantly influenced by men's job choices (reskin & roos, 1990). during the first world war, as men left their positions, women entered the workforce to fill the vacancies, but in subsequent years, women were predominantly employed to meet the demand for cheaper and less skilled labor, while men tended to pursue higher-paying and higher-status jobs (reskin & roos, 1990). the emergence of professional and managerial job opportunities in developing bureaucracies led to a shift in the gender distribution within certain professions, with educated men pursuing these new roles while women filled the positions vacated by them (reskin & roos, 1990). these changes also resulted in the devaluation of previously held occupations, which were considered relatively unimportant. employers recognized women as a cost-effective and educated workforce capable of fulfilling the tasks associated with these roles (reskin & roos, 1990; uchikoshi et al., 2025), often considering them well-suited for mundane and low-level tasks where leadership or independence was deemed unnecessary (davies, 1982). consequently, women’s career opportunities were constrained by systemic barriers that undermined their confidence and, in turn, reinforced gender inequality and limited professional growth (galsanjigmed & sekiguchi, 2023; reskin, 1988). researchers have shown how these systemic barriers shape professional advancement, especially in academia, where women faculty must navigate persistent evaluation bias (kreitzer & sweet-cushman, 2022). another persistent form of gender inequality is the separation of women and men into different kinds of work, often called task differentiation (reskin & hartmann, 1986). this process assigns certain responsibilities according to gendered expectations, reinforcing a sexual division of labor across both domestic (pleck, 1985) and professional domains (reskin & hartmann, 1986). historically, this has meant that women are often directed toward lower-status or less visible work-tasks labeled as supportive or routine rather than technical or leadership-based (reskin, 1988; steinberg, 1984). these patterns continue today in subtle forms. researchers have demonstrated that women in academia, science, and business are more likely to perform “invisible labor,” such as mentoring or service work, that is undervalued in promotion and reward systems (ceci et al., 2023; joyce et al., 2024). such divisions perpetuate assumptions that women’s competencies stem from innate qualities like empathy or intuition rather than developed expertise (el-alayli et al., 2023; feldberg, 1984). this perception devalues women’s professional skill and reinforces systemic barriers to advancement. gender norms and conflicting expectations in academia students’ expectations of faculty continue to reflect long-standing social norms about gender and behavior. researchers have shown that women are still expected to display personality traits aligned with traditional femininity-warmth, empathy, and receptiveness-while professorial roles emphasize authority, assertiveness, and expertise (dringó-horváth et al., 2025; lewis, 1972; richardson et al., 1980). when female professors act in ways considered “feminine,” they risk being viewed as less competent; yet, when they adopt more directive or assertive behaviors, students often perceive them as unfriendly or intimidating (basow et al., 2006; hildenbrand et al., 2020). this tension, often called the double bind, continues to disadvantage women across disciplines, particularly in male-dominated fields such as engineering and technology (el-alayli et al., 2023; etaugh & riley, 1983; lamba et al., 2023). recent analyses conducted by researchers confirm that student evaluation comments confirm that gendered expectations remain embedded in classroom judgments. students tend to describe male instructors in terms of competence, professionalism, and clarity, while evaluating female instructors more frequently for approachability and emotional warmth (joyce et al., 2024; kim et al., 2024; okoye et al., 2020). these patterns reflect broader cultural scripts that link women’s value to interpersonal traits rather than professional expertise. female faculty therefore receive higher ratings on relational qualities-such as caring and support-but lower ratings on course organization and intellectual authority (centra & gaubatz, 2000; dringó-horváth et al., 2025). recent studies show that scholars have found that these patterns have not disappeared but have evolved in more subtle forms. large-scale reviews find that women continue to perform disproportionate amounts of invisible academic labor, such as mentoring and service work, which students often conflate with personality rather than professionalism (ceci et al., 2023; joyce et al., 2024). such expectations reinforce the perception that effective teaching by women is rooted in innate caregiving rather than disciplinary mastery. in short, the gender norms that shape student perceptions of faculty still create a paradox for women: they must appear caring enough to meet social expectations but authoritative enough to meet academic ones. bias in student evaluations of teaching (sets) gender bias in student evaluations of teaching has been documented for decades and remains a significant concern in higher education. early explanations for this phenomenon stemmed from the historical misinterpretation of biological and physical differences between men and women. in the nineteenth 96 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 century, for instance, scientists argued that women’s smaller brain size indicated lower intellectual ability (bleier, 1987). such assumptions shaped long-standing gender stereotypes that positioned women as less rational or capable, limiting access to positions of authority and academic prestige (reskin, 1988). although these biological myths have been discredited, their cultural residue continues to shape how students interpret and evaluate female faculty. researchers have demonstrated that gender bias persists in both traditional and online course evaluations. scholars have found that students consistently rate male instructors higher on professionalism, fairness, enthusiasm, and subject mastery, even when the content, delivery, and grading standards are identical (lamba et al., 2023; macnell et al., 2014). conversely, women are more often evaluated on interpersonal qualities such as warmth, helpfulness, and approachability rather than on teaching effectiveness or intellectual rigor (dringó-horváth et al., 2025; mitchell & martin, 2018). these differences reflect the same cultural scripts that associate men with competence and women with care, leading to the systematic undervaluation of women’s academic contributions (basow & silberg, 1987; okoye et al., 2020). current analyses highlight how these biases intersect with other social factors. lamba, kishore, and khokhlova (2023) found that both gender and race influence evaluations, with faculty of color especially women receiving disproportionately lower ratings. similarly, kim et al. (2024) demonstrated that interventions designed to reduce evaluation bias yield mixed results, suggesting that implicit stereotypes remain resilient despite institutional efforts. these findings emphasize that gender bias in sets cannot be fully corrected by procedural adjustments alone; rather, it reflects broader societal norms about who is perceived as knowledgeable, credible, or authoritative. scholars increasingly call for multidimensional frameworks that move beyond numerical ratings. constantinou and wijnen-meijer (2022) argue that sets should be complemented by peer observations, teaching portfolios, and qualitative feedback to capture teaching quality without reinforcing gendered expectations. likewise, joyce et al. (2024) and ceci et al. (2023) note that the undervaluation of women’s academic labor extends beyond classroom assessments to broader patterns of professional recognition and promotion. collectively, these studies illustrate how the gendered assumptions embedded in evaluation systems both reflect and reproduce inequality across higher education. in summary, the persistence of bias in teaching evaluations underscores a deeper cultural problem rather than an individual one. student evaluations continue to measure conformity to gender norms more than actual teaching effectiveness. as a result, female faculty often face the double burden of meeting high expectations for both professional competence and emotional availability, while male faculty are rewarded for fulfilling only one of these criteria. academic status and recognition of women faculty women faculty continue to face significant barriers to full recognition and authority in higher education, despite steady progress in representation. researchers have found that women hold only about one-third of senior academic leadership positions, such as full professor, dean, or provost (abalkhail & allan, 2015). these inequities persist partly because of the “leaky pipeline,” a well-documented phenomenon in which women advance more slowly or leave academia altogether as they move through each career stage (cech & blair-loy, 2014; ceci et al., 2023). even when women attain positions of authority, they often experience status inconsistency occupying high-prestige roles while being perceived as less legitimate because of gendered assumptions about expertise and leadership (joyce et al., 2024). this disconnects limits women’s visibility, reduces their access to research networks, and influences how both students and colleagues perceive their authority (dringó-horváth et al., 2025; kreitzer & sweet-cushman, 2022). recognition disparities also extend to scholarly output. researchers indicated that women academics publish less frequently, receive fewer citations, and are less likely to be lead authors compared to men in similar positions (huang et al., 2020; lerchenmueller et al., 2019). these differences are compounded by institutional cultures that undervalue service and mentorship forms of invisible labor that disproportionately fall on women (ceci et al., 2023; joyce et al., 2024). family-care responsibilities further amplify this gap. a recent longitudinal study found that caregiving duties significantly mediate gender differences in productivity and promotion opportunities, particularly in the early and mid-career stages (acker & armenti, 2004). in short, women faculty continue to navigate an academic system that outwardly promotes equity yet still privileges male-coded models of productivity, leadership, and intellectual authority. professional recognition for women remains conditional not simply on their credentials but on meeting gendered expectations of what competence and expertise should look like. address terms as sociolinguistic tools address terms have an important role in interpersonal communication (delisle, 1993). they serve as significant indicators that provide insights into an individual's attitudes and perceptions towards others because the choice of address terms reflects the social and relational dynamics between individuals, as well as the level of familiarity, respect, or power dynamics within a given context (clayman, 2010; delisle, 1993; dunkling, 1990; lerner, 2003). therefore, people form their address terms according to the status of both the person who addresses and the person who is addressed (morand, 1996). lerner (2003) discussed that address terms play a crucial role in communication by serving multiple functions. even though one of their primary purposes is to attract the attention of the intended recipient or the broader audience, the purpose of the 97 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 use of address terms can vary according to their location in the sentences. for example, people use address terms at the beginning of a sentence to address someone, in the middle of a sentence to get someone’s attention while talking, or at the end of a sentence to address someone or mention their name as the conversation is wrapping up. additionally, these terms are employed to express one's stance or position about the addressee or the topic being discussed (lehtimaja, 2011). therefore, address terms encompass multiple dimensions that can be emphasized or activated depending on the specific context and interactional objectives (clayman, 2010). on the other hand, the relative prominence of these functions can vary across different contexts (lerner, 2003). for instance, delisle (1993) pointed out the issue of inappropriate usage of address terms. she mentioned that every culture has its own set of linguistic and sociolinguistic norms, and when someone fails to adhere to these norms, it can transgress sociolinguistic norms, disrupt power dynamics, and be perceived as disrespectful, intrusive, and a challenge to established social hierarchies, thus violating cultural expectations and potentially eliciting negative reactions. besides these social norms, address terms are also influenced by gender norms. recent researchers have confirmed this, showing that gendered forms of address in higher education contexts continue to shape perceptions of authority and respect (el-alayli et al., 2023; hildenbrand et al., 2020). gendered dimensions of address terms in english language usage, there is a notable disparity in the number of address term options available for women compared to men. women have three commonly used address terms: "miss" (used for unmarried women), "mrs." (used for married women), and "ms." (used as a gender-neutral or non-specific term for women) while men have a single address term, "mr.," which does not carry any marital status connotations (lillian, 2006). a study conducted by crawford et al. in 1984 found that the evaluation of the four titles used to address individuals as good or bad revealed gender bias in the ratings. "ms." received significantly lower ratings compared to "miss" or "mrs." this suggests a societal perception that "ms." is less favorable, which can be attributed to the gender-neutral nature of the title, challenging traditional gender roles and potentially facing resistance or biases. the preference for "miss" and "mrs." implies that femininity and marital status play a significant role in the evaluative sense, reinforcing gender stereotypes and societal expectations. furthermore, the findings demonstrated a significant difference in the attribution of power based on gender. males rated "mrs." higher in power, aligning with the societal norm of associating power with married women. in contrast, women attributed higher power to "miss," which can be seen as a reflection of the perceived youthful vitality and potential associated with unmarried women. lastly, findings show that there are also gender biases in the evaluation of activity levels. both men and women agreed that "mrs." was less active compared to "miss" and "ms." this observation aligns with traditional gender roles, where married women are often expected to be less active or assertive compared to unmarried women. these biases towards married women may explain the reasons why they are less likely to be hired than other candidates (etaugh & riley, 1983). in summary, the evaluation of address titles exposes gender biases in societal perceptions and expectations. the negative connotation associated with "ms." and the differential attribution of potency and activity highlight the impact of gendered norms and the perpetuation of traditional gender roles within the cultural context. contemporary work further shows that these patterns extend into academia: students are more likely to use formal professional titles when addressing male professors than female professors, reinforcing asymmetries in perceived competence (hildenbrand et al., 2020; takiff et al., 2001). indeed, in english, respect, distance, and familiarity are lexically encoded through various nominal forms as address terms. these include honorifics like "madam," personal titles such as "mr." and "ms.," professional titles like "professor" and "doctor" used with last names or full names, as well as informal forms like nicknames, familiarizers, and endearment terms and these lexical choices reflect the range of ways english speakers express and navigate social dynamics (biber et al., 1999). recent scholars have emphasize this point further, noting that the structured use of titles and honorifics is central to how english speakers signal deference, familiarity, and institutional hierarchy (hickey, 2023). in light of this information, this study investigates how students choose address terms to interact with their professors and how these social and gender norms affect their choices. address terms in academic settings numerous studies in academic settings have examined how students address faculty members (cekaite, 2009; hildenbrand et al., 2020; lehtimaja, 2011; rubin, 1981; takiff et al., 2001). within university contexts, address terms often vary and can cause uncertainty because their use depends on the formality of the situation, the perceived status of the instructor, and broader cultural norms. formal titles such as doctor and professor emphasize a faculty member’s academic credentials and professional role, while honorifics like sir and ma’am express deference or politeness. courtesy titles such as mr., mrs., ms., or miss are sometimes used for instructors without doctoral degrees (formentelli & hajek, 2016). the choice of how to address a faculty member is more than a matter of etiquette; it reflects and reinforces social hierarchies, norms, and gender expectations. specific forms of address serve as communicative signals that shape perceptions of professionalism, respect, and interpersonal distance. as hildenbrand et al. (2020) note, linguistic practices in classrooms are often influenced by implicit gender bias and traditional cultural expectations about authority. researchers have confirmed that students’ address choices reveal underlying assumptions about power and gender, even when students report being unaware of these patterns (el-alayli et al., 2023). 98 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 cultural norms and gender expectations strongly affect how students evaluate faculty competence (basow & silberg, 1987; centra & gaubatz, 2000; chávez & mitchell, 2020; mitchell & martin, 2018), prestige (paludi & bauer, 1983), and authority (brooks, 1982; richardson et al., 1980). newer research shows these perceptions have not substantially changed. similarly, el-alayli et al. (2023) found that female professors are more likely than male professors to be addressed informally or ambiguously, a linguistic tendency that can subtly diminish their authority. although professional titles such as doctor and professor signal earned academic status and expertise (biber et al., 1999; delisle, 1993; dunkling, 1990), students often rely on personal titles (miss, mrs., ms., mr.) when addressing female professors (rubin, 1981; takiff et al., 2001). these personal titles reflect cultural and gender norms that associate women with relational warmth rather than authority. addressing instructors by first name or personal title, though seemingly casual, functions as a marker of social distance and respect, communicating relational boundaries and perceived legitimacy (delisle, 1993; hildenbrand et al., 2020). researchers have continued to show gender differences in how students address professors. hildenbrand et al. (2020) reported that professional titles remain the default form of address for most faculty members, yet rubin (1981) and delisle (1993) found that only a small portion of students consistently used earned titles such as doctor or professor. takiff et al. (2001) demonstrated that both student and professor gender influenced these choices: students were significantly more likely to use professional titles when addressing male professors than when addressing female professors. this bias persists in more recent studies, which show that students, particularly male students, continue to afford greater linguistic respect to male instructors, even in settings that emphasize gender equity (el-alayli et al., 2023). these linguistic preferences reveal how language and gender expectations intersect in shaping perceived authority. brooks (1982) found that gender bias also manifests behaviorally, as male students interrupted female professors more frequently than male professors. such interruptions demonstrate how the assumed lower status of women can override formal credentials. takiff et al. (2001) further reported that male and female students alike were more likely to use professional titles for male professors than for female professors and that older female professors were least likely to be addressed by their earned titles. this pattern reflects enduring stereotypes that associate age and femininity with diminished authority, a bias reinforced by cultural histories that excluded older women from professional spaces (reskin & roos, 1990). recent systematic reviews suggest that these biases continue to echo in modern academia. despite progress in gender equity, subtle linguistic choices such as omitting titles or opting for informal address remain powerful markers of perceived legitimacy (kreitzer & sweet-cushman, 2022). these small but persistent patterns demonstrate that the politics of address continue to reflect broader systems of gendered inequality in professional and educational contexts. rubin’s study and its legacy rubin’s (1981) work provides the theoretical foundation for the present study and remains one of the most influential early investigations into how students perceive and linguistically construct professors’ authority. her research consisted of two distinct studies that together form the basis of this replication. in study one, rubin examined students’ perceptions of ideal professor traits across gender and age, identifying the dimensions of knowledge and intellect, professionalism, communication ability, openness, and nurturing. these findings revealed subtle but consistent gendered stereotypes female professors were more often associated with nurturing and interpersonal warmth, while male professors were linked to openness and intellectual authority. in contrast, study two explored how students addressed professors in different contexts (classroom and office) and whether those choices varied based on the professor’s gender or age. rubin’s legacy lies in establishing a connection between the language students use and the social meanings that language conveys about respect, authority, and gendered expectations in academic settings. her framework continues to guide research on how linguistic practices reflect and reinforce social hierarchies (cekaite, 2009; hildenbrand et al., 2020; el-alayli et al., 2023). the present study uses rubin’s study two as its empirical foundation, replicating the address-term analysis while drawing on the theoretical categories from study one to contextualize how students’ perceptions of professorial traits influence their linguistic choices. specifically, this study focuses on students’ perceptions of professors’ authority, professionalism, and relational warmth, and how those perceptions inform the address terms students choose in both public (classroom) and private (office) settings. rubin’s original findings demonstrated that male students were more likely to use personal titles (e.g., miss, mrs., ms., mr.) or the professional title dr. with the last name, whereas female students more frequently preferred professor with the last name. both male and female students, however, were equally likely to use first names when familiarity increased. in private contexts, such as office interactions, female professors were more often addressed by first name, while male professors were more frequently addressed by title and surname. these results underscore the intersection of gender and formality in linguistic behavior. rubin’s studies illustrated that perceptions of authority and relational proximity were filtered through gendered expectations, patterns that continue to appear in research. studies by el-alayli et al. (2023) and hildenbrand et al. (2020) show that students still tend to use formal titles for male professors but address female professors more casually, reflecting persistent inequities in perceived authority. takiff et al. (2001) confirmed that these linguistic patterns are influenced 99 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 not only by gender but also by the perceived status of the professor. rubin’s framework, therefore, provides a critical lens for understanding how language functions as a social marker of respect and authority, an idea that continues to shape contemporary scholarship on gender, communication, and power in higher education (ceci et al., 2023). methods this study employed a quantitative, cross-sectional survey and is best described as a partial replication of rubin’s (1981) seminal work on students’ perceptions of professors and the use of address terms in academic settings. rubin’s research, conducted at the university of georgia in 1981, included two distinct studies. study one analyzed the perceptions of ideal professor traits specifically how students described male and female professors using five conceptual categories: knowledge and intellect, professionalism, communication ability, openness, and nurturing. study two, which the present project partially replicates, examined how students address professors across two communication contexts: the public classroom setting and the private office setting. in the current study, we used rubin’s (1981) study one as a theoretical foundation to frame contemporary expectations about gender roles and professorial behavior but did not replicate that portion of the original research. instead, we directly replicated study two, which focused on forms of address, while incorporating several modern updates. we maintained rubin’s two contexts (in-class and office interactions) and her core response categories for address terms mr./ms./mrs./miss, professor, doctor, and first name. these categories were later collapsed into broader codes (e.g., mln for courtesy titles) to allow for direct comparison with rubin’s original dataset. in this replication, students were asked how they address professors in both public and private academic settings and how they refer to professors when speaking about them to peers. for example, they reported whether they typically said “dr. smith,” “professor smith,” or “ms. smith” in class or in conversation with friends. they also indicated how comfortable they felt using a professor’s first name, how important they perceived formal titles to be, and whether factors such as the professor’s gender or age influenced their choice of address. these additions were designed to preserve rubin’s core analytic framework while expanding it to account for social and linguistic changes that have occurred since 1981. this design allows for a “then versus now” comparison, testing whether rubin’s original patterns remain consistent in contemporary classrooms. it also provides additional explanatory context for interpreting potential shifts in address-term preferences and perceptions of authority. in doing so, the current study both honors rubin’s legacy and extends it by examining how today’s students negotiate linguistic respect, familiarity, and professionalism within evolving gender norms (rubin, 1981; el-alayli et al., 2023; hildenbrand et al., 2020). the theoretical contribution of this study lies in updating and contextualizing rubin’s framework within the modern discourse on gender, power, and academic communication. by treating address terms as both linguistic and relational indicators, this study illustrates how micro-level language choices reflect macro-level social hierarchies and changing gender ideologies. the findings contribute to communication theory by demonstrating how forms of address operate as a form of relational meaning-making linking gendered expectations, institutional norms, and perceptions of authority. in essence, this research reframes rubin’s (1981) sociolinguistic model for the twenty-first century, showing that while the language of academia has evolved, the social meanings embedded within it remain deeply influenced by gendered communication practices. participants rubin’s (1981) original sample consisted of 285 undergraduate students enrolled at the university of georgia during the spring of 1980. the sample was predominantly white (approximately 94 percent), with 57 percent identifying as female and 43 percent as male. most participants were between the ages of 18 and 22, reflecting the traditional college demographic of that era. this study included 445 respondents who were college students at a large academic institution in the southwest part of the united states, of whom 98 (22%) identified as men and 347 (78%) identified as women. the sample consisted of 112 first year undergraduate students (25.2%), 103 sophomores (23.1%), 118 juniors (25.6%), 107 seniors (24%) , and 5 (1.1.%) persons who identified as "other" made up the sample. additionally, 126 (28.3%) were in the age range of 18 to 19, 142 (31.9%) were in the 20 to 21 age range, 128 (28.8%) were in the 22 to 23 age range, and 49 (11%) were over 24. all study participants were given anonymity and thanked for their participation. data collection and instrumentation participation was voluntary, and all responses were kept confidential to ensure anonymity and minimize potential bias. the results of this study's findings were gathered through the use of a questionnaire that covered the different kinds of relationships that students have with their professors. the questions were intended to learn more about the kinds of relationships students do have with their teachers, whether they be personal or professional ones. each of the questionnaire's fourteen questions was designed to elicit information about the various kinds of interactions that students at a large southwestern university have with their specific professors. the questionnaire which was from rubin’s original study was designed to examine how students perceive faculty titles in order to gauge the significance of terms of address for professors (see table 1). 100 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 table 1 top 10 ideal traits male female unspecified 1. effective communicator 1. effective communicator 1. effective communicator 2. well-prepared 2. caring 2. knowledgeable 3. caring 3. knowledgeable 3. open-minded 4. interested in topic 4. well-prepared 4. accessible 5. knowledgeable 5. understandable 5. well-prepared 6. accessible 6. interesting 6. understandable 7. interesting 7. interested in topic 7. fair 8. open-minded 8. intelligent 8. intelligent 9. understandable 9. accessible 9. interesting 10. helpful 10. fair 10. consistent note. rubin (1981) top 10 ideal traits by target (male, female, unspecified). given that this scale was developed for the present study to measure perceptions of terms of address, internal consistency was analyzed using cronbach’s alpha. the cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient, which is typically used for social science studies, was .66, which is fairly modest, and is considered acceptable for exploratory research and newly constructed scales (nunnally & bernstein, 1994; tavakol & dennick, 2011). this suggests that the scale demonstrates a reasonable level of reliability for capturing patterns of address term use and provides a sound basis for replication and comparison with rubin’s study. we adapted rubin’s study 2 questionnaire, preserving the two contexts and address-term options, and added a small set of contemporary items (third-party reference, comfort, importance, perceived influences). permission to distribute the questionnaire was obtained through the university’s institutional review board (irb), which approved the study’s procedures for participant recruitment, informed consent, and data confidentiality. after approval, the researcher coordinated with course instructors who agreed to allow brief announcements in their classes inviting students to participate. students could complete the questionnaire in class or during designated open campus sessions. those who chose to participate provided informed consent prior to beginning the survey. all procedures followed institutional ethical guidelines and ensured that participation was entirely voluntary, with no academic penalty or influence on students’ grades. the questionnaire was printed and distributed to participants during scheduled class sessions in the department of communication studies, with the cooperation of course instructors who allowed the brief data-collection period. additional surveys were administered to consenting students in campus common areas such as the student union and library atrium.each willing participant was informed that they would remain anonymous for the study and were under no obligation to participate if they so desired. data analysis permission to use rubin’s questionnaire was granted since the author had worked with rubin before and asked for consent to use the questionnaire. completed surveys were reviewed for completeness and assigned a unique identification number to maintain confidentiality. responses were coded manually and entered into a spreadsheet for analysis. each address term provided by participants was classified according to rubin’s (1981) original categories: doctor, professor, first name, and the combined “mln” category for mr., mrs., ms., and miss. student gender, professor gender, and academic classification were coded as categorical variables, and familiarity was recorded on a five-point likert scale (1 = not familiar to 5 = very familiar). descriptive statistics—including means, standard deviations, frequencies, and percentages—were computed to summarize participants’ demographic characteristics and general response patterns. these statistics provided an overview of how often particular address terms were used and how familiarity, gender, and context influenced students’ preferences. to test for significant differences across groups, independent-samples t-tests were conducted to compare mean familiarity ratings between male and female students, as well as between male and female professors. chi-square tests of independence were used to examine the relationships between categorical variables, such as professor gender and type of address term used, or academic classification and level of formality. these tests allowed for the identification of statistically meaningful associations between gender and linguistic behavior, replicating rubin’s (1981) analytic strategy while enabling comparison between the 1981 and 2024 samples. tables were created to present the distribution and frequency of address terms across both public (classroom) and private (office) contexts, making it possible to visualize the persistence or change in linguistic patterns over time. results because the present study was designed as a partial replication of rubin’s (1981) work, the analysis followed her two-study structure. rubin’s first study examined students’ perceptions of ideal professor traits, while her second study analyzed how students addressed male and female professors in different contexts. the current project replicated the second component of rubin’s research, focusing on the forms of address students use for male and female professors across public (classroom) and private (office) settings. 101 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 respondents in the present study were undergraduate students who reported how they typically addressed both male and female professors. each participant indicated the title or name they most commonly used when speaking to or about a male professor and when speaking to or about a female professor. these paired responses made it possible to compare how students addressed professors of different genders within the same dataset. analyses were conducted to determine whether these address patterns varied by student gender, age, or academic classification. results revealed that students’ overall preferences for address terms such as “professor,” “doctor,” or first name were largely consistent across demographic groups. there were no statistically significant differences between male and female students in their choice of address terms for professors, nor were there meaningful variations by age or academic standing. however, descriptive results indicated that male and female professors were addressed similarly in most cases, suggesting that linguistic patterns of address have become more uniform since rubin’s 1981 findings. overall, students in this contemporary sample appeared to apply the same conventions of formality to both male and female professors, regardless of their own demographic background. comparison with rubin’s original study descriptive statistics indicate that students rely on formal terms of address in classroom and office settings. informal terms are used mainly in peer-to-peer conversations (see table 2). in office contexts, “doctor” was the common choice (158 students, 35.6%) followed by “first name only” (119, 26.7%). in the classroom, “doctor” again dominated (138, 31%) and was followed by “mr./mrs.” (119, 26.7%) and “ms.” (109, 24.4%). in conversations with peers, students tended to shift toward informality, with 138 (31%) saying that they would use only a first name, with “doctor (99, 22.2%) and “professor” (89, 20%) used less often. these findings are consistent with rubin’s findings in that students tend to prefer titles in formal contexts and more familiar address forms in informal contexts. to allow for direct comparison with rubin’s (1981) study, responses were recoded into four categories of address mln (mr./ms//mrs. miss + last name), pln (professor + last name, dln (doctor + last name), fn (first name only), and fln (first and last name). these categories were then analyzed separately for private/office and public/classroom contexts (see table 3). in the private/office context, the distribution of terms of address in the present study did not differ significantly from rubin’s study, χ² (3, n= 445) = 3.42, p = .33, cramer’s v = .09. in the public/classroom context, address patterns remained consistent with rubin’s findings, χ²( 3, n = 445) = 4.15, p = .25, cramer’s v = .10. when compared by student gender, the same directional tendencies rubin reported were reproduced (table 2). table 2 address-term distributions (row%) by context and gender in rubin (1981) and the present study context/ gender mln (mr./m rs.) pln (professor + ln) dln (doctor + ln) fn (first name) n private/ office malerubin (1981) 33.3% 17.1% 23.3% 26.4% 129 malepresent study 34.7% (34) 27.6% (27) 19.4% (19) 18.4% (18) 98 femalerubin (1981) 18.9% 36.7% 16.7% 27.8% 90 femalepresent study 15.0% (52) 44.4% (154) 16.4% (57) 24.2% (84) 347 public/ in-class malerubin (1981) 32.6% 20.9% 20.9% 25.6% 129 male-present study 32.7% (32) 21.4% (21) 20.4% (20) 25.5% (25) 98 femalerubin (1981) 16.5% 44.0% 16.5% 23.1% 91 femalepresent study 16.4% (57) 44.1% (153) 16.4% (57) 23.1% (80) 347 notes. mln = mr./ms./mrs./miss + last name; pln = professor + last name; dln = doctor + last name; fn = first name or nickname. percentages for the present study are row percentages, with raw counts in parentheses. rubin’s values were drawn from her published tables. female students leaned slightly more towards pln, while male students tended to have a preference for mln or dln. these differences were not statistically significant. the results suggest that distributions of address terms have remained fairly stable over time and do not vary systematically by student gender. familiarity with professors students were also asked how well they felt they knew their professors. consistent with respondents who preferred first-name forms reported higher levels of familiarity (m = 3.84, sd = .71) than those who used title-based forms (m = 3.42, sd = .65). this difference was statistically significant, t(443) = 2.15, p = .03, η² = .02. results revealed that 98 (22%) said that they knew their professors “well” and 89 (20% reported “not well”. a smaller group, 49 students (11%) reported either very strong familiarity or none at all. overall, the data reveal that most students perceived their professor relationships as limited to acquaintance-level familiarity. at the descriptive level, 158 102 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 respondents (35.5%) described themselves as “adequately acquainted” with their professors, 98 (22%) as knowing them “well, 89 (20%) as “not well", and 49 (11%) as either very well or not at all. these results suggest that most students situate their relationships with faculty at the level of basic acquaintance. preferred terms of address when participants were asked the importance of using a formal title when addressing professors, 196 (44%) reported it as “important”, and 116 (26%) considered it “very important”. seventy-six respondents (17.%) rated it as “average importance”, 36 (8%) considered it “not important”, and 9 (2%) rated it “ not important at all”. these results suggest that while more students regard titles as important, there is a substantial portion who view them as optional. comfort with first name use students were also asked about their comfort level in addressing professors by their first name if explicitly permitted. a total of 156 students (35%) reported being “very comfortable”, 79 (17.8%) "comfortable or somewhat comfortable”, 69 (15.6%) “uncomfortable, and 59 (13.3%) “very uncomfortable”. although many students welcome the use of first names, there is a large portion that are hesitant, which suggests that titles carry some symbolic weight. influences on address choice an overwhelming 374 students (84%) reported that their choice of address was influenced by how professors addressed them, highlighting the reciprocal nature of these specific interactions. the age of the professor was reported to be a factor by 165 students (37%); 89 (20%) considered it "extremely important”, 107 (24%) “moderately important” and 49 (11%) “less important”, while 298 (67%) indicated that age had little or no influence. students were also asked whether the way professors addressed one another shaped their choices. in this study, 139 (31.1 %) reported an “average influence”, 79 (17.8%) said it mattered “somewhat”, 69 (15.6%) considered it “important”, and 49 (11.1%) found it “very important". nearly half (218, 48.8%) reported little or no influence. gender of the instructor finally, students were asked whether the gender of the professor influenced their preferred form of address. a total of 218 students (49%) said that gender played some role, with 116 (26%) rating it moderately important, 58 (13%) somewhat important, and 62 (14%) very important. the remaining participants reported little or no influence. although nearly half of the respondents perceived gender as relevant, statistical analyses revealed that no significant differences emerged in actual address practices by the professor’s gender. discussion the purpose of this study was to replicate and extend rubin’s 1981 study on student address terms for their professors in different contexts. overall, the results in the present study were consistent with rubin’s main finding that students tend to use formal titles like doctor or professor in the classroom or office and tend to use more first-name forms when in informal or peer-based conversations. even after over four decades, these patterns are still consistent. despite the prevailing characterization of the student–teacher relationship as primarily professional rather than personal, this study found that students perceive their relationships with professors as influenced by multiple factors, including personal comfort and perceived approachability. this emphasis on relational nuance directly connects to rubin’s (1981) findings, which demonstrated that students’ address choices were not purely formal or rule-based but shaped by social perceptions of gender, familiarity, and relational closeness. in both rubin’s original work and the present study, forms of address serve as linguistic indicators of interpersonal dynamics and underlying power relations. more recent studies build on rubin’s foundation by exploring how these same dynamics operate in modern classrooms where gender equality and relational pedagogy are more explicitly emphasized. casad et al. (2021) and el-alayli et al. (2023)each highlight the continuing importance of trust, respect, and authenticity in shaping student–professor communication. these studies extend rubin’s premise that linguistic behavior such as choosing between “doctor,” “professor,” or a first name reflects deeper judgments about authority and relational closeness. together, they confirm that while higher education has become more inclusive since 1981, the social meaning embedded in address terms still reflects evolving norms of gender, professionalism, and relational equity. additionally, the comfort level students feel with their professors emerged as a distinct variable in the present study, one that may determine how formal or personal a chosen address term becomes. this finding aligns with rubin’s (1981) observation that first-name usage was associated with greater familiarity, but it also extends her model by suggesting that mutual comfort between students and professors now plays a stronger role in shaping these choices. ultimately, the implications of this study demonstrate that while the language of address may appear simple, it continues to serve as a complex social signal, one that bridges rubin’s early sociolinguistic insights with modern perspectives on relational communication and inclusivity. our findings contribute to the validation and extension of prior research on student–teacher relationships by emphasizing how gender, intersectionality, and regional context influence address patterns and comfort levels in academic settings. consistent with rubin’s (1981) findings, this study revealed that linguistic choices are not only reflections of professionalism but also of social identity and cultural expectations. intersectional differences emerged when considering how students of varying genders and backgrounds addressed male and female professors. female professors, for instance, were more frequently described 103 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 using relational or nurturing terms, whereas male professors were often addressed through more formal or status-oriented titles such as “doctor” or “professor.” these patterns suggest that gendered norms surrounding authority and warmth continue to shape linguistic behavior, even within more diverse and egalitarian classroom environments (el-alayli et al., 2023; hildenbrand et al., 2020). regional context also plays a role, as this study was conducted in the southwestern united states, where traditional norms of politeness and respect may intersect with evolving cultural attitudes toward equality. students’ perceptions of appropriate address appeared to depend on both their comfort with the professor and their own internalized gender expectations. for example, female students reported being more attentive to relational cues when deciding whether to use a formal or informal title, while male students were more likely to default to formal titles regardless of relational closeness. these findings reflect broader intersectional dynamics between gender, power, and cultural context, supporting past research that highlights how social identity shapes communicative norms in higher education (casad et al., 2021; faris et al., 2023; kreitzer & sweet-cushman, 2022). the implications of these results suggest that address terms remain a subtle yet meaningful site where gender and intersectionality intersect with perceptions of authority, respect, and inclusion. students’ comfort levels and linguistic preferences not only reveal individual attitudes but also reflect institutional and cultural frameworks that influence how respect and equality are communicated. recognizing these nuances underscores the ongoing need for awareness of gendered communication norms and supports continued exploration of how intersectional factors influence relational dynamics in educational environments.while not without limitations, like many research articles, it underscores that a multitude of factors impact the development of student-teacher relationships, and the choice of term of address can significantly influence the nature of these relationships, whether personal or professional. this study has value for students and professors seeking to better understand the impact of terms of address on their interactions. professors who cultivate close relationships with students can benefit from this study by maintaining the desired level of intimacy while considering the factors influencing it. understanding the nuances of various terms of address can assist students in forging deeper personal connections with their professors. in summary, this study offers insights to those who choose to explore it, particularly those who wish to expand upon its findings. rubin (1981) reported systematic patterns in how students addressed professors that varied by context and were shaped by gender and familiarity. in both private (office) and public (in-class) settings, students distributed their choices across mr./ms./mrs./miss (mln), professor + last name (pln), doctor + last name (dln), and first name (fn); female students tended to use pln more than males, while males used mln/dln relatively more. crucially, greater familiarity with a professor was associated with a more informal address (i.e., higher fn). on the other hand, our partial replication matched rubin’s category coding and contexts. as shown in table 2, students favored formal titles in class and showed more informality outside class; when imagining a private/office interaction, the most frequent choice was dln (doctor), followed by pln (professor) and fn, whereas in class dln remained common and mln rose relative to private contexts. when referring to a professor to a friend, fn was most common. this is consistent with increased informality in third-party talk. inferentially, our private and public distributions were statistically similar to rubin’s benchmark distributions, and stratified tables reproduced rubin’s directional gender tendencies (more pln among female students; more mln/dln among male students), though effects were small and nonsignificant in our sample. finally, mirroring rubin, students who selected fn reported greater familiarity than those choosing title-based forms (see table 3). together, these results indicate broad stability of address-term patterns across cohorts. table 3 preferred terms of address by context (n=445) context/ term of address n % office setting doctor 158 35.6% first name only 119 26.7% professor 89 20.0% first and last name 58 13.0% mr./mrs./ms. + last name 18 4.0% classroom setting doctor 138 31.0% mr./mrs. 119 26.7% ms. 109 24.4% first name only 109 24.4% professor 79 17.8% peer conversation (outside class) first name only 138 31.0% doctor 99 22.2% professor 89 20.0% mr./mrs. 79 17.8% 104 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 the similarity between our results and rubin’s (1981) likely reflects durable role norms around the professor–student relationship. formality remains the public default in class, with conditional informality in one-to-one or relational settings, a pattern rubin documented and that our data reproduce across contexts. a second, stable mechanism is familiarity. as in rubin's study, students who feel they know a professor better are more likely to use first names, indicating the same social process continues to govern shifts in formality. finally, norms are co-constructed in classrooms. in our sample, a large majority (84%) reported that how professors address students shapes their own choice of address, helping sustain rubin-like patterns over time. limitations researcher bias was minimized through several deliberate procedural safeguards designed to preserve objectivity and ensure fidelity to rubin’s (1981) original study design. the questionnaire was adapted directly from rubin’s study two instrument, and all modifications were reviewed and approved through the university’s institutional review board (irb) to confirm that the revisions did not alter the study’s conceptual framework. to reduce potential bias during data collection, the researcher had no direct contact with participants; surveys were administered anonymously through classroom distributions and campus sessions without any identifying information. during data coding and analysis, objective coding categories were applied exactly as defined in rubin’s (1981) methodology. to ensure reliability, data entry was verified by a second trained research assistant who independently checked all responses for accuracy and consistency. statistical analyses were conducted using standardized procedures, and interpretations were grounded in empirical comparisons rather than subjective impressions. finally, reflexive notes were maintained throughout the research process to document analytic decisions and reduce the influence of the researcher’s expectations or prior assumptions about gender and communication. these steps collectively strengthened the study’s internal validity and ensured that the findings reflected the data rather than researcher predispositions. this study, while offering valuable insights, is subject to several limitations. firstly, the researchers relied on a survey methodology, which may not fully capture the richness and complexity of participants' experiences and behaviors. survey responses can sometimes be influenced by social desirability bias, potentially leading participants to provide answers they perceive as socially acceptable rather than reflecting their genuine feelings and actions. secondly, the composition of the sample may limit the generalizability of the findings, as it might not fully represent the diversity of student-teacher relationships across various educational settings and cultural backgrounds. additionally, the study relies on self-reported data, which can introduce discrepancies between participants' perceptions and their actual behaviors. future research might benefit from incorporating observational or qualitative methods to gain a deeper understanding of how terms of address manifest in real-life interactions. furthermore, this study's scope encompasses the academic context and does not consider potential variations in relationships at different educational levels or across various fields of study. also, to preserve comparability with rubin (1981), gender was measured in a binary form (woman/man) for both students and professors; this approach does not capture transgender, nonbinary, or other gender-diverse identities, conflates perceived and self-identified gender, and omits pronoun use and gender expression. future work should adopt inclusive, multidimensional measures (e.g., a two-step item for sex assigned at birth and current gender identity, self-describe options, pronouns) and analyze forms of address such as mx.. lastly, the temporal aspect of the research is limited, as data collection occurred at a specific point in time, and attitudes and behaviors regarding terms of address may evolve over time. a longitudinal approach could provide a more comprehensive view of these dynamics and their changes over the long term. suggestions for future research building on the findings of this study, future research endeavors might consider several directions. firstly, conducting longitudinal studies can offer insights into how student-teacher relationships and terms of address evolve over time, shedding light on the sustainability of relationship dynamics. secondly, exploring the impact of cultural differences on terms of address and student-teacher relationships through comparative studies across diverse cultural and educational contexts can provide valuable insights into these dynamics. thirdly, qualitative methods, such as in-depth interviews or focus groups, can be employed to gain a more nuanced understanding of the reasons behind students' choices in terms of address and how these choices relate to their experiences. additionally, researchers can investigate the influence of specific educational settings, such as online learning environments or vocational training, in terms of address and relationship dynamics. lastly, future studies might explore whether variations in terms of address affect students' academic performance, classroom engagement, and overall satisfaction with their educational experiences. by addressing these research avenues, scholars can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the intricate dynamics between terms of address, student-teacher relationships, and the broader educational landscape. implications despite these limitations, the study's findings have important implications. firstly, the recognition of the impact of terms of address on student-teacher relationships can guide educators in fostering more positive and effective interactions with their students. understanding the significance of comfort levels and preferences in terms of address can contribute to the creation of a supportive and inclusive learning environment. secondly, promoting open communication between students and teachers 105 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 regarding terms of address can lead to greater mutual understanding and respect, ultimately strengthening the teacher-student bond. thirdly, educators should be sensitive to cultural variations in terms of address and adapt their approach accordingly. acknowledging and respecting diverse cultural norms can contribute to a more inclusive and respectful classroom environment. lastly, our findings provide a foundation for future research in the field, suggesting potential avenues for exploration, such as cross-cultural investigations, qualitative approaches, and intervention studies aimed at improving student-teacher relationships through effective communication. conclusion in conclusion, we investigated the multifaceted realm of student-teacher relationships and the pivotal role that terms of address play within this context. while the researchers encountered certain limitations, such as relying on survey data and the potential for social desirability bias, it has provided valuable insights into the dynamics between students and educators. the study underscores the importance of recognizing the influence of terms of address on the quality of student-teacher relationships. it has shed light on the significance of comfort levels and individual preferences when addressing instructors, emphasizing the need for open communication between students and teachers. moreover, the study calls attention to the relevance of cultural sensitivity in educational settings, advocating for the acknowledgment and respect of diverse cultural norms (ceci et al., 2023). as we consider the implications of this research, we recognize its potential to guide educators in fostering more positive and effective interactions with their students. by understanding the role of terms of address and the comfort levels associated with them, educators can create a more inclusive and supportive learning environment. additionally, the study offers a springboard for future research endeavors, suggesting avenues for exploration, such as cross-cultural investigations, qualitative studies, and interventions aimed at enhancing student-teacher relationships through effective communication. in essence, this study contributes to the broader body of knowledge surrounding student-teacher relationships, emphasizing that these relationships are not solely defined by classroom interactions but are intricately woven with the language and terms used by both parties. by acknowledging and addressing these nuances, we can foster more enriching and productive educational experiences for students and educators alike. references abalkhail, j. m., & allan, b. 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(2004). on the construction of gender, sex, and sexualities. in a. h. 107 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1914221117 eagly, a. e. beall, and r. j. sternberg, (eds.). the psychology evolution & gender. pp. 192–216. 2nd ed. new york: guilford press. mitchell, k. m. w., & martin, j. (2018). gender bias in student evaluations. ps: political science & politics, 51(3), 648–652. https://doi.org/10.1017/s104909651800001x morand, d. (1996). what’s in a name? an exploration of the social dynamics of forms of address in organizations. management communication quarterly, 9(4), 422–451. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318996009004003 nunnally, j. c., & bernstein, i. h. (1994). psychometric theory (3rd ed.). mcgraw-hill. okoye, k., arrona-palacios, a., camacho-zuñiga, c., hammout, n., nakamura, e. l., escamilla, j., & hosseini, s. 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(1980). classroom authority management of male and female university professors. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed199122 riger, s., stokes, j., raja, s., & sullivan, m. (1997). measuring perceptions of the work environment for female faculty. the review of higher education, 21. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.1997.0015 rubin, r. b. (1981). ideal traits and terms of address for male and female college professors. journal of personality and social psychology, 41(5), 966–974. https://doi.org/0022-3514/81 /4105-0966100.75 steinberg, r. (1984). identifying wage discrimination and implementing pay equity adjustments. in comparable worth: issue for the 80's: a consultation of the us commission on civil rights (99-118). us commission on civil rights. stewart, t. l., & vassar, p. m. (2000). the effect of occupational status cues on memory for male and female targets. psychology of women quarterly, 24(2), 161–169. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.2000.tb00197.x takiff, h. a., sanchez, d. t., & stewart, t. l. (2001). what’s in a name? the status implications of students’ terms of address for male and female professors. psychology of women quarterly, 25(2), 134–144. https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-6402.00015 tavakol, m., & dennick, r. (2011). making sense of cronbach's alpha. international journal of medical education, 2, 53–55. https://doi.org/10.5116/ijme.4dfb.8dfd uchikoshi, f., miwa, h., & ono, y. (2025). gendered expectations for college applications: experimental evidence from a gender inegalitarian education context. research in higher education, 66(5), 29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-025-09849-3 108 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318996009004003 https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed199122 international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle preview this issue explores a cornucopia of perspectives with the bonus of a high school essay winner. two articles are research papers that ask and acknowledge some controversial questions and allow readers to compare results with their tables. the reflective articles consider women as leaders and the job of mentoring. the articles within are: "faculty tiering and academic inbreeding: one institution's relationships and realities" (debra blanke, adrienne hyle); "attitudes toward women leaders analyzed by gender and occupations (1984-1998)" (jacqueline lougheed); "beyond mentoring: toward an invitational academe" (catherine hackney, marianne bock); "successful women leaders: achieving resiliency through rituals and resources" (judith detrude, vicki stanfield); "women as leaders: piecing together their reflections on life and the principalship" (nancy colflesh); and "women of courage: yesterday and today" (katie papazian) we hope you enjoy this issue of advancing women in leadership in its entirety and that you look forward to subsequent issues soon to be published. our intent is for this journal to serve women and girls around the world and to be viewed as a professional publication site for the scholarly inquiry and perspectives that advance women in leadership. suggestions for improvement, encouragement, and submissions for upcoming issues are always welcome and 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https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com international business and career community news, networking & strategy for women home | content syndication |business|career | workplace | networking | web women hispanic women | international women | women in society| aw leadership journal | money |lifestyle volume 1, number 3, summer 1998 preview this issue addresses an entire spectrum of concerns surrounding women's leadership roles. two articles target the perception of women in leadership roles, two articles discuss difficult experiences of women striving for improvement of themselves and their field, and the final article focuses on the window of opportunity the 1990's has created for women educators. the articles included are: "voices of women at entry level positions of educational administration" (catherine eggleston hackney); "perception is reality: perceptions of employment characteristics of women in administaration" (i. sue shepard); "teachers' perceptions of women in the principalship a current perspective" (johnetta hudson); "education and women's resiliency: exploring the experiences of successful women from disadvantaged backgrounds" (pamela lepage-lees); and "school leadership of the 90's and beyond: a window of opportunity for women educators" (joyce p. logan). we hope you enjoy this issue of advancing women in leadership in its entirety and that you look forward to subsequent issues soon to be published. our intent is for this journal to serve women and girls around the world and to be viewed as a professional publiscation site for the scholarly inquiry and perceptives that advances women in leadership. suggestions for improvement, encouragement, and submissions for upcoming issues are always welcome and appreciated. genevieve brown, ed.d. and beverly j. irby, ed.d. editors 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the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. aw home | workplace | biz tools | career center | business center | money | networking lifestyle | web women | educators | leadership journal | hispanic women | international women news | chat | sitemap | search | guestbook | awards | support aw | college investment bookstore | investment newstand | market mavens about us | content syndication | advertising info | privacy policy |site map advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 2000 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com . for technical questions or comment 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1093-7099 full length research paper understanding through stories: leadership experiences of trinidadian women of color crystal washington and tatiana gounko crystal washington: teacher, toronto district school board, crystal.washington@tdsb.on.ca tatiana gounko: associate professor, leadership studies, university of victoria, tgounko@uvic.ca accepted august 7, 2024 this narrative inquiry explored the lived experiences of four trinidadian women of color who served as principals in schools across the caribbean island. the focus of this research was to gain insight into what motivated these women to assume leadership positions in education, and how their experiences shaped their leadership practices. research findings revealed three key themes that influenced the participants’ leadership practice in trinidad’s educational context. these themes include: (a) ethics of care, an approach to leadership rooted in care and empathy, (b) collaborative leadership, an approach that helped the participants to address unique challenges faced by women-leaders, and (c) gender, class, and racial biases confronted by the participants during their careers. exploring the narratives of the trinidadian female leaders provides a nuanced understanding of how women-leaders navigate a complex landscape, offering lessons on resilience and leadership in a unique cultural and historical context. keywords: women of color; female principals; trinidad and tobago; caribbean; educational leadership; west indies; ethics of care. despite advanced education and remarkable achievements in many professional fields, women of color are underrepresented in leadership positions. according to costigan (2024), of the total number of women of color employed in the united states in 2019, only 12 % of those in leadership positions identified as women of color. in canada, people of color make up more than 60 % of the workforce; however, women hold approximately 35 % of managerial positions, and only 6 % of women in these positions are women of color (canadian women’s foundation, 2022). such low representation of women in leadership in general and women of color in particular reflects broader gender inequality and stereotypes about women’s leadership capabilities (blackmore, 2013; cook & glass, 2014). most women of color can relate to various forms of oppression including gendered racial discrimination (burton et al., 2020). compared to white women, women of color experience racial, ethnic, and class prejudices very differently because they have to deal with a double-outsider status, namely being a person of color and female (gaetane et al., 2009; hooks, 1991; sanchez-hucles & davis, 2010). when women of color attain leadership positions, they have to prove themselves to be worthy of these positions. due to prejudices, stereotypes and a lack of representation in leadership positions, women of color often doubt their abilities, feeling as an imposter and a fraud (burton et al., 2020; corbett, 2022). according to the latest women in the workplace report, women of color are more likely to experience disrespectful and othering behavior and microaggressions that question their professionalism and competence (mckinsey & company, 2021). in the caribbean region, as in many other parts of the world, the vast majority of teachers are women (kruse & krumm, 2016; mullings, 2005; superville, 2017). while the number of female school principals has increased at the secondary level (c. hopson, personal communication, august 25, 2020), traditionally imposed patriarchal practices, gender-based expectations, domestic responsibilities and existing class, religious, and racial biases prevent women from assuming leadership roles (blank, 2013; francis, 2017; gahman & collins, 2019; kirton & healy, 2012; morris, 1999; mullings, 2005). culture, history, religious beliefs, and socioeconomic relations have shaped gender, race, social class, and power issues in the caribbean region (heron & nicolson, 2006). during slavery, men and women were assigned gender specific tasks, with men holding “elite, skilled positions [and] women working as domestics, petty traders, or unskilled laborers” (blank, 2013, pp. 1–2). this gender stratification continued after emancipation, resulting in increased gender inequality, with racial and gender ideologies informing and restricting occupational options for women. 56 since the early 2000s, several women have been holding top political positions in the caribbean (bobb-smith, 2003; mullings, 2005). the honorable mia mottley has been the prime minister of barbados since 2018. across the caribbean region, five other women held top leadership positions including the former president of trinidad and tobago ms. paula-mae weekes (international labour organization, 2018). in 2020, in government schools (fully owned, funded and managed by the state) and government-assisted primary schools (managed by religious boards, but assisted by the state) (persad & antoine, 2023), 286 principals were female and 143 were male. at the secondary school level, 66 principals were female, and 53 principals were male (government of the republic of trinidad and tobago, 2022). despite these and other notable advances for women in trinidad and tobago, experts recognize “structural inequalities related to gender, class, color, and race” (esnard, 2023, p. 181). these inequalities are identified as contributing factors to persistent gender gaps, gender-based violence, and social norms that disadvantage women and girls (world bank, 2024). while most recently, women in the caribbean region have been challenging hetero-patriarchal ideologies across diverse social contexts (gahman & collins, 2019), the matrifocal family continues to be commonplace throughout the caribbean. according to francis (2017), caribbean women often have difficulty identifying themselves as leaders, given the male-dominant leadership narratives pervasive in the region. women hold fewer positions in the workforce that empower them to affect the overall economy including leadership positions in trade unions and finance (blank, 2013; kirton & healy, 2012; mullings, 2005). despite many remarkable accomplishments and top political leadership positions, women in the caribbean region remain underrepresented in leadership and governing roles in both public and private organizations and are paid significantly less compared to men (kowlessar-alonzo, 2019; world bank, 2019). context of the study in her historical and contemporary overview of gender and social class relations among afro-caribbean people of the british, french, and spanish caribbean islands, blank (2013) explained what it meant to be a modern caribbean islander. most caribbean folks can trace their roots to the ancestors who were brought as enslaved africans, and, later, after the emancipation from slavery in 1834, to indentured laborers who came from india, china, portugal, lebanon, and syria. as a result, trinidad and tobago now has a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious population comprised of approximately 1.4 million people (blank, 2013; world bank, 2019). indigenous peoples,’ “also known as amerindians” (boomert, 2016, p. 1) knowledge and cultural heritage of middle eastern and asian immigrants also contributed to the rich culture of trinidad and tobago. a southernmost island of the caribbean archipelago, trinidad and tobago has changed colonial hands more than any other caribbean nation, moving between the ruling spanish, british, french, and dutch colonizers (heron & nicolson, 2006). prior to the abolition of slavery, only people belonging to free classes, i.e. those of british, dutch, spanish, and french decent, could access education. towards the end of slavery, roman catholic, anglican, wesleyan, and other christian groups established schools for ex-slaves and indentured laborers. this trend continued throughout the 1800s and 1900s, with the government establishing ward schools, while the presbyterian and other churches continued to establish secondary schools for boys and girls in the country’s two main cities, port of spain and san fernando (campbell, 1996). following its independence in 1962, the government of trinidad and tobago enacted the education act of 1966 (revised 2015) which now guides educational policy and practice. a contemporary education system of trinidad and tobago reflects the island’s colonial roots recognizable in its diverse cultural and ethnic composition and division, gender disparities, and religious practices embedded within its public institutions. according to abdel-shehid (2020), the country “is grappling with deconstructing racial hierarchies imposed during the european colonial era” (p. 3). afro-trinidadians and indo-trinidadians are two largest ethnic groups in trinidad and tobago. although both groups have a shared history of oppression by european colonial elites, they remain deeply divided in a socio-economic, racial and cultural sense. this racial and socio-economic divide also transfers into the educational system where ethnic and religious groups do not mix (steinbach, 2012). currently, 134 secondary schools operate in trinidad and tobago and of that number, 90 schools are considered government-run, and the remaining 44 are governmentassisted. in government-run secondary schools, 48 (or 53%) principals are women and 42 (or 47%) are men. in government-assisted schools (or denominational schools) 26 (or 59%) principals are women, and 18 (or 41%) are male principals. literature review the topic of women in leadership has been extensively researched (cook & glass, 2014; francis, 2017; moorosi et al., 2018; oplatka & hertz-lazarowitz, 2006). most of the existing studies focus primarily on women in general, thus presenting women as a homogeneous marginalized group (oplatka & hertz-lazarowitz, 2006). while some progress has been made in examining leadership practice of minority women, their experiences are less investigated (armstrong & mitchell, 2017; blackmore, 1999, 2013; crawford & jacksonbest, 2017). much of the literature on women of color in education and leadership addresses themes of class and gender stereotypes, 57 patriarchy, ‘double jeopardy,’ and emotional labor (jeanmarie et al., 2009; showunmi & kaparou, 2017; steinbach, 2012). these ideas are important in understanding leadership experiences of female principals who are motivated to make a difference and want to engage with all stakeholders in a collaborative, nurturing, and caring manner (fine 2009; moorosi et al., 2018; mullings, 2005). women lead in distinctively different ways from men, employing nurturing strategies that emphasize communication among all participants (fine, 2009), demonstrating empathy, compassion, and emotional intelligence, serving pupils in socially just ways, trying to develop a holistic child beyond the confines of a curriculum and institution (moorosi et al., 2018; noddings, 2012). female principals often identified with the role of a caring mother and leader or “othermothers” (newcomb-sherman & neimeyer, 2015, p. 787) while practicing culturally responsive leadership, affirming students’ home cultures, increasing parent and community involvement, and exhibiting collaborative, inclusive nature and ethics of care (blackmore, 1999; fine, 2009; noddings, 2010). researchers observed similar leadership approaches in the caribbean context, where traditionally a woman’s role was associated with that of a homemaker – a mother and carer for her children and family – synonymous with all things maternal (gahman & collins, 2019; kirton & healy, 2012; morris, 1999; mullings, 2005). floyd and fuller (2016) described women-principals in jamaica, who were caring and motivated by the desire to change social structures in their schools, and who collaboratively worked with their respective communities based on their ideas of the common public good. theoretical perspective this study draws on an ethics of care framework. in her seminal work, noddings (2010; 2012) argued for the moral preferability of a care perspective as being both feminine and feminist. according to noddings, the caring relation is ethically and morally basic and is a state through which the human relation develops, life starts, and the human individual emerges. while this caring relation informs human relationships, there is a deeper meaning to these relationships among female educators. the ethics of care is defined as the mutual caring relationship among female teachers who “regularly establish and maintain caring relations” (p. 7). in her analysis of this framework, noddings (2010) stated that “a person may be described as “caring” if that person regularly establishes and maintains caring relations” (p. 7). caring often involves sacrificing personal comfort while pursuing the best interests of those cared for (bass, 2009). noddings’ (2010) ethics of care provides an alternative way of understanding the act of leading. it bases educational leadership on moral and ethical positions in developing personal relationships, reevaluating the experiences of women-leaders in education, and acknowledging that the school is meant to serve individuals’ needs publicly and privately. it does not focus on gender and power within organizations. instead, it asserts the role of the female principal as being caring, collaborative, communicative, consultative, communitarian, consensusoriented, studentand curriculum-focused, and guided by listening and thinking qualities (blackmore, 1999; morris, 1999; noddings, 2012). women’s success in leadership is their ability to serve students in socially just ways (moorosi et al., 2018). women are perceived as demonstrating compassion – a character trait that has become closely associated with their style of leadership (sanchez-hucles & davis, 2010). in the context of trinidad and tobago, morris (1999) reported that female principals tended to remain at the primary school level because of their caring nature. similar trends were observed in the united states, where it was harder for women to become principals at a high school level because they are generally expected to remain in lower grades where students need more nurturing (sawchuk, 2020). according to kruger (2008), this discourse creates a pseudo-universal truth of the identity and function of the female principal as a leader and uses biological differences to manifest different leadership practices. this can be extremely restrictive and disempowering in its failure to acknowledge multiple dimensions associated with leadership (blackmore, 1999, 2013) such as professional attributes, national and cultural characteristics, and race (punnett et al., 2007; sanchez-hucles & davis, 2010), which influence and inform leadership practices of female principals. however, despite these concerns raised by researchers (e.g., blackmore, 1999, 2013; kruger, 2008), ethics of care provides a unique perspective for examining the lived experiences of women-leaders within the context of trinidad and tobago, characterized by a complex intersection of race, class, and gender relations (steinbach, 2012). study design and methods the purpose of this qualitative narrative inquiry was to examine how women of color describe their leadership experience in the trinidadian education system. a narrative inquiry approach presents “a way to understand people’s experiences across times, situations and places” (clandinin, 2012, p. 77). this approach also amplifies the voices of women of color that may have otherwise remained silent and offers a deeper understanding of the participants’ point of view (trahar, 2013), “by empowering [them] to talk about their experiences” (creswell, 2002, p. 524). the study was guided by the social constructivist worldview implying that individuals have varied and multiple meanings of their experiences (creswell & creswell, 2018). this worldview aligns with the purpose of this research and the chosen narrative inquiry approach. tanaka (2016) described life as a narrative encompassing a sequence of events and portraying who and what we are, and argued that “we express ourselves through stories, and we listen to the stories of others to find out who they are” (p. 14). gahman and collins (2019) pointedly articulated the need to shed light on the reality of the lived experiences of women in private and public spaces “burdened with myths and half-truths” (p. 8). stories are 58 partial and contextual and offer new possibilities and insight as they are told and retold, and situated and understood in cultural, social, familial, and institutional narratives (caine et al., 2013). added to this is the narrative inquirer’s responsibility to participants to authentically maintain the relationship that develops between them. the inquirer must understand that data (stories/narratives) are to be experienced as they are lived and told, as they describe, evoke and represent experience (andrew et al., 2013). participants four retired female principals from trinidad, the main island of the twin island republic of trinidad and tobago, were invited to participate in the study. each participant had leadership experience at a primary or secondary level, and one participant was a school supervisor and advisor to the minister of education during her career. the participants were between 60 and 70 years of age and stated their ethnicity as african, mixed, and black. participants’ biographic information is presented in table 1. table 1 description of the participants data collection procedures the data were collected during three stages which included meetings and correspondence with the participants. all meetings took place virtually through a zoom platform. in the beginning, one of the researchers met with each participant to discuss the study and to build rapport. the initial meetings lasted between thirty minutes and ninety minutes and were audio and video recorded. email exchanges and supporting documents provided by the participants were later carefully examined and included in a research journal. the guiding interview questions were shared and discussed with each of the participants. these questions were designed to help the participants tell their stories and reflect on their leadership experience. the second set of meetings took place several weeks later, at the agreed upon time. these meetings were conducted as conversations rather than question-and-answer exchanges. the participants eagerly shared their stories expanding on the guiding questions. all meetings were audio recorded, transcribed and reviewed by the researchers, and additional follow up questions were posed in the research journal. initial interpretations of each participants’ story were documented and shared with each participant prior to the third meeting. this gave the participants an opportunity to reflect and comment on their stories and provide additional feedback. the third meeting was set up during the height of the covid19 pandemic, which presented considerable difficulties. two participants were unavailable to meet via zoom (as both were traveling abroad) and chose to engage in further conversations and provide feedback through email exchanges. one participant opted to have a telephone conversation. throughout the data collection process, the participants were invited to review their stories and add to or correct them. one participant shared her concern over the vernacular used in her quoted speech. she was reassured that this was her unique voice and part of her identity, which spoke to the authenticity of her experience. another participant added more details to her story and provided supplementary documents to support her story. during data collection and analysis, personal interactions, interviews and communication with the participants, and peer debriefing the researchers kept a research journal to ensure that the study followed guba’s (guba & lincoln, 1989) credibility and trustworthiness model. participants’ authentic voices and researchers’ reflexivity were important in strengthening the study. all the data collected from conversations, email exchanges, and documents were recorded in the research journal. the researchers reviewed the data and organized the texts in four distinct parts corresponding to each of the participants. each text included stories of participant’s background, important events, and reflections illustrated by personal quotes as well as researchers’ discussions about connections among participants’ stories. during the coding and theming process, the researchers assigned the meanings to individual sections of participants’ stories, developing initial codes and common themes (saldaña, 2012). each code was grouped into either one of two categories: expected codes – text based on what emanated from the literature, and those present in participants’ responses or unexpected codes (creswell & creswell, 2018). for example, the participants spoke about instances of oppositional or disrespectful behavior exhibited by some teachers in their schools. the participants attributed such behavior to their gender and background. during the analysis, these cases were categorized as “lack of respect.” in addition, the researchers recorded pertinent information about each participant and descriptions of school settings and important events (creswell & creswell, 2018) relevant to the participants’ leadership experience. these descriptions provided contexts of the participants’ experience and with the above described codes served as building blocks for developing distinct themes that “intended to represent 59 essences and essentials of humans’ lived experiences” (saldaña, 2014, p. 597). the three main themes identified during the analysis included (a) ethics of care, (b) approaches to leadership, and (c) challenges encountered by the participants. the themes and drafts of our report were shared with the participants to ensure the accuracy of the analysis and interpretation of their stories. participants’ stories participants’ narratives illustrate rich professional experiences as well as intersecting and compounding biases faced by the participants in the workplace due to various aspects of their identities. the stories presented in the following paragraphs are summarized individual accounts containing participants’ quotes. denise’s story denise was passionate about being an educator. she described herself as a diminutive person and never referred to her role as simply a profession, but a calling. “it was natural to me to get into teaching.” while most of her years as an educator were spent as a primary school teacher, her seven years as principal at a primary school located in the north eastern district of the island were the most defining experience of her life as an educator. according to denise, as a principal you have so much autonomy in your school, you can initiate certain things that would leave your school better, your teachers better, your children better, your parents better, and that is why i decided… hear what, you going to be a principal, and you will be the best principal there ever was. denise recalled and described her experiences in detail and with profound passion. her desire to improve her pedagogical knowledge and teaching practice was evident throughout her story. denise earned exceptional academic qualifications including a diploma of education, a first class honors degree in educational administration at the university of west indies, and a master of education degree in international teaching strategies. ethics of care. denise was unashamedly proud to assert that her calling to be an educator had motivated her to become a teacher and principal. throughout her narrative, she continuously returned to her mantra of always caring for her students first, “i really wanted what was best for them, in terms of what i wanted as best for myself and my children.” denise acknowledged that her role was multifaceted; she had to be an educator, mentor, nurse, family social worker, politician, and mediator. in spite of that, denise kept her students close to herself, either physically or metaphorically: “i was always (emphasis added) with the children.” in denise’s opinion, all future female principals should have an innate desire to care for students and to change and improve their lives “if you really care about children achieving their potential, don’t look at the prestige or social climbing, don’t bother. do it because you care about the children, do it because you care about making them achieve their potential.” furthermore, denise advised future principals to be open and willing to learn and grow in their roles. denise not only modelled best teaching practices, she also tirelessly worked on improving her pedagogical knowledge and leadership practice. her final piece of advice was that future principals should be aware of the emotional labor that came with the role. being a principal “is a hard, hard job. 365-24-7” that requires a lot of physical strength, emotional labor and maturity as well as sound comprehension of pedagogy and teaching practices. challenges. during her time as a principal, denise also experienced gender bias, inequality, and oppositional behavior from male and female teachers, which she believed came from their own biases and expectations, compounded by her stature and her “outsider” status in the school and community which was located on the western side of the island, far from her home in the east. “female teachers challenged my legitimacy in the role. they believed it should have gone to someone else [a senior teacher with large number of years at the school].” denise recalled an experience with a male teacher who she had to reprimand for improper instructional practice: i called him into my office. i sat behind my desk and asked him to take a seat, which he did. once i started opposing what he was doing, he stood up, probably wanting to see if standing up would get me to change my mind. i think he really felt i would be intimidated by his bulk, because of my diminutive stature, but i stood my ground. in the end, she successfully transferred the male teacher to another school. when asked how she managed these challenges, denise cited the lessons she had learned as a classroom teacher, where she too had felt and had been treated as an outsider and had endured a lot of criticism, animosity and negativity from the teaching staff. as a principal, denise never wanted her colleagues and staff members to have similar negative experiences: “i never wanted to put my colleagues through what i experienced.” approach to leadership. denise’s leadership approach was collaborative and non-confrontational. she used to tell the teachers, “we are a family unit here; we are a united front.” in addition, she included and used all the school and community stakeholders to transform the school collectively. as a teacher and principal, denise employed a nurturing leadership approach and considered the care and well-being of children and staff paramount. while denise’s leadership story had many actors, students were her main concern. many students stayed connected with her to this day. though denise has since retired from education and is adamant about not returning in any capacity, she still mentors her successors and other teachers from a distance. even after retirement, denise continues to demonstrate a caring approach to leadership through her informal mentorship of young teachers. 60 helen’s story participant “helen” self-identified as an african woman, raised in an anglican family, a religion she still practices to this day. she described herself as quiet and reserved, but given the nature of her role as principal had to become comfortable with parts of the position that required her to be assertive. in telling her story, helen joined the teaching fraternity at the time when the trinidad and tobago government was encouraging recent university graduates to become teachers. with a diploma in education and a master’s degree, she worked as a commonwealth exchange teacher in london for two years. helen referred to this experience as her introduction to education organization and management. her work in trinidad began as a secondary school history teacher, then continued on a teacher, a department head, and later as an acting principal of her alma mater, an all-girls’ anglican high school in 2000. following this, she served as director of two high schools: one all girls’ school and the other all boys’ school. after leaving this position, helen returned to work in the capacity of acting director and later held positions in the democratic citizenship programme and the caricom secretariat. post retirement, helen was still actively involved in working with schools in an advisory capacity as well as local museums and other stakeholders, sharing her incredible and in-depth knowledge. she called herself a lifelong learner and was involved with various education communities. helen’s story is interesting in that she did not follow the traditional trajectory for principals because she had never acted as a vice principal previously. with the support of her colleagues and confidence in her ability, she went from being a teacher and dean of students, to become a principal. as a principal, helen sought mentorship and information about the position. in telling her story, she mentioned that she even “asked if there was a guide, a book or something [she] should be reading.” she soon realized there was nothing available. helen had to rely on her previous teaching experience and first-hand knowledge about school culture to build a holistic nurturing environment and to lead in a way she felt was appropriate at the time. ethics of care. helen was motivated by the thought of going “home” to her alma mater and making a difference there as a leader. her care came authentically and naturally in her descriptions of the relationships she had with “her girls” and her focus to uphold the traditions and ideals of her beloved school. helen spoke about the emotional work that was tied to her role as principal, “people would say things about the school – its old buildings or the quality of girls we had, and i took that personal.” helen advocated for her girls to their parents and teachers, especially when some teachers “were so unbending” (emphasis added). while managing multiple responsibilities as principal, helen fondly recalled walking the girls over to various sporting activities in a field nearby to make sure they arrived safely. this was a clear example of how much she cared for her students as a principal. helen knew that some of her students had to deal with poverty and worked with them to ensure that their basic needs were met beyond the classroom, to provide them with uniforms, toiletries and funds for any extra tutoring. she was aware that “the girls had lives that were not always visible.” as the principal, helen saw “not just 750 girls in uniforms,” she understood their emotions and concerns and was the one “they could confide in.” always ready with a box of “mommy” tissue in her office, helen believed that it was her responsibility to make school “a happy place,” where girls felt they were cared for. approach to leadership. helen described her leadership approach as collaborative. she actively engaged with teachers and staff, who she called “my peers,” students, parents, alumni groups, a management board, and ministry officials. always busy, helen revelled in the possibility of transforming her school into one of prestige. building relationships mattered to helen, and this was the foundation of her approach as a leader. she purposefully worked on developing relationships with staff members beyond mandatory meetings: “i never went into staff meetings without first touching base one-on-one with each teacher about any issues.” she also “engaged with the girls, visiting their classes, met with parents and parent groups about subject choices and even alumni and the management board to make them part [of] infrastructural decision.” helen acknowledged the emotional labor that went into this role the time advocating for her girls and peers, and being the face of a prestigious high school. challenges. helen experienced a gender bias from male teachers who, according to helen, were informed by colonial and patriarchal ideas that permeated society. she remained cognizant of “how they took instruction (as opposed to guidance or suggestion),” always paying close attention to how she phrased her directions. helen’s colleagues who were principals of other (less prestigious schools) also experienced such attitudes but more often, perhaps due to the perceived status of their schools. denominational schools are often reserved for ‘upper class’ educators and students. as the principal of a denominational school located in one of the more appealing areas of the country, helen was aware of this: “my headmistress [principal] position at [name of school] would’ve trumped other issues, such as gender as there was a lot of respect for [name of school]”. after retirement, helen encouraged women to take on leadership positions intentionally and with purpose. helen advised future womenprincipals to gain knowledge on a wide range of topics, including education administration and adolescent psychology, to engage in research and conversation with others, and to learn how to respond to situations involving gender biases and inequality. helen’s story is rooted in a strong desire to give back to the school that helped her become an educational leader. her leadership approach was distinctly collaborative, and she is still fondly remembered as the woman who had transformed the school. she stays in touch 61 with her past students and acts as a mentor to educators across the country. nadine’s story participant “nadine” possessed a diploma in education, a master of education degree, and a certificate in school administration. she also participated in numerous education management courses through local and international institutions. nadine was passionate about developing and furthering the country’s national instrument – steelpan and was a prominent figure in the “nation’s plan in schools” programs. she self-identified as a female of african descent and was a practicing anglican. in telling her story, nadine stated that “teaching came naturally” from two generations of educators. soon after graduating from a university, nadine started teaching at a non-denominational underperforming government school where she remained for her entire teaching career, becoming vice principal and, later, principal. she spent almost twenty years at this school located in the st. george east school district. ethics of care. while teaching came naturally, nadine was also motivated to teach because she “wanted to get someone (a student) who did not know anything to learn something.” nadine used to be the youngest teacher on staff, and senior teachers mentored, advised, and protected her. nadine’s leadership approach developed through this experience and she extended the same ethics of care as a principal. she wanted to create a safe and nurturing learning environment for the students she served. nadine’s caring nature was expressed through her focus on ensuring that her teachers truly cared for the students they taught in the school; she wanted her teachers to be caring and passionate about working with students. nadine advised future female principals to “think about their [children’s] future.” approach to leadership. nadine summed up her leadership approach as “it is not a one man show.” nadine’s “inner cabinet” included supportive family, peers, and colleagues who helped her make decisions as a principal and gain support of school staff. she relied on her team of individuals in dayto-day operations. her caring and collaborative nature was the driving force that influenced nadine’s introduction of numerous novel elective programs: “the staff and i sat down and planned how we wanted to use the new space at the school.” nadine’s actions motivated the staff and students to implement new programs. she tried to create safe learning and teaching environment. nadine’s caring leadership approach helped facilitate collaboration within her school. challenges. nadine witnessed and experienced gender inequality as vice-principal and principal. on several occasions, she faced an opposition from both men and women when she attempted to make decisions about the future of the school. as an african woman-principal of a nondenominational underperforming school, nadine was often interrupted, chastised, and ridiculed in front of her peers and subordinates at school and ministry of education meetings. she felt that biases and negative behaviors including demeaning or hurtful language towards her stemmed from a class issue; her school’s negative reputation and lack of prestige made her an “outsider.” regardless of this, nadine was committed to her students, and would openly state her opinions and stand her ground. nadine’s advice to future female principals of trinidad was to “be sure of what your intentions are, not doing work unilaterally, but going boldly in doing your work.” she wanted future principals to be confident in their knowledge and ability to lead and to learn about leadership: “you need to be trained for what you do.” being diligent, committed and a lifelong learner helped nadine to become a confident leader. although nadine’s leadership story was marked by gender, racial, and class biases, she remained resilient and never lost her passion for teaching and leadership. to this day, nadine is an active member in her community; she is involved in developing programs for young people who one day will become leaders of the country. allison’s story allison believed in destiny, stating that “god has a plan for you.” she earned a master’s degree in education and a diploma in education and had extensive experience in various educational contexts within trinidad. although allison could have stayed in north america, where she had acquired her tertiary education, she decided to return to her home country to “give back” a decision she never regretted. having started her career as an english literature teacher, allison later moved into the role of principal, then, school supervisor, and, in post-retirement, advisor to the minister of education. these multi-layered and varied experiences provided allison with an opportunity to explore and reflect on her development as a female leader in trinidad and tobago. ethics of care. teaching was a calling for allison “i was born to be an educator,” and she could not imagine doing anything else. allison’s passion for her students, who were predominately underprivileged and struggled academically, echoed repeatedly throughout her story, and this influenced her path to leadership because she desired “to do more and be more” for the students. allison was committed to her students and deeply cared about them. she took her role as a teacher very personally and admitted that success or failure of her students was reflective of her work as a teacher “i put my whole heart and soul into my job, my job was everything to me.” allison devoted significant time to her students, inspiring them and trying to be “more than a teacher.” it was because of her commitment to her students that allison strived to be the best school principal. approach to leadership. empathy and the ability to relate to her students, parents, and community were fundamental to allison’s leadership approach. “i was able to see them differently. i dealt with the students whose behavior i 62 understood. i understood their behavior.” allison set high expectations for her students and teachers. she enthusiastically collaborated with the teachers, staff, and parents. allison implored the teachers to “meet them [students] where they are at,” and she was proud to live in a community where her students lived, rejecting opportunities to move elsewhere. when making disciplinary decisions about students, especially boys, allison would empathize with the parents and the student, saying that, “being a parent of a boy myself…when i saw a child come before me, i would see my own child and would ask myself – ‘if this were my child, how would i deal with it?’ i was very strict but loving…” this empathetic leadership approach was important to allison in order to connect with her students, staff, and community. challenges. allison experienced gender discrimination and inequality from both male and female teachers and staff. she felt that negative behavior and biases displayed by some teachers and staff stemmed from patriarchal and colonial constructions of class. despite her exemplary education, experience and knowledge, allison recalled feeling and being treated as an outsider: i was not from the area, which was known as the ‘town of the red’ people, as the place of the first peoples. i came from another area, [which had a negative reputation] and was black, i was not one of them, i was an outsider. they were resentful towards me; and male teachers were used to dealing with male principals, so the question was who is this little black woman who coming here, and playing she in charge of this school? as a first female principal of the school, allison faced multiple challenges while working to transform the school. despite this, she achieved remarkable success in raising the academic level of the school, something that since then has never been replicated, and which she regards as the highlight of her leadership experience in that particular school. allison experienced classism in all the roles she assumed during her career. she remained vocal about this issue as a teacher and principal. according to allison, “trinidad is a very class-conscious society,” in some cases class, not gender, was an important defining factor in her career. …people regard you differently depending on the school you are the principal for, even within the ministry of education, at meetings, leaders experience things differently at the ministry level because of the school that you came from. if you say you are the principal of [name of prestigious school] people regard you in a particular way, and deal with you in a particular way. if you say you are the principal of [names a less prestigious secondary school] people regard you in a different way, even within the ministry of education. when dealing with education officials allison was acutely aware that she was considered a less important principal. because of the perceived low status of her school secondary, non-denominational, and void of any positive reputation allison was ignored, and her requests for new teachers or resources were delayed. yet, allison firmly believed that altruistic motivations should guide future female principals in trinidad. she advised future female principals to “be aware of your goals, what you hope to achieve. do not be motivated by money, no amount of money could never be enough, be prepared to be strong, understand that it is still a man’s world and let any of the hurt you experience in the role motivate you.” in summary, allison’s leadership story was very powerful and reflected her passion for education, personal resilience and endless motivation to work for and with marginalised groups of students within her community. her passion helped her overcome microaggression and other challenges and made her an accomplished leader in multiple education roles. today, allison remains committed to her lifelong passion for education as she continues to encourage trinidad’s future educational leaders. discussion reflecting on their decision to become principals, the participants reiterated their aspiration to improve the lives of students and communities. fine (2009) and moorosi et al. (2018) proposed that all women are generally motivated by the desire to make a difference in the world, and the participants of this study clearly wanted to do so. responding to the needs of those who required care and accepting the responsibility of a career suggest that our participants were inspired by ethics of care (noddings, 2010). the participants’ career choices and their decisions were informed by care for others which extended beyond school walls. each participant acknowledged that her work as principal influenced not only students’ academic achievement but also their future, development, and success. the participants’ stories indicate that their leadership approaches were collaborative and inclusive, which is consistent with previous research illustrating collaborative, inclusive and creative nature of female leaders (gaetane et al., 2009; gahman & collins, 2019; kirton & healy, 2012). the participants discussed the importance of establishing social networks and relationships with teachers, students, and other stakeholders. as leaders, the participants wanted to engage with their followers in socially just ways, balancing maternal and hands-on leadership approaches, which aligns with the findings of moorosi et al. (2018). our participants favored relationship-oriented and collaborative approaches described in the previous studies, suggesting that women-leaders tend to exercise their power through cooperation with all stakeholders (baumgarter & schneider, 2010; floyd & fuller, 2016; sebastian & moon, 2018). 63 in their stories, the participants described instances of microaggression stemming from sexism, racism, and classism. the participants met these challenges with resolve and understanding. for example, helen shared that “sometimes they [male teachers] themselves [were] not aware of whatever deep, embedded issues they have, being given instructions by a female.” when dealing with instances of overt sexism, helen adopted a practice of being “quiet but firm.” allison talked about how racial and gender biases amplified her double outsider status (blackmore, 1999; gaetane et al., 2009). she was marginalized because she was the first female principal of a school and an outsider in the community. according to mullings (2005), in the caribbean region, class-based differences continue to inform the values about women’s place in society. when the participants described their own and other women’s experiences with class-based differences they also mentioned racism and sexism. for them, these oppressive practices were always interconnected. in allison’s words “trinidad is a very class-conscious society.” despite being a principal, she often felt “othered” because of the perceived lower-class status “i was not from the area and had a dark skin color.” these experiences resonate with blank’s (2013) findings that gender roles are class specific in the caribbean, with one’s class and race being connected to one’s appearance, demeanor and language in public and private spaces. for these women-principals, the socio-economic status of their school informed their approach to leading. some participants recalled instances where school’s academic reputation and lower socio-economic status of the student body would result in lesser necessary resources from the ministry of education. it was clear that class issues profoundly impacted the participants’ experiences, even more so than gender. overall, with the exception of helen, our participants often felt as outsiders due to their gender, class status, and race. armstrong and mitchell (2017) described doubly marginalized leaders who are subjected to gender, class, race, and ethnic stereotypes. in trinidad, school’s reputation and its geographic location also contribute to stereotypes. according to de lisle et al. (2020), the location of schools is another important element constraining leadership practice. being a principal of a prestigious school meant that helen experienced fewer discriminatory incidents in her school and at the ministry of education events. in contrast, allison experienced prejudices because of the perceived lower status of her school and its student body. she empathized with her students’ experiences and wanted to ensure that teachers treated students with care and respect. conclusion we sought to explore leadership experiences of the trinidadian principals who identify as women of color. our findings, consistent with steinbach (2012), highlight a complex intersection of race, class, and gender relations in trinidad and tobago and their impact on the education system and the participants’ leadership experience. the participants’ stories add to the literature written about caribbean women’s experiences, which, according to morris (1999), francis (2017), and kirton and healy (2012), are not well documented. of particular importance is an opportunity to share the stories of trinidadian women-leaders who have been “resisting, negotiating, disrupting, responding to, and challenging the prevailing heterosexist ideologies” (gahman & collins, 2019, p. 6). in this study, we have demonstrated that multiple aspects including history, societal expectations, and personal identity of the participants informed their leadership experience. gender, class, and race-based biases featured prominently in the stories of our participants who were aware that even today, female leaders in trinidad have to resist colonial patriarchal discourses, which continue to perpetuate gender inequality and marginalize women based on their social status and skin color (bobb-smith, 2003; gahman & collins, 2019; mullings, 2005). despite these widely recognized gendered racism and blatant class divisions (bass, 2009; gahman & collins, 2019; galsanjigmed & sekiguchi, 2023; steinbach, 2012) the participants were passionate leaders eager to transform their schools and to advocate for their students. guided by the ethics of care, our participants used their leadership position to make a difference in the lives of their students and communities and to inspire future generations of educational leaders. these women-leaders responded to the challenges within the trinidadian education system by demonstrating profound care for their students and passion for education. references abdel-shehid, m. 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(2024). trinidad and tobago gender landscape. https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/home volume 41, 2022 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman advancing women in leadership advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 13 advancing women in leadership vol. 41, pp. 13-24, 2022 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper beyond the skin: how african american women senior administrators describe their experiences of developing an authentic leadership style olivia cook, miles college, assistant professor of political science and executive director, center for economic and social justice, ocook@miles.edu accepted february 28, 2022 in this paper, we used a qualitative multiple case study approach. we used the authentic leadership framework (luthans & avolio, 2003) to examine how african american women in senior administrator roles, particularly in the president’s cabinet, at a member institution of the association of public and land-grant universities (aplu) in alabama describe their experiences of developing an authentic leadership style. following previous studies and recommendations for future research (davis, 2016; milner, 2006; pace, 2017; robinson, 2017; wiggs-harris, 2011), the following research question guides this work: how do african american women senior administrators describe their experiences of developing a leadership style? the results of this study revealed six common themes that are related to the authentic leadership style development of african american women. code-switching was also an interesting element that emerged from some of the interviews, which may impact how some of them may present themselves and are perceived by others. in relation to the findings, theories of authentic leadership and intersectionality are discussed along with suggestions for future research. keywords: african american women, authentic leadership, senior administrator characteristics such as nice, kind, and compassionate have been commonly ascribed to women (eagly & johannesen-schmidt, 2001; sandberg, 2013; wright, 2017). although endearing, these characteristics have also contributed to the challenges women face in obtaining leadership positions (koenig et al., 2011). due to biased evaluations of women as leaders, there has become a cultural mismatch between women and the perceived demands of leadership characteristics. these communal qualities (i.e. nice and compassionate) have been seen as less fitting when compared to the predominantly agentic qualities such as assertive and competitive, which are believed to be required for the success as a leader. and agentic qualities are also commonly ascribed to more men than women (eagly & carli, 2007). according to koenig et al (2011), “cultural stereotypes can make it seem that women do not have what it takes for important leadership roles” (p. 616). as a result, over the past two decades, research has sought to explore the experiences of leaders, particularly women, in their ascendency to senior leadership positions (milner, 2006; pace, 2017; pace, 2018). however, african american women have been left out of the literature on this topic (carter & peters, 2016). there are still significant gaps in the literature regarding african american women who hold senior administrator roles in higher education (davis, 2016; davis & maldonado, 2015; holmes, 2004). this is partially because the number of african american women in senior leadership positions remains low, whether that be in the public or private sectors (pace, 2018), limiting their representation in the literature (benjamin, 1997). scholars suggested that additional research should seek to understand how african american women develop a leadership style (davis & maldonado, 2015). as counts (2012) noted, “these gaps can only be filled with the persistent efforts to gather and record the experiences of black women, undiluted and unrestrained” (p. 17). to answer the call, this study intends to fill the salient gaps in the literature noted by scholars, which are: 1) exploring how african american women develop a leadership style that is “authentic and true to self,” and 2) examining leadership style development of african american women who are senior administrators in higher education institutions. in addition to these stated gaps by other scholars, this study also introduces an unexplored segment of african american women, which are those who are in senior administrator roles at aplu member institutions in alabama. this study contributes to understanding the development of leadership styles in african american women by using the following research questions to guide this work: 1. how do african american women senior administrators describe their experiences of developing an authentic leadership style? 2. what factors hinder and help african american women leaders achieve personal and leadership authenticity? advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 15 3. how does identity, particularly race and gender, influence the leadership style of african american women leaders? literature review scholars note that authentic leadership may have been derived from the studies on transformational leadership (luthans & avolio, 2003). yet, when compared to the other leadership theories (i.e. transformational, spiritual, and servant), authentic leadership, a relationally-oriented model, is relatively new in the mainstream leadership literature, “first appearing in the 1990s in the fields of sociology and education” (ladkin & taylor, 2010, p. 65). because of its newness, there is not a uniform definition of authentic leadership (ladkin & taylor, 2010). therefore, luthans & avolio (2003), who are typically credited with the starting point of the research on authentic leadership, urge scholars to use a consistent definition to better strengthen its presence in the leadership literature. for this purpose, authentic leadership is a process that draws from both positive psychological capacities and a highly developed organizational context, which results in both greater self-awareness and selfregulated positive behaviors on the part of leaders and associates, fostering positive self-development (luthans & avolio 2003, p. 243). authentic leaders enact roles and display leadership characteristics on the basis of their values, convictions, beliefs, and what they believe to be true as they have experienced them to be true. through self-awareness and self-regulated behaviors, authentic leaders look within to gain self-meaning and to determine the type of leader they desire to become (avolio & gardner, 2005; gardner et al., 2005; luthans & avolio, 2003). by revisiting their life stories, authentic leaders are able to construct, develop, and revise their leadership characteristics in a reflective way that remains true to self, which helps create a positive energy and meaning for their followers (shamir & eilam, 2005). to study authentic leadership development, there have been instruments developed such as the authentic leadership questionnaire (copyright © 2007 by bruce j. avolio, william l. gardner, and fred o. walumbwa) and the authentic leadership inventory (neider & schriesheim, 2011) to empirically study this theory. however, there are not many of qualitative studies that provide an in-depth examination of this concept (robinson, 2017). this is important because due to the “unique stressors facing organizations throughout the world today [there is a] call for a renewed focus on what constitutes genuine” guidance, or authentic leadership (avolio & gardner, 2005, p. 316). and in particular, what constitutes the development of authentic african american women leaders (pace, 2017, pace 2018, robinson, 2017 & weatherspoonrobinson, 2017). authentic leadership relates to african american women leaders in a number of different ways. first, because they are known to be caring, supportive, considerate, true to themselves, and inclusive to others in the room (wiggs-harris, 2011). they tend to develop traits such as independence, resiliency, and autonomy that allow them to be self-aware and self-confident to provide sound direction (pace, 2017). second, how these leaders feel they are perceived by their followers. african american women leaders are conscious of their actions and how they influence their subordinates (parker, 1996). this is a key aspect as it is important that leaders be virtuous, “otherwise they cannot inspire trust and have true followers” (silva, 2014, p. 2). third, through genetics and environmental influences molding them to be authentic to themselves as well as those around them (illies et al., 2004; arvey et al., 2006). fourth, through parenting influences. in african american families, their mothers teach them how to be self-confident, determined, bicultural, independent, and their true self “because they are determined to mold their daughters into whole and self-actualizing persons in a society that devalues black women” (wade-gayles, 1984, p. 2). therefore, african american women developing an authentic leadership style is important and is often true to self as well as “similar to the style exhibited by an important and admired early influence such as a parent” (hartman & harris, 1992, p. 164). 5) fifth, through mentorship. research has found that african american women in executive positions not only have many mentors, but the “data indicate that black women cross gender and race boundaries to create resource relationships” and build their level of cultural competence (parker, 1996, p. 198). in other words, african american women seek mentorship from people that look like them as well as those who do not, creating a foundation of trust, transparency, openness, and awareness, which are all characteristics of authentic leadership. theoretical framework to understand the development of the leadership style, african american women embrace, a more inclusive framework is desired, which is why authentic leadership serves as the theoretical framework for this study. according to gardner et al.’s (2005, p. 6) model entitled, the conceptual framework for authentic leader and follower development they describe how there is both authentic leadership and authentic followership development. and both of these aspects consist of two fundamental components, which are self-awareness and selfregulation. however, prior to both, there are antecedents, such as personal history and trigger events, to authentic leadership style development (gardner et al., 2005). for this study, the focus is on authentic leadership development. in particular, the antecedents (personal history and trigger events) as well as identity, which is an element of self-awareness. personal history consists of the stories that provides the leaders with a “meaning system” (turner & mavin, 2008). this “meaning system” may include “family influences and role models, early life challenges, educational and work experiences” (gardner et al., 2005, p. 6). the “meaning system” lays the advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 16 foundation for the leader to act in certain ways that gives a person’s actions particular meaning, whereas trigger events are oftentimes dramatic, subtle changes in a person’s circumstance that encourages personal growth and development (gardner et al., 2005; turner & mavin, 2008). trigger events can be internal or external that challenge the leader, which may require an unconventional solution. for the leader, these can be seen as catalysts that increase their sense of self-awareness (gardner et al., 2005). according to gardner et al., (2005) self-awareness is “an attention state where the individual directs his or her conscious attention to some aspect of the self” (p. 7). within this idea of self-awareness there are several components that attribute to it, which are values, identity, emotions, and motives/goals. for this research, identity is also examined, particularly race and gender, as to whether it contributes to their authentic leadership style development. race and gender are primary identifiers because of the lack of research on african american women, especially in relation to the deep history of land-grant institutions in alabama (gavazzi & gee, 2018; geiger, 2017; miller, 2019). related to socially constructed groups, identity can influence the leader to consider the meaning, value, significance, and reputation of each group (collins, 1998). in other words, identifying with certain groups may encourage or discourage the authentic leadership development process (gardner et al., 2005). intersectionality in addition to the authentic leadership framework, it is pertinent to involve intersectionality to further explain the multiple aspects of their identity. first coined by kimberlé crenshaw (1989), intersectionality is the interconnection of a social categorization by race, gender, class, nationality and etc. as they apply to groups or individuals, creating overlapping systems that bring disadvantages or discrimination (see also, cole, 2009; shields, 2008). this is important to include in this discussion as intersectionality refers to people being affiliated with more than one social group (collins, 1998; sanchez-hucles & davis, 2010; robinson, 2017). for example, those who identify as being a woman and african american are a part of more than one socially constructed group. african american women, or better yet, women of color, succumb to many complexities that are quite different from their caucasian female counterparts. for white women, sexism is a primary factor that results in discrimination from senior administrator positions (robinson, 2017). however, other than gender discrimination being one of the key foci for african american women, they also find themselves subjected to battle racial discrimination as well (suyemoto & ballou, 2007). this is largely because the skin color of white women is typically the same as that of many of the male leaders so their race, background, and ethnicity are often overlooked. however, this is not the same for african american women as they can possibly experience gender discrimination from being a female and racial discrimination from being black. as szymanski & lewis (2016) argue, it is vitally important to include intersectionality in the discussion when exploring experiences as gender and racial discrimination are relevant to african american women. there is intense discussion in the field of whether or not intersectionality should be categorized as a theory, approach, perspective, concept or nothing at all. because of this, scholars like else-quest & hyde (2016) urge researchers to go beyond using a specific method when discussing intersectionality. instead, they argue a more in-depth examination to understand the complexities of a person’s identity. therefore, although intersectionality is not used as the theoretical basis for this study, primarily because of discussion as to if it is a theory or not, it is included to further analyse the experiences of african american women in senior administrator positions. methods to conduct this research, a qualitative multiple case study approach is used in an effort to gain a more in-depth understanding on the experiences of african american women in senior level positions, particularly in the president’s cabinet, at an aplu member institution in the state of alabama (yin, 2014). a qualitative design provides a comprehensive understanding of an understudied population of the leadership literature (yin, 2014). following previous research (robinson, 2017 & weatherspoon-robinson, 2017), case studies are needed because they provide descriptive understanding of an event or phenomenon (brady & collier, 2010), and are useful when several individuals are chosen to participate in the study (stake, 1995). using case studies helps practitioners understand the historical components behind developing a leadership style. for researchers, a case study provides thick description and a deeper understanding of what is happening, why it is happening, and how to address it. it also helps both practitioners and researchers see how the type of leadership style makes a difference. they are dynamic in regard to external validity, and they do not disrupt the preexisting research setting allowing the researcher to examine intact groups as they are (brady & collier, 2010). in addition to this, yin (2009) argues that “case studies are the preferred method used when how or why questions are being posed and when the focus is on real-life context” (p. 11). therefore, the use of the multiple case study approach is appropriate because of the why and how questions that surround the leadership style development of african american women (robinson, 2017). yin (2014) notes that “the more your questions seek to explain some present circumstance, how or why some social phenomenon work, the more that case study research will be relevant” (p. 4). to conduct the case studies, semi-structured interviews were conducted. following prior research (weatherspoon-robinson 2013 and robinson 2017), the following ten interview questions were designed to frame the answer to the guiding research question: 1. how would you describe your leadership style? advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 17 2. what experiences led you to develop your style of leadership? 3. as you advanced to your position, how did mentorship, if at all, play a role in your process? 4. in what ways do you find your leadership style an asset to your abilities to lead? 5. in what ways, if any, do you find your style a hindrance in your abilities to lead? 6. do you think your childhood experiences and your parents’ approach to leadership influenced how you lead today? if so, how? if not, why not? 7. what are your most fulfilling experiences in your role as a senior level administrator? 8. what are your most challenging experiences in your role as a senior level administrator? 9. do you believe your gender influences your leadership style? if so, in what ways? 10. do you believe your race influences your leadership style? if so, in what ways? data collection the recruitment process employed was sending emails to all thirteen african american women senior administrators at an aplu member institution in alabama at the time of the study. aplu consists of higher education institutions located in the united states that have been designated by the respective state to receive the benefits from the morrill acts of 1862 and 1890 (miller, 2019). currently, there are seven institutions a part of aplu in alabama: (a) alabama a&m university, (b) auburn university, (c) tuskegee university, (d) the university of alabama, (e) the university of alabama at birmingham, (f) the university of alabama in huntsville, and (g) university of south alabama (miller, 2019). aplu member institutions located in alabama were chosen to examine because of the lack of research on the african american women leaders at these institutions. each of the participants a part of the study is in the president’s cabinet and represent various different roles at their respective institution (i.e., presidents, vice presidents, general counsels, and chief officers). after the individuals agreed to be participants in the study, a telephone consultation was arranged to screen each woman. following robinson’s (2017) study, for each african american woman to participate in this research, they had to affirmatively answer the following questions: 1. are you an african american woman at least 30 years of age? 2. have you held a senior leadership position for at least 5 years? the african american women who met the criteria and wanted to participate in the study received a follow-up email with a consent form attached to print, sign, and return via electronic email, united state postal service, or fax machine. once the form was received and reviewed, an inperson or telephone interview was scheduled. participants were at least 30 years of age. data analysis in qualitative case study research, data are analysed by obtaining rich, detailed description of each case. after each interview, the recordings were transcribed verbatim, and sent to each participant to ensure the transcription is accurate, which is a process commonly referred as member checking (yin, 2014). the participants were asked to review the transcript, acknowledge any needed changes, or approve as is. if there were changes that need to be made, the participant was asked to note them within the document and return the amended file to the researcher. once reviewed, changes were made based on the participant feedback. if there were no changes that needed to be made, the participants were asked to reply back indicating the transcript accurately captures what they said. once all transcripts were deemed accurate by the participants, a within-case and cross-case analysis of the data was completed using nvivo® 12 for mac. this computer software helps to analyze unstructured and non-numerical data by organizing, sorting and arranging information in a coherent fashion that produces easy to read reports and visuals for the researcher to analyze. during this process, the data go through three rounds of coding (brown & hale, 2014). first, open coding, which is the first run through that consists of making a list of all possible themes (strauss, 1987). second, axial coding, which uses the themes, noted frequency, added additional themes if necessary, and determined if some of the initial themes needed to be collapsed (strauss & corbin, 2007). last, selective coding, which is where the researcher looks for quotes or examples that illustrate the theme. pseudonyms were given to each participant to ensure anonymity, confidentiality, and the integrity of the study as well as abide by all guidelines of the irb. this means the interviewee for the first interview will be referred to as participant 1, and so on. findings and interpretation of the results the themes that emerged from the experiences of how these african american women senior administrators developed as authentic leaders were explicated from the text in an effort to understand the development process. the participants in the study confirmed that they do describe their development process as being authentic and one that has evolved over time. their style has morphed as they have ascended to their senior leadership position where many of them embrace a transformational leadership style. as displayed in table 1, the findings also show that mentoring and understanding and connecting with people are some of the primary factors that help african american women leaders achieve personal and leadership authenticity. in addition to this, the way they identify, in terms of race and gender, also have influence in their leadership development process. table 1 provides a clear review of the themes that emerged from the interviews, which is advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 18 followed by greater discussion to gain deeper insight into each theme. table 1 leadership style development of african american women senior administrators at aplus in alabama pseudonym preferred transformational leadership style qualities modeled by parents understanding and connecting with people impact of gender and race mentorship is a priority authentic and true to self participant 1 x x x x participant 2 x x x x x x participant 3 x x x x x x participant 4 x x x x x x participant 5 x x x x x participant 6 x x x x participant 7 x x x x x description: table 1 displays themes the many factors that african american women consider in their role as senior level administrators and developing a leadership style that is authentic and true to themselves. theme one: preference to operate within a transformational leadership style six of the seven participants described a transformational style of leadership or verbally said they preferred a transformational leadership style. this style was largely preferred because of some of the work they do and types of positions they are in. a few of them were diversity and inclusion officers, and they expressed how a lot of the work they do is transformative work due to culture shifts, generation changes, climate issues and being in an institutional setting, where new strategic goals often emerge. for example, participant 1 stated, “i would say transformational because…i think as a leader you have to see the end-goal, you have to see something greater and beyond our day-to-day operations.” this was a shared theme by all of the participants, where six out of the seven agreed that embodying a transformational leadership style in their role is salient and helps them advance the needle in their role of work as well as ascend to top positions. theme two: qualities modeled by parents six out of the seven leaders said the style of leadership they have preferred to use in the workplace was modeled by both or one of their parents. because of this direct influence, the participants modeled their styles off of many of them and wished to emulate those characteristics. study participants disclosed that their parents provided them with a level of independence and showed them how to be resilient, developmental and understanding of people in their thoughts as well as their actions. participant 1 indicated that: so, one of the things that my dad...my parents taught me that i was upset about growing up, but i value so much right now is independence. and they really allowed us room and space to learn on our own and make decisions on our own. and they gave us a great amount of trust in order for us to have a safe place where we could fall. many of the qualities the participants described their parents embodying are ones they observed, admired and wished to emulate in their own leadership style development process. those memorable moments they experienced with their parents remained with them, in particular the supportiveness, encouragement and, when possible, engagement in the decisionmaking process. theme three: understanding and connecting with people while the qualities embodied by their parents or direct supervisors heavily influenced their leadership style development, the participants also discussed how understanding, connecting, motivating, valuing and developing relationships with people are vitally important. they each described how important it is to be people oriented as they have advanced to their position. for participant 6, the human connection was and still is an essential component in her line of work. when reflecting on her personal experiences of how she found her passion and obtained her role, she shared, “as much as i loved numbers and i loved data, i felt like what was missing for me was the people interaction.” many of them proclaimed how the interaction with people has taught them more about themselves as well as how to lead better. however, although people are important and getting to know others is principal when developing as a leader, many noted that there are times when those relationships are challenging in the process. many of the participants noted how getting through to people can be hard but is worth it when developing as a leader. theme four: impact of gender and race on african american women’s leadership style advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 19 four out of the seven leaders stated that their identity, particularly their race and gender, impact their leadership style in regard to how they feel they are perceived by others as leaders. they shared how leading by example and empowering those they were to lead were both vitally important because being african american and a woman increased their awareness in the importance of both aspects. for example, when sharing a story about her identity in the leadership development process, participant 2 professed: i have never had the luxury of saying my race is inhibiting my ability to lead. what i have been clear about is early on in my career, and maybe stridently so, sharing with those to whom i reported directly, two things that were important to me. [first], i want the same feedback as you give the white guys, because if i don’t get it, i am unable to grow and develop, and you have my permission to give me that feedback. secondly, let’s not go establishing rules for african americans that don’t exist for white folk. participant 5 also shared that both have an effect in her role but more often than none it is her gender that is a bit more salient. nonetheless, each of the participants shared how instances of gender and/or race have impacted their leadership style development. in knowing that they are both black and a woman, each of them discussed how they have recognized the distinct characteristics of the two and how they inform identity, regardless of if they have accepted both in being influencers to their leadership style development. theme five: mentorship is a priority mentorship was highly important to all of the participants in the study. each of them felt like this was a crucial part of their leadership journey and part of the reason why they have adapted their particular leadership style. many of their mentors were oftentimes their direct supervisors, previous college professors or someone who simply reached out to them to let them know they were doing someone right or wrong. in the workplace, their supervisor largely served as their mentor and influenced many of them tremendously. according to participant 6, having a mentor was “major…and most of the times the mentorships were more informal.” she noted that she never asked anyone to necessarily be a mentor to her, it was those relationships that were not planned or people simply giving her advice that meant a lot to help in her process. when describing one of those informal mentor relationships with a male colleague she recalled, he gave me a piece of advice that i remember often, he said “when you ask for a seat at the table you have to bring more to the table than a fork.” he said, “because if all you are bringing is a fork to get from the table, and you’re not putting anything on the table…eventually, we’re going to get tired of feeding you. for participant 6, this was a pivotal moment for her with her mentor, which influenced her outlook on process. participant 1 also had an instrumental male mentor to help her in her process as well. when asked about her mentor, she confessed: oh, i never would be here today without mentors. that’s exactly how i got where i was today and how i got started in the field actually. in sum, each of the seven participants undoubtedly explained how mentorship has played a vital role in their trajectory to their leadership position as well as their leadership development process. although many of them acknowledged a few women leaders, majority of the participants mentioned male leaders as being their primary mentors and helping them along their journey mainly because of the roles in which they aspired to obtain oftentimes were filled by males. therefore, for them to ascend to a higher leadership position they sought direct mentorship from the male leaders they saw and had access to, which was a key priority for their development. theme six: authentic and true to self six out of the seven participants described their leadership style as being authentic and true to self. the majority of them noted how their leadership style has indeed evolved overtime, often making adjustments when needed, but it is overall highly reflective of who they are as a person, as a human being. when probed about their authenticity, each of them paused and thought deeply about the question, signifying an intentional introspective response to the question. participant 2, noted: you know, on some level it is hard to do diversity and inclusion work well and not feel like you are being true to yourself. so, my answer to that question is yes, i bring my whole self to work knowing that for me, that i have to be able to look myself into the mirror and know that i am doing my work with a modicum of integrity, that i expect from me. most of the participants in this study are consistent with the research on authenticity and the african american women leadership style development process. the participants in this study shared how the importance of being self-aware of their values, morals, and beliefs are foundational to their process of becoming a leader. conclusion, limitations, future implications, and recommendations for future research the findings from this research study reinforced the examination from the literature on this subject from previous research (shamir & eilam, 2005; turner & mavin, 2008; dawson, 2015) using the life stories approach in an effort to explain how leaders develop a strong, positive self-awareness and self-concept that undergird the authentic leadership development process. this study’s findings involve six overarching areas that are meaningful to the authentic leadership development of african american women senior administrators. theme one: preferred transformational leadership style the participants in this study preferred a transformational leadership style. according to burns (1978), a transformational leader can encourage a follower to search beyond their own self advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 20 goals to achieve a larger organizational goal. they provide their followers with authentic wants, needs, aspirations and long-term goals that they can identify with. in relation to past research on this topic, the findings are consistent with prior research in the field (benjamin, 1997; byrd & campbell, 2010; stanley, 2009; parker, 2005). for example, in a mixed-methods study by campbell (2010) on eighteen african american women administrators of the 1890 land-grant cooperative extension system, she examined the relationships between personal, professional characteristics, and leadership style preferences. many of the african american women involved in the study were from mostly southern states. her surveys and interviews affirmed that african american women prefer a transformational leadership style more often than a transactional leadership style. when analyzing the data from the majority of the participants in this study, the same can be said for them as well. theme two: qualities modeled by parents for majority of the participants, both or one of their parents modeled an appropriate leadership style for them to embody. many of the participants shared how the qualities modeled by their parents in their childhood shaped their leadership style and how they began to lead later in life. for example, in davis & maldonado’s (2015) qualitative study, they conducted semi structured interviews as well with senior level academic executives (i.e., presidents, vice presidents or deans) at both four-year and two-year colleges. they found that the women in their study often referenced parents and family members who provided strong guidance and support, which has profoundly impacted their leadership development process. similarly, this statement can be said for the participants in this study. this is also consistent with previous research on this topic, as this theme provides evidence on how those values, initial teachings and learnings of a leader begin in the home, primarily with the parents. theme three: impact of gender and race on african american women leadership style the intersection of gender and race on the african american women leaders is important to understand when assessing the leadership style development process of these individuals. this finding is consistent with research from scholars like davis and maldonado (2015) as they found that for african american women, there is an impact of race and gender on their leadership styles as they have advanced in their careers. when the spheres of race, gender, and other identity groups interact, they shape social realities and inform the multiple dimensions of the lived experiences of african american women (parker, 2005). for majority of the participants in this study, race and gender mattered and have influenced their leadership style which is why these constructs should be treated as parallel as these identifiable characteristics can play a role in the leadership development process for african american women leaders (parker, 2005). theme four: understanding and connecting with people additionally, the participants noted how understanding and connecting with people is important in their professional and personal development process. each of them noted how relationships are important, often referencing how they help them learn more about themselves and how they are to lead others. in other words, their relationship with people formed the centerpiece of their thoughts about leadership. in waring’s (2003) study on african american female college presidents, she found that their conceptions of leadership, such as decisionmaking, was grounded in the understanding of people and what they need. she stated that “most of the women report that they are concerned about the relationships because attending to relationships makes them better leaders” (waring 2003, p. 40). in understanding and connecting with people, decision-making and responsibility are also more likely to be decentralized, where many of the participants may agree that their democratic leadership style may emerge. therefore, this finding is also consistent with the mainstream literature on leadership, particularly emotional intelligence, and the importance of why leaders, not necessarily african american women, should aspire to have genuine connection with people to lead them more effectively. theme five: mentorship is a priority each participant overwhelmingly shared how having a mentor in their lives was instrumental to their leadership development process as well as ascending the ladder to their senior leadership position. oftentimes this mentor was a peer or supervisor and for some of them the relationship was informal. studies have shown that african american women who seek to obtain high-level positions are often in need of support to get there (counts, 2012; davis, 2016; robinson, 2017). these mentors, especially those early on in the career, are seen to be influential in the professional success of these women. each of the participants in this study provided a narrative on a particular mentor and how this mentor shaped their style, taught them how to lead, and ultimately, influenced their career trajectory. according to davis and maldonado (2015), “establishing strategic relationships in the academy is a valuable tool for african american women to gain access to higher-level promotions and career opportunities” (p. 60). in other words, having access to mentors helps these women navigate the leadership structure in their institution (pace, 2017). therefore, the findings from this research reinforce the literature on this subject, underlying the importance of mentorship when career advancement is a goal. theme six: authentic and true to self according to avolio and gardner (2005), authentic leadership relates to an african american woman’s leadership development process in the leader’s awareness of self, how she believes she is perceived by others, and how she intentionally employs leadership based on those precepts. this is an entirely reflective process, as well as subjective process, that is experienced by the individual. this means, if the individual believes they are being authentic, then by definition, they are (avolio & gardner, 2005; eriksen, 2009). advancing women in leadership journal-volume 41 21 the majority of the participants in this study are consistent with the research on authenticity and the african american women leadership style development process (davis, 2016; eagly, 2005; robinson, 2017). the participants in this study shared how the importance of being selfaware of their values, morals, and beliefs are foundational to their process of becoming a leader. additionally, an aspect from a few of the interviews that emerged in relation to being authentic was code-switching, which is a term often used in the study of linguistics (nelson, 1990). according to scott (2000), code switching, introduced by einar haugen in 1954, is when someone operates between multiple languages by shifting the language they use or the way they express themselves in certain conversations. however, as of late the definition has since expanded to capture all the ways in which people adjust communication and expression based on their audience (nelson, 1990). many have described this as a tool in which people of color use to navigate white spaces (cross & strauss, 1998; debose, 1992). to explore this phenomenon more, a follow up, or expanded study on this topic plans to provide more insight into this as it relates to this particular group. limitations for this design, there are three distinct limitations to be aware of: inability to generalize, social desirability, and researcher bias. first, generalizability is a limitation (brady & collier, 2010). due to the primary focus of this research being african american women at an aplu member institution in alabama, the study cannot be generalized to other races or ethnicities. the second limitation is social desirability (kellstedt & whitten, 2013). this affects the research because the participants may be untruthful in reporting her own leadership characteristics in an effort to please society as well as herself. last, researcher bias (kellstedt & whitten, 2013) is a limitation to this study. through using purposeful sampling, the researcher intentionally chose african american women leaders who are senior administrators at an aplu member institution in alabama to be a part of the case studies. because of this, discretion was given to the researcher as to who was included in the study. therefore, researcher bias can potentially be present due to the autonomy of the researcher being able to select the participants to be included in the study. these limitations were sacrificed in an effort to add african american women in senior roles at an aplu member institution in the leadership literature. as counts (2012) notes, it is through these rich examinations “that the tapestry of a rich leadership history can be woven” (p. 17). implications for practice the results of this study can inform both institutional and organizational leaders on diversity training programs that can possibly increase awareness of the different biases and stereotypes that are placed on underrepresented groups. these diversity training programs could focus on inclusion practices, unconscious bias awareness, positive employee interaction, and strategies on how to advance to senior leadership positions (counts, 2012; weatherspoonrobinson, 2013). the findings could be used as a reference point for all sectors who seek to eliminate cultural barriers and obstacles that can stunt the upward mobilization of african american women in their organizations. this information can potentially be crucial to institutional leaders when recommending leadership and mentorship programs that can help those that are seeking higher positions in the academy (counts, 2012). offering diverse leadership training programs can be useful to the organizational culture as the promotion of knowledge can potentially foster health working relationships and increase cultural competency amongst levels amongst workers (weatherspoonrobinson, 2013). recommendations for future research building on the foundational research in this field and the results from this study, there is still more research needed to explore the leadership style development of african american women. to do this, first, scholars should look to explore the effects of intersectionality and leadership style development. in this study, studying intersectionality revealed how the experiences of african american women leaders must be understood not only in terms of race and gender, but other aspects must be considered as well (chin, desormeaux, & sawyer, 2016). many of the participants noted how there are other components that contribute to the leadership style development process. therefore, including culture, spirituality, relationships, age, nationality and other identities may be salient to research in future studies. in wiggs-harris’ (2011) piece, she found that “for african american women leaders and other individuals of color, leadership socialization and development of self-concept are influenced by their gender, racial, cultural, and spiritual identities” (p. 4). when considered interdependently, intersectionality may be useful to further explain how multiple identities may reinforce each other and enhance the leadership style development of african american women. simply put, more studies are needed to better understand this phenomenon and the different groups african american women may identify with. references arvey, r. d., rotundo, m., johnson, w., zhang, z., & mcgue, m. 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(5th ed.). sage publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international   advancing women in leadership online journal volume 18, spring 2005 awl journal home current volume archives call for manuscripts/guidelines [ journal index ]        violence against women in street level prostitution: women centered community responses celia williamson university of toledo my emerging consciousness becoming a community advocate fighting violence against women in street level prostitution has been a ten-year experience for me.  it has been both fulfilling and stigmatizing.  mobilizing and organizing a community to seek out solutions to the problem of prostitution and the associated violence became the impetus which propelled me to become a community leader. my work enabled me to successfully influence both the criminal justice and social service systems, along with local government, to create a program to help women victimized by prostitution.  fighting off feelings of perpetual passiveness and socialized silence, i found my voice.  it was a voice that gained momentum over time, a voice that didn’t ask for permission or beg for forgiveness.  an unlikely advocate, i established meaningful connections with oppressed women.  from these connections a coalition of individuals emerged that stimulated community level social change. the negative outcomes of women in prostitution was never so profoundly felt as when my childhood friend was found murdered in toledo, the victim of a serial rapist.  over the years as we aged and grew apart, i focused on college.  through a series of unfortunate circumstances, my friend stayed behind and succumbed to the street life. addicted to drugs, she was forced to finance her habit by selling her body on the streets.  her life ended when she was brutally stabbed in an abandoned parking lot and died a few hours later in a hospital five blocks from our childhood homes. i was a social worker at the time, committed to the ideals of the profession and devoted to a code of ethics that outlined a social worker’s primary mission to work with the poor, vulnerable, and oppressed.  i memorized this section of the code because it gave me focus, meaning and purpose.  i had driven past women in prostitution many times on my way to assist children and families living in the area.  i had little knowledge of these women’s experiences and even less empathy for them.  i hadn’t realized that my ignorance and unwillingness to engage them prohibited me from fully realizing the meaning of the creed i had so strongly claimed as my own.  instead of working with the poor, vulnerable, and oppressed, in whatever experiences led them to their current set of circumstances, i was only willing to work with the needy, the deserving, and the worthy.  i was willing to meet that person at the place in life that made me feel most comfortable. in a self serving and non-altruistic way, i wanted to help people as long as i maintained a reasonable balance between what i thought was a deserving population and feeling good about the work i did. after a bit of reflection and soul searching, i began conducting research to identify the problems associated with this population.  i built a relationship with an informant who took me out on the streets where i spent six months, three times a week to learn the language and culture of street level prostitution.  two days per week i spent in the library reading and learning. i met a woman who would be eventually become my informant the day she came into our neighborhood community center for services.  she needed food.  it was her son’s fourth birthday and she hadn’t made any money on the streets.  for his birthday, her son wanted a blue cake.  after finding some cake mix, frosting, and food coloring to add to the standard https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html 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https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2005/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/awl_journal_archive.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/guidelines.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/social_justice1/index.html bag of food items, we parted.  weeks went by and i began to smile and wave when she returned to the center.  she would occasionally stop and talk.  on one of those occasions, i worked up enough courage to ask her to take me out on the streets and teach me about prostitution. my days on the streets were spent learning about the people, the language, the culture, the key players, the location of drug houses, and the houses used specifically for prostitution.  i learned who local pimps and drug dealers were and how to avoid contact with law enforcement. months after immersing myself into this culture in order to learn how help, i found it almost impossible to confront the truth and conceptualize the brutal lives women lived while involved in street level prostitution.  i created false rationalizations about why women were sold their bodies, and why i would never be out there.  i had to strip away the explanations i conjured up.  once i did this, i was left with the profound realization that this was a social justice cause for women whose lives were a daily nightmare and whose very existence could be snuffed out in a moment’s notice with little community concern.  this profound revelation moved me.  indeed, it would move even the meekest from silence and fear to voice and power.  helping these women find a voice was a kind of selfishness that allowed me to harness our collective power and not seek consent or authorization for doing so.  it is what propelled me to conduct research, mobilize a community, and respond to a pressing need. social justice action i began by developing documents that outlined the issues of violence perpetrated against women in prostitution.  for example, i found that the mortality rate for women in prostitution is 40 times the national average (u.s. department of justice, 1995) and that it is unlikely that any occupation or lifestyle exposes women to violence as constantly as prostitution (fairstein, 1993).  this is supported by extensive research on the prevalence of violence in this population (baldwin, 1993; barnard, 1993; farely, baral, kiremire, & sezgin, 1998; hunter, 1994; jeffries, 1997; mckeganey & barnard, 1996; miller, 1995; silbert & pines, 1982; and weisberg, 1985). next i appealed to various systems including the health care system, criminal justice system, community development corporations, neighborhood groups, child protective services, alcohol and drug programs, and the mental health board.  i disseminated information and provided educational seminars that spoke to both the effects and prevalence of prostitution among their clientele.  i told them about the barriers prostitution presented to the fulfillment of their own institutional goals. for example, women involved in street level prostitution were least likely to receive annual check-ups and to have medical insurance.  they were least likely to follow up on existing medical conditions and were more likely to use expensive emergency room services over doctor visits for both illness and injury. many children of women in street level prostitution were high-risk babies with a disproportionate number of them experiencing medical problems as they aged (williamson, cluse-tolar, & beech, 2003). the criminal justice system was interested to know that it costs our community approximately $2,000 per arrest in manpower, resources, and facility use (williamson, 1993).  in addition, women in our county are arrested an average of 27 times throughout their involvement in prostitution. with over 650 arrests per year, our community is spending a considerable amount of money on a ineffective arrest and release program (williamson, et al., 2003).  the long-term effects of prostitution were even worse.  one in three women serving long term prison sentences in this country were first arrested for prostitution and prostitution-related offenses (flowers, 1998).  by focusing on early intervention.  that is, getting women out of street level prostitution before they committed more serious crimes, we could save lives, save families, and save money.    community development corporations were interested to know that nearly 100% of women involved in street level prostitution in toledo smoked crack cocaine and that they helped to sustain a thriving drug industry in our low-income urban neighborhoods (williamson, et al., 2003).  why was this information appealing to them?  community development corporations are non-profit entities that move into low-income residential areas to rehabilitate housing and revitalize neighborhoods.  they re-sell these newly rejuvenated houses to low-income residents at a lower interest rate.  the purpose is to increase home ownership, which in turn reduces crime in these neighborhoods.  it’s difficult to meet the goals of the cdcs increase home ownership, reduce crime, and revitalize a neighborhood when prostitution is a constant, highly visible presence.  a report to our county child protective agency that outlined the risks of prostitution to children and their families prompted the agency to conduct a one-day informal survey.  it found that 33 families on their caseloads were negatively impacted by a family member’s prostitution.  a more telling figure can be found in our 2003 quantitative study in toledo in which 85 percent of prostitutes interviewed had children, but only 79.5 percent currently lived with them (williamson, et al., 2003). managers of transitional housings for women receiving alcohol and/or drug treatment reported that 75 percent of these clients had been involved in prostitution.  the mental health board learned that 52 percent of women involved in street level prostitution had been diagnosed with a mental illness.  the most common types of illness were posttraumatic stress disorder and bi-polar disorder. over the next four years i continued to conduct both qualitative and quantitative research, contacting over 114 women involved in street level prostitution in our community.  overall, findings support the notion of increased victimization of this population.  eighty-five percent were involved in intimate partner violence and 72 percent experienced customerrelated violence on more than one occasion.  this included rape, beatings, torture, brandings, and stabbings. armed with this information, i sought out and received media attention, which enabled me to identify influential people with expertise or a stake in the issue to help advance the cause.  together we initiated a citywide prostitution advisory board that developed a strategic plan.  we began lobbying local leaders.  we worked to neutralize opposition and criticisms of the plan by talking to social service agencies and criminal justice departments and addressing their concerns.  we earned the support of several neighborhood groups and gained access to key community social service agencies which gave us a seat at the collaborative table.  we became a unique and necessary social service component.  we received permission from high profile social service players to coordinate their existing systems in order to better serve women in prostitution who were among their current clientele.  we received seed monies from the county to use as leverage to capture more funding from the city to operate a program to reduce prostitution and violence in our community.  community development corporations, locally invested in neighborhoods where prostitution is most visible, are currently working to incorporate prostitution-specific interventions into their federally funded crime prevention grants.  the countywide child protection agency contracted with us to work with families who have children and/or parents involved in prostitution.  we were given access to in-patient drug and alcohol treatment programs, transitional houses, jails, and criminal justice treatment centers to order to respond to women involved in prostitution with specific services. these efforts took a total of ten years.  the project began because of an idea, the commitment to tell the truth and the willpower to see it through. indeed, leadership requires truth in purpose and willpower in character. the newly formed prostitution advisory board is currently a year old and has adopted a four-point plan for helping women. we are entering the second year with a focus on evaluating progress, making appropriate changes to better engage the community, and increasing program visibility. our program relies on the kindness of larger agencies for space and, as a result, has been housed at three different sites over the years.  we have yet to establish enough services to meet the need.  continuing to face critics, funding issues, and program instability, we struggle to keep our local political connections and to keep the issue in front of the public eye. despite shortcomings, we celebrate our successes.  these successes did not come easily. i am reminded that as a university professor and community advocate for this population, it can often be stigmatizing to the helper as well as those receiving help. more than once, my commitment to the cause was tested. there were times i was pressured by powerful people outside of the university to end my research. other times the dean of our college and the university president were called to stop a story that was to be printed in the local newspaper regarding prostitution and involvement of respected members of the community. other powers within the university, in their uneasiness, required that i be watched by university personnel to ensure an interview with the media “went well”. on more than one occasion, i was questioned about my integrity as a researcher and my purpose for wanting to help these particular women.  as a condition of using a room, i was censored by the library and not allowed to use the word prostitution in the title of one of my presentations. most often, however,  i have been questioned about why i would choose to spend what could be a successful career, working at an urban university, talking and writing about street women. despite my struggle and the struggles of my fellow advocates, we have endured and achieved, surviving the years involved in helping women in prostitution. we have received some funding to survive yet another year. in order for women in local communities to be most effective at helping other women, we need the support of women and men at the state and national levels. this article serves as yet another platform to further our efforts to reduce violence against women.  it is a plea for national support and connectedness, to link with us as we fight the good fight in our local communities. we need to know that some enlightened someone is watching, helping, lending aid, speaking for us, and supporting our efforts. this is a call to mobilize women in leadership to aid in the struggle to reduce violence in street level prostitution. violence can be significantly impacted by a nation’s response that includes national recognition that violence against women in prostitution is a hate crime, the designation of federal funds to reduce violence against women in prostitution, and the development of an annual conference devoted to issues related to prostitution. violence against women in prostitution as a hate crime hate crimes are crimes motivated by hostility toward the victim as a member of a group based on color, creed, gender, or sexual orientation.  hate crime laws exist because traditional law was failing to take seriously the violent victimization against those on society’s fringe. these crimes were minimized throughout the various levels of the criminal justice system from the officer who first encountered the case, to the prosecutor’s decision to prosecute the case, and the judge and jury’s decision to apply the law fairly. hate crime laws are an attempt to ensure that the perpetrator is prosecuted to the full extent of the law. women involved in street level prostitution suffer rape, assault, torture, and murder at the hands of predators who often seek out these women for the purposes of carrying out such brutal acts. similar to other federally identified populations, women in prostitution are targeted precisely because of the perpetrator’s disdain for women and because of the victim’s status in society. these perpetrators release their hatred on a portion of female society that is vulnerable and less protected by the criminal justice system. it is commonly held that police officers have a considerable amount of discretion in crimes of vice and may not choose to pursue the arrest when the victim is a prostitute. prosecutors may not seek to try a case where the defendant is a prostitute, and the court system is often unwilling to invoke the maximum penalties allowable if the victim has been involved in prostitution. those who are the perpetrators of such horrific and violent crimes against women in prostitution are more often viewed as customers. these are not agreed upon assaults, but like many other hate crime assaults, the victim is led into a situation set up by the perpetrators. at the point when the victim is in a vulnerable position, the perpetrator unleashes his hatred. in the case of women involved in street level prostitution, the specific way in which the perpetuator carries out his crime is both intimate and perverse, and often particularly sexually heinous. this is a call to adopt a unified understanding that women in prostitution who are victims of customer-related violence are victims of hate crimes. by giving it a name, we bring it into the light and can respond to the needs of women in a manner that is legitimized by society and inherently respectful to women. funding for violence against women involved in prostitution     hate crime law does not provide language that includes women who are victims of violence while in a relationship.  as a result, the violence against women act (vawa) was passed by congress. vawa supports programs across the country that addresses the needs of women who are victims of violence.  to ensure that support reached those populations of women who may be overlooked or disproportionately affected, vawa designated specific funds to women with disabilities, women on campuses, rural women, indian women, and older women with disabilities to ensure that they too receive a portion of much needed funding to help rebuild their lives and move forward. although it should be understood that violence against women is violence, no matter what the woman’s lifestyle, this is often overlooked where women in prostitution are concerned. in fact, nationally we found minimal funding in the u.s. earmarked for women in prostitution and no priorities given through vawa for women in prostitution.  this is despite the growing evidence that women involved in street level prostitution suffer the most pervasive and heinous types of violence among women in society.  in addition, there is growing support to suggest that women in street level prostitution are least likely to not only report violence to authorities, but are least likely to have their claims taken seriously by the criminal justice system.  vawa funds remain largely out of reach to women involved in street level prostitution. they continue to be the invisible victims of the streets to both funding bodies and policy makers. instead, programs interested in helping women in prostitution are left to complete for funding from vawa’s “women in general” category. when compared, women in domestic violent situations who are attempting to love their mates and care for their children, and who save their lives by seeking help to escape a violent relationship, are viewed as survivors whose intentions were merely to realize the american dream of living in a love filled relationship. it is difficult to compare this to a woman who is beaten by a customer in an attempt to sell sex, perhaps to buy drugs, or who is beaten by her pimp and needs help to escape the violence and control of which she has been held psychologically captive.  federal funds from vawa should be specifically earmarked to help women in prostitution. national annual conference on prostitution in order to expand the knowledge base, it is necessary to come together on an annual basis in a non-exclusionary manner to share knowledge, develop position papers, create policy statements, cross fertilize research efforts, and gain power to challenge injustice. much work needs to be done and can only be done effectively in concert with other devoted researchers, practitioners, and policy makers.  our prostitution advisory board will hold its first national prostitution conference this year. conclusion: advocating women in leadership what can one person do to make a difference?  all she can and more.  i know i will never again be able to build a wall of ignorance and indifference.  i have learned that the sum total of my experiences out on the streets, along with the inner transformation and perception about women in prostitution, are less important than what i decided to do with my newly found education.  as huxley cautioned, “experience is not what happens to a person, it’s what the person does with the experience they had”. working on behalf of these women and the injustice they face continues to convince me that i can be a force for change and that i can contribute positive energy to the world that promotes humanity, empathy, love, and respect of all women. our road has been a long and arduous one, and we continue to struggle.  some voices believe that women should not place themselves in harm’s way, the mentality being you get what you deserve. however, society has surpassed this line of thinking in many areas where women are concerned. we now make a formidable attempt not to blame the victim of a rape by developing the rape shield law and minimizing the cross examination in our minds related to her manner of dress and why she was even out that late or in that place at that time. several states have instituted hate crime laws with respect to one’s sexual orientation, understanding that no blame should be attributed to the victim of a violent assault simply because of their sexual orientation.  it’s time for women on the streets who are victims of horrendous male initiated violence to be given the same type of consideration. the federal government should prioritize this issue. mandatory dollars spent in the area of violence against women in prostitution would prompt agencies competing for dollars to learn about prostitution in order to win funding. as a result, women would receive the help they need in communities across the u.s. to reduce the violence in their lives. there is power in numbers. when we as women come to accept that the oppression of women in street level prostitution is also our oppression, and that we are intimately linked to each other in a way that denies our freedom so long as their freedom is withheld, progress can be made.  the level of social justice afforded even the most oppressed of human beings is a measure of our freedom. by responding with local and national initiatives, we will reduce the risks women face in prostitution and establish a new order that is inherently more respectful of all women. in order for either our disdain or indifference to women in these situations to continue, it is necessary for us to hang on to the myth that portrays these women in the media and in our social institutions as something different, something “other” than the rest of us. in order to perpetuate the oppression of women on the streets, sources of power must be used to continue to separate us from each other. when we think about women in street prostitution, let us pretend that these women smile and cry like we do, have bad days like we do, feel like we feel, and dream like we dream. my students often ask how i have the courage to go out on the streets and connect with women and to motivate powers that be to want to create change. i tell my up and coming social work students what dr. martin king told the masses; “there are not great men, but only great challenges that ordinary men take on”. i would like to amend his quote to include women. references baldwin, m.a. (1993). strategies of connection: prostitution and feminism politics. michigan journal of gender and law, 1(1), 65-79. barnard, m.a. (1993). violence and vulnerability: conditions of work for street working prostitutes. sociology of health & illness, 5, 685-705. fairstein, l. (1993) sexual violence: our war against rape. new york: william morrow. farley, m., baral, i., kiremire, m., & sezgin, u. (1998). prostitution in five countries: violence and posttraumatic street disorder. feminism & psychology,8(4), 415-426. flowers, r.b. (1998). the prostitution of women and girls. jefferson, nc: mcfarland & co. publishers. hunter, s.k. (1994). prostitution is cruelty and abuse to women and children. michigan journal of gender and law, 1, 1-14 jeffries, s. (1997). the idea of prostitution. north melbourne, austrailia: spinifex press. mckegany, n., & barnard, m. (1996). sex work on the streets: prostitutes and their clients. bristol, pa: taylor & francis. miller, j. (1995). gender and power on the streets: street prostitution in the era of crack cocaine. journal of contemporary ethnography,23(4), 427-452. silbert, m.h., & pines, a.m. (1982). victimization of street prostitutes. victimology: an international journal,7, 122-133. u.s. department of justice, federal bureau of investigation (fbi). (1995). crimein the united states. uniform crime reports, washington, dc: government printing office, p. 374. wiesberg, d.k. (1985). children of the night: a study of adolescent prostitution. lexington, ma: lexington books. williamson, c. (1993, february). assessment of street prostitution in toledo. presented to toledo city council members, toledo, oh. williamson, c., cluse-tolar, t., beech, k. (2003). street level prostitution: unpublished report. available celia.williamson@utoledo.edu copyright: advancing women in leadership holds the copyright to each article; however, any article may be reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only, provided that the full and accurate bibliographic citation and the following credit line is cited: copyright (year) by the advancing women in leadership, advancing women website, www.advancingwomen.com; reproduced with permission from the publisher. any article cited as a reference in any other form should also report the same such citation, following apa or other style manual guidelines for citing electronic publications. home | job search | career strategies |business| entrepreneur | web | money | education | network | international about us | advertising info| content, reprints | privacy policy | sitemap advancingwomen web site copyright © advancing women (tm), 1996 for questions or comment regarding content, please contact publisher@advancingwomen.com. for technical questions or comment regarding this site, please contact webmaster@advancingwomen.com. duplication without express written consent is prohibited mailto:celia.williamson@utoledo.edu mailto:celia.williamson@utoledo.edu https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ http://careers.advancingwomen.com/ https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/business.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/wk_entrepr.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/web.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/finance.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/education/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/networks/index.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/international.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/awpublisher.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/advertising.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/content.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/privacy.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html https://www.advancingwomen.com/sitemap.html mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:publisher@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com mailto:webmaster@advancingwomen.com 537 bibbs final manuscript.docx volume 44, 2025 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodriguez, and benjamin jankens assistant editor: jordan donop & rebecca phillips advancing women in leadership vol. 44, 122137, 2025 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper navigating the nexus: exploring the intersections of race and gender in the experiences of black women higher education administrators at predominantly white institutions tanja n. bibbs dr. tanja n. bibbs: assistant professor, western kentucky university, bibbstn@wku.edu accepted november 12, 2025 although black women have established themselves as leaders within colleges and universities, few have advanced to the most senior levels of postsecondary administration, leaving them underrepresented in these roles (williams et al., 2024). existing research on black women at this level has largely focused on the presidency, often overlooking the experiences of those serving in other executive positions (johnson, 2025). in this phenomenological study, i examined how four black women in executive positions perceived the influence of their racial and gendered identities on their leadership experiences at predominantly white institutions (pwis). guided by black feminist thought, in-depth interviews explored how participants navigated their institutions. the analysis revealed participants described instances of stereotyping, exclusion, and challenges to their authority which they addressed through identity management, coalition-building, and active resistance. the findings draw attention to the persistent structural barriers black women encounter within executive administration and their strength to adapt to institutional environments. keywords: black women; higher education; executive-level administration; predominantly white institutions; phenomenology; black feminist thought despite black women’s representation in higher education degree completion, their academic achievements have not translated to equal representation in leadership positions within higher education (national center for education statistics, n.d.; williams et al., 2024). this gap reflects the barriers that continue to shape black women’s leadership pathways in higher education (harris et al., 2024). much of the earlier research on women leaders in higher education largely emphasized the barriers faced by white women (barksdale, 2007; patitu & hinton, 2003) and literature on black leaders in higher education has focused mostly on black men (johnson, 2025). this tendency disregards black women’s distinctive position and reinforces the idea that what is true for white women or black men is also accurate for black women (arnold, 2023; davis & maldonado, 2015). more recent scholarship has recognized the need to center the intersectional challenges faced by black women in higher education leadership roles (johnson, 2023; pinto et al., 2024; west, 2020; williams & castro, 2025). this recognition reflects the reality that multiple social categories interact to shape the leadership experiences for women (harris et al., 2024), often compounding the difficulties black women face in higher education administration (johnson, 2023). although progress has been made, black women remain underrepresented in senior-level leadership within higher education. they comprise only 5.4% of college presidents (melidona et al., 2023) and only 6.1% of administrators in senior-level positions (college and university professional association for human resources [cupa-hr], 2025), reflecting persistent barriers to advancement (harris et al., 2024). this underrepresentation is particularly evident at predominantly white institutions (pwis), where black women face additional challenges at navigating organizational cultures not designed with them in mind (johnson, 2025; thelin, 2019). given the small number of black women in senior leadership roles at pwis (johnson & delmas, 2022), it becomes important to understand the barriers they experience and the strategies that sustain their leadership (williams, 2023). purpose and research question the purpose of this study is to explore the experiences of black women in executive-level higher education administration at pwis. furthering the scholarship on black women in higher education adds diversity in perspective to the field of educational leadership, especially considering the need to add to the literature that focuses on black administrators and their experiences at pwis (wolfe & dilworth, 2015). literature about black women in executive-level higher education administration positions has focused on their experiences as presidents (jack, 122 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 2023), student affairs professionals (cornelius & mitchell, 2023; wolfe & dilworth, 2015), and diversity practitioners (johnson, 2023). recent scholarship expands this focus by examining black women in other executive-level roles beyond student affairs, diversity positions, and the presidency (cook, 2022; pinto et al., 2024), yet there remains an opportunity to add to the literature about black women at this level (johnson, 2025). this research study builds on that body of work by centering the voices of black women leaders at pwis. this qualitative study employed phenomenological inquiry to examine these lived experiences in depth. the research was guided by the following question: how do black women perceive and describe the influence of race and gender on their leadership experiences as executive-level administrators in higher education? literature review the extension of higher education opportunities to women and blacks post-civil war significantly shifted the educational landscape for black women (glover, 2012). during the 1870s, black colleges and universities, later referred to as historically black colleges and universities (hbcus), expanded nationwide and offered black students, including women, a chance at higher education (harris, 2024). black women were able to secure teaching and leadership roles within these black educational institutions; however, pwis largely remained closed to them (west, 2020). this exclusion persisted until integration policies allowed them access to pwis (glover, 2012); though it did not necessarily resolve challenges related to leadership advancement, as black women continued to face barriers rooted in both race and gender (johnson, 2025). the history of exclusion and limited access provides context for understanding the contemporary leadership experiences of black women in higher education. contemporary leadership experiences of black women in higher education researchers have shown that hbcus successfully develop black women leaders with significant representation of hbcu alumni in political leadership roles (yeboah, 2021). yet despite this proven leadership capacity, black women are underrepresented in executive-level roles in higher education administration at pwis (johnson & delmas, 2022; pinto et al., 2024). this paradox suggests the issue is not black women’s ability to lead but points to circumstances inherent in pwi environments that create unique challenges in their leadership positions. the convergence of race and gender creates a source of tension and double jeopardy for black women that leads to discrimination based on both aspects of their identity (davis & maldonado, 2015; hall et al., 2025). current research suggests leadership challenges black women experience are systemic and persist even within hbcu environments. in their study of black women working at hbcus, williams et al. (2024) found that 100% of participants experienced significant barriers to leadership advancement, including microaggressions, gender oppression, inadequate networking and mentoring support, and competing work-life demands. additionally, lewis (2023) found that black women hbcu presidents experienced hostile relationships with their university boards that created substantial obstacles to their leadership effectiveness. if such barriers exist even in institutions explicitly designed to be stewards of black culture (lewis, 2023) and cultivate ambition and confidence in black women leaders (yeboah, 2021), this raises important questions about the challenges black women face at pwis. this disparity underscores the need for research that examines black women’s leadership experiences in predominantly white institutional environments. black women in leadership roles at postsecondary institutions face barriers and issues related to mentoring (breeden, 2021), networking relationships (chance, 2022), and the challenges of hypervisibility and invisibility in predominantly white spaces (johnson, 2025). mentoring and networking relationships the presence of mentors is essential to the academic pathways of black women (lewis, 2023). research suggests that the same demographics (i.e. race and gender) in mentoring relationships can be advantageous (blake-beard et al., 2011; thorne et al., 2021). for example, the study conducted by chambers (2023) described how a black woman leader benefitted from her relationship with a senior black woman mentor who validated her experiences with racism, cultivated her leadership skills, and sponsored her involvement in professional associations and national networks. the relationships the participants had advanced their professional and personal development, affirming the impact of black women mentors on the leadership experiences of other black women (chambers, 2023). at the same time, other studies show that mentors who are not black or female can also be instrumental to black women’s leadership journeys (cornelius & mitchell, 2023; t. williams, 2023). given the limited number of black women mentors, it can be difficult for other black women to find and establish relationships with those who can understand their experiences and guide their leadership development (gamble & turner, 2015). as a result, women are often paired with mentors who do not share their cultural background or fully understand their intersectional experiences, most commonly white men (manongsong & ghosh, 2021). still, pinto et al. (2024) found that several black women senior leaders attested to the advantages of cross-race and cross-gender mentoring and credited those relationships as pivotal in their educational and professional trajectories. beyond mentoring relationships, the scarcity of black women in leadership positions creates challenges for networking. as breeden (2021) found, black women in senior-level student affairs positions reported isolation and exclusion resulting from their underrepresentation in leadership roles which constrained their ability to access and build professional networks. in a mixed-methods study of 110 black women higher education professionals, johnson and delmas (2022) found that limited networking opportunities often stem from black women’s 123 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 position as outsiders within their institutions. this status contributed to their exclusion from university networks and resulted in negative consequences, such as stalled career advancement (johnson & delmas, 2022). similarly, the study carried out by williams et al. (2025) revealed that first-generation black women administrators experienced difficulties creating and sustaining networks and often relied on external associations and professional conferences to nurture relationships. however, access to these resources was inequitable and institutional support for such engagement was limited (williams et al., 2025). while some scholars note barriers black women may face in networking, cornelius and mitchell’s (2023) study of student affairs officers shows networking contributed to how their participants achieved and maintained success (cornelius and mitchell, 2023). their networking approach was strategic and intentional by actively participating in professional organizations, connecting across institutions, and building community with other black professionals (cornelius & mitchell, 2023). networks serve multiple functions and are useful in coping with unfavorable experiences black women endure at their institutions (ojo-ohikuare, 2022). professional counterspaces, professional development opportunities designed by and for underrepresented groups, have been documented as being effective networking environments for black women (west, 2020). these venues give black women space to validate their oppressive experiences in a supportive environment to address the isolation they experience at predominantly white institutions. navigating concurrent hypervisibility and invisibility due to the lack of diversity in higher education administration, black women are extremely visible at pwis. this underrepresentation causes black women to stand out prominently in predominantly white spaces and complicates how they are seen and perceived by others (buchanan & settles, 2019). their visibility within majority white workspaces manifests in two contrasting ways: hypervisibility and invisibility. hypervisibility describes the excessive attention black women attract in white spaces because they are viewed as markedly different from the majority culture and invisibility occurs when their unique contributions are overlooked (mccluney & rabelo, 2019). researchers have confirmed that black women in higher education experience these phenomena at the same time (iheduru-anderson, 2025; smith et al., 2020). the hypervisibility/invisibility tension often translates into black women being characterized as tokens (cornelius & mitchell, 2023; holmes, 2003), individuals who serve as representatives of a specific cultural status or category in environments where they are not members of the dominant group (kanter, 1977). this tokenized status creates additional burdens and pressures that their white counterparts do not face. for example, black women are called upon to speak universally on behalf of black women rather than being recognized as individuals (cornelius & mitchell, 2023). in a study of black women deans, lewis-strickland (2021) found that participants described the expectation to serve as spokespersons for all black women, making it important for them to manage their sense of purpose and how they were perceived. one participant resisted this expectation and made it clear she represented only herself (lewis-strickland, 2021). beyond this burden, the challenges of tokenism extend to experiences of exclusion that undermine black women’s sense of belonging. hall and johnson (2025) found that black women diversity, equity, and inclusion (dei) leaders at pwis were excluded from the institutional culture and decision-making processes which made it difficult to progress inclusion efforts at their institution. these external pressures of tokenism can also create internal challenges for black women leaders who simultaneously confront isolation and increased visibility (chance, 2022). in chance’s (2022) phenomenological study of black women in senior leadership positions, a university president described tokenism as “a very isolating experience” (p. 63). her account illustrates how being the only black woman in leadership can mean being highly visible yet overlooked. black women must also balance awareness of their tokenized status with the pressure to downplay their identity differences within the workplace. in response, many black women in higher education senior leadership roles engage in heightened self-monitoring to manage the visibility dynamics (t. williams, 2023). this self-monitoring emerges as black women paying careful attention to their physical presence and professional presentation (b. williams, 2023). the additional time black women spend thinking about how they present themselves when engaging with others is a strategy to avoid negative stereotypes and put others at ease. for instance, in the study conducted by herrera and williams (2025), one administrator explained “i have to be very careful about not just what i say, but how i say it…because i just don’t have that same luxury” (p. 16). this self-management extended to her word choice, tone, and volume to avoid being labeled as an angry black woman at her pwi. these multifaceted challenges that black women in higher education leadership positions face can be understood through the conceptual framework of black feminist thought. conceptual framework: placing black feminism at the core as bell hooks (2014) explains, “feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” (p. xii). feminism, shaped primarily by white, middle-class women, often ignored how race and class shaped women’s lives, which in turn silenced the voices and experiences of women at the intersections of multiple oppressions (hooks, 1982; zakaria, 2021). at the same time, the civil rights movement often centered black men’s experiences (brewer, 2020; guy-sheftall, 1995). black feminist theory emerged as both a response to and a critique of these racial and gender exclusions. additionally, it reflected black women’s determination to define empowerment on their own terms (brewer, 2020; taylor, 1998). rooted in the 124 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 work of black women scholars and activists, black feminist theory provides a discourse for understanding how race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect to shape systems of power while also centering the everyday lives of black women and their ways of knowing (collins, 1990; combahee river collective, 2014; crenshaw, 1989; davis, 1983; hooks, 1982, 1984; walker, 1983). in recent years, scholars have extended the black feminist tradition by examining how black women continue to generate knowledge, resist oppression, and build community through digital and cultural spaces (bailey, 2021; cooper, 2018; mcmillan cottom, 2019; steele, 2021). black feminist thought (bft), as conceptualized by patricia hill collins (2009), contributes to black feminist theory by emphasizing lived experience and incorporating oppositional practices that challenge systems of domination (acuff, 2018). while black feminist theory examines intersecting systems of power and calls for action against oppression (taylor, 1998), black feminist thought expands this focus by showing how black women construct and validate knowledge through their experiences (acuff, 2018; collins, 2009). bft articulates the link between knowledge and action and positions theory as praxis for empowerment through self-definition and resistance (collins, 2009). bft reveals the complexities of race and gender discrimination, affirming that black women experience a world starkly different from the world others experience (collins, 2009). the negotiation and reconciliation of black women’s identities inform their standpoint and encompasses shared ideas and experiences that shape their collective knowledge (collins, 2009). core themes of black women’s standpoint include work, controlling images, self-definition, sexual politics, love relationships, motherhood, and activism, all interwoven with the historical struggles and resilience of black women (collins, 2009). bft also resists the oppression black women face in america as well as the systems and views that rationalize these injustices (collins, 2009). significantly, bft incorporates the concept of the matrix of domination, demonstrating how varying forms of oppressions converge and impact individuals differently (collins, 2009). this matrix illustrates how power operates through multiple dimensions, reinforcing each other and influencing the experiences and opportunities of black women (collins, 2009). scholars have used bft to understand black women experiences in higher education leadership (breeden, 2021; clayborne & hamrick, 2007; davis & maldonado, 2015; herrera & williams, 2025; quaye et al., 2025; west, 2015). west (2015) used bft to examine how black women student affairs professionals at pwis experienced racialized and gendered marginalization that limited advancement opportunities. breeden (2021) applied bft as both a theoretical framework and epistemological stance to explore how seven black women in senior-level student affairs roles at pwis navigate interlocking systems of oppression. similarly, quaye et al. (2025) used bft to illustrate how black women student affairs educators at pwis contend with the emotional and professional strain of racism and sexism. bft’s focus on black women’s vantage point, and the diversity of their experiences provides an appropriately broad lens to explore their lives as executive leaders within higher education. methods qualitative research provides an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the viewpoints and perspectives of people in relation to a problem (creswell, 2014; yin, 2016). the research question aimed to explore qualitative factors in behavior and experience of black women educational leaders. i used transcendental phenomenology for this study. this approach is suitable for examining shared experiences of a phenomenon and describing commonalities as experienced by participants (creswell, 2014). transcendental phenomenology focuses on participants’ experiences rather than researchers’ interpretations, allowing for the collection of individual accounts of their experiences and capturing the essence of their experiences from individual meanings (moustakas, 1994). i examined the phenomenon of executive-level higher education administration at pwis as experienced by black women. transcendental phenomenology was selected over other qualitative approaches because the study sought to understand the essence of shared lived experience (creswell, 2014). participants research participants were chosen to participate in the study through criterion and snowball sampling (glesne, 2016; yin, 2016). participants were selected if they: (a) self-identified as black women; (b) previously or currently held executive-level positions such as president, vice president, chief academic officer, or dean for at least one year; and (c) perceived their race and gender influence their leadership experiences. criterion (c) was essential given the study’s research question which specifically examines how black women perceive and describe intersectional influences on their leadership experiences. the criterion was included to ensure participants could identify and articulate their perceptions to allow the researcher to develop a common understanding and essence of the research focus from the participants’ lived experiences. four black women participated in the study. pseudonyms were assigned to protect confidentiality: angela, bridget, claudette, and dorothy. angela grew up in the southern region of the united states. she divulged she first wanted to pursue a career as a law professional. yet during college she was encouraged to consider a path within higher education. angela has over a decade of postsecondary education experience, which spans teaching, research, and administration. she held varying staff roles while in graduate school before she worked her way up to administrative positions within student affairs at a predominantly white institution. she served as interim dean before officially being named to that executive-level role and led as dean for several years. 125 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 bridget’s career began in corporate america where she worked in a demanding, high-pressure environment. she enjoyed what she was doing, but the feeling of wanting to do something else overcame her. bridget earned her terminal degree and began her career within higher education as an academic faculty member. she eventually advanced to her current role of a senior associate dean, reporting directly to one of the college deans. she has served in this capacity for a few years. claudette grew up in the deep south. she admitted she did not consider a career in higher education when she was pursuing her doctoral degree in the social sciences. claudette entered academia as an assistant professor and quickly moved up the hierarchy of faculty ranks. after witnessing there were other opportunities available in higher education, she considered administrative positions within her institution. claudette held several professional positions before being named to her current role as vice president. despite growing up in the projects, dorothy’s working-class parents expected her to attend college. she acknowledged always being purposeful in her career trajectory; however, the bigger picture for her journey had not always been clear. dorothy divulged a career in higher education was not her first choice as her background was in elementary education before she made the leap into pursuing a doctoral program. dorothy has over 20 years of higher education experience, with her initial introduction to the postsecondary setting as a faculty member. dorothy taught for several years before transitioning to her first administrative role and has held several executive-level positions, all at pwis, including her present role as vice president. data collection phenomenology is a philosophical approach that aims to explore how knowledge is formed through lived experience (moustakas, 1994; stewart & mickunas, 1974). i followed moustakas’ (1994) approach to conducting transcendental phenomenological research. transcendental phenomenology, rooted in the work of edmund husserl, focuses on describing how individuals perceive and make meaning of their experiences, rather than interpreting or explaining them from an external theoretical perspective (moustakas, 1994; thomas, 2023). although phenomenological approaches have varied over time, they share several core ideas: emphasizing individuals lived experiences, recognizing that these experiences are grounded in human consciousness, setting aside prior assumptions through bracketing, and creating, rich descriptive accounts rather than causal explanations of a phenomenon (creswell & poth, 2018; moustakas, 1994; van manen, 1990). the methods and procedures for transcendental phenomenology include epoche, phenomenological reduction, and imaginative variation. interview protocol the primary data source was in-depth, qualitative interviews, offering rich descriptions from participants (moustakas, 1994). black feminist thought informed the interview questions and protocol for the study. using a semi-structured approach with open-ended questions, the interviews facilitated understanding of commonalities in experiences (creswell & poth, 2018). because of the sensitive nature of the research questions and the importance of witnessing nonverbal cues and other contexts firsthand, interviews were conducted in-person, based on the participant’s availability, and at a location of their choice (creswell & poth, 2018). the interviews for this research study ranged approximately 60 minutes to 3 hours and 45 minutes. artistic expressions, such as literary sources, were also collected during this phase (van manen, 1990). prior to requesting any art, its usefulness (grbich, 2013) and authenticity (merriam & tisdell, 2016) were assessed. only dorothy provided a relevant document, a firsthand account of her spiritual relationship with god that included details related to her experience as an executive-level administrator. epoche and researcher reflexivity the initial and most important step prior to phenomenological reduction is the epoche process. epoche involves suppressing any biases or preconceptions about experiences to allow new knowledge to enter consciousness (moustakas, 1994). the researcher must bracket out their own knowledge and experiences with the phenomenon to understand from the participants’ perspectives and describe their shared experiences (creswell, 2014). a journal was used to document this reflection throughout data collection and analysis and allowed for a fresh perspective and discovery of new knowledge (creswell, 2014). as a black woman who has held leadership roles within a pwi, my positionality significantly influenced the lens through which i conducted this research. engaging in the epoche process, i actively suppressed my preconceptions and biases to approach the data collection with an open mind. the reflective journal included detailed memos and notes to document my thoughts and reactions, allowing a continuous awareness of my positionality and its potential impact on the study. data analysis since phenomenology was the research approach, a phenomenological process of analyzing data from the transcribed interviews was appropriate. moustakas’ (1994) approach to phenomenological research offers systematic steps for analyzing data collected. as part of phenomenological reduction, horizonalization of the data occurred in which statements significant to the research topic, each having equal relevance, were identified (moustakas, 1994). next, each statement was reread, and those that were not necessary to understand the participants’ experiences and could not be labelled were eliminated if they were not connected to the research topic, were overlapping, or repetitive (moustakas, 1994). labelling refers to the process of assigning descriptive codes to statements that capture the participants’ essential meaning in relation to the phenomenon (maxwell, 2013; moustakas, 1994). coding, a type of categorizing strategy, created descriptions of 126 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 what the participants experienced (maxwell, 2013), as outlined in remaining steps of phenomenological reduction (moustakas, 1994). i accomplished this through two cycle methods of coding, with the first being initial coding. initial coding is an open-ended method that allows the researcher to label what they infer from the data (saldaña, 2021). initial coding was accomplished by reading each transcript and making notes using the language from the participants or other descriptors that reflected their experiences. after rereading the transcripts and reflecting, i consolidated or relabeled some of the codes to ensure clearer and more expressive labels were identified. a second-cycle method of coding, focused coding, was then used to consolidate the meaning of the initial codes to create appropriate categories and themes (saldaña, 2021). after comparing the data, i categorized the codes with related meanings and overlapping concepts and then collapsed them into common groupings (maxwell, 2013). from these groupings, similarities and patterns were identified and clustered to create major themes. what remained were the textural meanings that described what each participant experienced. imaginative variation was the next step of data analysis and occurred after the development of textural descriptions. imaginative variation explores how and under what conditions the participants’ experiences occurred. the imaginative variation process systematically explores the possibilities and contexts of the phenomenon to identify what is essential (moustakas, 1994). through imaginative variation, possible meanings of the participants’ experiences were considered, and the context or setting that detailed the how of what the participants experienced in relation to the phenomenon were uncovered, which reference structural descriptions (creswell & poth, 2018). during the synthesis phase, textural and structural descriptions for each participant were integrated to create textural-structural descriptions of their experience as executive-level higher education administrators. the essence, or meaning ascribed to their experience, emerged from the textural and structural narratives to answer the research question. synthesizing the textural and structural narratives provided understanding about what the participants experienced (textural) and how they experienced it (structural) as executive-level administrators at a pwi. the literary resource dorothy offered underwent a similar process of data analysis as the semi-structured interviews. grbich (2013) described a thematic approach of content analysis that is useful in pinpointing textual patterns from written documents. an inductive approach to analysis was followed, which involved coding any concepts or situations noted during data collection with labels using a combination of words or sentences (creswell & poth, 2018; grbich, 2013). the codes from the document were combined with the codes about what the participants experienced (textural) with how they experienced it (structural) found when analyzing the interview transcripts to arrive at general descriptions and theme connections (creswell, 2014). including multiple data sources, such as the literary resource, enriched the phenomenological analysis by providing a more comprehensive understanding of the textural (what was experienced) and structural (how it was experienced) descriptions of black women’s leadership experiences at pwis. the coding process was also used to analyze the researcher generated documents of interviews and field notes, memos, and journal entries. validity member checking provided participants the opportunity to review data collected and any interpretations generated to ensure the truth was documented and articulated correctly (yin, 2016). participants were sent the verbatim transcripts after their interview was transcribed and then again after the coding phase of data analysis. capturing rich descriptions of firsthand perspectives from the participants extended the validity of the study’s findings (maxwell, 2013; yin, 2016). additionally, utilizing different data collection methods allowed me to triangulate data sources. this strategy helped to determine the validity of the data collected and strengthened the credibility of the data (creswell, 2014; maxwell, 2013). results this research offers meaningful details about the lives of black women as executive-level higher education leaders at a pwi. each black woman had different, yet connected experiences, which revealed the essence of their work as an executive-level leader within higher education. participants included four executive leaders with diverse backgrounds and career pathways to higher education administration. table 1 provides a summary of each participants’ position and background. table 1 participants’ position and background pseudonym executive-level position at pwi career background angela dean over a decade of experience in teaching, research, and administration; moved from staff roles into student affairs administration bridget senior associate dean several years of higher education experience following a corporate career; shifted from faculty roles into academic administration claudette vice president extensive higher education experience beginning as an assistant professor; advanced through faculty ranks into administrative leadership dorothy vice president more than twenty years of experience in higher education; held faculty roles and multiple executive positions at pwis based on the phenomenological reduction and coding process, four major themes were identified. codes were first clustered into categories and then consolidated into themes when they 127 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 recurred across multiple participants and represented essential elements of their shared lived experience. a code or pattern was considered a theme when it appeared in several participants’ narratives and reflected an aspect of the phenomenon. from their distinct perspectives, the black women described the individual resilience and strategic acumen of black women in executive-level leadership roles, which reflected the pervasive challenges they face due to their race and gender. the themes that emerged reflect the essence of black women’s leadership experiences as executive-level administrators at pwis. just because i am who i am preserving their personal identity was crucial for the leadership experiences of angela, claudette, and dorothy. each developed a unique leadership style based on self-awareness. they described situations that tested their sense of self, drawing attention to the constant negotiation between their personal and professional identities. in one of dorothy’s previous executive-level positions, she described different instances in which her sense of self was being overshadowed by having to occupy somewhat of a subservient role to her supervisor, the institution’s charismatic president. in the vein of choosing to stay who she was or at least trying to stay who she was, she endured several years of mistreatment. she disclosed, “i took about as much as i could until my husband said, ‘you are disappearing. who you are, you’re becoming invisible.’ and i cried and i cried. cause to me that meant failure.” rather than continue to let her identity dissipate, dorothy elected to take a year sabbatical and use that time to heal and rediscover her worth. having braved through situations "detrimental to her”, it was expected that the first piece of advice dorothy would offer to black women aspiring to roles such as those she’s attained would be to “know who you are. be true to who you are.” she admonished, “don’t flip flop and try to fit into what somebody says.” she acknowledged she will have opportunities and opposition “just because i am who i am” as a black woman administrator at a pwi. she explained further, it means i have to know who i am in order for me to be able to give back. i can never, ever leave this building and walk on campus and not know who i am. and beyond just the ascribed characteristics, i mean knowing who i am as a person. i experienced that at [name of previous institution] when i lost who i was. i never wanna go back to that again. similarly, angela spoke to adapting to various situations as an administrator, but remaining her authentic self was important to her. she stressed the difference between maintaining your sense of self and changing who you are. prior to becoming dean, she had always wondered when she would be confronted with the decision to change who she was to stay an executive-level administrator or remain steadfast in her truth. in the last year of angela’s deanship, she had to make that choice. she chose not to change and left that institution after tolerating several years of adversity. claudette echoed similar sentiments about adapting her personality and likened herself to a “chameleon”. she explained, i can be flexible and fluid and get along with my colleagues. i can laugh and talk, about a lot of things….but what i try to do is be able to fit into different settings, while also maintaining an important part of who i am. so even though i can be friendly and jovial and kid and laugh and talk, when those issues come up that i have to bring an alternative perspective to, then i’m willing to do that. playing the game angela, bridget, claudette, and dorothy all viewed engaging in institutional politics as essential for acquiring power and influence. this strategy helped them navigate and negotiate the political landscape, crucial for achieving work outcomes and maintaining their executive-level positions. bridget shared she learned quickly higher education was not a meritocracy and expounded, “it’s about who has the leverage, who has the power, who has the decision-making rights, right?” she went on to explain engaging in politics “is not an indication of your worth or your value or how committed or uncommitted you are. it’s an indication that you want to be successful.” angela felt playing the game was necessary for black women due to their marginalized status as executive-level higher education leaders within a pwi and having to work harder as a result. she proclaimed, “and i think it’s being aware of that as a black female. and that you do. i’m sorry, i don’t care what anyone says, you do have to work. you do….the games and the politics and things like that.” all four participants employed various tactics to accomplish individual or institutional goals, often through political connections and networking. bridget commented on the social circle aspect of office politics. “the clubbiness that underrepresented minorities see that exists among white people is because they socialize. if you want to receive the benefits of the clubbiness, then you too, must partake of the socialization.” angela, bridget, and claudette engaged in relationship-building with others at their institutions to support their career trajectories, with each cultivating these connections in different ways. claudette shared she spent her time “getting to know people in position of influence.” she elaborated, “schmoozing up to these folks because that’s part of it. it’s not just what you know, it’s the relationship and schmoozing up and validating their thoughts and ideas and making it more than sometimes what it actually is.” dorothy used her influence and network of allies to bypass a previous president’s attempts to stall her initiatives. she admitted, every initiative that i started, he found something wrong with it...i would get people on board, and even if it didn't come out of my mouth, it would come out of the mouth of somebody else, and it would get received. then he would find out it was my idea. 128 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 being methodical when articulating their ideas was useful for all participants’ when managing the political processes within their pwis. claudette mentioned she’s “calculated” in her approach to making suggestions and described an experience with her supervisor in one of her previous executive-level roles. she narrated, i had to make sure he felt validated. even though there were times i felt like, i didn’t feel that he had the knowledge. there were certain things he weren’t. but i still had to give him the respect and affirmation he deserved. because if not, it would’ve been my kiss of death. to show him up, is my kiss of death...he would come asking me “what do you think?” and i would tell him what i would think. realizing, i was influencing his thinking, but then i would affirm that “see you already knew, you just needed me to validate it.” i would just try, [laughs] it was almost comical. but i just had to realize that to get to the next step, i needed to be savvy. you have to be savvy. bridget observed colleagues using emotional tactics to get what they wanted, but chose to be direct and forthcoming, viewing such behaviors as manipulation. she proclaimed, “probably my path is a more difficult one because i’m not going to do that.” but bridget would also be deliberate in her opinions. when discussing if another leader should be reappointed to his role within their college, bridget indicated her evaluation of the individual swayed the dean’s decision to hire someone else. they have to feel like i like her all the participants reported positive experiences with relationship building and mentorships, noting the critical role of supportive networks. claudette expressed the positive impact of connections on inclusiveness within her institution. she asserted, because the thing about being successful as a leader at a pwi, that interpersonal is huge. you can’t be so serious. you have to be able to engage people. they have to feel like i like her. sometimes even when they don’t even know a person’s knowledge, skills, and abilities, if they like you, it’s like they believe you even before you’ve done anything. claudette believed she was afforded an advantage because of her influential relationships and being a black woman. they, often times, the majority in administration, they want to have, somebody used this phrase, a favorite son or a favorite daughter. i think i have been privileged in that i have, i am now perceived, and i say now, because you can fall out of favor. but i think right now, i am now perceived as a favorite daughter. and so because of it, i’m able to get certain opportunities. dorothy described the personal relationship she has built with her current president and how he has fostered an institutional culture that made her experience a sense of belonging. dorothy shared, he’s a real person. but he’s transparent and open. he doesn't mind crying in front of me. or saying to me, “dorothy, can you pray with me right now? i'm worried about—.” we've actually prayed together. i know that's not supposed to happen in higher ed, but it—he has a strong faith and so do i….but we talk about, this is kinda telling you about the relationship. we talk about all kinds of things…i have never in my [number] years had someone that i reported to that cared about me like that. each participant shared experiences with mentors who provided valuable support, advice, and information, significantly impacting their leadership experiences. dorothy commented on how transformational mentoring was to her. i think i probably wouldn't be where i am had i not had people who first saw something in me and took the risk to say something to me…and so for me, the possibilities for mentoring go beyond the cognitive to the area of affect. and affect is what changes hearts. dorothy also acknowledged another treasured supervisor who instilled in her the value of reflection and recognizing her strengths and weaknesses. she confessed the insights gained from this mentor were invaluable and life changing. angela, bridget, and dorothy each noted that white men expressed a vested interest in supporting or advancing their careers. angela recalled this experience when she was named the permanent dean for her institution. i get called to his [president’s] office, me and the dean, and so he looks at me and he says, “i'm going to make you dean.” i looked at my boss, and i said, “where are you going?” he's like, “oh i'm going to [name of another division].” i'm thinking, “you're too happy about this. something ain't right.” then i said, “oh you're going to make me interim again until you hire who you want.” he said, “no. i'm going to build your career.” he said, “we're going to build it here at [name of institution].” claudette shared a heart-to-heart interaction she had with a black male mentor of hers who offered honest and meaningful advice about one of the executive-level positions she was pursuing. he said, “sister, it’s not that you can’t do the job. he doesn’t want you for the job. you’re not getting the job.” i can remember sitting in his office, literally crying, and i said, “but why? i have the knowledge, the skills, abilities.” i said, “in fact i could do the job better than he can.” he said, “it’s not about what you can do. he doesn’t want you.” walk in more than one world three participants, angela, claudette, and dorothy, acknowledged being the “first” or “only one” at their institution, drawing attention to the disproportionate representation of black 129 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 women in executive-level roles and the stagnant progress in higher education administration. their experiences reflected intersectional challenges in predominantly white spaces, with most conflicts attributed to their identity as black women. angela recalled a colleague’s derogatory remark of, “what you going to be the caddy today?” while playing golf. he apologized after her supervisor addressed the inappropriate comment. bridget mentioned a comment a white woman colleague friend of hers made after she was appointed to her executive-level role, saying “i’ve always thought, i’ve always wanted an administrative role. but it must be nice being an african american woman and getting all of these opportunities because of that.” dorothy remembered entertaining at events hosted by her former president and guests would often say to her supervisor “you have a really good african american woman...and they really thought they were being kind.” all participants, except bridget, were highly conscious of their tone, mannerisms, or appearance to avoid the “angry black woman” stereotype, often prioritizing others’ comfort. bridget viewed any behavior changes as adopting a work persona explaining it as “behaving appropriately for the place you’re working.” angela described being in an executive-level higher education administrative position “meant always being on my ps and qs, everything.” she stated, it always meant making sure my shit was together. everything’s fine….always making sure you’re articulate, it’s just your whole presence, that when people look at—[name of one of the institution’s presidents] told me this and i started thinking about when i walk into a room, i know people see three things. age, race, and gender. before i became dean, i’d never thought about it like that and i’m very much conscious of that. dorothy practiced acculturation rather than assimilation because it allowed her to “walk in more than one world.” however, she found it taxing to constantly monitor her words and actions. she indicated, i spend a lot of time in my head figuring out how do i say this so that it is understood and received...lots of time, i leave meetings, and i’m exhausted. because i’ve spent a lot of time in my head doing that. if i don’t do that, and i just say things, it alienates people. and that isn’t good for me. people don’t necessarily have to say something to me. i just know it. i look at body language. facial expressions….i think i see that in the way people respond. they became staccato in how they respond to you because they’re fumbling for their words or they drawback. i’ve seen people cross their legs away from me. i’ll say “why did you do that?” and they’re like, “what?” “why did you cross your legs in that direction?” “oh, i didn’t notice.” those kinds of things i pay attention to. sometimes i’m off base. but because i do it almost without thinking, i kinda see little cues and signs that make me say you need to word that differently, you need to say that with a different tone. angela also reiterated the constant awareness required in her executive-level role and the possible impact. she declared, “you have to—i think, so as a black female you’re always just aware of your tone with people….i think we pick up this attention to stuff like that because we know how people—the angry black woman.” dorothy also referenced the angry black woman stereotype when sharing about the perceptions of the colleagues on her team. she explained, there are men on the home team. it’s really funny. they don’t quite know what to do with me either. because when i’m passionate, sometimes it’s misunderstood as anger. that happens with black women when we get passionate. we become the angry black woman. i very seldom am angry. claudette stressed the importance of being keenly aware of her emotions and feelings as a leader and mentioned numerous times she often had to recalibrate when she found herself getting angry in certain situations. she offered, “because if you don’t reframe your reality, you get bitter and angry. and then you become the angry black woman.” both angela and dorothy experienced moments of inclusion, yet they also felt forgotten and invisible at times. angela was excluded from important meetings and denied crucial information, initially attributing it to gender before realizing it was about her race. it was not until people that she worked with for a long time began to treat her differently that she began to question the dynamics of her role and her position within the institution. she recalled, it became about my race, about you got this young black girl up here telling you, “y’all are going to do this,” and i’m calling you out that y’all having these back room meetings. we would be in president’s council underneath this last president and this was the only time i had this issue. i’m like, “because people havin’ back room meetings”...he [president] wouldn’t call ‘em out at all...i said, “that’s fine if you don’t want me in these meetings, but don’t come, don’t act like i’m supposed to know when you’re all having these meetings.” dorothy recalled being dismissed by her president who told her “don’t be a whiner,” when she questioned why he did not introduce her at an event. the oversight became so evident that others started questioning the president’s negligence in acknowledging her. she stated, “this is who i report to. i’m not going to say anything negative. i would say, ‘i don’t know, i guess he overlooked it in his script.’ but it was a pattern.” each of the four participants detailed conflicts in their roles as executive-level higher education leaders, citing their authority was undermined and they experienced acts of disrespect. angela described an uncomfortable situation with a colleague and the 130 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 institution’s president when they met about a project that did not pan out as anticipated. during this meeting, she felt her peer was scolding her. she recalled, the president doesn’t say anything...this man is basically berating me and he’s not—and i’m looking at the president and i’m shaking a little bit and i said, “god help me through it.” i said, “don’t you ever talk to me like that again.”….he just got huff and puff, and he didn’t say sorry or anything. he said, “i have nothing else to say.” he leaves, so the president doesn’t say anything. i said, “you’re going to let him talk to me like that?” he said, “well he’s very upset, about what happened.” bridget recounted a colleague who also yelled at her over a decision. she advised him to sit down and firmly stated, “you’re not going to be in here yelling at me and being disrespectful.” bridget did not attribute the negative treatment she endured in instances such as this to her race and gender, saying, “for me, the lens that i choose to view these people through is, they’re just difficult people.” the themes presented in the results reflect the participants' lived experiences as expressed in their own words and perspectives. in the discussion that follows, these themes are examined through the lens of black feminist thought, which provides a conceptual framework for situating the participants’ experiences. discussion self-definition and identity affirmation for angela, claudette, and dorothy, their leadership experiences were deeply rooted in self-awareness, enabling them to navigate and challenge the systemic inequities in higher education. this self-defined perspective, a core principle of bft, empowers black women to resist and dismantle oppressive structures (collins, 2009). among the participants, dorothy and claudette offered the clearest examples of this, as their emphasis on knowing who they are shows the importance of a self-defined identity in resisting marginalization and asserting their leadership role. these findings are consistent with the work of showunmi and tomlin (2022) which indicated how black women in leadership must maintain a strong sense of self to counteract systemic oppression. however, this perspective differs from findings in townsend (2021), where black women administrators did not feel comfortable presenting their authentic selves, highlighting the challenge of navigating their identities to inform their standpoint (collins, 2009). as harris (2024) documented among black women faculty who carefully manage their classroom presence, these administrators often engaged in strategic performance designed to ease tensions and mitigate negative assumptions tied to their identity. claudette’s strategy of recalibrating herself to avoid projecting racist stereotypes of black womanhood reflects a broader pattern among the three participants who faced similar pressures to navigate and mitigate intersecting oppressions within the matrix of domination. this approach demonstrates the ongoing negotiation between personal identity and professional expectations in an environment where racial and gender biases are prevalent. this experience parallels the kinds of identity negotiations townsend (2021) found among black women who felt pressure to adjust aspects of their authentic self. despite the challenges of operating within a pwi, angela, claudette, and dorothy remained committed to their authentic selves, consistent with bft’s assertion that self-knowledge and self-valuation are essential to counteract negative societal images (collins, 2009). this discovery aligns with cook’s (2022) work addressing black women higher education leaders’ perception of identity, leadership style, and authenticity in senior roles. further, angela, claudette, and dorothy’s experiences suggest that being surrounded by a culture not their own did not deter them from remaining steadfast in their truths of what being a black woman executive-level higher education leader meant. they adapted to their minoritized status without assimilating into the majority culture, showcasing versatility and resilience (chance, 2022). the same self-awareness these participants relied on to maintain their authenticity also informed how they approached institutional politics. strategic navigation of institutional politics regardless of their positional authority and perceived power, all the participants still had to employ political tactics to accomplish goals at their institution. angela’s extra effort in workplace politics is consistent with davis and maldonado’s (2015) assertion that black women in higher education recognize the persistent inequality and focus on developing strategies to enhance their leadership abilities in bureaucratic institutions. creating powerful connections was a key tactic reported across participants in advancing personal agendas and inciting institutional change. dorothy’s experience reflected a practice all four participants described, as she relied on allies to champion her ideas and rally buy-in from institutional stakeholders (lewis, 2023; lewis-strickland, 2021). this tactic is akin to forming coalitions, a political strategy that relies on leaders building groupings of individuals with divergent interests to push forward an agenda (bolman & deal, 2021). further, according to bft, engaging in institutional politics to influence change within social institutions is a form of activism for black women, with coalitions being integral to their ability to transform and impact policies and procedures from the top-down (collins, 2009). through their use of political strategies, black women can exploit an oppressive circumstance, such as being excluded and undermined, to affect the powerful networks within pwis in some capacity (lewis-flenaugh & myrick, 2022). all four participants’ ability to use relationships and informal networks to support their leadership practice stands in contrast with the work by mor barak (2022) and pinto et al. (2024), who suggest that black women are isolated from informal networks and often struggle to access the powerful informal relationships that could benefit them professionally. persuasion and involvement in decision-making conversations were effective across all four participants’ attempts to influence change and maintain positive 131 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 rapport with colleagues (lewis, 2023). these strategies reflect bft’s concept of the matrix of domination, where black women must navigate multiple, intersecting systems of power (collins, 2009). community building and networking for solidarity building social capital through professional relationships can provide access to essential information, support resources, and career advancement opportunities (eagly & carli, 2007). each participants’ willingness to build connections despite their marginal status highlights the importance of community and networking in their leadership experiences. while dorothy’s relationship with her current president fostered a sense of belonging and feeling valued, bridget also noted the value of being seen by influential colleagues, and claudette emphasized the interpersonal aspects of leadership within her institution. recognizing the importance of relationships in their leadership experiences supports the conclusion that relationship networks are crucial to black women’s careers (jernigan et al., 2020; pinto et al., 2024). while black women may find it challenging to acquire mentors that look like them (reed, 2023; smith & crawford, 2007), they are able to successfully acquire mentors who are instrumental to their professional development and career trajectories (cook, 2022). all participants described mentorship as influential, though the sources and forms of support varied. from the president dedicated to advancing angela’s career to dorothy’s supervisor who encouraged introspection, these mentors identified the potential within the black women and offered help, advice, and support to encourage their personal and professional growth (bertrand jones & dufor, 2012; breeden, 2021). this focus on building supportive networks aligns with bft, which emphasizes the importance of community and collective empowerment (collins, 2009). their experiences were shaped by interactions within their academic communities, and fostered strong, supportive relationships as a form of resistance against the systemic marginalization they faced (collins, 2009). resistance and resilience in the face of adversity all the participants navigated racial microaggressions, bias, or the effects of hypervisibility and invisibility. the lived experiences as described by the four participants revealed some were rooted in racial microaggressions, deliberate or unintended verbal, behavioral, and environmental circumstances that convey aggressive, offensive, or harmful racial smears and insults to an individual or group (sue et al., 2007). the microaggressive comments each participant experienced ignored the accomplishments and acumen of them as black women and contributed to them being devalued and disrespected with their intelligence, expertise, and abilities contested and questioned (herder, 2021; holder et al., 2015; tinglin, 2025). the bias others had against the study participants is indicative of black women continuing to face adversity because of their race and gender regardless of the executive-levels of leadership they achieve within higher education (lewis-flenaugh & myrick, 2022). efforts to dismantle stereotypes and prevent being mislabelled were also motivation for three of the four participants, angela, claudette, and dorothy, to adjust their behavior and tone (herrera & williams, 2025). to combat the angry black woman stereotype, a controlling image that reinforces the oppression of black womanhood (collins, 2009), they carefully managed their responses to prevent them from being misconstrued as negative. the restraint the black women exhibited when engaging with colleagues required them to tread cautiously when interacting with others at their institution and often pulled them away from expressing their authentic selves. this dynamic reflects the years of conditioning black women endure about how they must navigate predominantly white environments (harris, 2024). however, bft asserts black women can reject images that negatively portray them and resist accepting those images as their reality (collins, 2009), as demonstrated when bridget refuted being stereotyped as the angry black woman because it was not her personality. due to the lack of diversity in higher education administration, angela, claudette, and dorothy were extremely visible at their respective pwis. hypervisibility results in black women feeling pressured to act in ways that align with the dominant culture (mccluney & rabelo, 2019). this pressure and mechanism of control (collins, 2009) often lead to black women changing their tone and behavior to avoid alienation or to be portrayed negatively (arnold, 2023; dickens et al., 2019). ironically, the increased attention from hypervisibility can also lead to these women being easily ignored and discounted because of their minority status in their workplace, as shared by most participants. while hypervisibility exposes black women to heightened scrutiny and unrealistic expectations, invisibility diminishes recognition of their contributions, both stemming from experiences of domination and subordination (collins, 2009). to navigate these circumstances, three of the four black women in this study responded by accommodating others, identity shifting (dickens & chavez, 2018; jones & shorter-gooden, 2003) or policing their behavior (townsend, 2021; b. williams, 2023). angela and dorothy’s willingness to sacrifice their emotional and mental health to conform to others’ expectations points to the continued exploitation of black women’s work (collins, 2009). this finding aligns with other studies where black women overextended themselves to contest the conditions of their outsider within status (b. williams, 2023; herrera & williams, 2025; townsend, 2021). their reactions of being silent or addressing their transgressors, as expressed in the study findings across all four participants, are also forms of activism black women use to reject and resist oppressive situations. this resistance is essential to their survival (collins, 2009). implications for research and practice the findings from this study have contributed to giving a voice to the black women who make meaningful contributions within higher education leadership. further research on black women as higher education leaders should continue to explore other 132 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 social identities they hold such as age and socioeconomic background and how they impact their leadership experiences. additionally, the experiences of black women in leadership roles at pwis creates a cascade effect that extends beyond individual career trajectories to impact the broader black student experience. for example, the disproportionate number of black women leaders reduces the presence of advocates who understand the unique physical and psychological impacts black students endure in predominantly white environments (harris, 2024). future studies could explore how the challenges black women higher education administrators encounter are connected to institutional practices that inadvertently impede black student success and outcomes. given the current dismantling of dei initiatives in higher education (u.s. department of education, 2025), institutions must be strategic in how they address issues that black women face. safe spaces for black women leaders to process their experiences can be part of a broader employee wellness initiative that emphasizes stress management and work-life balance. additionally, with the expected turnover of senior-level leaders in higher education (klein & salk, 2013; melidona et al., 2023), institutions have an opportunity to integrate succession planning (hoque & zheng, 2024) with leadership development. consistent with wolfe and freeman’s (2013) call for a more comprehensive approach to address the leadership disparity, institutions can strengthen promote from within practices by embedding mentoring and intentional professional growth opportunities, such as shadowing, for black women in middle-level positions who aspire to ascend to senior leadership roles. conclusion this research was centered on the voices of black women in higher education, exploring how they perceive and describe the influence of race and gender on their leadership experiences as executive-level administrators at predominantly white institutions. leading in these spaces created both challenges and opportunities, requiring them to strategically manage their identities and transform obstacles into leadership advantages. their narratives revealed how intersecting systems of race and gender shape their realities and demanded constant negotiation of identity, institutional politics, and power dynamics. black feminist thought provided a critical lens for understanding these experiences and showing how black women lived experiences and standpoint inform their leadership as they navigate intersecting systems of power within predominantly white spaces. these findings hold important implications for institutional leaders and governing bodies as they continue to grapple with representation and equity in leadership. understanding and addressing the unique challenges black women face is not merely about inclusion, it is about fundamentally transforming institutional systems and culture to value and support the leadership these women provide. note: the participants’ names and any other identifying information have been changed to protect their identity. references acuff, j. b. 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(2021). against white feminism: notes on disruption. w. w. norton & company. 137 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 volume 44, 2025 issn 1093-7099 editors: beverly j. irby, nahed abdelrahman, julia ballenger, sonia rodriguez, and benjamin jankens assistant editor: jordan donop & kristina hall 16 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 advancing women in leadership vol. 44, 15-29, 2025 available online at http://www.awlj.org/ issn 1093-7099 full length research paper factors impacting female senior enlisted leaders’ representation in the u.s. army’s basic combat training units allison smith, james fyock, carole godette-baker, lynda idleman allison smith, ed.d.: u.s. army (retired), allison.purvis.smith@gmail.com james fyock, ed.d.: committee chair, jafyock@liberty.edu carole godette-baker, ed.d.: committee member, carole.baker115@aol.com lynda idleman, ph.d.: editor, dridleman@idleman.com accepted: this qualitative study explored the lived experiences of 10 retired female senior enlisted leaders assigned as first sergeant (1sg) and command sergeant major (csm) in initial entry training (iet) to ascertain if their experiences shed light on the underrepresentation of female leaders in the basic combat training (bct) environment. data collection emphasized factors that led to success in the iet environment, as well as challenges and barriers they faced. the theoretical framework underpinning this study included the social role theory, which holds that the expectations for men and women are based on sex differences that regulate behaviour in an adult’s work and family life, and the role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders, which suggests women do not reach top-level positions because they are less capable than men and because women are judged more harshly when they are in leadership roles. having to prove oneself, reaction to female leadership, family obligations, and fighting stereotypes emerged as barriers and challenges. attributes needed for success in the iet bct environment included army values and toughness and tenacity. coding of positions and male perception of female leaders emerged as barriers that prevent females from attaining 1sg and csm in the bct environment. the findings support the social role theory and role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. the results extend research on the representation of women in senior leadership positions because they illuminate female leaders in a nontraditional educational environment in the largest branch of the u.s. military. keywords: women, leaders, u.s. army, basic combat training, glass ceiling, women in leadership; leadership theories in the united states, women make up just over 50% of the nation’s population and nearly 47% of the labor force (schaeffer, 2024). women hold over 51% of management, professional, and related positions in the u.s. labor force (catalyst, 2017; u.s. bureau of labor statistics, 2017), yet they remain significantly underrepresented in senior leadership roles across a wide range of sectors, including education, higher education, law enforcement, fortune 500 companies, and the military (cater et al., 2018; jackson & o’callaghan, 2009; moore, 2020; schuck & rabe-hemp, 2024; seo, huang, & han, 2017). despite considerable qualifications and demonstrated contributions to improved organizational outcomes, women still encounter systemic barriers that restrict their progress in the highest echelons of leadership (american psychological association [apa], 2024; eagly & karau, 2002; nanton, 2015; tabassum & nayak, 2021). for instance, women account for only 15% of school district superintendents, 29% of senior-level executives, and 10% of ceos in fortune 500 companies (johnson, 2021; rhode, 2017; u.s. bureau of labor statistics, 2017). within the u.s. military, these disparities are equally pronounced, with women comprising just 8.5% of activeduty general officers and 12% of the army’s most senior enlisted ranks of sergeant major (sgm) and command sergeant major (csm: u.s. department of defense, 2022, 2024). following the formation of the all-volunteer force, women entered the military in record numbers, and the 2015 lifting of the combat exclusion policy opened 220,000 military positions, including many combat roles, to women (crowley & sandhoff, 2017; national defense authorization act, 2016; rosenberg & philipps, 2015). today, women represent about 16.5% of the army’s active-duty strength and serve in a variety of roles, including as fighter pilots, infantry soldiers, and members of elite units like the rangers (u.s. department of defense, 2018). yet as the military’s female population grows, the need for women trainers and mentors in basic combat training (bct) has become essential. female senior enlisted leaders are particularly crucial in bct because they serve as visible 17 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 role models reinforcing the army’s commitment to leadership diversity and inclusivity (rosenberg & philipps, 2015); editorial team, 2024). this study draws upon social role theory and the role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders to analyze the enduring barriers faced by women in the u.s. army. social role theory posits that traditional gender roles shape expectations about what men and women can or should do, thereby creating challenges for women in roles typically associated with men, such as military leadership (eagly, 1987). additionally, the role congruity theory suggests that prejudice arises when there is an incongruity between societal gender norms and role expectations; this prejudice creates significant challenges for women pursuing military leadership positions (eagly & karau, 2002). although studies have examined the barriers women face in the military (braun et al., 2015; doll, 2007; pinch et al., 2004; u.s. department of defense, 2013; williams & mcgivern, 2017), a lack of research exists on the underrepresentation of women in senior enlisted positions within the bct environment. enlistees make up approximately 82% of the armed forces and 83% of the army’s ranks, making it critical to explore the challenges and barriers faced by enlisted women in leadership roles within bct, where role models are key to inspiring future female leaders (congressional research service [crs], 2020; u.s. department of defense, 2022). context of study: united states army basic training program bct is the training course that transforms civilians (recruits or trainees) into soldiers. typically, all enlisted recruits, both male and female, attend bct. the army bct program has three goals: (a) convert civilians into soldiers by motivating the trainee volunteers, instilling discipline, and encouraging acceptance of the seven core army values—loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage; (b) ensure the trainees reach the required physical fitness standards; and (c) train them to the basic level standard on tasks to make them successful soldiers (klimack & kloeber, 2006). over the course of 10 weeks, recruits learn basic tactical and survival skills, along with how to shoot, rappel, and march. they also learn the basics of army life and military customs. male and female trainees receive the same program of instruction and are mixed at the operational level of basic training. the basic training staff is typically organized into battalions commanded by lieutenant colonels and csms. battalions are organized into companies commanded by captains and first sergeants (1sgs; klimack & kloeber, 2006). in the bct environment, the most senior enlisted ranks are csm and 1sg. although women represent approximately 15% of the army’s active-duty strength, they make up only 10% of the senior enlisted ranks from 1sg through sgm of the army (u.s. department of defense, 2022). further, women account for only 10.5% of the csm ranks (u.s. department of defense, 2024). in 2020, women held 12% of the 1sg positions in bct and one station unit training (osut) units, and only two women were assigned to csm positions in bct units (department of the army, 2020). these statistics highlight the persistence of a glass ceiling within the army whose structural barriers limit women’s advancement into senior leadership roles despite their qualifications and representation at lower levels (smith, 2020). increasing the number of female senior enlisted leaders in bct and osut environments can provide essential representation and role models for recruits, helping to close the gender gap in leadership and foster a stronger, more inclusive force. studies note that when individuals see leaders who reflect their own demographics, they feel more motivated to aspire to such roles (latu et al., 2013). literature review: barriers for women a review of the literature reveals that while women in the u.s. military have significantly expanded their roles since 2001, longstanding barriers continue to limit their advancement into senior leadership positions. with the 2015 lifting of the combat exclusion policy, all military roles, including combat positions, are now open to women (bensahel et al., 2015; orrick, 2016; pellerin, 2015). despite this progress, structural barriers and intersectional challenges persist. the glass ceiling effect remains, particularly due to the high percentage of general officers drawn from combat specialties—roles historically restricted to men—that has limited female representation at the highest ranks (cook & glass, 2014 haring, 2013; jackson & o’callaghan, 2009; jackson et al., 2014; smith, 2020; tama, 2016). barriers rooted in perceptions regarding physical standards and leadership stereotypes further constrain women’s opportunities. social role theory highlights how traditional beliefs about gender roles influence perceptions of men’s and women’s capabilities, thus creating bias when women pursue roles outside of these expectations, such as combat (eagly, 1987). physical standards in bct reinforce these biases—with women often perceived as less physically capable than men—which contributes to institutional bias (chapman, 2008; cohn, 2000; trobaugh, 2018). family obligations also complicate women’s advancement since extended duty requirements and deployments disproportionately impact single and dual-service parents (clever & segal, 2013; dindoffer et al., 2011). additionally, maternity policies may reinforce perceptions of women as burdens or being less devoted to their careers (bensahel et al., 2015). further, smith (2020) identified other structural and cultural barriers within military environments that hinder women’s progress. the literature underscores that, while gender remains a central factor in the military’s leadership structure, an intersectional lens is necessary to fully address the unique barriers faced by women in pursuit of senior leadership roles. the role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders adds that women in leadership often face bias because they are perceived as less aligned with traditional male-dominated leadership traits. studies show that women who exhibit agentic or directive leadership styles in maledominated environments are often seen as insufficiently communal, leading to negative evaluations (brescoll, 2016; eagly & karau, 2002; eagly et al., 1992). although women have gained more opportunities, skepticism about their suitability for combat and command roles lingers, with biases from past restrictions still affecting perceptions 18 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 (rollins, 2012; rostker v. goldberg, 1981). internalized biases are also evident; research shows that even fewer women than men support female combat roles, and cadets tend to view a female presence as potentially hindering combat effectiveness (kurpius & lucart, 2000; matthews et al., 2009; snider et al., 2001). addressing these barriers requires fostering diversity and inclusion in military leadership. research indicates that a diverse leadership pool—valuing both agentic and communal traits— can reduce gender bias and promote an inclusive culture (berkery et al., 2013; powell, 2012). increasing female representation in senior roles is key to dismantling stereotypes and positioning the military to meet the evolving demands of 21st-century leadership. theoretical foundation of the study imagine you are an 18-year-old girl, newly graduated from high school, and you have decided to enlist in the u.s. army to serve your country. you have seen groundbreaking achievements for women in the military—the first female graduates of marine corps infantry training (drake, 2013), the army’s first women to complete the ranger training course (vergon, 2016), and the recent promotions of women to high-ranking positions across the services (united states army, 2016; u.s. department of defense, 2014). yet when you arrive at bct, you notice that only 2 of the company’s drill sergeants are female, and there are no senior enlisted females in the roles of 1sg or csm. where are the role models? this absence of visible female leaders reveals underlying barriers shaped by perceptions of traditional gender roles supported by social role theory (eagly & wood, 1988) and the role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders (eagly and karau, 2002). these theories help explain the persistent barriers that influence the leadership opportunities and representation available to women in male-dominated environments like the military. a foundational understanding of these theories is vital to this study and to advancing organizational constructs and policies. madsen and scribner (2016) emphasized the necessity to understand the lack of progress women have made in ascending ladders of leadership and management positions; this study supports the same inquiry. because progress continues to be protracted, examining the roles women embody shapes the destiny of women, whether in corporate america or governmental positions. the social role theory provides a conceptual framework “to understand how sex differences and similarities in behavior reflect gender role beliefs that in turn represent people’s perceptions of men’s and women’s social roles in the society in which they live” (eagly & wood, 2012, p. 458) and to understand from where beliefs about social groups are derived. koenig and eagly (2014) suggested that the social role theory “postulates that social perceivers’ beliefs about social groups in their society derive from their experiences with group members in their typical social roles” (p. 371). social role theory we explored the social role theory to determine its impact on leadership challenges, barriers, and opportunities for women. social role theory discusses two kinds of expectations for leaders—agentic and communal (koenig & eagly, 2014). agentic behaviors refer to give-and-take tendencies (eagly, 1987). agentic characteristics are described as assertive, controlling, aggressive, ambitious, dominant, forceful, independent, self-sufficient, and prone to act as a leader and are normally associated with male leaders (hogue, 2015; koenig & eagly, 2014). communal behaviors refer to a concern with interpersonal relationships (eagly, 1987; hogue, 2015). communal characteristics are often ascribed to women and relate to care and welfare—being affectionate, helpful, kind, sympathetic, interpersonally sensitive, nurturing, and gentle (eagly & karau, 2002; hogue, 2015; stegaroia et al., 2017). a successful leader should possess both communal and agentic qualities; however, there is a traditional perception that agentic leadership is more successful than communal leadership, especially in a military setting (crowley & sandhoff, 2017). current research supports the social role theory claim that inference from group members’ typical role behaviors concerning their group stereotypes is a key process that creates stereotypes. kiser (2015) theorized that findings aligned to the expected roles of men and women, which lent credence to why women did not hold as many high-level positions as men. kiser also found that men viewed it as their right to a job in conditions when jobs are few. kiser also asserted that men are better political leaders and executives and that children suffer when women work (kiser, 2015). these stereotypes often derive from social role theory and explain why men and women serving in the military are typecast (bissessar, 2013; king, 2013). role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders a theory by which to explain gender stereotyping is the role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. the role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders is grounded in social role theory’s treatment of gender roles, which emphasizes promoting gender differences as a result of behavioral characteristics (eagly & karau, 2002). role congruity theory extends beyond social role theory in that it factors in gender roles with leadership roles (buckalew et al., 2012). according to role congruity theory, individuals are penalized when they do not perform according to the expectations of society (ferguson, 2018; skelly & johnson, 2011). because effective women leaders tend to violate standards for their gender when they manifest stereotypical male, agentic attributes and fail to manifest stereotypical female, communal attributes, they may be ostracized (bongiorno et al., 2013). an important aspect of eagly and karau’s (2002) research is the conditions that moderate incongruity. eagly and karau contended that unpredictability exists in gender roles and how leadership is defined. eagly and karau (2002) noted a distinct principle: “the greater the incongruity between the descriptive norms that define the female gender role and a leader role, the more likely that women are perceived as less qualified for 19 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 leadership” (p. 577). this premise was a cornerstone to this study. gurbuz et al. (2014) found that the military was perceived to have very distinct definitions of what leadership is and the expectations of its leaders. although the military has made advancements in the number of women serving, the idea of women serving at all is still counter to social expectations (king, 2013). therefore, women are caught in a dichotomy; they can either (a) conform to the stereotypical communal role and face criticism for not meeting the requirements of being a leader; or (b) follow the leader role and fail to meet the stereotypical communal role (bongiorno et al., 2013; eagly & karau, 2002). women find themselves trying to meet the perception that leaders must espouse agentic traits, all while performing communal roles that submit to gender role expectations (zheng et al., 2018). another characteristic of conditions that moderate incongruity is that of the culture of organizations. eagly and karau (2002) described how organizations that are male dominant present adversities for women because of the incongruity with the expectations placed on women, thus causing limited access and a perception of ineffectiveness. the military is a classic depiction of such incongruity. for decades, women were not authorized to serve in combat roles, a role often used as a barometer for advancement to senior positions. without combat experience, women faced difficulty garnering the respect of decision makers sitting on promotion boards who determine the future career paths of senior leaders. allowing women into combat roles in 2015 was a divergent as well as a historical shift (crowley & sandhoff, 2017; king, 2013). the change required military leaders to recognize perceptions and unconscious biases that may have existed that prevented women’s assignments to leadership positions historically held by men (tama, 2016). this fact is critical and illuminates eagly and karau’s (2002) findings that the type of organization moderates the role congruity theory. because of the change to allow women in combat, this study proved timely because it allowed us to examine how the traditional, highly male-centric environment is evolving and whether there is hope that change is possible in how women are perceived in leadership roles, thereby allowing them greater access to upward mobility and equalizing leadership diversity. study design and methods the purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to explore and understand retired female senior enlisted leaders’ experiences while assigned to the leadership positions of 1sg and csm in initial entry training (iet), specifically bct and osut, to ascertain if their experiences may shed light on the underrepresentation of female 1sgs and csms in the bct environment. by examining factors that contributed to their success, as well as the challenges and barriers they encountered, this study aimed to address the gap in literature regarding female representation in senior enlisted roles within this nontraditional educational setting. a transcendental phenomenological approach that relies on detailed narratives to reveal collective insights was chosen to capture the essence of the participants’ experiences. this approach emphasizes the practice of bracketing, in which the researcher set aside personal biases to focus purely on participants’ descriptions to illuminate the shared meaning of experiences within the iet environment (bloomberg & volpe, 2016; creswell, 2013). this study explored how participants’ successes, challenges, and barriers intersect with broader patterns of underrepresentation in senior leadership assignments within bct and osut. structurally, bct battalions consist of five 1sg positions and one csm position, each of which is crucial to shaping the early leadership experiences of new soldiers (united states army, 2016). a similar study by williams and mcgivern (2017) examined the lived experiences of retired female general officers within a specific military branch. although williams and mcgivern identified key barriers—such as limited mentorship, persistent stereotypes, and few female role models at the general officer level—their findings did not address the unique experiences of senior enlisted leaders within the training environment. smith’s (2020) study built upon those insights by focusing on senior enlisted leaders’ experiences within iet, specifically in bct and osut, where female senior enlisted leaders face operational challenges that are not typically encountered at the general officer level. in contrast to williams and mcgivern’s (2017) focus on broader command experiences, the current study centered on the critical role that senior enlisted leaders play in the initial training and development of new soldiers. by investigating the enlisted perspective, this study fills a gap in understanding the barriers and opportunities unique to senior enlisted women who are directly involved in soldier training and development, offering new insights into how gender representation at these formative stages might impact the army’s leadership pipeline. through this research, a deeper understanding of the experiences influencing the assignment of women to senior enlisted roles in bct emerged, thereby contributing valuable insights into strategies to promote greater representation and mentorship of women in crucial leadership positions. participants the 10 participants were retired army senior enlisted leaders who retired from the army between 2009 and 2019 and served as a 1sg or csm in the iet environment at three army installations (table 1). we identified 13 retired females who served as a 1sg or csm in an army bct environment. ten of the 13 met the participant criteria. prior to collecting any data, the researchers obtained institutional review board approval and gained consent from each participant. the interviews took place via video conferencing. 20 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 four of the participants had basic training as their iet assignment. five of the women had experience as drill sergeants. all of the senior enlisted officers were in a gender-integrated bct environment. promotion of eight participants to csm occurred between 2003 and 2012 (table 2). data collection procedures after irb approval, data collection involved a triangulated approach: a research journal, individual interviews, and a focus group. this multi-method strategy, as creswell (2013) and denzin (1978) suggested, adds credibility by providing multiple perspectives on the phenomenon. the careful sequencing of methods—beginning with journaling, followed by interviews, and concluding with a focus group—enhanced data depth and validity (deshefy-longhi et al., 2009; morse, 2005). throughout data collection, the researcher maintained a research journal to reflect upon the data as they were gathered, documenting my impressions, reflections, and potential biases. this journaling process, described by creswell (2013), created an audit trail (lincoln & guba, 1985) that tracked my interpretations over time. for instance, after one participant spoke passionately about proving herself in a male-dominated setting, the researcher noted my reflections on the subtle challenges of interpreting her experience without inserting my assumptions. journaling helped balance my perspective and mitigate bias as themes emerged (miles & huberman, 1994). next, the researcher conducted individual interviews to capture each participant’s personal stories and experiences as senior enlisted leaders in bct environments. semistructured questions, as moustakas (1994) and merriam and tisdell (2016) recommended, allowed participants to openly discuss significant events and challenges. one participant shared a story of leading a physically intense drill that gained her respect from initially skeptical male colleagues—a critical moment of leadership that she believed shifted perceptions within her unit. these 45–60-minute interviews were conducted privately via online video calls or in person based on participant preference (aborisade, 2013; lo iacano et al., 2016), recorded, transcribed professionally, and supplemented with notes reviewed in my research journal. the final data collection method, a focus group, was conducted to validate themes that surfaced during individual interviews. focus groups enable group interaction, enhancing insights by encouraging participants to share and expand upon each other’s experiences (gill et al., 2008; patton, 2015). in this study’s focus group, participants discussed shared experiences of gender-based barriers, with one noting the expectation to meet both army standards and additional unspoken male standards to gain acceptance. this shared discussion environment allowed participants to exchange and refine their views on common themes such as resilience, teamwork, and the impact of subtle biases in leadership roles (kreuger & casey, 2015; stewart & shamdasani, 2015). together, these methods provided a comprehensive view of the participants’ lived experiences, contributing to an indepth understanding of success factors, barriers, and leadership attributes for female leaders in military environments. this triangulated approach ensured credibility and addressed the research questions, offering rich insights into the experiences of women in senior military roles. focus groups patton (2015) recommended using focus groups after individual interviews to validate research themes. these discussions allow participants to share insights, explore differing perspectives, and generate deeper understanding (krueger & casey, 2015; creswell, 2013). the focus group 21 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 protocol included nine open-ended questions aligned with the study’s research questions. participants confirmed their participation via email, and the session was conducted via webinar for convenience. the 45to 60-minute discussion was digitally recorded and transcribed by a professional transcriptionist (creswell, 2013). notes were documented in a reflective journal, and backup recording devices ensured accuracy. the focus group explored retired female leaders’ experiences as csms or 1sgs in the iet environment, examining challenges they faced in leadership roles and whether these barriers contributed to the underrepresentation of women in bct units. discussions also assessed whether these obstacles affected participants’ career progression. data analysis data analysis in this transcendental phenomenological study followed a rigorous and systematic approach, as outlined by moustakas (1994). prior to initiating the study, informed consent was obtained from all participants to ensure ethical integrity and credibility, particularly as they described their lived experiences. to eliminate potential researcher bias, journaling was employed to reflect on any subjective thoughts, thereby safeguarding the participants' responses from external influence. the survey and interview processes were designed to minimize risk to participants, ensuring confidentiality and anonymity throughout the study. pseudonyms were utilized to protect the identities of participants and the military installation. in accordance with creswell’s (2013) guidelines, participants were provided with transcripts of their individual interviews and focus group sessions to review for accuracy, enhancing the validity and credibility of the results. all interviews and focus group discussions were transcribed by a professional transcriptionist. the data analysis began with a thorough reading of the interview and focus group transcripts, followed by the removal of any repetitive or irrelevant comments. the data was then clustered into fifteen initial codes that represented significant themes from the participants’ experiences. clustering involved grouping similar data points or codes based on commonalities, such as "tenacity," "guidance," and "self-setting standards," which were aligned with success factors. the codes were subsequently organized into broader categories by identifying patterns within the data. for example, challenges/barriers emerged from grouping themes such as "old boy network" and "proving oneself," while leadership attributes were clustered around characteristics like "integrity" and "caring for soldiers." after organizing the codes into these meaningful clusters, the themes were refined and consolidated into four overarching themes central to the study’s findings. this clustering and thematic analysis allowed for a synthesis of the data, accurately capturing the essence of the participants’ lived experiences. this transcendental phenomenological approach enabled the exploration of the lived experiences of female senior ncos in leadership roles within the u.s. army bct environment. the study adhered to the principle of bracketing, ensuring that the voices of the participants guided the analysis. key themes such as success factors, challenges/barriers, leadership attributes, and barriers to advancement emerged from the data, providing a deep understanding of how the participants navigated obstacles and defined success in a male-dominated environment. the data analysis in this study placed emphasis on the participants' lived experiences through their voices rather than the researcher’s interpretation of those experiences. the analysis thus contributed valuable insights into their leadership journeys, aligned with the transcendental phenomenological approach. participants’ stories this section presents the stories of the 10 retired u.s. army senior enlisted leader participants who served as 1sgs or csms within iet environments. these women retired between 2009 and 2019 and served at key training locations. each story highlighted individual experiences that underscore their unique journeys, success factors, challenges, leadership attributes, and the barriers the strengths and struggles of female leaders in a traditionally male-dominated military structure. jane’s story jane, raised in a middle-class, single-family home in florida, joined the army seeking new challenges and educational opportunities after participating in marine corps jrotc. over her 30-year career, she reached the rank of sgm, with success factors—including selfmotivation and high standards—that earned her respect in a gender-integrated training unit. jane’s challenges involved overcoming stereotypes about physical strength; she felt she had to match her male peers to prove her competence. her leadership attributes included integrity, resilience, and empathy for soldiers. reflecting on her journey, jane remarked, “you have to come prepared, physically and mentally, to meet the standards just as well as the men. there’s no room for shortcuts.” regarding barriers to advancement, jane noted the difficulty of moving beyond entry-level leadership roles due to limited mentorship and entrenched gender biases. debbie’s story debbie, who grew up in south carolina with five siblings, joined the army in 1986 to serve her country and earn college benefits. over her 27-year career, she reached the rank of csm, with success factors that included a commitment to duty and strong mentorship. however, challenges arose from having to prove her capability repeatedly to gain respect among male peers, a common theme in her career. debbie’s leadership attributes included discipline, strategic thinking, and a deep care for her soldiers. she reflected, “you have to prove yourself over and over, especially as a female. there’s this constant expectation that we have to work twice as hard to get half the respect.” barriers to advancement for debbie included navigating the old boy network within the army, which made it difficult for women to be considered for senior roles. sue’s story raised as an only child in florida, sue joined the army seeking independence and a life beyond college. she served 30 years and reached the rank of csm; her success factors included her tenacity and willingness to exceed expectations. challenges were significant because she frequently confronted stereotypes about women in leadership, particularly regarding physical and emotional 22 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 strength. her leadership attributes included integrity, resilience, and a commitment to being a role model. sue’s barriers to advancement included limited career planning resources for women in leadership, which meant she often had to chart her own path. she said, “the only person that stops me is me. they may want me to fail, but i’m here to show them otherwise.” beth’s story beth, raised in a middle-class home with mixed religious influences and 1 of 6 children, joined the army after marrying a service member. she served 25 years, achieving the rank of csm, and her success factors included a focus on skill-building and knowledge, which helped her stand out in leadership roles. challenges centered around her need to consistently advocate for herself to overcome gendered expectations, especially in a maledominated setting. beth’s leadership attributes included perseverance, effective communication, and a dedication to army values. discussing barriers to advancement, beth noted that position coding often limited female soldiers’ advancement opportunities, particularly in leadership roles typically held by men. she shared, “you have to set the bar for yourself and be ready to carry the weight, both physically and mentally, to earn the respect of your peers and subordinates.” becky’s story becky, raised in a lower-middle-class family in new york city, joined the army for adventure and new experiences. over her 28-year career, she advanced to csm, with success factors that included her focus on continual learning and self-improvement. challenges included overcoming societal stereotypes about women’s roles and physical abilities, which required her to constantly prove her capability. becky’s leadership attributes included empathy, courage, and the ability to inspire others. she said, “you’ve got to show up ready and willing to give more than what’s expected. that’s how you earn your place.” for becky, barriers to advancement included bias in selection processes, with limited opportunities for women in senior roles. kim’s story kim, raised by her mother and grandmother in a strict pentecostal home, joined the army for educational opportunities and personal growth. she served 22 years, reaching csm, with tenacity being her defining success factor. challenges included balancing her commitment to work with family responsibilities and overcoming misconceptions about her abilities as a woman. her leadership attributes included resilience, integrity, and a commitment to high standards. kim reflected, “it takes stepping out of your comfort zone, pushing past the doubts, and proving that you belong.” regarding barriers to advancement, kim identified the old boy network as a significant obstacle, noting that senior roles were often allocated based on connections rather than capability. cindy’s story cindy, the 2nd of 7 children from a small town in north carolina, joined the army for educational and life opportunities. serving 34 years, she advanced to csm, and her success factors included determination and the support of mentors. challenges were tied to balancing family obligations with demands of military service, a significant theme throughout her career. her leadership attributes included selflessness, dedication, and a focus on supporting soldiers. she shared, “you have to sacrifice a lot, including time with family, to succeed at this level, but you do it because you’re driven to lead.” barriers to advancement for cindy included limited access to mentorship and networking, which often hindered career progression for women. lisa’s story lisa, raised in a military family, joined the army initially to earn a college fund. she ultimately served 25 years, retiring as a csm, with success factors including mentorship and a well-defined career plan. her challenges included managing male-dominated work environments where women’s leadership was often questioned. lisa’s leadership attributes included strategic thinking, empathy, and an unwavering commitment to her values. regarding barriers to advancement, lisa noted that promotion opportunities for women were often overlooked, a factor she believed could change with more female representation. she recalled, “i was fortunate to have leaders, both male and female, who guided me, but it took planning and resilience to get where i am.” carol’s story carol, raised in a single-parent family in florida, joined the army after training as a social worker. serving 32 years, she reached csm, with success factors including her high standards and a clear career path. challenges included working within a male-dominated hierarchy where women’s abilities were often underestimated. carol’s leadership attributes included integrity, resilience, and a commitment to setting a strong example. discussing barriers to advancement, carol observed, “i was expected to work harder, to be twice as qualified, just to be considered equal. but i kept pushing.” the army’s position coding system, which often excluded women from key roles, was a barrier carol and many other participants faced. mary’s story mary, from baltimore, maryland, joined the army to gain independence and escape local economic challenges. serving 30 years, she retired as an sgm, with success factors including her resilience and a deep care for her soldiers. challenges she encountered included stereotypes about women’s roles in the army that required her to constantly prove her commitment and capability. mary’s leadership attributes included empathy, integrity, and loyalty. reflecting on barriers to advancement, mary highlighted the influence of societal views and traditional gender expectations, sharing, “you have to show you care about your soldiers. that’s the foundation of any good leader.” in summary, these stories collectively highlight the resilience and dedication of female army enlisted leaders and capture their shared experiences and the unique challenges they overcame to lead effectively in the iet environment. findings 23 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 experiences of prejudice and bias each participant reported experiencing prejudice despite their successful service as 1sg and/or csm in the iet environment. these prejudices align with those described by eagly and karau (2002), indicating that even qualified female leaders face entrenched biases. participants discussed specific challenges and barriers that they believed restricted senior enlisted females from obtaining leadership roles like 1sg and csm. male colleagues frequently questioned their capability, particularly in the bct environment, which participants felt was rooted in stereotypes about women’s roles and abilities. tenacity as a key to success the participants attributed much of their success to tenacity, describing it as essential in navigating the demanding standards of iet. whether through physical fitness, mastery of the program of instruction (curriculum), or dealing with male colleagues who doubted their abilities, tenacity was central to each participant’s leadership journey. many went beyond established standards to demonstrate their dedication and capability. as one participant expressed, being “physically fit and an expert” were foundational to her success. additionally, some credited the support of their team members as a factor that enabled them to overcome challenges and excel. structural barriers in position coding seventy percent of participants highlighted structural barriers within the army’s coding system for leadership positions. they noted that senior enlisted roles are frequently coded for combat arms (e.g., infantry) soldiers, thus restricting women’s access to these positions. one participant criticized the centralized selection process for assignments, suggesting that it neglected important background factors that should be considered when determining candidates for senior positions. in contrast, another participant argued that assignment criteria are gender-neutral and prevented direct discrimination against female candidates. however, the general consensus was that the coding system and current assignment practices unintentionally restricted female advancement into key leadership roles within iet. male perceptions and gender stereotypes participants reported that male perceptions of female soldiers often created barriers to leadership roles in the iet environment. they noted that stereotypes about women’s capabilities were pervasive, frequently setting an unspoken, additional male standard for female leaders to meet. one participant explained that she was expected to not only meet the army standard but to exceed it to gain respect from her male counterparts. this factor led many female soldiers to avoid pursuing senior roles like 1sg and csm because they found the pressure to meet these biased expectations discouraging. the scarcity of female mentors further limited participants’ access to guidance and role models, compounding the challenges women faced in navigating leadership paths. participants observed that when they employed direct or agentic leadership styles, they often faced backlash for not appearing sufficiently communal, as brescoll (2016) documented. lane-washington and wilson-jones (2010) found similar gender-related challenges for women pursuing senior leadership roles in civilian sectors such as public education, thus indicating that these biases are not unique to the military. despite recent increases in opportunities for women in military leadership (orrick, 2016; pellerin, 2015), participants reported that historical biases remain strong. one participant cited a statement from the commandant of the marine corps to highlight the persistence of these attitudes: “when you get right down to it, you’ve got to protect the manliness of war” (enloe, 1983, p. 153). this mindset often casts women in senior military roles as insufficiently communal, which generates negative perceptions when they display agentic behaviors. this lack of acceptance and entrenched stereotypes presents significant barriers for women striving to meet both formal army standards and the unspoken expectations of their male peers in leadership positions. leadership attributes for success throughout the study, participants consistently demonstrated the leadership attributes that the army values, such as integrity, resilience, toughness, and good judgment. many of them cited toughness and tenacity as attributes that supported their success, along with a commitment to caring for their soldiers. participants also emphasized that their dedication to army values was critical to their success, thereby underscoring the need for both agentic and communal traits that align with the army’s leadership competency model (department of the army, 2015). these attributes helped participants earn respect in their roles and establish themselves as effective leaders in the iet environment. barriers in position coding and military occupational specialties a major barrier cited by participants was the way positions are coded and assigned. many recommended changing the structure of bct position coding to increase female representation because positions often favor combat arms specialties typically associated with male soldiers. participants suggested that military occupational specialty (mos) identifiers contributed to this barrier. until recently, laws and policies restricted women from serving in certain combat-related moss, which limited their eligibility for key positions (kamarck, 2015). although these restrictions have been lifted, change has been slow; the 2018 military demographics report showed only a 0.7% increase in activeduty females in the u.s. army (u.s. department of defense, 2018). family obligations as barriers and challenges family responsibilities emerged as both a barrier and challenge to career advancement. participants noted that, like women in other fields, they often had to choose between career progression and family obligations, with some delaying family planning to protect their careers. this finding aligns with groysberg and abrahams (2014), who found that women in leadership positions often anticipate difficulty in balancing motherhood and career demands. in this study, participants echoed those concerns, revealing that 24 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 working long hours and postponing family plans were necessary to advance in their careers. although family obligations do not preclude success, participants observed that military culture often prioritizes career advancement over family life, particularly in bct environments, where long hours are common. this cultural expectation pressures women to choose between family responsibilities and pursuing ranks and duty positions, thus deterring some from seeking 1sg and csm roles in bct. physical ability and fitness standards although physical ability was not consistently cited as a barrier, participants highlighted the necessity of physical toughness and fitness for success in iet and bct, noting that proving physical capability—such as excelling in running—earned them respect from male peers and commanders. one participant shared, “once i proved that i was a runner, i gained respect from my male colleagues and my commander,” thus reinforcing the role of physical fitness in overcoming biases. historically, lower fitness standards for women created institutional biases and reinforced perceptions that women were physically weaker (trobaugh, 2018). in 2020, the army introduced the army combat fitness test (acft) to enforce standardized requirements for all soldiers regardless of age or gender, thus aiming to ensure that every soldier meets rigorous physical standards in preparation for combat roles (rand corporation, 2022). initial findings from the acft, however, showed higher failure rates among women than men, which underscored challenges in adapting to the uniform requirements. participants agreed that maintaining physical toughness allowed them to establish credibility and overcome biases regarding women’s physical abilities in challenging environments, thus highlighting the importance of physical resilience in changing perceptions within the army. discussion this study helped to clarify how the social role theory and the role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders applies to the factors that contribute to the underrepresentation of female leaders in the u.s. army’s bct units of the iet environment. individuals involved in the assignment of 1sgs and csms must understand the importance of assigning females to these positions in the iet/bct environment (kiser, 2015; paustianunderdahl et al., 2014; tench et al., 2017; violanti & jureczak; 2010). the most common themes identified by the participants were tenacity, old boy network, having to prove oneself, reaction to leadership, fighting stereotypes, army values, coding jobs, and male perceptions of females. the commonality of these themes supports the social role and the role congruity theory’s postulations. the role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leader postulates that individuals are penalized when they do not perform according to the expectations of society (ferguson, 2018; skelly & johnson, 2011). this outcome was evident in the participants’ responses to the question of how they were viewed, considered, or referred to when using the direct approach leadership style. all but one of the participants reported that women were referred to negatively (e.g., angry, aggressive, negative, bitchy, too blunt, over the top, and too direct). the role congruity theory of prejudice also suggests that women do not reach top-level positions because of two types of prejudice. the first is based on the perception that women are less capable than men are to occupy leadership roles. the second involves judging women more harshly when in leadership roles (eagly & karau, 2002). the themes found in this study support the theory. empirically, the study’s findings corroborate much of the reviewed literature relative to challenges and barriers females face that contribute to the underrepresentation of females in senior leadership positions. carli and eagly (2015) suggested that women in leadership continue to face challenges that men do not. of relevance to women currently in senior army leader positions or seeking leadership positions in the future, participants strongly voiced the importance of tenacity in the iet environment— so much so that one participant recommended that female senior noncommissioned officers “be in their [superior’s] face and say, ‘i want to be a first sergeant here. i want the job, and i want to be a first sergeant, and i need your support [to] ensure that i have it!’” importantly, in order to be successful, women in leadership positions will need to demonstrate confidence and determination, especially in male-dominated organizations. concerning challenges and barriers experienced by the participants and the challenges and barriers participants believed are factors that prevent women from seeking out senior enlisted leader positions in bct, the overarching themes that emerged from both the individual and focus group interviews are that female senior enlisted leaders continue to fight stereotypes, and male perceptions of females may prevent senior enlisted females from seeking out those positions. beth shared that sometimes she was the only female at the table. she stated, “male counterparts, african american and caucasian, let me know that they had [an] issue with me being at the table … almost as if i took one of their brother’s position.” mary noted that a few of her subordinates challenged her authority by stating, “you can’t tell me what to do … because you’re a female.” mary also shared that her battalion commander made many public statements about how females should only take care of paperwork—processing the soldiers in and out of the unit— and let the male drill sergeants do the training. these themes imply that challenges and barriers are prevalent in the bct environment and that these challenges and barriers prevent female senior enlisted soldiers from seeking out senior positions in bct. they become barriers to advancements for female senior enlisted leaders, thus implying that a glass ceiling may exist in the bct environment. the meanings constructed from the data collected can help researchers understand how to increase the representation of female senior leaders in male-dominated organizations. the practical implications are related to participants’ successes, challenges, and barriers they experienced, as well as challenges and barriers that affect female, senior enlisted representation in the bct environment. the implications 25 advancing women in leadership journal-volume 44 are also related to the participants’ perceptions of leadership attributes needed to be successful in the bct environment. with diversity and inclusion at the forefront of any organization’s success, the army must continue discussions on how to make the organization more inclusive. of particular importance is determining how to assign senior enlisted females to positions that are typically regarded as male-dominated positions. nanton (2015) asserted the need for decision makers to have continuous diversity and inclusion conversations when considering the pipeline of available talent. it is clear from the results of this study that the military cannot merely be about business as usual. the literature is clear on what it takes to produce success, and that leadership is, in fact, gender-neutral (frye & pham, 2018; sahin et al., 2017; sims & morris, 2018). delimitations and limitations the main delimiting parameter set for this study was the inclusion of only females who had retired from the u.s. army in the previous 10 years and who were a 1sg or csm in the iet environment. the delimiting factors were important for ensuring the data captured were current and included the lived experiences of participants who had firsthand knowledge of the phenomenon. a major limitation was the number of participants who met the requirement of having served in bct as a 1sg or csm and had retired in the past 10 years. during the initial recruitment process of this study, we could not find 10 participants who had served specifically in the bct environment; therefore, we included participants who had served as 1sg/csm in iet. we recruited on facebook and linkedin and used the snowball sampling technique. we were able to recruit only 13 interested women, and only 10 met the criteria for the study. summary in male-dominated organizations such as the political arena and military, the leaders and the followers have changed (diekman & schneider, 2010; walker, 2008). recent studies suggest the scarcity of women in top-level positions warrants a unique leadership approach for aspects of femininity, self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, and teamwork (fritz & van knippenberg, 2017; kiser, 2015; walker, 2008). as societal changes continue to evolve both in leaders and in those who are being led, it becomes important for organizations to distinguish what is indispensable for effective leadership, irrespective of gender. history has shown that many women have supported and defended their country by serving in the u.s. military. their roles have changed significantly since they were first formally recognized as military members in the early 20th century (u.s. department of veterans affairs, 2017). although women have served in the military for well over a century, the u.s. military is still a male-dominant organization, and military forces have exemplified a strong and authoritative leadership style, normally exemplified by males (bass, 1990). the female participants in this study were successful in the iet environment and attributed their success to their tenacity, genuine care for their soldiers, and guidance from others. the participants also experienced challenges and barriers, mainly from lack of female representation, gender stereotypes, and lack of acceptance from male counterparts. overwhelmingly, participants listed one or more army values as the overarching characteristics needed to be successful in the iet/bct environment. participants believed that changing the coding of military occupational specialty of the 1sg and csm positions in the bct environment might help increase the representation of female senior enlisted women in bct units. although participants were successful in their senior enlisted positions in the iet environment, they all experienced challenges and barriers that contributed to the underrepresentation of female senior enlisted leaders in the positions of 1sg and csm in bct units. the researchers hope to encourage more women to aspire to attain the positions of 1sg and csm in the bct units and to pursue these positions to help the army increase the representation of females in this environment. more female role models and mentors are needed in the bct environment to train female soldiers who will become the future leaders of our army. those 18-year-old female high school graduates need to know that they can succeed! references aborisade, p. 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